Tag Archives: Xbox

Homefront – The Revolution: Further Impressions

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As I continue to put time into Homefront, I’m starting to recognize its difficulty curve. As the player, you have your health bar on the side of the HUD, and you’re equipped with injection-type health packs. These are limited to 5 on your person, and the animation takes about 4 seconds to pull off. Health packs can be found around the battlefield and in the rebellion stand-offs, or can be purchased from the equipment lockers for $50 at the rebellion strongholds.

I’ve noticed that your health diminishes very quickly when exposed to gunfire, and you can die almost instantly if you come across an enemy with a shotgun. Stealth is almost near impossible in the outset of the game as the combat areas are littered with enemies, and taking down any drone or camera will immediately signal the enemy of your position. The enemy is also very quick, take more than a few good bursts of gunfire to kill, and are usually accompanied by a patrolling vehicle. Couple that with a prolonged health pack animation, where you are not invincible, I find that I’m dead before I can get the health boost..

Now, that said, I understand that we play the part of the resistance. We are supposed to be out-gunned, and out-manned. The enemy is numerous and nubile, but when I’m attacking a point of entry, or come across a patrolling scout group, I find that I’m dying a frustrating amount, only to reload my progress back at the last stronghold. I might not even be on the same side of the map. The point of the game is guerrilla warfare. Attack, and retreat. But by this thinking, its hard to advance forward.

One saving grace is the ability to get assistance from the other rebellion participants. Anybody standing idly around a stronghold can be attached to your entourage. At the very least, they provide a valuable distraction for the enemy, which allows you to pick a few off.

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I’m still catching myself groaning at the checkpoint and save freezes. They’re not long, only a few seconds, but when you’re running into the enemy encampment around the corner, about to train your sights on the next enemy, and then the entire game hangs, it feels like a gut-punch. You just can’t breath while that like “checkpoint reached” save icon rotates.

The game supports a camera functionality. But it serves a purpose, or “job”. You can take pictures of your rebellion, or hacked signs, or enemy routes. These jobs unlock money and perks. It is not suited for in-game photography, which is a shame. No way of removing the HUD when taking photos.

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I’ll continue to plug through it though. Maybe it will get easier as I unlock new gear and equipment. There’s clothing that can be purchased that allows the played to become more camouflaged, which’ll be a nice perk. I tried the online Resistance mode only briefly, as the first couple attempts didn’t find anyone online, and my first successful attempt had the host leave after a few minutes, and I was booted during the host migration process. So I’m glad I didn’t spend any addition money on the Resistance DLC.

On a more positive note, the move is complete, so I should be able to start posting on a semi-daily basis again. Around this time last year I was putting out some short stories like the Far Cry one, Sniper, and Titanfall. So I’ll have to work on something new. I also posted a big Top 10 Xbox games. So I’ll have to think of a new project this summer.

I’m about wrapped up my Assassin’s Creed Unity Review, and I have quite the queue of games that I’ve completed this year, that need a review. This week was the Xbox Ultimate Summer Sale, and I picked up Inside (which actually just happened to come out this week, and wasn’t on sale, but I’m excited nonetheless), Just Cause 3 (which has been quite the blast to play this afternoon) and Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark.

My art table is also setup now in the new place so expect some new art stuff.

-iRogan

 

 

Homefront The Revolution First Impressions

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While currently in between household moves, I got the chance to pick up Homefront: The Revolution. Sequel/Reboot to 2011’s Homefront by Kaos Studios and THQ. The game was about a resistance movement fighting off the occupation of the USA by a military powerful unified Korea.

After THQ’s public bankruptcy, the rights were sold to Crytec, and then to Koch Media. Deep Silver took over publishing of the sequel/reboot Homefront: The Revolution, and it was developed by Dambuster Studios.

The style changed from linear FPS to an open-world FPS, and you continue to play an out-matched resistance fighter fighting against the imposing enemy.

Visually the game is pretty. Very similar to the latest Far Cry games. In both looks and feel. The open world is split into quadrants and blockaded by huge security walls. But the resistance has underground tunnels to access new areas. And there is a fast travel option once the area is unlocked.

I did notice that the game freezes fro a few seconds every time a quick save or checkpoint is happening, which is a little more than frustrating. And the difficulty is also ramped up a bit. For realism sake, I suppose. We are supposed to be outmatched and out-gunned after all. I found that enlisting some resistance stragglers around your base will help. They follow you around and will help defend you.

Little updates will come in sporadically over the next little while as I continue my move, and go in and out of Internet access. Stay tuned.

-iRogan

iReview – CALL OF DUTY: ADVANCED WARFARE – Another step forward

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CALL OF DUTY: ADVANCED WARFARE

Publisher: Activision
Developer: Sledgehammer Games
Platform: Xbox One
Availability: Xbox One, PS4, Xbox 360, PS3, Windows

I’m always a little behind when playing Call of Duty games. I used to buy them eagerly upon release, back when the single player campaign was the primary focus. This was back when Infinity Ward was in their prime, making the Modern Warfare titles. Back when there was one good Call of Duty developer, and one not-so-good developer. Modern Warfare 1 was great, Modern Warfare 2 was great and Modern Warfare 3 was a hack job, scrambled together by the gutted remains of Infinity Ward after Vince Zampalla and Jason West jumped ship/were forced out, along with a lot of the other senior creative talent. With the help of Sledgehammer Games, Infinity Ward was able to release a feeble conclusion to the Modern Warfare trilogy and move on to their next Call of Duty game, Ghost.

After the releases became muddled, with three separate developers working on their own Call of Duty titles, and Activision’s focus on Multiplayer and Zombies took precedent, I started to lose the insatiable drive to pick up the games on release, and resigned myself to get them later on in their life, around the time the next iteration is announced.

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So that brings us to 2014’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. The first Call of Duty title to usher in the new console generation, releasing simultaneously on the Xbox 1/360 and Ps3/Ps4. This was Sledgehammer’s first go alone at a Call of Duty game, and the results are pretty impressive, even considering they are working in the three year development cycle now.

Advanced Warfare pushed the series forward into the next-gen visuals, and for the first time since Call of Duty 2, used a game engine that had its majority re-written and built from scratch. The game’s story also pushed the franchise further into a futuristic setting, taking place between 2054 and 2061. Call of Duty Black Ops 2, Treyarch’s first step towards a futuristic game, was set in 2025.

The story follows one playable character, Jack Mitchell – as opposed to previous titles which followed multiple – and makes use of pre-rendered cinematic cutscenes to tell the story in between missions. After a mission in North Korea, and losing his friend in the fight, Jack is offered a position in Atlas Corporation, which is a private military organization. Following a series of terrorist attacks, the world turns to Atlas – who holds no country or government allegiances – to stop them. After a year of fighting, watching as the terrorist groups attacks becoming increasingly sophisticated and deadly, Altas – essentially for-profit mercenaries – has emerged as the dominant military force in the world, showing that they are the key to holding back the terrorist attacks and aiding countries around the world.

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The story jumps forward a couple of years, and we start to find information linking the Atlas leader, Jonathan Irons (voiced and acted by Kevin Spacey) to the ongoing attacks, showing that he has been deliberately allowing the attacks to occur to continue Atlas’s reputation, profit, and power throughout the world. When his devious plan is revealed, Irons takes to the United Nations General Assembly, reveals his plan to remove all politicians, and declares war on the world. And there isn’t a country with a big enough military to stop him.

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Coinciding with the futuristic theme in the story, drones, and other futurist technology play a big part in the game, and gameplay mechanics. The player is equipped with an exo-skeleton suit that allows for boosting in different directions, or long falls and a soft landing. It allows for additional strength as well, for melee combat, and moving large objects, like cars; ripping the door off a car and using it as a shield is pretty fun. There are also a few instances where a mute charge is used, when taking part in a breach-and-enter. Everything in the zone of the mute charge is silenced, and is an interesting event to watch unfold. The guns in the game are updated as well, and offer different types of scopes – some of the hybrid type, allowing for different levels of zoom, or thermal views. The player also has unique types of grenades: one type highlights all the enemies in the area, and another is a drone-like grenade, that will propel towards the closest enemy grouping.

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Visually and gameplay-wise, I think Advanced Warfare is a positive step for the franchise. I still have to go back and play Black Ops 2 to see how that last-gen game pushed the boundaries. Story-wise, the game didn’t break much new ground, aside from using a famous Hollywood actor – nothing that hasn’t been done before. I do see that as the future of some games, as mo-cap and 3D rendering gets more and more advanced, and the production quality and story telling visuals become parallel with Hollywood movies. We’ve seen it already now with EPIC Games latest announcements towards their Unreal Engine being used to render Animated Movies.

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Overall, a great step forward for the franchise as they truly break ground into the latest gen. The new types of combat add a lot to the series, and the technology of the new engine, and consoles allows for bigger, more detailed level design and creative destruction. The exo-suit allows for some verticality to the levels as well, and while somewhat limited during the campaign, Multiplayer allows for full use. The story is also a little more coherent, although it does jump ahead a few years at a time. I thought Ghost was a step forward, but Advanced Warfare just leaps ahead, and is breath a fresh air to a franchise, that was starting to grow a bit stale.

Now to move ahead again, and try me some Call of Duty Black Ops 3… but I promised I would play 2 first.

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The achievements in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare are very standard for the franchise. There are those for completing each level, and those unique achievements for each level. There are those for each new gameplay mechanic, killing a certain number of enemies using said mechanic. And then the Intel collection and Multiplayer types. Nothing really memorable.

Notable Achievements:
Never Saw It Coming (Boost jump, dash forward, and then air stomp an enemy) – 10G
Carma  (Kill and enemy by throwing a door at them) – 10G

-iRogan

IReview – CONTRAST -Shadows Within Shadows

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CONTRAST

Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Developer: Conpulsion Games
Platform: Xbox One
Availability: Xbox One, PS4, Xbox 360, PS3, Windows

Contrast is a game of shadows. Set in a noir type atmosphere, we play as Dawn, an imaginary friend to Didi, who is a little girl. Dawn and Didi are the only two characters in the game who appear as full 3D figures, and the rest of the cast is made up of shadows. The key gameplay mechanic in Contrast is Dawn’s ability to move between the 3D physical world, and shadows, the 2D world. Sounds like an interesting mechanic, right?

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The story follows Didi who has led a troublesome childhood. Her mother is a cabaret singer, and recently separated. Child support has threatened to take Didi away her mother if she doesn’t find stable work; that or reconciles with her husband Johnny. Johnny has been kicked out of the house due to his association with gangsters and racking up dept, which is not healthy behaviour for a family. Didi sneaks out one night to watch her mother perform at the Cabaret, and it is here where we watch the interaction between a shadowed Johnny and Didi’s mother Kat discuss their failing marriage and Johnny’s big plans to improve all their lives

Wanting to help her mother and Johnny reconcile, Didi follows Johnny to the bar where we witness the meeting between Johnny and Vincenzo, a famous illusionist. Johnny is trying to convince Vincenzo to perform at his new circus event. Simple enough, but Johnny doesn’t have enough money, so he returns to the gangsters to borrow more.

What follows is a tale of Didi and Dawn following Johnny throughout the night, and fixing his blunders, ensuring that his circus project gets off the ground, and that he makes good on his debts.

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The game is a puzzle platformer. As Dawn, we have the ability to transition between the real 3D world, and the shadow world. Using projectors, spotlights, and other maneuverable light sources, we have to navigate the streets and building interiors, getting from one checkpoint to the next.

The game is broken up into three chapters, the first being the largest and lengthiest. This chapter sets the stage and introduces all the mechanics, and tells the bulk of the story. Chapter two fixes the conflict revolving around the circus, and its three attractions that are of course broken or in disrepair. The last chapter concludes the events of the story and wraps up the relationships of the primary characters. This chapter ties all the mechanics together into more challenging and sometimes time-sensitive puzzles.

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The game is short in length and shallow in concept. And while it was released across both Xbox’s and Playstation’s platforms, it’s only OK looking. The noir theme and character design is fine, but the environments were fairly lifeless and stale. And just lonely, as Didi and Dawn are the only two physical characters in the world.

The shadow concept was unique, and I found it especially amusing that you can’t die in the shadow world – unless you fall off a platform – but in most instances you just get squeezed back into the 3D world.

But the platforming mechanics were not as smooth or refined as they could be. Oft times jumping led to falling as the character animation, and Dawn’s model in particular is not that agile to maneuver. The story was short and the gameplay was clunky. Some of the puzzles were excellent in design though, where the player has to maneuver two or three different light sources to cast shadows on the wall, that they then have to scale.

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In the category of achievements, this game made the list of Xbox One’s games easiest to 100%, and for good reason. Play it and you’ll acquire a nice 1000G. Only a few of the collectibles are actually hidden, where the rest are out in plain sight, and each part of the story will net you a couple hundred G’s

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Notable Achievements:
To The Heroes Among Us (Unlocked when the player finds the hidden Extra Life 2012 logo) – 25G
Not The Kind of Game (Unlocked when the player tried to enter the XXX door) – 10G

-iRogan

iReview – RORY McILROY PGA TOUR – You Get Bad Breaks From Good Shots

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RORY McILROY PGA TOUR

Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: EA Tiburon
Platform: Xbox One
Availability: Xbox One, PS4

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Now you’ll have to forgive me, but I haven’t played an EA Golf game in a few years, possibly even an entire console generation. I do have fond memories of the Tiger Woods EA golf games on the PS2 and Xbox however, even on the PC. I also don’t typically review annual titles like Hockey or in this case, Golf, because they’re essentially the same game year over year, with minor improvements.

Nevertheless, the PGA Tour series has always had a place in my heart. I enjoy playing the game, even in RL, I’m just not that great. The PGA Tour games are one of those annual EA Sport titles that are justr shy of being an RPG, except you have to reset and recreate your character after every expansion.

In the same light as Need For Speed, EA took a year off from its annual Golf franchise to prepare for the latest console generation. Also, coincidentally, they took this time to make us all forget about the Tiger Woods’ name and brand, as he’s been stricken from the cover. For the first time since 1998, Tiger Woods was not used as the cover athlete, and his likeness is not used in the game whatsoever. He’s not the household name he once was. Rory McIlroy is the new face of golf, and our new cover athlete. Rejoice.

The 2015 iteration of the PGA Tour franchise was rebuilt from scratch for the latest console generation, and now uses the Frostbite 3 engine to render more realistic environments. An entire 18 hole course can now be rendered as a single map, so other fairways become playable whereas before, errant shots would have been considered out of bounds, when the course was rendered hole-by-hole.

Not only do the courses look better, but more information can be gathered from the different lengths of grass, tree branches and sand. Throughout, the engine just allows for more realistic physics and interactions between the ball and environment. That being said, while the courses may look nice, everything else about the visual presentation is lacking, from the static wildlife to the laughably minimal character creation and clothing options. Swimming ducks hover above the water, deer or foxes just walk a straight line with barely a hint of animation, and you’re stuck with a bare selection of generic faces when creating your own golfer, and only a handful of different “EA” labeled clothes, until more are unlocked through tour progression. You also can’t create a female golfer. But at least the AI crowd reacts as one would expect, when you aim a golf ball in their general direction.

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“Did that go in? I wasn’t watching, did it go in? I didn’t see it, could you tell me if it went in?”

The game offers up a few different swing mechanics to try: “Arcade”, which uses the analog stick to swing and allows the player to apply a spin to the ball mid-flight, the traditional “3-Click”, click once to generate the back swing, 2nd at the peak of the swing, to generate the forward momentum, and 3rd at the precise point of impact, and finally “Tour” which is for advanced users, similar to the “Arcade” method, but with higher sensitivity, and with no assists.  Additionally, the game has also seen some improvements in the aiming, and putting line.

The regression is also noticed when you take a look at the lack of game modes and courses, as most are notably missing from the game on launch. As previously mentioned, no female golfers allowed, so the Women’s events have been scrapped, as well as Best Ball, Skins, and Stableford gameplay modes. All you’re allowed to play is Stroke and Match, and restricted to back 9, front 9, and 18 hole courses. Online tournaments and a full proper career scheduled have also been removed.

The game at launch included eight real-world courses, with a few additional courses made available through free DLC, and a handful of fantasy courses. The PGA Tour event has the player playing through many 4-day events, to increase PGA Tour rank and level up our player’s attributes. What I noticed with this mode is you no longer play a full 18 hole course every day, but a smaller selection of 5 to 8 holes per day, and then the game simulates the rest of the day based on your attributes. This may have been the result of my choice in Arcade gameplay style, so I’ll have to dig a bit deeper. No visible calendar is available, so you just move from one event to the next. As we rank up, the attributes that improve our player are based on our play style, and will focus on areas that we excel at, or improve in, instead of letting the player manually pick where we want to see the incremental changes.

A new mode that they have added is the Night Club Challenge mode, which offers up about 200+ challenges across 3 maps. These challenges range anywhere from target practice, to putting challenges to trick shots, and utilize boosts and power-ups like a rocket-ball, double bounce, or speed spin. Each challenge grades you on a 3-star measurement based on points.

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“Lotta pressure. You gotta rise above it. You gotta harness in the good energy, block out the bad.”

Overall, while some improvements have been made to the engine as a whole, better visuals, life-like crowds, and better ball mechanics, the lack of features and courses, non-existent game modes, and character creator are what hurt this title the most. It’s clear that this is a 1.0 title again, for the latest console generation. And this is something that plagued a lot of the EA annual titles at the transition to this latest console generation. It’s just a little concerning that EA took a full year off from the brand, and we’re still left with an empty shell.

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On the Achievement side, like Need For Speed, the game is quite generous. At the time of this writing, I am only two locked achievements shy of 100%, and the remaining two are related to the Night Club challenge mode, where I’m left to finish each challenge, and getting the required amount of stars. Just time consuming. The rest are basically complete the PGA Tour season, and try the different game modes at least once.

Notable Achievements
All I Do Is Win (Win a PGA TOUR event) – 15G
Now you’re golfing with Portals (Hit through a portal for the first time) – 15G

-iRogan