Kick, Lick and Baa

Have you ever wanted to be a little furry bi-pedal whirlwind of destruction? I know I have, and my dreams have now be realised in this completely pointless and hilarious game. You will spend your time in goat simulator running around head butting people, cars, shops, bbq's and even other goats! In this gloriously buggy and broken virtual town.

What started out as a 'joke' at an indie game jam has turned into a phenomenon, when they showed a broken buggy game that was only made as a bit of fun, the developers had no idea how popular it would become.  The initial videos showed a goat running around and glitching into walls, causing it's head to stretch all over the place and generally causing carnage. The internet loved it and demanded that it was released for all to play and waste time on. After a lot of pressure, the game company caved and made Goat Simulator into a full title (side-splitting funny bugs and game breaking moments intact). 

The game developers themselves have described the game as follows: “Goat Simulator is a small, broken and stupid game. It was made in a couple of weeks so don’t expect a game in the size and scope of GTA with goats. In fact, you’re better off not expecting anything at all actually. To be completely honest, it would be best if you’d spend your $10 on a hula hoop, a pile of bricks, or maybe a real-life goat.”

With no heirs or graces taken, let alone pride in the product they have produced, they have managed to make a truly unique hilarious and genuinely fun game. In a game industry where grey pallets and knee high wall covered based shooters are your AAA bread and butter and about as bland as it comes. This game goes to show that you don't need the best graphics and your game doesn't even need to work properly! For all those sat on the fence about whether to buy goat simulator or not, we highly recommend this title! Take that money you were going to spend on your Call of Duty map pack, or that fancy hat you want in Team Fortress 2 and buy this game. Probably the most retarded fun you will have, and a great way to relieve stress.

Watch Durr play this disgracefully fun title below:

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Rust: The Ultimate Survival Test

 

Rust is a true test of survival skills, not just from cold, hunger and the occasional zombie attack. But also from players in a ruthless, unforgiving world. You wake up in rust with only a pair of jeans (or completely naked if you turn the censor off), a rock, a few bandages and a torch. Your aim, to survive, can only be achieved by harvesting food and materials. Eventually, you can manage to build yourself a shelter and fire to cook with (all the time worrying if someone is going to come along and blow it all to smithereens).
 

You can craft basic weapons from wood and stone which is easy to collect, but more advanced weapons require blueprints. Once studied, you will have the ability to craft the weapon as much as you want – provided you have the materials. The other way to get them, is to kill zombies, raid storage boxes, or steal them from other players. There are players in the game who will seek out new players and kill them just for fun. Unfortunately in the current state of the game there is nothing stopping them from doing this and no negative consequences.

This makes it difficult for single players to establish themselves early on if they are on a high populated server. Your only hope is to attempt to survive with a group of friends, or join another group. Although most groups kill on sight, probably from fear of being attacked. The hardest part of Rust is the beginning stage, even finding your friends is a challenge as the map is huge and filled with dangers. Your best part is to use the ‘suicide’ command until you spwan near to a landmark which you can use as a meet-up point.

Once you have formed a mighty fortress, your aim is to protect it with your life. You can craft sleeping bags which allow you to set a spawn point and you can hide away all your loot in storage boxes. Most players will be inside during the night as it is mostly pitch black, this is arguably the safest time to go outside as there will be fewer players. Although be wary of using any light source which will make you can easy target for night time lurkers. Eventually you will encounter other bases on the server, and it may end up in a full blown out war. The main lesson you need to learn from Rust, is don’t get too attached to anything you own and you will be fine.

 

 

If you die in Rust, you will lose all the items you had on you and it will be free loot for anyone standing near your corpse. And if someone is nice enough to blow a hole in your house with C4 (as I have experienced) you can always prepare for this by giving them the ultimate middle finger – dropping all your best loot on the floor so it despwans and they get nothing.

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First Impressions on Hearthstone

Hearthstone is Blizzard’s entry into the rapidly growing and very competitive arena of online trading card games. Over the past 2 years we have seen a massive surge in online TCG's being produced, with games such as Scrolls, Solforge and Might and Magic all entering this lucrative market.While Hearthstone is not strictly a TCG (as there is no trading between players)it is most defiantly a collectable card game and has all the elements of a TCG that fans will enjoy.

So what separates Hearthstone from its competitors? Well for a start, the sheer amount of polish is unreal. It’s the small things, such as the interactive card environments, For example if you click one of the windows of a building, you will repeatedly knock on it until it breaks with a very satisfying smashing noise.

Then there are the very big things, such as your collection being in an interactive binder, with pages you can scroll through as if the binder was in your hands. The game also feels very realistic, for example when you drag a card from your hand to the field of play, it’s very similar to the sound made if you were actually playing in real life, but with the added delight of creatures as they hit the field. You also cast spells and attack with beautiful animations and sounds.

The gameplay is simply fantastic! It’s very simple and easy to grasp the basics, with a great tutorial system that gradually introduces new concepts and abilities. But not everything is included in the tutorial and will be discovered on the battlefield. For instance, the ability to cast ‘secrets’ that will only be activated once a particular condition has been met. Your first encounter with them will most likely involve you running into them head first and being severely punished for it. 

An interesting feature of Hearthstone’s gameplay is that, rather than having land cards or sacrificing cards, you generate 1 mana every turn so there is no fear of being ‘land screwed’ or having to make tough decisions on which card to sacrifice for resources. This is a breath of fresh air in the TCG world, to say the least! While the gameplay is quite simple, this doesn't mean that there isn't depth to be found. In blizzards classic trade mark of games, it's easy to pick up - but harder to master. For those ready to test their mettle, there is the ‘Arena’, a draft environment where you build a deck from a limited card pool.

Currently there are nine classes to choose from, each comes with their own unique spells, creatures and a hero ability. The hero ability is a unique feature to Hearthstone, which grants each hero their own ability that can be used once each turn and costs 2 mana. These abilities range from a fireball that deals 1 damage to a target, to dealing 2 damage to yourself to draw a card. To help flesh out your deck, there are also a wide range of neutral creatures which can be slotted into your deck.

There are many viable strategies in Hearthstone, from aggressive low cost aggro creature decks, to the long game control decks, with everything else in-between. Even some very unique strategies are viable, a personal favourite is the one turn kill.  This is achieved by gently witling down the opponents health until they’re in range of a massive amount of damage in a single turn, through a combination of cards in your hand generated by cheap draw cards.

The decks you build consist of 30 cards with no more than two copies of any card and only a single copy of any of the very powerful legendary cards. The legendary cards come in the form of powerful and popular figures from the World of Warcraft mythos. These include the dragon aspects, warcraft raid bosses and famous heroes and villains. A personal favourite legendary is Leeroy Jeknins who screams his trademark“LEEEROOY MMMMMJENKINS” when he hits the field! Summoning some pesky dragon whelps for your opponent as well - just to complete the full flavour of Leeroy Jenkins.

Hearthstone definitely makes a big splash into the TCG/CCG online market at the moment and may well come out on top, due to it appealing to a wide range of players.Blizzard have created a very addictive, fun game with a lot of heart; currently there is no official release date for hearthstone but with the game in its current state I would hope it's not too much longer.

Watch Hurr an Durr play a game of Hearthstone!

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Outlast Review (Spoiler free) and Gameplay Videos

I’m someone who’s fairly new to the horror genre when it comes to games, and being a huge fan of scary films – I was desperate to find a game that could capture the same experience. Most people would agree that 'Amnesia' is the go-to game for horror, so I was rather sceptical about the potential of Outlast. But every game deserves a chance, and Outlast does not disappoint.

The game opens with the main protagonist, who is a journalist investigating the strange going-ons of an asylum known as Mount Massive (yes I did giggle at the name). Even standing outside the asylum with the thunder in the background, I felt extremely tense and yet eager to see what horror awaited me inside.

Outlast incorporates the fatal-frame notion of using a camera to look through. While you don’t need it to see the ‘monster’, you will need it for its night vision feature. However, the more you use it, the quicker the battery will deplete, potentially leaving you stumbling around in the dark with god-knows-what chasing you. Batteries are fairly easy to find though, perhaps making them more abundant would help to create a greater sense of panic.

Much of the gameplay is focused around completing objectives while staying out of the way of the frenzied inhabitants of the asylum. Along the way you collect confidential documents, which provide a small insight as to why they are set on cutting you into pieces. Although the story itself is not much to write home about, and probably won't be the reason you keep coming back to Outlast.

Perhaps the scariest element of the game is the fact that you can’t actually fight back. Although there are a number of objects which could potentially be brandished as weapons, your character seems to have an innate fear of confrontation and much prefers to hide away in lockers (or under beds, in toilet stalls, etc) instead.

The closest you will get to a battle is flinging the mouse around wildly if someone grabs you, or slamming a door in their face. Wondering around with only your camera to protect you, is a truly terrifying experience (the bits of body parts scattered around don't help much either). Although this is not a new concept in horror games, it is definitely one that works.

Aside from getting dangerously close to horror clichés (crazy people in an asylum doesn’t scream originality) and an overuse of jumpscares, Outlast is definitely a strong contender in the horror genre market. The game itself is fairly short (although that depends on how much time you spend cowering in lockers), but overall it is definitely worth a play through. And if you are as much of a scaredy-cat as I am, you will be in for a frightening experience.

If you want to see more, then you should watch my Let's Play series - videos are below.

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Gone Home Review

Gone Home is more of an interactive story than an actual game, but this shouldn’t stop you from enjoying this unique and refreshing experience. The opening of the game sets an unsettling mood; you are in control of Kaitlin Greenbriar who arrives home at night, in the middle of a thunderstorm. There is a note from your sister Sam on the door, who says she has gone away and that we are not to worry (which of course, has the opposite effect).

If you go into the game looking for an ‘Amnesia’ like experience, then you are going to be disappointed. Upon entering the gloomy house, my first steps were quite timid as I was rather expecting a sudden jump scare – but my fears were senseless. No matter what dark secrets I uncovered, or hidden passageways I descended down, the house remained silent.

But this sense of fear soon fades and you are then immersed into this unknown family’s world, with fragments of their lives scattered around like pieces of a jigsaw, just begging to be exposed. The house itself is a pleasure to explore, with so many interactive items you can inspect; although not all of them serve any actual purpose. However, there are some real gems amongst the dispersed objects, such as a piece of paper with Chun Li’s Street Fighter moves written on it.

While these items seem like junk at first, they do create the feeling that you are in a real house, occupied by real people with typical yet troubled lives. They also help to create a sense of the characters personalities, which is critical as they are physically absent for the duration of gameplay. This can be as subtle as a cinema ticket stubb, or as glaringly obvious as a hotel matchbox with a time on it.

The real backbone of the story comes in the form of snippets from Sam’s journal, which are played to you when you pick up a particular ‘trigger’ item. The voice acting of Sam’s character really brings her to life and creates a deeper understanding of her motives for leaving. The unraveling story does leave you feeling slightly dejected, but this is just part of the experience.

There is no right or wrong way to make your way through the main story, although if you plough right through it, the game is rather short. Your experience of the story is really what you make it, and even once you have come to ‘the end’ you can still continue to explore the house and perhaps uncover something which you missed earlier on. Although truthfully I did feel slightly empty at the abrupt ‘ending’ of the game, perhaps because I was hoping for something more sinister.

The £15.00 price tag is fair considering the attention to detail and the interactive-ness of the game, but those who want something a bit more fast-paced should stay clear. Overall, I would recommend Gone Home to more patient players who really enjoy sinking their teeth into a gripping story.

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Surgeon Simulator 2013: A true test in patience

Surgeon Simulator 2013 is about as far away from an actual simulator as you can get. The title of the game itself is completely tongue in cheek. The controls are probably some of the worst and most difficult I have ever encountered. I kind of get that this is meant to be the point but it's truly horrendous, as I shall elaborate on later.

You play the game as a 'surgeon', although all you will ever see is a floating hand. The first surgery you are presented with is a heart transplant. Your job is to smash open their rib cage remove the organs, replace the heart then place the organs back into the patient. Sounds straight forward enough right? A bit of open heart surgery should be fine! Well on my first attempt at this I was even struggling to pick up the tools, let alone perform an operation!

So this is the meat of the game and something that I think you will either love or hate with this game - the controls. You have five buttons to bind each controls, one of the fingers and the thumb. When pressing these buttons down, you close the assigned finger and/or thumb. So your left hand becomes a claw, trying to close all the floating hands fingers and thumbs at once! Now the icing on the cake is that the mouse controls are even worse. You can move the mouse forward and back to move the hand back and forward, hold the left mouse button to move the hand down towards the patient/table/tools, and hold the right mouse button to rotate the wrist. If this all sounds complicated already, try picking up a tool and going to town on your patient. 

I get that the controls are meant to be beyond clunky, everything is not meant to work and it's just abit of fun. But MY WIG after trying for 30 minutes just to pick up a hammer to crack open the guys rib cage I really had enough. If you have the patience for this game I could see it being a lot of fun, but for me personally it's rare for me not to have a good thing to say about a game. 

Oh wait! I did laugh when my hand bumped into the anesthetic needle and the screen went into a twisted psychedelic rainbow mode. There we go something good to say about the game -  it made me laugh this one time.

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Dust: An Elysian Tail

Dust is a game that harks back to the good old days of Castlevania and Metroid, a 2-D side-scroller with fast paced frantic combat and RPG elements, with a solid story built in to boot. First of all the game is just beautiful to look at, the hand painted graphics and character design is brilliant. Considering that everything in this game was made and designed by one man is truly inspiring.

The combat strikes the perfect balance between being easy to pick up but hard to master, the basics of combat are introduced at a steady pace, making it easier to get to grips with. With one button letting you do a basic attack and another letting you perform a heavy attack, holding down the heavy attack will make you spin your blade. On top of this you can dodge left and right and have a button for magic, whilst the magic is very weak when initially cast, if it's combined with your spinning heavy attack then it will create mass homing missiles or pillars of fire depending on the selected magic.

The story of the game is deftly told with a strong cast of voice acting and beautiful animations, the main character is voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch, who's other notable performances include Izaya from Durarara and Renton from Eureka Seven. He really brings the character of Dust to life. Fidget  Dusts main companion throughout the story provides often needed comic relief and a few hilarious 4th wall breaking comments such as early on she screams "mash all the buttons!!!" during one of the first fights you encounter.

The RPG elements of this game are well done being able to level up and assign a stat point according to your play style. There is a crafting system as well enabling you to craft items found in the field. However something I haven't come across before which I loved was the ability to sell materials you find to the merchant who will in turn then be able to stock them for you. This removes the need to grind X monsters for Y material which is a breath of fresh air for the genre.

If you enjoy the Castlevania sides scrolling action of ages past or just enjoy a game with a good story and fun combat I can't recommend Dust enough. Truly worthy of more praise than it has received thus far.

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Catherine & Katherine

I have recently come into possession of a game I had long been wanting to play, but due to financial constraints, lacked the ability to do so. That game is Catherine and whilst I have yet to complete it, it's certainly been a hell of a trip so far. Catherine is a very unique game, both in style and substance. The game blends a story of fidelity and relationships, mostly being told from a bar, through cut scenes and a frantic puzzle based climbing game. The two seem starkly different, but the story manages to explain how the two intertwine beautifully.

The main story line follows the protagonist Vincent and his interactions between his long term girlfriend Katherine, and the flirtatious and much younger Catherine. Without spoiling to much lets just say things get very complicated in this love triangle.

For half of the game you will be climbing a tower made up from blocks. You can only climb one block at a time, so you must create stairs of blocks by pulling and pushing them into a desired place. Whilst this sounds straightforward enough, some of the blocks will fall apart under your feet and some are even traps which will kill you should you linger on them to long. All of this combined with the fact the floor falls away leads to some very frantic (not to mention frustrating) moments.

In between these floors you will come to a rest platform and meet 'sheep' who are also trying to climb this wall. You can choose to chat to your fellow sheep to learn techniques or encourage them to keep climbing, or should you choose belittle and discredit them. Also on each of these platforms you will be asked a question before you can proceed. For example one of the very early questions asked is "Is marriage the point where life begins or when it ends?" Once you have given your response you are presented with a graph showing responses from both men and women. Some of the responses are surprising and interesting to say the least!

The other half of the game is spent in the Stray Sheep bar chatting to your buddies, drinking beers and meeting the various patrons who enter the bar. Whilst exploring the bar you will receive text messages from either Katherine or Catherine, which you can reply to. Depending on how you reply and your interactions with various bar patrons, will effect a meter which will determine the outcome of the story. How this meter is affected is very vague, and as you play you will gradually come to understand how actions effect it.

If you're looking for something very unique with a mature story line I highly advise playing this, for anyone aged 21-35 the story of this game will speak to you on many levels. Great title, frantic fun game-play, can't recommend enough. One last thing, some of the bosses in this game are terrifying truly... horrendous.

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Bioshock Infinite: Steam punk beauty

Bioshock Infinite is probably the most fun I have had in a very long time from a single player FPS, the story is mysterious and unfolds at just the right pace. Unfortunately I can't really discuss a great deal about the story without spoiling anything so all i'll say on the matter is play it through right to the end and you won't be disappointed. 

The main character in the story isn't the character you play Booker but rather Elizabeth and she kicks the trope of the damsel in distress clear out of the water. During the course of the game Liz will prove to be a very powerful and helpful ally! keeping Booker stocked with ammo health kits and summoning in cover or gun turrets to assist you. She reminded me a lot of the old Disney Princess's but with some serious ass kicking potential built in!

The environment is about as far from Raptures claustrophobic corridors and repressive atmosphere as you can get. The city in the sky is literally bursting with life, the constant turmoil plays out right before your eyes rather than witnessing the aftermath of the events whilst in Rapture. The skylines accentuate this, acting as effectively a roller coaster between points from which you can shoot from right before landing on your enemies and crushing their skulls.

The combat can be considered restrictive at times being only able to hold 2 guns at any one time but I found this to be quite a fun mechanic. Which 2 guns compliment each-other well for a situation? I found myself becoming quite attached to the shotgun and sniper rifle combo picking people off at range and giving them a face full of boom stick should they get to close. You of course have your plasmids  Vigors in this installment as well. All are very useful ranging from controlling your enemies to ripping them apart with a flock of ravenous crows.

All in all whilst linear and perhaps restrictive in the combat (holding only 2 guns at any one time) the enviroment is breath taking. The story's pace seems to match character development with actual game-play exceptionally well, a balance that a lot of game developers find hard to get right. Don't read to much about the story go into it completely unaware of what to expect and you will be in for a real treat.

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Survival Instinct is a bloody mess

I’m not entirely sure what Activision were smoking when they decided this game was ready for launch. After the highly successful Walking Dead game from Telltale, I thought that Survival Instinct may be able to recreate something similar from an FPS perspective. Oh how very wrong I was. This game is based off the TV series of The Walking Dead starring Darryl as the main character, who is accompanied by his brother Merle (who you spend the first part of the game looking for). Fans of the show will be pleased to see that the same voice actors are used in the game.

However, from the outset you can see that the graphics are atrocious and nowhere near the standards of a modern game. And as Jim Sterling has pointed out, there are visible window cursors in the loading screen. If that isn’t a sign of Activision not giving a shit, then I don’t know what is. Although this wouldn’t have been so much of an issue if the gameplay itself made up for it.

The controls are not explained well and I didn’t realise there was an easier way to change weapons until I did it by accident. You will only swing for a melee attack if the target is aimed exactly at the zombies head, which I felt was too restrictive. If I want to pick up a hammer and swing wildly like a mad man then I should be able to do so, especially in a game where it’s supposed to give you the feeling of being in a zombie apocalypse.  

As many others with tell you, the most irritating part of this whole game is the execute sequence. Sneak up to a zombie (or run really fast it doesn’t really make a difference) and press R1 to finish them off with a quick knife kill. That doesn’t sound too bad does it ? Well it does when the game does this regardless of what weapon you are holding, so if you’re equipped with a hammer you will still executive with the knife. This makes execution kills boring and since you can probably run past the zombie anyway, there’s not much point.

The second most irritating part of the game, is a mini game which happens when a zombie grabs you. You have to steer the analogue stick towards the zombies face (while the target moves around) and press R2 to stab it. And if there are several of them standing around, you will have to do this one after another with no chance to shove or attack in between. The other zombies will politely wait around for their turn and not even bother attacking you, which is nice of them I guess.

I found the way which the zombies spawned to be really strange. If you clear out a whole room, go into another one and then walk back into the same room, they will have already spawned back. They sometimes spawn right behind you, even if your back is against a wall. It means that there is less fear when walking around searching for supplies, because you already know that they are going to pop up everywhere regardless.

If it was more unknown, then you would have more motivation to sneak around trying to be undetected. But since the zombies will just cram back into the same room anyway, you can’t be bothered with all of that. They have tried to put a survival horror element to the game, with dark rooms lit with your torch, but it all feels so contrived. If I walked past a dead zombie (as in one that’s not moving) and it suddenly grabbed my leg and tried to eat me, then that would make me shit myself.

Another feature of the game is that you will have the opportunity to gather a few survivors among your journey who will be able to scavenge for supplies for you. I was disappointed that there was no opportunity to interact with them, which meant that you end up not caring they die or not. I contemplated giving someone a shotgun, but I decided that if they died I would be more upset about losing the gun. So I sent them out to get me fuel totally defenceless, and I felt nothing.

Activision have really missed out on a great opportunity here. There were so many things that could have vastly improved this game. If they had spent more time making it pretty, if they had made more executive sequences with different weapons, no silly spawning and survivors which you would actually care about. I want to know if their family got eaten by zombies in front of them and now they feel like it was all their fault. I want to console them, tell them that there was nothing they could do – but Activision took that all away from me.

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