Our heroes set out on the second leg of their epic quest, and today’s episode is not to be missed! It features everything from horses with silly names, bandits with hearts of gold, and even the possibility of Dunstan the bard accidentally killing the entire human race!
Please do like and subscribe, so you don’t miss the next episode of what is turning out to be one of my favourite things to do. And if you missed episode 1, feel free to check it out, here!
IT’S HERE AT LAST!
THE VERY FIRST EPISODE OF OUR BRAND NEW SERIES: DUMMIES AND DRAGONS
As you can probably tell we’re all very new to playing D&D so we’re a little shaky on the game in terms of rules but you know what? We had a great time and we hope you’ll enjoy it just as much
Here to improve your week comes the (Slightly) belated E3 special Podcast from the Played Out boys.
Make sure to subscribe to us on Soundcloud or Itunes and follow our future projects here on Roguelike Start.
The Surge was released yesterday and I’ve been lucky enough to have had a few hours with it to see just what it’s all about.
The first thing we need to set straight is just how similar this game is in terms of design and gameplay to the Souls series by FromSoftware. The combat, the exploration, the boss fights, everything about The Surge is a cover version of the well-established design philosophy that has made the Souls games so beloved by a large sect of the gaming community. I’d say in terms of how the game plays it’s closer to Bloodborne than Demon/Dark Souls thanks to how fluid (and at times how frustrating the combat can sometimes be). These comparisons should be somewhat of a red flag to those who didn’t get into those games in a big way, which I must admit I didn’t. Still, it’s got enough to differentiate it that it could prove a good starting point for those interested in the genre.
The first thing that really struck me about this game was that the main character is, before being augmented with a mech-suit, in a wheelchair. My knowledge of the representation of disabled people in games is sadly limited but I found this to be a very good way of grabbing my attention. After the five or so minutes of the prologue before the protagonist is fitted for a suit that allows him to walk the game never makes mention of the characters past disability. I have a feeling the game is unlikely to use that narrative potential going forward since it’s a game that appears more interested in dismemberment than anything nuanced.
The combat as you’d expect is all very hack & slash in the mould of Souls game. Attacks carry with them a certain weight with them as they collide with foes bodies (if they don’t just clip right through as sometimes happens). Enemies can be focused on and individual body parts can be targeted for dismemberment. You can choose to target unarmoured parts for greater damage or you can take a risk and target the more heavily armoured parts of a foe and try to hack it off. Doing so will reward you with whatever that enemy had equipped. For instance, if I cut off the arm of my opponent I’d have a good chance of being able to loot the schematics to whatever they had equipped at the time, allowing me to craft my own for. Any later looting of the same parts will give you the resources to upgrade your equipment. For the most part, this system works well, although it does have some issues in targeting the torso of the typical human opponent, meaning I was left without a chest plate for the first two hours of the game as was unable to take much punishment from the various psychotic robots I encountered.
So far I’ve only encountered one Boss fight and I must say It left me a little cold. If you’ve seen any footage of the game it’s quite likely you’ll have seen this encounter, featuring a bi-pedal robot that looks like the one from Robocop (Which became a joke in how bad it was). For most of the fight I was just smashing my weapon against it’s legs, doing no real damage but instead filling a bar that once full would then decide that I was allowed to start doing damage for a very brief period. The fight was for the most void of any drama or tension. I hate to keep harking on to Dark Souls but remember the first boss fights of Dark Souls 3 or Bloodborne, those were epic as fuck! You were treated to a fearsome spectacle and even at such an early stage of the game they still felt nerve-wracking and skill testing. I’ve yet to encounter any more bosses in The Surge but I really do hope they’re a little more awe-inspiring
Those are just some of my initial thoughts about the Surge after my few hours playing with. I’ll be sure to write more about it in the coming days so do follow us on Twitter @RoguelikeStart
4 Years is a long time in games. In the last four, we’ve seen the rise of nostalgia-fuelled Kickstarters, the affirmation that Indie Games are here to stay and about a dozen different series by Telltale. I often find it useful and enjoyable to revisit games that came out a few years back, to see what I had forgotten about them, and recently I did this with the game that stole 2013, Grand Theft Auto V. Well, technically the PS4 remastered edition which came out in 2015, but that’s splitting hairs.
Most of us have probably played it, but for those who haven’t, GTAV is THE open world game. A distillation of almost two decades of design from the folks of Rockstar and the gold standard for the genre that many would claim still hasn’t been topped. This is a game that is still garnering headlines in 2017.
The story is that of three career criminals, from Franklin, an African-American Gangster who sees his hustling as a way to better himself. Michael, a professional Bank thief who until recently has been retired and Trevor, the physical embodiment of anger and frustration who hides his personal pain away under a penchant for shouting and killing.
The story then takes these three across the state, planning heists, assassinating people for the government and occasionally operating heavy machinery for their friend’s brother-in-law. As I replay the story, I’m struck by how good the writing and dialogue of this game is. GTAV has the great advantage in that it has days worth of character dialogue to help flesh out each of its main characters, as well as a large cast of ancillary ones. With this room to breath, each character is fully believable, and understandable in many of their decisions. Of course, the fact that they live in a world where murder is a legitimate course of action 90% of the time can make them a little bit hard to empathise with at times.
Speaking of murder, the killing in GTA is just fine. For a game that, at it’s most basically level, is all about indulging your inner-spree shooter, the gunplay has never been that compelling. The game features a whole range of weapons to mow down cops and random goons but they all feel anaemic when the trigger is pulled as if I’m only pulling the trigger on a light gun. The game expects you to be doing much of your killing from the 3rd person perspective so maybe this lack of weapon “immersion” is understandable, but it still annoys me as a player who uses the first person mode a lot.
The driving works….. I hit fewer things than I don’t…. Mostly. I to am good to words.
Nah, but seriously. The driving experience shines best when you’re not on a mission but just cruising about, messing around while driving up the side of a mountain in an ice cream truck. To me personally, the driving in GTA was always there to facilitate me being a moron in one way or another. In many ways that define the best GTAV experience, you can have. I have a load of memories of playing the original GTAV on my mates Xbox, while three of us took turns to commit various atrocities. That couch experience was better than anything the game could script or plan. I feel the games multiplayer was designed to emulate this experience but unless I’m playing with people I know well, it just can’t hold a candle to the real thing.
GTA V was in many ways the swansong for the last generation of gaming hardware. The culmination of 8 years worth of trail and error. In many ways, the game has the feeling of being a self-congratulatory exercise from RockStar, with them nailing everything they’ve achieved from previous games and making it look effortless, throwing in all manner of bells and whistles to sweeten what was already one calorific pie (My food metaphor game is on point).
In the first of what may prove to be a semi-regular feature on the podcast, Rob and special guests gather to discuss one topic in-depth until they run out of things to say.
First up on the Bitesize chopping block (I’m mixing metaphors aren’t I? Is For Honor and he is joined by Roguelikes very own musical wunderkind himself, Philp Aldous
Philp’s work can be found here at RoguelikeStart and is well a listen, he can also be found on Twitter @PAldous. As for Rob he can be found here as well (At least until they take the tag off) and is on Twitter ranting about certain things until the small hours @ProperRob
Today sees the start of what I hope will be a new regular series here at RoguelikeStart: The Joys of *Insert game title here*
Here at Roguelike sometimes all we want to do is gush about a game we particularly love. So we decided to do just that. Today the series will be making its debut with me (Rob) talking about State of Decay, a third-person zombie survival game that I think is rather splendid.
Now unlike say Kevin, I’m not the greatest at video editing but I do hope to improve my work in the coming weeks and months. If you’d like to follow my journey to being watchable do Like/Subscribe/blood sacrifice a goat to the Roguelike Youtube Channel.
This afternoon after playing a bit of Horizon: Zero Dawn and finishing off the edits for the most recent podcast I allowed myself to go onto the internet and see what was new in the world of video games to get excited about and I was not disappointed.
Yes, the good folks over at Monolith studios have deemed us worthy to receive a morsel of gameplay from their upcoming Middle Earth: Shadow of War, the sequel to Shadow of Mordor (Which I will now refer to as SoW and SoM respectively). Since it’s “Leak” a little over a week ago my mind/the internet has been boggling with what new stuff the game will bring to the series, thankfully the new gameplay that’s been released is choc-a-bloc with all manner of good stuff for us to mull over. First off here is the gameplay for your viewing pleasure.
Housing prices in Mordor aren’t what they used to be. Following an influx of less than desirable orc neighbours and an ever so troublesome Dark Lord to contend with, most choose to move into more stable areas such as The Shire or far away from active volcanos. Thankfully this leaves the way open for you to aggressively take over your own little bit of Mordor through the use of violent negotiating tactics such laying siege to castles.
Yes, it would appear that SoW will have a new focus on taking and holding fortresses to extend your power throughout the lands of Mordor. Doing so looks to be a bloody affair and will call upon Talion and Celebrimbor to raise an army of Orcs (or Uruks if you insist on calling them that in the game) to smash down the gates and lay waste to everything inside. These sieges will act as flash points to your own narrative with multiple big name Orcs from your nemesis system (NS) coming out to play on both sides of the conflict.
With the sequel comes a whole bunch of new things to do with the nemesis system for you machiavellian monsters to play around with. From planting spies in enemy camps to having special commanders lead the charge in battle, the amount of variety in your Orcish friends has grown tremendously. Vendettas will grow between commanders who meet in battle, rivalries will grow in your own ranks as commanders vie for your praise. Friendships will blossom between them, leading to who knows where (My money is Shadow of Love to be the next sequel and to just be dating sim for Orcs.)
One thing the first game in the series felt to be lacking was a having little in the way of character customisation. Outside of the rune system for the various weapons, Talion used you couldn’t really alter the way the game played. Thankfully with SoW comes an expanded range of RPG-like systems to give you more say on how you play and look. The only thing that changes during the video is the chest piece Talion wears after he loots one off a dead Uruk Nemesis. Looking at the menus used during that change is shows the potential for a range of stuff to equip from helms and upgrades for your ring. Not sure if there will be much in the way of weapon customisation outside of an expanded rune system, so don’t expect Talion to start wielding Uruk cleavers instead of his rather awesome longsword.
Or is it a Drake/Wyvern/Fell Beast/School Children in an elaborate overcoat? Whatever that fire breathing bugger is I want one. I want to fly around Sauron’s Tower while smack talking him and his mother while my Orc boys bellow chant songs from the Best of Men at Work. Will this happen? I have my doubts but it would be a cool thing to do. DLC maybe? I was never the biggest fan of the mounts in SoM, I tended to just possess them and let them go about their own thing.
One thing that isn’t covered in the gameplay at all is the open world of the game. That’s no bad thing to be honest since we’ve all played enough open world games to know what’s what in that scenario. Still, it would have been nice to get some detail on it in the next few gameplay dumps that will surely follow. My guess is there won’t be too much different from the first game in terms of what you can do in them. I doubt for instance there will be much of a human element outside of scripted story missions. Which suits me just fine because the worse parts of SoM were the other humans/Dwarves.
So there are a few things that have got me excited for Shadow of War. How about you? What are you looking forward to or do you have so reservations about the game, why not leave a comment below….. Or above….. or somewhere? DO IT.
On today’s episode of the Played Out Podcast, Spoiler Kevin makes his PoP debut and chats about the Nintendo Switch, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Rob’s tiny hands. Please do enjoy and make sure to follow PoP on Soundcloud and Itunes for further episodes.
The newest episode of the Played Out Podcast, hosted by three of the fine gents who make up Roguelike is out now and available to listen on Soundcloud and download on Itunes
This particular episode covers the boys chatting about For Honor and Final Fantasy XV in perhaps more depth than is entirely called for.