First Impression: Prey 2017 (PC – Steam) ~ This is the real one.

Wikipedia entry – Steam page

I love atmospheric shooters. Ever since I played games like Bioshock, Outlaws, Blood, Doom (2016) … I fell in love with shooters that are more than just your typical war or good versus evil shooters. One day, on a school friend’s birthday, he gave a pile of games he got for his birthday to me. It were a whole pile of shooters that he got as a present. He didn’t like shooters, and he knew I was a game collector. One of these games was the original Prey game. Now, that game ended on a cliffhanger and Prey 2 never released. Instead, 4 years ago now, we got a reboot of the franchise or a game with the same name called Prey. The only thing that those two have in common from what I can see is that they are both atmospheric fantasy shooters. But is this Prey 2017 game also good enough to be played, or should I have skipped this game? Well, let’s find out together in this article, while I invite you to leave a comment in the comment section with your thoughts and/or opinions on the content of this article and/or the game.

The real one

In this game, you take on the role of Morgan Yu. A researcher in this alternate timeline where the Soviet Union found a special type of aliens. After doing some tests, you find out that your life is a lie and that you are living in a simulation. It doesn’t take long before the scary things start happening, and you find out that the base you are living was attacked. These attackers are quite powerful black blobs who can mimic anything. So, it’s up to Yu to find out what happened and to save the day if needed.

Now, trying to briefly explain what happens in the story if this game is extremely tricky since this game has a lot of lore and explaining too much might spoil some neat surprises the story takes. So, since I don’t like to spoil games in my articles, I’m not going to talk too much more about what happens in the story of this game.

As a big fan of the Bioshock franchise, I do have to say that I love the way this story is paced. I always wanted to play another game that resembles the gameplay formula but does a lot of things differently. Just like in Bioshock, this game takes you from area to solve puzzles, fight enemies and progress in the story. I felt right at home.

The voice acting in this game is excellent. I love how you can choose the gender of the main character, and they are both done by excellent actors. If you want to dive deeper into the voice actors, the page on Behind the Voice Actors lists them all quite nicely.

The atmosphere of this game combined with the amazing voice work really pulls me into the game. Like I said before, I felt right at home and I felt that my wish of playing another atmospheric shooter like the Bioshock games was coming true.

This game is a horror adventure shooter game. That’s the best way I can describe this game. I hesitate to call this game an RPG but then again, it has various elements of that. During your travels, you can find neuromods that can unlock abilities like being able to lift heavier things or resist more damage. You can compare it to the skill system that is used in the Tomb Raider reboot games.

Apart from this, you can also find junk lying around in this game that you can transform into usual materials you can use to craft more ammo or better weapons. But beware, all these items are in a shared inventory, together with your weapons, ammo, healing items and so on. Compare the inventory system to Resident Evil 4.

Exploration in outer space

Almost like DooM 2016, this game doesn’t really take place on Earth. It’s set in space, Talos I to be exact. Unlike DooM 2016, there are outer space sections in this game. Then again, DooM 2016 goes to hell and back. Anyways, you go through various locations during your adventure in this game, and you even have sections that are in outer space that gave a similar feeling to the underwater sections in Bioshock 2. But, I haven’t gotten far enough into the game to tell you what these “out door” sections are all about.

During this adventure, you can use a huge amount of weapons. So far, I have gotten three very different types of guns and various types of grenades. So, the most common enemies in this game are the mimics. These enemies can change into various objects in the space station. Thankfully, your weapons can be quite helpful. For example, your crossbow has reusable darts you can shoot when you suspect a certain object to be a mimic. Another example is the first gun you get in this game, the gloop gun. This gun can’t only stun mimics, but it can also be used to create ladders to climb walls.

I really like how open this game feels. With the various power ups you can unlock and the various uses of your weapons, this game feels like an open world game, while it is anything but. The levels/area’s are quite open and you can totally choose how to tackle them. So, I think the replay value in this game will be quite high all the while this game having a very linear story.

In terms of difficulty, this game isn’t the easiest nor the hardest game I have ever played. Depending on the things you unlock in the skill tree, this game can become easier. But don’t get me wrong, this game kept challenging me in quite unique ways. Quite often, I had to think outside the box to solve certain sections or to find secrets. I loved reading the various lore books scattered around the levels. They gave so much more depth to the story. Those were quite rewarding secrets to find.

I have to admit that I find this game quite addictive to play. This game feels like an amazing cross between amazing elements of great games like Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, DooM, System Shock and Bioshock. And it works together so amazingly. I had to adjust the default control scheme a little to suit my AZERTY keyboard lay-out a bit more, but the fact that it recognizes my AZERTY keyboard made me smile. Speaking about the controls, they are excellent. I always felt in control of my character, and every death felt like my mistake and not the game cheating me out of it.

Peek-a-boo!

The AI of the enemies in this game is excellent. The amount of times I was chasing a mimic while it disappeared on me… for me having to turn the corner and suddenly a chair transforms back into a mimic and attacks me… Well, I can’t tell you how much something along those lines happened.

This brings me to the visual presentation of this game. I’m so glad that this game runs so fluently on my GTX 1050Ti, so I can experience the visuals of this game in all its glory. Just look at the screenshots I chose in this article. The environmental details in this game are amazing. Together with the excellent animations, moments like I described above work so well in this game. This space station really feels like it would have been a real work and living space for some, many people, making the atmosphere more realistic and more enjoyable.

I have jumped out of my chair several times while playing this game. Especially when the mimics suddenly attacked me or when a big mimic monster started to follow or attack me. But, there were also moments where I was extremely impressed on the presentation this game has. I think this game is going to hold up visually quite well in the future, it looks that good in my opinion.

But, what is an amazing visual presentation without sound design and music? I’m happy to say that this game also delivers on that front. The techno-dance / orchestral soundtrack of this game only adds to the atmosphere. The soundtrack is done by Mick Gordon together with Ben Crossbones, Matt Piershall and Raphaël Colantonio. These composers did an amazing job on this soundtrack and made some amazing soundtracks for other games in this own rights.

And yes, the sound effects are also amazing. I always feel like I have to be on my toes while strange noises fill the empty and scary hallways of the space station. I think I might repeat myself again here, but I felt on edge while playing this game, in the good way. Almost everything in this game falls into place just right for me. I actually had a hard time writing this article since I wanted to keep playing the game more than I felt like finishing this article.

So far, I have been praising this game quite a lot. Are there things that I didn’t like about this game? Sadly enough, there are a few of them. The first is that the crafting process of ammo is a bit silly since you can’t mutli craft. Seriously, when I want a ton of gloo gun ammo, I have to craft them one by one.

Secondly, the amount of healing items is a tad bit too low in this game. I felt that one mistake gets too harshly pushing. One time in the outer space section, I bumped into an explosive that took out almost all my health. So, back inside the station… A strong enemy is waiting for me. Oh well, this might have been my bad luck or more moments where you can heal would be nice.

And to be honest, that’s it in terms of negatives. I could complain about the game sometimes lagging a bit, but that’s mostly because my system meets the recommended specs quite well. My CPU is a lot stronger, but my GPU is just one generation newer.

Do I recommend this game? Oh heavens yes, I do. If you enjoy games like I mentioned in this article, shooters, horror games, Dead Space… I think this game is going to be one for you! When I bought this game, I knew that I was going to enjoy this game, but I didn’t expect the game exceeding my hype and hopes for the game. I can’t wait for my summer holidays to start since then I can start on finishing this amazing title. I’m also glad that I’m playing this game after the technical issues that this game had at the start with save games. According to howlongtobeat.com, this game is going to take around 40-ish hours to beat, and I currently am 5 hours in. So, I can’t wait. I can’t wait to be pulled into the mystery of the mimics and phantoms and what happened on that space station. But I’m not going to be the Prey… right?

And that’s everything I wanted to say about this game for now. I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in a future article, but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!

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Publishing: Be Part Of History With Rise Of Ages

Rise of Ages is a sandbox game that lets you explore, build, found cities, make wars and evolve technologies to reach the highest level of civilization and then travel to other planets! The game begins in prehistory and advances through ages, as the player evolves. In each era, the player will live a unique story, which will lead him to face dangerous dungeons and powerful enemies. Several building blocks and items will allow the player to create their own culture with unique structures.

History

Development of Rise of Ages began in early 2015, the team has dedicated all its time and effort since then to bring the game to life. Late 2016 a public demo was released at GameJolt to see public reception. The team kept working on the game and is preparing to launch the game on early access.

Features

• Evolve from stone age to space age, going through a total of six eras.
• Discover new technologies, each one expanding your possibilities. There are more than 30 of them.
• Found your civilization and call NPCs to live there. A city is just the beginning, claim other cities through war and build an empire.
• Each NPC will have a job and will work for you. They can specialize in a profession and become better at it. You can even create a supply chain.
• Experience a unique story on each age through dozens of quests and multiple side quests.
• Fight bosses that are powerful enemies and unimaginable beings.
• Craft multiple objects from your hands or from your skilled workers.
• Explore the world beyond the limits, going through the left/rightmost side of a region will leave you to the World Map that connects multiple regions of the world.

Check out the last public demo of Rise of Ages. gamejolt.com.

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About Anguis Game Studio

Boilerplate
Anguis Game Studio is an independent game studio based in Porto Alegre, Brazil. We are working on our first title Rise of Ages

More information
More information on Anguis Game Studio, our logo & relevant media are available here.

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Rise of Ages Credits

Michel Alves: Founder & Programmer

Ronaldo Boeira: Founder & Artist

Contact

Inquiries: contact@anguis.net

Twitter: twitter.com/AnguisStudio

Facebook: facebook.com/anguisstudio

Web: anguis.net

More information can be found in the press kit located here: http://playriseofages.com/presskit/sheet.php?p=Rise%20of%20Ages

The game is released on Steam TODAY: https://store.steampowered.com/app/744270/Rise_of_Ages/

First Impression: Mind the Vikings (PC) ~ Very Alpha

Official Steam page

The game I wanted to talk about today is already released in an early alpha stage of development. The name of the game is “Mind the Vikings”. This game has been released in early January on Steam. While I got a review code from the developers, they wanted that I wrote 100% my opinion, and that’s what you will be getting. For this review, I played version 0.4.1. The game was also updated with various new features while I was playing this game for this review. In any case, let me talk about my first impressions of this game. As usual, feel free to leave a comment in the comment section down below with your opinion on the game and/or the content of this article.

Vikings in a sandbox

Do you remember the first night you had in Minecraft? The time you are dropped into a sandbox with a world to explore. Well, I got that feeling when I first started to play Mind the Vikings. Like Minecraft, this game doesn’t really have an overall story.

This is a breath of fresh air for me. If the developers are planning to add a story in the full release of the game, I hope that they make it a separate mode to the main game. In this game, you start in a randomized land and you must decide where you place your main base.

When you decided on a spot, Vikings start to join you. The goal of the game is to create a base for them and decide which jobs they do. Also, you should maintain peace, to a certain degree, in your clan.

Something I decided is that I want to know as little about the future of the game as possible. I really think that this game will be much more exciting if I don’t know what other features this game will bring. There are already a bunch of hints on the Steam Store page and they all sound interesting.

It didn’t take long before I had a small Viking village up and running. Various lumberjacks gather, and miners were gathering resources. At first, I was going to complain about the lack of the tutorial, but I think the game doesn’t really need one at this moment. If the developers decide to make a tutorial, I think it would be a great idea to do something like Minecraft and achievements. Where the achievements are there to guide the player but if you want to learn to play this game by playing it, you can ignore the achievements.

Early Stages

At this moment in time, the game is in pretty early stages of development. There isn’t too much to do in this game, but I do have a few things they can polish up already.

First, the camera is pretty good if you have a QWERTY-layout. The game didn’t recognize my AZERTY-layout. You can also move the camera with the arrow keys, but I much more prefer the ZQSD keys, since around there, the buttons to turn around the camera are located.

Secondly, I want to talk about the “exit menu”. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s the strange name the “pause menu” has. Something I found strange is that you can still interact with the game to a certain degree while the pause menu is open. Two examples: you can recruit new Vikings or click on a house and navigate to the location of the Viking who lives in there. I think it would be better if the pause menu appears in the middle of the screen and makes you unable to do interactions like that. Because this menu appears in the top right of the screen, underneath the gear icon, I didn’t always know if the game was paused or not.

Third, I think it would be helpful more things in the UI had visible “quit” buttons. A button to close the options menu for example. I know that this menu is closed by using the right mouse button, but I have a feeling not everybody will realize that.

Fourth are two minor things. Why do I always see the company’s logo when I go back to the main menu and why isn’t there a load option on the pause menu? Two minor things which would be a great improvement of the game is this is fixed.

Fifth, put an invisible wall at the end of the map where the camera can’t go past.

So, when you are reading this, you would think that this game isn’t that good and is rough around the edges. You would be right about one thing; this game is rough around the edges. That’s why feedback for this game is so important. The developers ask for feedback like this on their Steam page. So, if you start to play this game and find a bug or have a suggestion, please go to their Discord server or on the Steam forums and talk about it. You will help to improve the game.

The right track

When I read the description of this game, I thought that this game would be full of action and split-second decision making to raise towns and fight various big battles on the sea. Well, that you don’t get into this game at this moment. Maybe in the future.

Instead, you get a rather relaxing game where you have to manage your civilization. In terms of gameplay, you can compare this game somewhat to Age Of Empires with a bit of The Sims sprinkled on top. I do have to say that I got myself relaxed while playing this game.

Even while this game is in the early stages of development, this game does somethings pretty good already. For example, music. It fits the game like a glove. The music is more ambient and relaxing like the music you can hear in games like Minecraft. I tested out this game with Minecraft’s soundtrack playing in the background and I must say, I think they made the right pick in terms of music.

Visually, this game is extremely well made. I really like the world and animations this game brings to the table. If this is the style the final product will be in, I’m quite pleased with the result.

Something I also really like is the way how you can build paths and how builds align themselves to the paths. When you built a path, you click somewhere to start a path. When you click again, you can make the path turn in a different direction. You must use “enter” to place the path. Now, it sounds confusing when I write it down here, but trust me, it’s so easy and great to use in the game.

At this very moment, the game isn’t difficult nor easy. This is because there isn’t an end goal for this game. And to be honest, I think that’s okay for now. This game should have a possible end goal like conquering x-number of villages or owning x-amount of land or defeating a certain general, but I think that this game will be better if it doesn’t have that.

While I could continue to talk about this game for a bit longer, I think I’m not going to do that. I’m going to follow the upcoming patches and new things added to the game. This game has a lot of potentials to become an amazing experience. I’m having a lot of fun playing this game and seeing it develop. I love to see the community around this game helping the developers out and making this game even better. At this moment, this game has an asking price of 11€. If you want to see this game get further developed, I encourage you to buy this game, play it and give feedback to the developers! I really want this game to grow to its fullest potential.

Thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing this article. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, take care and have a great rest of your day.

First Impression: Bully – Scholarship Edition (PC / Steam) ~ It’s a game at least.

Official website

My current studies, at the moment of writing this article, in college are to become a teacher. So, honestly, I was quite interested in this game. I was curious how they would address the problems of a bully. Knowing the developer, the first impression of this game is that this game actually gives bullying a “good vibe”. But let me explain in this article why I think the game is actually not even worth it. How they totally missed tons and tons of opportunities. If you follow me on my Twitter, you know that I tweeted out to Q that this game left me ‘meh’.  In other words, I’m not extremely interested in beating this game. There are just too many flaws in this game that it isn’t even funny. And it’s an extreme shame, Rockstar Games are known for amazing games, but they failed on various parts in this game. I kinda feel like a real teacher now, sometimes repeating this same information but in different ways. Hah! Food for thought. Something my colleague teachers will understand. Anyway, while I do realize that I can possibly get hate on this article, I honestly only care about people who can say their opinion with respect. And I invite you to post a comment with your own thoughts on this article and or the game. 

And I haven’t played yet.

When you have games like GTA under your belt, you expect quality things from the developer. But the download on Steam was just finished, and I noticed that the game was going to be a major let down.

I researched the problem, and I wasn’t the only one. The game has freezing issues at the start-up loading screen. I repeat, the start-up loading screen. Yeah, and I haven’t played the game yet. And we are off to a great start. And sorry Rockstar, you have no excuse! At the title screen it says “1,200”. Assuming this is your version number, this means most likely that you released 2 patches. Ignoring that issue is a shame.

Then the main menu, I seriously thought that I was going to pull my hair out. The main menu on the Steam version is terrible. It has an interesting design behind it, but it barely has any options you expect from the main menu. To configure most options, apart from video (If I recall correctly), have to be done when you loaded your save.

Sadly enough, the problems don’t stop there. The game can be played with an XBOX360 controller. And honestly, I recommend playing it with a controller. Why? Because the controls feel stiff and awkward. The controller’s controls are an improvement but not that much. And how can a big studio not program the recognition of the controller? I found this out in mid-game. So, I plugged in my controller and I have to reboot the game in order for it to work. And here is the fun part, when I unplugged it mid-game, the game didn’t react to keyboard input!

Nice try guys.

Graphically this game is pretty okay. It isn’t anything amazing but thankfully they used some detail. But then, the developer got GTA in their heads and the designing a school got a “GTA upgrade”.

You can buy new clothes to wear instead of the uniform. I facepalmed hard right there. If you missed why, look up the definition of a school uniform. You have to wear that uniform and nothing else. Okay, it’s to rebel, I understand. But you easily get in trouble in real life if you break rules.

Now, the animation. Do I truly have to? Well, here we go then. The animation of this game is just awful. Please tell me when I can come out of hiding after the hoard of angry fanboys went by.

The game is riddled with animation problems. From twitching characters to people falling upwards, they got it all. As if this game has been thrown on Steam just to have some more cash. This game is pretty bad at hiding its issues. In cutscenes, you can see the issues popping up. In the cutscenes! I mean, come on. If you know your engine has issues, use movies like in the old days as cut scenes.

More issues

I might start talking again about the design and the animation of this game in this article, but if I don’t, I’ll surely talk about it in my full review if I ever write one.

Another BIG issue I have to address is the sound. From the music to the sound effects. The music, honestly, is bland. I always listen to the game’s music when writing articles. It helps my brain to get into the mood and feel from the game. But the music is nothing special. I find it hard to even remember tunes from the game. While I can easily recognize many tracks of other games I played. But that might be because I didn’t hear everything yet.

And the sound effects, my lords. Are they bad! The sound of students stepping sounds like they clapped two coconut shells to each other. Or those old plastic pots with cords that you walked around with on the playing ground. It breaks the immersion quick.  I had it happen often.

And don’t get my started about the students. They are loud and thanks to that you can barely hear what’s said in some cutscenes and what your reply was of a student you praised or said bad things too. Also, they sometimes give you awkward replies or the same one over and over again.

Is this game junk? Well, no not completely. The gameplay is somewhat interesting. But please, anything but the classes. While they could have showed the fascinating part of teaching they replaced the courses by simple mini-games. And English class is such a pain for a not native speaker. Trying to make words with the letters given. I had to struggle a lot. My native language isn’t English, it’s Dutch. So, that’s a spot where they missed something they could have done gameplay wise.

Anyway, I think I’m going to leave it here. I might play this game a bit more to research it, but that’s my current opinion on it. If you want to try it, know it didn’t talk in depth about the graphics, design, gameplay and control. That’s something for you to discover. But I warn my readers, think this one through before you buy it. You might be let down by the sheer unpolished elements in this game.