Just so I know I've said this at least once here, there won't be an update this week because I'm on Enrichment Week in school, and have a bunch of homework I need to get done in the break from assignments that it's provided. Next week, however, we will return.

Press 'X' to Review: Besiege

Besiege
Platform: PC/Steam
Developer: Spiderling Studios
Premise: Conquer the world, one zone at a time, by building siege engines relying on physics, skill, and a frankly ludicrous amount of explosives.
Initial Release Date: 28/01/2015 (Early Access)

I picked up Besiege about a year ago when it came out on Early Access, but didn't get very far because a) a lot of the elements that I ended up finding useful during my recent run through hadn't been added yet, and b) my computer at the time couldn't really run it without slowing down to a crawl whenever things started to get particularly explode-y. However, since then it's received a number of updates and I've managed to get a better school laptop as well as something vaguely resembling a gaming computer, so in the absence of anything else to play this week that I could both play and review in the time allotted, I picked it back up.

The best way I can think of describing Besiege's gameplay is "Kerbal Space Program, but with siege engines and a vaguely medieval-punk aesthetic". The only other main difference is that if your siege engine manages to get to the moon, something has gone horribly wrong instead of horribly right. The builder is easy enough to use, although it would've been nice to know about the 'rotate' control before I was three quarters of the way through the first kingdom. That being said, something being poorly explained is the kind of thing that's only a problem once. Each level gives you a vague objective, something like 'Destroy 90% of everything', or 'Steal and deliver this crystal' and doesn't particularly care how you get from Point A to Point B, and I like that it doesn't hold your hand, but it would've been nice if it gave you a couple of ideas on what to build because I'll admit that despite the variety, I ended up relying on the same handful of tools. Pro tip: helicopters are relatively easy to build, easy to mod for a variety of objectives, and unless there are archers or heavy winds in play the only real danger to you is yourself.

Press 'X' to Rant: Multiplayer Only

An open letter to the developers of "multiplayer-only" games:

Dear developers,
I can understand why, over the past year or two, you collectively seem to have become entranced by the idea of making games "multiplayer-only"; It requires significantly less work than creating a balanced single-player and multi-player experience, it means that you can focus on a more polished and full experience in one court as opposed to having two thinner experiences in two, and you can apparently sell it at full-price with people calling you out on it left, right and center and still make a frankly ludicrous amount of money.

I'll grant you, multi-player is often very satisfying to be good at; there's something viscerally fun about knowing that you've bested your fellow man that you just don't get by playing against a computer. In addition, I'll grant you that multiplayer tends to take longer to get tired of than single-player, although this is largely dependent on who you're matched with or against. However, it does have one major problem which I've brought up previously in my RWBY: Grimm Eclipse review, and that is Ghost Town Servers. What happens six months down the line when most of the player base have moved on to the Next Big Thing?

Press 'X' to Review: RWBY: Grimm Eclipse

RWBY: Grimm Eclipse
Platform: PC/Steam
Developer: Rooster Teeth Games/Jordan Scott
Premise: Play as one of the four members of Team RWBY to fight the forces of Grimm, Explodey-Grimm(tm), and android guards who will ruin your day if you're in the same postcode.
Release Date: 05/07/2016

A.N: Just wanted to say that this blog finally managed to hit 500 views over the week (WOOHOO!), so thank you all, from the bottom of my heart. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

So, a bit of backstory: before it was a game, RWBY was (and still is) a web-show by Rooster Teeth. I quite like the show, although volume 3 did test that somewhat. There's only so much emotional trauma I'm willing to deal with in the span of 5 episodes. Anyway, the point is that I expected that Grimm Eclipse might follow the traditional curse of the movie/TV tie-in game. However, it was also made by the same people that made the show, which from experience is pretty much the best way to avert the TV show/game tie-in curse. So, now that I've actually played the thing, the one question that needs to be answered still remains: Is It Fun?

Press 'X' to Review: Pokémon GO! (Australia)

Pokémon Go!
Platform: iOS, Android
Developer: Niantic Inc.
Premise: Pokémon, but in the real world and with pretty much all the strategy and combat mechanics stripped out.
Release Date: 06/07/2016

Between the Darwin Police Department having to issue an official statement asking players not to enter their stations looking for Pokémon or to use the PokéStop, the Tennessee Highway Patrol needing to run posters asking drivers to "Stop before you GO!" because people were having car crashes by trying to hunt down Pokémon while driving, and that whole thing with people going into graveyards or the Holocaust Museum because they're set as Pokéstops, it's been practically impossible to have not heard about Pokemon GO! over the past month. There was apparently some controversy among the Americans about the fact that Australia got access to it first given that we quote "already have dangerous creatures waiting to attack us around every corner", to which I'll simply say that it's probably karma for having pretty much every release arbitrarily pushed back by a month or two for the last forever. 

For those of you that have somehow managed to avoid hearing anything about Pokémon GO! (presumably by living in Antarctica), it's an Augmented Reality game for iOS and Android where Pokémon are scattered throughout the real world, so you walk around and attempt to catch them, whilst also getting involved in a massive clan war between Team Instinct, whose philosophy is mostly "Eh, we'll wing it", Team Mystic, whose philosophy is that Pokémon battles should be approached more methodically, and then there's Team Valour who.... hmm. Look, you know the Hunters from Destiny? Whose philosophy was basically "Let's just run at the problem with a knife in each hand raised overhead while screaming 'LEROOOOOOOYYY JENKINS!'"? Yeah, Team Valour is basically that but instead of a knife in each hand they have pokémon. Personally, for me it was a toss-up between Instinct and Mystic, because both made good points. Mystic eventually took it, because I thought the Blue colour scheme looked better.

Press 'X' to Review Overwatch: New Hero, Zenyatta Buff, and Healers in general.

So, last week on Overwatch a new hero was added to the roster in the PTR (Public Test Region), which for those that are unaware is the place where people that own the PC version of the game can play the next update before anyone else. This hero was Ana, Pharah's mum and a new way to disappoint your team. She's a sniper-support class, which on paper sounds quite good; given that most support class heroes can't take more than 3 shots to the face, it makes sense that you would have a support class that can heal from a distance. How this works out, however, is that you snipe enemies and cause damage over a short period of time, or snipe an ally and heal them for a short period of time. Possibly the best example I can think of for why this is perhaps not the best idea is when a Junkrat was requesting healing, but was in the middle of a firefight with a D.va so I couldn't hit him, and my A.O.E heal ability was still on cooldown. In addition to this, she's a sniper with no movement abilities, so she has to pretty much be with the rest of the team anyway. At time of writing, what I'd probably suggest is to maybe increase the amount of aim-assist for allies by a bit, and maybe give her a short jet-boost or climb ability or something to make her viable as an actual sniper. That being said, I also had to play against her a fair bit and based on the skill level of some of the players I had to go up against I'd say that it's entirely possible that either I just suck at her and practice may improve my abilities, or that it's just a very specialised skill-set required to use her well. There's certainly a lot of room for improvement, but what's here now is still reason enough to go back to Overwatch for a bit if you've let it sit idle for the last few weeks.

Moving on to Zenyatta, another healer who experienced some additions in the PTR recently. I'll admit that I'd not played them much before, given that they had the same health as Tracer but with half the speed and because their damage seemed a little underwhelming. In the PTR, however, their health has been upgraded to 200 (50 health, 150 shields) and they've also received a buff to their primary weapon damage. It was enough that I was able to reliably have an even K/D with them, and even when I didn't I was getting the team's gold medal for healing. They're certainly a much more viable choice than they were before, and with a bit more practice I could even see myself using them as my preferred healer. I certainly noticed a few more Zenyatta players than usual, although in spite of this I was unfortunately still unable to convince a team to help me show the enemy the true meaning of tranquility with a full Zenyatta team. Regardless of my inability to debate the merits of one-hero team compositions, it's certainly a positive development.

The last thing I'd like to talk about here is Overwatch's Support class in general. The buffs to Zenyatta and the addition of Ana could not have come soon enough, because it means that Mercy and Lucio are no longer the only supports anyone picks, and as someone that previously default-picked Mercy whenever a healer was needed I'm glad that there are other viable options; that is, options that have decent weapons. It's also good that there are now support characters where saying that they're good doesn't need to then be qualified by the statement "for a support," because it means an increase in the number of people willing to play a support character if necessary, and a boost to the number that might consider doing it voluntarily or as a first choice. The thing with games like Overwatch and TF2, where the success of your team relies on the willingness of your teammates to fill a role and perform that role well, is that the community is just as important as the game itself. A toxic or un-collaborative player base can ruin a good game, but a friendly and co-operative community can save a mediocre or bad one. That's all for this week.

As per usual, anyone with a question, query, rant topic or review suggestion can email them to me at pressxtoreview@gmail.com

-Harry

Press 'X' to Review: Dark Souls | Journal, Part 1

So I recently acquired the Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition during the Steam Summer Sale, on the basis that I have yet to hear a review about it that hasn't recommended picking it up. From what I could tell looking around the forums, it really is one of those games where everyone you talk to will have a different story and anecdotes of getting literally pounded into the pavement. I wondered for a while if it was the kind of game I should bother reviewing; for starters, it's notoriously ginormous (a quality that, while generally attractive in games, makes it a bit difficult to get through in a week to review. Secondly, everyone already knows that it's good, and reviewing it now would be akin to trying to review Half-Life in the sense that it would be a colossal waste of time. At the end of the day, I decided that I probably should review it given that it was the only game I actually got around to playing this week that I haven't already reviewed, and I didn't want to just do a rant for the second week in a row.

I started off playing Dark Souls with only a minimal amount of knowledge about the actual combat: I'd seen the Zero Punctuation review, which described it as the kind of system where "dodge rolling always works", and I'd watched a let's play of DS3 that was able to confirm that much. I rolled a Pyromancer with the Skeleton Key as my special gift, because none of the other classes seemed to have decent ranged attacks in a game where most enemies are melee-focused, and the other gifts seemed like they wouldn't be much use. After this, I was given a cut-scene that filled me in on the plot so far: the world was apparently ruled by dragons, until 4 beings somehow got their hands on 'Lord Souls', which granted them the supernatural powers necessary to overthrow their dragon overlords (with the help of another dragon that betrayed its own people). Somehow this resulted in the world being trapped in a cycle of ages of Fire and ages of Dark. The end of these ages is heralded by the dead rising from their graves to enjoy the consequent fireworks, which is where the player comes in. As an undead 'Hollow', I was dropped into a locked cell in an asylum with half a sword, because that's apparently what they do with undead people around here.