Monthly Archives: August 2017

Splatoon 2

Splatoon 2 is a third-person ink-splatting shooter with fast-paced matches and eye-catching visuals. Deck out your squidling from an enormous collection of visual and gameplay altering equipment followed by heading to the various stages with the goal to cover absolutely everything in beautiful paint, available for the Nintendo Switch.

Features:

Sheldon’s Arsenal: Choose from a variety of weapons including rollers, sprayers, and giant brushes.

Lemme Splat: Jump into one of the several game modes like 4v4 turf war, tower control, rainmaker, zone control, co-op survival, and even a single player campaign where you can learn the game at your own pace.

Stay Off the Hook: Pick a faction -like ketchup or mayo- and fight for supremacy over the course of a week.

Raze: Dungeon Arena

Raze: Dungeon Arena is a free-to-play mobile apocalyptic ARPG developed by WonderGame Inc. for iOS and Android. In Raze: Dungeon Arena players can enjoy hack-n-slash style, dungeon crawling gameplay that revolves around hero choice, team composition, and collecting tons of loot! You won’t be at a loss for something to do with exciting combat and RPG elements to manage your heroes, all at the convenience of your mobile device. Start your dungeon crawling experience and create the strongest team of heroes you can in Raze: Dungeon Arena!

Features:

Hero Selection: The game is intended to launch with 24 different playable heroes like Ambrose – The Summoner, Alina Stewart – The Frost Priestess, Wojtek – The Beast Hunter, Hoatson – The Rhino Warrior and many more!

Game Mode Choice: Choose to play by yourself through a singleplayer campaign or take to multiplayer battles in 1v1, 2v2, co-op, and even guild matches.

Hero Upgrades: Upgrade your heroes with the loot you collect on your dungeon excursions and develop their special abilities.

Valnir Rok

Valnir Rok is a 3D online survival game developed by Encurio GmbH for PC that is centered around Norse mythology. In Valnir Rok players awaken to find themselves on Valnir Island, a place filled with violent men, wild animals, and mythical beasts. As a hardened Viking warrior they must attempt to survive in this harsh world by butchering any enemies that stand in their way, building and improving village structures, and forming clans to expand power, reputation, and influence. In a world where might makes right players will need to fight for their success, doing whatever they deem necessary for survival. Do you have what it takes to thrive in a world torn with clan warfare and mythological beasts running rampant?

Features:

Exploration: Players can explore deserted villages and burnt ruins, search for treasures in hidden caves, or take on quests for rewards and renown.

Crafting: Craft useful tools and concoct potions which you can trade. Combine items and learn new recipes. Improve your skills until you become a master craftsman.

Clans: Establish a full-fledged village with your friends and companions. Defend your clan banner and territory together as a single force. Battle against opposing clans, wreak havoc, and subdue their forces to render them helpless.

Insidia

Insidia is a 3D apocalyptic strategy game developed by Bad Seed and is expected to be available on Steam Early Access in its open beta phase during Summer 2017. In Insidia players can engage in frantic, tactical duels by assembling a team of four champions and taking them into battles. By being easy to learn and hard to master with fast-paced matches, Insidia promises to keep you on your toes in every match. It’s always your turn in Insidia, so get out there and lead your champions to victory! Never has fighting for glory be so hectic, strategic, and satisfying at the same time!

Features:

Team Composition: Each hero plays a particular role in a team’s composition. Make sure you have a wide variety of skills and abilities at your fingertips.

Apocalypse Survivors: Steam knights, fierce punks, odd mutants and the like all have found their way in the world, and they won’t be willing to give it up so easily. Heroes are hardened by the lives they’ve lived and are ready to do battle!

Combo Attacks: Blend your champion’s abilities together in the game’s combo system and deal devastating blows to wipe your enemies away.

DarkEden Origin

DarkEden Origin is a free-to-play 2D MMORPG developed by SOFTON ENTERTAINMENT that takes place 200 years after the events from the original Darkeden game, featuring battles between races and player-killing in an open world. The year is 2048 and it is a very turbulent time. Endless battles are raging in an effort to gain control of lands and resources with no foreseeable yield in the future. As the war draws out humans have found ways to develop industrial technologies to use to their advantage, but the vampires have been hard at work as well developing their own intelligent magic skills. Which way will the war swing?

Features:

Vampires and Slayers: Players can become either a Vampire or Slayer and choose to become one of their varying classes, each of which has its own unique role in battle.

Improved Throwback: Those who loved the first DarkEden game will enjoy that DarkEden Origin goes back to its roots while improving its user experience with reconstructed gameplay.

Open World PvP: You’d better watch your back for other players out in the world. You never know who will try to take you down at a moment’s notice!

Prosperous Universe

Prosperous Universe is an upcoming buy-to-play browser sci-fi MMORPG developed by simulogics for PC, Mac, and Linux with an expected release sometime in Q4 2017. In Prosperous Universe it is the mid-21st Century and humanity is doing surprisingly well contrary to prior concerns a few decades earlier. At least, humanity was doing well until the discovery of the planet killer: an asteroid that would hit Earth 100 years later and destroy the entire planet. In the interest of survival large corporations banded together to transport part of the human population to other planets, but now those humans are back at what they do best: trading and looking to expand their influence even more than before!

Features:

True Consequences: With thousands of other players as your competition you’d better be careful when choosing partners and trusting others. Every single choice you make will leave its mark on other players and the universe.

Real Economy: Every resource, component, and spaceship must be provided by other players in an economic system where supply and demand determine prices.

Build Wealth Your Way: Mine resources to sell to other players, design complex production chains, play with commodity exchanges and more! This universe lets you become wealthy in whatever way you can find.

Sailcraft

Sailcraft is a free-to-play mobile strategy game developed by TQ Games for Android. It is expected to see an iOS release as well sometime in 2017. In Sailcraft players can participate in exciting naval warfare where they can dominate the world with their own unique strategy and style. If you were ever a fan of the age-old game of Battleship then you are sure to enjoy the way Sailcraft mixes classic battleship rules with warship skills to creative an innovative gameplay experience!

Features:

Naval Races: Players can create different kinds of ships based on three different races: humans, elves, and dwarfs. Whether you’re looking for something glorious, elegant, or hardy there is a ship for you!

Arena Battles: Finalize your fleet’s formation and take it to the Arena to put it to the test against other players’ formations. Use your mortars, torpedoes, missiles, scouts and more to secure victory.

Event Ships: Set yourself apart from all the other warriors out there by acquiring unique event ships like alien ships.

PWND First Impressions: Satirically Bad Mannered

By Mohammad Abubakr

There are not a lot of moments in gaming that feel as great as landing the perfect sequence of rocket jumps, direct rockets, and aerials in a fast paced arena shooter. While the concepts behind each of these tactics is quite straightforward, actually executing them outside of the lab can be difficult. How can you focus on landing rockets properly to jump and attack enemies while you’re being pushed around by incoming rockets? When you do manage to execute this sequence, it feels amazing. As you can probably tell by now, I’m a big fan of rocket jumping, rocket launchers, and arena shooters in general. So the description of PWND being a rocket jumping arena shooter instantly caught my attention. Read on to learn more about the game!

PWND takes place in a dystopian future where somehow the 1980s culture still influences society. The quest to crown the ultimate badass lead to the invention of the LAZER-US Resurrection Pods. Now, death was not the end. With this invention, the fear of death was eliminated and extreme sports such as rocket arena combat came into fruition. Without the concept of death, the audience quickly grew bored, just killing enemies was not enough. This brought forward the concept of ‘pwning’ where points were now awarded to teams based on their ability to further humiliate downed players.

PWN your enemies to earn points

PWND features itself as a game with unparalleled three-dimensional rocket jumping action with a unique scoring system that is not based on frags. The game revolves around the idea of ‘pwning’ your opponents, which basically means dancing on top of them as a form of bad manners. While getting pwned or pwning someone, you are left completely vulnerable and it is up to the remaining players to protect or take down the ‘pwner’.

I’m not really sure how I feel about this whole system. Bad manners in online games have always been a pet peeve of mine. Sure, it’s funny at times but can cause a lot of saltiness to what should be a fun and enjoyable environment. On the other hand, when everyone is in on the joke, it’s not really an issue and is seen more like friendly banter in a competitive environment. This is where PWND fits in – it embraces its own rude nature while at the same time ensuring it is not overly gross or repulsive to its players.

Pile of bodies waiting to be PWNed!

So the game revolves around dancing on the corpses of your fallen enemies. This doesn’t mean that the actual combat and fragging mechanics are disappointing. While the game does not want you to just focus on the kills, the real fun, at least for myself as a fan of shooters, comes from the solid controls. Everything you do just feels so natural. Running around, using your various abilities, rocket jumping, wall jumping – it all feels great. When I first got into the game, I was quite impressed by how nicely the game played, especially since it is still in development. I was disappointed to see rocket jumping just being carried out with your spacebar, I’ve always been a fan of manually shooting rockets at your feet to jump.

Even as a rocket jumping arena shooter, rockets are not all you have at your disposal. The class based system allows you to choose between four different characters each featuring unique abilities, weapons, and playstyles. You have Hank featuring his traditional rocket launcher, Mack with his more tanky playstyle, Risa and her assistant PWN Bot, and Victor featuring a shotgun shooting goo damaging and slowing enemies. Of course, when I jumped into the game I just saw myself sticking with Hank because, well, the game advertises itself as a rocket jumping arena shooter, why would I pick anything other than a rocket launcher? However, while Hank is awesome, I’ve come to enjoy other characters such as Victor. It’s just so satisfying rocket jumping around and landing a huge shotgun blast into the face of your enemies. While these additional characters and weapons lead to more than just rocket jumping action, they are a nice addition adding more variance to the game.

The goo can slow down your enemies!

It seems like additional maps and game modes will be added to the game but at the moment I’ve only encountered one map and gamemode. It will be interesting to see how the concept of ‘pwning’ is extended with additional game modes. If points are only to be awarded through ‘pwning’, what can we expect to see in the future?

Conclusion: Not for everyone

I came into the game looking for a well made arena shooter featuring rocket jumping. This, I found. The game plays very well, nothing ever feels clunky and I always feel in control of my movement and weapons. However, the idea of not relying on kills to earn points but rather focusing on humiliating your enemies by ‘pwning’ them is quite different than your typical shooter. The game takes the whole idea of teabagging to the next level by making it a core feature of the game.

Doesn’t this UI look familiar

As mentioned before, I’m very against rudeness and bad manners in online games. I’m the kind of guy that greets my team every time and always tries to keep a positive attitude when playing. Naturally, this means that I don’t like teabagging or any form of humiliation towards enemies that have already lost. With this in mind, PWND’s system does a good job at featuring ‘pwning’ without it acting as a turnoff. The entire game embraces this satirical bad manner theme and as a result, what may normally be seen as gruesome perfectly fits into the game. You’ve got to hand it to the developers for working around something that is a turnoff for many gamers and turning it into a core feature of the game.

Opening crates never gets old

Even then, I don’t see the fun behind ‘pwning’ enemies. The game’s combat and movement system is really well done, can I not just focus on killing enemies and not waste my time dancing atop their bodies? This system is amusing… for maybe the first 5 to 10 minutes. After that, it just becomes an additional step I need to carry out just to add to my team’s score. Maybe some gamers will enjoy this additional step to ‘pwn’ enemies, but I will personally just stick to fragging.

You can find PWND on Steam!

Note: A key for the game was provided for review purposes.