Puyo Puyo Champions has arrived today, on the PS4, PC, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One, and it’s only 9.99! It’s time to rain down cute blobs of color, match them in sets, and battle players around the world to head to the top of the Puyo Puyo leaderboard! This Puyo Puyo title is based on fan-favorite rulesets and includes the intense Fever Mode.
Puyo Puyo Champions Features:
The Preferred Way to Play—With a strong focus on global online competitive multiplayer, Puyo Puyo Champions is based on the fan-favorite rulesets of Puyo Puyo 2 (Tsu) and Puyo Puyo Fever. This includes the popular “Fever Mode” where you crush your opponents with ready-made chains!
Tournament Mode–Duke it out for bragging rights in the brand-new, eight-player Tournament mode that lets you scratch that competitive itch locally with friends and family.
Improved Replay System-–Pull off a devastating chain combo? Alongside auto-saved replays, Battle History provides a visual timeline of the biggest moments of a game with timestamps, so you never have to worry about missing a thing.
Dual Audio—Players have the option to enjoy Puyo Puyo Champions between English or the original Japanese voice acting, with either English, French, German, or Spanish text.
The first major expansion for Immortal: Unchained has arrived today for PS4/XB1/PC, Storm Breaker! The hardcore action RPG shooter’s new content is priced at 14.99 (or local equivalent). The fall of Apexion was swift, and the Undead have overrun the outpost of Storm Break, and assault everything that moves. It’s up to you to eliminate the undead threat and discover a new area, the Sea of Scars.
The ruins of Storm Break lie within, and there are secrets to uncover, new enemies to battle, and of course new weapons. This includes the legendary Brightreaver, which is a devastating weapon capable of obliterating its victims with super-charged lightning. Don’t forget about boss fights, because there are new challenges there as well. Storm Breaker is here!
FEATURES:
Discover two new alien locations: The Sea of Scars and Storm Break. A mysterious force is pushing aside the ocean, allowing you to travel along the seabed. Tread carefully, however, for the presence of the dead reach even these vile depths.
Wield four devastating new weapons, including the lightning-charged Brightreaver, one of the most powerful weapons in all the Cosmos, and the Ashborne Needler, a toxic sniper rifle used to take down the biggest foes.
Encounter two monumental bosses and defeat challenging new enemies.
Frozen Flame is an action MMORPG featuring a dynamic 3rd person camera and elements from the open-world survival game genre. A cataclysmic series of events has left the World of Dragons on the brink of complete annihilation. Band together with the few remaining survivors and clash with the merciless power of darkness for the fate of humanity.
Business Model: Buy-to-Play
Microtransactions: Yes, there are optional in-game cosmetic purchases available.
Key Features:
Two-Eyed Raven: Explore the expansive environment in search of clues to recall the past and uncover ancient secrets.
Firebender: Learn the ways of flame magic to combat dangerous creatures lurking around every turn.
Knowledge Bomb: Master the use of mysterious magical artifacts and discover a whole new level of power.
Light-Footed: Navigate across any terrain with ease using the ability to float through the air, or climb up even the steepest of walls.
Dragonslayer: Improve your odds of surviving a fight with one of the legendary dragons by leveling-up your stats and acquiring new equipment.
Making Mine: Personalize how you look and play with a variety of cosmetic and classing options.
Self-Sufficient: Build or craft everything you’ll need to live just one more day.
Battle Buddy: Head out on your own, grab a friend for co-op, or join up with a ancient order for reputation-locked goodies.
Custom Made: Experiment with wide range of servers settings to find the best fit for you!
Transformice Adventures is a 2D action-adventure role-playing game featuring 4-player cooperative dungeon crawling. Ill omens and a distinct absence of divine assistance has left the land in a dire state. Bravely venture out into the world and uncover the warning signs of a destructive god’s catastrophic return.
Business Model: Free-to-Play
Microtransactions: Yes, there are optional in-game purchases available.
Key Features:
Classes: Make the most out of untraditional professions like the Cook, Botanist, Journalist, or Trickster.
Small Heroes: Dive deep into a realm of brave mice and terrifying animal-enemies.
Keep it Fresh: Change how you play on the fly in response to the skill and weapon enchanting Elisah’s Gift.
Personalization: Mix and match skill-sets to find the winning-combination right for you!
Someday Strong: Take care of a personal pet and unlock it’s true power over time.
Look at Me: Make a frequent return to the tavern to chat with other players or show off your hard-earned costumes.
Fantastic Science Fantasy Adventures Press is proud to announce the release of author C. A. A. Allen’s new fantasy, LitRPG adventure: Into The Game: Dungeon Crawl Quest, available April 1st on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.
Mr. Allen stated:
I combined my passion for computer gaming, DnD, and epic fantasy to concoct this book. I was addicted to a groundbreaking RPG called Wizardry: Proving Grounds of The Mad Overlord back in the days. I have included many nods to the game that had me up for several months of all-nighters in this book.
Into The Game provides readers with an original experience including breathtaking illustrations and a unique in-real-life/trapped-inside-the-game story. Taking you deeper into the books immersion are in-depth Dungeons and Dragons style player sheets that give you unique insight into the abilities and personalities of both the novels main characters and its monster antagonists.
C. A. A. continues:
Another thing I included is illustration. I have been fascinated with drawings in fantasy ever since Thror’s Map and The Trolls in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I am also a big fan of the DnD Monster Manual, so I had to go all-in on illustration. I commissioned over a dozen works for this project including tavern logo’s, action scene’s, monster portrait’s, and of course an epic fantasy map. I love the way it all turned out.
To spread the word about Into The Game, Fantastic Science Fantasy Adventures Press is launching a unique advertising campaign that includes everything from the tried-and-true to the new.
“For the new, we teamed up with CPMStar,” says FSFA Press marketing director John Palmer. “They have the largest ad network in the games and youth oriented entertainment space. We will be running ad’s on several MMO review sites they represent including MassivelyOP, MegaGames, and OnRPG. For the tried-and-true, we will be running online ads on some Sci-Fi/Fantasy staples like Clarkesworld, Analog, and Locus.
From the Humpty Nose to literary prose… C.A.A. Allen is a hype-squad dancer for multi-platinum hip-hop group Digital Underground, Humpty-Hump’s personal nose crafter, and a fantasy book author. His first book, The Cave Maze: Wizard Warrior Quest was a finalist for best Sci-Fi/Fantasy novel at the 2017 San Diego Book Awards.
Into The Game will be on sale for .99 cents from June 1st to June 30th on Amazon.
Operation Spectre Rising is the latest update to Call of Duty Black Ops 4 and comes with a new Multiplayer Specialist/Blackout character. There’s also the Wetworks Map Update, new weapons, and new Zombie Gauntlets.
Choosing to buy a game carrying the Games Workshop licence can be a bit of a crapshoot. You throw the dice and hope. Unfortunately, despite being really excited for Warhammer: Chaosbane, I think the game is more craps than anything else. While the art style is of reasonable quality, that and the fact that it carries the Games Workshop name are about the only things it has going for it. In fact, I think it only nominally even carries the Warhammer theme, and that by relying heavily on tropes, unoriginal storytelling, and name recognition.
In Warhammer: Chaosbane (Chaosbane from here on), you choose one of four heroes to play as in an ARPG that tries to be both Diablo 3 and Path of Exile, but pales horribly compared to either. You choose between Vollen, the human soldier; Elontir, the high elven mage; Bragi, a dwarven slayer; or Elessa, wood elf waywatcher.
The diversity between the characters themselves is one place where the developers over at EKO Software seem to have done okay. Unfortunately, they’re also quite familiar to characters from the Diablo 3 franchise. Bragi, for example, has a sustainable whirlwind attack that is painfully similar to the D3 Barbarian.
Every single time you start using this ability, he lets loose an obnoxious laugh. So obnoxious that I stopped using the skill, despite it being one of the more powerful abilities.
The skill system itself is quite similar to Diablo 3, as well, if given an ever so slightly different layout, and a point based system that’s nothing if not annoying and prohibitive. Each player has a selection of active and passive skills, and a unique class skill. Then there are so called “god” skills, as well as a few skills obtainable by donating items, which, yeah, I’ll rant about that later.
Active skills are, again, similar to Diablo 3. You’ve got energy builders, energy spenders, and then abilities on cooldowns which often don’t require energy to use. Each of the characters does have their own unique skill tree, unique passives skills (unlocked normally be leveling), and the favour tree.
This favour tree is where the obvious Path of Exile influences seem to come in, though it’s not done nearly as well as PoE, and just feels arbitrarily added. It is the favour tree, however, the allows you to unlock the god skills, after the deities of the Warhammer universe, presumably.
It’s like those miserable psalms. They’re so depressing. Now knock it off!
The part that annoys me most in the skill department is that these god skills that require special allocation of points to unlock, also cost skill points, which your character has a fairly limited selection of. So limited that you have to choose between having a narrow focus of useful skills, or a wide variety of useless ones. This might change later in the game, as I only played through Act I during the second beta weekend, but it was rather infuriating to unlock things and not be able to use them without giving up something else I’d come to rely heavily on.
There are plenty of other things that frustrated me about the game however. One example is the alt key. Now, ever since Diablo 2, the alt key has been the “show all the things” button in ARPGs. Diablo 3 used it, and so did Path of Exile. Chaosbane also uses the alt key, but in the case of this game, it highlights only objects. Not gold. Not shards. Not barrels. Just dropped armor and weapons. I just find this to be lazy, and annoying. I want my gold!
Why do I want gold?! Well… I’m actually not entirely sure. I haven’t found anything to spend it on yet. Yeah, that’s right, I completed the entire first act, 19 levels and 8 hours played, and haven’t found anything I can spend money on, except reviving. Except the only time I actually died was because my cat started yowling like he was dying in the other room, and I ran AFK (don’t worry, it was just the sight of the bottom of his food dish that had him freaked out).
Note: This is one of two times in Act 1 where you’re not fighting in the sewers. The other time is also in this exact same spot.
There does appear to be a locked option at the donation guy for “trades”, but playing through the entire first act, that never unlocked. You can’t actually buy any gear, nor even sell it, in THE ENTIRE FIRST ACT. The only thing you can do is donate it to some random guy in the keep, in exchange for some passive skills: one ups your XP gain, another makes you get more money from drops, and yet another I believe increases movement speed a tiny bit. Thankfully these particular passives didn’t seem to cost skill points, they’re just always on.
The utter lack of challenge contributes heavily to exactly how boring this game is, in my estimation. The fact that I can pretty much ignore mobs is bothersome. Now I get it’s the first act, but some challenge would be nice. Even the “captain” level mobs, which have little glowy bits above their head, or the lesser daemons, really don’t present any major struggle, aside from tedium of having to hit them over and over again.
And the final boss of the first act? About five minutes of attack, dodge big attack, potion, fight boss for two seconds before it turns invincible and a horde of mobs come out. Rinse, repeat. And again. Aaaaand again.
Furthermore, 95% of the first act takes place in the sewers. Not even unique or changing sewers, you actually go back into the exact same sewer sections several times. The sections themselves seem to be stuck together copy/pasted assets in yet another example of just plain lazy development.
I feel the same about the lack of nametags above enemies. There’s a health bar, but no name. It’s not even like they had to name the enemies, as they just took it (loosely) from Warhammer lore. They just couldn’t be bothered to stick the names above the mob’s heads, like, well, every other ARPG out there. Now, again, this could be “well it’s still in beta” talking, but IMO that’s a game feature, and game features go in during alpha. Beta is for getting the bugs out.
Final thing to rant about: the gear itself. Now, the artwork on most of the gear is pretty cool, and some of the gear even has a bit of lore on it. Mostly this has to do with where exactly the gear came from. See, in Warhammer tabletop, you paint your miniatures to look like tribes or armies in companies or dwarven clans, or whatever, and often try to stick to a theme for all the units of a given army. The game has some of those unit collectives named, to give you a basis for painting.
Chaosbane pulls on some of that theme/lore and tags some armor pieces with it, which is cool enough. Furthermore, when you have a complete set of five pieces of the same gear, you actually get a set bonus. This applies to all gear, not just special specific pieces that are set gear. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like this balances out the fact that there are only four tiers of gear total: common, rare, heroic, and legendary. By the end of Act I, almost all of my pieces of gear were heroic. This didn’t leave me much to look forward to, and I felt like I was given too much, too soon.
Oh, and also, one of Bragi’s item slots is tattoos. So yeah, you can take off and switch tattoos on the fly. Hair and beard, too. Again, lazy. Just… lazy. They could have given him a static hair and beard length, and color, and then added ornamentation. They also could have given him certain tattoos, maybe even that increased in elaborateness as he leveled, and then added warpaint. The thought of a character changing tattoos though just rips me right out of the immersion and makes me cringe.
The Slayer’s new “clothes”.
Like I said at the beginning, I really wanted to love this game. I love ARPGs, and I love the Warhammer franchise. What I don’t love, however, is how readily Games Workshop allows its intellectual property to just get slapped on any ol’ dumpster fire of a game. I think the folks at EKO were planning on sailing on art direction over game design to carry them, but in my opinion, it’s just not enough.
I did, by the by, try the game couch co-op with my fiance. The game supports up to four players in a match. When we found out it was tethered game play, though (as in all players must remain on the same screen) we just got annoyed and gave it up for a bad job. In fairness, split screen would have made things far too tiny to see. It’s just… not a worthwhile feature, either way you cut it.
Again, this is only the second beta for Warhammer: Chaosbane, and I feel that’s worth of mentioning, but I can’t imagine them doing the complete overhaul of this game that I would want to see before I could recommend it. As it is, I’m recommending that unless you’re just completely desperate to throw your money down the Games Workshop gullet on a tedious ARPG with a Warhammer fantasy skin, to stay away from Warhammer: Chaosbane.
Despite the Earth being in ruins, Yaesha is vibrant and full of life. How will your teammates adapt to this new world on August 20th, in Remnant: From the Ashes?