Madden NFL 20 has players tackling the College Football Playoff, and taking stardom into their own hands. The trailer also features Patrick Mahomes, DJ Khaled, and Lil Yachty.
Yearly Archives: 2019
Autonauts to Be Published by Curve Digital
Curve Digital is proud to announce they will be working with studio Denki to bring their management sim Autonauts to PCs this autumn. Autonauts is from former DMA Design creative director Gary Penn and will let players explore an adorable universe, and colonize procedurally-generated planets, with fully programmable AI helpers.
Starting from nothing, after leaving your spaceship, you harvest stick and stone to begin the colonization efforts, crafting rudimentary items and teaching AI helpers their duties. You show the helpers what you need them to do, step-by-step, whether it’s cooking, farming, or mining. The helper bots will carry out their duties until they are finished, or you can set them up to loop indefinitely. This creates a fascinating dynamic where players can code AI to do their bidding, offering a whole new approach to building/colonizing style management sims. Autonauts has been in development since 2017 and has been downloaded over 300,000 times since Early Alpha.
Autonauts Features:
- Playful Programming: Teach your workerbots requisite steps to complete tasks by asking them to repeat actions utilizing a visual programming language. Designed to be easy to learn but with added complexity, there are numerous possibilities.
- Automated Automation: Build an army of bots to automate just about everything in your colony, teach them what to do and expand both their brains and task possibilities with numerous upgrades and options.
- Various Ventures: From gathering to building, cooking, fishing, tailoring, farming, animal husbandry and more – the world of Autonauts is vast with limitless opportunities to automate and colonize.
- Charming Creativity: The world of Autonauts pops to life with a low-poly art-style married with a consistent and bright color palette adding depth and scale, creating a relaxing and attractive play space.
Pagan Online Announces August Launch and Content Updates
Pagan Online, by Wargaming and Mad Head Games announced it will be leaving Early Access on August 27th, 2019. The game will offer massive updates and revamped systems, based on player feedback when the game launches officially. The combination of top-down ARPG and session-based PVE will release for 29.99 at launch.
“Since we began closed alpha testing 10 months ago, Pagan Online has been constantly evolving with the help of our players,” said Uros Banjesevic, Chief Creative Officer of Mad Head Games. “During our 4 month run in Early Access we have implemented massive changes and amazing new features and mechanics to deliver the best possible 1.0 experience at full launch. It is going to be, literally, a different game.”
Pagan Online also announced a community initiative called the Might & Glory Club. This club will give content creators, streamers, artists and more the ability to take part in the launch of Pagan Online and to be mentioned in the game’s credits. Club members are granted access to updates (and can produce content on said content) a week before launch.
All members will also receive codes for in-game rewards, including Decimator the dragon, that can be given away on their channel. Every day from August 21st to 25th the Pagan Online team and its media partners will nominate Heroes of Pagan Online from authors of the most creative and resonant pieces of content. The most creative participants will also be offered a partnership with Pagan Online. Further information can be found here.
Features of Pagan Online:
- Full story campaign – Featuring eight total acts, new zones and maps, and two new bosses.
- Click-to-move controls and full controller support – Originally designed for WASD controls, the control scheme has been extended due to popular demand.
- Two new playable characters – Joining the battle and expanding the roster of heroes players can choose from are:
- Elden – A quick and nimble dual-wielding ice construct with high attack speed, capable of slowing and potentially freezing enemies with each slice.
- Hector – An agile scrapper who specializes in everything fire. His weapon of choice is blunderbuss and he uses dirty tricks to set the battleground ablaze.
- Fabled Weapons – Some Legendary Weapons could be upgraded to Fabled by overcoming Pagan Online’s toughest battles.
- Schools of Magic – Ultra rare gear sets that boost stats and provide awesome new looks.
- Revamped crafting and loot drop systems – Making drops more valuable, diverse, and immediately usable, while recipes become more rare and have a bigger impact.
- All-new skill trees – Letting players build and spec out unique heroes by improving, modifying, and unlocking new abilities.
Fit For a King is an Upcoming ‘Henry VIII’ Simulator
Fit For a King is a concept that I never realized I needed until I read it out loud: A Henry VIII simulator from Kitfox Games. Players will enforce their royal will, marrying foreign princess, or even something like a lamp, or their favorite bookshelf. Or both! Why restrict yourself? Jail people, execute everyone, ordain your horse as a priest! Hell, why not go for broke and Knight your rug? Who is going to stop you? God? Nope, Henry VIII broke away from the Church, after all.
In Fit For a King, the year is 1520, and as King or Queen of England, you have been challenged to outspend your rival, King Frank. Though you’ve misplaced your gold all across the kingdom. So now you must figure out how to humiliate France with wealth and excess or die trying. High-stakes tax collection is on the way with this dark comedy sandbox, developed by Tanya X. Short, and her partner, Brent Ellison. There are over 26 royal commands to decree in this non-linear game. It’s what Henry VIII would have done if he had a little more imagination. Fit for a King releases on September 5th, 2019, and we absolutely cannot wait.
Code Vein – Weapon Focus: Great Hammer
One of the best weapons in any action game is the Great Hammer. What’s more enjoyable than hearing the violent squelch of your opponent, as the heavy weapon smashes them like an overripe melon? Code Vein shows off their Great Hammer in today’s video.
This War of Mine: Stories Launches ‘Fading Embers’ DLC in August
11bit Studios is proud to announce a new DLC chapter for This War of Mine, entitled “Fading Embers”. This scenario portrays the story of Anja, who is living in a warzone, carrying a heavy burden. The question of “What is more important – survival of a human legacy, or the survival of a man?” is asked during this story. Fading Embers will launch on Steam, GOG, Humble Store and Mac Appstore on Aug 6th, 2019 for $3.99, and is part of the Season Pass.
“The latest This War of Mine story focuses on choices that can lead to multiple endings. These branches were necessary to help address the overarching question of what has the bigger value — things made by men that outlast life or the life of a man itself. When you think about it, humans stand against the destructive power of war not only to save themselves but also to save what entire generations have created.”
Greedfall – Webseries Ep. 2: Forging an Adventure
GreedFall has a new episode in their new web series, focused on showing the depth of the systems of the upcoming RPG. It’s almost time to forge a new adventure!
Re:Legend To Enter Early Access in August
Re:Legend is an upcoming multiplayer JRPG, which revealed that on August 30th, it will enter Steam’s Early Access program. This JRPG-simulator hybrid will combine farming and life simulation, with fun monster-raising mechanics. If that weren’t enough, it’s also going to be multiplayer, where players build an expand their village in life-simulation activities.
Set in the world of Ethia, players awake as a legendary hero washed ashore on Vokka Island with no memories. Players must revive their hero, and find ways to remember the forgotten past. By learning how to survive – cultivating the land, breeding and catching fish, befriending inhabitants and so much more. The Early Access program will let players access the game in the final phases of development, to help shape the final game content. During Early Access, additional biomes will be made available, leading towards the 1.0 launch. Re:Legend will also be available at a special price during Early Access, 19.99 USD.
Key Features of Re:Legend Include:
- Create your hero to fit your personal taste with a plethora of customization options
- Tame and grow your Magnus, impacting their evolution into powerful creatures
- Farm the land and the sea by cultivating crops, catching fish and maintaining fisheries
- Fight menacing enemies with a variety of crafted weapons and your Magnus
- Master your skills through practice, with skillsets including logging, crafting, combat and more
- Socialize with villagers, join festivals, make new friends and even find love
- Play by yourself in single-player mode or with up to four friends in multiplayer co-op mode
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order Review
by Jason Parker (Ragachak)
I. Absolutely. Loved the previous Marvel Ultimate Alliance games. Every time I would play the MMO Marvel Heroes, I would find myself missing the Ultimate Alliance games. Let’s be honest: Superheroes are made for action RPGs, and you don’t have to use bland, uninteresting characters to fill emotions in for. You have a ton of larger-than-life characters with outrageous powers that people are already familiar with. It’s just that much easier to immerse yourself into the excitement. With superhero movies being all the rage now, good superhero video games are hard to find. There are some, such as Spider-Man, but there aren’t rightly enough of them. I’ve been waiting on another Ultimate Alliance game, and admittedly, I was a little worried about this one. Being a Switch exclusive didn’t bother me (as I own a Switch), but it’s the current marketing landscape we’re in that I was afraid of.
My biggest fear is that it would only offer me six to eight heroes to pick from, then I’d have to wait to buy DLC packs of heroes/have some kind of awful cash shop. Now, there are DLC packs on the way (20 dollars for the Season Pass), but the cast is not sparse at all. Practically all facets of Marvel fandom are going to be represented in Marvel Ultimate Alliance, not just characters in the major roles of the MCU. Sure, many of them are there. But you also have characters like Ms. Marvel, Crystal, Venom, and Deadpool! There are even unlockable characters that aren’t DLC! The Infinity Trials (hidden challenge areas to tackle) offer several of the villains to play, such as Elektra, Loki, and Magneto. There are also free DLC characters revealed, so there is going to be absolutely no shortage of fun characters. This fear was neatly assuaged. I did purchase the Season Pass also because I really want to play as Cyclops. That’s really the whole reason, do not judge me.
The tutorial area (The Raft) is absolutely massive, and kind of bogged me down after several play sessions, and I still found myself in the enormous prison. It made sense and felt good from a story perspective, but I’ll be good and goddamned if I wasn’t angry about it. It teaches most of what you need to know but did not really go into a lot of detail about the Lab option, where you use currencies to increase basically a Sphere Grid. It’s a grid of various passive stats, which in turn can unlock even more stats to improve! Spend time on this, because even if you’re under-leveled (which can and will happen), this extra health and damage will be a godsend. The gameplay breakdown is pretty simple: You put together a team of four superheroes (and villains in some cases), and go through lengthy stages, broken down by several S.H.I.E.L.D. sigils (checkpoints). These full heal your characters, and lets you swap characters out, should you want to. You can also access the lab here, or improve the skills each character is using.
As your characters level up, they gain a few more skills to use in battle, which use Energy. This is refilled by Blue Orbs, which are gained by breaking stuff (enemies or objects), and you can pair up anyone that you’d like. While it’s fine to just build whatever teams you want, having teams that offer synergy not only offers up stat buffs but team-up attacks. Holding R and then hitting a face button will use skills, but if you hit RZ and a skill, if nearby characters have synergy, they will team up to help you deal damage. You can also, as an aside, hit A at the right time while other characters are using skills to team-up with them. The synergies are all easy to figure out, though. Here are a few of them for you to consider:
Original Avengers: Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Wasp
Marvel Royalty: Black Panther, Crystal, Rocket & Groot, Star-Lord, Storm, Thor
Women of Marvel: Black Widow, Captain Marvel, Crystal, Elsa Bloodstone, Gamora, Ms. Marvel, Psylocke, Scarlet Witch, Spider-Gwen, Storm, Wasp
Defenders: Daredevil, Doctor Strange, Hulk, Iron Fist, Luke Cage
Back in Black: Black Panther, Black Widow, Ghost Rider, Venom
See? Options galore! That’s not even half of them, either. The stages are pretty easy to follow, with plenty of enemies to battle, and puzzles to solve. The puzzles aren’t terribly difficult, but they are enjoyable distractions. However, I will say that in the early game, the difficulty, regardless of which of the two you play on, can be horribly frustrating. The bosses aren’t so bad, but the hordes of enemies deal mountains of damage, and it was enough to make me want to scream. You have a limited amount of revives when your characters fall (and they will – often), but thankfully NPCs will help you deal with this. There aren’t a lot of healer characters either that I can think of, and healing orbs are fickle. I feel like this is to push people into going into multiplayer instead with their friends, and it is admittedly much easier when working together.
I teamed up with Epip to smash through much of the early game while on his livestream, with very few difficulties, despite being on Mighty difficulty. Characters will jump, punch, throw blasts of energy, and use humongous, massively damaging team-up attacks to beat up both run-of-the-mill villains and serious, major galactic-level threats like Ultron. Ultimately, the Infinity Stones are the focus of the story, with Thanos and his titular Black Order looking to gather them up to, of course, do rotten things with them. When does Thanos ever have a good plan, though? One of the important features to be aware of though is the Stun System. Anything above the weakest enemy has a purple meter under their health bar, which is the Stun Meter. When it hits empty, the enemy is briefly stunned, and you can batter them while they are defenseless. Bosses tend to have phases with increasingly greater threats, but at least you can see when the next phase will hit (indicated by a bar between the parts of the health bar).
One thing we learned while live-streaming Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, is that if you use an Ultimate Team-Up at the end of a phase, that damage does not carry over. So be smarter than we were, and wait until the fight is just about over. Each fight felt different, and most importantly, everything in this game had the snarky, proper Marvel feel to the writing. The characters were developed and felt like the actual character from the comics. They weren’t boring! However, while I enjoyed this combat system, one thing I absolutely loathed was the camera. The camera for this game is absolutely damn dreadful, and more often than not, it would get stuck somewhere where I can’t see what I’m doing. It was even worse when I was trying to rotate the camera to resurrect someone, but it bugs out, and I can only stand there while Mysterio kills me yet again.
The story is pretty standard Marvel fare, but that is in no way a bad thing. It’s a fun story told with the familiar feelings and emotions I expect from the various superheroes and villains. It is not new or interesting and is nothing more than an excuse to have a giant, varied Marvel cast, and that is just fine with me. The voice cast is terrific, and everyone brings 110% to each and every character. However, the graphics do feel just a bit dated. I feel like the Nintendo Switch can do so much more with this, but my suspicion was the graphics were done this way to avoid slowdown with tons of special effects hitting the game at once. I would rather have slightly dated graphics, rather than have a ton of lag and slowdown. Perhaps this also lets them include even more of the characters since a Switch cartridge can only do so much. Perhaps there will be a PC version in the future, that has “upscaled” graphics. But please don’t think this means it’s ugly, because it looks pretty darn great. It’s just not a PS4’s Spider-Man. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 does have a more comic feel to the graphics, which, if that was their goal, they nailed it.
Excelsior – 4/5:
Honestly? Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is just damn fun. Team Ninja did a bang-up job with this one. It definitely pushes you heavily towards co-op with the difficulty of the game, but it’s pretty easy to set up an online match, and the gameplay just feels right. It honestly makes me miss the earlier Ultimate Alliance games, and Marvel Heroes. The difficulty when playing solo feels incredibly frustrating unless you are wildly over-leveled, and the camera makes my head spin, but every other facet of the game has been a genuine joy. If you’re playing co-op, the game is very easy though. There are so many characters that I love, it’s hard to stick to one team, but I think that’s the idea. There are even secrets! There are hidden items, hidden challenges, and treasure boxes that require specific combos of moves (there are 15 traits to special abilities) to open and plenty of amazing Marvel banter. Characters I never thought I’d see work together, but am sincerely glad they are here. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is the superhero game that I didn’t know I needed. It’s brilliant fun as a team, and though I’ve only played two-player, I absolutely cannot wait to enjoy some mad four-player action online. I just hope it goes to other platforms.
Blood Bowl: Death Zone Review
By Terris Harned (NWOrpheus)
I remember a while back the big fad was rubbing all manner of meat with coffee. You could find coffee rubbed ribeye, coffee rubbed pork chops, mocha rubbed chicken breasts, and even coffee rubbed whole roasted chicken. Some of these recipes were pretty darn tasty.
Today my boss today was telling me about a time she reviewed a recipe that involved pork chops and wet, used coffee grounds. This seems to be a case of someone seeing the success of others and thinking, “Hey, this looks easy. I could do this,” and being utterly wrong. Blood Bowl: Death Zone is the video game equivalent of that recipe.
The title Blood Bowl: Death Zone (Death Zone hence) is based incredibly loosely on the turn-based tabletop miniatures game, Blood Bowl, by Games Workshop. There are also a pair of recent video games developed by the same game developer, Cyanide Studios, Blood Bowl and Blood Bowl 2. These latter two games were published by Focus Home Interactive, however, as opposed to Death Zone which was published by Bigben Interactive.
I cannot help but wonder if it was the influence of the publisher that turned Death Zone into the pixelated equivalent of a culinary disaster, given their recent release of the utter dumpster fire that was Warhammer: Chaosbane (You can see my preview of that monstrosity, or Jason’s moderately more forgiving review here).
Suffice to say, it’s pretty clear that Bigben picked up some licensing rights to the Warhammer franchises along the way and decided to treat the IP like the girlfriend that left them with a Dear John letter after stealing their favorite dog and filling their car with shaving cream.
Ahem
I’ll admit, not everything is bad about Death Zone. The graphics are decent enough in some places. And then there’s… Well I did like… Okay okay, but the premise was good. The idea behind Death Zone is that a “Star Player,” a powerful MVP type character, leads a group of amateur players in a pre-game event, sponsored by various fictional corporate entities from within the Blood Bowl universe, such as Orcidas and Spike Magazine.
Honestly, I have no idea what most of the sponsors sell, especially Orcidas. I think McMurty’s was a booze of some sort? I really couldn’t be bothered to care. The choice of sponsor does have some relevance, though, as it determines one of your four special abilities you can use on the pitch.
Frankly, I object to the name Blood Bowl even being slapped on this title, despite the fact that it’s set in the same universe as the actual game. It would be like calling a rousing game of greased pig riding football. No, really. The entire point of Death Zone is to chase down a “squig”. A sort of small demonic entity that’s something like a cross between a squid and a pig, I guess? Anyway, you have to chase it down, pick it up, and carry it into the opposing end zone.
Either team in Death Zone is comprised of four players. Different players have different roles, as well as different strengths and weaknesses. Some move quickly, some can throw or catch a ball better, some can hit like a ton of bricks. There’s no real tutorial on the stats, but if you mouse over various parts of team icons in the profile screen, you can probably figure out what does what.
While you’re at it, make sure to pay attention to contradictory stats, like the Power Roller type character who has both a trait that prevents them from holding or catching the squig, and a boost for when they pick up or catch the squig. Makes about as much sense as using wet used coffee grounds to marinade your pork chops in. Which is just gross. Seriously, who would even do that?!
Like I said, fundamentally Death Zone isn’t terrible. What is terrible is the execution. The controls aren’t intuitive at all. You constantly have to jump back and forth between your four different characters, trying to give them directions to keep up with the situation at hand. The animations are ridiculous and nonsensical. When you’re fighting an enemy’s unit, the units are standing their doing their thing, like throwing drop kicks, and the other unit is doing their thing, but those two things have nothing to do with each other. It’s like a mime-off, and the one that runs out of energy first loses.
The sound quality itself is okay, but the music gets quite repetitive, very quickly. The usage of the sounds are also very meh. Lots of grunting and whistle blowing and shouting, but most of it doesn’t feel very relevant.
The original Blood Bowl games are turn based, and Death Zone is real time. I really think that was the biggest mistake. If anything I think the turns should have been resolved at the same time, but planned during a game pause. Or perhaps this game would have made a better auto-chess style setup.
As it stands, it really just feels like a bunch of Blood Bowl assets used to slap together a dish that I wouldn’t feed to my dog. Oh, and it crashes a lot. I give Blood Bowl: Death Zone 1 out of 5 coffee beans. I’m pretty sure that I’d rather use a sweaty gym sock to steep tea in than to ever play it again.
Note: A game key was provided for review purposes.






