Soccer fans rejoice! Most leagues will kick off their 2020-21 season at their normal dates despite the issues surrounding COVID-19, and for gamers, this can only mean another FIFA game is coming fast upon us. Yes, my soccer-loving friends, FIFA 21 is on its way and is slated to drop on October 9th for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, with the next-gen versions made available once the systems come out. And if you’re anything like me, you probably want to hear about a reason you should go out and buy yet another edition of a FIFA game. Well, let me tell you now this year’s iteration of the long-running series is shaping up to be the definitive way to play FIFA together with your friends.
For starters, Volta makes its return as the newly dubbed Volta Squads and, besides the addition of a noun at the end of the title, will now include a cooperative mode that allows for you and up to four friends to join together and compete against other teams online. Volta Squads will come with more customization options available for you to style your avatars and new levels for you and your friends to demonstrate your skills on the field. EA also says on the gameplay side, Volta Squads has been tweaked in order to create faster-paced, intelligent squad movement, and more rewarding one on one situations.
Many of these same cooperative features will also be extended to FIFA Ultimate Team, which now has a new co-op functionality that finally allows for a friend to play alongside you on the pitch. Both you and a friend can compete in either Division Rivals and Squad Battles to earn weekly progress and rewards. FUT also comes with a bevy of new options, including some new ways to customize the look of your team on the field and your supporters in the stands. EA also notes players who purchase FIFA 21 on the current-gen consoles will be able to transfer their progress over to the new consoles if they choose to make the jump this holiday season.
The campaign mode returns with new additions that create additional depth in matches, transfers, and training to give you more control over your team. These new functionalities allow you greater insight into your team’s performance, including a new Interactive Match Sim that lets you monitor game data while giving you the option to jump in and out of key moments of each match. FIFA 21‘s career mode is said to give you greater options to simulate real-world experiences both on and off the pitch, such as new ways to sign and loan players. EA also enhanced the opposition’s AI to make both attacking and defending more challenging, keeping each game feeling fresh.
Gameplay-wise, FIFA 21 looks to switch the attention back to attacking after last year’s emphasis on defense. EA says they added a new agile dribbling system that gives you greater control and responsiveness in one-on-one situations. They also claim to have created greater positional awareness in the AI, meaning less probability of an offside call as you move up the pitch. Other additions include manual headers, more balanced blocking, and more intelligent passing options. But whether or not these additions truly impact the gameplay, only time will tell.
Stay tuned for the full reveal in August this year. For all other inquiries, visit EA’s dedicated FIFA 21 page here.
The life of the pirate has been fantasized to no end and yet the reality of those sea-fairing men was harsh, smelly, and unforgiving. Lucky for us, we don’t have to leave the comfort of our homes to enjoy an adventure out on the sea. Italian developer 3DClouds has blessed our adventureless lives with King Of Seas, an action RPG that will throw players into the ferocity of a pirate’s life.
Releasing in autumn of this year for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, there’s really no excuse not to participate in the debauchery and thievery, unless, that’s not how quarantines should be spent.
Set sail to explore islands, dig up treasures, get rich, lay waste to the seas, and, on a more linear approach, avenge your father’s death. King Of Seas will pit players against harsh enemies, force them to navigate through dark and untrusting waters, and fight to become the pirate king–master of sails and saltwater.
As any RPG should have, King of Seas features intriguing characters that will help the player along the way, or not. These characters may lead players to hidden treasures or lure them to their untimely deaths in the black waters. If cautionary-trust wasn’t enough to deal with, players will also have to navigate the world itself. Adaptation is key as the world reacts to every choice the player makes. Routes may shift forcing players to look for new ways to seek out treasures and conquer settlements. Weather conditions might force new routs to be navigated when heading to the desired location. In order to do the trading players want to do or acquire the upgrades players want for their ships, strategizing will be key.
3DClouds couldn’t be more proud of their project and for good reason. This game will have all the thrills of being a pirate including the gorgeous scenery of islands, the ocean, and the expansive sky overhead. Francesco Bruschi, the founder and CEO of the developing company said, “We are thrilled that after a year of hard work, we are finally ready to unveil King Of Seas, our most ambitious project to date.“
He went on to say, “We have poured all our creative talent into creating this stunning pirate world and can’t wait to share more with you in the coming weeks.“
There is certainly a lot to look forward to and if you are a fan anything to do with pirates than this is a game to put on your wishlist.
Prepare to lift off with Rocket Arena, a new 3 v 3 hero shooter developed by Final Strike Games that leverages rocket-fueled gameplay to create some fun and frantic combat situations. Choose from a colorful cast of heroes that each come equipped with their own unique rocket and special abilities. Learn to master your hero in order to blow away the competition and become the next arena champion.
As it says in the name, Rocket Arena is a game where two teams of three are pitted against one another with rocket launchers across small, arena-style maps. There are ten playable characters to choose from at launch, each with their own quirky playstyles that add a level of diversity and challenge to every match. Each character also comes with their own progression system that rewards players with things like cosmetic items to further customize their experience.
Speaking of customization, while players are currently unable to swap out their character’s abilities, the game does allow you to equip up to three special “artifacts” that grant additional bonuses, such as the ability to move faster, or reduce the damage taken from specific weapons. While these players will initially have to unlock them through social play, Final Strike Games has went ahead and unlocked them for competitive matchmaking sessions in order to level the playing field.
At launch, the game ships with ten playable heroes to choose from, ten dynamic maps, four competitive game modes, a co-op mode and a practice mode. Final Strike games has also stated that they plan to add a battlepass on July 28th, dubbed the “Blast Pass,” which will also mark the start of season one for the game. Season one will come with the inclusion of a new character, a new map, and a limited time game mode. Each season will last roughly three months, allowing players plenty of time to progress and earn unique items.
Post-launch, players can look forward to the addition of new content such as characters, maps, and new items to discover and collect. Final Strike Games has said they plan to add additional game modes and daily and weekly challenges to entice players into coming back week after week.
Rocket Arena is out now for Playstation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam and Origin; and supports crossplay between all three platforms. You can pick up the standard edition for $29.99, or the Mythic edition for $39.99, which comes packed with extra content.
Who knows who H.P. Lovecraft is? All of you? Good! That makes my life a hell of a lot easier. As one of the founding fathers of the Cthulhu Mythos, Lovecraft’s works have been thrilling and frightening readers for generations. The other wonderful thing about a mythos is that it’s something that can be carried on and embellished over time. Now, not all of Lovecraft’s books had old squid-face as their villain; they were full of cults, elder things, and a whole menagerie of creepiness. History lesson over this is where the visual novel I’m going to be talking about today steps into the limelight. It’s called The Innsmouth Case and if you have a dark sense of humor and like your horror Lovecraftian, it might really float your proverbial boat.
The Innsmouth Case has magically appeared on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android and is coming from the folks over at Robot Pumpkin Games. Should you choose to join the story, you’ll be invited to the awesomely eerie town of Innsmouth for helpings of horror and hilarity in equal measure.
Take on the role of a detective investigating the disappearance of Tabitha Marsh. The child’s distraught parents have requested the best detective the department has to offer be put on her case. Sadly, he was busy, so they’ve sent you. This isn’t just a case of a missing little girl though; we’re following in Lovecraftian footsteps, after all. Innsmouth is a town crawling with nameless horrors so you’re going to need a strong stomach and eyes in the back of your head if you’re going to be anything but dead by the end of your time there.
“The long road to Innsmouth has been a fun one, to say the least.” Said publisher Assemble Entertainment CEO, Stefan Marcinek. “The Innsmouth case is full of surprises, offbeat humor, and enthralling mystery – a perfect addition to the Assemble Entertainment roster. We’re thrilled to give players this unique Lovecraftian gameplay experience!“
This isn’t just one of those text-based games where you plod from scenario to scenario. In the Innsmouth Case, your gray matter will be all-important. The choices you make will not only affect immediate decisions but also have a permanent effect on the story as a whole. This being said, there is also a lot of replayability here. Those choices will lead you to one of this title’s twenty-seven endings. Are you going to save the day, save the girl, or save the world? Alternatively, you could just get eaten; entirely your choice.
I think I might just be all over this like a hot rash. I love a bit of Lovecraft and if the humor is properly injected, it’ll create a nice mix with all the harrowing, heart-rending fear. This definitely sounds like a virtual book worth picking up for fans of the genre.
I’ve always been a fan of the worlds created by Games Workshop. Though these are primarily orientated around tabletop gaming there is so much lore and so many well-written stories in those settings that they warrant investigation; even if you aren’t a lover of miniatures. This being said there have been a series of games on both PC and various consoles over the years ready to entice us gamers into the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40K. Aeronautica ImperialisFlight Command is a new addition to the library of titles and being a bit of a fan I thought I’d give this turn-based strategy game a go and see what’s what.
It’s nice to see spin-offs of major franchises. Sometimes you just want to leave the main players to do their thing and follow the story of a character or organization that might be considered fluff in the grand scheme of things. In Aeronautica Imperialis Flight Command we aren’t interested in big stompy Space Marines or battles raging across the stars we are concentrating on the slightly undersung heroes and heroines of the Imperial Air Corps. These fighter aces have their own issues to contend with and in this particular case, it’s Orks.
Let’s talk about the campaign first. This isn’t what I’d call a campaign in the truest sense because there isn’t a story that evolves as you go. This mode has a board game feel. You need to win a certain number of points to win outright. You set the game length, (number of points needed,) and difficulty and away you go. After that, you choose from a series of missions each with varying objectives that will grant you points if you complete them.
One of the few plusses of the game. The controls are fluid and make sense.
Missions range from dogfights which simply ask you to knock out enemy fighters to escort missions, cargo drops, and so on. The fact that you can choose from two missions at a time means that you can go for the ones you feel you stand the most chance of completing or find the most enjoyable. This in theory negates any difficulty spikes and that’s actually quite clever. Sadly I don’t have a lot of other positive things to say here.
The campaign in general feels rushed and a bit thrown together. There isn’t a great variety of missions and the maps you fly over are limited and pretty basic. This is a game where they could have given you loads of terrain to hide behind, ambush from, or in the case of mountains, avoid. There just isn’t enough there to really add any strategic depth.
You can only play from the Imperial side so if you fancy leading the Orks to victory it isn’t going to happen. Considering the campaign should be the main focus of the story in the game this feels like a bit of a strange omission at launch. I’m not sure, though, exactly how much this really matters as there is very little story other than the main premise. There are no protagonists to fall in love with or villains to hate other than maybe ‘Eadboila, the Ork Warboss; just a series of fairly nondescript pilots in planes. There is no voice acting of any sort either so you won’t even feel like you’re in character. There are no plot based cinematics on top of all this so there’s nothing to ground you, (pardon the pun,) and really pull you in.
I completed the campaign on easy. This is something I often do, then go back and up the challenge for another playthrough. Please note I’m not commenting on the game’s difficulty and I was expecting things to ramp up a bit when I played again. The problem is I didn’t want to play again and for a full-release title that isn’t cheap, this isn’t good. Aeronautica Imperialis just didn’t feel exciting. It was nice to see the moves you’d set up for your planes play out but the lack of story just left everything a bit bland and repetitive.
The only real story present is in the limited scenarios
This should be the sort of game that will pull Games Workshop fans in droves. I was really excited to follow a new story in the 40k universe. Sadly, none of what I was looking for as a fan was there. If I hadn’t been told this was a 40k game I could have missed it entirely. Aeronautica ImperialisFlight Command just feels like a pretty shoddy effort with a brand stuck on it. There is a bit of 40k terminology present but nowhere near enough to make it stand out amongst other games in the Warhammer40k library.
Before missions, you’re given a loadout screen. Here is where you outfit your planes with a variety of weapons and upgrades. This would have been great if there were any. You’re told which planes your using and in the time I played, I didn’t see any upgrades. I wasn’t given any new weapons to play with either. This just added to my feeling that I was doing the same thing over and over again without any real difference other than the odd objective.
Aside from the campaign, you have a series of scenarios to complete. These involve similar missions as the campaign with a bit more story linking them together so they don’t feel completely disjointed. This is a good way of helping you learn the game but as they don’t massively differ in what they offer, completing them doesn’t feel like a must. If completing the scenarios unlocked new planes, abilities, or pilots fair enough. You aren’t really rewarded for your extra time so they feel more like something extra to do as opposed to something worthwhile. In addition to this, there are only currently seven of them. You can play each mission from both sides but it shouldn’t take too long to complete them all.
It feels like the devs have done things a bit back to front. They did the tutorial and scenarios first, then added the campaign. The problem with this is it feels like they just rushed the campaign out to make the game feel finished before it was fleshed out enough to be worth playing. The scenarios could in my opinion happily come later. If this was an Early Access release I’d be a lot more forgiving but it’s not. As a full release, there just isn’t enough there to warrant your money.
Nuts and bolts wise, the graphics are nice if a wee bit basic. The issue isn’t with the quality, (it looks great,) rather the lack of memorable environments and fairly basic setting. Sound is something they could have done a lot with and for me, missed the mark completely on. At the very least it would have been nice to give the pilots a voice but instead we just get a pretty forgettable sound track playing in the background.
Mechanically Aeronautica ImperialisFlight Command is fine. The controls make sense. You set the movement angle of your plane and it’s height/speed and the game does the rest for you. You don’t need to worry too much about firing at things as it’s all done automatically depending on your range. It’s actually one of the few things in this game that I really don’t have any problems with.
All in all, I’m pretty sure Aeronautica ImperialisFlight Command could be a really good game. I also genuinely believe the devs will continue perfecting this title. The issue is that, for me, they have a lot of work to do before it can be called anywhere near finished. This being said I can’t recommend the game in its current state and would advise sticking it in your wishlist and watching what happens with it for now.
Technical difficulties are the nature of virtual reality, especially when it comes to this show. This episode features the Oculus-exclusive shooter Robo Recall, but it’s actually only half of what I recorded; the first half was lost. Still, I hope you enjoy it:
Thanks to the recent lockdowns and quarantines, there haven’t been many new games so far this summer. That may be whyManeatergot so much attention when it was released; it was given almost as much coverage as a Triple-A game. And I’m glad that happened, in a silver lining sort of way, because Tripwire Interactive’s so-called “ShaRk-PG” is a great concept, and definitely the most ambitious shark game I’ve ever seen. But isManeatergood enough to keep you going until the next big blockbuster game? Let’s dive in, pun intended, and find out.
The general concept ofManeateris pretty simple: you’re a shark, and you want revenge on a human shark hunter. It’s an open world with all the usual landmarks and hidden items to find, but it starts small; more of the setting is opened up for you as you progress. You have missions that basically involve eating a given number of creatures or defeating big Apex predators, and finishing those helps you progress through the story and power up your shark. I was really happy with this setup; though it was disappointing how long it took to reach something I could describe as “open water,” the threats increased with the world, and having an open world to mess around in was a really cool idea. It’s true that these missions do become repetitive, but given the relatively short length of the game and backstory of the setting that becomes clearer as you progress, I never had any trouble with them.
For my money, the game’s biggest issue is its inconsistent difficulty. Right off the bat, the challenge comes from the larger predators in the area, trying to kill you while you go about your missions. You’ll die a lot inManeater, but there’s virtually no penalty to it, so I assume the folks at Tripwire expected this. It can also be kind of scary, as you’ll be focused on your mission and all of a sudden a predator will come up and kick your tail. Despite this, it did seem the game got a little bit easier as I continued. That is, until I reached the second to last chapter, where I encountered an enormous difficulty spike. In particular, it was that chapter’s Apex (each chapter has one), a killer whale. While previous Apex battles didn’t take too long, I had to try this one four or five times before I succeeded. But by the time I reached the next and final Apex, it was super easy, and so was pretty much everything from that point.
Some of this can be attributed to the upgrade system. Your shark gains experience in the form of nutrients, and can level up; it’s reaching certain levels that allows you to make your shark bigger. But, the maximum level is 30, and you’ll likely hit it long before you reach the end. When you can’t grind to prep for a challenge, what can you do? The answer is, use and level up your mutations. Mutations are special upgrades that can be unlocked by completing particular missions, and can be leveled up using nutrients. As long as you keep a focus on them and make sure to level them up, you should be OK.
All of this might sound like busywork, butManeaterhas plenty to keep players entertained. The writing is fantastic; the game is presented as a reality TV show of the same name, which means there’s plenty of narration. It’s all fun stuff, especially the landmark descriptions, and when it comes to comedic narrators, it’s hard to beat SNL alum Chris Parnell. Granted, repeated lines can get annoying by the end of the game, but for the most part, it’s funny and adds character toManeater. The humor also contains that low-level backstory about what happens when man fights nature, which is told both in the dialogue and by the world itself, without being pretentious or overbearing. Outside of humor, the “war” between the shark and the hunter is played totally straight, and was actually kind of unnerving near the end.
So, whileManeatermay not be a replacement for the triple-A games that have been delayed, it’s a fun and well made game in its own right. Playing as a shark is just fun, and Tripwire clearly put a ton of effort into just about every aspect of the game. It does get a little bit frustrating at times, but I’m glad I pushed through that. For a game focused on bloodthirsty destruction, I’m impressed thatManeateralso has a subtle environmental message. I recommendManeaterto anyone who likes playing as the violent killer in games. There is definitely a power fantasy element to the game’s appeal, and if that sounds like fun to you, you won’t be disappointed.
