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To celebrate the release of Just Cause 4, Sanitarium.FM’s patrons received exclusive artwork of the games main hero, Rico Rodriguez by our artist in residence, PhaseChan.
Check out the process behind the portrait below:
Love this illustration? Sanitarium.FM patrons get exclusive Game Of The Month artwork every month, support the station today to start receiving your prints
ATLAS: The ultimate survival MMO of unprecedented scale with 40,000+ simultaneous players in the same world. Join an endless adventure of piracy & sailing, exploration & combat, roleplaying & progression, settlement & civilization-building, in one of the largest game worlds ever! Explore, Build, Conquer!
[New reviewer Darsch will be taking on ATLAS, the new MMO from Grapeshot Games, in an ongoing diary of gameplay, join us in Discord if you’re playing and chat about your experiences! ~Lonesamurai]
ATLAS. The pirate survival MMO I never knew I needed, surrounded by controversy over its rough early access launch rendering it unplayable for many players. Then there are game files which are copied from ARK Survival Evolved and its expansions. Many people believed upon this revelation that the game was just an ARK asset flip. Players bemoaned the “launch” saying the game was not ready. More on this in a moment first I want to tackle the ark asset flip accusations.
What is Atlas? For starters it sure as hell is not ARK. The only thing the same about the two are shared game file names, the survival theme, and game engine. Ark had stat points and engrams which are just blueprints you learned to be able to craft items, Atlas has skill trees that modify everything about your character, unlocks special abilities, teaches you how to make things, and unlocks additional skills lines, while forcing you to specialize. For example my character unlocked the bow skill line as well as the taming skill line from the basic survival skill line. From there I went down the bow skill tree learning how to make fire arrows and zipline arrows and how to do the special attack penetrating shot which penetrates armor and hits all mobs in a straight line. These special abilities are called feats and are something ark does not possess. Atlas is not an asset flip, all the art assets are new, new game mechanics such as managing your vitamin levels, having to catch the wind with your sails at the correct angles to even be able to move your ships and raft are all new, the files sharing the same name as ARK’s I can completely dismiss as Atlas feels so much different.
“Well the game was launched incomplete, broken, buggy, and laggy!” some would say. They are just plain wrong and ignorant of what early access means. So time to get this off my chest, early access is a fucking paid alpha people, its an incomplete game sold at a discount to get money to continue development and test the game! The game has not even officially launched yet, that won’t be for another two years as the devs have said in multiple interviews.
Yes the game’s early access start was terrible with server pings of 250 ms, terrible frame rate , and some game breaking bugs. The devs worked non stop on the game, some putting in 24 hours a day even to get this game playable. The servers have 120 ms ping still on official servers but I have not experienced any more lag or frame drops. Considering everything wrong and that they did numerous patches the first week that we went from version 1.0 to 7.0 and higher now is astonishing and the devs even apologized for the the rough early access start. I have never in all my years been this impressed and humbled by a game dev team, color me impressed. The was playable on the 27th of December 2018. On top of all the hard work they were doing on their own game servers they helped groups like TwitchRP set up and fix their own private servers
The devs have gone above and beyond the call of their duties, worked endlessly on the game, and care about their players and game. They continue to fix things and balance things while trying to give us the best play experience possible for a game still in the development stages and in testing. Also this game is fucking great.
ATLAS is available now in Early Access on STEAM – https://www.playatlas.com/
Keep an eye here for more news and play diary’s as we dive more into the game
To celebrate the release of Fallout 76, Sanitarium.Fm’s patrons received exclusive artwork of the games Scorchbeast boss by our artist in residence, PhaseChan.
Check out the process behind the portrait below:
Love this illustration? Sanitarium.FM patrons get exclusive Game Of The Month artwork every month, support the station today to start receiving your prints.
Same sick burns, same smoldering attitude, now all scaled up in stunning HD, Spyro is back in the Spyro™ Reignited Trilogy! Rekindle the fire with the original three games, Spyro™ the Dragon, Spyro™ 2: Ripto’s Rage! and Spyro™: Year of the Dragon, all in fully-remastered
To say that I was excited for this release is an understatement – The original Spyro trilogy on the PS1 has held a special place in my heart for the last 20 years, ever since I first played Spyro 1 at a friends house back when I was at school after which I then instantly needed to have my own Playstation and a copy of the game.
After the release of Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy, I couldn’t help but feel hopeful for a Spyro remaster, and since it’s announcement I had been anxious to play it and relive my joyful experiences of obsessing over Gems, collecting the final Dragon or Egg I needed and relive the epic soundtracks of the games. I even booked a day off work to play them on their release day, and to make sure they were installed and ready to go as soon as possible. After what felt like an eternity, the game was finally installed onto my Hard drive after downloading a 40GB update and I was able to play Spyro: Reignited Trilogy. And how blissful it was.
Spyro moves and feels exactly how he did 20 years ago which for someone like myself, was exactly what I wanted. The levels are beautifully redesigned with bright colours, great definition with a wonderfully reimagined cast of characters. Each of the dragons in Spyro 1 has their own defined character and personality when you free them and even though the original script is intact, the new voice actors suit them all well.
The charm about the first game is its simplicity – collecting every last dragon and gem is something of a satisfying obsession whilst you dive into a world of fantasy and magic (although Tree Tops still remains as tricky as I remember!) The second and third games add new abilities including swimming and the ability to hover, which mixes things up and means you can revisit a level once you’re able to access a new section of it.
One thing to remember is that these three games were designed for kids so for any hard core gamer new to the series looking for a challenge, these games may become a little boring or samey after the first few hours, but this is only a minor thing.
Overall, as far as a remaster goes, these games are perfect. The only thing I found slightly frustrating was a small glitch which meant that gems would disappear in a level, even after I had defeated every enemy and visited every section. This was easily rectified if I simply killed myself – this would force any enemy containing a gem I was missing to respawn – in order for me to then defeat them and claim the gem. This only happened twice during the first game and wasn’t that troublesome. I didn’t encounter any other glitches or issues.
If you loved the original games on the PS1, I cannot recommend picking this up enough for not only the nostalgia, but for the fact that it’s just so relaxing to play. You can even switch the Sound in the Pause Menu to play the original soundtrack rather than the reignited version, something I was very happy to see as the soundtracks were one of the best things about the series in my opinion. If you’re looking for a family friendly platformer, I’d say this is also for you!
Spyro: Reignited Trilogy is available now on XBox One and Playstation 4, head over to spyrothedragon.com for more info.
I personally give it a thousand out of ten but that’s so bias as it’s so personal and nostalgic, so 9/10!
~Phasechan
Relentless rogue-like shooter/brawler coming soon to a host near you. SNATCH, ZAP and REPEAT your way through a dystopian 1980’s as a mysterious organism bent on world domination.
Troglobytes games’ HyperParasite is a top down twin stick shooter with a twist.
The first thing people will notice about HyperParasite is probably the obvious homage to the 80’s, the game looks like it was dunked in a tank of 80’s neon sheen, the soundtrack is full of awesome 80’s inspired dark synthwave, and the whole concept of the post apocalypse filled with various themed gangs (which isn’t exactly what the game is, but with character classes being very specific and appearing together a lot in waves it does have a slight Warriors vibe).
So gameplay wise, you play as the titular HyperParasite, a mass of shadowy smoke like tentacles, the Parasite has the ability to move around freely, dash (which can be used to avoid attacks and to smash various objects), and a tentacle swipe (and here is where the gameplay twist comes in) the tentacle swipe is used to infect your enemies and hijack their bodies, the effect of this is twofold, not only do you used them as a literal human shield to protect your fragile parasitic lack of a body, but you also get to use their strengths, each enemy has their own attack, special and stats, generally a melee character will be stronger and have a higher amount of hit points, while a ranged character will be weaker and survive fewer hits with the trade off of being able avoid more damage while on the run and still scoring hits.
Outside of the two main classes, each enemy character has their own playstyle, cops are ranged and can fire their pistol with moderate strength straight in the direction you are facing they also have a clip limit so they need to reload once their shots are spent, whereas the paper girl, while also a ranged unit throws two newspapers that do low damage and split out in a small V formation in the direction you are facing, they also have unlimited papers so no need to reload or watch your clip count, similarly melee characters will have different range and damage to their attacks that you will need to take into consideration when selecting a host for your parasite.
Now what if you are surrounded by units you don’t like? Should you stay as the parasite? Well no, it’s never really a good idea to stay as the parasite because it’s super squishy, and at any point if you see a better unit you can destroy your current host and snag them, assuming they don’t destroy you before you grab them, you also have the choice of throwing a potential host at your enemies instead of taking them if you grab the wrong one by mistake, using them as a decently strong ranged attack.
Each run you do is procedurally generated, and the waves of enemies are randomised as well, so it’s more about quick reactions and luck than planning things out, some areas will have things like barrels and cars strewn about as well, some of these contain nothing, others have pickups, mostly in the form of money which can be used to purchase upgrades if you find a store, and the rest of them blow up, prior to blowing up you will see a ring which indicated the area of effect the explosion will cover, so you can know how far to move to avoid it, and if you are lucky and skilful enough you can also lure enemies in to feel the effects of the blast.
Some certain enemies also allow you to take their DNA after you defeat them, this can be used to power up your parasite and make it more formidable, and with roguelike elements, you can gain power ups that will apply to future runs, making things easier for subsequent attempts, which would be helpful as I found the difficulty even in the first area very hard to overcome.
Overall the game is well made, with a winning art style, music and over all feel, the replayability is high, with some runs going well enough to think, I’m going to take another shot and see if I can push it further, and other runs ending so quickly that you think, that was a mulligan, one more try, the game is still also in pre-alpha at the time of this review so they have time to add more and balance the difficulty if it turns out I’m not alone in being absolutely destroyed.
