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Currently Amplitude Studios are releasing videos to show off the four X pillars of the game Endless Space 2 – Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate. They released Explore last week and now they’re showing off the second, Expand.
Of course, for a game of this genre expansion is a very big part of the game. It’s a slow and often risky process, especially when you’re moving the unit to set up your new outpost/base/colony/etc. through territory that they could easily fall prey to someone else’s attacking unit, or even AI controlled mishap. It’s essential though to make progress – areas must be controlled, resources brought under your sway and so on. This is true for many games that hold 4X as their gameplay mechanics. Of course, this doesn’t mean that all factions in a game will do this in the same way – Endless Space 2 will have one race (the Vodyani) that never builds outposts of colonies at all as they ‘settle’ in ark ships that orbit the planet instead.
Of course, it’s not just getting there and setting up your colony or outpost. There’s always stuff to be done to maintain and grow your new holdings, whether that be growing technological progress, making good use of newly controlled resources or even just building the necessary things for one of your outposts to function at peak efficiency. This is what makes a good part of the 4X strategy game’s time. After all, how can you win over or destroy your opponents if you don’t have the resources or staging areas with which to do so?
Endless Space 2 is due to be released on May 19th, but can currently be purchased as an Early Access title on Steam for about $30 or just over £26. Go forth, expand.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf is a card-driven turn-based tactical game which features RPG elements, containing a single player campaign, survival and PvP modes. Win these battles using the arsenal of weapons, abilities and cunning of the sky warriors.
Now anyone who knows me, knows my love for the all father and being a loyal son of Russ, having played Space Wolves on the Table Top since the early 90’s, so with 25 years under my belt, I’m dubious about anything that uses Leman Russ’ Legion, not only in it’s title but also as the main bulk of the game.
Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolf was initially an iOS/Android release back in 2016, which got rave reviews on the iOS/Android stores and usually the game would be straight ported over to PC (like Fallout Shelter, of course that seemed to work, so if done right, hell, why not), however Herocraft, the Engineseers behind the game, decided to rebuild the game from the ground up for it’s PC (STEAM) release, not only by making the graphics better and more detailed, but making it a one off purchase for the incredibly reasonable £9 and removing all the ingame purchase options that mobile games are well known for.
What we have at heart here is a TCG based tactical turn based shooter, and it works perfectly, using your cards abilities to make your character move, shoot and melee attack the vile chaos scum of the Word Bearer Legion and it’s really as simple as that. Of course it is a TCG at heart, so in typical card game fashion, you build a deck for your main character, in three variations that give him different option, from the standard Power Armour option, which has everything from melee and jump pack abilities, all the way to heavy weapon and wolf companion summoning abilities, through to the Scout armour that gives you more sneaking and sniper abilities, to the Terminator Armour, where everything is heavy, from the melee weapons to the Cyclone Missile launcher. there are some cards that can be equipped on your character too, giving you more options and even Overwatch ability, meanign if an enemy comes into range, your character may take a shot at them (incredibly good if you’ve buffed yourself in the last turn too).
What really struck me early on is the apparent difficulty level, it’s hard, but actually in a good way, I enjoyed losing. As you can see in my first live stream of it below, I just kept going back for more and didn’t realise how long I had been trying just the first level.
As you progress through the levels, you unlock, not only new cards to use, but requisition to make new cards and you can even fuse cards together, for instance, fusing two level 1 cards of the same type into a level 2 of that card. You also unlock new battle brothers aswell, Space Wolves of different squads lost on the planet during planetfall and making there way back to each other.
We all really enjoyed Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolf here at Geek Towers adn would wholeheartedly reccomend it, not only to Warhammer 40k fans, but to other TCG and Tactical Shooter fans too, it melds two game genres together brilliantly and considering it is a massive upgrade from the mobile version, not a straight lackluster port also raises it to exceptional, keep it installed for fun, game levels.
In the month of April, the Sanitarium.FM will be going all in on covering one of our favorite franchises of all time. Streaming, videos, articles, discussion in Discord. So if you love WarHammer, join in the discussion and check out the trailer below!
Pixelmon is a very popular Minecraft mod. It basically implements Pokemon into Minecraft, removing a lot of the Minecrafty elements for convenience of finding, catching and training your team. Of course, it is a mod and quite a sizeable one at that. So what do you do if you’re no good at modding Minecraft? Play a map of course.
Made for vanilla Minecraft 1.8.8, Pokemon Cobalt and Amethyst is a map that makes use of command blocks and was built by a team of players. The project took them about a year and a half to make and was based around trying to replicate things as they were back in the original game of 1996 – although in an original region (Suliqu) with unique stories and 136 new Pokemon that mixes in a few of the later gen Pokemon with the originals. It is however only available in singleplayer right now, so no link cable simulation I’m afraid.
Developer Phoenix SC claims that the game has a playtime of about 60-80 hours and features “an antagonist threatening to release a legendary darkness that demands tribute.” The criminal team in this game won’t be Team Rocket, Magma, Galactic or any of the other gangs from the official games – this time they’re Team Tempest.
Of course, fan-made content is wonderful but Nintendo have a reputation of stamping out the more popular and noticeable fan-made creations. Pokemon Uranium was one of the biggest to fall, only last year after fans spent hours on its development. Cobalt and Amethyst do make use of sounds borrowed from Red and Blue as well as other assets so it remains to be seen whether Cobalt and Amethyst will avoid the DMCA takedowns.
If you’re interested in playing Pokémon Cobalt and Amethyst for yourself, you can download the map here. See the video below about how to install it if you’re unsure:
Recently it was announced that Sega and Creative Assembly were teaming up with Wargaming for a collaboration on Total War Arena, one of their upcoming games. Now an image has been released on the official Facebook which along with e-mails sent out, confirm the date of closed Alpha tests for the game.
The image is of Roman soldier’s pauldron with the roman numerals XXVI.XI.MMXVI. visible on it. For those of you who get confused with Roman Numerals or just can’t be bothered to decipher it, in numbers we’d recognise more easily it reads 27.11.2016. You might be reading this and realise that it happens to be tomorrow’s date. So we won’t have to wait long for news.
We know that it’s closed alpha as well because the subreddit for Total War Arena is currently filled with players saying that they’ve received alpha keys, and a number of people have screencapped and posted the e-mail that came with the key. Said e-mail suggests that the tests will start from 8am tomorrow, so as long as NDA isn’t put in place you may see the game popping up on Twitch and Youtube Gaming tomorrow.
Of course, the partnership with Wargaming means that the game is not available on Steam and must instead be played through Wargaming Game Center, along with a wipe of any previous tests’ progress. So everyone’s starting from square one which is probably a good thing.
