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Welcome to your weekly look into the world of gaming campaigns on Kickstarter.
Starting with our catch-up, there have been a number of campaigns cancelled due to it seeming that they wouldn’t reach their targets in time. These are Legion 1917: Rise of the Bolsheviks, Xenosis and Daymare: 1998 all of them cancelled 5 days ago at time of writing. The Legion team wrote to thank those who supported them with backing and vowed to make the game somehow, sending out surveys to people for feedback; the Xenosis one was cancelled because of new possibilities that had arisen behind the scenes and a bigger update has been promised soon; and the Daymare team have thanked people for the support on Greenlight and revealed that they’re in talks with partners to get the game funded in another way. Also of note is the the FictionSphere team did not cancel their campaign, but all the same have finished up unsuccessful in raising the money needed – but at the same time have vowed that the game is not dead yet. Behind the Rose is also struggling, with just under seven-tenths of its goal to raise in under 6 days.
First up we have an RPG that deals with the themes of loyalty and revenge.
Sacred Fire is a strategy game, where your progress and paths are tied more to how the characters think and feel as opposed to just weapons, attacks and powers. You do not start as a leader, but you must become one. How you choose to do it through is up to you – will you be a fair, just ruler or take control through blood and fear? Can you exercise self-control or will revenge mean more to you?
Sacred Fire has a $50,000 goal, of which it has made $20,910 so far. It has 23 more days left to run.
Dragon Lore is a turn-based tactical game that boasts of 20 hours of main quest and over a hundred of side-quests, and will be available in English, Korean, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. The graphics are 2d pixel art turned 3d voxels and the gameplay and story take place over several floating islands with an air ship in between that you can call down for an attack!
Dragon Lore has made $11,147 with 15 days left to go to reach its $50,000 goal.
Now we have a game that is inspired by 90s games of the same genre.
Stardust Runelord is an action adventure game that sees you venturing into ruins and dungeons to take and and defeat monsters and demons while searching for upgrades and level ups. The game has a demon available that’s linked on the campaign page and looks to be done in a 2d pixel style with the maps done in a room-by-room network to be navigated and explored. The developer says that he is hoping for an early summer release if successful
Stardust Runelord has 6 days to go and a lot to make up as its made only $11 or it’s $6,000 goal. Go check it out and back it if you like the look of it!
Finally we end with something completely different from everything else.
Cheap Golf is a game that combines golf with surreal humour. This is another of the 7-day campaigns that have been popping up on Kickstarter in the last month and some of the campaign rewards will be offered even if they don’t reach target. The game is low-poly so it might not be for everyone, but the page says it’s apparently “50% Atari-style mini golf, 40% surreal comedy and 9% rainbow ice cream” and the pledges do start from $3 so it’s probably worth a look at.
Cheap Golf has 6 more days to run to make $9,000, and has made $671 so far.
So, who remembers the game Kick Ass Commandos from a previous article? For those of you who don’t remember or weren’t about, Kick Ass Commandos was one of the games I covered in my Kickstarter Gaming Round-Up article of November 1st 2016. It had a small target and the team hoped to use gamecodes to give their backers early access for Christmas. And now, we have one for review.
Kick Ass Commandos was published and developed by Anarchy Enterprises. The game is a top-down shooter where you can choose to play as any of the commandos in the pack (starting with just the one but the roster expands as you complete the ‘rescue’ missions) to complete missions with objectives such as rescuing commandos or hostages, taking out something or someone in particular or simply clearing the level of enemies.
There are a number of different level packs, and you will start with a few of those missions unlocked with you having to complete those before you can unlock further missions down the chain. Each pack ends with a ‘boss’ level which can take the form of one hard-to-kill opponent to three tough opponents at once backed up by an army of enemy players. Weapon-wise you often start off with your standard gun, although some levels will start you off with a knife/machete to hack at opponents instead. Most levels will have special temporary pick up weapons though which give you the use of a special weapon for a set period of time – such as flamethrowers or my personal favourite the rocket launcher.
Levels are also pretty damn destructible, if something’s there you can probably shoot it. This just lends itself to the game’s atmosphere of being a crazy, guns-blazing, rampaging game and it’s true that you can play it like that if you wish to. It’s a bit like a top-down Broforce in that way.
However, there’s also a lot to be said for slowing down and planning. Sometimes when you shoot down an item or an enemy you get health packs, but they despawn if not picked up and used quickly enough. You can also find and rescue other commandos, mostly NPC ones but sometimes, especially during their rescue mission, you will find one of the other ‘named’ commandos. Keeping your assembled team alive is a good idea because more firepower equals better chance of winning, and your NPC allies can also make use of health packs. So a little strategy is a very good way to approach this game.
I enjoyed this game for having that openness, of being able to run and gun it if I felt like just destroying everything or being able to plan ahead if I needed to. I enjoy games like this and succeeding with either strategy made me feel like a badass, as games of this type should do.
Do I recommend it? Hell yeah, Kick Ass Commandos is amazing fun and it’s nice to see one of the games I covered in my Kickstarter articles making it into our review box.
Recently Ubisoft have come under fire for the introduction of new emotes into their fighting game For Honor, specifically due to how much they actually cost in a game that was already full priced to begin with. True they can be bought through the in-game currency of Steel, so in theory it’s possible for a player who doesn’t want to spend anymore real money to earn all of them but at 7000 Steel a pop it’s going to take a while. How long? Well someone actually did the math – it would take a casual player around two and a half years to earn enough Steel to buy all of the emotes for all the characters. Ouch.
If you do want to spend money on Steel, each 5000 Steel pack costs around $4.99/£3.99 – so you can’t even buy one emote for that. You either have to earn the shortfall yourself, buy another 5k pack or the 11000 pack for $9.99/£7.99 – which again is only enough to get one emote. Out of the many there are.
To the calculations done, Reddit user bystander007 has worked out that each hero in the game right now needs 91,500 Steel to unlock all their associated emotes. There are 12 heroes in the base version of For Honor so times 91,500 by 12 and you get 1,098,000 Steel. It would therefore cost you a total of $732/£585 to unlock everything in the current build of For Honor – on top of the £40/$60 you’ve already spent on the game. And this isn’t even counting the six upcoming heroes.
They then crunched the numbers on time taken if someone wanted to grind out all the Steel needed, if the player earned it through the in-game contracts, half-contracts and duels. Based on a casual player’s estimate of about 1200 Steel per two hours of play, they calculated that it would take 921 days or 2.51 years to unlock everything in just the base version of For Honor, as I said earlier- this doesn’t take into account the upcoming six new heroes (that pushes the time taken up to around 1373 days or 3.76 years).
Oh, and the game requires you to use Steel to keep your weapons and armour upgraded – you fall behind what your opponents might be using if you don’t.
So you can see why players are currently not impressed at Ubisoft’s actions here, as well as the apparent greed of bleeding the players dry of more money after they bought the game. You expect this in a free-to-play (not to such a scale though), but not here. Not for £40/$60…
It’s a shame too, I enjoyed For Honor when I played in its open beta.
One of the things that Nintendo sold their new console the Switch with was a lot of talking up the components inside of it. One of those was a claim to having a processor that was a custom design. Only, here’s the thing – it might not be as custom as they made it sound.
Hardware analysis site Tech Insights has updated their Nintendo Switch teardown with some photography of the console’s processor, a Tegra which as I said Nintendo have promoted as being a custom design. Only upon inspection the site has determined that it seems the configuration of it is awfully similar to the standard Tegra X1, as can be seen in the Shield Android TV. It’s pretty much the same as the one found inside the 2017 revised version of the Shield Android TV, right down to the same assortment of the surface-mounted capacitors surrounding the processor. Which can lead a lot of people to ask what exactly was meant by a ‘custom design’ in the first place.
The one place its talked about is a blog post by Nvidia on the Switch, in which they talked up the processor. Although the blog post does cover more than the hardware of the console, talking about the system design, system software, APIs, game engines and peripherals as well – so possibly by ‘custom design’ they meant the way they’ve gotten it to function inside of the console to play games. The Shield Android TV is much less able to handle gaming framerates than the Switch has so far proven to, so maybe the custom design was focused on getting enough out of the processor to achieve this.
Of course, when you talk about a ‘custom design’ it makes it sound as if the processor was specially designed for the Switch and from the looks of it this is clearly not the case here. Whether or not this was intentional we can’t ever know, but it is easy to see how you could read the statement both ways given the facts.
