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Few series have enjoyed the level of success that Ubisoft’s flagship Assassin’s Creed has attained. Each new entry in the series is highly anticipated. Which makes it all the more strange that almost three months after the release of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag the company also released Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD. This remake of the PS Vita title has a lot going for it. Unfortunately, it has almost as many things working against it.
Liberation will be immediately familiar to anyone who has played an Assassin’s Creed game. The free running, high flying, rooftop leaping assassination’s are all still here and for the most part, are just as satisfying as ever. Of course, in Liberation you palys as the only female assassin in the series, Aveline de Grandpré. Daughter of a wealthy family and of mixed French and African heritage, Aveline is a refreshing character. Unfortunately, shortly after you are introduced to the pre-Revolutionary War setting of New Orleans things begin to unravel a bit. The most immediate issues are in the graphics. While this is a port of the Vita game, it is also touted as being an HD remastered version. In actuality, its simply a Vita game with some HD textures slapped on it. And in places, these textures look a bit bland. While free running, everything looks fine. But slow down for a leisurely stroll as Aveline’s Lady Persona and muddy textures and pop-in begin to rear their ugly heads. Some animations appear stiff and stilted, and the voice acting is hit or miss. Still, as with all Assassin’s Creed titles, Liberation does manage to create a believable city filled with life. Which makes the swamp sections all the more disappointing. The game is split between the city and the swamp, and it is the swamp sections that really drag the game down. The swamp is filled with vegetation and wildlife, but it feels lifeless and flat. Nothing ever really seems to happen there outside of scripted events and side missions, and the animals feel as if they are only there for your hunting achievements. Even wrestling an alligator is reduced to a quicktime event – one that responds quite poorly to the timed inputs it demands of you.
Herein lies the main problem with Assassin’s Creed Liberation. It uses the same tree-centric free running system as Assassin’s Creed 3. But, in the case of Liberation, the controls feel stiff and imprecise. More than once, I would find Aveline endlessly running up the side of a tree trunk and plunging to her doom on the swamp floor below rather than sliding gracefully around the trunk to the next branch and continuing on her way. While combat is fast and fluid, I encountered multiple instances where the “Mark And Execute” feature of combat – which lets you select opponents to dispatch in quick succession mid fight – simply refused to function as the onscreen prompts said it should. I expect long dialogue and heavy story when playing an Assassin’s Creed game. What I do not expect are clunky controls, yet Liberation delivers both in equal measure. Things get a bit more bearable if you play with a controller rather than mouse and keyboard, but not much.
Aveline has three main guises, a new gameplay mechanism for the series. her lady guise sees her dressed like the wealthy scion of New Orleans she is, and reduces her to either walking or a modest jog. No free-running is allowed, and the most combat you will engage in will be some bare knuckle fisticuffs or using the dart gun hidden in your parasol. To balance this out, the Lady guise gains notoriety much more slowly than the other two. The Assassin guise, on the other hand, is your typical Assassin’s Creed outfit. Equipped with darts, hidden blades, pistols, and your melee weapon of choice you can run, jump, climb and air assassinate to your bloody little heart’s content. Of course, you pick up notoriety very easily as the Assassin. In between the two is the Slave guise. This guise gains notoriety more slowly than the assassin and is able to sprint and engage in some combat. Switching between the three is as easy as ducking into a convenient shop and selecting them from a radial menu. While the guises do add a refreshing element to the gameplay, to often I found myself stuck in the Lady guise and unable to change so that I could explore the city around me.
Rounding out the game are the usual Assassin’s Creed side activities. Taking random assassination contracts, buying and renovating buildings, and engaging in a bare bones trading game that has you sending ships full of goods throughout the Gulf of Mexico will keep you occupied if you so choose. The most glaring omission from the game is the complete lack of multiplayer. Recent Assassin’s Creed games have incorporated innovative and entertaining multiplayer modes, but the complete lack of them in Liberation is a puzzling decision.
All in all, if you are looking for a good Assassin’s Creed game, you would be better to buy Black Flag or find a copy of Assassin’s Creed 3 on sale. While Liberation isn’t a terrible game, it falls far short of other entries in the series. Muddy textures, pop in, stiff controls. the lack of multiplayer and some laughably bad voice acting all drag down what could have been an excellent port of one of the best Vita out there.
ARMA 3 may be the premiere hardcore military simulator on the market, but things just got a bit more interesting in Bohemia’s love letter to modern war fighting. Now available by selecting the game’s Development Build in Steam, the new Zeus mode looks set to change the way the huge armies of ARMA engage each other on the battlefield.
The concept of Zeus mode will be familiar to anyone who has ever played a Real Time Strategy Game like Starcraft. The player in Zeus mode is granted a free flying view of one of ARMA 3’s massive maps. They can move around the map, zooming in and out, panning the camera and getting up close and personal with individual units with ease, while also easily surveying the entire map with a few clicks of the mouse. While in this mode, Zeus players are able to place enemy squads, animals, NPCs, vehicles, waypoints and more for the players on the ground. Even if this were the extent of Zeus mode, it would be a worthy addition to the multiplayer component of the game.
Fortunately, Bohemia has gone much, much further in implementing Zeus. The tools available to the Zeus player extend far beyond simply placing waypoints and summoning squads of Anti-Tank infantry from thin air to harass unsuspecting convoys. The player in command of this mode is able to sculpt a living story for players on the ground, through objectives he can place and change on a whim, ambushes along the road and easy improvisation, that has been made available through the tools that Bohemia Interactive provides. The player isn’t locked into one side of the conflict either. Able to interact with any of the myriad forces and factions deployable across and ARMA battleground, they can provide swift and varied reactions from multiple allies or potential threats in any given scenario as they create and morph it around players on the ground. In essence, Zeus mode turns the player in command into the GM in a DnD game, albeit in a hardcore military sim, with a lot less dice rolling, but the comparison is strong as the Zeus player guides those on foot through a custom built story that’s never the same in any given play session.
The sheer depth that Zeus brings to the game has yet to be fully explored, but developer Bohemia showed off some of the functionality in a large scale battle during a live stream. The results were impressive. Maneuvering squads of AI in support of opposition or heroic forces, morphing objectives and waypoints on the fly were all demonstrated. While the developers did of course demonstrate the most basic capabilities of the mode, they were also quick to stress that this tool was conceptualized as a way for players to experience an interactive story on the battlefield, likening it to player created campaigns on the scale of other military shooters – with, I hope, less Michael bay style explosions. Theres a laundry list of things Bohemia plans to add to Zeus mode, including loading AI into other vehicles, making helicopters fly on there own (currently the Zeus player has to drag them airborne) and several balance fixes, but the basic start of the mode is very promising. It remains to be seen what can fully be done with this tool, but if the demonstrations are anything to go by, the most in depth military shooter on the market just got even more intense.
Want to see Zeus mode in action? Check out the video below:
Last week in gaming saw the release of new user-added tagging to games on Steam. The idea was to allow players to apply tags to games to further refine categories and maybe allow people to find games similar to ones they might already own and be enjoying, a way to give the players more control on how they sorted games available and allow them to choose what tags they followed. What followed was some of what was intended but as is the way of humanity, the new tagging system quickly became a free-for-all. The exploiting of the system ranged from people using the tags to spoil endings of story-driven games, to people using the tags to insult the game or developers to even offensive and abusive tagging on games such as Gone Home from players who opposed themes presented within the game.
Now in a bid to attempt to combat abuse of the new system and prevent strict moderation internally Valve has added a way for other users to flag tags they don’t find helpful, bringing them to the attention of Valve who will remove the tag if it meets one of four criteria: spoilery, offensive/abusive, not appropriate for the game or simply unhelpful. Tags will also now need to be applied by a greater number of people before they will show up as popular tags to the wider Steam audience.
The Steam Dev team says that they are working to improve the feature and to keep feedback coming as to how the new safeguards are working, but also Valve has shown no interest in removing tags that might keep someone from purchasing a game if enough players find it a bad game; which can only be a good thing.
What do you think? Will this new set of safeguards be enough to make Steam user-tags useful and reliable at last?
“A Chunder has entered your dungeon!” Eagerly, I scroll over to my dungeon’s portal and watch the somewhat portly monster waddle off in search of new living quarters. It’s then that I realize I’ve lost the last hour of my life to the spell of War For The Overworld.
Pressing concerns like lunch and the wrath of my wife loom large in my mind.
For all of about five seconds…
Then, it’s right back to building my masterfully planned hero deathtrap.
Such is the magic of the spiritual successor to Dungeon Keeper. The anti RTS, a game that tasks you with being the evil overlord and ruthlessly crushing any do-gooder that dares enter your twisted lair. All while revelling in the sheer pleasure of being evil.
Dropping today, the team over at Subterranean games have given us a rather substantial patch for the Bedrock Beta of this wonderful game. Among the stand outs from the patch notes:
Spell: Recall- Benevolent Underlords may now rescue their foolish minions from outside their own dominion.
Units will now work more reliably
Units will now need to sleep less often
Units will now need to eat more often
Units that spawn will now far more accurately reflect the rooms that you have in your Dungeon
New death and idle visual effects for some units
And a whole host more, including other visual updates, texture and bug fixes. All in all, it adds up to a rather nice chunk of work from the guys over at Subterranean. Some of these seemingly minor tweaks and fixes actually have a significant impact on the way you play the game. The new tweaks to hunger, units also get hungrier faster when fighting, force you to make sure you have enough slaughter pens to feed your slavering army.
And the game plays fantastically. The Recall spell in particular is a nice new tool for saving those foolish imps that think it’s a good idea to claim enemy dungeon space while a towering behemoth of a hero is flailing at them with an axe bigger than they are. While the game may still be in beta, it’s looking more and more polished all the time. I would encourage you to go jump into the beta right now, but honestly if you haven’t, you need to check your pulse.
The standalone version of DayZ was released on Steam Early Access in mid-December.
The standalone version of open-world survival game DayZ is off to a remarkable start, having sold over 800,000 copies in less than three weeks — a figure that far outpaces the amount its developer hoped to sell in the game’s first three months.
In a comment on Reddit, DayZ creator Dean Hall explained what the expectations for the game were and what this outpouring of support means for the game.
“We ([publisher Bohemia Interactive] and I) had very ambitious plans for 2014 already, however this amount of sales was completely unexpected,”
he wrote.
“Honestly, 250k within a quarter was what I would have considered a success. So to move nearly 800,000 in under a month is crazy.
“We’ll be finalizing our roadmap in mid January, but it is safe to say that this kind of result will be having a very positive effect on that roadmap.”
DayZ started out as a mod for PC shooter ArmA II and quickly became incredibly popular. Hall had aspirations of turning the mod into a standalone game from the start, with that project officially being announced in mid-2012. The game has already served as the inspiration for a number of other games — some more so than others — and last month an alpha version was released on Steam as an Early Access game.
In just 12 hours, it had already seen 88,000 downloads and was attracting new player registrations at a rate of 200 per second. Now, less than three weeks later, DayZ is well on its way to one million units sold, and all without the benefit of a Steam sale — the game was routinely among the top sellers on Steam during the Steam Holiday Sale despite not being on sale.
Hall is admirably not shy about cautioning some people away from buying the game at this stage. Games in Early Access can be at many different stages of development, some more complete and playable than others. While DayZ is playable, it’s far from finished. After explaining that buying the alpha now gets you the full version once it’s released, Hall advised one prospective buyer on Reddit,
“I would recommend a very careful and critical review of whether purchasing now is such a good idea. There are many problems which can ruin your gameplay experience. These are being actively fixed – but if you delayed your purchase by a month you would pay the same price but it would be a better experience. Something to consider.”
