Plague Inc: Evolved, successor to the highly successful 2012 iOS game Plague Inc., is out of early access and into official release as of 18th feb. 2016 for PC, Mac, Linux.  The game features many devastating ways to exterminate the human population of Earth.  It is hailed as a “highly authentic simulation of a world-ending pathogen”, so realistic that the developer was invited to the Center for Disease Control to speak about the game’s infection models.

Plague Inc. boasted a staggering 65,000,000+ players, and Plague Inc: Evolved has already sold over 800,000 copies before even leaving early access.

The game boasts a plethora of features, including:
10 different types of diseases, including the use of bio-weapons, mind control, and zombies.
20 Scenarios; spread a plague during an ice age, handle new strains of older diseases, and many more challenges!
Steam Workshop support where over 10,000 players have already created their own scenarios, worlds, and diseases.

The latest update brings multiplayer into the mix, where players can either join up in Co-Op to eradicate the world together, or compete against one another or AI to wipe out humanity and each other.

Plague Inc: Evolved by Ndemic Creations is now available on Steam!

XCOM 2’s release was quite good as far as the launches of big-name games has gone in recent years. No big issues, although some have reported performance issues that affected their gameplay by tkaing framerates down below what they should have been. And in a game that is all about getting things done in as few turns as possible… it sort of ruins the immersion, you know?

Last week publisher 2K Games acknowledged the issues, saying that they were “gathering more information from users” and today Lead Designer Jake Solomon said that the developer Firaxis was “working very furiously” to get XCOM 2 running smoothly.

He also said that the issues hadn’t been caught before launch purely because it doesn’t seem to effect every computer and every build. Where as some less powerful computers have reported no problems, so high-end expensive custom rigs have been seeing issues left, right and centre.

“We didn’t catch this stuff in compatibility testing. We’re fully, fully accountable for the product in people’s hands, so we certainly take responsibility.”

He admits that some of the camera pauses after events take far too long, and that all the issues with the stuttering and framerates annoy the developers as much as the players.  While he couldn’t say when the fixes would be coming he was adamant that Firaxis was working hard on them and that there would be “fixes coming soon.”

In the world of Hearthstone there are a lot of well known players, and one of them who is known as one of the best Hearthstone Arena players in the world is Hafu Chan. However, Hafu is female and that means that she has to put up with some stuff that people would never dream of directing towards a male player.

Now such issues and experiences are being shown off in a ten-minute documentary about the subject entitled “The Trials of a Female Esports Champion” in which she is interviewed about the abuse she has faced both now as a Hearthstone player and streamer, but also before that when she was a WoW pro player as well. She was previously turned off from that game’s competitive scene by such incidents as the time a team formed for a WoW Tournament Realm called “Gonna Rape Hafu At Regionals”. Just, wow.

In the documentary she talks about this and also why even though she loves Hearthstone, she’s thinking about walking away from streaming it for similar reasons.

“When you have 70,000 people watching a stream, and all you see is terrible things being said about you, it’s kind of like, why am I competing?” she says. “[Viewers] know to press where it hurts, right? And when you kind of show where it hurts, people will just keep pressing.”

Of course, there are some watching who claim that she has it wrong and that the abuse and harassment does not come from her being female – but simply because she is a streamer and therefore should expect such insults and attacks upon her person. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a male livestreamer being told that said commenter would love to “rape them” or tell them that they’re only using their bodies to get them attention for their videos (not specific examples from Hafu’s video but commonly seen around many websites sadly). All streamers get trolls, but females are significantly more likely to get abuse related to reducing them to nothing more than their appearance or something to have sex with.

Either way, whether you disagree or agree with what Hafu is saying I’d recommend at least giving the video a watch. It’s just ten minutes of your life after all.

Kick or Die is a stationary beat-em-up by Boomfire Games reminiscent of One-Finger-Death-Punch except, you guessed it, the game uses your gams and not your guns.

The title is incredibly accurate. In this game, you either kick, or you die, and you can take 3 hits per stage before you give up the ghost. I encountered a few different kinds of reflex-testing enemies while playing; the basic black-clothed ninjas who die in one hit, seemingly mask-wearing ninjas who take one kick and rise up again for another mouthful of foot, and the white ninjas who attempt to trick you by dodging your first kick and appearing on the other side of you. Those in particular gave me trouble. But never fear, because each successful kick builds a meter for your ultimate attack, which conjures some sort of serpentine creature and launches tornadoes on either side of the player character that clear the map when you get a little too overwhelmed.

I am always a sucker for a nice art style, and this game doesn’t disappoint. Set in aesthetically pleasing Asian-themed pixel art backgrounds, the graphics, music, and sfx harken back to the old side scrolling arcade games of yore.

This game boasts 10k downloads on the Play Store with an overall rating of 4.4, however upon installation it asked for a surprising amount of credentials including access to my camera, microphone, and location. Somewhat worrying for a game of this kind, but nothing worth deterring a download.

I died a lot while playing, my reflexes are not what they used to be and mobile games are not my forte. Unfortunately this meant I encountered a lot of ads, which play almost every time you go through a loading screen. Typically I could skip them after 5 seconds, but the sheer amount was off-putting. The game also features a system of continues. You get a certain amount of continues, I believe I started with a maximum of 9, and a ten-minute timer replenishes them one at a time. Fortunately for both of these issues, for the paltry sum of .99c you can permanently banish the ads and give yourself infinite continues for unlimited, uninterrupted play. Honestly I believe that’s quite a fair deal given the content of the game.

In closing, I don’t regret the download and I’d recommend giving it a shot if you’ve got a buck to spare on removing the ads and enjoyed One-Finger-Death-Punch enough to want a mobile version with pretty pixel art.

My rating: 3.5/5, would probably have been higher without ads.

Kick or Die is available for Android and iOS

After yesterday’s news about Rodeo Games and their apparent shutdown after the less than optimal sales of their latest game release – Warhammer 40,000: Deathwatch – it seems that the studio might not be as done as it sounded.

Despite the comments from Matthew Spencer, an ex-Rodeo staff member, the studio is not shutting down but rather “taking a break” according to the studio themselves. In the meantime they will continue to support their titles, both on mobile platforms and the ones that have made their way onto Steam.

However Deathwatch has cost the studio more than it managed to make back though, as the team is not developing any new games at the moment although they continue to work on the games they already have out and will make plans for future releases “at an appropriate time”.

“As reported some of the team left the studio back in November, after we’d shipped the iOS and PC versions of Deathwatch,” Rodeo told us via email. “Since then the core team have been working on new platforms for Deathwatch, one of which we’ll be announcing shortly!

“Despite Deathwatch being the best game we’ve created as a studio and our highest rated metacritic game, the changes in market have meant that we are unable to continue development as we’d initially planned. Coupled with some personal issues within the team, Rodeo Games are currently taking a break from developing any new titles. The team will continue to support our existing titles.”

They also took the time to thank fans, as well as Games Workshop who owns the Warhammer IP that the studio makes use of for their games.

“We’ll announce our plans for future releases at the appropriate time. We intend to carry on making the games we love, for the people who love them.”