Have you ever wondered what would happen if your typical student Dungeons and Dragons player got thrown into a castle straight out of one of the games he plays? Have you ever wanted to play a game as that typical student player? Well, you’re in luck. Such a game exists.

Unepic is the story of Daniel, your typical young male student who somehow during a bathroom break during a game session winds up in a castle occupied by a Dark Lord and his many monster minions. Not that your character realises that this is all for real, believing instead that his fellow players drugged his drink and therefore the adventure is all in his head.

The game itself is a 2D side-scrolling Metroidvania-type game, with an awful lot of castle to explore as you explore, smash, fight and in some cases trick your way through towards your ultimate goal. Inside the castle there are many items to be found and also equipped as well as upgradeable skills such as the various weapon types, magicks and constitution that can have some of the 5 skill points you gain on level up assigned to them, in the manner of how your typical tabletop RPG handles a character’s skill increases. Each type of weapon has strengths and weaknesses and certain monsters will take more damage from a certain type of weapon, but it will take trial, error and a few deaths before you can be sure of what works best as a weapon for each foe you encounter.

As with most games with a role-play element included, you have an inventory of items, which can hold a limited amount of items within it (and can be sorted with the k key, helpfully displayed in the Inventory screen). Fortunately throughout the levels you can find shops that will let you both sell and buy items. I recommend selling your extra items to the shopkeepers and vendors you encounter whenever you can, because even if the monsters you squish and barrels you smash drop coins or an item only about 50% of the time, it does eventually add up. Also, upgrade your armour as soon as you can, taking less damage helps a lot on those screens with multiple opponents if you’re a lot like me and prefer melee combat over ranged. Also special unique items and coins can be earned by taking on and completing quests for the odd non-hostile resident of the castle, and if you complete special quests you can gain access to certain branches of magic too.

Combat itself is fairly simple, with a key-bind system allowing you to switch quickly between weapons and heal up within seconds if need be. Melee involves hitting the space key to swing/swipe in front of you, which is enough to deal with most enemies. Sometimes it is better to use your bow though and Unepic has a targeting system that allows the nearest enemy within sight to be aimed at using the Tab button and Space again is the attack button although it does require you to be standing still so watch enemy projectiles while shooting!

Control-wise the game works beautifully, which is a relief during those moments when you need to turn tail and get to safety to heal up before finishing off a tricky group of opponents and that requires a dash across a room and a leap up onto a high ledge. The way that the controls are set up too is also well-done, fairly easy to figure out with a minute or two of experimentation (and the first bit of the game teaches you how to do things such as pick up loot and aim your bow’s arrows). The only minor niggle I have about it is that up is the jump key but as space is attack and enter is used to interact with items and pick up loot it does make sense. It just takes a little getting used to at first.

I would certainly recommend picking up this game if you enjoy RPGs, DnD or platformers, as this is a wonderful little game. It has a great sense of humour, an interesting story and is full of little nods to other games and shows, some that come out of nowhere. Currently in Early Access on Steam, the single-player is said to be fully complete and there is a multiplayer option too for when you want to play with a friend. And what’s more, it comes with ten different language options and will soon be available on the WiiU as well.

I give Unepic an 8/10 and look forward to getting past the second boss fight soon.

Unepic website is here.

Buy Unepic on Steam here.

Smashdate! #4 is bringing you honey roasted hell, this contenders Legume Ladened Lethality is joining the fight. And this week’s stages are out of this galaxy.

[*ALARM*]

A Challenger Approaches

Diddy Kong

Kart Racer, Jungle Japer and Sidekick extraordinaire returns for his second round battle. Diddy Kong is a small and fast character with some ok ranged attacks. His strength lies in his speed and various barrel themed gadgets, not only does his barrel jetpack pack a punch but it makes for a precise recovery allowing skilled players to avoid edge guarders with ease. Diddy is seen still packing his peanut guns and again these are no ordinary blasters, you will have to charge for distance and damage but be warned over charging will mean that it’s not just the nut that gets roasted.
Diddy Kong although a lovable childhood mascot is not one for those new to smash as his move set can be pretty risky at times. But with practice you’ll be popping peanuts all over the battlefield.

The Stage Is Set

 
Super Mario Galaxy

Although there’s not a great deal to decipher from this stages screenshots on thing is certain that backdrop looks awesome with majestic celestial bodies twinkling as you attempt to re-enact that scene from gravity on your friends (you know the one … the one that makes you never want to go to space). It appears that this stage will be mostly flatland with a few floating platforms making for a pretty basic stage. What I’d like for this stage to be is a spherical base with Galaxy-esc gravity so combatants stick to all sides making for some crazy upside-down battles.

Pikmin

The Pikmin stage takes heavily from its environmentalist source material, with watery swamps, rocky crevasses and giant flying onions. The exact layout is unclear from the screen shots but if it’s anything like the Pikmin stages we’ve seen in the past it’ll provide a tough challenge with dynamic landscapes that will keep you on your toes.

So one of our childhood greats is back for his second round, donning his vest and sweet Nintendo cap, this chimp is one that’ll warm your hearts then pound your face. But still I’m left with a tear in my eye (unfortunately not from the stench) that my main is still hiding in the slightly smelly shadows. Where are you WAAAARIOOOO???

There’s always an element of chance when it comes to loot drops in MMO and similar games. While you know it is possible to get something useful, there are always times when you have runs of majorly bad luck and land only items that you can’t use with your class and race set-up or worse, are completely not worth the effort.

Knowing this, a while ago Blizzard introduced a ‘currency system’ to their raid system so players who fought the same raid boss multiple times trying to get certain items but never did could instead use the accumulated ‘justice points’ or ‘valor points’ to buy that item instead. But now, they feel that the system has evolved in such a way that the currency will no longer be necessary to counteract the bad luck RNG, so will be removing it from Warlords of Draenor.

“The traditional role of valor was to offer compensation for bad luck – and that goes all the way back to badges in Burning Crusade,” said lead encounter designer Hazzikostas. “The bonus rolls system that we have these days actually goes a long way towards helping counteract that. We think we can take the bonus rolls system and make it a little bit more intelligent, so that it tries to avoid giving you duplicate loots… It removes a little bit of the grind and a little bit of the awkwardness of the current valor system.”

The rolls system was introduced in patch 5.0 and gives players a chance to ‘reroll’ loot received, with the chance of the new loot being something more useful to your character’s class and set-up increasing with each new roll.

A two-currency system also operates on the PvP part of the game and while Blizzard feels that PvP still needs currency, they are hoping to remove one of the currency systems from PvP too to further simplify how the game works.

“We are trying to get rid of one of the two, but at the end of the day a purely random system probably would not work as well for higher PvP gear,” Hazzikotas said. “Conquest makes a lot of sense.”

Today sees the release of a new Minecraft version! Not 1.8 though, rather 1.7.5 with a promised 1.7.6 version to follow soon.

Minecraft version 1.7.5 brings with it some server-side optimisation and fixes as well as a stamping out a few game bugs. The main thing that 1.7.5 brings to the game of Minecraft though has to do with Minecraft Realms. Several of the community’s most popular mini-game maps, such as Survival Games etc. are now available to add to Realms as ‘mini-games’ for the Realm community to try. Mojang are also using this update to pave the way for more countries to have access to the Realms feature, planning to roll it out across the Nordic countries in Europe within the next week.

Mojang are also going to soon release a 1.7.6 version in March which will bring with it support for the new skin system that is currently only accessible if you are running snapshots with your game, as well as beginning to set up the system to change game names (although they say that actually changing names is still a way off). They will also continue to work on 1.8 snapshots as well.

New version announcement is here.

An update is coming soon for Battlefield 4, and by the sounds of it, it should be a well received one. There will finally be a way for friends to group up before entering the server as opposed to having to waste time trying to meet up before the action can begin.

DICE seemed to have no plans to ever add private lobbies to the game even a few months ago despite it being part of the previous game Battlefield 3, saying that the feature hadn’t offered quality on par with what they felt the players should be offered; but it seems that player demand and complaints about the system BF4 did have has won out once again and gotten the private lobby system, named ‘Platoons’ added to the game. Platoons will soon enter into a Closed Beta stage with a selected number of people being allowed to test-drive it for a short while and potentially give feedback to catch any bugs before it will be released to the masses, allowing matches to run a little more organised from the get-go.

At least… as organised as FPS games can ever be when you’re running around trying to kill without being killed…

A recent patch has also removed one persistent source of the game freezing; the (as DICE put it) ‘so called sound loop bug’ as well as a glitch that sometimes stopped people in a gunner position on some vehicles from actually shooting and better integrated the game with AMD’s Mantle card.