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.

8.5/10

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.

Sometimes for all the terrible stuff we hear about gamers in the news, both mainstream and from gaming-related places, it’s nice to know that some people give gamers a good name.

The video above is a gif that an Overwatch player posted to Reddit, wanting to show off his Play of the Game as Reinhardt. As you can tell, their machine wasn’t exactly top of the line which is one reason why they were so happy with their being awarded Play of the Game.

“I run Overwatch on a potato so it’s hard to get a good [Play of the Game], but when I do it is satisfying,” he wrote.

For those unaware, people tend to describe tech as a ‘potato’ when it’s really old. Most of the time it’s hyperbole but this player might have had a point. He has to play the game at 800×600 with all settings at low to get the game running, and even then he apparently is excited to hit 30fps. His specs included an AMD Radeon 8400 with only 512 mb of RAM, which is 200 mb short of Overwatch’s minimum requirements to run the game. It’s a miracle that the game has been running, but there was a Youtuber called LowSpecGamer who had a guide that has allowed the player to run it so far.

Anyway, a few hours later he checked Reddit to find that a number of replies had come in and some were offering him replacement computer parts to help him better run the game. “What GPU do you have? I have an EVGA 660 I could send you,” wrote one player. When there were questions about whether the power supply would be able to handle it, someone else offered him one that could. And it went on and on.

Of course, he has decided not to just rely on the donations and with the help of another Redditor he is picking out a few other parts to help him bring together his new build that are within his small budget. Thanks to the generosity of the Overwatch community though, the biggest expense will be Windows 10 – everything else more expensive has already been covered.

“I’m at a loss for words. Watching a community band together just to help one person, if this all works out and I end up getting this new PC I’ll probably break down crying.”

As I said at the beginning of this article, we so often hear about the bad that sometimes good news is very welcome. GG Overwatch Reddit community.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has been in the news so often for the wrong reasons, it’s nice when some news comes out that reminds us that it’s still a game with an active (and mostly behaving!) community of players.

Now some datamining by KordGamer on Reddit suggests that the game might be about to get its eighth operation event, and we could even know which maps it’ll be taking place on. Using a Flash decomplier KordGamer managed to locate an image from the game’s files. It’s similar to the ones used in the game to illustrate the maps in each playlist, but doesn’t match any of the current ones as well as having the title “mapgroup-op08” – which it a big hint towards this eighth operation event coming.

Although the eight fragments are hard to make out which maps they are, someone’s already identified seven of them as de_thrill, cs_agency, de_shipped, de_lite, de_blackgold, de_austria, and cs_insertion. A Steam community thread tracking clues to the eighth Operation suggests that cs_concert might also be among the new maps, although it’s not for certain yet though.

The first operation event was Operation Payback in April 2013, and since then there’s been many more. The reason the community looks forward to them so much is that operations are events that feature and make use of some of the most popular user-created content for the game found on the Steam Workshop. The last one wrapped in July of last year, so it’s about time for another. Participation in these events is paid, with some of the proceeds going back to the creators of community content.