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Game of the Year 2018 – Awarded to the best of our Game of the Month winners of 2018.
Legrand Legacy – SemiSoft Studios
Our first Game of the Month title in the new scene and a worthy community choice for our first proper Game of the Year award aswell, massive congrats to Uwil and the team at SemiSoft Studios!
For a reminder of our Game of the Month choices in 2018, here you go –
01-2018 Legrand Legacy – Semisoft Studios
02-2018 Fe – Zoink Games
03-2018 Surviving Mars – Haemimont Games
04-2018 Battletech – Harebrained Schemes
05-2018 State of Decay 2 – UndeadLabs
06-2018 Jurassic World Evolution – Frontier Developments
08-2018 World of Warcraft Battle For Azeroth – Blizzard Entertainment
09-2018 Shadow of the Tomb Raider – Square Enix
10-2018 Red Dead Redemption 2 – Rockstar
11-2018 Fallout 76 – Bethesda Studios
12-2018 Just Cause 4 – Square Enix
Team Choice 2018 – Awarded by the station team.
Marvel’s Spider-Man – Insomniac Games
The station team thought long and hard over the new year break what they loved the most in 2018 and Marvel’s Spider-Man was the stand out winner from the team. Insomniac Gaes bought us a blinder of an open world adventure for the web slinger that all the other great games this year just couldn’t quite top!
And for those interested, here’s the full list of the teams choices –
Crimsonshade – Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – BANDAI NAMCO Studios Inc.
Ca1t – Marvel’s Spider-Man – Insomniac Games
Isnotavampire – Marvel’s Spider-Man – Insomniac Games
Phasechan – Spyro Reignited Trilogy – Toys for Bob
TGB-Sirhc&Ar0n – Marvel’s Spider-Man – Insomniac Games
Darsch – Monster Hunter World – Capcom
Katoe – Marvel’s Spider-Man – Insomniac Games
Best Sony Playstation 4 Exclusive Game – Our choice for the best PS4 title in 2018
Marvel’s Spider-Man – Insomniac Games
As mentioned in the Team Choice section, Insomniac played a blinder with the new iteration of Marvel’s Spider-Man, bringing qualities we loves from way back in Spider-Man 2 to make a perfect free roaming open world.
Best Nintendo Switch Exclusive Game – Our choice for the best Switch title in 2018
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – BANDAI NAMCO Studios Inc.
The latest Smash Bros. dominated the Switch owning members of the community and team in 2018, with challenges flying over in discord (we should have done a tournament), with a fantastic roster of fighters and clean, precise controls, it was one of the best fighting games of not only 2018, but also all time!
Best Microsoft XBox One Exclusive Game – Our choice for the best XB1 title in 2018
Forza Horizon 4 – Playground Games
Bringing us a good chunk of the north of England and the Scottish border, Forza Horizon 4 turned into the best racing game of 2018, but more on that later. It was also the first in the Forza series also on XBox Play Anywhere that ran brilliantly on mediocre PC specs aswell, after the horrible showing by Forza 7 in 2017!
Best Action Game – For the best game in the action genre focused on combat.
Monster Hunter World – Capcom
The first Monster Hunter to make it to PC, albeit a few months after the console versions, didn’t arrive with fanfare’s, but it should have. A great action game, even if a little shallow compared to other RPG’s, but still amazingly fun if you like chopping up huge monsters and using the parts to make new armour and weapons!
Best Independent Game – For outstanding creative and technical achievement in a game made outside the traditional publisher system.
Celeste – Matt Makes Games
An indie title we shockingly missed when it came out in January of 2018 on STEAM and other platforms, and then a free title on XBox Live (you can grab it now if you haven’t already) Matt Makes Games made a classic platformer that left us in awe of what Indies can do.
Best Multiplayer Game – For outstanding online multiplayer gameplay and design, including co-op and massively multiplayer experiences, irrespective of game genre.
World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth – Blizzard Entertainment
Blizzard may have had some issues at the end of 2018 and into the new year, but WoW had a great launch to it’s 6th expansion, Battle for Azeroth. Learning from Legions up’s and down’s, it was a solid expansion, but felt a little lacking in places until patch 8.1 dropped.
Best Ongoing Game – Awarded to a game for outstanding development of ongoing content that evolves the player experience over time.
World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth – Blizzard Entertainment
As mentioned above, WoW’s 6th expansion dropped continuing WoW’s dominance at the top of the MMO tree for another year!
Best Racing Game – For the best racing experience in 2018.
Forza Horizon 4 – Playground Games
As mentioned above, Forza Horizon 4 was a massive step up for the series, especially being cross platform, but as a really good racing game.
Best Role Playing Game – For the best game designed with rich player character customization and progression, including massively multiplayer experiences.
Monster Hunter: World – Capcom
Again, as mentioned above, Monster Hunter has been successful for years on Nintendo systems, but finally branching out to the other consoles and even PC made it one of the best RPG’s of 2018!
Best Strategy Game – Best game focused on real time or turn-based strategy gameplay, irrespective of platform.
Battletech – Harebrained Schemes
One of our Game of the Month winners in 2018, Harebrained Schemes bought us a turn based Mechwarrior title that not only reminded us of the good old days of XCom, but has us excited for Mechwarrior 5 in 2019. The Flashpoint DLC near the end of the year added a well needed Iron Man mode for those that wanted more of a challenge too!
Stinker of the Year! – The most disappointing game of 2018, not the worst, just disappointing
Fallout 76 – Bethesda Studios
We were unsure when Bethesda first announced Fallout 76 last year, but we wanted to give it benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, although not bad, it wasn’t great either. With a bad, buggy start for most people and issues like duping and cheating carrying on into the new year and beyond, although it was good and even fun to play sometimes, it left a sour note on the franchise.
Darsch Pugs here with the first of my Atlas journal entries. These will be done in character as I feel it is more fitting since I am playing on a role play server. I will however break character in the journal when needed to explain things or game mechanics.
Journal Entry 1
I am Mirac Pugs, first of my name. With no recollection of my past I woke up on a desert island in a free port, the former crew I sailed with were missing and my memory of all event prior to awakening with them. All I remember is a rowdy drunken night in a tavern and that is it. [this was the very first load into the server after character creation, you load into a free port naked]
I awoke to finding myself with nothing but the shorts I had on and a hangover. I meandered along the paths of the free port and the small outlying area just outside of the port looking for some supplies and that is when I met my friend Ming Tao. Ming was in a similar situation to mine. We made a pact to find our lost memories together, or to make new ones and move on. Together we worked to build a raft and left that island behind in high hopes. My hopes however were soon shattered as I fell sick from what I assume to be a vitamin deficiency and fell overboard. [my vitamin levels dropped to low and I started to die, then my internet connection went out so my limp body fell off the raft and I died]
The current dragged me to a new island with a larger free port and here I stayed for a couple of days resting until I was reunited with Ming. [the role play server did a relaunch after a wipe and so myself and the player of Ming decided to keep our characters rp and this is where I logged into a new free port upon creating my character]
Ming had made contact with a group calling itself the Take and Trade Company, and he happened to be in port looking for new recruits, so naturally I signed up. We travelled to the company’s temporary base of operations to find it over run with large wolves baying at the doors and trying to break in. By the gods I have never seen such large wolves in my life, they were damn near the size of horses and just as quick! My introduction would have to wait as I grabbed a bow and helped to defend against the beasts, we killed 6 in total with four falling to my bow that day.
After the wolves were dealt with I was introduced to Adustus, the company’s admiral, the company’s chef Angel bonny, and another Captain, Ezekiel. All a right friendly and lively lot. Each with their own specialized skill set and desires. I regret I have as of yet to fully get to know anyone outside Ming though. My duties as a seaman kept me busy harvesting resources and fighting off the many beasts I encountered.
The island we were on was full of elephants, wolves, rattlesnakes, giant snakes, giant spiders and scorpions. There were plenty of boar and horses as well as beautiful parrots and sneaky monkeys. It was during one of my many incursions into the forests off the beach the shipyard was set up at was that I encountered both a giant spider and a giant snake. I was quick with my bow and defended myself against the spider, it had trapped me in some webbing and managed to bite me, the giant snake struck me from behind, I could feel both sets of venom coursing through my body sickening me, m,y vision becoming blurry, I barely managed to escape, but I made it back to our base, and then it happened, I was stung by a scorpion on my way into the base, and fainted once I made to where I intended to lie down to rest. I may have a strong bit of fortitude, but even the most hardy of men eventually succumb to enough venom and I was asleep for three days.
I woke to find myself on a raft, our base destroyed, all my gear gone, and a note saying to come to Gorgon’s Haven island, apparently while I still was recovering we relocated to a new island. I immediately went to work harvesting more supplies upon my arrival on Gorgon’s Haven. [I was killed by a wolf through the wall before the relocation started and logged in after the relocation was finished]
After some time, maybe two to three days, Admiral Adustus and myself went on a voyage to hire some more crew, the admiral and other had collected some gold and our new ship was finished, it was a small but fast vessel, and I was overjoyed to man the sails on it. With the admiral at the wheel and me in the cows nest and handling the sails we would soon make it to the free port to hire some crew. We would first though have to brave the dangers of the open sea, we sailed through several hurricanes, dodged and weaved through water spouts, skirted the dangers of ghost ships and made it to port in one piece. We hired a stalwart crew [of the npc kind to man the sails and ship repairs] and made the return trip home. We would never make it home however. Disaster struck, one of the ships of the damned caught wind of us, and their vessel was just to quick for our dear Gorgon’s Whore to outrun. Their cannons made quick work of our ship with their demonic roars and that eerie green smoke trailing behind those hellish balls they fired, and we lost all the new crew we hired as well as all of our gold in just a few cannon salvos from the undead bastards. [Both Adustus and I died to the sharks in the water when we had to abandon ship]
So it is with all these event’s that I decided I should set pen to paper and chronicle my adventures, lest I forget anew what has transpired in my life, and for future generations to know my tale.
We hope you enjoyed Day 1 of Darsch’s player diary of ATLAS, if you want to chat about the game, please join us in Discord and remember Darsch will be joining Katoe sttreaming atlas on Tuesday night’s, 9pm GMT on the station twitch!
Here’s Katoe’s stream from last week [it didn’t go well 😀 ~Lonesamurai]
ATLAS: The ultimate survival MMO of unprecedented scale with 40,000+ simultaneous players in the same world. Join an endless adventure of piracy & sailing, exploration & combat, roleplaying & progression, settlement & civilization-building, in one of the largest game worlds ever! Explore, Build, Conquer!
[New reviewer Darsch will be taking on ATLAS, the new MMO from Grapeshot Games, in an ongoing diary of gameplay, join us in Discord if you’re playing and chat about your experiences! ~Lonesamurai]
ATLAS. The pirate survival MMO I never knew I needed, surrounded by controversy over its rough early access launch rendering it unplayable for many players. Then there are game files which are copied from ARK Survival Evolved and its expansions. Many people believed upon this revelation that the game was just an ARK asset flip. Players bemoaned the “launch” saying the game was not ready. More on this in a moment first I want to tackle the ark asset flip accusations.
What is Atlas? For starters it sure as hell is not ARK. The only thing the same about the two are shared game file names, the survival theme, and game engine. Ark had stat points and engrams which are just blueprints you learned to be able to craft items, Atlas has skill trees that modify everything about your character, unlocks special abilities, teaches you how to make things, and unlocks additional skills lines, while forcing you to specialize. For example my character unlocked the bow skill line as well as the taming skill line from the basic survival skill line. From there I went down the bow skill tree learning how to make fire arrows and zipline arrows and how to do the special attack penetrating shot which penetrates armor and hits all mobs in a straight line. These special abilities are called feats and are something ark does not possess. Atlas is not an asset flip, all the art assets are new, new game mechanics such as managing your vitamin levels, having to catch the wind with your sails at the correct angles to even be able to move your ships and raft are all new, the files sharing the same name as ARK’s I can completely dismiss as Atlas feels so much different.
“Well the game was launched incomplete, broken, buggy, and laggy!” some would say. They are just plain wrong and ignorant of what early access means. So time to get this off my chest, early access is a fucking paid alpha people, its an incomplete game sold at a discount to get money to continue development and test the game! The game has not even officially launched yet, that won’t be for another two years as the devs have said in multiple interviews.
Yes the game’s early access start was terrible with server pings of 250 ms, terrible frame rate , and some game breaking bugs. The devs worked non stop on the game, some putting in 24 hours a day even to get this game playable. The servers have 120 ms ping still on official servers but I have not experienced any more lag or frame drops. Considering everything wrong and that they did numerous patches the first week that we went from version 1.0 to 7.0 and higher now is astonishing and the devs even apologized for the the rough early access start. I have never in all my years been this impressed and humbled by a game dev team, color me impressed. The was playable on the 27th of December 2018. On top of all the hard work they were doing on their own game servers they helped groups like TwitchRP set up and fix their own private servers
The devs have gone above and beyond the call of their duties, worked endlessly on the game, and care about their players and game. They continue to fix things and balance things while trying to give us the best play experience possible for a game still in the development stages and in testing. Also this game is fucking great.
ATLAS is available now in Early Access on STEAM – https://www.playatlas.com/
Keep an eye here for more news and play diary’s as we dive more into the game
SAIL THE STARS. BETRAY YOUR QUEEN. MURDER A SUN. Set a course for the heavens in your steam locomotive! Lose yourself in a changing universe where even time can be bought. A Victorian Gothic adventure for PC, Mac and Linux.
Sunless Skies is currently an early access title and is the sequel to Sunless Sea which itself is a sequel and spin off of Fallen London, the browser based text game that started the world of the sunless games. Sunless Skies is one part rogue-lite, one part trader sim, one part narrative focused RPG. The game is built on the Unity game engine and Failbetter’s own narrative platform StoryNexus. Failbetter has once again managed to make a charming game that captures the whimsical humor of their fallen London universe and the Lovecraftian adventures one could find there but now set in space on a steam powered locomotive.
For better or for worse the core of the gameplay remains the same as that of sunless sea, you create a captain, and you navigate your vessel through the dark and dangerous expanses of space trying to make your fortune or become famous. If you die that captain is dead permanently in the legacy mode but your new captain may inherit a higher starting level, money, and star chart. As of writing this I have gone through 6 captains, each having died hilariously and horribly from my own growing pains trying to learn my way around the map. You have to manage your sanity, your fuel, your supplies, and of course your cargo. The farther away from the starting port you get, the more dangerous things become, I was killed in two shots by an enemy locomotive while I was distracted by the beautifully creepy homestead I discovered. Combat is simple with you firing one of two weapons and trying to hit the enemy while at the same time trying not to get hit by said enemy. This usually end up revolving around you flying circles around the enemy to line up a clean shot to their starboard or port broadsides so you can avoid the front of the enemy as all weapons currently fire directly ahead of the locomotive.
Like any good narrative, the meat of the story and immersion is what happens between start and finish, and having the legacy of your previous captains help to make a unique story for each play through. Much like the heirs of your heroes in rogue castle changed gameplay, so too does your next captain. I have had captains that found devils and rats to be officers aboard their locomotive, each with their own story to pursue, and then i have had captains that instead found passengers that lead to their own stories and quests but never found the same officers. This randomness keeps things fresh and unique in between traveling from port to port when travel is getting tedious and the monotonousness of the dark space between ports sets in.
Sunless Skies is a great narrative and a superb time killer. The writing is great and the art is appealing. Failbetter has most assuredly learned from their previous titles and seem to have once again struck gold and I expect them to further tune the gameplay in this early access title as they continue to integrate player feedback. That being said, this game is not for everyone and I can only seriously recommend it to those looking for something slow paced to kill time and wanting to try something different or to fans of the old star trader style games as the game can get tedious and boring during long stretches of exploration if you are not into games like this. I had a blast playing this title and am looking forward to seeing how it progresses from here and have even gone to take a look at the browser based adventure game that started it all, Fallen London. I am giving Sunless Skies a 6 out of 10, I have fallen in love with this universe and can’t get enough of it.
For the first time in history, the long-closed borders of Summerset are open to foreigners by decree of Queen Ayrenn. But darkness looms over the ancestral home of the High Elves, and whispers stir of Daedric followers organizing in the shadows. Rally your allies, brave champions. Summerset awaits.
Explore an all-new zone packed with adventure. Join the mysterious Psijic Order and gain powerful new abilities. Reunite with old friends, forge new alliances, and work together to unravel a conspiracy that threatens Tamriel’s very existence.
Summerset is the newest chapter to the The Elder Scrolls Online, and while it adds much new content, a new crafting skill line and a new skill line focusing on time manipulation from the Psijic order, new mobs, two beautiful zones to explore and an amazing continuation to the main overarching story, it does not do much else, which is a good thing. ZOS stuck with what makes ESO great and avoided trying to reinvent the wheel.
When I do a review I have one main question I always ask myself and set out to answer. Is this fun? And the answer is a resounding OH HELL YEAH. I have long loved the elder scrolls franchise and I love ESO, but the game is not without its flaws, which is true of all games, but I have to say that Summerset is some of the most fun I have had in a long while in an mmo, from new trash mobs with interesting combat mechanics in the open world too the amazing new coral crab mob designs and the quest stories and writing has gone a long way to making this one of the best expansions yet for ESO.
Underneath the beauty of the High Elven island lies a darker side, The high elves prejudice against the “lesser races” is on full display, their political intrigues show up in force in Summerset’s main story as it is both a continuation of the Morrowwind Clock Work City story picking up right where it left off with more daedric cults and daedric princes up to no good and a continuation of the Aldmeri dominion’s story lines surrounding queen Ayrenn’s ascension to the throne. The quests diving deeper into the motivations of the characters around you and not simply praising your prowess as a world-class savior brings a human quality to the game that helps you feel more connected and immersed in the game. One example of this is Razum-dar, a long time fan favorite, he is not just another NPC but a friend to the player. As a result, Summerset is both familiar and foreign. The new Public dungeons are a breath of fresh air in how they are designed and some of the new bosses look amazing. The new trial, Cloud rest, has you taking on one to the ancient long thought extinct sloads, a slug devil toad abomination that just wants to smash your face with the help of mind controlled minions and crazy daedric magic.
Summerset brings a host of new additions to the game, The main story as mentioned previously, 6 new delves, 6 new Fun world bosses, 6 abyssal geysers which function like dolmens. 2 new public dungeons which have farm-able collections that net you prizes such as the new ginger kitten vanity pet. A new trial that can be completed multiple ways. The new psijic order skill line which adds 5 active abilities, a new ultimate, and new passives. It also adds Jewelry crafting which allows you to craft your own jewelry and make set piece jewelry. Both of these new skill lines drastically open up build diversity. The champion point cap was also increased to 750 and the game adds several new interesting gear sets to the game.
If I had to rate Summerset on a scale of 1 to 10 I would rate it a solid 8, it just does so much right in terms of what an expansion should add to the game but it still has old flaws that still need to be addressed from older versions of the game and class balance & build balance issues that continue to still plague the game.
~Darsch
The Elder Scrolls Online: Summerset is available now on –
