Let’s get straight down to business, eh? I’ve had a rather jam packed week, with a handful of game events to keep me more than a little bit busy, but what you’ll have seen plastered all over TSA today actually came from last week. I got to spend a good few hours playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider, finding a game that builds upon its predecessors in some pretty neat ways. Catch our preview, our listicle video, and a good long interview that starts off talking about Predator. I also got to post the most ridiculous of Strange Brigade interviews.
Alongside those features, I nipped over to Paris to play Insurgency: Sandstorm, a modern Middle Eastern shooter that straddles the divide between hardcore tactical shooters and more arcadey affairs like Battlefield and Call of Duty. It’s holding a pre-order beta this weekend, and you can expect our thoughts and impressions early next week.
A bit of airport time meant I also played some Overcooked 2 with a Switch precariously balanced on a pile of backpacks, and got some Wario Ware Gold silliness done on my 3DS.
Jason popped up first to say he finished off Resident Evil 5 with a mate, played and reviewed his favourite game of the year, Dead Cells, and also played and reviewed the less digestible We Happy Few. He also returned to Destiny 2 and said “it’s definitely still a game…”
Jim’s been enjoying Assassin’s Creed Origins a bit more, now that he’s accepted that they’ve gone for a Witcher-style RPG, has pumped some time into Rainbow Six Siege, reviewed Overcooked 2 and picked up the battle pass for H1Z1, so has been crossing off those daily challenges.
Naturally, Tuffcub’s also been playing H1Z1, and he’s actually on duty to review it now that it’s hit a full release. He’s also gone back to Destiny 2 for a bit of grinding and said it was “sort of fun,” damning it with faint praise!
Aran’s continued to muck about in Far Cry 5 and is playing The Wardrobe for review, which sounds like a game about keeping clothes safe from moths and spiders. Alongside this, it’s been the puzzle game Yellow and Civ-like grand strategy of Polytopia, both of which are on mobile.
Indulging in some Cold War themed turn-based strategy, Ade’s been continuing on with Phantom Doctrine for review – e would tell you more, but then he’d have to kill you – while Steve found Remothered: Tormented Fathers to be pleasantly horrific, Insomnia: The Lost Ark to be quite promising, Chasm to be metroidvania-tastic, and playing Knack II with his son to be mighty.
Gamoc decided to try out his old 60 hour save in No Man’s Sky, to make a change from the new one he started after the NEXT update, but he got a second ship and then could no longer summon his first ship which had a huge amount of filled up cargo space. “It’s been a bad week in No Man’s Sky.”
Savouring the painterly visuals, Miguel revisited Okami HD on Nintendo Switch, before switching over to Overcooked 2 and Puyo Puyo Tetris with his other half. Almost certainly unrelated to playing Overcooked, he also played a bunch of Blazblue Cross Tag Battle and Street Fighter V, to mess about with the new characters.
Finally, Dom’s been throwing long balls in Madden NFL 19, returned to the most excellent Monster Hunter: World on PC, playing Jurassic World Evolution with his son, and savouring the excellent Dead Cells.
Now it’s over to you. What have you been up to this past week?
MrYd
Gave a Dead By Daylight a go, since it was on PS+. It’s not bad, but gets a bit repetitive, very quickly.
And some the Walking Dead, ready for the final season next week. Just finished the Michonne episodes, which are possibly a bit more unnecessarily violent than any of the others. Just got season 3 to finish.
A bit more Tales of Berseria, which is an interesting change to most RPGs. Current plan for beating what I assume is going to turn out to be only a minor boss (since I’m not that far in) seems to be “I’ll attack, you keep healing me, because that’ll work unless I die”.
Plenty of fancy hat fun this week too.
Finished off The Invisible Hours. Interesting little murder play you have to watch several times to work out the whole story, since you can’t watch all 7 characters at once. So a 90 minute story becomes 6 or 7 hours, jumping about and piecing it all together and finding the collectibles (which are actually useful for once, filling in more details). Worth the £12 when it was on sale, and a nice shiny Platinum trophy.
Which was my second of the week. Electronauts is an interesting musical experience. Remixing songs in VR while hitting things with electric drumsticks is fun and can get a bit too energetic. Somehow it kept popping trophies for things that just seemed obvious to do. Mute the kick/snare stems and then unmute them? Up pops a trophy. Record a sequence on every instrument at once? Trophy. Clear all those sequences at once? Trophy.
It’s definitely worth a look. Even if you have no musical ability, there’s no possibility of playing a bad note, and timing isn’t too much of an issue because it’s heavily quantised (by default anyway – you can turn that off if you want). And 40 songs to get lost in fiddling about with sounds and doing a good impression of a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tubeman.
I may also have finally given H1Z1 a go. It really does look terrible, and I’m still not convinced the whole Battle Royale thing is much fun with that many people. Although I’m wondering who the first 50 people that die every match are? Who keeps dying before I even see another player?? Why do only 58.3% of players have the trophy for being top 50 in a single match??
And Bridge Crew fun this week involved a brand new tactic to deal with the Borg. Why destroy all the Romulans so the friendly ship will drop it’s shields and let you transport the important technology for defeating the Borg when you can let them fight amongst themselves, maybe lob a couple of proximity torpedoes at the friendly ship yourself, and just steal it off them once their shields are down? It saves so much time, which is useful when the Borg are never more than 3 or 4 minutes from finding you.
If all that wasn’t enough for one week, there was some Destiny 2. And sod that stupid armour from the event. That’ll take forever to upgrade it to 400. Or even the first step.
I was impressed I was playing it with my better half sort of watching (well, fiddling with his phone behind me), I paid a visit to the future war cult woman, and he instantly recognised her voice from a single line of dialogue. I don’t think she’s particularly well known as an actress (although she should be), but he has been watching The Expanse on Netflix, and that voice is kind of distinct.
Crazy_Del
Just H1Z1 this week for me won Solo 3x this week with one of my best matches that ended up with 14 Kills!!! xD my best match!
I too bought a Battle Pass can’t argue for playing a free game with just £3.99 Battle pass.
This weekend is Duos matches with B_Cambo
Also FOOTBALL IS BACK….. WHOOP
I miss betting xD
MrYd
It’s you that’s killing off half the players before anyone finds me then!
Crazy_Del
Hehe my evil plan is working hehehehe
MrYd
Glad that’s working out for you. It’s always good to have an evil plan. Mine mostly involve powerful magnets.
Crazy_Del
That’s already taken…. by Magneto!
(McKellen and Fassbender)
gernboes
The usual GTA of course, but i also got Dead Cells and like it very much so far, had a look at the trophy list, but i think this platinum is out of my reach :)
Also started Mass Effect Andromeda. Struggled quite long with myself if i should play ME 2 & 3 beforehand, but decided against it. The stories just seem to unconnected for that being necessary… But i still plan to play them sooner or later!
ron_mcphatty
Have you bought a night club in GTA? I did and enjoyed the brief interaction with Gay Tony, but then he’s gone all too soon and you’re left with another hole in your bank account and some brief distractions from the missions. Not sure whether to hire more DJs, presumably there’s more missions involved and some sort of progression towards Black Madonna?
gernboes
I did buy a club, but didnt do many club missions, i use it mainly as a slow but passive way of generating money – you dont need to buy or steal supplies and it just keeps on generating whatever products your businesses are producing
ron_mcphatty
That’s good to know, so my bunker used to produce weapons but I haven’t resupplied in a long time. Time to do some research!
JR.
So this weeks ‘game time’ has mostly been spent completing the very good Lego Incredibles. I clocked my platinum at just under 14 hours – so refreshing to have a ‘short and sweet’ Lego game. It’s great fun, easy to play, bright and colourful – the kids really enjoyed it too. I’m hoping the upcoming Lego Villains game sticks to this new format, it’s great.
The character roster isn’t quite as impressive as say the Lego Marvel games (for obvious reasons) and I think they were smart to include a selection of well-known characters from the other beloved Pixar movies. I’d love to see them make a broader Disney/Pixar Lego game with all the Disney/Pixar characters and worlds – so much potential. Make it happen Tt games!
So now that my Lego ‘chores’ are done I can concentrate on PSVR for the next few weeks – before the Tsunami of gaming greatness arrives in September and into the rest of the year (Spider-man>Tomb Raider>Spyro >AC Odyssey>Battlefield V>Red Dead Redemption II).
I’ve just picked up Dino Frontier (currently on sale for £11.99 on the PSN) – I’ve been waiting ages for a price drop. Also picked up ‘The Weeping Doll (I dont even know?) for £1.69 and Dying Reborn, also £1.69. I suspect they’re both a bit rubbish but they’re cheap as chips so what the heck. Also trying to decide whether I should buy Theseus or Don’t Knock Twice? I only have £20 credit in my PS account and I really need to curb my store purchases… so I’m only buying 4 games instead of 5… ? Decisions…
Moss dispatched today, so that should arrive over the weekend and I still need to play The Inpatient, which I installed last night.
Has anyone played the Exorcist VR game on the PSN? I spotted it last night whilst browsing but I’ve never heard anything about it until now. Intrigued.
MrYd
The Exorcist VR thing is apparently quite scary (unlike the film, but then that’s ancient). But the episodes are only 20 minutes long. And only 3 of the 5 have been released so far.
There’s also been people complaining about the non-optional comfort features. FOV blinders you can’t turn off, which they’ve said they’re not allowed to remove, or even make optional, because Sony said they can’t. Even if those things have the complete opposite effect for some people. Personally, suddenly restricting the field of view is horrible and confusing. And even if other developers seem to have no issue with making these things optional.
Sounds like a definite “avoid until a sale” type thing.
ron_mcphatty
Gravity Rush done,
Beautiful ending, many tears.
GTA, bought club.
ron_mcphatty
Oh shit I clocked up the Haiku, I meant ‘beautiful end’! Eejut!
ron_mcphatty
Aargh, autocorrect, I cocked up cocked up!
Andrewww
No gaming this week for me, as I was on holidays in the Swiss Alps, away from my consoles and most things running on electricity, mostly hiking.
But, speaking of my scepticism of all things you need to plug in sooner or later, I had the opportunity to ‘play’ around a little with one gadget, which was surprisingly convincing, and which made me go all ‘Wow’. I was driving a Tesla Model S for a short while, and walked away thoroughly impressed, what a fine piece of machinery that is…!
I got to check whether there’s any racing game you can drive a Tesla in, as that’s the only way I’ll ever own one.
aerobes
I know the Model S was in GT6 and I believe Tesla features in some Forza games too, the newer Horizon perhaps.
Andrewww
Cool, thanks, I’ll give GT6 a go then. They even got it in the local library, so I can save some bucks towards a car, if I ever get one… ;o)
aerobes
Mostly the PES19 demo. It’s very different, surprisingly so.
I feel like there’s a few balancing issues, particularly in midfield with pingpong style nonsense, through balls barely work and high pressure strikers seem a little adept at ball winning.
I’ve always found the demos for PES to play differently than the full game functioning almost as a beta so I’m not concerned.