What We Played #170: Plants vs Zombies, CounterSpy & Diablo 3

There are few better games for a local co-op-athon around at the moment than Towerfall Ascension, something Blair took advantage of at the weekend. During the week he’s played some Watch Dogs, “the digital trip missions are fun, the rest is boring”, Surgeon Simulator “which is crying out for Move support” and Hohokum “which is quite hard to describe. He was “also underwhelmed by ALONE on iOS despite the fantastic visual style”.

Still on his way down from his Gamescom high as the number of still-to-be-written articles refuses to diminish at an acceptable rate Stefan has still managed to stop typing long enough to play a couple of games.

I’ve had a lovely time with CounterSpy. It’s this really clever mix of 2.5D platforming with stealth elements and lots of murder, all set to the backdrop of a satirised 60s-styled Cold War. I made a quick video about it earlier in the week, but a review won’t show up until next week, now.

Oh, and I hopped onto Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare with a few chums, thanks to the PC version getting a 72 trial thingy. It’s a pretty decent tower defence ‘em up, co-op game, as I said in my review of the Xbox One version, but, hot damn, is that one pretty game with all the settings maxed out on PC! I’m curious to see how it looks on the PS4 version, but I doubt I’ll pick it up unless I have some regular people to play it with.

Despite some doubts sown in his fertile mind by mediocre reviews Jim gave Ground Zeroes a shot and after a slow start found himself enjoying it to the point that he “played through all the missions at least four or fives times, netting myself all the trophies in the process”.

After that there were some brief dalliances with Disney Infinity, Shaun White Snowboarding (I’ll spare the younger members of our audience from Jim’s less than complimentary Anglo Saxon opinion of that game) Disagea 4 and Shogun Total War 2.

Splinter Cell: Blacklist also soaked up a fair chunk of his free time. “In a nutshell, it’s a tight game yet no way near as smooth as Ground Zeroes, locking much of its content away in co-op only missions.”

Dom has been playing Diablo 3 on PS4 for our review summing things up by saying “it’s a fantastic version of the game – and probably utterly life-suckingly addictive”. Which is why I’m currently giving it a wide berth.

I’ve started The Wolf Among Us on PS3 and so far I’m massively impressed – great art direction and music, and the story and characters are enjoyable as well. I’m a little concerned though as my friend bought it at the same time and in the last day has had to reset his PS3 8 times thanks to crashes. I’m hoping it’s just bad luck, as so far I haven’t had any problems at all.

His Xbone was blessed with seeing some gaming too with Max: Curse of Brotherhood, Peggle 2 and Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare all getting some screen time. However Dom notes that “to be honest the X1 is finding more of a place as an exercise tool, with Xbox Fitness helpfully filling in the gaps when I cant make it to the gym”.

I’d have thought that knowing that the alternative was pratting about in front of a Kinect sensor that Dom wouldn’t be missing many gym days at all!

Have you played anything of note this week?