Community Round-Up: 22/08/15

After what seems like an extraordinarily long summer break, F1 is back. I managed to tune into FP1 while in work just in time to see Maldonado crash, so it was good to see normal service had resumed! Meanwhile on TSA, it was another mammoth week, with 7 reviews and 8 previews!

With that in mind, pull up a chair so we can begin this week’s Community Round-Up!

Looking at the Meets, chances are that Monday will see the usual Project CARS meet, with the odd Rocket League or GTA V Meet thrown in elsewhere.

If you’d rather play something else, you can add your own Meet to the list, provided you have more than 250 TSA Points.

For the reviews, our high scorers sat three abreast on the podium. Volume, which is Mike Bithell’s follow up to Thomas Was Alone, was the first game to be given an 8/10. Summing up, Stefan called it a “clever distillation of the classic stealth genre wrapped up in an excellent retelling of a classic English legend”. Also on an 8/10 was Toy Soldiers: War Chest, bringing its “unique brand of tower defense to the new generation”. Dom enjoyed the gameplay and characters, but did note a few performance issues and some “questionable DLC practices”. Our last high scorer from the week was Curses ‘N Chaos, which Aran reviewed. Despite it feeling repetitive at times, it’s still a good arena brawler with challenging gameplay.

While we had three games sharing the top step of the podium, we also had three games sharing the bottom step. On a 6/10, Dom said Sword Art Online Re: Hollow Fragment had “inexplicable performance issues”, while the term ‘muddy visuals’ was used to describe The Castle Game by Jim. Beyond Eyes, a game that sees you taking control of a visually impaired girl sadly missed the mark according to Dave, thanks to a poor narrative and short play time.

The last review was for Zombi, which was originally released on the Wii U under the title of ZombiU. Blair said that although there isn’t much if you’ve already played the original, this one is still a “brilliant and downright scary survival game.”

Let’s move onto the previews now, because they are still pouring out of Gamescom. Stefan first looked at Gremlins, Inc, which stems from its card-based board game, before turning his gaze to The Escapists: The Walking Dead, which mashes up the game and TV show surprisingly well. Next, he unleashed the freedom fighter within him for Homefront: The Revolution, and then turned on the lights for Cities: Skylines’ After Dark Expansion. Finally, he had a go at another title from Paradox Interactive, Stellaris, a grand strategy game of space exploration and conquering, and also Hellblade, which is coming from the Ninja Theory.

The other previews not from Stefan were from Jim and Matt. Jim shared his thoughts from the Black Ops III Multiplayer Beta, and also had a look at Risen 3 Enhanced Edition, the follow up to one of TSA’s worst games of 2014 (spoiler alert: it still sucks). Elsewhere, Matt played Trove, an ambitious F2P title that is a bit of a mashup of Minecraft and World of Warcraft.

Last week’s Chronicle featured the RE 2 remake, Vote to Play PS+ and Guillermo del Toro pledging to never again try to work on games. Meanwhile on Retro WeView, Crash Bandicoot recieved a Must Play Verdict, while this week’s Mobile Watch game was Prune, a puzzle game about growing trees.

Finally, Monday saw Episode 190 of the Podcast being released, while What We Played #217 featured Volume, Black Ops 3 and Mafia.

It was another quiet week for the Forums with just some regular threads seeing new posts:

• Tactical20’s PS4 game wishlist has some good suggestions
• And the Witcher 3 is currently being discussed in the What Are You Playing thread

Today’s weather is meant to be a bit of an anomaly from what we’ve been experiencing so far this August, so enjoy your weekend and I’ll see you next time, bye!