Game Review #32 - Civilization V - Strategy Games Month

Platform: Steam
Store Page
Price I Paid: £9.99

What can I honestly say about this game that hasn't been said already? I could tell you the usual stuff about how this game is considered a masterpiece because of how well it was made, how enjoyable it is and how this is possibly the best strategy game of all time. But that would be boring, so what I'm going to do, is lie to you for the first paragraph of a review and tell you how good this game is.

So obviously, yes, this game is good, the DLC is better and the Steam Workshop adds so much to the game that it's just extraordinary. I have a few mods installed, mainly to replace a few leaders with people who should've been in the game. That was my problem, while most countries have their obvious leader such as France and America, there are some countries that just make you question why they didn't put someone else in their place, like Germany and Russia. Yes it would've been controversial to put Hitler and Stalin into the game but it probably would've been a lot better with them as leaders as they're more recognisable.

Tech Tree's are amazingly detailed and it requires a lot of strategy to do efficiently. You could just zoom all the way along to "Future Tech" click the final Tech and let the game just progress you through everything all at once but that is in no way the most efficient thing to do, it would indefinitely hinder your progress.

Unit wise, you start with a warrior and settler unit, with resources around you for your workers to, work on when you have them. Over time, you unlock new units and buildings for your cities to develop and make, with each building giving your city a nice boost and the units being varied enough to keep the battles fresh. Another thing you can build are basically Wonders of the World, the Pyramids of Egypt, Eiffel Tower, Stonehenge and so on, which give your city/civilization a huge boost in certain things, for example money, food or population.

Multiplayer wise, that's where the game falls over itself a bit, the multiplayer isn't bad it's just not done well enough compared to the single player mode of the game. Turns can take a while to process, however they give you certain types of turn movements to choose from, you can make everyone take their turn all at once or one at a time. Mulitplayer is only really fun if you have a few days and a few friends who have a lot of spare time on their hands because Civilization V games can take literal days to finish.

Each civilization has a different unit specific to their civilization, such as Panzer tanks for Germany. Much alike Halo Wars with the specific commander having specific units that do a bit more damage than the original unit. Still nice to see so many damned units in a game.

But wait, there's more! You can trade with other civilizations, make friendships, research agreements, even denounce/declare war on them. It's extremely in depth and it needed to be to make the AI feel like they were more than enemies, they aren't too useful combat wise if you do partner up with someone, they'll usually just not help or by the time they get there you've already disposed of the enemy units.

So with all that in mind, it's obvious that the game is good, albeit a bit rugged on the AI frontier and Gandhi, while a war monger-er in this game, can easily be defeated with this giant pile of nukes I have, and I don't think elephants can withstand nukes.

Civilization V gets a 9/10

Game Reviews #31 - XCOM: Enemy Unknown - Strategy Games Month

Platform: Xbox 360
Store Page
Price I Paid: £8

Much alike "The Bureau: XCOM Declassified", this is another game in the XCOM series. Unlike "The Bureau: XCOM Declassified", this game isn't a pile of shit. This game is extremely, extremely,  fun to play.

It's a tactical strategy game made by our friends at 2K Games, who, now that I think about it, are a pretty dominant force in the gaming industry, they own a lot of amazing franchises, I'll have to talk about this in another blog post. On with the review.

XCOM isn't like most strategy games on console, Enemy Unknown works pretty well on console, it's not clunky, laggy and it doesn't have any of the usual problems that most console strategy games have, mainly the controls. The game does a very good job of making sure the bulk of the content is accessible to all players from an early stage, with enough strategy and challenge mixed in to make sure the player doesn't just blitz through the game at rocket speed. It's a lovely balance that I wish more games had.

So how does one go gallivanting around, killing our extra terrestrial invaders? Well, you (initially) have a squad of four troops to deploy onto the field and fight the aliens, however, here's the kicker, once a squad member dies, they're dead for good. It gives you a real feeling of "OK, I need to be careful here" and what makes it worse is that you can name these loveable lemmings to give yourself a personal attachment to them. I usually name my squad members with names from my real life friends or celebrities, it seems like the only two you can really do.

Of course, if you're going to beat the aliens then you'll need to get better equipment, tech and so on, which is where the research comes in. Every time you finish a mission, you might bring the alien bodies and tech back with you for research to begin, giving you the advantage in your next bout of combat.

You eventually get alien weaponary and if you bought Enemy Within/DLC then you can eventually use bloody robots to fight off the aliens, I have Enemy Within on PC, but for whatever reason I didn't enjoy it as much on PC as I did on console.

Oh yeah, there's a multiplayer in this game as well, uhm, so that's a thing. It's alright I guess, what can you expect? They're basically quick firefights, a 1v1 match of tactical strength, however you can play as the aliens which is pretty fun.

If you haven't played this game yet then do yourself a favour and go out and buy a copy of it.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown gets a 9/10

Game Reviews #30 - Supreme Commander 2 - Strategy Games Month

Platform: Xbox 360
Store Page
Price I Paid: Free!

This ones for you, if you're reading this said person, you know who you are. You finally get to find out what I think of your beloved franchise.

And what did I think?

Yeah, it's alright I guess. It's not my cup of tea strategy game wise but I did enjoy parts of the game. It was all very menu-y, something usually seen in PC games, every button apparently opened another menu for one or two different things. If you want to build a shield generator then you need to click on the APC and then hit Y twice, Y do that. That was a great pun, but you see what I mean? They made the selection menu so small there has to be multiple ones, or maybe it's just a branch of something.

Graphically wise it reminds me a lot of Halo Wars, which is fitting seeing as though I reviewed that last week. What is it with strategy games liking the colour blue so much? Halo Wars, Supreme Commander, Civilization V, XCOM, the list goes on, use a different colour for gods sake. That should be a feature on the back of some boxes of new strategy games "now featuring different colours". I would buy that.

So what units do we have? Lots to do unit wise actually, multiple ways to upgrade your units, but if you're like me and have little to no idea of what you're doing then you're gonna build 40 Rock Units, upgrade them fully and then pretend to attack while your other two friends nuke the enemy, still got me 35G but that's not the point.

Yeah, I gave the multiplayer a go, was actually quite fun, the games at a minimum go on for a half hour or so, which isn't a bad thing but when 20 Minutes of that time can be spent with the rush defence on, which means that you can't attack or anything, then it can get boring when you've finished building everything.

Unfortunately I didn't give much of the campaign a good look through, I'm still playing it through actually and so far it's been pretty good, more or less the same each time, build units, blow up enemy, repeat x amount of times until objective y is complete.

To a new player, this game might seem very alienating and much more complex than other strategy games on the console, but it can be an enjoyable experience once you learn more about the game.

Supreme Commander 2 gets a 7/10

Updownright

What's he going on about? Well, this is only going to be a short post, because I've actually secured myself a job at updownright.com which means that, obviously, I'll be posting a bit less on here. Game reviews are weekly, that wont change, however you might not get as many Ewan Rants and so on, as they're going to be on updownright.

Thanks for the past two years etc etc, go view my posts on updownright.com, two posts a week on there.

Five games I like that nobody else does

We all have those games. You know what I mean, a game that you thought was amazing and you go and tell all your friends about it, only to find out that apparently the game was worse than series nine of Scrubs. Here's five games I thought were great, only to find out that major critic websites like Metacritic didn't agree with me. I'm looking at games that were either critically panned or hated by fans globally. A game can get good reviews and be hated by fans and vice versa.

The Simpsons Road Rage - GameBoy Advance/GameCube



When I first got this game on my Gameboy I loved it. I enjoyed every second I had with it, then about a week before I started collecting I traded it in for store credit at a now closed down game store so I could get a Nintendo 64. But as fate would have it, a lot of the games I traded in were liquidated to an even better games store nearby, so I bought back a bulk of my games, including this one. Now the GameCube version was even more hated, getting mostly negative reviews overall, which surprised me, you can see my review of the game for my further thoughts but wow, didn't expect it to completely flop in professional reviews.

It's a quirky, fun, fast paced game that I can definitely recommend playing through.

007 Quantum of Solace - Xbox 360



Every single person I've asked about this game have responded with one of two things, either "What games that?" or just general laughter at my expense. Yeah it's a movie tie in and the game got favourable reviews but apparently people didn't like it. I'm not sure why they didn't like it though, the game, obviously while being a movie tie in, was a really enjoyable game if you like mindless FPS games, which I apparently do.

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard



But Ewan, how could you like such a terrible game? Well, it's an odd one this one, I didn't like it for the shooting that's for sure. Yeah, I see why people don't like this game but at the same time the story is one of the best parts of the games and it's worth playing through this game to see all the story envelop. It has Neil Patrick Harris as a voice actor too, along with Will Arnett and even Olivia Hack. There's also some really easy achievements in this game, I mean, 60G for watching the credits? I'll take that.

Destroy All Humans Game Series



Literally the entire series has been attacked by critics and my friends, and I have no idea why. It's some mindless fun, especially the second game of the series. A whole four "Destroy all Humans!" games were made, with the final game being released on the 360. Then Pandemic shut down, then THQ shut down, so the rights to this franchise are somewhere out there, we can only hope for another one of these in the series.

Some really creative ideas were thrown around in that game, especially mind control, the variety of weapons and slaughtering cows.

Fable III



So apparently this game (while well received by most critics) was hated by most people. I'm not too sure why, every time I go play this game and ask a friend they usually laugh in my face and say it's a bad game. But is it really? I absolutely loved the whole game and the voice cast was just star studded, Simon Pegg, Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and John Cleese which is just amazing.

And there you have it. Five games that I like that apparently everyone else hates, according to Google searches, IMDb and my friends.

Mini Reviews #6 - The Walking Dead: Road to Survival

Platform: iOS/Android
Store Page
Price I Paid: Free!

So this just randomly popped up in my Twitter feed of all places and it looked moderately okay so I thought I'd download it and play it for a few minutes.

Two days later and I'm completely engulfed in this game, and I'm not even sure how. It honestly isn't even that good, but once I started playing I couldn't stop, I've let it control my life so far, no way out of this one. There's actually a hell of a lot of things to do in the game, which is surprising, there's a campaign, raiding, special missions, town upgrades, it's taken the best bits of a load of games and hastily stapled them together.

Now as far as a "Mature Role-Playing Game" goes this game is far from it. There's actually some spelling errors dotted around the games story.

But of course, being a freemium game it's going to have it's fair share of "Buy this because it's good value" premium currency. Surprisingly there is a lack of items you can purchase straight through the premium currency, say I wanted to buy the character "Hershel" I'd have to get lucky in opening a pack of Elite Characters. It adds more of a reward to getting a good character which is great.

Funnily enough this game has actually made me want to start watching the TV Show, I saw the first five minutes of "Fear the Walking Dead" and the first episode of "The Walking Dead" but it never hooked me, but thanks to this game I'm going to go watch it.

Campaign wise, I'm onto, I guess you could call it Chapter 9, the part in the softball field or something, stage 2, not where I'm leaving it though, I'm planning on finishing the game, because it is surprisingly good.

Of course with all freemium games things take time to build, you have to wait for certain things to replenish etc, which is a real shame because I'd be playing a lot and then be told I have to stop because I ran out of gas cans.

Also, other than gaining resources, there doesn't seem to be a point to upgrading your town, so hopefully they'll do something about that in a future update.

Like it or not, there's another good Walking Dead game out there, it's on iOS and Android and you should indefinitely download it.

The Walking Dead: Road to Survival gets a 7/10

Games You Haven't Played #5

Another re-boot to an arguably original topic I used to cover, here's three more games you haven't played.

Dark Void



I bought this game about a year ago now, I got halfway through it and then stopped playing it, I have no idea why I stopped, it's a really enjoyable game, with an alright campaign, it has jetpacks and guns, how can you resist it?

Phantasy Star Universe



A very nostalgic game for me for whatever reason, I used to play the demo of this game all the time, and I recently found it in a game store for only £2, while the multiplayer is offline, apparently you can download something on the marketplace which turns it back on which is just amazing, well worth giving this a playthrough.

Over the Hedge



A movie tie in game again, this is honestly a pretty decent game, the movie was also alright, you can probably pick this up cheaply on GameCube which is the console I have it for.

So there's three more games that you've probably never played or heard of, enjoy.

Game Reviews #29 - Halo Wars - Strategy Games Month

Platform: Xbox 360
Store Page
Price I Paid: Free! (I think)

Halo isn't primarily a strategy game, it's an FPS, but when they announced this everyone went mad. A strategy Halo game? Who thought that was a good idea? Whoever did is a genius because this game is great!

The campaign of this game revolves around Sergeant Forge and his merry gang of UNSC troops going off and starting the fight that Master Chief eventually finishes. As this is a strategy game expect base building and such and such. There's quite a few units in this game that aren't really seen that often in the other games, like the Engineers, Flamethrower Squads and Wolverines. The game takes place before the original Halo so it's a prequel sort of thing.

Gameplay wise, you begin with a certain number of resources and a base ready for you to build upon. You need a variety of things to build certain units, for example you need a generator to make Spartans, so it's nicely balanced in a way that you can either rush to get your special unit or take it slowly like I do, build up a squad of scorpions/wraiths and then just obliterate the enemy bases before they have time to take off their coat and settle in.

One thing this game offered is the ability to play as the UNSC and the Covenant which is fantastic, you can play as Sergeant Forge, Captain Cutter and Anders for the UNSC. For the Covenant we have the Prophet of Regret, the Arbiter and just a regular old Brute Chieftain. Now you're probably wondering if there's any benefit to play each character. There is, each character gets their own unique unit, for example, if you choose to play as Captain Cutter you get to use ODST drop pods and as the Prophet of Regret you get Elite Honour Guards.

The variety of different military units in this game is kind of underwhelming, there's a total of eight to nine units for each character, with one unit being allowed an upgrade to the unique unit for said leader, like Sergeant Forge having Scorpions, which are upgraded to his special unit.

Another thing this game offered was multiplayer! 3v3 multiplayer against random people around the world, sounds great in concept, it was kinda cool to play it but it's better played with friends against difficult AI if I'm being honest.

Achievement wise, this game has a hell of a lot, all the campaign missions offer an achievement for the regular completion of a mission and a unique objective, such as flicking switches in a certain order or killing a certain number of enemies on a certain level. I still need to go back and pick up the remaining achievements but I have the majority of it.

Even though it's an RTS game on a console, it's a really fun game that I can't recommend playing enough.

Halo Wars gets a 9/10