Tom Clancy's The Division

Over the recent years Ubisoft have been producing a lot of games that all tie into a sandbox theme - Assassin’s Creed, Watchdogs and Far Cry all fall under this. For those of you that don’t know what that is: Imagine a sandbox, the type that you used to play in as a child. You could do anything in that sandbox, be anywhere as long as your imagination permitted it. A video game sandbox is much like that just without the imagination for the most part as everything is provided to you, think of it as the kitchen sink approach to game design.

PubG and Fortnite

The battle royale format has become a huge thing over the last year or so. Having a large amount of players running around, trying to be the last one standing sounds like a great plan, so there’s no wonder it’s become as big as it is. Today, I’m going to be looking at the two biggest of the BR genre, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (or PubG for short) and Fortnite.

Heavy Weapon

 

If you're looking for an easy to learn, hard to master, addictive and greatly rewarding game, look not further than Heavy Weapon.

Heavy Weapon is an arcade style action game available on Windows, Mac OS, Xbox 360 and Playstation Network developed by PopCap Games, a company more notably responsible for such 2D hits as Bejeweled, Peggle and Plants Vs Zombies, so this may be a wee bit of a tone shift with guns and all, but at least it keeps with the on going 2D theme.

PopCap Games is a weird company. They are incredibly wealthy, I mean they were acquired by EA for god's sake, yet they make very cutesy, friendly and colourful games that feel more at home on a phone app store. It's a great business model as all these 2D games are a lot easier, and cheaper, to produce and animate and im not complaining either as I love a lot of PopCap games. However, it must make other game developers feel a bit sad to think that they can spend years producing a fully rendered masterpiece with intricate set pieces and in depth game play only to be vastly outdone by a bunch of colourful lights, cathartic music and special effects, but anyway.

In Heavy Weapon you play an Atomic Tank, working for... no one in particular by the looks of it, that's been dispatched to fight the forces of Red Star, a group that is in no way a thinly veiled disguise for the Russian forces, honest, and it isn't really explained why they are invading either. An intro cinematic does clue us in with a couple of still images that they definitely are invading, so at least something has been confirmed, but on the whole Heavy Weapon isn't good at explaining, or having a story, but really who cares about the story when the game play is what you're here for.

Heavy Weapon is a horizontal bullet-hell shooter, very big on reactions as pattern recognition is pointless in this game, and very typical of bullet-hell shooter game play; enemies flock in from every angle onto the screen and attempt to kill you. Your job is to use your machine gun, and other added weapons, to stop yourself from dying.
With a 180 degree view, your machine gun is able to deal with enemies descending from on high or coming from left and right, but the real good stuff is when you unlock and upgrade weapons.
Now obviously the farther you progress, the more enemies you will face so naturally you're going to need weapons situated for such an occasion. The weapons you can acquire, or upgrade, range from a more powerful version of the starting gun to homing missiles. All of the weapons feel necessary in successfully completing the later levels just for the sheer amount of enemies that will be occupying most of the screen at any one time. Speaking of enemies, there are a plethora of them that the game will throw at you, ranging from the standard planes that shoot at you as they fly across the top of the screen, to dive bombing jets and B52 bombers that can drop their own atomic bombs that will wipe you out if they hit the floor, and it also has ground enemies like other tanks or jeeps

The things occupying the rest of the screen will be all the projectiles coming for your gormless, side-scrolling arse, for which you're probably gonna need a shield. Enter the white blimps. These blimps seem to be your only allies in this war on the poorly explained Red Star, although they probably wont be after the amount you're going to accidentally shoot them throughout the game, drop shield boosters and other perks such as faster fire rate, spread shot or even atomic bombs, for you to pick up. Another staple in the bullet-hell genre, the shield gives you the ability to take a couple of extra hits before exploding into tiny little pieces, the spread shot is very useful as it gives you the chance to be able to take out multiple enemies at once, and maybe the most effective, the atomic bomb will clear the screen of all those pesky enemies wishing you harm and even take out a couple coming into frame at the time of detonation.

As you progress through Heavy Weapon, occasionally the enemies will drop pieces of a mega weapon. Picking up four of these before they touch the ground will result in a steady laser beam for a few seconds that essentially one-shots any opposition, giving you a little bit of time to regain focus and start dodging the fresh barrage of bullets ready to turn your tank into Swiss cheese. 

Now of course there are bosses, ranging from a slow moving helicopter firing missiles at you, to a train car with a massive wrecking ball attached flailing it around, to a big hovering dome with a myriad of attacks and forms making all kinds of hard work for you. All the bosses are decently designed, a lot of the fall in the category of "dodge attack, shoot, repeat" but there are a few that require you to achieve certain things before attacking.

 

Heavy Weapon will give you a good 3/4 hours of game play, depending on general poor movement decisions, and has a fair bit of replayability as its more of a test of attrition than learning patterns. But sometimes that's exactly what you're after and Heavy Weapon is great at testing patience, positioning, concentration and timing. As I said, there isn't much of a story but that's not the point, Heavy Weapon is just good, fast, clusterfuck fun.

I hope you enjoyed taking a look at Heavy Weapon, keep checking back to Game Changers for more gaming news and updates.

Bulletstorm

Bulletstorm

So apart from possibly being the worst type of weather, Bulletstorm is an FPS brought to us by People Can Fly (makers of Painkiller) and Epic (the Gears of War guys). You would think the run gun fun of Painkiller and the gritty realism of Gears of war would make a good mix, and for the most part, that’s correct. You have an array of varied weapons, ranging from the obligatory assault rifle to what I like to call the bouncing ball of justice. This weapon fires a bouncing betty-esc ball which is content to bounce up and down two feet in front of you waiting for you to run up and kick it into onrushing enemies. Sounds good in theory but connecting with it is a matter left to the baby Jesus and his legs are tiny, he can’t kick shit. I’ll take this time to reaffirm to anyone that, as you can imagine; having to fire a gun, watch the bullet, kick the bullet in the right direction and hope it hits what you were looking at before what you were looking at has realised what a berk you’re making of yourself and has fucked off, is quite flow breaking in an FPS no matter how satisfying it is when you blow up onlooking mutants. Your mighty boot is useful for something when being combined with your Energy Leash. Using this, you can pull enemies towards you and give them a swift punt and then pair that with a shotgun to send various bits of bad guys flying in various directions. All in all, Bulletstorm offers some cathartic weapons, some with satisfying feels and uses like the Flail gun, that sends two linked grenades that wrap around foes before detonating. The main issue come with the secondary fire on your guns. Although giving you a more powerful, alternative shot, having to press the shoulder button to activate the secondary fire and then the trigger to fire it gives you one more thing to think about in the heat of battle. This could have been circumvented by just using the shoulder button to deploy the secondary fire, because no one holds a controller with one finger on each shoulder and trigger button. 

 So, that’s the Painkiller influence now what about the Gears of war influence? 

Well most of that lies in the characters and settings. The main character looks like the love child of Marcus Fenix and Monkey from Enslaved; a big, grizzled, overly manly man with the stature of an upright car and the hair and sideburns that could star in their own Pantene advert. In contrast to the gung-ho muscle head main protagonist, he has a level headed, logical second in command. Sounds out of place in a game like this although, most of this could do with the fact that he becomes part robot, so if the revolutionary space army doesn’t work out for him, he would kick arse on Robot wars. Both make haste on their journey through lovely, picture-esc sky boxes filled with vivid foliage and glistening glass from the crumbling ruins that lay all around you from the once upright city-scape, and if you haven’t noticed by now, I’m trying to avoid talking about the story.

It’s not bad, it just doesn’t stand out from the other modern FPS stories. You’re a space marine who has learned of the dark truth behind the man running your squad and now you vow to destroy him for what he has done. Forgetting that the army doesn’t look fondly on killing a commanding officer, but fuck that let’s shoot his ship down and hunt the bastard! Our heroes find their man, General Sarrano, and he makes them realise that maybe this is bigger than they thought! Grayson (that’s Chevy Mcsideburns name by the way) is a fickle man and absorbs information as gospel the instant it leaves a character’s mouth, Sarrano abusing this fact in particular. Ishi (that’s Robo-Joe) plays straight man to Gray’s flippant antics, disapproving of Grayson’s thirst for revenge, all the while losing his mind to the machine man! The last member to round off the cast is Trishka. True to female character models in gritty war shooters, she’s so much better in every way to the guys for no other reason than to avoid having a kidnapped princess story on our hands. So, naturally she saves your stupid arse on several occasions, when in reality, you would probably be able to pull yourself onto a ledge when you look like a man that benches the entire gym. After finding Sarrano, and therefore being in a prime position to shoot him in the face, Gray changes his mind. I guess he’s more of a chase guy than an end result man, instead choosing to blindly follow the genocidal prick that ultimately brought him to this planet. At this point I think its apt to talk more about Gears of war because if you’ve played the first Gears then you’ve played Bulletstorm and had more fun. The story culminates in a similar way but seems to lose all the nice side elements and, looking back, I don’t remember there being any roadblocks besides chest high walls and debris that Gray relishes in getting stuck on. Bulletstorm isn’t a long game, at least it didn’t feel like it, but after the 30^th smashed and burning room with overgrowing trees all over the place it does start to all mesh together. 

The main drive for this is Gray’s guilt for all the people he’s killed, which he hammers home in every cut-scene, just in case the game puts you into a bored trance and you forget what you’re doing here I guess. But once he finds out about Sarrano’s sorted past, Gray embarks on a redemption quest to kill him with gusto because that’s how he thinks forgiveness works. It’s like the Dom’s wife thing that drives Gears one just without all the other characters having an equally depressing backstory to balance it out, and with less Dom’s wife, probably because Gray shot her too. The character’s delivery is played to an odd contrast when you think about it though. Leaping from Gray’s incessant whining about all the lives that he couldn’t save from his own destructive nature, to Sarrano’s constant swearing, sarcasm and casual racism. All the while running through a city on the verge of cataclysm, putting bullets in anything that moves. Bulletstorm wants to have its sweary, bullet-ridden cake and eat it, and it starts to come across a bit over the top. 

Final Thought: It’s fun. A nice way to kill a few hours at a time with a decent satisfaction level in relation to the weapons. Harking back to the weapons of the doom and quake era, as intentional and obvious as the homage is, it works. But if you can wait a little longer and save your money or swallow your sadness and trade in some of you more played games, I would suggest Gears of War.

I’m sure you’ll have fun with Bulletstorm, or Gears of War, gunning down legions of mutants, but keep checking back to Game Changers for more game news and more.

Borderlands

Borderlands

Borderlands is a first-person shooter role playing game (FPSRPG), taking place on a wasteland-esc planet called Pandora, but not that one. 

The game opens to a thick accented, eastern European man named Marcus, regaling us with the tales and legends of this new, scary world. Apparently located somewhere on Pandora is something known as The Vault, a magical, mystical place that could contain any number of things. Some think it’s treasure and riches, some think nothing awaits the entrants except a small case of buggered and a big case of death, and then there are some that don’t believe it exists. That aside for the time being, you play as one of four characters that heard about The Vault when they were kids and weren’t put off by all the buggery and terrible death and decided to all go on a quest to find it.

 Along the way they’ll encounter trials and tribulations; the natives of the planet, most of which have gone crazy or maybe just like the idea of driving around spraying everything with bullets because apparently, no one gives a shit and it looked like fun. The native animals, if you can call them that, more like twisted abominations, that have even less of a preservation instinct. Most of them choose to gleefully run up to you, completely oblivious to the ten or their pack that you’ve already blasted away right in front of their very eyes.

 Then there are the others that have ventured to Pandora also with The Vault in mind. These are probably the sanest of Pandora’s inhabitants, sane used in a very loose term especially when they send their flaming minions in your direction, but hey one less person to take their share of The Vault riches and one less witness to account for the boss’s arson.

So, we got the location, the plot device and the hazards along the way. What about those four glory hungry kids I told you about earlier by which I mean playable characters. We’ll start with Roland. This soldier character has a proficiency for guns, giving him a slight damage or recoil bonus for example. He also has a special ability to create a turret content with filling enemies with bullets to give you covering fire to move forward. Next up is Brick. He’s the berserker, a melee focused character who has fists like cinder blocks and isn’t afraid to use them, especially when you activate his rage mode. Mordecai, the hunter. Armed with his trained pet rak, Bloodwing, that he can send into battle to dive bomb the enemy, Mordecai can sit at a distance with his high-powered sniper rifle, picking off stragglers that could escape the aerial assault one by one. Last is Lilith the Siren. Not much is known about the Sirens in the universe except that they have incredible powers, involving the manipulation of elements. Lilith can phase-walk, meaning she can turn invisible to bypass enemies or unfriendly turrets. Except when you’ve misjudged how long it will last and end up phasing back into existence right in the middle of a group of bandits that are only too happy to wail on you with whatever they have to hand.

Borderland’s “addition” to the FPSRPG scene is its “Shoot and Loot” system. RPG players will be familiar with this system as it’s what any RPG player does after entering a town. You kill all the people you can kill and the search the place and take all their stuff; brings back great memories of smashing all those pots in Ocarina of Time, so basically they just gave it a fancy name. You can pick up weapons left by the dead bandits, most probably after you shot them in the face, and some people just give you ammo and grenades if you talk them enough, and then there’s the chests. These can be found in various place around Pandora but most commonly located somewhere near a boss in their base camp, ready for you to explore and collect your winnings after clearing out the peoples. All this killing and thieving, while questing of course, means racking up the experience points (XP) to fill you experience bar to level up. An RPG wouldn’t be complete without inventory micromanagement, making sure which of the weapons and shields you have picked up along your merry way are slightly better than what you have equipped. So, Borderlands is constantly throwing up items for you to laboriously sift through to make sure you’re shooting or healing efficiently even when you’re over encumbered with useless, low level items that you’ve been lumbering around just to find somewhere to sell.

Borderlands is designed to be played in four player coop and, as an informative loading screen will tell you, “More players=harder enemies=better loot”, so the difficulty does scale but if you are playing solo, you still get a good experience without other players stealing all the good weapons in addition to health and ammo. After completing Borderlands, you might want to play with friends, and the game nicely offers the ability to use the character you have invested in, so no one has to start from zero thus creating a greater experience all round.

The game play is pretty standard, you shoot at things until they don’t move, steal their wallet, go to another area, repeat. Apart from that, the game world is split between two main hub towns and you get quests from talking to non-playable characters (NPC’s) or consulting the bounty board. Constantly running back and forth, shooting various bandits in the face to get whatever thing whichever NPC asked you for but can’t be bothered to retrieve themselves, can get tiring and repetitive, but the beauty of and RPG is that little experience bar I mentioned before. Gaining any amount of XP, steadily increasing quest after quest until, BING! Another level gained and another chance to fiddle around with you character specific skill tree. To start with you only have a couple that you’re pretty much forced to put your skill points into but as you get further into the game, completing the many side quests and leveling up more, you have access to better skills that require more skill points to unlock. All four characters have three skill trees each contributing to their abilities in different ways, ranging from duration of abilities to damage buffs with certain guns or elements, so it comes down to what takes your fancy. If you prefer to look your opponent in the eye through your sniper scope, efficiently putting a bullet in their forehead from a town over, then you can put points into Mordecai’s sniping tree to increase his head shot bonus. If you’re afraid of confrontation, or low on health and would rather send in Bloodwing, you can put your skill points into his rogue tree so you regain health whenever Bloodwing hits your foes.

The story to Borderlands is thin with it pretty much being a case of “Go there, kill him, return to town”. Most of the story is explained to you through the opening cinematic told to us by our friend Marcus, but it starts to shine when it comes to the character design, backstory and writing. All the characters on Pandora are well rounded, interesting and the emotion they convey, mostly verbal because video games hasn’t yet master faces, does make you feel for them sometimes. I mention this because of one specific NPC, Claptrap. This little boxy robot is essentially your tour guide through this adventure and he comes fully equipped with an annoying personality and grindy, synth voice ensuring to get on your tits at some point. Personally, I enjoyed the little bastard, but I am the kind of guy that thought Ja Ja Binks could have been worse and Ocarina of Time’s Navi was absolutely delightful. I am also aware that the design of Claptrap was to annoy and Gearbox achieve this with an almost scary amount of gusto.

To open this Vault, you’ll need a key, I mean what vault doesn’t need a key right. Unfortunately, this key is broken into pieces and scattered around Pandora. So, as your main quest, given to you by a lady of questionable frame of mind, is to retrieve them. As you discover new worlds, pillaging camps and doing the odd side quest, you will come across characters of…well… character. These individuals range from friendly NPCs you interact with during story missions to bosses you fight at various points through the story. All of which are introduced with a dramatic freeze frame, colour effect and quick zoom in on their face while the screen is hogged by their name accompanied with a witty/punny one liner. Borderlands is fairly linear and has a bad habit of making you run through the same areas you have already explored quest after quest, but the colourful characters and imaginative writing really pull their weight. Most quests have you meeting a new character or delving deeper into a character you have already met, which kept my interest if nothing else. From having a conversation with Claptrap about the bandits using him and his robot friends for target practice, to blind TK Baha about surviving on Pandora, to crazy Doctor Zed with his lack of medical license and dubious methods, Borderlands is littered with characters that I found engaging and funny.

At the end of the day, Borderlands is a good FPSRPG with some very good writing. The world is expansive and you can spend a long time running through the camps and finding the caves, preferably on foot because the cars are a bit crap. I found myself playing for hours on end without realising and the downloadable content (DLC) adds so much more to discover. If you’re into the standard FPS and maybe feel like reaching a little out of your comfort zone, I would highly recommend Borderlands.