Reviewer: Cody Hall
Game: Invisible, Inc.
Developer: Klei Entertainment
Source: Purchased as a backer for the Game's Alpha and later used here for review.
To start out though you’ll send your Kaiju out to one of dozens of cities around the world, each with a tier ranking the difficulty that you’ll encounter if you attack it. When you do attack a city, which is where most of your time will be spent, you’ll be confronted with a unique grouping of buildings and foliage for each city. Attack a spot in Africa and you’ll see mostly sand and small buildings, but attack New York and you’ll be forced to smash your way through skyscrapers and docks. Different types of buildings will drop different resources when they are destroyed and you’ll need to learn which buildings harbor the resources you need if you hope to be as efficient as possible.
But it’s not as simple as your Kaiju destroying buildings, you’ll be confronted with various enemy units from foot soldiers to bomber planes and laser tanks. While most enemies won’t put up much of a fight for your monster, several of them can start to chip away at it’s health quite quickly. In addition, eventually you’ll encounter tougher and tougher enemies that will take you down without much trouble. As such you need to train your Kaiju, giving him new passive abilities and active defenses and attacks that he can call on not only to destroy enemy units, but also to help you demolish the city you are attacking. Your monster will also increase in size as you pump him full of abilities. At the start of the game it might take you a swipe or two to destroy a home, but by the end you can walk over them without pausing at all.
Cities burn with satisfying infernos, spreading through foliage and buildings alike and you’ll reap the rewards as they do. That’s if you make it to the city, as once you’ve done enough damage the governments of the world will start sending out military patrols to intercept your Kaiju. Luckily, you can either run from the patrol (if you make it), or you can destroy it outright removing it from the map entirely.
The end goal of the game is to conquer the majority of the world. To take over a city you must destroy it until the local population has a moral of under 40%, at which point there is a chance for them to surrender to your mad rule. This means you can no longer attack the city for resources, but you’ll get their net income every month for the rest of the game.
You start with an island lair that you use different resources to build up, adding power plants, research stations, training lairs and more. Certain buildings will produce specific resources, but it will also consume a certain amount of resources each month. You’re goal will be to balance the production and consumption, while sending your Kaiju out to replenish resources as needed. Eventually you’ll want to build up some base defenses as well since later in the game your lair can be discovered and attacked, and if you aren’t prepared long before this happens you’ll soon find that you’ve lost the game. Or that you’ve destroyed all of the land based enemies before having your Kaiju killed by ships, and then stuck in a never ending cycle where the enemies can’t destroy your buildings and you have no Kaiju to attack the enemies.
That brings us to some of the games problems, and it does have a fair few. Firstly I want to talk about something subjective, but it really turned me off at first. The look of the games resources. I know that seems like a little thing to nitpick, but they look like an iOS money grabber game. When you destroy buildings they pop out and look completely out of place with the landscape, easily recognizable sure, but out of place none the less.Combine that with the mechanic where buildings, training and healing all take a certain amount of time (which you can fast forward in the PC version as of writing), it just feels like it’s one of those iPad games trying to steal your money with time sinks and resources. Especially the purpletonium as it isn’t used for much throughout most of the game, is extremely rare, and could easily be the “real money currency”. All that said, the game is not like that on Steam. The resources are plentiful if you go looking for them, the purpletonium is rare but isn’t used for much, and and time can be sped up or slowed down. Mechanically it’s fine, but it just FEELS bad to me. Maybe I’ve been burned too many times before.
On to more concrete problems. Tutorials seem to appear out of nowhere, telling you things that would have been useful five hours ago but are useless now. Tutorials also seem to repopulate so you’ll be the same one everytime you start-up the game. In addition there are supposed to be 3 Kaiju in the game to pick from, but only 1 has been released as of this review. Enemies can get stuck on buildings, and they will do so all the time, making destroying cities much easier than it really should be. Boats can sail through land and infantry can walk on water, and the aforementioned base attacks can cause no end scenarios if you’re unlucky. You also can’t access the menu while on an attack map, so you can’t even exit the game gracefully or save if you are in the middle of a city or base attack. I even experienced a crash to desktop once and though it hasn’t happened since, it’s made me paranoid about the game crashing during a big city attack.
It can also be a pain to navigate with your Kaiju. Trying to get him to walk between buildings to attack a tank can result in him uselessly attacking nearby buildings while he’s blasted with laser fire. There are also some icons on the side of the attack screen that tell you your passive bonuses such as speed, defense, etc, but they never seemed useful. You can tell if you’ve got your boosters on as every step sets the ground on fire and you move faster. You can tell if you have a defense bonus active as you’ll see it visibly on your Kaiju. Not to mention they are never explained to you and I had to ask on the forums to discover what they are for.
Another small issue with the game is that it is a bit inconsistent. Sometimes it will change the speed time passes back to normal after an event, and sometimes it won’t. Also if your Kaiju is returning with loot but you are looking at your base when he arrives, you won’t actually get that loot. You’ll have to go back to the world map to receive it.
Overall I had a lot of fun with the game and Kerberos Productions is constantly patching it and adding in new buildings and features. I’m giving Kaiju-A-Gogo 3 ½ Stars, potentially changing to a 4 star review if they continue patching and release the other two monsters down the road! What Kerberos Productions have created may be a bit buggy and undercooked, but it’s still amazingly fun. I can’t believe Maxis gave us Sim Copter and not Kaiju-A-Gogo!
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Reviewer: Billy C
Game: Kaiju-A-Gogo Developer: Kerberos Productions Inc. Source: Purchased for personal use and review. |
Five Star Wrestling gives each of its wrestlers an extremely accurate moveset, putting WWE’s games to shame in that regard. You move with the left analog stick and grapple with the right. Each direction will give you a different move, and you can access more by holding down L1, L2, or R2 and moving the right stick. Additionally you have a dedicated “illegal move” button by pressing the right stick in, which will give you an illegal flag. Get three and you’re disqualified. It’s a good system and it allows you to really feel like a heel during a match.
Another great aspect of Five Star Wrestling is the damage system. Each wrestler gets a doll by their name that shows how damaged each area is. As you target different body parts, they’ll go from white, to yellow, to orange, to red, and finally to black. The more damage you inflict on your enemy, the more bruises and damage you’ll see on their wrestler and it really makes matches feel more impactful. I’d love to see that feature brought into the WWE games in the future.
In addition to visible damage and a susceptibility to submissions, lowering an opponent's leg condition can provide other benefits. Sometimes they’ll start to mount a comeback and Ragnabrök will pick you up for an F5, only to have his knees buckle underneath him and drop you. It’s a small thing but it really adds to the feeling that the match you’re having is meaningful.
There are 8 different match types ranging from a normal match to a submission match, but nothing as exotic as a ladder match. Indeed, you’ll only ever have a two person contest, no tag teams and no handicap matches or royal rumbles. There’s an exhibition mode, but you probably won’t be spending much time here as all you have unlocked is the regular match type and the training gym location. To unlock more you’ll need to complete matches in the Challenge Mode, which is where the majority of your playtime with the game will come from. The challenges span all the different match types, including wrestler specific challenges, and there are over a hundred to complete.
In a challenge match you will be given a specific wrestler vs another specific wrestler and, much like WWE’s Showcase Mode, you’re required to meet three objectives during the match in order to complete the challenge. This could be a punch combo, performing a finisher, a springboard move, making the opponent bleed, or many more. There are two main issues with the challenge mode though. The first is that it often requires you to damage a specific body part on the opponent until it is red, but tends to give you a wrestler who only has one attack that hits that particular body part. This causes you to spam the same move over and over to complete the objective, which gets old fast. The second problem is that each challenge gives you around 1,000 currency, with a bonus for higher star rated matches. The issue is that it takes 46,000 to unlock a costume, 92,000 to unlock an arena, and the match types range from 161,000 to 230,000. So don’t expect to be playing the exhibition mode much.
Another area where 5 Star Wrestling falters is the AI. It’s really dumb and doesn’t provide any challenge once you figure out the controls, even if you crank the settings up. Lastly and perhaps the worst of all are the glitches. These range from small things that I can overlook, such as wrestlers not being in the right place while moves are performed, or sliding across the mat while lying down, all the way to match-ruining glitches that force you to restart. In a longer challenge this can be extraordinarily frustrating. Collision detection is also near broken at times, and you’ll need to wait until your opponent is completely standing up before trying to grab or hit them, otherwise you’ll go right through.
The game has a rating system, as I briefly mentioned before, and if you can get into it, you could spend a long time figuring out it’s intricacies. Ideally you’re supposed to use ring psychology, pacing, excitement and more to create an epic match. This means stopping and letting your opponent get some offense in sometimes, coming close to losing just to make things more exciting. Anyone who's heard me talk about WWE 2K15 knows that I love a match rating feature in a wrestling game, so it’s welcome here.
I haven’t touched on the graphics yet because there’s not much to say. 5 Star Wrestling looks like a bad PS2 game at times. The lighting is fine, but the wrestlers often look horrifying, and the stages are bland. There are no crowds either. It’s serviceable, but often quite ugly. The sound is better than the graphics, with the music for wrestler entrances obviously being inspired by their real life versions. While the game lacks commentary, I feel like that’s a better option than including poor commentary that repeats often.
Overall what do I think of 5 Star Wrestling? For the first couple hours I absolutely hated it, but I pushed through to try and find something to enjoy in the game and it worked, kind of. The game just feels unfinished due to all of the bugs, and some of the challenges aren’t hard so much as tedious. I did have fun with the game while playing it, including getting sucked into doing multiple challenges when I just turned it on to capture some quick footage for this review. Still, I doubt I’ll be coming back to this game at all, and I certainly wouldn’t pay the $25 that their asking for. I give 5 Star Wrestling a 2 out of 5, with an extra star if you’re a huge fan of wrestling and the game drops in price by at least $15.
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Author: Billy C
Game: 5 Star Wrestling Source: Review copy given to Twinstiq. |
*UPDATE*
The mod now has a DMCA takedown notice disclaimer on the Steam Workshop site. This could be legit, or it could be people upset about paid mods doing it, so we'll have to wait and see how it shakes out.
My name is Billy C for Twinstiq.com, and today’s mod is “Wet and Cold” by Isoku, for Skyrim. The mod is meant to increase your immersion in Skyrim by adding a few small details, mostly affecting the NPCs. With the mod enabled, and none of the optional mods, you get water dripping off of characters during rain or after you get out of water, and it looks alright. Honestly I would have prefered less drops pouring off of you, or have a lot of drops early on and then quickly slow down to a few. Right now it just feels like your character is exploding water out of their torso and legs.
Another nice effect is NPC breath fogging up in the colder areas of Skyrim. Your characters breath will be visible while you’re running, but the NPCs will also have their breath fog up while speaking, and it’s a nice touch. The mod doesn’t add this effect to all creatures yet though, but it’s enough that I don’t really mind. For a full list of creatures check out the mod link in the description.
The final vanilla effect for the mod involves snow accumulating on your character’s hair and armor. It affects you as well as the NPCs when it’s snowing, and when a blizzard picks up the wind sounds like it’s really rushing past you while snow builds up on your body. It never gets very thick so you aren’t going to be covered head to toe, but it looks nice.
NPCs will also react to all of the weather effects as well, heading into their homes if it’s raining, with Argonians and beggars just sitting outside in it. If it starts snowing then everyone will head inside, to their home if it’s close or an inn if it’s not, and that can be a pain in the butt if you’re trying to find someone.
While all of this is nice, my favorite parts of the mod only work with Skyrim Script Extender also installed. When you have SKSE then NPCs will equip hoods and light cloaks when it starts raining, or massive fur lined hooded cloaks if it’s snowing. They don’t seem to do this if you’re watching, so you can be stalking an NPC when it starts snowing, turn around for a second and when you look back he’s got a cloak and hood on, but it’s not a deal breaker.
Sadly I did notice a performance hit while using the mod. I ran around for an hour before installing the mod to get comparison video and my FPS never dipped below 60. After I installed the mod there were a few moments in heavy blizzards, or in crowded areas when it started snowing, where the FPS dropped for a few seconds. Granted, I’ve got a decently powerful rig and it could have a greater effect on others, so keep that in mind.
There are several optional mods that this mod will take advantage of if you install them, and I’ll link to that in the description below. So, overall what do I think of the mod? It’s a nice addition to my Skyrim gameplay that adds to the immersion factor. I wouldn’t bother with it without the SKSE additions of equipping cloaks, but with that and several of the other optional mods I enjoyed “Wet and Cold”, and I’ll be keeping it installed in my Skyrim when I’m not reviewing other mods.
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Dr. Strangethumb (standing by this score until he's done with the first boss)
The style of LA Cops is fantastic. From the cell shaded rooms and characters to the ridiculous 70's cop show setting that recalls some of the best movies of my childhood. Even the music is great for a while, though it does get old due to the limited selection of tracks available. I really do have very little to complain about with this games presentation but there are a few issues. The first is that the camera doesn't zoom out enough to see an entire room, which means that you might have to walk halfway through a room away from all cover before you see that the far end is littered with Uzi wielding enemies. The second problem is that the objectives window is massive and useless. Most missions are just about killing all enemies, with maybe destroying some items, but the objectives window takes up such a large portion of the top right of the screen that it can block incoming enemies.
Mechanics:
The gameplay of LA Cops is an isometric twin stick shooter with an element of tactics thrown in to differentiate it from Hotline Miami. When I first started playing the game, having not played Hotline Miami before this, I did not immediately have a good time. The game felt very tactical, having two characters you could either take direct control of, or use a 'move to' command to position your AI controlled partner. Bullets shot into walls draw the attention of enemies in adjoining rooms which can quickly overwhelm you as well, so it seemed necessary to stealth through levels, handcuffing as many enemies as possible before all hell finally breaks loose.
Sadly that's just not what LA Cops is. That is possibly what it aspires to be, but if so it falls short. In fact the only strategy that seemed to work was to go in guns blazing and lure enemies through doors. You have a second cop that the game instructs you to station at doorways, or to send him into a room through one door while you burst through a door on the other side, but sadly he's near useless as a true partner. Sometimes he will kill 4 or 5 enemies in as many seconds, and other times he will stand there not firing a single shot while enemies run through the doorway he is guarding. This leads to him being murdered, and shortly after you being murdered.
In LA Cops you get two police officers and a single, randomly placed resurrection per level in the form of a health pack. To use the health pack you need to find it, grab it, and return it to the body of your fallen partner. In reality it is almost always a better idea to have your partner stay far back out of harms way as a second life than it is to risk him by sending him to near certain death by trying to fight.
It doesn't help anything when the games mechanics seem like they are fighting you either. In a fast paced twitch style shooter like this where bullets are at a premium for the nice guns, it should be obvious what it will take to kill an enemy so that you can start to engage the next. In LA Cops I could sometimes kill an enemy in one shot, and other times it would take two or three shotgun shells at near point blank to take them down.
If you are locked onto an enemy and you have a clear line of site then you will always hit that enemy, which is essential for controller play and indeed feels essential for keyboard and mouse too, which is odd. It is so powerful that you can sometimes take our waves of 5 or 6 enemies without taking damage, simply by alternating the lock-on and fire buttons. The problem is that the game doesn't lock-on to the enemy closest to your reticle and instead it locks-on to the enemy closest to your character. This means you might have two enemies rushing through an open door, but you accidentally lock-on to an enemy behind you and in another room, leading to your death. Interestingly the lock-on feature is disabled in impossible difficulty, which makes controller play feel truly impossible.
Doors are another source of frustration in LA Cops. Most doors are closed when you first come to them and you can swing them open either way just by moving into them. Sometimes though the door will explode for no reason leaving you exposed to enemy fire. Additionally doors can be used to stun enemies by swinging the door into them, as long as they aren't walking in the remote direction of the door. If they are then you'll just end up pushing on each side of the door and slowly opening it.
Another way that the game stands out from the crowd is it's stable of playable characters. You can pick from an assortment of cops, each of which can be leveled up individually. This makes each cop unique as you experiment, but you quickly realize that unless you want to repeat the same levels over and over to grind for XP it's just better to stick with two characters throughout the game. XP is shared among all officers as well, so you can either spend your XP leveling up one cop, the two cops you are using, or seriously dilute it by spending it on more cops. Make no mistake either, you'll need to spend you XP if you want to get anywhere in the game, leveling up things ranging from starting weapon, clip size, health, damage, and speed.
Conclusion:
LA Cops has many problems that keep it from being a classic like the game it takes inspiration from, but it does enough to stand apart that it's a fun game in it's own right. With 9 levels to play, a selection of bonus levels, multiple officers that are really just different skins, and an attempt at tactical gameplay that just turns into an interesting way to handle multiple lives, LA cops is a fun little game that kept me interested for a while but ultimately didn't make any headway into my daily gaming schedule.
LA Cops gets a 2 1/2 out of 5, but with the caveat that most of it's problems could be patched. Indeed the developers have stated that they are working on the partner AI, so this could all change in the future. My recommendation is to pick it up if you find it on sale for $10 or less, but unless you are a huge fan of this fledgling genre I wouldn't pay full price while there are more coherent offerings out there.
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Author: Billy C
Source: Review copy provided to Twinstiq.com by Team17 Digital Ltd. Rating: 2 1/2 out of 5 Developer: Modern Dream Website: http://www.la-cops.com/ Platform: Reviewed on PC, also available for XBox One and Mac. |
