Game Dev Tycoon

Overview

           This week's game review will be of..

            Game Dev Tycoon is a simulation game with the focus of allowing the player to create a multitude of games of different genres on different platforms, and also giving the player the ability to change the level of focus of different aspects of the game being created (e.g. Graphics, dialogues etc.) through sliders. Games that the player releases are reviewed by critics and scores are given out of 10, which affects sales and how people will react to your game.

Where you can't say "don't judge me"

            The game is very unique in what it does, which is giving players an opportunity to be creative, and for a person, like myself, who loves the idea of designing games, this game allows players to do so without spending actual money or having detailed thought.

            The story of the game is set 35 years back in the past, where the gaming industry was slowly forming, in a real-life comparison, this would be around where the first video games were being produced. You’re the boss of your own video game company, meaning you start off with only yourself as the sole game creator. From there, the story paces you up from being a one-man team working in a dusty old garage, to a professional team of game designers hand-picked by yourself who have the potential to create epic games to satisfy every gamer out there.

Sleeping in da garage tonite

You'll be stuck here for a while guaranteed

            The fictional platform releases in the game are somewhat tied into the story aspect, it tells the story of how certain platforms came about and in some, speaks of some controversy that did happen in real life. These platforms are all renamed versions of the SNES, DreamCast, Xbox, PlayStation and the like, all of which are released at a specific time during gameplay.

Cook, Serve, Delicious!

Introduction

            This week’s review will be of...

Food falling from outside the window, but ignore that.

            Cook, Serve, Delicious is an indie game with multiple game elements taken from multiple genres. These genres include action, simulation and strategy, making this game a tri-brid game… YES TRI-BRID. 

            The core mechanics of the game involves the player managing a restaurant (the simulation part), setting the daily menus (the strategy part), through day shifts of the player working from 9am to 10pm every day doing every possible position in the restaurant (the action(?) part) by themselves. 

No caption needed. Wait...

            Players start off as being introduced into a 1-star restaurant within a hotel, and is tasked to work their way up to becoming a 5-star restaurant. The only way the player can advance up the ranks is by completing goals set by the game (e.g. passing health inspection tests from a health inspector that stares into your soul). 

            The food the player can possibly have on the menu is 5 at the start, this increase to 6 when the player progresses through the game. These 6 (eventually) slots can be filled up with foods and drinks, ranging from the humble commoner food called pretzel to the destroy-their-wallet only-for-the-rich-and-classy 5-star lobster. Basically, selling the food is the player’s main source of income (duh!). 

The menu of nicely drawn food

             Money in the game is used to purchase upgrades and kitchen equipment such as fryers, which unlocks certain foods for purchase. Oh yeah, and food must be bought before they can be put on the menu (my middle name is Obvious).

            The main gameplay involves the player working a day shift from 9am to 10pm; the days generally last 15 minutes give or take in real-time. And in these 15 minutes is where you, the player, single-handedly run the restaurant: take orders, make the food, cook the food, throw the trash, set rat traps, and flush toilets. The part that varies the most and is not always the same day in day out is the food itself. A pretzel’s preparation is as simple as dunking well-shaped flour into a tub of hot oil for 5 seconds, while preparing something like a steak takes somewhere around… forever.

 

The pains of a 4-star restaurant

            Okay, enough with the introduction let’s go into deep-fried analysis, get it get it get it?

The Wolf Among Us

Introduction

            This week’s game review will be of…

 ******************************************SMALL SPOILERS***************************************

            The Wolf Among Us is a game developed by Telltale Games, the same company that released The Walking Dead. It is a story-based point-and-click game which tells the story of the main character, Bigby, who is the sheriff of a town called Fabletown, which is inhabited by familiar characters such as Snow White, Beauty, Beast and many more, all of which are interconnected within the game’s story. 

The game is unique as every decision the player makes playing as Bigby will result in different consequences. In other words, the story plays out according to the decisions the player makes. For example, if the player replies rudely to a character within the story, and if this character reappears in the later parts of the game, he/she will have a rude reaction towards the player. 

Various decisions the player can choose which result in different reactions.

This varied character behavior that is influenced by the player and thus varying story adds some replayability value to this game.

The Wolf Among Us consists of five episodes, and at present, only the first episode is available, while the other four will be released periodically till Summer 2014.

Having played the first episode twice over so far, here’s what I think about the game…

PAYDAY 2

Introduction
         After the successful post of the first game review covering Dota 2, there’s no time to stop. The next game review will be of…

PAYDAY 2 is a cooperative FPS game released on the 13^th of August this year. It was developed by Overkill Studios and is a sequel to the first, known as PAYDAY: The Heist.

It has improved on its predecessor by having better visual graphics, gameplay mechanics, and gunplay than the first, and also gives players new abilities that also help to improve the gameplay experience. All of this, along with a diverse amount of weapons, equipment and masks makes this a truly solid game.

Gameplay picture

Four players, comprised of either friends or random players in a lobby, are tasked to perform audacious bank heists and robberies, and when this is successfully done, the players receive their “payday”, namely, the loot stolen from finishing any of the 12 heists that are currently available in the game, and a huge chunk of the loot is sent to an offshore account (for that retirement party woohoo!), and the remaining is given to the player for him/her to spend on new weapons or masks. 

A successful heist!

In the first PAYDAY, there was a need for teamwork among the four players in order for them to pull each heist off. In PAYDAY 2, this is no different, and in fact is emphasized even more than the first, and it is in this teamwork element mixed with the gameplay elements that make this game unique from the other first-person shooters.

A level-up system is utilized in this game. Players gain experience from successfully pulling of heists, and depending on the scale and difficulty of the heist, they may be rewarded substantially more. When enough experience is gained, players level up, and are rewarded with skill points (elaboration below) and on certain levels, unlock new weapons.

Skills are also present within the game, and they are divided into four classes known as Mastermind, Enforcer, Technician and Ghost. These classes have six tiers each. Each skill has a “basic” effect (having a small/moderate impact) from spending 1 point (or 3 in higher tiers), and an “ace” effect (having a high/substantial impact) from spending 3 points (or 6 in higher tiers). As the level cap currently is 100, players are given only 120 points and it is up to them to use these points wisely, and is for them to choose what they wish to specialize in.

The four different classes.

The different classes (and thus, skills) mean there is usually some uniqueness to every player’s character, one guy might be the demolitions expert (Technician class), blowing up doors and safes but lacking in other areas such as lockpicking and evasion (Ghost class). Another guy could’ve mastered everything within the Mastermind class (pun intended), gaining unique abilities such as reviving downed teammates just by shouting, but lack the tankiness that the skills in the Enforcer class provides.

And that about raps up the introduction of this review (unlike the last time), now it is time to delve into what makes this game good (or bad)!

Dota 2

Introduction

The first game review (celebration squeal) of this blog will be of..

What is Dota 2? You’d probably heard of Dota 2 from perhaps your brother shouting into the microphone asking his team to back up, or maybe just from the immense clicking of the mouse while you look on to notice enormous amounts of animations which only served to make you feel even more confused, or just from the rants of an older (maybe younger?) sibling who lost a game badly. 

So, what exactly is this game?

Dota 2 gameplay

 It is a game created by Valve (with the help of Icefrog) as a successor to the original Warcraft 3 mod that was titled Defense of The Ancients (and therefore Dota), the difference between the original Dota and Dota 2, most noticeably, is the graphical upgrades in terms of the appearance of the different heroes and the different animations of each of their skills.

Differences from Warcraft 3 to Dota 2

 

Dota 2, like the original, pits two teams, one named Radiant and the other, Dire, of five players against each other to see which team gains decisive victory by destroying the opposing team’s “Ancient”.

Team Radiant's Ancient

Players utilize a vast range of heroes to accomplish this goal, each with their own special abilities and also an ability called the “ultimate”, which can change the entire flow of the game when used correctly. 

One of the heroes, Enigma channeling his ultimate, Black Hole, a potential teamfight-changing skill

 Once the players have selected their heroes, they battle it out on a diagonally symmetrical map, with the bottom-left being the base of the Radiant, and the top-right being the base of the Dire. Three lanes branch out from either base, and three stationary threats (all equally spaced out from the base) known as towers protect each respective lane.

The minimap: colored dots and crosses are used to differentiate the teams and the color refers to the one specific hero.

  When the game commences after the players are given some time to select and position their heroes, creeps start to spawn during regular intervals of time at the barracks, and will slowly make their way down the lane into the one thing they are supposed to do every game: fight to the death.

The other purpose these creeps serve is to give bounty to the enemy heroes of the other team, they do so by “last-hitting” the creep, heroes accumulate gold (to buy items) mainly through last-hitting creeps.

Last hitting earns money, allowing the hero to afford costlier items within the game.

There are of course more game mechanics that can be discussed, but I feel that there’s more to this review than listing these various mechanics (which is quite boring), which can be learnt in the game itself.

Hey there bloggers and gamers!

Hey there! My name is Richard and this is my first blog post so I am gonna explain why this blog is made! :)

The main reason why I have decided to make a blog dedicated to game-related stuff and making some game reviews in general is because I LOVE GAMES (not a stereotypical gamer person in the basement btw). In my opinion, games are an awesome way for people to come together and play unlike sports where someone may have stubbed their toe on the way to the bathroom in the morning and be unable to take part later in the day, or something around those lines.

So yeah, anyway, this blog is meant for me to express my feelings, remarks, and overall thoughts on any game that I feel is reviewable (be it indie games, AAA games, HumbleBundle games). 

I'd probably make it a habit to update this blog AT LEAST once a week (probably Sunday but who knows). Of course, once in a while I would run out of games to play (or money because I am sadly money-deprived *sigh*), then I would probably do something like YouTubing, video of the week or yada-yada-yada, I'd come up with something.

When I do get a nice new computer I'd probably start posting video links of the game reviews I have done on this blog in video form (IN NICE PERFECT 1080P QUALITY!!1!1!) or perhaps new ones from games that emerge during 2014-beyond.

I guess that is all I have to say for now, stay tuned for next week's blog post and have a nice day! :)