The Great Whale Road (Steam) - Preview

The Great Whale Road is available now on Steam and is priced at £10.99.

The Great Whale Road has released into Early Access, meaning the game is still in development and may change over time. The devs have said "We have been working on The Great Whale Road for over a year now, and we don't want to complete the game without your feedback" on the Steam Store page for the game.

I am a big fan of the Early Access/Game Preview programs, as it allows us to watch a game progress. The problem with these sometimes is that if you're a really early adopter there isn't always much of a game to play. This was my experience with The Great Whale Road (so far!) I played it for a number of hours over a few days but it ultimately felt like a very empty, unfinished experience. It certainly has potential but at the moment it is very barebones. There are a lot of areas in this game that you can't help but compare to others and The Great Whale Road never comes off favourably. The game shows a lot of promise as long as they listen to their fans advice on how they can improve certain features.

The Great Whale road is basically a text based story which sees you set off on an adventure to find out what happened to your people. You play the game through the seasons, so have different concerns for each one and times that are better for growing food etc. This sounds more involved than it actually turns out to be, but I'm sure it will be made better before the full release. You get given focus points to place into certain training or attributed for your people, like diplomacy, husbandry and warriors etc. Putting all of your points into diplomacy didn't seem to make much difference if I'm honest, but again maybe that's something that will be finetuned before the game is fully released. The art style is the biggest stand out for this game at the minute - it is truly beautiful to look at. I encountered a lot of bugs, some that completely crashed my game, resulting in an entire season being lost. Other bugs included my advisors details not being loaded so I could see none of the text - even the choices I could make.

Battling in The Great Whale Road is via a RNG card system. I have to admit to often finding RNG incredibly frustrating, as I'm sure many do. In this game it was incredibly frustrating as the only person who needs to be killed for a battle to be won is the leader of either side. They enter the board first and from there it is completely random whether you ever get another one of your men onto the battlefield. This meant that there were a number of occasions where the enemy team had four men on the board and I just had my leader, cornered. I find it difficult to accept losing battles just because I had such crappy luck, I like to lose because I wasn't good enough,  not because luck wasn't on my side!

Overall, I think The Great Whale Road shows a lot of promise. If you want to support the dev from the off go grab it now, but honestly I'd advise waiting for maybe the next update when hopefully the game will have fixed some of these issues.

This is the Police (Steam) - Review

This is the Police is available now on Steam and is priced at £13.99 (though there is a 10% discount at the minute making the game £12.59).

I don't know what I was imagining when I read the description for This is the Police on Steam, but it wasn't quite what I got. That's not necessarily a bad thing; I have LOVED my time with This is the Police, it's just...different to how I imagined and when I read it back now, after I've played hours upon hours of it I don't even know why I expected anything different.

Anyway now I've confused you all with my silly ramblings let's get into the review, eh?

You play as Police Chief Jack Boyd and you are thrust into the role immediately, playing as him in a press conference. You are told you will be out of a job in 180 days, so Jack makes it his goal to earn $500000 by then for his retirement, because obviously every game needs a goal. I can't really see any other cohesive reason for this, but never mind,

So you must take on the role of Chief of Freeburg PD and all it entails. You are given two shifts of investigators and cops to control and you must answer various calls across the map. These will range from mass shoot-outs where you will need to send a SWAT team, a Paddy Wagon and the majority of your cops, to calls concerning "suspicious characters" which can sometimes end up just being an innocent man walking his dog. You will never have enough cops on shift to send the maximum amount of cops to every call, so you have to learn which calls are more important and will need more than two of your cops. If you don't get this balance right, your cops will die.

The first time this happened to me I was aghast. I was already struggling to go to every call and just couldn't afford to lose a member of the force. You can't hire a new person immediately either, and this is where my Jack Boyd started to show just how corrupt he could be*. Because when a member of your force dies you are posed with a question at the end of the shift. You can either hand the body in and declare them dead, or you can hide them and carry on getting their wages. And with the $500000 in the back of my mind, I'm ashamed to say I chose to stuff the body in the morgue and collect the dead cops pay check for myself.

This was the start of an incredibly slippery slope. I hid that body for a week before I realised that another cop would be way more beneficial to me, thanks to my new found "friendship" with Freeburg's mob boss. He wanted my cops at his deals and it was always a set number he wanted, you couldn't short change him. So I declared them dead and hired someone new, only to get an email the next day from the Mayor telling me I had to fire all the black cops on my team. Yikes.

Now you can refuse any of these things. You can refuse to get in bed with the mob and you can refuse to heed the mayors warnings, but this will make your life as Jack Boyd much more difficult. As ever I don't want to go into story spoilers, but trust me it's much harder than you'd imagine to stay straight. I went into This is the Police naively thinking that I'd play it as the good guy, all the way through and prove that good guys can win. Haha. Isn't that a nice idea?

I really enjoyed my time with This is the Police and it is a game I will be returning to. The voice acting is amazing, and the steak art style really suits the game. The story is interesting and the UI is slick and simple to use. It's a fairly simple idea, executed brilliantly and in my opinion well worth the money. Though I have heard rumours of a console release, so if you'd rather play on an XB1 or PS4 it may be worth waiting to see if that happens.

8/10 BUY IT!

*It was me. All me. I'd make a terrible cop. 

A code was provided for the purpose of this review.

The Town of Light (Steam) - Review

The Town of Light is available now on Steam and is priced at £13.99.

It's really tough to sit down and write a review about The Town of Light because it is a game unlike any other I've experienced. I say experienced because you really don't 'play' The Town of Light - you inhabit it. It isn't fun and it isn't entertaining, it is a story that needed to be told. It is an experience that preys on your feelings, on your ability to empathise.

You play as Renee, or more specifically a voice within Renee's head. You must guide her through a recreation of a very real psychiatric hospital in Tuscany; Volterra. And when I say recreation I really mean it, just compare these pictures to the screens on the Steam store to see how well the developer has transported the real asylum to the game. Renee has returned to Volterra after its closure and you must walk around the peeling halls looking for anything that will spark a flashback - which are beautifully hand-drawn storyboards. The story comes in snippets and has a few different endings depending upon what you do with your time whilst in the asylum.

The game is fairly good to look at, a little clunky and rough around the edges but within the asylum's wards they are much better. The voice acting is a little jarring too, in my opinion. I can't really put my finger on why if I'm honest, it was just something that I noticed affected my immersion in the game. Another thing that affected the strength of this game was how few things could be interacted with in the asylum. The world is populated with plenty of items, but very, very few of them can be picked up and when they can be you can;t really do much with them anyway, other than more them around your screen in what is essentially a rather clumsy way which makes text difficult to read. But lets be honest, these things aren't what you really play a game like The Town of Light for, you play for the story, for the experience. I'm not going to go into details with you, because that will always detract from your own experience, but suffice it to say that this game features an extremely emotive narrative - it's dark and depressing with only flashes of hope.

The Town of Light is a powerful story. It isn't overly long, but it will stick with you long after you've finished. It's not a game you can say you have enjoyed (or at least I hope no one has enjoyed it!) but it  is one that will have an affect on you. The Town of Light is a solid, thought-provoking experience, but I struggle to recommend it purely because of how dark it can be and I don't want to be responsible for people's sadness. That being said though I think a lot can be taken from The Town of Light. If you're at all curious, go for it.

7/10 TRY IT!

A code was provided for the purpose of this review.

XCOM 2 (Steam) - Review

XCOM 2 is available now and is priced at £34.99 on the Steam store. It is also available at retail.

I had to buy a new gaming laptop for this review. No, I really did. My trusty old Macbook Pro that is still going strong almost six years after buying it has finally failed me and literally wouldn't run the game as it didn't meet the minimum specifications. *sob* SO I got a shiny new gaming laptop with Windows 10. I've wanted one for awhile really as there are still so many games that don't come out on Mac, so I guess this is a blessing.

Now, I don't pretend to know the first things about computers. In fact I know barely anything about their inner workings anymore, despite being able to use them for the majority of my life. I used to laugh at my Mum as she typed using one finger and struggled to open anything other than Solitaire. Now, I feel like that's how I look to my kids, albeit I'm a slightly faster typist. (Thanks, Uni!). SO yeah, I can't really go into the stats on my new laptop but I'll put a link to it at the bottom of this review. The only reason I am doing this is because I've read that a lot of people struggled to run XCOM2 on their rigs and I really haven't encountered any problems of the sort. The game has run damn near perfectly for me, with just a little lag sometimes when the battlefield view animations were running.

WhenI first loaded up the game I was really blown away by how it looks. I'd heard that a lot of people were disappointed with XCOM 2 graphically but I really think it's a beautiful looking game. I dunno maybe it's because I'm not really much of a PC gamer - I've always been primarily a console gamer, finding them much more accessible to someone as un-techy as me - and I know that some PC games now can look pretty much picture perfect. But there's something about XCOM 2 that is deep in the uncanny valley for me. I thought that the graphics - especially the facial animations and in particular the eyes - were really quite realistic.

Anyway, XCOM 2 sees you pick up 20 years after the events of XCOM - Enemy Unknown. Humanity lost the battle and the XCOM forces are now underground resistance fighters. I think this was an awesome decision on the developers part, and really served to add to the drama of the situation. I feel like it was a perfect fit for the XCOM franchise and it made the time constraints within missions make real sense. These time constraints are a big bone of contention for many, but I found them really refreshing. They really helped me mix up my strategies and approach things from angles I hadn't considered before. There's a multiplayer mode that pits you against other people. This is a mode I haven't had the confidence to try out for any real amount of time as of yet, but when I do I'll come back in and edit this review. Another reason I haven;t played much of the multiplayer is because the story in XCOM 2 is completely gripping. I'd put the game on 'for an hour' and end up finally turning it off four hours later, shattered and bleary eyed but having to admit defeat. Unfortunately I cannot run on less than four hours sleep, trust me I've tried (especially during this review).

XCOM is infamous for its difficulty level and lack of giving a shit about whether you care for your troops or not and you should definitely prepare to be responsible for a hell of a lot of death - and I don't mean of the aliens. Your troops will die over and over again, usually just after you've used a character just enough to become attached. In the process of writing this review I've learnt a new term; 'save scumming' which apparently is the act of reloading a save when the odds haven't been in your favour and you need to undo your mistakes. So at this point I have to hold up my hand and admit to save scumming BUT hear me out! I reloaded twice, because for some reason when I clicked to attack it didn't load the next bit where you choose who to attack and I attacked (and killed) one of my main squad members who was being mind-controlled. This happened to me twice and remain the only times I have reloaded my game. Don't get me wrong watching my beloved troops die is pretty heart-breaking, but it's part and parcel of the game so I'm at peace with it, kind of. But I am not willing to accept the death of my troops when they were killed because of a control not working. So shoot me.

Gameplay is split between the turn-based tactical battles and building your base, which is kinda like Fallout Shelter - you use your resources to build rooms that are essential in your fight against the aliens. The latter obviously takes up less time than the actual bottles do, but managing your resources isn't that much less stressful than trying to get all of your troops home. You will constantly be struggling for the resources to build what you need and stressing out about the time it takes for things to complete. I found that I always had less engineers than I wanted too. But maybe I'm just a much more stress-y person - my family will attest to that.

The battles in this game are on another level. You constantly have to adjust what you thought was your battle plan to try and get out alive - calling in an emergency evac to save your prized troop might be the best thing that you can do, but it will also leave you with one less troop on the field. I did this with my sniper I'd had from the beginning only for the majority of the rest of my team to die. Jeez was my sniper pissed - she was out of action for what felt like years and I was left questioning whether I should have just let her die, especially when she died a few missions after she had made her triumphant return.

I think this is what I like the most about XCOM 2 - the story is amazing, don't get me wrong - but everyones game will be slightly different. Each persons game is made up of the little stories they've made on the battlefield and in their memorial room. Two people could be discussing the same battle but there are infinite different possibilities within that each could have encountered. You might have had a 95% chance to hit one of the enemy forces and missed, whilst the other had a 32% chance and got a critical hit. It's unfair, demanding and brutal but it's a bloody brilliant game that I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with. Buy it people!

10/10 BUY IT!

This is the laptop that I've been using http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/hp-pavilion-gamer-15-ak000na-intel-core-i5-6300hq-8gb-1tb-nvidia-geforce-n9r91ea/version.asp and I love it!

A copy of the game was provided for the purpose of the review. 

Cosplay Maker (Steam) - Review

Cosplay Maker is available now on Steam and is priced at £10.99, though it currently has 25% off.

Cosplay Maker is basically a time management game that revolves around the cosplaying world. I haven't ever really cosplayed in my life - I mean, I've done fancy dress but I've never gotten involved in the cosplay scene past going to Comic Con with the family (although next year I TOTALLY want us to go as The Incredibles). I just think that cosplaying requires a lot of time, money and patience - none of which I possess much of.

So in Cosplay Maker you play as a newcomer to the scene. You must research outfits, make them and work to earn the money for them, all whilst navigating your way through the social circles (and even dating some of them). The art style is cute and the story is alright. But goddamn the music is annoying, I turned it off after half an hour as I couldn't face any more repetition. The game itself is repetitive enough to deal with...

I'm a big fan of management games and have been known to spend hours and hours on them. But Cosplay Maker bored me within the first fifteen minutes. Let me explain...All the gameplay basically takes place in a diary. You have a very basic diary screen that has three blanks to fill in; Mon-Fri (daytime), Mon-Fri (nights) and Weekends. You have a few different options you can place into these time slots, including the options to work on your outfit, work your job, relax, research, or socialise with friends. The problem is that you have to put these in for the whole slot, you can only do three of these things per week. So you could say work your job every day Monday to Friday, and work on your outfit every night but you're soon gonna get burnt out doing that and the next week you;d have to make up for it. It just seems like a really sloppy way to put a management mechanic into a game. In my opinion if you;re going to base an entire game around the idea of making cosplays then you should be able to manage your time in hourly slots, not entire weeks. It was also a problem if you finished your outfit in the middle of the week as you would "continue" to work on it until the end of the week.

I found myself setting a week going and then pottering off to do things around the house whilst the in game week passed - not really what I sit down to game for. Maybe I'm just not the target audience of this game, but I just don't see how this game could constitute anyones idea of fun.

2/10 SKIP IT!

A code was provided for the purpose of this review. 

Big Pharma (Steam) - Review

Big Pharma is available now on Steam and is priced at £18.99.

In Big Pharma you are tasked with running a drug company. You have to create the pills, balance the books and basically make sure you turn a profit from selling your drugs. Which sounds like it'd be fairly simple, but watch the side effects of your drugs - too many and it isn't going to sell. Similarly if your drug is too perfect, you're gonna kill the market. It's a tough balancing act. 

I am a massive fan of Theme Hospital and every year or so I replay it and start looking for a game that comes close to its greatness. If, like me, you came to Big Pharma hoping for that I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed.

That's not to say Big Pharma is a bad game. It isn't, it's actually alright. But for me it just isn't in depth enough where it matters. You do have to put a lot of thought into creating the right drugs and working out which machines you need in order to do so yes, but the act of doing this is what cheapens the game. You end up with rooms full of winding conveyor belts that change your pill from one colour to another (increasing its abilities/side effects) before it reaches the end of the line. But it's just not very satisfying.

The magic of Theme Hospital was in the humour and Big Pharma sorely lacks in that department. It wants to take itself seriously but the game play is just too gimmicky in places for that to happen. I wanted FULL management, building, placing of rooms etc. not just pills and profit. The business management side of the game is quite good and will see you making some pretty questionable decisions ethics-wise, but for the most part the game just feels pretty lacking. 

The game works beautifully, I haven't yet encountered a bug. Controls are great and the interface is intuitive. At first it feels really complicated - the tutorials feel never-ending and aren't worded very well in my opinion, but it quickly becomes quite simple and repetitive. And in this price range I just don't think that's acceptable. Wait for a sale guys.

5/10 TRY IT!

A code was provided for the purpose of this review. 

80 Days (Steam) - Review

80 Days is available now on Steam and is priced at £6.99.

I've spent all day playing this game - well a good seven hours of my day - which considering I own Fallout 4 and Star Wars Battlefront is a pretty big deal. Something about it just kept me going.

80 days sees you become Philes Fogg's valet, Passepartout, as you try and circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. You must find routes from place to place, look after Fogg's health and make the money necessary for your travels as you try and win the Fogg's bet.

I have yet to do it in the required 80 days. On my 1st attempt I did it in 95 days which I didn't think was too bad for a first run. On my second play through I had gotten to Yokohama in 25 days, but then had to wait for ages for a bank loan and then the bank to re-open after the weekend. Gutted. I managed that in 93 days.

I think what is just so addictive about this game is the need to do it in 80 days. I feel compelled to do it now, and can't imagine I will leave this game alone until I have done. The writing in the game is brilliant, I honestly didn't expect to find it as entertaining as I did. The story is great and takes loads of different paths. At times it reminded me of the 'create your own adventure' books I had as a child - no bad thing - and I half expected to be told I was stabbed in the street the moment I turned my back if I picked the wrong dialogue option.

The game tracks all of your attempts too and shows the routes you have taken on a globe in the menu. When you do go in for another try (which you will!) you are shown your previous routes. At first this confused me and I didn't realise I hadn't opened that route in this game yet, leading to a few wasted days. But once you realise what is happening it's a great way to maximise the amount of cities you've visited.

In my opinion 80 Days is really pretty cheap for the amount of fun you can have it with it. If you're hankering for a challenge then grab it now. But everyone should at least put this in their Steam Wishlist and wait for a sale. You won't regret it.

9/10 BUY IT!

A code was provided for the purpose of this review. 

Empire TV Tycoon (Steam) - Review

Empire TV Tycoon is available now on Steam and is priced at £9.99 (though it is on sale for £7.49 at the minute).

I love tycoon style games. Tycoons and simulators are pretty much my most played games on a PC. I've bought Theme Hospital about 7 different times in my life because I love that game so much. Tycoon games are great for a lazy Sunday morning in bed, until you've realised you've spent the entire day on it. Empire TV Tycoon had big holes to fill.

So in Empire TV Tycoon you run a TV channel where you compete with two other TV channels that run from the same building as you. You are not building this studio from the ground up like you'd expect from a simulator game and are instead taking control of one that already has a building, a small amount of viewers and some films to show. You have to increase on everything basically - more viewers, get more films in your library etc. etc.

Now what it does, it does pretty well and I've whiled away a fair few hours on it now trying to get my station to the top. I haven't managed it yet as I have gone too far into the red after a week or so because I kept trying to make full feature films. Yes you can also employ a script writer and make films in house, but this can be an incredibly costly way to increase your film library. I didn't learn, even after the first three attempts and kept trying to make all of the David Attenborough documentaries and feature length Star Wars films. Wow my bank balance went really red.

But Empire TV Tycoon is let down by its simplicity and I don't mean how easy it is to complete, seeing as I haven't yet. But I'd have really loved to have had to start from the ground up; try and broker deals with advertisement agencies, be able to run billboard campaigns for upcoming shows weeks in advance and be able to see a more in-depth analysis of just who was watching at certain times. You can see a general description of who was watching at certain times - smh as elders or kids - but oddly there are no children's shows that you can show, you just have to pick something that doesn't sound too bad and hope for the best. I also found that the children category were watching TV waaayyyy too late into the night, in my opinion you should be able to program a children's hour or some such and then go onto all the more gory stuff without the fear of a rogue child popping up in the audience.

I can't say I've not had fun with Empire TV Tycoon though, because I really have. I just wish there was more to it. But for a tenner or less this is well worth a punt if you're anything like me and love a good tycoon game. Try it out guys.

7/10 TRY IT!

A code was provided for the purpose of this review.