COMPUTER GAME: ROCKET LEAGUE (2015)

Rocket League is a game where you are driving around in a rocket-powered car. This car can perform jumps, barrel roles and other maneuvers inside an arena. The goal of this is to play a game of football, hitting a ball around until it goes in the other teams goal and scores your team of 3 cars a point.

At its core, Rocket League is simply a fun game. You are driving around, boosting and jumping to get the ball in cars that look crazy. There is a variety of different arena's with obstacles arranged differently (pits, columns, etc.) to challenge you as well as some different game modes. There are no paywalls, with only cosmetic items being available for purchase (although you unlock one every couple of levels). And there is a wide variety of cosmetic levels and bodies. If everyone is of the same skill level, it can be a fun experience.

The downside is when matchmaking pits you against people of different skill levels (or even your friends, if you don't advance equally in skill). This can be frustrating as they do trick shots and keep getting the ball in no-win situations for you (or vice-versa). Also, the servers lately have been filled with games where players appear to be running bots just to get experience.

Overall, this game is definitely good. A more beginner friendly atmosphere and better matchmaking would help it allot. But it does what it sets out to do- be a fun car-sports game that is a good time. It is also a shame that the game has microtransactions (even if they are just cosmetic) considering Steam still sells it for $20US.

3 out of 5 Rocket Waffles in League.

VIDEO GAME REVIEW: SUPERHOT (2016)

I recently received a steam key for Superhot as part of the Kickstarter for the board game. I have recently spent a little bit of time with it and have mostly found it to be fun although it is occasionally frustrating.

The main game is a first person shooter where 1 hit will kill you (and 1 hit will mostly kill the enemies as well). The main hook of the game is the art style, which is featureless polygons. The other hook is that time only moves when you move (which includes looking around). You go through a series of levels and a meta-story about playing a hacked game while you do this.

The game is fun in that each level is like a mini-puzzle with weapons and enemies lying around. The mechanic of time only moving when you do lets you assess situations and takes a normally frantic game type (first person shooter) and makes it nearly turn-based.

However, the frustrating part is that it is a puzzle and it does still rely on reflex. On some of the larger levels, it can get quite tedious to go through the same first slow-moving part of the level before you puzzle out a solution. This is particularly true if you are completing a difficult section of the level and than a stray bullet catches you, meaning your pinpoint timing has to be repeated. 

Most the levels, however, are too short and fast paced for this to be a worry. Overall, I found Superhot to be a very enjoyable game which has a novel take on the first person shooter genre. It is definitely worth checking out.

4 out of 5 smoking-hot waffles

Computer Game Review: Nation Red (2009)

Nation Red is a top-down shooter released back in 2009. What originally attracted me to this game was the survival element of being in an arena and fending off wave after wave of zombie. While Nation Red delivered in this, I did find the whole experience lacking over other, similar games out there.

There isn’t much of a story to this game. You start the game by choosing one of four classes (Medic, Gunner, Sniper or Scout) and are then put in the game. You use WASD to move, and the mouse to aim and shoot. There are some good mechanics here, such as reduced speed backpedalling. However, there are also allot of annoying mechanics. The fact you move incredibly slow with a melee weapon makes them nearly useless (for me anyway). As you kill Zombies, you get experience to pick perks (such as getting a free grenade every 30 seconds) which you deal with the increasing number of zombies.

 

And that really is all there is to the game. Single player consists of these arena’s and a specific wave to survive to. In multiplayer, up to 4 players each choose a class and go at it. The maps have a bit of variety but all boil down to the same thing: some zombie spawn points and some walls with a different texture on top. Sometimes the objectives change, as you have to hold zombies off a certain area or defend a structure in the middle. However, the gameplay and strategy remain the same throughout and most players just end up camping the spawn points. The small online community and only handful of maps doesn’t help as maps are simply repeated throughout. There are the possibilities of deeper tactics and teamwork, but for the most part this is what most online games boil down to.

 And at Nation Red’s core, that is it’s main problem. There is no sense of progression as you go through the levels and at the end you lose most of your progress. It would have been cool to pick some permanent wargear or passive perks for your character (kind of like X-Com) as you slowly level up your character.

That being said, it is still fun to jump on for a game or two of Nation Red every so often. It is hectic survival-type gameplay. However, I feel that this game had allot more potential than how it turned out, The addition of some persistent skills or customization for your character or some more varied missions would have done the game a world of good. At the moment, it is only good for some arcade-type action, but gets repetitive quite quickly.

2 out of 5 re-animated red waffles.