Tagged: FPS

BlizzardOverwatch

Pop Quiz. When’s the last time Blizzard released a new franchise? If you said 17 years then you either know way to much about Blizzard or have obviously been reading all about the new game they announced today, Overwatch. It doesn’t seem like that long but I guess if you don’t consider Starcraft Ghost a new franchise then it makes sense. Blizzard does after all make a company like Nintendo look like it has tons of different franchises.

The game does look interesting though and since it’s going to be a new genre for a company like Blizzard as a first person shooter, I am interested to see what they do with it. The little bit of game play that I’ve been able to check out reminds me loosely of Team Fortress 2. Which if it turns out to be true would make me pretty happy. The game takes a pretty original turn to start things off by taking place in the future.  Not like that’s been done before.

Ok maybe not a completely fair comparison, and future settings do lend themselves pretty well since you get more freedoms in your gun designs and levels.  The rest of the small bit I’ve managed to find looks decent so far.  Small 6v6 battles, different classes to choose from including a big slow gorilla and a fast blinking around woman.  If you squint they might even look like a Heavy and a Scout.  Not really to much else I can say about this for now since I don’t really know anything about the game but we can always hope that it turns out better then Ghost did.  They’re planning for a beta in early 2015 so maybe we’ll get lucky and get a chance to try it then.

 

Oh and before I forget.  To any news sites that want to write about game announcements, please make sure your writers know something about games when they write about them.  Trying to say that Overwatch is “similar in some respects to multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games including League of Legends and DOTA” just makes you look silly.  Unless there are npc minions that roam around the map in lanes, each team has a base they need to defend, and there are levels and item upgrades to purchase; there is no way you could possibly say the game is like those.  I guess that’s what I get for clicking the link to a normal news site.

 

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EnemyFront

It used to be that you would hear about a new WWII fps game coming out every other week.  For the last couple years though most companies seemed to have stopped living in the past and now cant stop looking into the future.  That’s why I actually found it somewhat refreshing to see a new fps game that goes back and give a new entry into the WWII genre with Enemy Front.

In the game you play as a resistance fighter in France.  Although the developers went back to a classic setting for an fps game, they did bring some of the newer features from games into the mix.  There is more stealth available in the game then in most shooters that I’ve played recently although it was kind of hit and miss in the execution during the levels.  Most of the time I found it easier to just run forward and kill everything then it was to try to sneak around.  Additionally, when you end up with a sniper rifle in your hands, once in a while the camera will follow a bullet as it travels to its eventual target similar to what is found in the Sniper Elite series.

It wouldn’t be a shooter if it didn’t include multiplayer and Enemy Front provides the basics that you would expect in any shooter.  You wont find the leveling or cover systems that most games have and instead just tried to focus on giving a classic multiplayer shooter experience.  You can choose a primary and secondary weapon as a way to customize your guy.  I can’t really say too much more about the multiplayer since every time I tried to play it, I was unable to connect to any servers.  From the little bit I did get to play, it seemed like the gameplay although pretty basic would provide an ok experience.

 

What I liked:

  • Price.  Although the game doesn’t give all the bells and whistles that you might expect from a new fps game these days, at $30 you get an ok game that has all the basics.
  • Graphics.  Graphics normally aren’t that important to me, but the game does look really nice if you are able to turn the settings up

 

What I didn’t like:

  • The difficulty.  Even when playing on the hardest setting, the game just isn’t very hard.
  • The AI.  They aren’t the brightest bunch of soldiers you will run into on a battlefield.
  • The Multiplayer didn’t work very well.  Like I said earlier, I was only able to connect to a server a couple times, and when I did it was a very laggy experience.

 

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