Recent reviews by jayne

♥♥♥♥ and alotta balls man :D

Praise the sun! A Souls game has arrived on PC. It is surely weary. We'll let it rest, and get to the new edition's bonus content and the quality of the port in a moment. On the off chance you've been off collecting beetles for the last three years and missed Dark Souls entirely, here's a recap of why to be excited.
On consoles, this began with 2009's Demon's Souls, a sleeper hit that offered a quest so hard, so hefty, so immaculately crafted that developer From Software might have hewn it from rock. It and sequel Dark Souls summoned staggering review scores, gifting a generation of jaded gamers with a cocktail of fear and self-respect.

You're best off not taking your cues from Dark Souls' charming marketing slogan of “YOU WILL DIE.” While it's best known for being nipple-rippingly difficult, ultimately, it's all about the weight I was talking about earlier. That dark heft. First and foremost, this is the physical weight of your character, and the foreboding atmosphere of From Software's stunning world.
Dark Souls tells the story of your hero trying to save an intriguing world which, by every possible metric, fell long ago. Abominations make their homes in the forgotten nooks of a lost civilisation. A handful of enigmatic survivors are all that's left, but you're as free to talk to them as kill them, and they're as liable to help you as to lie. Best of all, the game literally kills you off somewhere between character creation and the first cut-scene. Above all, Dark Souls seems to thrill at escaping expectations.
Dark Souls can happily scare the crap out of you in broad daylight, with something as simple as a giant insect dive-bombing your head as you cross a narrow walkway.
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An example is how your character controls. Just to swing a sword sees your avatar putting their back, shoulder and wrist into the blow, leaving you to wince at the weapon's weight. Hit attack again, and you'll roll the weapon around down, up and around, maintaining its momentum to strike once more, quicker this time. But every single attack, every block with your shield, every panicked evasive roll, takes a fat bite out of your endurance meter. Never mind whatever action games you've played before, you have to learn to fight all over again because, simply put, you're only human.

That might not sound so bad when you're gleefully taking apart a zombie with a mace. How are you going to deal with a pack of feral dogs? Or a rat as big as a Land Rover? These are the questions Dark Souls asks you, before leaning back in its high-backed leather chair to light a cigarette. It never rushes you. It never needs to. It simply tells you, to your face, that certain death lies this way. And then it tells you to walk.

Which brings us to the radioactive feather in Dark Souls' cap. Death is something you fear. If you die, you don't just get cast back to the nearest waypoint. You run the risk of losing any unspent XP or precious humanity points. Never mind fleeing from ghosts in brooding catacombs. Dark Souls can happily scare the crap out of you in broad daylight, with something as simple as a giant insect dive-bombing your head as you cross a narrow walkway.
All of which is why Dark Souls has a reputation of being a colossal beast, but also so addictive. If a game's capable of making you grin with each new item you furtively recover, imagine how it feels to stand over a slain boss. On a minute to minute level, though, what makes Dark Souls moreish is its suffocating consistency. That down-to-earth, tactile combat is a reason to play Dark Souls in and of itself, but it also functions to immerse you in the game's similarly plausible world.
What defines Dark Souls is the moment you decide you're literally out of your depth, and turn the hell around, with all your precious XP intact, to go explore somewhere else. But for the most part, you won't do that. You Will Die.
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You're not completing levels, or even doubling back in the Metroidvania style. You're just exploring, taking step after nervous step through a foul wonderland that oscillates between great cruelty, and moments of sweet relief. Its great achievement is in not feeling like a game world at all, much as Minecraft didn't, and it's a similar joy to explore. This simply feels like a place where you really, really shouldn't be, where every step is heavy with dread.

Let's put it this way - it's not the petrifying Capra Demon boss that defines Dark Souls. It's not the key he drops, that leads you to a room where you fight a disgusting, cannibalistic chef. It's not the labyrinthine sewer that the chef guards, or the village you find beneath the sewer, or the putrid moat the village is built above. It's not the nauseating creatures that live in the moat, nor is it the terrible beast that lays its eggs in them. It's not the staircase you find behind her, leading you down still further. What defines Dark Souls is the moment you decide you're literally out of your depth, and turn the hell around, with all your precious XP intact, to go explore somewhere else. But for the most part, you won't do that. You Will Die.

Saving Dark Souls from the loneliness that haunted the open worlds of say, Metroid, is its online functionality, which was designed with the same blend of accuracy and fearless creativity that defines the rest of the game. Players can scratch messages into the ground, which are pulled at random into your own world. Watch Out For Wizard, you'll find, lying ominously before a closed door. Or more dubious stuff still - Step Off, written over a chasm into blackest darkness.
More traditional multiplayer is limited to blue and black phantoms - other players invading your world, to help or assassinate you, for their own selfish aims. Offering some of those moments of relief are the game's bloodstains. Touch one, and you'll see the final seconds of a real-life player, which is a bit like opening a present. Perhaps you'll get a poignant warning, as they flee from something you didn't spot, or you'll just laugh as they go cartwheeling lackadaisically off a ledge.
The mouse and keyboard controls in the Prepare to Die edition are a war crime. Losing the gentle acceleration of analog movement would have been bad enough, but the mouse doesn't control the camera so much as wrestle it around on a rubber leash.
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All of this survives, totally intact, in the PC port, with a single caveat - you must own a Xbox 360 pad, or suitable equivalent.

The mouse and keyboard controls in the Prepare to Die edition are a war crime. Losing the gentle acceleration of analog movement would have been bad enough, but the mouse doesn't control the camera so much as wrestle it around on a rubber leash. Meanwhile, the GUI's adaption to the keyboard is just awkward. All told, you could be playing on an emulator. If you don't own a pad but somehow end up with Dark Souls running on your PC, remove the power cable from the back with a barge pole.

But if you do own a pad, and quickly grab this 80Kb fan hotpix, which unlocks the game's resolution from 1024x720, you'll be able to enjoy the definitive edition of Dark Souls until the Artorias of the Abyss DLC arrives for consoles this winter. That content's packed in the PC version for free, and we're pleased to announce that it's... fine. It's just fine.

The best thing we can say is that it's not ungenerous. It's three whole new areas for you to plunge through like a nervous knife, each packed with the epic bosses, new items, new spells and unsettling NPCs that you've come to expect during the rest of the game (Artorias of the Abyss is, sadly, squirreled away towards very end of Dark Souls).
You'll cut off the tail of a chimera to use as a whip. You'll descend deeper than you've ever been before. But throughout, there's the niggling sense that this wasn't the work of the entire From Software team.

This being DLC that's basically a given, but it shouldn't feel that way. The first new area, Royal Woods, repurposes a ton

The game is played from the first-person perspective and can be played either in the single-player Mode or multiplayer mode. With the latter, the server is automatically provided by the game and the game takes place in co-op mode.

At the start, the player starts on a raft in the middle of an ocean. The player starts with only a hook with which they can fish barrels, wood, palm fronds, plastic, and other objects out of the water. The player can leave the raft and collect things while swimming, but must be careful as the raft can get swept away by the current and the player can be attacked or killed by the shark who is always near the raft. Using a crafting system, the player can use the collected content to assemble and research new items and to expand and improve the raft. For example, tools, weapons and nets can be manufactured, control and guidance of the raft can be improved, technical systems can be manufactured and purely visual changes can be made.

The player also needs to manage basic needs like hunger and thirst by catching or growing food and purifying water to drink. During the game, the raft may pass by islands which the player can explore to get special items and resources. The player can also dive in coastal regions and collect special items.

With the help of a two-way radio.[1][2][3][4][5][6] radio built in the research table, the creator unveils the game's storyline. The world has been deserted. The protagonist which the players play as is searching for his wife and daughter. Using the two-way radio, the players can find nearby radio signals by changing the radio frequency. Once, the player found the source of the radio. It takes you through a sequence of adventures on that particular land where you can find more information on the survivors and how the world turns into this in the first place. All of this information will be recorded in a journal where the player can refer back on. After gathering all the basic storylines, the players will be given a new radio frequency to find the next storyline. The game has only been updated to Chapter 2, so the storyline has not yet been finished nor perfected.

The rules of Bloons TD 6 are standard tower defense fare. Creeps travel along the path, and you have to play towers in fixed positions with certain target radii to destroy them, without getting rid of all your lives. Where Bloons TD 6 mixes things up is through having dozens of towers, each with their own upgrade trees, and also some fun units to play with that don’t fit the standard tower defense archetype. The plane and helicopters can patrol certain parts of the board, and you can set paths and formations for them! Towers of different types come into play, and certain objectives require you to use just those towers, so you want to learn about everything the game has to offer.

Visually, Bloons TD 6 mixes 3D monkey towers with 2D levels and bloons that come in. Due to the top-down view, it actually works pretty well, and the monkeys are animated well enough that they look smooth when the game’s going at fast speed. Many of the enemies just feature visual variations to differentiate between them, such as colors for different power bloons, and decorations to show that they’re camo, but there’s so much on screen that you’ll have to pay close attention to which is which. And really, everything gets so flooded with action that you’ll have to tell in more general cues what’s on screen and what isn’t. If nothing’s dying, you have a problem.



Each monkey tower has three upgrade paths, with later paths unlocked by earning more experience for them by using the tower more. You can only have upgrades from two paths, and only one path can go to level three or higher. This means that you can have towers of the same base type, but with wildly different effects. And you will need many of these variations to do well, particularly as the bloons come in different types like ceramic, lead, and camo, which often require specialized upgrades in order to destroy. The camo bloons are particularly nasty, as if you don’t have enough firepower that can detect them, they will utterly wreck your defenses.

Additionally, the game now includes her units, with four available at first. These units automatically upgrade themselves, so you don’t have to worry so much about them, and you can only summon one of them on the battlefield. Still, their different attacks can provide a helpful boost to your preferred attacking style, whether you like sending arrows at enemies or dropping explosives.



The game contains 20 levels at launch, but as per previous Bloons TD titles, expect more in later updates. Each level has rewards for beating it on Easy, Medium, and Hard, and then there are different objectives after that to throw you off. For example, you might have to beat a level with only a certain class of monkey tower, or deal with stronger enemies, or reverse paths, and so on. You get money for each time you complete one of these objectives, so there are reasons to play beyond personal challenge and completionism. Though, there is a lot here if you love just hammering down and trying to beat every single piece of content in the game.

And that’s the thing with Bloons TD 6. It’s very clearly for a certain kind of gamer. I’m more the kind that likes to play a ton of different experiences, but I can see this being a game that you can spend hundreds of hours with, if you never get tired of the tower defense mechanics. The game gives you so many units, and so many strategies with your units, and then so many different variations on challenges, that there is a lot to master. And the promise of future content should keep you coming back for more and more. Seriously, there are just so many systems and subsystems that it’s tough to scratch the surface of what’s in play.



Every time I play one of these Flash game adaptations, I feel like I notice a trend of maximalism in these games. Everything just happens so much in these games. There are often complex game systems, levels have multiple variations on top of each other, and the games feel like they’re intended for an audience that wants to complete everything to 300 percent completion. I notice it with stuff like Codename Entertainment’s Idle Champions (Free) and Kongregate’s Realm Grinder (Free) along with the Bloons games. They feel like they’re just meant to overload you with stuff. They feel targeted toward the kind of gamer who gets value out of, say, the maligned Steam “dollars per hour" metric. Which, hey, if you’re someone that only has a few bucks to spend on games, and prefers to obsessively master one title, then Ninja Kiwi makes games just for you. Bloons TD 6 at launch has enough content and upgrades to go after for the different towers, that you’ll likely play this one for hours upon hours at a time.

The one thing about Bloons TD 6 is that it’s a lot like the Kingdom Rush series in that while it’s a paid game, you can also spend a lot of money on top of it. You can buy special powers with the game’s hard currency, Monkey Money. However, you do earn Monkey Money for completing levels and objectives, so you can earn a lot of it by grinding. Additionally, you can unlock all the upgrades for units much faster through in-game purchases. Also, if you want to drop $17.99 for a coin doubler, which seems like the way to go if you want to just wreck everything, you can do that. Seems like the game should probably just go free-to-play at that point, but I suppose there’s enough of an audience that keeps spending on Bloons TD in-game purchases that the paid app plus IAP model works?

BEST GAME EVER NGL

i love this game

i ♥♥♥

FUN AS HELL GAME

GOOD GAYME LES GO

SPOOPY GAME I CRY MUDDA ♥♥♥♥♥