So I finally got round to getting my First Access Club demo key for Duke Nukem Forever, but to be honest I was a tad unimpressed by the experience.
For some reason the resolution, despite being at maximum, is still kind of bad; everything is sort of fuzzy. The models of the characters are quite out-dated, and the gameplay itself feels like that of something released nearly 10 years ago. I still had some fun with it, though, and I never truly had any expectations of any groundbreaking gameplay or ideas. It’s a Duke-fest, with nostalgic comments and scenes that take me back to some of the memories of Duke 3D, but so far nothing more.
The highlight for me was writing ‘dick’ and ‘tits’ in varying colours of pen on the whiteboard next to a commanding soldier who then proceeded to praise my plan to take down the huge monster on the football field, so I did get at least a few laughs out of the typically immature-but-spot-on Duke humour. The demo is only about 30 minutes long so I can’t imagine it’s really enough time to get a great feel for all of the content in the game, but apparently the full game is going to be around 17 hours long. This is ample time for there to be a lot more to see and do, and maybe even redeem the let-down of the simple, rather empty demo. Pretty sure this won’t be a day-one purchase though, as I simply can’t afford to gamble at the moment; I learned my lesson about pre-ordering on faith alone when I bought Naughty Bear.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
Format: PC
Year: 2000
It may look clunky as hell thanks to the original Unreal engine, but Deus Ex was a pioneer in videogames because it gave the player so many choices to make. It resulted in one of the deepest gaming experiences of the time, because it went to great effort to show the consequences of those choices. The story was spread across many ‘hub’ levels, giving you total freedom to approach your objectives whichever way you wanted, aided by an RPG style upgrade tree that you invested in as you played. Wanna finish it without killing a single soul? That is entirely possible. Prefer to tool up with a rocket launcher and just murder your way to the end? Nothing could stop you. Your NPC allies would respond differently back in the Unatco base, depending on what you did out in the field. This level of responsiveness was unparalleled for a long time, to the point that even if you walked into the ladies toilets, your boss would scold you for it during the mission debrief later on. It was many little moments like that which made the game so memorable for me.
I’ve got an enormous backlog to catch up with, so my gaming time has been pretty varied lately as I jump from one thing to another. I’m squeezing every spare moment I can in between work, life, and fatherhood duties, and enjoying some side-scrolling platform action, blasting zombies in one of the best remakes around, and scaling a literal mountain.
I don’t get on with the Souls games at all, but I really wish that I did. For me, the combat was just a little too clunky and, oh, you know, fucking difficult.
Copyright © 2010 - 2026
Site designed and hosted by Tekamutt Media