Dead Island is out in the UK tomorrow. It was released in America a few days ago in what can only be described as a major balls-up whereby the developers unfinished test build was released for anyone who ordered it on Steam. Oops. Hopefully, the day one patch which came along shortly after has fixed all of those shenanigans and we’ll be able to play the game the way it was meant to be played. I was mostly curious to find out if it contained even a hint of the emotional heartbreak shown in that infamous trailer, but after the slew of hugely varied reviews, it certainly seems unlikely. The game does allow you to chop off zombie’s individual arms though.
Seriously, this game features some horrifically brutal and gory melee combat. If you’re playing with a gamepad, you can switch on ‘analog-combat’ which lets you swing your boat oar/crowbar/sword with ultimate precision. If you target a zombie’s arm, you can disable it by breaking it at the elbow, after which it will dangle there uselessly. Break the other arm, and the zombie will stagger towards you and use the only weapon it has left: its head. It’s hilarious, and sick, and oh-so-satisfying.
With such mixed reviews, I’m undecided whether to get this or not, but I’m very tempted. I thought I’d had my fill of zombie games, but the more gameplay I see of this, the more my interest gets reignited. Open world zombie survival on a tropical island setting might just be too hard to resist.
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.
Is bingeing bad for us? It seems an obvious question, but I have been thinking about it lately, while revisiting Lost, the tv show that started 22 years ago (cripes, I feel old). Back when it was airing, my friends and I watched it religiously every week, talked about it in great detail, eagerly awaiting the next episode. It was the definitive show of its time, sparking debates and endless theories. It felt great to be a part of that, the sense of all experiencing the same thing together over a long period of time – most seasons had over 20 episodes, which is way more than most shows get these days – and they aired one by one, every week for several months. In today’s age of bingeing a show from beginning to end, I wonder what we are missing by not taking our time.
Hello, world! This post marks the moment in time and space when BangClickReload got a little redesign and was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Every post before this point is rather old and might not look right, and unless I decide to go through them all to fix them, they’re going to […]
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.
