Game news – 123 games free https://123gamesfree.com Wed, 24 Apr 2019 09:24:36 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.26 https://123gamesfree.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/favicon-gamefree.png Game news – 123 games free https://123gamesfree.com 32 32 The Eternal Castle Remastered Review – Vivid Flashbacks https://123gamesfree.com/the-eternal-castle-remastered-review-vivid-flashbacks/ Wed, 17 Apr 2019 09:57:08 +0000 http://123gamesfree.com/?p=11862 The Eternal Castle Remastered Review – Vivid Flashbacks. Memories are notoriously unreliable. We frequently forget things that have happened or embellish our experiences with new details that never actually occurred. The conceit of The Eternal Castle is that it’s a remaster of a long-lost classic from the late 1980s. The developers claim, with a nod...

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The Eternal Castle Remastered Review – Vivid Flashbacks. Memories are notoriously unreliable. We frequently forget things that have happened or embellish our experiences with new details that never actually occurred. The conceit of The Eternal Castle is that it’s a remaster of a long-lost classic from the late 1980s. The developers claim, with a nod and a wink, that they wished to preserve the “feel” of the original and keep its memory alive. When I first heard about it there was a moment when I thought, “This looks vaguely familiar. I think maybe I played it on my old 286?”

I should have known better than to trust my memory. The Eternal Castle isn’t a remaster at all. There was no game with that name released in 1987–nor, indeed, in any other year of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Instead, The Eternal Castle, as a brand new game in 2019, is a retro throwback that’s at once deeply indebted to the likes of Flashback and Another World while at the same time recognizant of how much game design has evolved over the past 30 years. The result is a cinematic platformer that doesn’t quite play as those games actually did but rather feels like our hazy, unreliable memory of them. Cinematic platformers have come a long way since the ’80s, but the genre’s core tenets of prioritizing animation over input (that is, when you commit to pressing the jump button you have to wait for the complete jump animation to play out before you input another action) and populating its levels with novel set-pieces can be seen running through games as otherwise diverse as the original Prince of Persia in 1989 right up to Limbo, Deadlight and Inside.

The Eternal Castle sees you play as the pilot of a crashlanded spacecraft, exploring a strange planet to recover the items required to fix your ship. The three levels that comprise the meat of the game–there’s a fourth and final level unlocked later–transition through some remarkably varied scenarios. One moment you’ll be sneaking past horrible creatures in a cemetery as flashes of lightning illuminate the night, the next you’ll be climbing up and down the tattered framework of a bombed-out skyscraper. Each of the three levels has a broad theme linking one area to the next, but they don’t rigidly adhere to any one setting. Indeed, one of the drawcards is the thrill of discovering what outlandish or perhaps utterly mundane (which I usually found even more memorable) situation you encounter next.

The Eternal Castle Remastered Review

On a mechanical level, these stages are distinguished in terms of the type of experience they offer. One promises “low ammo” while another warns of “poor visibility,” thus giving you some idea of what to expect and, crucially, what gear you might need to take with you. You can only carry two weapons at once, ammo is scarce, and clips can’t be refilled. Deplete the six-bullet clip on your pistol and you’ll have to swap it out for the next weapon you find, and if that’s a shotgun with two shells then that’s going to have to do the job. Every bullet counts.

This isn’t a run-and-gun shooter, but in its weaker moments it can turn into a bit of a mash-heavy brawler. Some areas, and at least one boss fight, favor use of close-range melee weapons like the club, hand-axe or sword. Your moves are limited to a regular attack, block and charge and further constrained by a stamina meter, thus theoretically offering some sort of considered nuance to the combat. But in any instance where I was fighting more than one enemy I found it easiest to simply mash attack until everyone was dead.

However, there were the odd occasions where my progress was blocked by a particularly tricky section, always combat-related whether it was being outnumbered by a group of thugs in a nightclub or being mowed down by some persistent gunners as I attempted to charge across the no man’s land of a battlefield. Here I took advantage of the game’s structure and backed out of the level to return to the hub and try one of the other two levels. This is effective because throughout the three levels are permanent gear upgrades–a backpack, for example, that allows you to carry more ammo or a bandana that somehow increases your strength and ups melee damage–so you may well find the assistance you need is in another castle.

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Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain Review – Infantry Does The Dying https://123gamesfree.com/earth-defense-force-iron-rain-review-infantry-dying/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 08:04:09 +0000 http://123gamesfree.com/?p=11858 Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain Review – Infantry Does The Dying. Once again, there is an Earth Defense Force game out there. Once again, it is not good. And once again, I couldn’t stop playing it. Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain isn’t good in the same way eating an entire bag of Cheetos in one...

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Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain Review – Infantry Does The Dying. Once again, there is an Earth Defense Force game out there. Once again, it is not good. And once again, I couldn’t stop playing it. Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain isn’t good in the same way eating an entire bag of Cheetos in one sitting isn’t good. There is very little your gaming life needs in this game. But some days, it might be the only thing you want.

Despite a new air of seriousness at the outset, it doesn’t take long to realize that Iron Rain is still Earth Defense Force, and not necessarily some reinvention for the series. Yes, the giant bugs are still invading Earth. Yes, you’re a hapless grunt who must kill the ugly bastards dead for hours upon hours with an ever-increasing arsenal of weaponry. Yes, the story is still told by the most questionable definition of voice acting this side of the very first Resident Evil.

Yet, for more than 20 hours, I kept coming back to it. Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain is in the business of immediate gratification; it gives you a weapon, lets you kill a whole slew of evil critters, generously showers you with rewards in the aftermath, and lets you progress. No questions asked, no sales pitch, few if any barriers between you and the main thing the game does extremely well, which is letting you kill a hell of a lot of bugs.

Earth Defense Force

The game tells you, “Your name is Closer, an EDF soldier. You’ve been in a coma for seven years, Now you’re awake, and we need you to kill every bug you see.” It shoves a gun in your hand, an assault rifle to start with, then drops you in the middle of a grudging facsimile of San Francisco and tells you to go to work. And you do. Giant ants come out of the woodwork within a few seconds. And for what it’s worth, these suckers are smarter in Iron Rain than in previous EDF titles; they know how to flank, how to surround, and when to run to a place of safety. But you’ve got an assault rifle, infinite ammo (for most weapons, anyway), and a grudge. You blast away, sending giant insect thoraxes and the disgusting green guts inside flying everywhere until the city is more dead bugs than street.

That’s mostly a good thing, since Iron Rain’s cities and deserts and forests are depressingly threadbare and devoid of any signs of non-alien life, but they are much less hard on the eyes thanks to some decent texturing and new lighting effects. The improvements are noticeable, but Iron Rain, like every EDF game before it, still falls short of current standards in the looks department.

That’s par for the course in Iron Rain. Most of the new additions–character customization, a Horde mode called Mercenaries–are nice, but they don’t fundamentally change what the series has been since 2006. Mercenaries in particular feels like a watered down version of Destiny 2’s Gambit mode. It’s a fun way to pass time, but without concrete goals beyond collecting as many gems from fallen bugs as possible, it’s not something to pump serious effort into. One of the only two major game-changers is the fact that weapons are no longer exclusive for the series’ traditional classes–for example, Rangers can now wield swords and missile launchers if you so desire. If anything, the character customization is a nice cherry on top, allowing you the freedom to create the insect-slaughtering war machine of your choice.

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Pikuniku Review – Delicious Morsel https://123gamesfree.com/pikuniku-review-delicious-morsel/ Mon, 15 Apr 2019 10:16:16 +0000 http://123gamesfree.com/?p=11854 Pikuniku Review – Delicious Morsel. With its simple character designs and a game world that often looks like a young kid designed it by cutting up and sticking together different bits of colored paper, Pikuniku sometimes feels like a video game adaption of a children’s book. It tells a simple story that doesn’t always quite...

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Pikuniku Review – Delicious Morsel. With its simple character designs and a game world that often looks like a young kid designed it by cutting up and sticking together different bits of colored paper, Pikuniku sometimes feels like a video game adaption of a children’s book. It tells a simple story that doesn’t always quite make sense, it’s pointedly very silly, and there are scenes within it that seem to be based on how a child understands the world. A giant company pays a town by making money rain from the sky; a trendy nightclub will only let you in if you dress “cool” by wearing sunglasses; you play a game someone “invented,” but which is, essentially, just basketball mixed with soccer.

But Pikuniku (Japanese for “picnic”) never feels like it was designed specifically for children. It’s a game about battling a corporate takeover, and the writing has the playful, sarcastically irreverent tone you’re more likely to see from someone in their 20s or 30s. But the childish veneer is charming, and while Pikuniku isn’t the deepest game around, it’s lovely, funny, and engrossing in its own weird way.

At the game’s opening, your character–Piku, an entity made up of an oblong red body with dots for eyes and two long spindly legs coming out of it–awakens in a cave, prompted by a ghost to go outside. The opening tutorial doesn’t take long, because the controls are simple: You can jump, causing Piku to spin haphazardly as he moves through the air, you can kick in any direction, and you can curl your legs into yourself and roll around in ball form. You spend the rest of the game wandering through the small game world, encountering characters and helping solve their problems until, eventually, you find yourself fighting against Sunshine Inc, a giant corporation that is sending robots all over the land to harvest natural resources from the game’s three regions.

Pikuniku Review

Progression rarely requires much thoughtful effort. You explore the world on a 2D plane, talking to as many people as you can, kicking at everything, and solving objectives as they’re handed to you. There are platforming elements that require some finesse, especially when you explore some of the slightly more challenging optional side quests that pop up throughout the game.

Pikuniku is entertaining rather than challenging, though, and even the hardest areas you’ll find are unlikely to trip you up for longer than a few minutes. But this is to the game’s advantage–it’s accessible to inexperienced and young players, and I never felt like the game would have been more enjoyable if it pushed me harder. Piku’s weird, wobbly walk, his awkward jump, and the force of his kicks mean that just moving through the game world is inherently entertaining.

Your ability to kick everything and everyone is crucial, and much of the puzzle solving in the game comes down to kicking an object from one place to another. The kick mechanic is great fun, with objects reacting differently depending on the angle and distance you hit them from, although there are occasional moments of frustration when, for instance, a box gets wedged into a corner and is tricky to get out. Getting stuck for a moment kicking something out of a corner, or dealing with an object that isn’t behaving how you’d like, can interrupt the flow of gameplay.

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Nintendo Labo VR Kit Review – Cardboard Magic https://123gamesfree.com/nintendo-labo-vr-kit-review-cardboard-magic/ Sat, 13 Apr 2019 09:08:05 +0000 http://123gamesfree.com/?p=11851 Nintendo Labo VR Kit Review – Cardboard Magic. With all the high-end hardware requirements typical of VR gaming, you’d think of the Nintendo Switch as the least likely candidate to adopt it. But one of the many things Nintendo is unequivocally good at is making the most of its tech and working within its limitations....

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Nintendo Labo VR Kit Review – Cardboard Magic. With all the high-end hardware requirements typical of VR gaming, you’d think of the Nintendo Switch as the least likely candidate to adopt it. But one of the many things Nintendo is unequivocally good at is making the most of its tech and working within its limitations. The new Labo VR Kit is yet another example. While it doesn’t always overcome its inherent shortcomings, Nintendo’s latest cardboard-based do-it-yourself package cleverly transforms the Switch into a light, inventive virtual reality gaming experience with the tools to go beyond the initial library.

First things first: You have to build. Thankfully, assembly is part of the fun. Like the previous Labo packages, the software contains detailed and digestible step-by-step instructions, which are animated to show you how to put everything together without a hitch–the encouraging communication also helps take the edge off the laborious, time-consuming aspect of it all. Construction is almost fool-proof since each cardboard sheet has precisely cut lines and slots for everything to be folded and snapped into place. There’s no denying the satisfaction of seeing little bits of cardboard gradually come together as an intricate device solidly held together by rubber bands, exact creases, and plastic grommets.

So, how does the Switch become a VR headset? You first build the mount that contains the slot you slip the Switch into, which also holds the packaged goggles. The mount keeps everything in place nicely and the adhesive pads keep the Switch safe. Once you set the Labo software to VR mode, the screen transforms to a stereoscopic view for the lenses. Since there is no headstrap, you’ll need to hold the Switch up to your face throughout your time in VR mode. It’s worth noting that the Switch’s 720p screen resolution is well below that of any other VR platform, resulting in a distinct lack of visual clarity–luckily, this limitation doesn’t detract from the types of experiences Labo VR delivers.

Nintendo Labo VR Kit Review

With the headset ready to go, you can physically look up, down, left, and right by moving your head. But because the Switch isn’t able to do positional tracking, forward or backward movements aren’t recognized and could be nausea-inducing. Tracking relies entirely on the Switch’s built-in gyroscope and accelerometer, which results in a relatively smooth viewing experience. Looking in and around in VR works pretty well, and in combination with the Joy-Cons’ own gyroscope and accelerometer (and the right Joy-Con’s IR sensor), the cardboard devices become functional pieces of hardware.

By and large, the creative process is what drives the Labo VR Kit to become more than its packaged contents–but to see that, you should experience its roster of games, minigames, and proof-of-concept sandboxes. Once you’ve assembled a new cardboard toy (called Toy-Cons), Labo then walks you through a specific game made for it. The Toy-Con Camera transports you to the middle of an ocean where you can snap photos of marine life, or look upward to float to the surface and see a bigger world. Twisting the Toy-Con Camera lens works just like zooming in with an actual camera lens because of the Joy-Con placed inside recognizes those small movements. Despite the Toy-Con Elephant being the toughest one to work with, the Marble Run game it’s tied to is a series of smart physics-based puzzles for you manipulate platforms, gravity, and trampolines to get a marble through a goal.

The novel applications don’t end there, either. The Toy-Con Bird delivers flight movements for its open-area collectathon and racing game because the Joy-Con, which is placed on the “bird”‘s beak rocks back and forth when you flap the cardboard wings. A personal favorite is the Toy-Con Blaster; it’s a pump gun for with tactile feedback that matches the launching of explosive balls for its on-rails shooter game. There’s impressive cleverness in how Nintendo makes use of the motion-tracking capabilities and cardboard components, and how they translate to sensible control schemes. These aren’t intended to be long-form experiences; rather, they’re bite-sized showcases of VR functionality for each of the cardboard devices you assemble.

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Ape Out Review 2 – Guerrilla Gorilla https://123gamesfree.com/ape-review-guerrilla-gorilla-2/ Thu, 11 Apr 2019 03:47:12 +0000 http://123gamesfree.com/?p=11846 Ape Out Review 2 – Guerrilla Gorilla. Ape Out is, at heart, a game about jazz. The soundtrack is crafted by your improvised actions as you careen a runaway ape through the game’s levels, leaving a path of destruction and bloodshed in your wake. It’s high energy and exciting, even if, by the end, it...

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Ape Out Review 2 – Guerrilla Gorilla. Ape Out is, at heart, a game about jazz. The soundtrack is crafted by your improvised actions as you careen a runaway ape through the game’s levels, leaving a path of destruction and bloodshed in your wake. It’s high energy and exciting, even if, by the end, it feels like you’re playing the same basic tunes over and over.

It’s a very simple game, at least in terms of how it’s played–You’re an ape, and you must run through each level without getting blown up or shot three times by human enemies. The camera is positioned above you, giving you a Hotline Miami-esque omnipotence when it comes to where your enemies are positioned. You can push enemies, who will splat and die if they hit a solid object, or you can grab them, at which point they’ll fire at least one shot from their gun straight forward, hopefully into another person. A grabbed enemy can be thrown with more precision, which is especially handy if they’re wearing an explosive pack, which will blow up and take out anything within its blast radius. You’ll spend most of your time running forward, smacking enemies as you go, occasionally snaking away to avoid a mob or stopping to rip a steel door off its hinges.

But the way Ape Out elevates its relatively straightforward gameplay loop is by evoking the feeling of creating music, thanks to Matt Boch’s captivating procedural soundtrack, which generates a drum-heavy percussion beat under the action. During lulls, the music fades to a calm, but when the action gets frenetic the drums and cymbal crashes kick in hard, and there are occasional horns and contextual changes depending on what’s happening in any given stage. Additionally, the levels are presented as though they were albums, with each new subsection representing a track, complete with transitions from Side A to Side B at the midway point. It’s a fascinating system which gives those moments where you’re in the middle of a killing spree a significant extra kick. It’s a repetitive game–you’re ultimately doing the same thing continually over the whole course of the game–but it can also be quite propulsive and thrilling, especially when you’re on a good run.

Ape Out Review 2

The stages themselves are starkly designed, with limited color palettes and simple geometric shapes. The ape itself is a single orange shape, and enemies are demarcated by a handful of different designs. There’s a slight film grain effect over the action that gives everything a subtle jittery quality, and the album motif is even baked into the loading screens, which make the faint scratching noises of a vinyl record that is left on the turntable after the music has finished. The game’s greatest strength is how defined and consistent this aesthetic is. The unique art blends perfectly with the soundtrack, making the game’s violence a bit more palatable than it might have otherwise been, and its boldness pulls you into the action very well.

It’s great that Ape Out has so much style and flair, because it’s essential to your investment due to the game’s lack of variety. There are slight variations in how each level operates–the third album, for instance, features combustible liquids that can create walls of fire if you throw an explosives expert into them, and in the second (and best) album there are windows that riot police can rappel through–but they never dramatically alter how you need to play the game. A few new enemy types pop up, but the methods you use to deal with them never really change. There are a handful of good sections where the lights go out and you need to track enemy movements based on the beams of their flashlights, and they highlight how much the game could have benefited from more interesting gimmicks and variety. It’s a shame that Ape Out isn’t more playful, because whenever new ideas are introduced, they’re always welcome–there just aren’t that many of them. The game is short, yet some levels still feel superfluous and samey. I kept hoping a level would come along that would fundamentally change how I had to play, but this never happened.

Levels are semi-procedurally generated, so while some landmarks and choke-points will always pop up in roughly the same spot, the exact layout and enemy placements will change. This means that you’ll sometimes find yourself in situations where a huge number of enemies swarm you at once, and properly defending yourself is all but impossible. Several times I encountered enemies wearing explosive vests and found that avoiding both their blast radius and gunfire from another enemy was frustrating and futile. The game isn’t too difficult on the default difficulty, although there are occasional spikes when a level is a bit longer, which gives enemies more time to put bullets into you.

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Dangerous Driving Review – Burnt Out https://123gamesfree.com/dangerous-driving-review-burnt/ Wed, 10 Apr 2019 08:06:16 +0000 http://123gamesfree.com/?p=11841 Dangerous Driving Review – Burnt Out. It’s impossible to play or talk about Dangerous Driving without comparing it to Criterion’s seminal Burnout 3: Takedown. This is by design, of course, as developer Three Fields Entertainment–a small indie studio comprised of former Criterion alum–set out to create a spiritual successor to the dormant racer; latching onto...

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Dangerous Driving Review – Burnt Out. It’s impossible to play or talk about Dangerous Driving without comparing it to Criterion’s seminal Burnout 3: Takedown. This is by design, of course, as developer Three Fields Entertainment–a small indie studio comprised of former Criterion alum–set out to create a spiritual successor to the dormant racer; latching onto the groundbreaking Burnout 3 as a clear and popular focal point. Everything about Dangerous Driving’s design, right down to small details like font selection and the phrasing used in its loading screens, is distinctly Burnout 3. It foregoes the advances made in its sequels–like traffic checking and the introduction of an open-world–to hone in on what made Takedown so special.

My first hour or so with Dangerous Driving was fraught with bewilderment, however. There’s a single song that plays on the main menu, but other than this there’s a complete absence of music throughout the entire game. Licensed tracks are a crucial component to the Burnout formula, and after playing a few events in near-complete silence, their monumental importance can’t be overstated. Obviously, this is true of most games, but particularly one where high-speed exhilaration is on the menu. After initially thinking this was either a bug or that music would eventually find its way into the game via a day one patch, I hopped into the audio settings and discovered the reason for its omission: Spotify integration.

This is a smart idea for an indie studio that might not have the budget to splash out on licensed music, and after finding something suitably upbeat and aggressive myself, the experience of tearing around the track and wrecking other cars was improved tenfold. Yet asking people to own a premium service just to get music in their game is a fairly excessive compromise. It’s an understandable trade-off for gaining access to popular music in a budget-priced game, but beyond the monetary requirement, it also has an effect on gameplay. Three Fields can’t manipulate Spotify music in any way, so songs will just play through from start to finish without the incorporation of any interactive elements. This means that the music doesn’t change its tone when you boost, or slow down and warp during takedowns, and that robs these moments of some of their potential impact.

Dangerous Driving Review

When you’re out on the road, the handling of each car will feel instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever played Burnout before. While most contemporary racing games are wary of fully embracing an arcadey style without featuring some kind of simulation element, Dangerous Driving is a full-blooded, balls-to-the-wall arcade racer. You’ll hold down the accelerator ad infinitum until your finger aches, careen around corners by either scraping across the steel guard rails or tapping the brake button to effortlessly drift around, and weave between oncoming traffic at over 200-miles-per-hour as the nitrous oxide flames spewing out of each exhaust pipe propel your car forward.

Unfortunately, the physics can be fairly wonky at times, often bringing your vehicle to a complete stop because you brushed against a wall; while other times it will shoot you straight up into the air, or force your car into a complete 90-degree turn. This can be incredibly frustrating during the latter stages of an event when one mishap is enough to send you tumbling to the back of the pack. Collision detection is also inconsistent; numerous times a head-on crash resulted in my car clipping through the floor and appearing unscathed on the other side. The face-distorting sense of speed, though, is genuinely electric, and the PS4 Pro version maintains a stable 60 frames-per-second with one notable exception: It has a tendency to hitch rather egregiously when you’re driving through tunnels.

The crux of Dangerous Driving’s racing is centered around the need to drive recklessly and constantly put yourself in harm’s way. By hurtling towards incoming traffic, performing near misses, nailing drifts, tailgating, and taking down your opponents, you earn variable degrees of boost that will help fire your chosen vehicle towards the finish line. There isn’t a discernible difference in how each car handles, other than the fact that some go faster than others, but their pinpoint responsiveness coupled with the high framerate ensures that you’re fully capable of serpentining in and out of danger if your reactions are quick enough. Again, this is quintessential Burnout, with the destruction of your fellow drivers doubling your boost meter and incentivizing the most perilous behavior possible. These takedowns are reminiscent of those that debuted in Burnout 3, although the slow-motion crashes in Dangerous Driving are surprisingly underwhelming. They’re not bad, but they’re also not impactful enough–which the aforementioned issues with music contribute to–lacking in any real dynamism or metal-crunching detail.

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God Eater 3 Review – Aragami Hunter https://123gamesfree.com/god-eater-3-review-aragami-hunter/ Tue, 09 Apr 2019 07:17:23 +0000 http://123gamesfree.com/?p=11838 God Eater 3 Review – Aragami Hunter. Gigantic inhuman entities threatening mankind are something that we’re all familiar with in the year 2019. Monster Hunter, Attack on Titan, Godzilla–there’s something inherently compelling about the trope where desperate survivors pit themselves against incredible odds and incredibly large monsters at the end of the world. God Eater...

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God Eater 3 Review – Aragami Hunter. Gigantic inhuman entities threatening mankind are something that we’re all familiar with in the year 2019. Monster Hunter, Attack on Titan, Godzilla–there’s something inherently compelling about the trope where desperate survivors pit themselves against incredible odds and incredibly large monsters at the end of the world. God Eater 3’s narrative, much like its predecessors, leans heavily into this conceit and tells an enjoyable (if light) tale as icing on its frenzied action-RPG cake.

Part of a series that has historically been for PlayStation portable devices, God Eater 3 is the first entry created with home consoles and PC as its primary platforms. Also significant is a new developer, Marvelous, a studio perhaps more well-known for its contribution to games with prodigious amounts of swimsuit DLC than the stuff of the monster-hunting variety. This tonal shift isn’t as evident as you might think, though, especially since the series was already awash with anime tropes and aesthetic choices. God Eater 3 doesn’t deliver any real twists and honestly, that’s fine. The real friends that you make along the way in God Eater games aren’t the ones with compelling backstories; they’re the ones that help you kill Aragami with the sort of precision reserved for surgical procedures.

Aragami are representative of the evil threatening the world–they’re gigantic predators that devour everything in their wake as the world drowns under deadly ash storms. A nightmarish fusion of beast and mech, there’s something brutal about their designs, which hammers home the divide between the alien and the organic world that you have to protect. You’re the mostly-silent star in this particular story, doomed to take up the thankless job of Aragami eradication for people who have treated you like an expendable weapon since infancy.

God Eater 3 Review

There’s a predictable follow-up series of events: You’re liberated, you recover from your trauma through the power of friendship, and then you meet a life-changing person who isn’t quite who they appear to be. There are plenty of similarities between the core story of God Eater 3, the previous entries in the franchise, and whichever monster-fighting anime is currently trending on Crunchyroll, so while it’s an entertaining tale, temper your expectations for crushing moral dilemmas.

What will likely exceed your expectations, whether you’re familiar with God Eater’s particular brand of slaughter or not, is the combat. While it’s easy to draw parallels with Monster Hunter, God Eater 3 is a fair bit closer to Devil May Cry’s style of action. It’s fast-paced and frenetic, reliant on chaining high-octane and high-mobility combos without getting hit in order to efficiently dissect Aragami. You have no shortage of movement options, including a specific command for Dash abilities, and you can effortlessly switch between melee and ranged combat. The feeling of stabbing an Aragami’s plated shins with your greatsword in close combat before flying away and firing a shotgun shell right into the exposed wound never really gets old.

Another mechanic, which is now a staple of the God Eater series, is the ability for your weapon to consume the essence of the beasts you kill. In doing so, you get to enter Burst Mode, giving you better damage output, flashier combo moves, and increased range on your basic attacks. The effects vary depending on your weapon loadout, which offers an interesting level of strategy for you to consider from mission to mission. The most difficult bosses in the game have a similar mechanic of their own, where attack patterns can grow a host of other deadly variables, making your defensive strategy just as important as your damage output.

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Jump Force Review – Shonen Through And Through https://123gamesfree.com/jump-force-review-shonen/ Mon, 08 Apr 2019 08:36:29 +0000 http://123gamesfree.com/?p=11835 Jump Force Review – Shonen Through And Through. Jump Force is a celebration of 50 years of Weekly Shonen Jump manga, featuring nearly four dozen fighters from 16 of the magazine’s most iconic stories. Bandai Namco’s arena tag-team fighting game borrows plenty of elements from its source materials, for better and worse. Although Jump Force’s...

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Jump Force Review – Shonen Through And Through. Jump Force is a celebration of 50 years of Weekly Shonen Jump manga, featuring nearly four dozen fighters from 16 of the magazine’s most iconic stories. Bandai Namco’s arena tag-team fighting game borrows plenty of elements from its source materials, for better and worse. Although Jump Force’s campaign story drags on for way too long and ignores what could have been interesting character interactions in favor of repeated excuses for everyone to punch the crap out of each other, its combat is an enjoyable dance between two teams of fighters–thanks to the game’s excellent mechanics and flashy visuals.

In Jump Force, you’re an ordinary human who’s caught up in a warzone when the Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Naruto universes collide into our world and bring their assortment of heroes and villains with them. After being mortally wounded by Frieza, you’re resurrected as a hero capable of learning the powers, skills, and abilities of Shonen Jump’s characters, and you decide to join Goku, Luffy, and Naruto’s Jump Force of allies in order to fix everyone’s broken world. What follows is a fairly stereotypical shonen affair, with your character growing stronger over time, enemies and friends switching sides, and a mysterious evil working behind the scenes. Like most fighting games, there’s not a single problem you don’t ultimately just fix with your fists, from deciding team leader to knocking sense into those who have been corrupted by the same evil forces responsible for everyone’s worlds colliding with one another.

There’s a decent story in Jump Force, but it’s buried beneath a second act that goes on for far too long. After getting acquainted with your new allies, the game tasks you with responding to threats around the globe, as well as the recruitment of any additional heroes who’ve managed to stumble into our world from their respective universes. Character models during cutscenes are all rather cookie-cutter, as everyone stands in the same position throughout the story, only stiffly moving their mouths and occasionally blinking. The actual story moves with the same awkwardly slow pace, and it doesn’t explain what’s going on with everyone’s worlds or what the villains’ motivations are until the third act, so you play through most of the game without any idea as to what you’re really fighting against. Not being able to skip cutscenes is also rather annoying, as exiting out of a mission for any reason–such as buying more items to use in combat–has you watch the same 40- to 90-second scene again.

Jump Force Review

There are brief snippets where you can see how a side story might have helped flesh out the characters, which in turn could have been a good incentive to keep pushing forward through the campaign. For example, Boruto recognizes a sadness behind the eyes of My Hero Academia’s Midoriya and confides with the young hero that he knows how hard it is to live up to the ideal of father figures. But the game breezes past moments like this in order to get to the next fight.

Thankfully, those fights are a blast to play. Every combatant comes equipped with an assortment of attacks, blocks, grabs, counters, and dodges that operate in a rock-paper-scissors system. Combat is fairly accessible, and it doesn’t take long to understand how the basic mechanics work. However, with over 40 playable fighters, it takes time to get a handle on the entire roster’s assortment of strengths and weaknesses, giving you plenty of reason to keep playing. Each fighter has four distinct and unique special attacks as well. Even though these special moves can be broken down into one of seven different types–short-range, dashing, counter, area-of-effect, long-range, shield, or buff–each fighter handles quite differently. If you’ve read the manga that these characters come from, you already have a fairly good idea as to what most of these iconic moves are and how they behave, but you’ll still have to practice with each fighter to get a grasp of what every move can do.

Every attack, basic or advanced, can be avoided in some way–whether via blocking, dodging, or countering–so most fights are tense, with each side looking for a way to bait their foe into opening themselves up for attack without putting themselves at a disadvantage. I’ve had fights where, after 30 seconds of back-and-forth, both sides are one strike away from defeat, and the battle continues for another full minute of counters, perfect dodges, and last-second blocks. It’s empowering to finish off your foe with a perfectly executed combo or snag a victory when all hope seems lost. Each win feels like it needs to be earned, and this encourages you to explore the varied movesets of each fighter, experiment in how attacks might be chained together, and deduce your go-to characters’ weaknesses in order to avoid defeat.

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Far Cry: New Dawn Review – Duct Tape Apocalypse https://123gamesfree.com/far-cry-new-dawn-review-duct-tape-apocalypse/ Sat, 06 Apr 2019 04:44:57 +0000 http://123gamesfree.com/?p=11831 Far Cry: New Dawn Review – Duct Tape Apocalypse. Spoiler alert: At the end of Far Cry 5, the United States gets nuked. Seventeen years later, the region and residents of Hope County have endured and mostly recovered from the devastation anew. The vegetation is more abundant, society has been reshaped, and there is a...

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Far Cry: New Dawn Review – Duct Tape Apocalypse. Spoiler alert: At the end of Far Cry 5, the United States gets nuked. Seventeen years later, the region and residents of Hope County have endured and mostly recovered from the devastation anew. The vegetation is more abundant, society has been reshaped, and there is a hell of a lot more duct tape everywhere. Everything feels new and different–well, except for that fact that there’s ruthless, tyrannical oppression taking over everything and it’s up to you, and basically only you, to stop it. Some things never change. That’s Far Cry: New Dawn–despite a few new novelties and a great mechanical twist, New Dawn feels exactly like what it is: a direct continuation of Far Cry 5.

That’s not inherently a bad thing. New Dawn features the same kind of forward-thinking approach to open-world exploration and progression as Far Cry 5. While main missions are mapped out for you, the discovery of side activities like enemy outposts, treasure hunts (formerly prepper stashes), and companion recruitment missions mostly comes from your own organic exploration. Earning perk points to improve your abilities is tied to your discovery of hidden caches and diversifying the activities you undertake. New Dawn is a more concise game–the map is smaller than Far Cry 5 and there’s less curated content to discover this time around–but the emphasis is still on staying out in the world and soaking up the environment.

That sense of freedom has been diminished, however. It’s not the fact that you’re revisiting Hope County, but rather how New Dawn sets up the pins. In Far Cry 5, you began in the middle of the map and were allowed to explore in any direction you wished; New Dawn starts you off in the bottom corner of the map and basically pushes you in a steady, linear sweep north as you slowly reclaim territory, and asks you to regularly bring resources back to your base in that starting area to bolster it.

New Dawn Review

What’s to stop you from just darting ahead? Well, damage numbers. New Dawn introduces RPG elements, like damage numbers, into its design for the first time in the series. The game’s guns and enemies fall into four different tiered ranks, and getting ahead requires that you go out into the world to scavenge crafting materials to upgrade your base so you can upgrade your weapons workshop and eventually craft better guns to take down the higher rank enemies impeding your progress. Outfits, armor, and defense numbers don’t factor in your growth, just weapons. Guns at rank 1 and 2 will do a minimal amount of damage to well-armored rank 3 and elite rank enemies.

Early on, this can be annoying if you try to push the limits of the game in a way you’re not meant to. Heading too far into the map and needing to use up hundreds of bullets to take down a rank 3 bear you encounter isn’t terrifying as much as it is silly, and eventually, the demands of story missions will stop you from going too far.

But if you dial down your Far Cry 5-style expectations of freedom and go with the flow, you run into these awkward predicaments far less often. Your guns feel like they do the damage they’re supposed to, and enemies feel like they have an acceptable level of resistance. In fact, once you get access to the top-tier arsenal, things will start to swing wildly in your favor–your guns will feel overpowered to the point where even shooting rank 1 enemies in the foot might be enough to take them out–which feels great when you’re getting overwhelmed. Played the right way, the game’s RPG-style systems basically feel invisible, and you can enjoy Far Cry’s style of weighty gunplay and feel like an incredibly competent one-person army. The feeling of eventually being able to overcome New Dawn’s elite enemies is good, but you’re left wondering why you needed to be held back by artificial gating at all.

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Tetris 99 Review – Embrace The Chaos https://123gamesfree.com/tetris-99-review-embrace-chaos-2/ Fri, 05 Apr 2019 03:43:13 +0000 http://123gamesfree.com/?p=11828 Tetris 99 Review – Embrace The Chaos. What can be said about Tetris that hasn’t been said already? Well, that depends on the type of Tetris game in question. Tetris Effect changed the conversation around the classic puzzle concept last year by directly tying your actions and the flow of stages to the fluctuating rhythm...

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Tetris 99 Review – Embrace The Chaos. What can be said about Tetris that hasn’t been said already? Well, that depends on the type of Tetris game in question. Tetris Effect changed the conversation around the classic puzzle concept last year by directly tying your actions and the flow of stages to the fluctuating rhythm of an eclectic (and all-around amazing) soundtrack. In the case of the Switch-exclusive Tetris 99, the moment-to-moment gameplay is more immediately recognizable, but a new twist helps it stand out from Tetris games of old: a 99-player last-player-standing competition. It’s chaotic, which can work in your favor or lead to moments that feel practically unfair. Thankfully, with the solid gameplay at its foundation and a quick means of getting into a new match, no game of Tetris 99 feels like time wasted.

The competitive aspect of Tetris 99 is something most people are familiar with, albeit based on less ambitious setups. Clear some lines, and a batch of junk lines will appear in a queue next to your opponent’s puzzle space. If they can clear lines of their own, the junk-in-waiting can be negated; if no new lines are completed, the weight of your success will bear down on their board and reduce the free space for mid-drop tetrimino trickery.

This straightforward setup has, in the past, been utilized in two-player scenarios. With 99 players competing at once here, all visible next to your puzzle space with lines appearing and disappearing between players every few seconds, your early matches will feel a little confusing.

Tetris 99 Review

Somewhat frustratingly, Tetris 99 offers no explanation of its inner workings nor the function of various attack modes you can pick from during a match. You can get really far by simply playing Tetris the way you always have, but an uninformed player will always be at a severe disadvantage. Even though all the info is a quick internet search away, it’s disappointing that Tetris 99 is bereft of these details or explanations.

So here it goes: You can influence automated attack patterns using the right analog stick, determining whether your offensive lines get sent to randoms, players attacking you, people near death, or players who have done the most killing in the match. Playing handheld, you can also use the Switch touchscreen to target players manually. Less intuitively, when playing docked, the left analog stick can be used to cycle through the phalanx of players on either side of your screen.

The control given to you by most of these options can be used in strategic ways, but none more so than by attacking killers, AKA the “badges” option. It’s named thusly because killing a player nets you a portion of a badge and, better yet, any belonging to the defeated player. These badges enhance the output of your attacks, throwing more lines per combo and making the final moments of a match a living hell for your opponents. With the increasing speed of a Tetris 99 match, manually picking your targets based on small icons is an expert’s game, so these automated attack profiles are ultimately to your benefit, even if they aren’t explained well and could potentially be a source of confusion for new players.

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