Hunted: The Demon's Forge

Yes, this game came out in 2011 but I personally love going back and playing older games because there are lots of hidden gems out there. This game definitely flew under the radar for most people because it wasn't a triple A title. The game also store some game play mechanics from Gears of War like the Roadie Run, the movement and cover mechanic.

Does that really matter? No, because the game is fun and isn't a Gears clone. To me, it's two types of games in one depending on which character you choose to play as. Hunted has two main characters to play as: Caddoc, who uses a sword and shield to hack and slash his way through the game, and E'lara, an elf who uses a bow and arrow to stay back and snipe enemies from a distance while Caddoc acts as the tank.

Which each character specializes in different weapons, they can still use the other weapon though not nearly as well. For example, Caddoc can switch to a crossbow if you want to take out enemies out of reach, or to shoot objects that will trigger the finding of a secret area. He cant however upgrade to better ranged weapons. E'lara can switch to a sword and shield when enemies get too close , but she isn't a heavy hitter so she needs to deal with an enemy fast then get back to a distance to start sniping again.

Both characters can also use magic. E'lara upgrade to use magical arrows. Some that freeze opponents and arrows that break enemy armour. Caddoc has magic that can do area effects to hurt enemies. They both also have spells like fireballs and electric bolts. If you hold down certain spells though, you will hit your ally with the magic and make them stronger for a short time.

There are lots of weapons for each character to upgrade to. Weapons get stronger stats and some even also have a magical damage boost that only lasts a certain amount of strikes. You can also pick up stronger more durable shields and even better pieces of armour.

The two characters have some pretty entertaining banter throughout the game. At one point I sprinted too long as Caddoc and he stopped and said "I need to rest for a minute" E'lara chimed in calling him old and telling him to keep moving, though I don't remember how she said it she made it pretty funny.

There are lots of secret areas and special weapons to find in the game if you do a bit of exploring and puzzle solving. Mostly though the levels are pretty linear.

Graphically the game looks good. Not great, but good. enemies come in a good variety and while you fight the same bosses over and over, they can be fun to take on. Gold in the game that you pick up only serve to unlock items in the Forge, where you can design your own stages.

This game was published by Bethesda but developed by InXile. The game had 4 different DLC packs and each one could only be obtained by buying the game from 4 different retailers. This is a terrible move that other games have done in the past. I recall that Gears of War 3 did the same thing. As for Hunted, the DLC was also tied to your save game and was activated by signing into your GameSpy account. The problem other than having to buy the game 4 times for all the DLC, is that if you lose your save game you also lose your DLC. And now that GameSpy is no more, you cant redeem the DLC anymore.

Luckily, people have put out save game files for everyone to download that have all the DLC. Good thing too other wise that DLC would be lost forever. For those who want to play the game with the DLC here is a link to the download.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/hv8npv9644h2ejc/Hunted+4+DLCs+save+%28v1.0%29..rar

If you want the DLC but want to start fresh make sure you select save slot 2 and start a new game.

The DLC is a couple new weapons, some new armour and two character skins to replace Caddoc and E'lara. The Seraphine skin is cool to use IMO because you get to be the mysterious character that is played by Xena herself Lucy Lawless.

There are 4 different endings for the game. Two for each character. The good ending and the bad ending. It is defintely worthwile to play through thei game multiple times. You get better and better gear going through the game again, and its fun to do one playthrough fully as each character even though you can switch between the two at certain spots throughout the game.

I would suggest playing this game as its really fun for a hack and slash/sniping game. I know it wont get a sequel but I would welcome one and buy it if they fixed issues like the tanklike controls, the few glitches that keep you from progressing and little graphical glitches here and there.

(Combat bloodies up the characters with enemy blood)

I never got to try this game in co op mode unfortunately but maybe ill try it with the new NVIDIA experience beta share feature. Anyway, as you can tell I really like this game and if your not a triple A game snob you might like this one as well.

The Witcher 2

The Witcher 2

The Witcher was a game that took me a couple tried to get into. It had a fighting system that took getting used to and not using the right enhancements and oils before a fight could make some fights near impossible to beat. Once I figured out the game though I absolutely loved it. I took time to look for crafting materials to make better blade coatings, to make better armour and potions.

The Witcher 2 changed the fighting system for the better I think. Instead of clicking the mouse then waiting for the prompt to click again to complete combos, you have a light attack and a heavy attack. You can block and parry as well. Another button will use one of your spells and another button will throw whatever other object you have selected.

You can easily switch between spells and throwable objects by holding the control button. Time will slow down while you select which spell to use and whether to use throwable daggers, bombs or drop a trap. Its pretty easy to use overall.

Like the first game, if you don't take time to do side quests to level up and upgrade your character, and if you don't take time to get better crafting materials to have people craft better amour and weapons for you then you will find lots of the battles pretty tough.

There are lots of returning characters and plenty of new ones to help flesh out the story and to tag along with Geralt to help him recover his memory. There is a part in the game where you are to make a decision about which direction to take in the story. I chose the path of following after Triss because to me it seemed more appropriate for the story, however I made a save before the option so I can go back and play through the section I miss for making the other choice.

In this game, Geralt is on the trail of a Kingslayer to clear his name after people accuse him of killing the King he failed to protect early in the game. Like the first game there are politics, personal relationships, side quests and lots of monster slaying.

The graphics have taken a nice upgrade as everything has great detail from castle walls, to the water, sky and characters. The different weapons you use like the steel sword and the silver swords as well as the different armours all have different and distinct looks to them.

Another thing the game has going for it is choice. There are many times where you choose how to solve an issue. Will you kill a troll that is causing trouble for the town or will you listen to people who sympathize with it and help the troll out so that he goes back to maintaining his bridge?

Will you side with the elves or with the humans? Will you kill the kingslayer or let him go on his way because you understand his reasons for what he did?

You get lots of choice in this game and you really can play it how you want. If you're wondering if you should play this game before starting The Witcher 3, I would personally say "yes" you should. I would even recommend playing through the first game as well because you will get a greater sense of the characters and the world that you are spending all this time in. Its very immersive.

CD Project Red delivered a great sequel, and they even delivered another enhanced edition for free, and its a game you can pick up on sale frequently for $5 or less. I'm looking forward to using my Witcher 2 save game and starting the Witcher 3.

Doom (4)

So, the Doom beta came out today on steam. I think the game had an alpha at some point but I never knew about it. I saw that my steam library had the Doom beta so I downloaded it. The trailers for the game looked amazing. Awesome graphics, with cool gore and it looked to me like classic Doom gameplay mixed with today's graphics.

I thought I would play for about an hour, but I think I ended up playing for 3 or so.... It was pretty addictive. The beta has 2 maps, and a bunch of customizations to unlock for your space marine with different helmets, and other pieces of armour. You can also get different patterns and colours for it as well.

There are unlockable custom loadout slots and weapons to unlock though you can only take two weapons into battle with you at a time unlike the old Doom and even Doom 3, where you could carry the game's whole arsenal in some magic pocket and switch between them all on the fly. The weapons can also be visually customized with different patters and colours as well as with a slider to adjust the amount of rust and wear on the gun. Those features are actually pretty cool and you can come up with some neat looking sets.

I only played Team Deathmatch but there were 3 modes total. TDM is just like in any other FPS game, but its a good jumping in point to get a good feel for the game. The game doesn't have regenerating health, so you will need to find health and armour pickups on the map to stay alive and you will need to pick up ammo boxes so that you don't find yourself against a group of enemies and nothing to shoot at them. Though you could resort to the melee attack, but unless your enemy is near death, it wont do much.

If you catch an opened at 10 percent or less health and perform a melee attack on them, you will perform a "glory" kill which is a small animation of you doing a cool finishing move on your enemy. It's actually pretty neat and very satisfying to pull off.

At some point in the match a power up will show up on the map and the first person to grab it turns into a monster from hell. When you are the monster you are more powerful and can rack up a nice amount of kills for you team. The other team really needs to work together to take you down, and if they do its not that hard to take the monster down because he only has 3 times the amount of health as a regular character. It's a pretty neat gameplay mechanic which spices up a match.

I had a blast playing the beta so far, and look forward to playing more, but I'm wondering if its enough to pay $80 dollars for. Depends on what content comes with the game. If there are lots of maps and a really solid campaign then I will buy it for sure. Also it looks like there will be lots of customization and wont have all the micro-transaction BS that lots of games like Halo 5 and Mass Effect have.

With so many games coming out, and lots of games being disappointing these days I will need to do more research before dropping almost 100 dollars on a game. I'm not into the trend of micro-transactions and season passes and DLC packs. It makes me feel like a slave to rich companies when I end up buying DLC packs for games I already blew a bunch of money on.

Mortal Kombat X PC Debacle.

Not too long ago on this blog I posted a review for Mortal Kombat X on PC and it was a positive review. That wont change because the game as it is now is pretty solid and still really fun to play. Though not everyone is having luck with running the game.

The game had a rocky launch. First of all some genius decided that the game should download in 29 separate chunks.....So some people would find that they all would not download correctly leaving the game running glitchy because of missing chunks of the game.

The big controversy with the game right now though, is that Ed and company (Netherrealm Studios and Warner Bros ) have essentially dropped support for the game on PC by not bringing Kombat Pack 2, or the new net code.

Technically, they are allowed to do this as it's in the User Agreement for the software. This however is a terrible precedent to set for gaming developers. To leave a big chunk of your fans behind with not so much as a reason or explanation that might help PC gamers understand why this was done. Instead, Ed and gang ghosted us. That's a dating term for when you stop all contact with someone you went on a date with. They might call or text asking what's going on, but you instead of manning up and letting the person down, just take the cowards way out and ignore and avoid the person so that you don't have to explain yourself.

The cowards way is the way Ed has chosen to take on this situation. Though lately he has been getting bold and trolling PC gamers with his "500,000" tweet. Gamers know this is the number give or take , of MKX copies sold on PC. The next day he posted that that was the amount of prize money to be given away at the next ESL tourney..... Good job Ed, you are solidifying your place in PC gaming history as the biggest douchebag in history.

No one is 100 percent sure who to blame for the drop of support. Some say Ed himself, others say Netherrealm Studios and some will say Warner Bros. Though WB had another PC game disaster with Batman Arkham Knight. The game was removed from steam for a while , then brought back with patches and more patches and more patches. They even gave us free DLC and all previous batman games for free to try to make up for the disaster.

The game got all DLC and still gets patches and support. MKX on the other hand, just got dropped.
Some say Ed blames PC gamers for whining about how badly optimised MKX was..... As if that is the fault of the gamers.....Seems like Ed cant take responsibility for not getting a decent team to port the PC version.

Look at the release of Killer Instinct. It came out yesterday and runs great at max settings even on mid range machines. On top of that , the online play is very very smooth.

Then you have smaller fighting games, that even with much less money than Netherrealm they still do what they can to bring their game to PC fans. I'm talking about Guilty Gear Xrd by Arc System Works.

We also have the newly released Street fighter 5 , and Capcom has not been known to abandon their PC game. Street fighter 4 on PC got all the updates and DLC and fixes so you can be assured that Street Fighter 5 will too.

Ed on the other hand has a bad track record with is games on PC. Injustice was a disaster. Online play barely worked since day one and it didn't get any patches or updates. Luckily we did get all the DLC but that's it. The game was unplayable online for the most part.

Before that we had Mortal Kombat 9. Again, we got all the DLC, but online was a shit show. Connecting with friends that lived 5 minutes away was a pain because it wouldn't work with any consistency. Did we get any patches to fix that? no. They just took the money from the initial sales and .... I don't know...jacked off with it. Which looks like what Ed is doing with MKX for PC.

The way he's trolling on twitter , it seems he's very proud of himself for doing it too. It's a horrible thing that happened with MKX on PC , especially when you basically give a chunk of your fans the middle finger and laugh.

The good thing is that other developers don't seem to be going along the same douchebag path that Ed is going down. We are seeing some great games coming to PC from some great developers and that is the trend while Ed Boon is the minority in his cowardly handling of the situation.

Go support devs that know how important their fans are, and ghost Ed like he did to us. Though taking some jabs at him on twitter can still be fun so vote in this poll I made.

Vote in this poll to take a jab at Boon. I post on his twitter all the time making jabs at him and MKX
https://twitter.com/Andreas00563331/status/715236543481397248

Killer Instinct Windows 10

So Microsoft released Killer Instinct today for Windows 10. This game and Gears of War Untimate Edition are 2 of many more games MS plans to release to merge their LIVE service with Windows 10.

Killer Instinct requires that you are running Windows 10, and is available only on the Windows store. You wont be able to buy it on any other digital distribution site like Steam. Some people might moan and groan at that, but the fact is that Windows 10 is the most solid MS OS in ages and is even better than Windows 7. It's also more efficient and makes your machine run much smoother. I haven't experience crashes with Windows 10, and I haven't had compatibility issues like I did with windows 7 and 8.

One thing that annoys me with the Windows games is that they don't support overlays. So you cant use FRAPS or NVIDIA experience to take screenshots or record video. Windows has its own version, but even that wasn't supported with this game. I had to use PrtScr to take screenshots.

MS even offer a free upgrade to Windows 10 and yes they are pushing their OS, but it's worth the upgrade especially if you want to play Gears of War Ultimate Edition, Killer Instinct and or the Upcoming Forza 6 for PC.

As for Killer Instinct on PC. Its free to download.... Yes you read that right. Though the free version only comes with one character, SabreWolf.

Luckily for me, I took advantage of when MS was giving away Season 1 of Killer Instinct for free for Xbox One. Though you could also claim it for free if you only had an Xbox 360.

I'm glad I did because from day one, I get to play Killer Instinct with 8 plyable characters , alternate and classic costumes and colours with a handful of stages.

Killer Instinct has 3 seasons so far. You can buy them all separate, or all together . You can also just buy individual characters from any season.

(I messed this picture up...sorry.)

 I have only put in about an hour so far but I really enjoyed what I played. Even though I don't own any characters from season 2 or 3, I can still play against those characters in single player which is great because you can still learn the matchups for online play.

Speaking of online play, the 2 matches I played ran silky smooth and this is day one of the release..... When has a fighter in recent history done that? I'm impressed. Edit: Online play features cross platform play, so you can play against console players in online modes. This is a great trend in fighting games because it makes the player pool much bigger.

The graphics look very sharp, and you don't need a killer rig to run the game well. I have a GTX 660 ti and turned all the settings to max and the game ran flawlessly.

Combos can be amazing to see, though really long and if you get caught in one it can be annoying to watch your life gauge go down while you try to complete a combo breaker to get out.

There are a bunch of game modes to choose from right off the bat. You have single player options like fighting against the CPU in a single fight or you can jump into training to learn combos for the characters you own. You can also go into a story mode, or jump into survival mode and see how many characters you can beat before you lose your health.

(look at those particles!)

I enjoyed every minute of the hour I put in so far and look forward to putting in much more while I learn how to do combos and take my game online. I even saw a stage "fatality" performed on me which was really cool. It was on the halo stage and a ghost got dropped on my character.

I would recommend this game to anyone who is into fighting games, those who loved Killer Instinct back in the day and to those who are disappointed that Mortal Kombat has left PC gamers behind with the new XL content.

It's free to try out so go download it and give it a shot. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

The Witcher

I bought this game on CD quite a few years ago for $2.50 from EB Games and the first time I played it I got stuck at the end of chapter 1 because I couldn't beat the Barghest. I also wasn't good at the combat system and wasn't using the proper sword or the proper fighting technique for the right enemies.

I ended up letting this game sit for a long time. Then the sequel came out and I ended up buying that game. For some reason I couldn't get far in that game either. But that was more due to not having time to play.

That game sat for a while too. I tried a few times to play through both games but never got far. Finally The Witcher 3 came out and I bought that too.... Though I decided that I was going to play through the series from the beginning so that I experienced all I could about the Witcher like I did when I was introduced to the Mass Effect series.

Well, I finally beat The Witcher. It took about 47 hours to complete and I loved it. I got the hang of the combat this time around and I loved it. Human enemies were weaker against steel swords while monsters were weaker against the silver sword. So you have two swords  on you at all times and each sword has 3 styles: strong, fast and crowd. Strong is for big tough enemies, fast is for faster enemies who can evade the slower strong style , and crowd is for when you are swarmed with 2 or more enemies.

You can also carry a third weapon. I carried an axe, but I never used it once in the entire game. You also have a slot for a 4rth weapon. Usually it would be a dagger or a torch for seeing in dark places. I did use the torch on occasion when I didn't have the "cat" potion which helps you see in the dark, but I don't recall ever using the dagger.

Speaking of potions, alchemy plays a big part in The Witcher. Lots of fights in this game can be really tough, but if you use the right potions or weapon upgrades beforehand then they can be quite a bit easier. There are potions that speed up your vitality regeneration, there are ones that make your weapons more powerful, ones that speed up your reflexes, ones that boost your damage against certain types of enemies and so on.

To make potions you need ingredients and those come from all over the game world or from merchants. Some require rarer ingredients than others but most of the time its worthwhile to make sure you have a good selection of potions ready for any situation.

This game came out in 2007 and while the graphics are dated I thought they looked really good for an older game. I'm not sure if it had a slight upgrade when it became "the enhanced edition" but I thought they looked good. I also liked that the game had a day/night cycle and even weather. There was even a mission where you needed there to be a storm. You could either get it done by magic or just wait for a storm and save some money from hiring someone to make a storm.

The music in the game is really good too and if you have the GOG.com version then you can download the music score, as well as a bunch of other cool extras like behind the scenes videos, maps of the world, interviews with the developers, and artbook and other things as well.

This game has tons of characters. Geralt Starts of with amnesia (original...) so you can go into the game knowing just as much about the world of the Witcher as he does. You meet people who know you, but you don't know. Some are friends, some are enemies and some turn out friends or enemies depending on choices you make in the game. You get to know lots of these characters through many interactions. There are also relationships that also change depending on your choices.

Geralt spends lots of time doing missions for other people, missions for himself, as well as lots of time drinking, playing dice, getting into fist fights and getting women into bed. Fist fights were pretty simple and also the most boring this in the game in my opinion. I enjoyed the Poker Dice game because at times it was a decent way to make money and it was actually fun.

Leveling up consists of spending bronze , silver and gold talent points to upgrade your weapon styles, the amount of damage you inflict, how well you can do alchemy, unlocking bomb making skills and to strengthen your sign usage (magic). I didn't unlock bomb making at all in this game, but by the end I had most things fully upgraded and Geralt was a total bad ass. Especially after getting the Raven armour in Chapter 5 which is the final chapter of the game. Though if you do finish the mission to get this armour, you can start the Witcher 2 with this armour which is pretty nice. I also noticed I started with the upgraded sword that I finished the first game with.

Missions are pretty standard for an RPG. They consist of taking quests and going off to find a lost item, or kill a monsters and so on, but I was rarely bored , even at parts with lots of backtracking. This game features politics and racism and as you progress you need to decide what side you're on. Though you can be neutral as well.

I'm glad I finally took the time to go through this game, it was really awesome and I enjoyed it a lot. I ended up starting up The Witcher 2 right away which is also a blast so far. I cant wait to finish and start the third game.

I recommend anyone start with the first game in the series so that you get more insight into the characters and motives of all the characters you'll come across in the third game.

Obscure

Obscure is a survival horror game that takes place in a school and you take control of one of 5 characters. The intro video for the game definitely gives off a Dawson's Creek meets Resident Evil vibe.

The game came out in 2005 and while the graphics do show its age, they were also surprisingly good. On PC at high resolutions the graphics were sharp and I didn't mind them at all. The school had good detail and while there aren't many monster types, they looked pretty good. Especially the final boss.

Each of the game's 5 characters have a different attribute that separates them from the rest. The good thing is that there is never a time where you HAVE to use a particular character. You can run around with one character, or two and switch between them with the press of a button. You can also play the game in co op mode with a friend.

Josh tells you if there are more items to be picked up in a room or any more areas of interest to check out.

Stanley tells you if there are any more locks in the area that can be opened.

Kenny can sprint

Shannon is Kenny's sister and she gives hints on what to do next and she can heal 20 percent more with health items/

Ashley is Kenny's girlfriend and can double fire handguns and does more damage with melee weapons.

The tips the characters give out helped me a few times in the game. At one point where you need to find 4 statues, I had 3 and couldn't find the last one anywhere. I had Ashley and her hint at first was "The last statue must be outside of the basement..."

I used the hint so much she finally said "  I think the last statue is in the library"

And there is was....

Another thing about the game is that if a character dies, they are gone for the rest of the game, unless you reload a save game and try again.

There was a section near the end where you had to go down some stairs that were under an elevator. If you didn't secure the safety lock before going down, then one of your team members gets crushed and killed by the elevator falling. If you secure it, then everyone makes it down safe..

The voice acting in the game is actually pretty good. I've seen games with bigger budgets with far worse voice acting than in Obscure. Also the game isn't overly long. I think I beat it in just under 5 hours.

There are a few melee weapons which are really just a couple different bats, and a steel bar, and the rest are handguns and shotguns. You can also find flashlights and attach them to your weapons.

The story has to do with one of your teachers kidnapping students and doing experiments on them that has to do with plants , and he turns students into monsters that react badly to sunlight. Kenny is kidnapped at the start of the game and you save him later on and then can use him for the rest of the game. Pretty basic story but the gameplay is fun enough that the story doesn't really matter all that much.

The enemies in the games are hurt by light, so if you focus your flashlight beam on the first and dispel the dark stuff circling them, they become weaker and take less damage before being defeated.

There are some pretty easy puzzles to solve, a bit of backtracking, and some special items to find, like the lazer at the end of the game.

Also, after beating the game on normal, you unlock hard and special mode and you unlock an extra costumer per character. Apparently you need to finish the game in hard mode to get the real ending. I haven't done that yet.

The game has a sequel called Obscure 2: The Aftermath which I haven't beaten before but what I played was fun. It has new characters with Kenny, Shannon and Stan returning.

There was also another game which was supposed to be Obscure 3, but it became Final Exam. A 4 player co op side-scroller. I have no intention of playing that one, but I do recommend the first two games if you want something different that wont take too long and will only cost a couple dollars on a steam sale.