Pew pew!

If you grew up playing Apogee's raptor, like all the cool kids did, then you will love Not Your War. Well, I dont know if you'll love it because it is not viewed through the eyes of nostalgia and most of the mechanics, graphics, sound and "backstory" are completely different.
But the concept is the same: you play as some kind of plane-thingy, the camera moves up, enemies move down, your bullets move into them, everbody's happy. Except the enemie's mommys.

What sets this game ahead of Raptor though is the great music, the griddy and awesome graphics and the fact that it has some sort of backstory, told in stills with text.
Im sold on it. The only thing I still find kind of weird is the upgrade system. You just get to choose upgrades at arbitrary moments in the game. Don't know why or how.
Anyways, check it out, if you want to kill about an hour.

This probably does not fit into my category

But I will review it anyways. Because fuck you.
Today I am taking a closer look Age Of Chivalry, a source mod, available for free on steam (as long as you have any game from steam that uses the engine.)
It is designed by Torn Banner Studios, formerly known as Team Chivalry and thus they sort of do fit into this blog.
Anyhow, the game itself is a first person... well its not directly a shooter, though you do shoot sometimes so... uh... yeah. Let me say it this way: you control one out of nine classes of warriors with different weapons and armory, with each weapon providing you with at least three ways to damage your opponents and you hack and slay your way through different maps with different objectives. You could say that the game is sorta multiplayer-based, because there is no single-player campaign. Given the absurd stupidity of the bots the game provides it is no wonder however. Minecraft has better AI. Whatever, real men don't use bots. Real men go to the internet and do battle there.
And boy, did I do that the past week.
Now let me start with the downsides of this game, so I can then drown it in praise, because I believe this is a great project that could really go somewhere.
The biggest negative point is that this game does require a good internet-connection. And by good I mean it is unplayable with a ping over 60. Seriously, it isnt. I guess you can sort of understand that if you think that you have to parry melee attacks and react to your opponent in real-time, which gets pretty hard if you are 1/10th of a second behind. It happened to me quite often that I simply died without understanding why the fuck I was dead.Yeah, I got mad, but I got over it. Another minus is the level-design. Most levels are so fucking dark that it is impossible to tell who is friend or foe unless you can smell their breath and tell that they didnt eat the same thing you did because they have eaten at a different encampment. This goes along with the fact that some maps are unplayable with 32 players (which is the player-limit for most servers tho), because there is just a shit-load of people trying to get through a narrow pass. You then just need a single dude (me) with a big weapon swinging away and 10 of his comrades loose their head. Not cool, especially if you have voice chat on. Boy, I did learn some new swear-words. In so many languages.
Which brings me to the next point: the community. It is an unfortunate fact that many indie-games have a lot of stupid kids playing it. Especially this one lures them in with its over-the top violence and body parts sputtering around.
But that is it with the negative points. Really, there is nothing more I can hate about this game. And I am sure all of these aspects will be taken out with updates gradually (right? rrrriiiiiight?).
Now, why did I play this game so excessively over the past week? Simply because it is very intuitive. Well, it did take some time getting used to the delay of your attacks, but after you get that down you can start slaying. The taunts and voice outputs of the characters, the blunt noises of steel hammers crashing skulls and the agonizing cries of dying warriors create a dense and violent war-atmosphere. You experience hell on the battleground. Which is probably why the levels have to be so dark. Who knows.
Anyhow, I will just go and play another round or six until I finally stop procrastinating and start writing that novel. Hope you are not too sad, office drones. Next week I will review infectionator.

The simple things.

It's the simple things that make me smile. Like fully-automated high caliber turrets that blast away at undead hordes while you kick back and enjoy a nice glass of white russian. Or people wearing red headbands while handling weapons that would rip a normal human's arms off. But the man I talk about is not a normal human. He is the main character of a Seant Cooper game series: Boxhead.
So far, there are five installments of the game: Boxhead: the rooms, Boxhead: More Rooms, The Halloween Special (which I believe to be the original one), Boxhead 2 Play (with multiplayer!) and the newest one Boxhead, The Zombie wars. Imma just go ahead and review the latter, if you don't mind.

I really like this scenic display of boxheaded zombies right here.

 The idea is just as simple as the graphics are: you are alone, you have guns, there are zombies which are after the soft, grey matter in your box-shaped head. And as always, the simple concepts are the best ones. The more zombies you kill in a row, the higher your combo-counter rises, the higher your combo-counter, the more upgrades and weapons you get.

Just don't get cornered...

 That is about all I have to say about the game mechanics of this series. There are a few things that set these games apart from the other zombie-shooters: for one this one does not try too hard to look good. There are so many games out there that try to create a creepy atmosphere but utterly fail. The boxhead games however just rely on action, action and even more action. You end up slamming your space key into oblivion in a fruitless attempt to hold off hordes and hordes of zombies. Especially the Boxhead 2 Play with it's co-op multiplayer and the fabolous possibility to wall yourself in with explosive barrels to mass-slaughter the undead does a really good job in creating a unique action experience for two people.

Turrets: the lazy man's choice for letting the dead rest.

 The Zombie wars one however is a little different. Not only does it feature new graphics, 3 new zombie types and completely different levels, it also gives you turrets. That's right: turrets. Automatic little thingies you put somewhere that just take out rotting walkers on their own. Just like that.
Amazing concept. Unfortunately this does not come without a prize: the devils became a lot stronger in this one, instead of just throwing fireballs they now launch entire firewalls at you that will destroy everything in their way (except for their little friends). Also their ammunition is quite limited, so in the end you rely on running around and going toe to toe with those smelly white-shirts as before. But trust me, that never gets old.

Turrets can't do the job alone :(

So if you have the time, and if you like shooting zombies, you should definitely check these games out. They will entertain you for hours and hours.