Tag: Reviews

Farming Simulator 19 Platinum Edition

As always, full disclosure, the fine folks over at Focus Home Interactive tossed me a review copy of this one and I would like to both be honest about that and thank them for it. Good people over there that are always friendly and I hope this is just the first of many chances to work with them.

I am also a huge fan of the Farming Simulator games, Picked up Farming Simulator 15 randomly on sale for like 8 bucks years ago and fell in love with what I thought would be a boring game, then I bought 17 and that love continued. I never got the chance to buy 19 tho, so when they gave me this edition I was excited to get started. In fact, day 1 of playing I unlocked the trophy for 10 hours on one farm.

That is what this game is at its core, a Farming Simulator nothing more and nothing less. There is nothing else going on here. There are basically three ways to start your farm on the map of your choice, you can be a new farmer, get some basic equipment and a field and this is where I recommend you start. The middle difficulty so to speak will give you a little less stuff some money and the third gives you money and nothing else. You will need to buy everything from scratch and it is sink or swim. It is clearly for the more advanced players. Tho before this, the tutorials are a great idea if you have never played the series. They do an excellent job of showing you the ropes.

After making this choice, I will assume you took my advice, you will need to start harvesting your starter crops, plowing fields, planting new cops and deciding exactly what you want to do on this farm of yours. Are you going to grow some crops, raise animals, chop down trees? The choice is yours and honestly, in Farming Simulator 19 for me, this felt like it was true like never before. I quickly started harvesting wheat to feed my chickens and sunflowers for some profits. I used this to start chopping down some trees while I waited for things to grow.

What started as a trickle of money coming in from two fields became a small creek from 4 fields as I took out some loans and doubled in size and quickly paid those loans off. All this, however, means nothing if the game isn’t fun or looks and sounds bad.

In the sound and looks category Farming Simulator won’t be winning any aways, it isn’t a AAA title after all. It is, however, the best the series has ever looked or sounded, and it is also the best one you will find on the console market. The joy of driving any of these hundreds of machines around is unmatched by anything else in the simulator console market, and even without all the DLC from the season pass, there are so many machines to do so many jobs I doubt I will ever use them all. The options feel limitless.

That isn’t to say the game is flawless. The physics in the world have always been sketchy at best. The number of times I have launched my tractor or truck through the air like Eddie Gordo from Tekken or got a trailer stuck somewhere is a number I never bothered to count, luckily for me the store the machines revert to is close to my farm and rarely causes me any issues. It can also be a pain to line up the bucket or trailers or drop trees in stuff, something that after hundreds of hours into the series I have never mastered and have just accepted I never will.

To close this out tho, the new animals like horses and that you now buy plots of land not just fields is a nice touch but giving this game a number score is a bit rough. If you don’t like this kind of game this one won’t change that, its more farming. If you do enjoy it, this is the best of the best 9/10 must buy. That is honestly the best thing I can tell you on this one, it is worth it for those that enjoy the series or games like it, but if you don’t this isn’t likely to change that. Happy farming my friends, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

SpaceWhip (PS4)

SpaceWhip is a free to play game on PS4 that is quite similar to the old Asteroids game from years ago. You defend a stationary city by shooting aliens from the city. The game looks pretty nice and sounds pretty good for a free to play, and is quite simple for both adults and kids as the description claims.

The game, however, is extremely short and while fun truthfully if I had paid money for this I would have been very pissed off. Don’t get me wrong, since it is free it is worth a playthrough but it won’t take you very long and that is the issue for me. Even for free they could have put some effort into it beyond it being fun for half an hour. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Adams Family Mystery Mansion (Mobile)

Adams Family Mystery Mansion is another game where they took a popular franchise and found a way to take their city, or in this case their home, to pieces and you get to put it back together. This time after a vacation Gomez decides to surprise Morticia by reverting their mansion to how it was before they bought it. Tho their kids and stuff are still inside it when you unlock their rooms.

It also quickly becomes quickly apparent there is quite the cash grab involved. Probably the 2nd character you can unlock basically requires quite a bit of grinding or for you to buy in-game currency. This one just wasn’t fun for me despite the fact that I loved it when they did this with Family Guy and even the Simpsons was quite a bit of fun despite it being a worse game from a technical standpoint.

Truthfully unless you are a big fan of The Addams Family, just skip this one. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Disgaea 4 Complete + (PS4 Review)

Hello everyone, it is that time of again where I give a huge thank you to my friends over at NIS America for hooking us up with a copy of Disgaea 4 Complete +. Disgaea 4 as actually the first game in the series I played so when I heard there was a version coming to the PS4 with everything that has ever been in the game included with updated graphics and sound I just had to have it. So getting to play it for weeks in advance, you have to belive I was more than excited.

To get us started, the story about a vampire named Valvatorez, a vampire that ruled as a tyrant before swearing to never drink human blood. Doing so cost him all his powers, and reduced him to nothing more than a lowly Prinny instructor, possibly the lowest job in all of Hades. However when the Corrupterment starts making life difficult for him and everyone else in Hades and causing the honorable name of demons to be sullied Valvatorez won’t sit by and allow it to happen, so he and his trusty right-hand werewolf Fenrich will recruit an army to set things right.

The gameplay is pretty standard Disgaea. It is a turned based strategy RPG that will see you attempt to outmaneuver and overpower your enemies through the use of magic, skills, and geoblocks that chance the attributes of the squares you stand on. Some are beneficial for you so as upping your attack or defense, others help your enemies in the same way. Some are equal opportunities for whoever is on them while others just make life miserable by warping people around or being impossible to pass them. These can be manipulated tho by moving or destroying blocks. You can even change the colors of squares by destroying different colored geoblocks to damage enemies and suck.

Graphically the game is beautiful, a nice step up from its PS3 release back in 2011. There is a new level of detail to the character models and the levels themselves which is great to see. The sound is also superior to the original release tho none of this is at all surprising considering the substantial time gap and system upgrade.

The game itself, however, has insane replayability, and can actually be as hard as you want. you can beat the game around level 60 or 70 if you want, or you can go all in and level up to level 9,999 and do insane amounts of damage up into the hundreds of thousands. If you want you can create a party of pirates to harass other players in the item world. The item world lets you level up your items to insane levels and increase their powers while leveling up your characters. There are also at least 30 characters to unlock and entire dungeons designed just for the post-game.

Truthfully any fan of Disgaea or strategy RPG’s in general need to pick this one up, the game is a solid 9/10 and I will be playing it for a long time to come. Best wishes, may the gaming gods bring you glory, and all is for my lord.

Flip Dunk (Mobile)

Not all mobile games are created equal. Some are fun, others are ok to kill some time and others are just complete garbage and aren’t worth downloading. This one is not worth downloading. You basically tap the button to jump, hold the screen to spin and let go to bounce on trampolines or go down slides and try to get enough spins before you dunk the ball. It sounds like it could be fun, but honestly, it is not. At all.

It isn’t hard, it just isn’t fun. The fact that every two or three levels/ attempts results in an ad make it even worse since each attempt takes about three seconds. This is one game you just should never bother with, best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Friends (Series)

So recently I decided to binge-watch friends, the whole series. I watched it years ago like most other people my age but I wanted to see it again with fresh eyes and I did learn a few things. For starters. Joey is truly the best guy in the show tho he really is an idiot. Chandler may be the best friend you could possibly have and Ross, well Ross should probably be punched in the face. Seriously, dude, we get it your wife turned out to be a lesbian. Sure you can be upset but like 6 years later its time to move on.

The show, however, is funnier than people give it credit for and I really don’t understand why so many people feel the need to bash it. The show had great character growth in the show and while it rarely covered serious topics when it did they did it well. Realistically the show was never meant to be that way tho, it was mostly just there for a laugh, and it ended up it needed to end. Ross and  Rachel always needed to end together, Pheobe needed to end with someone, not on the show the entire time and Monica and Chandler deserved their happily ever after.

Many people, however, will point to Joey and say how he kind of got screwed, but forget his show was planned as friends was ending. He couldn’t have a really happy or definitive ending because he was getting his own show which sadly ended rather abruptly, many of its episodes actually never even aired.

The show itself, however, was simply good for a laugh and was never meant to be overly realistic and that is why it was enjoyable. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Letterkenny Season 7

So here we are, Letterkenny Season 7 at last. This season honestly felt different, not in a bad way just different. Much of it revolves around a farming show they started where they drink and answer questions that basically took to much time during the week. In between this, we see our friends in Letterkenny have a contest to collect pennies, drink a lot, tell the usual style of jokes, revive a hockey tradition.

Fans of the last 6 seasons will enjoy season 7, but honestly, if someone were to start here I can’t see this being the season that brings you into the fold. Each episode while funny doesn’t really stand out, except for the season finale. That one is amazing. I won’t go into detail tho. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Frostpunk (PS4)

So I picked this bad boy up because I heard rumors that this game wasn’t easy. Your goal is to build up a new city during a sudden ice age. One of the last new cities to be exact. As your group sets off from London you will find yourselves next to a new heat source that you will build the city around as you mine resources such as coal to keep the fires going, wood to keep the buildings rising.

This isn’t the only challenge tho, you will also need to pass new laws, some of which will raise hope, others will raise discontent, some will be necessary, however. Will you let the kids work so you have extra production or do without resources and let the kids learn how to be better medics and researchers later? Make people work 12 hour days or 14? toss a little sawdust in the food to make it last longer or eat soup despite it upsetting people but have a bit more food, or give them real meals and risk running low on rations later.

All these decisions equal a hell of a fun time, and we haven’t even touched the research portion where each decision can be life or death. One game I ran out of wood and never researched a way to get more. Yes, that was stupid I know. The game, however, is as challenging as it is made out to be, and I love every minute of it. Definitely worth checking out. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Hero Express (PS4)

Hero Express is a driving game in which you will attempt to race across vast hills and valleys in order to deliver items to help a hero save the world. The hero is incompetent, because he honestly forgets the item he needs to defeat every monster which are parodies of other monsters from movies and such.

The game graphically isn’t amazing but it is good enough and the controls function great for what the game is trying to do which is essentially a physics-based driving game where you level up your cars to improve performance so you can complete each level. It is a bit repetitive but is enjoyable, and the platinum is pretty easy to get if you are into that sort of thing. Plus, the game is cheap, like $5. I picked it up on sale for less than $2. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

The Alliance Alive HD Remastered (PS4)

As always huge shout out to NIS America for hooking me up with a copy of this one. It is always a pleasure to get to review a game for them and this was no exception.

The Alliance Alive is a remaster, obviously, of the game of the same name from the Nintendo 3DS. It has overhauled visuals, sounds and the story should be pretty similar to the 3DS version for those that played it.

The story is pretty standard JRPG stuff. A group of humans will rebel against their beastmen and daemon overlords. The world has long since been split apart, and the sky is no longer blue. It is actually rumored that the blue skies in stories are just that, stories. The story starts out with a simple delivery mission, and as always explodes from there. As always I won’t spoil too much, but you can expect to be bounced around in the early chapters to get a good view of different perspectives. The story is pretty good, tho not very innovative. It isn’t going to reinvent the wheel or even improve it, but it will entertain you.

The battle system is also pretty typical JRPG stuff. Turn-based battles until someone’s HP is gone, tho you can revive your characters with a simple healing spell which is cool. Getting into battles is a simple matter of walking into an enemy on the map, and I like the fact you can basically equip any character whatever weapon you want, tho you would waste talent points learning new skills for those weapons.

Admittedly, while I enjoyed the game you really could tell you were playing a 3DS game on PS4. The visuals and sound were upgraded weren’t quite up to scale and the gameplay was simplistic. It was fun tho and for that, I have to give this game an 8/10 and recommend it to any fan of the genre. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.