Spec Ops : The Line

It's a shooter.  Room after room after room of guys to shoot and collect bullets and new weapons from.  No better or worse than anything current in that regards, it uses all the shooter standards like flashing red screens when you take a bullet, but everything heals if you don't get hit for a few moments.

So really you would have to rate Spec Ops by the story, which is told through the cutscenes between these kill rooms.

You are the leader of a squad, I think you were sent to either investigate what was going on - or communicate with some lost troop in Dubai, which was hit by the mother-of-all sandstorms.  The city is devastated, much of it buried under a mountain of sand.

As you are discovering what happened to the city - you are placed in increasing uncomfortable choice situations, like allowing civilians to be killed in order to save someone you are trying to rescue.  This is reinforced by your squadmates who occasionally bitch you out about the choices you make.  They even force you to burn a whole troop of enemies by raining mortar fire, and then show the charred civilians they made you blow up.

The connected people in Dubai knew of the impending doom of the storm, and kept it secret from the public - evacuating themselves.   A hardcore general and his faithful legions stayed to help evacuate, but got stuck and the place went all Lord of the Flies.

You fight your way through his legions and desperate bands of survivors - but when you make it to him, he is already a desiccated corpse - so presumably this all has been your descent into madness.  You invented a dark nemesis to excuse your actions, thinking back to early memories where reality flickers back and forth between what you saw.  ... "The horror!  The horror!"

This game tricked me into thinking I was going to play as a soldier, not a Marlow in some downer art project.  I never got a sense I was going crazy - I thought my buddies were losing it, and I was getting pissed off at the stuff they were making us do.  I tried and died so many times to do the right thing in this game, they force you to push terrible buttons and then guilt trip you for doing it.


If it wasn't so forced, it really could have been epic though.  Have your choices affect which of the three of you go completely nuts would have made me play this multiple times.

XBOX One

I was given an XBOX One for attending a developers conference recently and jumped at the opportunity.

This was before doing the math, now I realize that being given an XBOX One is like being given a Skylanders toy, it's only the beginning of the investment... I got past the first obstacle, but now I'm in for a penny, in for a pound.

After turning it on and having it discover my wireless, it proceeded to molest my internet - first downloading a 650 MB (!!! someone forgot something big) patch, then the 36 GB (!!!!) racing game that came with it.    Forza Five.  ..  yep, like an Italian Maître d trying to count your dinner party size.

I'll give it a true review after I've put in my hours, but initially - it's pretty.  But it's .. racing.  Super detailed ... but racing.  Very accurate cars (probably?) ... but racing.  There are probably some really really cool features to it, but - it's plain old racing.  I've played very fun racing games in the past, at times I enjoy blasting through towns at breakneck speed, most often being chased by police in Need For Speed, or exploring the world in Test Drive Unlimited 2.  This is racing circuits, only.  Racing, only.

I need a second controller and a game now (no backwards compatibility?  Seriously?).  Cha-ching says M$.

FTL: Faster Than Light

FTL is a game that has you fleeing across multiple galaxies with important intelligence information, hounded by an overpowered "Rebel Fleet".  You move stop to stop across the randomly generated system, each planet a randomly generated event - fighting pirates, rescuing research stations, escaping asteroid fields and purchasing upgrades.  You want to touch as many locations on a map before the fleet catches up to your exit point and you can warp to the neighboring galaxy.

Scrap is your currency from combat and events, spent on upgrades for you ship - hiring crew members, purchasing weapons and upgrading systems.  Not only do enhanced ship systems help you directly in combat, but adding devices like a crew transporter might be important for certain scripted events (for example if you encounter a space station being overrun, you might be given an additional option to rescue a crew member).

If you make it all the way across the galaxy to deliver your information, you have to fight the mother ship a few times.  I have never destroyed it utterly, I beat it down once and didn't realize it would reconfigure and I would have to attack it again, my second attack was pretty pathetic.

Once your ship is destroyed, you have to start completely over - it's not debilitating, and I find a vicious cycle of wanting to take care of the easy first galaxy and get the maximum upgrades to my ship or see if the shops have my favorite weapon stocked (BM2 laser).

I like this game so much that I purchased it for iPad.

Sins of a Solar Empire

This game is probably one of the best RTS 4X games out there (explore, expand, exploit, or exterminate to win) out there.  "Probably" because I just don't get these games.  The way I play - 4X is exxxxterminate and RTS ends up becoming a long drawn out ordeal.  I can't help but build the maximum number of ships and slow march across the map, leaving a wake of either supporters or corpses.
 
The learning curve was steep, the tutorial could have used a  few "applied knowledge" missions to get novices like myself going.  I was building and upgrading with no clue as to any benefits or limits or requirements - oftentimes looking through multiple trees of potential upgrades for things like how to colonize hostile planetary types.  The ship research trees were even more complicated, between ship designs, additional weaponry and enhancements.  Thankfully, research is based on time/resources rather than having an escalated cost like a leveling system.

I ended up becoming a master of rapid expansion, and claimed huge amounts of resources early on.  Even if the enemy attacked one of my controlled planets, oftentimes I could distract them long enough to extract a huge toll or bring in support from each of the neighboring planets.  Meanwhile my expansion crew has claimed half of the galaxy.  Cue music, begin slow march.

I've seen the beautiful screenshots for this game, but I think that's more fan service being able to zoom in that close - that's just now how it plays out in the game.  I never drifted much closer than 50,000 feet above them looking straight down the flat plane of the galaxy.

Here is the view I typically had.

Now that I've committed the required hours to the game, and even though I only played as TEC Rebels, I'm pretty sure I won't play this again without a smack-talking rival.  Solo matches end up being a 2 - 4 hour ordeal, not a quick fix.