On it’s own, the story doesn’t sound too bad, but coupled with the fact that there are almost no characters in the game besides Karl, there is really nothing or no one to cling to other than Karl, and Karl is just bad. Generic in every conceivable way; humorless, deep voiced, hard bitten tough guy, and nearly everything he says is cringe-worthy due to it’s utter lack of flavor or joy. Two other characters show up later in the game and none leave any impression whatsoever because they literally take up about five and three minutes screen time, respectively, in a 10-12 hour game. The “story” doesn’t have anything to say about Karl, war, or anything really and it’s really nothing more than a flimsy excuse to put the player in each level and a reason to leave when the mission is done.

This is Karl, completely nondescript and outside of his stunning ability to kill people in fun ways, isn’t very interesting.

Once I accepted the fact that I was never going to care about the story, I totally immersed myself into the gameplay and I’m glad I did, because once I got into the mechanics of the game, I had so much more fun. Rebellion uses a lot of things that work together to make the game fun. First of all, it controls well. Movement and aiming is similar to most shooters with left trigger aiming and right trigger shooting, tap B (or Circle on PS4) to crouch, hold to go prone, A (X) to climb, X (Square) to reload, etc. so having any experience with shooters makes the game easy to pick up. Where it gets more intricate is with its sniping, which is the main gameplay mechanic of the Sniper Elite series, opting for a more “realistic” approach than other games. Simply aiming my cross hairs on a target and pulling the trigger will not suffice because depending on the distance to said target, bullet curve will become a factor that you have to account for and it takes a bit of time to line up. Not too much time, but just enough to make it all the more satisfying when a bullet hits the intended mark. To make this process easier, tapping the right bumper goes into “focus” mode, which basically allows you to hold your breath to steady your shot. A small red “X” will narrow as your shot gets lined up, at it’s smallest, pull the trigger and watch the bullet fly.

Once the bullet has left the barrel, the camera takes over and follows the bullet in slow motion as it flies through the air, getting slower as it reaches the target, then going into Sniper Elite’s patented “X-ray Cam” which shows the organs and skeleton of the victim as the bullet passes through and destroys whatever it comes into contact with; lungs, heart, liver, face, eyeballs, bones and even testicles. Yes, the game even shows testicles being obliterated by your bullets. Whatever it hits, it’s always gruesome and always satisfying, both visually and auditorily. The squish and cracking of bones is presented with gleefully sickening detail to accompany the impact. I should note that this can be skipped or turned off all together if for some reason you get tired of seeming eyeballs, livers, hearts, bones and such explode into a bloody mess.

As satisfying as this mechanic is, it would get boring pretty quick if all Sniper Elite III had to offer was a series of linear shooting galleries. Instead, each of the 8 maps is fairly expansive, with quite a lot of variety in how you can approach each situation. Each level has 3 “Sniper’s Nests” that can be accessed for a clear view of the surrounding area, and patient players can tag enemies with their binoculars, follow their movements, and pick each one off at their discretion.

For players like myself, that love stealth, remaining unseen, and taking every single enemy out, there are things in the environment that can be used to “mask the sound” of every shot you take. Remember, this is WWII so there aren’t silenced sniper rifles. Every shot is loud and will give away your position if you don’t wait for the most opportune moment to take each shot. To this end, there are generators you can sabotage that will cause a loud noise when it kicks back, which is when you should take your shot. The game tells you when a shot will be unheard by a visual representation of a sound on the top middle of the screen. However, you’ll need to take your shot reasonably quickly because the window is always brief. I found myself counting down between moments of kick back so I could be ready as soon as it started. I was also able to use planes flying overhead, artillery canon fire, and general sounds of the environment to mask my shots as well.

The X-ray Cam is awesome and never gets old. I mean, Testicle Shots is a thing.

If I did take a shot outside of sound masking, a yellow alert would show up on the lower left corner of the HUD, indicating that the sound was heard and the enemies are more alert. Taking one more shot changed the yellow to red and now the enemy has a general idea of where they should be looking for me. Similar to Splinter Cell’s “Last Known Position,” a white outline of where I last was would appear on the screen signifying where the enemy would be looking and aiming their aggression, allowing me to stealthily relocate myself, and take out more enemies. I also set up traps to lure enemies into with trip and landmines, making the path to get to me deadly for enemies brave enough to attempt it. Oh and protip: setting trip and land mines in the paths of vehicles is much easier than shooting them.

Not all portions of missions allow for good sniping opportunities, so an up close and personal approach is required from time to time. For these instances you are armed with a Welrod, a single shot, relatively primitive silenced pistol that allows for closer, silent kills when aimed at an enemies head. This allows you to more easily take out the sentry’s that permeate the maps in close quarters situations. There are also stealth takedowns in the game which consist of stabbing and snapping enemy necks a whole lot.

Objectives vary from mission to mission and there are always multiple tiers. Several missions begin with a primary objective, that once completed, leads to another and then another. This beefs up the length of the missions and depending on how I approached them, usually as stealthily and tactical as possible, missions could last north of an hour each. Adding in optional objectives, missions would last even longer. Optional objectives, however, kind of have to be stumbled upon either by entering an area that will trigger them, or viewing the objective through your binoculars. The pause menu does let you know how many optional objectives there are in each mission; it’s just up to you to find them.

The AI is pretty much all over the place. Most of the time they don’t notice their dead allies who are no longer stationed at their position but rather lying dead with a hole in their face or kidneys. Other times they can spot you with ridiculous accuracy and quickness. While the latter makes the game more intense, the former undermines the tension with an unfortunate regularity.

Visually, it’s pretty clear than Sniper Elite III was designed with last gen as the lead platforms because on Xbox One, the game looks like an uprezzed version of a last gen game. So if you haven’t yet made the jump to the current gen, don’t worry about missing out on anything in the visuals department. While textures looked decent, nothing popped and at a cursory glance, you would be hard pressed to tell it was being played on a current gen system. There is also some screen tearing and in a few dense areas the framerate would stutter when I panned the camera, only to right itself when I looked at a wall behind me. And while I do admire the variety of level in terms of design and layout, aesthetically, it doesn’t offer much variety in terms of color. If anyone was tired of brown shooters before, Sniper Elite III‘s abundance of sand, with a bit of shrubbery thrown in, really isn’t going to do them any favors.

Levels are pretty huge and offer a lot of different ways to approach each objective. Just make sure you like the color of sand and rocks, because you’re going to see a lot of them.

One area where I feel like Sniper Elite III does benefit from being on current gen platforms are load times and the save anywhere feature. Going into the save menu is incredibly fast, saving even faster. I clicked the button to save and my game was saved. There was no “please wait” or save confirmation. It’s impressively fast and something I have been hoping for with these new consoles. Also impressively fast are the load times. Even these huge levels only take a couple of seconds to load and restarting from my last save was the same. Press the accept button, about 2 seconds of black screen and I was back in the game. It really made self-restarting because I was spotted as painless as possible. Good stuff, right there.

In terms of sound, Rebellion really knocked it out of the park. Guns sound like guns do in real life. Sharp and loud, the only time there seems to be any enhancements are when the bullets leave the rifle during a kill cam, mostly because of the slow motion and a flanger mixed with phaser type effect to accentuate the velocity of the bullet as it travels through the air. Depending on the environment, shots would echo and bounce around my surround sound, using it to great effect. The Nazi conversations were all executed well and sounded authentic. The only weak spot is the voice acting for Karl. Like I mentioned earlier, it’s just so painfully generic that it’s almost comical. There is an extremely late game exchange between Vahlen and Karl that is unbelievably rote and leads to Karl being relatively indignant giving him a closing line of dialogue that makes absolutely no sense as it was never a theme of the game.

There is also a multiplayer suite available for the game, and the less said about it the better. While two game modes stood out, Distance King and No Cross, Team Deathmatch just wasn’t for me. As someone who is primarily into objective based gameplay in his multiplayer games, Team Deathmatch has always left me cold and putting it in a game focused on sniping makes me even colder. It also allows players to get close and take out opponents, completely making sniping pointless. Distance King and No Cross stand out because they allow for the game mechanics themselves to shine. In Distance King, kills get more points the further the player is from their target. In No Cross, there are lines that can’t be crossed by the opposing team so it’s all sniping, all the time.

The major issue with multiplayer is that, at least on Xbox One, it’s a barren wasteland. Trying specific modes turned up no results and in Quick Matches I managed to join a few matches with only 4 people in them.

There are also some co-op modes on offer, including full campaign co-op, Survival, and Overwatch. Survival is a basic horde-like mode and Overwatch allows for one player to spot for the other with asymmetrical co-op gameplay. It’s a fun distraction, but hardly something that is going to pull people in. And if my experience with finding people to play with less than week after release is any indication, this game is pretty much DOA when it comes to online, unfortunately.

At the end of the day, reviewing Sniper Elite III has been an interesting situation for me, to say the least. While I thoroughly enjoyed the gameplay, the huge missions, the expansive maps and the way the game is designed to be played how the player wants, it’s constantly mired by nagging issues such as limited variety in the color palette, some glaring lack of polish and, how can I put this delicately, terrible writing. With that said, I am more than happy with the time I spent with Sniper Elite III and as a reasonably “budget” title, I think fans of stealth, sniping, and graphic violence will have a lot to enjoy here.

SpawnFirst Recommends…

Sniper Elite III offers fans of stealth a bunch of fun playgrounds to let loose in, with visceral kills and great sound. What it doesn’t offer is a story of any consequence, it serves as merely an excuse to be at each playground, has no heart, says nothing about war or its lead character. With that said, ignore the story and just have fun killing Nazis.

The post Sniper Elite III Review appeared first on SpawnFirst.

The big draw of this game is the five different race types and the varied gameplay that they offer. There’s Touring (which is pack racing and high impact), Endurance (nighttime racing and a big emphasis on tires), Open Wheel (fast cars with little contact), Tuner (specialized races like drifting and time attack), and Street (short courses with a lot of turns). While they all do offer various styles of races, the differences beyond the obvious like car types and courses will be left a mystery to players who aren’t serious about racing games. This being said, the game is very friendly to players who are unfamiliar with the genre.

I was actually quite surprised with how it caters to newer players. You can set several options to help you with racing such as a projected line showing you where you want to be on the racetrack at any given time for greatest effectiveness as well as a general read out of how fast you want to be going. Other features that make the game easier include: steering control, turning control, and traction control. You can also pretty much make the game an exercise in seeing how good you are at holding down right trigger. These handicaps don’t come without a price though, as each one you enable lowers the amount of experience you receive at the end of a race. This is a small price to pay though, as all the experience does is open more races which will open anyway as long as you continue playing. The far bigger problem with these settings is it lowers your overall ability. For example, while the game will autoset your speed for taking corners, if you have the skill to do it manually, you can maintain much more speed and control. That’s all dependent on actually having the skill though. If you’re like me and can’t take a sharp corner without spinning out of control then you may want to stick with a turning control. But even if you do mess up hitting that corner, the game features an ability that allows you to rewind several seconds and try again. More often than not, I found myself using this ability as a crutch and a way to bypass other drivers by seeing how exchanges would play out.

I found the actual races themselves to be repetitive and mostly boring with some brief moments of excitement. When I say repetitive, what I mean is that you typically have to do every race two to four times. Do a practice run, followed by a qualifying run, followed by the actual race which you typically have to run twice. You can skip the practice and qualifier, but then you’re going in blind and starting at the back of the pack and you’ll do considerably worse than if you had done the preliminary races. So, by the third time or so you run the race it becomes very tedious.

The races themselves varied with how exciting they were. Typically a lot of action occurs in the first lap with a lot of jostling for position but after that, the race becomes pretty static. There’s an occasional attempt at your position but it’s easily remedied (especially with the flashback feature) and sometimes you’ll get the chance to overtake an opponent but these moments are few and far between. However, these moments, and the first lap jostling, do allow for some great moments of out-driving your opponents and they’re pretty thrilling.

The other major problem that I had with the game is that for all the noise they make about joining different teams and picking different sponsors, the function is very hollow. You pretty much pick some teams and they have goals for you that you get extra experience for completing but if you do poorly on these goals, the game tells you that it’s no big deal and you can always do better next season. I never felt like I had to justify my place on the team or that I was in danger of losing sponsors, which seems like it would be a mechanic that would go hand-in-hand with having a system of teams and sponsors. The only thing the different sponsors offer are different goals for you to achieve with varying amounts of experience. They don’t offer much in the way of varying vehicles or funds to upgrade them, but the upgrading options are pretty limited so this could be by design.

GRID Autosport  would definitely be good to pick up if you’re looking to branch out into the racing genre. It’s simplistic controls and newbie friendly options make it easy to pick up and play. It’s varied racing types and the potential for more in-depth control may attract more serious fans of the genre. While there is great rewards for actually becoming skilled with the games quite realistic mechanics, the shallow nature of everything outside the actual races may drive you away.

SpawnFirst Recommends…

GRID Autosport is a good game for both players new to racers and veterans of the genre. That being said, there are probably more outstanding titles in the racing genre that you could spend your time playing. Don’t go out of your way to drop too much money on this title.

The post GRID Autosport Review appeared first on SpawnFirst.

Valiant Hearts: The Great War  tells the story of four characters during World War I torn apart and brought together by the massive, devastating event. First there is Emile and Karl, father-in-law and son-in-law respectively, who are forced to fight on different fronts due to Karl’s German nationality despite being married to Karl’s daughter, Marie, and residing in France. Deported by the French government due to the declaration of war on Russia for the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Karl is soon drafted into the German army, and Emile drafted into that of the French. The game immediately sets up what’s at stake here and does it incredibly well with no discernable dialogue save for the narration.

We then meet Freddie, an American who volunteers to fight for the French and has a laser sharp focus on hunting down Baron Von Dorf for extremely personal reasons. Emile and Freddie soon meet up and form a fast friendship as they both pursue Von Dorf. Along the way, the two soldiers meet Ana, a student and field nurse, who is also after Von Dorf because he’s kidnapped her scientist father and has been forced to create advanced technology for the Germans to use in the war. Accompanying the trio is an unnamed German Shepherd who serves as a faithful companion as well as partner.

Emile and the dog have seen some sh*@.

The story takes the group to and from the front lines of many devastating battles while mostly in pursuit of the evil Baron Von Dorf, often stopping to tell little vignettes that involve each of the characters on their travels. I genuinely felt something for all of the characters, especially Emile and Freddy after seeing their experiences, their triumphs, and their failures. It’s really good stuff and on its own it would be enough to recommend the experience. Be warned though, while the gorgeous visuals and minimalistic sound design soften the brutality of the subject matter, this game is very much about war and the effects it has on the people involved, and as such it can be incredibly depressing. It’s made even more so throughout if you read the diaries, historical facts, and the collectibles’ descriptions.

However, this is a video game after all, and as such it mostly succeeds. At its, erm, heart, Valiant Hearts: The Great War  is an adventure game, so about 80 percent of the gameplay involves solving puzzles to advance to the next section. Some of these puzzles are easier than others, and while none are incredibly taxing on the brain, they’re often clever and well thought out with several moving parts needing to align before they can be completed. Sometimes you will be tasked with switching characters to help get past an area with the way to switch between characters functioning by sending the dog companion towards one from another. It’s used sparingly, but it’s a neat design choice and one I personally have never experienced. The game also employs some stealth missions that, again, are relatively simplistic, but always fun.

Ana’s medical mini-game is nothing more than a QTE repeated ad nauseam. Which is unfortunate because it makes her sections of the game the least interesting or enjoyable.

What isn’t fun is the other 20 percent of the gameplay. Where Valiant Hearts: The Great War  succeeds as an adventure game, it absolutely fails as an “action” game. The controls are just not precise enough to be enjoyable in these moments and towards the end of the game, action becomes more prevalent and ultimately tedious. It got to the point where I just started rolling my eyes and wanted the game to get to the next story beat thus undermining the experience overall. Another poor gameplay design are Ana’s medical mini-games which are basically a series of timed button presses set over an electrocardiography machine. Essentially quicktime events, these moments would be tolerable had they been used once or twice. However, it comes about so often throughout her segments that once again, it becomes tedious and the antithesis of fun or even engaging, even if the word “fun” in a game about the horrors of World War I seems to be a bit of a misnomer.

One of the things I truly adore about video games, more than any other medium, is the interactive nature and how it can immerse me into a story and evoke genuine feelings through that immersion. Ubisoft’s Valiant Hearts: The Great War  is one such game. Equal parts melancholy and charming, mixed ever so slightly with whimsy, the game uses a deceptively simple aesthetic to tell a compelling tale of friendship and love and how war affects these relationships, and how these relationships affect war. Unfortunately, the gameplay (and some design choices) doesn’t always add up to something that is fun to play and ultimately overstays its welcome, thus undermining the impressive storytelling in the process. Still, one must commend Ubisoft for releasing a game such as this, as it’s an experience we don’t get very often.

SpawnFirst Recommends…

Ubisoft’s Valiant Hearts: The Great War  tells a dark story about the tragedy of war. With great storytelling and an incredibly charming art style, as an adventure game it excels. When the gameplay turns to a minor action game or relies on quick time events, not so much.

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Floats like a butterfly, stings like a…

While I imagine no one was expecting Shakespeare here, Rise of the Dark Sparks’s plot pretty much goes as follows: Decepticon and paid mercenary Lockdown show up on the outskirts of modern-day Earth while looking for the Dark Spark, an ancient relic that has literally just crash-landed there after spending a good amount of time whizzing through the darkness of space. The Dark Spark acts as a direct opposite to Optimus Prime’s Matrix of Leadership, in that instead of instilling knowledge and the power of life, it pretty much just gives whoever possesses it the power to fill the universe with complete chaos and bend things to their will. Lockdown detects that Optimus and company are also on Earth somewhere, and immediately makes it his goal to ruin their day by taking a small army and rolling over the majority of the planet while working to acquire it.

The game then spends the majority of its time flashing back to the Autobots’s last days on Cybertron and what becomes the most trigger-happy game of hot potato this side of Kaon. Both sides race to keep the Dark Spark out of each other’s hands before the moment where it’s inevitably launched off the planet. Like I said, none of this is given to you in a way that’s even remotely impossible to follow. Megatron wants it because he’s bad (though he only shows up in person briefly), Optimus wants it because he’s noble and wants to get rid of it, and Lockdown is looking for it for reasons that make me think he should of been wearing a twirly, silent-movie villain mustache the whole time because of how shallow and silly his motivations are for being the main threat in the game.

Gameplay wise, Edge of Reality (who took the reins from High-Moon for this installment) isn’t reinventing the wheel, but giving you a sturdy and definitely well-worn one it found in a garage somewhere. There’s a good selection of Autobots and Decepticons to play as here, which it makes note to alternate between them so you have a fair amount of time with both factions. When the action picks up, the game is entertaining and frantic, but also entirely standard and generic if you’ve played the previous games. Shoot things, upgrade your weapons/loadouts via lockboxes acquired by doing level specific side tasks or just leveling up your character profile, shoot more things, repeat. Simple, really. Enemies can be relentless and occasionally challenging, but also sometimes act as if they’re only running on a couple of gigabytes of hard-drive memory, as they’ll at times run right into your line of fire and stand around lifelessly as you get the drop on them.

If there’s one thing that the game could of benefited from, it’s a sturdy cover system, especially in the more open and hectic areas. I found myself constantly running for my life because, as I soon realized from looking at the game’s control scheme, there wasn’t a button that allowed me to catch my breath behind a wall or barrier. This of course also led to a whole lot of death and having to restart entire sequences I was very close to finishing. Plus, for a game about transforming robots, the transforming  part sure got underutilized in Dark Spark. There are no race-specific quests, an oddity for a game with so much literal wheel power, and in general very few reasons to transform at all beyond the too few times when the environment begs for it. The one highlight here, and really, the highlight of the whole game in general, is towards the end of the game when Dino-Bot fan favorite Grimlock becomes playable for a brief and exciting sequence. Say what you will about this game, but playing as a giant, fire-breathing robot T-Rex is about as exhilarating and fun as it sounds.

Beyond the main campaign, there’s very little to keep you playing beyond the Escalation Mode, which returns from the Cybertron games and serves as a survival/horde mode where you and four friends can jump online together and basically annihilate up to 15 waves of deadly transformers. It’s more than entertaining if you’ve got some spare time and are just looking to go in and wreck something. Plus, all of the levels and items that you acquire throughout the campaign transfer over into Escalation, and vise-versa, so leveling up is really a simple process if you put enough of an investment into it.

Prime time!

Graphically speaking though, Rise of the Dark Spark  is easily the one of the lowest resolution games I’ve played on my PS4, and anyone hoping for a Transformers game that utilizes the console’s high-definition power is going to be massively disappointed. That’s not to say it’s completely terrible looking, but it’s so obvious that Edge of Reality directly ported this from their work on the PS3 version of the game and called it a day. I almost had to check to see what system I was playing it on. The cutscenes in particular stand out by being full of fuzz and jagged edges, and the environments are not just boring, but lifelessly blend together at times in ways that are really kind of ugly and unacceptable. Again, this isn’t a huge issue, especially if you could care less about graphics and care much more about shooting things in the face, but putting in a little bit more of an effort for the graphics would have been nice.

SpawnFirst Recommends…

Transformers, Rise of The Dark Spark  isn’t necessarily a terrible game. In fact, at times it is quite decent. But the overall result is an incredibly mediocre experience that fails to rise above the bar set by i’s predecessors, as well as being a disappointing movie cash-in. If you’re a die-hard Transformers fan, it’s worth renting for a weekend, but this game isn’t worth your time if paying full price.

The post Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark Review appeared first on SpawnFirst.

I’ll start with the story, which is what the game mainly relies on. Soul Suspect  is a classic ghost story with a twist. It begins with the protagonist, Ronan O’Connor, being thrown from a window and then shot seven times in the chest with his own gun by a disguised assailant. He dies and becomes a ghost. He comes to discover that the person who killed him is the infamous Bell Killer who’s been claiming several lives around Salem, Massachusetts, and then he sets out to discover the killer’s motives and true identity.

The plot plays out much like any detective fiction, but also like a horror movie. Ronan is caught in what is essentially purgatory until he can resolve his own murder and find out what else is keeping him from ascending to heaven to join his deceased wife. During his journey he encounters mediums, other ghosts, some of which need his assistance, and demons. I’ll get to all that shortly.

Soul Suspect  is not just interactive fiction like, say, The Walking Dead. Ronan is free to move about Salem and explore the legendary location as he sees fit, but the main gameplay in Soul Suspect  consists of investigating crime scenes. Investigating an area is as simple as wandering around it and picking up clues, a la L.A. Noire. Ronan will then have to use these clues to solve a mystery.

I enjoyed collecting evidence because it made me feel like an actual detective. The problem with these sections is that once all the evidence is gathered, all suggestions of a tough-to-crack case are thrown out the window. It all boils down to Ronan choosing a few clues (I think the most he ever picks is three, and he sometimes gathers almost 20) in order to advance, and it’s hardly rocket science. The solutions are all basically pointed out. And even if Ronan does get an answer wrong, the game never punishes him for doing so. It’s like taking a joy ride in a Lamborghini and then getting stuck in traffic.

My favorite scenes to investigate were the ones in which I had to help out other ghosts. Some of the game’s best storytelling is showcased in these instances. A man was involved in a drunk driving incident and thinks it’s his fault, a girl died from drowning and is confused as to how it happened, and a woman committed suicide after she thought her boyfriend was cheating on her. These moments and a few others are scattered throughout the game and I went out of my way just to hunt them down. They are memorable.

Salem, Massachusetts should be an awesome setting for a video game, but Soul Suspect  squanders its potential there as well. The Salem in it is not very intriguing. Dead-eyed NPCs repeat the same lines while standing still or wandering in set paths. The same character models are used for several of the NPCs and a lot of them even share the exact same voice actors. Rockstar does the same thing with the Grand Theft Auto games, but their money-saving tactics aren’t as noticeable as the ones in Soul Suspect  are. Salem is apparently a lifeless place.

What doesn’t help is the frequent lag that occurs while Ronan is exploring Salem. Soul Suspect  froze completely on me twice. I also had to restart the game once because a clue didn’t show up in one of the crime scenes. That made the fact that prompts are often hard to spot in the crime scenes to begin with worse. The game has a plethora of technical issues going on, some of which could be fixed and some of which players will have to just deal with.

Ronan is sometimes forced into stealth sequences, and they suck. He must sneak around sometimes and take out “demons.” They’re hideous creatures that Ronan can spot through walls. If he can get around behind one of them, he can…make it explode, or something (whatever it is that he does to them isn’t pleasant). If he’s spotted, he must quickly hide inside the remains of other ghosts (I’m not making this stuff up). All these sections are easy and pointless. The demons really have nothing to do with the game’s story and the game would have been better off without their inclusion.

The gameplay that really works in Soul Suspect  lies in Ronan’s ability to possess humans (and the occasional cat) and tamper with environmental objects. For example, if Ronan needs to find out the room number of a hospital patient, he can possess a human who’s sitting at a computer and cause them to look it up (he cannot cause the humans to move in any way; he can only persuade them to do things). If it doesn’t look like Ronan can go any further in an area, there’s probably a vent nearby that a cat can fit in (I don’t know why Ronan can directly control cats but not humans). If Ronan is escorting an NPC through an area and needs to get past some other NPCs, he can cause an object, such as a printer, to malfunction, which distracts the latter.

Possessing humans is enjoyable because it lends some more personality to Soul Suspect. I had fun reading their minds, and I delighted in making them do my bidding. Being a poltergeist is also entertaining and I made sure to interact with every object I came across. And OH MAN did I love being a cat!

What really kept me going in Soul Suspect  was the story. Most of the main characters are fantastic, especially a medium named Joy, who is one of the only humans in the game who can actually see Ronan and becomes his sidekick. Ronan himself starts out seeming like he’s going to be an antihero cliche, but his well thought-out background story and his brilliant characterization make him a wonderful protagonist. He made some mistakes in his past, but he’s still a great guy…ghost.

Ronan’s investigation of his own murder leads to more sinister happenings. The plot twists and turns up until its big reveal at the end, which took me off guard. In a game like Soul Suspect, story matters, and it nails its story. It’s bizarre, complicated, and satisfying.

SpawnFirst recommends…

Murdered: Soul Suspect  is two games combined into one. One of them works and the other doesn’t. My halfhearted recommendation would actually be a wholehearted one if I based it solely on the game’s narrative, but that’s just not how these review things work. So is Soul Suspect  worth your time overall? I say yes. I actually can’t wait to see what Airtight does next. I just hope it’s a little more focused.

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Watch Dogs  tells a well-worn revenge story in which Aiden Pearce sets out for revenge and uncovers something much bigger than he had ever imagined. It’s been done to death in all forms of media, and if I were to judge Watch Dogs  on story alone, it wouldn’t be much of a rating. Only a few of the supporting characters register and the emotional connection between Aiden and his sister is all but non-existent. Unfortunately, that’s the crux of the entire narrative. I never felt anything for his sister or his nephew and the game doesn’t do anything to make you care besides what is essentially “because, family.”

Thankfully, Watch Dogs  has much more interesting characters for Aiden to interact with throughout. My personal favorite is Jordi Chin, a “fixer” (cleaner, hitman, etc.) who loves his job. While the amount of time they spend together is relatively limited, every time he pops up it’s always fun to watch. The third act (in the traditional sense of the three act structure, not the game itself which is broken into five) is incredibly predictable and some moments meant to muster an emotional reaction fall short as a result of it.

Watch_Dogs features some interesting characters like Jordi Chin (right) and some others that didn’t resonate with me (mostly everyone else).

While the story itself isn’t incredibly remarkable and hits a lot of familiar and predictable beats, the varied and fun missions it takes you on are, for the most part, fresh and new. Sure you will spend a lot of time driving—ugh, that driving—from point A to point B, chasing dudes in cars, and taking down enemies, there is just so much varied and interesting stuff to do while on those missions. Which brings me to my my original point— freedom of choice. A lot of games offer multiple ways to approach situations, but for me, this is where Watch Dogs  truly excels.

Taking a cue from another Ubisoft franchise, Far Cry, Aiden will be tasked with approaching a heavily guarded area. He can survey the area from a good vantage point, tagging enemies so he can monitor their paths and avoid detection while he accomplishes his mission. That on its own doesn’t sound very exciting, but thankfully you have a wide set of tools at your disposal.

And by far, the best tool is the number one mechanic in the game: Aiden’s smartphone. This thing is plain old badass. As long as Aiden has line of sight with it, a simple button press can give him access to anything connected to CtOS network—smart phones, bank accounts, computers, traffic lights, bridges, road blocks, and most importantly, security cameras—Aiden’s phone is his number one tool for pretty much everything.

Enemy controlled zones are marked red on the mini-map and once Aiden sets foot into one of these zones, enemies will shoot him dead on sight. Aiden also can’t take a whole lot of damage, so his best weapon is using his phone to hack the aforementioned security cameras from behind cover. From there he can bounce from camera to camera, hacking into the environments to either lure enemies off of their path, or he can simply hack the enemies’ electronics, depending on what their respective electronic device does. My favorite is getting two or three guards together and hacking one of the explosives one of them is carrying. Often times it will lead to a huge explosion and three dead bad guys. It was always satisfying when I succeeded and was always disappointing if the explosive was tossed far enough away as to not kill anyone at all.

What makes this mechanic really stand out is that it’s not always used to avoid enemy detection. Often times, it’s used simply to suss out some information from someone’s laptop or unattended phone. Or to ID a target that has to be tailed. Or to glean some incriminating evidence to be used for blackmail. How you approach most of the scenarios is always up to the player, and I genuinely love that true sense of freedom.

While Aiden is by no means some sort of super soldier, that doesn’t mean that shooting doesn’t offer its own sense of fun and rewarding gameplay. Thanks to “Focus,” Aiden can move so fast that time seems to slow down, allowing him to make the perfect headshot and drop enemies from a reasonable distance. The guns themselves are all pretty satisfying, but I found that about 85 percent of my shooting/combat was done using focus and my silenced pistol. The other 15 percent comprised of other guns and various explosives.

If I can level one complaint in this aspect of the game, it’s that there are so few options for non-lethal combat. No flashbangs, no sleep darts, nothing. While most of your encounters are with guys who will shoot you on sight, since the game does allow for some inventive ways to avoid confrontation, it would have been nice to see some options I could use to avoid killing for when combat was inevitable. I suppose the Blackout ability works for this purpose well enough, but it really does feel like this game wants to you kill people.

For myself, open world games live and die by the worlds I play in. Is there a lot to do when not playing missions? Is what there is to do fun? Is there variety? Is it fun to get around in?

Profiling and hacking offers brief but informed insight into every NPC in the game. It also helps identify potential criminals and their victims with whom Aiden can intervene.

My answer to all of these questions, save for one, is undoubtedly “Yes!”

Oh man, is there a LOT to do in Watch Dogs. So much that I wouldn’t even begin to list them all of them lest this review become a travelogue rather than a critique on the game. Card games, drinking games, arcade like games, convoy takedowns, and sightseeing are just a few of the things to do. OCD players will have a field day trying to get everything cleared off the map and it’s actually kind of exhausting.

The side activities each offer rewards; some offer money, some offer reputation, some offer XP, and some offer skill points, all of which have varying degrees of usefulness. After a certain point I had so much money that the offer of a few thousand dollars was meaningless. Reputation helps insofar as citizens are less likely to call the cops on you when they spot you out and about. Stopping criminals or criminal acts boosts your reputation so I found these to be pretty fun and rewarding diversions.

XP and skill points are by far the most useful as they give you the ability to unlock skills that become more and more essential later in the game. In fact, I had done so many of these missions before even leaving Act I that later missions became much easier as a result. I do recommend doing these activities as often as you can before really engaging in the story.

By far my favorite distractions in the game are gang hideouts, CtOS towers, and most of all, privacy invasions. Gang hideouts are just enemy encampments like those I detailed above only they have one objective: Get in close to the leader and knock him out. From there you can either escape the area or take out the rest of the enemies. Once again, you have a choice.

CtOS towers serve the same function as vantage points do in the Assassin’s Creed games and the radio towers in Far Cry 3. The twist here is that each tower is a puzzle in and of itself. Using cameras, vantage points, and some critical thinking—there are locked gates (sometimes more than one) to be circumvented and using the hacking tool once again becomes integral to solving each and every one of them. Hacking the CtOS towers reveals all of the side activities and missions in the area, once again presenting a whole heap of things to do.

And lastly there is what I find to be the best pieces of storytelling in the game, the privacy invasions. Hacking into CtOS internet terminals on buildings gives you access to web cameras pulling back the veil on the citizens of Chicago. These range from utterly hilarious—a man rating women on a dating site, to downright tragic—seeing an elderly man die of a heart attack while his concerned son leaves a message on his answering machine. So much information is given in these small little snippets and all are so incredibly well written that I genuinely wish there were more of them. Hell, I would love an entire game full of them actually. They’re all that good.

Privacy invasions are the highlight of the game. Almost like single location short films that are incredibly well written and directed.

When not on missions, hacking terminals, or peering in on the private moments of the citizens of Chicago, Aiden is just moving around the city. On foot, Aiden can hack into people’s smartphones and hear their conversations, access their music library, find out where crimes are about to happen, or simply take money from their bank accounts. Once again, the game makes no binary judgments on the player as to whether or not you did a good or bad thing. It leaves all of that up to the player. Giving you just enough information about the potential hacking victim, you can choose whether or not you want to take money from their bank account, or leave them be. And like the privacy invasions, it’s all presented incredibly well and so much information is given with so few details.

In a car Watch Dogs  is, by far, mechanically at its worst. Cars feel like they’re made of paper and roads feel like sliding on ice. One tick of the stick in either left or right can and will send your vehicle careening onto the sidewalk, talking out pedestrians and benches alike. This makes car chases, particularly in the beginning hours of the game, incredibly tedious. It’s not until later when you have unlocked more access to hack road hazards with your phone, does driving become more tolerable. And much like I stuck to focus and a silenced pistol for most of the shooting in the game, I spent the latter half of the give driving motorcycles in cockpit view. I found it the easiest way to navigate the tight spaces and have the most control over steering. And if I was forced to use a car to evade police, I simply found it easier and far less frustrating to drive to the docks, dive into the water, and swim under a bridge until they gave up chase.

Watch_Dogs is visually impressive, especially when it’s raining.

Technically, Watch Dogs  is impressive. Visually, while the game might not be the true “next-gen” experience I had hoped it would be, it’s still incredibly impressive. Especially when it rains. Water reflects light well on the city streets, characters walk with newspapers over their heads, hunched over (which is something I never understood why people do when walking in the rain) and Aiden’s clothes become soaked and shiny with water. I noticed no pop in, even when moving at incredibly fast speeds on a motorcycle in cockpit view. And character animations are all realistic.

The sound is even more of a feat. Chicago feels alive and very real; pedestrians talk, verbally react to situations, and generally behave in a believable way. At no point was I taken out of the game by any wonky behaviors or hitches. The music is a bit of a mixed bag depending on your taste, but there is a pretty decent amount here. By no means as robust as something that is always on offer in the Grand Theft Auto games, I did find myself looking up artists and songs that I heard for the first time in the game. Lastly, the voice acting is all very, very good. While not at the heights of something from Naughty Dog, it never falls into bad or even mediocre; it all ranges from good (Aiden) to excellent (Jordi).

In regard to online, Watch Dogs  offers a somewhat unique take on multiplayer that for me wasn’t very much fun. I will admit I turned off online invasions for my playthrough from the first moment I installed the game onto my PS4. The reason for that is because I like to play open world games at my leisure and my own pace and didn’t want to have to stop what I was doing because a random hacker was invading my game. When I finally finished the main story, I turned the online invasions back on and low and behold, I was hacked while on my way to do a side activity. I had to stop what I was doing, suss out the hacker with my phone, and give chase. It was neat, for sure, and kind of exhilarating the first couple of times, but after awhile I became annoyed just like I thought I would be.

Online tailing is the least offensive of the bunch as all it really means is that you get followed or follow another player and profile them while a meter fills up to 100 percent without getting profiled yourself. Online Decryption is basically another variation on keep away, while players/teams all contend over a piece of encrypted data; the one who holds it for the longest will decrypt it and win the game. Again, a fun diversion, but considering games can last up to 30 minutes, it got tedious after a while. Lastly, there is Online Racing. I’m just going to let my thoughts on the driving in this game speak for my thoughts about the racing.

Watch Dogs  is a remarkable first game in this inevitable series. It offers a ton of stuff to do, has some excellent writing and presentation, is technically impressive, and has a great central mechanic with well-designed missions and puzzles. It stumbles a bit with the storytelling and almost hits a wall, literally, with the driving mechanics, but all in all, Ubisoft has another great franchise on their hands, and I’m very interested to see where they take the series from here.

And I will be watching.

SpawnFirst Recommends…

While Watch Dogs  may not be the true “next-gen” experience we were hoping for, it’s still a very good, very good-looking game that serves as the foundation for what could be yet another very new and interesting series from Ubisoft.

The post Watch Dogs Review appeared first on SpawnFirst.

Super Time Force  is one of the most ridiculous games I’ve ever played. I was told up front from the developers at Capybara Games that their game was ‘kinda bonkers’, but I still didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Moments into the game, things become clear just how insane the world of Super Time Force  is. Feeling like I had set foot into a classic 80s action movie on crystal meth, I immediately fell in love with everything that was going on.

The game begins with the main character, an eye-patched professor named Repeatski, creating time travel. Mere moments after his invention is completed, the world becomes enslaved by an evil race of robots. It is here that Professor Repeatski is then greeted by the arrival of his future self where he is known as Commander Repeatski and now sports two eye patches. The future Commander Repeatski tells his past self that with the help of the Super Time Force, they will save the Earth. Making sense yet?

After saving the world from robots, Commander Repeatski decides to use time travel to go throughout history and change the past for the betterment of humanity. This includes preventing the sinking of Atlantis for the sole purpose of making it become the fifty-first state in the U.S.A.; recovering the Holy Grail to then sell on the Internet to keep the local “Medieval Funtimez” from going out of business; and stopping the meteor from killing the dinosaurs to create a perfect society where dinos and humans can co-exist.

This sort of ridiculousness is what makes Super Time Force  so incredibly charming. The dialogue is outright hysterical and provides one of the funniest gaming experiences I’ve had in recent memory. There’s something to be said about this since the game has no voice acting, and is instead all text based.

While the story is one of the best parts of the game, the gameplay is what stands out as the most unique part of Super Time Force. In each level, you are given thirty lives and sixty seconds to reach the end. The action plays very much like Contra, with bullets flying past you at all times. When you die – and trust me, you will die – you can immediately press the B button to rewind the clock and restart from a point where you hadn’t yet died. In addition to this, your past character that once died continues the same path that it took up until its death. It sounds confusing, but once you get your hands on the game it becomes apparent what is happening. Every time that you rewind you are also allowed to then choose a new character to play. If you are able to collect all of the characters in the game, then you will have the option to switch between sixteen different characters.

Each of the characters has their own unique weapons and abilities, which can each help depending on the situation you are in. The characters also all have a normal attack and a heavy attack. Each of these provides the player the opportunity to mix and match to create some truly crazy combinations. The funniest thing about the characters, however, is the hilarious 80s inspired names that they each have. From Dolphin Lundgren and Melanie Gibson to Jean Rambois and Jef Leppard, it is easy to see where Capybara Games receives their inspiration to create such an outlandish game.

In addition to its insane bullet-hell levels, Super Time Force has some of the best boss fights I’ve seen in awhile. It’s in these fights that the rewind gameplay mechanic truly shines. Using your abilities, you can have dozens of characters on the screen at once firing their various projectiles at the boss. This allows more creative experimentation with the characters, since you aren’t so focused on reaching the end of the level in under sixty seconds but are instead focused on shooting as much as possible to quickly drain the boss’ health bar.

While the gameplay is unique, it only really seems to shine in these boss battles. Throughout the rest of the game it begins to feel clunky and hard to manage. You’ll often rewind only to be immediately killed in a firestorm of bullets. It can be a frustrating gameplay mechanic to get a grip on but also provides a challenge for those who truly want to master it.

That being said, even if you do get annoyed with the gameplay, you don’t have to put up with it for long. The main story only lasts around 2-3 hours, but there are many collectibles to be found in each level for those who want to stick around longer. In addition, you unlock Super Hardcore Mode after initially beating the game in case you want to play it again.

Despite its length, I enjoyed all of my time in Super Time Force. When it’s not leaving you rolling on the floor in laughter, you will be carefully planning out the best way to get through a level without running out of time or lives. For being such a twitchy side scrolling shooter, Super Time Force makes the player think ahead and use their brain to beat it, which is yet another unique feature out of the many that are found in this incredibly weird game.

SpawnFirst Recommends…

WIth its hilarious dialogue and fast-paced gameplay, Super Time Force is one of the most fun indie games that I have played in some time. In the end, it does what every video game should and allows the player to just have fun. Even though it’s somewhat short, the price of admission is still very much worth it.

The post Super Time Force Review appeared first on SpawnFirst.

But, man, I sure was left feeling cold by a lot of the fourth episode. I felt the sting of the pedestrian nature of it right from the start. After an intense opening that shows Bigby recovering from his confrontation with Bloody Mary that occurred at the end of A Crooked Mile, Snow White suddenly starts spouting nonsense. She starts chastising Bigby’s roomate, Colin (one of the Three Little Pigs), about not having a glamour (the spell Fables must undergo to take on a human appearance) done yet. Of all the things that should matter to Snow White at this point in the Wolf Among Us  narrative, whether or not a character has been glamoured should be at the bottom of the list. But then the episode keeps taking the path of least return.

Then the characters of Beauty and Beast are completely ruined. Their relationship had been thoroughly explored in The Wolf Among Us  leading up to the latest episode and it was one of the most interesting things the game had going for it, but In Sheep’s Clothing  has them reverting back into vain nobodies. I was shaking my head when the scene was over. I’m afraid that scene, and I hope I’m wrong, may be the last big one featuring Beauty and Beast. At this point I was really bored and wanted to turn the game off, but REVIEW.

Fortunately things started looking up. The next stop in my journey had me inquiring at a pawn shop about the Woodsman’s axe, which Bloody Mary had somehow came into possession of (and then returned to the pawn shop for some reason). There Bigby comes into contact with the worst Wolf Among Us  character, Jack (from Jack and Jill), and is introduced to the owner of the pawn shop, Jersey, who just so happens to be the Jersey Devil. Things get heated and a big fight breaks out, and I was treated to the best action sequence in The Wolf Among Us  so far. It’s brief, brutal, and drives home the point that Bigby is sick of putting up with bull****.

How does this awesome moment begin? Bigby asks Mr. Toad if he’s been glamoured yet. Huh? What is up with the inane obsession with characters getting glamours in this episode? Surely these people can find better uses of their time like, I don’t know, investigating a MURDERER. Instead they’re focusing on whether or not fairytale creatures look like humans.

I thought the episode couldn’t get anymore inconsequential, but then I visited the butcher shop. It’s operated by a man named Johann, who is the butcher mentioned in the well-known tale about the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. I was intrigued just like I am when I meet any new Fable in The Wolf Among Us, but then Bigby spends what feels like an eternity talking to him and I discovered he’s actually very boring. The conversation is a set-up for a big moment in the back of the butcher shop, but it still feels pointless. It felt as unimportant as the rest of the episode had.

Then Bigby finally discovers where the Crooked Man is located and the episode picks back up again. He meets the Crooked Man’s assitant, Tiny Tim, and then finally the Crooked Man himself. I could feel the brilliance that has existed elsewhere in The Wolf Among Us  start to creep back into In Sheep’s Clothing. Then, in a flash, it’s all over. I was left wanting more, but now I’ll have to wait a few months. Maybe the mediocrity of In Sheep’s Clothing  will have faded from my memory by then. I look forward to seeing the conclusion Telltale has in store.

SpawnFirst recommends…

I look at Telltale’s games in the same way I would a TV show. Telltale puts out wonderful entertainment products, but some individual components are better than others, as in any great TV show. In Sheep’s Clothing  is the weakest episode of anything Telltale has put out in a while. Despite that, The Wolf Among Us  is still a great show…ahem, game. I hope the finale kicks some serious a**.

The post The Wolf Among Us: Episode Four — In Sheep’s Clothing Review appeared first on SpawnFirst.

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SpawnFirst Recommends…

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Wolfenstein: The New Order begins in an alternate history version of the year 1946. World War II is still ongoing and the Nazis have managed to develop advanced technologies, which give them a huge advantage over the Allied forces. William ‘B.J.’ Blazkowicz and a team of Allies undergo a raid on an enemy fortress that is being run by B.J.’s old nemesis Deathshead. From there things go badly and the player is forced to make a moral choice which will alter the timeline you experience.

Blazkowicz and a few of his men manage to escape the fortress, but in the process B.J. suffers a serious head injury. The game jumps forward in time 14 years at this point. Since his injury B.J. has been housed in an asylum, stuck in a vegetative state. Nazis are ordered to shut down the asylum and they begin to massacre the staff and patients inside. Witnessing this awakens B.J. from his docile state and he begins to retaliate, saving an asylum worker in the process. When he learns that Germany won the war he begins his globe-trotting crusade to join the resistance and fight back against our new Nazi overlords.

This isn’t your typical linear FPS by any means. More often than not there are multiple paths through a level. The maps are quite open for exploration and exploring will pay off, rewarding you with upgrades for your health and weapons, among other things. That isn’t to say that you won’t be fighting the Nazi horde in tight corridors from time to time. There are 16 chapters in all; each one can take anywhere from 40 to 60 minutes to complete. It took me about 11 hours to complete the story on the medium difficulty, which left me at 47 percent completion overall.

More often than not there are multiple paths through a level. The maps are quite open for exploration and exploring will pay off, rewarding you with upgrades for your health and weapons, among other things.

The gunplay is as good as you would expect from an FPS game. You can have up to five weapons on you at any one time, most of which can be dual-wielded, and they all generally have alternate fire modes. The weapons you’ll be using to mow down Nazis left, right, and center with are your usual suspects for an FPS, such as assault rifles, shotguns, and pistols. There is a special weapon you’ll acquire for a level late in the game that I won’t spoil. The game controls similarly to the Call of Duty franchise and runs at 1080p and 60 frames per second, ensuring that gameplay is smooth and fluid. The game features a fair amount of gore as you’ll be dismembering limbs and blowing Nazis into little chunks with ease depending on your weapon of choice.

The New Order  won’t be taking away any ‘best graphics’ awards from Infamous: Second Son or Killzone: Shadow Fall,  but that’s not to say the graphics aren’t good. The game runs on id Tech 5, which is the same engine that Rage was built on, so if you’ve played that; you’ll have some idea of what to expect, graphically-speaking. There are some jagged edges on objects if you stop to get up close and personal with them, but in motion the game looks great. You’ll have a ton of fun blasting Nazis to bits and painting the walls red.

The health system in place is akin to your classic FPS. For example, if your health drops to 87 percent your health will regenerate to 100 percent. However, if you take enough damage to fall below the threshold your health will only regenerate to the nearest 20 percent increment. You can also overcharge your health by picking up as many health packs as you can find. There doesn’t seem to be a limit to the amount you can overcharge your health; at one point I had over 300 percent. Armor is capped at 100 percent unless you find a permanent upgrade.

When you engage with the enemy they’ll do their best to evade your fire by scrambling behind cover. That’s usually not a problem for you though as most of the objects they choose to hide behind are destructible. You can keep on firing at that concrete until all that remains is exposed rebar, and of course, the corpse of your Nazi prey.

Stealth works surprisingly well and is definitely a valid option. A well-placed headshot with your silenced pistol will quietly kill a Nazi soldier. Or you can get up close and personal by sneaking up behind a guard and opting to do a knife takedown.

There are four perk tiers in the game to suit your play style and they can be upgraded and expanded upon. For instance, the more you opt to use stealth, the better B.J. will become at it. Some of the perks include increased damage with a silenced pistol, faster movement speed while dual-wielding, and increased reload times.

Stealth works surprisingly well and is definitely a valid option. A well-placed headshot with your silenced pistol will quietly kill a Nazi soldier. Or you can get up close and personal by sneaking up behind a guard and opting to do a knife takedown. Be careful when approaching a guard head on because sometimes they’ll grapple you and fight back. At this point you just have to mash R3 as fast as you can to ensure you aren’t the one that gets stabbed to death.

For all that The New Order does well there are a few issues I have. Some transitions from cutscene to gameplay are quite jarring. There are instances where you approach a character to engage in a conversation, which will trigger a cutscene for no good reason. I don’t see why the characters couldn’t converse during actual gameplay; it just feels awkward. There are also some bizarre animations that make me feel they could have used a bit more polish. B.J. can apparently pull himself out of water by grabbing onto thin air.

Some of the buttons are double-mapped so occasionally you might find yourself throwing a knife at an enemy a few feet in front of you rather than simply stabbing them. Not only that, but the weapon wheel is mapped to the same button as your grenades, which means you can’t “cook” grenades either. Luckily I didn’t encounter anything game breaking and these are only minor grievances.

If you like to hunt for collectibles, such as golden Nazi artifacts, there’s plenty to keep you occupied here. However, the fact that the story can be completed in 11 hours and the game’s distinct lack of multiplayer make it a little hard for me to recommend a purchase at full price. If you’re a completionist there’s enough here to keep you occupied for 20+ hours, but that’s only if you want to see the outcome of both timelines and collect absolutely everything. If you’re the type of gamer to run through the story once and move on, I would think twice before you pay full price for this.

SpawnFirst Recommends…

The franchise that helped launch the FPS genre is back and it hasn’t skipped a beat. But more importantly, it’s a ton of fun. Wolfenstein: The New Order is very much a modern FPS with some retro mechanics sprinkled in for good measure. However, the lack of multiplayer means it may not stay in your system of choice for long.

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