Insurgency - Review

I snipe. It's what I do.

Title:
Insurgency

Platform:
PC

Who:
You the special operations soldier. First-person.

What: 
Tactical player-versus-player and player-versus-bots combat.

When:
Released 2014.

Where:
Various middle-eastern looking cities. Maps are limited by restricted zones and invisible walls, but otherwise large maps provide for interesting bottle-necks and long-range encounters.

Why:
Battlefield 4 is expensive, and doesn't have bots.

Significance:
Only a few first-person shooter games in the counter-terrorism category allow for cooperative combat against a common enemy.

Pros:
Fantastically challenging A.I. Intricate maps and nice visuals. A good use of weapon sounds. One shot kills.

Cons: 
A.I. gets to cheat by seeing through smoke, fire, bushes, pitch-black darkness, and dead bodies. An appalling lack of weapon choices. Game design choices around respawn time, loadout limits, and map boundaries is disappointing.

Drive Forever

Ever play F-Zero? Ever play Midtown Madness? Respectively, speed and driving in a sandbox are two great characteristics to make a game out of. Drive Forever uses procedural generation to allow players to experience the best of speed and environment. Each time you play, no two environments are the same. There's no learning the track and committing it to muscle memory, no following the same boring road. Go fast, don't crash, and enjoy the scenery. Drive Forever.

There is also track mode which allows players a more traditional way to test the controls and the hover car's ability. Split screen allows multiple players (right now two, but four is what were aiming for) to race, explore, and generally goof around with each other. The car's engine and thrust is highly based in physics, and having multiple different car options will make this game exponentially deeper. I personally would like to see the procedural generation used to create lush forests and monumental cities to drive through. There's also a full day cycle currently, which will be followed soon by a night cycle.

Other possible features include destructible structures (with weapons of course), an antagonist, probably a wall of fire or something else equally menacing, that chases you around, prompting a de-facto survival mode, multiple various tracks, and hover jousting.

We plan on developing on PC, and then porting it over to Mac, Linux, Xbox, and Android mobile. IPhone and IPad support may also come depending on accessibility.

We want to have beta ready mid-September and release by the end of November.


Credits:

• Jordan Black - Programmer / Project Manager
• Dan Modesto - Programmer
• Zach Checkeye - 3D Modeling
• Natan Golynskiy - Level Design
• Josh Donnelly - Sound Design

Banished - Review

If the developer doesn't make Banished 2 I will be disappointed.

Title: 
Banished

Platform: 
PC

Who: 
You the village leader, Birds-eye.

What: 
Secluded village builder. Singleplayer.

When:
Released February 2014.

Where: 
River valley areas far from everything, but still close enough to enjoy river trading.

Why: 
Medieval life simulator. This is basically what it means when people in movies say "It'll send us back to the stone age."

Significance: 
There hasn't been a good 3d medieval citybuilder in a long time. Resource management is difficult to find in entertaining forms.

Pros: 
Great in-game economy, realistic survival challenges. Dynamics such as firewood for warmth, and tool and clothing deterioration, that many games ignore for simplicity's sake.

Cons: 
No combat, weapons, or walls, and a limited building set.