Game Review: Wasteland Survival

 
By Bixyl Shuftan

When checking Steam for games the other day, one that got my attention was "Wasteland Survival." It's the sole game offered by Joyloft Co. Limited. The type, a survival game in which one fights zombies. The price: Free to purchase. The game had gotten mixed reviews. Deciding to check it out, I downloaded it, which took only a short time, and started playing.

The opening scene was that of an unconscious man having washed up on a beach being woken up by a friendly dog, happy to find human company. With no sign of the owner, what's left is to look around the area. Going about, you find a few tools and weapons. You also come across a few low-level zombies that are easily beaten. You can equip a weapon by dragging  it from your storage to one of the two weapon slots on your inventory page. You can also wear clothes by dragging them onto your legs, torso, and head spaces. Your main screen has an action bar on the bottom with two weapon spaces and a space that can hold an item such as bandages or food.

Your character has only so many hit points, which are reduced from zombie attacks. Your character also gets hungry and thirsty, with your hunger and thirst levels steadily going down. Once either reaches zero, you will start to take damage. To stave off thirst, you need to drink bottled water or eat food with water content such as berries. To take care of your hunger, you need to eat food such as canned beans, berries, and more. Eating also replenishes your hit points, some foods doing so better than others. While you can find monster meat off some zombies, it's not recommended for eating (but does have another purpose).

You can also craft items. At the start, you're limited to just a couple tools, the stone hatchet and pick, a few weapons such as a baseball bat, bandages, and a couple items of clothing, survivors' shirt and pants. You can also build structures such as floors and walls, storage containers, a garden to grow food, a campfire to cook food, a rain barrel to get water, and the kennel for your dog, which you'll need to finish for it to travel with you. And the way you get the materials for this is to gather them. You can gather grass and an occasional log and stone on the ground. You can also chop trees for wood, pick bushes for edible berries, and pick rocks for stone and iron ore. Zombies can carry cloth and occasionally rope or some other material. Crates can carry bottled water, canned food, glue, bars of iron, and others.

To get items, you'll have to search other areas. At first you're limited to just a few, the lush woods, the small mine, and the novice hunting grounds. The woods has more wood, the mine has more rocks that deliver iron ore, and the hunting grounds has critters that drop meat you can cook, leather and hides you can use to craft, and bones you can feed your dog. Sometimes two other areas will pop up. A crashed plane has a number of suitcases you can open that you can find items from dog food to better clothes and more. This is about the only zone that's zombie free, but one place may explode and damage you for a few points. The airdrop is the most dangerous of these early areas as there are zombies that can quickly rush up to you and quickly kill you. So here you'll need to be ready to make a break for it and retreat.

Of the zombies, the first ones you'll encounter are no big deal, slow, lumbering, and taken down with a few wacks of a baseball bat or one or two. But if you've played "Left 4 Dead," you have some idea what's to come. Later on are "Coneheads" whom require more hits to kill, and the "Ironhelms" that take a lot more. The "Batters" can quickly run over and proceed to pound you with their baseball bats, dealing more damage than the Coneheads and Ironhelms. The "Bloaters" can deal heavy damage in close combat, and will spew acid that not only hurts you but can slow you down. But the most deadly of the zombies you'll run into early on are the "Engineers" and "Spitters." They will quickly catch up to you and kill you with just a couple blows. Spitters in particular are to be watched out for as not only can they outrun you, but they sometimes can detect you from long distance and make a beeline to you. And if they catch you while stopping to eat or drink something from your backpack, you'll likely end up dying - and losing your stuff. I eventually got the hint to put food in my action bar instead of bandages.

Eventually, you'll start to start to stink, or "smell of aged cheese" as your character puts it. It will happen faster if you have to take a pee. This means the zombies can smell you and detect you easier, which can be inconvenient if there's a crate with zombies nearby you don't want to tangle with. Build a shower and have bottled water on hand to take care of this.

Early on, you find a body with a diary. Each page will give you a mission, and in carrying them out, you read more of the diary and get a small reward. If you play daily, you'll be given a reward once a day. Sometimes it's a pickaxe or bow. But once in a great while, you'll get something valuable like a shotgun. There is a trader in the game, offering items like ammo, but he demands high prices for his goods.

If the zombies in the zones weren't bad enough, once a day a horde will head to your base. If not stopped, unless your base has defenses, they will damage it and possibly take some things from your containers. At first, they're just a few not too tough ones. But as time goes on, they get more numerous and some more dangerous. Early on, you have an automatic turret that can help as there's some ammo boxes you find. But it's useless when they run out. Building barricades will cause the zombies to attack them first before nearby buildings (if the obstacles are between the buildings and the horde) and damage themselves. The first ones will be killed, but a horde will eventually smash a barricade. More barricades will stop more zombies. But eventually the horde will have a powerful boss zombie at the end that just smashes them with his weapon. If you're around when they make your attack, you have a chance to stop any damage. You also get a small reward if you stop the attack.

Dying in the game means you end up waking up back at your base, without your clothes or any other gear you had when the zombies caught you. You have ten minutes to get your gear before it vanishes. But if it was a Spitter that killed you, it will be waiting for you. You'll need a gun, preferably an automatic rifle, to take it out. Otherwise you'll have to say goodbye to whatever you lost, which can be very, very, aggravating.

As you progress, you'll get points that can be spent for extra abilities, for you and your dog. You'll also be able to craft more. Some builds allow you to make goods, such as the furnace will allow you to smelt iron ore into iron bars, and sewing machines can turn grass into cloth. Some are two-part builds. One automatic crossbow build turned out to be only the base, with the top requiring materials I hadn't found yet.

Early on, I found a pistol. This made progressing not *too* difficult. That is until a Spitter caught me while I was eating and clobbered me. And in trying to get back to get the gun, it clobbered me yet again. So it was goodbye gun, and slow progress as I had to find the stuff to make my clothes and new weapons. And more than once the Spitters and Engineers would get me before I'd gotten a full set of decent gear and weapons.

The game often offers me a shortcut, dangling items like weapons if I pay up some real cash. Considering the aggravating setbacks, I can imagine players fed up with the slow progress going ahead and paying cash so they'll have a working gun or a machete so they have a chance against the Engineers and Spitters. It would seem this is how this "free" game makes money for it's creator. 

On the plus side, it doesn't seem to take too much processing power to play. I'm able to run it and Second Life at the same time. It also pauses if some things, such as the SL viewer, are what you're using at the moment.

Wasteland Survival will likely frustrate you, but it's unlikely to be boring. If you want fast progress though, it's probably best to pass this game and head for another of the survival genre. This game will have you grinding a lot as you keep searching for supplies to rebuild the gear you lose to the zombies.

You can get the game for free on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1044200/Wasteland_Survival/

Bixyl Shuftan

Reader Submitted- Game Review: Super Animal Royale

By Aegis J. Hyena (Xymbers Slade)

Recently I saw a couple of my friends playing a game called Super Animal Royale and decided to try it out. It's a free game on Steam, in the genre of battle royale games. You take control of a little animal and wander about the map picking up weapons (a shotgun, machine gun, assault rifle, pistol, or magnum, with a desert eagle added in the most recent update) and go on to shoot the other 63 animals that are in the map along with you. Weapons are color coded for rarity, with higher rarities having faster reload times, rate of fire, and the like. There's three tiers of armor, which can be repaired by finding duct tape scattered about the map and in boxes, and you can even run over enemies in hamster balls although it has to be in a dead-on hit as far as I can see.

Matches are short and fast, so this game is excellent for killing some time with friends or just chilling out rather than being truly competitive (at least, as far as I can see). The "free" version is no different from the paid version (about $13) except you can actually equip clothes for a basic appearance -- there's no microtransactions to fast-track yourself to be better than someone else.

After each battle you gain "Animal DNA" that is used to unlock other appearances. You start with Fox, Bear, "Skullcat", Tiger, Cat, Dog and Songbird and there's more varieties every 5 levels (although I think you have to upgrade to the paid version to actually be able to use anything other than the beginning animals). No animal has advantages over another -- it's strictly an appearance choice.

Currently the matches are full of bots because the game is still getting off the ground. Lobbies before a match can hold 64 people, and if there are less than that in a lobby it populates with bots (I've seen as many as 26 people in one lobby before). You can play solo, or duo with another player; only the paid version can invite friends, if I remember right. The devs have said they'll unlock squads fully where four players can play together once more people start playing and the lobbies fill.

As of this writing, squads are open for the weekend in an attempt to drum up some interest.

If you upgrade from the free version to the paid version everything you've earned as drops for appearance editing carries over.

I like it for its cutesy style. It's a refreshing change from all the realistic gritty battle royales out there like Apex or PUBG, and I think it has the potential to be a real gem if the devs (who are active in their discord) approach it right. The community also isn't as toxic as most of the other battle royales I've seen (well, yet... this is the internet after all). I'm going to give it four dragon hoards out of five here, if only because I can't tell if it's a mobile game ported to Steam or not. It looks simplistic enough to be a mobile game, and I'm no fan of mobile games.

Addition: Aegis would later say,  "I've learned it's not a port, but I'm keeping it at four out of five to give 'room for improvement'." He would also say the four-person squad option was closing later today, so it'll be limited to solo play and two-man teams.

Aegis J. Hyena

Gaming News: Steam Suddenly Ending Modder Payment System, WoW Numbers Drop, A Cheater's Public End

By Bixyl Shuftan

There were a couple notable stories this week in the world of Massive Multiplayer Games. The  news about World of Warcraft's numbers revealed that the boost provided by their latest expansion is now over. When "Warlords of Draenor" came out, the response was electric, subscriptions going from less than 7 million in June 2014 to more than ten in November. The latest statistics released show that by March 2015, numbers had plummeted as fast as they had risen, down to 7.1 million.

So why the plunge? Different players will give different answers. One heard more than once was that once a player reached Level 100, maxed out the Garrison, and witnessed Garosh Hellscream's end, there wasn't that much to do. But even with this drop, World of Warcraft remains the top MMO.

Links: MMO Champion, Gamespot, Nasdaq, IGN, 

In another MMO, a cheater was delt with in a very public way. Over a few weeks, players gathered evidence of a JT Darkside using exploits  to dominate other characters in Player versus player combat, teleporting away, dealing massive damage, etc., "with these programs running, the character could travel around the map at extraordinary speeds, teleport inside structures to take them from opposing factions, and apparently both hit hard as well as be hard to kill."

As youtube videos were the big evidence against him, in a fitting end to Darkside, his fate was shown in a youtube video on a post by security cheif Chris Cleary in the Guildwars forum. The video showed Darkside being stripped of his clothes down to his underwear, giving the viewer a friendly wave, then plummeting off a ledge to his death. The character, and one other belonging to the player, were deleted. When someone asked about his account, Clearly posted, "We don't need to see it (evidence) in-game. Sometimes good video evidence is good enough for me to track down who it was. In this case, the video was enough for me to findout who it was and take action. Thanks for the video, and to accompany your video, I give you this video of his account's last moments. Oh yah, he's also banned."

The response was a number of cheers from gamers, "Perfect way to embarrass these idiots who seem to find it fun cheating."

Links: Guild Wars 2 Forums, Eurogamer, BBC News, Massively OP,

Late last month was a move by Steam that got quite a bit of attention. They announced a new system that would allow the makers of game mods to sell them on Steam Workshop, starting with Skyrim, which has among the most mods of any game on the market. While the move excited some people whom felt this would encourage new content, others reacted badly, feeling they'd have to pay for what they were getting for free.

The system didn't remain up for long. After only four days, Steam announced the system was being taken down. In a statement, Steam explained than in the past their efforts to allow "community creators to receive a share of the rewards" had been "in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different." They had been taken off guard by the numbers of those complaining.

There was one other issue, though it didn't get as much buzz as people having to pay for mods. The question was also raised about how much the modders themselves would make. Only a 25% would go to the modder. The rest was split with Steam's owner Valve and Skyrim's owner Bethesda, 30-45 respectively. Hamlet Au blasted this decision to give modders such a small percentage, "it suggests that Bethesda looked at it's sales data, noticed the financial success of it's most talented, dedicated, grassroots developer fans, and decided that was a bad thing. I'm not even finished with how bad this is: It suggests that talented independent gamers do not deserve great success, despite countless hours of free work, risked on the great likelihood that they would earn little or no revenue for their plans. It suggests that only professional game developers deserve to be reasonable compensated for game development. It suggests that Bethesda thinks it puts more value into Skyrim than the hundreds of thousands of it's most passionate fans who make and use Skyrim mods."

Hamlet Au compared Bethesda's apparent attitude to modders to Linden Lab's feelings to content creators making more money than the Lindens themselves, "They brag about it." He brought up a speech by then CTO Cory Ondrejka in which he mentioned one businesswoman, " 'She makes more money than me,' said Cory. And he was proud of that."

Both Bethesda's attitude and the sudden removal of the mod sale system "has deeply hurt the long term value of Skyrim," Hamlet Au thought. He felt the game, now four years old, could have "easily thrived for a decade or more."

In the meantime, those modders hoping to get at least some money for Skyrim mods will have to look elsewhere. Perhaps some will hear about the successes of Second Life's content creators and come here.

Links: New World Notes, Steam Community,  Ars Technia, Kotaku, Bethblog, Steamed,

Bixyl Shuftan

Steam Summer Sales

By Nydia Tungsten and Brandi Streusel Tungsten

         You’ve seen talk about Steam and their sales all over the web and how Valve sucks us dry of every penny they can get, but let’s look at what they are doing for the gaming industry. With their sales, they are making is possible for many, (myself included) that are on a fixed income to be able to afford great games at a great price. Yes…some not so great to me, BUT fantastic to others.

    Here’s the draw back that I think makes everyone jump on the sale bashing band wagon. It is VERY easy to get caught up in sales and just start buying, after all, that game you want is only five bucks, or ten, or fifteen… Where you can get into trouble is not paying attention to how many you get. After all, even the great pyramids start with a single brick, and then just…..grew.

    At the time of this article, I have over 75 games just in Steam alone. Some have been bought for me to review but 99.9% of them I got on sale through Steam, and most I’ve enjoyed. But, we all have bought games thinking we will enjoy them and then have it turned out it just wasn’t what we were hoping for. But, at least if you got it on sale from Steam, you know you really didn’t spend too much on it. Out of all my games I have from Steam, I think about a quarter of them are no longer installed on my system for several reasons but none of them do I feel I wasted my money or was cheated on.

For those of you that don’t know what Steam is and have no clue as to what I am talking about, but want cheap and free games….oh yes, they have PLENTY of free games as well, here is the link.
http://store.steampowered.com/ 

  I remember who “inflicted” steam onto me, Treminari. I can’t thank her enough and I have since inflected many others for the simple reason I like playing with my friends and loved ones. It is a great way to keep in touch with those distant friends. I play with my son, who is stationed at FT. Carson, Co. as well as with other friends from around this globe we all live on.

   I know of no other site or service that offers this at such a scale and affordability. So, while they offer these sales at prices that make them almost impossible to resist, they also allow us to have some truly great fun with those we care about and that to me is priceless. You can also find likeminded groups that share your passion for a certain style of games as well from Star Trek and Star Wars, to the D&D flavored games.

So if you haven’t tried Steam yet, I cannot recommend them enough and hope you try it soon. After all, the price is right and they have some of the best deals out there.

Hope to see you there soon….who knows, maybe we like the same games, but as always, until next time GOOD GAMING TO YOU!

Nydia Tungsten

Game Review: Sniper Elite V2

By Nydia Tungsten & Brandi Tungsten

   I was told about this game being free on Steam for the day by several people, so I got it, as did my son, Kody. We sat down and played for a few hours and between the two of us, we had beat the game.

     It is a basic first person shooter taking place during WWII while the game designers took some liberty with the historical facts to create better missions. First thing I notice about the game is how the tutorial is buggy, so don’t worry if you can’t get all the way through it. While irritating, it is not game breaking, so go as far as you can then go to the missions. In this game, you can play with others in either co-op or PvP. Kody and I tried co-op.

   Another annoying aspect about this game is when we hit Continue, it threw us back into the lobby. So, we had to go through the list of missions to get to the next one. In my opinion, the developers of this game did not do a very thorough beta testing with this game. It has just too many things going wrong, nothing game crashing, but just annoying.

     Would I shell out money for it? No, so I cannot recommend it unless it comes up free again, but until then, I’d say leave it alone.

They have started pushing Sniper Elite III, but with the problems I am having with V 2, I don’t think I could trust it’s sequel enough not to have problems. I cannot stress enough that if they have a game that originally has problems, and then they release a sequel to it, leave that one alone. It is the only way we can get the message to the developers we will not stand for “close enough” games being thrown at us. Remember, we have the power to get our message across by not giving them money for unfinished games and Sniper Elite, while fun, was lacking in many ways. Not having enough missions is the biggest flaw. If someone can finish and beat the game in just a few short hours in co-op mode and have one of the players not even take the tutorial and just jump in means there isn’t enough content in my eyes.

And another thing is given that it never told us where to aim to destroy tanks. It took us a bit to figure that out as well and we STILL beat it quickly.

   So, save your money and wait for it to come out on another free day to get it, that is the only way I can recommend getting it. If you already have it, let me know how YOU like it and let me know if you think I am wrong.

And as always, GOOD GAMING TO YOU!

Editor's Note: At times when making a sniper shot, the view changes to show a slow-motion of the bullet traveling towards it's target. Just before reaching the target, the screen changes to an "X-ray" view which shows the bullet shattering bones, or if the shot's at the target's gonads, disintegrating testicles. Not exactly something for the squeamish. 

Nydia Tungsten

Game Review: Space Engineers

By Nydia Tungsten

First thing I would like to do is to thank Kit, one of my friends and readers, for buying this game for me to review. That being said, let me tell you about it.

Space Engineers, or SE as we have come to call, it is a very addictive game. I was on it for several hours into the night on my first try. I was pleased to find out it is a multiplayer game so Kit played into the night with me while I was streaming it on my Twitch account (www.twitch.tv/nydia_tungsten) and getting comments from some of my regular viewers.

Now, once you see this game, it is one of those you have to try it so, the next thing I knew, I was joined by quite a few of my angels. We have been rebuilding the starter base and built another one right next to it to grind up all the little yellow starter ships. These ship are the ones everyone was spawning in every time they joined the game until we found out that if we built “med bays,” we would spawn there and not litter the area with “Cheddars,” a nickname my mousie started calling them because of their color, and it stuck with the group. The second base we built was to help with disposing of them. A HUGE grinder was built to grind up a ship whole, breaking them down into their components. We would drag the “cheddar” over to the grinder to “cut the cheese” ( rim shot here ). We even put one of the largest ships to spawn in the game through the grinder.

http://www.twitch.tv/nydia_tungsten/c/4278353

http://www.twitch.tv/nydia_tungsten/c/4278369

Those are the two grinding shots I have for now.

Grinding and mining are just two of the ways you get your resources. You can also capture random ships just by going and getting them. Well, you could until this last update where now they shoot at you, so if you want what they have … you have to fight them for it, which brings in a whole new element. Now you have to build fighters with missiles and machine guns to even hope to have a chance, which gives it a bit more of a challenge. We are playing in “safe,” which means no random asteroid to come crashing through your base but now we have to fight harder to survive.

The biggest con about this game isn’t the fact that your “server” is only up when you’re playing. This means a shared world is only shared IF you are on and in the game to share it and not wanting to let your crew down by not having it available to them. The worst is the fact that it has a MAJOR memory leak. After 2 hours of playing, everyone that is on has to empty their inventory so they don’t lose anything and then the host has to totally exit the game to let the cache clear. I have 16 gigs of ram, a 1 gig video card and a 8 core 3.7 CPU so you wouldn’t think I would have any problems, but you would be wrong. This game takes my ram all the way up to the max and if I don’t restart it soon after, it will either crash the game or my system. It sometimes kills my video drivers so I have nothing on my screen, it is like I powered my system down except it is still running, I just have no video.

The only reason we put up with it is because it is a fun game and it IS so addicting (Yeah we’re hooked) The game is still in Beta and still costs $20 USD. On Steam, which if you look at it compared to the games that are $50 to $60, this one is a bargain, if you can overlook the occasional crash and memory leakage.

Now here is the BIG question, would I recommend it?

YES! I have even helped a few to get it.

Like I said at the beginning of this, I THANK Kit for introducing me to it and buying it for me. So I have to give it a thumbs up and a recommendation and bare with it as they fix the bugs.

So until next time Good hunting and good gaming to you and if YOU would like to see a game reviewed let me know and it will be GAME ON!

Nydia Tungsten

Editor's Note: For players whom aren't sure what to do other than help out their friends, and need a little encouragement to figure things out, I would recommend the "Crashed Red Ship" scenario, in which the player has to fix up a large busted ship. Since you don't start out with a refinery, assembler, or cargo hold, you'll need to make those. To make the first two, you'll need to use parts of your ship to make them (without the benefit of "cheddars"). Keep an eye on your energy level, and don't be afraid to fly to another asteroid if you can't find a ore at the one nearby. Before you build the assembler, make sure you have both gold and silicon on hand (you'll figure out why when you get there). Once you have those and a cargo hold, you can began rebuilding what you took apart (one thing you'll have to rebuild immediately before making the hold), and otherwise modify the ship to your hearts content, such as a mother ship for smaller vessels, or rebuild it into a space station.  

It took me a while to figure many things out, but it is a great game, especially when playing with friends.