Dungeons 2: Evil Gets a Review

Realmforge Studios' Dungeons 2 will be releasing on Steam tomorrow, April 24th. We took an early look at the game last month and returned to give its campaign a new look, as well as dipping into the skirmish and multiplayer features.

The campaign mode has been optimized since our earlier playthrough, taking care of the extra polish we were concerned that the game needed. Once you pass the tutorial mission, the in-dungeon gameplay is quite similar to the Dungeon Keeper series. You play as the Ultimate Evil's hand, build your dungeon, gather creatures, mine gold and thwart attacks on your dungeon.

PlanetSide 2: PlayStation 4 Beta Impressions

Ladies and gentlemen, I come before you an honest individual prefacing this examination for the closed beta of PlanetSide 2 on the PlayStation 4: I'm biased. Years of playing different games on a range of consoles have led me to prefer a particular setup when I run first-person shooters. I'm not going to touch PC/console wars by any stretch, but I'll admit when I play on console, genre of preference is definitely not first-person shooter.

Dragon Age: Inquisition - Jaws of Hakkon Review

Dragon Age: Inquisition's first single-player DLC, Jaws of Hakkon, was released a few weeks ago, introducing a new region and storyline to the game. The new area, Frostback Basin, both beautiful and challenging, is recommended for level 20+ characters and can be reached before or after the completion of the main story. Avvar—friendly and not—are the primary inhabitants of the region and are whom most of the quests end up involving.

In the DLC you'll embark on a new main story adventure to discover what exactly happened to the last Inquisitior, Ameridan, who had disappeared 800 years before you took the post. Numerous side-quests will involve gaining the trust of the friendly Avvar at Stone-Bear Hold, pushing back the threat from the unfriendly Avvar calling themselves the Jaws of Hakkon, and furthering the inquisition's discovery and foothold in the region.

Skyforge: First Impressions

Earlier this year My.com, the Allods Team and Obsidian Entertainment announced that Skyforge, their upcoming sci-fi MMORPG, was getting ready to start closed beta testing on March 11th. At the time I hadn’t been following the game, so I was going into it blind. All I knew was that it was sci-fi and there was a guy with a giant gatling gun that transforms into a flamethrower. Since I’m a sucker for anything with a flamethrower (see also Bounty Hunters in Star Wars: The Old Republic), I was interested enough to pay for one of the Founders Packs and get into the closed beta. That was almost a month ago and we’re currently wrapping up the last week of CBT2 testing after a week of downtime following CBT1. So what are my thoughts on the game?

Woolfe - The Red Hood Diaries Impressions

Woolfe - The Red Hood Diaries is a platformer that came out March 17th on Steam. Woolfe is a reimagining of the fairy tale story with a dark twist. In the game, Red wields an axe that she uses to fight against the forces of B.B. Woolfe to take vengeance against him for his role in her father’s death.

Pillars of Eternity Review

Over the last few years we’ve seen plenty of game companies go the Kickstarter route: Double Fine Productions with Broken Age, inXile Entertainment with Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera, Harebrained Schemes with Shadowrun Returns, Larian Studios with Divinity Original Sin and many more. There’s been a great deal of success from these early Kickstarter projects, but also some failures along the way. Broken Age had to be split into two halves because there was too much to put into one game and meet their release window. Peter Molyneux’s Godus is pretty much an all-around mess.

That brings us to now with yet another high profile Kickstarter project finally releasing. Obsidian Entertainment’s Pillars of Eternity started as Project Eternity back on September 14, 2012. They were one of the most successful game Kickstarters ever, blowing past their $1.1 million goal in just over 24 hours, passing stretch goal after stretch goal until they finished ahead of Double Fine Adventure’s Kickstarter at $3,986,929 ($4,163,208 with the PayPal pledges). With all of those stretch goals adding to the scope of the game though, plus your typical schedule slips, the game went from an estimated delivery of April 2014 to coming out March 26, 2015, nearly a year later.

So was all that time and money the fans put in worth it? Did Obsidian make a great RPG in the vein of Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale? After 42 hours, the first two acts’ worth of story and a whole lot of sidequesting, I can safely say that I’m absolutely satisfied with my Kickstarter pledge.

The Ultimate Evil: An Early Look at Dungeons 2

Dungeons 2 is an upcoming RPG dungeon simulator developed by Realmforge Studios and published by Kalypso Media, where you'll find yourself playing the Prime Evil—or his Hand of Terror, at least. We put on our best-looking sinister hat and went hands-on with a pre-release version of the game.

The first order of business in Dungeons 2 is a quick tutorial mission where you play as the invincible Prime Evil. The game has a top-down view, with WASD panning the map, which has a fog of war for you to uncover. Using click-to-move (RMB for basic attack) you'll plow through those pesky heroes, who have the nerve to be happy on the overworld.

Unfortunately, these heroes don't appreciate being completely slaughtered, and once you have the basics down you'll find yourself returned to the underworld. How they managed to get the best of the Prime Evil is unknown, but you're left only being able to control things through his Hand of Terror.

Victor Vran: Early Impressions

Victor Vran is an Action RPG available for Early Access on Steam. Being an Action RPG, it is comparable to games like Diablo 3, and while there are a lot of similarities between Victor Vran and Diablo 3, there are also some unique features that make Victor Vran stand out.

We Happy Few: PAX East Demo and Interview

At PAX East we had the chance to speak to Sam Abbott, COO of Compulsion Games, the developer of Contrast. We Happy Few, still in pre-alpha, is best described as a dystopian story-driven survival game; if you enjoy games like Don't Starve, you'll really dig this title.

"With the game, we wanted to try and look at what we did really well with Contrast, and what we could have done better. For We Happy Few, what we felt we did really well with Contrast was atmosphere and story, so we wanted to make sure that we did well with that again.

"And we wanted to do a couple of things that were a bit more different this time around in terms of developing the game. We wanted to involve community early on, which is why we're showing this way earlier than we did with Contrast."

We Happy Few is a systemic game that follows a linear storyline. Sam likens the art style to that of BioShock. The game is played in first-person view inside a procedurally generated world. It has an estimated 2-3 hours of gameplay, but with good replayability.

World of Tanks: Generals - PAX East Recap

PAX East was an eventful weekend, and while there we caught up with Wargaming to get a look at how their collectible card game (CCG), World of Tanks: Generals, is shaping up.

This upcoming free-to-play title brings World War II warfare to the turn-based card gaming world. Just entering closed beta last week, the PC version of the game is completely browser-based, working best on Chrome but also supported by Firefox, Opera 15 and IE9 or higher. Wargaming anticipates the mobile version to also be available in 2015, which looked pretty solid when they showed off a tablet demo.