Thief review : Xbox One

Thief the re invigorated reboot of the classic game series of the same name recently launched for current and nest gen consoles and I've sank a good couple dozen hours into playing the title on multiple difficulties and I have to say I'm impressed with what the game is meant to be......

Thief as the name suggests puts you in control of Garret the master thief in a dark toned fictional city. This is a fist person game that gives you the freedom to approach a situation anyway you want but only ever really rewards you for using stealth. Thief is the game of stealing and it gives you ample opportunity to do so, basically anything that is not nailed down you can steal and that's one of the problems I have with the games premise. Thief puts you in Garret's shoes who is meant to be a legendary thief for which there is no equal and yet he(thus you) is still encouraged to take items such as fountain pens and silver forks worth a couple of gold pieces along with the artistic master pieces like golden bracelets made to look like a snake or an exquisite pearl necklace that are completely unique. It kind of takes you out of the fiction while you're trying to convince yourself your playing a game where you can pull of an Ocean's eleven style heist(you can by the way) but at the same time your scraping together a living like a rookie still learning his craft. Now this may just be me as a game designer as well kicking in but it would make more sense to steal smaller items and work your way up throughout the game to the good stuff as your skill increases but this doesn't happen your always encouraged to steal anything and everything in order to pay for that new tool you need or that upgrade that will prove useful. It's something that doesn't affect gameplay by any means but it does take you out of the fiction.

The game has a very dark tone and the visuals fully support this and give you a great sense of the cities plight and squalor. You'll be sneaking past guards and the homeless alike through dark, wet piss stained alleys of the city and looking down upon your unsuspecting prey from roof tops covered by the sweet shroud of darkness as you watch guards walk around making it all too easy for you to spot with their torches lit. The game portrays the use of light and dark very well and there are times that you can really believe you can walk up to within a few centimetres of a guard, pickpocket his hard earned wage and sneak back off again without him ever knowing you were there.

 The gameplay has you roaming the games open world city looking for either loot(for which there is alot) to steal or a mission from one of the many npc's there are around the city. The missions often provide the greater risk, profit and fun that the game can provide to its players. During these missions you'll be faced with a number of obstacles that must be overcome however you see fit such as traps that need to be disarmed with the correct tool, roaming guards with guard dogs that can sense your smell and secret hidden passages that could lead you to a new collectible or allow you to bypass certain security obstacle. This is where the games stealth mechanics really come into their own as you have to contend with not only light but line of enemy sight, whether your walking one cobbles or grass, weather there is running water nearby or if you should use that empty bottle you picked up before to throw and distract the guard for a few seconds. This is where your rewards come in as you make it through these missions you can choose whether you play the game stealth, predator or assault, all of which are valid methods of completing the game but while the game excels at stealth it heavily lacks in the combat department.

Combat in Thief is a clumsy affair to be polite and utterly fracking frustrating to be brutal! Using the bow is a good way to take out your foes from afar but your normally faced by more than one in a patrol which is a problem since the bow is not exactly fast, it's more of a tool with you being able to use it with different arrow heads for jobs like putting out a lamp with a water arrow or push a switch from far away with a blunt arrow. Then there's close combat where the stealth aspect again comes into it, if you manage to sneak up behind an enemy you can knock them out in a single quiet blow but if your discovered your forced into a clumsy dodge/block enemy attack then attack and repeat and if you're facing multiple enemies it's even worse near impossible on the harder settings.

Story wise the game is not going to win any awards, without giving too much away there's a big bad guy who's abit too overly interested in a plague that's ravishing the city and its already devastated population with a good chunk of the super natural and semi dead love interest mixed in. The story may have come out abit better if not for the boring and frankly terrible voice acting in the game. The general npc's sound drab and boring with primary npc's having some nice(and at times darkly funny)dialogue who can't convey the intended emotion for a given situation then we come to Garret himself, he was obviously intended to be dark and serious with a flat dark sense of humour but the voice acting doesn't quite cut it. He always seems to speak in a single un emotionless mono-tone that reminds me of Deus-ex human revolutions Adam Jensen.

My Verdict

Thief is a reboot that try's some ambitious stealth mechanics with a gorgeous overall tone and well thought out game world which these two aspects make the game a joy to play, its only when you add in the other parts that are necessary to make the game whole do we see its deep failings in the combat system and characters. I do recommend this game but only for hardcore stealth game fans who should play on the most difficult setting and try to go full stealth in order to get the full Thief experience.

3/5 Stars

Titanfall review : Xbox One

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiyvxRo8DoM

Not just another Call of Duty clone

I've been playing Titanfall for a few weeks now and every time I hear the A.I voice say your titan is ready I still feel a euphoric feeling of joy as I press the d-pad and look upwards to see my 20ft mech fall towards my position like a thunderbolt sent by Zeus himself. Let me say before I go any further that this is not another first person shooter trying to knock Call of duty and battlefield from their perch at the top of the multiplayer food chain, Titanfall blends the best parts of the fps genre with new and exciting game mechanics that makes it, to me at least, the new kid on the block to beat.

Let's start by saying it looks great, I'm playing it on the Xbox one and its right up there with anything else I've seen lately. It runs at a smooth 60fps and I've had no visual problems at all.

Titanfall for those of you who don't know puts you in the shoes of a Titan pilot who is both an elite jet pack equipped soldier and a trained pilot of the games main focus being the Titan mechs. When on foot the pilots have an incredible amount of mobility that makes it a joy to play which in turn has had an effect on the games level design with every map having an amazing amount of verticality to them. You can double jump using the jet pack to reach heights giving you an advantage when it comes to sniping and picking off enemy pilots or A.I controlled grunts that make up the bulk of your enemy force, you can wall run and better yet chain together multiple wall runs in order to get from one end of the map to another in a mere few seconds.

On the other hand after you have waited a short time for your Titan to be built you can call it down and take control of your new shiny walking tank and begin to 'try' and dominate the battlefield, I say try as the thing that I enjoy most about Titanfall is the balance of the match's. There is always a fight that can be won by anyone as each pilot is equipped with an anti-titan weapon as well as their regular load outs which makes a single pilot going up against a 20ft mech seem not so suicidal after all, it's a good feeling when you take out another player big titan with only your wits and a rocket launcher. Not only do you have your anti Titan weapon you can also use your pilots mobility to "rodeo" an enemy Titan to jump on its back and open up your weapon into its vital gears and circuitry to bring it down that way.

When you have your Titan your basically in a walking tank. Depending on your play style you can choose to call down a fast lightly armoured Titan, a big bulking behemoth that is slow but take a hell of lot of damage or a jack of all trades Titan giving you a mix of both speed and strength. Being in your Titan that you have kitted out is enough to give you a major ego boost as you walk around the map shooting both A.I and human controlled enemies full of lead and a rocket here and there. Some of the most interesting points of a match is when you have a Titan vs. Titan fight which depending on your own skill and how you kitted out you titan you'll either come away with joy, reeling that you have just lost 90% of your shiny new Titan health in its first fight or be somewhere 100ft in the sky trying to time your landing after an ejection so you can rodeo and destroy the bastards Titan who just destroyed yours!

Unlike most other multiplayer games Titanfall is solely focused on its excellent 6v6 pvp matches, it cannot be played single player and you are completely at the mercy of Microsoft's dedicated servers apart from a useful but short and easy tutorial mode. There is a feeble attempt to infuse a two sided campaign into the game that you must complete in order to unlock two of the three Titans you can customise and pilot, to be honest I couldn't explain the story to you as the most you get is a voice over from your Commander in the lobby before a match. Playing through and levelling up your pilot brings you new weapons and upgrades based on certain achievements(e.g. getting ten head shots with an assault rifle may unlock a new scope add on to be used with that weapon) but the most interesting thing Titanfall gives you are the burn cards. Burn cards are disposable one use bonuses that may grant you extra damage for a round or the use of an amped up weapon for one round. Some of these cards can drastically change the course of a match like having a titan ready to call at the start of a match a full three minutes before everyone else.

Those are all the good things about Titanfall but by no means is it a perfect game. There is at the moment a severe lack of game modes to play being only 6 which all seem very similar and boring after a while. I always find myself going back to the classic attrition and hard point domination matches. Also the until recently ability to have private matches with friends was a huge disappointment from a game that has such online only focus and business plan. There are also only 15 maps without the 4 additional ones you can get with the recent dlc, those original 15 get old very quickly and worse still while in the lobby the players cannot even vote for which map they play on next. On a personnel level though the lack of visual customizability is annoying, your class of Titan will look exactly the same as another players of the same class apart from weapons chosen. Hopefully the ability to add abit of flair and personnel customisation will come but that's just a visual niggle I have it does not affect the game play at all.

My Verdict

Titanfall is a breath of fresh air in the genre when you look at over saturation of first person shooters there is at the moment, everyone seems to want to jump on the billion dollar call of duty wagon but not make any real changes to the gameplay. Fusing mobility of the pilots with the power of the Titans and keeping the matches to 6v6 has worked incredibly well for Respawn and they have made sure all of these different ideas have come together in a cohesive package that plays like a dream which is why they can be partially forgiven for the bare bones multiplayer experience they are providing, sometimes I suppose you can say less is more and Id recommend this game to any multiplayer and first person shooter gamer out there.

 4.5/5 Stars

Hello my fellow internet dwellers and gaming lovers, my name is Daniel and I am proud to say Im a gamer, well a very enthusiastic gamer friendly people would say and my loved ones around me may say at times that I need help which when you have been referring to your girlfriend as Liara by accident for a day and didnt notice why she was pissed off Im not suprised and may agree with them. Im saying I have a problem just a healthy enthusiasm for the past time thats all and ill admit I love video games. I enjoy the challenge they offer, the immersion factor of entertainment other than just sitting watching something on ya arse. Instead video games let you take control and let you be the hero or villan and most of all I love the stories alot of games provide, honestly I think alot of video game stories are so much better than what tv and film are offering us at the moment.

I first started playing games in 1994 when I was given a super Nintendo system and a Sega mega drive(both of which I still have wrapped up somewhere) with Mario and Sonic I  fell in love with the pixelated worlds they inhabited and as I acquired each and every console that followed(to my parents and their wallets dismay) my love of the pixelated world grew ever stronger along with my enthusiasm to try new genres. The platforming of Super Mario brothers seems so far back when you move into a house on Sim street or pick up your first Glock in Vice city.

On a seemingly unrelated but it is actually related note I've finished the second part of my three part course and have sent of my portfolio projects to be marked and while i've got a little time I thought id rock the old consoles as well as the new ones and write a blog reviewing the games Im playing. Im planning on reviewing titles from all eras of gaming so expect some retro classics on here along side the next gen stuff.

First game ill be reviewing is one I've been putting alot of hours into lately and that is Titanfall! Watch out for my review ladies and gentleman and "may the pixels be with you"