Player Preview - Dungeon Defenders 2

Title: Dungeon Defenders 2
Developer: Trendy Entertainment
Status: Open Alpha

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1kX02ao
Steam Page: http://bit.ly/1kWZZLK

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the Co-Op action tower defence game, Dungeon Defenders 2, developed by Trendy Entertainment there 2^nd major PC release after the original. Dungeon Defenders 2 has you and 3 others defending the kingdom against an onslaught of various enemies and bad guys that have just recently been freed from their prison inside gems. In your arsenal to push back the waves you have 4 towers at your disposal along with 4 abilities and offcourse an auto attack to thin out the masses.

The maps that you’ll be setting up your defences consist of 3 or more lanes with differing units and amounts coming down each one. For the early maps holding off 3 lanes as a team of 4 is pretty easy, able to get around 3 or 4 turrets and structures in each lane from wave 1. The later maps however provide extremely tricky situations with some having 6 different lanes that need to be defended spreading your defences thin not to mention that there are side objectives that need to be defended that if they are destroyed, open up even more lanes for enemies to spawn from and travel down. For the last wave of every new map you’ll be introduced to a new enemy as a more powerful boss form of itself that will head down the main lane and require focus fire from your team to defeat before it does any real damage to the objectives you’re trying to defend. These new enemies will then appear as a part of the usual waves in the later on levels only a little bit less powerful but still carrying over its special mechanics like dealing extra damage to defences or being able to soak up a ton of damage. To help you in your tower placement and lane focus the game does devote 1 of the lanes to be the lane that a majority of enemies or just the most powerful enemies will travel down. Simply holding down shift will show you the enemy spawn locations and how many enemies will be spawned from that point for the wave.

Dungeon Defenders 2 is a class based game providing 4 unique character classes to play as, each with their own unique towers, abilities, attacks and roles. These characters include a mage that focuses on damage and slowing enemies, a soldier that aims to get into the thick of it with taunts and increasing damage with each attack, a monk that buffs allies and their towers and finally an archer. As team composition is extremely important especially when you can load into a game that could have all monks for example, you can actually change your character anytime during a game, keeping any towers you placed beforehand. This feature actually also makes the game completely playable solo and for some people this may be there preferred method of getting through some of the earlier levels as if you are pubbing it there are players that like to spam all their turrets and placeables in excess filling the levels maximum defense structure limit, preventing you from placing any of your own turrets.

To increase you damage output there are also some environmental weapons you can use to help out if things do get a little bit dicey including things like ballista’s, arcane turrets and high pressure water that will deal high amounts of damage or just completely wipe out any enemies caught in the effect. You will have to take advantage of them in the later levels especially if you aren’t levelled and I imagine they will become invaluable assets in the harder difficulties. They are pretty easy to use as well, being activatable by simply hitting them with a projectile or going up to them and hitting E. Your character levels up in the game gaining skill points that you can put towards numerous different stats like tower damage, character health and a lot more. These skills can be upgraded to crazy amounts too with you earning only a couple skill points for every level up and skills able to be raised all the way up to 200 each. You also have equip able gear that will help you out with your base stats allowing you to build your character toward things like pure turret damage or build your character tanky, like the soldier, so you can go into the thick of it without getting instantly killed.

Equipment drops from enemies when they die as well as being obtainable from these end of game loot chests that will first randomly generate its contents rarity indicated by the colour on the front, then drops items and gold corresponding to that rarity grade. The item system in the game is one part of the game that does need a little bit more tweaking as you are continually inundated with items, exiting a game with around 20 or so new items most of which are downgrades. There’s even a hub world character that holds onto all the items that couldn’t fit in your 4, 16 slot bags. It kind of takes away from the excitement of getting a new item drop and becomes more of a hassle to go through each one looking for a possible upgrade. If you don’t want the cash from selling these items though and are just purely after upgrades you can set up your inventory bags to auto collect only certain rarities at the end of each wave however gold can buy some nice things back at the Tavern. 

Outside of the main game you have a bunch of merchants available to you via this Tavern that acts as a sort of hub world with other players running around doing their thing. The items that each of these different shops offer refreshes every so often so if you can’t find anything good the first time around it’s worth checking back later on plus it gives you something to spend all that extra gold on, the most important being character passive orbs that increase the effectiveness of your turrets with things like radius and damage increases as well as increasing your own stats with 8 slots available to fill once you unlock them all at higher levels. Other vendors available in the tavern to take note of are the hatchery that latter on will allow you to hatch a pet that will aid you on missions, attacking enemies and increasing your stats. There is also an equipment upgrade station that also unlocks later on in the game that allows you to upgrade your equipment to get as much out of them as possible.

Other features of the game include the ability to customize your characters look with multiple different outfits that can be mixed and matched but do cost real world money and is the main free to play cash shop purchasable. There are character lockboxes that randomly drop during missions that can be unlocked with keys, purchasable with Wyvern tokens that are obtainable by completing quests. Once unlocked you will receive a piece of the customizable outfits to use. You can have multiple characters running at the same time with enough character slots to have every class in the game plus some. If you want to play purely with people you know or perhaps even just on your own you can set-up a private lobby so that only people invited can join your group.

Altogether Dungeon Defenders 2 provided a somewhat middling experience with no real draw that had me wanting to play more. The difficulty is almost purely based on your statistics rather than any kind of skill or advanced strategies requiring you to grind out levels to deal the damage needed for certain missions. The solo experience for me was also a lot more fun as I could actually set-up various turrets in effective ways, taking advantage of certain effects and bonuses, I imagine this gets better though as you move up the difficulty ranking with players learning optimal turret positioning and cohesion between them all. If you’re after a casual wave based tower defence game that doesn’t require too much strategy or skill then Dungeon Defenders 2 may be of interest to you.

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Dungeon Defenders 2. The game is currently in open alpha and will most likely be releasing sometime in 2016 but it is currently available to download for free on Steams Early Access. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you guys next time.

Player Preview - Armored Warfare

Title: Armored Warfare
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Status: Open Beta
Release Date: Unknown

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1GJmjD0

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the Military vehicle sim, Armored Warfare, developed by Obsidian Entertainment, the same guys behind Skyforge and Pillars of Eternity. Armored Warfare takes the extremely popular game play of World of Tanks but trades up from World War 2 era vehicles of war to the vehicles of today while also offering a PvE mode.

If you have ever played World of Tanks or even perhaps War Thunders Ground Forces you will feel very at home playing Armored Warfare. From the menus, matchmaking tiers, consumables, purchasable ammo to hiding in bushes and main domination game mode almost everything about Armored Warfare has been copied over from World of Tanks.

The general gameplay of Armored Warfare has 2 teams of 11 tanks either converging on an objective in the middle of the map or travelling all the way to their opponent’s base to capture it. The different types of Tanks provide the standard kind of set-up with fast low fire powered APC’s acting as scouts, main battle tanks bringing in the big guns and armor and Artillery to coax out any enemies in hiding or just camping from a far. There are a couple outlier classes but these other vehicles are just various combinations of the previously mentioned roles. There is one vehicle type that is different from the rest in the form of the Artillery vehicles that give you a top down look of the map while firing. Positioning of this vehicle is extremely important as it can easily have its line of sight broken by hills, buildings and other structures rendering your shots useless not to mention that if an APC or tank destroyer charges you, you’re pretty much dead. There are also certain vehicles that have extra activatable abilities like Designate Target for APC’s that tags an enemy vehicle for extra damage and ECU Override for light tanks that drastically speeds up their movement. The different vehicle types also have varying armour thickness which plays an extremely important role in the game as there is a ton of different ammunition types including Armour penetrating rounds, Heat rounds and explosive rounds with different ammo types able to be used by your tank in a game. 

With the tiered tank system in the game you have a good chance of penetrating the armour of tanks in your tier however the matchmaking puts you together with people from various tier rankings and if you’re on the lower end it will be pretty hard to get any shots off that actually penetrate an enemy’s armour. There are weak points in armour that you can find by moving your reticule over a tanks hull until it turn orange or green indicating that if the shot is accurate you will penetrate the armour and deal damage. Alternatively if you are going up against a main battle tank with no penetration points you can still be of use by aiming for its tracks and disabling its movement, at least until it auto repairs. There are other parts of a tank and its crew you can damage that will reduce the performance of it but are a lot harder to damage significantly compared to it’s tracks.

Out on the battlefield almost everything is destructible except for large buildings and structures. If it’s only 1 story high, it’s more than likely you can just drive straight through it. As an added bonus piece of visual information you can also see which part of your tank is covered by environmental objects via the grey lines surrounding the tank in the bottom left which can be useful if you are behind a small piece of cover and want to make sure no part of your tank is hanging out. For people playing stealthy spotting or artillery support classes there is also a cover mechanic that will prevent enemies spotting you. By stopping your tank behind or in foliage your cover meter will go up indicated by the bottom left meter. Being hidden only works while stopped and not firing, as soon as you do either the enemy will be able to see you especially if you fire. While this feature may sound like it encourages bush camping, something World of Tanks is somewhat infamous for, Armored Warfare’s map design providing no real open battlefields means you can’t really do it, instead the maps encourage a slow pushing play style. The different maps settings vary quite significantly too with you fighting in the snow and ice on relatively flat land then fighting on a tropical island in rough hilly terrain.

While the PvP battle mode will be where most people go to play in Armored Warfare there is also a Co-Op mission mode that will have 4 players taking on AI tanks while they try to complete certain objectives. Enemy tanks are a little weaker then player controlled tanks so they are easy to take down however they make up for their weakness by sending a lot of them your way so you can be overwhelmed if not working together with your team mates. 

Outside of the main game you have a 2 different factions to the game with their own unique vehicles. I would advise choosing one of them from the beginning as there is a fair grind to get the higher tiered vehicles unlocked. Unlocking a new vehicle has it at its bare basics requiring you to earn experience with it to unlock its full potential with speed, ammunition, armour and other types of upgrades. You’re vehicles also have a commander and crew that can level allowing them to gain small bonuses to its performance like faster reload, faster speed and better accuracy. Bonuses to experience gained, money earned, the cost of equipment and more can also be increased via your base by building and upgrading certain buildings. You earn resources for these buildings daily and the bonuses given can eventually be quite significant.

Other features of the game include a guild system called a Battalion that offers members some bonus rewards at the end of games. You can also customize your tanks with decals and camo’s and this is where the game will be aiming its free to play model along with a premium subscription that increases your end game rewards by 50%. For those that want to speed up their progress and play in higher tiered games you can purchase premium vehicles that are all slightly less powerful then the vehicles you have to work towards. Consumables can be purchased with the in-game currency but is honestly not really needed unless you really want to get absolutely every little bit of performance out of your vehicle as they are only around 5-10% bonuses. Similarly you can add retrofits to your vehicle that add around the same kind of percentage bonuses.

Altogether Armored Warfare is basically a modernized World of Tanks both in terms of its graphics and its available vehicle line-up. The map design has almost completely eliminated the whole camping in a bush strategy while still having a hiding mechanic for the support vehicles to take advantage of. The game leans on the arcade side of things rather than the realistic something that I feel War Thunder does a little bit better especially with their collision meshes. If you liked World of Tanks then Armored Warfare is an easy transition to make and a nice step up graphically. If you’re expecting anything new or innovative to the formula you may be a dissapointed as the game follows it to T. 

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Armored Warfare. The game is currently in open beta with no official release date. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you guys next time.

Player Preview - Star Wars Battlefront

Title: Star Wars Battlefront
Developer: Dice
Status: Open Beta
Release Date: 17/November/2015

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1K7UGxU
Origin Page: http://bit.ly/1Pfhnbn

 Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the multiplayer first person shooter, Battlefront, developed by Dice, the same guys behind Battlefield 3 and Mirrors Edge. Battlefront continues the Rebel and Empire war with infantry, vehicles and ships battling it out for domination.

From outside looking in Battlefront has been labelled as a Star Wars re skin for Battlefield however the game plays more like Planetside 2 more than anything else at least for the assault walker game mode. It’s more about overwhelming the objective with man power and continually zerging until successful or until a new objective pops up. Due to there not being any transport vehicles in the game the player spawns are extremely close to the objective and with no real punishment for dying except about a 5 second respawn timer it leads to brute force pushing rather than any real high level strategies or plays. Unfortunately you can’t select were you spawn out of 2 possible spawn locations so you can end up on the other side of the map from where you want to be. You can however spawn on your partner which is either someone you partied up with beforehand or someone you are randomly matched with in the game.

Being a futuristic shooter, Battlefront does a couple of things differently in terms of its shooting mechanics. Projectile weaponry has been traded in for laser weaponry the biggest difference being the overheating mechanic as compared to ammunition. After a long sustained burst with your gun it will eventually overheat and require a short amount of time to cool off. There is a fast cool down mechanic where if you hit “R” at the right time your gun will instantly cool off. The mechanic is pretty easy to hit the first couple of times but if you keep doing it the space that you’re able to hit will get smaller and smaller. The types of guns are still the common Assault Rifle, Sub machine Gun, Light machine Gun and pistol variants however the sights and scopes for these guns have been removed with all of the guns during the beta having the same sights and zoom except for the light machine gun. So there isn’t any real gun customization in the game. Battlefront also allows you to play in either first person or third person, able to change on the fly and for me at least feels better to play in third person. You can also change your camera position while in an aircraft with the first person having really cool cockpits, fully immersing you into the Star Wars dog fighting experience.

 Your characters loadout consists of a primary gun, 3 pieces of equipment and a trait. The equipment is the cards you see at the bottom left hand side of the screen and is only interchangeable outside of a game. There are obviously going to be more options one released but during the beta you could choose between an Explosive Grenade best used against infantry especially those camping the objective, an Ion Grenade that is super effective against vehicles and turrets, a jetpack that will get you around the map a lot faster and easier as well as getting you places that players without the jetpacks can’t and a sniper rifle that deals a ton of damage if not one shotting them with a headshot. Those pieces of equipment are what’s available to equip on the hand slots but there is also an activatable slot that items like a personal shield that soaks up a lot of damage but makes you incapable of shooting and an ion power up to your primary weapon which makes it effective against vehicles and turrets. These items work a little differently in the fact they build up and use charges which can be found around the map but can also be purchased with in-game credits. You also have to use the in-game credits to unlock additional guns, equipment, traits and activatables. Only one trait was available during the beta being the sharpshooter trait that when you headshot kill someone your equipment cool downs are reduced by a certain percentage. Basically these will be passive bonuses that will benefit certain playstyles.

The vehicles available are somewhat limited at least for ground vehicles. The only truly pilotable ground vehicle is the AT-ST Walker which is extremely powerful at pushing up and clearing objectives but can be focused down relatively quickly. It has 3 different armaments with default laser rifles, an artillery strike for enemies behind cover and a lock on missile that can easily take out turrets and provide some anti-air. This walker is only available for the Empire and honestly more could have been done with the mechanics surrounding them for example weak points, something that isn’t available on the bigger AT-ATs either and could easily be added to the back panelling of each of them for a little bit of strategic play. Something else that I think would be great is being able to steal AT-ST’s by jet packing onto the roof and throwing the pilot out. This would help greatly with the balance problem currently plaguing the game mode while also just being a really cool thing to be able to do. As for the AT-AT’s you basically just take control of the head and weapons and while it might have been cool to control the movement too I see why they opted not too due to the way the game mode is set-up to be a linear movement rather than an open battlefield. The weapons available on the AT-AT include the default laser rifles that are slightly explosive one shotting any enemies nearby, explosive rounds that are best used for taking out turrets on the ground rather than infantry and finally an orbital strike that will lay down devastating fire power in a large area.

Aircraft on the other hand are extremely varied with 5 pilotable variants including X-Wings, A-Wings and Snow Speeders for the Rebels and Tie Fighters and Tie Interceptors for the Empire. Each ship handles differently most noticeably the Snow Speeder were its main purpose is to trip the AT-AT’s, not really dog fighting so it handles like a flying brick. There is some weird auto-piloting going on that pulls up automatically while flying towards the ground in all of the aircraft that make it hard to perform ground assault runs but while you’re not heading straight towards the ground they handle very similar to the Jets in Battlefield with a couple of extra manoeuvres you can perform to either escape a missile lock or to just turn around really fast. They also have abilities on cool downs including missiles, extreme boost and a radar jammer.

All these vehicles are obtainable via power-ups found around the map and will always spawn in the same location. The Empire have it a bit easier than the rebels as all their vehicle power-ups are found at their spawn, rebels however will have to push up to the objectives to be able to get their vehicles which doesn’t make much sense other than to reinforce the fact that the Rebels are in a desperate position and have to fight for every little advantage they can. Vehicles aren’t the only power-ups you can obtain, special equipment can also be found including things like Smart Rockets, Orbital Strikes and various automatic and manually operated turrets. These aren’t terribly important for the Empire to obtain but for the rebels a well-placed orbital strike can deal 1/4 of an AT-AT’s health.

Finally heroes can also be obtained through power-ups, allowing you to take to the battlefield as famous characters from the movies, the beta allowing you to try out Luke Skywalker for the Rebels and Darth Vader for the Empire. They each have their own slight ability variations for example Luke has a force push that will 1 shot a player while Vader instead ops for a force choke. Wielding just a lightsaber you might think they are at a disadvantage from ranged attacks but by simply holding right mouse button you can deflect incoming fire and aim it back at the player. Each time someone activates a hero you will hear their theme music play server wide along with different theme music for when they die. You can’t regen health as these heroes instead you actually slowly lose health so as not to become a nearly unstoppable force. The heroes that are currently expected to be part of the game include Boba Fett, Han Solo, Princess Leia and the Emporer. I really hope they add Yoda to that list as it would be amazing to see him kicking ass out on the battlefield flying all over the place.

The different game modes in the beta included the main Assault Walker were the objective as the rebels is to capture and hold comm links that overtime will generate Y-wings. At certain points in the map the Y-wings will attack 2 AT-AT’s, dropping their shields and making them vulnerable. The rebels have to take them both down before the end to win. The Empire side simply have to defend these Comm-links and the AT-AT’s. Unfortunately playing as the Empire in this mode can get a little boring due to them not really having anything to work towards. They don’t have massive AT-AT’s to destroy, no real overarching goal that they can really impact. There isn’t that same adrenaline pumping moment of trying to take down the last AT-AT at the end of the game. For a pure infantry experience there is Drop Zone which is basically capture the point on a small map were each team is battling for control over escape pods, nothing too out there with this mode having no vehicles and no heroes to obtain. There is also Co-Op missions in what is basically a wave based game mode were you and a friend can fight for survival as Imperial units are sent your way. Other game modes listed include Supremacy which will basically be conquest mode from Battlefield, Fighter Squadron which will be purely aircraft dog fighting and Blast which is a Team Deathmatch mode. There are a couple of unknown game modes in terms of their actual gameplay but they are called Cargo and Droid Run. Finally in the missions category you can do battles vs AI or a friend in what looks to be a sort of hero versus hero game mode.

I have to give huge props to the team over at Dice for creating some really cool effects and sounds in the game for example the Thermal Imploder and the amazingly satisfying sound when it explodes, the squad shield and the sounds that come from laser fire bouncing off of it and the aircraft cockpits and sounds are fantastic and really immerse you into the Star Wars experience as opposed to just another shooter.

Other features of the game include character customization as to what extent you can customize is currently unknown as the feature was locked for the beta. You can also collect dioramas or figurines again exactly what this feature is, is still unknown due to it being locked for the beta. Finally there will be a stats page for the people that like to keep track of their kill death ratio. The game also runs extremely well even on older tech, even though my graphics card was listed as a minimum requirement I was still able to get 60+ frames per second with all the important stuff on high and the rest on medium.

Altogether Star Wars Battlefront is a really fun game for what it is, that being a somewhat on rails shooter rather than a massive open map with various vehicles like Battlefield. Even with the game type they went with there still could have been better mechanics to create a truly epic experience like being able to steal AT-ST’s. The games progression system is a little lack lustre especially for those that like to upgrade and customize their weapons and vehicles. If you’re really into the Star Wars universe then Battlefront is definitely worth a look, if you are a battlefield player then I suggest maybe waiting to see how the Supremacy mode plays before making your final decision on whether or not to purchase the game at release.

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Star Wars Battlefront. The game will be officially releasing on the 17th of November on Origin for $60 or your regional equivalent. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links at the top. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you guys next time.