PixlBit

On Friday and Saturday I finished up with The Order 1886 and Crystal Defenders. Next on my backlog list was Halo: C.E. so Mark and I played it within The Master Chief Collection on XBO part of Saturday and all day Sunday. Here's a breakdown. 

The Order 1886. I guess it's a steam punk version of 1886 London but I'm not totally sure because I don't know enough about steam punk worlds yet (I plan to get up to speed on that soon). Suffice to say, it's a fanciful take on 1886 because they have comunicators and strange electric based weapons. Oh and there's supernatural stuff like werewolves. The story is basically a horror/steam punk spin on the clash between rich and poor in Victorian England. Nice, I say. Fun stuff.

This game is visually stunning, but what mostly happens in graphical powerhouses such as this is lack of interaction and exploration. There are so many carefully crafted items in each room you come across, and they can even be knocked over, but not picked up. I got into Tesla's workroom and wanted to play around with all his experiments, but you only get one. Exploration is minimal as the game is mostly a linear affair running through alleys and corridors with small outdoor areas, or spacious rooms where the shooting takes place. You shoot in third-person and it feels very much like Gears of War in its controls. 

I should add that the voice work is excellent. With the fantastic visuals, it is up to movie standards and very engaging. 

I got about 5 hours into it and got stuck fighting in the airship. There are these guys who wear knight's armor and run around with shotguns. I took one out earlier in the game but I had a strange weapon that shoots a powder which you then ignite with a rocket. That did him in, but one-on-one with a machine gun, forget it. That guy didn't even feel it. I tried to aim at his legs or head but nothing stopped him. I tried to melee him but you don't really melee freely in this game. Some encounters give you quick time event prompts for melee fighting, but on the fly, you just have to shoot or throw grenades. So I got blasted over and over by this wreckless suicide attacker and got frustrated and quit. I could've looked up something to help me about it, but I got a lot of games and not so much time. Plus, I don't like looking stuff up much anymore because it takes me out of the game, and a good game should give me all the tools I need to figure it out. So I liked the game, but really, what's with that armored shotgun dude?

Then I finished up Crystal Defenders. I played all twelve levels and messed around with strategies. For fun I put a single Black Mage on a map and leveled him to the max and put a speed boost crystal next to him. I got to wave 14 doing that with a thief for extra gold and a level 4 archer for the occasional airborne monster resistant to magic. I don't like managing lots of characters on these maps. It gets too hectic, so I like to see what I can do with the bare minimum. Well, I had had enough of tower defence for a while. 

Then I had Halo: C.E. on my list to revisit. I did it on the Master Chief Collection for XBO. Mark and I played Legendary difficulty. We got to level 2 before things got really annoying. Then we played Heroic difficulty and go to level 7 of 10 before the flood made things not fun at all. Then I set up a cross-game playlist and we did the supposedly shortest ones that just had 3 levels. Turns out, those were really long because they used some of the longest levels in all the games. We did two of those, jumping from Halo CE, to Halo 2, to Halo 3. It was pretty interesting seeing the changes in each game from level to level. Halo 2 plays a bit faster than Halo CE, and Halo 3 is more challenging than either 1 or 2. Along the way we picked up a bunch of surpirse achievements like one for listening to a soldier give advice during a battle on the Pillar of Autumn. 

Tomorrow I think Mark and I will do some level playlists just within Halo C.E. and then maybe I can finally set up Skylanders SuperChargers and give that a try.