Your intrepid heroes kick beach balls, adjust gerbils, and examine the murderhobo paradigm.
Game: Living Continent (ambiguous edition)
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/383150/
Devel: Techland
Engine: Chrome Engine 6
Price: 19.99 / CDN 21.99
Wazzat: Welcome to the zombie apocalypse experience of a lifetime – and now more beautiful than ever. Caught in the midst of an epic zombie outbreak on the tropical island of Banoi, your only thought is: Survive!
CHAIRQUISITION:
Makes with the working
V-
- I CAN’T KICK BEACH BALLS! -11ty chairs!
- Steering wheels in the right place, literally.
- Few graphical glitches but nothing to complain about considering the performance.
J-
- The game kind of shits it’s pants at UHD. The cursor becomes super slow and the choppiness is brutal
- At 1080, no issue
P-
- In-game proper, this game will use 60-70% of all the cores on the FX 8370E and peg GPU utilization on the 970 at 100%. That’s awesome!
- The initial load from the desktop is single-threadsville and it takes almost 2 full minutes.
- Then, at specific points in game, there’s some texture corruption, which causes the screen to be filled with a stretched version of that texture.
- It becomes a problem in areas where there are loads of zombies and you can’t see them.
- Also, I could never get multiplayer to work.
- I would be willing to excuse almost all of these as bugs which would eventually be fixed.
- But neither the developer, Techland, or the publisher, Deep Silver, want to provide support for the Definitive Edition… at least not on Linux.
Total-
Shiny / Sounds
V-
- Oh it’s pretty.
- The graphical upgrade is hella noticeable.
- Kida like the Metro / Metro Redux joint.
- I did learn that THE SUN NEVER FKN SETS in Space australia.
- Characters are done well and each environment is proper unique…. Minus the sewers.
- Speaking of characters, I keep waiting for Mel Gibson lifeguard guy to say something anti-semitic.
- Disappointment aside, the rest of the voice work is top notch and borderline believable.
J-
- It looks and sounds as good as a AA or AAA game from 2011 can
- The voice acting is competently done
- However, yer buddy John is Aussie Steve Blum, through and through. You can’t escape his Bluminess
P-
- The graphics… yeah, they’re shiny.
- They look about as good as you can expect, except maybe the non-zombie NPCs.
- The Uncanny Valley is a long way down and they all look like they fell face first onto it.
- What I really enjoyed about this game’s aesthetics were the ones you put in your ear pussies.
- The background noise, assuming you’ve muted the music, is like being drowned in eery anticipation.
- It keeps you at the edge of your seat and even though you know you can probably slash your way through anything the game might throw at you, it will still keep you on the edge of your seat.
- Very good soundscape… Assuming you muted the music.
Total-
Control
V-
- WASD.
- Didn’t have any issues /w the gerbil after the initial adjustment.
J-
- There definitely is some weirdness going on with the mouse in this game. Pedro has a whole rant you can tune out for
- Everything else is mapped sanely. Except E and F should be switched
P-
- The mouse sensitivity is jacked.
- I’m almost sure they’re using some manner of mouse deceleration and, as is tradition, they don’t give people an option to disable it. Why?!
- What do game developers have against raw mouse input?!
Total-
FUN
V-
- I never really played the first one because bugs so take this with a grain of chainsaw.
- I put 22 arns into this motherfucker.
- Venn don’t normally put 22 into anything with the possible exception of Shadows of HORDOR.
- And that’s real gameplay because I noped most of sidequest.
- Admittedly it gets repetitive around the 18hr mark (repetitive as skull-fkn zombies can get) but that can usually be solved by building a new weapon.
- And one non-spoiler protip: Do some of them sidequest before going past the point of no return.
- It loses a chair for two things, one big and one REALLY big.
- 1. Multiplayer is hella spotty and unreliable.
- 2. It might never get sorted since neither the devel or publisher will take responsibility.
- 2a. That will also affect all the other little bugs.
J-
- This is diablo with zombies and painful driving sections
- Engaging the game at that level is actually kind of fun. Borderlands in a resort
- Plus it’s very satisfying to go all American History X style on zombies
- But like borderlands, playing on my own got a little boring. The quests are really all the same.
- Go find X items
- Bring this thing to that place over there
- Or just go to place
- Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to try out multiplayer. It could have got a few more points from that
P-
- Dead Is Land Definition Editive has all the makings of a great game but when it comes down to it, it’s only a good game.
- It has a grounded set of mechanics, whether you like the MMO style combat of having to rely on the numbers instead of skill proper or not is up to you.
- Personally I don’t mind it. In fact, in that specific subgenre, I’ll take Dead Is Land over Borderlands any day of the week.
- The non-zombie NPCs all look like they fell face first into the Uncanny Valley and the voice acting is often so forced it makes it painfully obvious how much of a tone dissonance there is in this game.
- And there is a lot of that.
- The plot and NPC dialog want to evoke a heart-wrenching story of the people who lost their loved ones to the infection.
- But then, the combat and your own character are constantly celebrating the dismemberment of said loved ones when you land a critical hit.
- Either all 4 of the protagonists are sociopaths and the game is actually a genius rendition of the irony of sociopathy or, the plot was developed in a completely different timezone than the mechanics.
- On top of that, those nagging technical issues I’ve mentioned up to this point compounded by the fact neither Deep Space 9 or Techwater seem to want to fix them, and you get a game which doesn’t live up to its potential.
- And there’s a lot of potential. There’s a lot of content. There’s even a lot to appeal to different playstyles their players.
- But all you really get is a janky albeit engaging zombie game.
Total-
Final –
