PixlBit

So I got Titanfall today with some birthday money, two copies, one for me and one for Mark. They were $8 each for XBO. I always wanted to try this game out. Well, while waiting for the install, I played a bit more Doom II and then this free-to-play game Battle Islands. Details follow. 

Doom II can be a bit annoying. Looking for those colored doors can sometimes make you run around the level for seeming forever until you find that switch you missed that opens a wall you didn't notice. Then, again, I forgot to save my game before I died. So I lost a lot of progress. Auto-saving is so trained into me now, I just can't readjust to that old style. I got annoyed and checked my Titanfall install - not yet. 

Then I started a free-to-play game I installed the other day, Battle Island. This is a WWII Pacific theater RTS with base building. It's in a cartoony style as well. It's pretty neat but it takes mucho real time to upgrade buildings to allow you to buy new units. You can speed things up with more gold, but even though I saw it done in the tutorial, I couldn't figure out how to make it happen in the real game. Anyway, you don't want to waste the gold they give you for free. More gold costs real money. Eventually you get gold for conquering other islands (everything is on islands in this game) but it'll take a while since you need to upgrade things. I noticed that the time runs fully in real time even when you are out of the game. I left for a half hour and my half hour upgrade was finished when I came back. So that's cool. I can go and do something else and come back later. Then Titanfall finally installed. 

Mark and I played Titanfall the rest of the day. What a great game! It's too bad it doesn't have a proper campaign but it's still a lot of fun. We played about half of the "campaign", which is just a 6v6 across all the maps alternating from free-for-all and control point modes. You get short cut scenes between matches to tell the story. It's neat how they did that. But Mark and I aren't much for competitive multiplayer so we switched to the horde-like survival mode.

Four online players team up to protect a location from waves of all enemy types. It's super fun and challenging. Controls are excellent. Movement around the maps is smooth and easy with wall jumping and double jumps. You've got lots of weapons to choose from and then there are the mechs, the Titans. Those things are super cool. Jump in one and wreck house, fighting ground troopes and other titans. Near the end there I got into letting my titan run itself while I tried to jump on enemy titans and tear their panels off. I also hitched rides on friendly titans and helped them keep the enemy pilots from jumping on them. What a blast! I customized my loadout and named my titan too. 

You level up in the game and earn all sorts of boosts. One thing you get are cards which you can use to give you various boosts every time you respawn. Well, not every time. You get to use three cards per match. They sometimes boost a weapon or give you a new weapon. Sometimes they make you faster and sometimes you get an XP boost for certain types of enemy kills. You get to choose what you want before the match starts. 

This game looks amazing too. Each map is so detailed and complex. There's so many routes both above and below ground to any point you want to travel to. 

I really enjoyed the game. I'm level 28 now and there's plenty of people playing online. We had no problem filling up 6v6 for the campaign mode. We did experience some slowdown a couple of times but there always seems to be online problems where we are on Mondays around 6-8 pm. I guess it's just rush hour online. Certainly the game ran smooth most of the time even when I was ejected from an exploding nuclear titan that took out several surrounding titans as I soared high in the air. What a blast! 

Finally, I just finished up the present time version of the robot infested island in Dragon Quest VII. Another sad ending to another tale. My only issue with the game at all is the slightly long wait between screens when you are moving from room to room or town to country. It's like slightly longer than a full second of blank screen and it makes my eyes blink. Of course, this is a very small complaint. I've enjoyed everything about this game so far. 

And that's a week. Tomorrow I pick up Dragon Quest Builders. I found out Atar Flashback Vol. 1 and 2 for XBO got delayed until Nov. 1. That's fine though. I want to spread out these day-one purchases anyway. 

Bye.