Tom Clancy's The Division Review

The Division is a third person cover shooter game, because unlike your regular "walking Rambo shooter", if you are not under cover, you will be dead in a second. What makes this game unique is that Ubisoft tried to mix some "RPG" elements, like skill trees, character attributes, weapon bonuses and control conditions into the game. We like to see it as a mix of Gears of War, Diablo and Borderlands blended together.

Gear bonuses

As any shooter game, this one has an immense arsenal at your disposal, each weapon having their own characteristics, so we definitely recommend trying them all out. But most importantly is the bonuses they carry. As we mentioned this game is heavily weighted on loot, which means that when you get to drop/craft that one weapon you were looking for, chances of it having the matching bonuses for your build are very, very low. They do allow you to re-roll one of them, but just one. It would be really nice to be able to

Incendiary grenade

have two equal weapons and transfer a bonus from one to the other, since loot is individual and there is no way to trade items, you still would have to farm your equipment. An important additional tool of your arsenal are grenades. They are a reliable source to disable your opponent. Flashbang will blind, incendiary grenade will burn and so on, all of them stunning your opponent for a couple seconds.

White line shows cover pathfinding.

The second most important mechanic is finding cover. Enemies do an enormous amount of damage, so you will always be looking for a way to protect yourself until the right moment to come out and shoot. To make things more exciting you can even aim for a specific cover and the game will pathfind a route to it. Interesting additional mechanic is if an enemy is peaking at you through cover and you hit a bullet right in front of him (in the cover itself, like the wall or barricade), the smoke and fragments will blind him for a couple seconds, giving you just enough time to reposition yourself or close in for the kill.

Inventory and Character Attributes

Finally we have character attributes, skills, talents and perks. Character attributes are simple, you have just three: Firearms (your damage), Stamina (your health) and Electronics (your skill power). All your gear will enhance at least one of this, and you can combine them as you see fit. There are 9 skills and 3 "super powers", you can have 2 skills + 1 "super power" equipped at the same time. Each skill has 3 modifications that will change it in some way, and we recommend exploring each one at least once. Perks are simple passive buffs and talents are somewhat "active" buffs. More precisely a talent has certain conditions (like getting to cover or shooting your enemy on the head), if you meet the condition you will receive the talents buff for a short time.

Dying in the Dark Zone

Last, but not least, we have to briefly talk about the Dark Zone, the end-game area of the map where the game becomes truly multiplayer with extra hardened enemies and the best gear in the game. The Dark Zone has exclusive mechanics that we could spend a whole post writing about, so in short: The Dark Zone has it's own ranking system, currency and contaminated loot that needs to be extracted in specific locations before you can use it. That is where the player killers will hunt you and try to steal your hard earned loot. Respawning, looting and specially killing other players is something that definitely could have used some more development iteration, as there is barely enough time to come back and get your loot and revenge. Which is the best part of this whole system.


We also feel that this mix of on-line/off-line didn't quite work the best. The world doesn't really feel as multiplayer as a single-player game with friends, despite being clearly focused on multiplayer. But if you are in for the single-player only you will be missing a good portion of the end-game. Overall The Division has a well paced experience with a reasonable balanced shooting/cover system. A positive point to the great environment artists that gave life to a very realistic trashed looking New York City.

Final Score: 8 out of 10.

Grim Fandango Remastered Review

Grim Fandango is a point-and-click puzzle game in which your goal is to solve the puzzles in order to continue the story line. Immersed in the after-life world of Mexican culture, there is plenty to be enjoyed in this remake of an old favorite.

Unfortunately there is nothing special about the mechanic of this kind of game: you have to move around the scene and interact with different objects in the right order so you can progress the story, solving the puzzles as they come by. You can either interact with something or observe/question something, and believe us, you better use both constantly!

This game has an amazing cultural theme, great voice over, plenty of funny bits and, compared to Broken Age, way more difficult puzzles! If you like this kind of game it is definitely a must.

Final Score: 7 out of 10.

Cook, Serve, Delicious Review

Cook, Serve, Delicious is a simulation game where your goal is to make the best restaurant in the world, hopefully by serving every meal to perfection. This game might be simple, but sure will make you hungry!

Food Prepping

The main mechanic is very simple, there are a plethora of foods that you can serve, each have their own recipes. In order to correctly serve a meal you have to hit the buttons in the correct order, always at client request. You can further "upgrade" each food for an increase in profit per meal, but that will also increase the quantity of recipes you have available for that particular food.

Our favorite menu

The game is not just about cooking, so there is also a restaurant managing aspect to it. Other than buying food recipes you have to decide what your menu will be, what equipment your kitchen has available, as well as Catering Events, Iron Cook and Hungry Festival. All this micro-decisions will affect your buzz, the more buzz the more people will come to order food. Near 100% is like every time is rush hour, pretty daunting!

We wish that the food orders had the thumbnail looking like the recipe that should be made, instead of the "regular" order. Not every food can have that, but would be a nice extra to the game. We also would like to see a button to throw away the current food and start from scratch, after all, if you are cooking and you clearly got the recipe wrong, would you serve it? We also recommend that you try at least every food in the menu, as many recipes look hard, but when it comes to the actual making, they are straight forward.

Overall the game is simple, but enjoyable. It is nice to play something that does not involve violence of some sort. An extra point for having controller support, a local-coop and online multiplayer modes, so you can play with your friends!

Final Score: 9 out of 10.

Beginner Tip: We recommend starting with Corn Dog and Pretzel, as they are cheap, easy and will be blocked once you raise the reputation of your establishment. To complete, we recommend any of the Sopapillas, Fried Chicken, French Fries and Beer, as their prepping are the same, very easy to learn and gives a fast return on investment.

Pro Tip: Learn the names of the recipes other than having to read the instructions every time. It will allow you to serve any food in an instant!

Fallout 3 Review

Fallout 3 is a First/Third Player RPG Shooter game in an open wasteland scenario. Your goal is to survive the post-apocalyptic world in order to find your father, that left you for no apparent reason. This game marks the comeback of an old favorite franchise, made by the hands of Bethesda, well known for the Elder of Scrolls games.

Let's start with the best in Fallout 3: Perks and VATS.

Perks are unique options you can choose every time you level up. Some of them open unique mechanics for the game, like the Cannibal Perk, which allows you to feed on dead corpses to restore health or the Bloody Mess Perk, which gives a chance that every kill will end up in a violent death animation.

VATS System

VATS stands for Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System. Despite the fancy name it is fairly simple, every creature is made by different members (like legs, arms, torso and head) and all of them have their own health. Depending on your position relative to your target your chance to hit those areas changes. Do enough damage and you cripple the member, unless you do enough damage to kill the creature all together. This system works all the time and you are also subjected to it. On top of it you have a limited amount of actions point that you can use every few seconds to slow time and pick by hand the member you want to shoot at.

The Skills system is very simple, but yet important to how the game operate, as every action success chance is determined by them. We like to divide the skills in two big categories: Combat and Survival. Combat skills affect your direct damage with weapons, like big guns, small guns, melee, etc. Survival skills are abilities that will help you survive the wasteland, like sneaking, medicine, speech, etc. One that we think plays special role in the game is the Repair Skill, because it synergizes well with the equipment duration mechanic. Just like in real life, the more you use an equipment, the faster it will break. But if you have a second piece of that same equipment you can salvage parts and repair the first one. This one skill is the sole responsible for most of the in-game money we made, damage we caused, weight we condensed and blood we kept in our veins.

To wrap up we have to talk about the game core mechanics: Attributes, Karma and Radiation.

Attributes are defined as a simple status page (called S.P.E.C.I.A.L.), and each will raise some skills or other status, like health, max weight or action points (used in VATS). Karma has a special place in the game, as every action you take can be considered either Good or Evil, and the game will keep track of them. If your karma is not neutral you might have special dialog options or even exclusive bonuses with different factions inside the game. Nothing fancy, but adds to the role play.

Enough Radaway for 3k+ radiation

Now being in a post nuclear world wouldn't make sense without radiation, right? Radiation plays a big role in the game plot, but mechanically is very dull. Every food, water or region has radiation somehow, the more you enter in contact with it, the sicker you get. Get sick enough and on top of loosing a couple of SPECIAL points you will die. But for you, as the player, to heal radiation is no big deal, any medic in the world will give you a full treatment or you can just carry an endless supply of radiation pill. It just doesn't really make sense that the world is struggling so much with radiation when there are a seamlessly infinite amount of radiation "cure" just laying around. We would have liked it to be a more severe or restrict system, that instead of killing you, could just make you very weak, like everyone else in the wasteland.

Fallout 3 is a bridge between how games used to be in the 90's and how games started to be after the year 2000. The open world and moral choices that the game offers also add a lot of depth to the story. This game is definitely a must and will give you hours upon hours of gameplay!

Final Score: 10 out of 10.

Half-Life 1 Review

Half-Life 1 is a First Person Shooter game in which your goal is to escape a scientific disaster while fighting your way through hordes of enemies. Released in November 1998, Half-Life 1 raised the standards for the whole game industry. Many of the design principles that are used today, almost two decades later, were set with this game.

For today standards, the game is mechanically very simple, you have about dozen different weapons and you have to beat, shoot, explode or disintegrate your enemies. What makes this game very interesting, even today, is that the whole plot happens as you play. Throughout the game you will face different forms of puzzle that will require different problem solving techniques to successfully reach the end, using no more than jumping, crouching, and one "interact" button.

Despite the simplicity, Half-Life 1 shows that is not the amount of different mechanics that makes an excellent game, but how the mechanics themselves can be weaved together to bring interesting interactions to life.

Final Score: 7 out of 10.
(Were we in 1998, this would easily be a 10.)