End of Games of Summer 2016

Opposites attract and same colors repel, as you get dynamic
control over your polarization to jump through these
puzzles. Ohh, and one-hit-deaths.

This month has been a doozy! I've played 3 new games this month, starting with a free PS+ game called Teslagrad. The former is a hand-drawn puzzle platformer, with no vocals or dialogue, with a pretty short playthrough. I like the game's campaign length, and simplicity. You get an ability to teleport short distances, and an ability to polarize red or blue, which attracts or repels objects including yourself. Otherwise, you collect 36 objects for 36 trophies, and that's it.

Frickin jam out to Chop Suey!

Guitar Hero Live has a very premium presentation. In Live mode, you play sets of 3-4 songs in front of a live audience, and the whole thing is live-action, recorded in super-crisp first person. This is one of the best versions of the view I've ever seen. Your band members are a tad overdone and you'll spot the acting, but GHL is an ambitious project that succeeds. As if this offline component wasn't sweet enough, you can also play GHTV, the 24/7 drop in/drop out continuous streaming of songs. There are at least 100 free songs, each with their own music video as you haul ass on the guitar. The controls have been overhauled from 5 keys down the neck to a more-compact 3x3, which was surprisingly easy to pickup after playing at least 10 guitar games with the 1x5 layout. The trophy path is challenging, but not as hard as some of the past games. I think one of those games had you play ~100 songs in a row without failing or pausing, or some complete garbage. The hardest one in GH Live might be hitting all notes in 4 songs on the hardest difficulty...or 1 song 4 times. Otherwise, there is playing the online mode for a total of 24 hours, and strumming the guitar 1 million times, which just take some perseverance.

This month also saw the win-some-lose-some release of No Man's Sky, which disappointed a decent amount of people in the same way that I was disappointed with Dangerous Golf. I'm not one for sandbox games, and really didn't care about No Man Sky's potential. I just don't do games that don't have goals, and games that have long completion times better be the cream of the crop. I hope the people who were disappointed with the game get a magic patch with all the missing gameplay features they're waiting for and a little stability...I'll keep my eyes forward for Final Fantasy XV.

Think...Marvel Ultimate Alliance + StarCraft

A free PS+ title this month is Kill Strain, which is pretty much what the dismal failure Evolve should have been. The game currently only has one map, with a dozen playable characters. Each match takes about 20 25 minutes, and starts 4 v 4 v 2. 8 of those players use human characters from several classes and try to kill either the other human team or the Strain team. The Strain team has its own unique 3 classes, and a small chance to infect a human after killing them. When this happens, the Strain team grows in number, as the previously-human player now joins the Strain team. Having one map, and only 250 players online at a given time, the game could use a little flushing out. However, from reviews of Evolve, this free game has a decent chance to run the full-priced game a run for its money.

Other than that I am still plugging away at Overwatch and Gems of War.