Delta's Variety Corner

Spec Ops: The Line is a third person action shooter developed by Yager and published by 2K. Yager developed the title as they wanted to criticise what they viewed as a romanticising of war in the media. And so they consulted Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the film Apocalypse Now and set out to create a narrative experience that would make people think more about the actions they take in videogames. But how well did they pull of their narrative? Is it the story to end all stories or is there room for improvement? I'll be finding out in this review. Spec Op's story takes place in a devastated Dubai, after a massive sandstorm has wiped out the city. You play as Captain Martin Walker, a Delta operative leading a team on a scouting mission. Your objective is to scout out the city and find survivors. On contact you are to return to waiting US forces outside of the 'Storm wall'. However the situation is quickly complicated when you hear a distress signal from US f

Hey there, as followers of this blog may have noticed, I haven't posted a new review for the past two weeks. Normally I try to have a review up every other week. I haven't been able to for the last two weeks as they were the last two weeks for my Final Major Project at college. So I was focusing on making sure everything was done and finishing up any left over work. This has meant that I have ended up a little behind on the reviews. Though I plan to have another one up next week and hopefully I can get back into a more regular schedule. Thanks for your patience.

Just Cause 3 is the third title in the popular Just Cause franchise. Developed by Avalanche Studios and published by Square Enix. The Just Cause series became famous for the level of destruction offered players. But how well does the third instalment match up to the others? Is it an improvement over the previous games or does it fall short? I'll take a look at it in this review to find out. Just Cause 3 features many of the same gameplay elements of the previous titles. However, there are a few new additions. The player now has access to a wingsuit alongside their parachute, which allows them to travel quickly across the world (provided they don't immediately dive into the ground) The wingsuit allows quick travel at the expense of the manoeuvrability of the parachute and with the right altitude you can get very far (I was able to travel from the top of a cliff all the way to an off-shore Oil Rig). Vehicle handling has also been changed, at least as far as land vehicles go. An

XCOM 2 is the followup to 2012's XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Unlike many other titles, XCOM 2 chooses to play off of the bad ending from the first game. This meant that the gameplay had to be overhauled in order to suit the new style of play that would be introduced in this game. But do these additions help or hinder the game? And does it live up to the legacy of the series as a whole? As XCOM 2 is based off of the bad ending of the first game, the gameplay has been redesigned to focus around guerilla warfare. A lot more of the missions are hit and run based objectives, where you have to get in, complete the task and get out again in as short a time as possible. This of course, means the introduction of timers. There were timed missions in the first XCOM game, but they were generally relegated to Council missions, and usually only Bomb Disposal, where you could increase the amount of time available to you by disabling power nodes scattered across the map. XCOM 2 has no such luxury, you&

Mass Effect 2 is the second installment of the highly acclaimed Sci-fi franchise by Bioware. For the second game, Bioware took a look at the feedback they'd recieved from Mass Effect 1, in order to know where they had to improve. Because of this. Mass Effect 2 has much tighter gunplay, which is a lot more responsive than before, however it also lacks the vehicle segements from the first game. So today I'll take a look at it, and see whether these changes and others help or hurt the game. As I mentioned in the intro, the gameplay has clearly been a focus for Bioware, as it's a much more fluid experience, the cover system has seen major improvements and minigames invovled with hacking have been changed as well, now any class is able to hack into things, however there is no option to use omni-gel to bypass the minigames anymore, in fact, omni-gel seems to be missing from the game completely. The inventory system is also gone, meaning you'll be spending less time managing

With Metro Exodus rapidly approaching I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the first game in the franchise. Released in 2010, Metro 2033 achieved critical success, and was almost universally well recieved. However it didn't fare as well commercially. Under performing in America. Needless to say, the game was at least successful enough to warrant a sequel, Last Light; which was published by Deep Silver after they aquired the rights to the franchise and developers 4A Games, after THQ went bankrupt. Unlike the other big post apocalypse series, Fallout; the Metro series is very story focused and unlike Fallout, linear. This means that encounters cannot happen randomly. Each play-through you'll find the same enemies in the same places doing the same things and though there are what you could call side-quests, they're fairly basic. Such as giving a begger some money or not, with the reward simply being some karma points. This is an interesting feature in Metro. A