Building and managing an amusement park is a difficult job. There are a surprising number of things to consider: keeping your rides safe and well maintained, making sure you have enough trash cans and janitors to keep things clean, forecasting and managing your finances to avoid crippling debt, and deciding how many pickles should or should not be on a burger. But most importantly, you need to keep everyone happy. You need to keep your visitors entertained, your employees motivated, and your business a success
Planet Coaster is a game full of optimistic, fun-loving character that conjures up fond memories of visiting local carnivals as kids, full of bright lights and jaunty calliope music, or maybe a more recent excursion to a big-name amusement park, full of thematic details everywhere you look. The desire to try to replicate these experiences is a driving force that makes it easy to get swept up in every aspect of Planet Coaster. This is a simulation where you can find satisfaction in tweaking your park on a macro scale: managing your park’s overall cash flow and adjusting variables to influence average guest behavior, for example. But you can also lose yourself in the more frivolous micro level, placing that decorative shrub in just the right spot or making sure a roller coaster triggers confetti cannons at just the right time.
It’s possible to feel lost when you first dive into construction and management. There’s no integrated beginner’s tutorial–only links to YouTube videos explaining some of the basics. But this quickly proves to be an ample solution since the systems in place are so clear and simple to use. With construction, the tools for creating and manipulating walkways, shops, rides, and scenery are efficient and enjoyable. Snaking a path between obstacles or creating a spiral staircase to reach an elevated platform, for example, is painless. Instead of drawing out a route, the pathing tool involves laying down suggested pieces. You can adjust the direction and elevation of a piece with subtle mouse movements, and clicking anywhere places the segment. Mistakes can instantly be undone using the universal Ctrl+Z shortcut, with any money spent instantly being refunded in full. It’s an intuitive process that encourages experimentation without the fear of punishment.
Constructing a roller coaster–which may sound as intimidating as riding one–is, thankfully, just as simple. Laying down tracks relies on a similar predictive pathing tool, but with a few handy additions: there are buttons to help adjust the curvature and rotation of each track piece, a number of complex, pre-made turns are available to quickly attach, and the track can be automatically completed and smoothed out. Portions of a coaster can also be adjusted non-destructively after it’s been fully built. It’s an accessible process that will allow even the most novice of players to comfortably create thrill-rides of their own.
his intuitiveness is consistent among all of Planet Coaster’s tools. They’re all extremely versatile, but it doesn’t take long for them to feel like second nature. You can pull the earth up through pre-existing structures to mold tunnels like it’s no big deal. A series of interlocking, elevated walkways spanning across vast chasms takes minutes. In making the labor of construction easy, Planet Coaster fast-tracks you into feeling like the game’s creative possibilities are endless.
While you can use pre-designed shops and scenery in your park planning, you can also build your own from scratch. Learning how to construct buildings requires a little more diligence, but only to get your head around the abundance of individual pieces you have to choose from: walls, roofs, windows, lights, animatronic characters, special stage effects, and foliage. Anything you construct can easily be saved as a template for future use or shared with the community. Given that creation is a painless process, it comes as no surprise that Steam Workshop integration is robust, seamless, and virtually limitless. Thanks to the game’s long stint in Early Access, there are more than 44,000 items available for use–beautifully intricate structures and stores, ambitious, carefully engineered rides, and detailed replicas of real-world attractions. Casual discovery can be a problem outside of prolific creators, but if you know what you want, chances are it’s probably already there.
Planet Coaster offers three different modes of play: Challenge, Sandbox and Career. Challenge mode offers the classic blank-canvas scenario where you begin with limited funds, a limited selection of rides, and an empty lot. Sandbox mode is the same as Challenge mode only you’re given unlimited finances, and Career mode puts you in the middle of pre-made scenarios. Initially, Career seems unattractive, especially since the game’s tools for creativity are so well realized and beg to be used on a fresh plot of land. However, it’s here where you’re pitted against the game’s management variables and learn how to work with and around them.
Career entrusts you with a number of impressive, half-designed parks–which on their own, are an awe-inspiring glimpse into what you can achieve with the game’s tools. It then dumps you in very tricky situations and requires you to learn how to get out of them with what you have on hand. A scenario may ask that you make a park located on treacherous terrain, without resorting to flattening the world with terraforming tools. It might limit you to traditional rides like carousels, requiring you to make the most of them, and tweak your park so it specifically caters to families. It may place a monolith in the center of your park that mysteriously makes attractions break down faster, forcing you to become competent in managing technicians, work rosters, and maintenance schedules.
There’s little guidance on the steps you should take to resolve these situations, and succeeding in a Career map may take more patience than other modes. But it’s satisfying to solve a big problem in a trial by fire, using hard-earned knowledge. Working hard to pull yourself out of bad situations, slowly improve your finances, and continuing to create bigger, better, and more attractive things under strict limitations is a great challenge. Once you’ve accomplished your goals, you’re left with a profitable, well-attended, attractive park to keep building on.
This is what makes Career mode compelling: it encourages you to dive deep into the management layer and focuses your attention on the elements that you may have ignored without consequence in the other modes. With the traditional blank-canvas Challenge mode, it’s easy to coast along, since ride integrity and human happiness don’t degrade fast enough to require constant attention, at least on the default difficulty. Planet Coaster has a wealth of easily digestible variables to tweak, all of which have tangible effects–the cost of your food and what toppings you have on them, the duration and specific movement cycles of your rides–but if you have no interest in this kind of micromanagement, it’s easy enough to leave everything on the default settings and still be profitable, leaving you to focus on the creation aspect.
Planet Coaster’s construction tools are effortlessly intuitive and encouraging, and the minutiae of its management variables are fun to tinker with for obsessive players, though it won’t punish those who don’t find satisfaction there. This is a game focused on the positivity that amusement parks can bring, one that fosters even the smallest spark of imagination and creativity. Planet Coaster’s scenario-based maps are a delightful challenge, the included assets are full of character, and its Steam Workshop community is a stupefying bounty of creative talent and inexhaustible content. It’s a game that occupies your thoughts when you’re not playing it, and it’s thoroughly captivating when you are.
When I die, I hope whatever happens next is even half as beautiful as Abzu. Its mesmerizing soundtrack and Wind Waker-esque visuals are among the most enrapturing in recent memory, yet the game’s true beauty stems not from its bittersweet score and inviting undersea environments but from its unfailing ability to imbue every moment with childlike wonder. Abzu is serene and meditative, calming and cathartic, moving and timeless, its simple components assembled so elegantly as to become something altogether richer.
There’s a striking sort of purity about Abzu that invites comparison to another, equally powerful game: Journey. As in Journey, Abzu’s characters are nameless, its story wordless, its campaign brief. It also eschews many mechanics we might consider standard for a modern adventure/exploration game, including combat, character progression, and fail states. It even lacks the ambient multiplayer that made Journey such a profound experience for many players. But Abzu finds meaning in other places and, like Journey, evokes a vast array of emotions with grace and ease.
Though the campaign follows a linear path, you’re typically free to explore areas at your own pace, following subtle environmental cues toward hidden details or grasping on to massive creatures like orcas and manta rays as they glide effortlessly through the blazing blue water. You can even pause to “meditate” at certain statues, allowing you to experience the world from the perspective of the animals around you. Doing so doesn’t earn you anything; it’s simply an opportunity to observe and enjoy the thriving ecosystems layered into every environment.
With lush kelp forests, pink coral reefs, and murky black trenches, Abzu captures the otherworldly beauty of the ocean and populates each breathtaking backdrop with its own unique fauna. You’ll find all manner of fish, sharks, eels, whales, crustaceans, and more, all of which behave believably. And yet, somehow, I never felt threatened–curious, awestruck, even intimidated, but never threatened. There’s something profoundly peaceful about drifting through that world with no score or objectives or heads-up display to break the spell.
That’s not to say, however, that Abzu abandons gameplay completely. In fact, the swimming itself feels surprisingly satisfying, thanks in part to the game’s novel control scheme. You swim straight ahead by simply squeezing the right trigger, leaving you to look around with the right stick and change direction with the left. Regardless of how you twist and maneuver, your character fluidly adapts to your every input.
Meanwhile, tapping X with the proper rhythm builds up your boost, allowing you to flit gracefully through obstacles and breach into the air if you speed toward the surface. Silly as that may sound, it’s actually pretty exhilarating, especially when you can entice a school of fish to swim alongside you or get dolphins to flip and squeak almost as if they’re playing with you.
Abzu is also more than a simple ocean-life simulator. As you push forward, you’ll encounter several straight-forward exploration puzzles and even a few tense moments of action, but more importantly, you’ll begin to dive deeper and deeper into the game’s unspoken narrative. You’ll uncover some strange yet adorable robots almost immediately and start to notice scattered ruins of an ancient civilization shortly thereafter.
The further you progress, the more exquisite the ruins grow, with gilded paintings, intricate tile work, and ornate, Moroccan-style windows hinting at some tragic past. Suffice it to say the game grows in some truly unexpected and borderline mind-blowing ways. Later areas and gameplay evolutions, though simple, prove remarkably affecting within the context of the experience, cleverly subverting expectations established by the game’s earlier portions.
Of course, Abzu isn’t perfect. The camera occasionally clips through larger objects, for example, and the mechanics walk a very fine line between minimalist and just straight-up simplistic. But these shortcoming are utterly inconsequential in the face of Abzu’s countless artistic triumphs–like the music. The soundtrack shifts dynamically as you progress through the environments, stitching together various compositions on the fly to create a mood that matches your surroundings without explicitly calling attention to itself.
And that’s not all. At certain moments, the camera slowly pulls back to communicate the overwhelming scale of certain creatures and environments. I swam eye to eye with a blue whale and have never felt more awestruck or insignificant in a video game. On another occasion, I emerged from a tight cavern and was suddenly enveloped by a vast, empty chasm with an endless darkness beneath me. Again, the deft camerawork turned an already memorable moment into something truly incredible.
Art exists to bridge a gap, to communicate emotions or ideas that would otherwise be impossible to articulate. Abzu does this–courageously, confidently, sincerely. Its stirring soundtrack, vivid colors, subtle storytelling, living world, and thoughtful execution combine to create a singularly moving, transcendent experience. In a word: Abzu is beautiful.
As a survival shooter with only two modes, Killing Floor 2 is naturally short on gameplay variety. Yet what it delivers, it does well–namely, uncomplicated, arcade-style zombie shootouts. Staying alive is simply a matter of fending off the undead using whatever weapons you have on hand while effectively managing the space around you. And while its 12 maps are short on objectives and destinations, the drive to stay alive is enough to keep you invested in the action and immerses you in a deep character progression system, which makes your fight consistently enjoyable, especially if you play with teams you can rely on.
While Killing Floor 2’s wave-based combat is conceptually reminiscent of Halo’s Firefight and Gears of War’s Horde modes, the flow of a match is more analogous to Battlefield or Call of Duty. You’re not tasked with defending a specific spot (only your team), which means the main skirmish will likely move around the map over time depending where the boss-grade Zeds come from. Whether you’re fending for your life in a prison or a dilapidated lab, each layout presents tactical benefits and challenges. Farmhouse, for instance, features an open field where you can see Zeds coming from every direction–the catch is that Zeds indeed come from every direction.
There’s thoughtfulness to the maps’ designs, which reveal strategic depth after you’ve gotten familiar with the lay of the land. These layouts present avenues for you to gain the upper hand, as well as some breathing room. But even with a strong position, Zeds continue to pose a meaningful threat. You may feel like a crafty escapee when you jump off a balcony or a mezzanine to create distance, until the moment you realize that Zeds recognize and use these shortcuts as well. You’d pat them on the back if they weren’t so eager to kill you.
A couple of distinctly European maps infer the spread of the outbreak. Evacuation Zone is fortified with concrete barriers and barbed wire, while Burning Paris shows an iconic metropolis in ruins. The only map that feels out of place is the Infernal Realm, a gothic underworld dungeon. At least Killing Floor 2’s generic death-metal soundtrack matches this locale’s hellish vibe. It’s a credit to the environmental art designers that the pervasive sights and scenes of ruin makes one wish for more exposition, to learn how the outbreak unfolded. Instead, you have to use your imagination to piece things together, which is a valid approach for a production that primarily focuses on the urgency of each oncoming wave of Zeds.
Just because you can get away with instinctively killing anything that moves does not mean Killing Floor 2 is bereft of depth. Its long-term appeal hinges on its rewarding progression system, which advances your abilities based on your moment-to-moment accomplishments. To gain levels efficiently, it’s not enough to simply shoot or slice upon sight. It’s about recognizing your character’s particular strengths and applying them to undead-infested battles, whether that means serving as a proactive healer or exercising patience while you line up a zombie-stopping headshot. Trying to make every action count in Killing Floor 2 can be an engrossing experience, especially when it benefits your team’s success and survival.
Along with skill, progression efficiency also demands thoughtful resource management. How you manage your resources is partly dictated by the diverse mixture of zombies, dubbed “Zeds.” It’s ultimately pretty basic, but appreciated nonetheless. For instance, a grenade is wasted on a grunt since a well-placed bullet to the head from a basic pistol will achieve the same result. If you have the foresight and patience to save your more powerful rifle rounds, you’re rewarded with an easier path to the boss who awaits you at the end of every session. Surviving becomes all the more satisfying when you’ve completed a round with ammo to spare and enough funds to buy better weapons for subsequent battles.
Win or lose, it’s not unusual to end a session feeling a sense of accomplishment, as XP bars fill up when your performance is tallied across multiple classes. Progression in Killing Floor 2 is driven by a clever design that assigns classes to individual weapons rather than a set loadout. That means you can earn experience in both sniper rifle proficiency and healing during a single enemy wave, resulting in XP growth in at least two class categories. This also means your career path in Killing Floor 2 may veer from your original vision or plan.
The perks of each class–which are unlocked as you level up–befit their respective specialities. For example, progress as a Field Medic can lead to greater resistance to toxic bile, while the Demolitionist can improve as a grenade supplier. Every perk is rewarding, especially since upgrades demand a substantial time investment, with new unlocks happening, on average, once an hour.
Once you’ve gotten familiar with the distribution of enemy types as the waves get progressively harder, it becomes all the more satisfying to adjust your customized loadout to suit the situation. Even if the most efficient weapon isn’t necessarily tied to your favorite class, you still feel like an amateur chess player as you try to anticipate what your enemies have planned for the next wave. It’s a stimulating case of problem solving when you’re weighing ammo potency against the number of rounds you can carry, let alone afford. And while you can be assured that waves get progressively harder in every session, the variety and distribution of Zed types in a given wave are always random, which keeps combat fresh over time.
Killing Floor 2’s difficulty dynamically shifts according to squad size, although anything smaller than a team of four feels like a slog, especially after you’ve experienced the heightened action and faster progression that comes with a full crew of six players. Single-player is a last resort–a lonesome experience–where getting killed immediately ends the current session. It’s a stark contrast to multiplayer, where teammates are revived at the start of the wave following their death.
How quickly you rank up depends on how focused you are with one weapon. Killing Floor 2’s flexibility in accommodating different play styles–and for those who want to experiment with unfamiliar weapons round after round–is one of the game’s strengths. If your tendency is to be a jack-of-all-trades, it would take more than 100 hours to max out these classes, which can be quite an undertaking if you don’t have a dependable, skilled team. Such a long span of time reveals Killing Floor 2’s repetitive side, which is accentuated by the cast of recycled enemies from the first game.
If the expansive suite of Call of Duty multiplayer modes is analogous to a buffet, Killing Floor 2’s offerings are a hearty plate of meat and potatoes. The game hones in on the basic appeal of killing Zombies without the complications of reaching waypoints or setting up intricate fortifications. Yet Killing Floor 2’s strongest asset is in its simple yet effective combat–Tripwire could substitute the Zeds for robots or Nazis and still have a solid shooter on its hands.
Games based on licensed properties can sometimes cover up a multitude of sins by remaining close to their source material. Space Hulk: Deathwing is not one of those games. Although this shooter from French developer Streum On Studio boasts the grim atmosphere and brutal combat that the Warhammer 40,000 universe is known for, there are too many problems here for even the most hardcore fan to endure for long. For every impressive set piece and “wow” moment in combat, there are a dozen befuddling rules or mechanics that make you scratch your head in disbelief.
Of all the issues, tedium is the biggest offender. All nine levels of the campaign are slogs where you trudge down one corridor after another, pausing only to incinerate predictable waves of enemies. Beyond a few minor variations, enemy Genestealers come in two forms: ones that rush at you gnashing teeth and slashing claws, and hybrids that shoot at you from a distance with guns, rocket launchers, and psychic blasts. Bigger and tougher baddies are introduced during the campaign–including some bosses capable of shredding squads with ease–but by and large, the tactics you employ at the start of the game will carry you to the end.
On a positive note, battles are often as brutal as you’d expect from a Space Hulk game. There’s real weight to the thud of your weaponry and power armor as you stomp through dark corridors and chambers. Even the thump-thump-thump of the (relatively) lightweight storm bolter, the whir of an assault cannon, and the whoosh of a flamer are exhilarating because you feel like you’re doing real physical damage. Pounding on enemies with melee weapons is even more ferocious, if a bit chaotic and hard to follow, with the medieval-styled swords and hammers that send flurries of blood and flesh into the air.
Deathwing thankfully nails the look and atmosphere of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It’s loaded with visual fan service like massive cathedrals, dissected bodies in laboratories, and humans wired into power systems. Everything is just as baroque and bloody as it ought to be, making for one of the most authentic video game interpretations of Warhammer 40,000’s striking aesthetic.
While everything does look great, there’s little room for interactivity. Aside from shooting gas lines into flaming geysers and opening, closing, sealing, and smashing doors, you can’t do much to your surroundings. There are no weapons, no ammo, no health packs, or any other goodies to collect. Objectives never involve anything more than killing lots of Genestealers, taking out a boss alien, blowing something up, or turning something off or on. You just follow the orders leading from one corner of each map to another until you wrap up the final battle.
Unfortunately, squad AI is a major problem. Your allies aren’t exactly dumb, but they’re limited in their abilities when it comes to choosing targets and taking cover.
Both the personality and texture of combat are vaguely reminiscent of the original Space Hulk PC games. You take the fight to the Genestealers in squads of three when playing with others online, or solo with bots filling out the ranks. Unfortunately, squad AI is a major problem. Your allies aren’t exactly dumb, but they’re limited in their abilities when it comes to choosing targets and taking cover. Trying to take out gun turrets is a huge exercise in frustration, as your pals tend to just stand in the open and get blasted until they die.
AI Space Marines are prone to shuffling in place, turning their backs on attacking enemies right in their faces, and standing in the middle of doorways when you’re trying to seal off a room full of aliens. Enemy mobs can easily overwhelm them, and they tend to stand their ground and shoot mindlessly in the face of bosses that destroy them in a matter of seconds. They don’t do anything on their own, either. You have to tell your apothecary marine to patch himself up when his health is low–otherwise he just lets himself die. A radial order menu allows you to give rudimentary commands like Follow, Defend, and Heal, but it’s impossibly clunky to use during combat unless your Deathwing trooper has a deathwish.
Playing co-op is better by far, but it’s currently tough to find a suitable squad. Either hosts are kicking people or there’s something wrong with the online code; it’s far more common to receive a server error message than it is to successfully enter a match.
Some core mechanics are also needlessly quirky. You can’t swap your loadouts on the fly, for example. To swap weapons, revive dead characters, and heal everyone up, you have to activate a Psygate that takes you back to your ship for some TLC. Unfortunately, you only have three of these per level, so it’s easy to exhaust them and find yourself at the end of a scenario with the wrong weapon for the battle at hand. This adds to the intensity of the game by ramping up the consequences every time you trigger a return for some new gear and healing, but it also forces you to start levels from the very beginning at times, which isn’t quite as welcome.
While it captures the look and feel of a bleak sci-fi world, numerous quirks and bugs make Space Hulk: Deathwing a guilty pleasure at best.
The game also crashes to the desktop fairly frequently. One of these crashes actually corrupted a save so that every time it reloaded, the mouse buttons and keyboard wouldn’t work. And when you aren’t forced to replay significant chunks of time, you may end up loading an autosave and begin in the middle of a firefight–an impossible situation and a demotivating outcome.
While it captures the look and feel of a bleak sci-fi world, numerous quirks and bugs make Space Hulk: Deathwing a guilty pleasure at best. Playing cooperatively with a couple of buddies helps smooth over some of these problems, but regardless, combat remains incessantly tedious. The one hope is that the fanatical Games Workshop community grabs hold of the game and starts modding, because the visuals, atmosphere, and ferocity of the combat could be harnessed and turned into something impressive. As is, even the most crazed Warhammer 40,000 or Space Hulk fan will have a tough time appreciating Space Hulk: Deathwing.
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