Nearly_Diamond

Rust is advertsied as an Alpha - in reality it's a completed concept game - there is a new one coming, but what it encapsulates and what all the 'nay-sayers' are missing is the beuty and purity of the sheer brutality of this game. You start naked with a rock. You need food to survive, but you don't have any. depending on where you spawn you could walk for days without seeing anything, and there's a pig....just one little pig....chewing the grass...minding its own business. You sneak up behind it and spend 5 minutes smashing it's little face in until you get a dead pig which you can then strip raw chicken breast from (yes that's right. The chicken breasts are just behind the pork loins." "Great!" you scream through the game's built in speech" FOOD! I can survive!" You eat the raw chicken get food poisonning and die. Then you respawn and learn how craft a fire to cook it on etc and so the crafting system starts to expand until you can make guns and C4 explosives, along with buildings which are rudimentary structures in wood or metal. The potential screams at you in this game, and to top it off everyone's tryoing to gather and harvest so most of htep layers you come accross want you for your stuff - never trust a naked man - they always have a shotgun and will let it off in your face and rob you. You then start again with nothng. When it happens to you you want ot break something in real life, when you do it to someone else it's the funniest and most rewwarding things that can happen in a game, and never before has Nerd-Rage becomes such a fundamental tennet. It's true it's limmited. There is no map - but the map is not randomly generated - you learn landmarks, and where to hide. The first time you see the guy that shot you wander into his house and log out with a "ZZZZZZZZZIIIIP" of the sleeping bag and cave his door in to rob all his stuff is the day you realise what other games are lacking and that is the true freedom for moral choice. Not guided by queslines or picking yes/no answers but whether or not you will tolerate your fellow players to construct an impenetrable citadel or be a complete **** and kill everything on site. This version is limitted. Pay the £15 gladly in the knowledge that you will fund those who care about this to create more and realise the full potential. I don't care what anyone says, yes it has its flaws, yes it can be better, but for it's sheer simple, brutal naked stripped down and bare essential gameplay, if you can find a crowded server with no hackers it will be a game you never stop playing. There is no other game that does this. DayZ does not do this. If the second iteration of this game is realised - and it's being developed as we speak, there is a glorious golden-zen age of gaming coming, where whiners have their houses broken into and all their stuff nicked, apart from some rocks, which can be left as a souvenir, like a horses head on the pillow next to you in the morning....

Ok so here's the thing - in the alpha and beta it wsa fun - everyone was messing around and the potential to 'do anything' was explored and was exciting. This game explodes the MMO grind like nothing else into some fun stuff, but it's a completely player based economy. At face value this is good, but what it means is the servers have to have decent numbers of people on them for the game to be viable, and so Trion deliberately don't have enough servers so as not to go through the surge and crash in player numbers - this means even if you paid over £100 for your founder's pack it's a 3 hour wait minimum just to get on. Additoinally all the servers are full - you need a strong guild to get anywhere in the game, and so if your friends are already established on another server - you won't get to play with them. Paying players can purchase land and build their own home there - which becomes a focus of one of the styles of play. Great! All the land went in the first week! This means if you're thinking of starting out now - you'll need to wait until thep layer populatoin crashes off for a bit to register on the server, once the game is dying. This Game has promise, but it is at heart a Korean grind fest with no shortcuts, and the ability to fully explore the game is precluded by having to log on to the servers (that don't let you alt-TAB out to do other things while you wait) and que fo 8 hours. As an online MMO Que simulator I would score this a 10. It's possible that somewhere in there, once the atrix has you there might be a game to play which could have a good score too. However, when developers have already given salient and unignorable lessons in how to set up ap layer economy usigng just one server, such as in EVE, to build a game arount this principle as a core tennet and then spread it out over a bunch of servers like WoW or that god-awful star wars MMO the old republic (apart from hutball... huttball was great..) is just a big mistake in my opinion. I intend not to play this any more.

I've been playing Firefall since the days of the endless Beta and I've had nothing but fun, but it can be a bit of a mixed experience, and certainly having friends to play this game with contributes in a major way. Ok so first the bad - the quests can be a bit repetitive and slow, particularly making you go back and fore to the message board to get them, but a number of them are fun. This is a first/third person shooter, so the quests will involve shooting things or rescuing people/stuff and then carrying those things while encumbered and other people shoot at you. I think more could be made of this from an MMO point of view as the progression isn't exactly linear - but that can be a good thing as well.] Some of the reviews slating this game are more through the developers making radical changes in patches - although most of hte big changes have been done and I think what we have now is a very playable game. Now for the good - and there is A LOT of good in this game. It was originally touted as an e-sports title, and the PvP is very slick. The weapon progression is accessable to everyone and can take time but it is satisfying to be able to play with things like reload speed, magazine size, rate of fire and now additional elemental damage. The graphics are quite stylised, but nice, and the artwork for the environments is still stunning. The freedom of exploration is also still there, although you can't place Thumpers in as many wierd and wonderful areas as was possible in the past. Squad thumping with a group is great fun and the classes are able to support each other well in game - it's intense and frenetic and was always one of the best experiences of the game. It's not perfect, and at times it does feel ike there could be more there to do, but rather than an MMO to burn hours of your life in, it's more like a shooter with progression features which add to the customisation feel of your character, and improve your interaction with the world, and there' alot there to make your character feel unique. Spending hours and hours doing PvE in this can get very dull particularly by yourself, but get a group of friends, and thump or do PvP and this game really shines. In short, I'm older and I have less time than when I used to bury myself in an MMO for days at a time and lose track of time. With family and other commitments, this game fits in nicely, and there still remains the potential for endless expansion and world boss moments like the exciting videos of the original trailers way back when. It's not perfect, but there's much more good than bad and the co-op play can make this game very exciting.