Month: July 2020

If you were to create a checklist of what makes a game a Souls-like, meaning it follows in the footsteps of FromSoftware’s massively popular Dark Souls series, you’d get bullet points that look nearly identical to Hellpoint: respawn checkpoints in a labyrinthine world, the loss of all currency on death unless you can retrieve it, slow and methodical combat with light and heavy attacks, as well as challenging encounters punctuated by enormous boss monsters. It’s all here, for better and for worse, but its elaborate sci-fi setting gives it some character of its own and a strong combat system made suffering through the extensive bugs largely worthwhile.

At the very start you’re plopped into a cloned body on a massive space station with zero explanation, left to fend for yourself against demonic entities and godlike beings. That’s the entire plot, basically, which feels like a waste of the potential for this immediately intriguing sci-fi universe. There are some books you can skim over, message terminals to read, and a handful of prompts at control stations here and there to peruse which add some flavor, but the majority of Hellpoint’s storytelling is suggested by its environments and enemies. Much like Dark

Alienware Area-51m R1 17″ 144Hz Intel Core i7-9700K RTX 2070 Gaming Laptop with 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD, and Tobii Eye Tracking

Here is your chance to get the best Alienware laptop for an incredibly awesome price. The Alienware Area-51m is a true desktop replacement laptop. It’s the first notebook with a socketed desktop CPU and a swappable GPU. Talk about a future-proof laptop.

See on Dell Home

One of the questions I’m sometimes asked by friends is what the best entry-level fighting game is for someone who is new to the genre, but who also doesn’t want to spend hours in a training mode or immediately get completely blown up when they play online. My answer is generally, “such a game doesn’t exist, but the closest you’ll get is probably Fantasy Strike.”

Fantasy Strike is a fun, easy to play fighting game with simple controls, tight and strategic fighting mechanics, a well rounded cast of 12 unique fighters, and some wonderful innovations in the genre that I wish other, bigger franchises would take note of. Visually, it’s very bland and lacks its own unique personality, but if you look beyond that, you’ll find one of the most daringly different fighting games of the last decade – not to mention it’s free-to-play, has great netcode, and full crossplay support between PC, PS4, and Nintendo Switch.

Breaking the Rules

Fantasy Strike throws the basic rules behind most fighting games out the window, instead writing its own with the goal of making things as intuitive and accessible as a traditional fighting game can possibly be. You can’t crouch, which