[Arma 3 mod] Lands Divided

Lands Divided is another single-player campaign made by Apollyon, and from what I understand it’s set in the same universe as The Bay Of Hugeris. This campaign takes place in the fictional country of Locombia, a typical third-world despot state, filled with crime, corrupt officials, and murdering rebels. Things are not all bad, though – now, with the country of Vespaccia taking interest in the stability of Locombia, helping it regain its footing. You play (at first at least) as a squad leader, part of an expeditionary peacekeeping force sent to the country to help the president and the local forces to retain control of the country. Things are going well at first, but as is common in these regions, rebels will show their discontent in the form of extreme violence.

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Unavowed – Mystery Club

Unavowed is technically an adventure/point & click game, yet feels more like a visual novel thanks to its focus on narrative, dialogue, and C&C (choice & consequences). The game does have classic problem-solving with you having to pixel hunt, pick up items and match these objects, but the puzzles are on the easy side. Thanks to being easier, though, it does keep the pacing consistent throughout the game. Real veterans of the genre will probably breeze through Unavowed solving issues effortlessly, thankfully, as stated above, it has more going on than just puzzles.

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Alpha Protocol – Espionage Stumble

Alpha Protocol could have been a masterwork of an RPG, the story, setting, and non-linear way of interacting with the narrative and characters I think is still unmatched to this day… but. The mission/level gameplay outside hub-area sauntering is absolutely awful. It’s both a major disappointment, because of the could-have-been, and baffling – how could it even turn out this bad? It’s not unplayable in any way, it’s just that it’s not very fun, especially since making a comparison to other games in the stealth genre the feeling gets so much worse. Imagine a Splinter Cell with this kind of narrative and the roleplaying elements from Alpha Protocol. It would be nothing less than a dream coming true, and oh so close we were to that dream.

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Black Mesa – Remake Wonder

Black Mesa started as a free mod back in 2012, unfortunately, I have no experience with the game from that time. Black Mesa didn’t enter my gaming radar until it reached Steam in the form of Early Access, and while I wasn’t immediately impressed, nor interested exactly – I’m glad my outlook changed. Because, as it turned out, the updated version of the legendary game Half-Life is damn good! While I only have admiration for the GoldSrc engine (all those hours in Day of Defeat, and Counter-Strike), it is getting a bit long in the tooth. The Source engine, from Half-Life 2, which Black Mesa uses is technically old too, but it does feel and look more modern, especially since Valve still updates it with new features.

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Quantum Break – You Got Time?

Decided to replay one of my favorite, semi-recent AAA-gaming releases – because the last time I played it, the engine the game runs on almost broke my old computer. Now, I’m on a new fresh one – so I thought it was time to play through this science-fiction time-travel epic in full graphical glory, and maximized FPS.

Let us continue on that note. The visuals, all these years later, are still absolutely fantastic beyond just having high-quality textures. With that I mean, lighting, location design, structures, and models, in general, make the game come alive. It just looks great, and realistic, yet, has this slight futuristic corporate vibe to it that is common in near-future settings – a bit similar to the modern Deus Ex games. Unfortunately, even now when I have “up-scaling” turned off, some areas are still looking blurry, which is disappointing. Otherwise, the game runs well on my new rig, but, unfortunately, I get drastic FPS drop in scene-transfers, and when cut-scenes change to gameplay. I don’t know why that is. It’s not too bad I guess, but still an annoyance since it happens fairly often. I assume it’s an issue with the engine, because CONTROL, a more recently released Remedy game, shares the same engine, and I didn’t have these kinds of issues here. The only thing I can assume from this is that the engine got better optimized between the games. Nonetheless, the game looks remarkable still, and will not disappoint on a modern computer with a good GPU.

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