Let's Play Door Kickers, Part One

Indeed, let's. Let's kick down some doors. In Door Kickers. This one could easily turn into a series, which would make this part one, where I go through the basic gameplay and mess around with some early missions.

Since it's me, I get some cops killed, indulge in some minor fat shaming (it's okay, I'm having difficulty tying my own shoes these days, so I think I'm allowed), attempt to pay tribute to one of the greatest unsung heroes of Star Wars by getting his name wrong (I'm so sorry, Porkins), discuss the (surely) far fetched linguistics behind weird names like Piere Åkerblom and question my superiors, who deemed a 50% casualty rate an "improvement". The cold hearted bastards!

Let's Play Door Kickers, Part One
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnnDIJ6wDJQ

Kicking Down Some Doors

Door Kickers is a lovely little indie title that I fear might have passed many a gamers by without much notice. It's the sort of title that lends itself perfectly to both PC and Tablet/Mobile gaming thanks to a perfectly executed UI and crisp, clear 2D graphics. Someone really ought to give it some well-deserved attention, don't you think?

"You rang?"

Door Kickers is a real-time tactical SWAT simulator with free pause from KillHouse Games. In it, you take control of a SWAT team and fight your way through meth-cooking apartments, hostage-littered office locales and pimped out drug lord yachts, all using a combination of real-time maneuvres and intricate planning while paused. You can choose between single missions of various difficulty or several campaigns with tiered missions and full, XP-driven squad control. Everything is top-down, extremely intuitive and it's a hoot to play.

Let's Play Offworld Trading Company, Part One

As promised, I now have my first Let's Play video for Offworld Trading Company uploaded to youtube. It's a glorious example of what I talked about yesterday, wherein I have a lot of fun being absolutely goddamn awful at the game. So take a gander and see me lower the difficulty setting for no good reason, miss most of the things happening to me and completely fail to utilize the Offworld Market in the correct way.

Let's Play Offworld Trading Company
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL93XXDS9vY

The Bad Kind of Fun

I'm not very good at playing games, which is sort of a shocker since that's pretty much all I do.

Sure, sometimes I'll stuff my face, change diapers (I'm just gonna let the question hang in the air) or drink way too much coffee, but other than that, there's not a lot going on that doesn't involve a computer and stuff I click on. And yet, I often find myself cranking the difficulty setting down all the way to "are you kidding me?" before I reach my comfort zone.

It's not that I'm stupid, because I'm not. I mean, I do stupid stuff all the time, but I don't think I am stupid. There are plenty of people whom I consider to be a lot dumber than me, who are able to out-game me at every turn. I can figure shit out. I can add numbers together and get other numbers back in return. I can follow along with even the most convoluted movie plots. But I can't for the life of me apply a decent strategy in any of the several strategy games I enjoy playing. So what the hell is going on then?

Well, there are several things going on I suppose, but they all lead to a happy place where I can frolic with unicorns at my leisure: a place where I'm able to have fun, despite being really, really bad at something. Sounds great, doesn't it? Don't worry, just take my hand and I'll lead you there.

Total Warhammer

Why? Why didn't they name it that? It's, like... right... there!

I realise I'm a little late on the ball here, but I simply can't wait for this behemoth to ruin my (already non-existent) social life. I mean, it's Total War and it's frickin' Warhammer, all baked into one delicious gaming cake. It's Total War: Medieval with orcs and fire wizards. It's the ultimate arm-seat general meets the place where it's always raining and you're there. It's taking a dump and eating at the same time (No? Just me?). What could possibly go wrong?`

"Ahem..."

Going Offworld for Some Trading

I'm not a big fan of competitive multiplayer, so it's rare for me to find such a game that I truly enjoy. There's something about the genre that just irks me. Maybe it's the (often) heavy focus on APM; the art of flailing your hands around like an epileptic going for the mother of all seizures, or maybe I'm just too old to withstand the pressures of an amphetamine-fuelled competition. To me, most competitive RTS games rely far too much on speed and quick decision making, and not nearly enough on slowly building momentum and the stroking of beards. But in the upcoming wall street-in-space simulator Offworld Trading Company, I might just have found what I'm looking for.

In Defence of Early Access

I'm a sucker for Early Access. There, I've said it.

I know that to a lot of people, the service (provided by Steam) is little more than a red flag, something to rally against in the name of consumer rights, but to me, it's where I find most of my games these days. That probably has to do with the fact that most Early Access games are indie titles, and the ones that aren't tend to be large, sprawling sandboxes. In other words, it's all right up my alley.

Still, the service has a reputation of being sort of a rip-off, a reputation I feel is undeserved. The truth is that considering how wide open the field is for exploitation, I'm amazed by how rare the outright scams are. The most notable, and therefore also the ones most often brought up, examples of epic fails within Early Access are Spacebase DF-9 and Earth: Year 2066. Those are the titles people will point to as an example of how few fucks are given within the service. But to be honest, only one of them was an outright scam, and while we're being honest, are we really pretending that Earth: Year 2066 ever looked and felt like a real game? That spotting it's status as a shovelware in the making was a difficult task?

Using Impact and the Canvas filter effect from photoshop in your promotional material: 

the true mark of a quality product.