Temple of Life: The Legend of Four Elements Collector's Edition V-2 [FINAL]

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RaiderZ review

With so many free-to-play massively-multiplayer online games hitting the market lately, it can be tough to decide which one is worth your precious time. At first glance RaiderZ may seem like your typical Eastern free-to-play MMORPG, complete with huge weapons and countless grind quests. However, at its core, the game offers an innovative monster-hunting experience that has the potential to be compelling, even if it's fairly rough around the edges.

RaiderZ features four generic styles, or classes: Defender (tank), Sorcerer (magic damage dealer), Berzerker (melee damage dealer), and Cleric (healer). The style you choose will initially determine the types of abilities and weapons open to you. As you progress through the game, you can eventually cherry pick abilities from other styles in order to create any sort of character you want, making for some interesting class combinations.

The first zone, Broken Mast, sets the stage for every zone that follows it, with mini-quest hubs throughout and small groups of quest mobs inhabiting only specific areas. RaiderZ's story, as told by these quests, isn't particularly gripping. However, it does introduce you to the game's treadmill progression, where players receive quests to kill specific monsters that in turn drop crafting items, allowing you (through the help of an NPC) to forge better equipment, so that you can in turn find and kill bigger monsters.

For the right gamer, that progression can be satisfying, but it's surprising that the quests aren't more interesting or inspired here. Instead, the majority of them are tedious grind quests, ones that direct you to kill a certain amount of monsters in an area or collect specific types of loot off their corpses.

RaiderZ's method of dealing with the questing system's monotony comes in two forms. The first is in its action-based combat, which allows you to actively dodge enemy attacks. It's best highlighted during elite monster fights and dungeon bosses, where timing your movements and choosing when to attack is crucial to survival. These elite encounters are intense, and it would've been nice to experience that kind of life-and-death danger with every enemy, not just the big guys.

The other area it breaks from the norm is in its unique enemy interactions, which happen from time to time. For instance, if you hit a crab hard enough, a piece of its armor might break off and you can use that bit to buff your own defense. Additionally, some enemies drop their weapons, which you can in turn use against them for increased damage and other special effects. These encounters are great, often humorous, and breathe life into the otherwise lackluster questing model that fills most of the game.

Around level 15 to 20, players are more or less forced to take a break from questing and group up for dungeons. These follow the typical "kill a bunch of generic bad guys to proceed" format, and are capped off by end bosses that are some of the toughest enemies you'll face, often requiring pre-planned strategies for victory. Nothing in any of the game's three instances drop equipment, only crafting materials, and you generally need to run each of them a few times in order to acquire all the materials to craft a full set of gear.

Constantly upgrading your gear is essential, and you'll need an entirely new set if you want to stay competitive in RaiderZ's player-versus-player. PvP only becomes accessible around level 25, but it's not until the end-game when you've hit the Epic Mt. Eda zone and can begin to craft special defensive PvP gear that you'll experience true competitive play. Additionally, there's the option to shell out real money in the RaiderZ cash shop for jewels that increase the success rate of enchanting armor to higher levels, giving PvP a pay-to-win feel. Competitive play rewards you with special PvP gear and wolf mounts, but it takes a long time to grind the reputation you need with your faction of choice before you'll see anything worthwhile.

Once you've hit RaiderZ's max level of 35, which takes about 20-30 hours, you'll find there isn't much to keep your attention. If you want to continue adventuring at max level, your options mostly involve continuously running epic versions of dungeons to get rare materials that let you make the highest-level weapons and armor. Alternatively, you can go on epic monster quests and fight elite monsters, which also have a rare chance to drop crafting components.

RaiderZ may not be able to go head-to-head against some of the bigger free-to-play MMOs on the market, but it does offer a fairly unique monster-hunter experience and fast-paced action combat that will keep you hooked for hours on end. The early- to mid-game offers a glimmer of promise, but unfortunately you'll quickly find the quests become as repetitive as the end-game content. Ultimately, we'd like to see more with future updates, but for now RaiderZ feels incomplete and suffers from unrealized potential.

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Aliens: Colonial Marines campaign hands-on preview

Know this: In the absolute worst case scenario, Aliens: Colonial Marines is shaping up to be the most authentic adaptation you could want. It's not just about how the game looks, though its visuals convince at every turn. The bleak, charcoal-grey hell of LV-426's surface is just as twisted and imposing as it should be, wailing wind and simmering lava evoking a harsh environment as dead as it is deadly. And the dank, dripping, ambiguous corners of the Hadley's Hope complex are more than likely to make you jump at the sight of a curling, tail-like power cable dangling in the shadows.

More important (and impressive) though is the fact that everything feels right. There's no sense of weak impersonation here. Nor is this a mechanical video game remake, going over the same old ground in hollow tribute. It's a video game sequel, revisiting Aliens' world but expanding upon it.

As such, the game takes a smart approach to fan-service. For instance the early stages of the level we played (number four to be precise) are set in and around the most frequented areas of the film, neatly justifying unspoken references without resorting to ruinous, clumsy shout-outs. The history of the setting is all around, but only if you know what you're looking for.

The distant wreckage of the atmospheric processor looms on the horizon, but our attention is never drawn directly to it. If you look closely when entering that corridor upon arrival at Hadley's Hope, you'll spot the acid burn in the ceiling and in the floor. An overturned bed still lies in the corner of the medical bay. The connecting window is shot out, gaping with a jagged Marine-sized hole. Before you even fire a pulse rifle (which feels exactly as compact, meaty and manoeuvrable as it should) or Smart Gun (whose grainy camera-equipped visor evokes the video feed of a certain ill-fated rescue mission horribly well), the entire place drips with authentic Aliens lore.

But there's a 'But' coming. Of course there's a 'But' coming.

You see, as impressive as Colonial Marines' authenticity is, the jury is still out on any element past that. It's doubtless a great Aliens experience, but a great game? Hard to tell. While our trek across the blasted wasteland of LV-426 was a damnably tense exercise in building atmosphere and character--all troubled dialogue and foreboding--and the initial exploration of Hadley's Hope an effective spin on the quiet unease of the movie Marines' arrival, the climactic descent of the Aliens themselves was rather less inspiring.

Pouring in through a hole in the command room's structure, the initial swarming of biomechanical terrors across wall, ceiling, and floor is a startling cinematic set-piece. Operating on adaptable path-finding AI rather than scripting, and displaying a total disregard for vertical orientation, a large number of Xenomorphs in a relatively wide area is exactly the seething, disorienting wave of black death it should be. The combating of said menance though? Repetitive and not-too-thrilling, like taking a shotgun into a shooting gallery.

And so it continued. As Aliens attacked us in corridors, the panic-drenched, back-to-the-wall threat was certainly more affecting. But the means of dealing with it was still a simple case of pumping bullets into a funnel until the things running down the funnel were dead. Later on, an ammo-depleted session of cat-and-mouse with three Xenos in a tight room full of obstructions was more satisfying, but all-too-brief.

As for that stint with the Smart Gun? The tense mix of eery video static, hidden enemies, and ludicrously empowering auto-aim made the sequence feel about as Aliens as it possibly could. But in terms of satisfying gameplay? Once the initial rush of wielding Vasquez's iconic weapon had worn off, it became immediately apparent that we were just pointing a crosshair down another corridor and watching things explode as they ran at us.

All of which makes the Smart Gun an effective metaphor for our experience of Aliens: Colonial Marines' campaign thus far. Stunningly authentic cinematic immersion giving way to the realisation that shooting swarming, claw-swiping monsters in corridors isn't as exciting to do as it is to watch. And that's ignoring the arbitrary busywork of the laborious "set up five motion detectors" mission.

There are flashes of potential greatness here. Our brief stalk-and-hide session in that small room showed that just a handful of Xenos can make a satisfying encounter when smart environmental design incites more interesting behaviour. Gearbox told us on the day of our demo that the Aliens' navigation of the environment will be where their AI shines, so here's hoping for much more of that sort of thing in the final game. Hopefully the new classes of Aliens that Gearbox has dreamed up--such as the bull-headed Charger and the small, stealthy Lurker--will help too, without feeling tacked on or out of place.

After all, it would be a damn shame if the Aliens game we've been waiting 26 years for failed to capitalise on what its own medium can achieve. We now know that Gearbox can turn Aliens into an authentic video game. That much is in no dispute. Now we just need to know that said game has more going for it than the tangible presence of the movie.

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