Harvest: massive encounter is the newly released game from oxeye games the makers of Dawn of Daria. harvest is an addictive strategy game that is hard to put down.

The games strength is its level of polish, every aspect has been improved in part due to its extensive beta process. This puts it in a good position to impress people who may not be so interested in strategy games. I certainly was impressed by its gameplay and spent many hours trying to improve my base. Since this is what the game is about, building the best base and staying alive for as long as possible. You begin on an empty planet with a couple of solar buildings and resources scattered around your base. You then move onto building miners and connecting points. This is when the aliens start to attack, slowly at first but as the game progresses their numbers rise. Your defenses come in the form of laser towers and missile turrets.

How you build your base is up to you, but in harvest there are a couple of better strategies which you discover as you play. This is the fun bit of the game, trying to find the ‘best fit’ base. Other gameplay types exist, they are wave mode, rush, insane and also creative where you can do what you like. theoretically there is unlimited gameplay here as you can never have the ‘best’ base. But the game does get repetitive thanks to the limited number of buildings and defenses.

The visuals and sound are both simple and repetitive but are very enjoyable. They inspire creativity and also enable the game to be run on lower spec computers.

Overall i found the game to be a great break from the hardcore games and highly addictive. However it didn’t last long before i returned to my hardcore games.

I would give the game a 7 out of 10.

The trailers for BLACK were quite impressive, though this could be because that part of them was in reality and the other part was in-game. Suffice to say the trailers left me excited…at the time, but time is a fickle thing and having only obtained BLACK sometime
last year it had mostly been forgotten by myself and the gaming world. So why review it?
Because we need something to fill the site up and if you’re actually looking to buy this game :O then I thought you should know a bit about it.

The main character, Keller, is an elite Black-Ops soldier who appears to have been arrested for…something. Frankly, the story is as clear as mud as you’re playing through events that have already happened. Not the best storytelling technique in my eyes as you know that Keller is at least going to survive, due to the cut-scene (live action I might add) at the start where he’s talking to some guy from some government. As I say, it’s not too clear. The main objective of the game appears to be to kill the leader of some-sort of group, named Seventh Wave, who are doing something naughty somewhere in the world. The Ex-Soviet Union looks to be the likeliest country as all the enemies shout loudly in Russian, immediately giving away their positions, allowing you to shatter their precious cover with an un-healthy dose of bullets.

Speaking of cover-shattering, BLACK focuses mainly on a few things: blowing stuff up,
shooting stuff up and blowing out doors. “But surely that’s the point of every FPS game?”
you say. Well, yes, but BLACK does it bigger, better and more repetitively than any other
FPS out there. The graphics are really very good, around “next-gen” quality. The
environments look battered and dirty, the weapons are sleek and smooth and the characters are quite good too. If you’re going to be killing terrorists of any kind then you want to be doing it in a very destructive and Rambo-ish way using insane amounts of ammunition and breaking almost everything that gets in your way. BLACK came highly praised for its ability to destroy the environments. It deserves the praise, it really does. Though the environments tend to look very similar toward the end of the game.

The weapons are another thing that BLACK focuses on. Though it seems to only focus on a few, mainly the G36C, MP5, AK47 and Remmington (shotgun). The assault rifles all seem pretty equal in their accuracy and power so it doesn’t matter which one you pick up. There are other weapons such as sniper rifles, machine pistols, HMGs, RPGs and one or two pistols though they seem to be bolted on as extras rather than being a key part of the weapon choices. The RPG can come in handy for blowing open emplacements, though they only seem to be there to block your path. The shotgun is only good for blowing doors off their hinges (as well as blowing holes in weak walls), which can be quite good if you blow the door, pop a grenade in, whip out your assault rifle and the hose the survivors with automatic fire.

There’s almost no shortage of ammo in BLACK, as the standard enemies carry similar weapons, so you can spray-and-pray through some of the smaller levels. The only beef I have with the weapons is that they seem to take ages to reload, especially the Magnum. Yes, it’s a powerful gun but I’d rather it was able to fire 6 shots off with reasonable speed than firing one, then having to wait for Keller to pull back the hammer with the speed of an arthritic bear. Sometimes you’ll spray fire into a room, fall-back to reload where-upon a particularly clever enemy (which are few and far between) will come running round the corner and put a clip into your chest as you stare gormlessly at the magazine of your gun. The reload animations feel drawn-out which can be frustrating in the middle of a gun-fight.

The enemies aren’t the smartest I’ve ever encountered but they’ll be a challenge in a confined space, especially if their are lots of them. There are only several types of enemy
for the whole game so you can quickly master how to defeat them and which weapons will work best. This isn’t that surprising as BLACK seems to be Criterion’s first game with anything other than cars in it.

The controls are tight and pretty intuitive but the complete omission of a “jump” button (and action) seems a little odd, though I suppose it stops you falling down massive holes in floors about 3 stories up. Actually, no, wait, invisible walls stop you doing that. To be honest, not having a “jump” option is actually quite good as it means you can’t go bunny-hopping around like a retarded BF2 player before leaping to the ground in front of your enemies and filling their groins with hot lead.

The addition of a multiplayer to BLACK would have been lovely, even a co-op mode would have been welcome. I like the idea of being able to run through the levels, tearing up the scenery with a buddy while legions of enemy troops fall before you eventually creating a
stylish carpet of corpses. The game almost begs for a multiplayer because the levels are
very linear which means almost no replayablitly and I can imagine that things like Team
Deathmatch and Assault would have suited the game brilliantly, oh well, hopefully in the
next one.

Well, people seem to have been throwing scores of around 8 out of 10 at BLACK. It’s good but it’s not great, I wouldn’t give it 8. Probably about 6 due to the lack of coherent story and lack of multiplayer. Otherwise it does everything else reasonably well, except graphics and ’splosions which it does brilliantly. We’re going to have to work out some kind of rating system here…maybe next time. ;)

P.M.