FarCry 3 Blood Dragon available now with 2 month packages!

Posted By: GamerDating - April 20, 2016

Last year we offered FarCry 3 Blood Dragon with our membership which was met with positive shouts of from Sgt. Rex Power, the demand echoing the beauty which is the 80s styled, retro hilarity.  Sgt. Rex 'Power' Colt: Blah blah blah, kill, blah blah blah. FarCry 3 Blood Dragon was one of the best FPS games to come out a few years ago, the humour, gameplay and tongue in cheek cheesy brilliance kept the Far Cry style game

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5 Top Tips How To Avoid Being The Dreaded Catfish

Posted By: Silja Litvin - April 18, 2016

Do you know that feeling to meet someone really special online? When the first curiosity turns into a flutter of hope, a happy smile when your phone or computer blimps - followed by nightly facetime sessions. From there on all you do is planning a true, real-life meeting. Oh how wonderful will this person be who understands you so well, who makes you smile to yourself all day and had you develop carpal tunnel syndrome at your typing thumb. Surely

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Top 10 April Fools in Gaming 2016

Posted By: GamerDating - April 03, 2016

The 1st of April is one the most hilarious, most frustrating and most confusing holidays. It is inevitable that misinformation and jokes can lead to hilarity and the gaming world is one of the few media platforms which gets bombarded. And we love it! So here are our top 10 April Fools Team17 introduce Worms Dating Revolution a dating worm sim Hearthstone gets its own MMO, the youtube video introduces a world where you can play the

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The GamerDating 3.1 Wolf Patch is now live!

Posted By: GamerDating - March 31, 2016

We have been working hard at refining our search options and adding a new, improved matchmaking system. We have taken all your feedback, suggestions and support and plugged it straight into our latest update. Wolf Patch Updates: New user matching Improved profile fields for match  New Discovery Wall Updated user location Updated user search  Site optimisation The new Discovery Wall populates automatically with th

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The Devs Who go Above and Beyond - Stardust Galaxy Warriors

Posted By: GamerDating - March 17, 2016

I was browsing the internet when I came across a steam review, a review which had been crowned as the devs favourite review due to the high number of hours played. However the hours played were nothing to me, it was the message of the review, the story shared by the player which led to a huge wave of respect for the developers. See the review below: The devs read the players plight, who had issues with playing the game due to the lim

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Microsoft Wants PS4 and Xbox One to Connect Online

Posted By: GamerDating - March 14, 2016

Microsoft has announced it will natively support cross-platform play between Xbox One, Windows 10, and other "online multiplayer networks." The move effectively opens the Xbox Live platform so that it can accommodate players on Sony's PlayStation Network, among others.  So will we see finally the forbidden love between PS4 and XBone come together in perfect harmony, of well... Rocket League? Chris Charla, director of

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EVE Online Introduces Project Discovery, Real-World Science In Game

Posted By: GamerDating - March 10, 2016

EVE Online have announced their latest amazing feature. In EVE Online, you can now easily take part in Project Discovery, a unique mini-game that's quick, easy, and rewarding to play which helps contribute to real world science discovery. Project Discovery is run by the Sisters of EVE (SoE). Their project lead, Professor Lundberg, will recruit you and provide a basic tutorial on identifying patterns of protein distribution in h

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Overwatch Open Beta Coming to PC, PS4, and Xbox One

Posted By: GamerDating - March 08, 2016

Want a chance to check out Overwatch™ ahead of its May 24 launch? Form a team of friends and try out the team shooter in the Overwatch Open Beta. As a newly added bonus, if you pre-purchase or preorder Overwatch for any platform at www.buyoverwatch.com, you'll also get early access to the Open Beta for you and a friend from May 3–4. After that, everyone will have a chance to play free during an all-access Open Be

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Cities: Skylines Available with our 4 Month Subscription

Posted By: GamerDating - March 03, 2016

Have you played Cities: Skylines? Our team loves it and you can get a key for free, bundled with a gold subscription on GamerDating. Cities: Skylines is a modern take on the classic city simulation. The game introduces new game play elements to realize the thrill and hardships of creating and maintaining a real city whilst expanding on some well-established tropes of the city building experience. With a very positive score on Steam and 8.9 met

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The Division Had The Biggest Ever Beta For a New IP On PS4 And Xbox One

Posted By: GamerDating - February 23, 2016

Ubisoft has shared a final update for Tom Clancy’s The Division‘s open beta, as they tracked down the numbers for the final day. More than 6.4 million people took part in the open beta for The Division over the weekend, publisher Ubisoft has announced. The company adds that this makes it the largest beta for a new IP to date on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Agents successfully accomplished 17 million extra

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Ten Reasons Everyone Should Be and Date a Gamer

Posted By: Melissa - February 14, 2016

Happy Valentine's Day, gamers!  As per usual, there is a lot of talk going on about dating; why one is single, how to not be anymore, who should date who and why seem to be the topics most discussed. The entire thing can get a bit overwhelming when you’re just wanting to scroll through your social media without being reminded of your single-ness.  Before I found my Player 2, this “holiday” felt like it was fi

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Happy Valentine's Day! Five Days of Free Messaging For All

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - February 12, 2016

Hi Gamers! We are closing in on singles awareness day Valentine’s Day and the team was thinking this would be a perfect time for a free weekend. It is important to us that you find someone who will love you in game and out — we wouldn’t be here otherwise! With this weekend being so focused on romance, maybe it will be the perfect time for you to meet that perfect Player 2. Our community director, Melissa (add her to chat!)

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Just Announced Total War: Attila DLC Could Be Free

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - February 10, 2016

New DLC for Total War: Attila has been announced on Steam and there is a possibility it will be free. The Slavic Nations Culture pack adds three new playable factions to the game: The Anteans, Scavenians and Venedians. They will all be playable in Single or Multiplayer Campaign modes as well as Custom and Multiplayer battles. A hardy and mobile people, The Slavs range far and wide across the blasted Steppe to recolonise and bring new life

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Happy 25th Blizzard!

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - February 08, 2016

Today is the 25th anniversary of Blizzard Entertainment. On February 8th, 1991, Mike Morhaime, Frank Pearce, and Allen Adham, all recent graduates of UCLA, founded Silicon & Synapse - the precursor to our beloved Blizzard. Through extremely hard work and fantastic creativity, they grew a company that would change the currents of gaming and many of the players who enjoy them. It would be hard to miss how much we love Blizzard. We

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The Overwatch Closed Beta is Recruiting

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - February 05, 2016

This has been a great week for fans of first person shooters, and it looks like the energy is going to keep going for some. The Overwatch Closed Beta returns on February 9th after an extended break. If you were like us and didn’t get in to the first round of the beta, make sure you’ve opted in (you can do that here) as Blizzard says they are looking to recruit more players. They haven’t released full notes for this recent

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Doom Reboot Announces a Release Date and Collector's Edition

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - February 04, 2016

id Software and Bethesda announced via a gore and demon-packed YouTube video that the long awaited reboot of the Doom franchise will be released on May 13th.  It has been over twenty years since the first release ushered the FSP genre into the spotlight. Since then, community after community has popped up to share their stories of playing the game and mods of the original source code. There are a lot of game franchises that would like to

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Get Orcs Must Die! for Free With GamerDating

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - February 03, 2016

Have you played Orcs Must Die? Our team loves it and you can get a key for free, bundled with a silver subscription on GamerDating. For those of us who are avid followers of tower defense games, this was a breath of fresh air. Yes, there are fortresses to defend, and plenty of enemies to slay but the genre-atypical third person view gives the game a fast paced, action game feeling. While many in the genre have the player control entire armies,

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Time Warping FPS Superhot Release Date Announced

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - February 01, 2016

For all of you lovers of FPS, some great news today. Superhot, the IGF finalist shooter where “Time moves when you move,” will be released on Windows, Mac and Linux on February 25. There will also be an Xbox One version to follow “just a few weeks later.”  It isn’t often that we see real innovation in the FPS genre. Let’s face it, there is only so much a dev can do with the format. Characters, setting a

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Get In On Rocket League's Second Season, Free With GamerDating Subscription

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - January 29, 2016

Rocket League is starting a second season in February and if you haven’t given it a shot yet (pun intended), you can get the game with a Gold subscription bundle on GamerDating. We are all about games that you can play on a couch, next to your perfect Player 2, and this one has taken the sports game world by storm. In case you have been under a rock for the last seven months or so, Rocket League is the insane vehicle soccer (football, da

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GoG Launches Games In Development

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - January 28, 2016

GoG.com enters the early access market, promising “excellent hand-picked games, 14-day refund policy, always DRM-free.” The early access thing has been an interesting ride for gamers. Many of us are Steam users and have had more than a few intense conversations about the pros and cons of their services. Don’t get us wrong, we love Steam, however, their early access program has been marred by lack of careful curation and a few

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>Observer_ Review

Posted By: Ryan - March 21, 2019

Game

>observer_ is a cyberpunk marvel built on the little stories of its all too human cast. Told through the eyes of KPD officer Daniel Lazarski (voiced by none other than Rutger Hauer himself), >observer_ is a short horror game drenched in the atmosphere one would expect from the minds behind Layers of Fear.

The 8 or so hours it took me to complete the main story (as well as some side cases) raised many questions concerning the nature of humanity, the lengths to which people will go to be happy in their own skin and the effects that our choices have on others.

As with Bloober Team’s well-known Layers of Fear, >observer_ is told entirely through first person exploration gameplay. Gone are the wood panelled halls haunted by memories of a family now lost, in their place are grime drenched, neon lit corridors. Holes are torn into the walls to make doorways, cables snake along the floor, powering the video intercoms attached to each door and the many advertisements hanging from the walls.

This is definitely a game to play docked. Whilst the handheld mode holds up, Unreal Engine 4 makes mincemeat of the Switch’s battery life (around 2 and a half hours) and many of the prompts presented in the near invisible UI are very difficult to see on the tiny screen. Docked, however, dust motes hang in the air of every cramped, concrete hallway illuminated by the bright teal glow that serves as the main accent for most of the game. Playing in docked mode also gives your screen the real estate to properly display the lavish visual effects, strobing and digital artefacting (the latter a sign that Daniel’s medication is running low) that are deployed to keep you on the edge of your seat.

 

Enjoy the view, you won’t be seeing it much


 On top of the visual treat, heavily inspired by films such as Blade Runner, a stellar soundtrack accompanies Daniel’s investigation into a series of murders perpetrated in a single apartment block in the late 21st century. Footsteps echo from the cracked concrete, or splash through the thick mud of the basement. NPCs, with the exception of a few characters, are spoken to through the doors of their sealed apartments and are a joy to talk with via >observer_’s simple dialogue trees. Even though no NPC (with the exception of two) is spoken to more than once, the handful of minutes the game devotes to each is more than enough to convey a compelling narrative. Many times, I found myself wanting to find out more about each character (especially the self-aware sexbot), only to get caught up in the next mini-drama played out in dialogue only.

Now, it’s probably worth stating that this isn’t a game for everybody. If you aren’t overly enamoured with “walking simulators” or games which use environmental hints to contribute to the narrative, this probably isn’t for you. As previously mentioned, Daniel’s solo jaunt through the building is broken only by the occasional conversation through a door (or face to face in a handful of cases), or a handful of stealth segments, leaving the main bulk of the story to be told through protracted memory sequences, Daniel’s inner monologue, or items scattered throughout the environment.

Exploration for said items is rewarded with extra objectives, interactions with NPCs who would otherwise brush you off or one of the sixty-nine collectibles to be found (on one memorable occasion, my exploration yielded a code to a locked door which I opened to reveal a P.T. easter egg complete with bleeding walls, looping hallway and freaky posters). That’s not to say the entire game is a permanent treasure hunt (although there are a handful of crime scenes you are encouraged to investigate to their fullest).

 

The Lost Woods this isn’t, but there are clues for those who seek to leave the maze


Daniel is a special member of the Krakow Police Department known as an Observer. He is equipped with an augmentation (the usual cyberpunk questions surrounding what is humanity, are augmentations a boon or a bane etc. are definitely being explored by the game) which allows him to plug into the neural jacks of the victims he encounters. Without wishing to delve too deeply into each one, suffice it to say Layers of Fear’s influence is felt strongly during these sequences, played out to a riot of disturbing visual effects, discordant ambience and pulse-pounding soundtrack. The game shows a warning about photo-sensitive seizures every time it is started and it’s warranted. A couple of times I found the visual effects to be too much for me to make any conscious progress and stumbled into the correct level triggers more through intuition and luck than by correctly interpreting the clues seeded throughout the environment (although the developers deserve much credit for the inventiveness of the clues they provide).

 

Everyone needs a Journal

 

This speaks to a lot of the problems I found during my playthrough. Solid ideas were implemented largely successfully, but with just enough niggles to be a problem. Messy visuals, somewhat unclear stealth segments (aided massively by a generous checkpoint system) and a tiny prompt when able to interact with an object caused my progress to stumble a few times (this is all in addition to a minor bug where I couldn’t select a certain object and a few periods of noticeable frame rate loss followed by the game crashing). In the vast majority of cases, I resolved the problem by exploring the same room over and over for a few minutes before finally looking directly at the right spot, or moving through rooms I could barely distinguish through the textures being used to amp up the tension, or, on one memorable occasion, realising I had just completed a stealth section without first noticing it was a stealth section. I largely enjoyed my time with the game, but it meant that when a problem like this came up, I really noticed it.


It’s a shame too, because the stuff Bloober Team experimented with worked really well. As I’ve mentioned, Daniel is reliant on medication to continue functioning and without it his vision starts distorting in a distinctly unhelpful manner (although there doesn’t appear to be any downside, apart from this and an irritating audio prompt, to not taking the meds), which helps build the illusion of a man whose body is fighting against the augmentations which allow him to do his job. Similarly, when his medication is running out, or in times of stress, the Joy-Con’s HD rumble is used to great effect, beating in time with his heart, grounding what in other games would be merely a sound effect, with a tactile, visceral sensation. As the game progresses, this small touch becomes very important, serving as a prominent tool during the stealth sections as a sort of proximity alarm.


I’ve mentioned augmentations a few times now and that’s with good cause. Possibly my favourite feature of the game (aside from the titular observations) are Daniel’s forensic vision modes. Using a combination EM-vision to find electronic clues, Bio-vision to find biological clues and good old-fashioned night-vision (because boy howdy does the game get dark in places), Daniel is perhaps at his best when searching crime scenes for evidence. Few games go into this level of detail and I found myself wishing more would. A clever combination of colour palette changing and the ability to swap with the press of a button really helped nail the feeling of a cybernetic detective doing their job.

 

He’s dead, Jim

 

At £26.99/$29.99, you’re getting a decent amount game for the price.

Sure, it might be short, but I was invested in every minute of playtime, caught up in the atmosphere of a place so similar to our own, yet so alien. The game does boast two endings, and sixty-nine collectibles (of which I found about a quarter), but with no real way to reload the last checkpoint, you’re looking at around 15 hours (or less if you focus on the main story) to see both endings, plus however long it takes to find all the collectibles.

Whilst I feel like the endings will only have slight differences, the branching dialogue trees hold more of my interest and I’m curious to see if several of the conversations I had could have ended differently.

Whilst narrative driven games like this are subjective, I wholeheartedly recommend it. The sub-text ever present in the cyberpunk genre is present (along with no small amount of body horror) and I’m a sucker for any game that has an atmosphere crafted with so much care and attention.

It’s not perfect, but it’s an excellent way to spend a few hours and you might learn something about the human condition along the way.

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