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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Ori and the Will of the Wisps Review

Posted By: Ryan - March 20, 2020

Game

It has beauty, it has grace, it will punch you in the face.

 

Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a charming, if mildly unforgiving, follow-up to Ori and the Blind Forest. I never played the first game much, metroidvanias aren’t usually my thing, but I continued to be intrigued by the art style and that intrigue led me to try out the sequel at launch on the Xbox One X, here is our Ori and the Will of the Wisps review.

Vibrant colours and a clearly defined palette help to distinguish all of the game's many areas from each other, as well as distinguishing a unique art style. The almost complete lack of spot colouring (specifically white) meant that it was a rare occasion indeed when I lost track of Ori among everything else on screen. Speaking of such, there were instances where foreground elements obscured my view of what was going on for few moments and only a handful where all of the on-screen particle effects taxed my ability to keep up with what was going on, although I do admit to having a problem with being easily overstimulated visually.

The UI, such as it is, is a minimalist wonder. Health and energy are displayed at the bottom of the screen in an easy to read manner, the abilities assigned to shortcuts are displayed between the two, and your money-equivalent flashes up when you collect it but fades from view when not needed, allowing you to fully lose yourself in the aforementioned painting-like backgrounds. All of this is set to a wonderful, extremely emotive score. Seriously, this is a game where the OST is better than the moment-to-moment gameplay and you owe it to yourself to check out the music if nothing else.

 

I kept getting lost in the background art. Hopefully, you can see why.

 

Obviously, graphics and audio aren’t everything when it comes to gaming and no review is complete without actually mentioning the gameplay itself. As I opened with, Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a metroidvania-style game with all that that entails: platforming, backtracking, puzzle-solving and combat. The map itself felt big without being too big and easily the standout feature for me was the ease of movement. I’m a sucker for games which just feel good to move around in and, even from the start, Ori was fluid and responsive to control.

I should re-iterate I was playing with a controller but there is enough care put into the rest of the game that I imagine keyboard controls to feel equally as fluid.

For this entry into the series, Ori is no longer alone. A large cast of supporting characters have been added, each one lovingly designed and animated. Whilst most belong to a cat-like species called the Moki, there is enough variety that remembering who wants which item for a side-quest doesn’t become a problem. There are a decent amount of side-quests, from rebuilding a village to a game-long trade-quest, each of which brings a different part of the world to life in the two or three text boxes that scroll through the start and the end of the quest. At their core though, all of these quests boil down to ‘ go and find something for me’, albeit pointing you in shadowed corners of the gorgeous map.

 

They aren’t asking for much, are they?

 

On top of the amazing movement, the game boasts an impressive amount of customisation in the form of many upgradable ‘shards’ which can be equipped through one of the game’s three (gorgeous) menus. You start out being able to equip only three, but can increase this capacity through optional combat arenas, and each modifies your playstyle in some way: for example, one offers reduced damage whilst another (which feels almost mandatory) offers a triple jump. At no point did I feel like I was forced into a certain loadout though.

 

This brings me onto combat and puzzle-solving. I played through on Easy for the first time. I’m not familiar with the genre and I wanted to complete the entire game without getting frustrated, but I did go back and play the opening hours on Normal and I’ll tell you now, after the halfway point Easy is VERY easy. If you’ve found many of the health and energy upgrades you’ll be able to tank boss fights (all of which are pleasantly varied) easily and the only real dangers will be instant-kill areas (although the game does tell you when your timer is running out and it is about to kill you). Normal is a nice challenge requiring some thought about in-combat movement and attack choices (sword, hammer, bow etc.) and is how I will play the game for any future playthroughs.

 

A beautiful game for this Ori sequel

 

The puzzles themselves were… okay. At no point did I feel like I couldn’t complete one, but several times it seemed possible to solve a puzzle in a variety of ways only to realise that I had been overthinking it because the game hadn’t taught me, or wasn’t even hinting at, the actual solution. Several times the breakable wall textures changed, or I was called upon to use one specific ability to interact with objects with no real clue as to which ability it was short of trying everything.

It was during some of the platforming puzzles where I got most frustrated as the fluid controls proved themselves to be too loose and led to me having to complete the lengthy puzzle set-up over and over again. Also, be warned that the latter half of the game has many, MANY spike pits that it is VERY difficult to leave if you happen to end up in them.

 

Some of the early game puzzles, like this one, are classics. Later ones are not.



These two things, long reset times for puzzles and inescapable spike pits, are my main niggles. Sure, I encountered some bugs and glitches, but what game launches without them these days? Nothing I encountered was game breaking, mostly confined to visual problems with animations and, on one occasion, an extended hitbox on a climbable object, with the most annoying thing being the lag when opening the map after I’d filled in a lot of it. Nothing here is problematic though and those things I did find were mild annoyances at worst and nothing really to complain about.

You can even get a plushie now

What I did like, in terms of polish, was the option to leave the escape sequences that Ori and the Blind Forest was famous for. These are prolonged chase segments of tight platforming that, if you slow down too much, will kill you and send you back to the start. I never felt the need to abandon the challenge, but I appreciated the option to back out and return later after exploring the map a bit more.

That’s really the nub of the problem here for me. I think the game is pretty well priced at £24.99 on Windows and Xbox One, and there is enough content to bring me back for more (mostly to try out different shard combinations) but I would dearly hope that by the time I come back to it those minor annoyances are ironed out because taken as a whole they did detract from the game.

 

You can also grab this beautiful art on Xbox Pass if you are that way inclined.

 

This is a game where the art style, soundtrack and (largely) well-written narrative set-up an atmosphere of wistful melancholy but where the puzzles/environmental design, challenging combat (on Normal and with nothing at the start of the game, at least) and brutal escape sequences yank you out of that and replace it with a teeth-grinding frustration.

If you want a largely enjoyable, 10–15-hour game that is both a visual and auditory treat, I would say check this out; but be wary of the obscure/missing environmental clues and tedious puzzle design.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps release date was 11 March 2020, so you can get playing now on Switch, Steam or Xbox.

 

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