Tastee: Lethal Tactics Review
In Tastee: Lethal Tactics, your plan is more important than the action that follows. It's a game of bets and bluffs, and if you telegraph your next move, you'll likely lose. Tastee doesn't always communicate its ideas effectively, and there are frustrating barriers to hurdle, but there's a tense, layered, turn-based strategy game waiting on the other side.
It all revolves around simultaneous turn-based combat in two phases. In the planning stage, you direct the stance, movement, vision cones, and attacks of four individual mercenaries fighting your opponents. In the action phase, you watch your plan unfold--all while the enemy does the same.
This forces you to think on several levels as you extract briefcases of money, defend control points, and eliminate enemy soldiers from an overhead view. You not only have to plan out your own attacks--you also need to consider the route your opponent might have in mind. So while your sniper may have one doorway covered, and your grenadier is ready to move around the corner of that building to get in position, this could all fall apart in the action phase if your opponent anticipated it. The resulting clashes are whiteknuckled displays of who saw the bigger picture in the planning phase.
This structure isn't new--Tastee borrows from games such as Frozen Synapse and Laser Defense Squad, which use similar phase-based combat systems that emphasize careful planning over reactionary tactics. As was the case in those titles, you spend most of your time in the planning stage, your squad members frozen in place, trying to think two steps ahead of the opponent. Facing another human exacerbates the tension of the missions. Tastee's AI performs well, but matches become cutthroat poker games when you can relate to, and exploit, another player's perspective.
Considering the numerous mechanical layers at play, and the nuance they display on each level, there's a steep learning curve to Tastee's combat. In fact, its tutorial only teaches the bare fundamentals of movement, aiming, and attacking before thrusting you onto the battlefield, either in multiplayer or the single-player missions. Because of Tastee's unforgiving difficulty--characters can die from only one bullet--most of your learning is based on trial and error. I spent almost two hours before I completed a mission without any casualties.
The 30 single-player missions focus loosely on a band of 12 misfit mercenaries fighting against the drug cartels in a desert wasteland. The story is sparse and and repetitive, and serves mainly to introduce new characters, complete with unique abilities to use on subsequent missions: flashbangs, door breaches, ricochet grenades, and enhanced sniper rifles, to name a few. They're some of the game's best aspects, as they create stronger attachments to their respective owners.
The loss of each soldier isn't permanent, but reverberates throughout the rest of your mission --losing a mercenary means losing a useful superpower, as it were. Augustus' Scout ability, for instance, lets you spot nearby enemies through the fog of war. If you can deduce which direction a soldier is running, and where he'll emerge from behind cover, you can set a sniper's sights on that exact spot. These abilities seem simple at first, but reveal deeper uses as you learn them.
There are numerous mechanical layers at play at any one moment.
Tastee's stellar map design is the catalyst for all of this planning and subsequent action. Missions span a variety of sandswept urban locales, from construction yards to abandoned shanty towns. Concrete walls funnel soldiers through choke points, wooden boards create complex sightlines, and low barriers provide opportunities for cover. The environments present a fine attention to detail, both in how they force your squad into precarious scenarios and how they allow you to master your surroundings. There's a sadistic thrill to circling your opponent's squad, eliminating them one by one, and setting up ambushes to stop their attempts at escape.
Maps can become something of a conundrum, however. Tastee's bigger arenas play host to numerous smaller encounters and nuanced skirmishes, lending a sense of cohesion to the separate huts, garages, and gas stations. The problem is, these bigger maps add to the confusion that sometimes rears its head in Tastee.
During the action phase, it's usually useful to zoom out from the map to see your overall plan unfolding. But the bigger the map, the less I understand the tactics of Tastee's world. There are more opportunities for distant snipers and random grenadiers to kill you on a whim. Often, I have no idea where I went wrong--what mistake sent things south. These sprawling locales are well designed in how they encourage tense individual encounters, but when they keep you at a distance from the action, it's hard to see what's happening on a minute level. The grasp I usually have on the tactical situation dissipates, leaving me confused.
Tastee's user interface doesn't do it any favors either. Instead of crowding the edges of the screen, characters' abilities and commands manifest in an arc above their heads. While this streamlines the process of selecting a mercenary, giving them a chain of commands, and setting waypoints throughout the map, it leads to several more frustrations. For one, characters' selection boxes often overlap. In close-quarters battles, it's often tough to target the wrong character. Secondly, cancelling commands or waypoints is laborious, forcing you to parse through tiny buttons on a small list for sometimes minutes on end, in an effort to finalize your plan.
Despite these annoyances, it's hard to deny the thrill of Tastee's firefights: moving your mercenaries into position, covering almost every sightline, worrying about that one you can't cover, and wincing as a shotgunner misses his target by a few inches--this is Tastee at its best.
Tastee is also clever in the way it disguises its systems in order to teach you through experience. It's an intelligent, difficult game with a high barrier of entry, and without patience, you might not see how great it can be. But once you see the layers hidden beneath the surface, Tastee Lethal Tactics becomes an intricate game of cutthroat poker. It just takes a bit of frustration to buy in.
Unannounced Pokemon Spotted in New Sun/Moon Trailer
A new trailer for Pokemon Sun and Moon showcases what appears to be a brand-new, unannounced monster.
Shortly after Japanese magazine CoroCoro released the trailer, Twitter user mattcavalcanti (via Kotaku) spotted the creature and shared the discovery on social media. You can see the dog-like Pokemon at the 12-second mark below.
For your convenience, here's a screenshot of the footage with an arrow pointing to the new creature.
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Starring and produced by Michael Fassbender and directed by Macbeth’s Justin Kurzel, Assassin’s Creed is set in a world where the villainous Templars are trying to gather artifacts that will allow them to control humanity and eliminate free will. To do so, they tap into the DNA of people whose ancestors were alive during certain periods and using their memories to track down the various artifacts.
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The project—which was created by George Clooney, Ocean's producer Jerry Weintraub, and director Steven Soderberg—will be directed by The Hunger Games helmer Gary Ross, with a script by Little Women writer Olivia Milch.
Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games franchise
According to Tracking Board, Lawrence is "at the top of the producer's shortlist," so the possibility of a Hunger Games reunion is more and more likely. Lawrence is being considered to play Bullock's "right-hand woman" on a major heist. If Lawrence does sign on, the Ocean's Eleven reboot's cast could rival the loaded lineup of the original films.
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While doing press to promote the upcoming release of X-Men: Apocalypse, the film's director, Bryan Singer, said future X-Men sequels could explore the comic book's cosmic elements.
Singer told Fandango, “I imagine – and this is the first time I’ve actually answered the question this way – but another thing that’s been introduced in the comics is a big alien, interstellar tenant within the X-Men universe that hasn’t been explored. And to me, that might be kind of fun because I’m a huge Star Wars and Star Trek fan, and exploring the X-Men universe and being able to utilize that would be exciting, visually."
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The news came from Major Nelson himself, via a post on r/xboxone. In fact, the first multi-disk game was added earlier this week, Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut.
In a statement to IGN, a Microsoft spokesperson had this to say:
"Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director’s Cut” was the first multi-disc Backward Compatible title added to the program. We know fans were asking for this feature and our engineers worked hard developing a solution to enable it so we could further expand the titles included in Xbox One Backward Compatibility. We’re continuing to listen to our fans on Xbox Feedback and work with our publishing partners to grow out library of Xbox One Backward Compatibility titles and will work to include more multi-disc games."
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Microsoft and Team Dakota have ceased support for Project Spark.
In a post on the game's official site, community manager Thomas Gratz announced that effective today, May 13, Microsoft's creation-centric platform is no longer available for download via the Xbox Marketplace or Windows Store. Online services will no longer be available for existing users after August 12, at which point players won't be able to upload or download any user-created content.
"This was an extremely difficult decision for our team that we do not take lightly," Gratz said. "When Project Spark transitioned away from active development last fall, many of our team members moved to other projects within Microsoft Studios."
The New Kojima Productions Logo Has A Secret
UPDATE 2 (5/17): Kojima has revealed a a photo of the Kojima Productions mascot, now referring to the character as Ludens. Kojima posted the photo on Twitter:
In follow-up tweets, Kojima added that Ludens is wearing "the extra-vehicular activity(EVA) creative suit" and said that Kojima Productions will "deliver THE NEW PLAY in THE NEW FUTURE with the cutting-edge equipment, technology, & the frontier spirit."
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When asked by The Empire Film Podcast (via Heroic Hollywood) why Portman isn't involved in Ragnarok, Feige said there are "many reasons," including several that are made evident when watching the film. "There are only a couple of scenes on Earth in this movie," he added, noting "80 to 90 percent takes place in the cosmos."
Another Human Torch Joins the MCU
Michael B. Jordan—who played the Human Torch in Fox's Fantastic Four reboot—has reportedly been cast in Marvel's Black Panther.
Jordan and director Ryan Coogler are no strangers; the duo worked together on Creed and Fruitvale Station. It's not immediately clear who Jordan will play in the film, though a source at The Hollywood Reporter mentioned he could play a villain. Marvel had no comment on the role.
Michael B. Jordan