Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - Multiplayer Features

The reveal, to a packed aircraft hangar in Los Angeles, was the first time that Activision and Infinity Ward have shown Modern Warfare 3's multiplayer modes in public. For many, the multiplayer is the main reason to play Call of Duty, and Modern Warfare 3 appears to have received the biggest revamp of the mode in years.

The changes are an attempt to fine-tune the balance of the game, while rewarding different styles of play. Killstreaks have been redesigned and renamed pointstreaks. Rather than streaks being handed out just for straight kills, players can now earn additional rewards by completing other game objectives. Players can choose between three strike packages at the loadout screen, which reward pointstreaks in different ways.

The Assault package offers similar direct damage equipment to Modern Warfare 2's killstreak rewards, such as Predator drones and helicopters, with your streak resetting on death. The Support package gives you access to gadgets such as UAV's and turrets, these streaks do not reset on death. While the Specialist package is aimed at more proficient players, handing out additional perks to their soldier which last until death. Deathstreaks, which give struggling players an extra boost, return after their absence from Call of Duty Black Ops. Infinity Ward have also confirmed they will be cutting certain overpowered streak rewards, such as nuke and One Man Army. Other tweaks, such as no longer being able to carry a shotgun as a secondary weapon have been implemented to help balance the game. One consistent complaint over Call of Duty's multiplayer is how it over-favours already proficient players and focusses too much on deathmatch, rather than objectives. These adjustments should, in theory, address those concerns.

Weapon progression has also been tweaked, with guns levelling up as you progress, while a new list of additional Perks has been announced, which can be assigned to give your soldier particular skills. The new perks include Recon, with explosive damage displaying on the mini map; Blind Eye, which makes you undetectable by air support and sentries; Assassin makes you undetectable by UAV, portable radar and heartbeat monitors; Quickdraw allows you to aim down the sight of your gun quicker; Stalker allows you to move faster while aiming. And Marksman allows you to identify targets at longer range.

There are a handful of new game modes too. Kill Confirmed, which has you collecting dogtags from fallen enemies to score points; Team Defender has one team member carrying a flag to earn points while his squadmates protect him. In addition to these public match options, more modes will be available in private match setups. One in the Chamber and Gun Game make the leap from Black Ops, while all new modes include Infection, which has players killing enemies in order to recruit them to their team; Drop Zone has players controlling specified areas to receive extra support, while Juggernaut has an AI super-charged character accompanying each team.

Posted By: Sam P 

Twitter: SammyRascall

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 - Coming Soon

It wasn’t that long ago when Call of Duty was just about the bees knees to gamers of any stripe. In fact, as part of our 100^th issue celebrations Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare got voted as one of the greatest shooters of all time. It’s quite amazing, then, to look at how the PC community – or at least Atomic’s iteration thereof – looks at the CoD franchise.
Hint: it’s generally pretty negative.
Generally, every trailer and news item to do with the brand is met with responses that range from ‘who cares?’ to ‘Activision killed, dismembered, and then sodomised my cat’. Perhaps the most eloquent (not to mention less abuse-filled) comment came from the curiously-name Xyzzy Frobozz, commenting on one of the DLC releases for Black Ops:

“The next COD is going to have to go in a pretty radical new direction before I'll look at buying it. I'm sick of having the same old girl in new clothes being wheeled out twice a year. To top it off, I then have to invest in the new map packs so I don't end up being kicked out of every second game...”

That sums it up pretty well. The PC audience is tired of re-tasked code and graphics, the same-old game with the same-old perks, the relentless crawl of paid DLC and the feeling that those who do invest will have the edge.
It’s basically the case, then, based on our hands-on time with Modern Warfare 3, that the Xyzzy Frobozzes of the world are going to be less than thrilled with Activision’s and Infinity Ward’s latest milking of the giant CoD cashcow.
Some changes...
Straight up front, we’ve got to say that Infinity Ward is really making an effort to appeal to a wider market with Modern Warfare 3, and on paper it sounds great. Kill streak rewards have seen arguably the biggest change, and have now been separated out into three streams – assault, support and specialist. The assault package is your classic CoD stuff, with lots of killy rewards to reward to the killiest of players. Support, on the other hand, is more defensive in nature, bringing in UAVs, buffing team mates with extra armour and so on.
The Specialist package sounds very interesting, too, essentially unlocking more and more perks with more and kills. This is basically the perfect lone wolf package, as its possible to end up with every perk if you’re really on the ball.
The aim of these changes is to open up the game to match the way people want to play it. Great idea on paper, but having played around with the different packages, it still feels as though it’s the guy with the most kills who’ll be rewarded the best toys. It is great to have objectives like caps and defusals count toward kill streaks, but it’s not enough of a change given the inherent run-gun-respawn nature of CoD’s basic gameplay.
The new map mode, Confirmed Kill, is another great idea that still can’t quite pull the game back toward something we want to play. The idea is that to score a kill, you must not only put the enemy down, but then collect their dog-tags. This simple mechanic accomplishes a lot of things – it rewards team-play, as you can collect tags for team mates, and deny tags to the enemy. It forces campers and snipers to work with their team, so that there’s always someone around to capitalise on their pwning skills. It also lessens the impact of some of the more offensive kill streak rewards – if you can get to the site of that recent missile strike you can deny a mess of tags to the enemy. Of course, if you’re too slow, someone’s going to have a great time – as happened in our hands on session – wandering to the site and collecting whole metric arseload of win.
Most things stay the same
Despite all these tweaks – and there’s more, like weapon-levelling, new equipment, and so on – Modern Warfare 3 still looks, feels, and plays more or less the same as every game that came before it. This is even more apparent on console, where there’s really nothing new to the graphics at all – in fact, we’re really getting tired of that same death animation we’ve been seeing since CoD4!
Confirmed Kill is a rare ray of light, but it still suffers under the more general issues of the modern CoD. Hitboxes are either miniscule or comedically large, as is often highlight by the kill-cam, hit-registration is way off even on knife strikes, and the fact that you can now not only kit-out a weapon with different items (such as scopes and suppressors) as well as fiddle with recoil, stability and hitting power, simply means you can no longer rely on simple weapon-recognition to know what you’re up against. Not that CoD is really about that kind of strategy aforethought these days anyway...
And on top of all that, it’s still such a fast, explosion-filled and loud experience, with spawns placing you anywhere on the map, that it’s simple not our kind of game anymore. There seemed to be an overall shape to CoD4 matches which is simply lacking in more modern iterations. At the same time, it also seems pointless to be even talking about disliking it – Activision and Infinity Ward are quite simply not making this game for gamers like me, or many of the folks on Atomic.
There are millions out there who are going to love what IW’s bringing to MW3, and for them, the new modes and gameplay elements will be enough to spark interest, while the underlying similarity to the last two CoD games will mean it’s still very familiar. It’s a recipe for success.
Why fight it?

Posted by: Sam P
Twitter: SammyRascall

19/9/11

2k Game reviews Website

Look out for the 2K Game Reviews which will be coming soon!

We will keep you posted and hope to have it running in the near future!

More reviews to come!

Posted by: Sam P

Twitter: SammyRascall

12/9/11

FIFA 12 Screenshots Video by 2K Game Review

FIFA 12 Screenshots Video by 2K Game Review

Sorry that the video is blurry, it was created by Stupeflix.

by Carwyn
Twitter - @CarwynP

New Rugby Union Games to be released this year

Jonah Lomu Rugby Challenge

The Trailer



Creation Centre

Rugby World Cup 2011 Game

There is currently no video linked to this game at the moment so we had to just rely on the screenshots:

By looking at both games, they don't look like very tempting games at all, both look very cartoony, and do not look realistic at all in my opinion, the closest to being realistic is the Rugby World Cup game, but we haven't seen the game as it is yet to be released yet and we only have screenshots to prove it at the moment, because I like Rugby I will most probably buy both of these games, and when they I have them, I will give you a much more detailed review on the two games. Currently the Jonah Lomu game has been revealed to be released this Autumn and the Rugby World Cup game will be released on August this year.

Winner: At the moment the Rugby World Cup 2011 game.

by Carwyn
Twitter - @CarwynP

New FIFA 12 Screenshots and more info on the new Career Mode introduced.

FIFA 12 Career Mode

I love this new idea of player morale, where if a player's morale is low the player will warn you, and will give you information on how to improve his morale, e.g. if he isn't happy with the captain and believes he shouldn't be the captain then you change the captain to someone else. And I don't know if you haven't notice, but if you look on the 1st, 3rd and 4th screenshots you can see on the left, Youth Academy, this means at last a chance for you not to just control the first team but also the club's youth system, and that is an awesome idea, the screenshots for the Youth Academy still haven't been released by EA but I think just the sound of Youth Academy excites me, you can see they have made a lot of effort on the Career Mode, but screenshots doesn't say anything until the game is ready and the game can be bought by the public.

Also there are further news from EA, and they have announced that former Arsenal striker and current Sky Sports commentator, Alan Smith will be Martin Taylor's No.2 in the commentary box on FIFA 12, which sees Andy Gray's long partership with EA gone even though TalkSport which is currently Gray and Key's employers are on the game.

by Carwyn
Twitter - @CarwynP

FIFA 12: Manchester City Trailer

FIFA 12 - Manchester City New Kit and Etihad Stadium Trailer

Just look at how realistic the Man City team look, Milner looks identical to his real self, so does Joe Hart and many other City players. The reason behind this trailer and why the City players look exactly like their real self, is because City have teamed up with EA Sports as a partner for FIFA 12, so it looks like City might have a player on the front cover with Rooney, a United player next to a City player on the front, that will look extremely odd. I just simply can't wait for it to be released.

There will be new screenshots revealed on this blog in the next hour or two, so come back in a bit to see these new screenshots, which will include screenshots of the new Career Mode, with some very interesting new features to it.

By Carwyn
Twitter - @CarwynP