GAME UK partnered with Sony to have a lock-in, to play The Order:1886 and Bloodborne before release, and I went, here are my thoughts on the games, and whether I’ve finally made up my mind on buying them! I also got some pretty cool loot!

If you’ve still got some questions, leave a comment and I’ll try to reply to them!

If you would like a quick sum-up of my experience, scroll to the bottom!

So to start off, unfortunately they didn’t let us take pictures. Bummer, but here’s a purposely blurred shot of the demo units I managed to convince the PS rep to let me take:

It’s pretty obvious that I have been more hyped for The Order than Bloodborne, I’ll admit that now, so let’s get started on The Order: 1886

The game was pretty good, unfortunately due to 3 other The Order games running, I couldn’t hear the audio too much, but it was a pretty good demo. The game was actually the same demo as below, from 7:45 minutes onwards, with a few changes to game layout; that featured Audio logs and an Armory until the end of the video, although shorter than the video provided it gave a reasonably solid insight into the workings of the game.

Movement is pretty cool, R3 toggles running and during conversation you jog, during gameplay you sprint and the camera angle swoops a bit lower and to the side, which I thought was quite nice.

Shooting mechanics were interestingly different, they were nothing special but I was happy with how the hit acknowledgement worked, much like in CoD you’ll get a white >< show up, but if you kill them the >< turns red, making it obvious that they’ve been killed. Shooting body parts is also an interesting thing, using a Sniper, I shot someone in the foot and they paused on the ground, holding their foot – then he died from another shot, his little bowler didn’t protect him unfortunately.

The crosshairs were a bit different, if you take a look below it’s different but a pretty nice change rather than the standard ones you see, if you’re unable to view the video they are a bit like –(  )– and travel further apart the more you shoot.

QTE? Well in the demo, I there wasn’t too much, there was an optional door to go through, that’s easy to miss unless you explore that you need to use the strange electric machine at 2:56 in the video – like I said, they’ve changed the level layout, and just after 11minutes rather than running straight through to a kitchen there’s an armory you have to look out for and also the infamous Audio log.

After finishing the demo, I had made my mind up about pre-ordering, I wasn’t sure if it’s the swag that convinced me (probably was – scroll down to the bottom for swag!) but it’s a solid looking game and I’m looking forward to the 20th

As for glitched, it was nothing that can’t be worked out – the only problem with The Order was pass-through on some guns and enemies, which I presume can be easily worked out, and being as it’s already gone gold I presume it has been.

The PS rep said he already had the game, and this part is about 4-5 hours into the game, I forgot to ask how long the total game was though.

Sound like your Cuppa tea? Well you can pre-order it here!

UK Link: The Order: 1886 || The Order 1886 Blackwater Edition

US Link:  The Order: 1886 || The Order 1886 Collector’s Edition

The release date is very soon, 20th February!

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On to Bloodborne now,  I was never really a fan of the Souls games, yeah, kill me now (100x in a minute).

To start off, the demo was surprisingly good, and I played from 6:18 onwards on the video below. The demo ended after you died, so my first play was pretty short, I’m not entirely sure if this was pre-set for the demo, but I’m pretty sure it is, you had the choice of 4 classes, Agile, sword&heavy, heavy, and normal.

An interesting mechanic is having the ability to combine/ split your weapon – effectively turning your one handed weapon into a two handed one, whether that’s for the agility class, which splits a small sword into two smaller awesome looking daggers, or if the heavy class turns his longsword into a big *** sledgehammer, or extending your already big one-handed axe into a two handed one by making the handle longer, this will increase the time it takes to attack, but will make your attack more powerful.

Here’s an example:

If you watch the video, you’ll notice it’s pretty head on, with no option to block, you need to be fast to play this game and dodging is what it’s all about, locking onto the enemy, you will shift you round to his behind, but you need to be sure that there aren’t any other enemies around.

As for enemy design? Holy heck, they were beautiful.

(oversized) Dogs, Ravens, and human looking creatures, were really nice and the design surprised me.

There were obviously mini-bosses, and their design was nice, their enviable weapons* and majestic size, despite being ugly as anything.

*One mini boss had a brick (A huge *** brick, the size of the characters torso, however)

The effects were pretty cool, with the obligatory blood splatters, your character would end up coated in blood, which gave your coat a nice gory, satisfying bloody shine to it.

If you fancy this as well, you can pre-order it here:

UK Link:  Bloodborne || Bloodborne Collectors Edition

US Link:  Bloodborne || Bloodborne Collector’s Edition

The release date for this game is different in multiple regions, with a release date of 24th in US, 25th for EU and 27th for Ireland and UK.

 

 

It’s a shame that not many developers offer demo’s nowadays, but at least that gives me something to blog about, right?

LOOT!

So they were giving away a few cool stuff, along with some swag if you pre-order the game at the lock-in, they gave me an awesome PS4 lanyard, for free:

 

As for what I got when I pre-ordered the game:

Double-sided poster

Trinket Box!

 

And probably my favourite, it was just a promo decoration, and they’ll just throw them in the bin anyway, so here it is:

 

Also, I’ve recently been trying to get back into photoshop, here’s my first attempt at something cool, any Suikoden fans?

 Sum Up

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The Order: 1886

Awesome graphics, movement is nice, fun shooting mechanics

 

Bloodborne:

As challenging as the Souls games, enemy design is awesome, clever mechanics for weapons

 

Playstation Trivia:

6.The early Mass Effect concepts included a single planet and no aliens

7. Manhunt originally featured a boss called Binbag who was wrapped in black rubbish bags

8.The Playstation specs were derived from a second, also aborted, deal with Sega to produce hardware, Virtua Fighters 3D capabilities drove the focus on 3d graphics

9.Resident Evil 4 was cancelled and restarted 3 times, these versions included:

• Fog version: This saw Leon trying to survive hallucinations in Umbrella’s Castle HQ
• Hook Man: This saw Leon fighting ghosts…..
• The third was almost scrapped immediately for featuring traditional zombies.

10. Until a late tage in development you could kill children in TES V: Skyrim. Not only are there recorded death noises and SFX, unused dialogue options reveal that one mission involved murdering a child!