Mark McMorris Infinite Air Preview

Do you spend your days dreaming about cruising down a mountain on a brand new snowboard? Mark McMorris Infinite Air aims to deliver the most authentic snowboarding game to date and it absolutely succeeds.

The first thing you’ll notice when you get dropped into the massive mountain range is that you can go anywhere – and I mean anywhere. By simply summoning a helicopter you are able to search for the perfect place to start your next run. What happens if you can’t find a place to shred that sweet, sweet powder? You can use the incredibly in-depth world editor to remove objects, increase or decrease the elevation, and smooth out the ground. You can then set up rails, ramps, jibs, pipes, buildings, and more. Once your epic run is complete, you can publish it to share it with other members of the Infinite Air community.

Most snowboarding games are all about impossible tricks and getting millions of points. Sure that’s fun, but Infinite Air reinvents the snowboarding genre by delivering realistic physics. The entire game uses the thumbsticks and triggers to perform tricks, but that doesn’t mean that you’re going master Infinite Air in just a few minutes. Once you finally get a solid grasp on the controls, every trick feels like an accomplishment. These mechanics may seem familiar and I think it’s easy to say that Infinite Air is the Skate of snowboarding games.

One of the most impressive aspects of Infinite Air is the amount of tricks. Even though you only use the triggers and thumbsticks, there is a ton of variety. I found myself getting comfortable with a few tricks before moving on to something more difficult. After a while I had a nice collection of tricks memorized that I would use on runs. When it comes to Infinite Air, practice definitely makes perfect.

Infinite Air is the snowboarding game we’ve been waiting for. The possibilities for runs are literally endless. You can spend all day designing mountains, checking out player generated runs, or relaxing in a newly discovered slice of the snowy paradise. There’s no doubt that Infinite Air is the real deal.

Infinite Air will be out on October 25th for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Thank you to Maximum Games for providing the code.  

Hands On With Loot Rascals

The first thing you'll notice about Loot Rascals is the colorful classic cartoon look, but once you get over the pleasing aesthetics, you find a rich, turn-based, roguelike game. Your character moves around a procedurally generated world on hexagonal tiles. Your goal is to find the exit on each level before exceeding the amount of moves on the turn counter. If you do exceed the move limit, stronger enemies will start to appear around the map. If you want to hang out and explore, you can, but this is not advised. 

Loot Rascals has a day / night cycle that affects if you or the enemy will hit first in battle. You always want to try to get the first hit, but if you're feeling pretty good about your situation, it's not too big of a deal to let them hit first. The time of day changes every five moves, so you definitely want to be aware of this as you're moving around the map, especially when you're desperate to attack.   

One of the biggest parts of Loot Rascals is the card system.  You can have a mix of ten offensive and defensive cards equipped with six in your inventory. Certain cards have bonuses that affect other cards, but are required to be in certain slots, positions, or rows. Loot cards drop all of the time so you are always switching them out. Once you find yourself with too many cards, you can decompile them for currency. 

There are also cards that you can place on other cards that give you extra long distance attacks or self heals. To use these attacks/ heals you simply select them from a pin wheel and drop a cursor on an enemy or yourself. You get so many cards that I don't think it's absolutely necessary to save your attacks for when you see a tough enemy, but you should definitely keep a few attacks handy for when you're near death. 

One of my favorite aspects of Loot Rascals is when you die the enemies will steal your card, which drops it on the server and will show up in someone else’s game. That person can then choose to send it back or keep it. If you find someone else’s card during your game you can choose to keep it or send it back. If you choose to keep the card then the person who lost the card can send an enemy to fight you. When you first start playing the game, the other player’s cards will be from strangers, but once you have a few that you’ve found, you’ll most likely be matched with the same select players. Hopefully if everyone is nice to each other you’ll receive the cards that you lost, but if you lose a good card you better cross your fingers. 

Loot Rascals will be coming to PC and the PlayStation 4 Q1 of 2017.