The Screenshot Thread

AC Valhalla. England is a lot prettier than I remember.

Then again, I've only been to Newcastle and London.

I am quite enjoying the raiding and pillaging.

And murdering Anglo-Saxon boys. Where's your White Christ now?

And setting everything on fire. Maybe there's something to this genetic memory thing after all.

Jade Empire. I think it looks rather pretty for the most part, despite its age and the limitations of the engine. The slightly cartoony style certainly helps.

Um, my eyes are up here, game.

Warhammer: Chaosbane

Only 4 hours in so far. Playing as high elf (haha), which is a mage class. Game is so easy you can basically just walk through and hold down one button from time to time.

Game starts in a Fortress town called Nuln, after a big bad chaos chosen has been defeated by the champion of good called Magnus. Unfortunately, Magnus falls sick and it's up to the player to find out why. Maybe it has to do with the Nurgle cult that moved in to the sewers below the fortress?

Game environments are appropriately gothic and desolate, as you would expect from a Warhammer fantasy setting. Game is pretty dark in general, but there is adjustable brightness. The camera is pretty far away rom the character, and both the zoom and the angle seem fixed.

Aargh, damage numbers and health bars.

Luckily, they can be disabled. The high elf can breathe fire.

And launch a magic energy ball that can be controlled with the right stick.

From time to time, red orbs will pop out of monsters, and when you collect them, they will heal you and fill a blood lust meter. Once it's full, you can enter a kind of frenzy state during which you shoot some weird blade rotors that bounce around the screen and do a lot of damage. You can also heal any time by pressing LB, which activates some kind of healing potion that has a long cooldown.

Lots of crispy monster corpses after a major fight.

Monsters and treasure chests drop random loot. So far, I've only found normal, blue and orange items, which have 2, 3 or 4 magic affixes, respectively. The affixes are more or less what you would expect from such a game. There is also some kind of offensive/defensive power summary, that tries to give you an overview of the quality of an item at a glance. The game is so easy that you can probably just equip whatever has better values in that summary, and do just fine. But you can also optimize by taking a look at the actual affixes and stacking some that you want to focus on.

Skills get automatically unlocked at certain character levels. You can then decide which skills you want to equip. Your pool of points that you can assign to active skills increases every level up, but improved versions of skills cost more points to equip. It's a flexible system that allows you to play around with all skills on the same character without having to respec anything. This flexibility is further supported by a town chest that allows you to store items. With this, you can in theory create all kinds of specialized builds.

But what's the point if you can just equip whatever and still kill everything by holding down button A?

There's a status screen that lists all the magical boosts from equipped items. I have no idea what the stuff in the middle is. Haven't even found a use for gold yet.

There's a journal that tracks all conversations, which is actually quite nice if you can only play intermittedly, because if you care about the world at all, you can quickly read up the last conversations to get back into things.

Finally, there is a sort of passive skill tree similar to what Path of Exile has, but much smaller. Actually, there are two, that you can switch with Y button. They have some minor nodes that give a little bit of damage or health, and major nodes that unlock new (passive?) skills.

You meet some well known people from the Warhammer lore, for example, the third guy from the left here is Teclis, basically the most powerful mage in the whole world? And he doesn't seem to do anything besides giving you errands. The conversations are all voiced, and the voice actors seem decent so far.

Some sewer pics to round everything off.

And we finish with a close up of his pompous highness in new clothes, Lord Elontir, the player character, born to riches and now exiled and forced to run errands in the sewers because of his arrogance.

Space Hulk - Deathwing:

Where it starts: A boarding torpedo on its way to the Olethros.

Entering the mission through the Psygate from out of the secure little arsenal room...

...or back to it via the limited Psygates the protagonist gets per campaign mission. Heals everyone and recharges the Apothecary's heal count.

"Premonitions...", as our Epistolary of the Librarium likes to state when this kind of story cutscene happens.

Lots and lots of appropriate detail and aesthetically pleasing sights to see on the various ships of the Olethros.

That's Barachiel and his Hammer. They are in charge of balance.

Force Sword in motion...

...and connecting.

The Tyranids can emerge in all kinds of ways. Coming down pillars, crawling up some wall from beneath and so on. But mostly they tend to come out of various shafts, holes etc.

Once they are out you do what you'd suspect with an FPS. 

The Assault Cannon is nice for kicking off the environmental burns/explosives as the bullets tend to go all over the place.

Chainlightning is similar in that way. It tends to go whereever it wants, but on the other hand it's very nice for sniping at very long range or not having to bother hacking turrets.

Even on the second lowest difficulty the game isn't that easy.

The campaign eventually ends when the Olethros is blown to pieces.

But no worries, the various campaign maps can be accessed from this hub and replayed with randomized objectives.

And then, inevitably, Weird Science.

I want to hate this guy, but he amused me too damn much:

This guy is pretty content in one reality:

In the other reality, things aren't going so well for him.

Same goes for this kid who was fishing.