Bit-Tech's 12 Games of Christmas - Part 2

On The Seventh Day Of Christmas: Dirty Bomb
Year: 2015

Free to play used to be such a dirty word, didn't it?

It's almost time we got past it, though. Dirty Bomb is one of the a number of free-to-play multiplayer shooters that have been making a name for themselves over the last year and while I'm no big fan of microtransactions, this feels close enough to the classic Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory to earn Dirty Bomb a pass.

It should feel similar to Wolfenstein: ET of course - Splash Damage worked on both of them. Dirty Bomb takes this formula and swaps out classes for specific operatives, but everyone can play the same operator if that's what you're into.

These characters are available for free on a rotation but if there's one you particularly like you can buy them for credits or for some cash. I found myself sticking to two: Skyhammer (he gives out ammo and has a grenade that calls down an airstrike) and Phoenix (can revive himself, others and can fire out healing in a circle) but there's a lot of different archetypes and weapon choices.

Shooting feels a little bit floaty for me, and after coming off of weeks of mainlining Rainbow Six: Siege it feels weird to shoot someone in the skull and them not die immediately, but playing with friends it's really satisfying. The classes all feed in together with your new best friends tossing ammo and health into the fray to save you as you fight over a series of objectives.

Not the sniper classes though. No one likes those guys.

Buy This If: You want a new shooter to play but don't necessarily want to pay the price of entry. It's one of the best free to play shooters I've played this year.




On The Eighth Day Of Christmas: Besiege
Year: 2015

Besiege is brilliant and I absolutely hate it.

I started struggling to murder the sheep, you see. In Besiege you have to build your own personal murder-machine to achieve a specific goal. Perhaps it's bringing down a tower, levelling a village or… killing a field full of sheep.

I just couldn't do it. Creating a steerable machine is the toughest thing of all time. Then I found out you could make a floating assault balloon with cannons and flamethrowers. Except then when you fire all five of the assault balloons mighty cannons at once it tears the balloon in half.

That's when I learnt about bracing to hold your machine together. Back to the drawing board.

I found Besiege immediately compulsive, even if i was terrible at it, and spent more hours than I want to admit trying to make a tank. It didn't pan out.

It's still early access, so it's not fully ready yet but there are already a bunch of missions to challenge your building abilities. Just to reiterate, I was terrible at it.

But if there's one thing I know, it's that I'm going to go back repeatedly during 2016 to murder those bloody sheep.

Buy This If: You want to demolish castles or build towering monoliths.