NOW PLAYING: GEARS OF WAR 2, Demoes
Say what you like about Fable II (which I will do shortly when our review is posted), but Gears of War 2 is out and this is the 360 game you NEED to own this year if you have a remote interest in shooting games featuring bald space marines. Except Marcus Fenix has hair under his bandana.
I liked Gears 1. I didn’t love Gears 1 like so many. As someone who enjoys lots of shooters, I found the gunplay in Gears to be not as good as it could have been and, as I occasionally do these days, played that game on Casual mode (ie easy). I’ve started playing Gears 2 (on normal) and its far better balanced. I recently attempted a playthough of Gears 1 again in anticipation of the sequel, but apart from the fact the difficulty still sucked, I came up against a glitch that didn’t affect me on my original playtrhough (the push car getting stuck). This frustrated me enough for me to say, fuck it, I remember why I didn’t like Gears 1 as much as I probably should.
Its still early days in 2, but I’m far more impressed with it than I was at the same point in the original. It just seems so much more interesting from the get go and not as shallow. The story is also more interesting that the first game. Yes, these game’s stories are all interchanghable but there’s doing something to death well and there’s doing something to death badly. And this one seems to get it right.
At some point I will hunt down Resistance 2 and play that (I wasn’t impressed at all by the original) but I see that Gears will be my shooter de jour for at least the next few weeks.
Also played, a few of the recent Demoes released for some of the season’s big hitters.
Firstly: Tomb Raider Underworld. I played this for 2 mins. I realised I was probably going to pick this up down the track when it was cheap so I gave up pretty quickly. It looks great, plays as well as Tomb Raider Legend (the first Tomb Raider game I ever enjoyed) and this time looks to have been built with 360/PS3 in mind.
Secondly: Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. Hmmmmmm. I’m not sure. This thing I took away most from the demo was how busy it looked. What you saw on screen wasn’t just crammed with detail, it was cluttered more than a level 70 mage’s bedroom is cluttered with diet coke cans.
I think Banjo shows the great thing about Rare. They don’t just make a game that conforms to a genre, or something that is easy to describe. It is also one of Rare’s major failings in that without knowing what to expect, its all too easy to be disappointed by the ambition sometimes not being realised. I can’t make my mind up whether I like this demo so I will still pick up the game soonish. Its not a particularly expensive game so that will help soothe the wallet sting if its not all that great.
It’s only partially a platformer the same way Uncharted is only very slightly a tomb raider style game.
Lastly, Mirror’s Edge. This is a platformer and bravely DICE have made this in first person, traditionally, the very worst way to make a platformer. The last game I played that attempted to make a first person game with decent jumping was Call of Juarez.
And that wasn’t the best bit of that game. Mirror’s Edge is all about parkour, that free running shit that is all the rage with the kids who are destined to be arthritic 30-somethings. The demo was quite good, but I don’t think that DICE have solved all of the problems but I’m up for somthing different. Hey, EA lost a bit of money just as they were starting to get out of making the same old same old all the time. Better get in on their good games now before they revert to licenses and sequels (as if there isn’t going to be Mirror’s Edge 2…)
