Available on Gamecube and Playstation 2. Developed by Grasshopper Manufacture.
Here’s an example of a story-based game done right. Killer 7 is a fever dream of a game, comprised of an off-the-wall collection of experimental ideas. Goichi Suda, its writer, designer, and director, deserves the acclaim that this title has brought him. He has made a game that is truly unlike any other. It’s a fine game for action-adventure lovers, but you should try Killer 7 even if you just enjoy a good mindfuck. Killer 7 is not always an easy game to play, or even to understand, but don’t give up on it. It’ll haunt you.
It’s Friday night, and Harman Smith (God) and Kun Lan (the devil) are in the mood for a friendly competition. They take a good look at the world, and see that its nations are at peace, having stamped out terrorism, opened up all trade, and destroyed their nuclear stockpiles. Kun Lan decides that it’s time to introduce a new threat to humanity: the Heaven Smiles, an army of cackling suicide bombers who exist only to inspire fear. In response, Harman takes charge of a mysterious group of assassins called the Killer 7, who are singularly skilled at hunting the Smiles. So begins another turn in the cycle of human history, one that will be marked by many bizarre and terrible events.
THE KILLER 7
Garcian Smith, the front man. He’s the one who takes orders from Harman and missions from the U.S. Government. His silenced pistol is a poor weapon, but he’ll have to risk his neck occasionally to do corpse runs: Garcian is the only one who can recover fallen members of the team and bring them back to life.
Dan Smith, the all-rounder. He’s a cocky and angry fellow in a business suit who hefts a huge revolver. He can “charge” his gunshots to take out even the toughest enemies instantly.
Kaede Smith, a.k.a. Barefoot. Her pistol bears a scope for long-range sniping, and she can open hidden doors by showering them with her blood.
Kevin Smith, the oddball. Kevin is as pale as the moon, he never speaks, and he prefers throwing knives to guns. He can also turn invisible for short periods to sneak past enemies and tripwires.
Con Smith, the kid. Quickness is the name of Con’s game. His automatic pistols fire rapidly, he can sprint at high speed for a short time, and he can squeeze through tiny passages.
Coyote Smith, the thief. Sort of a mix between Dan’s power and Con’s mobility, Coyote can charge his shots, jump onto roofs, and pick padlocks.
Mask de Smith, the luchador. He’s big and slow, but when you need heavy firepower, Mask’s your man. His twin grenade launchers are devastating to groups of enemies, as well as to certain cracked walls.
The game’s look is as memorable as its cast. Few of its polygons are textured. The backgrounds are filled with simple color gradients, and every surface is edged with hard black shadows. It looks like an elaborately lit stage play, and that works to the game’s benefit: you can view any given screenshot of Killer 7 and recognize it immediately.
The game is divided into six chapters, and each chapter is represented by the target you’re out to eliminate. You’ll take control of the Killer 7 and pilot them through large, maze-like buildings and complexes. As you go, you’ll shoot down hordes of Heaven Smile, converse with the ghosts of your past kills, solve the occasional puzzle, and collect widgey-whazzits to open doors and gain access to your targets.
None of these conventions sounds particularly unique for a video game, but Killer 7 grabs them and twists them into new shapes. While most shooting games give you an arsenal of weapons to switch between at any time, Killer 7 lets you switch entire assassins at any time. You choose the Smith you want from the pause menu, and your character literally transmogrifies from one form to another. You’ll have to do this many times to advance in the game.
Another striking feature is that you don’t use the control stick for movement. Instead, you hold A to move your character along a pre-determined path. You press B to turn him or her around to move in the opposite direction down that path. When you reach a point where you can choose from multiple paths or interact with objects, a list of choices appears. You select your choice of direction with the control stick, and then continue holding A to move along the path. You don’t have the freedom to move wherever you like, but in a way, this is kind of a relief. You don’t have to adjust the camera, and you’re only ever presented with meaningful options. You’re not going to be obsessively checking every door, corner, and wall for secrets to hoard, because you can’t. It’s really a daring and brilliant design choice. The only game I can think of that incorporates a similar sort of “on-rails” movement is The 7th Guest, but that game didn’t have bloodthirsty terrorists out to kill you.
The Heaven Smile are a violent lot, but they’re also rather cheery. As you run about the area, you’ll hear these mad bombers snicker at you. When that happens, hold the R trigger to enter first-person aiming mode. While aiming, pull the L trigger to perform a “scan,” which neutralizes the Predator-like camouflage the Smiles use. Suddenly, you’ll see these hideous, gangly beasts creeping toward you. Lock on to them using B, aim manually with the left stick, and press A to fire.
The shooting action plays something like The House of the Dead. None of the Smiles have long-range attacks; their only method of fighting is to march up to you and detonate their bombs. You must finish them off before they can get close enough to do that. The trouble is that most of the Smiles don’t go down easily. You can tear off their arms, legs, and even their heads, and they’ll continue to come after you. Every Smile has a glowing weak point which can be shot for a one-hit kill, but it’s not easy to hit, and sometimes it’s in an awkward place, like a knee or an elbow.
You could just use Mask and his grenades to burn up the bad guys, but there are a couple of drawbacks to that strategy. First, some enemies are immune to grenades, and second, burning the enemies wins you no blood.
Blood is the currency of Killer 7, and you earn it by blasting off Smile limbs or by shooting out their weak points. You’ll collect two kinds of blood: thin blood, which is depicted as test tubes while aiming, and thick blood, which is depicted as a beaker in the pause menu.
Thin blood can be used to heal your character, or to power special attacks. Dan, Kevin, Mask, and Coyote can each “charge up” their weapons by pressing Y while aiming. Each level of charge requires one tube of thin blood. Some enemies can only be killed using these charged attacks, and sometimes you’ll be unable to advance in the game until those enemies are killed. This means that without blood, you’re fucked.
The key to success is to be a sharpshooter. Your gunplay must be accurate enough to consistently hit the Smiles’ blood-spilling weak points, while also being fast enough to kill the Smiles before they can reach you. Once you get the hang of it, picking off Smiles with one shot a piece is a thrilling and wonderful rush.
It’ll take practice to get to that point, but upgrades are available to help you along. You can purchase them at the “Harman’s Rooms” that are scattered about each area. Thick blood is converted into a special serum, which is then used to improve the stats of your team members. You can boost each assassin’s attack power, increase their firing rates, reduce the kicks of their guns, and inflate the hitboxes of enemy weak points. At the beginning of the game, it’s easy to keep every member at an even level of strength, but towards the end, the upgrades become pricey, and you’ll have to make some tough choices about whom to improve and in what areas. Odds are you’ll grow to specialize in the use of a particular Smith, and I recommend you pour most of your upgrades into that guy (or girl).
As a bizarre game, Killer 7 also has some bizarre problems. The worst one is that its difficulty is uneven. It’s all over the place. Early missions have some tough encounters against hordes of spawning Smiles, while later areas can be extremely tame. These tough fights aren’t too bad if you use the different skills of the Smiths effectively, but they still seem as though they belong in later stages. Meanwhile the final areas offer hardly any combat at all.
The puzzles are so simple as to be laughable, and if you still get stumped by them, there is a friendly character who will give you complete solutions in exchange for some thick blood. In case you encounter a confusing obstacle, you can check the map screen for icons that tell you exactly which Smith you need to use to get past that obstacle. It’s nice that you’ll rarely get stuck, but it makes me wonder why the puzzles are even there in the first place.
Then there’s the story. It’s a cool story, told in a tongue-in-cheek, horror-movie style that keeps you from taking it too seriously, but it’s also a little ambitious, and by “ambitious,” I mean confusing. It’s messy and wild, which can be fun if you’re in the mood for it, but after a while it can make you crazy. This is a story you want to seize by the shoulders and force down in a chair so it can start talking sense. It leaps from one plot thread to another in an instant, it dramatically introduces characters who may or may not be significant, it delves into the pasts of some of the Smiths while ignoring others, and it never bothers to piece its own dreamlike fragments together. You might be able to connect some of the dots if you’re especially attentive, but a host of unanswered questions will still remain. The natures of Harman, Dan, and Garcian are especially strange, but the game never clarifies them, so you have to draw your own conclusions. The finale is a series of half-revelations that seem like they could be powerful and resonant, if only they actually explained anything.
I get the feeling that Goichi Suda had a hell of a lot to say in this game, but he didn’t have the time or the resources to make it all fit. If you’re the sort of person who pores over episodes of Twin Peaks, Aeon Flux, or Lost in search of the tiniest connections in logic, then Killer 7 will keep your mind revved and spinning for weeks. If you’d rather ignore a game’s story, or prefer that the it tie up its own loose ends, then Killer 7 is not the one for you.
Killer 7 is a polarizing experience. Its nightmarish look, unorthodox controls, freaky characters, and shattered plot pissed off a ton of gamers back in 2005, and it didn’t sell well in any territory. Odds are that it will still piss off a lot of people today. Your enjoyment of this game will depend on your willingness to be hypnotized by its creepy world. Once you’re drawn into it, you’ll find Killer 7 to be a lovely gem.
If I still haven’t convinced you of how exceptional this game is, check out the following video, which illustrates the action better than I can describe it.
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PC, PS3, PS3, Wii, DS. Developed by Treyarch. Published by Activision
Mock if you must but for the next few days at least I’m going to party like it’s 2008. I saw a couple of cheap games that I’d been interesting in playing during a lull SO LONG AS THEY WERE CHEAP. The other week I saw Quantum of Solace and 50 cent Blood on the Sand for cheap (AU $30 ea) and I thought “why the fuck not?”
I needed something relatively simple to cleanse my gaming palette after the majesty that was Uncharted 2 and before Modern Warfare 2. Something cheap, short and can’t be looked down as anything other than dumb fun. Quantum of Solace fits that bill quite well. I like James Bond films but I still don’t really know what to make of Quantum of Solace the movie. The title comes from an Ian Fleming short story where Bond is told a story by some stuffy diplomat-type over a cognac, a story about some couple who grew to hate each other. And it’s really quite dull. If I was Bond in the story I would have shot the guy telling the story for being boring. So the movie QoS followed on from 2006′s excellent Casino Royale movie. And then proceeded to ignore all of the lessons of Casino Royale. People didn’t want far fetched Bond plots in 2008.
Why is this important? Well, this game is actually two thirds a Casino Royale game and one third a Quantum of Solace game. A bit of context doesn’t hurt. So you take the Call o Duty 4 engine, give it to Treyarch who were making the better-than-everyone-was-expecting Call of Duty World at War at the same time as this and what do you get? Something that’ s okay rather than great.
As so many games from movies do, any location that appears in the movie is fair game for a full on corridor shooter fest that takes 20-30 minutes to complete. The final scene from Casino Royale is turned into the intro level to this game. Move through level, kill enemies, pick up cell phone’s convenient dotted around the map for intelligence useful (but by no means vital) to your mission. So despite this using the CoD4 engine, it doesn’t necessarily play just like Call of Duty. You run and gun in much the same way but you don’t have melee in the same way. If you get close to an enemy, you can click on the right stick and to trigger a quick time event where you have to press a face button (a different one each time) to takedown an enemy in a nicely animated unarmed
attack.
It feels as though this game took a lot of cues from the first Uncharted game, especially with 3rd person cover and action scenes. You can balance on beams (looking like Treyarch re-purposed some manual meter code from one of their Tony Hawk ports) jump over things and make leaps of faith just because the game says you can press ‘Y’ to jump. You have some hacking minigames which aren’t anything special but then this is a game designed for a very casual audience. That’s code for saying Normal is actually pretty easy.
So how does it actually play? Well it’s fun for a bit and it is thankfully fairly short. In so many ways you think you are playing a game from five years ago in terms of design and quite often the visuals. It also doesn’t run at Call of Duty 4′s standard 60fps frame rate, so it’s hard to see where the extra fidelity is going.
Presentation is fine for a licensed game but it isn’t going to wow anyone in this day and age. We have many of the cast members from Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, including a bored Dame Judi and Dame Daniel. Gunfire sounds are somewhat lacking, however, but at least the James Bond theme is used in a more restrained way than some of the EA games on PS2.
So overall- cheap filler when you want something quick to snack on in between the ‘great’ games but there’s no reason to go out of your way to play it.
Reviewed on Xbox 360 (Also on: PC, 360, Wii, PS2, PS3, PSP) Developed by Terminal Reality. Published by Atari (Playstation versions published by Sony in Europe)
So Ghostbusters, one of the biggest grossing films of 1984, has made into a 2009 video game. Despite there being a Ghostbusters game on the Comedy 64, Terminal Reality though they could improve on this (get out of my head with your thought control, Cameron!), accquired the license and then made this game thinking they had a deal with Vivendi to publish. Then many things happened. Vivendi merged with Activision and the resulting Activision-Blizzard behemoth dropped a number of titles from their portfolio including 50 Cent, Scarface, Brutal Legend and Ghostbusters: The Game. The developers continue, secure a deal with Activision, show off the cute Wii version, proclaim how much better the PS3 is. And then Five minutes before the release of the game comes the whammy for PAL gamers, Only the PS3, PSP and PS2 versions would be available at first since Sony was now co-publishing this as a timed exclusive. Yada, yada, yada, here we are with a review of this game reviewing the region-free 360 version on a PAL console.
So Ghostbusters is that unique beast. It is very faithful to its source material. So faithful it fails. Rather than tell a new Ghostbusters story with all new and exciting demons, the game sees fit to basically revisit the more popular hauntings from the films and expand upon them. So the first three levels consist of Slimer in the Hotel, Mr Staypuft and the Ghostly Librarian. In other words, its Back to the Future part 2. If this is meant to be the third film, why is it a clip show?
Set in 1991, you play as a rookie Ghostbuster being trained by Igon, Stantz, Venkmann and Zeddimore (all voiced by the original cast members) as you learn the ropes. Of course, this being a game you have more than just a proton pack and trap in your arsenal but can use different element beams, use slime and fireballs and even shotgun-style blasts. you generally find yourself in a linear corridor, using your PKE meter to search for paranormal manifestations before zapping ghosts in various ways with your gizmos, all the while being entertained by a really very dull Ghostbusters outing. It’s like Pirates of the Caribbean. Everyone loved the first one since it was so refreshing and funny, but by the thiurd film it was so bloated and full of itself it forget the funny.
While the graphics, sound, atmosphere, design and stroy are all authentic to the first film, the gameplay is where things start to fall apart. It does play a lot Luigi’s Mansion (ironically) but it’s nowhere near as much fun as Nintendo’s game. It becomes repetitive rather quickly- like Assassin’s Creed. You feel like you’re a Ghostbuster all right but like any dream job, it quickly becomes work.
Also of note, is the lack of balance. Playing this on normal is excruciatingly frustrating due to the ghosts knocking you down and killing you with little chance. Knocking the difficulty down to casual gives you a better chance to experience the storyline (and this means a restart of the game). Of course, that’s when you realise the story isn’t much cop. Comedy is all about timing. The timing here is off. Cutscenes drag and its almost as if the developers left gaps for the laugh track (like they forgot which Ghostbusters franchise they were working on. Larry Storch’s unused voice work for this game was phenomenal)
So while its actually fun to play in short bursts, there’s nothing driving you to complete it, unless of course you’re a huge Ghostbusters fan. It also seems slightly buggy in that it can take an eternity for triggers that allow you to proceed to activate. You can often stand around for a while, waiting for some dialogue to trigger which means you can continue. Then you might have to wait for another interminable dialogue exchange before you can continue.
The graphics are relatively decent and the character models are pretty decent. You hear the actual score of the movie rather than Ray Parker Jr’s song over and over again. The sound effects are authentic as are the voices, as mentioned earlier. The main crime of the game is that it makes Ghostbusters boring. A followup with a different structure (this is crying out for an open world games with lots of smaller missions rather than a few missions strung out past their use-by date.
Controller1.com Rating 1/3 (3/3 if you’re a fan of Ghostbusters II. If you can make it through that, you’re fine to put up with this)
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on: DS, PSP, PS2, Wii, PS3, PC. Developed by Traveller’s Tales. Published by Lucasarts (NTSC)/Activision (PAL)
It’s the third Lego game based on Lucasfilm source material. And probably the best so the pressure’s on Lego Batman. Lego Indy takes the storylines from the first three movies and turns them into plastic heroin.
Maybe that was pushing it a bit far but what you have is a charming (if
sometimes obtuse) action game with puzzles, combat, vehicles and Short
Round able to destroy metal barrels with his bare hands.
Lego Indy has refined the formula laid down in Lego Star Wars but reducing the number of characters in your party (usually 2, sometimes three in some of the Temple of Doom levels) and very occasionally 4 (as in the final level of Last Crusade) but without characters who only have one talent that is occasionally used and is otherwise a drain on the fun (ie C3PO). Of course now you have phobias (Indy can’t go near the snake pits, Elsa won’t go near the rats, etc). You also don’t have unlimited ammo in guns and can only use weapons dropped by enemies (when they have them). A few shots and you’re empty. Of course any character can pick up a spanner to fix a machine or a shovel to dig up Lego treasure and small characters have their hatches leading to secret areas but on the whole this has refined the approach. There are puzzles based on Simon Says provided one of you characters has a blue book that’s usually sticking out of their pocket and some boss battle where its not immediately apparent what the fuck you have to do to progress (the worst was the thugee on the rock crusher)
That said there’s still some annoying crap such as often respawning on the edge of the cliff you fell off anyway, areas where you are constantly overwhelmed by enemies, some of whom now wield RPG’s that blow you to Lego bits with one shot. Obscure puzzles and boss battles are annoying but you’ll generally work stuff out without too much drama. I scratched my head a bit, but then I’m not very bright. But I think the Comedy 64 is more over-rated than Kristen Bell so I can’t be all that dumb.
Graphics don’t really matter much as they look the same on most platforms but they are quite pretty on 360 with background textures of non Lego items being rather nice. Lego is Lego and as such Marion looks like a tranny, but one without a penis so its not all bad for Indy. Lego Indy, of course has no genitals either so….
The Score is great and It’s nice to hear the music from Temple and Crusade since you can’t buy the fuckers on CD at the moment. The sound effects are also crisp, but many of them are the same as the ones from Lego Star Wars.
So I loved Lego Indy. Would I buy Lego Batman? Well, One Lego game a year is enough and I love Indy and Star Wars so much more than Batman. But I would be up for a Kingdom of the Crystal Skull game, just so I can hear people trying to popularise “nuke the fridge” and be burned like a goat’s bitch. Oh wait.
