Reviewed on PS3. Developed by Quantic Dream. Published by SCE
Heavy Rain is not a game per se. It is a multiple path movie with many a quick time event as well as you assisting the character perform basic moves with your fingers playing Twister over a PS3 controller.
France-based developers (not a phrase you hear often) Quantic Dreams, noted for making that game with David Bowie in it a decade ago and Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy a few years back, have give us something daring and new for the PS3. The story, which for once is king here, revolves around the hunt for the Origami Killer, a child-murder who drowns his pre-teen male victims, then places and orchid and an origami figure on the victim’s person. During the story, you’ll play each chapter as one of four characters as they all strive for the same thing. Or are they?
“And now for something completely different.” I wish this was photoshopped. I really do.
So at first you’re Ethan Mars, an architect living in a perfect life until a tragedy splits his family apart. Years later, Ethan’s son Shaun goes missing at the height of the Origami Killer’s reign of terror (the Orchid-placing Child-Drowner having been caught the previous summer), and blackout prone Ethan has to face five trials set by the killer in order to save his son before time runs out. Or is he? Then there’s Scott Shelby, a private investigator hired by the families of the Origami Killer’s previous victims. Or is he? Next is FBI agent Normal Jayen, part time junkie and Minority Report fanboy, representing the official investigation of the Origami Killer. Or is he? And then there’s plucky journalist Madison Paige. She gets her tits out.
So you’ve probably heard the game is eight hours of quicktime events and to a certain extent that is true. It’s also got elements of point and click adventures in that, for you often need to explore you location for the next clue. Unlike a point and click, you can only interact with items displaying an on screen prompt (many of these only appear once). You get the opportunity to influence a conversation by selecting questions or answers or even the tone of what you’re about to say. These answers will have a major effect on which path the game will take and it is the game’s major success that there are so many ways this story can unfold. Some or most of the characters can die. It’s not choice in the sense you can make a good or evil choice like in inFamous or Mass Effect but you can affect the storyline fairly radically. You may see a story that’s different from your friends. Failing QTE prompts too often near the end of the game and people will die.
The game itself starts off veeeery slowly, some of which is there to set the scene, some to familiarise yourself with the unique, if clunky controls, and all of it duller than a faded matte-brown Volvo after a dust-storm. Things to perk up after about 3 or so hours and get quite exciting and you start having more action scenes. Control is an illusion in action scenes and a fistfight of just dozens of 1quicktime events triggering one after the other. However, you can’t fail and retry. You let a character and the story merely continues without them. The button prompts aren’t always the same for each event (though if you replay a section they are) so you don’t learn the controls, more you learn where things are on a PS3 controller. Our friend Sixaxis motion control returns to vex us, I’m afraid. Sixaxis is like that cousin you see at family gatherings, you know, the guy who’s a bum, an addict, borrowing money of you, etc. You give him a buck and then tell him to get the fuck out. And like that no good cousin, they come back just as you managed to forget about them. Sometimes, because this is a piece of software on a gaming machine, some control is given to you to do silly mundane things like apply lipstick, change a nappy or remove a bra (weirdest date ever, don’t ask).
This is a bold move away from games aimed at teenage boys. But if any teenage boys do play this, you can see Madison naked several times. Result!
The presentation is mostly good with great graphics (though there may be a glitch here and there or a very occasionally blurry texture) and sound that can be great (sound effects and music) or extremely variable (voice acting). Some of the actors are very good and some are woeful, particularly some of the minor characters who are very obviously French actors. Imagine casting Jean Reno, Gerard Depardieu and Vincent Cassel as Green Berets in an English Language movie set in the US and you get the idea.
So a bold experiment that doesn’t really come off. Do you want this? Well, do you skip cutscenes in other games? If the answer us yes, because you can skip nothing here. If you think you should just watch it on youtube, you can but be aware that what you see there is different from what you would see at home die to the nature of the story and branching paths. I ended up with two playable characters dead and the killer walking free. And from what I’ve read, everyone’s play through is different.
Controller1.com rating 2/3 (0/3 if you’ve no interest in story)
Reviewed by Lisvender on PS3. Developed by Sega Wow. Published by Sega
This PS3 strategy shooter stirred up pleasant memories of such gems as Advance Wars, Shining Force, Fire Emblem, and X-Com: Enemy Unknown. It also reminded me of how much these tactical combat games piss me off. It’s still very good, though, and anyone who enjoyed those aforementioned games should definitely get it.
Note: This is the only picture in this review. Why? Let’s just say it’s not a good idea to Google images for this game without safe search on.
The year is 1935 EC, and the Second Europan (that’s not a typo) War between the eastern Empire (Russia) and the western Federation (NATO) is a-blazin’. Pinched between the two factions is the teeny nation of Gallia, a land which also happens to be rich in the precious resource Ragnite. The greedy Empire swoops into Gallia to take control, but they are met by Welkin Gunther, a militia draftee, who gives the Empire a serious headache. You’ll guide Welkin and his Ragtag Squad of Misfits through battles against the Empire that grow in challenge, complexity, and length as you go along. Your goal is to push the invaders out and save Gallia from complete pacification.
The story’s premise is interesting, but the developments are typical anime crap, filled with overblown, melodramatic moments, long-winded, head-scratching dialogue, that uniquely Japanese “awkward” humor, and endless death scenes. The Hurt Locker this ain’t. If you want to play a game about soldiers who speak the true words of war, play Call of Duty.
Nobody talks about tangoes in Valkyria Chronicles, but they do go on about bugs, bread, vegetables, and love a lot. Welkin and his girlfriend/sidekick Alicia remain self-absorbed and strangely cheerful in spite of the sobering situation they’re in, and killing people never seems to upset them. This is a war story for the adolescent. Hell, the game even has a beach cutscene so you can see the female characters run around in bikinis. Pretty sad.
Honestly, though, the story isn’t that important to the game’s success. The real joy of a game like Valkyria Chronicles comes from learning and mastering its rules and tactics. The warfare here centers around a basic rock-paper-scissors system:
Shocktroopers are foot soldiers with machine guns, and they can mow down all kinds of infantry.
Tanks are heavily armored, and can blow away Shocktroopers.
Lancers are foot soldiers with rocket launchers, and are best at taking out tanks.
There are three other classes of infantry, too: the Scouts, the Snipers, and the Engineers. While these units play essential supportive roles, they are poor fighters, and they should circumvent the combat engaged in by the others.
Valkyria Chronicles is a war game where you take turns with the computer moving your squad of soldiers around a map. Your goal in most missions is to get your men to the heart of an enemy camp, but you have to coordinate your movements so that your men can clear out the bad guys efficiently and cover each other. There are plenty of games that function like this, but Valkyria Chronicles stands apart from them because it incorporates elements of third-person shooters and makes them critical to your success. When you start a turn and are prompted to select a unit to move, you get a simple bird’s-eye view of the battlefield. All the soldiers are represented by icons. When you pick a unit, the camera swoops down into a fully detailed, over-the-shoulder view, and you get to control that unit using the familiar two-stick move-and-aim model. You can run around, take cover, survey the topography, avoid enemy firing lines, and position yourself for a good shot at the bad guys. The distance you can move is limited, though, and you can only shoot once per movement, so be sure to make your turns count! Aim at the heads of infantry units, or at the rear radiators of tanks to take them out quickly.
Units around you won’t move while you’re moving, but if you get too close to enemy units, they will turn and fire on you, so be careful. This also works for enemies who enter the sights and firing ranges of your guys, so positioning your troops to throw out intercepting fire is a very important strategic aspect. A group of Scouts and Shocktroopers is a veritable death machine to infantry, and it can be very effective at suppressing enemy advances. Lancers and Snipers don’t use intercepting fire, however, so they’re sitting ducks when enemies approach. Be sure to back them up.
If one of your units is downed, you can send another unit to rescue her. Just walk up to her, and your medic will fly in to pull her out of the battle. You can then select your camp to call in reinforcements. If a downed unit isn’t rescued in three turns, or if an enemy unit closes in to finish her off, that unit will be killed and removed from the game permanently. For this reason, you should never send a unit into danger alone.
Each soldier in the game has his or her own personality, and this is expressed through Potentials and friendships. Potentials are buffs and debuffs that come into effect under unique conditions. Some soldiers can absorb intercepting fire without taking much damage, while others have special hatreds for particular enemies which will up their accuracy. Then there are the soldiers with allergies to sand or pollen, who won’t fight effectively in desert or grassland settings. While there are some loners in your squad, most of your soldiers are friends with each other. Putting two friends side by side, and then ordering one to fire will cause both to shoot at once, and more or less doom your target. Forgetting the technical details, odds are you’ll become attached to one or two of your soldiers, and you’ll want to keep them around simply because they make you smile.
As the story progresses, the missions become increasingly complex, and some of the later ones are real brain-busters. You’ll have to divide your forces, capture multiple enemy camps, use smoke bombs to blind your enemies, sneak past spotlights, dodge mortar fire, and engage in trench fighting. Many of the missions have a twist that occurs halfway through, with some new challenge or objective popping up, and no two missions are alike. They’re all very satisfying to study, analyze, explore, and complete.
Succeeding at missions earns you experience points and money, which can be used to increase the stats of your infantry, upgrade your equipment, and add new parts to your tanks. You can also purchase optional Orders, which provide stat buffs and other benefits to your squad in combat, and Reports, which open up side stories and optional missions for further character development. If you run short on resources, you have the option to play Skirmishes, which are slightly altered replays of missions you’ve completed, to refill your coffers. Grinding can be a pain, but it is necessary if you want to get your soldiers to the highest levels, and gain access to special weaponry.
I don’t often talk about graphics and sound in reviews, because nowadays most games have these mastered, or at least polished to the point where they don’t offend. I feel that I should mention them for Valkyria Chronicles, though, because they are truly outstanding. The graphics are have a lovely, colorful, painted look. There are sunny skies, rolling hills, and pleasant architecture everywhere you turn. While I can’t remember a single bit of music from Uncharted 2 or Modern Warfare, I caught myself humming the driving battle themes from this game at work multiple times.
Valkyria Chronicles is a rich and deep game, with immense rewards in wait for the thinking player, but like many strategy games, it can also be frustrating. Early on in the game, before your weapons can be upgraded, your soldiers are going to miss a lot of their shots. Even your eagle-eyed snipers, who can use scopes to zoom in on their targets, will manage to miss most of the time. It doesn’t matter if you line up your crosshairs properly; the computer rolls the dice on where the shot actually lands. In a game like this, where your every movement is precious and critical, a missed shot is heartbreaking and enraging. Not surprisingly, the computer-controlled units rarely have this problem. I highly recommend that you pour your money into accuracy upgrades the moment they become available to counter this problem.
Another issue is that occasionally the intercepting fire won’t work. Sometimes your guys will just stand there while enemy soldiers run right by them. It’s like they momentarily go blind or something. It’s bewildering, exasperating, and just shy of unfair. It can even cause you to lose, if an enemy Scout strolls by your defenders and captures your base camp.
Then there are the mines. Oh God, the mines. The battlefields in Valkyria Chronicles are often peppered with land mines that can severely injure your soldiers and cripple your tanks. They’re easy to spot, but they’re also easy to forget about, and one second not spent looking at the ground can ruin an entire mission. Engineers can disarm them, so if you step on a mine and hear that distinctive “click,” stop where you are and get that wrench-slinger over there pronto. It would be nice if the bad guys could set off the mines, of if you could lay mines of your own, but they don’t, and you can’t. Sigh.
Valkyria Chronicles has been in stores for a while, but with the mountains of hype that were raised around its competitors, it’s likely you haven’t considered it. Mixing third-person shooter elements with turn-based strategy is a brilliant stroke, and while wargamers should grab it in a heartbeat, even newcomers to the genre should try it out. There’s a lot to learn, but the game rolls out the rules in a gentle, friendly manner, so it never gets overwhelming. It has a silly story and some irritations, but it’s nevertheless a well-designed and satisfying game. The only way it could be better would be to change its setting to the future and call itself X-Com.
Controller1.com rating: 3/3 (2/3 for non-strategy fans)
Lisvender reviews Demon’s Souls. Reviews on PS3. Developed by From Software Published by Sony/ Atlus
Review: Demon’s Souls
I haven’t beaten the dark fantasy game Demon’s Souls, and I don’t expect to for a long while. I don’t believe, however, that this disqualifies me from having an opinion about it. Every Game of the Year should elicit some kind of response from the average video game player, even if it’s an apathetic one brought on by hype-burnout. What makes Demon’s Souls unusual is that it was not hyped in the West at all, and the reaction it got from half of the gaming populace was one of passionate hate-spit. “This game hates me,” the detractors say, “so I hate this game.”
Does Demon’s Souls hate us? Well, it does reject many of the conveniences we’ve come to expect to be in modern games, like checkpoints. It also bucks some of the conventions of not-so-modern games, like pausing. Yeah, you can’t pause in Demon’s Souls, not even to look over your inventory. You press Start to open the menu, and the action just keeps going on around you. If you need to go to the bathroom, make sure your character is in a safe place first.
This might suggest that creators From Software were out to be unfair and mean when they made this game, but I don’t think that’s true. It’s just possible that they were aiming to create a very intense experience, something more stressful and scary than what’s offered by most video games, and that every design decision was made with that result in mind.
In Demon’s Souls, you play a voiceless fantasy hero who has traveled to the cursed kingdom of Boletaria to face down The Old One, an angry, toothy beast of Lovecraftian power and dimensions. You get to choose from a large list of character classes which includes the traditional warriors, swordsmen, and wizards. Each class has its own unique stats and starting equipment, which will dictate your style of play as you start out. You begin in a brief tutorial level that shows you what you’re going to be doing throughout the game: slashing at monsters, blocking and dodging attacks, running down halls, casting magic spells. At the end of the tutorial you are one-hit-killed by a boss, and you are thrust into the Nexus, the hub/town of Demon’s Souls. Here, you can buy or upgrade your equipment (though you cannot sell anything back), store items you don’t want to lug around with you, buy and memorize spells, and upgrade your character’s stats.
All of these upgrades are purchased using souls, the currency of the game. You get souls automatically every time you slay a monster, and there’s no limit to how many you can have on hand. You cannot, however, store them away in a bank or a stash. Your money stays with you at all times. This makes exploring new places with a full wallet incredibly tense, because when you die, you drop all your souls. You can make a corpse run if you want to get them back, but if you die again before you reach your place of perishing, the souls disappear forever. You’re going to want to take your time with this game.
The Nexus connects to five areas, and each area is divided into four sections. Every section is loaded with monsters, secret passages, and deadly traps. They have no checkpoints. If you die in them at any time, even during the boss battle at the end, you’ll have to start the whole section over, with all the monsters revived and back in place. Good luck with that corpse run! Fortunately, any switches you’ve activated or doors you’ve opened will remain as you left them.
There are monsters all over the place, but they’re often tucked away in spots where you won’t be able to see them until they’ve got the drop on you. March ahead slowly, and be ready to jump out of danger’s path.
The sword-and-sorcery combat in Demon’s Souls is complex and deliberate. You can use regular or strong attacks, parry and counter enemy attacks, and wield one-handed weapons with two hands for added damage. You can cast spells on yourself or on your enemies, but you need to have enough magic power, have the proper spells memorized, and have a wand (or “catalyst”) equipped.
Knowing your moves is only the start of the challenge. Demon’s Souls is not Zelda or Fable, where you can just swing your sword like a maniac and watch the monsters drop. Most of the enemies in Demon’s Souls can kill your character in one or two hits, so there’s very little room for error. You need to fight defensively, and attack only when there’s a clear opening.
You can’t just stand there with your shield up all day either, because you’ll run out of stamina. Attacking, dodging, and blocking hits all drain your green stamina meter. If it runs out, you can’t attack. The bar refills quickly and automatically, but only if you lower your shield and don’t do anything. This means that you’ll sometimes have to retreat from a fight momentarily to regain your strength. If you block an enemy attack that bottoms out the stamina meter, your character will be stunned and helpless for a couple of seconds, which is more or less inviting death. You can’t afford to get careless, even against enemies you’ve beaten many times before; they can still kill you, and quickly.
There are also numerous traps in the game, many of which will insta-kill you if you don’t know how to get sidestep them. An early level features causeways that you must cross while flying dragons breathe flames on them from overhead. You need to learn the timing of the sweeping fire, and calculate a starting position for your sprint. You don’t want to edge too close to the danger zone and get roasted before you begin your charge, and you don’t want to start sprinting too soon and run out of stamina before you reach the next safe spot. You’ll probably die many times before you get it just right.
Speaking of death, Demon’s Souls has a very unusual rule about it. You begin the game as a living person with a solid body. This is called “living form.” When you die, that body is taken away from you, and you enter “soul form.” To avoid confusion with all the other soul terms in the game, I call this “ghost form.” Being in ghost form doesn’t change the way you play: you can still use all your equipment and you move and fight just the same as when you were living. Your leash is tightened, though, because being a ghost halves your maximum health. As we’ve already established that death is a common occurrence in this game, expect to remain in ghost form for a long, long time.
Playing in living form with a nice, full health bar means you can take a lot more hits before dying than you can in ghost form. It’s a secure and comforting thing that you’ll want to guard jealously because it’s so fleeting, and so tough to attain. There are four ways to give up the ghost and get back to living form:
1.) Beat a boss. Beat any boss and you will be revived. This requires time and patience, as you must master the level and the boss fight to get through them without dying.
2.) Use a Stone of Ephemeral Eyes, a rare item that instantly returns you to living form. These are not sold in any store. You have to find them, and because of their scarcity, you’ll probably want to save them.
3.) Help a living player beat a boss. You can use a special item called the Blue Eye Stone to leave a mark in the level that living players on the Playstation Network can see. If one of these players activates that mark, you will join him in his game. If you succeed as a team in beating that level’s boss, you will return to your own game with a living body. This demands a little luck, however, as you have to hope that there are living characters who are not only online, but also in your particular section of the game, and also inclined to ask for your help. Teams cannot communicate in any way, either, so if one or both of you doesn’t know your way around, you’re likely to get killed, which sends you back to your own game. Better luck next time!
4.) Kill a living player. This is the most interesting, and the most asshole-ish, of your options. Instead of leaving your mark on the ground and waiting for a living player to give you a call, you can take a more aggressive approach. Use the Black Eye Stone, and the game will find a living player who’s exploring the same level as you, and shove you into his or her game. The invaded player will be notified of your arrival, but not of your whereabouts. Your goal is to hunt down and kill the living player. Do so, and you are rewarded with a living form and returned to your own game. You have essentially stolen the other player’s body. Congratulations, you dick. If the other player kills you, you don’t lose anything and are returned to your own game. If you fall to the monsters, however, you are returned to your own game with a stat rollback. Your most recent stat upgrade will be undone, and the invaded player will receive a bonus equal to the amount of souls you spent on that upgrade. So beware if you wish to go ganking. The game will only allow you to invade characters with similar stat levels, but since the filtering ends there, there’s no way to know how skilled or well-equipped your quarry will be. Your best bet is to perform the invasion in a level you know very well, so you can take advantage of the environment, and surprise your victim.
Demon’s Souls looks like a simple Diablo clone from a distance, but it is immensely more strategic and slow-paced. Every action you take demands care and forethought. Where most games only set you back a few feet when you die, Demon’s Souls is always ready to take something from you that you might not want to lose. The auto-save feature seems to be in constant effect, so you can’t just reload your save when you screw up. Amazingly, the tense exploration and the heartbreak of dying are not strong enough for me to discount Demon’s Souls: the action of dodging traps and slicing monsters is fun and satisfying enough that it is worth experiencing, if only in small doses. If your temper is flaring, it’s probably time to take a break. The game is dense with difficulties, but it is not impossible. Keep coming back, and you’ll find that even the sternest areas become easy with practice. Of course, by “practice,” I mean many, many deaths. But come on, let’s be honest here: It’s only video game money you’re losing. Is it really that important?
Take a look at your little Demon’s Souls guy. He might suffer death again and again, but he keeps getting back up and drawing his sword. He’s always ready to get right back in there, among the demons and the darkness. We could all learn a lesson from him.
Lisvender reviews Brutal Legend. Available on PS3 and Xbox 360. Developed by Double Fine. Published by EA
I can’t help but wonder how many gamers are going to pretend they’ve always loved heavy metal music after they play this game.
Remember the hype-roar over Bioshock and its Art Deco design, and its Ayn Rand themes? So original! It seemed like everybody wanted to learn more about these revolutionary concepts once that game came out. We gamers are a sheltered lot. We really need to get out and read more. Video games can’t be our sole window into history. It’s not healthy. Besides, Grim Fandango did the Art Deco thing long before Bioshock, and it’s a better game. By the way, Tim Schafer, who wrote and directed Brutal Legend, also wrote and directed Grim Fandango, which I have to say is the superior game.
After playing Brutal Legend, I don’t think I’ll ever be a heavy metal fan. The game just doesn’t sell it well, and all those revving guitars sound the same after a while. I’m an 80s child, though, so synthesized pop is more my thing, and this game just isn’t meant for me. The fantasy land of Brutal Legend, which exhumes and fetishizes the sound and fury of the “metal experience,” is clearly built to appeal to people who lived during the music’s heyday. I’m not sure it’s sensible, though, for Double Fine to aim for an audience that pines so strongly for the past. Are the forty-somethings who spin their Def Leppard vinyl on their creaky turntables for fun also very likely to play modern video games on Xbox 360s or Playstation 3s?
Eddie Riggs, the hero of Brutal Legend, complains that he wasn’t born in the right time for metal either. This is just before he is flattened by a collapsing stage set, and transported to a mythical world by the metal god Ormagoden. Apparently, Eddie has no family or friends in our world, or else he has a command of incredible coping skills, because his reaction to this dangerous new place is more or less, “Coooooool!” I’m guessing that Eddie is a veteran of a few tours in the Iraq War, because he never questions his unexplained combat skills, nor does he display a hint of fear at the murderous beings marching in his way. At one point he is directly asked if he misses his old home, and he replies with only a dismissive sputter. I realize that Eddie is supposed to be a badass, but I’d find that easier to swallow if he had grown up in this harsh place, rather than just suddenly been thrown into it after years of soft American life.
There are plenty of other problems with the story, but I won’t go into them all. I’m the sort of asshole who picks at the logic in movies like Back to the Future when I should just relax and have fun with them. Brutal Legend’s story is fun, and funny, but Tim Schafer has written stronger, more interesting stuff than this, like the aforementioned Grim Fandango.
Brutal Legend, the game, is different from Brutal Legend, the tale. Instead of focusing on the tastes of a specific type of player, the gameplay goes all over the place, trying to please everyone at once. The game starts by giving you a hand axe, and throwing some enemies in front of you. “Here,” says the game, “enjoy some chop-em-up action not far removed from God of War or Spartan Total Warrior.”
“Fine,” you respond, “let’s chop up some monsters!” You chop up monsters for a few minutes, and then the game gives you a guitar.
“Here,” says the game, “this is your secondary weapon, and it uses elemental powers like lightning and fire, similar to the plasmids in Bioshock.”
“Cool,” says you, “let’s rock out!” You burn enemies with lightning and fire, then tear down a building with an earth-shaking chord, and then a few minutes later, you get a car.
What is the point of this car? I really don’t understand the car. It looks cool, and it uses decent enough physics, but from a practical standpoint, it’s fatuous. In the small-scale missions to come, Eddie can’t use it, and in the large-scale battles he won’t need it. Why is there a car?
The answer is, “Because the game world is big, and you’ll need a car to get from place to place in a reasonable amount of time.”
This is not a good answer, because it raises more questions. Why is the game world so big that getting around on foot isn’t reasonable?
The only answer I can think of is, “Because other games have big worlds too.”
I’m being honest here: I see no reason for Brutal Legend to have a big, open world, other than to fill the game with long stretches of driving and to flesh out a feature list.
What’s worse is that Double Fine went with “big open world” first, then came up with “things to do in big open world” second. There are all these little side missions scattered around the map, but they’re really not that interesting, and there are only three or four styles of them. You have enemy ambushes, which are simple chop-em-up skirmishes, turret battles where you fire on enemies from a raised hydraulic lift, cannon firing missions that require you to set targets for long-range artillery, and races. That’s right, you can’t have a car in a video game unless it’s entered in a race at some point. There are also little things to look for like dragon statues (120 to find!), legend spheres that tell a needless backstory, and binoculars so you can get a good look at some of those fancy landmarks Double Fine’s artists spent so much time laboring over. Look! A mountain shaped like a pair of hands clutching a guitar! Awesome, sort of!
These distractions from the main missions are all optional, so why would anyone bother to roll around the world for several minutes at a time to take them on? For upgrades, of course!
Completing missions earns you “fire tributes,” which are really just money, and which are spent at Motor Forges to buy attacks, guitar strings, special effects for your axe, and weaponry for your car. The shopkeeper, called the Guardian of Metal, is voiced by Ozzy Osbourne, and he’s excellent. I hope he continues to do voice acting for games, because he’s great. The Motor Forges themselves, however, are not great. Why does this game have upgrades? I mean, really? Uncharted 2 doesn’t have upgrades, and that was a pretty good game. The effects of Brutal Legend’s upgrades are hardly noticeable. What’s the point? Why am I using the precious gift of life to drive around a big, empty video game world to complete stupid side missions to collect fire tributes to buy upgrades that don’t do anything?
The big open world in Brutal Legend is filler. It’s a joke. It’s not as ugly, but it’s certainly as unnecessary as No More Heroes’s Santa Destroy. Don’t waste your time with it. Just drive from primary mission to primary mission; it’s the way the game should have been made.
And what is there to say about the primary line of missions in Brutal Legend? It’s action! It’s strategy! It’s stractegy! You’re going to fight some big battles that Eddie can’t win alone, upgrades or no upgrades. The game gives you a stage that acts as your base, and a crowd of friendly characters that acts as your army. Your goal in these battles is to get your dudes to the enemy’s stage and destroy it. You control Eddie, contributing to the battle with his attacks, while issuing commands to your soldiers. It’s like Battalion Wars, only not as logical. In Battalion Wars, it makes sense that units with flamethrowers will be pretty effective against enemy infantry, while units with rocket launchers will be more useful against tanks. In Brutal Legend, you’ve got these headbanger dudes, and chicks who tote rifles ripped from the spines of mutant hogs. There are also guys with big hands, and roadies who heft giant amps on their backs. How do you divide tasks among an army like that? There’s some kind of logic to the system, but the action is too hectic, and the missions too varied to really figure it out and exploit it. Simply overwhelming your enemies with sheer numbers doesn’t always work either. You can throw a horde of guys at a tiny group of enemies, turn to other matters for a minute, and still come back to find your dudes dead. The surest way to win a fight is constantly babysit your soldiers. You need to stay near them, fight alongside them, and buff them incessantly.
You also need to keep an eye on your merchandise booths, which are like the gas refineries in Starcraft. There are these fan geysers in Brutal Legend, see, which spew gaseous fans that somehow act as resources for your war machine. You “spend” fans to make more soldiers. To collect fans, you have to construct merch booths over the geysers by playing a riff on your guitar near the geyser. Once the booth is ready, the fans flow to your stage. Sometimes the computer will sneak its men past your army so it can destroy your booths and cripple your production. All this chaos is manageable because Eddie sprouts a pair of wings when you click the left stick, and he can fly about the battlefield to keep an eye on things.
Note that in order to protect that very important big open world from obsolescence, the game only allows you to fly during these stage battles.
The stage battles are actually pretty fun once you get a grasp on them, so much so that you’ll be disappointed that there are so few of them. The single-player campaign is surprisingly short, even with all the driving, and I think that Double Fine is banking on the game surviving just a little bit longer through a multiplayer following. I’m not the person to ask about multiplayer, though, as I hate playing games online, and I’ve never won a real-time strategy match against another human being.
It’s hard to say exactly what Brutal Legend’s problem is. I suppose you could say that Brutal Legend, like Psychonauts before it, has an inferiority complex. It tries so hard to fit in with the other games, when it should really just concentrate on what makes it unique. Brutal Legend would be so much better as a long, linear series of increasingly challenging stage battles with cutscenes in between, than as what it is: a hodge-podge of mixed missions pinned together with a weak Grand Theft Auto structure. This is a problem with a lot of games these days, and I hope that people will come to look at Brutal Legend as an example of the perils of me-tooism. Grand Theft Auto’s cities are features that grew out of game’s unique action of carjacking, just as Super Mario Bros.’s blocks and enemy designs grew out of Mario’s jumping. Games like No More Heroes, Infamous, and now Brutal Legend, don’t need to copy the mainstream to be great. Fuck the establishment man, and sing your own tune. Isn’t that part of the spirit of heavy metal in the first place?
Controller1.com Rating 1/3 lisvender
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Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on: PS3, PC. Developed by Gearbox. Published by 2k Games.
So Borderlands is one of those games that shouldn’t. It shouldn’t have sold as well as it has. It shouldn’t be as much fun as it is. But it is. Gearbox, known previously for Brothers in Arms and a lot of good porting work had been showing the game for quite a while before a massive revamp in art style took place. Realism was replaced by a unique cel-shaded graphic novel look. And it obviously worked. Even though the games features many similarities with Fallout 3, Borderlands manages to escape many direct comparisons by being it’s own beast.
So you’re on this planet Pandora (Seems to be a lot of that going around these days), and while it’s a failed colony of sorts, you can’t help thinking that you’re playing Fallout 3 with better gunplay. In fact, it’s like the bastard offspring of Fallout 3, Mad Max and Firefly. It’s an open world first person shooter with a decent RPG feel so levelling whores (which, since WoW and CoD4, is almost everyone). So you pick one of four characters- the usual soldier, sniper, engineer, chick with super powers, etc and off you go, going from mission to mission (and a few side missions) looking for The Vault. You can play it by yourself or party up with up to 3 other players to explore the world and kill and loot to your heart’s content like all good social experiences. Most believe that’s the way to play this game but I concentrated on single player. Me being the solitary loner that I am, I played the game all the time thinking of the sling and arrows I suffered as a child and how I burned them all and pissed on their remains and… anyhoo.
The world of Pandora is a cel-shaded desert full of wackos and doof doof droids. You visit someone who gives you a mission, follow the way point to your mission, beat it, and then return to the mission giver to collect your reward either in the form of experience points or money or hopefully both. Missions are varied with some kill all of the xxx here, some collect all of the yyy (which usually means killing some xxx along the way) or make your way to zzz, kill aaa after you’ve killed all of the xxx). In other words, it can get just a tad repetitive after 10+ hours which is why the co-op would really lift this game if it’s an option open to you.
The game is put together well and has a fairly polished feel. Levelling and using the menus are nice and easy with a controller though I can’t help feel the checkpoint system and save system needs some work. Several times I saved a game and the game didn’t restart from the last checkpoint I was at. Another thing to note: this game respawns enemies. So when you leave Fyrestone, your jumping-off point, expect the same two or three bandits to attack you from exactly the same spots. This does tend to make the game more tiresome than it needs to be, but it least means that there will always be something to kill to get more XP. That said, the enemies scale with you, meaning it’s easy enough to go wherever you like and do missions in almost any order. The mission briefings even tell you what level you should be at and the difficulty of each mission before you make the attempt. A few corners may have been cut with animations, as briefings tend to be a text screen but the text is full of a wry sense of humour. It might just be the cel shading but this game reminds me somewhat of XIII from the PS2/ Xbox era (one of those first of a franchise games that never went any further.
Traversing the large world is made easier when relatively early on, you gain access to vehicles. While these may control like a golf cart driven by a drunken one-legged midget with blisters on his feet, they offer a decent amount of firepower to make mincemeat of respawning foes in encampments. You can get some sick air with these on ramps with your boost enabled. Just like Pedro.
Of course, one of the big draws are all the weapons you collect in this game, somewhere in the order of 3+ million. And some are good and others not so much, so you can drop them, buy them or sell them at vending machines around the world. You can buy upgrades to the capacity of the weapons and even upgrade how many you can carry and have equipped at once. There are lots of guns in this game. A lot. There are more guns in this game than there are HDTV owners who know how to change aspect ratios when watching old movies (“Say, Honey. Doesn’t Orson Wells look a lot fatter on this new TV?”).
Cel-shaded or not, the game has a unique vibe in its presentation, despite a few blurry textures here and there. The world looks like an early 90’s graphic novel come alive, the framerate is mainly solid and the audio presented well, if you can stomach the comic accents. The game could have used a slightly less old fashioned looking menu system and a bit less repeated dialogue (YES, I UNDERSTAND YOU ARE DANCING. THANKS FOR REMINDING ME, AGAIN)
It’s nice to see Gearbox try something other than trying to convince us Brothers in Arms is a popular, fun-to-play franchise. The difference is, this is fun. Is it essential? No, but if you have a lull in your schedule and can time it to coincide with a friend in the same predicament, give Borderlands a shot.
Reviewed on Xbox 360 and PC. Also on PS3. Developed by Infinity Ward. Published by Activision
Call of Duty’s beginnings as more or less a straight copy of Medal of Honor Allied Assault (which was more or less made by most of IW when they were at 2015) don’t really set the scene for this latest game. Call of Duty was never a popular franchise with the hardcore player who were more interested in Counterstrike, Quake III, Battlefield and Unreal games. It was a hit, but with the people who enjoyed Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers- a more casual type of PC gamer. It was a mainstream hit, but always looked down on by people who were in clans or lugged their 21 inch CRT monitors to LAN parties, fragfests and virginal circle-jerks. All that changed with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare which ditched the WWII setting of the previous CoD games and sold more copies than a street vendor in Moscow selling genuine Rolex watches.
CoD4 was a surprise hit with the hardcore and even the Treyarch WWII-based World at War sold well. So MW2 was so big that almost every publisher put back a large number of their biggest titles to early 2010 just to get out of MW2’s way. But how does it play?
SINGLE PLAYER (may contains traces of nuts and spoilers)
The single player story had a lot to live up to. The WWII CoD games had a basic story to get you into a mission but the overall theme was “defeat the Axis powers before the end of 1945.” CoD4, not being based on anything in particular (parallel to the current wars around the world), need a more defined story. MW2 takes that, runs with it, amps up to 11, char-grills it, over-inflates the bouncy castle and just generally makes the stakes higher. Before we had a nuke going off in an unnamed Middle Eastern country of GAFghanistan, a main character dieing and a race to stop things getting worse. In MW2, it gets worse. An undercover American operative being implicated in a terrorist massacre of civilians in Moscow causes an all-out war. The story is told in two parts with half of the game played from the perspective of SAS operatives and the other half as a US army Private attempting to de-red dawnify the Continental United States. The scale of the story is rather undersold since most of the set-up is done in the form of rather dry voice overs during the loading screens that lack the punch of the similar screens during WaW’s load screens. And it’s way too tempting to just skip these as soon as possible.
The actual game itself is great even though it’s the same as the original MW. Just different settings and perhaps a tad more over the top in its scale. The game is intense for most of the time you’re playing, which isn’t all that long. IW have thrown in a lot of things to mix things up constantly, from snow mobiles to rafting. But mainly, there are lots of levels that make you think “Hmm, I did this on CoD4.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Graphics are crisp and clear with a constant 60fps on 360 and since it’s an enhanced version of the engine used on CoD4, it will run well on most medium spec computers. Sound is the usual fantastic mix of effects and voice, now with added Hans Zimmer music. Even though the game on consoles runs at technically a sub HD resolution, there is very little to indicate low resolution. It looks crisp and runs smoother than peanut butter at a gigolo convention. The only major gripe is the jam gun the enemies fire at you. This is the new blood effect that splatters across the screen to let you know you’ve been injured. Fall from a reasonable height and you will tear a major artery in your eyes.
MULTIPLAYER
Well, since a large number of people skipped the single player of CoD4 entirely and have been playing the multiplayer fairly solidly for two years, you’d think IW would just make new maps and be done (after all, that’s more or less what Treyarch did for WaW). But no. IW have ramped it up to the nth degree. CoD 4: MW’s ranking and perks system helped extend the appeal of the multiplayer modes in this post WoW/ achievement whore world we live. MW2 takes that, jolts it 50, 000 volts up each leg and give it a raise. Now you have a far bigger combination of perks and weapon options, customization kill streaks, emblems (though I’ve yet to see anyone not use the pot leaf), tags and so forth. So not only can you select which killstreak rewards you receive, you can also have a deathstreak, which helps you out if you get spawn-raped by a camping sniper noob who’s been playing for 17 hours and hates the game. This thing will have legs since the number of combinations means it will be a while before everyone just uses the same three or four combos as they did in CoD4.
The netcode is probably a bit better than CoD4 and WaW, but the matchmaking still is a pain since it will routinely hook you up to a game where everyone else in another country- something that doesn’t make the game all that much fun. They could learn a thing for two from Bungie when making peer-to-peer networked games work. Of course, MW2 also brings the PC player into a realm they don’t normally visit: p2p networking without the latest episode of Lost to show for it. In my brief playthough on PC game online, I had no issues, but I did only play two rounds. The problem is you can’t play on a dedicated server as you can for most other PC games, nor can you choose what server you are on- It’s all Matchmaking with one player as the host (whether they like it or not). So far the main issue is listening to the whingeing of the master race (though they have a point- the best online console experiences -Halo 3 aside- have been those with the dedicated server model). My CoD4-playing colleagues at work have been entertaining me with their attempts at playing the game together at lunch. They don’t want to play private games since they won’t get XP. Oh well. Infinity Ward! You got some ’splaining to do!
There’s also a third mode called Spec Ops which can either be played solo or coop (either splitscreen or online). I haven’t tried it since I can’t see any reason to play this with so much crap in Multiplayer to unlock.
So there you have it. Game of the Year? Well, it’s certainly the shooter of the year and the multiplayer game of the year, for me at least. It’s knocked down on PC simply there’s no reason for the basic server stuff to have been stripped out unless Activision want to start charging for maps on PC as well. Which is likely.
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 PS3. Developed by Naughty Dog. Published by SCEA/SCEE
So I can be one of the cool kids, I too am playing Naughty Dog’s latest. A bit over half way through the single player and what do I think? It’s excellent. It’s the game that sells the PS3 in a way the first game could only dream of and only Metal Gear IV came close to doing. It makes the PS3 sing in every way possible and is a rollicking good time to boot.
So why the hell is Elena’s voice so irritating to listen to in this? I don’t know. Maybe Nolan North’s sexy Drake voice just makes everyone wet (whether he’s in this, Shadow Complex or ODST). The Farscape chick has a way sexier voice when Chloe speaks. This is the game that makes animators cry look little girls and engine programmers weep into their Starcraft pajamas. It’s prettier than a prom date after the third whiskey and sounds better than Elvis and Michael Jackson releasing an album of Beatles covers.
How did we get here? Years ago, these guys made the first four Crash Bandicoot games. Then they made Jak and Daxter on the PS2. Then everyone who knew how to make a game died and they released Jak II. Obviously they’ve learned some sort of sorcery in order to resurrect the talent and produce this masterpiece.
At the start of the game you play as Drake after he’s been involved in a serious accident. Recovering his wits as best he can we quickly get start to see how Drake got to this point. Suckered in by friends and ex lovers, Drake ends up in jail, yada, yada, blah. So he climbs a lot more and there’s less ordinary Gears clone sequences. That’s what people who played the first game wanted to know. The first game was a lot of fun, a sleeper hit for PS3 but the second game ratchets up everything that matters. More climbing and more action sequences rather than static hide behind cover and shoot all the enemies in the area. The game almost does away with constant repetition. Almost.
One minute you’ll be having a gun battle, then climbing along the side of a moving train, then attempting to shoot down a helicopter with an RPG, then have a serious conversation with a chick with eyes glassier than an Apple store. It constantly changes so that you get a feeling the developers really took the criticism of the first game to heart and just worked their guts out to avoid the same complaints the second time around. On a train, being chased by a truck, in cars, on foot, climb this- It’s all there and it’s done in a way that doesn’t scream “Hey! They just copy and pasted that bit!”
The story is classic Indiana Jones without having to pay a rich old man royalties. You have Drake, his most recent flame, plus an old flame. It’s as if the Marion showed up in Last Crusade. Go here, do this, go here grab this. It all flows together well and you don’t think “well, here’s the sewer level. Here’s the Ice level. Here’s the desert level,” like you did in the Resistance games. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like a particular scene since it’s likely going to change in five minutes to something different anyway. The awesome sense of humour is intact and funny as ever. When you hit the Nepalese levels and reach the top of the hotel, jump in the pool.
The visuals are just draw dropping. Killzone 2 doesn’t look this good. It’s not perfect but it does what you expect of it. It’s bright and colourful in away that PS3/360 games aren’t known for yet feels real. Maybe Crysis on Max has better graphics but I’ll stick with Uncharted for my own benchmark. Sound is very good but really the voice artistes are the stars of this game almost as much as the gameplay and the visuals. The acting is perfect. It sure beats the silly voices in Killzone 2 and over the top theatrics of Kojima’s last epic. Yes, Elena’s voice is whiny but she’s whiny. You need that contrast with Chloe’s deeper voice. Drake may well be the best character to headline a game since Masterchief. Despite every lead character looking the same, you won’t be mixing him up with Sam Fisher, Ezio or that Shadow Complex guy. Well maybe that Shadow Complex guy.
The game even tweets for you much to the consternation of your followers. Funnily enough- I don’t think it actually works since I’ve set mine up and my twitter doesn’t actually have any of the auto-tweets there.
Uncharted 2 manages what Killzone 2 didn’t. It was actually more than a basic shooter that didn’t try to do anything new, just solidly. Uncharted manages to meet expectations and delivers on the hype and buzz surrounding its release. It deserves to sell far more than Gran Turismo 5 or Assassin’s Creed 2. Don’t have a PS3? Well now you have a reason to get that second job (though with the price now, it’s more like overtime on your first job)
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PS3 and PC. Developed by Techland. Published by Ubisoft.
I’ll keep this short and sweet. As a fan of the original game, I’ve found this prequel to be highly disappointing. The original filled a gap in gaming- the well done western FPS. The sequel seems half-hearted in many ways while being more assured in execution. It’s rather lacking in something that for the sake of being descriptive I shall call soul.
In BiB you play as Confederate Brothers Ray or Thomas. In the aftermath of the South’s loss, these two become a pale parody of a spaghetti western protagonist. You usually choose which of the two you’ll play as at the start of a level with the other tagging along as a computer controlled ally. Ray (who becomes Reverend Ray, star of the first game) is the stronger of the two, able to dual wield pistols and be generally Cardassian. Thomas replaces Billy and is the more agile of the two, able to jump higher and use a lasso to scale some obstacles. Both characters have concentration mode, which is a fancy bullet-time mode that works differently for each of the brothers.
There are story missions and some optional side missions in this game but to be honest they aren’t particularly compelling to play compared to the original. Seemingly, most end in a one on one duel mechanic that is painful in the extreme to beat. Even though there is a save point just before it you have to move your guy so that your opponent is in a specific point (more or less the centre of the screen) . It’s shittier than a constipated ox that has eaten curry for a week and suddenly been exposed to very cold air.
So apart from the fights, the rest of the game is put together well but it’s just missing that hunger to do stuff that was in the first game. This is too by-the-numbers to be more than a time-waster while you wait for better games to be released. You go somewhere, and basically kill everyone who attacks you. But you don’t do in it an interesting way. The first game had a mix of stealth, climbing, Ray going off his nut and quoting the bible while he killed baddies. Here you just kill everything. In between chapters you are able to go off and do some side missions but these are more of the same- go and kill everyone and often ending in another annoying duel.
The multiplayer is not too bad and with more of a community, could have been a fun diversion for a while. It’s definitely better than the MP portion of Wolfenstein (a wasted opportunity if ever there was one) with multiple modes. I played a few rounds of a mode where you played as either the outlaws or the law. I was an outlaw, sticking it to the man as I blew up various safes and vaults in a delightful western town circa 1890-ish. Of course, know where the next objectives are are just an invitation to the Law -abiding team to just camp with rifles but it was fun while it lasted. Probably the most fun part of the game since it doesn’t rely on Techland’s half-hearted design.
So while the original was a breath of fresh air, the sequel is as stale as a box of donuts left in the back seat for a month. Looks brand new but probably best left unopened
