Reviewed on PC. Also available on PS3, Xbox 360. Developed by Obsidian. Published by Bethesda
War never changes and neither, so it seems, does Fallout. Released in what some would say is a ‘broken’ state, it’s been patched numerous times already in the 6 or so weeks it has been on the market, upgrading the games status to be slightly less broken. But when it’s not “forcibly making you spend more quality time with your desktop,” AKA crashing, its great.
Fallout 3 came out in 2008 and proved that the combination of Bethesda’s experience and tech from their acclaimed Oblivion title was the recipe for a great RPG, albeit one with a few rough edges that occasionally conspired to stab you in the eye. New Vegas takes the assets and codebase from F3 and lets the team at Obsidian run amok. NV takes the balls, runs with its, plays a rough and dirty game but ultimately wins. It’s like a genius doctor who keeps dropping his cigarette ash on you while he operates.
Set several years after the events of Fallout 3, New Vegas tells the tale of a Courier who’s attacked by some hoods from New Vegas and left for dead. Revived by a kindly small town doctor, The Courier sets off to find the men who shot him/her down. Along the way, the Courier will carry out several missions for various people, faction and towns. Choice is big in this type of game, and it’s not just the number of choices that can change the story, it’s the breadth of choice that’s available to you. You can be whatever the type of person you want to be from a saint to a sinner to everything in between; up to and including robiality (sex with droids), near-necrophilia, cannibalism, addiction, treason and more. It’s an open minded game when you want it to be. It doesn’t judge you, but I do, you sick puppy.
New Vegas’s fiction is set in a completely different part of the country compared to Fallout 3, so the factions and towns are mostly different, apart from some members of the Brotherhood of Steel hanging around. The big doggies here are the NCR (New California Republic) and the Legion, a group of Roman Empire wannabees with New Vegas as the sandwich filling both sides are looking to control. Of course, the big boys controlling New Vegas aren’t interested in being ‘looked after’ by anyone, though they’re happy to do business with either side. One of these interests is the reclusive Mr House who drives a lot of the action, particularly towards the end of the game. You can do more or less the same missions from two entirely different motivations (ie attack the cannibals, or procure them “raw materials.” Occasionally when I would need to restart a section, I would try a different approach and the story outcomes can vary wildly. It’s undeniably one of the game’s strengths. Also, Obsidian can do this without going on and on about it in interviews (you listening, Lionhead-head?)
Just like the first game, you start by walking around Vegas but once you’ve found landmarks, you will be able to fast travel between them, eliminating the tedium of too-much backtracking. In games like this, I generally spend a large part of the early game ‘mapping’ the world to get those landmarks and then being able to whiz between them quickly to churn out missions. The Mojave Wasteland is full of fun places to visit and things to do, and in hindsight seems a lot more interesting to traverse than the decaying ruins of Washington DC depicted in Fallout 3. There are casinos aplenty, factories, saloon, bars, brothels, prisons, camps, bases and more casinos. And when you’re done you can go play cards with random traders. I actually felt it a little better laid out than Fallout 3 (I spent much too time in the subway tunnels in that game) and apart from having to fight wave after wave of those damn giant flies whenever I ventured across the wasteland, it’s mostly fun.
It looks and controls like an FPS for the most part with a well-presented menu system. You spend lots of time in the menus and Bethesda set up a very good scheme that works well on PC and consoles. From trading, managing your inventory and stats, it shows other games how to manage a fairly complex system with ease. It doesn’t hurt that the Pip-Boy is rather iconic. The speech options are also well handled as are those for combat which can either be shooter style or use Fallout 3‘s VATS targeting system. I found I used it a lot less in NV for some reason, perhaps because I better understood it or maybe I prefer shooter controls. Also, I had a lot of fun playing NV on PC using a 360 controller so you can tell these guys know how varied the audience for this game is these days.
It’s also a game that’s both easy and hard to spoil at the same time. You can’t really describe what the game is without giving away something that may be key in any playthrough, but by the same token, the choices offered by the game are such that no two playthrough will be the same. I found the intrigues in New Vegas to be fascinating, each new twist was like reading a thrilling novel- a page turner in fact. It’s interesting to see how similar it is to F3. New Vegas is a refinement of that and perhaps the more frivolous Las Vegas setting has allowed a stronger humourous streak to come to the fore.
Presentation is Fallout 3 revisited though bear in mind I’m comparing my experience of F3 on the 360 and NV on a PC. The ageing Oblivion/ Fallout 3 version of the hopefully now defunct Gamebryo engine (thanks Scott). I found the voice acting to be mainly good for main characters, less good for lesser characters. There are a few stars in there such as Ron Perlman, Felicia Day, that guy from Battlestar Galactica with poor depth perception and they put the right amount of emotion into their readings. Where it falls down is in some of the lesser characters such as ‘Generic Guard A’ or ’2nd Mutant Whore Father’ who are either flat in their delivery or just plain repetitive. There are lots of lines they can say but for some reason everyone seems to say “Patrolling the Mohave makes you wish for Nuclear Winter” a lot. Obviously Fallout has nice sound effects and the music, used sparingly, is really fitting.
And it breaks a lot. You can’t review the game without talking about bugs. There were small things like some weird animation issues, physics bugs, mesh issues, floating or skating characters, etc. But they don’t stop the game being good. What’s less good ares the sidekicks who stop following you and the constant crashing to the desktop. It crashed a lot. Probably more than any game I can ever recall playing. But the game is so good, I just reloaded the game to continue. F3 may have hung on me three or four times over 40 hours, whereas New Vegas would done likewise on close to thirty occasions over 50 hours of play.
In all, New Vegas is a great title but a game where the only thing wrong with it is the stability. It’s close to being my personal game of the year as I can say I enjoyed it more than nearly everything other than Halo and Mass Effect 2.
Available on XBox 360 and PlayStation 3. Developed by Platinum Games. Published by Sega.
The Japanese video game industry is in a weird place. Big western studios backed by big western publishers are directing the gaming climate these days, and aside from Nintendo, who stubbornly blaze their own trail, Japanese developers are making weak and flailing attempts to fit in. Vanquish, a fast-paced, third-person shooter, tries to pin the slick, melodramatic style of anime onto the desperate, cigar-chomping badassery of Gears of War, and ends up with something occasionally hot, but far too short and silly to be more than a forgettable distraction.
You control Sam the DARPA scientist, who smokes, speaks, and spits jargon just like Solid Snake, and who wears an experimental suit that provides him with some nifty abilities (also like Solid Snake, now that I think about it). Like most anime mechanical designs, the suit is powerful to use, but silly to look at. Seriously: the helmet features guards over the eyes and a visor over the mouth. The wearer will be blind, but his squad will be able to tell if he’s smiling.
Anyway, San Francisco gets cooked by some microwave ray fired from some space station hijacked by some Russian guy. The President of the United States, played by Joan Allen, sends a Team of Grizzled Marines (and for some reason, Sam) up to the station to rescue some scientist and take back the place. The details aren’t really that important. The important parts are the firefights, which are usually set in large open areas with lots of opportunities for Sam to take cover, gather weapons, toss grenades, yell at his squadmates to get out of the way, and blast a lot of red robots. I don’t call them that because they’re Russian; most of the enemies in this game really are colored bright red.
The graphics are quite good. Everything is sharp and sterile-looking, with lots of chunky white surfaces to make them look techy and futuristic. Since there’s only one setting in the game, though, you won’t see much variety in the environments. It’s just a lot of windows and catwalks. The cylindrical shape of the space station means you’ll see structures curling up from one end of the horizon to the other, like Halo’s ringworlds. A lot of stuff is burnt up and smashed, of course, and the particle effects on display here look great. The explosions are fantastic, and it’s a joy to watch the bad guys crackle and burst after you’ve pumped them up with lead. Bullets, blood, smoke, sparks, and bits of busted robot rain over every battle, creating a terrific sensation of chaos.
You might be tempted at first to play Vanquish in the same careful manner as you would other cover-based shooters like Uncharted or Gears, but the powers of Sam’s silly suit mean you don’t have to. The suit comes with built-in boosters that allow Sam to slide about like a baseball runner on a luge, only faster. This incredible mobility means you can play the game on your own terms, and flanking bad guys, dodging incoming fire, and sweeping up collectibles is a snap.
The other big feature of the suit is its “synaptic-reflexive augmentation,” better known as Tequila Time. By executing a rolling dodge and then holding the aim button, you can snap Sam into Max Payne mode at will. Some of the more agile robots, as well as the weak spots on the bosses, are nigh impossible to shoot while moving at normal speed, so the bullet time is a necessity.
These two suit powers are neat additions to the third-person shooter kit, but even though they can only be used for brief periods, the advantages they offer you are so great that the game becomes extremely easy. You’ll never feel pinned in place when you can literally run circles around your enemies. When your health is critically low, your suit’s bullet time kicks in automatically, giving you ample time to retreat and recover. What’s more, if you pick up a weapon that you already have, and its ammunition is at full capacity, the weapon will upgrade, Ratchet & Clank style. It will increase in ammo capacity, damage, or firing rate, tilting the scales of power even further in your direction.
There really isn’t much more to tell here. The battle for the space station lasts for a measly five hours, so there isn’t much room for variety. The designers took a few chances: there’s a gunfight on a fast-moving monorail that requires you to blast all the bad guys within a time limit (which, of course, isn’t a great challenge when YOU CAN SLOW TIME DOWN), and a small scene that requires you to shoot out some spotlights. Everything else is one big, open gunfight after another, with melodramatic voice acting filling in the gaps. You get a lot of what the Japanese think is just so damn cool, like super slow-motion, goofily gruff man-banter, inappropriate smoke breaks, and a hot blonde standing in a ring of minority report screens over at control, telling you what’s going to happen next. The girl is usually shown from a creepy, upskirt angle.
Probably the weirdest, and most irritating thing about this game, next to the awful acting, is that between fights, the camera will sometimes zoom into Sam’s helmet, revealing a first-person view. This usually means that you’re about to briefed on something, so you’ll have to endure what amounts to a mildly controllable Codec conversation. You can move Sam around as normal, but his speed is reduced, and you can’t use the boosters or pick up items or fire your guns. You can’t advance or accomplish anything until the talking is done and the camera zooms back out to the standard third-person view, so I have to ask: WHY AREN’T THESE JUST REGULAR, SKIPPABLE CUTSCENES?!
What the hell is going on? Gears of War, Uncharted 1 and 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Red Dead Redemption: they all have these endless scenes where you drag the characters around for minutes on end, while they all just jaw at each other. No action, just yakking! What happened here? Aren’t these shooting games supposed to be the pinnacle of thrilling, overstimulating entertainment? When was the walk-and-talk deemed hot video game action?
I complained about this in a comment to a Kotaku article a few months ago, and some jackass replied by saying, “It’s called a story, which most games tend to have. :/” I say, hey junior, maybe you’re too young or too busy watching Naruto to remember, but there was a time when video game stories were nothing but blurbs in manuals, and though they may have been paper-thin and dumber than a dimestore novel, they never immovably forced themselves into the game experience to pad it out. I say this shit has gone on for too long, and it’s time to go back to the tried and true rule of years past: if you can’t die in a scene, make it skippable.
Maybe that jackass is the kind of person Vanquish was made for. The game is loaded with laughable, over-the-top action and testosterone so the kids playing it can feel cool and powerful, but it also has a lot of unnecessary story and jargon so they can feel like they’re playing something smart and meaningful. Being a grown-up, I’d rather have a game that goes one way or the other.
Vanquish is neither smart nor meaningful, and it’s too easy to be considered worthwhile. It’s like a sweet but unsatisfying soda: briefly stimulating, but not made to fill you up. The characters and story are the definition of “disposable,” and the game ends without challenging or exploiting your suit’s unique capabilities. I can appreciate that you have to create most of the golden moments yourself by way of quick thinking, like when you boost past a phalanx of robots that’s holding your squad back so you can blow them all up with a single grenade, but your character is so powerful, and the levels so simple and straightforward, that you rarely need to use this sort of strategic maneuvering. The game is shockingly short, and doesn’t even offer a multiplayer option to extend its lifespan – not that multiplayer would have worked well with the bullet time mechanic.
With Vanquish, Sega has only succeeded at imitating its betters, and it doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson: next year, it’s gracing us with Binary Domain, ANOTHER game with meatheaded marines yelling at each other and gunning down gaily colored robots. Let me know when the storm is over; I’ll be in my den playing Just Cause 2.
Reviewed on Xbox 360 (soon on PS3, PC). Developed by Crystal Dynamics. Published by SquareEnix/ Eidos
Once upon a time, Lara Croft’s breasts were the biggest thing in gaming. She was featured in commercials, model shoots and Hollywood movies. And apparently there were nine videogames in there as well. Lara Croft: Guardians of Light is as radical departure from your typical Tomb Raider as you can get and still have Lara Croft front and centre. Except she’s not so much front and centre more from above and to the left. Isometric Lara Croft is a mix of platforming, puzzles and twin stick combat in a way that makes everyone think “Why did this take so long?”
So Lara’s in some South American jungle ridden with underground temples littered with fiendish traps from a bygone civilisation. So if the ancient Aztecs, Mayans and Toltecs were so smart, as is depicted in games like this, how come they never invented a bulletproof vest before the likes of Cortez and Pizarro turned up? There’s a coop character who appears if you play through with a friend but I played this as single player game so you infinitely old chum Totec didn’t figure too much in my playthrough outside of the odd cinematic.
With a new perspective that puts less emphasis on minge-cam and more of gameplay, you direct Lara to jump between platforms, manipulate giant stone balls, use an infinite supply of spears to create jumping points, pull levers, etc to progress through the level. Along the way there will be optional side rooms that allow you to pick up a collectible that may also help increase your health or ammo stats, as well. The game is a compulsive’s dream as there are red crystal skulls to collect in each level (collect ‘em all to increase your real-world wealth), a number of challenges that don’t affect the outcome of the game in any way but give you a reason to retry sections over and over (which increases the size of your genitals in real life), time attacks and weapon upgrades. Each level has its own weapon upgrade from pistols to assault rifles, rocket launchers and more. It gets almost silly how much Lara can carry tucked into her bra.
Thanks to well thought out level design, mostly tight controls and generous checkpoints, the game plays well and is fun to boot. Occasionally you’ll get a puzzle that makes you scratch your head for a bit but solving it only adds to the sense of achievement the game engenders. I did have one bit of scripting break the game and I had to restart the level but that wasn’t too much of a hardship. Ingenious use of Lara’s available tools (my favourite are the infinite bombs) in the puzzle design and the wider field of view makes this feel like how Tomb Raider games should have been all along. There’s coop with Totec with online functionality added after launch. How this changes the gameplay I can’t says since the single player doesn’t feature the second character as an AI character.
Graphics are very pretty and sound gets a good rap too. In short it’s a quality product for $15 that will easily take 6-8 hours on a playthrough, more if you attempt to beat a number of challenges. CD say a’proper’ Tomb Raider game is in the works but I think I’ll wait for the inevitable sequel to this title.
Overall, this is this one of the stronger DDD games on XBLA (And eventually PS3 and PC). It’s not an absolutely essential purchase but it is worth the 1200 points/ $15 Square are asking for.
Available on PC, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3. Developed by Avalanche Studios. Published by Square Enix.
I fucking love this game. Just Cause 2 is one of the few games I’ve played that actually delivers what’s promised on the back of its case: “relentless, adrenaline-fueled action.” The genii at Avalanche Studios have slapped the Rockstar trend of angry, dramatic, and satirical open-world games right in the face, and have given us a boisterous smorgasbord of outrageous excitement that doesn’t take itself seriously at all. Just Cause 2 doesn’t give a shit about providing a powerful, emotional experience, it just wants to make you smile. And smile you will, as you turn acre after acre of banana republic property into a mad and swirling inferno.
Just Cause 2 is the latest and best in the recent line of open-world, gently structured action games with big environments, oppressive governments, stupid stories, and even stupider acting. Crackdown started it, Red Faction Guerilla continued it, The Saboteur took it a few steps further up the silly meter, and now Just Cause 2 has mastered it. The story is ludicrous, but I’ll go over it anyway: The president of the tiny Southeast Asian country of Panau has died, leaving his spoiled son in charge. Unfortunately, this new prez, “Baby” Panay, won’t answer the phone when NATO calls. What’s more, Tom Sheldon, a former US agent who was called out of retirement to investigate the Panau situation, has gone missing. So the mysterious “Agency” sends in Rico Rodriguez, played by Al Pacino, to find Sheldon and, in time, bring the misbehaving Panay to his reward. You’ll take control of Rico as you cut a path across the lovely forested landscapes of Panau, exploring villages and towns, piloting vehicles, collecting collectibles, shooting shootables, and most importantly, completing missions for the Agency and the various local criminal groups who also want to see the government pushed to its knees.
You’ll accomplish this revolutionary goal by causing Chaos. Chaos is your measure of progress in Just Cause 2, and you earn it by blowing up government property, such as gas pipelines, fuel depots, radio antennas, and military equipment. When you see an object with the red-and-white Panuan emblem on it, find some way to blow it up. Shoot it, throw a grenade at it, plant some C4 on it, or crash into it with a vehicle. Whatever suits your fancy. As your Chaos number rises, all kinds of things unlock, from strongholds/safehouses, to new Agency missions which advance the story. If you find yourself unable to push forward with the game, just look around for more things to blow up. You’ll get back on track in no time.
Naturally, the Panauan military won’t appreciate your efforts to destabilize it. You can kill all the civilians you want, but if you so much as shoot a government-issued trash can, look out. As you cause Chaos, the “Heat Meter” fills up, and the redcoats will come after you in droves. You’ll wield the usual assortment of shoot-em-up weaponry (revolvers, shotguns, SMGs, rocket launchers) to battle them. Just Cause 2 features a helpful automatic lock-on aiming system, so you can run and jump all over while you fight, and as long as you keep your finger on the trigger, you’ll probably hit someone. Once you’ve had your fill of gunfighting, or once the odds start to turn against you, head for the hills. Stay out of sight for a while, and the Heat meter will empty. The soldiers will eventually lose interest in you and leave you alone again, so you can plan your next assault.
Alec Mason liberated Mars with a simple sledgehammer. Sean Devlin fought the Nazis with a fistful of dynamite. Rico Rodriguez takes on the Panay regime with two slightly more unusual tools: a parachute and a grappling hook. These two items are a revelation. With Rico’s parachute, there’s never any fear of death by falling. You can leap off of any tall building or out of any high-flying jet, and land safely. Magically, Rico seems to have an infinite number of these parachutes in his little backpack, and they never get caught on tree branches or power lines. The grappling hook is also surprisingly useful. If you can see something, you can get to it with the grappling hook. Just aim at any surface and hit L1/LB, and Rico goes soaring towards it. It works simply and performs beautifully. The grappling hook is great for getting yourself out of enemy firing lines and behind cover, crossing long stretches of land, and for quick escapes to the rooftops.
The hook also has some more creative applications than these. You can fire it at enemy soldiers to grab them and yank them. This is great for pulling them out of cover, or from behind mounted gatling guns, or down from lookout towers. By holding L1/LB to attach the hook to one object, and then releasing the button while aiming at another object, you can tether the two objects together. You can hook a big truck to a statue of Baby Panay, and then drive the truck forward to pull the statue down. You can hook a soldier to the ceiling and then fire at him while he dangles. You can hook a car to a helicopter and airlift it. You can hook a person to a gas canister and then shoot the canister, propelling it forward on a fiery leak and taking its hapless attachment for a wild ride. You can spend hours just dreaming up crazy and cruel tricks to try.
Assault helicopters, the bane of characters like Mason and Gordon Freeman, are but a minor irritation for Rico and his grappling hook. If a tenacious chopper swoops in to strafe you, all you have to do is aim up and grapple onto it, where you’ll hang from the underside. From there, you can climb to the front of the chopper, shoot out any armed passengers, toss out the pilot, and commandeer it yourself! The most satisfying part of this is hearing the poor pilot scream and scream as he plummets to the earth. Truly, the grappling hook is the heart and soul of this game.
If you don’t want to wait for the military to send a chopper after you, you can always call up your black market buddy Sloth Demon, and have one delivered. After completing the game’s first Agency mission, Rico is given a special beacon, which he can use at any time, even during missions, to have armaments and vehicles dropped at his feet. It functions similarly to the air drops in the Mercenaries games. The items aren’t cheap, and the best ones have to be unlocked by causing Chaos, but since you rack up money and Chaos just by blasting and collecting stuff, finances are rarely a problem. Sloth Demon will become your very best buddy when you get caught without ammo during a tense firefight, or when a target on the horizon looks a little too dangerous to conquer on foot. Even a broad and steely military base offers little resistance when you can just order up a tank at will, as I do in the following video:
Yes, Rico can quickly and seamlessly move from one deadly vehicle to another, but they’re not invulnerable by any means. Military installations are often dotted with SAM sites that are just waiting for you to pilot a flying vehicle so they can take you down. Good thing you have your parachute! Remember that cutscene in Uncharted where Nathan Drake and his chick are flying a plane out to an island, when they get hit by anti-aircraft fire, and they have to skydive out to safety? Well, in Just Cause 2, not only can you actually DO that instead of just watching it, you can do it several times in one gaming session!
Traveling is a big part of Just Cause 2, but it’s rarely the chore that it is in some other open-world games. Rico can pilot any of the dozens of motorcycles, sedans, sports cars, ATVs, speedboats, jeeps, tanks, helicopters, airliners, and jet fighters he’ll find around Panau, but even on foot, Rico can maneuver in some nifty ways. One of these moves is the stunt jump, accomplished with a single press of Circle/B, which makes Rico leap onto the hood or roof of a nearby vehicle, even if it’s in motion. From this position, he can fire on approaching enemies, grapple onto a nearby surface, throw the driver out and take the wheel for himself, or even stunt jump onto another passing vehicle! If you’re on a busy highway, you can perform “stunt jump combos” by leaping from one vehicle roof to another.
Rico’s other great trick is the slingshot maneuver, or as I like to call it, “grapplechuting,” which combines the utilities of his trusty parachute and grappling hook. You start it off by firing your grappling hook into a distant surface, and then opening your parachute while you’re being pulled to your target. Then, while your chute is open, aim at the ground ahead of you, and fire the hook again. Rico will keep his parachute open and reel himself forward with the grappling hook cord. If you can repeat this process often enough to maintain your momentum, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you’ll get around.
For all the goodness it provides, I’m nonetheless willing to admit that Just Cause 2 can be pretty annoying at times. The first problem most players will encounter is the surprising learning curve. Rico’s moves aren’t especially difficult to pull off, but he has so many of them, from dual-wielding to grappling around to ordering items, that it’s easy to forget what your options are once the bullets start flying. It will take some practice before your eyes finally open up to Rico’s impressive maneuverability.
Just Cause 2 is also susceptible to a disease common to open-world games, which I call “Who-the-fuck-is-shooting-me Syndrome.” Since the game has no intentional level design, enemy soldiers can and will spawn from just about anywhere, and they’re going to hit you before you can hit them. This is especially frustrating when you think you’ve cleared an area out, and you’re trying to relax or grab a pickup, and then a new horde of bad guys starts firing from behind you.
The game’s health system is also unnecessarily complicated. Rico has the Halo/Gears/Uncharted Healing Factor that refills his health bar if he avoids damage for a short time, but it won’t fill the bar completely. To get all your health back, you need to find and activate first aid kits, and they’re not as common as you might think. This can be frustrating when you complete a tough mission with reduced health, and then have to choose between hunting around for first aid, or beginning your next task at a disadvantage. For some stupid reason, you can’t order up or carry first aid kits with you to use in emergencies. What the hell, man? Even Mega Man can do that!
I should also mention that one of the mandatory Agency missions involves an extremely frustrating escort segment. Rico has to protect some unarmed moron who can’t stop himself from charging headlong into enemy ambushes. I’ve been playing video games for a long time, and I haven’t met a single person who actually enjoys doing escort missions. Pay heed, Avalanche: no one liked escort missions in Wing Commander, no one liked them in Dead Rising, and no one’s going to like them here. I say we put a stop to this escort nonsense right now! Who’s with me?
The Agency missions can be lengthy and complicated, but the criminal faction missions are all pretty brief, and some of them can be completed in a minute or two if you use a good strategy. Unfortunately, one of them, called “Black Gold,” has a serious glitch that makes the mission impossible to complete. Your goal is to fly to a distant offshore oil derrick and blow up a certain number of its fuel tanks. If you destroy only a portion of them, die, and choose to retry the mission from the you-died menu, the mission progress meter will reset, but the fuel tanks you busted in your first attempt won’t return. This means that you won’t be able to perform all the destruction you need to do to finish the mission. Thankfully, this is not a game-killing bug, and it can be resolved by manually aborting the mission and then accepting it again, but it can be maddening if you don’t recognize it as a bug right away.
Funky bugs are all over the place in Just Cause 2. Some of them are frustrating, such as a strange one that causes enemies to spawn within buildings, where they can shoot you but you can’t shoot them, while others are pretty damn funny, like this headless fellow here:
Amazingly, when set against the undiluted craziness that this game is intentionally providing, this sort of glitch isn’t disruptive in the slightest. It’s just another thread in the tapestry, another gift from the game that keeps on giving.
Just Cause 2 isn’t just a gem, it’s a perfectly cut diamond. I know that I’ve been gushing on about it for good while here, but I doubt that I could ever run out of good things to say about it. If you’re looking for your game to deliver something “grown-up” and “meaningful,” go kick a horse around the dull and depressing deserts of Red Dead Redemption. If you want a terrific, beautiful action game that’s just a ton to fun to fool around in, Just Cause 2 is it. From its opening skydive to its hilariously stupid final objective, Just Cause 2 is so far over the top that it really should be called Just Awesome. As goofy as it is, though, I don’t think it goes quite far enough, and that’s what keeps it from dethroning Total Carnage as my favorite video game of all time. What I’d really love to see is a game with the same controls and basic structure as Just Cause 2, but which engulfs you crazy, crooked, sci-fi architecture, hordes of mutated creeps to kill, and towering, bloodthirsty bosses that you have to grapple onto and tear apart piece by piece. THAT would be, quite honestly, the only game I would ever play.
Reviewed on PS3. Developed by From Software. Published by Atlus.
I have beaten the dark fantasy game Demon’s Souls, and it took me a good long while. Having passed through its voluptuous challenges alive, I can say that my opinion about it has changed somewhat. I went over the rules and details of the game in my first review of it, so I won’t repeat myself here. The purpose of this re-review is to describe some of the intangible aspects I discovered about Demon’s Souls that transform its plodding and frustrating experience into one of the most addictive and engrossing games I’ve played in years.
Demon’s Souls has every advantage over you. Each of the game’s five worlds has its share of unique dangers, from fire-breathing dragons to arrow-traps to poisonous marshes, and each of them is capable of shredding an unprepared adventurer in seconds. Losing in one of its grand boss fights, and then dying again to weak monster while making a corpse run, causing all those souls you gathered to vanish, is a lesson in heartbreak. Many times, in the course of my playthrough, I tossed my Dual Shock aside and flopped onto my bed in hopelessness. I’d turn off the console, go do something else, and then, the next day, fire up Demon’s Souls again.
I’ve always been drawn to games with high difficulty levels, but I don’t put up with them if they cheat. The thing about Demon’s Souls is that it’s completely fair and consistent. The enemies are unintelligent, and they repeat the same attacks over and over, usually leaving themselves open. The traps behave the same way every time you activate them, so they’re easily avoided once you know where they are. The challenge of Demon’s Souls often comes from the environments, the level design. Enemies are often placed in tight corridors or on narrow cliffs where dodging is difficult. Traps sometimes fire from behind you when sprung, so you’ll hear them but won’t know what’s happened until you’re hit in the back. Luring tactics are often required in areas where enemies hang out in groups. The traps and monsters are always set the same places when you enter a level, though, so they’re easy to handle with the right preparation.
Building a strategy requires a lot of patience and persistence, which is something video games don’t often demand anymore. You play a game like Uncharted or Halo, which are liberally peppered with checkpoints, and you never have to replay much when you die. In Demon’s Souls, though, and in difficult games from the past, such as Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania, you need to replay a significant chunk of a level upon dying, so that sooner or later, the tougher areas become a part of your memory.
I’ve said before that I’m not much for “performance games,” games which require memorization in order to win them, but in Demon’s Souls, the levels rarely play out identically from one attempt to another. The monsters switch up their attacks, they weave, they circle, and they spar. They may not be smart, but they’re not always predictable either. Recognizing telegraphed attacks, dodging or blocking them, and then countering, all while managing your stamina, makes the combat in Demon’s Souls reminiscent of Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! games. Even the toughest bosses can be beaten using this basic strategy. It just requires a little patience while you wait for that opening.
Practice and reflexes are all well and good, but Demon’s Souls is an RPG at heart, so playing its numbers is just as important as having fast fingers. It’s important to know that each weapon in the game has properties such as slashing, piercing, blunt, magical, and physical damage, which differ in effectiveness against the game’s bevy of baddies. It won’t do much good to stick with a weapon that only inflicts heavy physical damage, since it won’t have much effect against a creature like Flamelurker, who is only weak against magical attacks.
So specialization is discouraged. Keep at least one of everything. Keep a spear, a sword, a hammer, and a bow. Keep a shield that protects against magic, and another shield that keeps your stamina high, even after multiple blocks. You’ll need to upgrade multiple weapons in multiple ways using the multitude of ores you’ll find, so that you have a broad variety of attack types at your disposal. Knowing what weapons work best on each monster and boss requires experimentation and time, but it also provides you with a huge advantage, and once it all comes together in your head, and you start tearing through the bad guys, you’ll feel like a fucking genius.
And the reason you’ll feel so accomplished is that game didn’t hold your hand along the way. All that planning and practice is easy to stomach because Demon’s Souls doesn’t say a word while you do it. Like a good parent, it shuts its yap and lets you set your own goals, and learn from your own mistakes. It doesn’t give you hints when you fall to a boss, like Batman Arkham Asylum, it doesn’t interrupt your play with interminable cutscenes and dialogue, and it doesn’t shove text boxes in your face about locked doors and levers, like a Zelda game. Truly, this is a Zelda game for grown-ups.
As annoying as it could be at times, I couldn’t help but be drawn to Demon’s Souls again and again until I was through it. Then I found myself picking it up again to play the New Game+, even though I told myself that I wouldn’t. Here is a game that is a truly demanding gauntlet, but beyond each hurdle is a grand and satisfying reward. Simple, stupid experiences like Darksiders, which don’t let you move for a few seconds without hitting you in the face with a fanciful cutscene, can’t hold a candle to the endless, absorbing, almost obsessive experience that Demon’s Souls provides. I still can’t say it’s better than Canabalt, but it’s damn close. This is one of the best games I’ve ever played.
Reviewed by Lisvender on PS3 Developed by From Software. Published by Atlus.
From Software’s first game since Demon’s Souls is a weird creature. It’s a Zeldalike that doesn’t borrow from current Zeldas, but from the original one for the NES. It presents itself as an experience stuck between generations of graphical technology, and similarly, it plays as a game stuck between generations of design theory. It is a cheerfully self-aware love letter to not only Zelda, but to fantasy adventures of the 8-bit day, but, sadly, that novelty is its only true feature.
Long, long ago, the Dark King Onyx, a really bad dude, set his army of monsters on Dotnia, a quaint little kingdom located somewhere between Hyrule and Alefgard. A courageous warrior and six powerful sages worked together to defeat Onyx and seal him in an orb, and peace returned to the land. Unfortunately, if not surprisingly, this peace was not to last. Now, hundreds of years later, the power-hungry bishop Fuelle gets his hands on that orb, puts a curse on the princess of Dotnia, and steals away to a tall tower surrounded by poisonous swamps. Monsters are running rampant across the land, and rumors of Onyx’s return have the good people in a panic. Now the descendants of the sages and the warrior must unite to put a stop to Fuelle’s scheme.
You play the warrior’s descendant, and you’ll have explore the countryside, delve into underground labyrinths, and battle bad guys as you search for the sages’ descendants and gather their power. You’ll explore six different temples, each with a big boss at the end. Your character fights with a sword and a shield, but he/she will also make use of a series of useful tools, including a boomerang to stun enemies, a bow and arrow to hit switches, bombs for breaking open walls, and candles to light dark halls. It’s all very Zelda, but a few twists make Heroes stand out from the games it apes.
The most noticeable aspect of the game is its appearance. Dotnia is a curious place, and a singular one among video game worlds. It’s rendered in 3D, but everything in it is built from very large blocks, as though roughly translated from chunky, low-resolution pixel art. Characters move with jumpy, two-frame animations, and slain monsters burst open into a shower of boxes. It’s meant to look like an 8-bit game brought a step nearer to reality.
Heroes’s look is initially striking, but this awkward, teenaged area that Dotnia occupies creates some problems. Some current visual effects have worked their way into this growing land: depth of field effects, light and shadows, and sparkling reflections are everywhere. Unfortunately, these effects are so prevalent as to be distracting and annoying at times. The game includes a character editor, which allows you to sculpt your own 3D pixel thing and use it as your hero, Spore-style. Putting together a character box by box, though, is tedious, and when viewed from the perspectives that the game provides, your creation will be hardly recognizable.
In fact, hardly any of the game’s details are recognizable during play. The simply designed inhabitants of Heroes would probably look great if viewed directly from the front or side, as they would be in the 2D games that inspired them, but here, as 3D models looked down on from a bird’s-eye view, they dissolve into blocky bundles of angular confusion. Using one of the game’s zoomed-in camera angles makes the details more noticeable, but it also makes effectively fighting and exploring impossible. You can only change the camera angle in the overworld, anyway, so you won’t see a difference in the dungeons.
Which brings me to another problem. The viewpoint in the dungeons is fixed at a low angle, which means that everything up against the near, “fourth” wall is obscured. This can be irritating when monsters creep down there, but it’s really frustrating when a critical puzzle object, such as a floor switch or a hookshot pole, is positioned down there. The only way to really figure out rooms like that is to use an FAQ, or to make a lucky guess.
The other major difference between Zelda and Heroes is the big sword. You’ve probably heard about it. When your character is at full health, his/her sword will grow to an enormous size, allowing you to swipe down monsters with joy and aplomb. You can bring your sword to a blacksmith to increase its size until it reaches across the screen and pierce through walls if you wish. Much has been made of the big sword in 3D Dot Game Heroes, but while it makes a fine symbolic image for the game, I consider it a liability. The big sword is so effective that it makes all the other treasures in the game unnecessary except as keys to progress gates. Why bother using the bow, the boomerang, or the fire rod, when the sword wipes out your enemies so much more quickly than they do?
The audio is good in some parts, just okay in others. The music is layered with happy, chirpy chiptunes, but it also features some strong horns and strings, and a few songs, such as the main overworld theme, are quite catchy. Some of the dungeon themes, however, can be grating. Tools and bombs make strong, satisfying sounds, and when you strike an enemy with your sword, you’ll hear one of the best slashing samples ever used in a game. What you won’t hear is any voice acting, as the game employs the traditional text boxes of RPGs past, but for the dialogue you get here, that might be a blessing.
There’s a ton of nerd humor in 3D Dot Game Heroes, some of it subtle, obscure, and clever, and the rest broad and heavy. While the game plays like Zelda, references to many different classic games are everywhere. Dragon Warrior gets the lion’s share of the attention, with sound effects, characters, and conversations lifted directly from the beloved series, while Final Fantasy, Hydlide, Tower of Druaga, and Spelunker get their dues as well. Each of the game’s loading screens is Dotnia-style riff on a classic video game’s box art, too, and this would be cute if the game didn’t load so often.
It’s a little confusing that we have games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Uncharted 2, which feature complex, detailed environments and yet stream data seamlessly, while 3D Dot Game Heroes, with its small, simple world and no voice acting, which loads every time your character enters a new area. There’s an install option on the main menu, but even that doesn’t do away with the loading entirely. I’m truly bewildered by this. The only explanation I can think of is that From Software didn’t give this game much time for optimization. It would certainly explain its jumpy frame rate. Yes, this game, with its simple graphics, can’t manage a stable frame rate. If you kill too many enemies and have too many little blocks flying around the screen, or if you’re in a room with a lot of lighting effects running, the game chugs. What the hell? Is this really what we should expect from an exclusive on the most powerful games console on earth?
3D Dot Game Heroes is a tough game to review. It’s joyful, and it revels in the simplicity of the 8-bit era, but it also has very little of its own to say. It can be enjoyable to run around Dotnia smashing monsters with a big sword, but it also feels unbalanced, with many of its items and ideas going underused. The pseudo/retro graphics are charming, but they wreck the visibility. To give this game a 1/3 feels too harsh, but to give it a 2/3 seems too generous. Perhaps the best solution is to give it both scores, and then summarize my position thus: 3D Dot Game Heroes is pretty good for smiling at the past, but if you want to play a Zelda game, trust in the name brand.
Controller1.com rating: 1/3 (2/3 for retro lovers)
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PS3. Developed by Rock Star San Diego. Published by Rock Star
Many years in the making, this sorta-sequel to Red Dead Revolver, offers the industry to take another crack at making the definitive western-based game. I don’t know if this is that game.
The original game was started off by Capcom before Rock Star/Take 2 tool over publishing duties. It was a relatively linear third-person shooter that was a reasonably successful game at retail, competing against a few disappointing western games such as Dead Man’s Hand and Gun (which seems like the best game to compare RDR to).
You play as John Marston, a former outlaw roped by unscrupulous government agents into hunting down his former gang members. Along the the way you take on missions for various people- sometimes on opposing factions, engage in a number of diversions and take your cousin Roman to a strip club.
The theme of this review will be similarities between this game and GTAIV. Considering GTA uses the Rage engine developed for this game, and considering that GTA is Rock Star and Take 2’s major source of income, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing such a similar game.
So you can walk around with the lft analog stick, press A to run, tap A repeatedly to sprint (despite the fact you have an ANALOG stick to control movement. You can also ride a horse and move the horse by pressing… well, you can guess, can’t you? You can jump and climb but these actions are best used occasionally.
Of course, this being a western, it’s all about guns. You have access to pistols, rifles, shotguns, knives, bombs, a lasso and of course, your fists. GTA has never gotten the hang of shooting in third-person mode without locking on to targets. Here, it has been greatly simplified, so much so that it’s inordinately easy to pull the left trigger to zoom in on the nearest foe and shoot with the right trigger. Perhaps, too easy.
To get around, you have a horse, who thankfully will appear whenever you whistle for it. Since so much of the game’s exposition is relayed to you while you’re travelling to somewhere new with someone, holding down A will more or less put you on autopilot so you can just sit back and marvel at how much you don’t want to listen to the conversation. Occasionally, the game gives you the option to skip the journey.
Missions consist of the usual “kill this person and his henchmen” though often you’re given the chance to use your cowboy skills with a rope and hog tie the target and carry him on your horse. Then there are numerous missions where you escort a train, and others where you ride shotgun on a carriage. And then a fair few on rails sequences where you’re manning a gatling gun. Truth be told, they get a bit stale as the game wears on since so many seem cut and paste.
Some missions involve you performing actual cowboy work such as herding cattle and breaking in wild horses. These are so much fun that I intend on shooting any stray cattle or horses if ever come across them in real life. The kicker is some of these are not optional and you need to do these to progress. And there’s another kicker, you have to do some of this right at the end of the game before you can undertake the final mission.
This being an open world game, there needs to be a plethora of side missions to keep you busy and in this regard, Rock Star does not disappoint. Well, it doesn’t disappoint in terms on numbers of side missions, but it might in terms of how much fun they are for anyone not having OCD tendencies. You can collect herbs, hunt and skin animals, herd cattle, find missing people, stop robbers and cattle rustlers, break horses, and test the limits of your patience.
The game lets you save more or less anywhere apart from someone else’s settlement and a road by setting up a campsite. Campsites also give you access to fast travel to anywhere you’ve been before, but at some point you can also warp to a waypoint. This is a little sluggish since you select the campsite, wait for a nice animation of Marston kneeling down by the campfire, then select fast travel, then your destination, then watch Marston put out the fire before you go to a loading screen. Not for this game, the instantly changing HUD of, say, Mass Effect or Gun.
The game’s presentation is top notch with the only minor niggle being some sometimes very obvious pop-in (something that many open world games suffer from). The art style is appealing and nicely rendered and animations are detailed as you would expect from a game utilising Euphoria for it’s animations. Of course, you often have to wait for these animations to do their thang so while that takes away some immediacy to your actions, it does offer a level of polish not seen this side of a cadet review.
The sound is noteworthy. Voice acting, like most Rock Star games, is top notch and feature some of the Houser twins cynical wit. Something to note is the lack of familiar voices (no Keith David or Nolan North) which sometimes pull you out of the game. Music is fantastic, evoking the west and the best of Morricone’s spaghetti western scores without being a slave to the era *cough* folk rock *cough*
So it’s mostly fun, then again, I avoided almost every side mission where possible and skipped the cutscenes. “Why would you do that? They’re beautiful,” you say. Well, they are paced to show off the animation, meaning they’re mostly dull (the ones I sat through anyway). I find that in GTA games, knowing the motivations of the characters is moot since many of you allies will eventually be your enemies. And then there are the interminable conversations when you travel with someone. These are mostly unskippable and while they fill in the details for skippers like me, they still just remind you that your are watching a cinematic without any editing. Checkpoints are mostly well spaced and seem a lot less punitive than GTA, so there’s one major improvement on the template. You can be a rogue or a good guy, but as it’s not really going to affect the story or more than a few of your character’s stats, it’s up to you how douche you go.
I didn’t touch multiplayer since it seems to be a bit unfocused and chaotic (not in a good way) for my liking (as in GTAIV), but there’s a decent amount of single-player fun to be had. How much fun is down to your enjoyment of the side missions on offer here- bounty and stranger missions aside, are close to Animal Crossing type mundanity.
Worth the praise it’s received? No. Good? Yes? Worth playing? Probably. you have to enjoy cutscenes and have some patience as there is not the ability to cause as much mayhem as in GTA. If tooling around doing nothing is your thing, you might find this world to be a little lacklustre.
So Portal. Although we briefly reviewed it long ago, it’s back, it’s on Mac for the first time, and it’s free on Mac or PC for a limited time (if you’re reading this and the date doesn’t rhyme with Bay two thousand and Len, it’s too late). How do you describe this phenomenon? Starting off as a HL2 mod before Valve released it as a full product and as part of The Orange Box in 2007, Portal is a first person puzzle game with more charisma than a cheerleader after a half a bottle of bourbon.
The protagonist is a girl called Chell, who remains voiceless, locked in an underground testing facility with only your wits, and eventually a strange gun that opens up holes in the wall. Think of those old Looney tunes cartoons where Daffy Duck moves a hole in the ground as if it was was a piece of cloth, or more recently, the short film with the magician and the rabbit that preceded Wall-E- that’s what the Portal gun does.
Your abilities in the game are rather limited. You can walk, crouch, jump and lift and that’s about it until you get the Portal Gun, which allows you to open up one end of a tunnel in the wall, the floor or the ceiling (though not every surface). Later on, you receive an enhancement that gives you control over the other end of the tunnel, but it’s a fairly simple move set. Of course, add momentum and the game opens up to a whole new level of fiendish puzzles, each more dastardly…
YOU BASTARDS, VALVE!
So the game itself is brilliant and two and a half years later is still fantastic. We have a sequel coming later this year which is a full priced game with multiplayer aspects to it. Huh? Doesn’t take like three hours to beat? I haven’t mentioned GlaDOS yet.
Chell may not speak but GlaDOS, the computer running the Aperture Science facility you find yourself in sure as shit has a story to tell (Aperture are a competitor to Half Life’s Black Mesa and are briefly glimpsed at the end of Half Life 2: Episode 2). GlaDOS is a rather typical computer offering you hints and tips in between challenges and occasionally during levels. But the hints and tips aren’t particularly reliable as you come to realise GlaDOS isn’t particularly trustworthy. GlaDOS turns a cool puzzle game into something special. The vocoded/autotuned voice augments a fantastic vocal performance. GlaDOS is almost the only voice heard in the game but you’d have to have a pretty cold heart not to crack a smile at the inanity of its statements.
The graphics were never flashy but there were clean and gave you a good sense of the environment inside of Aperture. The sound is simple and works fantastically. There’s very little music in Portal but it has its probably the most quote song lyric of any game. Still Alive is still considered one of the best pieces of game music ever written and I love it. So does Bob Dylan.
So how does it work on a Mac? Like a PC, only you change the mouse first. Yes, one button mouse jokes in 2010 are funny. They just aren’t particularly accurate. That said, any USB Logitech or MS mouse will be a better gaming mouse than a mighty or magic mouse. OK, I have a decent machine with a decent card, not something the entry level Apple computers have featured but hopefully Valve’s entry into this more or less untapped (apart from casual games and two year old ports) market will stimulate development in this area. A few teething problems (Valve have patched it twice in the few days I played this), but nothing worse than Windows. I am looking forward to finally playing Left 4 Dead 2 when it shows up in a few weeks, a game that should be a much better showcase.
Mac’s main ting hamstringing it isn’t the reduced spec of video cards, it’s the lack of Direct X- something most PC games are based around. Open GL fills in many of the holes but wit will take more development to see both systems on par. That said, if you already boot camp for the PC only stuff, Valve allows you to play the game on Mac or PC without charging any extra. Nice. And it only takes 3-4 hours to play. If you get bored there’s also the developer commentaries, plus you can import bonus maps and challenges- though I can’t say if these are the same as those on Portal- Still Alive expanded edition released on XBLA a while back.
Get in quick and grab it for less that it costs to buy a DVD-R.
Reviewed on PC. Also on: PS3, Xbox 360. Developed by Rocksteady. Published by Eidos (Square Enix)
So you’re Batman. You’ve just captured the Joker and are just dropping him off at Arkham Asylum, Gotham City’s biggest and best nuthouse. And then, shit gets real…
All hell breaks loose on Arkham Island and Batman has to track down his nemesis, as well as several other villains conveniently locked up in the asylum. It’s a mix of exploration, combat and action, telling a story in a way that sounds like an ordinary license but has so much flair and inventiveness that you will never automatically talk about Uncharted 2 as the best game of 2009. How is this possible? Let’s break it down.
Note: I played this on PC with a mouse and keyboard. And it needs a gamepad and since there’s no 360 gamepad driver for my computer, mouse and keyboard it is. I recommend playing this with a controller.
You play as Batman (duh), criss-crossing the island in search of clues, beating up roid head convicts, taking on the odd boss, exploring all sorts of nooks and crannies. You detect, you codebreak, you grapple and you beat the living shit out of things. You are, after all, THE Batman. Not just a batman. The definite article.
Unlike other superheroes, Batman doesn’t have superpowers. He’s just an ordinary roid-enhanced (as are all the men in this, it has to be said) dude with lots of gadgets such as his Batarang, a grappling hook, a decoder etc, to help him through his tasks. Gadgets unlock at salient points in the game, many of which allow Batman to get to areas you would have noticed during the early stages of your travels, areas that early on, you can merely look at longfully, ruing that you will have to come back at a later date if you’re remotely OCD. Batman also has Detective mode, which highlights areas of interest and x-rayed allies/enemies. It will help Bats to find ledges to grapple to, to find vents, track down traces of DNA, etc. And if you find yourself not playing in Detective mode 90% of the time, I would be royally surprised. Some gadgets can also be used as weapons, but these generally only have a temporary stunning effect on some foes, but useful nonetheless. Batman doesn’t use guns. He’s Batman.
Combat in the game is simple- usually just a button for attack with another for countering and a third to stun some foes who are otherwise impervious to your blows. Combat is generally not random and metered out in a fun way at intervals that help vary the game’s overall pacing nicely. Often the game will lock you in a room with a set number of foes to beat (like 90% of other games). Of course if you knock them down, you’ll still need to perform a takedown in many cases. Bosses are well thought out in general with a degree of variety (apart from Scarecrow encounters, which are really just 2D stealth missions) though your enjoyment of them may vary. Of course, the game, though it looks like a brawler, isn’t a beat-em-up. It just does the fights it does offer quite well. This could so easily have turned into fight wave after wave of enemies, monotony being your constant companion and repetition your amusingly Southern sidekick dealio.
If you end up in an area with armed foes, then the game requires you to take a stealthier approach, since if you run in expecting to take out armed guards with just your fists, you’re going to die faster than a whale on a plankton-free diet. These chambers usually have stone gargoyles along the ceiling and you’re meant to take a guard out quietly, then using your grappling hook to zip up to a Gargoyle. If you’re seen, rapidly moving between gargoyles seems to confuse your pursuers, because really, they’re that stupid. AA is easily the best stealth game since Metal Gear 3 or Splinter Cell:Chaos Theory (not to denigrate MGS4 or the latest Splinter Cell- but they aren’t really stealth games any more, are they?). Many of your gadgets also assist in combat with the batarang, explosive gel and grapple gun able to assist you in briefly disarming foes while you move in for the takedown. The game will also mix these up by placing restrictions and adds to the feeling that everything old is new but still way cool and fresher than a daisy that’s won Fresh Daisy of the Year. Remember how everyone says Grabbed By the Ghoulies is one of Rare’s worst games (I’d put Perfect Dark Zero in that slot)? Well Rocksteady obviously took something away from that game since they do the exact same thing here.
You upgrade your gadgets by finding them, but every little thing you do contributes experience points, which will unlock upgrades such as better suit armour, enhanced abilities for your gadgets etc. You also have The Riddler placing puzzles all over the island, most of which just involve finding an icon, but some others require scanning using detective mode. You can also find recordings of Therapy sessions with some of the choice inmates. Replay is a big focus with this game, with challenges unlocked as you play the game (these are accessed separately from the main game.
The game has a story to tell, something many titles based on comics don’t do very well, concentrating on action. Comics have wiz-bang action but they tell a story and here, story is well serviced by what’s happening. You feel the story unfolds around you, not just in loading mission briefing screens on games such as MW2. The story also doesn’t usurp the game as Hideo Kojima fails to understand time and time again. So we do get to see a fair few of Batman’s favourites, to name them all would A) spoil the game and B) reveal I haven’t gotten to the end. Oops, what a giveaway! Batman fans of most persuasions will get a kick out of this game (unless you can’t accept anyone other than Heath Ledger portraying the Joker).
Speaking of actors, Kevin Conroy’s more measured Batman is easier to listen to than the what-the-fuck-is-going-on with Christian Bales’ voice in the latest films. Occasionally there’s a little wood in some of his lines, such is the deadpan delivery but he’s as badass as he needs to be. Of note is Mark Hamill’s performance as The Joker. Whether in cutscenes or bombarding you with his wisdom over the Asylum’s public address system, he gets it note perfect. All’s I can say Luke- lay off the lucky strikes and Bourbon-flavoured Corn Flakes. Huskier than the Iditarod, he gives it his all. It’s probably his best villainous performances since Cock-knocker but since that wasn’t that great. Anyhoo…
The presentation in this game is uniformly excellent with this being possibly THE single most polished game of last year. Visuals are fantastic with an art style that let Rocksteady’s team bring this dense world alive. Sounds is top notch with a sound design that games will be referencing for years to come. It’s purdy and sounds nice, too. I’m assured the console versions look nice as well.
It’s hard not to recommend this game to practically anyone referring to gaming as a hobby. It’s got action, it’s got drama, it’s got Harley Quinn upskirts, it’s got a ***-**** (how the fuck to you build that under a high security installation with no-one noticing?). Also- it’s usually quite cheap by now so no excuses.
Controller1.com Rating 3/3
Review rig specs: quadcore PC with 8GB RAM and a 512MB ATI 4870 card. Monitor resolution at 1920X1200. Win 7 64 bit. Steam version tested.
Reviewed on PS3. Also on PC, Xbox 360 Developed by Pandemic. Send to to die by EA.
Pandemic’s last release before being shuttered late last year, The Saboteur is a third-person, open world action game set in Paris during the Nazi occupation of WWII. You play as Sean Devlin, a hard drinkin’, hard-lovin’, hard drivin’, hard swearin’ fecker possibly from Ireland who wreaks havoc throughout gay Paris. Released with less fanfare than a deaf marching band, The Saboteur set new records for a major release being barely marketed and therefore ignored by the buying public. It’s also a cracker of a game.
As with many Pandemic games, it’s a melting pot of other games, most notably GTA. Take GTA and set it in World War II, an idea that is surprising only in that it took so long for someone to actually do it. You’ve played GTA, right? Well add in the ability to climb up most buildings a la inFamous or Assassin’s Creed; then add the dozens of items to blow up (channeling, though not copying, Red Faction Guerrilla’s biggest thrill) and add in some rather wonky driving mechanics; add a pinch of over the top stereotypical accents and more tits than you can poke something resembling a stick at or at least something that is stick-shaped in a NSFW type of way and you have The Saboteur.
Sean Devlin is an Irish mechanic-cum-racing driver in Paris during the Nazi occupation who fast becomes the go-to guy for most of the resistance factions. You’ll meet a faction leader and they may give you a mission that’s either a side mission or one that will advance the storyline. Variety here is pretty good and you don’t get the feeling that you did the same mission for another guy earlier in the game. Now some of the story missions have a really epic scope. Not to say they’re overly long, but you don’t that “scripted by a level designer out of available elements” feeling that many of the missions in GTA /GTA-style games engender. So you might be assassinating an informant in one mission with a sniper rifle; having to kill a German general locked up safely in an armoured car surrounded by a division on men; Or take sabotage a bridge, then kidnap a defecting scientist from the train before it reaches said bridge, all the while laying waste to Germans. Lots of laffs guaranteed. Play this game and join the Laffwaffer.
Some of these side missions can be done easily by hijacking a gun emplacement or unlocking certain weapons, others can be exercises in frustration as you attempt to escape from hordes of Nazis. And I mean hordes. Not so much at the start, but around the time you hit the game’s halfway point, there is a marked spike in Nazi aggression to the point where mission restarts become commonplace. There are at least checkpoints during missions which often (but not always) lessen the sting of death.
The next type of mission is a sort of target-of-opportunity called Freeplay. This basically means that many signs of Nazi occupation, whether it’s a stationery armoured vehicle, a German general, propaganda speakers, AA gun, guard tower, etc can be blown up with dynamite or a remote detonator. And there are hundreds of these across the maps you can atatck at any time, even during missions. They are invaluable for collecting contraband and the like; though so of these targets, such as gun emplacements, can be more useful to keep around since you can use them yourself to blow up other targets or pursuing soldiers (even the Zeppelin’s hovering over Paris’ skyline). They are also a massive distraction whenever you are out and about as blowing them up becomes somewhat addictive, and working out ways to get everything in a clustered area before you are overrun by pursuing Germans is a hell of a lot of fun. Best thing is, as long as the game registers the destruction of the target before you die, you can respawn from your last checkpoint or safehouse.
Being a Saboteur implies some sort of stealth and this game uses stealth in a variety of ways. Unlike Liberty City, this is a town occupied by soldiers. If you are just walking around with no guns on show, you’ll be fine. But if you start waving your piece around, or worse, pull out a gun near a Nazi, the soldiers will often react. If this happens you can try and lower their suspicion level by walking in the other direction but if they get too hyped up, they will call for backup and that’s where the fun starts. Climbing or running near troops can also raise the suspicion level, but somehow you seem able to get close enough to parked vehicle to set a charge even with two guards nearby. They will be roused by the explosion but you have to be right on top of them for them to spot you. If you destroy Freeplay targets clustered together (as often they are), you may find the Alert level rising faster than a Swiss Banker denying rightful owners of their gold fillings. This generally means guards with bigger weapons, airships and even the odd Messerschmidt fighter attacking you with a vigour not seen since the French rush to surrender in 1940. The Germans get plenty pissed and you can get away either by driving (or running) out of the area of investigation indicated on your minimap or find a hiding place (also marked on your map). Alternatively you can find an alarm button and as long as you aren’t being watched by a German, you can deactivate the alarm. Later on, you can lead the Germans into areas where your resistance friends are fighting Germans in the streets and join them. Once you’ve killed a number of Germans, the alarm is over and you can continue with the mayhem. If you despatch a German soldier using stealth tactics or unarmed combat, you can borrow his uniform if no one’s about. This will also cancel alerts so it’s quite a good habit to get into, even if it isn’t as polished as it should be. A number of missions reply on the disguise mechanic to get you into even more trouble. You hold a button down to walk like a Nazi, which reduces the distance around you where you will be spotted as a spy, but you can get further this way that rolling in guns blazing. You can’t get too close as Germans are smarter than the average Fascist.
The Saboteur also adds free climbing into the mix, handy for evading pursuers as you seem to take less damage from enemy fire whilst climbing. It’s not as fluid as the climbing in inFamous or ACII, but it works relatively well and adds verticality to a game world that is very open. The game handily highlights what you can grab onto next but unfortunately doesn’t handle an eave or a protruding ledge quite as nicely as ACII does. If every game did things as nicely as ACII, we wouldn’t need the 2010 Assassin’s Creed II-2 that seems to be coming out.
Everything you achieve earns you contraband, the game’s currency (I can’t see why francs or marks couldn’t have been used), whether it’s the reward for successfully completing a mission, freeplay target destruction or just finding a crate from an OSS drop. Contraband can be used to unlock maps showing freeplay targets, new weapons car upgrades, etc. Or you can gamble with it in the boob room (more on that later). There are a lot of freeplay targets in this game but the reason seems to be the contraband you get for things is rather measly. A few missions need you to have a certain amount in order to bribe a black market operator which will usually mean stocking up on dynamite and going fishing. A pleasant drive through the Parisian burbs later and I’ve destroyed two sniper towers, a fuel dump, an AA gun, three propaganda speakers and two searchlights. And collected several hundred in contraband.
There are also races. I hate races. Most of them are optional apart from the few that aren’t. I hate races.
One element I’ve not found a use for, nor be able to get to work is you can apparently call back up from resistance members. Every time I try to use it, I get a big fat zip in response. Oh well.
The presentation is interesting. At the start of the game, most of Paris is black and white with the colour returning to an area after you’ve beaten a major mission. Apparently the locals are inspired by your actions to resist the Nazi’s. These areas are now in full colour and feature points mentioned earlier in the review where you can cancel an alarm by picking off a set number of Germans. So sounds great when you first see the game, and then progressively less so when you can’t see a fucking thing on the screen (especially in some night time scenes). You’re totally fucked if your screen gets lots of reflections (such as the glass screen on a Plasma or a somputer with a glossy monitor) The graphics (on PS3) are crisp and the frame rate usually behaves itself though after a recent firmware update, I did have a problem where the game constantly hard locked the PS3 (about 4 times in an hour) but it’s behaved itself since then. The audio is mostly excellent save for for the outrageously fake accents sported by most of the cast.
The main character is voiced by actor is Robin Atkin-Downes, who Babylon 5 fans may remember as the much vilified Bryon in that show’s last season but fear not her could star in a Father Ted remake. Lots of shits, feckers and pronouncing ‘I’ as ‘Oi.’ Also, UNCHARTED GUY is in here as a bald Frenchman with a hook! Nolan North represent! The worst voice is a character called Mingo, who seems like winning a race for bass with Paul Robeson. The initial safehouse is in a burlesque theatre, so there are lots of scantily clad, if not topless, ladies with really bad accents but surprisingly modern lingerie and could best be described as ‘pert gallic.’ Lastly, the history in this game is only slightly more reliable that that featured in Inglourious Basterds.
This being an EA game, it features, like Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2 and Bad Company 2, a coupon inside the box with a redeemable one-use code meant for the person who buys the game new. Mass Effect 2 gave you some items and an extra character with some missions. Battlefield gave you a weapon. The Saboteur takes a different tack. There is a secret passage in the Burlesque theatre called The Midnight Room that is only accessible with the code which you can enter for free if you buy new or EA would like to charge you $15 to buy online if you buy pre-owned. Now, since the new price of the game has actually fallen to only marginally more than the DLC, let me tell you what you get. A speakeasy with even more topless girls, one (admittedly fun)betting game combining alcohol, knives and Wheel of Fortune; and a bunch of topless girls who will dance for you in close-up. YMMV.
So the design is ambitious and Pandemic manages to tie it together well for the most part. Like any open world game there will be a few annoyances in there but I’ve been mostly impressed by how Pandemic dealt with those. Fast Travel between hideouts might have been nice but overall it’s a credible effort. There are a few edges that could use a bit of sandpaper, but nothing you could cut yourself on. I’m actually surprised how polished it is considering Pandemic’s fate. It’s not an essential purchase, by any means. But if you do spring for it, it is a good time and it’s also now a cheap date as well.
You don’t hate WWII games, like Pandemic’s output, like open world games with a ton of things to do and blow up? Then get this.
Controller1.com Rating 2/3
Get it if you liked Just Cause 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, Medal of Honor Underground, GTA, Saint’s Row, Red Faction Guerilla.
Don’t get it if you like: Animal Crossing, Pokemon, Imagine: Nazis
