Reviewed on PS3 Developed by Sony Santa Monica/ Published by Sony Computer Entertainment
Oh (Greek) God. Kratos is back in town, and he’s pissed. I mean, really pissed. He’s so pissed this time, that tearing off heads and slitting open bellies isn’t enough for him; now he’s out to annihilate the very fabric of nature.
In God of War III: Kratos Kills Everybody, the outlandish violence that’s the signature of the series has been inflated to a ridiculous level, and the Playstation 3’s hardware makes it look prettier than ever before. Unfortunately, little has been done to adjust or improve the structure of the game. If anything, with the game’s new emphasis on showing off artwork and fancy cinematics, it’s gotten worse.
The game begins with Kratos riding the shoulders of Gaia, a woodsy, rocky giant who’s clambering up Mount Olympus in a balls-out assault on the gods. Zeus and his posse, which includes Poseidon, Hades, Helios, and the very annoying Hermes, are none too happy about this aggression, and each god will set out to taunt and irritate Kratos in his own way. Before Kratos will take his precious revenge on Zeus (which he reminds us of regularly), he’ll plod through several gorgeous mythological backdrops, ride on the backs of titans, collect weapons and magic spells, rescue Scarlett Johansson, and endure endless flashbacks that clobber us over the head with their message of hope.
Throughout this trek, Kratos will repeatedly face the typical God of War challenge: barriers will enclose you in a small arena, and a crowd of ineffectual, undead Greek soldiers will pour out of the ground, spoiling for a fight. What you do in these situations is hit Square over and over, occasionally throwing a Triangle in for variety. Kratos will do a little dance, swinging his chain-blades around in fancy patterns, until all the enemies are dead. If you see an bad guy winding up to get a hit of his own, just hold L1 to block, and then commence the Squaring.
After going through this ceremony dozens of times over the past few years, I began to wonder if God of War would play just as well if Kratos just swung his blades constantly, and you’d have to press a button to stop him. It would probably work.
When you’re done Squaring your enemies to death, the barriers will vanish, and you get to run ahead for a minute or so. Eventually you’ll encounter…a puzzle.
Most of the puzzles in God of War III use familiar video game logic: activate a switch to open the way forward. Kratos can push buttons and pull cranks, set things on fire, or search for hidden passageways using a glowing severed head. You’ll also find weird, blue stones jutting from the ground here and there. They usually obstruct you from reaching a secret or a goal. You’ll need the Cestus, a pair of laughably large metal gloves, to punch through the stone. Since they’re also powerful enough to fell even the biggest creatures in a few hits, I recommend that you just keep the Cestus equipped at all times. They really are all-purpose tools, silly and uncomfortable though they look.
A couple of the puzzle sections are clever, like a garden that uses Escher-like illusions to connect pathways, or a labyrinth constructed from an array of rotating cubes. The rest, though, are recycled from the Book of Zelda, and they go on for so long that you’ll start to wonder when you can just back to killing monsters already.
If you’re especially patient, you can always travel off the path that the game’s camera leads you down, and try to find some secrets. Kratos can discover treasure chests that contain the usual collections of Gorgon Eyes, Phoenix Feathers, and red orbs, which increase his health and magic meters, and the strengths and capabilities of his weapons. The game is very generous with these orbs, and you won’t have to stray from the main road too often to get most of your weapons maxed out. I guess the designers wanted to be sure that everyone will get to see all the fancy combo animations they came up with.
One of the few additions to God of War is the Minotaur Horn, which increases the length of Kratos’s new Item meter. Kratos is now limited on how often he can use special items, such as Apollo’s Bow, Hermes’s Shoes, and Helios’s Head. I’m not sure why there are limitations on these things, as they don’t provide any great advantages to Kratos in combat, but the meter is there anyway, and now we have Minotaur Horns to go searching for. Locating a hidden chest and finding a Minotaur Horn, when you were hoping for a far more desirable Gorgon Eye, is a tremendous disappointment.
As in previous God of War games, you’ll run into some stupid segments that break things up rather unpleasantly. Like the parts when Kratos has to climb hand-over-hand across ropes, kicking at approaching enemies like a spastic idiot. Then there are the scenes where he has to ride steam plumes up enormous shafts, dodging obstacles and unexplained balls of fire like this is Star Fox or Battletoads or something. I dreaded these scenes, and couldn’t wait for them to be over.
So what, if anything, is the true draw of God of War III? It would seem to be, as with Heavy Rain, the dazzling Quick-Time Events, which involve astounding action and camerawork that still isn’t possible in regular gameplay. After you’ve beaten an enemy or boss into a sufficient level of weakness, a huge, flaming Circle will appear above it. Get Kratos close and press Circle, and watch the magic begin!
Kratos is as gymnastically skilled and cruel as ever in this game, and in these Quick-Time Events, he’ll swing, jump, fly, stab, and just beat the hell out of whatever he’s up against, provided you press the buttons that appear on the screen at the right times. It’s Dragon’s Lair rendered on a Cell processor. I must admit, though, that these scenes really are impressive, and even therapeutic, especially when you get to see Kratos punish an irritating boss.
The violence in God of War III has already garnered a ton of internet attention and gorehound love, but those who are squeamish probably won’t have to turn their heads. Sure, the grisly deaths Kratos imparts on his opponents are pretty gross, but they’re also so bizarre, and so far over the top, that they’re hilarious. The flashy spectacle of the QTEs had me saying “whoa” quite often, but they also had me cracking up. The designers at Sony Santa Monica have obviously watched a lot of horror movies in order to devise kills this creative.
What I realized while “playing” God of War III is that it’s not a game to be played so much as a game to be looked at. The QTEs are impressive enough, but there are plenty of other aspects the designers labored over to make the game an eye-popper. The characters are superbly detailed, especially Hephaestus and Kronos, with their wrinkled, stained skin and burnt out eyes. The designers planted some books on pedestals at scenic overlooks throughout the game, and they function like the mounted binoculars in Brutal Legend: they do nothing but allow you a lengthy eyeful of the landmarks the artists constructed. Aside from the Cestus, Kratos’s multitude of weapons and attacks differ in appearance only. You’re not going to be changing them because one weapon is more effective against a specific enemy than another, and it’s pretty safe to ignore the many combos the game offers in favor of hitting the Square button over and over. One attack works just as well as another.
Pretty pictures don’t make a game worth buying. This is a rental, through and through. It will take around eight or nine hours to complete, so maybe two rentals will be necessary, but that will still be cheaper than buying the game. I hope that games like Heavy Rain and God of War III – and hell, let’s throw Metal Gear Solid 4 in there too – are not representative of a trend, one in which video games throw out all the thoughtful and challenging play and then replace it with cutting-edge imagery and interactive movies. That stuff is entertaining in its own way, but it should be kept in the venue where it belongs: the theater.
To close, I’ll say that even God of War III’s cover is stupid. It’s just Kratos’s eye, glowering with rage. It’s a terrible cover that tells us nothing about what you actually do in the game. It looks like the teaser poster for a movie, which is probably fitting, because that’s more or less what’s in the case.
Reviewed on PC. Also on: Xbox 360, PS3. Developed by DICE. Published by EA
Sweden’s DICE are back to the Battlefields with their latest release. It’s an interesting release for various reasons and it’s also one of the better games in the series. The first game in the series came out for PC in 2002 with two decent expansion packs before the law of diminishing returns started to kick in and we had the unloved Battlefield Vietnam and that’s where things went all over the place. There was the somewhat-loved Battlefield 2 with a DLC fragmented player base, its late to the party console versions BF: Modern Combat and the best forgotten Battlefield: 2142 and Battlefield Heroes. The first Battlefield Bad Company was DICE’s first designed for console-only title and was loved by most of those who played it, though the lack of a PC version was bemoaned by many (which is fair considering it was a defining game franchise in the PC shooter space). Bad Company was sold as a single player-focused game with a multiplayer component, but it felt like a single player shoehorned into the wide-open multiplayer maps. BC’s multiplayer was excellent (I played it on PS3/PSN) with its infantry combat now being useful and not 100% dominated by whoever camped long enough for a Tank or can fly a chopper for more than 20 seconds without crashing. It also brought with it the excellent Gold Rush mode, where one team attacks and the other defends its bases. Once two crates in each base had been destroyed, the action moved to the next base until the defender’s bases were all destroyed or the tickets of the attackers had exhausted. That said, it was unfortunately ignored by a lot of long-time BF fans w. many of whom aren’t interested in FPS games on a console. The still console-only but soon to be PC Battlefield 1943, which remade 3 maps from the original game using the Bad Company Frostbite engine, made a of those people sit up and take notice (BF1943 is apparently the first game on XBLA to sell over 1 million units. This also sold well on PSN, so that’s a lot of people taking notice).
BC2 came out early in 2010 and brought with it a PC version. Before release, the PC diehards were still waiting for a true sequel to Battlefield, but having played the PC version to death since release, they need not wait as this is what they need. I do, however, find the need to write a review to attempt to extricate myself from its charms and its vices.
BC2 has several modes. Single player feels like a fun version of a scripted classic Medal of Honor or CoD single player experience, though here, instead of tough and gruff professional soldiers, we have a bunch of whiny slackers. The single player campaign on its own is not worth buying the game for but could be a pleasant enough diversion if you find yourself unable to connect to EA’s servers (which occasionally happens). The real meat and potatoes (or tofu and potatoes for vegetarian readers) is in going online in Rush mode. Yes, there’s BF’s traditional conquest mode, plus Squad Deathmatch, Squad Rush, etc but I’ve only played Rush. It’s a pity that there aren’t more playing Rush on PC (surprise, surprise- more PC players are playing Conquest). Rush offers and intense experience that Modern Warfare 2 removed by going down that arcadey, badly networked path; an experience that targets the action very well, funnels you to the action quickly without having to walk across the entire map due to a poor spawn choice. Squads, first introduced in BF2, allow you to spawn alongside people already in the thick of it which can save valuable battle time. It also means, you can spawn in the middle of a mortar strike or your opponents spawning squad members in the middle of a pistol duel can shift the balance very quickly.
There are four classes you can play as in BC2. The grunt with the assault rifle and grenade launcher is not as overpowered as in MW2, though the grenade launcher is at least usable in BC2 (it was so incredibly weak in BC). The Engineer has a sub machine gun, can repair vehicles and carry mines or a rocket launcher to take out tanks and APCs. The Medic runs around with an light machine gun and drop medkits and later on can revive fallen team-mates so they can go back into battle and get shot again by the same enemy within 3 seconds or resurrection. The last class is the recon, AKA sniper AKA sniping fuckers. Snipers will generally sit back in their ghillie suits and snipe from a very long way away and pepper the field of battle with mortar strikes. Even with BC2 making sniping trickier by having bullets falling away, a good sniper will be able to make a defending team’s life miserable. However, due to the perception that sniping is easy, you sometimes end up in a game where all of the attackers are sniping, meaning no one gets around to setting charges. Oh well.
The more you play the more gadgets and weapons you can unlock. Unlike MW2, if you unlock a new sniper scope, you can equip it the next time you respawn rather than between matches (on PC, anyway). The progress and unlocks does encourage farming. I recall one sparsely populated server where there 5 members of the one clan used a public server to unlock a boating medal. That’s fine, we just used them to farm our sniping stats.
Of course, there are vehicles in BC2. You have a few tanks, armoured personnel carriers, mobile anti aircraft, jeeps, quad bikes, boats, jetskis and helicopters. And unlike previous games, you have far better tools, as ground forces, to deal with them. Some of which are improved by improving your stats to unlock specialties, better vehicle armour, improved reload times, etc. Missing, are the artillery batteries but we have the UAV which is a remote controlled chopper that can be used to send in a missile strike. Fortunately, Tamiya doesn’t build them very strong so a few hits from an M16 should see them right. Engineers can use a variety of rocket launchers to take out vehicles, Snipers can use mortar strikes or place charges on a tank, Engineers can use the LMG to pound the choppers plus there are a profusion of mounted machine guns and stationary rocket launchers dotted around the maps. It’s not like the original game where you were totally fucked once someone who could fly got into a cockpit of a Zero.
An online game is only as good as your community and it seems all popular games are going to be full of dickheads. BC2 started off well in the first few weeks when everyone was learning the ropes, but once the tricks start emerging, most games quickly degenerate. With BC2, it depends on the server you’re on but generally seems to have far fewer abusive players (or maybe the worst ones are the ones with headsets, which I have muted anyway).
The Frostbite engine produces great graphics and the sound for BC has a unique real world sound you don’t hear often in games. It sounds loud even when it’s not.One technical aspect that has cast a vast shadow over this game is network code. It’s just not as god as you’d expect from DICE on a PC title. Back wen I played the older games on PC on bog standard 512k ADSL, a ping of 70 was average for a server in the same country as me. Years later with much much faster ADSL 2+, pings of less than 150 are wishful thinking. That said, you can have a decent game playing with people in other countries, so long as you don’t use sniper rifles. The server browser was not working that well at launch and I took to using the matchmaking for a week or two.
It’s certainly a pretty game that runs well, plays well and you will have fun playing. Until the fucking snipers get you. Spawn and again. Overall, if you like shooting games, BF games and are sick of MW2 and/or the extortionate price of the ‘stimulus to Kotick’s wallet,’ give BC2 a spin.
Controller1.com rating 3/3
Play if you like Bad Company, Battlefield Modern Combat, Battlefield 1943, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Modern Warfare 2
Don’t play if you like: Single player, Final Fantasy XIII, Heavy Rain, Tetris
Lisvender’s Retro Review: Blood Omen Legacy of Kain
I often criticize games for having immature stories, but here’s one whose tale is quite impressive. Brought to you by the heel-draggers at Silicon Knights and their leader, “Mr. Reciprocity” himself, Denis Dyack, Legacy of Kain is a competent Zelda-like from the Playstation 1 era. Few games feature this level of atmosphere, with moody music, punchy sound effects, phenomenal voice acting, and a grim but engrossing tale. Unfortunately, few games also contain this much loading time. The story makes the game worth playing, but the technical flaws simply can’t be overlooked, even by the standards of its day.
The dark fantasy world of Nosgoth is in sorry shape. The Circle of Nine, the keepers of order in the land, are succumbing to a slow insanity. Vampires and bandits scour the countryside. The armies of a neighboring kingdom are planning an invasion, and Kain, a nobleman who was just out for a drink, is accosted and murdered by thugs for no apparent reason. Seems like everything’s going wrong, but then Kain is granted a boon in the afterlife: an offer to escape death and take revenge on his killers by becoming a vampire. He leaps at this chance, but he soon regrets it, and he begins a quest to cure himself and the world by restoring the Nine Pillars of Nosgoth.
I know what you’re thinking: more vampires, huh? Don’t worry, the toothy ones in Blood Omen aren’t the whiny, beautiful, effeminate things you’d see in a Stephenie Meier novel; they are angry, monstrous hedonists who see human beings as little more than livestock. A major thread of the game’s story involves Kain’s slow acceptance, and eventual appreciation, of his undead powers.
Kain is just an intensely likable character. He will encounter mad magicians, plague-ridden lepers, and armies of hellspawn, but his attitude is all a smooth and cynical charm that actually fits, and doesn’t come off as inappropriate or awkward. Kain will comment on every item he receives, every landmark he sees, and every boss he faces, but it never gets annoying: each bit of speech is a poetic, perfectly-delivered delight. Simon Templeman, who voices Kain, puts just the right spin on his lines, and he turns out quite the droll demon.
Kain will travel all across Nosgoth, dueling with soldiers and town guards, feeding on people to restore his health, collecting weapons and armor, learning magic spells, and exploring towns and caves. The game is played from a 2D, overhead view, and it feels very much like Zelda, but with an emphasis on combat. Most of the items and spells in the game function as offensive projectiles.
The sword-swinging action is fast and fun, and it features a difference from most action-adventure games: when an enemy is one hit away from death, it enters a “waver state.” In other words, it gets dizzy. Press Circle while the enemy’s wavering, and Kain will feed on it, causing its blood to fly straight out of its body and into Kain’s mouth. This is one of the few ways that Kain can heal himself, so you mustn’t attack too wildly, or you’ll kill your foes before you can feed on them. Some of the weapons and armor you’ll find have unique qualities that will affect your feeding strategy: the Spiked Mace doesn’t damage enemies much but it dizzies them quickly, the Flame Sword is a mighty weapon but it burns enemies up and leaves nothing to feed on, and the Flesh Armor draws blood into Kain’s body automatically as you fight, so you don’t have to feed manually. The downside of the Flesh Armor is that some enemies have green or black blood, which is poisonous and deadly to Kain, so you’ll want to change clothes while fighting these guys so you won’t ingest any of that junk.
Kain can also change forms, as most vampires do, to solve puzzles or to facilitate travel. He can turn into a cloud of bats and zip to major landmarks scattered across the world. He can change into a wolf, a speedy form that can leap pits. He can melt into a mist form, which protects him from physical damage and allows him to walk on water. He can also take on the appearance of a living person, which helps him to blend into society and chat with the townsfolk. The numbnuts of Nosgoth rarely have anything helpful or even intelligent to say, though, so the real purpose of the living guise is to avoid the attention of town guards, who attack vampires on sight.
As a game released in 1996, Blood Omen has a curiously cheap look. It was that interesting time when pre-rendered sprites were considered cutting-edge, and motion-capture technology wasn’t yet common. The in-game action doesn’t look so bad, as it’s viewed from a considerable distance, but the CGI videos are nigh laughable, with stiff, doll-like characters reciting deep and dark dialogue. It’s good to remember, though, that Blood Omen’s only real competitor at the time was the 16-bit Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. A visual comparison between the two is completely unfair.
On the other hand, it must be said that Zelda has the upper hand in the technical department. Blood Omen may have a terrific story, fun action, and a big world to explore, but its flaws hang continuously over all these good qualities. They cast a shadow over the entire experience.
The loading times in Blood Omen are completely out of control. Moving from one area to another, which is a breeze in any given Zelda game, requires several painful seconds of loading in Blood Omen. The music cuts out, a big red “LOADING” box appears in the center of the screen, and that delicate atmosphere the game has worked so hard to wrap you in just evaporates. It’s worse than the surprise load times in the Half-Life games. The poor designs of some of the levels don’t help matters. Sometimes Kain will enter a new area and be greeted by an enemy projectile. If you don’t react immediately, the attack will shove Kain backward into the previous screen, forcing you to endure two more load times just to get back to where you were.
That’s not the worst part of it, either. The worst part, the truly, completely, all-encompassingly worst part is that the game loads every time you pause and resume it. Given that pausing is the only way to change Kain’s equipment and set up which items and spells he can use, these load times are absolutely exasperating. In my recent playthrough, I often encountered monsters whom I knew were resistant to the weapon I was equipped with, but I refused to switch up because I knew how long the loading would take. The game’s load times actually pushed me into a strategic malaise! Fighting the monsters with a weak weapon was more convenient than equipping a better one!
Remember the Water Temple in The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time? Remember how irritating it was to have to go to the Equipment Screen to change boots every few seconds? Well, imagine what traversing that temple would be like if you added five seconds of waiting to every press of the Start button. It’s not a pretty picture, but that’s exactly what playing Blood Omen Legacy of Kain is like.
Blood Omen is now available through the Playstation Store. You download the entire game to your Playstation 3 hard drive. I downloaded it because I enjoyed the game when it first came out, and I expected that playing it from a hard drive would mean that the loading would be reduced. Well, here it is, free from the sluggish form of the CD, and yet its load times are no shorter than they were fourteen years ago. Now, I’ve always thought that installing games from an optical disc to a hard drive was done to reduce load times during play. Have I been lied to for all these years? Was I just wrong about that? Or is the PS3’s emulator just deliberately including all those excruciating seconds of waiting because Sony thought it would complete the nostalgic picture?
If you can stomach the ubiquitous loading, you’ll find a great game in Blood Omen Legacy of Kain. That’s probably the most tragic thing about it: that few people will have the patience to see its excellent scenario through to the end. If the game had reached more people, maybe Silicon Knights wouldn’t have sold the rights to the IP to Eidos, who then turned the series into a buffet of blandness. If the game had reached more people, maybe Mr. Dyack would have spent more time conceiving good action-adventure games, and not wasting it on the ridiculous Too Human.
The opportunity, now, is gone. Thanks to the efforts of today’s largest game companies, the world may never know what will happen if the great and serious story of Blood Omen was married to decent technology. If there’s anyone who can do it now, it’s Goichi Suda, a.k.a. SUDA51, the guy who made No More Heroes and Killer7. That’s material for another review, though…maybe my next one!
Controller1.com rating: 1/3 (2/3 for the very patient)
Double Review by LisVender: Infamous and Uncharted 2
They didn’t save the Playstation 3, but they may have saved 3D platformers. These two PS3 exclusives are the descendants of Tomb Raider, Super Mario 64, Contra, and Jak & Daxter. They’ve gathered some of the best elements of today’s games and compressed them into a couple of action-packed packages. They may not have the sunny skies and colorful creatures that you’d see in a 8- or 16-bit platformer, but I can put up with that.
I can also accept that these two games are aimed chiefly at adolescents. Aside from their violence, there’s little to these games that could be called “mature.” They don’t have the dank, secret-filled storyline of Silent Hill 2. They don’t have the devilish wit and detailed world of Grand Theft Auto IV. They don’t have the ballsy, mind-bending design of Killer7. What they have is fast-paced action, slick, responsive controls, gorgeous graphics, and high adventure. They are the descendants of the side-scroller.
Nathan Drake and Cole MacGrath a just a couple of regular dudes who wind up in whole heaps of trouble. Regular, that is, except for the incredible gymnastic skills. These guys are dexterous parkour masters, capable of climbing a thirty-foot street sign, jumping off from it, twisting in midair, and grabbing the edge of a nearby building with one hand. Then, while hanging with that one hand, they can shoot bad guys with the other. Drake can even reload a pistol with one hand! You can’t believe what the backs of the boxes tell you. These dudes are superheroes.
Cole is especially super, as the explosion that rocks his world and turns it into a gangsta’s paradise has left him with the power to control electricity. Before long, he becomes a tool of the government, performing search and destroy missions and generally wiping out evil wherever it roams. Occasionally he’ll jump into a sewer to find a power station that will grant him new abilities. Some of these powers function similarly to weapons in more traditional shooters, but they all have unique twists and applications which make them fun to use. You can also enhance these powers by spending experience points in the pause menu.
Drake doesn’t have electrical super powers, but he’s a hell of gunfighter. His globe-trotting search for the life-giving resin of Shangri-la will see him mow down armies of men with pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, and rocket launchers. Every once in a while, he’ll have to stop and figure out a simple puzzle, or otherwise cross a series of precarious platforms.
These scenes can be a bit frustrating because the shooting action is so good. The lion’s share of Uncharted 2 and Infamous is spent blowing away bad guys. The games play pretty much alike, with their unique systems for climbing, regenerating health, and taking cover. The only major difference between the two is that Cole cannot blind-fire, which can be frustrating when there are several enemies ahead of you. Drake can blind-fire with the best of them, though, and he can do it quite accurately.
As these two wingfooted heroes are such skilled climbers, the firefights feel more loose and free than in other third-person shooters like Gears of War, which keep your characters anchored to the ground. If you don’t want to simply hide behind cover, you can climb all over the environment and rain hell down on your enemies from whatever angle you wish. There are a couple of scenes in Uncharted 2 that force you to do this.
One of the best sequences in Uncharted 2 involves stowing away on a train. Drake must make his way across several cars in order to save a captured friend, and each car offers a unique shooting or platforming challenge. You’ll have hide from helicopter fire, sneak up on enemy patrols, dodge oncoming signs and lights that can shove you off of the cars, and engage in fisticuffs with an angry mercenary captain. Sometimes you are only provided with one way to take out enemies, but in other situations, you are free to take out your enemies how you like, either in a sneaky manner or with guns blazing. I usually ignore the stealthy route when games offer me such a choice, but the stealth kills in Uncharted 2 are easy to pull off, and they’re quite satisfying. Softening up an enemy patrol with careful sneak attacks will also save you some headaches once the shooting starts.
Infamous doesn’t provide stealth attacks, but Cole’s battle options are nevertheless varied, as he gets to use all of his powers at all times. He doesn’t have to wait for the game to throw him a Dragon Sniper before he can snipe anyone. Cole can throw explosive shock grenades, shove enemies into the air with a shockwave, and use a long-range precision attack for headshots. Mixing these moves together creatively can be tons of fun. They use energy from Cole’s battery cores, but you can refill them by holding L2 while standing near electrical objects, meaning cars, streetlights, transformers, and rooftop vents. It’s reminiscent of the water pump in Super Mario Sunshine.
The major difference between the two games is that Uncharted 2 is linear while Infamous is open-world. Drake may be a veteran explorer, but his games don’t really let him do a lot of exploring. It’s a constant push, push, push toward the next action scene. It’s hard to complain, though, when the set pieces are so detailed and exciting. Infamous may have a big environment to play in, but many of its side missions are clones of each other, and there isn’t much variety in the settings. It’s a weird trade-off. When you’re stuck in a shootout with the baddies, though, you won’t much think about these things.
Though I can only recommend these games to anyone who relishes action and adventure, neither one is quite perfect. Infamous has a pretty weak story, and it’s poorly presented. Major plot events are shown using sliding, ink-splattered images with no dialogue but the constant narration from Cole. In the the age following Half-Life 2 and Call of Duty 4, this isn’t good enough. The characters are pretty bland and unlikeable as well. The actor who plays Cole seems to have attended the Christian Bale/David Hayter School of Acting, and he sounds like a ten-pack-a-day man. His voice is low, and not especially grating to the ear, but he’s clearly forcing his delivery, and that’s annoying in its own way.
Uncharted 2’s story is also nonsense, with its magic resins and monkey monsters, but it’s still a lot more enjoyable than that of Infamous. Each character is voiced with surprising believability, right down to the smallest grunts, and they’re even legitimately funny at times. Drake is a little too glib for a guy who slaughters men by the dozens, though, and I find Chloe’s constant resistance to Drake’s plans to be irritating. Drake pulls off some superhuman feats in this game, some of them right before Chloe’s eyes, and yet she still questions him at every step. The only explanation I can come up with for this is that Naughty Dog’s writers felt the story needed the extra dramatic conflict.
There are also some fundamental flaws with both games. Infamous’s transgression is the greater one, though. The game is set in a gray and dingy city. A city inhabited by insane people. The citizens meander around in the open, and cars roll casually down the roads. Uh, did these people forget about the bloodthirsty gangs prowling the streets? Are their errands so critical that they’re willing to brave a storm of bullets? When one of these pedestrian morons gets shot by a gang member, he falls to the ground writhing, but no one around takes notice. The bystanders just continue walking. They don’t even run. You can use Cole’s Pulse Heal move to somehow shock the slug out of the wounded man, after which he’ll get up, maybe say thanks, and then continue his morning constitutional. It’s baffling.
Now, if Sucker Punch can’t craft an even slightly convincing real-world city, they should have gone with a different setting. Just put Cole in a place with lots of things to climb and enemies to shoot, and get rid of everything else. I can imagine Infamous’s action working very well in a mountain range, or a forest, or even a Metroid-like alien planet. Cole’s already a superhero; why not make him a space traveler? Call him Captain Cole, Capacitor of the Cosmos!
Uncharted 2 has the exotic stages, but their linear, story-entwined nature creates a different problem. The game’s got too many scenes that give you control over Drake when it’s not necessary. They put the brakes on the game and wreck its pace. There’s one segment set in a peaceful mountain village where you don’t do anything but follow a dude from one building to another. Drake can’t run in this area, so you get to gently creep through town, just looking at things. What is the point of this? Why can’t we skip this? It was mildly interesting the first time I played it, but now that I’m on my second go-round, this chapter frays my patience. There are similar scenes at other points in the game, where Drake is just looking for things and conversing with his buddies, and we’re piloting him around, hunting for the trigger that will let us progress. There is no reason for this. Not every game can get away with what Half-Life 2 pulled off. If a level has no risk of death, let us skip it, or turn it into a cutscene.
BUT! None of these problems are serious enough to ruin the big, blasting action of these two games. They are thrilling, they are satisfying, and they are a blast to play, even for a few minutes. I want more games that play like this. I want to run, jump, climb, shoot, and beat up bad guys. That’s what the greatest video games often come down to, and few games do it better than these.
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.
