Reviewed on Xbox 360. Developed by Chair. Published by Epic.
And so the cavalcade of great downloadables continues. Shadow Complex, by Chair, takes the beloved 2D Metroidvania gameplay and marries it to the Unreal 3 engine. The result is a triumph for gamers.
Shadow Complex sees your character traversing a secret base of a group calling themselves the Reformation. As you move between rooms you encounter enemies to fight, weapons and items to upgrade and nooks and crannies to explore. So if you like old Metroid and Castlevania games, the theory is that you will love this game to death. Well, I don’t particularly care for that style of game and have been having an absolute blast with this.
So you’re frolicking with your girlfriend in the woods when you come across this underground base and suddenly your training your dad wanted you to have makes sense and to cut a long story short insert description of Super Metroid here. So you start off with a pistol and some basic jumping and climbing abilities but you upgrade everything the more you play the game. Your pistol is replaced by successively more powerful automatic rifles, you gain grenades and other devices as a secondary weapon, your jumping and movement abilities are upgraded in various ways and of course you can search for little upgrades (such as the ability to hold more ammo of a certain type) that are dotted throughout the game. The colour pink is notorious for its exclusion from the game’s colour palette.
Combat is , of course, a big part of the game. If you’re able to get near to a foe you’ll be given the chance to melee him or of course you could just shoot them with your weapons, or blow them up or destroy an exploding object near them and listen to their cries as they fall to their death. Your movement is strictly up and down, left and right, but enemies maybe on multiple planes. The game is set up relatively well to aim at those enemies not on the same plane as you but it can sometimes be a touch finicky. Enemies range from guys in masks with pistols to guys in masks with rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers and eventually mechsuits. You will kill a lot of these and perhaps the game is a tad easy in the combat department but even so you will need 6 or more hours to complete the campaign which is pretty decent for a 1200 point game. Like HL2 there is an achievement meter so you can check on your progress towards each new achievement the game has to offer. It’s like weighing yourself before and after you go to the toilet.
The movement is very slick and the best since infamous (which was three months ago so ‘big deal’). At the start of the game there are many areas you won’t be able to access the first time you spot a hidden item, but you will likely encounter it again at some stage. Though the game expects you to backtrack and revisit areas, this only gets painful towards the very end of the game. Of course- it is quite painful at the end when the game more or less says, “hey bud, you need every upgrade.” I just want to finish the game FFS.
The visuals are nice and polished with the design very reminiscent of Metal Gear 2. It is one very pretty looking game though the cutscenes look somewhat rougher. The story is also similar though it is nowhere near as over the top as anything dreamed up by Kojima and co. Conversely, while it is well told and the voice acting is top-notch it is also not as memorable as a girl in a bikini shooting at you. The sound is also top notch, one of the best combos of music, effects and voice in any recent 2D game. I still have that save room sting going around my head. It’s almost like brain cancer, only more melodic. I long for amnesia.
So a 1200 point game that will take easily 6-8 hours to complete and is fun to boot? We need more of these, stat! Of course, we do have an actual 2D Metroid game coming from Team Ninja soon so that should fill the gap for many. In the mean time, I have to work my way to the last boxx battle and finish this thing. Huzzah!
Controller1.com Rating 3/3
Before this year, my purchase of Digital Download content was rather restrained with only some CoD multiplayer maps and a few cheap XBLA games and a Guitar hero song or two. Somehow this year, I’ve gone nuts for DLC and download titles. It never really hit me that the revolution has overtaken me and I’m hip-deep in this shit.
There’ve been Singstar tracks, Guitar Hero Tracks, one Fallout DLC pack, two Call of Duty World at War map packs, Halo 3 maps, Burnout Paradise add-ons, Grand Theft Auto TLAD. But then there’s also Battlefield 1943, Shadow Complex and Trials HD and Peggle and World of Goo. Suddenly, that purchase of the 120 GB Hard Drive doesn’t seem so extravagant. Expensive, yes. but worth it. No more juggling and deleting crap to make room.
Gears of War 12 reportedly cost $12 million dollars to make. Shadow Complex, however) would have been a fraction of that, even with the costs of licensing the Unreal 3 engine. Shadow Complex may be a small game from a small developer (recently acquired by Epic) but its managed to make a big stink with people complaining about author Orson Scott Card’s involvement with the game. Battlefield 1943 managed 600 000 downloads in its first few weeks, an amazing feat for a DD-only title. And Trials HD has every dick on my friends list beating my measly scores. DD on consoles has come of age. By come of age, I mean draining my wallet of space bucks.
DD on PC has fewer barriers to entry but a different type of dynamic. Paid DLC- such as map packs is not as prevalent. You tend to have more of the expansion pack mentality- where you still need the original game in order to play, plus the expectation of free maps and updates for some titles. The microtransaction element, that was introduced to consoles this generation is standard practice in Asia. Many games are free to play with either ads or microtransactions paying the developers and publishers for their efforts. EA has tried this with Battlefield Heroes (micro payments) and id with Quake Live (ads). You can buy a silly hat for your in-game character or a gun that shoots chocolate death. EA tried small paid map pack expansions for Battlefield 2, but theses merely fragmented the player-base between the haves and have-nots. Lousy Have-nots ruining my BF buzz.
Nowadays, you don’t even need a game in order to buy stuff that has no bearing on the game. Sony Home is the ultimate in this regard. You pay for shit to decorate a virtual apartment that does nothing. Buy designer costumes for your avatars. Now we have 360 Avatars with lightsabers- lightsabers that cost more than many XBLA titles did when the 360 was launched in 2005. AND I’M SERIOUSLY THINKING OF GETTING A LIGHTSABER SO I CAN BE COOL. So we’ve come a long way from the days when Oblivion’s Horse Armour and EA Sports pay-for-cheats where the hot topics for gamers.
Of course, PC gamers have had it pretty good with free updates over the years. Of course that means Valve these days since Activision have more or less ignored the huge player base of Call of Duty 4 in regards to DLC and expansions, a mistake they’ve readily admitted while Treyarch’s been breaking records with WaW’s three map packs. PC gamers have been so spoiled that when Valve attempted to release a sequel to Left 4 Dead a year after the original, some vocal fans feared it would mean the end of DLC for their beloved game. They even started petitions to have Valve make L4D2 DLC for the original game. Top tip- don’t buy it if you don’t like it.
Here’s the catch. There’s been a fair bit of my DLC Odyssey that I regret buyuing. And of course, I can’t sell it on. I wish I had resisted the temptation to pick up Penny Arcade Ep 1, The Burnout DLC (thanks PS3 region coding on DLC), the Halo maps (since they’ll be part of ODST) and Grand Theft Auto Lost and Damned. I’d probably have enjoyed that more if I had played it before Infamous and Red Faction but them’s the breaks. I’m sure many people bought hyped up games and then thought “hmmmm.” Thank Christ i didn’t lay down money (Real or Microsoft points) for any game that picks an animal out of a zoo directory and sticks the word ‘space’ on the front.
So while EA might be looking at the numbers for BF1943, how many of those customers will return for more maps that are almost guaranteed to trickle out of EA over the coming months? Bethesda have said their five expansions for Fallout 3 are the last they will release (never mind how much it costs to but the game and then all of the DLC). Mass Effect 2 is coming out early in 2010 yet EA and Bioware are just now releasing the second DLC campaign for Mass Effect the original. DLC is all over the place and its still unpredictable. Apart from Ubisoft trying to sell you the end of Price of Persia. Dicks!
Reviewed n Xbox 360. Also on PS3, PC Developed by DICE. Published by EA
Back in 2002, Battlefield 1942 shook up the PC multiplayer shooter world with its blend of infantry and vehicle based combat. Carving out a rather large chunk of the market, EA and DICE never managed to achieve the same level of devotion to its follow-ups to 1942 set in Vietnam, the present day to the future. Bad Company was a recent console-only attempt that wowed those who tried it and the free to play PC title Battlefield Heroes hasn’t really found the huge audience was expecting. It’s a testament to the power of the original 1942 title when a downloadable remake using the Bad Company Frostbite engine that only features three (now four) maps managed to spur on 600, 000 downloads in its first few weeks.
So we have three Pacific theatre campaigns (with a fourth now unlocked) which are very close remakes of Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Coral Sea (a plane-only map unlocked after 43 millions kills on each platform) and Wake Island. They are almost identical to those found in the original release but with substantially upgrade graphics and sound. The pace of the gameplay has been upped with infantry weapons actually quite useful and respawns being much faster than the PC original. Regenerating health and explosives are another key difference. The objective of each game is to capture and hold the bases on each map with each capture and each kill removing tickets from the enemy team’s score.
There are three classes to choose from. The Rifleman has a semi automatic rifle, rifle grenade (which is possibly a little overpowered- the opposite of the firecracker in Bad Company’s rifle grenades), bayonet and a few grenades. The heavy assault has a sub machine gun, and a bazooka whilst the sniper has a scoped bolt action rifle, explosives and detonator and a sword/dagger for melee. Of course, any of these guys can get into a tank or plane and ruin the game for everyone else but 1943 seems a lot more fun to play as infantry than some past PC BF games. Tanks aren’t as invulnerable to infantry attacks (well, when I’m in one they seem to be made out of newsprint) and there are many anti-aircraft cannons dotting the maps.
A nice touch is the ability for each team to call in an airstrike. When the airstrike is available, all you have to do is enter the radar bunker and then you can guide the trio of bombers to their target (much simpler than actually flying a plane but more involved than just point a cursor at a map).
Overall, the game does not punish you for being on foot as much as previous BF games which makes this one the BF that managed to get it right on consoles and be recognised. Of course, if you’re like us and gave Bad Company a chance last year, you already know DICE have the console side figured out pretty well. Added to that is EA’s use of server backed games proves that P2P (only Halo’s P2P code has ever been really playable for me) means that this game can hold its head high in the online arena. You still have vehicle campers and people who’s idea of teamwork is to shoot you so that you don’t get the plane but this has been fairly well restrained (but it’s still there).
Of course, Bad Company, the first game to use the Frostbite engine showed that DICE nows how to make a pretty console game that looks sounds and above all runs very well. It’s in no way a primitive looking game and is polished to the extreme. The sounds are impressive in the same way they were on BC. You wouldn’t think this was a re-skin of a seven year-old game just by playing it. There’s obviously been a lot of attention paid to this game and it shows.
Overall, its one of the better online experiences around at the moment. It might even stop me from forking over any more money for World at War map packs.
High recommended if you have Live, PSN (or a PC, whenever that version is released)
Controller1.com Rating: 3/3
PS- I suck at this game but I love it nonetheless
