Reviewed on PC (Single Player), Xbox 360 (multiplayer). Also on PS3, PS2, Wii, DS, PSP. Developed by Treyarch. Published by Activision.
So, despite the dire predictions of Call of Duty World at War being a total disappointment compared to Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat, Treyarch have surprised us all and delivered a worthy successor to the most popular CoD game of all time.
CoD WaW follows a US soldier in the Pacific being led by the hand by 24’s Keifer Sutherland interspersed with playing a Russian soldier in the final assault on Berlin. It doesn’t try to out do CoD4’s sniper mission or the Gunship level. It has its own slants to those CoD4 signatures and adds a tank level and flying boat level. The shooting is EXACTLY the same as that in CoD4, which is what everyone who loved CoD4 but wanted more asked for.
Keifer’s gravelly tones tell you to shoot that. You shoot it. He tells you to shoot that, you shoot. “Those Jap bastards,” he says and you aim and open fire. Flames are a big part of this game. You wield a deadly flame thrower in some levels, including one level where it subs for the machine gun on a Russian tank. The flame thrower is a really nice weapon- much more usable than the one in Gears 2. The weapons are typical WWII fare with KAR98, M1 Garand, Thompson SMG, etc but they handle very nicely. There are a few large battles where progress is a little more difficult since Treyarch love their “infinitely re-spawning enemies until you cross a threshold” trick but overall the level designs are solid and fun to play. You may not have been to these locales, but if you’ve played previous CoD4 games, you have played them.
You can play the campaign either by yourself or in coop mode and once you’ve beaten it you get the Zombie mode “Nacht der Untoten,” which is basically a short version of Left 4 Dead. It is awesomely fun and highly recommended to give it a go. Pity there aren’t more levels but I guarantee this will be expanded upon at some stage. I’ve found that I’m unable to get online in the PC version so I’ve been playing a few rounds of this before I boot up CoD4 every night. I love it.
Multiplayer offers the usual modes, Search and Destroy (CS), Capture the Flag and Deathmatch modes. I mainly play Team Deathmatch but it compares quite favorably with CoD 4 and CoD3 multiplayer (CoD3, also by Treyarch did feature excellent Multiplayer modes). If you’ve played CoD4 MP, then you know what to expect. Just substitute Recon plane for UAV, Artillery for Airstrike and Dogs for choppers. That’s right, get to 7 kills without dieing and you can unleash the dogs. So long as you have no problems shooting digital dogs in the head, you’ll have a blast. Think of it as retribution for all the times in Nintendogs when your Alsatian took a crap when you were walking it. One thing that makes me think of CoD3 is the fact you can drive tanks in multiplayer. Overall, highly enjoyable. They even used Keifer to announce “Team Deathmatch” when you play as an American.
Graphics are excellent. I mean, they are jaw droppingly gorgeous on PC and console versions. Even in multiplayer, the 360 version ran at a smooth as butter 60 frames per second. Sound is also excellent though the weapon are a bit weedier sounding than CoD4 (but at least the sounds are different). The Flash cutscenes opening each level are also interesting and different from what you’d expect in a WWII-set game.
Since FPS WWII games set in the Pacific are pretty thin on the ground, the only competition is really the two rather poor EA Medal of Honor games (Pacific Assault and Rising Sun) and this game just wipes away all memories of those travesties. So, no it isn’t better than CoD4. It is close in many respects and doesn’t fail in any one particular area. That said, its an entertaining game in its own right
controller1.com rating 2/3 (or 3/3 if you love Call of Duty games and can’t face any more CoD4 MW) As Keifer says when the Marines win a multiplayer game “Out-fucking-standing!”
Reviewed on XBLA. Also on PC, N64. Developed by 3d Realms
Well Duke is back and this time its the original 1996 adventure in its entirety on XBLA. This isn’t a remake, merely a port but even after all these years, this is still a good game.
The game is a first person shooter starring Ass-kicking Duke Nukem, originally a star of a side-scrolling shooter before getting this 3D makeover in 1996. An instant classic managing to hit all the sweet spots for a typical teenage gamer (action, gore, smart ass wrestling style commets and some pixelated T and A), the game is also a case study in making a varied FPS. So much of the game play is done right that its hard to remember its rather unrelenting difficulty and some rather obtuse puzzle elements.
This port brings features online multiplayer and 8-player coop. It also manages to make the difficulty a non-issue without completely re-engineering the gameplay. When you play, the game is recording every move you make so that when you die, you can restart anywhere along the timeline of your current playthough of the level. The game is still hard, its just not as punishing as it was.
The multiplayer is like stepping into a time portal and emerging in 1996. All that’s missing is Ace of Base on the radio and giant cell phones that could cave in the skull of a hippopotamus. If you loved that sort of intense deathmatch gameplay, you might get some feelings of nostalgia but this is an excellent single player experience.
Graphically its still a 4:3 game with either decals or black bars on the side (though you can zoom the image to see more of the VERY PIXELATED graphics. The sound is just as crunchy as it was back in the pre HD era. But you are playing this game because you remembered it being fun and cool, not because you miss 3D games using sprites instead of 3D models.
Is this a portent for Duke Nukem forever actually coming out? I’ve no idea and after playing this and enjoying it, I really don’t care anymore. This sates any desire I had for more Duke unless DNF is very, very, very, very, very good.
controller1.com Rating 2/3
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on: PS3, PC. Developed by EA. Published by EA
It’s a recent oldie if there’s such a thing. One thing’s for sure, no one does Call of Duty Medal of Honor better than Infinity Ward EA.
So EA’s most recent MoH game is not a bad game for MoH fans. What’s new? You start every level by jumping out of a plane, and indeed every time you die, you jump out of a plane again, though any objective’s you’ve successfully completed are still intact. Of course, most enemies also respawn after you die, but you can land almost anywhere on the map. Indeed, this is encouraged because although there are safe landing zones (green smoke) there are also 5 skill drops in each level (these are more difficult landing points you can aim for as a collectible for those of you who look for such things in this type of game). But really, think of it as a game with branching paths rather than the scripted events of yore because you still have to complete all of the objectives in a level before the more linear ending area is unlocked.
Many people forget MOH started off as a successful PSOne series before 2001′s PC hit Medal of Honor Allied Assault, which was of course excellent and 2002′s PS2 (and later Xbox and GC) MoH Frontline, which was also pretty good. Of course, despite two decent expansions on the PC, Call of Duty hit PC in 2003 and changed everything for Medal of Honor (Most of Infinity Ward’s leads came from 2015, makers of MoH: AA).
Suddenly MoH looked tired (DESPITE CoD BEING THE SAME GAME) by comparison and the two MoH games set in the pacific were universally loathed (Rising Sun was particularly awful). There was one last hurrah on PS2/Xbox called European Assault which tried to get away from scripted, linear levels and make scripted open levels. It was okay, but didn’t feel like MoH (as well as being cuntingly hard) while even the two PS2 / Xbox CoD games (Finest Hour and Big Red One) were quite enjoyable. Now MoH Airborne (which came out in late 2007 for PC and 360 and later on PS3) is trying to recapture the magic.
It does and it doesn’t. It plays like a fine antique since once you get past some of the innovations – it plays like the older games, particularly when it puts you on rails (funnily enough, the more linear areas feel like very good classic MoH). The game is not easy and you will be jumping out of the plane a lot. And in an effort to make the game feel less scripted, the AI is waaaay too good. You often will be surrounded. In one particularly obnoxious example is in the penultimate level when you have to destroy a pimped out battle train and a new Elite group of Nazi troops attacks you and you are swarmed from all sides and FUCK YOU EA!
Graphics are decent if nothing special. It does at least look better than Too Human or Resistance Fall of Man. Sound is pretty good but then MoH games were one of the first games to treat sound as a feature rather than an afterthought. I can’t tell you about MP because it seems more or less dead but considering I basically swapped this for Assassin’s Creed (which i found initially fun but eventually boring), I think I’ve gotten a hefty amount of fun out of this title. If you like FPS games, particularly MoH or older CoD games, give this one a spin. If those games aren’t your bag, baby, then you might want to try something else.
It’s definitely a product of ‘old’ EA, but since the single player of Battlefield Bad Company is very similar, it remains to be seen whether ‘new’ EA can make this series sing again.
C1 rating: 2/3 (if you ever liked MoH or older CoD games)
Reviewed on PS3. Also on Xbox 360. Developed by DICE. Published by EA.
Let’s get this out of the way. There is no PC version. Nor is this the free to play Battlefield Heroes. Let’s also get this out of the way: It’s frickin’ sweet!
Battlefield Bad Company has been touted by EA as a Single player Battlefield game with a multiplayer component. The single player is like Call of Duty with longer distances between the objectives. A storyline ripped from the Clint Eastwood classic Kelly’s heroes and some destructible buildings but really the reason to play this game is from some of the best online gameplay for this type of game (PC or console).
The multiplayer was downplayed for whatever reasons EA had, but they’ve made one hell of a game. There are two modes, Gold Rush and Conquest mode (which was recently added in a patch). Conquest mode is the old control the flags while the tickets count down from the original Battlefield 1942 game. Gold Rush is altogether more interesting and truth be told, all I’ve actually played online. You either play as Attacker or Defender. Attackers have to destroy the two gold crates of each base of the opposing team. They can do this by firing weapons, using tanks or missiles or by setting a charge (a la Counterstrike). Once each base has its two crates destroyed, the defenders have to pull back to another base, the attackers inheriting the destroyed base for their next assault.
You have tanks, light tanks, jeeps and occasionally choppers as well as turrets and missile launchers. Its very well balanced unless you want to use grenade launchers which are gimped (to the point of being useless). The choppers don’t dominate like they did in a PC game of Battlefield though they are a lot easier to fly. The artillery also works rather well with some bases having a giant field gun and some classes offering unlockable mortar strikes and guided missile airstrikes. But no class is totally overpowering so it works and works well.
And jeez it works well. I thought it would be a while before a multiplayer game could tear me away from CoD4 for any decent period of time. I’ve been playing this on PSN and the only gripes I have will eventually be fixed the more Sony copies the Live infrastructure. This title apparently uses servers for both PSN and Xbox Live and to be honest, this has been the most consistently playable on line console game I’ve played.
Graphics are very pretty, control worked very well and the sound is suitably huge and excellent (though my amp found the levels too much to handle). Why PS3 version for review? It’s multi region and cheaper for me to import but I played the Xbox demo and it too ran well.
I likes it a lot.
C1 Rating: 2/3
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on: PC, PS3. Developed by Ubisoft, Published by Ubisoft
Not a football score but a game, a sequel in a series that seems to alternate between extremely high quality offerings such as GRAW and the original R6 Vegas title and cheesy expansion packs. Guess which one this is…
The original R6 Vegas title came off four console titles from last gen of descending quality. The first Xbox R6 title was a pretty good game for its time and its follow up Black Arrow was more goodness. Then there was Lockdown and the Classics game (which redid missions from older PC titles). They were shithouse. R6V2 is somewhere in between the two extremes.
GRAW came out shortly after the 360 launch and was a great game with a sequel coming out a year later whose only major shortcomings were its lack of anything new and brevity. It was still kick ass. R6V2 seems to have lost a lot of the sparkle from the original Vegas. Its not so much kick ass as it is suckass.
The gameplay is identical in most respects. The locale is not, as there are health centers in Vegas, Junkyards in Vegas and the convention center, but the casinos are conspicuous by their almost complete absence (I do remember thinking they were a tad overused in the first title, but come on, Ubi. Only one level?). Being able to tag which enemies your fire team will prioritize when you use your snake cam is useful but that’s hardly anything other than expansion pack de rigeur.
With the more prosaic locales in most of the game, the graphics seemto have taken a big hit. Lightning is flat as a pancake most of the time and the frame rate can really struggle on some levels (particularly the health center). The brief MP game I played looked awful, like an early Xbox 1 game. It was even flatter than the Single player campaign after being flattened by a steamroller driven by a very large man.
Sound is a mixed bag as some of the voice work is barely audible and yet more use of the same sound effects these guys have been using since at least 2003 with Rainbow Six 3.MP was pretty ordinary as well. I played a Team Deathmatch game on LIVE – lag was fine but the gameplay seemed like an old R6 3 user map with spawn points almost always in the line of fire from camping whores. So massive fail there.
I ended up stopping playing this game’s SP about two thirds of the way through since it just wasn’t any fun and was frustrating enough to prevent me finishing.
I wouldn’t recommend this unless you looooooooooved the first one so much you need more. It would make ordinary DLC and is quite poor when its supposed to be a sequel that Ubi’s charging full price for.
AVOID LIKE HERPES
C1 Rating: 0/3
Reviewed on Xbox 360 and PC. Also on PS3
Developed by Valve (PS3 version by EA). Published by Valve (PC via Steam) and EA (Xbox 360, PS3)
Half Life 2
Working my way through The Orange Box, as you do, I thought I would collect some thoughts on HL2′s campaign, which is the only part of the Orange Box I had played previously. It’s also the longest part of the
Orange Box, unless for some strange reason you’re still playing Team Fortress 2.
Half Life 2 tells the story of Gordon Freeman when he arrives in City 17. Between Half Life 1 and 2, there have been a fair few unexplained events happening off-screen. Earth has now been taken over by the
Combine, who exert their control through a traitorous human. Gordon takes charge of the resistance, get a girlfriend and shows Bioshock (Bioshock? Bioshock?!) still has a way to go in unseating Half Life 2.
It’s funny that in an industry where every successful and original game is copied relentlessly that no one has really tried to do the type of story and varied gameplay, and really no one who’s tried has
got it right, with the exception of Bioshock (Bioshock? Bioshock?!). This thing just doesn’t feel all that dated.
Graphics hold up very well on 360 and the sterling audio work carries over with nary a glitch. The game runs smoothly on 360, load times aren’t excessive and the controller works well. It took me about 14-15
hours to play though the second time, maybe a bit longer – its hard to estimate re-tries, and even on its own would have been worth the price of admission.
The weapons are all interesting takes on the standard FPS fare, though you have some oddities such as the crossbow being the only long range weapon and the Combine rifle. Sometimes it feels as though your
character is a bit too large for the corridors he’s traversing but on the whole, a very entertaining experience.
Half Life 2 is one of those games you have to have in your collection, either on PC or on Xbox 360. There’s also an Xbox 1 version from a few years back, but like the frame-rate optional PS3 version of Orange box, this is best avoided.
C1 Rating: 3/3
Episode One
Well, almost through the Orange Box, Meh-pisode One is the least interesting single player element in the Orange Box.
I finished it in about 3 hours (probably 4 with restarts) so its not a very long experience, but it really is ho-hum compared to the brilliance in evidence throughout the rest of The Orange Box.
Meh-pisode One carries on from the rather unusual ending of HL2. You and Alyx Vance have to RE-ENTER the Citadel (which has all these things that weren’t there before). At least here you get to spend alot more time with Alyx Vance, who clearly has the hots for Gordon Freeman. It is an expansion pack since there are all of two new character models (one of which, the Stalker does almost nothing thataffects gameplay) So Gordon and Alyx go through an underground car park, Gordon and Alyx go through a disused Hospital, yada, yada, yada. Nothing to see here. Move along. So why play it?
Well, I hear Episode Two is the dogs balls. It’s supposed to be fantastic, even more fantastic than HL2. So even through I read that Meh-pisode One was ordinary, I knew I’d have to sit through it in order to ‘get’ Ep 2.
So it wasn’t bad, but I had never played it, I would never had missed
it. It’s like most PC expansions packs, you really can’t see the point.
C1 Rating 1/3
Episode Two
Well, I have finally finished going though everything in the Orange Box, and believe me by the time you’ve played through all of Portal, TF2, Half Life 2, Episode and Episode Two, you certainly feel as if
you’ve gotten your money’s worth…
So Episode Two is about 4-5 hours of gameplay continuing on from the end of the rather ordinary Episode One. Episode Two is much better, with the sense of deja vu you get playing through some sorta familiar level types is less than Ep 1.You have a level in a mine infested by Ant Lions, with a new variant
that spits acid at you and luminescent Ant Lion Grubs which restore one point of health everytime you step on one. Then there’s a new car to drive and the Magnusson devices at the climax. So its more of the
same with some tweaks but there’s enough of an improvement over Episode One that playing through this if you have Orange Box is a must.
Graphics are still decent, slightly better than the earlier installments and framerate never misses a beat. Sound is still great with the voice acting being a particular highlight. The ending battle is somewhat more intense than anything outside of TF2, and it almost goes on for too long but once you have a stratgey
in place, it’s not as daunting as it appears at the start of the battle. I found the difficulty levels throughout to be better than Half Life 2 or Episode One so it wasn’t too easy or too hard, just
right.
So, would I play Episode Three? Well, that depends on how is made available to 360 or PS3 users since I don’t want to end up buying the game on Orange Box again (I have already bought Half Life 2 when it
came out and TF2 on PC as well). If I can just buy one part at a reasonable price (by reasonable I don’t mean the ridiculous prices on Steam where all of Orange Box on PC is $50 but TF2 on its own is $30)
and on console, I might give it ago. At the moment, I am a bit Sourced out and will take a long break from HL2-based games for quite a while (unless Day of Defeat for Xbox LIVE is announced).
C1 Rating: 3/3
PORTAL
Portal started off as a HL2 mod that become a phenomenon in its own right. a short 306 hour puzzle game played in first person mode, Portal has several things going for it. Unique gameplay that’s going to be hard to replicate without being so obviously a clone; a presentation that will never be matched for originality, humour and creepiness- a veritable meme factory; and that song.
The 360 version of Portal as part of the Orange Box is great. Its a short review for a short game. You just need to play Portal. rent orange box, or just by the PC version on its own but go out and get this now.
Team Fortress 2
Lastly, my least favourite part of the Orange Box. Its my least favouite but its not bad, it just doesn’t click with me like it does for so many who believe it to be Jesus’ son. TF2 is a class based team game based around capturing control points(battlefield), or collecting intelligence (capture the flag) and similar gameplay types (since this review was originally written in late 2007, other modes have been added and are not reviewed here).
Its one of the games you either get it or you don’t. The ones that do love this to the point where WoW was just a footnote in videogaming history. Its obviously a very well put together and quality game that I totally don’t get despite owning the PC and 360 version (the 360 version of TF2 is the only unplayable part of orange box on 360,)
C1 Rating: 1/3
overall Orange Box: rating 3/3
