Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PC. Dev: Bioware. Publisher: Microsoft
Well, fucken done and dusted. And now that it’s an EA game, even though EA had nothing to do with development or publishing or distribution, they make all the money and of course, soon enough this game will forever be known as Mass Effect 1. Or, the game that the sequels aren’t as good as…
So Mass Effect is a big RPG, more in the vein of Jade Empire than KotOR, even if the universe is just the same as Bioware’s old SW game just with the force renamed Mass Effect, and guns instead of Lightsabres.
You play as Commander Shepard who, depending on how you customise at the start of the game, is either a man or a woman who early in the games joins the Jed… er Spectres, but depending on your early choice at the time you customise can either be a soldier, or a biotic (jedi forces) or a technician. So play as a soldier to start with. You basically chase the big bad across the galaxy, and along the way you take on side quests. The side quests are all exactly the same: you visit all of the points of interest and recover artefacts (pressing buttons in sequence in response to the prompts), then visit a base that looks the same on which ever planet you visit and clear out a few bad guys. Or you can board a ship that always looks the same and has the same layout and defeat a few enemies there as well.
On the main hub level, the Citadel, the quests there are more of the talk to this guy and talk to that dude type stuff. My favourite part was one that a lot of other people disliked, the Mako. I enjoyed driving around the planets because I could drive up cliffs and over mountains instead of corridors and valleys.
So the game has pretty graphics, mostly a decent framerate and nice sound and VO, even the cutscenes are a bit more involved than the conversations in KotOR. It took about 25-26 hours on medium to do most of the side quests (maybe 70-80%). I liked it and now I don’t want to see another game for at least 24 hours.
PS-I didn’t get no full digital nudity!
C1: Rating 2/3. (The score would have been 3/3 if not for the highly repetitive side missions)
Reviewed on Xbox 360 also on PC, PS3 Developed by Midway Games. published by Midway Games.
John Woo pulls a Sid Meier on Max Payne and here’s the result…
Midway’s big title of last year is actually pretty good. Developed by Tiger Hill and with about 300 middleware companies, Stranglehold is the closest thing we currently have to a next-gen Max Payne game and hopefully there’s more of this sort of thing to come. It’s not super deep, but that’s why I loved it. It’s a sequel to a 1997 John Woo movie Hard Boiled starring Chow Yun-Fat, a movie I’ve not seen in a genre I normally avoid so call me a n00b on the subject matter.
You play as Detective Tequila, who looks and sounds exactly like Chow Yun-Fat (unlike the upcoming Bourne game with its Matt Damon-free countenance) and you basically go from one end of the level to the other and blow the living shit out of everything. It is fairly consistent in its intensity but at least you do have some breathing space, even if its just a loading screen masquerading as a loading screen. Gameplay consists of shooting, bullet time, with some moves depending on building up a special meter so that you have precision aiming, rapid fire and a smart bomb type move which kills any enemies around at that time. You often see a glowing line above railings you can run along or things you can hang from which helps you get to some of the trickier spots. The levels are few in number but fairly long, but they tend to become a bit repetitive. The devs have spiced this up as much as they can but in the second level you have to destroy 6 drug labs, then destroy 8 drug labs, etc and this gets a bit much, though at least this levewls is huge and the topography changes regularly. Fortunately, each level is very different to any other level so after one sprawling level,, you’ll have a more contained one where you go progress through the floors of a casino until you reach the boss battle at the top.
The presentation is excellent. Its an Unreal 3 engine game that at least looks as though there’s some colour other than brown. It’s a colorful game and runs very smoothly on 360 (the game is also on PC and PS3). The visual effects are impressive though some textures on a few backgrounds look a bit blurrier than they should. The amount of detail in the world is beautiful and you can shoot the shit out of everything in your path (apart from making holes in walls that you can walk through).
The audio is also excellent, The music is standard action fare but well done in all instances. Sound is crisp, the guns might sound a bit weedy at first but this is welcome since you hear those gun sounds soooo often (I found the gunfire in HL2 to be deafening compared to everything else in the game).
There’s multiplayer modes but I tried unsuccessfully to find a game at all so I don’t know whether the DLC map pack would be worth your money. The game is short – 2, maybe around 5-8 hours depending on your skill and the difficulty level you choose, or whether you want to try and get a higher score for each level. Also – it’s region free so don’t pay full price figuring there’s MP to keep it alive. It’s a great game, if the price is right.
So, here I am saying I liked another game. Gee I do that a lot, but then Xbox 360 demos have proven a great way of picking out the bad games. This was a game I liked from the demo and said I would get it once I was able to get to it and I’m glad I took the time.
Would I get a Stranglehold 2? If it was at least as good as this (and as cheap as I got this), then yeah.
C1 Rating: 2/3
Reviewed on Xbox 360. also on PC. Dev: Techland. Publisher: Ubisoft
Developed by polish developers Techland and released for PC in 2006, this was picked up by Ubisoft and released in 2007 on Xbox 360. It’s a Western, a setting that has not done all that well in games. Sure there were levels in the Duke Nukem games on N64 and in Timesplitters. And there was Red Dead Revolver (decent), Dead Man’s Hand (awful) and Gun (good, but not great). Call of Juarez is actually pretty good.
It didn’t score well on PC reviews but did better on Xbox 360. The demo came out on LIVE last year just as games such as Bioshock and Halo were about to hit so the timing of the Xbox 360 version was poor. But now that I’ve played my way through Bioshock (Bioshock? Bioshock!), Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Mario Galaxy, Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted and Orange Box, I picked up Call of Juarez on the cheap. I thought “for 30 bucks, if I at least get 4 hours out of it, I’m fine with that”. So anout 12-13 hours later, I finish the thing on medium and enjoyed it a lot.
It’s a first person shooter set in the wild west. You play as two different characters throughout the game. First, there’s Billy a young half-breed who’s accused of a murder he didn’t commit and goes on the run from grizzled Reverend Ray, who you play for the other half of the game.
Billy can climb, use a bow and hide from those following him by hiding in bushes and use a whip as a weapon or to climb and swing to new areas. Rev Ray can’t climb, but has “concentration mode” which is like a poor man’s bullet time and can stun some enemies by reading a passage from the bible (after which you shoot them). Throw some platforming, stealth missions, horseriding and a lot of shooting and you have a fairly varied set of gameplay dynamics.
Most of it is done very well. Except for the platforming. I must say there’s a reason why most FPS’s don’t have platforming elements in them any more and its a lesson that the Call of Juarez creators seemed to have missed because they are easily the most frustrating parts of the game. And these aren’t skippable bits of the game either so you end up jumping and hoping for the best quite often. I also found trying to negotiate a horse down a steep slope not to be all that much fun.
The presentation is excellent. The graphics are very good apart from some draw-in issues with the grass and some pop-in in the large outdoor areas. The framerate is smooth though there a degree of screen tearing. Audio is excellent with great music (that ultimately gets overused) decent voice acting (Reverend Ray is voiced by Marc Alaimo from Deep Space Nine) and nice sound effects. The story and cutscenes are pretty well done. They’re aren’t fancy but they get the job done well.
Overall – if you’ve played all the big FPSes you’ll probably enjoy Call of Juarez. It is definitely better than the Western themed games of last generation even if it’s not Bioshock great.
C1 Rating: 2/3
