The new Prince of Persia kinda crept on us like a stealth camouflaged Pedo bear. I was expecting a cel-shaded Assassin’s Creed and what we have Prince of Persia Sands of Time with an even more automated control scheme. Its like trying to type something with auto-fill on. Predictive text may be great on phones, but its not so great when you’re trying to pull off complex moves smoothly.
The new PoP apparently does away with death. Bullshit. All it does is put more checkpoints in and cover the fact with a cutscene. You will be watching that short non-skippable cutscene of Elika grabbing your hand many, many, many, many times. Why? Because this is a game that expects you to ignore your instinct whilst playing.
Its hard to describe. In order to pull of the move list, you need to unlearn. Need to double jump? Press A to jump then Y to have Elika use her mojo to give you an extra distance boost. Jump across a chasm and press A to jump up? No the game does it for you automagically. If you press A again, you’re jumping backwards to your temporary death.
I’m very conflicted about playing this game any further. I like it and it shits me to tears within the space of five minutes. Its a great game to play in 20 minute installments. The reason you can’t play it any longer than that is because you realise that you’re spending so much time on one jump sequence because the controls don’t quite do what you need them to. Prince of Persia is in fact the best argument for Mirror’s Edge using a first-person perspective.
PoP is the last 2008 game I have left to play and is the last of my gaming Xmas pressies I had to play. We have a long weekend coming up so it will be interesting to see how much time PoP actually gets. Right now its level pegging with Halo 3 time.
So Grifball. What the fuck is that? I played this as part of the Mythic Map pack last night and its basically a room where two teams are only armed with melee weapons such as the Gravity Hammer and the swords. It was fun apart from one of the few instances of lag I’ve noted in Halo 3. Like, it was really really bad lag. There’s a bomb in there as well but dying when enemies were nowhere near me made it a little confusing.
The other team modes are just plain fun. Its a pity the bigger team games are so objective based as I want to shoot more than I want to capture flags. The question remains, why is Halo 3 easier to play (its P2P just like most live games) online than CoD WaW, where there is a noticeable lag between you shooting and hitting an opponent.
I’m kinda waiting for something to hit me in the face. Hopefully Infamous will be that game as its the only game on my radar for the month of May. Maybe I’ll look at some more DLC stuff like Burnout Paradise Cops and Robbers pack. Part of me wants to replay some faves like Bioshock, Crackdown and even the campaign from Halo 3.
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PC, PS3, DS. Developed by Ubisoft Monteal. Published by Ubisoft
Ubisoft presents a Ubisoft Montreal production…
Assassin’s Creed is an enigma of a game. It looks like a gorgeous open world stealth action game. It looks as though there’s millions of things to do in this [cliche] leaving, breathing city [/cliche]. Well looks can be deceiving. Assassin’s creed has a few tricks up its sleeve. You just have to do them over and over again.
Halo creators Bungie have often said that their games are 10 seconds of fun repeated over and over. Well Ass Creed is about 2 seconds of fun repeated over and over again. It’s like Ubi Montreal got wrapped up in how cool the locale and story was and forgot about making the gameplay varied enough (as GTA does so well). Obviously you can’t have bazookas and helicopters in a game set during the middle ages. Or can you?
SPOILERS (even though this game has been out six months, Flamey still has another 3 years before he can even consider it retro enough for his tastes. This spoiler is not all that much of a spoiler since the menus give it away before you’ve even pressed start and the game doesn’t wait 5 mins before it tells you the big twist)
This game is set in the present. Your character is actually accessing a trace memory on his ancestor (similar to the Matrix). Unfortunately, this serves almost no story purpose, kills the middle age realism by having techno looking menus, computer voices telling you you’re fast forwarding and the like. It even feels grafted on in some ways.
So, hi tech conceits and repetition aside, what has Unisoft done for us? Well, the game is fun to play, the towns are interesting to explore and combat and movement is fun, despite the incredibly wanky tutorial. By incredibly wanky, I mean super incredibly wanky in the vein of Final Fantasy wankery. Its pretty and it sounds very good.I quite liked being able to climb buildings though I found having towers more fun than missions because they were more frustrating than fun to be honest. There’s little skill involved in pickpocketing more luck. Interrogating barely works and stealth kills in order to assist an informant where somewhat more fun.
Metal Gear meets GTA meets the middle ages meets the Matrix meets hype and cute producer meets 5 million in sales. If AC2 managed to fix the basic gameplay issues, I’ll be there, since they’re got most of the elements right. As it is, if you can play it for more than a few hours without getting incredibly frustrated or bored, you might like this.
C1 Rating: 1/3
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
