Titanfall Mini-Review

By now you've read all the reviews for Titanfall that you can stand, so I'll keep this fairly short. Titanfall's good.

Okay, longer than that.You feel pretty damn powerful in a Titan.

Basically, in the lead up to the game's launch I wasn't terribly excited. I didn't think it looked massively game changing but kept hearing "you just have to play it for yourself." Well, after playing it for myself, I can confirm that playing is believing.

The game feels silky smooth. You glide around the battlefield, running up and bouncing off walls, elegantly taking out the enemy forces as you go. Movement feels effortless and you're always in control. In hours of playing I only felt like I lost control a few times, which is a testament to how well the game is made (as opposed to a game like Assassin's Creed, where feeling in control is a rarity.)

The main mechanic that sets the game apart from other First Person shooters are the Titans. Titans are huge robot suits that basically act as your kill streak. Killing enemies or taking objectives reduces the cooldown of your Titan, but if you're bad at the game, you still get your Titan time. If you, hypothetically, don't kill a single enemy or score a single point, your Titan will still have gone on cooldown within a few minutes. Parading around in a Titan feels pretty good, although I found it to be most thrilling when running around outside my Titan, when there were enemy Titans in play. To destroy an enemy Titan when you're on foot you have to use your superior agility, and a touch of stealth to either hit it with your anti-Titan weapon, or to climb on top of it. Jumping on top of an enemy Titan, your character rips a panel off the top of it, leaving a weak spot for you to barrage with whatever bullets you have available, which for me was usually a pistol. There's nothing quite like the feeling of straddling a bucking Titan whilst unloading pistol clip after pistol clip into it's exposed brain. So satisfying.

The gameplay is, floor to ceiling, exemplary. It just doesn't stop feeling satisfying, which is getting more and more rare in this day and age. The game isn't without fault though, as it's pretty barebones.

Short little scenes like this are about as complex as the game's story gets.The "Campaign" is a joke. You play multiplayer matches and, whilst you fight the other team, a radio play happens in the background. You can't pay full attention to the story happening because you're too busy playing the actual game, and the bits of story you can make out, are of so little consequence that it's impossible to care. The game's story is split up into half, with each half taking place in one of the game's 2 different factions. In fairness to Respawn, it is kind of clever the way that, no matter if you win or lose your match, they still find a way for the story to progress. For example, if you win on the "refuelling" stage, the dialogue after the match says "We got all the fuel we need, good job"; whereas if you lose the match on the same level, it will say "Well we lost, but we managed to get just enough fuel to last us a few months" and the story keeps progressing. It's elegant, though it shouldn't be necessary in the first place! This game is made by the same team that were behind Call of Duty 4, a game that changed the way we think about single player Campaigns, and yet there's not even an attempt to replicate anything like that. Compared to what this same team has done in the past, Titanfall's sorry excuse for a "Campaign" is an absolute joke.

Another section where features feel lacking is in multiplayer. Don't get me wrong, there are enough modes for you to sink your teeth into, but your customization options feel absolutely tiny. Again, this is the team behind Call of Duty 4, one of the best, most customizable multiplayer games of all time, and what they've come up with here feels pedestrian by their own standards. Looking at the list of things you can unlock up to level 50, nothing among those perks/weapons/unlocks feels game changing in any way. Perhaps that's the point? A dedicated sniper class wouldn't do well in Titanfall, you HAVE to embrace your own manoeuvrability or else you'll die to everyone else who's embracing theirs, but still, I can't help but feel a sense of disappointment every time ielevl up, because I'm never earning anything truly exciting.

Ultimately, I really do recommend Titanfall. Though it's lacking in some very key areas, the feeling of just playing the game is intoxicating. It's kept me coming back, on and off, for 2 weeks now just so I can get that exhilarating feeling all over again. I'm being harsh with my score, but that's only because of how excessively disappointed I was by the areas that game was lacking. Essentially the game scores a 5/5 for gameplay, but a lot lower when it comes to features, so wait until it drops in price before picking it up, but make sure you do pick it up eventually, because after all, playing IS believing, right?

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Titanfall is out now for Xbox One and PC.

Earth Defence Force 2025 Review

"Charm" is a commodity that's hard to measure. Some games have it, most games don't and no game can survive on charm alone, but some games can get by on charm a lot further than others. The Earth Defence Force series has always been one that relies heavily on charm to detract from the glaring performance issues and lack of graphical fidelity and 2025 is no exception. Fortunately, EDF 2025 has charm in spades, and that goes a long way to making you look past its flaws.

The game is set 8 years after its predecessor (EDF 2017) and The 4 classes give you a lot of variety.the dreaded Ravagers (a race of aliens we know little about) have returned, bringing with them countless giant insects and robots to exterminate the human race. The plot doesn't get much deeper than that, nor does it need to. Any attempt at a narrative only serves to set up a new level with new giant things to destroy, so if you're expecting a deep, thought-provoking story... You'll be disappointed.

...If, on the other hand, you come into the game expecting nothing but action and the feeling of a £1 bargain bucket B-Movie that you've never heard of, then I doubt you'll regret throwing your hard-earned money at this. The crux of the game is shooting. Shooting giant ants, shooting giant robots, shooting giant spaceships. Each of the games 4 classes has many, MANY different ways of shooting things, and strategies that can be employed in order to shoot things more effectively. There really is something for every play style. My main method was to go with the default class, the Trooper, and go for as much damage as possible. The Trooper is very bare-bones, only being able to jump and roll, but to make up for it he packs a lot of health and a lot of heavy weaponry. My co-op partner stuck to the Wing Diver, a class that can fly using energy, but reloads its weapons using that same energy, meaning combat with the Wing Diver is a delicate balance of staying maneuverable whilst also juggling your energy so you can reload. The Air Raider is a support class that has low damage, but a very versatile set of equipment. He can heal, protect and buff teammates in a number of ways and he's also the only class that can call in vehicles (though, to be honest, you don't need to call in vehicles). The final class is the Fencer. The Fencer is the heavy class, being able to equip 2 weapons at once but is super slow and unwieldy. There's a lot of variety in how you want to play, but you'll more than likely fall into a role early on and feel a good bond to it.

The game's never short on action!Each class gets their own separate set of weapons, which you get as random drops from killing enemies. The weapons always drop as the same green boxes and you don't get to find out what was in the boxes until you complete the level. The list of things you've picked up at the end of the level is super satisfying, telling you immediately if any of the weapons you've picked up are new, delivering a strong sense of excitement particularly if you've not come across that weapon type before, which is likely, because the game contains an immense amount if weaponry. Each class has several different types of weapon they can unlock, with well over a hundred weapons to unlock overall for each class. The feel and performance of each weapon is unique, and that's good because the whole game hinges on how good the weapons feel. As the Trooper my weapons were relatively standard (Assault Rifles, Rocket Launchers, Shotguns etc.) but the team over at Sandlot know how to take a simple missile launcher and make it into something truly unique and special. Take for example, the Air Tortoise, a class of missile launcher that fires a huge, super powerful missile... Which travels ridiculously slowly to its target. Hilarious the first time you use it but satisfying when you, seemingly impossibly, use it effectively for the first time. Even the most initially ridiculous weapon has its uses, and the game is balanced in such a way that these niche weapons may even make certain situations easier. I must admit though, I did feel a pang of jealousy when my co-op partner would whip out his futuristic lightning shotguns and laser chainsaws, if only for a moment.

One advantage to the Trooper class was that some of its best weapons are explosives, and explosives in EDF games are always super fun, mostly because basically every building you can see in any level is destructible. From the tallest skyscraper, to the smallest bungalow, everything is ripe for the destroying. The damage models have been hugely improved for 2025 over 2017, making tearing down buildings way more satisfying than it ever has been before. They will crumble and fall apart dynamically before finally toppling over in epic fashion. There's nothing quite like shooting aYep, that enemy's as big as it looks. rocket at a giant robot, missing, then seeing the building behind it shatter into a million pieces. The frame rate takes a huge hit when it happens, but it's worth it. There's an example of that "charm" we talked about earlier, the frame rate in the game is all over the place, rarely running at 60 or even 30 FPS due to the sheer amount of carnage on screen, but you don't mind because you're too busy nuking an entire city block whilst also dodging the projectile webs of a spider the size of a bus.

Graphically the game is nothing special. The textures aren't great, there aren't really any lighting effects to speak of and the whole game has barely evolved visually from EDF 2017, but the thing the game does better than any other, is scale. No other game can get away with what an EDF game can get away with. There are times you literally won't know how far away something is from you because it's so impossibly big that your brain can't accept that it's just THAT big but far away. There was one example that stuck out: A huge alien ship was flying above me and I was shooting at it. My gun's range was quite far but my shots weren't reaching the ship. I looked at my radar (which depicts the area a couple of hundred metres around you) and the giant spaceship wasn't anywhere close to me. it was so big that I thought it was right above me and fairly close, but it was so huge that it was actually hundreds of metres away horizontally. Therein lies the charm that lets you see past the graphical shortcomings of the game. Sure it may not be the prettiest, it may not come close to showing off the graphical power of your Xbox or Playstation but it's hard to care or even notice when you're staring at a robot the height of the Empire State Building, firing plasma cannons at you from a kilometer away.

Unfortunately there's ALWAYS a bigger spider...On the surface the game may seem to be nothing more than a quirky distraction, but underneath there's a surprisingly tight, mechanically interesting experience. There are 5 difficulty levels and the games are renowned for their difficulty, but they're not impossible. Your weapons will always do a set amount of damage, and enemies will always have a set amount of health, so with some experimentation you can always find the exact combination of ordinance you'll need. On the harder difficulties this is extremely important, as you'll need to concoct the correct strategy to even stand a chance. An enemy drop ship may take exactly 6 shots from a certain Sniper Rifle, so you can start to figure out what other weapons you have can measure up with that firepower but may be more versatile or appropriate for the other enemies on that stage. The whole thing is a pretty cool balancing act that, in co-op especially, leads to a lot of in-depth discussion and planning with your buddy. That the game is much more complex and deep than it would lead you to believe is just another one of its many charms.

When you play a game like Earth Defence Force 2025, it's hard to think about it critically. In places it's so rough whilst simultaneously being so wonderful that it's almost impossible to look at objectively. I personally have a big love for this series, and have already played the game for 30+ hours so obviously I'm a little bit in love with it, but taking a step back it's easy to see how someone more cynical with less joy in their life might only see a laggy, ugly mess of Japan-ness. I can't do that though, I love it too much. It's not a perfect game by any means, but it's more fun than most and one of the best co-op experiences on the market, so if you've got a buddy you can sit next to on a couch you'll have the time of your lives. The charm of the game makes up for a lot of its rough edges, but not all of them. The frame rate gets a little tiresome after 30 hours, and the Air Raider and Fencer classes are pretty bad, but ultimately the charm wins the day. It always does.

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Earth Defence Force 2025 is out now on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360

Broken Age: Act One Review

I know it's weird to only review the first act of a game, but I think we can all agree that this is an edge case. If you're not aware, Broken Age is the game that came about after Double Fine's hugely successful, $3.3 million Kickstarter campaign a little under a year ago. The company promised to make an adventure game in their old classic style (ala Tale of Monkey Island), a style of game we rarely see made nowadays, and if we do, it's never the quality of the kind of project the people behind Double Fine made back in the Lucasarts days. A major part of the appeal of the Kickstarter campaign was seeing the old adventure game 'band' back together and I think it's safe to say, they don't disappoint.

Broken Age follows 2 characters, Shay and Vella. Upon first starting the game, you're treated to the choice of which of the two you want to play as, and then after that you're free to switch at will. Vella's story takes place in a whimsical land with many odd and interesting characters, on the day she is set be her town's human sacrifice for the annual "Maiden's Feast" to All the girls except Vella are pumped to be sacrificed!satiate the evil monster 'Mog Chothra'; whereas Shay's story takes place aboard a spaceship on which he is the only human, with only a computer and it's creations to talk to. The 2 worlds are such a stark, and interesting contrast to each other that switching back and forth doesn't (as I was worried it might) get in the way of the 2 stories at all. The ability to be solving a puzzle in a cloud town one second, and then be going about your daily life aboard a sentient spaceship the next is exhilarating, and lends the game a sense of scope beyond the obvious size of the environments or events.

If you've played any kind of point-and-click adventure game before, you shouldn't have too big of a problem here. The gameplay is simple and intuitive, with the mouse being 99% of your control (you can press space bar to skip dialogue or cutscenes if you want). What this meant is that I could just ease back, put the game up on my TV and just control the game with the mouse, it was a very comfortable experience that went along very nicely with every other facet of the experience. All you can do is left click, but that turns out not to be a problem at all. In older adventure games, you would often have several commands to pick from for each and every little thing in your inventory, but here you click it to get a bit of an item description, and then if you want to use it on something, you just drag and drop. The whole system works wonderfully, without ever feeling dumbed down from those old classic games, and the game is all the better for it. This really does feel like a much more modern version of this genre, refined and remastered with modern sensibilities and common sense employed to great effect.

Graphically, the game is incredible. The art style is a joy to behold, almost unbelievably so, and it allows Double Fine a whole bunch of creative freedom. It's not enough to just set up a whimsical world, the Shay, under the watchful eyes of the ship's computer.tone has to be right, and here it's perfect. You never question the reality of what's happening, you just instantly buy into whatever you're seeing because what you're seeing is unlike anything you've seen before. You don't question a town floating on clouds when you're actually looking at it, and you can't help but wonder what they're going to be able to show us next in future acts. The world is their oyster in that regard. It's worth mentioning too that my 5 year old laptop, with a very old graphics card inside it handled the game superbly with everything looking sharp and gorgeous. If you own a computer with any graphical power of any kind, it can probably handle it with flying colours.

One of the big features of the classic adventure games was their razor-sharp writing, and that pedigree definitely returns in Broken Age. Colourful, vibrant characters charm you instantly and make you wish they had more dialogue once you've reached the end of their conversation tree, the 2 main characters are savvy and likeable, and you look forward to clicking everything you can see so you get to hear the associated inner monologue of the characters as they examine what they're looking at. I found myself running around to every character when I got a new item and offering it to them just to see what they would say, and that's what you want out a game like this, you want to want to offer the towel to everybody, just so you can hear why they don't want the towel.

There were a few glitches in the sound, occasionally something would happen on screen and there would be no noise associated with it which is a little disappointing but for a game that's yet to be released, not a huge issue, especially when what sounds ARE there are fantastic. Whether it's the ambient noises aboard Shay's spaceship, to the malevolent tones that occasionally rear up during Vella's story, the game's aesthetic is never betrayed by its sound design. Another huge aspect to the game is voice acting, with celebrity voices like Jack Black, Wil Wheaton and Elijah Wood all playing roles. Elijah Wood is the voice of Shay, and does a good job selling the character. The game is beautiful from start to finish.Only at first was I picturing Frodo Baggins sitting in a recording booth somewhere, but that quickly faded away and all I was left thinking was "damn this game's got good voice acting!" The voices all sound very natural and grounded, none of the voice actors are doing anything wacky or ridiculous and the game benefits from the raft of believable performances.

Now ofcourse, all of the above things: Graphics, sound design, acting, controls, gameplay etc. are all well and good, but they're for nought if the game's story isn't very good. Luckily however, Broken Age's story is actually fantastic. Vella's journey not to a human sacrifice and instead fight the monster that's threatening everybody is engaging; and Shay's tale of a spaceship clearly made for small child, but which is now occupied by a curious and bored teenager, is interesting and thought provoking. Both stories containt lightness, but also a lot of darkness. People in Vella's world absolutely love sacrificing their daughters to the evil monster and don't even see why he's such a bad guy; and Shay's life trapped inside a child's fantasy play palace has numerous undertones of darkness and sadness that leave a lasting effect. No spoilers here, don't worry, but Act One finishes about as strongly as any piece of media ever possibly could. If any ending to an act ever made me want the next act immediately, it's this one! I need it, now!

There's not one aspect of Broken Age's first act that I didn't love. It drew me in, hooked me, then made me want more in a way I wasn't expecting. When this thing is finished it's going to be something obscenely special, but until then I'm more than happy to make do with just this little slice of perfection.

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Broken Age: Act One is available now for Kickstarter backers, and on 28th of January 2014 for everyone else. Act Two will be released later this year as a free update.

Darksiders 2 Review

First off, let me just say that I really liked the first Darksiders. It was a fun game that played well, had a cool story and some fantastic polish. It was essentially a Zelda game, reskinned, but somehow original in its own right. It cannibalised lots of other games and mechanics but still vomited up something that was quintiscentially original, it was great. Darksiders 2, like its predecessor, put players in the shoes of one of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse. In the first game you played as War, but in Darksiders 2 players take on the mantle of the skull-faced, scythe-wielding Death.You'll find Death likes to solve problems by, well, impaling them. Death is a bit more agile than his bulkier brother, and has quicker combos, but for all intents and purposes Darksiders players will feel right at home when controlling Death.

Combos are easily pulled off, with different weapons having different speeds and attacks, usually leaning between light and quick attacks, to heavier slower attacks. There isn't too much wiggle room for different playstyles, but I definitely found myself playing differently to other people I had heard talking about the game, wading into groups of enemies swinging an enormous hammer has its advantages over swifter attacks, to me atleast. Death has spells he can cast, with skill trees dividing up appropriately as players progress and earn skill points. I was able to adopt my usual playstyle of summoning creatures to do my fighting for me, and there was definitely flexibility in Death's spells should you not want to go down the same route. Again, if you're comfortable with the original Darksiders then the combat should feel familiar, though certainly more varied than War's limited array of moves.

The story is a different matter however, and is where the game started feeling less than the original to me. In the first game you were summoned in as war between heaven and hell broke out on earth and humanity was being wiped out. You were wrongfully accused of the extinction of mankind and you had One thing the game does very well, is give you impressive views of epic architectureto prove your innocence whilst traversing the post-apocalyptic wasteland that was now Earth, it was super cool and set itself apart from most other games for the scale of its story alone. By comparison, Darksiders 2 feels like a clip show right in the middle of a season of your favourite show, not in structure, but in terms of a wasted oppurtunity to show an actual episode. In Darksiders 2 Death is attempting to get his brother War out of trouble by bringing all of humanity back from the dead, which on the surface of it sounds like a pretty interesting endeavour, but which ends up being a massive wet noodle. Obviously I won't spoil anything, but the thing you think might get sorted out within the first hour of the game, winds up taking over 20, and wraps up with as unsatisfying a conclusion as you could hope for. You thought Mass Effect 3 had a disappointing ending? Hold onto you horses! You're in for a treat!

The game's other big problem, is sticking too rigidly to its 1 trick: Dungeons. Much like how in Pokemon the answer to EVERY problem is Pokemon-related; or how in Yu-Gi-Oh the answer to EVERY problem is to play Yu-Gi-Oh cards; in Darksiders 2 if you have a problem, you better believe the answer to that problem will revolve around a fucking dungeon. Dungeons every-fucking-where! There was a section in the game where they promise an arena battle, but as soon as you enter the arena you're met with "Before we can let you fight the champion of this arena, we're going to have to ask you to complete these 3 mini dungeons!" It feels like game padding, and that's because it is game padding. Don't get me wrong, I like a good dungeon, but not where it doesn't make Your horsie will be essential in Darksiders 2's bigger environmentssense! The same happens in Pokemon where a big Pokemon is rampaging through a town and nobody thinks to just shoot the fucker! Don't battle it, just fucking get the army to blow that cunt up! Don't ask me to complete a dungeon to have a massive fight I'm already in the right place for, just let me have the massive fight! This shouldn't be rocket science, this should be common sense.

Problems aside I enjoyed more than I disliked, the new loot system akin to an MMO or Diablo is fun, and you're always getting loot thrown at you; the combat is enjoyable and lets you spec out your Death in some fun ways; the world is very colourful and pretty, and they achieve a great sense of size and scale with their environments, and there's a surprising number of sidequests with which to occupy yourself, should you be so inclined. The game may not be prefect, but it'll do for now. It's a bit of a joke that it's a numbered sequel, when the game has no bearing on the events before, during or after the first Darksiders but it is what it is. Though it doesn't deliver upon the promise made by the superb ending of the first game, its heart is in the right place... Its cold, dark, soul devouring heart.

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This review was written based on impressions made whilst playing the Xbox 360 version of the game. It is also out on PS3, PC and a Wii U version is on its way.

Magic The Gathering: Duels Of The Planeswalkers 2013 Review

There have been a fair few video games based on collectible card games over the years, from Yu-Gi-Oh to Eye Of Judgement, Culdcept to Monster Rancher, from Pokemon Trading Cards even to that weird Phantasy Star Online 3: C.A.R.D Revolution game, though no CCG-based video games have been as universally well received as the Duels Of The Planeswalkers series.

For those of you unfamiliar with how Magic The Gathering The little attacks that cards do is about as graphical as the game gets.works, I'll give you a crash course. You make a deck of 60 or more cards, with your cards comprised of 3 main types: Creatures, Spells and Lands. Every turn you can play 1 land card, and a land card entitles you to 1 mana point of the colour the land card is, for example, a blue land card will be able to give you 1 blue mana a turn. Simple so far. You lose any mana you had at the start of your turn, though you can still use mana to cast spells during your opponent's turn. Everything in the game you can do (except play a land card) costs mana, so it's important to include enough in your deck that you don't run the risk on not drawing any. Creatures you summon using your mana have 2 numbers attached to them (as well as various effects, but more on this later): The first number represents the amount of damage they can do, and the 2nd number is the amount of damage they can take. If they take that amount or higher, they are discarded. When you attack, you attack your opponent directly and they can choose if their creatures will block your attacks or not. And finally there are spells. Spells can do anything from bring a creature back from the discards, to damaging a player directly, to simply making your monsters stronger.

The basics of Magic the Gathering are very simple, but the beauty of the game comes in the form of the cards themselves. Because of the way the game is designed, whatever's printed on the card takes precedent over the regular rules. What this basically means is that in every new expansion and every new card released they can come up with whatever new rule, or gameplay twist they like, making the game extremely expandable.

The game's been going for almost 20 years now, and has amassed over 20,000 cards by this point. That's a massive barrier to entry, but if there's one thing Duels Of The Planeswalkers has always done it's welcome in new players. The game has a great tutorial system and tooltips popping up every time you encounter a new rule on a card you haven't seen before. It's also very easy to refresh your memory on what certain card effects do with a simple zoom into the card and a click of the "More info" button. If you ever thought about learning Magic The Gathering, this would without a doubt be the way to do it.

If this looks confusing as hell... That's because it is.There are several modes with which to flex your throbbing, Magic willy, the chief among which is the Campaign mode. In Campaign mode, you battle various other Planeswalkers and in doing so, you unlock more cards for your deck as well as the deck the guy you just defeated was using. Unlocking decks is your main incentive for playing through the game, and trying out new decks is genuinely really fun. Each deck has it's own style of play and own mechanics to consider, whether it be to do damage to you opponent's health without requiring battle, swarming the field with lots of weaker creatures or even to mass heal yourself while you chip away at your opponent. The decks are pretty well thought out, but you have very limited capability to edit them, and NO ability to create your own deck.

This has been the case, and main issue, with all of the Duels Of the Planeswalkers games. The incredible joy of a Collectible Card Game, comes from accumulating a collection of cards and building a deck piece-by-piece, possibly over the course of months. You start out with shit cards, you earn or buy better cards, you slowly build and improve a deck until it's exactly the way you want it and then you feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment. I've played my fair share of CCGs in my time, and it's fantastic fun, which these games do not even attempt to represent. I understand the technical limitations of including 20,000 cards in a game is massive, but without it, the game is always going to feel less than it could have been. You don't even have the option of creating a deck from all the cards you've earned, only in editing the decks you've won off other Planeswalkers. It's sad, I suppose there's not much to be done about it right now.

Revenge mode has you face off against computer players as they use the decks you've won against you, really showing off the correct way to use the deck. Numerous challenges are available of varying types and Planechase is a new mode that sees you face off against 3 other people in a free-for-all with daft rules, a weird dice and a shitty middle-of-the-table massive card which does imbalanced stuff and is completely pointless and not fun at all. The modes, for the most part, seem crammed in and just there to pad out the game instead of actually adding anything of interest, which is a bit of a shame.

What you'll be glad to hear is that the game supports multiplayer. The multiplayer is, for the most part, fun and challenging with options or fighting 2v2 as well as mono-on-mono with another human being. It's an obvious addition, and by obvious I mean necessary, but even the multiplayer gets old fast. The main problem is, that as you're using a deck from a set pool, nobody will have anything that will surprise you, in fact, if you've been playing the game at all before you get into the multiplayer, you'll recognise the very specific deck the opponent is using from the very first creature they play, which removes any surprise element at all. Not knowing what your opponent could whip out at any moment is a joyous thing in CCGs, but you're robbed of that feeling here, as with so much in the game, it fails to deliver on an actual, real-life game of Magic.

I imagine that the majority of my grievances with the Games rarely last very long in Magic, but occasionally you get a bit of an epic.game mainly come from my relatively extensive real-life experience with CCGs. I've been to tournaments, I've had a shit deck and slowly built it up into something that can actually beat people, I've traded for awesome cards and I've traded for bad ones and I've seen the look in a person's eyes when you draw that one card that wins you the game that they never even knew you had. These games cannot translate these feelings and they don't even try. What the Duels Of The Planeswalkers games (this one included) do do, however, is provide an amazing entry point into the wonderful world of CCGs, and I applaud them for that. A lot.

If you've played Magic before you'll have fun with the game up until you unlock the last deck and try out the multiplayer then you'll probably be done with it, and if you've played a previous Duels Of The Planeswalkers before, then you've already played this, but if you're new to Magic The Gathering, or even to Collectible Card Games in general, then I can safely recommend that you add a point onto the score below, because the game's made for you. Literally. And if you're nerdy enough to break through the initial barrier-to-entry, you could just find a love for a whole new type of gaming, and I can't help but have some love for the game for that.

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Magic The Gathering: Duels Of The Planeswalkers is out now and available digitally for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC and IOS devices for around £7.00

Diablo 3 Review

Much like with Max Payne 3, Diablo 3 was a sequel to games that I'd never played but was, obviously, well aware of. In Max Payne 3 I found a mediocre storyline well told, nice graphics and pretty much poo everything else. In Diablo 3 I found a mediocre storyline poorly told, basic graphics and, well, a whole lot of magic.

If there's some way you don't know how a Diablo game works, it's rather simple: You view the game from a semi-top down perspective, you move and attack enemies by clicking your mouse and using buttons 1-4 to use specific attacks you've mapped to those buttons and you also have access to some passive skills. The story follows Deckard Cain (apparently a character from the older Diablo games) as a weird meteor falls from the sky. You play as a character in one of 5 classes who sees this meteor fall and is drawn to it and its obvious potential for adventure.

Wizard is the class to play as. Bar none!Each of the 5 classes, and each gender for that class, have their own voice actor and own dialogue, it's all very smartly done. I played as the female Wizard and as a character she's very full of herself. She seeks out the meteor because she's fed up with being the most talented magician in her entire country and wants a new challenge, she's always making sassy remarks and is voiced by the voice actor behind Azula from Avatar: The Last Airbender! So in my book she was the perfect class for me. I embarked with my ex-firebending Wizard not really knowing what to expect. The combination of clicking to move, the perspective and the click-to-attack combat system immediately reminded me of my high school days playing Runescape (but obviously better looking) and I felt somewhat at home. The game is very inviting anyway, even without that niche nostalgia, by giving you powerful, fun, new ability after powerful, fun, new ability very early on. Within my first hour I was already doing Void Ray impressions (Starcraft references ran rampant in my playthrough) and mowing down zombies with my icy death beam. When you level up you're given new abilities and modifiiers for your existing abilities, in an almost unbelievable volume. Every new level showers you with new powers and it feels epic.

The flip side of this level-up power shower (I should trademark that) is that the game automatically levels your stats up, not letting you give any input. as a Wizard it would automatically dump the most stats into Intelligence, the wizard's main damage stat, with a bit into health and then next to nothing into the other stats. At first this annoyed me, your instinct when playing games is to want to customise yourself as much as possible, and the game's level-up mechanic feels like it's robbing you of that pleasure, but inactuality it's just allowing you to focus your customising energy on the bit that matters: Your abilities.

Laser Beam of death? Check.You get to choose your abilities from 4 main categories, each category assigned initially to one of the 1-4 keys. For example, as a Wizard my 4 categories were Defensive, Force, Conjuration and Mastery. Each of these categories contains multiple abilities, and each of those abilites has 5 Runes it can have assigned to them, which alter the initial ability in some way. As an example, one of the Wizard's basic attacks is called Magic Missile and is a basic projectile attack, but at level 13 you get a rune which lets you fire 3 at once, each for half damage. If you're firing into a group then you much more damage as a whole, but you can only land all 3 against larger enemies. I'm past level 50 now, so have gotten a few dozen runes by now, and the sheer variety and range of effects they can have on your powers keep things interesting and never fails to make levelling up an exciting process. For all you know, your next level will turn your beam attack into an AoE, or will make a nuke type attack into a DoT, such is the versatility of Runes. It's a jolly good job the rune system works as well as it does as well, because it's pretty much the only way to truly customise your character. Well, That and the loot. Oh, did I not mention the loot yet?

Motherfucking LOOT dude. Loot. Loot is crack. Whether you find it from breaking a barrel open, popping out of a dead enemy's corpse or yanking it out of a chest, the effect remains addictive after a good 40 hours of gameplay. Nothing quite compares to seeing a yellow item drop, picking it up, then having to identify it, watching your character cast a spell to unlock it's power then looking at the stats to see how epic it is. Sometimes it's a shitter, much less often it's a corker, but the threat of a corker is ever present and great fuel for pregression. As if crack wasn't enough for a game, the game's auction house also provides that most universally addictive of activities that we all love: Bargain hunting. Because the auction house is purely player controlled, there are always amazing items that people either undervalue or just want to sell desperately so underprice the hell out of them. While searching desperately for bargains is as satisfying as sex, it does tend to make the game a little easier than it's supposed to be, though of course that means you roll around the game as an unstoppable, badass, killing machine... Which is also enjoyable.

I've played the entire game in co-op which is, in my The only thing better than a Wizard? TWO!experience, the way it's meant to be played. In co-op the enemies were a little tougher but, more importantly, you get to show-the-fuck-off! Nothing quite compares to levelling up, getting a new ability and bragging about it to your mate, or finding some epic loot and showing him how massive it's stats are. It's a great feeling and adds so much to the experience. Going through the campaign entirely co-op was good not only for the above reason, but also because the campaign's story is fucking TERRIBLE! It's the most bullshitty, obvious story you could possibly imagine, and the "twists" would only be twists to either a feral child only recently rehabilitated into human society, or a boot polish from the early 1900s who has never experienced a real story before. There is a character in this game who does an over-the-top Dr. Evil laugh after literally every conversation you have with him... and it's supposed to be a twist when this guy turns evil?!?! you guys know how much I hate spoilers, but this is honestly so obvious it's not even a spoiler.

The presentation of the game is pretty good, effects look nice, characters show the loot they have equipped and look cool all geared up, the music is suitably epic and orchestral and animations are pretty good, with tonnes of variety between enemies, you can't really fault any of it's presentation. At all. Which is important with a game like this. It's graphics won't set the world on fire (though video that should run it fine have been encountering issues, including my own) but they're nice enough that you really like staring at it for 10 hours at a time. Which you will.

Seeing your character in your epic loot on the main menu is awesome!I had a major gripe with the game, for a few weeks, and that was that there was basically no point. I mean, we're all sat controlling block of computer generated polygons, so you could kind of make that argument about almost any game, but I feel Diablo more than most... or atleast, that was the case. It used to be that you were levelling up to beat that difficulty so you could get better loot and attempt the next difficulty... But that was it. Once you had beat the game on it's highest difficulty there was nothing to do after that, but recently they've added the Real Money Auction House, which changes everything. Now when you get to the higher points of the game you can start theoretically making money off it, which is crazy. For me, this definitely adds incentive, and makes me want to reach the upper reaches of the game to earn some money... Not much probably, but if you could earn enough through the game to have essentially gotten the game for free (just earn a cheeky £45, that's all!) then that's pretty amazing, and well worth striving for.

So by now you already know this, but I'm gonna tell you anyway: Diablo 3's pretty good guys. I don't know how it compares with the Diablos of old, but I know how it compares with the games of today, and it's up there with some of the best games I've played in recent years. a relic this aint, and though its absolutely horrendous story HAS to bring it's score down, as it really is shocking, it's defiitely more than worth the price of admission. A relic of games-gone-by the Diablo series may be, but it turns out it's as relevent now as it was 10 years ago, and just as good. Trust Blizzard, eh?

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Diablo 3 is out now for the PC.

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Max Payne 3 Review

The words "Max Payne" will have one of two effects on you: Either you will read the words and recall the noir storyline, the complex character progression and the revolutionary gameplay mechanics that made such waves back in 2001... Or, like me, you see a ridiculous person's name which obviously means 'maximum pain', and remember hearing about this game where there was slow motion and painkiller addiction and was fashionably "controversial" for it's time, 10 years ago. Well here we are, 11 years after the release of the original Max Payne and we're getting a third instalment, or at the very least, a game called Max Payne with a number 3 on the end.

The game picks up a year or 2 after the events of Max PayneWhen he's not shooting people, he's just drinking. 2. Max is still managing to survive, even finding some work in private security in Brazil. His vices remain intact, obviously still reliant on pain-killers and getting drunk at pretty much every opportunity, lamenting over almost everybody he meets in his own head while shit hits fans all over the place. He finds himself surrounded by rich socialites, whom he is forced to not only protect but also tolerate. I imagine I would be less than thrilled myself, being in that situation (the people he has to watch really are quite prickish) but what's immensely irritating, is hearing his drug-addled, drunken inner ramblings about how disgusting the rich upper class are when he can't even function without a drink in his hand or a pill in his stomach. Who the fuck is Max Payne to feel contempt for somebody just for having money? He's a fucking prick! Max Payne as a 'person' is an immensely unlikeable character from beginning 'til end, but that's only the start of the game's problems.

As with the other games in the series, you play in the third person perspective and shoot enemies in the head, torso and limbs repeatedly, utilising Max's ability to slow down time (activated by clicking in the right stick and refilled by killing people or being shot at) to shoot people in the head or to tip the odds in your favour in a tough spot. Pain pills return as your source of health, and you either administer them yourself by hitting 'Up' on the D-pad or by waiting until you die, then you start a Borderlands-style 'Last Stand' minigame whereby unless you shoot the person who just landed the killing bullet on you, you die, but if you manage to peg your killer then you come back to life but spend a pain pill. This fails entirely 50% of the time by having enemies shoot you from impossible angles at which you could never shoot them back, effectively making it more frustrating than helpful. The game has 3 modes of shooting: Hard The gameplay is good on paper, just not so good in action.Lock, Soft Lock and Free Aim. Hard Lock is an auto aim, which is a guaranteed hit every time; Soft Lock auto aims when you initially hit the left trigger but then doesn't follow the enemy after that (the way I played) and Free Aim is, predictably, where you are given no aiming assistance. Max can roll by double-tapping A, can jump with 'RB' (which will also trigger some slow motion) or he can take cover with a press of X by an appropriate surface.

In one sense, the gameplay is fine, but in another, less untrue sense, the gameplay is actually pretty shite. The cover feels shoehorned in and unbelievably poorly integrated, to the point where you wonder exactly how close to shipping they actually decided to ram it in there. Max Payne doesn't so much as get into cover, as he just sort of sloppily collapses onto it. I've been playing Gears Of War 3 a little bit recently and the way cover feels in that game, it's a necessity, it's so easy and intuitive to flit from cover-to-cover, slamming up against the wall with a satisfying thud that tells you "Dude, it's fine, you're in mother-fucking cover!!!", conversely, Max will often run up against a piece of waist height cover as you frantically hammer the X button and just sort of wipe his trouser leg on it, or, even worse, you'll rub up against a surface expecting to get straight into cover, only for Max to stand near it, then his delayed reaction will get him into cover AFTER you've pressed the cover a 2nd time, resulting in him popping out of cover, again with a delayed reaction. It just doesn't work well enough, especially because they make Max super fragile to account for the new cover mechanic.

Another huge problem with the combat is it's animations. Max will do a slow motion dive, but before he does it he steadies himself, bends his knees and then does the dive. Doesn't sound like much, but considering it's also followed by slow motion it feels like an unnecessary addition. After diving, Max will lie there until you flick the stick in a direction then he will stand up, but his standing up animation takes fucking AGES, and all the while you're just getting fucking shot repeatedly. The same thing with all the other animations too, plus, if you're slow motion diving and you hit something (a cardboard box, a window ledge etc.) it will take you out of slow motion instantly and leave you stuck in either a getting up animation or an ouch-I-just-hit-a-thing animation, each leaving you to get riddled with hot, painful bullets. I found, after about an hour of play time, that diving in order to activate slow-mo was more trouble than it was ever worth. If, say, you did the dive as Luckily, cover is shit for your enemies aswell.soon as you pressed the dive button, then once you landed on the ground you could get up and sprint away quickly, the combat would have a much faster, more satisfying pace, but as it is, it's slow and painful, not just for Max, but for the player aswell. You stand behind cover, slow down time, headshot, wait for Max to get back in cover, then release slow-mo. It's boring and when you're not watching cutscenes it's ALL you're fucking doing, for fucking hours. It gets tiresome.

Fortunately, though your time is split between cutscenes and lackluster shooting, the cutscenes are actually pretty well done. They're all done using the in-game engine and for the most part they look really good. They contain little flairs, which are unusual, like key words flashing up on screen as a character says them, or coloured flashes to show how fucked up Max is all the time. They're distracting at first, but a necessary evil if you want to try and enjoy anything about the game, as they're everywhere. There's no polite way to segway into this, so I'll just say it... The story is ridiculous, and in a bad way. You start out as basically a bodyguard for a powerful family and stuff just keeps happening that defies character logic, or any reasonable person's behaviour, I mean you could make the argument that Max isn't a reasonable person, but that's just another reason to dislike the game. If there's a saving grace in the story apart from the presentation, it's Max's partner and friend, Passos. He's Hispanic and a badass and he and Max have some great banter. He's basically the only proper friend Max has had in a long time, largely due to Max being a cunt, and he's constantly giving him shit in a friend-y way that rings super true to how guys actually talk to each other. Pretty much the entire game I was either hoping he would turn up soon, or didn't want him to leave Max's side when he did. Passos is great.

Get used to red coming out of people's faces.As are the game's graphics. The game looks a treat, thanks in no part to the varied locations Max gets to visit, from skyscrapers and nightclubs, to the rainforest and the slums of Brazil, the colour palette of the games is bright and vibrant, and despite the fact that all you do is shoot guys and watch cutscenes, it remains just the right side of tolerable due to the presentation, which remains impressive throughout. If there's one main problem I have that stands above all else story wise, it's that every single advert and piece of promotional material for the game depicts Max as a bald guy in a blood stained vest. Not going into story details here but Max's baldness happens a good halfway through the game! I was expecting, after seeing the adverts and trailers and such, that Max would be bald from the beginning, but knowing it was coming totally ruined the impact for me. The worst thing about this though, is that had I not know about the baldness, it actually would have had TONS of impact! The things Max goes through leading upto the baldness would have had way more impact had I not already had in my head he would be bald at some point, but Rockstar's marketing for the game basically ruined the game's most impactful moment.

The game has other modes than the story, it has a scoreI'll be honest, this is just a cool as hell picture. attack arcade mode, and a multiplayer where you use slow-mo on people by being near them or by having them in your line of sight, but I didn't play either of these modes. You do so much of the same stuff in the game's story mode (literally JUST shooting guys), and I was so burnt out on the gameplay by the game's ending that I just couldn't be bothered doing more standing around waiting for a slow motion gauge to fill up. In the end it all got a little bit... tedious. Not to mention that it's a depressing world to be in, with people living in squalor and constantly getting murdered horribly and unnecessarily. It's made to look like the worst place in the world, and I didn't enjoy spending a great deal of my time there.

Scoring this game is hard, and reading my review back I realise that, whilst I haven't exaggerated my feelings at all, I still feel like the game was better than alot of others I've given low scores to (Neverdead springs to mind instantly, that got 2 stars, and was WAY worse than this). In Max Payne 3 I found an experience. One that I got fairly bored of, and one whose tone I didn't often appreciate (if at all) but despite that, the most important thing was, that I found it to be an experience. For all the stuff I thought it did wrong, the game must have done something right, because it kept my attention for 12ish hours. Content-wise it's certainly fits into a niche of game that gets made all too seldomly, and I give it props for that, but it's not enough compensation for the damages it makes you suffer.

What score do you give a game with below-average gameplay and above-average presentation? Turns out you reluctantly give it a 3 and don't really give it a second thought. Oh God, I hope it doesn't come and kill my fictional wife and children in a vicious bout of revenge! I doubt it, not really sure where I'd get such a grim and horrific idea as that though...

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Max Payne 3 is out now for PS3 and Xbox 360, with PC coming very soon. This review was conducted on an Xbox 360 and has been represented as such, with Xbox-specific controller terms being used.

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Trials Evolution - XBLA Review

I've been putting this review off for about a week now, not because I think it's going to be a difficult review to write, but because it's probably going to be a pretty easy one... In a sad way.

The original Trials (Trials HD) was awesome, difficult but awesome. The game was the most popular game on XBLA by a pretty wide margin, beating out games like Castle Crashers, Geometry Wars and Limbo. The game seemed to resonate with, shall we say, more mainstream audiences for a reason that's actually not very apparent. The game can get brutally hard as you get towards the game's higher levels,
probably even approaching the difficulty of a Super Meat Boy. The game is at it's best when you're just navigating un-steep hills. It's just lovely.Typically, super hard games have an instant barrier-to-entry for the majority of gamers, but that didn't seem to be a problem for Trials HD, largely, I imagine, due to the game's simplicity of control. The player is riding a dirt bike, and can accelerate and lean back and forward. That's it. Essentially all there were, was 4 buttons, and the ability to warp to the last checkpoint instantly with the push of a button. Simplicity of gameplay and slow ramp up in difficulty made it more accessible than it had any right to be, which made it appealing to the masses.

The sequel, Trials Evolution, keeps alot of Trials HD's charm, but still tries to change it up. The simple accelerate and lean controls are kept intact, and restarting back at a checkpoint after a wipeout is just as quick and easy as it was before. The first major difference you notice within your first 5 minutes with the game, despite the shitty menus, is the new friend list integration. By default, if you ride a track anyone on your friends list has ridden, you get to pit your time alongside their whilst you ride. Your friends names hover over the track, following the route they took when they got their best time on the level. It's a pretty cool idea, and is executed very, very well. After each race you see the times of all your friends and you're instantly added to that friends-only leaderboard, usually last. This friends list integration really took me by surprise, and made playing the game feel harmlessly competitive. That can be the danger with games like this, sure it's a challenge but what's the fucking point? Well when your mate's Gamertag streaks past you just 3 metres from the finish line, the urge to smash them in the next course is pretty damn strong.

I mentioned the menus briefly, a moment ago, but they really do suck ass. Now I know, menus may not be high on everybody's list of priorities, but they're the kind of thing you don't really notice until they're done badly. When you go into the single player menu you're treated to some shoddily strewn sticker-looking icons, with no discernible rhyme or reason to them. I just kept pressing A on the menu to get to the next track, though there was basically no indication if what to expect next. I only found out hours The changes in perspective piss me right off. Every time. Ugh.later that one of these stickers lets you access the bonus games, like skiing and a game when your bike explodes and you try to fly your body as far as you can. It would have been nice if I knew these were there sooner, but they're so terrible anyway that it wouldn't be a great loss if you never even noticed they were there. Another mode on this menu lets you play all the tracks in a set at once, though why this is appealing to anyone is beyond me. Like the previous Trials, you earn medals by how well you do on tracks, and eventually by getting more medals you'll unlock the next set of tracks. As far as carrots on sticks go it's fine, but come on, hardly groundbreaking.

The real bit that matters in a game like this (this game especially) is the level design. The game falls flat here. In the original Trials the mantra was difficulty through simplicity, you'd be confronted by just a box and you'd have to figure out how to get over the fucker with nothing but a bit of revving and leaning backwards or forwards. The challenge with trials was seeing the obstacle, sizing it up, and using your own homemade momentum to get past the obstacle, you always had a clear view of what was coming up and you always saw the way past even if you couldn't quite finesse your bike enough to get it done. In Trials Evolution there's precious little of that. They've definitely gone for style over substance and it's glaring. On one of the earlier tracks you're on you reach a section of the track that looks like it meets a dead end, you're mid-air by the time you realise it and you're kind of thinking to yourself "How the hell am I gonna get out of this?"... and then the camera spins and it turns out the track has a turn in it. Your rider stays perpendicular to the camera but the actual course you're on has like a 90-degree turn in it, so you have no idea what's going on, then moments later you smack into a wall only for the floor to start moving upwards underneath your unconscious body. Turns out, you're supposed to come to a stop on this particular bit of track while it lifts you onto another piece of track above you and out of sight, and the worst part is, the lift kind of flings you but the physics are all wrong, so about 3 quarters of the way up your wheels are no longer touching the floor, and the only way you know this is by trial and error: "Oh, the floor lifts here, guess I'll brake at this bit next time. Oh, the lift throws me at the top, guess next time I'll start moving forwards before it reaches the point it flings me, even though it's blocking my view of my biker so I can't ACTUALLY SEE if my wheels are touching or not". In a game like this you never, ever want to feel as though you're being subjected to randomness, but the feeling is constant.

The above example isn't the only either, there is one virtually every other level! From the entire level's gravity being messed up just for that one course, to having a track at night so you actually can't see where you're going at all, to having your bike propelled through the air with no control by water jets (seriously, who thought this would be a good idea?!?),"How about a level where everything is the same colour and gives you a guaranteed migraine? No? Then there's just no pleasing you!" to a level taking the piss out of Limbo which irritated me, to your bike actually passing through a cube of water, magically suspended in mid-air for no apparent reason, other than that it fucks with your jump. Skill is not king here, randomness is. The courses are designed to be a treat for the eyes of an onlooker, and not to be played on, atleast that's the way I felt for literally my entire time with the single player. There were moments where I would come across an obstacle and drive at it without leaning 3 or 4 times, each time getting a different outcome, sometimes I got over, sometimes I backflipped backwards off it, sometimes my front wheel just hit it and my bike stopped moving, it feels loose and pointless, and this is definitely due to the level design. I can see the conversation now: "Why make the bike handle in any consistent way over there smaller obstacle when we've got a level that spins round retardedly like a deleted scene from Inception!!! Fuck yeah!" I feel bad saying it, but it's one of the laziest sequels I've played in terms of improving over the original. Dumbing down the skill factor and making the levels behave with little-to-no consistency is surely a step backwards in anyone's eyes.

Thankfully the game does have a saving grace in it's multiplayer. Aside from the intuitive friends leaderboard stuff the game also has a full blown multiplayer mode which sees you race against opponents in real time, unable to crash into them or influence their run. It's sort of like a simultaneous time attack mode, except that seeing a guy wipe his face out into a metal girder is certainly distracting enough to make you fuck up yourself. If you do wipe in multiplayer it gets held against you at the end of a race, so getting to the end fastest may not always be the best way to win. The mode is really actually quite fun, and also simplifies it's tracks, they feel much more like a Trials HD map and they're so much better for it. As far as other features go, the game also contains a supposedly mammoth map maker, letting people make their own tracks sure, but also crazy things like top-down shooters, first person shooters or even an Angry Birds clone. While it's The game's multiplayer is the stand out, it really does steal the show.an interesting feature it only kept me entertained for 10 minutes at the most, though I will say, user-made maps download in no more than a few seconds and load up just as quickly. It's a very smooth process, just one I didn't end up very interested in.

Trials Evolution is then, for this gamer, a disappointment of tremendous proportions. Lacking the precision control of a Super Meat Boy, but trying to be just as hard, it frustrates in a bad way instead of a good one. The game seems more interested in taking you on a rollercoaster ride than letting you show off skills, and while the social integration is nice, I'm hardly going to go back to my mate and say "Ha! I beat your time on level 3, track 8! Suck it!", there's no fun to be had there because there's not a single level I touched that I would ever want to go and take another stab at. In it's defence, Trials Evolution's friend list integration sets the bar for all future XBLA games to (hopefully) copy, it's elegant and doesn't interfere with the gameplay at all, and the game's multiplayer is solid and enjoyable, but hardly has any rewards, other than winning, making it a tough prospect over other games where earning experience points actually matters (CoD, Battlefield etc.). Other than that though, Trials Evolution just doesn't cut it.

Not only is it worse than the original, it's not even in the same league, it's the high school sweetheart you remember so fondly, but whom you saw stood on a street corner 3 years later, with her hair falling out, offering blowjobs so she can buy her various anti-STD prescriptions. It's whored itself out, and is worse the wear for it. A damn shame.

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Trials Evolution is available now exclusively on Xbox 360, downloadable from the Xbox Live Marketplace for 1200 Microsoft Points (rougly £10).

Fez - XBLA Review

I reviewed Warp a couple of weeks ago ago, a little XBLA puzzle game where you played as an alien trapped inside a nasty science facility. The game was fine, but at the end of that review I said that it didn't really measure up against the upper echelons of the XBLA Games that came before it, the Limbos of the world, the Super Meat Boys, the Geometry wars, in fact, very few games reach those near-legendary heights. But Fez does.

Gomez is a simple creature, but he knows how to wear a fez, I'll give him thatIn Fez you play as Gomez. It's his birthday and he receives a present off an old, eye-patched man who, well, I'm not entirely sure to be honest. To me, this old man is a mystical guide of sorts, who somehow makes Gomez aware that the world does not entirely take place on a 2D plane, as it first seems. The old man unlocks something in Gomez's mind and he is visited by some form of Hypercube, who bestows upon him the titular Fez, which grants him the power to see the world from 4 different 90 degree perspectives. The hypercube then implodes for some reason, leaving behind it various smaller cubes (and cubettes) strewn throughout the world, just waiting to be found by Gomez and his new found power.

The gameplay is fairly simple, even for a 2D platformer/puzzler, which are hardly the most complex games in the world. You can run and jump, and Gomez will grab onto ledges and can shimmy along them, and that's it. Switching the world perspective is done via the triggers or bumpers, and makes up the meat of the game's puzzles. You'll constantly be flicking the world from angle-to-angle, trying to find the way to the next area or bit of cube, gracefully shifting the world around you to try and spot something you couldn't see from the last angle. The world-rotating mechanic is simple and elegant, and works very well. Not once did I feel like I was failing at something because the controls and the tools I had at my disposal were sub-par, if I failed it was my own damn fault for being stupid, which I can live with.

Graphically the game is, frankly, beautiful. Seeing thousands-upon-thousands of polygon-pixels being pumped out in HD makes the game super gorgeous to look at. The animations are silky smooth, even on ambient creatures throughout the world. Everything animates in a deliberately jumpy way, to simulate the animation style of a SNES-era game, but somehow it still all looks fantastic, and oozes off the screen and into your eyeholes like warm maple syrup poured generously onto a stack of American-style pancakes. Even just thinking about looking at the game again gets me excited.

The game's music, inkeeping with everything else in the game,"ADVENTURE IS READY!"is also great. Predictably chiptuney, but surprisingly noninvasive. The game hums and gently bleeps at you with the kind of calming effect you'd expect from a stress-relieving "Sounds of the Ocean" CD in places, yet in others it crescendos to enhance moments of accomplishment, of mystery or even just of a new, spectacular piece of scenery. Even without a veil of nostalgia I think the soundtrack would be enough to warm even the twattiest of hearts, but if you do harbour a love for anything that reminds you of the games of your youth then the sounds of Fez will have you in somewhat of a joy coma. I would put it right up there with Super Meat Boy's soundtrack for sheer awesome "chiptuneyness", though outside of the context of the game it's not quite as lovable.

Story-wise there's not a whole lot to talk about with Fez: Cube gives you a fez, explodes, go rebuild cube. Hardly a Shakespearian epic (I'm not even particularly a fan of Shakespeare but the metaphor works a treat) but what the game lacks in story to tell, it makes up for in story-telling. The world is dotted with ancient monuments and remnants of civilizations past; unreadable languages pop up in unusual places you wouldn't expect; long-since anandoned buildings sit there, almost hauntingly empty as wildlife thrives all around them; the whole world just feels very lived in. It's one of the best thing about the game, is it's ability to constantly show you new and interesting places that you actually wantto explore and find out the secret of. You know what, that'll segway me nicely into kinda the most insane thing about Fez...

So, remember earlier, when I said it was a 2D platformer/puzzle game? Yeah, it totally isn't. Forget what all the trailers for the game showed, and what the developer said about the game before it's release, it's about as far from a 2D platformer/puzzle game as a game can get without also containing 2D plaforming/puzzles. What Fez actually is, is basically... an archaeology game. Sure, if you want to The game's environments are varied and beautiful"complete" the game you can just collect the 32 cubes the game tells you to and then never play it again, but if you actually want to PLAY Fez, you're gonna need a notepad, a good head on your shoulders and heaps of patience. Aswell as the regular 32 cubes you can collect, there are also "anti-cubes" which are harder to come by but still count towards your cube total (for example, I complete the game with about 26 regular cubes and 6 anti-cubes to make up the 32 needed). Anti-cubes are the real challenge. To earn an anti-cube you really have to work at it, granted, some are easier than others but some... well, you actually won't believe the lengths you have to go to unlock those bad boys. Coupled with all that great ambient story-telling in Fez I mentioned last paragraph, are actual puzzles that do not make themselves apparent to you until you either: A) Cheat and look at the internet, or B) Start putting the pieces of the world together yourself. It's not too much of a stretch for me to say I no longer feel comfortable calling it a platformer, or necessarily even a puzzle game, it kinda invents it's own genre. I don't know what it'd be called, but calling it an archaeology game is pretty darn close.

I don't really know how to convey Fez to people. Now that I've played it, and took a plunge down the rabbit hole (probably closer to just sticking a toe in the shallow end knowing the amount of depth in the game) all I know is what Fez means to me. To me, Fez is the kind of game somebody could write a book about, it's possibly the most complex game of all time, but at the same it eases you in so well it's also one of the most accessible. It hides it's ridiculous complexities behind a fantastic, beautiful veneer of retro presentation and scrumptious gameplay that'll keep you coming back just to re-experience what it feels like to move around as Gomez. It keeps you guessing, then when it answers one question, that question gives birth to hundreds more. Don't judge Fez by it's cover: It may look sweet and cuddly on the outside, but on the inside it's nefarious in ways my puny human mind could barely comprehend.

For 800 Microsoft Points you'd be a fool to miss out on it, and, not to be too presumptuous, but you'd have to be a fool not to love it aswell.

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Fez is out now exclusively for Xbox Live Arcade for 800 Microsoft Points (roughly £6)

Asura's Wrath Review

I think it's fair to say that Neverdead and Asura's Wrath for carrying very similar torches for me going into the start of the year. Both had interesting sounding gameplay, cool ideas, original concepts and, above all, both looked like they were going to be absolutely flipping mental! Neverdead came out a few months ago, looked my expectations dead in the eye... And then shat all over my carpet. The game was not good at all. Neverdead's lack of payoff on a promising concept and cool gameplay premise had me, by association, concerned about Asura's Wrath. Would it also be terrible? Would it too fall into regular, boring gameplay tropes and abandon exactly what made it unique in the first place? Would I get bored half way through and not even give a shit about what might happen in rest of the game? No. No to all of it. I am very happy to report that Asura's Wrath succeeds where Neverdead failed, that is to say, in every single aspect.

He's not a happy guy, Asura.Asura's Wrath follows the story of Asura, one of 8 demi-god generals helping to protect the world from a race of demon animal things called the Gohma. Asura's wife and daughter are human, but his daughter is a priestess and apparently pretty powerful.  After a particularly massive battle, a plan is hatched by Asura's fellow generals to wipe out the Gohma once and for all, but it's success depends on the generals seizing control of the empire and taking Asura's daughter, therefore Asura has to go. Asura is framed for the human emperor's assassination, killed and his daughter is kidnapped by the other generals. You can see why he might be a pit peeved. The game follows Asura's path of unstoppable, uncontrollable anger as he looks to get his revenge.

The premise, atleast on the surface, may remind you alot of God Of War, but the game definitely breaks you away away from that feeling pretty quickly. The majority of the action in the game takes place in cutscenes, with ergonomic button prompts mid-custscene bringing you into the action. At first it feels like just a simple Quick Time Event that you've seen a hundred times, but when I describe them as ergonomic I really mean it. You push the right stick to the right to make Asura push his right arm out to the side, you shove the left stick upwards when you're prompted and he raises his left arm, it almost makes you feel like you're still in control despite the fact that all you're essentially doing is watching a cutscene, and it's actually pretty clever.

When you're not watching cutscenes, you'll be taking part in either arena fights, or Panzer Dragoon/Space Harrier-style shooting sections. In the arena battles Asura has access to some quick 1-button combos, a rapid-fire shooting attack and a heavy attack that will knock enemies back (but has a cooldown). In the shooting sections you either use your rapid-fire attack, or 'tag' targets and attack them all at once with a powerful lock-on move. The I mean sure, he's huge, but Asura's got 6 arms... soooo... call it even?shooting sections are entertaining enough, and the arena combat, while not having the depth in combat of a God Of War or a Bayonetta, is still good at what it sets out to do. The way you win fights is very simple: You build up "Burst" power by fighting, so do enough damage to whatever you're fighting against to fill up your "Burst Gauge" and unleash it one battle-endign super move. The concept of Bursting is fantastic, especially when you're forced to Burst multiple times during boss battles. When Asura Bursts, he BURSTS man. Like. Dude. Yeah. Bursting is awesome.

If you're a bit iffy on the idea of most of the game being cutscenes, it'll relieve you to know that the game looks great. Character models are superb, particularly on the 8 demigods, who look like a cross between being carved out of stone and metal being bolted together. You never get sick of Asura's face, his craggy, rocky skin or his massive robot arms, and each of the other main characters in the game are equally as joyous to behold. The action always looks good, You've never had a boss fight like this. TRUST me.with punches landing hard and energy beams flying all over the place. When Asura punches a guy the earth shakes and shockwaves eminate from the guy's face, it all looks very anime and suitably epic, making every fight feel amazing.

The game is presented in a very unique and weird way. The game is broken up into various episodes and chapters, with each chapter (level) having it's own opening credits, brief commercial break and "to be continued..." at the end. There's no real need for it to be set out this way, other than to make the game feel sort of like a television series. With all the awesome cutscenes you'll be watching an onlooker might be fooled into thinking you're watching a new computer animated tv show anyway, but just add this to the ever-growing list of things that make Asura's Wrath exactly the right kind of weird. What's even better though, is that at the end of every chapter you get a screen showing you how many of the game's various art pieces and movies you've unlocked, often having you unlocking 10 things at a time in a joyous orgy of stuff-getting. You're overly rewarded for seeing the mental shit Asura's Wrath has to offer, but once you've Somehow, the word "scale" doesn't quite seem large enough...looked at all the stuff (and you pretty much unlock it all after 1 playthrough) I don't see what appeal a 2nd play through the game could possibly yield, other than to see some crazy shit again ofcourse.

When (not if) you finally play Asura's Wrath for yourself you'll be constantly amazed. Whether you find yourself unexpectedly in first-person for a while, or you're facing down a boss larger than the Earth (you heard me) you wont be bored with the game, it will continue to keep you on the edge of your seat and fist pumping, completely unable to contain your excitement, right up until the end. The game is absolutely mental, good fun and "doesn't take itself too seriously" feels like it would be an understatement akin to calling Bill Gates "ever-so-slightly well off". Asura's Wrath may not be sophisticated, or a good candidate for "video games as art", but it's tremendous entertainment in a style we just don't see in games. If you want to punch a man the size of a planet with your 6 robot arms, then you're in the right place with Asura's Wrath, and if you don't? Then it's only because you haven't done it yet. To try it is to love it, and to love it, is to BURST!!!!!

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Asura's Wrath is out now for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, at the usual prices you find games for nowadays.

Warp - XBLA Review

Some of my favourite games of recent years have been downloadable titles, from Super Meat Boy to Limbo to Castle Crashers, they (more often than not) offer something different than the usual first-person shooter or third-person action game, tending to push the envelope and do something that little bit more risky and unconventional. As such, I'm sure you can imagine that I always look forward to promotions like Microsoft's XBLA House Party (a selection of 4 eagerly anticipated downloadable titles), which kicked off last week with Warp, an action puzzle-game.

In Warp you play as an alien, crash landed on Earth and How Warpy got his groove backcaptured by douchebag scientists. They somehow sap you of your inner, I guess I'd call it, "juicyness", leaving you sad and devoid of colour. During the course of their experiments though you manage to reacquire your harvested alien ability, which was to 'warp' (hence the name! Aha!) to about a metre in front of you. Doesn't sound like very far, but it's more than enough for our little alien to start making his daring escape from the underwater, alien-poking laboratory. Along the way you'll encounter a few other aliens as you add new powers to your repertoire, and exact revenge on the scientists that wronged you and your alien buddies.

The facility you've been trapped in is a pretty standard looking place: Concrete walls, big steel doors and the occasional bright yellow railing. The art style of the game is very uninspired, even your alien isn't particularly interesting looking, with most of the other aliens in the game getting represented as nothing more than blob creatures. The enemies you'll face are basically just guys with guns, and the scientists are torn straight out of 'Splosion man. With the exception of a few admittedly nice views of the ocean floor outside, it's a very bland game to look at.

Fortunately it plays better than it looks, with your main warping power being surprisingly satisfying to utilise. How do I get through this door? Just warp through it. How do I make at across this hallway without getting spotted? Oh yeah I can just appear on the other side. How will I get past this enemy? Oh yeah, warp inside him and explode him from the inside-out. Yeah you read that right. Enemies expand and turn into meaty chunks if you teleport yourself inside them and give the analog stick a good wiggle. You can do the same to various barrels and objects strew around the map, with barrels wiggling as you do the same to the analog stick, leading to situations where you can attract a bunch of enemies towards the vibrating barrel you're hiding in and exploding it in their face, stunning them all long enough to make some man-size dog food. The alien is very squishy, only needing one bullet to kill him, so you'll be needing to use these kind of devious tactics alot... well, either that or just run around a room like a mad man, dodging bullets and exploding guys like a mad man. Both strategies are more than acceptable.

Sure, why NOT jump in thereAs far as puzzle design goes Warp is competent, but far from the most challenging game I've ever played. Later levels introduce puddles which will sap you of your powers, leading to the scientists developing water shields for the troops and water traps to stop you going places you shouldn't. They serve as unwarpable walls, and largely justify the underwater setting (it would be a very boring game if you could just warp through a few walls and escape) but mainly they're there to keep the puzzles going. kind of wish these 'water walls' hadn't been introduced and they had made the game harder in other ways. The joy in the game largely comes from warping from object-to-object, zipping in and out of rooms through the walls and fucking with the enemies therein, but too many of the later rooms just contain a bad guy with a water shield all around him and 1 barrel, almost as if they ran out of ideas and had to throw some extra rooms in to pad out the game time. It's frustrating because there's alot of potential in the idea I just wish had been explored a bit more.

There are boss fights in the game, and they're all bad. The first boss fight forces you to warp between multiple barrels in a row (as it's faster than running) to escape a beefy military guy, but halfway through the fight the direction you're supposed to warp is off the bottom of the screen, which means that you only realise that was the direction you were supposed to go when you get upto that bit for a 2nd time and have a quick (literally, like 1 second) run around in that area before getting murdered. Trial and error is only really fun when you get multiple attempts at something and then the time to think about it and why it might not have worked, like combining items in Monkey Island or trying out every available option on every available object in the game in Broken Sword. When you're running from an enemy you don't want to rely on dumb luck on the uncommunicated path you were supposed to take. The boss battles are pretty needless and terrible across the board.

The game contains challenge rooms (because hey, it's a It's a surprisingly violent game, pleasantly surprising.video game) that pop up in various places in the single player. You can go into them and attempt the challenge whenever you see them in the game world, but after about 3 of them I started ignoring them all together. They're boring and the time constraints are far too harsh. I'm all for a challenge, but if it's not fun then I'm not gonna work tirelessly to figure out how to shave 20 seconds off my time, it's just not gonna happen. The game's achievements are atrocious too. I know not everybody cares about that too much but to me, it definitely affects the amount I enjoy a game. I played the game through from start to finish in about 6 to 7 hours, and got 2 achievements: 1 for starting the game, and 1 for completing it. I guess you could argue that harder to get achievements add replay value, but this isn't a game you'll want to replay anyway. If you're anything like me you'll have had your fill after the main game finishes. The game doesn't have any subtitle option either, so be sure not to play the game in a loud room... like I did.

So it's not a home run for Warp, although it definitely earns it's 'House Party' place by being fairly unique. Unfortunately, In the pantheon of great XBLA games of the past it doesn't really come close, and while a few minor issues certainly do drag it down it's by no means bad. It has an original idea and it executes on it well, if a little generically.

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Warp is available via Xbox Live for 800 Microsoft Points and, I believe, is also on PSN.

The Darkness 2 Review

Duel-wielding is a big part of the game... as are demon arms.I never played the original Darkness. I rented it once, but it just happened to have been in that outrageously busy period towards the end of last year. Between Battlefield 3, Skyrim and Arkham City I just couldn't find the time to play it, which was a shame, because I always liked the look of it and wanted to catch up with the story/gameplay mechanics before I dug into the sequel. Luckily, the Darkness 2 is accessible enough that I rarely felt out of the loop storywise, and easily got into the swing of the brutal beheadings and skin ripping.

The Darkness 2 follows the story of Jackie Estacado, a mob boss in New York City and human vessel to The Darkness, the embodiment of all the darkness in the universe, pretty pissed that God decided to turn the lights on. Jackie started out as a pretty low-level mobster before his 21st birthday when a job went wrong and the Darkness emerged. A hit is put out on Jackie and in an effort to get back at the mob, Jackie decides to kill anyone and everyone that screwed him over. In the process his girlfriend Jenny, the only good thing in his life, is killed right in front of him which doesn't go down very well with Jackie. Needless to say he murders everyone in his path, and eventually, kills the boss of the mafia. Jump to 2 years later and we're at the start of The Darkness 2. Jackie is the new boss, and has been suppressing the Darkness the whole time, until an attempt is made on Jackie's life and he is forced to once again call upon the Darkness and do a fair-to-high amount of killing.

The Darkness manifests itself in a couple of ways, most notably You never, EVER get desensitized to this...as 2 demon heads on long necks which peer over Jackie's shoulder, acting almost like 2 extra arms. One of the heads likes to grab (and eat) things and the other likes to violently slash things. The control over these demon arms is super easy, with the left bumper controlling one, and the right bumper controlling the other. You're constantly slashing away at incoming enemies, plucking up bad guys as they try to run away from you and eating the hearts of the dead to regain health in a tight spot. The darkness also allows you to summon a little, British demon, who will attack enemies and help Jackie out in various other ways. He has his own personality and, while potentially annoying, never overstays his welcome.

While the Darkness powers may be what differentiates the game from other first person shooters, it still does contain it's fair share of guns. Jackie can dual-wield pistols and sub machine guns, and can carry assault rifles and shotguns too. The shooting is okay, but when you can grab a guy from metres away and rip off his head, a few bullets seem suddenly less effective. That was probably the worst part of playing the Darkness 2, anytime I needed to shoot something instead of to just 'Darkness power' it, the game was at it's lowest point. What's so great about how effective the Darkness powers are, is that it makes sense. In any other game (NeverDead, I'm looking at you) the thing you character could do that makes him awesome, would be nerfed as the game drags on to increase the difficulty. In The Darkness 2, from start to finish, the Darkness makes you feel like an absolutely indestructible badass, which, when you consider that 'The Darkness' embodies the near-unlimited power of all darkness in the universe makes sense. Jackie is essentially a god in the universe of the Darkness, and you feel like one. Each new power you level up is cool, and makes you even more of an invincible badass than you already were.

Levelling up in the game is done in a similar way to Bulletstorm, with Jackie getting points for killing, and more points the more brutal the kill. Killing somebody with guns will net you 10 points, but, for example, ripping a guys spine out Your little imp friend comes in very handy.will get you 30 points. It's a great way of keeping you creative, aswell as rewarding you for playing the part. Some of the things that you can level up are pretty standard, like increasing max ammo or giving you armor, but then some things you can level up are genius. If you spend points wisely you gain the ability to execute enemies to gain one of 4 mid-combat boosts: Regain ammo, regain health, recharge powers or gain a shield. This makes combat fun and active, "Do I need more ammo? Okay, ammo execution. How's my health? Okay, slash that guy, then health execution." Feeling like you have options, and that you can accomplish whatever option you choose, makes fighting bad guys exciting and never boring.

The game is incredibly brutal, each new execution animation I saw had me physically recoiling from the screen. Some of the stuff those demon arms do is pretty out of order... There's a line, and they cross it constantly, I mean I know these guys are shooting at me but still, don't yank THAT out. Fortunately I think the game's art style helps to keep last night's dinner down, with the entire game having a great, almost hand-drawn, vivid style that works really well (especially in the context of a game based on a comic book). When you rid a head off, bright red blood will come out, almost jokingly so, which helps. If they had gone for a realistic art style I could see myself losing control of my stomach more than once during the course of the game.

The game is paced tremendously, it's not just non-stop Yeahhhhh, this guy probably not as useful CUT IN HALF.shooting action in the likes of a Modern Warfare, there are real story moments, and long periods of time where you don't pull a trigger which work and work a treat. I won't spoil a single minute of the game for you, but I will say that the way it justifies you taking a break from the action is probably done in the most interesting way they could ever do it, and really lands in such a way that impressed me to no end, even the mafia side of the story is well told, in fact, you'd be hard pushed to find a better (and more brutal) representation of mafia life in any game, it just so happens that this mob boss has 2 demon tentacles. They construct a story that doesn't get in the way of the gameplay, but enhances it, and Digital Extremes deserve a heap of credit for it. The game is short but not frustratingly so, and besides, the addition of 'New Game +' mode means you can still get your fill of vicious murder should you want it.

The game features online co-op but it's extremely disappointing. You choose to play as 1 of 4 characters, each one having access to 1 Darkness-imbued weapon and 1 minor Darkness power. These Darkness weapons do not feel terribly effective, and, compared to Jackie's mastery over the Darkness, feel like kiddie weapons. The Darkness weapons lack of effectiveness means you'll be forced to rely of guns, Get used to sights like this as best you can. Squishy!which, as I mentioned earlier, are definitely not the best way to experience the game's combat. They try to make the co-op tie into the game's main story but it never feels like you would have missed out on valuable story beats if you didn't touch the co-op. The co-op feels rushed and slapped on at the last minute. I understand that it's difficult to justify multiple people having access to a little bit of Darkness power each, but the game doesn't shine when you have very little power and the enemies are being sent wave-after-wave at you, it highlights just how powerful you are as Jackie (which is kinda cool, I guess), because these enemies weren't too much trouble in the single player but are now ripping you to shreds. When you're used to throwing car doors at enemies faces, a throwing axe that takes 2 hits, is hard to aim and takes a second or 2 to come back to you seems like an insult.

The Darkness 2 is an easy game to recommend. Well made, fun and original, it manages to walk a line between gameplay and story that most games daren't even attempt, let alone be successful at, and is a fulfilling experience that'll make you wanna play the Darkness 3 straight away. As a whole package though it's not quite as well realised as I would have liked. The story may be satisfying but it is short, and the game's sub-par co-op mode means that replayability is a problem. As such, The Darkness 2 is a game that won't stay in your console for very long, but will keep you thoroughly entertained whilst it does.

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The Darkness 2 came out on February 10th for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC. This review was based on my experiences with the Xbox 360 version.

NeverDead Review

If you've been paying attention to the site you may remember that I was kind of looking forward to NeverDead, a game that first came to my attention at last year's E3 during the pre-recorded Konami press conference, where we saw a mental trailer in which a guy rips his own head off and throws it at someone in one scene, and then is conversing with a giant, green, buff, Shakespeare looking frog demon thing the next. Bryce and Arcadia - Surely 2 instant classics *sigh*It looked like exactly the kind of crazy I could get behind, and so I set my expectations somewhere between 'high' and 'cautiously optimistic'. Well here we are a good 7 months later and I've played it! But will it live up to my middling-to-high expectations?...

The game focuses on Bryce, a character with a scarred face, 2 pistols and a sword, and his partner Arcadia. Together they've been assigned to fight demons wherever they may appear, usually causing massive amounts of property damage whilst they do it, and working for a strange corporation that gives them their orders and funds their demon-slaying. Bryce's back story is perhaps the most interesting part if the game, as it becomes quickly apparent that he was alive and killing demons hundreds of years before the start of the Don't mind him, he's 'armless...main game is set. Bryce, through an unfortunate event we find out about during the game's story, has been made immortal... immortal, but not invulnerable. He still feels pain and can still be mutilated, but his head is always conscious and able to move, and it's this mechanic that aims to set the game apart from other 3rd-person action games.

The gameplay centres around combat and puzzle solving, with Bryce using his guns and swords to get past the varieties of enemies in the game. As Bryce can't "die" in the traditional sense there's no damage meter, instead he will lose limbs if he takes too much damage, eventually getting so badly mutilated that you're left as a head rolling around. If you roll over to your torso your head reattaches and then from the torso you can reattach all your other limbs, either that, or you can wait for the "regen meter" to fill up and just click in the left stick to regenerate all at once... the meter takes a while to fill up though, so you'll have to get used to doing some head-dodging. The enemies you face come in various flavours, from dog-sized demons that lunge at you (and like to play fetch The bosses are, admittedly, pretty cool lookingwith your detached arms), to walking plant-looking demons with machine guns or missile turrets for heads, to fat demons who hurl objects from around the environment at you and massive bosses that explode you into body parts with the flick of a wrist.

You fight the various swathes of demons by either shooting them, or slicing them, though I'll be honest here, the shooting's terrible. The targeting is kinda 'effed'; the aiming is sluggish and inaccurate and enemies take far too many shoddily-aimed bullets to go down for it to be fun. Bryce's blade on the other hand is much more fun, with the player holding the left trigger/L1 to ready the sword and the right stick to actually swing it. Every swing of the sword requires a flick of the analogue stick, and while obviously stolen from the original idea for Metal Gear Solid: Rising, lets you have an unnecessary amount of control over the direction you can swing. The sword cuts though enemies much faster than bullets, so it was what I focused on with my upgrades (more on those in a minute). The game is about 90% combat, and it approaches it's fights in pretty much the most disappointingly standard way possible: The player enters a room, then all the exits to the room are sealed, and "demon wombs" appear and start spawning enemies. You have to destroy these wombs or A whole new meaning to "giving head"...the enemies will just keep on getting spawned, and then, once you clear the room of enemies the exits open up and you can progress onto the next room, which will feature almost the exact same scenario. Every so often a puzzle will interrupt this, usually requiring you to rip your head off and get it through a small space, much like the morphball in Metroid. The combat gets really repetitive, really quickly, though it is helped by a neat mechanic which lets you do loads of damage to enemies by destroying objects and scenery in the world and having the debris fall on them, but even that isn't reliable enough to be a permanent tactic during battles.

The combat, while BARELY varied enough to just about sustain a full length game, has a slightly bigger flaw that is, for lack of a better word, unforgivable. In every fight there are little round creatures rolling around, who can't do damage to you directly, until you've been dismembered. They roll over to any limbs you lose and suck them in, not letting you get the limb back unless you either use some of you regen meter, or kill the creature. The disaster comes when these creatures suck up your head. If they suck up your head, and you fail the button press afterwards, then it's game over. Yes, you read that right, in the game "NEVERDead" you can fucking DIE. Why?!?! Why did Here's how the game justifies a "game over" screen... infuriating!they feel the need to include this? The one unique conceit the game would have over other third-person action games is that your character can't die, and yet you find out they haven't adhered to that within the first fucking hour. The first time my head got sucked inside one of these creatures and it gave me a game over screen my jaw hit the floor, what an unbelievable mis-step! Why was it necessary??? All the 'game over' does is force you back to your last checkpoint anyway, so the penalty of death is as minimal as it could possibly be, literally making the inclusion of these creatures bafflingly pointless, seemingly only there to piss you the fuck off. Absolutely retarded.

There's a small glimmer of hope, aside from the usual array of collectibles every game under the sun requires nowadays (yes, there are collectibles in here aswell), there is exp everywhere. Everywhere you go there are red icons you can pick up that give you exp, which factors into the game's upgrade system. You only have a set number of slots for Bryce, with more powerful upgrades taking up more slots. The upgrades are varied and actually pretty clever, ranging from simply increasing sword damage, to letting you jump higher, to crazy upgrades like an upgrade that auto-dodges attacks for you, or letting you turn your self-dismembered limbs into grenades or land mines. You can buy more slots and switch upgrades out whenever you like, conceivably allowing you to switch tactics mid-battle, but that would be far too much trouble for a game with such tedious combat. The fact that everywhere you go there are experience giving pick-ups is actually pretty cool, it means you're always working towards better upgrades and it encourages exploration in a non-invasive way. It was a neat touch, and a pleasant surprise amongst the disappointment of the rest of the game.

To be honest the best part of the game I played took part in Arcadia's apartment, and barely anything happens in there!I think you can probably tell by now that the game wasn't everything I was hoping it was cracked up to be, but I need to make an important clarification here, I didn't complete the game. I suffered a problem in my PS3 review copy whereby after my first 6-hour play session, upon turning the game on the next day, it had not saved any of my progress. I contacted the PR firm that sent me the game and they assured me that nobody else had a similar problem, which is good news, but obviously unfortunate for me. That being said, it's not that I don't think this review is trustworthy (6 hours was MORE than enough time for me to give it the score it got) but for all I know the latter parts of the game's story MAY be epic and turn the whole thing around, and while I highly doubt it will, I intend to play the game all the way through post-release, so I'll obviously let you guys know is that happens. Also, in the interest of full transparency, there's a multiplayer mode to the game, but I couldn't connect the PS3 to the internet, so I have no idea how that would even play.

I felt very let down by NeverDead, in almost every way possible: The combat was dull; the game didn't save my progress; the story progresses in an incredibly Japanese way, that was kind of a bit too obvious (you'll see); the controls are loose and unresponsive and you actually CAN die. The few bright spots (the upgrade system, the interesting universe and back stories) are dwarfed by the glaring mistakes and design decisions that almost cripple the game. I feel like there is fun to be had in NeverDead, if you know what to expect and prepare yourself for it, but not for the price of a brand new retail game. If you see this in the bargain bin in the next few months (which is likely) it may be worth the price of admission for a tenner, and ofcourse if you rent games there's no reason not to atleast give it a try, but if you do give it a go then do yourself a favour... ignore that it's called NeverDead. That name's just a massive dick move from Konami. Not cool guys, not cool...

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NeverDead is available on PS3 and Xbox 360. I played the game on the Playstation 3. Neverdead is due to be released on February 3rd.

Quarrel - XBLA Review

Not having an iPhone or, well, decent phone in general means I miss out on alot of cool bitesize games I otherwise would have probably become addicted to (if I had any travelling at all to do, that is). Many of these games are starting to work they way into more accessible areas now though: Fruit Ninja Kinect; Words With Friends on Facebook; Angry Birds on PSN and now the latest addition to that list, Quarrel on XBLA.

The game uses the Scrabble Dictionary... so no rude words!Quarrel is probably best described as a cross between Risk and Scrabble, and as such brings with the best/worst parts of both games. The main aim of the game is to take over the whole board, using Risk-esque troop deployment, but doing battle with other players by making better words than them (which replaces the dice rolls in Risk which suck balls). Just as in Risk you can re-deploy troops to other adjacent squares you own, which makes a difference when attacking/defending because the number of troops you use determines the length of the word you are allowed to make, upto a maximum of 8. The higher scoring word wins, or if it's a tie, the player who typed their word fastest wins. You earn coins for almost everything you do in the game, even for making words when it isn't your turn, so there's always something to do.

I got used to the game mechanics pretty quickly, having played both Risk and Scrabble in the past, and then I hit somewhat of a wall. After playing the tutorial and taking part in 1 or 2 games versus the AI I had basically had my fill. For the sake of reviewing the gameIf you're susceptible to brain farts, definitely not the game for you I forced myself to play the game's different modes, but they weren't varied enough to grab my attention. Domination Mode (seemingly the main single-player component) has you facing off against varying AI opponents to take over the map, Showdown Mode pits you against a single, difficult AI and Challenge Mode puts you in situations where you must figure out the strategy to win. I'll be honest, once you've played the Domination Mode there's really no draw to play the other modes, as they're far too similar, and while I appreciate the attempt to try and vary it up, the other modes all just feel like watered down versions of Domination.

On the positive side, the game has a good look and feel, with a nice chunky art style, bright colours and a great, easy to read interface and Xbox Chat-pad support, which was a neat little addition. The sounds and music in the game are what I would describe as extremely Spongebob-like, with lots of Hawaiian instrumental music and sounds (though no talking starfish, which is always a bummer). I found it curious that the aesthetic was so clearly geared towards appealing to children, as the gameplay would be (I The similarity to Risk is pretty evident here, albeit simplifiedwould assume) far beyond your average child. Between the AI's tendency to pick on the human player, it's uncanny ability to always be faster than you (by nature of it not having a squishy, second-guessing human brain, I'd wager), the necessity of a good vocabulary and the strategic aspect I find it baffling to picture subjecting a fragile, child's mind to the game, especially because picking your words is done under a very strict time constraint which had me stressing out, nevermind a kid.

My guess is that the reason Quarrel even got published onto a console in the first place, instead of just staying on the mobile phones, is to allow for the addition of online multiplayer. It really feels like any single player mode is solely there to teach you the ropes so you can play the game over the internet, although in my experience there are few more stressful games to play against people. the beauty of a game like Scrabble, is that it being turn-based allows you to think about your word for a long time, constantly rearranging your letters and scouring the board for a free vowel, all the while everyone else is having a nice conversation about biscuits, or holidays or some such nonsense. That nice, snuggly feeling of making the best word you possibly can is completely removed when you add a harsh time limit and the need to play a word quicker than the "The anagram was Preverts"... Indeedother person. Human minds go blank, human minds can't see the forest for the trees, human minds will completely miss the fact that almost any word can end in 's' if you only give them 15 seconds to think. You lose all that satisfaction, even if you win, if you're being forced to throw random letters at your brain, see what sticks, then hurriedly type the outcome out for fear of being slower than the other person. It's stressful, and unpleasant, and left a sour taste in my mouth at the end of it (despite coming 2nd in my game).

I feel like I've been quite harsh on Quarrel, but when the measuring stick you've set for your game is Risk and Scrabble (2 of the best-loved and greatest games of all time), you're kind of forcing it upon yourself. It's not a bad game, the presentation is about as clean and spot-on as you could hope for, and there's fun to be had from the concept, but in a world where Words With Friends exists on Facebook for free? Then it's hard to recommend. Perhaps the iPhone version is different, in little chunks whilst on the bus I bet it works a treat, but sat in front of my TV? To be honest, I'd rather just watch Countdown.

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Quarrel is available now on Xbox Live for 400 Microsoft Points. A free demo of the game is also available.

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Review

(This review has come from playing the game on the Xbox 360. I do not know first hand about the different control options or graphical advantages playing the PC or PS3 versions may have on the overall experience of the game)

98 hours I've played Skyrim. 98 hours I've traversed the picturesque Northernmost Province of Tamriel, saving 177 times and completing more quests, side-quests and miscellaneous quests than I dare to count. I've slain many a dragon, fought off many a reanimated corpse and bribed more than my fair share of seedy characters; I've toppled regimes, sieged cities and brought giants to their knees; I've been to the top of the highest mountain, explored sunken ships on the ocean's depths and delved into the minds (literally) of more than one doomed soul; I've seen men go insane before my very eyes, I've changed the weather just by shouting and sometimes,
sometimes... I just sit back and watch the Salmon jump upstream, Such is the life of the Dragonborn.

Chances are that you already know what Skyrim is about, but for those that don't, Skyrim is the 5^th in Bethesda's extremely highly regarded Elder Scrolls series: A collection of epic RPGs that basically spawned their own genre of open-world adventure games. The games centre around the continent of Tamriel, with each game in the series taking place in a different Province of the country. As you can imagine, a province of a continent is pretty massive, and the size of the environments is one of the defining features of the series. Skyrim itself features a map containing 9 different counties or “Holds”, and each Hold containing a city and numerous small villages, farms, caves and ruins, each one fully explorable. It's completely up to you if you want to help out the inhabitants, do the main story quest, or even just murder everybody in town and plunder their possessions. The level of player freedom is the main staple of the Elder Scrolls franchise, and never has this been as evident as it is in Skyrim.

The gameplay is similar to the previous Elder Scrolls game 'Oblivion', in that you can choose exactly the way you want to do everything. Want to fight with a sword and shield? Go for it! 2 swords? Hell yeah! Magic in one hand, axe in another? You betcha! Axe and a mace?.... You get the idea. The freedom to fight enemies in literally any way you see fit isn't exactly new, but it feels fresh and exciting, helped in no small part by the ability to favourite certain spells, weapons and even bits of armour. Mid battle, with the touch of a button you can freeze the action and go from double magic to a two-handed axe, a bow and arrows, or even just fists within a matter of seconds. The system helps encourage creative and varied combat, by making it just so damn easy! Combat is (finally!) fun in an Elder Scrolls game! And I love it.

Another thing this game shares in common with Oblivion is the sheer number of activities you can be doing at any one time. There are separate categories for a number of things, from Sneaking, to Smithing, to Alchemy, to Pickpocketing. You level the categories up by, ingeniously, performing the thing you want to level up. This system isn't like other RPGs, where you level up by killing enough enemies then spend points on specific categories to get them higher, if you want to make better armour whilst you're Smithing, then hey, do more Smithing and level it up! Every skill you level up contributes towards your character's level increasing, so it's entirely possible to level up your Dragonborn without killing anything, something no other game really has the balls to give you the option to do.

Upon levelling up you're treated to a major change to the series, and one clearly borrowed from the last 2 entries into Bethesda's other popular series 'Fallout'. Every time you level up you can choose to either increase your Health, Stamina or Magicka by 10 points, then you get to unlock a perk. Perks can do anything from increasing your damage output, to making magic spells cost less Magicka, to making your lockpicks never break. A higher level in a skill will net you the ability to buy a better perk for said skill, for example, you can't get the perk that allows you to behead enemies with one-handed weapons until you are over level 50 with one-handed weapons. This new system really lets you power yourself up, whilst also giving you heaps more options when you level. Perks can be saved up for later, and there's always the option of saving, assigning a perk, trying it out, then re-loading the save if you don't like it. I found myself misspending a few of my perks, but never felt compelled to re-load a save. All the perks are ultimately useful, and a fantastic improvement over the old levelling system, which felt archaic and ineffectual.

The game takes advantage of some other lessons Bethesda has learnt from this generation's Fallout games aswell, with the interface much improved over Oblivion and the conversation system actually feeling like you're chatting to a character, as opposed to Oblivion's conversation system which let you pick topics of conversation, with no real context. The conversation system is much closer to Fallout now, with branching conversations with varying levels of politeness, bluntness and downright aggression. It really helps make the world feel more organic. Try to intimidate a mercenary and he'll laugh in your face, or downright insult somebody asking for your help and watch as they skulk
                                                                 away saddened.

Now ofcourse while all these additions and improvements are obviously welcome, they don't mean squat without some context, and thankfully there's a lot going on in the land of Skyrim. 200 years after Oblivion, you enter the world amidst a civil war between the soldiers representing the free peoples of Skyrim, known as the Stormcloaks, and the soldiers of the Imperial Legion wanting to seize control of the province. The leader of the rebellion, Ulfric Stormcloak, is due to be executed before fate interrupts and we find out that Dragons, an ancient tyrannical race, have re-emerged to fuck some shit up. Needless to say the fate of the world rests entirely in your hands, and the game's main quests will take you all over the snow-covered scenery. The basis of your characters world-saving ability is that he has been born with the soul of a dragon, and as such is the only person who can kill a Dragon for good, absorbing their souls and using them to unlock 'Shouts', a new form of power your character can use, which comes in many different flavours. A shout can change the weather, slow down time or even just distract an enemy for a few seconds, they're varied and fun to use and are another great addition. I never once got bored of killing dragons either, finding every dragon encounter epic and fun. I've been hearing a lot of bad things about the game's main quest, but I found it to be interesting and to take you in enough unexpected directions that I never felt bored with it, and even if you do get bored with it, there are literally hundreds of other things you could be doing instead. HUNDREDS!

As jam-packed as the world is with shit to do, maybe the thing I love most about the game is just being IN Skyrim. The game's graphics are great, the world is lush and vibrant and packed full of little secrets to discover. Everywhere you turn you're treated to a picturesque view the likes of which you've probably never experienced in a game before, and there's such a massive draw distance you can literally see for miles and miles, not to mention being able to travel anywhere you can see, whether it's the very tippy-top of a mountain or a landmark way off in the distance. Every inch of the gameworld has something to do and something to see. Pick flowers, go hunting, catch Salmon as they jump upstream, admire the Northern Lights or just play hide and seek with the local children, it's all a joy to be a part of, and still after 98 hours brings a smile to my face.

98 hours. 98 HOURS!!! 98 hours and 177 saves. 98 hours, 177 saves and just 90% of the game's achievements done. In a month. A month of ONLY playing Skyrim. Skyrim has essentially robbed me of a month of my life, and I don't want it back. It can have it. It earned it. Skyrim is a game that surpasses any expectations, and rewrites what you'll expect from so-called “Triple-A titles” in the future. It lays a fresh groundwork for Bethesda that ensures their next game will be anticipated like no other and, despite the game crashing under it's own weight once or twice (don't worry, it autosaves super often) was an experience I found to be absolutely faultless. Amazing.

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Battlefield 3 Review

I played the game's single player on the Xbox 360, and have played the multiplayer on both Xbox 360 and PC.

My experience with Battlefield 3 was more than a little confusing. I found myself hating the game in points, and loving it in others. There's a clear division between the game's single-player and multiplayer that was unfortunate. I had completely different experiences with both modes, so much so that I feel like the game would get unfairly dragged down if I judged it as a whole package, so I've decided to split this review in two.

Battlefield 3 – Single Player Review

Toughie, this. I wanted to love Battlefield 3's single-player, I really did. I had watched the lead up to the game intently; gasping in glee at every new trailer and biting my lip at every sexy-looking explosion and intense fire fight; drooling over every new screenshot that showed a building falling over or the most realistic heat-vision I have ever seen; and, most importantly, getting excited to be a part of these huge battles that are only really possible in a Battlefield game. It let me down.

I'll start with the positives, as when they're great, they're pretty The game looks stunning, even just going down generic alleywaysdamn great. The game is absolutely gorgeous. In all the build up to the game's release, it looked incredible, but I grew more and more concerned that the visuals just couldn't hold up on a console. Thankfully, they look great. Of course, it goes without saying that the PC version will look better than the console, but it still was constantly making me stop in my tracks, just to stare at how gorgeous the game was, usually over something as simple as a neon sign reflected in a wet floor. The game has a fantastic art design, which is hard to do in a game trying to emulate reality. Lighting is intense and constantly glaring right in your face, causing little flecks of dirt on the “camera” to becomes visible; lush green fields will stretch out ahead of you with the summer sun casting perfect shadows as Russians rain down from the sky; explosions will cause dust to coat the battlefield, impairing everyone's vision and causing light to stream through in streaks. The game really is beautiful, and a great technical accomplishment.

Tell me you're not excited to play this!The other area the single-player excels is in the vehicle sections. Early on in the game there is a level that takes place with you sat in the back of a fighter jet which is fantastic. The gameplay during the level is minimal at best, but the feeling and the views you get during the experience is unlike anything else I've really had. Another level later on (the now infamous E3 Tank Demo) takes place with you being a single member of a convoy of tanks racing across the desert. The sense of power you get from being a member of this tank battalion is awesome, and really makes you feel like a bad ass, whilst also delivering that “part of an army” feel that is so awesome.

Unfortunately for the rest of the game, that feeling is seldom seen. For the most part the game is a Call Of Duty-like experience but with a different plot. You play as various characters over the course of the campaign, switching between them depending on whether their whereabouts were relevant to the story being told. It reminded me a whole lot of Black Ops, with a single character being interrogated to stop a terrorist attack, although to give the game credit, I feel like it's more coherent than Black Ops, whose campaign I actually hated. Without giving too much away, the bad guy feels evil enough, and the threat is big enough to justify somebody doing something about it, but the execution is flawed in nearly every way other than the fantastic presentation and vehicle sections. If you bought the game and never touched the single-player I wouldn't blame, especially considering the multiplayer...

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Battlefield 3 - Multiplayer Review

Battlefield 3 came out just over a week before Modern Warfare 3, so inevitably the two will have to get compared at some point. For my money, Battlefield's multiplayer experience is the superior of the two. Like previous Battlefield games, multiplayer contains a smattering of modes, all revolving around 2 teams attempting to capture (or prevent the capture) of various objectives using a multitude of classes and vehicles to do away with the opponents team. The maps are bigger and more varied than Modern Warfare's, and the inclusion of vehicles really sets it apart from it's duty calling counterpart.

If you've not experienced Battlefield multiplayer before, the best A good example of one of the game's massive mapsway for me to describe it as methodical. In a single game of Modern Warfare, you may get a kill/death score 18 kills and 22 deaths and consider that a pretty average game. In Battlefield games, typically a good k/d score would be maybe 8 kills, 6 deaths and a whole heap of extra points from healing, repairing, resupplying and spotting for your team. The game is much more about teamwork, and less about running around with a revolver out because it lets you knife faster. The game encourages you to help your teammates with plenty of points awarded for healing them and giving them more ammo, and lots of bonuses given for suppressing enemies (firing in their direction will blur their vision) and for pointing out their locations to your team. As such, the game delivers on something Modern Warfare can't: Teamwork.

You actually have to base jump off this cliff to attack your opponents in the base below....The 2 main modes in the game are Rush and Conquest. In Conquest mode, both teams start off with a certain number of respawns which tick down every time a member of your team dies. Your team's respawns will also slowly decrease if the opposing team holds more of the map's capture points than your team does. Capture points can be captured by 1 person, a squad of people, 20 guys, or 2 or 3 in a tank, leading to some great capture/defend gameplay as you attempt to hold off rushes on your control points whilst also slowly creeping your way into your opponents points. With the enormous size of the maps in the game, this mode definitely favours the PC version, which allows 32 vs. 32 multiplayer matches, as opposed to the Xbox's 12 vs. 12. The game's other main mode is Rush mode, a multi-level mode where the attackers (whose respawns are limited) have to attack and destroy 2 objectives, and the defenders (who have infinite respawns) have to whittle the attackers' respawns before they can complete their goal. The mode is a bit more focused than Conquest, so works fine on the Xbox, though I find 16 people each attacking/defending a single point absolutely ridiculous.

Your multiplayer character is split up into 4 classes: Medic, Oh, and did I mention? Still plenty of shooting dudes in the faceEngineer, Support and Recon. The Medic is a combination of the old Medic and Assault classes, so this is your basic infantry guy; Engineer deals with vehicles, both in their destruction and upkeep; Supports will carry machine guns with large clips to provide suppressing fire whilst resupplying their team-mates with ammo and grenades; and the Recon is your sniper class, pointing out vulnerable targets whilst also popping a few heads from distance. The classes are very well balanced, with enough team working options that you won't ever feel either surplus to requirement or ineffective on the Battlefield. Each of the classes has it's own weapons, weapon-specific attachments and gadget unlocks, with your soldier levelling up separately and earning perks that can be applied across all your classes. The upgrades feel satisfying, and don't unlock too
easily, meaning the multiplayer will last you a hell of a long time if you let it.

As you can see, you're never short of options out in the fieldBattlefield's multiplayer is awesome. While not as fast paced as Modern Warfare, the game makes up for it by incorporating actual strategy and teamwork; the game's maps are so much huger than Modern Warfare's and the maximum player cap so much higher (on PC at least) that every battle feels infinitely more epic than the kill boxed Call Of Duty provides; the selection of vehicles in the game, from jets, to helicopters, to tanks, to Jeeps, to amphibious APCs, to boats, all add to that feel of a huge battle going on around you (nothing quite like firing an RPG at a tank whilst a jet shoots down an attack helicopter overhead); and perhaps most importantly, you don't have be great at shooting games to be a valued member of the team due to the many other ways you can help your team-mates out.

Overall, the multiplayer stands on it's own, triumphant and glowing with a halo above it's head. It's so much fun, and so easy to get into that really I would recommend it to almost anybody. The game will still be being played 10 years from now, and I for one can't wait to get back on there and blow up some tanks, bring my fellow troops back from the brink of death and crash a fighter jet into the side of a troop-filled building. Bliss.

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Batman: Arkham City Review

I don't think anybody was expecting Arkham Asylum to be the Everything you loved about Arkham Asylum is back with a vengeance!massive hit that it was. The game delivered an engaging story, incredibly fun gameplay and more comic book references than you could shake a stick at and found tremendous success as a result. The game pleased video gamers (both hardcore and casual) and comic books fans, seemingly hitting a bat-shaped hole in the market. All of a sudden superhero games were transformed from the butt of cruel jokes, to almost a brand-new genre of game that had potential to actually be good (as well as profitable). Unfortunately, since the original Arkham Asylum no other superhero game has even come close to that standard, so it is with great trepidation that we delve into the newly released Arkham Asylum, to see if Rocksteady can repeat the impossible, and make not only a good Batman game, but a fantastic game fullstop.

Arkham City opens with Bruce Wayne calling a press conference in which he expresses his displeasure at the prison city, which doesn't sit well with the prison's warden (and professional criminal mastermind/Batman villain) Hugo Strange. Needless to say it kicks off and Batman is forced to traverse the seedy underbelly of Arkham City to find various answers to various questions which I won't get into here, as this is the kind of game you just don't want spoiling, but I will say that the story is superbly well-told... more on that later though. The game takes place about 6 months after the first game ends, and feels like it starts somewhat abruptly, but this is because the events leading upto the start of the game are chronicled in the Arkham City comic book. Having no knowledge of the comic book leaves you a little bit on the dark, but luckily I found this article which should fill you in and doesn't spoil the game at all. In typical comic book fashion the story has as many twists and turns as a Curly Wurly, but luckily is just as deliciously satisfying to work your way through.

Hugo Strange is obviously evil, but dude rocks a pretty sweet beard...If you played Arkham Asylum you'll be immediately at home. The free flow combat system returns and is as joyfully, erm, free flowing as ever. Batman whips across the screen, flooring thugs left and right, catching their punches and throwing their faces into the floor at will, dispatching dozens of enemies in a matter of seconds. The combat system is supremely satisfying and makes you feel like a totally indestructible badass. The stealthy puzzle-like encounters from Arkham Asylum return, turning a room full of heavily armed bad guys into a playground of creativity. Sure, you can just creep up behind all of them and choke them, but why do that when you can lure them underneath a glass ceiling and drop down onto their heads, or blow up a wall with them on the other side? It's fun to toy with them and watch their heart rates shoot up as they become more terrified of what's in the shadows. As the game ramps up the enemies will gain equipment that makes them more effective at dealing with your stealthy escapades (like heat vision, or detective vision disruptors), but you're still always the most powerful guy in the room, and it never gets old destroying a room full of guys with guns using nothing more than fists, gadgets and your brain.

The game takes place in the better half of an entire city, so the scale compared to Arkham Asylum is huge. Luckily Rocksteady make great use of the space, adding in plenty of side quests, most of which have you interacting with a bunch of classic Batman characters. The side quests are varied and fun, and a welcome addition to the already awesome formula established in the first game. Riddler returns and bring with him 400(!) trophies to find dotted everywhere you go, aswell as the "classic" types of riddle found in the first game. Riddler also is a little more involved than in Arkham Asylum, as he's actually in the City somewhere, unlike Arkham asylum where he was transmitting from some apartment random. the Riddler challenges have to potential to take up alot of time, but every trophy is gettable if you can think your way around the puzzle the Riddler has set out.

The game is great looking, when Batman gets to the top of a tall Catwoman is agile but not quite as well equipped as Batman himselfbuilding and the city is sprawling out in front of you, you really can't help but stop and stare. The majority of the game's story parts take place indoors, and the indoor environments tend to be a little bland and boring, but this doesn't really end up mattering all that much. When story stuff is happening the last thing on your mind is whether the room you're in is pretty or not, all you're too busy going "Oh shiiiiiiit! No way!". The story in Arkham City is great, if not in content then in execution. In a similar way to Half Life, which delivers the story organically in first person, Arkham City does such a good job so often of delivering story to you without just throwing you into a cutscene that it really grabs your attention. Multiple times things will happen that you won't see coming, but instead of starting a cutscene when these moments happen, the game will keep you in control. It's a neat little touch that is done so well that it really feels like there an extra 15 layers of polish on the game.

The best thing about Arkham City though, bar none, isn't the graphics, or the story, or the side quests, or the comic book geekery... it's how well it conveys what it's like to be Batman. Whether you're gliding across the city skyline, listening in on unwitting inmates as they talk about you in hushed, fearful tones; scanning crime scenes for the evidence to lead you to the rampant bad guy like only the world's greatest detective can; or constantly crossing paths with enemies who have tried to kill you multiple times, and going from talking to them like best friends, to fighting them at the drop of a hat. It's a strange life the Dark Knight leads. Literally you'll be chatting to Mr Freeze like best pals, but then the next time you see him he's trying to murder you. You beat him and what does Batman say? "You wanna maybe grow up and have a nice civilised chat, please?". It really brings to light the fucked up world of Batman, whereby his enemies are also kinda his best friends. He knows these guys very well, and often talks to them on a first-name basis in a parent-angry-at-a-child kind of way. Peculiar... peculiar but fascinating.

The city is really impressive, and loads of fun to move aroundSo few games do such a great job of putting you into a character's shoes whilst also doing everything else right. It's so rare to see a game that is great in all areas, even games I've loved recently had areas they weren't so great in, but Arkham City can do it all: story, combat, characters and content are all fantastic. A challenge mode backs up the game's main story, and the game even let's you play as Catwoman at various points during the main game if you either bought the game new or bought it off your consoles store (The Catwoman download is actually a really cool addition I think really adds to the game!). There's alot to do here, and alot of fun to be had whilst doing it.

I thought it would have been impossible to make a Batman game that surpassed Arkham Asylum, even knowing it was being made by the same developer, but I'm glad I was wrong. Rocksteady have taken the framework they built for Arkham Asylum and expanded on it in literally every way they could. The conceit for the game is a little ridiculous, but we're talking about a universe where a man dresses as a bat to beat up a guy with a clown face, so I think we can let that slide. At the end of the day, when all's said and done, if you buy this game you'll be buying one of the best games of the year, and you really can't argue with that.

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Gears Of War 3 Review

The Gears Of War series is a weird one in my eyes. Some people (myself included) love the story, and really enjoy the gameplay; for others the game is a gun-chainsaw with some cutscenes getting in the way of gun-chainsawing; some people just play the multiplayer and ignore the wrappings of plot or context completely; and some people find the whole universe so ridiculous that they dismiss the games entirely. Gears Of War 3 should appeal to all these people and make them very happy.

Let's start with your game modes. If you love shooting guys in Humanity has been driven to living on shipsthe face with a shotgun and watching them explode into a bloody pile of mess, you'll be very happy. Some of the game's classic multiplayer modes are intact: Warzone, Execution, King Of The Hill and Wingman, and 2 new competitive modes have been added: Team Deathmatch, where each team has 15 respawns; and Capture The Leader, which is a combination of previous Gears multiplayer modes Guardian and Submission.

It's not all competitive multiplayer though, the game gives you plenty of oppurtunity to work together with your buddies instead of chainsawing them. Full campaign co-op is available, with you being able to play the entire story through with 3 of your friends, or indeed, some strangers. The game also adds an "Arcade" mode which adds respawns and scoring to the regular campaign, aswell as some interesting modifiers (like a laugh track or infinite ammo) but these have to be earned, usually via difficult means. Gears 2's Horde mode returns but has been revamped to include some Tower Defense, with you scoring money for kills and spending that money on fortifications, new weapons or ammo. It's alot of fun and feels like a definite improvement on the previous iteration of the mode. The last co-op mode is Beast Mode, which gives players a chance to play as the various assortment of Locust creatures against teams of AI-controlled humans, essentially serving as a reverse Horde mode. All the co-op modes are alot of fun, and are varied and challenging enough to keep you happy for a good while. 

Locust now explode out of the ground!The wealth of multiplayer options are welcome, and were actually incredibly fun once I sank my teeth into them (even though I was a Gears Of War noobie online prior to playing 3), but for me personally they're not the reason I come to Gears Of War. I come to Gears Of War for it's story. Gears 1 and 2 did a really good job of creating huge, elaborate set pieces in impressive locations to convey the epic scale of the ongoing war. In Gears 3 though, the war has basically already been lost for Humans and Locust, both losing their final safe havens and both being forced to fend for themselves with their former homes destroyed.

On top of the last human city getting sunk, the Coalition Of Ordered Governments has also disbanded, which means that mankind is now without any supply lines. With the Lambent (the enemy the Locust were running from when they attacked) now rearing their ugly, mutated heads above ground, the only really safe havens are aboard ships, with survivors being forced to trade and scavenge for supplies. And that's where Gears 3 starts. Former president of the COG, Chairman Prescott appears with a mission for Delta Squad that will ultimately, if successful, end the war for good. Now obviously resources are extremely scarce and our heroes can't exactly just take a Raven to wherever they need to go anymore, so the extreme trek to get where you're going takes up the majority of the game. There aren't as many set pieces in Gears 3 either, which makes sense. Mankind is on the verge of extinction, and as such things like kickass vehicles and huge weapons are hard to come by. The majority of the game is spent fighting your way through Lambent forces and the leftover Locust, to scrape together just enough resources to make Chairman Prescott's mission work, and while that may sound more boring it actually gives the game a great 'last ditch' feeling.

This brings me to probably my favourite thing about the game:The boss encounters in the game remain epic The way it feels. Everybody is tired, they've been at war for their entire lives and you can tell. The world is worn out and scarred, and no matter what they try the Locust, and now the Lambent, still continue to attack in huge numbers. Family and friends have been lost and only a very tiny percent of the population is left. The game conveys the grimness of the situation very well, and looks terrific to boot. This is possibly the best looking console game I've ever seen. Unlike other Gears games brown isn't the main colour on show, with plenty of ambient foliage and flowers providing green, lush backdrops. It's summer on Sera so the sun is out, casting impressively detailed shadows and causing some incredible dust effects (the first time you see sunlight shining through a cloud of dust your jaw will drop). The game really does look absolutely fantastic, infact, there's a level fairly late on in the game which may be the best looking level I've ever seen in a game (you'll know it when you see it). The game's cutscenes often drop frames but it personally didn't upset me too much, as I was too wrapped up in the story to notice the brief technical hitches too much.

The gameplay is still as satisfying as everWithout going into spoilers I will say that the story wraps up nicely. More than once during the game I welled up a little (seriously) and after completing the game I spent the next 6 hours on a Gears Of War wiki, reading up on the universe, the fiction and the back story of the characters. I would be very surprised if this was the last game to bear the Gears Of War game (personally I'd love a prequel), but as far as the main Gears Of War storyline goes, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that it's officially over. The events of the game's ending, coupled with my reading up of the Gears Of War fiction left me with a tremendous sense of closure, which was comforting like a warm blanket.

Closure. Not something you see a ton of in video games, but something that's always appreciated when it rears it's head. It seems weird to be talking about a Gears Of War game in terms of it's maturity of storytelling and not it's "sick, hardcore action" but Epic have treated the end of the franchise with respect. Ending the story of Marcus Fenix and wrapping up a series that has sold more Xbox's than almost any other game took balls, but it was well worth it, because what's left is, for me, one of the best games of the year.

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution Review

Disclaimer: This review is for the Xbox 360 version of the game. I cannot speak for any specific mechanical aspect of any other versions, PC included.

Deus Ex. 2 words that strike both fear, and joy into the hearts of PC gamers everywhere. From the classic original, to the legendarily disappointing sequel, it's a franchise steeped in controversy, with many seeing the original Deus EX as one of the (if not THE) greatest PC game of all time, but others having the franchise forever tainted by the sequel. So where do you go when you're attempting to make a third entry in the franchise?

Adam Jensen - Your typical video game badassThe direction they went was very smart. Make the game a prequel so as not to alienate any new gamers (but still keep the original fans happy) and make playing completely unstealthily a more viable (though obviously still not really recommended) option to keep the impatient gamers interested. What you're left with is a game that places you in a fascinating, well-realised world and allows anybody to play any way they would like, a freedom not many games even attempt.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution tells the story of Adam Jensen, head of security at a company on the cusp of a major breakthrough in the field of human augmentation, a new kind of science that enhances human's abilities with technology. Needless to say the shit hits the fan, and in the ensuing chaos you character becomes augmented against his will in order to save his life. The game's story explores the extensive world of the game, as Often you'll just have to stop and take in the viewwell as the philosophical (and political) implications that enhancing ourselves with technology might actually bring about. It's all very well done, though the subject matter isn't so much delicately handled as it is crammed down your throat; combine that with almost universally terrible voice acting and a main character that permanently channels Keanu Reaves in The Matrix and you've got an unusual, yet somehow enjoyable story to enjoy.

A major factor in the game's game's story, and to the overall experience of playing the game, is the amazing world the designers have created. A great art style, and impeccable map design help make the universe feel grounded in reality and genuine, and in-game E-books and NPC-to-NPC emails help to fill in the smaller details of the world, giving it a more organic feel. Combine all this with pretty graphics and you're onto a winner. The variety of places you get to explore is refreshing, feel justified, and all feel very unique from each other.

Now story and setting are all very well and good, but they're nothing without solid gameplay, and it's in the actual playing of the game that it really starts to shine. As you can imagine, the concept of being a robotically enhanced human being leads to some pretty interesting upgrades when you level up, whether it's being able to fall from any height and not take damage, lift skips and vending machines or even something as subtle as influencing people in conversations, each upgrade feels significant, because each and every one is actually useful.

You're never short on options when you level upThankfully you get lots of oppurtunity to level up, because you receive experience for doing almost anything in the game, whether it's hacking, or exploring, or just doing the various side quests you discover throughout the game's hubs. In that respect I found the game reminded me of a Fallout game in lots of ways. The side quests are varied and not just fetch quests, and conversations with other characters let you choose to be either naughty or nice, and there's even an upgrade that lets you influence people in conversations with pharamones.

The action in the game is interesting. You have access to instant stealth knockouts but each one uses up a "battery"s worth of energy. Over time you'll always refill a battery that isn't fully depleted (and you'll always have atleast 1 battery that will recharge). You can get more batteries by levelling up but to refill a battery you've used up you need to eat a chocolate bar. Seriously. You also have access to a cover mechanic, which you activate simply by holding the left trigger down. It takes a few minutes to get the hang of but is actually really intuitive, and adds alot to the game. Bullets go wherever the crosshair is pointing (no accuracy stats) which makes it fairly easy to headshot enemies. You feel like a huge badass, knocking guards out easily, headshotting them with ease and generally demolishing whoever you want in whichever method you see fit. You don't have much health though, so don't go TOO mental...

It's not a perfect game though by any means. Enemy AI is "My name Jaron. I nearly ruin your game, yes?"absolutely terrible; animations during conversations are very robot-like; the story can take turns that would never actually happen if you were making your characters in-cutscene decisions; the game's inventory system leaves a lot to be desired as far as making room for new items goes; the mini-map becomes very unreliable once you get the upgrade that doubles it's range (it actually just zooms it out, making it much harder to identify enemy camera locations effectively) and not constantly saving can oftentimes leave you dead, staring at the "load game" screen, sobbing gently as you realise you just lost 15 minutes worth of hacking, stealthing, looting goodness. The absolute worst thing in the game though, by FAR, are the boss battles. The boss battles take what's great about playing the game, and make you do the complete opposite. Bosses walk/run right towards you and do insane amounts of damage instantly. Compared to the methodical, tactical action in the rest of the game it's jarring, and completely goes against the flow of the entire rest of the game. There are only really 4 in the entire game though, so on balance, I'd say it's worth the soul-crushing tediousness of facing the game's bland bosses.

There was a tremendous amount of hype surrounding Deus Ex: Human Revolution pre-release, but hype's a funny thing. Hype can get you massively pumped and increase your excitement level for something you're really looking forward to; or hype can oversell something, leaving you ultimately dissatisfied, no matter the quality of the finished product. Deus Ex: Human Revolution manages to straddle the line between these two extremes, yet somehow manages a level of polish, and playability that is sorely lacking in most modern sequels. A definite rental, and if you're a fan of the original, an extremely worthy prequel.

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Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars Review

 

The game looks miles better than previous iterations

The Lego series only really has one flaw: They pump out so many games that they must all be garbage, right?... Well, no. I enjoy Lego games immensely! Probably because they're based on my most highly beloved franchises ever. They not only re-tell the best stories from my childhood, but also invoke a childlike sense of wonder and curiosity, making the whole experience super fun.

Ofcourse, I can't deny that Lego games were in a bit of a rut, with the first few Star Wars and Indiana Jones iterations basically being the same game reskinned, but I genuinely believe that what I've played in Lego Star Wars III makes me excited about Lego games again. I wanna see Lego Lord Of The rings, Lego Back To The Future, hell, I'd even take Lego Alien! But why? Aren't Lego games incredibly simplistic and easy? Haven't they been basically the same for years now? Aren't you sick of them?!? The answer to all these questions is no.

The first thing that hits you about Lego Star Wars III is the graphics. They look MUCH better than the older games, even incorporating creatures not made out of Lego into the mix. The second thing that hits you (as it happens in the first level) is the sheer amount of enemies they can get in screen now! This really lets them open things up later as they introduce more and more mechanics based around this simple jump in technology. Thirdly, they keep to what made the previous Lego games so good for children (and big children like me) and that's the sheer amount of STUFF. The hub area is absolutely enormous. I reached a rather baffling moment about 12 hours in where I suddenly realised the huge hub I was in was only actually about half of it's actual size. A kid is gonna go NUTS when they figure that out for themselves.

See, epic right?!?

Part of the conceipt for the Clone Wars storyline is the war being fought between the Droids of the Republic, and the Clone Troopers of the Alliance (Star Warsy stuff). It factors into the story of the Star Wars universe pretty heavily so you wanna see it being portrayed in as epic a way as possible, and LEgo star wars III delivers! As I said earlier they've figured out a way of fitting (what seems like) hundreds of characters on screen at a time, and this comes into full effect with the ground battles, basically a "My-First-RTS" where you pick which type of units you want to make and try to gather up money to invest is better troops or bigger vehicles. There's some strategy involved but mostly I just liked to make as many crazy units be on the battlefield as possible, just to complete the epic "war" look.

The game still features the trademark hundreds of unlockable characters and vehicles with loads of collectibles to find and heaps of extra missions piled on on top, it can seem like alot to take in but if you wanna save money by buying your kid a game that'll last them a while, this'll do nicely! I myself played the game for about 20 hours and am roughly 50% of the way through, so a kid should take twice that long. That's a lot of game for your money! and, more importantly, a lot of your kid keeping quiet.

So if you want some peace and quiet, but don't mind losing control of the TV for a few weeks, then by all means, treat your kid... but don't expect to get too much out of the game yourself.

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