Mass Effect 2: Armour Preview
Bioware has released some info on the types of armour you can expect to see in Mass Effect 2, including the Dragon Age: Origins styled armour, only available with a purchase of Dragon Age. Also featured is the awesome “Collectors” armour, only available to players who have plashed out on the Digital Deluxe and Collectors Edition versions of the game. Check them out HERE.
Darksiders
Promising destruction on an apocalyptic scale and the chance to control one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Darksiders promises the end of humanity as we know it. But does it deliver?
I had been looking forward to this one. Darksiders was created by Vigil studios, of Dawn of War fame, and was released for Xbox 360 and PS3 in the first half of January 2010. You play as War, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, who has mistakenly brought about the apocalypse on earth. As punishment, those in charge of keeping “the balance” between heaven and hell have stripped the mighty horseman of his powers and have sent him back to earth to find out what went wrong.
What’s it like? Well, you run around in third person for most of the game, controlling War who can string together a number of basic combos with his sword and scythe to reap destruction on his foes. Later on you get the power to turn into a demon form which makes you practically invincible. There are a good number of puzzles that will keep you entertained and some of the boss fights are really impressive, both in terms of scale and graphical awesomeness. You get the opportunity to buy new combos and weapons by picking up souls, the currency in the game.
Darksiders looks good, but lacks polish in some key areas. Much of the time you’ll find yourself running around an environment that is devoid of all activity apart from the one or two easy enemies you encounter. Little touches that bring the environment to life seem to be missing too and, since they borrow so heavily from other titles, they should have had a look at how similar post-disaster environments are created well in games like Left 4 Dead, Half Life 2 or Portal which as a game is the master of telling a story through an environment that the player encounters along their journey.
I can’t stay away from the hot topic of discussion any longer. This game is Zelda. From the heart containers, to the boomerang, to the Navi, even the way War locks on to targets and fights bosses is very similar. Is this a bad thing? I mean, If Nintendo turned around tomorrow and said they were going to make a dark, stylized, violent Zelda, drawn by an acclaimed marvel comic book artist, wouldn’t you get excited too? Yes, yes you would. I think the problem with the game is that, although it copies Zelda to the letter at times, it doesn’t improve on the game play very much at all. Zelda isn’t the only game Darksiders borrows from. Your weapons upgrade system is taken right from a Devil May Cry game, without the level of complex combos. Also, you may notice some similarities in the story and in the characters if you have ever read a Spawn comic. Personally I think there are more than enough similarities between the two characters to raise some serious eyebrows about where the team got their concepts from. There is no denying that the character art in Darksiders is beautiful. The bosses and War’s character model and animations prove that 100%. And if you’ve never read Spawn, I’m sure it won’t really matter anyway.
Reading back through this, I would say the review is quite damning. But to conclude, let me say this. If you’re looking for a hack and slash game, you can’t go wrong with Darksiders. The game isn’t BAD, it just doesn’t seem to do anything you haven’t seen before. However, sandwiched between Bayonetta and Dantes Inferno, all of which are “Heaven and Hell Hack n Slash” I fear that Darksiders doesn’t bring enough to the table to come out on top.
Bayonetta
With perfect scores from Famitsu and Edge and a glowing review from Kotaku, Sega seem to have finally found the formula for the ultimate videogame, Guns, Tits and Buns. Bayonetta went on sale in the UK last Friday and smashed into the top 20 at number 5. This might seem like a lukewarm reception to the title, but bear in mind that no one has yet managed to knock Modern Warfare 2 off the top spot for weeks now and, in a chart inexplicably dominated by Nintendo Wii games it has done well to beat other triple A titles like Dragon Age: Origins, Darksiders and Assassins Creed 2.
I’m habitually cynical when it comes to perfect games, so I tried to remain neutral when playing it, trying not to expect anything too awesome, while at the same time, gearing myself up for the first of the big console releases for 2010. First impressions? Well, not great. The cut scenes in this game, although some of them are visually great, are very confusing. At points, the dialogue between the characters makes absolutely no sense and the attempts to explain the plot are laughable. I can’t help feeling that maybe crucial plot elements disguised as Japanese metaphors were lost in translation along the way and what I was left with was an unfathomable mess of random conversations that allude to concepts and storyline only understood by the guy that wrote it in the first place.
That aside, Modern Warfare 2’s storyline makes next to no sense and that’s brilliant, so let’s move on to the gameplay itself. Wall-running, turning into a panther, blowing stuff up and shooting the shit out of things with the guns either in your hands or the ones attached to your feet all feels smooth and well done. The combo system is one you’ll be well used to if you’ve played Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden or Onimusha, with a very similar weapon and character upgrade system. Within 15 – 20 minutes or so, you’ll be well used to the controls and kicking some angel ass. The fact that I didn’t have a clue what was going on in the story actually seemed to make it better as I was hurled from one completely abstract level to another. One minute I’m surfing on a missile, the next I’m running up the side of a sky scraper, dodging trains and the next I’m slamming a huge angel tentacle phallus into a babies mouth and slicing it in half, before tearing it to pieces using demons summoned from and made out of hair. Yeah, it is random.
The game is 70% boss battles. You may get a feeling of “I’m sure I killed you on the last level” as the game forces you to kill the same boss four or five times on consecutive missions, before having you fight them all again in a final, final, FINAL battle to the death. The boss battles are so ridiculously awesome in how they look and the amount of colour and activity going on that it really doesn’t matter and most of them are challenging enough to tax the average player without getting them stuck for too long. Saying that there are points in that game that are so knuckle-bitingly frustratingly hard that I almost destroyed London in a ball of white hot ball of fury several times during the completion of this game.
I’d personally not give this game a perfect score, but it would be pretty close. I can understand why the Japanese might think it’s perfect as they have a higher chance of being able to figure out what the hell is actually going on. I just can’t fault how graphically amazing this game is at times and when I finally turned my Xbox off after completion, I was surprised it hadn’t RROD’d on me again from being overloaded by sheer awesomeness.
Warhammer 40,000 MMO
THQ have done a sterling job with taking my favourite IP in science fiction and translating it to the gaming medium. The Dawn of War series and its subsequent expansions still stand the test of time today as a fantastic set of games with beautifully modelled units. It’s features like the model painter, included in both games, that captured the spirit of what Warhammer was all about and really proved to me that these games were created by people who had done their homework or, more likely, had played the table-top games themselves. THQ extended their rights on Warhammer 40k until 2013 – that was back in March 2007 and since then they have made good on their promises to really bring the characters to life.
A Warhammer 40k MMO had been hinted at a while back. I read an article on Massively which had the MMO down for a 2012 release. I’ll be honest with you, I was a bit gutted that it had been planned for release so far into the distant future. The Warhammer MMO is slated for release AFTER Darksiders 2. At the time of writing this, Darksiders 1 hasn’t even been released yet. (8th of Jan 2010) However, that was the beginning of the year and this is now. A lot has happened since then, notably the Halo MMO being canned, for whatever reason, and a small recession that I’m sure you’re all very much aware of! I mentioned the Halo MMO being cancelled because it is significant alongside all the failed MMOs that are drawing their last rattling breaths, emaciated and defeated and the feet of mighty Warcraft. Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa, Hellgate London & The Matrix Online, to name the biggest names. The Warhammer Online classic MMO is still going, although it confused me as to why anyone would want to move from Warcraft to a new game with a very similar IP. All this depressing MMOWTFFail news was gradually chipping away at my faith in the Warhammer 40k MMO ever being released at all.
Today, Kotaku published some images, released from a “Friendly Source” inside THQ Studio – Vigil Games. They aren’t exactly screenshots, but they ARE proof that work on the MMO hasn’t been shoved on the back burner to be forgotten about. The presence of the massive Warhound titans give a small hint towards the scale that this game could possibly working towards. The rest of the models do look tantalising, the Space Marine model especially, but I’ll hold off drawing any more wild conclusions until we have some more information. But keep going Vigil, I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with!
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
I must confess, I missed the first instalment of Uncharted, “Drake’s Fortune”. I didn’t own a Playstation when it came out so I couldn’t get my mitts on a copy. So I wasn’t on the edge of my seat when I heard that its sequel had been announced. Sure, I saw the screenshots, which looked fantastic and I watched some videos of gameplay which looked scripted but still made the game look fun, but I’ve been burned too many times by games that promise the earth and fail to deliver, so I tried not to get too excited by it.
The game combines 3rd person shooter action with stealth as an option but not a requirement to progress through the story. There is a fair bit of Parkour – style climbing which reminded me very much of assassins creed and some puzzles which are so easy, they may as well not be there at all. Where Uncharted 2 really excels is in the mix of all these elements tastefully and in the right quantities so as never to bore the player with too much of one thing. The story was fun and kept me interested while the cut scenes were well acted, both by the character models and the talented voice actors. (Claudia Black especially) All of this is set against some of the most stunning backdrops I have ever seen. Clicking the images below will enlarge them.
The controls work well for a third person shooter. You will find soon after picking up the pad and learning how to use the pistol, that headshots are possible but made tricky enough to be extremely satisfying when you one-shot that evil henchman on the next rooftop over. The game combines 3 gameplay types together well in quantity, however it does fall down at controlling these 3 types equally well.
The Parkour running and jumping controls well enough, but I sometimes found that jumping from ledge to ledge felt rather scripted sometimes, like I was initiating a tiny quicktime event to jump across a gap, rather than using skill to judge the distance of the jump. This DID make the game play smoother but at the same time, made it feel a little linear, which is a shame because the backdrops were really, beautifully rendered. I want to feel like at any point, I can break away and go explore, at least a little bit.
The stealth gameplay was a particular sticking point for me. The stealth takedowns were very smooth when executed and I did try to stealth-kill where I could, rather than go guns blazing every time. However I did find that sneaking around enemies to get behind them was made more difficult because of Drake sticking to the wall at a crucial moment or perhaps jumping over the top of the wall instead of simply standing up behind it. I think this problem could have been solved by a dead-mans-switch method of duck and cover, i.e. if you aren’t holding a button down to hide, then the character doesn’t duck behind cover.
Controller woes aside though, the game is possibly the best game I have played this year. It really is beautiful to watch and to play. It never leaves you bored or frustrated and is impossible to put down. I keep thinking about Metal Gear Solid 4 as I write this. I think the comparison I’d draw is, while MGS4 is a classic that will be studied and praised for years to come, Uncharted 2 is an addictive airport novel of a game that you find yourself devouring in record time and then tentatively waiting for the next instalment. There no doubt will be a sequel to this game and when it is released, I’ll be first in-line to bag myself a copy. Oh yes.
Uncharted 2′s stunning backdrops have been unsurpassed this year.
Fable 2
OK. The last few months have turned out to be amazing in terms of gaming and I don’t think it will stop just yet, with Fallout 3 on the Horizon, Farcry 2 actually here RIGHT NOW (!!!) and Little Big Planet screaming at me to sell one of my kidneys and finally get my hands on a PS3. Saying all this, I promise the NEXT entry I write won’t be about computer games but, as we are truly in the golden age of interactive entertainment, it seems foolish of me not to get in on the action.
Fable 2 was created by the now famous (or infamous) Peter Molyneux and Lionhead Studios. For those of you that aren’t aware of Lionheads back catalogue, it mainly consists of Fable & its expansion and the Black & White games. Lionhead have really carved out a style for themselves and it has become quite easy to tell one of their games apart from the rest, largely due to the open world “Sandbox” game environment that they prefer and also the chunky, cartoony style of their world and character design. Another theme that runs through all their games is the dominant “Black and White”\wrong and right\good and evil parallels that they draw to in each game by making the player decide between morally good and bad choices and reflecting these choices in the player avatar itself.
Fable 2 is a 3rd person RPG game set in a rural backdrop which looks something like an idyllic version of England before the industrial revolution. The game world is stunningly beautiful as are the inhabitants of the world itself. The game veers away from your usual Orc, Goblin, Dwarf RPG archetype in favour of bandits, slavers, shadows and Hobbes (said to be monsters created from little children that are stolen away in the night by monsters). Expect to use a variety of spells, swords and guns to hack and slash your way through a mass of enemies and, depending on how you play, friendly villagers too.
Most of the quests in the game are designed to have an impact on your “good” or “evil” personality, your character changing as you make these decisions in the game. If you make mostly evil decisions you will gradually start to look evil and demonic. Most of this is very familiar to the Black & White games and obviously the Fable predecessor. Some of the biggest changes for me came with the buying and selling of property to generate your income, the ability to hike up the prices on the shops you own if you are evil or lower them if you are a benevolent saint.
Other facets of the game include the ability to buy a home and raise a family (or multiple families). Players can contract STD’s from sleeping with prostitutes. You can have children and even become king by eventually owning all the shops and pubs in the land.
This game is seriously addictive. It is playable to the extreme, allowing it to be accessible to players with little experience in RPG gaming. This does however make it incredibly easy for someone who has played Oblivion or Warcraft but no less addictive and fun as a result.
Things I Liked
GFX: This game has fantastic graphics, especially on the backdrops the opening scenes are amazing, especially when you make it to the rural town of Oakvale.
Narrative: The story is very well told (narrated by Zoe Wannamaker) and ties in nicely with the first game, while not requiring you to know too much about it at all. The story is good, if a little obvious to see where it is going from the outset but it is written well enough to get you hooked from the beginning and pull you through to the end.
Playable: The Ranged, Melee and Magical combat are assigned to one button each, a fairly unique combat system sits behind all of this allowing the player to come up with a few simple combos.
Things I Didn’t Like
Too Easy: The game is incredibly easy. You could defend it by saying it is designed to be fun for players of all skill levels, and it is, but seasoned gamers will have little trouble rattling through this. Some people will tell you it is also too short but I don’t think this is the case. If you want to, the core story thread is there to play through in about 14-15 hours but there is so much other stuff to do in the mean time that you should be able to pad it out easily to 25-30 hours. Then I guess you have to play both good and evil sides of the story which could double that. OK… maybe it is a bit on the short side too.
Casting System: Is very poor. The fact you need to charge up EVERY spell before you can use it means that a lot of the direct damage spells become pointless as you only get to cast against one target before the rest of them are on you. Better to just chop people up with your sword.
Maps: What maps? The only map you’ll find for the regions of the game is tiny and you’ll only ever see it when you are actually in that region. I managed to get by but this feature was sorely lacking in the game.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Shepherds Bush on a Sunday evening. A lively place filled with sounds of pint glasses clinking in the pubs, revellers denying the end of another blissful weekend. Red double decker busses create guttural rumbles as they ferry throngs of Londoners across a sprawling city that never sleeps. But tonight a new sound joins the evening chorus. Tonight the sound of a dying rancor echoes across the rooftops, the crackle of force lightning arcs down the streets and the sizzling pop of lightsabre on storm trooper startles a city fox rummaging in the bins outside
Things I Liked:
Sound Effects : a full range of familiar zaps, fizzles and screams from the Lucas Arts sound department.
Combat: The combat is fluid and the control system is intuitive.
Storyline: The story is well written, the characters instantly seem like they “belong” in the Star Wars world I was completely hooked on the storyline and its characters.
DLC: A new campaign is on the way and 4 new playable characters. I hope they get new moves too. The expansion for this title has some real potential.
Things I Didn’t Like:
The force powers can be difficult to control sometimes. Looking at the design of the game, I can’t think of a better way they could have approached the issue with the constraints of a console joy pad. The main issue I have with it is the boss encounter which requires the mastery of the force powers to complete it. It is very frustrating and if nothing else, just highlights the issue to the player.
Too Short: I completed the game in about 3 evenings of play, granted i had a weekends worth of play too, i did feel that the game was a little too short and could have done with a few more levels of storm trooper smashing fun.
Replay Value: As I was playing the game I remember thinking, “I’m having fun, I’m going to play through this again!” there is a small element of RPG-esque character development in this game, but as you get towards the end, you should have earned enough points to pretty much max out all the skills, meaning that you aren’t forced to concentrate your characters skills in a particular field. I don’t think this is necessarily a BAD thing, it just means that every player at the end of the game will have exactly the same character, instead of one with different strengths and weaknesses, which would have been far more interesting and an incentive to play it all over again.
In Short…
I would recommend playing this game. It’s fun, looks good and is quite immersive. See if you can borrow or rent it as it is short and there isn’t really an incentive to buy it again. You could always get it second hand, but i think in retrospect, I would have rented it twice, once to play it through and another time later on next year when the DLC comes out.
Game Review: Spore
By now I’m sure that anyone stumbling across this blog has already heard all about Spore and been exposed to at least some of the surrounding Hype about this game. Yes. The media storm surrounding the game as it built up to its release billed it to be one of the most innovative and original games ever made.
The famous video of Will Wright “um” using the creature creator when it was in its earlier stages was amazing and there is no doubt that the design of the creator and the technology behind it is absolutely astounding and revolutionary.
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Spore received mixed reviews upon release; a recent Amazon.com “glitch” meant that a thread of unfavourable reviews was somehow “lost” from the Spore product page, although after some questioning, the reviews were restored. The biggest controversy to overshadow the game was its stringent DRM (digital rights management) restrictions – which restricted users from installing the game on more than 3 machines and only allowed customers to create a single account capable of receiving the user generated content and adding a users own creations to the collective. EA have since announced that they will be relaxing the rules slightly, allowing the game to be installed on up to 5 machines. This issue is still a point of contention between developer and end user, but it’s also a complex one and maybe a topic for another blog.
As Spore is cut up into five distinct sections, which means this review is really 5 mini reviews in one massive block of intimidating text. Sorry about that.
Phase 1: Tidal Pool Phase
This part of the game is awesome. You start as a small amoeba-like creature and have to swim through a primordial soup of other microbes, eating other animals or plant matter to grow in size. Once you have grown, you can munch on the creatures that have been eating you. You are offered the chance to upgrade your organism, giving it different mouths, weapons and methods of propulsion. This part of the game is very addictive, looks great and its great fun. My only real criticism would be that it is too easy and it is over too quickly.
Phase 2: Creature Phase
This looks like World of Warcraft or some similar MMO. You run around with your creature in third person, grinding computer controlled creatures in order to get you experience bar to the top level. You have some skills on a Warcraft-style action bar at the bottom of the screen that vary in degrees of uselessness. There are a few basic quests which give you extra XP, all in all – it is extremely easy and gets boring fast. You are offered the carnivorous “kill and eat everything” route or the herbivorous “eat vegetables and make friends with everything” route. I chose the former as the latter is for girls.
Phase 3: Tribal Phase
This feels like a Settlers game and turns the camera view into a birds-eye view of the map. You are now controlling multiple copies of your creatures, competing against other creatures in a battle to dominate the landscape. You tell your creatures to hunt, fish, attack rival tribes or befriend them. There is no customisation in this phase and i felt myself rushing through it. There is no substance to this phase and the usually classic RTS features it should have don’t exist (for example ctr+1 grouping of units, selecting unit type on double click or selecting all units on screen). In short – play a Civ or Settlers game and you will have a much better time than wasting an hour on this part. The Civ Revolutions demo that I got FOR FREE on Xbox live lasted longer than this, was more fun and looked more graphically polished.
Phase 4: Civilisation Phase
This phase is much better than the last two as you get to use the creator tool again, this time to construct your buildings, tanks, navy and air force. I would compare this phase to a command and conquer or dawn of war title but, yet again, not nearly as good.
The phase itself, again, only lasts a very short time and there is even an “I win” button that you unlock after defeating half of the enemies on the map, making the entire thing completely pointless. The vehicles do look really good but you are restricted in how many you can make, the enemies are very easy to defeat and hardly attack at all, even the “aggressive” ones. Also, this phase suffers the same lack of RTS functionality that the last phase did. Very disappointing. It takes roughly three and a half hours of game time to get to the end of this stage without rushing and this is the penultimate phase of the game.
Phase 5: Space Phase
The Space Phase is the proverbial carrot on the end of the stick which kept me playing through three and a half hours of brightly coloured disappointment.
The phase begins with the creator window again. This time you get to create a spaceship. Once you have created one, you are taken through the tutorials which teach you to master trade, diplomacy, terra-forming and changing the planets you have populated by introducing plants and animals.
This phase looks beautiful and the galaxy you have to explore is HUGE. You zip around in your ship and perform various quests in order to gain currency to improve your existing planets, expanding your empire. Think Master of Orion or Freelancer as a basis for comparison on this stage. My main criticism for this phase is that your massive galactic empire only supports one ship to defend its empire… YOU. If you expand your empire to more than 3 or 4 planets, you will soon find yourself zipping back and forth from planet to planet to defend them, without getting anything done. This is a huge game play design flaw in the phase in my opinion.
Conclusion
The best part about this game is, without doubt, the creature creator. Creating the buildings, creatures and vehicles is really good fun and seeing them come to life is great. I really hope the creature creator is implemented in future games. The game play elements are very poor. It’s extremely easy, I doubt younger players would have a difficult time completing it at all and once you have completed it in carnivore and herbivore “modes” there isn’t enough there to warrant a third run. The game genres it traverses are already dominated by far superior titles that are specialised in doing that genre WELL. While it has some great ideas I don’t think it manages to pull them off to the standard people were expecting. A victim of its own hype, Spore is a jack of all trades, master of none.
Assassins Creed
With a backdrop so gorgeous in its design, a fluid game play style and a sexy new monk\assassin
look for your main character, it is easy to see why Assassins Creed generated so much attention and hype prior to its release. For months, myself, colleagues, friends and the MOG Army awaited its release with anticipation and delight at the thought that one of the classic gaming genres, the assassination game, was about to get the 21st century makeover it so rightly deserved.
The genre already had many gaming gems, including the “Tenchu” stealth assassin games and the fabulously brutal and complex “Hitman” series that had both set the standards high in graphics and game play. It seemed obvious from the day the titbits and teasers for this title were released onto the internet that the game intended to not only compete with, but totally reset the benchmark for the third person “stalk-and-kill” game play style.
I got the game on for the 360, my console of choice for the time being. (I may have to write a blog about the trials of choosing between the three big consoles some day.) Got myself comfortable, made sure there was a readily available source of snack food and alcohol nearby and began to play.
As soon as the game play starts, you realise the potential of the game, the movement of the character, the free running style he uses to move between buildings. The story allows you to quickly sample all the weapons and puts you in a friendly start area to allow you to learn the basics of movement, combat, sneaking and escaping detection.
Just as I’d hoped, the game is easy to pick up and learn with an intuitive control system and fluid character movement. The ability to clamber up onto almost anything in the environment and stylishly jump, flip, wall run or swan dive off it again still hasn’t gotten boring to this day. The character itself will seamlessly interact with the buildings and I saw no clipping or strange collision bugs. The NPC soldiers have an annoying habit of being able to climb buildings almost as well as the assassin can, although they are not nearly as graceful when doing it. I felt a sense of smugness when, after brutally killing a guard, citizen or beggar I managed to perform carious acrobatic escape manoeuvres, ending in a leap of faith into a bale of straw and off the guards radar.
Sadly the beautiful backdrops and fluid movement of the character don’t make up for the games lack of real game play and, once you’ve assassinated a few people, you’ll begin to realise that, not only are you completing very easy sub missions but they are all in fact exactly the same. Even the script for the NPC’s is identical in each city which completely bemused me. They have DIFFERENT voice actors, but the NPC’s all say the same thing!?! Not good.
The combat system is fantastic, especially the counter moves which offer you the ability to dispatch your enemy in a number of stylishly brutal ways, think Dead Or Alive 3, which offers a similar system for countering attacks.
