One of the cool things about “new” media is a company’s ability to bridge the gap between paper and pencils with technology. Neverwinter Nights on Facebook is a social game you can play.

The first thing you do is roll stats. There’s no character class, but this min/maxer (That’s right.. Me…) rolled a few times until I got… Well… Some decent stats. The game didn’t work on Chrome so off to Firefox I go… That’s where I found out that punctuation doesn’t work in the character name field. I have an elf name I often use (Lazy, I know, I know…) but the apostrophe didn’t take.

Character name: Sha relea
Strength: 20/20
Stamina: 165/165
Intelligence: 10/10
Agility: 10/10
Spirit: 10/10
Experience: 1/100 Lvl 1 <---At least I get one point for setting this up!
Gold: Zero <--- OUCH! MUST FIX!
Gems: 5

Currently, I am located in a graveyard. I own a neutral army. Should I attack said graveyard? OF COURSE. I try to attack the graveyard and that isn't the right action for me to take. There's an add for D&D online, but below that I see a number of options for me that flesh out what I can do. I'm feeling... Peckish? In the mood for violence? So I click on the "fight" link.

And win!

My stats now are:

Strength: 40/40 <--I'm going to be soooo buff!
Stamina: 205/205
Intelligence: 10/10
Agility: 10/10
Spirit: 10/10
Experience: 11/100 Lvl 1
Gold: $10
Gems: 5

I attempt to buy a weapon, but sadly I have little gold. I need a hundred pieces! The Blade's description cracks me up. It says: Basic stabby stabby. So I attempt to fight the Ghost Army and I lose. Badly.

However...

I lose 10% of my health. That's it. And gain an experience point. I try a Quest to Smack the Rat. I get a dollar and an experience point. It's suggested that I visit to the tavern. I click "continue" and I find two gold. (Still need that hundred to get a blade...) So I try another Lvl 1 quest. More gold. (You see where I'm going with this -- I like the shinies!)

So I go back to fighting and I win again.

Before I leave the game, I check out the icons in the upper right hand corner. Find out after I click the Tavern’ll cost me twenty gold (OW!) but I recover my pride along with my Health and Stamina before I fight again.

The game is fun, quick and easy. You can recruit friends and fight quickly. The only drawbacks are for… Well, should I call myself a hardcore gamer? There’s no character class, but I’m not sure there needs to be. Yes, the ad threw me off a bit because I was concentrated on playing Neverwinter Nights on Facebook. And I would have liked to know what to do in a sample round before diving in. Other than that? It’s very, very easy for gamers and non-gamers alike. So easy, in fact, it’s the kind of game you can kick all kinds of arse in less than ten seconds.

Wanna fight?

Review by Monica Valentinelli

Related posts:

1. Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter on Facebook

Available at Amazon.com

Warhammer 40,000: SpaceMarine is a game that debuted for the PS3 (and other platforms). While I’m familiar with Games Workshop, I am new to to the Warhammer universe. I feel that’s important to keep in mind when you’re reading my review.

Part of the reason why I’ve never played Warhammer or read the fiction was because my impression was that I wasn’t really the target market for this setting. It has always felt very male-dominated and macho to me. Even though I felt that way, I always gave the property a healthy amount of respect. I consider the Warhammer SpaceMarine to be the original. Period. This is where the super-soldier in gaming comes from and truth be told? For someone like me that can be a little intimidating because I like big guns just as much as the next gamer, but I also want a good story. These initial impressions were reinforced when I read the handbook. Most of the alien ork names were riffs on “boy.” A few of my fellow gamers reassured me that this was part of the game’s charm, and that I should really keep an open mind when diving in.

Glad I did!

Is there a great story? Oh, yeah! Are these SpaceMarines different from the space marine derivatives I’ve seen in anime and other video games? Yes. Did I come away with a feeling that I was playing an ancient console game? Absolutely not. The science fiction world of the UltraMarines reminded me of what might happen if the Roman Empire never fell. There’s an order to things and a code of ethics these characters follow. Right from the start, you fill the big shoes of Captain Marcus Titus, an experienced veteran who doesn’t live by the letter of the law. He knows the spirit.

The graphics on this game are really impressive. There’s a level of detail that gives each screen a grungy, war-torn feel. But that’s not the only reason why I liked playing Warhammer, the mechanics are simple and there is a lot of ass-kicking to be had. (Just press one button for most of the action and combos for special effects.) So much butt-kicking, in fact, that one of the mechanics allows you to stun and take health from an ork to refuel. Multiple play settings are perfect for any style of play. Though, you may want to go through the first leg of the mission on an easier setting. Orks by themselves aren’t the problem. It’s the swarms and the individual boss battles that wind up making a SpaceMarine’s life difficult on a mixture of high-and-low terrains. Short on time? Don’t worry. Each leg of the mission has a mini-RPG style feel and you can play through each checkpoint and not lose out the next time you pick up your controller.

If the goal for this fast-paced third person shooter was to make the game as playable as possible, then I feel Warhammer 40000: SpaceMarine really does the job. Very easy to aim, great visual cues and auto-saves keep the emphasis on the action, right where it should be.

Review by Monica Valentinelli

Related posts:

1. Announcing Black Crusade, a Warhammer 40k Roleplaying Game
2. Deathwatch (Warhammer RPG) Review
3. Call to Arms (Warhammer) Review

Available at Amazon.com

Before I get into my review of Dragon Age 2, I’d like to put my thoughts into context for you. I’m a fan of the games that BioWare puts out and I enjoy the mechanics. Primarily, I play RPG style video games to relax and to shut my brain off. It’s increasing harder for me to watch movies, for example, and do nothing else. Playing games like Dragon Age: Origins allows me to turn off the brain-neuron connection switch and have fun.

Mind you, I am a min/maxer… There. My secret is out. Phew!

Anyway, when I get into a video game, I’m looking at it as a casual experience with the ability to cheat modify my characters in a way that gives me better flexibility and playing style. Story is important to me, but for some games *coughs Final Fantasy XII* I get confused if there’s no recap or summary after the side quests portion.

Dragon Age 2: The Set Up

I played both Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age: Awakenings, along with a few of the add-ons you could download. My playing style for those games was casual but bloody, and my main character was a female warrior. So, for this game I decided to play a mage, in part because the uber fancy hardcover edition of the player’s guide recommended that it’d be more fun.

The first thing that popped into my head when I started to play this game was: “Oh my, this is a gorgeous game.” The second thing? “Mages are badass.” The graphics, set design and scenery are the best I’ve seen in a fantasy style video game. There is detail, lots and lots of fine detail, that adds so much texture you feel like you’re playing in a set.

I opted to port over the story from my previously-played games, which affected the plot only slightly. A few characters from Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age: Awakenings make an appearance — even ones that I killed. Even though you play as a refugee from Ferelden and this is still firmly planted in the Dragon Age universe, I don’t really consider Dragon Age 2 to be a sequel to the first one at all.

Not Like Its Predecessor

In my mind, there are quite a few differences between the games. First? This is what I would call an RPG-style video game for beginners. The interface was so intuitive and so casual that even if you screwed up royally you could fix it by buying a bottle of “Maker’s Sigh” to redistribute your attributes and special powerz. The only thing that would have made it even more simpler, would have been an auto-optimize mechanic where you press a button and you automatically outfit your character with the best equipment. Admittedly, I was kind of surprised Bioware didn’t go that route, because all signs — including color coding of equipment and a star rating system — were pointing in that direction. There is one limitation, in that if you want the uber-special equipment that you have to purchase through the different vendors, spend your gold wisely ’cause you ain’t getting a lot of it when you loot corpses. Just sayin’.

Second, the story arc is much more epic and less immediate than the other two games. There’s no recruiting of factions to fight against a common foe; this is a story that’s centered around your character — Hawke — as a prelude to something else, something we don’t see in this game. There are three acts to the story, three main events that propel Hawke from a refugee to a wealthy noble, from a noble to a Champion, from a Champion to a defender. Each event is not related to the other, though there are threads that weave in between the two.

In these two ways, I feel this game would have been better off with a different name. Dragon Age 2 is, in my opinion, a little misleading because it’s not the same game or style of play.

Side Character Quests

The style of play in this game fits all three story arcs, so it’s important to explore and get everything done that you need to do in Kirkwall before you complete the main quest. I had a guide book, but I rarely used it. Once I knew what the main plot thread was, which is not indicated in the game, then I focused on the side quests. Both potential side quests and plot threads are indicated by a little flag above the person’s head. I found this changed my game, because I was missing a ton of stuff to run over and grab that flag. Then, I’d wonder what I missed, so I’d go back and backtrack.

The tone of these quests change from chapter to chapter. In the first arc, you are broke. Dead broke. But? You need coin. A lot of it, too. So the reason for doing the side quests is to get you the coin you need to complete the first story arc. In the second arc, the side quests turn to more investigative-style play, where there are mysteries to uncover as part of the main plot in the third arc. The second arc is really where the heart of the game is, and it’s a place where you’ll learn more about Meredith. Although there’s a build up to the Qunari, I have an opinion about their presences in the third act, which I won’t get into here due to spoilers. There’s not a lot of side quests in the third arc, but I recommend you complete them anyway to get a better impact when you reach the final confrontation.

By far, I felt that the character quests in Dragon Age 2 were a vast improvement over the previous incarnation, because most of them affect the game in a real and tangible way.

To Sum Up

Would I grab this game again? Yes. Is it as stunning as the first installment? Yes and no. Do you need to play the first game to play this one? No, and for all the reasons I listed above, I feel your opinion of the game will change if you do.

If you like dark fantasy-style RPGs, a consistent and tight storyline, beautiful and amazing graphics/artwork — then you’ll like Dragon Age 2. If you’re picky about your games, however, and fall under the umbrella of “serious” gamer, then I would play the demo to see if Dragon Age 2 is right for you.

Review by Monica Valentinelli

Related posts:

1. Dragon Age: The Calling Novel Review
2. Dragon Age: Redemption Trailer for New Web Series
3. Dragon Age: Origins (PS3) Review

Available at Amazon.com

Introduction
I didn’t buy Heavy Rain when it came out, largely because it was described by many as, essentially, being one huge eight-hour long quicktime event. Me and quicktime events have never gotten on since I first played Dragon’s Lair, on one of those huge, laserdisc arcade machines and died, horribly, many times. I have serious issues with authority and when there’s ‘one right way’ to do something, whether it be in a game or in real life, I rail against it and get bloody annoyed. Heavy Rain, then, seemed to me to be a nightmarish game which would be the total opposite of anything I might ever want to play, however innovative, however artistic and hower stylishly French it might be.

I was wrong.

Not completely wrong, but I was wrong.

Story
Talking about the story of Heavy Rain without being spoilerific is difficult and I don’t want to give spoilers even though it’s now an ‘older’ game and most people who will have wanted to play it will have played it. I’ll try my best.

You take on several roles throughout the game:

* Ethan Mars, bereaved father whose second child is kidnapped by the mysterious Origami Killer who then screws with him throughout the story, testing him.
* Madison Page, feisty, sexy investigative reporter, looking into the Origami Killer murders.
* Norman Jayden, FBI profiler and massive geek.
* Scott Shelby, private eye, also looking into the Origami Killer murders.

This gives you several different viewpoints on the ongoing plot but the main thrust is through the eyes of Ethan Mars and the main theme of the story is to ask ‘what would you do to protect your child?’ with the tests that the Origami Killer gives you becoming harder and harder as the story wears on towards its climax and its resolution.

Gameplay
You progress through the game via exploration within each section and via progress through quicktime events, moving the thumbsticks or pressing the buttons according to particular order or timing in order to get through the various scenes which might be anything from shaving your face to staving off the attentions of an insane doctor with a bonesaw. You’ll also be called upon to remember things from the various scenes from time to time, so the game requires you to pay close attention to it all the time which can be oddly exhausting, mentally and emotionally.

Unlike quicktime events which are crowbarred into other games, Heavy Rain doesn’t quite have the same punishing level of ‘get this right or you’re toast’ that those have. In most scenes there’s room for a couple of mistakes and even if you do mess up and die horribly, often the game can continue to progress even without one or more of the main characters still being alive. The variety of outcomes and the possibility to continue regardless massively mitigates many of the problems with normal quicktime events and makes Heavy Rain much more playable.

Controls
The quicktime events work well but the more normal scenes – where you’re exploring and investigating – don’t work to the same degree. The movement feels like the early Resident Evil games with the same issue where you go spinning off in a crescent and bashing into things. That breaks the immersion that exists through much of the rest of the game and is a shame and a big source of annoyance.

Atmosphere
Heavy Rain scores highly in its atmospherics, though the ‘uncanny valley’ effect is in evidence, a barrier to empathising with the characters completley. The contrast between the clean, tidy opening to the game and the grime, filth and terror of the rest of the game is effective, though a few more beats of happiness in the later game may have made the darkness more effective.

The game does draw you in and does manage to make you engage with the characters, despite often being understated and despite the barriers of the graphics and the control system. It takes a while but, eventually, you find yourself genuinely caring about the characters and the outcome of their individual stories.

Graphics
Despite the uncanny valley effect of the characters (the main problem seems to be the mouths, rather than the eyes, oddly) the graphics are excellent throughout the game. This may be a side effect of most scenes being enclosed, so a lot of computing power can be brought to bear upon a relatively small area. The animations are fluid and effective and the mocap work is excellent.

Conclusion
This was a very innovative game and we need more of this, however if I had bought it new I wouldn’t have felt that it would have been worth the price as the replay value, I feel, isn’t there. Despite there being something like 20 different possible endings. I think a playthrough after the first time simply wouldn’t have the same emotional connection for the player.

On the Plus Side

* Engaging story.
* Solution to the quicktime ‘issue’.
* It settles the ‘can a game be art?’ question, once and for all – if you accept that it’s a game.

On the Minus Side

* Lacking replay value.
* Uncanny valley is a big obstacle.
* Non-quicktime controls are a bit of a pig.

Score
Style 5
Substance 4
Overall 4.5

Review by James “Grim” Desborough

No related posts.

Available at Amazon.com

Introduction
Demon’s Souls is a western-looking but Japanese made ‘RPG’ – in the loosest sense of the word – which has become somewhat notorious, even legendary, for its ‘challenging’ difficulty and it’s old-school ‘hardcore’ sensibilities. Something which has made it a bit of a hit with ‘hardcore’ gamers.

This view of the game is horseshit, based on false nostalgia and a failure to recognize that things are a damn sight better these days and that technology has taken us beyond the conditions that made old-school games, necessarily, difficult.

Story
A mysterious fog has enveloped a kingdom and all word from within has been cut off. The greatest heroes and adventurers from beyond this land have ventured into this fog and none have returned. Being a masochistic dipshit who can’t take a hint like any reasonable person, you’ve followed them into the fog only to be annihilated in turn by a giant demon and waking up, a lost soul, in a weird cathedral like space called The Nexus where, it turns out, you have to venture forth as a sort of ghost in order to collect enough demon souls to reincarnate and take on the forces of evil lurking in the fog.

Gameplay
There’s a massive difference between ‘challenging’ and ‘fucking with you’. Demon’s Souls is very much in the latter camp. The game is not difficult in an honest way but, rather, seeks to deliberately screw with you in order to make the game as difficult as possible, not for any real story reason but just out of pure sadism and the desire to create a ‘challenging’ game experience. This sadistic (and not in the fun kinky way) ethos infects the entire game from the premise and execution of the ‘reincarnation’ gameplay to the exacting timing needed for any of the special moves and actions to work, right down to the control method selection. You’ll repeat things over and over and over the slightest mess up means you’ll have to play the whole level all over again, right from the start.

When you’re playing through the levels to gather enough souls to reincarnate you’re on half health, so in order to play a level normally you’re expected to complete it on a higher difficulty to start with, ludicrous.

Fuck.
That.
Shit.

You can’t even pause for chrissakes and every time you do fail at a level, you go right back to the start, lose ALL your gains and all the enemies respawn.

Controls
The controls seem straightforward to start with, the usual move, block, attack, swap-weapons and swap items controls. The problem comes about with their deeper implications, the combinations and timings of what you’re trying to do and the layout of the controls seems to have been deliberately chosen to make fighting and so on even more difficult. For example, you get a parry/riposte manouevre and a jump-back move that are both meant to protect you in combat. They don’t unless you’re somehow blessed with Neo-like reflexes that slow down time to a crawl allowing you to hit the femtosecond long period in which such moves are effective.

Atmosphere
There isn’t a huge amount of atmosphere, despite the nice intro and the fairly lengthy explanations of the background. The levels have all the soul and character of an assault course and other than ‘collecting souls’ you have little to no reason or understanding as to why you’re repeatedly going over the same, grindingly-dull fights and one-shot kills of your character over and over again in the vain hope of lady-luck striking and you being able to progress to another level of frustrating, repeated death.

Graphics
The game is pretty enough but a little off, a western style RPG that feels as though it was made by someone working on second-hand descriptions that they didn’t quite get. It’s dark, nasty feeling, the bad guys – at least the ones I saw – are spooky enough and not over-the-top as they can be in many games. Skeletons, mad-men, demons and the possessed. We didn’t make it past the first proper level though, so I can’t tell you anything about the later sections.

Conclusion
Old school games were tough because there often wasn’t the technology to save your position, so you had to play them in one sitting. They were also often difficult because difficulty was a way of adding longevity to a game when you didn’t have so much storage and memory to play with and couldn’t necessarily have shitloads of levels for people to play in.

Old is not always better, that’s a logical fallacy. We have the technology now to make games that aren’t pixel-bitching snorefests and enough storage that games can have a lot more play and story value without forcing you to beat your head against a wall six-hundred times to progress.

I think this is part of some backlash against the Wii, Kinect, DS etc and the casual game/kiddy game/’girl game’ and their percieved level of easiness but I think how games have actually developed is more into interactive entertainment. I don’t generally play a game on hard, rather I normally choose easy or normal as I want to balance the pleasure of accomplishment with not being horribly frustrated – plus I don’t have a huge amount of time to invest in these games and I use them as a break.

I remember old-school games and while they were difficult, they didn’t deliberately set out to fuck with you. The controls weren’t deliberately foxed, special moves might be difficult – but they were possible. If an old-school game was a difficult mountain climb, Demon’s Souls was a difficult mountain climb made worse by being forced to wear lead shoes and having a rabid weasel stuffed down your pants.

In summary, about as much fun as volunteering to be raped with the Se7en strap on, sans lube.

On the Plus Side

* Pretty graphics, but that’s par for the course these days.
* We didn’t pay full price.
* Deep but ultimately pointless character customisation (like painting the sistine chapel on a conker).

On the Minus Side

* Sadistically difficult.
* Incoherent.
* Controller-breakingly frustrating.

Score
Style 2
Substance 1
Overall 1.5

Review by James “Grim” Desborough

No related posts.

Available at Amazon.com

Introduction
Red Dead Redemption could easily also be called ‘Grand Theft Horse’, it’s a freeroaming sandbox game in the style of the GTA series and by the same company with much of the same humour, cynicism and cinematic eye that those games have. The game is set at the very end of the ‘Old West’ in one of the last remaining frontiers, just as the government and other forces are making a concerted effort to finally civilise the area and bring it under the heel of proper governance. Meanwhile, in the south, Mexico is thrown into the chaos of a revolution…

Story
You are John Marston, a former outlaw who has been trying to make a new life for himself as a chicken-scratch farmer, though he has no talent for it. With a wife and son to be used as leverage against him, Marston is manipulated into tracking down his old gang, members of which can still be found in the area that the government is trying to control.

After an ill-conceived confrontation with one of your old gang you’re shot and left for dead, rescued by a local rancher and her father and nursed back to health, ready to try again. You find your feet and your health again as you re-learn the skills that will serve you well in the frontier, riding, herding, lassoing and the use of your firearms as well as scavenging for plants and skinning animals. Once you’re hale and hearty again you need to come up with an effective scheme for pursuing your old gang and that, of course, entails doing a huge variety of different missions and tasks for all manner of Old West characters across the desert, the plains and south into Mexico.

Of course… once you’ve dealt with the old gang, there’s still one member of the gang left. You…

Gameplay
This is a third-person live-action RPG, in effect, though your moral choices throughout the game are quite limited and two-dimensional, it’s no Fallout or Dragon Age on that score, there are a lot of annoying characters who you’d love to shoot in the face, but can’t. The story, while good, is pretty locked in to one particular course.

The land is rich with wildlife and feels alive, even if sometimes that life is really fucking annoying, such as when invisible rattlesnakes bite your ankles or a cougar appears – apparently out of warp space – and eats your head before you can even do as much as shout ‘Eep!’. This is good as it provides variety and skinning critters is a great way to get some money so you can buy some better guns and horses.

There’s a lot of variety in the missions and the optional side quests, of particular relief to me was that the few race sections that you were forced into were pretty easy – a sticking point in many GTA games – and only optional additional races got more difficult. There’s nothing worse than an impassable mission in something you’re really not good at.

Controls
You negotiate the land using the thumbsticks and gun combat can be either freehand or rely on a lock-on effect. You can also drop into a bullet-time effect called ‘Deadeye’ which lets you line up a number of shots and then unleash them in a rapid fusillade of fire. Controls are intuitive and largely effective, the only real annoyances are the unreliability of the lock on and negotiating terrain that looks surmountable, but isn’t.

Atmosphere
The world is well realised – though it tends to be either way too bright to see what you’re doing properly, or way too dark. The cinematic old west is well realised and familiar stereotypes – some of which are confounded or twisted, make it easy to slip into character, even if the nature of the quests can be jarring for that. Throughout 90% of the game you’re carried along by the atmosphere and story and it is only in the final 10% and the epilogue that one, unfortunately, ends up feeling betrayed by the game and fobbed off. Something that prevents RDR getting the full five stars from me.

Graphics
The graphics are effective but, as pointed out above, can feel a bit too dark or too light. Long flowing clothing feels a little odd and texturing rather than form is used to create effects and shapes that would have better been served with additional polygons. As with quite a few games this end up making the game feel more like an uprated PS2 game, than a true next-gen game.

Conclusion
An awesome game let down only by its ending and epilogue.

On the plus side:

* Evocative.
* Immersive world.
* Engaging story.

On the minus side:

* ‘I fought all that time to get back to this pinch-mouthed shrew?’
* ‘What did I done tell you boy? Ah’m comin’ back from the dead to whup your arse’
* You can’t bone Bonnie, or whores.

Score
Style: 4
Substance: 4
Overall: 4

Review by James “Grim” Desborough

No related posts.

Available at Amazon.com

Introduction
Enslaved is a post-apocalyptic re-telling of the classic Chinese tale ‘Journey to the West’. It spins off from the original tale significantly but still retains a great deal of the character and themes of the original, even though the main theme – redeeming a chaotic land by finding missing enlightenment – is one of the casualties (or at least ends up transmuted into something else). It’s a gorgeous game, with very few niggles, which seems to have – unfortunately – gone relatively unnoticed around a lot of higher profile releases.

Story
The game opens with you, Monkey, trapped inside a prison cell by slavers. Your prison is an egg-shaped metal orb – a nod to the origins of monkey – and as you languish helplessly in your prison, things start to go wrong all around you. The slaver prison – which turns out to be a flying ship – starts to explode and fall apart and its a race against time to get to the rapidly depleting number of escape pods. Once you do get off the disintegrating ship you find yourself in the company of ‘Trip’, a beautiful and technically gifted girl from a wind-farming settlement, technically gifted enough to fit you with a ‘slave band’ and to make you do what she wants.

You then engage in a journey, escorting and looking after Trip while you make your way across and out of a ruined New York to take her home and later, on, aiding her in a quest for revenge. Along the way you meet Pigsy (but not Sandy) and getting to experience a beautifully realised wasteland. It’s a bit more lonely and empty than the original story or its many wonderful interpretations, but it has a unique character all of its own.

This seems like a short summary but, while each step in the story is relatively simple, there’s a lot going on in each part and a good mix between acrobatic progression and swift violence.

Gameplay
Enslaved plays as a third person beat-em-up with a few shooter, RPG and platform elements. Your character – Monkey – is upgradable in his capabilities using an ‘experience’ system, you charge around in third person mode swinging your power-staff and smashing robots to pieces, you can fire energy bolts from its tip and you can leap from handhold to handhold with all the confidence and agility of a hopped-up gibbon. You progress from step to step in an almost completely immersive screen with only the bare minimum of readouts and displays. The only problem with this is that sometimes what you take to be a cutscene is, actually an action scene and while you’re goggling at what’s going on, you die. Once this has happened a couple of times you get wise to it and its not so much of a problem. Controls are largely intuitive and, in addition to the normal sections of the game, there’s a few in which you get to zip around on your ‘cloud’, which are tremendous fun, even if they’re not big, or long enough.

Trip gives you access to upgrades and can also fix things, bypass doors and distract enemy mechs. Unlike in many other games she isn’t too much of a liability to the point where you end up resenting her and doesn’t get attacked so much that you begin to hate having to drag her along. You do need to watch out for her though and often need to throw her across gaps or give her a boost to reach areas that are otherwise inaccessible.

Controls
Controls are largely standard 3rd person run-around-and-hit-things fare, you switch to an over-the-shoulder view when you’re firing your staff bolts, which can be a little annoying since your own body can block some of the field of view. Very occasionally you’ll leap off something in a direction you weren’t anticipating but, by and large, while the flow of motion/climbing isn’t quite as fluid as, say, Assassin’s Creed 2, it is plenty good enough.

Atmosphere
This is where the game excels, the aftermath world in which you find yourself is not the bleak wilderness of Fallout and other, similar post-apocalyptic games, rather this is a world in which man has become largely absent and nature has taken over. This is a world ‘after man’ where vines, plants and animals have reasserted themselves and the ruins have become a new habitat and landscape for the lush growth to take over.

Wandering through this wilderness is a profoundly lonely experience, everywhere there is the mark of human habitation in the past, but little to no sign of anyone being alive in the present. The whole world is like wandering a tomb.

One thing that particularly stands out in this game, for me, is that the death of the world is as much a mystery to you – the player – as it is to the inhabitants of the world itself (Monkey, Trip and Pigsy). You – and they – can only piece it together from reading the in game signs, listening to the few bits of folklore that you’re told by the others and experiencing the flashbacks you get from the slave band. This is, in its own way, far more effective than simply spelling it all out for you as happens in some games and experiencing the strangeness of the new world – as it has been remade – is almost as effective as it is in Half-Life 2. As you take in the broken vistas of the ruined New York near the start of the game, you almost can’t help mouthing silently to yourself ‘What the fuck happened?’

Graphics
The graphics are sleek and bright – another contrast with many modern games which seem to have settled on ‘beige’ as being ‘where it’s at’. While it stops short of being technicolour this tropical colour palette actually enhances the weird experience of exploring ruined New York as it’s nothing like you might expect an East Coast urban centre to be. The characters are well designed and while Trip is attractive she isn’t ‘pneumatic’ which is a welcome break from the ‘Lara Crofts’ and ‘Dead or Alive’ girls. Monkey is a great big, gristly lump of a man, covered in scars, brands and tattoos and exuding muscular danger. It’s nice to see more brutish, assertively male characters as well in games, rather than slimline metrosexuals.

Conclusion
I’m a sucker for the story of Journey to the West in whatever form it appears, most especially – of course – the TV series ‘Monkey Magic’. Perhaps this biases me in favour of anything that explores it or perhaps it makes me more demanding of things that do draw upon the story. Either way, I loved this game despite the change in the story and despite the absence of Sandy and the only real drawback to it that I can think of to the game is that it really isn’t long enough.

On the plus side:

* Beautiful graphics.
* Non-annoying sidekick.
* Immersive, unsettling world.

On the minus side:

* No Sandy.
* Too short.
* Diverges a lot from the original story.

Score
Style: 5
Substance: 3
Overall: 4

No related posts.

Available at Amazon.com

Introduction
Valkyria Chronicles is a squad oriented, turn-based strategy game with a big narrative emphasis and a strong anime style. It’s daring in some ways in its narrative, but not quite daring enough. Regardless, it’s an engaging game and well worth sitting through the cut-scenes for.

Story
Valkyria takes place in an alternative Europe and an alternative World War II. In this world your small nation, which seems to be an analogue for Holland or Belgium, is independent of the two opposed forces which are beginning their clash across this world’s Europe. Your nation, Gallia, is invaded by the Imperial Alliance in a blitzkreig and Gallia’s citizen soldiers – including your team – are rapidly deployed to try and blunt the advance and secure Gallian independence from both the Imperials and the overtures of their enemies, the Atlantic Federation, a force that isn’t above being manipulative and underhanded in their prosecution of war either.

Your squad plays a key role in turning aside the Empire and, ultimately, defeating its invasion which shows that a plucky little nation like Gallia can withstand even the might of an Empire. Along the way you discover things about Gallia’s past, about the mysterious Ur-race the Valkyr and about despised Jews… I mean Darcsen.

Gameplay
Gameplay takes place across a sort of diary/notebook with each double-set of pages representing a chapter. Each chapter is made up of a lot of cutscenes that lay out the background and the mission parameters and then the missions themselves.

Missions take place in a tactical map view and a third person, turn-based view where you take direct control of a character, directing them and making attacks, setting them behind cover and positioning them to take potshots at anyone coming across their field of view. You get a certain number of activations that you can use to move and shoot with your troops and tanks. You can activate the same character multiple times but you get diminishing returns as they can move less and less with each successive activation.

You get to make your squad up of several different kinds of troops, tanks, scouts, engineers, snipers, lancers and assault troops. Each has their own strength and their own weakness and each can be upgraded through training or through equipment, either researched back at the base or captured from enemies in battle.

Controls
On the map page you can get an overview of the terrain and battlefield and you can be aware of the position of enemies that any of your troops can see. Here you select your troops each activation, dropping into third person view and moving them with the thumbsticks. When you choose to fire you drop into a closer view and can line up your shot, though whether you hit or not is mostly down to chance. That’s essentially it.

Atmosphere
This is an alternate World War II that lacks aircraft but the combination of cel-shading and very well-done cutscenes creates an atmosphere that invokes much of the spirit of WWII and touches on a lot of themes from history, both in WWI and WWII. The light, cartoony nature of the graphics helps emphasise the ruin and the stakes of the conflict, rather than drawing a way from it and the characterisation and storyline from the cutscenes genuinely makes you care about your unit and the lives of your soldiers, extra knowledge about their backgrounds and lives is even released in your diary screen as you move on, giving each a sense of their own personality which is reinforced by traits that come into play in certain conditions during combat.

Graphics
The cel-shaded graphics are some of the best I have seen done in any game that uses the technique. Much of Valkyria genuinely looks like watching an anime cartoon and while some cutscenes can come across a little wooden – still a problem with CG – most are streets ahead of any similar games. The whole thing feels almost like a watercolour sketchbook and almost like a comic, complete with onomatopoeia.

Conclusion
If you have any love for alternate history or the mystical aspects of WWII this is a good game to get, if you have any love for skirmish games or turn based strategy at all, get this game. Full stop.

On the plus side:

* Engaging storyline.
* Excellent gameplay.
* Brilliant cel-shading.

On the minus side:

* Too…many…cut-scenes.
* Some levels take a very long time to play.
* Doesn’t follow through on some of the more controversial source material.

Score
Style: 4
Substance: 4
Overall: 4

Review by James “Grim” Desborough

No related posts.

Available at Amazon.com

Introduction
Fallout 3 was a giant, radioactive monster of a game, an awesome game that was SO awesome that we could forgive it many of its flaws and drawbacks simply because the awesomeness factor was so strong that they didn’t matter. We didn’t CARE if the game crashed the console every so often or if you couldn’t get to the boat to Point Lookout because the level wouldn’t load properly, because we wanted to play so very much it gave us boners that could double as battering rams. We forgave it its sins.

Second time around we, or at least I, are not as liable to be so forgiving. Especially if many of the flaws and errors of the game are the same ones that dogged our experience with Fallout 3. We sort of expect them to be fixed or, at least, for the same flaws, errors and bugs not to show up this time around, given that they were patched in Fallout 3 and that this is a ‘whole new game’ which has had more time to finesse the engine and iron out the issues.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still a brilliant game with a huge amount going for it, but ‘however good she looks, someone, somewhere, is tired of her shit.’ Besides the annoying bugs, the source of my frustration can best be summed up by this quote, that came out after Fallout 3 was released…

“Greatest lesson? Don’t let the game end, and don’t have a level cap.”
- Todd Howard, Executive Producer, Fallout 3

How’s that crow taste Todd? (Yeah, Vegas has both).

Story
You are a courier, a member of the Mojave Express courier group. You were assigned to deliver a mysterious platinum poker chip but end up being shanghaied and then shot in the face by ‘Benny’, a big man in one of the Vegas casinos. Recovering from your wounds in a little no-horse town you start to put your life back together and set about finding Benny and the chip and completing your task. Along the way you’ll get mixed up with the slaving hordes of Caeser’s army, the expanding New California Republic, the Mysterious Mr House (Wizard to Vegas’ Oz), the Brotherhood, remnants of the Enclave, The Followers of the Apocalypse and a great many gangs, interests, casinos and individuals.

Where Fallout 3 was more of a straightforward black/white, good/evil choice that was directed towards a singular ending, New Vegas has many different endings and many different ways of completing the game. This is less of a black and white choice and more a choice of faction, of shades of grey and no group comes out entirely smelling of roses – and neither will you.

There’s a lot of call-outs to previous versions of Fallout, which is nice for us e-grognards who have played the games for some time and gives rise to many ‘Aha!’ moments. Many of the side-quests are interesting in and of themselves and provide more insight into the nature of the post-apocalypse wasteland and the developing world. The one problem with this is that the atomic frontier is rapidly becoming civilised and one wonders how much room there’s going to be left in the game world if powers like the New California Republic keep expanding and game continuity is retained.

Gameplay
Gameplay is 90% the same as Fallout 3 with the main differences really only being in character development and levelling and the moral/faction system. This time around when creating your character you get to pick some beginning traits in addition to the ones you develop later on, this is nice as it helps you futher individualise your character and helps you decide if you want to play ‘sensible’ Fallout or ‘Zany, whacked out’ Fallout.

The second part is where problems occur and it’s up for debate whether the greater breadth of choice and alliance pays for the issues that arise from the faction system. For example, even if a faction loathes you, even if you’ve been gunning them down in droves and teabagging their corpses, even if you’ve been raping their mothers while pouring sugar in their gas tank with no moral repercussions, you can’t steal from them or you lose karma. A related issue is that if you’re wearing the armour of an opposing faction when you’re picking up missions, your choices can be narrowed by the armour that you’re wearing, even if nobody of that faction is around to see you.

You level up and, while the cap is 30, there’s still a cap (Oh Todd…), the game also ends, completely ends, when you finish the mainline plot (Oh Todd…) so you best make sure you get all your exploring and sidequests done before you set about ending the game.

One other addition is the ‘hardcore’ play mode which lets you take the whole survival thing full on, needing food, water and rest on a regular basis and with every single item having some weight to it. The reward for this is only a trophy and it is a huge pain in the arse, so if you’re only playing for fun, I wouldn’t bother.

Controls
The controls are unchanged from Fallout 3. It’s a first/third person RPG/shooter hybrid with a ‘turn based’ bolt on called the VATS targeting system, which lets you drop out of first-person-shooter mode to pick your shots nicely.

Atmosphere
New Vegas lacks some of the atmosphere of Fallout 3 and feels like more of a hodge-podge of elements than that first game did. The desert also feels a lot more monotonous than the ruins of Fallout 3 and makes everything very beige. Plot-wise the conflict between opposing forces and ideologies around Vegas and the Hoover Dam compensates for this a great deal and you do find yourself being drawn into the conflict and making some very difficult decisions about who to back, how, and what you’re willing to do. Only Caeser’s legion is really somewhat two-dimensional as the ‘baddies’, but a game needs some people you can really hate and enjoy gunning down. Their habit of crucifying people lead me to mercy-kill people who had been strung up, which was something spontaneous on my part and that I felt, showed I was being drawn into the game.

Graphics
Fallout 3 looked very nice but we sort of expect things to improve a bit further in later iterations of a game. Given how the bar has been raised by a lot of other new releases the graphics of New Vegas, while servicable, no longer really impress as they once did.

Conclusion
This is still a good game but lacks the impact and sheer awesomeness of Fallout 3. The shine is really taken off by the bugs in the game which, hopefully, will be ironed out in updates fairly rapidly. It’s also taken off by failing to learn the self-admitted lessons from Fallout 3 as the game retains those issues. This time around I’m just not willing to forgive a sandbox game that ends up being closed, the random hangs and crashes, the bugged quests that I can’t complete or, especially, the fact that the monorail with the bomb – that I disarmed – still blows up, leading to radio clips stating that BOTH outcomes happened. Apparently, not content with cats, Schroedinger experimented with trains in the Fallout universe and they’re now subject to indeterminacy.

On the plus side:

* A whole lot of game going on.
* Excellent political plot.
* Big freedom of action/choice for a CRPG.

On the minus side:

* Bugs, bugs, bugs.
* Nobody listened to Todd.
* Beige.

Score
Style: 3
Substance: 4
Overall: 3.5

Review by James “Grim” Desborough

Related posts:

1. Vampire Apocalypse Fallout Review

Available at Amazon.com

Introduction
The Last Remnant is a tactical RPG by Square-Enix and that comes with a weight of expectation. Last Remnant doesn’t disappoint on these stakes, though it is a little unpolished. Coming out of playing through Final Fantasy XIII this game feels like a dry run in many ways, the theme of powerful, unknowable machines and whether they’re being used or using the people around them and, system-wise, taking a great deal of control away from the player and putting it in the hands of automation.

Story
The Last Remnant places you in a fantasy world of multiple human and non-human races and kingdoms whose power largely derives from rulers being bound to Remnants, powerful magical machines and talismans that grant powers, create art, can be used in war or bring prosperity and luck.

You enter the game in the role of Rush Sykes, son of famous Remnant scientists and brother to Irinia Sykes, inheritor of a special power that enables her to wrest control of Remnants and to control powerful ones that are beyond the capability of most. Irinia has been kidnapped as you begin to play and you are trying to find her and save her from whoever has taken her. In so doing you stumble into the middle of a battle and end up hooking up with Lord David Nassal (Dah-veed), the ruler of Athlum, a small but ambitious client state of the larger realm of Celapelais.

As the game continues you throw in your lot with Athlum and grow in friendship with David and his generals, ranging across the world to find and rescue Irinia while at the same time being drawn into Athlumian independence and the machinations of the council chairman, the God-Emperor, The Academy and the sinister warlord, The Conqueror.

Gameplay
The Last Remnant is unusual in that, rather than concentrating on the actions of individual characters, you form units of characters and, in effect, create small, skirmishing armies. You get very little direct control over the action save for particular special actions (summoning ally Remnants and using special, powerful magic or attacks), most of the time you can only select the broadest sort of action, accenting the unit on healing, attacking with combat skills or attacking with magical skills.

The secret to succeeding at the game is building effective units using the right leaders and the right soldiers. In the end it mostly comes down to hit-points though, so long as you can survive attacks from powerful enemies, you can pretty much guarantee a recovery.

Options are slow to build, army size increasing and combat power increasing two different ways, firstly in a more traditional ‘leveling’ manner, and the second coming from using your skills. The more you use combat or magical skills, the faster they advance and the more powerful they become. There’s also a power-building sub-game where you can build new weapons and equipment from monster parts and things dug up around the world. This isn’t complete to the extent that it could be but it does encourage you to roam around and explore, as do the guild missions – little tasks that unlock extra unit formations, money and other special rewards.

Atmosphere
The game feels a little flat sometimes, the cities are rather static with people just standing around, the environments are pretty but don’t come alive, there’s no weather and they are a little plain. Rush is peculiar, a modern anachronism in a fantasy world which is explained, later, but is nonetheless jarring through much of the game.

Cut-scenes and in game graphics are mostly the same, though there’s a few cut-scenes which aren’t and in many of these the cut-scenes the animation is wooden, even if the dialogue isn’t. Overall while the game is good and the story is much more comprehensible and complete than many (FXIII *cough cough*) the game feels like it was developed for the previous generation of consoles and in this generation of consoles with our unforgiving expectations, that feels like a cop out and greatly reduces immersion.

Graphics
The graphics are workmanlike and stylish but sluggish to load (Xbox 360) and not as good as one would expect, or hope for.

Conclusion
A huge problem on the Xbox 360 with this game was the loading from the disk. While this was alleviated somewhat by installing Disk 1, getting onto Disk 2 things slowed down immensely again and the Xbox sounded like it was preparing to take off like a jet constantly, meanwhile the game was stuttering and slowing down constantly with big pauses as parts of the game were loaded and unloaded.

In spite of these problems the game is interesting and gripping and, perhaps, better for those who prefer a more traditional, open-ended RPG to the linear railroad that FFXIII turned out to be! Worth picking up on a budget, but maybe for the PC or PS3.

Score
Style: 3
Substance: 4
Overall: 3.5

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

No related posts.

Available at Amazon.com

***CAUTION SPOILERS!***

Introduction
Unlucky for some, Final Fantasy XIII is the first proper third-gen installment in the Final Fantasy series and it’s a divisive one that’s been the cause of some controvery. It’s a big departure from the previous games in the series and from many of the gameplay conventions of JRPGs and RPGs in general. It’s also virtually incomprehensible and requires a big investment of time to get to the full ‘whack’ of the game.

Story
I have no idea. Seriously.

I like to think I’m a fairly canny and intelligent guy with an IQ in the 140s, a more-than-passing familiarity with Japanese popular culture, JRPG tropes and have successfully negotiated my way through some very confusing games, books and films but even having completed the game I am little the wiser about what FFXIII was actually about. Something about ancient magic/machine beings infecting people with special powers and using them to try and kill themselves to summon back the creator of the universe… it makes little sense, isn’t well explained and contradicts itself a half-dozen times along the way. It seems to come from a similar half-crazed, strange interpretation of Christian philosophy that Bayonetta does and makes almost as little sense.

I’m little the wiser as to what it was all about at the end of game compared to how I felt at the start. Frustration at this problem is only compounded by the fact that you were thrown in at the start with little to no background information and yet hours and hours and hours were spent (wasted) on a prolonged tutorial and the gradual introduction of game elements that took hours. If as much attention had been paid to explaining the world, the L’cie, Fal’Cie, Coccoon, Pulse and everything else involved that would, frankly, have been time better spent.

Given that the game is so, so, so, so, so very, very linear and you’re essentially being lead by the nose through the game writer’s story and plot with little or no sidelines or hidden areas and almost zero exploration, you’d think they’d do a better job of getting the story, plotline and worlds across.

Gameplay
Gameplay takes a big departure from normal Final Fantasy play, you give up control over all but one character, the leader, who is the only one that you directly control. Otherwise you issue orders by choosing ‘paradigms’ which determine the skill set and actions of all the characters, including the one that you directly play. This makes for some fast and furious live combat, which greatly speeds up the encounters and makes the fights more frenetic, but it greatly removes your input as a player, removing you from the action and since you can use ‘automatic’ to fill in even the lead character’s actions combat can devolve into simply pressing the ‘A’ button, over and over again. I prefer a more tactical and turn-based mode of play to this, though I did enjoy FFXII which had a similar system, albeit one you had greater control over (being able to essentially program your companions and being able to step in and give them specific orders as needed.

Characters are advanced through a system called the ‘Crystarium’, you earn points from killing monsters which you spend to upgrade your skills and stat bonuses in the various roles (Ravager, Sentinel, Commando, Medic, Synergist and Saboteur). The customisation isn’t as open as you might think however as each character is only truly effective in up to three of these roles and even when the rest open up you’ll likely only boost them for the sake of it with leftover points. Unless you grind like a mad bastard and run back and forth killing monsters you’ll only max your main roles.

Weapons are customised with more grinding, this time for animal and mechanical parts which you use to imbue your weapons with boosts, increasing their combat and magic bonuses and unlocking higher levels which require special items to boost them even higher. Again, you’re unlikely to do this as it would take a massive amount of grinding beyond the seventy or so hours we spent on the game.

Rather than finding out the weaknesses of the enemies and structuring your attacks accordingly as you would in the old games, you’re now much more reliant on the enemy-scanning Libra ability. Once the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses are known then your secondary characters will adjust their attacks accordingly, but until you get that information they’re as liable to heal the baddies with ill-chosen magic spells as to hurt them.

The speed is welcome but too many compromises have been made on playability and the tactical side of the game. More thought and tweaking is certainly needed.

Atmosphere
As mentioned before, FFXIII is extremely linear and can be split into two halves. The first half you’re effectively fleeing from pursuit, trying to escape Cocoon, your home and get away to Pulse, the twin planet. Cocoon is extremely high tech and certainly feels that way, through many cut scenes you do get a feel that you’re pursued and that living on Cocoon isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be but the linearity is so constricting you’re frustrated as much as you’re drawn in. It’s essentially nothing more than one long string of fights, punctuated by cutscenes.

Once you get to pulse the atmospherics become much better and this coincides with a little more freedom in exploration, moving around and side-quests (though these are essentially pointless and you can’t do some of them until after you’ve completed the game at which point… what’s the point of going back again other than being OCD?

While Cocoon is the logical extension of the magitech seen in so many of the other Final Fantasy games (since VI), Pulse – or Gran Pulse, is a ruined, wild planet of Archaeotechnology, vicious beasts, chocobos and a near endless number of hunting quests that, while they’re writen into the story are really just make-work, rather than having any truly free-roaming element to the game.

The graphics are brilliant and do draw you in but without a comprehensible story to hang the pretty images onto there’s nothing to draw you in. Couple this with largely unsympathetic lead characters and there’s not to engage you with the story and without a clear story to comprehend it’s very difficult to figure out whether the game has true atmosphere or not.

Graphics
The graphics are brilliant and the visuals are, apparently, part of a new ‘Crystal Tools’ game engine which is keyed for transitions between cutscenes and play as well as physics and special effects. This is some of the smoothest rendering I’ve seen on the PS3 and where a lot of games seem to gain pixelation at higher resolutions, FFXIII remained smooth and anti-aliased without getting degraded.

Character animation is good, though the jumps are a little unconvincing. Combat is fairly smooth and the smoke effects, explosions and spells are visually very impressive and exciting. Transitions between cut scenes and live play are smooth and while there’s – perhaps – too many of them this lessens the disruption to play. The lighting in particular is well done and, unlike many games, it never gets too dark or too washed out with bloom effects to see what’s going on.

Conclusion
FFXIII is a deeply flawed game that is, nonetheless, pretty. It’s more comprehensible than Bayonetta… but only vaguely. It’s very pretty, but that’s really all the game has going for it and for hardcore RPG fanatics the lack of free customization and lack of a true free-exploration section severely devalues the game. While a lot of RPG development – admittedly western – has been bringing choice into CRPGs this game runs on particularly narrow rails. While it’s pretty, there’s a lot to be ironed out and expanded to make it a truly satisfying game. FFXII overcame its system changes with a comprehensible story and some engaging characters, both of which are missing in FFXIII.

Still, there’s the seeds of a good, even a really great game in there which, hopefully, will get shaken down in Versus XIII and FFXIV and allow the pure brilliance to shine through.

Score
Style: 5
Substance: 2
Overall: 3

Side-Note
Another major disappointment this time around was the Piggyback game guide. Usually these are really complete, give great advice and give you enough information about the background of the game and the game rules that you could run a tabletop RPG based on the material given there. This time around the book felt virtually useless, didn’t contain a huge amount of useful information and the combat advice wasn’t exactly all that. Not really worth the money, especially in a world that contains Gamefaqs.com

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

No related posts.

Available at Amazon.com

Introduction
If you’re a fan of the pulps then the prospect of a decent rocket-pack game set in the 1930s will have you squeeing with glee. Indeed I can’t remember a rocket pack game since the Atari ST and so, despite all the reviews warning about Darkvoid I caved in and purchased it – albeit preowned for only a tenner. Unfortunately, this isn’t the game pulp fans have been waiting for though there are the seeds of a potential, good pulp or rocket-pack game contained within this disappointing effort.

Story
While Darkvoid does have a story it’s something of a confused mix of David Icke lizard-conspiracy, fascism, Bermuda Triangle disappearances and vague mysticism. Our hero gets turned around in a storm over the Bermuda Triangle, carrying his ex (who has become entangled with a mysterious group called The Adepts) and ends up crashing into a mysterious island inhabited by cod-Aztecs, Nikola Tesla and mysterious mechanical men and snake-robots called The Watchers.

Our hero and his ex work to recover aircraft parts and repair their own plane and in so doing learn to use one of Tesla’s devices, a sort of jump-pack, little brother to the rocket-pack. This is your tutorial for later use of the rocket-pack and at the end of it there’s an attack on the cod-aztec village and your ex is, apparently, stolen away with the villagers and taken who knows where…

In pursuit you finally don the rocket-pack and take to the skies, fighting and then chasing The Watchers through to The Void where you fall in with The Survivors and The Adepts and become part of a revolt against the lizards to keep them out of the real world and to stop them supplying the fascists with advanced weapons.

That makes the story sound a lot less confused than it is, it jumps all over the place, suddenly veers into new elements (like a giant monster) that just seem to have been thrown in, dispenses with Tesla in a cursory fashion and contradicts itself over the big focus of the story, crossing back and forth from The Void to the real world, which apparently still happens regardless of all your efforts.

Gameplay
This is a standard third-person shooter for the most part with the addition of an expanded third dimension but, much like Mirror’s Edge, the game is so impressed with itself and what it can do as regards movement that it overuses it. The controls are sluggish and in the transition from ground to air you’ll often find yourself diving into the ground or a wall as you switch from one to another as the movement controls shift, which is clumsy.

You have to really pour the damage onto your enemies to destroy them, for the most part, and aiming with the thumbsticks is clumsy, though there is a slight bit of aim correction under some circumstances. There are some slight RP elements included in that you can upgrade your weapons by collecting ‘tech points’ though these are represented by glowing spheres, which don’t particularly draw you into the idea of scavenging tech parts.

Rocket-pack flight which should be a ‘YAHOO!’ moment is frustrating and dogfighting is much more luck than judgement. Even worse, your character flails around like a puppet with broken strings every time you take off, which really stops you feeling remotely heroic (especially when combined with crashing into the ground and bouncing off the walls every time you take off).

Atmosphere
The lizard conspiracy feels a little out of place as it’s a modern interpretation rather than the lizard people that were found in various pulp novels and planetary romances. While the islands and peculiarities of The Void are atmospheric the screen is often so dark – even with the video option brightened – that you can’t make out where you are or what you’re doing and ‘atmospheric’ turns to ‘annoying’ with great rapidity. The voice acting is average, not terrible, but the story has so many glaring contradictions and jumps that you’re never really drawn into it.

Graphics
The environments can be very beautiful but overall the character animation and graphics are only average for a third-generation console and the character models are a little bug eyed, almost disneyfied, which could have been a good direction to take it (if the game were cel-shaded) but just looks off and creepy as it stands.

Conclusion
At a playtime of only around 6 hours I’m very glad I didn’t pay full price for this. There’s the seeds of a good game in there somewhere but the controls, the darkness and the inconsistent story all cut the legs out from what could be a great game. If they’ve made enough money to justify a sequel they might be able to fix these problems and hopefully a more pulpy fight against the Nazis and their alien allies across war torn Europe would lift the story issues out of the mire.

Score
Style: 3
Substance: 1
Overall: 2

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

No related posts.

Available at Amazon.com

Introduction
I’m a sucker for pulp and I’m a sucker for steampunk. These are factors which often lead me to buy things, read things and play things that I’m otherwise not so sure about. Sometimes that leads me to find hidden gems, sometimes it means I play awful games because I’ve been suckered in by a love of genre. Damnation falls somewhere in the middle, in no way is it as much of a disappointment as Dark Void was but it’s still a little confused and doesn’t shine like it could.

Story
In this world the American Civil War went on for much longer than in real history and ended up smashing the USA into numerous different, smaller states. Profiteering from the war and from stolen inventions, ‘Lord’ Prescott turns his war money into a grab for power of his own, Prescott Standard Industries becoming a state of its own and turning its inventions and its juiced up troopers (made tougher and more powerful through a chemical cocktail) upon the shattered remnants of the other, fragmented states.

You play the part of Rourke, a traumatised and bereaved survivor of the Civil War and of the depredations of Prescott, the defacto combat commander of a small group of freedom fighters made up of the noble scion of Terre Verde, a Native American shaman/healer (with actual magic powers) and the scientist whose inventions Prescott largely stole. They fly around in an airship, attempting to thwart Prescott’s expansionist aims across several different terrains, sabotaging his mining operations, helping those who are resisting his expansionism and doing all they can to oppose him.

As Prescott sets his sights on finalizing his control of the continent things accelerate out of control and the rebels are left with no choice but to make a desperate, last ditch attempt to deal with Prescott and bring an end to his evil Empire.

Gameplay
Gameplay is mostly third-person, over the shoulder and while the game is ostensibly a shooter a huge amount of the game is spent leaping and climbing since, for some inexplicable reason, Prescott has built everything in precipitous locations and with deadly falls in all directions. While this is pretty and visually interesting, without a compass or a goal/direction pointer it becomes incredibly frustrating trying to find your way around the levels though, fortunately, when you plummet to your doom you start up again exactly where you fell off, whereas when you get shot to death, you start from the previous checkpoint, making it – perversely – more worthwhile to throw yourself off a cliff in a difficult fight rather than to slug it out if you think you’re going to die.

Combat can be a little frustrating as most weapons are wildly inaccurate and don’t seem to do a lot of damage. While that’s consistent with the idea that the enemies are juiced up on drugs and – therefore – stronger and tougher and better able to resist harm, it makes combat a little too methodical and slow, save the situations where you’re using the sniper rifle and can squeeze off a headshot.

There are brief interludes where you mount a bike or trike and race along canyons and cliff walls at dangerously high speed, making jumps over deep holes in the ground and ploughing through gangs of enemies and sending their bodies tumbling. Because of the need for high speed and not being able to go slowly you don’t feel particularly in control during these sequences, which makes them unwelcome.

Atmosphere
The landscapes are, largely, the iconic landscapes of the Old West as seen in endless cowboy movies – Deserts, canyons and mining towns but some variety is brought in with the snow-clad mountains of Prescott’s mountain factory/castle. The visual look of the game is consistent and fairly good though it verges on the dieselpunk, rather than the steampunk, mixing and matching some aspects of both. I also tend to think of Steampunk as being more of a Victorian, city aesthetic, rather than a Western one (even though it’s the same time period).

There’s some black humour mixed in, particularly in the announcements through PSI loudspeakers about ‘potted meats’ and how happy everyone will be as slave labourers for the company and while this is at odds with the – somewhat – more serious tone of some of the rest of the game it works well and draws you into the nature of Prescott’s hellish industrial dystopia.

You don’t really get to spend any time in any ‘normal’ areas, everything is war torn or ruined, or filled with drug-crazed cannibal savages. You don’t get a sense of what’s being lost or what you’re fighting FOR, only what you’re fighting AGAINST.

Graphics
The relative crudity of the graphics count against the otherwise atmospheric vistas and jagglies and a few other graphical issues are not what you really want or expect from a new generation game, detracting from the atmosphere. Overall the game feels like it’s an old generation game for the PC rather than a new(ish) game for the PS3. Stylistically they’re fine, the weapons and outfits are a little anachronistic (very immodest for the women) but with the mechanical devices this isn’t an issue.

Conclusion
Not a brilliant example of either the steampunk genre, or a third-person shooter/platformer the game’s background and ideas could have been executed much better, the ideas outstripping the execution.

Score
Style: 2
Substance: 3
Overall: 2.5

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

No related posts.

Available at Amazon.com

Introduction
As a sequel to Bioshock, one of the best story-shooters to have come out in recent years, Bioshock 2 had a lot to live up to. A good combination of biting political satire, excellent gameplay and superb atmosphere the original Bioshock set a standard almost impossibly high to meet and, while Bioshock 2 makes an heroic effort to equal its predecessor, it falls somewhat short of equaling that goal.

Story
Eight years after the events of Bioshock where Andrew Ryan, the founder of Rapture (the undersea city where Bioshock is set) a psychologist, Doctor Sofia Lamb, has taken over the city, winning the civil war that has taken place between the factions in the fractured city. In contrast to Andrew Ryan’s ‘Objectivist’ outlook, modeled on Ayn Rand’s adolescent philosophy of selfishness, Sofia Lamb presents a sort of biological/psychological Communism as an alternative for the dispossessed and lost of Ryan’s utopia.

Lamb has reinstated the Little Sister programme, using children kidnapped from the coasts, those Little Sisters of the original generation who remained have grown up and become Big Sisters, relatively powerful and much quicker than the Big Daddies, enforcers of Sofia Lambs will. Part of the reason for her hatred for Ryan and her determination to see everything through is that her own daughter, Eleanor, was turned into one of the very first Little Sisters and was bound to the lead character, the one you play, who was – himself – turned into a Big Daddy. Bound body and soul together, the two are inexorably linked and the bond motivates Big Daddy to find and save Eleanor and Eleanor to rebel against her monstrous mother.

Initially used by all and sundry to their own ends, Big Daddy eventually finds his way to Eleanor and together they engineer an escape and an end to Sofia Lamb’s new dictatorship.

Gameplay
Gameplay is broadly the same as in the first Bioshock, standard first-person controls and the same weapon/plasmid (‘psychic’ power) combination as in the first game. Playing a Big Daddy you’re a bit more lumbering and slow than the lean and fast lead character of the previous game but you also feel stronger, tougher and you get some more powerful weapons to compensate. You still have to hack various machines and trade money for weapons and items – something that seems a little out of place given Lamb’s cod-Marxist philosophy. Unlike in Bioshock 1 however, you don’t gather up junk and other materials to be converted into extra supplies, fortunately this is the only piece of ‘dumbing down’ (an unfortunate trend in many sequels and modern games) that seems to have taken place.

Atmosphere
The game is as atmospheric as the original, but suffers a little by not really advancing the appearance of the game or really making you feel like there has been a passage of time since the original Bioshock. The only truly new environmental element that you get is the ability to go outside and walk around under the sea. The thrill of being able to do this is immediately deflated by the fact that these sequences are incredibly short and that you can’t really do anything out there. One interesting aspect for atmosphere is the brief sequence

Graphics
The graphics are as good as the original, though the models for the people still look a little odd (and not just the deformed gene-splicers). As compared with the original I found some of the rooms and sections surprisingly bare, harking back to the really, really old 3D games where you mostly had empty rooms and blank environments. This seemed hugely at odds with the rest of the environments which were lavish and full of junk and detritus.

Conclusion
A good, solid sequel that suffers only from its failure to properly advance the gameplay and the slackening of the satirical bite that was present in the original. While Ryan was a perfect play on the Greed-is-good mentality and Randian Objectivism, Lamb’s portrayal is relatively clumsy and unnuanced, barking right from the start and failing to live up to the same sort of standard as the previous game, which was another disappointment. That’s realy the conclusion on this sequel, it’s a series of mild disappointments, but only because the previous game is so good.

Score
Style: 4
Substance: 4
Overall: 4

Review by James “Grim” Desborough

Related posts:

1. Bioshock Review
2. Resident Evil: Outbreak Video Game Review

Available at Amazon.com

Introduction
Another sequel and another one with a lot to live up to. Mass Effect 2 was, somewhat, overshadowed by the release of the hotly anticipated Dragon Age: Origins. While ME2 is a solid sequel much as with my review of Bioshock 2 I felt a sense of mild disappointment – not that this stopped me playing it all the way through quite rapidly. ME2 is a solid game and is, in my opinion, superior to the more lauded and praised Dragon Age, perhaps due to the fact that Science Fiction is a more free and wide-ranging genre without the similar sort of strictures and expectations – even demands – that the fantasy genre has.

Story
The game opens with a hell of a kicker, the Normandy investigating missing vessels and encountering an enormous and deadly vessels that cuts clean through her defenses and destroys the ship, including – apparently – killing Shepherd, the main character. Given that you’ve just imported your old game details that’s a bit of a fright. Fortunately, that’s not the end of it.

When you awaken you find yourself scarred and apparently rebuilt by high end cybernetic and biological technology, shockingly this resurrection has happened at the hands of Cerberus, a pro-human terrorist organization that you fought against in the first game. You’re plunged right into action with the Cerberus facility under attack from subverted robots. Once that problem is dealt with and you’ve shaken the dust off your skills the story proper begins.

Cerberus has resurrected you to look into raids on outlying human colonies by The Collectors, more agents of the Reapers, as the Geth had been, but – strangely – biologically oriented. Human forces are failing to address the issue and the galaxy is still reeling from their previous war with the Geth and the revelation of the Reapers so Cerberus has decided to go ahead with their own, secret war and investigation while the authorities cover up the existence of The Reapers and try to piece galactic society back together.

The Normandy 2, an uprated copy of the Normandy, is unveiled – put together by Cerberus – and you take on a crew of misfits, terrorists and old friends to investigate and thwart The Collectors and to gather intelligence on The Reapers, all the while interfering in the path of key figures and key societies throughout the Galaxy.

Gameplay
Gameplay is broadly the same as in Mass Effect but it has been dumbed down considerably when it comes to inventory, weapon management and customization. Hunting for minerals is no longer accomplished by driving over the surface in the Mako (I seem to have been alone in liking this, though most worlds were blank, uninteresting slates) and this has been replaced by a MORE tedious scanning game of hot/cold. One last addition is the inclusion of special, heavy weapons though I found that I wasn’t using them very often.

Atmosphere
Mass Effect 2 still has the atmosphere of a late 70s, early 80s, semi-serious (plausible rather than hard-SF) world and this is seen throughout the artwork and graphics as well as in the text background on the various species. There is still an unfortunate tendency to make most of the aliens into distorted humans but there are a few genuinely alien species that break that up.

The dialogue is the winner here for creating atmosphere, each character feels like they do have their own personality and your interactions are meaningful and interesting. The tangled webs of romance, jealousy and friendship draw you in to caring about the characters and even feeling like a heel for leading one girl on and then choosing another.

This is a clean, optimistic future for the most part but the people within it remain grubby and keep it interesting, preventing it from becoming a blank and uninteresting utopia. A skillful balance.

Graphics
The graphics are very good when it comes to the character models with natural movement and good detail. A slight improvement on the original Mass Effect. The outdoor sequences on planets are particularly well done but there is a distinct lack of the ‘human touch’ to many of the internal sequences. While this aids atmosphere and calls back to the period upon which the images appear to be based, it can come across as ‘cheap’ in terms of the graphics, too simplistic, too blank.

Conclusion
ME2 is an honorable entry into the sequence but it largely feels like a stepping stone to Mass Effect 3, coming next year. The carrying of decisions from one installment to the next is excellent and makes you fret – even more so – about every decision and every conversation point, making you buy into the narrative much more than you otherwise might. Even so, the slight dumbing down and the replacement of the driving/searching sections with a boring minigame are severe strikes against it. Hopefully ME3 will get things exactly right and make an excellent game into a perfect game.

Score
Style: 4
Substance: 4
Overall: 4

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Related posts:

1. Ghostbusters: the Video Game Review
2. Blue Dragon Plus Video Game Review
3. Mass Effect Video Game Review

Avaialble at Amazon.com

Story
The story is a bit of a casualty to the mission structure and game play to start with, though threads emerge and little plot arcs with the various ‘quest givers’ do emerge. The information about Pandora is there to understand its background but you really have to pay attention as you whisk through the missions to really get an idea of what happened.

Pandora was a mining world run by one of the big interstellar corporations until they decided to pull out. In so doing they left behind a bunch of convict workers and everyone who couldn’t afford to get off world. The injured, the perverse and those who simply enjoyed exploiting a frontier planet. Stories about the vault have brought other mercenaries here, along with members of larger mercenary forces, ostensibly there to keep the peace. A job they fail at.

The planet is a broken down wreck, overrun by bandits, almost entirely populated by men and full of various forms of dangerous animal wildlife to get in the way. As you get closer to the vault – guided by a mysterious ‘angel’ – so do all the other forces of the planet, though many of them don’t understand exactly what it is that they have…

Gameplay
You run around in first person mode, but you shoot. You level up like a regular RPG and this gives you points to put into special class abilities like in Diablo or World of Warcraft. When you shoot people they bleed, but numbers also appear over their head telling you how much damage you do. Weapons are like magic weapons in Diablo or WoW. They have special qualities and variable stats and come in white/green/blue/purple/orange to let you know how rare and powerful they are.

Gameplay varies heavily by class and I haven’t had a great deal of time to play every class yet. The soldier is an excellent generalist with a very useful throw-down turrent that provides cover, healing and ammo as well as shooting anyone who comes into range. The siren can teleport – after a fashion – to get out of trouble and can detonate herself like a bomb while the hunter is hell on wheels with a sniper rifle and has a pet bat-like creature that can be used to attack enemies. The class I haven’t played at all is a hulking great tank of a man that’s supposed to be good in close combat.

There are vehicles, but they’re all identical and a little fragile when it comes to firefights with a tendency to explode around you.

There’s a good variety of enemies, but you will get tired of shooting ‘skags’ (wild, feral, armoured rat-dogs) before you’re even out of the first area.

The RPG/First Person hybrid is annoying to start with, but eventually you settle into it and it no longer seems strange. One minor annoyance, though it’s good simulation, is that there’s a slight delay between firing a bullet and it striking the target which, for sniping, makes it much more difficult, especially on a console with the thumbsticks, to hit a moving target.

You can play online or cooperatively on your TV with someone in the same room. It’s hard to see what’s going on with a split screen (they did it vertically rather than horizontally) and online is full of arseholes, but this is true of any game and so Borderlands can’t be told off for it really. I’d love to play a 4 player game with one of each character type, but I simply can’t endure the online duel-spammers long enough to find such a group.

Atmosphere
Pandora is a desolate, desert world, littered with the trash and leftovers of the corporation that upped sticks and left people behind. It feels like a stereotype of a massive, America trailer park. Prefab, rickety buildings inhabited by hicks and freaks and with dangerous, gun-toting nutters all over the place. The overall feel is somewhere between that and the wild west and in some aspects almost reminds one of the old, cheesy SF film ‘Space Hunter: Beyond the Forbidden Zone’.

The desperate feel of the planet is well represented but loses some of its edge thanks to the cell-shaded, cartoony feel of the graphics, which enhance the humour aspect of the game, but detract from some of the scarier moments, the big reveal and some of the aliens.

Overall you do get conveyed the fact that Pandora is a desolate shithole and that anyone who remains there is crazy, but to really get at the meat of the back-story you have to fiercely pay attention and to read absolutely everything you find as well as looking at all the little background details. It’s there, but you have to work at it.

Graphics
The graphics are competent and cell-shaded, giving Borderlands a cartoony feel that’s something like Heavy Metal without the tits. There’s a lot of trash and detritus everywhere and while the scenery is sometimes a bit angular, harking back to 3d games from 5-10 years ago, overall it has a distinctive look and feel that works for the game. I would have liked it if they’d decided to either go a bit more realistic or a bit more cartoony and stylish, but the middle ground, while initially a bit niggling, becomes better as you play on through the game.

Conclusion
I rarely play a game through twice unless it REALLY grabs me. I’m on my second play-through of Borderlands, mostly because I want to use the higher level skill powers on my soldier character but also because the weapons are fun and I want to play with a larger gamut of them. The story and the missions are varied and fun enough that playing through a second time doesn’t feel like a chore but a third time might be pushing it.

The classes are different enough that playing through with a different class may give enough of a different play experience that another play-through could be on the cards. It’s a fun and quirky game and takes a few risks with the genres, something that’s to be encouraged.

The first downloadable content, The Island of Doctor Ned, is a great comedic-horror romp that makes fun of both cheap re-skinned game expansions and horror tropes like zombies and The Wolfman. Well worth a download and a play. The second download – arenas and storage – doesn’t seem as worth it to me.

Score
Style 4
Substance 4
Overall 4

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

No related posts.

Available at Amazon.com

Introduction
This review is unlikely to be of a great deal of use to most people who will have seen the word ‘Bioware’ associated with it, ignored the EA also associated with it, had a happy accident in their pants and bought it anyway. For those of you who’ve been a little bit slower off the mark or have hung back unsure whether to buy it, without having the money spare or who are curious without being curious enough to spend money, hopefully this will offer something useful.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Dragon Age: Origins is the kick off of a new CRPG franchise for Bioware, divorced from their D&D associations (Baldur’s Gate) and that of their old game engine. Dragon’s Age has been sold as a glorious, sexy, blood-spattered romp that tears down preconceptions about fantasy games and worlds, plays about with them and offers a more mature and visceral entertainment ‘sausage’ at the end of it all.

The version I’m reviewing is the PS3 one, though I would image the console versions are largely the same and any differences are more likely to be found in the PC version.

Story
The story is fairly standard fantasy tale, but with a darker twist. I’m almost inclined to assert that Dragon Age is, in fact, a horror game rather than a fantasy game per se, just to stir up some controversy but that wouldn’t be entirely accurate. Your character is the hero of a grand tale that sketches out the world – and most particularly the land of Ferelden, which is threatened by a terrible event called a ‘blight’, wherein an arch demon (in the form of a dragon) brings forth an army of darkspawn (pretty much orcs) to the surface and lays waste – unstoppably – to everything for miles with no purpose other than destruction. You gather an unlikely band of heroes and… yadda yadda yadda, lots of side quests, build up experience and ultimately save the day. Huzzah!

The main storyline is pretty hackneyed, standard fantasy fare for the most part, you find yourself calling out some of the plot twists and events like you’d call out lines from a favourite film you’ve seen a million times… “Gordon’s alive?!” …and it never quite plays with your expectations enough to shock or compel you. The far more interesting sides to the story are all the little side plots, schemes and favours for the other members of your party, but you’ll have to work hard at buttering them up to get to all those.

Gameplay
The trailers and clips initially suggested a fairly free-flowing and cinematic fighting experience, but that wasn’t the vibe I got from the combat at all. You have your basic fighting moves and then you have access to special moves, accessed as you level up and then slotted into your remaining action buttons (on consoles this means you can only ever have quick access to six of these powers at one time, I don’t know if this is the same on the PC version). This isn’t free-flowing and cinematic, much like a D&D CRPG it’s a matter of picking a target and leaning on the basic attack button, occasionally triggering a special ability.

The two games that Dragon Age brought to mind while playing were Final Fantasy 12 (with the tactics selection for your companions) and any MMORPG of your choice for the combat itself. Countdown timers on special attacks and timing management definitely brought World of Warcraft more to mind than anything cinematic or immersive.

Otherwise everything was largely as you’d expect, though after playing Mass Effect the old style dialogue trees felt a little old fashioned, as did much of the rest of the game! I did spot a couple of minor bugs, characters appearing in strange locations with dialogue that belonged with them being somewhere else, but overall there wasn’t too much problem with that.

Atmosphere
The game does create its atmosphere fairly well. The graphics hold it back from really drawing you in completely and the animations could have been better but the dialogue is fairly faultless and it’s worth mixing your party around a lot from encounter to encounter just to hear the banter between the various members of your party. Morrigan’s scathing wit is particularly well done and I think only Sten (a qunari, a token new warrior/honour race) ever caused her to stumble.

The world is brought to life but the settlements can’t help but feel a bit empty most of the time, in a game world that includes the crowded, busy and bustling cities of GTA and Assassin’s Creed everything feels a bit staid, dead and dull in the towns of Dragon Age with people standing around waiting to deliver a couple of lines of dialogue or feed you a quest chain.

The game unquestionably has a deep set of background lore and material, on paper it’s very well realised and the story of it certainly draws you in but this is a computer game, not a novel, not a tabletop RPG and while the material is there, is weighty, engaging and interesting the game fails to adequately convey it. It tells you rather than showing you – with a couple of exceptions such as in the Mage’s Tower where you get a first hand lesson on how dangerous magic is.

Graphics
For a new game on a next gen console the graphics are unforgivably crap. I’ll often go off on one about how graphics aren’t all important and gameplay should be king but, really, this looks like a PC game from a few years ago. The textures don’t bare up to close examination, many of the buildings and streets look flat and if you compare it with – even fairly modest – other titles it doesn’t hold up. In my opinion it doesn’t even match up to their older game, Mass Effect.

The characters look somewhat wooden, their motions aren’t quite natural and flowing enough and the underwear makes the character models look even worse during the ‘sex’ scenes!

Conclusion
Dragon Age: Origins is a good game, despite the average score I’ve given it and it lays a solid foundation on which to build a franchise but, after loving Mass Effect so much I was left disappointed by Dragon Age. Perhaps, Mass Effect being SF, there were no preconceptions or requirements to the game world and they could play around with what they were making, leading to a superior product. With Dragon Age, despite playing with fantasy preconceptions it never quite paid off, just as the sex scenes never quite pay off. In a blog post while I was playing still I referred to this – somewhat crudely- as: “All boob and no nipple” and this does make a fairly good metaphor for what it is that ails this game.

There’s sex, but not really, it’s neither tender nor titillating. The dwarves are different, but not different enough. The elves are different, but not different enough. The qunari are ‘new’, but klingons with cornrows aren’t really new. All the standard pseudo-medieval claptrap is there, just not necessarily quite where you’d normally expect to find it. Dragon Age tries, but it always stops just short of being truly brilliant.

A sequel, with more effort on the graphics and world and pushing things just that little bit further, could be a truly great game. Roll on Mass Effect 2!

Score
Style: 2
Substance: 4
Overall: A high 3.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Related posts:

1. Dragon Age 2 (PS3) Review
2. Dragon Age: The Calling Novel Review
3. Dragon Age: Redemption Trailer for New Web Series

Available at Amazon.com

Developer: Terminal Reality, Threewave Software

What do you get when you take one of the most popular comedy franchises ever, bring back the original writers and actors who made it so great, and have the original writers come up with a new script tying it all together?

You get Ghostbusters: the Video Game, of course.

Ghostbusters: TVG had been plagued from developmental issues from the start. Passing from publisher to publisher, the game faced cancellation several times despite promising trailers. Eventually managing to be released by Atari, this game features voice acting from the original cast. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson reprise their roles as the classic supernatural investigators and eliminators.

The game expands on the Ghostbusters mythos. Set two years after Ghostbusters 2, the Ghostbusters have managed to stay in business and now work directly for the city. You are the Recruit, a nameless new employee who never says a word throughout the whole game. Together you work as a squad, investigating strange levels and trapping ghosts for money. Familiar faces return to menace New York, including Slimer, Gozer, and Walter Peck. The game’s plot continues with the events of the first two films. Ivo Shandor, a character mentioned off handedly in the first film, has set a chain of events in motion and the secrets behind Gozer, the Grey Lady, and other seemingly minor events are revealed as the Recruit has to work with the team to stop them.

The game itself is enjoyable. The controls are tricky to master at first, mainly with trapping ghosts. Even this is fun, as new ghosts represent new challenges on how to defeat them. The game introduces new equipment as well as your proton pack is upgraded throughout the game, and new weapons such as the Slime Thrower, the Dark Matter Generator, and Meson Collider help solve puzzles and defeat specific ghosts.

It’s not just about trapping ghosts as well. While combat is still a major factor in the game, you have to solve puzzles in order to advance and use your PKE Meter to track down hidden ghosts, Cursed Artifacts, and help guide your way through puzzles. The game is very much like Metroid Prime, as you can solve several puzzles by utilizing the different functions on your weapons or by moving parts of the environment around.

One of the more enjoyable aspects of the game are the cut scenes and the dialogue. Aykroyd and Ramis made the game like a true sequel to the films, with Venkman’s dry wit and the deadpan delivery from Egon helping to make the game more fun. The cut scenes are shown in the same way as the film, and the soundtrack combines music from the original movies and combines them with new mixes.

Now, there are flaws which have to be addressed. While this game is good, it has several important flaws which detract from the overall experience.

For starters, the length of the game was disappointing. I beat the game on basic difficulty within fifteen hours. I had found ¾ of the hidden items and had earned many of the achievements in the process. For $60, I had hoped the story mode would be much longer than that and last me for a while. While the multiplayer is fun, this can be a turn off for some players who enjoyed the single player campaign so much.

The game also suffers from some critical bug issues. I had to reload the game several times on the second level as Ray would inexplicably stop and rotate his torso around repeatedly. One time I lost Egon to a bizarre glitch where he was knocked out and part of him had fused with a nearby statue, and the game would not let me revive him. Perhaps a patch will be released that can correct these issues, but it can prove frustrating while you play. If you ever seem to get stuck and you’ve tried every task, just reload it.

Will the game scare you? Sure, the animated candelabras and Stay Puft Marshmallow Man might not scare you, but there is plenty of room for horror in the game. Shandor’s sinister plot to destroy the world combined with several dark twists in the plot bring fear and dread to the table. Several enemies are particularly terrifying, especially in numbers. Nothing gets your heart pumping like having a ghost leap out of a painting to your left while zombies leap about clawing at your face.

There is an issue on whether or not the game is canon with the movies, and until the new Ghostbusters movie is released this is still up in the air but thanks to Ramis and Aykroyd, this is felt more than a game set in the Ghostbusters franchise. This felt like Ghostbusters: the Video Game in every sense. From the spontaneous one-liners to the ability to interact with your environment I was hooked throughout the game, although very disappointed with how quickly I beat it. Even a casual gamer who is unfamiliar with the series might get excited about pulling on a proton pack and taking it to them.

Rating: 4/5

Review by John D. Kennedy

Related posts:

1. Mass Effect 2 Game Review
2. Blue Dragon Plus Video Game Review
3. Assassin’s Creed Video Game Review

Available at Amazon.com

Genre: Real-Time Strategy
Platform: Nintendo DS
Developer: Brownie Brown
Publisher: Ignition Entertainment

The original Blue Dragon was a hotly-anticipated title for the Xbox 360. Not only did it have an esteemed pedigree with the creator and composer of the Final Fantasy series onboard but the 360 was going through a bit of an RPG drought. Its release helped scratch an itch a lot of Xboxers had and was a decided “hand across the aisle” to the Japanese market who regarded the 360 as an American machine with American games.

The Nintendo DS, by contrast, has plenty of RPG titles (including remakes and originals in the aforementioned Final Fantasy line) and the platform boasts two entries in one of the best strategy series of all time in Advance Wars: Dual Strike and Days of Ruin. So, Blue Dragon Plus is swimming against a stronger tide this time around and, while it’s fun enough to pass a couple hours, frustrating controls and repetitive gameplay prevent it from being a must-have title.

Blue Dragon Plus is a real-time strategy game from the folks behind Magical Starsign. In its fantasy world, characters have “Shadows” which are spiritual extensions of themselves. In battle, they manifest from within the character as big, bad beast-headed people-things that lay the smack on enemies.

The game doesn’t waste much time getting you into the action. After a brief and beautiful cutscene, you’re introduced to the characters. As each enters the scene, the game gives you not only the narrative lowdown on the character but a good overview of their role in battle and how to use and equip them.

While these pointers are nice, the game doesn’t spend any time telling you how to play. So learn on your feet or read the manual beforehand. I’m a believer that a game should teach you how to play so I came into it not knowing how to move, what the various attacks were, or how to access any of that information. By blindly navigating the icons, I fumbled my way through and managed to win the first encounter. But even in that first encounter, the control issues rear their head.

Battles play out on an isometric birds eye view of the field. The bottom screen only shows you a portion of the battlefield at a time so you have to use the stylus to direct the camera by “grabbing” part of the map and moving it around. But you also direct character movement by selecting the character then selecting an point on the map. There were times when I would set a destination for one character and then try to look at somewhere else on the map only to inadvertently set a new course for that character. Given that this is a real-time strategy game, all time is valuable and I don’t like wasting any of it.

After a character has completed its action, it is immediately unselected. This means that you can’t direct Shu and then immediately have him attack. You must select him again. This is a really minor change that not only goes against RTS standards but does so needlessly. I’m all for breaking rules in game design but they should be done with a benefit. This is just a needless step which, for a game playing out in real time, becomes annoying quickly.

You’re only ever going to control four characters in a battle which is a limitation that I found appealing. While I enjoy larger-scale battles (such as those found in the excellent PSP title Jeanne D’Arc) these four-character warbands felt more controlled and more intimate. Though it also means you need to micromanage each character to get the most out of them. There is no such thing as simply throwing more bodies at the foes that spring up in this game.

Probably the greatest change from Blue Dragon to Plus is that everyone and their grandmother has a Shadow. These once-prized and rare spiritual reflections now pop up in unexpected places that, in part, set off the first thrust of the story. This shadowy proliferation also suits the gameplay well since Shadows now feel like standard arsenal instead of a Limit Break (which may put some people off, admittedly).

Visually, the sequel retains the same Dragon Ball-flavored graphics of its predecessor. While the cartoony style may have seemed a little out of place on Microsoft’s big white box, a softer graphical style fits is at home on the DS. The graphics are bright and fun and the Shadow animations are smooth (the character animations are tiny and distant so it’s hard to comment on them).

The story is told through beautifully rendered cutscenes and “pop-up” dialogue sequences that have become a mainstay of both the DS and popular RPG lines such as the Persona series. And the story is good! Very good, in fact, even when it wears its anime roots and tropes on its sleeve. Blue Dragon fans are rewarded not only by the return of Shu and his compatriates but the reimagining and repurposing of some other returning characters (and some brand new characters as well). Blue Dragon Plus really opens up the world established by the first title without ruining what was attractive about the original. No small feat for any sequel but Blue Dragon Plus pulls it off.

All in all, Blue Dragon Plus is solid though unremarkable gameplay experience that is hindered by a couple frustrating control issues. But if you dig into the story, it’s enough to keep you going—so if you’re a gamer who plays for the story, and doesn’t mind slogging through repetitive gameplay, then Blue Dragon Plus will certainly pay off

Rating: 3 (out of 5)

Review by Jason Blair

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1. Mass Effect 2 Game Review
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3. Ghostbusters: the Video Game Review

Available at Amazon.com

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Review

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year you’ve probably heard of Mass Effect and, since I’m always late doing these reviews odds are you’ve already played it, or – lacking the luxury I have of spending more time playing games – are still playing it. A brief summation then at the start of this review is ‘buy it, it is good’. Above and beyond Bioware’s existing reputation for creating good computer game RPGs this shows they’re masters of it and, until they perfect freeform AI for running roleplaying games this is about as good as the genre gets.

Collector’s Edition

The collector’s edition for Mass Effect came in a natty looking tin, quite solid compared to a lot of other tin-box special editions with the Bad Guy on the front and the Good Guys on the back. Inside you get your usual controller guide with some basic background on the game, character creation and so forth plus a more in depth Galactic Codex with 33 more pages of slightly deeper information about the various races, planets, technology and so forth from the game. The game DVDs are housed in a slightly disappointing card case and disc inserts in plastic within that. One of which is the game disc, the other is a series of documentaries and art sketches which you can watch and geek out at.

On a side note I would like to mention that it is now around twenty-five years since the Compact Disc made its debut and engineers still haven’t designed a non-fiddly way to get discs out of a package without a) hurting your thumb, b) breaking the packaging or c) breaking the disk. How hard can it be?

Lastly you get a flimsy art book ‘A Future imagined’. When ‘art book’ is mentioned as part of a special edition I tend to think of something a little more expansive and this was just a controller guide sized pamphlet with a few bits and pieces of art within, no larger than postcards. I think I’d rather have had actual postcards of the art if a more substantial book wasn’t a possibility.

Game Story

If you’re not making up your own character you play as Commander John Shepherd of the System’s Alliance Military, the military force of Earth and all its colonies. Earthlings are the brash, up and coming race in the setting, a common SF motif, and they are resented, hated, envied and admired in equal measure by many of the other alien races who are loosely united under the banner of The Citadel Races, a concord of aliens based around a huge alien artefact, left behind – apparently – by the same alien race that left behind massive transfer portals between distant star systems.

These aren’t the only artefacts left behind by this elder race – the Protheans – and rivalry over archaeological finds is great in terms of military action, espionage and science. Any Prothean find can accelerate a race’s development and technology massively creating potential disparities between the races and throwing alliances out of balance. Besides the Protheans there are rumours of an altogether less benevolent elder race, the Reapers, who may or may not be gone and whom most regard as a myth.

With Earth bucking for full Citadel membership and wanting humans within the Spectres (Citadel special forces) you’re thrust to the fore as an example to help the first problem and a candidate for the second. At much the same time an important Prothean artefact turns up with some important new knowledge that could affect the fate of the whole galaxy and you get caught up in the thick of it.

I can’t say too much more without giving away plot and surprises and with a game this good spoilers are a real problem. Suffice to say it is a really good story, albeit your usual sort of galaxy saving fare that these universe spanning games will tend to go in for, it develops naturally and yet contains enough twists and turns to keep you going. There were elements that were left out that I felt could have done with a bit more exploring, I was dying to visit the Quarian refugee fleet but that never happened and the homeworlds of some of the other species, more understanding of the Krogan and more exploration and understanding of The Attican Traverse would all have been nice but understandably there wasn’t room. Still, it felt like a bit of a lie to describe Mass Effect’s universe as huge, there’s a lot that is simply empty.

Atmosphere

Mass Effect plays and feels like a pre-Star Wars science fiction film, or book, with a military slant. If you’ve read or flipped through the old (or new) Terran Trade Authority books that’s precisely what it feels like. A clean and crisp future as imagined in the 70s and 80s and everything from the graphics through to the sound emphasises this. Kudos to Bioware for including at least one truly alien looking race – the Hanar – amongst all their other humanoid species, though I felt the alien sex goddess Asari were a bit of a cheap shot really.

Still, it manages to be engrossing, the effects applied to the graphics – which are mercifully adjustable – can give you a more cinematic feel to the game and the Vangelis style music really does top the whole thing off nicely. It maintains its sense of alienness even when you’re just driving your buggy around the surface of the planet and each location does have a good feel to it.

Gameplay

Mass Effect foregoes the more usual RPG controls for more of a first/third person control setup. Initially I was rather wary of this as, in my opinion, first person shooters and consoles don’t get on, I can’t aim for shit without a mouse and moving without a keyboard just feels… weird. Mass Effect compensates for this with some aim correction – if you’re a spazz like me – and I never felt too imposed upon by the first/third person mechanics. I can see how this might upset some RPG enthusiasts who prefer the character to express the skill rather than themselves, but I don’t think it was too obtrusive and there are enough statistical modifiers as you advance down the skill trees to keep a statistic junkie happy. Hacking is accomplished by dance-dance-revolution style timed button presses, combat is done using the sticks, conversation is handled by a nice and fluid stick-based selection mechanism and everything else is easy enough.

The story is advanced through missions, but there’s plenty of side quests and planets to explore if you want to go off by yourself chasing down pirates and otherwise being a galactic do-gooder or menace. Whether you’re mean or nice opens up different conversation trees and you have the option of two romantic sub plots, at least you do if you’re playing a male character. What’s a lot of fun is just romping around the surface of planets, shooting at giant killer bugs, raping resources and seeing just how many flips you can get out of your Big-Trak looking space buggy before it explodes.

Conclusion

Mass Effect deserves the hype and it deserves a sequel. I’ll be interested to see what additional materials for it come out over Xbox live – if any ever do -and I can see myself putting together an RPG fanbook for Mass Effect very easily. Its a compelling universe and unlike many of these world-hopping, galaxy-spanning adventures this one leaves itself open for future stories very nicely indeed.

Style: 5
Substance: 5
Overall: 5

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1. Mass Effect 2 Game Review
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