Category Archive: Reviews

Sep
15
2011

Review: Space Marine

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September 15, 2011

spacemarine_mp6Quite a few games have two potential markets. The first is the one who is after exactly what the game offers, whether it be Call of Duty for people who buy one game a year, or a road sweeping simulator. These people will like the game no matter what unless it really sucks because it covers the major bases for what they want. Then you have the rest of us who buy games that we think we will like.

Space Marine comes with a massive number of fanboys out there who will buy the game no matter what and it’s not worth really reviewing the game for them. OK, I’m one of them and I loved that side. It added to the body of work by showing more detail for day to day life on a forgeworld that is having a slight invasion event. The battlefields are much better fleshed out than the green fields with a few pieces of scenery scattered around. Think green sheets with books under it to make hills. I think this may have gotten better in recent years but this isn’t a 40k blog and I’ll just say that it gives a much better impression of streets, inside buildings and FECK, THAT TITAN IS MASSIVE! than the tabletop game usually does. Lots of the weapons you would expect are there and unlock as you progress through the plot, which in itself was actually pretty interesting to me and the cliff hanger at the end could actually be left unresolved without being out of place in the universe (The future being grim, dark and therefore grimdark).

You are Captain Titus of the Ultramarines and no matter how hard you try and avoid noticing it it you are also the narrator from Who Do You Think You Are?. Pieces of dialog about finding an Inquisitor automatically filled in my mind to include finding out about his grandfather. You are sent to a Forgeworld (a planet set over entirely to making things for the Empire of Man) to repel and Ork attack and protect a Titan (big, big, big stompy thing). Then you meet an Inquisitor, Chaos turn up and along the way you need to use careful choices in cutscenes in order to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the situation. Or you kill anything that moves in an incredibly bloody manor, I forget which.

So if you like the universe for 40k you will like the game. What if you don’t care about it that much?

The game is a 3rd person shooter that gets lots of comparisons with Gears of War. This isn’t fair in some cases (it’s not a cover based shooter and it encourages you to rush into close combat) but in others is (you are big muscly marines with big guns and chainsaws. For the record 40k had chainsaws attached to guns first, but they stopped having them as they were a bit silly.

The first thing you notice is that you don’t feel like a massive man in a massive suit of armour. You run lightly, can roll around the floor and engage in hand to hand combat with the best of them. It’s not quite Halo, but it’s certainly more fluid than Gears. Guns feel as you would expect, with Bolters causing Orks to explode in clouds of red mist, lascannons making scarily good sniper rifles and melta guns being a bit more shotgun than I thought. It’s the hand to hand fighting that is important as you only regenerate health through execution kills. When an enemy is damaged enough you can stun them then execute them to get a chunk of your health back. This encourages you to take risks more and works nicely to make you play in a more visceral style. You also have a fury mode that regenerates health and makes you stronger for when it all gets a bit much and you need to kill a large number of people very quickly.

The problem is that it’s just not as good as the major players in the genre and if it didn’t have the IP behind it then it would be even more average. Much like Transformers: War on Cybertron it gains more from the IP than it should and so becomes highly enjoyable for even casual fans.

The multiplayer is an interesting affair with loyalist and Chaos Marines fighting in either  race to get enough kills as a team or in a capture the flag game which seems by far to be the better of the two. You have three classes of marines that you can play, predictably Tactical, Devastator and Assault, and a nice choice of weapons that unlocks as you level up. There is a perk system for customisation as well which mixes it up a bit more and you can unlock more perks by achieving challenges for number kills with a weapon that will upgrade it slightly. I will admit to having had far more fun with a jetpack and hammer in this than I ever did in the Red Faction multiplayer.

Over time you unlock armour parts, and the customisation for you multiplayer characters is really quite excellent. Piece by piece you will unlock helmets, greaves and the rest so that you can mix and match for the appearance you want. You can also change your colours and chapter and it’s quite interesting seeing what people have chosen for themselves.

Where it falls down though is the lack of multiplayer modes and limited maps. After 30 levels of this over a couple of days I’m quite bored and a quick look at Gears last night to see what their XP event was like has put me off even more. Again like Transformers the multiplayer gets old far too quickly and really needs some DLC to spice it up.

Overall it’s a game that I’ve enjoyed more than most this year, but the longevity is sorely lacking. The fact that it launched right before Gears 3 will on 360 and at the same time as Resistance 3 did on PS3 is not good as I fear that the the player numbers will plummet very quickly and not recover because there are one or two minor shooters being released later this year.

This is probably the most negative positive review ever as it’s a very fun game and if you like the IP it’s probably a must buy. It’s just not as good as the competition in a period when we have a Gears, Halo, Battlefield and Call of Duty coming out. It’s a B list shooter like Resistance, which explains why the PS3 sales were so low as they released together.

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Sep
06
2011

Review: Driver San Francisco

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September 6, 2011

DRVSF_S_034_IG_MassChaseLogotcm2119738Good news everybody! My summer gaming funk is over and I really enjoyed this weeks new game: Driver San Francisco. This is perhaps a little predictable because I do love open world driving games, but I’m now all fully charged up for Space Marine next week.

How can I describe this game? You drive a car. In San Francisco. That combination gives any game a solid 7 out of 10 score on setting alone, but what about the plot? Well I’m not going to lie, but it’s silly. Very silly. In the opening of the game you get hospitalised and the rest of the game is a dream you have while in a coma. This means you get special powers like boost for your car and, more excitingly, the ability to take over any other car on the road.

That turns out to be the killer feature for the game, and one that gets a massive thumbs up from me. At the most basic level you can travel to the other side of the city in no time at all by jumping cars, or pick up side missions by jumping into a marked car. Jump into a police car and you can have a little chase mission, jump into another and you can be helping some street racers pay for their college tuition by winning races. If you are in a long car chase you can jump to random cars or trucks in the other lane and ram them head on into the car that you are chasing. A couple of times the game asks you to defend a static vehicle in this way and it almost turns into a tower defence game.

The dynamic is, when you get your head around it, a game changer that really makes a difference. Chasing down a car is the usual affair of beating down their damage bar until they stop, but a head on collision with a tanker is far more effective than ramming somebody from behind.

The rest of the plot is interesting with a nice curve at the end in the inevitable mission where you don’t have any powers because of the entire premise of the game has to end that way. Still, it’s fun and doesn’t suffer from that usual spike in difficulty that games tend to fall into.

What’s an open world game without things to do, and this game has it covered with an awful lot of events called dares that you can take part in. These are locations that give you a race or a challenge like jump X meters in a taxi and they unlock new cars and give you currency to spend on new cars and upgrades. You also gain this while driving by performing drifts, jumps, overtaking, near misses and the like. There are also Challenges, which are really just like dares and missions but are gained in different ways. By buying garages you unlock some, collecting little film icons unlock Movie challenges and you can also get some from the most pointless online service ever, uplay. The movie challenges are interesting as you don’t have any abilities and it gives you familiar sounding scenarios as chasing a car in a green Mustang. All without making explicit mention of where they come from of course.

I even played some of the multiplayer and have to say I quite enjoyed it. It has a bit of the Burnout feel to it, which can’t be a bad thing and the fact that I won a race because I managed to drift down Lombard Street perfectly means it’s my new favourite thing (until the next thing).

The only slight issue is the length of the game. You can finish the plot in a day, but you still a majority of the content to get through at that point with the events spread throughout the city.

I believe the game is out in the US this week, and I really recommend it if you like driving games. The plot is silly, but knows it is and uses it as a great excuse for a new mechanic that takes the switching cars mid mission angle from Wheelman and makes it so much better.

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Aug
08
2011

Review: From Dust

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August 8, 2011

The second game in Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade promotion this was From Dust, which is a God Sim and so I just had to play it.

You are, shockingly, a god and must help a tribe travel to something called The Sanctuary. You do this through various powers such as raising and lowering land and moving water and lava. The star of the show is the landscape engine. Move a pile of dirt and it will flow neatly into a hill. Water will carve channels through the dirt to form rivers, but if you drop some lava and it will set into rock that will be a lot more robust. Your goal is to settle all the villages in each land, of which there will be a maximum of four, and each village will give you a new power. You can also collect repel water and lava powers that are flown as kites above the villages and these are very important to keep your villages alive. Once you have all the villages populated the exit lights up and you have to send some people there to end the level.

It all sounds very simple, and honestly it is. You might have to build some more islands to get them where they need to go, or build some defences against tidal waves which seem to happen every few minutes on some levels. You also need to manage lava and deal with the fact that it tends to set plants on fire, which causes out of control wildfires.

At its heart it’s a game wanting to be the world manipulation from populous, and it does this very well. Graphically it’s great, the atmosphere is spot on and using lava to create a breakwater to protect a village is immensely satisfying. The cracks start to show with the game though as the building is a bit too limited because of the task at hand, and rushing to grab villages isn’t nearly as hard as it could be even when you are diverting streams or massive lava flows.

At the end the game gives you a final level where the gloves are taken off and you get to place the villages as well as creating land, water and lava from out of thin air. This is a disappointing moment as you realise that when you are given the freedom to do anything all you need to is place four villages and then hold out against a collapsing island until an amount of time has elapsed. I’m not sure what I would have preferred, but I think it needs some more conflict instead of being against the environment.

As you complete each map you unlock challenges that go a bit further towards being an interesting game, but at the end it feels like a tech demo that has gotten a bit out of control, but it’s still worth playing if only for the experience. It feels like a stepping stone for an engine before a real game is added and the engine is more than ready for the challenge. I somehow managed to come away very disappointed that it never really goes anywhere and somewhat relieved that people can still experiment with games in this way. Take a look at the demo, and if you enjoy what you see and accept that there’s only a few days play in the game and it never really expands much beyond the first few levels then it’s an enjoyable way to try something new.

The game is out now on Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 points, and will show up for PC and PS3 over the next few months.


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Aug
04
2011

Review: Bastion

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August 4, 2011

250px-Bastion_BoxartSummer is notoriously rubbish for game releases, but luckily Microsoft have the Summer of Arcade promotion on Xbox Live Arcade so we get a few good games each year that are released in a window that doesn’t swamp them with competition from retail releases.

The first of these this year was Bastion, which is an isometric style RPG game. You collect weapons, upgrade them by collecting items dropped by monsters and scenery you destroy and level up your character with a solid, if simplistic system, but we’re not here for the mechanics with this game. We are here for the gameplay and style.

The big, attention grabbing feature for this game is that it has a dynamic voice over that describes what you do. Amazingly this works, from the basics of standing up and starting to explore at the start to details such as destroying lots of scenery when you don’t have to, getting killed and the like. I was expecting to get annoyed by it, but even at the end of the game it was still providing a large chunk of the atmosphere, and since that is the biggest pull for Bastion I suspect that turning it off would diminish the game greatly.

You play The Kid, a silent character who has survived something called The Calamity that has caused the world to be fractured. Everybody had agreed to meet up in The Bastion, so you set off to find this area. When you get there you meet the narrator and he sets you off to rebuild the world by collecting items to rejuvenate the bastion. As you move along the world rises up in front of you in a very pleasing way and the game has that artistically interesting feel that quite a few good smaller games have strived for over the last few years.

The key question is will you like this game? You will know within a few minutes if the narration annoys you so download the trial and give it a go. I suspect that only a few people will get annoyed by it and the rest will love it.

The game itself is short, as you would expect for an arcade game, but there is plenty of extra content beyond the plot with a new game+ mode after you complete it and a large number of challenges that you can complete.

Microsoft have chosen a very high quality game to start the Summer of Arcade this year, but it’s not one that takes many risks. This isn’t a bad thing, just them choosing a reliably solid opener and it’s certainly worth a look for 1200 Microsoft points. I believe a PC version will show up later in the year as well. Grab the trial and take a look, which you can set to download to your Xbox from this handy link.

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Mar
10
2011

Call of Duty: Black Ops

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March 10, 2011

Some games are very easy to complete, you can’t put them down and they are over far too soon. Other games may be short, but annoy you all the way through them and you actually start to wish they would end. Call of Duty: Black Ops was one of those latter games for me. It’s also a recent game, which makes a change from clearing my back catalogue.

I do like a good shooter, and Black Ops is undeniably a good shooter. The multiplayer is the pinnacle of the genre and Zombie mode is sublimely fun. It truly is the best game in it’s class for multiplayer. 10/10. Can’t wait for the next one to see how they make it even better.

The problem is that you don’t complete a game in the multiplayer and so I’m not writing about that. The single player is the one with the end credits and having seen them now all I can say is that for such a short game I found it a real slog.

This begs the question as to how I can not really enjoy a shooter with the best feeling mechanics for actually shooting at the moment. The answer, after a lot of thought, is the level design. I just really didn’t get on with the design direction for the game.

Firstly, but not very importantly, is the plot. The story is told mostly through flashbacks with you strapped to a chair in an interrogation room being asked about your past missions, which means you are jumping between black ops missions in places like Cuba, Russia and Vietnam. The plot isn’t uninteresting and almost hangs together but it never feels like it was really thought all the way through and is more of an excuse to string together the varied environments.

Since it’s the level design that got to me the most I’ll start by saying how great they look. A lot of care and attention has gone into the art design and there are some wonderful set pieces. Where it falls down for me is that there are very few points in the missions to enjoy the environments. You are pushed between firefights almost constantly. The ratio of action to downtime is too skewed for me to really enjoy myself and I can’t help but feel that the game could have been longer by adding more padding and actually been better for it.

I also didn’t like missing what I was meant to be doing because it wasn’t clear enough and there are some notoriously awkward moments in the game. A quick straw poll told me that everybody hated the level in Vietnam in the trenches because people missed how to stop the infinitely spawning enemies (kick the barrels down the hill) and a couple of my friends were stuck there and had given up until told how to actually do it.

Another thing that is getting to me more and more as time goes on is comical gore in games. I’ve never shot anybody with an incendiary shotgun in real life, but I’m pretty sure that their limbs don’t fall off quite like they do in this game. It’s a very violent game and some of the weapons are truly horrific, but it feels like they’ve stepped slightly beyond that and it’s a little bit off putting to me. Some of the deaths wouldn’t be out of place in a flamboyant shooter such as Bulletstorm.

It all comes together into a game that I should love, but don’t. The only reason to replay the single player campaign for me would be achievements, and that’s never a good sign. You never feel that you’re on a journey, you never feel like the world is anything more than an amusement park for your entertainment and worse of all it could probably all be fixed not pandering (I assume) to the hyper players who need 100% action, all the time.

At least the multiplayer is great.

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Mar
08
2011

Retro Review: DiRT

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March 8, 2011

The next game has been completed for the year. I felt in the mood for some rallying and so I grabbed Colin McRae DiRT off my shelf with the intentions of running a few races and then getting bored. Two days later and I had completed it, which says quite a lot about my mood and the game.

I am a big fan of driving games, in fact I think I play most of them, it’s just that I don’t finish very many. DiRT was put to one side for reasons that I really can’t remember, but I really suspect the problem was that I got in in June 2007. The other big games I got that month were Overlord (not completed yet) and Forza 2, which I played to death and well and truly completed. This makes DiRT a game I overlooked because of bad timing and so is a perfect example of why I’m doing this. In America it was just called DiRT, but we got the last remnants of the Colin McRae series of games technically linked through this new franchise.

DiRT is a game without much of a linking narrative. You have a career mode that has you working up a pyramid of events where each higher level has one less event than the last tier. There are eleven events in the first tier and eleven tiers so I make that 66 events in career mode, of which many are multi stage events. You earn cash for cars (which you will need) and new liveries (which you don’t) for them and each win gives you more points that unlock new events. It’s pretty standard stuff for a racing game.

This game marked the start of a new era for Codemasters racers. The engine has gone on to power every racing game they make and they all share a common look and feel. As there is now a law saying that all racing games must be compared to Gran Turismo 5 I shall do so, and since it does include a rally element it’s not an unfair comparison. Although graphically inferior to GT5 due to both age and the quality of that title the game in many ways actually looks better. From simple things like the trees being better to more mundane aspects like the menus being graphically interesting to a level that contrasts GT5s almost clinical presentation in places. The game really stacks up well to GT5 and it certainly gives a lot more attention to rallying than GT5 does.

The game features a mix of event types, from tradition stages through misty German forests to yellowy orange deserts. There are other events such as track based spectator racing and hill climbing  which mix things up but they all have the same general goal: be faster than everybody else.

Rating the car handling is a tricky one as I’ve never thrown an Impreza though the woods at 100mph. Not for lack of enthusiasm it should be noted, but my friend who actually had one back in the 90s deemed that a bad idea. When I think back about the ultimate fate of that car and how far into the field it ended up I think she may have had a point. Because of this I can only say that it seems good to me. It’s certainly not perfect and not near to the feel of Gran Turismo 5, but it’s respectable and sliding around hairpins feels satisfying.

Interestingly as the first in a (rebooted) series I can actually recommend it over the sequel as they went on a different direction with that title. The third game will be out soon and is going back more towards the feel of the first game and so until then it has to be the recommended rally game if you prefer more traditional rallying rather than the more Americanized focus in the second game. Even after a few years the game still feels fun, looks good and plays really well.

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Feb
01
2011

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfare

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February 1, 2011

I’m not a massive fan of Tom Clancy. I have no interest in the books, but I’ll watch a film if it’s on. I do own a rather large number of games that bare his name though, some of which I actually enjoyed.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warrior (or GRAW to people who want to finish saying the name this week) is a first person shooter that I got in the second month of owning my 360. It was the first proper console FPS I owned as well and needless to say that I didn’t get very far into it before giving up because it was too hard. I remember exactly what it was that actually made me give up: you can’t heal mid-mission.

The game is a 3rd person over the shoulder style squad based shooter that apparently can be played 1st person too but I didn’t even realise that before I checked a few facts for this. It’s very slow in design, with cover being very important and you not being able to take that many hits in a stand-up firelight. This feels quite nice and tactical and so the game actually ends up playing quite well. Your three squad mates are available for most of the missions, but they do seem a bit dumb in places so I tended to end up using them as a quite capable diversion while I maneuverer around the enemy to finish them off. The shooting isn’t very twitch based either, with a more deliberate line up and fire from a distance style being the order of the day. Occasionally I would get bored and charge in with a pistol to just clear some enemies out fast, but more often than not this will just get you killed unless you’re very aware of your situation.

This time I’m playing it on hard and it’s still a bit easy most of the time, unless it’s one of the bastard hard bits in which case it’s really annoying. More proof that I can learn new skills over time I guess, but the fact that you can’t heal during a mission is all that gives the game the difficulty. In a more modern FPS you can peek up from cover, take a shot and duck down again while taking a few bullets. You then shrug that damage off with a bit of good old Positive Thinking or maybe forgetting you took damage because you’re absent minded, but you can do it again and again without any serious repercussion. Even in a game with health packs you don’t worry too much about damage because you know the designers will be looking out for you after a hard bit with a well placed pack. With this game you have to avoid being hit as much as possible otherwise you just don’t have enough health to make it to the end of the level. I tried playing with cheats enabled to see how it would work if I could shrug off damage as there’s a helpful indicator during the tutorial that teaches you when you would die with the cheat enabled, but the game becomes almost boringly easy if you can behave like you can in Call of Duty. Luckily the levels are all very short so there are only a few places where the damage system is actually a real problem.

The premise is that you are a super soldier in the near future and a presidential visit to Mexico has all gone tits-up. It is up to you to get the presidents of America and Mexico to safety while a coup makes your job difficult. You have all sorts of near future technology available to you, like a HUD that tracks enemies and waypoints, and you can also command UAVs, Apache’s and tanks on the field to tell them where to go, what to shoot and the like. The controls are nice and easy and it feels pretty good to be calling down the airstrikes. There’s really something reassuring about having an Apache hovering overhead looking out for you, which I imagine is pretty true in real life as well.

The biggest problem I have is that the game is very short and I can complete it in a lazy Sunday of playing (my new standard unit of measurement for game length). The story is, in accordance with my view of Tom Clancy, unrealistically bollocks in the most part but makes sense at least with each mission following on from the last with a "couple of hellish days on the ground" vibe to it. This instantly makes it feel more connected and well written than the last few call of duty games in my mind. Even with my disliking the writing and situations I still had fun so if you like Tom Clancy then you’ll be in an even better situation with this game. Towards the end some of the dialogue does become painfully bad as well, especially the reactions of your fellow soldiers to you, but you soon get back to killing things.

Something the game never quite gets right is the atmosphere. It never feels like it is anything other than an anonymous sterile grey city that could be in any country and the city lacks any real character of it’s own. As I write this a little while after completing the game I’m at a loss to describe anything about the city that really stood out and the only real colour seemed to be in adverts and the odd bit of plant life.

When I first played this game back in 2006 I really didn’t like it. I died lots, it was unforgiving of mistakes and was just too slow to control. Now I actually quite enjoyed it. Not enough to care about the multiplayer to be fair, but I enjoyed the single player campaign and all the skulking about being a spec-ops badass. When played right there are only a few (deliberate) places where you don’t feel like you are in total control of the situation and outclassing your opponents to the point where they need tanks before you even start to break a sweat.

Graphically the game is pretty basic, with flat textured walls more reminiscent of the previous generations than this, but since this is a game from 2006 it must be forgiven that. At the time it was considered to look amazing, which is a nice reminder of how far this console generation has moved on over the years. Of course the graphics don’t matter in reality because the gameplay is solid, but the detail can make it a little hard to pick out distant enemies when your HUD hasn’t noticed them yet. There’s also a tendency to disrupt your HUD during missions just so you don’t have it any more, and when this happens at night it gets really hard to see what is going on and deal with distant enemies, especially when you realise that you have over extended your position, have no backup and can’t viably fall back to safety.

Having completed the game now I’m happy that I went back and took another look. It just plays so differently than the current crop of shooters that it actually made a nice difference for a genre I think I’m pretty much getting burned out on. It lacks the fun of Battlefield and the spectacle of Call of Duty, but the pace gives it the feeling of power that those other games miss nowadays. It’s more of a Black Hawk Down type experience rather than the 80s action film experience of most other shooters and I think it’s something that we need more of. That isn’t to say that it’s as good as Black Hawk Down of course as the atmosphere never really manages to develop fully but I think that’s all that really stands in the way of this being a much better game than it is.

I wanted to add some things about the game that really stood out to me, but as hard as I think I can’t think of anything special about it. There isn’t a single set piece, toy or plot point that makes it stand out in today’s market. If I had to say where this game should be considered in gaming history I would have to think hard. Earlier games in the series implement most of the features such as squad control and so I’m not sure I could find anything that makes the game stand out in the grand scheme of things. With the benefit of a half decade of hindsight this is a game that refined and did not innovate, which is something I think I will return to with future games.  As with Project Gotham Racing 3 there is very little to recommend this game to people as there was a sequel a year later that refined the experience again. It does make me look forwards to the next game in the series though, Future Soldier, which is due out this year or next.

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Jan
28
2011

Crackdown 2: Project Sunburst

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January 28, 2011

The next game I’ve completed this year is a phone title. In this case I decided maxing out the levels was how I would declare it completed as there isn’t actually anything plot wise to speak of.

The game is for Windows Phone 7, and has two unique selling points. The first is that it unlocks items in the Deluge multiplayer DLC for Crackdown 2 on 360, but that’s not really the interesting one. What makes the game interesting is that it is played over a real world map.

When you start the tutorial is the Microsoft campus in Seattle. A central base exists and you build guns within the control radius in order fight back a never ending onslaught of freaks and cell enemies (the bad guys from Crackdown 2). Technically the game is a tower defence game, but without most of the skill and planning that implies as although the enemies do travel along the roads roads you don’t really need to think too much about tower placement and can get away with just an intelligent placement of your base and having the right guns in the right place. Putting your base at the end of a long road and a laser that can fire down that road means that not much will get to your base from the rank and file, and only special mission targets will be a worry.

These missions trigger every so often and will either be to kill something or defend it so that it can reach your base. In return you get cash, XP and items that are needed in order to purchase upgrades to your base and weapons. Individual targets for these missions can be manually targeted so that one or more guns will hammer them, and while nothing is targeted the guns automatically fire at any nearby enemies.

After your bases have reached a high enough level you can activate project sunburst, which allows you to link three bases across the globe together and kill kill enemies within that triangle. This nets you cash and lots of XP, which really makes levelling up become so easy as to be trivial by the end.

You can assign people to your guns (which means nothing as far as I can tell) and so some fiddling around in your friends’ bases, but this seems totally pointless. I don’t know what else I can say about this feature as the only point I could see for it was to get an achievement. There’s no actual interaction with other players, you just get to see that your friends have played this game.In fact the main friends list is hidden away on the UI so that I think many players just aren’t going to see it.

The problem with the game is that there isn’t more to it than that. It doesn’t get more difficult and it doesn’t require you to adapt to situations. In fact when going for the final achievement I just had to set my guns targeting a point and leave the phone connected to power for a day while I played other games on other systems. I’m still not sure why I decided the last achievement was worth getting actually. There’s just nothing there beyond the gimmick of playing on a real world satellite map, and that gets old very quickly. After you have gotten a couple of bases up to level 3 and fired your first sunburst you have seen everything. It seems like a waste to me, the scope for the idea is great but it seems like they only implemented the first pass of ideas. If you play the free trial of the game you will get an idea as to what it’s about and see most of the content in fact.

I’m not sure if it was Crackdown nostalgia, but something about the game did make me get max level and get all the achievements, including the one that needed me to kill a quarter of a million enemies with a gun (target a laser at a point down the road, go play PS3). The sounds of the XP coming in is taken from the 360 games and that may be it, but I’m not sure. All I know is that I’m unlikely to ever play this game again and I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody.

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Jan
26
2011

Review: Deathspank

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January 26, 2011

If there’s one genre of games that hasn’t exactly been popular recently in the mainstream it’s adventure games. Many years ago the torch was held high by companies like Lucasarts with games like Monkey Island. Nowadays the torch is mainly held high by Telltale Games and games like, er, Monkey Island. Deathspank is an adventure game by somebody closely linked with Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, so expectations were high.

It launched last July and I played through for a while before getting distracted. I can’t remember why, probably the latest shiny came out and I was in a bit of a gaming lull then anyway but after seeing a friend play it last week I jumped in again this weekend and in fact ended up spending money because of it as I grabbed the sequel as well. Never underestimate the power of 3rd party sites being able to track what your friends are playing to get people back to your games and drive sales, something incidentally that I think Sony needs to address with the PSN.

Deathspank is a 3D adventure game that sees you, as the titular character, seeking out The Artifact. It’s a fantasy world that’s full of humour and nods to other titles, even going as far as mentioning World of Warcraft by name. In fact the game has been influenced greatly by Blizzard I would say, with it feeling very much like a single player MMO with a lot of the quests being the sort of thing you would expect from something like WoW, with there being many nods to the absurdness of MMO quests in general. Gilbert actually described the game early on as Monkey Island meets Diablo, but it’s probably more accurate to say that it’s a humourous adventure with a diablo style gear system, and therefore quite like some MMOs too.

Graphically the game is very good. It has a cartoon style with some nice animation. The world is presented as if it’s on a rotating world that’s far too small to contain more than a short distance away from you. this means that as you’re walking along the background can be rotating into view in a very pleasing way. A lot of elements such as trees and buildings are flat billboards which helps to give the style a very distinctive look that works well for the game. In fact it almost oozes charm all the way through.

One really nice feature is that the game is fully voiced, and the voice of Deathspank himself is worthy of note in an over the top way. If there is a problem with this, then it’s the fact that while taking swipes at MMOs it’s actually taking another subtler swipe at the fact that they aren’t fully voiced. I don’t think it intends to do this, but it”s something that stood out as a contrast for me.

Deathspank is one of those games that you either get or don’t; you either like the humour or find it annoying and smug. If you like Ron Gilbert style humour you will most likely love the game and should have played it already. If you don’t the you should probably really avoid this game. I found myself drawn to not only complete the game (my 3rd of the year already, I’m doing well) but I also ended with getting all the achievements. This is mainly because there were only a couple that I wouldn’t have gotten just from how I played through it, but I did continue playing after the credits to grab my last 1/3rd of a level to reach level 20.

It’s not an overly long game, and as a download available on PS3, 360 and PC it’s not expected to be so. It will suck up a pleasing solid day of play though if you’re going through and completing all the quests while seeing the world. It’s well worth the asking price

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Jan
21
2011

Retro Review: Project Gotham Racing 3

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January 21, 2011

The second game I’ve completed this year is another of the games I grabbed in the first month of owning my xbox back in 2006: Project Gotham Racing 3. PGR3 is an event based racing game from Bizarre Creations that was a launch title for the 360 and so is really a snapshot in history for a genre of games where the similarities between titles and franchises are greater than the differences. That’s a polite and overly complicated way of saying it’s a racing game from 2006 and things have moved on, but all racing games are 95% the same anyway.

The game features 21 tournaments that unlock as you progress through the list; each tournament completed gives you a medal and events are unlocked by having a certain number of these medals, for instance the final tournament requires you to have completed (at any difficulty) all 20 preceding tournaments. For most of the time you have more than one unlocked so if you’re stuck on one you can try something else in the meantime. Each tournament has a number of events that range from normal races to exercises in  car control such as driving through cones or passing a speed camera at a certain speed. It falls down with the age old scaling issue that most racing games have, and before long you can afford a really fast car that blows the competition away for most of the events, but things like the cone challenges do manage to start to bring the challenge back in by requiring you to be able to control the car instead of just use a surplus of power in the straights to make up for lack of ability.

While racing you earn Kudos, which is a score based on your driving style. It rewards things like drafting, drifting and overtaking and crazy late breaking with a chain of points that build up as you race. This chain is broken by hitting the barriers, at which point those points are lost and you have to start a new chain. If you go for a little while without gaining any extra kudos then that chain ends and those points are added to your score. It’s an interesting system, but it was hard to shake the feeling that it was rewarding me for not driving smoothly. Even on events like the cone challenges where you have to beat a score by passing cleanly through cones I found that it was much easier to just power slide around the corners carefully and grab the majority of my points from that instead of paying any attention to the cones beyond avoiding hitting them.

The car selection is pretty focused, or limited depending on your point of view, as every car bar one or two DLC cars can reach 170mph. This means that there are a lot of cars from Ferrari and the like and you’re not going to be racing a Toyota Yaris in any of the races. Despite how that sounds, and despite the fact that the performance of the cars was chosen specifically to be fast, I found that it meant that the game lacked variety after a while compared to something like Gran Turismo. There just aren’t any oddball races that make you smile, or technically hard races with non-racing cars. Overall you can’t really hold this against the game beyond noting that it’s focused with it’s car choice.

When you start each race you choose which difficulty you want to race on, and are awarded only the medal for that difficulty. The lower difficulties have correspondingly easier conditions, such as only having to come 3rd in a race or getting a lower kudos score but this feels a bit odd as if you complete an event with a better result than you need to you don’t automatically get a higher medal so I found myself running events multiple times before I found my level. After a while I stopped doing this and just ran it all just below the point where I would have found it challenging just to complete the game, which isn’t exactly a good sign. It was just too frustrating to constantly run events again after I completed them, but I could see people going back and working on the higher levels over time if there now weren’t a lot of better driving games to play.

While there are only five locations in the game, four cities and the Nurburgring, the game gives you a really nice mixture of tracks. Each track has a range of options and layouts that actually give you a really large number of individual tracks in five locations. The least variations are of course at Nurburgring, the real track, although it does feature both the modern circuit and the classic incredibly long track that seems to be legally required to be in nearly every racing game ever made. For some events you start on one and end up on the other, which is really nice and I can’t think of another game where that happens although it does happen in real life racing. The city locations are interesting as there are a lot of variations that the game allows within each city. In fact there is also a track editor that lets you define a race by selecting points in the cities and the game automatically adds barriers to create that route. This is a really nice feature and actually feels more useful than something like the track editor in Gran Turismo 5.

In my initial play through back in 2006 I didn’t get very far through the game and seem to have gotten bogged down on a cone challenge that I managed to pass with no problems this week so I’ve obviously improved as a gamer quite a lot. It helps that driving game skills are transferable between titles and once you understand the basics of cornering, breaking intelligently and actually using controller you end up with a solid set of skills for all driving games.

Back in 2006 this was a pretty cutting edge game and graphically a large leap over the generation before it, but unfortunately launch title graphics doesn’t compare to the graphics of games from half a decade later so it does look very dated. On some sections the slightly jagged graphics caused the grey of the road to merge with the barriers and make looking into the distance, which is where you tend to focus in racing games, slightly difficult. It still plays OK, but the fact that there is a sequel that was released a couple of years after it makes it pretty hard to recommend to anybody, even on price. Some of the offline features are also now defunct although I believe if you could find somebody you wanted to play with then you could still play online.
The hidden gem in the game is in the garages in which you store your cars. There is a mode to wonder around your garage and look at the cars, but there are also a couple of arcade games machines sitting in the garage. These contain Geometry Wars, a game that was later released as two Xbox Live Arcade games and is a very good twin-stick shooter. Of course you are better off getting the stand alone games but at the time it was a really nice touch having very playable games inside of the game.

Nowadays with the uncertainty surrounding Bizarre Creations and their future it was nice to go back and remember where they came from back when PGR was the other racing series of choice on the 360.

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