30 Days of Night is a really interesting and unique take on vampires. Dark Days takes place shortly after the original series. Stella Olemaun heads to Los Angeles, where she is trying to expose the Barrow, Alaska, attack via a book. Certain vampires are after her, including the Queen, and the comic gets pretty intense.
I loved how things just happened unabashed, like the main characters dying off. It just happened out of nowhere and shocked me, and the comic just moved on. Ben Templesmith’s art continues to bring the series to life and gives it a very dark and gruesome atmosphere. Stella isn’t really on the run, which is a nice change. The vampires are afraid of her and respect her, but a change of events happens. She ends up trying to get her husband back, who died in Barrow, but I won’t say how. The whole series is so well-paced and keeps you turning pages.
I really can’t complain about this series except that it’s too short. I really wanted to see it go on, but it ended right when you were most curious. I love Stella’s attitude; she’s both brave and makes stupid choices at the same time. She’s a bit too bold and cocky, but she’s also sensitive in a way. Her undying love for her husband is really touching, and the other characters are great. I honestly recommend this series to anyone who has read the original series. Newcomers should stay away because you will have to have read the original series to understand what’s going on here.
Amnesia is probably one of the scariest games ever made. I’m talking about The Dark Descent. It made you fear every sound and corner due to the fact that you couldn’t fight enemies. The atmosphere was so scary and haunting, not to mention the extremely scary monsters. A Machine for Pigs gets picked up by a new developer, The Chinese Room, of Dear Esther fame. While it’s still scary and haunting, it doesn’t make you fear every second like the first game did.
Honestly, the story is confusing and makes no sense. It’s a garbled mess, and all I got out of it was that there was a machine that processed pigs for mass consumption in 1899. You play as a man named Mandus who is trying to find his two boys who went down into the depths of this machine. That’s pretty much all I got out of it. What this machine is doing is creating man-pigs that are trying to “cleanse” the town of people for the coming 20th century. The ending sucked, and the game is overall just really short and anticlimactic.
A lot of features were stripped from The Dark Descent. You no longer use tinderboxes to light areas, and you don’t need oil for your lamp. You just run around with a lantern, flipping switches, and solving extremely basic puzzles. The Dark Descent had you really scratching your head, but A Machine for Pigs doesn’t even try to challenge you. In fact, there aren’t even that many monster encounters. Sure, when you reach them, they are scary and intense, but the first 2/3 of the game is uneventful. As you get to the last few chapters, it’s mostly story and nothing else. The whole feeling of progress from The Dark Descent is absent here, which makes no sense. A Machine for Pigs felt more like a barely interactive story than a game.
Towards the end of the game, it just feels disjointed and unbalanced. You bounce around from level to level, and nothing feels connected. Many times, in the beginning, I wandered around, not knowing where to go or what to do. The game just lacks guidance or real direction and can’t be felt from the very first level.
That doesn’t mean the game is bad. It’s not nearly as good or memorable as The Dark Descent should be. The graphics are really dated, despite the nice art style that is carried over from The Dark Descent. A Machine for Pigs feels like an average indie horror game with a story that can’t be followed. Fans of the original will be highly disappointed, but newcomers should just skip this and play the first game.
Remember Me is a brand new IP from Capcom. I always welcome new IPs because you never know when you’re going to get the next Assassin’s Creed. Once I started to remember me, I instantly fell in love with it. The art style is fantastic, the story is engaging, and the characters are memorable. This will be a game I talk about for years to come—at least the story anyway.
You are Nilin, a memory hunter fighting against M3morize. M3morize is a corporation that invented technology to let you forget any memory you want and gain memories. As you can tell, this leads to civil war because everyone eventually becomes Leapers, who are completely corrupted and bereft of memories. It turns out that there is some sort of new world order to wipe out everyone’s memories and make them all mindless soldiers. That’s the gist of it, and if I say any more, I will give too much away. The story is fascinating and really plays well with the art style and atmosphere.
The problem with new IPs is that the developers concentrate on just one aspect of the game, and the rest gets left behind. This is apparent in Assassin’s Creed 1 after playing AC3. You can see the difference. Remember Me has an amazing story and characters, but the gameplay is just lacking; it just feels useless and unnecessary. The tools you have to play don’t really mean anything in this game, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. The first thing is the combat system. While it’s unique, it is very limited and actually holds the player back. Nilin has four different combos she can do over the course of the game. You fill these combos with two different attack buttons called presses. These presses can increase your health, decrease S-Pressen cooldown timers, give you more powerful attacks, and cause a chain reaction. This seems really interesting—gaining health during combat? It’s more frustrating and limited than you think. With just four combo chains, you have to memorize all four of them and also remember what presses are in each one. I had one as a focused cool-down combo, then one for health, and the third was for power. The further in the combo the pressen, the bigger the effect. With just four combos, combat gets really repetitive and super boring; it just never picks up.
Once you unlock S-Pressens, things get a tad bit interesting, but only during boss fights. These are powers that can let you attack really fast, stun everyone, place a bomb, and even turn invisible and get a one-hit-kill on an enemy. You can use two different ones on robot enemies that will attack you. These S-Pressens are key to winning tougher battles later in the game. That’s all there is to combat, and it is so limiting and repetitive. I actually only kept going because of the story.
Another part of the game that is never fully developed are the puzzles. There are only four in the entire game. These allow you to remix people’s memories to make them think something happened in a different way. You watch a cutscene and then rewind it, looking for glitches that can change the scene. You have to set off the right glitches to change the memory. The problem is that there are no multiple outcomes. You just keep retrying until you get it right; there’s no fun in that. If I mess with someone’s memory, let me decide how it goes. I also wish there were more of them. There are also memory puzzles that you interact with in the world. They are usually really easy, and the answer is given to you after just a minute. I hate how these things were so underdeveloped; they are great concepts. There are a couple of move-the-stuff puzzles using your arm’s special powers, but I felt these were useless. You unlock a gun-type thing that can blast enemies and move things. Why do I need to unlock this throughout the game? Honestly, the moving and blasting open doors just felt like pointless filler.
Lastly, the exploration is very linear. The controls respond well, but the best part is just viewing everything. You get taken from the slums to the richest areas of the city. The journey is fascinating and breathtaking. Remember Me feels like a mix of Mirror’s Edge, Steven Spielberg’s A.I., and Blade Runner. I ate it up, and the characters are very memorable. I just wish it had better gameplay to complement it.
After you finish the game, you will be talking about the amazing story for a while. While none of these mechanics are bad, they are just underdeveloped and feel like they need more work. The combat is interesting but very limited and repetitive; the same five enemies repeat often; and the puzzles are underdeveloped. I hope Remember Me comes back because I love Nilin and her journey through this breathtaking world, which just gives us better tools to explore it.
Metro 2033 pretty much blew up in Russia and became a cult classic. The video was a pretty big hit in the US, yet no one really knows about the book. While Last Light is based on the first book, some of the events in the first game are taken out of the first book. You follow Artyom. A young Russian boy lives in the metro below Moscow. He is just trying to get through everyday life when a mysterious man named Hunter comes by and gives him a mission. As you follow Artyom through the Metro, you are constantly reminded of the darkness. This isn’t just regular darkness. It’s an entity, and it envelops your mind and soul. It’s thick and impenetrable. There’s something always lurking in the background—or is there? The psychological terror that everyone goes through in the Metro keeps you tense throughout the whole book.
While the book is light on action, it’s spaced apart pretty far. The dreary atmosphere drags you into the book and keeps you turning the pages. There are some odd moments that don’t make sense, but overall, the book is very mysterious. There’s some magic thrown in that isn’t quite explained. Strange monsters have been mutated by the radiation, but the mystery is always in the air. Nothing is explained, so you are always wondering what’s going on in the world. Artyom’s main goal to destroy the Dark Ones that are trying to take over the Metro is very tough and brutal; the story is just really memorable, and you will talk about it with friends.
If you ever played the game, you need to pick up the book because there are things that you couldn’t come across in the game. If you have never played the games, you are in for a treat. Anyone who wants something truly different and original in the horror genre should pick up this post-apocalyptic book.
The idea of using shadows as puzzles is fascinating, and Contrast has one of the most unique puzzle elements I have seen since Portal. Arranging objects in a room to make the layout of the shadows just right to get to where you need them can be very satisfying. Bringing objects into the shadow world and pulling them out is also very fun. The story is also kind of touching. You play Dawn, who has a mysterious childhood friend, Didi, whose parents are going through hard times, and she wants to bring them back together. Her father is always getting into debt trouble and decides to open a circus using a magician. Everything goes wrong for her father, so it’s up to her and Dawn to fix it all.
The story itself is pretty interesting, but the ending stinks. It honestly just ends, and you never find out what this mysterious shadow world is. She and Dawn are the only people who are in the real world. Her parents talk to her on the walls as shadows. It makes me wonder if Didi has mental issues and is imagining all this. Is Dawn a figment of her imagination? No one else can see her, but it’s never explained. These mysteries can be frustrating in the end when they never make sense.
The game is actually poorly paced. There are a lot of little cutscenes that break everything up, and it gets really annoying. You will walk ten feet, cutscene, walk ten more feet, scene, pull a switch, scene, solve an easy puzzle, scene, and it continues like this. The puzzles are extremely easy, and a few were head-scratchers for a few minutes towards the end, but nothing I couldn’t solve after a little thinking. The game is very linear, and you only explore a few areas, but explore is the wrong word to use here. The only thing you can do that’s extra is find collectibles and find luminaries to be able to start certain puzzles. That is literally all there is to this game.
The game itself can be beaten in about 4 hours. The graphics are really nice; however, they are a little dated, and there are numerous bugs and glitches. The game would crash; Dawn would get stuck in a T pose during certain jumps; Crates would get stuck due to weird physics issues; and they all required restarts. That’s unacceptable, and hopefully it will be patched. I honestly can’t recommend this game for the asking price, but maybe for a sale, it would be worth it. The game isn’t bad; it just seriously lacks content and depth and has a disappointing ending. The shadow puzzles are very inventive and fun to do, but they just need to be more.
Pikmin is one of Nintendo’s lesser-known franchises. While the first two were fairly successful on the GameCube, they didn’t reach sales numbers that matched Mario or Zelda. Pikmin 3 was a great start for the Wii U, especially with a system with so few games that it can garner the attention it needs. The game is cute, whimsical, and easy to play, but it has a lot of micromanagement that can frustrate players.
Like most Nintendo franchises, this game isn’t about the story. You play as three different spacemen who are venturing into the solar system to find food and sustenance for their home planet. This is your main goal for the game. Each day, you need to find fruit to bring back to your ship, which then turns into juice. Depending on how many people are at your party on that day, one juice will be consumed per person. This is where things get frustrating. When you’re on the ground, you go around collecting tokens that are used in the Pikmin Onions to create Pikmin. The Pikmin must carry these to the onion, and some tokens require a certain amount of Pikmin. If you spend a lot more than the required amount, the token will get carried faster. You can also bring enemy carcasses to the onion to convert to Pikmin as well, which is a neat idea. Of course, you will lose Pikmin if they get caught up in water (except blue Pikmin) or killed by enemies. That’s not even the frustrating part. You get about 10 minutes for the entire day to explore the area, gather Pikmin, and find fruit. Two days would go by where I get caught up on a boss, need to gather more Pikmin because I’m low, or just figure out where the fruit is.
This sounds frustrating because it really is. I wish the day cycle wasn’t here; it makes things annoying. I wound up losing 100 Pikmin because they were carrying a boss carcass and fruit back to the ship, and I missed getting them in the safe zone by 1 second. So I spent two days gathering more Pikmin and another day finding fruit. In the meantime, I consumed three juices, which left me with one. If I hadn’t found fruit on that third day, I would have had a game over. Super frustrating, and that’s honestly not much fun.
Other than this major frustration, the game is super enjoyable. The game is paced really well, and I felt I was blazing through areas at a brisk pace. The game keeps you on your toes with inventive enemy designs and bosses. The variety of Pikmin is nice since they are based on elements. Rock Pikmin can smash through crystal and glass and do massive damage to enemies. Yellow Pikmin can electrocute, and Red Pikmin are your base Pikmin, are resistant to fire, and are great fighters. Blue Pikmin can swim but aren’t good fighters. You can swap around these Pikmin and order them around with the right analog stick. I just found that micromanaging them got annoying because they can get lost and stuck in places if you leave them behind, so I lost many Pikmin from that. Sometimes I just downright lost them somewhere and had to leave them behind.
The Battle Mode is really fun. A bingo battle pits two players against each other in an effort to gather four cards in a row. You have to collect fruit, defeat enemies, and achieve various other objectives. There’s no online multiplayer, which is a crying shame, but two players on the couch are better than nothing. This mode can be really addictive, and the mission mode will keep you coming back after the story mode is complete.
The game is actually one of the best-looking Wii U games out there. It really shows the power of the Wii U with a depth of field, high-resolution textures, and some great lighting effects. There are some ugly textures, like the dirt. It looks like Wii textures; maybe this was a rush job from Nintendo, I don’t know. The previous complaint about the micromanagement and the daily limit was too short. No online multiplayer is a bummer, but overall, this is a really nice package, and any Wii U owner should check this game out.
Brothers is about two boys who travel across their land to find a magic sap from a very special tree. They need this sap to heal their father, who has come down with a life-threatening illness. That’s pretty much all there is to the story. However, that’s not the touching part. Brothers don’t really start hitting your feelings until the end. Brothers have a unique gameplay mechanic where you control each brother with an analog stick. It takes some getting used to, and you never completely get used to it, but using both brothers at the same time is a unique way to play a game.
The game consists of simple puzzles. They aren’t complicated and don’t take much thinking to figure out. Some puzzles only certain brothers can solve. There may be a gate that the smaller brother can squeeze through so he can lower a bridge for the bigger brother. Sometimes they have to work side by side, such as in the water. The smaller brother can’t swim, so he needs to hold onto the older brother. The only other buttons you use are the triggers. One was assigned to each brother for grabbing stuff.
There are some boss fights in the game that are a lot of fun. One early on consists of fighting a troll. The little brother needs to lure him into a cage while the older brother closes it with a lever nearby. There’s only one way in, so the little brother has to slip through bars to escape. It’s moments like this that make Brothers shine and make you smile. Later on, in the game, it gets darker and grimmer. Puzzles involve dismembering the dead corpses of giants. The gameplay ideas change throughout the game, like when they have a rope tied to each other and you use it to swing each other around cliffs. The game feels like a grand adventure, but it’s short-lived. You can beat it in 4 short hours, wanting so much more.
The game looks really good; while not technically impressive, the art style is great, and the game has many beautiful vistas. The story lacks any depth, but it’s the adventure that counts here. If you have a free evening of gaming, Brothers is one of the best indie games you can buy this year.
Gears of War is the Xbox 360’s best series and one of the best of this generation. It introduced cinematic gameplay in a gritty post-apocalyptic world with revolutionary gunplay and cover systems. Judgment proves that all series run out of steam. It’s the worst Gears game, but not terrible. People Can Fly (of Painkiller fame) took the driver’s seat thanks to their successful collaboration with Epic during the development of Bulletstorm. Judgment isn’t anything like the previous games in a bad way. It’s dragged down by balance issues, linearity, and a poor story.
Let’s start with the story. It takes place years before Delta Squad was formed and Baird was a lieutenant. He’s accompanied by UIR Paduk, Sofia Hendrick, and Augustus Cole. They are arrested and are being held in a trial in the middle of a battlefield by Colonel Loomis. You play their flashbacks as testimonies. Honestly, the story never goes anywhere, and there’s nothing gripping about it. You just play as each character in short 30- to 45-minute chapters. Once you catch up to the present moment, you play one more chapter, and that’s it. Nothing interesting at all. Even the bonus chapter called Aftermath is pretty lame. It takes place after Gears of War 3, but all you’re doing is finding a boat to get out to sea. There’s nothing revealing about the overall story.
Challenge and pacing take a back seat as well. Judgment is all about the kill count, and tactical combat takes a back seat. All the enemy’s health has been dialed back a lot, so you can run around pumping them with lead. It got so bad that 5–6 enemies would pile up on you or an ally. This would never happen in previous Gears games. I honestly rarely used cover and just went around blasting enemies with the Gnasher. The game is broken up into sections, with score totals at the end. The only awesome thing about Judgement that impressed me was the declassified missions. These are giant red gear logos on the wall at the beginning of each section, which makes the game a bit more challenging. Ranging from time limits to certain weapons, more enemies, more defenses, etc. These also increase your star rating, which is used to unlock items and achievements.
Halfway through the game, it starts getting extremely repetitive. I honestly almost hated the game, but the action itself kept me hooked because it was faster-paced than previous games and a bit more exciting. There really isn’t much new added to this game either. There’s one new enemy that acts as a mini-Berserker. Once you shoot it, it will grow bigger, and only headshots will kill it. There are a few new weapons, but they are UIR weapons. The Booshka is a grenade launcher, and the Markza is a sniper rifle with a fast firing rate. There’s also another rifle that is nearly as deadly as a Longshot but fires four rounds before reloading. I wanted more content; honestly, even the levels were generic and boring. It’s the same hallways and battlefields over and over. The overall game is just really disappointing.
Once you finish the campaign, there’s really no reason to go back unless you really want all the stars, find the hidden COG tags, or play co-op. The multiplayer is probably the best out of all the Gears games, but it lacks content. There aren’t many maps, and Horde mode is absent, but there’s a substitute mode called Survival and Overrun. Survival pits a Gears team against an AI-controlled locust, and Overrun lets players control the locusts. This mode is intense and another small step in the evolution of the Gears multiplayer suite. The classic modes are back and feel as solid as ever, but the lack of maps may bore players quicker than in previous games.
Overall, Judgment is a huge disappointment. The campaign is generic, short, and almost boring; the tactical side of Gears is taken away for running and gunning. Multiplayer suffers from a lack of maps, but at least there’s a lot of customization stuff to unlock for your characters. You now get rewarded for all those kills and ribbons you earn in the form of prizeboxes. The graphics look great and push the 360 to its limits, but the console is seriously aged, and it shows. Judgment is a fun weekend rental or bargain purchase. At this point, Gears of War needs a reboot to keep going.
Max Brooks has become the number-one expert on zombies as of late. The Zombie Survival Guide seems like some gag gift or joke for the paranoid or extremely nerdy. Most people will imagine a fat, sweaty bearded man with coke bottle glasses reading this in his mom’s basement with a headlamp in sheer panic. It’s not really like that at all. This guide is so well written, and Max cancels out nearly every contradiction as to how this can’t happen. This book is so believable that you stop sometimes and wonder how that can’t be possible and then realize there isn’t one!
The book is broken up into sections; you get started on what a zombie is and the basic workings of how a zombie functions. Zombies aren’t reanimated from graves; they aren’t voodoo zombies; they are humans who contracted a virus called Solanum, and Max explains this as a scientific medical condition. After you get to know what a zombie is, Max will take you through survival by running and defending yourself. He talks about terrain types, vehicles, supplies, weapons, defense and offense tactics, and various other survival skills. The book does a good job convincing you that this is what you should do, thanks to Max’s writing style, where he gets straight to the point and cuts out all the nonsense.
He talks about how to fight, when not to fight, and how to detect signs of a zombie outbreak. They are in four different classes. 1 is just a few zombies, and class 4 is Armageddon. He will also give you tactics on how to defend and fight in different environments, like large skyscrapers and small one-story homes. He completely cancels out all Hollywood clichés and various other zombie garbage that has become “fake” over the years. This is a very detailed guide, and if zombies do start popping, I actually feel I could survive against them thanks to this novel.
Later on, you can read “real-life stories” that happened and are both scary and somewhat convincing. One was even set in my hometown! Max’s writing is full of suspense and will keep you hooked until the end. I just felt the book was a bit short and could have used more content. One thing I liked was the crappy “survival guide drawings” that were peppered throughout the book. It gave the book a layer of humor that you wouldn’t expect. By the time I flipped to the last cover, I felt educated and prepared for a large and small-scale zombie attack. While I was reading, I was thinking about my own living situation and how I would defend it or run. That’s a good writer if he can make you think that. Zombie Survival Guide is a must-have for any zombie fan or survival guide fanatic.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown was one of the best TBS games to come out in years. It had tightly coordinated tactical gameplay that packed a punch and kept you on your toes. The Bureau kind of keeps this idea while bringing you into the dice-rolled battles firsthand so you can control them. The game takes place after the Cold War, when agent William Carter is tasked with helping save the entire planet from an alien invasion. That is one hefty mission, but you have squadmates to bring alongside you.
XCOM is a third-person cover-based tactical shooter. It pretty much feels like a zoomed-in, more detailed Enemy Unknown. You will encounter some of the same enemies, and the art style is even the same. You can snap into a cove and order your squad to do things like lift an enemy up, heal, revive, throw out traps like mines, sharpshoot an enemy, etc. You can queue these up while time slows down and watch it all unfold. It’s a very powerful tool in this game and can get you out in a pinch. The shooting itself is mediocre. Weapons never feel all that powerful and somehow just feel off. Ammo runs out constantly, and you can end up weaponless a lot of the time in a hot firefight. At least the levels are well laid out enough for you to find adequate cover and plan your attack.
There’s really not much else to the game outside of shooting. You move from fight to fight, pressing switches or finding the intel. The game is a bit on the cinematic side, and the opening sequence is pretty awesome. Once you are back at HQ, you can walk around and talk to people, start side missions, and upgrade your squad and loadout. You get the same death penalty as in Enemy Unknown. A completely leveled-up squad member can be lost in battle if you don’t revive them in time; however, the revive time is way too quick to pass. It’s not enough time for someone to go to a battleground and save someone. This becomes frustrating since leveling up takes so long. When you do choose squad members, you can choose from snipers, close combat, medics, and various other classes. This mainly just determines their skill tree.
I also found it annoying that weapons are slow to unlock. 25% of the way through the game, I only found a few weapons and two alien weapons. There are various other blueprints or technologies you can find to turn into other things, but they’re not as deep as Enemy Unknown. What’s here is solid fun, but it gets repetitive and boring quickly. Every battle turns out the same; you get the occasional boss fight, but it just gets so monotonous that there would be more substance. The game looks pretty good on PC but looks very dated on consoles. It’s nothing special, but the attention to detail in the Cold War-era atmosphere is pretty awesome and engaging.
As it stands, The Bureau is a solid shooter that takes the tactical RTS gameplay and puts you in the driver’s seat. The atmosphere is well captured, and the skill tree system makes battles easier, but the frustration of perma-loss when a squad member dies is excruciating. The overall combat can get dull and repetitive early on, with nothing in between.
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Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !