Remember those super-hard games from the 8/16-bit era? Well, it’s come back to haunt with this little game that is so simple in design yet so hard in execution. You guide an orange block over spikes and pits to the end of the level. All you do is tap to jump and hold to do quick jumps. It sounds simple, but the levels are brutally hard because they require precise skill and focus. There is a practice mode that lets you drop the flag with a touch of a button, and when you die, you respawn there instead of at the beginning of the level.
Of course, you can delete these flags if you spawn one in the wrong area, but man, this game is almost impossible! The game has a nice soundtrack that flows with your jumping, but most people will hate this game due to its high difficulty level. All I have to say is that hardcore platformer fans will die for this game and love it. All I wish is that there was an easy mode or something, but there’s a lot of great game here for a buck.
The Red Faction series has been very rocky since the first game was released in 1998. Guerrilla revolutionized the series with a massive destruction engine that allowed you to destroy anything standing. Armageddon builds on this but gives us new characters and a whole new enemy to fight, but this time under the surface of Mars. Darius Mason is the great-great-grandson of Alec Mason. You get a job to excavate some sort of artifact and awaken a whole race of Martian creatures. The story is pretty riveting and takes you on a wild ride to finally beat the Marauders, as well as a long ancestral war. The characters are likable and are fleshed out really well, especially between Darius and his AI SAM, who guides him through the game. Their bantering will sometimes make you laugh with some pretty witty dialog.
The heart of the game is the combat. The game isn’t an open-world like last time, but a guided linear adventure that is actually more suited for the series. You can destroy anything in your path by using a large explosion or magnet gun. Shoot at one point, then link it to another, and it will drag and pull apart anything in its path. You can even do this to enemies, which is kind of amusing. The hammer is back, but pretty much useless since you are overwhelmed by a ton of enemies most of the time. The new Arsenal kicks ass with some pretty sweet weapons. The nanorifle returns and disintegrates anything in its path. There’s a black hole launcher that sucks anything nearby up and then explodes. Of course, there are the usual weapons like rifles, rocket launchers, and shotguns of various types, but the new weapons are very unique.
Most of the time, you are blowing up various creatures of different sizes, but the game encourages finding strategies for each alien. This requires swapping out weapons all the time and finding which ones work in certain situations. You will come across points where you have to destroy spawn points, large tentacles, and behemoth aliens. It’s challenging, but just enough so that you can actually finish the game without dying constantly. You always feel like you’re on the run and never safe for a second. The objectives vary, and there are some really awesome vehicle sections in the game.
Using the walkers is awesome, with certain sections slapping different weapons on the walkers as well as the spaceship section. These parts don’t last long, but you always look forward to them thanks to great controls and the feeling of finally being able to overpower the alien threat. You can upgrade yourself by finding scrap metal, and there are a lot of upgrades. These range from health to weapon power and your nanoburst. The nanoburst allows you to push enemies away, create a shield, and even make a shockwave to get out of tight situations.
One of the most unusual parts of Armageddon is being able to rebuild things you destroyed. You can rebuild anything that was blasted away, and most of the objectives require using this to repair things. This can also be used in combat by rebuilding cover that broke away, so you have a ton of things at your disposal for combat. I never really got bored with the game because the action was constant and there were so many variables for combat. If I had to choose something bad about the combat, I would say some of the environments are a little cramped, and there are times when you feel the enemies will just never stop coming. It is also little in variety besides the few levels with humans, but 90% of the time you will be fighting the same aliens over and over again.
Multiplayer is fun, but it won’t last long due to the lack of people playing. There is a Ruin Mode, which lets you just destroy things, and a few other modes to let you continue using the awesome things Armageddon lets you have, so there is some replayability here. The visuals use DirectX 10 and 11, if you can run them, which adds great visual quality over the consoles and DX 9. I’m not sure why it uses 10 and 11, but the game does look pretty good in most areas. Overall, Armageddon is the best (and sadly, the last) Red Faction game, so enjoy it while you can and get destroying!
Hydrophobia was a game that was announced a few years ago but quickly forgotten about. It seemed to have gone into the way of vaporware, but suddenly it came back as an XBLA game. The game boasted excellent water and physics to support it, as well as a mantra of “the water is your enemy” as a selling point. Upon release, the game seemed highly overrated, with dated visuals, poor combat, and lackluster level design. While most of this is true, there is still something to be had in hydrophobia.
The PC port boasts better graphics and refined gameplay mechanics, but there are still some issues. The water physics are really incredible, and I haven’t seen anything quite like it with water bursting in through a door and making Kate act as if you were actually in an ocean or being bombarded by waves. While it feels a bit stiff to maneuver through this, it makes you feel like you are trying desperately to escape this sinking city. While the physics are good, the story is a bit lacking, with little to go by due to the short length. You are trying to stop some crazy Russian woman named Mila from using a corporation’s nanobots as a biological weapon, and that’s about as far as it goes—literally. Why is the game called Hydrophobia? Does Kate have it? It seems that way because when you get close to drowning, you can hear her thoughts of maybe in her childhood she almost drowned? The game never explains this.
While you trudge on through the watery depths, you can clamber your way up to areas for platforming segments that are far and few between. The beginning of the game mainly consists of this, which slowly becomes very combat-heavy. Combat isn’t very fun in the game due to a poor cover mechanic (there really isn’t one except ducking), and the shooting feels a bit stiff. You have one pistol that you can swap ammo with, such as semi-auto rounds, explosive gel, and electrocution rounds, and your main ammo type is a charged kinetic shot that can knock enemies dead. Later on in the game, they throw so many enemies at you that it detracts from the watery atmosphere.
Another issue is level design because everything is very claustrophobic and is built of just tons of hallways. It’s another problem when your MAVI unit tells you to go in one direction, and sometimes it will be a pain to find out how to get there because of the lack of natural clues. Sometimes you have to go into a hacking minigame; sometimes you have to find a decipher code on a wall that you can only see with the MAVI; and finding these will drive you nuts sometimes.
The visuals are good for the level that they are at, but even with a high-end system, you will experience frame rate drops and stuttering. They have gotten better since their initial release, but it still exists. The visuals overall have some low-resolution textures, the characters have terrible lip-syncing, and the art style is pretty stale. What should you play the game for? It’s a decent 5–6 hour adventure with great water physics that hasn’t really been done before. That’s pretty much it, and for the low price point, it’s well worth it.
New Vegas has been struggling to have solid DLC that stands up to the Fallout 3 releases. Old World Blues is the best of the three so far, even for the excellent dialog, great characters, and huge new world. Old World Blues has you going to a drive-in that teleports you to Big MT. Once inside, you meet some strange doctors who lobotomized you, and you are on a quest to stop the evil Dr. Mobius and find your brain. Old World Blues takes a whole new approach to Fallout DLC by removing your spine and heart and giving you perks at the start. There are new weapons, enemies, and a whole new world to explore.
There are also a lot of great dungeons to explore, such as the X facilities, which have things such as new armor and testing facilities that run you through a series of courses, as well as other hidden items like new recipes. My favorite part of the whole DLC is the excellent new characters that are inside The Sink, which is your little safe hub inside the dome. All the appliances have hilarious personalities, such as the evil toaster, the crazy miniature robot, the perverted fertilizer, and the seductive light switches. Sound strange? That’s what makes this DLC brilliant. Even the doctors have great personalities, and the whole story has some twists at the end, so you really get a punchy, fulfilling story and ending.
The new weapons are some of the best yet, such as the K9000 Cyberdog Gun, which actually barks when you shoot it thanks to the dog brain attached. The Sonic Emitter pistol is probably the best, thanks to the upgrades you can find for it to enhance its power. Unfortunately, this DLC is really best for people who specialize in energy weapons and melee because guns are hard to come by. Old World Blues also raises the level cap, so you will have a chance to maybe dump some XP into energy if you are weak in that area.
The new environments are great, such as the canyons that have giant red crystals, which are a huge change from the brown wasteland. The new enemies are challenging, such as the robo-scorpions, lobotomites, and other weird creatures lurking around. I highly doubt you will be bored with this DLC due to so many things being different from the other ones. All I have to say is that the dialog and characters are probably better than the main game and are just top-notch.
There are a few problems, such as the fact that the initial dialog with the doctors will take you a good hour to get into its entirety. While the characters are very interesting, you’ll start getting antsy to start exploring. Most of the quests are fetch quests, and this really kept the score from getting a solid 9 because I wanted some pre-scripted stuff or just more unique quests. Most of the quests consist of getting technology for The Sink and Dr. Klein. This kind of gets old after a while, but the quests drag you through most of Big MT, so it’ll help you encourage exploration. The usual New Vegas glitches and bugs are still ever-present, but the dated Gamebryo engine can’t really be saved at this point. Old World Blues is a must-buy even if you skip the past two because the good 12 to 15-hour storyline is just brilliant.
Most action RPGs tend not to be too bad, but Hunted is probably one of the worst I have ever played. The game has an interesting story that falls flat due to poor storytelling and pacing. You play as a mercenary couple: the human Caddoc and the beautiful elf E’Lara. Caddoc is calm and reserved, while E’Lara is all about rushing in and killing everything. The swapped stereotypes are nice, but the overall story goes nowhere until the very end. You get caught up in a mission to stop an evil man named Annuvin, who is using a dangerous liquid called Sleg that can turn everything into evil. Along the way, the only other part of the story is trying to find a mayor’s daughter for a high reward. It is not very interesting since the game is linear to a fault and the gameplay is just yawn-worthy.
Throughout the game, there are points where you can swap between the two, and they each play differently. Caddoc is all about melee and brute force, while he has a crossbow that does minor damage. I felt the crossbow was completely useless since it does hardly any damage (even after you find a few upgrades), is very slow to shoot, and takes forever to reload. His melee attacks are the best, but you just mash the attack button ad nauseam. If you block attacks with your shield, you can charge a fury attack, but if you get hit once before it charges, it depletes. What kind of thing is that? Every so often you will get supercharged and do extra damage, but I could never figure out how this happens exactly since it seems to be random.
E’Lara is all about using her bow, and melee is just like Caddoc’s crossbow; useless. You can pick up different-level weapons at three levels, which are fast, medium, and slow, but she doesn’t have a fury meter. If either partner dies, you can throw each other regeneration vials, but if you run out, you’re dead for good. You can also use magic, but it’s clunky and doesn’t fit right because some magic uses your weapon, so you have to switch to just magic, which involves throwing stuff. The game is just very clunky and not very responsive, and it makes a lot of battles a huge pain to get through.
Upgrading magic works, but it’s nothing special since there are only three different types and then two upgrades on top of that. You get upgrade crystals by finding them in containers, or enemies will drop fragments. On top of this, you would think that being an RPG, there would be side quests. Not really. You can find paths that lead to “rare” weapons, but these tend to be just as useless as the rest of the game and not worth anything. Hell, you can’t even spend the gold you pick up through the game. It just increases your score on the leaderboard. You can also find death stones on fallen enemies to hear their stories, but what’s the point? You’ll be too busy screaming at the clunky combat and falling asleep at the derivative gameplay.
Does the game at least look good? Not really. This is another game that uses Unreal Engine 3 but doesn’t use it to its full potential. The game looks average and, for some reason, has a lot of bugs and constant slowdowns, even on high-end systems. The voice acting for the characters is good, but since the game is so boring, you won’t really care. Why should you play through this? The archery in the game is fun at first because at least that part is done well and is pretty quick and fun. Hell, just play to stare at how gorgeous E’Lara is if you want, or even Seraphin. Everyone else should just move on to better action RPGs.
It seems the New Vegas DLC just can’t balance itself, right? First Dead Money was full of cramped environments and brutal difficulty with game designs that worked against the game. Honest Hearts has a very open area to explore, but the characters are pretty underwhelming, as is the overall story. You meet some travelers who are part of a caravan trying to get across Zion National Park, and they hire you to protect them. Of course, there’s more than that, so when you enter, you see three rival tribes fighting against each other. You have the dead horses, white legs, and sorrows. The White Legs want to prove themselves so they can work for Caesar’s Legion, but the Sorrows want to stay, and the Dead Horses are a rogue “extra” tribe. Of course, in Fallout, there’s some sort of third-party hand in the pot, and that’s where Daniel and Joshua Graham come in.
Joshua wants to fight the white legs, and Daniel wants to run. Without getting into their backstory too much, you help each other out on various missions, but most of them are fetch missions and aren’t very inventive. I was really disappointed with this and kept expecting some more exciting missions. Even Dead Money had some exciting missions, despite its major flaws. The characters seem interesting at first, but after the initial dialog stuff, when you meet them, you never do much more with them. This is due to the DLC’s short length, running at about 10–12 hours. There are hardly any side missions, and it feels like the huge area gets wasted since you don’t really get to explore it much.
The area is full of huge canyons and cliffs that surround a lake and a couple of rivers. The area is a pain to navigate because it’s hard to find how to get to high-up areas due to all these layered cliffs. Some of the areas are great to see, and they really captured the national park feeling with abandoned camps and cars on the road right when the bombs fell. So there is a nice charm about the area, and seeing some trees and rivers is a nice change from the dried-up Mojave. Other than that, the environment is full of vicious animals instead of just people, so that’s also a bit different than the Mojave and Dead Money.
Other than that, the DLC is worth a purchase, but don’t expect 15+ hours and tons of new weapons or extra stuff. It’s the best New Vegas DLC so far, but it’s also not the best it could be. I hope the third and fourth DLCs are a lot better and are finally on par with the excellent Fallout 3 DLC add-ons.
While the Oddworld series may have been dead for years now, the last creation from Lorne Lanning is a great opus. While the series hasn’t been perfect gameplay-wise, it instills great characters, humor, and a unique art style that can be recognized from the series. Stranger’s Wrath was a cult classic Xbox hit but saw poor sales (as did most of the Oddworld games) due to its quirky style. You play as a bounty hunter named Stranger, trying to collect enough Mulah (money) to get a mysterious surgery performed. The story doesn’t get interesting at all until the end, but there are two key plot twists that really throw you for a loop and make the story worthwhile.
The game is split up into two parts. The first half of the game has you finding 12 different wanted bad buys and wandering around the linear world to find them. The thing that made Stranger’s Wrath so unique was its shooting mechanic. Unlike most shooters, Wrath has you shooting critters as your ammo, and you even have to gather them in the wild. A few ranges from Zap Flies have unlimited ammo and can be charged. Boombats are explosive, Thud Slugs are like shotgun shells, and so on. Each critter will eventually be upgraded in the game, but this is a unique approach to shooters that has never been done since.
Most of the time, you can try to sneak your way around and bounty up bad guys, but the stealth mechanics are pretty broken. You can hide in tall grass and lure the bad guys to you, then wrap them up to get them alive (for more bounty), or just run and gun and kill them all, but you get less bounty. While the shooting may be unique, it doesn’t really know what it wants to do. There’s ammo for stealth, but it’s not good enough for run-and-gun action. Finding ammo in crates helps, but you will constantly try to decide which ammo type is best suited for the situation. You can equip any two at the same time for combos, but you can’t shoot them at the same time. I would have liked to see some sort of combo element implemented with that.
The second part of the game lets you have more powerful melee attacks and is all about running and shooting, really. You get the upgraded ammo types, so this is possible, but the game’s difficulty is ruthless, and you will die a lot. Thankfully, the game has a quick save feature, so this alleviates it a little bit. I just felt that this game should have stuck to either a platformer or a shooter because switching from first to third constantly can be a bit disjointing, and even jumping around and climbing is difficult because it feels like all the physics in the game are very floaty.
The second part of the game lets you have more powerful melee attacks and is all about running and shooting, really. You get the upgraded ammo types, so this is possible, but the game’s difficulty is ruthless, and you will die a lot. Thankfully, the game has a quick save feature, so this alleviates it a little bit. I just felt that this game should have stuck to either a platformer or a shooter because switching from first to third constantly can be a bit disjointing, and even jumping around and climbing is difficult because it feels like all the physics in the game are very floaty.
Overall, the shooting mechanic is very unique but works against itself, and the game doesn’t know if it’s a third-person platformer, stealth game, or run-and-gun first-person shooter. If it stuck to just one, the game would be better, but it is a cult classic and shouldn’t be missed if you never owned an Xbox.
Japanese developers have a lot to learn from Western developers, but Vanquish shows that they are slowly catching on. Vanquish is infused with Western shooter’s big explosions and lots of shooting fused with Japanese fast-paced action and quick controls. Vanquish is a third-person shooter on speed thanks to the ARS suit. Sam Gideon can slide around at super speeds on the ground as well as slow down time during dodges. This allows for very hectic gameplay against robots of all sizes and shapes.
The plot is paper-thin and only advances at the very end of the game since the middle has absolutely nothing to do with the plot because you’re just dealing with in-the-moment problems, but the overarching story is a pretty standard affair with Russia trying to take over the world with a giant microwave emitter that destroys San Francisco. It’s nothing to get excited about, so just pop in Vanquish and expect fast shooting. The shooting is great thanks to using weapons that can be upgraded throughout the game with droppable upgrades. Everything is done on the battlefield, so there are no menus to fiddle with. I wish more shooters would use this idea so it doesn’t draw you away from the action. You get a loadout of three weapons and two different grenades. EMP grenades stun robots and incendiary blow them up. Different weapons range from your standard assortment of shotguns, heavy and light machine guns, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, etc., but there are a few originals, such as the disk launcher, the LFE gun that shoots huge blobs of purple energy, and the laser rocket launcher.
Thanks to the ARS suit, it allows for what would normally be an impossible amount of enemies to kill in a standard shooter, but being able to slide around at fast speeds and slow downtime isn’t the key to staying alive. If you get shot too much, your suit will automatically slow down time and burn up your energy meter. This allows you to kill any immediate danger and get to cover, but if you continue to get shot, you will die. The energy meter determines all your special abilities, and if you overheat, you have to wait for it to cool down. I found this a little annoying, especially when you start dying and you can’t shut off the use of the auto-slowdown, which will actually cause you to die during boss fights since you can’t slide away after it’s burned up.
The best part of the game is the boss fights since you have to shoot weak points, and sometimes this will trigger cinematic QTEs (Quick Time Events), but the biggest fallback for Vanquish is the repetition. Sure, there is some different gameplay stuff thrown in, like firefights on rail carts and turret sections, but I felt the game never truly took advantage of the whole ARS suit system. This is where the typical Japanese game’s generic atmosphere and aesthetics bring Vanquish down for me. While everything is responsive and sharp, it all feels generic, with weapons feeling like they don’t pack a punch and just feel like pop guns. There’s a good variety of enemies in here, but they are all just robots, and you can pretty much use the same tactic on all of them. Boss fights to recycle after Act 2, and the environments all look the same after Act 1.
The game looks good, but it is also generic-looking thanks to the typical Japanese art style of sterile whitewashed environments and copy-and-paste feeling levels. The characters are the usual stereotypical, cheesy voice-acted, empty-feeling people that you can’t really get attached to or don’t make much sense to. I want to get attached to the characters, but they just feel too cheesy and stereotypical and are completely forgettable. So why should you play Vanquish? The fast-paced action is undeniably addictive, and 6 hours is just enough to not get too sick of the game without wanting it to just end. On a side note, the ending credits are probably the most original I have ever seen in my 19 years of gaming. The developer’s faces are on asteroids, and you shoot them as their names pop up. The more important guys are harder to shoot, and the lead designer ends everything with a final boss fight. Kudos to Platinum for making credits more interesting than scrolling text.
Racing games are usually highly criticized because there is an overabundance of them. Everyone quickly pushes out the crappy racers and holds the good ones up high enough so everyone else can see through the overcrowded genre. DiRT 2 is an amazing rally simulator, and I don’t think there is another rally racer that does this better. The first thing DiRT fans will notice is the complete visual change from the last game. It uses a lot of elements from GRID and has a more Americanized visual attitude by using real-world famous drivers with voice clips to help you out. Gone are the more serious-style menus, and I kind of miss those. The virtual menu is pretty neat, though, which has you walking inside your tour bus for various options and outside to select your cars. It’s a neat idea, but the whole Americanized badassery with the drivers is a turn-off. Not to mention the voice clips are really annoying to hear over and over again, and there’s no option to turn them off.
Once you select a series of events (there are a ton of them) from one of the several areas around the world, you get to pick up your car. Each car has different stats, but you have to buy upgrade packs for different types of events. There are so many different types of cars for raids, rallies, races, trophy trucks, dude buggies, and the list goes on. You can’t upgrade your cars (still), but that is OK because you can now adjust settings such as downforce, gear ratio, suspension, etc. before the race starts (you will have to adjust these occasionally).
You can also select different liveries, rearview mirror toys, dashboard toys, and horns. These are to actually just show off the amazing physics engine, but it’s neat to see a toy dangling around in real-time physics on your dashboard and mirror. Once you hop into a race, you’ll notice the superb cockpit view that was revolutionized in the first game. Everything can be seen, not just your hands. You can look down and see your foot moving on the pedals, your hand shifting, and all the switches and parts of the interior. You can even see your screen swaying to your left in the Raid cars. It’s astounding how Codemasters got everything so detailed without having to have some sort of crazy hardware requirement.
When you’re actually racing, everything comes to life with the physics and sound design. You can hear rocks singing off your car, dirt scraping under your tires, water splashing up on the windshield, and your wipers kicking in and wiping it off. It all looks amazing and adds to the realism. Your car will get damaged in real-time, and dirt will stick and cling to the car as you drive. Depending on what difficulty you chose, you can view your replay at any time and rewind time, which was borrowed from GRID. This helps a lot during tough and long races. Sliding around and drifting around corners is all about skill, and that’s what’s so great about DiRT 2: that you win entirely based on your skill. The AI is also great since they will crash and go crazy when trying to catch up to you; they may even get totaled and have to drop out of the race altogether.
You never really get bored with the game because you’re always leveling up from the XP you earn in races (even completing “missions” such as jumping a certain height, etc.) and constantly unlocking new tracks, locations, and different event types. DiRT 2 also supports Windows Live and the Xbox 360 controller, which is great for people who love that. I want to give DiRT 2 a perfect score, but I wanted more than just racing-type events, and the sudden change in style really bothered me. I also wanted to be able to actually upgrade my cars and have more toys, liveries, and unlocks. There’s a very small amount, and that’s a little disappointing. The game can also be very hard thanks to such realistic physics where you’ll be retrying some events 20+ times to get first, but if you drop your difficulty too much, you won’t earn much money.
I highly recommend DiRT 2 for rally fans, racing fans, or anyone who just loves simulators. There’s enough here to make fans of the last game jump for joy, but some of the sudden changes will make them grumble in annoyance.
Back to the Future hasn’t really done well when it comes to games. There were a couple of bad games in the 8 and 16-bit eras, but Telltale Games finally picked up the license and injected its excellent adventure formula into the beloved series. You play Marty McFly, who has to go back in time and save Doc Brown from his own deadly fate. He gets a message from Doc to save him, and Marty must find out how to do it with the help of young Emmet Brown.
The story is original but uses the BthF license very nicely. The voice actors sound almost spot on, and everything from the DeLorean to Doc’s dog Einstein and even Marty’s relatives is voiced well and resembles their live-action selves. It’s great to explore the BthF universe with the same clever writing and storytelling. There is a simple adventure game interface where you click around on objects and listen to Marty explain them, but the puzzles are more involved than just slider puzzles or matching symbols. The puzzles are broader and story-driven, and that’s what Telltale is famous for in their Sam & Max games.
You can have items in your inventory, but you don’t just wander around and use them for every pixel in the game. It’s usually pretty obvious to use your recorder to record young Doc’s mumblings so old Doc can solve them. You aren’t overburdened with a ton of items that you have to constantly use a million times on everything, so it’s straightforward and simple, but you do have to think a bit. One great feature to resolve pixel hunting is a button that will show every icon you can interact with. This saves time and frustration, so you’re not wandering around and missing that one item that’s almost off-screen.
While the interface and interaction are smooth and simple, the game is very short, and it’s still lacking some gameplay depth. I would like more cerebral puzzles, but Telltale is more about the story than anything else. The game doesn’t get super exciting until the last 30 minutes of the last two sequences. You can beat the game in one to two sittings (about 3 hours), so for $25, the game is highly overpriced and not worth the money unless you’re a die-hard BthF fan. I would wait for the full season to come out and not spend a ton of money on each episode. Also, the graphics are pretty horrible considering the nice art style. Telltale really needs to upgrade their 8-year-old engine to something more modern.
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