With the fourth (and hopefully not final) Fallout 3 DLC, we are once again almost as disappointed as the first DLC outing, Operation Anchorage, where Bethesda mistakenly takes you out of the Capital Wasteland and into the redundant dead world of an alien spaceship. When you get the signal from the downed ship in the Capital Wasteland, you get beamed up and stuck in an alien prison cell where you must, throughout this adventure, fight your way off the ship with a woman and a little girl (who causes more trouble than wanted) to a final standoff with the captain of the mothership and finally an epic space battle.
Most of the DLC has you running around places blowing up these “cores” that will shut certain parts of the ship down so you can get to the bridge. While this sounds repetitive, nothing is as bad as the ship looks. With lots of 50’s cheesy alien sci-fi-looking infrastructure, it all looks copied and pasted throughout the entire thing, so after about thirty minutes, you’ve seen it all. There are three new weapons in this DLC: the shock baton, the atomizer, and the atomizer rifle. While these sound powerful, the aliens are some tough meat if you haven’t downloaded the Broken Steel add-on, so you can level up to around 25–30. With me being 28 years old, I still had a hard time fighting off the various droids and aliens since some have this invisible-looking armor that is a pain to break through.
While there are a few epic moments in the game, such as when you get to shoot a death ray at Earth and see a huge mushroom cloud appear, it makes you feel powerful. While not spoiling them all, I’ll move into items you can find, and these are probably worth more than anything in the Wasteland. Most of the items are alien crystals varying in size, along with some alien food, alien biogels, and various odds and ends that are worth tons back on Earth. You actually end up with so much that you can’t find enough people with the caps to purchase it all.
Once you do get back to the Wasteland, you’ll quickly forget what happened since there isn’t much narrative except for the hidden audio journals scattered throughout the ship. This really isn’t a way to progress dialog in Fallout 3, since most are interactive. After everything is over within the 2-3 hours it takes to beat this DLC, you’ll feel like you were ripped off about $5 and want a refund. Mothership Zeta is skip-able, but hardcore fans should really take it for a spin.
I’m neither an X-Men fan nor a comic book fan, so you can expect a fair, unbiased review first off. One great thing to think about when thinking about this game is that you don’t need to be an X-Men or comic fan to like this game; all you have to do is like action/adventure games (God of War, Prince of Persia, Bionic Commando, etc.). The game starts out pretty heavy and shows some great graphics, cinematic gameplay, and great voice acting (by none other than Hugh Jackman himself) all while skydiving into the forests of Africa. When you land, you’ll be shown a quick tutorial on how to use heavy and light attacks, along with combos. You’ll learn how to do quick kills, which are a timed heavy attack complete with a zoom-in slow-mo, gruesome, and gory kill. Yes, I said gory, and yes, this is the first mature-rated comic book game ever made, and I’m so glad Marvel got off their high horse (cough DC) and started showing their characters’s true feral side.
Most of Wolverine is based around combat since the story is simply only for hardcore fans, people who saw the movie (I hear it’s excellent and Mr. Jackman is the best Wolverine yet), or the fact that the story is just too cut up and flashed back to really get a grip on. A lot of the combat may feel repetitive sometimes, but it’s all cut up thanks to great platforming sections, some action button timing, some really big guys you must take on, and sprinkle on some epic boss fights. Each enemy must be killed differently since some are not weak enough to make quick kills and must be weakened; some can’t be thrown off ledges; and some enemies can only be killed in feral sense mode because of their camouflage. Each enemy has different quick-kill animations, thus making the game feel less repetitive. You can unlock different moves by leveling up, along with permanently increasing your health and rage meter. Rage always requires you to perform four of the rage moves, which range from a blender-style claw spin to a saw blade-style spin. Each one can be upgraded for a longer time—more power, more speed, etc. You also have three slots for mutagens, which somehow passively enhance the gameplay by adding some more health, making rage moves more powerful, or gaining more experience per kill. All these are easily in sync with each other, along with a great tree that allows you to learn things about your enemies for every kill, so they die faster later on in the game. This immense skill tree really works brilliantly and keeps the game from feeling cookie-cutter.
The game does have puzzles when it comes to environments, and some puzzles are even part of the environment. These puzzles are never hard to figure out thanks to your feral senses, but the timing of certain puzzles can be frustrating. Speaking of frustrating, the only real gripe I have with the game is that the difficulty isn’t balanced very well, so several levels will be easy, then suddenly an ultra-hard one, then an easy one, and maybe a few hard ones. The same goes for certain sections in levels, and this can lead some people to throw their controller at the wall…or a person. A lot of puzzles consist of pushing blocks to get up on certain ledges, pulling panels out of walls to unlock certain doors, and some level-length puzzles, such as using the hand of a giant robot to destroy the head and firing lasers to get through the only door out of the base.
Let’s talk boss fights. Some range from other X-Men universe characters (Saber Tooth for one) that are easily killed, along with some that are hundreds of stories high (like the epic robot boss fight that you fight from space while falling down to earth—yes, uber epic). Boss fights aren’t annoying; you just have to learn their moves.
The visuals in the game are astounding, and using the Unreal 3 engine, you can expect some of the finest-looking graphics yet. Everything looks sharp, clean, and highly detailed for your ultimate Wolverine experience. There are some nice unlockables for fans of the game, and I guarantee that this game will turn haters into lovers.
If you have ever played The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, you will kind of get the idea of what Alex Mercer is going through in Prototype (or [PROTOTYPE] as SEGA thinks CAPS is cool >.>), just minus the green problem our Mr. Banner seems to be having. The reason I say prototype is like Ultimate Destruction, and just a tad more ultimate with a hint more destruction, is because it uses a beefed-up engine from the same game and shares some of the same mechanics.
You play Alex Mercer, a confusing test subject who wants revenge on his creator and to stop the infection from spreading throughout the story. I’d tell you more, but the storytelling is so terrible that I had no idea what was going on or who was doing what or who! Constant flashbacks and pieces of the story told through consuming certain targets and watching stills aren’t fun for your brain to digest.
When you first jump into the game, you’ll be able to run up walls, climb buildings, and eventually glide, kick, and consume your way to ultimate infected glory. Most of Prototype is a free-roaming mode where you run from mission to mission, or side missions or activities, like Spider-Man or any other hero you like that can run across a city in less than 30 minutes. The great thing about this is that you can find hidden items such as extra experience or little-hidden things to unlock achievements (or trophies if you’re a PS3 fan and are somehow “accidentally” reading this Xbox 360 review). While most of these (like in any sandbox game) are so spread out and so well hidden, you won’t, except for the ones you run across by accident. Most of the free-roaming is, unfortunately, boring and bland. There are just people and cars, and that’s pretty much it. Once you get further into the game, rampant zombies and infected people terrorize the streets, and it does get more interesting, but it just makes you want to stay off of them and onto the buildings. Most of the graphics in the game are outdated and kind of boring, to begin with, so there’s nothing really “eye-catching” about the game at all.
The meat of the game, really, is the fighting, and this is where the heart of Prototype lies. You have a HUGE skill tree that extends from combat to stealth, to movement, to, yes, you guessed it, powers. What kind of game would [Prototype] be without powers? Well, pretty boring since there are so many; you have more than you can handle. Prototype has so many different moves and powers that you will end up forgetting most of the little ones and just using your most obnoxious ones. Your arm can transform into different weapons such as a whip, giant fists via The Thing, larger muscles for a mix of power and speed, a giant scythe (the one on the cover!), and a few others. Accompanied by these, you have some armor (you can’t glide or double dash though!…yeah, shut up Mario Kart fanboys), and you can also shapeshift into whoever your last consumed victim was (more on that later). The way you use these powers depends on the enemies you’re fighting. A huge mechanic is the grab ability, since this is used to fling objects at helicopters, giant tentacle arms, and even military soldiers or infected monsters. Most of the time, you mash X and Y together to create a cool combo, then somehow unleash a weird power. That’s why there is just too much in this game since you can’t memorize all these combos and what each one does for what weapons. One of the next major mechanics is the lock-on system, which is used to dash toward enemies and pummel them before they do something amazing to your infected self. I had a hard time with multiple enemies since you’d want to target one (say, a guy with a rocket launcher up high), but the game would keep targeting someone else below.
You can use actual weapons in the game that enemies drop, such as machine guns, shotguns, and rocket launchers, and these are essential in some missions. Not always will you have your weapons available, and you’ll have to use the environment around you. It also consists of many boss fights, and this is where I concluded my playthrough. The game gets so frustratingly difficult towards the end that it will throw so many hard enemies at you at once (two tentacles plus 5–6 hunters) while trying to protect something. Yeah, right, but then again, Sega is known for doing this in their games. You’ll end up trying to hit one enemy, then another knocks you back, then you can’t get up because another is smashing on you, and when you do, you get knocked back again. Yes, a lot of cheap deaths and hits, and this isn’t fair.
Aside from the annoying main missions, there are some rather fun and unique activities that utilize your powers. Some missions will have you using selected power to eliminate a certain amount of enemies in a certain amount of time; some are races, checkpoint races, and some even have you finding targets and consuming them for your Web (more on that later). While most of these are fun, some are impossible to get because of the target requirements for a gold medal and the maximum amount of experience points to spend in the skill tree. Other skills are earned by consuming certain targets to fly helicopters, tanks, etc.
The last element I should mention is the skill tree, which is filled by consuming certain targets and watching a series of stills and a brief voice clip to fill in the story (lame). So as you can see, this may be unique (and ways to unlock achievements, yeah, or trophies), but this seems more like a cheap way to tell the story or used as a game filler. While Prototype is fun for a while, it quickly gets repetitive with its cookie-cutter enemy AI, broken storytelling, cheap deaths, and bland free-roaming world. I recommend Prototype for a rental, but don’t expect anything amazing.
The sandbox or “open-ended gameplay” genre is actually the newest genre known to video games, with a good seven years under its belt, but not that many games have really proven the genre worthy. With Grand Theft Auto III being the daddy of this genre, many games were failed mock-ups of GTA; many weren’t even related but still didn’t do the genre justice. Saint’s Row tried to push the genre once again a few years ago, but didn’t do such a great job and was just shoved off as another GTA clone. Now that Saint’s Row 2 has been out for a while, people kind of just stopped with blank expressions, while some roared and cheered with joy. Saints 2 really does push the genre and is a clear opponent against Grand Theft Auto IV, but I’m not going to sit here and compare the two since Saints 2 deserves a separate look.
The first thing you do when you enter the game is to create your own character, and this is what really sets the game apart from others in the genre. You wake up from your coma in a jail hospital, and bam, you’re in there, changing your sex, picking your taunts (some are very vulgar), rearranging your face (you can do that outside of this too), picking your hair, and even your voice. The options are deep and riddled with lots of ways to make your character unique and stand out from others online. Once you get out of this mode, you are introduced to an easy-to-use tutorial that will show you how to control your character, and I have to admit, the controls are wonderful. I never got frustrated with them, and they are just so intuitive and easy to understand and remember. You start out with some melee training, then you pick up a pistol and discover you can zoom in via over the shoulder, jump around, and it all just feels nice and smooth. Once you hop into a car, this doesn’t change one bit since cars will turn on a dime and have the perfect feel to them (all 40 or so of them), and this makes driving around the city of Stilwater very pleasant.
The bulk of the game is about rivaling gangs throughout the story, and I have to admit the story is riveting, gruesome, and very entertaining and never falters once. You see, since you were knocked out for two weeks, all the gangs who hated you took their territory back, and now you must gather your old friends, start the 3rd Street Saints up again, and build your hideout. In this hideout, you can get your cash from the stores you purchased, change your gang’s style (like the ’80s, hip-hop, pimps & hos, that sort of thing), change your weapon layout, and pimp out your crib. All of these are just nice subtle touches that THQ didn’t really have to do, but they went that extra mile anyway.
Between these story missions, you can go to different stores and buy food (health), jewelry or clothes to increase your respect, go to plastic surgeons to redo something on your character, buy cars, buy weapons, and in the second half of the game, play side missions.
These side missions are actually a blast, and the two I will talk about are Fuzz and Septic Avenger. Most of the side missions are scattered throughout your map (Stilwater is HUGE, by the way), and they consist of events such as racing, celebrity protection, helicopter attack missions, etc. All of these missions earn you respect, so you can play story missions (each story mission takes one piece of your respect bar). Each mission gives you a time limit and a certain objective to complete, while some are easy and others are a pain in the @SS and can leave you screaming in frustration. Fuzz is a cop reality show where you drive around to designated crimes and kill them according to what your cameraman says. Sometimes you’ll have to use a chainsaw (camera angle a la Gears of War), use satchel charges on skateboarders, etc. Fuzz is an addictive (like most missions) way to fill your respect bar and leaves many laughs as well (thanks to the amazing dialog THQ wrote for the game). Septic Avenger has you driving a septic truck (yeah, a poop truck) spraying fecal matter all over buildings to depreciate their value for certain clients. As you spray the buildings, a red meter will drop and a cash amount will pop up, bringing that much closer to your depreciation amount. There are also some other smaller side missions, like the taxi missions and hostage diversion, in which you hijack a car and any passengers can be driven crazy (literally) until a ransom is given. You also have a streaker mission since you can walk around naked (blurred naughty bits, of course) and streak in front of people for cash.
If you think the side missions sound fun, don’t forget those story missions. The game has amazing voice acting and clever dialog, so it’ll keep you wanting more and make you come back to see which gang member you’re going to kill next. Not one mission is identical, and you are blessed with a nonrepetitive mission-based game that gives you many different places and ways to kill people throughout the entire game.
Now, when it comes to nitpicking the game apart, the graphics aren’t up to par with most next-gen games (thanks to a lot of Gears of War 2!). , and there are serious slowdown problems where the FPS will drop into the single digits sometimes; there are collision detection and clipping issues; some funky physic problems; but nothing that sandbox games haven’t encountered before. The game is highly playable, and you shouldn’t let these small problems bother you. The last thing I need to mention is the fact that the game is gruesome and more ballsy than GTA ever was. There are complete torture scenes, foul language, and running around naked a la Sims style, which is pretty far out there. The game is just hard-hitting and in your face, and that’s exactly what a mature-rated sandbox game needs.
The highly anticipated Point Lookout is finally out, and it does not disappoint. With this being the fourth DLC available for Fallout 3, you’d think Bethesda has started to run out of steam, but it seems they’ve just gotten started. The DLC starts out with a boat docking near the Jefferson Memorial and talking to a strange Tobar, who tells you all about Point Lookout, Maryland, and all its great treasures and adventures. Sure, it sounds great for the heroine of the Wasteland, but just how dangerous is it? Well, extremely, and especially if you are under level 25 and without the Broken Steel DLC, because the bog hillbillies are extremely tough to kill even with the Tesla Cannon (you get this in the Broken Steel DLC). Hell, even the Rocket Launcher won’t kill them with one shot (it must be all that moonshine they drink).
While not giving too much of the story away, you meet one AHOLE of a ghoul. Try to find a woman named Nadine, a deceptive brain, a strange cult, and a woman who has you help her with her family recipe of moonshine. The DLC is nothing short of amazing when it comes to the atmosphere since it’s just as lonely and creepy as the stuff on the disc (and The Pitt), with lots of fog, bogs, creepy hillbillies, strange buildings in the distance, and rads. Yes, since most of the DLC has water in it, you’ll be getting irradiated quite a bit, and this means you will need to bring some RadAway and Rad-X with you.
One mission even requires you to swim away from the island and locate a sunken submarine underwater. You have one store in the game in the carnival; there’s a motel you need to explore, a mysterious mansion, and a few other buildings, but there’s a lot to explore on this HUGE island, so you’re in for about 4-6 hours of great gameplay and story. Bethesda seemed to have concentrated more on exploring this time around than weapons or anything like that. There are a few new parks, the double-barreled shotgun, ando the lever-action rifle, but there are a ton of supplies to loot and grab. So much, in fact, you’ll have to head back to The Capital Wasteland just to sell it all. I believe this is a great DLC and is well worth the $10 (hell, I’ve paid $140 into Fallout 3 already), so don’t be afraid and come down to Point Lookout and explore!
When we called the Ghostbusters back into our games in the early 90s, they didn’t do a very good job. You remember the Genesis version, MSX, NES, GameBoy, Atari 2600, and C64. The richness of the Ghostbusters universe needed more than 8 or 16-bit graphics and midi sounds to make it come to life. Technology has improved considerably since then, finally being able to do justice to our Ghostbuster friends. With the help of the Unreal 3 engine, the developers were able to create an atmosphere and story that are truly amazing.
Players start out in the Ghostbusters’ headquarters, which has been properly equipped with a true-to-life fire pole for you to slide down on. Ray takes you through the basics of wrangling ghosts, trapping them, and using your gear down in the basement. One of the first things you will notice is that the controls feel very familiar, resembling those of games such as Resident Evil 4/5 and Gears of War. Still comparing it to a shooter, your proton pack takes the place of your “gun,” and your “ammo” consists of different types of particle streams. You can unlock four streams throughout the game, starting with your basic proton stream. The Stasis Stream, Meson Collider, and Slime Gun follow suit quickly. The most useful is the Proton Stream, which weakens ghosts and stuns them so you can wrangle, toss, and then hopefully trap them. Ghosts come in many shapes and forms, and it is rare to see so many different enemy types and level bosses in a game. These include many of the ghosts from the movies. You will be battling the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, heading through the Sedgewick Hotel and the Haunted Library.
Each ghost has a weakness for a specific weapon type. To find out which type is effective, you must scan them with your goggles. Doing so will also reveal all sorts of other interesting and sometimes ludicrous information. Some ghosts are dispersible, which means that they die after a few hits with a certain weapon, but others must be trapped instead. The objective is to weaken them until their health bar turns red, after which you can trap the suckers. Walking around with your energy detector is good for finding artifacts—treasures that you get money for—and enemies.
Upgrading your weapons will improve them in various ways. You can increase a weapon’s rate of fire, make it overheat less often, or let you trap your enemies faster. All of these upgrades can be purchased in one play-through. Ghostbusting is a high-revenue business, and you will earn ample money to purchase any upgrade that catches your fancy. You are also tallied by how much damage you cause the city throughout your play. Doing too much damage may affect achievements.
The gameplay may sound simple, and it is, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it is extremely fun. There is always something new to be experienced, and only towards the end of the game did I feel some repetition setting in. Ghostbusters kind of felt like a mix of Gears of War, BioShock, and Silent Hill. It can be downright creepy at times, but it also has wonderfully witty humor and some great lighting effects that help create a fantastic ambiance. Walking through dark hallways, your senses are always stimulated in various ways. Things may jump out at you, or you will hear strange cries and screams. Besides being scary, it is also immersive; I left the game after about a four-hour sit-down, and I really felt like I was a Ghostbuster (don’t call the men with the long-sleeved jacket until you have played for four hours straight yourself!). This is in large part due to the fact that the original actors are voicing the game, and I think that’s what truly made the difference.
The game is actually based on the script written by Harold Ramis and Dan Akroyd that was never made into a third movie. There are a lot of tidbits in the dialog that relate back to the original 1984 classic. This game can be played by both fans and nonfans, but it is truly geared toward fans of the movie. You can safely say this game is one of the best movie-licensed translations ever made.
Ghostbusters is just one of those amazing and immersive games that make you all giddy inside. The game truly has an amazing effect on its players. It may not have a lot of depth, but it easily makes up for that in the fun department. It is worth noting that Ghostbusters is a little on the short side, giving you about 6 to 8 hours of gameplay. Fortunately, the replay value is fairly high, making this a recommended buy. I really hope there is a sequel. Playing Ghostbusters has been one hell of a ride.
OK, Far Cry was a great technical feat, and that’s pretty much it. Far Cry had a lot of AI problems with enemies being able to see you miles away; you needed a monster computer to run it; it had almost no story; and it was pretty repetitive. Unfortunately, Far Cry 2 follows all these trends again, but with better graphics, a setting in Africa, an even more confusing story, a super confusing level editor, and the same bland, boring, huge open world. Now, I’m not saying Far Cry 2 is bad; I’m just saying it needs more filling because there is way too much crust on this one.
The game starts out great with you in the back of a car driving to the guerrilla’s headquarters. Once you get through the tutorial, you’re thrown into the beautiful yet empty world, trying to find “The Jackal,” who is feeding both rival gangs guns and fuel (APR and UFLL). You can work on either side since you need either to get to The Jackal. For starters, the game has lots and lots of guns, and you can upgrade them by using diamonds (finding diamond cases and/or completing missions). You can buy the weapons for infinite ammo in your safe rooms, and you can buy manuals that increase accuracy, reliability, etc. You can also buy equipment that will let you hold more ammo, more health, more stim-paks, etc. There are lots here, and everything is fairly priced, but you earn diamonds so slowly that it takes forever to get enough.
When you’re actually shooting the guns, it feels great, but another problem carried over from the first one is that these guys never die. You’ll pump a whole clip into these guys, and sometimes they’ll still be standing. Sometimes your gun will jam and you have to mash X to get it unstuck, and if you’re really unlucky, the whole gun will break, and then you’re SOL. Getting the reliability upgrades fixes this, and swapping out weapons from fallen foes helps this a lot. Far Cry 2 also has a “buddy system,” which is acquired by completing missions, and these so-called buddies can save you in battle (if you run out of health; think of it as an extra life). They can help make missions easier by offering alternatives. This is a great system and is probably the only great gameplay idea in Far Cry 2 that isn’t boring or doesn’t piss you off. When you do get low on health, you can pry bullets out of yourself, wrap yourself in bandages, and even poke yourself with magic needles. You can refill these at health boxes in random areas or in one of your safe houses. You unlock new safe houses by killing all guards in the area, and bam, there you go.
The next gameplay element that is from the first game and was bizarrely stripped down is the vehicles you drive. There are only maybe five in the whole game, and those are a Jeep, a car, an assault truck, and a couple of boats. When your vehicle gets banged up and starts smoking, you can hop out and repair it, which is great, but even if the car starts smoking a little bit, it runs very slowly. Now to get to the most annoying part of the game—the constant backtracking. I understand this is an open-world game (I love sandbox games, don’t get me wrong), but Far Cry 2 fails at this. First, the map they give you is horrible since it’s a little piece of paper you hold (next to your GPS), and all the dots look like blobs, so the legend is useless. You’ll travel to missions on one side of the map, finish them, and then have to navigate all the way back to town. You can’t really go off the trails since there are so many mountains, rocks, and trees blocking your path unless you run on foot.
Then this is where the meat of the annoyance comes in; there’s nothing in between all of this driving around! Maybe here and there you’ll see an animal, but all you get are the same thugs coming after you in their vehicles from the guard posts plastered all along the trails. That is really all there is to driving from mission to mission. The missions are exactly the same; maybe you’ll have to save a friend (or shoot him/her), but essentially it’s all the same.
The malaria effect was useless and made things even more annoying. Every so often, you’ll have to take a malaria pill, and if you run out, you have to go to the ends of the earth (ok, Africa!) to get more, or you die. Essentially, this makes the game boring, and I get headaches every time I play it. Now if you like sandbox games where there is hardly a story and you just drive around killing random thugs, then go ahead and have at it. Now, this brings me to the level editor, which is deep, but there’s no tutorial, and it is not user-friendly. Lastly, the only exciting thing is multiplayer. The best part of Far Cry 2 is the graphics; the game is gorgeous with free-flowing grass, everything burns, trees break when under fire, and the lighting is beautiful. It just all looks so good, but the gameplay is just not there. Sorry, Ubisoft, maybe Far Cry 3 will fix all of these issues.
Silent Hill 4 is a continuation of the long-running Silent Hill series that started on the PlayStation way back in 1998. As a kid, I remember how incredibly horrifying SH was and how ridiculously hard the puzzles were, thus sending the rental back due to complaints of nightmares to my mother. Fast forward to 2004, and we get SH4, which is a mediocre approach to the amazing survival horror series. For some reason, Konami changed everything for this game, thus making it less fun and a major chore to play. You play Henry Townshend, who wakes up in his apartment one day with the front door chained up. You walk into your bathroom, and there is a hole in it that is a wormhole to these creepy SH worlds. You are following the murders of a man named Walter Sullivan and must release his soul and find out why he’s killing all of these people. The story is very interesting, yet there are few cut scenes and very little dialog, so most of the story is told through diary pages and memos that you pick up, which is actually kind of bland and boring (and lazy on Konami’s part).
SH4 is very strange in the sense that the game uses an initial gateway between levels, and you travel back and forth to heal, save, and unlock the rest of the world. After you finish the world, you get warped back to your apartment room 302, and you are free to roam around. This is in a strange first-person view, and you can save (this is the only save spot) and dump stuff into your trunk for later storage. You only get about 10 slots in your inventory, so going back to your apartment via red holes is essential. While this isn’t so bad, there’s so much backtracking and repeating of levels that it will make you sick. While you’re on a level, you wander around in the same SH fashion, picking up strange objects and using them in puzzles. The only problem is that the memos that give you the puzzles are so unbelievably vague that you will have almost no idea what to do unless you wander around aimlessly, just trying everything out. In most SH games, you do this, but it’s pretty obvious where to go. If you use a little bit of brainpower, you will get it. In SH4, things are so obvious that you will completely miss them.
This is all tied together because SH4 has the worst level design ever, and those are just paths that lead nowhere. You will wander around hallways and go up and down ladders that lead to dead-end rooms or send you back to places you don’t recognize. Not only this, but if you miss certain items (like the Swords of Obedience), the “boss” later on cannot be fought, and there’s no way to go back. Thanks to the whole gateway system, if you miss an item, you cannot go back, unlike in past SH games. There are four worlds that you must complete by finding a placard at the end of each level. In SH fashion, you must complete weird puzzles by putting the right pieces in the right places, and this is figured out by the memos you pick up. As I explained above, they are so vague that you can’t really figure out what to do except look through a walkthrough.
After you complete the world, you go back to your apartment, look through the peephole in your door, and read all these pages to advance the story. After you complete the fourth world, everything changes, and your room becomes haunted. You must use holy candles that you find throughout the world and place them down in front of these demons on your walls to rid them before they kill you. I found this extremely annoying and pointless gameplay element, which just makes this SH game very weird and a bad departure from the series. After completing these four worlds, you open up another whole of your washroom (yeah, what?!). With the four placards, you go back through these worlds again, trying to find God knows what, but the levels are continuous, and you don’t get warped back to your apartment (thus not getting healed). I found this really annoying and very boring since I just spent hell in these worlds and I have to go back?!
Now the boss fights are really stupid since they aren’t traditional SH bosses; they just look like regular enemies, and you must hack away at them till they fall, then stab them with that sword of obedience I mentioned. This is both boring and stupid since if you miss a word, you just have to run away from this boss until you finish the level. Now, if I should mention improvements, the combat is actually really great since you just lock on and whack away. You can charge attacks, but that’s about it. If you play on a harder difficulty, you’re going to be SOL because the game can be extremely tough since they throw dozens of enemies at you at times. The only weapons in the game are melee weapons, a pistol, and a revolver. Yeah, lame. Where’s the shotgun? Halfway through the game, you have your neighbor, Eileen, following you everywhere, and this is extremely annoying since you can’t leave her behind, and she hobbles on one leg, so she’s very slow. She has to be near you before you go through doors, or you leave her behind. This was a huge gameplay mistake, and it’s probably just as bad as the level design.
Now the only thing I haven’t mentioned is the scary factor. Is it as scary as past SH games? The answer is no. The enemy designs are a little creepy, but not out of this world terrifying like the past SH games. Are the levels creepy? Not really. Sometimes you’ll see something weird in the background, but you won’t really notice it. The atmosphere is a little spooky, but nothing that’ll make you crap your pants. The past SH games scared the living hell out of me, but SH4 didn’t really do much for the scary factor. I feel SH4 is really toned down, and Konami tried to do something new but failed at it. The siren doesn’t even go off in SH4!! C’mon… If you played the hell out of the other SH games, then go ahead and pick this up at bargain bin prices, but don’t expect a whole lot.
Call of Duty is probably the best WWII FPS series ever made, and there are many reasons why. If you rewind back about six years, when Call of Duty was released on the PC and console, gamers envied this exclusivity. CoD offered cinematic gameplay, great characters, and amazing visuals. At the time, the Medal of Honor reigned supreme, but not for very long. With Medal of Honor, Brothers in Arms, and Wolfenstein being the top competitive WWII FPS games, CoD always remained on top. With each new sequel, CoD added better graphics, a more realistic cinematic experience, and overall great multiplayer. Throughout CoD’s six-year life cycle, Activision has used many developers to keep the series going strong, and it was also the first WWII series to stray away from WWII and lean towards modern warfare (no pun intended, really!). Now that CoD is back on the WWII front line, it finally hit the nail on the head, and this is what CoD should have been years ago: World at War.
I thank the WWII gods who listened because we finally, for the first freaking time, got to go through the trials and campaigns of Japan and not just the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The game starts out in the jungles of Japan with banzais rushing after you with bayonets, strange rifles never seen before in a WWII game, amazing visuals (a slightly updated Modern Warfare engine to be exact), great enemy AI, and just absolute mayhem. The first thing I noticed were the new weapons. Yes, you have the Kar98, MP40, Thompson, BAR, MG42, Springfield, Enfield, etc. What I picked up was an Arisaka, a variation of the Kar98, a flamethrower?!, a bayonet?!, the ability to toss motorheads like grenades, molotovs?…insane. I couldn’t believe this. Someone actually added something new. Not only are the graphics amazing and extremely cinematic, but the level design is also awesome. There are cool sniping missions (think of the one in MW), tank missions (they drive great for once, by the way), and missions where you run through Japanese mortar pits and just torch the hell out of everyone. How fun is that? Well, let’s just say it’s so fun you won’t want to use another weapon during those levels.
You don’t just fight in Japan; you also fight on the European front as the Russians overtake the Reichstag all the way to planting the flag yourself. If this isn’t enough to sell you, try out the air mission, where you’re shooting down Japanese boats and pulling in survivors of the Pearl Harbor bombing on your way back home from Japan. If that’s not exciting enough, oh boy, I don’t know what is.
What makes the return to WWII so great isn’t just the new content or the cinematic gameplay. It’s the detail put into the level design, the characters, the ambiance, the dialog, and the voice acting; it’s all top-notch, and not even the first CoD had this much detail put into it. After playing WaW, you will want more WWII games, and this is the revival we’ve all been dying for (sorry, MoH Airborne was terrible). If single-player isn’t enough to sell you, how about multiplayer?
While I didn’t get to try it, I was involved in the beta multiplayer, and it was pretty amazing. It’s just like Modern Warfare but set in WWII instead. There’s plenty of incentive to go back and play the game again, thanks to its fair difficulty and amazing visual experience. World at War has so much detail put into it that I wouldn’t be surprised to see another MoH, BiA, or Wolfenstein copy any of it. Thank you, Treyarch and Activision, for reviving this great series. Now everyone shuts up.
I remember when the first BloodRayne came out. I stared at the ad and drooled. I never knew vampires could be so sexy, and right there, she became one of my top 5 favorite female video game heroines ever made. Of course, being younger, I wasn’t allowed to play such games, so in the end, I never got the chance to play the first BloodRayne. When BloodRayne 2 came out, I had to play it, so I rented it for my PS2, and it was great—not amazing, but pretty solid—but now, well, time ages things.
BloodRayne 2 has you playing as the half-human, half-vampire Dhampir Rayne, who is trying to kill her father Kagan (who survived the first game) and kill all his children and demon spawns. Through this escapade, Rayne runs into his new minions, Kestrel, Ferril, and Ephemera (who hate each other). While they are almost as sexy as Rayne, their attitudes make up for it. BloodRayne 2 has pretty decent voice acting, and Rayne’s attitude is just something you have to love.
BR2 is very gruesome, with lots of dismemberment and gory death traps. There are two types of enemies in the game: unarmed weapons (that you can freely feed off of to get health) and armed enemies with melee weapons that will push you down if you try to feed. You just knock their weapons out of their hands before doing this. Yes, I realize there are only two enemy types, but this is why the game could have been better. The designs for them are neat, and they look cool, but seriously? You will run into sub-bosses an awful lot, and most of these are just elite henchmen or giant minotaurs. This is where one of my biggest gripes comes in, and that’s the fact that boss fights are all luck and no skill. It doesn’t help that the game is a button masher and there’s no skill involved whatsoever. You just hit X for blade attacks and B for kicks, and that’s it. The blocking never seems effective, and you are constantly relying on your powers.
Powers range from astral feeding, temporary invincibility, time freeze, and aura vision. These take up a lot of power, so you have to constantly kill them to keep your meter up. You can level up to extend this, but it never seems enough. You also have your Dragon Pistols, but you can’t level them up, and you only get very little ammo, which feeds off your health. You have to kill to keep your ammo up, but this thing never seems effective until you get different ammo types.
You also have a harpoon that you use to throw enemies into deadly death traps to unlock different parts of levels, but later on, enemies in Twisted Park can block this, and you have to use your time freeze or super speed to get behind them, but sometimes THAT doesn’t work. See what I mean? The game is so frustrating later on—so much, in fact, I had to use God Mode through the last 25% because they threw way too many larger enemies at you and not enough people to feed on. There are some acrobatics involved, such as sliding down rails, swinging, and climbing poles, but this is troublesome since the mechanics are so finicky and everything has to be aligned perfectly.
Don’t get me wrong, BR2 is worth a bargain bin purchase; you just have to look past its many flaws. When it comes to graphics, the game is decent at best. The characters look good, and so do the environments, but the pre-rendered scenes look cheap and crappy. There is also a lot of slowdown throughout the game when too much is going on on-screen. With button mashing, no skill involved in fighting, unbalanced everything throughout, and weak acrobatics, there is just something about this game that makes you want to keep playing, and it’s probably Rayne herself.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Clearly you have been blocking everything you or haven't played the game at all. Maybe pay attention to the story…