Well, here is part 2 of the Fallout 3 DLC, and boy, is it a huge improvement over the last one. I’m not going to explain much about Operation Anchorage, but it was linear, stripped away most features, and was kind of boring (check out reviews elsewhere). The Pitt actually adds a whole new city, which is post-apocalyptic Pennsylvania. You are to free slaves there and find a cure to the rad poisoning that’s getting to everyone and turning them into “trogs.”. Yes, trogs are a new creature you’ll discover and are even creepier than those ghouls.
The Pitt is fairly large, and you start out on a bridge that was once a freeway that led into Pennsylvania, so you’re right on the border. Once you cross the bridge, you lose all your equipment (don’t worry, you’ll get it back!). and talk to these poor people and fight in a gladiator arena to win an audience with a man named Ashur. I won’t go any further since this will spoil stuff, but The Pitt has an awesome new weapon and, mainly, a great story and new setting.
The Pitt is very industrial, with a huge steel mill and a steelyard that goes hundreds of feet above the ground. To get an idea of how big The Pitt is, you need to take the Citadel, Rivet City, and the whole area around the Capital Building (you know, with the Washington Monument and that huge lake), and you have The Pitt. While most of it is indoors and in the steelyard, you’ll spend a good four hours exploring this amazing place.
Thankfully, there are reasons to go back here (which I won’t reveal due to spoilers), so this setting isn’t a one-shot deal like Operation Anchorage. The Pitt is just very gritty, more dark and mature than the Capital Wasteland, and much more dangerous. The whole place feels scarier than the Wasteland (which just felt really lonely), and this place feels haunted. There are raiders everywhere, and there’s no way you can fight them all off like you can at the Falls. The new weapon added is the Auto Axe, and boy, is it sweet!!! This thing spins a deadly blade and will do almost a one-hit kill in V.A.T.S. I highly recommend buying this, but also buy Broken Steel for the level 30 cap!
Fallout 3 is just one amazing experience, one of the best games I’ve ever played, and one of my top ten for this generation. I’m not going to write a review for Fallout 3. This review is really for Fallout 3 fans who paid $10 for this addon and for those who are thinking about it.
Operation Anchorage is the liberation of Anchorage, Alaska, from the communist Chinese. You’ll be helping out the Brotherhood Outcasts and will have to travel a great distance from the downtown metro area to get there. Once you help some outcasts fight off some super mutants and help escort them to their bases, you enter a computer simulation of this liberation. This is where Fallout 3 goes weird and doesn’t really feel like Fallout anymore. Everything is covered in snow, first off, and second, it turns Fallout 3 into a linear FPS. You still have everything, like your Pip-Boy and your RPG bits, in tact, but there’s no looting or anything like that. You have health and ammo dispensers spread throughout, and you’re only allowed the weapons the simulation wants you to have.
You have to help these people infiltrate the Chinese base in the mountains and disable three AA guns. After this, you have to take out a listening post, a tank depot, and then a pulse field to finally get into the headquarters. The DLC feels very derivative, with only two new enemies and one or two new weapons. The only new weapons I saw were the awesome Gauss Rifle, which uses microfusion cells (yeah, you actually use those now!) and is a one-shot super sniper rifle. The other was a Chinese officer’s sword, but I think that might be old. You can get troops that can help you battle things out, but this was a weird turn of events for Fallout 3.
On the plus side, though, you have realized this is a simulation, and it helps ease the pain for people wanting to wander the Capital Wasteland. The whole purpose of this DLC is to unlock some pretty sweet loot (I won’t spoil it!) in a vault that can’t be accessed unless the simulation is completed. You can complete this DLC in about 3–5 hours, depending on your play style, and it’s not worth the $10. I would honestly skip this one and go get The Pitt and Broken Steel. If you really want more Fallout, then pick up OA, but Bethesda’s first foray into DLC wasn’t a great one.
These indie games just keep getting better and better and more like full-budget titles. Zeno Clash is no exception, with an original, wonderful art style, fun gameplay mechanics, and a very intriguing story. ZC puts you in the mind of Ghat, a runaway man who is hunting his “Father-Mother” and wants to release his or her secret.
During your meeting, you meet a few interesting characters, and you play through flashbacks occasionally. The game is an FPS/melee game with some pretty deep combat mechanics. You use your fists by using the left mouse button and right mouse button (for strong attacks), which you can lock on by using E and using space as a block. While you’re blocking, you can dodge attacks by hitting D or A, and if you time it right, you’ll get a slow-mo queue to punch. You can create combos, and then when the enemy is stunned, you can knee-bash them or throw them around. I found the best tactic was to charge your strong attack while backstepping and then let it go. This is a bit repetitive (just like the whole game), but it’s effective and works when you are up against four-plus enemies. All enemies have a health gauge, and so do you; thus, having to eat orange flowers will give you health.
Sometimes you’ll get weapons to use, and these are neat little things that can be used to shoot the enemies, causing massive damage. Most guns have no more than a few shots in them (this game has a tribal theme to it), so you’ll have to aim very well since reloading can take longer than you want (sorry, this isn’t Call of Duty). While most of the game consists of this pattern: Run, fight a batch of enemies, cutscene, rinse, and repeat. Thanks to the short length (about 5–6 hours), you won’t get too bored. One level, however, is a lot different from the rest: You are running through a foggy plain (the fog will kill you since it bites!) and you have a crystal torch. You must keep it lit with candles littered throughout the level and use it to shoot fireballs as shadows that come after you.
Zeno Clash has a wonderful premise to all of its gameplay, but ultimately it’s all the same and can actually be really frustrating towards the end. If there are too many enemies, you can get boxed in and beaten to death, and I found the most frustrating part about the game to be that if you get hit while you have a weapon in your hand, you drop it. This usually happens during a reload and can piss you off a lot. There aren’t too many weapons, but you have a single-shot rifle, a dual-shot crossbow, a sledgehammer, a bone bat, and a grenade launcher. But these are tribal-looking weapons, so everything is made from what you see around you, which is pretty slick.
The game uses the Source Engine (the updated one, not the old one), and the graphics are just bizarre and way out there. The creatures are something straight out of nightmares, and some of the speech is pretty odd too. Nonetheless, it makes the game even better, and the visual splendor is probably what saves this game. If you think there’s something to come back to (there isn’t), you can play challenges, and there are a bunch of Steam achievements to unlock. I highly recommend Zeno Clash to any FPS or indie game fan.
Now I’ve never played the original Trials, and in fact, I never heard about it until I saw it on Steam. Trials is a motocross physics game that gives you control of a poor soul on a dirt bike, and you have to safely get him through and over obstacles. The game is a side view, so think of it as a 2D scroller; you don’t have to control in a 3D environment; you just go forward and backward. You can adjust your bike in three different positions, and this affects gravity and inertia, so leaning forward helps you go up steep hills; lying flat helps you go under low-hanging obstacles and level your bike out in the air; and it also helps you go down steep hills. Most of the game consists of going up steep ramps and jumps and using precision to go over the craziest jumps you’ll ever see.
Some consist of extreme ramps (leaning forward) and then maybe going down three smaller ramps (leaning back), and you have to adjust the speed with all of this. Trials 2’s physics are superb and feel very real; the graphics are excellent with shadows, motion blur, depth of field, and high-res textures. You need a pretty beefy rig to get this running at full speed, but when you do, you’ll love it. There are online leaderboards and Steam Achievements, so there are plenty of reasons to replay courses.
There are three sets of courses: easy, medium, and hard. Each set requires more accuracy, precision, and skill. They get longer and crazier as you go, so watch out! As the name implies, Trials 2 has a ton of trial and error, so you’ll be hitting backspace to reset your guy more times than you can count (sometimes I was resetting over 100 times for the same spot). I highly recommend Trials 2 to any physics/puzzle game fan or any racing fan. With it only being $10 on Steam, it’s a bargain.
Before I start here, Dark Messiah suffered bad reviews because of all the terrible bugs that launched with the game. Now that 2 1/2 years have passed, Dark Messiah’s bugs have been pretty much ironed out, and you now have a pretty fun action RPG. Before I start explaining the game, DM uses the Half-Life 2 engine, so you can expect some wonderful graphics and effects. DM uses the HL2 engine very well, but the engine is a bit supped up, so you’ll need a fairly beefy rig to run this game. If your computer was being pushed with HL2, then your computer will have a hard time running this game. I also have to mention that DM felt a lot like Oblivion Lite in the sense that it is set in medieval times, melee combat is in the first person, and the art style is a little like Oblivion (not as unique, of course).
You play as a young protagonist named Sareth, and you must stop the evil Arantir from using the Skull Crystal and bringing the Dark Messiah back to life. You have a choice: either stop him yourself or let the Dark Messiah live on. The story is actually fairly interesting and will keep you on the edge throughout this 15-20-hour adventure. Now DM is a linear RPG (it’s not free-roaming like Oblivion), but it makes up for it with an intricate combat system. You have about 30–40 different item slots, and you can carry things from health, mana, weapons, magic, etc. As you progress through the game, you will earn skill points for completing objectives, and you can upgrade a variety of things from endurance, health, stealth, and archery skills to learn new skills such as heal, fire arrow, freeze, sanctuary, etc. There’s a lot to learn, and you won’t upgrade 100% in a play-through. You can either concentrate on being a knight, mage, or archer or just go down the middle.
There are a variety of unique weapons you can pick up throughout the adventure, such as the awesome rope bow (shoot an arrow at any wood overhanging and a rope will come down), ice staffs, flame swords, poison daggers, and even a cool electricity shield that stuns enemies when they attack you. Now there are no shops where you can buy things, so everything has to be picked up throughout the world. This keeps the action constantly going but will disappoint people who are used to having stores in their RPGs.
Combat consists of left-clicking for your basic attack, but if you hold it down, you do a power strike, and whether or not you strafe, move forward, or backward will determine whether it’s a sideswipe, impale, or overhead strike. This can let you easily dodge an attack and quickly strike back. You can use the right mouse button to block (and, when you get the ability), left-click to knock enemies back. Hit enough bad guys and you’ll get your adrenaline bar up, and this results in a gory, slow-mo instant kill. This applies to all weapons, and each of them has its own unique advantages. You have a kick button, and this is great when you are on a ledge, so you can just kick them off. Every so often, you’ll find spike beds on walls you can impale enemies on, and you’ll also find traps that can be kicked down to crush enemies.
While the combat is really fun and you can do a lot with it, it will get repetitive after about halfway through unless you use different weapons and toss things up. Every so often, you’ll find a blacksmith room where you can add bars of metal and forge your own weapons. Now, when it comes to enemies, there aren’t too many of them (knights, undead, spiders, necromancers, evil demons), and that’s about it. They are mixed up a lot, but you can still get bored of them after a while.
Every so often, though, you will get a great boss fight, and these are huge creatures that require key items in the environment to kill them. These are pretty awesome and very satisfying to take down. My biggest complaint must be the level design. A lot of times, you won’t find most of the hidden secret areas since they aren’t even in places you’d remotely think they’d be in. There will be times you’ll wander around for over 30 minutes in the same place wondering where to go, and this has to do with poor-level design. The levels are very linear, most of the time dark, and really hard to navigate. Other than this, Dark Messiah is a pretty good game, and you can even get it off Steam for $10! I highly recommend Dark Messiah to any action RPG fan.
I was waiting for this game ever since I stepped foot into RE4 two years ago (on the better PS2 version). For some reason, RE5 feels like RE4.5 since it feels so similar, and this was a big disappointment for me. Don’t get me wrong, RE5 is phenomenal, but all the similarities can make avid RE4 players quickly bored and/or not so impressed. Rewind four years ago to that pre-rendered still of Chris Redfield during the RE5 announcement and look (or remember) how amazing it looked.
Well, since it took so long to come out, RE5 now looks on par with most next-gen games. It is one of the best-looking games out right now, but what RE5 does that RE4 didn’t do is have amazing cinematic cutscenes. RE4 had a lot of interactive cut scenes, but RE5’s are very cinematic (buy the collector’s edition and you’ll see the new camera technology they used to make these amazing cutscenes). There are fewer interactive cutscenes (press the so-and-so button within 2-3 seconds), but everything else makes up for it. RE5’s controls and basic gameplay are exactly the same as RE4’s. Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? There’s still the over-the-shoulder camera, along with the whole laser sight and the whole wonky control scheme. While it still works, it does feel dated, and I wish there were a more Gears of War-type control setup or even something more modern.
One of my main gripes is that your attached case is a whole lot smaller, and you can’t upgrade it like in RE4. Sure, you have a quick-select button, but I’d prefer more room for stuff, thanks. You get nine NINE slots, and they are quickly used up. Let’s say you have a vest, four different weapons, and four ammo types. There’s no room for health (yes, it’s still the stupid herb ordeal), grenades, or anything else. This requires a lot more sacrificing, but thankfully your sexy buddy, Sheva Alamar, has nine slots as well, so you can trade and exchange items with each other. Yes, there is a “buddy system,” and I think in a zombie-ridden Africa, the buddy system is great (don’t worry, it’s not a “bodyguard” system like RE4 Sheva actually fights). Sheva’s AI is pretty good. Sometimes she tends to try and shoot through you half the time and doesn’t like to keep up with you when you’re bombarded with enemies.
Rarely will you die from this, but if you do, you get mad. This is why RE5 is a better-played co-op, online or offline. This is great and even has a Left 4 Dead feel since you’re surviving zombie hordes while trying to stop…err…a really bad man from unleashing the new Uroboros virus around the world. Since this is a next-gen system, the boss fights are bigger, badder, and tougher, and boy, do I mean BIGGER!!! You thought the El Gigante was huge on the GC, PS2, and Wii tries shooting up a 30-foot flying B.O.W. or something that’s the size of a naval freight ship. A few new elements are added to certain boss fights, such as “key weapons,” and these are only good for that fight. You may have a rechargeable flamethrower, an RPG, or even a satellite gun, kind of like the Hammer of Dawn in Gears of War. While all boss fights are a major challenge, you can always do it in one try. There are a lot more weapons in RE5, but most of them are useless since they are slight variations of other weapons. It takes longer to completely upgrade weapons, and you can only do this when you start the game, die, and are in between levels. No, there’s no creepy British dude with stuff under his coat selling you things. I found this change a bad one since it may hinder some people when they need a weapon before a certain point. Upgrades cost a lot more and thus make unlockables harder to get.
Another great thing about being next-gen is that the levels are now huge and the puzzles are challenging but not confusing and scatterbrained. There are a lot of little goodies to collect and unlock. You can use points for achieving certain things (such as finding all BSAA emblems, beating certain levels, etc.) to unlock figurines, filters, costumes, etc. These add great replay value and can make the game more fun a second time. When you beat the game, you get a mercenary mode (like in RE4) that pits you against tons of zombies you have to fend off. RE5 is an amazing game, but it feels too similar for RE4 veterans and may hinder and bring down your expectations.
Once again, Valve brings us another great game using their source engine that brings all the elements of Left 4 Dead to life (or death???) The first thing you’ll notice (mainly Valve fans) is that the Source engine has had a next-gen upgrade (even more so than Portal), and everything looks amazing. While HL2 fans will notice some sounds and elements of the engine from those games, it doesn’t really bother you. The game looks stunning with excellent lighting effects, awesome AI (enemy and friendly), great character models, high-res textures, and just everything you’d expect out of the source engine. L4D, however, isn’t really a single-player-only experience; in fact, you won’t even see the full potential of this four-player game unless you play online.
The game is comprised of four campaigns, and each campaign has five levels. Each level gets longer and more and more difficult, with a final level where you have to face off hundreds of zombies until your rescue transport arrives. At the start of each campaign, you get to choose the four characters (each character just starts out with a different weapon). Speaking of weapons, I was disappointed in the small selection that there was (just pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and a sniper rifle, along with bombs and Molotov). The basic idea is that these four characters have to cover each other’s butts through these levels while you face off massive hordes of zombies. The whole idea is a bit more in-depth, with some gameplay elements thrown in there. For example, zombies are attracted to noise and light, so if you keep your flashlight on near zombies, they’ll charge you. Shoot a car that has its headlights on, and you’ll have to face off with dozens of zombies charging at you because you set off the car alarm. Killing these zombies is fairly easy since a few shots will bring them down, but it’s sheer numbers that make up for this.
There are over 150 different zombie types, but there are a few “special” zombies that are harder to take down. These are the Tanks (massive zombies that will take all four people to bring down), Smokers (these guys have super long tongues that snatch you up), Boomers (no, not like in Gears of War, if these guys vomit on you, they attract more zombies, and the same if you blow them up if they’re too close to you), Witches (you hear them cry through levels, and if you disturb them, they’ll take you down and you are down until someone revives you), and Hunters (which are super fast-moving zombies that pounce on you and eat you until someone saves you). This changes the gameplay up, along with certain sections requiring you to do something, such as hit this switch to move this, and while this is happening, you have to fend off hordes of zombies. The game is probably the only “zombie simulator” out there because they just act and look so real, and you really do feel helpless in the middle of nowhere with hundreds of zombies around you.
Of course, you’ll blow through the four campaigns in about 3–4 hours, but it’s the great online play that extends the replay value. The way levels are played out is very original as well since you have to get everyone into a “safe room” at the end of the level (look for the red door) and close it, thus the next level loads and you get to restock on health and ammo. Throughout the levels, you may find rare ammo stocks, pipe bombs, etc. It’s the final levels that really are hard since you have to fend off so many zombies, and this can be hard for a single player since the AI won’t go anywhere unless you do. When your transport arrives, you must start heading towards it before it gets to you, because if you’re surrounded by dozens of zombies, you’re dead. If your teammates die, they tend to respawn in closets or behind closed doors. Once you run out of health, you can be healed by other teammates or take pills to temporarily fill your void. L4D is a wonderful game, but it’s tight on content and lacks more maps that we need (Valve sucks when it comes to DLC). I highly recommend this game as a great online multiplayer game.
The Sands of Time trilogy was probably one of the best game series ever made, let alone a few diverse series, with each game completely evolving from the other. When the series started with The Sands of Time, everyone completely freaked out on their consoles with the game’s great acrobatic moves, enticing story, and beautiful graphics. The game just felt so good and played so well that the controller almost melted in your hand. The return of Warrior Within the Prince kind of went to the dark side with a grungy, heavy metal, gory sequel that was either hate or love it type thing. I, however, considered that one my favorite, but fans were pleased again with Two Thrones when the Prince actually got a dark side and went back to the style of the first game. If you loved this game, you should go back and play the previous trilogy, because I promise you’ll fall in love with it.
The PoP we are playing has a completely different story, and hell, the Prince isn’t even a prince; he’s a thief who wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time whilst running into Princess Elika. The Prince and Elika play major roles in this wonderfully made game, and it all actually works. The first thing I need to explain is that the core of the gameplay is like the previous PoP games, with the whole acrobatic aspect still intact. However, the prince now has a gauge that he uses to help him with all of this. The controls have been simplified so that everything is just one button press. Yes, let go of that analog stick because you just use it to point the Prince where you want to go, not guide him. He can run across walls, run up walls, swing around poles, climb on vines, shimmy across ledges, etc. The game controls so incredibly well, and with a few minor issues, you really won’t hate the controls. Another major change is that the game is open-world, so you can go anywhere you want in this huge world.
The point of the game is to stop Arihman from destroying the world with corruption and, in turn, save Elika’s father, Ormazd. While there are over 30 areas to explore, you can go to them however you want using the acrobatic moves. Yes, this can get tedious after a while because once you discover everything, you’ll have to backtrack to the temple to acquire new powers. These are four powers that are activated on various colored power plates on walls, and they are key to accessing new Fertile Grounds. Each section is a “mini-level” with various obstacles to cross, and just before fertile ground is a boss fight. Navigating the world can be a bit confusing in the beginning since you’ll be relying on a “compass” that’ll guide you to where you want to go depending on what area you select on your map. The point of healing for each area is to rid itself of the corruption killing that piece of land. Of course, you can’t touch this corruption, or, well, you don’t die in this game. Elika saves you if you fall off a ledge, so consider any flat ground a checkpoint.
During combat, you cannot die either, and you may think this is absurd, but it is a blessing. Trying to find light seeds (after you heal a ground, you go back and collect these to gain new powers) can be kind of hard, so you jump off a cliff to reach one, and if you fail, no big deal. This is better than restarting a level, but of course, if it’s open-world, you can’t technically restart a level. Elika is also a big part of your acrobatics because if you can’t reach a ledge, you press Y when you jump, and she’ll give you a boost. This is also true in combat, where she is basically your “magic” attack. Moving through the levels is fairly easy, and I didn’t once have to resort to an FAQ of any kind. The compass is a great way to find out where to go since it’s a little light that kind of goes along a path, and you can follow it. Of course, finding all 1001 light seeds isn’t necessary since you’ll find plenty to acquire all powers without having to hunt and search for each seed.
Now, when it comes to combat, you’re in for quite a treat since combat is very cinematic. Everything is “one-on-one,” and each enemy has a life bar that you may deplete. You have four major attacks: magic, acrobatics, grab, and sword. You can combine any four of these to make huge combos. Of course, corruption plays a huge role, so if the enemy changes status, you can only use a certain attack to break through it. While each character technically plays the same, you have to use time-button presses to fend off their attacks. This can make things fun and challenging at the same time. The combat is very rewarding with the dramatic sweeping camera angles and beautifully scored music. Of course, after a while, it starts feeling really old, but not enough to really bore you since it always keeps you on your toes.
If you want to talk about cosmetics, PoP is probably one of the best-looking games ever made so far. The game is just stunningly beautiful, and there are high perches you can stand on and just look out to this beautiful vista that is amazingly rendered in real-time. I don’t know how Ubi did it, but they pulled off some amazing stuff to get the game to look the way it does. The soundtrack is really stunning as well (even though there’s not much of it), and the voice acting is top-notch. You are really in love with these two characters, and they struggle with the world around them and with each other. The Prince tends to be a sarcastic, hot-headed wannabe hero, and Elika is a confused woman/goodie-two-shoes who is always putting the Prince’s fire out. There are so many amazing elements to PoP; you just have to play it to really know it all. With a great cliffhanger ending, a great way to control the ending, great controls, cinematic combat, and beautiful graphics, you will spend a good 10 to 12 hours exploring this world.
Everybody knows and loves Lara Croft from way way back in 1996, when she starred on the PlayStation as the busty, sexy British female adventurer that everyone has grown to love over the past decade. Tomb Raider: Underworld really expands off the recent TR games with better environments, more brain-bending puzzles, less linearity, and more moves than you can count. Tomb Raider has always been about exploration and finding the best route using the environment, and this is still the core gameplay element used. The story of Underworld picks off where Legend (read my review for that) ends with Amanda on the loose and Lara trying to find her way into Atlantis to find her dead mother. While most of the story doesn’t pick up until the very end, there is enough incentive to keep you playing and motivated to press on.
The main element I need to talk about is just how much more detailed this game is. While most of the problems still exist, they can easily be overlooked with all the new features and elements added to the game. The first thing you’ll notice is how much more real Lara looks, feels, and moves around in the game. It’s just amazing to see Lara push brush out of her way, move to and fro in 360-degree motion with her stopping and starting really quick, the way she climbs, the way she places her hands and feet while climbing—it all just looks so damn good and real. The best thing about this is that the controls are still responsive and, most of the time, will do what you want. When you are swinging around poles, climbing walls, or hanging from ledges, you can pretty much get where you need to go with minute problems from the camera and some iffy collision detection issues. A lot of times Lara will jump in the wrong direction because of the finicky camera; she’ll fall off an edge you know you didn’t slip from, but all these are easily overlooked.
Now that all the climbing action is still the same and hasn’t changed much, the new animations, better controls, and sheer freedom you have really make it feel fresh again. Still staying in the action, the combat is exactly the same as before, and this is disappointing. The developers seemed to have taken the slo-mo headshot element from Anniversary and mixed it with Legend’s combat, and you get what you get: Simple lock-on combat with dodges and flips that don’t really do much. While the camera keeps up with the action, there’s nothing much to do but shoot your heart out. You can, however, throw grenades, and this really helps in tight situations. With all of that out of the way, let’s talk cosmetics.
Yes, the game looks absolutely stunning and is one of the better next-gen games as of yet. Everything is just huge and detailed. The sheer scope of the levels will make your jaw drop and make you think, “How the hell am I going to get up there?” This doesn’t just include land; it is also underwater. You will partake in two levels where you are hundreds of feet under the ocean, and it will take a good 4-5 minutes just to swim everywhere. The game really leads away from linearity with massive scope in the levels, and this usually leads to treasure hunting. Throughout the levels, you’ll find silver vases or just objects lying around as treasures for you to pick up. These will unlock extra content when you beat the game, so you must keep an eye out for them. Thankfully, they are easier to get to and easier to spot than in previous TR games, so you can relax. There’s just something great about this game that makes it different from other TR games, and the only thing I can think of is its pure epicness. Running around (yes, they added a run button!) in a sinking boat with a beautiful, sweeping orchestral soundtrack playing in the background just wows you every single time.
The game really does a good job mixing up exploration with action, and it also helps build upon Lara’s character. She is wiser, knows more, is a lot older with bitterness in her heart, and is holding onto all she can to keep from becoming corrupted like the enemies of her past. You really see this and how calloused her personality has become since she is no longer cheerful and happy but bitter and angry, with powerful rage flowing through her veins. The game just becomes so epic and amazing in the end that you wind up forgetting about all the gameplay flaws, and you feel very satisfied in the end. The main reason for this is that puzzles really bend your mind in just the right way to make you smile every time you solve a puzzle that expands an entire level.
Underworld requires you to take everything in and divide it into chunks instead of just looking and solving. Most levels will have you going from room to room to find pieces of a bigger puzzle, and this is actually better in the end. A small feature added is the ability to choose your weapons at the beginning of each level and your outfit. This is really useful and lets you mix things up for multiple playthroughs. There are other elements added to the game, such as your Gauntlets, which let you move certain heavier objects around rooms, Thor’s hammer (which you get toward the end), which is a one-hit kill scenario, and not to mention all the cool gadgets such as better binoculars (it’s actually a DV camera), your grapple hook, etc. You also get your bike back, but this time you get to control where you want to go. In Legend, you just drove straight, avoiding things along a linear path, but this time you drove it around and even used it to solve a few puzzles.
Underworld really is for hardcore Tomb Raider fans, and newbies really won’t like this much unless they get hooked on previous games. With gorgeous graphics, a great ending to a great story, our favorite female protagonist, and a few gameplay flaws, you will have a blast with Underworld.
Legendary is yet another game this year that has been released and has totally let all of us FPS fans down, but what a surprise, right? FPS games are probably the most prone to failing terribly due to lazy level design, bad stories, bad physics, and anything else you put in an FPS. Unfortunately, Legendary does almost everything wrong and hardly anything right, but you can still squeeze a few drops of fun out of this weekend rental. Legendary puts you up against Pandora’s Box’s creatures that start taking over and destroying the world while trying to be controlled by the evil LeFey.
While the plot sounds semi-interesting, it takes a face dive right into a mud pit once you start playing since you don’t really give a crap after about thirty minutes. If playing the game is hard enough as it is, the mechanics the game is built around are totally slapped together and not very well done. Even when I saw videos of this game, I knew it didn’t look complete, and they actually shipped the game unfinished. First and foremost, the main culprit is the Unreal 3 engine. Now, I’m not bashing the engine at all; it’s just that many developers tend to think U3 will make the game for them, and they just have to tell it what to do, which is not the case. There are a lot of similarities to BioShock, in fact, from the animus powers shooting out of your hand (with almost exact animations) to the same glowy look on everything you interact with. While the game looks halfway decent, everything looks like it was copied and pasted into the game instead of built there. You’re wandering around a war-torn London and New York, and you don’t even feel like you’re there since the game doesn’t replicate the cities at all, not even famous landscapes for Christ’s sake! On top of this, the physics are way off, and everything seems to stick like glue or something, and it’s just really weird. There’s terrible collision detection where enemies will go through walls, stick there, and start flopping around.
This is also coupled with cramped levels and linear levels, and everything just looks the same. Turn this wheel here, kill these creatures here, shoot these wire suspensions here, and bypass this keypad here. The game is very tedious, completely retarded, and put together so poorly. Even moving your character is a pain since when you get hit on one side, you stop moving that way for some strange reason, and I have no idea why. You’ll be strafing left and then get attacked by your left, but you just stop dead in your tracks, and you have to jam the stick left a few times before even moving again. The guns don’t feel powerful at all and are just completely retarded with almost no recoil; they are all standard, such as shotguns, machine guns, rocket launchers, and a weak pistol that does NOTHING. The most original weapon is probably an axe, but even the more powerful weapons take a while to tear down foes coming after you. The enemies are just absurdly difficult to bring down, even in the easiest setting. For some unknown reason, the weakest enemy (blood spiders) just swarms after you, and you have to find the sac holding them. Getting there can be a pain since this leads into the lame healing system. Other enemies range from werewolves, minotaurs, and griffons—you name it.
These are cool enemies and shouldn’t have anything go wrong, but it does anyway! They throw so many enemies at you, and you never feel powerful enough to take them down, so you’re constantly scrounging your health with the difficult healing system. You have this power from your hand called Animus, so you take Animus Clouds from dead creatures, and you use this for health. You hold down Y to take it, but it takes so long to absorb it all, and this is not good when you have a ton of guys shooting at you or creatures clawing at you. You hold down Y again to heal yourself, but as you can see, using the same button to heal and absorb is not going to work very well. When you’re near clouds, you absorb them instead of healing, and vice versa. If you double-tap Y (why are we double-tapping with so many buttons?) you can do an animus push to stun enemies, and this does absolutely nothing. Now, when it comes back to combat, you can’t use any melee attacks; there is no cover system. NOTHING, ZERO, ZILCH, SQUAT! You have to hide behind everything and peek out like a stupid old PlayStation game from six years ago. This makes things ridiculously annoying during the unbalanced levels that are badly designed.
This game just has so many things wrong that you wonder what there is to like. Well, it’s for the sheer epicness that the game seems to pull off with a 300-foot Golem, a HUGE Kraken you fight in London, and even the giant Griffons are cool to kill. If you can bear through this 6-7-hour campaign, you can find some fun in this game. With a different story, decent graphics, cool enemies, and lots of big bosses, you can have fun all at once. Legendary, this definitely is not.
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