Hitman is a long-running series that is over 10 years old. The series is highly underrated and overlooked, mainly because of the time between each release. The last game (Blood Money) was released back in 2005. Some people actually thought the series was done until the announcement of Absolution about 18 months ago. You play as a slightly older Agent 47 while he hunts down men involved in kidnapping a very important girl for the agency. The story isn’t all that interesting and is slow-going, but the characters are great, and the voice acting is superb. Of course, the best thing about this game is the signature kills and stealth.
The levels are pretty linear, but 47 now has an instinct ability that will highlight important objects in yellow when they are nearby and will be flashing beacons at a distance. These range from weapons to distractions. Some levels will have hits that you have to complete, but the challenge isn’t just running around shooting everybody. Sure, you can, but what is the fun in that? Absolution has a very punishing scoring system; even if you kill one target that isn’t your hit, you will get a score drop—not much, but enough to keep you from getting the ultimate Silent Assassin score. You can knock out enemies and hide them to regain the negative score as well. The levels are cleverly designed, and each one is completely different. It is really fun to sneak around trying to find ingenious ways to kill your hit, which is usually to make it look like an accident.
If you just can’t find one, you can use your signature fiber wire to get the same score, but it isn’t as fun. This is the biggest issue with Absolution, though; you get punished for not being stealthy, but the game has a large arsenal of weapons of all kinds. Sure, you can run and gun for fun, but I honestly felt they should have just stuck with stealth and left the other weapons out. There are very few times where you need to use a gun, but those are usually silenced. The other huge problem is trial and error. Some levels had to be restarted over a dozen times because I just couldn’t find a path through a bunch of enemies or find a signature kill. I eventually found one, and there are checkpoints spread throughout the levels, but it is really tough. You can use disguises for enemies you subdue or find. The instinct indicators will tell you if someone is about to see through your disguise, so you use instinct to kind of blend in. This uses a special instinct meter but can be upgraded over time.
Some levels require multiple hits, which can be really tough. The whole point is to distract guards or find quicker ways to your target via vents, ledges, ladders, and other hallways. Most levels are pretty easy to figure out, but there is one you will restart over a dozen times. This really made the game feel frustrating at times because you would have no idea what to do on the first level. I was completely lost and didn’t know how to kill the targets. You can poison food, make things drop on enemies, or there are level-specific things that can happen. Sometimes you can blend in with the crowd; other times, disguises may not be available. Thanks to the large variety of levels and hits, you will never get bored. There is also a Contracts mode that expands the single-player campaign as well as the ability to outscore other players.
Multiplayer lets you create your own contracts, but most people won’t spend too much time here. The PC visuals are astounding, with beautiful DirectX 11 visuals, but you will need a rig with the latest hardware to run it in this mode. The textures look nearly realistic, and there is some gorgeous lighting and shadowing in this game. They are a huge step up over the consoles, which really show their age. Overall, Absolution is an amazing stealth game with a lot of variety and satisfying signature kills. I just wish the trial and error wasn’t so high.
Liberation is probably one of the most anticipated games for Vita, right next to Uncharted and Mortal Kombat. Like both of those games, it doesn’t live up to their console counterparts or everyone’s expectations. Liberation is probably the most disappointing of the three, but it is still a solid game. The problem with Liberation is that it is sloppy and felt slightly rushed to meet the Assassin’s Creed III console release. Aveline is an excellent protagonist and a very interesting character, but the narrative is very confusing and just feels slapped together. It only makes sense, or gets interesting, towards the last two sequences of the game.
Like all the other portable AC games, Desmond Miles doesn’t make an appearance in this game. You just started out as Aveline in New Orleans before the American Revolution started. New Orleans is occupied by the French, and the Spanish are busy selling slaves from Africa and trying to take control of New Orleans. Aveline, being a slave herself, is now freed by her stepmother but joins the Assassin Brotherhood by a leader who lives in the Bayou to free these slaves. This sounds very interesting, and it is, but it lacks the expansiveness of AC3. The story is very short, and it doesn’t allow enough time to tell a rich story. The side characters are forgettable, and Aveline barely gets enough time to really show her personality. I was highly disappointed with this, but the disappointments don’t end there.
The game is mostly like AC3, in terms of combat, animations, the control scheme, and whatnot. There are some Vita-specific features, but they fall flat. You pickpocket by zooming in on the character and running your finger down the rear touchpad; this makes it very cumbersome. You can open letters by pinching the top of the screen and sliding it, but it doesn’t work as it should. There’s even a weird puzzle thing that uses the Vita’s camera by holding it up to the light at a certain angle and turning a dial on the touchscreen. This also doesn’t work like it should and is confusing.
Combat is the same as AC3 and thankfully that hasn’t been broken. The combat system is very fluid and just feels so good. However, your assassin recruiting abilities are now gone. You have to use them in the world by interacting with an NPC and starting that ability. I really didn’t like this. Aveline has a couple new weapons, like the sugar cane machete and whip she can use to swing around some ledges. She has a pistol, as well as a blowpipe and parasol gun! The weapons are really neat and work well within the setting. Aveline can also use three different personas, which are an assassin, a lady, and a slave. The lady can’t climb around anywhere, but it is good for bribing certain soldiers to get into areas you need and blending in with certain crowds. The slave persona can blend in with slave workers, but the assassin has all weapons available but always has a minimum notoriety of level 1. The problem is that these personas are only useful during the main missions, but each one has a certain collectible that only that persona can get. Other than that, these personas feel useless. great idea, but not fully fleshed out.
Another issue is the world you’re exploring. The Bayou isn’t a fun place to be because you wind up swimming 70% of the area or being forced to climb around trees up top. Hunting was completely removed from the game, and the only animals that attack you are alligators. The game just feels very small in comparison to AC3. Let’s talk multiplayer. Don’t expect the addictive and excellent multiplayer from AC3. Instead, we get a cop-out of a strategy board game that is extremely boring. It requires 5% user input, and the game does the rest. You choose a faction (Abstergo or Assassin), pick your closest location on the map, then tap the icons of the opposite factions. You send off NPCs to fight a roll of the dice. Very boring and will keep you interested for all of 5 minutes. This is just like the assassin recruit missions in AC3, but used for multiplayer. There is nearly zero interaction with other players.
As it stands, Liberation is disappointing with its sloppy design. The story is confusing and not very interesting until the very end. The story is very short, the side missions aren’t very interesting, and the multiplayer is an absolute bore. The game is a fun weekend rental, but nothing more. I hope to see Aveline again, but the developers need to take more time. At least the game looks fantastic and is a huge technical feat for all portable games. It looks very close to the console games in terms of quality, but I know the Vita can do better still.
Scribblenauts is one of those games that is just fun, no matter what age you are. Solving puzzles by using your imagination just spells fun for anyone. Unlimited tries to throw in an open-world feel, which doesn’t feel so open and has almost every item you can imagine in there. The problem with Unlimited is that it is literally unchanged with no new features, and that is a huge letdown. Still worth a playthrough, though.
There is a bit of a story about Maxwell and his sister, who have parents who have a magic journal and pen. You can create anything with this, but one day Max uses it for bad on an old man. He puts a curse on his sister to turn her to stone unless he does good for people and collects Starites to free her. It’s a bit touching at the end and pretty cute, but nothing will wow you. The story is fine and works for the game. Once you are set free, you use your special vision to find people at each level who need help. They will appear gold, and the main puzzles will have blue stars above them.
The people outside the main puzzles just require items to solve their dilemmas. You will read your clue at the bottom of the screen and try to solve it. Most logical things work like a ghost that doesn’t feel scary enough. Click on him and write in the adjective box “scary,” and you solve the puzzles. It seems pretty simple, but there’s such a variety (over 100 in all) that it is just plain fun. I spent 2-3 hours in one sitting just flying through the puzzles, but then you get the snafus, which kind of ruins it all. Some puzzles won’t accept logical solutions, or you get a bad hint. The secondary puzzles don’t get additional hints like the main puzzles. The best thing is to get other people to help you who have a fresh thought process on it.
Overthinking puzzles will probably make you the most frustrated in the game, so it is a good idea to come back. Most main puzzles are pretty wacky and fairly simple and easy. For example, one area has you making dishes for certain people. A gamer comes in and wants pizza, so you add three ingredients. Easy. Another comes in and wants to eat a phoenix. Pretty weird, but ok. Add feathers, a beak, and wings, and you’re done. The last one wanted to eat a motorcycle, so I added a tire, gas tank, and engine. It was very strange, but very simple, and it was fun coming up with all this stuff. There are a few that are challenging and require some minor platforming and timing, but there aren’t many. You can finish the story in just a few hours, but getting 100% is fun.
Scribblenauts still has colorful graphics with paper cutout-style visuals, and it looks nice. The physics have been improved, but overall, the game is just pure fun. Sure, it may be really easy, but there are those puzzles where you just won’t get it or won’t take logical solutions. The biggest issue is that there is literally nothing unchanged from past games. The UI may have changed for PCs, but that’s about it. I wanted to see some mini-games or an actual adventure where you have to think about objects to get you from one end of the level to the next using objects. What’s here is fun, but maybe not for $30.
Man, where do I start? From a movie directed by the anti-Christ of video game movies to a game series that just refuses to improve on itself (whether on purpose or not is a mystery), Postal is just one terrible game series. Why Running With Scissors keeps making these stupid games with no improvements is beyond my comprehension.
Postal tries to shoehorn in raunchy and potty mouth humor but does it in a way that’s not funny. How that is possible is a mystery as well. From using porn actor Ron Jeremy’s likeness to dumb ideas like rampaging social justice soccer moms crashing porn shops, porn star signings, and other conventions with the lead mom looking like Sarah Palin, These ideas are dumb and should never exist. It doesn’t help that Postal III tries to poorly copy Quintin Tarantino’s art style. If playing as a guy named Dude and running around trying to help people but constantly failing because he ends up killing everyone sounds fun, this game makes it unplayable.
At first, it didn’t seem so bad during the tutorial until you realized the game has poor hit detection. When my reticle is over something and bullets don’t go anywhere near it, that is a serious issue and lazy game design. I honestly doubt RWS even play-tested a smidgen of this game. On top of all this, they used an outdated source engine, so the game looks over 5 years old. There are even sounds and effects pulled directly from Half-Life 2! Movement isn’t right either, like it’s still in alpha. Not to mention, some of the weapons in this game are just dumb. A vacuum that sucks up garbage and launches it? This isn’t Ratchet & Clank. Throwing feral cats? Using your own pee as a weapon? Not only are these stupid ideas, but they aren’t even done right!
The biggest issue is that everything is so mundane. Each “level” consists of the same thing over and over. Just run around killing these people. Nothing ever changes, and it doesn’t help that the game is really hard and enemies respawn until you complete the goal. How a developer can screw up this bad is just unheard of. It feels like Uwe Boll himself made this game, despite the developers making fun of him in the game. Postal is a homeless person living in the streets of the game world, and some people stop to talk to it but realize that it is just a foul-mouthed, unfunny piece of crap. Absolutely no thought or effort was put into this game.
There’s not much else to say, but don’t play this, or you will regret it. I wasted a whole hour trying to like this game, but I just couldn’t. Do yourself a favor and play any other game but this one. Even if you get this for free, it isn’t worth your time or hard drive space. Just ignore this piece of crap.
Zombie games are abundant now, but they are getting smarter and more atmospheric. Deadlight brings the unique 2D side-scrolling platforming of Shadow Complex and adds zombies. You play as Randall Wayne, trying to find his family in the Safe Zone while uncovering why The New Law is trying to round up survivors. The problem with the story is that it is so short that it doesn’t give it much time to develop. You won’t care about anyone in the game, just the action. Deadlight’s strongest feat is its atmosphere, but this one has a few issues.
The game is all about platforming and running from zombies. There are some puzzles thrown in, but they are basic and not very hard to figure out. Push this button to raise this platform-type stuff. You can run and bust open doors, but the run feature is mainly used to run from zombies in open areas. Jump to avoid obstacles in your way because you don’t want to take down all these zombies. You carry an axe most of the time, but they don’t go down easily and take several swings to take down. Once you get caught up in a zombie group, you’re pretty much dead, which is frustrating. It’s best to just jump over them and get to the next area. In some sections, you get a pistol or a shotgun, which comes in handy, and then you don’t have to run from zombies. All the action and platforming are really fun, but the game is troubled with some awkward mechanics. You can’t jump or grab onto objects directly above you if you are pressing left or right at all. Randall with a leap forward, and this can lead to cheap deaths. Climbing up and down things is annoying because you have to press a button to go up and down. Instead of just pressing up to go up and down to go down, you have a button for each action that breaks the game’s momentum. The same goes for aiming. You can’t just whip out your gun and blast enemies away; you have to stop, aim (which takes a second for the gun to be drawn), and then fire. This is ridiculous and annoying.
Besides that, the game has many locales you go through, and it is just a lot of fun. I played the whole game in one sitting because of the atmosphere. Seeing zombies in the background, having to run, and taking them down is just plain fun, which Deadlight does a good job of providing. There were a lot of cheap deaths due to awkward controls and glitches, but most glitches have been addressed now. The game just has a great pace that constantly keeps you on the move, but there are other issues that persist.
The voice acting is spotty where it is good sometimes and terrible other times. The graphics are amazing for this type of game, and they really draw you into this desolate world. I just wish there was a great story to go along with this game. Being so short, I felt they could have done so much more. There’s no reason to go back, and finding collectibles doesn’t give you jack, so one quick play-through and you’re done. This is just an evening play-through and isn’t really worth the price. This feels more like a long demo than anything else. Deadlight has a lot of potential, but hopefully, a sequel will provide more.
XCOM was a popular turn-based strategy game back in the ’90s, and everyone was surprised by how well this game turned out. Enemy Unknown keeps the series vibe and atmosphere updated to today’s standards. Enemy Unknown is one of this year’s best strategy games, but there is one reason why most people will never complete this game: It is too damn hard. Not the fun and challenging type of hard, but the kind that makes it impossible to move on no matter how well equipped your soldiers are.
The game does a very good job of introducing new things to you as you move on. The UI is very simple and uncomplicated, but pretty deep. You get to see a cut-a-way of a military base, and you can click on each department. Research is where everything starts. By gathering all intact materials from missions, you can research new things like weapons, armor, satellites, and various other things. Engineering is where it is all made and upgraded, as well as keeping track of other buildings. Workshops, laboratories, generators, hangars—all these things determine how fast you can upgrade and how you become more powerful. The barracks are where you can equip your squad’s loadout, upgrade soldiers, hire new ones, etc. Finally, there are the situation room and the command center. Here you can advance the days until you run into missions, trade alien parts on the black market, and view how in distress the world is. It is all very simple and almost revolutionary in design because most strategy games are Excel sheet-based and are pretty complicated and hard to navigate.
Once you assign things to engineers and do research, you can advance the days until you run into something, such as a UFO sighting. When this happens, you scramble your jets, and depending on how good the equipment you gave them is, they’ll take it down. Most of the time, you will run into abduction scenarios where you eliminate all hostiles or have to rescue someone. When this happens, you get a choice as to what country to help. Each one gives you a reward, such as money, scientists, engineers, or other items. Usually, you pick the one that’s in distress the most because if you don’t, they will remove themselves from the XCOM operation, and if they all withdraw, it’s game over. Once you go into battle, this is where you see how hard this game gets.
Each soldier gets two moves. The area around them is blue, which means that’s one move, and yellow, which means it takes both moves to get there. Performing an action takes one move, and that is usually shooting alien scum. All soldiers start out as regulars with assault rifles until after their first mission and they rank up. The class is chosen randomly, which I really hate because you can be stuck with five snipers and just one assault guy. When you are ready to shoot, you will see how accurate your shot is. Once all turns are taken, it’s the alien’s turn. This back and forth is normal for strategy games, but the objectives you are given, or the difficulty of aliens, are absurd and completely unfair. You will shoot down some small grays and get through a few thin men. Maybe you will lose 2 or 3 guys in the process, and then four freaking Mutons will show up and wipe the rest of you out in one turn. Or don’t forget the damn spider things that can turn your squadmate into a zombie in one hit. This gets frustrating because every mission is like this. I rarely got through any unless it was on an easy-difficulty mission.
This would be ok if it were during main missions, and you could go back and grind a bit to get better equipment, but you have to do that with every single mission. You fail almost more than you succeed, such as by losing so many soldiers. Once a soldier dies, they are dead forever and won’t come back. Once you lose a fully ranked soldier, you have to start from scratch again with a new guy. It is completely unfair in a game this difficult. In most missions, you will be lucky if you get out with 2 or 3 guys, but you are probably thinking that’s because I stink at the game. I would restart and try all different strategies, and nothing would work. The whole point of the game is to take cover and never be out in the open. Once you advance and are just standing there, you’re dead. The fog of war doesn’t help when you run around the map trying to figure out where all the enemies are. Forget a rescue mission where you have to save a certain amount. Saving 5/25 people is a lot harder than it sounds. All 20 will die before you get to your third guy. This game is just a nightmare, and not in a fun way.
That doesn’t make the game bad, though. There are a lot of great research projects that have a huge impact on everything you do. You have to decide carefully about what you want, or you’re screwed. You get a very limited amount of money every month, and you have to stretch it. I found this a bit unfair as well, because there’s no compromise. Even if just one element was easier, it could make this game more tolerable. As it stands, I had this game for over a month and barely got 25% through the game before I gave up. Spending 45 minutes on a mission and then dying at the end is just ridiculous. Reloading quick saves doesn’t always work, either because you realize you forgot to equip someone with a medkit or because you need to be more accurate on certain missions and forgot to equip scopes. This game is just a pain.
The production values are at least nice, with great-looking aliens and some decent voice acting, but overall, this game requires extreme patience more than skill or brainpower. The game is well done with intense battles, but maps repeat often, the camera is screwy where it zooms out of buildings, and the graphics are a bit underwhelming. The main thing is the extreme difficulty, which practically ruins the game. I have never played such a hard strategy game before, but there’s someone out there who will like this.
Creative Assembly has made a lot of time-period hack and slash games that are decent but have many flaws (Spartan: Total Warrior for PS2 was one). Viking is a decent game but is plagued with repetition. I played this 5 years ago on the Xbox 360, and it was just OK back then. This game has aged like rotten milk, only having a decent graphics upgrade. Is it worth even a $15 purchase?
The answer is maybe. It depends on how you look at low-budget ports of older games. Viking has a paper-thin story that is middling on nonsense. All I know is that two busty goddesses are fighting each other and using Skarin (what a dumb name) to round up Vikings to stop Hel’s Legion. It feels more like a Lord of the Rings rip-off when you play it. Aside from the lame story, everything in this game is repetitive and grows boring. I finished this game back in 2007, but I couldn’t even finish the third section of this game this time around; I just wanted to tear my hair out. The combat is sluggish, with repetitive animations and combat moves. Sure, there are some upgrades, but mashing light and heavy attacks against hundreds and hundreds of enemies is boring. There are a few instant kill animations, but they repeat so often that you will just finish off the enemies normally because of how tiresome it gets. It doesn’t help that the slow motion goes on for way too long.
Using flame pots, throwing axes, and health potions don’t help either. This game can be really tough, and you respawn at Leystone locations spread throughout each of the three islands. Your only goal is to run around liberating camps with Viking cages in them. It gets boring because that is all you do. There are no other objectives. Some camps require you to “prove” yourself before they join your army. This leads to mundane tasks like liberating another camp to prove yourself. At the end of each island are large fortresses that you liberate, which are probably the only interesting thing in the game for the first time. You can summon a dragon to wipe out shamans, but you need to acquire stones to do this, which completely breaks this. Once all the shamans are dead, you liberate that area and move on. No matter how fast your computer is, you will experience a massive slowdown during these battles because of all the people on screen. This drove me nuts.
Before you can liberate the final town on each island, you have to use stealth to sneak in and complete an objective. This was both broken and boring because you had no idea where to go. Enemies spot you too easily, and then they call all their friends over, and you die. Why you have to sneak into these camps is beyond me. Why can’t you just liberate it and then take the item as a reward? After one hour, this game is just not fun. The world is empty, there’s no reward for exploration, and the map system is nearly useless. The only redeeming qualities are the gore and the updated graphics. At least the game is really short and can be beaten in about 8 hours.
Overall, if you missed this five years ago, you’re not missing anything now. If you really need a budget hack and slash, then go ahead, but be warned of the boring, repetitive gameplay.
I can’t tell you how long I have been waiting for this game—well, I can, since the first one. I didn’t know what AC3 would be, but I knew down the road it would come, and here it is. Somehow, Ubisoft can manage to make each entry feel fresh without having to do drastic reboots. AC3 is set in the American Revolution and is the final chapter in Desmond’s story, or so they say. You play as Connor or the unpronounceable Ratonhnhaké:ton. He is a Mohawk Indian, or half British, half Kanien’kehá:ka. He is actually a likable character, and after Ubisoft created such loved characters as Altair and Ezio, it becomes a huge challenge to create a third. There are so many changes to the game that it feels like a true sequel, but a few flaws that have persisted throughout the series remain.
The first thing you will notice is the change in the HUD design. It is much more streamlined and user-friendly. The second thing you will notice is that the puppeteer system is gone. You do everything with RT only and jump around with A. This is supposed to help streamline climbing (which it does), so you have to press fewer buttons. Connor automatically pushes people out of the way while running, so you no longer stumble and fall down. One major thing I took away was how much you can blend. Being able to run away from guards is much easier now, but you can still hide in stacks. There are different crowd types of blending in, like people leaning against walls, starting riots, etc., but when you are notorious, you can fight or lose them more easily. The whole environment just feels more natural, so you can climb on cliffs in the frontier and use different handholds. Trees can now be climbed because a new V-shaped object has been introduced.
The same flaw persists in parkouring throughout every game. Connor will jump around on handholds that you don’t want him to. He will even sometimes get stopped by invisible barriers if an object is too low. This led to cheap deaths and frustrating restarts. I guess some things can’t ever be ironed out. Thankfully, the combat is much improved, with Ubisoft realizing Assassin’s Creed is a counter-fest and actually building on this. AC3 is my third favorite fight system in an action adventure right under God of War and the new Batmans. Each attack is built around a counter, so you press B when a red triangle appears above an enemy’s head, then press X to instant kill, B again to throw, or A to disarm. The combat system is fast and fluid and leads to fewer deaths, but it is still challenging because you need to be quick. Each assassin you recruit is unique, and there are only six. Each one has a special ability, like escort, marksman, riot, and others. These unique abilities give you much more options when infiltrating restricted areas to either bring you to the heart or distract guards. You can even send them off on missions through the map menu instead of localized areas.
There are many weapons and items you can use in combat. The punch dagger has been reduced to just one, but you have a flintlock pistol (yes, it requires a lengthy reload every time, but you can carry two later on), and you also have a bow and arrow. Other items include mines, poison darts, rope darts, and many others. You also have to watch out because enemies have weapons and will form firing lines. When they do this, press A near an enemy and use them as a human shield. Good stuff.
On another note, combat leads to hunting, which is a great mechanic added to this game. Exploring the large Frontier area and homestead allows you to hunt animals and skin them for items to use for crafting. You can stalk animals (stalking is a whole new feature that allows you to hide in tall brush), assassinate them from the air, and lay snares to trap smaller animals. Laying out bait will make an animal come to the exact area you want, but watch out. Using more aggressive methods of killing will damage the animals’ pelts, such as using a pistol or mine. Hunting also leads to many club challenges, which are extremely difficult to complete. You can even be attacked by animals, which leads to quick-time events.
Now that we have the three major things about the game out of the way, let’s talk about the minor stuff. The menu and HUD design are much more streamlined, such as your health, ammo count, and even the assassins you can call upon. Everything is minimal, and I really like that. Of course, when you pass by new areas, you get briefed on a bit of history about them, which is 25% of the fun in AC3. After you finish the story mode, you can go around finding hundreds of collectibles such as feathers, chests, trinkets, and other items. The club challenges are really tough, though, and require you to meet certain criteria to move onto the next list. It can be fun, but some are nearly impossible to complete.
One of my favorite things in the game is the Peg Leg Trinket missions, which are cinematic and a placeholder for the Templar Tombs that were in previous games. The final piece of loot for these missions is awesome, and each mission is memorable and so much fun. There is a new investigation mechanic added that has you finding clues on the map, which is used for hunting, side missions, and story missions. What’s more, the naval battles are absolutely epic and really fun. Thanks to the new Anvil-Next graphics engine, Ubisoft created some pretty realistic water effects that make you feel like you’re really in the ocean. Steering the ship around and blasting off cannons at enemy ships is so much fun, and each mission has various objectives. Probably the best use of a controllable ship in any game ever!
You are probably wondering about the story. Sure, Connor’s story is touching and has him following every major event in the Revolution along with key people. The characters are entertaining to watch and hear, and Desmond’s story is, like all the other games in the series, very brief, but the ending isn’t as bad as everyone says it is. It isn’t confusing, but just abrupt. Desmond and the gang are trying to stop the solar flare from destroying the world on 12/21/12, and it gets a bit complicated. Connor’s story has a satisfying ending, but you just can’t help but feel giddy when a historic figure like Ben Franklin or George Washington appears on the screen.
Once you finish the epic story mode, there is multiplayer, which is just so addictive. Ubisoft has fine-tuned it and nailed it with the cat-and-mouse gameplay that you can’t get enough of. Each player gets an avatar of another player they have to kill. However, at each level, there are dozens of duplicates walking around, but you can’t just start killing everyone. Killing innocents exposes you and makes you vulnerable. Find your target by watching for suspicious behavior like blending, hiding, or running. You also have people hunting you, but you can’t kill them; just knock them out. If you confront them directly, you just get an honorable death, which reduces their kill score. Stay incognito and knock them out from behind. There are many modes, such as Assassinate, that don’t give you any contracts. You just have to watch your compass and kill everyone you can find. There are deep customization options that allow you to change the appearance, attack moves, stances, taunts, and weapons of each character. You can unlock new items by ranking up and earning credits.
Overall, AC3 is huge and fantastic. Exploring the Frontier, Boston, and New York is amazing, not to mention the fantastic graphics for such dated hardware. Multiplayer is extremely addictive, and other small tidbits just add to that. Weather changes, hunting, crafting, side missions—the list goes on and on. The only way to truly experience this amazing game is to play it. This is definitely a game of the year-worthy game and well worth a purchase.
Limited Edition: For $60 extra, you can get a highly detailed figurine of Connor, a life-size Assassin’s version of the American flag, a beautiful art book, and a belt buckle. This is all well worth the extra money because of how detailed everything is. The flag has metal eyes, so it can be flown on a pole. The statue has so much detail; it looks fantastic. The art book is designed like a 17th-century journal and looks beautiful. It was well worth the purchase.
Serious Sam is one of the original old-school shooters where you just shot everything on sight. Forget about the story, gameplay, cinematic events, or anything else. Serious Sam is one of the less popular FPS series that is shadowed by Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem. BFE doesn’t really do anything new or add anything new except a spiffy new engine, which is seriously wasted. The game is repetitive, lacks any awesome guns (except a couple), and has the same handful of enemies thousands of times over. BFE is mainly for newcomers because only the super-hardcore fans will truly enjoy this (if that).
The story is paper-thin, with Sam trying to stop an alien invasion. That’s it. This is the prequel to First Encounter, but who really cares? The game tries to be a bit different by starting off slow with a sledgehammer and introducing awesome melee attacks to show off the new engine. You acquire a pistol, then a shotgun, and then more guns as the game goes on. There are dozens of secret areas everywhere (I couldn’t find a single one for some reason). You shoot thousands of enemies throughout the game, but in extremely difficult waves that can be in the hundreds.
I honestly felt that my arsenal was underwhelmed by the vast amounts of enemies the game throws at you. The most effective weapons were the cannon, C4, and Devastator, but the ammo for those is pretty rare (except C4). All the rest were pretty useless except the minigun, which was good at reducing crowds in a wide area but ate up ammo quick. I can’t tell you how boring the game got by the end, and it will really test your endurance. I played on the easy setting and still got my ass kicked sometimes. For the hell of it, I tried it on the hardest difficulty, and it was impossible. I couldn’t get past the third level; it was that hard. By the last level, you are thrown probably a few thousand enemies with wave after wave that takes you about 45 minutes to chew through. The waves get so big that I backpedaled half the level to get some breathing room in some areas.
When it comes to looks, BFE is impressive for a DirectX 9 game. This is the most customizable PC game ever made when it comes to graphics options. There are options here I have never even heard of! There are about 45 options, but when you max the game out, it looks amazing, but it is sadly wasted on a bland and boring art style. Everything is brown and dead, with nothing interesting to look at. Halfway through the game, I couldn’t take it anymore but finished it anyway. I do have to say that I am disappointed that Sam’s macho quips aren’t as funny this time around as in previous games. They just seem stale and are pretty mellow. Oh well.
Multiplayer is where BFE shines, but no one is playing online. During my entire week of playing the campaign, I logged in at different times of the day and night and maybe got 1 or 2 people playing if I was lucky. The server list is almost always empty, which is sad. This is a game that you will have to get buddies to go LAN on. When I did get a tiny game going, it was addictive and felt very old-school with fast movement, lots of jumping, and twitch reaction shooting. There are some neat modes, but I never got to play most of them because this game is nearly abandoned despite Croteam releasing a patch about 2 weeks ago.
I can only recommend this to hardcore FPS fans and hardcore fans of past Sam games. The campaign is nothing special and gets incredibly boring and monotonous halfway through, not to mention freaking tough as nails. The weapon arsenal is disappointing, and there are only a handful of different enemies. There isn’t enough new here to make it a true sequel, but the game looks damn good. For the low price, it is worth a fun play-through, but don’t expect tons of people to be playing online.
When big new action RPGs come out, I am very wary because it is very difficult to create a convincing, believable world without forcing it onto the player. Amalur fails in this sense and feels extremely forced and weak in almost every way. The game is just too big for its britches, and it tries to do too much. There is too much game here that feels empty and boring, and the game seriously lacks polish everywhere you look.
Let’s start with the story. The story, lore, environment, characters—all of it just feels forced and not memorable at all. Almost every aspect of the story is just boring, and I could not care for anything even if I tried. There are too many unpronounceable names, and just too much is thrown at you early on. Games like The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Fable, and other action RPGs dole it out slowly, but they also have names and lore that are just memorable. It just doesn’t click here, and you will notice this about 3–4 hours into the game. I looked all over the place, desperately trying to find that one quest or character that would make everything click, but I just couldn’t. The story has something to do with Fey and war, and yeah, I lost track early on because there is just too much distraction here.
It doesn’t help that the game is so hard to navigate. There is a fast travel system via the map, but the world is just way too big and empty. There are no memorable landmarks, and every place just starts looking the same after a while. The game forces level grinding on you, so you are locked out of areas due to enemies killing you in one hit until you level up more. Leveling up takes so long in this game and forces you to do these side quests too, ultimately making you want to quit playing. The menus are clunky and confusing, and I still couldn’t really figure out the crafting systems even 10 hours into the game. There is just so much in this game that needs polish, but the game just needs to be seriously downsized.
There are way too many pointless and boring side quests. I could count 30+ side quests in my journal at one time that spread across the entire map. You feel completely lost and have no idea where to start. It also doesn’t help that the game is just way too long. That is fine in a game where you love the lore and characters, but here you just want it to end. Too many characters are introduced too fast; they have boring personalities, and they all just look and sound the same after a while. I swear I was introduced to 50+ characters by the 15-hour mark, and I felt my brain swim in the confusion. I got tossed so many names of races, characters, magical relics, landmarks, towns, buildings, weapons, and other things that my brain just imploded after a while.
The combat is at least decent because it relies on skill, but the level grinding makes the game really hard. You can use a secondary weapon and a primary weapon, but leveling up your character is also confusing when you start. The tree skill is odd and lets you upgrade skills outside your class, which I found pointless. If I’m a mage, why would I want to increase my heavy armor and two-handed weapon skills? When the levels don’t come very often, you can’t afford to deviate like that, so you just stick to your class skills. The controls are pretty good for combat with parries, counterattacks, dodges, blocks, and magic skills. The animations are fluid, and when I was in combat, that was the only time I forgot about this huge, confusing open world.
That is probably the only strong point in Amalur besides the pretty art style. However, the game is technically underwhelming and looks like it was made in 2006 or 2007. At the end of a session, you will sit back and not remember a single thing about the game’s story or characters, and you will be overwhelmed by the amount of pointless and seemingly endless side quests that give a very little reward. Hell, even the looting system is odd, with magic rune dispelling on chests and lock picking as well as picking wild plants. Sound familiar? Well, it would, with one of the head guys having worked on Oblivion. All the mechanics around everything in this game are just so unpolished, and they feel wrong.
After about 10 or so hours, you will probably quit the game and not find any reason to go back. With boring, pointless side quests of hunting animals, finding stupid items, and running aimlessly around this huge, huge open world, you will call it quits. I had this game sitting on my computer for 10 months, and I got in just under 20 hours and couldn’t find any incentive to go back. Even when I had no new games to play, I couldn’t even load the game up. I thought about the level grinding and dozens of pointless side quests, and I couldn’t remember a single thing about the story or a single character’s name. The only redeeming thing about Amalur is the art style and combat. If you can stomach all this, then go ahead, but most players will get bored quickly.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…