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!
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.
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.
Now that the third (but most certainly not final) DLC is out, we get the best of the bunch. Broken Steel adds an extremely hard quest, a level 30 cap raise, new powerful foes, and one mean Tesla Cannon. I also highly recommend, if you haven’t bought any DLC yet, buying BS first because it picks up two weeks after the “Project Purity” quest when the game initially ended.
This quest, of course, is for the Brotherhood of Steel, and you must help cut off the rest of the Enclave forces by blowing up a radio control tower that they are using at the Air Force Base, which is a whole new location. Before you do this, however, you must steal a Tesla Coil for the Scribes (they are scavenging Enclave tech after all), and you get a brand new awesome Tesla Cannon that is probably the most powerful weapon in the game now. This thing will kill almost anything in one to a few hits, and after impact, the electricity keeps eating away at health. This thing will also take out vertibirds in one fell swoop. Yes!!! Thankfully, it uses EC cells and not special ammo, so there’s plenty of it.
Walking around these two new locations is actually extremely tough, so just make sure you’re at least level 25–30 before even attempting it because you have Hellfire Enclave and new Ghouls that take forever to kill. Make sure you take a good 30–50 stimpaks with you because you’re going to get hammered in probably the most enemy-populated area in the game. When Bethesda said harder quests and enemies, they meant it. Now, this doesn’t mean the DLC is impossible to beat; it’s just extremely challenging.
There is also one other side quest they go through in there called “Aqua Pura,” and this is located at the Ghoul hideout in the Museum of History for those of you who want to know. Now there’s no interesting, unique atmosphere like The Pitt, so it’s just like what’s on the disc, except with new locations. I highly recommend players pick up Broken Steel, especially for the level cap raise and the new perks. The only problem is that this DLC is still too short, with about 4-6 hours of play, but the level cap raise makes up for it.
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.
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.
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.
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Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…