With the fourth (and hopefully not final) Fallout 3 DLC, we are once again almost as disappointed as the first DLC outing, Operation Anchorage, where Bethesda mistakenly takes you out of the Capital Wasteland and into the redundant dead world of an alien spaceship. When you get the signal from the downed ship in the Capital Wasteland, you get beamed up and stuck in an alien prison cell where you must, throughout this adventure, fight your way off the ship with a woman and a little girl (who causes more trouble than wanted) to a final standoff with the captain of the mothership and finally an epic space battle.
Most of the DLC has you running around places blowing up these “cores” that will shut certain parts of the ship down so you can get to the bridge. While this sounds repetitive, nothing is as bad as the ship looks. With lots of 50’s cheesy alien sci-fi-looking infrastructure, it all looks copied and pasted throughout the entire thing, so after about thirty minutes, you’ve seen it all. There are three new weapons in this DLC: the shock baton, the atomizer, and the atomizer rifle. While these sound powerful, the aliens are some tough meat if you haven’t downloaded the Broken Steel add-on, so you can level up to around 25–30. With me being 28 years old, I still had a hard time fighting off the various droids and aliens since some have this invisible-looking armor that is a pain to break through.
While there are a few epic moments in the game, such as when you get to shoot a death ray at Earth and see a huge mushroom cloud appear, it makes you feel powerful. While not spoiling them all, I’ll move into items you can find, and these are probably worth more than anything in the Wasteland. Most of the items are alien crystals varying in size, along with some alien food, alien biogels, and various odds and ends that are worth tons back on Earth. You actually end up with so much that you can’t find enough people with the caps to purchase it all.
Once you do get back to the Wasteland, you’ll quickly forget what happened since there isn’t much narrative except for the hidden audio journals scattered throughout the ship. This really isn’t a way to progress dialog in Fallout 3, since most are interactive. After everything is over within the 2-3 hours it takes to beat this DLC, you’ll feel like you were ripped off about $5 and want a refund. Mothership Zeta is skip-able, but hardcore fans should really take it for a spin.
If you have ever played The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, you will kind of get the idea of what Alex Mercer is going through in Prototype (or [PROTOTYPE] as SEGA thinks CAPS is cool >.>), just minus the green problem our Mr. Banner seems to be having. The reason I say prototype is like Ultimate Destruction, and just a tad more ultimate with a hint more destruction, is because it uses a beefed-up engine from the same game and shares some of the same mechanics.
You play Alex Mercer, a confusing test subject who wants revenge on his creator and to stop the infection from spreading throughout the story. I’d tell you more, but the storytelling is so terrible that I had no idea what was going on or who was doing what or who! Constant flashbacks and pieces of the story told through consuming certain targets and watching stills aren’t fun for your brain to digest.
When you first jump into the game, you’ll be able to run up walls, climb buildings, and eventually glide, kick, and consume your way to ultimate infected glory. Most of Prototype is a free-roaming mode where you run from mission to mission, or side missions or activities, like Spider-Man or any other hero you like that can run across a city in less than 30 minutes. The great thing about this is that you can find hidden items such as extra experience or little-hidden things to unlock achievements (or trophies if you’re a PS3 fan and are somehow “accidentally” reading this Xbox 360 review). While most of these (like in any sandbox game) are so spread out and so well hidden, you won’t, except for the ones you run across by accident. Most of the free-roaming is, unfortunately, boring and bland. There are just people and cars, and that’s pretty much it. Once you get further into the game, rampant zombies and infected people terrorize the streets, and it does get more interesting, but it just makes you want to stay off of them and onto the buildings. Most of the graphics in the game are outdated and kind of boring, to begin with, so there’s nothing really “eye-catching” about the game at all.
The meat of the game, really, is the fighting, and this is where the heart of Prototype lies. You have a HUGE skill tree that extends from combat to stealth, to movement, to, yes, you guessed it, powers. What kind of game would [Prototype] be without powers? Well, pretty boring since there are so many; you have more than you can handle. Prototype has so many different moves and powers that you will end up forgetting most of the little ones and just using your most obnoxious ones. Your arm can transform into different weapons such as a whip, giant fists via The Thing, larger muscles for a mix of power and speed, a giant scythe (the one on the cover!), and a few others. Accompanied by these, you have some armor (you can’t glide or double dash though!…yeah, shut up Mario Kart fanboys), and you can also shapeshift into whoever your last consumed victim was (more on that later). The way you use these powers depends on the enemies you’re fighting. A huge mechanic is the grab ability, since this is used to fling objects at helicopters, giant tentacle arms, and even military soldiers or infected monsters. Most of the time, you mash X and Y together to create a cool combo, then somehow unleash a weird power. That’s why there is just too much in this game since you can’t memorize all these combos and what each one does for what weapons. One of the next major mechanics is the lock-on system, which is used to dash toward enemies and pummel them before they do something amazing to your infected self. I had a hard time with multiple enemies since you’d want to target one (say, a guy with a rocket launcher up high), but the game would keep targeting someone else below.
You can use actual weapons in the game that enemies drop, such as machine guns, shotguns, and rocket launchers, and these are essential in some missions. Not always will you have your weapons available, and you’ll have to use the environment around you. It also consists of many boss fights, and this is where I concluded my playthrough. The game gets so frustratingly difficult towards the end that it will throw so many hard enemies at you at once (two tentacles plus 5–6 hunters) while trying to protect something. Yeah, right, but then again, Sega is known for doing this in their games. You’ll end up trying to hit one enemy, then another knocks you back, then you can’t get up because another is smashing on you, and when you do, you get knocked back again. Yes, a lot of cheap deaths and hits, and this isn’t fair.
Aside from the annoying main missions, there are some rather fun and unique activities that utilize your powers. Some missions will have you using selected power to eliminate a certain amount of enemies in a certain amount of time; some are races, checkpoint races, and some even have you finding targets and consuming them for your Web (more on that later). While most of these are fun, some are impossible to get because of the target requirements for a gold medal and the maximum amount of experience points to spend in the skill tree. Other skills are earned by consuming certain targets to fly helicopters, tanks, etc.
The last element I should mention is the skill tree, which is filled by consuming certain targets and watching a series of stills and a brief voice clip to fill in the story (lame). So as you can see, this may be unique (and ways to unlock achievements, yeah, or trophies), but this seems more like a cheap way to tell the story or used as a game filler. While Prototype is fun for a while, it quickly gets repetitive with its cookie-cutter enemy AI, broken storytelling, cheap deaths, and bland free-roaming world. I recommend Prototype for a rental, but don’t expect anything amazing.
The sandbox or “open-ended gameplay” genre is actually the newest genre known to video games, with a good seven years under its belt, but not that many games have really proven the genre worthy. With Grand Theft Auto III being the daddy of this genre, many games were failed mock-ups of GTA; many weren’t even related but still didn’t do the genre justice. Saint’s Row tried to push the genre once again a few years ago, but didn’t do such a great job and was just shoved off as another GTA clone. Now that Saint’s Row 2 has been out for a while, people kind of just stopped with blank expressions, while some roared and cheered with joy. Saints 2 really does push the genre and is a clear opponent against Grand Theft Auto IV, but I’m not going to sit here and compare the two since Saints 2 deserves a separate look.
The first thing you do when you enter the game is to create your own character, and this is what really sets the game apart from others in the genre. You wake up from your coma in a jail hospital, and bam, you’re in there, changing your sex, picking your taunts (some are very vulgar), rearranging your face (you can do that outside of this too), picking your hair, and even your voice. The options are deep and riddled with lots of ways to make your character unique and stand out from others online. Once you get out of this mode, you are introduced to an easy-to-use tutorial that will show you how to control your character, and I have to admit, the controls are wonderful. I never got frustrated with them, and they are just so intuitive and easy to understand and remember. You start out with some melee training, then you pick up a pistol and discover you can zoom in via over the shoulder, jump around, and it all just feels nice and smooth. Once you hop into a car, this doesn’t change one bit since cars will turn on a dime and have the perfect feel to them (all 40 or so of them), and this makes driving around the city of Stilwater very pleasant.
The bulk of the game is about rivaling gangs throughout the story, and I have to admit the story is riveting, gruesome, and very entertaining and never falters once. You see, since you were knocked out for two weeks, all the gangs who hated you took their territory back, and now you must gather your old friends, start the 3rd Street Saints up again, and build your hideout. In this hideout, you can get your cash from the stores you purchased, change your gang’s style (like the ’80s, hip-hop, pimps & hos, that sort of thing), change your weapon layout, and pimp out your crib. All of these are just nice subtle touches that THQ didn’t really have to do, but they went that extra mile anyway.
Between these story missions, you can go to different stores and buy food (health), jewelry or clothes to increase your respect, go to plastic surgeons to redo something on your character, buy cars, buy weapons, and in the second half of the game, play side missions.
These side missions are actually a blast, and the two I will talk about are Fuzz and Septic Avenger. Most of the side missions are scattered throughout your map (Stilwater is HUGE, by the way), and they consist of events such as racing, celebrity protection, helicopter attack missions, etc. All of these missions earn you respect, so you can play story missions (each story mission takes one piece of your respect bar). Each mission gives you a time limit and a certain objective to complete, while some are easy and others are a pain in the @SS and can leave you screaming in frustration. Fuzz is a cop reality show where you drive around to designated crimes and kill them according to what your cameraman says. Sometimes you’ll have to use a chainsaw (camera angle a la Gears of War), use satchel charges on skateboarders, etc. Fuzz is an addictive (like most missions) way to fill your respect bar and leaves many laughs as well (thanks to the amazing dialog THQ wrote for the game). Septic Avenger has you driving a septic truck (yeah, a poop truck) spraying fecal matter all over buildings to depreciate their value for certain clients. As you spray the buildings, a red meter will drop and a cash amount will pop up, bringing that much closer to your depreciation amount. There are also some other smaller side missions, like the taxi missions and hostage diversion, in which you hijack a car and any passengers can be driven crazy (literally) until a ransom is given. You also have a streaker mission since you can walk around naked (blurred naughty bits, of course) and streak in front of people for cash.
If you think the side missions sound fun, don’t forget those story missions. The game has amazing voice acting and clever dialog, so it’ll keep you wanting more and make you come back to see which gang member you’re going to kill next. Not one mission is identical, and you are blessed with a nonrepetitive mission-based game that gives you many different places and ways to kill people throughout the entire game.
Now, when it comes to nitpicking the game apart, the graphics aren’t up to par with most next-gen games (thanks to a lot of Gears of War 2!). , and there are serious slowdown problems where the FPS will drop into the single digits sometimes; there are collision detection and clipping issues; some funky physic problems; but nothing that sandbox games haven’t encountered before. The game is highly playable, and you shouldn’t let these small problems bother you. The last thing I need to mention is the fact that the game is gruesome and more ballsy than GTA ever was. There are complete torture scenes, foul language, and running around naked a la Sims style, which is pretty far out there. The game is just hard-hitting and in your face, and that’s exactly what a mature-rated sandbox game needs.
The highly anticipated Point Lookout is finally out, and it does not disappoint. With this being the fourth DLC available for Fallout 3, you’d think Bethesda has started to run out of steam, but it seems they’ve just gotten started. The DLC starts out with a boat docking near the Jefferson Memorial and talking to a strange Tobar, who tells you all about Point Lookout, Maryland, and all its great treasures and adventures. Sure, it sounds great for the heroine of the Wasteland, but just how dangerous is it? Well, extremely, and especially if you are under level 25 and without the Broken Steel DLC, because the bog hillbillies are extremely tough to kill even with the Tesla Cannon (you get this in the Broken Steel DLC). Hell, even the Rocket Launcher won’t kill them with one shot (it must be all that moonshine they drink).
While not giving too much of the story away, you meet one AHOLE of a ghoul. Try to find a woman named Nadine, a deceptive brain, a strange cult, and a woman who has you help her with her family recipe of moonshine. The DLC is nothing short of amazing when it comes to the atmosphere since it’s just as lonely and creepy as the stuff on the disc (and The Pitt), with lots of fog, bogs, creepy hillbillies, strange buildings in the distance, and rads. Yes, since most of the DLC has water in it, you’ll be getting irradiated quite a bit, and this means you will need to bring some RadAway and Rad-X with you.
One mission even requires you to swim away from the island and locate a sunken submarine underwater. You have one store in the game in the carnival; there’s a motel you need to explore, a mysterious mansion, and a few other buildings, but there’s a lot to explore on this HUGE island, so you’re in for about 4-6 hours of great gameplay and story. Bethesda seemed to have concentrated more on exploring this time around than weapons or anything like that. There are a few new parks, the double-barreled shotgun, ando the lever-action rifle, but there are a ton of supplies to loot and grab. So much, in fact, you’ll have to head back to The Capital Wasteland just to sell it all. I believe this is a great DLC and is well worth the $10 (hell, I’ve paid $140 into Fallout 3 already), so don’t be afraid and come down to Point Lookout and explore!
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.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !