Not much can be said about this DLC for Renegade Ops. This closes off the story with just 3 levels and a couple of new enemies, but everything is the same, and that’s not really good or bad. If you couldn’t take any more after the end of the main game, then three extra levels may or may not kill you. The biggest change is the ice-cold scenery, but the overall design of the levels remains the same.
The final boss fight with Coldstrike is very challenging and even harder than Inferno was. The same problems consist of the repetitive nature of the game. The objectives are not any different from the main game, but if you really like the structure of this game, then this DLC is a must-buy for you.
The new enemies consist of a new huge bad boy called a Golem (who replaces the Juggernauts) as well as turrets that fall from the sky and just “re-texturing” of old enemies. There are a few scenes where you are running from missile drops that will break the ice for you, but that’s as exciting as it gets.
For the low price, you get an hour’s worth of fun activities, but you can go back with friends to experience it all again. With just 3 levels and barely anything new, it doesn’t add up to a “campaign” and more like, well, DLC.
Twin-stick shooters are running amok on mobile devices, but the best tend to be on consoles. Renegade Ops lets you choose from a variety of characters with a special weapon each. You can level up and unlock new upgrades while trying to mow down as many enemies as possible to rack up a high score. The story is actually really cliché and stupid, with a commando leader named Bryant trying to stop the evil Inferno from taking over the world. The cut scenes are drawn in nice comic book-style stills, but the dialog is as cheesy as it can get. No matter how you try to kill Inferno, he always seems to survive, and it’s just one of those “You’ll never kill me, Bryant! MWAHAHA!” type stories.
Besides the cheesy story, the action is really fun, with some great graphics and physics. You drive your vehicle using the right stick to shoot with your machine gun. Along the way, you can get pickups to make your machine gun stronger as well as secondary ammo pickups like rocket launchers, rail guns, and flamethrowers. There aren’t many pickups, which is a real bummer, but this is just the start of what else there isn’t much of. The enemy variety is interesting with varying degrees of difficulty, but it leads to the game being very difficult most of the time. You start off with 5 lives per level, and if you lose them all, it’s game over. The levels are very long, and you will be infuriated if you have to go through all that effort again.
My main concern about the game is that it gets very repetitive very quickly because all you do is drive around and shoot. The graphics are excellent, so you could get some cinematic scripted scenes going, but instead, you just follow an objective arrow around all over the place and kill everything in front of you. There are secondary objectives that lead to achievements, but they span the entire level and take way too long to complete. You are also timed on the primary objective, so if you don’t get it done fast enough, a 3-minute timer ticks down, and if you don’t complete it by then, it’s game over. This means you have to abandon the secondary, which makes things even more frustrating. When you die, you lose your machine gun pickups, so you start with the weakest form and can die easier that way because it takes longer to kill enemies.
There is a lot of fun to be had here with destructible environments and a four-player co-op, which makes the game easier and more fun. The upgrades are disappointing because you can only equip four at a time, and this leaves a lot of useful upgrades unused. There are only 7 missions, so you will beat the game in less than 5 hours, but most people probably won’t go through it again due to the difficulty and repetitive nature of the whole game. Twin-stick shooters should pick this up and rejoice, but don’t expect it to change the genre.
The Dispenser of Justice! Hero of the Downtrodden! Those are just a couple of DeathSpank’s other names in this hilarious action RPG from Hot Head Studios. You play the silly hero DeathSpank in his quest to find the artifact and kill the evil king, Lord Von Prong. LVP wants DeathSpank’s magical thong to become eviler, but in the meantime, you need to do some saving for the downtrodden.
The overall story isn’t much, but the banter with NPCs is what really makes you crack up with the obvious stabs at RPGs and other games. It will take different shots at the genre without even saying anything, sometimes like one quest has you pleasing an orphan in the Demon Mines to put in your orphan bag. You must run into town and get everything she needs, but the store just so happens to have everything you need when you get there, like a cell phone and a pony! This is an obvious jab at RPGs, whose stores always have what you need.
The game also has some more childish jokes, like collecting unicorn poop, finding help letters in dragon poop, and helping villagers make their dirt and stone soup taste better using various animal parts. While this humor may not be funny to all, most will get a kick out of it, and DeathSpank is chock-full of it. Of course, the gameplay is important, and DeathSpank lets you assign four different weapons at a time to use, and there are a ton of weapons, armor, and different types of potions to use. You can even eat various foods to heal up, like pizza, fries, magic mushrooms, and root beer. When you whack enough enemies, you get to unleash your Justice meter, which is a power-up for certain weapons. The game consists of a huge map that you can wander around and travel via outhouses spread throughout the world. There are a ton of quests, and you’re looking at about 10–15 hours of gameplay here that is very entertaining.
The game has two major flaws, and this is the fact that no matter how high you level up or how good your armor is, you will be guzzling potions and healing items every 5 seconds. Enemies respawn when you re-enter an area, and you can’t move on to another until you are at a higher level, or those enemies will kill you quickly. This makes progression slow at first and forces you to complete quests because that’s the only way to really level up. You get very little XP for killing enemies, even if they are at a higher level than you. I found this very frustrating and made the game less enjoyable because of all these weird quirks. I also found that some quests were vague on where to go, and using fortune cookies spread around gives you hints, but those are just mostly useless.
The visuals are nice, but technically the game is very simple; there is a huge variety of enemy types, and you really won’t get bored on that end. The best part about DeathSpank is the humor in the dialog and the funny voice actors who over-exaggerate voices. Even as an action RPG, the game is fun and challenging for anyone looking for something out of the ordinary to play, plus it has co-op play for anyone wanting to share the fun and jokes with a friend.
The DiRT series has come a long way from the Colin McRae Rally series and has been around for over 15 years. Codemasters has always pushed for the latest hardware for the best physics and graphics possible, and DiRT 3 is no exception. Not much has changed from DiRT 2 besides a visual, physics, car roster, and track upgrade. The core gameplay is pretty much the same. This time around, the visual aesthetics steer away from the street gang style of art and move onto a weird psychedelic thing about triangles—don’t ask me.
The main attraction here is the new Gymkhana events, which are all about tricks. Doing donuts, spins, getting air, drifting, and all the fun stuff you can’t do on the track. Pull out into a third-person view (it’s not really possible in the first person) and tear around the area, trying to rack up a certain amount of points, beat a speed run, or smash into a certain amount of objects. It’s all great fun, but it takes a lot of time to master. The cars can be squirrely because of how powerful they are, and learning when to time each trick takes hours. You will get frustrated early on, but keep at it because once you unlock the Battersea Compound to complete 80 missions, you will master it there.
All the other event types are back, such as Rally Cross, Rally, Land Rush, Trailblazer, etc. My biggest gripe is that there aren’t any new event types besides Gymkhana. The repetitive nature sets in at about the halfway point in the tour because of the lack of events and tracks. All these events are loads of fun, but most people probably won’t finish the tour due to the fact that it’s the same as DiRT 2. What does the new weather system that gives us snow, blizzards, heavy rain, and more night races really help? It helps give some variety to the tracks, but you will spend a good $30 buying the new tracks and cars, which is a major rip-off and not worth it.
The physics have improved and feel a little less floaty or too heavy. Of course, you can always tune your car if you don’t like the way it drives, but we still can’t customize them, and they even took away the little dash toys to show off the physics engine. I really want to customize my cars, but at least there is a bigger variety in them, and you unlock them at a faster rate. The graphics are phenomenal, and PC users get treated to some DirectX 11 features such as better lighting, shadows, and blur effects. It’s very light, so don’t expect a huge difference, but it lets us PC gamers know we get a little extra.
I also wish those stupid announcers would shut up like they wouldn’t in DiRT 2. They are more annoying now than ever, and I really hate the hip menus Codemasters is doing. What happened to the slick, simple menu of DiRT 1? Besides this, the online modes are fun and not much different from the past two games, except for the addition of Gymkhana. If you loved DiRT 2, pick this up, but newcomers will be amazed at all the greatness.
The first three MK games saw dozens of ports over the years, and not all were very good. The latest port of the three is all packed into one tight collection, and they are perfect arcade ports. I won’t go into each game in detail, but it’s great to see the progression over the three, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. People who are used to the new fighters with tons of combos won’t like the first two as much because combos weren’t implemented until MK3. The first two are just spamming special moves and getting someone stuck in high-punch spam. The good old sweep and uppercut move worked, and the feeling of nostalgia came back.
While each game has great “alities” and characters, each game suffers from some visual quality because these are arcade ports. You can turn on various filters, but overall, don’t expect the games to look amazing. MK1, for example, is very pixelated, but what can you expect? Each game has online play, and that is what will keep you coming back. The CPU is cheap when fighting solo, and I always hated MK’s AI system, with MK2 being the worst. I also loved how all the “-alities” and special moves are on the pause screen, which prevents you from having to have an FAQ near you.
Arcade Kollection could have used more features, such as being able to play Test-Your-Might mini-games separately from MK1, throwing in the great Puzzle Kombat, and maybe even adding some more online modes. Including the Mortal Kombat Trilogy would have been nice, despite it never being in arcades. I’m also not sure why MK4 wasn’t included because it was the last arcade MK game. What is here is excellent, but only hardcore MK fans will really appreciate this collection.
Need for Speed has taken many different directions in the last decade, but The Run tries to go back to its roots while trying something new. Sure, you’re being chased by cops, doing illegal stuff in a car, having great graphics, and having a super-fast sense of speed. It sounds like an NFS game, right? Well, in a sense, it is, but it won’t change haters’ minds or make hardcore fans happy. This isn’t the true return like Hot Pursuit was, but it does convey a nice idea. You play a guy named Jack Rourke who owes a mob a lot of money. You hear about a race from San Francisco to New York, and your “agent” will give you a cut of the prize money and make your little mob problem go away. You start at the 200th place and make your way to the 1st.
This sounds like it would take forever or be just one straight race, but it isn’t. The game is broken down into 10 stages, and each stage has various races. The terrain obviously changes a lot, and this means lots of different environments to look at, which gets help from EA’s latest Frostbite 2 engine that was used in Battlefield 3. While it doesn’t look as amazing as that game, it looks fantastic and is probably the best-looking NFS game to date. There are so many different places to race—snow, open fields, farms, factories, cities, you name it. There are several different race types, but they are thrown up variously, and the overall experience is repetitive.
Races range from gaining a certain number of positions to battling against the clock in elimination races. There are “boss” races that have you racing a good distance; there are also races solely against the clock to catch up time. That’s about all there is, and the only thing keeping you from getting really bored are the constantly changing environments, which are great to look at, and not one stage is the same. There are some better elements that make the game thrilling, and these are the survival sections. One has you running from an avalanche, another from a helicopter shooting at you, as well as a mountain demolition, but these are so far, and few of you yearn for them between the constant drag of gaining positions.
While these moments are highly entertaining, and probably the moments in the game, a few times Jack will get out of his car and initiate quick time events, which are also entertaining but pretty pointless since you normally don’t play an on-foot NFS game. Don’t worry, you don’t control him; just think of it as an interactive cutscene.
A great NFS game needs fast real-world cars, and there are plenty here, from Ferrari to Lamborghini. You will find them here. You can change cars by pulling into gas stations throughout stages, but overall, you usually stick with one car until the next group is unlocked. You can earn experience through things like drifting, jumping, overtaking cars, etc., but I found this kind of useless since you only earn one thing when leveling up, and it’s usually an avatar or something like that. You can use resets during a race if you crash or really screw up, but watch out; they are limited.
The game features Autolog, which everyone has grown to love, plus there are Challenge Series races to do after you beat the short 4-5 hour campaign mode. Multiplayer is pretty standard and nothing to write home about, but The Run is a fun weekend rental and nothing more. You will quickly forget about this one, but the whole idea is fun while it lasts.
For a game that carries the Dead Space name, you would expect it to be good. Ignition is nothing of the sort because it’s a series of hacking minigames that follows an engineer and a cop on The Sprawl who have to do hacking things during the Necromorph outbreak. Yeah, really exciting. The voice acting is terrible, and the gameplay is even worth a lame story.
The game is comprised of three games, and the first is a side-scrolling defender-type game, but not nearly as fun. You just control a red orb that moves through space while dodging obstacles and racing AI orbs. You have a few powers, such as speed boosts, walls you can drop to slow them down, and circuits that make them spin out of control. This is as uninteresting as it sounds because no matter what you do, they seem to always get ahead of you, and this game was obviously not playtested because the obstacles are almost unavoidable and are in such positions that you have to slow down every time while the AI just quickly maneuvers through them.
The second game is some weird reverse tower defense game where you have to get viruses to a gate on the other side but have to destroy seekers and radars on the way. You get four different types of viruses that do various things, but you just spit them out, and they go wherever they want. You can’t control them, so there’s no strategy except spitting them out in certain orders.
The third game is a mirror and laser mini-game, but they are laid out in such incomprehensible designs that you don’t really get a grasp on where to start. Getting different colored lasers to different endpoints should be simple, but lasers flip and move on their own to confuse you, and this doesn’t make the game fun at all. You can drop lasers that split the beams, and of course, this is timed, but there is no strategic way of going about any of these games, so it all feels like a big mess.
You won’t even finish the game because it is so frustrating that you will just give up. No matter how skilled you are, the game works around you and doesn’t allow you to increase your skill due to poor level design. On top of all this, the game is made up of badly drawn concept art turned into some hack of a Dead Space story that you will quickly forget. The easy achievements and the armor you get at the end of Dead Space 2 aren’t worth a trek through this terrible hack job.
The Cthulhu series from H.P. Lovecraft hasn’t seen much love in the form of games, but indie developers Zeboyd picked it up and turned it into a whimsical/parody 8-bit RPG, and it’s done very well. You play as Cthulhu and pick up many party members along the way, but the whole point of the game is the great dungeon crawling that harkens back to the ’80s. You can attack like any RPG, but you have tech attacks that are more powerful and magic, and then you can unite with other members to combine devastating attacks. There are a ton of different attacks you learn when you level up, and you get a choice between two different things to level up with either stats or an attack, so by the end of the game, each member has a huge arsenal to use.
The game is very close to the mythology, with bosses that are from the story, towns named after the exact towns from the stories, and art-style matches. The music is amazing, with sweeping orchestral scores (in 8-bit midi audio, mind you) that really move you and sound great. The story is hilarious, with Cthulhu trying to redeem himself and become a true hero to raise his city of R’lyeh, but his interaction with characters in the world is really funny. Of course, the game wouldn’t be complete without a huge map to explore that has some secret dungeons, plus the environments and dungeons vary with lots of loot and chests to find.
However, the game’s biggest flaw is the extreme difficulty later on in the game, as well as the constant random battles that really drag the experience down. The developers tried to tone this down by disabling random battles after you do 25 of them, but you will probably go through a dungeon before you hit that number. I also didn’t like how if you don’t level up high enough, the end boss is impossible to beat, but each dungeon just really racks up the difficulty and requires you to grind a bit to get through the dungeon. I also didn’t like how you don’t really need a strategy to beat the enemies because you can just use the same one over and over through several dungeons. This causes the feeling of repetition to set in and makes you want the game to just end a little faster.
While the visuals are nice and give you a feeling of nostalgia, they don’t look good in HD, and the lack of battle animations and everything else that goes along with 8-bit graphics grates on your eyes after a while. However, the Cthulhu license is rarely explored, so any game to do so is welcomed, but this game is probably for hardcore RPG fans.
Leave it to an indie game to be clever, atmospheric, and do things that AAA titles wouldn’t dare do. Limbo starts out with just a simple message: Find your sister. No voice acting, no characters—just a black-and-white 2D platformer and a nameless little boy. This can be risky because why would you care about it with none of those elements? You won’t need to, because the game makes you care for the boy through your actions. He can be dismembered and killed in every way possible via deadly and horrific obstacles and traps like getting caught in a saw blade, getting hung, or being impaled by a giant spider leg. You cringe at every death because this is a little boy and not some nameless soldier or thug.
Limbo offers tons of atmosphere thanks to the great ambiance and visual cues that make you just wander through the whole game. The puzzles start with simple ones that deal with gravity, pushing stuff around, and pulling switches and levers. Later on, you have to manipulate gravity, and these puzzles get pretty complicated, but the game also gets darker and more dangerous as you go on. Limbo approaches typical platforming elements like bosses, enemies, and puzzles differently. Enemies are few and far between, but there is such a unique way to eliminate them that you wish there was more of it.
This short, 3-hour game feels like a sample because you really want more. The sudden and seemingly unsatisfying ending is made purposefully to just make up your own ending in your head. Yeah, this isn’t for the narrow-minded, but keep in mind that the game is juicy and gives you tidbits along the dark journey to make you feel satisfied at the end. Limbo delivers a lot more creativity and atmosphere than a lot of top-budget titles because it uses subtly over the explosion and big scares. My only issues are that some of the puzzles are pretty obscure, and the game can be very difficult in spots that will frustrate you to no end.
I also didn’t like such an abrupt ending that didn’t solve anything for you. However, this is a case-by-case basis for whether you like this sort of thing or not. The game has a lot of variety, but I wish there were some more of the unique scripted events that made Limbo feel really fun and intense.
One thing that Bastion does differently from most games is its strong and unique narrative. A man narrates the boy’s every step and action in Bastion, and this is a very interesting way of telling a story. It’s like you’re playing an interactive storybook, especially since it looks like one too. You are trying to re-build The Bastion, which is a safe spot to run from The Calamity, and throughout the story, you find out what this is and why this boy is trying to find these shards to build this thing. Rucks (the narrator) guides you through the story as it unfolds, so you don’t know anything until it actually happens, like a storybook, but it’s happening while you’re doing it.
With the excellent narrative aside, the combat is top-notch and responsive. You can use a regular attack, a special attack, a block, or a projectile weapon. There are plenty of weapons, and you can upgrade them to add different attributes and bonuses. As you progress through the game, you unlock six different areas, which include an arsenal to swap weapons, a forge to upgrade your weapons, a shop to buy upgrades and special powers, a shrine to make the game harder, and an “achievement” area where you can meet requirements for extra shards (in-game currency). The customization and upgrades are deep and will keep you busy for a long while thanks to the proving grounds, which are unique challenges for each weapon. If you meet certain criteria, you get prizes based on your performance. These are not easy by any means, and a few were almost impossible to beat for me.
Combat is very responsive and challenging. The enemies are quick and smart and vary from stationary, fast-moving, slow-moving, heavily armored, etc. I should probably say that the balance is perfect, and you slowly get introduced to tougher enemies as the game progresses. You really have to use a combo of everything to stay alive because you will gulp health tonics constantly if you don’t use block and dodge a lot, so stay on your feet. The action gets hectic, and you start realizing this game is for hardcore action fans and not the casual gaming crowd that the visuals might seem to cater to.
There are a lot of levels, and the length varies from 5 minutes to 15, but one thing I can’t get over is the visuals. As you run through the levels, the walkways appear under you and seem to float in the air. The levels vary so much that not a single one looks the same. The hand-drawn visuals are just gorgeous, plus you can’t forget about the amazing soundtrack, which is something you stick on your MP3 player and listen to. This feels like a high-budget game, but only an indie game can deliver something on this side of creativity and originality. Bastion is a unique game, and nothing is quite like it in terms of narrative and visual delivery. Every action fan should own this because it’s $15 well spent.
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Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !