I watched the movie when it first came out, and now I’m late playing the game. While I played the PC version, I found the Xbox 360 version not much different. The game does sport decent graphics, but now, in 2009, they feel pretty dated, there are a lot of collision detection issues, and the game is very…green. While you spend 70% of the time playing as Jack, you wish you could play as Kong more. There are a decent variety of enemies, such as giant centipedes, bats, T-Rex, raptors, crabs, and so forth. You just wish there were more.
When you play as Jack, you are in a first-person perspective, and there are no health bars, no ammo meters, just you and your instincts. Ubisoft made it this way, so the game feels more cinematic like the movie, and it works. I was surprised at how well you can aim with the spears and guns without a reticle, and it’s very easy to do. Most of the playing as Jack is pretty straightforward, with most of the puzzles revolving around burning brush via lit spears. Most of these puzzles get pretty dull towards the end, but thankfully, as you progress, you play as Kong more often. Playing as Kong, though, is the best part. You are in a 3rd-person POV, and the camera sweeps around dramatically while you beat up a giant T-Rex and fend off dozens of bats.
There are moments when you run along giant cliffsides and swing on huge pillars. While this is good and all, it does get repetitive, and it’s the same thing over and over. The game isn’t very well-paced, and there aren’t any clips from the movie at all. I understand that Michel Ancel wanted players to not emerge out of the experience with jaunting clips from the movie, so everything is done in real-time. Of course, all the load times defeat this purpose since some chapters are only one cutscene long. I also have to mention that King Kong has the easiest access to 1000 GP ever. Just complete the game, and you have all your achievements and GP. Yes, you heard me, just complete certain chapters, and they hand them to you. Of course, this had a lot to do with the fact that most developers didn’t give two sh**s about achievements during the first year or so of the console’s life. While Ubisoft did a good job in the short time they had, it could have been a lot better. The game also ends very abruptly, and it feels like they took huge shortcuts. Despite all this, you’ll get a kick out of the game on any console, and it’ll sure to please the movie fans.
Silent Hill 4 is a continuation of the long-running Silent Hill series that started on the PlayStation way back in 1998. As a kid, I remember how incredibly horrifying SH was and how ridiculously hard the puzzles were, thus sending the rental back due to complaints of nightmares to my mother. Fast forward to 2004, and we get SH4, which is a mediocre approach to the amazing survival horror series. For some reason, Konami changed everything for this game, thus making it less fun and a major chore to play. You play Henry Townshend, who wakes up in his apartment one day with the front door chained up. You walk into your bathroom, and there is a hole in it that is a wormhole to these creepy SH worlds. You are following the murders of a man named Walter Sullivan and must release his soul and find out why he’s killing all of these people. The story is very interesting, yet there are few cut scenes and very little dialog, so most of the story is told through diary pages and memos that you pick up, which is actually kind of bland and boring (and lazy on Konami’s part).
SH4 is very strange in the sense that the game uses an initial gateway between levels, and you travel back and forth to heal, save, and unlock the rest of the world. After you finish the world, you get warped back to your apartment room 302, and you are free to roam around. This is in a strange first-person view, and you can save (this is the only save spot) and dump stuff into your trunk for later storage. You only get about 10 slots in your inventory, so going back to your apartment via red holes is essential. While this isn’t so bad, there’s so much backtracking and repeating of levels that it will make you sick. While you’re on a level, you wander around in the same SH fashion, picking up strange objects and using them in puzzles. The only problem is that the memos that give you the puzzles are so unbelievably vague that you will have almost no idea what to do unless you wander around aimlessly, just trying everything out. In most SH games, you do this, but it’s pretty obvious where to go. If you use a little bit of brainpower, you will get it. In SH4, things are so obvious that you will completely miss them.
This is all tied together because SH4 has the worst level design ever, and those are just paths that lead nowhere. You will wander around hallways and go up and down ladders that lead to dead-end rooms or send you back to places you don’t recognize. Not only this, but if you miss certain items (like the Swords of Obedience), the “boss” later on cannot be fought, and there’s no way to go back. Thanks to the whole gateway system, if you miss an item, you cannot go back, unlike in past SH games. There are four worlds that you must complete by finding a placard at the end of each level. In SH fashion, you must complete weird puzzles by putting the right pieces in the right places, and this is figured out by the memos you pick up. As I explained above, they are so vague that you can’t really figure out what to do except look through a walkthrough.
After you complete the world, you go back to your apartment, look through the peephole in your door, and read all these pages to advance the story. After you complete the fourth world, everything changes, and your room becomes haunted. You must use holy candles that you find throughout the world and place them down in front of these demons on your walls to rid them before they kill you. I found this extremely annoying and pointless gameplay element, which just makes this SH game very weird and a bad departure from the series. After completing these four worlds, you open up another whole of your washroom (yeah, what?!). With the four placards, you go back through these worlds again, trying to find God knows what, but the levels are continuous, and you don’t get warped back to your apartment (thus not getting healed). I found this really annoying and very boring since I just spent hell in these worlds and I have to go back?!
Now the boss fights are really stupid since they aren’t traditional SH bosses; they just look like regular enemies, and you must hack away at them till they fall, then stab them with that sword of obedience I mentioned. This is both boring and stupid since if you miss a word, you just have to run away from this boss until you finish the level. Now, if I should mention improvements, the combat is actually really great since you just lock on and whack away. You can charge attacks, but that’s about it. If you play on a harder difficulty, you’re going to be SOL because the game can be extremely tough since they throw dozens of enemies at you at times. The only weapons in the game are melee weapons, a pistol, and a revolver. Yeah, lame. Where’s the shotgun? Halfway through the game, you have your neighbor, Eileen, following you everywhere, and this is extremely annoying since you can’t leave her behind, and she hobbles on one leg, so she’s very slow. She has to be near you before you go through doors, or you leave her behind. This was a huge gameplay mistake, and it’s probably just as bad as the level design.
Now the only thing I haven’t mentioned is the scary factor. Is it as scary as past SH games? The answer is no. The enemy designs are a little creepy, but not out of this world terrifying like the past SH games. Are the levels creepy? Not really. Sometimes you’ll see something weird in the background, but you won’t really notice it. The atmosphere is a little spooky, but nothing that’ll make you crap your pants. The past SH games scared the living hell out of me, but SH4 didn’t really do much for the scary factor. I feel SH4 is really toned down, and Konami tried to do something new but failed at it. The siren doesn’t even go off in SH4!! C’mon… If you played the hell out of the other SH games, then go ahead and pick this up at bargain bin prices, but don’t expect a whole lot.
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.
Ahhh…here we are again with the cunning, brave, smart, posh, sexy, and beautiful Lara Croft. Most people overlook the game when they see a half-naked chick on the cover, but Tomb Raider is one of the few (only?) “chick” games that are actually good. Everyone and their mothers have heard of Tomb Raider or Lara Croft as “the game about shooting animals in ruins and sex,” so if you’re reading this, you’re either a fan or one of the latter. While Tomb Raider has absolutely nothing to do with anything sexual, Lara’s skimpy style can contradict that.
The series has always been known for its intricate puzzles, great platforming, and beautiful tombs, ruins, and vistas to explore. Tomb Raider: Legend is the first TR game since the PSX days to be actually good and worth playing. With the first 2 TR games being great, the series started falling with 3, got saved with 4 (The Last Revelation), and just went downhill with 5 (Chronicles) and 6 (Angel of Darkness). TRL revives the series by making us feel familiar and redoing everything we’ve grown to love. The game’s story is also very interesting, mainly for fans of Lara who want to know more about her past. Lara is trying to find the pieces of the Excalibur sword that killed her mother, and she runs into ghosts of her past that come back to haunt her. While the story is teeter-tottering on the edge of bleh, it does get interesting and saves itself at the end with a twist. TR has not been famous for its stories, so let’s get right into the adventure! The game seems to have tried too hard to bring the series back since the game is really short (6 hours you can beat the game) and there are too many levels to explore, so you don’t get a lot of feeling for one level.
Everything about TR’s platforming is still here, so you can either stop reading now or carry on if you are a skeptical action/adventure fan trying to find a new series to get into because you’re bored. The whole game is about puzzles that use the environment and include hanging, swinging, jumping, pole climbing, rope swinging, and zip-lining. Most of the game is pretty easy to figure out where to go since you get a grapple that lets you pull boxes off ledges, bring certain things down to climb across, and even use it to swing across chasms. A lot of items you use with the grapple hook have a shiny gold bit on them, so you know to grapple there; otherwise, you’d spend hours trying to grapple every object in the game. A lot of puzzles are usually lever and switch puzzles, with you pulling statues onto this pressure switch to lower this bridge and pulling this block across onto this switch to raise the gate. Most are simple, but some are unique and fun and have you climbing huge cliffs, walls, and statues to push giant balls (haha!) off ledges to use down below. A lot of the platforming is fun and awesome, with ledges crumbling away, swinging across poles onto ropes, etc.
Not one situation is the same, and that’s what’s so great about the TR series; you’ll have something new to figure out. Jumping around these beautiful environments is easy thanks to the responsive controls, great animations, and a good camera (most of the time). When you jump to a ledge and there’s a wall behind you, the camera will swing out to the side so you can see the whole 30-foot pillar you’re supposed to climb. This works in every type of situation, and the camera does a good job following you. The only time it gets weird is when you’re in tight spaces, when the camera doesn’t know what to do and has seizures. You wind up exploring places such as Japan, Bolivia, Nepal, Kazakhstan, and others. These range from jungles to dark tombs, snow, and even the city. What I found odd was Lara climbing around in buildings like in Japan (she wears a damn sexy dress on that level) and a military base in Kazakhstan, so this can be weird for longtime fans. The whole thing fits well, but it just seems out of place compared to past games.
Combat is also the second thing you’ll be doing the most, and while it’s easy, repetitive, and not amazing, it works and you won’t get annoyed. You just lock onto an enemy and fire away with your pistols, machine guns, or shotguns you find lying around off of enemies. If you get too hurt, you can use health packs lying around as well. While you’ll spend most of your time fighting brain-dead enemies that just stand there and fire at you, you can use the objects in the environment to kill enemies, like barrels, tanks, and even snapping things to make them fall. So while the combat is nothing interesting or fantastic, it’s there, and it works well for what the game can offer. The camera stays behind you well enough when you’re locked on, but Lara will lock onto enemies off-screen a wee bit too often, forcing you to target them yourself.
A new part of TR is the motorcycle driving section. These can be fun and annoying since the physics are a bit weird and the checkpoints are punishing. You just shoot baddies off their bikes while you go off jumps and make your way through. Another added idea is button-pressing cinematics, which are cool to look at and a lot of fun. What makes them so fun is why you have to do them. A lot of the time, it’ll be the most intense part of the game, so you really get into it. The boss fights are also another cool part of the game since they are a bit easy, but they are big and cool, so you’ll have tons of fun with them.
Now that we have two main elements out of the way, let’s talk about cosmetics. Lara’s whole appearance has changed, and she looks so much better. Gone are her sunglasses and the F-size boobs, along with her usual outfit. Lara has different outfits she wears throughout the game, and they are all hot and sexy, and they make Lara look smart and sharp as well. Her breast size has been reduced to DD (boohoo…), and her main outfit is now a brown belly top with shorts, and I prefer this over the old one. She wears an earpiece now, and she no longer has a braided ponytail. Along with Lara looking amazing, she also gets dirty and wet (oh, if only…). When she climbs out of the water, her clothes look wet, and dirt sticks to her as well, so this adds to the realism. She also has a personal light now, so exploring dark places is no longer a problem. The sound is also great with Lara’s charming British accent, and everyone’s voice acting is top-notch.
With new characters aplenty, you’ll expect to like them all, but actually, you won’t. They are underdeveloped and wind up annoying you with their stupid comments over the radio, so the only character you’ll love is Lara. Apart from all of this, the game has replay value with a time trial mode, Croft Manor (where you unlock certain areas to get rewards), and cheats. Doing all of this will grant you new costumes, concept art, profiles, and more. So, as you can see, there is so much to love about TRL, and fans who have hated the series can come back since TR is getting better and better as time goes by. Give the ‘ol girl a second chance and explore her tombs (awww, yeah).
Beyond Good & Evil…yes, I remember that, but for some reason, a certain game called Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was plastered all over TV and stores, and BG&E was disappointingly overshadowed. BG&E is a lovely and wonderful action/adventure game that was released during the peak of the last generation in 2003. BG&E’s premise is something along these lines: You are Jade, who is the caretaker of an orphanage on a futuristic (has a Star Wars feel to it) planet called Hillys. The Alpha Section is fighting a so-called war against the alien invasion known as the Domz. Jade and her pig uncle Pey’j must find out the conspiracy behind the Alpha Section and the Domz in order to bring peace and freedom to the planet of Hillys. You take on a job as a reporter or spy for the IRIS Network, and along the way you take pictures of animals, take part in speedboat races, and play a familiar air hockey game to earn pearls and credits (the game’s two currencies) to find your way through the world.
A lot of the game is set up around two gameplay elements: stealth and combat. While the stealth is stronger than the combat, both are enjoyable and evenly balanced throughout the game. Sneaking around the two major parts of the game to take pictures of the Alpha Section’s activities is rewarding and easy to do. Crouching around corners and learning the guard’s patterns is a typical element of stealth, but the great part about the game is that there’s no jump button. Yes, this makes the gameplay a lot more smooth, and you actually know what to do. If you see a ledge Jade can hop up on, you know to go there instead of hopping around like an idiot trying to, hopefully, find some collision detection glitch and get up onto that ledge. Sneaking around the guards is also like a puzzle in itself since you have to figure out a way to open certain doors, hit certain switches, and even get items without anyone seeing you. The stealth isn’t brutal and is pretty forgiving since if you run out of the area, everything will calm down and go back to normal. Most guards have a weakness on their backs (a yellow jetpack), so this can blind them and make things a little easier. Sneaking around the place is pretty typical, and there’s not much to describe, but it is very fun squeezing between walls, ducking in vents, and whatnot. Thanks to the no-jumper button, dodging lasers is really fun since you have a run button and a dodge button, so you just run and jump over lasers and obstacles, and it can be really fun.
The combat, however, is a bit weak since it’s so simple. You just mash the mouse button, and Jade will beat the S out of everything with her magical staff; hold it down, and you get a supercharged spinning attack. While you can dodge and roll around while running, the camera is one of the major flaws of the game, and the combat can get so tedious and boring. Thankfully, there isn’t much fighting, and you mainly just sneak around and do a lot of traveling. The only thing that keeps the combat from being a snooze fest is the unique way of having to kill certain enemies. Double H or Pey’j may be with you, so you can order them to do their special attack, which will stun enemies or shoot them in the air. When they are in the air, Jade will spin around and knock them across the room, and this is good for taking out certain obstacles in your way.
Traveling around the world can be fun and frustrating since the map is useless and the game is very labyrinthine. Since you’re sneaking around everywhere, you don’t really remember where you’ve been, so if you forget to take a certain picture, you don’t know where it was since the map is just a bunch of white blobs that don’t tell you where to go. Finding things like animals, pearls, and other items is pointless since they are big dots on this useless white map, so hopefully you have enough pearls (used only at Mammago’s Garage to upgrade your speedboat) to finish the game. Finding all of the animals can be almost impossible since a lot of them are in spots you never knew you could even access, so earning a lot of money in the game is a bit hard and can make you go hunting for items you have to know are there. This being the game’s biggest flaw, it can easily be overlooked since you’ll usually get just what you need by just playing normally. You can partake in four separate races, but they are impossible to beat since there is no speed upgrade for your boat, and playing flawlessly and using speed boosts won’t get you first place.
The races are seriously impossible, even if you drive perfectly, so this is just retarded. You can play air hockey at the Akuda Bar or a cup game, which can be fun and challenging. There are items called MDiscs, which you put in save machines to help evolve the story. Increasing your health is done by finding PA1s, Kbup, and Starkos, which are foods that give you health. As you can see, the game tries a lot of original things and is just a fresh world that has been overlooked by many people. With the game’s unique story, great voice acting, and wonderful yet simple gameplay design, you’re sure to spend a great number of hours on this short, yet sweet, adventure.
Picking up the game for any system has its ups and downs. The PC version’s controls are kind of funky for this type of game; the PS2 has a slowdown; the GameCube’s controller requires a controller to play; and the Xbox version isn’t backward compatible on the 360, so take your pick. Either way, you’re going to have a blast with this wonderful yet overlooked game. Look forward to the anticipated game next year as well.
Every FPS fan has played a WWII shooter, and it was either Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. While Call of Duty is the superior WWII series, it’s just as guilty of having constant sequel after sequel. The reason why the WWII genre is dry is that there is so much you can do with actual events that happened. You can only use D-Day and Market Garden so many times before new explosions, and updated graphics won’t even save those scenarios. Call of Duty at least tried to use new events from WWII, and this was the battle for Chambois, also known as the Falaise Gap.
The game has you playing with four, I repeat, four different people, and these are the Americans, Canadians, British, and Polish. The game does develop some attachable characters that have personalities, but since the game is so short, this can’t be done properly. This is also the first “truly next-gen” WWII game that came out (no, CoD2 was just a PC port), so you have high-res textures, flowing grass, realistic weather effects, etc. The game looks really good, even for today, and helps add to the realism of the game.
Everything here is the same as in the past, though, with all your WWII weapons, and I can’t even tell which ones are new or old since they change every time. You do have new gameplay elements, such as button-pressing sequences; these are fun and break up some of the monotonous shooting. Now instead of just attaching explosives to Flak guns, you have to do button presses to do this. You do, however, have to use cover a lot more in this game since the AI has improved a lot. Your teammates will actually shoot back and help you, and the enemies will target you and run to cover you pretty well. You can’t just run around like Rambo, shooting Nazis out in the open, because you’ll die pretty fast.
One thing I do love about the CoD series is the sweeping orchestral soundtrack and that tear-jerking theme song! They put the right songs at the right moments of the game, and it really makes the game feel epic (not as much as CoD4, of course!). Basically, the single-player game consists of 9 levels and is pretty much the same as before. You have driving sections, turret sections, tank sections, every WWII weapon you can think of, a decent story, decent characters, and a wonderful soundtrack, so this makes things really solid.
When it comes to multiplayer, things really shine since there are a lot of modes. You have all your typical modes, but what makes it great is that you can play with 24 people on one map! This makes things chaotic and addictive, and you’ll never stop playing. You have (I think) six or seven classes to choose from, such as medics, riflemen, assault troopers, etc. All of these classes are well balanced, and the map is nicely designed. When you die, though you don’t just die, you can call for a medic (but no one is ever a medic). The multiplayer is pretty straightforward, but it’s highly addictive, and this is always a plus.
I just wish they’d make a game of WWI or the Revolutionary War! Once you finish everything here, you can look under the extras for concept art, videos, etc. The achievements make for playing single-player more than once, and overall, this is a solid WWII shooter, but we all know it wasn’t the last one.
I remember hearing all about Jet Grind Radio back in the day, when I only dreamed of owning a Dreamcast. About 6 years later, I picked up JSRF off eBay for $2, and, well, you get what you pay for. I expected a lot more of this game, but really it’s just repetitive with a horrendous camera, a lame story, and a few other odds and ends.
The story is almost non-existent, where you have to stop the Poison Claw gang from taking over the city, and you basically go through the city covering their tags with yours and racing them here and there. That’s really all there is on the story side, and it’s a huge letdown. I found the best things here were the visuals and audio. The game has beautiful cel-shaded graphics with a rich hip-hop and techno-driven soundtrack. When it comes to gameplay, things are very simple and derivative. Each section has a certain number of tags you have to cover, and you do this by grinding around places and covering them up. You have to pick up spray cans lying around everyone to do this, though. Blue ones are worth ten, and yellow ones are worth one. Once you cover all the tags, you have to meet the Poison Claw gang and challenge them to a race. These are really easy and only require a little trial and error. The tags are fairly easy to locate thanks to their being dotted on your map.
I found the levels to be a bit claustrophobic, though, since your characters can defy gravity and jump 50 feet, so you’d miss your line on the building and fall all the way down. This leads to the terrible camera, which you can’t control and never stay behind the character. You always have to make circles and use the reset camera button. This ruins a lot of the game because you’ll climb all the way to the top of a high tower and then fall all the way down and have to climb the top again because you couldn’t see that open ledge. So, this is the basic concept of how you play the game; it’s just ground here, tag here, fight camera here, watch dorky Japanese characters dance around, rinse, and repeat. Don’t get me wrong, this game is pretty good, but the game is just too monotonous, and the camera ruins everything. Sometimes the police will be after you, so you knock them down and spray paint them to death. Some are too strong to knock down, so you “boost” into them.
You’re probably asking, Where is the trick system? Well, there isn’t one. The game relies on a few moves while grinding by hitting the X button and maybe a backflip here and there when you jump, and that’s about it. You do hand plants in half-pipes, but when you jump, tricks are automatically done, and there are maybe a handful of tricks. After maybe 2-3 hours of playing, you’ll get bored and irritated with the game so much that you’ll stop playing (like I did). I got maybe 90% through the game and just stopped playing because it was too annoying and repetitive.
The game was really great back in the day because of the amazing graphical style, but I think Sega concentrated too much on that. The game has some serious slowdown on the Xbox 360 and makes the game almost unplayable in certain areas. There really isn’t much in sound—just a grinding sound, grunts, moans, whooshing, and crowd sounds when you run into them. I love the visuals, Sega, but in the sequel, please upgrade the gameplay.
I remember hearing so much about this game back in 2005. I wanted to play it really badly, but thanks to the poor release time of the year (the Christmas holidays of ’05), Psychonauts was lost in the hype of all the fall and winter releases. I played the demo for PS2 and quickly realized I had to play either the Xbox or PC version to get a good experience because of the dumbed-down visuals, poor frame rate, and just overall bad performance on the PS2. So, now that Psychonauts has been an Xbox Original on the 360 for a while, I decided to spend the $15, and it was the best $15 I’ve spent in a long time. To start with, the game’s strongest points are its visuals, story, and voice acting. The platforming is really fun and has unique ways of doing so, but there are extremely frustrating moments in the game that just make you scream!
You play as Raz, who is a psychologist in a training camp for children trying to become psychonauts. An evil dentist known as Dr. Loboto is stealing the children’s brains, and another evil accomplice is behind it all, and you need to find that out. When you start the game, you’ll notice how beautiful the world is (for a 3-year-old). Everything is really bright, and the shapes have a Nightmare Before Christmas type of style. Everything is shiny and twisty, and it looks like an AAA cartoon. The voice acting is top-notch, and Raz is voiced by none other than Richard Levitz, who plays the voice of Invader ZIM. The characters are very unique, and you quickly learn to love them all. Accompanying the voice acting is clever dialog. It’s funny, witty, and keeps you drawn in.
When you explore the outside world, you can hunt for PSI cards, arrowheads, and challenge markers. A challenge marker ranks you up so you can power up your psychic abilities (more on that later). If you collect nine Psi cards and buy a Psi Core from the store, you can put them all together to create a challenging marker. Arrowheads are used as currency in the game, but you need a Dowsing Rod to find the buried rare ones. The problem with this is that there never seem to be enough arrowheads in the game to buy everything. Small arrowheads are worth 1, and the rare ones are worth 75, yet there just doesn’t seem to be enough. Luckily, all your upgrades are acquired by ranking up, so the only thing the store holds in his life are a few odds and ends (that are kind of useless).
Throughout the game, you’ll go inside people’s minds and try to solve their mental issues. This is what’s so unique about this game, and most of the puzzles are more about how you will get from point A to point B using your powers instead of pulling levers and switches. There are nine powers, from telekinesis to pyrokinesis to Levitation, so a shield. All these powers are used very well, and not one world is the same. Speaking of that, the worlds are so unique that the graphics change at each level. One world has you in a war zone, one level looks like you’re in a painting, and another level has you playing Waterloo against Napoleon!. The constant change in scenery is a huge plus and gets you excited for what’s coming next.
After about halfway through the game, you’ll explore the main world hardly at all, so when you do need to change your markers or just get some more arrowheads, there’s a warp system that takes you to each area. Once you finish a level and you want to go back and get some figments (these are floating neon 2D shapes that help you rank up: 100 and you rank up), cobwebs (these can be turned in for Psi Cards, but you need the Cobweb Duster to get these), you can also find tags for emotional baggage (see what I mean? This game has very neat ideas: They are crying baggage of emotion, and if you find the tag, you set them free. Find vaults (these have slideshows of why the person usually went mental).
There is a lot of collecting in the game, but it keeps you busy and has something to do for completionists. What I liked so much is that completing the game 100% is not that difficult, and you rarely need to resort to an FAQ. You always see everything; it’s just a matter of what psychic power will get you there. The game has lots of action with great boss battles, but these can be a bit too easy (just a few hits and they die). Overall, it’s a tragedy that Psychonauts‘ fate turned out the way it did, and I hope there is a sequel soon! If it weren’t for the extremely frustrating platforming sections, I would give this a 9.5, but that can really make things drag. The game is pretty long, with about 12 hours of gameplay and even more if you’re a completionist.
I’m not really a comic book person, but when a good game comes along, I won’t pass it up. UD is probably the only game ever made that lets you jump 300 feet in the air. Jump over skyscrapers, grab cars and use them as steel fists, battle giant mechs, grab on the copters, and bring them to the ground. UD pulls this off superbly, but not perfectly. The main problem with UD is the extreme difficulty. The difficulty is unbalanced, so you’ll get an easier mission than an impossible one. The enemies just won’t let up at all. You’ll have 10 mechs come after you, shooting missiles and whatnot, and after a few minutes, you’re dead. This will make some people just give up (such as myself).
The game has a pretty decent story, but it’s nothing too special. You are Bruce Banner, who tries to tame the Hulk inside of him by partnering up with a scientist and getting various parts to build the machine to do the latter. Some missions have you protecting things, some have you destroying things, and some have you fetching things. That is pretty much all the missions are about. The combat is really rewarding and awesome. You have to use a basic attack, but combos with these will do massive damage, along with grabs and slams. You can buy new upgrades after you unlock each chapter.
There are 50+ moves, and they are all different. Some vary from being able to grab and throw things while running to jumping on copters and bringing them to the ground. This would be even more fun if there was some sort of block or counter button. You have to take all the damage that is sent at you unless you purchase moves that send missiles flying back and whatnot. You can run up buildings and fly over them to get healthy, but you’ll be doing this more than fighting, and it’s so annoying. While the initial introduction of flying all over the place, jumping as high as a plane, and being able to utterly destroy a whole city is fun, it gets old kind of fast because that’s all you do in this game.
You do have mini-games you can play, but they are pretty lame and boring. You can use a pole to smack enemies as far as you can in one, race, float and land in the middle of a giant ring, rescue people, etc., but they just aren’t as fun as they sound. Hulk fans will be able to unlock artwork and whatnot through pickups in the game, but this still doesn’t save you from fighting the difficulty. The graphics are nothing special. This is a 2003 game, so it looks pretty bad compared to today. If you can stomach the high difficulty, then pick this up. If only this game were easier, I would have been able to finish it.
I remember when Doom 3 came out for the PC in 2004, and it looked astounding. Compared to today, it’s a bit ugly, but it did shine on the Xbox. While, even on the Xbox, it looks dated, the game keeps a constant focus on the action. Through the whole 5–6 hours it takes you to beat the game, you’ll be on your edge and jumpy.
The graphics engine is exactly the same as in Doom 3, even in the way it plays. The only additions are a few new enemies, such as a big burly guy who has two giant cannons on his arms and head, Vulgar, who is a bat-looking thing that can teleport at you, and the Hazmat worker, just to name a few. You also get some new weapons like the Ionized Plasma Rifle (Think: Gravity Gun Half-Life 2), Double-Barrel Shotgun, and a new Heart Artifact that lets you slow downtime. These essentially help the game with its extreme difficulty in many ways. You now have a flashlight on a gun! Except it’s on your pistol, so it still doesn’t make a difference, but at least you can defend yourself now. You now have to defeat the bosses using the heart, and it also gets you out of a pinch.
The “Gravity Gun” lets you throw back energy balls and whatnot, and this is good for preserving ammo. The story has you playing as a clean-up crew for what happened on Site 1 two years ago. You discover the heart, and you have to return it to Hell. While there are very few cut scenes in the game and the PDA files aren’t as interesting as in Doom 3, you’ll mainly just play for the action. Another note is that no one is playing this online. I tried connecting three days in a row, and not one person was playing. So if you just want a great, fun single-player game, then pick this up. I also should mention that the game has backward compatibility issues with the Xbox 360, such as movies in the beginning not skipping and some slowdown.
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Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !