The LOTR franchise has been struggling in the games department since the movies came out. While there have been amazing LoTR games, the adventure games have been slacking since Return of the King. Aragorn’s Quest is a sneaky thing because it just retells the story of the movies in Aragorn’s eyes using the movie actors, and it’s kind of lame. While the movies are great, please let’s move away from them and do something original.
The combat is lackluster and pretty disappointing. You can find abilities and equip them, and these come in pretty handy for more powerful enemies. You can buy new attacks and find new weapons, armor, and bows, and these are all pretty useful. You can level up by killing enemies, but you can’t distribute the points at all. The whole RPG thing is very bare-bones, and I would have liked to see more depth here and more customization, but it’s not there.
Actually, doing the combat is boring since you just mash heavy and light attacks, and most enemies are dumb and easy to kill. You can parry and counter-attack and use your bow for far-off enemies, but it’s been done so many times before. Every enemy attacks almost the same, and while there are a few good moments, there just aren’t enough. Running around highly linear levels and hitting this switch, finding four stones to open this door, and hitting that switch is really annoying.
The game doesn’t look very good from an isometric perspective, and it doesn’t sound too hot either. The game is just boring and easy, and it drags on longer than it should. I was really looking forward to this game, but with just a few more months, this could have been something epic.
The mash-up of Disney and Final Fantasy set fanboys squealing and shook the gaming world. It was like a huge tsunami of awesomeness that no one could have predicted. Thus, the first Kingdom Hearts was born with lots of charm and character but had a lot of problems with combat and one confusing story. The second game came out and really added depth to the game and was fan-freaking-tastic. Birth by Sleep is a prequel to the first game, and you really get a lot of stuff that was answerless in the last two games. You play as Terra, Ventus, and Aqua, who are three key blade wielders trying to stop the darkness from spreading through the world and within themselves. While the story works and is a lot simpler than in past games, it never feels like it really goes anywhere and isn’t as emotional as in other games.
With that aside, the next biggest thing is combat. While it’s a lot deeper, it’s also a lot more confusing and can be daunting to understand, especially for newcomers and younger players. You have a command deck that allows you to swap out abilities, and there are a lot of them. You can eventually equip up to nine commands, but flipping through them is tedious and not so combat-friendly. Using the D-pad to flip through commands can really kill you, especially during tough boss fights. Having to move from the analog nub to the D-pad means you stand still while switching. This leaves you vulnerable and can mean life or death if you have one hit left.
You can use the shot lock command, which is like a special attack that requires focus. You go into first-person mode and lock on the target for a few seconds, and it unleashes a pretty devastating attack. Summons are no longer available; instead, they are replaced with the less spectacular D-links. As you beat worlds, Disney characters can be selected, and basically, you just have a different set of commands to choose from. Your health replenishes, but this doesn’t seem as exciting as seeing the character fight with you.
You can meld commands together and add boosts to create new commands. This can be really interesting, and you can make commands you can’t normally buy or find. Other than this, the menus are usual with character bios, documents, and whatnot, but once you get used to the menu, you will have no problems. The biggest issue with combat is the stupid camera. Relying on a camera is critical with PSP games due to the lack of a second analog nub, but this camera is stupid. Locking on seems like a good idea until the lock-on breaks for some unknown reason and you lose sight of the enemy. This is really irritating during highly intense boss fights because you lose sight of them and can walk right into their traps. The camera likes to flip-flop around constantly, and fighting enemies above you is like going down into a swirling toilet with needles stabbing your eyes. It jitters and jitters and spasms, and it feels like the game is having an epileptic fit.
Despite this, it’s manageable, and you get so used to it that you just deal with it. Exploration is still the same yawn fest, but even more so since most of the environments aren’t as active or lush as KH2. The worlds are super short, and you can get to each boss without even fighting a single enemy, but if you return, they respawn, and this is only because of the irritating amount of level grinding. No matter what you do or what level you are at, bosses can kill you in just a few hits. At level 25, I was still getting my butt kicked by a boss late into the game. This leads to each character’s story completion time of about 10 hours. The words just don’t feel as alive and exciting as in KH2, and they just seem like bite-sized samples of what they should be. There are a few original worlds that are a nice touch, but they could have made the game so much better.
There is a command-board game that is so complicated and boring that you may not even care about it. You move around a board trying to collect new commands, and it’s overly complicated, as all Square mini-games are. This is more like a mini-mind meltdown than anything else, and co-op doesn’t make it any more fun. The game’s best feature is its technical achievement, being one of the very few games that pushes the PSP to the max. You could easily mistake this game for a PS2 game, but there are some frame rate issues, and if you don’t install your data on your memory stick, you are most likely going to experience horrendous load times. The voice acting is a bit iffy, but the game looks amazing. The enemies are pretty boring and generic, and they could have been a lot better.
Overall, Birth by Sleep is a great start, and I hope this isn’t the last KH on the PSP. If they improve the game’s many flaws, we are looking at the best portable game ever made. What the game really needs is a reboot because this formula is tasting a bit stale in 2010.
I always hate to talk about casual gamers since they almost ruin everything for hardcore gamers (Kinect and Wii), and everybody always forgets about us, hardcore guys, but Sony always knows how to balance it just right (the Move is a perfect example) to please both sides (this is kind of like politics). The Hot Shots series has always been a great game for both sides because you can completely ignore stats and have fun, but also delve into them and fine-tune your game. Tennis is no exception, with a good amount of stat tracking but also just quick and fun tennis for casual gamers.
On the court, the game is fairly simple yet surprisingly deep. You can perform three different swings: slice, lob, and stroke. Using the nub or D-pad allows you to decide where the ball goes, but it’s a nice grid-type structure, so if you’re running right, the ball will go right, etc. The longer you wait to hit the ball, the more accurate your shot will be on that dot, so timing is key. Or if you just like swinging away, you can still have a good challenge. You can outsmart the players by looking at what their play style is, and you can even trick them during serves, which is always fun. Lobbing the ball will show a yellow dot, and if your opponent lobs, you have to run to that spot and hit X at just the right time, and you could get a Smash Ace.
While the game is super fun on the court, you can change attributes by selecting courts with bounce and hardness, but you can also totally ignore that and still have fun. You can collect clothes for your character, but each piece has a stat boost. If you just want to deck out your character, you can still win. Before each match, you can choose No-Ad for a quicker game, change rackets, and if you play characters long enough, they will level up and play better on the court.
What’s so great about this game is that if you just want to jump into a couple quick games, you can do so without concentrating on stats, and the game will almost play the same. Unfortunately, it doesn’t reward hardcore stat trackers too much since it does lean a little more toward the casual side. Despite all this, you are on a world tour to make everyone happy by using tennis. Not the best story, but it’s nice to see the cute characters talk it out in an open adventure format, and you can click around and find hidden items, but it’s more of a distraction than anything really.
With another person, you can really have a lot of fun, but the best part about Tennis is that it’s addictive, and you always want to keep coming back thanks to the good AI. You want to keep finding new items for your characters; you want to boost your characters as much as possible and make them the ultimate tennis swatting machine. If only the game had some sort of special power ability to make narrow wins turntables, but other than that, the game is super fun.
Hot Tunes does for Korea what Fever did for the US: deliver the popular Korean rhythm game as a “best of,” but adds nothing new to the table that Fever didn’t already provide. The only thing you will notice right off the bat is the new “Lite” 4-button mode.
DJ Max is a huge rhythm game hit in Korea that uses a DDR-type gameplay style. There is obviously no dance mat, so you have to use the face buttons, and this works out just fine. There are 4-button, 5, 6, and 8-button modes. While 4 is the easiest, 8 can be damn near impossible. You select a song for each of the four stages, and each stage has harder and harder songs.
The game has some RPG elements, such as leveling up to unlock more gear, images, songs, etc. Notes, gear (the whole box in which the notes fall), and your character can have certain attributes that earn you more exp, gold, etc. There is even a speed modifier for people who want more of a challenge or if the game is going too fast for them. This can be changed during the song or before it.
After you get a certain score on a song, you can play a harder version of that song on the same stage by pressing left or right. During play, you must hit each note when it hits the bottom. Depending on your accuracy, a percentage will appear. If you miss a note, you will break your combo, but if you fill your fever bar and use it, your combo will double for a short amount of time. You don’t just hit single notes, however; there are held notes and even “scratched notes” that require you to spin the analog stick.
Once you finish a song, you are scored on how well you performed and given a grade, some experience, and gold. Gold is used to buy more gear. There are 50 songs, and each one has a wonderfully illustrated music video that streams in the background. If you get bored with the main mode, you can complete challenges that have set goals. Reach this score, don’t break more than this many times, etc. If you really love the music in here, you can even listen to the OST or watch the videos. There are dozens of images to unlock and lots of goodies for fans to keep playing.
The game may sound perfect, but it has flaws. There are already five other DJ Max games (including Clazziqai and Black Square Edition), and this is exactly the same as those. Hot Tunes takes some of the more popular songs from those games, but it is still missing some key gems. Playing with more than four buttons will frustrate most players; there’s no way to transfer the OST to your memory stick, and you can’t transfer songs from the other versions like you can within those. If you already own Fever or have even played the other entries, you’re not missing anything with Hot Tunes, but if you’re brand new to the series, this is a great entry.
Arcade racing games have always tried to do something new other than just adding new cars, tracks, and customizability. Racing games are trying to go beyond that by bringing in the environment and getting more involved with the other opponents instead of just racing them to the finish line. Split Second tries to involve everything around you in the race, and you really get the feeling that it is. The guys behind the hit sleeper Pure bring back exhilarating speed with top-notch audio, visuals, and controls. The focus around Split Second is bringing the environment down around your opponents and getting ahead in the race.
The way you accomplish this is by building up your power meter, which has three segments. Doing drifts, shunts, jumps, or slipstreaming will grant you this power. Activate the power when the icon appears above an opponent and blast! Something’s going to happen, but you have to watch out because you can wreck yourself doing this as well. You can start out by blowing up cars near opponents, but it’s when you can level whole pieces of track on top of them that it really gets exciting. Having a landing plane come crashing down on you and try to drive under its wing is pretty damn cool and has never been done before in a racing game. Watching huge towers fall down and block the path can really get your adrenaline going, especially when you start getting ahead.
Yeah, the further ahead you get in the pack, the bigger the target you’re going to be and the more you’re going to have to watch out. I’ve never played a racing game before where I was actually afraid to be in first since everyone would be targeting me. There are several modes to keep this interesting, such as time attacks and an eliminator mode, as well as others that have you dodging things and even shooting back at helicopters.
You can unlock cars, and most of them vary depending on their stats, but don’t expect any real-life cars here. These are generic, and Burnout fans will already be used to them. Unlocking new episodes is rewarding, and it keeps you playing through the long game, so you won’t ever get bored.
The game looks and sounds great, but the PC version suffers from a bug that makes the music drown out the car sounds if you have any surround sound system at all. Also, playing the game on a keyboard is no good since you can’t get precise control of your car. I recommend a gamepad for this, or even a wheel if you have one. The multiplayer is what you would expect, and it is a bit more intense thanks to the more clever human opponents.
Split Second is a racing game that really tries to define the genre and really does a good job doing it, if only it weren’t so repetitive. While the game is super fun, it slowly wears off unless you play in short bursts. The game really could have built upon the destructible environment idea more and made it a bit more controllable. Despite this, Split Second is a must for action racing fans, and you will walk away with a smile on your face and sweat on your palm.
You are the prince once again who will stop his brother from using King Salomon’s army of sand to destroy the kingdom. The story is pretty straightforward, predictable, and not very interesting, but it’s enough to keep you interested. The Prince’s banter is funny as always, but there isn’t any character development.
Prince of Persia has gone through a lot of changes since its original release in the 80s, and The Forgotten Sands adds some new things. First, the game’s focus has changed to elements instead of concentrating too much on time. Yes, you can rewind time if you mess up, but the focal point of the game is the ability to freeze the flow of water and use it as a wall or a pole. Let me set up a little scenario for you: Jump to a wooden beam, and then you have water spewing out ahead of you. Freeze it, jump to it, climb the wall of water, and jump back to another pole of water, but then you have two waterfalls next to each other and a wooden beam. Quickly unfreeze the water, jump in between, freeze quickly, jump back to the other waterfall, unfreeze the water to jump through the other one, and you’re done. Sounds complicated? It really isn’t, but getting your timing down is a bit tricky at first.
You can also use water to solve puzzles by freezing the water and having poles on the statue stop so the lower pieces can rotate, etc. While water is the main element, the others feel tacked on. You can jump to an enemy that’s on a ledge that’s too far away to jump, so you get this super dash move. It feels unnecessary since you only use it for this. The other “power” is the ability to bring back a piece of the environment, but this also feels tacked on since there’s no real challenge to it. It works like water since you can only bring it back one piece at a time. I wish they would have used Earth and the wind or something like that instead.
The platforming is top-notch, and every level is cleverly designed with tons of traps and obstacles to work yourself around. All the same types of traps from previous games are here, and each level never feels the same. The game slowly makes each level harder and harder, but the game always feels really easy, not to mention short. The puzzles are easier this time around, and there aren’t that many of them either, but there are a couple of head-scratchers thrown in there.
The combat is probably the worst part of the game. You get lots of enemies on screen, but they all look the same, and there aren’t even half a dozen variants. They are pretty dumb and don’t really do much, and you can quickly take them down. You get a basic attack, a shove attack, and you can jump on enemies. The combat is very shallow, and even with the powers you can upgrade, you never really use them since the game is so easy. These vary from flames to ice, wind, etc., but you only really use them if you are playing hard. Bosses are even easier since they all play the same and aren’t very interesting.
When it comes to looks, the game uses the Assassin’s Creed II engine, but for some reason it doesn’t look as good. It’s the best-looking PoP game to date, but artistically, it feels like all the others and stray away from the 2008 PoP reboot’s looks. Is this the best PoP game? No, but it is a good one. While the shallow combat breaks up the exciting platforming, you will get a good six hours of PoP fun.
Physics games tend to be very popular on the App Store, and Angry Birds is one of the best among them. The idea is to flick birds off a slingshot and have structures crash down around the evil pigs. There are various types of birds, such as one that spreads into three when you tap it, one that goes really fast, one that doesn’t do anything but cause damage, and a few other types.
At the start of each level, you get shown what you have to bring down, and then you drag your finger to move to the slingshot. You can’t see where the structure is when looking at the slingshot, so this provides a challenge but also a lot of trial and error. Trying to find the weakest points in the structures can be painful and tedious since you never feel like your birds are strong or heavy enough to do a good deal of damage.
You get rated at the end of each puzzle for how many birds you have left and how much damage you have caused. Once all the pigs are dead, you clear the level and move on to the next. It seems that there is no consistent difficulty increase, and it just seems to be all over the map. The art style is nice and it feels fluid, but the sounds are really annoying.
Overall, Angry Birds is an excellent physics game and well worth your dollar.
I don’t mind sexually driven games, but I like them to be good and done right. Dead or Alive Paradise is a direct port of Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, which was an Xbox 360 exclusive. Everything is intact, with a few additions. One new character is added, Rio, and, as you would guess, the graphics are dumbed down as well as the gambling for some odd reason. No longer are you in a 3D casino, but you get to choose from a list of a few games such as BlackJack, slot machines, and poker, but roulette is now missing.
The whole point of the game is to play mini-games with other DoA ladies and earn their trust and friendship, and this is harder than it seems. The game plays similar to a Japanese dating sim game, and it can take forever to buy a lot of the items and learn how to become friends with these lovely ladies. You have to figure out what each lady likes, loves, and hates and send them gifts accordingly. All you get is a visual guide for each lady with pictures of what they like, but this doesn’t help much. After you spend a whole two weeks at New Zack Island, you pretty much give up trying to gain trust and friendship since it’s so hard to figure out without some in-depth guidance. After a try, you end up just playing the mini-games, ogling the scantily clad women lying around, and even dancing.
The mini-games are the most fun of the game, with pool hopping, flag running, and beach volleyball, except jet skiing and the water slide were scrapped from the game, and that’s not a good thing. Pool hopping consists of pressing the buttons according to what is shown on the floaties. This game tends to be very hard since it requires precise timing. Flag-running is pretty simple, but the best game is probably volleyball. It has tight mechanics and controls, and it can be a blast to play. After you earn enough money from playing mini-games, you can purchase a camera, take sexy photos of the ladies, and view them later in your album.
The casino is the second major part of the game that lets you really earn some bucks. All the games are pretty self-explanatory, but BlackJack is interesting since Rio is dressed in a sexy dealer outfit and spews cute sayings at you with some cute animations. Like I mentioned earlier, roulette is missing, and this was the most intense casino game in the original game, so I have no idea why it was scrapped.
The game really has no purpose except to ogle your favorite DoA girls and try to buy the skimpiest bikini for them. The graphics are pretty good for the PSP and resemble the first DoA Xtreme game for the Xbox. If you are lucky enough to have a hacked PSP with custom firmware, you can use a program called CWCheat and use the “nude” code for the game. Don’t get too excited since the girls have Barbie doll-esque bodies and the really naughty bits aren’t shown, but it does make the game that much more interesting for those lucky enough to figure this out. The audio is pretty mundane, with Japanese audio tracks to cover the horrible English voice actresses. The game isn’t serious, but it could be so much more, and I just hope DoA Xtreme 3 becomes more deep and involved. The game will make you choke your chicken, so DoA fanboys (girls?) should pick this game up and enjoy its simplicity.
Patchwork Heroes is one of those strange, quirky games that makes you really appreciate indie games. Heroes are all about strategy and are less puzzle-like, and I liked this a lot. You play as a team of kids who are hell-bent on destroying airships and scrapping them for parts. There’s really no story involved, but the cutscenes break up the levels nicely.
The main mechanic of the game is sawing parts off a 2D ship. Each ship is measured in feet at the beginning of the stage, and your goal is to cut it all off. There are obstacles on the ship, such as enemies and even prisons, that have your friends trapped. If you break them out, you can use them as bombs to blow up parts of the ship that can’t be cut by your saw, such as metal. Some enemies can patch up what you cut, so you have to distract them by cutting an area that’s not near your target and watching them fall.
You can find power-ups that let you move faster, slow downtime, etc. Once you saw off enough pieces, you can get a special power that will let you continually see up to a certain amount of time without stopping. After you sawed off almost the entire ship, you had to avoid the self-destructing bombs and saw off one final piece. While all this sounds easy, it’s kind of fun at the same time. The graphics are really charming, and the 2Dness of them brings the whole game to life.
I honestly think this is one of the best sleeper handheld hits of the year. It should have gone multi-platform on the DS and iPhone and would have done better on touch screens. Nevertheless, Patchwork Heroes is a great game to pass the time and shouldn’t be passed up.
The echo series is a very cerebral puzzle series that really is not for everyone, and echoshift is no exception. The game just makes you really think and screws with your perspective in a way that requires a lot of trial and error, and mainly memorization.
echoshift lets you directly control your echo, but this game uses a time mechanic instead of perspective. Every level is a 2D side view, and you are mainly pressing switches, walking through doors, and basically trying to find the fastest route to the exit. You get 50 seconds for your first echo to try and clear the way. Then your echo will do what you just did. This is the key element in echoshift to solve puzzles, since you can’t always solve them in 50 seconds.
Let’s say you have five sets of switches, but you can only do three in 50 seconds. There are 5 blocks on each set, and only one is the right switch. You would have your first echo solve three, then while that echo redoes what you did, you go solve the third (the final switch your last echo will press), and then you solve the last two. Confused? I don’t blame you since it takes a lot of critical thinking to get these 50 or so levels solved. You get rated on how many echos you had to use, and if you beat the level, you can go back and solve the version to find the key, which really has no purpose.
The graphics are very simple, just black and white, and all the items you interact with are in color. The game is also very slow-paced, so only the patient will find any fun in this game. Echoshift is one of those rare puzzle games that makes you think so much that your brain will explode, and I can’t stress this enough. There were times when I was too tired to think to play this game, but it gets the thinking juices flowing and can be a good exercise to get into the flow of school or any office work.
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Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.