While the name doesn’t roll off the tongue, there’s something I particularly like about Courtney: she’s a typical child who has rich parents but wants to be normal. They move in with her creepy great, great, great uncle or something like that. The first issue seems pretty average, and you start thinking about putting it down until strange things start happening. She discovers a spellbook and things under her bed at night. A little gremlin creature steals the baby boy she is supposed to babysit. She gets sent off to another world, and her uncle saves her. It’s what she sees and how she deals with it all that make her such a unique character.
The art style is fantastic. I highly recommend the color versions because black and white don’t do it justice. The creatures are drawn very strangely, and they are like nothing else—not gory and horror-like, yet still childish in a way. The spidery art style is similar to maybe Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, but with its own twist. Towards the end, Courtney sees what kind of powers she has and how dangerous they are. It’s nice to see her want to go back to being her normal self instead of being power-hungry, but you get to go deep into her head because the whole narrative is her thoughts. That’s something very different and unique about this comic compared to most.
The four-part series feels like a mini-adventure, and it will have you hooked and coming back for more. Courtney may be the only main character, but the writers made Uncle Aloysius so mysterious that you really want to know more about him. He seems like the cool and mysterious old uncle that everyone wants, but you’re not quite sure. The only issue with this series is that it seemed to hit a few dry spots here and there, but at least they didn’t last long. Night Things is an amazing comic for people who want something that’s not full of scantily clad women and superheroes.
Some video game comics are a bit iffy. The Fall is a whole new storyline set in Russia, and there’s no Desmond Miles this time around. Daniel Cross ends up losing his memory, but he can also see visions of his ancestors from the late 1800s. Nikolai Orelov is tasked with killing the Tsar of Russia and getting the Golden Staff. In the present, Daniel gets taken away to a secret Assassin camp and finds out his true identity.
Daniel himself is a raging drug addict and alcoholic. He has a court order to take psych meds but won’t do it. I loved how they introduced him, but he’s not a very memorable character. The comic series wasn’t long enough to allow this. During the first issue, you are just introduced to everyone and what their common goal is. During the second issue, Daniel finds out who he truly is and why he has these visions. It all comes to an end during the third issue when you find out the major plot twist and how shocking it is.
There is a special edition 4th issue that shows several years later where Daniel has cleaned up and finally meets the mentor that he has searched for for 2 years. There’s another shocking twist at the end, and without this final issue, the other three don’t seem so great. The art is really nice, and the series is pretty gory and bloody. There’s a decent amount of fight scenes, and the art holds true to the game. I just wish it were longer so we could get to know these characters more; there’s a lot that could have been done.
One thing that video game comics tend to have is a lack of intelligent dialogue. The Fall has great writing, and there’s actually reading to be done rather than a sentence or two on each page. Fans will enjoy The Fall, and the separate storyline is a welcome change. I just wish it were longer.
Before you continue reading, this review is coming from someone who has grown to hate JRPGs over the past ten years. I rarely play them, and if I do, I never finish them. The story ends up falling flat; there are too many random battles; the characters are boring; or it’s just too damn hard. Ni no Kuni caught my attention due to the fact that Studio Ghibli was involved, and Level 5 is a master at JRPGs. While I didn’t finish Dragon Quest VIII, I did enjoy its story and art immensely.
Ni no Kuni is all about magic. A boy named Oliver’s mother dies after saving him from drowning. A fairy named Mr. Drippy comes to visit him, and he’s off to another world. It turns out that an evil witch wants to destroy the world. It sounds pretty simple, but there are a lot of plot twists, and the ending will have you going, “No way!” during each cutscene. The game holds a lot of secrets, the characters are engaging, and you will get very attached. However, the story is only half of what makes a good JRPG.
The combat is in real-time, not turn-based. It’s all about reaction time and strategy. All three of your characters run around the battlefield. The enemy can strike at any time, but so can you. Each character can cast spells and send out one of three familiars to cast various other spells and do physical damage. There are dozens of them throughout the game that you can capture and train. Oliver is the most powerful mage, and by the end of the game, you will be casting room-clearing magic. The biggest issue with this is that the game is solely focused on magic. Physical damage, no matter how high of a level you are, never does the same amount of damage as magic. You will be guzzling MP potions like crazy; always make sure you have a ton stocked up. Enemies will sometimes cast spells themselves or charge physical attacks. You can order your team to defend or attack, and then you have to attack yourself. This requires quick thinking and timing, as well as actual gaming skills. It’s also important to exploit the elemental weakness of each enemy, if there is one. During the battle, enemies will drop HP and MP glims to help you out, and rarely the gold glim will supercharge you or you’re familiar with an ultra-powerful attack or defensive move.
Boss battles are the toughest in the game, and towards the end, they will come with 2 and 3 different phases. This game gets extremely tough after the first few chapters, so tough that it will require a lot of level grinding during the last half. I actually played the last half on easy and still died quite often. This game is extremely hard; be warned. There are other things you can do outside of battles, like side quests. Oliver can go around collecting pieces of heart from people and giving them to other people who need them. He can cast spells to help advance his way through the world, like making bridges, talking to ghosts and animals, rejuvenating broken objects, etc. There are 150 side quests, and you get gold and items for them as well as stamps. 10 stamps get you a card, and these cards can be redeemed for permanent effects like extra XP during battle, enemies dropping more loot, and even giving Oliver 100 extra max HP and MP. These side quests, including bounty hunts, can be fun and can add 15-20 hours of gameplay themselves.
After so long, you will be able to sail and fly around the entire world, allowing you to avoid overworld battles. The game has no random battles, but some enemies are so hard to avoid that they might as well be. If you get to a high enough level, enemies will run away, and you won’t have to deal with them. The game is also full of dangerous dungeons full of chests of loot. Now, what about these familiars? Think of them like Pokemon. You can feed them treats to advance various attributes, and then feed them gemstones to advance them to their third and most powerful stage. As they level up, they acquire new spells and techniques. You can swap out different familiars and hold up to 500 in your familiar retreat.
The game’s art is fantastic and gorgeous, along with the music. Studio Ghibli created the animated cutscenes, but there aren’t many of them. There are less than 10 minutes of animation throughout the whole game, and that’s very disappointing. I felt they shouldn’t have bothered at that point. There’s also a lot of unspoken dialogue, and it just seems random when it happens. Towards the end, there are hardly any cut scenes, and it drove me nuts. Why waste the great voice acting and animation only to spread it randomly and unevenly throughout the game? Other than that, colors pop on a 1080p HDTV with bright, vibrant colors thanks to Studio Ghibli’s art style, which everyone has grown to love and appreciate.
In the end, Ni no Kuni has a very engaging story that will keep you hooked for dozens of hours. The combat tries to change things from the typical JRPG format, but there are a few flaws in it. Your spells can be interrupted often, and when you defend, sometimes they won’t register or you don’t get enough time before the enemy attacks. You get about a second before the enemy attacks. During that time, you need to order your team to defend themselves. It can be tough during boss fights. I also hated the focus on magic, and the game was overly difficult during the last 3/4. Other than that, the combat was fine. The game suffers from tedium towards the end, and the side quests start feeling the same, and you just want the game to end. There is some post-end content, but most people might skip this. Ni no Kuni is a perfect game for JRPG fans, but non-fans won’t find enough here to change their minds.
Metro 2033 was one of the most atmospheric shooters in the past decade. It had an excellent story, great characters, and solid shooting action. It just wasn’t paced very well, and the stealth sections nearly ruined the game. That has all been fixed in Last Light; this is one of the best shooter and horror games to come out in a long time.
You play, once again, as Artyom. Set in the post-apocalyptic Russian underground metro system, the creatures, radiation, and violent storms have driven everyone underground. Life isn’t so simple. After Artyom launched the missiles on the Dark One’s nest, the war against the communists is getting more heated. The only way to stop this war is to find the last surviving Dark One and use it against President Moskvin to stop the war from destroying the last humans on Earth.
The game is more about Artyom’s journey than the overarching story. The game is broken up into underground sections, stealth, top-side sections, boss fights, on-rails stuff, and then safe cities. The atmosphere in this game is just phenomenal. Never in a shooter—in a long time anyway—have I felt actually afraid. When you’re underground in these dark, decrepit tunnels and you’re hearing strange sounds all around, you get really scared. These sections last for minutes rather than seconds, like most shooters. They let you marinate in this dark, frightening atmosphere. Sometimes your flashlight won’t work, and you just have to use your lighter to see. The monsters are terrifying because they look so close to what they once were—just mutated. This plays out through the entire game, and it’s very tense.
You can carry three weapons with you at all times. They are all great weapons to shoot because some of them are kind of slapped together with parts. The Bastard is an interesting side-loading machine gun; it gets jammed often, and you have to be careful. Ammo is scarce, and you must make sure you save your military-grade bullets to buy ammo and better weapons along with attachments. Once you get to a city, it’s like a breath of fresh air. After being in such a scary situation, you are so relieved to see civilization. There are some throwable objects at your disposal, like bombs, incendiary flares, knives for stealth, and then you have med syringes. You get night vision goggles later on, and you have to use your charger to keep your flashlight and goggles powered on. When you’re on the surface, you must wear a mask, and you need to find filters to continue breathing. Artyom can also wipe his mask when things get blurred out. This is a fantastic mechanic—a wipe mask button—and it just adds to the feeling of survival. If you get hit too much, your mask breaks and you can’t breathe.
While I stuck with mostly the same guns throughout the game, you always feel slightly underpowered. The monsters are vicious and dangerous, and you can’t take them all on at once. Sometimes stealth is the best option, and it’s so much better. AI doesn’t detect you a mile away, and you can stealth kill easily with your throwing knives or from behind. The levels are laid out much better, and you get a sense of accomplishment when you get through a level for the first time. The pacing is fantastic, and I just couldn’t put the controller down; it was that good.
The graphics are some of the best out there. On consoles, it actually ruins the atmosphere because a lot of stuff is taken out due to the underpowered hardware. On PC, the game jumps to life with mind-blowing lighting effects, super-high-resolution textures, and various other things that actually severely downgrade the experience on consoles. Last Light is one of those games where graphics are a huge part of the experience. The lighting, textures, depth of field, all that stuff makes the game just come to life. You have to play it to experience it. I honestly have to say that you won’t get the same experience on consoles as you will on PCs. If you buy the PC version, you also get the Metro 2033 eBook for free.
Overall, Last Light is one of the most intense and frightening shooters made in the past decade; nothing comes close. The sheer terror you feel when Artyom is breathing heavily in his mask, blood and mud are dripping down your mask, and your watch says you only have 90 seconds of filter life left. Mutants are after you, and if you panic and run to find filters, then you have to turn and face them. With the destroyed world around you, you are constantly reminded that this was once a habitable place. You walk through buses and planes with skeletons in the seats and apartment buildings with ghosts that haunt them. Anyone who wants to feel survival horror, don’t play Resident Evil or Silent Hill; Last Light is your one-way ticket.
Games these days lack much of a story, and thankfully Indigo Prophecy takes up some of that slack. About 80% of Indigo Prophecy is just storytelling with excellent voice acting. The majority of the game has you walking around places looking for clues to solve simple puzzles. This is done with the thumbstick moving, so it makes you feel like you’re “really picking objects up.” A good example is when you have to sit down: you just push the right thumbstick down (an icon will appear on the top of the screen to show what you are going to do and what move to make). The other half of the game is made up of mini-games with the timed thumb stick moving (think of Simon Says) and L+R alternations. Yeah, it doesn’t sound exciting, but it really works, and these ideas are implemented well with the ideas attached to them.
On the story side, it’s very complex and well-executed. You play Lucas Kane, who is convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. You play as the two cops investigating the crime as well. The whole purpose of the game is the idea of playing chess against yourself. You can decide how the game is played out, and actions you take early on will affect things later on. You really notice this too, because later on, you’ll say, “Oh man, I shouldn’t have done that earlier!” The game’s pace flows smoothly, and everything eventually comes together.
Between each scene in the game, you can choose which character you’ll play next, and this also determines the outcome. Some parts are also timed, so you have a certain amount of time to hide, collect, and hide evidence. If you miss one piece of evidence and someone comes to ask you questions, they’ll see it and get suspicious. This, in turn, raises their suspicion meter, and you must make the right choices so you don’t get busted. You also have a mental health gauge that lets you know how your character is feeling. Your choices will determine whether or not they become happier or more and more depressed, leaning toward suicide. You can do things like go to the bathroom, drink something, or even just make the right choice in a conversation to raise or lower this gauge. This plays a key role in certain scenes because some choices will completely drain your meter, so you end up turning yourself in. The game is constantly changing from Lucas’ childhood flashbacks, and the three separate characters keep things interesting.
Thankfully, you can beat the game in about 6–8 hours, so you won’t get too bored with these concepts. For a short time, they work well and will keep you hooked until the very end. The great storytelling and excellent voice acting keep you hooked. Now, a huge downside is that the game is hideous. The animations are stiff, and the textures are flat, dull, muddy, and just downright ugly. The game looks like a PS2 launch title; that’s how bad it looks. I played the PS2 version back when it came out, and that version had some slowdown, but the Xbox version is just as ugly. There are some extras here, such as making videos, galleries, and a soundtrack (which is really good). You can unlock these by finding bonus cards in the game, but don’t worry—one playthrough and you’ll get more points than you need to unlock everything. I highly suggest IP if you really want a good story. I also suggest picking this up at a game store because you can get it for less than $10 now!!! Xbox Originals charges you $15, so be warned!!
I went into this not expecting much. I was halfway through the first issue when it suddenly grabbed my attention. This series plays out—and could be translated to—a full-on game. The gods (Hades, Ares, Hermes, Poseidon, and Helios) are bored and make a wager. They find the strongest clans in the world and make something disastrous happen. The Barbarian King’s father is stricken with illness, a female clan suffers starvation, and Kratos’s newborn child with Lysandra, Calliope, is born with a deformity. The Spartan law is that an ugly baby is thrown out at sea. Lysandra’s midwife tells them a tale about the Ambrosia of Asclepius, which can give eternal life and bring back the dead. They both beg the Spartan King to let Kratos bring back this ambrosia for the King himself and a sip for his baby.
That’s one freaking awesome story. That is the premise for a whole new God of War game. As the series advances, the gods start cheating because Kratos is obviously winning. He slays large, strange beasts, avoids natural disasters, and has the King’s army following him. The series does an excellent job of showing the hot-headedness of Kratos and his selfishness. The Spartan general gives him a lecture on this, and we also get some insight into the Spartan ways and how cruel they were. Several times, Kratos almost becomes defeated, but we all know the ending here.
The art was a bit disappointing. It’s very murky and washed out with black. There’s some realism here, but it doesn’t exactly fit the game’s art style. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes I didn’t. There were a few mistakes, like when he had a flashback to his childhood. Kratos is drawn with ashy skin and red markings, but he didn’t get that until after he slew his family. In Ghost of Sparta, Kratos is seen with normal skin as a kid, so there were some screw-ups with the lore here. This series was made towards the tale-end of WildStorm Comics’ life; issue 6 was done by DC Comics after they absorbed WildStorm. At least the comic is gory, and there’s a lot of violence, like in the game. While the art may be iffy, it does have an excellent atmosphere of darkness and constant betrayal.
It’s a short series, but it does the game justice. If you love God of War, these six issues should be in your comic collection. The story is so great that it can stand as a standalone game.
I didn’t really have high hopes for this comic series. Comics are a good avenue for video games because you get a new story along with visuals. The first mini-series wasn’t all that great. The art was good, but the story was very average and just felt like a piece of a level from the game. There were a couple of comics after that that focused on Jace, which is a character I didn’t really like. These issues felt pointless, and I feel sorry for anyone who wasted $4 on them. The second mini-series, Barren, was excellent, with fantastic art and an awesome story. It also brought out a darker side to the franchise that wasn’t seen in the games. Using a run-down facility to capture and rape girls to create babies to keep humanity running. Delta Squad goes in and tries to save them, but there is a constant love/hate thing going on, and it was very gripping.
After this, the series went into some one-offs with Jace again, and I didn’t like them. The third and final mini-series was Dirty Little Secrets, which led up to the ending of Gears of War 3. Karen Traviss wrote the comic this time around, except the artwork was terrible. It was washed out, and the character design was inconsistent with the whole series. There were some character tie-ins to the Gears novels, so anyone who’s read those will finally get to see what these characters look like, such as Trescu, Mathieson, and a few other Garasnaya people. The story was pretty gripping, and it got into the heads of Adam Fenix, Chairman Prescott, and Hoffman. Of course, by now everyone knows how Gears ends, but this is still a great insight.
Interestingly, WildStorm dropped the series shortly after the Barren mini-series, and DC Comics picked it up. I don’t know if it wasn’t profitable anymore. I highly doubt the comic series sold very well. After the switch to DC, the artwork went down the wayside, yet the stories were a little better. Seeing as the series only ran for 24 issues (2 years), I’m guessing after Gears of War 3, they didn’t expect it to sell. It went on for quite a while, as most video game comics are only one mini-series long. If you are a hardcore Gears of War fan, I recommend at least picking up the last two mini-series. The series went through some ups and downs, but it was solid for a franchise that mainly focused on shooting things.
While Hollow was a huge disappointment and felt completely unnecessary, the writers and artists at WildStorm seem to have gotten the hang of the series. Barren is full of twists and exciting new characters, and, surprisingly, a bunch of female ones. Delta Squad gets a new female soldier in their squad, Alex, and they are sent to a destroyed city called Jilane to find any survivors. The distress beacon was somehow activated there, but it’s actually a plant where they capture and rape women to reproduce. This is a very dark series, even darker than Gears of War. Things like rape and torture aren’t talked about in the games outside of the Locust.
For some reason, they are still sticking with Jace as the main character. Nobody likes him; he’s boring and uninteresting, yet he’s still here. There’s even a sex scene in the series with Jace and one of the female survivors. It’s very shocking, but a good move for the series of comics. Throughout the five-part series, Liam Sharp’s art brings the story to life, and it feels like they have the series under their belt. There’s a lot of action and suspense, and each comic ends on a cliffhanger, but thankfully I didn’t have to wait until the next month to read what happens next. Cliffhangers are important in comics because they keep the reader coming back every month.
Barren just really shows the darkest part of humanity and how the emergence of Locust affected everyone. It also shows the softer, more humane side of the COG and Delta Squad. They save children and women, but it also shows that the best among us will sacrifice themselves to save the masses. This comic series is just rock solid, and I hope it continues further into the 24-part Gears of War comic run. If you don’t want to read them all, just get #9–14 and enjoy beautiful artwork, solid writing, and tense action.
What can I say? The allure of being a biker got me interested in this game. I just tried it with no knowledge of it at all. I saw a few screenshots and went for it. The game seems okay at first until you realize something. There are no graphics options in this game; you know you are getting into something bad if it has no graphics options. After playing the broken-up, badly done intro, I thought the game would be at least playable. I was wrong.
You play as a biker named Jake who comes back home from serving in the army. Your little brother gets into some trouble and is killed by a rival biker gang. You now have a vendetta against the Devil’s Hand; this all started after they recognized your jacket, which is from the Retribution gang. It was your dad’s old gang, and now you are stuck with his mess. It seems a bit promising, but everything just falls apart after the first mission. Where do I start? How about quick-time events? The X and Y buttons aren’t even recognized during these sequences, so you always fail them. The X and Y buttons work fine in combat, but for some reason they are completely broken during QTEs. Good job, guys. Second, the animations and voice acting are just so bad. When Jake is holding a gun, his hand doesn’t even go around it properly; the list goes on.
The combat is terrible and boring. Mash X and Y forever; sometimes Y will appear above an enemy to counter-attack. It doesn’t help that the camera is all over the place, but the worst is the shooting. It takes 10 bullets to drop an enemy unless you aim for the head. The timing is so bad, and the acceleration is awful. When you move the reticle over, it suddenly speeds way up in less than a second. The cover system is just as bad. Blind fire doesn’t even work; Jake just shoots at the cover he’s on. What kind of pile of crap is this? The game tries to sell itself on the many sex scenes that are in the game, but they are awkward, and there’s not even any nudity. It looks like two plastic dolls humping each other. Jake has sex with a female mechanic with her overalls on. Yeah, explain how that works.
I can’t really say anything good about this game. The screenshots may look good, but the game is really ugly. All the settings are turned all the way down by default, and you can’t change them in the.ini file. The game is supposed to support DirectX 11 and other features; at this stage, it looks like a first-gen Xbox 360 game. I still wonder how Deep Silver allowed this game to be published. Even the driving sequences are bad; the motorcycle drives at 500 mph and feels like a squirrely boat. There are times when you need to use QTEs to knock down opponents, but again, the X and Y buttons aren’t registered, and you always fail them.
There’s really nothing to say about the game that’s good except that it has violence and sex. Even that is poorly done. The game is playable, but just barely and only while you wrestle with all the game mechanics that should just work. It’s like the developers started making this game, didn’t like how it was going, but had to release it anyway, so they submitted their alpha build and called it a day. Ride to Hell is the worst game I have played all year. Just stop yourself from making the same mistake.
Being on a strange alien planet, you are tasked with the mission of using a device called the Swapper to escape. You must free yourself from this foreign alien race. The problem is, these aliens aren’t alive; they are a gathered mass consciousness. The space station you are on is home to research and experimentation on these beings, as well as The Swapper. As the story goes on, you’ll find out who’s responsible for the Swapper and why everyone died. The game has an eerie atmosphere with mind-bending puzzles.
The main mechanic of this device is being able to clone yourself. You can make up to four copies, and these are used to solve intriguing puzzles. Holding down the right mouse button will show a red outline of your clone, so you’ll know where you’re going to place it. The left mouse button lets you transport your soul into that clone, allowing you to control it. It’s not always as easy as that. Colored lights play a big role in the game. Blue allows you to teleport, but you can’t place clones; red is the opposite. Purple doesn’t allow you to do either. Sometimes lights are blocking buttons, paths, and most importantly, the orbs you need to collect to make it through the space station. There are 124 orbs in the whole game and about 30 puzzles. Each puzzle is completely different, but later in the game, one other major element gets introduced.
That element is gravity, and with it being introduced so late in the game, it actually extends the longevity of the game. Instead of getting bored early on, you have to now use gravity, which makes the puzzles that much harder. Walking upside down to place an upside-down clone on a button, only to teleport to it, place another clone, then find out how to get yourself right side up without dropping all the clones. The tricky thing is that all the clones will follow you. Movement plays a big puzzle-solving role as well. The Swapper is a very innovative game and one of the most original since Portal.
The story elements are told through some voice work, but it’s only from one woman. She follows you throughout the ship and later tells you how to get out. The rest is told through logs that you find throughout your journey. The atmosphere is very eerie, with dark visuals and the feeling of being alone and scared. The only issue lies in the fact that some puzzles are just way too hard to figure out. They are very unbalanced, ranging from really easy to suddenly super hard. I had to use a video walkthrough to solve some of them, and they were so complicated that I never would have figured them out on my own. That’s the biggest problem with all puzzle games: you have to have balance. There are some puzzles where the solution is right in front of your face, but others are not so much.
There’s also very little replay value; you need to complete all the puzzles to finish the game, and there are no time trials or anything like that. Once you finish it, you’re pretty much done and will never come back. The story is also a bit flat towards the end; you never really find out what these aliens are or what they want. What’s here is fun and very original, but it needs a bit more to stand up to puzzle games like Portal.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Clearly you have been blocking everything you or haven't played the game at all. Maybe pay attention to the story…