Multiplayer can be put into any game, but a good multiplayer (whether it be cooperative or competitive) has to have balance, a good amount of modes, and something to set it apart from the rest. Shooters tend to be the main course when it comes to multiplayer. However, those tend to always be the same, but something needs to set it apart. Usually, it’s well-made maps, balanced weapons, and customization. Even something like poorly run servers can make online play bad. There were a lot of shooters this year, but only one topped them all.
Great maps, a beautiful game engine, vehicles, and a change in pace for unlocks and perks is what makes Battlefield 3 the top dog this year. All the rest were just perfections of what has already been down, but Battlefield 3 perfected and added on to what’s already been done. Excellent maps, great balancing, and starting you out with crappy load-outs to force you to be good makes this one shine. Not to mention up 64 players on huge Rush or Conquest matches is an absolute blast and no other shooter can pull this off.
Another World War II game, but wait, this came out 7 years ago during the sub-genre peak. Why should I play this? It’s just another Call of Duty. Before you go making drastic decisions Call of Duty started out as a WWII series way before the Modern Warfare explosion. Call of Duty was known for its great cinematic atmosphere, tight gunplay, and excellent storytelling. United Offensive is the expansion of the award-winning debut game in the series. Offensive is just superb and even holds up on all levels today.
The game has three campaigns that run between America, England, and Russia. You play as three different faceless soldiers, but the environment is the main character here. Each campaign has an amazing opening scene as well as some memorable moments like the escape on a Jeep in the American campaign, the gripping plane scene in the England campaign, and the tank scenes in the Russian campaign. There is never a dull moment in Offensive, and everything from sound, great voice acting, and realistic-sounding war effects brings together a riveting experience that I truly have not found in any other WWII game (even in later CoD games).
Instead of trying to pack every scenario into one game (including weapons), we get some long battles that feel challenging but not terribly hard. Some scenes can last up to 20 minutes (like the plane scene in the British campaign), but they hold you out just enough to make you feel the terror of war and a little helpless. Some battles require waiting a certain amount of time before reinforcements arrive, and then a wonderful orchestral soundtrack picks up and makes it that much more intense.
The gunplay is solid and feels great with favorite weapons like the MP40, M1 Garand, MP44, and the Springfield sniper rifle. We’ve used the weapons dozens of times, but each weapon feels different, which includes power, accuracy, and the mechanics of the gun. I feel the grenades still have no weight, but there are a variety of them. Each level and scenario feel different and gripping, but you never get attached to any characters because the environment is the main attraction.
Multiplayer would keep you coming back, but due to your age, there is no one playing online ever, so you have to stick to LAN. War games just aren’t like they used to be, and United Offensive shows how to put the feeling of war as well as realistic-feeling weapons. United Offensive stands out graphically as well, thanks to the tiny details. The only thing dated are the low-poly models, low-resolution textures up close, and some static lighting. Most of the time, you won’t notice because you’re sucked into the experience too much. If a game from 2004 can suck you in after playing modern war games, then that really shows how much a game stands up.
Game of the Year is one of the hardest decisions because so many games are created every year. But to come out on top the game must be excellent in its genre (usually re-define it) and have great production values, and not feel repetitive, and usually, it changes the way we think about games.
What sets Red Dead apart from all of these other excellent games is how authentic its world is. It feels so real and feels just like the wild west. With excellent voice acting, a huge open world to explore, lots of missions, and it’s just the subtle details that make it a winner. Hunting, gambling, horseback riding, even down to the drinks, attitudes of the people, clothing, accents, it just all adds up to something spectacular and really shows what a game can do. It’s Red Dead’s subtle details that truly make this game shine over the others.
Shooters probably take the most flak from gamers and tend to be the most hated. Most gamers don’t like shooters due to their true-to-life reenactments, or just killing people with guns doesn’t sit well with most. No doubt shooters helped push consoles graphics-wise, and have some great stories to tell, and excellent cinematic moments.
Black Ops not only has astounding multiplayer, but the single-player campaign is probably one of the best this year when it comes to shooters. Most shooters have shallow stories, but Black Ops‘ Vietnam/Cold War story is gripping, with some of the best set pieces seen in shooters. Excellent graphics, memorable characters, and awesome weapons make this a winner.
The Rhythm/Music genre has always been about great music, and whether your rocking out, dancing, or singing you are meant to have a great time, but the game also has to have responsive controls. If the game can’t also be read without thinking your game is broken. Making a good rhythm game is hard since the genre is so bloated these days. The game also has to have good sturdy hardware that’s responsive.
Rock Band 3
Rock Band isn’t a unique or original game anymore so why does it win for the second year in a row? The new peripherals and the fact that it actually teaches you how to play music now. With the addition of the new keytar and being able to play with a real guitar? That’s ingenious, and while the gameplay hasn’t changed much that addition of excellent hardware makes it a winner.
Driving games are all about the cars whether it’s a simulator or arcade racer. A good driving game has responsive controls, slick cars, fun tracks, and customization options that suit the game.
While it has its flaws and was overhyped there’s no denying the attention to detail in GT5. With over 500 cars, tons of real-world tracks detailed to every crack, excellent tuning options, and a slick interface what’s there not to like? With the new special events, GT5 is oozing with awesome content for car lovers. So flaws aside it’s the attention to detail that won this over the rest.
Military shooters tend to take the most flak because they tend to be the same, linear, sometimes boring, with questionable multiplayer, but when Modern Warfare came out four years ago, it really shook the ground, and shooters have been copying it ever since. Black Ops also has something that surprised me, and this was a solid, memorable single-player experience. Blasphemy right? Wrong! The game has lots of varied environments, tons of epic moments, and a few vehicle sections are thrown in, as well as the best helicopter-based missions in any game ever. The game also doesn’t start out as a regular shooter, with Alex Mason (Red Faction: Guerrilla, anyone?) strapped in a chair and a disguised voice yelling at him to remember numbers. The whole story only makes sense at the end, reveals a lot of plot twists, is beautifully crafted, and shows developer Treyarch isn’t the weak link in the CoD series.
The game has a lot of new weapons that are true to the Cold War/Vietnam era, and even the art style shows. The game is beautiful, with great sound, voice acting, and the actual plot mentioned above. The game has memorable characters that you get attached to through the 7-8-hour campaign (yes, it’s also a tad longer than most campaigns in shooters) and even memorable moments themselves. The storming of the Vorkuta prison in Russia and many other levels are memorable. Of course, the game has some issues that Treyarch is known for, such as not knowing what to do, poor directions, respawning enemies, and a few glitches here and there. Despite that, the campaign is solid and well worth the wait and the money, but of course, it’s multiplayer that most people will keep coming back for.
And, oh boy, is the multiplayer sweet. With new maps, a whole new approach to customization, and even the new Wager matches, Black Ops multiplayer is probably the best in the series and the best FPS multiplayer ever made. The game has the same overall playstyle as Modern Warfare 2, but instead of receiving fixed unlocks, the game adopted a currency system, and you can buy everything from perks to weapons to visual add-ons—you name it. This is a great approach to changing up the game and making it more about what you want. On top of this, the Wager matches are ingenious, with players betting on a match, and the top three get some money and the rest lose their bet.
There is One in the Chamber, which gives you one bullet and a knife. If you kill someone, you get a bullet but run out, and you are left with your knife. This is a great and intense mode because it does not shoot first and aim later like the regular models. Gun Game has you start out as a pea shooter, then you move up in tiers of guns with each kill. Not every gun is good because a sniper rifle vs. a machine gun won’t be very easy. The next mode is Sticks and Stones, which gives you a crossbow, a tomahawk, and a ballistic knife. Hitting a player with a Tomahawk resets their score to zero, and the most points are awarded for crossbow kills. Sharpshooter has your weapon switch every 45 seconds, and it’s random, but every player has the same weapon. These are fun and amazing modes that never get old.
On top of that is the zombie mode that Treyarch made a cult hit in World at War. You play as Nixon, Kennedy, and two other characters, along with surviving the three maps and the hilarious political banter the characters speak (Nixon when spending points to remove a barrier: This is taxing me like the Democrats). Players, but fight off hordes of zombies in multi-tiered maps, and points are awarded for barricading windows and shooting the zombies. Points can be spent to buy weapons and ammo and unlock new parts of the map. It’s intense, and trying to survive rounds gets heated (most won’t survive after round 10 and past round 5 alone). With four players playing cooperatively, it’s a great departure from the seriousness of the rest of the game.
Rhythm games are pretty much mainstream these days. The days of the rare Guitar Hero are long gone, and everyone and their mom plays Rock Band, but DJ Hero was a spark and a light to revive this, and while it didn’t, it does offer a different and new approach to rhythm games. Like the title says, you use your turntable like a DJ and scratch, crossfade, and freestyle your way to the top. There are a lot of songs, and the game requires some hefty skills to master.
Like Guitar Hero, you must use both hands in unison to hit colored notes at the right time to score points. The notes are presented on a record on-screen that is in a semi-circle, and when you see jagged notes, you press the button down while turning the record. Sometimes you’ll have arrows that are up or down, so just scratch quickly in that direction. The left or right notes will always have a line going down, and when they move to the left or right (which looks kind of like a bracket or a quick 90-degree bend), you move your crossfader in that direction. This can be tricky, especially in the higher difficulties, since sometimes you’ll have to scratch and crossfade at the same time, but over time you’ll nail it. You can do some mixing with the effects knob, but this seemed pretty useless. When the red line gets larger, you can press the red button freely and select one of your effect noises, but this just seemed stupid, and I never really used it.
If you nail highlighted areas, you can use Star Power, and your button on the turntable will turn red. When you activate this, the game will crossfade for you, but the fatal flaw here is that if it ends in the middle of a fade and your slider isn’t in the right position, it’ll kill your multiplier, so you have to babysit it anyway. One last feature is the ability to rewind the track a little bit to add to your score, but this isn’t as neat as you think. While the elements are nailed down, there are still a few issues.
There’s no real way to express your creativity since freestyle is so restricted. There’s no freestyle zone where you can scratch and crossfade at will. While the song selection is large, a lot of the mixes are repetitive and grate on your nerves after a while. It feels more like quantity than quality here. You have big names like Eminem, Jay-Z, Grand Master Flash, Run DMC, and some other rock groups mixed in, but only a select few are worth playing multiple times.
The game’s pretty customizable with lots of characters, skins, tables, stages, and all that good stuff, so it makes you really want to try for five stars. Other than that, the only thing is multiplayer, which allows you to use a guitar controller on songs with rock bits. The game looks like any of the recent Guitar Hero games, but the price of admission is pretty high. As of this review, the price has dropped almost double, but upon release, it was $130, and that’s pretty steep. I recommend DJ Hero even to people who don’t like rap music because there’s a lot of fun and skills to be honed here.
First-person shooters have always been one of my favorite genres because of the amazing stories that most tell, accompanied by the beautiful cinematic experiences that most provide these days. Modern Warfare 2 is among those, but the multiplayer is what will keep you coming back for more. Modern Warfare 2 starts after the first game, so I highly suggest picking up the Game of the Year Edition if you really want to get into Modern Warfare. You play as new recruits and follow the characters you played as in the original (Captain Price and Soap MacTavish). You are still trying to stop the Russian psychopath Makarov, who has now brought the war to the east coast of our own country.
The game is more cinematic than the original, but not as intuitive in terms of level design and length. There are things in Modern Warfare 2 that have never been done in an FPS before, like ice climbing, but you also have a snowmobile scene as well as using AC-130 attack planes. But the game just doesn’t compare to the original in terms of single-player. One of the most memorable moments is at the beginning, when you actually play as a terrorist on one level and massacre people in an airport. I am very surprised this passed the ESRB censorship without anyone complaining because they can’t control their kids’ actions. Anyways, there are a lot of things in the single-player experience for fans of the original, including flashbacks of the last game and even another sniper level with Captain Price, but nothing tops the level in Pripyat from the original. The biggest thing you will notice is the mass amount of weapons you can use. There were so many weapons that I couldn’t use them all in one play-through. One thing that just strikes me as amazing is seeing our own country, as if this happened tomorrow, as a war-torn battlefield. It’s very awe-inspiring and makes you stop and admire the scenery. While the single-player experience only has about 4-6 hours of gameplay, it’s enough to get you started and familiar with the game enough to jump right into multiplayer, and it comes out bats swinging and all.
Modern Warfare is renowned for its award-winning multiplayer, and it is probably the best FPS multiplayer I have ever played on any system. The game is about reaching rank 70 using the real-life military ranking system and earning experience points from kills. You start out using the default load-outs, but after reaching rank 4, you can make up to five custom classes. You can pick a primary and secondary weapon, equipment, special equipment, three perks, and a death streak. For each weapon, you can choose an attachment ranging from scopes, grips, silencers, and heartbeat monitors. Perks add advantages to your skills, such as steady aim, faster reloading, being invisible to UAVs, air support, etc., master melee speed, and you get the idea. There is even a new perk called Bling, which allows you to have two attachments to your primary weapon.
Once you have your classes created, you can start earning experience points with them. The multiplayer in Modern Warfare 2 is so deep that you earn points from completing challenges by using and doing everything you possibly can hundreds of times. Challenges range from getting so many kills for every weapon, attachment, perk, death streak, kill streak, etc. Just about everything you do earns you points to move on up, and this can get you hundreds of hours of online fun. If that isn’t enticing enough, 12 players may not seem like much, but on these maps, they are. My only real complaint is that there aren’t many maps, and most of them aren’t that good. A select few are well designed and very fun to play on, but some are just boring, but a map pack is due soon to fix this.
Some of the new features you have heard me talk about are new death streaks, which are a fourth perk that is enabled if you die three times, and these range from dropping a live grenade upon death to 10 seconds of extra health upon respawning. Killstreaks are now customizable and unlockable by earning ranks. There are over a dozen now, ranging from controllable AC-130 airstrikes, helicopter strikes, Hind attacks, and carpet bombing. Getting 25 kills in a row can even land you a tactical nuke that lets your team automatically win. My favorite is the care package drops (upon earning 4 kills in a row) that deliver random kill streaks or even the placeable turret.
You also now have a customizable call sign, which is a placard that displays an emblem, a mockery banner, your rank, and your gamertag. There are dozens of emblems and titles to unlock, and mixing and matching is fun while the titles can match your personality, such as ones that say “Bow Down,” “Omnipotent,” “Joint Ops,” or “Voyeur.” There is just an endless heap of options in this game, and it truly makes it the best FPS multiplayer game ever made because there isn’t one thing I would want to change about the game. I really want to give this game a 9.5, but the slightly disappointing single-player and covert ops bring it down a tad.
Covert Ops seems more like an experiment than anything else because no one plays it online. Think of these as special missions that have you killing a certain number of enemies or racing down a hill in a snowmobile to get a certain time. 90% of these are impossible to do without someone else, so you will most definitely need a buddy to beat them.
On one last note, the game looks amazing. With super high-res textures and looking close to real-life on an HDTV in all its 1080p 50” glory, you will be drooling all the time. Everything is highly detailed, and the sound is just amazing for that “in-the-war” experience. Modern Warfare 2 is just an amazing game and really shows how sequels should be: improvements upon the original in which the developer listens to its fellow community and makes changes accordingly.
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Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.