OK, all I want to say is, What the hell? I dodged this game since I got my 360 on Christmas of ’06, and now that I finally paid $4.50 for this game, I feel like I got ripped off. The game is ugly, derivative, poorly designed, and buggy. The multiplayer is terrible, the shooting mechanics are flawed, and the story is retarded. If there’s anything positive about this game, it’s the fact that Joanna is hot, there are some pretty cool gadgets, and that’s about it. I wish I could stop my review now, but I must enlighten you.
When you start the game, you are brought to an equipment loadout screen where you can select your weapons, but you only get a pistol to start out with. OK, fine, cool, but once you enter, you have no idea what’s going on. Enemies are hard to track thanks to the offbeat, weird (not the good weird) art style and the way you move your gun. I mean, what? The thing feels like I am moving it through the mud. What happened to a smooth-moving reticle? This thing has a drag on it or something because I could never aim properly in this game, and I’m pretty damn good at FPS games, never having a problem aiming even in the worst of them.
Anyways, each gun has a useless secondary fire that you’ll never use; the P9P has a silencer (useful), but the SMG is thrown as a delayed (long delay) grenade (not useful). The enforcer can bounce bullets around corners (not useful), so, c’mon, what is this crap? Even James Bond wouldn’t approve of these lame secondary fires. Not only are the guns hard to shoot, but the AI is freaking retarded. All they do is strafe back and forth in the same line or just stand there staring at you. If you think it’s hard to hit those guys, try using a sniper rifle that uses the pressure-sensitive trigger to zoom with a bolt-action. What super spy has a bolt-action sniper rifle? What happened to ten round clips? Hell, even the Germans figured that one out.
OK, if you think the action levels are hard, try the stealth levels. It’s so hard to see enemies and to kill them stealthily that you’ll just get pissed and run through the level. There is so much trial and error, it’s absurd that even Metal Gear doesn’t have this much T&E. Yes, there are some cool gadgets like the Locktopuss, but who plays a minigame on this thing when people are shooting at you? And a puzzle on a demo charge to place it?! Joanna’s gadget creator needs to be fired because super-spies don’t have time for that. I haven’t even gotten to the most frustrating part yet—the checkpoints. There is one in each level, so if you spend 30 minutes sneaking through a level and then get caught but complete two objectives, you’re screwed and have to start over again. That is the main reason why I stopped playing after level six.
If you think the single-player is lame, try the multiplayer, where somehow it looks even uglier than the single-player. Not only are there only two modes, but the game types are random and just stupid. You have deathmatch and team deathmatch, then you have other modes that are never explained and make no sense. The players move extremely slowly and have that running floating effect like old PS2 games; the aiming stinks even more, thanks to it somehow being more sticky; the maps are terribly designed, with dead ends and tons of empty rooms and halls; plus, there is no jump button. Plus, all the achievements are wrapped around multiplayer (yes, all but two), and there’s no one playing online!
If you think that’s even worse, the game is ugly and probably the ugliest Xbox 360 game to date (ok, one of the ugliest). I mean, this game looks like a really good Xbox game with shiny plastic flat textures and just old-looking animations. I honestly think this is the most disappointing Xbox 360 game I’ve ever played, so everyone should just stay away.
The sandbox or “open-ended gameplay” genre is actually the newest genre known to video games, with a good seven years under its belt, but not that many games have really proven the genre worthy. With Grand Theft Auto III being the daddy of this genre, many games were failed mock-ups of GTA; many weren’t even related but still didn’t do the genre justice. Saint’s Row tried to push the genre once again a few years ago, but didn’t do such a great job and was just shoved off as another GTA clone. Now that Saint’s Row 2 has been out for a while, people kind of just stopped with blank expressions, while some roared and cheered with joy. Saints 2 really does push the genre and is a clear opponent against Grand Theft Auto IV, but I’m not going to sit here and compare the two since Saints 2 deserves a separate look.
The first thing you do when you enter the game is to create your own character, and this is what really sets the game apart from others in the genre. You wake up from your coma in a jail hospital, and bam, you’re in there, changing your sex, picking your taunts (some are very vulgar), rearranging your face (you can do that outside of this too), picking your hair, and even your voice. The options are deep and riddled with lots of ways to make your character unique and stand out from others online. Once you get out of this mode, you are introduced to an easy-to-use tutorial that will show you how to control your character, and I have to admit, the controls are wonderful. I never got frustrated with them, and they are just so intuitive and easy to understand and remember. You start out with some melee training, then you pick up a pistol and discover you can zoom in via over the shoulder, jump around, and it all just feels nice and smooth. Once you hop into a car, this doesn’t change one bit since cars will turn on a dime and have the perfect feel to them (all 40 or so of them), and this makes driving around the city of Stilwater very pleasant.
The bulk of the game is about rivaling gangs throughout the story, and I have to admit the story is riveting, gruesome, and very entertaining and never falters once. You see, since you were knocked out for two weeks, all the gangs who hated you took their territory back, and now you must gather your old friends, start the 3rd Street Saints up again, and build your hideout. In this hideout, you can get your cash from the stores you purchased, change your gang’s style (like the ’80s, hip-hop, pimps & hos, that sort of thing), change your weapon layout, and pimp out your crib. All of these are just nice subtle touches that THQ didn’t really have to do, but they went that extra mile anyway.
Between these story missions, you can go to different stores and buy food (health), jewelry or clothes to increase your respect, go to plastic surgeons to redo something on your character, buy cars, buy weapons, and in the second half of the game, play side missions.
These side missions are actually a blast, and the two I will talk about are Fuzz and Septic Avenger. Most of the side missions are scattered throughout your map (Stilwater is HUGE, by the way), and they consist of events such as racing, celebrity protection, helicopter attack missions, etc. All of these missions earn you respect, so you can play story missions (each story mission takes one piece of your respect bar). Each mission gives you a time limit and a certain objective to complete, while some are easy and others are a pain in the @SS and can leave you screaming in frustration. Fuzz is a cop reality show where you drive around to designated crimes and kill them according to what your cameraman says. Sometimes you’ll have to use a chainsaw (camera angle a la Gears of War), use satchel charges on skateboarders, etc. Fuzz is an addictive (like most missions) way to fill your respect bar and leaves many laughs as well (thanks to the amazing dialog THQ wrote for the game). Septic Avenger has you driving a septic truck (yeah, a poop truck) spraying fecal matter all over buildings to depreciate their value for certain clients. As you spray the buildings, a red meter will drop and a cash amount will pop up, bringing that much closer to your depreciation amount. There are also some other smaller side missions, like the taxi missions and hostage diversion, in which you hijack a car and any passengers can be driven crazy (literally) until a ransom is given. You also have a streaker mission since you can walk around naked (blurred naughty bits, of course) and streak in front of people for cash.
If you think the side missions sound fun, don’t forget those story missions. The game has amazing voice acting and clever dialog, so it’ll keep you wanting more and make you come back to see which gang member you’re going to kill next. Not one mission is identical, and you are blessed with a nonrepetitive mission-based game that gives you many different places and ways to kill people throughout the entire game.
Now, when it comes to nitpicking the game apart, the graphics aren’t up to par with most next-gen games (thanks to a lot of Gears of War 2!). , and there are serious slowdown problems where the FPS will drop into the single digits sometimes; there are collision detection and clipping issues; some funky physic problems; but nothing that sandbox games haven’t encountered before. The game is highly playable, and you shouldn’t let these small problems bother you. The last thing I need to mention is the fact that the game is gruesome and more ballsy than GTA ever was. There are complete torture scenes, foul language, and running around naked a la Sims style, which is pretty far out there. The game is just hard-hitting and in your face, and that’s exactly what a mature-rated sandbox game needs.
Rock Band stole the show from Guitar Hero as the best rhythm game and broke the boundaries with the drum peripheral and the excellent multiplayer to really make you feel like you’re in a band. I’m not going to explain how Rock Band is played since most people have already played it, so I’m mainly going to focus on improvements and updates.
Well, everything here that you loved about the first game is still here, but improved. I’m going to start with the hardware, which is actually much better than the original, and the most noticeable are the drums. The first game’s drums were poorly designed, with pieces constantly coming apart and a lot of plastic parts. Rock Band 2’s drums have a metal cover on top of the kick pedal; it’s bigger; the drums are quieter thanks to the pads being a softer material than just rubber; the base of the drums actually stays together since there is a whole locking mechanism on them, so moving your set won’t make the base come apart. Other than that, everything on the drums is the same; there are, however, three extra-colored plugs for the cymbal attachments (which are very poorly designed and not recommended), along with the drumsticks being a couple of inches longer. The best part about the drums is that they are wireless, and the batteries last forever. With three AA batteries, I only changed them once in a five-month period, and I played a lot.
On the guitar, it is also now wireless, with a wood-type texture on the next (instead of that ugly plastic), and the buttons are a little further apart so you can feel which button you’re hitting. For some reason, the bottom buttons are still the same, and I still find them useless. The microphone is a little bit lighter, but otherwise, I found no difference between this and the original. While all the hardware is well designed, it’s also more solid, stable, and responsive.
On to the game now. When you start the game, you’ll notice a nicer menu, more modes, and a longer World Tour. The first mode you’ll want to try is the training mode (if you haven’t played Rock Band before), but there is also the new drum trainer mode. You can work on your rhythm or just hit along to your own songs via the Xbox Guide, which I found fun and great. I know a lot of people tap things to their favorite songs, so now you really can while choosing several different drum set sound schemes. When you pop into the World Tour, you’ll notice there’s a venue in almost every city in the world, it seems. I bought this game in February, and it’s now June, and I still haven’t finished the World Tour (and I play several setlists every day).
While the fan, setlist, and star systems are still intact with a new manager element added, You can hire new managers that gain you extra fans, cash, or something along those lines. While there are 25–30 cities in the game, there are at least 2-3 songs plus 3-5 setlists in each city. By the time I got around to unlocking the hidden cities (including the endless setlist, which is an 84-song marathon), I had thirty million fans and over 2,500 stars. Yes, that is a lot of playing, and the World Tour is actually almost impossible to beat. The best part about Rock Band is the multiplayer, and Rock Band 2 adds some greatness to it with a few new modes.
There is now the long-awaited Band World Tour, so you can take your whole band through the World Tour and complete it that way. While the other modes are still here (Tug of War, Band Duel, Co-Op), nothing else has changed. There are some other cool modes, such as “Never Fail” and “Break Neck Speed.” These are cool modifiers for people who are really bored. On to customization: there are more items, including the new Thrifty section, but everything else is the same. The graphics are exactly the same, and customizing hasn’t changed. You can create a band logo, but it’s not any deeper than you’re familiar with. Now my favorite feature about the game is that you can import songs from Rock Band 1 into the game (for a $5 fee, of course), but this is well worth it.
When you’re done with that, head to the store, which has 500+ songs available to download in every genre imaginable. After you get bored with the songs on the disc, buy some songs! Rock Band 2 is such a great rhythm game; it’s solid, smooth, fun, heavy with songs, and has lots of quality.
OK, Far Cry was a great technical feat, and that’s pretty much it. Far Cry had a lot of AI problems with enemies being able to see you miles away; you needed a monster computer to run it; it had almost no story; and it was pretty repetitive. Unfortunately, Far Cry 2 follows all these trends again, but with better graphics, a setting in Africa, an even more confusing story, a super confusing level editor, and the same bland, boring, huge open world. Now, I’m not saying Far Cry 2 is bad; I’m just saying it needs more filling because there is way too much crust on this one.
The game starts out great with you in the back of a car driving to the guerrilla’s headquarters. Once you get through the tutorial, you’re thrown into the beautiful yet empty world, trying to find “The Jackal,” who is feeding both rival gangs guns and fuel (APR and UFLL). You can work on either side since you need either to get to The Jackal. For starters, the game has lots and lots of guns, and you can upgrade them by using diamonds (finding diamond cases and/or completing missions). You can buy the weapons for infinite ammo in your safe rooms, and you can buy manuals that increase accuracy, reliability, etc. You can also buy equipment that will let you hold more ammo, more health, more stim-paks, etc. There are lots here, and everything is fairly priced, but you earn diamonds so slowly that it takes forever to get enough.
When you’re actually shooting the guns, it feels great, but another problem carried over from the first one is that these guys never die. You’ll pump a whole clip into these guys, and sometimes they’ll still be standing. Sometimes your gun will jam and you have to mash X to get it unstuck, and if you’re really unlucky, the whole gun will break, and then you’re SOL. Getting the reliability upgrades fixes this, and swapping out weapons from fallen foes helps this a lot. Far Cry 2 also has a “buddy system,” which is acquired by completing missions, and these so-called buddies can save you in battle (if you run out of health; think of it as an extra life). They can help make missions easier by offering alternatives. This is a great system and is probably the only great gameplay idea in Far Cry 2 that isn’t boring or doesn’t piss you off. When you do get low on health, you can pry bullets out of yourself, wrap yourself in bandages, and even poke yourself with magic needles. You can refill these at health boxes in random areas or in one of your safe houses. You unlock new safe houses by killing all guards in the area, and bam, there you go.
The next gameplay element that is from the first game and was bizarrely stripped down is the vehicles you drive. There are only maybe five in the whole game, and those are a Jeep, a car, an assault truck, and a couple of boats. When your vehicle gets banged up and starts smoking, you can hop out and repair it, which is great, but even if the car starts smoking a little bit, it runs very slowly. Now to get to the most annoying part of the game—the constant backtracking. I understand this is an open-world game (I love sandbox games, don’t get me wrong), but Far Cry 2 fails at this. First, the map they give you is horrible since it’s a little piece of paper you hold (next to your GPS), and all the dots look like blobs, so the legend is useless. You’ll travel to missions on one side of the map, finish them, and then have to navigate all the way back to town. You can’t really go off the trails since there are so many mountains, rocks, and trees blocking your path unless you run on foot.
Then this is where the meat of the annoyance comes in; there’s nothing in between all of this driving around! Maybe here and there you’ll see an animal, but all you get are the same thugs coming after you in their vehicles from the guard posts plastered all along the trails. That is really all there is to driving from mission to mission. The missions are exactly the same; maybe you’ll have to save a friend (or shoot him/her), but essentially it’s all the same.
The malaria effect was useless and made things even more annoying. Every so often, you’ll have to take a malaria pill, and if you run out, you have to go to the ends of the earth (ok, Africa!) to get more, or you die. Essentially, this makes the game boring, and I get headaches every time I play it. Now if you like sandbox games where there is hardly a story and you just drive around killing random thugs, then go ahead and have at it. Now, this brings me to the level editor, which is deep, but there’s no tutorial, and it is not user-friendly. Lastly, the only exciting thing is multiplayer. The best part of Far Cry 2 is the graphics; the game is gorgeous with free-flowing grass, everything burns, trees break when under fire, and the lighting is beautiful. It just all looks so good, but the gameplay is just not there. Sorry, Ubisoft, maybe Far Cry 3 will fix all of these issues.
Call of Duty is probably the best WWII FPS series ever made, and there are many reasons why. If you rewind back about six years, when Call of Duty was released on the PC and console, gamers envied this exclusivity. CoD offered cinematic gameplay, great characters, and amazing visuals. At the time, the Medal of Honor reigned supreme, but not for very long. With Medal of Honor, Brothers in Arms, and Wolfenstein being the top competitive WWII FPS games, CoD always remained on top. With each new sequel, CoD added better graphics, a more realistic cinematic experience, and overall great multiplayer. Throughout CoD’s six-year life cycle, Activision has used many developers to keep the series going strong, and it was also the first WWII series to stray away from WWII and lean towards modern warfare (no pun intended, really!). Now that CoD is back on the WWII front line, it finally hit the nail on the head, and this is what CoD should have been years ago: World at War.
I thank the WWII gods who listened because we finally, for the first freaking time, got to go through the trials and campaigns of Japan and not just the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The game starts out in the jungles of Japan with banzais rushing after you with bayonets, strange rifles never seen before in a WWII game, amazing visuals (a slightly updated Modern Warfare engine to be exact), great enemy AI, and just absolute mayhem. The first thing I noticed were the new weapons. Yes, you have the Kar98, MP40, Thompson, BAR, MG42, Springfield, Enfield, etc. What I picked up was an Arisaka, a variation of the Kar98, a flamethrower?!, a bayonet?!, the ability to toss motorheads like grenades, molotovs?…insane. I couldn’t believe this. Someone actually added something new. Not only are the graphics amazing and extremely cinematic, but the level design is also awesome. There are cool sniping missions (think of the one in MW), tank missions (they drive great for once, by the way), and missions where you run through Japanese mortar pits and just torch the hell out of everyone. How fun is that? Well, let’s just say it’s so fun you won’t want to use another weapon during those levels.
You don’t just fight in Japan; you also fight on the European front as the Russians overtake the Reichstag all the way to planting the flag yourself. If this isn’t enough to sell you, try out the air mission, where you’re shooting down Japanese boats and pulling in survivors of the Pearl Harbor bombing on your way back home from Japan. If that’s not exciting enough, oh boy, I don’t know what is.
What makes the return to WWII so great isn’t just the new content or the cinematic gameplay. It’s the detail put into the level design, the characters, the ambiance, the dialog, and the voice acting; it’s all top-notch, and not even the first CoD had this much detail put into it. After playing WaW, you will want more WWII games, and this is the revival we’ve all been dying for (sorry, MoH Airborne was terrible). If single-player isn’t enough to sell you, how about multiplayer?
While I didn’t get to try it, I was involved in the beta multiplayer, and it was pretty amazing. It’s just like Modern Warfare but set in WWII instead. There’s plenty of incentive to go back and play the game again, thanks to its fair difficulty and amazing visual experience. World at War has so much detail put into it that I wouldn’t be surprised to see another MoH, BiA, or Wolfenstein copy any of it. Thank you, Treyarch and Activision, for reviving this great series. Now everyone shuts up.
Once again, Valve brings us another great game using their source engine that brings all the elements of Left 4 Dead to life (or death???) The first thing you’ll notice (mainly Valve fans) is that the Source engine has had a next-gen upgrade (even more so than Portal), and everything looks amazing. While HL2 fans will notice some sounds and elements of the engine from those games, it doesn’t really bother you. The game looks stunning with excellent lighting effects, awesome AI (enemy and friendly), great character models, high-res textures, and just everything you’d expect out of the source engine. L4D, however, isn’t really a single-player-only experience; in fact, you won’t even see the full potential of this four-player game unless you play online.
The game is comprised of four campaigns, and each campaign has five levels. Each level gets longer and more and more difficult, with a final level where you have to face off hundreds of zombies until your rescue transport arrives. At the start of each campaign, you get to choose the four characters (each character just starts out with a different weapon). Speaking of weapons, I was disappointed in the small selection that there was (just pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and a sniper rifle, along with bombs and Molotov). The basic idea is that these four characters have to cover each other’s butts through these levels while you face off massive hordes of zombies. The whole idea is a bit more in-depth, with some gameplay elements thrown in there. For example, zombies are attracted to noise and light, so if you keep your flashlight on near zombies, they’ll charge you. Shoot a car that has its headlights on, and you’ll have to face off with dozens of zombies charging at you because you set off the car alarm. Killing these zombies is fairly easy since a few shots will bring them down, but it’s sheer numbers that make up for this.
There are over 150 different zombie types, but there are a few “special” zombies that are harder to take down. These are the Tanks (massive zombies that will take all four people to bring down), Smokers (these guys have super long tongues that snatch you up), Boomers (no, not like in Gears of War, if these guys vomit on you, they attract more zombies, and the same if you blow them up if they’re too close to you), Witches (you hear them cry through levels, and if you disturb them, they’ll take you down and you are down until someone revives you), and Hunters (which are super fast-moving zombies that pounce on you and eat you until someone saves you). This changes the gameplay up, along with certain sections requiring you to do something, such as hit this switch to move this, and while this is happening, you have to fend off hordes of zombies. The game is probably the only “zombie simulator” out there because they just act and look so real, and you really do feel helpless in the middle of nowhere with hundreds of zombies around you.
Of course, you’ll blow through the four campaigns in about 3–4 hours, but it’s the great online play that extends the replay value. The way levels are played out is very original as well since you have to get everyone into a “safe room” at the end of the level (look for the red door) and close it, thus the next level loads and you get to restock on health and ammo. Throughout the levels, you may find rare ammo stocks, pipe bombs, etc. It’s the final levels that really are hard since you have to fend off so many zombies, and this can be hard for a single player since the AI won’t go anywhere unless you do. When your transport arrives, you must start heading towards it before it gets to you, because if you’re surrounded by dozens of zombies, you’re dead. If your teammates die, they tend to respawn in closets or behind closed doors. Once you run out of health, you can be healed by other teammates or take pills to temporarily fill your void. L4D is a wonderful game, but it’s tight on content and lacks more maps that we need (Valve sucks when it comes to DLC). I highly recommend this game as a great online multiplayer game.
Legendary is yet another game this year that has been released and has totally let all of us FPS fans down, but what a surprise, right? FPS games are probably the most prone to failing terribly due to lazy level design, bad stories, bad physics, and anything else you put in an FPS. Unfortunately, Legendary does almost everything wrong and hardly anything right, but you can still squeeze a few drops of fun out of this weekend rental. Legendary puts you up against Pandora’s Box’s creatures that start taking over and destroying the world while trying to be controlled by the evil LeFey.
While the plot sounds semi-interesting, it takes a face dive right into a mud pit once you start playing since you don’t really give a crap after about thirty minutes. If playing the game is hard enough as it is, the mechanics the game is built around are totally slapped together and not very well done. Even when I saw videos of this game, I knew it didn’t look complete, and they actually shipped the game unfinished. First and foremost, the main culprit is the Unreal 3 engine. Now, I’m not bashing the engine at all; it’s just that many developers tend to think U3 will make the game for them, and they just have to tell it what to do, which is not the case. There are a lot of similarities to BioShock, in fact, from the animus powers shooting out of your hand (with almost exact animations) to the same glowy look on everything you interact with. While the game looks halfway decent, everything looks like it was copied and pasted into the game instead of built there. You’re wandering around a war-torn London and New York, and you don’t even feel like you’re there since the game doesn’t replicate the cities at all, not even famous landscapes for Christ’s sake! On top of this, the physics are way off, and everything seems to stick like glue or something, and it’s just really weird. There’s terrible collision detection where enemies will go through walls, stick there, and start flopping around.
This is also coupled with cramped levels and linear levels, and everything just looks the same. Turn this wheel here, kill these creatures here, shoot these wire suspensions here, and bypass this keypad here. The game is very tedious, completely retarded, and put together so poorly. Even moving your character is a pain since when you get hit on one side, you stop moving that way for some strange reason, and I have no idea why. You’ll be strafing left and then get attacked by your left, but you just stop dead in your tracks, and you have to jam the stick left a few times before even moving again. The guns don’t feel powerful at all and are just completely retarded with almost no recoil; they are all standard, such as shotguns, machine guns, rocket launchers, and a weak pistol that does NOTHING. The most original weapon is probably an axe, but even the more powerful weapons take a while to tear down foes coming after you. The enemies are just absurdly difficult to bring down, even in the easiest setting. For some unknown reason, the weakest enemy (blood spiders) just swarms after you, and you have to find the sac holding them. Getting there can be a pain since this leads into the lame healing system. Other enemies range from werewolves, minotaurs, and griffons—you name it.
These are cool enemies and shouldn’t have anything go wrong, but it does anyway! They throw so many enemies at you, and you never feel powerful enough to take them down, so you’re constantly scrounging your health with the difficult healing system. You have this power from your hand called Animus, so you take Animus Clouds from dead creatures, and you use this for health. You hold down Y to take it, but it takes so long to absorb it all, and this is not good when you have a ton of guys shooting at you or creatures clawing at you. You hold down Y again to heal yourself, but as you can see, using the same button to heal and absorb is not going to work very well. When you’re near clouds, you absorb them instead of healing, and vice versa. If you double-tap Y (why are we double-tapping with so many buttons?) you can do an animus push to stun enemies, and this does absolutely nothing. Now, when it comes back to combat, you can’t use any melee attacks; there is no cover system. NOTHING, ZERO, ZILCH, SQUAT! You have to hide behind everything and peek out like a stupid old PlayStation game from six years ago. This makes things ridiculously annoying during the unbalanced levels that are badly designed.
This game just has so many things wrong that you wonder what there is to like. Well, it’s for the sheer epicness that the game seems to pull off with a 300-foot Golem, a HUGE Kraken you fight in London, and even the giant Griffons are cool to kill. If you can bear through this 6-7-hour campaign, you can find some fun in this game. With a different story, decent graphics, cool enemies, and lots of big bosses, you can have fun all at once. Legendary, this definitely is not.
Well, here we are again sitting around the Bond fire (LAWL!), but seriously, who still likes James Bond after five different actors and twenty different movies? Does Bond ever age? Does he ever get a vacation without it turning into a firefight? How many mysterious foreign chicks does he need to bang before he realizes he should retire and get married already? Seriously, no one will be as good as Sean Connery, and Daniel Craig can’t even pull off Bond to save his life. This dude is a serious joke, but thankfully you won’t even care when you play this stupid yet fun game. This is one of those sleeper hits that has a retarded story and gameplay, yet you still finish the whole thing because it’s just stupid fun. Kind of like bathroom jokes; they don’t do any harm or good, yet they are still fun to say and laugh about over and over again. Quantum of Solace is like the bathroom joke of a sleeper hit FPS; you have your basic follow-up, and the punchline is what keeps you laughing. While you can completely forget about the retarded story about Bond and some terrorist dudes who are doing this and that I have no freaking clue and I don’t care, Daniel Craig has bits of his voice in the game, and his model has one expression that never seems to change.
While this game is seriously flawed, there are a lot of good things to keep you playing (rent it only!). The game looks really good; while not superb, it can pass off as an above-average next-gen game, which is a plus. Secondly, the game has super awesome guns, and they all feel really powerful. While they have more acronyms than a NASA space launch, you have your pistols, silenced pistols, submachine guns, sniper rifles, etc. While they aren’t anything new, they look cool, feel powerful, and sound cool, and they all go BOOM! You also have grenades, which are kind of retarded since you only get to carry one grenade at a time! The game actually has a semi-useful cover system that is both great and flawed at the same time. While you can sprint around and stuff, you can hit A to dash into cover (think Gears of War), and you have your typical blind firing and all that covering crap. The flawed part is that when you get hit by a grenade, you suddenly stand up. If you aim too far to your sides, Bond tends to stick his head out, and you can easily get killed this way.
Basically, the gunplay is your typical standard FPS stuff with retarded AI to boot. You’ll have swarms of guys coming after you, and they just stand there and let you blow them apart. Speaking of blowing apart, the game has an “environmental damage” system where you can shoot flashing objects to damage enemies (like we haven’t seen that before!). This actually does help when you have seven guys under a wooden platform full of explosive barrels. Shooting those support beams is just oh-so-awesome. The game is full of adrenaline-pumping sequences like your OMG!! button-pressing cutscenes (which are actually fun), and this is where you really feel like Bond, so that’s always a plus on the cinematic side. Since this is a Bond game, you can use stealth in a lot of the levels, but it’s very shallow and not implemented well. It really feels like an old PlayStation or an N64 game where you just hide behind a wall, dodge this camera’s spotlight, disable that camera, and shoot that guard. The cameras don’t even notice when you pop some lead into a guy’s head right in the camera’s view. I don’t know what the developers were trying to prove except for the fact that using old mechanics in 2008 doesn’t work too well.
A lot of times you’ll not know what to do, and you’ll blow your cover due to trial and error (again, a 10-year-old thing), and you have to restart all over again (if you want to stay stealthy). So, you can sneak around, but it feels really old and doesn’t really work out too well. Of course, you have to have some Bond moves to perform, and this is done by pressing the L stick and pushing the on-screen button and watching a 2-3 hit instant kill! While this is cool, the animations get repetitive. When the camera pulls back into first-person mode, you get disoriented since sometimes the game will flip you around, and it’s too easy to do. It’s cool sneaking up behind a guy and pulling off a Bond movie, but after about twenty times, you’ll get sick of it. Another thing I didn’t like was that there were no driving sequences. What’s a Bond game with no driving?! There is, however, a cool train sequence that is pretty cool, with you decoupling cars, jumping from decoupled cars, and just all that cool Bond stuff. While that’s the basic gameplay, you can see there is a lot missing that should have been in here.
With the mechanics feeling about 10 years old, this really drags the experience down, and after a while, the game feels more like a chore that you’re forced to play. Thankfully, the game isn’t very long at all since you can beat it in about 6–7 hours. The multiplayer is OK, but nothing super special—just your standard FPS online action—and you won’t be coming back for this often since the mechanics are somewhat flawed. I really loved this game, though, since there were a lot of explosions, shooting, sneaking, Bond moves, and cool locales. If you want an awesome weekend rental, pick this up, and you’ll have a blast.
When I saw the Pure demo on XBLM, I just blew it off. After seeing how people were having so much fun with the game, I downloaded the demo, and boy, was I in for a treat! The game was super fast, super easy to play, and super beautiful! One thing I just have to say is that I was surprised at how great the game looked. The game is truly next-gen, with beautiful open, soaring vistas, crisp blue lakes, and waterfalls. Free-flowing grass, flowers, and weeds. Mud that really sticks to your ride and makes you feel like you’re slipping around in the mud. The game is just so beautiful to look at, especially when you’re going 120 mph over 200-foot jumps off cliffs! Yeah, this game is all about tricks, speed, and pure awesomeness (maybe this is why they just named it Pure so you can fill in the rest?). The game really feels fast, but the tracks are open and big enough for you to slip and slide around without feeling cramped.
The name of the game is all about building your ride and doing tricks (ok, the name is actually Pure, but work with me!) When you start out, you can build your ride from scratch, and I mean straight from the frame, and you add shocks, tires, drums, brakes, the body, footrests, and the whole nine yards. You can even change what your hand bars look like, the color, the decals—I mean, customizing your ride is insanely detailed, and nothing like this has been done in an ATV game before. Of course, you can pick your characters as well, but there’s no customization in that, and I thought that was pretty lame since you look at your character more than your ride anyway. You can unlock new parts and upgrades for your ATV as you win races (yes, 1st place at every event, or you don’t get the good stuff). There are plenty of parts, and you slowly get better and better upgrades to keep up with the competition, so there are no worries on that part, and as you unlock more ATV slots, you can just make endless different types of ATVs.
You’re probably wondering what it’s like to actually race, right? Well, that’s the best part! You preload your jumps like in all ATV racing games, and you press the right stick in any direction plus one of the face buttons to do a trick. Ok, it’s a lot more involved than that, and there is a unique twist to all of this here. The trick system is integrated into the boost system, so you can spend your boost with the X button as normal, or you can save it and unlock new buttons to perform new tricks as your bar fills up. Get it halfway up, and you get the B button, which lets you do intermediate tricks, and these take longer to pull off than the A button tricks. Get your bar almost all the way up, and you unlock the Y button tricks. These are the cooler, more advanced tricks that take the longest. Get your bar all the way up, and you get a special trick bonus. You can perform a special trick by pressing the right stick in any direction plus pressing the RB+LB buttons. This takes a good 4-5 seconds to pull off, so only do this on the super high jumps! But wait, there’s more!
You just can’t keep pulling off the same trick over and over since there is a rating system. Every time you do a new trick, you’ll get a “Fresh!” star next to the name of the trick; do it again and you get a silver “Tame!” star, and three times you get a bronze “Stale!” star. Tame stars give you a tiny bit of boost, and stale stars don’t give you any boosts. Link tricks together, and you can get a major boost—um, boosts—and you can quickly unlock the other buttons. Wait, there’s more, though! You can also tweak your tricks by pressing either the LB or RB buttons; while these take longer to perform, they give you an extra boost.
Tricks also have different effects on different race types. There are only three types, but they are very fun: race, sprint, and freestyle. The race event is what I was just talking about, so you race three laps, and you have multiple branches throughout the track that you can take to cut off the other racers and hopefully gain a lead. These are must-learns since there is a strategy to winning each track. Sprint is 5 laps of a 25–40 second track that maybe has 2-3 small jumps on it, so you must nail these to get your boost! Freestyle is probably the most robust event where you have a “gas gauge” and you have to get the highest score before your gas runs out. Linking tricks together gives you a multiplier timer, and picking up pickups along the way can help with this. Some range from freezing your gas for a few seconds, some give you an automatic special trick, some double your score, some give you a boost, etc. The freestyle event is always fun, and the gas tank meter keeps you on your feet.
Now all of this is fine and dandy, but the game does have some flaws. The AI can be very hard and frustrating since, no matter how well you race, you can never make the first. I had to start races dozens of times to nail first place, and you have to memorize the track and drive flawlessly to get first place. As I mentioned, you can’t customize your character; there are only 3 event types, so this makes multiplayer kind of drab. The game also starts to feel very old and repetitive after a while since there are so many tricks to pull off and the game is just the same over and over again. Still, though, you’ll have lots of fun with this game, and I hope the sequel provides more pure awesomeness.
I have been hyped about GoW2 ever since I finished the first game, and with information slowly leaking out of Epic’s mouth, I just couldn’t help myself from getting all giddy and mushy inside. Ok enough, seriously, Gears 2 is just amazing on so many levels with tons of new multiplayer modes, weapons, enemies, environments, etc. The game is just a whole new beast, and old Gears fans will not be disappointed. First, let’s start off with the campaign. Do you remember Gears One being huge and sprawling with wide vistas and beautiful architecture? Ok, well, that was nothing compared to Gears 2. You really do have wide open vistas that stretch as far as the eye can see, and they are absolutely breathtaking, especially on an HDTV. The graphics are still what we’ve grown to love, but with better lighting, higher resolutions, and more objects on-screen, everything is just crunchier and more big, beautiful, and hectic than ever before.
Speaking of crunching, the game’s audio has been tuned up, and everything sounds more gruesome and brutal than ever before. Headshots pop and sound and feel more satisfying than before; curb-stomping an enemy looks more painful (and sounds it!); sawing Locust in half with the Lancer feels more powerful and just looks, feels, and sounds nastier. The whole game is like this, and it feels like a true sequel instead of just Gear of War 1.5. All of your core elements are here, like the great cover system, the Roadie Run (TM!!), the voice actors, characters, Locust, and story, which are all set in place, but you are a bigger part of the whole thing, and you feel more like a participant than a spectator. The story is more involved, in which the Light Mass bombing failed, the Locust are coming back with their full force, and the Delta Squad is sent in to rip out the heart—three of them! Anyways, Dom is trying to find his wife along the way, and a few new characters are introduced but aren’t fully developed since they don’t make many appearances, like Dizzy, Tai, Chairman Prescott, and a certain dad who will go unnamed. The story goes even further with 41 collectibles you can find that you can read and help evolve the back story some more. Gone are the COG tags people; now you gotta find papers and more of them too.
Getting back to the campaign’s weapons, there are about double the amount with a whole new weapon class: heavy weapons. You still have the Lancer, Boltok pistol, Shotgun, Longshot, Boomshot, Snub—you know all those—but now you have better, crunchier, and kick-buutt weapons like the Hammerburst (gone is that dinky little Locust assault rifle), Gorgon Pistol (a semi-auto three-round burst Locust pistol), the Mulcher (a heavy weapons KICK @$$ mini-gun that you CRANK!), a Mortar (yes, like a WWII mortar, only better without all those Krauts), the Scorcher (a flamethrower that you can blind fire!), Ink Grenades (go figure), and a whole bunch others. These weapons feel powerful and sound powerful, and they are all useful—in fact, it’ll be hard to choose which gun you want to use half the time! Now this time around, you also get to use more “vehicles” like the Centaur, which is a monster truck tank…a Reaver, a Brumak, you know, just cool “vehicles” like that. Yes, they all feel powerful and are just amazing to “drive.”.
The campaign together is just more riveting and more cinematic thanks to the HUGE open vistas and massive hordes of enemies, and the campaign is just perfectly built. The only problem is that it’s about the same length as the original, and there’s room for a sequel. I just really can’t express how great it is to feel upfront in Gears and really drive things home with all of the awesome weapons, graphics, and audio. Of course, I have to mention the new awesome Locust like the Tickers (little ticking and crawling “bombs”), the Kantus (these guys summon Tickers and can resurrect downed Locust), Brumaks (only seen in GoW1 for the PC and at the end of the fight at Fenix’s mansion), cooler-looking Reavers, a whole “Boomer Class” like Butcher Boomers, Maulers (which have spiked shields you can carry!), Grinders (which carry Mulchers and yell “GRIND!”), Flamer Boomers, etc. The whole old crew of enemies is here with great new ones, and they are all fun to kill, and the game is perfectly balanced.
Speaking of balanced, let’s move on to multiplayer. Ah yes, good ‘ol Gears multiplayer is back with a ton of new modes along with the old ones. First off, you all remember Annex, Execution, Warzone, etc. Now here are the really fun modes that make me really get into Gears multiplayer. Horde. Just one word: horde. You and four other people are pitted against 50 waves of increasingly difficult enemy AI. Yes, this is addictive and super fun, and you need a couple of hours on your hands if you and your teammates are really good. Getting through all 50 waves can take a good couple of hours, but boy, isn’t it fun? Just imagine one guy sawing a drone in half while the guy next to him is popping off headshots at Wretches and Boomers. You are at the enemy spawn point, sticking grenades on walls, and that last quiet guy is just hiding in the middle somewhere, scorching Locust. Ah, it is joyous and wonderful at best, and you are sure to come back until you clear all 50 waves (I could only get to 36).
Now there is Wingman, which is 5 teams of 2 against each other, and you can only kill with executions (more on those later) or one-shot kills like a grenade or something. This is extremely adrenaline-inducing since all you can rely on is your buddy, and if he dies, it’s just you. Meatflag is very interesting since it utilizes GoW2’s new “meat shield” system, where you can press A near a downed enemy (even in single-player!) and use them as a “human shield,” as most of you would know. Other executions include the classic curb stomp, but if you press Y, you can do “long executions” with other weapons, like a golf club swing with the Longshot, or just use your fists and beat the guy up, but back to the multiplayer mode. In Meatflag, it’s like capturing the flag, but you have to bring the locust back to your base, so he’s a moving, shooting, ugly flag. This is super fun and an original twist on Capture the Flag. There are a few other modes, but these three are the “blue light” modes that really stand out and are super addictive. If you haven’t noticed, the player count has gone up by 2, so now there are 10 people playing instead of 8. This makes things more hectic and fun, as you can tell. Thankfully, the online mode plays perfectly with no server issues, and there are a ton of new maps to play that are very well laid out, which you’ll grow to love.
Before I close this out, I have to mention the new achievement system. For once, a game updates you on your achievements in-game while you’re playing without you having to pause and go into the guide. Let’s say you’re aiming for the new Seriously 2.0 achievement. cough It’s, oh, nothing, only 100,000 kills, so every 100 kills you get a widget that will pop out at the side and update you on this. Try the new Said the Spider to the Fly (killing 10 enemies will grenade wall tags), and every 5 kills you’ll get updated. This is very helpful and is just a reminder of why you should keep playing this wonderful game. I love this new achievement system, and more developers (multi-platform or otherwise!) need to take note of it. This takes full advantage of the system, so please learn! Now, this game isn’t perfect.
There are a few flaws, as we’ve seen in the core of all of this before (GoW1 I gave a perfect 10), but there are still a few bugs, and they were tweaked like the cover system. Turn the left stick a certain way, and a little sketch will show up on-screen telling you what Marcus will do. While this is fine and all, it’s just not perfect. There are times when you’ll want Marcus to roll a certain way, but he’ll snap against a wall. Yes, they let you change the buttons for this, but it’s still annoying. Multiplayer can be a bit challenging for people who aren’t very good at it. Gears veterans will smear you on the floor within seconds and will make a lot of newcomers hate multiplayer. There are mainly glitches that are only noticeable on insane difficulties, like collision issues that let enemies shoot through walls that will kill you in one hit, etc. These are super minor, but we STILL have seen all of this before two years ago, and I just can’t wait for Gears of War 3.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !