The most disappointing isn’t exactly the worst. These games tend to be over-hyped and turn out just mediocre when they were claimed to be something amazing by developers.
Disney Epic Mickey
With a game that was supposed to be so amazing, and well, epic this game really was like a punch in the gut. With a bad camera, muddy textures, and poor combat and controls, Epic Mickey should have come out next spring with more polish. This just goes to show that a superb idea can fall flat.
Downloadable games are great for indie developers because you don’t have the restriction of big publishing companies and it cuts costs. It’s also cheaper for players because they send to be a fraction of full-price retail games.
Don’t let Limbo’s simplicity make it feel like an unfair fight against these other more complex games. Limbo is so simple that it’s just amazing. The game has great physics puzzles, but the feeling of being a helpless boy is just unreal. The charming art style (that’s very risky), and the gruesome deaths (the fact that it’s a boy) make you cringe, and that’s hard to pull off in such a simple game. This should let developers know that simplicity isn’t a fault.
The Legendary Starfy is actually the fifth game in the series, but the first game seen here in the States. You play as Starfy, who finds a little rabbit who lost his memory and must find crystal shards that will restore his memory. Yeah, it’s not too great, but this game is clearly aimed toward little kids.
The game has tight controls and is easy to grasp, with Starfy mostly swimming underwater, but he’s really slow on land. The goal of the game is just to navigate screen to screen, collect little stars (currency in the game), and watch cutscenes until the end. It gets very boring after the second chapter, and most older, more experienced gamers will turn it off. The game is just way too easy with enemies that don’t attack you. Yeah, you have to run into them to get hurt. Navigating the levels for treasure chests and stars is probably the only incentive to go through this game, but the items you can buy are pretty lame.
Try dressing up a star. It looks pretty bad and obviously only appeals to small children or simple-minded people. Even the boss fights are easy and can be killed in just a few hits, not to mention a save before a door, then a save when you go through it, then no save until the end of the level. Yeah, that makes no sense, but kids won’t really notice or care. Plus, you can save it in the start menu! Do we really need this many saves?! Well, you can find different abilities to help Starfy that are attached to the touchscreen, such as Moe’s ability to sense treasure, a mermaid’s ability to give you level info as you go, and you can transform into a fire-breathing dino, but it’s not as fun as you would think.
There are four different mini-games that are boring and pretty lame even with other people, but little kids will enjoy them, I guess. There is even a little talk show thing that Moe does, but it’s as strange and lame as can be, so I don’t even think kids will get this. Overall, the game has a nice art style, looks really cute, and has crisp, clean visuals, but the underlying game is just for casual DS players and kids. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone remotely more than the most casual of casual players or kids.
Tomb Raider’s comeback with Legend gave fans hope that Lara was not dead, but after the success of Underworld, Crystal Dynamics decided to do something different with a top-down adventure game, and everyone was skeptical. The game’s story is probably the weakest part of you and an Aztec named Totec trying to beat an evil Aztec guy. Yeah, really interesting.
Despite that, the combat is awesome with dual-stick shooter-type gameplay. You can switch weapons on the fly from four presets, and killing wave after wave is fun. Each enemy type is pretty unique, with some shooting magic spells; some explode with deadly gas; some are huge and can crush you; and some are even faster and come in high numbers. There is a huge weapon selection, from assault rifles to spears to grenade launchers, and each weapon is well balanced and has its uses, even in puzzles.
This, of course, has always been Tomb Raider’s strongest point, which is the puzzle department. You can use spears to get to higher ledges, use the grenade launcher and bounce it around corners to flip switches, destroy barriers, etc. You can use your grapple to hang down ledges, and pushing giant boulders around can even be used as a powerful weapon! It’s great how everything in the game has more than one use and really makes you think and gives you a broad range of things to do. The puzzles can range from switch puzzles to combat puzzles, or even a whole level being one great puzzle.
The game also has lots of ways to come back and do well in levels. There is a point system, and you acquire them by killing enemies and collecting gems, and you get rewarded relics for completing challenges. Relics can be equipped to boost your stats, such as weapon power, health, speed, or range. These will really turn the tide in battle, and there is quite a bit to collect, so it’s a good incentive to really do the challenges. However, some challenges are almost impossible and don’t seem like they were planned out too well.
The game looks amazing, and Lara is as sexy as ever and is voiced by the same person who’s been doing it since Legend. The game is full of thrills, just like the bigger games, and is just so much fun that not one section ever feels the same. Each level is crafted perfectly, and everything is balanced just right. Another incentive for players who couldn’t get the hang of other TR games is to pick up GoL because of its ease of perspective and good controls. This is one of the best XBLA games to come out in the Xbox’s history and should not be passed up. It even has a good price!
The Trine tells the tale of three heroes whose souls are tied together by the Trine, and they must find a way to break apart. While the story is simple and shallow, the gameplay is where it’s at. You can play as a warrior knight who has a sword and shield and is your combat guy; the thief has a grappling hook for getting across long distances and a bow for long-distance kills; and the wizard can create objects to climb on and levitate objects, but it is a no-go during combat.
The wizard is the most interesting character since he can create blocks to climb on and bridges to cross gaps. You can find things to add to your characters to give them new abilities as well as enhance them. The combat is pretty shallow as well, with just a hack that slashes everything that comes after you type play. It actually tends to get in the way of the tricky platforming and can get annoying after a while. The game is based on physics, so some physics puzzles are involved, but they don’t seem implemented very well.
The game looks great with a beautiful fantasy art style, good voice acting, and smooth controls. There are a few glitches in the game, but these are all wonky physics issues. The game is pretty much just getting from left to right without dying, but you can respawn characters at checkpoints, so dying seems kind of pointless since you aren’t severely punished. In fact, if you do die, you can’t use that character if the puzzle requires them, so this just seems irritating. Overall, the game is pretty good and worth a purchase thanks to its nice length, pleasing visuals, and good platforming segments.
Assassin’s Creed is an amazing franchise, and no one would have thought it would ever go to portable systems, but it did. Discovery follows Ezio in a 2D side-scrolling adventure that plays out fairly well. The story doesn’t really have anything to do with the console game except follow the Templar’s plots. Ezio must help Christopher Columbus get funding for his expedition to the new world, but the Templars are foiling his plans.
The game controls fairly well, with you just moving left and right. Ezio can jump, climb walls, attack, throw knives, and even sneak his way through levels. The levels are fairly large, and some even have multiple objectives, so you must climb your way around the platforms, kill guards, and pull levers to find your destination. Wall climbing is fairly simple with the press of the B button. Like in the console game, you can pull enemies off ledges that you’re hanging on, hide in haystacks, barrels, etc. While climbing walls is easy, it’s also the most frustrating part since, during tight situations, you will try to jump on a wall and you have to press B again for Ezio to cling on. You never quite get used to this (especially if you’ve played the console game), and it can lead to cheap deaths.
Fighting is just like the console game, which is a counter-attack fest. Holding R lets Ezio block, and pressing Y at the right time will let him counter. It’s familiar with the console game, so it won’t freak you out. The best way to avoid confronting guards in these fights is to use your minimap on the bottom screen. They show up as yellow arrows, and if they get into your field of vision (the black square around you), they will see you and alert nearby guards. Throwing knives before they see you are good, as well as waiting for them to turn around so you can run up behind them and kill them, just like in the console game.
Later on, all this gets more difficult and becomes hair-tearingly difficult since you can’t always see the next jump ahead of you and you can plummet to your death far away from the next checkpoint. There are multiple kinds of guards, and you will get the harder ones thrown at you more often in the last few levels. Navigating around these guards is sometimes impossible, and you must fight them due to the level setup. While these levels are hard, all the ones before them are pretty fun, and it’s satisfying to jump up from a ledge and land on a guy without him seeing you.
While there are different kinds of objectives, you can blow through the game in about 4 hours. If you have a DSi, you can take a picture of yourself, and it will be put on a wanted poster like in the console game. Tear 10 of these down, and you get a permanent health increase. Collect orbs throughout the game and buy Animus hacks to use when playing through the game again to increase your score. This adds to the replayability for people who really dig this game. The graphics are pretty good and look nice in 3D, but there’s really no detail to them. The voice acting is good, and the game’s just overall fun to play and worth a playthrough.
Doodle Jump is one of those perfect pick-up-and-play games. You are a little, er, doodle guy who is trying to make his way up an infinite ladder of platforms. You tilt the device left and right to move Mr. Doodle and tap to shoot enemies. There are various items on platforms to help you gain more height. These range from springs to flying hats, jet packs, trampolines, and more. Some platforms are wooden, so you want to avoid those. Some platforms move left and right and side to side. Your goal is to get as high as possible, but Doodle Jump has a unique marking system, so you can see your place marked every time you play, as well as that of your friends. The game connects straight to Twitter and Facebook, so you can see where your friend’s highest scores were.
The game isn’t much to look at, but it does have a certain charm to it. The background is grid paper, and everything looks hand-drawn, thus the doodle part of the name. Everything looks and plays simple, and for only a dollar, you get tons of fun out of this little game. This game isn’t good for long stretches, but it’s a good time killer. The game is also dangerously competitive thanks to its social-networking integration. If you love pick-up-and-play games, this is your dream come true.
Patchwork Heroes is one of those strange, quirky games that makes you really appreciate indie games. Heroes are all about strategy and are less puzzle-like, and I liked this a lot. You play as a team of kids who are hell-bent on destroying airships and scrapping them for parts. There’s really no story involved, but the cutscenes break up the levels nicely.
The main mechanic of the game is sawing parts off a 2D ship. Each ship is measured in feet at the beginning of the stage, and your goal is to cut it all off. There are obstacles on the ship, such as enemies and even prisons, that have your friends trapped. If you break them out, you can use them as bombs to blow up parts of the ship that can’t be cut by your saw, such as metal. Some enemies can patch up what you cut, so you have to distract them by cutting an area that’s not near your target and watching them fall.
You can find power-ups that let you move faster, slow downtime, etc. Once you saw off enough pieces, you can get a special power that will let you continually see up to a certain amount of time without stopping. After you sawed off almost the entire ship, you had to avoid the self-destructing bombs and saw off one final piece. While all this sounds easy, it’s kind of fun at the same time. The graphics are really charming, and the 2Dness of them brings the whole game to life.
I honestly think this is one of the best sleeper handheld hits of the year. It should have gone multi-platform on the DS and iPhone and would have done better on touch screens. Nevertheless, Patchwork Heroes is a great game to pass the time and shouldn’t be passed up.
The echo series is a very cerebral puzzle series that really is not for everyone, and echoshift is no exception. The game just makes you really think and screws with your perspective in a way that requires a lot of trial and error, and mainly memorization.
echoshift lets you directly control your echo, but this game uses a time mechanic instead of perspective. Every level is a 2D side view, and you are mainly pressing switches, walking through doors, and basically trying to find the fastest route to the exit. You get 50 seconds for your first echo to try and clear the way. Then your echo will do what you just did. This is the key element in echoshift to solve puzzles, since you can’t always solve them in 50 seconds.
Let’s say you have five sets of switches, but you can only do three in 50 seconds. There are 5 blocks on each set, and only one is the right switch. You would have your first echo solve three, then while that echo redoes what you did, you go solve the third (the final switch your last echo will press), and then you solve the last two. Confused? I don’t blame you since it takes a lot of critical thinking to get these 50 or so levels solved. You get rated on how many echos you had to use, and if you beat the level, you can go back and solve the version to find the key, which really has no purpose.
The graphics are very simple, just black and white, and all the items you interact with are in color. The game is also very slow-paced, so only the patient will find any fun in this game. Echoshift is one of those rare puzzle games that makes you think so much that your brain will explode, and I can’t stress this enough. There were times when I was too tired to think to play this game, but it gets the thinking juices flowing and can be a good exercise to get into the flow of school or any office work.
The dynamic duo that debuted on the PS2 nine years ago is now back in next-generation action with new weapons, updated graphics, and the same awesome stories and dialog you would expect from the series. The future sees the duo fighting an ancient race known as the Cragmites that Ratchet’s lombax ancestors supposedly destroyed. Ratchet learns more about his ancestor’s dark past and must stop the evil Emperor Tachyon before he annihilates the last of the lombax race: Ratchet.
The game hasn’t changed in the past nine years, and this is both good and bad. The tried-and-true action platforming formula that revolutionized the platforming genre is still intact here, but with no upgrades. Ratchet can jump around, hover, glide, fly, roll, and shoot his way through hordes of enemies. The game is also a third-person shooter that allows strafing from side to side and a first-person mode. You have to go around the world finding certain gadgets and weapons to kill bigger, badder enemies and unlock areas. Gadgets range from the classic Slingshot and Gravity/Grind Boots to the new Geo-Laser (which uses the SixAxis to guide it), the Hover Wings (which also uses the SixAxis), and more. Weapons include the Combuster, Shard Repeater, Tornado Launcher (that uses SixAxis to guide the tornadoes), Death Springs, Predator Missile, and more. There are some defensive weapons, like the awesome Grovatron, which shoots out the disco ball and makes the enemies dance. The Morph gun turns enemies into penguins, while the Gelenator uses a green jello goop that lets you jump to higher areas at certain levels. All the weapons are original, creative, and really fun to use. Some enemies are weaker than other weapons, which makes weapons gained at the beginning useless towards the end, so there are balancing issues.
Weapons can be upgraded automatically after use, or you can do it yourself by collecting raritanium and upgrading at weapon stations. You can also buy new weapons, armor, and gadgets like Leech Bombs. Buying items in the game requires nuts and bolts that are collected from killing enemies or breaking open boxes. There are also some ammo boxes spread throughout the level, so keep an eye out for those. There are also life boxes that you can collect, but these tend to be rare thanks to the game’s high difficulty. Yeah, the game is really hard because not only are the bosses hard, but later on, in the game, a few hits will kill you even if your health is past the 200 range. I found this very frustrating, plus no matter how much you upgrade your weapons, you never feel like they’re powerful enough, which leads to ammo issues. This is a huge downfall in the game, and I hope the new game fixes this problem.
If you really love just killing enemies, you can go into the infamous gladiator stages and earn yourself some serious bolts by beating waves of enemies with certain instructions. These can range from only using your wrench, weapons switching automatically, to even boss fight tag teams. Some people are probably wondering about Clank. Well, he gets his own upgraded and improved levels using the mysterious Zoni as his helper instead of the little robot Clanks. You can levitate across gaps and order them to repair things, and the newest addition is slowing downtime. Clank’s sections haven’t been updated too much, but it’s enough to keep you from getting bored. You can also collect gold bolts and unlock skill points to buy some costumes in the extras menu, but they aren’t that great, so only hardcore fans should indulge.
Another side note that I have to mention is that the game uses the SixAxis really well, from diving from the sky to use the weapons to even shaking your booty in a pirate dancing mini-game—yeah, only in Ratchet & Clank. One of my favorite mini-games is the new “tilt-the-ball” type of hacking game, which has a spark running from circuits, and you have to tilt the controller to guide a metal ball to connect the gaps so the spark can reach its node. The game throws a lot of new stuff at you at a good rate, so this keeps you from getting bored. I just wish that the game wasn’t so hard so it could be more enjoyable. What makes the game even harder is that the checkpoints are far and few in between. You can finish half a level and then have to start over from the beginning.
If you think Future suffers from a lot of problems, it does. The huge difficulty problem, poor balancing, and not-so-next-gen graphics make you really consider this for purchase, but with a super funny story, loveable characters, and great weapons, it makes up for all those shortcomings. The Groovitron alone is worth the play-through.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…