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!
My name is John Marston, and I’ve lost everything. The US government took them from me and promised my freedom if I helped “establish a civilization” by catching the three crooks I used to ride with.
The first thing I noticed after I got off the train was how beautiful the country looked. Rolling hills, trees, and animals roam wherever you look. People on stagecoaches and even the occasional train. How I learned this new “civilization” was very interesting and even would make a good story.
Day 2
After getting shot by Bill Williamson, I met this lovely lady, Bonnie MacFarlane, and she helped me along the way. Riding horses with her was a good time, and it doesn’t seem too hard. If I kick it too hard with my spurs, it will buck me off unless I bond with it first by riding it often. Keeping speed with her was easy since holding my speed kept me right next to her.
Shooting on the horse was a little difficult, and using my dead eye was almost necessary since everything went by so fast. Controlling a horse and a gun at the same time isn’t very easy. When I focus enough, everything seems to slow down, and I can mark my targets with an X and blast away. I don’t know where I got this trait from, but it sure is handy.
She even showed me how to herd cattle by keeping pace behind the herd and making sure stray animals leave. Taming horses was pretty easy since I just had to lasso them and keep my balance until they were broken. Today was a long day, so I’m going to rest.
Day 3
I left Bonnie after helping her out on some errands. I just follow the yellow route line to my objective, which I put on my map, and it ain’t too hard from there. I can even mark waypoints and travel to them via stagecoach or when I make a camp off the road or away from water. This makes things handy since traveling this vast land can get tiresome.
After shooting some thugs from the wanted poster I picked up, I realized how each bullet affects every part of the body. Hit an arm, and they drop their gun. Hit their leg, and they limp away; hit their chest, and they fall over and crawl away. I found this useful when having to catch criminals with my lasso. Shoot the sucker in the leg so he stops running!
I went to the local market (there are many) and sold some herbs I picked, and after I hunted some deer, wolves, a snake, and some birds, I sold all those parts for some cash and bought myself a new gun. I love my shotgun, sniper rifle, revolver, and other weapons, but I just needed something more powerful. I did buy a new horse as well as some tobacco for focus and some medicine. I’m beat for now, so I’m going to go purchase some property in this town and rest.
Day 7
I’ve learned a lot lately, and one of the biggest things I learned was not to shoot other people or even run over them by accident. I had the law come after me, and I now have a bounty on my head. I can get a pardon letter or pay the bounty, but if I get my honor and fame up by doing good deeds, maybe people won’t be so hasty to tattle.
I tried some gambling to ease my mind today, such as Liar’s Dice, Texas Hold ‘Em, Blackjack, Horse Shoes, Arm Wrestling, and more. These games seemed pretty fun at first, but after a few tries, they bored me, so I was off hunting again. After I caught my kill, I noticed a stranger needing help, so I marked him with a question mark on my map and a purple circle in the area where I could find him later. I’ll tell you to partner these tales and these people with something else.
There are so many things to do here that I can’t describe them all. This place is huge, even with Mexico to the south. Everything here just looks so amazing, and as you can see so far, it’s stunning. Even when I got to the snow-capped mountains and was hunting bears, I felt like I couldn’t get enough of the scenery. The world also sounds beautiful, with birds chirping and the sound of crunching dirt under my feet. It’s refreshing.
Day 28
Well, I don’t know what else to say. This world is so massive, expansive, and gorgeous that it’s like nothing else. There is so much to do here that by the end of my journey, I’ll have felt satisfied, and even roaming around with friends can be pretty fun. So long, partner, and keep the West and the Wild alive.
Grand Theft Auto has inspired a lot of games, and The Saboteur is one. Think of this as Grand Theft Paris, in which you play Sean Devlin, an Irish man trying to help the French Resistance against the Nazi war machine. Yes, this is another World War II, but it’s different. Just read along, and you’ll see.
The first thing you will notice is the game’s atmosphere. It’s set in a replica of 1940’s Paris and feels just like it. The graphics are technically good, but artistically, that’s where they’re at. When you liberate an area of the city, it turns from black and white to color. So as you travel through the city, the color will change in real-time. What’s great about it artistically is that in the B&W areas, only the red Nazi flags stand out. On resistance soldiers and leaders, certain things are in color, such as the eyes and parts of clothing, and it makes things look really unique. While this all looks great, the novelty wears off pretty quick, and you end up forgetting about it.
The game has stealth gameplay and shooting mechanics. When you get a mission, you can jack up a car or get one from your garage (you can store new ones there too) and follow a yellow route line on your mini-map to your destination. While the game is called The Saboteur, this is actually the hardest thing in the game to pull off. Some missions have you trying to sneak into an enemy camp. This is marked by barbed wire on the map, and if you enter it, you will hear the alarm almost immediately if you are seen. Your goal is to knock out a soldier and take his disguise. This isn’t always as easy as it sounds because you have to make sure other soldiers aren’t looking. If someone sees the dead body, a yellow “suspicious zone” will appear, and even if you are in disguise, you can trigger an alarm. Doing things such as running, climbing buildings, and walking fast will make soldiers who can see you suspicious.
The stealth element is kind of flawed because it all works against you. Trying to plant dynamite in an area to draw soldiers away doesn’t work at all since they just stand there staring around. There are a lot of times when you will be forced to just gun it out because the stealth elements are so flawed that you can’t get away with sneaking. Some missions will go flawlessly, and others won’t. This doesn’t make the game unplayable; it just has you wasting your time trying to figure out a stealthy way when, after so much effort, there just isn’t one.
Gunplay is simple enough with cover mechanics, and there are a ton of true-to-the-era weapons as well. You can find ammo crates all over the place, but you can only carry two weapons at a time. Between missions, you can visit black markets and use contraband to buy upgrades for resistance fighters, car upgrades, ammo, etc. It’s all pretty basic, with nothing special in the store, but there’s nothing crucial that you will need to buy to get past a part of the game.
The missions are pretty diverse so this isn’t the issue with the game. The issue is how you have to execute the missions and nothing ever really turns out the way you planned. All of this needs to be trimmed up and fixed for the sequel. During missions, if you raise an alarm you can run (like in GTA 4) or find a hiding spot. Most are located on top of buildings, and climbing isn’t very fun. This isn’t Assassin’s Creed, so climbing is sluggish and a bit unresponsive. Thankfully, you only climb buildings for about 40% of the game.
Other than that, the game is worth a purchase if you like sandbox games. There aren’t many side missions or free-play missions, but the game is long enough to get your money’s worth. The story is the best part of the game, with memorable characters and a gripping ending. Watching these people struggle for survival against Nazi Germany is movie quality. The writing is witty, and Sean has a lovable personality. You quickly grow to love these characters, and they are all fleshed out nicely. The game also has lots of boobs, but this sticks to true 1940s Paris because nudity wasn’t as sinful as it is today. Of course, you have to buy the game new or buy the unlock DLC for the nudity and four cinematic stripper scenes.
Overall, the game is solid in some areas but not in others. With broken stealth mechanics, you can’t always be the saboteur the game claims, but certain missions are satisfying enough to play out the way you want. The game is looking good for a sequel, and I’ll definitely be by Sean’s side when that time comes.
id Software is famous for creating the FPS genre with Doom and Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein is a little different from your typical WWII game. The game is wrapped around the paranormal, so you’re not going to get another Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. The game is entirely fictional, so it lets the Raven use fact and fiction and kind of mix them. You play BJ Blazkowicz, who is an American secret agent trying to stop the Third Reich from using the Black Sun as a weapon to rule the world. Sounds cliche? Well, it kind of is, but it’s interesting enough and has a very small plot twist at the end that makes the whole story worthwhile. You are working for resistance factions known as the Kraisau Circle and the Golden Dawn.
Wolfenstein isn’t just a linear run-and-gun shooter. In fact, the game is a bit sandboxy in the sense that you can choose your missions, and getting to them requires running around the city, fighting your way through Nazis, and getting the right sections. While I found this kind of pointless since there are only half a dozen side missions, it makes it different from most shooters. The game has four different powers you can use as well as a whole new weapon upgrade system.
The four powers consist of slowing down time, shielding, empowering, and the basic passive power that can let you go through certainly marked walls, climb hidden ladders, and see energy pools, as well as highlight enemies in the dark and reveal their weaker points. You will use all these weapons, but not as often as you’d like. You can upgrade your powers at the Black Market buildings, but finding gold is a pain since it’s all hidden, and the only way to upgrade everything 100% is to find every sack of gold in the game, and there are over 200. The same goes for intelligence files and tomes that let you unlock more power upgrades. I just find hidden items in shooters pointless since you’re concentrating on not dying, yet you’re also supposed to hunt for crap. I don’t like it. The powers must be used during boss fights and to get through some enemies.
Upgrading your weapons is really fun since we have never had a WWII game that uses real WWII weapons that can have silencers attached to them and scopes. Of course, there are fictional weapons such as particle cannons, Tesla guns, and a flak cannon. All these are slowly acquired as you play the game, and each weapon is fun to use. The weapon’s efficiency is solely up to how you upgrade.
The levels are pretty varied, but they all look the same. The graphics are very nice, but there’s not really an art style here. All the levels are pretty much laid out the same: kill these Nazis, figure out how to get past this obstacle, kill more Nazis, blow this up, and kill the boss. Rinse and repeat for about 8–10 hours. This doesn’t mean the game gets boring since everything is scrambled up quite often, so you get the illusion that it’s not the same thing over and over again.
There is some enemy variety in the human form. Each is the same, except some are wearing different uniforms, but it’s the supernatural enemies that you should worry about. There are assassins that will sneak up on you and slash you to death if you don’t use your powers to spot them quickly. There are powerful generals that shoot fireballs and pound the ground, and they will kill you fast. You have sexy Nazi chicks that do extreme melee on you unless you’re fast. There are guys with flamethrowers and particle cannons that must find the weak spots to defeat them. That’s about it, though, and you can throw creepy monkey dogs in there too. The enemy variety is a bit thin, but these guys work.
The boss fights are pretty amusing, and some are just downright hard. You just figure out their weak spot and what weapon works best when it’s easy from there. So overall, the structure of the game is sound, with your main missions branching off the city of Isenstadt, where you go get your missions from the two resistance factions. The game is well worth the purchase, but you won’t really come back to it, not even for multiplayer since no one’s even playing, and even if there were, it’s pretty generic.
Wolfenstein offers great gameplay, a decent story, and just a solid 8–10 hours, but you won’t be coming back to this one unless you really want to find all the hidden items.
I don’t mind sexually driven games, but I like them to be good and done right. Xtreme 2 is the sequel to Xtreme Beach Volleyball for the original Xbox. Everything is intact, with a few additions. It consists of six mini-games and five casino games, but that’s not enough to save this simple-minded game.
The whole point of the game is to play mini-games with other DoA ladies and earn their trust and friendship, and this is harder than it seems. The game plays similar to a Japanese dating sim game, and it can take forever to buy a lot of the items and learn how to become friends with these lovely ladies. You have to figure out what each lady likes, loves, and hates and send them gifts accordingly. All you get is a visual guide for each lady with pictures of what they like, but this doesn’t help much. After you spend a whole two weeks at New Zack Island, you pretty much give up trying to gain trust and friendship since it’s so hard to figure out without some in-depth guidance. After a try, you end up just playing the mini-games, ogling the scantily clad women lying around, and even dancing.
The mini-games are the most fun of the game, with pool hopping, flag running, beach volleyball, jet skiing, and water sliding. Pool hopping consists of pressing the buttons according to what is shown on the floaties. This game tends to be very hard since it requires precise timing. Flag-running is pretty simple, but the best game is probably volleyball. It has tight mechanics and controls, and it can be a blast to play. Jet skiing is very mundane since it’s the same track over and over again; however, the water effects are nice, and doing tricks on the ski can be fun. Water sliding is the hardest game of them all since it’s so hard to stay on the slide, and after you fall off, you don’t get another try. After you earn enough money from playing mini-games, you can purchase a camera, take sexy photos of the ladies, and view them later in your album.
The casino is the second major part of the game that lets you really earn some bucks. All the games are pretty self-explanatory; roulette tends to be the most intense, but you can lose all your money in one go if you’re not careful, so watch how you spend your money. The casino is all in 3D, so it’s nice to view, but I wish you could walk around in it and see all your DOA lady friends playing in there as well. When you earn enough money, you can go buy stuff at the store to give to your lady friends or yourself.
The game really has no purpose except to ogle your favorite DoA girls and try to buy the skimpiest bikini for them. The graphics are great, and everything jiggles in all the right places. The audio is pretty mundane, with Japanese audio tracks to cover the horrible English voice actresses. The game isn’t serious, but it could be so much more, and I just hope DoA Xtreme 3 becomes more deep and involved. I just wish there would have been more interaction, and all the load times don’t help either. The game is just too hard to figure out with the whole dating sim thing going on, so just sit back and enjoy the women and mini-games. The game will make you choke your chicken for sure, so DoA fanboys (girls?) should pick this game up and enjoy its simplicity.
By now, everyone with a 360 has either played or owned this game. There’s so much about Oblivion that it would take pages and pages to describe it all in detail. The main story is that you have to restore the dragonfires so the realm of Oblivion can’t come back to Cyrodiil. The story is very interesting, and the side quests add to this. To start with, you make your character with an absurd amount of detail, and you can even name and customize your own race, abilities, etc. In each city in Cyrodiil, you can choose to join guilds such as mage, fighter, thief, etc. You complete tasks for the guild leader, and you get a recommendation from the head of that guild. You can train there to raise attributes and rest. Now, when it comes to talking to people, the game uses facial expressions to show you what the NPC is feeling. You can persuade people via a little mini-game that takes a while to master.
Now let’s talk about combat. The combat is very deep and simple at the same time. You block with LT and attack with RT. You can use magic, swords, bows, katanas, staffs, etc. As you use your weapons, they deteriorate, and you can repair them with hammers or at weapon shops. Some weapons can have attributes like causing your foe to be paralyzed for 30 seconds or something like that. You can use scrolls, which are magic attacks for defense, and offenses that can be used once. When you level up, you have to go to sleep so you can meditate on everything you learned. It takes a long time to level up in this game, but it’s well worth it.
The vastness of attributes is insane in Oblivion. The combinations of alchemy spells and everything combined just, literally, make it infinite. Now let’s talk about vastness. The game is huge—bigger than all the GTAs put together. Anything that you see, you can walk on or climb. You can ride a horse there or just go there for the hell of it and discover something new. You can pick plants for alchemy, you can find new weapons…or just completely useless stuff like bones, cups, vases, quills, mops, shovels, etc. Some stuff is worth thousands, and some stuff is worth nothing at all. You’re probably wondering how you travel such a huge amount of land. Well, the map lets you warp. Thank God for that. Of course, you can’t warp inside a building, but you can get the idea. Now the game can let you go good or evil depending on whether you steal people’s stuff, pickpocket, murder, etc. Or you can choose to be rude to people during conversations. Technically, there are some flaws.
The graphics are still pretty good by today’s standards but show some age, just a tad compared to recent next-gen games. The music is outstanding, and the voice acting is superb. There is some texture popping up here and there and hitting. The constant loading is also annoying, but with recent software updates that have been remedied, this is some. You just have to get this game. It’s so big and so deep that you’ll play it for hours and hours. Also, with all the expansions out there, I wonder if there is an end. A note to casual players: stay away. The vastness and depth will turn some players off and will turn JRPG fans off.
Ahhh, the tired old FPS genre. Everyone loves it, and then everyone hates it. What more can developers do to change the FPS genre to make it interesting? Better graphics? Better sounds? More realistic AI? Realistic physics? Less linear? Keep the linearity? More vehicles? Better story? The list goes on and on, and the answer is yes to all of the above.
Bad Company 2 is a sequel to the first, but the first game was pretty forgettable. You play as a squad of four soldiers who were military rejects and must earn their freedom or face the slammer. They are sent into Africa and other parts of the world to find some sort of scalar weapon that the Russians found in Japan and are using for global domination. Not something we haven’t seen before, but the squad has great characters that you’ll love, and hearing their banter is enough to keep playing.
A lot of people are comparing Bad Company 2 to Modern Warfare 2, and if I were to pick the better game, Bad Company 2 for single-player and realism, and Modern Warfare 2 for multiplayer, but then again, I’m not comparing the two, so let’s get down to it. The first thing you will notice is how real Bad Company 2 feels, more so than any other shooter so far. The sounds are just amazing, with the sound of fire echoing off caverns, the sounds of you reloading echoing in a building, the pinging of bullet shells hitting the floor—everything sounds like it would in life and is placed accordingly to unlock most (if not all) shooters, real or not. The foliage looks real, and everything blows up. You can blow pretty much anything up in the game with anything you can get hold of. This is also used in gameplay when getting around turrets that you can’t shoot through. Find some red barrels and blow the building up, then have it collapse on everyone below it. This goes for radio towers, telephone poles, and large trees. Then again, it’s pretty stupid when you can blow apart small objects like trash cans, chairs, or cardboard boxes, so it’s very strange.
The weapon selection in the game is great, and you get all your real-world guns, and they fire like they should. The guns feel powerful, and everything about shooting feels dead-on. Gone, however, is the whole healing thing, and instead, you just hide in cover to heal. Another element stripped is finding the gold bars, but instead, M-COM stations that you blow up and finding weapons. The M-COM stations are hard to find, and I don’t know where all the hidden weapons could be, but they’re there for people who like that stuff. I personally hate finding crap in shooters like this since it detracts from the experience and pulls you out. Other than that, though, the game is paced nicely and flows just right.
There are some elements that haven’t been down before, like the whole blowing up everything in your path (in an FPS anyway), and there’s even one level where you will freeze to death if you don’t find shelter fast. This level has your knifing doors open as you race down a hillside. There are some epic vehicle sections (that haven’t been done before), but there is one level that isn’t linear that has three checkpoints, and you can choose which ones you want to do first. The opening level is even from WWII in Japan, so the game is full of surprises and is a blast to play.
When it comes to multiplayer, the game is solid with three modes of play, but my favorite is Rush. Like in the original game, you have an attacker and defender side on a huge map (this one supports 64 players). You have five different classes to choose from, and you can customize them as you please. There are three “perks” that you can use at a time, but they must be unlocked, and this takes a while. The multiplayer is fast, intense, and fun, with lots of vehicles zooming around, everything blowing up, and people just being crazy.
My last words here must be how amazing the game looks. Probably being the best-looking shooter around, it looks great technically but has no artistic style and is just “real life” type of stuff, so it’s not for everyone. If you want a really amazing shooter to play and are bored of Modern Warfare 2, pick up Bad Company 2, because it’s one hell of a ride.
LIMITED EDITION: If you pick up the game soon, you can still get the limited edition, which has six multiplayer unlocks and entitles you to upcoming maps for free. A deal? I’d say it’s the standard price with no additional charge. To find a new copy if you can.
Norse mythology. That’s what drew me to Darksiders, but don’t just jump into this thinking it’s a God of War clone. In fact, it’s a mix of Zelda exploration and puzzle-solving and combat similar to God of War, but not as good or as epic. The story goes a little something along the lines of you playing as one of the four horsemen, War, who is chosen by the Council to find these broken seals and kill whoever did it to bring back Balance because the bad guys want all the realms aligned and made into one. The story is stretched between the long-winded levels, and it never picks up until the last hour, but by then you have forgotten what has happened because there is a little story between levels. It almost feels as if the story was an afterthought, and Vigil just concentrated on the puzzles and combat.
That being said, there is a lot of puzzle-solving in this game—almost more so than any other I have played. The game takes a lot of ideas from other games, such as God of War, Zelda, and even Portal, and puts them to good use. While the game isn’t 100% original, it does have its originality in certain areas. While starting with the combat, it’s pretty simple. You start out with your Chaoseater sword, which is mapped to the X button. Later on, when you get the scythe, you can map that and any other secondary weapon to Y and your tools to RT. Combat moves can be purchased by using blue souls gained from killing enemies. There are power moves and multiple combos you can pull off, and it’s all fluid and fun to use, so there’s no problem there.
You have a yellow wrath meter, which is war’s “special powers,” and then you have health shields, which are bars of health. Sometimes when you weaken an enemy, you can execute a kill move by pressing B (God of War, anyone?), but no QTE (quick time events) are displayed. Instead, you just watch war butcher the enemy. I love QTEs and would rather participate in the killing than just watch, but some people may prefer this. You can also ride your horse, Ruin, through the last 3/4 of the game and swing your blade while on him to kill and demolish enemies.
Now combat is neat and fluid. I just wish there were QTE events and a more fixed cinematic camera, but after explaining the puzzle-solving, you’ll see why it’s a user-controlled camera. The puzzles are so frequent and so complicated that they drove me nuts. It was just puzzle after puzzle after puzzle, and it was never-ending. While this doesn’t ruin the game, it just feels more and more like Zelda with every hour that passes. You have a free-roaming world that is broken down into sections that you can warp to. You have to find tools such as a grappling hook, a Mask of Shadows (to see hidden objects), and a portal gun (yeah, ripped straight from Portal, but it’s a gauntlet instead of a gun), as well as a glaive (Dark Sector maybe?). As you discover each tool, you use them to solve puzzles accordingly. The portal gauntlet is probably the most unique. There are orange circle plates that you can attack portals with too, and if any portal fans are reading this, you know what happens. However, there are a few unique touches, such as in the Black Throne area (mostly puzzles and hardly any combat), where you guide a beam from across a level through the different rooms and solve those puzzles to allow the beam to pass through more rooms. Yeah, it’s a bit in-depth and complicated, and don’t fret because most puzzles are pretty easy to solve, but there were a few brain scratchers that resulted in a video walkthrough.
A lot of the puzzles are pretty unique, but there are a few things thrown into the game that will surprise you, such as the ride on the dragon and using heavy guns that enemies drop. There is even a pistol that you can use in the game, but it is kind of useless except for the boss in the Ashlands level. Other than that, the pistol was pretty useless. There are just a lot of unique puzzles in the game, and they are pretty fun, but the fact that there are so many makes the game redundant, and that’s why it didn’t score as high as I wanted it to. The combat is pretty repetitive, and there’s nothing outrageous about the gore level; it’s actually pretty mild; it’s nothing close to the gore in God of War III. The kill animations are pretty repetitive since there is only one per enemy, and even the enemies are recycled. While there may be about six or so different enemy types, they are just recycled with different “costumes” and become more powerful as you progress through the game.
The bosses are pretty epic, but they aren’t too hard to beat. They repeat the same pattern over and over, and even the last boss is a pushover after you learn the strategy. The graphics are actually pretty nice. The character details are excellent, but the environments tend to be lacking. There is a lot of aliasing (jaggies), and I know the game could just look a whole lot better. This is also a game for people who like collecting since there is hidden crap all over the game, but I tend to not go searching for this stuff since I’m not good at it, but it’s there for Zelda fanatics to find.
Overall, the game is worth a purchase, but people who want just the action should steer away from it since this game is very puzzle-heavy, as in Zelda-type puzzles. The game gets very redundant after a while, and only the hardcore will continue playing, but Zelda fans and puzzle fans should check this out. You can play anywhere from 10 to 20 hours of gameplay, depending on whether you’re a completionist or not. There is lots to love in this package, but a bit more flare would have been nice. Bottom line: This is an adventure game for men, not elves.
With the second expansion for Oblivion come some great quests and some loot that are well worth your time. Knights of the Nine starts out in Anvil, where you overhear a crazy priest ranting about an order of crusaders that protected magic armor but failed, and some evil dude is trying to steal them all. It’s a little more detailed than that, but the story is so deep and involved that it would take me forever to explain it all.
One thing about Nine is that all your first objectives aren’t marked on your map; you have to find them yourself. Oh, don’t worry, you get another map handed to you, and you have to compare it to your map and mark it. They aren’t hard to find at all, but this means no warping to them. You have to travel on horseback all across Cyrodiil and find these temples to pray at. This can take anywhere from one to two hours, depending on how you play.
Once this is done, you head to the Priory of the Nine and get the whole scoop on all the armor pieces and their locations. This is the most time-consuming part of the expansion, but it can take you about 2–3 hours or more, depending on how you play. The armor pieces are special and have magic attached to them. You can also find two weapons and a shield, so you can deck your character out in the powerful crusader armor.
There aren’t any new enemies or anything that is really new, like in Shivering Isles, but it’s $10 that will last you a good 5 or more hours. The whole expansion is very well done, and it keeps you hooked and makes you never want to stop. Looting the 8 or so dungeons is great and allows players who may have beaten the game and skipped out on this to squeeze some more Oblivion awesomeness out of their disc.
The city of Rapture. Full of life, love, elegance, beauty, innovation, and Big Daddy’s. Well, that’s how it used to be before the civil war broke out for who had the most Adam. BioShock 2 takes place ten years after the initial fall of Rapture, and instead of playing as Nobody, you play as Big Daddy. Not just any Big Daddy, though you play as one of the first Delta models that helped build Rapture. After your daughter, Eleanor, wakes you up from a cold, dead sleep, you must find her and stop the evil Dr. Lamb from destroying Rapture and using the Splicers to commit her evil deeds.
The first thing I have to say is that you must play BioShock 1 before even going into this game, or you won’t know what’s going on. There are so many tie-ins to the original game that newcomers won’t have a clue. With that said, this review is mainly for fans of the original. I also have to tell those fans that BioShock 2 isn’t as good as the first one but has lots of much-needed improvements and a pretty fun multiplayer, so let’s get to it.
The first thing you will notice is that you have a drill. Yes, a nice big drill to cut those damn splicers up. Of course, the drill takes fuel to use (sorry, I can’t have you just drilling people away, yeah), but the biggest change is that you can use Plasmids and weapons without having to switch. Your left hand uses Plasmids (LT), and your right hand uses a weapon (RT). This is great for faster combat and makes it less cumbersome. All of your favorite weapons from BioShock have returned, but with a twist.
As you can tell, all the weapons need to be handled with one hand, so you get a double-barrel shotgun (which replaces the original pump action), a minigun (which replaces the Tommy gun), the grenade launcher, and instead of a crossbow, we get an awesome spear gun. Yes, and you can even impale enemies to walls. With that said, there are some new weapons that are very handy, such as the hacking gun (more on that later), which can also shoot out auto-turrets, which are great for defending yourself against hordes of enemies. You can lay traps with proximity mines, spear traps, and even some new traps from the rivet gun, which you can pick up later if any weren’t detonated. The shotgun has a couple of new types of ammo for you to use, and these are the slug rounds that knock enemies across the room and the phosphorus rounds, which look like sparklers that explode all over the enemy. You can use antipersonnel rounds, armor-piercing rounds, etc. for the situation at hand. When you get to Power to the People stations to upgrade your weapons, a third hidden one will become available that adds an extra “hell yeah” to your weapons. For example, the third upgrade for the shotgun adds electric charges to shots for extra damage.
One greatly improved element is hacking. In the original, we had to do this Pipe Mania-type mini-game, but that has been scrapped, and everything is done in real-time while playing via a moving needle on a meter. Green areas are good, and red areas have trip alarms. Blue areas give you bonuses, such as turrets doing extra damage or vending machines giving you free items. This is a huge improvement over the original, and it keeps the game flowing.
Being a Big Daddy obviously requires you to protect your Little Sisters, and that’s exactly what you do. Instead of just killing their Big Daddy and then harvesting them, you can adopt them and go find “angels” to harvest Adam out of. Once the Little Sisters are all full, you can harvest them for tons of Adam or free them. Gathering Adam isn’t an easy task because once you start, Splicers start coming out of the woodwork with no mercy. Set up traps and find a good vantage point before setting the Little Sister down, and usually you can make it through just fine. If you decide to take the merciless harvesting route, watch out for the new Big Sisters, which are fast, mean chicks who don’t mess around. They are harder to take down than Big Daddies and require a lot of firepower to be prepared.
One last little tidbit is the research. Instead of taking pictures of enemies, you now have a movie camera. You whip it out and start filming a splicer, and the faster you take it down, the higher the research rating you’ll get. Research enough, and you will get special bonuses and even a secret tonic.
Now that most of the new features are out of the way, you’re probably asking, “What hasn’t changed?” A lot, in fact, and I could boldly say the developers played it too safe with this game. Everything is pretty much exactly the same as the original; the art style, the graphics, the menus, the sounds, and even the splicers’ animations are exactly the same. The only new splicers are the Brute splicer (Tank from Left 4 Dead anyone?) and the Big Sister, but that’s about it. All the plasmids are the same tonics, with a few new exceptions. You get a ton more tonic slots, but everything is the same. The other problem, too, is that the game gets extremely repetitive. After the first level, you’ve pretty much seen all of what BioShock 2 has to offer. The narrative isn’t as memorable as the original, but the game is still excellent. All of these things staying isn’t so bad since they work, but a whole new approach would have been nice. The graphics are slightly updated, but other than that, you won’t see any changes there.
The multiplayer is pretty fun, but it’s an acquired taste. Multiplayer feels more like the first game; you can use plasmids and research other players for bonuses, level-ups, etc., but it’s kind of short-lived. You can find Big Daddy suits, and there is pretty much every game type you can imagine, including protecting Little Sisters and taking down Bid Daddies. The hype about the multiplayer was from a narrative standpoint since it’s never been down before. As you level up, you will receive messages that let you know what Rapture was like before the civil war.
All in all, BioShock 2 is a solid sequel with fun multiplayer, but the developers just played it too safe in the end. I would have liked to see some more bold moves, but what we get is a wonderful package to enjoy.
SPECIAL EDITION: If you paid the extra $40 for the special edition, you’re in for a treat. Being the biggest game box I have ever seen, SE packs in a lot of extras for die-hard fans. The SE includes a vinyl record of the soundtrack, the CD version, four posters that represent the in-game ads, as well as a 164-page book about how BioShock 2 was developed. After reading this book, you can really tell every idea was scrapped, and they just stuck with the original ideas. It seemed the developers were too scared to stray off the familiar path, which was a disappointment.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !