I watched the movie when it first came out, and now I’m late playing the game. While I played the PC version, I found the Xbox 360 version not much different. The game does sport decent graphics, but now, in 2009, they feel pretty dated, there are a lot of collision detection issues, and the game is very…green. While you spend 70% of the time playing as Jack, you wish you could play as Kong more. There are a decent variety of enemies, such as giant centipedes, bats, T-Rex, raptors, crabs, and so forth. You just wish there were more.
When you play as Jack, you are in a first-person perspective, and there are no health bars, no ammo meters, just you and your instincts. Ubisoft made it this way, so the game feels more cinematic like the movie, and it works. I was surprised at how well you can aim with the spears and guns without a reticle, and it’s very easy to do. Most of the playing as Jack is pretty straightforward, with most of the puzzles revolving around burning brush via lit spears. Most of these puzzles get pretty dull towards the end, but thankfully, as you progress, you play as Kong more often. Playing as Kong, though, is the best part. You are in a 3rd-person POV, and the camera sweeps around dramatically while you beat up a giant T-Rex and fend off dozens of bats.
There are moments when you run along giant cliffsides and swing on huge pillars. While this is good and all, it does get repetitive, and it’s the same thing over and over. The game isn’t very well-paced, and there aren’t any clips from the movie at all. I understand that Michel Ancel wanted players to not emerge out of the experience with jaunting clips from the movie, so everything is done in real-time. Of course, all the load times defeat this purpose since some chapters are only one cutscene long. I also have to mention that King Kong has the easiest access to 1000 GP ever. Just complete the game, and you have all your achievements and GP. Yes, you heard me, just complete certain chapters, and they hand them to you. Of course, this had a lot to do with the fact that most developers didn’t give two sh**s about achievements during the first year or so of the console’s life. While Ubisoft did a good job in the short time they had, it could have been a lot better. The game also ends very abruptly, and it feels like they took huge shortcuts. Despite all this, you’ll get a kick out of the game on any console, and it’ll sure to please the movie fans.
Trials HD is a game that PC gamers will recognize thanks to the amazing (yet buggy) Steam. Trials HD is very simple but hard to master, and it is a motocross physics game. The basic goal is to get from one end to the other using physics and the environment around you, and to also make the best time.
Trials start out with a simple tutorial to get you familiar with the controls, and they are easy but hard to master. You use the weight of your body by leaning back and forth to hit jumps just right. These jumps are crazy, with huge leaps, teeter-tottering beams, and even a super hard move to master that has you jumping off the ground over large pipes. The game is a 3D/2D side scroller, and the tracks are built out of junk such as wood, tires, cones, ropes—you name it. There are four different difficulties to master and three different medals for each track. The medals are based on a time limit, and these limits are fair, but there’s a catch. Yes, yes, I know. Just listen. You can retry as many times as you want, but to get the gold medal, you have to be perfect or screw up within the designated limit. Some tracks have a no-restart qualification, and the harder tracks will let you restart over ten times for a gold medal. Yeah, they get that tough. Most of the tracks you’ll be on for over an hour just mastering the tricky maneuvering, while some you can just blow through.
The physics engine is spot on, though, since the bike feels just right and you have complete control of where it goes. Later on, on the more difficult tracks, you will need to master the control of the bike. Throttle and weight distribution are the base elements of making your fastest time. If you just hold the throttle, you’ll fall backward, and if you brake too hard, you’ll fly forward.
There are also mini-games that help you with your skills, such as climbing, ball rolling (which is impossible), bumpers, and just flying off your bike and seeing how far your ragdoll man can go. Most of these mini-games are fun, but a select few are just a nightmare, especially getting the gold medal. Trials HD also looks great with HDR lighting, high-res textures, and the next-gen fix that you would expect out of a $15 arcade game. The money is well worth the investment thanks to the level editor, which allows you to make your own easy or god-awful track and upload it online. There’s not much else to say about this complicated yet simple game. If you love physics games, go for it; if you love racing, go for it; if you love retrying a lot, go ahead.
Remember games like Sonic the Hedgehog, TMNT, Kid Chameleon, or even Mario? Yeah, well, we haven’t seen a game like that in a while (especially a 2D one), and that’s what makes ‘Splosion Man so great. It brings back that classic, challenging platformer goodness with a great sense of humor and a loving character. ‘Splosion Man pits you against a bunch of mad scientists obstacles and traps trying to capture you while you run rampant, trying to escape.
As the name implies, you have the ability to explode, but not just as many times as you want. You can explode three times in a row, then you must “recharge” yourself by staying on the ground for a few seconds or clinging to a wall. Exploding allows you to jump, break glass, hit switches, and pretty much do anything because this is the core gameplay. You have different obstacles to overcome, such as jumping gaps; you may need a green canister to shoot you across a huge gap; exploding barrels will give you a slight boost since there may be huge open areas above a death pit that are just barrels. The idea would be to explode yourself on each barrel and “hop” across the huge gap. Most of the time, scientists will pull levers that block your way, and you must figure out how to get to them. Giant closing walls may come down on you from either side, and you’ll need to jump your way up and out. You may run across electrified fields, and you must find the switch to turn them off. Then you can kill the scientist and be on your merry way. There are dozens of different traps and obstacles, and it would take forever to describe them all, but one thing is certain: you need to use your exploding powers to get through them.
When it comes to boss fights, they are epic and rather tough. They all involve some form of exploding or evading, which must be mastered. That’s the beauty of this game; you can conquer the controls, but it takes practice to master them. The later levels require precise jumping, exploding, and timing, or you will meet your death. Speaking of death (unlike older platformers), checkpoints are fair and plentiful, so you are sure not to get too frustrated. Trial and error here is abundant, but it’s forgiving. What I mainly love about the character you play is the noise he makes. He runs around looking goofier than ever, making airplane noises, barking noises, and just overall maniacal laughs that make you laugh every time. The achievements, on the other hand, are pretty easy to get and take a bit of thinking to figure out. Most of them require finishing certain objectives, and some require finding hidden items. Like any platformer, it was impossible to find items, and these are cakes. Yes, they even make a joke about the Portal reference in the achievement description. Hell, there’s even a real-life ‘Splosion Man video during the credits roll. Speaking of that, the game has great co-op play both online and offline, so you and a friend can master the power of exploding. You even unlock a theme and gamer picture for all your effort.
So to conclude, ‘Splosion Man is a fine platformer that does something original that we have never seen before. Whether it’s the epic boss fights, the ability to explode, or the levels that just make you feel giddy, ‘Splosion is worth every penny and will hopefully make an explosive sequel.
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.
With the fourth (and hopefully not final) Fallout 3 DLC, we are once again almost as disappointed as the first DLC outing, Operation Anchorage, where Bethesda mistakenly takes you out of the Capital Wasteland and into the redundant dead world of an alien spaceship. When you get the signal from the downed ship in the Capital Wasteland, you get beamed up and stuck in an alien prison cell where you must, throughout this adventure, fight your way off the ship with a woman and a little girl (who causes more trouble than wanted) to a final standoff with the captain of the mothership and finally an epic space battle.
Most of the DLC has you running around places blowing up these “cores” that will shut certain parts of the ship down so you can get to the bridge. While this sounds repetitive, nothing is as bad as the ship looks. With lots of 50’s cheesy alien sci-fi-looking infrastructure, it all looks copied and pasted throughout the entire thing, so after about thirty minutes, you’ve seen it all. There are three new weapons in this DLC: the shock baton, the atomizer, and the atomizer rifle. While these sound powerful, the aliens are some tough meat if you haven’t downloaded the Broken Steel add-on, so you can level up to around 25–30. With me being 28 years old, I still had a hard time fighting off the various droids and aliens since some have this invisible-looking armor that is a pain to break through.
While there are a few epic moments in the game, such as when you get to shoot a death ray at Earth and see a huge mushroom cloud appear, it makes you feel powerful. While not spoiling them all, I’ll move into items you can find, and these are probably worth more than anything in the Wasteland. Most of the items are alien crystals varying in size, along with some alien food, alien biogels, and various odds and ends that are worth tons back on Earth. You actually end up with so much that you can’t find enough people with the caps to purchase it all.
Once you do get back to the Wasteland, you’ll quickly forget what happened since there isn’t much narrative except for the hidden audio journals scattered throughout the ship. This really isn’t a way to progress dialog in Fallout 3, since most are interactive. After everything is over within the 2-3 hours it takes to beat this DLC, you’ll feel like you were ripped off about $5 and want a refund. Mothership Zeta is skip-able, but hardcore fans should really take it for a spin.
I’m neither an X-Men fan nor a comic book fan, so you can expect a fair, unbiased review first off. One great thing to think about when thinking about this game is that you don’t need to be an X-Men or comic fan to like this game; all you have to do is like action/adventure games (God of War, Prince of Persia, Bionic Commando, etc.). The game starts out pretty heavy and shows some great graphics, cinematic gameplay, and great voice acting (by none other than Hugh Jackman himself) all while skydiving into the forests of Africa. When you land, you’ll be shown a quick tutorial on how to use heavy and light attacks, along with combos. You’ll learn how to do quick kills, which are a timed heavy attack complete with a zoom-in slow-mo, gruesome, and gory kill. Yes, I said gory, and yes, this is the first mature-rated comic book game ever made, and I’m so glad Marvel got off their high horse (cough DC) and started showing their characters’s true feral side.
Most of Wolverine is based around combat since the story is simply only for hardcore fans, people who saw the movie (I hear it’s excellent and Mr. Jackman is the best Wolverine yet), or the fact that the story is just too cut up and flashed back to really get a grip on. A lot of the combat may feel repetitive sometimes, but it’s all cut up thanks to great platforming sections, some action button timing, some really big guys you must take on, and sprinkle on some epic boss fights. Each enemy must be killed differently since some are not weak enough to make quick kills and must be weakened; some can’t be thrown off ledges; and some enemies can only be killed in feral sense mode because of their camouflage. Each enemy has different quick-kill animations, thus making the game feel less repetitive. You can unlock different moves by leveling up, along with permanently increasing your health and rage meter. Rage always requires you to perform four of the rage moves, which range from a blender-style claw spin to a saw blade-style spin. Each one can be upgraded for a longer time—more power, more speed, etc. You also have three slots for mutagens, which somehow passively enhance the gameplay by adding some more health, making rage moves more powerful, or gaining more experience per kill. All these are easily in sync with each other, along with a great tree that allows you to learn things about your enemies for every kill, so they die faster later on in the game. This immense skill tree really works brilliantly and keeps the game from feeling cookie-cutter.
The game does have puzzles when it comes to environments, and some puzzles are even part of the environment. These puzzles are never hard to figure out thanks to your feral senses, but the timing of certain puzzles can be frustrating. Speaking of frustrating, the only real gripe I have with the game is that the difficulty isn’t balanced very well, so several levels will be easy, then suddenly an ultra-hard one, then an easy one, and maybe a few hard ones. The same goes for certain sections in levels, and this can lead some people to throw their controller at the wall…or a person. A lot of puzzles consist of pushing blocks to get up on certain ledges, pulling panels out of walls to unlock certain doors, and some level-length puzzles, such as using the hand of a giant robot to destroy the head and firing lasers to get through the only door out of the base.
Let’s talk boss fights. Some range from other X-Men universe characters (Saber Tooth for one) that are easily killed, along with some that are hundreds of stories high (like the epic robot boss fight that you fight from space while falling down to earth—yes, uber epic). Boss fights aren’t annoying; you just have to learn their moves.
The visuals in the game are astounding, and using the Unreal 3 engine, you can expect some of the finest-looking graphics yet. Everything looks sharp, clean, and highly detailed for your ultimate Wolverine experience. There are some nice unlockables for fans of the game, and I guarantee that this game will turn haters into lovers.
If you have ever played The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, you will kind of get the idea of what Alex Mercer is going through in Prototype (or [PROTOTYPE] as SEGA thinks CAPS is cool >.>), just minus the green problem our Mr. Banner seems to be having. The reason I say prototype is like Ultimate Destruction, and just a tad more ultimate with a hint more destruction, is because it uses a beefed-up engine from the same game and shares some of the same mechanics.
You play Alex Mercer, a confusing test subject who wants revenge on his creator and to stop the infection from spreading throughout the story. I’d tell you more, but the storytelling is so terrible that I had no idea what was going on or who was doing what or who! Constant flashbacks and pieces of the story told through consuming certain targets and watching stills aren’t fun for your brain to digest.
When you first jump into the game, you’ll be able to run up walls, climb buildings, and eventually glide, kick, and consume your way to ultimate infected glory. Most of Prototype is a free-roaming mode where you run from mission to mission, or side missions or activities, like Spider-Man or any other hero you like that can run across a city in less than 30 minutes. The great thing about this is that you can find hidden items such as extra experience or little-hidden things to unlock achievements (or trophies if you’re a PS3 fan and are somehow “accidentally” reading this Xbox 360 review). While most of these (like in any sandbox game) are so spread out and so well hidden, you won’t, except for the ones you run across by accident. Most of the free-roaming is, unfortunately, boring and bland. There are just people and cars, and that’s pretty much it. Once you get further into the game, rampant zombies and infected people terrorize the streets, and it does get more interesting, but it just makes you want to stay off of them and onto the buildings. Most of the graphics in the game are outdated and kind of boring, to begin with, so there’s nothing really “eye-catching” about the game at all.
The meat of the game, really, is the fighting, and this is where the heart of Prototype lies. You have a HUGE skill tree that extends from combat to stealth, to movement, to, yes, you guessed it, powers. What kind of game would [Prototype] be without powers? Well, pretty boring since there are so many; you have more than you can handle. Prototype has so many different moves and powers that you will end up forgetting most of the little ones and just using your most obnoxious ones. Your arm can transform into different weapons such as a whip, giant fists via The Thing, larger muscles for a mix of power and speed, a giant scythe (the one on the cover!), and a few others. Accompanied by these, you have some armor (you can’t glide or double dash though!…yeah, shut up Mario Kart fanboys), and you can also shapeshift into whoever your last consumed victim was (more on that later). The way you use these powers depends on the enemies you’re fighting. A huge mechanic is the grab ability, since this is used to fling objects at helicopters, giant tentacle arms, and even military soldiers or infected monsters. Most of the time, you mash X and Y together to create a cool combo, then somehow unleash a weird power. That’s why there is just too much in this game since you can’t memorize all these combos and what each one does for what weapons. One of the next major mechanics is the lock-on system, which is used to dash toward enemies and pummel them before they do something amazing to your infected self. I had a hard time with multiple enemies since you’d want to target one (say, a guy with a rocket launcher up high), but the game would keep targeting someone else below.
You can use actual weapons in the game that enemies drop, such as machine guns, shotguns, and rocket launchers, and these are essential in some missions. Not always will you have your weapons available, and you’ll have to use the environment around you. It also consists of many boss fights, and this is where I concluded my playthrough. The game gets so frustratingly difficult towards the end that it will throw so many hard enemies at you at once (two tentacles plus 5–6 hunters) while trying to protect something. Yeah, right, but then again, Sega is known for doing this in their games. You’ll end up trying to hit one enemy, then another knocks you back, then you can’t get up because another is smashing on you, and when you do, you get knocked back again. Yes, a lot of cheap deaths and hits, and this isn’t fair.
Aside from the annoying main missions, there are some rather fun and unique activities that utilize your powers. Some missions will have you using selected power to eliminate a certain amount of enemies in a certain amount of time; some are races, checkpoint races, and some even have you finding targets and consuming them for your Web (more on that later). While most of these are fun, some are impossible to get because of the target requirements for a gold medal and the maximum amount of experience points to spend in the skill tree. Other skills are earned by consuming certain targets to fly helicopters, tanks, etc.
The last element I should mention is the skill tree, which is filled by consuming certain targets and watching a series of stills and a brief voice clip to fill in the story (lame). So as you can see, this may be unique (and ways to unlock achievements, yeah, or trophies), but this seems more like a cheap way to tell the story or used as a game filler. While Prototype is fun for a while, it quickly gets repetitive with its cookie-cutter enemy AI, broken storytelling, cheap deaths, and bland free-roaming world. I recommend Prototype for a rental, but don’t expect anything amazing.
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.
The highly anticipated Point Lookout is finally out, and it does not disappoint. With this being the fourth DLC available for Fallout 3, you’d think Bethesda has started to run out of steam, but it seems they’ve just gotten started. The DLC starts out with a boat docking near the Jefferson Memorial and talking to a strange Tobar, who tells you all about Point Lookout, Maryland, and all its great treasures and adventures. Sure, it sounds great for the heroine of the Wasteland, but just how dangerous is it? Well, extremely, and especially if you are under level 25 and without the Broken Steel DLC, because the bog hillbillies are extremely tough to kill even with the Tesla Cannon (you get this in the Broken Steel DLC). Hell, even the Rocket Launcher won’t kill them with one shot (it must be all that moonshine they drink).
While not giving too much of the story away, you meet one AHOLE of a ghoul. Try to find a woman named Nadine, a deceptive brain, a strange cult, and a woman who has you help her with her family recipe of moonshine. The DLC is nothing short of amazing when it comes to the atmosphere since it’s just as lonely and creepy as the stuff on the disc (and The Pitt), with lots of fog, bogs, creepy hillbillies, strange buildings in the distance, and rads. Yes, since most of the DLC has water in it, you’ll be getting irradiated quite a bit, and this means you will need to bring some RadAway and Rad-X with you.
One mission even requires you to swim away from the island and locate a sunken submarine underwater. You have one store in the game in the carnival; there’s a motel you need to explore, a mysterious mansion, and a few other buildings, but there’s a lot to explore on this HUGE island, so you’re in for about 4-6 hours of great gameplay and story. Bethesda seemed to have concentrated more on exploring this time around than weapons or anything like that. There are a few new parks, the double-barreled shotgun, ando the lever-action rifle, but there are a ton of supplies to loot and grab. So much, in fact, you’ll have to head back to The Capital Wasteland just to sell it all. I believe this is a great DLC and is well worth the $10 (hell, I’ve paid $140 into Fallout 3 already), so don’t be afraid and come down to Point Lookout and explore!
When we called the Ghostbusters back into our games in the early 90s, they didn’t do a very good job. You remember the Genesis version, MSX, NES, GameBoy, Atari 2600, and C64. The richness of the Ghostbusters universe needed more than 8 or 16-bit graphics and midi sounds to make it come to life. Technology has improved considerably since then, finally being able to do justice to our Ghostbuster friends. With the help of the Unreal 3 engine, the developers were able to create an atmosphere and story that are truly amazing.
Players start out in the Ghostbusters’ headquarters, which has been properly equipped with a true-to-life fire pole for you to slide down on. Ray takes you through the basics of wrangling ghosts, trapping them, and using your gear down in the basement. One of the first things you will notice is that the controls feel very familiar, resembling those of games such as Resident Evil 4/5 and Gears of War. Still comparing it to a shooter, your proton pack takes the place of your “gun,” and your “ammo” consists of different types of particle streams. You can unlock four streams throughout the game, starting with your basic proton stream. The Stasis Stream, Meson Collider, and Slime Gun follow suit quickly. The most useful is the Proton Stream, which weakens ghosts and stuns them so you can wrangle, toss, and then hopefully trap them. Ghosts come in many shapes and forms, and it is rare to see so many different enemy types and level bosses in a game. These include many of the ghosts from the movies. You will be battling the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, heading through the Sedgewick Hotel and the Haunted Library.
Each ghost has a weakness for a specific weapon type. To find out which type is effective, you must scan them with your goggles. Doing so will also reveal all sorts of other interesting and sometimes ludicrous information. Some ghosts are dispersible, which means that they die after a few hits with a certain weapon, but others must be trapped instead. The objective is to weaken them until their health bar turns red, after which you can trap the suckers. Walking around with your energy detector is good for finding artifacts—treasures that you get money for—and enemies.
Upgrading your weapons will improve them in various ways. You can increase a weapon’s rate of fire, make it overheat less often, or let you trap your enemies faster. All of these upgrades can be purchased in one play-through. Ghostbusting is a high-revenue business, and you will earn ample money to purchase any upgrade that catches your fancy. You are also tallied by how much damage you cause the city throughout your play. Doing too much damage may affect achievements.
The gameplay may sound simple, and it is, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it is extremely fun. There is always something new to be experienced, and only towards the end of the game did I feel some repetition setting in. Ghostbusters kind of felt like a mix of Gears of War, BioShock, and Silent Hill. It can be downright creepy at times, but it also has wonderfully witty humor and some great lighting effects that help create a fantastic ambiance. Walking through dark hallways, your senses are always stimulated in various ways. Things may jump out at you, or you will hear strange cries and screams. Besides being scary, it is also immersive; I left the game after about a four-hour sit-down, and I really felt like I was a Ghostbuster (don’t call the men with the long-sleeved jacket until you have played for four hours straight yourself!). This is in large part due to the fact that the original actors are voicing the game, and I think that’s what truly made the difference.
The game is actually based on the script written by Harold Ramis and Dan Akroyd that was never made into a third movie. There are a lot of tidbits in the dialog that relate back to the original 1984 classic. This game can be played by both fans and nonfans, but it is truly geared toward fans of the movie. You can safely say this game is one of the best movie-licensed translations ever made.
Ghostbusters is just one of those amazing and immersive games that make you all giddy inside. The game truly has an amazing effect on its players. It may not have a lot of depth, but it easily makes up for that in the fun department. It is worth noting that Ghostbusters is a little on the short side, giving you about 6 to 8 hours of gameplay. Fortunately, the replay value is fairly high, making this a recommended buy. I really hope there is a sequel. Playing Ghostbusters has been one hell of a ride.
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Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !