We all know what to expect from games that are launched alongside brand new consoles, and that isn’t very much. Launch titles are usually just a handful of games that kind of give us a taste of what the new console is capable of and nothing more. Kameo was just one of those games with beautiful graphics (for its time, even) and fun gameplay, and well, that’s about it. Kameo fails to develop a really good story and characters to be in that story, but what there is works, and it’s enough to keep you hooked for the 5–6 hours you spend playing this.
Kameo is an elf (they can fly now?) whose sister betrayed their kingdom and woke an evil troll named Thorn. The whole game is about you setting elements free and using them to work your way to Thorn. There are 10 elements altogether, and each of them is well designed and very unique in its own rights. Kameo is a platformer developed by Rare, so you kind of know what to expect here. Surprisingly (for a rare game), Kameo is fairly easy, and the only frustrating moments are bugs or design flaws rather than mechanical issues with controls or cameras. The game is peppered with collision detection issues and just overall errors. These don’t hinder the play but tend to make you more frustrated than you should be. Anyway, most of the game consists of you switching between these elemental creatures and using them to kill enemies and solve simple puzzles. For example, the first elemental you’ll get is pummelweed, which is a plant that can go underground, uppercut, and do jabs. You may need him to get under low-hanging doors or walls or use him against specific enemies. A second creature you get is Ash; he is a dragon that shoots balls of fire, and you can use him as a flamethrower.
Some enemies are weaker against him than others, so there is a strategy that comes into play here. Elementals can be changed on the fly via the four face buttons, and attacks are done with the triggers. You can go into your Wotnot (book) and assign different creatures to your buttons. Of course, you have to catch these creatures by finding shadow trolls and defeating them in the manner of throwing light trolls at them. Once the troll is defeated, you absorb your elemental (and get an achievement!). Your main goal is to rescue your family members, and this is down to epic boss fights (that can be TOO tough). At the end of each level, you get to fight a huge boss that involves using certain elementals (usually the ones you’ve most recently captured).
Now you can upgrade your creature’s powers by finding fruits around the world or buying them with coins. These powers are needed to become more powerful and help you through the entire game. Of course, finding all these fruits is nonsense, knowing they are rare, so just finding the ones you come across is sufficient. The game also sports a co-op mode, so you and a buddy can have fun with the baddies in this game, or you can do a time trial mode or a “level-by-level” mode where enemies get increasingly harder. I find all these modes uninteresting since once you beat the main game, you’ll be pretty sick of this game to begin with anyway. The game is very repetitive, even though there are multiple creatures to play, as they all end up being the same in the end.
The only really awesome part is mowing down thousands of trolls with a charging horse in the Badlands (between levels, you do this to save shield generators), which really showed off how many enemies can be shown on-screen at the same time. I have to admit that the enemy AI is pretty decent, so don’t get the game wrong there. There are some downloadable costumes for Kameo, but for some reason, the game never recognized them. I have no idea why. If you skipped out on this launch title, I suggest you go pick it up for less than $10 pretty much anymore.
Fable II is another Western RPG that really tries to use a lot of action mixed with RPG elements and tag a good story in it. Fable was a big deal when it came out because it was one of the few games that let you choose to be good or evil with every single task they threw at you. Everything you did affected how the game turned out, and these included things from terrorizing towns with crude expressions to giving money to a church. Fable II continues: There are tons of things for you to do and tons of ways to go about doing so. When you start the game, you are introduced to the story, and you get to choose your main character. Whether it be a boy or a girl, it is your choice. As a child, you go about performing small tasks to get used to the idea of how to play the game. These range from finding things for people to helping children fend off bullies. This is also a crucial point in the game for heading down your good or evil path. You can choose to give arrest warrants that you find to the sheriff or give them to the criminals for a reward.
The whole game evolves like this, and it really makes an impact later on. Once you get the hang of the game, you can equip better weapons, buy food, potions, etc. One great thing about Fable II is that you get a dog by your side, and he helps you hunt out treasure chests and places to dig. You can upgrade him by finding or buying books that will upgrade his hunting abilities. Your dog also helps you in battle, and if he gets too hurt, you can heal him; also, mind you, he can play a part in expressions (more on those later). Surprisingly, the AI for the dog is done very well, and he looks, sounds, and acts like a real dog. Rarely did he get in the way or couldn’t find his way around an obstacle, and the same goes for enemies as well. While you can buy more powerful weapons (blunt, slashing, stabbing, you know the type) to kill enemies, there is no armor for you to buy.
All you can do is buy clothes, and these just add to your looks, which affect other things in the game (more on socializing later). The game consists of three different elements to upgrade with: skill (ranged weapons), will (magic), and strength (melee). You upgrade yourself by absorbing the appropriate orbs after defeating an enemy or using the appropriate potion. It takes a while to start getting the higher-level stuff, but once you get further into the game, you earn experience more quickly. You can customize your character a lot by buying tattoos, getting makeup done, etc. You can also even dye your clothes now, which is cool.
Combat in the game is pretty simple yet satisfying. You use X to attack, Y for range, and B for magic. Melee attacks can be charged, while ranged weapons have other abilities like a TPS (third-person shooter) mode, lock-on, etc. Magic is a bit different this time around since you have a “Magic Tree” that you access by holding down the RT, and this brings up a series of bubbles. Each bubble is a higher level, and you just equip which spell you want in each bubble. For example, if you have a level 1 shock, level 2 blades, and level 3 wind, you hold down the B button and let go when you get to the spell you want. This is really easy to use, and I found it very useful. While combat is a large portion of the game, socializing has always been a huge part of Fable, and Fable II expands on this quite a bit. You can now get jobs, and these range from blacksmithing to bartending. While these jobs are tedious, they are almost required to earn a lot of gold to buy better items. These jobs are timing mini-games and can be pretty difficult to master. Each job has five different levels, and you have to earn a certain amount of gold on each level before moving on. One important thing to note is that you can never die! When you “die,” you just lose all the experience that’s lying around on the ground. This can either be great or bad for you, depending on your playing style.
Now Fable II has a whole marriage, child, and sex thing, and it’s very useful if you want it. You have expressions you learn in the game by becoming more renowned in the world by completing tasks. Certain expressions can be used to flirt, be rude, make people laugh, etc. When you use these expressions, you’ll attract people, and eventually someone might start liking you so much that they’ll offer gifts and even fall in love with you. When they do, you offer them a wedding ring and set your home (more on buying a property later) as the marital home, and you’re married. You have to go back sometime and visit your spouse, or they will start hating you and eventually divorce you. You can have sex (yes, it’s blacked out, you pervs!) either protected or unprotected, and this can lead to childbirth. Sometimes having unprotected sex with prostitutes can lead to STDs, and you don’t want to get those. Often, you must come back and give your child a gift and use good expressions on them to keep them happy.
Expressions are really a good way to scare people during combat or to get your way in towns. You can also buy property, houses, and even furniture and furnish them to your liking. If you don’t want to move into one, you can rent it out. The same goes with stores, and you just accumulate income as time goes on. If you want, you can set a budget limit for your family to keep them happy so you can visit them less. This is great once you start buying a lot of property around the world. While the world is huge with lots of areas to visit, they are all broken up with fairly long load times (even when the game is ripped to the HDD). There is a lot to do in the world of Albion, such as solve Demon Door quests, hunt for treasure, finish jobs and side quests, etc.
You really never run out of things to do; it’s just that when you decide the game is over, that’s all up to you. The game looks absolutely amazing, and you often stop and look at the scenery and take it all in. Fable II is one of the best-looking games right now, and the sound is even more marvelous. Fable II is just such a charming game (the pub games are confusing, though!) with a few minor flaws that can be overlooked. Often, combat feels tedious after a while, and the main story is still pretty short. While there’s a lot more to do, it’s all repetitive quests and other things to do. If you get too bored, you can join in the co-op play, but even then, you’ll get bored after about 20 hours or so.
The Sands of Time trilogy was probably one of the best game series ever made, let alone a few diverse series, with each game completely evolving from the other. When the series started with The Sands of Time, everyone completely freaked out on their consoles with the game’s great acrobatic moves, enticing story, and beautiful graphics. The game just felt so good and played so well that the controller almost melted in your hand. The return of Warrior Within the Prince kind of went to the dark side with a grungy, heavy metal, gory sequel that was either hate or love it type thing. I, however, considered that one my favorite, but fans were pleased again with Two Thrones when the Prince actually got a dark side and went back to the style of the first game. If you loved this game, you should go back and play the previous trilogy, because I promise you’ll fall in love with it.
The PoP we are playing has a completely different story, and hell, the Prince isn’t even a prince; he’s a thief who wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time whilst running into Princess Elika. The Prince and Elika play major roles in this wonderfully made game, and it all actually works. The first thing I need to explain is that the core of the gameplay is like the previous PoP games, with the whole acrobatic aspect still intact. However, the prince now has a gauge that he uses to help him with all of this. The controls have been simplified so that everything is just one button press. Yes, let go of that analog stick because you just use it to point the Prince where you want to go, not guide him. He can run across walls, run up walls, swing around poles, climb on vines, shimmy across ledges, etc. The game controls so incredibly well, and with a few minor issues, you really won’t hate the controls. Another major change is that the game is open-world, so you can go anywhere you want in this huge world.
The point of the game is to stop Arihman from destroying the world with corruption and, in turn, save Elika’s father, Ormazd. While there are over 30 areas to explore, you can go to them however you want using the acrobatic moves. Yes, this can get tedious after a while because once you discover everything, you’ll have to backtrack to the temple to acquire new powers. These are four powers that are activated on various colored power plates on walls, and they are key to accessing new Fertile Grounds. Each section is a “mini-level” with various obstacles to cross, and just before fertile ground is a boss fight. Navigating the world can be a bit confusing in the beginning since you’ll be relying on a “compass” that’ll guide you to where you want to go depending on what area you select on your map. The point of healing for each area is to rid itself of the corruption killing that piece of land. Of course, you can’t touch this corruption, or, well, you don’t die in this game. Elika saves you if you fall off a ledge, so consider any flat ground a checkpoint.
During combat, you cannot die either, and you may think this is absurd, but it is a blessing. Trying to find light seeds (after you heal a ground, you go back and collect these to gain new powers) can be kind of hard, so you jump off a cliff to reach one, and if you fail, no big deal. This is better than restarting a level, but of course, if it’s open-world, you can’t technically restart a level. Elika is also a big part of your acrobatics because if you can’t reach a ledge, you press Y when you jump, and she’ll give you a boost. This is also true in combat, where she is basically your “magic” attack. Moving through the levels is fairly easy, and I didn’t once have to resort to an FAQ of any kind. The compass is a great way to find out where to go since it’s a little light that kind of goes along a path, and you can follow it. Of course, finding all 1001 light seeds isn’t necessary since you’ll find plenty to acquire all powers without having to hunt and search for each seed.
Now, when it comes to combat, you’re in for quite a treat since combat is very cinematic. Everything is “one-on-one,” and each enemy has a life bar that you may deplete. You have four major attacks: magic, acrobatics, grab, and sword. You can combine any four of these to make huge combos. Of course, corruption plays a huge role, so if the enemy changes status, you can only use a certain attack to break through it. While each character technically plays the same, you have to use time-button presses to fend off their attacks. This can make things fun and challenging at the same time. The combat is very rewarding with the dramatic sweeping camera angles and beautifully scored music. Of course, after a while, it starts feeling really old, but not enough to really bore you since it always keeps you on your toes.
If you want to talk about cosmetics, PoP is probably one of the best-looking games ever made so far. The game is just stunningly beautiful, and there are high perches you can stand on and just look out to this beautiful vista that is amazingly rendered in real-time. I don’t know how Ubi did it, but they pulled off some amazing stuff to get the game to look the way it does. The soundtrack is really stunning as well (even though there’s not much of it), and the voice acting is top-notch. You are really in love with these two characters, and they struggle with the world around them and with each other. The Prince tends to be a sarcastic, hot-headed wannabe hero, and Elika is a confused woman/goodie-two-shoes who is always putting the Prince’s fire out. There are so many amazing elements to PoP; you just have to play it to really know it all. With a great cliffhanger ending, a great way to control the ending, great controls, cinematic combat, and beautiful graphics, you will spend a good 10 to 12 hours exploring this world.
Everybody knows and loves Lara Croft from way way back in 1996, when she starred on the PlayStation as the busty, sexy British female adventurer that everyone has grown to love over the past decade. Tomb Raider: Underworld really expands off the recent TR games with better environments, more brain-bending puzzles, less linearity, and more moves than you can count. Tomb Raider has always been about exploration and finding the best route using the environment, and this is still the core gameplay element used. The story of Underworld picks off where Legend (read my review for that) ends with Amanda on the loose and Lara trying to find her way into Atlantis to find her dead mother. While most of the story doesn’t pick up until the very end, there is enough incentive to keep you playing and motivated to press on.
The main element I need to talk about is just how much more detailed this game is. While most of the problems still exist, they can easily be overlooked with all the new features and elements added to the game. The first thing you’ll notice is how much more real Lara looks, feels, and moves around in the game. It’s just amazing to see Lara push brush out of her way, move to and fro in 360-degree motion with her stopping and starting really quick, the way she climbs, the way she places her hands and feet while climbing—it all just looks so damn good and real. The best thing about this is that the controls are still responsive and, most of the time, will do what you want. When you are swinging around poles, climbing walls, or hanging from ledges, you can pretty much get where you need to go with minute problems from the camera and some iffy collision detection issues. A lot of times Lara will jump in the wrong direction because of the finicky camera; she’ll fall off an edge you know you didn’t slip from, but all these are easily overlooked.
Now that all the climbing action is still the same and hasn’t changed much, the new animations, better controls, and sheer freedom you have really make it feel fresh again. Still staying in the action, the combat is exactly the same as before, and this is disappointing. The developers seemed to have taken the slo-mo headshot element from Anniversary and mixed it with Legend’s combat, and you get what you get: Simple lock-on combat with dodges and flips that don’t really do much. While the camera keeps up with the action, there’s nothing much to do but shoot your heart out. You can, however, throw grenades, and this really helps in tight situations. With all of that out of the way, let’s talk cosmetics.
Yes, the game looks absolutely stunning and is one of the better next-gen games as of yet. Everything is just huge and detailed. The sheer scope of the levels will make your jaw drop and make you think, “How the hell am I going to get up there?” This doesn’t just include land; it is also underwater. You will partake in two levels where you are hundreds of feet under the ocean, and it will take a good 4-5 minutes just to swim everywhere. The game really leads away from linearity with massive scope in the levels, and this usually leads to treasure hunting. Throughout the levels, you’ll find silver vases or just objects lying around as treasures for you to pick up. These will unlock extra content when you beat the game, so you must keep an eye out for them. Thankfully, they are easier to get to and easier to spot than in previous TR games, so you can relax. There’s just something great about this game that makes it different from other TR games, and the only thing I can think of is its pure epicness. Running around (yes, they added a run button!) in a sinking boat with a beautiful, sweeping orchestral soundtrack playing in the background just wows you every single time.
The game really does a good job mixing up exploration with action, and it also helps build upon Lara’s character. She is wiser, knows more, is a lot older with bitterness in her heart, and is holding onto all she can to keep from becoming corrupted like the enemies of her past. You really see this and how calloused her personality has become since she is no longer cheerful and happy but bitter and angry, with powerful rage flowing through her veins. The game just becomes so epic and amazing in the end that you wind up forgetting about all the gameplay flaws, and you feel very satisfied in the end. The main reason for this is that puzzles really bend your mind in just the right way to make you smile every time you solve a puzzle that expands an entire level.
Underworld requires you to take everything in and divide it into chunks instead of just looking and solving. Most levels will have you going from room to room to find pieces of a bigger puzzle, and this is actually better in the end. A small feature added is the ability to choose your weapons at the beginning of each level and your outfit. This is really useful and lets you mix things up for multiple playthroughs. There are other elements added to the game, such as your Gauntlets, which let you move certain heavier objects around rooms, Thor’s hammer (which you get toward the end), which is a one-hit kill scenario, and not to mention all the cool gadgets such as better binoculars (it’s actually a DV camera), your grapple hook, etc. You also get your bike back, but this time you get to control where you want to go. In Legend, you just drove straight, avoiding things along a linear path, but this time you drove it around and even used it to solve a few puzzles.
Underworld really is for hardcore Tomb Raider fans, and newbies really won’t like this much unless they get hooked on previous games. With gorgeous graphics, a great ending to a great story, our favorite female protagonist, and a few gameplay flaws, you will have a blast with Underworld.
Legendary is yet another game this year that has been released and has totally let all of us FPS fans down, but what a surprise, right? FPS games are probably the most prone to failing terribly due to lazy level design, bad stories, bad physics, and anything else you put in an FPS. Unfortunately, Legendary does almost everything wrong and hardly anything right, but you can still squeeze a few drops of fun out of this weekend rental. Legendary puts you up against Pandora’s Box’s creatures that start taking over and destroying the world while trying to be controlled by the evil LeFey.
While the plot sounds semi-interesting, it takes a face dive right into a mud pit once you start playing since you don’t really give a crap after about thirty minutes. If playing the game is hard enough as it is, the mechanics the game is built around are totally slapped together and not very well done. Even when I saw videos of this game, I knew it didn’t look complete, and they actually shipped the game unfinished. First and foremost, the main culprit is the Unreal 3 engine. Now, I’m not bashing the engine at all; it’s just that many developers tend to think U3 will make the game for them, and they just have to tell it what to do, which is not the case. There are a lot of similarities to BioShock, in fact, from the animus powers shooting out of your hand (with almost exact animations) to the same glowy look on everything you interact with. While the game looks halfway decent, everything looks like it was copied and pasted into the game instead of built there. You’re wandering around a war-torn London and New York, and you don’t even feel like you’re there since the game doesn’t replicate the cities at all, not even famous landscapes for Christ’s sake! On top of this, the physics are way off, and everything seems to stick like glue or something, and it’s just really weird. There’s terrible collision detection where enemies will go through walls, stick there, and start flopping around.
This is also coupled with cramped levels and linear levels, and everything just looks the same. Turn this wheel here, kill these creatures here, shoot these wire suspensions here, and bypass this keypad here. The game is very tedious, completely retarded, and put together so poorly. Even moving your character is a pain since when you get hit on one side, you stop moving that way for some strange reason, and I have no idea why. You’ll be strafing left and then get attacked by your left, but you just stop dead in your tracks, and you have to jam the stick left a few times before even moving again. The guns don’t feel powerful at all and are just completely retarded with almost no recoil; they are all standard, such as shotguns, machine guns, rocket launchers, and a weak pistol that does NOTHING. The most original weapon is probably an axe, but even the more powerful weapons take a while to tear down foes coming after you. The enemies are just absurdly difficult to bring down, even in the easiest setting. For some unknown reason, the weakest enemy (blood spiders) just swarms after you, and you have to find the sac holding them. Getting there can be a pain since this leads into the lame healing system. Other enemies range from werewolves, minotaurs, and griffons—you name it.
These are cool enemies and shouldn’t have anything go wrong, but it does anyway! They throw so many enemies at you, and you never feel powerful enough to take them down, so you’re constantly scrounging your health with the difficult healing system. You have this power from your hand called Animus, so you take Animus Clouds from dead creatures, and you use this for health. You hold down Y to take it, but it takes so long to absorb it all, and this is not good when you have a ton of guys shooting at you or creatures clawing at you. You hold down Y again to heal yourself, but as you can see, using the same button to heal and absorb is not going to work very well. When you’re near clouds, you absorb them instead of healing, and vice versa. If you double-tap Y (why are we double-tapping with so many buttons?) you can do an animus push to stun enemies, and this does absolutely nothing. Now, when it comes back to combat, you can’t use any melee attacks; there is no cover system. NOTHING, ZERO, ZILCH, SQUAT! You have to hide behind everything and peek out like a stupid old PlayStation game from six years ago. This makes things ridiculously annoying during the unbalanced levels that are badly designed.
This game just has so many things wrong that you wonder what there is to like. Well, it’s for the sheer epicness that the game seems to pull off with a 300-foot Golem, a HUGE Kraken you fight in London, and even the giant Griffons are cool to kill. If you can bear through this 6-7-hour campaign, you can find some fun in this game. With a different story, decent graphics, cool enemies, and lots of big bosses, you can have fun all at once. Legendary, this definitely is not.
Well, here we are again sitting around the Bond fire (LAWL!), but seriously, who still likes James Bond after five different actors and twenty different movies? Does Bond ever age? Does he ever get a vacation without it turning into a firefight? How many mysterious foreign chicks does he need to bang before he realizes he should retire and get married already? Seriously, no one will be as good as Sean Connery, and Daniel Craig can’t even pull off Bond to save his life. This dude is a serious joke, but thankfully you won’t even care when you play this stupid yet fun game. This is one of those sleeper hits that has a retarded story and gameplay, yet you still finish the whole thing because it’s just stupid fun. Kind of like bathroom jokes; they don’t do any harm or good, yet they are still fun to say and laugh about over and over again. Quantum of Solace is like the bathroom joke of a sleeper hit FPS; you have your basic follow-up, and the punchline is what keeps you laughing. While you can completely forget about the retarded story about Bond and some terrorist dudes who are doing this and that I have no freaking clue and I don’t care, Daniel Craig has bits of his voice in the game, and his model has one expression that never seems to change.
While this game is seriously flawed, there are a lot of good things to keep you playing (rent it only!). The game looks really good; while not superb, it can pass off as an above-average next-gen game, which is a plus. Secondly, the game has super awesome guns, and they all feel really powerful. While they have more acronyms than a NASA space launch, you have your pistols, silenced pistols, submachine guns, sniper rifles, etc. While they aren’t anything new, they look cool, feel powerful, and sound cool, and they all go BOOM! You also have grenades, which are kind of retarded since you only get to carry one grenade at a time! The game actually has a semi-useful cover system that is both great and flawed at the same time. While you can sprint around and stuff, you can hit A to dash into cover (think Gears of War), and you have your typical blind firing and all that covering crap. The flawed part is that when you get hit by a grenade, you suddenly stand up. If you aim too far to your sides, Bond tends to stick his head out, and you can easily get killed this way.
Basically, the gunplay is your typical standard FPS stuff with retarded AI to boot. You’ll have swarms of guys coming after you, and they just stand there and let you blow them apart. Speaking of blowing apart, the game has an “environmental damage” system where you can shoot flashing objects to damage enemies (like we haven’t seen that before!). This actually does help when you have seven guys under a wooden platform full of explosive barrels. Shooting those support beams is just oh-so-awesome. The game is full of adrenaline-pumping sequences like your OMG!! button-pressing cutscenes (which are actually fun), and this is where you really feel like Bond, so that’s always a plus on the cinematic side. Since this is a Bond game, you can use stealth in a lot of the levels, but it’s very shallow and not implemented well. It really feels like an old PlayStation or an N64 game where you just hide behind a wall, dodge this camera’s spotlight, disable that camera, and shoot that guard. The cameras don’t even notice when you pop some lead into a guy’s head right in the camera’s view. I don’t know what the developers were trying to prove except for the fact that using old mechanics in 2008 doesn’t work too well.
A lot of times you’ll not know what to do, and you’ll blow your cover due to trial and error (again, a 10-year-old thing), and you have to restart all over again (if you want to stay stealthy). So, you can sneak around, but it feels really old and doesn’t really work out too well. Of course, you have to have some Bond moves to perform, and this is done by pressing the L stick and pushing the on-screen button and watching a 2-3 hit instant kill! While this is cool, the animations get repetitive. When the camera pulls back into first-person mode, you get disoriented since sometimes the game will flip you around, and it’s too easy to do. It’s cool sneaking up behind a guy and pulling off a Bond movie, but after about twenty times, you’ll get sick of it. Another thing I didn’t like was that there were no driving sequences. What’s a Bond game with no driving?! There is, however, a cool train sequence that is pretty cool, with you decoupling cars, jumping from decoupled cars, and just all that cool Bond stuff. While that’s the basic gameplay, you can see there is a lot missing that should have been in here.
With the mechanics feeling about 10 years old, this really drags the experience down, and after a while, the game feels more like a chore that you’re forced to play. Thankfully, the game isn’t very long at all since you can beat it in about 6–7 hours. The multiplayer is OK, but nothing super special—just your standard FPS online action—and you won’t be coming back for this often since the mechanics are somewhat flawed. I really loved this game, though, since there were a lot of explosions, shooting, sneaking, Bond moves, and cool locales. If you want an awesome weekend rental, pick this up, and you’ll have a blast.
Ahhh…here we are again with the cunning, brave, smart, posh, sexy, and beautiful Lara Croft. Most people overlook the game when they see a half-naked chick on the cover, but Tomb Raider is one of the few (only?) “chick” games that are actually good. Everyone and their mothers have heard of Tomb Raider or Lara Croft as “the game about shooting animals in ruins and sex,” so if you’re reading this, you’re either a fan or one of the latter. While Tomb Raider has absolutely nothing to do with anything sexual, Lara’s skimpy style can contradict that.
The series has always been known for its intricate puzzles, great platforming, and beautiful tombs, ruins, and vistas to explore. Tomb Raider: Legend is the first TR game since the PSX days to be actually good and worth playing. With the first 2 TR games being great, the series started falling with 3, got saved with 4 (The Last Revelation), and just went downhill with 5 (Chronicles) and 6 (Angel of Darkness). TRL revives the series by making us feel familiar and redoing everything we’ve grown to love. The game’s story is also very interesting, mainly for fans of Lara who want to know more about her past. Lara is trying to find the pieces of the Excalibur sword that killed her mother, and she runs into ghosts of her past that come back to haunt her. While the story is teeter-tottering on the edge of bleh, it does get interesting and saves itself at the end with a twist. TR has not been famous for its stories, so let’s get right into the adventure! The game seems to have tried too hard to bring the series back since the game is really short (6 hours you can beat the game) and there are too many levels to explore, so you don’t get a lot of feeling for one level.
Everything about TR’s platforming is still here, so you can either stop reading now or carry on if you are a skeptical action/adventure fan trying to find a new series to get into because you’re bored. The whole game is about puzzles that use the environment and include hanging, swinging, jumping, pole climbing, rope swinging, and zip-lining. Most of the game is pretty easy to figure out where to go since you get a grapple that lets you pull boxes off ledges, bring certain things down to climb across, and even use it to swing across chasms. A lot of items you use with the grapple hook have a shiny gold bit on them, so you know to grapple there; otherwise, you’d spend hours trying to grapple every object in the game. A lot of puzzles are usually lever and switch puzzles, with you pulling statues onto this pressure switch to lower this bridge and pulling this block across onto this switch to raise the gate. Most are simple, but some are unique and fun and have you climbing huge cliffs, walls, and statues to push giant balls (haha!) off ledges to use down below. A lot of the platforming is fun and awesome, with ledges crumbling away, swinging across poles onto ropes, etc.
Not one situation is the same, and that’s what’s so great about the TR series; you’ll have something new to figure out. Jumping around these beautiful environments is easy thanks to the responsive controls, great animations, and a good camera (most of the time). When you jump to a ledge and there’s a wall behind you, the camera will swing out to the side so you can see the whole 30-foot pillar you’re supposed to climb. This works in every type of situation, and the camera does a good job following you. The only time it gets weird is when you’re in tight spaces, when the camera doesn’t know what to do and has seizures. You wind up exploring places such as Japan, Bolivia, Nepal, Kazakhstan, and others. These range from jungles to dark tombs, snow, and even the city. What I found odd was Lara climbing around in buildings like in Japan (she wears a damn sexy dress on that level) and a military base in Kazakhstan, so this can be weird for longtime fans. The whole thing fits well, but it just seems out of place compared to past games.
Combat is also the second thing you’ll be doing the most, and while it’s easy, repetitive, and not amazing, it works and you won’t get annoyed. You just lock onto an enemy and fire away with your pistols, machine guns, or shotguns you find lying around off of enemies. If you get too hurt, you can use health packs lying around as well. While you’ll spend most of your time fighting brain-dead enemies that just stand there and fire at you, you can use the objects in the environment to kill enemies, like barrels, tanks, and even snapping things to make them fall. So while the combat is nothing interesting or fantastic, it’s there, and it works well for what the game can offer. The camera stays behind you well enough when you’re locked on, but Lara will lock onto enemies off-screen a wee bit too often, forcing you to target them yourself.
A new part of TR is the motorcycle driving section. These can be fun and annoying since the physics are a bit weird and the checkpoints are punishing. You just shoot baddies off their bikes while you go off jumps and make your way through. Another added idea is button-pressing cinematics, which are cool to look at and a lot of fun. What makes them so fun is why you have to do them. A lot of the time, it’ll be the most intense part of the game, so you really get into it. The boss fights are also another cool part of the game since they are a bit easy, but they are big and cool, so you’ll have tons of fun with them.
Now that we have two main elements out of the way, let’s talk about cosmetics. Lara’s whole appearance has changed, and she looks so much better. Gone are her sunglasses and the F-size boobs, along with her usual outfit. Lara has different outfits she wears throughout the game, and they are all hot and sexy, and they make Lara look smart and sharp as well. Her breast size has been reduced to DD (boohoo…), and her main outfit is now a brown belly top with shorts, and I prefer this over the old one. She wears an earpiece now, and she no longer has a braided ponytail. Along with Lara looking amazing, she also gets dirty and wet (oh, if only…). When she climbs out of the water, her clothes look wet, and dirt sticks to her as well, so this adds to the realism. She also has a personal light now, so exploring dark places is no longer a problem. The sound is also great with Lara’s charming British accent, and everyone’s voice acting is top-notch.
With new characters aplenty, you’ll expect to like them all, but actually, you won’t. They are underdeveloped and wind up annoying you with their stupid comments over the radio, so the only character you’ll love is Lara. Apart from all of this, the game has replay value with a time trial mode, Croft Manor (where you unlock certain areas to get rewards), and cheats. Doing all of this will grant you new costumes, concept art, profiles, and more. So, as you can see, there is so much to love about TRL, and fans who have hated the series can come back since TR is getting better and better as time goes by. Give the ‘ol girl a second chance and explore her tombs (awww, yeah).
For one, I rarely buy games like this on day one without knowing that I’ll at least want to play them 2 or 3 times, and Mirror’s Edge was a great buy, but I wish I would have waited for a price drop first. Now don’t get me wrong, go spend $60 on this and you’ll have one hell of a time, but for the length and content, ME cuts it a bit short. ME is a parkour/free running/building jumping/limber skinny people running around like monkeys on rooftops game and is very well executed.
The first thing I’d like to mention is the warming soundtrack EA created for this game. EA has finally listened to the fans and got rid of the horrible EA Trax, a bunch of wannabe punk and metal bands mixed with lame hip-hop and R&B that everyone with half a brain and decency turns off. EA’s new IPs (Dead Space and ME) have an original, rich soundtrack that fits the game very well. ME has a slow, soothing OST with lots of low basses and some poppy techno thrown in. The game’s main theme by Lisa Miskovsy (ironically titled “Still Alive”) is a charming song that really gets the feeling of the game across. A woman and message deliverer for the resistance named Faith, who’s sister was framed for murder, must find the killer of the person her sister, Kate, was framed for, and must bring all of this to an end. In a rebuilt city corrupt and full of backstabbers, Faith must scour the rooftops to find entrances into buildings to find her targets.
Scouring these rooftops is both fun and beautiful, thanks to the game’s amazing graphics. EA’s next-gen engine (used and updated from Skate.) makes ME one of the best-looking games ever made. Everything is highly detailed, with buildings as far as the eye can see, reflections off of windows, and everything is just highly detailed. The game looks similar to Portal (hmmm…just mere coincidences here?) with lots of HDR lighting and lots of blinding whites, blues, reds, and oranges. The art style really helps the game’s feel and works brilliantly. The cut scenes, however, are a bit different and detract from the feel of the game with cell shading similar to those Esurance commercials (with that hot pink-haired Esurance chick that has tons of porn available everywhere). While this style works, it really is a detraction from the actual game. The voice acting is really good here, and the characters are decent except Faith, who is the only character you get attached to thanks to the game’s absurdly short length (6–8 hours, depending on how you play).
Now back to how the game plays: it plays well and feels well, with a few flaws. The game’s control scheme has its plate full of lots of different button combos that take a little while to get used to, let alone master. You have all of the parkour moves available to you, such as building jumping, wall running, pole swinging, zip lines, three-step jumps (LB, RB, LB), wall climbing, shimmying, etc. Additionally, you can make runs faster by pulling your legs up instead of double-stepping jumps or hopping over rails. This makes time trials go faster and keeps your speed up. Finding your way in ME is fairly simple since you have “runner’s vision,” which makes certain items turn red, and you use them according to what they are. Boards leading off buildings usually mean to jump down; small objects in front of a larger object mean you double-step your jump and vault to a ledge; you can crawl in vents; and a lot of the time you must climb poles attached to walls and even jump to them! The game is fast and very smooth, and you don’t have to be afraid of sluggish controls. The whole game is responsive and reacts to your commands.
The biggest flaw in the game, however, is the combat. Most of your enemies have guns, and you don’t. This always proves a problem. Most of the time, you just run away, but when you’re forced to fight, you must take on 5+ enemies in one room using melee combat, jumping kicks, sliding kicks to the nuts, etc. The combat itself works well, but actually using it against enemies with machine guns, shotguns, etc. doesn’t work out too well. Try taking down five guys in one room with shotguns just with your fists—not too easy. This requires disarming (timing is a must, of course) and either using their guns against other enemies in classic FPS action or just being very fast and outsmarting the enemy with kicks off of walls and all that. While the combat is manageable, it’s flawed and makes up most of the trial-and-error in the game. The game has little trial and error outside of combat since most of the deaths are on the player. Try finding out where to go without a runner’s vision while 10 guys are shooting at you; that can be very tough to do, and in some spots, I had to try 20+ times just to get it all right.
With that flaw aside, ME proves to be an amazing game and should be played by all FPS fans, Parkour fans, or just action-adventure game fans (PoP fans can come out of hiding now!) With ME’s wonderful soundtrack, graphics, art style, story, and gameplay, you will stay busy with the time trials and speed run. I hope ME2 improves upon all of this, and I will be there when it comes out.
When I saw the Pure demo on XBLM, I just blew it off. After seeing how people were having so much fun with the game, I downloaded the demo, and boy, was I in for a treat! The game was super fast, super easy to play, and super beautiful! One thing I just have to say is that I was surprised at how great the game looked. The game is truly next-gen, with beautiful open, soaring vistas, crisp blue lakes, and waterfalls. Free-flowing grass, flowers, and weeds. Mud that really sticks to your ride and makes you feel like you’re slipping around in the mud. The game is just so beautiful to look at, especially when you’re going 120 mph over 200-foot jumps off cliffs! Yeah, this game is all about tricks, speed, and pure awesomeness (maybe this is why they just named it Pure so you can fill in the rest?). The game really feels fast, but the tracks are open and big enough for you to slip and slide around without feeling cramped.
The name of the game is all about building your ride and doing tricks (ok, the name is actually Pure, but work with me!) When you start out, you can build your ride from scratch, and I mean straight from the frame, and you add shocks, tires, drums, brakes, the body, footrests, and the whole nine yards. You can even change what your hand bars look like, the color, the decals—I mean, customizing your ride is insanely detailed, and nothing like this has been done in an ATV game before. Of course, you can pick your characters as well, but there’s no customization in that, and I thought that was pretty lame since you look at your character more than your ride anyway. You can unlock new parts and upgrades for your ATV as you win races (yes, 1st place at every event, or you don’t get the good stuff). There are plenty of parts, and you slowly get better and better upgrades to keep up with the competition, so there are no worries on that part, and as you unlock more ATV slots, you can just make endless different types of ATVs.
You’re probably wondering what it’s like to actually race, right? Well, that’s the best part! You preload your jumps like in all ATV racing games, and you press the right stick in any direction plus one of the face buttons to do a trick. Ok, it’s a lot more involved than that, and there is a unique twist to all of this here. The trick system is integrated into the boost system, so you can spend your boost with the X button as normal, or you can save it and unlock new buttons to perform new tricks as your bar fills up. Get it halfway up, and you get the B button, which lets you do intermediate tricks, and these take longer to pull off than the A button tricks. Get your bar almost all the way up, and you unlock the Y button tricks. These are the cooler, more advanced tricks that take the longest. Get your bar all the way up, and you get a special trick bonus. You can perform a special trick by pressing the right stick in any direction plus pressing the RB+LB buttons. This takes a good 4-5 seconds to pull off, so only do this on the super high jumps! But wait, there’s more!
You just can’t keep pulling off the same trick over and over since there is a rating system. Every time you do a new trick, you’ll get a “Fresh!” star next to the name of the trick; do it again and you get a silver “Tame!” star, and three times you get a bronze “Stale!” star. Tame stars give you a tiny bit of boost, and stale stars don’t give you any boosts. Link tricks together, and you can get a major boost—um, boosts—and you can quickly unlock the other buttons. Wait, there’s more, though! You can also tweak your tricks by pressing either the LB or RB buttons; while these take longer to perform, they give you an extra boost.
Tricks also have different effects on different race types. There are only three types, but they are very fun: race, sprint, and freestyle. The race event is what I was just talking about, so you race three laps, and you have multiple branches throughout the track that you can take to cut off the other racers and hopefully gain a lead. These are must-learns since there is a strategy to winning each track. Sprint is 5 laps of a 25–40 second track that maybe has 2-3 small jumps on it, so you must nail these to get your boost! Freestyle is probably the most robust event where you have a “gas gauge” and you have to get the highest score before your gas runs out. Linking tricks together gives you a multiplier timer, and picking up pickups along the way can help with this. Some range from freezing your gas for a few seconds, some give you an automatic special trick, some double your score, some give you a boost, etc. The freestyle event is always fun, and the gas tank meter keeps you on your feet.
Now all of this is fine and dandy, but the game does have some flaws. The AI can be very hard and frustrating since, no matter how well you race, you can never make the first. I had to start races dozens of times to nail first place, and you have to memorize the track and drive flawlessly to get first place. As I mentioned, you can’t customize your character; there are only 3 event types, so this makes multiplayer kind of drab. The game also starts to feel very old and repetitive after a while since there are so many tricks to pull off and the game is just the same over and over again. Still, though, you’ll have lots of fun with this game, and I hope the sequel provides more pure awesomeness.
I have been hyped about GoW2 ever since I finished the first game, and with information slowly leaking out of Epic’s mouth, I just couldn’t help myself from getting all giddy and mushy inside. Ok enough, seriously, Gears 2 is just amazing on so many levels with tons of new multiplayer modes, weapons, enemies, environments, etc. The game is just a whole new beast, and old Gears fans will not be disappointed. First, let’s start off with the campaign. Do you remember Gears One being huge and sprawling with wide vistas and beautiful architecture? Ok, well, that was nothing compared to Gears 2. You really do have wide open vistas that stretch as far as the eye can see, and they are absolutely breathtaking, especially on an HDTV. The graphics are still what we’ve grown to love, but with better lighting, higher resolutions, and more objects on-screen, everything is just crunchier and more big, beautiful, and hectic than ever before.
Speaking of crunching, the game’s audio has been tuned up, and everything sounds more gruesome and brutal than ever before. Headshots pop and sound and feel more satisfying than before; curb-stomping an enemy looks more painful (and sounds it!); sawing Locust in half with the Lancer feels more powerful and just looks, feels, and sounds nastier. The whole game is like this, and it feels like a true sequel instead of just Gear of War 1.5. All of your core elements are here, like the great cover system, the Roadie Run (TM!!), the voice actors, characters, Locust, and story, which are all set in place, but you are a bigger part of the whole thing, and you feel more like a participant than a spectator. The story is more involved, in which the Light Mass bombing failed, the Locust are coming back with their full force, and the Delta Squad is sent in to rip out the heart—three of them! Anyways, Dom is trying to find his wife along the way, and a few new characters are introduced but aren’t fully developed since they don’t make many appearances, like Dizzy, Tai, Chairman Prescott, and a certain dad who will go unnamed. The story goes even further with 41 collectibles you can find that you can read and help evolve the back story some more. Gone are the COG tags people; now you gotta find papers and more of them too.
Getting back to the campaign’s weapons, there are about double the amount with a whole new weapon class: heavy weapons. You still have the Lancer, Boltok pistol, Shotgun, Longshot, Boomshot, Snub—you know all those—but now you have better, crunchier, and kick-buutt weapons like the Hammerburst (gone is that dinky little Locust assault rifle), Gorgon Pistol (a semi-auto three-round burst Locust pistol), the Mulcher (a heavy weapons KICK @$$ mini-gun that you CRANK!), a Mortar (yes, like a WWII mortar, only better without all those Krauts), the Scorcher (a flamethrower that you can blind fire!), Ink Grenades (go figure), and a whole bunch others. These weapons feel powerful and sound powerful, and they are all useful—in fact, it’ll be hard to choose which gun you want to use half the time! Now this time around, you also get to use more “vehicles” like the Centaur, which is a monster truck tank…a Reaver, a Brumak, you know, just cool “vehicles” like that. Yes, they all feel powerful and are just amazing to “drive.”.
The campaign together is just more riveting and more cinematic thanks to the HUGE open vistas and massive hordes of enemies, and the campaign is just perfectly built. The only problem is that it’s about the same length as the original, and there’s room for a sequel. I just really can’t express how great it is to feel upfront in Gears and really drive things home with all of the awesome weapons, graphics, and audio. Of course, I have to mention the new awesome Locust like the Tickers (little ticking and crawling “bombs”), the Kantus (these guys summon Tickers and can resurrect downed Locust), Brumaks (only seen in GoW1 for the PC and at the end of the fight at Fenix’s mansion), cooler-looking Reavers, a whole “Boomer Class” like Butcher Boomers, Maulers (which have spiked shields you can carry!), Grinders (which carry Mulchers and yell “GRIND!”), Flamer Boomers, etc. The whole old crew of enemies is here with great new ones, and they are all fun to kill, and the game is perfectly balanced.
Speaking of balanced, let’s move on to multiplayer. Ah yes, good ‘ol Gears multiplayer is back with a ton of new modes along with the old ones. First off, you all remember Annex, Execution, Warzone, etc. Now here are the really fun modes that make me really get into Gears multiplayer. Horde. Just one word: horde. You and four other people are pitted against 50 waves of increasingly difficult enemy AI. Yes, this is addictive and super fun, and you need a couple of hours on your hands if you and your teammates are really good. Getting through all 50 waves can take a good couple of hours, but boy, isn’t it fun? Just imagine one guy sawing a drone in half while the guy next to him is popping off headshots at Wretches and Boomers. You are at the enemy spawn point, sticking grenades on walls, and that last quiet guy is just hiding in the middle somewhere, scorching Locust. Ah, it is joyous and wonderful at best, and you are sure to come back until you clear all 50 waves (I could only get to 36).
Now there is Wingman, which is 5 teams of 2 against each other, and you can only kill with executions (more on those later) or one-shot kills like a grenade or something. This is extremely adrenaline-inducing since all you can rely on is your buddy, and if he dies, it’s just you. Meatflag is very interesting since it utilizes GoW2’s new “meat shield” system, where you can press A near a downed enemy (even in single-player!) and use them as a “human shield,” as most of you would know. Other executions include the classic curb stomp, but if you press Y, you can do “long executions” with other weapons, like a golf club swing with the Longshot, or just use your fists and beat the guy up, but back to the multiplayer mode. In Meatflag, it’s like capturing the flag, but you have to bring the locust back to your base, so he’s a moving, shooting, ugly flag. This is super fun and an original twist on Capture the Flag. There are a few other modes, but these three are the “blue light” modes that really stand out and are super addictive. If you haven’t noticed, the player count has gone up by 2, so now there are 10 people playing instead of 8. This makes things more hectic and fun, as you can tell. Thankfully, the online mode plays perfectly with no server issues, and there are a ton of new maps to play that are very well laid out, which you’ll grow to love.
Before I close this out, I have to mention the new achievement system. For once, a game updates you on your achievements in-game while you’re playing without you having to pause and go into the guide. Let’s say you’re aiming for the new Seriously 2.0 achievement. cough It’s, oh, nothing, only 100,000 kills, so every 100 kills you get a widget that will pop out at the side and update you on this. Try the new Said the Spider to the Fly (killing 10 enemies will grenade wall tags), and every 5 kills you’ll get updated. This is very helpful and is just a reminder of why you should keep playing this wonderful game. I love this new achievement system, and more developers (multi-platform or otherwise!) need to take note of it. This takes full advantage of the system, so please learn! Now, this game isn’t perfect.
There are a few flaws, as we’ve seen in the core of all of this before (GoW1 I gave a perfect 10), but there are still a few bugs, and they were tweaked like the cover system. Turn the left stick a certain way, and a little sketch will show up on-screen telling you what Marcus will do. While this is fine and all, it’s just not perfect. There are times when you’ll want Marcus to roll a certain way, but he’ll snap against a wall. Yes, they let you change the buttons for this, but it’s still annoying. Multiplayer can be a bit challenging for people who aren’t very good at it. Gears veterans will smear you on the floor within seconds and will make a lot of newcomers hate multiplayer. There are mainly glitches that are only noticeable on insane difficulties, like collision issues that let enemies shoot through walls that will kill you in one hit, etc. These are super minor, but we STILL have seen all of this before two years ago, and I just can’t wait for Gears of War 3.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !