Should I Buy? – LEGO Lord Of The Rings

Who’d have thought that not only would the  gimmicky idea of mashing up LEGO and Star Wars into a videogame for kids not only work, but endure for nearly a decade without stagnating and branch out into some of the most beloved nerd culture franchises of all time? So far it’s taken on Star Wars, Indiana Jones, DC Comics, Harry Potter, Pirates Of The Carribean and now Lord Of The Rings. There was even that Rock Band spin-off that was actually better than Rock Band (not that that’s hard) .

Oh, and next for the franchise? Marvel Comics. No really, they’re making a LEGO Marvel game that will have over 100 characters including Spider-Man, Iron Man, Wolverine, Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Deadpool, Loki and Galactus. I know!

After that? Almost definitely a Hobbit game. Another DC Comics game to capitalise on the planned Justice League film also really likely. Somebody gets these guys the rights to do Doctor Who and Star Trek. Not just the new revivals either, both new and classic versions of both shows should be made into LEGO games.

Anyway, the question you clicked on this link to have answered is “is LEGO LOTR any good?” Rest assured, it is. Maybe not the best, but certainly up there with titles like LEGO Batman 2 & LEGO Star Wars 2.

Squeezing Peter Jackson’s three Lord Of The Rings films into one videogame took a fair amount of compression that really shows at times. Sure, all the key scenes and plot points are recreated but this is one of if not the first time a LEGO game has cut out parts of its source material that could have made great levels, rather than expand small action beats into full levels.

This is most readily apparent with the Return of the King section, where Denethor is completely absent, and there’s no night raid on Osgiliath, no attempt to reclaim it, no trying to take over the Black Fleet, no lighting of the Beacons and no battle in the streets of Minas Tirith.

While it is a shame that both these and sections that weren’t in the film like the Barrow Wight aren’t in the game, the levels that are there are fun, varied and of a good length. Unfortunately, not all the characters are as great. Oh sure, their designs are all spot on but some like Merry and Pippin don’t get that much to do while others like Legolas, Gimli and Sam are so incredibly useful you’ll spend most of your time as them.

While it is fantastic that they’ve recycled the audio from the films, with both Howard Shore’s music and the original actor’s voices, none of the voices were re-recorded to make them better match the heavily shortened cut-scenes. It’s not a huge problem, but the flow from one line to the next isn’t quite as natural as it was in the films in terms of emotion or emphasis.

They’ve made a fairly big deal out of how Middle-Earth is a completely free roaming experience, and you can literally walk from Bag End to the Crack of Doom on the world map, passing through all the key locations. It’s scaled down just enough so that it feels big enough to encompass all those locations and secret collectibles yet not so big that it’s a chore to navigate and even if you do feel that way, there’s also a fast travel system in place.

While there’s just about every character you can think of from the films and a few more like Radagast and Tom Bombadil thrown in, most of them don’t have any innate special skills that make them useful in Free Play, and there’s basically no enemy exclusive skills you’ll need to collect so it can often seem like you’re doing it for its own sake.

There is a way to remedy this, however, with the also much vaunted item forging system. By collecting Mythril bricks, which replace the traditional Gold Bricks, and the appropriate schematics you can craft a large variety of items that give your character access to abilities they don’t normally have. By the time you’ve forged a good chunk of these items, you can pretty much demolish the entire game as characters like Arwen, Eomer, Rosey Cotton, Faramir or Lurtz.

But even this throws up a new problem. That’s not an option until you’ve already completed a good chunk of the game and fun as it is to replay levels and the like, a major part of the fun in LEGO games is going back to find all the crazy secrets as characters you love and/or didn’t get to use the first time round. Sure, the inventory system means that almost every character is precisely as useful as every other, but it takes a damn long time for that to happen. Time you’ll spend playing primarily as Sam and Legolas.

To talk about the controls, there are some problems there too. In order to access the inventory, you have to hold down a button to bring it up, from which you scroll through the items which seem to have no real order to them and pick one out. This is often way slower than just quickly switching to an on-hand character.

Also, most Mithril items can only be wielded one at a time and can’t be placed in a character’s own inventory, so every time you want a new one it’s back into the confusing menu. The only items that do get placed in your inventory (other than ones you pick up from the world map in the levels) are the various cosmetic items like the Goggles, Shimmering Armour and Statue Hat.

Switching characters is something which should be perfected by now, but LEGO Lord Of The Rings contains the most infuriating problems yet. For starters, the ‘press button to open character wheel, hold to bring up big menu’ thing quite often doesn’t register that you’re actually holding the button and just plain switches you over to the other character (at least on the XBOX 360 version). This isn’t too bad in and of itself, but when you’re in the middle of a particularly long or difficult platforming section and when you accidentally switch to Samwise waiting at the bottom and the character you were playing as has jumped halfway back to you by the time it switches back, it is really annoying.

There’s also an odd problem where the game seems to want to keep you as having one Hobbit sized and one human sized character at all times, perhaps to further enforce that Samwise and Legolas are the Gods of LEGO Middle-Earth. See, if you’re playing as Legolas but want to switch over to say, Frodo for his Vial of Earendil, the game will switch you to playing as the Hobbit in the player 2 slot and then change *them* into Frodo whenver you’re in Free Play or wandering the world map after finishing the story. Again, this doesn’t really become a problem until you’re in the middle of a platforming section, but they make up a a fair portion of the levels and a huge chunk of the post-story collect everything stage of the game.

None of this is insurmountable or game-breaking, merely frustrating. Oh, and like all the other LEGO games, there’s a fair few mostly harmless bugs to be found in this game.

Again, I feel like I’ve been way too hard on a game I actually really like. LEGO Lord Of The Rings has all the charm and polished design the rest of the series has, and a greater reliance on sight gags has meant they can keep their trademark humour without compromising the serious tone of the story.

There’s a lot of content, most of the collectibles can either be plainly marked on your world map, or are hidden in easy-to-find places and behind puzzles with an obvious start point in the levels themselves, so you can work through it all at a sold and productive pace without getting it done in a few dedicated sessions.

The puzzles and boss fights have by and large been simplified, but giving that this is a series aimed at kids being more readily accessible to both children and people who don’t frequently play videogames is really a plus rather than a negative. Actually, it’s probably one of the most easily accessible LEGO games out there.

In a sense, it is to Peter Jackson’s film trilogy what the Jackson trilogy is to the books. After a long time, finally a truly great conversion to another medium that cuts, changes and compresses where it needs to in order to fit itself into a new medium.

If it being a fun, long-lasting and well designed game isn’t enough by itself, let it be known that what you see below is real in game footage of an item that actually exists.

Should I Buy? – Warriors Orochi 3

The works of Koei, now Tecmo-Koei, are a rather love it or hate it affair. Koei is best known for its two Warriors series, Dynasty Warriors set in the Three Kingdoms Era of ancient China and Samurai Warriors set in the Sengoku Jidai of feudal Japan.

They both follow the same basic hack’n’slash structure, you choose a character and beat up on folk through a recreation of a historical battle. In Japan they’re well received, but in the West they’ve never really caught on thanks in part to critics deriding the entire series as repetitive regardless of what changes were actually made between iterations.

Warriors Orochi is a subseries which unites the casts of Dynasty and Samurai Warriors into one game. Why? Because it’s freakin’ awesome, that’s why. With WO3 some of the greatest warriors, strategists and leaders of Asian history are united to wage war against demons. See what I meant when I said it was an awesome premise?

Those of you who have played a Warriors game before will find the basic combat mechanics incredibly familiar, as this is essentially more of that. For those of you who haven’t, each character has a one note personality, a ridiculous weapon and can string together a variety of combos from their “Normal”, “Charge” and “Musou” attacks to slaughter waves of footsoliders and the occasional enemy officer.

So, the excuse to have Oda Nobunaga facing off against Guan Yu this time is that several years after the events of WO2, the demon army returns with a giant 8-headed Hydra at the…head of it. Unfortunately, the war against the Hydra goes south and we start the game with only three of the game’s impressive 132 playable characters still alive. And so just when it seems that Sima Zhao,  Ma Chao and Takenaka Hanbie are about to fall, the Mystic Kaguya rescues them and takes them back in time to find a way to destroy the Hydra.

From here the game’s story consists of the various characters using their knowledge of the past and future to revisit important battles in order to turn the war around. This makes for a surprisingly interesting tale, where one character can lament the loss of a close friend, only to travel back in time and save them.

I appreciate and admire Koei’s attempt to craft more engaging and mature stories for their Warriors games over the years, but WO3 won’t knock your socks off in the story department. While it’s perfectly competent in what it tries to achieve, with such a huge cast it can’t ever focus on the development of the major characters that would be necessary for a truly engrossing story.

Attempts have been made to invigorate the combat with a few extra tweaks that keep things flowing faster. For example, you can now combo straight off of a rush attack and switching a character mid combo will make them come out swinging, allowing you to extend your combo with all the tricks your two allies can bring to the table. All these changes work and give you a lot of new options to experiment with.

Unfortunately, most of the characters who lost their unique fighting styles in Dynasty Warriors 7 don’t regain them here, though there has been some effort to shake things up. As a tradeoff for this though, each character is stuck with one weapon style instead of being able to chop and change between two on the fly.

The shared movesets aren’t as annoying here as they were in DW7 because A) you have dozens more characters to play with and B) the focus on the more obscure characters means that you won’t have to put up with the damned Spear and Sword movesets all the time.

Tecmo-Koei have come up with a rather elegant solution to the problem of managing the huge cast. Each mission has a set of “Recommended” characters, who often tie in to the particular story thread at hand. Thanks to the “Growth Points” system, you won’t have to keep on carting a load of level one characters into battle. Growth Points are basically EXP that gets put into a bank from which you can assign them to any character you like.

Though you can get a good few days out of the Story Mode, once it’s done you can’t restart it without making a fresh save. You still get the pre and post mission briefing, but not the connecting cutscenes and such. If you’re not the sort of person who can keep replaying old battles without a sense context, this might give you problems.

Another potential problem is that each battle is very much intended to fill a role within the story, and as such are highly based around completing certain objectives and not big pitched battles. Sure, you can ignore these objectives, but this will often lead to the odds becoming highly stacked against you.

Unfortunately there’s no “Legendary Battles” for each character like some of the other games, or versions of famous battles like Sekigahara or Chi Bi to play. That a few of the maps get recycled isn’t as much of a problem, however, as they’re not that common and each time it does happen, the allied and enemy armies tend to be laid out in completely different patterns.

There are a few other things I should mention. the most important is the lack of English voice acting in this game. Though everything has subtitles, some people may be put off by this (especially as it has that problem where the text is tiny if you’re not using an HD TV).

There’s nothing wrong with the Japanese VAs, though I found myself thrown by how wildly differently some of the characters sounded between versions.  The biggest of these was the contrast between Guo Huai’s deep raspy death rattle in the English version and his high-pitched Japanese version.

The other thing to mention is that this game includes a number of guest character from various Tecmo franchises. Included are Ayane from Dead Or Alive, Ryu Hyabusa from Ninja Gaiden, Joan of Arc from Bladestorm: Hundred Year War, Achilles from Warriors: Legends of Troy and Nemea from Trinity: Souls Of Zill O’Ill. Which is pretty cool.

It’s pretty fair to say that you’ll get out of Warriors Orochi 3 what you get out of any Warriors game. If you’ve never played one, this game is an acquired taste but if it grooves with you there’s a lot to be got out of it.

The various team mechanics and overall polish can make for a lot of crazy combo options, combined with the numerous difficulty settings means there’s a lot here for players who like to master a game to find. If you’re after something casual then playing a few battles on Easy Mode every now and again is a fun way to pass the time, especially with a friend.

But if you’re after a great story then this isn’t the game for you. As nicely as it’s presented, this game is about the mechanics first and foremost.

Warriors Orochi 3 is available on XBOX 360 and PS3, although it is exclusively a digital download for the PS3.

Should I Buy? – LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes

Over the last nine years, the LEGO crossover games have slowly been refining their mechanics and it’s pretty obvious with LEGO Batman 2 that they’re still working on it. As fun as LEGO Batman 2 is, it’s pretty rough around the edges. In some places, it’s just a few niggling bugs that shouldn’t have made it through, in others its design choices that are confusing or questionable.

The LEGO Harry Potter and LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean  games experimented with a fairly limited sandbox as opposed to the traditional mission hubs that you can adventure through and explore to find secrets, and LEGO Batman 2 ups the ante by giving you all of Gotham when you’re not playing the story mode. There’s a wealth of content including villains to defeat, heroes to discover, citizens to save and more beside. It’s almost a shame that the weeks you could spend finding all this stuff can be muted to a couple of afternoons once you find the cheats that point out the locations of all these things.

Travelling around the map itself can be a bit of a headache. Of course running about is way too slow unless you’re The Flash, so you’ll want to rely on vehicles and the power of flight to get around. The actual unlockable vehicles like the Batmobile and Two-Face’s truck are really fast, to the point where trying to drive them in anything other than a straight line is a hassle. Flight itself works great for gross motor control, but when you try to make small movements to, say, land on a small roof, things get infuriatingly fiddly.

That said, flying is fun and fast and pretty widely available. Just in the course of playing through the story, you’ll unlock Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern as flying heroes so actual aircraft become rather pointless. Not quite as pointless as aquatic vehicles though, which have no use other than the Gold Brick containing driving courses. When you play one of the rare vehicle levels, you don’t even get the choice of your unlocked vehicles. It’s kind of a mystery why they bothered, and this is one of the areas where the game where things get questionable.

What about the story mode? Well, it’s the first fully voiced LEGO crossover game and the second to use an original story, so it’s a pretty big change from the standard format. The humour is much less slapstick this time around, but still has that same goofy, irreverent charm which is really helped by the healthy application of DCAU VAs reprising their roles and other experienced VAs  stepping into the empy slots. Christopher Corey Smith’s Joker is fine, but does lack the range and sheer insanity of Mark Hammil’s, Troy Baker makes for a good Batman, though I do miss Kevin Conroy. The real star of the show is Clancy Brown’s Lex Luthor, whose deep voice is equally adept at making Lex sinister and comedic.

The story itself is just as silly as you’d expect, with some pretty questionable logic on the villain’s part. Fifteen levels being pretty short as far as a LEGO crossover game goes and the story feels truncated and aguely unsatisfying for it. Any villain that isn’t the Joker or Luthor get the short end of the stick, basically being reduced to cameos. Still, the levels are fun and make good use of the character’s abilities.

Remember how in the original LEGO Batman the hero levels were the most boring because the limited number of abilities meant there were only so many ways you could be asked to solve a puzzle?  2 handles the situation a lot better, with the new Suits Batman and Robin wear each having two different abilities instead of just one and the design requiring a lot more cooperation than before. And when Superman comes on the scene, he’s just as powerful as you’d expect. He’s super strong, can fly, has heat vision, ice breath and is completely invulnerable to damage. However, he can’t demolish levels by himself and relies on Batman and Robin to fill in the gaps for him, meaning that the other two don’t turn into useless loads.

If nothing else, LEGO Batman 2 is a great representation of why Batman and Superman make such a good team. Unfortunately, there’s no villain levels this time around to counterbalance the hero ones which might leave you feeling short changed, given how the original game had twice the levels.

The much vaunted inclusion of characters from across the DCU doesn’t really make itself apparent until the end of the game. Apart from Cyborg, they’re not high on the versatility scale so you probably won’t be using them much unless you’re a real fan. Green Lantern and Flash do have unique abilities, but it’s pretty rare that you’ll need them. Actually, Aquaman is more useful than they are in the grand scheme of things. Aquaman! Among the Batman villains, there’s also a few from other heroes like General Zodd, Brainiac and Sinestro. Though this leads me to one of the design choices that annoys me most. Sinestro can’t build Green bricks like Green Lantern, but there are no Yellow bricks for him to use, and neither of them get a ranged attack, so Sinestro only gets to fly and Green Lantern’s one special trick is very situational.

But that’s a minor complaint. And those are all I can really muster. It looks great, it’s funny, the soundtrack mixes Superman and Batman music together well, there’s plenty of content for the explorers to find and hey, where else can you play as Huntress, Hawkgirl, Ra’s Al Ghul or Captain Boomerang? Also, whenever you take to the skies of Gotham as Superman, that music plays.

Should I Buy? – El Shaddai

OK, I have no idea what is happening most of the time in this game. All I know is that my eyes did not want it to stop. Just, just look at this trailer.

That doesn’t even do it proper justice. If nothing else, it’s worth checking out El Shaddai on a big telly just to marvel at the visuals. Though any one of the myriad styles this game adopts over the course of its story could hold a game, it never sticks with any one of them for too long.

I could relate a plot summary but 1) the trailer already does that and 2) going in completely ignorant and getting confused by this game is a  marvellous way to experience it. That and…beyond the basics, I spent most of the time not knowing what was going on. Of course, this isn’t indicative of an intricate and gripping story but it does mean that I get to endlessly reply “How the El Shaddai know?” when people ask me what’s happening.

Truth be told the very archetypal and somewhat neglected narrative isn’t a real weakness. In its own way it’s actually a strange strength. It gives the game a feeling of bigness that nicely matches the visuals and general ethereal feel of the design and execution.

But OK, enough dilly-dallying with the artsy visuals and narrative, what’s El Shaddai like to play? Pretty fun. It’s not too long, 6-10 hours depending on how good you are and pretty bare bones. For the most part it switches between 2D & 3D platforming and third person combat that has more than a smidge of Devil May Cry about it.

The biggest barrier to success in platforming is that the visuals and camera angles can make distances and timing hard to judge, though the 2D sections mix it up with elements that appear to be part of the background actually being foreground elements that you need to interact with. It’s not Mario Bros., but it gets the job done.

The combat takes a while to really get the hang of. You, as Enoch, are able to wield three different weapons by taking them from the enemies you fight, and each one has its own properties, special moves, strengths, weaknesses and all that stuff. Even if you’re playing on Easy, you’ll still be challenged pretty much constantly and punished for your mistakes. The jeopardy isn’t too great however, as you get a free extra life in every fight. This’ll be pretty much necessary for when you reach El Shaddai‘s bosses.

They all hit like a demonic truck full of TNT, but it’s like a more complex form of the old platformer bosses where each attack had a specific tell and there was a counter to each of their techniques. Learning and mastering all this is pretty damn tricky, however. This is a game in which there is no shame in bumping down the difficulty.

All in all El Shaddai is an experience in the good sense of the phrase. It won’t change your life, but it will challenge you and enchant you with its beauty. If you’re the type of gamer that likes a challenge, you’ll probably get some life out of replaying on higher difficulties when you’re done. And if you’re a lover of great visuals, you might want to keep the game and occasionally replay it. But if none of these an hold a game for you, it’s probably just a rental rather than a full on purchase.

Either way, this is one of, if not the premier current gen Japanese action-platformer based on Biblical apocrypha you should play.

Should I Buy? – Catherine

For some people, just hearing that this game was made by Atlus is reason enough to buy this game. See, the developers have a certain reputation. They’re known for making very difficult JRPGs, specifically two series. Megami Tensei and Persona. Both are different flavours of weird and are known for different things, but this time around instead Atlus have switched genres to bring up Catherine, which in terms of narrative structure more closely follows the standard set by the Persona franchise.

But instead of JRPG this time around we have a puzzle platformer with sheep as its main motif. Yeah.

Also this is the first time I’ve noticed the constant reuse of voice actors between projects. Apparently it was quite deliberate this time around, as the actors were chosen because their previous roles suited these ones. Which is why it’s pretty easy to hear who’s who. There’s a galumphingly large couple of paragraph at the end about which game I found out these people are also from if you care to read that kind of thing.

OK, so Vincent Brooks is a 30 something slacker dating Katherine, his slightly bossy girlfriend of some years. He spends most of his nights drinking with his friends and tends to blow his excess cash on junk he doesn’t need, and hasn’t got round to making a commitment yet when the wild, flirty young Catherine walks into his life and he starts an affair in his drunken stupor.

In his everyday life, Vincent has to deal with multiple problems, like the guilt of his affair, whether or not he wants to commit to Katherine and the various other problems this all throws up, while at night he has this bizarre dream of having to climb a tower with a bunch of sheep or die. All while a mysterious affliction is killing off men who cheat.

The story takes place over a week in which you, as Vincent must decide the course his life will take. This is done not only by surviving the nightmares but also in the responses you give to the various things Vincent gets asked, which are tracked in a little bar on the screen.

Structurally, it’s about as linear as you can get. Each day plays out the same way, you have some cutscenes, you hang out at the bar, talking to the patrons, getting drunk and texting both C and K, then you go home and get to the real meat of the game. The nightmares.

Even on Easy Mode they’re tough. Using the unique physics of blocks comprising the towers and the various special properties you must ascend to the top. Each night has multiple towers to ascend, and each night ends with a Boss encounter, who will try to disrupt your climb with various hazards  and in the grand old Persona tradition represents various anxieties in Vincent’s life that he has to overcome in order to not only survive but grow as a person.

You’ll die a lot. I suggest finding an easy place to grind lives early on.  But as this is Atlus, the difficulty isn’t ever too high to deter you so long as you select the appropriate difficulty (which will probably be easy mode). Instead, it’s actually quite addicting and as you continue to play you’ll realise you continue to learn, devise and use more and more advanced ways of solving problems.

The difficulty isn’t so much a curve as a collection of jagged peaks and harsh drops. This generally depends on whether the level in question is meant to be a puzzle or a quick dash to the top, because the various hazards are pretty easy to learn to circumvent making dashes simple whereas the puzzles will always stump you.

Luckily, the game keeps the formula fresh with new hazards on pretty much every stage, even up to the very end.

There’s even a game within the game, an arcade cabinet called “Rapunzel” in the Stray Sheep (name of the pub) which has its own huge collection of tower climbing puzzles.

Apart from that, the other ‘sidequest’ as it were is trying to save the other men in the shared nightmare. Various sheep in the in-betweeny bits of the nightmare have distinguishing features like wearing a tie or a cop hat that helps you recognise who they are in the real world.

By speaking to them in the nightmares and when they enter the Stray Sheep, you can help talk them through their problems and give them the strength to overcome the nightmares too.  This is just an optional thing, and doesn’t affect the ending you receive.

So, with a game so focused on the story and characters, how well does it work? Pretty well, actually. Despite Vincent’s inability to say any of the things he needs to say to either woman, it’s nice to see him making his emotional journey and how it’s not just “things go from bad to great”. As a character arc it really lets us see him grow as a person and learn to appreciate him as a character.

The two -atherines don’t get as much growth or screen time, but both work as foils to each other and there are valid reasons why a person would want to pursue a relationship with both of them, as well as why a person wouldn’t want to.

Vincent’s friends are a fun bunch, each one have a particular viewpoint that means that whenever Vincent talks his troubles through with them, you get an array of advice. Luckily, they’re not just strawmen there to illustrate different viewpoints, they’re people with problems of their own going who’ve been shaped by their pasts. They’re not as complex or interesting as the main three, but they’re still pretty darned good.

The other characters that inhabit the Stray Sheep also have their own particular reasons for appearing in the nightmares built out of their own neuroses which come out of sympathetic backstories, but they’re a lot more expository about everything. I’d still put them slightly above average, but they’re really not great.

The story as a whole is a nice interplay of themes with some interesting characters and doesn’t artificially stretch itself to accommodate extra gameplay but as a game it’s pretty short. Depending on how fast you can go through the puzzles, there’s two to four days in the main story.

As for extra play value? Well, there’s a multiplayer mode that I didn’t play because multiplayer and a challenge mode called Babel with its own ending that requires high score to be attained in the Story Mode which I didn’t play because bugger going through Clock Tower on Normal mode.

While I would have had trouble justifying this purchase when it was at full price other than it being an Atlus game and we should buy every damn one of them so they keep releasing them outside of Japan, now that you can buy it cheaper I’d say it’s worth the investment if you like tough puzzles or good stories.

Vincent is Kanji Tatsumi of Persona 4 fame and Snow from Final Fantasy XIII, Catherine is Dissidia‘s Cloud of Darkness, Final Fantasy XIII’s Serah, Persona 4‘s Rise Kujikawa and Street Fighter‘s Chun Li. Katherine is Street Fighter‘s Crimson Viper (Chun Li’s rival, natch) and Dynasty Warrior‘s Sun Shang Xiang.

Orlando in Final Fantasy‘s Kain Highwind, Toby is Persona 4‘s Yosuke Hanamura (he’s even doing the exact same voice).   Johnny is Dynasty Warrior‘s Zhou Tai and Street Fighter‘s Guile,  Boss is Dynasty Warrior‘s Xiahou Dun and Erica will be the new VA for Chie Satonaka in Persona 4 The Arena (which is totally getting a Japanese and European release! Also why the hell are they changing Chie’s VA!?)

Should I Buy? – Batman Arkham City DLC – INCLUDING Harley Quinn’s Revenge

This isn’t a review of the Game of the Year edition because I don’t own that, and truth be told I’m also missing the additional Challenge Pack from my purchases so I can’t in all honesty say I’m reviewing the content in the GOTY version.

If you want to see what I thought of the main game, that review’s here. This review is for the Catwoman, Robin, Nightwing, Skins and Harley Quinn’s Revenge packs.

A final note, the prices here are in Microsoft Points. If you want prices for PC or PSN, I’m sorry but you’ll have to track those down yourselves.

Catwoman Bundle Pack

This was launch content included for free with all new copies of the original game and costs 800MS points to buy. It adds the four “Catwoman Episodes” into the main game, as a separate option on the main menu and adds Catwoman as a playable character in the Challenge Mode.

Her episodes are quite short, the first one is just a small fight sandwiched by cutscenes, but flow pretty well as they were obviously designed in tandem with the main game to flow into each other.

Though the rest of her episodes are of a better length, they’re still fairly short and lack any of the big set pieces that Batman has. If you just zip through the story aspects of the episodes, they’ll pass by pretty damn fast and you may start to wonder just where your money’s worth is.

In my opinion, that’s in the post-game content. Just like how you can control Batman after the plot’s over, Catwoman’s fully controllable in the playable epilogue section as well as the aforementioned Challenge Mode and this is where you’ll really get to stretch your feline legs.

Cats plays as a much weaker but faster version of Bats with much fewer tools  to work with. She only has her whip for exploration and there’s only two more gadgets but this works. She’s not a super-rich badass detective, she’s a cat burglar and though she’s competent in a fight, she doesn’t have cash, know-how or need for any of Bats’ trinkets.

Her animations make good use of her lighter frame and sex appeal to give a real sense of character, even when she’s fighting. Learning quite how to handle Cats is a bit of a curve as you can’t tank as many hits as usual, but it’s just as fun as Bats.

Instead of a Grapnel like Bats, Cats whips to things and then climbs them. Though annoying at first, I got into quite a groove with it and ended up preferring it to Bats’ grapple. Though it trips me up every time that you can end up exposing yourself to the enemies you’re trying to ambush while you’re swinging across an area.

In Predator situations Cats does come with the added ability to cling to grated ceilings.  This helps to make up for her lack of tricks, and it, along with her “Thief’s Vision” (which doesn’t list the number of enemies or even flag the ones with guns a different colour) force you to think and act more carefully.

All in all the Catwoman Bundle Pack was worth it for me, but if you’re looking for a solid story expansion this probably isn’t the investment for you.

Robin Bundle Pack

Robin was, until Harley Quinn’s Revenge, a Challenge Mode only character. This Robin is Tim Drake, by the way, famed for his use of a staff in combat and currently Red Robin in comic continuity.

In this game we have a Robin wielding a retractable staff, and he makes full use of its properties in a fighting style that makes him rather unpredictable. He’s stronger than Cats and faster than Bats, and several of his Gadgets have interesting properties.

For example, his staff can throw out a frontal Bullet Shield that’s handy for tight spots, and he can instantly zip to an enemy in battle instead of pulling them towards him like Bats does.

In terms of difficulty for Predator Challenges he’s between Cats and Bats. He’s a bit fiddly to get used to, but his unique properties mean that if you want to mix things up, he’s a good candidate for it.

At just 560 MSPoints for him individually or 1200 Points for him, Nightwing and the bonus skins all together which’ll save you several hundred points.

Nightwing Bundle Pack

Now the only one of the four playable characters with no story mode, Nightwing is a lightning fast bruiser who really struggles in Predator challenges. Also, strangely, he doesn’t speak at all. Just kind of scowls. Which is really weird for Dick Grayson.

He makes Batman feel slow as a turtle and Catwoman as weak as a newborn kitten with his Escrima sticks (which are now also stun batons). I also really admire his fighting animations, which really drive home his acrobatic past. Actually, I’m calling it. The fight animations of Batman Arkham City are the finest in gaming history as far as I’m concerned. Every single attack the heroes have feel like a part of the character and what they’re about.

Nightwing is priced the same a Robin and part of the 1200MSPoint The Arkham Bundle as well.

Arkham City Skins Pack

This pack is really just something fun, it doesn’t affect gameplay at all. Batman gets about six different ones, Cats and Robin get two and Nightwing only gets the one. It costs 400MSPoints, so track down pictures of the costumes and if you want them, go buy it. There’s not really any more to say than it’s 400MSPoints alone or part of the 1200MSPoints  The Arkham Bundle.

Harley Quinn’s Revenge

Look at me! I’m topical! This DLC came out at midnight and I stayed up late playing it especially for m-er, you. It’s an additional short story campaign set after Arkham City‘s ending in which you get to take control of both Batman *and* Robin. that’s right, the Dynamic Duo are tackling this caper together.

Basically, Batman went missing investigating Harley Quinn’s base and Robin goes in when he doesn’t pop back for more Bat-mints. Like the Catwoman story, it’s split into four segments, two for the Dark Knight and two for the Boy Wonder.

The thing I noticed first was that the difficulty has been ramped up. Enemies seem to hit harder and faster and a lot more of them are armed now. This was a bit infuriating at first, but I managed to adapt.

Though I like that they introduce sections to explain how Robin’s gadgets can be used to interact with the environments like Bats’, but his sections are so short they never really get used more than once or twice. Robin’s sections feel more like a proof of concept demo at times.

But I’d still call them the highlights. Bats’ sections feel a little padded and less well thought out. Almost like it was meant to be an all-Robin story until someone upstairs pulled the plug on that idea.

There’s been some pretty obvious corners cut. Most of the places you could explore in Joker’s turf has now been forcibly closed off, to the extent that parts of the scenery have been destroyed. Still, there is a new warehouse area where most of the action takes place, including a Predator battle for Robin against Quinn and her goons that provides a fun challenge.

At 800MSPoints I had to put a tenner on my account to get it and I did finish it in one sitting of maybe an hour or two but I still enjoyed it. As to whether it’s worth it? Well…that depends on how much you like the game and whether or not you want more.

And really, that’s my verdict on all the DLC for this game. It’s enjoyable and if you want more out of the game, then this’ll probably see you right. In the end I can’t give it the giant gold stars the main game gets, but it’s by no means bad content.

Should I Buy? – Final Fantasy XIII

Oh dear. Final Fantasy XIII isn’t very good. Not that it’s a *bad* game by any measure, well OK by a fair few measures, but I don’t hate it and I kind of admire how it tries to do things differently. Some of them even work.

To give a quick over-view of the plot with a few spoilers, there’s this giant floating world called Cocoon in which people live. And then there are these weird angel-like things called fal’Cie that provide power, food etc. Outside of Cocoon is the mysterious “Pulse”, which has its own fal’Cie that want to destroy Cocoon. The player characters are made into l’Cie (super-powered slaves) of a Pulse fal’Cie and tasked to destroy Cocoon because…pancakes and along the way must question…oh, many things.

I don’t cherry pick the most prominent ones because the damn game can’t ever seem to decide. This is where most of my complaints come from. The game suffered from a pretty far-reaching array of internal problems. The English script was rewritten so often that the dialogue had to be re-written five times.

The narrative  holds most of the flaws. The dialogue has that slightly clunky feel that most Japanese games do, but it’s in the broad strokes. Characters will shift motivations on a dime, not address fundamental differences of opinion in the group, make senseless decisions, have strange outbursts that they never address again, the villains are poorly characterised and almost entirely absent, plot holes you could drive an airship through…It’s all kind of a mess. Not that I blame the English translators entirely, it’s clear there was only so much they could do with the original story.

To be fair, everything connected to Snow that doesn’t involve the words “hero” or “Serah” really does work, not just in the character himself but also in how others react to him. In fact if it wasn’t for him, I don’t think I’d be able to discern any character from Lightning other than “she seems like a bit of a bitch” and Hope would have literally no arc or reason being tagging along.

Let’s talk about the actual game itself. After all, we went decades where stories were an excuse to play a good game so let’s not pin a game down because it fails there.

The basic idea in combat is that your three characters can have one “paradigms” which basically amount to jobs like warrior, black mage, white mage etc.  active at a time, and you can set up different combinations of roles and switch between them on the fly to adjust to the flow of battle.

And that’s about it. You only control one character at a time, and even then it’s only this weird quasi-control. You have an Auto-Battle option that queues up the most useful actions based on your paradigm and the battle situation, and there’s few times you’ll want to choose a different set or do something different. Items are almost non-existent and the only other option is to Summon your Eidolon or use one of half a dozen or so Techniques, most of which aren’t that useful.

It works well enough. It’s not exciting, but once you gain the ability to set your own paradigms and switch between them on the fly there’s a kind of “yay I used tactics kind of” feel to proceedings.  Which is way too late in the game, but ah well.

Levelling up is done by earning points at the end of a battle and then using them to unlock a new Node in the Crystarium to get the next bonus, whether it’s stats or ability. You might be wondering how this is any different from the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X. Well, each character has their own version of the Crystarium that ensures they’ll perform differently in a paradigm somebody else has because they’ll learn different abilities.

For example, as a Ravager Hope is all about powerful spells because of his sky high magic stat, but Lightning mixes it up with special “-strike” abilities that rely partially on her strength to do damage cause she’s not so hot a spellcaster.

In an effort to prevent power levelling, only so much of the Crystarium is available to you at one time, the rest being locked off until the plot says so. For the first two thirds of the game, this keeps pace pretty well with the plot, so that you can max it out with just a little grinding.

But then the final third hits and all of a sudden there are huge bonuses real close together. Except they now cost thousands of points instead of hundreds for each of them. Dick move. Literally days of grinding are necessary to be able to progress beyond this section of the game.

Finally, weapons. You can, every once in a while buy a new one from a shop or find one in a chest. But there’s not really much point. The point is to upgrade your weapons with items you find to increase their stats but these stat increases are pretty minimal and the added bonuses some weapons have aren’t really worth it.

Not that finding materials is hard, oh no, after a certain point you can just buy them (which you can do easily because after the first few hours Phoenix Downs are the only items you’ll ever need) but this just makes it a hassle to buy new items and then go through the process of upgr-ahhh no pointless mechanic go away.

That’s…pretty much it. For a Final Fantasy game there’s really very little to it. It looks pretty enough, I guess, the character designs are fairly under control and the music’s decent if not anything especially memorable or beautiful.

I don’t hate it. I don’t regret having paid £10 for it. But I really don’t know if I’ll ever replay it. I know it sold well, but  I can’t really find anything from a narrative or mechanical standpoint to justify giving it more than a 6.5 out of 10.

Inoffensive, playable but also repetitive with head-scratchingly bad plot.

Should I Buy? – LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga

Who doesn’t love LEGO or Star Wars? If you don’t, you might not be human. Not judging. Just saying. When I first heard the news about the first game being in development, I was really excited. The Complete Saga is actually two games stitched together into one, one based on the Prequel Trilogy and the second based on the Original Trilogy.

Thankfully, these interpretations of the Prequels are much more fun to sit through than the films. For those of you without a soul and ergo have not played the LEGO games yet, you (and a friend if you wish) control little LEGO versions of the characters as you play through the events of the films with all that plot and dialogue removed and replaced with funny cutscenes and puzzles.

And it’s really fun. It’s got a tangible affection for the source material and a light, breezy style. See, each character has a variety of skills which have simple applications in puzzle solving. Force users can build stuff, robots can use panels, guys with blasters can shoot targets etc. The levels don’t outstay their welcome but if you want something really deep and meaty you’re better off looking elsewhere.

There’s a few kinks, the partner AI is terrible and can’t kill any enemies, blaster characters from the Prequels can’t dodge at all (and Chewie, for some reason) and there’s vehicle sections which are…well, vehicle sections.

Where a lot of the replay value for this game comes in the option to replay levels with any available characters to find more secrets or to see Yoda kick Vader’s ass. There’s also a lot of fun to be had playing with friends, and the simple gameplay means that anyone from kids to adults can enjoy it together. Seriously, if you’re looking for something you can play with a young child like a daughter or a nephew or a little sibling for some ‘quality bonding time’, the LEGO games are great. And it means you don’t have to fall off Rainbow Road all the time.

So yeah, it’s fun, colourful, charming, family friendly and great for pick up and play sessions. Seriously consider investing in this. Just don’t get the one based on the Clone Wars TV series. That’s supposed to be terrible.

Price: (CEX) £15 – PS3
(CEX) £20 – XBOX 360
(CEX) £15 – Nintendo Wii
(Steam) £14.99 – PC

Should I Buy? – Poker Night at the Inventory

Do you like Texas Hold ‘Em but don’t get enough chances to play it in your everyday life? Do you like internet humour? Well then Poker Night at the Inventory is for you. This is literally Texas Hold ‘Em with a bunch of internet characters as the players.

You’ve got Tycho from Penny Arcade, Max from Sam and Max, Strongbad fromHomestar Runner and The Heavy from Team Fortress 2. How many of those guys you’re familiar with can be used as a litmus test for whether or not you spend too much time on the internet.

The main draw is being able to play Poker while listening to the interactions of the comically sociopathic players seated with you. The conversations are characterful and amusing, but there’s a fairly limited amount of them. After a dozen games or so, you’ll have heard every line the game has to offer twice at the very least.

It’s not too bad, but certainly noticeable. As for the rest of it, you get varying difficulty levels and every player has tells that you have to learn to read. The only problem is that Max and Strongbad aren’t exactly recognisably human, so it’s a lot harder to read them.

Occasionally you’ll get the opportunity to win an item from one of the other contestants that yo ucan then put to use in Team Fortress 2. It’s a clever incentive but I don’t really play Team Fortress 2 so I can’t tell you if they’re worth it.

I suppose I should also mention that there’s different table designs and decks to unlock as well, but that’s hardly important. I’m no expert of Poker sims, but this one is perfectly serviceable with some good humour added in but sadly lacking in multiplayer.

Price: (Steam) £3.25

Should I Buy? – Yosumin!

And lo did we behold the harbinger of the apocalypse. Do you all remember how ridiculously addictive Bejewelled was? Well Yosumin! is just as ridicutive (my new word). It also seems to be some kind of military experiment in weaponising cute.

This is a colour matching tile game from Square Enix, better known for creating a series of increasingly androgynous characters than this sort of thing. Originally a Japan exclusive for the DS, it’s now been ported to Steam in an attempt to utterly horde your free time.

The story (such as it is) of the adventure mode is that a giant stained glass window the Yosumin somehow rely on has been smashed, with pieces of it raining down all over their domain. Your job is to go out and find them. This is done through entering an area and completing a variety of challenges therein.

Gameplay give you a Bejewelled type board in which the object is to create squares or rectangles which have corners that’re all the same colour. Doing so removes them from the board and spawns new ones. Simple enough. On each board you have certain targets you have to meet before time runs out. These can be things like getting a certain number one different coloured Yosumin, different sized rectangles or collecting a certain amount of fragments.

Playing through either Adventure Mode or Endless Yosumin will slowly introduce you to a range of things that shake up the basics like the Bigmin, Goldmin and Badmin. you might feel a little overwhelmed at times as you try to conquer a difficult board, but it’s quite well paced.

Yeah, I can see like half a dozen good moves in there.

Like Bejewelled, it’s simple enough mechanically but put together with enough spit and polish to make it infinitely playable. A lot of that comes from the Pavlovian rewards the game offers up. Beating a map gets you a nice fanfair, clearing the whole board at once makes all the tiles explode as the game shouts “Yosumin!” and clearing a set of challenges lets you see another piece of the window be remade.

Like I already mentioned, this game is cute sculpted to a near scientific degree. I found myself shouting “Yosumin!” along with the game and see coloured blocks when I try to sleep. A rent warning slipped under my door while I played this. The only thing that stops this from consuming the world like its predecessor is the fact that right now the most portable thing you can play it on is a laptop.

If you play Yosumin! my recommendation is to stay away from the Endless mode. The only reason I was able to tear away was the clearly marked stop points in Adventure Mode. Also, it has a demo available.

Price: (Steam) £5.99

Should I Buy? – Penny Arcade: On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness Episode 2

Now I really did mean to get round to this sooner, but better late than never. For those of you who don’t know, Penny Arcade are a real web success story. From a webcomic started as a hobby by Mike and Jerry, it’s the biggest on the web. It has its own charity, its own merchandise, two annual conventions and have branched out into other ventures like a new comic, the Trenches, hosting shows like Checkpoint & Extra Credits on PATV even its own games.

On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness was intended to be an episodic four game story, but the developer moved on to something else after the second game had disappointing sales. Let me assure you, that’s not because its’ a bad game. If anything, it’s better than the original. And luckily, Zeboyd Games are picking up the series! Yay for them. I like you now, Zeboyd games. Well OK, I liked you for making Cthulhu Saves the World, but now you get extra cool points.

Episode 2 continues the story of the first, with Tycho and Gabe still investigating the strange goings on of New Arcadia and once again drawing your custom character into the fray. Like Puzzle Agent and its sequel, this follow up works better overall despite being mechanically very similar because it has a tighter narrative than makes your actions feel weightier.

The gameplay is unchanged from the first (what ain’t broke), it’s still the limited yet fun JRPG type stuff. In a nice touch, you start the game at the first’s max level instead of being reset to level one. In response, the enemies are toughened up to match, but it’s only really cosmetic as you weapons and special skills have gone down to to their baseline.

At least the game has a reason for not using your kickass old weapons, so all is forgiven.

While the first game focused on hobos and mimes, here its the absurdly rich and the mad that get your grizzly attention. It’s nice to see the plot picking up the dangling threads from the last game and beginning to build itself a mythology. Though there’s still a really rather limited amount of environments, they tend to flow together better.

Again, the comic’s legendary humour is omnipresent, and Jerry’s writing style is well suited to the macabre, the occult and the dark humour. Fans of the comic will be pleased to see Dr Darktalon Raven Blood, Divx & Charles the Apple fanboy joining the cast under varying guises.

I really enjoyed the time I had with both games, and I really can’t wait for Zeboyd to deliver the third. I heartily recommend this game to everyone. And buy the first one too.

Actually, this week I’ve only reviewed sequels. I guess that makes it a ‘weequel’.

OK If Penny Arcade had done that joke they totally would have gotten away with it. Stupid Penny Arcade, with their money, success, talent, money, talent, respect, talent and money…

Price: (Steam) £8.99 – Combo Pack
(XBLA) 800 Microsoft Points

Should I Buy? – Puzzle Agent

I can save you the trouble of having to read this. Do you like Professor Layton? Then yes. While Professor Layton is the respectable, well turned out gentleman of puzzle games, Puzzle Agent feels like its horror-fan little sibling.

Puzzle Agent is a so far two game series developed by the ever versatile Telltale Games and tells the tale of the only member of the FBI’s Puzzle Research Division investigating the mysterious closure of an eraser factory in Scoggins. Said factory is so important because it’s where the White House gets it erasers from, and you’re sent because all attempts to contact the sleepy northern town have been answered with puzzles.

Silly as all this sounds, the game somehow manages to play it all seriously, though it’s never afraid to make the occasional jab at its own lunacy. Instead, it’s more concerned with being a horror game. Telltale were fully aware that they couldn’t get away with big shocks or grotesque monsters, so Puzzle Agent instead goes for a slow burning sense of unease and mystery.

The influence from Twin Peaks and Stanley Kubrick is almost palpable, although it never quite manages the balance of mystery versus explanation that it needs, and the ending all but screams ‘sequel tease’.

Gnet it?

That being said, that my complaints with pacing all get quickly put aside when it decides to twist the screw and bring in the chills. The character of Tethers is also a surprisingly good lead, with a credible and strong character emerging from his initial nervous persona. The others are all weird townsfolk of varying levels of cliché, though I will give special mention to both the writing and acting of the character Glori Davner for managing to rise up from the rest of townfolk.

Now you may have noticed that I’ve spent a lot of time avoiding any mention of the actual gameplay, save for a brief comparison to the king of puzzle games. Really, Puzzle Agent is very much the same. It’s lacking in the sheer numbers of puzzles, but there does tend to be a better reason for you solving them.

So was mine by the time I'd finished

It has a near identical Hint system, but also lacks any additional puzzles or challenges. If I were to say the puzzles have one advantage, its that they tend to be explained better than some of those from Professor Layton though this by no means makes them easier.

It doesn’t present itself as well as its older brother, opting for a more simplistic approach with its art style and a near-absent musical score. Though the stripped-down visuals serve the tone, as soon as there’s a close up of an art piece the rough edges show quite clearly.

The puzzles do tend to repeat themselves, this may be an annoyance to you, but the ones this happened with were personally some of the puzzles I most enjoyed.

This game is cheap, widely available and while not overly long, certainly earns its price tag.

Price: (Steam) £3.99
(iPhone) £2.99
(iPad) £4.99

Gaming on a budget

Now the point of this site is to provide advice to those who’re, well, gaming on a budget. I have always tried to keep the games I review at under £20, and I don’t review more current games because well, I can’t afford them. I’d be no good at it, but I’ve been playing games since I was a child and I’ve never had much money. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from all that, it’s that gaming can be both cheap and rewarding.

Play Free Games
Too obvious? It goes without saying that nothing is cheaper than something with no cost, and James of Extra Credits once set himself the task of playing games with zero cost for a whole week. There are casual games like Farmtown, little Flash ones, social ones like Echo Bazaar and a wealth of demos on services like Steam and XBOX Live.

Just last night, I tried half a dozen demos from Steam, and its only by loving the demos for Tiny Bang Story and Bastion that I bought the full games.

Even more than that, there’s an increasing number of free-to-play MMO’s that you can choose to spend money on if you want, that will give you some nice extras features if you decide you want to splash out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_massively_multiplayer_online_games

Team Fortress 2, one of if not the most popular online shooters, is now free-to-play and the excellent point-n-click classic Beneath A Steel Sky is available for free at gog.com And you strategy fans, try out Battle for Wesnoth, a free turn based strategy game with an open source code and strong modding community.

For that matter, are you aware of mods? People work to create custom campaigns, challenge maps or characters/factions for many PC games to increase the challenge or simply include a bunch of fun stuff. You’ll need to be a little tech-minded or willing to read a fair amount of FAQs to install one, but a good mod or two can really increase a game’s lifespan.

Own decent consoles
Not every console has a great range of games, and is it really worth buying one that’s only got half a dozen titles in its entire catalogue you care about? If you’re stuck between buying two consoles like say a PS3 and an XBOX 360, look at the exclusive titles and think about what you’re interested in and what genres you want to play.

Personally, I think the cream of the currently available crop is a decent laptop that’ll let you play stuff from Steam, a 360 (I prefer it over a PS3 because it, DVDS rather than Blu-Ray and the games are cheaper, and I prefer the 360 exclusives over the PS3 ones), a Nintendo DS and a PS2.

Between them they can cover pretty much any genre you care to mention, sometimes with the best stuff available in that genre. And hey, if you’ve got a smartphone that has access to gaming apps, there’s a cheap way to turn your phone into a console.

Buy good games
Again, this seems too obvious to be worth mentioning, but there is just so much junk out there. Whether its derivative, bland, repetitive, a multiplayer focused title disguised as a single player epic, a lazy cash grab or simply overpriced is something you can discover before you buy it.

Read reviews, ask your gamer friends, talk to the guys in the game store. And when you do these things, don’t just here what’s being said and take it at face value. If someone says they hated the timed platforming sections, don’t assume the game is bad, ask yourself whether you mind that.

Gamers might seem elitist because you’re not playing ‘classics’ or the hottest new thing, but don’t let that put you off. Some gamers will be like that, and if you’re having fun with Super Smash Bros Brawl, don’t let some insufferable jerk with no life tell you how it sucks because its more ‘casual friendly’.

Don’t get caught up in fads
The reason everybody and their dog and their dog’s grandma bought either a Wii or a DS is because it was a fad. Halo was a fad. Even my beloved Professor Layton was a fad. No matter how big these are, that doesn’t always mean they’re good or that they’re right for you. It doesn’t mean its something you should get into after the fact because its the only thing you know about.

The Wii does have some really fun games, but it suffered from poor third party support (translation: good games not made by Nintendo). And yes, fad titles like Halo or Professor Layton didn’t wholly undeserve their hype, but instead of Halo, why not try Bioshock or Fallout 3? And instead of Professor Layton, there’s always Monkey Island, Ace Attorney, Broken Sword and Ghost Trick that’re equally fun and readily available.

Look, if you want a game in a certain genre, you can buy it without breaking the bank. Don’t be afraid to take risks on strange or obscure titles if the price isn’t too high. Don’t jump to get Final Fantasy XIII, ask a few fans what they think. Consider Kingdom Hearts or Crono Trigger instead. Not because Final Fantasy XIII is a bad game, but because you should know your choices and put some thought into your purchases.

You’d be pretty pissed if you paid £15 for a terrible film or book, so don’t spend £15 on Grizzled Macho Brown Shooter 5: The Bloodening of Space Death.

Blending mechanics, aesthetics and story

My recent forays into Steam’s catalogue of indie games has given me a renewed interest in just how games work, and how developers can blend elements of the design process together to ultimately create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Although before I get started, games have got to stop ripping of Professor Layton style puzzles. Puzzle Agent gets a pass on this for actually being good, the rest of you have no excuse.

Now the narrator as a storytelling technique is hardly new, and the ‘support character over an earpiece’ is a favourite for games trying to include exposition without stopping the flow for cutscenes, and it can also allow for building character through the interaction of two or more people. This is everywhere, from Mercenaries to Mass Effect and other games that don’t start with M.

Another trick is to have the character be narrating the story to someone else, like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones or Metroid: Other M if you want an example of this done badly.

Now, this is all perfectly serviceable in most cases, but what’s serviceable is merely what’s doing a solid yet thoroughly unspectacular job. As some of my recent purchases have shown me, narration can be used as a potent toll for immersion, storytelling and worldbuilding.

Had I mentioned this game before?

The Stanley Parable and Bastion both feature narrators who provide the sole point of exposition and we gain all we known about the game world through what they tell us. Now in the Stanley Parable the narrator was an active, omniscient presence with an agenda and an Old Testament sense of retribution.

In Bastion the narrator is a character within the world itself, and his narration is him telling the story of the Kid’s exploits while explaining what the hell actually happened to the world. This means a couple of things, the narrator is both fallible and prejudiced. Though he can tell us a great deal about the city of Caelondia and the guilds like the Brushers and Menders, while assuring us all this stuff was wonderful and amazing and fantastic he also balks at the mention of the Gods, is largely ignorant of the Ura and will comment on what actions you actually take.

These ‘dynamic narrators’ that interact with the characters and the plot, or are even integral to them, help to bridge the gap between gameplay and exposition. They also allow the developers to pick and choose the perspective you’re given on the gameworld and influence your decisions while you play.

If these examples are making you think of GlaDos from Portal, that’s probably no coincidence on the developer’s part.

It took me forever to realise I had to take the wheel from the schematics

Another technique I was impressed with was making Tiny Bang Story‘s visuals be its gameplay. This isn’t exactly unique, similar things have been done with games like Rez and Children of Eden, and really it in this case it just feels like the most logical extension of the point-n-click concept. That Roman numeral graffiti isn’t decoration, it’s something you can take to complete a clock. Need a spare wheel for that train? Take it off the diagram.

I’ll be the first to admit that Tiny Bang Story far from perfects this technique. It fails to ever really establish that we can do things like this and the lack of text or speech gives it a certain charm, but also means you have to clue into its logic without any assistance.

Another thing of note was that both Puzzle Agent games include instances where you’re lead to believe that this is a perfectly normal puzzle, only for the real world to intrude on it. One puzzle had an FBI Agent catch you as you were working it out, one had some pieces of the puzzle stolen halfway through and more than once Nelson gives up himself because he doesn’t have the information for the puzzle.

They're not kidding

To set up expectations like this and then drop them with an intrusion of logic that works with the narrative and doesn’t cheat you out of anything is not only a great storytelling method, but could also be a great method of covering up where content had to be cut if used cleverly and creatively.

Another thing designers need to start doing is relearn the old JRPG trick of having a character’s abilities be tied into who they are. Final Fantasy IV, VI, VII, IX and X all had good examples of this.

Cthulhu's here to save the day and destroy civilisations, and he's all out of civilisations

I recently saw it to some extent in Cthulhu Saves the World in a way that really left me wishing the game had done more to integrate it. Cthulhu could make enemies insane in battle, which could really help or hinder you. If only the characters had had more differentiated skills rather than just vague archetypes.

A few more things from Bastion, explaining game mechanics with an in-universe reason. To make the game more difficult, you invoke the Gods, who’re pissed at you. The Pike & Revolvers works so well in the wilderness levels because they were used by people who explored and tried to tame those areas. The reason each upgrade level offers you two mutually exclusive options is because they’re alternate forms of the same component. Giving reasons why things are there and how they work might require some extra legwork but it can really enrich what’s otherwise an age old mechanic or story trope.

El-Shaddai looks pwetty

I’ve hardly been able to play every indie game I want, but from my brief foray I can see that this is where the real experimentation is at. Nerds may run comics and Hollywood, but I have a feeling that the business suits and by-the-number developers of the gaming industry will give way to more experimental and visionary people. Look at Catherine or El Shaddai. Hell, look at Kingdom< Hearts‘ complex metaphysics and philosophical aspects.

Should I Buy? – Bastion

Yes. Now. In fact, the rest of this review is superfluous. All that matters is the first word. Do read anyway though, I worked hard on this.

Meet the Kid

Bastion is the first title from indie developer Supergiant Games, available on XBLA and Steam. It’s an isometric action-RPG that revels in the hack-n-slash rather than the number crunching. One day you, the Kid (of no relation to the Kid from ICO or I Wanna Be The Guy), wake up in your bed only to find that the world’s been basically destroyed and some guy’s narrating what you’re doing.

This narration is the sole source of exposition in the game, and its much touted ‘dynamic narrator’ feature keeps up a running commentary of your actions while also talking about the characters you encounter, the backstory of the areas you explore and the people that inhabited it and the challenges you face.

Luckily, the smooth, rich tones and effort put into giving him so many phrases avoid annoying repeats like “The Kid chose the Machete” or “Then he fell off the map”. There are some other unique features to it, like each weapon combination having a line based on its effectiveness or significance and incorporating things like deaths and falling off the map into the narration, with Rucks commenting with lines like “Lost my train of thought”.

As long as I could talk about that sexy, sexy voice, the combat is what you’ll stay for. It’s fairly simple stuff, you can have two weapons at once and a special move depending on what you’ve got equipped. Each of these is upgradeable, but when you come across a new, basic weapon chances are you’ll test it out and decide you want one of your old reliables back.

Some of them also feel a bit redundant. You’ve got the Breaker’s Bow, a single target long range weapon with high power and charge time! And the Army Carbine with etc etc etc.! Plus the Fire Bellows damn near break the game, and are only not the perfect weapon because of limited range and a recharge timer.

Another problem is that to fully upgrade each weapon, you’ll need to conquer the difficult Proving Grounds. Though just finishing it gives you an upgrade item, you have no chance to get first or probably even 2nd place without a few upgrades first.

The screen does get very clustered at time, and this can wreak merry hell with an old processor. Unless your computer is truly a relic though, I doubt this’ll be a deal breaker. This tendency towards large groups can also leave all but the most hardened player at a loss to deal with the myriad threats, reducing you to running and drinking a health tonic.

Though the levels are quite pretty and well designed, the isometric viewpoint can be finicky and confusing. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I fell of the stage simply because I was walking on a narrow ledge and pressed down instead if down-left or something equally stupid.

Speaking of the design, the colourful animesque art style is charming and serviceable, though it all feels like it was adopted more for ease of animation rather than visual charm. The music though, is exceptional. It’s a fusion of western folksy strings and more frenetic Asian music, that sounds like it comes from all over the continent. Seriously, it’s worth purchasing the soundtrack even if you don’t get the game.

This game needs posters

The replay value of this game is entirely in the combat. You probably won’t reach level 5/10 in one playthrough, and finishing the game unlocks New Game + which is the only way to access certain tonics and Prayers. Oh, and those of you who buy this through Steam, on a New Game + you get a special attack that spawns Portal turrets. Awesome.

Supporting repeat play for combat are the Proving Grounds, which quickly get monstrously difficult, the Who Knows Where, a series of dream sequences that have Rucks narrate a character’s backstory while you fight off waves of foes and the Prayers in the Shrine. See, the Pantheon are pissed at you, and by invoking they’ll help your enemies and make things harder for you. Doing so ups the challenge and the reward.

If you’re playing this on a PC or Laptop, I recommend investing in a Gamepad as the controls are a little cluttered and fiddly on PC. Though I did, and it won’t recognise it. Overall, I’d say getting this on XBOX Live Arcade is a better option, even if you do miss out on the Portal turrets.

When you’re biggest problem with a game is a specific enemy type, you know you’re onto something great. Buy Bastion now. Then we can talk about it all day long! And if the price is putting you off, it has a demo. Try it.

Price: (Steam) £11.49
Soundtrack £5.99
Game & Soundtrack £16.99

(XBLA) 1200 Microsoft Points

Should I Buy? – Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars

Made by Revolution Software of Beneath A Steel Sky fame, Broken Sword is a series of point-n-click adventure games for the PC that first came along in the final days of the genre.

Now that games could be longer and have more powerful engines driving them, point-n-click was lost in the wave of new stuff like Tomb Raider and Wipeout. The shift from crazy weird stuff that both the genre and the medium had revelled in in its past to more serious stuff was also seen here. Templars lacks a lot of that overt, surreal humour of games like Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle. That’s not to say it isn’t funny, humour just takes a back seat in more plot heavy, character driven iteration of the genre.

The premise of Templarsis that you play as George Stobbart, an American tourist visiting Paris who is caught in an explosion at a cafe. Being understandably curious, you begin to poke around and begin to unravel a sinister plot that threatens the world. But you do so by using your brains, not brawn. The old marketing for the game and even the case itself proudly boasted that you saved the world without a single punch thrown or shot fired. George himself is never stupid, arrogant or patronising because he’s American. Instead he’s the perfect straight man to the eccentric cast.

The story will take you all over Europe, with some affectionately stereotypically accented people to encounter. Rather than play on the stereotypical behaviours of the country though, the people you meet are each given their own unique quirks that makes them strange and memorable. Well, except the other American tourists you encounter.

Unlike Sky this game foregoes big intellectual themes for historical intrigue in its plot and larger than life lunacy for subtle eccentricity in its characters. This works very well, the game’s humour is perfectly balanced against the seriousness of the plot.

The puzzles are more grounded in real world logic too. None of that “use wax lips of yak” stuff. This more cohesive logic to the game’s puzzles also cuts out a lot of the frustration of getting stuck, as ‘blind luck’ and ‘use everything on everything else’ are joined by ‘think it through’ in the stable of adventure game puzzle solving tools.

The game is simply gorgeous to look at, the character models aren’t particularly amazing, but the style in which they’re rendered means they’ve barely aged a day and the pre-rendered back drops are achingly pretty. The music feels like some kind of exquisite mix between game and film score styles, and work well with the rest of the game to make this feel like a huge, sprawling and progressing adventure.

The Director’s Cut is now available for multiple formats and adds new puzzles and a side-plot involving your eventual partner Nicole Colard, and French photojournalist with a sexy accent that helps tie her into the plot and develop her character. Though the new sections are visually very apparent, the puzzles blend well with the others in the game and it’s a nice addition.

There are some problems I have with the Director’s Cut though, a lot of the random, unimportant items you could click on for humorous lines or general atmosphere are gone and there’s a few changes to the art that aren’t a huge deal but bug me. If you’re that fussed, you can get the original and the Director’s Cut editions from gog.com with a few other nice bonuses.

This game is basically what you’d get if Dan Brown was a competent writer that checks his facts. This is a good length, enjoyable and challenging adventure. It’s so widely available these days there’s almost no reason not to check it out on some format.

Price: (CEX) £2 PC
£8 Wii Director’s Cut
£3.50 Broken Sword Trilogy PC
£5 DS Director’s Cut

(Steam) £4.99 Director’s Cut
£9.99 Broken Sword Trilogy

(gog.com) $5.99 Director’s Cut
(NOTE: This is the only digitally available way buy the original version legally, it’s bundled in with the Director’s Cut.)

Should I Buy? – Evil Genius

Ever wanted to build your own underground lair? Did you ever vow revenge on those that called you mad? Has world conquest ever been your burning ambition? Well your time has come! Evil Genius is a 2004 game designed to allow you to do just that. Though you’ll probably find it classified under ‘strategy’ or ‘simulation’, it’s really more of a ‘resource management’ sim in line with Theme Hospital or Dungeon Keeper.

The premise of the game is simple. You select one of three Evil Geniuses, the narcissistic beauty Alexis, the scheming former Triad member Shan Yu or the industrialist with a Napoleon complex Maximillion and lead them to world domination. Along the way you’ll recruit an army of henchmen and minions, fight the world’s deadliest superagents and commit such vile acts of evil that never again shall the world ignore or laugh at you.

You don’t ever lead your troops in the field to do this. Instead you plan and furnish your base, set up the security systems, train the minions and send them out into the world to do your bidding. Some of you might be put off by this managerial approach but it presents its own challenges and intricacies.

Before I go on to talk about the rather mixed bag that is the gameplay I want to talk about what this game does so right that those flaws can be overlooked. First of all, this game has its tongue very firmly in its cheek. This is a parody of the 60’s, of old Bond films and cheesy spy stuff in general. Everything from the design to the animations and even the flavour text is designed to lovingly send up the entire genre of spy fiction.

The unique characters like your henchmen and the superagents of justice are great examples of this. You can recruit a New York gangster, a cannibalistic surgeon, and a Russian heavy among many other to fight off the James Bond or Rambo parodies.

And the ‘Acts of Infamy’ you commit are suitably heinous without ever making you feel like you’re kicking a puppy or something. They’re things like making sure the police find squeaky elephants instead of poached ivory or sinking a ship full of tea bound for the UK.

But while you’re ordering people to do these your stuck back at your base. You’ve only got limited room to build places in your secret island lair and you need to balance the size of the room against its importance, and make sure it’s easily accessible and not going to be found or passed through by people that shouldn’t go there.

This can cause plenty of headaches, especially in your first few games. And demolishing rooms later can be more trouble than its worth. Also, the only units you have direct control over are you henchmen (who can’t build or operate your machinery) and your Evil Genius his/herself. This means you have to rely on a bunch of sliders and priority tags to get the AI to do what you want.

There’s also a good number of bugs that make sensible decisions detrimental. Sending out your awesomely powerful henchmen on missions must seriously increase the chances of success right? Actually no, their huge positive value is actually read as a negative. Same goes for a Science Minion’s Plotting score. These are fixed with a patch, but this kind of problem should never make it to release.

There’s also some issues with pacing. This is obviously the type of game that is meant to go slow but waiting while you have to track down and perform certain missions with nothing much to do but tinker with traps and plan out a room gets old fast.

Oh, there’s something I didn’t mention! The traps. Around your base you can research and set up various over the top traps. You start with just Nerve Gas but eventually you’ll have things like the Giant Red Button and the Pirahna Pit that you can liberally sprinkle your base with to deal with pesky intruders. Just be warned, it can hit your guys too.

Evil Genius is a fun game. Well designed and charming, but weighed down by a few simple flaws that should and probably could have been remedied with a little more play-testing spit and polish. It’s definitely something you should investigate, and there is a demo out there that you can try to help you get a feel for the game.

Price: PC – £3 (CEX) – £6.99 (Steam)

Should I Buy? – LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4

This is a rather special edition of Should I Buy, as it’s being written to commemorate the release of the final Harry Potter film. Still, you all know of J.K. Rowling’s seven book phenomenon, so I don’t need to reiterate the premise or other such details here.

I did review this game before, along with several other LEGO games from Traveller’s Tales. However, they really do warrant being talked about individually so that’s what I’m going to do here.

LHP is the result of the LEGO game formula being refined through its four previous incarnations. And that’s really tangible here. Instead of trying to shoe-horn in unnecessary combat or stray from the events of the books or films to create dramatic sequences to the extent that the LEGO Star Wars games did.

The game derives most of its gameplay through using your various magical abilities to manipulate your environment so you can proceed. While this is hardly new to the LEGO formula, they’ve clearly learnt from past mistakes. While it can still be unclear what you’re meant to do at times, the game cleverly changes the aesthetics of the puzzle enough so that you never really realise you’re only ever using the same dozen or so techniques.

Instead of the traditional hub from which you jump into any of the available levels, the game takes a more narratively structured approach. Once you’ve gone past the first level, you’re free to wander around Hogwarts Castle to your next lesson or level by following Nearly Headless Nick. Or you can simply explore the castle, looking for secrets and unlockables.

A lot of these can’t be found until you learn new spells though, which in turn require you to play through the game to acquire from the various lessons. This means that the castle opens up gradually to you as you play, and at certain times of the plot it’ll be covered in snow or soaked in rain as it was when the events you’re playing through took place.

Diagon Alley is a location that you can return to at any time, and serves as a more traditional hub alongside Hogwarts. Here you can buy characters from Madam Malkin’s, play secret levels at Gringotts, replay levels from the Leaky Cauldron and many more. All of these feel very characterful and shows how much attention was paid to LHP in the design phase. My favourite touch though is that if you want to switch your character while exploring Hogwarts to somebody with a special ability you need, you have to brew some Polyjuice Potion.

There are a few frustrations with the game however. I can understand that they needed a lot of characters for us to find in the huge castle and all the levels, but why would I want to play as a Milkman? Or Harry’s Dragon Task outfit as opposed to one of the six other outfits I have for him? This kind of ‘reward’ is anticlimactic and unsatisfying.

Speaking of which, the levels do suffer somewhat from the lack of external conflict. What combat there is is very simplistic, with all enemies but Dementors requiring only a spell or two to defeat. And even then Dementors only require one hit from an Expecto Patronum, which only certain characters have and takes ages to cast. They don’t show up often either which is something I praised earlier and indeed it’s not something they should have changed but the levels don’t ever feel tense.

They’re also rather short. If the puzzle or solution is not obvious, blow up everything in site until it does. They’re fairly fun and never really dull, but outside of the context of the story, they don’t have the same excitement factor or length that previous titles did.

Still, the game has bosses! Surely they must heighten the atmosphere right? To an extent. They tend to just be puzzles you have to solve while under attack. They’re not terribly complicated, and don’t feel like bosses in the way ones from a Final Fantasy or a Zelda game do. They’re not bad, they’re just not bosses like you’d expect the Basilisk or Professor Quirrell to be.

All that aside, I do still recommend this game. It’s fun, charming and slightly more cerebral than the other LEGO games, though not too much so that a child playing the game couldn’t figure it out with some patience. The only reason I’d say not to buy it is if you’re looking for a way into the Harry Potter universe. It’s taken for granted that you know what’s going on and that knowledge will come in handy. Sure I know to touch Quirrell to harm him, but the game doesn’t tell an uninitiated to.

If you’re a Harry Potter fan, then this is a great game regardless of your age. It has a real tangible affection for the source material and the trademark LEGO humour is as strong here as ever.

Price: XBOX 360: £18 (CEX)
PS3: £15 (CEX)
Wii: £12 (CEX)
DS: £15 (CEX)
PSP: £10 (CEX)
PC: £5 (CEX) £19.99 (Steam)

Should I Buy? – Dynasty Warriors 5

Some days you don’t want to dine on fine cuisine, or even on on your regular culinary fare. You just want junk. It’s cheap, quick, tasty and satisying in its own way. And that’s pretty much how I view the Dynasty Warriors franchise. It’s my gaming junk food.

Despite this review being for number five, there’s no need to have ever played the previous entries as each game is set in the same conflict with the same characters, with each game adding in a new fighters and redesigning the maps. The conflict in question is the Three Kingdoms Era of Ancient China, both the actual history and the popular historical novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Basically, the previous Imperial Dynasty, the Han, fell out of power due to internal corruption and the lack of a strong successor to the line and China pretty much fell apart into a giant, bloody civil war.

And so the game places you in the shoes of one of 48 different fighters who you then lead through a series of historical battles. Exactly which ones is dedicated by the character you pick, with five for your average character and eight if the guy lead a kingdom. The intention was to give each character a storyline based on their historical actions but all too often a character’s actual goals are either so damn vague or gets completely forgotten that ‘uniting the land’ becomes their big ending.

A few characters avert this and almost forge credible storylines. Sun Ce’s story only goes as far as he historically lives, and then hints at the illness which killed him for example, and Zhang Fei’s stops after he rescues his sworn brother from what was historically his death. It’s ones like these that make for the better storylines, as they feel a lot more credible and almost manage something resembling a narrative arc.

Still, with characterisation so broad and voice acting so hammy plot was obviously not a major concern. Instead, this game is all about the battles. And yeah, these work. The maps are well refined and uncomplicated, each one will be teeming with enemies to fight and an effort is made to insert reasonably historically accurate events into each map like fire attacks, betrayals and ambushes.

A lot of these events require player intervention to turn out positively as the people necessary to accomplish them tend to die or fail to reach the required area in time if left to their own devices. While this can be annoying when playing the battle for the damn hundredth time, you’re pretty much doing all the work on every map anyway. If you go out of your way to activate the events that lower enemy morale your allies will start to eat through the enemy forces and kill the generals, but never while you’re onscreen and 99.9% of the time you’ll be the one killing the enemy commander.

The fighting itself is simple. Square is attack. You can mix this up with Charge attacks by pressing triangle. When your Musuo bar is full, press circle to do a really big attack. There are other things like archery and horseback riding that can mix things up, but not enough to ever be important.

The amount of attacks you can string together is determined by your weapon. The only way to acquire new ones is to pick them up from certain crates or defeated officers. Whether or not this weapon will be useful is random, you can get an awesome top tier weapon on your first battle or never encounter anything beyond your base weapon in your entire playthrough. This rarely happens, but it can be incredibly frustrating and really cripple your performance.

For the most part the characters are unique enough for the game to get away with its ridiculous roster size. A few like Xiahou Yuan and Huang Zhong are a bit too similar, and some like Diao Chan feel unbalanced or just plain bad. Their personalities are pretty much all one note as well. Ma Chao is ‘angry honour guy’, Cao Ren is ‘doesn’t like war guy’ and Sun Shang Xiang is ‘tomboy’ etc. Characterisation isn’t too much of a concern, but the game constantly tries to make you care throughout their storylines. At least you can laugh at the bad voice acting.

Despite the fact I’ve spent pretty much the whole review finding flaws with this game, I still recommend it. Like I said, it’s junk food. The gameplay is solid enough to play this for hours and even the battles you’ll see dozens of times like Chi Bi and Hu Lao Gate never get truly annoying. Plus, through playing these games and reading the in-game encyclopaedia I’ve learnt a lot about what is a really fascinating period of Chinese history and that’s always a plus.

Price: PS2 – £3.50 (CEX)
XBOX – £7 (CEX)

Should I Buy? – Dawn of War

“In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.”

With these words Games Workshop have sold one of the world’s most popular tabletop war games, Warhammer 40,000. It’s set in the far flung 41st Millennium where the Imperium of Man rules over millions of worlds and billions of souls die each day to defend humanity from its manifold enemies both within and without. Though the game is both complex and expensive, it’s certainly an immersive hobby with a rich internal mythology. Luckily, with the work of  Relic Entertainment, you no longer need to absorb tons of information and pay out hundreds of pounds to experience the challenging, visceral battles of 40K.

This is a real-time strategy (or RTS) for the PC that was originally released back in 2004. It allows you control of one of four different factions, either the Space Marines, the Orks, the Eldar and the forces of Chaos. Each is designed with a different play style in mind. The Space Marines are balanced and flexible, the Orks use massive numbers to overwhelm the enemy with little strategy, the Eldar have a wide range of highly specialised units that require intensive micromanagement and Chaos, which are an up-close and personal elite cadre of psychopaths. Each one draws from their tabletop counterpart without being bound by it. All put together, this makes sure the game is faithful to the source material without ever limiting itself.

Unlike most RTS’ that emphasis base-building, this game instead advocates combat.  The usual resource harvesting and base building has been streamlined. There are only two resources to worry about, Power and Requisition. Power is earned simply by building generators, and Requisition by holding Strategic points and Critical Locations. These are special locations on the map that you can order your squads to capture. These are set at routes to your base, chokepoints etc. which gives you two reasons take as many as you can. It also gives you objectives to focus on in battle. If your north entrance keeps getting harassed because you haven’t secured a proper perimeter and defence, you know what you gotta throw your Tactical Marines at.

The base building also boils down to just a handful of proper structures, the rest is all big grimdark tough things like turrets and stuff Once it’s set up, you’ll pretty much never have to bother about it.

You know how in most RTS’ building a unit just gives you one guy? Not here. Instead, it gives you a basic squad which you can then reinforce it with additional members, leaders, advanced weapons etc. that can be used to adapt the squad into different roles. Each race gets variations on different archetypes. There’s the scouts, the standard guys, the jetpack types etc. Still, they manage to strike a balance so that each race feels familiar enough at first that you’ll have a basic handle on them but they’re differentiated enough not to feel like palette swaps.

The game’s campaign only allows you to play as the Space Marines and pits you against the other three factions over twelve missions. It’s not the focus of the game, but it’s much better designed and fun than most tacked-on single player campaigns.  It doesn’t hold a candle to the campaign from the expansion pack Dark Crusade, but I’ll get round to reviewing that soon. Overall, this is a great game. The graphics may be dated now, but the whole visual and auditory design is pitch-perfect 40K material.

I’m only going to include the price for the base game below, but the various expansion packs are available in collected editions.

The price is £2.50 in CEX, but you can’t get this by itself on Steam. There are many collected editions on there though that combine the different expansion packs.

Should I Buy? – Left 4 Dead 2

Pretty much everybody’s putting zombie or suspiciously similar substitutes in their games these days. They’re an easy enemy to make and justify. You don’t need to program any intelligence to them and you’re not gonna kick up any controversy or moral questions by having players blast a creature of folklore into bloody chunks.

Well Valve, of Steam, Half Life, Team Fortress and Portal fame (who doesn’t love Valve?) got in on the action too with a pair of zombie blasting games. Both are very similar mechanically, but I’m more familiar with the second one so that’s what I’ll be talking about here.

The game is a first person shooter in which you take the role of one of four survivors and attempt to blast your way through one of five campaigns. There’s the jerk of an ex-con with a mysterious past Nick, the dim but good natured Ellis, the loud, angry black guy Coach and Rochelle whose…well, rather lacking in the personality department.

If you’re playing single player, or local 2 player co-op then the other roles are filled by bots who are competent, if limited. For example, they won’t use melee weapons. These are perfectly fine to play with, and they will rarely if ever be a load you have to carry.

In each campaign, you work your way through several areas until you reach a place from which you can be evacuated while fending off hordes of Infected. The campaigns each have their own setting and challenges, so none of them feel repetitive or rip-offs of the others.

The weapon choice is simple, you get pistols, assault rifles, shotguns, rifles and melee weapons of varying strength. Each is useful for different situations, and lets you approach combat in different ways. There are a few other unique weapons like chainsaws and grenade launchers that the game’s A.I. ‘Director’ throws up for you.

Speaking of the Director, it’s what keeps each replay feeling fresh. The Director changes the location and frequency of enemy and item placements. If you take down the Horde with big guns at every opportunity, it’ll throw more at you. If you’re doing too well, it’ll spawn one of the dreaded Special Infected to take you down.

L4D2 never feels like a typical shooter, so you don’t have to be an FPS fan to enjoy this. I’m a gamer who plays multiplayer as an exception rather than a rule. L4D2 is one of the games that I enjoy playing with friends. Unfortunately local co-op is only two player, if you want a full group you’ll have to brave random online gaming.

And those Special Infected I mentioned earlier? They really break up the monotony of zombie killing. Each poses a unique challenge to you and your team, requiring you to move out of your usual tactics to face them.

This is a difficult one to say something constructive about. I don’t want to go too far into explaining the mechanics, but criticisms aren’t very forthcoming and the game isn’t exactly innovative. If you want a fun game to play with friends, or a dedicated zombie shooter or hell, just something that’s fun to play then L4D2 is a blast to play.

 

Price:  £15 (XBOX 360 -CEX Price)

£12 (PC – CEX Price)

£14.99 (Steam Price)

 

EXTRA – As of the time of writing, L4D2 is on a 33% sale on Steam, along with a four pack that gives you three copies to gift to your friend, a pack bundles with L4d1 and as part of the Valve Complete Collection.

Should I Buy? – Fallout 3 DLC

Here’s the promised follow-up to yesterday’s review of Fallout 3 where I’ll look at the DLC available for the game. I don’t usually buy DLC, and only got these because they were available on disc bundled with the game. But in this case at least, paying the extra for that disc is worth it. There are 5 DLC campaigns, so I’ll do 5 mini reviews a la my Steam games reviews.

1) Broken Steel (F3BS)

2) Point Lookout (F3PL)

3) Operation Anchorage (F3OA)

4) The Pitt (F3TP)

5) Mothership Zeta (F3MZ)

Broken Steel (F3BS)

Broken Steel is the major DLC campaign for this game, and designed to add a more challenging endgame to experienced players. There are four main features to this DLC. The first, it allows you to play past the ending of the original, and changes the ending in response to fan complaints. Secondly, the level cap is raised from 20 to 30, with all new perks to allow your character to develop further. It also negates that sadistic choice of which of the two awesome level twenty perks to take.

The third part is that it allows you to play a new set of missions that carry on from the main plot, as you track down and destroy the Enclave’s remaining power base. These missions take place in their own special area of the map and don’t allow for any sidequests or exploration but they are action-filled fun.

Fourth is the introduction of three new enemies to the Capital Wasteland. This isn’t something usually worthy of note, but these are designed to be sadistically tough. Even on the easiest setting, these guys can send you running for cover.

For the money they’re asking, this is worth it. But I still maintain that buying the Game of the Year Edition is the best way to go, giving you all five for a fraction of the price.

Point Lookout (F3PL)

This DLC is the one I’d most recommend after Broken Steel. Point Lookout takes you to a Louisianna swamp that was largely untouched by the nuclear devastation, but after centuries cut off from the outside world things have degraded. There’s a ghoul (kind of a sane zombie) from before the war battling the brain of an evil genius in a jar and his army of brainwashed tribals, a bunch of inbred hillbillies that have devolved into grotesque, bloodthirsty sub-humans with a fascination for ritual blood magic and a sinister old man living in his family’s manor.

The swamps are dangerous and foreboding. The atmosphere here is even stronger than the main game. And the strange peoples and quests in this area add a semi-surrealist tone to the whole experience.

Point Lookout is based on exploration and will make even you powerhouse level 30 fear confrontation. It’s an excellent addition to the main game.

Operation Anchorage (F3OA)

I would not recommend this as a separate purchase. Buying this unlocks a special quest line available from the main game map. By approaching the Brotherhood Outcasts you can enter a pre-War combat simulator, designed to train soldiers for one of the pivotal battles against China, the aforementioned Operation Anchorage.

This turns the game into much more of a standard shooter, with little originality beyond setting this in a semi-futuristic snow field. It doesn’t offer up any of the atmosphere or aesthetic of the main game and is only playable once per character. There are some good rewards at the end, but that doesn’t really make this DLC worth it.

It feels like they missed a real chance here, they could have made a campaign that gave us a glimpse into that twisted pre-War military psychology that was going on, or offering up some pathos through showing a more human element some rogue programmer had put into the simulation. Instead, it’s pretty much straight shooter action with the slightest hint of strategy.

The Pitt (F3TP)

I’d probably list this one as third in terms of value. You’re transported to the Pitt, the new name of the remains of Pittsburgh. This place was awash with a terrible disease that turned the inhabitants into sub-human cannibals called ‘Trogs’. But a Brotherhood of Steel Member stayed behind after they purged it off the Trogs and has since forged the survivors into an industrial super power using the old steel mill.

Lord Ashur has created a vast army of slave labour, which he controls with an army of slavers and raiders. He seems like your average evil overlord, but playing through this DLC quickly reveals that in fact, the rebellion you’re brought in to help may well end up being the worse of two evils in the long run.

A fair portion of the quests have you disguising yourself as yet another slave, which makes a nice change from the combat-centric quests that make up most of the Fallout 3 experience. These quests don’t last too long though, and you’re quickly forced to make a moral choice that for once is not cookie-cutter good or evil but instead incredibly complex. The game doesn’t even award you any Positive or Negative Karma for deciding.

Mothership Zeta (F3MZ)

Why isn’t this DLC great? You’re abducted by stereotypical 50’s style aliens in flying saucers and have to win your freedom by fighting your way out with a bunch of warriors plucked from different eras of history while also slowly uncovering details of just what the aliens have been doing with all these people over the years.

For some reason, none of it works. The new characters feel flat, the new weapons don’t balance the game’s seriousness with their intended comedy, the level design is bland, repetitive and uninspired and the clues you get rarely evoke a reaction, visceral or otherwise.

In fact, I’ve never even finished this DLC. Half a dozen times I’ve got halfway through and reloaded a save before I started it out of boredom. Don’t buy this separately. If you want to buy one individually, get Point Lookout or Broken Steel.

Price: PS3 DLC – $9.99 – £9.99 – 800 Points Each

XBOX 360 DLC – $9.99 – £9.99 – 800 Points Each

PC DLC – $9.99 – £6.75 Each (Games for Windows Live)

Game of the Year Edition: £12 (PS3) – £18 (360) – £12 (PC) – CEX Price

Operation Anchorage & The Pitt disc – £4 (360) – £3 (PC) – CEX Price

Broken Steel & Point Lookout disc – £6 (360) – £4 (PC)

Steam Prices: GOTY Edition – £14.99 DLC Price – £3.99

Should I Buy? – Fallout 3

Holy Gameplay Trailers, Batman! Did you guys see the new Arkham City trailer? It looks amazing! I cannot wait to play that.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/trailers/3638-Batman-Arkham-City-Gameplay

Anyway, down to business. The Fallout series is one with a troubled history. The first game was released in 1997 and was a critical success and a cult classic. Its sequel Fallout 2 performed similarly. Then the series was taken out of the hands of its original creators and made first into a divisive tactical game and then a disastrous shooter game.

With its original studio shut down, it looked to become a relic of gaming’s past until it was revived by Bethesda Softworks with Fallout 3, an RPG-shooter hybrid. The series is set in the future of an alternative timeline where the Cold War happened between China and America which continued into the 21st Century though culture stagnated in the 1950’s and hasn’t moved on since. Eventually the world nuked itself to death but humanity survived.

You grow up in one of the underground Vaults, where remnants of humanity have dwelt for the past 200 years with no contact from the outside world. And this childhood actually comprises the game’s tutorials. Under the guise of bullies, classroom tests, birthday parties and more you create your character’s look and statistics and get introduced to combat and morality. This is all very immersive , and doesn’t outstay its welcome.  Eventually however, the time comes for you to leave the Vault to find your recently escaped father (Liam Neeson).

And from there, you’re given free range to do pretty much whatever you want within the game’s parameters. You’re free to explore the crumbled wastelands of the Washington D.C. and interact with the peoples therein.

The game’s main plotline revolves around finding your father and unravelling his past. However, you can choose not to do this for weeks while you explore the Capital Wasteland and get embroiled in side quests.

All the equipment you can use has it’s own ‘condition’ bar. This means you have to scavenge equipment as well as medicine in order to keep yourself and your gear in working order. This mechanic serves two great purposes. For one, it fits very nicely into a world where everything is built on the bones of the old as a blend of mechanic and aesthetic. Secondly, it means you can’t just pick up the most powerful weapons at the beginning of the game and expect to rely on it.

Combat can be taken care of in first or third person views. Personally, I’d recommend using the first person view, as something about the aim in third person seems a little off.

The freedom that the game gives you is great, as this is an environment you can quickly draw you in with its great sense of worldbuilding and atmosphere. Though the game world leaves you with a lot of neat little secrets and stuff to find, it’s not very populated. The game has about five proper, revisitable settlements and depending on whether you play as good or evil you’ll probably end up destroying one of them.

Despite this, being able to wander around an office building which has no relation to any quests and find a series of internal emails on the computers that tell a story of the people who worked there is fantastic. These kinds of touches are all over the place and really help the world feel alive. Or dead. Or dead but with people living in it again. Whatever it is, it makes the world feel like that.

Unfortunately, there’s not much to really say about the gameplay. It’s perfectly serviceable gunplay mixed with some simple to understand, yet deceptively deep RPG mechanics whirring away close enough to the surface that you’re mindful of them, but not so much so that they ever really intrude on the game.

Now that this game is so cheap, there isn’t really a reason not to buy it. Don’t expect any handholding once you leave the Vault though, and if you’re a shooter fan with no interest in RPGs then you should just go back to Gears of Halo Duty Warfare  5. The five different DLC packs add a lot to the game’s quality, and I’ll do a write-up of those soon. As a note, instead of having to download the DLC packs to your console, buying the game of the year edition would give you all those on disc, so you might wanna wait on buying this till you’ve heard about the DLC and whether you think it’s worth it.

Price: PC – £6 (CEX) £14 (Steam)

PS3 – £5 (CEX)

XBOX 360 £7 (CEX)

Should I Buy? – Bioshock

Yes. Now. In fact, you should buy it yesterday. Better yet you should go back in time to buy it on launch day so Irrational Games get more money to keep doing things like this. It doesn’t matter if you’re not a gamer, this is something that everybody who loves a good story should play.

The story of the game is that you’re the last survivor of a plane crash in the middle of the ocean. Waking up, you see what seems to be an ornate lighthouse not too far away and so you swim towards it. Soon you enter the once great underwater city of Rapture, now a place of madness and anarchy. You become embroiled in a battle between two powerful and enigmatic men to decide the future of the city.

The actual story of Rapture, its denizens, its purpose and its downfall are slowly revealed throughout the game. You can collect diaries of various characters to help you piece together the game’s timeline. And what a story it is. The founder of Rapture and its nominal leader Andrew Ryan’s personal philosophy is based on the ‘Objectivist’ philosophy of Ayn Rand.

You don’t have to understand any of this philosophy to understand the game, I didn’t and I still had a blast. The game is basically deconstructing this philosophy and showing how a world based on the philosophy of only furthering your own goals and living under no restrictions leaves a lot of people angry, betrayed, or virtually enslaved to the few who rise to the top. It also shows what happens for example, when doctors are free to research and refine their techniques with no ethical inhibitions.

That’s long enough without talking about the gameplay. It’s a first person shooter with some minor RPG elements, mainly in the way of buying and equipping upgrades. The weapons are fairly standard fare, at least until you get the gun that can shoot fire, ice and lightning. As well as weapons, you get access to a range of ‘Plasmids’, special tonics that alter your genetic code so you can use magic-like abilities such as telekinesis, the  ever reliable lightning and even keeping a swarm of killer bees in your hand. Though you can only use either your weapons or Plasmids at any given time, switching between the two is as easy as pressing the other shoulder button.

The environments you move through are all dark, chaotic and semi-destroyed but each looks different and has a different person whose carved it out as their personal kingdom. Particularly chilling are the mad plastic surgeon of the medical centre and the sociopathic artist of the pavillion, both of whom seem to have developed serious perfectionist/thanotos complexes.

Like most FPS’s these days you’re lead through each area by people giving you objectives over the radio, though things aren’t quite as plain as they seem.

Each of the game’s systems are well balanced and together with the novel challenges of Rapture this means that while this game follows many of the conventions of the FPS genre the game never feels cliché or formulaic.

This is a game of brilliant storytelling and solid atmosphere. It’s hard to think of a time when this game missteps. Instead of trying to think of one, I’ll just say that you need this game now.

Price: PC: £5 (CEX) £13 (Steam)

XBOX 360: £6

PS3: £8

Should I Buy? – Batman Arkham Asylum

Me reviewing Batman, this’ll be impartial. Let me start by saying that this is the best superhero game ever. That’s not hyperbolic. This really is. And it really shouldn’t be.

Most games based off of licensed properties from other franchises are mediocre at best, or only fulfill niche markets. Normally this is because the game is just a cheap cash-in, and if it’s being made to emulate the plot of a film or tv series it’s an even bigger problem because the developer has got a lot of restraints  placed on them and only a limited amount of time to make the game in.

This came out the the year after The Dark Knight, so Batman was all the hype. And for some reason, DC handed the license over to a company that had only made one forgettable PS2 game before, and that was released all the way back in 2006. So licensed game, inexperienced studio, big film to cash in on. The perfect recipe for disaster. Instead, we got a Game of the Year.

First of all, Arkham Asylum uses the ‘adaptation by spirit’ approach. It drew from many elements of the Batman mythos and media to create something new and unique. The plot (that Joker takes over Arkham Asylum and challenges Batman to survive the night) is based on Grant Morrison’s A Serious House on Serious Earth, the voice talent comes largely from Batman: The Animated Series, the level design draws from the Tim Burton’s use of German Expressionism in Batman and Batman Returns and so on. All that, added with all the little details in the character profiles and interview tapes shows Rocksteady did their work.

But that alone isn’t enough to make a great game. They did that by making this game do what no other superhero game has ever done as well. Hell, something most games don’t do period. Playing that game, you feel like Batman. Whether it’s fighting huge groups of thugs, silently picking them off one by one from the shadows or using your gadgets to traverse the environment in ways that just make you feel powerful.

I think they benefited by choosing a superhero who has no powers. Strange as that sounds, it allows them to create a character that’s powerful without having difficulties contriving excuses for challenge. Sure, you can take down hordes of guys without a scratch, but you might get sloppy and get hit by a lead pipe.

Gameplay can be divided into three sections. Runny-jumpy-climby, sneaky-sneaky stealth and biff-pow combat. Moving through the game world feels great, as you can zip around with your gadgets and use them with Batman’s natural athleticism to reach almost anywhere you can see.

When you’re stealthing it up, it’s because the hordes of burly henchmen in this area have got guns, which not even Batman can stand up to in a straight fight. The reason the developers refer to this as ‘Predator Mode’ is because that’s exactly what it feels like. These guys don’t stand a chance, and you’re picking them off one by one and making them fearful. In fact, if you do it particularly well they’ll start to believe that you can’t be human, that you’re some supernatural force. Listening to them get terrified (and therefore, sloppy) is great fun.

The combat is very simple. You press a button, you punch things. If an enemy has a sign flash over their head, you press another button and counter them. There are a few more advanced techniques, but the two button approach is the real core of combat. It sounds boring, but it works very well because it’s incredibly satisfying to see yourself in the middle of this tornado of punches and brutal attacks.

Arkham Asylum also boasts a range of Batman villains to serve as bosses. These fights…don’t match up to the rest of the game. Though Mark Hammil’s performance as the Joker easily rivals Heath ledger’s, and blows Jack Nicholson out of the water.

The Riddler has also left plenty of puzzles for Batman all over Arkham. Completing the completely optional Riddler Challenges give you extra experience (which will also recharge your health) and cement your position as the World’s Greatest Detective.

There’s a lot more that could be said about individual areas and design choices, but this isn’t the place for that. What I will say is that it’s a little short, but comes with combat and stealth challenge maps that can prolong that. But in terms of value for money, this is great. Buy it.

Price: £10 (Preowned average – CEX)

Steam: £14.99