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? – 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.

In Which I Don’t Review Persona 3

WARNING – MILD SPOILERS FOR PERSONA 3 & 4 IMMINENT

I frikkin’ love Persona 4. It stands as one of my favourite games of all time and every few months I get pangs to go back and spend time with those characters again. So I was really excited to crack open Persona 3 FES and experience another such game.

I didn’t get it.

Let me just say that if you’re a fan of the game that’s great. It just wasn’t for me.

Setting aside the slightly differing mechanics and the darker tone, the real difference between 3 and 4 is in its narrative railroading. One could quite reasonably argue that 4‘s gigantanormously long introduction and fairly frequent and lengthy cutscenes are too much and there’s not enough time spend playing the game as opposed watching it, but in my opinion it used that time to make me care for the characters and set up clear goals and conflicts.

Persona 3 was, for the twelve hours I logged on it, a hell of a lot more vague about what was happening or why I should care. I hadn’t met any characters that I *really* liked or was interested in and I had no idea what the overarching plot was. But in about four hours of cutscenes and exposition at the start of Persona 4, I knew very clearly the personalities of each of the characters I’d been introduced to. I had favourites and quotable lines and despite being more than a little fatigued at all the cutscenes, I knew where I stood, what I was doing and why I was doing it.

The third playable character in 4 is introduced a little over half an hour in and becomes playable at about the four and a half hour mark, by this point I know her hobbies, mannerisms, relationships with other characters and why she’s with the team. The third playable character in 3 is just brought to the dorm one day with Akihiko informing us he’s a Persona User and part of the team now. Sure, he was in one cutscene or so before where I learnt he knows Yukari and she doesn’t like him very much (very, very understandable). That’s it. We don’t even get to see his “awakening” to his powers.

I get the 3 is meant to be more of a slow-burner, plot wise, but in not yanking me by the leash and giving me a reason to care like 4 did, I didn’t form any attachments to it. It’s kind of like how I feel about sandbox games and games with customisable protagonists. If I’m not given a narrative or mechanical ‘hook’ early on and have to find my own somewhere down the line, I’m likely to just not find one at all and if that happens, I won’t care and I won’t play.

Sometimes a game needs that freedom. It took me quite a while to ‘get’ Fallout 3, but I love that game. But then again I spent about three or four hours wandering around the countryside in Oblivion with no idea what I was doing, how anything worked or why I sould care and, well, I didn’t care. I turned it off and never a backwards glance did I throw it.

And that’s why Persona 3 disappointed me so. It didn’t give me enough of a reason to care. Seeing as I was renting it and therefore paying to be unimpressed with it, twelve hours is all it got from me. Sorry Persona 3. Maybe you got really good at the thirteen hour mark, but I’m not willing to search any further to find the brilliance in you.

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.

In Which I Don’t Review Suikoden V

So I rented Suikoden V recently cause it’s Goddamn Suikoden and has a pretty impressive pedigree behind it. I didn’t really like it. The beginning was way too slow (after twelve hours of gameplay I’d barely gotten to the actual meat of the game) and left so many parts of its mechanics unexplained that even though I had a fleeting knowledge because of my time with Suikoden IV I just couldn’t get into it.

But I’m not here to review it. Instead, I want to talk about something that puzzled me.

See, the nation of Falena from which the hero hails is a Queendom. I’m all for gender diversity and alternative socio-political-economic-cultural structures in videogames but nothing’s ever done with it.

Well, OK, spoiler warning for the first 12 or so hours of the game. So you’re the Prince of Falena but in the Queendom, obviously only women can inherit the throne so it falls to your younger sister, Lymsleia, to inherit the throne.  This seems like it’d be setting up a female dominated society, which could let us see men undergoing gender based assumptions and persecutions, but instead it’s just a place with a queen. Sure, the people and her knights are loyal to her, and nobody questions her executive power, but in the hierarchy of Falena she’s the only woman (bar two others) of high office we ever get to meet.

The others are Raja, the Falenan Admiral who worked her way up from commoner status during the last civil war. But she runs the nomadic boat-based town of Raftfleet and seems to hold no sway in the kingdom except as the leader of Raftfleet. During the second civil war – the focus of this game – the Godwins have their own loyal contingent of the navy led by a man. Then there’s Lady Haswar, the Queen’s cousin and the Oracle of Falena. Despite it being an important religious role, she lives in a tiny mountain village and only ever seems to play a ceremonial role in proceedings.

All the members of the Senate we meet are men. The commander of the Queen’s Knights and, by extension, the entire Falenan army, has always been the Queen’s husband, the King. And he’s not selected by the Queen choosing a suitor, instead there’s a giant gladitorial tournament called the Sacred Games which determines the winner.

Even among the Queen’s Knights there’s only one woman and one young woman as an apprentice, and we never see any female guards or more than a handful of women in all of Falena who have jobs that weren’t traditionally associated with men. Those who do have what would be considered atypical jobs based on old fashioned gender assumptions, like doctors, are almost always one of the 108 recruitable Stars of Destiny or turn out to be a plot important NPC.

It’s also made clear that the Queen’s rule is not absolute. The Senate members have their own lands and loyal soldiers and citizens and so the Queen must play politics herself  to skirt around them in order to get things done.

What I’m really bemoaning here is the missed opportunity. I have a few theories about why the writers settled on having a Queendom but I’m not actually sure. It’s never explained. I’m not saying that I buy into Rune Magic and Dragon steeds but I can’t buy a woman being in charge. I’m saying that it strikes me as lazy to give no explanation as to how this socio-political structure (unique to Suikoden as far as I know) works and functions. The writers could at least follow through on the whole “women in charge” angle to gender-flip the traditional power structures. Like, it was the foundation for a great story with facets the series hasn’t really delved into before but instead we got the bog standard Suikoden plot.

Am I asking too much? Back in the PS2 era we hadn’t really started asking “Big Questions” as a community, so perhaps taking a series so grounded in tradition and making a radical shift in its gender policies would be too mu-no, wait, that’s stupid. Persona 4 gave us the stories of Kanji Tatsumi and his struggles against society’s perceptions and his possible homosexuality as just *one* of its character studies and that was a PS2 game.

Persona may well be “about” people, but Suikoden isn’t a game with a completely traditional take on gender politics. Since Suikoden I there’s been a healthy array of female fighters and not just in a “rebellious tomboy fighting even though she’s not meant to” kind of way. We’ve seen mercenaries, knights, magicians, strategists, explorers, heroes, villains; it’s had them all.

I don’t think the inclusion of a Queendom was meant to be a lip service to feminism (and if it was, it was pretty piss poor). It was probably because this game being set before all the other Suikoden games that Falena was mentioned to be a Queendom and they had to run with it.

Either that or it was an attempt at narrative convenience. They want you to play as a prince because “girl protagonists don’t sell videogames”, isn’t that right Samus Aran and Lara Croft (how sad is it that they were the only two consistently appearing, long running, mass recognised videogame heroines I could name)? And introducing a female lead to a long running franchise never works, does it Terra Brandford and Lightning? Also, the heir to the throne has to be a princess because no *woman* could manipulate a prince into being a figurehead, right?

There are arguments and counter-arguments to be made how necessary a Queendom is to the plot but it quickly gets convoluted. To reiterate, I am not attacking women in positions of power, or gender equality. I just really feel like Suikoden V missed a trick. With so many different ways they could have played it, it’s almost a shame they chose to tell the story they did with the world they’d created.

And here’s the really…heavy? important? controversial? whatever. Here’s That Part. As horrible as it is to admit, humankind has in 99.9% of cases created patriarchal societies with the role and power of women either never present or squashed as the patriarchal power structure became more entrenched. And we still don’t have true gender equality anywhere in the world.

I get the want to make our fictional worlds into utopias, like how the Federation of Star Trek was basically a socialist conclave of races based entirely around the promotion of peace and knowledge, and as Star Trek proved those settings can still give us amazing stories.

But as much as fiction is about escaping the unfairness of life, it’s also about dealing with it. Whether it’s speculative sci-fi or fantasy trying to understand how and why humanity could be changed by our advancement as a species, post-colonial literature bridging the gap between the cultures we destroyed and the ones we imposed on other people, romance novels letting us fulfill our unmet desires, adventure stories giving us the pulse-pounding thrill we crave or maybe we’re just empathising with how alone and under pressure Harry Potter feels as he struggles against the world around him.

And so too our fiction should meet matters of gender equality and other Serious Issues head on and tackle them. Of course, there’s places for fiction that does that and fiction that doesn’t. I don’t ‘hate’ Suikoden V for not tackling these issues, and I don’t feel that whenever we see women with power in fiction it ‘needs’ an explanation.

But I do feel that whenever we get ‘feminism-but-not-really’ in our fiction, like a woman stated to be all kinds of badass but really does nothing like Kate from the BBC Robin Hood series that it kind of demeans the fight for women’s rights that are still being fought for today.

I just feel that Suikoden V had a chance to do something really interesting with its setup of a Queendom, and if it had done any of the things mentioned above I would probably have stuck it out just to see what they did.

Suikoden V isn’t bad. In the end, it just wasn’t for me, even though I can see it’s what a Suikoden game is meant to be and competently pulled off. But it was like seeing an advert for some “All new Big Mac! Like nothing you’ve ever tasted before!” and getting yourself worked up, only to find it’s no different than before.

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? – Batman: Arkham City

Unless you’re some kind of DC hating Marvel fanboy that gets violent every time they hear the word “Kryptonite”, then yes. Arkham City is the sequel to Rocksteady’s surprise critical and commercial stunner Arkham Asylum from a few years back, and is a good example of a sequel done right. Instead of coasting by and making no real attempt to improve on things, City is bigger and better, with more stuff to do and more ways to do it.

Basically, Quincy Sharp, head of Arkham Asylum in the last game, took credit for your work stopping Joker and got himself elected Mayor of Gotham. Then he walled off an entire district of Gotham, dumped all criminals (insane or otherwise) inside, hired heavily armed mercenaries to police it and put relatively unknown psychiatrist  Hugo Strange in charge. A bit suspicious, no? Well, Batman thinks so. Unable to do anything as the Dark Knight, he tries to campaign against it as Bruce Wayne, which results in his incarceration as a political prisoner.

Inside the city, Joker, Two-Face and Penguin have carved out their own criminal empires and  there’s a host of other villains running about like Zsasz and Mister Freeze. And you’ll track them down through both the wide open cityscapes and the more familiar claustrophobic building interiors. The cityscape adds a whole new dimension to the game, and I must say is very well designed. See, in the last game you basically guided Bats from one challenge room to another. There were no alternate routes. Even when outside, the enemies were in scripted locations and the spaces too small for more than a handful of viable approaches.

But with the city full of randomly spawning enemies and with no set paths to traverse, the precision artifice of the encounters from the original isn’t present. Not that traversing the cities is a chore, the layout has obviously been carefully designed for both getting around and for you to do your Goddamn Bat-thing when push comes to punch. There’s also a host of new techniques Bats has for getting around in the big wide open, though on foot travel is pretty much irrelevant in the streets.

The interior sections aren’t as tight as the original, nor as long or prominent. With so many new additions to Batman’s arsenal, it’d be difficult to design encounters to compliment this. For example, much is made of the fact that enemies start laying mines. There’s even a short sidequest that gives you a gadget to counter them. But I can only recall one encounter where enemies will actually use them, and even then the explosions are so small and undamaging that *if* you do run over one the most it’ll do is alert the baddies and make you drop a smoke pellet.

Speaking of which! That’s a major change. Now when gun toting enemies see you, you can drop a smoke pellet to instantly become lost and untargetable. Then, you can safely grapple away or use that Bat-Grapple disarm move on all of them and be in a better position than you started in. Relying on it will make most encounters with gun thugs laughably easy.

Of course, you can choose whether or not to use these balance…unbalancers and  it’s handy to have them when things turn Bat-shaped. The only real problem with Bat’s expanded arsenal of tricks and little things that go buzz and hurt bad men is that there’s so many you’ll often forget you have them. When you’re up on that ledge, do you do an inverted takedown, Sonic Shock Batarang, sneak up on them, rig some explosive gel, attack through a crumbling wall, shock him by charging the surprisingly prevalent electromagnets, glide kick him, Batarang him, Remote Batarang him, Reverse Remote Batarang him,  use a cryo grenade, use a cluster cryo grenade, disable his gun, remote detonate his mine, remote electric shock him, use a Sonic Shockwave, Glide Boost or throw a smoke grenade at him? Your choice.  Yeah.

The main story is longer, and doesn’t get tired. It won’t (and indeed, hasn’t) win any awards but it’s solid fare for a Batman tale. It mostly takes leads from Knightfall and No Man’s Land, though isn’t afraid to mix up established continuity points when it wants to. The villains are integrated well, and the attention to detail with the Batman mythos is fantastic. The boss battles are particularly intense, especially given how lacklustre they were in the last game. Mister Freeze might qualify for both cleverest and most frustrating for years. In the best possible way.

Riddler’s challenges are back. There’s obviously a lot more of them, and now getting a lot of the trophies is a matter of solving a small puzzle. These also tie into a bigger sidequest that involves saving people from Saw-style rooms and tracking down Riddler’s goons to interrogate. It’d take ages to track it all down and complete. Even longer if for some weird reason you don’t Google the solutions.

Adding into ways to extend your playtime are New Game Plus, the additional Challenge Maps & campaigns, not to mention there’s DLC that makes Catwoman, Robin and Nightwing. I haven’t played any of it, so I can’t vouch for it.

But yes, this game is bigger and, in most ways, better than the original. Go buy it. Get hunting for those tantalising hints for a sequel.

Should I Buy? – Shadow Hearts Covenant

Er, pft. Maybe? Alright, settle in folks.

Actually, before we get started there are some insights that the guys over to Penny Arcade have on this game: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/10/04

Covenant is the sequel to the PS2 JRPG Shadow Hearts. It’s not a direct continuation of the original game’s story, thankfully, because that was a rather neat little narrative with no need for expansion.

It does take some of the mythology and concepts from the original game, as well as lead hero Yuri, to create a new tale all of its own. And yeah, it’s longer, there’s more characters, the combat’s expanded and better refined, there’s a decent amount of content outside of the main plot, but it’s a bit too sequel-y.

So the new tale sees German military officer Karen called on by Nicolai of the Catholic Church to help defeat a “demon” that’s been defending a town the German Army’s trying to capture. Turns out, said demon is actually Yuri. Nicolai curses him with the Holy Mistletoe, which seals his godly powers and will slowly kill him. Karen decides Nicolai’s not very nice and abandons her position, family and country to help out Yuri. Who has also made friends with an aging puppeteer with a living doll and an intelligent white wolf who also travel with him. No, they never explain how or why.

Probably my biggest disagreement with this game is its shift in tone. By the time you were half an hour into the first game, you were trapped in a village of demon cats, trying to find items for a magical rituals amongst human remains and it set a pretty consistent thematic through-line for the game. This one abandons a lot of the Cthuloid horror for a mix of kitsch comedy and more traditional world domination plots.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the superhero/overmuscled wrestling vampire guy and the hard gay shopkeeper/tailor twins that follow you everywhere, but the game never has great atmosphere. Which is weird, considering that the first half of the game consists of Grigori Rasputin (yes, that Rasputin) leading an ancient cult and seeking Godly power. This would have been perfect for the old Shadow Hearts aesthetic.

And I say first half, because the second disc basically starts up a whole new plot in Japan that spends a lot of time having a much vaguer connection to the first half than when the original game pulled off the continent switching thing.

Alright, on to gameplay. The Judgement Ring is back, now much more easy to customise and it even comes with a variety of modes to suit beginners or more confident players. Instead of only some guys learning preset spells, now there’s a bunch of Materia-like Crests. These also link into a side challenge where you try to arrange them in a grid based on passages from The Book of Solomon for reduced casting costs which is a neat idea if a lot of trial and consulting GameFAQS.

Each character’s unique skills are now gained through character specific sidequests. It’s a nice mix up, but it’s never made clear when or where the item you need is or when the challenge for it is open. Several times, the thing you need to do appears in a dungeon you’ve just cleared out with no clues. It can be a real Guide Dang It to be looking up a puzzle solution on GameFAQS only to realise you’ve now got to load up a save from two hours ago because you’ve missed out on a Wolf Bout for Blanca.

There’s a new combo system in place, where you make several characters act one after the other to rack up bonus damage. Though this is always the best way to handle a tough enemy, I could only ever be bothered to use it to take down bosses (where the added damage can be really substantial). Unfortunately, enemies can do it too, to devastating effect.

The characters are pretty cool, though it’s almost a shame you can only have four in combat. Do you want another reliable physical fighter that can take another few hits? Well then watch Gepetto try to be your primary healer, buffer and black mage! See how your party disintegrates when the boss takes him out!

That said, it’s not too big a complaint and nowhere near as limiting as the three character parties from the original.

The graphics are better and voice acted cutscenes are now standard, though the acting leaves a fair bit to be desired. Also, Yuri was much more interesting when he was a pervy, apathetic bruiser that only cared about fighting that was evolving into a dim but well meaning hero. Here, he doesn’t have a real character arc.

I don’t really think of this game as negatively as I’ve made it sound. It’s still fun, it’s just a different kind of fun. This is ‘solidly made but unspectacular’ rather than ‘flawed gem’. It’s Aliens to Alien. Same universe, different approach, bigger in scope, but somehow loses something in the transition. Not enough to break the deal, but enough to make you pine the simpler days when the attack animations were ridiculously stilted and there were creepy orphanages involved in unholy experimentations.

A simpler time, yes. A better time? Perhaps. Time for tea? Always. And a toast sandwich too? Oh, you’ve twisted my arm.

Should I Buy? – Persona 4

Absolutely. Do it yesterday. Better yet, do it a month ago so we can talk about it now. Still need convincing? Alright, here goes.

Persona 4 is a JPRG that’s technically part of the MegaTen franchise, which is a huge deal in Japan but kinda only has a cult following here. Europe got Persona 4 in 2009, but the rest of the world got it at varying times in 2008. The developer in question is Atlus. For those of you who don’t know of them, Atlus are famous for making really difficult games. For example, a boss that can hit every party member every turn for their precise weakness, bypass your physical defense and has a resistance to every single element is only really a mild threat compared to what else is out there.

Yeah. Still, this game’s Beginner Mode is a lot more forgiving than your regular Atlus game, if only because it seems to have stopped the AI from using strategies that would murder you every turn.

The game is about you moving to the small Japanese town of Inaba for a year and the people you meet. Except it’s not, because you get involved in a supernatural murder-mystery case. Except that’s not it either, because this game’s actually about the truth. There’s a constant undercurrent to every encounter you have that nudges the characters towards facing and accepting their own repressed negative feelings and dealing with them to become a better person.

It manages this because I wasn’t entirely truthful about the genre classification. Yes, this is a meaty and challenging JRPG, but it’s also a social simulator. As a High School student the time you don’t spend saving the world is spent attending clubs, doing part-time jobs and working up the courage to ask girls out. Literally. And somehow, it pulls it off. Though you may not like a character at first, chances are that by pursuing their Social Link you’ll grow invested in their story.

There’s a real incentive to do so, even if you’re some heartless bastard that doesn’t give a damn about Kanji-kun or Nanako-chan. That’s another thing, this game is unapologetically Japanese. It throws around the honorifics without ever explaining them and you’ll be quizzed on how to make dishes like sushi.

Anyway, the battle gimmick is that each character gains a ‘Persona’, a magic creature that gives them special skills. The protagonist is a ‘wild card’, who can wield the power of many different Persona and fuse them together to form new, more powerful ones. For each rank in the corresponding Social Link you’ve established with the characters, you get bonus experience for the new Personas you create, which can save hours of grinding for cool abilities.

Battles rely around you finding the weaknesses and strategies to defeat the enemies, with your allies being able to do their own thing or fight under your control. For the most part, they’ll do the right thing if left on autopilot. Even if you take control, by increasing their Social Links they’ll gain a level of autonomy, becoming able to help each other cure status effects, performing special moves and taking powerful blows for you. It’s all very gratifying to see your team come together with all this camaraderie.

Still, if a straight up RPG is what you’re looking for, this isn’t your ideal game. The dungeons, for all the interesting symbolical representations of a characters personalities and randomly-generated maps that mean it’s never the same twice are few and far between. You’ll often spend in-game weeks running around doing unrelated stuff. Luckily, there’s enough scripted events and general activities to make sure this doesn’t get too bad.

If you’re wondering just how far a game can push a single theme, you’d be surprised. In order to find everything there is you’ll really have to work hard. Some of the Social Links are a devil to start, let alone finish and you need absolute perfect actions throughout game year to get them all up to maximum. And the advanced Fusions you can perform require very specific Personas that are a nightmare to assemble without some kind of detailed list of locations and Fusion outcomes.

Another major point in the game’s favour is that it keeps its perspective firmly grounded in the mindset of the teenagers we follow. There’s a lot of tantalising hints at budding romances between just about everyone, and things like midterms carry some fairly serious weight to them. The unfolding plot isn’t told from an omniscient point of view, always giving us the relevant facts like a lot of games, but in the insular bubble of knowledge the characters have. It’s hard to explain, but you’ll understand after you’ve spent some time with it.

Ultimately, you’ll get out of Persona 4 what you put into it. If you just try to potter through on
Beginner and see what all the fuss is about, you’ll have a good time. If you invest heavily in the characters, you’ll be rewarded with appropriate and meaningful resolutions. And if you pump it up to Expert you’ll see the Game Over Screen so much it’ll become almost welcoming.

But the best way to play it is to remember that you’re always searching for the truth. If a character is looking to you for advice, that’s what you’ve got to push them towards. If there’s an easy way out, you should ignore it. If there’s still mysteries left unsolved, you’ve got to keep looking for answers.

This is one of the best JRPGs I’ve played. And I’ve played a fair amount of them. It’s seriously worth your time, just try to forgive the fact that the opening cutscenes last for several hours. Hey, if people can forgive Metal Gear Solid for it, they can forgive Persona 4 too.

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? – Kingdom Hearts II

Tetsuya Nomura has had quite the rags-to-riches story in his career. He’s been working on the Final Fantasy series since IV, and really made his name as the character designer for Final Fantasy VII meaning that he was in part responsible for the radical shift in art direction the series took when it went into 3D.

Since the departure of Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yoshitaka Amano and Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy‘s creator, long time character designer and achingly good composer respectively) he’s pretty much the biggest name left in the company and the most prominent remaining guy who helped shape the early Final Fantasy‘s left.

It’s not really where he’s been spending his time though, as he’s the creator, director and lead designer of the new action-JRPG megahit franchise Kingdom Hearts. On paper it’s a silly concept, a gigantic Disney/Final Fantasy crossover in which a young boy wields a magic key across various Disney worlds as he tries to both find Mickey Mouse and hold back the forces of Darkness.

In execution though, it’s worked surprisingly well. See, while the kiddies get to relive their favourite Disney movies in non-terrible videogame form, the more mature players can instead appreciate its solid yet flexible mechanics and increasingly complex metaphysics…as well as being able to relive their favourite Disney movies in non-terrible videogame form.

Kingdom Hearts II is when the series really found firm footing. In it, Sora, Donald and Goofy awaken from a long sleep in Castle Oblivion after the Midquel Chain of Memories to discover that although Ansem’s Heartless has been defeated, the Heartless themselves are still around, and Organization XIII is leading a new kind of monster called the Nobodies in some vaguely sinister plot.

After an overlong and very boring tutorial section and a much more exciting introduction to the new status quo, the game promptly forgets about this for what’s at least a third of its length so Sora and co. can reunite with all their friends from the previous game. This isn’t such a blunder as it sounds, as the inherently nature of multiple small worlds means you get bite sized chunks of action that keep you from noticing this.

They also try to mix things up with the different worlds. Each gives you a character who’ll join your party while you’re there, a few unique Heartless and some mechanic to differentiate it from the others, even if its just a part of the scenery that can cause damage. It doesn’t always work, but it is the better for trying.

Adding Auron to a game is like adding Sean Connery to a film. Awesome, and not enough people do it

All the different locales are well designed and essentially compressed versions of what you remember from the films. Overall, the only place I’d say is ‘bad’ is the Pirates of the Caribbean world. The realistic artstyle is strange enough next to everything else, but the lack of any of the film’s actors makes it near painful.

The combat flows well, with lots of colourful and exciting action filling the screen. This game is easier than the original, though there’s still plenty of challenge to be found on the harder modes. It’s very easy for so much to be going on that you’re not so much fighting as hoping that mashing attack will end in some vague approximation of victory rather than death.

There’s plenty of options to keep things fresh like Limits, your plethora of magical abilities and the new Drive Forms and Reaction Commands which can take some getting used to but are also useful in addition to alleviating the monotony. Still, having to access these from a JRPG style menu on the fly can get more than a little distracting when you’re trying really hard to get turned into mincemeat.

Though the score is fantastic (if not up to Uematsu’s level), the voice actors don’t deliver as well. Whenever the original actor or someone similar enough could be found, like with Hades or Oogie Boogie it’s just as good as their movie versions but none of the other Disney people sound right. The original and Final Fantasy characters sound pretty darn good though.

Aside from the plot and the combat, there’s a plethora of mini-games to be had, mostly originating from Pooh’s Storybook. Nice a distraction as they are, they never rise above being a distraction. They do tend to get weaved into the plot just enough to make sure they don’t outstay their welcome though.

Another thing this entry delivers on is the boss battles. Only a few of them derive their difficulty from unfair gimmicks, the rest are simply really big, really fun enemies to hit with your Keyblade.

Once the game’s plot actually kicks in you might surprised at just how far it goes for a 12+ with its metaphysics and increasingly confusing backstory. Organization XIII are a Rogue’s Gallery of bosses as diverse and entertaining as anything out of Metal Gear Solid.

You might worry that Sora plays like some self-insert designed to be the big hero that makes everything right in the Disney worlds, but instead he plays as a Shonen manga-style kid hero and never really gets annoying. Donald and Goofy also make a nice pair of sidekicks and together they form a trio of heroes that really, really shouldn’t work yet somehow still does.

As to whether you can enjoy this without having played any of the other games, it holds up pretty well as a standalone piece. Sure, there’ll be parts where you scratch your head and wonder what they’re on about but generally enough information to get by and the ending is pretty conclusive if you ignore the vague sequel tease hook that we’re finally getting answers for in Kingdom Hearts 3D.

If you’re looking for a really fun, standalone action-RPG it’s a toss up between this and Birth by Sleep which is mechanically the better game if a bit lacking in content besides the plot and action.

NOTE: The menus are in English, just most of the screen shots easily available are from the Japanese only Final Mix+ version.

Price: (CEX) £15

Should I Buy? – Sid Meier’s Pirates!

Those of you who know the name Sid Meier, it’s probably as the creator of the Civilisation series, in which you take your chosen civilisation from the Stone Age right up to the present day. Pirates!, on the other hand is something quite different.

Pirates! was originally created in 1987 for the Commodore 64, and yes I review some fairly old stuff sometimes, don’t worry I’m not going that far back. Instead, the old version that was still being ported to newer systems right up until 1991 was remade back in 2004 to allow a new generation of gamers to to experience the incredibly fun and influential game.

The premise is simple, you are a pirate in the Caribbean. More correctly, you’re a guy with a ship that has no official allegiance to any nation or company. When you start the game, you can choose which decade to play in, which itself changes the number, wealth and power of settlements and the traffic therein. There’s also the ability to pick your nationality (which doesn’t change much of anything) and your special skill, which will make one aspect of the game easier and your difficulty.

It’s when you start that the game’s most glaring omission becomes apparent. There’s no tutorials. Things aren’t too hard to pick up, but you’ll have to learn how to sail your ship in and out of combat, which goods are worth buying and selling, when it’s prudent to change ships, how large a fleet you should amass and everything else by yourself.

This isn’t nearly the trouble it sounds like it is, because the interface is well designed and the gameplay is simple in operation, but diverse in execution.

You see, outside of a vague overarching story of rescuing your family members from imprisonment, the entire game is a sandbox of free choice without any mission control or morality system to worry about.

You’ll still carry the consequences of your actions though, get overzealous and attack a War Galleon or Blackbeard and you’ll get your buckle considerably swashed. If you antagonise a nation too much, they’ll put a price on your head and send privateers after you. On the other hand, attack a nation’s enemies and protect its interests and become a privateer in their names, gaining titles and land in the process.

They're not fighting for loot, they just can't decide if Batman would beat Captain America in a fight

The core gameplay lets you sail your ship around the Caribbean to do as you see fit. Individual elements such as sword duels, ship-to-ship combat and charming a Governor’s daughter are handled with minigames. Some are simple cases of pressing the right buttons at the right time, others are more complex. They all work well, with nicely increasing difficulty for more complex matters.

Your ship itself is another major factor. Obviously, you’ll want to keep it in good condition, but what upgrades should you get? What class and model should you use? You’ll have to capture a ship in combat to get a new one, so you’ll probably try out plenty of different combinations. But still, if you’re a merchant, should you go for a big fat cargo ship that can carry over 100 tonnes, or something more nimble in case you come up against pirates?

And if you’re gearing up for combat, do you want a big slow warship with 250 crew and 80 cannons? That’ll cost you a lot in food, and you might sink any ship you try to take with a volley. What about a little 40 crew sloop? You can’t carry much loot, and you can’t take down big combat targets. What approach do you want? Where’s the right middle ground for you? The answer’s in their somewhere, and it’ll be a lot of fun finding out.

Unfortunately, there’s really not much that can be said about the actual gameplay itself. It all works through being simple easy enough to get a handle on, its only through playing the game, exploring what’s possible and deciding what you want to do with your time that things really get interesting.

Sailing on the big, blue wet thing

What I can talk about is the refreshing charm of the game’s visual and auditory design. The brightly coloured people act talk Sim-like gibberish and act in a nicely exaggerated fashion, and the music is simple and cheery with everything looking like an indealised, romanticised version of pirates. There’s nary a rape or murder to be experienced, instead they prefer to ‘arr’ at you with a cutlass in hand and hoist the Jolly Roger.

You’ll eventually reach a point when you’ve done pretty much everything a character can do, and the game nudges you in the direction of starting afresh by making your character get stiffer and less responsive in combat and dancing as you get older.

Pirates! is a timesink, and one that’ll reward the time you put in with fun and unique experiences rather than repetitive grinding of the same actions. It’s much more The Sims than World of Warcraft, but with pirates instead of wacky careers and cannon fire instead of interior design.

I highly recommend this game though there’s a technical point to be made before I do. It’s designed to be played entirely with the number pad of a keyboard if you get the computer version, which of course laptops lack. Instead you’ll have to use the slightly awkward combination of mouse pad and direction keys. Play this on a home computer if you can, or failing that try to scrounge up a USB or wireless keyboard for your laptop.

Not that it’s unplayable with a laptop, just fiddly.

Price: (Steam) £5.99

Should I Buy? – Fallout New Vegas

Oh dear, Fallout has had a troubled past. After it finally got a chance to prove itself again with Fallout 3, it proved itself to be a hit and a sequel was inevitable. That arrived in the form of Fallout New Vegas, very much the Fallout 2 to Fallout 3‘s Fallout.

Yeah, it's kinda like that

OK now that’s just confusing as all hell, let me explain. The original Fallout was a dark, atmospheric yet limited game that captured a pervasive mix of both hope and despair as the player attempted to stop a singular organisation from destroying the people’s of the Wasteland. And Fallout 3 was very much that, and has one of the best atmospheres I’ve seen in a game period.

Fallout 2 on the other hand, added more locations, factions, weapons, moral ambiguity, choice and, most controversially of all, humour and bugs. This is what New Vegas has done. For the record it’s made by a studio comprised mostly of the people who made the old Fallouts, and boy did they bring back the classics.

The Mojave Wasteland is much more inhabited than the Capital Wasteland, mostly because the titular city was spared most of the destruction of the Great War by the efforts of one Mr House, now its enigmatic ruler some 200 years later. But even outside of the city, the Mojave is brimming with the local inhabitants and the presence of two invading factions.

The plot at first concerns itself with you, the Courier, being robbed of your package and left for dead. Once you track down the guy that did it, you come back into possession of the item that was stolen and your efforts have gained the attention of the three major factions, who now all want your help.

The first is Mr House, a Pre-War Industrialist who wants to make Vegas great again, damn the desires of everyone else. Then is the New Californian Republic, a state-spanning democracy dedicated to providing equality, freedom and basic living for all under its banner. Then there’s the aggressive, imperialist slave army known as Caesar’s Legion.

Who you work with is your choice, and each has their ups and downs. House is an excellent administrator, but has no interest in anything beyond Vegas’ wellbeing. The NCR are nice guys, but their bloated bureaucracy and idiot Presidents are dragging things down. Caesar’s Legion will establish order, and quickly. But they’re bloodthirsty, technology hating slavers that treat women like cattle and destroy whatever culture of beliefs you held before.

Well Vault Boy likes it

But moving on from the major players and glossing over the minor ones, what’s different in the gameplay? Well, the basics are the same. This game’s more difficult. The old school developers have made gamers fear Deathclaws and Super Mutants again. Armour works differently, Big Guns as a skill has been dropped, with each such weapon instead using a skill based on its ammo type.

And of course, there’s Hardcore Mode. This optional setting sounds great, but in practice I really think it should be handled differently. With this on, ammo has weight so you really have to pick your weapons carefully, you need to eat, drink and sleep regularly so a lot of that junk you can find has a point now, healing is much more difficult and if a companion’s health drops to zero, they’re gone. Permanently.

Now some of these options would allow for a fun, roleplaying experience. The others are just there to give you a challenge. What I want to know is why this has to be an all or nothing feature, instead of a bunch of options you can choose from.

The companions themselves are worthy of mentioning. In 3, they were rather basic. Dogmeat and Fawkes broke the game, while the rest were likely to die with varying degrees of ease. In New Vegas, the companions are instead useful for a wide variety of reasons and have interesting back stories you can explore that lead to a variety of quests. For example, Boone is a monstrously powerful shot as an ex-sniper, and you can recruit him for his skills and then help his work through his issues. Or Raul, who’ll keep your weapons in good condition and who you can convince to revive his old Vaquero skills or become a dedicated mechanic.

All this choice and depth aside, it’s still difficult for me and many others to say whether or not this is the better game. Pretty much the only subject 3 wins out on is atmosphere, but it was such a strong atmosphere that it just might be enough. New Vegas trades the broken 50’s feel for a cowboy/swingin’ Vegas aesthetic that all but vanishes when you’re not in the Mojave itself or the streets of Vegas.

But still, this is a good game. The characters are great, the factions are plentiful and interesting, the moral choices are more ambiguous, the tweaked combat and new weapons fit and all the throwbacks to old Fallout are well executed and never intrusive.

If you liked 3 you’ll like this. It’s more of the same but from a different approach. 3 showed the world broken and barren, New Vegas shows us what civilisation’s up to. I hope the future games continue this approach, I want to see the NCR and Caesar’s Legion really go to war. I want to find out about the Commonwealth. And who else is out there? An army of tribals like the Great Khans? More Enclave? More Brotherhood of Steel? How’s about bringing the Pitt into this?

My recommendation for this game is just as strong as it was for its predecessor, but for different reasons.

Price: (CEX) £10 – XBOX 360
£10 – PS3
£10 – PC

(Steam) £14.99
DLC – £7.49 each/£22.47 combined

Should I Buy? – Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep

This was reviewed here before by a friend of mine, and you can find the original by using that pretty little search bar up there if you fancy, but there are things I want to say about this game and so here goes.

Kingdoms Hearts Birth Sleep is the sixth game in the franchise to be created but takes place first canonically. Kingdom Hearts itself at first looked like some cutesy cross between Final Fantasy and Disney but has grown into a surprisingly complex and difficult series of Action-RPGs master-minded by long time Square Enix artist turned writer/director Tetsuya Nomura.

The series has a rich internal mythology mostly concerned with the balance of light and darkness, the intangible power of the ‘heart’ as some spiritual force and the result of losing said heart. By now the series contains creatures that technically don’t exist, and one who now never existed in the first place, causality be damned. Luckily, you’re not required to know any of this to play Birth by Sleep.

The game itself takes place ten years before the first game and is basically an origins story for the series recurring protagonist told through a trio of young Keyblade Wielders, apparently the last heirs to this ancient order. Each one of these wielders gets their own playable storyline, and playing all of them is necessary to understanding what’s really going on.

First is Terra, a quiet and brooding older boy with great strength and will but troubled by darkness in his heart. Next is Ventus, a cheerful and friendly young boy with an incredibly pure heart who’d do anything for his friends. All you Kingdom Hearts fans should be picking up the obvious links by now. Finally, there’s Aqua, the blue-haired magic specialist who, unlike most girls in this franchise so far, doesn’t depend on the protection, love or approval of a man and instead kicks all kind of Unversed ass.

On the franchise’s gender politics, I never felt that there was any real sexism on the part of the developers but when your dramatis personae is drawn mainly from old animated Disney films, and the strength shown by characters like Jasmin and Belle tends to be overshadowed when Sora and Beast are tearing through hordes of Heartless. Luckily, Aqua’s here to show that the woman of this universe kick just as much ass as the men.

Those of you who’ve played a previous Kingdom Hearts game will be familiar with the basic setup here, though there’s been a lot of tweaking and stremaling to make everything faster and better balanced.

Now your menu of all your learned spells and all your items is replaced with the Command Panels. You can equip panels that you buy and find into the limited slots in your menu, and then simply move between them with the D-Pad and cast with Triangle. This may sound limiting, but it’s much more efficient. As you use these abilities, they level up and you can fuse two panels to create a new one, allowing you to explore new attacks and play styles.

Also up is your ability to Shotlock, which can make some bosses pretty much trivial. There’s also the D-Link, where you can fuse your with the memories of characters you encounter to unlock sets of Command Panels based around them and powerful Finisher moves.

Finally are the Command Styles. By using moves of a certain type, like a Fire move, you can enter a Command Style. These are themed around whatever you just used and later in the game you get the ability to use advanced Styles that can entered from a previous style. These are a great addition to the combat, allowing you to change things up on the fly and use powerful attacks to decimate even the toughest of foes. Unfortunately, a boss’ attack patterns can mean that these styles are difficult to enter or maintain just when they’d be most useful.

All of these new options (added with the fact that every single damn Command Panel, Style, Shotlock, D-Link and Finisher is really useful if used right) mean that the combat is much more varied than all the previous incarnations of the series, which is a good thing because there’s bugger all besides.

The worlds feel empty, even moreso than before. Only plot essential characters show up, and a good deal of them disappear when there’s not a cutscene for them to be in. Take Cinderella’s Ball, there’s only her, the Prince, a servant the wicked stepmother and the ugly stepsisters there. I understand that UMD isn’t the best format for large crowds, but come on Squeenix, really?

This also means a lack of sidequests. There’s exactly four minigames, one set of collectible items and once non-storyline location. And even that’s just an arena used for multiplayer. I want to forgive the game this because the plot and combat work so well, but I can’t help but feel that this game is pretty damn bare-bones. Birth By Sleep would need to include at least a special Boss fight mode for this problem to be addressed.

As for the characters themselves, a few will be familiar to fans of the franchise. Mickey, Yen Sid, Pete, Maleficent and others return. The Final Fantasy trappings have been further demoted to the character of Zack and the Moogle shopkeepers. The Disney worlds seen here are based mainly on the earlier works of Disney, and these don’t really lend themselves well to great characters. Fortunately, the original characters and returning players bring enough to cancel this out.

Terra plays as a slow moving bruiser, and is essentially the game’s easy mode as he can take most hits in his stride and his high strength means you don’t have to worry much about all the different types of magic. Ventus is the fragile speedster type, though unfortunately so much so that his basic combo can’t kill the very first enemy. Aqua’s the most difficult to use, but by far the most rewarding. Magic is incredibly useful in this game, and she outstrips everyone with it.

Oh! I forgot to mention the Command Board! This monopoly like minigame is strictly optional, and can be played against friends or the computer and lets you gain and level up all sorts of different Command Panels, including a few only found here.

I’d also like to give a special mention to the villain being played by Leonard Nimoy and your Master having Mark Hammil as an actor. That is awesome.

But ultimately, should you buy it? Yes, fans of the franchise should. If you’re looking for an entry point, this is probably your best shot outside of the original. But if you’re just looking for a really good PSP game, this certainly fits that criteria, though you might object to the price.

Price: (CEX) £18

Should I Buy? – Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions

Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions is one of those strange Gaiden games that the eye-wateringly popular Final Fantasy franchise has spawned over the years. It’s the first of three Final Fantasy game to bear the ‘Tactics moniker, though it’s not directly related to the other two. They’re all part of the underrated genre of ‘Tactical Role-Playing Game’ that you don’t see a lot of outside of Japan.

Is that a Chocobo?

War of the Lions was set in the fictional world of Ivalice, and told the story of Ramza Beouvle as he fought in the War of the Lions and is available now as a PSP port. The plot goes the way these all do, it starts with some kind of war between two factions or nations and escalated until the player’s cut a bloody swathe through the command hierarchy, only for it to be revealed that there’s some kind of world destroying magic or demons involved and then things become a more typical JRPG plot.

Now I’ve always preferred the political intrigue section, with the various factions having their different histories and motivations, the interactions and backstabbings of the leaders. Good stuff, the sort you don’t normally see. As for the ‘end-of-the-world’ scenarios, I’ve saved so many virtual worlds that my track record probably puts the Avengers to shame. This isn’t a specific criticism of War of the Lions, as this always happens. It’s a particular shame it happens here though, because the politics are such a dense interconnecting web of juicy plot that the simplification of all this that happens is made that much more noticeable.

In the game itself, you’ll have to control a group of fighters through the various maps while they level up and learn new abilities. These abilities are dictated by their Jobs. In order to unlock more of these, you’ll have to get ‘Job points’ to gain ‘Job levels’ in specific classes. Job points are also used to unlock a class’ different abilities, so you have to invest time in your Thief before he can swipe the enemy’s sword from their hands. All this adds up to a need to grind, as the story missions have a high difficulty. The grind itself isn’t too bad, but it is a long and laborious process.

Another thing is the way death is handled. Once a fighter goes down, they’ll lay there for three turns. If they’re not revived in this time, they die. Permanently. If this is one of your guys, it can mean that weeks of grinding and customising has gone to waste. Sure, you can restart the level if you miss the deadline but will you want to?

The story is enjoyable, the new script gives an arch-arcane dialogue style that’s quite amusing to read and the battles themselves are fun to play when they’re not teeth-gnashingly frustrating. The problem is that the game feels a bit poorly paced, as you don’t gain those Job points quick enough. Also, if you get bitch-slapped down by that boss for the umpteenth time you can really get put off. I’ve often put this game down for long periods of time because I couldn’t beat a damn level, only to got back and grind like hell only to get stuck at the next one.

These are all problems that would get addressed by the later Final Fantasy Tactics games. Its problems aren’t necessarily a deal-breaker though. Casual players need not apply, but real strategy enthusiasts and more ‘hardcore’ Final Fantasy fans love all that grinding and difficulty. In fact, it’s a prime candidate for self imposed challenges like only using the main character, or only using the Dancer class.

This is by no means a bad game, but do think hard about how committed you are to the challenge of a game, and trying to surmount it. Oh, and those of you who’re not that type, about halfway through you get a guy known as ‘Thunder God Cid’, and he’s as strong as his reputation implies. He’s a storyline character that utterly breaks the difficulty curve.

Price: £6 (CEX)

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? – Shadow Hearts

Now there’s an obscure one. Just wait till I review Hotel Dusk or Vandal Hearts! This is a PS2 RPG from Japan that was developed by a little studio called Sacnoth, later Nautilus. Pretty much the only thing they ever made were the three Shadow Hearts games and its predecessor Koudelka. They’ve managed to achieve the status of cult classic for a mixture of Lovecraftian horror, offbeat humour and colourful cast of characters.

The first game of the series certainly suffers from its share of flaws. The graphics haven’t aged very well, and the only time you’ll hear voices are in one of the game’s three animated cutscenes or those in-battle grunts and phrases it seems all RPG characters have to spout.

Shadow Hearts puts you in the shoes of the Harmonizer (here spelt Harmonixer) named Yuri. He’s a drifter who gets by on his fists rather than his wits, and is occasionally guided into adventure by a freaky headache inducing voice in his head. He tends not to mind, because it lets him punch monsters and Yuri loves to punch him some monsters. This time it’s telling him to protect the young Alice from the evil warlock, Roger Bacon.

And the rest of the game is spent thwarting the evil schemes of this dapper villain, recruiting the usual ragtag bunch of misfits along the way. I say ‘usual’,  they’re really anything but your typical RPG crew. You’ve got Yuri, the slightly dim and pervy hero who fuses with demon souls, Alice, the Bible wielding ingenue, Zhuzhen, the happy-go-lucky Taoist sage, Margeuritte, the German secret agent, Keith, the French vampire and Halley (shouldn’t that be Harry?) the magical London orhpan.

You guide these characters through various locations Asia and Europe just prior to the outbreak of World War I. You’ll visit a variety of locations but the enemies will always be monstrous. If you read the bestiary, those monsters you’re fighting are really…well, monstrous. One of the nicer ones is a beast that hides in the sewers and drags obese people down to the dark depths to feed on. One of the NICER ones.

What makes the battles in this game unique is the game’s Judgement Ring. Whenever you choose an action, the ring spins and you have to press X when the spinner’s in the highlighted areas to pull off the move. This works fine in battle, but there’s a few variants used outside of battle for no real reason that are just frustrating.

Overall the game’s unique and setting atmosphere along with a sense of macabre humour and its genre savvy characters make this feel really one of a kind. It’s not the most polished or expansive of experiences, but this is certainly one you won’t get in any other series. So if you’re a fan of RPGs (I’m assuming you are to have read this far) then yes. I recommend this. And the sequels too, but those are reviews for another time.

Price: CEX – £18

Should I Buy? – Final Fantasy VII

I’ll be honest with you and say that I’m reviewing this game because the last few have been about titles nobody seems to care about. So, I’ll review something huge to get some more interest! Thankfully, doing this doesn’t violate my rule of a game being cheap and easy to find. Although you can buy an original PS1 version off of Ebay for a squillion pounds fifty, it’s now available in the PSN Store for a much more reasonable price.

So, the PS1 classic has now been made available for download onto your PS3. And should you buy it? Well it hasn’t gained its reputation for nothing. I imagine over the years you’ll have heard of this as a candidate for ‘Best Game Ever’ or ‘Best RPG Ever’ and while I wouldn’t go that far, it is an excellent game.

You play as Cloud Strife, the moody mercenary who’s just been hired by the eco-terrorist organisation AVALANCHE (all caps necessary) to fight against the evil, world ruling megacorp that is the ShinRa Electrical Power Company. As the game unfolds and you recruit your party you find that each has a past tied to the various ventures of ShinRa, from sabotage to war to questionable medical procedures.

The characters themselves are really quite the site. Yes, the overworld models are awful, but that’s not what I mean. This being the first Final Fantasy that was made in 3D and being long enough to focus much longer plots on each of them. So while the cast of characters is strong and memorable most of the time, there are some real oddballs. My personal favourite is Cid, the gruff yet warm hearted pilot that chainsmokes and swears all the time.

If you’ve ever played a JRPG before, you’ll be familiar with the basic tenets of the battle system. When you enter a battle, the screen goes all swooshy and your party of three are transported to a special screen where you and the enemy stand in lines on the opposite sides of the screen and take turns to choose commands from a menu until the other sides are dead.

In order to gain access to special skills, you have to use one of two methods. Most come from equipping magical orbs known as Materia to the slots in your weapons and armour. The more you have it equipped, the more points it earns. After enough points, it’ll learn more powerful versions of its spells. This ensures that so long as you set yourself up right, you’ll always have spells appropriate to point in the game without overloading you with hundreds of different Materia.

Another point to the Materia system is that magic Materia will increase your magical stats a bit, but decrease you physical ones and vice versa for physical Materia. This means that your natural instinct to load up on all the spells will do you more harm than good and could even cripple your chances. The game never really gets round to explaining this though, as it doesn’t with a few of the game’s foibles that might trip you up.

The other way is each’s characters Limit Breaks, as you take damage in battle the bar fills up and eventually you get to unleash one. Characters earn more of these by participating in battle, which means that you’ll be at a bit of a disadvantage when your favourite’s not allowed on the team. The Limit system still works though, and adds characterful moves to tough battles that can really feel like they’re changing the course of the action.

The character models are terrible outside of FMVs and battle scenes, but the pre-rendered backgrounds can be gorgeous.

They’re  characterful, using a well thought out and implemented aesthetic style that lets the game’s look stay consistent even when it switches from tribal villages to Gothic sci-fi structures to ancient cities and beyond.

It manages to look a lot better than most modern games, despite its much lower graphical capabilities.

I’m also a huge fan of the soundtrack. This is in my opinion veteran Final Fantasy composer’s best work, with him using the limited MIDI format to create plenty of songs that really evoke the atmosphere or emotion of the scene.  Then again if you prefer something more orchestral or modern sounding, you’ll probably disagree with me. But if you like videogame music that sounds like videogame music rather than a film score, I’m sure you’ll groove on it too.

The script has a few translation issues and the story can be confusing at times but it is great. The characters work well, the battles aren’t frequent or repetitive enough to ever become a chore and if you can look past the regular character models the game’s still quite pretty.

Still, those of you who’ve come to this game hearing about how its some unrivalled masterpiece will probably leave somewhat disappointed. Sure, it’s a great game that brought the JRPG genre to the west and exploded Final Fantasy from a pretty much Japanese exclusive series that always lost out in sales to Dragon Quest into a global mega-franchise.

And at the same time it codified the genre for entire continents that had had hardly any exposure to it and delivered story and gameplay depth pretty much unparalleled excpet by Western Computer RPGs of the time.

Final Fantasy VII isn’t just important and well regarded because of just what it is as a game, but also because of the impact it had on gaming culture. It was, pardon the pun, a game changer.

NOTE: The PSN Store site is currently down, so I had to do some scouring to find the prices and they may not be 100% accurate cause I got them from old posts. If anybody knows the current price, feel free to let me know and I’ll edit them in.

Price: $15/£10

Should I Buy? – Dissidia Final Fantasy Duodecim

Man that title’s a mouthful. This may sound like some incredibly insular title aimed only at the most dedicated of fans. That’s partly true, this is another example of nerdy fanservice taken to the extreme. However, this title is far from excluding.

A basic knowledge of Final Fantasy is good as it’ll help you know who these characters are, why you should care and help ease you into a lot of the game’s systems. That being said, I’ve spoken to people who’d had no prior experience with the series who loved it.

This is the prequel to the original Dissidia Final Fantasy from 2009 which pitted a hero and villain from each of the first ten main Final Fantasy games against each other in a battle of good vs. evil. It was a love letter to the fans, and its return with Duodecim is bigger and better in just about every way.

The game introduces eight new playable characters to the original’s twenty two. I’ll list them here for Final Fantasy fans: Laguna, Vaan, Kain, Tifa, Yuna, Gilgamesh, Prishe and a super secret villain character.

The Dissidia game use a unique battle system that is basically a beat ’em up with huge stages and RPG elements. In battle you’re free to run, jump and climb all over the stages while the two characters unleash one of two types of attacks. You have ‘Brave’ attacks, which lower your opponents Bravery points and increase your own. These are the bread and butter moves of Dissidia. Then, you can use these points to launch HP attacks, more difficult to use moves that decrease your opponent’s health by your total Bravery points.

This system really differentiates Dissidia from other brawlers, and helps this game not feel like the clone of some other fighting game. The RPG elements I mentioned work because they’re entirely in the background. As you fight, you level up, learn attacks and support abilities and can equip better weapons and armour. Tweaking these makes your characters very customisable while still keeping each character’s unique style intact.

And each character does have a completely different style. You could loosely define three types, ‘powerhouses’ that have great close range attacks but little else, ‘tricksters’ that are nimbler and weaker, but have special tricks to make up for it and ‘shooters’, characters with primarily long ranged attacks that rely more on tactics to use properly. The unique properties of each character is drawn from their in game personality and abilities, and really makes you feel like you’re fighting as that character you love, much like the Smash Bros. games.

There are also a few new features to the combat, like ‘EX Revenge’ and the ability to call in another character to assist you in combat.

Also, each of the old characters has been rebalanced. In some cases with completely new moves. I want to make special mention of Jecht, who gained the ability to fire lasers from his eyes and throw flaming meteors around, as if being able to backhand the final boss’ attacks away wasn’t enough. And all that time you spent levelling them isn’t wasted, you can start a new game on here with all those levels and skills transferred just as they were. The top level equipment though? You gotta get that again.

The story doesn’t measure up to the combat though. If you’ve heard of or experienced the legendarily great Final Fantasy plots, you’ll be disappointed. The voice actors do acceptable jobs (with Kefka again being the highlight, though Gilgamesh rocks too), but the script is really lacking. Then again trying to recreate, or in terms of the earlier story-lite games create, everybody’s character arcs in the few cutscenes they get in their story mode is probably too great a challenge for any writing team.

You should still play through the story mode, it’s just far from stellar.

Probably the best non-mechanic part of this game is the soundtrack. It’s got tunes collected from all the represented Final Fantasy games, most of which were composed by industry titan Nobuo Uematsu. Listen to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT6CmBOcAfw for example, and this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KNssd1wdH8

There are problems with this game, though they’re really just niggling complaints like I don’t like how they’ve restructured the equipment system etc. and fanboy bemoaning of favourite characters, stages and tracks that aren’t included. None of them should put you off of this.

This is one of the reasons to own the woefully lacking in quality titles PSP. Get this over buying the original, it literally has all the old content with more added. If you’re a fan that didn’t get the first one, get this one. If you’re not a Final Fantasy fan but want to try it out or just want a solid game for your PSP, give this one a look.

Just, it may not grab you straight away OK? It may take a few hours for it to really click. Give it that time. It really deserves it.

 

Price: £20 (CEX)

 

 

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

Guest Review – Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep

This is a special guest review by user suzukiwillow of Square’s PSP exclusive, Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep. You can see the original at: http://lemoncity.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/birthbysleepreview/

If anybody’s interested, I’ll do a counter-review that talks more about the gameplay and other such points that were kinda glossed over here. Hell, I might do that anyway.

The version shown here has been slightly edited for profanity, length and to keep it more in line with what I’m trying to do here.

It’s 3:15AM. Why am I awake, you ask? Well, I have just played two hours of Birth By Sleep (BBS) for the PSP. There are no spoilers in this.

Now, Let me first state before I go any further, I am not an avid Kingdom Hearts (KH) fan; but I have seriously been trying to like it for the past however many years. If you’re a fan, know this entry will end positively, if you’re not, enjoy my reasons for KH-hate.

I have tried to play KH1. I tried, honest to God, I tried; in fact, I’m still trying to play it. Every so often I’ll feel a bought of zeal like, ‘yeah let’s love this game!’ but omg. The battle system is horrid. The gummie-ship is a joke. The travelling-between-worlds-experience is the shittiest navigation system since Star Fox 64/Lylat Wars (except Star Fox was fun). The levels are stupidly, stupidly hard for simpletons like me who play RPGs for the, you know, role-playing and not constant hack and slash. And last but not least, I could not give a flying frack about any of the characters. Well, except Riku, but he’s not in it enough for me to want to keep playing.

Therein lies the biggest fault. Riku, Squall (his name is not Leon) and Cloud are the only ones I care about in KH1 – Cloud and Squall slightly redundant because I know and love them from Final Fantasy (FF) VII and VIII (here be the FF nerd). Also, Squall has hysterically dirty lines in KH if you read them wrong.

So moving on…

KH2, again, I’ve watched some gameplay because I thought: at least I personally won’t have to deal with the crappy battlesystem. Nah, I didn’t have a clue what was going on and I still didn’t care.

Which brings me to Birth By Sleep (cause let’s be honest. There’s no way I was going to, or ever will, touch Chain of Memories or 358/2 Days). I saw the trailers and thought, ‘well, it’s definitely pretty and the producers/animators have been watching gmvs for scene transitions, but there is no way I’m attempting to play it,’ when – hold on – ‘did I just see Zack Fair?’

Good. Heavens. Don’t get me started on how much I love Zack Fair, from Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core. I would travel the world, steal the Enterprise, defeat the Cylons and heal all the Nobodies just meet Zack-freakin-Fair. My heart; it’s throbbing.

When I found out that not only is Zack Fair in BBS but that BBS is the prequel to the series (so I don’t have to know the KH plots) I bought it as soon as I could.

It’s amazing.

The scenes draw great parallels from the original games (mind-screw) and the artwork is super smooth. I guess this is even more enjoyable to die-hard fans because I can tell the game makes a lot of hints at Sora, Roxas and Riku, but I don’t know enough to appreciate these moments. Meh. Roxas: who? Ansem: never met the first one let alone the alleged others! But I digress.

As pointed out by my cousin (a die-hard fan), who watched me play the first 25 minutes over my shoulder, the music is slightly jazzed up but very nostalgic, which works well. My cousin left before the music got super good, but believe me, it has a bouncy, enrapturing quality. The boss battle music, so far, is hilariously J-Pop. J’adore.

The main characters themselves are, at first glance, an imitation of the original three; but! they are thankfully not the same after all. Sure, the same archetypes have been churned out and Terra is wanking on about the same tripe as Riku – but you know what, I care about him – and that’s all I’ve ever wanted from KH in the first place. I know there’s a good story to be told (somewhere) but who is Sora and why should I care? >_O

Aqua. Damn. Not only is she hot but she is A GREAT, NOT IRRITATING, FEMALE LEAD – OMGWHUT? Her voice actress, Willa Holland, is also fantastic. She has a real earthy, mature voice, which definitely helps.

Terra, on the other hand, geeeh… His voice actor, Jason Dohring, is not bad but I personally know amateur voice actors who could do a better job. Dohring has potential, that’s for sure. Ven, however…

Jesse McCartney voices Ventus. Well, I guess I got used to it. At first, I was concerned because his diction was so poor, but either I got used to it quick or McCartney improved between recording the prologue and the opening chapter. I’d like to think it was the latter.

The set-up is divided into three chunks so far, but I’m guessing it will eventually be four. You play each character from the beginning of their story to the end, no swapping in between, and then figure out the plot holes by slotting all three storylines together; which I personally love the idea of and am keen to amalgamate. I’ve started with Terra’s story because I hate, well, no, dislikeVentus and adore Aqua, so I’m saving her for last. Despite the familiar Riku-characteristics, I am becoming quite fond of Terra in his own right.

Onto gameplay: super fun. Enough said. I enjoy it, and that’s a first. Also, save points restore all health – YES! One thing though, I’m still confused as to how you are meant to level up, equip and ‘meld’ abilities. I feel they looked at Final Fantasy X and thought, “we can do that; but sleeker!” Well, it’s definitely shiny but the simplicity of the design was lost somewhere… Maybe I’m just a moron.

Travelling between worlds: freaking bliss. I gasped with glee at how clean, simple, wooshy and fun space travel is in this instalment. Good God, it’s wonderful. You can whizz around space storms for as long or as little as you like, and not get lost.

So to wrap this up: the battle system, like any game, requires a little getting used to but certainly works. Space travel no longer makes me stressed. The new enemy designs are familiar but nicely redone. The voice acting is as balanced with good and bad actors/lines as it ever was. The music is wonderful and the plot actually progresses. But best of all, I love the new characters; Aqua still at the top.

It looks like I’m not just playing this for baby-Zack anymore. Well done, Squeenix. It’s now 4:30AM.

Come back next time to see Willow kick herself in the mouth for everything she said in this amateur review! *thumbs up*

So there you have it, my new editor’s grand entrance. It is, however up to me to finish this review off by answering the question, should I buy this? Yes. If you have a PSP this is one of the richest games available on the tragically under-served system. You don’t have to be a Kingdom Hearts fan to enjoy this game, but it certainly helps and its my personal favourite of the series. This is an action-RPG that’s a bit on the pricey side, but definitely worth it as the story is very replayable and caps out at anywhere from 30-40 hours. And considering the amount of people that’ll pay full price for a shooter with an 8 hour campaign, I’d say the price is definitely worth it.

Price: £15-£20 (multiple sources)

Should I Buy? – Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII

Now even a lot of non-gamers know of the mind-numbingly popular Final Fantasy series by reputation, and Final Fantasy VII has often been said to be the best of them. Personally I think IX & VI are better, but that’s not something to get into here. What I will say is the FFVII is a classic that was first released on the Playstation 1 and introduced a lot of westerners to the series, myself included.

Despite being such a beloved game, Square didn’t cash in on its popularity for a long time. Then, instead of the epic sequel or up-to-date remake that many of the fans had wanted Square introduced the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, a bunch of titles set in the Final Fantasy VII world, dedicated to teaching us more about the characters of the original.

This was received with some mixed opinions. Most people thought Dirge of Cerberus was terrible, Advent Children regularly divides fans on the novellas and game Before Crisis haven’t even been released outside of Japan. Often agreed to be the best thing to come out of the Compilation is Crisis Core, a prequel focused on the life of Zack Fair. Zack only showed up in a couple of flashbacks in the original game despite actually being quite integral to the game’s plot. By the way this is a PSP exclusive, I’d hate you to read this whole piece and get really excited only to find out you can’t play the game.

In this game we learn that Sephiroth wasn’t the only incredibly powerful member of SOLDIER, the evil megacorp ShinRa’s elite military division back in the day. He had two friends, and fellow SOLDIER 1st members Angeal Hewley, your mentor, and Genesis Rhapsodos.

After your first proper mission though Genesis goes evil and takes half of SOLDIER with him. You, as Zack then spend most of the game fighting Genesis’ army, slowly becoming more important as the other 1st Class members become less reliable until you’re just about as integral as you can get.

Unlike the original, you only play as Zack instead of with a group of characters and the battles are action-RPG style instead of a straight JRPG. This works by giving you a simple attack combo with one button, then selecting a spell or ability from a list with the shoulder buttons to cast. This is a perfectly functional system that lets you use some of the range of spells that were in the original but sometimes trying to cycle through to your cure spell while running to safety can be frustrating.

I would likewise describe the battles as functional. The system on hand does what it needs to do, but even in the most important or difficult of battles it never really gets exciting. Though I must point out that the AI opponents can work together in very clever ways like aiming an attack for where you’ll be when you avoid the attack of another enemy.

Another thing is that all your uber moves like Limits Breaks and summons and even your level ups are handled by a spinning roulette in the top corner. Apparently it’s actually an incredibly complicated mathematical system and not blind chance, but that doesn’t stop me feeling that I’m mercy to the whims of the Random Number God.

The story is always held to be one of the most important parts of a Final Fantasy game, often because they’re of such a high standard.  In this is the villain, Genesis, never feels threatening or even like he has an understandable motive, or at least one that’s properly in synch with his actions. But the story of Zack’s maturation and developing connections with characters from the original is a much better told and ultimately more important than that of the game’s ineffectual villain.

As a side to the story, we also get to see what Sephiroth, the original game’s famous villain, was before he went bad and he has some really sweet moments of warmth with Zack.

Other than the linear but enjoyable story the only thing this game offers is the optional missions. Despite whatever justification they give for them, they always boil down to running through one of the same six or so areas until you find the ‘boss’ encounter or, rarely, standing in the same area and fighting down a boss or waves of enemies. Some of them give great rewards, but after you surgically remove all the Summon materia and the like by looking up the rewards online the only reason left to do them are to get strong enough to challenge the other  missions. If you do them all you do get to challenge the game’s superboss, but that’s a lot of work for a challenge most gamers couldn’t and wouldn’t take.

Despite un-thrilling battles, repetitive side missions and a terrible antagonist this is definitely a game worth playing. It’s a must for all FFVII fans, and if you’re not it can be a good entry point. You can enjoy this as a stand alone story without too much bother and if it grips you hard enough you can now download FFVII from the PSN Store to your PS3.

Price: £8 (CEX)

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

Should I Buy? – The LEGO Games

OK the last review was a long on. I had to explain what I was doing, then give context to the game and then talk about the writing and both sides of gameplay. I imagine it was so long some of you didn’t bother to read all of it. So today, I’m picking something both more ‘casual friendly’ and easier to get a shorter review on.

Everybody hear loves LEGO right? That wonderful Danish invention, it was certainly the best toy I had growing up. Well it seems Telltale Games loves LEGO too. They’ve spent years making LEGO games based on various famous film licenses Warner Bros. owns.

Because I’m writing about four different game, you can zoom to one using Ctrl + F then typing in the key LSW, LIJ, LB or LHP to find the one you want.

Now the reason I can review LEGO Star Wars I & II, Indiana Jones, Batman and Harry Potter Years 1 -4 is because they’re all very similar in play style and, conveniently, I own them all. Also, these are all available on 360, PS3, PC, Wii and most are available on the handhelds. These are great for more casual gamers as you can’t actually lose, just die and respawn a few seconds later a little poorer.

As a note, the handheld version may lack some features or characters and have new ones to compensate. I’ve also heard about some of them having dire performance bugs, and they lack local co-op play. I’d advise getting these on consoles.

OK, so here’s how a LEGO game work. They’re based around three or four films and let you replay scenes from those films as fully interactive levels that are full of puzzles, combat and things to blow up. The cutscenes lack any dialogue, meaning that what little story they give is done through mime, and all the scenes work in a few good jokes too. Once you beat the levels in Story Mode (which you can easily do with a friend, the game has full co-op compatibility) you unlock them in Free Play where you can go back through them as any character you want to unlock all their hidden goodies.

See, each character has special abilities. For example, in LEGO Star Wars only Stormtroopers can use special Stormtrooper doors, only characters with blasters can grapple, only Force users can interact with certain objects and in some cases you need Dark Force powers. This, combined with the ability to unlock a whole range of characters from the games’ source material and even a character creator system gives the games great re-playability.

They do have their cons as well as pros, and before I talk about each game in turn briefly I want to talk about the flaws the series as a whole has. The camera moves along a set path throughout the game, which can be dodgy but is generally OK. In co-op though, some games won’t let the two of you move too far apart because you share the same screen. In other, you can because if you get too far apart the game becomes splitscreen which can be really confusing when it happens.

If you’re playing solo, then you’re stuck with a crappy AI partner. They’re incapable of killing enemies (not for lack of trying) and about the only thing they can do is help you with puzzles. You do one part, they do their part. The stupid AI can also get stuck on a jumping section because it keeps respawning to and jumping from a point that it can’t reach the other side from. You’ll occasionally have to take a break from doing your LEGO  thang to unstick the AI, and that’s never fun.

LSW
OK, let’s get started with LEGO Star Wars. Now if you’re going to buy these avoid the latest release and instead plonk for The Complete Saga. This is both LSW I & II combined, and covers the six films. The first game has you play mostly as Jedi, and here the puzzles are quite simplistic, use Character A on Object B type stuff. And if there’s no solution around, just hit stuff til so it explodes, you’ll find something to use. The second has a few levels as Jedi Luke, but most of the characters use blasters so shooty combat got upgraded. Now shooter heroes (excpet Chewie, for some reason) automatically dodge attacks if you press the attack button. The levels here are longer and focus more on puzzles. Overall, these two are a great buy buy still a bit on the pricey side. Steam will give it to you for £15 if you want it on PC, but I maintain these are best on console where you’ll be charged roughly £20 to get it preowned. Steep. Then again, it’ll be a bit cheaper if you get the PS2 version, but not much.

LIJ

Now, Indiana Jones, I haven’t played the second one, only the first. The first covers the original trilogy of Raiders, Temple and Crusade while the second has these ones with redesigned levels and the fourth film. The levels are as well designed and cutscenes as enjoyable as ever, but this game does have its problems. The heroes don’t really have that much in the way of unique abilities, so you’ll spend a lot of the game picking up weapons and tools to help you through the levels. This works fine most of the time, but some tools really limit your character’s combat ability and if you’ve had to put on a ‘hat’ as a disguise, one hit will knock it right off.

That’s another thing, the combat in this game doesn’t feel properly balanced. The game will throw hordes of bad guys at you, often armed with guns. This means you’ll die a lot and lose a lot of in game currency (studs) in some locations. In one level, there’s an area that almost makes me turn the game off rather than play it every time. Then, on other levels there’ll be nothing but a few barely noticeable spiders, and you’ll have to puzzle your way through the entire thing. This does make thematic sense, there’s no reason for Nazis to be in the tomb they just trapper you in after all. And I actually had more fun with these levels, because the puzzles are more complex and feel rewarding to solve. Ultimately, this game’s more of a mixed bag of tricks than a straight up recommendation. I’d say buy another one first. The Steam price is £13 and CEX asks about £10. This is also available on PS2.

LB

Ah, Batman. It was inevitable I’d buy this someday. So inevitable, I’ve bought it three times. Not because this is the best LEGO game necessarily, but because I’m such a sucker for Batman. The game has two halves, the Hero Missions and their villainous counterparts. This is the only LEGO game to use original plots, such as they are, rather than follow a film chronology. In this, a whole bunch of Batman’s villains break out of Arkham Asylum and split into three groups to do evil stuff. You’re Batman and Robin. You stop them.

Each level has the Dynamic Duo go after one of these baddies in a themed level and then fight them at the end as a boss. To compensate for the limited characters you get to play as in these missions, both the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder get four additional costumes that give them special powers that are scattered throughout the level. They do mean the game gets to be more complex than ‘punch things’, but some of them near useless while others are just annoying. Sure, they’re serviceable, but you’ll probably get fatigued of them before the game’s over. Also, a couple are near useless in the story missions, and almost as much so during free play.

The villain missions let you see the events that led to the levels you played in the other missions. You don’t get to play as every villain, but they’re all unlockable. Also, none of your boss fights here wear a cape. Most just don’t end with one. Most villains have at least two powers that the heroes don’t have access to, so the puzzles in these missions require different things of you, meaning the villain levels are a breath of fresh air.

Despite this being the darkest LEGO game, both thematically and visually (what with it all taking place in Gotham ‘the sun never shines’ City), the cutscenes retain their humour. Special mention goes out to Batman STILL being serious and competent in a LEGO game, while Robin goofs in the background. That said, Batman’ll still get a few laughs out of you. Another thing I love is that while Batman uses big beefy strikes and throws to fight, Robin uses more agile kicks and tumbles. This is a really nice characterful touch.

Damage wise, this is the best deal. roughly £10 both preowned and on Steam.

LHP

Finally, we reach the most different game of them all. Remember all that visceral combat in the Harry Potter films? How many times did that Herbology class seem so kick ass you couldn’t wait to play a game about it? Yeah, no and never right? This has been a problem with making Harry Potter games, but Telltale have cracked it with their mix of puzzling and platforming.

As you move through the films your characters learn more spells and gain a few abilities, and you have to use these in the most puzzle based LEGO game yet. The levels aren’t based on the easiest material to use and while there’s nothing really wrong with them, they do suffer from some quite extreme brevity when put alongside the other games. Still, the levels aren’t the real focus of the game. Instead, you get to use these magical powers to explore Hogwarts. As you go to more classes and gets more spells, you can interact with different parts of the castle to find collectibles and secret areas.

This can get frustrating at times because some parts require you having a character you haven’t found the token that lets you buy them, and you’ll have to scour some likely levels to find it, but for the most part the exploration is really fun in a ‘Gotta Catch ‘Em All’ kinda way. In terms of price, Steam’ll give it to you for £20, and preowned it’s between about £15-£20 depending on the platform.

OK so this was another long post, but I reviewed four whole games! C’mon people, work with me here! Anyways, I’d recommend any one of them as a fun distraction or to play with a younger sibling or a friend or partner who’s not particularly interested in games. They’re fun, simple and funny. If you don’t enjoy the LEGO games, you have no soul. Not judging, just saying.