Some more catch-up blogging.

I got a random impulse to buy some games the other day as I’ve not bought any for ages (in fact Resi 5 might be my only 2009 purchase so far). So I got Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom (very, very cheap) and Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (fairly cheap)

Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom is a bad game. It’s a very bad game. I got it because I fancied a bit of a hack & slash, loot finding, dungeon crawling, trad fantasy type thing. Which sadly is genre pretty much ignored on this generation of consoles. What is remarkable about the game is it involves nothing more than pressing ‘A’. You press ‘A’ again & again & again to slash your sway through swathes of enemies, you walk forward 50 yards and repeat the whole process. You can’t block, you can’t jump, you can’t do any moves, you can’t mix-up or combo your attacks (there is another attack button, but you can’t combo with it) all you do is press ‘A’. Sure you find loot; armour, weapons, etc. but it all makes very little difference. There is no map to explore, just walk forward – and face wave after wave of identical enemies with you hacking through them with the A button. I switched it off after about 2 hours

So Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.
This is much better. The much anticipated return to the Banjo Kazooie series (which we’ve not seen since the N64 days) It’s not the platform game you’d expect. The game is based on building lots of customised vehicles and completing challenges in them. The vehicle building aspect is pretty clever and works surprisingly well, you can very easily knock-up mini tanks, boats, helicopters, trucks, planes and everything in-between. it’s pure digital Lego. The game is also gorgeous, with a nice detailed, fairytale-like vibrancy, rare in games these days, coupled with an impressive draw distance.
Hard to put my finger on why but I got bored with it after about 5~6 hours. The challenges quickly become a chore (some of them are really tough, requiring dozens of attempts) and the novelty of the vehicle construction soon wears off. It’s definitely not a bad game, but I found myself not wanting to play it, something about it wasn’t grabbing me. I was forcing myself to switch it on – this isn’t a good sign, so for now it’s gone back on the shelf.

No natty subtitle – no time for that, I’ve got catchup blogging to do

I got Dead Space late last year in the silly season, but saved until a few weeks ago, it was getting a lot of love on rllmuk so I thought I’d save it until I has some time to do it justice.

Wow! now this is how to do survival horror. It’s the videogame equivalent of Event Horizon meets Alien meets Resident Evil meets The Thing. I’ll cut to the chase plot-wise; you’re a space engineer dude, you’ve come to rescue some giant ‘planet cracking’ super mining ship, turns out this ship has gone all kinds of batshit mental since they picked up some alien “Marker” thing from the planet below. The uphsot is – the ship is now infested with necromorphs – sort of undead, mutant, evil, deformed killer things. Sounds a little bit shit so far, right?

It isn’t. It’s a terrifying, well paced, slice of true survival horror. See Resident Evil was the game that pretty much invented the whole survival horror genre, but has moved  further and further from it in recent years. So it’s refreshing to see a game return to those roots and do it so well, and in space. The necromorphs are bloody nasty (the graphics in the game are superb), and the main premise of the combat is to try and slice and dismember them rather than just blast away. This works really well, especially with certain weapons like the ‘Ripper’ basically an industrial circular saw you can use to dismember the necromorphs as they crawl/run/amble towards you, yes it gets messy.

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