As the release neared, Capcom slashed it’s sales projection for the title to 600,000 units, and pre-order prices were starting at less than £30, which is unusually low. Signs were bad that this was a stinker. A lacklustre demo was released which failed to impress anyone, even people like myself that were looking forward to the game. Within weeks of it’s release it could be had for about £12… Oh dear

Well I took a punt on it anyhow and as a pleasant surprise - it’s really not that bad! In a nut shell: it’s Crimson Skies meets Uncharted with 1940s style future-retro setting, Gears or War with a Jetpack if you will. Masses of corners have obviously been cut in development, the cut scenes feel like they have had 40% of the material removed, some levels end abruptly. The game is only 5~6 hours long and the lack of polish is evident everywhere. But… it’s kinda fun to play, which is what really matters. It has one or two ideas I’ve not seen in a game before, namely the vertical combat & sections where you fight on foot, but also take to the air with your jetpack for aerial combat and dog fighting. The scale of the levels when flying about is impressive with a surprising lack of invisible walls which are often used by lazy developers to keep you in one tiny area (yeah Bionic Commando, I’m looking at you)

Combat is basic but workable, with a solid cover system and range of upgradeable weapons. Enemies tend to be very samey (they all look like a Geth crossed with a T-800 Terminator endoskeleton) but the AI is often surprising, as I’d find myself being flanked or tracking the enemies as they intelligently ducked & dashed between spots of cover.

Be under no illusion this isn’t a triple-A title, but it’s a fun bit of filler. And I’m glad I played it through. Sometimes it’s good to play a game of this calibre, so when you do play something top-notch you appreciate it even more!  In summary – worth checking out as it can be had for peanuts now.

There has been a lot written about the first Bioshock both for and against it, and this isn’t the time or place to add to that debate; but I will say I adored the first game.

Damn it’s been good to go back to Rapture! As settings in videogames go, Rapture has to rank up there as one of the most interesting, detailed and well conceived. It’s a joy to simply explore the place, looking for audio logs, taking in the exquisitely designed art-deco environments or simply being in Rapture is a reward in itself. Gameplay wise it’s very similar to the first game, nearly identical in fact, with a few tweeks and improvements. That’s no bad thing of course. It can be unforgiving at times, so you really have to plan ahead, laying traps, hacking security and using your plasmid’s intelligently if you want to have any chance of surviving

Some reviews and people have mentioned the game’s short length (reports of 5-6 hours). Something I’d like to dispute; I’ve been playing this for a week, a few hours per night. I’m close to the end now and it’s evident that’s a much longer game, 10 – 12 hours or thereabouts. You probably could rush thought it, heading straight for the next objective ignoring everything there is to do and see. But doing that you’ll be missing so much of the game you might as well not have bothered playing it at all.

Anyhow it feels good to playing something that makes me feel positive about gaming again, yay!

I enjoyed the first FEAR game, it was a bit lacking variety and had a odd, practically monochrome visual style. But it was a decent game and not without a solid dose of scares.

FEAR 2 is pretty much all you could want from a sequel, much improved visuals, better combat, environments which are more than the same endless office building. Still more or less the same game – only better. I’m kinda shocked how good this game is actually. I’ve found myself drawn in and playing it far more than I expected. It really hits its stride a few levels in, once you start exploring the ruined city and get to use a ridiculously overpowered mecha-power armour suit. Reducing enemy soldiers to a red mist with a high powered mini gun, actually put a big grin on my face.

Combat works well with a good selection of weapons, smooth controls and the series’ trademark slow motion “reflex time” being the same violent balletic fun it always was.

Just how scary you’ll find it, is maybe questionable, but it’s undoubtedly very, very tense in places; the school in particular was a highlight, with some proper WTF?! moments

This really is an underrated gem, it passed under most people’s radar, mainly due to Killzone 2 arriving around the same time, with stupid levels of hype and fanboy hysteria. This is a thousand times better than that turgid, generic borefest. This is how you do a good story led FPS.

It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a game this much, and all the way through. Now the game is by no means perfect, there’s a lot I could pick on: fiddly controls, underutilized powers and areas, frustrating in places. The game is also a shameless rip-off (or homage, depending on how cynical you feel!) of many other games: Zelda & God of War are the main influences, with a smattering of Panzer Dragoon, Portal & Prince of Persia. However it’s not really a problem, as Darksiders takes all these elements and blends them exceptionally well, it never feels like a hotch-potch.

“Greater than the sum of it’s parts” is a terrible cliché, but it describes Darksiders so well. Taken in isolation any of the game’s elements are fairly unexceptional; the graphics, the level design, the combat, the story etc. Each examined alone they probably average. But they somehow combine into an excellent and solid experiance. Be it: riding across The Ashlands on your horse, brutally slaying countless demons & legions of angels, exporing one of the games dungeons, or trying to get your head around some of the puzzles.

Special mention needs to go to the final dungeon which is a non stop barrage of mindf**k puzzles & huge battles. The puzzles are of the “spatial” Zelda kind, and come close to being up there with the best Zelda dungeon. In fact the game improves as it goes on, and I only fully appreciated it all at the end. It also has a curious backwards difficulty curve, so the game gets easier as you go on (the first boss is by far the hardest). It was also nice change for a game not to have a lame or ‘WTF?’ ending – they’ve set things up nicely for a sequel or two.

Anyhow, I know it’s only January but I think this is a strong contender for my 2010 GOTY

Here’s a recent haul, which landed through my letterbox (apologies for the crummy pic). All for the princely sum of £42 which is about the RRP of a new title these days.

Now this post isn’t to brag about my amazing new games or my bargain hunting skillz. I thought I’d take the chance to highlight some of my favourite sources of gaming deals:

• Gamestracker.com – Couldn’t live without this site. You can use it to find the best price for practically any game. It also supports “watchlists” where you can keep track of stuff you’ve got your eye on (even games not released yet). So I maintain my ‘to-buy wishlist’ on there. Another good feature is email alerts, when a game drops below a specified price you will receive an email. Brilliant.

• The rllmuk “Bargains” folder (Note. You’ll need to be a member, sorry!) – An excellent source of all kinds of gaming & non-gaming cheap finds

• There are quite a few sites out there that post gaming bargains on a daily, even hourly basis, here’s some good ones, I’ve used in the past:
- Frugal Gaming
- Postabargain
- Cheap Ass Gamer

• Twitter. Some of the sites also have twitter feeds which is a really good way of spotting the deals as they arrive, as often these bargains are very short lived. For example: @frugalgaming & @postabargain. In fact this is becoming my main source of impulse buying

Summary: You’re War, one of the four horsemen. You been stiched up with ‘acidentially’ bringing the apocalypse, and subsequently sent back to sort the mess out. Blah, blah. It’s a third person brawler cum action RPG.

It’s drawn a lot of comparisons with God of War, it’s pretty clear after a couple of hours play these comparisons are a bit off. It really plays & feels a lot more like a Zelda. I’ve also seen people lumping it in with Bayonetta, another fallacy – the two games are nothing alike.

So I’ve only played a few hours but initial impressions are good:

• Combat is chunky, with plenty of moves & combos, but without any of the “wankyness” of say DMC or Bayonetta
• Lots of power-ups to get, secrets to find and back-track for, in a slightly Metroidvania way
• The exaggerated OTT character design might not be to everyone’s taste, but Games Workshop desensitised me to massive gauntlets and shoulder pads years ago. I like it
• Graphically it’s adequate, quite pretty in places. The 360 version does suffer from some noticable tearing. But apparently a patch is on the way for that
• It does rip rather shamelessly from several games, but wears it’s influences on it’s sleeves. It’s a gamey game

So far it seems a really nice game to start off the year

I generally thought 2009 wasn’t a stellar year for games, yeah there were a few decent titles but nothing really standout & exceptional. Certainly when compared to 2008, which was packed with brilliant games (Fallout 3, Dead Space, Far Cry 2, LBP, Fable II etc.) it’s been a pretty disappointing year. But what about Modern Warfare 2? I hear you cry, well I couldn’t give a shit about MW2, so it doesn’t factor into anything as far as I’m concerned. Onwards to the listery…

Lowlights

1. Resident Evil 5 – Without question the biggest disappointment of 2009. No need to go into details here as I’ve already blogged on the topic. Needless to say Resident Evil 5 was a very shit game.
2. Tim Langdell – There was a very long section here trying to sum up this whole drama, but it’s really a topic for a post it it’s own right. Summary: Tim Langdell is a very nasty piece of work that has made a living for 30 years ripping off hard working developers. A good place to start would be this summary on TIGsource
3. Bionic Commando – Capcom fail again. I had been looking forward to this for a long time. The game turned to be a bit of a stinker. In fact very similar to Resi 5. The main problem was the swinging controls which clearly were the most critical thing in the game, were rubbish, clunky and totally robbed the game of flow. Grin, the studio responsible for the game (and the truly rotten Terminator: Salvation) went under later in the year. Make of that what you will

Highlights

1. Shadow Complex – It’s indicative of how the game industry is changing when a downloadable Xbox Live Arcade title is my joint place Game Of The Year. Shadow Complex is a 2.5D Metroidvania game. It was well executed, polished & great fun to play. It didn’t pretend to be anything it wasn’t, and over reach itself which so many games do these days. All for the bargain price of a tenner. I suppose you really have to like Metroidvania sytle games in order to fully appreciate it’s charms. I’m a real sucker for the genre myself and this turned out to be an excellent example. Essential stuff.

1. Assassin’s Creed 2 – My other GOTY. I rather enjoyed the first game, it was horribly flawed of course that much is well acknowledged, but I felt a sequel could be Ubisoft’s chance to finish the game they left as a bit of a husk with AC1. And I was right, AC2 improves on it’s predecessor in almost every aspect. There’s more to do, there’s more variety and it’s a fuller more fleshed out game all round. In fact if I had one criticism, they over compensated and put too much into the game and padded it out too much, resulting in an overlong experience which begins to drag towards the end. Still a brilliant example of how impressive videogames have become. Oh and it’s easy too and has no boss fights, a double bonus in my book

1. Batman: Arkham Asylum - I really liked this game, I didn’t like it as much as some, but it was very good. In a word; polished. And I don’t mean in a Perfect Dark Zero shiny sense, I mean it’s a game that does very little wrong. However in the end, I felt I’d played a very good game, not a standout brilliant game that will be remembered for years to come. It’s here in my list of highlights out of necessity really, not on it’s own merits, but mainly due to the rest of 2009 was so uninspiring. I’d still welcome a sequel

1. Honourable mentions – Borderlands, Uncharted 2 & New Super Mario Bros. Wii

So there you have it

I’m going to try and make my criticisms well justified, it certainly at least deserves that.

Pros:

• The music
• The awesome homage to metal that pervades every inch of the world
• The characters & dialogue
• It’s a decent looking game with some great scale to it
• Best menu screen in any game ever
• Cameos from Ozzy, Lemmy & Halford and others.

Cons:

• The game
• Everything else

It boils down to this, the core game, you know the bit you actually control and play isn’t very good. The overworld-roam-about bits are OK, a bit sparse but good enough. The RTS bits are a badly designed mush. Now your mileage may vary, depending on how forgiving you are and how into the RTS genre you are, but I hated them. In the end I dropped the difficulty down to Gentle just get them out of the way.

Now I was thinking when I started the game, that all the METAL stuff would be enough to carry the game, enough for me to forgive the shonky gameplay. I mean how could I dislike this game!? it was like it was designed for me personally! But sadly the METAL isn’t enough. The funniest dialogue is all in the first 30 minutes (through which I was grinning and laughing, like a kid). The rest of the game barely raises a snigger.

It was by no means a terrible effort, but the game didn’t come close to doing the setting and concept justice. And for that I can’t forgive it.

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.