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

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’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.

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.

But this isn’t a cheap shock, gore obsessed kind of game, the scares are generally quite subtle and frequently based on what you can hear rather than what you can see. The audio and sounds effects are something often overlooked in a game, but not in Dead Space, they really heighten the sense of terror with all sorts of subtle ambient sounds interspersed with some nerve jangling industrial grinds/howls/roars – the sort of stuff that makes you think “how the fuck, did the sound guy come up with that!?”. It’s gratifying to see they got a BAFTA for the sound work. A great example of the sort of scares you get in Dead Space, is what was referred to on rllmuk as “the room”. A small fairly inconsequential part of the ship, yet it is probably one of the most unsettling spaces I’ve ever encountered in a videogame. There isn’t a single enemy in “the room”, but it’s terrifying, it’s place you just want to get away from, all down to very good use of sound effects and lighting. When I was playing this with headphones, late at night with lights off – I could just about manage an hours play before it just got too much. I mean this as good thing BTW!

So lets wrap this up; the positives:
The game is a good length, is a decent challenge without being too hard, graphically impressive, has several good ideas (the zero gravity and vacuum sections are pretty unique) good replay value, the fantastic HUD (which is a sort of ‘in game’ holographic thing that pops up – so no immersion spoiling menus)
The negatives;
Ending was a bit weak, the plot is not entirely clear (possibly deliberate), has a slight lull in the middle chapters.

It’s the sort of game that makes me glad I’m a gamer, and after the tragedy that was Resident Evil 5, Dead Space has reaffirmed my faith in videogames.

OK first of all, I’m a long time Resident Evil (RE) fan, I got the first game with my first Playstation back in 1996 (doing extra temp work as a bin man, so I could save up and afford it!). I found it to be a scary, engrossing, funny & challenging experience, the likes of which nobody had really experienced before (it was 1996 remember) Since then I’ve gone on to accumulate & play 16 different RE games!, more or less the entire series. So yeah – I’m a bit of a fan.

Next, Resident Evil 4 (RE4). Easily one of the best games I’ve ever played, best in the RE series & comfortably in my top 10. Amazing from start to finish. It’s stood the test of time, has a metacritic score of 96 and consistently appears at the top of greatest games of all time lists (Edge put it at number 2 in 1997). Trust me on this one, it’s a very, very good game.

So that leads us finally to the point of this post – Resident Evil 5 (RE5). It’s evident that it had a lot to live up to, but hey Capcom had over 4 years to develop it, they have a proven track record as one of the industry’s best developers, so what could go wrong?

Everything.

To sum it up RE5 is a below average generic shooter, devoid of fun, story, charm & ideas. You have to play the game in co-op mode, there is no true “single player” anymore. Playing single player results in the co-op partner (a token black lady called Sheva, who actually isn’t black if you spent more than 5 seconds looking at her) being controlled by some of the worst AI I’ve ever had to endure in a videogame. She wastes her ammo, uses health packs when they aren’t needed, is in your line of vision/fire about 90% of the time, pinches items that you wanted to pick up and basically is an abomination. It’s fair to say Sheva is all that is wrong with RE5. You spend nearly all of your time playing simply wishing she wasn’t there, she also spoils the atmos.

That leads me onto another major problem with RE5, they’ve taken all the main elements of the RE series (RE4 in particular) and pissed them up the wall. There is none of the oppresive, dark and spooky atmosphere, there is no exploration or puzzle solving, there is no real inventory management (RE4′s brilliant inventory system being crudely reduced to 9 item boxes). The game has essentially become a linear, generic, 3rd person shooter, think Gears of War but with shit controls.

Ahh the controls, so they haven’t changed since RE4, you still can’t move and fire, the turning and aiming speed would make an arthritic turtle look speedy and thanks the new real time inventory most fights decent into a Benny Hill chase, round and round while you find a safe spot to reload or heal. These controls worked in RE4 but that game was 4 years ago – things have moved on Capcom.

I could go on all day about the frustrating and poorly designed boss fights (which seem to be every 10 minutes), the short game length (a measly 10 hours), the fact you seem to jump from location to location with no real reason, the copy and paste enemies from RE4, QTE events in the middle of boss fights, etc, etc.

Then there is the whole racism debate, that is probably a topic for an whole other post, but lets just say when I was blasting the heads off African tribes people in grass skirts, living in little mud huts it did feel like Capcom had scraped the bottom of the stereotype barrel

So…. I think RE5 can’t win. Compared to it’s mighty predecessor it’s doomed to fail, despite copying so much from it’s older sibling it makes a massive balls up of it all, I think the developers wanted to tap into the RE4 “magic” but just didn’t get it. On the other hand, remove RE5 from the shadow of RE4, and it’s nothing more than just another 3rd person shooter with awful archaic controls and AI co-op partner you want to kill more than the bad guys. So after 4 years of waiting, I think it’s fair to say I’m more than a little diapointed in RE5.