Been looking forward to this for ages and ages, since it news of it first popped up on rllmuk in 2008. I’ve been itching to play it since release (a couple of weeks now) but I had Assassin’s Creed II to get out of the way first.

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

So it’s 2010 and I once again decide to fire up my much neglected blog. What better way to start than discussing some of the best & worst games of 2009. Yeah that’s original!

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…

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So this was a game I was destined to love right? It’s a slightly tongue in cheek love letter to metal and hard rock. I played the demo and found myself chuckling away and grinning like a big kid. Turns out the full game is a pretty big disappointment

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.

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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Where on earth do I start with Resident Evil 5? such a mixed bag of feelings; anger, disappointment, pity, nostalgia.

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.

So I’ve not blogged for ages. Normally this would be because I’ve not been playing any games, but in this case I have been playing; a lot. I’ve been playing Fallout 3 since early Jan and last night I finally finished it (well not really but more on that later)

Fallout 3 is a action RPG set in an post apocalyptic future where America and China have had an all out nuclear war, and there’s not much left of the world. Despite it being the year 2277 culturally America is locked into a 1950’s like era, you know that kinda of future-retro thing.

The game is vast and open ended, once you escape the Vault you’ve been brought up in and clamber out to the wasteland – you really can go anywhere and do anything you want. This is probably where I will lapse into gushing praise, but I can’t help it. This game is incredible in it’s scope; the sheer amount of places to explore, things to find, people to meet, stuff to do; far exceeds any other game I’ve played. I spent over 100 hours on this game and only found a fraction of the game had to offer. Now often this “embarrassment of choice” can be overwhelming in a game, but not in Fallout 3. You don’t have to worry about doing things in the correct order or playing it the “right way”, the game permits you the freedom to do what you like. See that interesting looking building over in the distance? why not check it out. That bloke you met that mentioned an android? sound more interesting than what you are doing now? why not investigate.
Getting sidetracked is part & parcel of the experience. I’ve mentioned before my love for games that reward the player for going off the beaten track, Fallout 3 is positively the pinnacle of this idea. Going off the beaten track you won’t just find some ammo and bits and bobs, but you’ll find an whole new town or set of tunnels filled with people and quests – as a reward for your curiosity

The main storyline is fairly short, the bulk of Fallout 3 is taken up in general exploring and doing sidequests. I estimate than at least 90% of the games content is entirely optional it really takes balls for a developer to do this. Detail is lavished on every little nook and crany, despite the fact that the majority of players might never stumble across it. I fell completely in love with this game, I’ve never spent anywhere near 100 hours playing a game before, that fact alone shows how much the game absorbed me. This is definitely one of those games you don’t want to end, but ultimately I got to the point where I felt it was time to move on, or at least take a break for a while.

There are still 3 chunks of DLC (Downloadable content) to play though, of which only one has been released so far. I might pick up the game again once they are all out

In summary games like this get made once every 10 years, it really is a work of art, it’s easily in my all-time top 5 games.
Buy it, Play it.

For a true ode to Fallout 3 see Consolevanias “review” of it here

A couple of gameplay videos to give you a feel for what the game is about