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Xbox 360 Review: The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings

By
Tony Odett
– May 14, 2012Posted in: Reviews, Xbox 360

Mature gaming is often a strong misnomer. The word “mature” is often substituted for “graphic,” “visceral” or “violent.” Actually maturity is demonstrated through portrayal of events that are adult, substantive and consequential. Mortal Kombat, for example, is often considered a mature game, but really, its simplistic nature doesn’t convey maturity so much as horrific maiming and violence.  The fact is that there are relatively few games that portray actual maturity. They attempt to imply maturity and consequence through arbitrary morality systems, glossing over and gamifying maturity. It is the classic failure you see in lesser works in many genres: showing instead of telling. And let’s face it: human beings are complex. Rare indeed is the individual who is completely saintly or utterly evil. The vast majority of human beings exist somewhere within that spectrum, yet games tend to force us towards one extreme or the other.

It is into the want of actually mature storytelling that The Witcher 2: The Assassin of Kings  steps. Sure, Geralt of Rivia will hack off limbs, cover himself in the blood of his foes, and have wild sexual escapades. But he will also exist in a real sense, a character in a complex world making decisions that vary from self-serving, self-interested to protecting the very fabric of his world. It is refreshing to see a character participating in epic events only as they relate to his own personal struggles. Geralt is not motivated to save nations out of a sense of duty. He is simply endeavoring to survive in the world, to make his way and build a life of his own. Sadly, Geralt is swept away in events beyond his control, and finds himself used as a weapon in a conflict not of his choosing. Geralt has abilities, and everyone has need of what he has to offer. He wishes peace, but is destined to be a pawn of war.

Early game will see Geralt wandering about during the sacking of a town. This is the result.

Fantastic writing and voice acting weave a first rate adventure (though the use of the amnesia trope is unfortunate- the writing here in all other areas is so good, they could have done better). The tale strikes an excellent balance between linearity and player choice. Each chapter provides significant opportunity for open world exploration, which can easily be ignored in favor of pursuing the main story. That story provides plentiful opportunity for choice as well, and those choices will guide the narrative, make enemies and friends, and significantly affect what portions of the game you play. Decision will, as they often do in real life, close off some opportunities forever, while opening other doors.

The level of maturity extends to the combat. Each encounter is a deadly event, and, much like real life, precautions must be taken prior to the event. That classic RPG mechanic of quaffing heath potions repeatedly whenever you’re in trouble won’t work here, for a couple of reasons. First, you can only take potions when you’re outside of combat situations. Secondly, each potion is, to a degree, toxic—drink too many potions, and Geralt will meet an untimely demise. Preparation also includes the harvest of the proper ingredients to make potions, and the crafting of strong armor. Searching for potion recipes and blueprints for weapons, armor, traps and bombs are key to success on the battlefield.

You have a sword for monster and one for humans. Pull the right one.

The thoughtfulness you apply to preparation extends to the combat itself. Enemies will work to surround you, striking you from multiple directions at once. Strategy, proper use of magic, well timed blocking, traps and items will get you through your battles, but take note: combat is tough. Success is built upon identifying and exploiting your opponents’ weaknesses. Assessing your situation is just as important as your ability to hit the X button with lightning speed.  Battles may be won with the casting of the right spell or the toss of the right item. Popping up the spell wheel or the items list in combat will slow down time to a crawl. It’s not a Mass Effect-style pause, but merely a slow down, given you precious time to cast a defensive sign in the nick of time or plant a throwing dagger in your opponent’s forehead. It’s an interesting stylistic choice, giving that Matrix-effect to key moments, and allowing you to experience the supernatural speed for which a witcher is known.  Though the battles are difficult (and on higher difficultly settings, a real rite of passage for the strategic gamer), the tools Geralt possesses make matchups compelling and fun, provided you are willing to truly think them through.

The Witcher 2 offers a refreshing look at the RPG genre. In an era where story driven RPGs are being pushed aside in favor of open-world experience, this effort reaches between the two and fines a happy medium. With a multitude of high fantasy games on the market, this is a unique endeavor, and one which would be appreciated by any gamer looking for a truly mature effort.  There are few true thinking man’s games available on console, games with tough, strategic combat and complex, compelling and adult content. The Witcher 2 fills that void with skill and intellect, and is a must play effort for all true fans of the RPG genre.

Huge massive creature? He's mine.

Pros

  • Skillful, interesting combat
  • Excellent writing, dialogue, and voice acting
  • Interesting upgrade systems and crafting mechanics

Cons

  • Jarringly difficult tutorial could scare off newcomers
  • Not the game to play without all your wits about you

5 / 5

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Xbox 360 Review: Country Dance All Stars

By
Diana Scott
– May 14, 2012Posted in: Kinect, Reviews, Xbox 360

Let me preface this review with the fact that I am NOT a gamer. I have no idea how to use a controller with more than an A and B button, and I have almost no desire to learn. This is probably why I really enjoy the Kinect; I never have to touch a controller I can just move a around and the machine does what I want – most of the time. While I have played a variety of Kinect games with my kids I enjoy the dancing games the most. Mostly because they are easy enough for me to master and it is fun to dance around like fool with my family and friends. This brings me to the latest dance release: Country Dance All Stars.

This game was a lot of fun to play; with a variety of country hits from traditional to current popular songs there is something for everyone who enjoy country music in the slightest. Additionally, the game includes the lyrics at the bottom of the screen karaoke style, allowing for additional fun for those who enjoy sing-a-longs (The Honkytonk Badonkadonk had us in stitches). The dance moves also range from simple to complex allowing for a even the least talented dancers to have a moderate degree of success. While the game was entertaining and I had an excellent time dancing around the living room, the graphics and ease of use leave something to be desired.

When you begin playing the game it jumps right into the song menu and you can immediately begin playing, you have to access a separate menu to practice the moves included in each dance. While this seems like it might be fun it is actually a bit frustrating; having to go to a separate menu to get practice moves encourages you to skip that part so the first go round of every song is a disaster. Other dance titles have practice built into the game play and that set-up makes for much more fluid play.  There is traditional dance mode and a freeze dance mode which is interesting; the player dances along until the freeze icon appears then you need to be still or the game will deduct points from you score. We could not figure out how to master this mode but it did add an element of variety to the game.

In addition to the weird set up the controls and background graphics also present some problems. To operate the menu you have to grab an imaginary dot and move your arm up and down which as a little confusing for my children. Also once you begin operating the menu screen you cannot switch out players because it will not read the new players – imagine trying to walk a four-year old through the menu screen so she can play when she cannot read, it was frustrating to say the least.  Then there are the graphics, which are distracting, at best and downright irritating at worst. It is difficult to describe but the patterns on the clothes the dancers are wearing appear to be stationary with the outline of the dancers moving across them – it is very tough on the eyes. However, these complaints aside I would recommend this game to country music fans. If you are looking for a party game to share with friends for a fun night in, Country Dance All Stars will do the trick – if you can master the controls and get past the strange graphics.

Pros

  • Excellent song list
  • Family friendly fun
  • Karaoke sing-along

Cons

  • Cumbersome interface issues
  • Practice modes are tiresome to access
  • Awkward graphical choices

3 / 5

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Review: Mad Catz Ghost Recon Universal 7.1 Headset

By
Don Parsons
– May 11, 2012Posted in: Hardware, PC, PS3, Reviews, Xbox 360

 

Mad Catz has recently released a Ghost Recon: Future Soldier-branded headset for Playstation 3, X360, and PC. With so many options on the market, it’s best to shop around to find what fits your needs. This universal surround sound headset will fill the gaps for most gamers needing a new earpiece.

There is no doubt about it, the aethetics of this piece of hardware are fantastic. Being a Ghost Recon fan helps, but even the skull art could be considered “universal” and anyone could appreciate it. The cable to this wired headset is a matching blue and the lights in the ear cups light up the artwork for anyone to see – or if you set your headset on the bed and need to find them again.

In terms of sound, the quality is both exceptional and customizable, complete with Dolby Digital 7.1. While any surround sound set-up is exponentially better than listening through your TV, I felt completely engulfed in my games while wearing this headset. A small remote links into the cable and allows you to adjust both the game and mic volume on the fly. It also features a very-accessible mute switch. It’s all incredibly easy to adjust while in the game, too, as I generally had the game volume cranked up and had to turn it down once I hopped online with friends.

If you are upgrading from a TV/earpiece set-up and play a lot of online games, you are in for a surprising treat. While playing games like Battlefield 3 or even the Ghost Recon: Future Soldier beta, you hear things that you just can’t hear from a TV. Everything had a rich and crisp sound to it.

During extended-play sessions, comfort was never an issue. Once the headset was in place, I became oblivious to my surroundings and actually forgot I had them on. The mic can be completely removed, but it also bends so I generally just bent it out of the way when I didn’t need it. My only problem with this piece of hardware was that it made my ears sweat a little after a few hours of playing. It wasn’t a major issue though, and the benefit of enveloping myself with such immersive sound was fully worth it.

It is a common problem to talk louder while having headphones on, but with the optional Selective Voice Monitoring, you can hear yourself as your teammates do. The fear of waking everyone in the house while playing because you’re immersed is completely diminished.

Everything is included to hook up to your PS3 or X360 and it’s just as easy to hook into your PC. While switching rooms is a pain, if all of your systems are in the same room it is as simple as unhooking the optical cable and USB cable and switching it to the other system. There is also an additional cable to hook into the X360 controller. The quality through my computer was exceptional, too, and it just plugs in via the USB cable. The drivers self-installed and off I was, chatting on Skype with a much clearer tone than through the old mic/speakers set-up I was accustomed to (or worse, Skype over a smartphone).

This Tritton-built headset (it’s essentially a prettier AX720) offers the performance of a quality headset you would expect from Tritton, but with a much more eye-pleasing aesthetic to it. For someone that uses more than one system (consoles or PC), I couldn’t recommend this piece of hardware more; it’s one of the best upgrades you could treat yourself to.

Pros:

  • Beautiful art work, lighting and color coordination
  • Superior sound and comfort
  • Universal – so no need for multiple headsets

Cons:

  • Can leave your ears a little sweaty after long-periods of time

Score: 5/5

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Review: Silent Hill HD Collection

By
Chris Scott
– May 10, 2012Posted in: PS3, Reviews, Xbox 360

Horror comes in a variety of flavors and while Resident Evil ruled the game scene with its campy B-movie approach, there was always room for something more serious. That is where Silent Hill came along. Until the original Silent Hill, on the original Playstation, I had never been scared by a game before. Silent Hill rectified that through effective use of their unique sound and visual design paired with mature subject matter, generally not found in games. Needless to say, Silent Hill was a smash success for publisher Konami and the series continued in sequels on the Playstation 2.

Konami, seeing the success other games have had with HD re-releases, has brought fans of the series, and potential newcomers, Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 in one package called Silent Hill HD Collection. Notably missing from this HD collection is Silent Hill 4: The Room. While The Room was less well received by both critics and fans, its exclusion from this collection diminishes the value of the package somewhat. That said, there are plenty of other things that diminish this package, that the exclusion of a mediocre title is the least of its worries. Developed by Hijinx Studios in conjunction with Team Silent, the Silent Hill HD Collection is a mixed bag of excellence marred by technical flaws and poor design choices.

While many games do a great job of putting their best foot forward, hiding their inherent flaws until one is too invested in the goings on to turn back, this HD Collection slaps users in the face on the main menu screen. Actually that is being a bit harsh; it waits to slap users until after they choose whether they want to play Silent Hill 2 or Silent Hill 3. Accidentally choosing the wrong game will require players to exit the game fully and reboot from the dashboard as there is no menu option to return to the game’s root menu. Some might be willing to overlook this issue but when grouped with the rest of the game’s technical issues and wonky design decisions, the menu issue is just the first check mark on a shoddy production job.

My personal experience got even worse. Using a wired third party controller that I have used to play other games before and after playing the Silent Hill HD Collection, the game was near unplayable. Character movement was jerky and unresponsive in both Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3, to the point that I actually felt the collection was completely broken. On a whim, I decided to try a Dualshock 3 and magically a lot of the unresponsiveness disappeared, albeit not all. Characters still controlled somewhat wonky until I switched the in game control toggle from 3D to 2D, or standard tank controls.

While things became playable after the switch from 3D to 2D control, the games themselves suffer from incredible amounts of slowdown. The frame rate fluctuates constantly, often with no rhyme or reason to it. This slowdown creates atrocious drops in playability, especially if it happens during an action sequence. There is absolutely no excuse for these drops in performance.

There is also no excuse for how little improvement has been made to the visuals. This is supposed to be a high definition collection but the textures only look fractionally better than their last generation counterparts and much of the visuals in the two games look muddy. The muddy visuals could actually be overlooked, and might have been overlooked, if Hijinx had not upped the brightness level of the game. With the added light, the visuals, in some cases, actually look worse than when the games were originally released.

I do not want to sound completely negative after all Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 are two of the best horror games to come out and this HD Collection does pose the opportunity for players to experience them both, that is providing one can look past the bugs and outright poor design choices. Both games are fantastic in terms of writing, puzzles and scares. Silent Hill 2 in particular deals with some extremely mature subject matter that most games today would not even dream of touching.

Silent Hill 2 anchors itself on the theme of loss as protagonist James Sunderland sets about exploring the mysterious town in search of his dead wife. Instead of overloading the player with jump scares, cheap scare tactics and tons of enemies, Silent Hill 2 works a more psychological angle utilizing smartly designed levels and effective use of sound. Sure there are still enemies to defeat but figuring out the mysteries of the town and James relationship with his wife are the most interesting and terrifying aspects of the game.

Where Silent Hill 2 deals with loss, Silent Hill 3 deals with revelations. Heather, the protagonist of Silent Hill 3, is the adopted daughter of the original game’s hero, Harry Mason, and the game sets out to reveal the secrets behind the mysterious town. As a fan of the original game, Silent Hill 3 is a great piece of fan service that continues the fine tradition set forth by its predecessors. It may not be as deep in its messaging as Silent Hill 2 but it holds a unique charm. However, the appeal of the game may be less to people that have not played the original game, still it lays a smart, cohesive horror story out that few games have matched since.

Neither game would be nearly as effective as they are without the stellar sound design. Hijinx mostly gets this transfer correct. For whatever reason, new voice acting was recorded and it leaves a bit to be desired but nearly everything else is spot on, from the soundtrack to the ambient noises that accentuate the terrifying atmosphere. I say nearly everything else because gunshots in the games sound muffled and less crisp than I remember them being. That said, regardless of if my memory is correct or not, gunshots sound flat and lack power which is extremely noticeable compared to the rest of the sound design. Still the sound design in these two games is excellent and shines amongst everything else in the package.

HD Collections should be celebrations of classics, providing fans the experience they remember while presenting newcomers with the evidence to support the acclaim these games received. The Silent Hill HD Collection fails to do this and as such it fails to be something that can be recommended.

Pros

  • Excellent sound design
  • Fantastic writing
  • Smart puzzles
  • Genuine scares

Cons

  • Subpar HD conversion
  • Brighter environments accentuate muddy visuals
  • Buggy and unresponsive controls
  • Unwarranted slowdown causing performance issues

2 / 5

Note: This review was done using the Playstation 3 version of the game. It is also available on Xbox 360.

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Review: World Gone Sour

By
Kyle Baron
– April 27, 2012Posted in: PC, PS3, Reviews, Xbox 360

The visual fidelity doesn't match up to the art design, but the music is bumpin'

By the end of World Gone Sour you will have fought a tennis shoe, thrown your allies into deep fryers for points, and watched Method Man rap about Sour Patch Kids and the dangers they pose when left uneaten.

Developed by Beefy Media and Playbrains, World Gone Sour seems like it’d just be a phoned-in game built to advertise candy. Booting up the game brings this into question, as you see Sour Patch Kids scampering across the dimly lit start screen playing with each other one minute and brutally murdering one another the next. It doesn’t take all of the four or five hours of the game to finally realize that World Gone Sour is actually a competent platformer with all the clever art design of a twisted version of Toy Story.

The story, introduced by the first of many well animated cutscenes, follows the tale of a Sour Patch Kid who was dropped in a movie theatre. Candies go insane when they aren’t eaten, apparently, and the nooks and crannies of the everyday human worlds you explore are made sinister by all of the traps and hazards added into the environment by the Sour Patch Kids and other members of the candy community that have gone insane. Usually it’s quite obvious, like yo-yos that crush you or evil pieces of bubble gum that use bottle caps for helmets; sometimes it’s more subtle, like seeing evil Sour Patch Kids torturing their brethren with pencils or trying to saw apart the ledges you use for platforms.

The boss battles are creative and never work to sour the experience. Sorry.

The hazards, be they deep fryers and spilled soda in a concession stand or table saws in a shed, are smartly designed with the progression of your abilities in mind. Safety pins stuck in gum serve as grapple points you can swing from, while popsicle stick barriers are only breakable with a ground pound. The enemies follow suit as well, with the nefarious blobs of bubble gum adopting spiked helmets that you have to knock off by throwing other Sour Patch Kids like bowling balls.

That brings me to my next point, you’ll see a lot of sour patch kids die by the end of this game. Heck, there’s a trophy/achievement tied to sacrificing 1000 of the little Sour Patch Kid candies that rally to your side when you rescue them. The game encourages you to do so, as you get bonus points at the end of each level for having your hapless buddies meet their ends by being melted, crushed, flung into orbit, burned, impaled, chopped up – you get the idea; it’s a bit like playing the Grape Escape board game from the ’90s where it was an every grape for itself run to the finish past saws and rolling pins.

A game about candy may seem like it’s geared towards children, but the T for teen rating ends up feeling partly in tune with the difficulty and not just the comically morbid ends of animate candy people. This difficulty comes from a couple tricky platforming sequences, especially if you want to go for all of the collectibles. The bad part comes from jumping physics that, although competent, never feel quite up to the precision of Mario Bros or the floaty forgiving leaps of Super Meat Boy. Also, the wall jumping feels like it works most of the time, rather than whenever you think it should; there were many times when my co-op buddy and I would leap towards a wall, only to have one of us slide uselessly into a pit of spikes. The game hands out extra lives generously, but this doesn’t make the occasionally finicky precision negligible.

Co-op lets you ham it up with a friend for sizzling excitement. Sound pun to you?

The sound design, like the atmosphere and art design, is effective.  The grunts, gasps, and squeaks of the Sour Patch Kids play colorfully overtop the growls of enemy bosses and the searing death rattles that all of the hazards draw out of their victims. The music helps too, with every world having its own catchy meld of hip hop beats and elevator music. No, really, it works. It makes it more of a shame that my [mostly] co-op playthrough saw a few glitches where the music and sound effects cut out for a few seconds.

The sound cutting out only happened two or three times, but the long load times were always a bit out of place. There were times when I was sitting around for 30-45 seconds wondering whether the game had crashed or if the bouncing-Sour Patch Kid loading screen animation was just taking a break.

Technical grievances aside, I was pleasantly surprised with World Gone Sour and I recommend it to anyone looking for a competent platformer with a sadistically comical atmosphere. Also, the end credits are tied in with a music video that has Method Man rapping about candy.

Pros

  • Good soundtrack
  • Clever art design
  • Unlockable video where Method Man gets angry and raps about candy
  • Funny narration
  • Good cutscenes and an overall effective atmosphere
  • It costs five bucks

Cons

  • Some sloppy looking textures
  • Wall jumping sometimes doesn’t work
  • Long load times
  • Two player co-op is local only

4/5

Note: The Playstation Network version of World Gone Sour was used for the review and was provided by the publisher. The game is also available on PC and Xbox Live Marketplace

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Review: The Walking Dead

By
Chris Scott
– April 27, 2012Posted in: PC, PS3, Reviews, Xbox 360

I met Robert Kirkman at a comic signing shortly after The Walking Dead launched. It was a nice little shop attached to a dingy little shopping center in Levittown, PA. As much as I loved the comic at that moment in time, I never would have thought that his little black and white comic book, published by a second tier comics company, focusing on the zombie apocalypse would spawn into the cross media sensation it has today. But that is exactly where we are. AMC has brought the adaptation of the comic series to television with astounding success and now Telltale Games brings fans its own vision of the series in the gaming space.

At the first mention of Telltale developing an episodic game based on the series, I was apprehensively optimistic. Telltale after all has a history of developing great adventure games and making The Walking Dead into an adventure game made perfect sense because of how much exploration and character interactions play a part in the series. However, the content of The Walking Dead was so unlike anything they had ever done before that I could not help but worry.

While zombies are the catalyst for the events taking place in the world, The Walking Dead is really about the character interactions and choices that are made by those that are still living. Telltale completely understood what makes the series tick and nails it from the opening moments of the game. Instead of focusing on the zombie outbreak, the beginning of the game is just a simple conversation during a car ride out of Atlanta. The whole thing lulls the player into a false sense of security and because of the underlying premise, players know something bad is going to happen, it is just a matter of when and the tension mounts as the climactic delivery is waited on.

Building and maintaining tension consistently is something The Walking Dead had to do especially well, fortunately with a solid combination of good writing and smartly designed gameplay, it is able to deliver it throughout the episode. The gameplay system The Walking Dead utilizes is a hodgepodge of design elements from other games. The dialog system in particular is very reminiscent of Alpha Protocol’s timed dialog wheel, while the navigation and environmental interaction pieces seem strongly influenced by Heavy Rain, albeit heavily modified.

These design choices give the biggest boon to the game via how Telltale has implemented the action sequences in the game. Forgoing generic third person scenarios that would have lost the feel of the series, action sequences are built around disorienting the player and making them feel uncomfortable. These scenarios generally have an easy solution but ,whether it is through visual manipulation, making it hard to see what needs to be done, or by presenting to the player a choice that needs to be decided immediately, The Walking Dead makes it hard on the player. And doing something or failing to do something can have major repercussions down the line.

Cause and effect are two major players in The Walking Dead and seeing how my choices played out in the game was emotionally draining. Unlike something like Mass Effect where my decisions are recorded and played out over the course of three complete games, to varying degrees of satisfaction, The Walking Dead delivers on player choice. If I neglect to do something it could be the difference between a character living or dying. If I seemingly insult someone that person could very well hold it against me causing me potentially irreparable harm down the line. While it is true that some of the decisions are purely cosmetic because the story has to be directed down a certain path but most of them have weight, making the game quite satisfying to play.

Due to the nature of the content, The Walking Dead will not be for everyone. However for fans of the comic and television series, for fans of the horror genre, and even for those just looking for a mature take on mature content, The Walking Dead is a treat. It is too bad we have to wait a month before episode two.

Pros

  • Decisions matter.
  • Smartly designed gameplay.
  • Excellent story dealing with mature topics.
  • Visual style is eye catching.

Cons

  • We have to wait a month for the next installment.

5 / 5

Note: The Walking Dead is an episodic series, this review was done using the PC version of the first episode of the game. It is also available on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

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XBLA Review: The Splatters

By
Magnus Risebro
– April 22, 2012Posted in: Reviews, Xbox 360

With physics-based puzzlers abundant, the requisites for originality and quality within the genre have risen. Making a block fall over and bounce off another block is no longer sufficient. The Splatters seems to know this, but its attempts at relevance and innovation feel forced.

Puzzle games usually work because of a simple clever concept and ruleset: In Portal, you place portals in the environment; in Braid, you manipulate time; in World Of Goo, you build structures of goo balls. The Splatters’s premise is less elegant – Gelatinous, eerily smiling blobs are launched at stacks of bombs. Upon hitting a sharp edge or hard surface, the jelly-blobs explode into paint-like liquid which detonates the bombs at contact. Sometimes there are differently-colored bombs only able to detonate by using blobs of corresponding color. The gameplay happens in side-on 2D arenas with platforms, ramps to glide along and spikes to gut your blobs on. Victory happens when all bombs are cleared. So far, so decent.

Eventually, more mechanics are introduced, including a pseudo-time-reversal ability and a trick-system. These somewhat successfully add depth, though it’s a messy kind of depth that feels unshakably desperate. The mechanics have few, specific uses and can scarcely be twisted cleverly. For instance, the kinda-time-manipulation is only useful for shifting momentum on ramps or aligning goo-rain to hit bombs, techniques you’ll repeat innumerable times. Instead of few but dynamic mechanics, the game opts for many restrictive ones, and thus feels clumsy.

The Splatters rarely demands outside-the-box thought and, as the difficulty surges in later levels, it’s your split-second timing being challenged, rather than your strategic muscle. Exploring all of the possible approaches to a level is mostly straightforward, making for scant “Aha-that-was-right-in-front-of-my-face-the-whole-time” moments. This isn’t necessarily a detriment – many good ostensibly “puzzle” games have reflex-based, thoughtless gameplay. Indeed, The Splatters can be rewarding when you’re firing a blob at the right angle, timing your double-boost perfectly and seeing the bomb-stack showered in colored gunk, all with suitably squelchy sound-effects and cool zooming camera shots. But, with increasing regularity, my progress was arrested in scenarios demanding ridiculously tight timing and little else, where success was a mere numbers game of waiting – not trying – to get it right.

Ultimately, The Splatters is decent. The blob-flinging gameplay, despite its contrived design, is mostly solid. It features impressively elastic goo-physics and has a good volume of stages. There are far better places to squander 800 MS points, but you’ll mildly enjoy yourself if you are stuck playing it.

Pros:

  • Cool semi-liquid physics model
  • Plenty of stages
  • Nice, tactile feel
  • …Fun?

Cons:

  • Ugly, Worms-esque visual design
  • Messy gameplay
  • Monotonous trial-and-error in later levels

3 out of 5.

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Review: I Am Alive

By
Don Parsons
– April 19, 2012Posted in: PS3, Reviews, Xbox 360

You’ll be hard pressed to find a survival game without some sort of supernatural gimmick playing into it such as zombies or ghosts. Ubisoft Shanghai knocks that stigma away with its latest digital release, I Am Alive. Instead of surviving horrible creatures with limited supplies, you are tasked with surviving the elements and the harsh survivors within it.

You play the part of Adam, a man who has traveled across the country in hopes of finding his wife and daughter. The world has been devastated by “The Event,” something the game never touches on, but traversing the fictional city of Haventon leads one to believe it was unapologetically brutal. While the overlying story is you trying to find your wife, you eventually meet up with a few friendly characters that you help out through the duration of the game. I won’t spoil anything, as that is the joy of such a game, but I found the story arch to play second fiddle to the gameplay; though the end sequence was quite a surprise and ended the game with a thoughtful moment of “what just happened”.

The strength in I Am Alive is the platforming. This is the selling point, in my opinion, and anyone who enjoys platformers should take interest. Stamina sets I Am Alive apart from every other platforming game I have played, and it’s so well done that anytime I got to a combat situation I grumbled because I wanted to scale more buildings. Some of the jumps and climbs Adam performs are a little unbelievable, but the stamina bar is the key element in creating tension.

As you climb around the environments, your stamina bar slowly drains and once you hit your limit you begin permanently stunting your stamina. You’ll find items to replenish the damaged stamina bar but these items are rare in the beginning of the game. The situations are so well placed and designed that, as you are making your way up to that open window, you really don’t know if you are going to make it into the window (climbing up to a standing position replenishes your stamina, though, if you lost of the bar itself, you’ll need an item to correct it) or if you’ll have to exert extra energy.

The environments themselves are a little wasteful, though. You can spend an hour of your five hour playthrough roaming around looking for hidden items only to come up empty handed. That’s not to say roaming won’t get you anything, as there are some people that need help scattered across Haventon. But the majority of the time I spent checking around corners and what-nots, I was left disappointed. I kept expecting little notes to fill in the details on what exactly “The Event” was, but nothing ever came up. That said, the areas you will roam around all look fantastic. The character models may look dated, but the environments look great.

Combat is handled in an interesting way, and even though I didn’t particularly care for it, it was because I enjoyed the platforming so much that combat just felt unnecessary. Most of the survivors of “The Event” are territorial, so the moment you walk into view, they will start to approach you. Thankfully, each situation is different, so you may get approached by one person with a gun and two with a machete, or vice-versa. The combinations make you think, because you can quick-kill one of them and then have the option to scare the others off by aiming a gun at them or outright shooting them. Bullets are in short-supply, so you really have to think about each situation carefully. It’s a genuine system, I will say that. After you have played through it once, you can go back through on a harder difficulty and try your hand at surviving the harshness with even more limited supplies.

My biggest complaint is the checkpoint/save system. Being an autosave-only game, you have to rely on the game saving at certain intervals. I didn’t actually know this in the beginning, and thought maybe a checkpoint would have been a good stopping point during one play session. When I booted it back up, I have lost 15 minutes of playtime and had to redo a few things I had already had a problem getting through. It’s not really the games fault, more-so the system the developers chose to work with. Much like quick-time events, I will state this is a personal preference thing, and I can’t stand these systems in games.

I Am Alive is a tense survival game. It stacks the cards differently and plays a great hand despite the few shortcomings. If you are looking for something with a gripping story that will keep you playing to see what happens, though, I Am Alive may wind up disappointing you. If you can get past the last-gen character models, and get into what the game is going for, you will find enjoyment and won’t regret your purchase.

Pros:

  • Very tense, edge-of-your seat gameplay
  • Unique combat system that makes you think
  • The platforming is top-notch

Cons:

  • No explaination what “The Event” is
  • Sub-par story-telling
  • Save system

Score: 3/5

Note: This game was played on the Playstation 3 console with a code provided by the publisher. It is also available on the X360 console.

 

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Review: Ridge Racer Unbounded

By
Don Parsons
– April 15, 2012Posted in: PC, PS3, Reviews, Xbox 360

Ridge Racer Unbounded is an odd title. The name aside, which makes sense in regards to the story, it’s a racing game that seems like the offspring of Ridge Racer and Burnout. Either way you look at it, Bugbear Entertainment took some brave steps to show that Ridge Racer was more than a high-speed drift around the park.

Taking place in the fictitious Shatter Bay, you join the Unbounded gang as they try to reclaim the city district by district. During the single-player experience, you’ll see a few different game modes that all showcase different parts of the city. Each have different focuses and will test different skill-sets. Domination has you destroying as much as possible and trying to keep the lead. Drift racing is exactly as it sounds, drifting around a track to score as many points as possible. Shindo racing is a funny term for racing in a clean, less destructive manner. Frag attacks have you crashing into a set amount of opponents (aka frags). Last but not least, is time trial racing which pits you against the clock.

The environments you race through will be littered with destructible objects and shortcuts if you are racing a Domination race. Crashes through the building are augmented with a stunning slow-motion camera shift that really highlights the beautiful graphics in Unbounded. Everything from the tracks to the cars all look fantastic, showing that Bugbear took some care to deliver a pretty package.

Car selection is a huge let-down though, to me personally anyhow. I figured the cars would have been fake, as this is a Ridge Racer game. Most cars resemble some sort of real-life car on the market too, but when choosing a color, there’s only a few selections (usually red, black, silver and orange with the occasional blue or yellow).

Thankfully, the physics are solid, albeit a bit awkward in the beginning. On the Playstation 3, the Circle button acts as a stiff e-brake. Unlike other Ridge Racer games, the track layouts feature more sharp corners than swooping curves, so learning to finesse the brake and drift around corners it a little trickier. Rear-wheel drives kick their backside out quicker, while front-wheel drive cars corner a little easier for beginners.

Unlike most arcade racing games were the difficulty slowly slopes upwards, Unbounded is relentless. This can be satisfying for some and frustrating to others. Even on easy, you have to be fairly decent to win the race. Winning on harder difficulties isn’t really required for anything, thankfully, outside of getting more XP to unlock more cars and stuff for the creation mode.

One of the big draws in Unbounded is creating a city. Each city can hold multiple races, each that can be easily tweaked to fit your specifications. You can create them quickly with the simple editor or go in depth and allow your creative juices to flow. After you are done, you can put them online for others to race in.

This is where this whole portion of the game gets messy. I hopped into a lot of created tracks. A few of them were great and offered quite a challenge. But most of them were sloppy and had me furious that I had wasted my time on them. Creating a smash-through shortcut that leads to a wall that you smash into and crumple into a wrecked pile of trash? Really? I’m sure once it is left to the hardcore audience to keep new tracks coming, playing on custom tracks will be a more fun experience.

As a pure-arcade racer, Ride Racer Unbounded can scratch many itches in one title. Bugbear successfully branched the franchise into a new path for future iterations to follow and with more refinement, Unbounded has set a good foundation. While the lack of cars and customization let me down, the beauty and spectacular set-pieces are impressive and with a lack of racers new on the market at the moment, Namco gives racing fans something to tide them over for awhile.

Pros:

  • Beautiful graphics and explosions
  • Fun drifting action
  • Creating tracks

Cons:

  • Tracks created by some are unplayable
  • Car selection is slim, and no real color selection
  • Difficulty could be frustrating to some

Score: 3/5

Note: This review was written based on Playstation 3 gameplay with material provided by the publisher. Ridge Racer Unbounded is also available on the X360 home console and PC.

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Review: Mass Effect 3

By
Tony Odett
– April 15, 2012Posted in: PC, PS3, Reviews, Xbox 360

Shepard first learned of an incoming invasion of the worst kind in the original Mass Effect. In Mass Effect 2, he was resurrected to battle to save humanity from that same incoming threat.  Finally, Shepard is left to face the great battle of our time, to attempt to stave off the Reapers, a race of sentient machines, from harvesting all sentient organic life. The shadow that loomed over the previous two games finally falls, and the entire galaxy faces chaos and extinction.

Mass Effect 3 is the conclusion to a trilogy, and as such, it sees both the benefit of refined gameplay and the burden of creating an adequate finale to one of the most engaging storylines in gaming history.  It’s an attempt that is largely successful, but also the videogame equivalent of kicking a field goal instead of going for the touchdown. The game largely plays it safe, and while this strategy results in a satisfactory experience, it also causes the game to miss out on the greatness of its predecessors.  The original Mass Effect’s dialogue and incredible story combined with some lackluster design decisions gave it the ultimate flawed masterpiece feel. Mass Effect 2 was able to refine the first game, eliminating the flaws, and provide a continuity of story based on player decisions we’d never before experienced in a game. Mass Effect 3 provides a similar continuity, while becoming even safer in the gameplay department. It seems that in an effort to avoid any gameplay criticism whatsoever, Bioware distilled the game merely to the “choose your own adventure” storyline and the 3rd person shooting mechanics.

Thankfully, they did not distill the hotness of Liara.

Bioware’s spectacular storytelling is center stage in this game, and the weaving of player decisions over the course of the previous two games into this effort gives events a weight they would not otherwise have. The themes of sacrifice for the greater good and perseverance are prevalent here, allowing the developers to tell a tale that is both triumphant and poignantly sad. This game will invoke your emotions, especially in its middle acts. The story starts a little flat, as it spends too much time trying to justify why the course of events are set in the way they are. And (as I attempt to avoid the ending controversy) the finale lacks the explosive emotional nature of the middle of the tale. It seems as if Bioware simply peaked too soon, and had difficultly constructing an ending that matched the powerful middle acts.

I believe I've let him get too close.

The gunplay which makes up the majority of your gameplay time is the best of the series. The weapons all seem to have unique personality and weight. The hotkeys and Kinect controls allow the player to implement their powers on the battlefield more easily than ever before. This improves the flow of the combat- the selection wheel still exist (for both weapons and powers) but skipping them in favor of hotkey selections is easier than ever before. The battles have a frantic pace, but in this effort (more than previous games) Shepard is much easier to control and the shooting is much tighter.

I like explosions.

Being that the combat is so well designed, it seems only fitting that this game would include a cooperative mode. Apparently your progress in cooperative mode affects the single player campaign, but save for an achievement for having a certain level of progress when I began the final battle in the campaign, it was difficult for me to see the relationship between the two.  The mode itself is a Horde-mode style battle of waves of enemies, as your team fights for its survival until extraction.  The battle is changed up as one out of every three rounds gives you a special objective to fill (like assassinating targets, or downloading data from a terminal). The combat is fast and furious, and proves especially tough at the higher difficulty settings. That said, the fact that there’s only one mode removes some of the legs from the co-op. The grab bag nature of the upgrades (you earn cash to buy packs filled with random equipment) is also alternately exhilarating and frustrating. The fact that it took me seven hours of play to get a weapon higher than level one was a strong strike against the mode, and I spent a lot of time wishing there was a way to buy the weapons I needed at a premium price instead of the “buy a pack and pray” method. Without any strong weapons, I was useless to my team at higher difficulty setting, and was stuck farming money at the lower levels until I could rank up in the world. I enjoyed playing the mode, but that frustration stung a bit.

Mass Effect 3 is a solid, if not divinely inspired effort. It is a must play for those who have invested so much into the previous efforts and wish to see the conclusion to Shepard’s story. The shooting is top notch, and the high points of the story telling are more than worth the price of admission. It does fail to meet the universal high quality of ME2 (which was, in my opinion, one of the greatest efforts in gaming history) but all in all, will satisfy all but the most jaded of gamers. Shepard out.

Put my woman down!

Pros:

  • Emotional and weighty story
  • Gunplay at the highest levels
  • Fun co-op

Cons:

  • Beginning and end of narrative fall flat
  • Co-op only includes one mode
  • Lack of gameplay variety of previous games
  • Too safe

4 / 5

Mass Effect 3 was released on Playstation 3, PC, and Xbox 360. This review was conducted with the 360 version of the title, purchased by the reviewer.

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