Tag Archives: 2010

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Shaun White Skateboarding

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Taking influences from many sources, Shaun White Skateboarding seeks to forge a new path for skateboarding games, and adds a few new twists on an old genre. It attempts to muscle in on territory held by Activision with Tony Hawk on the one hand, and EA’s Skate on the other. Instead of knocking out the competition, it gets squished in the middle, making a little noise but ultimately being ineffectual in making itself really stand as a contender.

With the story of SWS appearing far more developed than in Skate or any Tony Hawk games, you find yourself in the world of the Ministry, a faceless, boring bureaucracy which insists everyone to behave in a regular manner, not dream nor imagine; not be exceptional, not be outstanding. It’s a dystopian view of the corporate world, not dissimilar to the one found in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, but nowhere near as clever.
As public enemy number one, presumably because he is exceptional and outstanding, Shaun White is arrested, and hands you his board. You transform from corporate slave to gnarly skateboarder dude, and then through the help of some friends, seek to free the whole city from under the corporate grey mundanity of the Ministry’s grasp.

You do this by skating, of course. Your main objective is to colourise the world, and in this way it is a bit like DeBlob on the Wii. As you cruise around on your board performing tricks, the world around you goes from drab and lifeless greys to full colour and life. Trees sprout from the side walk. Cars are splashed with bright colours. Walls become covered in animated graffiti artworks. The more tricks you pull, the wider your area of influence becomes. The wave of energy ripples out from where you land the tricks, shaking the cars and trees around you, reminiscent of Blur’s area effect weapon.

The trick system is very familiar to anyone who’s played Skate. You flick the Right Stick to pull off moves in the air, and modify with the face and trigger buttons. However, it feels like Skate –Lite. The tricks are easy to pull off, and the game guides you to land safely most of the time. It’s only in extreme circumstances, like falling from a great height or not completing a flip that you ‘bail’.

There’s also a Flow meter down the bottom of the screen, and filling up the meter means you can use Flow to influence certain areas of the world. For example, see a swirly yellow line in the middle of the street means there is something, usually a ramp or jump, which can be influenced to appear by landing a trick when your meter is in the yellow zone. Blue swirlies indicate objects which need you to be in the blue zone, and likewise purple indicate the highest amount of Flow you need to unlock the area. This also applies to the pedestrians who populate the world. Get your meter up and you can influence yellow and blue business people to become brightly clothed snap happy photographers and skaters.

Flow is the main weapon used in the story of the game to unlock more areas and further the story along. There is more to do than just build flow though. There is an XP system, and by completing challenges around the world you gain XP, which is used to unlock more skate tricks. The more tricks in your arsenal, the more flow you build up.

The best bit of the game is creating ramps and rails out of thin air. Around the world you’ll see hazy green icons, and running up the ramp icon creates a ramp. Riding onto the street icon creates a wide path which can be manipulated up or down, creating bridges and the like. Jumping onto a rail and sliding onto the rail icons creates a rail which can get you up to higher places. At first the rails follow a determined path, but later on in the game you can manipulate the paths how you wish. This innovative approach to extending levels vertically works very well, making you feel some real freedom in making your own paths through the world.

There are also a host of things to smash, walls to wall ride, and tickets to collect, all of which grant achievements, experience and / or unlockable clothing and skate boards and accessories. The latter seems to be lacking somewhat in “real world” brands especially compared to Skate and Tony Hawk, although the subtle advertising in world (such as the Wendy’s shop fronts plastered with the Wendy’s logo) points to paid advertising in the game. As to why the advertising wasn’t more “skate culture” orientated I can only surmise that other companies had exclusive deals with the other franchises.

And despite the cool new things you can do in the game compared to the other skate games, about 5 or 6 hours into it things get rather dull. The story slows down, the new area is already full of colour so doing tricks is just morphing the world into ramps and jumps, and you feel like you’re simply going through the motions. I still like to fire up Skate and try to pull off new tricks, but the simpler trick system in SWS means there’s nothing to actually master.

The graphics of the game look decidedly underwhelming. Although the effects and colours are great, and the main character animations are smooth enough, the animations of the albeit numerous pedestrians are very basic. You’ll see the same animations over and over again. The in-game cutscenes look very basic, with low polygon models and atrocious lipsynch.

Although the game never takes itself seriously, with caricatures of stoner skateboarders throughout, the story script won’t be winning awards for creative writing. The dialogue is delivered well enough, although I often had problems in cutscenes where the voice would drop out entirely. The ancillary voices are repetitive to the point of annoying. It’s unintentionally funny you’re helping this repressed and conformist world to free itself, and everyone runs around saying “Hi, my name is Dave” and “Fight the Power!” Musically the game also underperforms compared to the other skateboarding franchises, being full of typical skate/punk/pop music with nothing too outstanding to make note of.

Multiplayer games simply do not exist. After more than an hour waiting over numerous nights, I didn’t find a single game. I admit it could have been one of those silly moderate NAT issues which sometimes occur with Xbox Live games, but I would have thought I’d have seen at least one person try and join my game. As it stands, not one person joined my on line game, and I never once saw anyone playing online.

Conclusion:
Shaun White Skateboarding provides a great deal of fun for a few hours, and then seems to collapse on itself. The ideas contained within are innovative in terms of a skateboarding game, but grow stale after a few hours. The ease of pulling off tricks, the poor quality of the characters and animations and music and dialogue all contrive to make the game lesser than the sum of its parts. Which is a shame, because given the state of the Tony Hawk franchise, the video game skating world does really need some fresh ideas.

Pros:
Interesting concepts
It’s fun creating your own paths through the world.
Easy to get the hang of tricks

Cons:
Poorly executed concepts, which grow stale after a few hours
Poor character animations, especially in cutscenes
Tricks are possibly too easy
Dialogue is too repetitive

67/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2

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The Force Unleashed underwhelmed people across the galaxy last year. Although it’s ever so fun to grab and throw storm troopers off balconies, the incredibly repetitive game play and shockingly badly boss fights, designed to show off the DMM physics but which ended up showing the limits of both this new technology and the imagination of the game designers, saw the game get reamed in the press, and have rather low sales for a new Star Wars franchise. Force Unleashed 2 seeks to address some of those concerns, but does so only half heartedly.

The story involves the clone of Starkiller, bought back from the dead by Vader and trained as a dual lightsaber wielder simply because it looks cool. Breaking out of your prison and escaping the Kamino cloning facilities, you rush off to find your old mate General Kota in an effort to find the love of your life, Juno Eclipse. Your journey takes you from Kamino to the Trade Federation homeworld of Cato Nemoidia, Dagobah, and then back to Kamino via a Rebel Frigate ship.

The locations look amazing. From the rain falling in Kamino, to the wealthy majesty of the upside down bridge cities of Cato Nemoidia to the fog covered swamp of Dagobah, the game looks less like a game and more like a Star Wars movie. I have to make special mention of the Frigate ship, which although empty at first creates a legitimately spooky feel, at least until the first wave of new enemies arrives.

However, for a game which is meant to be a sequel, there are less locations than the original, and when Dagobah is essentially an interactive cut-scene with no action to speak of, you feel cheated. The game will take you a little over 5 hours to complete and although there is an unlockable “unleashed” hardcore mode and at least one alternative ending, the short and rather contrived story and limited locations make a second play through an option only for the serious fan (or seriously bored).

The action of the game is still the same – you simply button mash your way through room after room of enemies. This time though, you start with nearly all your force powers, and there is also dismemberment, which on top of the force push/grab mechanic, is damn fun to do. There is a little more Arkham Asylum finesse to your button mashing for flourishes and kill moves. It’s almost as if the designers had something special in mind for these moves, but then that got left out of the game.

There are variations to enemies this time around to make things more interesting, but they’re rather easy to dispatch once you’ve figured out some can only be hurt by lightsaber, and others can only be hurt by certain force effects. The fact these appear in groups together on the same levels gives you a little more pause for thought, but when you realise the guy you’re sabring isn’t getting hurt, you simply mash the force buttons instead.

Two new enemies appear in FU2 and need require special mention. The little scamping robots in the Frigate level, although they do little damage and are easy to dispatch, are almost annoying as Halo’s Flood. And while the Rancors are gone from the game, the new carbonite and fire droids are almost as annoying and repetitive to battle. You take their shield away with a button mash minigame, use lightning or saber throw, and then quicktime event to dispatch them when their health is low.

The infuriating boss fights are still present, and while it’s much easier to not fail now, they still seem designed to prolong gameplay instead of creating fun. The boss fight with the Gorog on Cato Nemoida is straight out of the God Of War handbook, and admittedly would have been fun if I hadn’t played it in every adventure game since God Of War. The Terror Droid on the Rebel Ship is annoying because not only do you have to contend with the Flood-bots, you’ve got to do a force puzzle to pull things out of their sockets, and then put things back into the sockets to complete the battle. It just seems so pointless.

There is an annoying jumping puzzle right near the final confrontation stage that will make you curse and throw your controller, and once you think it’s done, there’s an additional bit to extend the gameplay out even more. When I saw this bit, I turned my Xbox off in disgust. Seriously game designers, if you’re going to make jumping puzzles in 3D action games, you need to get your camera perfect. Otherwise they just upset and frustrate players. And if you’re going to make the player restart, make it at the point they fell, not where the level starts.

And if you insist on making a jumping puzzle like this, make it lead to something awesome. The final confrontation is so repetitive for the most part that you’re thankful for the simple button mashing quicktime events it feature, and positively ecstatic when presented with the only “light / dark choice” moment in the game.

Conclusion:
The fact this game is named “Force Unleashed 2” is a misnomer. There have been minor tweaks to the game play, little change to the animations of any but the main character, rampant re-use of assets and props, and at a little over 5 hours of game play, you know this project was rushed out to make the most of the fading light that is Lucas Arts Star Wars franchise. It really should have come as an add-on for the original game, and not as a full priced, stand alone product.

However, despite the story being rather lame, the game being too short, overwhelmingly repetitive and frustratingly annoying in most of the boss fights, I can’t say it’s a completely terrible game. I found myself happily mashing buttons for 5 hours straight. Because not matter what the rest of the game does, it’s still too much fun to pick up a flailing Stormtrooper and fling him off a ledge to his doom.

Pros:
Playing with physics is always fun
flinging stormtroopers to their doom is always cool
The environments look amazing

Cons:
Too short
Too repetitive
Too derivative

65/100

FULL DISCLOSURE:

At Krome Studios in 2007, I worked as a tester on the PSP, PS2 and Wii ports of Star Wars The Force Unleashed.

I did not work on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 at all in any capacity.

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

PES 2011

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Pro Evolution Soccer used to be king of the hill when it came to soccer games. FIFA, whilst glitzy and loaded with cash, couldn’t match PES for the realism and all the fun of the World Game on a home console. However, starting with the2009 versions of the games (which were actually out in 2008), we saw the tables turn, with PES playing catch up ever since. This year is no different, but the gap has closed significantly.

It begins with the 360 passing. Quick and effective passing is what soccer is all about, and whilst it’s been good in PES in the past, it needed work. It always felt in PES that players were glued to the ball and running down invisible bits of string, with passing being based on algorithms and logic, instead of timing and forethought. However, it’s changed now to be much more flexible, and indeed harder. Now there is a power meter as well as the ability to send the ball in any direction. You must practice and get used to it, otherwise you’ll feel like passing has devolved. It wasn’t until I realised holding the trigger modifies the passing allowing you to target the ball better that I began to understand why I was passing through balls instead of passing succinctly.

This year’s game is played at a slower pace than what most PES players would be used to, but this is an improvement to the realism of the game. It complements the new passing moves and the new power meter. This makes the game slightly more tactical, which means the “ping-pong” action of the game, always a criticism of PES, almost doesn’t exist any longer.

PES 2011 retains the card modifiers for star players, and for the most part works well. Messi, although a great player, doesn’t have superpowers in real life, and the card modifiers for him don’t make him unstoppable. They add an increased depth to the way the player AI handles certain situations, but there is never a sense these star players are overpowered, just good at the game.

However, the improvements are let down somewhat by the AI and ball physics. To explain my complaints with the AI, it’s best to use examples. On a run up the field with a defending player, such as Puyol, players will do a dead stop rather than run offside. However, forwards are always faster than defenders, so this means if you dribble past the line of defence, your players will be at a standstill at some points and not running up into support. Conversely, when you’re defending, your players will run back from the player with the ball, meaning they’ll lose their marks, allowing attackers into the goal square.

Ball physics still needs a lot of work, as I’ve seen the ball bounce off a player into touch at right angles to that player, who was facing away from the direction of play. I’ve also seen a corner being headed directly upwards, which then neatly fell at the player’s feet which was volleyed into the goal. Whilst it makes the game more unpredictable, and in some ways a lot of fun, there are times when the bounce can put you at an extreme disadvantage. Particularly true is near the end of the match, when your players are tired. Last minute goals which end up in tied or lost matches are far too common in PES to be put down to simple luck.

There are plenty of modes of offer, with the Champions League and Copa Santander Libertadores (South American League) being playable, as well as being able to form your own leagues and competitions. The Master League is still incredibly in depth, seeming to take more from football manager games but applying it to how you manage your club. The menus are less obtuse and confusing than before, making it easy to get in and edit tactics, team formations, individual positions, man marking and the like. However, leaving it all to the “coach” also works just as well as getting your fingers dirty with the minutia of PES Master League.

This year the Master League goes online, and I have to be honest and say I never really gave it much of a go. I like being able to jump online, play a game, and then forget about it. If I wanted to manage teams in an in depth fashion, I’d play an online football manager. However, the few games I did have were pretty good compared to my experiences in previous years. There was an awfully long wait to get to a game, but once in it was only a little laggy, and certainly not unplayable as PES has been in the past.

The Be a Pro – sorry “Become a Legend” mode introduced a few years ago is back, but it still feels like a terrible rip off of FIFA’s mode. There’s still no ongoing notification of how you are performing during a match, which makes it very hard to develop your Legend. Personally, I think they should drop this mode and concentrate on the team game, which has always been one of PES’s strong points.

This is one of the best looking PES games in years. On field animation is great, especially with the teams licensed for the game. Other teams don’t fare so well and at times some players look a little stiff, robotic and bowlegged. Replays look fantastic, as there is a motion blur applied to the camera, and you can see players heads follow the ball as it whizzes past them. The crowd animation is still poor, and it lacks the vitality of other sports games. The ability to modify teams and now stadiums is a welcome addition, but it still feels silly to call the teams North London and Pompy.

The sound is great, for the most part too. The players call out to each other, and the authentic crowd chants and drum beating capture the authenticity of a real soccer match where the animation doesn’t. The music this year is great – no weird no-name Japanese trying to be westerners pop, but actual licensed music from Elite Force and Shihad, amongst others. However, this too is let down by the commentary. Dull, repetitive, and often not following the course of play at all. I don’t think it’s particularly the fault of John Champion and Jim Beglin, but more so the way commentary is arranged and triggered.

Conclusion:
To be brutally frank, in the preceding years PES seemed wishy washy, unsure of itself in light of the more powerful FIFA. This year, they’ve gone back to the drawing board, worked out what PES did well, what FIFA does well, and tried to make the better game. They succeeded in making a better PES, but it’s not the best football game available this year. In essence, it’s a poor man’s FIFA.

And whilst calling PES 2011 a “poor man’s FIFA” may be an insult to long term PES players, I think it’s a very admirable quality to have. Konami don’t have the teams and Leagues EA can secure, don’t have the resources to dedicate to upgrading and improving the game and engine like EA can, nor even supply as good a commentary or soundtrack as EA, but even so PES 2011 is a damn impressive attempt at a fun soccer game.

Pros:
Great new passing mechanism
Incredibly in depth Master League
Master League can now be played against others online.
Relatively lag free online play

Cons:
Bad commentary
Still has some AI issues
Ball physics still feel unrealistic and unpredictable
Some dodgy player animations

81/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

R.U.S.E.

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When I first heard about R.U.S.E. I was pretty excited. A game which promised being able to fool the enemy into thinking you were attacking from the left flank, only to hammer it on the right and other similar tactics was something I thought I could really get my teeth into. I was a little apprehensive at playing it on console, as Real Time Strategy games on consoles are always hit and miss. Very few console RTS games have succeeded in being able to bring the ease of selecting and controlling troops as well as base defence and resource collecting as well as their PC counterparts. R.U.S.E. succeeds in this where so many others have failed.

R.U.S.E. is set during WWII. Two generals, USA’s Major Joe Sheridan and Germany’s General Major Erich Von Richter, fight for control over Europe, positioning troops and bases at strategic points across a map and try and take other points, then wipe out the enemy. There’s some silly rivalry and a plot twists to make the campaign seem more than some random maps stitched together, and the cut scenes which stitch up the battles are well done though, being fully animated and voiced, but the story isn’t really going to be that well remembered, and their intrusiveness when things start to get interesting is intolerable.

The main action of the game occurs on a table which represents the battlefield. All over the battlefield are troops, represented as tokens, and you move the tokens about using the controller. Surrounding the table is your base of operations, full of radios and clatter of Morse code machines. However, when you zoom in closer to the table the tokens come alive, no longer represented as coloured chips, but as troops and equipment. You see tanks rolling over fields, infantry moving through woods, planes dog fighting and the flash of artillery. It’s really clever design, made better by the ease of the controls. One of the joys of R.U.S.E is how easy it is to control your troops. Select a unit by clicking on it with the A button, and move it’s “ghost” to where you want it to take up position, and it does it. Select a “stack” by pressing X, and they’ll move in formation to where you direct them. The AI takes care of the rest, and does a pretty good job of getting them from A to B with little micromanagement.

Like most RTS games, the strategy comes from building your base, deploying defences, and building troops to take objectives. R.U.S.E uses a rock/paper/scissors approach to combat, with each kind of unit being strong against one type of unit and weak against another. It’s simple but it works. In addition to this, field of view and terrain up the ante. Infantry are weak against armour (tanks) and moving them into a field near a tank will lead to lots of dead soldiers. However, in woods and swamps infantry can hide and ambush armour. Buildings and woods block line of sight for many units, so placing two artillery units either side of a town allows better opportunities to attack and destroy approaching troops.

The twist on normal RTS comes in the form of the ruses, which is somewhat apparent given the title. Ruses allow you to mislead the opposition into thinking something different is going on than what they see. For example, you have a heap of infantry you’d like to move into a wooded area in order to protect the nearby town from an armour convoy. You use your Spy Ruse to make sure it is armour; you use the Radio Interception Ruse to see where they’re going, and you use the Radio Silence Ruse to move your troops without the enemy knowing.

Later in the game, Ruses can become incredibly complex. You create fake armies and fake blitzes in order to fool the enemy into thinking you’re attacking one location, when you’ve really got your sights on another. You can draw the enemy into attacking your fake base, whilst you mobilise from your real base. You can use the Terror Ruse to make all the enemy flee into a column of tanks you’ve moved behind the enemy force. It is this level of depth that makes the game shine.

Unfortunately, this level of depth takes so long to arrive via the campaign it will probably be best to skip straight into the Battles and Operations. The battles are small skirmishes, reflecting the online component of the game, whilst Operations recreate famous scenarios from WWII, such as Operation Seelöwe (Sea Lion), the German’s ambitious plan of invading the UK.

Although there is a multiplayer component, there is a lack of online games being played. That’s partly due to Halo Reach tying up the Xbox, and Star Craft 2 occupying the minds of RTS gamers. Furthermore, games take a long time to play, and only the most time rich and dedicated R.U.S.E. fans will stick around for the entire game.

Conclusion
R.U.S.E is by no means the greatest game you’ll play. It’s campaign in slow, the battles can take too long, and after a certain point all the games against the AI play out the same. And if you’re simply not into RTS games, then there’s nothing here to change your mind. However, if you are a fan of RTS games, you’ll find one deep, lengthy and engaging game to sink your teeth into. Moreover, it has enough new original gameplay elements to be truly influential in future, especially when it comes to RTS games on a console.

Pros:
Amazingly easy to control and play
Great graphical representation of the battlefields and units
Lots of options for types of games

Cons:
Campaign takes too long to get going and has a story too silly to be engaging
Battles take too long to complete
No one playing multiplayer games

74/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Grand Theft Auto IV: Ballard of Gay Tony

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Grand Theft Auto IV was criticised in some circles for being too serious, losing its sense of fun and humour to opt for a darker, grittier tale. Whilst I can see where this criticism came from, I for one liked the new tone as it turned the game from a farcical look at modern Western life found in San Andres and Vice City, to a more satirical look at the condition of modern man. GTA IV’s Ballad of Gay Tony attempts to address this by adding more farce into the tale, but still manages to keep its satirical side.

The Ballad of Gay Tony sees you step into the shoes of Luis Lopez, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. Luis is part owner of a couple of clubs with his friend and mentor “Gay Tony” Prince. The recession has hit the clubs hard, and Luis and Tony are in a little bit of bother with money, and get into some bad deals with some bad Mafioso types, setting the scene for the entire game.

Luis is a really likable character. He’s much more likable than Johnny Klebitz of The Lost and the Damned, more relaxed than Niko. Like Niko, he’s a product of his upbringing. He makes mention of the fact he’s a contract killer, but doesn’t seem to have as many issues with it as Niko did. He admires and respects Gay Tony, and as Tony succumbs to drug addiction it is hard not to side with Luis, even though you soon realise he’s making as big a mess as Tony.

The game itself plays like GTA IV, obviously. The mission structure is the same – generally drive somewhere and then blow everything up. The game also takes you to many of the set piece locations of the original title. You’ll find yourself in the middle of a bank heist, deep in the diamond heist, searching for a kidnapped Gracie, and having a shootout in the Museum. However, these are often presented in a different way to previously seen. Instead of running through the museum, you see a cinematic, and then are placed into a helicopter and have to escape.

Many characters seen in the first game and first DLC crop up here and there. You’ll see Roman try and get into the club a few times. Gracie, the loud mouth hostage, is Tony’s best friend. The Irish mobsters Gerry and Packie will feature in more than a few scenes. Brucie Kubbutz returns, but is a side kick to his even more annoying older brother Mori, who suffers Brucie’s insecurities but magnified ten times because of his short man syndrome. And of course Niko and Johnny appear frequently.

The effect of these two things on the player is to make the world seem more coherent and whole. The stories are weaved brilliantly together, reconnecting GTA IV and making the conspiratorial nature of the game seem much deeper and more intense. You’ll never know who your real allies are, and moreover, you’ll begin to rethink the outcomes which occurred in the other two games.

To spice things up a little, Rockstar have introduced more outrageous weapons and vehicles to the game. My favourite is the explosive shell shotgun, although sticky bombs are rather fun as well. Yusif, the ridiculously rich Arab will have you flying in a gold coloured attack helicopter. They’ve also brought back the parachute. This brings a verticality to the city that was previously absent. No longer are helicopter rides just about getting somewhere specific – you can jump out and parachute to the top of a building or the ground safely. I’ve gone to the tallest building just to jump off. The parachuting base jump minigames are even more fun, testing you skill as you fly through hoops or ride a bike off a building and then try to land on a moving flatbed.

Another fun new introduction to TBOGT is night club management. You go from point to point in the club, watching people dance looking for trouble. Trouble comes in the form of drunks, who you throw out. You’ll often get a call from the other club where you’ve got to go help out a hapless star who is caught with their pants down, or drive an English prince to find some hookers. When you’re not working you can play some drinking minigames and even participate in a dance off, which sees the whole floor doing a bus stop routine and sounds lame on paper, but is a lot of fun to pull off.

The new music is gregarious disco and dance, and whilst it’s a little clichéd to have “Shake Your Groove Thing” by Peaches and Herb and the like associated with the Gay scene, it’s also just fun music in general which adds to the overall lighter tone of the game. Not much is made of Gay Tony’s gayness, either. When people do start throwing around the homophobic slurs, it’s often directed at Luis too despite his repeated protestations of the contrary, and you’ll find yourself wanting to hurt those guys just for being dicks. And in most cases, you get to.

Conclusion:
In TBOGT you’re still as ruthless a killer as Niko and Johnny, but there’s a larger sense of fun and play here. Whilst never as ridiculous as Vice City or Saint’s Row, it has a very similar feel. Whereas GTA IV was almost like a moral play, TBOGT plays much more like a comedic tragedy. It takes itself seriously, but presents a much more laid back sensibility to the player, giving them a chance to have a bit of fun in between the gritty reality of gangsters and money.

Pros:
Great story line
Great reuse of characters
The parachute opens up the vertical city
Fun new minigames

Cons:
Helicopters don’t have missile locks
No changes to the core game

85/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Crackdown 2

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There are certain brands which, due to a number of factors such as quality of product and level of marketing, which step beyond their genres, they begin to define those genres. Take for example Coca Cola. Even if you don’t like Coke, I’ll bet when you order a Cola based mixer drink you say “Rum and Coke”. There are other brands too – Liquid Paper, Hoover, Google, iPod. It’s the same with videogames too. Certain games have come to define genres. Pacman, Puzzle Quest, Mario Cart, Doom, God Of War, Resident Evil and Grand Theft Auto, for example.

Whilst the quality of those games could be argued until the end of time, saying “it’s like Mario Cart” instantly gives you a frame of reference to talk about another game. One of the best examples of this in recent times is XBW Shane’s review of Red Dead Redemption. In many ways it is superior to GTA, but in defining it as “GTA Deadwood” he nailed it in a simple and concise manner. You might have a different opinion to Shane about GTA and Deadwood, but even so your knowledge of those products will influence how you react to his review, and the game itself.

Crackdown could have been one of these genre defining games. It differed enough from GTA to make it stand out from any other GTA Clone you’ve played. Yes, it was a free roaming open world set in a city with cars and pedestrians you could kill, and the missions involved driving to places and destroying all the enemies in a given area, but the skill progression and the collection minigame were so distinctive they could have began to alter gaming landscape with gamers describing other games as “Crackdown Clones”, providing they made good use of what made Crackdown so good in the sequel.

Unfortunately, they’ve dropped the ball, and given us the first game only with less to do and less to see. Pacific City, itself quite a defining quality of the first game with its neon filled streets and high-rises, has undergone what I like to refer to as “next-gen browning”. The city has fallen into decay, and as such the art has lost the distinctive edge of a super city and in order to give the look of the city a “gritty edge” the art team simply made everything an uninspired rusty brown colour, something featured in every next-gen game since the PS3 and Xbox360 appeared on the market.

Moreover, the layout of the city is exactly the same. There’s nothing new to see or explore. There are new underground areas, but these are just big arena areas. Although other games have done similar in using the city over – GTA’s mini episodes spring to mind – there is still enough new stuff to see and do to make it worthwhile. They also have incredible stories which drive you play the game.

The story in Crackdown 2, what there is of one, is since you’ve visited in the first game, the place has become a mess. Although you brought down 5 gangs to bring peace to the city previously, that was all for naught as a new terrorist organisation has risen from the ashes to threaten the city’s Peacekeepers. On top of that the city is overrun by zombie mutant freaks at night time. The only way to stop it is to re-introduce the Agency’s most effective weapon against crime – the Agent.

Like the first Crackdown, your agent starts with middling powers and work your way up by using your skills to gain orbs. Shooting the enemy with guns builds up your weapons skills, unlocking more powerful weapons and making your firing more accurate. Doing hand break turns and J-Turns, drifting, and running down enemies in vehicles increases your driving skill, unlocking more vehicles and giving more control when driving. Using explosives like grenades unlocks better grenades and rocket launchers, and increases the impact of explosions. Punching and fighting makes you tougher, and unlocks ramming and ground punch abilities.

The most fun of the game is from agility orbs. Like the first game, these are dotted around the city, enticing you to explore by jumping from building to building, gaining the ability to jump higher and further as you gather more orbs. Unlike the first game though, their position isn’t as logical as before, and there’s a little bit more of hide and seek going on. To give this aspect of the game a bit of a twist, there are “rogue” orbs, orbs which have an avoidance field and are difficult to catch. At first, these orbs are great fun to chase either on foot or in a car, and you can spend a good half an hour running around trying to grab one. But eventually it gives way to frustration, because no matter how high your driving or agility score, they’re designed to move away from you, so if you had difficulty catching one at the start of the game, you’re going to have the same amount towards the end of the game.

They also haven’t fixed up some of the biggest frustrations of the first game. Some buildings look like they have ledges you can grab onto, so you’ll leap onto them and end up sliding all the way to the bottom. Or they have overhangs you can’t get past, so you jump and hit your head and fall. And this entire jumping agility thing means there’s almost no point to driving. There’s an amazing list of songs on the car radio which you’ll never hear because you’re rarely in the car for more than a few seconds. You’ll hit other cars, flip over or otherwise crash. Or you’ll be shot at by other vehicle, get out (as you can’t shoot from vehicles) and have your car destroyed.

The lack of multiple gangs means no bosses, and that was part of the fun of the last game. In the first crackdown, as you took down bosses, the enemy became less effective at fighting you. Now all you have to do is capture base points by killing all the enemies which appear on the map when you stand in a certain zone and press the back button. They’re also pretty stupid AI wise, and will mill around in groups just waiting for you to kill them. They’re only a problem if they’re armed with rockets or grenades, in which case they’ll just spam you. Otherwise, it’s simply a matter of jumping around and shooting them.

The Freaks are even more tedious. Every night, the streets become flooded with zombies. Like Dead Rising, there are so many on the screen you’re amazed at first. But they’re so dumb they pose hardly any challenge later in the game. Simply get in a car and drive though them. And if you stick to the rooftops you can pretty much avoid them altogether.

There are two basic scenarios you need to do to proceed the story and subsequently the game – capture a base which shoots a laser beam into the sky, and when you have 3 beam together you jump into the subterranean part of the city and kill all the zombies which attack a bomb device. That’s it.

Part of the reason the game is so simple is it’s designed for four players in mind. Obviously you can’t have too much of a complex GTA scenario like drive here, blow up this, drive to a next check point, and kill that, if the game is designed for more than one person. Although having said that Red Dead Redemption seems to do a pretty good job of doing precisely in its Multiplayer. So they’ve made the game as mindless as possible so you can have as much fun with other players.

And yes, it is fun with other players. It’s only a little more fun doing the missions still, as they don’t get any harder, but still the added fun of simply having another real live person with you makes it marginally more enjoyable. And doing things the designers probably had in mind, but didn’t make any use of. Like picking up a car when your friend is in it, and throwing it off a bridge. Like dropping a cluster grenade near an orb your friend is after. Like chasing each other around in choppers.

But what I can’t understand is why didn’t the designers utilise this more effectively? Surely in play testing they would have noticed people playing the game in this manner, so why not design co-operative missions around this – design chopper races; design timed missions where you’ve got to knock down as many freaks as possible, make the game co-operative in the mission design. I don’t want to call the designers lazy as it’s very hard to make a good game, but it’s clear the design is precisely that. Rather than identifying how players generate their own fun in a game and directing their design towards that, they’ve designed a game where it’s as open as possible but with so little to do, so players have to create their own fun.

Conclusion
Maybe I’m being a little hard on the game. The original Crackdown was flawed genius. It came out of practically nowhere, and was bought by the truckloads because of the Halo3 Multiplayer Beta offer. However, the game was unexpectedly compelling and fun, even if it felt a little rough and unfinished.

Crackdown 2 still feels rough and unfinished. In fact, it feels even more so than the first, especially when viewed as a single player experience. Multiplayer improves the game, but it still feels vacant and simple, and doesn’t develop a good story or good mission structure to encourage you to play the game, just a little incentive to tool around in the city for a few hours blowing shit up.

Pros:
Keeps the addictive agility orb collection game and spices the orb collection with “rogue orbs”
Heaps of things to blow up and kill.
Fun Multiplayer
Fantastic soundtrack

Cons:
You won’t hear the soundtrack because you’ll never be in the car long enough
Unconvincing story
Boring, repetitive missions
Stupid AI
Many of the problems of the first game not addressed

68/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Alan Wake

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World famous author Alan Wake has writers’ block, so he and his nyctophobic (scared of the dark) wife decide to holiday in Bright Falls, an idyllic ex-mining town in rural America. You’d think, he being a writer a fan of Stephen King and having written episodes of Twilight Zone rip off ‘Night Springs’, he’d be wary of holidaying in a rural town surrounded by tall mountains and deep forests. After all, nearly everyone knows they’re all full of some kind of unholy-and-ancient-darkness slash portal-to-the-other-side, or at least rednecks and bears. But no, he doesn’t even google the town, but heads there cluelessly, and of course something terrible happens. His wife gets abducted by this darkness, and it’s up to Alan to save her.

Alan Wake almost succeeds at creating a classic horror game. At first, the game is very creepy. The town has that disturbing Twin Peaks charm, full odd characters that you get to revisit throughout the game and discover more about. The surrounding forest and mountains, full of old mines and logging farms have that Stephen King vibe, as if the very elements are in league with nature to confound and upset Alan and in turn, the player. On top of this, the game itself creates the feeling that nothing is ever quite right, and you’re never sure what is dream, what is real, and what is psychosis.

Most of the time you’re on foot and the game encourages you to explore the wide playable areas looking for pages to the manuscript Alan is writing. The manuscript echoes the story of the game, and although I personally think reading text in a game is a cop out – videogames are a visual multimedia experience and reading pages of text on screen bores me – this works here because Alan is a writer and it does recreate the Stephen King self referential mentality of many of his finest books.

There are also environmental hazards to overcome in typical 3rd person adventure style, which are generally easy to figure out. There are weapon caches to find, and TVs and Radios to tell you more of the story. The TVs show episodes of the aforementioned Night Springs, which are quite long, whilst the radio informs the player of what’s happening in the world of Bright Falls. There are signs about the town and surrounds revealing a history of the town, all which create a very real sense of place for the game. And with a cheeky nod to Twin Peaks, you’ll find coffee thermoses scattered across the landscape.

The game uses light and dark to brilliant effect, and most of your time is spent in the dark, so you’re always under constant fear of attack, and this creates and excellent way to progress the story. As light is a source of healing and every light post is a checkpoint, you actually begin to fear being in the dark too long in the game.

The first level is a dream, and here you learn the basics of how to fight what are known as the Taken. The Taken creep from the shadows, and are imbued with unholy darkness. Equipped with a torch and a gun, fighting them involves a two phase attack. Shining your torch at them nullifies their dark power and stops them momentarily, and you can boost the torch’s power with a simple button press, although this depletes the battery power so you’ll need to stock up on batteries. Once their power is gone, you can pop a cap in their ass, as long as you have enough bullets. Dropping flares keeps them at bay, and bright light kills them outright, so flash bang grenades and flare guns become your most powerful weapons, as they light up the dark and vanquish foes at once, as does flashing car or spotlights onto them.

The Taken also manifest as poltergeists, and at various points in the game you’ll find objects imbued with darkness hover and fling themselves at you. These often take a bit more of time to take down, especially the larger vehicles you’ll encounter, although ducking behind posts and rocks can shield you a little whilst you shine your light onto them and drop flares and flash bangs.

There are also a few driving sections, and these are fun as well. Considering the game is a 3rd person action game, the car controls quite well. And as there’s nothing more fun than running people over in video games, it’s even better when they’re darkness imbued zombies, as you speed towards the Taken, turn your high beams on, and mow through them faster than Ash’s zombie killing machine from Evil Dead 3.
However, like many other horror games before it, the need t make Alan Wake a videogame ruins the overall vibe of the story eventually. Whenever there are enemies nearby, there is always a ‘tell’. Like in Doom 3, there’s always a sound to alert you to an enemy’s presence. In this case it’s music, and the game also takes control of the camera and zooms out or pans around to show you your enemy. At first, this is really cool and alarming, but eventually it becomes so much part and parcel of the game you forget to be scared about it.

Boss fights are signified by the game environment opening up into a wide area, with flares in emergency boxes lying about on the trail toward them, and as you near the “you’re about to be attacked” music plays. It happens so often in the middle part of the game the dread I felt wasn’t legitimate fear, but rather boredom at yet another fight where I had to point my torch at a bad guy/thing then shoot him when he stopped emanating darkness. Towards the end, I just wanted to advance the story, not face hordes of bad dudes just because the designers wanted to make the game an hour longer.

There is one exception to this occurs a little past midway in the game. I don’t want to give too much away, but the most fun I had in the game was at the Old Gods of Asgard’s farm. What seems like it would be a similar scenario to previous levels turns into something quite different and a hell of a lot of fun.

Also annoying is Alan keeps losing his equipment. You collect a shot gun, flare gun, flash bangs and a high powered torch during a level, and it’s likely to be gone after the next cutscene ,without any real reason for this occurring other than to annoy the player who likes to hoard things. Sure, “I lost my gun in the fall” is a perfectly legitimate reason, but losing them after going to a police station? Obviously the evidence cupboards need better locks in Bright Falls!

And although a minor annoyance, you can listen to all the radio and read the pages you’ve collected in the Extras menu, but you can’t watch any of the episodes of Night Springs outside of the game. This isn’t a game killer by any means, but I would have loved to watch the shows outside of the game in another menu, as they were quite entertaining.

Conclusion
It’s worth spending a few hours alone in the dark with Alan Wake and just the glow of a TV screen. It’s certainly better than most of Stephen King’s recent book to film outings. The game creates an excellent and believable sense of ‘reality’, as much as horror story can. You’ll suspend your disbelief for the most part, and there are some very cool and spooky moments early in the game that will really put you on edge.

It’s just a shame that because games cost so much to make and sell to the consumer, and game developers have an expectation to give players their money’s worth, extending the gameplay aspects of the game tend to ruin the vibe of the story later on. I guess it’s unavoidable as no game has really been able to create the legitimate scares of a horror story throughout its ten plus hours, although I’m pretty sure a ten hour long horror film would also be rather hackneyed by the end of it as well.

Pros:
Excellent use of light and dark both in fights and setting the scene
Great story development through the use of collectables
Very good sense of Bright Falls being a real place. Well, as real as a horror story town can be.
Lots of clever nods to the horror genre
Cool driving levels with solid controls even though it’s primarily an on foot 3rd person action game.

Cons
The creepiness of the game’s early levels gives way to a “been there, done that” feeling.
Player has all their cool weapons taken away and has to go get them all again every level.
Ending is not very satisfying and screams sequel.

85/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Blur

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Bizarre Creations’ Blur is one of those games so simple in its premise you wonder why it hasn’t been done sooner. It’s best described as Project Gotham Racer meets Mario Cart, and takes the best things of all those games and shoves it in one neat little package.

Like Project Gotham Racing, Blur has “real world” locations such as San Francisco, Tokyo, and Barcelona, with fake tracks in each of those cities. The cities look vibrant and real, full of neon lights and flowing banners and glass towers and trees and dirt on the off-road tracks. Also similar to PGR, it has fantastic looking licensed cars from Ferrari, Lotus, Ford, Volkswagon, Landrover and more. As you zoom about the race tracks, you take damage from other racers and crashing into walls and such, and the more you get hit and smashed, the more damaged your car looks. But that’s where the realism stops and the fun starts.

The object of single player is nothing new to racing game enthusiasts. Race to win and collect “lights” for first, second and third place. The more lights you have, the more events you unlock in each division. Each division is owned by a particular racer with a particular car and mod, but more on that in a moment.

There are also bonus lights to pick up via two means – Fan Runs and Fan Targets. Driving through a gate icon found on every track opens up the Fan Runs where you must race through slalom style to get more fans. Fans are otherwise rewarded for clever driving and using pickups on other racers. Fan Targets are how many fans you must win to unlock a light. Fans are the currency of Blur, and by winning fans you unlock different cars and mods. It’s similar to Kudos found in PGR. As you do certain manoeuvres, you’re rewarded points. However, unlike PGR there is more to it than simply slick driving.

Like Mario Cart, there are pickups on the track at various locations. These come in the form of offensive and defensive, and cause all kinds of mayhem when racing about. The offensive pickups come in the form of mine, barge, shunt, bolt, and shock. Mines can be shot forward or backwards, and remain on the track until someone hits them with their car or another weapon. Barge pushes the cars around you away from you. Shunt is a homing beacon, which whirls into the car targeted in front of you, ala the red shell in Mario Cart. Bolt is like the green shell, a “dumb” forward or reverse firing missile which is devastating if you manage to get 3 hits in a row with it. Shock shoots columns of lightning into the front runners path, causing mass destruction. Defence involves shield, repair and nitro. Shield protects your car from other effects. Repair repairs damage, and nitro boosts you at speed.

However, to view the pickups so simplistically won’t win you many fans. All pickups can be used offensively or defensively in the right situation. Use shield and nitro to ram into other cars. Fire nitro forward to “air break”, allowing you to avoid collisions and then speed out of danger. Deploy mines, barge and bolts to destroy shunts and mines. Your score will rise even higher due to the fan multiplier when you’re driving well and use the pickups in combination, such as drifting around corners and bolting cars. There are also Fan Favourites, which give you a time limit to perform a certain manoeuvre such as nitro slam another car, or drift well around a corner.

There are nine different divisions in single player, and to be eligible to race the owner of the division in a One on One Race to own their car, you have to do more than just race. For example, in the Fan Favourite division you must complete 5 Fan Demands, Complete 2 Fan Runs, Complete 4 Fan Targets and Win Event 5 with one x5 Fan Combo. Once you defeat them, you unlock their car and their mod. Mods do a range of things, such as increase the number of bolts you can fire, and armour plating.

There are 3 varieties of races other than One on One – Checkpoint, Race, and Destruction. Checkpoint is a timed race, with stopwatch and nitro pickups only. Race is a regular blur race against 10 or 20 other cars, whilst Destruction arms you with bolts only and places cars in front of you to destroy. Each car destroyed add more time to your race. Whilst on paper this seems like not a lot of variety, the fast paced nature of the game means you never get bored.

Single player, whist quite difficult and a little shallow compared to other racing games, is still loads of fun. Bizarre Creations have recognised this to some extent, and allowed the creation of challenges between friends. Just amassed an enormous amount of fans? Set up a Nemesis on the leaderboard and challenge your friends to beat you. Got all the lights on expert? Send a message to facebook or twitter to brag about it. It seems worthless at first, but seeing your friends beat your hard work with what appears to be ease spurs even the least competitive person to try the race again, and this simple yet effective method of creating depth has worked.

But even so, racing multiplayer is where the game truly shines. Four player split screen will fill a room with the same laughter and entertainment as Mario Cart once did, and even the best driver can be taken down by a well placed mine right on the finishing line, meaning it’s accessible to everyone.

In Online Multiplayer there are different race modes, including racing with no mods which is rather boring to be honest; Team Racing which makes the game feel like Midtown Madness but with power ups; to a smash up derby arena fight which is quite possibly the best thing since Destruction Derby on the original Playstation. Furthermore, Fans and Mods are slightly different. Taking a leaf out of Modern Warfare’s book, Fans act as experience points and Mods act as outfits. As per single player fans unlock cars and events as you go up fan levels, but you’re only racing for fans, not lights.

Mods are different from single player as there are more of them and they have more effects, such as converting shield hits to power ups, and causing mines to explode into 4 mini mines, and defensive stuff like make your car harder to home in on. You can assign 3 mods to a car, and you have 4 mod groups to customise and apply to your car, so like the weapon kits in MW you can find the mods which suit your play style best.

There are also car and rank challenges, again which improve your car and are rewarded by playing the game online. This adds enormous depth to the multiplayer game, especially in team games where users will complement each other with some equipping their cars to win the race, and others equipping to take battle to the other team.

Conclusion:
The fun of Blur is unparalleled in any other driving game. It could have been simply Mario Cart in real looking cars, but Bizarre Creations have looked hard at what is fun about racing games, what is fun about competitive play, what is fun about online gaming, and worked out how to get all of that in one game and more importantly, get it to work well and remain fun.

Pros:
Looks awesome
Simple yet fantastic take on a motor racing game
Incredibly fun to play split screen
Quite some depth to the multiplayer
Cool use of social networking tools

Cons:
Single player is quite difficult
Can’t race split screen online

90/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Resonance of Fate

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I find J-RPGs to be curious beasts. From the outrageous story arcs, to overdramatic dialogue, to the over exaggerated proportions of the characters and their weapons, the games are bewildering. Often I think someone is playing a cruel joke on us Westerners, because even if there is something lost in translation, the Japanese can’t really be into this absolute craziness, could they? Yet time and again, J-RPGs appear with the same iconographic and defining characteristics I must simply concede I do not get them.

Let me give you an example from Resonance of Fate. There’s one cutscene where Vashyron, the game’s lead character, meets with Cardinal Barbarella. From her name, you simply know she’s lusty and well stacked. As she’s telling him she needs the gang to fetch a bottle of wine, he focuses on her heaving bosom and goes into this weird dream world. As he comes out of it he says something like “she’s got luscious grapes whilst we’ve just got raisins” whilst looking at Leanne, the female character of the game, who promptly kicks him in the nuts. All of this just to let you know you need to fetch a bottle of wine as a quest… It’s completely nuts!

As to the rest of the story, I honestly don’t know. It’s quite confusing and easily forgettable. From what I can gather, the world became poisonous, and to regulate living conditions Basel was built. A towering complex of clockwork contraptions, people moved to live around the tower, and the higher up in the tower you lived, the higher your social status. Tied to this is quartz, which allows the people to live free of cancer. However, through this, lives become limited. One of the heroes of the game, Leanne, is special because she didn’t die when she was meant to, and because of this she’s wanted by the Cardinals, the rulers of Basel. The other heroes, Vashyron and Zephyr somehow get caught up in all this.

However, what isn’t confusing nor forgettable is the gameplay. Unlike every other J-RPG, Resonance of Fate doesn’t involve swords, but is a world of guns and bullets. Obviously this makes the usual turn based menu fighting style of most other J-RPGs inadequate for combat, so for the first time in years, something has changed the J-RPG battle system and it will resonate through to other games.

Upon entering a fight, you are given options. You can move and shoot a magazine of bullets into an enemy. This is the basic move and weakest attack, and is used mostly to position your heroes. There is a meter for each character, and when the character moves like this, or takes damage when moving in this way, the meter depletes.

There’s scratch damage and direct damage. Scratch damage is generated by machine guns and certain types of explosives. Scratch damage is best seen as damage to armour. It makes an enemy’s healthbar turn blue, repairs over time, and will be removed by direct damage. Direct damage deals damage directly to a targets health. If a character does direct damage on top of scratch damage, the enemy takes more damage than just taking direct damage. You’ve also got enemies with different strength shields on different parts of their bodies. By positioning your characters properly, you can do the most damage to them.

Beyond this, there are Hero Moves. These moves, initiated with a simple press of a button, will be more familiar to J-RPGs, as you set off where you want to go and who you want to target, and launch into an over-the-top cinematic. This matrix style bullet time event sees round after round of bullet pumped into an enemy. Another meter fills as you move towards your mark, and the more it fills the more power your shots will have. It can be modified by more button presses – pressing X launches the character into the rain down bullets from above, bypassing most shields. Staying on the ground can sometimes work better as you can throw your enemies into the air, and another button press sees you do multiple hits to juggle airborne enemies.

On top of this are Resonance moves. When one character passes in between the other two characters, you get a Resonance Point. Each point allows you to move your characters as one in a Hero move. Moving in a triangular direction, the characters enter bullet time and lay down heavy fire against an enemy. This is often the best way to kill the bigger bosses, although if you want a fight to end quickly you can target the leader of a group and destroy him this way, and the other enemies flee.

All these moves take up Bezels, best described as health tokens. You lose them by being shot, and gain them by killing enemies and during certain Hero Moves. If you lose them by being shot, they shatter, and lie about the battlefield. It’s in your best interests to pick these shards up, otherwise the enemies will, restoring their health. Lose all of your Bezels, and you go into critical condition, where you can’t initiate Hero Moves, take more damage, and generally die and lose the game. You can flee, but if you flee into another fight, you’ll still be at critical condition until you rest.

There is also a destructible cover system, so walking up to a wall will flash an icon, which means you can shoot from this cover. You can be hit through the cover, and the cover itself takes damage and will eventually disappear. This is best used when you’re at critical condition.

In other respects, the game is like a traditional J-RPG. You get mission bites from notice boards, run around towns to see people to get whole missions, and venture onto the world map to complete the missions. It will be very familiar to J-RPG fans, who will probably plant their face in their hand and say “oh no, not this shit again!” Where RoF differs again the world map is made of a locked hexagons grid, meaning you can’t travel anywhere until you make a path across the world. As you play you’ll find or be given Energy Hexes to unlock the map. There are also coloured hexagons, usually surrounding buildings and Stations. Unlock a station, and you can link them and their bonuses to places where you travel and fight.

If it sounds confusing, it is until you play it for a few hours. The more you play, the more you get used to it, and the more it becomes apparent on what you should do in given situations against different enemies. There is a learning curve, but once you get over that, it’s quite an entertaining system. And unlike that other J-RPG to come out recently, Final Fantasy XIII, it won’t take over 25 hours before the game stops babysitting you and let you master the moves on your own.

However, like so many J-RPGs before it, you will have to grind your characters up levels to complete missions. This is my biggest gripe against the game. Why can’t the Japanese take note of RPGs like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, and realise when you unlock an area you should be able to complete those missions without having to grind your characters stats? Even if you play all the side missions in a chapter, there will always remain story missions which you will not be able to complete until you grind your skills up in the arena for 2 or so hours. The game will take about 40 or so hours to complete, but more than a quarter of that will be mindless grinding.

I can kind of understand grinding for weapons and upgrades, and RoF has a fine weapon upgrade system. You can scrap parts for cash or items, then rebuild items and then equip them to your guns. This gives you more damage, greater movement speed, higher rate of fire, and more. However, again I believe games should reward you this stuff for killing big bosses and completing missions, whereas in RoF the best weapons and items are to be found in the completely optional areas, which you have to grind though to get.

Visually the game is fine, but nowhere near as impressive as other J-RPGs on the Xbox. The world has an interesting steampunk vibe with gears and steam pistons and men in dapper hats and women in corsets, but the dungeons you’ll travel in suffer from looking the same drab backgrounds and all too familiar layouts. The character designs are ok, and the collectible and customisable clothing gives obsessives something to collect and dress up their characters. Again, to get the best stuff (and that depends on what you consider “best” in terms of optional clothing), you have to grind for it.

The music score is decent, full of guitars and electro sounds, quite typical for a J-RPG. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the dialogue. Like many other J-RPGs the barks at the end of the fights make little to no sense and are mind numbingly repetitive, and as I mentioned, the story itself is confusing so any speech is easily forgettable.

Conclusion:
Resonance of Fate’s complex and engaging combat system is refreshing in a universe of clones, and it will be memorable for this alone. The character and weapon customisation is cute, and the world map exploration is quite clever and engaging. However, none of this goes far enough to address the other negative aspects of the game, which are also found in many other J-RPGs. Its story is confusing, the characters trite, and the grinding unacceptable.

Pros:
Fantastic combat mechanic
Interesting map exploration
Cool gun and character customisation

Cons:
Confusing story
Too much grind
Poor characterisation
Repetitive looking world locations

75/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction

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I want to get this out of the way to begin with – I think Tom Clancy, or rather those who now write using his name, are horrible, predictable hacks. Every story with the Tom Clancy name is exactly the same. Their premises, characters, themes and outcomes are always so similar it’s hard to discern one title from another. I’ve never been challenged by his works, never tricked by the “twists”, and never, ever thought it could be anything but pure fantasy.

The story in Conviction is so predictable as to be almost irrelevant. It opens with a voice over, telling us in flashback style that Sam has changed, and how his actions are a result of many things. Sam is now out of the game, we’re told, but he gets pulled back in by the machinations of his previous employer, Third Echelon. He’s more jaded, more brutal, and even more badass, but the good characterisation stops with Fisher. The other characters are so transparent that you know exactly who is good and who is bad. The twists and reveals are so trite that you simply don’t care about any of it.

And lastly, I’ve got to say the “flashback” presentation style simply does not work for videogames. After all, if you have someone talking past tense about how Sam did this and that, then it flashes back to you as Sam doing this and that, how can he fail? Sure, you as a player can fail the mission, but story wise you know he succeeds, making the plot holes greater and twists more irrelevant!

But honestly, it’s not like something with Tom Clancy’s name is ever going to be as appreciated as high art. And I think this actually works in Conviction’s favour. No, the story isn’t great, but the game is still enthralling. I want to play through again, not to see if the story will play out differently because I know it won’t, but because the game is simply so damn fun.

Like previous Splinter Cells, it’s all about stealth and shadows. Unlike previous Splinter Cells, the darkness is used to hunt, not hide. In previous Splinter Cells, if any trace of you could be found, if you were seen, or left a body under a light to be discovered by another guard, it would be mission over. And it was frustrating as hell. Chaos Theory and Double Agent went a long way to address this, but they were still games of hide and seek. Conviction turns Sam into a cat like stalker, using the shadows to stalk his enemies, unleash terrible fury upon them, and slinking into the shadows for another round.

When you slip into the shadows, the screen bleeds of colour, leaving you in a black and white world. This is a fantastic way to show when enemies can see you and when they can’t without using on screen meters that clutter your view. Another little nicety that keeps you in the world is there are no PDAs or mobile phones to look at to get mission information. Instead, they’re projected onto the walls as if from an old slide projector. As you walk through them, the beams of light wrap around you. Also, when Sam is having a flashback, instead of taking you out of the game and into a cutscene, the walls around Sam become movie screens, and grainy, black and white images play. These techniques keep you in the game world attached to Sam as a character, and create a feeling of immersion I’ve not experienced since Dead Space.

Sam has a variety of methods to dispatch foes from the darkness. He can simply shoot enemies with his pistol or machine gun, with headshots being the quickest way to take them down. Obviously, unsilenced weapons alert guards to your presence. If you get noticed, an on-screen alert tells you who has seen / heard you and where they are, and a silhouette appears at your last known location. This allows you to set up all kinds of scenarios. Use a flash bang or EMP blast to stun them and escape. Drop a mine as you leave to wipe out any guard who comes near. Drop a few remote mines around the place, and kill them all in one big multikill. Sneak off to other shadows to circle around from behind to do melee kills, or climb walls and posts to hover above the unsuspecting guard and rain death from above.

When you do a hand to hand takedown, you get the ability to Mark and Execute. Depending on your weapon, you can tag up to 4 enemies with the right bumper and then execute them with the Y button. Some of you may think this is a game killer, in that all you have to do is take down a baddie and then Mark and Execute any others. However, there are usually more guards than the number of marks, and if they see their mates fall they will become more alert. Also, marked guards have to be within range of your weapon and in line of sight to be taken down.

All this adds up to a faster, more visceral Splinter Cell, and some people may not like this direction. I for one find it much more appealing – I hated the instant fail levels in the early games. But for those who do want to creep about and not be detected, that’s a perfectly viable option for most levels. You can sneak around and complete objectives without killing any guards, and you’ll be rewarded with in-game points you can spend on upgrading guns and gadgets, as well as the ever popular Xbox achievements.

There are a host of in-game achievements, from completing missions without being seen, to taking enemies down with explosives, and so forth, and it wasn’t until I saw these that I realised the freedom players are allowed to complete the game. You have the tools and abilities to approach the mission in a variety of ways, and are only rarely told to proceed in a certain way to beat the level. It’s a fantastic way to get the player to play through again without waving a big “YOU MUST PLAY AS A SNEAKY GUY NOW!” sign like so many other games attempt to do.

After the short but intense single player campaign, there is Deniable Ops. Playing single or doubling up with another player either locally or online, you can play Hunter, Infiltration, and Last Stand modes against the AI, or Face-Off against other spies. Hunter and Infiltration will have you sneak into various locations and alternatively kill or avoid AI guards. With Last Stand, you protect a generator from hoards of guards trying to destroy it. Face Off is spy vs spy with AI against everyone.

Whilst enjoyable, I never found a partner to play with online that I didn’t previously plan to play with. Admittedly Halo Reach Beta and Red Dead Redemption were both released around the time I was reviewing the game, so it’s understandable no one was online. However, the removal of the critically-acclaimed Spies Vs Mercs mode could have more to do with it. I had some of the best multiplayer experiences with Chaos Theory, and the lack of that type of multiplayer seems to have impacted the Conviction multiplayer experience.

It would be amiss to skip talking about sound. As other Splinter Cell games, the sound is excellent. Footsteps and bullets are great indicators of who is where. There is one part where Sam gets really angry and goes on rampage to the wonderful “Building Steam From A Grain of Salt” by DJ Shadow, and it fits perfectly with the action. Sam Fisher is portrayed excellently by Michael Ironside once again, and his deep, gravelly voice is edged with appropriate anger and brutality this time. Other voice acting for main characters is good, but the barks of the guards, whilst not really repetitive are far too vociferous. If you saw all these bodies lying about with head wounds and broken necks, would you yell out “I’m going to get whoever did this!” and let whoever did know you were coming?

Conclusion:
Splinter Cell Conviction deviates from the original series in quite a substantial way, but keeps its soul is intact. It’s still very much a Splinter Cell game, just faster paced and more streamlined. The immersion in the world is fantastic, and the gameplay enjoyable, despite the rather predictable story. The Multiplayer modes are fun, especially with two people in the same place playing together, although the omission of Spies Vs Mercs mode is, I suspect, a big reason for lack of online players.

Pros:
Excellent immersion using light and colour
All the gadgets and fun of previous Splinter Cells
Great new gameplay ideas such as Mark and Execute which are executed well
Michael Ironside brings even more passion to the lead character
Fun Multiplayer

Cons
The omission of Spies Vs Mercs mode
Not many people playing the online modes
Guards dialogue is a little over the top
Predictable and trite Tom Clancy story.

85/100