Tag Archives: Shooter

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Evolve

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Sometimes I’m not sure if my passion for gaming is dying, or if I’m just choosing really poor games to suit my lifestyle. I’ve realised I spend more time on both the PS4 and XboxOne watching video through the Plex and Youtube Apps. I got games with my Xbox I haven’t even looked at! And yet when I do play games, I feel cheated. I feel that “Next Generation” is really the same as other marketing bullshit like “Fresh Frozen” and “Organic”.

Evolve, the latest game added to my collection, feels like such a game. I’ve bought into the marketing hype and come out disappointed. Evolve is like a collection of everything from last generation scrambled up and packed as next generation. The four classes of tank, healer, support, and hunter is standard fare of any multiplayer game out in the last decade. The idea of 4 against 1 was introduced in games like Unreal and refined in Left4Dead. The witty banter mistakenly written to provide characterisation to dull, insipid character tropes has been here for as long as we’ve had 3D characters.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Evolve isn’t a poor game. It looks fantastic. The character models look amazing, and are highly detailed. For example, the way the robotic eye moves on Markov the tank is a nice little detail which would have been difficult and expensive (CPU wise) on previous generation machines. It’s just a pity you only ever see this kind of thing when you start the game. Sure, you see the other players when you’re playing the game, but you’re never close enough to see good detail, and there are usually so much other shit on the screen to actually bother to care. I get it, this is “next generation” so I should be impressed with the amount of effects and filters and animals and shiny which can be rendered on my screen. But it’s amazing that graphics and displays can be so detailed we can use them to see inside far away galaxies and into our own very cells, but yet I can’t tell if I’m shooting at an enemy, another team member, or a rock.

The game plays well enough too. The balance between the monster and the monster hunters feels fairly even. You can still take down a monster when it’s fully evolved as long as you have all members of your team alive. But speaking of monsters, this whole evolve thing is a crock. All that is happening is the monster levels up during the game. Big fucking deal. Like seriously, this is meant to be “evolution”? The same thing happens in Left4Dead.

Worse still, it doesn’t even feel like a threat. In Left4Dead, it was always scary when you see that alert flash up. You know that if you’re caught alone, you’re screwed. In Evolve, you see the warning and most of the time you haven’t even seen the monster! Maybe that’s just the sign of good monster playing, but yet the best games I’ve played is where the monster struggles against the players a couple of times. Playing as the monster, when you evolve, you get stronger and get to add points into the abilities you already have. So, during a good game, you might catch a player out on their own at level 1, kill them (each character has 3 resurrections and then are out of the round for good), then run off to evolve so you can take on the whole team later. The old cat and mouse. It’s a poor game when you don’t even see the cat.

A major issue is finding games and people to play with. The offline solo mode is reasonably similar to the online game. The game uses AI to fill in your roster of hunters and monsters, and you earn XP after a game. You can play Hunt, a one off match, or Evacuation, which is a series of 5 games. After each game, the world “evolves”, so if the monster wins, the next match he might have plants which can help it evolve faster, or if the hunters win turrets pop up in certain parts of the map. It’s not a terrible tacked on story mode which is good, but it’s not as fun as playing with other players.

However, finding those players seems difficult. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of people playing the game. That’s when the servers are up. I know that server downtime is to be expected in this day and age, and I don’t know if it was unfortunate timing or an ongoing issue, but on more than one occasion my game time was stymied by the servers being down. When the servers are running, it seems to take a long time to find games, and I find I’m always on with the same people. Again, it’s hard to tell if this is a feature and I’m matching with similar players, or if there just aren’t too many people playing. Those who do play also tend to leave their headsets off. There’s no communication. I guess it’s better than screaming kids dropping the N word, but still, in a game focussing on co-operation it’s annoying no one is communicating.

I think another major problem is the grind of the game. Yes, you level your monster up during games, but it’s only momentarily and as I said, it’s only upgrades to your existing form. No new powers, and you don’t even look that different. After the match you’re rewarded XP like every other game these days and you ever so slowly unlock slightly better upgrades and even more slowly, new monsters / characters. The new monsters and characters go through the same slow grind to upgrade their weapons and unlock more new characters. Why? This type of progression is taken from Dungeons and Dragons which is 40 years old now. Why do I have to start off with a shit character and grind to be better? Why haven’t we come up with a better system yet? This sense of false progression is becoming really tedious.

Here’s the other thing – this game has microtransactions, but they don’t help you overcome the progression blocks. Yes, I know everyone hates microtransactions, you should pay for the whole game, blah blah blah, but the old model of making money from games has collapsed due to the global economy, piracy, ease of distribution across networks, the pricing mechanism of App Stores and so on and so forth, so the games industry had to change their methods of making money or they would have vanished. It’s here now, if you don’t like it get over it.

However, what is annoying is when games don’t do it correctly, and this is what we should be focusing on criticising. Buying skins in a game which makes you grind to level up shows these guys have no idea how to properly monetise their game. Good monetisation comes from a well designed level flow which limits your progression and only prompts you to spend money when you get stuck or want to do something faster. If these skins allowed you to earn XP faster, or gave you unique but balanced abilities, sure, by all means put them in. But this is just pure nickel and dimeing and the resources wasted putting this together could have been used elsewhere in the game.

Conclusion
As I said, Evolve isn’t a poor game. It simply doesn’t live up to the expectations and the hype the “Next Generation” promised us. And I think people who got the game quickly realised this and stopped playing. Its progression system seems deliberately tedious, meaning even the people love it dropped off perhaps quicker than they would have in other situations.

Pros
Well balanced 4 versus 1 gameplay
Great graphics

Cons
Absolutely nothing next generation on offer apart from the graphics
Progression too tedious
Can’t find people to play with online
Crap microtransations

70/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Call of Duty Black Ops II

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The annual release of Call of Duty rolls around again, and to try and make things fresh we find ourselves battling terrorists in the near future, as well as the immediate past cold war era. We return to Alex Mason, the hero of the first Black Ops, and journey through the creation of the story’s main enemy, Raul Menendez, the leader of Cordis Die, a hacktivist organisation with sinister motives. We battle through Africa, Afghanistan, and Panama. Then, as David Mason, Alex’s son, we battle in the near future through Burma, Pakistan and the Cayman Islands, Yemen and Haiti. Oh, and also on the huge USS Obama. All in all, it’s just another gun boner shooter with a typically boring and trite “America Fuck Yeah” storyline to go along with it.

The gameplay isn’t anything new – single player still spends half its time taking control away from the player in a desperate attempt to make everything seem action packed and cinematic. I just find it tedious and annoying. Yes, I realise this is fundamental to the Call of Duty games, but it doesn’t mean I like it. Treyarch have tried some things differently, like giving you control of the bad guy on occasion, and also offering branching storylines based on players actions. I like the idea, but not the execution. Simply put, branching doesn’t have much impact on the gameplay, just the story, which is baloney and simply not engaging enough to care about.

Another new feature of single player is Strike Missions. These maps are small, almost tower defence like battlegrounds. Taking control of troops, drones and turrets, you have to secure areas by stopping invading forces or taking control of various areas on the map. These missions also impact which ending type you get, and can’t be replayed if you fail them too many times. At first, I tried to play these like a tower defence game, placing forces at various choke points and so on, but doing this is guaranteed failure. The AI is simply terrible and although appearing as a strategy based game with overhead tactical map and hotswapping characters, it’s better to simply zoom out and take control of the various troops and run and gun around the maps.

Of course, single player isn’t why people buy COD games, and I’m glad to say even though there are no huge changes in the way you play multiplayer, it’s still a damn lot of fun. There is a plethora of modes to play from the traditional death match to team death match and capture the objective / king of the hill modes. There’s a new multi-group capture objective mode, which amps up the action by including more teams to complete against, making the already hectic action seriously adrenalin pumping.

The killstreak rewards have been altered to allow players like myself to unlock more rewards. I never used to get rewards because I’m not very good at killing – my ratio generally sits at 3 deaths for every kill. However, I am really good at defending and taking objectives and Treyarch have refined the allocation system to help players like me and those that work well in teams to actually win rewards. To be honest, it works, as I don’t think I’ve played multiplayer more in any other game this year.

Zombies also make a return – after all, there’s no point cutting modes when it’s easy as having endless waves of zombies attack you, but it seems out of place. There’s a single player campaign, but I just couldn’t get into it. I guess I have zombie fatigue and I don’t think I’m alone as you can have up to 8 player zombie multiplayer, but no one ever seemed to be playing these maps.


Conclusion:
The problem with COD:BO:II is obviously it will be compared to not only all the previous Call of Duty titles, but Halo 4, Battlefield 2, and Far Cry 3; and to put it bluntly, it’s not as good as any of them. This is not to say it’s a bad game, it’s just not different enough from previous Call of Duty titles. The story isn’t memorable, the maps and weapons aren’t any different to what we’ve previously experienced, the gameplay is near identical to previous games, and when it’s not identical it falls flat and fails to impress.

Multiplayer is where the series has always shined, and with Black Ops II multiplayer shines brightest – it’s almost the sole reason I’ve given it the score I have. It’s fast, furious and fun, with enough different modes to keep most people happy. The change in reward structure will disappoint some players, but entices cooperation and team play amongst others, and attracts those who usually get bored of being pwned by people with a lot more time to play.

Pros:
Excellent multiplayer
A plethora of multiplayer modes & rewards
Branching story ideas are good for those into the story
Strike Missions are interesting idea..

Cons:
Boring story which is badly written and overly trite
Branching doesn’t impact gameplay
Strike missions could have been a lot better in implementation
Zombie mode is boring

80/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Child of Eden

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Kinect games get a lot of flak for being childish or simple, and pandering to a non-gamer audience. But Child of Eden, the follow-up to the critically acclaimed Rez, is nothing but an unadulterated video game experience. So much so you can actually play the game with a controller, but only a fool would prefer it over the Kinect controller. It’s not that playing with the Kinect is more accurate, or more skilful; it’s simply more fun. As someone who has become mightily disenchanted with games recently, playing Child of Eden was an exercise in pure, unabated joy.

Child of Eden acts as a prequel to the events in Rez. The human race has moved to the stars, and what we know as the internet is now referred to as Eden, a storehouse of humanity’s combined knowledge and also the database you defend in Rez. Lumi, the first child born in space, is adding her knowledge to Eden to become the first artificial intelligence, but the memories are under attack from a virus and you have to fight to save the memories.

The core gameplay of Child of Eden is quite simple. You’re locked on rails moving slowly through the game space, shooting enemies on the screen with one of two weapons – a pink “quickfire” weapon and a blue “lock-on” weapon. The quickfire weapon eliminates enemies quickly, but they take a lot more hits than if you lock on. You can lock on up to 8 enemies, and getting all 8 will give you a higher score. You also have a smart bomb called Euphoria which eliminates all enemies on screen. It sounds simple, but the wonder and the joy of Child of Eden comes from how the enemies are presented and dispatched.

You have to play through 5 databases to rescue Lumi, each one named after a particular theme – Matrix, Evolution, Beauty, Passion and Journey. Each database has a variety of different viral enemies. Beauty contains flower-like enemies. Evolution contains gears and mechanical flying machines. Passion contains giant space whales. Each enemy is colourful and exotic, sweeping into view with majesty and vitality, and often it feels such a shame to destroy these beautiful creatures. Many will fire at you, and the pink bullets can only be shot with the quickfire weapon. There are also walls where you have to quickly unlock by locking onto certain parts and blasting before coming into contact with them, damaging yourself.

Rather than the traditional “pew pew” and explosive sounds of shooting games, each shot fired is accompanied with a percussive sound. By listening to the brilliant techno inspired musical score and timing your shots with the beats, you get better scores. Certain enemies will be predominantly pink or blue, meaning only your pink or blue weapons harm them, and then it becomes a juggling act as you switch weapons.
The boss battles use the dual weapon system to great effect. You’ll fire your lock on at various parts of the trippy and wonderfully designed creature on screen, locking on and then quickly switch to the quickfire to blast away enemy missiles. The enemy will change colour, meaning you’ll have to switch up your tactics quickly, else miss a chance at eliminating it quickly.

With playing with the Kinect, you hold your left hand out to fire the pink quickfire, and with your right hand and sweep over the enemies to lock on, flicking your right wrist to launch your weapon. Raising your hands and clapping fires the smart bomb. It’s feels silly at first, but eventually it feels very natural and you feel yourself start to sway in time with the music. You become absorbed by the action, listening to the audio cues when you’re firing, watching the visuals explode and coalesce to the sounds.

Although it will take you only about 4 to 5 hours to get through the entire game, it’s not a matter of rushing to the end. Scored on time, amount of enemies killed, and number of health pickups and Euphoria, as well as the timing of your shots to the music, it’s a game designed to be savoured again and again. Each time you play, there will be something new you never noticed, a new way to confront enemies, and you’ll start racking up the scores and climbing the leaderboards.

The best thing about completing the game is Hope, the “Survival mode”, a kinaesthetic battle against the computer which had me giggling as wave after wave of things to shoot appeared on screen, as the colours and sounds flashed and you become completely absorbed in the game. It was reminiscent of the hard songs in Guitar Hero or Rock Band where all your concentration is consumed with the action and the music, but unlike those two games there is never a sense of failure or frustration. There’s no feeling of “I’ve failed again. I can’t do this”, only “Hell yeah! Let’s do that again!”

Conclusion
Lately, video games haven’t felt like games to me. They’ve felt like extensions of Hollywood, full of violence and explosions and not much substance. Or they’ve felt like tools to keep the music industry afloat. Or, at their very worst, addictive time sinks designed to fleece money out of you.

Fortunately Child of Eden has arrived, and it’s a game that completely absorbs you when you’re playing it. A game which makes you laugh for no reason when playing it. A game which expresses pure joy at simply being a game. And it’s brilliant.

Pros:
Amazingly fun to play
Combination of audio and visuals creates a stunning experience
Proves Kinect can be used to play video games

Cons:
Possibly too short
100/100

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

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

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Wanted: Weapons of Fate

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The game Wanted: Weapons of Fate, like the movie on which it’s based, straddles the line between merit and mediocrity but more often stumbling towards the latter. It’s not a terrible game, but it’s not up to the standard of many other shooters out there, and its flaws outweigh its pluses.

Following on from the movie, Wanted, the game places you in the shoes of Wesley Gibson, who, for those of you who haven’t seen the movie, has discovered he’s not a anxiety ridden geek, but the son of an assassin and all that comes with it; quick reflexes, the ability to curve bullets, and tougher than the average person. In the movie he is trained by the assassin’s guild to track and then kill someone called Cross, who it turns out *spoiler* his is father. Once he learns this, he then turns on his trainers, the Fraternity, and gets his revenge.

The game opens with Wesley, reflecting on his new life when his apartment is broken into. From here, you take him on a trip of discovery, visiting locations in the film as well as locations new for this story, trying to determine who is after Wesley and why. His journey also includes flashbacks of his father, Cross, and helps explain why he was also wanted, why he was killed, and why Wesley is so special. Unfortunately the story is very disjointed, jumping from area to area and principle character to principle character, and the story simply isn’t engrossing enough so it’s easy to forget what’s going on.

But story is not central to a videogame so much as say, a movie, and some of the best games have a poor story or none at all, and make up for it in awesome gameplay. Unfortunately Wanted: Weapons of choice lets us down here too. You’re slowly introduced to the main elements of game play – cover to cover fighting, slowing down time and bending bullets, but once you’re taught these, it’s the only thing you’ll do for the rest of the game.

Shooting controls are pretty standard, Right Trigger to shoot, left to aim down the sight, B Button to melee, but it’s the other gameplay ideas which offer a bit of variety from the everyday first/third person shooter. The cover to cover fighting mechanic is pretty simple and most of the time pretty effective. Press the A Button to go into cover, and then move the right stick to see where you can move to next. A diagram will appear on screen to tell you which way you can go, and you pres the A Button again to move to the next piece of cover. This system isn’t slow and methodical like Gears of War, but quick like Stranglehold. Sometimes the game frustrates you, being unable to find a path to cover, and other times you won’t stick to cover and end up getting just standing up during a fire fight getting hit.

A variant on this occurs when you blind fire buy pulling the trigger when in cover. The screen will turn white, and the rest of the world will slow down, and you can move quickly around enemies and expose them to your shots. You can chain your moves together and move quickly behind enemies you can’t otherwise hit. Again, sometimes you’ll find your route to the cover doesn’t pop up on screen, so you’ll come out of the bullet time and find yourself under fire.

Each enemy you kill gives you a bullet shell to indicate adrenalin, used to slow down time even more, and to bend bullets. Using adrenalin, as you dive from cover you can press the Y Button and go into super slow motion, releasing a hail of bullets towards an enemy. This is far more effective than blind shooting, as you can target more than one person in your line of sight. However, there are times where the camera angle in this fast mode obscures your view, making open shots against foes now impossible until you leave the mode.

I have to admit bending bullets is a bit of fun. Squeeze the Right Bumper and you see a red arc appear on screen between you and your victim. Moving the left stick changes the angle of the arc, and when it goes white letting go will send a bullet curving around to hit the hapless foe. Executed well, and you’ll see a cinematic play which follows the path of the bullet into the victim. However, there are times when the lock on won’t go to the person you want it to, and you have to change the camera angle to get a better feed onto them. Other times it will focus on canisters or mines which you can shoot and blow up, but when there’s no enemies near them it’s rather pointless.

Individually, the components are rather fun, but together as a whole combined with the repetitiveness of the incredibly linear levels, it all becomes a bit dull. For example, with bending bullets there are no special tricks to shoot something and make it fall, or bend bullets around a pole to distract an enemy, you only bend bullets to kill guys. And there are only a handful of enemies – those you can one shot with bendy bullets, and those who you can’t but will stumble around into the open so you can shoot them normally.

There are a few instances when you have to use the blind firing effect to get past a certain guy with a shield, but they can be superseded later in the game by exploding bullets (just like bendy ones but with a bang) or the super fast adrenalin slide. And the bosses are pretty much the same as any other enemy – use the bendy bullets to get them into the open, and shoot the crap out of them.

Then there’s the obligatory sniper mode, where you’re positioned with a sniper rifle at the end of a corridor and have to shoot guys before they get to you slash get to the person you’re protecting. There are also quick time events, which see you do all these cool acrobatic dives, then slow down time to shoot an enemy and a bullet flying at you. These help to break up the monotony, but once you do the first one and realise you have to shoot the bullet and the baddy, it’s easy to do them all.

And then there’s the big endless bulleted chain gun, which the game gives you absolutely no indication you’ll be using, so suddenly it will just pop up in your face and you have to guess you need to shoot the bad guys. Because there’s a big bloody gun in your face, you can’t see the bad guys, but if you blindly fire your head pops up and they will shoot you and you’ll die. It’s the single most frustrating aspect of the game.

The game looks ok, but suffers from the dreaded grey/brown equals realistic mentality of so many other games, and there is some slowdown at odd times which really disconnects you from the game. The locations, given their incredibly linear nature, all feel a bit samey after the first few levels. Sound wise the game has a forgettable soundtrack, but the characters are voiced by the people from the movie, and they put in reasonable effort considering, and the wizzing of the bendy bullets sounds great.

After about 6 to 8 hours of play, the game is over and there’s nothing else to do. You can replay with another character, but they share the animations of Wesley, and it’s Wesley in the cutscenes, so it’s a little pointless really. There’s collectables throughout the game which unlock the other characters as well as art and typical unlockable items, and other modes which involve you getting headshots or meleeing a certain number of enemies, but there just isn’t enough variation in the game to warrant another playthrough.

Conclusion:
Whilst it’s not a terrible game, and there is some fun to be found here, it gets repetitive fairly quickly. There’s not enough variation within levels, between levels and with the different types of enemies to kill. Luckily, the game is over quickly, but with no multi-player and no other incentive to play the game again, there just isn’t enough in Wanted: Weapons of Choice to warrant purchasing the game.

Pros:
Bending bullets is fun
Cover to cover fighting is quick and fun when it works
Decent voice acting

Cons:
Poor story that’s difficult to follow
Too linear with not enough variation in the action
Boss fights feel the same
Moving between cover and locking on to enemies can feel awkward
Mounted gun sections appear without warning leading to quick death
Average graphics with no real pizzazz to the world

65/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Call Of Duty: World At War

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The Call Of Duty franchise has always been one of the better shooter franchises, but Infinity Ward, with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, trumped all the other COD games by setting the game in modern times, and putting some killer scripted events in amongst the frantic and intense shooting. Not only that, it had one of the greatest online game components of any game, rivalling the Halo franchise for online fun.

When it was announced Treyarch, responsible for the competent but average Call of Duty 2: The Big Red One and Call of Duty 3, were bringing the franchise back to World War II, there was some consternation about the series. After all, World War II been the setting of more games than any other conflict, and there were big questions as to whether Treyarch could do the series justice.

The answer to that is “sort of”. Call of Duty: World At War is a great game, as nearly as good as Modern Warfare, but what you will get out of the game really depends on what you’re looking for. For someone really hankering to get a gritty World War II shooter with scripted events and good online play, then COD:WAW is perfect. But in my experience, playing the game felt like playing COD4 with a lick of paint, a mere expansion, than playing a new experience.

COD: WAW focuses on the Pacific and Russian fronts, two little explored areas of WWII by video games. These fronts were brutal and savage, and the game reflects the loading screens with footage not usually associated with WWII videogames. I found it to be an interesting experience – on the one hand the game was demonstrating the horrors of war, yet on the other hand it gave you a flamethrower that never exploded nor ran out of fuel (although it would overheat), and was incredibly fun to use on enemy troops, especially as they danced around on fire much like in Loonytoon cartoons.

That aside, the campaign is just as intense and fun as its predecessor. The scripted moments are just as intense as in COD4. The “on rails” section in the seaplane, jumping from gun to gun shooting Japanese boats and Zeros is fabulous fun, and the Russian tank kicking the crap out of the Germans section is incredibly satisfying. However, the story doesn’t feel as well put together as the previous title. The two fronts are so far apart from one another there’s less of a connection between them, and moreover you know who’s going to win, so it takes a little away from the whole experience. The campaign seemed short and relatively easy, which was a criticism of COD4 as well, but it is obvious single player is not really the focus of the franchise any more.

The campaign can be played multiplayer, with four friends battling through many of the maps together. There are some which aren’t available – it doesn’t seem right to have a mission with four snipers after all – but it allows you to approach the missions with a new perspective. Much like Halo 3, there’s cards you can pick up which alter the experience of playing, again making the campaign more fun a second or third time through.

The multiplayer is also just as fun as COD4. You can create classes and level up in much the same way, unlocking perks and weapons the more you play. The perks have been jigged a little to fit the times, however, with camouflage replacing UAV Jammer, but doing the exact same thing. The weapons feel a little imprecise compared to their COD4 counterparts, but that’s to be expected, as WWII weapons aren’t as good as those of modern warfare. Artillery and “spotter planes” (radar) make a return, and now you have attack dogs which tear around the map hunting the enemy.

The maps are set up similarly to COD4, being a mix of open and close quarters fighting, although there are a couple which include vehicles which add a nice dimension to play. In addition to the new, err, old WWII weapons, there are some unique weapons such as the aforementioned flamethrower, “bouncing betty” bomb and Molotov cocktails. There’s also the Nazi Zombie mode, unlocked after completing the main campaign mode, which is a survival mode against the shambling horde. It’s fun, but it’s not a patch on Left 4 Dead.

I must admit, the graphics didn’t really grab me. It looks “next gen” enough, and the pacific areas are quite lush and full of jungle foliage, but it just felt like playing every other WWII game when it really came down to it. Drab greens, browns and greys dominated the game, with a splash of Nazi red and fire here and there. Although I get the whole reality / grittiness of the graphics, I think it’s just a little overdone and wish people would think a little deeper about colour palettes. Sound, on the other hand, plays an incredible part in the game, and during the final battle for the Reichstag I was literally in awe of the sounds all around me, and it added immensely to one of the more powerful experiences of the game.

Conclusion:
Whilst it is obvious Treyarch put a lot of sweat and love into the game, Call Of Duty: World At War just doesn’t stand out as much as it’s predecessor. I’ve played scores of WWII games, and even with the slightly different story campaign settings and grittier overall feel, COD: WAW never felt much different from playing any other WWII game, nor even much different to playing COD4. It is a good World War II shooter, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but I feel it doesn’t have enough of its own identity to really win me over from playing COD4.

Pros:
Uses the COD4 engine to great effect
Great online play bot h competitive and cooperative
Nazi Zombies!

Cons:
Feels like every other WWII shooter
Short and easy single player campaign.

85/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Battlefield 2: Modern Combat

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The world of PC shooters was set alight by the introduction of Battlefield 1942. A massive amount of people could play an engaging shooting game that was fast, furious, and full of action. It shirked the realism aspect of other WWII games out at the time, and allowed you to fly a plane, drive a tank, then get out and shoot like a soldier. When you died, you only had to wait a few seconds before spawning into another soldier.

When Battlefield 2 arrived, its setting was placed in a more modern context, and new soldier roles allowed you to play a much more tactical game, but still kept the arcade fun of the original. Now that experience comes to Xbox, however the Xbox version of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat shouldn’t be compared to its PC counterpart, as DICE designed B2:MC for the Xbox from the ground up. It’s a similarly intense action shooter, yet provides a different and exciting gameplay experience from the PC version.

One aspect of B2:MC that is different is the single player campaign. Like many war games, you’re tasked with completing certain missions in campaign style. B2:MC is a little different to most in that it places you in the sides of two forces – NATO and Chinese – concurrently. Every few missions the game will swap you to the other side, and you’ll play a mission as the other side, complete with news broadcasts letting you know how insidious the other side has been. This negates the whole “good” versus “bad” ideal that so frequently occurs in these types of games, as well as allows you to experience quite a wide range of vehicles and weapons from time to time.

Each mission varies greatly in its objectives, and you’ll be tasked to blow up bridges or installations, defend an area, attack an area, and each encourages you to utilise a whole range of different troops, such as snipers or engineers, and vehicles. In fact, there are 5 different types of troop you can be – Assault, who is your typical on foot combatant; Sniper, who not only snipes, but can locate enemy troop locations with his “GPS Forward Observer”, and paint targets for missile strikes. There’s Special Ops, trained in stealth and sabotage, whose weapons are silenced. They also carry C4 charges, designed for blowing things like bridges off the face of the planet. The Engineer is Mr Fixit, who can repair vehicles with the blowtorch, and lay landmines to stop enemy vehicles. Failing that, he can whip out his rocket launcher, which is brutally effective against tanks and helicopters. And bringing up the rear is Support, acting as field medic, administrating health intravenously, and also able to call mortar strikes to devastate an area.

Missions help you rise in rank. The quicker you complete a mission, the less men you lose, the more enemy you kill, objectives completed, and so on, the higher your Combat Score. Medals are also awarded for doing certain things in a mission, such as Hotswapping (more on that later) a certain distance or number of times, getting so many sniper headshots, planting so many explosives, that kind of thing. At the end of a mission, time, kills and casualties are tallied up, along with any medals you’ve earned, and you are awarded stars for certain point milestones. The more stars you earn, the higher your ranking will go. Ranking gives you access to better weapons and equipment, as well as more health, ammo, and so forth.

B2:MC also allows you to pilot tanks, jeeps, boats, amphibious vehicles and helicopters. Run up to a vehicle, press B and you’re in and racing. AI Teammates can operate mounted weaponry, or by simply pressing the Black button you can switch to the mounted weapons while the AI drives. This is great for when shooting is more important than driving. However, the AI isn’t anywhere near perfect, and often drives into enemy fire, or occasionally gets stuck on obstacles, so being able to switch so quickly is a godsend in some missions.

Speaking of switching, something absolutely awesome in the single player game is Hotswapping. If you see a fellow trooper on the other side of the battlefield, simply pressing the Y button zooms you into that player. The player has to be in the line of sight, which indicated by the icon above their head turning white. This allows you to, for instance, snipe some guards from one position, Hotswap to a tank and attack another position, zoom into a Special Ops to breach a wall, and then hotswap back to the tank and roll into an enemy compound. It is a fantastic gameplay mechanic that works incredibly well and is a lot of fun to use, and it allows for some great tactical manoeuvres and is totally unique to the single player aspect of B2:MC. I just wish it were available in Multiplayer as well!

Apart from the single player campaign, there are minigames that allow you to increase your star rating by up to 3 stars per game. This include a hotswap challenge, where you have to hotswap from person to person travelling across a map; a racing challenge, where you drive or fly through checkpoints; and shooting challenges which test your accuracy with a particular weapon. These are also a lot of fun, and often more intense than the action of the campaign missions, and extends the single player game further than the rather large 20 mission campaign. For a game that is mainly meant to be for online play, they sure have catered well for the single player.

Online, the game is just as fun and addictive as both the single player, and PC counterpart. With up to 24 players Conquest is where you have to hold certain key control points on the map to get hold ‘tickets’, which are essentially remaining soldiers. The less control points the team hold, the quicker the tickets decrease. Unlike the PC version, you don’t have online bots though, just your human counterparts, so in that way it is a little tougher to capture and hold points. Capture the flag is the traditional capture the flag – storm an enemy’s base and steal their flag, and this seems to be the less popular online mode.

Getting into a game is pretty simple –Quick Match finds games quickly enough, and optimatch allows you to choose your favourite game type and map, although on the odd occasion I got a ‘server is full’ error when it said there were only 15 out of 24 players. I also got a few mysterious disconnections, but no more than usual for Xbox Live. Lag was non-existent, and voices were crisp for the most part. In fact, unlike other Live games, the talking was, 90% of the time, just about the game. Most of the players seem pretty serious about playing and having fun – there’s very little Team Killing, very little Griefing, which makes B2:MC all that much more enjoyable.

The maps are varied enough to keep you interested for a while. Some obviously suit vehicles more than others, but on the whole the maps provide a balance for all kinds of players. Snipers can set up on top of buildings and the like, but most buildings can be entered from below, and rooftops accessed by stairs, so there’s never a sense of the sniper ‘sweet spot’ that occurs in other shooters.

B2:MC isn’t going to win too many awards for its graphical presentation. It’s not that it looks particularly bad, it just doesn’t stand out. The interface is rather bland, featuring mainly text and a few 3D ‘army sim’ style graphics, but it’s not a shining example of a great user interface. The in-game graphics are solid, and the game moves so fast that you don’t really notice anything too bad, but it’s no Halo. Explosions look quite sad, as vehicles disappear in a puff of smoke, and often it’s hard to see where the tracers of enemy bullets are actually coming from. And there’s certain sameness about all the maps you play on, particularly in single player. However, there are nice touches, like smashed windows, graffiti covering bridges and disused city blocks, and the smoking remains of ruined vehicles.

Audio wise the game is pretty solid. Weapons sound different enough, and the clink and clank of tanks and other vehicles sounds authentic. Explosions, whilst looking weak, sound great. The voiceover for your fellow soldiers give them personality and vitality. However, one really annoying thing about the audio is the Chinese voice over in the mission briefing. It sounds like someone putting on an accent, and a rather bad one at that.

Conclusion:
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat may disappoint fans of the PC game who expect a PC port, but don’t let that put you off. It is still a fabulous game, with single players being well catered for, and online players having a similar, although more arcady and faster experience than their PC counterparts. And with Hotswapping being so damn cool and a hell of a lot of fun, it is sure to become common in more and more games in the future.

Pros:
Single Player well catered for
Excellent Online Play
Hotswapping is a very cool device

Cons:
May be too arcadey for those use to the PC version
Vehicles sometimes get caught on obstacles.
AI isn’t too good at driving.
Bad voice acting for the Chinese forces.

85/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Lockdown

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Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six series started off as a strategic command type game where you planned your mission, then executed GO codes to your teams and watched them do their thing. As the series evolved, it became a first person shooter to suit action orientated console gamers. Initially this move was met with some scepticism, but after the first Rainbow Six game (XBW: 94) hit the Xbox, we knew Ubisoft was onto a winner. It was action packed, but still tactical, strategic and well paced, and had awesome online modes that captured the single player intensity but pitted you against other humans.

The single player contains the usual story of evil, radical organisation taking action against various governments around the world, and also has a few little twists to try and engage you more fully. I’m not going to spoil it, but if you’ve read the book then the game’s story treads some familiar territory, although this time more close to home. For some reason though, the story isn’t as engaging as in the previous games. Part of this is the voice acting, but most of it is the overall feel of the game. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something that isn’t cohesive about the whole experience.

Gameplay wise, the feel is similar to the previous Rainbow Six’s, but a little more action based. You can pretty much run and gun through the levels and survive with your entire squad intact. There’s not so much of the careful manuvering and planning, and much more shooting. Part of this is due to the new heart detection device that shows you the heartbeat of enemies through walls. When you know there is a bunch of baddies in the next room, you know to flashbang or grenade almost every time.

There is a nice addition to the gameplay where you take the role of the sniper, and it’s like a shooting gallery. It’s quite a lot of fun, and your skill does reflect on the difficulty of the on coming mission – if you’re too slow in eliminating the enemy, and your team gets walloped, you’ll have an injured team to play the rest of the mission with, which can make it a lot more difficult. However, there is a problem with this mode, in that you’re informed of more enemies arriving, but it’s rather imprecise. For example, you’re told in one level that there are snipers on the balconies, but there are four balconies – if a special ops team was that inaccurate in real life, I would be very concerned about their training.

Another problem arises with the team and enemy AI. Sometimes it’s good, and others you’re left wondering what the hell has gone wrong. In one instance, one of my team just simply refused to climb the ladder. This meant for the rest of the mission I couldn’t actually order my team to do anything. Another time, pressing the A button to order the team to open a door meant they would prepare, but the “go code”, accessed by the black button, never appeared. Often they would clear out the immediate area, and then give the all clear, and you would walk into sniper fire. With enemy AI, you can pick off bad guys in a room without others in the room noticing. They will patrol, but don’t wander too far out of their zones, and will do really odd things like throw grenades when their teammates are in the way.

Moving onto the online modes, I was hesitant about the Persistent Elite Creation (PEC) mode. Luckily, you can choose to ignore this, and get right into the thick of the game. There’s the usual Team Survival, the elimination deathmatch; Team Sharpshooter which is deathmatch with a time limit; Total conquest, where you have to hold locations for a given time limit, and Retrieval, which is essentially capture the flag. Plus, you can join with up to four friends and work through the missions or play terrorist hunt.

The PEC mode is a new addition to multiplayer, allowing you to choose a class and upgrade your equipment. There are four classes – Commando, Engineer, Special Ops and Medic. These are pretty standard roles in shooters, and there’s nothing really outstanding in Lockdown to differentiate these roles to any other game. For example, the Commando can develop skills that allow him to dish out more damage, take more damage, and set up ballistic shields to protect his allies. The medic can heal either on the run, or set up mobile field restoration points, and the special op can sneak and use sniper rifles. The Engineer can lay mines and set up machine gun turrets, and open or lock passages and routes through the maps.

At first, I though I would be at a disadvantage, because I was a low level character and was up against level 40 players. However, after a few games, as you find your feet, and start to get a feel for your role, you do start to advance quicker. And, as you kill more opponents of higher ranking, you also advance further, so it does enforce more of a run and gun mentality. In addition, people don’t seem to utilise their extra functions properly. I never saw a ballistics shield or a weapons emplacement, although engineers did appear to block off routes, and medics did heal me on the odd occasion, but these abilities were not as utilised nearly as much as in other combat games that have ‘roles’.

The multiplayer maps are very well designed, but I found that a lot of them seemed more to facilitate spawn-rushing more so than other games. Even though they had intricate back routes into enemy bases, simply rushing to the enemy spawns seemed to be the most logical way to fight. Admittedly the tactics changed with the people you played with, but there never seemed to be the same levels of communication I experienced playing Rainbow Six 3 or other online game like Halo 2 or even Return to Castle Wolfenstien.

Rainbow Six has always looked good, but unfortunately Lockdown seems to have dragged the chain here as well. The new visor effect is cool, especially how it fogs up if you go into a cold storage room, and how the more beat up you are, the harder it becomes to see as it gets cracks, holes and grime on it. The environments all look nice, but they don’t have the impact and the wow factor of the previous games. And, perhaps more disappointingly, the explosions look quite average. The rolling fire effect doesn’t look good at all – throw a grenade and you expect something bigger and better. The different vision modes you can employ don’t have the same impact either, with both thermal vision and low light seeming to be washed out, making it harder to determine objects and enemies when looking in these modes. There was also so unexpected slowdown in framerate in single player, something I’ve not noticed in the series before.

The sound is also simply OK. The characters seem to lack the individuality the previous Rainbow Six games infused into them. There is a certain level of distance and detachment that wasn’t present in the previous games. Before you actually cared is Louise got taken down, now it’s more of a case of inconvenience. The bullet and explosions all sound good, and the score is a little more upbeat and rocking, but I did notice a few odd glitches in multiplayer where the gun firing only had the tail end of the sound on more than a couple of occasions.

Conclusion:
Lockdown is a competent shooter, which is disappointing because the previous Rainbow Six’s were fantastic shooters. Slipping further into the realm of action forsaking its origins, the single player suffers from inconsistent AI of both teammates and enemies, and even though the environments are a little more interactive, they seem to lack the realism that was the hook of the first game. The PEC multiplayer mode does add a new dimension to the usual online way of playing, and does hook you at first, but the online matches do seem to degenerate into spawn rushes and feel more like a simple run and gun battles common to all shooters than the tactical and epic battles that so absorbed players of the previous games.

Pros:
PEC Mode is a great addition to online play.
Environments more interactive than previous Rainbow Six games
New sniper action at start of round is lots of fun
Visor effects and decals are cool, even if they do obscure the action.

Cons:
Inconsistent AI for both AI and teammates
Online matches all too frequently devolve into spawn rushing
PEC Abilities seldom used
Doesn’t look as good as previous versions of the game.
Unexpected choppiness and slowdown in framerate

81/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Halo 2: Bonus Map Pack

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From the hilarious Red Vs Blue (www.redvblue.com) to the pages upon pages of fanart that can be found on the net, the universe Bungie created in Halo and extended in Halo 2 has captured the hearts and minds of gamers around the globe.

This universe has both intrigued and infuriated; intrigued by introducing new worlds to visit, new aliens to menace humankind, and compelling and involving storylines, and on the other hand there’s nothing more infuriating than wandering around a new world, looking at the beauty of the awe inspiring and mysterious Halo that floats above, or examining the ancient and bizarre Forerunner installations, mentally mapping out the multiple paths through structures, than to suddenly find an iniquitous plasma grenade lodged in your chest armour, or a well placed sniper shot shatter the otherwise peaceful surrounds. For that is the danger of the Halo universe – beautiful one minute and deadly the next.

The new Halo 2 Maps have been lovingly crafted to extend the multiplayer aspect of the game, which is, it must be said, the games’ biggest strength. The original Halo engaged people with it’s story and action, but the sequel seemed to let quite a few people with it’s rather incomplete ending. However, it more than made up for this by providing one of the most solid multiplayer games available on a console, if not in any game, with an incredibly well developed online interface that intergraded with Bungie.com. The ability to track scores, form clans, and download extra content through Live has seen the Live service grow to over 2 Million users.

The new maps are either brand new, or a development of the maps found in Halo, and even one from Bungie’s original first shooter, Marathon. Each map has been made for a specific game type, although they work well in their other modes. For example, Terminal, set in Old Mombassa (one of the locations set on Earth) is great for Assault and CTF, but also great for Slayer matches in its tight urban environment. There are small maps like Backwash, set in a swamp reminiscent of 343 Guilty Spark in the first Halo game, to massive levels designed to present interesting vehicular combat in Containment. The manual presents a minimap of each of the maps provided, showing weapon and vehicle locations, as well as some informing of best tactics to use. In this case, it really does pay to RTM.

For those without Live but like to get together with friends for split screen or system link action, then the Bonus Maps are a godsend. Not only do they give you 9 new maps, they patch up glitches and eliminate exploits and cheating, and also give offline players a chance to hone their skills on levels where they previously couldn’t. Considering the disc isn’t required to play (although the original Halo2 game is), it’s great for people who play LANs – people can split the cost and pass the disc around. I don’t think Bungie would mind me saying that, especially considering the maps will be free for download at the end of August.

If you’re a Halo nut, and an Xbox Live subscriber, then the Map Pack is a must. You will find it patches Halo and eliminates cheaters, although I still had to download an extra live update even after installing. Furthermore, if you don’t have it, you may find it hard to find games of certain types using Optimatch, and there’s nothing worse than not being able to play with your friends because they have a map that you don’t. And if you do wait until they become free, everyone else will know the maps rather well and you’ll find yourself at distinct disadvantage. You’ll be stumbling around trying to find the rocket launcher that someone will tell you to get from “near the pillars” – not a good idea when you’re trying to keep your stats up!

The bonus, non-map material, whilst appealing, is only of minor interest. The Developer Video provides some useful tips, like being able to hide yourself on the moving platforms in Elongation by squatting. However, you’ll gain no massive advantage from watching it. The short movie is pretty cool, but for me it just reinforced the notion that the single player mission could have been much more developed. It shows an aspect of the Halo Universe that is never really expanded – urban squad combat. I’m not proposing that Bungie turn the game into Rainbow Six, but I really enjoyed the urban battles set on Earth, and wished there were more.

But if you’re simply a casual fan, then it’s probably best to wait until they become available for free at the end of August, because, well, they’re just extra maps. There’s absolutely nothing here for the single player, which is a little unfortunate really. Although the Xbox Live service has reached 2 million subscribers, and that’s only a small proportion of the 10 million plus units that Halo 2 has sold. When you look at it from that perspective, the Bonus Maps is a slight disappointment, especially that many think the single player of Halo 2 is severely lacking in many places.

Conclusion:
What the Map Pack does is show that Bungie really does care about the community it has helped foster through Halo 2. With one simple gesture, Bungie has offered to even the playing field between online and off line players, allowing patches and content that they could have offered to online customers as individual downloads, in one well presented package for a reasonable price. Being able to share the disc around counters the cynical notion that this is a money making scheme – I’m pretty sure Bungie are sitting pretty anyway – and reinforces the idea that Bungie really do understand the players of Halo2’s needs.

Pros:
Provides content for those without Live for a reasonable price.
Nine extra maps that have been researched and refined to perfection.
Updates Live and patches the game quicker than downloading.
Disc can be shared around friends.

Cons:
Absolutely nothing for the Single player.
Will be available free for download soon.

90/100