Welcome to my end of year review. I played a bunch of games throughout the year and I thought I'd sum it all up with the games I played during the year. I'm only going to talk about the games I played through for the first time, so unfortunately I won't be able to praise The Last of Us some more. Some games I played for the first time this year, I played in the earlier months before I started my reviews, so they will get their own section. Onto it then.
Best game I played in 2016: Sunset Overdrive
Runners up: Portal 2 and Batman a Telltale Series
This may be a surprise as the review isn't out yet, same with Batman. These reviews will be out in the coming weeks, so you'll be able to read more in depth about both. Sunset Overdrive was an incredible game, so unique and fun. Insomniac did an amazing job with this one and packed this game with content. I'll admit I wasn't a fan at first, I didn't like the combat as much, if you weren't jumping and grinding, you were playing the game wrong. I had to suck it up and adapt to how you were meant to play, once I did, I was hooked. I love the cartoony, but fantastic graphics. The hilarious dialogue and voice acting, the vast customization. The huge arsenal of unique weapons. I loved this game and Insomniac has left me desperate for more.
Worst game I played in 2016; Saw the Video Game
Runners up: Medal of Honor Warfighter, Sniper Ghost Warrior
The sad thing is about Saw, was that it could've been a decent game. The combat ruined this game, the fact that sometimes I just couldn't attack despite button mashing the attack buttons proved how bad it was. If it had not been for the easy achievements, I honestly wouldn't have bothered to finish it. The story was interesting, but the gameplay was so poor, I just lost interest. The puzzles and the traps were pretty good, but the unappealing graphics and crappy gameplay was enough to cement itself as the worst of the year.
Most disappointing game of 2016: Mafia 3
Runners up: Quantum Break, Homefront
It keeps me up at night how disapointed I was with Mafia. I was looking forward to it so much and yes, I did give it a pretty good score, but this should've been 8.5 at least. It simply just wasn't a Mafia game, they just used the Mafia name to help it sell. Please tell me were the Mafia part was, this was just a revenge story with brilliant graphics and good voice acting. The gameplay and stealth were good too, but the repetitive nature of it killed it. I just couldn't wait for it to end, I was so bored of doing the same mission in a different area over and over. It's a damn shame and I hope Mafia 4 will rectify this.
Biggest surprise of 2016: The Amazing Spider-Man
Runners up: Mars War Logs, Shadows of the Damned
I'm a sucker for a Spider-Man game, I didn't expect much from this one though. Movie games are often lacklustre, and a movie-game of a pretty average movie meant all hope was lost, but I enjoyed it. The graphics were poor and the acting was cheesy, but there was lots to do. I loved the web swinging animations and the spider suit looked great. Even the combat was pretty good, it was a shoddy version of the Batman Arkham combat, but that's so good, even a shoddy one is decent. I'm going as far to say that my most anticipated game to play of 2017 is The Amazing Spider-Man 2, that's how excited I am to play the sequel, and I'm going to play some awesome looking games next year.
So, the games I played at the start of the year, before I started reviews. I plan to review these games in the future, but I'm going to give a mini review on each. One or two I didn't feel the need to review and are included here too.
Torchlight (Xbox 360)
Honestly, this just wasn't my sort of game. I don't plan to give it a full review because I think it would be harsh. I just rushed through it and button mashed and spammed all my magic powers to kill the enemies. I skipped all the dialogue and didn't bother to explore the vast variety of weapons, armor, quests, abilities and enchantments. I feel this is a game people would get into, but it just wasn't for me.
Star Wars Battlefront (Xbox One)
EA have ruined this once great franchise. Graphics and sound are amazing, but everything else is dog shit. Fuck you EA, you money-grabbing, game-ruining, trash-polluting pricks. All you had to do was remake Star Wars Battlefront 2, it's one of the best games ever made. No single-player? Of course you fucked it up. I preordered this shambles and it's one of my biggest regrets. I only played three games the day it arrived and the third match crashed. I was so bored that I didn't even care it crashed and used it as an excuse to quit the game.
Dead Space (Xbox 360)
Brilliant. Terrifying. Absolutely loved it. Gameplay is fantastic, unique weapons, great boss fights, heart pounding chases. I first played it in 2008, it took me 8 years to get the guts to finally finish it. Truly a great survival horror. The fact that an enemy could literally pop out at any moment, had me on edge throughout. The Necromorphs are disgustingly scary, the only way to kill them was to shoot their limbs, I made sure to shoot every one because the sight of seeing them crawl after you was enough to keep me up at night. I'll never forget that opening scene, where you are chased by one, you don't even see it, but my God, do you not want to turn around and look for yourself.
Escape Dead Island (Xbox 360)
This was so shite. I don't know why there are so many Dead Island games, they're yet to make a good one. I'll admit that the gimmicky cartoon graphics were the best thing, but the awful acting and constant back and forth makes me question why they even bothered. Being able to stealth kill the zombies was pretty cool and it was actually pretty challenging, but the end boss fight went on far too long and the guy I played as, I absolutely hated. I think a game immediately fails when they can't make the protagonist likeable. But, it's like they didn't even try with this guy. He was literally a douchebag.
Duke Nukem Forever (Xbox 360)
10 years? For this? Are you fucking joking? Outdated. Simply put, Duke is not made for modern gaming. The sexualisation was ridiculous. Alien boobs that you can slap? Picking up literal shit? That sums up the crassness of this. It took me five years to complete, the thought of going back to it was tough. The unfair boss fights, the everlasting levels, the ridiculously long loading that makes Fallout look quick. If this is the best they can do in ten years, they should be shut down. Honestly don't know how this didn't just get cancelled.
Lost: Via Domus (Xbox 360)
Don't like the show, hate the game. It's pretty obvious I just played for the easy achievements. Let's just say that Lost is lucky I didn't review the game, as it would most definitely of rivalled Saw for the worst game. And the guy we played as was a fucking snake, don't make me play as terrible characters, who are dirty little rats.
2016 was full of gaming, it was great to go back and finish games I started years ago and play some great games that were more recent too. I plan to write even more reviews in 2017, but will anything ever beat The Last of Us at 9.5/10? With Days Gone, Red Dead Redemption 2 and of course, The Last of Us Part 2 all to come, it may just be possible!
Happy 2017.
Saturday 31 December 2016
Tuesday 27 December 2016
Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360)
The sequel to the Xbox exclusive series released in 2008 and I picked this up in Asda for a bargain of £5. We're again treated to a wonderful coop experience with the duo of Marcus and Dom (again I wanted to play as Dom).
Continuing the fight against the Locust and their Queen (who looks like a human for some reason). They are attempting to sink cities with a giant worm... yep, a giant worm, it's fucking huge! With this, we get to meet a bunch of new character. Dizzy, Tai and Ben Carmine are three specifically new and interesting characters. Ben may sound familiar as he's the brother of Anthony Carmine who featured in the previous game. Ben gets a lot more game time and he's a rookie and is learning the ropes with Delta squad.
With the stellar gameplay we already had, we get some great new features on top of it. Chainsaw battles are probably my favourite, your defence is tapping B as fast as you can to win it. It means you now get a chance instead of an instant death when a Locust sneaks up on you and chainsaws you. Being able to pick up Maulers shields gives you a lot of protection and you can move around with them. You are limited to your pistol though. You can also grab downed enemies and use them as a meat shield, if they get shot a lot they'll become as useless piece of cover. You get to use loads of new weapons too, like ink grenades, mortars and flamethrowers.
The multiplayer is great, I had a lot of fun on it when it was populated, sadly it's not as much anymore. There's a tonne of game modes to choose from and play with your friends. The ranking now makes sense to me, as you have an experience bar. Easily the best addition is horde mode. 50 waves of Locust coming at you with a total of five players, your choice of map and character, features all standard enemy types. It's pretty great.
Again, I played on insane in coop with a friend. The insane difficulty is much better than it was previously. The enemies don't just sponge and take a thousand bullets to kill anymore. It was so much more fun and wasn't a drag in parts. One part, where you had to kill a brumak and you were split up, we killed it and the cutscene started playing and during it, it said we failed despite killing it and the progression cutscene playing. Other than that, the rest was quite fun. Although the final boss was ridiculously easy, even on insane. The acting was fantastic, particularly a scene between Marcus and Dom, it showed how good these guys really are.
I faced a bunch of glitches while playing this again, but nothing major really. Walking on air as a grinder with a minigun appeared, was really fun on insane with no cover. I felt the game felt too similar to the first in the areas we where. There were way too many on the rail sections, they are something I'll never enjoy, but Gears seems to pump them in.
I loved the new enemies and the new weapons. The gameplay was again brilliant and felt looser. The characters and story were great. The campaign overall I didn't think was as good, Dom was pretty whiny, understandably of course and the boss fights were no comparison to the first. They did carry this game onwards brilliantly though and horde was a very fun addition to an already great multiplayer.
8.3/10
Continuing the fight against the Locust and their Queen (who looks like a human for some reason). They are attempting to sink cities with a giant worm... yep, a giant worm, it's fucking huge! With this, we get to meet a bunch of new character. Dizzy, Tai and Ben Carmine are three specifically new and interesting characters. Ben may sound familiar as he's the brother of Anthony Carmine who featured in the previous game. Ben gets a lot more game time and he's a rookie and is learning the ropes with Delta squad.
With the stellar gameplay we already had, we get some great new features on top of it. Chainsaw battles are probably my favourite, your defence is tapping B as fast as you can to win it. It means you now get a chance instead of an instant death when a Locust sneaks up on you and chainsaws you. Being able to pick up Maulers shields gives you a lot of protection and you can move around with them. You are limited to your pistol though. You can also grab downed enemies and use them as a meat shield, if they get shot a lot they'll become as useless piece of cover. You get to use loads of new weapons too, like ink grenades, mortars and flamethrowers.
The multiplayer is great, I had a lot of fun on it when it was populated, sadly it's not as much anymore. There's a tonne of game modes to choose from and play with your friends. The ranking now makes sense to me, as you have an experience bar. Easily the best addition is horde mode. 50 waves of Locust coming at you with a total of five players, your choice of map and character, features all standard enemy types. It's pretty great.
Again, I played on insane in coop with a friend. The insane difficulty is much better than it was previously. The enemies don't just sponge and take a thousand bullets to kill anymore. It was so much more fun and wasn't a drag in parts. One part, where you had to kill a brumak and you were split up, we killed it and the cutscene started playing and during it, it said we failed despite killing it and the progression cutscene playing. Other than that, the rest was quite fun. Although the final boss was ridiculously easy, even on insane. The acting was fantastic, particularly a scene between Marcus and Dom, it showed how good these guys really are.
I faced a bunch of glitches while playing this again, but nothing major really. Walking on air as a grinder with a minigun appeared, was really fun on insane with no cover. I felt the game felt too similar to the first in the areas we where. There were way too many on the rail sections, they are something I'll never enjoy, but Gears seems to pump them in.
I loved the new enemies and the new weapons. The gameplay was again brilliant and felt looser. The characters and story were great. The campaign overall I didn't think was as good, Dom was pretty whiny, understandably of course and the boss fights were no comparison to the first. They did carry this game onwards brilliantly though and horde was a very fun addition to an already great multiplayer.
8.3/10
Thursday 22 December 2016
Styx: Master of Shadows (Xbox One)
Styx released in 2014 and was a super quiet release. Had it not been for an Xbox Live sale, I wouldn't have noticed this game until it entered the Games With Gold program. It's a prequel to Of Orcs and Men, another game I know nothing about or managed to get to play. It's a stealth game, so I had to give it my money.
We play as Styx, a master thief, who's also a little green goblin. He has abilities to create clones, turn invisible and use amber vision, which highlights enemies and items. Super handy tools when it comes to stealthing through the tower of Arkanash. The tower is seemingly built in the sky, it's so high up and it has an infinite drop that descends in to grey clouds. It's a great place to dispose of bodies when you're near the edge, can't be leaving bodies around unless you want to get detected.
The opening cutscene is beautiful, it looks great. But that's it, from then one we're giving stills with dialogue, but they were nicely presented at least. The graphics are OK, not great like, the voice acting isn't the best either, but the performances were funny, I liked them. Being able to distinguish torches or with balls of sand from afar was a great way of creating cover and I did it as much as I could, enemies would light torches back up if they were near when they went out. You have a tattoo on your back that lights up when you're unlikely to get detected, this was a huge help in knowing whether you were safe.
There was a lot of ways to stay stealthy too, you could land on carpets from drops to cover the sound. You could hide bodies in boxes and even make them disappear completely using acid. Using your special abilities comes at a price, you need amber, which is a potion that can crop up through your missions. Each power takes down your amber bar until you replenish it. You could also do quiet kills, if you snuck up on an enemy, you could do a quick kill that or would make a lot of noise or do a silent kill which took longer.
There weren't a lot of missions but, each one was split into a few parts. This really broke up the missions and didn't make them feel like they dragged. The loads times were ridiculously long and were a huge reason why it took me so long to properly start playing. There was no non lethal option, which meant you killed everyone you got rid of, there was no way to knock an enemy out. The lip syncing was so bad it was like they didn't even really try. The combat was not the best, as you had to keep parrying their attacks until you got to strike with a deadly blow, this was there to encourage stealth.
I hated the platforming, sometimes it would work perfectly and the next you'd fall to your death because he wouldn't grab a ledge. It got to the point where I saved after every jump, I didn't trust the platforming one bit. Another annoyance was that Styx would automatically vault over a railing when you jumped across, he would never just hang on the ledge, this lead to me getting caught often when an enemy was on patrol as I always expected him to just hang there. There were insects too that would attack if they heard you as they were blind, but they didn't attack humans which made no sense, I tried more than once to get them close to each other so they'd fight, but it never happened.
The story was interesting, but I then struggled to keep up with it. At parts I just didn't know what was happening. If any enemy was investigating when they thought they saw you, you couldn't leave the area until they stopped looking, I thought this was dumb, as you should be able to finish the zone even if someone is looking, I mean why would you not proceed just because someone's looking for you? I was hiding behind an open door as a guard was patrolling and when he got close he somehow managed to spot me through the door and wall, there was no possible way for him to see me. On one mission you don't have your dagger and because of that you can't kill anyone during the mission, but it didn't make sense because Styx snaps there neck in the silent kill and doesn't use his dagger, it just made the mission so much more difficult. The finale was so disapointing that I'm not even gonna say anymore than that.
Styx was a good stealth game overall, it did have some problems but I enjoyed it. With a sequel confirmed, I'll be purchasing it, hopefully some tweaks to the problems I faced and some new additions could make it a great game. After this I'd like to go back and play the prequel.
6.8/10
We play as Styx, a master thief, who's also a little green goblin. He has abilities to create clones, turn invisible and use amber vision, which highlights enemies and items. Super handy tools when it comes to stealthing through the tower of Arkanash. The tower is seemingly built in the sky, it's so high up and it has an infinite drop that descends in to grey clouds. It's a great place to dispose of bodies when you're near the edge, can't be leaving bodies around unless you want to get detected.
The opening cutscene is beautiful, it looks great. But that's it, from then one we're giving stills with dialogue, but they were nicely presented at least. The graphics are OK, not great like, the voice acting isn't the best either, but the performances were funny, I liked them. Being able to distinguish torches or with balls of sand from afar was a great way of creating cover and I did it as much as I could, enemies would light torches back up if they were near when they went out. You have a tattoo on your back that lights up when you're unlikely to get detected, this was a huge help in knowing whether you were safe.
There was a lot of ways to stay stealthy too, you could land on carpets from drops to cover the sound. You could hide bodies in boxes and even make them disappear completely using acid. Using your special abilities comes at a price, you need amber, which is a potion that can crop up through your missions. Each power takes down your amber bar until you replenish it. You could also do quiet kills, if you snuck up on an enemy, you could do a quick kill that or would make a lot of noise or do a silent kill which took longer.
There weren't a lot of missions but, each one was split into a few parts. This really broke up the missions and didn't make them feel like they dragged. The loads times were ridiculously long and were a huge reason why it took me so long to properly start playing. There was no non lethal option, which meant you killed everyone you got rid of, there was no way to knock an enemy out. The lip syncing was so bad it was like they didn't even really try. The combat was not the best, as you had to keep parrying their attacks until you got to strike with a deadly blow, this was there to encourage stealth.
I hated the platforming, sometimes it would work perfectly and the next you'd fall to your death because he wouldn't grab a ledge. It got to the point where I saved after every jump, I didn't trust the platforming one bit. Another annoyance was that Styx would automatically vault over a railing when you jumped across, he would never just hang on the ledge, this lead to me getting caught often when an enemy was on patrol as I always expected him to just hang there. There were insects too that would attack if they heard you as they were blind, but they didn't attack humans which made no sense, I tried more than once to get them close to each other so they'd fight, but it never happened.
The story was interesting, but I then struggled to keep up with it. At parts I just didn't know what was happening. If any enemy was investigating when they thought they saw you, you couldn't leave the area until they stopped looking, I thought this was dumb, as you should be able to finish the zone even if someone is looking, I mean why would you not proceed just because someone's looking for you? I was hiding behind an open door as a guard was patrolling and when he got close he somehow managed to spot me through the door and wall, there was no possible way for him to see me. On one mission you don't have your dagger and because of that you can't kill anyone during the mission, but it didn't make sense because Styx snaps there neck in the silent kill and doesn't use his dagger, it just made the mission so much more difficult. The finale was so disapointing that I'm not even gonna say anymore than that.
Styx was a good stealth game overall, it did have some problems but I enjoyed it. With a sequel confirmed, I'll be purchasing it, hopefully some tweaks to the problems I faced and some new additions could make it a great game. After this I'd like to go back and play the prequel.
6.8/10
Sunday 18 December 2016
Quantum Break (Xbox One)
Quantum Break developed by Remedy, released in 2016. When I saw the gameplay trailer for this at E3, I genuinely thought this was going to be one of the best games to hit the Xbox One. Sadly that wasn't the case. The game even suffered a delay, I'd hate to have seem what it would've been like, had it released on schedule. As well as the game, we have a TV show, five episodes long that plays in between the chapters of the game. It features the cast of the game and some people appear a lot more in the show than the game.
We play as Jack Joyce, better known as Shawn Ashmore who played Iceman in the Xmen film series. After a disastrous time machine experiment fails, Jack is gifted powers that allows him to manipulate time. Time fractures and will soon break if Jack is unable to fix the fracture. Jack's brother, Will, played by Dominic Monaghan, better known as Merry Brandybuck from Lord of the Rings, built the time machine. Jack's friend, Paul, played by Aidan Gillen better known as Little Finger from Game of Thrones, expands on Will's time machine and asks Jack to be there for a demonstration. When it fails, both Jack and Paul are gifted time powers. Paul believes time can't be fixed, leading the two time powered friends to now become enemies.
The story is really short, five chapters long that can easily be done in a few hours, the TV episodes are full twenty minute segments, though I enjoyed watching them, I could see how they could frustrate a player who just wanted to play the game. Some people featured heavily in the show, but practically didn't feature in the game, this was stupid because it felt like the game and show were following different people that just linked up, rather than following one story.
The cast is great, I knew most of them and they gave brilliant performances. Even the people I didn't know gave a great performance. The graphics are fantastic and the life-like appearances are scarily good. It's far too linear though, it doesn't feel like you're allowed to do anything except the story, it just felt so restricted. There's parts where you get to play as Paul, which I thought was really cool, but all you do is walk to an area, where you then get to make a choice that affected the story. I didn't understand why I got to make a decision as the bad guy, when I played as the good guy. I also felt that the choices weren't really that important, it all leads to the same ending, is that really giving you a choice?
You get some cool powers though. You can get a time sheild, time stop is a blast, which freezes an enemy and then let's you shoot bullets towards him and when it unfreezes, the bullets hit. There's time rush, which allows you to run in a slowed down world, you can takedown an enemy or run from falling debris with this. Time vision allows you to see enemies through wall, looks like heat vision. Time dodge allows you to quickly move away from enemies and their gunfire. What was really disapointing was that there was no power that completed stopped time, only when a time fracture occurred that happened. Even Timeshift let you freeze time. Jack was a just a normal guy, next he's some expert marksman? They should have let you briefly stop time and than be able to steal the enemies weapons or even subdue them when they were frozen. There should be some sort of stealth, freeze time and then sneak past the enemies, this would've fitted so much better I think.
The gun play is far from the best, but this is the only time when it really feels like a game, when you in action using your powers and guns. The platforming is really average and clunky, and the time fractures are a pain trying to get through some sequence. It's a cover-shooter that has no cover system! Jack sort of crouches behind things, but you can't move around in cover and you can't blind fire, I didn't enjoy the gun fights much at all. Something cool though, was when you killed the last enemy in the area, it did a slow motion kill so you always knew when it was clear. The pistol had unlimited ammo, but often when the clip was empty, it would automatically switch me to my rifle without me realising, it was so annoying seeing as it had ammo why it didn't just auto reload. What made it more annoying was when your rifle was completely empty, it didn't automatically switch to your pistol, oh no, no, no, that would be too convient for us now wouldn't it? There's also some enemies that can move around in the time fracture, they are also able to time dodge and can give you a more interesting fight.
There's a lot of exposition in this game, I love when games have it, but when main characters are talking, important parts of the story, if you pick up a collectable during, Jack will start talking about the collectable and the exposition continues! So Jack is speaking in two conversations at the same time and I'm now missing important parts of the story. Thanks, great job. The collectable dialogue should interrupt the story chatter and then let it continue after. In the first half of the game, there was this horrible, blurry, haze going on around characters when they were moving, it was genuinely making me feel sick and giving me a headache. Thankfully, it just seemed to be around in the first act. The loading was ridiculously long and the checkpoints felt bad. Sometimes I died and I go back to an earlier battle and die at the same but, only then for the checkpoint to load me in after that fight, the checkpoints weren't even the same. I even skipped a cutscene I already watched, after a checkpoint with caused the game to crash. Another thing I found really annoying was the time fractures. Every time Jack was about to die or some hazard was taking place, there was a convenient fractured that allowed you to escape. The hard difficulty wasn't too bad really, you could get overwhelmed in parts but the powers made it easy to persevere. The final battle had to be done in one go, but as long as you didn't play too brave, you wouldn't have had much of an issue.
Apparently, this started off as a sequel to Alan Wake, which I honestly would've much preferred. This isn't a bad game, but it's just too linear and lacking gameplay. The gameplay it has isn't even great. But the graphics, cast and performances are truly fantastic. I don't think it needed the TV show, they could've just done shorter cutscenes instead. I really liked the way they set up the sequel, whether it gets one we will have to see. I did quite enjoy this game, even if it sounds like I didn't, I was just massively let down with the final result. I mean, not being able to freeze time in a game with time manipulation powers, c'maaaan.
7.2/10
We play as Jack Joyce, better known as Shawn Ashmore who played Iceman in the Xmen film series. After a disastrous time machine experiment fails, Jack is gifted powers that allows him to manipulate time. Time fractures and will soon break if Jack is unable to fix the fracture. Jack's brother, Will, played by Dominic Monaghan, better known as Merry Brandybuck from Lord of the Rings, built the time machine. Jack's friend, Paul, played by Aidan Gillen better known as Little Finger from Game of Thrones, expands on Will's time machine and asks Jack to be there for a demonstration. When it fails, both Jack and Paul are gifted time powers. Paul believes time can't be fixed, leading the two time powered friends to now become enemies.
The story is really short, five chapters long that can easily be done in a few hours, the TV episodes are full twenty minute segments, though I enjoyed watching them, I could see how they could frustrate a player who just wanted to play the game. Some people featured heavily in the show, but practically didn't feature in the game, this was stupid because it felt like the game and show were following different people that just linked up, rather than following one story.
The cast is great, I knew most of them and they gave brilliant performances. Even the people I didn't know gave a great performance. The graphics are fantastic and the life-like appearances are scarily good. It's far too linear though, it doesn't feel like you're allowed to do anything except the story, it just felt so restricted. There's parts where you get to play as Paul, which I thought was really cool, but all you do is walk to an area, where you then get to make a choice that affected the story. I didn't understand why I got to make a decision as the bad guy, when I played as the good guy. I also felt that the choices weren't really that important, it all leads to the same ending, is that really giving you a choice?
You get some cool powers though. You can get a time sheild, time stop is a blast, which freezes an enemy and then let's you shoot bullets towards him and when it unfreezes, the bullets hit. There's time rush, which allows you to run in a slowed down world, you can takedown an enemy or run from falling debris with this. Time vision allows you to see enemies through wall, looks like heat vision. Time dodge allows you to quickly move away from enemies and their gunfire. What was really disapointing was that there was no power that completed stopped time, only when a time fracture occurred that happened. Even Timeshift let you freeze time. Jack was a just a normal guy, next he's some expert marksman? They should have let you briefly stop time and than be able to steal the enemies weapons or even subdue them when they were frozen. There should be some sort of stealth, freeze time and then sneak past the enemies, this would've fitted so much better I think.
The gun play is far from the best, but this is the only time when it really feels like a game, when you in action using your powers and guns. The platforming is really average and clunky, and the time fractures are a pain trying to get through some sequence. It's a cover-shooter that has no cover system! Jack sort of crouches behind things, but you can't move around in cover and you can't blind fire, I didn't enjoy the gun fights much at all. Something cool though, was when you killed the last enemy in the area, it did a slow motion kill so you always knew when it was clear. The pistol had unlimited ammo, but often when the clip was empty, it would automatically switch me to my rifle without me realising, it was so annoying seeing as it had ammo why it didn't just auto reload. What made it more annoying was when your rifle was completely empty, it didn't automatically switch to your pistol, oh no, no, no, that would be too convient for us now wouldn't it? There's also some enemies that can move around in the time fracture, they are also able to time dodge and can give you a more interesting fight.
There's a lot of exposition in this game, I love when games have it, but when main characters are talking, important parts of the story, if you pick up a collectable during, Jack will start talking about the collectable and the exposition continues! So Jack is speaking in two conversations at the same time and I'm now missing important parts of the story. Thanks, great job. The collectable dialogue should interrupt the story chatter and then let it continue after. In the first half of the game, there was this horrible, blurry, haze going on around characters when they were moving, it was genuinely making me feel sick and giving me a headache. Thankfully, it just seemed to be around in the first act. The loading was ridiculously long and the checkpoints felt bad. Sometimes I died and I go back to an earlier battle and die at the same but, only then for the checkpoint to load me in after that fight, the checkpoints weren't even the same. I even skipped a cutscene I already watched, after a checkpoint with caused the game to crash. Another thing I found really annoying was the time fractures. Every time Jack was about to die or some hazard was taking place, there was a convenient fractured that allowed you to escape. The hard difficulty wasn't too bad really, you could get overwhelmed in parts but the powers made it easy to persevere. The final battle had to be done in one go, but as long as you didn't play too brave, you wouldn't have had much of an issue.
Apparently, this started off as a sequel to Alan Wake, which I honestly would've much preferred. This isn't a bad game, but it's just too linear and lacking gameplay. The gameplay it has isn't even great. But the graphics, cast and performances are truly fantastic. I don't think it needed the TV show, they could've just done shorter cutscenes instead. I really liked the way they set up the sequel, whether it gets one we will have to see. I did quite enjoy this game, even if it sounds like I didn't, I was just massively let down with the final result. I mean, not being able to freeze time in a game with time manipulation powers, c'maaaan.
7.2/10
Sunday 11 December 2016
Sniper Elite 3 (Xbox One)
The third installment of the Sniper Elite series released in 2014 and is a slight improvement on the predecessor. There isn't really a whole lot of difference, but I enjoyed this one slightly more and the graphics look sharper, but also a slight cartoony look. Set in Africa, prior to the events of the previous game, it's now sunny and bright as oppose to the dull, bleakness we had previously.
We play as the same character again, I forget his name as he's not very memorable. He's still as bland as he ever was, the story again is nothing special. The missions are fairly decent and are much more enjoyable with a friend in coop. The xray kill cams are back and they are even more beautiful, it's a shame again that I barely got to see any, I have no idea how to trigger them.
You can now use all the of the d-pad to switch your weapons, rather than just scroll through. There's an inventory wheel, so you can now look and pick from your whole inventory at once, this was a great improvement as you have a lot of equipment. There's a new alert system that pops up over an enemies head when they see you, it shows yellow when they can see something and turns red when you have been spotted. You can now do a relocation by running away and hiding if you alert the enemies, so you can try your hand at stealth again. Using your binoculars to tag enemies, vehicles and explosives was a brilliant way to keep track of everything and plan your mission better.
I think this game is boring to play one, but with a partner it's made much more fun, they can help you out too if you get in a tough spot. There's now a wave mode where you and a friend can take out hordes of enemies. There's an online multiplayer that I didn't like too much, mainly because everyone else was a sniper so we were all just camping. It wasn't very fun to play.
The reviving was much better but the issue of you character going prone after was still present, it always caught me off guard and usually lead me back into trouble. The sprinting looks ridiculous, his torso can move around but his legs always look forward, it looks so dumb in an otherwise well done game. On one mission, when protecting an AI, he stopped moving and he needed to escape the area to finish the mission, this lead to having to restart the checkpoint. Even worse, when at the end of a mission, the cutscene wouldn't trigger meaning we had to restart the whole mission again.
I enjoyed Sniper 3 much more than 2, doing all the optional objectives made the game fun and when me and my partner tried to be really stealthy, we communicated and really worked on not getting caught and it was fun. Getting caught was always a nightmare and being in gunfights is not what you want in this one. I'll be investing in Sniper Elite 4, as long as it has a coop campaign. Also, show more goddamn xray kill cams!
7.1/10
We play as the same character again, I forget his name as he's not very memorable. He's still as bland as he ever was, the story again is nothing special. The missions are fairly decent and are much more enjoyable with a friend in coop. The xray kill cams are back and they are even more beautiful, it's a shame again that I barely got to see any, I have no idea how to trigger them.
You can now use all the of the d-pad to switch your weapons, rather than just scroll through. There's an inventory wheel, so you can now look and pick from your whole inventory at once, this was a great improvement as you have a lot of equipment. There's a new alert system that pops up over an enemies head when they see you, it shows yellow when they can see something and turns red when you have been spotted. You can now do a relocation by running away and hiding if you alert the enemies, so you can try your hand at stealth again. Using your binoculars to tag enemies, vehicles and explosives was a brilliant way to keep track of everything and plan your mission better.
I think this game is boring to play one, but with a partner it's made much more fun, they can help you out too if you get in a tough spot. There's now a wave mode where you and a friend can take out hordes of enemies. There's an online multiplayer that I didn't like too much, mainly because everyone else was a sniper so we were all just camping. It wasn't very fun to play.
The reviving was much better but the issue of you character going prone after was still present, it always caught me off guard and usually lead me back into trouble. The sprinting looks ridiculous, his torso can move around but his legs always look forward, it looks so dumb in an otherwise well done game. On one mission, when protecting an AI, he stopped moving and he needed to escape the area to finish the mission, this lead to having to restart the checkpoint. Even worse, when at the end of a mission, the cutscene wouldn't trigger meaning we had to restart the whole mission again.
I enjoyed Sniper 3 much more than 2, doing all the optional objectives made the game fun and when me and my partner tried to be really stealthy, we communicated and really worked on not getting caught and it was fun. Getting caught was always a nightmare and being in gunfights is not what you want in this one. I'll be investing in Sniper Elite 4, as long as it has a coop campaign. Also, show more goddamn xray kill cams!
7.1/10
Sunday 4 December 2016
Sniper Ghost Warrior (Xbox 360)
Sniper Ghost Warrior released in 2010 and is pretty much a bargain bin title. For a VERY cheap price this game can be fun. I got this game cheap, but I still thought it was garbage. How this game has two sequels is crazy, maybe they're better, but stick with Sniper Elite in the sniping genre.
There are only five acts and they're so boring. Even though sniper is in the title, you play as man with machine guns at times. Your playable character swaps out with another guy, but I didn't realise I was playing as someone else for a while after. There sniping was fun, but it was too easy, same with the silenced pistol. It was a one shot kill even on the hardest difficulty, but you could play stealthily with the silencers. The story was boring and I never cared about the characters, or even remember their names.
The crouch movement was ridiculously slow, little things on the floor were a nightmare to walk over, little rocks would stop you and you'd have to go around. When I was on top of a building I had to snipe machine gun enemies, somehow they were more accurate than me and I had to keep hiding away. The checkpoints were awful and often loaded me in front of enemies, terrible graphics, uninspired voice acting and it was just so boring. There was a multiplayer that simply shouldn't exist.
Some good, but very little here. Enemies appeared as red arrows on your map, so you always knew where they were, but they stayed on your mini map until they were dead, so you could be long gone from that area and they still show. There's bullet cams which are always cool to watch and there's concentration mode which slows down time to help you shoot better. You get a tonne of sniper ammo so you don't need to stealthily scrounge for some.
Do you want to know how bad this game is? When you climb a ladder, your gun is still pointed, you literally walk up the ladders like they're stairs. You can walk right past an enemy and they won't spot you, but they'll see you across a bridge. Sometimes aiming right at an enemy wouldn't kill them, but if you didn't change your aim and kept shooting, eventually they would die. On easy difficulty, the machine had no recoil, on hard the machine had no control and would be aiming at the sky so fast after shooting. What kind of game changes the gun play depending on difficultly? If you can, play through the whole game and just watch the awful ending cutscene. Four guys all walking together with explosions going off in the background in slow motion, they look like jackasses and this is how it ends. It's actually laughable.
I seriously don't know how there are more in this series, I'm really intrigued to try them and see if they improve. I wouldn't waste your time on this one, but you have to see the last mission and cutscene, YouTube it at least. Sniper Garbage Warrior.
4.8/10
There are only five acts and they're so boring. Even though sniper is in the title, you play as man with machine guns at times. Your playable character swaps out with another guy, but I didn't realise I was playing as someone else for a while after. There sniping was fun, but it was too easy, same with the silenced pistol. It was a one shot kill even on the hardest difficulty, but you could play stealthily with the silencers. The story was boring and I never cared about the characters, or even remember their names.
The crouch movement was ridiculously slow, little things on the floor were a nightmare to walk over, little rocks would stop you and you'd have to go around. When I was on top of a building I had to snipe machine gun enemies, somehow they were more accurate than me and I had to keep hiding away. The checkpoints were awful and often loaded me in front of enemies, terrible graphics, uninspired voice acting and it was just so boring. There was a multiplayer that simply shouldn't exist.
Some good, but very little here. Enemies appeared as red arrows on your map, so you always knew where they were, but they stayed on your mini map until they were dead, so you could be long gone from that area and they still show. There's bullet cams which are always cool to watch and there's concentration mode which slows down time to help you shoot better. You get a tonne of sniper ammo so you don't need to stealthily scrounge for some.
Do you want to know how bad this game is? When you climb a ladder, your gun is still pointed, you literally walk up the ladders like they're stairs. You can walk right past an enemy and they won't spot you, but they'll see you across a bridge. Sometimes aiming right at an enemy wouldn't kill them, but if you didn't change your aim and kept shooting, eventually they would die. On easy difficulty, the machine had no recoil, on hard the machine had no control and would be aiming at the sky so fast after shooting. What kind of game changes the gun play depending on difficultly? If you can, play through the whole game and just watch the awful ending cutscene. Four guys all walking together with explosions going off in the background in slow motion, they look like jackasses and this is how it ends. It's actually laughable.
I seriously don't know how there are more in this series, I'm really intrigued to try them and see if they improve. I wouldn't waste your time on this one, but you have to see the last mission and cutscene, YouTube it at least. Sniper Garbage Warrior.
4.8/10
Sunday 27 November 2016
The Last of Us (PS3)
The Last of Us released in 2013 and when I saw it at E3, I got a PS3 just for this. Another fantastic game from Naughty Dog, whether it becomes a series of games I don't know, but I certainly hope.
The story takes place in 2013 where a mutant fungus starts to change people into infected zombie-types. After the prologue the game shoots twenty years ahead and we see the devastation the infection has had on the world. We play as Joel, brilliantly portrayed by Troy Baker as he tries to get Ellie, amazingly portrayed by Ashley Johnson, to a group called the Fireflies as they look for a cure. Ellie has a bite, but is immune to the infection, as she doesn't turn which happens quickly. There's a bunch of characters who pop up during the story, Tess, Bill and David stand out and are also fantastically voiced. Not everyone you meet is friendly, as well as the infected, the people are the ones to really fear.
The game is brutal, intense and very mature, it's video game that is definitely not for kids. Whether you're trying not to get spotted or hordes of enemies are after you, there's always potential danger wherever you go. The stealth is great and listen mode let's you see where the enemies are positioned, there's even stealth takedowns so you can try and thin the herd and stay quiet. The gunplay is difficult to get used to but it's good, they don't want you to feel safe even with guns and once you've alerted the enemies, you definitely aren't safe. As well as guns, you can fight with your fists and pummel the enemies if your ammo has depleted. You can also craft medkits, explosives, molotovs and more. You can even use melee weapons that will soon break if you find them. Granted this stuff isn't as common as you'd like, ammo and items are very scarce and it's always a celebration when you find some.
The cutscenes are beautiful to watch, these are some of the best graphics I've ever seen, you can see the emotion in their face and hear it in their performance. The characters are amazing and so is the development, we see both Ellie and Joel over the course of this game, which spans through all four seasons. It's a powerful game, emotional, intensity, fearful, so many feelings come out of this one. The wonderful music that fits perfectly is another stand out. It's a challenging game with five difficulties. The higher you play, the more scarce the items, you don't even have listen mode, Ellie can tell you where enemies are though and she can even pass you ammo if she finds it. The people you're with will also contribute to killing your attackers, rather than just idly watch you get your ass kicked.
Some of the best collectables I've seen, they're notes and messages from other people and they're really informative and can even give you combinations to safes and doors. The on the rails intro let's you see firsthand the world's demise to the infection as you drive through the streets. You have to plan your battles, once you're caught they will come at you, if you aren't prepared you're gonna have to use bricks and battles for distractions and use your bombs and ammo well, basically, don't shoot unless you'll definitely hit them, you'll regret firing so much if you miss. The sound work is brilliant, from Joel's loud sprinting footsteps to enemies distant voices as they walk around the area. Don't miss the optional conversations as they give you more insight to the world, all the dialogue is worth listening to, so make sure you keep your allies close to hear what they're saying. Ellie will even bust out some of her jokes if you keep an eye out during the quieter moments, the chemistry between the characters is entertaining to watch.
There's almost nothing wrong with this game. There's a decent multiplayer that is difficult to get used to but so rewarding when you manage to get the best of another player, but it just seems out of place, maybe they could've put in something else that would've been more beneficial to the game. Some of the overgrown vegetation looked awful when you went too close to it, 2D plants looked terrible, but it wasn't really an issue. A few texture glitches and environmental pop outs here and there, nothing too daunting.
This is without a doubt the best game I've ever played, and from experience I can justify buying a console for this game. Naughty Dog never fail to impress me and this time they blew it out of the park, I think it's impossible to give a game a perfect 10, but this is the closest I've ever been and probably will be, maybe The Last of Us sequel could be the first if it happens. Go buy this game, go borrow it off a buddy and if you don't play games, watch someone who does play it, it's better than most movies you'll ever see. This game is worth experiencing no matter if you're a gamer or not. Best. Game. Ever.
9.5/10
The story takes place in 2013 where a mutant fungus starts to change people into infected zombie-types. After the prologue the game shoots twenty years ahead and we see the devastation the infection has had on the world. We play as Joel, brilliantly portrayed by Troy Baker as he tries to get Ellie, amazingly portrayed by Ashley Johnson, to a group called the Fireflies as they look for a cure. Ellie has a bite, but is immune to the infection, as she doesn't turn which happens quickly. There's a bunch of characters who pop up during the story, Tess, Bill and David stand out and are also fantastically voiced. Not everyone you meet is friendly, as well as the infected, the people are the ones to really fear.
The game is brutal, intense and very mature, it's video game that is definitely not for kids. Whether you're trying not to get spotted or hordes of enemies are after you, there's always potential danger wherever you go. The stealth is great and listen mode let's you see where the enemies are positioned, there's even stealth takedowns so you can try and thin the herd and stay quiet. The gunplay is difficult to get used to but it's good, they don't want you to feel safe even with guns and once you've alerted the enemies, you definitely aren't safe. As well as guns, you can fight with your fists and pummel the enemies if your ammo has depleted. You can also craft medkits, explosives, molotovs and more. You can even use melee weapons that will soon break if you find them. Granted this stuff isn't as common as you'd like, ammo and items are very scarce and it's always a celebration when you find some.
The cutscenes are beautiful to watch, these are some of the best graphics I've ever seen, you can see the emotion in their face and hear it in their performance. The characters are amazing and so is the development, we see both Ellie and Joel over the course of this game, which spans through all four seasons. It's a powerful game, emotional, intensity, fearful, so many feelings come out of this one. The wonderful music that fits perfectly is another stand out. It's a challenging game with five difficulties. The higher you play, the more scarce the items, you don't even have listen mode, Ellie can tell you where enemies are though and she can even pass you ammo if she finds it. The people you're with will also contribute to killing your attackers, rather than just idly watch you get your ass kicked.
Some of the best collectables I've seen, they're notes and messages from other people and they're really informative and can even give you combinations to safes and doors. The on the rails intro let's you see firsthand the world's demise to the infection as you drive through the streets. You have to plan your battles, once you're caught they will come at you, if you aren't prepared you're gonna have to use bricks and battles for distractions and use your bombs and ammo well, basically, don't shoot unless you'll definitely hit them, you'll regret firing so much if you miss. The sound work is brilliant, from Joel's loud sprinting footsteps to enemies distant voices as they walk around the area. Don't miss the optional conversations as they give you more insight to the world, all the dialogue is worth listening to, so make sure you keep your allies close to hear what they're saying. Ellie will even bust out some of her jokes if you keep an eye out during the quieter moments, the chemistry between the characters is entertaining to watch.
There's almost nothing wrong with this game. There's a decent multiplayer that is difficult to get used to but so rewarding when you manage to get the best of another player, but it just seems out of place, maybe they could've put in something else that would've been more beneficial to the game. Some of the overgrown vegetation looked awful when you went too close to it, 2D plants looked terrible, but it wasn't really an issue. A few texture glitches and environmental pop outs here and there, nothing too daunting.
This is without a doubt the best game I've ever played, and from experience I can justify buying a console for this game. Naughty Dog never fail to impress me and this time they blew it out of the park, I think it's impossible to give a game a perfect 10, but this is the closest I've ever been and probably will be, maybe The Last of Us sequel could be the first if it happens. Go buy this game, go borrow it off a buddy and if you don't play games, watch someone who does play it, it's better than most movies you'll ever see. This game is worth experiencing no matter if you're a gamer or not. Best. Game. Ever.
9.5/10
Sunday 20 November 2016
The Walking Dead: Michonne Telltale Series (Xbox One)
Telltale have certainly became a high profile developer over the past few years, with their episodic games based on popular TV shows and other games. One of their well know games, The Walking Dead series is my favourite and they decided to release the Michonne episodes to keep us anticipated for series three of The Walking Dead... or was it a cash in? That's been done before, releasing a Walking Dead game with popular characters.
Not much is known about Michonne in the TV show, other than she's a bad ass with a sword. This story follows Michonne before she appears in the show, it's cool to get more back story on a very closed character. Telltale's cartoony-comic graphics fit Walking Dead brilliantly and makes the comic come to life. One thing they do every game is make an interesting story and characters you care about. This makes you think about the choices you're given as Telltale's story changes based on what you pick, or so they say.
The Michonne series was only three episodes long, opposed to the five we usually get. Each episode felt short too, the story seemed to be over in a flash, I felt like there wasn't enough time for the characters to develop and how I felt about them. Some of the characters had potential, but three episodes wasn't long enough for them. The performances were brilliant as they always are, Michonne was perfectly portrayed. I tried to play like I thought she would act, trying not to get attached to anyone. It's always hard not to in Telltale games, but it seemed I was destined to make friend with certain characters and enemies of others.
The intro was fantastic, images of the comic appeared in the background as some cool music played. They definitely got their intros from Tales From the Borderlands. The story was really good and left me wishing they had more episodes in between so they could have built up the final battle more. The engine runs so much smoother with the recent games, there's a lot less stopping and starting, but it is still present.
Michonne had visions during the game, I felt they used these too much and they often went on too long. I wanted the game to take place more in the present and not in sequences that weren't real, the game was too short for them. My issues with Telltale games were still here too, I still felt like my choices didn't really matter and what happened would've happened either way, even if it just delayed something to a later episode. You still have to interact with the right object to trigger the rest of the story, this can lead to having to interact with a load of pointless objects in the hope it takes you further. I do love Telltale however and I'm always excited for their upcoming games and announcements.
This was just a miniseries that probably won't go any further. I'm just patiently waiting for season three of The Walking Dead and I hope making this didn't mean they delayed it, because this wasn't really necessary, but I did enjoy it still.
7.3/10
Not much is known about Michonne in the TV show, other than she's a bad ass with a sword. This story follows Michonne before she appears in the show, it's cool to get more back story on a very closed character. Telltale's cartoony-comic graphics fit Walking Dead brilliantly and makes the comic come to life. One thing they do every game is make an interesting story and characters you care about. This makes you think about the choices you're given as Telltale's story changes based on what you pick, or so they say.
The Michonne series was only three episodes long, opposed to the five we usually get. Each episode felt short too, the story seemed to be over in a flash, I felt like there wasn't enough time for the characters to develop and how I felt about them. Some of the characters had potential, but three episodes wasn't long enough for them. The performances were brilliant as they always are, Michonne was perfectly portrayed. I tried to play like I thought she would act, trying not to get attached to anyone. It's always hard not to in Telltale games, but it seemed I was destined to make friend with certain characters and enemies of others.
The intro was fantastic, images of the comic appeared in the background as some cool music played. They definitely got their intros from Tales From the Borderlands. The story was really good and left me wishing they had more episodes in between so they could have built up the final battle more. The engine runs so much smoother with the recent games, there's a lot less stopping and starting, but it is still present.
Michonne had visions during the game, I felt they used these too much and they often went on too long. I wanted the game to take place more in the present and not in sequences that weren't real, the game was too short for them. My issues with Telltale games were still here too, I still felt like my choices didn't really matter and what happened would've happened either way, even if it just delayed something to a later episode. You still have to interact with the right object to trigger the rest of the story, this can lead to having to interact with a load of pointless objects in the hope it takes you further. I do love Telltale however and I'm always excited for their upcoming games and announcements.
This was just a miniseries that probably won't go any further. I'm just patiently waiting for season three of The Walking Dead and I hope making this didn't mean they delayed it, because this wasn't really necessary, but I did enjoy it still.
7.3/10
Sunday 13 November 2016
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (PS3)
Uncharted 3 released in 2011 and was one of the first PS3 games I owned, I was pretty late to the PlayStation 3 party. I did however wait to play it after the first two of course. It was so great getting to play through the whole trilogy so soon after each other. I loved the previous games and this was no different, Naughty Dog are so consistent in creating games, it's frightening.
The intro was so great, a bar fight. Great camera work and improved combat made it so enjoyable to play and watch. All your favourites are back and we have a new friend, Charlie Cutter. Cutter was without a doubt my favourite character in the whole series and it's a shame how little he was in the game. The villains were pretty good and there was even a fisticuffs boss fight at the end which really suited this game. This is probably the most humorous game of the series, Cutter and the gangs dialogue works so well and they seem so real in their conversation. I found myself slowly playing the story so I could hear all the dialogue without accidentally triggering the rest of the story.
It looks stunning, the graphics are so much sharper. The beautiful scenery, the well designed levels and the cutscenes are fantastic to watch. The combat has improved, being able to break grabs and throw enemies back to get some more space. You can even hit the enemies with near by weapons, which act as a one hit kill. We also get to see how a you Nate and Sully meet, I loved it, it was a great chapter and I wished there was more to their back story. It's action packed, there's never a dull moment in this one, escaping a burning building, a capsizing boat, a horde of Killer spiders, chasing enemy vehicles on a horse, there's much more too.
The main villian was an interesting one, but I feel they were underused and the sub villain, who was quite bland starred far more. There was a dream sequence that was different, but it ending up going on too long. Grenade spam and bum rushing enemies made the hard difficulty just feel cheap rather than challenging. Enemy spawns also felt cheap as they would spawn behind me and I wouldn't know until they practically killed me. It was very difficult to leave hand to hand combat if you engaged it and there was another enemy shooting you, the only way I could leave it was if I was gunned down. While in cover, a grenade landed and I left cover and tried to roll away, but I was just put back in cover and blew up, rolling and cover were the same button so this happened frequently. I couldn't switch shoulders when shooting and thought they removed the feature, it turns out it was set to off which baffled me, it didn't make sense why it wasn't already on like the others. There weren't many glitches but one puzzle, a gear got stuck when I took it off the wall but it stayed on, so I had to restart it
This was a great installment to the series and it was great to see our favourite characters again and some new ones, I only wish there was more backstory and Cutter. I'm so glad the series didn't stop here and Uncharted 4 will surely be another wonderful addition to the series from Naughty Dog.
8.3/10
The intro was so great, a bar fight. Great camera work and improved combat made it so enjoyable to play and watch. All your favourites are back and we have a new friend, Charlie Cutter. Cutter was without a doubt my favourite character in the whole series and it's a shame how little he was in the game. The villains were pretty good and there was even a fisticuffs boss fight at the end which really suited this game. This is probably the most humorous game of the series, Cutter and the gangs dialogue works so well and they seem so real in their conversation. I found myself slowly playing the story so I could hear all the dialogue without accidentally triggering the rest of the story.
It looks stunning, the graphics are so much sharper. The beautiful scenery, the well designed levels and the cutscenes are fantastic to watch. The combat has improved, being able to break grabs and throw enemies back to get some more space. You can even hit the enemies with near by weapons, which act as a one hit kill. We also get to see how a you Nate and Sully meet, I loved it, it was a great chapter and I wished there was more to their back story. It's action packed, there's never a dull moment in this one, escaping a burning building, a capsizing boat, a horde of Killer spiders, chasing enemy vehicles on a horse, there's much more too.
The main villian was an interesting one, but I feel they were underused and the sub villain, who was quite bland starred far more. There was a dream sequence that was different, but it ending up going on too long. Grenade spam and bum rushing enemies made the hard difficulty just feel cheap rather than challenging. Enemy spawns also felt cheap as they would spawn behind me and I wouldn't know until they practically killed me. It was very difficult to leave hand to hand combat if you engaged it and there was another enemy shooting you, the only way I could leave it was if I was gunned down. While in cover, a grenade landed and I left cover and tried to roll away, but I was just put back in cover and blew up, rolling and cover were the same button so this happened frequently. I couldn't switch shoulders when shooting and thought they removed the feature, it turns out it was set to off which baffled me, it didn't make sense why it wasn't already on like the others. There weren't many glitches but one puzzle, a gear got stuck when I took it off the wall but it stayed on, so I had to restart it
This was a great installment to the series and it was great to see our favourite characters again and some new ones, I only wish there was more backstory and Cutter. I'm so glad the series didn't stop here and Uncharted 4 will surely be another wonderful addition to the series from Naughty Dog.
8.3/10
Sunday 6 November 2016
Mafia 3 (Xbox One)
Mafia 3, yes, this is apparently a Mafia game... Set in 1968, around twenty years after the events of Mafia 2, we are taken to New Bordeaux, heavily based on New Orleans. We take control of Lincoln Clay, a Vietnam veteran returning home after the war, very similar to Mafia 2s intro. The game is also set in the present during some cutscenes, they're shown as a documentary style about the things Clay had done, this was really cool and set the tone for the things that would occur. When the main menu shows and All Along the Watchtower plays, you're fooled into thinking "This is going to be amazing", from the start, you're built up for disappointment.
Clay is part of the Black Mob, after a tragedy occurs early on, he sets out for revenge on the Mafia after being saved by his friend, Father James and has help from John Donovan, a CIA handler, in tracking the mafia. During Clay's pursuit, he makes three friends, well, they're more acquaintances, they are underbosses who you can hand out districts to when you take over a territory. One of whom, is our old friend Vito Scaletta from Mafia 2. I was duped into thinking this was creating and building your own mafia, all we got is three uninteresting characters whining and bitching about how they want the territory. Your "mafia" is effectively three separate gangs temporarily working together to take over the city, Godfather 2 made you feel like you were building your own mafia, this didn't feel like a mob at all and it was so annoying listening to the gangs leaders moaning constantly.
The graphics are outstanding, the emotion in the cutscenes is perfect and the lip syncing is incredible. As well as the cutscenes being the best thing in the game, was the music, all you have to do is listen and you'll agree. The lighting looks really nice and the nights are pitch black and often difficult to see, but it looks realistic. However, sometimes the weather and lighting was off key, I could literally drive back and forth at one point and literally watch it change from day and night. A cool thing when driving, was there was a rear view mirror at the top, so you could always see behind even when driving forward. Unfortunately here, the view in the mirror looked awful, everything looked unrendered as you drove past, making the game look poor.
The gameplay was great, shooting, grenade throwing and switching cover all worked smoothly. The new stealth and takedowns were brilliant, you could play through the majority of the game in stealth if you chose to, but that was also a bad thing, it's a Mafia game so it shouldn't really have focused so much on the stealth, as good as it was. There was also the focus ability that let you see points of interest and enemies through walls, this was so useful and great to use, but again felt out of place in this game. Shooting from vehicles was a nice new feature that was missing from the previous game. The hard difficulty wasn't really challenging because the stealth was so good, I never really got in to many gun fights. I only died when I didn't play smart, not using cover and running out in the open.
There were side missions but they were boring and repetitive, but if you do a fair amount, you can find out what happened to Joe Barbaro from Mafia 2, a question that's been on all of our minds these past six years. You can feed bodies to crocodiles if they're near, this is a unique way of hiding bodies. Even the radio signal would get distorted in tunnels, the combat was different and easier than the brawls in the previous game. You get some decent perks from the underbosses, you can get an arms dealer, a car delivery and even a hit squad to help you out. The best moments of the game would be when a well known song would kick in during the story missions, they made the game feel alive and excited to play the upcoming mission. There's also a choice ending, but I won't say much more other than it's kind of got some replayability.
This may be a harsh section as I played it on release, but there were so many bugs. Most games have lots of bugs when they first release but I had so many, some were funny though. A car drove past with both front doors open, two police cars blew up and flew up really high, some cutscenes featured the same character twice, one was talking and moving and the other was still as a rock. I tried to take over a car and crashed into an invisible wall, it turns out it was just a lamppost that hadn't loaded yet. Waypoints wouldn't set, my brand new car wouldn't start and the game randomly shut down, but that was only once. Bugs for a brand new release however are inevitable, but I gotta mention them.
The game starts off so well but quickly deflates. It becomes repetitive as you do the same thing over and over before you get to do a story mission. The game was only interesting during the story, but we had to do repetitive tasks just to unlock more of the story. An issue I had with the story was you were given a name of a person to kill and why so you did. No character really had a part in the story until it was time to kill them, I felt like I was being told to kill instead of Clay wanting to for revenge. There was a police awareness bar that was practically pointless, I never once paid attention to it. During the whole game you don't get to change your clothes, once you see Clay, he wears the same outfit throughout. When I did a stealth takedown on a cop, it alerted all the cops despite me not being in their site. The hit squad was good but a lot of the time they would just show up and if I weren't already in combat, they would just leave without attacking anyone. The music was great but the radio would often repeat so I wouldn't get to hear the rest of the great songs on the soundtrack. The developers went the wrong way on this game, it's not a bad game, but it's not a Mafia game, it's a GTA clone. It suffered because of that, it should've been released under a different title because it didn't feel like a Mafia game in the slightest.
I loved Mafia 2, when 3 was announced I was so hyped and looking forward to it so much. It looks and plays great, but it's not a Mafia game. If that's the best they can do in six years, I'm disappointed. There was so much potential here and it shows, they just went the wrong way about executing it. I was under the impression I got to lead my own mafia, but what I got was three giant babies crying for their juice. This could have potentially been 9/10 had they not made a GTA clone, I'd love a Mafia 4 done right.
7.5/10
Clay is part of the Black Mob, after a tragedy occurs early on, he sets out for revenge on the Mafia after being saved by his friend, Father James and has help from John Donovan, a CIA handler, in tracking the mafia. During Clay's pursuit, he makes three friends, well, they're more acquaintances, they are underbosses who you can hand out districts to when you take over a territory. One of whom, is our old friend Vito Scaletta from Mafia 2. I was duped into thinking this was creating and building your own mafia, all we got is three uninteresting characters whining and bitching about how they want the territory. Your "mafia" is effectively three separate gangs temporarily working together to take over the city, Godfather 2 made you feel like you were building your own mafia, this didn't feel like a mob at all and it was so annoying listening to the gangs leaders moaning constantly.
The graphics are outstanding, the emotion in the cutscenes is perfect and the lip syncing is incredible. As well as the cutscenes being the best thing in the game, was the music, all you have to do is listen and you'll agree. The lighting looks really nice and the nights are pitch black and often difficult to see, but it looks realistic. However, sometimes the weather and lighting was off key, I could literally drive back and forth at one point and literally watch it change from day and night. A cool thing when driving, was there was a rear view mirror at the top, so you could always see behind even when driving forward. Unfortunately here, the view in the mirror looked awful, everything looked unrendered as you drove past, making the game look poor.
The gameplay was great, shooting, grenade throwing and switching cover all worked smoothly. The new stealth and takedowns were brilliant, you could play through the majority of the game in stealth if you chose to, but that was also a bad thing, it's a Mafia game so it shouldn't really have focused so much on the stealth, as good as it was. There was also the focus ability that let you see points of interest and enemies through walls, this was so useful and great to use, but again felt out of place in this game. Shooting from vehicles was a nice new feature that was missing from the previous game. The hard difficulty wasn't really challenging because the stealth was so good, I never really got in to many gun fights. I only died when I didn't play smart, not using cover and running out in the open.
There were side missions but they were boring and repetitive, but if you do a fair amount, you can find out what happened to Joe Barbaro from Mafia 2, a question that's been on all of our minds these past six years. You can feed bodies to crocodiles if they're near, this is a unique way of hiding bodies. Even the radio signal would get distorted in tunnels, the combat was different and easier than the brawls in the previous game. You get some decent perks from the underbosses, you can get an arms dealer, a car delivery and even a hit squad to help you out. The best moments of the game would be when a well known song would kick in during the story missions, they made the game feel alive and excited to play the upcoming mission. There's also a choice ending, but I won't say much more other than it's kind of got some replayability.
This may be a harsh section as I played it on release, but there were so many bugs. Most games have lots of bugs when they first release but I had so many, some were funny though. A car drove past with both front doors open, two police cars blew up and flew up really high, some cutscenes featured the same character twice, one was talking and moving and the other was still as a rock. I tried to take over a car and crashed into an invisible wall, it turns out it was just a lamppost that hadn't loaded yet. Waypoints wouldn't set, my brand new car wouldn't start and the game randomly shut down, but that was only once. Bugs for a brand new release however are inevitable, but I gotta mention them.
The game starts off so well but quickly deflates. It becomes repetitive as you do the same thing over and over before you get to do a story mission. The game was only interesting during the story, but we had to do repetitive tasks just to unlock more of the story. An issue I had with the story was you were given a name of a person to kill and why so you did. No character really had a part in the story until it was time to kill them, I felt like I was being told to kill instead of Clay wanting to for revenge. There was a police awareness bar that was practically pointless, I never once paid attention to it. During the whole game you don't get to change your clothes, once you see Clay, he wears the same outfit throughout. When I did a stealth takedown on a cop, it alerted all the cops despite me not being in their site. The hit squad was good but a lot of the time they would just show up and if I weren't already in combat, they would just leave without attacking anyone. The music was great but the radio would often repeat so I wouldn't get to hear the rest of the great songs on the soundtrack. The developers went the wrong way on this game, it's not a bad game, but it's not a Mafia game, it's a GTA clone. It suffered because of that, it should've been released under a different title because it didn't feel like a Mafia game in the slightest.
I loved Mafia 2, when 3 was announced I was so hyped and looking forward to it so much. It looks and plays great, but it's not a Mafia game. If that's the best they can do in six years, I'm disappointed. There was so much potential here and it shows, they just went the wrong way about executing it. I was under the impression I got to lead my own mafia, but what I got was three giant babies crying for their juice. This could have potentially been 9/10 had they not made a GTA clone, I'd love a Mafia 4 done right.
7.5/10
Sunday 30 October 2016
The Amazing Spider-Man (Xbox 360)
Ahh Spidey, I've missed you old buddy, old pal. We all love a Spider-Man game, as they were the best superhero games... until the Batman Arkham series showed up. It's not even worrying when a Spider-Man movie game is released as Spider-Man 2 was arguably the best SM game around. The Amazing Spider-Man movie however, sucked. The game, not so much.
What I liked about the game, was that it wasn't just a game of the movie, it sort of expanded on it. It seemed to take place straight after the movie, so it was all new missions and not playing levels from the movie. The story was about all new human cross species, just like the Lizard. This was great as the game tied in Rhino and Scorpion, some of Spider-Man's popular villians. As it was a movie game, the graphics were awful, but, Spider-Man himself looked great, his suit sparkled in a dull game, the voice actor of Peter Parker did a great job too. The game looked great in daylight, the sun and lighting looked wonderful, as did the night, it's a shame they didn't really try with the other character models.
There's plenty to do outside the story, albeit mostly boring. There's time trials, saving civilians, secret lab missions and a lot more. It's all repetitive though and only worth doing to get better upgrades. The combat is pretty decent, it's a poor man's Batman Arkham combat, but that combat is so good, even a shoddy version is decent. Even though Spider-Man isn't often stealthy, you can stealthily take out enemies and it's always good to use stealth to make it easier for yourself. The problem was stealth takedowns could be really slow animations, causing you to be detected and making stealth attacks utterly useless.
The camera angles were awful, Spider-Man is very fast at swinging, climbing and fighting, the camera just can't keep up and is flailing about. The hard difficulty wasn't too bad, it would just take a full minute for your health to recover. There was nothing worse swinging around in circles, surrounded by enemies, waiting for your health to recover and then dying. It wasn't really hard, it was just ridiculous trying to recover your health. Ninety percent of the game had you traversing the sewers or laboratories, you'd be constantly in either if these and felt you'd been there many times, there was no diversity in where the game took you. The open city boss battles were probably the best bits, as there were seemingly no limits on how far you could go in the city during them, the cross species boss fights always felt the same, just in a different enclosed area.
This game causes a lot of frustration too, constant indicators about a comic book collectable being insight, as there was 700 of these atrocities, it was made even worse by the fact you'd press the button to fly directly to it, only to find out you pressed it too late and Spider-Man would start flying somewhere completely off track. This was the same for attempting stealth, it would suddenly switch to web strike, which would alert all enemies. When completing side missions, the screen would fade to black and load you near where you started the mission, then sometimes it wouldn't load you and you could freely play, it was annoying not knowing whether the game would let you start travelling to your next destination or if it was going to cut you off and load you, it was so inconsistent.
There were some nice features though, the web rush was cool, it would let you slow time and let you choose where to send Spidey. The beautiful red and blue suit would rip and tear the more combat you entered and you could always repair your suit by going back to the safehouse. Stan Lee even made a cameo in the game and was even a playable costume, why wouldn't you want to web-sling as Stan Lee? However, there were more problems, long loading, phone call story dialogue repeated after every death until you proceeded with the story, bad checkpoints that lead to unskippabke cutscenes, Spider-Man not casting a new web to continue swinging no matter how many times you pressed him too only for him to decide to as he practically swung down to the ground.
Spider-Man games are always something I enjoy, I grew up with him and Spider-Man on the PS1 was the first game I ever completed. I'm very happy to see Spider-Man is still around in the video game industry and I'm very excited for the upcoming PS4 game. Movie games are never really impressive and this was a game of a pretty poor movie, but the game took a nice turn by continuing the story of the movie. I'm definitely gonna give the Amazing Spider-Man 2 game a try as the movie was also better than the first too.
6.5/10
What I liked about the game, was that it wasn't just a game of the movie, it sort of expanded on it. It seemed to take place straight after the movie, so it was all new missions and not playing levels from the movie. The story was about all new human cross species, just like the Lizard. This was great as the game tied in Rhino and Scorpion, some of Spider-Man's popular villians. As it was a movie game, the graphics were awful, but, Spider-Man himself looked great, his suit sparkled in a dull game, the voice actor of Peter Parker did a great job too. The game looked great in daylight, the sun and lighting looked wonderful, as did the night, it's a shame they didn't really try with the other character models.
There's plenty to do outside the story, albeit mostly boring. There's time trials, saving civilians, secret lab missions and a lot more. It's all repetitive though and only worth doing to get better upgrades. The combat is pretty decent, it's a poor man's Batman Arkham combat, but that combat is so good, even a shoddy version is decent. Even though Spider-Man isn't often stealthy, you can stealthily take out enemies and it's always good to use stealth to make it easier for yourself. The problem was stealth takedowns could be really slow animations, causing you to be detected and making stealth attacks utterly useless.
The camera angles were awful, Spider-Man is very fast at swinging, climbing and fighting, the camera just can't keep up and is flailing about. The hard difficulty wasn't too bad, it would just take a full minute for your health to recover. There was nothing worse swinging around in circles, surrounded by enemies, waiting for your health to recover and then dying. It wasn't really hard, it was just ridiculous trying to recover your health. Ninety percent of the game had you traversing the sewers or laboratories, you'd be constantly in either if these and felt you'd been there many times, there was no diversity in where the game took you. The open city boss battles were probably the best bits, as there were seemingly no limits on how far you could go in the city during them, the cross species boss fights always felt the same, just in a different enclosed area.
This game causes a lot of frustration too, constant indicators about a comic book collectable being insight, as there was 700 of these atrocities, it was made even worse by the fact you'd press the button to fly directly to it, only to find out you pressed it too late and Spider-Man would start flying somewhere completely off track. This was the same for attempting stealth, it would suddenly switch to web strike, which would alert all enemies. When completing side missions, the screen would fade to black and load you near where you started the mission, then sometimes it wouldn't load you and you could freely play, it was annoying not knowing whether the game would let you start travelling to your next destination or if it was going to cut you off and load you, it was so inconsistent.
There were some nice features though, the web rush was cool, it would let you slow time and let you choose where to send Spidey. The beautiful red and blue suit would rip and tear the more combat you entered and you could always repair your suit by going back to the safehouse. Stan Lee even made a cameo in the game and was even a playable costume, why wouldn't you want to web-sling as Stan Lee? However, there were more problems, long loading, phone call story dialogue repeated after every death until you proceeded with the story, bad checkpoints that lead to unskippabke cutscenes, Spider-Man not casting a new web to continue swinging no matter how many times you pressed him too only for him to decide to as he practically swung down to the ground.
Spider-Man games are always something I enjoy, I grew up with him and Spider-Man on the PS1 was the first game I ever completed. I'm very happy to see Spider-Man is still around in the video game industry and I'm very excited for the upcoming PS4 game. Movie games are never really impressive and this was a game of a pretty poor movie, but the game took a nice turn by continuing the story of the movie. I'm definitely gonna give the Amazing Spider-Man 2 game a try as the movie was also better than the first too.
6.5/10
Sunday 23 October 2016
Dead Rising 2: Off the Record (Xbox 360)
Dead Rising 2: Off the Record is a reimagining of Dead Rising 2, where Frank West from the original DR is the playable character over Chuck Greene. Released in 2011, only a number of months after DR2s release, it became the fourth DR2 game following Case Zero, Case West and the original second game. The story is practically the same, just with some slight changes, most of them I actually preferred too.
For those that played DR2 will know there's not a lot of difference, besides playing as Frank and some story changes, the only new features are a new area to explore, challenges and free roam. The new area is in the form of a space theme park, it's a decent sized area and even has some mini carnival games to have fun with. Free mode explains itself, you can't do any of the story during it, but you can freely run around and kill all the zombies you want. Challenges feature in the free roam mode and can be do single-player or co-operatively.
What's a great improvement here is if you play coop, your partner plays as Chuck, so together you're Frank and Chuck. In DR2 you both played as Chuck. It was great to see the game star Frank, he's the star character in the DR franchise and was well performed again and slotted right in as Chuck's replacement. Once again, you are rewarded with more story if you complete all the cases, Overtime Mode makes a return and gives the real ending of the story when you finish it. Some character changes I appreciated too, I was glad with pretty much all the story changes from the second game, apart from a ridiculous and out of place boss fight. Chuck Greene featured in the story too, he became a psychopath and was a stand in for the biker psychopath from DR2. It was so well done, made sense of how he went crazy and explained Chuck's part in the story. It was sad to see how the mighty Chuck had fallen though.
The cases were pretty much exactly the same, everything we had already done in the second game and it felt cheap that a new game was released with nothing new in the story. A couple of glitches appeared, as I did a drop kick to Tk, he charged at the same time and I started to endlessly fall through the map, thankfully my coop partner could still fight TK and finished the fight. In the challenges, you were given times to get the gold medal. One challenge had us reach the marker in 45 seconds, we got there on 44 and a gold medal was shown, then when we were returned to the game, only a silver medal was given.
The game is practically just a cash in, but I enjoyed it, mainly because DR2 was already a good game. It was great to play as Frank as we knew him and the story changes were welcomed. For a fair price I'd recommend it and if you never played the original DR2, then maybe skip it and get this as the story changes are an improvement.
7.6/10
For those that played DR2 will know there's not a lot of difference, besides playing as Frank and some story changes, the only new features are a new area to explore, challenges and free roam. The new area is in the form of a space theme park, it's a decent sized area and even has some mini carnival games to have fun with. Free mode explains itself, you can't do any of the story during it, but you can freely run around and kill all the zombies you want. Challenges feature in the free roam mode and can be do single-player or co-operatively.
What's a great improvement here is if you play coop, your partner plays as Chuck, so together you're Frank and Chuck. In DR2 you both played as Chuck. It was great to see the game star Frank, he's the star character in the DR franchise and was well performed again and slotted right in as Chuck's replacement. Once again, you are rewarded with more story if you complete all the cases, Overtime Mode makes a return and gives the real ending of the story when you finish it. Some character changes I appreciated too, I was glad with pretty much all the story changes from the second game, apart from a ridiculous and out of place boss fight. Chuck Greene featured in the story too, he became a psychopath and was a stand in for the biker psychopath from DR2. It was so well done, made sense of how he went crazy and explained Chuck's part in the story. It was sad to see how the mighty Chuck had fallen though.
The cases were pretty much exactly the same, everything we had already done in the second game and it felt cheap that a new game was released with nothing new in the story. A couple of glitches appeared, as I did a drop kick to Tk, he charged at the same time and I started to endlessly fall through the map, thankfully my coop partner could still fight TK and finished the fight. In the challenges, you were given times to get the gold medal. One challenge had us reach the marker in 45 seconds, we got there on 44 and a gold medal was shown, then when we were returned to the game, only a silver medal was given.
The game is practically just a cash in, but I enjoyed it, mainly because DR2 was already a good game. It was great to play as Frank as we knew him and the story changes were welcomed. For a fair price I'd recommend it and if you never played the original DR2, then maybe skip it and get this as the story changes are an improvement.
7.6/10
Monday 17 October 2016
FIFA 17: The Journey (Xbox One)
As a FIFA player for over 15 years, a story mode is something I've always wanted, but never thought I'd see the day it arrived. FIFA 17 is the one they finally thought to give it a shot with, after Fight Night Champion gave it a crack in 2011. Alex Hunter, the grandson of the great, Jim Hunter, is a 17 year-old looking to make it in the big leagues. With the choice to sign for any Premier League club, you get the chance to make him a rising star for your favourite prem team.
The game has cutscenes that tell Hunters life and they look great. Powered by the Frostbite Engine, it looks real and the lip syncing is great, an odd plus for a FIFA game. There are a number of characters that show up, Hunter's family and people who pop up in his footballing life. Some of these are portrayed brilliantly, particularly Hunter's mother, Butler, the coach at your chosen team and Hunter's lifelong friend, Gareth Walker. Their performances seem so genuine and real.
The game works out as a more in depth Be A Pro, but you can also play as the whole team, which I found much more preferable. Hunter is aiming to get into the first team and an eventual starter. After the rise of fellow teammate, Walker, Hunter is then made to leave on loan to the Championship. So, you end up playing for two teams, which I didn't see coming but liked it as it made sense. Hunter is portrayed well, but it can be so hard to listen to his cringey dialogue, especially during the post-match interviews.
You get to pick which position to play as, you only get the choice of attacking positions. However, depending on what the default team is, the team you sign for may not play your position. I picked CAM and my chosen team didn't play with one, but my on loan team did, suffice to say I enjoyed being on loan, rather than playing for my favourite team. The weaker squads were always getting played too, third choice goalkeepers and the youth striker would play ahead of the star players. All the teams you played against had their star players on, which made it feel unfair. Williams was another footballing personality in the game, he featured often in cutscenes and in the social media tweets praising him and Hunter's partnership together, I think the whole time I was in the same squad as him, we played together twice. It was the same with Harry Kane, who was the big signing your team made, but he didn't feature with me once.
You can do training skills to improve your overall stats and you get punished by skipping them, you can lose your starting eleven place. I wanted to check my personal stats, like my goals and assists, but I didn't think you could. Turns out they were hidden by what I thought was an Ultimate Team advert, but after you looked at your UT rewards you could see your personal stats. I thought that Butler should've just been the manager of whatever team you chose, the real life manager features but never says anything, I know they couldn't get the real voices, but Butler acts like the manager, it just fits better. Also, when going for the league title, a random woman in a suit entered the dressing room and gave a big speech, Butler and the real manager just stood there, I had no idea who she was, she just entered, spoke and left, no one even told us who she was.
I think we were partly mis-sold, there weren't really choices. I was expecting choices that affected your career, not just picking how to react to dialogue. I was expecting people to ask you to come out drinking at a party and you had a dilemma of choosing whether to go out with your friends or call it a day for training the next day. Basically, someone says something or you get asked a question in an interview and you get three choices to respond with. The gist of each option is to reply humbly, cocky or standard responses. They didn't seem to really even matter, fiery just meant you'd get more Twitter followers and fall down the pecking order with your manager and the opposite if you responded cool.
The Journey is a welcomed addition to the FIFA series and I commend EA for trying something new as the franchise certainly needed a new feature/mode. It's only available on the newer generation of consoles, keep that in mind. Sadly, it's only one season long which gives you around forty five games to play, maybe Alex Hunter's story continues in FIFA 18 and a year of his career each new FIFA game. I didn't know the name Hunter, but I certainly do now.
7.5/10
The game has cutscenes that tell Hunters life and they look great. Powered by the Frostbite Engine, it looks real and the lip syncing is great, an odd plus for a FIFA game. There are a number of characters that show up, Hunter's family and people who pop up in his footballing life. Some of these are portrayed brilliantly, particularly Hunter's mother, Butler, the coach at your chosen team and Hunter's lifelong friend, Gareth Walker. Their performances seem so genuine and real.
The game works out as a more in depth Be A Pro, but you can also play as the whole team, which I found much more preferable. Hunter is aiming to get into the first team and an eventual starter. After the rise of fellow teammate, Walker, Hunter is then made to leave on loan to the Championship. So, you end up playing for two teams, which I didn't see coming but liked it as it made sense. Hunter is portrayed well, but it can be so hard to listen to his cringey dialogue, especially during the post-match interviews.
You get to pick which position to play as, you only get the choice of attacking positions. However, depending on what the default team is, the team you sign for may not play your position. I picked CAM and my chosen team didn't play with one, but my on loan team did, suffice to say I enjoyed being on loan, rather than playing for my favourite team. The weaker squads were always getting played too, third choice goalkeepers and the youth striker would play ahead of the star players. All the teams you played against had their star players on, which made it feel unfair. Williams was another footballing personality in the game, he featured often in cutscenes and in the social media tweets praising him and Hunter's partnership together, I think the whole time I was in the same squad as him, we played together twice. It was the same with Harry Kane, who was the big signing your team made, but he didn't feature with me once.
You can do training skills to improve your overall stats and you get punished by skipping them, you can lose your starting eleven place. I wanted to check my personal stats, like my goals and assists, but I didn't think you could. Turns out they were hidden by what I thought was an Ultimate Team advert, but after you looked at your UT rewards you could see your personal stats. I thought that Butler should've just been the manager of whatever team you chose, the real life manager features but never says anything, I know they couldn't get the real voices, but Butler acts like the manager, it just fits better. Also, when going for the league title, a random woman in a suit entered the dressing room and gave a big speech, Butler and the real manager just stood there, I had no idea who she was, she just entered, spoke and left, no one even told us who she was.
I think we were partly mis-sold, there weren't really choices. I was expecting choices that affected your career, not just picking how to react to dialogue. I was expecting people to ask you to come out drinking at a party and you had a dilemma of choosing whether to go out with your friends or call it a day for training the next day. Basically, someone says something or you get asked a question in an interview and you get three choices to respond with. The gist of each option is to reply humbly, cocky or standard responses. They didn't seem to really even matter, fiery just meant you'd get more Twitter followers and fall down the pecking order with your manager and the opposite if you responded cool.
The Journey is a welcomed addition to the FIFA series and I commend EA for trying something new as the franchise certainly needed a new feature/mode. It's only available on the newer generation of consoles, keep that in mind. Sadly, it's only one season long which gives you around forty five games to play, maybe Alex Hunter's story continues in FIFA 18 and a year of his career each new FIFA game. I didn't know the name Hunter, but I certainly do now.
7.5/10
Thursday 13 October 2016
Red Faction Guerrilla: Demons of the Badlands DLC (Xbox 360)
Welcome to my first downloadable content review, these are gonna be rated out of 5, as DLC isn't always as interesting or enjoyable as full released games, so they're harder to critique on the same level.
Demons of the Badlands is the only main DLC pack for Red Faction Guerrilla. It's sort of a prequel to the main game. You play as Sam from the main game, she said in the campaign she was a Marauder, so that's what the DLC is. Sam as a Marauder looks kind of odd, her hairs now reddish and her outfit looks ridiculous. Mariner Valley is the new area of the game and is a Marauder territory that's been infested by the EDF.
There's new vehicles and weapons, some of the weapons aren't really worth using but there are some cool new ones, the vehicles are unique and cool to drive, they're better than the Marauder vehicles that featured in the original game. There's new demolitions and transporter missions, some of these are really cool, they're more unique and can be really challenging. That's probably the best thing about this content, but they're just optional side missions you'll only do for the 100% completion
You're thrown straight into the DLC with no introduction. If I hadn't just played the main game right before I started it, I probably wouldn't even realise the main character was in the original game. Sam being able to take on the EDF made no sense, she can take the fight to them as a Marauder, but in the main game as a Red Faction member she don't do shit but hide at the safehouses. That's why they should've made a new playable character and give them a back story, other than just playing as someone we know. There's only three main missions and they're not great, that being said, they weren't great either in the main game. But only three story missions for a pricey DLC, just not worth it.
This DLC honestly just shouldn't exist, it's pointless. It doesn't add anything to the story and just makes you question why Sam wasn't around more in the story or why the Marauders didn't help the Red Faction in taking out the EDF. There's nothing to justify buying this, so save your currency for something worthwhile.
2/5
Demons of the Badlands is the only main DLC pack for Red Faction Guerrilla. It's sort of a prequel to the main game. You play as Sam from the main game, she said in the campaign she was a Marauder, so that's what the DLC is. Sam as a Marauder looks kind of odd, her hairs now reddish and her outfit looks ridiculous. Mariner Valley is the new area of the game and is a Marauder territory that's been infested by the EDF.
There's new vehicles and weapons, some of the weapons aren't really worth using but there are some cool new ones, the vehicles are unique and cool to drive, they're better than the Marauder vehicles that featured in the original game. There's new demolitions and transporter missions, some of these are really cool, they're more unique and can be really challenging. That's probably the best thing about this content, but they're just optional side missions you'll only do for the 100% completion
You're thrown straight into the DLC with no introduction. If I hadn't just played the main game right before I started it, I probably wouldn't even realise the main character was in the original game. Sam being able to take on the EDF made no sense, she can take the fight to them as a Marauder, but in the main game as a Red Faction member she don't do shit but hide at the safehouses. That's why they should've made a new playable character and give them a back story, other than just playing as someone we know. There's only three main missions and they're not great, that being said, they weren't great either in the main game. But only three story missions for a pricey DLC, just not worth it.
This DLC honestly just shouldn't exist, it's pointless. It doesn't add anything to the story and just makes you question why Sam wasn't around more in the story or why the Marauders didn't help the Red Faction in taking out the EDF. There's nothing to justify buying this, so save your currency for something worthwhile.
2/5
Monday 10 October 2016
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS3)
Uncharted 2 released in 2009 and is a direct sequel to the PlayStation hit Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. The game starts off immediately with a train wreck and an injured Nate, barely alive having to climb up the train as it dangles over an icy cliff. Shortly into the climb to safety, the game takes you back sometime before and are introduced to the new characters. Nate meets up with Flynn, a sarcastic, humorous type just like Nate, Chloe also so shows up, a tough and adventurous type, also like Nate! The trio set out to look for the Cintimani Stone and Shangri-la.
Along the way, Nate links up again with our favourites Sully and Elena. Sadly, Sully doesn't feature a lot in this game, but there's a lot of Elena and Chloe, they're great enough to fill the void left by Sully. Prior, you and your buddy Flynn attempt a heist to steal an oil lamp. Classic robbery, black suits and gloves, hiding from security and using takedowns and stun guns to get through stealthily. The conversations between both are so believable, they seem like real people and are hilarious together. The writers for Uncharted are brilliant and do a great job with the exposition during gameplay. It turns out they're not the only ones looking for the Cintimani Stone, Zoran Lazarevic, a Russian warlord is on the path too, armed with a military unit to aid him. Lazarevic is a much improved villian over the first one in Drake's Fortune and is portrayed excellently by Graham McTavish.
Halfway into the story, there is an excellent train sequence, where you make your way to the front, whether you are inside the carriages or on the trains roof. You're surrounded by enemies, but when you get a moment you can just watch the train go through some wonderful sights, the game takes you around the world, so sometimes you should take in the scenery, the developers did a great job and created a beautiful environment. You also get to traverse through snowy mountains, they look so real and it looks like you'd freeze to death if you were there, the game looks fantastic. Improved graphics with seemingly more facial detail and more real looking environments, much different to the grassy jungle and ruins from the first.
Gameplay is as good as ever and there's more stealth options too, it's mostly gun fights, but it's nice being able to take some enemies out quietly. Also some great new weapons dropped by the enemies, giving you more of a choice to disperse those pesky villains. I genuinely think this game shines in the moments you're just exploring and having conversations with those around you. They are always interesting, funny and develop the story. You can roll over and pick up ammo as you do it, this is extremely handy for dodging bullets and refilling your own when still surrounded. You can quick throw grenades now and even reverse enemy attacks when in hand-to-hand combat. Something that's always handy is being able to switch your shoulder aim, sometimes it's more useful to shoot from your other side.
There were some issues, not a lot. If you entered combat it was difficult to get out of, if another enemy was around and was shooting you as you were fighting, this caused a couple of deaths. As with platforming games, jumping to the wrong climbable object or even jumping to your death came naturally, one day a game will perfect jumping and climbing safely. While trying to stealth around a group of enemies, Chloe walked ahead of me and got caught, which automatically meant I was discovered too, not good when you're trying to play on hard difficulty, which is challenging enough, cheers Chloe, mate.
All in all, an improvement on what was already a stellar game. New fantastic characters and a brilliant villian, all portrayed excellently, this really is a sequel better than the original. The humor is too good, Nate's handbook that's filled with clues and information, even has funny drawings and quotes, yet the game is serious as well, it just gels perfectly. Well done Naughty Dog, you've proved countless times you can make a good game and a good series of games. Also, thanks for including the theme from the first, the music is excellent. I'm pretty sure every PlayStation gamer has played this, but play it again, it really deserves it.
9.1/10
Along the way, Nate links up again with our favourites Sully and Elena. Sadly, Sully doesn't feature a lot in this game, but there's a lot of Elena and Chloe, they're great enough to fill the void left by Sully. Prior, you and your buddy Flynn attempt a heist to steal an oil lamp. Classic robbery, black suits and gloves, hiding from security and using takedowns and stun guns to get through stealthily. The conversations between both are so believable, they seem like real people and are hilarious together. The writers for Uncharted are brilliant and do a great job with the exposition during gameplay. It turns out they're not the only ones looking for the Cintimani Stone, Zoran Lazarevic, a Russian warlord is on the path too, armed with a military unit to aid him. Lazarevic is a much improved villian over the first one in Drake's Fortune and is portrayed excellently by Graham McTavish.
Halfway into the story, there is an excellent train sequence, where you make your way to the front, whether you are inside the carriages or on the trains roof. You're surrounded by enemies, but when you get a moment you can just watch the train go through some wonderful sights, the game takes you around the world, so sometimes you should take in the scenery, the developers did a great job and created a beautiful environment. You also get to traverse through snowy mountains, they look so real and it looks like you'd freeze to death if you were there, the game looks fantastic. Improved graphics with seemingly more facial detail and more real looking environments, much different to the grassy jungle and ruins from the first.
Gameplay is as good as ever and there's more stealth options too, it's mostly gun fights, but it's nice being able to take some enemies out quietly. Also some great new weapons dropped by the enemies, giving you more of a choice to disperse those pesky villains. I genuinely think this game shines in the moments you're just exploring and having conversations with those around you. They are always interesting, funny and develop the story. You can roll over and pick up ammo as you do it, this is extremely handy for dodging bullets and refilling your own when still surrounded. You can quick throw grenades now and even reverse enemy attacks when in hand-to-hand combat. Something that's always handy is being able to switch your shoulder aim, sometimes it's more useful to shoot from your other side.
There were some issues, not a lot. If you entered combat it was difficult to get out of, if another enemy was around and was shooting you as you were fighting, this caused a couple of deaths. As with platforming games, jumping to the wrong climbable object or even jumping to your death came naturally, one day a game will perfect jumping and climbing safely. While trying to stealth around a group of enemies, Chloe walked ahead of me and got caught, which automatically meant I was discovered too, not good when you're trying to play on hard difficulty, which is challenging enough, cheers Chloe, mate.
All in all, an improvement on what was already a stellar game. New fantastic characters and a brilliant villian, all portrayed excellently, this really is a sequel better than the original. The humor is too good, Nate's handbook that's filled with clues and information, even has funny drawings and quotes, yet the game is serious as well, it just gels perfectly. Well done Naughty Dog, you've proved countless times you can make a good game and a good series of games. Also, thanks for including the theme from the first, the music is excellent. I'm pretty sure every PlayStation gamer has played this, but play it again, it really deserves it.
9.1/10
Saturday 8 October 2016
The Order: 1886 (PS4)
The Order was something I was very interested in when I first saw it. When it was first shown I was intrigued because I like Victorian England as a setting in a video game. It was originally sold to me as a monster hunting game set in VE, then I saw the futuristic weapons. This immediately made me lose interest, but then when I saw the gameplay of the fight with what I thought was a werewolf, I was right back in there with interest. Anyway, let's get started.
The Order set in London, in the late 1800s follows a small group of knights who protect the world from 'half-breeds' and also protect against the Industrial Revolution. It's a third person action game that features a substantial amount of quick time events. You're put straight into the game where you play as Galahad, a knight who is in quite the predicament. Shortly after the prologue, you are taken back some time to where the story really starts. Galahad is a very serious man, which can lead to a boring playable character. There's something off-putting about a character that has the same angry face throughout. That's just it, all the characters are serious and they're often with you. Ingraine isn't always serious, but by God she is always annoying. Marquis is by far the best, he's funny and likeable, but he's surrounded by serious folk so his humor is quickly swept under the rug. I'd much have preferred him to be the star of the game.
Now, what people will have you think, is this is an average game and incredibly short. These are lies, the game is fairly short, I'll admit. I heard someone say they finished it in four hours, this is insane. It took me around seven, short I know, but I can only imagine it was completed in four hours on the easy difficulty. Now, if you're complaining about a game being too short and completed it on easy, you have no right to moan. A disappointing factor was that a couple chapters were just cutscenes. It's a shame they decided to do this and make you think the game was longer than it actually was, with it having sixteen chapters and at least three are cutscenes and a few more are rather short. Anyway, don't let reviews tell you this game is near four hours or its average. It's gameplay is pretty good.
The graphics are exceptional, truly some of the best I've seen. The detail in the faces are incredible, facial expressions are up there with LA Noire's face scans. The performances are really good, just all a bit too serious. The scenes look great and the way they transition into the gameplay are flawless, you almost don't realise you can now move your character. When you play as Galahad near the start, he is looking over the edge of a building and his hair is blowing in the wind, it's extraordinary! Hair is an incredibly difficult thing for developers, but Ready at Dawn not only made hair blow in the wind, but made it look real. There's no denying how good they made this game look.
The gameplay here is good, nothing really new, but well done. Typical cover shooter, with some good gun play. The blacklight move allows you to kill multiple enemies at once in slow motion and move the cursor to where you wanted to hit them. It was pretty cool, but I find it difficult to really aim at enemies heads, so I just shot where the aim already was and it worked just fine. There's a good amount of weapons and lots of ammo pickups for you too. The science weapons were great, although they felt out of place in a game set in the past. One would fire thermite and then let you fire at it to blast fire, another would shoot a burst of electricity that would instantly kill anything in the way and the last had a stun mechanic, you'd fire a sort of smoke blast that would stumble the enemy, leaving them at your mercy. Another cool feature in the gun play I liked, was when you killed an enemy the cursor went red as you shot them, this was a confirmed kill, so you needn't worry about them rising up from cover.
The enemies were quite smart too, always in cover and not just idly standing by, waiting for death by science! The shot-gunner enemies charged at you and were armoured up, they were pretty challenging. There was a lock picking mechanic that hadn't been done before, sometimes you gotta ask yourself, just how many ways can game developers come up with to enter locked doorways. You could use the PS4s touchpad once to call in support, but it was pointless, but I think the whole touchpad debacle is pointless in whole.
There wasn't a lot too bad with this game, a guy's beard was see through looking at it from the side, but I got over it. The credits went on so long, the music got bored and stopped. It was quite short, BUT NOT THAT SHORT! I think the most disappointing thing was that the boss battle was just a big QTE. It looked great though, one on one with a half-breed, armed only with a knife. Also the ending left me with so many unanswered questions. *SEQUEL ALERT*.
All in all, a decent story, amazing graphics, far too serious characters, disappointing boss battle, but with the capability of Ready at Dawn, I'm certainly looking forward to what else they can do. Just hopefully it looks as great as this and is a bit longer.
7/10
The Order set in London, in the late 1800s follows a small group of knights who protect the world from 'half-breeds' and also protect against the Industrial Revolution. It's a third person action game that features a substantial amount of quick time events. You're put straight into the game where you play as Galahad, a knight who is in quite the predicament. Shortly after the prologue, you are taken back some time to where the story really starts. Galahad is a very serious man, which can lead to a boring playable character. There's something off-putting about a character that has the same angry face throughout. That's just it, all the characters are serious and they're often with you. Ingraine isn't always serious, but by God she is always annoying. Marquis is by far the best, he's funny and likeable, but he's surrounded by serious folk so his humor is quickly swept under the rug. I'd much have preferred him to be the star of the game.
Now, what people will have you think, is this is an average game and incredibly short. These are lies, the game is fairly short, I'll admit. I heard someone say they finished it in four hours, this is insane. It took me around seven, short I know, but I can only imagine it was completed in four hours on the easy difficulty. Now, if you're complaining about a game being too short and completed it on easy, you have no right to moan. A disappointing factor was that a couple chapters were just cutscenes. It's a shame they decided to do this and make you think the game was longer than it actually was, with it having sixteen chapters and at least three are cutscenes and a few more are rather short. Anyway, don't let reviews tell you this game is near four hours or its average. It's gameplay is pretty good.
The graphics are exceptional, truly some of the best I've seen. The detail in the faces are incredible, facial expressions are up there with LA Noire's face scans. The performances are really good, just all a bit too serious. The scenes look great and the way they transition into the gameplay are flawless, you almost don't realise you can now move your character. When you play as Galahad near the start, he is looking over the edge of a building and his hair is blowing in the wind, it's extraordinary! Hair is an incredibly difficult thing for developers, but Ready at Dawn not only made hair blow in the wind, but made it look real. There's no denying how good they made this game look.
The gameplay here is good, nothing really new, but well done. Typical cover shooter, with some good gun play. The blacklight move allows you to kill multiple enemies at once in slow motion and move the cursor to where you wanted to hit them. It was pretty cool, but I find it difficult to really aim at enemies heads, so I just shot where the aim already was and it worked just fine. There's a good amount of weapons and lots of ammo pickups for you too. The science weapons were great, although they felt out of place in a game set in the past. One would fire thermite and then let you fire at it to blast fire, another would shoot a burst of electricity that would instantly kill anything in the way and the last had a stun mechanic, you'd fire a sort of smoke blast that would stumble the enemy, leaving them at your mercy. Another cool feature in the gun play I liked, was when you killed an enemy the cursor went red as you shot them, this was a confirmed kill, so you needn't worry about them rising up from cover.
The enemies were quite smart too, always in cover and not just idly standing by, waiting for death by science! The shot-gunner enemies charged at you and were armoured up, they were pretty challenging. There was a lock picking mechanic that hadn't been done before, sometimes you gotta ask yourself, just how many ways can game developers come up with to enter locked doorways. You could use the PS4s touchpad once to call in support, but it was pointless, but I think the whole touchpad debacle is pointless in whole.
There wasn't a lot too bad with this game, a guy's beard was see through looking at it from the side, but I got over it. The credits went on so long, the music got bored and stopped. It was quite short, BUT NOT THAT SHORT! I think the most disappointing thing was that the boss battle was just a big QTE. It looked great though, one on one with a half-breed, armed only with a knife. Also the ending left me with so many unanswered questions. *SEQUEL ALERT*.
All in all, a decent story, amazing graphics, far too serious characters, disappointing boss battle, but with the capability of Ready at Dawn, I'm certainly looking forward to what else they can do. Just hopefully it looks as great as this and is a bit longer.
7/10
Saturday 1 October 2016
Gears of War (Xbox 360)
Gears of War is one of Xbox's biggest exclusive franchises, in my opinion this should be Xbox's promotional franchise over Halo, (sorry fanboys) it's good but I think Gears is a better series. Let's see why, shall we?
When I saw the trailer for this game, I had to get it. That eery trailer showing main character, Marcus taking on what looked like a giant spider was jaw dropping. I had to see that thing for myself! You are thrown straight into the game, on planet Sera. Dom, a fellow Gear soldier frees Marcus from prison, in an attempt to recruit him to Delta squad and fight the threat of the Locust. The Locust are a sort of reptilian-human mix, who are savage in their attempts to abolish humanity.
You play as Marcus Fenix, the very serious, angry badass. He's a tough guy and he's not someone you'd like to be up against. The rest of your squad are memorable characters too. Dom, looking for his wife, is the coop player and my personal favourite. He's just so likeable. He's serious and also has some funny remarks. Cole is the eccentric killing machine, nicknamed 'Cole-Train', he's the humouous one and then there's Bird, the sarcastic and often whiny one. All four together make a great group of characters.
GoW is a cover-to-cover shooter and it's easily one of the best around, the movement in cover is fluent and being able to vault and dive to more cover makes it safe to manouver during combat. The gun play is excellent too, you can also do a 'perfect reload', which is a manual, quicker reload. Now, the Lancer. The Lancer is one of the best weapons you will see, it's an assault rifle, with a God damn chainsaw attached. If the Locust get too close, whip out the chainsaw and make him think twice, as you split him in two! If you're not a fan of gore, then this probably won't be for you as it's easily one of the bloodiest games I've played, I think you may be able to turn the gore off.
This game is a perfect coop game, if you have a buddy to play Gears with, it'll make the game so much better. You can revive eachother if you go down and a human player means one less dumb AI to have around. I played through the whole game with a friend on the Insane difficultly and it was a challenge, but a really fun challenge.
There are some boss fights and one is probably the most memorable boss fight in recent years. The Bezerker. Holy shit was I terrified of this dude. A giant, blind reptilian creature, that charges at you if you make too much noise. Never has the term 'tread lightly' been so true. You can't shoot it with regular guns as it's practically bulletproof. The only way to kill it, is to lead it outside and use the Hammer of Dawn which is a satellite gun the reigns fire down upon thee. There's also a massive spider-type creature and also the main villian, General Raam, these two are not meant to be trifled with. But, if you're gonna want humanity to survive, you're gonna have to! There's also a lot of mini-boss Locust, like the Boomer, I can't help but love the Boomers. Mainly because they shout "Boom" as they fire their rockets at you. It's pretty funny in their monstrous voice.
There's a multiplayer mode that is very good and features many game modes and a ranking system that doesn't use experience gained in matches, I'm not really sure how it works, but I don't like the ranking. GoW is a great multiplayer game, but it requires skill to be good, unfortunately for me, I am not a good Gears player online. It feels so rewarding just when I get a kill, but that rarely ever happens.
All in all, there wasn't really many problems with the game. A confusing ranking system probably my main gripe, a couple of texture issues, but nothing major. A pain in the ass on-the-rail section, but when are they ever fun? I also didn't like how big all the characters where, normal people look like ants compared to these massive hench dudes. Everyone was very well voice acted and fitted their characters and a good, lengthy story. The game can not be missed and neither can the following games. Play this game, because for a game that's almost a decade old, it's still very much relevant.
8.4/10
When I saw the trailer for this game, I had to get it. That eery trailer showing main character, Marcus taking on what looked like a giant spider was jaw dropping. I had to see that thing for myself! You are thrown straight into the game, on planet Sera. Dom, a fellow Gear soldier frees Marcus from prison, in an attempt to recruit him to Delta squad and fight the threat of the Locust. The Locust are a sort of reptilian-human mix, who are savage in their attempts to abolish humanity.
You play as Marcus Fenix, the very serious, angry badass. He's a tough guy and he's not someone you'd like to be up against. The rest of your squad are memorable characters too. Dom, looking for his wife, is the coop player and my personal favourite. He's just so likeable. He's serious and also has some funny remarks. Cole is the eccentric killing machine, nicknamed 'Cole-Train', he's the humouous one and then there's Bird, the sarcastic and often whiny one. All four together make a great group of characters.
GoW is a cover-to-cover shooter and it's easily one of the best around, the movement in cover is fluent and being able to vault and dive to more cover makes it safe to manouver during combat. The gun play is excellent too, you can also do a 'perfect reload', which is a manual, quicker reload. Now, the Lancer. The Lancer is one of the best weapons you will see, it's an assault rifle, with a God damn chainsaw attached. If the Locust get too close, whip out the chainsaw and make him think twice, as you split him in two! If you're not a fan of gore, then this probably won't be for you as it's easily one of the bloodiest games I've played, I think you may be able to turn the gore off.
This game is a perfect coop game, if you have a buddy to play Gears with, it'll make the game so much better. You can revive eachother if you go down and a human player means one less dumb AI to have around. I played through the whole game with a friend on the Insane difficultly and it was a challenge, but a really fun challenge.
There are some boss fights and one is probably the most memorable boss fight in recent years. The Bezerker. Holy shit was I terrified of this dude. A giant, blind reptilian creature, that charges at you if you make too much noise. Never has the term 'tread lightly' been so true. You can't shoot it with regular guns as it's practically bulletproof. The only way to kill it, is to lead it outside and use the Hammer of Dawn which is a satellite gun the reigns fire down upon thee. There's also a massive spider-type creature and also the main villian, General Raam, these two are not meant to be trifled with. But, if you're gonna want humanity to survive, you're gonna have to! There's also a lot of mini-boss Locust, like the Boomer, I can't help but love the Boomers. Mainly because they shout "Boom" as they fire their rockets at you. It's pretty funny in their monstrous voice.
There's a multiplayer mode that is very good and features many game modes and a ranking system that doesn't use experience gained in matches, I'm not really sure how it works, but I don't like the ranking. GoW is a great multiplayer game, but it requires skill to be good, unfortunately for me, I am not a good Gears player online. It feels so rewarding just when I get a kill, but that rarely ever happens.
All in all, there wasn't really many problems with the game. A confusing ranking system probably my main gripe, a couple of texture issues, but nothing major. A pain in the ass on-the-rail section, but when are they ever fun? I also didn't like how big all the characters where, normal people look like ants compared to these massive hench dudes. Everyone was very well voice acted and fitted their characters and a good, lengthy story. The game can not be missed and neither can the following games. Play this game, because for a game that's almost a decade old, it's still very much relevant.
8.4/10
Thursday 8 September 2016
Red Faction: Guerrilla (Xbox 360)
Is there life on Mars? Disappointingly, yes. Red Faction: Guerilla released in Summer 2009 and was my first game in the series. This series features great destruction physics that let you destroy buildings. Blowing up buildings or smashing them down with your sledgehammer is so fun and satisfying, it saves this game from being a forgettable one.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad game, it just could be so much better. I think it had huge potential that failed to deliver, too much focus went into the destruction, which is the only thing that's really good in this game. I'm yet to play Armageddon which was released after this, but if RF ever came back with the destruction and a more solid story and characters, I believe it could thrive.
Onto the game, you meet up with your brother on Mars (oh yeah, it's set on planet Mars) and you quickly discover that things aren't too swell. The EDF have pretty much taken over and the Red Faction are the resistance that are trying to liberate Mars from their control. Standard story really, except there are no characters. There's a couple named people, some only feature in cutscenes, in which there are only about five total, some can only be heard and some pretty much just suck. Alec Mason, who you play as is probably the best character. He's not really that good though, he's boring really, but he's the only one you ever see. The story is short and the missions are boring. You have to do around three missions to liberate each sector of Mars. The missions are basically hijack this, destroy that, not very interesting at all.
So, apart from the boring story and bland characters what else do we get? Well, we get the empty, dismal planet Mars to explore. There's literally nothing to look at, just rocky mountains and sandy roads. The driving is good and the amass of unique vehicles to drive makes for variety, but driving around is made even more boring when there's no radio or no music playing, you're literally driving around a deserted place with nothing but the sound of your car. You can get a walker which is a machine you can enter that has legs and arms and are a fun way to destroy buildings and enemies quickly. The graphics are very average, the buildings all look the same and the characters that do barely appear are boring or annoying. A lot of work is needed for character development and more cutscenes and story content is definitely needed.
The gun play wasn't to my liking, I hated getting in gun battles and the EDF had a specific gun that felt over powered as it could send your car flipping as they shot it. Thankfully the sledgehammer saves the day, it's powerful and fun to use. The enemies are annoying though as they're constantly running away, leaving you to chase after them. There is a vast selection of weapons including remote mines that you can tactically use to take down structures and plant a few at once, there's also a rocket launcher and land mines. The nano rifle is the most memorable though, a gun that can disintegrate buildings, vehicles and even enemies. The AI are stupidly annoying as they will get in your way and even run you off the road, they're so annoying and even when they're talking, they're not adding anything but more annoyance. They do join you and help you out when you're in a tough situation against the EDF and they even drive a car over to you when you're running on foot for a certain distance. These were nice touches to an otherwise useless group of friendlies.
However, there is a decent amount of content here, there's plenty of side activities which go from destroying buildings, attacking EDF locations, defending bases from assaults and many more. There's also a multiplayer that seems out of place, but it can actually be pretty fun. It has a bunch of backpacks that give off certain boosters like sprinting or shaking the screen to make shooting difficult. It has a bunch of modes to try out and there's also Wrecking Crew, which lets you destroy buildings in creative ways with some friends.
I hate to diss the game, but after playing it all the way through I have to. If it wasn't for the fun of destroying buildings I probably wouldn't have liked it at all, there is so much potential here but with THQ absent these days, there may never be a chance for this potential to be unleashed. I really hope Armageddon can redeem this as that could be the last we ever get in the series. There is life on Mars, I just wish it was a little more lively... and also green! Where were the little green martians?!
6.8/10
Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad game, it just could be so much better. I think it had huge potential that failed to deliver, too much focus went into the destruction, which is the only thing that's really good in this game. I'm yet to play Armageddon which was released after this, but if RF ever came back with the destruction and a more solid story and characters, I believe it could thrive.
Onto the game, you meet up with your brother on Mars (oh yeah, it's set on planet Mars) and you quickly discover that things aren't too swell. The EDF have pretty much taken over and the Red Faction are the resistance that are trying to liberate Mars from their control. Standard story really, except there are no characters. There's a couple named people, some only feature in cutscenes, in which there are only about five total, some can only be heard and some pretty much just suck. Alec Mason, who you play as is probably the best character. He's not really that good though, he's boring really, but he's the only one you ever see. The story is short and the missions are boring. You have to do around three missions to liberate each sector of Mars. The missions are basically hijack this, destroy that, not very interesting at all.
So, apart from the boring story and bland characters what else do we get? Well, we get the empty, dismal planet Mars to explore. There's literally nothing to look at, just rocky mountains and sandy roads. The driving is good and the amass of unique vehicles to drive makes for variety, but driving around is made even more boring when there's no radio or no music playing, you're literally driving around a deserted place with nothing but the sound of your car. You can get a walker which is a machine you can enter that has legs and arms and are a fun way to destroy buildings and enemies quickly. The graphics are very average, the buildings all look the same and the characters that do barely appear are boring or annoying. A lot of work is needed for character development and more cutscenes and story content is definitely needed.
The gun play wasn't to my liking, I hated getting in gun battles and the EDF had a specific gun that felt over powered as it could send your car flipping as they shot it. Thankfully the sledgehammer saves the day, it's powerful and fun to use. The enemies are annoying though as they're constantly running away, leaving you to chase after them. There is a vast selection of weapons including remote mines that you can tactically use to take down structures and plant a few at once, there's also a rocket launcher and land mines. The nano rifle is the most memorable though, a gun that can disintegrate buildings, vehicles and even enemies. The AI are stupidly annoying as they will get in your way and even run you off the road, they're so annoying and even when they're talking, they're not adding anything but more annoyance. They do join you and help you out when you're in a tough situation against the EDF and they even drive a car over to you when you're running on foot for a certain distance. These were nice touches to an otherwise useless group of friendlies.
However, there is a decent amount of content here, there's plenty of side activities which go from destroying buildings, attacking EDF locations, defending bases from assaults and many more. There's also a multiplayer that seems out of place, but it can actually be pretty fun. It has a bunch of backpacks that give off certain boosters like sprinting or shaking the screen to make shooting difficult. It has a bunch of modes to try out and there's also Wrecking Crew, which lets you destroy buildings in creative ways with some friends.
I hate to diss the game, but after playing it all the way through I have to. If it wasn't for the fun of destroying buildings I probably wouldn't have liked it at all, there is so much potential here but with THQ absent these days, there may never be a chance for this potential to be unleashed. I really hope Armageddon can redeem this as that could be the last we ever get in the series. There is life on Mars, I just wish it was a little more lively... and also green! Where were the little green martians?!
6.8/10
Friday 2 September 2016
The Warriors (PS4)
"Warriors come out to play". I had never heard of The Warriors back when I played this, I was fairly young and never watched the 1979 film until a few years after. My life revolved around this game once I played it. I was addicted, I loved it. Rockstar turned the movie into an amazing game, if you never played it go buy it right now.
For those unfamiliar with the movie, the Warriors go to a meeting with a number of other gangs, something occurs and the Warriors have to "bop" their way home to Coney Island. Sounds easy, but not when every gang and cop in the city is on their tail.
All nine of the original Warriors feature and all are playable (only Fox is not playable during the story, he's only playable in his Flashback mission). Some of the original cast even voiced their likeness, Cleon, Fox, Swan, Cochise and Ajax all reprised their roles. The game takes place before the movie and most of the story leads to the meeting at the start of the film. It shows how the Warriors got to the meeting and the later missions are featured in the film. The Flashback missions show how all nine members joined and even how the gang was formed, this is a nice added bonus and you get to know each member even more, not many got much screen time in the film so this adds more to each individual.
Graphics look great, if you've watched the movie, you can tell who each character is in the game. The Warriors who never reprised their role are well acted by the new voices. The warchief (whoever you're playing as) is given the ability to order fellow members around as they're currently in charge. The orders you get are 'wreck 'em all', 'scatter', 'hold up', 'mayhem', 'watch my back' and 'let's go' which are all pretty much self explanatory. It heavily features tagging, which is spray painting the Warriors' mark, if you're not a fan, it could get frustrating but it's not that bad when you're used to it.
There are new gangs and even a rival gang that come from Coney Island too. This builds on the story more showing how the Warriors act when they're not being chased all the way back to Coney. There's even some new added Warriors. Rockstar did an excellent job with the new gangs, characters and the story. In the game, the Warriors are a new gang and they're trying to build up their reputation so they can get in on Cyrus' big meeting with every gang in the city.
As well as a story and flashback missions, there's Rumble Mode, free roam and Armies of the Night. Rumble Mode is filled with different game modes for you to try and even lets you create your own gang, where you can hand pick your nine favourite characters to one gang. My personal favourite is Battle Royal, there's nothing more entertaining than throwing each other off of a building and watching the slow motion cutscene and the screams as they fly off, it's honestly the funniest thing ever, as harsh as it may sound. Free roam let's you run around Coney and help out the citizens, while Armies of the Night is an arcade-style beat-em-up.
There is tonnes and tonnes of fighting, thankfully the combat is fantastic. There's combos, finishing moves, takedowns, wall finishers, double team moves, throwing and grappling and rage mode which lets you do brutal finishers. There's even weapons you can pick up like batons and knives. You can also give and take weapons from your buddies. Gang wars are made better when your whole gang is with you and you take on another fifteen gang members, the bigger the brawl the better.
There's a lot of cool features too, you can sort of free run, jumping across rooftops and climbing. You can hide in the shadows from cops and rival gangs when there's too many. You can uncuff any Warriors that have been caught by the cops and even uncuff yourself when you've been taken down. Revive any knocked out buddies with flash, which is a drug that acts as health. The levels have a sort of open-world feel to them, they let you explore and you can even stay in the level as long as you want and build your arcade score very high. There's also training exercises that let you increase your stamina. You can even wear any hat that's been knocked off an enemy or even Cowboy's hat, but he's never happy when you've stolen his hat.
The Warriors are often outnumbered, which leads to some great chase scenes and they feature in the game, along with some new ones. It's pretty terrifying when you know there's a bunch a face painted, crazies chasing you armed with baseball bats. The soundtrack is amazing and true to the film, every song I loved and even the music played during the levels is fantastic. You also have the ability to replay levels and try to beat the high score if you were unable to your first time round.
The dreaded part, the bad stuff. The camera can be really awkward to control and give you a poor angle to play from at times. There's also lots of clipping, you're just trying to sprint and you're caught by the smallest corner, it can become incredibly annoying. Like I said earlier, the tagging but that's preference really, I just felt it featured too much. Thankfully there wasn't much wrong with this game.
Thank you Rockstar for making this game. It's one of my favourite games and I never even heard of The Warriors until I played this. I'm just thankful my friend let me borrow it off him and a week later, buy it off him. If you are crazy and missed this, go buy it on PS4 or even the PS3 if you're on that one. The only question that remains is "Can you dig it?"
9.1/10
For those unfamiliar with the movie, the Warriors go to a meeting with a number of other gangs, something occurs and the Warriors have to "bop" their way home to Coney Island. Sounds easy, but not when every gang and cop in the city is on their tail.
All nine of the original Warriors feature and all are playable (only Fox is not playable during the story, he's only playable in his Flashback mission). Some of the original cast even voiced their likeness, Cleon, Fox, Swan, Cochise and Ajax all reprised their roles. The game takes place before the movie and most of the story leads to the meeting at the start of the film. It shows how the Warriors got to the meeting and the later missions are featured in the film. The Flashback missions show how all nine members joined and even how the gang was formed, this is a nice added bonus and you get to know each member even more, not many got much screen time in the film so this adds more to each individual.
Graphics look great, if you've watched the movie, you can tell who each character is in the game. The Warriors who never reprised their role are well acted by the new voices. The warchief (whoever you're playing as) is given the ability to order fellow members around as they're currently in charge. The orders you get are 'wreck 'em all', 'scatter', 'hold up', 'mayhem', 'watch my back' and 'let's go' which are all pretty much self explanatory. It heavily features tagging, which is spray painting the Warriors' mark, if you're not a fan, it could get frustrating but it's not that bad when you're used to it.
There are new gangs and even a rival gang that come from Coney Island too. This builds on the story more showing how the Warriors act when they're not being chased all the way back to Coney. There's even some new added Warriors. Rockstar did an excellent job with the new gangs, characters and the story. In the game, the Warriors are a new gang and they're trying to build up their reputation so they can get in on Cyrus' big meeting with every gang in the city.
As well as a story and flashback missions, there's Rumble Mode, free roam and Armies of the Night. Rumble Mode is filled with different game modes for you to try and even lets you create your own gang, where you can hand pick your nine favourite characters to one gang. My personal favourite is Battle Royal, there's nothing more entertaining than throwing each other off of a building and watching the slow motion cutscene and the screams as they fly off, it's honestly the funniest thing ever, as harsh as it may sound. Free roam let's you run around Coney and help out the citizens, while Armies of the Night is an arcade-style beat-em-up.
There is tonnes and tonnes of fighting, thankfully the combat is fantastic. There's combos, finishing moves, takedowns, wall finishers, double team moves, throwing and grappling and rage mode which lets you do brutal finishers. There's even weapons you can pick up like batons and knives. You can also give and take weapons from your buddies. Gang wars are made better when your whole gang is with you and you take on another fifteen gang members, the bigger the brawl the better.
There's a lot of cool features too, you can sort of free run, jumping across rooftops and climbing. You can hide in the shadows from cops and rival gangs when there's too many. You can uncuff any Warriors that have been caught by the cops and even uncuff yourself when you've been taken down. Revive any knocked out buddies with flash, which is a drug that acts as health. The levels have a sort of open-world feel to them, they let you explore and you can even stay in the level as long as you want and build your arcade score very high. There's also training exercises that let you increase your stamina. You can even wear any hat that's been knocked off an enemy or even Cowboy's hat, but he's never happy when you've stolen his hat.
The Warriors are often outnumbered, which leads to some great chase scenes and they feature in the game, along with some new ones. It's pretty terrifying when you know there's a bunch a face painted, crazies chasing you armed with baseball bats. The soundtrack is amazing and true to the film, every song I loved and even the music played during the levels is fantastic. You also have the ability to replay levels and try to beat the high score if you were unable to your first time round.
The dreaded part, the bad stuff. The camera can be really awkward to control and give you a poor angle to play from at times. There's also lots of clipping, you're just trying to sprint and you're caught by the smallest corner, it can become incredibly annoying. Like I said earlier, the tagging but that's preference really, I just felt it featured too much. Thankfully there wasn't much wrong with this game.
Thank you Rockstar for making this game. It's one of my favourite games and I never even heard of The Warriors until I played this. I'm just thankful my friend let me borrow it off him and a week later, buy it off him. If you are crazy and missed this, go buy it on PS4 or even the PS3 if you're on that one. The only question that remains is "Can you dig it?"
9.1/10
Friday 19 August 2016
Dead Rising (Xbox 360)
A zombie game set in a shopping mall, I wonder where they got that idea.... Zombies have pretty much been done to death now, Dead Rising however, was near the start of the zombie buzz. Released in 2006 and spawning many new additions, this is truly one of the great current game series around. You play as Frank West, a photo journalist who's covered wars y'know. Frank is dropped off at the mall and is determined to cover the zombie outbreak story and get it out to the world. Frank has three days to get his story, so he can make it out by getting picked up by his choppa buddy, Ed.
The game has a 'if you can pick it up, you can use it' approach, meaning whatever you can pick up can be used to kill zombies, benches, boxes, baseball bats, you name it! Things that don't start with a B can also be used too! Zombies aren't the only thing to fear, psychopaths are even worse. People who have gone crazy due to the outbreak, they often have survivors held captive, but they are hell-bent on killing you. The battles are often good, but always cheap, striking you while you're already down and taking plenty of health from one attack. You do feel like you've accomplished something when you take them down. You level up through the game and unlock new moves and such throughout, you can level up by bringing survivors back to the safe room and killing zombies of course. Otis, a mall security officer gives you your side missions and let's you know when there's a survivor or a psychopath around, he calls a lot and is really annoying, but you can't help but love the guy.
The game has multiple endings and will probably require a couple playthroughs too. After completing the main story, there's Overtime mode, which sort of extends the main story. You also get 5 day and 7 day survivor mode, which has you try and hold off for longer than the original 3 days. Plenty of extra modes to try once you're all done with the story. I was genuinely quite frightened by this game back in the day, maybe it was because I was pretty young, but I was always weary watching the cutscenes waiting for something bad to happen. I always panicked when I would run into a psychopath. Sadly, future DR games never had me feel the same way, infact they tamed the games down way more. If you killed Adam the clown, you'll know how violent this game was. The psychopaths are great though, they're memorable and very disturbing to watch in the cutscenes, a lot of their death scenes are so brutal to watch too. As well as a chainsaw wielding clown, you have a raincoat cult and convicts driving around in a car with a gun turret.
The map is a decent size, numerous places to go and a whole bunch of shops to explore. Likeable characters and a great performance from Frank West, most of the other characters weren't portrayed as well. A good story that actually has a good zombie outbreak, most zombie related outbreaks are just contaminated food products or some virus got out. An unclear ending though, if you complete overtime mode if you ask me.
This is one of the most frustrating games I've ever played, yes the boss battles are cheap and annoying, but nothing comes close to the dumb AI survivors. You'd think they don't want you to save them. Sometimes when calling them they just stop and you have to call them again to get them moving. You can give them weapons but they're more likely to hit you than zombies. They'll walk in front of you as you're about to clobber a zombie, you'll clear a path for them but they'll run up to the one zombie you missed and there could only be one around and they could get grabbed by it, meaning you have to go back to them to smack the zombie off them.
The game is old and with that comes poor controls, how I longed for aiming and shooting with LT/RT, instead we had aim with RT, fire with X, disgusting right? Only one save, if you screwed up and left yourself with no time to get to the next case mission, you done fucked it up, buddy! Also, manually saving by having to find a bathroom, the amount of times I would die and have to go so far back was depressing, I'm used to autosave, we really do take that guy for granted. Dialogue only exists in cutscenes, when you get a call from Otis, it shows up in a damn text box, nothing makes good gameplay by trying to read a phone call with literally hundreds of zombies around you!
A nice touch was that some of the zombies you see are fallen survivors, they will look familiar as they were people you've came across, I thought that was a good small detail. You can drive vehicles and take out multiple zombies at once and you can even ride skateboards indoors to traverse more quickly. The photography is annoying at times but it's necessary to the game seeing as Frank's a photo journalist. The game has lots of hidden secrets that you most likely didn't even think of, you can blend food items together to create consumables that give off effects such as, running faster or invulnerability. The graphics were pretty good for the time but they come across as cartoony now. Being constantly grabbed by zombies as you try to get by is the worst, especially when you think there's enough distance to walk past, only for them to suddenly leap onto you. The game is funny and most importantly, fun. There's nothing like being dressed up as a woman and putting teddy bear masks on the zombies, actually makes the outbreak look less frightening when they all look like slow, friendly bears!
This game is "faaaaantastic". There's so much to do and so much to explore, you nev- *transceiver rings* - hang on. - *answers call* - GODAMMIT OTIS, WILL YOU STOP CALLING ME EVERY TWO MINUTES, I'M TRYNA REVIEW THE GAME.
Sorry about that, Dead Rising 4 is out later this year with a Christmassy trailer, I for one am looking forward to killing more zombies in hilarious ways with my good buddy, Frank.
8/10
The game has a 'if you can pick it up, you can use it' approach, meaning whatever you can pick up can be used to kill zombies, benches, boxes, baseball bats, you name it! Things that don't start with a B can also be used too! Zombies aren't the only thing to fear, psychopaths are even worse. People who have gone crazy due to the outbreak, they often have survivors held captive, but they are hell-bent on killing you. The battles are often good, but always cheap, striking you while you're already down and taking plenty of health from one attack. You do feel like you've accomplished something when you take them down. You level up through the game and unlock new moves and such throughout, you can level up by bringing survivors back to the safe room and killing zombies of course. Otis, a mall security officer gives you your side missions and let's you know when there's a survivor or a psychopath around, he calls a lot and is really annoying, but you can't help but love the guy.
The game has multiple endings and will probably require a couple playthroughs too. After completing the main story, there's Overtime mode, which sort of extends the main story. You also get 5 day and 7 day survivor mode, which has you try and hold off for longer than the original 3 days. Plenty of extra modes to try once you're all done with the story. I was genuinely quite frightened by this game back in the day, maybe it was because I was pretty young, but I was always weary watching the cutscenes waiting for something bad to happen. I always panicked when I would run into a psychopath. Sadly, future DR games never had me feel the same way, infact they tamed the games down way more. If you killed Adam the clown, you'll know how violent this game was. The psychopaths are great though, they're memorable and very disturbing to watch in the cutscenes, a lot of their death scenes are so brutal to watch too. As well as a chainsaw wielding clown, you have a raincoat cult and convicts driving around in a car with a gun turret.
The map is a decent size, numerous places to go and a whole bunch of shops to explore. Likeable characters and a great performance from Frank West, most of the other characters weren't portrayed as well. A good story that actually has a good zombie outbreak, most zombie related outbreaks are just contaminated food products or some virus got out. An unclear ending though, if you complete overtime mode if you ask me.
This is one of the most frustrating games I've ever played, yes the boss battles are cheap and annoying, but nothing comes close to the dumb AI survivors. You'd think they don't want you to save them. Sometimes when calling them they just stop and you have to call them again to get them moving. You can give them weapons but they're more likely to hit you than zombies. They'll walk in front of you as you're about to clobber a zombie, you'll clear a path for them but they'll run up to the one zombie you missed and there could only be one around and they could get grabbed by it, meaning you have to go back to them to smack the zombie off them.
The game is old and with that comes poor controls, how I longed for aiming and shooting with LT/RT, instead we had aim with RT, fire with X, disgusting right? Only one save, if you screwed up and left yourself with no time to get to the next case mission, you done fucked it up, buddy! Also, manually saving by having to find a bathroom, the amount of times I would die and have to go so far back was depressing, I'm used to autosave, we really do take that guy for granted. Dialogue only exists in cutscenes, when you get a call from Otis, it shows up in a damn text box, nothing makes good gameplay by trying to read a phone call with literally hundreds of zombies around you!
A nice touch was that some of the zombies you see are fallen survivors, they will look familiar as they were people you've came across, I thought that was a good small detail. You can drive vehicles and take out multiple zombies at once and you can even ride skateboards indoors to traverse more quickly. The photography is annoying at times but it's necessary to the game seeing as Frank's a photo journalist. The game has lots of hidden secrets that you most likely didn't even think of, you can blend food items together to create consumables that give off effects such as, running faster or invulnerability. The graphics were pretty good for the time but they come across as cartoony now. Being constantly grabbed by zombies as you try to get by is the worst, especially when you think there's enough distance to walk past, only for them to suddenly leap onto you. The game is funny and most importantly, fun. There's nothing like being dressed up as a woman and putting teddy bear masks on the zombies, actually makes the outbreak look less frightening when they all look like slow, friendly bears!
This game is "faaaaantastic". There's so much to do and so much to explore, you nev- *transceiver rings* - hang on. - *answers call* - GODAMMIT OTIS, WILL YOU STOP CALLING ME EVERY TWO MINUTES, I'M TRYNA REVIEW THE GAME.
Sorry about that, Dead Rising 4 is out later this year with a Christmassy trailer, I for one am looking forward to killing more zombies in hilarious ways with my good buddy, Frank.
8/10
Saturday 13 August 2016
Homefront (Xbox 360)
'Home is where the war is'..... As long as it's not where this game is! Homefront released in 2011 and I remember how massive the hype was for this game, a hype I never got myself sucked into. I rented this game when it came out because I didn't think it'd be worth a purchase. The game is set in the near future, where North and South Korea unite and a war begins with the US. A war with the US you say? I'm shocked too!
You play as Jacobs who... who's... I'm not even sure. I'm some guy anyway, who has got some sort of military background. While on a bus being driven by Koreans, some geniuses come up with the escape plan to drive into the bus you're on to free you. You're the only survivor on the bus, gee, that was lucky! The Resistance, as they referred themselves, tell you that they read your file, you're really great and want you on their side... How did they get the file? How did they know Jacobs was on that bus and that route? Does Jacobs even want to be part of the Resistance? Surely he would've already signed up by then. The game is ridiculously short and has only seven forgettable missions, baring some sections. It has to be said, the Call of Duty esque intro is very memorable and brutal, you should probably witness it for yourself. The story is ok, but there are so many close calls and you survive every one of them, this includes falling off a bridge, falling out of a tower and even a white phosphorus mortar aimed on top of you, now that in itself is just laughable.
The shooting is probably the best part in the game, the M4 is outstanding. The Goliath is a really cool idea, getting to commandeer a vehicle that can target enemies and wipe out groups at a time is really handy, sadly there isn't much with the Goliath. The AI actually do kill, but they get in your way more than they help. If you're scavenging for ammo or looking for collectables, orders are barked at you to go somewhere and the dialogue is constantly repeated until you carry on the story. The Guerilla difficultly wasn't too hard but there were some challenging sections, definitely not for casual gamers. Did you notice how small the good section was and that it probably had more flaws mentioned than good?
This game has lots and lots of problems, incredibly slow loading textures and plenty pop in and out as you move. There was a vehicle that blocked the way and as I got close to it, it just completely disappeared and you could see the next area that the vehicle was meant to block. The game is really slow and clunky and the melee is crap, there is no reason to ever use it. It never even gave me an option to pick a difficulty when I started, I wanted to play on the hardest difficulty, but to do it, you have to change it in the options before you start the game. One of the most buggy games I've played, there's a part where you run across the street to hide from a tank, I ran right across an enemy, a foot away from me and he never saw me somehow! I was also hit in a section where there wasn't any enemies, but I lost health and was hit by a bullet. I couldn't shoot through a space because there was debris too close to it, yet I was shot while talking cover behind a plane for Christ sake! The game looks so bad at times I wasn't sure if it was a PS1 game, it's hard to believe it was released in 2011. Enemies would just walk past the AI to get to me and they would let them! One more thing that frustrated the Hell out of me, I got to the objective to end the mission but the new objective hadn't set and I was almost killed waiting for it and the worst part was that it's the hardest part of the game. You have to kill a bunch of enemies and GET TO DA CHOPPA (couldn't resist) but the enemies are infinite and on the hardest difficulty, it really was... well, difficult.
This part gets its own paragraph because it was so bad.... the characters. Oh my God, the characters. Are we supposed to like them? We're actually meant to care about them and they try and make you feel sad about a certain individual near the end, I couldn't give a shit about them! Connor is one of the worst characters I've ever seen in a game, he shouts everything and is always bossing you around, he's so unlikeable and even tells a hungry kid to go away. Fucking dick. Can't forget Jacobs, the guy you play as, no face or voice, he's just a silent protagonist who's meant to be great, but he doesn't do anything and has no story. Don't get me wrong, not all the characters are bad, Boone and Hopper are likeable.
I think most of the effort went into the multiplayer, I wasn't interested in it back when I rented it and by the time I played it again, the servers were gone due to THQ's closure. This game somehow managed to get a sequel, well, more of a reboot so I hear. I am willing to give it a chance, despite my hatred for this game I think it has potential with more focus on the characters and a longer story. However this was a disaster. Just before I go.... FUCK YOU CONNOR, I HATE YOU.
5.2/10
You play as Jacobs who... who's... I'm not even sure. I'm some guy anyway, who has got some sort of military background. While on a bus being driven by Koreans, some geniuses come up with the escape plan to drive into the bus you're on to free you. You're the only survivor on the bus, gee, that was lucky! The Resistance, as they referred themselves, tell you that they read your file, you're really great and want you on their side... How did they get the file? How did they know Jacobs was on that bus and that route? Does Jacobs even want to be part of the Resistance? Surely he would've already signed up by then. The game is ridiculously short and has only seven forgettable missions, baring some sections. It has to be said, the Call of Duty esque intro is very memorable and brutal, you should probably witness it for yourself. The story is ok, but there are so many close calls and you survive every one of them, this includes falling off a bridge, falling out of a tower and even a white phosphorus mortar aimed on top of you, now that in itself is just laughable.
The shooting is probably the best part in the game, the M4 is outstanding. The Goliath is a really cool idea, getting to commandeer a vehicle that can target enemies and wipe out groups at a time is really handy, sadly there isn't much with the Goliath. The AI actually do kill, but they get in your way more than they help. If you're scavenging for ammo or looking for collectables, orders are barked at you to go somewhere and the dialogue is constantly repeated until you carry on the story. The Guerilla difficultly wasn't too hard but there were some challenging sections, definitely not for casual gamers. Did you notice how small the good section was and that it probably had more flaws mentioned than good?
This game has lots and lots of problems, incredibly slow loading textures and plenty pop in and out as you move. There was a vehicle that blocked the way and as I got close to it, it just completely disappeared and you could see the next area that the vehicle was meant to block. The game is really slow and clunky and the melee is crap, there is no reason to ever use it. It never even gave me an option to pick a difficulty when I started, I wanted to play on the hardest difficulty, but to do it, you have to change it in the options before you start the game. One of the most buggy games I've played, there's a part where you run across the street to hide from a tank, I ran right across an enemy, a foot away from me and he never saw me somehow! I was also hit in a section where there wasn't any enemies, but I lost health and was hit by a bullet. I couldn't shoot through a space because there was debris too close to it, yet I was shot while talking cover behind a plane for Christ sake! The game looks so bad at times I wasn't sure if it was a PS1 game, it's hard to believe it was released in 2011. Enemies would just walk past the AI to get to me and they would let them! One more thing that frustrated the Hell out of me, I got to the objective to end the mission but the new objective hadn't set and I was almost killed waiting for it and the worst part was that it's the hardest part of the game. You have to kill a bunch of enemies and GET TO DA CHOPPA (couldn't resist) but the enemies are infinite and on the hardest difficulty, it really was... well, difficult.
This part gets its own paragraph because it was so bad.... the characters. Oh my God, the characters. Are we supposed to like them? We're actually meant to care about them and they try and make you feel sad about a certain individual near the end, I couldn't give a shit about them! Connor is one of the worst characters I've ever seen in a game, he shouts everything and is always bossing you around, he's so unlikeable and even tells a hungry kid to go away. Fucking dick. Can't forget Jacobs, the guy you play as, no face or voice, he's just a silent protagonist who's meant to be great, but he doesn't do anything and has no story. Don't get me wrong, not all the characters are bad, Boone and Hopper are likeable.
I think most of the effort went into the multiplayer, I wasn't interested in it back when I rented it and by the time I played it again, the servers were gone due to THQ's closure. This game somehow managed to get a sequel, well, more of a reboot so I hear. I am willing to give it a chance, despite my hatred for this game I think it has potential with more focus on the characters and a longer story. However this was a disaster. Just before I go.... FUCK YOU CONNOR, I HATE YOU.
5.2/10
Tuesday 2 August 2016
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3)
Welcome to the start of the charismatic story of Nathan Drake. Released all the way back in 2007, it was one of the first big hits on the PS3. It's went on to spawn three more major releases and has continued into the PS4 era. Drake will be one of your favourite playable characters I can assure you, he's cool, he's funny and he's entertaining. I didn't get to play this game until late 2012, it was definitely worth the wait.
The game starts off straight in the middle of the ocean. Drake, accompanied by journalist Elena are lead to believe that Drake's relative, the great adventurer, Sir Francis Drake's body is buried at sea. Drake's old friend Sully, joins Drake in hunting for more of Francis Drake's treasures, with the help of his handbook filled with information and sketches that lead to treasures. Soon after, 'friends' of Sully's catch up to them, people who he owes money to. One suggestion of payment is Francis' treasure, it suddenly becomes a race to the finish, who will win?
The game has some great characters, the aforementioned Drake of course, but the side characters are really good too. Sully and Elena are good characters and all gel together. Each actor put in a stellar performance and they had great characters to play. The gameplay is really well done, it's fun to play and the climbing sections aren't frustrating, even when you fall. Thankfully, they're not too long so you don't feel you have to do a lot if you make a mistake. The shooting can be quite difficult, but once you get used to it, it's no problem.
There is a great variety of weapons, in case you ever get bored of using the same one. You can have a sidearm and a primary weapon, like a machine gun or shotgun equipped at all times. You also have grenades if you find them, Drake is also capable of knocking sense into enemies and by that, I mean he knocks them the fuck out!
The game flows chapter to chapter. You could climb up a ladder and as you walk forward a little, the new chapter triggers. The cutscenes are great, I always enjoyed watching them. The characters were so well done, it was a joy to watch. A lot of games have boring stories and cutscenes, but this certainly isn't one of those games. The conversations in between action sequences are fantastic, just the bond between the characters is entertaining to watch. Anyone who played The Last of Us would know how well Naughty Dog do this. The game has humour but it also has serious parts too, it's a nice combination.
The music is amazing, I love it! When the main theme plays at the end of the game, it fits perfectly and you realise how great this game is. The game has some good puzzles for you to work out, made easier with Sir Francis Drake's handbook, the only issue was that it didn't seem there were enough of them. The water effects look beautiful, Drake looks soaked after he's just came out of the water and it looks real, water, as well as hair I imagine are two of the hardest things for a developer to create. There's also some unique sections, there's driving and even driving a boat.
Like every review I do, there's bad things, there really aren't many here though. As in almost every game, there's texture issues, nothing too daunting of course. There is also an exploit you can use in cover, I did use it to my benefit, you can angle youself so that you have a great view of the enemy while aiming, even though you're clearly blocked by the cover, the bullets still hit. It justifies it a bit in that you can get hit too if you can see them, but it makes it much easier. The boat section was quite difficult on hard difficulty, it seemed better to stop and kill the enemies, rather than drive through like you're meant to do.
The hard difficulty was quite challenging, but that was mainly due to the difficult shooting. There is an even harder difficultly for expert gamers to use called 'Crushing'. I look forward to trying this difficultly and I'm now looking forward to replaying the rest of the trilogy and one day playing the fourth game. If you missed this game or don't own a PS3, now is the time to go back to it or even purchase yourself a PS because it's worth it! I envy you if you have yet to play them.
8.5/10
The game starts off straight in the middle of the ocean. Drake, accompanied by journalist Elena are lead to believe that Drake's relative, the great adventurer, Sir Francis Drake's body is buried at sea. Drake's old friend Sully, joins Drake in hunting for more of Francis Drake's treasures, with the help of his handbook filled with information and sketches that lead to treasures. Soon after, 'friends' of Sully's catch up to them, people who he owes money to. One suggestion of payment is Francis' treasure, it suddenly becomes a race to the finish, who will win?
The game has some great characters, the aforementioned Drake of course, but the side characters are really good too. Sully and Elena are good characters and all gel together. Each actor put in a stellar performance and they had great characters to play. The gameplay is really well done, it's fun to play and the climbing sections aren't frustrating, even when you fall. Thankfully, they're not too long so you don't feel you have to do a lot if you make a mistake. The shooting can be quite difficult, but once you get used to it, it's no problem.
There is a great variety of weapons, in case you ever get bored of using the same one. You can have a sidearm and a primary weapon, like a machine gun or shotgun equipped at all times. You also have grenades if you find them, Drake is also capable of knocking sense into enemies and by that, I mean he knocks them the fuck out!
The game flows chapter to chapter. You could climb up a ladder and as you walk forward a little, the new chapter triggers. The cutscenes are great, I always enjoyed watching them. The characters were so well done, it was a joy to watch. A lot of games have boring stories and cutscenes, but this certainly isn't one of those games. The conversations in between action sequences are fantastic, just the bond between the characters is entertaining to watch. Anyone who played The Last of Us would know how well Naughty Dog do this. The game has humour but it also has serious parts too, it's a nice combination.
The music is amazing, I love it! When the main theme plays at the end of the game, it fits perfectly and you realise how great this game is. The game has some good puzzles for you to work out, made easier with Sir Francis Drake's handbook, the only issue was that it didn't seem there were enough of them. The water effects look beautiful, Drake looks soaked after he's just came out of the water and it looks real, water, as well as hair I imagine are two of the hardest things for a developer to create. There's also some unique sections, there's driving and even driving a boat.
Like every review I do, there's bad things, there really aren't many here though. As in almost every game, there's texture issues, nothing too daunting of course. There is also an exploit you can use in cover, I did use it to my benefit, you can angle youself so that you have a great view of the enemy while aiming, even though you're clearly blocked by the cover, the bullets still hit. It justifies it a bit in that you can get hit too if you can see them, but it makes it much easier. The boat section was quite difficult on hard difficulty, it seemed better to stop and kill the enemies, rather than drive through like you're meant to do.
The hard difficulty was quite challenging, but that was mainly due to the difficult shooting. There is an even harder difficultly for expert gamers to use called 'Crushing'. I look forward to trying this difficultly and I'm now looking forward to replaying the rest of the trilogy and one day playing the fourth game. If you missed this game or don't own a PS3, now is the time to go back to it or even purchase yourself a PS because it's worth it! I envy you if you have yet to play them.
8.5/10
Sunday 24 July 2016
Sniper Elite V2 (Xbox 360)
This is what a real sniper looks like, fuck you Call of Duty with your quick-scope/360 no-scope bullshit. Now, with that out of the way, onto the review.
Sniper Elite V2 is an apparent sequel and remake to the first, I never played the first myself. I originally got this for the PS3 but completed it on 360. I played through the entire game with a friend, this game is a fun game in co-op. However, if you want to be able to stealth through it, then single-player is the best way. Less chance of getting caught on your own.
The game is set in WW2, you play as- hmm, I don't even know... You play as some guy in WW2, equipped with a sniper. The guy you play as was incredibly bland and didn't even stand out in appearance, the story was also bland. Basically the game is fun, everything else is bland, but it has some really good gameplay and some great mechanics.
The graphics are ok in this game, I'd expect more considering it's quite recent. The hair looks terrible though, it looks plastic, like you're playing a video game of an Action Man doll that came to life! (I miss Action Man come to think of it.) The sound-work in this game is incredible, just the sound of the boots as you're sprinting is great. But it is pretty bland elsewhere, a short and not very engaging storyline. No characters to like and a boring playable character. It may be a sniper, war game, but it needed more in these elements to improve it.
One thing I did like, is how it actually forces you to use your sniper. That may sound weird given the name of the game, but hear me out; the pistol is incredibly difficult to kill enemies with unless your close, due to the huge reticle aim, the machine gun has next to no bullets and you never find much ammo, thus using your sniper! You do get a whole load of other gear to use too, you get trip mines, grenades and even a rock, which you can use to throw and distract enemies with.
Here's the best thing in the game though; X-ray kill-cam. These truly are a thing of beauty, there's nothing better than watching the camera follow your bullet and fly through an enemy soilder as it shows their skeleton and organs, as you see the bullet pierce them and destroy where ever you hit them from the inside. It's incredibly satisfying seeing the bullet shattered the skull or explode a lung, vulgur in text, but trust me on this. I don't feel there was enough X-ray kills. The bullet cams are good too, but compared to the X-ray bullet cams, they are boring. You have no silencer either, which makes the game much more difficult, but being able to mask the sound of your shot by nearby noises is a great feature. As well as the story the game has some other modes you can play in co-op, but they can get boring fast but they do add a little more.
The game as always came with some bugs and issues. Not being able to go prone despite nothing being in the way as a sniper shot at me was frustrating. While taking cover at a destroyed tank, the camera started to shake vigorously. Couldn't fit through a gap that was big enough to walk through, thanks to the incredible invisible walls. Would sink into the ground as you walked up structures and steps. You were forced to trigger the enemy spawns, meaning you would often have to put yourself out in the open to proceed, which often end up with needing to be revived. Speaking of the reviving, it was awful, a huge delay from trying to revive eachother resulted in having to hold the button to revive many times and that it would take you out of prone and force you to crouch, making you a much easier target to shoot.
This game is really fun with some great features. I'm not surprised a third was released and soon to be a fourth. I am surprised at its apparent Game of the Year release though, still not sure if it is a legit GotY. Too much blandness lowers this game's score, but I do look forward to the next releases.
7/10
Sniper Elite V2 is an apparent sequel and remake to the first, I never played the first myself. I originally got this for the PS3 but completed it on 360. I played through the entire game with a friend, this game is a fun game in co-op. However, if you want to be able to stealth through it, then single-player is the best way. Less chance of getting caught on your own.
The game is set in WW2, you play as- hmm, I don't even know... You play as some guy in WW2, equipped with a sniper. The guy you play as was incredibly bland and didn't even stand out in appearance, the story was also bland. Basically the game is fun, everything else is bland, but it has some really good gameplay and some great mechanics.
The graphics are ok in this game, I'd expect more considering it's quite recent. The hair looks terrible though, it looks plastic, like you're playing a video game of an Action Man doll that came to life! (I miss Action Man come to think of it.) The sound-work in this game is incredible, just the sound of the boots as you're sprinting is great. But it is pretty bland elsewhere, a short and not very engaging storyline. No characters to like and a boring playable character. It may be a sniper, war game, but it needed more in these elements to improve it.
One thing I did like, is how it actually forces you to use your sniper. That may sound weird given the name of the game, but hear me out; the pistol is incredibly difficult to kill enemies with unless your close, due to the huge reticle aim, the machine gun has next to no bullets and you never find much ammo, thus using your sniper! You do get a whole load of other gear to use too, you get trip mines, grenades and even a rock, which you can use to throw and distract enemies with.
Here's the best thing in the game though; X-ray kill-cam. These truly are a thing of beauty, there's nothing better than watching the camera follow your bullet and fly through an enemy soilder as it shows their skeleton and organs, as you see the bullet pierce them and destroy where ever you hit them from the inside. It's incredibly satisfying seeing the bullet shattered the skull or explode a lung, vulgur in text, but trust me on this. I don't feel there was enough X-ray kills. The bullet cams are good too, but compared to the X-ray bullet cams, they are boring. You have no silencer either, which makes the game much more difficult, but being able to mask the sound of your shot by nearby noises is a great feature. As well as the story the game has some other modes you can play in co-op, but they can get boring fast but they do add a little more.
The game as always came with some bugs and issues. Not being able to go prone despite nothing being in the way as a sniper shot at me was frustrating. While taking cover at a destroyed tank, the camera started to shake vigorously. Couldn't fit through a gap that was big enough to walk through, thanks to the incredible invisible walls. Would sink into the ground as you walked up structures and steps. You were forced to trigger the enemy spawns, meaning you would often have to put yourself out in the open to proceed, which often end up with needing to be revived. Speaking of the reviving, it was awful, a huge delay from trying to revive eachother resulted in having to hold the button to revive many times and that it would take you out of prone and force you to crouch, making you a much easier target to shoot.
This game is really fun with some great features. I'm not surprised a third was released and soon to be a fourth. I am surprised at its apparent Game of the Year release though, still not sure if it is a legit GotY. Too much blandness lowers this game's score, but I do look forward to the next releases.
7/10
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