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Helldorado

2009-11-08T11:50:00.000-08:00

Helldorado

Viva Media
Spellbound
Strategy
Release: Apr 9, 2009
ESRB: Teen

Helldorado

Excruciating difficulty makes this latest addition to the Desperados family one frustrating trip back to the Wild West.

The Good

Missions are numerous and huge.

The Bad

Grueling difficulty
Out-of-date visuals with some frame rate problems
Not enough atmospheric audio or vocal cues from sentries.

Don't let Helldorado confuse you. Despite the snazzy new name sported by this real-time stealth strategy game set in the Wild West, this is actually the third release in the Desperados series from German developer Spellbound. As with many strategy sequels, don't expect to be treated kindly. Everything about this unbelievably hard tactical game assumes that you have logged serious hours with the previous two Desperados. If you haven't, then say howdy to big-time frustration. Every mission is so spectacularly grueling and the settings so thoroughly rigged against you that you feel like a guy with a broken hand drawing six-guns against Wyatt Earp. The extreme challenge is certain to drive away almost everyone but Desperados veterans itching for another fix and hardy Western aficionados willing to endure anything for a trip back in time.

Every member of your Wild West gang has some deadly talents, but they don't do much good when you're faced with sneaking past dozens of sentries.

The story, setting, and characters could have been pulled out of an old Gunsmoke episode. Everything is just as cliched as in the previous Desperados games: You control a team of Wild West stereotypes that includes gruff-but-lovable gunslinger John Cooper, sexy gambler Kate O'Hara, dimwitted Mexican thug Pablo Sanchez, slippery explosives expert Sam Williams, creepy old Doc McCoy, and a Native American tracker named--yes, seriously--Hawkeye. Just in case you don't immediately understand that these are all cornball rip-offs of stock characters featured in oat operas for the past century, each of these clowns underlines the point with goofy order acknowledgements, such as Pablo's expressions of love for tequila, Hawkeye's continual references to the "white devil" and buffalo, and Sam's "Yippee-yi-yay!"

As with most games of this type, each hero has a specific set of abilities. Cooper, for instance, is quick with his six-guns and can make silent kills with a throwing knife. Kate can seduce opponents into a stupor or knock them out with the special powder in her makeup compact. Hawkeye can shoot arrows and throw a tomahawk. Sanchez is a muscleman who can blow baddies away with a shotgun and leave bottles of tequila lying around to tempt guards into drinking themselves unconscious. Gee, a stupid, drunken Mexican bandit. It couldn't be any more of a racist stereotype unless he were constantly wandering off to take siestas in the noonday sun.

Hawkeye bites the dust for the 407th time. In this level.

All of the characters are drawn up along the same lines as those in the prototypical tactical stealth game, Pyro Studios' Commandos. You go into missions with a team and have to work together to get out of whatever scrape you find yourselves in. The overall story is sketched out roughly and is kind of hard to understand. Not that it matters much. You don't need to know a whole lot about being blackmailed by a mysterious femme fatale into committing various dastardly deeds, because the objectives of the multipart missions are cut-and-dried. Basically, you need to make it from point A to point B in each of the 12 single-player-only missions without attracting the attention of the guards who are between you and the goal. And that ain't easy.

You know how most tactical stealth games tend to place a handful of sentries at key points in levels? How they structure maps like puzzles, with a few guards walking patrol routes with vision cones regularly overlapping so that you need to watch for patterns and sneak on through only when the time is right? Well, that same design pattern is followed here, but with the addition of dozens of enemies wandering around, hanging out having a smoke, waving guns for no particular reason, taking a whiz in the bushes, manning guard towers, and so forth. So as you might expect, the difficulty level in Helldorado is beyond belief, no matter what difficulty setting you choose. If you make a single mistake, a pack of enemies instantly leaps into action to gun you down. Instead of tracking one, two, or three sentries at any given moment, you have to keep an eye on the vision cones of at least half a dozen.

The missions are more tedious than tense. You need to methodically eliminate the opposition one by one to open up a passage through the many, many guards. For instance, in one chapter of the second level, you need to guide Pablo and Sam around a train depot guarded by more US cavalry soldiers than Custer had at Little Big Horn. These troops are scattered across the map in groups of five or six, with all of their vision cones intersecting in such complicated ways that you simply cannot sneak past them. Instead, you need to knock them out, but in a very careful fashion that doesn't alert the whole train station.

Open up this screen and count the sentries guarding this train in a tiny part of the third level for an idea of how hard Helldorado is.

First you have to come up with a plan of attack, which requires you to treat each mob of baddies like a logic puzzle and set a pecking order. Then you need to start luring victims off to a quiet spot where you can conk them over the head without raising an alarm. Generally this is done with Pablo's ability to distract enemies with conveniently located bottles of tequila. You need to get close to a vision cone, drop a bottle, retreat posthaste, and then either club the soldier over the head when he wanders over for the free booze or wait for him to chug it down and pass out. Finally, you have to tie up the unconscious enemy with Sam and use Pablo to carry him off to an out-of-the-way spot. Sound like fun? It sort of is at first, but you need to repeat this same formula over and over again to make progress through the level. Just about every enemy along the route you choose to reach the end goal has to be eliminated, because there are few seams to exploit and almost no shortcuts to take.

Actions also sometimes have to be coordinated with multiple team members by using the game's quick action feature. This lets you script attacks and then set them off concurrently, but it can be tough to script everything so that guards are gooned simultaneously. One slight slip is all that's needed for a baddie to get off a gunshot and bring the whole level down on your head. And even when you do pull off some derring-do that would have impressed Sergio Leone (which you can watch in a close-up cinematic camera), chances are good that you will still wind up spotted by a guard you missed. It's just about impossible to see every sentry in a first run-through, because there are so many of them hanging out in the shadows. Most don't say anything unless they spot you, either, so you don't get any audio tip-offs to a nearby enemy presence. Aside from an odd whistle and an even rarer conversation, you're stuck using your eyes, not your ears.

Unfortunately, these convenient hiding rocks can't be found in most levels.

The game quickly turns into one of those immensely annoying "experiment, die, and try again" cycles where you spend more time loading saves than you do plying your sneaky trade. This might be enjoyable for hardcore types who have mastered the previous Desperados games, but most players are going to quickly become discouraged. By the time you hit the fourth mission, you're starting levels up against too many enemies to count, with your team spread out in starting positions all over the map. It's so daunting to look over what's to come that it can be hard to suck up the courage to even start these levels. Missions are massive. The maps consist of sprawling towns, train depots, saloons, and so forth, and they're covered with dusty streets, staggering drunks, water towers, wooden sidewalks, and all and all sorts of other Wild West accoutrement. Every location looks great, too, although the graphics are dated, the characters are a tad pixelated, and the levels are often so packed with enemies that the frame rate gears down until you're in single-digit territory, making progress so choppy that the game verges on the unplayable with the camera zoomed out. Each of the 13 missions takes a good two to three hours to finish, and given the current sub-$20 price of the game, you're getting a good bang for the buck. Still, it's hard to count this as much of a plus when you might be spending those many hours tearing your hair out from frustration.

Challenging strategy games are always appreciated, but Helldorado takes a good thing too far. The difficulty is so extreme that just the act of starting a new level can be depressing, especially after you pan the camera over the landscape to reveal the dozens of enemies that need to be sneaked past or knocked out. Only players who have experience with the Desperados franchise or its inspirations, such as the Commandos franchise, need apply here.

Stalin vs. Martians

2009-11-08T11:46:00.000-08:00

Stalin vs. Martians

Do not play, look at, or even think about this mangled wreck of a strategy game.

The Good

Dancing Stalin.

The Bad

It isn't fun, and it isn't funny
No strategy involved
Frustrating, broken missions
Excruciating sound design
Loads of technical problems.

Don't be offended by Stalin vs. Martians' subject matter. The genocidal communist leader may figure heavily in this budget-priced real-time strategy game, but it's hard to be outraged when he's gyrating his hips to the beat of Russian dance pop, or signing off his written missives with "xxooxx." No, be offended because Stalin vs. Martians is an abysmal game that represents the dregs of game design. It isn't strategic, it isn't fun, and as hard as it tries, it isn't even remotely funny. This is perhaps the worst RTS game ever created, worth neither the 1s and 0s that were used to program it nor the mental exertions expended on this creatively bankrupt waste of hard-drive space.

Actually, calling Stalin vs. Martians a strategy game is a bit of a stretch, though to its credit, you do control units in real time, so at least it gets that part right. You start each of the 12 missions with a given supply of units, and you generally move them all en masse across the map, killing a bunch of aliens while completing the oft-broken mission objectives. When Martians die, they frequently drop gold and power-ups; you spend gold on reinforcements or on special powers, whereas power-ups enhance a unit's armor or attack damage, or perhaps replenish the unit's health. It sounds like an interesting idea designed to keep the action moving. In actuality, it's an absolute mess. Power-ups disappear if you don't maneuver a unit over them, but moving forward toward a sorely needed gold drop may bring you closer to a deadly, goo-spewing greenie. Poor enemy placement and bad pathfinding make the whole process a lame, frustrating war of attrition as you slowly whittle enemy numbers down while summoning replacements for your lost units. And just as the "S" is missing from "RTS," there is no "I" in the AI; your foes either wait for your attack in their assigned position or follow scripted paths, but in no way do they ever require you to think strategically.

Premission briefings from Stalin give context to the proceedings: Martians are invading 1940s Siberia! The concept had potential, but the missions themselves are a complete disaster. A few are so easy and straightforward that you can complete them within 10 minutes or so. Others drag on endlessly, forcing you to move your sluggish tanks from one corner of the map to the other. It's anyone's guess why they move so slowly when you issue a move order but develop a sense of urgency when you issue an attack order. But even when you manage to get your units to their destination, you'll be banging your head on your computer desk out of pure frustration. In one mission, you can lose if Martian units invade a village. The final objective in the same mission involves killing a roaming, buglike alien, which might be near the village center when the objective is triggered, and thus can count as an invasion. This abysmal mission structure can lead to a loss not based on your actions, but rather on thoughtless game design.

Similar issues plague several missions, such as those in which units clip into level geometry and jitter around trying to extricate themselves, but even the functional ones are beyond irritating. Poor balancing and cheap attacks lead to numerous annoyances, such as in one mission in which you must use only infantry units to destroy enemy artillery that can wipe away almost all of your soldiers in one hit. This leads to a lot of trial and error, forcing reloads of your saved games until you know exactly what the game expects of you. But mission design aside, Stalin vs. Martians doesn't even get the basics right. Trying to drag a selection box around units can be nigh impossible if the mouse pointer is near the edge of the screen; the absence of significant visual and audio feedback makes it hard to tell if you've activated a special power, or whether you're actually firing at an enemy; and infantry units will go wandering off in some direction other than where you commanded the control group to go.

A few ear-splitting musical videos break up the putrid gameplay, and they offer the only seconds of so-bad-it's-good amusement that Stalin vs. Martians provides. You won't be inclined to laugh at scenes of zombified communists and be-bopping aliens, though, as much as you'll stare with your mouth agape. The game clearly aims for broad satire. Three-eyed Martians are ripped directly from Pixar's classic animated film Toy Story, and swarms of tiny ETs resemble the charming creatures from the acclaimed Pikmin games. Selected units bleat out such gems as "I am like Bolshevik on bicycle!" and the apparently homoerotic "My name's Ivan, I like you." But every lame grab for chuckles falls totally flat. (What image is a Bolshevik on a bicycle meant to convey anyway?) The forced humor lacks charm and wit, and though it aims for the tragically ludicrous mentality of a camp classic, it's just plain tragic.

It just never seems to end.

The production values struggle with similar attempts at energy, but their exertions will exhaust both you and your system. The sound design deserves special mention for its limited selection of awful house music and tinny array of Martian bloops and beeps. Some onscreen activities don't even produce noise, which is a rather welcome glitch, given that your ears will need a break from the excruciatingly aggressive soundtrack and overlapping, nonsensical chatter of selected units. The environmental visuals are at least colorful, though all of the maps look the same until you reach the final missions. Some of the Martians are cute, though the art design displays absolutely no creativity; for a game featuring alien lizards and Russian tanks on the same battlefield, Stalin vs. Martians looks completely generic. That's a shame, considering that a clever visual slant could have helped veil the decrepit technology powering this dud. There are no graphics options whatsoever in the game menus--no antialiasing or anisotropic filtering, not even an option to change the resolution. How unusual, then, that the frame rate takes occasional dips, and that the game crashed multiple times on multiple systems during our testing. The mouse pointer disappeared after every musical interlude, forcing a restart each time. Changing the "Do you like cats?" menu option from "yes" to "no" had no apparent effects on these issues.

You can play only as the communist forces, and there is no multiplayer, but why on Earth, or on Mars for that matter, would you want to extend an experience like this? Don't play Stalin vs. Martians, even if you are a big fan of communism or Martians--or even both.

Tunnel Rats

2009-11-08T11:44:00.000-08:00

Tunnel Rats

Tunnel Rats Review

Five buggy hours of tunnels, booby traps, and laughably bad dialogue.

The Good

Hmm.

The Bad

Ugly, monotonous, unrelenting tunnels
Deadly traps demand nonstop pixel hunting
Unpleasant protagonist
Short, but not sweet.

Tunnel Rats: 1968, inspired by the movie of the same name, is the brainchild of infamous German director Uwe Boll, who has made a name for himself adapting video games into movies. A single-player first-person shooter set during the Vietnam War, Tunnel Rats attempts to express something terrible and disturbing about the horrors of war, and in a way, it succeeds. After spending an hour with the game, you'll begin to understand how terrible it is, and after two hours you'll be profoundly disturbed that you bought it. In fact, the game gives itself away from the start. "You tunnel boys like things real deep," remarks a GI during the opening cutscene, "like deep down in your own dark tunnel of the soul."

War is hell.

You play as Brooks, an American soldier stranded alone in an inhospitable Vietnamese jungle. Brooks is one of the least sympathetic heroes you'll ever play as; he's a cruel, foul-mouthed jerk who is often deranged but never witty. He is apparently supposed to be on a character arc that sends him to the cusp of madness, but in reality he's insane from the start. Brooks' eccentricities are revealed primarily through frequent, awkward monologues, which vary schizophrenically from antiwar rants to "That's what you get, you commie bastards!" The other glimpses you get into your character's psyche come in the form of images from Brooks' childhood and life back in California. You discover, for instance, that he has a bizarre neurosis related to hunting with his father, which never makes much sense.

The character's voice acting is just as clumsy and inconsistent as the writing, and his inappropriate attitude is reflected throughout the game. From one perspective, Tunnel Rats deserves credit for daring to defy political correctness. However, a consequence of Tunnel Rats' zealously anti-PC approach is that it will offend just about everyone. For instance, the game's portrayal of American soldiers goes from bad (Brooks) to worse when you encounter a GI who has turned into a shrieking cannibal, and to offend the other side, your character issues a steady stream of anti-Vietnamese slurs and goes out of his way to desecrate every Vietnamese corpse. Granted, ripping the ears off of your slain enemies is optional, but since it increases your total health, only the most principled individuals will be able to abstain. In addition to the obviously poor taste of this "feature," the game makes the experience (and its less disgusting counterpart--taking dog tags from dead GIs) especially painful in two ways: first, you can't interact with just any part of the body; you have to find the right pixel to "use" in order to get the ear. Second, for each trophy you collect, you have to listen to your character's insipid, psychotic ramblings, such as, "Beats your precious stag heads, eh, Pops?"

Most of the game takes place in the tunnels, a dreary, subterranean world of endlessly repeating dirt-brown walls, one-hit-kill traps, and Viet Cong, with the occasional addition of a room, usually consisting of several boxes and a portrait of Ho Chi Minh. Navigating the tunnels can go from wearisome to downright nauseating as you spend what feels like hours staring at the floor and looking for unavoidable traps. You disarm one variety by completing pointless, irritating quick-time events and the other with the use key, but once again your cursor must be in exactly the right spot, so attempts to traverse the tunnel at greater than a snail's pace will frequently be rewarded with instant death. Easier to outwit, but equally deadly, are a handful of tunnel-dwelling snakes, who have, for all practical purposes, forged an unholy alliance with the Viet Cong. If all the instant-death obstacles aren't sufficiently frustrating, the checkpoint-only save system forces you repeatedly through the same trap-infested tunnels, unless of course you get the loading bug, in which case you'll have to restart the level entirely. Another bug will send you clipping into forbidden areas from which you can't escape, and additionally, every time you die, you lose the ability to throw grenades for the remainder of the level, so do adjust your strategy accordingly.

Aboveground sections are a welcome relief from the underground torments that make up the majority of the gameplay. Although the jungle is still full of traps, you can jump over them or avoid them entirely, and the Vietnamese enemies are more plentiful out here, so you can indulge in some typical linear shooter action (sans grenades, in all likelihood). For your aiming needs, don't bother using the iron sights; the crosshairs are much more accurate, particularly on the "commie" weapons. As for your enemies, they'll have no trouble shooting you, but that's about the most advanced tactic in their arsenal--some will even charge you with a knife as they stare down the barrel of your AK-47. Graphically, the outdoor scenes are beautiful in comparison with the tunnels, but objectively they don't come close to modern standards, most notably in the character and weapon modeling departments. Sound is likewise underwhelming throughout the game, and you may even notice that the ambient bird sounds from the jungle occasionally filter deep into the tunnels, as if to mock you.

Exploring the tunnels is every bit as exciting as this screenshot suggests.

Tunnel Rats: 1968 seems to have a strange notion of what constitutes "fun." Does anyone enjoy searching for booby traps in repetitive, brown tunnels or listening to a psychotic man-child rant about his father? The whole concept is fundamentally flawed, and the game's brevity, its suicidal AI, and its exasperating bugs and other annoyances only compound the problem. Don't blame Uwe Boll--he merely inspired the game--and don't expect the developers to take responsibility, because they don't even mention the game on their Web site. Perhaps Tunnel Rats mysteriously emerged from somewhere hellish and deep, "like deep down in your own dark tunnel of the soul."

Hinterland: Orc Lords

2009-11-08T11:40:00.000-08:00

Hinterland: Orc Lords

Got Game Entertainment
Tilted Mill
Real-Time Strategy
Release: Jun 9, 2009
ESRB: Teen

Hinterland: Orc Lords Review

Hinterland: Orc Lords plays like a remake of a very old game, but for once, that's mostly a good thing.

The Good

Inventive hybrid design crossing up RPG and RTS genres
Appealing, fast-flowing game matches
Cuts out the mindless, monotonous combat that afflicts other action RPGs.

The Bad

Totally randomized game events
Low production values and no tutorial.

Hinterland: Orc Lords may be one of the best games never released for the Commodore 64. OK, that doesn't sound complimentary in 2009, given that the computer system in question is a Cyndi Lauper contemporary. But this mash-up of a hack-and-slash role-playing game and a base-building real-time strategy has a refreshing old-time feel about it. Indie developer Tilted Mill (best known for 2006's Caesar IV) has put together a likable, fast-flowing hybrid that manages to feel like a remake of a golden oldie but also brand new. While the game isn't entirely successful, due to inconsistent difficulty, poor production values, and the lack of a tutorial, it delivers some appealing action for a bargain price of just $20.

Hacking and slashing--not the most genteel way to build a medieval fantasy town, but a pretty effective one.

At first, however, Hinterland is a tad frustrating. The game does not come with a paper manual or an in-game tutorial. An Adobe manual is automatically installed with the game, and the main menu tries to lure you to the official Web site with the promise of information in the forums; but, really, you shouldn't have to hunt around to uncover basic information on how to play a game you just bought. Thankfully, it isn't that complex. Aside from a few irritating early moments while you figure out the interface and maps, there aren't many stumbling blocks. Still, some sort of training mission should have been included.

Still, chances are good that you've seen all of this before, even if you haven't seen it all crammed into a single game. You play a typical RTS/RPG hero tasked with both building a medieval settlement into a full-fledged town and hacking the countryside to bits. A couple of dozen D&D archetypes are offered for the choosing as your alter ego, including such been-there, done-that sorts as an elven archer, a goblin thief, and an undead warrior. Oddly, there are actually only a few orc options. Regardless of skin color or pointed ears, the heroes are pretty much interchangeable. Each comes with skill bonuses that affect characteristics relating to settlement development and battle bonuses, but they otherwise could have rolled off of a Gygaxian production line. This sameness is further emphasized by generic visuals and sound. Buildings are typical medieval structures; maps are dull stretches of flowery grassland dotted with rare unique features, such as ruins and mushroom fields; and the music is a collection of triumphal odes that could have been clipped out of any RPG released in the past decade.

Your time is divided between managing a town as in a traditional Age of Empires-style RTS and roaming the wilderness looking for fights as in a traditional hack-and-slash RPG, such as Diablo. You begin in control of one location on the map with the goal of expanding your village while branching out to conquer neighboring territories randomly generated for each game. Victory is achieved by killing all enemies over the entire map, which varies between 20 and 50 enemy territories, depending on the size option you choose in the beginning. But fighting isn't all that interesting, even though you can do some nifty things, such as recruiting and outfitting town residents into makeshift adventuring parties.

Town development is really where it's at because settlements grow organically in a way not seen in a typical RTS. Instead of cranking out peasants, you rely on tourists. Every few days, your settlement attracts visitors with skills in such areas as farming, trapping, growing herbs, praying, selling stuff, and playing soldier. The catch is that they only stick around if you meet strict conditions. First, you need coins to build them their digs. Second, you need to fulfill a range of prerequisites, such as settlement quality and access to items; these include crystal balls and dragon eggs. Finally, you need to be famous. Even a bottom-rung sharecropper won't sign on to a lord without a high enough fame score, which is built through killing enemies and taking over territories on the map.

And this is where things get tough. While it is pretty easy to boost your fame in the beginning by killing the goblins, skeletons, spiders, dogmen, orcs, and other fantasy villains that populate the maps, penalties can cripple you. Getting killed, for instance, knocks a whopping 30 points off your fame, while failing a quest assigned by your monarch takes off an even more formidable 40 points. As peasants ask for a fair bit of fame to set up shop in your town, this can quickly put you behind the eight ball. A lot of the game is also random. Peasants of varying levels can seemingly show up at any time. When you've got 15 fame, you might see farmers and merchants popping by with demands of 50 or more. When you're loaded and looking for experienced help, you might see useless grunts arriving who ask for fame under 20. Monarch quests seem totally arbitrary, too. The big guy can ask for something impossible right off the bat, such as access to human souls when the only location on the map with a graveyard is guarded by ninth-level minotaurs that you can barely scratch. Later on, though, when you can offer up the big stuff, that same monarch might just ask for tiny donations of food and gold. At least you can turn off monarch requests.

Low fame? Forget about recruiting a guard. Heck, good luck even convincing a lousy farmer to stick around.

The difficulty can seriously vary from one game to the next depending on your luck. There is only a single save slot, too, and games can only be saved when exiting, which prevents you from even trying again if you get killed at an inopportune time. Still, it's damn near impossible to stop playing. Although the random elements may feel a little unfair, there is something compelling about being kept on your toes by so many unforgiving surprises. Combining such a challenge with catchy, easy-to-play mechanics is another plus. This approach will be familiar to anyone who played strategy games a couple of decades ago because they were similarly built around simple hooks accentuated with brutal, haphazard difficulty. Games also fly by. Territories are guarded by no more than 10 or so enemies apiece, which keeps you from getting bogged down in too much monotonous clickfest combat. You can wrap up a match on the small map in about an hour or so, and even games on the medium and large maps tend to take no more than a single sitting of three-to-five hours to finish.

Although an old-school attitude makes Hinterland: Orc Lords a hard sell to the masses, the game is well suited to dedicated strategy and old-school gamers looking for a challenge. A few more options to ease the randomness would have been appreciated, but there's fun to be had here regardless.

CrimeCraft

2009-11-08T11:34:00.000-08:00

CrimeCraft

Vogster
Modern Shooter
Release: Sep 1, 2009
ESRB: Mature

CrimeCraft Review

This "persistent world next-gen shooter" gets the shooting right but the "persistent world" part pretty wrong.

The Good

Fun PVP multiplayer
Lots of depth to the combat.

The Bad

Poor value for the money
Little sense of immersion
Poor PVE gameplay and questing
In-your-face ads are prevalent.

When there's a single entity that dominates its niche as thoroughly as World of Warcraft dominates the massively multiplayer online game space, it's a daunting task to go head-to-head with it. Thus, a company that wants to get in on that massively multiplayer money needs to go to the margins and explore new gameplay styles and genres in order to interest players looking for something beyond the world of orcs versus humans. This has contributed to an exciting explosion of MMOGs for every taste and style. Vogster Entertainment was banking on this with CrimeCraft, an MMOG built around an enjoyable carnival of gunplay and mayhem. If CrimeCraft's world lived up to its aspirations, it might have become the "WoW alternative" one might expect from an MMOG with "Craft" in the title.

The shared world is attractive, though the ads are in your face.

The basic premise is simple enough. A worldwide economic depression causes the collapse of civilization. The United States falls into anarchy with individual cities and regions controlled by warring corporations and the remnants of local municipal governments. The last remaining "free city" is Sunrise City. This former beach resort town, which resembles Miami, is run by an interlocking assembly of six rival gangs who keep the peace in the city center while defending it from the assaults of outsider gangs and other cities that constantly splash against the city walls. You play as a refugee from the wasteland looking to make a new life in Sunrise City and work your way up from the streets to the upper echelon of gang leadership.

Like Guild Wars, CrimeCraft is completely instanced; it's built around three city zones that act as game lobbies and social areas. These offer you the chance to load up with different weapons, weapon modifications, clothing, and accessories that give a variety of bonuses and special abilities. From these zones, you'll have access to a dozen or so maps that run the gamut from "industrial warehouse full of junk" and "dockyard full of junk" to "chemical plant full of junk." Once in these areas, you'll run and gun at other players wielding a variety of traditional shooter weapons. These range from pistols and shotguns to sniper rifles and rocket launchers. Given how much time you'll be spending in these areas, it's good that this player-versus-player portion of the game is its strongest attribute. While CrimeCraft is controlled from a third-person perspective and there's no jumping (bunny hopping is replaced with an equally effective roll maneuver), it shouldn't take long to get the hang of the game's slightly unusual skill requirements. You'll quickly be able to delve into the many nuances and strategic options that make the gameplay varied and quite interesting.

PVE gameplay consists of randomized bot matches.

For example, crafting is built around four different professions (tailor, gunsmith, engineer, and chemist) that create upgrades, armor, boosts, and weapon mods that can significantly affect your killing power in combat. These items are created using crafting materials that drop in player-versus-environment instances and give even the hardest of hardcore PVPs a reason to occasionally get into a bot match. The game also offers variations on traditional shooter gameplay modes, including Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Assault and Defend on every map, which keeps the player base rotating through the different scenarios and the PVP from becoming stale. Even better, the PVP shooting is well balanced enough that despite the variety of weapons, boosts, and armor available, it's skill and teamwork much more than equipment and character level that separate the winners from the street meat. A level-20 character may not have an easy time against a level-40 character, but it's certainly possible for the 20 to take the 40 down, especially if the level-20 character works with a team.

The problems with CrimeCraft really begin with the minimal MMO shell that's been put around the good-but-unexceptional PVP gameplay. PVE content is thin on the ground and poorly constructed. Much of it consists of basic questing for the first seven or so levels. The rest is the traditional "kill 10 foozles and bring me their heads" along with a decent achievement-style system that offers experience, cash, and perks for completing certain goals in combat. This simplicity isn't the real issue, however; it's the fact that the PVE questing zones are the same maps used in PVP--only populated by rapidly respawning bots. That means you'll be running around shooting things randomly in a zone that isn't crafted to provide any sense of place, narrative, or progress. There is a boss that spawns in after a few minutes, but there's often no reason to kill him. And even if there is, it's awfully tough to get a group together to kill him when the rewards are often greater for just hanging around the treasure drop points (which never change) than completing quests. It's no wonder that players are keeping their time in PVE instances to the minimum that is necessary for keeping the crafting professions supplied.

While PVE gameplay has things like bosses, there's not much structure to the missions.

Indeed, the game's biggest issue is that it's not really much of an MMOG at all. Because the game has no shared world outside of the noncombat city zones, there's no sense of exploration or connection, no identification between players, and no opportunities for the spontaneous stories that develop from chance encounters. As graphically attractive as the three city zones are (and they're all suspiciously clean with a ton of advertising for such real-world companies as Atticus and Best Buy), it doesn't take long before you realize that they are annoyingly large multiplayer lobbies that force you to run around to do stuff that could just as easily be handled by a series of menus. This sense of disconnection and player fragmentation is worsened by not having combat in these shared spaces and nothing but traditional PVP gameplay and poorly constructed PVE missions. Where's the actual "crime" in CrimeCraft? For all that, you're supposed to be a member of a criminal gang, but you don't rob banks, run drugs, mug old ladies, or do drive-bys. Instead, you'll behave in ways that mark you as more of a soldier operating in a well-ordered fascist state than a supposedly lawless thug in anarchy.

From a technical standpoint, CrimeCraft seems to be operating well. Servers have been up pretty consistently while the level of bugs and major lag spikes seems minimal. There has been an issue when the server population gets too high. We've seen a bit of lag in both the lobby areas and the combat instances, but it's never been so bad that we considered leaving the game to wait it out. Considering its complexity, the game kicked off in a remarkably well-balanced way, though even here, there are certain problems. Players have quickly figured out the optimal specs and loadouts that give too much of an advantage in combat, and at the moment, light machine guns and sniper rifles are the combos to beat. The dev team seems active, though, and has been in communication with the player base since launch.

Any serious avatar customization is handled via a microtransaction system.

Ultimately, what really hurts CrimeCraft is completely separate from the game itself: the price tag. The game's initial MSRP was $49.99 US plus a $10 a monthly subscription fee (the first two months are free). This was quickly lowered to $39.99 but even at that price, the game raises more expectations than it's prepared to fulfill. You'd think that a "persistent world next-gen shooter" would have a persistent world. What you get instead is a static universe filled with traditional non-player character vendors, crafting facilities, auction houses, and a distinct lack of adventure. Players can form themselves into gangs to compete against other gangs, but this is nothing more than a ladder and scoring system. Nothing the player does effects the world one iota. There's no fighting over turf, and nothing you do will actually affect the city. As fun as the PVP battles are, they're ultimately meaningless in a larger sense. What CrimeCraft offers is available in a lot of other shooters that give players their endless battles without the monthly fee. Players who want to truly customize their avatars even have to use more money in a microtransaction system that feels excessive on top of the monthly fee. When you add the in-your-face ads all over the place, you might start to wonder why you're paying good money to be marketed to and nickel-and-dimed.

Aion

2009-11-08T11:29:00.000-08:00

Aion

Spotlight On: Aion: Tower of Eternity

We recently had a chance to see the updated content that will appear in Aion: Tower of Eternity at launch. The new updates are part of the "1.5 update," which has already gone live in the original Asian version of the game (NCSoft plans to keep the Western version of game more or less up-to-date with the Asian game within two months' worth of updates), and the US team already has an established pipeline to take content from Asia and translate it into English while also localizing the content for Western audiences by adding many more quests and story-driven details. The US team suggests that about 75% of the content remains the same, but a great deal of content is still added by the localization to make the new stuff more-relatable; for instance, many new "Western-looking" character faces that resemble well-known Western actors have been added. Also, humor is a big part of Aion's lore (both in the original version and the Western version), but not all jokes translate from culture to culture.

The pre-release version of Aion just got a bunch of new pre-release content with the 1.5 update.

Otherwise, Aion's prerelease preparation continues to chug along with more than a million players in the beta and more than 3 million hours logged worldwide; the game is, again, already up and running in Asia and planned for launch in North America and Europe soon, with approximately 6 servers per territory to make sure each area gets good performance. The 1.5 update adds 14 new zones to explore, many of which focus on player-versus-environment ("PvE") gameplay, including new hunting grounds and new raid bosses to challenge. Interestingly, players in Asia have actually requested additional PvE and raid content--uncharacteristic for an audience that typically seems to crave heavy-duty player-versus-player ("PvP") content, though some of Aion's higher-end PVE content has a competitive bent to it, since raid bosses carry the best loot and rewards, so in many cases, teams of players will compete to see who can get to the boss and the loot quickest.

Aion's Western development team described the ongoing reception of the game to Western players as being positive. The game has several features that might appeal most strongly to really hardcore players, such as a positional combat system that grants minor offensive and defensive bonuses to characters who are moving while fighting, and a "stigma" system that lets you customize your character's role by embedding stigma stone items into your weapons and armor--the recent 1.5 update actually added three new additional slots and new ways for stigmas to branch out so that players can create even more-customized characters.

But the team is also looking to build in other features for players of all skill levels. For instance, Aion will have various chat channels for different languages, as well as a handy auto-join group feature that will let you search for and remotely (and automatically) join open groups. In addition, even though Aion's characters start out as tall, shapely humanoids, it offers a full body customization that some players have really taken to, even going so far as to create entire legions (the game's version of guilds) that look similar--for instance, there are no dwarf characters in the game by default, but some players have gone so far as to create dwarf guilds that recruit only characters that look like dwarves.

You can fly into action in Aion later this year.

We then jumped into the game itself to see some of the new zones that have been added, including an Abyss PvPvE zone full of new "Balaur" monsters (the fiends that inhabit the Abyss that separates the two halves of Aion's world), as well as a higher-level version of the game's early training ground, overrun by the Balaur, who have started to emerge into the other parts of the world as part of the 1.5 update's storyline. Like with Aion's other zones, the new zones are colorful and detailed, as are the monsters and characters.

Aion's beta events have come to a close and the game is gearing up for its launch in September.

R.U.S.E.

2009-11-08T11:27:00.000-08:00

R.U.S.E.

R.U.S.E. Multiplayer Hands-On

We took part in the Battle of Normandy in another hands-on with this exciting strategy game.

Ubisoft was showing a new mission for R.U.S.E. at GamesCom, and we were lucky enough to try it out for ourselves. The new mission is based on Operation Dragoon, part of the Normandy invasion in World War II. Located in the south of France around the areas between the towns of Peillon and Gorbino, the map featured steady rain, dark clouds, and lightning, which certainly helped to create a sense of dread. We played as the British, whose speciality is air superiority. Germany, on the other hand, specialises in tanks and artillery, whereas the USA is an all-rounder. This mission was Britain versus Germany, but others will let you play as France, Italy, Russia, or the US.

Ruse cards give you access to special abilities and make up a large part of the game's strategy. On this map, we relied on the blitz card, which speeds up your units in one of the map sectors. The map had around 23 sectors, and we used the card on the sector where our base was located, allowing our resource-collecting trucks to earn us money twice as quickly as usual. We also used the spy card, which exposes an enemy decoy card in any one sector. As its name suggests, the decoy card is used to create a decoy of fake units, which is useful when trying to mask genuine units. You earn one ruse point each minute to spend on any card you have, and you can reuse the same cards in a mission. The points accumulate too, so you might prefer to wait until later in the game and use the spy card on every sector of the map, for instance, before planning a mass assault.

Since the British specialise in air superiority, our plan involved building several air bases, with each supporting up to seven air units. An added bonus of the air superiority bonus is that air units are cheaper to build, and this made our job a bit easier. After the airfields were complete, we built an Avro Anson reconnaissance plane, to scout for enemy troops, and several Hawker Typhoon and Lancaster bombers. We also built some AA guns to take care of enemy planes, and some tanks to guard the road into our base.

Rather than destroy the enemy's base, this particular game mode requires you to reach a certain score before your opponent by destroying as many units as possible. With a formidable squadron of bombers at our disposal, we set about destroying any convoys or troops we found and also used our recon plane to verify as many as possible. About 20 minutes into our mission, we finally defeated our enemy. (We later discovered that his strategy of amassing a large tank force had taken longer than he thought it would.)

From what we've seen, R.U.S.E. is looking like a very solid and addictive strategy game, and we're looking forward to playing it again in the future. R.U.S.E. is heading to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC later in the year.

MotoGP 08

2009-11-07T12:34:00.000-08:00

MotoGP 08

Capcom
Motorcycle Racing
Release: Oct 28, 2008
ESRB: Everyone

MotoGP 08 Review

MotoGP 08 is meat-and-potatoes racing with enough challenge to keep two-wheeled gearheads busy for weeks.

The Good

Three different series of bikes provide some nice variety
Excellent handling physics
Great track list
Fine sense of speed.

The Bad

Game physics are sometimes haphazard
Career mode only lasts five seasons
Limited online options
Very little bike/rider customization.

After snagging the official MotoGP license from THQ in 2007, Capcom released MotoGP 07 on the PlayStation 2; a promising, if far too difficult, rebirth of a game license that had previously thrived in the hands of developer Climax and publisher THQ. MotoGP 08 is Capcom's series debut on the PC (as well as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3). While the game likely won't create a new generation of virtual racing fans, those who have some two-wheeled gaming experience will find a demanding driving model and plenty of stiff competition to keep them busy.

Hard-charging AI, three different handling settings, and multiple weather options are combined for a true test of skill in MotoGP 08.

There aren't any surprises in MotoGP 08's list of game modes--you've got the standard list of single-player modes you'd expect from a racing game: Single Race, Time Trial, Championship, Challenge mode, and so on. The highlight on the single-player menu is the Career mode, which gives you a chance to create a rider from scratch and work your way up through three bike racing series (125cc, 250cc, and, the pinnacle, MotoGP). As you enter races, any points you score by placing high enough in the final results will earn you attribute upgrade points you can apply to one of four aspects of your particular bike: top speed, acceleration, braking, and traction. You can then take your souped-up bike online and enter the competition in online racing events against up to 11 other online riders.

While Career mode is certainly the best single-player mode in the game, it has its quirks. First of all, your career ends after five years regardless of how many series championships you've won. Second, once you've selected from the game's various AI and handling difficulty levels, you can't change them for the entirety of your career. This is especially frustrating once you've maxed out your bike and can smoke the easy or medium-level AI opponents. It would have been more user-friendly to give players the chance to tweak options in between seasons to keep up the challenge.

This lack of career option flexibility is a shame because MotoGP 08 is all about the challenge. While the learning curve is a bit gentler than in last year's PS2 debut, even an experienced MotoGP vet will find some challenge at the default difficulty level. If you bump that up to hard or champion level, you'll face cunning, hard-charging AI opponents that won't give you an inch; you'll be fighting for every position and having a fine time of it (except when you're cursing out loud at your own lack of skill).

Fans of motorcycle racing games will relish the game's bike physics, which are excellent. There are three handling settings to choose from: easy, advanced, and simulation. With a little track time, MotoGP vets will likely be able to settle in at the advanced handling level with little trouble, but throughout every race, the emphasis on the racing line and careful acceleration out of corners is a hallmark of the game. The advanced handling setting is touchy enough; when riding in the simulation setting, even the slightest error on the throttle while deep in a turn will result in a spill. When running against the upper-tier AI opponents, any mistake you make is magnified by their unyielding aggression, and you'll find yourself in yo-yo battles for position at nearly every corner on the track.

While the feel of the bikes in MotoGP 08 is just right, the riding model is not without its problems. The developers have chosen to downplay the consequences of contact between riders. While it is possible to be knocked off your bike by an opponent (and only slightly more difficult to dismount him with some dirty driving), more often than not, you can run into a rider ahead of you with little consequence. In fact, once you've gotten used it, you can actually use this to your advantage by using a rider ahead of you as some extra braking when approaching a corner too fast. The tracks, too, have their quirks. For example, in some corners, the game will penalize you for cutting corners by instantly slowing your bike down to a crawl. It's a fine idea in theory, but its implementation is inconsistent; with enough experience, you'll know exactly which corners you can take advantage of and which you'll need to play straight.

As with the console game, up to 12 players can hop online to race in the PC version of MotoGP 08. Actually getting online is confusing, and neither the game manual nor the game itself does a particularly good job of explaining the process (you need to fill out a form on the game's loading menu). Still, once you're online, network performance is decent--even if the lack of features leave you wanting. You can only run races one at a time--there's no option for virtual championships where players can run multiple races for points--and can only bring your Career mode bike into a race if the host allows it. Even when using custom bikes, however, there's not much in the way of customization; you're stuck with the actual team leathers and bike paint schemes, as well as a series of unique helmets from which you can choose. In an era of customization in such games as Forza 2 and Midnight Club: Los Angeles, next year's MotoGP game simply must have more options for making your rider appear unique.

A fine sense of speed will have you tightly gripping your controller (or keyboard). Wait, can you grip a keyboard?

The game's system requirements are modest, and on the Intel 2.13 GHz machine we ran the game on, the frame rate was solid throughout. That said, the game has its graphical high and low points. Best of all is a thrilling sense of speed (especially on such long, straights tracks as Shanghai and Mugello) that really puts you in the seat of the rider. Unfortunately, decent speed doesn't make up for certain tracks that are simply a bore--with plain backgrounds and sometimes grainy asphalt textures that aren't impressive. New details, such as the night race at Losail, and the brand new Indianapolis GP track set at the historic Indianapolis Motor Speedway are great additions to the game. The hardcore fans will also find a lot to like with the game's audio presentation; not only is there a big difference among the 125cc, 250cc, and MotoGP bike engines, but individual constructor bikes have an engine sound all their own.

A slightly more approachable learning curve coupled with a great deal of challenge means that MotoGP 08 provides enough to keep you busy for months to come while not being as punishing on new players as the previous game in the series. Now that the series has moved to the next-gen consoles and the PC, the real work begins. Next year's game must primarily make sure that it has the same suite of offline and online features that players have come to expect from modern racing games. There's a lot to like in MotoGP 08's meat-and-potatoes approach to two-wheeled racing; here's hoping that next year's game offers a more extended menu.

Tom Clancy's EndWar

2009-11-07T12:27:00.000-08:00

Tom Clancy's EndWar

While the console versions are solid, the PC version of this unique strategy game is too stripped to stand out.

The Good

Innovative voice command mechanic makes you feel powerful
Persistent online campaign makes matches meaningful
Different match types make good use of uplink capture mechanic.

The Bad

Single-player campaign has no story to speak of
All three factions play the same way
Limited unit types make for simple rock-paper-scissors skirmishes
Success of voice recognition varies depending on player's headset.

Tom Clancy's EndWar is a real-time strategy game created for consoles that has now found its way to the PC. How's that for a twist? With its innovative voice controls and strong production values, EndWar was an enjoyable experience on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, granting armchair commanders a sense of high-tech supremacy. Yet on a platform overflowing with quality RTS options, its core simplicity is far more obvious. Its three near-future factions all play the same way, the rock-paper-scissors relationships between units are incredibly straightforward, and the single-player campaign doesn't tell any story to speak of, which is a blatant missed opportunity. Nevertheless, a novel multiplayer mode and persistent units that carry from one mission to the next keep things interesting, and on the whole, EndWar is a mildly enjoyable game, even if it never feels like a comfortable fit on the PC.

Scissors beats paper. Or in this case, transports beat gunships.

To get the most out of the experience, you'll need to plug in a headset. To order your units about, you issue a series of preset commands by holding down the space bar and speaking your directive into the microphone. This runs the gamut from attacking enemy squads ("Unit two, attack hostile four") and bringing in reinforcements when they are available ("Deploy gunships") to centering your view on a particular group ("Unit three, camera") and ordering special attacks ("Air strike, hostile six"). There are limited possibilities, so don't expect to plan out multiple waypoints or set up tank patrols. Nor can you rely completely on the microphone--at least, not if you intend to be competitive. Actions like garrisoning infantry in a building or ordering your units to unleash special attacks require some key presses, so there is a bit of light micromanagement in this regard.

If you'd rather take a traditional approach, you can use a mouse and keyboard, but doing so makes EndWar more frustrating than fun. Because the camera must be focused on a particular unit, you can't scroll across the map and issue orders with ease. You can enter a "sitrep" view, assuming your command vehicle hasn't been destroyed, which makes issuing orders with a mouse more feasible but is visually unappealing. Should you decide to use a headset (which you should, if you want to experience EndWar at its best), you may need to mess around with settings in Windows and within the game menus to get your hardware to work properly. A standard Logitech headset recognized most voice commands, while others were less successful (or completely unsuccessful) in consistently recognizing instructions.

The units themselves are products of EndWar's World War III setting. In the game's version of near-future events, The United States, Russia, and a unified Europe have become superpowers, and the US plans to launch a military space station to tip the worldwide balance of power in its favor. Unfortunately, terrorists destroy the station upon liftoff, thereby igniting global conflict. Yet as interesting and far-fetched as the setting is, it's mostly backdrop. The campaign is just a series of battles against the AI that emulates EndWar's main multiplayer mode, so don't expect much exposition, larger-than-life personalities, or political intricacies. You can play as any of the three factions, but while your own commander (and his or her blatant accent) will change, there's no story to involve you, aside from mission updates and news blurbs. Thus, there's no reason to play the campaign with another faction if you've finished it once already. This lack of narrative is a big disappointment, given Tom Clancy's pedigree of political page-turners.

Capturing every uplink leads to the sweetest kind of victory.

Nevertheless, EndWar has a way of drawing you in, not just because of the unique control mechanism, but because it lets you closely follow your squads into battle. Regardless of your faction, the basic units are the same: Infantry comprises riflemen and engineers; tanks and artillery have the armored advantage; gunships take to the skies; and transports not only whisk your infantry about the battlefield, but offer necessary antiair support. Most of the time, you'll be switching your view from squad to squad, and the camera's close-up vantage point has quite an impact when you're engaged in combat. Bullets fly, gunships fall from the sky, and artillery fire rains from above, and some visual glitches aside, it's all exciting and cinematic in a way that most other strategy games just can't accomplish. Using sitrep view lets you get a quick overview of the battlefield, which is useful but not particularly dramatic. The rapid zoom of the camera when you move in and out of this mode and from one unit to the next, however, is slick.

While it may be authentic to have so few unit types and no striking difference between factions given the setting, it doesn't make any side worth playing more than another. The relationship between units is always the same--tanks beat transports, gunships beat tanks, and so on--so there's little subtlety to the gameplay. Instead, strategy is delivered on a broader level, starting with the mission objectives. There are four main mission types: assault, conquest, siege, and raid. Assault is the simplest (kill your enemy), while in Raid, you must either destroy or defend certain buildings on the map to achieve victory. Conquest is the most interesting mode, taking its cues from the Battlefield games in addition to EndWar's closest RTS cousin, World in Conflict. Here, you must use infantry to capture control points, called uplinks, scattered across the map while fending off the enemy and sabotaging their attempts to do the same. Siege battles are much less common than other types and involve an assaulting player attempting to capture a critical uplink while the defending player struggles to maintain control of it.

Tactics are generally obvious in all of these situations, but they can still generate a tense tug-of-war between players as each jockeys for position. Uplinks are present in all modes, and they are a critical part of the gameplay. Most importantly, they help you earn command points, which you need in order to call in reinforcements and perform other actions. However, uplinks can be taken only by infantry, so even if you aren't playing a conquest map, you'll still want some riflemen or engineers in the field. Uplinks also hold a second key to victory: upgrades that allow you to engage support powers like air strikes and electronic attacks. These powers are invaluable in a sticky situation but also cost command points, so you'll need to weigh the advantage of bringing in another transport to defeat your gunship-heavy opponent against a quick strike that could do immediate damage. There are even short-range nukes to deploy in certain circumstances that can immediately turn the tide of battle and produce a spectacular explosion.

Why is Russia always the bad guy?

All of these battles are given context within a larger turn-based map called the Theater of War. The offline theater is good for practice, but it's the online theater that provides the meat of the experience. This semiglobal map is persistent, so as opposing players engage one another, the results of an entire day's matches represent a single turn within the theater. Once the day's turn is complete, new battles open up as each faction spreads its dominion. This is a great idea that may remind you of a similar mode in the mech action game Chromehounds. But while the sameness of each faction makes it hard to feel particularly loyal, it's involving to watch your faction's color spread across the map, whether that means establishing your presence in Florida or burning Paris to the ground. A few days after the game's release, however, relatively few players seem to be participating in the theater, making EndWar's long-term viability unclear.

Your battle prowess has global consequences, but success brings more than a victory for your faction. You'll also earn a supply of credits after each battle that you can then spend on upgrades for your units. Surviving units gain levels, which gives them access to purchased enhancements, which could mean faster movement speed, new support powers (being able to designate a new drop point for reinforcements is ever so helpful), or additional attacks that can be triggered when you are following the unit that can perform them. Like the Theater of War, this feature seems like it's supposed to make you feel emotionally attached to your faction's success, and it works to an extent, giving you an incentive that functions on a more personal level. While new attacks open up some minor micromanagement options, they don't bring drastic changes, because most battles are still won or lost with quick uplink securing and a basic understanding of rock-beats-scissors dynamics.

While EndWar's tactics were designed on a broader scale, its presentation attempts to throw you into the midst of battle. When firefights get heavy, the screen fills with units and explosions, and it's fun to watch the destruction on the ground from the vantage point of a gunship squad firing at tanks or engineers from above. Some smaller touches make an impact, such as the authentic-looking behavior of engineer squads as they enter a building or a transport. However, the PC version looks much less impressive than its console counterparts. Textures are bland, while lighting, shadows, and other aspects are simply average, so even with all settings turned up, the quality of the visuals doesn't seem to justify the relatively high system requirements. EndWar also suffers from occasional performance problems, which affect not only the frame rate, but the speed of the entire game, which can suddenly start chugging for no obvious reason.

EndWar looks like your prom backup date: pleasing, if not quite beautiful.

The sound design does a better job of immersing you in battle. This is partially due to the din of combat--perfectly appropriate for World War III. However, it's the constant radio chatter and responses of your units that have the greatest impact, making you feel as though you really are in the role of a military commander. The sound effects aren't just cosmetic, however: EndWar's constant feedback is an important tactical tool, letting you make split-second decisions that could mean life or death for your squad. Unfortunately, there are too many times when crucial feedback ("Check unit nine") comes far too late for it to do any good.

EndWar's voice command mechanic makes it unique among strategy games, and it's this innovation that stands out above all of its other features. Strip it away, and you'll find an RTS game that can be fun but is ultimately too simple to stand out in a crowded genre. But even if strategy veterans won't find all the complexities they'd expect, there's something to be said for EndWar's smart match types and persistent campaign. Hopefully as its community grows, so too will the game's long-term possibilities.

Fuel

2009-11-07T12:20:00.000-08:00

Fuel

Codemasters
Asobo Studio
Driving
Release: Jun 23, 2009
ESRB: Everyone

Fuel

This expansive arcade racer may be ambitious, but it doesn't nail all of the basics.

The Good

Hundreds of different challenges and career races
Cool vistas and weather effects
Some of the courses are clever and satisfying.

The Bad

A big open world with too little to do
AI doesn't play by the rules
Racing lacks thrills.

Fuel is an ambitious game that tries to do a lot, but it doesn't deliver where it counts. There's a lot to like in this postapocalyptic, open-world driving game. Some of the races are cool and clever, there are a mind-boggling number of different courses and dozens upon dozens of different vehicles to drive, and the atmospheric environmental effects make for some fun moments. Yet by focusing on the bigger picture, developer Asobo Studios didn't nail down some of the basics that make for fun driving. The racing doesn't feel as thrilling as it should, the artificial intelligence is fundamentally flawed, and the enormous world gives you precious little to do in it. There's a great game struggling to emerge here, but Fuel's strengths are too often overshadowed by its shortcomings.

Fuel's greatest asset--and biggest liability--is its sprawling open world. Every career event and optional challenge is carved out of the enormous, often gorgeous landscapes. There are hundreds of offline races in which to partake, and none of them are exactly the same. Some of these courses, like the occasional circuit race, are cleverly designed and fun to compete in. Circuit standouts include a bridge littered with ramps and debris, and a course that cuts a winding path through an abandoned farm. Some of the longer, broader courses are also designed well and are even exciting on occasion. Racing a motorcycle down the steep inclines of a rocky cliff and improvising a shortcut through a dense forest (and emerging unscathed) are terrific and memorable moments. It's a staggering number of races--and a healthy list of challenge types as well. There are checkpoint challenges in which you have limited time to get from one point to the next; helicopter chases that encourage you to look for good shortcuts; seek-and-destroy chases in which you need to catch up to and eliminate AI opponents that are given a head start; and plenty more.

Shortcuts are the key to winning most races, though you can't get too carried away with them, lest you miss a checkpoint or try to zoom into the woods in a vehicle that performs better on asphalt. Generally, but not always, the AI racers will stick to the obvious path indicated by Fuel's waypoint system (more on this later), giving you a chance to get creative. And creative you'll need to be when it comes to leaving the bizarre AI in the dust. Simply put, the laws of physics that apply to you have only a vague influence on your artificial competitors. The AI racers seem practically glued to the road at times, taking corners without much drifting and avoiding most obstacles. You may see a motorcycle get stuck against a cliffside and then leap dozens of feet in the air onto the path above. Sometimes, competitors will burst forward at insane speeds, or they'll run out of steam in the last mile of a race, letting you pass right by when they seemed capable of impossible speeds a moment before.

The artificial intelligence doesn't seem to be "rubber band" AI, where the competition is meant to stay close to you and provide a sense of competitive excitement. For example, in endurance races you might take an early lead and race 10 miles without glimpsing another vehicle. Rather, "cheating" seems to be a more appropriate term. As a result, Fuel's difficulty level is all over the place. An easy shortcut in the early moments might lead to a quick lead that you'll never relinquish. At other times, you might seemingly deliver a perfect race, yet still manage to lose. This isn't always because of the AI, however. A few checkpoint and timed challenges are too punishing, requiring not just perfection, but ultraperfection. Mistakes are made even more costly by one more element: To make progress, you must finish first. This inconsistency of challenge can be infuriating, because you might cruise along for a few satisfying races, only to hit a roadblock. You can choose the lowest of three difficulty levels if you're having trouble getting past a particular career race, but doing so earns you fewer stars, which in turn slows down career progression.

In races like this one, the AI lies down and dies. In others, it cheats its way to victory.

Ironically, the enormous postapocalyptic wastelands that inspire the incredible variety of courses and vistas also make Fuel's open-world exploration its least engaging feature. It's certainly a gigantic world--5,000 square miles, according to the manual. But it's a gigantic world that gives you very little reason to explore it. You'll discover liveries that earn you new vehicle designs and paintjobs, and vista points that will also lead to unlockable items. These are scant rewards, however, for the long drives through the lonely world required to get to these scattered locales. You can make things less lonely by taking your free roaming online, in which case you'll encounter other players wandering about in the vicinity. It can be a bit more enjoyable to group up with friends or even strangers this way and go hunting for rogue AI drivers together. However, even if you are able to find other players wandering about (a difficult proposition, given the PC version's small online population), you'll be struck by how little there is to do while free-roaming. It begs the question: Why bother creating such a huge wasteland, if you don't give players much reason to explore it? Certainly, no one would play a massively multiplayer online game if all you could do was jog around looking for new clothing designs.

Perhaps if the driving were more exciting, checking out the world would be a bit more interesting. Fuel's driving model isn't bad--it's just unspectacular. Some of the vehicles are really fun to drive, such as the cool-looking Deathwing quad bike or the bouncy Knightmare dune buggy. Yet while there are occasional exceptions (screaming down the side of a mountain in your Shuriken), racing doesn't feel fast or thrilling. You might glance down at your speedometer to see that you're zooming along at 90 miles per hour, but it doesn't feel like you're going that fast. This is due to a combination of factors: the way the AI vehicles don't bounce and drift around as you would expect, the minimal blur effects, and the passable engine noises that are too frequently interrupted by ticks and sputters. The circuit courses feature more clutter, so they offer a better sense of momentum than the more barren courses, because there are more objects rushing past you than just bushes and sand.

Nevertheless, Fuel does offer occasional bursts of excitement, many of them by way of its cool weather effects, which feature in a number of set-piece races. Sand- and windstorms not only fill the screen with gritty debris--and the speakers with authentic whooshes--but may also lead to scripted events, such as trees falling and partially blocking your way. In one of the most memorable races, an entire tornado weaves about, limiting visibility and toppling towers in your path. The environmental effects are highly atmospheric, which makes certain races much more enjoyable than they otherwise would be.

The driving model gets the job done, but there’s a distinct lack of energy to the racing.

You'll never worry about getting lost at least, even in the darkest and windiest of races. The GPS navigation arrows will be perpetually in your face, giving you a generally good idea of how to get to your destination. This moving trail of arrows looks rather disruptive at first, though eventually you'll get used to it and even occasionally appreciate its guidance, though you can turn it off if you prefer. Most of the time, it works well enough, guiding you down the path of least resistance (though hewing out a smart shortcut is the best way to win many races). Other times, the GPS just flat-out breaks, trying to lead you across lakes or up cliffsides that no vehicle in the game can navigate. It might even give up completely, pointing to one spot, then pointing back a few feet, and then pointing to the original spot again in an endless loop of inadvertent hilarity. These issues are memorable because they're so blatantly obvious, though to Fuel's credit, the GPS functions rather well considering the scope of the world. In free roam, you can set a waypoint anywhere, though it's odd that hovering the map's reticle over an exact target, such as a livery or a vista point, doesn't place the waypoint directly on that target as it does in most games with such a feature. If you want to be exact, you will need to zoom in on the map and be precise about waypoint placement, which just makes no sense considering that most waypoints you will want to place will be directly at these targets.

Environmental effects aren't Fuel's only visual standout. While there are a lot of plain-looking areas, the game as a whole looks great. You'll glimpse ruined cityscapes, race across snowcapped mountains, and navigate through fallen windmills, and it all looks extremely impressive. Vehicles didn't receive as much attention as the landscapes did; there is no damage modeling, and some vehicle textures and reflections don't look right. Yet the visual fidelity is high considering how much terrain is covered. The long loading times and occasional frame-rate jitters of the console versions are much less of an issue on the PC. However, antialiasing support on the PC is nonexistent; Although there are AA options in the menu, toggling them has no appreciable effect on how the game looks. You might also find yourself vexed by the day/night cycle. Transitions between day and night are abrupt and frequent, and it gets so dark that nighttime driving is an annoyance that comes with no obvious benefit. The cycle was likely meant to make free roaming seem authentic, but it just feels like one more reason to avoid the open world altogether.

Search and Destroy challenges are heavy on the searching and light on the destruction.

Free roaming isn't the only way to play online. You can play career races against other drivers, and it's a pleasure to leave behind the inconsistent AI and take on some real opponents. Playing online can be great fun, and it's also a good way to discover cool new shortcuts to follow in your next online race. Lag is an issue in Fuel, though, causing vehicles to teleport around on occasion and even disrupting the countdown timer. Also an issue is that you are bumped back to free roam after completing an online race. It's mind boggling that developer Asobo Studios didn't allow players to remain together in the race lobby, or at least drop them back to the online menu. Nevertheless, the number of online courses is impressive, and using Fuel's race creation feature, you can add to that staggering list. It's a cool feature, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Rather than dropping checkpoints behind you from within free roam, you place them on the overhead map. This makes it hard to gauge what the terrain is like, which in turn makes it difficult to make a fun and clever course to race on. Additionally, you can't practice on your course against the AI (you can test it all by yourself, though) or limit the types of vehicles available to the players who join. The idea of creating your own race is good, but as delivered, the feature feels half finished, and it's unlikely that most players will get anything out of it.

If you want to get the most out of Fuel, you should plug in an Xbox 360 controller. Other gamepads and wheels may work, but many players are reporting difficulties with their racing hardware of choice. But even given this drawback and others, some players will embrace Fuel's overall ambition. Nevertheless, if you're interested in racing--and there's a good chance you are--then you'll likely be disappointed by the game's shortcomings. Sure, there are a lot of races and vehicles, and there's a huge, unpopulated open world to check out, if that's your thing. Yet Fuel often seems to go out of its way to invite goodwill, only to let you down. If you're the patient type, it's worth checking out, but if you're looking for offroad excitement, games like Pure and Dirt are better choices.

Painkiller: Resurrection

2009-11-04T05:53:00.000-08:00

Painkiller: Resurrection

Painkiller: Resurrection Review

Painkiller: Resurrection is a buggy trip into hell.

The Good

Spooky levels play a little like Halloween funhouses
Creepy monsters and heavy-metal attitude.

The Bad

Extremely unstable and packed with bugs
No co-op mode, despite it being a promised feature
Confusing level design
Idiotic enemies.

Every loading screen in Painkiller: Resurrection is emblazoned with the tagline "Homegrown: fan_made_product." And boy, they are not kidding around. Although this slogan actually refers to the name of the developer responsible for this mess, it really just rubs in the amateurish and awful quality of this way-late-to-the-party sequel to the 2004 shooter. Confusing levels, idiotic enemies, loads of bugs, and missing modes of play will make you drop your mouse to reach for the ibuprofen.

Heavy-metal monsters so sinister that you can almost hear Bruce Dickinson howling in the background.

First, there is no way that Painkiller: Resurrection is ready to be foisted onto an unsuspecting public. The game as released to Steam is extremely buggy. Hard lockups requiring system restarts, constant crashes during multiplayer, objects getting stuck on you, hang-ups during already-long level loads, enemies that spawn in right on top of you, and hyperactive rag doll animations are just some of the many, many flaws that you can find here. And if you're considering dropping in to check out the cooperative mode of play, which would be sort of a Holy Grail to Painkiller fans because the original strangely didn't include the option, forget about it. Despite what the developer and publisher have promised, co-op isn't in the game out of the box. They have issued a workaround on the official forums, but that involves manually moving around map files and hosting a dedicated deathmatch server. Not only is such a manual workaround unacceptable, but it doesn’t result in the true co-operative experience promised. More pledges are being made in the official online forums about cleaning up all the bugs and adding proper co-op support in the future, but it's obvious that you're paying for a work in progress by buying the game at launch.

Even if you don't care about co-op and manage to get everything to work properly, there isn't much here of interest. The thin storyline is something of a reworking of the original story, with you playing as an assassin who winds up in purgatory after losing his life attempting to save innocents from a car bomb that he set. You think you're going to hell, but you actually wind up in an eerie middle ground populated by lost souls that have apparently morphed into weirdo monsters. The logic behind all of this is a little fuzzy, though, unless you can figure out why murdering thousands of creatures should get you a ticket to the pearly gates. Anyhow, as in the original Painkiller and its expansion, the goal here is simply to go from point A to point B in every level, killing everything that gets in your way. Action is simple and fast paced, with you using mostly standard shooter weapons to gun down hordes of skull-faced ghouls, doughy monsters, cowled grim reapers, undead Saxons with giant swords, and other assorted freaks that look like rejects from Iron Maiden album covers. Generic hair metal guitars sometimes wail in the background during battles, too, and the protagonist utters moronic comments like, "Die in pain!" repeatedly during gunfights, so the rawk attitude is entirely intentional.

Levels have an eerie atmosphere, but their layout and the frequent lockups are far scarier than any ruined cemeteries.

Not that there's anything wrong with all that; dumb shooters can be great. But Painkiller: Resurrection is just too dumb in too many ways. Level design in the six-mission campaign is extremely confusing. While the settings look sufficiently spooky in an old-school way (you can't escape the fact that the game engine is well over five years old, and wasn't cutting edge even back then), complete with ruined churches, rainy cemeteries, dank dungeons, and the like, the layouts are seriously misleading. There is little rhyme or reason to any of the level design. Maps are all just massive areas that lack any sort of structure needed to push you along to battles and end goals. So you wind up getting lost constantly and forced to hunt around for ages trying to find a fight you might have missed. Or you end up looking for slender cracks in walls leading to hidden chambers, and so on. This adds a ton of unnecessary frustration to what is otherwise a run-and-gun shooter. You just shouldn't be getting stuck in this type of game. And speaking of stupid, enemies are totally brain-dead, with virtually no awareness of objects, terrain, or level architecture. They appear to have been programmed to come straight at you, which isn't always possible given such complications as corners, shrubs, tombstones, and the like. So the creatures wind up getting stuck and pump their legs running in place until you mercifully end their struggles. It's not so much that you're fighting monsters trapped in purgatory as it is that you're fighting monsters trapped on the Stairmaster of the Damned.

Painkiller is one franchise that appears to be better off dead. While the original game is still a treat for old-school shooter fans who won't let go of DOOM, all of the expansions and stand-alone add-ons have been pretty much atrocious. Let's hope that Painkiller: Resurrection is the last nail in the coffin.

Prince of Persia

2009-10-24T04:56:00.000-07:00

Prince of Persia

The Good

Intricate level design
Beautiful art direction
Platforming is entertaining and looks great
Cinematic combat moves are cool to pull off and impressive to watch
Elika's presence leads to unique gameplay mechanics.

The Bad

Really, really easy
The new prince isn't a good leading man
Some combat and platforming annoyances.

In many modern games, you rain death upon your enemies; how refreshing, then, that your main task in Prince of Persia is to breathe life into a darkening world. That doesn't mean that the forces of evil aren't on your tail in this open-world platformer, but the most indelible moments of this enchanting journey are uplifting, rather than destructive. Similarly, the latest iteration in this long-running franchise is a rejuvenation for the series, and it's an ambitious one, offering up a new titular prince and casting certain game traditions aside in favor of player immersion. And for the most part it succeeds, eliminating illusion-breaking mechanics like game-over screens and long loading times in the process. This re-imagining comes with a few caveats, however, and if you're a longtime series fan, you'll quickly discover--and possibly resent--that Prince of Persia is, far and away, the easiest game in the series. But if you can clear your mind and let the game's magic wash over you, its easygoing joy and visual beauty will charm you into forgiving a sprinkling of flaws.

Elika grows on the prince--and she'll grow on you.

In some ways, Prince of Persia represents a return to Sands of Time's storybook vibe, which had been somewhat lost in that game's two sequels. Yet our new hero isn't exactly Prince Charming, but rather a wisecracking nomad interested only in his donkey (named Farah, in one of several nods to previous games) and the riches she apparently carries. His royal status is referenced but never fully explored, though his companion Elika is clearly a princess, and as the game progresses, you'll become much more invested in her past than the prince's. Together, they seek to imprison the evil god Ahriman, who has been inexplicably set free by Elika's own father. To do so, they must restore a series of fertile grounds to their former fecund glory, thereby banishing the inky black corruption that has enveloped the land. Storytelling isn't the game's strong suit, and the dismissive, often unlikeable prince is hardly beguiling, a poor fit for the captivating journey ahead. Thankfully, Elika exudes enough charm for the both of them, and the relationship they slowly forge lends plenty of emotional impact to the game's final moments.

This relationship enriches the very core of the experience, given that Elika is not your standard game sidekick. She isn't just a helpless companion, but an important part of a number of gameplay mechanics. As the prince, you will pull off moves familiar to franchise fans: jumping, climbing, scaling, and wallrunning among them. There are also a few new acrobatics to play with, such as the aptly named roofrun, where the prince scuttles along the roof in a vaguely simian manner. But if the moves are familiar, Elika's presence enriches and enhances them. She will jump on your back as you scale across vines, reach for your helping hand as you climb, and perform an elegant pas de deux with you when you need to pass her on a narrow beam. In some ways, this relationship recalls that of Ico and Yorda in 2001's ICO.

While in ICO Yorda was totally dependent on her companion, here Elika is far more helpful to the prince than he is to her. She is, in fact, your constant savior, because she will not, and cannot, allow you to die. Should you fall, Elika will grab you by the wrist and whisk you to safety--meaning the last checkpoint. There is a checkpoint at almost every platform, so aside from possibly having to repeat a few seconds of gameplay, there is absolutely no penalty for plummeting to your doom. You will never see the words "game over," and you won't need to save and reload before difficult sequences. Nor will you need to ever puzzle over how to make it from point A to point B: Elika can fire off a magical homing orb that will show you the precise way of getting to your destination. Combined with simple platforming controls that require a minimum of key or button presses, these facets make Prince of Persia one of the easiest games you'll play all year.

En garde!

This ease of use makes each individual action seem relatively meaningless as you string moves together. For many, this will translate to a diminished feeling of reward; aside from a few exceptions, there is no sequence that feels remotely challenging, certainly not for players familiar with the old-school difficulties wrought by the early games in the series. Yet while the unique satisfaction of overcoming hurdles is missing, it is tempered by other kinds of rewards. The platforming is fluid, and seamlessly chaining a number of moves together is simple but visually appealing, making for some silky-smooth motion that you'll get a kick out of. To get the most out of it, however, you will want to use a controller. While the keyboard controls work surprisingly well for platforming, the numerous quicktime events aren't well suited to a keyboard, and the key prompts are more confusing when you aren't using a gamepad.

As you progress through the game and explore some of the more intricate environments, you'll find some truly impressive level design. Each area flows organically into the next, and while the overall design appears a bit more synthetic than it did in Assassin's Creed, platform placement and other architectural features don't seem overtly artificial. This becomes even more apparent when you begin to unlock Elika's various powers--though calling them powers is a bit of a stretch. As you unlock new explorable areas by collecting glowing orbs called light seeds, you will be able to utilize the various colored plates that dot walls and ceilings. There are four types of plates, and each kind initiates a high-flying feat. Red and blue plates are functionally the same (though visually unique), propelling you automatically toward the next plate or platform. Green plates turn you into a sort of Persian Spider-Man, causing you to quickly scale up walls and ceilings while avoiding obstacles. Finally, yellow plates initiate on-rails flight sequences that give you limited room to maneuver around obstructions, sort of like a 3D version of Nights Into Dreams, the Saturn platformer. Many of the sequences combining plate jumps and standard platforming are exhilarating, and the manner in which some of them utilize all three dimensions make the level design all the more impressive. And amazingly, the camera is rarely a liability, which is quite an achievement. Unfortunately, the flying initiated by leaping from yellow plates is a clear weakness. The constant camera movement and overwhelming visual effect used here make for a few annoying sections, and it is never clear whether you need to go left or right, up or down to avoid certain objects. Given that most of the plate-initiated bits are terrific fun, it's a shame these particular flights of fancy were so poorly crafted.

There is some combat, and while it's hardly Prince of Persia's focus, it looks mightily spectacular. You fight only a single enemy at a time, including the four main bosses, which you'll take on multiple times. Battles are on the simple side: you have four main attacks--sword, gauntlet, Elika's magic, and acrobatic vault--that you can string into various combos. Enemies can change states, making certain attacks ineffective, and there are some other occasional twists. Yet like the platforming, it is on the easy side; even if Elika is bound by corrupted tentacles or rendered unconscious, she's always there to pluck you from death's cold embrace should you miss an important quicktime event (of which there are many). But battles are still uniquely satisfying and look fantastic. The prince throws Elika into the air with ease, stringing throws, slices, and magic attacks together as the camera zooms in and out to showcase the slashes and backflips. The stringent enemy-focused camera and odd scuttling motions of the prince feel confining but work just fine in most of these battles, though they're a bit less successful during certain boss fights that require some environmental manipulation.

This high-flying combo is one of many visual treats.

Combat's not the only thing that looks spectacular. Prince of Persia is beautiful to look at, thanks to vibrant cel-shading and some sumptuous environments. Tendrils of corruption reach toward you as you navigate the cold, colorless caverns of infertile regions. The contrast between these areas and the beautifully lit vistas and thriving vegetation of healed locales is palpable, and the transformation of a fertile ground from darkness to light may remind you of similarly impressive moments in Okami. There are a few rough spots here and there, in the way of glitched animations and tiny frame rate stutters, but they barely detract from the lovely visual design. While there are some minor differences, all three versions look great and well represent the capabilities of their respective platforms. And all three feature the same lovely ambient music, which sounds more Persian than the very American-sounding prince.

Most will be able to finish Prince of Persia in around a dozen hours, though if you want to collect every scattered light seed and avoid quick travel (you can teleport from one healed ground to another instantly), you could add a few more hours to the total. But while a few unlockable skins may not seem like enough reason to return, this game is so enjoyable and delightful that you may want to return to it as you would return to a favorite fantasy novel or film. While its lack of challenge may lull fans, its ease of use will delight newcomers and draw in anyone who appreciates a touch of magic.

Mirror's Edge

2009-10-24T04:48:00.000-07:00

Mirror's Edge

Mirror's Edge offers occasional thrills, provided that you can look past some awkward stumbles.

The Good

Flawless runs provide a total rush
Clean, striking visual design
Fantastic sound effects and music.

The Bad

Frustrating amount of trial and error
Cramped jumping puzzles trip up the momentum
Combat and gunplay are weak.

Like its heroine, Faith, Mirror's Edge tries to hurdle some significant obstacles, but unlike Faith, it can't always make the leap. No doubt, this fascinating action platformer possesses its share of innovations, from a first-person perspective to a clean and crisp visual style, yet it looks to the past more than you may initially notice. This is a modern-day iteration of an old-fashioned platformer, in which you're meant to play and replay sequences of jumps, grabs, and slides until you get them perfect, or at least perfect enough to continue. But unlike its ancestors, Mirror's Edge is more about speed and momentum, and when you can connect your moves in a flawless stream of silky movement, it's eminently thrilling and satisfying. Unfortunately, Mirror's Edge has a tendency to trip over its own feet, keeping you slipping and sliding blissfully along, only to have a tedious jumping puzzle or hazy objective put the brakes on. Leaderboard chasers looking to set a speed-run record will find Mirror's Edge to be pure gold. Others will give up, alienated by the inherent trial and error of the game's basic design. At the very least, there's nothing quite like it, and it deserves a cautious look from anyone who appreciates games that hew their own path.

No matter how fast she runs, Faith can't always escape danger.

Faith is a runner, in more ways than one. In the oppressed society of Mirror's Edge, runners are an underground network of couriers, carrying sensitive information and documents from sender to receiver. The content of these messages is never clear, and it doesn't matter much; rather, the story's conflict revolves around Faith's sister, a cop who is framed for the murder of a mayoral candidate who promised to bring change to the totalitarian government and bring hope to the runners living on the fringe. Soon, Faith is running for a different reason: to uncover the conspiracy at the heart of the murder and clear her sister's name. The story is straightforward, but it's interesting enough to keep you involved, and though it ends with a sequel-hinting cliffhanger, it wraps up things enough to feel fulfilling nonetheless. More intriguingly, the story plays out between missions in stylishly animated cutscenes, as well as scenes within the game engine itself, which also look attractive but feature a completely different art style. Both types look good, but the disparity is a little odd.

And so you run, across rooftops, through train stations, and along walls. As you run, you pick up speed and are able to string a number of moves together in rapid succession. You can slide under pipes, bound over railings, and leap across impossible-looking chasms, among other techniques. Of course, the most obvious twist in Mirror's Edge is that you do all of this from a first-person view, rather than with the typical third-person camera that we've come to expect. It's an interesting spin, if not wholly new, and it has a way of immersing you as you speed toward your destination. Actions such as balancing on a narrow beam, sliding under a ledge at top speed, and tumbling when you land a long jump are fun to execute and look neat, but it may also make you wonder how much fun it would be to see what Faith looks like when she pulls off these neat stunts, which isn't possible in this game.

Nevertheless, Mirror's Edge excels when you hit that snappy stride, and once you've found the best route through a particularly tricky scenario, it's exhilarating to rush through it without a care to weigh you down. But this doesn't happen the first time you do it, or even the fifth time. You will need to experiment and hone your skills, given that a simple mistake can send you plunging down onto the street below, or will at very least interrupt your stride. You're expected to play each level multiple times to learn the routes that best propel you along, which is great the 10th time around but is often an infuriating series of false starts, mistimed jumps, and full stops during the first few attempts. If you need a hand, you can hold a button to activate runner vision, which turns the camera toward your destination, but it's an imprecise solution that sometimes points you toward a short-term objective and at other times points you toward your long-term goal.

Geronimo!

Another inconsistently helpful tool comes directly from the game's impressive art design. Mirror's Edge is a game of visual contrasts, in which stark white environments contrast with vivid colors. It looks beautiful and clean, and it's a great way of demonstrating both the bleakness of an authoritarian society and the unique manner in which a runner would see the world--as an array of landing points and jumping opportunities. Important ramps, doorways, ladders, and other points of interest are painted in a vibrant red, which is an important visual cue in some of the broader levels. However, this element too is delivered inconsistently; in some cases, the red hue may not fade in until you are close to the pole or vaulting point in question, and in other cases, Mirror's Edge expects you to figure things out without this visual assistance.

For a game that relies on so much forward momentum, Mirror's Edge has a way of bringing the pace to a halt. Sometimes this is because of the nature of trial-and-error gameplay: fall, die, reload checkpoint. At other times, it's because you're faced with an intricate jumping puzzle that eschews the sense of speed entirely, such as one that has you descending into the depths of the water-supply system and then up again. These aren't bad, but they're not particularly engaging, either; you're likelier to feel relieved rather than fulfilled when you reach your destination. Or you'll be zooming along, only to find yourself in an elevator, reading the news crawl on the wall's electronic panel while the level apparently loads in the background. In all of these cases, you're torn from the experience and reminded that this is, after all, just a game.

Armed enemies further complicate matters. It's best to run right past them when possible, but their bullets have a way of bringing you to your knees as you rush around looking for the best escape route. Some foe-heavy scenarios are particularly annoying, such as a sniper-loaded sequence in the final level. You can confront the threat head-on in some cases, but it requires careful planning and excellent timing. You can perform some close-combat moves such as jump kicks and punches, but these are best when used as hit-and-run tactics; trying to engage in melees with more than one or two enemies at a time is a quick path to the most recent checkpoint. Conversely, you can disarm an enemy in a quick-time event, pressing the disarm button when your foe's weapon flashes red. If you want to hold on to it, you can fire off a few shots until the clip runs out. However, Faith is ultravulnerable to gunfire, and the gunplay is loose and unfulfilling. If you have trouble keeping things in check (it takes some split-second timing to land a pitch-perfect disarm), you can enter a limited-use slow-motion mode, which comes in handy and makes some of these action-focused moves look cool, though it ultimately doesn't add much to the gameplay.

If you can overlook the array of quirks long enough to find your stride, you'll want to check out the beat-your-record races and level speed runs. Both modes feature online leaderboards, and both cater to the players likeliest to get the most out of Mirror's Edge. In a sense, the single-player story is simply a practice run for being a virtual show-off, yet the players repeating these levels (who will learn them to perfection) are also the ones likely to see Mirror's Edge at its most thrilling. You will want to break out an Xbox 360 controller if you want to get the most out of the experience. The keyboard-and-mouse setup is decent but occasionally awkward, and it can't compete with the interesting (but intuitive) gamepad controls.

You'll be seeing red, both literally and figuratively.

The unusually crisp visuals have seen some nice additional touches on the PC, such as fluttering industrial plastic over a few doorways, and symbolic flags undulating in the wind. The audio also deserves high praise. Sound effects such as Faith's breathy heaves and plodding footsteps are authentic touches that heighten the sense of speed and tension. The voice acting is equally terrific, but it's the pulsing, driving soundtrack that impresses most. Its rhythmic flow augments Faith's most fluid runs, whereas subtle ambient chords fill in the silence during downtimes. The superb musical journey culminates in a fantastic vocal track that plays during the game's final credits.

Mirror's Edge is many things: invigorating, infuriating, fulfilling, and confusing. It isn't for everybody, and it stumbles often for a game that holds velocity in such high esteem. But even with all of its foibles and frustrations, it makes some impressive leaps; it just doesn't nail the landing.

Undead Knights

2009-10-24T02:58:00.000-07:00

Undead Knights

Adding zombies into the mix isn't enough to revive Undead Knights from its stale, typical hack-and-slash action.

The Good

Interesting premise
Amusing zombie-toss multiplayer mode.

The Bad

Tedious gameplay and level design
Environments only get remotely interesting toward the end of the game.

These days, if you want to create instant fun, it seems as if the solution is to "just add zombies." Undead Knights for the PSP, from publisher Tecmo, takes this philosophy and runs with it by injecting a healthy dose of reanimated rotting corpses into mundane, screen-filling hack-and-slash action. The idea of transforming hordes of enemies into your own personal army of shambling doom is an intriguing one, but in the case of Undead Knights, the end result is little more than a Dynasty Warriors-style game sauteed in extra zombies.

You play as one of three pallid, undead warriors hell-bent on revenge. They were once loyal knights serving under King Gradis in the kingdom of Cavalier, but because the knights suspected the king's beautiful (and overly buxom) new queen of foul play and witchery, they are murdered at the behest of the king. After their deaths, a mysterious being known as "The Beast" offers to revive them as undead and grant them the power to turn their enemies into zombies under their control. Though there's a twist or two thrown in for good measure, the plot mostly serves as a straightforward excuse to make a soldier-slaying and zombie-making mess.

Yes, you can turn this big lug into your very own pet zombie.

Undead Knights attempts to play up the drama with cutscenes, but a few strange elements make it difficult to take the presentation seriously. The major enemy characters in the game are voiced-over with dramatic acting that is appropriate for the game's fantasy medieval setting, but your characters sound like rejects from heavy metal and punk rock bands. The dialogue is scripted to match the voices; thus, your enemies speak lines that are--again--appropriate for the setting, but your own characters will throw in vulgarities for no other purpose than to titillate the player (or perhaps the writers), and no one's mouth moves at all during spoken lines. The only explanation for this odd mixture is perhaps that the game is going for unintentional humor.

Thankfully, none of these odd decisions get in the way of the gameplay. On the field, your characters can slash, jump, evade, and grab. Grabbing an enemy turns him into a zombie; grabbing a zombie allows you to either throw it or smash it into the ground for an explosive attack. There's a delay--determined by how strong he is--from when you grab an enemy to when he's fully converted into a zombie. This encourages you to weaken said enemy enough to the point where you can instantly convert him. With each successful conversion, you fill up a meter under your health bar that, when full, allows you to unleash a devastating combo attack that renders all victims zombies. Beyond this, though, there's little technique you'll actually need to employ. Because you're likely to be crowded by a mass of soldiers at most points during combat, you'll be just fine if you mash on the weak attack button for a few swings and then repeatedly hit the grab button.

Having the zombies on your side is advantageous because they'll keep lesser enemies distracted, but their most notable use comes when you have to overcome obstacles. You can command your zombies to destroy archery towers, as well as siege machines and barricades. Comically, you can also throw them onto spiked wrecking balls so that they roll into enemy forces, and you can command them to form a bridge across chasms. If you've ever craved a game in which you can walk across the backs of undead minions, then this is it. Once the initial glee of controlling an undead army dies down, however, the game's tedious pattern becomes painfully clear. Most of the level design boils down to fenced-off kill rooms, so more often than not, you'll simply enter an arena-style environment, slash at soldiers, convert as many zombies as you can, and then hold down the R button to command them to wreck something. Occasionally, larger and more powerful enemies will visit to make things interesting (at which point you'd best employ your special attack), but it's not until the last one-third or so of your playing time that things get really challenging and the whole repertoire of enemies comes at you supplemented by multiple traps, such as land mines, cannons, and spike traps.

You're encouraged to slaughter as many enemies as possible while completing each chapter as quickly as possible because the game ranks your performance and awards you dark energy with which you can upgrade your characters' abilities. Sadly, the list of upgrades isn't exciting: All you have to look forward to is maximum health, increased attack power, two combination attacks, and a few peripheral abilities and buffs. There aren't any new weapons to discover. There aren't any magical abilities or new special attacks to learn. What's most disappointing is that the possibilities for powerful, inventive, or even amusing new zombie techniques are never explored.

You'll be hard-pressed to find another game that lets you walk across the backs of your zombie servants.

The zombies themselves are almost all the same--shirtless blue-bodied detritus--which makes sense because a great majority of the enemies are the same armored soldiers differentiated only by the colors of their smocks. With a few of the larger executioners and monsters thrown into the mix, combined with some of the more detailed fortress environments, Undead Knights looks decent enough. The frame rate never bogs down to unplayable levels, so some of the flatter character models can be excused, given that you might see dozens of enemies on the screen at once. Again, though, it's not until much later into the game that you'll see anything more interesting than rocky paths, dirt trenches, or the inside of a stone fortress. (One embarrassing note: Enemies will spawn out of thin air, sometimes right in front of your face.) The music fares slightly worse because it consists almost entirely of wailing electric guitars churning out angry yet generic riffs that all start to sound the same by the third hour. All told, the presentation is almost as tedious as the gameplay.

Undead Knights offers you three difficulty levels from the start, allowing you to go through any of its 20 chapters on "Hell" difficulty if they get too boring. It also has its own list of achievements (dubbed Revenge Titles) that unlock for such things as throwing a certain number of zombies, turning a certain number of soldiers or larger characters into zombies, destroying a certain number of structures, and the like. They've been given amusing names, too, with some favorites being "Boom Goes the Dynamite", "Tenacious Z" and "World's Greatest Boss" among others. The game allows you to revisit any chapter to improve your rankings and throws in three multiplayer modes for good measure as well. These are actually more interesting than the main game: One mode has you throwing zombies at a second player to see who can score the most hits; another has you racing through several areas before fighting to the death; and the last one is a token Survival mode. The amusement of chucking corpses at each other or pummeling each other after a race isn't necessarily worth playing through six hours of the single-player game just to unlock every multiplayer map, but it's nice to have these options.

There's nothing entirely terrible about Undead Knights, except for maybe the soldiers that infinitely spawn out of nowhere. It's just disappointing that the action remains so simple and unremarkable when many similar games exist for the PSP. This is especially true when you consider that creating a zombie army--its one leg up on such games as Dynasty Warriors and Warriors Orochi--doesn't let you do anything much more exciting than demolish an iron gate.

Naruto Legends: Akatsuki

2009-10-24T02:53:00.000-07:00

Naruto Legends: Akatsuki

Naruto's latest outing is yet another simplistic, mediocre brawler.

The Good

Good voice-overs and music
Akatsuki mode is fun
Lots of customization
Plenty of unlockables.

The Bad

Lousy camera and lock-on system
Same story you've almost certainly seen before
Shallow fighting system
Lackluster graphics.

The Naruto series is enormously popular worldwide. Given that, it's no surprise that fans of the spiky-haired blonde ninja-in-training would love the chance to actually play him in a video game. Unfortunately the history of Naruto games is one that consists primarily of a string of mediocre-at best titles. Still, hope springs eternal and with each new Naruto game released, there's always the chance that this one will be that ultimate Naruto game that you've been waiting for. Alas, Naruto fans will have to keep waiting because Naruto Shippuden: Legends: Akatusuki Rising, the latest in the series, is yet another sub-par brawler that seems to re-tread the same ground with similarly pedestrian results.

Combat amounts to little more than mindless button mashing.

The "haven't we been here before?" quality begins with the game's storyline. It follows the Kazakage Retrieval story arc in which Naruto returns to his village after a few years absence to meet up with his teacher and some old friends. Of course, it wouldn't be a day in the life of Naruto if something horrible didn't happen so that Naruto and his pals could bust out their cool ninja moves. Sure enough, when a couple of Akatsuki's followers manage to capture Naruto's friend Gaara, it's up to Naruto and his friends to rescue Gaara. If this sounds familiar, it's because it is familiar. It's pretty much the same story arc featured in Ultimate Ninja 4: Naruto Shippuden. Fans of that game who are hoping for a different perspective on the Naruto story based on the title (perhaps delving into the history and rise of the popular Akatsuki villains) will actually get a bit of fan service through the Akatsuki mode. This mode allows you to play as the bad guys capturing Sand Village and is a nice addition to the game. Unfortunately, you'll have to trudge through the same old repetitive story to get to it and the actual mode isn't that long.

The heart of the game takes place in the Scenario mode, which is a linear series of missions that follows the storyline of the show. As you complete missions in this mode, you'll unlock others things to do. These include the Mission mode where you can go on stand-alone missions that are rated in terms of difficulty to help the citizens of Leaf Village and the Survival mode where you'll have to defeat a certain number of enemies. Items, skill scrolls, and money acquired in these missions can also be used in the games store to kit out the many unlockable ninjas you can use. This level of customization and unlockable content is one of the game's biggest strengths. Put simply, there's a lot of game in here, and if you're a completionist looking for the kind of game where there's always another glittering prize on the horizon, Akatsuki Rising has you covered.

Unfortunately, getting there means that you'll have to slog through acres and acres of mindless button-mashing beat-'em-up combat. The key difference between Akatsuki Rising and previous Naruto games is that combat has been made a bit simpler by putting all attacks and counters on one button: the square. Most of the game is spent mashing that single button and repeatedly throwing the same combo on a mindless group of enemies. Counters are performed by pressing any button when being struck by an enemy, which means you'll often counter without realizing it. This can mess up your combo if you are struck by another opponent, and your target lock will switch away from the opponent you were attacking. Given the clunky method for switching between target-locked opponents and the occasionally wacky camera, it can make fighting against groups harder than necessary. That's somewhat ironic considering the simplicity of actual one-on-one fighting. The result is a system that starts out modestly enjoyable but eventually grows weirdly dull and frustrating at the same time.

Akatusuki mode is fun, but it's short and not enough to save the game.

Artistically, the game is all over the map. The sound is excellent. The music is the licensed soundtrack from the Naruto anime series and is used very effectively to punctuate the action. The character voice-overs are well done, which is an especially impressive feat considering how many untranslated Japanese terms the English voice cast had to incorporate into the dialogue. Graphically, however, the game could use some work. The characters and enemies translate well into 3D-animated models, but the environments they're traipsing through are the kind of blocky, flat, low-poly worlds that wouldn't be acceptable in a PlayStation 2 game. Landscape colors seem oddly muted and the level design apparently draws its inspiration from the square corridors of the original Doom base on Mars.

In the end, the biggest sin Naruto Shippuden: Legends: Akatsuki Rising commits isn't that it's a particularly bad game. If all you're looking for is some mindless button mashing and lots of unlockables to hunt down, this game will do well enough. The worst thing about Akatsuki Rising is that it's the same mediocre game Naruto fans have been playing in every one of the roughly 16 million Naruto games that have been released. There have certainly been exceptions (Ultimate Ninja Storm comes to mind), but Akatusuki Rising isn't one of them, and it seems like the Naruto faithful deserve better than this one.

Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga

2009-10-24T02:48:00.000-07:00

Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga

Xseed Games
K2 , Kurogane
Role-Playing
Release: Sep 30, 2009
ESRB: Teen

Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga

As Valhalla Knights moves to the Wii, any potential for fun is buried under tons of repetitive busywork and technical gaffs.

The Good

Lots of jobs and skills to choose from.

The Bad

So ugly it's hard to see the gameplay
Mind-numbing repetition
Interface ignores years of design evolution
All the grind of an MMO game but none of the camaraderie
Crippled multiplayer.

The previous entries in the Valhalla Knights series were monotonous, unrewarding PSP games that poorly aped the Monster Hunter series. Monster Hunter will be making the leap to the Wii in North America next year, and while Valhalla Knights has beaten it to the punch on this occasion, it hasn't so much leapt onto the console as it has limply flopped onto it. Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga is ugly, repetitive, and boring, and it's one of the worst action role-playing games since Valhalla Knights 2.

Eldar Saga hangs its storytelling hat on having two related gameplay sections, joined by a family bloodline. The first chapter casts you as an uninteresting young man. He goes where non-player characters tell him to go and he shrugs during cutscenes, but that's about the full measure of his emotional depth. You spend much of your time early on reuniting the four races of the world: elves, dwarves, halflings, and humans. Monsters are scattered across the land, and an evil spirit is returning to unite them. The backdrop is meaningless and has no impact on the game other than providing a convenient excuse to kill things and level up. Drama certainly takes a backseat when your enemies include such fiends as moths and immobile fungi. Demons and monsters do appear, but the first chapter's real purpose is to set you up with a swooning woman from one of the four races. Conveniently, each of the four races has a woman so dunderheaded as to be attracted to your character. Your child is the character you'll play in the second chapter.

You'll spend a lot of time in this forest.

Set 16 years later, the second chapter covers the war between the alliance of the four races and the monster armies. Your race options for the second chapter will be human or half-human/half-girlfriend's race. Want to play as a half-elf but decided on the halfling girl in the first chapter? Too bad. You're just as out of luck if you want to play a whole-blooded anything-but-human. Your choice of race affects your stats, but there's no way to find that out during the first chapter, when you make your irrevocable decision. You could easily find yourself locked into playing the greater part of the game as a race that doesn't suit your character's build or that you just don't like. In the first chapter you take on one of the basic jobs--thief, mage, priest, bard, and soldier. The second chapter opens up advanced jobs, such as knight, ninja, samurai, and anchor. Each job comes with its own set of active and passive skills you can advance, and each job demands a focus on a different set of stats and equipment bonuses. So, while you can switch jobs in-game, Eldar Saga rewards single-minded focus with the bonuses and powers you'll need to survive.

You could pick your battles if you could actually spot enemies, but low-resolution visuals make it hard to spot them. One smudgy blur in a field of smudgy blurs isn't an easy target. You're better off hiring a computer-controlled mercenary and letting him engage the enemy for you--and in fact, Eldar Saga even recommends hiring mercenaries for their "sharp eyes." Once the aggressive computer-controlled enemies spot and attack you, combat begins, and you have a chance to test out a variety of attack types and special skills. Unfortunately, the poor graphics and a number of equally troublesome camera modes make it hard to see where your enemies are in relation to you. As a result, you need to rely on camera lock-on, which heavily restricts your mobility. It's unfortunate that in order to use one key mechanic, you are forced to give up another.

You spend most of combat sticking close to your mercenary, locking on to any enemies that come near, and pounding the attack buttons mindlessly. Any thoughts of careful maneuvers or plans will wilt under the reality of always-aggressive opponents, the necessity of locking on, and the superior results that boneheaded button-mashing defensive fighting will deliver. You can still expect to be on the receiving end of plenty of cheap deaths, though. Sharp spikes in enemy difficulty arise without warning. To access any items or skills requires going into your item menu in real time. That's a difficult task with an action game's limited inventory, let alone with this RPG's massive collection of gear. You'll frequently find yourself forced to choose between dying from an inflicted condition and dying as you try to get the cure from your backpack while enemies tear you apart. You can set a few items for quick access, but it's simply not enough.

You have to wait for enemy bodies to vanish before you can collect loot.

Bizarrely, in order to heal without using precious items or magic, you have to stand stock-still and not take any action. Since standing still costs nothing and heals you, a core gameplay technique is to stand still, doing nothing. There's no justification for encouraging you to disengage like this, other than to arbitrarily run up the gameplay clock. Death is punished by the removal of half of your money and the theft of most of your items. You can store spare items and extra money in your house. Well, it's called a house, but it's really just a menu where you can drop stuff off and change your character's haircut. Also, it's accessible only in the main city. You'll find yourself making frequent trips back to the city to stash money and items, followed by frequent trips to pick up money and items when you need them.

Repetitive trips are one of the most defining features of the game. Storyline quests will send you from a hub city to a dungeon, either to kill something or to find a spot where a cutscene happens. Then you'll return to the hub city, only to be sent right back to the same dungeon. The second time you dive into an identical set of monsters and challenges in the Castle of Ruins level, it will feel old. The third, fourth, and fifth trips will feel downright antediluvian. Clever reveals of secrets and rewards could alleviate this, but each trip just feels more tired than the last.

Between storyline quests, you can take on guild quests. These are smaller missions that send you to kill a certain number of a certain type of monster, escort an NPC to a particular location, or go talk to an NPC and come back. They are no relief from the storyline's drudgery, sending you right back to storyline areas you've finished. And there's no way to knock out a few guild quests all at once, since you can take on only one at a time.

If you save up enough money, you can go shopping for weapons, armor, and items. While you shop, there's no way to compare what you're buying to what you've got. If you haven't memorized your character's gear and all of the two-dozen-plus stat changes each piece has, you'll have to exit out from the shop and take some notes. Extensive notes, since there's no rhyme or reason to the gear modifications. You can easily buy a weapon that costs 10 times your current weapon's price and find yourself with lowered stats. Don't save only before you go into a big fight; save before you go shopping.

If you don't want to memorize the stats for every piece of gear you see here, you better buy a notepad.

You can also hire and equip mercenaries in town, and sadly, there's no way to change out your sole mercenary companion in the field without a return trip. Buying gear for your mercenaries is integral to their success, but there's no way to compare their current gear to what you're shopping for. You'll have to take notes on their current gear, leave the mercenary hiring shop, go to the item store, buy what you want, bring it back over to the mercenary hiring shop, and then distribute what you've bought. They can also take items you don't need, as long as you're willing to compare each piece on each mercenary, one item and one mercenary at a time.

Visual effects are limited to blasts and healing energy, without any spectacular summons or flashy magic. But you can still expect the frame rate to stagger when you've got more than a handful of enemies on the field. The field itself is often so dark and the graphics so muddy that you won't be able to see where you're going without watching the minimap and crossing your fingers. Audio problems start with your character's first step, which you'll mistake initially for the pealing of massive bells or the fall of a blacksmith's hammer. Your character's awful-sounding footfalls set the mood for dull music and inoffensive sound effects. There's no reason to play Eldar Saga, but if you're determined to, there's no reason to leave the sound on. Put on an album you enjoy and set the TV's volume to zero.

You can choose to play co-op with another player using the Wii's Wi-Fi. There's no local co-op, although with the frame rate issues in single-player, that's no surprise. Once you're connected, your co-op buddy takes the place of your mercenary companion. Predictably, there's also no voice chat available--there are only preprogrammed emotes.

Constantly repeating the same dungeon, crisscrossing the same areas over and over again, standing still and doing nothing to survive: Eldar Saga's gameplay more closely resembles that of a lackluster massively multiplayer online game than of a compelling console RPG. In an MMO you'd at least be able to play with friends. You do not want to make a friend play Eldar Saga.

Forza Motorsport 3

2009-10-24T02:34:00.000-07:00

Forza Motorsport 3

Turn 10 Studios' latest racer is bigger and better than its superb predecessor in every way.

The Good

Hundreds of desirable cars to drive, paint, and tune
Great and varied selection of tracks to race on
Presentation is uniformly excellent
Superb online multiplayer options
New storefront features make it easier to buy and sell your creations.

The Bad

AI drivers occasionally fall asleep at the wheel
Career bug sometimes lets you use cars that far exceed event restrictions.

Do you like cars? If so, Forza Motorsport 3 is the game for you. In fact, provided you don't hate cars, Forza Motorsport 3 is the game for you. Turn 10 Studios' latest racer is an ambitious game that tries to be a lot of different things for a lot of different people, and the great news is that it succeeds at just about every turn. It doesn't matter how good you are behind the wheel; you can find a difficulty level and a handling model to suit you. And while there are plenty of options available for those of you who enjoy painting or tuning your rides as much as you enjoy driving them, you don't have to devote any time to those features to reap their rewards. Forza Motorsport 3 is a bigger and better game than its predecessor in every way imaginable, and while it's not flawless, it's certainly way ahead of the competition.

The Ladera Test Track is among the first new circuits that you race on.

Your first race in Forza 3 is spent at the wheel of an Audi R8 loaner, and by default, there are several driving assists--including the series' familiar dynamic racing line--turned on that serve as your water wings as you're thrown in at the deep end. From there, you're free to take your career in whichever direction you choose, though with limited funds at your disposal your first car is more likely to be a Scion than a Shelby. Career mode is divided into seasons, and each season you compete in a world championship that spans several races. You don't get to choose which championships you're entered into, so you start with relatively slow showroom cars early on and must get some miles under your belt before competing in thoroughbred racecars later on. With that said, championship races are generally two or three weeks apart, and so after every race you're invited to choose another, shorter series of events to take part in. You can also ignore the calendar completely if you choose, and just compete in whichever events you want to at anytime. Either way, the options you're presented with are determined, at least in part, by the cars that you own, so if you manage to get your hands on an Enzo Ferrari or a Porsche Carrera GT early on, you don't have to wait around before putting them to work. You might even find that you can use one or two of your cars in events for which they far exceed the maximum performance restrictions, though this bug doesn't rear its competition-trivializing head very often.

Regardless of what you're driving, you're free to pick and choose which assists you want to use, and you have an opportunity to quickly alter your settings before every race. This is definitely a welcome feature, because while you might not feel the need for antilock brakes or stability control when you're driving something modest, you might not be nearly as confident climbing into a Bugatti Veyron supercar for the first time. It's tempting to make things easier by keeping all of the assists turned on, but there's a great incentive to turn them off, because every time you do so, your potential earnings increase. For example, turning off the autobrake (which you'll probably want to do right away) increases your winnings by 10 percent, and if you opt for "simulation" damage, fuel, and tire wear as opposed to "cosmetic" or "limited," you can add another 15 percent on top of that. This setup ensures that while anyone who picks up Forza 3 can spend their entire career feeling like a winner, better drivers will earn more money in the process, and rightly so. Similarly, you get to keep more of your winnings if you don't have to spend them paying for damage incurred during a race, so although it's possible to win some races by driving aggressively and using opponents or walls to slow you down for corners, you won't be doing yourself (or your opposition) any favors in the long run.

Ever wondered what the interior of a Ferrari FXX looks like?

That's especially true if your opponents are other online players or a friend that you're playing split-screen with, because retaliation is likely to cross their minds at some point. Forza 3's AI is more focused on the finish line than on forcing you off the track, which makes it superior to some of the players you're likely to meet online, but it's not an intelligence that's going to pose a threat to its human counterparts anytime soon. At times, AI drivers are superb: they jostle for position, they look for openings when other drivers falter, and they know when to back off if their attempt at an overtake starts looking perilous. Occasionally, though, these otherwise believable opponents will make such silly mistakes that you'll swear they must have fallen asleep at the wheel. At Barcelona's Circuit de Catalunya, for example, it's not nearly as uncommon as it should be to see opponents accelerate toward the Seat hairpin and fly off into the gravel without ever appearing to touch the brake pedal or the steering wheel, and it's not unheard of to see different opponents making the exact same error on consecutive laps. Race incidents like these aren't something you'll see often, especially if you're spending most of your time at the front of the pack, but if you're in a closely contested race, it's less satisfying to win as a result of an opponent's incompetence than it is to beat him out of a corner or slingshot past him on a straight.

It's also slightly less satisfying to cross the finish line first if you've felt the need to use Forza 3's new rewind feature during the race, but it's a great (if unoriginal) addition to the game regardless. If you consider yourself a purist, you might feel inclined to look down on this new feature and on anyone who uses it, and that's fine, because you don't have to use it if you don't want to, and nobody is ever going to have the option of using it while competing with you online. Furthermore, if you're from the no-rewind school of racing, your leaderboard times will always appear above those of drivers who have used the rewind to correct any number of their mistakes. The leaderboards also clearly display which assists drivers were using when they recorded their posted lap times, which might ultimately end up being a better incentive for you to turn them off than extra winnings are.

With so many cars to choose from you're sure to find some of your favorites.

As in Forza 2, your winnings in Forza 3 can be used to buy new cars (more than 400 different models are available at launch), either direct from manufacturers or from other players via an auction house. However, it seems unlikely that Forza 3's auction house will be the hive of activity that Forza 2's was, not because it has changed for the worse, but because unless you're looking for a bargain or want to offload a car that you've been awarded, there are few reasons to go there. In Forza 2, one of the main reasons to buy a car from the auction house was that it had a great custom paint job and/or because it had already had money spent on upgrading and tuning it. You can still buy and sell cars this way if you choose to, but in Forza 3 you can also deal in tuning setups, paint jobs, and individual vinyl designs without having to attach them to cars. For example, if you re-create a favorite video game character on the hood of a car and you want to earn some credits selling it, you now have two options. You can either sell it as a vinyl that other players will be free to paste onto any car that they choose (safe in the knowledge that they won't be permitted to resell it subsequently) or incorporate it into a design for a specific model of car so that players who own one of those cars can apply it to their vehicle. It's a vastly superior system to that in the last game, and because potential buyers can search for designs either by typing in keywords or by using presets like "retro," "anime," and "realistic," there's a good chance that players who are interested in the kinds of things you create will find their way to your in-game storefront.

Forza 3's car models look fantastic in their showroom and real-world race liveries, but it's the designs being created by the community that are really making them pop. That's no mean feat, because the tools that designers have to work with, while clearly powerful, don't make life easy. If you're familiar with the design tools in Forza 2, then you might be disappointed or at least surprised to learn that they haven't changed much in Forza 3. You still work primarily with geometric shapes and generic-looking icons, you still group large numbers of them together to create race team logos or photo-realistic images of your favorite Brazilian supermodels, and it still takes a lot of work to create something worthwhile. It's time well spent, though, and because there's now an option to create designs on a perfectly flat surface before applying them to a car, you no longer have to use the roof of a Mini Cooper for a canvas. Would this aspect of the game be better if you could import images from Photoshop or just scan them in? Absolutely not. Sure, it would be easier, but it wouldn't be as rewarding, and more importantly it wouldn't be fair for players without access to the necessary hardware or software. It's also unlikely that the end results would look significantly better. Spend some time checking out the top designs, as rated by other players, and you'll realize that just about anything is possible with Forza 3's design tools; you just have to get good with them.

The only problem with the cockpit view is that you don't get to check out your own paintjob.If you're more inclined to spend your time racing than playing with geometric shapes, there's still no reason you can't have great-looking cars. Just make sure you win enough credits to buy all of the designs you want. Whether you're racing in your single-player career or online with up to seven opponents, all of your winnings go into the same pot, and so do your experience points. Leveling up in Forza 3 doesn't benefit you in the way that you might expect it to in other genres, but every time you reach a new level, you're awarded a new car, so it can be a strong incentive to keep playing long after you've told yourself "just one more race." This is especially true later in your career, because the cars you're given are among the most desirable in the game--assuming you haven't rushed out and bought them already.

Just as you would in real life, it's not a bad idea to test-drive cars before you buy them. None of the cars in Forza 3 handle poorly, and all are delivered to your garage with perfect bodywork and spotlessly clean, accurately re-created interiors. Inevitably, there will be cars that suit your driving style better than others, though, and if you don't know much about tuning, it can be tough to tame a car that's proving problematic for you--even if you take advantage of the new quick upgrade option that optimizes your car for the class of competition that you want to use it in. In Career mode you're only able to use cars that you own, but every car in the game (as well as those in your garage) is available to you from the outset for use in single races, hot lap events, and multiplayer.

Even if you don't win, using custom car designs in online races is sure to set you apart from the opposition.

Online play was one of Forza 2's greatest strengths, and the same is true of Forza 3. It doesn't matter if you're looking to enjoy a private session with friends or hop into a race with random opponents--getting your car onto the starting grid couldn't be easier, and it's hard to imagine how the subsequent races could be any better. Even in multiplayer, detailed environments from all over the world fly by at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour without ever posing a threat to the frame rate, and the game is very smart about knowing when to "ghost" players who have tried to take shortcuts or are in the mischievous minority who think it's hilarious to drive the wrong way and try to crash into other racers. In addition to regular races, online options include Drag and Drift events, as well as three different Tag variants, Elimination races, and team-based Cat and Mouse competitions. As the host of a session, the options that you have to customize these game types number in the dozens, and you can even force players to turn off certain assists or use a specific camera angle.

Those camera options include all of the usual suspects: bumper, hood, cockpit, chase near, and chase far. Another great feature of Forza 3, which will be familiar if you played the previous game, is that at any point during a single-player race or during a replay of a multiplayer race, you can pause the action to take a photograph. The in-game camera has more settings for you to tinker with than the cameras that most of us use in real life, and if you're good at photography (or even if you're not) it's possible to create some impressive images. This is especially true at new tracks like Italy's Amalfi Coast, Japan's Fujimo Kaido, and the United States' Sedona Raceway, which are great additions to the sizeable roster not only because they offer very different and enjoyable driving experiences, but also because they're set in some quite beautiful locations. If you choose to share photos by uploading them to your storefront they'll also appear on the official Forza Website, from which you can download them for posting in forums and the like.

The new tracks offer some very distinct driving experiences.

Other than some load screens that stick around long enough to outstay their welcome before each race, the quality of Forza 3's presentation is uniformly excellent across every aspect of the game. The menus are clean and intuitive, the in-game visuals never fail to impress, and the default audio options prioritize the satisfying roars of the cars' respective engines over the 30-plus licensed tunes playing in the background. Artists on the soundtrack include The Hives, The Fratellis, Fall From Grace, Alkaline Trio, The Qemists, DJ Drunken Master, Logistics, and many more. Regardless of whether or not they're to your liking, there's no denying that the vast majority of the songs on the playlist make good driving tunes.

There's also no denying that Forza Motorsport 3 is a truly special racing game. Not only does it make simulation-style racing accessible to anyone with the inclination to give it a try, but it looks and sounds superb doing it and manages to foster an unusually strong sense of community along the way. If you have any interest whatsoever in racing games, even if you've never played one before, you'd do well to pay a visit to your local video game showroom and become a member of the Forza Motorsport 3 owners' club at your earliest convenience.

Need for Speed Most Wanted

2009-10-23T11:57:00.000-07:00

Need for Speed Most Wanted

Most Wanted is great fun, from its hysterical cutscenes to its extremely tense police chases.

The Good

Outrunning the cops is extremely exciting
Outstanding sound effects
Sharp graphics
Tones down some of the over-the-top product placement found in the previous NFS games
Mindblowing full-motion video cutscenes.

The Bad

Racer AI isn't too bright at first, gets wicked smart later on
Not enough mindblowing full-motion video cutscenes.

EA's long-running Need for Speed series took a trip underground a couple of years back when the developer refocused the game solely on illegal street racing. While the nighttime racing series was certainly successful, the lawless world was always missing one key factor: cops. This year's installment crawls back into the daylight. The actual racing hasn't changed too much, but the ever-present police make this game a whole lot more interesting.

Need for Speed hasn't had cops for awhile, and they make a welcome return in Most Wanted.

The game's career mode starts out with a hilarious bang. You take on the role of a nameless, faceless new racer attempting to hit the scene in the city of Rockport. An underground ranking known as the Blacklist governs who can race who, and when. You almost immediately run into a punk named Razor, who's definitely the sort of dude that lives his life a quarter-mile at a time. He's at the bottom of the list, but a few races later, he's sabotaged your ride and has won it from you in a race. Meanwhile, you're carted off to jail. Left with nothing but some mysterious help from a stranger named Mia, your task is to get back in the race game to work your way to the top of the Blacklist, which is now topped by Razor, who's using your old car to wipe out the competition.

The game actually has a great story hook at the beginning that makes you want to see the career mode through to completion. The early story segments are told through some sort of unholy mixture of computer-generated cars and full-motion video actors. The acting in these early segments is awful...awful good, that is. You'll scratch your head and wonder if these segments are intentionally bad and meant to be played for laughs or if they're just unintentionally funny. Either way, they're great. Unfortunately, after a brief prologue, you stop seeing video sequences, and the story is conveyed via voicemails from various characters. Are you a cop? Will you get to utter the magic street racing words, "Mia, I am a cop"? Or is the plot twist even more painfully obvious than that? You'll have to see the story through to find out where everyone's allegiances lie.

Working your way up the Blacklist is a multistep progress. Before you can challenge the next Blacklist racer, you have to satisfy a list of requirements. You'll have to win a set number of race events. And you'll have to reach a set number of pursuit milestones and earn enough bounty by riling up the police. The cops hate street racers and will give chase when they see you rolling around the open city. You can also just jump right into a pursuit from a menu, too.

Running from the cops is the best action the game has to offer. Chases usually start with just one car on your tail. But as you resist, you might find 20 cars giving chase, in addition to a chopper flying overhead. Losing the cops gets tougher as your heat level rises. Level one heat results in the appearance of just your standard squad cars. But by the time you get up to level five, you'll be dealing with roadblocks, spike strips, helicopters, and federal-driven Corvettes. A meter at the bottom of the screen indicates how close you are to losing the cops or getting busted. Stopping your car--or having it stopped for you by spike strips or getting completely boxed in by cops--is how you'll get busted. To actually get away, you'll need to get out of visual range...and stay there. The initial evasion changes the meter over to a cooldown meter. You'll have to lie low and wait for that meter to fill up to end the chase. This is probably the tensest part of the entire chase, since you never know when two cops might blow around the corner and spot you, starting the whole process over again. It all sort of works like some sort of strange, wonderful cross between Grand Theft Auto's open city and Metal Gear Solid's stealth mechanic. All the while, you'll be acquiring heat on your car. This means that you'll have to keep a couple of cars around, because acquiring heat on one car lowers the heat on your other ones. Also, getting busted too many times can result in your car getting impounded, though you can avoid that by resetting the system whenever you get caught (if that's more your speed).

The game's storyline is interesting and occasionally told through some amazingly hilarious cutscenes.

There's also a lot of racing in Most Wanted's career mode--almost too much, in fact. You'll engage in multilap circuit races, point-A-to-point-B sprint races, drag racing, checkpoint-driven tollbooth races, and speed trap, where the winner is the player that accumulates the most speed while passing by a handful of radar cameras spread throughout the track. The races are solid but not spectacular. The artificial intelligence doesn't really help things along, because most of the game is rubber-banded like crazy. We actually set our controller down for 20 seconds--then picked it back up and caught our opponents on the final lap. And though the AI will occasionally crash and come to a complete halt, it'll catch up very, very quickly. Later on in the game, you get a voicemail message informing you that things are going to get tougher. At this point, the computer drivers magically start taking every single shortcut, and the rubber banding only seems to work against you. As a result, catching up after a mistake is much tougher. If this difficulty had gradually sloped up, it wouldn't be a big deal. But flipping the switch from "drive like crap" to "drive like a genius" is really annoying. Fortunately, the racing action itself is entertaining enough to keep you going, and of course, you'll be dying to find out what happens next in the story.

The game has more than 30 licensed cars that you'll be able to purchase or win from other racers. We started out with a pretty weak Chevy Cobalt, but eventually we picked up a much faster Supra, a new Covette C6, and so on. You can also find the Ford GT, a Ford Mustang GT, and other cars from BMW, Mitsubishi, Porsche, Lamborghini, Lotus, and more. You'll buy your first car, but as you move through the Blacklist, you'll get a shot at the pink slip of the other racer, letting you ease right into the driver's seat of a new, tuned vehicle. Buying them from scratch means you'll have to apply enhancements yourself. You can buy a lot of different performance gear and a ton of visual stuff, like body kits, spoilers, vinyls, and so on. Applying visual upgrades lowers your heat level, making them pretty useful once the cops take notice of your faster cars.

As you work up to higher heat levels, the cops become much more aggressive in their response.

Aside from the career mode, there's also a challenge series that gives you a car and a specific goal. Race goals are fairly easy to understand, but the pursuit challenges ask you to achieve specific milestones, like blasting through five roadblocks or racking up a specific amount of property damage. You can also just dive into quick races, or take it online. The online game is focused strictly on racing, which is a little disappointing. Teaming up to avoid the cops or letting some players drive police cars probably would have been more interesting. Still, the game offers sprint, circuit, and drag races for up to four players, and it keeps an online version of the Blacklist going so you can see who the most dangerous online opponent is. On the game-creation side, you can play in ranked or unranked games, and you can specify a disconnection or "did not finish" percentage, letting you manually weed out jerks. You can also turn off collision detection between players if you want to prevent people from just crashing into one another throughout the entire race, but that's only possible in unranked games. All in all, the online is functional, but without any sort of pursuit mode or other police-tinged races, it's awfully standard.

Graphically, the game looks great, overall. But when you break it down, some parts of it look better than others. For the most part, the game does the large city environment quite well. The different parts of the city give a nice sense of variety, and the car models look sharp, especially when you start painting them with crazy triple-colored paint. The game delivers a pretty good sense of speed and seems to scale reasonably well to fit different PCs. There's a level of detail setting that gets the image quality up to around the Xbox 360 version's graphics, but when that and the resolution turned all the way up, you're going to need a really tough machine to get a playable frame rate out of it. The game doesn't have much car damage at all. You'll see your rear window crack up after a few good wrecks, but there's never any real damage to your vehicle.

You'll probably find yourself wishing that the game consisted solely of police chases, rather than occasionally saddling you with its more-standard racing events.

On the sound side, the game has outstanding engine noises that change depending on which car you're in and which upgrades you have. The rest of the sound effects are also of excellent quality. The game uses quite a bit of voice acting in the story, which is good. But the best voices come from the police. When you're being chased, you'll pick up the police band and hear them communicating and cooperating as they try to take you down. The cop talk sounds awfully authentic, and you'll eventually decipher the police 10 codes and figure out when they're going to lay out spike strips, set up roadblocks, and so on. While the 10 codes used don't seem to be the actual ones the real police use (at least that's what a little basic research told us), they sound good enough to be realistic. The music included is the standard mix of rock and hip-hop you've come to expect from EA's games, including a few songs from Styles of Beyond.

While the actual racing in Need for Speed Most Wanted is probably the weak link in the chain, it's still solid enough to keep you interested as you move from racer to racer, working your way up the Blacklist as you go. But the real stars of the show are the police, who give the series a much-needed shot in the arm. If outrunning the law sounds like your idea of a good time, you'll have a great time here.

Need for Speed Underground 2

2009-10-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

Need for Speed Underground 2

Electronic Arts
EA Canada
GT / Street Racing
Release: Nov 9, 2004
ESRB: Teen

Need for Speed Underground 2

Need for Speed Underground 2 is pretty good, but unfortunately most of the stuff you do in between races keeps you away from the game's best moments.

The Good

The actual races are fun
Strong online stat tracking.

The Bad

Too much meaningless driving to get between events
Heavy product placement makes the game feel like you're playing a big ad
Cross-genre soundtrack is too varied to give the game a cohesive sound.

Last year, EA took its long-running Need for Speed series in an exciting new direction with the release of Need for Speed Underground, a racing game that focused on making the import tuner scene the star of its arcade-style racing show. The game worked really well, combining the right level of car customization with good track design, challenging opponents, and impressive graphical effects. Now, one year later, a sequel is on the streets, adding some new race types and a big, open city to cruise around. The actual racing in Need for Speed Underground 2 is still pretty good, but unfortunately most of the stuff you do in between races keeps you away from the game's best moments.

Underground 2 gives you a whole city to drive around, but there's not much to do in it.

Need for Speed Underground 2 tries to inject a story into your career mode using static-image cutscenes that pop up before some races. The effect is similar to what the Max Payne series does with its noninteractive sequences, though that game pulls it off much better than Need for Speed Underground 2 does. Dopey story short, you're sent off to a new town after getting ambushed by a rival racing crew, and you'll have to start from scratch with one car and a handful of races to get you going.

The biggest change made by this year's game is that the action now takes place in one large city. You're given free rein to drive around wherever you want, and you'll have to drive to races to drive in them. You'll also have to drive to different parts shops to customize your ride--in fact, you'll have to find most of the game's shops by cruising around the city, looking for the right type of colored lights. The game gives you an onscreen map, but shops don't show up until you've found them, and some races don't actually appear on the map, either.

On paper, this whole open-city thing sounds like an interesting idea. Someone probably sat down and said, "Well, everyone likes Grand Theft Auto, and it has an open city, so our game has to have an open city as well. In fact, let's even make it so that different sections of the city are locked away until you progress to a certain point in the career mode." In practice, driving around the city is a real drag that keeps you out of the action longer than you'd like. The game also rarely takes advantage of the open city for racing purposes, staging a majority of its events on preset tracks, rather than attempting to go for a Midnight Club-like "get there however you can" feel. There's a menu in the garage that lets you jump to a handful of different events, but most races don't show up here, and none of the shops do, either, making it completely useless.

You'll start out in some pretty slow cars, so the racing isn't very exciting until you earn enough for a full set of upgraded performance parts. But once you've done so, the racing is fun and the cars handle well. The cars are fast, and things like turning, powersliding, and proper corning technique are easy to pick-up. Like in last year's game, there are a handful of different race types: Circuit races are long lap-based events, sprints take you from point A to point B on a set course, drag racing lets you live your life a quarter mile at a time, and drift races rank you based on how squirrelly you can get on the track. New in this year's game are the street X races, which are essentially regular races that take place on drift tracks. Outrun races take place in various parts of the city--you roll up behind another racer, tap a button, and then try to pass and outrun him or her. You'll also encounter a few races against the clock, in which you'll have to get from one point in the city to another before a photographer leaves the area. Make it, and you'll get to put your car on the cover of one of the game's magazines or DVDs for extra cash. The big new race type is the "underground racing league." These races are the sort of mysterious events where you'll see most of the game's cutscenes. They mostly involve some knucklehead breaking the lock on a race track and then swinging open a gate so your street-racing posse can race on a "real" track, though you'll also bust into airports and such, too. These races are essentially circuit races with racetrack scenery instead of cityscape scenery.

Tricking out your car's look will let you put it on the cover of a magazine or DVD.

Though there are three different difficulty settings for the career mode, none of them put up a particularly good fight. As a result, most of the races simply boil down to getting in front of the opposition and then doing what you can to not make a mistake. Between nitrous boosts and drafting, gaining the lead isn't very difficult, and the game doesn't seem to employ any heavy rubber-band AI routines to retake the lead from you, so you can usually stay in front without any trouble at all. When you consider that it will take you about a minute to get in front, and that some of the circuit races can last six minutes or more, this means that a great deal of your race time is spent just cruising along, dodging traffic and not paying any attention to the other cars unless you screw up and get into a wreck. In the event that you do crash, regaining the lead usually isn't too tough, especially if you've purchased a nitrous-oxide upgrade, which shamelessly lifts concepts from the Burnout series, translating powerslides and near-misses into extra boost for your tank. The opposing cars will slow down quite a bit if they take a big lead, making them very easy to beat.

Need for Speed Underground 2's crashes are laughably weak. While high-speed collisions with other cars trigger a slow-motion, cinematic shot of the crash, the game doesn't model any damage at all. It's like you're watching two plastic car models bump up against each other, accompanied by the sounds of an actual car crash. While it practically goes without saying that modeling damage in a game with licensed cars is still a tricky proposition, that fact doesn't make these wrecks look any better. Fortunately, the game's car customization features somewhat make up for this lack of visual detail.

A big part of Need for Speed Underground 2 is the ability to customize your car's performance and appearance. On the performance side, you'll purchase parts that have been organized into stages, which gives the game an easy way to lock the better parts away from you until you're ready for them. While the parts fall into different categories, like engines, brakes, tires, and ECUs, the only thing you really need to know is that you need them all to win races. The visual enhancements are a little more involved and give you a little more leeway, but ultimately you'll need to trick out the look of your cars to proceed, as having a flashy car is the only way to get noticed and end up on magazine and video covers. Each set of parts has a number associated with it, and these contribute to a meter that sums up how many pieces of flair you've bolted to your whip. Spoilers, neons, vinyls, roof scoops, spinner rims, custom gauges, and even speakers for your trunk are just some of the available modifications, and they all help your car stand out. This is especially handy online, where you can show off your stuff to the world.

NFSU2 packs in an obscene amount of product placement.

Need for Speed Underground 2 is online on the PS2, PC, and new to this year's game, the Xbox. The online mode is pretty straightforward, letting you set up races in any of the game's race types, and it also features a free run mode, in case you just want to cruise around the city with other players. As you'd expect, the online mode works well over an average broadband connection, even with a full six players in a race. The game also does a good job with statistics and rankings, which can help you find evenly matched races. You can also limit races to cars of a certain rank, or just open it up and let people take their career-mode vehicles onto the track. The GameCube lacks online play, and to add insult to injury, the already-shaky frame rate gets a little shakier when you play in the GameCube version's splitscreen mode.

While Need for Speed Underground 2 is attempting to emulate an illegal scene of "underground" street racing, the game really tries to drive its product placement down your throat. Things like billboards on the sides of the roads aren't too bad (though with an ad for a financial service popping up on some signs, you have to wonder who EA's target audience for this game is), and the occasional real-life fast-food joint does its part to make the city feel a little more realistic. But basing the game's whole onscreen display around the logo for a cellular phone service provider crosses the line. Sorry, but there's nothing "underground" about forcing a bunch of non-car-related corporate logos on people. The game's hokey dialogue also adds to the counterfeit feel. The overzealous script is constantly throwing poorly placed slang at you, having Brooke Burke use her teleprompter voice to tell you that "you've got to be racing tight," constantly calling you "dawg," or being very careful to always call your money "bank."

Graphically, Need for Speed Underground 2 looks good, unless you're talking about the GameCube version, which has a wildly unstable frame rate that really gets in the way of the action in some races. But in the other three versions, the car models are sharp and the city looks fine. For the most part, the game keeps running at a smooth frame rate, even in the later stages, when you're moving much, much faster. But at the same time, it isn't quite the effects show that the last game was. You still get nice little effects, like the shaky camera used to show drag races, but the blur effects are much less pronounced now, which is too bad, because they were really well implemented last year. Now, you get blurring at very high speeds or when you kick in the nitrous oxide, but more would have been better. Like last year, the PS2 version is the heaviest on the effects, though the overall look is still a little subdued. For the most part, the different versions of the game look very similar, with the Xbox and PC versions allowing for slightly higher visual fidelity than the PlayStation 2 version, and the GameCube version bringing up the rear, but ultimately the only major differences come down to the GameCube version not having online support, the Xbox version's analog triggers being the best control scheme for the game, and the PC version not playing very well with the keyboard controls (you'll need at least an analog gamepad if you're planning on playing this game on the PC).

The game's sound rises above its lame dialogue and poorly delivered speech. The engine sounds aren't quite as deep or as throaty as you might like, but the game is great at changing the sound of your car as you purchase upgrades. Also, things like the whoosh of wind when you fly under an overpass really help sell the game's sense of speed.

Finally, Snoop Dogg and Jim Morrison, together again for the first time.

Musically, Need for Speed Underground 2 is all over the place. The schizophrenic sounds start with the game's lead song, which is a remix of The Doors' "Riders on the Storm" done by prominent rap producer Fredwreck. Snoop Dogg joins Jim Morrison on the vocals here. For some people that will be blasphemy, but the remix sounds pretty good. The part that ruins it, though, is that Snoop is rapping about the racing--Need for Speed is specifically mentioned in the lyrics. Again, if you're going to have a game with "underground" right in the name, showcasing a song that does double duty as both an ad for the game and as an extreme case of exploitation of an old favorite probably isn't the best idea. Other songs on the soundtrack include "Lean Back" by the Terror Squad, "LAX" by Xzibit, and tracks from Sly Boogy, Felix Da Housecat, Paul Van Dyk, Cirrus, Ministry, Queens of the Stone Age, Mudvayne, Helmet, and more. This is a textbook case of a soundtrack that tries to appeal to too many different audiences and ends up not including enough of any one style to please anyone. Xbox users won't be able to fix the problem, either, as the game doesn't contain custom-soundtrack support. However, you'll be able to at least turn off tracks that you don't like.

Need for Speed Underground 2 starts with last year's game as a template and builds from there. Unfortunately, almost everything that has been added to this year's game detracts from the overall experience. Once you're in and racing and customizing your cars, it's a lot of fun, but there are too many obstacles standing between you and the best parts of the game.

Medal of Honor Allied Assault

2009-10-23T11:37:00.000-07:00

Medal of Honor Allied Assault

Medal of Honor represents the absolute best that action-packed, event-driven shooters have to offer.

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, the first PC installment of Electronic Arts' WWII-themed shooter series, is superb. However, if the realistic setting has led you to expect a serious combat simulation along the lines of Ghost Recon or Operation Flashpoint, you're going to be surprised and perhaps disappointed. Medal of Honor is first and foremost a run-and-gun shooter--a really, really excellent run-and-gun shooter. A lot of clever scripting and precisely orchestrated mayhem lend it a sustained intensity that more open-ended tactical shooters often lack. Relatively short but very dense, it's like one-half game and one-half amusement park ride.

Medal of Honor is intense and exciting all the way through.

Medal of Honor isn't very heavy on story. Instead, the game is split into six more or less disconnected missions spread across more than 30 different levels. Rather than focus on creating memorable characters or surprising plot twists, the developers at 2015 have taken an arguably more effective route by constantly introducing memorable set pieces and surprising new gameplay elements. As in Half-Life, you witness everything from the fixed first-person viewpoint of your character. All the "cutscenes" are seamlessly integrated into the ongoing events of the level. Control is never taken away from you. Just as in Half-Life, this technique is incredibly effective for creating a sense of both urgency and of attachment to the game's environments. It's an ongoing mystery as to why developers don't use this uninterrupted viewpoint more often.

Over the last couple of years, 10 to 15 hours appears to have become the standard length for single-player shooters. Medal of Honor doesn't break this trend and should take you slightly longer than 10 hours to complete on the standard difficulty setting. However, it packs a lot of content into those hours. You won't ever have to force yourself through the game. This is mainly due to the wide variety of interesting things and unexpected events that happen on a regular basis. It seems as if the developers have tried to inject every level with some completely new challenge or new combination of elements from previous levels. It's a testament to this variety that to give many specific examples would be to ruin the surprise.

The Omaha Beach landing is just one of the game's memorable scenes.

Even so, at least one specific example is in order, just to give a sense of how involving Medal of Honor's missions can be. You begin the first level riding in the back of a truck with four members of your squad. The squad leader informs everyone that you're attempting to infiltrate a Nazi-occupied village. You can see another truck driving behind you. Both vehicles stop at a checkpoint, and a German guard approaches the rear truck and begins talking to the driver. As the conversation drags on, your squad becomes progressively more agitated. Finally, the driver of the rear truck pulls a gun and shoots the guard, at which point alarms sound, gunfire erupts all around you, and the rear truck explodes in a fireball. Your squad jumps out of its truck and you follow. With the leader barking orders, you all advance on the village gates, eventually making your way to a courtyard. There, you're ordered to check a door. As you do, German soldiers appear all across the rooftops and balconies surrounding the small courtyard. You're trapped and chaos ensues, as bullets and grenades rain down on your squad. Eventually, a door is blown open and you're ordered to enter a building, get to the second floor, and commandeer a mounted gun that's currently being used against you. Once you do that, and turn the gun against the Nazis, an ally joins you and tells you he'll cover you from a window while you head to the far end of the courtyard. By the time you make it, the entire rest of the squad is dead, and you're forced to continue to the next level alone.

This isn't the first mission, but rather just the first level. Things continue apace from there. While not all of the following levels are as eventful as the first, virtually every one breaks up the traditional straightforward run-and-gun action with some twist. One level that re-creates the Normandy beach storming scene from Saving Private Ryan is quite likely the most intense and well-executed set piece in shooter history. It's the perfect implementation of Medal of Honor's apparent design philosophy: the heavily scripted level that somehow feels alive and completely spontaneous.

In what has become a disclaimer that, at this point, should probably just be left implied in every shooter review, the enemy artificial intelligence is not as good as Half-Life's. However, it's not bad either. The Nazis don't exhibit any real squad-based behavior, and they'll sometimes come running single file around a corner as you shoot each one in turn, but those that don't come sprinting after you tend to use cover well. They also know how to toss grenades and get out of the way of incoming grenades. If fact, you can provide cover for yourself by tossing grenades and then advancing while the Nazis are busy scampering out of the way.

The action takes place in a variety of distinct locations.

Two things contribute to making the fights especially intense. First, other than snipers who are sometimes frustratingly accurate, the rank-and-file soldiers you'll face aren't perfect shots. Gunfights usually involve bullets spraying all around you, instead of merely straight into you. Second, when you do get hit, you become incapacitated for a brief moment, and your viewpoint is knocked aside accordingly, leaving you open to more hits. This means you can't simply roll toward an enemy while absorbing hits like a tank. Moving from cover to cover becomes an indispensable tactic, which ends up making the fights feel more real, in spite of the fact that you can absorb an unrealistic amount of damage and can instantly replenish your health with med packs.

Medal of Honor uses the Quake III: Team Arena engine, and its graphics are generally excellent. It may not look quite as crisp as Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but it's no slouch. Character animations are especially good, as are more subtle effects such as lightning storms in the distance and trees swaying in the wind. It also features some of the most impressively destructible environments ever created. However, to ensure a teen rating--previous Medal of Honor games for the PlayStation were also rated T--the game is completely bloodless. If that turns you off, think of it this way: Maybe they took out the blood so it wouldn't obscure your view of the death animations, which are gruesome to say the least.

The graphics are very good, but the sound is phenomenal. Every level is thick with ambient sound effects. The voice acting is excellent, and there's plenty of it. Best of all, the Germans actually speak German. A lot. The music is fine and usually appropriate, but the game is smart enough to sometimes forgo music. The soundtrack for the Normandy beach level is nothing but gunfire, waves, screaming, and the overlapping conversations of groups of panicked soldiers, which ends up being much more effective than any score could have been.

Medal of Honor's single-player game is a blast.

Medal of Honor offers a few different multiplayer modes, including deathmatch and objective-based team matches. There's nothing really wrong with them, and the realistic World War II-era weapons are interesting, but there's nothing here that's overly compelling. Nothing like the marginal but significant advances to teamplay offered by Return to Castle Wolfenstein are present in Medal of Honor. Worse, there are some severe implementation issues. Rather than offer a built-in server browser, Medal of Honor relies on the GameSpy program for finding games. Quitting out to a third-party application every time you want to switch servers is a pain to begin with, but the developers have made it even more obtrusive by forcing you to sit through three uninterruptible logo animations every time the game loads. Three! Someone will probably come up with a workaround to this, but a workaround shouldn't be necessary. There's also already a rampant cheating problem. It's possible to enter god mode in multiplayer and become an invincible opponent or, worse yet, an invincible team killer. Complementing this problem is the fact that there's no clear menu-based voting system. Voting exists, but it's only available through console commands, and only then if you check the advanced console setting in the options menu.

So, if you're looking for the next great online game or a deep tactical shooter, Medal of Honor isn't for you. For anyone else, it's hard to recommend it strenuously enough. At a time when shooters seem to be evolving into two distinct kinds of games--either focused on realistic tactics or on arcade action--Medal of Honor represents the absolute best that action-packed, event-driven shooters have to offer.

Today a patch was released that addresses many of the multiplayer issues mentioned in this review.

Loki: Heroes of Mythology

2009-10-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

Loki: Heroes of Mythology

Loki may be awfully late for the party, but this Diablo derivation is a solid rip-off with great game mechanics and atmosphere.

The Good

Outstanding atmosphere in four different campaigns
Impressive straightforward clone of Diablo game mechanics
Great monster variety.

The Bad

Never strays from familiar territory
Extremely tough on the easiest difficulty setting.

Somebody needs to tell Cyanide that it's a little late in the day to be ripping off Diablo II. That seven-year-old action RPG provides the template for Loki: Heroes of Mythology, a derivative hack-and-slash that brings nothing new to the genre. Still, being late for the party is the only major strike against this game. Even though the Diablo formula may seem awfully ho-hum these days--especially in this case, since Titan Quest covered the mythological-heroes shtick over a year ago--good mechanics and great atmosphere make up for the lack of innovation.

Despite the title, Loki has an equal-opportunity philosophy when it comes to ancient mythology. You choose from male or female warrior and mage characters from the Norse, Greek, Egyptian, and Aztec traditions and engage in four different lengthy campaigns that can be played solo or with up to six friends in cooperative mode (although there is no matching server, so it can be tough to hook up with fellow players). Things start off with you playing errand boy for the three principal gods in your pantheon (a lineup that includes heavy hitters such as Athena, Isis, Tyr, Quetzalcoatl, and the like), but then move on to you defending a collection of multicultural divinities that looks like an old United Colors of Benetton ad. The end goal is to defeat the machinations of the evil Egyptian god, Seth, who has defied divine rules and crossed into other mythologies in the standard megalomaniacal bad-guy quest to take over the universe.

Hacking through yet another pack of those pesky half-naked Amazons.

As this hook-snouted deity is also apparently a big fan of all things multicultural, you face a hodge-podge of monsters from across the entire mythological spectrum. But each of the four campaigns is based on the character battling beasts from his or her own milieu. So the Greek warrior begins by cutting down hundreds of Amazons, centaurs, and harpies, for instance, while the Norse fighter slaughters beasts of the North like bears and wolves, the Egyptian sorcerer battles desert creatures such as giant scorpions, mummies, and scarab beetles, and the Aztec shaman fights jaguars and giant tarantulas.

All of them look great (although, oddly enough, the same can't be said for the four heroes, who are thin mannequins who move in a slightly herky-jerky fashion), and are accentuated with creepy sound cues. Many of these sound effects, such as the hissing of vipers, are so effective that they give the game a menacing vibe that usually isn't present in speedy, action-oriented RPGs. Some monster types are relatively generic and can be found across different levels, although these creatures are often given differing characteristics based upon their location. Birds of prey, for example, look like eagles in the forested Greek missions, while in the Egyptian desert levels they appear as scruffy vultures. The monster variety in Loki is quite good--even though you still wind up killing so many birds, beasts, and living fauna over the course of the game that the proceedings can get rather monotonous in spots (Amazon lancers? Again?!).

Additional atmosphere comes from music and level design that really plays up the four mythologies. The original score is fantastic, immersing you in each of the four cultures through tunes that perfectly evoke the setting and time. All are decidedly spooky, too, specifically the Greek and Egyptian scores. They wouldn't be out of place in big-budget horror movies about Medusae and mummies. Visuals tie into the music for the most part. The Egyptian campaign is particularly effective, as it takes you into desert wastes and forbidding tombs, although the snowy wastes of the Norse missions and the jungles of the Aztec escapades are almost equally evocative of ancient myths (the Greek settings go a little too heavy on generic fantasy forests). Cyanide apparently uses a random level generator to mix things up, though, which makes your travels look a little mundane after a while. You encounter a lot of the same terrain, and outdoor maps often seem to be laid out on a template. You generally get a single road leading from point A to point B along with a lot of scrub brush to both sides that is packed with enemies.

Quests themselves are more varied, however, as they're drawn from specific myths. You check out what rival gods are plotting for Athena, explore the tomb of Seth, rescue Odin from the clutches of Fenrir, and so forth. Storylines aren't really developed, though. Generally, you just walk over to the deity of the moment, who's typically loitering around the hub of each campaign as if waiting for a bus, and take your marching orders. These orders always involve straightforward objectives like looking into some sort of mystery, such as seeing if Seth's body remains in its sarcophagus, investigating the deadly machine that Minos seems to be constructing, or going out to murder some deadly threat like the Medusa.

Regardless of your goal in Loki, you always get there the same way--by bloodily slaughtering an endless horde of monsters. This Diablo-styled theme was old when the world was young, but Loki still manages to mostly pull it off by sticking to the template. The only serious annoyance is extreme difficulty even on the easiest "mortal" game setting. Enemies are so numerous in spots that you need to wage a war of attrition to make it through many maps. You start off by killing as many monsters as you can before succumbing to their crazy numbers, then respawn at the start of the level and repeat. Over and over again. Many levels require seven or eight instances of this frustrating wash, rinse, and repeat cycle. Even worse, there are moments when the game engine can't keep up with the number of monsters onscreen. In some of the Greek forest missions, for example, the combination of dozens of flying foes and the heavily treed landscape turns the game into an instant, unplayable slideshow. Thankfully, these slowdowns are rare.

Mummies haunt the tomb of Seth in the Egyptian part of the campaign.

Despite the overall difficulty, everything moves along pretty quickly. Even though you have to repeat yourself a little too often, you still easily get into a killing groove balanced just about perfectly between addiction and monotony. The only thing that slows you down is the regular 20-second or so wait after battles to regenerate health and mana. As with every other good action RPG ever made, you know that you're just clicking mouse buttons over and over again, but the pace of combat and the collection of magical weapons and other goodies (the usual assortment of swords, armor, and potions, with some cultural characteristics tossed in mainly to differentiate one style of clothing from another) is so speedy that you can barely bring yourself to stop playing.

Character development is an equal mix of the simple and compelling. Leveling up is a quick process of assigning points to attributes like strength and vitality. Added special battle abilities are gained with points earned every time you max out your faith bar. Basically, this lets you suck up to your three principal gods and take on combat buffs like Thor's Bull's Charge and spells like Ra's Fireball. The whole faith system is actually laid out in a very similar fashion to the skill masteries in Titan Quest, although the number of options here are even more varied. You're generally stuck on a linear path when picking abilities, however, so this doesn't afford a great deal of character customization.

All told, Loki is one of those rare, totally derivative pleasures. A game that will inspire a lot of déjà vu but very little boredom.

LOTR: Middle-earth II

2009-10-23T10:59:00.000-07:00

LOTR: Middle-earth II

The Battle for Middle-earth II improves on 2004's game with a better strategic mode and a much broader scope that encompasses the whole of Middle-earth.

The Good

Fast-paced real-time strategy with authentic Tolkien flavor
War of the Ring mode lets you really battle for Middle-earth
Excellent production values, beautiful graphics, great sound.

The Bad

Single-player campaigns are fairly generic
War of the Ring mode suffers from many weird logical gaps.

With the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy more than two years in the past now, it seems a bit weird that EA is still pushing ahead with its Lord of the Rings game franchise. After all, 2004's The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth already covered all the ground from the movies. EA's solution, though, was to unify the movie franchise with the general Tolkien license, so now the games can feature content from both the movies and the many Middle-earth books that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote. Armed with this unified license, EA has gone about and created The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth II, a real-time strategy game that features all of Middle-earth, and not just the stuff we saw in the movies.

Battle for Middle-earth II features new battles in both the north and south of Middle-earth. The original game focused just on the latter.

Battle for Middle-earth II focuses mainly on the northern part of Middle-earth, where elves, dwarves, and goblins battled it out while those pesky hobbits trekked to Mt. Doom. That means there are new races and factions that we didn't get to see in the original game, complete with their own heroes and specialized units. The elves are supreme archers, the dwarves are miners who build giant war machines, and the goblins rely on spiders and sheer numbers to swamp you. Battles take place in familiar places, such as the Shire, and in unfamiliar places, unless you've read the books, such as Dol Guldur. And if you liked the factions and settings from the original game, don't worry, because they all appear in the game's overarching War of the Ring mode in one form or another.

The two single-player campaigns in Battle for Middle-earth II, one for good and the other for evil, are easily the weakest part of the game, in that they consist of the same, cookie-cutter real-time strategy missions that you've probably played countless times already. There's little here that hints at originality, a situation made worse by the decision to remove some of the more unique ideas from the original game, such as building nodes. In the first Battle for Middle-earth, you could construct buildings on only a few predetermined points of the map, which eliminated the base sprawl problem seen in most real-time strategy games. It also forced you to spread out in order to seize the remote building nodes, which meant that your forces were usually stretched thin trying to defend remote outposts. While Battle for Middle-earth II does try to force you to spread out by the way farms and mines work (you can't concentrate resource centers because it limits their cumulative effectiveness), you usually needn't worry, because all you really need to do is build up a huge core base and defend it. So basically, much of the strategy in these missions involves "turtling up" in a defensive shell until you manage to research all the unit upgrades, and then sending out a massive force to sweep the enemy off the map.

While the single-player game is fairly generic, it is at least saved by some of the rich Tolkien mythology. Once again, you command armies in the form of companies and hero units. Soldiers, archers, and cavalry come in company formations of about 20 to 30 units in size, and they form the bulk of your army. Your hero units include notable characters from the books and movies, such as Aragorn and the Witch King, and they're far more powerful than regular units, with special abilities that they can bring into play. They're also far more expensive to purchase. Meanwhile, once again, you can draw upon special army powers that you purchase by accumulating certain points. These powers can range from summoning a fiery balrog to instantly turning a portion of the battlefield into a lush forest, which confers bonuses to any good units in its midst. Also, it's worth noting that the artificial intelligence is better than it was in the original game, as it's usually pretty good about hitting you where you're vulnerable, which means that the computer can send units around you from the sides.

The good news is that things get really interesting once you play with the new War of the Ring mode. Essentially, War of the Ring links all the real-time battles to an overarching strategic campaign, but one that's deeper than the superficial strategic mode in the original Battle for Middle-earth. There are a number of different War of the Ring scenarios to choose from, but the basic goal is that you will try to lead your side to victory by conquering all of Middle-earth, province by province. You can re-create the entire epic scale of the war, with the elves, dwarves, and men battling the goblins, Mordor, and Isengard--you control one of the factions, while the computer controls the others. Or you can set it up so perhaps the dwarves and elves battle each other, or any combination.

The War of the Ring mode lets you try to battle for all of Middle-earth, your way.

The strategic mode in War of the Ring looks and feels very much like a board game, such as Risk. This isn't a complex or incredibly detailed strategy game, and EA keeps the overall management rather light. Your main job is to manage territories and move armies around the map. And since there are only two building nodes per territory (and only four building choices), you have to make some basic decisions about each territory's role. You might want your rear territories to house all the farms, which lets you recruit larger armies, while your front-line territories contain barracks to pump out units and fortresses to provide defense. Each territory confers certain bonuses to take into consideration as well, so that may go into your decision making. In addition, if you conquer whole regions, you'll gain even more bonuses. When two opposing armies meet, you can choose either to have the computer automatically generate the battle results or to play the battle yourself in real time. If you do play the battle yourself, you'll drop down to the province map and have to play it out just like you would a regular skirmish game, though any units or strategic buildings that were in the province at the beginning of the battle will show up on the battlefield. Needless to say, to win, just wipe out the opposing force.

War of the Ring does suffer from some issues, though. For one thing, the world's not as persistent as it should be. You can develop a huge base in a territory during one battle, but if the enemy reinvades that territory, most of your structures will disappear and you have to start from scratch again. And while it's understandable that this is so (a contest between a fully developed real-time economy and a nonexistent one isn't really a contest), it's a bit frustrating, not to mention illogical, to have to rebuild everything all over again. The same goes for armies on the battlefield. Only the units that you build on the strategic map are persistent, which means that the huge armies you may build during a battle disappear once the battle is done. And while those strategic units gain experience, it still doesn't make much sense to see fully developed armies suddenly vanish in the middle of war. It's these kinds of issues that prevent War of the Ring mode from being the ultimate Lord of the Rings strategy experience that many of us have been waiting for, but it still makes for a good lightweight strategy game.

You can still summon superunits, such as the balrog, and these can turn the tide in a battle.

EA has made some changes to the battlefield gameplay mechanics, though not much has changed. Naval warfare is a pretty addition, thanks to the shimmering reflections of ships on the beautifully rendered water. However, ships are featured only a handful of times in the campaign, and they don't come in most of the time during the War of the Ring mode, since most territories are landlocked. Meanwhile, the new emphasis on being able to build defenses such as walls seems a bit misplaced, since walls can be incredibly easy to knock down and defensive towers are something of a joke, making their value suspect. Other new features in Battle for Middle-earth II aren't fully fleshed out. For instance, the new build-a-hero function is pretty lightweight. Basically, you can create your own hero or heroine, and he or she appears as a hero unit in the game. However, the actual build-a-hero function is quite limited, since you can't alter your character's appearance aside from selecting between a few armor types, weapons, and colors--you're stuck with the physical features that EA gives you. Normally, this wouldn't be a big thing, but since practically every other EA game features a much more powerful build-a-character mode, Battle for Middle-earth II's build-a-hero mode comes off as disappointing.

The game's multiplayer suite is also one of its strengths, though be prepared for some brutal and wild matches online. You can play in the customary skirmish game in one-on-one matches or in teams. The new resource model becomes the huge linchpin in multiplayer skirmish, since you have to spread as many resource-gathering centers as possible over the map. This means that the winner is usually the side that can quickly eliminate a handful of the opposing side's resource structures, which is an incredibly easy task. After that, it becomes a huge battle of attrition, as one side has a resource advantage to bring to bear. Heroes and other powerful abilities also come into play quite a bit more during multiplayer, since human players are much smarter about using them than the AI. Hero units like Gandalf are worth their weight in gold, as they can quickly wipe out swaths of an opposing army. Meanwhile, the War of the Ring mode is also playable in multiplayer, though as you'd expect, these games take a long time to play through (we're talking days, not hours). Thankfully, you can save a game's progress and pick it up at a later time. EA has also done some good work in terms of making games easy to find online--the server browser is nicely organized, and the game persistently tracks performance so you can easily gauge your chances against a potential opponent by examining his or her experience level.

Visually, Battle for Middle-earth II packs a few graphical improvements over the original. For instance, there seem to be a few more shader effects at work, so surfaces such as ice have a nice sheen to them. There's also some improved lighting and shadowing at work. But in general, the graphics haven't evolved much from the first game. That's not a bad thing, though, as the original game still captured the look and feel of Middle-earth quite well. Though the battles are nowhere near as large as those seen in the movies (or in the game's own cutscenes, for that matter), you still get a sense of the clash of arms as companies of human soldiers clash with hordes of goblins and orcs. And, once again, the biggest units in the game are some of the best looking--you can send impressively rendered dragons and fellbeasts into battle or watch the noble eagles swoop down from the sky and rip apart an enemy building with their talons. It's interesting to note that the in-game cutscenes taken directly from The Lord of the Rings have disappeared in the sequel, probably because the developers would have had to recycle the same cutscenes over again given that there has been no new movie footage since the first game.

The build-a-hero mode isn't as powerful as it should be, but at least you can still create your own avatar in the game.

The sound effects also remain strong, and Howard Shore's memorable music from the movies echoes throughout the game. Meanwhile, some of the voice work from the original carries over to the sequel, and die-hard Lord of the Rings fans may feel a chill down their spines whenever they hear Ian McKellen's Gandalf or Christopher Lee's Saruman declare victory after a battle. And EA managed to find decent substitutes for the other big-name roles.

The Battle for Middle-earth II is certainly a better version of 2004's great strategy game. With that said, for all the things it does new or differently than before, some aspects feel a bit undercooked. Still, this is probably the best Lord of the Rings RTS available, and by encompassing the whole of Tolkien's mythology, it really lets you battle for all of Middle-earth this time around.

Kohan II: Kings of War

2009-10-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

Kohan II: Kings of War

Kohan II retains its predecessor's unique gameplay while also making key changes that distinguish it both from the original and from any other real-time strategy games in the intervening years.

Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns was released in 2001, and though it wasn't a blockbuster success, many of those who actually played it loved it. Its particular take on real-time strategy focused on the strategic control of companies of troops and on eliminating much of the tedious micromanagement often associated with the genre. As such, the game proved to be an innovative change of pace from the conventions of real-time strategy. The sequel, Kohan II: Kings of War, retains its predecessor's unique gameplay while also making key changes that distinguish it both from the original and from any other RTS games in the intervening years. And while some of the changes streamline a slickly designed RTS model even further, they don't detract from this great game's own winning formula.

Kohan heroes round up followers to save the world.

Kohan II's fantasy setting takes place long after the events of the first Kohan game. Naava Daishan is chasing after the remains of the Ceyah faction, who were the aggressors and losers of the first game. Led by Sebak, the Ceyah survivors escape from Naava's grasp and unleash a dark power upon Khaldun. The forces of humanity are on the brink of annihilation, and it's up to Naava and Jonas Teramun, a recently awakened Kohan with no memories, to unite the races of the land. The storyline is a little unoriginal for a fantasy setting, but it is enjoyable nonetheless, thanks to a few well-placed plot twists. The last mission is also quite fun and suitably climactic, although the game's ending is rather dull and disappointing. The single-player campaign spans 25 missions and should take anywhere from 15 hours to twice that long to complete, depending on your strategies and if you complete optional secondary objectives. At any rate, like its predecessor, the campaign in Kohan II is too scripted and suffers from weak artificial intelligence. Also, it'll be an absolute breeze for experienced RTS players at the default difficulty, and even hard difficulty won't be much of a challenge for the first half of the game. The missions are varied, though, and you'll get to play as each of the game's races at various parts in the campaign. You may or may not enjoy this aspect, because even though this lends some variety to the gameplay, you don't really get attached to any particular characters or their causes.

Kohan II features six playable races: human, haroun, drauga, gauri, undead, and shadow. Each race has its own unique units, buildings, and economic factors, such as reliances on particular types of resources over other types. These economic twists turn out to be what most differentiates the races from each other, because the respective military units are basically functional equivalents despite their aesthetic differences. Each race can also belong to a particular faction. There are five factions total (although not every race can choose from all of the factions) and each of these confers certain benefits. For example, the council faction reduces the cost of buildings by 10 percent. These factions allow you to further tailor the game to your play style, although the factions mainly come into play in skirmish or multiplayer matches since you can't choose your faction in the campaign. Overall, though the game's races and factions don't have a ton of personality to them, the various combinations can make for significant and interesting gameplay differences.

Former enemies join your cause for their own reasons.

The Kohan series differs from traditional RTS games in both economic and military terms, and Kohan II continues this tradition. For one thing, you don't gather resources in Kohan II. Instead, buildings and mines will provide an income rate for the resources. Gold is the only resource that you actually accumulate. The other resources--stone, wood, iron, and mana crystals--are quantified only by a positive or negative flow. Gold is the bottom line, so if you have a negative flow of the latter resources, you can still recruit units requiring these resources by paying an additional cost in gold. A positive flow of these other resources won't automatically grant you more gold, but some of your structures (or all of them, depending on your race) can be upgraded into exporters where you can exchange surplus resource income for gold. This rather elegant system actually still requires you to spend just as much of your attention on resource management as you would in a traditional RTS game. You can easily find yourself overspending and bringing your gold income down to a trickle. And since gold is required to buy units, buildings, and upgrades, you won't get very far without it. You'll have to carefully manage your income flows by converting buildings to exporters or producers, depending on your needs, in order to maximize your gold.

In Kohan II, military units are handled differently from other real-time strategy games. Units are organized into companies, and you directly control these companies rather than all the individual forces that comprise the companies. Companies have three formation options--combat, skirmish, and column--which bestow certain effects on the company. For example, combat formation decreases the company's movement rate but offers complete combat effectiveness, while column formation gives a boost to speed but cuts combat effectiveness in half. When to switch between different formations tends to be pretty obvious. One issue with the game is that units in combat formation are too eager to fight anything, and they tend to stick to a target once engaged unless they are ordered to run. As such, in larger battles, it's common to see members of your companies automatically attacking buildings, walls, or other low-priority targets when there are more immediate threats in the area. You'll need to micromanage them more than you might expect in a game that alleviates a lot of other micromanagement issues.

Walls of wood won't stop this invading army.

A company is destroyed only if every last member of the company is destroyed, but if you manage to keep just one member alive, you can retreat back to a town or fort. These installations have a supply zone where your members will be automatically healed and replenished. It's hard to wipe out a company in Kohan II. Retreating companies will automatically move at their highest speed, so you will have to chase down your opponents to permanently get rid of them. In fact, you'll usually have to spend a lot of time chasing retreating companies, so you have to decide if it's worthwhile to press the attack or to focus your energies elsewhere. Be wary if you let your enemy live to fight another day--companies replenish their health much more quickly in Kohan II than in the previous game, which quickens the pace and has a way of making battles quite interesting. We fought battle after battle over just one city in a multiplayer game because both sides were able to quickly replenish their forces.

Companies in Kohan II include four frontline units, two flanking units, two support units, and one captain. You can mix and match any of your available units, and you're encouraged to do so. An example of this would be a frontline of four swordsmen, a flank of two archers, and a healer and mage as your two support units. Your swordsmen would engage the enemy melee combatants, your archers and mage would shoot from afar, and your healer would keep your swordsmen at full health. However, in practice, it's not necessarily this neat--you may viably swarm your opponent with greater numbers for good results. We finished the campaign by simply recruiting companies with the strongest infantry in the frontline and flank, and using the healers as support. With a couple of pure archer companies in the mix, we were able to mow through any opposition. This is rather unfortunate for the campaign, because it means about half the units in the game are either optional or useless, depending on how you look at it. Of course, multiplayer games do require you to be more careful in your company composition, especially when you factor in heroes and experienced companies.

The immortal Kohan heroes of Khaldun return in Kohan II. Like companies, the heroes gain experience and level up to become stronger. They provide extra bonuses to the company, such as protective shields or healing. Unlike its predecessor, dead heroes in Kohan II do not require gold to revive. Instead, they will automatically revive inside a city's supply zone like an ordinary unit; however, they will lose all experience and start from ground zero--so there's a big incentive to keep your hero-led companies from getting wiped out. Heroes seem more powerful in the sequel. A veteran company with a Kohan hero and a healer can trample multiple foes at once. Our three swordsmen companies, along with Kohan heroes, held off a force three times its size due to their veteran status. We experienced similar results in a multiplayer game, so you definitely want to keep your experienced units alive.

Spells are as devastating as they look.

The cities in Kohan II are also handled differently from the first game, and they represent the key locations on each map. First of all, you can only build cities in predetermined settlement spots, which has several impacts on the gameplay. The limited cities, along with the resource mines scattered across the map, cap the income you can generate. Resource generators become much more valuable. You don't have to worry about defenseless or unproductive mines, though; they no longer need to be in a supply zone to generate income, and you can build forts to protect mines and other key points on the map. Forts, like cities, have garrisons of militia that will automatically run out and attack anyone who ventures too close to the strongpoint. They are a welcome addition to the Kohan series, because they buy you time so you can get to a besieged city before it falls. The limited cities also let you know where points of contention will be for the entire game, and it also stops players from building cities to postpone an inevitable defeat at the end of a game. In spite of the fixed settlement spots, you still need to scout the map. Not only can your opponents build on settlement spots, but they also can build forts to block your movement. A few well-placed forts can delay and wound your reinforcements from getting to a besieged city, for example.

Cities are also built differently in Kohan II. Like the first game, you construct auxiliary buildings in order to upgrade your town. These buildings generate resource income and allow you to recruit new units. However, unlike in Kohan, these buildings actually appear on the map as selectable structures. Also, upgraded cities automatically gain defensive walls, so when a city is besieged, attackers must first breach the wall before they deal with the city's militia and other defenders. You can only capture a city by reducing the main citadel's hit points to zero. Auxiliary buildings can sometimes block opponents and can be attacked and destroyed, but in fact, their physical presence serves no real strategic purpose in the game, which is disappointing. It would have been nice to be able to disrupt your opponent's economy by using hit-and-run tactics, but that's not possible thanks to walls. And if you have free reign to destroy buildings, you might as well go straight for the citadel, since the ancillary buildings aren't worth the time. Even if you take a city, all the existing buildings are sold back to the original owner and you'll need to rebuild them yourself. Therefore, the buildings end up being completely worthless from a tactical standpoint, because it doesn't matter if you destroy them and it doesn't matter if you leave them standing.

Going after the main building is the best route in a siege.

As with most real-time strategy games, Kohan II offers a skirmish mode for single-player and multiplayer games on LAN and Internet. In multiplayer, you can choose from any of the game's races and assign an appropriate faction. You have a ton of options when starting a game, including volume of settlement spots, bandit camps containing computer-controlled enemies, and even trees. The AI for computer opponents in the skirmish mode is much more of a challenge than in the campaign. The computer will often attack you in multiple locations at once, and it will use diversionary tactics to draw your attention away from key locations. Multiplayer games can be especially fun because of the changes in the gameplay. Battles can go back and forth as you retreat companies and send in reinforcements. If you're playing a team game, teammates can give units and even buildings to each other. This places even more emphasis on race/faction combinations, because if you have a race with a strong resource income, you can give buildings to your teammates to supplement their income. Internet play features a built-in game-server browser. You can check for games and look at community stats for race/faction wins, though a quick-match option of some sort would have been welcomed. Kohan II also features a scenario editor for those who want to create their own maps.

Kohan II's presentation is very nicely done. The fully 3D graphics look great; units look distinctive and animate well, although combat is cluttered and the campaign's cutscenes using the 3D engine can be bad at times. Some of the spell effects, especially the archmage's meteor, are quite impressive. The maps are well populated with environmental scenery and wildlife. All together, it's a pleasing game to look at. Likewise, the game's audio lives up to the quality of the visuals. The voice work is better than in the first Kohan game, and the various sounds of combat appropriately fit the action.

A handful of veteran units can tear through overwhelming odds.

Kohan II: Kings or War had quite a reputation to uphold. Many of those who played the original would agree that Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns and its follow-up, Ahriman's Gift, took a tired genre and did something new and refreshing with it. Kohan II could have simply recycled that formula, but instead, developer TimeGate Studios changed around the gameplay just enough so that it plays similarly to the original yet has so much more to it that makes it unquestionably different. The resulting game has a great design, and it offers plenty of depth and complexity.

King's Bounty: The Legend

2009-10-23T10:36:00.000-07:00

King's Bounty: The Legend

King's Bounty is a great modern rendition of an old-fashioned formula.

The Good

Solid gameplay based on a traditional tactical RPG formula
Good turn-based tactical depth
Strong RPG flavor and storyline
Colorful graphics evocative of old-time role-playing.

The Bad

Not much in the way of innovation
No multiplayer.

One thing you can say for King's Bounty: The Legend is that it fares a lot better than most resurrections of old games. While these digitalized archaeological digs generally reveal that you wouldn't want to go home again even if you could (Defender of the Crown, anyone?), the revival of New World Computing's fondly remembered role-playing/strategy hybrid is a vast improvement upon its 1990 predecessor. While King’s Bounty may not be the most revolutionary game of 2008, its refined gameplay makes it a treasure worth hoarding.

Actually, about the only fair negative comment you could make about King's Bounty is that there isn't really anything new here. Just about everything feels like a rip-off of Heroes of Might and Magic. As with that long-lived Ubisoft franchise, the core of this game is all about taking on the role of a hero in a solo campaign (there is no multiplayer option) and guiding parties of mercenaries across a real-time map to fight turn-based battles on hex grids. A strong RPG flavor is granted through character creation, which allows you to choose from warrior, paladin, and mage classes and then trick out your avatar with skills, artifacts, weapons, armor, spells, and assorted other Gygaxian accoutrements. You then explore the huge medieval fantasy world of Darion in the service of King Mark the Wise, plying the trade of a treasure hunter. A story slowly develops regarding the king's older brother and the standard evil threat to the continued existence of, well, everything, although you don't have to pay much attention to it. Essentially, you just wander around doing good deeds, guiding an icon of your hero through the usual D&D-inspired landscape to slay monsters, loot treasure, scoop up skill runes, mana crystals, and leadership banners, and solve quests handed out by your king and various passersby.

Throwing the book--er, spellbook--is just one way to get rid of a pesky undead enemy.

Despite that description, this isn't a hack-and-slasher. Instead of whaling on monsters with a small party of adventurers as in the typical RPG, you wage tactical battles with veritable armies of troops on turn-based battlefields. Mages, priests, knights, archers, monsters, and the like are hired at special buildings such as the king's castle for use as shock troops in your hero's party. You start off with a paltry handful of these goons, but soon wind up at the head of a tremendous force of killer Renaissance fair refugees. Stuff enough gold into your pantaloons and increase your hero's leadership skill as you increase in level and you'll be able to afford the services of loads of hirelings. The scale of battles always remains manageable, however, as each unit type is depicted by just a single character model on the battlefield no matter how many of those units you actually command. This keeps the focus on pure tactics and allows you to whip through battles lickety-split, while still letting you make use of each unit's special abilities. As just about every unit comes with some sort of skill involving spells or bonus attacks, cutting to the chase without dealing with hordes of units is vital to keeping the game straightforward and simple.

This should sound familiar if you have any experience playing a tactical RPG. The only real difference between King's Bounty and Heroes of Might and Magic or Disciples is a greater emphasis on role-playing. Story is brought to the fore here in a much more overt way, thanks to a sarcastic sense of humor and a ton of quests to be solved. True, most of these quests have been scooped out of the big bag of RPG cliches (find stolen property, remove a curse, kill the big bad whatever that's plaguing our village, and so on). But many come with multiple parts that force you to venture all over the map to solve them, along with a great deal of personality conveyed through idiosyncratic characters and a lot of text. You can't just skip around like you're filling in blanks; do so and you're liable to get caught not paying attention, as with the quest where you're given the words to a spell solving a peasant's zombie problem and then have to pick the actual phrase out in a multiple choice menu when casting the spell a little later. So even though these various tasks might not break any new ground, completing them is more involving than the map-clearing busywork that dominates the usual tactical RPG.

Difficulty is also scaled well. Starting off on easy knocks down monster hit points to something quite manageable, and cranks up the amount of gold awarded so that you never seem to run out of the coin needed to hire reinforcements. It's gratifying to see newbies getting let in on the action like this; too many games of this ilk seem to want to punish players, or at least present such a grueling level of difficulty that only veterans of the genre need apply. With that said, moving to normal difficulty is one heck of a leap. Enemy hit points take a huge jump and your gold gets slashed to practically nothing, turning what was a pretty fast-moving game into what can be a grueling slog through battles of attrition.

King's Bounty isn't the most modern-looking game out there, although you can't quibble with its creepy, bombastic spell effects.

Visual design is impressive, if not cutting-edge. The game is a couple of years out of date, although the use of bright color and loads of details on maps means that everything still looks great in a Disney kind of way. Areas are intricately drawn and laid out in such a way as to increase the fantasy atmosphere. Every nook and cranny is filled with something D&D-ish, from urns and skulls in catacomb corners to webs and giant mushrooms in forest clearings. Spell effects are spooky and imaginative, too. Magic is generally underlined with special effects like clouds of brimstone, puffs of green gas, and even leering skull faces. All of these added details sometimes gets in the way of your simply playing the game, though. Pathways through maps are very twisty-turny and often obscured with foliage or other terrain obstacles. It can be tough to locate a way forward without rotating the map or zooming in. Failing to at least pan the camera around before galloping into an S-curve can also see you trot right into a killer encounter with powerhouse monsters hidden just out of sight. Audio, on the other hand, is similarly secreted away. The score is a generic triumphal blast that repeats so often during tactical engagements you will almost immediately tune it out, while battle sounds are tinny and there is virtually no voice acting in the game.

Forget about looking at King's Bounty: The Legend as a sequel to an oldie-but-goodie and take it on its own merits. Anyone with the nostalgia gene who played the original might get a special thrill out of this sequel coming along almost 20 years later, but you don't need a connection to this classic to enjoy this impressive take on the traditional tactical RPG.