Wet [Xbox360/Demo]

From the demo, Wet looks an interesting game perhaps not for the game play but the fantastic combination of visual and audio art style. The sound track at every stage in the demo fitted in perfectly with whatever was happening at the time – the visuals were beautiful and fitting for a game trying to be like honk-kong kungfu flicks.
The "berserk/blood lust/rage mode" mode (no name was actually given to it in the demo?) which was triggered when blood was splattered over the heroines face, switches the visuals to a cel-shaded like mode, which while simplistic was also beautiful.

Art style aside, the game plays like you’re in a Tarentino film. And like any Tarentino film, this has its ups and downs – the action is great, but apart from fight scenes there isn’t a whole heap actually going on. The story somewhat gets in the way of the killing. I think there was something about revenge.

Back to the game play, you can seamlessly switch from guns or a katana (in the demo you had just akimbo pistols or your sword) and jump around like crazy. Most of the gun play occurs while you’re in the air, sliding on your knees, running along a wall, or sliding down a ladder (holding on with your legs).

There are some quick time events, which are always a negative in my book.. but they seem to be fairly limited and were fairly forgiving too.

I want to buy the game – but I have a feeling it’ll be incredibly repetitive, albeit beautiful, so I think I’ll wait till it is on sale.

If you enjoy (almost) mindless killing of people over and over, with some bullet time thrown in, I think you’ll love this game.

Review: [PROTOTYPE]

[PROTOTYPE] launched earlier this year on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3, developed by Radical Entertainment. Released during June 2009, it was part of several largely hyped, third person, sandbox games launching this year, including inFAMOUS and Red Faction: Guerrilla. I’m late on my review, I know.

This genre has really been defined and refined by the Grand Theft Auto series – the only true standout in the genre thus far, so there are some unavoidable comparisons.

Story

The story goes something like: You’re Alex Mercer, you wake up in a morgue remembering little other than your name, and discover you’ve got two problems: one, you’ve got super powers, two you’re being hunted because you’re infected/have super powers. These super powers give you the ability to shape shift your body into various weapons and armour, as well as take the form and memories of other people by consuming them.

Given the game is of the sandbox genre, it would be fair to expect [PROTOTYPE] to suffers the same as all sandbox games when it comes to pacing. It’s hard/impossible for the developers to set the pace of the game and story when the player is the one who is ultimately calling the shots. It also makes it harder to tell the story as its being interrupted by the pesky player going off and doing side missions. Unfortunately, Radical took it upon themselves to make it even more difficult on themselves by not revealing all of the story unless you “consume” certain VIPs – who are weak and fleshy and will die if you run into them a little too fast.

Gameplay

Like the majority of the Grand Theft Auto series, [PROTOTYPE] is 3D, but unlike GTA, that really does mean every possible direction and dimension – half the game is played on the rooftops or climbing skyscrapers. While it looks and feels awesome to be gliding or scaling huge buildings at first, it becomes tedious as its a rather slow way to move around a rather large city. Red Faction: Guerrilla suffered from the same problem where transport (cars) was the weakest element in the game.

For the most part the difficulty curve is… absolutely broken. The first level is “somewhat towards the end” of the game, a psuedo-tutorial if you like, where you have all your powers/abilities at your disposal. When the level ends, you go back to retell your story to a shadowy figure, losing all your abilities. Assassins Creed did the same thing, and frankly I find it more frustrating than anything. However, this isn’t what breaks the difficulty curve. The game flipflops between being stupidly easy, and setting you up against boss fights or the like which require 10-30minutes because the opponent has so much health/armour that your weaponry – which carves through tanks – is ineffective. Then throw in a section where you lose your abilities? Yeah. Great.

The control system wasn’t exactly intuitive either, which didn’t help the combat system. The combat system lets you activate a variety of powers, the more powerful “moves” resembling more of a Street Fighter/Tekken combo system which (at least on PC) lead me to do one thing – spam light attacks. It was far too easier just to use the “Blade” and just a general “attack” rather than the “twenty five button combo that cuts everything down, but takes three minutes”.

Overall

There are some genuine highlights in this game that you are very unlikely to see in other games, such as the ability to kick a chopper and make it explode. The novelty of these sort of features runs out quickly as the game shows its a little too repetitive.

Overall the game isn’t bad, I’m happy saying that it is good – but it is not great. The poor story, repetitive gameplay and dull graphics (again, they weren’t poor, but they were certainly not great, and the repetitive scenery did not help) are the main detractors, while sense of freedom, encouragement to destroy everything, and some unique gameplay movements are the attractors.

2.5/5

One Hour In Review: Far Cry 2

Why is this a one hour in review? Honestly, it was slightly more than one hour, but nowhere near completion. After 16% of the game (the save game tells you how far you’re through the game), I couldn’t stomach the game and uninstalled it.

Far Cry 2 is a sequel to Far Cry in name only despite Ubisoft’s marketing – it features all new characters, vastly different gameplay style, a ‘realistic’ storyline compared to the originals sci-fi, a new engine created from scratch (CryEngine for Far Cry, Dunia Engine for Far Cry 2) and it is even developed by a different company (Crytek created the first, Ubisoft Montreal the ’sequel’).

Despite how little of the game I played, it does get a few things right. The graphics and physics systems combined are fantastic – the day/night cycle gives you a feeling of ‘being in reality’ compared to many games that are a constant day or night depending on the level, despite how many hours you may wait. Fire looks better than in any other game I’ve seen, and given the dry terrain often setting things on fire results in a hasty retreat before the flames consume you!

After you get over the initial ooo-ing and ahh-ing associated with the graphics, you’ll be in for a big disappointment.

While the story in the first Far Cry wasn’t brilliant, at least it was present. Oh, sure, in Far Cry 2 there is some Jackal guy you’re sent to kill, but you manage to mess that up by contracting malaria in your taxi ride from the airport to your hotel. From there on in, it becomes less of an assassination game and more of a mission based, Grand Theft Auto style game, just without the random fun, people, or general filling to the game. Each mission is basically the same, you’re sent to kill some bad guys, well, badder than the guys you’re currently working for, since you eventually switch sides. In each quest I accepted, I was always warned "nobody knows you’re out there, even our guys will shoot you", although apparently they stop giving you the warning in later missions.

Gameplay suffers too, the mechanics have taken a big dive from Far Cry. I remember the fun of being able to crawl under decking and shooting threw the wooden planks, or being able to drive a car that didn’t conk out the moment it went on a gravel road.

The overall world layout was very poorly designed, checkpoints of respawning bad guys (of evidently no affiliation other than "lets kill that guy") are dotted all over the map which makes driving around a real pain in the backside, breaking the flow of the game.

I tried to finish this, and I couldn’t, so even Call of Duty 5 and Spore rank better from me. They took a fun, crazy game and ruined its name by making a boring game, couldn’t come up with a title for it, so stuck Far Cry 2 on it in hopes it would sell.

Review: Fallout 3

I’ve been holding off on putting thought to paper (well, keyboard to bits) for awhile because I wasn’t sure how to approach this.

Without a doubt, Fallout 3 is one of the biggest titles of the year, perhaps the game of the year. Unlike other big name titles it isn’t all about the graphics – but has gorgeous graphics and oozes style; it focuses on a familiar – but not overdone (here’s looking at you Call of Duty 5) post-apocalyptic world; a story driven game – rather than a series of “quests” that just happen to get in your way (Far Cry 2 anyone?); and it is in the style of role playing-first person hybrid which thanks to the V.A.T.S. (“Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System”) gives you the choice of manual or automated firing thus not requiring you to be a trigger-junkie.

For me the most enjoyable aspects were the sci-fi elements. It isn’t the first sci-fi RPG out there but the sheer number of fantasy RPG’s (quality or otherwise) eclipses those that spring to mind. There is something satisfying leveling up and being more efficient with a plasma rifle.

With advances in “gaming technology” its nice to see lots of games benefiting from it. In particular, Fallout 3 is big. I could phrase that better – its fucking big. To walk from one side to the other of the map without going indoors, you’d get no loading screens, but it would take a least half an hour (“real world” time) to do so – and that’s before factoring in combat, repairs, looting, quests, and all the things you’d actually do in the game itself. I really got a sense for how massive the game is.

So seemingly it does everything right? Yeah, well almost. According to my save games, it did take me roughly twenty hours to complete, but a lot of that involved dicking around to see how many ways I could tick certain people off or explode super mutants with mini-nukes. If you drilled down to the core story of the game, even venturing out for some of the side quests the main story would be abruptly over in under ten hours. By todays “standards”, ten hours certainly isn’t anything to scoff at (again, Call of Duty 5 proves that), but the majority of that time involves traversing the Wastelands on foot, and storyline does conclude very suddenly and unfortunately in a way that does not give credit to the rest of the game. Okay, I’ll stop beating around the bush, the ending was balls.

There are other problems too. The level cap is set to twenty, which does take some time to get to – I had finished the game at level 13 – but finishing a few more of the side quests wouldn’t have made it that hard to reach the cap. The real problem however, is that at level 13 I was indestructible. Armed with a heavily (self-repaired and thus self-upgraded) unique plasma rifle, and protected with Enclave Telsa Armour, nothing but several Deathclaws could take me down, and at that stage I had only ever seen one at a time. It wasn’t a matter of difficulty so much as I was single shot killing everything because of the mechanics of upgrading/repairing guns, combined with a high energy weapon proficiency.

Despite the flaws of the game, it was genuinely fun to play. I’ve spent many more hours going back to save games near the end and detouring to explore the rest of the Wastelands and to finish off side quests. I played it on PC so I can’t vouch how the experience is on a console (available on PS3/Xbox 360), but the overall game play should be so similar that I’ll give it a universal highly recommended – go out and get it, or at least find somebody who has it to take a look at it for yourself as there is no demo available.

Bottom line? If you like RPG’s, get it. If you like shooters, get it. If you like a good story, get it.

Which possible war? (Review: Call of Duty World at War)

Which possible war could a shooter choose to focus on to become the next big success? You guessed right, World War II! This war certainly hasn’t been done to death in the movie, documentary, or gaming genres. World War II games have become like a lot of sports game franchises – a new one is released every year with upgraded graphics and new players licensed.

Call of Duty World at War (CoDWaW) marks the fourth (sixth if you include the United Offensive expansion and the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube exclusive Call of Duty 2: Big Red One) game in the Call of Duty (CoD) series to focus on World War II. I suppose by focusing on World War II the game becomes cheaper to produce as they certainly don’t need to employee any story writers. Sadly Treyarch also decided not to employee too people to focus on the single player either, which despite the fun of a limitless flame thrower, was still a woefully short three hours of wave after wave of either Nazi’s or screaming Japanese soldiers.

Treyarch seemingly thought to very little about growing the series leaving that up to Infinity Ward, who have made the only decent Call of Duty games (1, 2 & 4). CoDWaW is a modified version of the CoD4 engine – they’ve added up to four player co-op to parts of the campaign, but visually and game mechanic wise it feels like a step back. The game plays more like a “rails” shooter (ie Time Crisis or House of the Dead) with a lot of invisible walls restricting where you can or can’t go – I came across a few open doors that I simply couldn’t walk through – and I was propelled forward to my death on more than one occasion when my AI teammates decided to walk into me.

AI might be a little too kind, AS (Artificial Stupidity) might be more accurate. My main gripe with the first CoD game was that you single handedly had to do absolutely everything as your team mates couldn’t hit the side of a barn from point blank range. As the series as progressed, the AI has slowly learnt how to fire a gun and even better than that, not relied on you to do absolutely everything to win the war. Unfortunately, CoDWaW makes another step backwards here and the AI again requires every objective to be completed by the player, which seemingly extends to killing every opponent. In CoD4 I noticed my AI allies would at least throw back grenades if they were close enough – in CoDWaW my allied AI aimed their grenades at me, killing me on numerous occasions.

If you love the Call of Duty series I would still recommend CoD4 (price alone makes it better value, let alone the better gameplay and larger single player campaign), but if you prefer a WW2 shooter and have no interest in single player this might be for you.

WW2 Shooter + no visual improvements + incredibly short campaign  = One and a half out of five from me.

Micro Review: Red Alert 3

I’ll skip a full break down of Red Alert 3, as I’ve already covered a fair bit of it in my review of the beta. Not much changed from the beta in terms of units or balance, so this is more to do with the single player campaign. Since that review however, I’ve played/completed Red Alert 2/Yuri’s Revenge so I have a bit more insight to the Red Alert series.

Campaign

The story starts by the defeated Soviet forces going back in time to kill Einstein, the man who “won them the war” with his technology in Red Alert 2. When the Soviets return, they find not everything was how they’d imagined with a new “technologically superior” enemy, The Empire of the Rising Sun, emerging from nowhere.

The three factions, Allies, Soviets and Empire of the Rising Sun all start from the same spot but fork out to create their own “destiny” and ultimately victory at the expense of the other two. This raises the interesting question of what’s considered cannon in the storyline – traditionally in all Command and Conquer games, it has been the Allies/GDI/”good guys in general” whose storyline is considered correct for the proceeding games. As such, they’ve always been the first campaign offered, but in Red Alert 3, the Soviet campaign is offered first.

My problems with the series isn’t exclusive to Red Alert, but to nearly anything that creates a series out of time travelling. In Red Alert specifically, time travelling just gives the an easy out (in every episode!) to screw with the previous games story and never build on it. The Allied and Soviet forces are mostly made up of units/etc from the previous game, nothing really “new and game changing”.

Bottom line

The bottom line is I’d give the game a two and a half stars out of five; while it is a solid RTS series it is getting old rehashing essentially the same story formula of the previous games, including Command & Conquer.

Red Alert 3 (Beta) Impressions

Please note: I must stress these are my impressions from the beta (v1.4), and may not represent the final product.

Because I bought Command and Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath, I was given access to the Red Alert 3 beta program. Additional keys have been released as part of an exclusive deal between EA and Fileplanet, first to their (Fileplanet) premium account holders but most recently to the free accounts too.

The beta is limited to online multiplayer only and to four maps (2x 2v2 and 2x 1v1 maps), but there is no limit to access to the three factions and their respective units.

Gameplay

It’s hard to comment if the gameplay is good, bad or otherwise in a restricted beta of a game especially when it is limited to just multiplayer, but I can draw comparisons. It plays much like any RTS – you collect resources, create buildings that provide X resource (in this case, electricity), create units, provide defense, or unlock further units (in the case of Russia; the Allies and Empire of the Rising Sun both ‘research’ the next tier of units). There is nothing particularly different or innovative with the gameplay presented in RA3.

The previous two games released by EA since acquiring Westwood/C&C rights have been C&C: Generals (and it’s expansion, Zero Hour) and C&C3:Tiberium Wars (and it’s expansion, Kanes Wrath), if I was to pick which one RA3 is most like, it’d definitely be Generals.

Generals has a “rewards” system, where you earn “experience” by doing stuff, which could include creating buildings, units, or removing substantial chunks of the enemy. In return, you could spend your experience on three rewards trees (dubbed at the time ‘General Abilities’), which included unit upgrades, aerial assaults, spawning units anywhere on the map, etc. RA3 features the same system, although the rewards don’t seem to be turning-the-tide-of-battle as some of the Generals rewards were (hint, this is a good thing – it sucks when all your hardwork can be undone by an enemies reward).

Zero Hour introduced another dimension of combat (sea, alongside air and ground) to Generals (which does not appear in C&C3), but is present in RA3. While this does have the problem that the developers have to balance yet another playing field, it really does add so much more to the game.

Graphics/Art Style

While I haven’t played a lot of the older games in the C&C universe, I’ve played a fair bit of Generals, and C&C3, and it is safe to say the visuals in RA3 are nothing like those. The easiest comparison would be Half-Life 2/Counter Strike to Team Fortress 2. The former are ‘realism’ shooters while the latter is a stylised, over the top, brightly coloured piece of art. RA3 falls into latter category, having many over the top effects and everything is very brightly coloured.

Like all games thus far based on SAGE (or RNA as its now known) it has appealing visuals in the unit models, detail textures, and particle effects, but throw it into a multiplayer arena and massive slow downs occur unless all players turn the graphics quality down. The game doesn’t become choppy as if frames are being skipped, it simply slows down the game speed so it takes longer for things to occur. With C&C3, I found settings that were silky smooth in single player, even during the epically scaled final battles, would bring the game to its knees in even the smallest 1v1 game online.

Problems

While this is a beta and you must expect most bugs or problems that will be fixed, it is hard not to see some that will never be fixed given the track record of EA.

Gamespy
For reasons that have never benefited actual gamers, Gamespy is involved in the multiplayer aspect of RA3, providing the chat lobby and game match making services. It is extremely rare (Quake…sure) to see a game that has benefited from Gamespy’s assistance with lobby/match making – and RA3 is no different. It mimics all the flaws of C&C3’s online play, where available games often don’t appear at all or the list continually expands and contracts so fast that it is often impossible to actually select the game you wish to join! One of the worst ‘features’ is that you have to be in the chat lobby (and currently there is over twenty) of the game creator to see the game; change lobbies and you see a different subset of available games.

Netcode
One thing that has played SAGE/RNA games has been poor networking code. During the days where I semi-frequented a gaming focused NetCafe, it was rare to see a LAN game of Generals finish without at least one of the players crash out due to network issues. The initial release of Kane’s Wrath was plagued with a ‘out-of-sync’ issue, which after a period of time would just lose connection with other players, rendering the game useless. EA denied that such a problem existed (stating it couldn’t be replicated and that a very small percentage of the player base was effected) for some time, until they decreased such occurrences with a patch (but not totally removed) after three months!

In RA3, I’ve already seen one or two out-of-sync issues, and many players randomly dropped from the game!

Balance
In one of the patches C&C3, the ability to construct multiple defenses at once by building multiple cranes was removed. It was a fairly drastic change, and effected singleplayer as well. I can’t help but shake the feeling that there will be some major balance upsets after the release of the game. Russian submarines currently seem to be overly powerful just as their Terror Drones are – to the point where I’ve had a few games where people have quit when others have gone Russian.

Will it drain my wallet?

The inevitable question is: despite its flaws, is this game “good enough” to be worth shelling out for? If you’re a hard core C&C/RA fan, it’s got some solid stuff in there which you’ll love. If you are a C&C/RA fan but are a Westwood purist? Not a chance – there is too much of the “EA Influence” inherited from Generals and C&C3. I fall short of being a fanatic to the series or to Westwood so the decision is a little tougher. I’ve been burnt by the flaws in Tiberium Wars and Kane’s Wrath and generally poor support by EA in those games as well as Battlefield 2/2142, but RA3 does offer some genuinely different gameplay to be entertaining.

My answer is, no, I won’t be buying it upon launch because I don’t feel it is worth the launch RRP of AUD$99.95; while the game might be fun, it’s just too “same-y” in both the good and bad aspects. If I can find it for AUD$60 or under, I’ll reconsider, but for now the similarities in gameplay to C&C3 and Generals are just encouraging me to hold tight to my money until StarCraft 2 is released.

Gallery

Review: Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H/Intel G45 Chipset

My initial choice for a G33 board for my HTPC was to get whatever would work for the right price, with the goal of turning it into a gaming capable machine by adding a PCIe x16 graphics card which would also give me DVI/HDMI output. As cool as gaming on a 40" 1080p panel is, the keyboard and mouse just aren’t up to scratch in their current forms.

When I needed a new motherboard for a new system (my Windows Home Server box) and I learnt that Intel G45 chipset boards were around the corner, offering AVC/VC1/MPEG2 hardware decoding with DVI/VGA/HDMI out, I put one and one together and ended up purchasing a Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H motherboard, the only G45 motherboard I could find for sale (at $169) in Australia.

The G45 chipset introduces the GMA X4500 HD, which brings Intel inline with both ATI (780G/HD 3200) and NVIDIA (GeForce 8200) by offering an integrated video chipset capable of hardware assisted decoding of Bluray and HD-DVD’s. In reality this translates to reducing CPU usage during playback of hi-def discs by making the GPU do a lot of the work. Previous Intel chipsets have been pretty woeful in this regard, actually hampering playback if hardware assist is enabled.

Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H Features

The back panel is fairly well endowed, HDMI/DVI being my main concern, but optical audio out, 6 USB ports, eSATA, Firewire, 10/100/1000 Ethernet port, and six stereo audio jacks.

Internally it consists of the usual assortment of ports you’ll find these days. The only things of interest are 5 SATA ports (6 total in the system, if you include the eSATA port on the back), two PCI slots, a PCIe x1 slot, and a PCIe x16 slot which is only capable of PCIe x4 speeds. I can see the reasoning – people who buy this board should really be using it in a HTPC, and with the newfound speed of G45 an dedicated graphics card isn’t needed, but it still seems "wrong". This is an issue specifically with the Gigabyte board not a blanket problem with G45 boards.

Oh, and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), for all the times you need your HTPC to be uberly secured?

Lets face it, the feature set on this makes it a perfect board for a HTPC, general home computer, or heck, even a workstation/personal server, which has always been the aim of the "G" chipsets from Intel (perhaps Larrabee will change this?). It is not designed as a gaming board, and the PCIe x4 slot posing as a x16 slot makes sure of that.  

The Test

I had trouble enabling Cyberlink’s PowerDVD to take advantage of the G45’s hardware acceleration, so I turned to ArcSoft’s Total Media Theatre (TMT). TMT’s CPU usage always seems to be a little higher than PowerDVD’s (I’m not sure if it is the application or their codecs), but the latest version worked fine with offloading to GMA 4500 HD.

Jumper used less power (with HW Acceleration On), despite identical CPU load, because the TS contained file was moved to a hard drive, instead of being read from the disc. I’m guessing a Bluray/HD-DVD drive draws 10 –> 15w while playing a movie.

As you can see Hardware Acceleration works for VC1 and H.264/AVC (and one would assume MPEG-2, but I don’t have any 1080p MPEG-2 sources) which reduces CPU usage as much as 70%, which in turn reduces power usage by as much as 22w.  The Hardware Acceleration Off values are roughly the same as what the G31/33/35 chipset’s will achieve with power usage a watt or two higher.

The Bottom Line

Pro

• 8 Channel LPCM Audio (ATI’s 780G chipset only supports 2 Channel LPCM, but ATI’s newer 4000 series cards, and Nvidia’s GF 8200 boards have 8 Channel LPCM). While I’d love to use this until I get a better audio system it doesn’t matter to me. Still, it’s nice to somewhat future proof it.
• HDMI/DVI/Display Port support
• "Works as advertised" – X4500 HD does indeed do the hardware accelerated decoding for H.264(AVC), VC1 and MPEG2 as described.
• Dolby Home Theater (encapsulates all analogue audio to a DD stream, which is handy when you have a 6 channel analogue stream which would otherwise be down-mixed to stereo)

Cons

• Price. As it stands, it’s cheaper to go with a G31/33 motherboard, and throw in a low end video card from ATI or Nvidia and you’ll get the same hardware assisted decoding. On the other hand, that will net you higher power consumption, and if you choose a non-passive model noise will be increased.
• While the PCIe x16 is physically a PCIe x16 slot, you’ll only get PCIe x4 speeds out of it.

Review: American McGee’s Grimm

Well, McGee is back to it again and this time in partnership with GameTap is offering the first episode (A Boy Learns What Fear Is) of his game series, Grimm, free.

I’ll cut to the chase, its 193meg of rubbish.

Graphics

In a gaming world obsessed with realistic graphics, it’s refreshing to see games that differ from the norm, be it celshaded hijinks like XIII or Team Fortress 2, or seemingly water-coloured games like what I’ve seen of Diablo III thus far.

Grimm certainly lacks the realism, but unfortunately also lacks and sort of quality in the graphics department. Utilising the Unreal 3 Engine of course gets it gets motion blur, but incredibly low quality textures, models and even animation reminds me of the first generation of game mods, certainly not something you’d see from a “seasoned” professional such as McGee.

Gameplay

Mario or Sonic are fine examples of platformers. You run around, you collect things, you dodge or defeat evil, and then you arrive at the end of the level. Often there will be a series of jumping puzzles that require varying degrees of skills to time and pull of the jumps perfectly, else you face doom. 3D platformers are much the same.

Well, Grimm’s a platformer too, a 3D one at that. Unfortunately, there is no real evil to dodge or defeat, you simply run around somewhat slowly spreading “darkness”. When you stand still, you pee. Yes, you pee. You pee and then you can jump to where your pee hits. So there goes the puzzle bit of jumping – you’re given an exact guide as to where you’ll land.

You also get to perform a “buttslam” by pressing the jump key twice. It spreads darkness a little further, or stuns those trying to clean up darkness.

Should you still insist on playing this game, there are six levels which shouldn’t take you more than five minutes each if you want to convert everything to darkness. If you don’t, maybe two or three minutes each. The entire game was over in less than the time it took to download for me (I’m on 1.5mbit ADSL)

Bugs

• Apparently will throw a bit of a hissy fit on x64 installsTurns out this is a problem with the GameTap installer which requires a 32bit system. Works fine if you install from ’setup.exe’
  
• If you’ve got UAC turned on, you must force it to run as Admin, otherwise you can’t change game options and even worse, you can’t progress anywhere in the game. You’ll finish a level, and it’ll restart the level.
• Alt tabbing caused instant crashes for me.

Closing Thoughts

I don’t know what the target audience is – it’d be too dark for littler kids, the dialogue is too dry/boring for ‘adults’, and the gameplay is too boring for everybody. Edit: American confirms (in the comments) that the game is aimed at the casual gamer.

Despite how little I think of reviews giving games a rating, I’ll have to give this one a over generous 1/5. The first point is for the price – free is good, and the second is for licensing the UE3, so that Epic can stay in business long enough to inevitably make UT4, or better yet, Gears of War 3.

McGee, if you read this I’m sorry, I’m not trying to break your heart, but this game was crude not just in the idea of game, but execution of the game as well.