In Singularity, you play BJ Blazkowicz fighting the Nazi paranormal units, taking place in Isenstant. You gain super powers when you find the Thule medallion which lets you slow down time..wait wait wait wait – thats Wolfenstein, not Singularity, although you wouldn’t be blamed for confusing the two. Both games are from Raven Software (the studio who gave us wonders like HeXen, Heretic, Soldier of Fortune (1 & 2), Jedi Knight Outcast and even XMen Legends), both feature historical weaponry/settings, both feature special powers, and both had a somewhat frustrating upgrade system to the devices that gave you the special powers.
In Singularity, you play Nate Renko who is thrown between modern day and 1955 on the elusive and fictional Russian island, Katorga-12. Kotorga-12 is the only known source of Element99, which in turn gives the scientists there the ability to manipulate time. The Time Manipulation Device (TMD) is the main draw card for Singularity – it acts as a gravity gun, shield and weapon. I will say this, while Singularity is better than Wolfenstein, neither are stand out games. While Wolfenstein just lacked punch and was overall too repetitive, Singularity‘s main draw is the TMD – but in reality, that was its only draw, as the game overall feels like yet another generic shooter.
The game is short – only taking four or five hours to stomp through, the enemies are either mutated creatures which can teleport (but due to somewhat dumb AI never bother doing that to get the advantage on you) or Russian soldiers (either Cold War era or modern) who are happy enough to line up and die in an orderly fashion. The weapons the enemy have are no match for the arsenal you can get – such as a time manipulating sniper rifle, a rail gun, or a gun which slows time so much you can actually steer the bullet. While these sound fun at first, combined with the overpowered TMD, the game just becomes boring – a game isn’t fun if it doesn’t challenge you on some level. That isn’t to say there aren’t genuine moments of "zomg that was so cool" when you first get the weaponry, but those moments were spread so thin throughout the game.
Once interesting tidbit is that this Raven game doesn’t use any of iD’s Tech engines, but instead uses Unreal Engine 3. During the peak of the id Tech 3 based games, Raven produced four hugely successful games, not to mention paved a lot of the way with a string of hits using the id Tech 2 engine. Heck, Raven even created (the somewhat lacklustre) Quake 4 – that’s saying something about how involved they’ve been with iD tech over the years. Now, this isn’t their first Unreal Engine 3 based game (X-Men Origins: Wolverine was), but it still came as a bit of a surprise to me. Despite years of working with iD Tech, Raven are relatively new with UE, and it shows – it suffers a hilarious bug where textures just stop loading (or take 10-20mins to load). This is a feature of UE3, where textures stream in to create a smoother loading experience, rather than loading all at once and slowing down the system.
As you can see from the above image the gun is fantastically detailed but the rest of the game looks terrible. More often than not, while playing Singularity, I was faced with this problem. Apparently there are now workarounds, and Raven are looking into it but it is somewhat of a big flaw.
To distinguish this game from the previous Prince of Persias, Ubisoft decided to not give it a subtitle like the Sands series (Sands of Time, Warrior Within, Two Thrones, Forgotten Sands). The name also bares little resemblance to the game itself – the "Prince" isn’t actually a prince – it is hard not to dislike the game when it is setup to deceive you before you even begin! Ubisoft somewhat gave up after that and it is rather hard to list any distinguishing features that the game has. If I was pressed, the celshaded graphics are the only unique element in the series although not particularly unheard of these days.
Unlike the Sands series, Prince of Persia features a different protagonist, a different story, and fairly different gameplay. I think it is probably important to note the rating that this Prince gets – and I mean from classification boards – PG (Parental Guidance recommended) compared to previous games which generally got M (Mature Audiences). By targeting kids, most aspects of the game have been cut back to make it easier.
So how is the gameplay different and easier? Well, for a start there is no death – if you die, the other character will magically teleport and rescue you. Combat is also missing in action – or at least as good as gone, as the occasional combat comes down to Y, X, X, RT looping until the opponent is dead. Well, dead or decides to run off, as you seem to kill very few bad guys. And finally, a staple of the Prince of Persia series is missing (at least in the half of the game I’ve completed so far) – there are no traps. The game boils down to random/repetitive/unsatisfying combat, jumping with terrible lighting and camera angles so non-death is more often than not, collecting ‘light seeds’ and not much else.
The story focuses on Elika the princess – your NPC companion – and Ahriman – the evil god of evilness. He’s been set loose, its your job to seal him back by making Elika heal the ‘fertile grounds’. As mentioned, whenever you are near death in combat or because you’re plummeting towards the ground, Elika will teleport and save you. Wait, hang on, the princess has magical powers that allow her to teleport (even when she’s caged up) to save you, she heals the lands, and is actually a princess, while you’re a nobody with no powers – why are you needed? While Elika can teleport, use magic in combat, heal the lands, and run circles around you there is one thing she needs you for – climbing on mossy walls. Yes, as soon as you hit a mossy wall, the character freezes as he waits for Elika to climb on his back.
Overall, I only have this game because a friend saw it going cheap ($10) at JB HiFi. If you don’t treat it like a Prince of Persia game or if you’ve never played Sands of Time, you might enjoy it but otherwise it’s a pretty hard sell.
Kane presumably looking on in horror
at what has become of the franchise
After playing most of the C&C games both in the Tiberium and Red Alert universe, you’d think I’d be eager to play C&C4.
I have no good things to say about C&C4. I played one round in the multiplayer beta, that was enough to put me off buying the game. Sadly, a friend of mine didn’t have a chance to play the beta, purchased it, and later lent the game to me.
This is not Command and Conquer.
Heck, I’d barely consider it an RTS. Why would I think a game series that helped create the RTS genre, is no longer an RTS? EA LA (developers) decided that
- base building wasn’t needed,
- nor resource gathering,
- and that particularly large armies weren’t fun (the “population” cap is about 50-60, but the smallest unit takes 3, meaning a max of 16-20 units per side)
- a leveling system that restricts what units you have at your disposal
Instead, you have one of three types of ‘crawler’ (giant carrier where you can dispense units), each type allowing you to build different types of units or use different powers. The goal is to capture various control nodes – if this is sounding similar, its because Dawn of War II got there first, but did it “right” with squad based play.
While the C&C cinematics have always been a little on the campy side, C&C4 just leaves a bad taste in your mouth with poor props, worse CGI, poor dialog and a very lack lustre performance by the usually brilliant Joseph Kuncan (who has always played Kane in the series). The game isn’t helped by laughable DRM (you have to be online to play…even single player) and restrictions (no LAN play).
While this might sound like me being bitter about change, the game simply isn’t fun. In singleplayer you’re either bombarded with three or four enemies all with higher level stuff than you or you’re waiting for stuff to happen, in the form of waiting for a timer to tick down or for nodes to be captured.
The last C&C game, Red Alert 3 wasn’t the mind blowingly awesome game that everybody wanted, but C&C4 retroactively boots its rating. This is the sad, final chapter in the “Kane Saga”, and the last game I’ll play from EA LA for a long time.
No star rating can be given for this monstrosity.
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.
[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
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.
½ / 5
(Yes, that’s right, half a star out of five, stark contrast to the perfect score some reviews have given it)
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 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.
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.
Will Wright’s (of SimCity and The Sims fame) Spore was released on September 4th, a game I’ve been eagerly awaiting since seeing demonstration videos of the game back in 2005. I must admit I’ve kept myself out of the loop, so that the anticipation and inevitable long wait didn’t kill me. Unfortunately it wasn’t until after ‘completing’ the game that I learnt it was designed for the casual gamer (in other words, its an extremely shallow, cutesy and repetitive game). ‘Completing’ is something you can never do for Wright’s games it would seem (being all sandbox games essentially), but I use the term in sense of ‘done-anything-I-was-going-to-do-in-the-game-and-have-now-uninstalled-it’.
Most of my gripes are particularly with the Space Age, because that is where the majority of the game is situated (as it only took two hours to progress through spore, creature, tribal and civilisation stages combined). During the Space Age, the game tries to do too much and unfortunately it can’t pull it off with the shallow/basic gameplay route. If you can get past the tedious nature of being the universes defender against biological disasters and the occasional pirates which steal spice one unit at a time, Spore presents a very basic trading game. There is no way to tell who you’ve visited or sold to in the past, no way to predict what they’ll pay for your spices on the next trip, and the only way to see is to fly into their solar system and around their planet – urgh! Oh yes, you’re supposed to be wowed at the supreme power you wield to terraform a planet, but the only reason you do that is to generate more spice to trade. The excitement of terraforming a world and building a new slave factory colony is diminished when all you have to do is hold down the left mouse button after selecting the appropriate tool.
While you’re conquering the universe in the name of…well whatever you named your Empire, you’ll often get called back to ‘duty’ to prevent a planets ecological disaster. Oh dear, a nuclear accident? A planet hurtling dangerously close to a sun? A meteor on its way? No. Some animals mutated/got sick, they now have glowing tails, and you have to kill the five mutants (it always seems to be five) before they infect the rest of the species and they become extinct; failure to do so will repeat the process slowly eliminating all creatures from a planet. That’s the best they could come up with? It wouldn’t be too bad if you weren’t either asked to do that for your empire and all your allies or recalled thousands of light years away, through several worm holes away during the middle of large scale battles.
Speaking of space battles, as you start off you are in an understandably weak vessel with limited weaponry, but as the game progresses you can buy new weapons as well as upgrade existing ones. The problem is, only one enemy race seems to have weapons that can approach or rival yours and even then its limited to their spacecrafts – their cities can be wiped out with a single bomb (MegaBomb, doesn’t cost anything to use) making combat quick and easy, you spend most of the time scrolling in and out of solar systems.
With the amount of grinding (eliminate this set of creatures, abduct that alien/plant, scan this surface) in the game, it just feels too much like a single player MMORPG. Perhaps I was just expecting too much from Spore, at the end of the day I really just wanted less Sims-in-Space, and more SimCity-on-a-universal-scale.
