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Review of Left 4 Dead

Ryan — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:00:00 -0000

Platform: (X360,PC)

4 out of 5

You know as much as you need to about Francis here just by looking at him.

In most first-person shooters, there's a fine distinction between the single- and multiplayer games, a distinction that Valve's Left 4 Dead does its best to obliterate. This is a case where the campaign, online co-op, and online multiplayer modes all bleed together into a delightfully putrid miasma of first-person zombie panic. For all the games that have used zombies as foils, Left 4 Dead is probably the closest a video game has gotten to recreating the oscillating senses of dread and terror that are fundamental to a good zombie movie. It makes for one of the most thrilling and unique shooter experiences you'll have this year, as well as one of the most authentic, kinetic zombie games ever made.

The beauty of Left 4 Dead is that it taps into a vision of the zombie apocalypse that is so familiar from films that it allows for a frightening economy in the way the game establishes its characters and setting. The game opens up “two weeks after first infection” with a brief cinematic of the four survivors amidst a horde of attacking zombies, and it's the closest the game comes to providing out-and-out exposition. The lack of further explanation of how the zombie pandemic started actually works to the game's advantage, as confusion and the fear of the unknown are two of the greatest strengths of a good zombie scenario. On a practical level, you'll be so concerned with simply surviving that any other concerns quickly fall by the wayside.

There are some blurbs in the game's manual that provide a little more back story for the four survivors, but they're all so archetypal in appearance and behavior--though without feeling generic--that you get a great sense of who these people are simply by interacting with them. The game also uses the state of the world itself to drive home just how bad things have gotten. Alternating between city streets, open wilderness, and other hallmarks of modern civilization such as hospitals and airports, this is a world that you know, albeit one scattered with the debris of previous carnage where civil services have broken down all but completely, and anyone still alive has boarded themselves up inside buildings and armed themselves to the teeth.

Zambies!

One of my favorite parts of Left 4 Dead is the safe rooms, where previous survivors have scrawled messages to loved ones, contradicting details about other safe locations, tallies of zombies killed, and darkly comic boastings like “no zombie is safe from Chicago Ted.” Even though you never see another non-zombie over the course of the game, the world seems familiar and lived-in. In a way, Left 4 Dead is a kindred spirit with Portal, another Valve-produced game that relies on inference and non-intrusive means to establish the bigger picture.

The campaign mode consists of four independent scenarios, the objectives for which are consistent throughout: survival. You'll start out stranded in one location, surrounded by the undead, and you'll fight from one safe house to the next, working your way towards a destination where you'll presumably find rescue. Between points A and B, you'll find yourself in a world undulating with mobs of shuffling, “common” zombies who, if left to their own devices, will usually just ignore you. If you shoot a zombie, or disturb them by operating machinery or accidentally set off a car alarm, they'll snap to attention and start sprinting towards you with the singular focus of tearing you to shreds. In small groups, these brown-label zombies don't pose much of a threat, though the game will regularly try to overwhelm you with hordes of them, which is a simply terrifying sight.

Of greater concern are the breeds of special zombies, who are tougher than the regular horde, and who come with some unique and deadly abilities. Boomers are corpulent, dyspeptic blobs who can hit survivors with a blast of vomit that both blinds them and causes them to attract a horde of zombies. The smoker tends to hang out further away from the main path, using its long tongue to drag survivors towards it. The hunter is a quick and nimble zombie who, when close enough, will pounce on a survivor and maul them. The tank is a hulking, thick-skinned beast that will tear up hunks of concrete and hurl them from afar, and it only takes one or two punches from one of these to incapacitate a survivor. Each of these special zombies require the use of specific tactics, though none are as dangerous or unique as the witch, who appears to be a thin wisp of a girl who, if left undisturbed, will simply sit on the ground and whimper plaintively. But if you get too close, shine your flashlight on her, or, God forbid, shoot her, she turns into a screaming whirlwind of deadly claws that can be quite difficult to put down. The game constantly encourages you to avoid the witch at all costs, and with good reason.

Just another day in the zombie apocalypse.

Forward momentum is critical to survival, though there are several points in each scenario where you'll find yourself trapped, with no recourse but to try and outlast the swarms of the undead before you can progress. Similarly, the scenarios culminate in a dramatic last stand, where you're forced to fend off wave after wave of zombies from a specific location as you await the arrival of your rescuers. Regardless of where you are, survivors need to stick together. A straggler makes a fine target for a hunter or a smoker, and once they've snared you, the only way you're getting out is with the help of another survivor. Other survivors can also heal you with their own first-aid kits, give you pain pills, and lift you up off the ground when you're incapacitated. The co-op nature of Left 4 Dead is a blade that cuts both ways, in that your explicit reliance on other players can make the experience both more satisfying and frustrating. The alternative is to play with some surprisingly competent computer controlled survivors. While the AI features a few quirks, such as their tendency to not pick up pipe bombs and molotovs, as well as the occasional problem negotiating doorways, they're not nearly as prone to accidentally shoot their teammates, and they're extremely attentive when you get pinned down or incapacitated. The lack of flesh-and-blood teammates evens out the experience, tamping down both the highs and the lows.

There's also a versus mode which pits two teams of four against each other--one as the survivors, and one as the zombies--with the roles alternating between rounds. Save for the increased difficulty of playing against live opponents, playing as the survivors isn't much different from the campaign mode, though playing as the zombies is an entirely different experience. Zombies aren't anywhere near as resilient as the survivors, but while the survivors have only one life per round, zombies can spawn repeatedly. With each life, you're randomly assigned to a different type of special zombie--either boomer, smoker, hunter, or tank--before you're allowed to choose your spawn point, preferably near the survivors, though the game puts a limit on how close you can spawn. Stalking your prey and coordinating with your zombie teammates makes this the antithesis of the survivor experience, and the presence of plenty of common zombies keeps the versus mode feeling true to the campaign. It's a shame that, for some inexplicable reason, only two of the four maps that Left 4 Dead ships with can be played in the versus mode, simply because it's so much fun.

A well-placed molotov is a good way to deal with the teeming undead masses.

The basic movement speed in Left 4 Dead is pretty fast, and while this isn't a game that demands pinpoint accuracy with your weapons, you never feel like the game is taking it easy on you. A big part of this is thanks to the game's AI director. Depending on both the set difficulty level and how well you've been playing the game so far, it will change up when, where, and how many zombies get spawned, as well as the placement of random items like first-aid kits, pain pills, molotov cocktails, and pipe bombs. Prior to the game's release, Valve has put a lot of focus on how radically the AI director can affect the play experience from one session to the next, and while each scenario features a few alternate paths, the consistency of your objectives restrain its influence to specific beats rather than the overall rhythm. This would be a complete non-issue, except that with just four scenarios, each taking roughly an hour to complete, it doesn't take long to see everything Left 4 Dead has to offer. The reactive nature of the AI director and the variables inherent to the game's multiplayer focus give these scenarios longer legs than they might have otherwise, but you'll still wish there was more to it. In a way, it's a credit to how well-crafted the scenarios are that you come away hungry for more.

As with The Orange Box, Left 4 Dead features a developer commentary mode which places brief bits of audio commentary throughout the game. The delivery can be a little dry at times, and it might be a little too nuts-and-bolts for some, though the insight provided into the process behind the game, as well as how the choices made have an impact on the final product, are consistently fascinating.

Left 4 Dead runs on the Source engine, the same engine that powered Half-Life 2 some four years ago. It's definitely getting a little long in the tooth, but it still puts on a pretty good show here. The game's smart use of lighting, film-grain effects, and various, subtle contrast and color effects give much of the world a desolate, washed-out feeling. The character models feature some of the most realistic, emotive faces I've seen in a game, and the stride of their animations will change depending on their current condition, to the point that you don't even have to look a a survivor's health bar to know how they're doing. There are some quirks, with interactions between characters being pretty consistently awkward, but the game's art direction is so thoroughly engrossing that the problems are easy to ignore.

Come give your Aunt Clara a kiss!

The sound in Left 4 Dead plays a deceptively subtle role in both the mood and the gameplay. The feral screeches of the zombies are unsettlingly animalistic, and the ways in which the survivors will shout out to each other conveys their varying levels of desperation. The music is also damned effective, employing eerie synthesized tones straight out of a John Carpenter movie to create a dangerous level of tension, and building up to some ominous horns whenever the action is about to get serious. It's not all window-dressing, though, and with a keen ear you'll be able to identify the presence of a special zombie before you'll actually see them. This is of particular importance when dealing with the witch.

The PC and Xbox 360 versions are pretty comparable across the board, though there are a few predictable deviations, such as the higher resolutions afforded by the PC hardware and the sharper controls of a mouse and keyboard. Communication with your team is key in Left 4 Dead, and while the PC version supports voice chat, it's not as standardized as it is on the 360, and you can't expect every player to have a headset. While the PC version features a quick dialogue tree that lets you call out a few specific phrases, it's no substitute for direct communication.

Due to the mere four scenarios included in Left 4 Dead, the biggest factor in deciding between the two versions will be post-release support. The standalone nature of the scenarios would make it easy for Valve and/or the community to cook up some new and exciting levels, which could extend the life of the game considerably. The Xbox 360 version is still terrific fun, though the limited post-release support that Valve has provided for the contents of The Orange Box on the 360, compounded by the inability of players to distribute their own custom maps, potentially gives the PC version a distinct advantage.

Beyond its categorical success in establishing a vivid picture of the zombie apocalypse, Left 4 Dead's biggest breakthrough is the way it blurs the lines between the often compartmentalized pieces of a modern first-person shooter. It makes for a game that's unlike any other, and while the limited amount of content is admittedly unfortunate, that shouldn't keep you from experiencing this fast-paced, nerve-wracking game. Release Date:

Review of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe

Jeff — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:00:00 -0000

Platform: (PS3,X360)

5 out of 5

The game's story is all about throwing the different characters together in ways you wouldn't expect.

Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe sounded like a dicey proposition at best. With the crossover thing having been done by Capcom and Marvel before, it isn't exactly groundbreaking. Plus, the DC Universe license comes along with the baggage of making the game a bit friendly to a younger audience, forcing the series' gruesome finishing moves to be toned down to a more-acceptable level of violence. On top of all that, it's the first time the MK series has come to the current generation of consoles, and with it comes a completely rebuilt fighting system. To say that the deck was stacked against MKvDC is something of an understatement. But all those potential pitfalls make the success of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe that much sweeter. The characters fit together better than expected. The new fighting system is a terrific mix of old and new that makes this the best Mortal Kombat game since the series went 3D. And the finishing moves... well, they're toned down, but even they still manage to put a good exclamation point on a hard-fought victory.

For the second time in series history, the fighting in Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe has been completely revamped. Most of the features and fighting from the previous three console games has been thrown out. Apart from a pair of characters who are armed with blades, there aren't any weapon stances or style changes to worry about. And the combo system ditches ground-based, memorization-heavy combos in favor of timing-focused juggles, which effectively makes it more like the previous 2D games in the series. While you can still sidestep to avoid projectiles at range, the game has a snappy, classic feel to it without feeling like a throwback. One of the few things that carry over from the more-recent 3D entries in the series is the combo breaker, which will crack you out of a jam if you have enough juice in your super meter to use one. You can store up to two breakers if your meter is full. A full meter also lets you enact rage mode, which makes you attack through an opponent's block and not react when you get hit for a few seconds. It's a neat idea that can be effective when playing alone, but most human opponents seem to know to just get away when you pop into rage.

While the core concept of merging the two worlds together is kind of appealing on their own, it's really the gameplay in Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe that makes it stand out. There's a steep learning curve to contend with, and the game doesn't really provide many pointers about how to get better. But once you spend time with it and start to pick up on how it all works, it's fantastic. The fighting manages to feel unlike anything else on the market while still retaining enough Mortal Kombat style to make it appealing to players who are familiar with the series' arcade roots. It also seems to work on multiple levels, rewarding players who take the time to learn and master the more difficult combos while never feeling completely alien. Two players with a passing knowledge of fighting games could probably pick it up and have a decent time, but you get the impression that between the different juggles and things like "pro moves," which are enhanced or branched versions of your special moves that often require very precise timing, there's a lot of appropriately rewarding stuff to pick up as you improve. While it may play quite a bit differently than most of the other fighting games coming out today, it still revolves around the classic balance of knowing what moves are available to you while also deciding when to use specific attacks, or how to block incoming flurries from your opponent.

Green Lantern, seen here dropping the hammer on Liu Kang.

The roster in MKvDC is solid. The MK side is a classic collection of fighters that don't get any newer than Mortal Kombat II. The DC side mirrors the powers and concepts of the MK fighters a bit, but without feeling like MK moves were cheaply slapped onto the superheroes and villains. That said, Lex Luthor's power armor grants him a wrist flamethrower and missiles that come in both regular and homing varieties, making him a bit like Sektor. Captain Marvel has a Kung Lao-like teleport. The Flash has Kabal's spin dash. The Joker tosses bombs near and far like he was Cyrax. Superman has a Jax-like ground pound, a Nightwolf shoulder charge, and his heat vision matches Kano's eye laser. Batman has a Sheeva-like teleport stomp. Green Lantern uses his ring for a telekinetic lift-and-drop move that comes right out of Ermac's repertoire. Actually, while we're on the subject, it's almost weird that Superman doesn't have Raiden's torpedo move. But if it's any consolation, that move can now be officially referred to as "The Superman" in Raiden's move list. While there are plenty of special moves on the DC fighters that map back to previous MK fighters, they fit the characters that have them really well, so you don't feel like you're just playing MK characters with a DC skin. It all feels pretty legit.

The game has a more elaborate story mode than you'd expect out of a fighting game, and it's largely in place to give you a good reason why the fighters of Mortal Kombat and the tights-wearing set from DC are getting together for a fight. Much like how the Mortal Kombat series is all about the bad guys trying to merge their horrific realm with Earth, a series of events causes Mortal Kombat's Earthrealm to begin merging with DC's universe. This sets everything in both locations topsy-turvy, as everyone's powers fluctuate and characters begin fighting due to an infection known as "kombat rage." Really, this all seems like it's in place to tell you why a ninja like Sub-Zero could harm Superman with his fists, or why Batman and Wonder Woman would face off.

The story is split in half, and you choose if you want the MK side or the DC side at the onset. The two stories run concurrently, so you'll see things referenced in one that take place in the other, and so on. They both culminate in a battle against the creepy merged creature that's causing all of this strife in the first place. Interestingly, you don't choose a character in story mode. Instead, it jumps around, devoting each chapter to a different fighter. This serves the alternate purpose of getting you up to speed on how most of the fighters operate. The story sequences themselves have a laugh here and there, but they're also a little hokey in spots. Then again, I tend to find most superhero stuff a bit hokey, anyway. Of course, there's probably something sort of hokey about a martial arts tournament that determines the fate of the world that is fought by movie stars, demons, ice ninjas, and thundergods, so maybe it all balances out. Either way, it works and the tone of it is just fine.

The game also has a single-player arcade mode, which provides you with the standard MK ladder, culminating in a boss fight and an ending. The endings are in the classic MK style, giving you a couple of static pieces of artwork with some dialogue about what your chosen fighter did after beating the crap out of everyone else. On the practice side of things you can find a standard practice mode and the kombo challenge. This mode gives you ten combos for each fighter that you must complete to succeed. The combos are surprisingly difficult and showcase the tight timing that many of the moves and juggles have. The game doesn't hold your hand at all, which is a bit harsh, especially when you consider that DC fans who don't play many fighters might be coming in only to discover a series of button presses that make absolutely no sense. A proper tutorial and a "show me what this combo you're asking me to do is supposed to look like" button--like the Tekken series has--would have been a good addition.

Between ice breath, heat vision, and extreme strength, Superman can do a little bit of everything.

It's also worth noting that the notorious Xbox 360 directional pad doesn't do the game any favors, especially when it comes to the kombo challenge mode. If you own an arcade stick or some other controller solution, you'll be happy to know that the game lets you freely remap the buttons. You can duplicate all of the game's functionality on six buttons, though the standard three-by-three setup doesn't feel quite right.

All of these single-player modes are made better by the game's AI. Unlike most MK games, which had bad pattern-based AI that refused to be thrown or only became susceptible to certain attack patterns, the opponents in MKvDC seem to fight fair and use a variety of tactics. It's a great improvement over most of the previous games to bear the Mortal Kombat name. That said, there's no substitute for human opposition.

You can, of course, play against another person locally. But the game also has online support on both platforms. The player matching is a bit different between the two versions, though. On the 360, you get ranked game and player match options, and unlike most Xbox Live games, there's no "host game" or "join game" options. You just push the "ranked game" button and it finds you someone to play with. Player match works the same way, but you can also just invite friends to join you in these unranked battles. There are also chat rooms that you can join (at least there are in theory--as of this writing, the 360's chat servers are offline). These chat rooms are the only available matching option on the PlayStation 3. You get a list of rooms that seem to each hold up to 100 people. Once in a room, you see a list of players, a window for text chat, and notices whenever a fight ends. You can select another player's name from the room list to issue a challenge, or wait for an incoming challenge, which pops up and lets you accept, decline, or ignore. If you want to find friends, you'll need to agree on which room you want to be in (or create) before you can fight. It's functional, but feels like it fell out of a PlayStation 2 game or something. Some honest-to-goodness automated player matching would have been nice on the PS3 side.

If you've been playing fighting games online for any length of time, you know how this next part goes. When you have a good connection to the other player, everything works great, and it's not much different from having a player sitting right next to you. But once the latency starts to rise, the game gets pretty glitchy. You trade hits and knock opposing players out of moves more frequently in laggy matches, as the game is trying to figure out who hit whom without causing the action to slow down. Considering the number of disorienting, direction-changing moves that are in the game, as well as the razor-sharp timing required for some of the combos, it becomes a very different game when your connection isn't prime.

At the end of a fight, the game still shouts "finish him!" Well, if you're fighting Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Sonya, or Kitana, I guess it actually shouts "finish her!" But you get the point. The game has finishing moves in it. With its T-for-Teen rating, though, you won't see Jax crushing skulls with his arms. Instead, he just claps his hands on either side of a victim's head, and they go down, head intact. The DC heroes that wouldn't normally kill their enemies instead perform "heroic brutalities." This is really just a matter of semantics, though. It really just means that after doing something horrible to the other fighter, that fighter wriggles around a little bit as if to say "see? No one died here today!" The finishers do still serve their purpose, though, and that's to put something extra on the end of a fight to make a loss a bit more humiliating. It's funny, the actual moves and animations of the finishers aren't that different--it's just that no one explodes into a cloud of blood or a mountain of rib cages at the end.

I'd rather have two combo breakers than rage, but hey, to each his own.

Personally, I didn't find the lack of M-rated violence to be that big of a deal. Even when fatalities are present, they're only really meaningful for the first month or so, when they're fresh and new. After that, everyone's seen them all, and they only serve to make the downtime between fights longer. But it all comes back to why you're personally interested in Mortal Kombat. For some people, the action is the juice. For others, it's all about the gory displays at the end of the fight. For what it's worth, the game does have blood during fights, so hits to the face will result in a bit of splatter. Also, clothing gets ripped up as you get beaten, resulting in some great-looking scuffs and scrapes at the end of the fight.

The game has a good number of backgrounds that reflect the game's storyline nicely. Some of them have a huge beam of energy down the middle that reflects the merging worlds, so one side of the line is a Mortal Kombat location and the other is a DC location, like Shang Tsung's island and Wonder Woman's home, Themyscira. You'll also see the Batcave, Superman's Fortress of Solitude, the torn-up streets of Metropolis, and so on.

The audio holds up its end of the bargain with appropriately intense music and the loud thumps and cracks of hand-to-hand combat. Moves like uppercuts and ground slams are accompanied by some great, deep bass that will shake your surroundings if you're appropriately equipped. While there's plenty of great new sound, there's also some old stuff. Raiden's superman move features the same, classic, unintelligible speech that it always has. Scorpion's "get over here" and "come here" also sound like they could have come from previous games. The announcer is also the same voice you've heard in the past several games. I could have gone for a new announcer this time around, but everything else seems just fine. There's also a lot more speech in the game to accompany the story's cutscenes. The character voices don't always perfectly match the look of the characters, but they're right on more often than not.

Given the way the last few MK games have gone in terms of redesigning the core concepts of the fighting and presenting a cast of characters that weren't as memorable as the ones that debuted back in the 2D days, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe feels like the refreshing start of a new era for Midway's fighting series. It probably won't change your mind if you're not into the genre, or even if you're into the genre but have already made up your mind about the MK series. But if you're open to the idea of more Mortal Kombat, you'll find a terrific game here.

Release Date:

Review of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3

Jeff — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:00:00 -0000

Platform: (X360,PC)

4 out of 5

You'll do a lot of your fighting on the water.

While the original Command & Conquer line certainly has its share of great, dynamic characters, it's the side story, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, that goes the extra mile. With its alternate-history plot line creating a collection of campy concepts like armored attack bears, hovering battle zeppelins, and Tesla-powered weaponry, it manages to give you just enough knowing winks that let you know they're in on the joke without hitting you over the head and essentially saying "hey, look at how funny and clever we are!" Oh, and it's a solid real-time strategy game, too. That's... probably pretty important.

The story in Red Alert gets a big reset in the form of some time machine chicanery. The opening shows you the Soviet leaders, on the verge of defeat as the Allies roll onto Russian soil. Thinking fast, the Russians employ the use of an experimental time machine, go back into time before all of the events of the Red Alert series (which, if you remember, were also caused by a time machine), and eliminate Albert Einstein. With no Einstein, there's no nuclear weaponry, and when the Russians go back to the future, they find that the Soviet forces are no longer on the verge of crumbling. Instead, the Allied forces are down and out. But the feeling of victory doesn't last long, as a new threat emerges as a direct result of the timeline-tampering and the Japanese forces rumble onto the scene to create a three-way conflict.

Three factions and a big-time focus on naval combat are the cornerstones of Red Alert 3. The faction differences are meaningful enough to require you to employ different strategies, but similar enough to where you don't immediately feel like one side has an edge. Each faction builds differently, with the Allies retaining the most C&C-like build system of placing completed structures on the battlefield. The Soviets build structures on the map as soon as they start construction, leaving their structures open to attack while being built. Meanwhile, the Empire of the Rising Sun's technologically advanced forces spit out small core vehicles from their construction yard, which then must be driven to a location and unfurled. There are also differences in how base expansion works, as well as the way the tech trees work and how they distribute to different parts of your base.

The campaign mode takes you through all three factions. Though you can take them on in any order, the game most-logically progresses from the Soviets, then the Allies, and wrapping up with the Empire. Like previous C&C games, you'll find bonus objectives to complete, and the story is told via full-motion video sequences that set up each mission. You'll also get a lot of video during the missions in a window that doesn't block your view of the action. This gives the missions a lot of personality and keeps you engaged in the Red Alert world at all times. All of the FMV and interaction between characters really makes the campaign a treat to see, as you'll encounter a lot of great moments on all sides.

You'll see a lot of great explosions and other effects as you play.

Part of the reason why you'll constantly hear a lot of chatter is that the campaign is built to be played cooperatively. That means that you'll always have a co-commander by your side, be it a human player or an AI-based partner that you can give limited commands to. The AI player seems to hold up its end of the bargain pretty well, too. This is probably the largest gameplay change that Red Alert 3 has, and it's a good one that combines the fun of working together with another player with the more-meaningful missions of the campaign, rather than forcing players who want to cooperate to set up skirmish matches against the AI. The cooperation is also done meaningfully--in some cases your partner will have a base in a different part of the map, making him or her better suited to handle local threats, or letting you coordinate for a multi-pronged offensive.

The large naval component to Red Alert 3 means that you'll see a lot of water-filled levels. Also, every one of the game's multiplayer maps has some sort of water on it. The levels with more water mean you'll have to figure out ways to expand your base onto different islands or use troop transports to ferry around your non-amphibious units. You can also build most of your base at sea, with only the structures devoted to deploying ground units locked to land. This changes a lot of the strategy commonly found in real-time strategy games and really forces you to rethink the best ways to attack. While Red Alert 3 certainly isn't the first RTS to fight at sea, it certainly takes the role of sea combat further than most.

While there's a lot of differences around the edges of Red Alert 3's campaign and unit design, at its core, this is still based on the classic C&C blueprints. You'll build bases, then build barracks and armor. You'll build commando units and sneak them in to destroy bases. You'll build engineers to capture enemy structures. But you probably won't build gigantic forces and slowly build your base to completion before you even think about attacking. It's a fast-moving game, and pumping out small forces of multifunctional units and sending them off to fight seems to be key here, rather than simply entrenching and building up enough units to stomp around the map. As such, expect to see enemies heading your way pretty frequently, too.

Another thing you'll have to constantly consider as you play RA3 is the special abilities of your units. While each one has its core strengths (which are helpfully identified by a series of tooltips you can get by hovering over the build menus), some of them can convert to perform different tasks. Units like the Empire's Mecha Tengu quite literally transform from a two-legged mech that can handle itself against ground-based units to a jet that can take on any airborne invaders. Or there's the Soviets' Apocalypse Tank, which has a secondary mode that fires magnetic harpoons that drag enemy units closer, where they'll be torn up by the tank's grinders. This gives you a lot to think about and manage if you want to be as effective as possible with your units. At times, all that management gets to be a bit much. I found myself getting a little overwhelmed when battles got hectic. But as you play more and more, you'll learn when to employ each strategy in a more calm and collected fashion.

There are a lot of great characters throughout the campaign.

So the gameplay is certainly good enough to bear the Red Alert name. But there's also the personality side of things. The FMV sequences get some real star power this time around with the likes of Tim Curry, George Takei, J.K. Simmons, and Peter Stormare all playing key roles. Plenty of other characters, from Jenny McCarthy's Tanya to co-commanders like Oleg, Zhana, Shinzo, or Lissette, also stand out as memorable components to the Red Alert 3 experience.

It helps that the dialogue is well-written and humorous without going too far. The self-serious tone to everything is absolutely key. There's also a lot of unit dialogue, too. While I'm not going to break down a list of everything you'll hear as you play, I will say that there are plenty of little references spread throughout the game, and hearing an Apocalypse Tank reference Scorpion from Mortal Kombat as it drags a unit in for the kill with its magnetic harpoon is always great for a chuckle. The music is also a great component to the audio, from the driving theme of the main menu to the interactive in-mission music that picks up whenever battles commence.

In addition to cooperative play, you can also set up multiplayer matches both online against humans or offline against the AI. Up to six players can compete on the PC, while the Xbox 360 version can handle four. I had a fine time playing skirmish matches against the AI, but as soon as I got online on the PC version, I felt like I truly knew nothing at all about how to play the game and got absolutely stomped by superior players every single time.

The other big story about the Xbox 360 version is that it's essentially the same experience. The game looks very nice when you blow it up on a big screen TV, and the gamepad controls are surprisingly manageable, though there's quite a learning curve if you want to get good at every little nuance and option. The control isn't that different than the 360 version of Kane's Wrath, but there's another layer of refinement here that makes selecting units, deselecting units, and dealing with all of the special unit abilities and top-secret protocol attacks pretty easy to wrap your head around. I suspect that players who don't already have the mouse-and-keyboard controls memorized will have an easier time getting up to speed on the 360. Most of my time was spent retraining myself on how to accomplish common tasks.

While we're talking about the console version, the Xbox 360 doesn't have any matchmaking for co-op games. You'll have to invite someone manually. While it makes sense, since you'd probably only want to play co-op with someone you trust, it also means you'll need to have a friend get a copy of the game and join you. Perhaps you could attempt to make some co-op friends while playing competitive matches.

Red Alert 3 makes compelling changes to the C&C brand of real-time strategy without abandoning the core of what makes these games tick. If you're a longtime fan, that's great news, though if you don't typically go for strategy games, but are still feeling the attraction of the game's stellar cast and full-motion video, you may find that the thrill of the cutscenes isn't quite enough to keep you moving through the missions.

Release Date:

Review of Mirror's Edge

Ryan — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:00:00 -0000

Platform: (X360)

3 out of 5

It's not all rooftops, though there are still plenty of those.

Digital Illusions, the developer behind the Battlefield series, is going way, way outside its comfort zone with Mirror's Edge. While it shares a familiar first-person perspective, the focus in Mirror's Edge is less on gunplay, or really, combat of any kind, and more on navigating your environment using acrobatics, free running, parkour, whatever you want to call it. Even if, on a fundamental level, Mirror's Edge isn't that different from a nimble third-person action game like Prince of Persia, the game's sleek, over-saturated visual style is incredibly striking, and its first-person perspective can prove quite immersive. But the game loses its momentum when it all but forces you into combat situations and when it pits you against precarious jumping puzzles, two common occurrences that turn a viscerally kinetic experience into a tedious pattern of trial and error.

Mirror's Edge takes place in the near-future metropolis of Daily City, a glimmering glass-and-steel corporate dystopia where information control has become so acute that political dissidents use special couriers called runners to relay information. You play as a runner named Faith, and the story revolves around a political assassination that's been pinned on Faith's sister Kate. From there, the game plays out like an aerobic murder mystery, though instead of fingerprints and deerstalker caps, it's lots of rooftop-running and encounters with well-armed private security. There are hints of a greater conspiracy and the high-level corruption that courses through the city, but there's a distinct disconnect between the story and the action, a fault that's exacerbated by the game's awkwardly stylized animated cutscenes. Beyond the facile “I'm just trying to skate here” antiestablishment sentiments and the whistle-clean, hyperrealistic look that comes part-and-parcel with the setting, you don't get a very deep sense for the world of Mirror's Edge.

Mirror's Edge will kick your fear of heights into overdrive.

Still, the setup is enough to justify the game's preference of flight over fight, and as a runner, Faith's mobility is her greatest asset. Basic movement works the way you'd expect from a traditional FPS, though all of her jumping and climbing abilities are streamlined into two context-sensitive buttons--one for moving up, one for moving down. The game gets a lot of mileage out of these two buttons which, in the right circumstances, can allow Faith to scramble up walls, quickly leap over short obstacles, slide down ramps and under barriers, run along walls to cross short gaps, slide down zip lines, swing across horizontal bars, shimmy up vertical pipes, and more. You can also combine some of these abilities to perform more advanced moves like the l-jump, which has you running up a wall, quickly spinning around and kicking off, hopefully landing yourself on a higher surface. It's nothing you haven't seen in a third-person action game, but the first-person perspective can make it feel incredibly exotic.

It's not all leapin' ladies, though, as Faith is regularly met by small groups of highly antagonistic guards. She can perform a few different hand-to-hand combat maneuvers, and she can acquire guns by disarming or knocking out enemies, though once she's out of ammo, she'll discard her weapon. For all her agility, Faith is pretty fragile, and on the game's normal difficulty, it only takes a couple hits to put her down. The game encourages you to avoid conflict when possible, though it's not always practical. Mirror's Edge falters when you're forced to go toe-to-toe with your foes, who are consistently tougher and stronger than you. You don't stand a chance if faced with more than one enemy at a time, and even one-on-one your chances aren't great. Disarming an enemy requires just a single button press, and while the ability to slow down time for short bursts can be helpful, it still demands such particular timing, that if you botch it on your first try, chances are you won't live long enough for a second. The game is effective at making guns seem like a crude solution to your problems--partially because they're just not fun to shoot--though there are situations where they're simply the most pragmatic.

You'd better run.

Few first-person games have made full-body dexterity so paramount to the experience as Mirror's Edge, largely because trying to execute precise movement when you can't see your character's body is exceptionally difficult. It's a problem Mirror's Edge isn't immune to, though it goes to some lengths to put as much of Faith on screen as possible. You'll see little bits of Faith's hands pumping into your line of sight when you get a good sprint going, her legs kicking out during a jump and tucking forward during a slide. If you look straight down, you can see pretty much her whole body, making it easy to get right up on a ledge. The most helpful cue is Faith's runner vision, which highlights objects in the environment that are key to your progression in bright red. For the most part, the levels in Mirror's Edge are extremely narrow, usually offering a few minor shortcuts, though most of the time you can hold a button to snap the camera to your next objective when you get lost.

When everything is working right, Mirror's Edge is a sublimely fluid experience. All the little touches--the way the camera will rattle and Faith's breathing will intensify as she runs up to a sprint, the coolly urgent techno music that swells at the right moments--compliment the effortlessness with which Faith can move. As the game progresses, though, taking you from the rooftops of Daily City to its inner clockworks and then back again, the leaps become more death-defying and the jumping puzzles demand more precision. The margin for error shrinks, and the mechanics and perspective can't keep up. It's easy to get disoriented, particularly in tight quarters, and you simply don't have enough information to make your moves. It's frustrating when there's no discernible difference between a failed attempt and a successful one. A jump puzzle or a bunch of guards are taxing enough on their own, but it's not long before the game is throwing both at you at once, and it hardly seems like you have adequate time to figure out your next move. You end up having to throw yourself against the problem, hoping to either luck out or stumble upon the solution. These bouts of trial-and-error grind the game to a halt, though Mirror's Edge also interrupts its own flow with conspicuously long elevator rides, as well as the occasional in-level load.

Consisting of just nine chapters, most of them running well under an hour your first time through, Mirror's Edge is a fleeting experience, though you can play through time trials or speed runs separate from the story. The highs in Mirror's Edge are undeniable, and Digital Illusions deserves credit for some of the bold choices it makes here, but the first-person perspective that helps make it so singular is also its biggest liability. Momentum is the biggest strength of Mirror's Edge, and it's unfortunate that it trips over itself so often. Release Date:

Review of Call of Duty: World at War

Jeff — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:00:00 -0000

Platform: (PS3,X360)

4 out of 5

Never underestimate the power and beauty of fire.

After a wildly successful tour of duty in the modern era, Activision's Call of Duty series heads back to the 1940s with World at War, a WWII-focused shooter that attempts to do many of the same things that the previous game did, but in a different time period. It's interesting to watch those different facets of a modern game as they're molded to fit into an earlier conflict, and it works better than you'd probably think. At times, though, it still feels like a knockoff of a better game.

The game's campaign splits time between two different fronts. For half the game, you'll play as an American Marine taking on Japanese forces as you push from their forward island bases all the way back to Okinawa. The other half puts you in Russian boots as you strike back against the Germans, pushing them out of the motherland and sieging Berlin. You know, just like the real thing! Like the previous game, the campaign jumps back and forth between the two perspectives. So you'll play a level or two as one guy, swap to the other for a bit, then swap back. This keeps up over the course of the game's 13 missions.

The campaign provides a good amount of first-person shooter variety, but it excels when the levels are wide open and all hell is breaking loose around you. There are more than a few moments where you're charging against an entrenched enemy, and the game does a good job of making these moments feel appropriately chaotic. You'll also see the requisite vehicle sequence and some up-close indoor battles. Overall, there really aren't any surprises coming out of the single-player--it's a quality single-player campaign from beginning to end.

You can also play the campaign mode cooperatively with up to three other players joining you via system link or over the Internet. Most of the cues for this aspect of World at War seem to come from Halo 3's co-op. You can enable competitive scoring, which makes you want to kill everyone before your partners can. You can also find and unlock "death cards" in each level. Each one you collect lets you enable a little modification in future co-op matches. These are, essentially, the skulls from Halo 3. Some of these cards let you fire explosive pistol rounds while you're downed, or make it so your enemies only die when you shoot them in the head. This gives the co-op some pretty decent options. Still, it's a little jarring that the game dumps you back to the lobby after every mission, instead of letting you just keep on playing with no breaks.

Black-and-white footage abounds!

The competitive multiplayer probably has the best chance of roping you in for hours and hours. This portion of the game feels like a really well-made mod for Call of Duty 4 that replaces all of the modern stuff with World War II stuff. Most of the things from COD4 are represented in some way. Instead of calling in radar when you get a three-kill streak, you can call in a recon plane... which has the exact same effect of showing dots on your map that represent enemy locations. Since helicopters and World War II don't mix, they've been replaced by dogs. Calling in the dogs on your foes is pretty funny and useful in multiple ways. While wily players can stick the dogs with a knife or gun them down before getting ripped apart, you can still follow your dogs to find the enemy. It's a clever addition.

The game has the same sort of player customization and experience point system as last year's release. So as you play, you'll gain levels, which in turn unlocks additional items and configuration options. You'll be able to set perks on your player--these are special skills and enhancements like the ability to reload faster, or a gas mask perk that makes your soldier able to withstand the effects of gas grenades more easily. There's also a new vehicle perk that lets you give your soldier enhancements like faster turret turning speeds.

Some of the multiplayer maps contain tanks, which let one player drive and another work a machine gun turret atop the tank. The tanks are probably going to be a dividing inclusion. While I like rolling around and gunning down enemy soldiers from the relative safety of a tank, I really don't like that the vehicle levels have to be open enough to accommodate the tanks. While only four of the game's 13 multiplayer maps contain vehicles, these maps seem like they come up in the rotation a bit more often than the others. If you're setting up private matches, that probably won't matter to you at all. They just feel too large, like you're having to hunt around for the action.

Fire seems to be a big visual theme in Call of Duty: World at War. Large portions of the campaign are devoted to running around with a flamethrower and burning as many Japanese soldiers as possible. You'll run through burning buildings. And if you play long enough, you'll be able to unlock that flamethrower for use in multiplayer. The fire effects, thankfully, are good enough to warrant their featured position. The flamethrower snakes around as you wave it and burns up most nearby grass and trees as you go. Creeping through dark, but still-burning buildings shows off the game's terrific lighting, as the soft glow of the flames reflects and flickers onto the nearby walls. All of the lighting, really, is well done. The game has a really dingy, dark look to it that helps make everything you're doing feel at least a little dreadful.

You'll get a bit of Hollywood-style voice acting via Keifer Sutherland and Gary Oldman. Both play characters that guide you through most of the campaign mode, making sure you're pointed in the right direction and giving the general sort of wartime orders you'd expect to hear out of your sergeant. They also serve as announcers in the multiplayer mode. The multiplayer mode feels a lot more chatty this time around, as most of the soldiers will curse and/or shout about something whenever they get a kill.

The larger levels are cool in single-player, not-so-cool in multiplayer.

The rest of the game's audio is fine, too. The weapons sound period-accurate and the battlefields always sound pretty intense. There's a lot of modern-sounding guitar rock on the soundtrack, which kind of makes the whole game feel like some kind of poorly-edited YouTube video. It's like what I imagine would happen if you asked a 15-year-old to make World War II footage interesting or something. It serves its purpose by picking up alongside the action and fading down for the quiet, creeping times. But it still feels out of place. The developers changed the clinky, weird noise that grenades make when they land. While this might sound more realistic, it also has the maddening effect of forcing me to retrain myself to hear the new grenade noise after killing someone online. So the martyrdom perk, which has soldiers drop a live grenade every time they die, is, at least until I can get used to the new sound, way more effective. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, mind you. In fact, that chintzy grenade effect from the previous game always seemed a little out of place.

Of course, these are all pretty minor points in the grand scheme of things. Call of Duty: World at War is a perfectly competent game with exciting multiplayer options and a campaign that's worth playing. But in most of the ways that actually count, last year's game was better.

Release Date:

Review of MotorStorm: Pacific Rift

Ryan — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:00:00 -0000

Platform: (PS3)

4 out of 5

Trucks!

While the original MotorStorm was most certainly a victim of heightened expectations, its distinct lack of visual variety and an underwhelming single-player structure were still very real problems. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift makes amends for these shortcomings, and it's successful in some significant ways, making for a much more thrilling experience.

Maintaining the same Burning Man/Mad Max/Burning Max posture as its predecessor, Pacific Rift moves the action out of the desert and onto a fictional uninhabited island in the Pacific, which serves as a microcosm for a number of different, lushly detailed natural environments. You'll rip through the underbrush in dense jungles, splash across white-sand beaches, skitter around lava floes, navigate the rusted-over remains of an abandoned WWII military base, and more. One of Pacific Rift's biggest strengths is how wide-open and organic the tracks feel. Rather than feeling like you're going through race tracks that have been skinned to look like rare exotic locales, you get the sense that some people showed up and decided that the shale-covered cliffs surrounding this active volcano would be a great place to stage a race.

This willful inconsistency does wonders for the game's authenticity, and lends the game a certain danger-of-the-unknown, but its real impact is on how Pacific Rift plays. Like the original MotorStorm, races more often than not feature a number of different classes of vehicles competing at once. Ranging from motorcycles to big rigs, there's a good variety to how the different classes handle, though they all have a certain slippery quality to them. The tracks themselves play off this diversity with constantly diverging paths that are better suited for one class or another. You'll find narrow clearings that only a motorcycle could get through, deep waters that would sink anything other than a mudplugger, or rocky terrain that require the large, soft tires of a monster truck to traverse.

Cars!

Regardless of what you're driving, or where, engine temperature can be a concern, and riding on the turbo boost for too long will cause your vehicle to explode. You can lower your engine temperature more rapidly by strategically plowing through shallow pools or waterfalls, though close proximity to lava will cause it to rise. It's a pretty minor aspect of the action, but it's something to consider. The surfaces you'll encounter on the track include mud, sand, loose gravel, shallow pools, and volcanic rock, none of which provide particularly reliable traction, regardless of the class of vehicle you're driving. The inability to divert forward momentum into another direction with much precision can be a source of frustration at first, and it's a style of racing that can take some getting used to. It's also one of the defining characteristics of Pacific Rift, and it helps intensify the sense that you're constantly on the verge of flying wildly out of control.

Actually flying wildly out of control, though, isn't as satisfying as it ought be. Vehicles will bust up as you rub against other racers and bits of the environment, earning dents and shedding fenders and bumpers along the way, and your chassis will crunch up like an empty beer can when it slams into an inconveniently placed boulder, but something about it lacks weight. Part of the problem is an inconsistent sense of durability--you can take a jump that drops you a couple hundred feet and keep rolling, but slide into a corner just a little too aggressively and you'll be treated to a slo-mo shot of your vehicle turning into scrap.

Additionally, Pacific Rift doesn't make it explicitly clear which path you should take depending on your vehicle class, and there will be moments when you're on a new track and simply unsure which direction is forward. To its credit, the game takes its time ramping up the difficulty, giving you plenty of time to get accustomed to the flows of the different tracks. Though, with twice the number of tracks as the original MotorStorm had on the disc, each one jam-packed with alternate routes and shortcuts, you could spend a long, long time trying to master all of them.

Bikes!

The single-player progression in Pacific Rift divides the tracks into four elemental themes--earth, air, fire, and water--though every track features plenty of all four. You can hop between the four sections at will, though the number of races you'll be able to take on are limited to your rank, which is bolstered every time you place in the top three positions. You'll rotate between straight two-lap races, elimination races, and timed checkpoint races, and you'll often have limits put on which classes of vehicles you can choose from. It's not an overly ambitious structure, but it remains lively throughout, and really, the racing speaks for itself.

The online multiplayer gives you a choice between ranked and “casual” races, with ranked races earning you bonuses like new driver skins as you progress. You can choose your track, the number of laps, the time of day, and which vehicle classes you'll allow when you create your own online race, but that's about the extent of the online features. That said, I found the online in Pacific Rift hugely satisfying, largely because of how smooth it runs. Even when racing with the full 12 players, all of them flying around at incredible speeds and barreling into each other, the only thing that made it apparent that I was playing online was the relative aggressiveness of the drivers.

It still doesn't live up to the unreasonable expectations set by those early Sony E3 trailers, but MotorStorm: Pacific Rift feels much, much closer to realizing that vision than its predecessor. As an off-road racing game, the format is simple, but the execution makes for a wild ride. Release Date:

Review of Resistance 2

Vinny — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:00:00 -0000

Platform: (PS3)

4 out of 5

Oh, Resistance 2! You are so confused about what you want out of me. Do you want me to play through your horrible single-player campaign, with its erratic and nonsensical storytelling? Would you rather I just concentrate on your deep and engaging multiplayer modes? How about if we just start from the top and answer these questions together?

Dude, don't look at me. I was following you!

The story in Resistance 2 picks up immediately after the events of its predecessor, Resistance: Fall of Man. You again jump into the shoes of American solider Nathan Hale. Nathan, and the rest of the world, are fighting against what appear to be alien invaders, dubbed the Chimera, though the aliens are actually humans who have been transformed through some kind of horrible infection. Nathan himself was infected in the original Resistance, but instead of going over to the dark side his condition gave him the edge to become the savior of the day. A hero's work is never done and Resistance 2 begins with Nathan being abducted by some special military organization. It turns out that this group is actually responsible for experimenting on humans with the alien virus in an effort to create super soldiers--but they're still the good guys...I think. En route to their special facility your helicopter crashes--the first of numerous fateful downings--and you'll fight a bit before quickly being introduced to some kind of Chimeran smart bug. Without so much as a sinister expository preamble, this malicious alien-man-thing dons his MacGuffin hat and escapes to wreak havoc on the world. You are then sedated and the prologue ends. Welcome to Resistance 2! Fast-forward two years later and you're now buddy-buddy with these special forces fellows. Oh, did I mention you've had some kind of experimental operation and your crazy underwater base is under attack? GO!

So that's the setup. You're still infected but now you need regular doses of antigen or things will apparently go very badly. Also, some of your comrades don't much appreciate the busy and heroic lifestyle that will inherently keep you away from said meds. That's about all you need to know about the story. You're obviously trying to save the world again, and this time around it's not the lonely, silent trek it was in the first installment. You'll be treated to a stable of recurring supporting characters, but they are never clearly defined and by the time the game hits its conclusion, you really won't care. Neither will Nathan apparently, as he seems totally indifferent to the fields of death being sowed around him. That's not to say these brave souls are worthless, as the game is actually at its best when it throws you into the midst of larger, epic battles with your allies. This also works to give you the impression that there is a lot more going on behind the scenes, but none of that information is ever presented to you in a reasonable or coherent manner.

While the game is supposed to be taking place in an alternate version of the '50s, you'll never really get that vibe aside from the old cars and some antique radios. The weapons you'll be using will mostly be alien, or at least modified beyond anything recognizable for the time period, and any allies you have with you will do little to keep you in the spirit of the era. The only thing that maintains some semblance of time and place is a distraught radio announcer that you'll occasionally be able to overhear as you checkpoint your way across America. The poor guy is actually one of the better story elements in the game, and it's probably worth your time to sit and listen to his morbid antics.

Well, this is happening now...

Those are my biggest gripes with the game, though there were a few more minor annoyances. I really enjoyed much of the actual combat and gameplay, aside from a few enemy behaviors with which I took issue. You'll trade fire with your standard Chimeran grunts, but you'll also encounter some special units, like the invisible Chameleons. Now, in addition to being able to cloak themselves, they'll also charge you, and they'll kill you in one hit. Apparently they make some noise when they are around, but as far as I could tell it all just sounded like pigeons cooing. To counter this, the game automatically saves checkpoints pretty frequently, so you'll never be too far away from your last sudden and surprising place of death. This leads to a lot of try-and-die gameplay, and you'll find things are not so tough when you have some fair warning. There are also some new zombie-like Chimera which will swarm at you as you try to mow them down. These are definitely of the “fast zombie” variety and I found myself backed into a corner more than once, screaming “Oh God, Oh God, Oh...I'm dead.” These baddies are hatched from cocoons and you'll mostly encounter them in the overrun towns you'll be traipsing through. While the “body snatchers” idea definitely adds to the creepier direction this game has adopted, it doesn't seem to make much sense as these young turks don't need the special cooling systems that the rest of the Chimera use to prevent them from overheating. The first game went so far as to have entire conversion centers for the processing of humans into Chimera. It's minor, but it bugged me.

You'll be treated to some new weapons but you'll also see some slightly modified versions from the original Resistance armament. The Auger, which originally only allowed you to blindly shoot through walls, now lets you keep track of your target as he hides behind cover, which is very, very handy. Each weapon, again, has two modes of fire and this time around I found myself using them often. The magnum, for example, not only packs quite a punch with its primary fire but, using the alternate fire, you can subsequently detonate any spent rounds. This is a quick way to improvise an explosive surprise for the oncoming hordes of Chimera. The only time I found myself getting frustrated with the weapons is when one of my less-than-effective teammates was wielding one of the rarer heavy weapons, with seemingly unlimited ammunition. In my hands that weapon could turn the entire tide of the war! Sadly, the opportunity to sacrifice that young man for the good of mankind never presented itself.

The locations have also been well expanded beyond the seemingly endless grey, industrial maps of the original. You'll be greeted by some really spectacular set pieces as you as span a good chunk of North America in your quest to do something...or other. Not all of the locales are great, but when they work, they work with flourish, and you won't be disappointed in the eye candy.

Once you've finished the campaign you can go back and select any level to replay. This is helpful if you want to collect any missing pieces of intel you may have missed your first time through. These sparse collectibles are really your only window into the overarching fiction. As someone who really appreciates some narrative context surrounding my mass murder, I found myself desperate to latch onto anything that might give me some more insight. While the intel you find won't do much to make the entire world make sense, it is a must for anyone hoping to extract even the slightest bit of coherence from the plot.

Fighting other humans is where this game shines.

Really, though, all this single-player nonsense is just an introduction and setup for the much more engaging multiplayer. It's in the cooperative and competitive multiplayer that Resistance 2 really begins to deliver on being one of the best shooters for the PlayStation 3. While the head scratching single-player campaign will take you all of 8-10 hours, the multiplayer modes are where players are going to sink the majority of their time. Both modes offer a leveling system that allows you to gain experience and unlock new items and abilities. It's easy to get engrossed in the constant need to reach the next level with any given class, and that's further aided by the ease with which you can actually get into games. Both modes include a button labeled “play” which instantly takes you into the action and on the road to gaining experience. While you still have the option to manually setup or pick a map, being able to get into a game in one button press really takes the anxiety out of having to find a group, especially for the co-op.

Calling the co-op a campaign is actually a bit of a misnomer. It really has nothing to do with the single-player campaign, other than taking place in the same universe and making liberal use of that special forces team you just met. Upon starting a map, you, and up to seven other players, will pick a class from three different archetypes: soldier, special ops, and medic. The most outstanding element is how much all these classes need to rely on each other, probably more than in any other class-based shooter I've played before. The medic will obviously heal your team while the special ops member is your only source of ammunition. The soldier class gets the heavy weapon and he'll be at the vanguard of your attacks. Luckily, the secondary fire on his weapon will throw up a shield and protect him from incoming fire, but it's still in everyone's best interest to constantly feed him health and ammunition. It demands a balanced and diverse team, and grouping with a party that understands these particular roles is a rewarding and unique experience.

Speaking of experience, you'll be racking it up almost constantly while you blast your way through each map. New levels will unlock new weapons and abilities, making you all the more eager to hit that play button again and again. Your team will also have the opportunity unlock a certain amount of something called “grey tech” per map, depending on how far you can make it without everyone dying. This grey tech can then be spent on even more upgrades for each class, and unlike earned experience, the amount of grey tech you have acquired isn't locked to the particular class with which you may have earned it.

These are some really nice places for killing.

On the competitive side of the multiplayer you'll find Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Core Control (essentially capture the flag) and Skirmish. Skirmish is probably the most exceptional, and for my money, the most entertaining of the bunch. This mode allows a total of 60 players--yeah, 60--to compete in a variety of objectives. The players are broken up into two teams, each of which is further broken up into smaller squads and then assigned their own unique objectives. It's a really fun mode, which will have your squad racing around the map to different flash points as new objectives appear. It's also a mode which makes good use of the extremely high player counts, whereas some of the others felt a little too chaotic for my aging reflexes. Luckily, when I got bored or embarrassed in the competitive arenas I would drag my sorry ass back to the excellent eight player co-op, which is where I spent the majority of my time.

So there you have it. Resistance 2 has a rubbish single-player campaign, which left me angry and confused. The lack of coherent storytelling is my biggest issue, but there's really nothing wrong with the overall gameplay. I am still of the opinion that the rest of the package makes it one of the best multiplayer shooters currently out for the PlayStation 3. Though my experience with the co-op definitely varied depending on the group I was with, it never ceased being entertaining. On top of that, the leveling seems to come slowly, but just quickly enough to keep you coming back for more. This game does not stand out for its single-player content, but those interested in sinking hours and hours into a unique and rewarding multiplayer shooter experience will find Resistance 2 well worth their money. Release Date:

Review of Quantum of Solace

Jeff — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:00:00 -0000

Platform: (X360)

3 out of 5

Hey everyone, please stop shooting me while I slowly hit this guy in the face. Cool?

Activision's first James Bond game, Quantum of Solace, is almost as deceptive as the spy who stars in it. While it might be named after the current Bond film, the majority of the game's levels are one big flashback to Casino Royale, the previous one. While the plots of the two films will be connected, this is a bit much, and the structure of the game is pretty ridiculous. Once you get past the misleading name, Quantum of Solace has its moments, but it also has its flaws.

The game opens where the film, Quantum of Solace, opens, essentially picking up right where Casino Royale left off. After a few chapters devoted to that, you run into a character who asks why you're after the same bad guy she is. You tell her in the form of the rest of the game--a Cliff Notes version of Casino Royale's plot that skips all the card-playing and sticks to the action sequences. Once that's done, you play through one of the action sequences from the upcoming film and call it a night.

The game is a first-person shooter with a cover system. When you take cover, the game pulls out to third-person shot, which simultaneously gives you a bit more awareness of what's going on around you and lets you look at the game's Daniel Craig player model. It's a pretty good model. The game looks and feels like a stripped-down Call of Duty game, enhanced in some spots and reduced in others. On one hand, the cover system is very handy and changes the pacing quite a bit. On the other, Bond is almost too accurate with his weapons. Blindfiring head shots is most certainly possible at ranges that, well, only an international superspy or carnival trick-shot artist would be able to pull off. Takedowns are another moment where you'll see James Bond on-screen. They're also another "like Call of Duty 4, but..." moment. You initiate a takedown by clicking in the right stick when you're up close, like you were trying to stab someone in COD4. But instead of an instant jackmove, this initiates a one-button quick time event that results in a slow-motion animation of you knocking out your foe. It takes too long and the animations get old fast.

The game occasionally breaks out of its shooter trappings into sequences where you'll have to shimmy along the outsides of buildings, or keep your balance as you run along a narrow beam. You'll also find a few spots where you can optionally play for stealth and avoid detection by shooting out or dodging security cameras. But for the most part, this game is all about lining up headshots while behind cover and taking them. As long as you're patient about sticking behind cover, you'll be fine. Even though the game is better about breaking you out of the shooting than some of the previous Bond games have been, overall, the single-player portion of Quantum of Solace is just kind of boring. Nothing terribly wrong with it, but you've probably played plenty of more entertaining shooters over the years.

The multiplayer portion of Quantum of Solace feels superfluous and unnecessary for the same reason. There are plenty of better shooters out there. The guns don't feel impactful, the characters move around in a very skittish way, and every player model seems to just shout "I'm empty" again and again and again. "Empty" sums up the multiplayer pretty well. You'll find a smattering of standard modes, as well as a few Bond-specific styles like Golden Gun, where players struggle to control a golden pistol that fires explosive rounds. As you play, you'll earn credits that can be used to purchase weapons and upgrades that you can use in future multiplayer matches. That's probably the neatest idea in the entire game, even if it's mostly a retooled take on the COD4 weapons and perks customization systems.

Shooting explosive things is handy, but headshots are just about as fast.

The graphics are where Quantum of Solace gets a bit dicey. The game's lighting is pretty bad, with most things having a sort of full-bright look to them that makes the environments look garish and, at times, washed-out. The animation for moving enemies is stiff, and things like explosions and other effects don't really stand out. The music is, as you'd expect, full of songs that occasionally recall the famous James Bond theme. Most of the relevant actors and actresses from the films show up to put on a performance here, and they do a fine, if unremarkable job.

Even when you factor in the way Daniel Craig's James Bond has been a rougher, more action-oriented take on the character, Bond is a spy. He should be out doing ill, spy-related acts of espionage as he spies it up with other spies. Instead, he's cast as an almost-faceless gunman yet again. If you were hoping that Activision's take on the license would be any more faithful than most of the games that EA put out while it held the license, you'll probably be disappointed. But on its own, Quantum of Solace is a passable shooter in a world that's filled with much, much better ones.

Release Date:

Review of Spider-Man: Web of Shadows

Ryan — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 04:00:00 -0000

Platform: (PS3,X360)

3 out of 5

As if New York weren't dirty enough!

It would seem that the elusive balance for a good Spider-Man game is to make web-swinging that's fun and intuitive while creating a combat system that plays to Spidey's limber, improvisational fighting style. Shaba's Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is probably the closest any game has come to realizing that ideal, though as much fun as it is to watch Peter Parker's alter-ego run effortlessly up the sides of skyscrapers and use his web-spinners to get up-close and personal with his foes in some inventive ways, it gets old.

The plot of Web of Shadows, which revolves around Venom's plan to overtake the city with his symbiotic spawn, is a dichotomous thing, serving to both tickle and enrage Spider-Man fans. The idea that Venom could just up and decide to start replicating himself, populating the island of Manhattan with teeming millions of other symbiotic beasties, is an infuriating one, and it's something that the game never even bothers to try and justify. Even worse, the game kicks off with Spider-Man getting back together with his original goop suit with a nonchalance that belies his troubled history with it. On the other hand, there's a really excellent What If...? quality to watching other Marvel heroes and villains get incorporated by Venom symbiotes. It makes for a few great moments, but in general, the story is poorly told and needlessly bewildering, and it features some breathtakingly bad dialogue. I actually died a little bit inside during an extended conversation about Wolverine's MySpace page.

Beyond all that, Spider-Man should be a preternaturally nimble dude, something that Web of Shadows captures. You can use his web-spinners to swing around the city, an act that carries some momentum. It feels appropriately unpredictable, creating a controlled sense of danger. Part of what makes the swinging feel so good is the way Spidey will spin and flip and contort his body in some real trademark ways as he navigates the high-rises of Manhattan, brushing his hand along buildings when you get close, and kicking his legs when he gets near the ground. The zip-splat sound effects that go along with the swinging are a nice touch. Spidey can also crawl and run on walls, and the game features a ton of enemies that share this ability, allowing for some unique horizontal combat.

Web of Shadows is at its best when it blends the ground, mid-air, and wall combat together. For the most part the camera can keep up with this often dizzying action, though it can get twitchy in tight quarters. The targeting is a little loose, which can make it tough to pick a specific enemy out of a crowd, particularly when you're just throwing punches. You can whale on enemies with a standard attack, but that's not nearly as interesting as using Spidey's web-strike ability, which allows him to lash onto an enemy from a distance and zip towards them. From there you can choose to either leap off the enemy and target another, or perform an intricately choreographed series of attacks.

This is a lot less dangerous than it looks.

The real justification for the whole red-suit/black-suit duality of Spider-Man is a mechanical one. You can switch between the two suits at any time, and each gives you slightly different abilities. For example, the black suit gives Spider-Man super-strength, allowing him to pick up and toss cars at enemies, as well as the ability to lash out at enemies with gooey symbiotic tendrils, while the red suit allows Spider-Man to regenerate his health more quickly and perform some special web-based attacks. Defeating enemies and completing missions earns you experience points which you can invest in new abilities for the individual suits, though depending on how you play the game, it's not hard to have enough points to max out both.

There's also a flimsy morality system that, depending on your actions in specific situations and which suit you use, will determine whether you'll be able to call in assistance from either heroic or villainous support characters. As chic as moral choices in games are, it's just window-dressing here, since you'll always be able to call in someone regardless of your choices, and I found that Spider-Man is such a bad-ass that I very rarely needed the help. Ultimately, the often subtle differences between the two suits aren't enough to differentiate them, and the whole system is superfluous.

Web of Shadows opens strong, but it seems like it runs out of interesting and varied ways to put them to use well before you get to the end, and it turns into a bit of a grind. After the novelty of being able to go from swinging through the air to running up the side of a building to zipping up on an enemy and giving them the old biff-pow wears off, you're left with a lot of missions that seem to always come down to traveling to a location and beating up some dudes. Still, Spider-Man looks great in action, and the game is better about giving a sense of that oft-discusses conditional “great power” than any Spider-Man game before it. Release Date:

Review of LittleBigPlanet

Jeff — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:00:00 -0000

Platform: (PS3)

5 out of 5

When Giant Skateboards Attack!

LittleBigPlanet is one part floaty platformer, two parts charm, and several thousand parts game-and-level creation tool. By allowing users to create and share the levels they've built, and by providing an intuitive front-end that allows players to quickly find the coolest levels, LittleBigPlanet excels whether you fancy yourself a bedroom game designer or if you just want to play the coolest things that others have built.

So it almost goes without saying that you'll only get the most out of this game if your PlayStation 3 is online. That's not to say that the single-player components are terrible, but they're really just designed to get you thinking about the sorts of levels that you might like to make. You'll also unlock tons of parts and materials for building said levels as you burn through the game's official levels.

The actual gameplay in LittleBigPlanet is, for the most part, basic platforming. But the game turns the concept inside-out, and the core mechanics of the gameplay aren't as important as you might expect. The new core of the experience becomes digging around and finding the levels that people have been creating, or talking over level design ideas with friends. It's the shared experiences that come from LittleBigPlanet that make it so special. And these things can be so incredible that any issues with the way Sackboy jumps become mostly irrelevant.

But to discuss what, exactly, happens in LBP, yes, you can run and you can jump. You can also grab onto things, which is used most often for dragging things around the level or grabbing onto hanging sponges and using them to swing across fiery pits. The movement, especially in the air, is really floaty. You don't have a lot of air control and the game never feels very precise. You won't mistake Sackboy's movements for an old Super Mario game, for example. This sort of imprecision is fine once you get used to it, but it also places a bit of limit on the level design aspect of the game. Expecting precise jumps out of players seems to always result in heartbreak, sadness, and burned-up Sackboys.

You can play with up to four players in a level at once. My experiences with the multiplayer were mostly negative, with a lot of slowdown and lag as the network tried to keep up with the players' movements. In a game with an already tenuous grasp on timing and precision, throwing in a bunch of random network congestion quickly makes the game unplayable.

OK, so the gameplay and control is a little weird for my tastes, and the levels that ship with the game aren't all that fun. Why, exactly, do I care so much about LittleBigPlanet? It's all in the level editor. Or, more specifically, what people are doing with that level editor. There's a wide variety of wild levels and concepts coming from players all around the world. There's a real Wild West feel to the created levels right now, and I'm not talking about cowboys. It feels like a frontier--like people are just going out and creating anything they can. Large numbers of levels are based on other properties, resulting in neat levels based on upcoming games like Mirror's Edge, or other favorites like Metal Gear Solid. Seeing other game worlds interpreted through the tools of LittleBigPlanet is pretty awesome, and usually pretty cute, too.

If you'd like, you could even create your own "death garden."

Of course, it's not all about boosting inspiration from some other property, and it seems like Sony or Media Molecule have started to crack down on some of the more egregious examples, like levels that re-create levels from Super Mario Bros. or a "PS3 vs. 360" level that was filled with big Xbox 360s. It's sort of a shame that the content has to be filtered at all, but I guess I understand why some of that stuff has to come down.

The level editor has already proven to be way more versatile than it initially seems. Players are creating the standard sort of obstacle courses that you'd expect, but they're also creating elaborate contraptions, like a working Pez dispenser or a functional calculator. Others are creating music levels that play crummy-but-endearing MIDI versions of songs while you stand on a button that drives a vehicle past all the notes. And a LittleBigGenius in Japan has managed to manipulate the levels in such a way as to create a horizontal-scrolling shooter--specifically, it's the first level of Gradius. Obviously, the control isn't as tight and fun as the original Gradius, but each one of these levels feel totally amazing, and searching through other users' levels becomes a wondrous act of discovery... though you'll certainly find some real stinkers in the mix, as well.

Of course, you can also create your own levels. The game is smart in that it forces a ton of tutorials on you before you are set loose into the editor for yourself. Building a basic running-and-jumping level is quite easy, and using things like motor bolts and the like to creating spinning objects or functional tires isn't much tougher. Even hooking up contraptions and devices to various switches so that you can control them is a lot easier than it initially sounds. The catch is that getting things just right will take a lot of time. I think most people will be able to pick up the basics very quickly, but it's going to take mountains of patience to create the masterpiece that's bouncing around in your head.

That's probably why it's so cool that you can easily seek out the game's best levels. There's a robust user-rating system in place, and a "cool levels" section seems to be pretty good about highlighting the best stuff. You can also add any level or person to your "hearted" list to easily find them in the future. Once you get to any single person's section, you can see the levels and people that they've hearted. So you could easily spend hours just digging deeper and deeper, bouncing from person to person, playing the levels they've created or liked. It gives the game a social networking feel.

And that's the "thing" about LittleBigPlanet. When you break it down to its component parts, there are a lot of little bits and pieces that aren't as cool as they probably could have been. I wish the platforming bits were tighter. I wish the servers weren't effectively broken for the first week or so of the game's release. I wish the online worked better. But when I'm just sort of digging around, uncovering the things that people have created and shared, all of that stuff becomes very easy to forget. When it's at its best, LittleBigPlanet offers excitement and the thrill of discovery in ways that no other console game ever has.

Release Date:

Review of Far Cry 2

Brad — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:00:00 -0000

Platform: (X360)

4 out of 5

It's a jungle out there.

The first thing you need to know about Far Cry 2 is that it has nothing to do with the original Far Cry. That means no tropical islands, no Jack Carver, and especially no silly mutant outbreaks derailing the gameplay halfway through. In place of those things, you get an unnamed African nation torn apart by civil war, a hierarchy of ambitious local warlords, a group of profiteering mercenaries doing all the dirty work, and a sprawling mission-based open world. Some elements of the travel and combat can get frustrating from time to time, but digging into the available weapons arsenal and exploring a variety of combat tactics will yield a dynamic experience that happens to look downright beautiful.

You're on the ground to take out a guy called the Jackal, an American arms dealer who's supplying the weapons that are fueling the ongoing conflict. He'll drop in now and again, mostly when you're incapacitated, to dispense some wartime philosophy and manipulate events behind the scenes. There's more to the Jackal's motivations than acquisition of wealth, as you'll discover over the course of the game. His activities weave in and out of the larger struggle between the UFLL and the APR, the two warring factions that go through a rotating cast of leaders as their respective machinations come into play.

You can take on missions from both groups in any order, which gives the story a playing-both-sides-against-the-middle sort of feel. The outcome is generally the same regardless of which missions you do when, though. There are a few seemingly dramatic decisions required of you at key points in the story, but the effects of only one of those choices seemed truly meaningful to me after the fact. Still, the high points of the plot felt appropriately gritty and intense as they came.

Every warlord wants a piece of the pie.

The game lets you pick a playable character from a group of international mercenaries, though this choice doesn't affect the gameplay, since your own character is never shown and never speaks. But it does remove that character from the merc pool, the remainder of which goes on to populate the game world as you play. These other guys and gals will sometimes act as buddies who will join you on some missions and save you when you take a dirt nap, and you'll find them hanging out in the local watering hole to offer some extra missions.

Your current best bud will also offer alternate, longer solutions to most story missions that result in higher reputation gain in exchange for higher risk. I took every one of these suggestions because they lengthened each mission considerably, taking me to more places and often giving me more interesting things to do than a simple "go here, kill this guy" directive.

The various buddies felt interchangeable to me due to their uniformly flat, dull voiceovers, but their collective presence enlivened the game world all the same. Poor voice acting plagues all the game's characters, actually; you really have to pay attention to keep all the faction bosses straight, since their unremarkable personalities tend to run together. It's not a deal breaker, but more emotive acting would have given the story a lot more dramatic heft.

Since this is an open-world game, you have to travel--mostly behind the wheel--between quest givers, objectives, weapons dealers, safe houses, and so on. Get ready to do a lot of driving, because these things are all spread far apart. And since you get attacked at every guard checkpoint you cross, and almost constantly harassed by roving bands of soldiers en route, get ready to do an awful lot of fighting outside your mission objectives, too. The core gunplay works fine, so it's not that combat itself is problematic, but having to constantly fight off attackers when you're already driving for five or ten minutes can get tedious.

You also need to learn how to manage combat properly to keep yourself alive. The designers give no quarter to lazy players; you always need to stay in cover and remain constantly vigilant, since you often get attacked from all sides and the underbrush sometimes hides your attackers. The game's health system also requires you to dress your wounds on the fly if you're below one out of five health bars, which entails a lengthy animation. If you get shot, you get knocked out of that animation, meaning you can't heal and will probably die, so again, cover is paramount.

The combat can be frustrating but also exhilarating.

Some other irritating moments can crop up, like when an attacking jeep runs you down and kills you outright before you can dodge it. These elements annoyed me at first but also made for some exhilarating combat situations when I learned how to handle them. Lastly, there's no auto-save feature, so you are strongly encouraged to save at every available opportunity to make sure you don't lose a lot of progress to a random battlefield mishap.

The game gets a lot more fun when you start to unlock more weapons. The vendors will give you simple missions to go out and blow up rival weapons convoys (which in itself is entertaining), and with each completed mission you'll be able to purchase better and more varied assault weapons, sniper rifles, pistols, explosive devices, flamethrowers, and so on. There are numerous accuracy, reliability, and ammo upgrades for each weapon, as well as character upgrades like a camouflage suit that limits enemies' ability to see you.

I found my enjoyment of the combat scaling to the number of weapons and upgrades I bought, as I tried different combinations of the aforementioned weapon types (you can only carry three weapons at once, one from each category). Story missions pay out liberally when you accept them--and you can also earn money by doing side missions like jacking into cell phone towers and intercepting hired-hit directives from a creepy computer-distorted voice--so I never lacked for the money necessary to increase my stockpile of better weapons and upgrades.

Given the amount of traveling around you have to do, the breathtaking graphics are very much to Far Cry 2's advantage. The game offers the lushest, most realistic jungles I've seen this side of Crysis, and the liberal use of high-contrast and HDR lighting makes the most of the game's day/night cycle. It seems a little silly to fawn over a video game sunrise when one should probably be outdoors enjoying a real one, but there are a few moments of jaw-dropping splendor here and there, when the giant landscapes and sunlight combine in just the right way. There's also a good range of environments to drive through, from barren deserts to dense forests, grassy plains, and so on. You can see the wind blowing ripples through the tall grass. Little touches like that make the game a joy to look at.

No doubt this is a beautiful game.

In terms of presentation, the game is bent on making sure you see every gory detail from your character's perspective. This manifests in benign ways when you hand a manilla envelope to a warlord or climb up through a vehicle's roll cage to get into its turret. It also means you're forced to watch when your character field-dresses his or her wounds in the middle of a firefight when your health meter gets too low. These animations are quite well done but extremely painful to look at--unless you relish the sight of dislocated fingers being wrenched back into place, or bullets being dug out of a wound with a pair of pliers--so your enjoyment of these will come down to personal taste. If nothing else, it's worth pointing out that I was still seeing new variations even at the end of the game, like when my merc got a nail driven halfway in between his knuckles after an explosion. Ouch.

After you're done with the story mode, there's a decent class-based multiplayer mode here with deathmatch, capture the flag, and a hybrid VIP/control point mode. You can also advance your character's rank and available weapons over time by earning experience points, a la Call of Duty 4. Lastly, a fully featured map editor rounds out the multiplayer experience, so presumably there will be reasonably good new maps to play on ad infinitum, if the community takes to the editor. The multiplayer component certainly gets the job done, with all the fundamentals you'd expect out of a competent online shooter these days. But with more multiplayer-focused games like COD: World at War and Gears of War 2 so close on the horizon, I had a hard time wanting to stick with the online options here.

Besides, the dense, lengthy single-player experience is the real focus here and is worth the price of admission alone. You can easily spend 20 or more hours solely on the story, notwithstanding all the side missions available from weapons vendors, buddies, cell towers, and so on. There's a lot to do in Far Cry 2, and if you can get a good handle on the quirks of the almost constant combat scenarios you'll run into, the weapons variety, stunning visuals, and originality of the story and setting make for a well-rounded and satisfying shooter. Release Date: