Topic: Rate The Last Game You Played

[broodwars]

I finished up some games lately.  I'm in a bit of a mood, so I'll make these short:

Back to the Future: The Game - All 5 episodes are out now so I can talk about this.  Basically, these games are all extremely easy and simple (especially compared to other Telltale games), but they do that rare job of capturing the essence of the films.  Christopher Lloyd is a bit spotty as a VA at this point but he's a more than welcome voice in the game, and the Michael J. Fox Soundalike they got for this game is amazing.  As for the story, it does start to feel a bit dull and stretched out by Episode 3 (and Episode 4 is pretty awful), but it does recover nicely in the very well-made episode 5 season finale.  Highly Recommended.

Shadows of the Damned - The controls are a bit stiff, the game is surprisingly not very long or hard, the game runs out of ideas and climaxes unfortunately early, and the gameplay feels at times like Resident Evil 4's "sloppy seconds" mixed with some increasingly irritating puzzle design and environments lacking in visual variety.  It's still a fun ride while it lasts, though.  Incidentally, Suda 51 really does have to learn that just because you put something "retro" in a game, that doesn't make it automatically satisfying.  The music kicks ass, though.

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin - Nothing special.  I wasn't a big fan of the first F.E.A.R. (I much prefer Condemned: Criminal Origins), but I thought that maybe the sequel might iron out the problems of the first game and actually be a scary game.  Unfortunately, outside a few well-done creepy sections, it's pretty much the first F.E.A.R. all over again.  If you liked that one, you'd like this one.  If you didn't like the first game, this brings nothing new to the table.  On the bright side, although they have no place whatsoever in a horror game, the sections where you're in a bipedal mech blowing stuff up are pretty fun.      They made me really long for a real Mechwarrior game on a modern console.

I recently picked up Red Dead Redemption; Alpha Protocol; and Crysis 2, so I'll be playing those in the near-future.  With Birth By Sleep finished, I'm finding it hard to sit down and play PSP stuff now.

[broodwars]

Red Dead Redemption - While I think this game is more than just a tad overrated (c'mon, people really think this was last year's Game of the Year over Mass Effect 2?), it is a pretty good Open World game.  My only really major criticism of the game is the same as most folks': the first and last 1/3s of the game are pretty good, but the middle section in Mexico is tedious and boring.  I'm sorry, Rockstar, but I don't care about the self-inflicted problems of the real Mexico, so your tired; tedious; and boring attempts to make me care about the self-inflicted problems of a fake Mexico aren't going to change my mind. 

Thankfully, once you leave Mexico the game recovers nicely, and the game concludes in a rather well-done last few hours.  It's odd, but it really feels to me like in a way the first 30 hours of the game exist purely to justify the last few "Little House on the Prairie"-esque hours of it.  You just don't see games often try to simulate family life like this, and frankly I would have preferred the whole game have been like this instead of the 30-hour murder-fest that preceded it.  At least it would have given John Marston a much more concrete character, because as it is he's more of an avatar than a character.  Regardless of whether they conflict with his stated values, he'll do pretty much anything for anyone on the frontier, and because it's based on GTA that includes the wanton slaughter of innocents whenever the player's feeling bored.

There are also lots of little problems that really hurt my experience in the game.  For example, while the game look rather lovely while you're outside and roaming the plains, the interior environments and the character models can be pretty awful.  The game also tends to lean too heavily on your reading the controls page in the options menu instead of teaching you how to execute certain actions.  I never did figure out exactly what determines how you win a gunslinger duel, because the same actions will sometimes lead to dramatically different results.  The mini-games are lamer than I thought they'd be, especially Texas Hold'em Poker since that's pretty much entirely decided by luck.  And at this point I have to wonder which Open World screw-up is lamer: Cole from Infamous 1 not being able to perform any meaningful interaction with chain-link fences, or John Marston (badass extraordinaire) drowning in 2 feet of water because Rockstar couldn't be bothered to create a swimming mechanic.  Oh, and the multiplayer's pretty lame and tacked-on, just folks running around the Open World shooting at each other.  And man does John Marston never hesitate to take an opportunity to tell pretty much every single person on the Frontier his life's story.

Overall, a good game but I hesitate to say a "great" game.  I'll probably check out the Undead Nightmare DLC sometime down the line, but after 100%-ing the Singleplayer Campaign I'm rather sick of this game.

[broodwars]

I just finished the Wii version of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands.  I've never before had a reason to utter these words, so now's as good a time as any: this Wii version of the game is a far, FAR better game than its HD counterpart.  The story is a bit weak, but it's serviceable and at least doesn't completely retread Sands of Time like the HD Forgotten Sands does.  It does give the game a nice "1001 Arabian Nights" feeling that was completely missing from the HD Forgotten Sands, and it suits the game nicely.  The game looks OK overall, but the art design is lacking.  The game consists of quite a few near-identical room and corridors, all of which use a very limited color palette (though not as limited as the HD game, which was pretty much all shades of brown and gray).  Although I have issues with the waggle-tastic combat (which at least you can exploit extremely easily to minimize the waggle), the gameplay's where this version shines...with a few caveats.

In many ways, this Prince of Persia feels like something of a successor to the 2008 technicolor Prince of Persia.  There's a lot of messing with power plates, there's a certain fondness for "corruption" and evil vines, upon death you are returned to the last piece of solid footing you touched, and some of the Prince's standard moves are simplified so they aren't too dissimilar.  Where the game shines is in the Prince's pointer-controlled powers.  Where the HD Forgotten Sands made the mistake of making most of its powers combat-centric (almost always a weak point in the series), the Wii version's powers are pretty platforming-centric (which is the series' strength).  The way the game mixes and matches between the mystical hook (which you can place on nearly any wall for an instant grip-point), whirlwind (which levitates you), and magic bubble powers (which allow you to create a temporary platform at nearly any point in the air) actually brings something new to the Prince of Persia formula, and it's much appreciated.  Having the game trace a little trail that tells me where the Prince will go when I'm about to wall-run or wall-jump is greatly appreciated as well, since that can be hard to tell in these games based on the camera angle.  It's cool to have an achievement system as well, which has a tangible reward in XP for leveling-up your skills.

Where the game falters a bit is in the implementation of those powers via the Wii remote and the really obstinate camera.  I can almost give Ubisoft Quebec a pass on the camera, since unlike most games you can take direct control of it at any point even while platforming.  Besides, it's not Ubisoft's fault that Nintendo thought the casuals couldn't handle the "complexity" of a second analog stick, which in 90% of games exists for the sheer purpose of controlling the camera.  Unfortunately, Ubisoft didn't really think things though when they were mapping the powers.  Placing hooks and whirlwinds is done by pressing the B button when pointing at either a wall or floor, and triggering a bubble requires pressing the same button while in the air.  The thing is, unless you point the remote straight up (which is what I had to do), 99% of the time when you're in the air your cursor is GOING to be pointed at either a floor or the air, so the wrong power gets used and you die.  This really could have been solved by just having the player hold a different button (like the A button) while in the air.  Another minor gripe is that the game feels kind of slow in places, as you spend a lot of time working off central hubs and accomplishing minor tasks to open doors.  It means a lot of backtracking, and it can get needlessly tedious.  I also think the game misses some opportunities to really go as wild with the platforming as it could have, though that could be Ubisoft acknowledging the problem with triggering specific powers on command in a speedy manner.

Overall, the game has some minor problems and it's not as wild as I've come to expect in my Prince of Persia platforming, but it's a damn fine game.  I wish the HD version was as inventive.

[broodwars]

I finished Crysis 2 the other day, a game I'd been playing off and on for a few weeks.  In short, the game is good, but it falls just short of being "great".  The campaign is generally well-paced with plenty of quiet and high action moments, but I suppose my big issue with it is that those "high action moments" don't go big enough.  The game just feels very pedestrian, even when things look like they should be getting very hectic.  You can often see exciting-looking things happening off in the distance or happening in a cutscene, but you don't often get to really take part in them outside the occasional Quick Time Event.  To use a simple analogy, if the Call of Duty franchise is a frantic roller coaster ride that doesn't give you a great chance to take in the experience or appreciate the epic scale of the scene, Crysis 2 is a roller coaster that's very steady and constant (not to mention pretty) with a few dips every now and then but not as exciting by comparison. 

As for the plot, it's is a real mess of talking heads and generic alien invasion while two human factions bicker amongst themselves.  The game does a great job of making your nanosuit-augmented soldier feel really vulnerable several times throughout the game, but it misses a big opportunity for character empathy by making the character a silent protagonist.  Even worse, its excuse for this is that your character is hung over.  Seriously, Crytek?   

The game does feature really nice open levels you just don't see in First Person Shooters anymore, and in theory your Nanosuit's upgradeable features should allow players to tailor the experience to suit their particular gameplay styles (though the suit really needed more abilities).  Unfortunately, there are a few issues with this: first, the UI is pretty terrible.  Unless you're looking through a solid surface, I dare you to be able to see the icons that appear on-screen to highlight targets you've marked with your visor.  The visor display becomes a sea of icons and numbers that becomes really cumbersome to sort out as well.  The other big problem is that your ability to Cloak and sneak around enemies is so useful that there's really no reason to use anything else, and its upgrades only make it even more ridiculously useful.  To give you some idea of how useful, it took me a good 13 hours to play through the entire campaign my first time through on Easy.  I took my fully upgraded suit into a New Game Plus on the game's hardest difficulty mode, and I finished the game in about 4.5 hours just cloaking and running around all the enemies.  I think I maybe killed 50 enemies in the entire game, and that was only when the game forced me to kill them in arena combat situations.  That's not necessarily a bad thing (it's certainly a choice you can't exercise in any other FPS), but it is a really odd thing that the game rewards player skill with removing the need to play the game in the conventional sense.

Overall, I liked the game but I'm probably never going to play it again.  Recommended if you are looking for something just a little different from your typical FPS, but I suggest waiting for Bioshock Infinite or maybe even Battlefield 3.

[broodwars]

Catherine (PS3) - "The Incredibly Challenging Game has appeared.  It is the Killer.  Do Not Die!"  Yeah, this game is already proving to be very polarizing due to its radically unique gameplay (climbing block towers), but I found it to be an excellent game.  A sort of occult puzzle-platforming game with a big emphasis on challenge and adaptability, it's both very much in the spirit of and yet couldn't be more different from Team Persona's previous Persona titles.  Personally, I found the puzzle-based "nightmare" stages to be very addictive and exciting as I had to think very tactically on the fly, but your mileage will vary.  It will especially vary because while I wouldn't say this game is the hardest thing I've ever played on the Normal difficulty setting, it does require you to cast aside your preconceptions and think outside your comfort zone so it can get really challenging. 

My problem with the puzzle sections (besides a few just sadistically hard levels) is that there isn't a good balance between them and the story-based downtime where you view cutscenes and interact with the other characters.  The strength of Personas 3 and 4 is that while you might spend several hours crawling through a dungeon, you could also spend an equally long time outside the dungeon building up your social links and pursuing sidequests.  Catherine doesn't have that.  While you can walk around the bar (and on the between-stages landings in the nightmare stages) and advance some sidequests that determine if several minor characters live or side, these sequences pass very quickly.  And after spending several hours clawing my way through these block tower "nightmare" stages and engaging in a race to the death with a hideous abomination (great boss "fights", by the way), it's disheartening when the game only gives you 10 minutes of relaxing downtime before sending you right into another gauntlet.

As for the story, it's pretty hit or miss with me.  The themes are good and the game feels like it belongs alongside the MegaTen games, but the only choices the player can make that actually matter to the story occur at the end of it, leaving the player very much "on rails" for a good 10-12 hours.  And until the game hits the point where your choices actually matter, it's very frustrating to tolerate the sheer amount of spinelessness Vincent exudes.  The story takes a nice Shin Megami Tensei-style twist towards the end, and depending on your ending (there are 8 of them, and I got the best possible one with Katherine) the story wraps up nicely, but it does feel like a lot of lost potential.  As a nice bonus, though, if you manage to get a Gold Ranking on a puzzle stage, you can skip it on any subsequent playthrough.  I got all Golds on my Normal Playthrough, so I can skip all the puzzle stages now for incredibly short replays to see the other endings.   

This is a game that people are going to either Love or Hate, especially if you believe that Team Persona shouldn't be making games like this when they specialize in JRPGs.  Still, I really enjoyed the game, so much so that I think I'm cursed now to have block tower puzzles constantly running in my mind's eye ala Tetris.  It's a highly unique experiment with great remixes of famous classical music and a great sense of artistic style (it will be a crime if this engine isn't used for another Atlus game), but I hope after this game that Team Persona focuses their considerable talents on Persona 5.  We certainly could use a quality JRPG on the HD consoles.

[Lithium]

Castlevania: Order of ecclesia

As part of my backlog of all the games on the NWR top 30 that i haven't played yet.

This was my first Castlevania game, at the start i wasn't sure if i liked this game or not, in fact it was pretty frusterating. However as you get further into the game and gain more glyphs and abilities this becomes a fairly enjoyable experience. I wasn't really fond of the music in this game though, I ended up turning the music to zero and then just playing my own music in the background, the story was weak but who the hell plays Castlevania for the story anyways...

If you're in the mood for a fast paced action game this wont dissapoint, but be prepared for some difficulty.

7/10

[Halbred]

Lithium, you should play Aria and Dawn of Sorrow. They're bettter introductions to the modern Castlevania. Order of Ecclesia, while excellent, is basically for Castlevania fans who want a meaty challenge but area already familiar with the formula. You're got a leg up now, so you might appreciate Aria/Dawn even more.

[broodwars]

Yeah, I have some pretty big issues with how poorly Ecclesia treats its main character as well.  For me, Eccelsia was kind of a mediocre game.  I definitely recommend Aria of Sorrow, Dawn of Sorrow, and even Portrait of Ruin over Ecclesia.

[Lithium]

Yeah I just beat Dracula about an hour before I wrote that post so I've already finished the game. I'll probably play Dawn of Sorrow later because my order of Henry Hatsworth just shipped from amazon

[ymeegod]

Just finished Arc Rise of Fantasia WII and here's a quick review.

It's basically as what most people stated, it's an low-production JRPG game will the same look as a Tales game but with different gameplay.  The story is a snore will all kinds of problems and the characters are very by the book for this genre.

As for the combat, this the only area where the game tries to be different and it ends up failing for the most part.  Basically you have zero control over your stats, there's only one selectable armor slot, ect so you're basically stuck with whatever the game gives you.  Now you still get to do some tweaking but it's all done with weapons tweaks and blocks.  It's kinda hard to explain but your weapon has slots and special abilites that unlock as they level up.  These mods come off in blocks (like Tetris) and each weapon has a grid where you can place those blocks--basically an 4 by 4 grid.  Fill the block and it's unlocks a special bonus to that weapon.  Some mods are like Add defence, auto-cure, add hp ect. 

Here's the ugly--bosses, midbosses, ect.  You're going end up wasting alot of time and loss a few straids of hair over them because you really can't scan them all that well, for example it tells you what magic there are strong against and what they are weak against and their HP but it doesn't tell you what effects will work on them or are they immune.  Basically they are more or less immune to anything that kicks ass so having all those mods like sickness (prevents the enemy for healing), silence, ect are utterly worthless.  So you really don't get to many options on how to defeat enemies other than to relay on your combo excel (you group your special attacks together) while you defend and heal and wait for it to recharge.  This can take hours.  What's worse is the bosses can easily wipe out your party members with magic/spells/arts that you never seen up to that point so losing a fight after an hour or so is fairly common unless you're following a guide which I would recommend but I fought them without one and wasted hours (at least 6) on one boss alone.

O-yeah, you really shouldn't turn off the audio because you'll need it because the characters will give you clues on the enemies attacks.  Not sure why the developers didn't give you a subtitile option or visual otherwise you can turn the voices off and just read the game because everything else has subtitles.

I can't recommend this game to anyone for any reason other than to punish themselves--a whooping 4 out of 10.

[broodwars]

Yeah, I have to admit that Arc Rise Fantasia's been tempting me lately, especially as it drops in price (I've seen it for as little as $20 lately in retail).  I'm not sure why, though...it's not like I'm in danger of running out of massive JRPGs I still have to finish (Tales of Vesperia, Star Ocean: The Last Hope, Ar Tonelico 3, Record of Agarest War Zero, etc.).

[Ceric]

...
Here's the ugly--bosses, midbosses, ect.  You're going end up wasting alot of time and loss a few straids of hair over them because you really can't scan
them all that well, for example it tells you what magic there are strong against and what they are weak against and their HP but it doesn't tell you what effects will work on them or are they immune.
...

But that's true for most of them and it annoys the ever living snot out of me.  It becomes to the point that most of the time I end up getting the max I can on the basic weapon skill that works on everyone and brute forcing it.   The bad part is that Most of the time you can't become super immuned in these games.  I like the games where I can do status effects and they mean something.  Let's me play with different strategies.

[FZeroBoyo]

I'm still chewing away at Fallout: New Vegas but I can say that I really, really enjoy this game. Knowing this, would anyone recommend that I go back and play Fallout 3?

[oohhboy]

It's effectively the same game, so knock yourself silly. Be warned about FO3's retarded ending. I don't like FO3 mostly due the rubbish gameplay. With how they setup the mechanics, it couldn't figure out whether it wanted to be a 1st/3rd person shooter or some quasi RPG realtime turn base not really kind of thing. Not helped by basing the game off Oblivion, a game I hate due to how poorly it plays and how utterly boring the whole exercise was.

So yeah, if you like FO:NV, go play FO3, it's more of what you want.

[ymeegod]

I liked FO3 better than NV myself.  Sure you might tire of the game since you just played NV and the gameplay is nearly exactly the same but FO3 has the better cast and missions IMO.

Just finished 3rd Birthday (PSP) and here's a quick breakdown:  I'm really glad Squaresoft is turning my beloved RPG games and spinning them into crappyass action games.  *rollseyes*  This game is bad is so many ways but the frist one is easily the most common for an PSP title.  The CONTROLS don't work, periord.  It's hard for many developers but in Square's game it's really their fault.  It has an auto-lock which would have been great if it worked 90% of the time like you wanted.  It's supposed to target the closest enemy by default but 9/10 times it wouldn't, instead it would target some distance foe who would be behind some wall or something.  Two, you couldn't make an Lock stick, enemies have a bad habbit of knocking you down and you have to re-target the enemy each time.  Other times the enemies will teleport which also nagged the hell out of me. 

To top it off, some weapons there's isn't an autolock function which means manual aim.  There's no control option so to manual aim you have to use the direction pad which means you have to come to a complete stop unless you have two left-handed thumbs.  For the most part I didn't bother with manual aim and just stuck with assualt rifles but there's a mission at the end where you had this beam weapon to defeat a reaper or whatever and that mission sucked.  Not only does the reaper teleports all over the freaking place but it also has wide area attacks that you really couldn't dodge all that well.

Another issue was the cheap ass enemies.  The main bosses where actually quite easy but common enemies can kill you without much fuss.  Why?  Alot of enemies have teleporting abilites, homing missles types, and massive wide angle attacks.  There's fix barriers but hiding behind them is for the most part pointless because the enemies can destory them with one or two hits or the homing beams would just hit you anyhow.  Also, if that wasn't bad enough there's a couple of enemies that have grappling abilities and once the get you it's game over.

And then there's the friendly AI.  For the most part these guys have one script and once it's broken they'll just end up standing there and do NOTHING.  One great example is there I am hiding behind one barrier when backup arrives.  He runs to the barrier nudges me out into the open.  The enemy notices me out of cover so he comes charging in a knocks down the barrier.  The soldier then just stands there in the open until he dies a few minutes latter without firing a shot.

The concept behind 3rd Birthday is neat how you can jump from one soldier to the next but it was excuted poorly.  The story is an utter mess of nonsense and top it off with it trying to be an 3D action game without an second analog--you can say this one deserves to fail.  Not only did it suck but it took something that I cherished (Parasite 2) and smeared crap all over it. 

3/10

[broodwars]

The first Parasite Eve and its sequel (whenever it finally hits PSN) are in my backlog, but it's sad to see Square-Enix so completely FAIL on 3rd Birthday, if only because it's an IP they have rarely used.

I played about 10 or so hours of Fallout New Vegas, and I was so fantastically bored by it that I stopped playing and I never intend to pick it up again.  That said, Fallout 3 is an excellent game, if a bit tedious in places due to repetitive environments and enemies.  If you liked New Vegas, definitely check it out.

As for me, with Deus Ex Human Revolution fast approaching at the end of the month, I figured if I didn't play through and finish Alpha Protocol by then I probably never would.  Well, I did and I have, and overall I thought it was a pretty decent game with some very annoying design quirks.  Maybe it's just because it's been a year since the game launched, but the game wasn't as egregiously buggy as I expect from an Obsidian product (Hello, Fallout New Vegas!).

The voice acting is quite good (outside of the absolutely terrible voice acting from your main character, Michael Thornton), the music is pretty decent, and I really liked how much the game allows the player to shape the story.  The dialogue system is quirky and it can get annoying trying to make major decisions with only a few seconds' worth of thought, but it keeps the game moving and suits the game.  The visuals are pretty "meh" and there are some major draw-in issues, though not as bad on PS3 as I expected from Angry Joe's review of the game.

Where the game fails for me is in the story and the combat system.  The story is pretty "blah" from beginning to end, a seemingly never-ending parade of talking heads and overly-complicated conspiracies.  You might want to sit down for this, but apparently a Private Military Contractor is EVIL!  Thankfully, this is a nice cast of characters, and there are several that are truly memorable (especially one boss who is in love with 1980s America, and you have to fight him against an 80s pop song on a disco floor).  The combat is just frustrating until you really build your stats up and get used to pretty much sticking with stealth builds.  Like the original Mass Effect, pulling the trigger when your gun reticule is pointed at an enemy usually doesn't result in the bullet actually hitting them (unless you wait for a critical hit meter to fill), because the game is checking invisible dice rolls instead.

One other major annoyance is that you can't save your game at any time.  You can only save where you were at your last checkpoint, and it is very easy to screw-up certain hacking minigames and trigger alarms.  Your only option at that point if you want to completely stealth areas is to reload a checkpoint that might be 15 minutes prior and lose all that progress.  It's just completely inexcusable when games like Mass Effect (which this game clearly wants to be) allow you to save practically whenever you want.

Alpha Protocol is a decent game that's interesting enough for me to recommend, but be very aware of what you're getting into if you're considering it.  It's a game with a lot of problems you have to be willing to tolerate or completely work around.

[ymeegod]

Went with the tank option with Alpha Protocol myself, maxed out toughness, martial arts, assualt rifles, and then buy the best armor and forget about noice reduction.  Worked great especially the martial arts and assualt options because they have active skills like slowmo-auto-aim that just donimates the enemy even bosses.

Just finished Killzone 3 (PS3) and it's just an solid FPS.  Can't really say anything to negative about the game other than the weapons.  You really don't get much of an option and the developers have a bad habbit of taking away your heavy weapons choice.  It's strange but there's a couple of weapons from KZ series that were left out and a few new ones added but for the most part they were genertic.  Still overally I still say this is a decent way to blow a weekend, good production values and some nice mini-rail-shooting stages.

Out of the three KZ titles this one is the best IMO but it somewhat fails at being epic because it just doesn't have much "new" to the whole FPS thing.

8/10

[KDR_11k]

Just finished 3rd Birthday (PSP) and here's a quick breakdown:  9/10

BOX QUOTE! :

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy
A janky-ass PC-ass PC game. EYE hasn't come out that long ago so we're still waiting for the first patch and it needs one. The game's made by a French mod team and people complain about the translation a lot. Beyond that, it's a good FPS with the RPG taking more of a backseat, at least if you, like me, spec for firearm usage. It was very interesting for the first two playthroughs with the weirdness adding a lot of exploration but going past that feels kinda like a chore. Of course playing through a game twice is already good enough in my book. I don't buy the hundreds of hours claim of playability, I beat it the first time after 10 hours after which it goes straight into a new game plus. Then you can experiment with different story branches and stuff.

Aside from some GUI jank and an alleged fourth ending that I don't think exists it's fun. The campaign takes a big change of pace after you get to Mars, going from populated, sidequest-heavy maps to more barren combat-only maps and most of your weapons become useless as anything without armor piercing won't cut it then. I'm not sure which is the better half, on my first playthroughs I liked the initial quest-heavy maps more while on the third (where I was getting tired of the game) I preferred the later straight forward shooty maps.
7.5/10

[reverb]Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet[/reverb]
ITSP is kind of a Metroidvania game though it feels more linear than your usual Metroidvania with distinct areas you beat and then only return for missed gear to. Maybe it should be compared to Zelda instead then. It's very puzzle -heavy (nothing really mind-bending, mostly straight-forward) which results in combat being fairly unsatisfying. You can upgrade your main gun three times but against most enemies it's still not useful as many require specialized tools or approaches to defeat (especially the annoyingly ubiquitous dodge-their-charge-and-shoot-their-back type). The game is very short and the 15€ asking price is too much for that. IMO the art style would go better with a World of Goo-style soundtrack, not epic Dimmu Borgir music. It's not a bad game but it's overpriced and they probably put more money into the graphics design than any other part of the game.
6/10

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon
Okay so they handed one of my favourite franchises to a different developer who's known for crappy games and completely missing the point (Matt Hazard looks NOTHING like an 8 or 16 bit era hero, people had hair and color back then!). It's not all bad but it lacks most of the strengths of EDF games. The good features are the different armor types (though the implementation details may be debatable, e.g. the Tactical's special abilities are useless for several ranks due to lacking damage upgrades), the vastly improved handling of homing weapons and online coop.  Vehicles work well but are doled out very sparsely, you don't get the whole motor pool thrown at you in every mission, they're dealt out when the devs want you to use them.

Now for the bad things: The game just isn't really challenging. It's too easy to revive downed squadmates and they gain full health from that, making health pickups not very necessary. You have to beat the campaign once before they let you disable the bots that revive you so quickly. Enemies are much less aggressive, you can run through a bunch of ants or spiders and barely take a hit because their melee attacks are rare and slow, by the time they finish the animation you're already past them. The game's so easy you could play it on Hard with your starting equipment if it wasn't totally boring that way. Enemy health goes up like crazy on higher difficulties, turning the already bullet-spongy enemies into nearly indestructible piles of boredom. For reference, in Sandlot EDF games the enemy health doubles with every difficulty level so ants go 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 instead of the 60, 500, 2500 they do here. Also while enemy health and damage grows their speed doesn't. In Sandlot EDF the ants would get faster and faster as you dial up the difficulty so even if you can find appropriately powerful weapons you'll need to act quicker and quicker to avoid being overrun.

EDFIA also has a leveling system. By itself not a bad idea but it limits you to weapons that you have leveled to (half of which you can just buy for ingame money then so you can always get your favorite weapon on every tier), even if you found better ones in missions. Then it simply replicates the same weapons for every level with stats always going up, up and up (in Sandlot games higher tier variants could come with downsides like slower reloading, inaccuracy, stupidly short range or simply lacking DPS growth). Later levels require so damn many points to reach that it turns into a grind, forcing you to play WAY more missions than the game has. It has 15. You'll be sick and tired of them by the time you can reliably play on Hard difficulty.

It doesn't help that the missions drag on and on. They're long which isn't good in a game where a wipe means having to start over so you'll never want to push the game's settings too hard against yourself (winning a hard fought battle just to be told to fight another one isn't very encouraging). Enemy numbers are low. Well, not quite. You'll fight the same number during a battle but instead of spawning them all at once and letting you see your progress against the wave by the number of surviving enemies it only spawns a small fraction and keeps spawning more to replace killed ones, making it feel like an endless battle until the game finally gives the go-ahead. Some enemies were declared as Elites which means you'll only see at most 2 of them at once (anything non-boss could appear by the dozen in Sandlot games, no matter how crazy powerful) and they have crazy amounts of health, making you wail at them for minutes without interruption before even the smallest mechs finally die. That's extremely tiring.

Also minor but I don't like the tone of the game. In EDF2017 you'd constantly hear radio chatter about losses, desperate plans to rescue people before they're overrun by the enemy, other cities being obliterated by the aliens, etc. In IA it's mostly stupid (and soon repetitive) jokes by your squadmates (tellingly one of them is voiced by Nolan North) and a blundering idiot heading up the intelligence division. It doesn't feel like Armageddon, it feels more like "yeah, whatever, it's just a minor attack".
6.5/10

[lolmonade]

Tried my hand at a few games lately in-between work and school.

I first rented inFamous 2 a few weeks ago.  Wanted to rent before buy because as much as I loved inFamous 1, I have a tight budget at the moment and don't want to waste precious video game purchasing dollars on a similar experience.  inFamous 2 is very much more of the same from the original, but almost every change in the game has greatly improved the experience of playing the game.  Movement is much more fluid than the first game, and you'll find yourself moving throughout New Marais at breakneck speed in comparison to Empire City.  Melee combat is greatly improved as well with the inclusion of the amp.  It is much easier to chain melee and electric attacks and hit enemies with much more fluidity.  My complaints are small.  The story imo wasn't as compelling as the first, and The Beast was a bit underwhelming in my opinion as a boss, but playing it once has convinced me to buy a copy once the price goes down a bit.

I probably made a mistake by then playing Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions afterwards.  I found Spider-Man to move a bit robotic in each level, which is disappointing considering how fun the last Spider-Man game I played, Spider-Man 2 was so fun just to move around and explore.  I also found combat to be a bit underwhelming in the game, given the typical light attack/heavy attack/dodge system.  I appreciated the variation of the villians in the game, but found myself returning the game early after getting bored in the 2nd act of the game. 

Next: found a copy of Luigi's Mansion for cheap at a local pawn shop.  Figured I'd give it a try to determine if the new one for 3DS would be worth my time/money.

[Ymeegod]

I actually liked Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, loved the skill-unlockables-challenges.  You didn't get that far in but you do get more combos to unlock.  What I didn't enjoy was the lame ass story and I hated Nior Spider-Man levels.  One of the better Spiderman games to date IMO, with only the orginal PC game Spiderman beating it.

Just finished Bulletstorm (PS3) and here's my review:  It's the best new IP this year IMO, it's what Duke Nukem Forever should have been.  It has a great single player mode with only one negative complaint--enemies don't vary all that much and the game throws the same groups at you all the time.  What I loved, the story and the characters dialog--some of the funniest smack talk around, got to love the good ole general. 

Also I loved the weapons and the skill challenges each weapon has.  Found myself replaying stages just to get all of them, not because I had to but because of how enjoyable they were.  Slide kick an enemy and kick him away while rapping his head with a frail (two grenades on a chain).  Or picking up the drill gun and turning them into overhead fans.  There's alot of fun to have with the weapons and the only downside was the game only let you carry three at a time but there was plenty of ammodrops where you could switch out them at any time.  And the ammo, you had to BUY ammo nearly 90% of the time because the enemy drops so little or you simply couldn't find the bodies/weapons.

The other negatives are minor as well, the game reuses a lot of textures like the same damn burnout car that's looks like it was created for an last generation title.  The game sometimes skipped or paused for a few seconds.
Overall it was a great game and hopefully we'll see a sequel. 
8.5

[KDR_11k]

Multiplayer in Bulletstorm also seems like it could be fun if it wasn't so damn laggy.

[Ymeegod]

Just finished Duke Nukem Forever (PS3) and here's my review:

Utter disappointed, the whole game should have been scrapped years ago.  It isn't broken like Diakatana but considering it's been 14 years or so in the making this game feels like three different games slapped together.  The weakest link in the game has to be the GAMEPLAY.  Standard weapons, piss-poor turret rail-shooting sequences, lack of enemies ai, only able to carry two weapons, ect make all the FPS shooting parts BORING as all hell. 

The graphics is another area where you can actually tell where Gearbox added to.  One area would look somewhat decent while other areas are dated last generation.  The animation for most characters look more like puppets on strings.  It's not the worst but a far cry from any of the other major titles that have been released in the last 5 years.

And lastly the story/humor ect.  The main story is about a paragraph long, so that just leaves you with a few lines from NPC which doesn't move the game forward at all.  The oneliners came off a little flat.  Most of it you heard before and a few of those "game related" humor wasn't all that funny. 

I still found myself enjoying some of the game, you can interact with TONS of objects which was kinda nice because most FPS don't offer any of it.  I also found myself likely the little shirking stages, the monster truck stage, ect so it wasn't all bad just 3/4th of it.

An 4/10.

 

[broodwars]

It's nice to see the rest of you guys join in on reviewing games in here.  For a while there, this was looking like my own personal thread.   

As for me, I'm currently struggling to claw my way through the PS3's "International" version of Star Ocean: The Last Hope.  It's an odd situation in that I do like the game, but it's in spite of a LOT of problems.  The game's also quite possibly the most gluttonous game I've ever played in terms of how little respect it has for the player's time.  I'm well over a hundred hours into this game, and I'm closing in on only the 2/3 mark with mountains of side content to do.  To put this into the proper perspective, I PLATINUM-ED both Final Fantasy XIII and Resonance of Fate (no slouches in their own regard in terms of time commitment) in that amount of time.  Hell, I probably Platinum-ed Fallout 3 in that amount of time as well.  It'll probably be a month or two before I actually review it, but right now I'm pretty on the fence with it.  It's certainly nowhere near the best JRPG this generation.

And incidentally, I really enjoyed Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions last year.  There were some problems with repetitiveness and the Noir levels really brought out some legacy camera problems Spidey's had for quite a few games now, but I'll gladly take that over yet another Spider-Man 2 clone.  It was just a really fun game that did a great job of highlighting the many different interpretations of the character over the years.  Plus, the game got me back into comics for the first time in decades as I started collecting the Ultimate Spider-Man and Spider-Man Noir graphic novel collections.

[Lithium]

I'm currently playing Goldeneye Wii, i haven't played a fps on the wii since prime 3 back in 2007 so i forgot how much the bounding box/dead zone setting matters for the overall enjoyment, before i figured this out I was thinking "maybe wiimote fps controlls werent as good as i remembered, then i switched to classic controller and then remembered how much i hate using joysticks to controll FPS games. anyways once you make the bounding box smaller it plays like a dream. As a PC gamer its almost as intuitive as a mouse and keyboard setup. I just finished the first 2 missions so i dont really have an opinion yet as far the game goes though.

[Oblivion]

I always thought Goldeneye was better played using the Classic Controller Pro. I guess I just didn't tweak it enough.