The War of the Worlds

Best looking XBLA game ever made to date. Incredible atmosphere & amazing graphics combine with Patrick Stewart's voiceover to give a very strong atmosphere which is very cinematic & involving. You really want to find out what's coming next. Unfortunately the game has massive problems which is such a shame as it really does look fantastic & plays like an interactive 2D platform game movie in the best possible way. The problems I am talking about are as follows: 1: Unforgiving ridiculously difficult gameplay. 2: Constantly dying & only progressing through trial & error as the objectives are not clear at all. 3: Poor checkpoint placement so you have to backtrack a lot on certain sections. 4: Very hard to attain achievements for completing the game without dying make this virtually impossible to ever get all 200GS on. Most players will struggle to get even 50GS for beating it once as the achievements are very poorly written & do not give enough reward to players for beating the game. It should have given all the achievements for beating the game once! let alone without dying!!! 5: Hazard animation timing is too severe/critical so this contributes to you dying a lot. 6: Pixel perfect unresponsive controls. Such a shame as I can see no way this can be fixed or tweaked with any patching. Casual players will avoid as its too time consuming to replay the same section over & over for hours just because the game does not make it clear how you can progress. If it did not have these problems & was an easy to play/progress game with more checkpoints/gameplay options (there are no difficulty selections) then I would give it 10/10 its really a stunning looking atmopheric game which is faithful to the original HG Wells source material & without a doubt an alltime great 2D platformer if only it had enough QA testing these problems would have been ironed out before release. As it stands its a tragic release as the game promises so much but the unforgiving gameplay, poorly conceived checkpoints/achievements & unresponsive pixel perfect controls cause nothing but frustration to the player & add nothing to the experience only remove you from the game as you start to question why on earth they did not make the game much easier & more about experiencing the story/presentation instead of fighting against the poorly tested finished product.