Despite me being someone who said they should not remake this game, I cannot deny that this improves upon the original in so many ways in terms of combat, player choices, weapons, enemy behaviour and variety, scale and atmosphere. It's an even bigger game, clealry made with love and respect for the original. The few downsides like some less than perfect VA at times, and decisions made to what made the final cut, don't stop this game being the best in the genre. I don't tend to give games a score, but since we have to on here, it's a 10 given that there's nothing better. Don't listen to the review bombs.
The atmosphere is on point, bringing horror back to resident evil. I welcome the 3rd person camera, and the return to the police station offers some great nostaligia. Zombie behaviour and procedural damage is probably the best I've ever seen, making you feel part of a horror movie. The 4 main campaigns offer some additional replayability, although each person will probably find a favourite among the arrangements. Hunk and Tofu(s) return, along with a handful of super weapons to unlock through rankings, all offering a decent sized package. On the downside, as a RE4 fan, I feel like much of that game has been left to die and sadly the combat of this game doesn't come close to RE4's, nor does it have the variety of weaponry, upgrades and lacks the specifics of the inventory system. There are also not that many enemy types (which you could argue was a restriction of the source material in a way, but I feel there was room for a few additions). On top of this, Mr X's behaviour can be irritating at times, rather than horrific. Once you learn his rules, there are times when you're just running around trying to get thing done and he's wasting time rather than feeling like a threat. Also for me personally, I found the random head durability of the zombies to be aggravating at times, as you never know if they will take 12 shots or even just 1. So the optimum way to deal with most enemies is actually to run away, which doesn't suit my play style. With all this said, I feel like this is the second strongest RE game, after RE4. It beats the original and all other RE games in my view.
The combat is slick and responsive, there are tonnes of weapons with unique animations, tonnes of gadgets, traps, bombs etc, and you combine your abilities as you find them in each of your play throughs through procedurally generated dungeons. This offers a lot of variety and replayability, especially as there are so many different enemy types too. There has been free DLC added which is such a nice touch, especially given the small team who worked on it. I played the game easily for 30 hours, and could get more out of it. You can customize your runs to stipulate particular weapons etc, to tweak the random elements of the game if you want. I would say that the game would benefit from even more biomes than there are, but for the price that it has, it's an absolute bargain, lasting me as long as so called AAA games.
The core gameplay loop is controversial to some, but to me it is satisfying to gradually overcome the terrain, with the game continually dropping new gadgets and abilities onto you. The world is initially harsh and a challenge to get across, but you make it civilized, and once you get the zip lines, you're creating convenient networks to get around. Most games have low level enemies to deal with, this game has the terrain as the common enemy, and you feel a sense of pride as you overcome it and change the landscape. In each area you are tasked with getting to your destination in your own way with no help, but upon doing so you link up to the "Chiral Network", allowing you access to usually a dozen or so of other players structures / items / signs in that area. This is always such a sense of relief, and you go on to add to these yourself or upgrade them, sharing the love. On the downside, in my opinion the story is a nonsensical mess, and the delivery of key plot points is mishandled. On top of this, some bosses or set pieces seem extremely out of place and don't have the same care and interesting mechanics as the rest of the game, and could simply not be there to be honest. But you can really just ignore that and focus on what you're doing for 99% of the game, which is facing the world find a refreshing kind of game, free from many video game conventions. If you don't like inventory management and tactical planning games, then give it a miss though, this isn't a game that necessarily has mass-appeal, but it is satisfying for people who like to tinker, optimize, gather, build and explore.
I love the system, high risk, high reward, great slick stylish action, zooming around on your knees with flames shooting out the back like Iron Man. But - it's just too short! And there are not enough weapons. Plus the melee system makes no sense to me. You hit one enemy, and your own armour gets depleted? Melee attacks in this game are not THAT powerful to warrant such a disadvantage. It's a shame because this really is the greated 3rd person shooter I have played. So much fun, and it's such a challenge. It really punishes you! Jumping out of cover to get that slow motion reward is brilliant. If you sit around in cover all day, blind-firing or just popping up like you do in most games - you will die and you will be punished and made a fool of. It's refreshing to play a shooting game where you are actually supposed to be on your toes. And actually it has amazing boss battles - something most games get completely wrong. But these get your blood pumping and really are enjoyable!
I was really surprised by this game, considering who it is made by. But it is definitely solid, and is a real competitor for RE4. Heavy on the shooting side, but it is still very atmospheric. Story is simple but engaging - you are shipwrecked in space, and there are parasitic aliens taking over the remains of your crew! Oh no! But they are also breeding and trying to alter the atmosphere within the ship to suit themselves. It's up to you, as the engineer, to survive and fix various parts of the ship whilst fighting for your life. Great elements include having to shoot the limbs off enemies, rather than go for head shots, a brilliant holographic menu system (everything is in-game, there are no menu screens. Even your inventory is handled on screen, and when people contact you, a hologram of them is rendered in front of your character, to talk to them), a variety of interesting weapons and abilities to upgrade including telekenisis and stasis (grabbing and throwing stuff, and slowing down enemies), and also there are some great atmosphere touches like parts of the game where you have to go into damaged areas of the ship which have no air, and therefore your hearing is diminished, and your own heart beat and breathing is pretty much all you hear, besides ominous thuds. Most of the time the game is awesome, and feels rewarding and satisfying as you collect loot from around the place, and sell what you don't need at the stores within the game. Some of the boss battles are not very interesting - which is standard in these kinds of games unfortunately. Also, the game suffers from the same problem as all survivals - either you do well and then the game is just too easy as you are overflowing with ammo, health and money. Or, you are not doing so well, in which case you struggle for ammo, heatlh and / or money, and then you have to reload from a check point. Not sure how games can fix this issue. Luckily for me I found the game slightly on the easy side - but still found it good fun. By the end of your first run, you will not have unlocked and upgraded everything, so you can start your game+ and shred some enemies with your powered-up stuff, and continue your upgrading.
Wow, I was not expecting to be disappointed by this game so much. I loved Blood Money, and I like the idea of an assassination simulator. What you have with Absolution is very different, and it totally misses the mark. Essentially, even in disguise, enemies wearing the same clothes see right through it. This means that even if you are in disguise - you have to hide! Completely negating the point of a disguise. Ultimately it becomes a crawl-a-thon, hiding behind chest-high-walls all the time, and rolling from cover to cover, creating distractions. That's not what the Hitman franchise is known for. Couple this with the fact that there are hardly any actual assassination levels, and only a couple of sandbox areas, and you have a game which is really boring. Most missions and just get from A to B. I don't know what they were thinking.
This is a great game. Plan your attack, walk among the crowds of civilians as they are unaware that you are an assassin. Wear disguises, infiltrate mansions, houses, parties, weddings, hotels and protected VIPs. Kill your targets however you want, and get out without anyone noticing. At least that's the idea - it's up to you if you want to go nuts. What you did is covered in the newspaper at the end of the mission. Do it properly, and you are noted as the "Silent Assassin" - with no extra casualities. Go crazy, and you are a "terrorist", "madman" or "deranged slayer". AI is not perfect and can be exploited at at times - but this is actually the only franchise of this kind. There are no other assassination simulators that work to this degree. So despite some flaws, I have to recommend this game. It works almost all the time, once you understand how the AI behaves. Playing through first time, you might take out one or two guys who get in your way. Play through again, and you can try to find the best way to get in and out without disturbing anyone. Play through some more, and you will find more unique ways to complete the mission - or find ways to kill everyone without blowing your cover. It's a dream for misanthropes everywhere!
Brilliant! There is very little wrong with this game. You must defend your garden from swarms of zombies, by growing plants which protect you... Zombies come in all kinds of varieties, ranging from standard ones, to zombies with buckets on their heads as armour, to zombies in vehicles, on pogo sticks, with mining equipment and even explosives. You must choose your plants carefully, but it's up to you how you go about each level. You also have several environments which impact your choices, and the kind of threat you face. Once you beat the main campaign, you get a game+ where you have all the plants you unlocked, and the game is twice as hard. In addition, there are so many extra mini games and challenges. It is great value for money with good replay. Only problem is that the multiplayer is broken - you can be either plants or zombies. But if you're zombies, you have such an advantage that it's just completely one-sided unfortunately! It is a good idea and could have worked, but clearly was not play-tested properly. Other than that, as a single player game, this is one I definitely recommend, and is very satisfying.
This is DMC3, but with Vergil and Bloody Palace added in. This is the version you should get, those added extras are pretty cool. Playing as vergil is awesome, you just play through the main game with him instead of Dante. He has his trademark moves from his boss battles, and a couple of new ones. He is highly aggressive - though he does have evasion in the form of teleportation. The thing that's best about him is that he does feel very different to Dante, it means you have to play differently, and master him separately. But here's my DMC3 review: What a brilliant game! Extremely hard, enemies coming from all over the place, slick 60 frames per second, tonnes of boss battles. The system is fair and responsive, everything is programmed correctly to make a fine experience. It has six fighting styles, so you choose one at the start of each mission. Trickster is for dodging, royalguard is for intercepting and stopping attacks, swordmaster is for showing off, gunslinger is for making guns more stylish at a distance, quicksilver is for slowing down time, and doppelganger means you can split into 2! Combine this with the fact that you have 5 swords and 5 guns - and you can take 2 of each of those into each mission, and you have... 600 combinations in total! Keep experimenting and you will never get bored. This is one of the best games on the PS2 and stands up today.
What a brilliant game! Extremely hard, enemies coming from all over the place, slick 60 frames per second, tonnes of boss battles. The system is fair and responsive, everything is programmed correctly to make a fine experience. It has six fighting styles, so you choose one at the start of each mission. Trickster is for dodging, royalguard is for intercepting and stopping attacks, swordmaster is for showing off, gunslinger is for making guns more stylish at a distance, quicksilver is for slowing down time, and doppelganger means you can split into 2! Combine this with the fact that you have 5 swords and 5 guns - and you can take 2 of each of those into each mission, and you have... 600 combinations in total! Keep experimenting and you will never get bored. This is one of the best games on the PS2 and stands up today.
What a fantastic game. Here's a quick run down of what's so great. 100% customizable move set. Great dodging system where you get up close and must deal with individual attacks, then get back on the offensive. All animations can be cancelled, making the combat smooth - cancel when you miss, cancel when you hit and want to interrupt your own attack with another - and cancel when you are hit yourself, so you get back to your ready stance. Brilliant! Dynamic difficulty - the better you are, the harder the game gets, and if you are struggling, it gets a bit easier. That way, everybody is challenged by this game, it just gets harder and harder! Great variety of enemies and enemy attacks - all fair, with wind up animations and audio cues, so it's always fair. Beat the game, and unlock all moves in the shop for your game+ as well as some totally new ones for your 2nd play through. Also bonus costumes, and 50 unique challenges to beat. Great comedy and enemy design, funny dialogue, lots of game references, and really catchy music. Pretty much the best game on the PS2, and still stands up today. Get it!
Okay so to start off, I thought Bayonetta looked alright, but wasn't sure how it would play. Turns out it's Devil May Cry but with guns on your feet and dragons made out of hair. There is very little that is wrong with this game, in fact it is one of the finest I have ever played. The point of this game is the same as Devil May Cry - kill everything, and do so whilst jumping around the screen or teleporting, jumping off enemies' heads, and avoiding getting hit by all the hundreds of projectiles or diving attacks from the enemies that surround you. There is also a story but I don't care. You can assign one set of weapons to Bayonetta's hands, and one set to her feet (some weapons can be assigned to both, others are unique like the sword and iceskates). As well as this, you can have an alternative set of weapons on your hands and feet, which you can switch between whenever you want. So you have access to 2 sets of hand weapons, and 2 sets of feet weapons. Pressing the punch or kick buttons in sequences with or without pauses create different combos, and each set of weapons on her hands and feet work together for different combos. Most attacks and combos however do follow a pattern, but there are also unique attacks for each weapon, and sometimes unique attacks for a particular set of weapons. Basically, the amount of variety available here is astonishing when you consider that there are eight weapons to combine together. As you fight and taunt enemies, you fill a magic gauge which can be used for a number of things. First of all you can use a small amout for "wicked weave" attacks, which are giant hands or feet you can summon to smash enemies for high damage, knock them out of the way, and hit crowds of enemies at a time. You can also use special abilities like teleportation for small amounts of magic per use. The main use of the magic gauge is to perform torture attacks. To do this your magic gauge must be full, and then you can use it to do very high damage to a particular enemy. Your magic gauge will go down if you get hit, so you are rewarded for playing perfectly without taking damage. In addition, if you kill an enemy with a torture attack you can take their weapon - and these weapons can be used a limited amount of times to cause further high damage. There are many types of enemies to face off against, and each have a range of attacks and projectiles. Some enemy classes can carry different weapons, which really makes them a whole different class of enemies as they have different attacks. Bayonetta is also one of the few games that has genuinely interesting boss fights. Admitedly, not all of them are so good, but most are pretty extreme, and most importantly, can be beaten without taking damage, once you are an expert. The reason why Bayonetta works is because everything is fair. It's a very, very hard game, that's for sure. But along with every enemy attack, there is a sound effect or visual clue to tell you what is about to happen. Things are not just happening out of the blue with no way to react. There is a lot of information to take in, but if you are able to keep track of the entire battle and learn the clues that lead to each enemy attack, then you can fight aggressively, non-stop, whilst also being able to evade. This leads me to the genius that is the dodge-offset. You can perform a backflip at any time, which gives you a split second of invulnerability. This works as a standard dodge for all occassions, but if you time it exactly as an enemy attack reaches you, then you are rewarded with "witch time" (slow motion) for a few moments to get payback. In pretty much all other fighting games of this kind, if you are on the offensive, and then a projectile comes your way, you have to cancel your attack, and evade. Bayonetta introduces the dodge-offset, which allows you to hold down the button of your last attack, then press the evade button, then continue from the middle of your previous combo. After a little practice, it becomes apparent that the developers of Bayonetta are geniuses, and all other games are not worth playing because of this. You can replay each mission to try to earn medals, based upon time, damage taken, inventory items used, and combo points earned. This is the real challenge, aiming for perfection. Just surviving the game on each difficulty is hard enough, but living up to what the designers consider to be perfection is a whole different level of difficulty. It's up to you how serious you're going to take this game. I guess you can just get through it and enjoy it on some shallow level. But if you put the time in, you can achieve so much more, and experiment with what all the weapons and items have to offer.
I first read about Minecraft on ****, and I was intrigued so I had a go on the basic free version. Though it was completely simplistic, I could see the potential of a full working game built around the principle. I went ahead and bought the full game, and I think it is one of the best value-for-money games out there. Before I talk about the gameplay, I want to talk about the way it is handled by its designer(s). First up, they constantly update the game for free - you make one payment for the game, and then you own it, and you can download subsequent updates without paying! Not just fixing errors and glitches, but adding entirely new things to do in the game. There is no subscription cost, so they appear to be doing it out of love for the game, more than anything else. Second, they listen to feedback from fans, and even incorporate elements that have been created by fans, if they realise they are good enough to be added to the official version. On top of this, the director has said that if you don't feel that Minecraft is worth the money, just pirate it, and if you decide later that it's worth the money, then you can choose to pay if you want. You don't hear that very often these days. So I love the attitude. Of course, you can have a nice bunch of guys make a game, but who gives a **** if the game plays like a bag of balls? Luckily that is not the case. You start the game up and you can choose either Survival Mode (which is the kind of "standard" mode), or you can choose Creative Mode, which gives you access to everything in the game, like a God Mode, and you can also fly around and do whatever you want. In Survival Mode, you begin with nothing at all, and you spawn on a land mass in the wilderness. First thing you notice is that the game generates the landscape as you move through it (though once it is generated, it is permanent). This means that your game experience will be unique to everyone else's - and if you start a new game, it will be different to your first game. You can choose to play Minecraft however you want to. But I advise going to ****/wiki/Recipes to get an understand of how to make things to help you. Once you've checked out that list, you will want to dive in and start making things. Most likely you will begin with a wooden pick axe, so that you can mine a bit of stone, so you can make stone tools. Stronger material makes better tools, which mine quicker, and last longer before breaking, as well as being able to give you access to more kinds of materials that you can't mine with an inferior tool. So once you have a stone axe, trees are easy to take down, and you can mine through stone to find coal and iron ore with your stone pick axe. You can also make a stone sword to fend off baddies - such as zombies, giant spiders and exploding monsters. Finding coal is important to start with, to make torches, because it will get dark pretty quick, and as well as not being able to see what you're doing, baddies will spawn in dark places and kill you fairly swiftly (especially early in the game when you don't have much to defend yourself with). You should also make yourself a shelter, to hide up and make a treasure chest to save all the goodies you've found. It is satisfying to make your first little hideout, whether it's a wooden hut, a cave you happen to come across, or a hole in the ground leading to a little tunnel. There is a feeling of safety and personality that is not present in other games. You feel like it's "yours", and as you start to furnish it and dig out new rooms, or put flooring down, you turn a hostile world into a pleasant environment. You can make a door or a trapdoor on the entrance to stop enemies just walking in. Also important is making a bed - they act as checkpoints or spawn points, so when you are killed, you will respawn at the last bed you slept in, rather than always having to respawn at the place you spawned at the very beginning of the game. From this point on, your imagination is really your limit. Do you want to explore and see what the land is like, and find all kinds of terrain ranging from snowy mountains, to deserts and swamps? Do you want to go mining and dig into some caves and look for gold, diamonds, ruins, dungeons and treasure? Do you want to hunt enemies, and loot them for their unique items? Do you want to build a castle, or a tree house? Do you want to build traps to catch enemies automatically? Do you want to build a water slide, or a roller coaster? Do you want to make a safe area by making it light up with torches, then build a village or even a city? Do you want to build an underground tunnel system? Do you want to build a railway system? Do you want to build a farm and raise animals? Do you want to grow plants and fruits? Do you want to see how high you can build, or how deep you can dig? It's basically like a giant playground, a giant wilderness where you can build whatever you want.
