BraceHare

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Too little choice, in terms of both your endgame options and in terms of your ability to characterize your own character. Reading long pre-written conversations when I know I would react differently in real life removes any sense of agency. At those moments where it was a game, though, it was good for what it was, and the writing wasn't terrible, although the characters were... well...I don't want to say 2-dimensional per-se, but most had the kind of depth you would expect from a high school student. I guess these are high school students though, so maybe that was actually good writing! I dunno.

Worth every penny and more. One of the few real examples of games being used effectively and meaningfully as an artistic medium. Granted, it is unlike games as they are known in general, but to complain about that seems insane given the competence and power of what is actually delivered here. No game has ever imbued me with a sense of the weight and impact of my actions nearly as well, or made me engage with the characters emotionally in nearly as much depth.

This game made me literally nauseous to play, and I have to respect that. I don't think it was the camera that did it so much as the characters. I mean really, most games give you a shining good guy protagonist with no moral ambiguity, and then you kill eleventy-thousand mooks, and in the early days of gaming that was all, and in the modern days of gaming they lampshade it by having the villain point out that you killed eleventy-thousand mooks and having the protagonist think about it for all of 10 seconds (this omnipresent throwaway trick is how modern games CREATE MORAL AMBIGUITY and DEMONSTRATE ARTISTIC SENSIBILITY, you see), but with Kane and Lynch you don't get that. You just get two mangy, aggressive **** and a great big mess for them to stumble through, and I like that. There is something fundamentally honest about that even if it isn't "pleasant".

The gameplay is competent and tight and the aesthetics are brilliantly executed but I still can't shake the feeling that it represents the confusion on someone's part of fatalism with art. Go ahead and ignore me though, I felt pretty much the exact same way about Watchmen (the comic).

Better than Fallout 3. Fallout 3 delivers a fairly conventional gameplay experience with a fairly conventional story delivered in the way which has been traditional for video games (IE, mostly linear narrative juxtaposed with gameplay). It is a solid game, but it is pretty much just a game. New Vegas does a much better job of delivering a WORLD, which in turn makes it a better example **** insofar as gaming as a medium is concerned. It does things that could not be done in other mediums. It also holds considerably more charm and less wangst, which helped it along quite a ways with me.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]