DrFistington

First of all, thank god for Redbox, otherwise I would have wasted 60 bucks on this game. Here's my breakdown: Gameplay: 4/10 The controls feel a bit awkward, and you can't adjust the controller sensitivity. Also, when the character moves through the environment, it feels like he's programmed to essentially be a straight line perpendicular to the ground, and when you turn, it just changes the angle of the line. It makes for an odd experience and it always feels like you're anchored to the ground and slave to some strange set of non-newtonian physics. The combat is alright, the respawns are painful. Presentation: 3/10 You'll notice right out of the gate that the graphics for characters are noticably worse than the environments/effects, particularly when it comes to facial animations. It looks like they hired all the animators from Mass Effect Andromeda. Faces look low resolution and lifeless on most humans, although the alien characters seemed to look much better. The only reason the Empire soldiers look good is because they're wearing helmets. Also, this is a light saber combat game that doesn't include full limb dismemberment, which is pretty weak. Textures in general seem to be hit an miss, but many of them look like they are from the ps3 era. Story 2/10 So for a single player game with so much source material to work from, the writing/dialog/story for this game is a steaming turd sandwich. You start off as a scrapper working with your buddy on crashed imperial ships from a recent conflict, oh but you're also a padawan, which you may or may not have been aware of, and your friend may or may not have been your jedi master, but it doesn't matter because he dies about 40 minutes into the game right as your starting to like him. Then theres a sith lord who couldn't tell you were a Jedi at first, despite their entire reason for being involved in the story is to find/hunt jedi's. So you run from this sith lord and while walking on top of some super futuristic monorail made out of metal grates, a ship flies up next to you, a bug eyed black lady opens the landing ramps, says she's your friend and she'll help, then that ship flies off. You reach the predictable end of the train level just in time to have that ship come and save you from certain doom. At this point bug eyed black lady basically reads you the cliff notes for the first several chapters of the games story. She's a rebel leader, and you know each other or at least she knows you, although its not explained why you would be working as a scrapper when you have contacts in the rebel alliance and you're actively being hunted. A talented writer would have written multiple nuanced interactions and dialogues that could have slowly brought you up to speed while letting you identify with, and become attached to these new characters. A talented writer was nowhere near this project. In about 5 minutes of exposition, Cera, the rebel lady basically just dumps out all the bullet points of who you are and why your here, and she does so in a way that's pretty painful. It looks like the same approach to the scripts for recent star wars movies was utilized for this game, which means dialogue is painfully simplistic and lacking any nuance or subtlety. It was written so that it translates easily to chinese and languages from other countries where Disney is trying to establish the franchise, and as a result, it has the quality of a script written by 5 year olds. The 'professional' reviews for this game are full of **** This game, at best, is a 6/10 in its current state, and thats being pretty generous

As far as PS Vita games go, RocketBirds has a firm spot in the list of top 5 games to own. I'm not generally a huge fan of side scrollers, but Rocketbirds is an exceptional game. Its got fun gameplay, good graphics, great aesthetics, great soundtrack, and a surprisingly good plot. In fact some of the cut scenes are downright inspired. Maybe as a game across all platforms this title may rest at around the 7/10 level, but as far as PS Vita games are concerned this game is an easy 9/10. When you consider its a title that's only around 10 bucks on PSN, this game is a must have for vita owners who want to get the more bang for their cluck. Yeah. I went there.

I was able to pre-order the PC version of Mad Max for 27 dollars due to some deals that were going on. Normally being able to get that price on a game before its even released would have thrown up red flags for me, but there were hours of gameplay footage to look at, and I love the universe, so I decided I'd take the deal and I haven't regretted it one bit. I'll start by saying that many mainstream game reviewers have just completely gotten this game wrong, and honestly, I think that most of the reviewers barely even played the game, and instead were still pissed from the horrendous PC release of Batman Arkham Night that WB put out and used their mad max reviews as a way to grind their axe. This game is a solid 85% in my book, and may even make it up to 90% depending on how it plays out (I'm only about 15 hours in). There are a few annoying things like not being able to skip certain interaction sequences, and sometimes the game play can be a bit repetitive, but overall, I think this is a fantastic game that does exactly what it sets out to do; Let you play as Mad Max driving a badass car through the wasteland. I found the hand to hand combat to be quite satisfying, and every time it starts to get a little stale, I'll unlock some new combat abilities that breath fresh life into it. I also think that the vehicle combat is entertaining as well, although it would be nice if they had polecats and motorcycles, but hey, they could add it with some DLC. I love the customization that's available for your vehicle, and between the variety of different chassis and archetypes/upgrade paths to choose from, I actually see a lot more replay-ability from this game than I initially thought there would be. Plus, the cars have a great feel to them, and if for some reason you don't quite like the way things handle, then you can tweak pretty much any aspect of your car to suit it more towards your liking. The audio in the game is top notch, and I've actually come to like Chumbucket after a while. He'll occasionally utter some fairly funny lines when he's left alone. The graphics in this game are also top notch. I'm not sure exactly what they did under the hood with the game engine, but this game runs beautifully on max settings at 60-100fps even on my GTX670, which is a solid mid-range card. If it weren't for the impending fallout 4 release, I think that this game could actually put up a decent fight for single player GOTY. With the average amount of time to complete the game at 50-60 hours, this is probably one of the largest and longest games you'll be able to play that's based of a major motion picture. Even at full retail price of 60 dollars, I'd still say this game was worth it, but for a 27 dollar pre-order this game was the best purchase I've made all year.

I'll try to be short and sweet with my review. I'll start by saying that this is a game that will not win any GOTY awards, however it's not nearly the train wreck that some people have made it out to be. Also I've heard alot of complaints on how easy the game is. Set the difficulty at hardened or greater and you should get a good challenge. Audio 9 Overall the game has great audio, well done and authentic sounds from the movies . Graphics- 7 I'd say that the graphics on this game are average to good for this console generation, that being said on PC, it would be nice to really be able to max everything, although the PC graphics are better than the console versions. Story-4 Well, they tried, unfortunately trying doesn't guarantee success. With some professional writers and a bit more thought and time they could have made a very compelling story, but they didn't Replayability-9 Ok, so the single player campaign isn't the best, and if this were a single player only game, that would warrant a 3 out of 10. But there is also a multiplayer element to this game that I find very entertaining and addictive(although the marines seem a bit more overpowered than the aliens, but it could be because my alien toon is low level. If they continue to develop multiplayer maps and features, then this game could turn out rather well. Let's be honest, no one is buying COD black ops for the single player, and if they did, they would be pretty disappointed. I would compare aliens CM to COD Black ops in that respect. Sure the single player is mediocre at best, but the multiplayer can pick up the slack.