Gene

It's a great looking and solid action game but it's too shallow to have any staying power. The enemies look impressive, but there's little variation in how to take any of them down. Circle strafe and pump full of bullets. Are are weapons and abilities to unlock, but everything feels kind of samey and doesn't really open up new tactical approaches. The lack of well defined classes and too fast a pace to be tactical kind of sinks this. My friends and I did a few rounds and decided to go back to Killing Floor and Mass Effect 3 multiplayer.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I'll leave the moaning to others, here are the basics: Running, dodging, and hugging a wall are all handled by the spacebar, which means if you try running from an enemy close to a wall, you are just as likely to crouch behind it and have your face eaten, combat is way more twitchy and less tactical than either of the two previous games. Quick time events with no prompts, I went through half the game before realizing that those overlong death animations are actually quicktime events where I had to mash the F key. Story was very solid, I loved it up until the just before the end, and then was massively enraged. The writers spent way too much effort making s*** epic and mystical, and as a long time fan I felt robbed, although I don't think new players will feel effected. I just wanted an end to a war 5 years in the making and finding out what happened to all my friends, the loopy nonesense they gave for an ending just completely broke the flow of the entire series.

This game is all sorts of average I'm not surprised it's getting such good professional reviews as average is the new 8. If you saw the trailer and had this really uneasy feeling that you're watching an MMO, that's about what the game looks and plays, a single player MMO complete with kill 10 rats and fedex quests. The combat is merely competent, it feels like the designers went for the God Of War aesthetic, got it just good enough, and stopped polishing it further. Throw in a crash to desktop every few hours, but not regular enough to really make one hate it, and I just have nothing good or bad to say, just meh.

If you want a fantasy Total War game do not buy this. The combat is anemic and simply not fun. Most of the nuance that made TW great is completely missing, No morale, routs, or fatigue. In stead you get anemic battles of attrition and "puzzle maps" where you have to slog your way through capture point to capture point. This is a puzzle based RTS with a turn based campaign map. I found myself auto-skipping most combats, but once in a while the game finds some lame story based battle that I can't skip. The game thinks I need to see this, I beg to differ. The campaign is sort of fun, but considering that I got this game with the intention of doing the battles, I just don't see the rest of the package being worth the money.

Imagine a taking the only worthwhile aspect of Spore - The Creature Creator - and then removing it. Or, imagine taking Diablo II, removing the creative level design and giving each playable character only 3 skills. Yes, you can unlock tons of different creatures to play as in the game, but their looks and skills are locked, all you can do is add superficial changes like extra horns and twigs, which may or may not increase certain stats but add nothing to the core gameplay. Also the level design tends to be boring, uninspired, and it just doesn't have any tile variation or details that will make one level of the jungle planet look any different from the next level. I'm giving the game a 5 because it executed the basics with competence, but as a game it's just not that memorable **** experience.

The story is solid and enjoyable and some of the combat is very memorable. I'm docking this DLC for all it's glitches. AI Hacking and Dominate is glitchy as hell. Most of the time dominated enemies will either keep attacking you or freeze up until it wears off. Also in early parts of the level some DLC weapons lose their reticles and fire from somewhere above Shepherd's head.

The single player campaign is short and crappy. Team members are only good for blocking you as you're trying to run away from a grenade, the battlefield are pretty small and you soak up more aggro than the rest of the group, so moving around is more danger than it's worth, while enemies flank you from all sides because dumbass team members are useless at holding the line. Not commenting on the Multiplayer yet, but the design is so worthless that Pump Action shotguns, the whole point of which is to be able to interrupt the lengthy reload and fire shots in between slugs so that you're not too vulnerable... well, when that reload animation starts, you have to load every single slug before you can fire. I swear none of the people involved in the game made an FPS before.

The game's a bit of a rushed mess. I don't mind the streamlined combat, inventory, or even the cookie cutter locations, but at the end the story just breaks down under it's own weight. Character motivations make no sense, both factions are so unlikeable that it's hard to really choose who to go with, and to top it off it makes absolutely no difference who you side with anyway since you're just going up against waves of lunatics on both sides the whole time.

This is a Tycoon game, plain and simple, think Theme Park, replace the theme park with a dungeon and the guests with heroes you need to keep entertained. Nice thing is that you get your own avatar, and as the campaign progresses can dump points into 3 different skill trees, one to improve avatar combat, one to improve survivabiility, and one to improve the dungeon. Game does become a tad repetitive when you get the perfect layout and hit the faceroll stage, but that's the case with all Tycoon games. PPL have complained about micromanagement, but it hasn't been an issue, complainers were probably expecting Dungeon Keeper where you could fall asleep after initial dungeon setup and wake up to a victory screen.

Buggy POS. This game is very much in the habit of reverting quicksaves and autosaves to the first one you ever make. So let's say you get 4 hours into the game and then crash or restart, guess what? Next time you run the game you lose 4 hours of playtime and start at the beginning. Invisible walls are everywhere, can't hike up a hill without running into one. Also enemies have a habit of of spawning inside walls and crashing the game. There may be some improvements over Fallout 3 in there, but I wouldn't know as I've been replaying the same 4 hours of game over the past 8 hours.

As far as a linear movie game goes, it's great. Good controls, challenging but not frustrating combat, but it's not the game I was expecting when I bought it. This release seems to be formulated entirely to sell DLC. On the one hand there's a large, detailed open world, on the other hand there's absolutely nothing to do in it outside of the 6-10 hours of story missions. The only real reason to rob stores or scrap/export stolen cars is for the steam achievements. The story missions provide you with everything you need from the get-go. Lo and behold, it turns out that 2K Czech has a ton of completed sandbox content they simply chose not to release with the box copy. You'll be buying it in DLC format at $10 a pop. If you're after a sandbox wait a year and buy the bundle with DLC for half the price.

Feels like a huge step backwards. The only major gameplay effecting problem is that match creation is overly simplified. For example, you can no longer tweak weapon damage/blast radii, you can't create games where worms are locked in place, and team sizes are locked at 4. The other issues are all UI, I have a suspicion it was meant for the Ipad version, and for the most part doesn't give enough useful info. The game was built for a touch screen and is really only capable of doing one thing at a time, getting all the information you need at once is downright impossible. Another problem is that these worms have worst animations and the least charm I've seen in a recent offering. Also, only the classic voice packs are any good, The all new ones kind of ****. It's still a worms game though, and this new offering seems to be pretty upgradeable, so it's up to Team 17 to offer some post-release support.