Hovis

S'alright I suppose. Problems lie in the fact that it isn't challenging. Once you figure it out, and it does not take long to figure it out, you're done. And you're done every difficulty, every new game. Power creep and an overly streamlined strategic layer have knackered it. Still kind of fun to blow stuff up though.

There are so many problems with this game that it's not even funny. The story is so bad it's good, there are parts of the levels that are so unpolished it's embarrassing and there's too much time shooting other humans rather than hunting bugs. As a single player game, it's a dead loss. If you stop to examine it, it's really stupid on many levels. BUT If you want an Aliens game, as a Marine, no Predators around, you and your mates shooting aliens for about seven hours, it's okay. I mean it's not brilliant but it's a fun, reasonably challenging cooperative shooter and there aren't many of those around for the PC. I enjoyed the coop campaign in ACM more than I enjoyed my first play-through of Left 4 Dead or the Syndicate coop missions and it had a much smoother process to set it up than the latter. It's a long way from polished but I think it offers something that is all too rare on PC, a solid coop first person shooter experience. I got seven hours out of it, which isn't much for a full price game, but they were seven good hours, so I don't think it's that bad. Wouldn't recommend getting it except on sale though really. But just to reiterate, it's only saving feature is the coop, it does that well enough to be worth a dip into a bargain bin.

I'm rating this a zero not because this game is literally the worst thing that it is possible for a game to be, but because it has absolutely no value. It's a nothing game. The turn based combat is horrendous. Really poor. Ugly. Poor controls. Poor system. Simplistic and boring. The co-op is non-existent, you don't play the real campaign, you play a couple of the crappy combat missions, this is a monstrously cynical ploy in itself. The main campaign is brutally simple and while it looks nice in parts it suffers from loads of really lazy elements, such as gangsters just running around to do jobs, the completely passive enemies, and the staggeringly small size of the maps. Really there is just nothing to this game to justify the price or anybody's time. Frankly I feel cheated by it.

Personally I think that Skyrim is the best game ever made. Nothing else has created even a fraction of the depth and texture in the game world. I'm forty hours into it now and still not really feeling like I've so much as scratched the surface. It's just so damn good and so damn deep and there's so much of it, it's just mind blowing to play. I've never played anything like it. It is a staggering work of art, a masterpiece, a feat of game design that is utterly unmatched, in my opinion. One day somebody will make a game better than this. But at this moment, I don't think anybody has.

This wouldn't have been a brilliant game if it had come out five years ago, let alone now. Looks dated and dodgy, plays very poorly with slow, unresponsive units and a primitive interface. Even though it's a niche game and offers the reasonably rare selling point of letting you build and run a castle it does it so badly that even if I was jonesing for a castle building game I'd still give it a miss. Really disappointed.

Some potential game-breaking tech issues aside (USB headset users beware) this is a cheeky little masterpiece. To call it old school or retro I think does it something of disservice, it's actually more original than that. Renegade Ops takes the old classics, then takes them to a modern level with co-op, persistent characters and tremendous graphics. The camera angle is familiar maybe, and the style of zooming round a large map taking care of different objectives is very Desert Strike (if you can remember that far back) but it's much more intense than any of the old Strike series, reminiscent of maybe an Ikari Warriors or Mercs style shooter. Of course it's a simple as a two piece jigsaw puzzle, get car, blow stuff up, but it's challenging and immense fun with it. It's a great example of a really fun game based on a really simple idea that is executed with care and attention to detail. Plus it's cheap like the budgie. I'm not giving it a ten because I think it's the best thing I ever played, but because I can't recommend it more highly. It's definitely worth a go.

Really poor. I mean it's an Unreal engine shooter, so it kind of technically works, but it's just really lacking in character or originality and without any sense of place or context. I was expecting a kind of more modern build of Killing Floor or something of that type, but while Killing Floor has loads of rough edges it at least has charm. The experience of The Haunted just feels empty and perfunctory. Shooting stuff that makes no sense, that comes out of nowhere, for no reason.

Wow. I thought that, with this being a Men of War game, it would be building on the solid gameplay of Assault Squad and improving on it. Big Mistake. It's really, really bad. Interface is retrofitted back to the same one as in the earlier games, and frankly who ever thought that dense canopy jungle makes for a good setting for an isometric RTS game needs to lay off the drugs. You can't see what you're doing, you can't do much when you can see, and the missions and multiplayer options are very week. Frankly, given how big a step down it is from Assault Squad, I feel a bit robbed.

There's a lot of butthurt about Dragon Age 2. Lot of nerds wanting to crunch stats, spank and tank and grind for gear. It's not that sort of RPG and, like Mass Effect 2, it is all the better for it. It's a story, one that you have a huge part to play in telling, rather than just watching it unfold, you make choices and pick sides and shape the world. Meantime you stab up a bunch of people and get frisky with a pirate wench, among others. It's not perfect, the combat animations don't fit the tone of the game too well for example, but beyond that it's a masterpiece, far superior to the original.