Nuka-World adds a vast, new and elaborate landscape to Fallout 4 with lots to do and explore. Unfortunately, it's story is poorly integrated into the main game. Players are, in effect, pushed into becoming the warlord from a Mad Max movie and then muscling in on the Commonwealth in the main game. That's fine if you were looking to play the game as a bad guy but it is extremely problematic if you weren't. While it is technically possible to play Nuka-World as a good guy it is not easy because there is no obvious way to do it. The options appear to only be a) bad guy, b) really mean bad guy or c) not quite so mean but still bad guy. For players trying to enjoy more adventure in a Fallout game but not interested in being an evil Warlord completing Nuka-World's quests and missions is kind of a problem.
At first glance it is hard to tell what exactly differentiates Gears of War from other military shooter action games. It's kind of hard to tell at second glance too. I mean, it's got the standard gruff, grizzled heroes who probably gargle with Drano to deepen their voices, involved in the standard gritty, pumped-up action that takes place in the standard wrecked grey-brown rubbled environments that you'd see in at least a dozen other series. By all rights, it ought to be too boringly familiar. And yet it *is* better than most of the others. Maybe its the fact that -- even for a game of its vintage -- the animations and textures are superbly done. Or maybe its the fact that the gameplay, especially in co-op mode, is fast, fluid and fun. Or maybe it is that writing and voice acting are top-notch, making the player really engrossed in the characters' stories. They even got Futurama's Bender to voice the main character, Marcus Fenix (Not that you'd notice, the actor sounds completely different in this). Or maybe it is that the characters' main weapon is a rifle that doubles as a chainsaw and that you can use it to tear the bad guys right in half. Come to think of it, it's probably the chainsaw.
Call of Duty II is exactly as advertised: a straightforward World War II adventure where you play soldiers in some of the major battlefields of the war: Stalingrad, the north Africa campaign and the European front. In each case, you are a regular grunt seeing and participating at the ground level. On the plus side, the game does a good job of recreating the fronts and the kind of fighting the soldiers would have experienced. The game smartly uses the loading screens to provide brief historical notes to give the various sections context. The gameplay is fast and exciting but the game smartly pulls back from glorifying it too much, emphasizing instead the danger and chaos of frontline combat. On the minus side, the game uses regenerating health and continually respawning enemies. It seriously detracts from the realism when the player can get shot in the head without dying and then heal completely by hiding behind a tree for a few seconds. Having endless waves of the exact same enemies appear until you move on to the next point on the compass doesn't help either. The game's other feature is that the player controls Allied different soldiers in different fronts. It is a nice mechanic that allows for a panoramic view of the war but it also makes the game less immersive. Rather than play the same character throughout the game, you Quantum Leap from one to another, never staying with one long enough to feel really invested in their efforts. So, overall a good game, entertaining and respectful towards history, but not great either.
Rage was a major disappointment. It starts off promisingly as essentially Fallout 3 but with racing and therefore even closer to the Mad Max films. Sounds awesome, right? And the designers clearly put some major work into this. The graphics and animations are top-notch: This is literally one of best-looking games ever produced for the Xbox 360. The voice acting is outstanding as well, with John Goodman playing one of the key roles. But Rage just never **** me in like the Fallout games did. Partly it was because the game has no leveling up system, so there's little sense of progress or accomplishment as you play it. Partly it was because the missions were mostly standard kill or fetch quests, without much thought or imagination. Partly it was because the storyline was blah. Partly it was because of the game forces you to do various road race mini-games as part of quests rather than allowing other ways to advance. I'm not good at driving games in the first place and the controls for this one were hard as hell to learn so I was forced to replay the races endlessly before I finally got through them. The final straw though was when I started one mission, fought through an extremely tough group of bad guys to get to the destination only for a screen to pop up and inform me that I now had to buy downloadable content in order to progress. I had purchased a three-disc "Game of the Year" version so I had naively assumed that all that stuff had been included. Not so, apparently. Well, screw it, I thought. Why bother for a game that become a chore to play?
Video games that are intended as tie-ins to major Hollywood films have a deserved reputation for being shoddy. They're produced with limited budgets under tight deadlines by people ultimately more concerned with having the maximum possible publicity for their film than with creating a worthwhile game. Captain America: Super Soldier is the rare case where the end result somehow manages to rise above this. It is not a great game but it is a damn good one: A fun, exciting chance to play Cap pummeling **** during behind enemy lines World War II mission. The game design and storyline both do a really good job of evoking both the film and the comics. Actor Chris Evans lends his voice as Cap and for true nerds there are some nice callbacks to the comics. A section where you escape from an underground prison is especially well done. Where it really shines is in the combat system. The designers gave Cap an acrobatic melee fighting style that is easy to learn and a blast to watch on screen. After playing a while, you'll be stringing together elaborate combos that allow Cap to take out entire rooms full of **** -- often with crushing finishing blows. Trust me, this *never* gets old. The game has a nicely balanced difficulty curve to keep it challenging too. As many others have noted, the combat system, ahem, "borrows" heavily from the Batman Arkham games, but, hey, if you're gonna steal... The game does have its flaws. It can be repetitive at times and the designers stocked it with a ridiculous amount of items to scavenge for. It just seems out of character for Cap to take a break from trying to sabotage **** plans so he can root around looking for golden eggs. But these are minor quibbles. Give the designers credit: They clearly put some serious effort into doing right by Captain America and producing a game they could actually be proud of.
If Roger Corman produced video games instead of low-budget "B" movies he would have probably come up with something like Jurassic: The Hunted. It is a game that is every bit as derivative and obvious as the name implies. And like Corman, the game designers clearly cut corners wherever they could: There's only a handful of different dinosaur types in this, for example. And yet, also like a Roger Corman flick, it still manages to deliver the goods often enough that you don't feel cheated by the experience. I mean, it is a first-person shooter where you fight off dinosaurs on a tropical island and that part of the game works. The writing and voice acting are some of the worst I have ever seen but it is so bad that it actually crosses over the line into being a hoot. On the other hand, the game really could have used a quick save function, so I'm docking it one point just for that. The bottom line: It is the video game equivalent of a drive-through fast food burger. If you can find this in the bargain bin, it is worth your time.
I wanted to enjoy this game. I really, really did. I absolutely love film noir flicks and hard-boiled detective novels, so a game inspired by them was right up my alley, I thought. Play a tough cop in post-World War II Los Angeles solving mysteries? Sign me up! But dear god was this game frustrating to play. Eventually I just had to give it up. The central mechanic in solving mysteries -- a mini-game of reading non-player characters' reactions during interviews and interrogations to determine if they are lying -- just doesn't work. The game's supposedly innovative animation just cannot mimic a real-life person's face accurately enough to make this possible and so trying to "read" the animations is endlessly frustrating. Similarly, the mechanic to find "clues" -- making the controller vibrate when the player gets close to them -- is actually less realistic than the usual video game method of highlighting objects the player can interact with so they stand out from the backgrounds. At least then you do have to pay attention and look around. Couple all that with the clunkiest, least intuitive driving system I have ever played and the game's insistence that you continually use it and you have a perfect recipe for aggravation, not enjoyment. It really undermines the immersiveness too. It's hard to view the game's protagonist as the stalwart law enforcement officer the designers want you to see him as when you cannot travel anywhere without him repeatedly smashing into other cars or running over pedestrians. It's a shame too because the designers clearly put a lot of work into re-creating the L.A. of the 1940s and genuinely tried to create something new and unique that would stretch the boundaries for future video games. But it just doesn't work.
Alice is a challenging game in both the good and bad senses of the word. The bad part is that it can be very frustrating at times, at least on the first play-through. Even on the easiest difficulty setting the game can be brutally hard at times and the lack of a quicksave function -- why do designers do this? -- eliminates any margin for error. You're likely to throw your controller down and curse more than once. But if you stick with it, Alice is a genuinely rewarding experience. It is a visually stunning and continually imaginative adventure (seriously, it's breath-taking at times) that somehow manages to both stay true to author Lewis Carroll's vision and be a kick-ass shooter at the same time. And once you beat it the first time, you unlock a variety of options that make it even more fun. Yeah, presenting a dark, grim version of a classic literary fairy tale wasn't exactly innovative when Tim Burton first started doing it -- or for that matter, when Terry Gilliam was doing it -- but it still suits the materiel. And the game's take on Alice is actually a really compelling heroine. She's not an over-sexualized fantasy object. She's not a cutesy moppet. She's not a walking feminist lecture either. She's just a tough, plucky kid in a (literally) insane world. A kid who gets get to smash things with giant hammer.
About a decade after it was released, Fallout 3 is still one of the most fun, immersive video games ever produced -- a terrific blend of role-playing games, open world adventures and first-person shooters in a beautifully-realized post-apocalyptic setting. It is easy to get the hang of and incredibly addicting once you do. There's a pretty compelling main storyline but as in the best open world games, you can also just explore and generally **** around without incurring any penalty if you'd rather do that. The gameplay mechanics, especially the "VATS" combat system, are fun and the writing and voice acting are solid. There's all manner of amusing, eccentric characters to meet and several fearsome badguys to fight. You gotta love that wacky, old-time music on the radio too. The Washington, DC setting is a great part of it. It allows for some truly stunning visuals as you explore the national mall and this apparently sparked some really clever writing in the storylines as well. As a resident of the D.C. metro area, I have a particular love for it. Holding off hordes of badguys is especially fun when you realize you are literally standing in your own backyard. Including a cool DLC adventure set in what was obviously inspired by Maryland's eastern shore, where I used to live, is just the icing on the cake. There are some downsides. The graphics are still good but the animation sometimes shows its age and odd glitches happen periodically. While the game's DC wasteland is appropriately stark and eerie for a post-apocalyptic world, the fact that pretty much everywhere in the game uses the same desaturated grey-green color palette does wear on you after a while. And while the game starts off pretty challenging, it gets progressively easier as your character levels up and develops a fearsome arsenal of weapons and high-tech armor, ultimately draining some of the fun. Still, this is an essential part of any gamer's library.
When I first learned of this game I thought, "Ok, so it's Fallout 3, only set in Las Vegas. It's probably interesting the first time you have a shootout in a casino, but the novelty of that has got to wear off pretty quickly." I couldn't possibly have been more wrong. Fallout: New Vegas is hands down one of the best games I have ever played. It includes everything that was cool about Fallout 3 -- A great role-playing system, terrific gameplay mechanics, an enormous open world to explore and plenty of amusing characters to meet and bad guys to fight. Plus, you can get four DLC add-ons, each of which is a cool game unto themselves. What it adds is one of the cleverest, most immersive storyline systems you'll find. Plenty of games have "moral choice" systems that alter the main storylines as you play it based on what you do, but Fallout: New Vegas includes four completely different main storylines, each of which can be completed in several different ways. There's also a "reputation" system that tracks how your character's actions affect their relations with the various different human survivor factions and settlements in the game -- and many of those groups are hostile to certain other groups. So doing a favor for one will likely make some others antagonistic. That in turn affects the options in the various storylines. The result is that the game can be VASTLY different every time you play it -- not just different cut scenes but whole main sections playing out in entirely different ways. I've played through numerous times and it has never once gotten dull. The PC version is best. There's a huge a modding community for this game, meaning whatever adaption or change you'd think might be fun to see in the game is probably already available for free.
The Pros 1- The graphics and animations are more detailed and realistic. The framerate is higher and the definition better. It was based on the Skyrim engine -- and it shows. 2- The game is less glitchy than previous entries and operates a lot smoother. There are fewer load screens, for example. 3- The combat system is much improved thanks to the new slo-mo version of VATS, the additions of a sprint function, a gun melee option and a grenade hotkey. 4- The expanded weapon crafting system is fun. Gradually improving your arsenal and customizing it to your preferences by rebuilding them is nifty innovation. Being able to name weapons is a nice add-on. 5- The player can now romance companions. It is awfully chaste, but you can romance multiple ones including same-sex characters. Cons 1- The graphics, while better, lack the proper "feel." The game resembles Skyrim more than it does a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It just isn't stark & desolate enough. 2- The game is less immersive. The new stats and leveling up systems give the player fewer ways to customize their character. The removal of the karma system means player actions have less weight. Giving the player character one bland, generic voice no matter what race you choose for them doesn't help either. The player also doesn't know what exactly their character will say when they choose dialogue options, resulting in unintentional results at times. 3- The storyline is problematic. Unlike in the earlier games the player character starts off with an extremely urgent goal, namely finding their kidnapped newborn child. This runs counter to the inevitable sidequest sidetracking the game imposes, inadvertently making the player feel like a **** negligent parent every time they return to the main quest. 4- The removal of weapons & (most) armor degradation is a mistake. It may have clashed with the new, expanded crafting system, but taking it out removes one of the key challenges to playing the game and one of its most immersive elements. The fact that the designers did include it for power armor only highlights the issue. 5- Many of the weapons look ugly. The designs are presumably intentionally meant to look clunky and purely functional as opposed to sleek and cool, but why is there nothing like a simple AR-15 or pump-action 12 gauge shotgun in the game? 6- The new Pip-Boy system is actually less user-friendly. The layout is more cluttered and less intuitive, making it harder to navigate. 7- Boston just doesn't provide as interesting of a setting as DC or Las Vegas. DC emphasized the game's politics, history and satire as well as providing some stunningly iconic visuals. Las Vegas allowed for a riot of different themes -- the wild west, rat pack-era Vegas, the Mafia and Elvis. Boston has baseball, the colonial-era history and ... that is pretty much it.
