Starts off fun but difficulty and awful platforming increases to the point of rage-quitting frustration (this is on easiest difficulty). The awful platforming might be tolerable if the checkpoints had any respect for the player's time. Attention game developers: when a player selects "easy" the game should be easy! Good for about 5 hours but I can't recommend it after that. The game does have great art and style, however.
10/10: Excellent and fun game. No spoiler review: practically every element of this game is fun: exploring, the physics puzzles (and I usually dislike game puzzles), shooting, climbing, etc. If you like Uncharted but find it clunky you will love Tomb Raider because the gameplay is fun. The visuals and sound design are also excellent. There are many memorable moments of gameplay--the kind that make we want to replay a game every few years, like I do with the Mass Effect series. The only downsides: the story could have been better and some of the voice acting is flat (but they have few lines).
Summary: 7/10, Good but not great. No spoilers review: My enjoyment of this game followed a straight line from 10/10 down to about a 3/10 by the end. The first hour or so should not be missed by any gamer. It's all downhill from there until gameplay is just a chore to endure to continue the story. There is also an unforgivable difficulty spike (yes, on easy) in the last portions. Music was excellent but the sound design had several extremely irritating elements and poor volume mixing that had me constantly muting. Visuals are mixed: most are excellent while others such as the characters are not up to par with recent games. The voice acting by the main characters was generally overshadowed by the lesser characters (Elizabeth being particularly bland--it's a bad sign when a non-talking mechanical bird is more interesting than a main character). My recommendation: play the first half, watch the rest on a video website for the story and visuals.
Killzone 3 is a huge improvement over Killzone 2. The controls feels pretty good, the graphics are amazing, and the overall shooting is great. It is a non-stop action extravaganza (with a stealth section as well). The only bad part is that the characters and story are just too generic to care about. It is embarrassing the way the developers fail basic Storytelling 101 principles (such as having characters like the female soldier who is never introduced beyond her name). If you were to combine this engine and action pieces with something like Mass Effect then you would have a perfect shooter. As for the multiplayer, I'm not interested but apparently it is now free-to-play so that is another option. Summary: highly recommended for shooter fans.
Good: An incredibly detailed, realistic urban world for the player to explore. Driving and car chases can be fun. Bad: GTA IV has a terrible (at times unplayable) framerate on the Xbox 360 (I've read the PS3 version is even worse). It also has one of the worst gameplay cameras I've come across (it constantly autocenters itself, making for a very unpleasant--even nauseating--experience.) The lack of checkpoints in missions is a big middle finger to the player from the developer. The cutscenes are drawn out and overacted, with uninteresting dialogue. Summary: an outstanding *world* but a mediocre *game*.
A great adventure movie but a terrible "game". The aspects of Uncharted 2 that have nothing to do with gameplay are so good that I withstood 7 hours of pure gameplay misery to see them to completion. I once read a gaming article that said if your game in prototype form is not fun to just walk around, then your game is not going to be fun. The gamer-avatar connection in Uncharted 2, as with Uncharted 1, is simply broken. The movement system (both on foot and on walls) is imprecise, sluggish, and unpredictable. It causes me mental pain to play this game because your avatar, Drake, will not do what you want. It's the same sort of mental pain when you write with your non-dominant hand. This is not a function of games in general, because I re-played some Mass Effect 2 to see if I was crazy, and it felt incredibly responsive, precise, and predictable. Guess what I'm doing for Uncharted 3? I'll watch a video of it. I will get all the good parts with none of the misery. What are the good parts? Anything that is unrelated to gameplay: the one-liner writing, art assets (some of the best texturing I've ever seen), lighting, vistas, sense of adventure, outstanding music, etc. I will never buy another Naughty Dog (the developer) game without renting it first.
Dragon's Dogma is one of my "must have" games. My recommendation is to try the demo, but don't just mash the buttons like I did at first. The controller button scheme seems weird at first but it becomes second nature after a while and is actually well designed. If you're not impressed by the demo, you probably won't like the main game. Dragon's Dogma has an elusive "fun factor" than many games lack (e.g., Skyrim for me is fun to explore but not fun to play). There is a great sense of adventure and the world is very memorable. Combat is highly satisfying and the giant creature battles are intense. It can be more difficult than average games but it doesn't feel frustrating as with Demon's Souls (e.g., you can save your game except during combat). The art, game animation (i.e. character/creature movements), and music are all excellent. The story is somewhat minimalist and leaves some things to your imagination but it works well here. Despite my great enjoyment, there are some annoyances with this game. To me they are tolerable but they seem fixable in any potential sequel(s). My biggest complaint? After 70 hours (I play slowly) to finish, I wanted more! Not more sidequests, but more of the world, more dungeons, continued story, more combat styles, more monsters, etc. This is not a complaint but a huge compliment to the game.
Crysis 2 is a graphical wonder but the gameplay gets repetitive. Technically speaking, this game is one of the best. Image quality (it uses some form of anti-aliasing) is outstanding. Lighting and shadows are very impressive. But the game itself is good but not great. The cloak ability doesn't last long enough, making sneaking too tedious (sneak 20 feet, wait, sneak, wait, etc.) Enemies are bullet sponges which is not fun. Some enemies have armor plating and there are so many sparks and particle effects flying that I don't even know if my bullets are doing damage. The story is generic and the dialogue is earplug-worthy (and it can't be skipped). Weapons feel rather bland (although they look great--notice a trend here?). I bought this because Far Cry (same developer) is one of my favorite games. That was a game with good gameplay to match its visuals. Crysis 2, by comparison, falls short. Visuals: 10/10, Overall: 8/10.
Skyrim is overrated. It's a good game but it is essentially Oblivion with a new coat of paint. The good parts are the world and the exploration. I have spent many hours just looking at the landscapes. Arguably, you could get your money's worth doing just that. The actual gameplay, however, is the same tired formula from Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3. Obviously many people enjoy this but I'm about 2/3 finished with the main quest and have no desire to finish. There are simply too many fundamental gameplay design decisions that make the game not fun. The combat is not fun. Moving around in the world is not fun (the player's "hit box" collision model gets stuck on tiny geometry bumps). The potions are not fun. The inventory is not fun. Picking up hundreds of tiny objects (e.g., coins) in the game world with an Xbox controller's crosshair is not fun. The plot is generic and the dialogue ranges from mediocre to terrible, and is uniformly spoken too slowly. The first King/Jarl you meet sounds like he's on painkillers. The cutscenes (not cutscenes per se as they all happen while you play) are laughably bad as well. I think the Skyrim team needs some new designers to inject some new ideas into their otherwise capable hands. As a game it is mediocre but as a world to explore it is one of the best. 8/10.
I must be strange because I enjoyed all 3 Mass Effect games nearly equally. If you like 1 and 2 you should like 3 as well. What's good about it? The writing, the characters, the universe, the graphics, the music & sound, the action, etc. It's not perfect, but no game is perfect. For the uninformed reader, the reason there are so many highly negative user reviews is because many people do not like the ending (no spoilers in my review). I enjoyed the ending spoiler-free and then read why people were upset and I can see their point. I can imagine other possible endings that would be equally good, but I like the official ending too. Taken as a whole, the game, if the Action-RPG genre and sci-fi setting interests you, is a 10/10.
Good: -The graphics are well done with a smooth frame rate (feels like 60fps, but not sure). -Some interesting track design. -Some people really like this style of punishing gameplay (example: Super Meat Boy, which I deemed "not fun" after 5 minutes). -The demo is a good sample of the full game. Try it first, but beware of the Bad points below: Bad: -I finished all the medium and below tracks in 2 to 3 hours. Not much replayability there. Professional reviews praise the abundant content but I disagree. On the other hand, it's only 15 dollars. -Tracks rated as Hard or Extreme are just exercises in tedious trial-and-error. When you finally pass an obstacle it feels like luck, not better skills. This is not fun. -User made tracks are mostly disappointing (lack of checkpoints) and/or rated for higher difficulty. -The music and voice effects are atrocious. -The track editor works but it requires so much time that average gamers might as well skip it entirely.
RF:G has flashes **** game buried under tedium. The destruction gimmick is technically and visually impressive but it doesn't make up for the game's basic design flaws. Such flaws include mandatory repeated traversal of a barren "open world", no fun way to get rid of your 'red alert' status (i.e. endless enemy harassment), new weapons are dribbled out way too slowly, you eventually have many destructive weapons but only 3 slots to carry them in (and limited ammo as well), and forcing the player to pick up little bits of the game's currency (salvage) (they should instead just be automatically added to your currency balance upon destruction of the object), etc. This game reminds me of Just Cause 2. It shares many of the same gameplay schemes as well as its flaws. But at today's prices you will get your money's worth. Just don't expect to finish it, unless you like tedium.
Try the demo for this game. It is a good taste of the full game. I was hooked by the demo. This game is a sandbox of destruction and mayhem. The story is zany in a good way (don't take it seriously). The gunplay thankfully has a little bit of aim-assist to help out (not sure if you can turn this off?) There are some frustrating sequences near the end (on normal difficulty) but the game is fun enough to keep trying. This game won't please everyone (try the demo) but if you like it, you can spend 30+ hours playing around. Annoyance: the never ending enemy reinforcements. The engine is top-tier. This game has a certain indefinable "fun factor" that kept me playing to completion.
-Excellent tech (animation, AI, renderer) and visual elements (textures, models). Music: excellent. Sound: some good & bad. Story: mediocre. Gameplay: somewhat bland and repetitive (there are some good sequences though). Difficulty: some very frustrating sequences in the latter half (even on "easy"). Your weapons are underpowered. The controls feel sluggish (probably due to perceptible input latency) and the cover system works but is too clunky. My campaign clocked at just under 8 hours. Includes multiplayer offline bots which is a bonus. Multiplayer: not played. I finished it only to see all the visuals--they are that good. This could have been a great single-player game with some needed changes. For its 2011 price, I'd call it a good value.
Uncharted is one of the few games I've played that does not match up to critics' review scores. Excellent: music, art, and tech, many extras crammed onto disc, some good gameplay sequences. Terrible: controls, cover mechanics, jumping mechanics, shooting mechanics, enemy behavior is too much like whack-a-mole, repetitive shooting scenarios, ridiculous difficulty even on easy, savegame checkpoints are extremely frustrating even on easy. The critically lauded story is the usual fluff and goes downhill later on. Overall, a good concept with some good elements but the whole experience is ruined by difficulty and frustration--so ruined that I registered for Metacritic to post this review. I usually play games at least twice but I have zero interest in replaying Uncharted:DF.
