MrMayge

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I was at my friend's house, all bored, when I decided to pick some random game from his shelf and give it a shot. I looked over the small library, and picked one with a logo that is legendary in the FPS genre; 007. I play the first mission and am hooked, and don't stop until I've beaten the campaign. I don't understand why it's so good until after the first mission, when the opening credits roll. I see that Treyarch was behind it. Now it makes sense why the game is so fun. And now, the review: The campaign is great. Combining the tense combat of Call of Duty with the cover systems found in Breach or GRAW. The story is nice, though it skips a bit in some places. The missions never feel too short or too tedious. Stealth isn't usually necessary, but it will usually make your mission easier. Silenced weapons and headshots, crouch-walking, melee takedowns, and not being directly spotted by camera or human are the rules of stealth. The ending isn't completely satisfying, but it's decent and leaves you feeling like you did, in fact, complete a full game. The multiplayer is so much fun, and I feel that it combines the best of the classic FPS "Goldeneye" (God bless it), and the modern FPS we love and won't shut up about (I'm looking at you, Black Ops), to create one, stellar multiplayer experience. Think I'm exaggerating? In most games, I get killed and yell some obscene thing I am going to do to the enemy's pet turtle and throw my controller (in my head, at least). In this game, after a 10 deathstreak, I feel great after one kill, enough to say "Idiot" every time. This, like Goldeneye, has that effect on people; no matter how good or bad you are, you can still find something fun and 007-class awesome to do.

I've always wanted to try a space simulator, but Darkstar One: Broken Alliance might have turned me off from simulators forever. The plot goes like this: your father has been murdered by a mysterious criminal, but on the bright side he left you a kick-@$$ ship that can be upgraded with alien artifacts. You must hunt down the vile murderer and bring him to justice, but first you must collect enough credits to get to a star system with information. From there, you go around collecting credits by killing pirates, pirating for yourself, smuggling, or escorting cargo ships between systems. The missions are pretty much all the same within their respective types. The game tells you it has "Over 300 star systems to explore!" That's half true; it does have over 300 star systems, but since about 250 of them consist of little more than a trade station, a planet decal (or picture), and some random debris, that's not saying a whole lot. Space battles are fun usually, once you get the controls. The ship's a little slow and the default weapon sounds like a Star Wars reject, but otherwise it's fun. I got this game for $5, and I don't think I'd pay a whole lot more for it, but I can't say it's a bad space simulator...just that space is really boring.

Team Fortress was a Quake mod that became wildly popular throughout the PC gaming community. Valve saw this as an opportunity and released Team Fortress 2. There are nine different classes you can choose from, from the stealthy spy, who sneaks up using disguises and invisibility and delivers devastating blows from behind, to the subtle-as-a-brick heavy, who, with his miniguns and sandvich in hand can deliver a world of pain and delicious-ness on the field. The classes are all perfectly balanced and have strengths and weaknesses that make sure that your class reflects only your playstyle. There are also dozens of weapons and even more hats to further customize your individual classes. Major updates give out free items to players, players can buy them from an in-game store for real-world money, or they can trade other players for items. They can also get items for earning Steam achievements, or from "crafting" items together to make a better item. The gameplay is great, and it never feels frustrating like some other games do. You can get into the console if you're an admin and do all sorts of crazy stuff in your game, at the price of not being able to get achievements and stats tracked. All updates are free, and you never have to pay for "map packs" or "expansions". It's also loads of fun to be part of the TF2 community. Every event has a cool new hat or accessory for your character to show that you were there. Some games on Steam offer hats and weapons with pre-order, like Portal's companion cube pin. I could talk about Team Fortress 2 for hours, but Metacritic will only give me 5,000 characters and I'm lazy, so I'll just say that Team Fortress 2 is one of the best values out there (at $10 on PC as of this review), and an even better value when bought as part of the Orange Box. There's just so much you get besides the already amazing gameplay.

Let me just say that, looking at this website, it's refreshing to not see a bunch of posers who only play the newest and most advertised games hating on every other game, and finally hating on a new, advertised game. That said, this is one game I don't mind people getting rabies over. While there are a dozen or so other games I'd like to play, including one or two in the CoD series itself. The campaign is nice, though you don't learn much about the characters. Basically, the Russians have created a super-deadly bio-chemical weapon and you have to remember how to stop it's activation. It starts in an interrogation room, where you're told to try and remember what a cryptic set of numbers mean. The missions, which, speaking story-wise, are flashbacks, should take you about 15-25 minutes to complete, of which there are about 15 missions. The plot is good, with a few big twists, most of which seemed to come out of nowhere, but make you say, "What? Oh. Oh, yeah! I get it!". The zombies mode is back, with two built in maps, a mansion and the pentagon. Just as fun and addictive as ever. But as with any first-person shooter, the multiplayer is what everyone (but me) buys the game for. There are several great maps, including my favorite: a close quarters map called "Nuketown". The gamemodes include the classics like team deathmatch and a new kind of game mode called wager. In wager, you bet your currency points (called CoD points) that you'll come in the top three ranking players in the game. I don't like the wagering in this mode so much (you could win four times as much easily in a regular match without risking losing a couple), but I love the game modes, like "One in the chamber," where everyone has one bullet, and if they miss, they're forced to knife their way to victory. Every kill grants you another bullet, and it's a nice twist to regular first person shooter attitude which is, "Screw the ammo, SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT!" All together, Black Ops is a great game, and fans of the series or genre should definitely add this to their respective collections.

Alien Swarm, for those who don't know, is a free game on (the mighty and honorable) Valve's game engine, Steam. It's very, very similar to Valve's zombie-apocalypse-shooter, Left 4 Dead; there are regular alien bugs, that the game refers to as "Swarm", just as Left 4 Dead refers to the generic zombies you mow down as "Common Infected". There are also several kinds of more powerful swarm, like shield-bugs, which can take a near infinite amount of punishment from the front, and still ridiculous amounts from the back, like L4D's "Tanks". The game plays like a dream, once you customize the controls to your preferences. Playing by yourself with bots is fun, but you don't accomplish all the things you do online, like new levels and weapons. There is only one set of missions to play through, though there is a free map editor for the game, which requires many tutorials and walkthroughs to use. The game online is one of the most fun co-op experiences I've ever had. My friends and I play the campaign straight through some nights! I would reccomend this game to anyone who can afford ****, yeah, and it's free.

First and foremost, let me say that this review is based on how good the game is, not how annoying the hype was built around it (which wan't that annoying). Halo revolutionized the first-person shooter genre (especially on consoles), and the series continues to add new and interesting mechanics to the game. The campaign is great, with characters you actually care about, incredibly smart (enemy) AI, and a mission or two that make you say, "I just did WHAT?!", Call of Duty style. The true gem in the game, like many first-person shooters, is the multiplayer. New game modes like Invasion shake things up, with one team attacking control points and the other defending, while the game modes we all loved from the past games are back, like grifball. The Forge is back, and better than ever. It's easier to use, and the game comes pre-loaded with the map Forge World, which has several relatively empty places to build from scratch. People, including me, like to complain about a lot of little things in this game, which prevented it from getting a perfect 10. Some of the ones I agree with: "The magnum still ****!", and "What the hell are skirmishers?!" All together, Reach is a great game with an incredible (and incredibly customizable) multiplayer experience, and it makes you wonder where the gaming industry would be if Reach didn't fall.

Breach is a game that combines the "pure fun/crap graphics" attitude of Counter Strike and the taking-cover ability of a Tom Clancy title. Early players will likely get frustrated with the game, and that's how we get the negative reviews on this site. Some people will finally jump that hurtle and discover that Breach is an awesome multiplayer game with interesting, though not original, mechanics. The massive destructibility the ads talked about is possible, but only RPGs, grenades, or about 1,500 rounds from any weapon will destroy anything useful. One major problem I've had with this game is that you have to play it at select times on select days, because otherwise there will be 5 games running, 3 of them will be empty, 1 will be glitched beyond repair, and 1 will be working. Overall, Breach is a straight-up fun game, but if you're obsessed with graphics, or aren't willing to put in any effort in becoming better at a game, all I can say is that this game is not for **** that ****. I definitely reccomend this to anyone who likes pure multiplayer expirences, who have $15.