VelocityGamer

A popular trend in the media right now is taking old franchises and either give them a reboot or remake. Now some of these are well done, but others fall flat. I can say with certainty that not only does Tomb Raider fall into the former category, but it is one of the best games I have played so far in 2013. When I first played the original Tomb Raider at my cousin’s house in 1996, I was introduced to Lara Croft and really enjoyed it in more ways than one. Then she was a buxom superstar who was an expert in her field, basically a female Indiana Jones. However over time, she became less and less popular and her games were just not the same. So like all things that were once popular, she called for a reboot and not just any kind of reboot, a gritty reboot. People now more than ever don’t want superstar heroes, they want a hero who has to face an overwhelming amount of odds. Gritty Reboots are the most popular form of reboots, just look at how many movies and games have been receiving the gritty reboot recently, examples include DmC, The Amazing Spider-Man, and even the upcoming Man of Steel. The new Tomb Raider does go full on gritty, but it does so in an amazing fashion. The Tomb Raider stars a young Lara Croft who is part of an expedition to search for the lost civilization of Yamatai. However things go wrong as a storm causes their boat to sink and strand Lara and her group on a mysterious island that holds many secrets. Lara is quickly captured by a mysterious man as she approached her fellow survivors. She then wakes up in some sort of ritual chamber, suspended upside down next to a few skeletons. She is able to escape and soon she is forced to make her way through the island both discovering its secrets and also trying to find a way save her fellow expedition mates and get off the island. Oh boy does Lara suffer, in this game. Throughout the game she receives her fair share of **** and bruises. The player roots for Lara, as she is just an ordinary woman thrust into extraordinary circumstances. As she learns to adapt an survive, she grows from this naive reluctant woman, into this badass heroine who kicks all kinds of ass. Not only is the story of this Lara amazing, the character development in this game is amazing as well. While the story and character development are well done, so is the gameplay. The controls for this game are simple and intuitive. One of the flaws of the original games was that the controls were quite clunky and multiple times I would find myself fighting the camera angles. Not once in this rendition of Tomb Raider did I find myself fighting with the camera, as it oriented itself quite well as I ran through the various platform sections. Oh boy did I love the platforming in this game. Most of the sections are well done and surprisingly on the more cinematic sections, I wouldn’t even realize I should be moving as I thought it was all part of a cutscene. I liked the good mix of omg I’m running for my life and ok where do I go next. Another well done aspect of this game is the combat system. Being an archer myself it is cool to see Lara trade in her former trademark pistols for a bow and arrow. Lara in this game fights her various enemies, be they man, wild, or other, with a bow, pistol, shotgun, machine gun or ice axe. The different environments and amazingly well done cover system lend to many dynamic fights. Let me tell you about the amazing visuals! Man oh man, were they breathtaking. I was playing on the 360, but I could only imagine them being absolutely stunning on the PC. The environments this game presents are simply jaw dropping. The grand shots establish a sense of grandeur about the island and the small up close shots convey a sense of claustrophobia as Lara struggles to get through the nooks and crannies of a dark dank cavern. As stated earlier the tombs were some of the best parts of this game. Not only was i excited to solve the mysterious of each one, but I was also excited by the prospects of what they would look like. Not once in this game was I disappointed in the visuals and was always excited to see the new environments. Overall I recommend this game for any fan **** adventure game. After this massive success, I look forward to this new Lara and her upcoming adventures.

You would be hard-pressed to find a game more inoffensive than Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Mirror of Fate. Mirror of Fate’s plot occasionally threatens to be interesting. The otherwise tepid dialogue is delivered pretty well, and the game does mess with the established Castlevania lore in a mildly interesting way as you might expect, since this yarn takes place in the rebooted Lords of Shadow universe. Yes, the Belmont family tree has been messed with a little. Trevor is now the direct descendant of Gabriel, and Simon is Trevor’s son. Also, Dracula and his progeny are significant characters, because Alucard was in the best Castlevania game. If none of that means anything to you, then maybe the attempts at pathos won’t really hit their mark. The game seems to assume you already care about these people and their plight. I had a passing knowledge of the existing mythos, so I did kind of appreciate the new twist on Alucard’s character and what it meant for the Belmonts. To be honest, I might have preferred actual emotional investment to mere appreciation, but the reality of Mirror of Fate isn’t too disappointing. It’s a nice looking game, in all fairness. About half of the cutscenes are rendered in a gorgeous cel-shaded style that really should be seen with the 3D slider cranked as high as your eyes will allow. The framerate is a bit dicey at times, but the environments are well crafted, and each part of Dracula’s castle feels new enough, preventing confusion when it comes time to explore or backtrack. Everything is well designed, especially the various monsters you will probably just start bypassing after a while. Yes, after about 5 or so hours in, I started trying to skip the combat whenever possible. Mirror of Fate is a fairly simple brawler. You have two basic attacks; a straightforward slash and 180 degree whip. If you feel like mixing it up, sometimes you can throw a projectile. Killing monsters unlock combos, but said combos usually just consist of pressing the same button more than once. Dodging/blocking is mapped to the left shoulder button, which is a delight if you’re playing on a regular-sized 3DS unit with the hands you would find on a slightly large 18 year old guy. Not only is the combat incredibly shallow, but using combos screws you over every so often. I kept unintentionally triggering an upward spin attack that usually resulted in my character taking an attack from an enemy waiting directly below. Apparently, if you jump right after pressing the ‘Y’ button, you’re stuck in that animation. I had to repeat many a boss fight because of that combo. To be fair, blowing through standard encounters has a satisfying weight to it, but when things get too complicated, it was just smarter to avoid fighting. In between fighting, there are puzzles and platforming sections to deal with. The puzzles are kind of clever, but if you’re playing a Castlevania game to break up your Calculus homework like I did, you probably don’t feel like using your brain any more than you just did. Each large-scale puzzle has a dead soldier nearby with a hint system you can take advantage of. Stuck? You can activate a hint, but it will lower the amount of XP you earn from completing the puzzle. Activate every hint, though, and you can just click a button to solve the puzzle. I’ve never seen this in a game before. The option to just skip a difficult section is brilliant, and I wish every game had this. It would have come in handy when it was time for platforming. Sadly, the characters are too floaty and their jumps too imprecise. Frequent deaths be they a result of hazards or misjudged leaps are but a certainty. Even after everything I’ve said, I still find it necessary to emphasize there was something about Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Mirror of Fate that kept me playing…up to a point. I wasn’t going to beat my head against a certain Trevor Belmont section with mine carts and fire, but if the game had just one more significant issue, I would’ve stopped far earlier. And vice versa. Improve on a single design aspect and my hour count would’ve been slightly longer. Mirror of Fate is a game right on the cusp: a perfectly serviceable entertainment. If you expected more than just a passable 2D action platformer, I’m sorry to disappoint.

How did Sleeping Dogs turn out the way it did? A cancelled True Crime game with gameplay elements borrowed from everything should be terrible, not one of the best open-world games ever made. The polish on display was kind of blinding. So when I saw the Nightmare in North Point DLC on sale over the holiday, I had to jump on it. Not to get ahead of myself, but the quality of this DLC convinced me to purchase another $5′s worth as an excuse to keep playing. Quit making entertaining stuff, United Front! If the content on offer is any indication, the idea behind the Sleeping Dogs campaign DLC seems to be fun tongue-in-cheek homages; specifically to 70s~80s Asian film genres that bled into the public consciousness of the West. Based on the various names I got while saving, Nightmare in North Point seems to be paying tribute to Big Trouble in Little China. Maybe there’s a movie about the Jiang Shi that I never saw, but the general tone of North Point matches up well with John Carpenter’s delightfully silly masterpiece. An undead Sun On Yee member, freshly escaped from Hell along with a ton of demons, has kidnapped one of Wei Shen’s one-off girlfriends. Shen does not approve, so you must send the hordes back where they came from if you ever want to get…whatever it was you wanted from Not-Ping. (It’s been a while) To do this, you must traipse across Hong Kong and gather some odd ingredients for a demon-killing tea. It’s a silly concept, but if you can’t find any humor in throwing Chinese demon/vampires into vents head first, then Sleeping Dogs was never the game for you. Since Nightmare in North Point is an entirely different executable on the menu, the combat moves you may have unlocked during the campaign have disappeared. A few carry over you can break arms if you so desire but the basic set does its job well enough. Over the course of the DLC, you get some items back, along with a safehouse. But your arsenal never quite reaches the heights from the main game, so you may need to re-evaluate your tactics if you’ve grown too reliant on that amazing counter grapple move. As you’d expect from the name, you’re limited to exploring North Point. The rest of Hong Kong is blocked off, but you can run around the area killing Jiang Shi all you want once you’ve finished the campaign. Thankfully, all the Halloween in the world can’t dilute Sleeping Dogs’ potential for insanity. You can still grab a motorcycle and ramp it off a sports car while unrelated vehicles blow up for no reason, but now there are vampires. Maybe the developers should have given players more tools, because this DLC is actually kind of difficult. A basic group of Jiang Shi isn’t too hard to dispatch, but when you start talking about six knife-wielding gang members and ten Jiang Shi, then we’ve got a problem. These combat scenarios feel like they were plucked from the end of the core game, but in the campaign your arsenal is far more expansive. The repetitive ‘pick up monsters and bring them over to a prompt to stop them from spawning’ missions have a tendency to slow down the game a little, but it’s not that different from dragging gangsters to have their skulls bashed in with environmental kills. As long as I’m going over flaws, it’s worth noting that I’ve heard reports of buggy scripting at least in the PC version. Everything worked fine on the Xbox 360 copy I played, but if you like playing games on your computer, keep that in mind. I must be frank here: Nightmare in North Point is more Sleeping Dogs. There are kind of broken chases, magnificent combat, and everything else I detailed in my original review. As an excuse to mess around in this world again, you could do far worse than a genuinely fun piece of DLC. But for those of you who are looking for something more than standard open-world missions with a coat of paint worth a few chuckles, maybe you should look elsewhere. ****/sleeping-dogs-nightmare-in-north-point-dlc-review/

Ni No Kuni has some faults, but its visual display, its actual child like sincerity, and unexpected quirks have a firm grip on my unexpecting heart. It’s a world where children can save the world, not everything necessarily needs to be stated, and magic is not only powerful but visually beautiful. Following the usual rounds of the hero’s path we find a young boy named Oliver sitting in small city America acting all cute and adorable to everyone in town. He’ll pick up food for his mother, help his best friend mess around with strange secret contraptions in the hopes of achieving some simple childhood dream, and will find ways to not tell lies while still doing things he probably shouldn’t. Disaster strikes, Oliver almost dies, and his mother saves him at the cost of her own life. Oliver finds himself alone, miserable, close to broken hearted when his best friend Mr. Drippy a doll) is suddenly brought to life and exclaims that Oliver is a wizard. Only the pure hearted could have undone the curse that Mr. Drippy was apparently entrapped in, then asks Oliver to enter his world to hopefully save everyone because he is now the chosen one.”Ollie-boy” is then sent on a journey, a journey that if the cards are played right will save Mr. Drippy’s friends and hopefully save Oliver’s mother with magic to spare. With wand in hand Oliver casts a magic spell to enter a world filled with wonder and whimsy. The world of Ni No Kuni. Before I started my magical adventure I decided I would need an army or a really good team. With “Ken Grify Jr.“ in hand along with “Hulk“ I began scouring the Kingdom of Ding Dong Dell for any items or monsters that could help me attain my perfect magician destiny. Sadly I lacked the ability to capture any monster I fought, but a lemur was given to me before I entered the first dungeon… I decided to call him “Wesley Snipes”. So with Ken, Wes, and Hulk in hand I set about saving the world. Ding Dong Dell’s King, a delightfully over sized cat has sadly been cursed in a similar fashion to Mr. Drippy, he has become “broken hearted” as in a piece of his heart has been stolen by the great Dark Djinn Shadar. Ollie-boy whips out his wand with spell book in hand and does a quick spell to take the overabundance of heart in one of the kings subjects to repair the damage done to his holy meow-ness. The king then stands up immediately and decrees he has a gift for Oliver a wand, which was the reason as to why we came here to begin with) but will need to fight the Mouse King in order to obtain it. This is a game that was made for children, we are just lucky enough to enjoy the ride. The more complicated tones of any modern RPG have been confusing us all for years. We can never truly understand why any of it is going on or why it is that everyone is talking about lightness, darkness, or their overabundance of weird crystals. Ni No Kuni I think chose to skip all of that nonsense and decided to focus more on making sure that the game itself actually works. We travel the world, watch Ollie-boy heal some hearts, play a few fun hands of platoon, face some great evil that is harming the land, then hope everything will turn out alright for Oliver and his new found friends. While I wish some of these more subtle details had been further explained or stated because I guarantee they have them written down somewhere it is not a game breaker when compared to how much in this game Level 5 managed to do right. Ni No Kuni is an actual world filled with hilarious characters, memorable quests, and actual moments of excitement. Perhaps Studio Ghibli next time around should be given control over the story along with the animation, but none the less Ni No Kuni is the best Modern Day JRPG. For the full review check us out at : ****/ni-no-kuni-review-a-sincere-heart/

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