Xorse

An old style platform game with very old fashioned game play hidden behind lush modern visuals, which often hinder rather than help you. Mario is clear, concise and bright. Giana sisters is dark and grim when in the evil/half world and quick switching between this and the light world can (with the over detailed backgrounds) make missing important details, such as spikes, all too easy. Everything kills you in one hit, enemies, spikes, getting trapped in a closing door... everything, Mario always had his mushroom from his first solo outing and the Sisters could do with a few of these as they are no where near as nimble as our modern day plumber. If you like out of date game mechanics, where you feel you have played through it all too many times in previously played platform games, masked over by impressive(albeit often grim) visuals with a gimmick or two thrown in for good measure then this may be the game you have been waiting for. If not then don't get tempted...

I've played through two versions of this on the xbox and its follow up on the 360. This version has some issues that were not in the original. It pauses to load in the middle of fights which did not happen before and should not happen now, fighting the enemies is hard enough... fighting the loading as well is a real **** This also causes enemies to re-spawn as soon as they are defeated in areas where their spawn point is close to a loading point... The new touch additions are a pain in the ass rather than an enhancement, its easy to touch the screen by accident as the left thumb-stick is too close to it resulting in a first person view when you least want it. The right thumb-stick also hinders the buttons above it so I never used the guillotine throw during this play-through. They may have removed a save point prior to the fight with Alma in the cathedral, I could be wrong but I don't remember such an awful trek back to this difficult fight when I lost in the older versions? There are now more life bar boosts than the game will allow the use of which is poor... The final chapter has always been frustrating but I thought when you got out of the volcano in the original that, should you lose the final fight, it would restart you at the fight rather than at the bottom of the bloody volcano, again I might be wrong. Either way you would not play through this chapter if it were near the start, you would turn the game off and trade it in for as little as a £1. To top this off once completed it just throws you back to the title screen after the credits have rolled with no final save, so you can't go through it again with all your gear etc... WHY!!! A very bad port **** game, a bit of modern TLC could have made a big difference... instead the conversion team who got hold of this have taken a butchers cleaver to it and hacked it up. Probably the same guys who made Ninja Gaiden 3!