chicagopoetry

I'm probably not that far into the game. I'm only in Lincoln High School trying to fight the first big boss. I can tell this game is going to be one I'll probably finish but already I know it's not the TEN everyone keeps raving about. OK, I'm into the main two characters, I feel the emotional bond growing, that's cool. But the zombie fighting is just frustrating and unrewarding. I finally have a shotgun and thank goodness because the pistols barely even stun anything and your lead pipes break after about eight hits. OK, since when does a lead pipe break precisely after eight hits? It's a lead pipe for crying out loud. You can slam it against concrete a million times and it wouldn't break. And you can't aim your weapons worth crap. This guy, for twenty years, has been surviving the zombie apocalypse and he still can't aim a stupid rifle, waving it all over the place as crazed zombies straight out of 28 Days Later come rushing at him? Really? And even with the shotgun, which you don't need to aim precisely, what does that help when five of them are rushing at you from all angles? So you fight, you die, you start over, you die, you start over, you die, and so forth until you are finally lucky enough to pick them all off not by any real strategy mind you, just because you got a little lucky. The scavenging is pretty boring. The workbenches are so far and few in-between it's pathetic. The crawling through hallways, climbing up ladders, running across planks gets old pretty quickly. And everything is so dark. You have to use your flashlight at least half the time and that actually gets a bit nauseating as if your swirling around on a carnival ride. So, although the graphics are way cool, and the characters are likeable, and the plot is engaging even if it's derivative, there's just too much senseless wandering around, searching for the limited scavenger items available, and extremely frustrating battles with things that will tear your neck out while you're trying to reload your stupid gun or switch guns which takes like ten seconds or heal which takes several seconds and the controls are so complicated it's extremely difficult to remember what buttons you are suppose to be pressing while a swarm of crazed zombies are rushing at you from all sides. This game is good but it does have a lot of flaws.

Fallout 3 was sitting on my shelve for years. The first time I tried to play it I got so bored in the vault that I never even made it out. Recently I've been having trouble finding a good game to play because I've played just about everything already so I decided to give Fallout 3 another shot. Once I got out of the vault it started to get better and I thought it was going to be great. But now I'm into it maybe ten or twelve hours and it is just so boring. There is this great big world out there but nothing to do in it. The first person shooting is just horrible (how cool would this game be if you got to blast your way through the world on your way to your quest points). I get killed over and over until I get lucky and escape with a couple of health bars left--whoopee. I can't find anything of any real value to sell so I have no money to stock up on anything. I have to drink out of toilets to get my health back because I can't even afford stimpacks. I can't find a larger backpack so I can't even pick up more loot once my pack is full which happens pretty quickly. Everything gets broken and it costs more to repair it than the item is even worth. The missions are just dreadful. I've been playing for hours trying to deliver a stupid letter going here and then going there and here and there having to save every five seconds in case I get killed, having to talk to boring, stiff, monotonous characters with no personality. When I kill some creature it's not exciting it's just a relief because now I can continue walking, and walking, and walking. If it wasn't for online walkthrough advice I wouldn't even have gotten this far. I mean, who would have thought that to find the "family" you had to go into that certain building, then into that certain room, then into that certain passageway, then through that certain tunnel, then backtrack to go the other way, then bride someone, then oh come on already I'm just trying to deliver a stupid letter!!

I'm about halfway through Tomb Raider (already, after sitting with it for just a few hours just three times) and I have to tell you, it is boring as all heck. First of all there is way too much combat. Tomb Raider is suppose to be an exploration game with some gunplay on the side; it's not suppose to be a shooter. Also, the gameplay is very linear and every five minutes there's another cutscene. You never really get to relax and explore the world because you're always on a mission to advance the story, and quite frankly I have no idea what that story is. Lara is on an island with a bunch of bad guys trying to kill her for no apparent reason while her lost friends are communicating with her by radio telling her to go here, go there, do this, do that, so that's what she does. I have no idea what the map even means either. Also, if you do not have a fairly large HDTV don't even attempt to play this game; all the text is tiny and blurry and you will have to stop the game and look up every upgrade on the internet to find out what the tiny little blurry letters say. I did manage to finally hook it up to a decent TV and admittedly the graphic are cool but looking around is very choppy and limited so even though it looks realistic it's not a realistic experience. And even on the HDTV it was boring because every five minutes I was in another shooting match with another army of men who wanted to kill me for who knows what reason. And if you die in one of these battles which you are likely to do because you are after all one girl against an army of men throwing dynamite at you and shooting machine guns at you, you'll have to start the entire battle all over again. YAWN. I kept asking myself when do I get to climb a pyramid for a couple of hours and actually RAID A TOMB? You explore for at the most five minutes before you find yourself in another long drawn out gun battle or sliding down some collapsing debris ala Uncharted, forced to push a series of buttons in a certain order just to get through another segment of the linear gameplay. YAWN. And yes, I understand that this is a prequel and Lara isn't the woman yet that she is in the other games, but come on, enough with the annoying whining and crying. For someone who can slaughter armies of men and go around shooting helpless animals for money and loot (huh?) Lara sure is a bit of a crybaby All in all I'm very disappointed with Tomb Raider. I was really looking forward to enjoying playing a traditional Tomb Raider game except with more awesome graphics but instead got a really bad Uncharted rip off. I've played all three Uncharted games and there was nary a dull moment in any of them. I'm only halfway through Tomb Raider and I'm starting to wonder if it's even worth finishing it. I mean I already know what's going to happen next. She's going to climb some more ropes, scale some more walls, kill more men who are rushing at her like maniacs, nearly reach one of her friends before whatever she's standing on collapses making the hour it took to get there completely pointless, and repeat.

What is with this installment of Sly Cooper? It's as if it's been made for a six year old child. I admit I'm only barely into it but I'm already considering trading it in because I can't see me spending too many more hours being held by the hand through a series of absurdly simplistic and boring missions only to end in a crazy, monotonous, suddenly completely difficult boss battle. It really shows that **** Punch was not involved this time around. There are way too many cut scenes and all the enemies are completely stupid with no AI whatsoever. If you aren't standing directly in the yellow circle caused by the lamp they are holding they don't know you're there even if you're jumping up and down smashing things making all sorts of noise. I hope this gets better and I can come back here and edit this review with some more favorable comments, but having played the previous three installments with much enjoyment, I'm really sensing a dud here.

I am having a love / hate relationship with Borderlands 2. On one hand, I'm enjoying it enough to continue playing it after three weeks already, and I'm only about half way through, but on the other hand, all too often I'm finding that playing it is more of a chore than it is fun. Yes, it's great that there are so many varieties of weapons and shields but, well, there are so many that it's a bit mind boggling to sift through it all. Mostly I just pick up everything I find and then sell most of it all off at the next ammo dump. And the mission are so long, so very very long, that it takes upwards of three to five hours just to get from point A to point B in a side mission, that is if you want to waste the enemies instead of just trying to charge your way through them. When you finally complete the quest, it doesn't feel rewarding, instead it's just a relief that the mission is finally over. There are other nuisances such as picking up items that will change the look of your automobile that hog your backpack space when who cares what your stupid automobile looks like; that's such a minor part of the game anyway. No matter what others say, don't believe them otherwise: this is a really hard game to get through solo. If you're not playing with friends online, you will repeatedly find yourself outnumbered in frantic episodes of insanity during which you don't even know what's shooting at you and you will die again and again, and each time you die it's going to cost you some of that loot that you spent hours picking up. With all of this combined I found myself all too often just wishing the mission I was on was over already so I could get on to something else, and the problem is you can't skip the side missions, that's impossible, if you do you won't be leveled up enough to play the main storyline. Yet, on the other hand, with all of this frustration going against it, I'm still coming back to it and playing it because it at least has it's good moments, unlike Dead Island, and the visuals along with the humor is just enough to keep things going by a hair.