matroycem

The concept of hole in the wall is simple. Your on a platform, moving towards a wall with a hole in it that you need to get into the correct shape to pass through. Sounds simple?? It would be if the Kinect would actually get your shape. Also you have to be in the correct spot on the floor. This would be fine if you had a huge playing space but it just does not work. The concept would be good but in reality the game is just broken. You honestly cannot get through any walls let alone a levels worth. Hopefully the new Kinect may actually allow this to be playable (Oh wait the old Arcade games do not transfer.... FAIL)

This review is a fair bit late and is based on when the game was released and not by todays standards. However **** could do with a HD reboot to make it damn near perfect this is the one. Okay the basic plot: You play a member of the First Encounter Assault Recon unit (Sounds rubbish but spells FEAR which is the point) and you are sent in to a building to capture an escaped lunatic. Not all is what it seems and it all gets very grim! Through the game you encounter many different enemies which do have a good range and also work very differenly on how you have to approach them. The AI is a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes the enemies will try to flank you and this makes it a good challenge. Other times they can just stand there and its a bit annoying (This was a very early game on the console and at the time the AI was pretty good). Even today this is not terrible and is certainly playable. The graphics are also dated by today's standards but then again they don't improve with time on a disc do they!. The punch this game has though comes through design. Some moments are very well staged and atmospheric and actually had me tense. I found the game absorbing and taxing in a good manner and the game time flew by. I would honestly say this is a must play game even due to its age. Today you will need to look past its age but it still feels better than alot of the current crop of titles. This game would be right at the top with just a few tweeks in areas listed but unfortunately the developers never really moved forward enough with the sequels (Hopefully some other developer will get the rights to publish a HD version and will nail it) The campaign is around 6 8 hours long and multiplayer wise was pretty good at the time of release. Think you would find it hard to find players online today. I really enjoyed this game and have recommended it several times and got good feedback from it. Shame that the franchise has kind of died because it has not had financial support of some of the big players.

This is a very hard game to review. I have nothing Bad to say about the game but nothing good either. Having played the older version of this game and then having played the new version I can't say that the games felt overly different. Criterion have improved the handling models of the cars and the cars themselves look pretty good and accurate (The damage models are also pretty realistic). The issue I have is that the game is in no way gripping. All the cars have almost exactly the same events attached to them which get very repetitive. during the Most Wanted take downs the cars would drive into walls or down dead ends making it at times simple to take them out. AI card can drive over spike strips with no damage to tyres. I did not notice an onscreen clock which meant you could not predict day/night cycles and the camera angles are awful. they only allow you two options and neither are good. The behind car angle felt sloppy and you did not have an in car angle only a front bumper angle. It just **** out the life of the game a bit. I will not say this game is unplayable and not worth a look into if you like racers in a similar vein (Split/Second, Blur, NFS Hot Pursuit etc) but as an arcade racer it just did not have enough to get my attention or enough to keep the enjoyment up.

I love formula 1. I have played Codemasters Simulations for the last three years and after playing F1 Race Stars they really should just stick to that. Karting game classics like Mario Kart and to some extent Sega All Stars Racing have nothing to worry about here. The level design and even the characatured are lovely to look at and have been designed well. However the handling and the weapons in the game really are awful. The game has tried to keep the F1 car handling and this does not work in Karting. You do not have the ability to drift the car. This may not sound bad but the tracks are winding and tight and often you have to break heavily into a corner. This is fine in a simulation game but in a arcade kart racer this is just useless. On the higher speed modes the cars are impossible to drive and then throwing in weapons means even the best drivers can almost never win. It's just a random mess and luck plays such a huge part. I thought that the game was going to make arcade versions of the classic tracks from F1 with the same general layouts, this would have been fun as it would have been familiar and also unique but the tracks just do not make any sense in this way. There is no real difference between the teams you can choose to drive either apart from a few unique weapons. These often feel unbalanced as some teams have very useful weapons such as added slipstream boost or firing homing weapons backwards, while some teams have really pointless specials which seem to do nothing apart from allow you to ram opponents. This bring me onto another issue. The contact with other racers causes no end of issues. The amount of time I kept being slowed down as the cars kept sticking together. In other games the karts are pushed apart and the fast car often come out on top. On this game it's random and often both cars almost stop. Generally the collision detection is stupid. At one point I pushed a car off the track only to find the game respawned them IN FRONT OF ME! What is that about. They should have been a good few seconds behind me. Obviously if I fall off the track I loose loads of time but the game does not seem to make the same rules. I also felt the game gave too much boost to players towards the back of he running. I had almost a half lap lead on one race and within a lap they had actually caught and certain me. Just didn't seem right. I wanted this game to do something half decent, but it was so avoid of anything absorbing that I felt frustrated and could not play anymore. Give this a miss and get Sega All Stars Racing Transformed instead. That game is much better and best karting game on Xbox. Not quite up there with Mario Kart Double Dash but a really good effort.

Not My Scene. Football to me is about tactics and team work. With Fifa Street this was just not an option. I understand this game is not built like that but it still did not play like 5 a Side games i play regularly. The mechanics and controls of the game were good and very easy to pick up. Performing skills was fine but I just did not find it enjoyable to play. I only really liked the normal match mode rather than the Panna (skin your opponent) or Freestyle (Perform skill moves) modes. I found these tedious and a real slog. I did not really get the character progression system. You can earn stupid amounts of skill points in game with a player and still only get the same level growth if you score a few goals. It just seemed unbalanced. This game really fell apart during multiplayer. Many times my opponents just ran back to their goal and trying to get past when they were just ringing the goal was pathetic. I am sure if you like this game you will love it but I would play the demo first. There is nothing WRONG with the game. Graphically its okay and the mechanics good, however I just was not engrossed and found playing it difficult to motivate myself to do. Its a shame when I love Fifa as much as I do.

I have to admit that I am not the target audience. I must be 20 years too old! This was purely a purchase for the EASY 1000 gamerpoints on offer. For this though it was not all that terrible. Its an arcade style game kind of like doing the half pipe in a Tony Hawks game. You sweep up a wave, perform a stunt get some points and boost and continue. It is mixed up by having to get collectibles through some of the maps but this is easy as whatever you have picked up on previous run throughs is not present on retry attempts so its very easy to get. I would be unsure if kids would really get that much out of the game. It is very one dimensional and I personally do not thing that this would give more than a few hours before kids got bored. Graphically its not all that great and the AI is terrible (Again possibly as its a kids game) This would be a purchase for me only if cheap and if you are looking to boost you gamer score.

I picked this game up on the cheap as I was not expecting very much from it. But to its credit this is actually a pretty decent game. It has a large vibrant world with a fair bit going on. Nice sub missions and variety of vechicles, but the main surprise was the Story. I expected when I first started the game that the story would be terrible but its not half bad. Yes it is not very believeable and really plays mainly to make the games Unique Selling Point work but it does work. The Storys USP is that you can jump freely between cars. So in a car chase you can jump from a car that you crash to another and keep on the chase. alternatively if you have to bring a car down, you can jump to oncoming traffic and ram it. Sounds odd and to begin with it can be, however after a while it just feels okay and you just get on with it. You earn a kind of XP for completing tasks and sub missions etc and can buy cars and boosters. I found the multiplyer mods the best as it can triple what XP you get and thus give you more extras later on. they dont really need to be opened though as the game is completable anyway. The voice acting in the game is fine and some of the random conversations are pretty funny. Honestly I would not suggest buying this for more than say £10 to £15 but if you want something light and to cause some automotive carnage this can be alot of fun.

I have only played this recently and that may be a small part of the poor score. It looks dated but to be fair was not bad at all graphically. I thought that the car handling was solid enough and felt responsive. The main gripe I had was with the Career Mode. It uses the same tracks and cars and setups repeatedly and it just got really tiresome having to play through to the end. After a while you get some much money you can buy the best car and then just blitz races without any care. The AI of the opponents is not up to much and they just follow in a procession until the end of the race. I found the game a real slog and could not motivate myself to fully complete it. I ended up having to play it over several months. Having a quick blast then leaving it when it started to get boring. A game should be a joy to play and unfortunately this wasn't. It has a good game in there but its so hard to enjoy it.

This review in a word AWFUL Okay so Halo fans are likely to love this game but it really is nothing new. there is no new ground covered in this game and it simply feels like a cash in. The Game is a side story to the plot of Halo 3. This time instead of being the Master Chief you are a band of UNSC soldiers who crash and lose one another. The game is then about finding one another. Often you end a story arch by finding something of a team mates at the end of the level. Then you switch to that person and play their story. the thing is that I did not care. I never felt any form of bond with the characters or really care what they are going through. There was just nothing that made me feel this was worthy of a retail release. If this had been an expansion of Halo 3 it may just have been passable. Bungie just feel lazy. They have the same enemies in the same linear environments where you walk from A to B and then back to A. I breezed through the game on Legendary mainly due to indestructible team mates (AI) who are unbelievably good on turrets. I kept seeing my team mate run into a horde of Elites and be battered to hell and still be there 5 minutes later taking the beating. It was incredible and not in a good way. If you are a fan of the series then you will play this for that reason. If you are not that much of a fan and really still want to look at it then get it VERY VERY cheap else you will feel ripped off.

Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns of the Patriots is very much into its own self importance. This does not really feel like a game but more an interactive movie. Out of the 22 hours to complete the game, I only spent 7 hours actually moving. I know this because at the end of the game there are stats of how long you spend prone, crouching and walking etc. The action in the game is very much what Metal Gear fans like with the classic formula still intact. Its just a shame that these are broken up by LONG video sequences that CANNOT be skipped. One scene i had to watch two or three times at 20 minutes each because I died. It was just painful. There is one really genius moment which fans of the original will spot and hopefully enjoy as much as I did. I cannot say this game is bad because it wasn't. But the story really took over what is meant to be a game. At times I began to really switch off to the story just because it felt like my life was being **** away from the LONG LONG backwards and forwards conversations throughout the game. The serious serious fans of the series are likely to not have a bad word to say but if like me you just want to play a game then this just goes on for far to long. Playing only one third **** does not sound right does it? I had such hopes of this game and its the reason i brought a PS3, but it left me very disappointed.

Gear Of War Judgment is a prequel to the Gears Of War Trilogy. It explains the back story to the two main support characters from the main series. It is your typical Gears of War game and the mechanics are very much the same as what you experience in the other games. There are some nice new weapons to play with along with some new enemies (some of which I would have liked to have been in the other games). The main new feature that really made the game a joy to play were the Declassified missions. Basically when you play the game there are additional challenges you can activate to make the game more challenging. These vary from using certain weapons, harder enemies and reduced visibility but they do add another level to the game. The main campaign is a little short and does not really have any massive Stand Out moments but its solid enough with a decent enough plot. I liked the addition of the Aftermath mode which opens up a story that fills in the blanks from Gears of War 3. This game is nothing new and so will not bring any new players into the Franchise but will be a welcome addition to the original games. For this reason I cannot give it a truely high score even though it does not do anything bad. The game mechanics are all solid and the AI is decent enough. I did not understand why in Aftermath they seem to have removed the Declassified options as I did honestly miss them once I had played the main campaign through. I have not spent much time on the Multiplayer modes and so cannot really review with any depth but the modes are mainly ports from the other games.

WARNING BIAS REVIEW! this was probably the first game I played when i was young. Playing this on my Amiga 500 with the 4 Floppy Discs (Remember them?) and constantly having to change as you moved from area to area. I found the scripting and the humour to be subtle but charming and the characters to be well thought up. The game now available is still the same old game that you remember but they have taken a few bits from the later series and put them into the new. The voice actors from the third game (Curse of monkey Island i think) has been brought in to voice the characters and they have given the game a new lick of paint. You can however change this back to the original with the push of a button. Point and click games are back with this and games such as 'The Walking Dead'. this is not quite where it all began but it is the most successful of the early breed of Point and Click adventures and what really gave the new modern games the audience they have today. Play this and tell me if you don't want to go Insult Sword Fighting... How Appropriate, you fight like a cow.

Another great game from Rockstar. Red Dead Redemption is the first Western game to really make it work. The Open world setting is varied and rich and filled with nice little side quests and things to search out. The game has a fairly strong AI and some good set pieces. This review is maybe a little bias as I have now played Far Cry and the Animals in Far Cry are better and there are more of them but this does not mark down the skill of the game. The Characters are well voiced and the game has a good strong plot that does move along nicely. The horse annimation was very good and it did upset me loosing a horse I had for a long time. The ending seemed a little rushed for me as you have a lot of missions between major plot moments early on, these seem to reduce as the game went on until it was almost only major plot driven missions towards the end. I did not venture much online with this title as with Rockstar they mainly focus on the campaign which is good. If you are a GTA fan and also like Clint Eastwood westerns give this a look

Still searching for a proper tennis simulation. Would say that Grand Slam falls slightly to far into the Arcade area. There are some nice ideas, such as the shot stick using the right analog for doing different types of shots, that work well. However i found far to often the timing to get perfect strokes off. I play tennis and just feel that is a bit simplified. The AI was not all that great and it was so easy to win tournaments against the top professionals with a very poorly developed player. It took on a better side when playing people online as they actually used challenging tactics. Think Top Spin is still the best tennis series out there for Simulation of the sport but EA's effort does have some merit for what it tried to do and its very accessible to people who are not 100% familiar with the game. The tennis genre is never going to be perfect as I just don't think the audience is there to put alot more time and effort into development.

I have never really felt the love for Halo that has been going around since its inception on the original Xbox. Yes it was modern but it never really gripped me. The Halo games of Bungie never really seem to have much of a plot of me and it bored me going from point A on a map, into a building to point B and then going back to point A again. It seemed lazy level design. Halo 4 however seems to be a big step forward. 343 have made a few changes and brought in some decent new weapons and enemies and it did grip me more than other games. Gone has the annoying drop out of scope when you are shot and SOME of the jumps to checkpoints when a team mate passes into a new area. There is also very little back tracking in the main campaign. The story of the game is still very similar and doesn't really go anywhere for me but its not completely missing like it was in Halo 3 ODST. I still think that Halo need to remove the respawn trick on COOP when you can have one person hang back and if the other dies they respawn next to their fellow. Mean that some of the difficulty is sapped from the game. I am not much of an Online Multiplayer so I cannot give much of a review of this area but the little I did play was enjoyable enough. I think there are modes for all different abilities and the learning curve is not completely stupid like i found in the COD games. Its worth a purchase in my opinion.

Far Cry 3 is an 8 or 9 out of 10. Its so close to being perfect but has a few minor let downs. Graphically the game is good. Enemies, landscape and animal etc all look good and bring the island to life. The small issue i had was with distances. Alot of the time the game struggled to display things far in the distance and they occassionally just appear from nowhere. You would spot a huge mountain in the distance but the game does not think so. to be fair I looked past this, it did not take away from the game but was a slight ****. I was a bit unsure of the human enemy AI. It was not bad but it was not great either but when you think of the size of the game world plus the fact that animals in the game are pretty impressively written and add some real tension again this can partially be looked past. I found the story really really engaging until one moment happened. From here the story is not bad but noticably takes a dip (You will know the moment when you play). I would say this was in my top 10 games of 2012 and would recommend anyone to play it. you can waste hours just hunting animals!. Don't be put off by anything bad written about it as the game is EPIC. Its just not perfect but when you play it you will see past the same **** I did.

The end of this Franchise?? Possibly. It was a shame playing this game as it did feel like the end has finally come. All that I enjoyed from the previous games seems to have been **** out of the new one. Salem and Rios have only supporting roles and the new character, who don't really have names, have none of the charisma of the original trio. There is no more fist bumping and comic beating up of your team mate and it just feels flat. Gone are the Morality moments from the second game which is a shame as there were moments where it would have worked. It feels like generic shooter 1-0-1 now. The AI is just awful with most of the enemies just charging at you like thoughtless drones. There would be a good game here if the developer had just remembered what brought people into the franchise. I'm afraid that all my previous love for the series has now gone and I can't see the Army of Two group reforming for another outting. but on this games example that may not be a bad thing. RIP Army of Two.

Well scripted, emotive and thoroughly enjoyable game. Loved the graphic novel style graphics and was very impressed with the voice acting of all the characters. The writers know how to surprise and you genuinely feel for the characters and care what decisions you make. You don't want to make a decision that affects the future plot but sometimes the game does not leave you a choice. The game has a good pace and does not overload you with hectic or dull moments. My only criticism is that a few times the save time affects some of the more cinematic moments and made the first few seconds stutter a bit. But this is so easily overlooked. I liked the episodic style and next time on the walking dead parts, but I thought the gap between each chapter was a bit long in the release schedule. I would have preferred these to be a little shorter but I realise the studio had reasons. I hated the end of the game. Knowing that there was nothing left to play! However I wanted to go back and replay making different choices. I hope they make a sequel and also would love to see other games made in this way. Must Buy!

The main thing tot he game is the handling and challenge of the game which really are great. Even when you have done alot of laps you still need to concentrate and drive clear lines else you can easily drop through the field. The Difficulty settings are great allowing almost any level racer to get into this game and by gradually dropping certain settings can progress into the harder difficulty levels. Graphically its not bad, i have seen prettier but the main focus has gone onto the tracks and their realism and handling and weather dynamics which really do bring the game forward. Damage modelling on the higher settings is good and creates a real tension if you happen to lose part of your wing and the car can be a very different beast. Each car drives differently which is amazing and means you really do notice the extra pace of the McClaren but the extra grip of the Red Bull. The AI drivers will drive aggressively to overtake and hold lines. I have heard that the car are just made up times when you are not in visual range of them and pople have complained about it and i can see why cause it would be nice to know where they are in split times but it doesnt really take alot away from the game. The interview sections are a bit boring and repetitive but you can see what Codies were trying to do and in future releases this will be improved. New patches have improved the corrupt saves people have mentioned so unless your a muppet and turn off console during the save process you will be fine. The game as a whole is brilliant and has alot of car customisation options if you like that kind of thing or the engineer help can be used which does it pretty much for you. Definately for a Simulation fan racer but worth a go. Would be a 10 out of 10 if a few little flaws were corrected.