plotlesviolence

I'm not usually a fan of horror games or movies, but I wanted to comment on this little-known gem because it's the most effective creation of horror I've ever seen. You could say that the gameplay is "basic," and I get why it's not for everyone. But it's also the only videogame that has ever scared me, and it's because of how brilliantly it does horror. Duck Season is essentially a simulation of being a 10-year-old kid in the 1980s playing a Duck Hunt ripoff. And then things slowly get weird. It was made by the same team that would later do Boneworks. There are 3 things that make the horror truly scary: 1) VR is great for horror in general. The sense of presence you get from having the outside world blocked out by the headset, the immersion from 3D stereoscopic images, the ability to turn your head, the groping of your hands around an environment instead of the usual button-to-action separation of traditional controllers. Everything feels much more real. In flatscreen, enemies that get closer just get larger. In VR, they FEEL closer. My scariest moment was where one night you saw footage on the TV in the game of the outside of the house, and slowly I began to recognize that it was my house, and then it panned to my character, in real time, and I whipped my head to the right in time to see the bad guy pointing a camera at me before he vanished; it felt completely natural and very creepy. 2) The game creates a convincing representation of a messy 1980s living room centered around an NES with a gun attachment, littered with cassettes (minigames) and toys, with mom in the background doing adult stuff. The TV plays frequent live-action 80s-style commercials. It's not my living room, but having lived this era as a kid it feels like they absolutely captured it. The game-within-a-game is a VR remake of 1984 Duck Hunt, complete with nice touches like being able to look behind you to see the the child avatar mimicking your movements through a giant tv screen. The point of all this sense of presence is that, while it's lulling me into a sense of complacency about a simple minigame, it's also taking me back to my childhood, when I was most vulnerable and prone to nightmares and fears. It sets up the rest of the scares really well. 3) Finally, and this is the most SPOILER-y part and what makes the game unique even among VR games: All the rest of the horror stuff happens because....................................... .................................................................................................................because you shoot the dog. It's actually a man in an obvious dog costume, and if you follow the clues from multiple replays it's obvious that it's actually your estranged father, who put on the costume to try to reconnect with his family. But what makes this interesting is that the game NEVER FORCES any of it. If you want, you can even NOT shoot the dog, and the game has one of the "good" endings. But it's Duck Hunt, and you always wanted to shoot the dog and Duck Hunt never let you. So of course when you see the Duck Season, you want to know what happens when you shoot the him, and he ragdolls about and it's funny. THEN all the creepy stuff begins to happen, and it becomes so much worse because you carry this undercurrent of GUILT because you know you did this, by shooting him for no reason, like you DESERVE what's coming, because you HAD a CHOICE, and that makes the fear all the more powerful.

Game difficulty is a tricky thing since players vary in skill and preference. Some games like the Mario series only have one setting, designed so everyone can have fun and the better players might finish faster or with fewer deaths or a better score. Some games like the Halo series have multiple difficulty settings, although this can get obnoxious if they don’t let you change difficulties mid-campaign. Some games, mostly shooters like Halo and Call of Duty, give you regenerating health so the better players can rush forward faster but everyone can get through if they match their pace. Some games with RPG elements, like Cyberpunk 2077 and God of War 2018, let you farm experience points to progressively lower the difficulty the longer you play and at the same time let you swap out equip-able items to set your own level of difficulty for each fight. Some games with roguelike elements like Hades randomizes the difficulty each round, but in the background also progressively lowers the difficulty by letting you earn better stats the more you play. And then there are the Dark Souls’ clones, designed around being as obnoxiously difficult as possible, by restricting checkpoints to the point of frustration and ensuring that the few farm-able resources can all be lost with a single mistake after hours of time invested. In Dark Souls’s case, the difficulty is there to disguise the fact that the gameplay is boring; balance the encounters correctly and you’ll see that the combat system is pathetically simplistic when compared to the modern 3D brawlers. In Sifu’s case, the obnoxious difficulty is there to disguise the fact that they only made a 3-hour campaign. You can die in single hit or sequence of hits, and you only get to start the next level at the youngest age you beat the last level, so this forces you to replay each level hundreds of times until you perfect it just to get a reasonable chance to beat the next. Additionally, the upgrades are lost unless you sink ridiculous amounts of experience into making them permanent, and experience doesn’t stack or save if you die, so be prepared to waste hours farming only to lose it all to one mistake. This does what it always does in these games, makes you play in the cheesiest least-fun way possible, abusing the environmental mastery skill to kill from afar, making you stack enemies by staircases so they take fall damage, forcing you to memorize each enemies’ location for the safest kill. That there is no way to truly get ahead without a perfect run means that no matter how much time you invest, you might never beat or see even half the game. The real tragedy is that buried inside is a terrific 3-hour game. The combat scheme is terrific, with multiple interlocking systems. Tapping the block button parries, or holding it and moving the analog stick dodges, creating a tradeoff between risking having your guard broken and taking a hit. You get health only from executions and weapons even up the odds, and crowd management is a tense experience of fast moves vs sweeps and deciding who to focus on. The death system where each respawn makes you have less health but deal more damage balances out the difficulty of that age while at the same ramping up the tension; however the fact that you stay that age after beating a level with no true checkpoint kills all sense of progress. The most obvious solutions would have been to automatically reset your age at the end of each level, and let experience stack so you didn’t feel like multiple runs were wasted. If the makers had the confidence to release this game at its appropriately paced 3-hour experience, it would have been short but terrific. Instead it’s a terrific one hour experience followed by hours and hours of progressive frustration until you quit. Only two things could save the game: a) someone releases a save game with everything unlocked and every level perfected so I could try out each level at the starting age (although that’s no guarantee you’ll beat the harder levels) or b) the developers actually balance games for more than just the tiny percentage of masochists who play games to not have fun.

OVERVIEW - A car-platforming game. PRESENTATION (6/10) Graphics (6/10)- Bright and colorful, but with low-resolution textures and extremely-low polygons, boxy rectangular models. Basically it looks like a PS1 or N64 -era game. Physics (8/10) - Almost every object bounces with real physics when you collide into it, and every building collapses. Most levels even have a few oversized bowling pins just to look cooler when you crash into them. Despite the simplistic polygons, the interactivity makes the world feel much more alive than the backgrounds of Call of Duty, which look great in screenshots but feel static in motion. Audio (6/10) Plot (7/10) - Plot is limited to one short text box just before each level just to tell you what that level's objective is. It's not even internally consistent; one level you're doing the mission for the police, the next level for the mafia. But it's totally unobtrusive. MECHANICS (8/10) Controls (8/10) - Controls are l consist almost entirely of the analog stick (or WASD on keyboard) to turn or tilt the bus. The bus accelerates automatically, becoming progressively harder to control, and your job is mainly to avoid (or conversely, target) obstacles--like pinball-style bumper paddles, speed-up strips, and/or jump pads--to navigate the stage and complete the objective. The faster you're going, the harder it is to right yourself when spinning in midair, and the more likely you are to spin out. The level is over if you drive out of bounds, get knocked onto your side such that you can't re-right the bus, or otherwise fail the objective. Occasionally you will be driving a special bus with an ability controlled by the "A"button (jumping, gravitationally moving you down wherever the bus's underside is pointing, or an exploding bus that stops you in midair). The most appropriate comparisons for the game mechanics would be Nitronic Russh (also a Devolver Digital game) but without the jet controls, or maybe the Riddler's Batmobile Courses from Arkham Knight, both of which I enjoyed. Physics(7/10) - The bus drives pretty well, but the physics can get wonky at times, like if you drive along the floor just slightly angled into it it will launch you in midair. But all of the objects bounce with real physics. Friendly AI - None Enemy AI - None DESIGN (8/10) Level Design (9/10) - The great strength of the game is that every level has a slightly different objective, keeping the game constantly engaging. In one level you might have to navigate a series of jump pads and tilting bridges, in another you must intentionally dump physics objects you are carrying by hitting a jump pad and rolling 180 degrees over the target before late-righting yourself for landing; Use the exploding bus to launch balls into hoops; Score enough flipping combination points in a tony-hawk style level, etc., etc. There are even levels styled as boss battles. Menus (6/10) - It's a linear sequence of levels, but the organization is a little confusing so you have to watch the numbers to see which level is next. Difficulty Curve (4/10) - There's not much of a curve in the traditional sense; difficulty is random. Basically every level can be competed in 30 seconds to 2 minutes, but every time you die you can instantly restart by pressing the "B" button. My biggest gripe is the final level, which strings together 4 levels in a row and forces you to start from the very beginning if you fail anywhere; my successful run of it was only 5 minutes but it took about an hour to beat. Otherwise the game was fine. Game Modes - a 5-hour singleplayer campaign, a few Tony-Hawk style point-scoring levels, and a local "battle mode" where 4 players crash into each other and vie to be the last bus standing. CONCLUSION Despite the 90's era graphics and simplistic control setup, this game packs alot of variety, could be played in short bursts if you were pressed for time, and I really enjoyed it.

[OVERALL = 0 (or less)] The Dark Souls series are the worst-designed games ever made and have no redeeming factor. They are also the most overrated, because for reasons I can't understand, the rest of the internet adores them and actually praises their flaws as if they were virtues. "Hard but fair" they say? Dark Souls isn't hard, it's time-consuming and obtuse; once you waste 5 hours grinding your stats and find the "cheat" weapons with a walkthrough, most encounters become so easy they're boring; and it isn't fair, the game randomly punishes you (SEVERELY) often and without warning, and is totally unplayable without a step-by-step walkthrough. If someone patched the game to remove the upgrade system, properly balance the enemy encounters, and put a navigation arrow telling you where to go, a 50-hour-plus slog would turn into a 3-hour game that would bore you after the first hour. [PRESENTATION = 7] (Visuals = 7) Graphics aren't bad, but everything more or less looks alike (brick castle with vegetation); the only reason you recognize places is that the game halts your progress so much you become familiar with the most generic of locations. (Sound = 7) (Voice Acting = 5) (Vibration = 5) (Physics = 8) Enemies ragdoll when they die and the physics of broken crates/barrels is actually pretty cool, although physics never affect gameplay. (Plot = 5) The story isn't great but is unintrusive. [CONTROL = 2] (100% 3D hack-and-slash = 2) DS is a shallow hack-and-slash. Damage can penetrate blocking shields and is affected by distance and whether you press the light/fast attack or heavy attack button, with every move drawing from a limited but regenerating stamina pool. But there are only three moves: a) while locked-on, deflect an incoming attack to instant-kill; this reduces the game to a quicktime event without a button prompt b) while locked-on, hold the shield button to block a strike until the enemy staggers, then counter-attack c) do a dodge-roll to avoid a strike, then counter-attack. This is the most risky strategy, it mostly only works on bosses (whereas a and b only work on standard soldiers) All of these put you at risk when you face more than one enemy at a time, because you can only focus on one. The game also lies to you about there being other options. Supposedly it's possible to wield one heavy sword with both hands, or one weapon in each hand, but since you need the shield to block if you want to survive multiple encounters, these are impossible. There are also some purchasable projectiles, and the occasional rare item that grants you a significant advantage (like doubling your health or the weapon's damage, etc.) but you'll never use them because you die so regularly that any one-use item would be a waste. (Camera = 6) (Physics = 4) (Friendly AI = none) (Enemy AI = 3) [DESIGN = 0] (Menus = 4) (Upgrade System = 0) Non-automatic upgrade systems are a cancer on videogames, because they always result in boring grinding early on and then being boring-ly overpowered later. Of course DS embraces both flaws to both extremes. But worse, you drop all non-spent experience points where you die and they vanish if you don't collect them on the next life, so it's easily possible to waste 2 hours of your time for nothing. (Level Design = 0) Every checkpoint has like 5 paths branching from it, 2 of them hidden, only 1 of them feasible in order to advance the game, and of course there are no hints as to which path that is. It is unplayable without a walkthrough. This is a problem videogames solved around the GTA3/Crazy Taxi era: navigation arrows. (Difficulty Curve = 0) Personally, I don't like "exploration" games, but for those who do, one of the prerequisites is that exploration not be painful. In DS, the constant risk of losing all your experience holds you back from trying new paths or risky jumps. At one point I fell into a pit and got hit by gas that took half my health (aka "cursed"). PERMANENTLY. Unless you trekked across the entire map and bought one of a LIMITED number of cures. And since enemies respawn, it is totally possible to lose half your health forever. The game is so punishing that you stop feeling guilty about winning through exploits that aren't fun: spamming projectiles from outside enemy reach, tricking the enemy AI into walking off cliffs, etc. (Modes = Singleplayer campaign w/occasional online Players allowed in to fight you, 50 hours, 95% padded) Had difficulty been properly calibrated, you could get through the whole game in 3 hours if you could stand how simplistically boring the combat is. [CONCLUSION] This isn't "hard", it's bad design. I've played bad games before, but never one made intentionally so bad to purposefully frustrate its audience. Super Meat Boy is hard. ANYONE can beat Dark Souls with a walkthrough guide and the willingness to be bored and frustrated for 50 hours straight. I only wasted as much time as I did to see what the fuss was about, and I regret even that.

[OVERVIEW = 7] A third-person shooter defined by time slowing and shootdodging, “adding” cover-based combat and only 2 weapon slots. [PRESENTATION = 8] (Visuals = 9) It looks like it’s running on the same (gorgeous) engine as GTA V, with garish flashes in the Tony Scott “Man on Fire” style that fits the South American setting. The levels have great variety while all looking realistic. And it’s cool that Max holds the unused rifle in the other hand while firing his pistol…once…and hardly worth the 2 weapon limit. (Sound Effects = 6) (Voice Acting = 7) (Nvidia 3D Vision = 7) Looks good in 3D, a few shadows are slightly fuzzy. (Physics = 8) The Euphoria engine that procedurally mixes ragdolls and animations is beautiful, but while levels have more physics-reacting objects to shoot than most games, it doesn’t appear to have more such objects than Max Payne 2. Certainly there’s no true destruction a' la Stranglehold/BF:Bad Company/Red Faction. (Vibration = 4) (Plot = 7) This is Rockstar’s version of “Man on Fire,” and while it’s well above ordinary videogame fare, it’s never reaches the overdramatic ridiculousness of the first twos' takes on New York-noir, and I miss the graphic novel-style cutscenes. Cutscenes become skippable after the next bit finishes loading. [CONTROLS/MECHANICS = 7] (100% Third-Person Shooter = 7) It’s a third-person shooter with the recharging abilities to slow time to aim better, or dive forward to invincibly pick off enemies at the risk of being extra vulnerable upon landing. Rockstar Games has hurt this winning formula by adding the cover system from GTA V, which works, but it makes the game less fun than the previous run-n-gun system; at least on “normal” you can ignore taking cover for the most part. Mouse controls work well, but the right analog stick for joystick control aiming doesn’t “scale” well: I SHOULD be able to fast-turn by pressing the stick all the way and aim carefully by barely moving the stick. You can adjust the sensitivity, but you either get a joystick speed that’s too fast for careful aiming or too slow for switching directions. A quickturn button (works in slow-mo) helps a bit. The other big change is the 2-weapon limit, which DOESN’T come from GTA V, it just comes out of nowhere and ensures that you have less fun than before and run out of ammo constantly. And bizarrely, you have to use a weapon wheel to switch between just three options (dual wield, single wield, rifle) where one “weapon switch” button would be the obvious way to go. There’s also no dedicated melee button, which forces you to waste some ammo at near-point blank range until you get closer. And the guns are unimpressive: pistol, shotgun, machine gun. There's also a "last stand" limited opportunity to shoot the enemy that killed you to come back to life, and I'm disappointed that this has been the ONLY beneficial new mechanic added to the Max Payne formula: There’s no Dead-to-Right-style disarms, or Stranglehold-style rolling trays or railings to ride, or Stranglehold-style physics objects to drop on enemies, no Crackdown-style special attacks or Bulletstorm-style kicking enemies into hazards; it’s just Max Payne 2 remade into the GTA V engine with a few mostly negative tweaks. (Camera = 8) (Physics = 8) I love the way dives get interrupted if you collide with walls or railings, which makes you assess when to use it, and I like the way the GTA V Euphoria ragdoll engine can have enemies go down without dying, so you have to pump a few extra rounds into enemies to be sure. You can also dive into enemies to knock them back. (Friendly AI = none) "Allied" movement appears to be entirely automated. (Enemy AI = 7) [DESIGN = 4] [Technicals = 0] I bought the Steam version, but the first day it wouldn’t work because the Rockstar Social Club website that runs their anticonsumer DRM was offline, costing me an hour of my life trying to figure out if I forgot to install something. Steam really needs to put its foot down and refuse to sell games unless they eliminate their SECOND layer of DRM (i.e., GamesforWindowsLive/Uplay/etc.). From then on it ran fine, although loading times are an ass. (Menus = 7) (Level Design = 7) Levels are linear, and I like the mixing between run-and-gun, rail shooting, dodging a sniper, being a sniper, etc. (Difficulty Curve = 7) (Upgrade System = none) (Modes = Singleplayer campaign (10 hours, 5% padding), Challenge modes, Competitive Multiplayer) It’s a good campaign with only a few enforced-slow-walk sequences and collectibles you can ignore. The multiplayer works fine (it’s a normal shooter but any player can put his bonus time-slow into effect that affects everyone) but didn’t hold my attention, and these days online play is uninhabited by human players. [OVERALL] Fun enough, but kind of a disappointment given that Max Payne was previously one of my favorite series. Stranglehold, a game 5 years older, took the mantle of being the better third-person shootdodge/diving game.

[OVERVIEW = 4] An archery sim with excellent physics, hampered by poorly designed controls. [PRESENTATION = 7] (Visuals = 6) Simple but functional. Enemies are human figures with apples for heads, allies are wooden stumps with expanding balloons for heads. (Sound Effects = 5) (Voice Acting = none) (Physics = 9) Enemies ragdoll, apples explode in showers of chunks, the ropes with hanging targets swing properly on impact with arrows, and you can even poke holes in a flag with full cloth physics. (Vibration = none) (Plot = none) [CONTROLS/MECHANICS = 3] (100% Archery Simulator = 3 (on mouse/keyboard)) You have control of 2 arms with 3 joints each: default is the Right wrist, hold E to move the elbow, hold Q to move the shoulder, hold Shift to move the Left hand, move the mouse to move/rotate as appropriate. The left hand holds the bow, and the mouse buttons draw and (if you’re close enough to the right spot) attach the arrow. Once attached, you draw back the arrow with the mouse and let go of the “attach” button. If that sounds unnecessarily complicated, that’s because it is. Ordinarily I love working through complex control schemes, like 1998’s “Jurassic Park Tresspasser” or 2015’s “Octodad: Dadliest Catch,” but these kinds of games require careful design to give you precise control without being too arduous. Probably Archery requires that you position the middle of the bow (left hand) and the end of the arrow (right hand) in 3D space. That COULD have been accomplished by letting you use the mouse for the X and Y axes, and switching to the Left hand by holding Shift, and having the game automatically animate the bend of the elbow and the connection of the arrow to the bow; you would have lost none of the fun of aligning the two limbs to get the targeting right. Instead you have to control 3 joints per arm, which each control differently (sometimes moving the mouse horizontally rotates the joint, sometimes it moves it), for no adequate reason, just to make sure it takes 30 seconds to line up each shot even after an hour of practice. The game even sabotages you by starting out with the bow off to the side, parallel to the ground! Why not keep the bow vertical, the way one fires a bow? A further sabotage is the fact that each time you fire an arrow the bow shifts, so you can’t just course-correct slightly when you miss, you have to totally re-aim from an unknown aiming position with every arrow. It’s sad because there’s some fun to be had here, but it gets way too arduous for even the simpler modes, and absolutely impossible where true precision within a time limit (the shoot-the-hanging-man’s-rope game) is required. I tried this game because the new Virtual Reality archery games coming out look pretty fun, and from Youtube it appears that Probably Archery controls really well with a $600 pair of Razer Hydra motion controllers. But if you watch, all the game is doing is positioning each of the two hands in 3D space with the controllers and self-animating the elbow bend, something it should have done for mouse control. It appears as if the game was designed for motion controllers and then ported (badly) to mouse and keyboard. (Camera = 6) (Physics = 10) Arrows fly with appropriate momentum-related dropoff and everything reacts properly (when you don’t miss). (Friendly AI = none) (Enemy AI = 5) [DESIGN = 6] (Menus = 6) (Level Design = 5) Small arenas. (Difficulty Curve = 3) There’s not really a curve, but the controls make most of the modes too hard. (Upgrade System = None) (Modes = Several Minigames, Multiplayer Horde/Survival Mode) There’s no campaign, just a series of minigames where you’re immovable in a room, hitting targets. The horde mode starts out doable because enemies get close enough for bad aim to work, and there’s a mode where you have an army that fires 50 arrows with you that helps because, again, you don’t need perfect aim. There really needs to be a series of levels, maybe where you’re traveling on a rail as the level shifts, with boss battles, for this to be a full-fledged game. [CONCLUSION] No amount of practice will speed up a procedure where you have to move and rotate 6 individual joints to line up one shot. If I had Razer Hydras, sure, this would be fun, but with mouse and keyboard the game is going to need a major reprogramming for the controls to work.

[OVERVIEW = 10] A 1- or 2-player 2D physics-based car combat game. [PRESENTATION = 7] (Graphics = 6) Pixel art. There's a really cool feature that lets you watch a replay after each match and even upload that replay to Youtube. (Visual aesthetics = 4) It mostly works, but the pixels can make it hard to distinguish the character’s helmets (the targets) from the rest of the cars at a glance, particularly since the cars and helmets change randomly each level (in most modes). (Sound Effects = 7) (Voice Acting = none) (Physics = 9) 2D physics abound as you drive over moving obstacles and tilting platforms. (Plot = none) [CONTROLS/MECHANICS = 10] (100% 2D Driving = 10) Drive Ahead is a perfect example of how simple controls translate into a deep experience. The goal is to drive onto the head of the other player's car while protecting your own. Ties are possible but rare. Each player has two buttons: accelerate Left and accelerate Right. That’s perfect for a touchpad game, and for a multiplayer game where the concept and execution must be instantly understood by a random friend. Any other buttons, like tilt controls, would have merely complicated things. (Camera = 8) 2 buttons per player at the bottom is probably the best setup imaginable to avoid obscuring the screen with fingers. Still, in 2-player mode it works a little better on an iPad than an iPhone for space reasons. (Physics = 10) The exact movement of each car is a physics-calculated result of starting momentum, how long you have held down an accelerate button to the microsecond, the car model, and the angle and friction of the surface you’re driving on. It’s a blend of randomness and control that illustrates how well-programmed physics can make a game infinitely replayable. Cars vary significantly in speed, center of gravity, and special features (like a dump truck that ejects obstacles and a tank that intermittently fires its cannon). (Friendly AI = none) (Enemy AI = 9) It appears to be really good when I’ve played against the computer. It can pick up on your errors or alternately can mess up and kill itself on its own, just like real human opponents. [DESIGN = 10] (Menus = 8) The game loads fast and lets you select a quick 1 or 2-player game with randomly cycling cars and levels without fuss. The worst aspect is that once a day you get free “coins” to unlock more stuff, which basically just puts an extra menu to click through when you first load the game. (Level Design = 10) Levels have hazards like collapsing towers, swinging pendulums, etc. If both cars survive too long, fire will rain from the sky or water will drown you from below to create urgency. A few are really creative like a giant spinning wheel. (Difficulty Curve = 7) (Upgrade System = 8) There’s a coin system, which buy spins of an unlock generator (new cars, levels, etc.) (Modes = Singleplayer campaign, Singleplayer arena, Competitive Multiplayer) You can play with random cars/levels in single or multiplayer, or set specifics if you care to (I don’t). There’s also a campaign with a sequence of challenges, such as kill-5-enemies in car X while you’re in car Y, etc., which I enjoyed. There are microtransactions to speed up unlocks but I kept getting a steady stream of new cars/levels without effort and never needed to pay. [CONCLUSION] I haven’t reviewed mobile games before, but I felt compelled to point out that Drive Ahead is the perfect game to pull out for quick games on the go, and is maybe the best 2-player casual game you can find. It’s simple but deep, designed to be endlessly replayable without (unlike most professional-quality games on mobile) being over-designed as if it were supposed to be a console game. It was free when I got it.

[OVERVIEW = 7] Another single/multiplayer FPS, not even the best CoD, but it does have splitscreen co-op. [PRESENTATION =4] (Graphics = 4) Whatever “tweaks” have supposedly been applied over the years, it still looks like it’s running on an unchanged 2007 CoD4 engine. It takes up 60 gigabytes but looks no better than CoD4 at 8 gig. (Visual aesthetics = 3) The problem with futuristic is that, like MW3 and BlOps2, this just seems sort of bland. I preferred the realism of CoD4:MW, CoD:WaW, and CoD:BlOps1. (Sound Effects = 6) (Voice Acting = 6) (Physics = 2) Bizarrely, CoD continues to program in ragdoll physics but then strangles it by having it activate only after the same stupid pre-animated deaths as before, totally missing the point of ragdoll physics, which is to provide infinite fun ways to watch bodies gib and collapse. Worse, half the enemies are robots that don’t ragdoll at all. Worse, the CoD4 engine has always been very static: almost no background objects react to gunfire. By comparison, games like Stranglehold really make you feel powerful when you have a real, physics-based impact on the world every time your bullets miss. (Plot = 4) Skippable after it loads. [CONTROLS/MECHANICS = 8] (95% First-Person Shooter = 8) CoD BlOps3 has the same polished movement and firing scheme as past iterations. Aside from the Halo system, this is the best joystick-controlled shooting you can find, and it’s probably the best mouse-controlled FPS system if you prefer playing that way. It works without doing anything new. But the guns aren't that interesting, even compared to past CoD's; it’s pretty much just machine guns. You have your choice of a recharging “power” (i.e. hack one turret/enemy vs. bee swarm, etc.) but it doesn’t change much, and you can see enemies behind walls once highlighted, which is kind of cool. At least, unlike CoD:Ghosts, you can actually toggle nightvision on/off whenever you want. The thing is, the first-person-shooter as a genre is hardly dead. There are plenty of ways to make it interesting: fun weapons like Painkiller or Bulletstorm; destructible cover and environments like Red Faction or Battlefield:Bad Company; intelligent enemy AI like Half Life; enemies that blow up interestingly like Binary Domain; destroying enemy attack options with careful aim like Resident Evil 4 or Dead Space; or, giant Shadow-of-the-Collossus-like enemies like MGS:Peace Walker. And that's not even talking about combining FPS with other genres (like Deus Ex) or bogging it down with walking-simulator levels (like BioShock). Instead of innovation, we have the 8th expansion-pack to the 9-year-old CoD4. (5% Platforming = 8) The new change, slightly modified from CoD:MW3 (and ripped off of Titanfall), is the ability to jetpack double-jump and wall-run. It works pretty well, and adds a lot to the online multiplayer and certain sections of the single-player campaign, but it’s not a replacement for Mirror’s Edge. (Camera = 5) (Physics = 3) (Friendly AI = 5) (Enemy AI = 6) About half the enemies are robotic killdroids, which unlike the human enemies, can stand there and take a lot of punishment, which encourages taking cover more regularly. Whether this improves or aggravates is a matter of personal preference. [DESIGN = 8] (Menus = 5) The 3D home base you walk around in is a wasted concept for what should have been a simple menu. (Level Design = 7) It’s a linear corridor shooter, but you don’t get lost. (Difficulty Curve = 7) Regular checkpoints & co-operative players can revive you. (Upgrade System = 5) (Modes = Singleplayer/2-player splitscreen Cooperative campaign (10 hours, 0% padding), 2 Singleplayer/4-player cooperative Zombie horde campaigns (?), Competitive Multiplayer) BlOps3 does something commendable I haven't seen in an FPS in a long, long time: Splitscreen Co-Op on the PC version. I play alot of local multiplayer, and when we play FPS's that usually means Unreal Tournament 3 (4-player via hidden console commands) or Left-For-Dead 2 (2-player via hidden console commands). Serious Sam 3 is the only AAA-franchise PC FPS I'm aware of where the splitscreen is built-in and not hidden. When Halo 1 and 2 hit PC, Microsoft actually disabled the splitscreen that was already coded into the Xbox versions. Heck, Halo5 no longer offers even console splitscreen, even though fans would assuredly accept halving the supposedly restrictive 60 frames-per-sec to 30 during a co-op mode. For all the vitriol CoD games typically get, everyone should be encouraging this trend at least. Online multiplayer is fun, although I doubt it will still be populated in a year, and I prefer CoD4 online. I never touched the Zombies modes because shooting at slow unarmed enemies always bored me, even in co-op. [CONCLUSION] For all of my criticisms, mainly about the lack of improvements, I had an absolute blast playing through the splitscreen campaign with my friend and I recommend it mainly for that purpose.

[OVERVIEW = 5] An insult to the legacy of Crysis 1. Not enough ammo is available for an action-FPS, and an overpowered option to kill while invisible ruins the stealth. [PRESENTATION = 7] (Graphics = 9) Very pretty, with a ton of foliage, and I really enjoy the sparks flying when bullets miss. Explosions look good. (Visual aesthetics = 6) The entire game is ruined city with overgrown foliage. Other than the insides of a few buildings and a cave level, there’s precious little variety. I miss the flash-freeze ice and interior alien spaceship from the first game. Also the aliens aren’t very interesting, just messes of triangular shapes. I prefer the human enemies of Crysis 1. The beautiful thermal vision superimposed over silver-grayscaled cold background returns from Crysis 2 for your “heat vision” viewtype, possibly the greatest improvement those games made over Crysis 1. (Sound Effects = 7) (Voice Acting = 8) (Physics = 7) Everything ragdolls and you can throw barrels. Although visually sharper, it’s much more static; I really miss the way trees in Crysis 1 would fall over when you mowed them down with a machine gun. (Plot = 6) Cliched, but not horrible and skippable after the first viewing. [CONTROLS/MECHANICS = 4] (50% Stealth = 1) Stealth options are limited to cloaking, throwing objects for distraction, stealth kills from behind, and bow-and-arrow sniping. The problem is sniping does not break your cloak, so it’s too easy to kill enemies without challenge. To prevent the game from becoming boring, I had to decide not to stealth. (50% First-Person Shooter = 5) Movement/aiming are pretty smooth. You don’t have any new suit powers, but this time they are all activated by separate controller buttons rather than a selection wheel. So to super-jump you just hold the jump button longer, super-speed is just sprinting (L3), super-strength is automatic when punching or throwing, and armor and cloak have separate buttons. That works more smoothly than it ever did in Crysis 1, while preserving the balance of each power drawing from the same limited pool of recharging energy. I dislike that grenades are considered a separate weapon to switch to rather than a secondary weapon as in Halo. The standard weapons are limited to sniper rifle, shotguns and assault rifles. Unfortunately you can only carry 2 guns, not counting the bow or the C4/rocket launcher. But the big problem is the utter lack of ammunition. Every large area has one ammo cache with about 2 clips per gun and 1-2 rockets, which is insufficient for the more than 10 enemies guarding the area. None of the enemies drop standard ammo because they’re all aliens. About ¼ of the aliens drop alien weapons, 1-clip’s worth of alien rifle/shotgun, again, insufficient to kill 4 other aliens. Occasionally you get an alien mortar-grenade-launcher or flamethrower, which are cool, but limited. The bow-and-arrow, while overpowered if cloaked, isn’t particularly fun, but you will use it because you quickly run out of everything else. So gameplay amounts to you having your fun with the ammo available, then the arrows, then cloaking and melee-ing the remainder until you find the next ammo cache. This could have been solved by just making the ammo caches provide infinite clips. (Physics = 6) You can throw barrels (including explosive) and objects. (Friendly AI = none) (Enemy AI = 3) It works, and enemies will shoot at you when cloaked if you remain at the last known position, but otherwise you can cloak and snipe your way through levels unmolested. [DESIGN = 3] (Menus = 6) (Level Design = 2) The game is linear, the levels are somewhat open, but you have no real options. In Crysis 1 you could take advantage of verticality by super-jumping up several stories in buildings, or you could punch through walls of a shack, Red Faction-style, to get the drop on enemies. Here everything is static, rarely vertical, and cover does not get destroyed, so at its best the game is mere linear FPS. (Difficulty Curve = 6) (Upgrade System = 5) As in previous Crysis-es, you can pull up a rifle menu to swap out components (like scopes and grips), which lets you customize guns with any items previous picked up. I particularly like the thermal vision scopes, which save you from having to switch back and forth in your main view. But the game also has a weird unlockable upgrade system I never really bothered with. (Modes = Singleplayer campaign (7 hours, 50% padding), Competitive and Cooperative Online Multiplayer) Everything after you run out of ammo is “padding.” The game is old enough at time of writing that online multiplayer is a ghosttown. [CONCLUSION] Crysis 1 was brilliant, a worthy successor to Deus Ex 1 but without the hacking or conversation options. Crysis 2 was a standard linear FPS with only stealth or shooting options. Crysis 3 is Crysis 2 with the stealth overpowered-ly boring and the shooting fun but arrested every few minutes by low ammo. If cheap, worth maybe one playthrough.

OVERVIEW = 3 A remake of the first major 3rd-person cover-based shooter. [PRESENTATION = 2 (Graphics = 3) Gears of War always looked good, especially on PC with 1080p resolution. Ultimate Edition is identical; you’d have to have a side-by-side comparison to notice the differences. (Visual aesthetics = 2) You’re a gray-armored character in a gray environment fighting light-gray enemies. The occasional glowing yellow lava sticks out because of the surrounding gloom. Call it “enemy camouflage,” but it lacks variety. The visual clutter hasn’t improved. Epic’s better shooter, the Unreal Tournament series, managed to be bright and colorful, so what’s up here? (Sound Effects = 8) (Voice Acting = 8) (Physics = 8) Ragdolls, blood spurts, and body parts exploding into gibs when blasted or sawed in half. (Plot = 1) As with many games, plot is just an excuse to move between setpieces. But I always loathed that in every level your character would put his finger to his ear and slow-walk while the game force-fed you unskippable exposition. Cutscenes were actually less aggravating. Never make dialogue or cutscenes unskippable; if they’re good, we’ll watch them, if we’re replaying the game for the third time, let us play instead. [CONTROLS/MECHANICS = 7] Aiming and running is smooth. The cover-based combat still holds up, I mean, it would have to, right, given that it took over shooters the same Batman:Arkham scheme took over all subsequent melee combat games? The “active reload” minigame that offers an opportunity to boost firepower at the risk of longer reload time adds a lot. I like that it switches to “tank” control (left/right turn instead of strafe) while you hold down “B” for the chainsaw, because it would have been too hard to also move the right joystick with the right hand. I dislike the unreliability of the chainsaw bayonet, which led to dying when it failed to operate on command. I never liked the Halo-style limit of only carrying 4 guns. In Halo it arguably works because there’s some strategy involved in switching mid-battle. There’s no strategy in GoW: 3 of weapons are permanent (the Lancer since it’s better than the submachine gun, the revolver since it’s the best pistol, and the grenades). The remaining slot is reserved for the only gun with available ammo, presented lying out in the open when it’s time to switch. Why bother pretending that we have a choice? The Hammer-of-Dawn superweapon takes up the pistol slot, but you only use it 4 times, and each time it’s used once, then replaced. Why not let us switch between all 8 weapons so we’d have options? Other than the submachine gun, weapons all work well: sniper, shotgun, explosive crossbow. DESIGN = 2 (Level Design = 7) I dislike that several levels have you split into left paths or right paths, because you shouldn’t be forced to have to replay a game to see everything. (Difficulty Curve = 3) The purpose of recharging health is to allow players to self-calibrate difficulty. Better players charge ahead, worse players take more rest breaks behind cover. But to keep up the difficulty, GoW starts throwing enemies that one-shot-kill in the final third, and it’s frustrating to spend 10-20 minutes clearing an area only to be killed in 1 second. The aggravation discouraged me from experimenting with tactics. (Modes = Singleplayer, Multiplayer) As with the original pc release, the pc version of GoW:UE lacks the splitscreen cooperative game mode its console has. I have fond memories of beating the Xbox360 version twice with my friend. I really really really hate when developers do this to ports. Splitscreen has already been coded, PCs have more power than consoles, so why kneecap the port by actively removing something? I don’t buy the explanation that pc is harder to standardize, because the game engine is already working on pc. And I don’t buy that it discourages piracy, because making a product intentionally less appealing discourages legitimate buyers more. And I certainly don’t buy that pc gamers don’t play locally, because I do, all the time. 4 wireless Logitech controllers, an HDMI cable, and my school’s bigscreen tv in the student center and, bam, we’re playing splitscreen Unreal Tournament 3. And frankly, it’s easier to set up on my laptop that it’s been on any console since the Nintendo 64. (Length = 8 hours, 10% padding) CONCLUSION This is a rerelease that offers nothing but an un-noticeable graphic upgrade, at a cost of more than 4 times the price and adoption of the Windows 10 store monopoly. It might have been worth it had they added back local co-op. While I hold personal animosity towards the GoW franchise for diverting Epic Games away from developing Unreal Tournament games, the original Gears of War 1 still holds up and would have been a 9/10 at the time of release. But as a full-priced game 9 years later, Ultimate Edition must be judged against modern shooters. So I recommend buying the 2006 PC games-for-windows-live release instead.

OVERVIEW = 0 A strong contender for the worst game ever made. Not enough gameplay to call it "stealth" or "puzzle," so it's closest to the "Walking Simulator" genre, with an awful story. I didn’t expect to like it, but a ton of recommendations convinced me to try it anyway, and in retrospect I have no idea what the recommenders were smoking. [CONTROLS/MECHANICS = 0] "Walking Simulators" are defined by the absence of gameplay, the 3D world existing only to showcase the plot, like an art gallery exists only to showcase 2D paintings in a way better served by an artbook. The experience can be faithfully recreated on Youtube, with branching videos for each choice. Calling these "games" is like calling footage of text crawling across a screen a "movie": it would have worked better as a book, just like Walking Sims work better as movies. Soma is somehow worse, in the sense that the barest whiff of gameplay is actually less enjoyable than zero gameplay: I prefer cutscenes to Quick-Time-Events because, if you're not going to offer real control, you might as well let me sit back and enjoy the movie instead of aggravating me with reflex testing. There are arguments to be made that "The Stanley Parable" because it relies so heavily on movement-determined choice, and "The Beginner's Guide" because its plot is about showcasing game worlds, justify their formats as games rather than sequences of videos. Rather than answer that question here, I'll point out that nothing in Soma, at least, justifies its pretense towards being a game instead of a video. (Physics Puzzle = 0) You can pick up, and throw objects, like Half Life 2's gravity gun without the "force pull" option. And unlike the 2004 masterpiece, the puzzles are all of the keyhunt variety. None of them do anything as interesting as HL2. (Stealth = ?) I quit before getting to the stealth portion, I'll admit that. But from what I saw on Youtube, you have basically no tactics other than running and hiding. If you want to call Soma a stealth game, it's going to have to compete against Metal Gear Solid V in that regard. Games like this are often called “horror,” as if identification with that genre somehow excuses the fact that you have no control options and are therefore weak. It wasn’t scary to me, but little is. It also wasn’t fun, and I have difficulty understanding why other people did find it fun. [PRESENTATION = 1] (Graphics = 7) I was really impressed with the graphics and textures for the machines and backgrounds. The human people look a little fake. (Visual aesthetics = 5) (Sound Effects = 5) (Voice Acting = 8) (Plot = 0) If Walking Sims are just movies presented in the wrong format, they can still redeem themselves if the movie is good. I have only ever played 5 games where the plot/cutscenes were good enough to stand on their own: MGS3:Snake Eater, Bioshock:Infinite, The Walking Dead: Season 1, The Stanley Parable, and The Beginner's Guide. By contrast, Soma has one of the worst plots I've ever seen. After I gave up on playing it, I finished watching all the dialogue on a Let’s Play, and it was almost unwatchable. The one plot thread is the philosophical question: when you copy your brain into another body, you are not “transferring” consciousness, you are just making a copy. It’s the same plot that was handled much, much better by the (still horrible) “The 6th Day” Schwarzenegger movie. That’s it. It’s a 5-minute short story padded and overstretched across a 9 hour game. It asks the question “What is identity?” but so does every other form of entertainment ever created. What it doesn’t do is ask that question intelligently, or offer any answers, or any competent discussions. There are only 2 characters and they only exist to restate and argue that same theme in the same way over and over. Even for a medium where plot is seen as an irrelevant distraction from the “good stuff” of action, and therefore as important as plot in pornography, this was bad. If it weren't for the fact that it was a Walking Sim, I would think the story had been shoehorned in as an afterthought. DESIGN = 0 (Level Design = 2) Keyhunts were the worst part of every FPS; I would enjoy a bit of 1993’s “Doom”, kill all the enemies and then, bam, red door needs a red key, and now you have to check every single room for the next 20 minutes before you're allowed to have fun again. I only played Soma for an hour, and more than half of that was me being lost, trying to figure out what to press next to continue a story that would never pay off. Not fun. (Length = 9 hours, 75% padding) CONCLUSION Soma fails on almost every level. Even if you like Walking Sims, even if you’re willing to just watch the cutscenes, there is nothing worth your time here. I seriously cannot understand where the accolades are coming from. Dark Souls is probably a worse game, but only because DS is intentionally designed as poorly as possible to hurt its own players.

[OVERVIEW = 10] A hack-and-slash with unique 360-degree sword control. [PRESENTATION = 5] (Graphics = 4) Not particularly impressive by 1998 standards, but not as blocky as it could be. Resolution and framerate are painfully low unless you use the “Xtended” mod. (Visual aesthetics = 2)The background is entirely muddy brown textures that mix very poorly, making it difficult to look at and often confusing to interpret, even if you upgrade with the “Xtended” texture mod. It’s a case study in why older games age poorly unless they use cel-shading or simple textures. Character models do fare a little better. Good blood effects. (Sound Effects = 8) (Music = 5) (Voice Acting = 7) A few quips here and there. (Physics = 7) Body parts fly off properly but there’s no ragdoll physics. (Plot = 7) Simple but unobtrusive. [CONTROLS/MECHANICS = 10] (Hack-and-Slash = 10 (95% of game)) What makes DbtS unique is the simulation-style control scheme. Move the mouse up or down to move the sword in a vertical circle in front of you (i.e., the “Saggital” plane). Left and right controls its position parallel to the ground (the “Axial” plane). Strikes are accomplished by moving the sword from one position, through the enemy’s character model, to another position, and--incredibly--the game considers the speed of the swing, your jumping/walking movement, the enemy’s movement, and the location on the enemy in calculating damage and knockback. You block by putting your sword in a position to interrupt an enemy swing. If you get blocked, your sword bounces slightly and you have to reorient to the new mouse position. The left mouse button bends your elbow 90 degrees, sacrificing reach for better blocking paths. It’s pixel-perfect, and the physics involved was a major achievement in 1998. The swinging controls are limited by the fact that you can’t move your mouse past a--slightly slow--speed or the game stops recognizing the input. No game since has managed this degree of spherical precision. “Mount-and-Blade” and “Jedi Knight” games are simplistic by comparison. Wii-motion-plus games--“Wii Sports Resort:Swordfighting,” “TLoZ: Skyward Sword,” and “Red Steel 2”--have come the closest in the sense that they allow you to position your sword, but even they only recognize 8 possible swing directions and only 2--horizontal or vertical--blocks, and only when the wiimote works at all. Movement on the keyboard includes both strafing and turning--critical distinctions with hit detection this precise--and holding spacebar crouches while double-tapping spacebar jumps, which I really like; who jumps first without crouching their legs? You can wield severed limbs, still holding their weapons, thus extending your attack reach. Apparently it’s possible to throw by swinging and letting go at the right moment, but I never managed to aim properly. You can also play as characters with functioning shields in the left hand. There’s an optional “arcade”-style control scheme, but it invalidates the whole point of the game. (Platforming = 7 (5% of game)) There’s a bit of jumping and pulling yourself onto ledges--with the sword holstered--to facilitate the fetch-quest puzzles. (Enemy AI = 9) Despite the complexity, it works really well, and enemy species will often fight each other. (Camera = 8) No complaints. [DESIGN = 6] (Interface = 6) You have to press F3 to turn on health bars. (Level design = 6) Mostly good, often interesting, but there’s one cave section where I got lost for a long while. A few sections mix things up, such as being suspended upside-down by a cut-able rope while enemies attack, a floating raft, etc., but more could have been done with the mechanics. (Enemy design = 9) Great variety. (Difficulty Curve = 3) Way too hard, with too few health potions. The game could have really used recharging health. I didn’t beat the singleplayer mode without enabling the godmode cheat…often. (Upgrade System) None, which is fine. (Modes) = The DbtS and its LfL expansion both have singleplayer campaigns. There is a cool 2 vs 2 version of hockey in LfL where you use the mechanics to knock a smaller enemy into the goal. My favorite is the Arena mode, where you can free-for-all against 3 enemies in a variety of levels with their own traps/swinging blades. The “Xtended” mod also has a really cool level where you play in an 8 vs 8 skirmish. 1 vs 1 multiplayer LAN works--and is awesome--but I couldn’t get anything with more players working properly. (Length) = 2 hours to beat each single-player mode (20% Padding), but I spent much more time in the Arena. [CONCLUSION] Despite its flaws, mainly the graphical mess and excessive difficulty, DbtS earns a 10 because its control scheme offers a unique experience. Its pseudosequel, “Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm” for Dreamcast, squandered all of DbtS’s advances by reverting to arcade controls, so the gameplay mechanics were lost to future generations, which is sad, because a modern version has so much potential.

[OVERVIEW = 3] An Endless Runner-style platformer. [PRESENTATION = 5] (Graphics = 5) A bit simplistic and lacking in effects, disappointing given how Tron games consist of almost entirely black textures with nothing BUT effects. And it’s sad that there are no character ragdoll physics when you die or take out an enemy, and no physics in the few particle effects present. (Visual aesthetics = 4) They captured the look of Tron, and you do get to customize the character and bike by selecting between different movie versions, but the stages aren’t very varied or impressive. It's at least color-coded to aid your recognition of obstacles. (Sound Effects = 6) Functional. (Music = 3) I would have like the Daft Punk score from Tron: Legacy. (Voice Acting) None. (Plot = 7) I didn’t notice any, which isn’t a bad thing. [CONTROLS/MECHANICS = 5] (Endless Runner platforming = 7 (66% of game)) You run forward automatically, and you can use the joystick to move right and left to avoid obstacles, press buttons to jump or slide under/over obstacles, and press the shoulder buttons to dash sideways. If you think I basically just described “Temple Run” with different visuals, that’s because "Tron Run/R" very much feels like a smartphone game. It’s pretty simplistic, too simplistic to carry a $20 console game. Casual games are better suited to handhelds, because it’s silly to boot up the PS4 and confine yourself to a couch for this little reward. The Prince-of-Persia-style levels from “Tron: Evolution” were way better. Also the left/right joystick movement speed feels a little off somehow, and in a game where that’s such a large part of a little game, that’s a problem. (Driving = 3 (33% of game)) The other gameplay type is the lightcycle racing, which is worse. You can accelerate, drift-slide, and press a button to attack an adjacent cycle. Time runs out unless you keep hitting the boost gates. The racing doesn’t feel great in general compared to most motorcycle games, and the “Road Rash” element just highlights how much better the Road Rash games were (“Road Redemption” these days). Each lightcycle emits a barrier wall behind it, which I didn’t realize at first, because you can’t ever do anything with it. Again, the lightcycle levels from “Tron: Evolution” (both the singleplayer levels similar to but better than “Run/R,” and the multiplayer levels where you tried to box in the other players) were better. (Enemy AI = 4) The other lightcycle racers are simplistic, and never try to cut you off. (Physics = none) (Camera = 7) No complaints. [DESIGN = 3] (Menus = 7) Functional. (Level design = 6) There are 16 runner levels, 16 lightcycle levels, a randomly generating runner level, and DLC planned. None of the runner levels look or feel different than what the random generator produces, except for the difficulty curve. (Difficulty Curve = 7) (Upgrade System = 6) Before each round you can attach boosts, but they don’t affect gameplay significantly. (Modes) = Single-player only. (Length) = 2 hours to beat the levels (0% Padding). Of course there is DLC planned, which is pathetic, as even for 1/3 the cost of a real game, “Tron Run/R” feels too expensive for its minimal content. The game hasn’t exactly sold me on the concept, either, so I won’t be buying more.

[OVERVIEW = 7] A 2D cooperative top-down shooter where 2 players switch between different subsystems of one spaceship. [PRESENTATION = 5] (Graphics = 4) Clean and textureless, like a 2D flash cartoon. (Visual aesthetics = 6) Simple, bright, cartoony. (Sound Effects = 6) Functional. (Music = 5) (Voice Acting) None (Plot = 4) You’re collecting “love.” I skipped most of it, but occasional popups kept insisting a story existed. Plot is a bad idea in a co-op game, because when you get a friend together to play a game, you don’t want to be bogged down in non-gameplay. [CONTROLS/MECHANICS = 9] (2D Shooter mechanics = 9) This is a top-down shooter where, rather than controlling the shooter, you are controlling a character running around the inside of the shooting vehicle, very much like “Air Buccaneers” and “Guns of Icarus” but in two dimensions instead of three. You press “use” on different chairs that represent each subsystem. In one of the four “gun” subsystems, you aim and fire the cannon covering that quadrant. In the “shield,” system, you rotate a shield around the ship to block incoming fire. In the “engine” subsystem, you can drive the spaceship. There’s also a recharging superweapon seat. It’s intuitive and easy to pick-up-and-play, making it perfect for cooperative games. (Friendly AI = 8) When playing alone, a cat substitutes for player 2, and you can direct which of the subsystems it takes (where it is actually competent), except that it won’t take the driver’s seat. (Enemy AI = 6) Functional. (Physics = 6) Planets tend to have gravitational orbits that will guide you around if you stop flying. There are other little touches like a current in the underwater stage. (Camera = 6) It works, but it’s zoomed in a little more than I would like in order to show the positions of both player characters at all times, which makes the player ship take up an inordinate amount of screen space and limits the enemy encounters you can have. [DESIGN = 7] (Menus = 7) Not terrible, but it incorporates the main gameplay flight mechanics into selecting the stage you want to play, and it wasn’t that clear about how far I was in the game, leading to some confusion. Convenient drop-in, drop-out co-op. (Level design = 7) The goal is to fly around small-medium open stages, fight off enemies, and collect the hearts. You have to hunt a bit to find the collectibles that let you continue but they’re signposted. Nothing really interesting. (Checkpoint distance = 7) (Difficulty Curve = 6) (Upgrade System = 8) The upgrades are cool, usually offered as your choice of a progressive boost to one of your ship’s subsystems (i.e., faster rate of fire vs bigger bullets). (Modes) = Campaign-only (singleplayer or 2-player local cooperative). No versus of any kind. (Length) = 7 hours (0% Padding) [CONCLUSION] The core gameplay never really changes, but you won’t finish the game in one sitting. It’s too basic of a top-down shooter to play alone, or to last more than an hour at a time with a friend. But it’s just simple enough to work great for really enjoyable half-hour bursts with a friend where you call out instructions to each other.

OVERVIEW = 9 A Bullet Hell/Platformer in the presentation style of 1980's Japanese RPG's. CONTROL/MECHANICS = 9 I do not like Role-Playing Games. Walking Simulator games are validly criticized for having all the interactivity of pressing the "Play" button on a DVD, an experience that could be faithfully recreated by watching a full-length playthrough on Youtube (with branching extra Youtube videos to click on if you make alternate choices in the game). By that standard, RPG's are sequences of Youtube videos where you must roll dice to see if you get to watch the next video or must restart and roll again. All of the "gameplay" is accomplished internally by the RPG's random number generator, your nigh-omnipotent gaming PC wasted rendering what is essentially a card game with a coat of paint over it. I remember playing Final Fantasy on the original NES and thinking that the lack of gameplay was a concession to the limitations of the hardware against rendering more action, and that the RPG style of game would die out in future generations, and to this day I still can't believe I was wrong about that. Fortunately, Undertale is not an RPG. The core gameplay is moving your character's heart icon out of the way of enemy attacks, like a Bullet Hell shooter where you can't shoot back, to avoid taking damage. Cleverly, each enemy type has different but character-specific attack patterns to learn and adapt to. In between each defense, you have the option of either attacking or talking to the enemy. Talking is kind of like a conversation puzzle where you try and figure out which of the options is having the right effect, until the enemy is willing to surrender on request. Attacking is, frankly, disappointing, the same timer minigame every time, pressing "Z" when the line crosses the exact center, like the field goal mechanic in "NFL Blitz 2001". You'll try it a few times, then give up because the conversation tactic is more interesting. Even the Mario RPG series had several attack patterns you could try. There are also a few puzzles in the overworld which are nice distractions. PRESENTATION = 7 The game is rendered in NES-style graphics, with references to alot of games I never played (again, not an RPG fan). It works, but it would have worked better with modern graphics. There are 2D physics in some of the puzzles. The plot is really excellent, very self-aware and genuinely cognizant of the failings of similar types of games (i.e., it mocks tutorials sort of like "Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon"). Disappointingly, and annoyingly, none of the dialogue is voiced. This game was made in 2015, not 1985, and “homage” only goes so far in excusing the failures of having an insufficient development budget. DESIGN = 7 The game is linear, but stays engaging throughout its 6 hour runtime, largely because the enemy attack patterns changed, but also because I could never quite predict what would happen next. Attacking enemies, however, suffers from the major flaw that if you befriend enemies through conversation, you only get money to buy healing items; but to keep attacking the progressively higher-level enemies without missing, you need to level up, which can only be done through the violent option. So you can't switch back and forth, which inevitably funnels you towards the talking option and the nonviolent ending. But, overall, Undertale earns its 9 for staying fun and providing a unique experience with entertaining dialogue. It might have gotten a perfect 10 if it hadn’t chained its presentation to the 1980s and if there were more minigames for attacking the enemies.

OVERALL = 2 A puzzle game PRESENTATION = 8 There's no story or plot, which is fine, since they would only intrude on the gameplay (other reviewers have said there is a plot and I don't know what they're talking about, unless they mean it's the story **** solving puzzles). Graphics are gorgeous, with overlapping low-textured shapes that makes everything look painted. No physics to speak of, no music. GAMEPLAY/MECHANICS = 8 All puzzles are solved by drawing a line from a starting circle to its corresponding finish line. You can press a button to start drawing anywhere in the game world, which is necessary because many of the hidden puzzles aren't on the obvious puzzle panels. The trick to each puzzle is that your line must obey certain rules, like separating certain shapes on the panel, etc. Typically the challenge is figuring out what the rules are. Often the hint that drives the solution is found in the game world, or you need to be standing at a certain angle to align shapes properly, which is why you can walk around the world (and why only showing you puzzle panels wouldn't have worked). DESIGN = 6 The game is open-world, which is a massive mistake. Often times you will encounter puzzles in the wrong order. In the right order, you get smaller puzzle panels that make it easy to guess what the rule is for a certain type of puzzle, and then the panels gradually get more complex. In the wrong order, you get puzzle panels that combine several rule types you have not encountered yet (especially the central town area, which you get to early on), or puzzle panels so large it becomes impossible to guess what the rule is by trial and error. Worse, it is not obvious when a puzzle panel is enforced-ly inaccessible to you. Most puzzle panels have a glowing cable that lights up to let you know that the next panel in sequence is available, but many don't. Sometimes there's a white barrier hinting that you cannot complete the panel, but sometimes there are absolutely no visual clues. So I've spent several hours, combined, trying over and over to complete puzzles before giving up, not knowing if my failure was because I couldn't figure out the rule or if the panel itself was incomplete until another nearby panel was solved. That's a significant design flaw, and better worldbuilding might have cut out 5 out of the 15 hours it took me to beat it. That said, I appreciated its singular vision. The Witness never takes detours into minigames with other half-baked mechanics. It is a rarity, a genuine puzzle game that has you use your brain rather than complete fetch quests, and I enjoyed it.

OVERVIEW = 2 A 3D Corridor Shooter. Star Fox 64 is possibly my favorite game of all time. It was the first game to have constant voiced characters talk to you throughout the missions, the first to offer any kind of touch feedback, looked amazing and controlled perfectly. 8 years later, Star Fox Assault is a pile of garbage. Seriously, it’s like a design document for how to ruin sequels. PRESENTATION = 3 It looks bland, like Metroid crossed with Halo. N64 graphics had a certain charm because the low-polygon count meant developers had to apply aesthetic creativity to construct shapes. Graphics are sharper now, but look worse. And, aside from the space level, all of the environments are boring. There’s nothing as in SF Assault as amazing as the N64’s Solar (i.e., the surface of the sun), no underwater levels, no videogame remakes of famous movie scenes (SF64’s Katina mission was essentially a better Independence Day videogame than the official one). The explosions lack weight and there are no physics. The plot is unwatchable but skippable. Star Fox 64’s only flaw was the unskippable entry and debriefing cutscenes before and after each mission, and I’ll grant that Star Fox Assault does at least let you skip these. That is the only way in which Assault has improved upon its predecessor. MECHANICS/CONTROL = 0 Star Fox 64 was one of the few flight combat games I liked, because most games in that genre are all about achieving homing missile lock-on. SF64 was one of the few games where the machine gun manual fire mattered just as much. Step 1 of ruining the best game ever made was screwing up the previously perfect vehicular controls. Back in the N64 days, when there were no post-release patches, developers had to get the “feel” **** right the first time. SF Assault’s movement feels wrong; in particular, the vertical movement speed feels too slow. It gets even slower when you brake, which is bizarre, because you should be turning FASTER when you brake. Even weirder, the vertical movement speed starts off just slightly too slow, and then after the first level it gets even slower even when piloting the same aircraft. It also feels like it takes too long to achieve homing lock-on. But that’s just the Arwing spaceship. The Landmaster tank has been totally ruined. You no longer control the left and right jump-jets separately, and the aiming is all off. I would have played an entire game based on just the SF64 Landmaster levels, but the SF Assault Landmaster is unplayable. There’s no submarine in this game, a nice change of pace in SF64, but not my favorite. But Step 2, the absolute worst design decision possible, was to make most of the game a third-person on-foot shooter. You’re flying only 1/3 of the time (some of the on-foot sections supposedly let you jump into an Arwing, but only in areas without enemies). That wouldn’t be so bad if the on-foot sections didn’t have the worst implemented controls ever coded. You move slow, with tank controls (i.e. turning instead of strafing), and you aim slower. It’s like an early Resident Evil game, except the enemies attack as if it were an action-FPS. Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike made the exact same stumble when it redesigned half the missions to have you play on foot with awful, awful on-foot controls, but at least RS3 kept the excellent vehicular controls from SWRogue Leader. The GTA series ruined their vehicular controls when moving from the Playstation 2 era to GTA IV, but at least GTA IV compensated somewhat by making it a decent on-foot shooter, and GTA V now drives okay. Star Fox Assault is just ruined its flight combat for nothing, and added on-foot sections so horrible that those levels are literally unplayable to me. I only got through it by using someone else’s save file and playing only the flight levels. DESIGN = 2 The flight levels are okay at best, never as great as the SF 64 levels. And, sadly, there are only 4 flight missions out of the 10 total levels. The last level is unreasonably difficult, even on “easy”: lots of cheap hits and no healing items. Also, you never get to fight Star Wolf, this series’ main antagonists. They show up, but completing the missions always means ignoring them and going for the critical targets. The game is just a mess, through and through. How hard would it have been to make a decent sequel? Take the same exact mechanics from Star Fox 64, without tweaking, and build more levels? Maybe improve the graphics? I realize that sounds like releasing an expansion pack as a sequel, but my point is that that should be your starting point. No one who enjoys video games can hold the Gamecube controller with SF:Assault running and deny that it feels awful compared to its 8-year-old prequel. Instead of a true sequel, the world got Star Fox Adventures, a Zelda clone in Star Fox clothing, and then this. Maybe Nintendo keeps rereleasing the N64 classics on modern handhelds because they’ve given up on ever doing better.

OVERVIEW = 7 A 3D beat-em-up/hack-and-slash based on the 1980s Generation 1 Transformers cartoon. PRESENTATION = 9 The game is gorgeous. Its cel-shading captures exactly—I mean exactly—the look of the 1980s cartoon, right down to the exaggerated mirror sheens on the transformers’ metal. The last game representing a cartoon nearly this well was 2002’s “Robotech:Battlecry” on PS2 and Gamecube. A petty complaint is that Megatron transforms into a tank instead ****, an odd choice for a game that otherwise accepts all the ridiculousness of the cartoon, including size-changing. All characters are voiced by their original actors (or by facsimiles so accurate I didn’t notice). The effects look good. Environments could have used some more variety: it’s one city in earth, within Cybertronian-style technology, and space. There’s no ragdoll or gib physics, sadly. None of the original music score from the show was used, however, which is weird because they had to resolve licensing issues to begin with to publish this. The plot isn’t very good (which I suppose is also accurate to the tv show), but it’s not grating either and cutscenes are skippable. Also, Unicron never shows up, which was a personal disappointment. GAME MECHANICS = 5 The game controls decently. It wisely eschews the Batman:Arkham/Ubisoft system of pressing a button to automatically counter, but it’s hardly complex. The Right Shoulder button/bumper pulls triple duty by transforming you into a car, triggering a free vehicle-based hit during a combo whenever the screen flashes, or acting as a universal dodge button to avoid getting hit. There’s a third-person shooting system, but ammo is so restricted that it functions as a special attack before resorting to melee weapons. Basically the game is you hitting “X” for fast strikes (occasionally with “Y” for heavy to mix up a combo), holding the “R” button whenever it flashes, and tapping the “R” button every 2 seconds when you’re about to get hit. Just barely dodging will slow time, allowing you a free hit with a slower, heavier weapon. Despite the game’s assertion otherwise, there are only 4 melee weapon types: hammer, single sword, double swords, and fists. There are a few guns, but only the sniper rifle (lets you aim in 1st person) and hookshot (reels enemy in) are functionally different. You can only carry 4 weapons total, 1 of which must be a gun, so this means 3 functional weapons. You can play as Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Sideswipe, Wheeljack, and Grimlock. Disappointingly, this means just basic cars the entire game, and, as you’d imagine, essentially all characters play alike. Even Grimlock is just a slower car you will try once and then go back to Optimus because his unlimited flamethrower breath isn’t worth the loss of a weapons slot or the speed decrease. Most of the game is played with just two buttons, “R” and “X” and the left joystick to move. Different enemies, even the giants, don’t require changing tactics, they just have different attack patterns to dodge (except shielded enemies, who require a rushing charge). Flying enemies get really annoying because you have to wait for them to come close (they dodge the hookshot!). Only one level requires you to chase an enemy in vehicle form. Even in empty space, the physics and double-jumping are the same as on land. I wish they had gotten more creative with the possibilities for using the mechanics. There are short platforming sections but nothing challenging, and the jumping physics aren’t exactly noteworthy. There’s also a few brief turret sections and one cool 2D shooter level. It can be fun, especially in the more chaotic arenas where you’re dodging giant laser beams/balls and multiple enemies and a giant and all your robot allies are shooting back, but while it tests reflexes it’s never complex. Even on PC, Ninja Gaiden Z: Yaiba and Metal Gear Rising:Revengeance (heck, even The Matrix: Path of Neo) have better, more developed systems. DESIGN = 5 The game is effectively 5-6 linear hours. You don’t get lost. There are a few extra challenge missions here and there. The worst design element is the weapons crafting system, which really screws with the difficulty curve and with the slower-weapon-equals-more-damage design. You have to combine existing weapons to level up the 3 you actually like in order to keep the game reasonable. It’s just busywork, and worse, guesswork, since I was never sure which weapons to sacrifice or to level up. Each weapon has a few “element” variants (like fire for extra damage, ice to slow enemies, etc.), which, like the other random buffs (extra damage if you headshot etc.), look cool but barely affect gameplay. But since the gateways to the crafting menu are so far apart in the main game, if you want to try out a weapon on some real enemies, it will be a good long while before you get to the next gateway to switch it back out if you didn’t like it. Fun enough, if you’re into Transfomers or really into beat-em-ups.

OVERVIEW:5 A platformer, one of the best Sonic games in memory, but severely held back by frustrating controls. PRESENTATION:5 The cutscenes are unwatchably inane, but at least skippable. Graphics are that modern Mario-esque brightly colored and bland. No physics to speak of. GAMEPLAY/MECHANICS:2 Controls are AWFUL. In a game that depends on lightning-fast twitch reflexes, that is a very bad thing. The worst part is the homing attack, which is triggered by pressing "jump" whenever the automatic lock-on randomly decides it feels like locking on. Often when you want to double jump the game will auto-lock on and homing-attack instead, causing you to die. Often when you want to homing attack, the game will refuse to lock on and double-jump instead, causing you to die. More than half my deaths were due to the uncooperative controls instead of my reflexes. Why not just have a dedicated homing-attack button, as would be OBVIOUS to anyone who played the game for 10 minutes? Additionally, there's a second homing attack with the "X" button that arbitrarily is the only attack that works on some enemies, but will not work on the standard enemies. This does nothing to make the game more fun, and it becomes aggravating because there is absolutely no visual indicator distinguishing which of the two homing attacks works on which enemy. For enemies that alternate, there's also no visual indicator telling you when he's in an immune phase and when he's vulnerable. Did anyone try to play this game before release? Also, why do we have to hold the R shoulder button to run? This is a problem Mario 64 solved in 1996: Push the left stick barely to crawl, push harder to walk, push all the way to run. You can wallrun, or, more accurately, sometimes you wallrun and sometimes you jump impotently at the same exact wall and fall off, and I honestly can't predict which will happen in advance. Occasionally there are powerups, but their use is so limited to the specific context (specifically, you use it exactly when you get it) that I don't understand why there's a separate button to let you "decide" to use it. Essentially the powerups all function as a way to transition to the next segment. You have no control over the camera, but miraculously, the automated camera actually works just fine, and it will even show a view-window through any objects blocking your view. I appreciate not having to worry about camera control when I'm trying to race through a level. DESIGN:6 Levels are nice: they alternate between traditional 2D sections and 3D "tube"-like levels that almost look Mario:Galaxy-influenced (although nowhere near as good). There's less time wasted in Lost World than in many sonic games; no RPG elements, no playing as less popular characters (just Sonic, thankfully), and all the levels are in organized linear succession. But the game is still tethered to a limited lives system for some reason: die enough times and you have to go back to the very starting checkpoint. This becomes increasingly aggravating in the later stages when difficulty does start to increase, because most of your deaths will be due to the unresponsive controls or the failings of the lock-on homing attack system. And for some reason, every few levels is locked off unless you have rescued enough animals, so I had to go back to previous levels three times to grind when all I wanted was to play the next level. Perversely, this encourages you to slow down and try and hit every enemy, when a Sonic game only really works when you are racing through it as fast as possible. But despite all of my many (justifiable) complaints, when Lost World works (which is about half the time), it feels and plays really really well, and was fun enough that I finished it regardless of all the cheap deaths. If only they had fixed the homing attack issues, this could have been a great game. As is, it's hard to recommend to anyone but rabid Sonic fans.

OVERALL:10 Peace Walker is my favorite Metal Gear game, The Phantom Pain included. I could not stop playing it. PRESENTATION:10 It has the best music of the series, one of the best stories (presented in excellent monochrome motion comics, which I prefer to CGI), and David Hayter's (the actual Big Boss) voice. Unlike TPP, audio cassettes are organized by mission, and aren’t where PW puts its most critical plot points. My favorite line, though, (“Revolution or no revolution, you pick up a gun, and sooner or later you're going to hell. Are you prepared for that?”) isn’t in a cutscene. Kojima had intended PW to be MGS5 before relegating it to a device few own. Whereas TPP was a disorganized side-story adding little to the cannon, PW is integral and delivered linearly. It presents Snake heroically, but he crosses the moral thresholds (i.e. forcible drafting, child soldiers, ironically endorsing nuclear deterrence) that set up Metal Gear 1. Kojima's games (ZOE:2nd Runner) always push the limits of Playstation systems, and PW looks gorgeous for a PSP game. Individual leaves on a snipers’ ghillie suits hid them in the foliage and added to gameplay. The interface both in the field (damage readouts per hit) and in menus are works of art. CONTROL:6 PW is a third person shooter with stealth options and close-range grab/throwing. Controls are always awkward in MGS games, and the fewer buttons of a PSP isn't helping. I like half-pushing the joystick to walk silently. But with only one analog nub, PW resorts to “tank” controls (left and right turn instead of strafe) so I ran in alot of accidental circles. Aiming is stilted by relying on the D-pad (or buttons). Autoaim (the "off" option just means "less") helps, but I never like autoaim. There’s not enough buttons to go around comfortably, but try “shooter” control in the menu to at least move and shoot simultaneously. Supposedly the PS4 version in the Metal Gear HD Collection solves these problems with dual analog controls, so I recommend that. If the HD collection didn't exist, PW would justify buying a PSP. Movement while prone or against a wall is absent, but was never useful in past games. The dodgeroll cancels the reload animation and is great when missiles start raining. Inexcusably, the game doesn’t pause while switching weapons/items (which controls awkwardly), limiting your ability to react in time. Some of the motion comics have QTE's, a horrible idea (especially the impossible torture bit). But there are 2 comic sequences with gameplay (albeit simple)--aiming at the kidnapper and horse-galloping between missiles; more of those would have been nice. Stealth improves as you unlock items. My favorite trick is tossing a smoke grenade, running in with nightvision goggles, and chain-throwing a whole group. The E3 2013 trailer for MGS:TPP intermittently sped up, and I wish there was a 3x-normal "speed-up button" in PW (not just 12-hr-blocks like the TPP Phantom Cigar) while sneaking, to relieve the annoyance of waiting for guards to turn around and walk away. The key selling point is the boss battles. The mechanical behemoths have various patterns and multiple targets, so combat involves prioritizing either weak points or specific parts to stop different attack patterns. Cocoon is almost a "Shadow of the Colossus" with guns. Missions where a tank/helicopter is protected by soldiers best integrate all the gameplay elements. DESIGN:10 TPP lifted its best elements from PW, primarily Fulton extraction, which ties the upgrade system to motivation to play stealthily. "Auto-assign" and signposting which upgrades are ready streamline what would otherwise be a chore. PW isn't open-world, but I like that: missions are short enough to play in bursts. Multiplayer is amazing, the one time I could find someone to try it with. There's nothing like taking on a boss or sneaking through a level co-op. Others have complained of onerous requirements to beat PW (Chapter 5), but it's just that many things are hidden (Google the Straw Box, Monster Hunter levels, and the last Zadornov). I never felt like I had to "farm" levels since I didn’t care about trying out every gun. Some of its coolest items are locked until the late game, when the necessary missions are available. What’s the point of new ways to extract after your base is maxed out? Or of newer guns after you’ve beaten every boss? You do unlock enough, at a steady enough stream, to get everything you really need just from the main missions. And there's little motivation to switch out the M16 and LAW. I appreciate that PW lets you take the lower-level versions into battle to preserve challenge on easy missions. Similarly, you shouldn’t skip to the hardest Extra Ops until you have the better guns. PW is enormous, 20 hrs+ even without unlocking everything, and it never got boring. Even if you didn’t like previous Metal Gears or already saw the cutscenes on Youtube, get PW for the boss battles alone. But get the HD Collection on PS3.

The best stealth game ever. It's Far Cry 4, inverted: open-world stealth with action elements. Find (by interrogating grabbed/held-up enemies) and kill/extract the target as you see fit. In the field, you steal resources, which feeds into mother base development, which in turn feeds into your upgrades. It's a perfect loop that kept me invested, whereas in most games I loathe upgrade trees and prefer a curated experience. Extracting soldiers encourages nonlethal approaches at greater risk of discovery. After each mission you can afford new toys (helper buddies, aerial bombardments, new loadouts, etc.), keeping the game fresh. The shifting night/day cycle and weather (dust storms/rain) yield additional sneaking options. The game is gorgeous, reminding me of GTA V, and ran like a 50 FPS dream on my approximately PS4-level PC to the point where I never messed with the default settings (a first for me). Cleverly, much of the story is on tapes which you can be listened to while playing. So why not rate it a 10? Previous Metal Gears had awkward gameplay but excellent (if bloated and overlong) storylines, but this is the opposite. 1) The story is unfinished. The "words that kill" theme is interesting and handled beautifully (see Quiet’s ending), but the child soldiers arc is never concluded (see the deleted Ep51 on Youtube). A shame, given the scene where children beg for their lives holding out diamonds, the impact of child soldiers on the series, and the paralleled central question "are we making things better by participating in war/nuclear armament/child rearing?" 2) Mission organization is bizarre. Some "side ops" are marked "critical" (to access later main missions). After the first ending (Ep 31), "Chapter 2" makes you replay half the missions on hard mode (more enemies, harder enemies, no-items or no-alerts). Fun, but FORCING them on me left a sour taste. If EVER a game didn't need padding...I think Kojima was too stubborn to reorganize his original design after Konami cut off funding. 3) “Alert” mode lasts forever, so it’s sadly easier to take out the whole base or restart the checkpoint. The way it SHOULD have been handled was, you get inside a cardboard box or dumpster hiding space and smoke the phantom cigar (speeds up gametime) until enemies give up if you hid well. I kept trying to get to a fast-travel point, alerting someone, and rendering that approach useless (can’t smoke or fast-travel when on alert). 4) Kojima thinks hiding things is fun thanks to some Pokemon game he once played, so A LOT of the coolest stuff is hidden. Do the Legendary Gunsmith side-ops (which require other side ops), or you can’t customize weapons: a silencer on a lethal weapon lets you shoot out lights and cameras (tranq guns can’t), changing my nighttime approaches. I totally missed getting the D-Dog buddy. Half the cutscenes are triggered by unknown criteria, like returning to base at a certain hour/weather/buddy. It’s hard to feel like you get the full experience. 5) Mother base has 8 platforms but only enough interactivity/content for one. The one mission where it might matter, the invasion, is only played on ONE of the 8 platforms, so why build a huge empty world? 6) Quiet is explicitly a sex object by design in name/dress/movements. It's juvenile, detracting from the character. Imagine watching "Age of Ultron" and halfway through fighting robots, the film paused for some hardcore pornography, would you take it seriously afterwards? Compare MGS3’s Eva: sure, she was sexy, but it was intentional as part of a honey trap for Snake; when the camera zoomed in on Eva, it was actually Snake's PoV, thematically showing her tactics were working. When Quiet moves like a stripper in front of the entire mother base, it’s a 3rd-person camera that zooms in on her boobs. There's no justification: Quiet isn't trying to seduce anyone, and spare me "breathes through her skin.” 7) There's less story here, but it STILL suffers trademark Kojima bloat. The first (of 2) tutorial missions was "push forward to slow-walk," worse than a (skippable) cutscene, and you had to play it TWICE to beat the game. 8) There are only 4 boss battles: sniper duel, the Man on Fire, the skulls, and metal gear. Disappointing, compared to MGS1 and MGS3. 9) You lose one of the buddies at the end. This is modable on PC only. 10) You can't replay side ops, just the main missions. 11) As Kojima's swan song, I expected the plot to be more of a finale that tied the series in a neat bow and left nothing else to show. We’ve already seen Big Boss turn against the CIA, raise the Outer Heaven army, and create Foxhound in MGS:Portable Ops. This should have been him running Foxhound. Instead, it's largely an unnecessary side-story. The interesting stuff happens offscreen. And the twist at the end detracts from rather than adds to the impact on the larger story. Is it worth the $60? Definitely. But it is simultaneously overstuffed and unfinished, impressive and disappointing.

OVERVIEW A story-heavy FPS with platforming, stealth and RPG elements. PRESENTATION - 8 Graphics aren't great technically (it looks like the first Unreal Tournament from 1999), and almost no objects have physics. But aesthetically, everything fits the cyberpunk themes really well, music is great, and all lines are voice-acted (a big deal back then). The story is superb, the greatest blend of conspiracy theories ever in a single product, and with a better understanding of the philosophy of technology than anything in the 15 years since. What's great about all the optional flavor-text is half of it is actually gameplay-relevant, giving you codes and passwords, which encouraged you to talk to everyone and read everything. CONTROLS - 8 FPS controls are smooth, and you can interact with everything in the world with just a right mouse button click. The game is hard: sights take way too long to become accurate unless you pour upgrade points into that weapon system, the "tranquilizer" causes enemies to run around for 10 seconds shooting back at you before they keel over, and the only other nonlethal knockout option besides tranq darts requires (very) limited ammo. Both violent and nonviolent options are difficult: you have limited inventory options, and the every "Augmentation" option excludes a different Aug, so you are constantly making meaningful choices. But since the game allows quicksaving/quickloading, and you never feel lost in terms of what to do next, it all works brilliantly despite the complexity. DESIGN - 10 What makes the game is that every encounter or puzzle has multiple solutions. When most (including Deus Ex's sequels) games say "multiple ways to play," they really mean 3 ways to play: 1)stealth around enemies' lines of sight 2)snipe enemies from hiding with a sniper rifle or silenced pistol or 3)kill everything like you're playing a shooter. You can do that in Deus Ex 1, but you can also talk your way out of situations, lay traps, stack crates (they can obscure cameras), jump around obstacles or hack camera/turret systems; all of those are also solutions to boss battles. Every room has at least 3 means of entry/exit, so while in most games "exploration" would mean "not knowing where to go," in Deus Ex it's almost impossible to get lost because there are so many different ways to get to the objective you stumble across it automatically. You choose your preferred gameplay style by picking which superpowers and skills (i.e., super-jumping will assist the platforming route) you upgrade. If you miss the document with the secret code to the locked door, it doesn't matter, because you can lockpick it open, blast it open, or get inside the warehouse through a different route. The game is also brilliantly adaptive; normally when a game is "realistic" it means the Shenmue-open-world system of having a bunch of irrelevant interactive minigames that delay your progress; here, realism means letting you choose your path and actions and having characters react to it realistically. You can kill allies, but they'll shoot back. My favorite part was at a ramp (leading to an optional arms merchant with good stuff for sale) protected by a laser tripwire that would release a robot drone when triggered. I kept reloading that section, testing out different ways to get past it, just for fun: 1)trigger the 'bot and shoot it out 2) lay an EMP or explosive mine on the wall, trigger the bot and it would roll right into the trap and kill itself 3) if you talked to the right person earlier in the level, he would give you a code to the nearby panel to disable the tripwire 4) you could use multitools to hack the panel, fewer multitools if you invested in the computers skill 5) using the speed augmentation, you could run past, triggering the bot but escape before it shot you 6)using either a stealth camo item pickup or the stealth augmentation, you could walk through the tripwire without triggering it 7) by stacking crates (easier if you got the muscle augmentation to lift the heavier crates) you could build a little staircase to walk over the tripwire without triggering it 8) with the superjump augmentation you could leap the tripwire without triggering it 9) If you placed a crate in the path of the tripwire, it would trigger, but you could hide, and after the bot returned to its original waiting position, the tripwire would only extend until the position of the crate, which interrupted it; then you could walk between the crate and the wall without triggering the tripwire 10) there was a nearby vent that let you bypass the ramp entirely. LEGACY - What I would have liked for the sequel would be better graphics, physics, and improved enemy AI. We got that, but in the grand tradition of sequels having fewer gameplay mechanics, the newer Deus Ex games are merely shooters with a stealth option and more dialogue choices than in most games. Deus Ex 1 stands alone, and it is a must-play for any videogame fan.

OVERALL: 9 A best-of mix: GTA:SA in setting and driving/flying; an improved GTA4 in graphics; and Max Payne 3 (minus the shootdodge dive ability) in shooting. TECHNICAL: 9 The best tweaking options ever. My 2-year old PC (about PS4-level) ran GTA4 at 15-25 FPS, but GTA5 runs at 30-45 FPS despite higher resolution and intenser graphical settings. I would've liked an explanation of each buzzword (instead of just VRAM cost, which doesn't perfectly translate to FPS). My recommendation: turn off MSAA, turn down Post-Processing, but leave Shadows on "very high" (so moving headlights will cast shadows) and Grass on "high" (for foliage immersion). PRESENTATION: 10 (Story - 9): Dialogue and characterization is so excellent it encourages progression even during simple taxi missions. Mike and Trevor are equally psychotic, but Mike feels guilty and Trevor hates that hypocrisy, an interaction paralleled by the Franklin-Lamar relationship. Franklin will compromise his morals for money. Trevor's in it for fun (nothing the player can do as him is "out of character"), and might snap and kill Mike at any time. It's great. My only quibble is how the GTA4:TLAD characters are treated. (Graphics - 10): Numbers changes used to designate engine changes, but GTA5 is GTA4 with tweaks. The level of detail is amazing, with thousands of little touches: roof lights when you enter cars, gorgeous sunsets, how distant lights halo out at night, smoke/dust effects, etc. Shifting reflections on your car hood and moving shadows do more to create a sense of speed when driving than any motion blur could. (Physics - 9): The Euphoria engine that procedurally blends animations with ragdoll physics (for humans and animals) makes for glorious car crashes and shootouts. I love how enemies can ragdoll and still get back up, so you have to confirm kills. (Audio - 7): Good music, probably not at GTA:VC or GTA:SA level. (Force Feedback - 7): You feel things like the rough of a freeway, but less in 3rd- than 1st-person view, and I prefer more frequent rumbling. CONTROL - 9 It's seamless, loading only on starting. 1st-person view on foot is recommended, 3rd when driving, and it remembers each preference separately. The interface is clean and functional, and time slows when you switch weapons or change radio stations. The game auto-detects when a controller is connected and accepts either input. GTA is built on open-world driving and shooting. The new element is shifting between the three characters at will. In one mission, one was flying a helicopter, another shooting out the back of it, and the third sniping from a nearby roof, all working in concert to avoid and take out chasing copters. Each character has a special ability, like slowing time or invincibility. Friendly AI is amazing; it can competently shoot AND drive (eat your heart out, Halo), to the point where, on one stealth mission with sniper cover, I kept switching and yelling "no, let ME do the fun stuff" at whichever AI I wasn't controlling. (Shooting - 7): Shooting is good, especially in first-person. I miss visible gas tank covers on cars from GTA:SA (you can still aim near the left rear wheel, but you have to guess). The worst part is that, unlike GTA4, NPC's now drive off when you aim at them. In GTA4 you could threaten a driver out of a car, which was better gameplay than just pressing a carjack button; now, even if you shoot them, they slump on the gas pedal and drive off. (Driving - 10): Vehicle physics have improved massively from GTA4. GTA4 cars felt slow, ruining what had been the best vehicular "feel" in all of videogames. Driving is now at the GTA 3/VC/SA/MidnightClubStreetRacing perfection level. You can do donuts again. Flight controls are similarly great, the equal of GTA:SA's, but now with wind buffeting your copters/planes. Parachuting works great and I liked the bullseye-landings side missions. Due to the constant rolling 3D waves, the water physics are now the best in any videogame (including Wave Race and AC4:Black Flag). Whereas Ubisoft claims it couldn't put online sailing multiplayer in any of the three Assassins Creed sailing games (3, 4 and Rogue) because it was "too hard" to standardize their water physics, Rockstar's GTA5 supports 8-player jetski races with the full 3D rolling waves and seaspray. (Melee - 3): Fistfighting is not improved, disappointing given how common it is. You can only attack or dodge-then-counterattack, and sadly the physics engine doesn't differentiate one fistfight from another. DESIGN - 8 You can replay missions (including most side missions) from a menu, and time of day autoshifts forward where appropriate on triggering a mission, but for some reason neither statement applies to street races. Sadly, every mission design has been repeated from past GTA's. GTA:Online Races and Deathmatches work fine, but Heists never will because they aggravatingly fail whenever any player dies. But singleplayer is huge (40+ hours) and well worth it alone.

OVERALL - 9 The first great climbing game since Shadow of the Colossus, except it's a short 2-hour tech demo. I hope the company puts these mechanics into a full game with multiple levels. PRESENTATION - 7 Simplistic untextured vector graphics, almost voxels except not boxy. It's colorful and it gets the job done, and there's a nice tradeoff of the day-night cycle where platforms are more visible in the day but the hidden collectibles glow so they're more visible at night. It's also really cool to look down at the level and see the intersecting collections of vines in a shape you individually have drawn on your way up. Audio is bleepy but fine. The story is just a few dialogue boxes here and there, mostly your robotic ship "mother" praising you no matter how poorly you perform. Lots of grabbable objects (including moving animals) have physics, and a few trees even bend on impact. Animation is procedurally blended with your movement speed and collision with obstacles, which looks cool, but even with the floating limbs there are still errors where you collide through objects. CONTROL - 10 Grow Home is a platformer, the goal of which is to ascend the level while collecting gems that upgrade your abilities. You start out with just a jump, earn a little jet boost to slow landings, and eventually a functional jetpack. You also climb by holding down either shoulder button to "grab" with left and/or right hand. While holding onto a surface (ANY surface in the game, including moving animals), the left joystick can hoist you up about the distance of your forearm. So by alternating left and right hand-holds, you can climb anything. Other games have climbing, but it's always handled the way FPS games handle ladders: attach-to-ledge-and-move-left-or-right or attach-to-climbable-wall-and-move-up-or-down. Other than "Shadow of the Colossus" and "I am Bread", I can't think of any other videogames where climbing is an actual gameplay mechanic (certainly not any of the Assassins Creed games, by the same company, which I don't feel qualify as platformers because they lack a dedicated non-context-sensitive Jump button). Bizarrely, there's no "cost" to climbing. SotC and IaB both have "grip gauges" that deplete and refill when you're on level surface, but in "Grow Home" it's almost impossible to fall unless you have a brain fart and forget to hold down one of the grab buttons. The motivation to take risks like make jumps is based around climbing simply being slower than other forms of travel. Additionally, you can collect either a flower (depleting parachute) or a leaf (a reuseable hang-glider that lasts until you crash), the latter of which controls incredibly well and speeds things up greatly. In the level are giant vines with sprouts. Once you climb on the sprout, you can activate it, at which point it will grow, and you direct the growth upwards towards more floating islands to get more gems or into glowing power sources which are necessary to grow the main tree trunk and complete the game. Each new vine comes with leaf bounce-pads and more sprouts, so you can grow yourself a path essentially anywhere. And once you master the gameplay mechanics, you can travel across the bounce pads much, much faster than running, or teleport to the top of the map and hang-glide down. DESIGN - 6 The goal of the game is to activate the flower at the top. You can die from un-slowed falls or the water at the very bottom, but there are checkpoints you can teleport between and an instant-respawn. The problem with the game is that it feels like the first level of a much larger game that hasn't been released yet. You have a ton of abilities, especially once you're halfway upgraded, but the game never becomes hard enough to really challenge you. For example, you can land in the bending trees to slow your descent, or use the bendy tree recoil to launch you even higher, but you never actually need to. It's as if the entirety of Mario 64 was limited to "Bob-omb Battlefield." You have to make your own fun to an extent, like trying to grow vines out to the limit of the map, or trying to make difficult jumps without using the hang glider. If the purpose of "Grow Home" was to sell me on the gameplay mechanics as tech demo, then, congratulations, I love it, now where's the full game? Where's the challenge? The only real motivation to play well is either to find 100% of the hidden gems or to try and ascend as quickly as possible without making mistakes like accidentally running off a vine and falling. And yes, that is fun, but I wanted more. Admitedly, the game is very cheap. You get much more than your money's worth, a truly excellent 2-3 hours. What I'm really saying is please, please, please, make a sequel.

Fun in parts, but intentionally held back by design problems (that were solved by other developers decades ago) just for the purpose of feeling "retro." PRESENTATION - 7 Graphics are really good technically, although there's nothing here that justifies a 40 gig download. Seriously, what exactly is that hard drive space going towards, because it doesn't look any better than 8 gig games. Aesthetically, it looks okay, but nothing that impressed, and I got lost quite a bit because many rooms look alike. Enemies have ragdoll physics and gib and bleed, which is satisfying. A few interactive background objects react to gunfire here and there, but nothing on the order of Stranglehold or the Red Faction games. Sound is good. Menus are functional. The plot is...there...clearly alot of effort went into it, but it didn't grab me (**** were evil?! SHOCK!). CONTROLS - 6 Standard FPS controls, although the movement feel isn't quite as good as Halo's. I like the fact that hard vs fast tap distinguishes between knife-melee and knife-throw. But you can only really carry 6 guns at a time (with dual-wielded versions of each) and you can't mix-and-match which gun you have in each hand the way you could in Halo 2. The guns are fine for machine guns, but there really aren't any unique weapons that impress (like almost anything from Painkiller or Bulletstorm). There's a new mechanic whereby some (i.e., very few) steel catwalk guards can be cut through with a laser and then fired through, but it's barely used, and even then it's a mechanic put to shame by, say, Battlefield: Bad Company 1 or 2 or any of the Red Faction games. DESIGN - 2 As a child, I remember having 30 minutes between when I got home and I could play videoames and my father got home and I had to start doing homework. So my biggest pet peeve in a videogame was always anything that I felt wasted my time, like grinding for levels or not knowing where to go or dying and losing all my progress. Let me assure you, reader, that this pet peeve has not at all changed now that I am older and have even less time for videogames. In other, better games, waypoints (Call of Duty) or navigation arrows (Bioshock) have solved the problem of getting lost; regenerating health (Halo) solved the problem of having to waste time hunting for medkits; quicksaving/quickloading (Max Payne) solved the problem of losing progress on death. This game has none of those advances. Other than allowing you to carry more than 4 (or 2) guns at a time, W:TNB eschews every single advance FPS game design has made for the past three decades. You can criticize CoD games for being boring shooting galleries if you'd like, but Wolfenstein's distinction of adding in unnecessary design aggravations doesn't improve anything. There's also an upgrade system, which is almost always a bad idea in action games, but at least it's automatic so it stays in the background. But the absolute worst part are those fairly frequent sections of gameplay where the shooting just stops and you have to complete a key hunt in order to trigger the next scene, because some developer thought that would help "world-build" better than a cutscene. I don't play videogames to do busywork, I play to relax; I shouldn't have to "earn" the good parts **** by playing through something that is manifestly un-fun to everyone. About half the 12-hour runtime (so I've read, I got bored and stopped halfway in) is spent NOT shooting people (either keyhunting in rooms without enemies or super-linear stealth gameplay). And it's not like that problem is solved in the multiplayer mode, because there isn't one. (No Co-op, either). There's little to recommend this game over those that let you just run-and-gun the entire length.

OVERALL - 0 (or less) The Dark Souls series are the worst-designed games ever made and have no redeeming factor. They are also the most overrated, because for reasons I can't understand, the rest of the internet adores them and actually praises their flaws as if they were virtues. "Hard but fair" they say? Dark Souls isn't hard, it's time-consuming and obtuse; once you waste 5 hours grinding your level up and find the "cheat" weapons with the walkthrough, most encounters become so easy they're boring; and it isn't fair, the game randomly punishes you (SEVERELY) often and without warning, and is totally unplayable without a step-by-step walkthrough. If someone patched the game to remove the upgrade system, properly balance the enemy encounters, and put a navigation arrow telling you where to go, a 50-hour-plus slog would turn into a 3-hour game that would bore you after the first hour. CONTROL - 2 DS is a shallow hack-and-slash. Damage can go through blocking shields, and is affected by range to the enemy and whether you press the light/fast attack or heavy attack button, with every move drawing from a limited but regenerating stamina pool. There are only three moves: a) while locked-on, deflect an incoming attack to instant-kill; this reduces the game to a quicktime event without a button prompt b) while locked-on, hold the shield button to block a strike until the enemy staggers, then counter-attack c) do a dodge-roll to avoid a strike, then counter-attack. This is the most risky strategy, it mostly only works on bosses (whereas a and b only work on standard soldiers) All of these put you at risk when you face more than one enemy at a time, because you can only focus on one. The game also lies to you about there being other options. Supposedly it's possible to wield one heavy sword with both hands, or one weapon in each hand, but since you need the shield to block if you want to survive multiple encounters, these are impossible. PRESENTATION - 7 Graphics aren't bad, but everything more or less looks alike (brick castle with vegetation); the only reason you recognize places is that the game halts your progress so much you become familiar with the most generic of locations. The story isn't great but is unintrusive. Enemies ragdoll when they die and the physics of broken crates/barrels is actually pretty cool, although physics never affect gameplay. DESIGN - 0 Non-automatic upgrade systems are a cancer on videogames, because they always result in boring grinding early on and then being boring-ly overpowered later in the game. Of course DS embraces both flaws to both extremes. But worse, you drop all non-spent experience points where you die and they vanish if you don't collect them on the next life, so it's easily possible to waste 2 hours of your time for nothing. Every checkpoint has like 5 paths branching from it, 2 of them hidden, only 1 of them feasible in order to advance the game, and of course there are no hints as to which path that is. It is unplayable without a walkthrough. This is a problem videogames solved around the GTA3/Crazy Taxi era: navigation arrows. Personally, I don't like "exploration" games, but for those who do, one of the prerequisites is that exploration not be painful. In DS, the constant risk of losing all your experience holds you back from trying new paths or risky jumps. At one point I fell into a pit and got hit by a gas that took half my health (aka "cursed"). PERMANENTLY. Unless you trekked across the entire map and bought one of a LIMITED number of cures. And since enemies respawn, it is totally possible to lose half your health forever. There are also some purchaseable projectiles, and the occasional rare item that grants you a significant advantage (like doubling your health or the weapon's damage, etc.) but you'll never use them because you die so regularly that any one-use item would be a waste. The game is so punishing that you stop feeling guilty about winning through exploits that aren't fun: spamming projectiles from outside enemy reach, tricking the enemy AI into walking off cliffs, etc. This isn't "hard", it's bad design. Super Meat Boy is hard. ANYONE can beat Dark Souls with a walkthrough guide and the willingness to be bored and frustrated for 50 hours straight. I only wasted as much time as I did to see what the fuss was about, and I regret even that.

The Bouncer is a beat-em-up game with mechanics that would have been revolutionary had they not been buried behind idiotic design choices. It reminds me of "Die by the Sword," in that the precise hit detection should have spawned a new genre of sequels and copycats with procedural action gameplay, but was instead lost and forgotten. REVOLUTIONARY: 1) The game has PERFECT hit detection. It feels pixel-based, and it's better than what we have 15 years later today. What this does is it really makes the differences between each attack stand out so you can apply them to the situation, shifting strategies as enemies cluster, or flip. It keeps everything feeling procedural and organic, because the impact angles are always different. 2) Rag-doll physics for all human and cat characters (but not robots). Some beat-em-ups today do this (not enough), but the ragdoll in this game is probably the best I've seen, and at the time any real physics was novel, and they actually affect gameplay. 3) Enemies knock each other over when they collide. In combination with the perfect hit detection and rag-doll-physics, this opens up a world of strategy and replayability. 4) Two NPC allies stay with you almost the entire game and help in fights, although they can knock you down when they're hit. IDIOTIC Design Choices: 1) No cooperative gameplay. The only multiplayer was the versus mode (up to 3-on-3 with 2 computer-controlled allies per, or free-for-all with 4 players). I would have killed for coop gameplay in the survival mode especially. 2) Encounters are way too short (3-5 enemies) before a frequent, overly-long cutscene and another upgrade/save/character-select point. The plot is so insipid you skip cutscenes on the first playthrough, but even that takes time. The characters are dressed for Final Fantasy, meaning they all universally look stupid aesthetically. 3) Walking movement in 3D was stiff, constantly arrested by an auto-lock-on mechanic that made it difficult to position yourself with the precision that the hit detection required. 4) Characters have 8 basic attacks (and paltry few combos) from 4 face buttons; this was one of the only games ever that distinguished between light and hard press on the PS2 controller. Picking attacks like that, rapid-fire in sequence, is just too much to ask from a player in a fast-paced beat-em-up. 5) There are no environmental hazards, ring-outs, or destructible/interactive objects in the environment. It's like the entire game takes place in one room where the background art shifts. 6) An RPG upgrade system, which never works in action videogames because it's always hard to calibrate how upgraded you need to be. So if you save up to buy new moves (which is my bias because I want to see **** least get the throw because it looks cool with the ragdoll effect) or switch characters midway to upgrade them, the game becomes impossible. 7) Then there are a few pointless sections without enemies or puzzles, just corridors with only one exit and literally nothing to do but proceed there; it's bizarre. 8) There's no "continue" option when you die (you have to load a save from the main menu) which just aggravates the steep difficulty curve and cheap bosses that begin appearing at the halfway point. 9) The game lasts 3 hours, although only 1 hour is actual new gameplay, the rest is cutscenes and restarting the same section over and over because of a super-cheap boss. The upshot is a relatively fun game (worth a playthrough or two) with enormously squandered potential. In the 15 years since, only dinky indie games have attempted procedural/organic beat-em-up gameplay, and not nearly as well. What probably went wrong is too much of Square's traditional Final Fantasy RPG influence. It's a shame, "The Bouncer" could have fixed itself into a superb 9/10 game just by adding cooperative play and deleting "features": delete the cutscenes, delete the RPG mechanics (spawn every character with all his moves), delete the robotic enemies, delete the invisible wall that keeps enemies from "ring-outs." One more step beyond that--add in environmental hazards, make the arcade (not "story"; literally zero cutscenes would be better) mode longer, and maybe design characters that didn't look like they were caught inside a Lisa Frank warehouse explosion--and we're talking a perfect 10/10 game.

OVERALL: A racing game with excellent object physics. The sequel "The Next Car Game" game, piqued my interest (Bugbear Entertainment lost the "FlatOut" license and FlatOut 3 was--from what I've read--a dissapointing entry created by "Team 6"). STORY: Nonexistent. GRAPHICS: (9/10): It looks great if you bump up the resolution, runs great, and has aged well. The big hook is the many physics-enabled side barriers and other objects to crash through. Many are large enough to slow you down, but most just help you by providing visual indicators of how you're moving. Crash hard enough and occasionally the driver will have its ragdoll thrown out of the window. Each of the cars also deforms realistically. (From what I've seen of demo videos, "The Next Car Game" is set to have way more physics-enabled objects its cars are much more deformable (to the extent of being crushed in half, to where that alters the angle of the tires and thereby the driving mechanics). And since FlatOut 2 already does both pretty well, I'm excited to see that ramped up in the sequel.) The only visual disappointment is the lack of "real" licensed cars; they're all generic. I would prefer it if the cars were real and handled like their counterparts, because then I might feel like I was "learning" about cars. Additionally, FlatOut 2 is the best use of 3D screens I have seen so far. I have an Nvidia 3D vision screen, but most videogames handle 3D poorly, with shadows misaligned over character outlines; even slight misalignments become headache-inducingly intolerable in any twitch-action game. But the alignment of FlatOut 2's 3D is PERFECT! It's bizarre, since I can't imagine enough people in 2004 had 3D tvs to make it worthwhile for them to invest time in the feature, but here it is. And for 3D to really matter, to really "pop" at the viewer, you have to have objects coming at you at all times or you forget it's there; FlatOut 2 has solved this problem because the ground (racing surface) is always rushing towards you, so you never forget about it, and then the opponents' cars and other background objects move between the foreground and background in a way where the 3D actually helps you play better. And the showers of sparks from each partial-crash being thrown at you is just an amazing effect. AUDIO: (5/10) - Sound effects are fine. The music track selection is poor and I turned the music off. CONTROL: (9/10) - The car driving mechanics are great. I still think that the PS2-era GTA games (GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas) and by extension Rockstar's PS2 racing game "Midnight Club 3" had the most perfect vehicular controls, and FlatOut 2's aren't QUITE as good. Also, you don't have "lean" options like in Midnight Club 3 or the crazy jump-jets of "Nitronic Rush", just basic driving and a bit of refilling nitrous turbo-speed. But the controls are still pretty great (better than most racing games), the various racing surfaces feel good, and the inter-car physics is probably the best in the business. I tried the "PIT maneuver" from the GTA San Andreas driver's school, and it works if you can then avoid crashing into the car you just spun around. Gorgeous crashes occur organically, making those in Burnout 3 seem stiff and manufactured, precisely because FlatOut 2 has the best physics of any racing game (at least until Next Car Game comes out). DESIGN: (7/10) - From what I've heard, "Flatout: Ultimate Carnage", a partial remake with insignificant improvements, has the major downside that (unlike FlatOut 2) you can't reassign joystick buttons, and "accelerate" is mapped to the trigger, which would have gotten tiring on my stiff Logitech controller. So FlatOut 2 is a better choice based on this quibble alone. The AI is superb, probably the best in any racing game I've ever played. Your 8 opponents per stage are difficult and aggressive and knock you around, jockey for position the whole race, split up among the different shortcuts, and don't rubber-band (you do need to restart if you crash badly enough). But they also make "human" crashing mistakes and you can knock them into the environment if you play well. The constant challenge--and the fact that I never felt alone during a race--kept me invested. For gameplay types, there's a) racing (sequences of 3-5 stages) b) demolition derby and c) "skill games" like jumping. The racing is by far the best mode. Demoltion derby is fun at first, but it's a little too hard: to stay alive you need to avoid crashing more than the once-per-45-seconds to avoid disqualification but to win you have to cause more damage than the opponents. The biggest downside is the upgrade system, because I never knew if I needed to grind more cash to buy a new car or just play better. Not every game needs an upgrade system, people! Alas, there's no splitscreen multiplayer (boo! Hiss! WHY?!?). But it is nice that all stages are unlocked from the start for LAN/online. Strongly recommend for any racing fan.

I feel kind of weird liking this game when I absolutely loathed AC3, but I'll try and explain why this iteration kept my attention the whole way through. STORY/DESIGN: (5/10) - On the one hand, the story is boring, and there's no real climax/payoff at the end, it's just a-bunch-of-stuff-that-happens that seems to rely on player time investment to make us connect emotionally rather than an interesting plot. On the other hand, the main character is somewhat unique in that his major motivation is making money and he aggressively wants to avoid joining either of the warring factions. But the most important part of the story is that, unlike AC3, it is mostly unobtrusive. GRAPHICS: (9/10) - this is a gorgeous looking game in almost every respect. There's a good variety of environments, from period cities of varying elevations (to facilitate the freerunning) to deep jungle to tropical islands. GAMEPLAY: (7/10) - this is kind of hit-and-miss, depending on what the game asks of you. Each of the 4 gameplay types represents about a quarter of the experience: Ship-to-ship combat is good (7/10), kind of like space combat games if you couldn't move up or down, but what makes it interesting is a very developed, shifting 3D ocean that is constantly buffetting your ship and changing the angles. I also like how quickly you go from sailing to aiming a side cannon at individual enemie on a ship, then swing over on a rope and go straight into hand-to-hand combat. One nice touch is that you can sneak-swim onto an enemy ship that's otherwise overpowered for your ship, kill all the soldiers in hand-to-hand, then return to your ship and conquer the now weakened and crippled ship in one shot. What I dislike about ship-to-ship combat is that, other than size and flag color, basically all ships you fight are identical in look and structure. I feel like they could have designed more than one enemy for you. Additionally, it would have been nice to go below decks for combat, instead of just up the masts once in awhile. Freerunning (3/10) hasn't really changed from AC3, but the environments are quite a bit better and smoother, particularly in jumping from tree-to-tree. It's very intuitive, but it's still hold-down-a-button and point the analog stick, whereas any true platformer would require individual presses of the jump button. There's also a swimming mechanic for underwater side missions, which is cool, but slow and eventually gets boring. Combat (5/10) has a few new enemy types that often require a different button press (i.e. "stun") to defeat certain enemies, plus the ability to throw enemies (off ledges or into other enemies) instead of insta-kill adds another layer. And sometimes you have to press a button to grab a human shield just before you're shot. But it's still way too easy to be fun most of the time. Stealth (5/10) is still functional but not improved. It's still based primarily on moving between bits of grass and insta-killing anything that gets near. Your only other options are a berserker dart (makes an enemy attack his friends), hire dancers to distract guards, and a smoke bomb escape; that's fairly paltry compared to any other stealth game. DESIGN: (9/10) The game starts with you experiencing the major gameplay types (ship-to-ship combat, freerunning, stealth, then combat) all the in the first mission with only a few seconds of cutscenes intruding on that. There are FAR fewer enforced-slow-walk-for-plot-exposition parts than in AC3, though there are still some. Similarly, you spend very little time in the "future" world outside the animus, another great choice, although even this half-hour total was still the worst part of the game. I never even got to the sailing portion of AC3 because I couldn't tolerate the pathetic "platforming" and the fact that they buried the good stuff so late in the game, but AC4 understands that it is a game and puts its best feet forward. There are a bunch of side missions, and you never have to do any of them more than once if you dislike one. And if you just like open-ended missions where you get to a guarded target and assassinate him, there are like 30 of those as "assassin" side missions. So it's a long game (21 hours) but it held my interest long enough for me to beat it. If they could just make you actually press the "jump" button when they wanted you to jump and made the melee combat more challenging/interesting, this game could have been a 9/10 easily.

OVERALL: Maybe the best 2-player cooperative game, certainly the best of those in the Beat-em-Up genre (yes, better than the Sega Die Hard/Dynamite Cop games, better than Shank 1, better than Double Dragon Neon, better than Dynasty Warriors _). PRESENTATION: 8 Graphics are good, especially in their adherence to the mortal kombat aesthetic and in character designs, at least by PS2 standards. The exception is the Sub-zero special effects, which look like ugly static bitmap blue clouds plastered over what's supposed to be "frozen." Enemies blast into bloody gibs if you hit them hard enough, which I loved. Sound effects are great. The cutscenes, CGI and rendered, have really great fight choreography, although they are extremely silly in the classic mortal kombat style. CONTROL:10 Although moves only affect one enemy at a time, MK:SM lets you move around really well with the left joystick so you don't lock-on. Combos are based on button presses, not directional inputs, which avoids the problems of Devil-Must-Cry games. There's dedicated throw button, dedicated jump button, (so already we're leagues ahead of modern beat-em-up games), attack button and launch/uppercut button. Holding down the shoulder button makes these buttons activate different character-specific special moves that draw from a recharging meter. You can also pick up, use and throw weapons. The feel of combat is perfect, and it's amazing how well all the character-specific special attacks from the 2D games translate into 3D space. You can also pick up, use and throw weapons. Fatalities are incorporated as instant kill or "rage" attacks. It's just simple enough to allow friends to pick-up-and-play, but deep enough to carry the entire game as you upgrade the special attacks and unlock more combos. There's a large variety of enemy types, incorporating most of the MK2 characters as well as background extras from the first movie. I personally prefer the MK:SM versus mode for one-on-one combat to any of the fighting game series of mortal kombats. In addition to combat, there's also some basic platforming. Puzzles work well because they all amount to throwing or knocking enough enemies into specific obstacles, so they're integrated into combat. DESIGN:3 Here is where all the little annoyances appear, due to some bizarrely-obviously bad design decisions. For one thing, there are parts of the game where you need a walkthrough to figure out where to go, not to mention the secrets (including critically important unlockables like the survival mode, extra bosses to fight and extra characters for the versus mode) that are impossible to find without one. There's no way to drop-in/drop-out of cooperative versus single player mode, so you have to restart the game to change. There's not even a way to switch characters besides restarting. Also, both players share one health bar, which seems like the worst possible design choice in terms of player health. There are only 4 playable characters in the campaign mode, even though there are 8 in versus mode and more besides that as bosses. But it's a mark of how great the core gameplay was that this is the only game I have ever gone through the hassle of getting the Action Replay cheat system to work for. Using cheats, you can play as not just the 8 fully-coded-for characters, but also as any enemy that appears in the game (although most of the enemies have limited movesets). It also gets very difficult at the end. I'm not too proud to admit I had to cheat heavily to get past the final boss Shao Kahn, who is very cheap in the classic mortal kombat final boss way. And it's short. 4 hours!? But better a brilliant short game than a good but padded one. Despite the flaws, it remains the best 2-player cooperative campaign I ever played, and even as a single-player game it rivals the best of the beat-em-ups.

OVERALL: Openworld Splinter-cell: 3rd-person stealth shooter with driving and remotely activating environmental cameras and explosives. Good value with all the side missions. PRESENTATION:8 Graphics good, just not as good as Ubisoft's previous Assassin's Creed IV, or as advertised in E3 2013, not next-gen in any way, but certainly near the top of the previous-gen PS3/Xbox360-era. Enemies ragdoll, and most structures have real physics to drive through. The interface is very slick, with pop-ups and a cool fast white-wireframe transition when you hop from-camera to camera to keep you oriented. Aesthetically it's boring, browns and blacks: I'm unfamiliar with real Chicago, but I wasn't walking through a distinct city the way Rockstar's GTA series made me feel like visiting the actual cities those were based on. STORY: 6 Story development is good if cliched. The protagonist is as boring as they come; when will game developers learn to stop making every hero an Everyman? Having zero character traits doesn't help me identify with him. I want to play as someone different from me, with unique quirks and flaws. But the biggest problem is that plot isn''t really about hacking the way it pretends to be. I expect videogames to immerse me in a new culture, like Tony Hawk and skateboarding culture, but the script here was written by authors who had never even spoken to a hacker but threw together some Hollywood stereotypes. So of course the female character is the Girl-With-the-Dragon-tattoo. They couldn't hire one single actual hacker as a consultant? Similarly, there are such wasted opportunities for philosophical discussions, i.e., the role of Anonymous as disorganized collective vigilantes "policing" the new field of cyberspace according to an evolving and non-codified set of ethics, copyright and the right to profit off your own work vs free expression, etc. etc. But the only plot threads the game cares about is the the dangers of overreliance on one centralized technology and Justice vs Revenge, both handled well, but again, if you're going to make a game about HACKING, I expect it to be ABOUT HACKING. Every character does has a little blurb about them you can read by highlighting them, which adds a bit to the fun of interacting with them, but it's not developed enough for you to do anything more than hack their bank account. GAMEPLAY:7 I like that it is hard, especially at first. Without upgrades, you are very vulnerable, so stealth becomes a necessity during shootouts. There's no melee combat; you take down any enemy with one button press but this just reinforces the stealth aspects well, because you get shot to death unless you sneak up on a solitary enemy. You have no offensive capabilities while driving besides ramming the enemy and hacking nearby explosives, so you have to lead enemies on exciting chase. It makes you focus, whereas by comparison Saints Row is so easy it's a series of options for killing enemies rather than an actual "game." The much-hyped "hacking" ability is just a "use" key that lets you do different things: explode nearby objects, start distractions on an enemy, raise/lower cover or elevators, activate traffic lights (which causes all surrounding cars to unrealistically pile into the intersection, but it's random because of the car distribution), or switch your view to any camera in your line of sight (so you jump from camera to camera). This all works well and adds alot, and it's possible to clear around half of each group of enemies without ever entering the compound if you're clever. But later, when you realize that instant takedown opportunities flash to get your attention, car chases stop being as exciting. The "parkour" is functional but hardly as fun or developed as in Assassin's Creed. Driving is ok. I particularly like the reckless speed vs easy crashing of the motorcycles. But it's not great, certainly nowhere near the Playstation2-era-GTA series (which remain the best vehicle control in any videogame). And that's disappointing for a game where you drive this much. I like that the morality system is functional rather than arbitrary. Shooting feet/knees instead of torsos is a nonlethal takedown; so the distinction comes out of gameplay rather than just switching to a tranquilizer gun identical to your normal pistol. Because it added to the challenge, I also made a constant effort to avoid running over innocents during chases. It's a sign of good design that I did this even though there aren't any real consequences for mass-murderer. I do like the nonlinearity, even in the main missions. If police show and who that hurts depends on citizens randomly calling when they hear gunshots. You are almost never ordered to use a specific vehicle, or to kill an enemy a specific way, so everything feels organic. Bizarrely, the occasional hacking minigame is pathetic. I'm not saying they should and had you type in actual computer code with a keyboard, but what they came up with is sad.

The 2004 Spiderman 2 for the Playstation 2 and Gamecube had the best movement system for getting around an open world of any game ever (counting the fast-running of Saints Row 4, the glide/hookshot of Batman:Arkham City, the high jump/wallrunning of the Hulk/Prototype series). All they had to do to make a great sequel would be to base more, better missions around that movement scheme. It is pathetic that in 10 years no other Spiderman game has come close. I got excited for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 because I had seen videos of them "improving" the web-swinging (i.e., restoring it to S2). But the end result is dissapointing, a game that is worse than the 10-year-old S2 on almost every level. In case anyone with the authority to make a Spiderman videogame is reading, I'll explain why. Most of the problem comes from the way they have simplified everything to make it easier. For example, in TASM2, you don't die or take damage from high falls (unlike S2); In S2, it was easy to get slowed down unless you timed everything properly, which made it fun to try and race across the city; since there are no consequences (not evern slowing down) for swinging poorly in TASM2, it's not fun. The wall-running is accomplished by continuing to hold the web swing button (in S2, you had to consciously let go of the web line and press the "wall cling" plus "run" buttons); it's how the Assassin's Creed system of auto-jumping to make parkour easier has actually made its platforming much less fun than the Mario64 system of actually pressing a jump button. And speaking of, you can no longer jump in between web swings, or wall-jump back and forth between buildings in TASM2. They took out (or failed to code) all the options of S2 that made you feel in control. Also, the physics in TASM2 feel wrong, like you're moving at a constant speed. The physics of S2 were alot sharper, like you were a weight at the end of a pendulum, moving with real angular acceleration. The one improvement of TASM2 in web-swinging is that there's a separate shoulder button for left and right web strands, which does work better than having the one web-swing button of S2. But that one improvement does not compensate for everything they took out. The combat of TASM2 is much worse than S2, and it wasn't that great in S2. TASM2's combat is a copy of the Batman:Arkham Series' (or any recent Ubisoft game), minus the near-perfect "feel" that only comes with repeat playtesting, minus the different kinds of enemies that have to be approached differently, minus anything new at all in any way. S2 had a better system: instead of a "counter" button, there was a "dodge" button, that you then followed up with different options (attack or web-grab). S2 also let you web-grab, hold, and throw enemies at each other, which was pretty fun in a "Minority-Report-Everybody-Runs more-of-a-toy-than-a-game" kind of way. My main gripe in S2 was that enemies would randomly block your web-grab attempts without visual indicators of when you could and couldn't grab an enemy. In TASM2 your only option besides "punch" and "counter" is a web-shot attack; there's no way to grab enemies outside of an automated pre-animated finisher. Again, S2 wins out over TASM2 in terms of combat. The stealth is functional but uninteresting. Enemy AI is as simplistic as it can be without being broken. The segments where you play as Peter Parker are pointless, boring, and unskippable. I can't imagine how they managed to publish TASM2 without anyone pointing out how much better all of those bits would have worked as (SHORT) cutscenes instead. Yes, S2 had Peter Parker segments, but they lasted like 5-10 seconds, and even then they felt pointless. The graphics of TASM2 are average (so, better than S2), and the animations are better, but the characters no longer have rag-doll-physics; game creators, take note: physics always, always, always make the game look better in motion than just having more raw polygons or high-res textures. So even in terms of looks, the 10-year-old S2 still wins out over TASM2. S2 was not perfect. There was alot more S2 could have done with missions to take advantage of the movement system (i.e. actual character chases with AI instead of just get-to-the-checkpoint-in-time), the submissions got repetitive, the combat was a little simplistic and the plot was insipid. TASM2 has fixed none of these problems and actually (by comparison) made the web-swinging and combat much, much worse. TASM2 is not average. A higher-resolution verion of S2 without other improvements would be "average," i.e., the least-they-could-do. TASM is just a major dissapointment. It doesn't matter if it's an improvement over TASM1's web-swinging, this is just not acceptable. And incidentally, the metacritic-tampering (perfect ratings posted by people who created their accounts the day of release, writing in obvious marketing language?) was pathetic on every level, though it didn't influence my score.

OVERVIEW: 3rd-person Beat-em-up, single-player only LENGTH: 5-6 hours (this lowered the overall score) STORY: (7/10) - The protagonist is unapologetically villainous, so it's more interesting than usual. I like most of the little visual gags (character intros), though Yaiba isn't above toilet humor. There's nothing great here, but for the most part the story is unobtrusive to the gameplay. The exception is that one 5-second clip right before the second main fight with Hayabusa, mostly because I had to watch it 1000 times. GRAPHICS (7/10) - Cel-shaded, with very garish colors. I like it, and it certainly stands out among grey-brown modern realistic games. That said, there's almost no destructibility to the environment, and none of the characters have ragdoll physics. We've had ragdoll physics in beat-em-ups ever since Spiderman 2 on the Playstation 2, and it has always, always been better than the canned animations, no matter how good they are, so every time I see a game without real physics it feels like a step backward. The screen tends to get chaotic and cluttered, but I like that (I also like the dust-of-war effect in Battlefield:Bad Company 2; I think dealing with the visual overload is part of the fun; maybe that's just me). One nice feature is how the context-sensitive items, your abilities, and QTE prompts are color-coded to the Xbox buttons; i.e., the whip-chain light trail is red because you press "B" to do it and B is the red button, so when you have to mash B the prompt will glow red. One wierd thing is that the indicator for mashing the chain button is a fist (but red), which is the same exact diagram the game uses for when you're supposed to mash the strong punch button (but orange); I died several times before I realized that; the game already uses different diagrams for "dash" and "sword", would it have been so hard to draw one more diagram for "chain"? Another criticism is that there's no indicator distinguishing which (and when) I can grab and throw an enemy and which ones won't let me grab them. CONTROL (9/10) - I play alot of beat-em-ups, but have never tried a 3D Ninja Gaiden game before, so I can't exactly compare Yaiba to NG2. But Yaiba controls wonderfully. "X" for the fastest melee sword attacks best for damaging strong enemies when they expose their weak points, "Y" for stronger punches that can punch through blocking enemies, "B" for the God-of-War chain attack that has the best range and is the only attack that can hit electricity-shielded enemies, and "A" to dash to avoid an incoming attack. Shoulder buttons to grab, block, or execute an enemy (executions regain health, or for elite enemies will give you a limited-ammo weapon that temporarily takes the place of your chain attack). This works really well, since each attack button is equally effective/important depending on the situation, and it feels indescribably faster to switch just by tapping a different button (whereas in a game like the 2013 DMC: Devil May Cry it was much slower to have to hold down a shoulder button to switch between the devil/angel/normal weapon, much less tap the d-pad to switch one out). Combos are based on switching back and forth between the different kinds of attacks in surprisingly intuitive ways (for example, if you switch between strong punch and chain attack, you end the combo with a stronger but slower chain attack). There's no lock-on, which I like. Combat is kind of like a souped-up Dynasty Warriors but with enemies that actually attack you instead of standing there dumbly, so you have to manage crowds, get your hits in, and dash out of the way before the elite enemies pound you into the ground. There's also an element system consisting of fire, bile and electricity, (i.e., bile + electricity = crystalized-frozen enemy, fire+electricity = storm that consumes enemy), and since enemies can hurt each other, much of the later half of the game is all about tricking the bigger enemies into killing each other by timing your dashes. Throw in the standard rage mode, and you get a combat system that rivals any other 3d beat-em-up. The god-of-war system is probably still better overall, but not by much. The fixed camera works most of the time (one or two areas where it leads to cheap deaths). For some reason, much of the game is devoted to context-sensitive-button pressing platforming. While I appreciate that it correlates intuitively with your normal attacks (dash to "jump", strong punch to punch through a barrier, chain to hookshot), without a dedicated jump button, this linear "platforming" just seems like it's mocking me; I would have preferred they just move the character in a cutscene rather than have me barely-control it. GAMEPLAY (8/10) - Game progression is mostly great, with the exception of one super-cheap bossfight (round 2 vs Hayabusa) just because he could kill you in 3 hits. Otherwise, the game improves and rewards skill pretty evenly. I would love a sequel.

What a thoroughly average game. It's just like the SNES Donkey Kong Country games with higher res graphics, except no longer novel or original. It's even average within its genre (of 2D platforming) within its console (Wii). It doesn't have the co-operative 4-player play of New Super Mario Bros Wii or Rayman: Origins, and it doesn't have the hand-drawn gorgeous cartoon look of Rayman: Origins, both of which are far better games. It's also all the worse (thus below average) for forcing you to shake the wiimote as an input command, which is unacceptable in a twitch platformer. At least Rayman: Origins let you use a Gamecube controller. It's sorta fun, but there are much better games (Rayman, NSMB) for the Wii you should be spending your time on if you love 2D platforming.

OVERVIEW: first-person platforming STORY: (5/10) GRAPHICS: (8/10) The bold colors against mostly white buildings is a good look, and, as with cel-shading, it makes the graphics hold up fairly well years later. The use of red to highlight pathways also works really well. CONTROL: (6/10) No problems, but I use a joystick for pc games, not a keyboard. GAMEPLAY: (8/10) Mirror's edge is one of my favorite platforming games, and by far the best of the more realistic parkour simulators (The Assasin's Creed games don't even COUNT as "platformers" since they don't have a true jump button, you just hold down the action button and run and the game jumps for you). It would have been rated higher except the game isn't varied enough. It would have been nice to have levels where you are actually chasing other parkour characters, or are being chased by characters you have to outrun, but instead every level is just a get-from-A-to-B deal with the only variations being in the placement of obstacles like armed police-guards and platforms. It was fun enough for me to replay the whole thing twice more already, but I hope the sequel takes some cues from the wilder mario games and adds some new platforming challenges (rather than turning it into a shooter). GAME PLAYTHROUGH LENGTH: 6-8 hours.

This game is fun. Basically every criticism I've heard about it is true (i.e., doesn't innovate, is the same game as CoD4, etc., 100% linear). But it's fun. The linear CoD design has solved my biggest pet peeve from pre-1990s games: not knowing where to go next and feeling like I'm wasting my time. Before, I would just look up a walkthrough, but the objective marker just keeps me immersed in the game. Aside from the sandbox shooters, all the competitors copy CoD because it works. Also, it's a pretty, polished game with lots of spectacle. So why not a higher score? Because it doesn't innovate and it is more like an expansion pack to CoD4 than the 5th sequel. The new stuff (a pseudo-rts mode and a cool see-through-walls scope) is pretty minor, and I probably won't be replaying the single-player mode ever again. Also, while I really liked the revenge-driven plot of Modern Warfare 3, the plot of BlOps 2 doesn't really do anything for me. So I'd say slightly above average. Worth playing once if you like the linear FPS genre, but not something I'd stake my reputation recommending to my friends.

Boring interminable unskippable cutscenes. One of the weakest stealth engines ever made (look me in the eyes and tell me the stealth aspects compare to Thief, Dishonored, Metal Gear, etc.). Combat is ok, but really it's just a less-fun ripoff of the Arkham City/Asyum melee engine. But here's the real problem: NO JUMP BUTTON. How do you make a platform game without a jump button? From the hype, I was hoping for a third-person Mirror's Edge, but all you do is hold down "run" and point the analog stick and the game plays itself. It's like a barely interactive cutscene. Imagine if you were playing an FPS where you just held down a "safety off" button and the guns all fired automatically whenever an enemy wandered into the crosshairs. Doesn't sound fun, does it? Neither is this.

I don't get why no one seems to like this game. I'm having an absolute blast with it. Compared to most 3PS's, the enemies have slightly more health but all the machine guns are more accurate, which I feel is a much better system (you're fighting the enemies, not the weapon spread). Plus one-hit melee kills while standing or over/under cover for additional options. And the game is really good about recognizing and rewarding headshots. I tried to replay Gears of War 1 recently and got bored halfway through, but this just feels better. And the vertical cover system works great. If you're flanked from above and below by enemies, then whether you take cover above or below the ledges becomes a shifting element of strategy. Whether you mantle upward for melee kills at the risk of giving the enemies a better shot is another element of strategy. And frankly, it's just cool to see a killed enemy ragdoll toward you as it falls off a cliff. Compared to the Rogue Squadron series, the jetpack flight seems just fine to me. And the ability to zoom into a horizontal ground fight or hover out of vertical cover for better aim (a the risk of exposing yourself) adds another layer. The slugs-inside-robots aren't quite as interesting as the multi-destructable robots of Binary Domain (another underappreciated shooter), but they are unique(r) than most games. I like the exploding red guys that leave damaging large energy spheres. Also I don't get the criticisms about graphics. It's not the prettiest game in the world, but I think it looks good (especially compared to the average Xbox360 title), and I like the semi-cartoony 50's style art choices. Admittedly the environments repeat. I love this game and have recommended it, especially now that it's dirt cheap ($5 on Steam as of writing, but you really need an Xbox controller to enjoy it). Mostly I'm just disappointed that a fun game (I would say 8.5/10) with a lot of great ideas won't get a sequel it really deserves.

This is the first successful (meaning fun) 3D snake game. In the standard mode, you start in a 2D mode (where you wrap around the edges to the other side of the plane or cube) turning only left or right, but when you eat enough targets/pellets, a hole opens up for you to enter a 3D space. The 3D mode controls sort of like an arcade flight combat game, only with the same rules as Snake (i.e., don't run into your ever-growing tail). You alternate back-and-forth between 2D and 3D, each iteration requiring more and more pellets to be eaten to advance, but each iteration resetting your tail size. Your movement speed is constant (though there is a "go slightly faster" button you can hold down), but increased challenge comes from randomly appearing block obstacles, "mines" that sprout delayed temporary laser walls in 6 directions when triggered, moving walls, and enemy snakes. There's also an occasional blue powerup that replaces your tail with edible pellets. The arenas and obstacles are randomized, but it gets harder faster when you perform well (i.e. holding down the "go faster" button). You have three lives per run, and death resets your tail length. The graphics and sound are pretty minimalist (I like them, but that's a question of personal preference), but pretty soon you learn to rely on those subtle cues: the 3 beeps in advance of each obstacle's materialization, the clicks before each laser wall goes up. In the 3D move, you are absolutely reliant on the fact that the walls get whiter as your snake gets closer to them, plus a growing white vapor effect that appears on objects (lasers, your own tail) right before you collide with them. Once you understand the visual cues, I found that the camera worked quite well, even in 3D (objects become semi-transparent to avoid blocking your view). Control is good. My Xbox360 controller plugged-and-played instantly, and the keyboard buttons work surprisingly well; the game was supersensitive to how long I held down each button so it is fully playable with the keyboard despite being a twitch-arcade game. The main complaint about this game is that your maximum turn speed is pretty slow; you have a fairly wide turn radius, which can make the 2D stages in the later iterations fairly challenging because I often felt I could have saved myself if the game let you turn on a dime. In 3D the turn radius doesn't seem to cause problems. The game also slightly rotates your snake to avoid collision if you're at a glancing angle from the wall, but you won't notice the game helping you unless you really pay attention. The other mode in this game is 8 single-arenas (4 * 2D stages and 4* 3D) where you try to go as long as possible in one life without switching arenas, which was great when I just wanted to play in the 3D spaces; what's weird about this mode is that it's buried (page 4 of the "Notes" option) and I didn't even know it was there for a week after I bought the game. Also, one time I accidentally triggered some kind of "green mode" 3D iteration with textual notes before it took me back to the main game, but I'm not sure how. Another comment I should make is that the game initially didn't work for me until I unchecked the anti-aliasing option; the simplified graphics don't really need aliasing anyway and I'm not sure why that broke the game on my laptop, but it was an option left on by default. The other feature missing is any sort of leaderboard. That may change if it gets a Steam release. Also there's no multiplayer (competitive Tron-like 3D-Snake would have been nice). Overall this is a really awesome game to play in 10-minute bursts, and it's only $3. I recommend it to anyone who thinks 3D snake looks interesting.

OVERVIEW: Intrusion 2 is a 2D side-view run-and-gun shooter action game with 360 degree aiming and 2D physics. STORY: (n/a /10) There are no cutscenes or text boxes, it's all just gameplay. The unnamed dude just crash-lands and immediately starts killing everything that moves while walking to the right. GRAPHICS: (9/10) The graphics at first blush appear to be the standard "retro" 16-bit stuff all indie developers are required by law to use, but what elevates this game's look above that is the 2D physics. Although simpler than the 3D ragdolls found in most FPS shooters, all of the enemies (and you when you die) ragdoll on death. The enemies also never dissapear, so the jetpack guys you kill will keep flying around, dead, until they trap themselves somewhere. Each level is littered with objects that react properly to gunfire and weight, and your character even has a long scarf explicitly to show off the cloth physics. One of the most impressive things about the look of the game is the way some of the crazier enemies move, like how wolf legs adjust and shift to sit on the terrain they stand on, or the way the robot (?)dog sub-bosses will wheel around their legs to claw their way forward. The larger enemies are also good about their weak point flashing when you hit it so you know you're doing damage. CONTROL: (8/10) With a mouse and keyboard, you have WASD movement and free-reign 360-degree mouse aiming. I do not recommend this setup, simply because it will over-focus your attention on proper aim, when you should be doing more spray-and-pray while focusing on jumping and ducking to avoid enemy fire. With an Xbox 360 controller plugged in, the game controls beautifully, with the left joystick (or D-pad) moving and the right joystick aiming in 360 degrees. My major gripe with the control scheme is that jumping is mapped to both Up on the joystick and to the A button, but since you have to hold down the right trigger to fire, it's too awkward to fire with your right index finger and control both joysticks AND press another button with your right hand. A better solution would have been to map jumping to the left shoulder bumper so you could keep your left thumb on the movement joystick and still click jump. The way it is now, to both dodge and shoot back you need to get used to jumping by pressing Up, which works, but is slightly more awkward. Additionally, a melee attack button might have been nice for close range. That said, the game controlled fine, and all deaths were my own fault. No other joystick type is supported, from what I can tell (unless you use third-party utilities). GAMEPLAY: (10/10) Basically you move right and shoot at everything, then when you get a harder enemy you have to move backward to keep dodging fire. There are checkpoints and (in Normal mode) you can take some hits before you die, so while you have to be careful with each encounter, the game isn't unreasonably challenging. It's a simple concept, but the pervasiveness of the 2D physics changes everything. You can grab onto ropes or bound from bouncy tree limbs to jump to the next part. The larger enemies will grab and throw smaller objects at you. You can sometimes roll heavier boulders down at enemies. You can climb on top of the flying sub-bosses. You can use small objects to block incoming fire, or trap the larger enemies in between objects inside certain crates, or temporarily reflect back homing missiles by shooting at them. One boss even grabs the room you're in and rolls it around, trying to use the shifting gravity to crush you in between the room's heavier crates. It's almost hard to go back to something as simple as Metal Slug after playing Intrusion 2, because this (physics) is that next step 2D shooters have been needing for awhile. Weapons include machine guns, a grenade launcher, and a shoot-through-walls railgun laser. The grenade launcher is kind of annoying in that at close range you do splashback damage to yourself, and you autoswitch weapons when you run out, so at one section I purposefully depleted my grenade ammo because it was more trouble than it was worth against a sub-boss. The vehicles vary things nicely. There's a wolf (better jumping and a melee bite) and three different types of mechs (rocket-launching, sword-swinging and grapple-hook). The grapple-hook mech is the most fun because you can swing-pull yourself to higher ledges and grab and throw enemies or objects. You end up trying to keep your vehicles alive as long as possible because they're so fun. Each of the vehicles is also a boss type. The bosses themselves are also amazing, multi-stage, and use physics as part of their challenge. GAME PLAYTHROUGH LENGTH: 2-3 hours. The game is short and there's no multiplayer at all (co-operative would have been awesome). If it had been a full-priced $60 game it would have been fair to ask for 6-8 hours, but at $10 it's well worth it. If you still doubt that, try the free demo on Steam.