six30two

I loved The Darkness for Xbox. Amazing game. In this sequel, the story is preserved, the pacing is great, the graphics are fun, the game play is fun. The whole concept of quad-wielding I laughed at initially, but it was put into play amazingly well. The story progressed well enough, if not being a little short. The characters were reasonable, but a little flat compared to the last game. I really just had fun with the engine and cutting people in two with my tentacle slash. The ending is an obvious tie-in for a sequel, though, rather than tying up the game nicely. Story could've used some depth.

The gameplay on this was fantastic, and very similar to Mass Effect 2. However, none of the sidequests or final mission choices have any affect on the endings. Remember in ME2 if you didn't get that upgrade for the ship, it'd kill your engineers? Or how if you didn't send the right guys on the suicide mission, they would die? Yeah, none of that happens. It doesn't matter who you pick or what you do, the game ends the same 3 ways. Total Deus Ex: Human Revolution style copout. Gameplay was fun, ending was crap.

I progressed about 2/3rds of the way into this game before deleting it. It does nothing new, the plot is incredibly unconvincing, the combat boring and incredibly easy... I was just left uninspired. Salvatore's artistic feel definitely is evident throughout the game, but it's just very simplistic. The game also lends itself to certain abuses with the crafting system that makes anything other than player-crafted gear absolutely pointless. Quests were boring and monotonous. For those of you who don't know, this was meant to be an MMO but was cut down to a single player game - and the feel is evident. It feels exactly like that - not strong enough on the single player elements. Everything was too light and made too easy to digest, as is typical of MMO's. The multiclassing was a nice attempt, and the whole "Fateweaving" thing was an interesting idea, just horribly implemented. Obviously just another thing written in to give you an "adrenaline super kill" mode like all games are using nowadays.

Point n' Click adventure games have been my thing since I started using computers. My very first was Monkey Island, back when DOS was an operating system and Windows 3.1 was the next big thing. I've played classics like The Dig, all of the Monkey Island series, Sam n' Max classics, some of the Leisure Suit Larry classics, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Modern ones like Gemini Rue and Yahtzee's Trilby/5 Days a Stranger series. To put it simply, I know Point n' Clicks. To put it simply, Yesterday was a waste of time. I was wary of Pendulo for some reason, and now I know why. The game is entirely too short, the plot and the way it progresses is ridiculously fast and feels contrived. I literally felt like I missed the first half of the game and felt no emotional connection to any of the characters. There was a little bit of reasonable humor, but it was brief and overshadowed by both the dark story and the overfast pacing of the game. INCREDIBLY overpriced, not even getting started on that. Pass this up and go play a classic, like Day of the Tentacle - now there's a real gem of point n' clicks.

I'm writing this review only to parrot what's already been said. Bioware has completely ruined themselves with this game in my eyes, and because of it I will likely not buy in to their future games. They pandered to the rest of EA's Madden-style crowd by severely dumbing the game down and taking shortcuts in EVERYTHING to rush release. My main complaints: 1. Shallow, bisexual characters - there was no art to seduction with these characters, unlike in other Bioware/EA games. A great example that comes to mind was Jack in Mass Effect. You had to WORK to get that relationship to have a happy ending. Not in this one. With 2 male and 2 female relationship options who react the exact one of two ways to your character regardless of your gender, class, or storyline actions, the relationships were a disappointment. 2 of the characters were annoying, needy, and obnoxious to listen to, and 2 of them were brusque, rude, and overly tough. Boring and very formulaic. 2. Exactly three to four "dungeon" rooms. The developers used the EXACT SAME tilesets/rooms for EVERY DUNGEON and EVERY MISSION you went on. Sometimes they started you in different places in these zones, sometimes they only used half of the zones, but the rooms were always identical. You kept revisiting the same places. Unlike Dragon Age Origins, where everyplace you went was different and unique. 3. Class Skills were incredibly simplistic, dumbed down, and not unique. They also didn't mesh well. I remember in Origins how you could build a really powerful character by selecting the correct classes and skills and how perfectly they meshed. In DAII everything was really dumbed down, straightforward, and... like I said, didn't mesh well. 4. Useless armor - the gear you find in DAII is, essentially, useless. There are about three sets that are useful, and all the rest is just filler crap. I liked not having to maintain 8 sets of armor for each one of my companions, but the way they simplified the gear for MY character made it boring. 5. Boring, lackluster, shallow story. It had so much potential, but fell so flat. I liked the idea of the Mages vs. Templars, and seeing some of my old characters come back for cameos, but ultimately I felt like the story would never really affect anything outside of the city that it was set in. I did like the redesign of elves and qunari, however, making them feel more unique, and how certain characters in your party yielded different results in key dialogue events. But other than that, it was boring. 6. Flashiness - the game tried to be a lot flashier and faster paced. This was obtained by dumbing all the old, fun combat from DA:O. The combat was either stupidly easy, or absurdly difficult - I remember kiting an ogre for about an hour after all my similarly geared and skilled allies had been killed off. There's no art or class to this game, it's all just dumb hack and slash. Where did my delightful Dragon Age; Origins gameplay go?!

The first videogame I ever played was the Curse of Monkey Island, and I've been playing every sort of game ever since - I'm no stranger to point-n-click adventure games. Gemini Rue was possibly one of the very best point and clicks I've played. Period. It reminded me a bit of The Dig, in terms of visual quality and dark, oppressive storyline. It was a lot of fun to play, allbeit a bit short. But the best thing was the graphics - the team did a GREAT job with the imagery (if you like Adventure Game graphics) The only thing I didn't like was the final line of dialogue that lends the game part of its title name. That was dumb.

A long time player of Ubisoft games, it was immediately apparent not even minutes into the opening cutscene that this game is a blatant ripoff of Prince of Persia. (I've also played God of War, but saw no similarities with this game) Garshasp (the protagonist) looks EXACTLY like the Prince, and combat, movement, graphics - everything looks like Prince of Persia, allbeit with a different scale, lower quality graphics, and a poorer engine. The skybox was nonexistant, and the sound was bad both in quality and choice. It was painful to listen to. Combat was absurdly easy and simplistic to the point of being boring, and the graphics just caused the game to be an eyesore. It straddles this awkward line of being more advanced than a 2d platformer, but so unpolished and simplistic that it became ugly. Aliasing was a HUGE issue, and movement felt clunky. There were several times I would be attacking an enemy as it approached, only to end up ON TOP of the enemy - LITERALLY standing on its head. Understandably, it's from an Iranian indie studio, which carries its own set of connotations, however they could've really stood to do some further playtesting to iron out small (but annoying and longstanding) bugs and to improve game balance to provide something more challenging and fun to play. AND SOMETHING MORE ORIGINAL PLEASE. It loses most of its points for me strictly for being an obvious ripoff of Ubisoft games that predate it, and loses the rest of the points for general lack of polish. This FEELS like it's from an indie studio, unlike other indie games that are very polished, beautiful, and fun to play. Instead of inventing their own "gimmicks" to draw players, they rely on ones created by other companies, which entirely ruins the game for me.