Review: Assassin's Creed 3

Question - what is your favorite thing about the older Assassin's Creed games? If you say the assassinations, then you, my friend, will absolutely hate this game because outside of a heavily scripted sequence that'd give Valve and Infinity Ward penis envy, you hardly ever assassinate people, nor is there an ounce of satisfaction from assassinating on the two or three occasions that you do get to assassinate people. If you say the story, then you'll probably dislike this game because it has garbage pacing and a main character who is so boring, Marge Simpson would look at him and go "damn, that's boring". So what's left? Umm... the pretty graphics? Well, they certainly kept the part where it looks pretty to a point where they top Assassin's Creed 2 with some better textures and smoother colors. Whoop dee fucking doo! Like a lot of sequels released in the year 2012, Assassin's Creed 3 coasts on the glory of its progenitors while delivering an uninspired, mediocre experience that can be better summed up by saying "well... it's in the same series as Assassin's Creed 2". I'd say this is like Dragon Ball GT, but besides not having the same directors as their predecessors and being inferior to said predecessors... they're not that similar. I mean... I actually enjoy watching Dragon Ball GT, flaws and all. Sure, Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z fucking annihilate it, but eh, GT has its charm. Meanwhile, Assassin's Creed 3 has all the charm and grace of an obnoxiously fat guy doing a big fart in the middle of an elevator.

Speaking of obnoxious, Assassin's Creed 3's story starts off rather slowly. In fact, it seems to have about the same sort of pacing you'd expect from Naruto where it takes like 60 episodes to do what anything else - from 26 episode animes to any western show - would have done in about a quarter of that time. You'll start the game in the year 1754 as Haytham Kenway, who assassinates a guy in a VIP seating at an opera house and takes a medallion, which happens to be a key to a temple's inner chamber. The modern day plot happens to take place in this temple, but I'll get to that later, let's just stick with Haytham for now. From there, he boards a boat that takes him from England to America. After doing tedious errands for about three hours, the plot re-emerges as he rescues some Indians from a slave trader, learns that the medallion isn't actually the key to the temple but only its inner chamber, and develops a relationship with one of the Indians... I think. It's hard to tell because it seems like he treats her more like a colleague than a romantic interest. After a couple of hours, in comes a plot twist that'd make you go "aww shit" if you even had the energy to muster in order to mutter those words after spending most of the first five hours doing tedious errands and tutorials, occasionally doing something worthwhile.

But the torture never stops, my friends - you'll gain control of Ratonhnhaké:ton, the son of Haytham and the Indian chick he "developed" a relationship with. From there, you'll be subjected to ANOTHER FUCKING TUTORIAL by finding his friends before his village gets attacked by a Templar known as Charles Lee. You guys remember Charles Lee, right? That disgraced general who... wanted to be a commander but didn't become one because George Washington was the far better candidate. Later on, Ratonhnhaké:ton engages in yet another tutorial - one that's just useless unless you want to get 100% because you never need to hunt during the main quest except for this one part. After another hour of play, Ratonhnhaké:ton gets a message from one of the aliens that he is to be an assassin. Then he seeks out Achilles to become an assassin, which then has him participate in EVEN MORE TUTORIALS GODDAMMIT I'M OVER THESE THINGS ARRRGH. At about the eight hour point, Ratonhnhaké:ton - who is renamed Connor so that it's less likely he'll get a lynching - is finally an assassin, and for the next six or so hours, he takes down certain bad historical figures who dare to keep America under control of England and Indians under the white man's control.

Yes, for eight gruelling hours, you'll have to set up the assassinations to come while you do tedious errands and tutorials. Eight hours of not assassinating somebody outside of some set piece in like the first couple of minutes, and then six hours of rushing through each assassination because they went "oh shit, we gotta make the date before the supposed apocalypse, we can't have overly long cutscenes to set up each assassination". I've also noticed that there are parts that seem all chopped up, like they had intended to add in parts here and there if they didn't have to rush to make some arbitrary deadline. But it's not just that - it's also the fact that they spent so fucking long on setting up an overarching plot that wound up being forgotten like halfway through the point during which Connor is an assassin, taking down those evil nasty people who threaten the independence of America. What it basically amounts to is "kill these people because the game said so and the history books say that they're bad people". While I'm on the subject of American history, it feels like each character was presented like some dry version of what you read in your year 9 history textbooks. There's nothing resembling an interesting characteristic in George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Paul Revere. They're just.. there, existing for the sake of existing because hey, the other games have historical figures! Furthermore, it feels like a glorified tour through history as you go through all these events like as if they're exhibits in a museum, rather than them all being tied together in a cohesive knot. If this review seems incoherently tied together, heh, it's still better tied together than the second half of this shitheap of a story.

All of this brings up something I really miss - where in frontflipping fuck is the war between the assassins and the Templars? It's hardly there in Connor's story. In fact, it's only really there in name only. Like, I get that the assassins eventually became extinct and the Templars rule everything with an iron fist, but I assume that anything resembling exposition for these important details were lost when Ubisoft rushed this out the door for the obligatory November release date because that's all you get. "Oh, the assassins are gone and the Templars rule everything". No shit, that's it. Okay, let's waste everyone's time setting up plot points that are dropped like babies from pregnant housos, but let's not even attempt to give one seventh of a shit about anything actually important that is not only a pretty big plot twist, but actually ties the fucking games together - oh, but we'll tie them together by keeping this grade school science fiction shit about solar flares and aliens and 2012 being the end of the world in Desmond's story. Funny enough, that's all Desmond's story is - aliens and world going boom unless he accesses Connor's life through the Animus to find the secret to humanity's salvation. Trust me, you'll love the ending for one thing it does, and hate it for being really anticlimactic.

Assassin's Creed 3 is what happens when the series takes a joyride with Ninja Gaiden and Hitman to 1313 Lobotomy Lane - the formula is still there in a sense, but the execution isn't quite there and anything resembling nuance and/or a good sense of uniqueness is practically gone. There's still the basic idea of skulking around cities and doing various missions that'll lead up to the assassination of one of the big targets while making sense within the context of the story at that point. Whether you run to certain points and await further instructions (sometimes without being detected) or tail somebody who may know something, there's a semblance of immersion to be found, but not much. You can still do some free running to find vantage points to map out an area, and there are additions like hunting and naval warfare, but while it can all add to the immersion of any game to be able to do what you want when you associate things with actions within reason, it just doesn't feel right within the context of it being an Assassin's Creed game. As its own entity, I could see this being at least a decent set of events and mechanic ideas for a game, but I don't know, just having these things doesn't mean it's automatically a good game, nor does it make one worthy of the Assassin's Creed name and a refreshing breath of fresh air after two superfluous entries that marked the grave for said name. All it does... is just make Assassin's Creed 3 feel like it coasts on the Assassin's Creed name.

Before I continue to shit on this game, there are some good things about it. One thing I've criticized the first two games for is the combat. Before, it was slow and clunky. Now, it's fast, vibrant and feels more natural. Basically what you have to do, is press the circle button when you're about to be struck, and then either press X to disarm them or press square to wail on them. No need to hold the guard button and press X these days kids. Also, the redcoats seem to be a bit smarter by attacking more in droves than as singular units. Now you have to *gasp* pay attention to what's about to ruin your day. The combat is still easier than a pre teen hillbilly, but at least Ubisoft ironed it out. On another note, I was ecstatic that with muskets and trees, there'd be more emphasis on ranged combat or using the trees to your advantage. Nope, not quite. I mean you can use a bow and arrow and a rope with a pointy thing at the end to make their daily walk through the forest more painful, and you can jump from a branch onto them with your hidden blade dealing a killing blow, but you could also go up to them, maybe take a hit from a bullet if you're far enough away, and then wreck them. They're only remotely tricky if they have guys with swords distracting you while they line up their shots, and even then... you can simply restart from the last checkpoint that's like 10 seconds away and make sure to cleave them in the face, forcing them to use the pointy end of their muskets instead of being able to shoot you. But again, I at least appreciate the fact that Ubisoft ironed out the combat because it was easy to see it being a big thing in the game and I'd hate to use that clunky piece of shit system from the other games.

Another cool thing is naval warfare. You set sail for the vast, open oceans to fire your cannons at redcoat ships, collect their stash and there you go. There are two storyline missions that require you to do this, and needless to say, they're easily two of the better ones out there. You'll have access to swivel cannons that are operated with one shoulder button and a group of bigger cannons operated with another shoulder button. Swivel cannons are used against smaller ships, which you aim using the camera; the big cannons are used against big ships and are more in line with what's 90 degrees either left or right of your ship. The only means of defense is to call for your men to lower themselves down and you'll take half the damage you'd normally take if you don't call for them to duck. Sounds simple enough, and you know what, it's a hell of a lot a fun because of its simple approach to warfare! There are some nice little effects like wind, rainstorm and waves that affect the ships' movement and even interfere with cannon shots, which can turn the tide of battle in a different direction to what it'd be without these weather effects. This also helps to immerse you into each battles as it looks and feels real. Terrain also affects battle as crashing into islands can damage your ship... it can also damage the redcoats' ships, so cornering them towards islands could prove to be helpful. Really, the only issue to be found is that this is mostly optional content. There's nothing resembling assassinations here - just some good old fashioned team deathmatch between teams of boats that only sneaks into the storyline by way of making trips to other parts of the world. That's a minor nitpick of a very fun aspect of the game.

Finally, there were a few fine, fine moments. There's one moment where you have to listen in on a couple of guys talking about their war and political plans while keeping yourself hidden on a rooftop. From the moment they stop talking, you have to get back down to ground level, snoop around and kill some redcoats without anybody knowing. Another moment has you rushing through a battlefield, making sure not to get shot while you make your way to the target. Moments like this manage to get the adrenaline pumping as you rush through from cover to cover, making sure you don't die before your target. Another moment is when you're infiltrating a boat while making sure nobody noticed you. Now, there are a few moments involving this, but the last one in the game is where it gets it right by having you shimmy across boards while eavesdropping on conversations through windows, all the while sneaking through and around cargo so that the redcoats don't spot you. The final chase scene is also pretty good as, like with the battlefield scene, adrenaline is running through you to make sure you catch the guy without the burning building taking you with the burnt wood. If this didn't have the Assassin's Creed name, it was shorter and there were more moments like this, I'd be quick to say that this is one of the best games of 2012. Instead, these moments are few and far between, serving to disappoint you further when you go through tedious “walk around town” moments and engaging in combat that's easier than the high school slut, among other moments that, try as they might to do otherwise, are just boring due to how little risk there really is as well as how small the challenge is. You can breeze through a lot of this game and get nothing out of it except for regret that you've wasted so much time trying to beat it.

In reality, this game is a very, very splendid case of one that goes through the motions. Ubisoft went through the motions making this game, and goddammit, I went through the motions playing it. There are other sorts of sidequests to engage in, but after a while, I was more than willing to shove my private parts into a meat grinder than to engage into a time waster. See, while sidequests serve as a fun distraction, they're also a means of extending game time, and given that I'm more than willing to place my head inside a lake of fire than waste any more of my time playing this sack of shit than I need to, the sidequests were simply not worth the time. Then again, what I did experience either had me hunting for certain animals (which really consists of laying down traps and bait or stalking them in the treetops) just for a few pounds (money), killing a certain bigger animal, escorting some guys to certain areas, taking over forts and collecting almanac pages. There's also a homestead, where you can develop new items, send out convoys and earn riches beyond your wildest dreams. Folks there give you missions after you find and rescue them like fetching items and ambushing their enemies (usually redcoats). All for what, a couple of pounds, which I can use to purchase hunting equipment and some extra shit that I really don't need anyway? You can seriously beat the game without anything more than your tomahawk. So really, sidequests are just there so you can rack up achievements. None of them outside of naval warfare is particularly engaging anyway due to the fact that they basically hold your hand. Like I said, it ties into whether you want to elongate your experience with the game - not much point in extending your session with a game that just isn't very good, especially one whose sidequests barely have any ties with the main game or any rewards worth reaping the "benefits" of.

The big thing, however, is actually assassinating your targets. It honestly feels like you're just stealthily taking them down because hey, it says “Assassin's Creed” on the cover. I mean, the only assassin-like thing Connor has going for him is his agility, but given the massive overhaul of combat not to mention the fact that every single fucking redcoat and big bad historical figure in this game can be taken down all the same, there's hardly a need to go in for stealth kills unless the mission arbitrarily fails you for getting noticed. See, the only reasons you'll bother to be stealthy range from “because the mission fails if you get spotted” or there's an optional objective that tells you not to get spotted, and you guys know how I feel about optional objectives in a game that's not even good to begin with. Other than that, you're more likely to assassinate some random redcoats than folks like Charles Lee as you can simply wail on him with your tomahawk and wind up progressing through the game once the redcoats stop chasing you down. Now, yes, you can do it the stealthy way, but... would you really want to? Admittedly, Assassin's Creed never had the best stealth mechanics in the world, resting somewhere above Metal Gear Solid and every game's stealth segments but below Thief and Hitman, but at least there were ways to utilize their environments to use stealth in a way that makes it fun and exciting, yet give off a feeling of tension. Altair and Ezio weren't exactly combat aficionados and the staggered combat mechanics made being spotted undesirable, especially early on in their respective debuts. Meanwhile... ooh, Connor can hide in conveniently placed tall grass, around corners of conveniently placed tents and in hay stacks that just so happen to be there. But hey, what if there aren't any means of covering up bodies within a short radius? Whoops, you're fucked! Well, you would be if Connor wasn't so strong that he could win in a two on one handicap match between Chuck Norris and Rambo while kickboxing with bengal tigers and taking breaks to impregnate your mother!

That's something that really drove me insane while playing this game. What further drove me to want to just finish this so I can see how my should've-been-favorite series “ends” is the fact that it only really applies to like a couple of your targets. Those few at least have area designs that can be utilized for a stealthy approach to their demise. Everybody else... nope, effort was clearly not in Ubisoft's dictionary during development of this game – the 2012 apocalypse was upon us and dammit, we don't want Ubisoft to look like idiots who rely more on some shitty sci fi story than a boring retelling of America's history with some half black guy in a hood hastily shoved into it because why not. A lot of the time, the assassinations will either consist of inexplicably slamming them in the face or watching some flashy cutscene where he jumps down and plows a musket down their throat. While these scenes look “cool”, what feels more satisfying is when you can immerse yourself into the experience via the use the environment in a variety of ways that you see fit and surprise your target with a bladed kebab or a literal stab in the back with grace and subtlety – after all, this is called Assassin's Creed, no? Not Errand Boy's Creed, nor Sandbox Game With Shit Story? Now, excuse me while I play the first Assassin's Creed and immerse myself in the well designed levels that allow you some liberties with your methods of assassination, or the second to immerse myself into a story that's great!

It's really a waste of time to delve into graphics and sound design because Assassin's Creed is normally known for having strong production value for the most part anyway. But hey, let's dive into it anyway by mentioning that Assassin's Creed 3 looks great, has detailed textures, runs smoothly for the most part (I've noticed some framerate issues when too much is going on in towns or on the outskirts) and the animations are mostly hypnotically smooth. The townsfolk still look a bit muddy, but when the landscapes and main character models look exquisitely detailed, it's a minor problem. The soundtrack STILL does little for me – it doesn't really make the subtle moments any more subtle, nor is it exciting when it needs to be. It's just there, really. I don't mind listening to the songs on their own on Youtube or whatever because they don't sound bad, but for the sake of ambiance, it does nothing, and memorabilia is nowhere to be found either. It's just big for the sake of being big. The voice acting is mostly good, especially Connor's – it perfectly suits the fact that he has literally no personality whatsoever by sounding robotic as fuck, even more so when speaking his native Indian language. But for legitimately good performances, everybody else manages to sound the part with a lot of bite behind them and all that.

Wow, I don't usually get into this much detail whenever I review a game – instead preferring to talk about parts of games that stick out to me and itemizing why they're good or bad - but it goes to show how much this game disappointed me because all of this shit stood out to me. Assassin's Creed 1 had great ideas but not quite with the rosiest of executions, while Assassin's Creed 2 is a fine piece of work with a captivating story and mostly excellent gameplay. I love those games and all Assassin's Creed 3 did was serve to make me more grateful for them because it's so incapable of making you out to be a real assassin. Instead, you're an errand boy who'll occasionally be a ship commander and maybe sometimes be an assassin. It's all tied to the plot, which is so poorly thought out that it never really sucks you into the story. Whether it moves at the speed of a tectonic plate or sails on waters choppier than Dragon Ball Z's animation, it never, at one point, even allows you to give a shit. In short, this game is crap. I've made the point before that if it wasn't tied to the Assassin's Creed name, was shorter, had better plot pacing and had more cool moments, this would be game of the year material. Instead, it drags the tedium on longer than this review and will entice you to play the older games as a palate cleanser.

Same time next year Ubisoft?

3.5/10 (Bad)

Review: Hitman Aboslution

When I reviewed Dishonored, I opened it up by saying that the stealth genre is practically dead and that the old guard have degenerated into action games with the odd stealth segment. A big part of me was very disappointed when it turned out that Hitman: Absolution would follow in the footsteps stamped out by Splinter Cell: Conviction. Of course, IO Interactive would be quick to say that it's designed in a way to be easier for newcomers to play while retaining some design elements for old fogeys to still enjoy. However, what I ended up getting after a while is that it appeals to nobody, save for those who find games with more flashy set pieces than actual gameplay to be good game design. The biggest thing is that it no longer has that nuanced playground feel that the earlier Hitman games had. It feels more like the latest instalment of the Splinter Cell franchise with its added emphasis on tactical espionage, or the newest instalment of the Metal Gear franchise with its added emphasis on sneaking and cutscenes.

Speaking of cutscenes, Hitman games were never really known for having their storylines take anywhere near as much precedence as the gameplay, nor was it ever anything more than “here is target, assassinate it because they have it coming; yours truly, The Agency”. When Absolution gives it the old college try, I have to be honest... it just doesn't work out as well as it would like to. Instead of The Agency just giving Agent 47 targets to kill, they're telling him to find Diana, who had gone rogue and is threatening to expose them for what they are. You're also tasked with finding Victoria, a teenage girl that was placed under Diana's care. Agent 47 does recover Victoria and places her in a Catholic orphanage, only for her to get kidnapped by Dexter Industries. From there, Agent 47 has to recover her from those evil people!

Okay, sounds like a decent enough setup, but for crying out loud, the execution is laughably terrible at best and just plain terrible at worst! Making Agent 47 more like a badass action hero with a sympathetic side rather than a cold, calculated hitman was a poor decision. It's mainly because, at the end of the day, he's really not a compelling character at all in this game. He simply exists as a generic action hero with no development or real personality to call his own. Really, everybody in this game falls under the generic action character tropes to such an extent that it baffles me why IO Interactive decided to focus more attention on the story.. sort of trying to make a Metal Gear Solid game out of the Hitman license. See, the thing with Metal Gear Solid is that it has crazy concepts, erratic pacing and more exposition than forward moving story. As poorly told as it may seem, at least Metal Gear Solid keeps things interesting. Hitman: Absolution, on the other hand, seems more content with acting like an action movie with a hint of espionage. But at the end of the day, the story is just terrible. It does nothing to hold your attention and just serves to waste your time.

Really, it does a great disservice to the gameplay. Because it's a more story driven experience with personal vendettas, Absolution could either have a lot of fluff with very few assassinations, or balance out the setups with the assassinations themselves. Sadly, this game is more about sneaking around and infiltrating where your eventual target(s) will be, and then taking down said targets because the story said so. “Okay,” I thought, “maybe this game will make it interesting, right?” Well, not quite. The shooting mechanics are touchier than a Vatican daycare unless you use the mark and execute feature. Sure, you can automatically get into cover, but between sensitive camera movement and the lack of bite in shooting guards unless you use the Instinct feature, it often feels like it's not worth shooting anybody, even when you have to... unless you're using the Instinct feature, but I'll get to that in a sec. The stealth mechanics are fine as you can sneak around with no real problem, although a lot of this is just so you can make it to the door at the end of each segment of each chapter with a disguise system is not all that well executed.

Oh yes, the disguise system, the one thing that makes Hitman Hitman, is not all that well executed folks and a lot of that is due to the upgraded AI. Not only are they more relentless than ever when they spot you, but they also seem to have eagle vision as they can spot you from like fifty feet away, regardless of whether you're wearing your trademark black suit or wearing just the right disguise. Even more impressive is that they can spot you if you're wearing a mask that'd be suitable for their ranks, in crowds and even when your back is turned to them, it makes one wonder what is the point of wearing a disguise if, for the most part, you get spotted anyway. Well, if you use the Instinct mode, you can cover your face. While on the subject of Instinct mode, not only can you hide your face, but you seem to have the power of x-ray vision – seeing through walls, detecting what kind of person each human being around you is (whether they be citizens or targets) and also seeing what objects are interactive – as well as the power to suddenly shoot like an expert marksman. Through that, only then does the disguise system work the way that it ought to. Sure, if you're trying to blend into a gang, it makes sense that they'd know their fellow members and would bash in or shoot up anybody who tried to sneak in, but it doesn't make as much sense for fellow policemen and SWAT members to do so, at least not without seeing their clearance. I'm pretty sure not every policeman and SWAT member knows every single workmate as some can actually be hired into their ranks under everyone else's noses! From there, you'll be relying on sneaking your way through the game. No IO Interactive, this isn't Metal Gear Solid, it's a Hitman game - the idea is to use the disguises to infiltrate the levels, not just Solid Snake your way through each level!

But that's not even mentioning what they've done to the assassinating. Oh, to begin with, it's not all doom and gloom as one of your first assassinations takes place within a crowded place and you have a couple of methods of which to carry it out. Should you deliver poison food, or should you set up the car bomb? I was like “nice guys, at least you deliver the goods where they count”, but I was clearly cheering a bit too early. Why? For one thing, Agent 47 seems to have a bad habit of leaving his toys behind at the end of each chapter because you begin every single one with a pistol that's louder than the mix for Death Magnetic. You'll find a sniper rifle in one chapter that you can use to snipe a target if you want to, but you'll have no sniper rifle in the next chapter regardless of whether you picked it up before or not. You're left at the level's mercy as it provides you with the methods to kill your targets. Sure, I can live without the loadouts because the crappy story established that this is personal, but why can't I keep what I've found? I thought that the story was an ongoing one, not just a series of assassinations set at different times. Meanwhile, Blood Money and Silent Assassin let you keep what you've found and yet... each assassination felt like their own separate things while only having minor things link each assassination together.

Furthermore, it feels like you don't really have as many methods of which to carry out your assassinations. A lot of the fun of the Hitman series comes from utilizing what you can find in a way that kills your target, and exploring big levels to find the different means of carrying out said assassinations is the cherry on the cake. Not quite the case here – between shrunken down levels that are usually linear and are far less interesting to explore, coupled with them being significantly less loaded with killer tools (god, even Codename 47 had more methods to utilize), there isn't nearly as much satisfaction to be gained from carrying out any of these assassinations. Sure, there are options in general, but the overall replay value is at an almost all time low because you're given so little to utilize. What, a whopping two, maybe three methods if it even lets you assassinate somebody? Bitchin'! Of course, that's IF you carry them out yourself and not have the game do it for you in some flashy cutscene, complete with slow motion. Whether that's via the mark and execute feature or in a cutscene, it's like the game wants to take control away from you. If it wasn't for the sneaking around, it's almost as if the game wants to play itself... and that's really my biggest grievance not just with Hitman: Absolution, but a lot of modern games as a whole. They seem to enjoy relinquishing control away from you so that they can either play out a boring cutscene or show your player character shooting some fools in slow motion, complete with explosions.

The soundtrack is... okay, I guess. Usually, Hitman games have soundtracks that blend intriguing soundscapes with cinematically exciting orchestrations (this was before every second game overused it to the point where you play a Super Nintendo game or pop on some Iron Maiden just to get away from it). Here however, the quieter songs are literally just there in the background, not really doing much if anything to inspire mystery and intrigue. The more “exciting” songs literally just go in one ear and out the other and don't really make any of the action set pieces or even the action oriented sections of play any more enjoyable. The voice acting is at least good though. Well, good in the sense that it doesn't sound like crap despite such a terrible story. I at least applaud these Hollywood actors for giving it the old college try.

I get what Hitman: Absolution was going for – a more story driven experience with Agent 47 assassinating for personal reasons. This could've been fantastic, but instead, it's a mediocre stealthy action game that focuses more on flashy set pieces than actually assassinating, getting immersed into the experience or even having a modicum of fun. The stealth mechanics themselves are fine, but with a broken disguise mechanic, uninspired level designs and that disturbing feeling that the game wants to play itself, what you end up with at the end of the day is a game that doesn't quite do it regardless of whether you're a Hitman newbie or an old fogey who loves the series. Oh, the game looks fantastic and the sound design is alright, but everything else makes this feel like some low grade Metal Gear Solid knockoff, only without anything that makes that series worth playing.

4/10 (Below Average) pre-disguise patch, 6/10 post-diguise patch

Review: Jak & Daxter The Precursor Legacy

Jak And Daxter: The Precursor Legacy is not only a precursor to the excellence that is Jak 3, but also a reminder that platformers can still be relevant even on a new system. Well, Silent Hill 2, Onimusha and Resident Evil: Code Veronica were praised and they used archaic tank controls, why the fuck can't Naughty Dog make a 3D platformer that's like Banjo Kazooie? Better yet, Naughty Dog made a 3D platformer, but with mostly seamless transitions between levels almost like a sandbox game ala Grand Theft Auto 3, which is very much the opposite of the overly linear Crash Bandicoot series. Being the tail end of the majestic 2001 lineup that made the PS2 relevant outside of being a cheap DVD player, Jak And Daxter certainly left a lasting impression by having a big world to play in and a light hearted atmosphere with some fantastic writing that still keeps peoples' spirits high even to this day. It isn't necessarily the greatest game of all time, but it definitely gets a few things right to make up for what doesn't seem as cool or interesting, whether you were playing it on Christmas day in 2001 or you randomly decided to relive some old memories or wanted to see what the big deal was in 2012.

There is a story, but very much like your typical 3D platformer, it's filler - basically, Jak and Daxter explore an island full of Dark Eco known as Misty Island because they have an itch for some adventuring. Unfortunately, Daxter is knocked into a pool of Dark Eco and is transformed into a weasel looking otter sort of thing, and they escape back home. From there, they have to find Power Cells to turn Daxter back into an elven human kind of thing while investigating the power of Eco and beings known as Lurkers, the latter of which had chased Jak and Daxter off of Misty Island. Whenever you get to certain locations, you are given bits of the overarching conflict, but other than that, there isn't much of a story to give a shit about. All it really amounts to is "shit happened, do something about it now". No character arcs or anything, just collect Power Cells. It's a bit of a shame because the characters have a metric fuckton of personality - Daxter's wisecracking one liners are often at odds with the green sage Samos and his daughter Keira as there's a fair amount of banter between them. Then again, Daxter's constant need to be a smartass is because Jak is a mute. Unlike Nathan Drake who is a smartass because survey said smartasses are endearing characters, Daxter is a wacky cartoon character whose one liners offset Jak's lack of lines. Every other character you meet along the way either have their own troubles or are bad guys, but their dialogue just seems so... out there that you can listen to them and feel like some wacky cartoon is playing out. FUCK I love this! It's good enough to help you overlook the fact that there's really not much of a story playing out.

Jak And Daxter is very much a platformer, meaning that you'll be running, jumping, double jumping and doing this kneeling slide punch thing that'd bloody up your knees if you did it in real life in order to find the Power Cells. Oh, and you can spin around and use Daxter to hit enemies. The aim is to collect enough Power Cells to power up each of the devices you'll use in order to get to different areas of the world, and the method of which to get them involve running around each area to drunkenly stumble upon them. Some of the Power Cells are in plain sight while others have you doing some precision jumping across gaps and onto moving platforms, or using vents of Blue Eco to activate some Precursor technology that lets you either enter Precursor temples or jump a million feet high. Said Blue Eco can also magnetize nearby Precursor Orbs, a shitload of which you'll need to find in order to acquire some Power Cells from some Precursor Statues. Each area also has a set of Scout Flies inside metal boxes that you'll need to collect in order to acquire a Power Cell for said areas... because they track it down or something and Keira is able to magically deliver it to you. You'll also have the odd boss to fight and... they're alright. Nothing particularly special, just either smack them with Daxter or head inside the Yellow Eco vent conveniently placed nearby to unload with fireballs. They're very formulaic and it becomes evident that fighting is not Jak's forte. Nope, it's all about the double jumps, the rolling jumps and riding the occasional vehicle around to collect orbs and cells.

If you feel a strange sense of deja vu while playing through this game, then not to worry - even when I played this at the bright young age of 10 years old, I felt like I was playing the Sony equivalent of Banjo Kazooie and at twice that age, it felt like I was playing Banjo Kazooie if the joints were greased up and the levels were shorter to placate the sudden need to make everything feel like one giant fucking level. There's no hub level so to speak, so you're not entering levels via caves, mini buildings and paintings. In fact, the closest thing to entering a level is taking a boat to Misty Island or riding a gondola to Snowy Mountain. At the same time, this approach to level design gives it a somewhat more distinct flavor, especially after every third Nintendo 64 game was "inspired" by Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie, not to mention the fact that we're dealing with a somewhat more powerful system than the Nintendo 64 in the Playstation 2 and there was a huge need to show it off. Much like the Playstation 3 and eventually (hopefully, even) the Playstation 4, the Playstation 2 initially did fuck all to impress the public - maybe except existing in a market where DVD players required a second mortgage to purchase - so there was a need for third party developers like Capcom, Konami, Naughty Dog and eventually Insomniac to step it up and release something that validates the purchase of a PS2 as a gaming system. Producing a seamless sandbox world with the formula of a 3D platformer instead of making 2D platformers with 3D graphics was Naughty Dog's way of saying "look guys, the PS2 is a grand old purchase for new and exciting games with huge, interesting worlds - fuck Banjo Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64 and all these old ass games, this is the future you pricks!". Consequently, that train of thought transpired to the Uncharted games where they basically went "look guys, the PS3 is the best console ever - I mean look at these graphics and these gripping action set pieces, you can't get that on a dusty hunk of junk PS2 you fucks!".

Funny enough, Jak And Daxter's biggest claim to fame is also one of its weaker points. While other 3D platformers clearly had levels, they also had levels that were fantastically designed. It says something when only a few levels are well designed while the rest seemed to have gone with the motions. I mean Misty Island certainly felt like a place you wouldn't want to go and Snowy Mountain certainly had its freezing cold caves and literally breathless heights, but fuck me, if that jungle level or the beach are considered good levels, then I suppose Rusty Bucket Bay and the Water Temple are masterpieces in level design! Simply put, a lot of the levels either seem to go with the motions or feel constricted by small size limits. It's no secret that the PS2 has the random access memory of an Alzheimer's sufferer - some levels had to be the size of a fire ant or have as much content as a McDonald's meal has nutrition. Meanwhile, because they're so separated from the rest of the world, Misty Island and Snowy Mountain have more things to do in them than simply running around to stumble onto Power Cells. Stuff like exploring icy caves, using vehicles or riding an ostrich-like animal to get to places Jak alone couldn't and much more - these levels leave more of an impression than the others. Same with Spider Cave - because of its blander color schemes, there's a little more to it like a mining facility and spiders so they can design something more interesting to make Power Cells a bit more exciting to get. That's not mentioning the Lost Precursor City - holy shit, there is a whole lot of shit to do! But again, it's because it's far removed from the rest of the world, meaning it doesn't have to deal with arbitrary constrictions so that it doesn't bugger up the game's processing or add in loading times all over the place. The Zoomer also sees some use, whether the level is like that of a tapeworm's home environment where you have to simply make it to the end and smash Scout Fly boxes, or it's a more open level that has you engaging in time trials and attacking flying monsters, on top of other things. Other than that... well, there are parts of levels that are kind of cool. I guess. Kind of. I don't know, I just went and did shit the whole time so I could say I have Power Cells.

On that same token, the graphics may not be the stuff of legends like Onimusha or Devil May Cry were in 2001, but it did have its own style that works very well nevertheless. In fact, its more cartoony style aged a hell of a lot better than the gritty realistic pre-rendered camera angles present in those two games because it's still at least aesthetically presentable. Sure, the models look like they were constructed out of clay and grease and the environments aren't much more detailed, but detail (as well as individual level sizes) was a necessary sacrifice so that the game wouldn't lag like a fat guy on The Biggest Loser. The animation is not just fluid; it's also exaggerated as there tends to be quite a lot of animation usually implemented for the sake of animating, and yet, it still manages to look impressive. Most early PS2 games that strive more for realism like Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 2 have decent animation and are technically more impressive, but Jak And Daxter's boisterous animation style is more interesting to look at than games whose graphical styles have been topped the very next year.

The sound design is a bit of a mixed bag. On one end, the soundtrack is pretty mediocre. Outside of the song that plays during the title sequence which has been embedded into my memory banks since I first played it, there's nothing that really stands out. There isn't much in the way of ambiance either, it feels like it's only there. But that first song... it sounds like a poppy tribal drum beat, but you could dance to that shit. It's light hearted enough to give you the impression that it's a light hearted adventure, and Daxter's dance during that only adds to it. But yeah, the rest of the soundtrack is pretty mediocre. Thankfully, the voice acting makes up for it. Jak's, for instance... okay, the voice acting is actually pretty good when in line with the atmosphere. Everyone is loud and exaggerated to great effect, going well with their wacky go lucky personalities.

Jak And Daxter: The Precursor Legacy is a game that ranges from Kenji Eno levels of ambitious to restrained like an S&M model. At its worst, it's a playable game that simply goes through the motions set by games with better level designs. At its best, it's a game with a lot going for it, one you look forward to replaying at a later point due to some good levels and fantastic writing. It's a game that's one part awesome one part mediocre. Ironically, the best parts of this game is not the fact that it's one big level; it's during the levels which are far removed from the rest of the world that manage to keep one engaged. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't dig the idea of a 3D platformer that had a sandbox world and I'd be lying if I said I'd prefer it if Jak 2 and 3 didn't play like how they did. So the best way to put it is that the most that it needs is a more refined sandbox design and a better story to make the writing even better than fantastic.

7/10 (Good)

Review: DmC Devil May Cry

 

The one thing that captures the attention of any potential buyer is what's on the box. As much as people bang on about looking up reviews and trailers, a cover can sometimes seriously speak volumes about what a game will contain. Having Devil May Cry on the box with some black haired guy who has the same fashion sense as Dante from that series made me think "hmm, awesome, we get to play as somebody completely different". But then I remember long before the game came out that the guy on the box... is actually a redesign of Dante because Ninja Theory, the developers Capcom trusted to continue the Devil May Cry lineage with, wanted to inject a different flavor to the franchise because a more western approach was necessary after Devil May Cry 4 turned out to be nowhere near as good as Devil May Cry 3 and had too much anime shit in it to be a coincidence. One way to do so was to change Dante's hair from anime silver to a more realistic shade of black. So with a change in designs and mood, how does Ninja Theory execute this game? Well, it's not bad as it has a solid combat engine, but there are a few too many missteps

In this reimagining of the Devil May Cry universe, a place known as Limbo City is secretly controlled by devils, advertising soft drinks and all this other shit to keep the population under their control. Dante, a really cool guy who isn't at all a Gary Stu or anything, is haunted by the demons inside his subconscious, but it doesn't stop him from going to nightclubs having sex with heaps of chicks. According to a mysterious woman in this nightclub known as Kat, Dante is in danger because she can see Limbo for what it really is. She's a part of a vigilante group that fights against the tyranny of the devils and wants Dante to join the fight. When the rest of the group meet him, they basically tell him that he's basically the only one who can save them from the government conspiracy. From there, you stop giving a shit about the story because what it winds up having is a grade school level of understanding of conspiracy theories like the media brainwashing us and there being a secret higher power controlling us.

That, and a main character whose dick is constantly sucked by every other character under the sun - I mean holy shit, the other characters treat Dante as their lord and fucking savior! What's so special about him? Oh, because he's powerful? Aren't the rest of this rag tag group of rebels strong too? But wait, then they can't inject their deepest personal fantasies into the story! See, Dante is Temeem's self insert character. He's a bad boy who says "fuck the government" flashing dual middle fingers on either side while having sex with girls left and right, but they insert some inner demons to try and make him more relatable. The problem, however, is that he's just a giant douche. Granted, Tameem's a giant douche whenever he talks shit about Japanese games while talking up DmC as the next big masterpiece in gaming so I guess it makes sense to make Dante like this, but when you aim to make a character relateable, you can't really turn them into complete pricks. His personality suits the story very well... in that it's got the kind of writing you'd expect from a kid who's just discovered atheism.

I don't know what's sadder - the fact that I just dedicated a paragraph to our main character or the fact that I have little to nothing worth saying about the other characters? Nobody else really shines as anything other than an accessory to stroke Dante's ego more often than not, and when they're not stroking his ego, they're unloading exposition about the big bad government conspiracy. People can criticize the old Dante for being a one dimensional character, but he's a GOOD one dimensional character. He wasn't trying to be relatable; he's too busy kicking ass and dispensing one liners to really care about relatability. New Dante? Well, he does roughly the same things... just not as well, especially his one liners that are more cringeworthy than cool in that "SO BAD IT'S GOOD" kind of way. Oh, and he tries to have depth that winds up being shallower than a fucking kiddy pool. Yes, the old DMC games have shit stories too, but they don't focus on it so much. They introduce and then end each level with cutscenes. That's it. Here in new DMC however, the cutscenes are longer and far more common. The more space a story takes up, the better it ought to be, and considering its lack of being any good, well, it's really crap.

But I can't spend all day ragging on the shit story so let's talk about how it plays. It seems to play a lot like the older Devil May Cry games, but with some big differences. Instead of having a variety of weapons that you'll switch on the fly every now and again, you'll have three types of weapons at your disposal that you can use in tandem with one another to create some interesting combos. You have your usual Rebellion sword and Ebony & Ivory pistols, but there's also Osiris the angel scythe (which is faster) and Arbiter the large demon sword (which is slow but very strong) to keep things interesting. You can also use the Angel chain to pull yourself towards objects and the Demon chain to pull stuff towards you. Being able to use all of these together makes for some potentially interesting combat scenarios.

Unfortunately, there are enemies that'll be immune to either an Angel or a Demon weapon, and this is where we start having problems. Because of how hypnotic style experimentation is, it undermines how mediocre combat really is until you're arbitrarily limited to only being able to use two weapons. Most enemies, when they don't get stuck in a loop or just stand there, really aren't that hard to read and counter. The only time you may have trouble is when learning the control scheme as it is tricky to get the hang of, having to hold certain buttons to use certain attacks and styles. Beyond that, they're basically slicing bags and hardly ever offer any challenge. From there, I expected the bosses to at least make up for that, but honestly, these are some rather underwhelming bosses. They're not terrible as they do work in a technical sense, but again, it feels like the combat engine has gone to waste on what basically amounts to mediocre bosses. The basic idea is to dodge their attacks and hit them in the weak spot. Most action games can still make things feel frantic and exhilerating under those circumstances, but only half of DmC's bosses really do that and even then, none of them are all that challenging if you have any hand eye coordination. If my only issue was the lack of difficulty, this would still be a good game, but the bigger problem here is that every enemy and nearly every boss are all just a complete chore to fight. You have this brilliant combat engine that's ultimately wasted on even bosses that feel more like cannon fodder than an actual interesting challenge.

What's this, there's a Heaven Or Hell difficulty mode where everything dies in one hit including you? Oh okay, so there's one difficulty mode that offers even a modicum of challenge as you have to make sure to avoid getting hit by anything and everything. What's that, Dante Must Die mode is here too? Well, that's fantastic, and it's actually somewhat challenging too as enemies dish out more damage and I've also noticed that they aren't as stupid as they are on the hardest difficulty mode that's initially available. And what is this that I'm hearing about Hell And Heaven mode where you die with one hit but the enemies all have full health and adopt their difficulty patterns from the Son Of Sparda difficulty mode? I'm crazy enough for this challenge! The only problem, however, is that you need to play through this game first on one of the initial difficulty modes, and then the Son Of Sparda difficulty mode before unlocking Dante Must Die, Heaven Or Hell and Hell And Heaven. So basically, you'll have to play through a game with boring piss easy enemies and bosses TWICE before you can play in a mode where shit actually gets interesting? Son Of Sparda, by the way, isn't that much harder than the initial three difficulty modes, so this second playthrough also feels like a chore. Maybe not as boring of a chore, but by that, the initial appeal of the combat and designs has worn off on you and you see everything for what they truly are - mediocre, if not maybe a cut above it. It's really when you finally get to play through the harder modes that this game truly shows how fun it can be, and it's... moderately fun. Now, I can understand getting newbies into the swing of things, but for Christ's sake, this feels like wasted potential for everyone else!

I've mentioned designs a little while ago and I feel like I need to explain why they're something worth a damn. Well, let's just say that DmC is a very nice looking game. Not perfect by any means - Dante looks pretty goofy if you ask me and sometimes, the colors become a bit too saturated and actually hurt my eyes after a while - but Limbo City and the various foes Dante has to take down look pretty fucking good. The various twists and turns Limbo City makes to mess with you via screwing with the buildings and terrain gives you the feeling that not all is as it seems, and the further into the game you go, the less far out they'll seem when you're at abysses and inside mainframes. No, not inside mainframes like in a Deus Ex game - more like the inside of broadcast media. There are plenty of interesting things to be seen here and the textures are good as well. The enemies and bosses are pretty twisted too as they take many different devilish shapes and forms. They're rather creative and it's a shame that for the most part, that's the best part about them - their designs. But a word of advice - install it onto your HDD because this has a habit of freezing if you don't have it installed.

The sound design is also pretty good. The voice acting works about as well as it could when given the crap writing and actually, these guys manage to make the most out of it. Dante definitely doesn't sound all that silly, which is a surprise after looking at him and reading some of his dialogue, but his voice actor at least tries to make his cringeworthy one liners sound campy. In fact, everybody tries their hardest to either be serious when necessary, or silly at other points, and I give them points for doing a good job of that. When it comes to the soundtrack, it's a good mix of dubstep and metal to pump you up during the game, which makes sense - Capcom's Devil May Cry games had a gritty industrial soundtrack to pump you up as well, and Ninja Theory's DmC manages to accomplish the same thing. I'm not normally a dubstep fan, but it's clear that it has its places - nightclubs and action scenes where adrenaline is absolutely necessary. Overall, the sound design is great.

It's easy to point my finger of frustration towards the immense amount of hype generated by Ninja Theory and all of the good press it's getting from "professional" "reviewers", but really, it's how much potential it had to actually live up to the monolithic amount of hype and the failure to reach such potential that resulted in my frustration towards this game. In its current form, it's got some mad potential because the combat engine is great and the designs are brilliant - I love Limbo City and how it warps around like it does at times! But I can't sit here and lie to you guys... actually fighting enemies and bosses feels like a chore until you unlock the hardest difficulty modes, and at that point, it's too little too late because while I admired the designs during my first playthrough, not much else really did anything for me. It's not so much the hype that let me down, as much as it was the potential to be a fantastic game because if they followed through with their designs a lot better, the 8s and 9s and even Tameem's boasting would be justified, but as is... it's worth a rental, but nothing more.

6/10 (Above Average)

Review: Hard Reset

First person shooters seem to sprout like acne on a teenager's face these days, but a lot of them are heavily inspired by Infinity Ward's apocalyptically smashing hit Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. More concerned with set pieces and going out of their way to take control away from you, it gets annoying when you realize a game that you happen to enjoy would somehow influence companies to copy it and miss the frigging point. Hell, it says something when Infinity Ward themselves miss the point and develop what amount to shallow parodies of the first Modern Warfare! Needless to say, travelling back to the early/mid 2000s and taking gameplay concepts from there is like breathing in a refreshing aroma scent after somebody does a really smelly fart. Enter Hard Reset, a game that feels like Serious Sam and Painkiller in that while levels aren't necessarily complex, open or mazelike, they're filled to the brim with waves of enemies and plenty of weapons for you to destroy them with. In that sense, it's like a roller coaster ride with twists, turns, loop de loops and even the occasional atomic death ray. Sounds like a lot of fun, hey guys? Well, more or less...

Roller coasters unfortunately have their boring bits, and this one's boring bits involve the story. In the future, humanity is mostly destroyed and entire cities are populated by robots. But there is one city left out there with humans. Unfortunately, that doesn't last for too long as robots are killing them all. Major Fletcher, a cyborg soldier, has to take them all down. Now, it could work out really well within the context of a shooter that's really all about shooting down robots, but then they introduce conspiracies and all this extra crap that does little if anything to actually grab your attention. It's one of those stories that tries to be Blade Runner by adding in themes of AI and what it means to be human, but given that the story is glossed over in favor of action, it falls flat on its face.

At best, the story is cute, like a three year old trying to draw its favorite animal; and at worst, you start to wish that there was more put into the story because in its current form, it's more convoluted than Metal Gear Solid. In other words, it's filler that gives justification for your actions, though due to its fillerific nature, there isn't much put into it, and unfortunately, the whole “what it means to be human” stuff that they slap onto the game is left underdeveloped and confusing as all hell. Not to mention, this game is about four/five hours long – if it was any longer, it'd have more space to stretch itself out a bit, not to mention that it could have a more conclusive ending. Thank god that it is, indeed, fillerific.

If you've never played Painkiller or Serious Sam, simply put, the idea is to go through levels and shoot down waves of enemies. You'll mostly fight robots that can cut you up, bash your brains in and blow you up via explosive shots or by blowing themselves up near you. There isn't much to their AI other than “kill all humans” and since you kind of look like a human, that's exactly what they're going to do to you. Unfortunately, one problem I had with this game about an hour in is the balance of difficulty... now, I expect twitch shooters like this to be harder than a porn star's tits as that's what keeps them enjoyable despite shallow gameplay, but only if it feels balanced. Sadly, Hard Reset is about as balanced as an overworked uni student's life at the worst of times – I've often found myself the victim of many different cheap deaths.

You see, Hard Reset can often feel like a two on one handicap match with oftentimes cheap enemies that can do plenty of damage, sometimes juggling you on one end; and explosives and electricity holding you by the arms for the enemies to beat the crap out of you. A fair amount of the encounters boil down to your usual twitch shooting formula of circle strafing while firing at enemies. Those are the fun scenarios because with many enemies to take down before they take you down, it's fast and frenetic. That's when Hard Reset is firing on all cylinders. The few bosses that you'll fight throughout the game are an even bigger treat – they huge and have hard to find weak spots, but fighting them is plenty of fun as these fights are also fast and frenetic due to their onslaught of attacks forcing you to think on your feet. These are easily the best part of the game. But then there are encounters with plenty of bigger enemies in smaller rooms where they can force you into a corner and unless you're lucky enough to fire some shots that'll give you breathing room to exhibit some good old circle strafing, these will lend you reservations six feet under.

Not to mention that this game has a thing for explosives and electrical currents... that may work against you by completely frying your circuits, should you shoot an explosive that will trigger a suicidal chain reaction. Also take into account the old school health system where you need to find refills instead of waiting for it to regenerate and the checkpoint system (as opposed to a “save anywhere” feature found in other twitch shooters), and Hard Reset is pretty damn hard, but it's hard to gauge whether the next scenario is hard because your reflexes aren't up to snuff or because of cheap enemy variety, small rooms and explosives that you might not want to shoot even in a moment of desperation out of fear of dying. To some people, it seems like I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but when I'm dying not because my reflexes were up to snuff but because a section worked against its design (lots of big enemies in a small room), I'm sorry – this is stuff that needs to be pointed out. Besides, not every section is like this. In fact, most sections are more like the fun old twitch shooters that separated the men from the boys – especially the boss fights - but there were most certainly enough of the cheap sections for me to want to warn you about them.

One thing Hard Reset has going for it is its weapon variety. You're given two guns, but each of them have five upgrades that... are actually different weapon modes. You have a CLN rifle, which turns into more traditional guns like a shotgun, an assault rifle and a grenade launcher, while the plasma pistol turns into more futuristic guns like a shock blaster, a plasma rifle and an electric mortar (basically a grenade launcher, only it fires balls of electricity that slow down enemies rather than just blowing them up). There is a good variety to be found here and unlike the rest of the game, it's pretty well balanced. The more powerful the mode, the more ammo it'll eat up for instance as each mode shares the ammo with whatever gun it's a mode of. You'll start off with just one mode for both guns, but eventually by finding orange orbs and killing enemies, you'll acquire enough experience points to unlock new modes, upgrade the modes with more devastating secondary or primary effects, and maybe even make Fletcher himself stronger in combat. You won't be able to unlock everything in your playthrough so if you want to do that, you'll need to play the new game+ mode. But either way, it'll open each playthrough up to be different depending on how you choose to upgrade everything. Whether you prefer the traditional modes, the more futuristic modes or a balance of the two (though both will be weak if you go that way), you'll be required to change up your strategy quite a bit. I have to admit, it's actually impressive how they implemented this feature.

Hard Reset is a brilliant looking game. On a high end PC, it looks downright amazing. The textures are crispier than freshly roasted cashews and the framerate is mostly very smooth. But where it grabs me by the hair is in its Blade Runner-esque cyberpunk style. The city is big with neon and holographic lights to signify that it takes place some time into the future, and they do a fine job of contrasting with the gritty cityscape. Said grittiness gives off the feeling that the world has become a hellish robotic wasteland devoid of human life, which goes with crappy plot established quite well. The scenes – which are played during the load times, by the way – are done in a hand drawn style that looks rather nice too. It pans out like a comic book with some oily drawings within panels, with speech bubbles showing what's being said. If it was an actual comic book series, I'd at least enjoy the look of it despite the lousily written story.

The bad writing could explain the rather mediocre voice acting. Just about everybody here sounded fine in the technical sense, but not a single syllable was able to grab me. It just sounded like they were more concerned with appearing to be realistic and good without having anything resembling a soul or conviction. The music is good though – a lot of it manages to pump you up with their hard and fast electronic beats. Nothing is overly memorable, but they manage to get you going during the intense firefights. During the cutscenes, the music does a good enough job of conveying a serious ambience to go with the serious story, so it's not as if the composers aren't trying. The music is generally good, it's the voice acting that lets the sound design down.

Hard Reset lives up to its name of being so hard you'll reset often, but not always for the right reasons. It's very much like the arena shooters of old, but at times, it seems like they ramp the difficulty up too high with cheap enemies and crap level designs that go against themselves. It's a shame because when the rooms are big enough to breathe in, Hard Reset can be a lot of fun to play through. The bosses are easily great. But games have two big goals to accomplish – one is to achieve what it strives to attain, which Hard Reset mostly does; and the other is to be the least bit fun or worth your time in some other way, shape or form, which Hard Reset does on its best day. But on its worst day, it's frustrating, and the overall rushed feeling of the single player campaign doesn't really help. I guess if you're starved for a twitch shooter to the point where you'll try anything, there's not much harm in playing through Hard Reset, but personally, I'd prefer that you play Serious Sam 3.

6/10 (Above Average)

Review: Sleeping Dogs

Although shooting games are more common than pocket lint, sandbox games aren't too far behind. Ever since Grand Theft Auto 3 entered the scene and popularised the open world sandbox genre, people have been wanting a piece of that pie. One of them was True Crime: Streets Of LA, which was an admirable little big game if not somewhat flawed in some bigger areas. It managed to spawn a sequel and then it nearly spawned another until some legal disputes not only pulled the plug, but chewed it in bits and buried the evidence outside. At least... it nearly did. Then Square Enix stepped in to give United Front a hand with the project and changed enough things to make it its own game so that they don't get in trouble. That game... is Sleeping Dogs, and honestly, thank *bleep* it got released because it's not only the single greatest game of 2012, but a really good *bleep*ing game on its own terms.

A lot of it is owed to its immersing qualities. For one thing, the story and the way that it's told sucks you right in. Wei Shen is a police officer who is deep undercover in the Sun On Yee, a triad gang based in Hong Kong. He has to find a way to bring them down without them realizing that he's a copper. At first, it seems like “oh they'll figure him out eventually” because there are heaps of stories like that - from A Bug's Life to The Road To El Dorado and Chicken Run, it's rife with potential to end up having that as some sort of halfway plot twist. But actually, the way this game does it is in a way that feels a refreshing twist on that kind of tale – it instead focuses on Wei's inner self. He's an undercover cop, but who knows for sure where his loyalties truly lie?

There are other elements to the story, like how it eventually turns into a full on internal and external war that Wei just so happened to be caught in the middle of, and all of this becomes a test of his loyalty. The gangs themselves get just enough time in the spotlight to establish themselves for the express purpose of developing Wei's character while having some presence of their own, all without being too intrusive. That's what bumps the story up from good to really fucking good – in reality, it's just as much about the gang that Wei eventually becomes loyal to as it is about Wei questioning how deep undercover he really is. It's a point that's driven home during certain parts of the story where it gets dramatic and intense, where the story takes twists and turns that makes you think “man, shit's going DOWN!!”. Because of this, the story is one that'll keep you on the edge of your seat and give you a hell of a ride while you're there.

A big part of triad wars involves each member getting their hands all bloodied up by either gunning each other down, or beating the everloving piss out of them. When it comes to a beatdown, Sleeping Dogs rules. Wei has access to a wide range of combo, throwing and counterattacks that allow you to take down anybody who dares to cross you. In that sense, the game is a tad on the easy side as if you have a decent set of reflexes, you can easily counterattack an enemy to set them up for one of your combo attacks. But difficulty is irrelevant when the feel of combat is so good that it eventually becomes second nature. See, after a while, you'll naturally be pressing triangle to break the kneecaps of kickers and holding X and square to deliver a kick of your own, ready to press triangle to elbow a pursuer from behind before you press square multiple times for a multiple punch+kick combo. It even becomes second nature to grab somebody and move towards a hazard so you can throw them into it and watch them die! It's like watching watching one of those 2D animated Dreamworks movies like Prince Of Egypt, that's how fluidly the animation flows from one attack to the next alongside how responsive each command is.

But then you get into the shooting, and it's.. alright, I guess. It's here that some cracks start to appear as, although the shooting works to the extent of which you can at least fucking shoot people in the head, it sure feels a bit crappy. Aiming is a bit stiff – I guess while mastering martial arts, Wei's arms don't move so well when he has to use a gun. To compensate, when you jump over cover, time will slow down. What's the matter United Front, can't fine tune your aiming controls so you engineer in some slow mo shit? Come on, I want to jump over chest high cover and shoot shit at big boy speed! That's not my biggest beef with the shooting, underfornately – for some bizarre reason, close quarters combat only seems to work when it wants to work. What I mean is that pistol whipping, disarming enemies and using said enemies as human shields seems to work completely at random, like I go to press the button... then I mash the button... then I just blast his head off with my stiff aiming pistol. Oh, I get less (and let's be honest here - arbitrary) experience points in the triad field, but at least I blew his head off and I get to live long enough to take down everybody else and see the next mission! To explain the experience points would be a complete waste of time, but basically, they lead to upgrades that hardly fucking matter as even at a low level on the triad, police and face sides of the fence, you're still a badass mofo! What's that, you get a Playstation Network trophy if you hit level 10 on all three accounts? Whoop-dee-fucking-doo!

Oh and given that this is an open world sandbox game, driving becomes an important part of the game. Whether you're cruising around to get to your next mission or you're racing against rubber banding AI drivers, there's plenty of driving to be done as Hong Kong is seperated into four areas. If I have to pick out any flaw, it's that when you drive fast, the camera has an odd habit of shaking like the cameraman has Parkinson's. Why? It doesn't feel extreme or intense – it's just irritating. But that's about it on the negative front, because driving feels absolutely fine otherwise. Accelerating, braking, turning, this thing where you can ram into other cars; it all works just finely and makes driving around a viable option without it getting frustrating. But that's really all it amounts to... until you're in the races when you have to navigate through a segment of Hong Kong and beat everybody else to the finish line! This is where not only the driving shines, but also the design of Hong Kong itself. It's designed in a way for a car to go around all of it with relative ease, except for parts that are designed to be on foot anyway, and thinking about each of the tracks that are derived from segments of Hong Kong, the corners either feel wide or tight enough to work not only within the confides of a tricky racetrack, but also as roads you'd expect for a city, and the straights and highways are in logical places, so really, there are no complaints about this... except for the shaky cam.

What open world sandbox game isn't complete with side missions? Well, I guess the more story driven ones like Mafia, but regardless, Sleeping Dogs has them and they're... actually a mixed bag. The aforementioned racing is pretty cool for reasons already explained. Going into a fight club to beat up a bunch of guys is also fun to do. Finding a small-ish gang of thugs to beat up is even more fun, especially since you'll have plenty of thugs to beat up and it might actually offer up a challenge! After those thugs are beaten up, you get to hack security cameras by entering a 4 digit code where each number is unique, and then you cruise back to one of four... safehouses, I guess, where you look at footage and bust whoever the icon pops up on top of. Okay, so far so good, but then there's the dating sim, which just has you going on missions like driving around or beating some guys up? Well, doing these deeds is fine – abruptly ending these like 3 or 4 missions later is laaaame because with something like this, you'd seriously expect something like... I don't know, living together or something, not just some bitch work for nothing! Karaoke is just fucking terrible. You tilt the analog stick up or down to two different degrees along with the thick bars and it is about as tedious as it sounds... oh, you're required to do that one during the story by the way. Twice. Fuck that. I'm surprised you don't have to do the other eight songs, that's how proud they were of this shitty ass fucking side mission!

But then I think about what brings me back to what makes this game go from good to really good – the immersion. Hong Kong not only looks brilliant for the most part (ehhh I've noticed a few spotty textures), but it's also legitimate. It's big, dirty and bright with incandescent lighting, but it has different locations like harbors, shipping piers and other places that are inspired by the real Hong Kong. Now, I wouldn't say it's even like going through a scaled down version of the real Hong Kong, but with plenty of cities full of things to do and shipping yards on some of the outskirts of this country, it does at least feel like a legit attempt at recreating Hong Kong at a smaller size for the sake of exploration within a video game. Even without that in mind, it still looks brilliant. The textures, for the most part, are really detailed and the animations, even the ones outside of combat, are very fluid, looking like a dream. The lighting is actually something that's quite impressive as all of the shadows and lights are in the right places from their light sources, and the amount of shadows and light look just right. No doubt, if this was just a generic city, it'd look pretty damn fine, but the fact that this is a faithful recreation of Hong Kong makes it stand out that much more.

Keeping up the immersion is the voice work. The actors are all Asian, meaning that they can inflict their dialect without it degenerating into Hong Kong Phooey. It really does sound like you're interacting with the locals of Hong Kong since their accents are authentic. That's not mentioning the fact that technically speaking, they do a fine job of voicing their respective characters as there's a lot of oomph behind their voices beyond their authenticity, with each bit of dialogue drawing you in that much more. Unfortunately, I can't quite say the same thing for the soundtrack. Oh, don't get me wrong, when there's more traditional Hong Kong style music, it fits with the setting, but when there's the usual sweeping epic symphony playing, it's like “oh yeah it's exciting”. Perhaps I'm just getting sick of that being used in like every fucking game under the sun and that it does incite excitement and all that? Maybe. To its credit, it does do just that. The licensed soundtrack is good. The actual radio is pretty boring, not much is really done with the adverts in them and you just listen to them for the music. Christ, even radio today is more exciting than this, but... at least the choice in to include Queen, Deep Purple, Squarepusher and more songs from other artists from a wide variety of genres (rock, metal, classical, rap and electronic, mostly) is nice for some driving music, particularly the more full on songs. Although driving like a maniac to classical music makes me think of A Clockwork Orange...

Games like this make me think that 2012 did hold a few gems. In a year full of sequels that pandered towards troglodytes with gamertags like xmasterchief420x and SephirothJuggalo6969, here's a game that's kind of a sequel but kind of an original IP and it's actually pretty fucking good! Game of the year 2012 does it very little justice – it's one of the best games in this generation! It deeply immerses you into the atmosphere through compelling themes and storytelling. It keeps you coming back for more with a fluid and intuituve martial arts system and various plot twists that, while somewhat predictable, are a hell of a ride to go through. Really, if you have a 360, PS3 or PC, you'd be doing yourself no favors by not playing this game.

9/10 (Fucking Excellent)

Review: Plants VS Zombies

I would've loved to have been in on the pitch meeting for this game - “yeah, zombies are cool, but we need something that'd make our game stand out from the thousands of generic zombie games out there... oh yeah, let's have plants that fire at zombies - genius!” I mean, this has to be one of the more out there premises for a game. We're not exactly dealing with Attack Of The Mutant Penguins or the last third of Indigo Prophecy here, but it's not exactly a concept that has any basis in reality, almost like... a video game. Yeah, remember when video games weren't about trying to be realistic? Well, this game does a fine of job of reminding us of this fact, as well as just being fun.

The idea is to set up lines of plants so that they can either shoot down or stall the zombies, making sure they never get to the left side. If they get past your defenses via eating your plants (mmm yummy plants) and make it all the way to the left, they'll eat your brain and it's game over! It's a simple concept and for a strategy game, it's a rather simple affair. You won't need much more strategy than sheer numbers, maybe stall a group of zombies if you can't take them down quickly enough if you have enough resources (or sun, in this case) to summon something that can stall them or slow them down whilst damaging them. At the same time, it's a concept that, nevertheless, fucking works because of its simplicity and how Popcap executes it.

Everything is laid out on a 9x6 square grid and your plants only take up one square each, so it really is a matter of having the numbers to take down zombies while protecting your brains. Plants range from simple pea shooters (no, literally, they shoot peas) to ones that fire two at a time, three peas in three different directions and then some that fire melons like a catapult firing large rocks. That's not to mention Wallnuts, walnuts that stall zombies so you can build up some sun to plant more offensive plants. If you prefer to turn zombies against other zombies, there's a plant – or rather, a mushroom (which are often the nighttime equivalents of daytime plants although there isn't a plant that turns zombies against each other) that'll let you do that. Simply put, you'll never be starved for variety. Given that this is a strategy game, you'll wind up mixing and matching groups of plants to find what'll work best for your playstyle. Whether you have a mostly offensive force with one plant for defense and another to acquire more sun more quickly to grow more plants to destroy the zombie onslaught. The only thing is that you'll unlock a plant after every level, so while you'll get time to aquaint yourself with the ones you do have, you'll either get a little too aquainted with them or you'll need to be experimenting a hell of a lot at the beginning of each level just to see what this new plant has to offer and how you can best utilize it on your team.

Hell, variety doesn't stop with our shit – zombies also have plenty to offer. At first, you'll have you stereotypical droning zombies that wouldn't be out of place in Resident Evil if it had a cartoony visual style (as opposed to a cartoony playstyle with Chris Redfield punching boulders with his overly muscly arms). Eventually, you'll have zombies with buckets on their heads, footballers, old grouchy newspaper readers and even dancing fucking zombies that wouldn't be out of place in the Thriller music video (hell, in the older versions of this game, the zombie even looked like Michael Jackson – how fitting), among others that not only have visual differences, but also practical differences. From higher defenses requiring more/better firepower to faster movement speed (whether they're quicker on their feet or just chewing on your plants) and even some flying in the air so you can only hit them with catapults, you'll need to make sure you're adequately prepared to take them down. That's when the plant variety I was talking about before comes into play.

Don't confuse this for a complex strategy game because this really is about as simple as it gets and it's at its most evident in the story mode. It starts off at a very low difficulty level and even the later levels are maybe moderately challenging at best. Even then, a lot of that has more to do with terrain than anything else. Every second world will take place at night, meaning you won't get any free sun – it all has to either come from sunflowers or sun generating mushrooms. The last world takes place on your roof, which means the left side will be angled lower and thus you NEED catapults, as well as pots because there's no soil on the roof. The third and fourth worlds take place in your backyard, with a long swimming pool taking up 2 rows, meaning you'll need water based mushrooms, weeds that'll drag zombies down to drown and lillypads for your grounded plants to float on the water. After a little experimentation, you'll be able to easily figure out the most efficient means of taking down waves of the walking dead.

The post-game content is where things get more interesting. The one that you'll really get into is survival mode as it basically takes the formula used in the story mode, but instead of there just being a wave or three of zombies, you'll have either five, ten, twenty or infinity sets of waves to take down. You can change your lineup of plants every five sets, and the further along you get, the more you'll need to be a bit strategic as you can't keep low costing yet weak plants forever – you need more firepower! But once the zombies become more plentiful and powerful, you'll find that you'll need to spend more sun on plants than you may have, requiring you to get some lower level plants. From there, it's like “what the fuck do I do!?!?!?” as you try to figure out the best means of survival, but then you realize that you have other plants that you can use before the beginning of every fifth set and from there, it really becomes a matter of predicting what may happen. That's easily the best that's on offer – not that Wallnut Bowling and Pot Smashing aren't fun either and the latter certainly requires a lot of strategy to make sure you use the plants you're given to quickly kill the zombies that you break out of the pots, but survival pretty much takes the story mode and injects it with steroids.

Plants VS Zombies sports a very cartoony style that'd make all but the most insecure of men and purist of zombie movie fans look at it and go “damn this is pretty fucking cool”. It's simplistic in nature much like the game itself with some basic shapes used to construct each of the models and plenty of reused heads for the zombies. The animations mostly consist of that old Flash technique where you have each limb as its own layer and simply move them along instead of painstakingly drawing each bit of movement on each frame, although the plants bobbing around like bobble head dolls is a rather nice touch. But it's the vibrancy of the color scheme that stands out. This game is very colorful, making it stand out on your computer screen. In particular, the plants are so vibrant that they stand out even in the daytime stages, let alone the nighttime stages when it ought to be dark. Hell, even when it's dark, it's brighter than the light at the end of the tunnel!

The sound design, like the graphics, are simple in design, but pretty damn effective in what it actually does. The soundtrack is mostly calm and upbeat, yet it's pretty much in the background for the most part, really only existing to give you a friendly hello when you start up the game and then to try and keep you calm while you take down hordes of the undead. There is an attempt at a haunting atmosphere during the screen where you select the plants you want to use for that level (or set of five in surival mode), but it's still decidedly upbeat and calming. It's not an issue because Plants VS Zombies isn't supposed to be scary – just a fun time waster – but it is in there nevertheless. The finest detail is in the zombies' groaning. It not only serves as a great audio cue for you to wake up and keep an eye out for zombies, but it sounds so goddamn cheesy and cartoony that it works!

Where Plants VS Zombies ninja kicks you right across the face is that its simplicity compliments what it strives to do. It's not an artistic reflection of society or an epic RPG; it's a fucking simple strategy game that was originally meant to be played on the go either while you're on a train, on a family trip or you have a spare few minutes in your day... only to be insanely addicted to it! These colorful, cartoony graphics reflect that – you ordinarily wouldn't have any time to appreciate fine details in your presumably busy schedule, you just want to play a video game to pass some time. Conversely, you wouldn't care much if at all about graphical fidelity or technicality once it has your nuts in a vicegrip with its addicting gameplay! That's the take home lesson for the day – Plants VS Zombies is simple, fun... and refreshingly addicting, so practice caution before you start playing this game. You might never come out of your house again...

8.5/10 (Great)