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)

Review: Dishonored

Despite what any paid reviewer will tell you, the stealth genre is practically dead. Most of the old guard have degraded into action games with maybe the odd stealth segment or some minor stealth influence – the biggest offender being Splinter Cell: Conviction. Ugh. That's not to mention the fact that Metal Gear Solid 4 was more concerned with boring you to death with 30 minute cutscenes than actual stealth gameplay. Worst yet, I'll probably be collecting social security checks by the time Thief 4 comes out. But there's always hope. Meet Dishonored, a product by Arkane Studios... who brought to you Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic (which is a pretty good RPG if you ask me). But whilst being marketed as a stealth game, you can play this as either that or an action game, and unfortunately, the action route is significantly better. Not that the stealth route is bad because it's still playable, but playing it like an action game is undoubtably a million times better.

One thing I didn't like is the story. Corvo is the royal protector of the empress of Dunwell. But after he returns from a trip elsewhere to find out a way to stop a plague that's killed half of Dunwell, he finds out that the empress had been assassinated and her daughter got kidnapped – and to top it all off. he got framed for it. From there, he has to take revenge on them while rescuing her kidnapped daughter. The story's biggest strength is its lore. As you explore around the city, you'll find various sidequests, books, journal pages, notes and audio files laying about that will tell you more about the background of where you are and what situation you're in. However, when it comes to the present and future, it's not quite there. Revenge is often a good beginning point for something bigger, but Dishonored sticks with it throughout the entire game with maybe a twist towards the end. Said twist is... pretty bland as the characterization beforehand is virtually non-existent and the delivery felt like it was written on toilet paper after the writer ate McDonald's.

There are two endings that you can acquire – one is attainable through playing the game as a sneaking pacifist, and the other is attainable through killing a lot of people. It's all calculated by your Chaos score, which is determined by how many people you kill. If you're going for the good ending, you'll pretty much need to avoid detection and the urge to kill any plague victims (yeah, apparently there's a plague going around Dunwell), but if you want the bad ending, eh, go nuts. Having said that, even the multiple endings aren't good enough to get you to play again as there's just nothing to them that makes them worth watching outside of... well, them being endings, I guess. Even then, both are quite abrupt and basically amount to “game's over guys, go play something else now”, rather than actually concluding the experience. Neither of them are even a “see you next game” kind of ending – just “Jack and Jill went up the hill aaaaaand Jill came tumbling after, the end, good night”!

The idea is to do a series of missions in each of Dishonored's nine big levels for you which involve finding and killing certain targets. You can go about these by either either sneaking around, or getting in there and going postal with your powers. As a stealth game, it's got all the right ideas, but not exactly the right execution. The levels manage to give you plenty of options as to what path to follow without so much as alerting a dust mite, and given their sheer size, there's a fair amount of level to explore. The only real reward is just not getting spotted – no conversations to overhear or super secret weapons to find. Just alternate routes. Still, it at least gives you an option, so it's not all bad. However, what is all bad are the enemies. Simply put, the enemies' AI is ridiculous. If they are in your line of sight, you're most certainly in theirs and there's no way to tell if there'll be one behind you or not due to the lack of a radar or a light gem.

To make things worse, regardless of whether you're skulking in the dim and dark back alleys or running in the middle of a sunny town center, you'll be spotted if there's an enemy anywhere near you. There's no sense of lighting. To you, there are light bits and dark spots; to them, it's all one light so it's irrelevant whether you're in darkness or you're under a spotlight. To compensate, if you're behind cover, you're basically invisible. Add the fact that their footsteps are quieter than Britney Spears's dietician, and let's just say that the enemy AI in regards to stealth is not very good. The only other real advantage you have here is that you have a power that lets you see through nearby solid objects so you can see enemies and where they're facing, but since that requires mana, you can only use it so much and for so long. It is rechargable though – keep that in mind. Due to all of this, if you're going for a pacifist gameplay, expect to reload your last save about as often as the average human blinks. Also expect some frustration. It's a shame because the levels actually lend themselves to be good for sneaking and from a fundamental standpoint, it does function. But going for a pacifist playthrough is where you'll see the majority of the problems.

Thankfully, this game is also playable when you're more violent and it's actually a hell of a lot more fun. If you still want to implement stealthy measures, it's easy enough to sneak up on enemies and slice their throats as long as you can find places to hide behind. But no, you want to be the ultimate badass, don't you!? Yeah, of course you do - the game's mechanics accommodate towards that style anyway! See, even if you get spotted, not all is lost, because you can simply use your magical powers or your weapons (either your guns, crossbows or your retractable sword) to take down the guards. That... is not good stealth game design. Combat is supposed to be discouraged, either because you're frail and wouldn't last five seconds in direct confrontation, or you'll have enemies on your ass if they find dead bodies! But in Dishonored, you can fire a tornado to blow guards away, slow down time, teleport right in front of them, shoot them with a pistol and summon plague rats to feast on the dead bodies – mind you, you'll need to find runes throughout each level in order to even unlock them and even more runes just to power them up, but they aren't too hard to find if you explore. That's not to say that Dishonored is terrible – Christ, I even said that it's a hell of a lot of fun at the beginning of this paragraph, but it really goes against stealth gaming conventions when combat is not only a lot more satisfying than sneaking, but that sneaking only really nets you an Xbox Live achievement or a PSN trophy. Oh and I guess there'll be less enemies in later levels if you don't go postal, but let's be honest, you'd want to kill a bunch of enemies, wouldn't you? Exactly!

The elephant in the room here are the graphics – god, this game is ugly. It wants to be cartoony, but it comes across looking like something from an early PS2 game. From rampant screen tearing to some jerky animations, lag and some very low resolution textures, not to mention that the FOV slider is a joke because you don't have much peripheral vision even with the slider up past 11, and there's nothing about this game that's technically any good except for the fact that... well, it at least functions.. The character models are all uglier than Quasimodo, as everybody seems to have disfigured or just plain weirdly shaped heads and faces. Look, I understand that we all need to go our own way, but after looking at games like Borderlands 2 and New Super Mario Bros U, Dishonored doesn't even do the cartoony style any justice. It just looks ugly. Not ugly enough to make you want to kill it with fire, but certainly ugly compared to its competition and not even remotely good looking on its own terms.

The sound design is pretty hit and miss. What misses is the music. I guess the idea is to create suspense with the tunes being more in the background, only to get more intense during confrontation, but in all honesty, it does nothing except for existing. It never really conveys any suspense, it doesn't really sound foreboding and it can never excite you, maybe except the final boss theme. Said theme actually does make the fight fairly exciting due to the louder, faster composition. However, everything else is bleh. The voice acting is where it hits home, though. Generally speaking, everybody is voiced in a way that at least helps you to care for the story despite its bland premise and just as bland writing. Everybody at least sounded like they wanted it to work and because of that, there's a decent amount of conviction put behind their voices. Not quite academy award winning, but it's good enough regardless.

Dishonored really wants to be a stealth game, but given all of the cool gadgets and weapons that prove advantageous in combat with no real incentive to sneak around outside of some forced moral elements, it's more appealing to play as Corvo the powerful sorcerer, master of the universe, and son of god. That doesn't make it a bad game, but what it does become is a flawed game that favors one style well above the other. That, and marketing tends to be pretty dishonest anyway – I guess I was just starved for a good stealth game in this day and age. Making things worse is the uglier than sin graphics and the lack of a compelling story. Really, where Dishonored hits the mark is its level design and how you utilize the tools you're given to turn the levels into bloodbaths. On that behalf, it's a good game as what it does right more than makes up for the lackluster stealth mechanics.
 
6.5/10 (Above Average)

Review: Spec Ops: The Line

 

If you've played through Medal Of Honor 2010 and found yourself going “man I like this story but it just feels like a poor man's Call Of Duty”, then Spec Ops: The Line is your motherfucking savior! Now, if you've never heard of the Spec Ops series, basically, it was a series of tactical third person shooters where you and a squad of people had to complete objectives. I suppose you could say it was Ghost Recon before Ghost Recon. But for whatever reason, what was scheduled to have come out in 2002 for the PS2 was cancelled and we hadn't heard from the series since... until now. Not only does Spec Ops: The Line breathe new life into the series, but it's also a pretty damn good game – just not for the reasons you'd expect.

The story is what sells this game. It details the horrors of war as you, Captain Martin Walker, are sent into Dubai, alongside a small recon team, to investigate what's been going on in the wartorn city. I mean, it would appear that the vicious sandstorms were the reason that Dubai got like this in the first place, but when Martin and company make their way there, boy oh boy, were we wrong. Rather than the whole bro tier action hero shit you see in many modern shooters, The Line opts for a more horrific take on war where everything is already fucked up and everything you do will only make things worse. Whether it's worse for you, your team, your nation, Dubai or even the entire world, it doesn't matter, because we're already in a world of shit; it's just a matter of how much you wade through to get to the super secret treasure at the end of the road.

With this darker take on war, the story becomes rather intriguing as you'll need to make various moral decisions – save the citizens or continue on your merry way, for instance. Nothing about these are black and white because no matter what, things are bound to get worse. This is war, not tea time with the Teletubbies and certainly not Rambo. Saving people won't necessarily make you a hero, especially if it gets you killed, because nobody wants you here in the first place – why else would they be shooting at you? The further along you get, the more morally reprehensible you can become, simply because the situation has worn on your psyche. You, the player, know not to do those decisions; it's in your conscience not to do them, but as Martin Walker, it isn't so easy, especially if a few deaths means the saving of thousands more, or the satisfaction of having killed those who have wronged you. There are plenty of questions that you'll be asked throughout the game and you'll need to weigh the pros with the cons. Save a few lives, or kill said few lives because what's a few more bodies, eh? We're rescuing a batallion of our own soldiers – fuck everyone else!

I'm willing to assume that the question on your mind is “but what about the actual shooting”. Well, you'll be grateful to know that it works out quite well. For the most part, it controls well enough – moving, running, getting behind cover and shooting is easy enough, although sprinting and getting into cover are mapped to the A button – that is to say, you'll sprint by pressing it once and get into cover by pressing it twice while near cover. In some senses, it feels like a one button clusterfuck, especially whenever you're in a more chaotic situation towards the end and you need to get into cover only to end up sprinting. The B button isn't immune to this either, as it lets you vault over cover or use a melee attack, depending on how close to cover you are. Beyond that, I have noticed that the movement is a little stiff. It's not too stiff, but it is noticeable when you're not quite moving as fluidly as other third person shooters' characters do. So really, the controls aren't quite there, but they're bearable as commands to at least respond they way they should. It's more of a matter of a few moments during the heat of battle where it can register the wrong command and get you killed.

But yeah, this is a cover-based shooter through and through – you run through linear levels, duck into cover, pop up and shoot enemies down. The weapons are what you'd expect from this kind of game with pistols, machine guns, shotguns and the odd rocket launcher, and the enemies are also what you'd expect, being guys that shoot at you from behind cover or rushing up to you. The basic idea is to run through sections of Dubai (that are really linear, but the level design is about on par with Half Life 2's in that it's just linear enough to be more linear than it appears, which helps to immerse you into the experience that bit more) and duck behind cover before your head gets blown off, and pop up every now and again to pop theirs off. It's not like I'm dogging the game for that because it's better than it appears. Outside of some instances of the whole “one button clusterfuck” thing I was talking about before, it's playable enough to go through and even fun at times, even though it really shouldn't be fun. Perhaps it's the killer instinct in me talking, but when you're given a decent array of enemies to take down and guns to take them down with, there's just a certain satisfaction in mowing them down what may appear to be impossible odds... the feeling of being John Rambo kicking ass and taking names, even when I shouldn't be such a vicious murderer.

That's not to say it's 100% what you'd expect from this style, though. Martin can't take anywhere near as many shots as Marcus Fenix – particularly if you're playing on the hardest difficulty mode, Martin can only take a couple of shots before taking a permanent residence underneath the sand, so you have to be a bit smarter with your approach, which can be tricky when at times, it feels like you've actually been ambushed. No, it's not some silly scripted event; it's the enemies being placed in locations you don't quite expect them to be placed. So in that sense, Spec Ops is a bit trickier than your average cover shooter, which is a rather freshing thing to have in this day and age.

You're also given a couple of squadmates who can keep you covered. By pressing RT, you can command them to either shoot enemies or blow up wherever/whatever you're aiming at. That, or they can chuck a flashbang to hopefully get you out of a sticky situation. Other than their, their AI functions... pretty damn inconsistently. On one hand, they can gun down enemies when necessary and back you up, and they often have the sense to duck into cover. On the other hand, they love to get in your way at times and do fuck all to help you, just sitting there with a thumb up their ass. Meanwhile, the enemy AI is consistently functional in the sense that they occasionally pop up from cover and shoot at you, maybe throw grenades at you after a while and perhaps just run up to you and hit you with the butt of their guns.

The graphics aren't the best in the world – there are some pretty weak quality textures that look like something out of a launch title for the 360, or even a late PS2 game! Not to mention that there's so much pop-up that it's really distracting. It'll take a few seconds for the crappy textures to load up, and believe me when I say that during cutscenes, it will do everything in its power to take you out of the experience as it's pretty much the elephant in every single room. It also ruins a lot of set pieces, which already look rather underwhelming as a result of low quality textures and particle effects. I will applaud it for having a color other than brown and gray... and that, my friends, is dirty yellow! But really, the colors are surprisingly varied, and what's used helps each object stand out in their own ways. The sand effects are also rather impressive as, although it doesn't look anywhere near as good as what's found in Uncharted, they feel like they have just the right amount of layers for the severity of any given sandstorm. It's also used for the sake of tension, like they may or may not be enemies behind them and I think that's a nice touch. Hey, look at this – a military shooter has more tension than the last two main Resident Evil games.

The sound design is actually pretty damn good. It uses rock music to lure you into thinking that it's going to be your usual shooter, though to be fair, it does pump you up and really get you into killing enemy soldiers, so it's not like it fails in that regard. Then gives way to more sombre acoustic tracks to drive the point home. It really sets just the right tones for what it tries to achieve and for that, it's a grade A fucking soundtrack. The voice acting is also really good. This is probably Nolan North at his best as he manages to make Martin seem like a generic soldier whose brain eventually fries to a crisp due to the horrors of war, and everybody else's voice actors also really get into it. Because of this, it's very easy to get absorbed into the story, which is really where the game shines.

It's easy to write off Spec Ops: The Line as a game with a great story carrying mediocre gameplay and graphics, but doing so will ensure that you'll be missing out on quite a lot. The story is what makes the gameplay work out the way it does. You're killing all of these people who are shooting at you, but it's not like you're shooting them because the government said so; you're shooting them because they are shooting you and you need to survive to see the end of your rescue mission! It's not necessarily entertaining; it's gutwrenching, unnerving and overwhelming with its heavy handed themes and excellent storytelling, all of which only serves to keep you coming back to see where else you can go with this situation. War is hell and we've taken a permanent residence there – might as well get used to it.

8.5/10 (Great)

Review: Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm

Fuck me, there are so many Naruto games out there that it's hard to figure out where to start. More to the point, it's hard to figure out which ones are actually worth buying, because a lot of them are pretty similar. Well, you could just buy all of them because unlike with Dragon Ball Z, there aren't any outright stinkers or anything like Budokai 2 and Legacy Of Goku 1; just some outright mediocre games and som good games. Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm, fits comfortably in the mediocre section mainly because of some oddball mechanics and decisions that just make me wonder what was in the air at CyberConnect headquarters that day.

If you don't know the story of Naruto, it goes a little something like this – 12 years ago, a powerful demonic nine tailed fox was on the loose, ready to unleash hell. Fortunately, the fourth Hokage was there to subdue it and seal it inside a newborn baby. So 12 years later, that newborn baby has grown into Naruto, the hyperactive knuckleheaded ninja to end all hyperactive knuckleheads. He manages to graduate from the academy and becomes a certified ninja... a low ranked one, but it'll do for now. From there, he goes out on missions with his teammates, but something up in the air smells funny as there's evil afoot. Ah well, he and the rest of squad 7 – Sasuke, Sakura and their leader, the ever so badass Kakashi – as well as other characters this game doesn't give a shit about (don't worry, Shippuden in general doesn't either) are on the case!

Now, the problem the anime suffers from in terms of storytelling is the overuse (almost self-indulgent usage) of flashbacks and monologuing, which doesn't necessarily make it unwatchable but it does slow things down considerably and does feel heavy handed more often than not; this game does the exact opposite by condensing it so much that you pretty much have to have watched the show before you can give two shits about what's going on in this game. To put it simply, it's just text that gives a basic description of what's happening. Outside of the last battles of each arc, there are no cutscenes to get you into it. Why? The older games had cutscenes and they were on fucking DVDs – this is blu ray, motherfucker; it can store five times as much data. I might also add that this game cuts out one arc entirely. It doesn't seem like a big deal because it does have the other major arcs, but this particular arc was meant to help set the mood not only for our fledgling ninjas but also the viewers – that is to say, being a ninja isn't all that glamorous and that there's plenty of hardships to endure, like being treated as a weapon and witnessing the deaths of your comrades. It's clear that this feels more like a cash in than a legitimate effort and the excuse of there being millions of Naruto games to play instead is at moot point because this is the first one to be on the PS3. Not everybody who owns a PS3 also owns a PS2. Even if they do, this could very well be their first game!

It's also indictive of the amount of effort put into this game, which is split into four different styles – a sandbox-y overworld, fighting, jumping through trees and running up trees. Getting this out of the way, the latter two styles are fucking terrible. When you're tasked with jumping from branch to branch, the idea is to avoid branches that stick up vertically while trying to touch the shoe icon so you'll blitz through the forest faster. Usually, you'll either need to go a certain distance or try and catch something like a dog or a small toad. Each of these segments are interchangable and not even all that interesting to begin with. I get that that's how they travel in forests, but come on, this doesn't need to be in a game unless it's a platformer or if it was a hell of a lot better developed.

When it comes to running up trees, you just need to avoid trunks that stick up out of the ground and get to the top of the tree. Not only are the shoes here to help you run fast, but you can also get access to techniques that'll either let you through trunks for a limited period of time or items that you leave behind, hoping that opponents (if any) will run into them and set off an explosion. I don't even know why this was put into the game – in the anime, it was just an exercise that Naruto did because he had to learn how to control his Chakra (source of energy to perform special techniques known as Jutsu) before they had to fight one of the bad guys. Here though? Oh wait, that arc was cut out of this game! So really, it's a classic case of variety for the sake of variety because they had no confidence in the sandbox and fighting segments! I might also add that each of the arcs are split into parts, and each part cosists of either tree jumping, tree running or fighting. The last arc does cut down on that, but you pretty much fight this one guy as four different characters before the big match that pretty much ends the original series (it mercifully doesn't cover the filler arcs).

But then, I can't really blame them for having no confidence in the sandbox segment – it isn't really that well developed. You don't really interact with any of the buildings here, nor do you have anything else to do besides main and side missions. There's literally fuck all to do in the village besides collect scrolls to purchase items for battle and some support moves. Said support moves can be useful in battle if used correctly, but the problem is that not a lot of main missions even give you the option of having support characters. Side missions do quite a bit, but... well, let me put it this way – to access a side mission, you have to find somebody in the village, talk to them, open up the mission menu and select that mission, and then you have to find that person in the village and talk to them to initiate it. Main missions, though? Eh, you can just open up the mission menu and select them... it's like “why bother” unless you want to get the side missions done.

Then you start fighting and... man, what's this feeling I'm having? Is it... is it fun? Is it the feeling of knowing I'm not just wasting my fucking time with underdeveloped and unneeded dog shit? Yes, yes and – you better believe it – yes! Unlike the older games which were on a 2D plane, this one is on a 3D plane, meaning you can make full use of a circular arena. But that's just the beginning. Fighting seems to be simple as you have a a jump button, an attack buton, a button that either charges Chakra or lets you use a special attack when you press it and the attack button right afterwards, a blocking button (which is also a makeshift dodge button if you press it just as you're about to get hit), a button that unleashes a few shurikens (ninja stars) and two support character buttons, but you also have to keep in mind your support characters which can, if used at the right time, set an opponent up for a combo attack and/or just fuck them up. Before battle, you can select what support attack they can use, which range from combos to one strong attack. If you have the right attacks and the right timing, you could turn a potentially losing battle into a winning one! That's really about as complicated as it gets because beyond that, a string of attacks with only two Jutsu at your disposal is all you have. Speaking of which, you have one Jutsu that's like a more powerful attack, and another that's really powerful, but using the stronger Jutsu of the two will then result in a button pressing duel. Basically, you press more buttons that appear on screen than your opponent does in order to pull it off for massive damage. If the defender presses more buttons though, they can simply dodge your attack and you've just used up half your maximum Chakra.

It might not sound like a big deal because you'll be like “oh well I can just recharge my Chakra”. Well, opponents have a tendency to jump around a lot and fire rounds of shurikens, only running in for a combo attack every now and again. Shurikens are weak as piss, but they can interupt you if you're charging up your Chakra, and the same thing applies to your opponents, so a jumping shuriken barrage tends to be a good way to interupt their Chakra flow whilst staying on the move. It's a matter of picking the right time to charge it up, and thankfully, it also charges up if you land hits on them. Really though, fighting is pretty simple, but unlike everything else in this game, it's the good kind of simple – the kind that's easy to pick up and play because it's not only simple, but it's also fun. It's easy to learn and the earlier fights are easy enough to let you learn the ropes, and as you get further and deal with tougher opponents who move around more often and make smarter usage of Jutsu and support attacks, you're prepared enough to take them down (if not lose at least once).

But hey, CyberConnect had something good going on here, so what's the catch? Oh not much, just conditions that sound more like an arbitrary means of making shit harder than it has any right to be. This is found more in the side missions, though it does sneak into some of the main missions (and I'm not just talking about the optional conditions either). These include “use Jutsu 3 times”, “get a 15 hit combo” and “use support characters 4 times”. I suppose some of these can make things more interesting/challenging and some of the others can at least force some experimentation, but really, it just feels like a cop out because they can't come up with different AI for individual fighters and/or different fights.

The game looks pretty good though. The cel shading gives you the feeling that you're playing key fights in the anime as it's all bright and colorful, although the 3D animation pretty much buttrapes the substandard 2D animation often found in the series as it flows like a calm downstream river (that, and they actually fight for more than 10 seconds at a time without yanking the animation budget because IT'S EXPOSITION/EXPLANATION TIME). There isn't much else to really say about the graphics besides the fact that at least there's authenticity – yeah, I remember them doing this fight in this forest or inside an arena. Still looks pretty good, which is what matters the most.

Now, one thing I absolutely love about the anime is the music. It was either upbeat, suspenseful, blood pumping or even sad when the scene calls for it. The game, on the other hand, seems to have this stock music that doesn't pump you up. It sounds more like elevator music. Oh, and while the anime's music is catchier than a cold, I'd be hard pressed to remember even a 2 second loop of any given song from this soundtrack. The voice acting is at least faithful to the anime as they seem to have each characters' actors/actresses – too bad there aren't many opportunities to utilize them because the story is told mostly in text format.

Bottom line: There's so much superflous bullshit in Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm that it makes you wonder if they were confident enough in the overall design of the game. A lot of what you're given is hideously basic, underdeveloped and a general waste of time. The story was hastily retold so that it could give context to everything you do in this game, but it might as well have just said “Naruto is fighting Gaara, believe it” and it'd give just as much information to you as each beginning mission text does. Despite my constant bitching though, the fighting is fun to do and it is pretty well executed. Really, it's just bogged down by all this filler content that you just wish would be better developed and flow more cohesively with everything else, or at the very least, be something resembling fun or even worth your time.

6/10 (Above Average)

Review: Enslaved: Odyssey To The West

At times, I find myself cleaning up my excess inventory so that I don't look like a loser who has more video games than friends – that, and trading in PS3 games will reduce your next JB Hi-Fi DVD/video game binge by about ten bucks a pop. Very rarely do I give them a chance to plea their case, but Enslaved was a special game for me... a special kind of shit that doesn't quite smell like what I'd be used to, and it kind of looks different too, but... well, you know where this is going, so I'll talk about it a bit more formally. Enslaved is the kind of game that only really has one thing going for it, two things that have a lot of potential to make this game good, and a bunch of crap that just sticks to the wall and stinks up the joint.

In the future, most of humanity is wiped out by robots and nature has taken over. Okay, so far, so good. But then comes some sort of doomship, which is apparently a slave ship. But never fear – the badass known only as Monkey manages to bust out and... well, he attempts to escape, except most of the escape pods have already left the ship. There's one left, but some chick named Trip escapes in it. Never fear, as Monkey, the most badass video game character known to mankind, holds onto the pod as it drops about a quadrillion feet down onto the ground. But because Monkey is such a badass, he survives (barely, but he survives nevertheless). Trip likes a man who has nice big, rippling muscles that survive death defying stunts such as falling so many feet from the air not even god knows, so she installs a head piece that'll kill him if either she dies, they're too far away from each other, or if he leaves the toilet seat up. Given that Monkey could most likely survive a 2-on-1 handicap fight against Bruce Lee and a Bengol tiger, I guess you can say Trip's found the only method that can actually kill Monkey – what a smart chick. And hot. And... kind of a bitch now that I think about it. You can tell she doesn't like Monkey for his personality – she only likes him because even a punch right across the face from Captain Falcon would only deplete a small portion of his hit points.

Oh and there's some shit about mechs and how Trip has to head home so they journey to the west or some fucking bullshit nobody actually cares about because the story is so wafer thin that you can see right through it. The ending sucks harder than a Taiwanese hooker as it concludes jack shit and actually only serves to ask even more questions, but fuck it, this is a more character driven experience than anything. Despite my embelishment of Monkey's actions, he's not a likeable character and neither is Trip. Monkey is a meathead whose only positive characteristic is his Herculean strength, while Trip is sneaky and manipulative, although she's quite a tech wizz as she can hack into pretty much anything technological. In fact, the only likeable thing about the characters are how their relationship develops. It first starts off with Monkey only helping because he has no choice, but over time, he grows to like, even love her, and the feeling is reciprocated. I only wished that they were actually likeable – so much effort was put into characters that are unrealistically selfish and otherwise bland for survivors of some apocalypse. Halfway through, you meet another character and... oh wow, a likeable character! Why? Because – and get this – he has a personality that you can actually enjoy! Now, I don't know why he's so fucking fat, unless he always lucked out when his tribe or whatever had to eat each other and he hogged all the bodies for himself, but hey, he has a sense of humor that's enjoyable to be around! What's not to like about him... unless he smells bad...

What makes it suck is how unfulfilling every moment of gameplay really is. The platforming in this game not only took a few classes in the Uncharted school of platforming – quick, climb up the conveniently placed rocks – but for fucks sake, you can't even die! Monkey never misses a beat on those ledges. He will ALWAYS make it to the next stone or chasm or whatever because he's Monkey! He's a badass motherfucker and you mustn't forget that. Ever! To forget is to realize that the platforming and what it's really there for is like what happens in the Ninja Theory headquarters while they think of ways to unfairly deprive us of 60 buttfucking dollars because god forbid these jokers can actually make a game with good gameplay! I mean, if you want to know their true intentions, look no further than the puzzles and the chase sequences – the puzzles are just long, drawn out tedious lever puzzles that slow down the game and end up having less logic the further along you go; meanwhile, the chase sequences have you chasing something on some disc board and, unless you have no hand eye coordination, it's so easy to get to the big robot that kidnapped Trip. I suppose if I must spell it out for you - The chase sequences are just there to show off the pretty graphics while the puzzles are either easy or complete bullshit. Guess what they put more effort in?

Now, to be fair, there was a legitamate attempt at a combat system, which is fine by me because that's what you did more often than not. Sure, the enemy variety wasn't big and the attacks list is smaller than the Vita's sales figures, but with that came a more realistic (well, psuedo-realistic really) combat engine and really, every decision made here at least complimented one another. The enemy variety was necessary – you have your generic grunts, big guys, shield guys, big guys with shields and gunners. The combat list is a necessary response with a combo attack, a vertical attack, a charged attack, a sweep and two sorts of plasma bullets (attackers and stunners).

This is the kind of thing that'd work if Enslaved had deliberate pacing or, at the very least, was made by a developer who knew what they were doing. I mean it's not like either of the Batman Arkham games are teeming with variety or anything, and it seems like they have similar strengths too! But alas, Enslaved's combat doesn't give it much opportunity to have anything bounce off of themselves. Instead, it just feels like a mediocre hack and slash game that wanted a slice of that God Of War pie without making any effort to be as brutal or over the top as it, or even remotely fun for that matter. It always feels like it's just going through the motions, like in case they can't shoehorn some crappy puzzle or "cinematic" chase scene or if they're looking for ways to fill up time, it's like "oh there are now waves of enemies". Parts like that especially piss me off because it shows how wafer thin combat really is. There are only basic strategies like using stun plasma bullets and/or wailing on them with the combo attack, and since you're fighting so fucking often, it wears you down. A few scenarios try to be interesting by having enemies in different positions and having a good arrangement of enemies to try and dick you over, but those are far and few between – at other points, the lack of commitment behind execution of the combat engine shows like disgusting zits on a pair of E-cup titties.

It's a shame, because the game at least looks good. There's some pixellated textures offset by some blurry ones, and lag is immiment, but beyond that, it looks brilliant. The landscapes of this post-apocalyptic world look convincing. There's plenty of green and while a puking analogy would seem fitting, no, it actually looks rather serene. Whether it's the forest you start in or the city you eventually head towards, it looks so peaceful after the obliteration of most of mankind. The city is appropriately ravaged, with mossy, rusty metals and moldy old buildings. It really does feel like you're there and it's not some fucking desolate, radioactive wonderland either, which is what really stands out about this game. The animations are also rather smooth, especially the facial features. The emotions on their faces fit their dialogue and tone of voice, which helps to bring the story to life despite the actual story's insipidness.

Speaking of voice acting, the characters, mediocre as they are, have ace fucking voice actors. Each of the emotions conveyed by them is not only appropriate, but they're conveyed so well that they manage to really draw you into the experience! The only minor nitpick is that Monkey is a bit tricky to understand sometimes due to Andy Serkis's accent, but if people can stomach the Irate Gamer, then you should be fine with this. As for the soundtrack, it's mostly ambient pieces, though when it gets loud, it manages to make for some epic music during fights. Nothing really memorable or anything, but it's got decent enough ambiance and that's probably enough when it comes to soundtracks from this generation to be considered passable.

There is potential to be found in its story as the characters' relationship is very well developed, but the characters themselves are mostly unlikeable and the story itself is an afterthought, especially that disaster of an ending. There's also potential to be found in its combat, but it becomes an insipid chore the further in you go. That's it. There's more time put into its story and set pieces than the gameplay and it shows. Enslaved is more interested in jacking itself off and because it's got such a small dick, nobody else can give it a whack. Avoid this like Square avoids making progress on Final Fantasy Versus XIII.

3/10 (Bad)