Title: Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten
Format: Blu-ray
Release Date: September 6, 2011
Publisher: Nippon Ichi Software
Developer: Nippon Ichi Software
Price: $59.99
ESRB Rating: T

This year will be known as the year of 3s and 4s, with sequels of sequels, or in some cases, sequels of sequels of sequels – hey there Ezio, overwhelming us with familiar gaming options. While most action and shooter titles have a fairly easy time reengaging their audience, just move the proceedings to more exotic locales and add some additional melee and/or gunplay mechanics, RPGs have to walk a finer line. With each iteration a roleplaying game needs to add more mechanics, but at the same time remain accessible so that a new player isn’t put off by the myriad of seemingly incomprehensible systems. Luckily for strategy RPG and NIS fans Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten doesn’t just walk that fine line, but gleefully dances down it making odd sardine jokes along the way.

Gameplay:
The Disgaea series has never shied away from throwing a variety of gameplay systems at you and letting the player choose which they want to engage with. In fact, Disgaea has been doing that since the beginning by combining the standard move and attack gameplay of strategy RPGs with the tile-based effects of the GeoPanel system, spelunking through Item Worlds to build up weapons, and playing cutthroat politics with a demonic Senate. Thankfully with each Disgaea sequel NIS has been able to add subtle tweaks to their successful formula that introduce depth without creating confusion.

Having not played a Disgaea title since the original I was pleasantly surprised to be introduced to the tower, Evility and MagiChange systems from Disgaea 3 as well as Disgaea 4’s new features – Demon Fusing and the Cam-Pain system. Demon Fuse is an ability that allows two monsters to combine to create a giant version, like Voltron only more adorable. The results, aside from twenty-foot tall Prinnies, are increased stats for your now larger than life party member. For even more fun feel free to MagiChange a Demon Fused monster into a giant weapon. While Demon Fuse is for use on the field of battle the Cam-Pain system is about setting up your characters for success. As you progress through the campaign each new level you unlock adds a grid space to your kingdom, place your party members adjacent to each other and their chances for combos will increase, or add in various buildings you can buy to boost abilities or your spoils from battle. Who doesn’t love their main characters getting an experience boost each time they level up?

If you glazed over reading that last paragraph – demon fuse-a-whatzit? why would I mess with a board game in the middle of my RPG? – don’t worry because all the systems I mentioned can be as little or as large a part of your Disgaea 4 experience as you want. If you have a backlog that towers over your living room furniture and just want to see the story, level up your characters a bit, and wail away on some bad guys you can invest a couple of dozen hours, get your RPG fix, and then make it back to Uncharted Creed City: Skyedges 4. You will walk away having enjoyed the game, indulging in a lot of unique, fun game mechanics and experienced a ridiculously offbeat story. However, if Disgaea factors into how you plan to spend your holiday vacation then go ahead and drop over a hundered hours into it – you will be rewarded. The most obvious indicator that this has the potential to be a free time eraser is the save game screen, which boasts a level indicator with four places. That’s right you can level up your characters to 9,999. Beyond that you can delve into Legendary weapons, upgrade them, and then one shot the final boss. There is no wrong way to play and enjoy Disgaea.

Visuals:
Gorgeous anime-inspired visuals are a hallmark of the Disgaea series, and Disgaea 4 is no different. While many felt Disgaea 3 lacked the visual punch a PS3 game should provide, Disgaea 4 makes up for it with a lush, warm color palette and striking character design. Each Disgaea has added new characters to its quirky pantheon, and Valvatorez, your main character and Prinny caretaker, Fenris, his loyal bodyguard, and Fuka, a girl who wears a Prinny hat and windbreaker combo because they ran out of Prinny skins, all fit right in.

The levels themselves have a more organic feel, with the courtyards and castles of more traditional strategy RPGs being absent in favor of  lush forests with giant mushrooms that serve as grid space and multi-tiered bridges, which bring height mechanics to bear. Add in the GeoPanel system, which allows individual grid spaces to have status effects, and a gorgeous mushroom patch becomes a deadly trap, as various spaces will poison characters. Level design in Disgaea 4 is among the best in the series and some of the best I have played in any strategy RPG.

Audio:
The underlying strategy mechanics of Disgaea alone would likely bring in a solid following, but it is the personality that NIS has time and again injected into these titles that make them the fan favorites they are. As always voice acting is top notch, probing the entire spectrum of characters from yellow-bellied wardens to too-cool-for-school Prinny posturing. Valvatorez, as the star, is particularly note-worthy combining an uncompromisingly serious demeanor with grand, and always ridiculous, pronouncements, with an occasional pop culture references thrown in for good measure.

Conclusion:
For strategy RPG fans Disgaea games are an event, and Disgaea 4 continues that illustrious tradition. While lesser series would have crumbled by their fourth iteration under the weight of their byzantine systems Disgaea has transcended this obstacle by allowing players to explore every nook and cranny, but not forcing them. The only knock against Disgaea is that it preaches to the converted instead of bringing new players into the strategy RPG fold. However, if you love chess, tabletop games, or just the idea of stylishly adorable characters eviscerating each other then Disgaea is worth your time. Just be warned if we haven’t heard from you in a few days and your mail starts piling up we might get worried, or just assume you are heading towards the level 9,999 promised land.

Grade:

Title: Goldeneye 007: Reloaded
Format: Blu-ray
Release Date: November 1, 2011
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Eurocom
Price: $59.99
ESRB Rating: T

Activision knows that you’ve been hoping and praying for another chance to redeem yourself after being double-crossed by 006, and has even set you up in a Daniel Craig disguise so you won’t be recognized. You would expect this to work great since all of the guards are looking for Pierce Brosnan…

Gameplay:
Granted I haven’t played the N64 original for Goldeneye in a few years, but if you’re going to compare to that one, well of course the gameplay is fantastic, simply for the much better controller. What I don’t honestly remember though, is how accurate this remake is to the original is locations or story. When compared to the plethora of FPS’ on the market right now, then Goldeneye 007: Reloaded is pretty middle-of-the-road. There’s nothing new in the execution, controls, weaponry, level design, enemy AI, or really anything else that screams originality. What bothers me is that there’s very well-known source material out there, but the developers and writers have chosen to merely pick and choose only certain elements and have created the rest out of thin air. I mean, you always see some creative license used when a movie is transformed to a videogame, but usually not as much when a game is remade in newer technology. What we get here is a mess though, as there are signs of brilliance that are ultimately overtaken by uneven textures, weird changes in well-known characters, and odd changes to different elements that are more confusing than convincing.

The gameplay here is what you’d expect from an FPS. Get into cover, pop-up, kill enemy, drop back into cover, rinse, repeat. There is of course, an underlying metagame as well, giving the player a secondary objective to optionally complete for a better ranking, and the standard “hidden items” to shoot in each level. The secondary objectives aren’t very difficult to accomplish if you’re actually mindful of them during the level, but the hidden objects are ridiculously hidden to the point where they’re almost completely obscured from view unless the player is in a very specific spot, and he or she just happens to look at that specific location in the corner of the outside of a bunker with trees and foliage covering the entire thing. It’s a recipe for frustration that I quickly chose to ignore.

The campaign itself is objectives-based, and loosely follows the story in the original movie…. very loosely. There’s a lot of sneaking, which at first was fun, since it’s not anywhere close to the level of an MGS title, but you’ll quickly realize that the clunky level design and pedestrian AI will completely ruin your expectations of playing a stealth-oriented game. My experience quickly would become “shoot about 4 or 5 guys in the head with my silenced Walther PPK, then all hell breaks loose because of a simple incorrect movement, or because an enemy spotted me across a room when the lights were out.” At that point, it became a standard FPS, but with AI enemies that home in on you no matter what distance there is between you and said enemy, and unless you get a headshot, expect to spend an entire clip on each one. That, or the occasional AI enemy that would hunch in the corner until you find and eliminate him.

To take a step back though, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong here. It just doesn’t do anything unique or groundbreaking, and with other FPS’ like Resistance 3, Killzone 3, Battlefield 3, and yes, even Modern Warfare 3, the gameplay is just “there”. There’s nothing really compelling other than the desire to get through the mediocre story.

Visuals:
This is a completely mixed bag. There’s some really cool stuff here like HDR lighting, weather effects like rain and snow, and all at 60FPS. But there are also elements that make this game look like a launch title for the original XBOX. The best example I can give is when you drive the tank through Moscow. The textures are blurry, the gameplay clunky, object models are simple, and glitches abound. It’s quite jarring when you have a gorgeous level like when you’re sneaking through a snow covered forest, just to be taken back a few years when you get to the Goldeneye facility itself. Some of the level and graphical designs are brilliant, while others seem to be copied from the game “Haze”. All-in-all the visuals can really impress, it’s just a shame that with al that’s good, there are other elements that are just as bad, which is quite a shame.

Audio:
Again, this can be a mixed bag, but is much more consistant than the visuals. Some guns don’t really seem to have that “oomph” that you would expect, but the little details like eavesdropping on enemy NPC’s coversations or the snapping of a baddie’s neck while you silently take him out of the picture, fit very well with the feel of this game. Surround is used well, and when sneaking through a large group of enemies, helps quite a bit in making sure that someone’s not in your blindspot.

Both Daniel Craig and Dame Judy Dench are the only voices that you’ll recognize from the Bond World (even though for Goldeneye you’d expect to hear Pierce Brosnan as Bond.) The rest of the voice work is adequate, but there’s nothing special there. The story has been changed a bunch from the movie, but the characters are all present here, even though most are here only in name, as many have been visually changed, and personality characteristics are also quite different than their movie counterparts.

Online/Multiplayer:
Here’s the crux of this game. The biggest reason that Goldeneye gained such popularity on the N64 was the 4-player split-screen multiplayer, which at the time was revolutionary for console gaming. In this new iteration, the multiplayer has the same feel that was in the originally game, albeit now online with more players. But this begs the question of how good this can really be in 2011. I can see people falling victim to nostalgia, but more often than not, I would almost bet that dusting-off the old N64 version would be a more favorable experience than trying to recreate the experience with newer tech and online availability.

For me, it just didn’t cut it. I was pretty bored with the multiplayer, but I’m also the FPS fanatic in our group. I do believe that there is a small section of gamers that will enjoy this, but at the same time, I just don’t see the multiplayer in this new version of Goldeneye lasting for very long for anyone.

Conclusion:
In my opinion, and even though I wasn’t a huge fan (mainly because of the awkward N64 controller,) I still recognize that the original Goldeneye on the N64 had a huge impact on gaming as a whole (even more than Halo I’d say.) I can definitely see the nostalgic angle that a lot of gamers around my age could take toward this “reloaded” version. But at the end of the day, all we’ve gotten is a bland FPS with a shiny new coat. Some of the visual elements blow me away, while others left me wanting a lot more. For games based on James Bond, I actually prefer “Blood Stone” to this one. But like I mentioned before, there’s nothing really “broken” here, but there’s also nothing extraordinary or groundbreaking either, and that’s the focal point that I kept coming back to when I was playing this game. I noticed myself being bored and merely playing it “to get through it for review.” That, to me, is the most telling factor of what this game brings to the table.

Grade:

Title: The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
Format: Blu-ray
Release Date: November 11, 2011
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Price: $59.99
ESRB Rating: M

Where does one begin reviewing a game like Skyrim?  Do I tell you that I have been playing it since release date and have enjoyed every moment of it?  Do I tell you about how magnificent the scenery unfolds before your eyes, or how the character models have improved greatly from the previous game?  Or how about expressing that the NPCs come to life with brilliant voice-acting that no longer sounds like its coming from robotic AI?

Yeah, I do have to tell you all of those things, because a review needs to elaborate on the individual elements that make Skyrim the game that it is.  But I will do so out of that requirement, because what I would rather tell you about is the experience of Skyrim.

I’ve been a fan of the Elder Scrolls series since the days of running Arena on my IBM computer in my college dorm room.  Before that, I was playing role-playing games on my Sega Master System, Genesis, and Super Nintendo, with the occasional Gold Box Dungeons and Dragons game on my VIC 20.  So, from out of nowhere comes this game that promised thousands of square miles of virtual world to explore.  There wasn’t much more that needed to be said.  I picked up the game and I installed the 10 or so floppy discs into my computer.  Everything from the decorated instruction manual, to the ability to create this custom character from a choice of different races.  From the living world that included its own calendar year (which had different towns celebrating holidays with convenient sales on weapons and items), to the promised-enormous world that actually covered all of the states that were later divided into the games we are familiar with (Morrowind, Cyrodiil, Skyrim).

Every game in the series has managed to improve upon its promise of a living-breathing world.  And while games like Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim do not cover nearly the insane amount of virtual miles as Arena and Daggerfall, the real estate sacrifice was made in favor of making every inch of the world as believably-beautiful as a hand-crafted virtual world could be.  And one thing that should be noted is that this world is not a canned world that can only be viewed by a camera positioned on a controlled rail.  Everything has to be crafted with the expectation that a player can approach anything in the game and observe it closely.  This makes the task even more of a challenge for the folks at Bethesda, but it is a challenge that they have taken, and the result of their work isn’t seen in high scores from the press, or some you tube video of a fella’ yelling at the screen about how Skyrim’s graphics are “off the wall.”

The result of their work came from a very simple emotion that I experience when I visited my first town in Skyrim.  The rain was coming down, and a small river was raging to my left.  There was a slight breeze making its way through the pine trees, and I could smell it.  I live in the suburbs, so the scent wasn’t coming from my asphalt encrusted neighborhood.  It was coming from a simple math equation.  The combination of those sights and sounds, all executed with such attention that it allowed my brain to add the remaining sensation, the smell.   I realize that Skyrim is far from being the only game to employ a rain element, and truth be told, visually, I have seen better rain.  Again, it’s the combination of the hazy lighting and fog, the sound of the wind, the distant effect of the river, some people talking in the distance, the creaking wood coming from some unknown source, and a simple dog barking in the background.  We’ve all been in that environment.  And we know what it sounds like and what it looks like, so our mind automatically fills in the blanks.  The fact that Skyrim allows you to walk around in this setting with full control of where you go is what sets apart this game (or series) from anything else.

Thus, I ventured forth with this initial experience, anticipating the world that would eventually unfold before me.  I refrain from spoiling any story elements, particularly because story and exposition is one thing that Skyrim has improved upon, and I don’t say this lightly.  While I admit that this may simply be my experience, I was never really attached to the narrative of Morrowind or Oblivion.  I knew well-enough what was going on, but I never actually felt like I was anyone important.  Oh, to be certain, I was treated like someone important by the NPCs in the game, but I always humbly felt that anyone could do what I was doing in the game.  My adventures in Skyrim and (once again) the combination of well-written dialogue, and NPC expression,  not to mention the situation that some of these quests put me in, bestowed upon me a level of self-worth that I hadn’t experienced in an Elder game.  I actually felt like a badass with the ability to speak the long-forgotten tongue of dragons.  These people needed me.  I could dual wield blades, and I looked like a legendary warrior (thanks art department).  People spoke about the “Dragon Born” when I walked by, and there was a dead dragon corpse at the entrance to town.  Yeah, that’s right, folks.  I did that.   The shop-keeper’s sister flirted with me when I entered his shop, and old women trusted me with their problems.

But if these NPCs had been robotic drones that approached each other and discussed the weather for 20 seconds before returning to their predetermined paths, I wouldn’t have believed in their love for me so much.  It’s the fact that I walked in on conversations that seemed to continue long after I had walked away that made their praise so believable.  These folks have lives and discuss situations with one another.  Some of these situations were actually indicative of future quests.

I walked upon a pair of gentlemen arguing with a guard who was preventing them from entering the city because of their race and reputation.  The men were simply looking for a woman who had eluded them.  I listened in on the conversation and eventually asked the two men about the women.  This unlocked a quest that would have me looking for the woman myself.  But this was not the impressive part.  An hour or so later I was venturing through the wilderness on a trek to visit a nearby dungeon when I saw two men harassing a woman on the road.  I moved into investigate and listened in on their conversation.  It was the same men from before, interrogating a woman who they believed to be the one they were previously looking for.  As it turned out, she was not the right woman, and was pretty defensive about their accusations.  But that little moment gave life to the NPCs in ways that better facial expressions and higher-resolution textures could not.  Oh Skyrim excels in that department as well, but bringing a character to life takes a lot more than just pretty pictures and motion.  They were on their own journey, and if followed, they wouldn’t simply walk into a wall and stand there until you returned.  They conduct actions that are more-believable than those of previous games in the series.  This is just another added level of detail that makes Skyrim a serious improvement over Oblivion.  Yes, Oblivion did allow you to follow characters throughout town, but the conversations they had with each other is at a completely different level with this sequel.

But enough gushing about the magnificence that is the world of Skyrim.  Let’s get onto the individual elements that make this game.

Gameplay:
I’ll start by describing the things that I felt needed work in Oblivion, and how they have been improved in Skyrim.  Oblivion was a role-playing fan’s love letter.  It had pages and pages of menus, where you could look at your weapons and armor, check your status and the level of different attributes.  Two pages for quests and tasks, along with their current progress.   Of course this included a map, which highlighted local areas, as well as your location in the entire world.  While this level of management and detail was lovely for a role-playing goon like me, I have to admit that at times (particularly when jumping into the game after a long absence) I found it a little painful to  flip through.  I carried around so many items and weapons at times that figuring out which weapon was stronger required a bit of effort.  Yes, I realize that the weapon’s strength and weight were all listed to the right of the item’s name, but you still had to find your equipped item and compare these values.

Skyrim does away with some of the clutter for a more simplified interface.  Pressing the Circle button brings up a basic menu that is divided into Magic, Status, Map, and Items.  Within the items menu, you have a column that indicates whether you are looking at weapons, apparel, potions, etc etc.  But its the weapons and armor menu where I found the first improvement.  Role-playing gamers who have been playing Japanese role-playing games for the last decade are familiar with the red and green numbers.  You walk into a shop and check out an interesting weapon.  If it’s better than yours, there is a green number indicating the difference in strength from what you are currently holding.  If it’s not as powerful, then the numbers show up in red.  This has been a simple way to keep players from wasting time in shops.  Skyrim has employed this method of weapons/armor comparison, and it’s only limited by one thing.

Games like Dragon Age adopted this old method and understood that when you were buying a bow (while holding swords) that you were more interested in knowing how this new bow compared to the one you had equipped as a secondary weapon.  Skyrim doesn’t.  So if I am holding my swords, it stands to reason that my bow will always appear weaker.  So in order to see if the bow that I am inspecting is better than the one in my inventory, I have to do a bit more work.  Yes, it’s a shame that the system isn’t as intelligent as the one in Dragon Age, but at least Skyrim is moving in the right direction, and shopping for weapons (or simply picking them off the ground) is a lot less time-consuming when I know that what I am holding is better than the fancy-looking sword that the now-dead bandit was carrying.

I have never been a magic-user in Elder Scrolls games.  This just about goes for any role-playing game out there.  Skyrim changed that for me.  It probably has something to do with the fact that I can hold the R1 button down and my hand becomes a flame thrower as a result.  It also has something to do with the fact that I can equip flame magic on both hands and dual wield the hell out of my flame-thrower, electricity (Sith style), or blizzard.  Not only is the presentation of magic improved in Skyrim (with charred stone textures appearing where my flame touches, and icicles covering the environment where I unleash my blizzard spell), but it also makes utilizing it along side a melee weapon possible, so you don’t have to completely give up your love of melee in order to use magic.  At one point I found myself torching an enemy with my left hand while slicing him up with my right hand.  This also opens up the possibility of healing while you fight.

Granted, your swinging arm is limited and does not deliver as many blows per round, but it is possible to fight and heal, which becomes an extra powerful tool if you really put some points into restoration perks.  If you equip two healing spells at the same time, you can do a mega heal that can turn the tide in a losing battle.  Magic has never been more enjoyable for me than it has been in this game.  Opinions of this may vary with good reason (I don’t usually play wizards).  But in my experience playing with magic in games, this has been the most rewarding, and I really feel like Skyrim allows for some interesting combinations and experimentation.

Swordplay in Skyrim has also been improved in a number of ways (not least of all the ability to dual wield).   Oblivion isn’t always remembered for its amazing sword fights.  Yes, you could get into some serious skirmishes, but it always began and ended with you swinging from right to left with an occasional stronger attack.  It’s not that Skyrim introduced Soul Calibur-style combos to the mix, but what Bethesda accomplished with this sequel is simply making bladed combat more interesting, particularly in third-person view.

Animations look better and contact with the enemy feels less floaty (if you take my meaning).  Referring to the word “floaty” again, running and simply moving about also feels less so than in the previous game.  This makes the aforementioned third-person mechanic work a hellovalot better.  This is especially true when playing a sneaky bastard like I do.  Since your cross-hairs are positioned with an offset to your character, you can do a lot of your sniping work from the third-person if you choose to.  I sometimes find myself returning to first-person view for this because I can see a bit better, but I have been exploring most of Skyrim in third-person view, because I like seeing my character fight.  I did this with Oblivion as well, but now I can functionally do so in Skyrim.

If I had one complaint about Skyrim’s Favorite system (where you check-mark items that you plan to use frequently and have quick access to them via a quick menu) is that after a while, you end up liking a lot of things.  I have five favorite spells, and two sets of headgear that I like to switch between.  This is on top of my swords and bows, and two shouts.  So my Favorites menu is pretty large, and as a result,  it ends up becoming just another menu.  I almost wish that there was a favorite menu for weapons, armor, and magic, (accessible by pressing different directions with your digital pad) instead of one menu with all of my items.  If not that, it would also help if I could sort by type, so that I could easily replace my bow with my swords when the enemy closes the gap between long range and close range.  Not a score-changing gripe, but perhaps something that I would have added to the developer’s approach in making things a bit easier to manage.

Visuals:
Skyrim has to be judged as a package when considering a grade for visuals.  Sure, I can compare it to Uncharted 3’s visuals, or something like Killzone 3.  But again, it is unfair to judge the visuals in a game like this against other games with stronger visuals, because such judgement would not factor in the considerations that the developers had to make in order to bring a living world to life.  Skyrim is not canned.  It’s not an environment where invisible walls can limit you from discovering that no geometry exists on the other side of that building.  Daylight and Night are controlled lighting fixtures that will not change throughout your adventures in Uncharted (unless its by design, within the controller environment).

And despite all of this, Skyrim still manages to impress, with technological advancements that make some its environments comparable with some of the more linear games out there.  For example, I found the open world of this game to be more visually-impressive than Dragon Age 2, a game with self-contained mini maps.  This is not a dismissal of the amazing work done on those other games.  It’s simply a testament to what Bethesda’s artists have done in delivering such a large environment, while still managing to make it look next-generation.

Stonework doesn’t tile (or if it does, it is beyond the player’s view), valleys expand out before you with majestic trees and foliage that make every square inch of the environment a different experience, be it a lonely tree sitting on a small patch of land in a swampy bog, to the amazing vista of the sun setting (complete with rolling clouds) from an outcropping high upon a snowy mountain.  Skyrim also employs a stronger shadow system that has every item (including yourself) casting beautiful shadows.  This also plays an amazing role when you are sneaking around a dungeon and the torch-cast shadow of an enemy creeps into view before the actual source, giving you ample time to prepare your attack.  Skyrim’s visuals are nothing short of breathtaking, and for such a task to be accomplished, while still making every mountain in the background explorable, is an undertaking that only Bethesda’s experience in the field could accomplish.

Audio:
Boot up Skyrim and you will be treated to a theme song that has already been cloned on youtube in heavy metal, piano solo, and I’m sure there is probably a guy singing it somewhere, if you really look for it.  The theme is familiar to fans of the series, but it seems to me that every time this theme song is revisited, it gets better and better.  The music continues strong throughout the game.  At times it dips to simple ambiance, and some familiar town music cues make there way into this game to compliment similar village and town environments. The sound effects work in Skyrim also benifits the successful implementation of combat in the game, in that sword collisions sound more effective (particularly when they make contact with the enemy).  You really get a sense that you are causing damage and beating the crap out of that troll.

This is rounded out by some amazing ambient sounds, delivered while exploring caverns and dungeons.  From the sound of water rushing in the distance, to that unnerving tell-tale effect of skeleton warriors approaching, Skyrim’s visuals only go at far as their sound compliments them.  As I initially mentioned, the sound work in Skyrim does so much to envelop you in the world which the visuals establish, that it would be extremely noticeable if the sound work was missing or poorly-done.  Fortunately, this is far from the case, and the sound design is strong enough that one can close their eyes and still imagine the location where his/her character is standing without the need for a visual representation.

Online/Multiplayer:
No online for this series at this point (for which I am eternally grateful).  Though I have to admit that a little four-player (join me to help me kill this dragon) might be fun in the future.

Conclusion:
It’s not the fancy graphics or splendid music that pushed me into giving Skyrim the score I ended up bestowing upon it.  It’s not the improved fighting system or better menu organization.  As gamers (particularly role-playing gamers) we look for the next experience that takes you from your living room into a virtual world that echos the realities you know, but places them in a fantastical setting with some unfamiliarities that separates the experience from that of simply walking outside of your house.  Skyrim receives my highest score because at one point in my play-through, I stood upon a rocky ledge, overlooking a magnificent valley below.  Ahead of me, beyond a distance mountain range, an orange haze marked the ending of the day, as low clouds rolled across the horizon.  The sound of a chilling wind filled my ears as it struggled through protesting rocky structures with a resounding howl.  Behind me was the cavern which I had recently cleared of bandits (my pockets a bit more full from the exploit).  This wasn’t a cinematic, and the mountains in the background were not pixel art, meant to be seen only from this vantage point.  I had 360 degrees-worth of choices to make at that point (270 degrees if you factor in the cliff-side behind me, but who’s counting).   It’s that knowledge of uncertainty and adventure, and that fact that the subsequent exploits were just as amazing as the previous ones, that guided me towards the score that I chose for Skyrim.

Grade:

Title: Battlefield 3
Format: Blu-ray
Release Date: October 25, 2011
Publisher: EA
Developer: DICE
Price: $59.99
ESRB Rating: M

Let’s get this out of the way right now, Yes, I’m a Battlefield fanatic. I own every iteration except for Modern Combat, I’m in an awesome BF Clan (WDT Fo’ LIFE!), and I’ve probably spent as much time playing the series as even the most devoted MMO fans have played WoW. That doesn’t mean, however, that I can’t realize a deficiency in a Battlefield game. For example, BF 2142 is still my least favorite, as air ships were incredibly nerfed and insanely difficult to control, and BF Vietnam, well it wasn’t very good until 3 or 4 patches were released. In other words, yes, I can be realistic about a Battlefield game, so let’s get to this perfect game! *smile*

Gameplay:
It’s Battlefield!

Kidding, but that’s definitely the feeling, which is a great thing. It’s feels like Battlefield in every aspect, even on a console. The scope of the maps, the way the weapons feel, the vehicles (including having a machine gun available on the tanks for the driver instead of only the turret like the “made for consoles” Bad Company off-shoots. Aircraft feel great as well, and I’m actually getting chopper flight down pretty well. It’s definitely been tweaked since BF2, as for example, the choppers are definitely setup to be more “realistic” and don’t allow for as many acrobatic feats as BF2 did.

There are some things that did evolve and move over from the previous console brethren, especially the weapons progression system. It’s smooth, and quite easy to understand. Physics are better than what was available in the Bad Company games, and hey, splash damage from a tank shell or RPG is actually present here, which is a key part of gameplay when you’re trying to take someone out with the tank.

In Single Player, you obviously start with specific weapons but dropped weapons of your foes are plentiful. Also, since we’re on the subject of single-player, the campaign is quite solid, and definitely better then what was included with BF: Bad Company 2. It’s your standard “you’re in a room and some dudes with bad attitudes are interviewing you about a bad situation, and you go back in time and play-through these scenarios” mechanic that we’ve seen in many games already. One big difference though, is how they take the player through these scenarios using cinematic techniques and solid FPS gameplay. One highlight is a portion of the game where you play as a Rio in a jetfighter under attack. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever played, and will blow your mind for sure.

At the end of the day though, it’s an FPS Campaign, but one littered with amazing next-gen effects and solid gameplay throughout, but it’s not without its issues. The difficulty, even on Normal, is ramped-up quite a bit. Also, a few situations really feel like “trial and error” since things can definitely seem vague occasionally. Also, I swear that I was being shot through cover like huge rocks and others items as well. Is the campaign perfect? No, not at all, but it’s solid, and still quite enjoyable. You probably will get a bit frustrated though, as it can become a bit uneven when your enemies all of a sudden develop PERFECT aim at 300 yards.

Visuals:
In a word, stunning! As a fan of the Battlefield series on a high-end PC, I can’t believe what they’ve done on the PS3. Lighting effects everywhere, highly detailed textures, a solid framerate, and things like blowing dust and rainfall (+more) This is on-par with Killzone 3 in terms of effects and overall visuals, but this time obviously in a more recognizable setting. Also, one place where BF3 excels is scale, in many situations you can see for miles with essentially no pop-in (some bushes and random objects may pop-in occasionally though.)

With every step taken, or every yard traveled in a vehicle, the visuals impress. Then put the destructibility of the Frostbite 2 Engine on top of that, and you feel like you’re truly in these battles. This is the most visceral and engrossing multiplayer I’ve experienced in an FPS for a long time. You’ll quickly notice this when a building that you’re in suddenly collapses around you even though you were safe from that tank firing upon you from the street.

A problem with the visuals though, is those damned flashlights mounted to tactical weapons (which DICE is saying will be fixed in the first patch.) Even in daylight, one of these flashlights aimed directly at you will completely blind the player, which is insanely unrealistic, and isn’t really fitting for a game trying to straddle that gap between realism and the fantastic. That’s about the only issue with the visuals though, as everything in the game is truly a sight you must experience on your own.

Audio:
In the pursuit of realism and bringing the player into this world, the audio design is second to none, with full use of surround sound at all times. Rockets whiz by your right ear, while you hear a tank moving-up behind you. Individual bullets hit the wall to your right, with chips of brink falling to the ground. You run toward the yells of who you hope are your teammates, as you hear a grenade hit the ground to your left. Every single object in this world has its own sound applied to it, and everything is encoded in beefy DTS sound. If you have the system to experience audio like this, you’re in for a treat. If you have a subwoofer, turn it up a notch or two, because you’ll feel how awesome the sound design is.

Online/Multiplayer:
Until BF Bad Company 2, I’d never done anything BUT play Battlefield online. In other words, that’s the bread and butter of the series, and Battlefield 3 doesn’t disappoint in the least. This is such a great evolution from what Battlefield 2 offered, and with the upcoming “Back to Karkand” map pack (4 of the best maps from BF2,) I couldn’t be happier. The squad system works as expected, and has been updated since Bad Company 2. Voice chat works great, and finally gives you the option of chatting with your team, only friends in the game, or with your squad only. The audio quality for chat is great, and in a game like this, chat is essential! The number of maps included is a nice number, and the variations between Conquest and Rush especially is well done. Honestly, this is what I’ve been waiting for, and unfortunately, the victims of how great the online play in Battlefield 3 are games like Resistance 3, Uncharted 3, Modern Warfare 3, Killzone 3, and well, you get the idea. I’m addicted to this game like no other, and even with some random bugs, this is one of the most solid Battlefield games at launch.

On top of this is the addition of some co-op missions. There are only like 6 or 7, but they vary quite a bit, and range from a clone of “horde mode” to snatch & grab and even to you and your buddy manning a chopper to cover a squad on the ground. The variety is good, and even if you’re playing under the idea that you can lose and learn, the missions will actually throw you a curve ball or two if you replay the missions. The chopper mission was definitely my favorite, and really, there’s something for everyone in there.

The one big issue people may encounter is partying-up. The best way to get a group together is by finding a server that’s near-to or completely empty, filling it with your crew, and letting it seed from then forward. Luckily, DICE have actually included a server browser, so you can easily communicate the server name to your cohorts.

Conclusion:
As you can probably tell, I love this game, not just because it’s a Battlefield, but because it’s awesome. I’m actually disappointed that so many other great titles have come out recently, because they’re pulling me away from BF3. If you want Call of Duty, you may want to go somewhere else. If you liked Warhawk, or are looking for a great FPS with a lot of scale and options, and an FPS that’s flexible enough for you to play any way that you’d like, Battlefield 3 will fulfill all of your needs.

Kudos DICE!

Grade:

Title: Assassin’s Creed: Revealtions
Format: Blu-ray
Release Date: November 15th 2011
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Price: $59.99
ESRB Rating: M

The Assassin’s Creed games are only four years old – if they feel older it’s because for the last two years they’ve been dropping in annually since the successful release of 2009′s Assassin’s Creed II. With Assassin’s Creed: Revelations Ubisoft is closing (one can only hope) the story arc of their most beloved enforcer – Ezio Auditore da Forenze. Is the new game a healthy addition to the Assassin’s Creed dynasty? Or does it push the series further toward becoming the next Dynasty Warriors?

Gameplay:
When Patrice Desilets left the Assassin’s Creed franchise – his baby – I was worried. Being a big fan of the original game and its sequel I didn’t hold out much hope that the new Ezio-heavy spin-offs of the series would be anything more than a way for Ubisoft to peel a few hundred more million off of fans of the franchise.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – though it did have some welcome additions like the ability to recruit your own assassins and a creative online component – seemed to confirm my initial worries. The game borrowed from other popular titles, (the Desmond portions of the game felt a bit too Uncharted) dumbed-up the combat, (what’s this follow-up one hit kill crap?) and forced players down narrow corridors brightly lit with waypoint positions.

Casual gaming was the trend of the period – and still might be – but I didn’t expect it to creep into the Assassin’s Creed series like it did.

Though Brotherhood was a huge success – as no doubt Assassin’s Creed: Revelations will be as well – it felt like we were getting away from the core of the first two games. Assassin’s Creed was built on an elegant concept. Players were forced to gather intel, hunt down targets, and then blend in and adapt to any situation they might stumble into. If the chance to kill a target presented itself, and the kill looked clean, then it was time to act, and act efficiently, brutally, and without an ounce of mercy. And once the deed was done and all hell broke loose? Then the decision came down to fight… or flight. Both being just as fun as the other.

Brotherhood sort of shrugged off those values and resolved itself to being a much more action/set-piece title. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations – depending on what stance you’re going to take as far as the direction of this series is concerned – has unfortunately followed in its precursor’s footsteps. They’ve added some new toys, prettied-up the aesthetics, and have introduced some brand new game mechanics (borrowed from much older games) and packaged it under the Assassin’s Creed brand just in time (again) for the holiday shopping season.

Not that this isn’t a great game.

Some of the things I didn’t like about AC:Brotherhood were fixed – even nixed – in AC: Revelations. Since the events of Brotherhood (SPOILER ALERT!!) left Desmond in a coma we don’t spend too much time monkeying around in his world this time around. Desmond’s been left in Animus limbo when Revelations begins. There are Desmond cut-scenes, (and we get a bit more insight into “Subject 16″) but they’re far less prevalent than in any other Assassin’s Creed game. Desmond’s main purpose in Revelations is to regain consciousness. To do that he needs to finish the final memories of Altair and Ezio… so that’s where we spend the lion’s share of our time in this game.

Revelations ditches horses and horseback riding/combat as well. Players will no longer feel like English cavalry stampeding through city streets and marketplaces, trampling over citizens and couriers as if they were rebellious Scotsmen. It was nice having a steed to gallop across the map when time was critical – but I didn’t miss horses at all during my initial playthrough of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. The landscape doesn’t pine for them, and anyway, the addition of the “hook-blade” makes traveling on foot just as fun as it may have been on hoof. In that respect Revelations rediscovers its roots. Half the fun of the original games was traversing the terrain the developers had created. Altair’s world – and later Ezio’s – was a city-sized jungle-gym. If Altair had had his progeny’s hook blade I’m thinking a lot of us fans probably would have never left Acre. We’ might still be there today, hooking at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

I should probably rephrase that…

The hook-blade makes climbing and zip-lining across rooftops a cinch. During and escape it can be used to hook and roll over opponents coming at you head-on – killing their momentum while increasing Ezio’s. In combat it works as a hay-hook. Ezio can drive the blade into the ribs of any combatant, lift him off the ground, and then body-slam him into unconscious nirvana at his feet. The move’s basically a new parry – but a satisfying one.

The first hour of AC:Revelations – the training hour – takes place in a much better location than the training level of Brotherhood, and features one of the most visually striking environments of the series. Ubisoft wasn’t kidding about returning to Altair’s old haunting grounds – the opening of Revelations exemplifies it. Fans that missed the fortress – and mountainside villa – of the assassin stronghold Masyaf might get a bit sentimental during the training – and Altair portions – of the campaign. We hauled ourselves up and down this mountain fifty times during the original title – Assassin’s Creed: Revelations asks us to make the trip a few times more. The path might feel a bit beaten at this point in the franchise, but Masyaf will still feel like home to most fans. It certainly did to this one.

The final map in Ezio’s journey – the “underworld” located in a massive cave system infested with Byzantine Templars – is one of most original, most provocative locations of the series. It may not have the scale of what we’re used to in these games – but it certainly has its own grandeur. I only wish I could have spent more time here, running missions along its cat-walks and precipices. As it stands 90% of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations takes place in Constantinople. The rest of the game is delegated to underground chambers, oily cisterns, island monasteries, and the caverns of the “underworld.”

Not that Constantinople isn’t enough map for any sandbox game – on the contrary, this city is expansive. Different boroughs  harbor different economies and classes and different building conditions. One area may have gardens and ornate mosques, another might be a docking port full of ships and sailors hauling cargo, another will be a ghetto full of bats, beggars, and fire-breathing gypsies. (you choose which one of these pests you might have the strongest aversion to) Minarets jut up from the landscape like Apollo rockets, covered markets take up entire city blocks, and alleyways are littered with hidden nooks and overhead foot-bridges.

Constantinople is a place to get lost in.

It’s a rat’s maze filled with soldiers, thieves, harlots, mercenaries, and hired killers of all allegiances. The city has two warring factions patrolling it’s streets – the royal guard and the Templars. If you get caught between the two parties it’s best to sit back and watch the battle – they like each other about as much as they like you – which isn’t much at all really.

The “rebuild” system is back from the last two games. Players can purchase banks, bookshops, blacksmiths, and clothing shops. The more you rebuild – the more money that rolls in every twenty minutes. It’s an easy system to understand – Donald Trump’s been running the same strategy since 1971.

The original Creed got us acquainted with the hidden blade. The second game gave players poison, hidden pistols, and smoke bombs to play around with. Brotherhood brought us extra assassins to heed our beck and call. Revelations gives us….?

Hand grenades.

Hand grenades, and a really scrubby tower-defense component. The grenade system is deep, and certainly most of the treasures you find in this campaign contain grenades parts and powders – Ubisoft isn’t being subtle about what they’d like to see you using to distract, deter, or maim and murder this time around. But grenades sort of remove us from the realm of what originally made this series something other than another Metal Gear clone. Altair – and later, Ezio – were murder artistes. The selling point of the series – at least for this fan – was in the execution. The ability to stay hidden in plain sight. The ability to inch toward a target till the kill moment was palpable. Grenades…? Don’t really fit here. They’re fun to use, and they make a ton of noise – but this isn’t that game. Or at least, it wasn’t that game back when Patrice Desilets was driving the bus.

As for the tower defense mechanic? It’s not broken. It’s not terrible. It’s just something else to do in a game that might already have too much in it to do. It certainly makes a terrific argument that Assassin’s Creed – as a franchise – is having an identity crisis.

Sorry to break your hearts fans, but there are precious few (and I do mean “few”) assassination missions during the entire ten hour run of this new game. Ubisoft even removed the ability to run your own assassination contracts from the map. You can build hundreds of hand grenades made out of shrapnel, sulfur, lamb’s blood, and caltrops – you can even command riflemen from rooftops to stop Templar invaders from besieging one of your dens – the one thing you can’t do in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is hunt down and assassinate a target for money. You might run across the occasional Templar noble to kill, but the only pay-off is a group of armed guards chasing you down for your actions.

If I can harp on one single element that has plagued this series since its conception…? Bugs. The bloody, gawdamned bugs. Angelo Ruggiero’s house wasn’t as buggy as this – even in 84′. (it’s a mob thing) I’ve seen enemy soldiers spawn (spawn’s being polite – these guys popped into existence like simple celled organisms) all around me after I killed one of their sentries. I’ve seen people – ordinary fishmongers and citizens of Constantinople – stuck in walls and floors. (funny unintentional side-effect to this bug – if you kill these would-be teleportation artists they deflate and scream through the air like punctured balloons) I’ve had guards suddenly attack me for no reason. And I’ve called in my assassins to take out a group of enemies, only to see them wandering around someplace else – sometimes even standing, board-straight, staring off into la-la land.

It’s been four years Ubisoft – can we at least start tackling the bug problem? Call Orkin: 1-866-949-6043. See if they can help point you guys in the right direction.

Visuals:
The Assassin’s Creed games – at least the console versions of Assassin’s Creed games – have always set a high mark for graphics. Ubisoft must have been working on the lighting engine during the last twelve months. (they certainly weren’t working on the bug problem) The streets of Constantinople are dusty. Sunlight filters in through cracks in walls and ceilings. Caverns look damp and dank. Lightning paints a brief, powerful picture on the landscape when it strikes. Ezio’s had a make-over since we last saw him. He’s old and bearded. His hair and his robes are gray – which gives him the aura of an old wolf. It’s a good look for the old Italian noble.

The latter “underworld” level is outstanding. The ambiance is something like the torchlit caverns and pantheons under Pankot Palace in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – minus the heart plucking parties.

Audio:
Looks like they’ve been working on the sound design during Summer vacation as well. The city sounds alive – just as it has since Altair’s first trials. What Ubisoft did do was beef up the brutality in the soundscape. When Ezio drops onto an unsuspecting sentry, when he hooks someone by the short-ribs and plants them into the ground, the accompanying sound is tooth-shattering. It sounds like God driving a spike though the Earth. Prepare to smile big would-be assassinators – there is an audible reward for your hard work this time around.

The voice-acting’s terrific. Star Trek fans will know John de Lancie’s voice the first time they hear it here. The sound design is one of the few places this Assassin’s Creed separates itself from its forebearers.

Online/Multiplayer:
I missed the opportunity to play this last Thursday when Ubisoft hosted an online game for media to play for review purposes. However, I will be playing this on the game’s release date: November 15th 2011 – and will return here to fill in what Ubisoft has added – and maybe even repaired – since Brotherhood last year.

Conclusion:
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is a great game – I just don’t know if it’s a great Assassin’s Creed game. Everything you like about Assassin’s Creed is here – combat, navigation, ultra-tangled-storyline, environment, graphics, sound – wrapped in a pretty little bow. The baffling lack of assassination missions make me believe that the series is heading toward an identity crisis – as it is over-saturation.

If Ubisoft Montreal is a pimp, (lets call him Monty) then Ezio’s been Monty’s top-bitch for the last two years running. But Ezio’s getting old now. There are gaps in his fishnets, lines on his face, his lipstick’s gone sour – even his crabs are starting to get crabs. It’s hard for us tricks (squares call them “Johns”) to drive up the track every year around this time and see Ezio standing there – alone, shivering, strung-out and tired, sucking the protein out of cigarette butts for breakfast…. Ezio needs his retirement Monty. Give the bitch a break. Sure he’s made you mo’ money than any ho’ before him. But it’s time to turn someone else out. So take a few years off and rethink this relationship before it burns itself out.

Remember what Eidos (call him “Eddy) did to Lara Croft? Poor girl could barely walk or brush her teeth after Eddy got through with her…

Grade:

Title: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
Format: Blu-ray
Release Date: November 8, 2011
Publisher: Activision
Developers: Infinity Ward / Sledgehammer / Raven
Price: $59.99
ESRB Rating: M

It’s the Michael Bay movie of the gaming world. The Call of Duty franchise offers big dumb fun, with explosions at a rate of 5 per second. So, with the trailers we’ve seen suggesting this is about World War III, we could pretty much expect much more of the same.

Arguably, any CoD game doesn’t need reviewing. It doesn’t need any previews, trailers, advertisements, anything. If Activision just set up a webpage saying “New CoD – 8th November”, it would still sell like nothing else out there. Just as importantly though, people would already know exactly what they’re getting – even with no specific info about the game. And that’s the big challenge for Infinity Ward; can they make a game that’s instantly accessible, but has a few tricks up its sleeve to appease the doubters? Read on to find out.

I’ll keep this review spoiler-free, although even after you play it you probably won’t know what the story is (more on that later).

Gameplay:
On the whole, you’ll find MW3 extremely familiar and very easy to pick-up and play. There’s no tutorial like in the previous titles, but I suppose they just presume every man and their dog knows how to play Call of Duty by now. To be fair, in the opening exchanges of the first mission, I found it very easy to get back into the flow – even after not playing CoD for the best part of a year.

On to the campaign and as referenced to before, this really is a game that looks like it was directed by Bay himself. It’s a myriad of events that take place in amazing locations and the story has quite blatantly taken the backseat; a complete afterthought that exists to very loosely tie these situations together. MW3 is by no means a realistic recreation of war, rather it’s a spectacular Hollywood take on it.

The storyline is simply an excuse to go from country to country, a ridiculously jumpy narrative structure. “Makarov is in famous city A”. Cue lots of explosions. “Now Makarov is in famous city B”. Cue lots of explosions. Sometimes you won’t even know what’s going on, it just seems like a convoluted mess being stitched together with the highly advanced compositional device of gunfire.

That at least was my view half way through. Towards the final stages it does pick up – and ties together all three MW titles. There’s an unexpected plot twist which makes you sit up and take note, as well as tension ramping up towards the finale in classic CoD fashion. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an Arkham City-rivaling storyline, it was just good to see a little more cohesion and meaning to the narrative.

The variety in mission types is decent, but they’re all things you’ve done in the past games – sniper missions, controlling an AC130, carrying fellow soldiers to safety. Just like the set pieces and most other facets of the campaign, it’s all very expected.

And this is where the real predicament of judging the campaign (and the game as a whole) comes in. MW3 is the best bits of the previous two games rolled into one 100mph thrill ride. It’s short (took me between 4:30-5:00 hours on regular) but it’s non-stop shooting and running and dramatic jumping. Possibly the most over-the-top war FPS to date, the campaign will completely come down to personal preference.

In my opinion, it serves its purpose well – a fun few hours of very solid gameplay to tie up the floundering storyline. No emotion, nothing thought-provoking, just gunplay and set-pieces aplenty. Overall, I’d say it’s ahead of MW2 but way behind the original masterpiece. The feeling you got from the sniper mission in Chernobyl was truly special. In this one there are many brief ‘wow’ moments but nothing game-changing or genre-defining that you’ll look back on in years to come.

If you want to wander through the mountains of Afghanistan taking down terrorists in a feasible experience, skip this and stick to Medal of Honor. If you want a Hollywood game, or, like me, have room for both in your library, give MW3 a whirl too.

Away from the story and on to more general mechanics of the game; the controls are as tight as ever. As mentioned previously, it’s so easy to pick up and play, especially as you can choose from a variety of layouts. Personally, I prefer shooting on R2 (I have triggers attached to controller) with crouching on the right stick and CoD is one of the only games that allows this.

A new feature of the weapons I found useful on MW3 is dual scopes. On some weapons you can now click left on the d-pad to select a more suitable sight. For example, if you have a sniper rifle and suddenly come across some close-quarters combat, you can push the red-dot sight into position and take enemies down without any hassle. A neat little addition.

These alterations are few and far between though; you could make an argument that they’d already mastered the fundamentals or equally you could say the team are resting on their laurels. Either way, if you look at it in isolation, it’s a fantastic game. If you look at the genre as a whole, you’d say that MW has reached its point of maturation and should bow out now while it’s on top, before they embarrass themselves (I’m looking at you Tony Hawk & Guitar Hero).

Visuals:
Call of Duty is always a bit of a strange one when it comes to the graphical side of things; you’d neither say it’s bad, nor show it off to people as visually stunning. The game still seems to be running off the same engine as MW and although you can see slight improvements, the changes are nothing to write home about. For the next CoD game, I think we could likely see a new engine as this one is showing its age now.

MW3, like its predecessors, runs silky smooth; it may not be the best looking war game, but it flows like no other at a velvety 60fps. The character models of your fellow soldiers look quite good, while enemies are o.k. Some textures still look like they’re made of cardboard, but on the whole there’s nothing overtly noticeable that would put you off.

One thing that did catch my eye was the activity in the distance. Some of it is remarkable when you can see different battles going on, as well as air support laying down missiles, people trying to shoot down choppers and much more. It gives the world an atmosphere and you do feel like you’re in the middle of World War III as you’re completely encircled by the whole thing.

Audio:
Like with most games, I played MW3 with headphones on and overall, it’s pretty sweet. Obviously whether your audio setup is headphones, your TV or a surround sound system, you’ll have a drastically different experience, so take it with a pinch of salt.

Although sometimes it can sound like a barrage of abuse to the ears with the constant explosions, on the whole there are some fantastic effects. You can definitely hear an improvement over the past games in general gunfire; especially when bullets just miss you – the sound of that round zooming past your face is great.

Because of the aforementioned summer blockbuster-esque nature of the game, the gunfire and blasts become the ambient noise of the game, so while I suppose they’re pretty decent sound effects, they do grate on you. The air support is pretty cool; for example, the sound of a harrier jump jet cutting through the air is quite something.

The word to most accurately describe the voice acting would be ‘meh’. It’s by no means terrible, but by the same token nothing special. Mostly the same voice actors as in previous games (including the exact same cockney accent for now a third character), it’s your usual array of “Oscar Mike”, “The LZ is hot!”, “Tango down” and “Noooooo!”.

The music, again, is bog standard. It usually fits in well with the environment and at the climax of a successful mission there’ll be that really American, victorious music; cheesy to say the least. Apart from that, not much more I can say – it did the job. I don’t really have any major complaints, but at the same time I’m no audiophile so maybe there’s subtle nuances that my untrained ears didn’t pick up on. For the average Joe, it’s fine.

Online/Multiplayer:
Just as a bit of background, I’m a huge fan of the Infinity Ward multiplayer. MW re-injected new life into the genre with the original and I spent an inordinate amount of time on MW2. So much so, that the almost addicted-levels of game time led to me owning the game on both platforms, just so I could play with friends on each console. Black Ops just didn’t do it for me. The maps felt a bit soulless, while I hated the new monetary system – because you could buy your preferred gun straight away, it made leveling up completely pointless.

The primary reason I vehemently loathed it though, was that it became almost unplayable. The lag was absolutely unbelievable and (in my experience at least) you were chucked out of every other game. It just used to freeze half way through a game, citing problems with host migration or server connection, and threw you back into the menu. This was not the multiplayer experience I fell in love with.

MW3 is ultra solid – as I’d expected. So far, I’ve suffered no lag whatsoever, no games ending early, just a smooth run of senselessly murdering random people with precise bullets to the face. And that’s exactly the way it should be.

The online mode (like the campaign and spec ops) doesn’t do anything new or risk-taking – what it does do is polish the best online play on console. The progression system of MW has always been fantastic and the third iteration is no exception.

Relating back to Treyarch’s perplexingly poor attempt at keeping you hooked by earning CoD coins, with Infinity Ward’s take on the multiplayer, you earn different weapons and perks after hitting each level, or performing specific feats. Obviously, the greater weapons are further down the unlock line so it gives the online a real sense of longevity.

They’ve added a great new mode called Kill Confirmed – a twist on the traditional team deathmatch. Now, when somebody is killed, they’re dogtags are dropped and you have to go and pick up the tags to get a point. There’s also a tweak when it comes to streaks – now MW is more akin to Battlefield and Medal of Honor. You have support streaks that carry over across deaths, as well as streaks that temporarily give you extra perks. Welcome improvements to catch up with the competition.

The actual gameplay is still as frantic and twitchy as ever, so if you really can’t stand the fast pace of CoD it won’t be for you. However, there is a middle ground and it’s what I almost exclusively play when it comes to MW titles – Hardcore.

It’s such an improved experience over the standard lobbies, filled with pre-teens who think they’re some sort of big shot and where you get shot as soon as you respawn. In Hardcore, the pace is slower and more deliberate, you have to wait before respawning, no killcams, just a couple of bullets kill an opponent rather than unloading a whole round and many more brilliant adjustments. The tension is higher, especially in Hardcore S&D – listening out for footsteps when you’re the last man standing and you have to disarm a bomb to win the game is an amazing rush.

Now for the third and final section of MW3. Spec Ops has now been split into two modes: Mission mode and Survival mode. Mission mode is largely unchanged from MW2 – you and a partner take on an objective and try to earn as many stars as possible. For each mission, you earn 1 star for regular difficulty, 2 for hardened and 3 for veteran.

It’s a worthwhile inclusion but not a game-seller. I enjoyed it in the previous version and this one likewise but it’s basically just the single player maps cut down and with different enemy positions and quantity.

The other Spec Ops mode – Survival – is Infinity Ward’s take on what now seems like a mandatory inclusion for any game; a horde mode. You take on waves of enemies and try to survive as long as possible. Simple as that. This particular version seems very tacked-on and only takes place in recycled multiplayer maps – the mode isn’t my cup of tea anyway, added to the fact it’s not had much thought put into it makes it worse. If you enjoy these modes, you may well like it; I just generally find them tedious.

Conclusion:
Like many a gamer nowadays, I’m pretty sick of Activision and the fashion in which gaming has almost become enveloped by the CoD franchise. Trust me, I’d love to sit here and say that the billionaire execs over there have rode this particular cash cow to death & that the pinnacle is long gone and never coming back.

After you’ve played MW3 though, that thought wouldn’t enter your mind. While Treyarch continue to fall short, Infinity Ward have done it yet again; creating a compelling (but ridiculous) single-player adventure and an addictive online experience, that make an unrivaled value for money.

I sincerely hope that they end the MW series here, because this behemoth of an FPS is a fitting finale. It’s been an amazing trilogy of titles that (especially the first two) revolutionised the genre. No matter how much we’ve come to hate the CoD name, there’s no doubt that IW are still top dog in the FPS world.

It’s more of the same, yes. But the first two were so damn good, that can only be a compliment.

Grade:

Title: Monopoly Streets
Format: Blu-ray / PlayStation Network Download
Release Date: October 26, 2010 (Retail) / November 8, 2011 (PSN)
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: EA Salt Lake
Price: $29.99
ESRB Rating: E

Gameplay:
Now past it’s 75th year in existence, I probably shouldn’t have to explain Monopoly to anyone, but just in case… Monopoly is a game of property acquisition. The original board game, with names based on Atlantic City streets, was first sold by Parker Brothers in a Philadelphia department store during the 1934 holiday season. It went on to become the best selling board game of all time with more than 200 million sold and over 2000 variations of the game in existence.

You move your token around the board with a roll of the dice, buy and sell properties, build houses and hotels and collect rent. The objective of the game is to effectively bankrupt the other players. Monopoly Streets was promoted in the trailers and marketing materials as a new Monopoly experience “presented as a street level tour of Mr. Monopoly’s fully animated world”. The unfortunate reality is that among the 11 boards available to you, only three are the fully animated 3D spaces that we’re promised and one of those has to be purchased from the PlayStation Network Store for $6.99. As for the others, only two of the eleven boards are available from the start of the game, Monopoly City (a 3D board) and the Classic Board. To unlock the rest, you have to play the game and earn Monopoly Money based on your winnings which can then be used to purchase additional boards and tokens.

Sadly, not all tokens are available from the in game store using Monopoly Money, for iconic tokens such as the cannon and rocking horse along with the newer horse and rider, you’ll need to shell out .99 each. Along with the aforementioned 3D board, Stratosphere City for $6.99, the 2D Championship Board is also available for purchase at $2.49. A lesson in capitalism that fits right in with the sensibilities of the game, but a bit crass on the part of EA and a definite disappointment.

Aside from all that, how does the game play? It plays just like real Monopoly, only better. Not only do you not have to keep track of money and properties or clean up after the game is over, all your stats are fully tracked throughout the game. In the menus, you’ll have access to a Profile screen which tracks everything from your total earnings, games completed, properties owned, houses and hotels built, times passed Go, doubles thrown and more. You can see the record for a single game and a running total across all rounds played. It’s a pretty cool addition and a way to see what you’ve done across all the rounds you’ve played.

When you start a game, you can choose one of the six predefined rule sets or create and save a custom set with a name of your choosing. While you’re given an impressive array of options to change, not everything can be customized the way you want. For example, one of my house rules was always that any taxes collected would be placed in a pile and given to the next player to land on Free Parking. The only option is to give a flat monetary value for landing on Free Parking, not a huge deal, but a little disappointing.

Each game requires four players but the trick to getting around this is to set one or two of them to human players and then start without them. The other slot or slots will be filled by AI players which can be set to Easy, Medium or Hard. None of them are easily duped into bad deals and the Hard players are especially ruthless so they definitely present a good challenge.

You choose a token and everyone gets to roll the dice to see who goes first. Each token has character and a sound associated with it and fortunately, those sounds can be turned off because they get very repetitive. At the start of each turn you can preview the board from an overhead perspective which gives you the ability to see what’s available and who owns which properties. When you’ve finished moving as a part of your turn, a number of options become available, you can hand over the dice to the next player, attempt a trade, build on or mortgage your properties, or declare bankruptcy. It’s all pretty standard Monopoly gameplay but the charm of the game lies in the animation.

The game will auto save after each turn so if you quit, you can resume a game right where you left off. Unfortunately, I had a number of problems with auto save glitches. At times during the game, the auto save would just stop working and the spinning disc save icon would never go away. At this point (if you notice it), your best option is to quit the game entirely and load the last save point, otherwise none of the stats get tracked, you don’t earn the in-game Monopoly Money and the game doesn’t count towards anything.

Visuals:
The iconic Mr. Monopoly (nêe Rich Uncle Pennybags) is a part of the game which is a nice touch. He’ll appear at the start, the end and many times in between. The 3D boards are really the big draw here and they look fantastic. You’re brought down onto a standard Monopoly Board that grows and changes around you, putting you right onto city streets that circle the properties. Neat graphical touches like dead grass and bushes or boarded up train stations will appear when those properties are mortgaged. Houses and hotels are all designed to fit each individual board theme and they even look better on the more expensive properties. The nice thing is that even in 2D boards, you’re brought down to them and they also include full character animation moving around board. This can also be turned off in all modes to speed things up.

When viewing the overview of the board before your turn, you’ll see small cards placed along the edges with a token helping to show you who owns what. The interface is good as well, showing each player’s money, total worth and small icons showing what color properties they own. It gives you a good quick overview as you take your turn and decide what to do next in terms of trades and such.

Whether you’re playing the fancy 3D boards or the more standard 2D boards you’ll still feel like you’re down on the board itself, a part of the world in a Toy Story kind of way. It’s a really fun way to play Monopoly and a much more refined experience than the Star Wars Monopoly game I owned on the PC in the 90′s which did an early version of the same thing.

Audio:
The music and sound effects are all good, but they get very repetitive. Hearing each character’s signature sound before they roll the dice can get annoying after one or two laps around the board. Fortunately, you can turn these off but the most glaring omission here would be in the lack of custom soundtracks. There’s just not enough variety in the included music or sound effects and you’ll quickly be playing in silence.

Online/Multiplayer:
Monopoly Streets offers you the ability to play up to four players locally or online. The host of the game has access to all the different rule sets and can create exactly the type of game they want. The host also has the ability to limit the number of players or save slots for friend invites. There’s actually a pretty robust set of features here with ranked and unranked matches along with leaderboards.

Overall the online matches I played went pretty well but I never heard another voice. Whether that’s from a lack of headsets on the PSN in general or a shortcoming of the game, I can’t say for sure, but being able to talk to people during a match would make a big difference during the game.

Besides that, the only real negative I found with the online experience was that when other players are involved in a deal and they’re working out a trade, you can’t see what’s going on. You’re left to sit idle as the other players take as much time as they need and you have no idea how long it’ll be. Otherwise, it was a pretty smooth experience.

Conclusion:
For a fan of Monopoly, this can be a great game. It’s a fun twist to be down on the board itself and see the world around you as if it were a real place. The unfortunately limited number of fully 3D boards and the need to purchase one of the three available just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. No other boards were ever added for download and they’ve never gone on sale. That being said, there’s still a fun game here with nine other boards to play on and an online component that can hook you up with friends around the world that also have the game.

Grade:

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Title:Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure
Format: Blu-ray
Release Date: October 16, 2011
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Toys For Bob
Price: $69.99
ESRB Rating:E

The task of reviewing Skylanders is a challenging one.  On one hand, my experience as a long-time gamer tells me that this is another form of Pokemon, except for the fact that I have to literally purchase my monsters instead of capturing them within a one-time purchased game.  That’s my logical side talking.  But therein lies the problem, right there.   We’re gamers.  We buy Madden sequels with nary a graphical change, and spend 60 bucks on something that cheaper DLC could have easily added to our existing copy.  We pay for maps that are already included in discs.  We do pretty stupid things.  And it’s with that level of voluntary ignorance that I looked upon Skylanders

Because the reality is that you can look at the game in two different ways.  But first, let me explain what Skylanders is for those of you who may have heard of it, but perhaps not delved deep into its details.  Skylanders tells the tale of a land (or collection of floating lands) in turmoil.  An evil-short wizard is threatening the the world of these innocent furry creatures and it’s up to the Skylanders to save the day.  The Skylanders are the Jedi of this world: legendary creatures who once protected the land from evil, and return to do so once again.

But, amidst an epic battle a spell is cast on these creatures turning them into small statues (or toys) and cast away to another world (Earth).  This is where you come in.  You find these toys and are able to summon the power of each warrior to help the furry warriors out in their moment of turmoil.  How’s that for meta-gaming?  Unlike the fictional human in the opening cinematic, you do not find these characters in your room, or in your back yard.  Instead, you buy them at your local game store.  Individual characters will set you back $7.99, with a three pack running you about twenty bucks.  So why would you choose to only buy one?   Well, for starters, the packs are element-based.  You see, these characters are divided into different elemental classes (you know, Earth, Wind, Fire), so if you want three fire characters, you could go and spend 20 bucks on them, but then you neglect the tech characters.  There are even Adventure packs that come with small location-based models (pirate ship for example) and open up new areas in the game.

On one hand, you can complete the entire game with the characters available.  You can also buy one character for each element and unlock everything (since the gates are element-based).  You get cool-looking figures to display, and show off to your buddies.   But this is where things get interesting.  This is also where my “gamer” side takes over and kicks my ass with the “Gee, that’s an awesome” element to this game.

You see, these little figures that you buy not only serve as a physical representation of your character.  When placed upon the cylindrical portal (that comes packaged with the game), your character is immediately teleported into the action.  You can switch characters on the fly, and you can even play co-op with a friend by having his/her character placed on the portal next to yours.  But it gets better.  So, let’s say that you leveled your tech dragon and your friend leveled her stealth elf.  He’s ready to head home, because it’s late and he has to work the next day.  So where do the levels and items, that he acquired during your session, go?  Why, they go with his little action figure.  Skylanders stores all of your character info inside of the actual figurine.  And these figurines are compatible with all version of the game.  Yes, you can level your character on PS3 and join your buddy on his 360 and continue your progress.  That save system is pretty amazing.  Of course, if you have similar characters, you might want to get the ol’ sharpie and mark your territory, because it would suck to level your character to 10 and accidentally bring home your buddy’s level 5 dragon.

Each character has his own attack style.  For instance I like playing as my elf ranger, and my fiance loves playing as the stealth dark elf.  I have to admit, her character is pretty incredible, as she slices and dices through the enemy ranks.

Now that I have explained how Skylanders works, I have to bring it back to reality again.  You probably would not play this game if this gimmick weren’t a part of the fun.  It’s a decent game, and it plays like Diablo-light.  It’s a hack-n-slasher with some light role-playing elements.  Your characters do level, and their abilities do improve, but we’re not talking multi-tiered skill trees here.  Your variety comes from the different characters you own, as they all have different abilities and attack styles.

I wanted to provide a fair judgement of this game.  While I enjoyed playing it co-op, I don’t believe that I am the target audience for this game.  So I brought my son into the mix.  I took him to Gamestop and let him choose a figure.  I didn’t tell him what it was for.  I simply told him to pick the one he liked best.  He chose a water dragon and his eyes lit up when he put two and two together and saw his figure come to life.  Naturally he began asking when we could buy more (Damn you Activision), but there is no denying that he was really enjoying this cool little gimmick.

Let’s take a look at the individual elements of the game.

Gameplay:
Again, Skylanders is Diablo for kids.  You fight through ranks and ranks of enemies and solve some basic puzzles.  Don’t expect full character customization, though you do see your hats appear upon your on-screen character.  Fighting is pretty decent and your enjoyment of it depends on which character you’re using.  I found my elf’s fire arrows to be a quite entertaining method of disposing of creatures of opposing political views, and my son ended up dumping his water dragon for a trigger-happy duel-wielding demon (that comes with the game).

You traverse floating environments defeating enemies, and you are told when a certain enemy is weak against a different element, prompting you to switch your figurine for a better-suited one.  There are a few mini games in the mix, but nothing that will make you long for them after you complete them.

Visuals:
This is a Wii game that was ported to the PlayStation 3.  The visuals aren’t going to win any awards, and there are PS2 games that look better.  But the style is sturdy and maintained through the entire game, The Skylander models are done well, as is their animation (which is a plus, since you’ll be fighting with them for hours).  While the Skylanders themselves are geared towards kids, don’t expect them to all be happy-faced fuzzballs.  Some of these characters look wickedly-cool (and yes, I used that term to describe them).

Audio:
I have to say that the music for the game is pretty amazing.  Also, while Skylanders is a light-hearted affair, it’s actually reads well, with some decent voice acting and great sound effects, during the heavy battles.  But again, the musical score really wins out here.

Online/Multiplayer:
Without multiplayer Skylanders would be a pretty drab experience.  It’s the fact that two players can place their characters on the portal and work together to defeat the bad guys.  There is also an arena mode that supports multiplayer.  But the meat of the game is in the campaign, and that’s where playing with a buddy really shines.  Dropping in and out is as easy as placing or removing your figurine from the portal, so there’s never an issue with starting a campaign solo and having someone join you.

Conclusion:
It’s a tough call, like I said before.  If someone handed me the game disc without the gimmick, and all of the characters were unlocked inside, I might play it for a few hours, and then move onto a stronger co-op title, like All4One.  But this isn’t really about me.  If I was still in school and all my kids were bringing their characters to class, placing them on their desk, and boasting about how they leveled their stealth elf to 10…. If discussion around the school yard was “hey, you should bring your water dragon to my house this weekend and we can tackle a dungeon together”… then I would have to admit that the entire package is a pretty amazing affair.   Hell, you might do this with your buddies in the office.  There a better games coming out this Fall.  But if you enjoy collecting, and the nifty little gimmick of saving your characters’ status to your figurine, then you will probably eat this thing up.

Grade:

Title: The Cursed Crusade
Format: Blu-ray
Release Date: October 11, 2011
Publisher: Atlus
Developer: Kylotonn
Price: $39.99
ESRB: M

I don’t know if the Atlus name signifies quality, or a rich tradition of publishing a good product. For me the company has been a standard for the unusual, the atypical, the unconventional – the game experience a bit off the beaten path. With the release of Catherine this year, and the much lauded release of Demon’s Souls back in 2009, Atlus stock has been looking fairly strong in the last few years. With this October’s release of The Cursed Crusade has Atlus managed to drive another ball out of the park? Or has the brand finally taken a thunderous knee to the groin?

Gameplay:
We gamers can get our hopes up. A game in development might catch our eye in a magazine, at an online media outlet, in a press event at one of these super-conventions like PAX, E3, or GDC… and we can let our guard down and find ourselves daydreaming about what this new game could be when it’s finally released – and upon daydreaming can find our hopes for the upcoming title flying higher and ever higher…

I allowed this to happen to me with Kylotonn’s The Cursed Crusade.

Am I embarrassed now that the final product sits – taking up precious oxygen space – on my entertainment cabinet? A little bit. If the game had been handed to me for free I’d be less embarrassed – by whatever the dollar-to-humiliation ratio demands of me. Now that I’ve played through the game and beaten it, I like to think of The Cursed Crusade as a symbol – as a sign that I can still believe in the intrinsic value of something without any evidence accommodating, or contrary to it. Though the warnings were all there – the 57 different release dates it bore, a twenty dollar drop in price a month prior to shelf date – I kept hope alive for this new Atlus game. This doesn’t make me Martin Luther King Jr, it just makes me less jaded then your typical online game writer.

Although… now that I think about it seriously, if I walk away from something as deflating and spirit-crushing as The Cursed Crusade without being slightly more jaded then I’ve become as blind and as disoriented as the folks responsible for the game. This is a game unworthy of hope. A game unworthy of play. A game unworthy of forty dollars. A game unworthy of the words we must spend reviewing all the reasons why it is unworthy.

The Cursed Crusade is as its name states. It is a cursed campaign of trial, error, and yet more error – signifying nothing. I walk home from the Holy Land neither a king, nor a sultan, nor carrying purses pregnant with riches and gemstones… instead, I walk home a disheartened son of a bitch who just spent the last forty dollars of his already stretched resources on what equates to magic beans.

The problem with The Cursed Crusade is that it has grand aspirations aimed at all of the least desirable components of an action game. Kylotonn plugged so much energy and inspiration into all the wrong places of this title. It is – in its pedestrian heart – a beat-em-up arcade game. Yet The Cursed Crusade’s story seems to have taken the full onslaught of every weapon Kylotonn had in its arsenal when developing this title. The preamble to this review – and I wrote it so I can admit it – is completely overwritten. It’s self indulgent, unrepressed, and at least ten or eleven sentences too long.

Believe me, the storyline in The Cursed Crusade is much more offensive than this rambling review of it.

This is a buddy game – where two guys fight and kill hundreds of other guys. This isn’t the light bulb. It’s not sliced bread. To try and treat a beat-em-up campaign as an epic tome to sin, redemption, and the glory of Christ Almighty is a waste of resources. For any one action sequence in this game there are at least three cut-scenes. The two characters – Denz and Esteban – share quips, tell tales of fortune and folly, and yammer on about bullshit anyone outside the guy who wrote this crud could ever hope to care about.

There was one four minute interlude on the personal histories of French crusaders (that had literally nothing to do with my characters) that the game neither warranted nor even seemed to respect. If I wanted to pay forty dollars for a history lesson I would have applied to a local Community College. What I wanted was to fight and kill digital opponents with precision and skill. I got the history lesson instead.

The combat system has its own ambitions. It’s a deep system, featuring multiple weapon combinations. Players can purchase add-ons for every weapon, shield, or combination of the two. If you’re carrying an axe and have a triangle-triangle combo (triangle in this game is designated for vertical attacks – square for horizontal) you can purchase more triangles and square button presses to build the aggregate into a much longer assault. Sometimes these combos can reach seven or eight button squashes in length. The problems this type of system creates are unwieldy and enormous. Since you can literally use any weapon (swords, maces, axes, spears, shields) you come across in the campaign – but cannot purchase any of them in between chapters(?!) – why buy any extra moves for a weapon you don’t even know if you’re going to have in the next chapter of the game? Why even try to remember an eight-button-combination for any of the countless armaments the game throws at you – especially when there isn’t much difference between any tool you use in a fight?

There’s a basic system to fighting anything and anyone in this game. Wait for them to glow bright white – this signifies a proposed attack on their part – parry the shot with R2, and then beat the opponent mercilessly until the dramatic “finishing move” animation (which might not always connect with your victim – but will still kill them no matter where they stand in the assault) kicks in. I’d be willing to wager that you could balance a Russet Burbank potato on the four buttons of your Dualshock controller, grab a potato masher, and then mash your way to a convincing victory in The Cursed Crusade.

In fact… I think you should run the campaign that way. At the very least there could be a nutritional benefit for completing this game. You could slide the crushed potato off your controller into a pot and whisk it with butter, salt, and warm milk as the final credits of the game careened up your television screen.

Kylotonn may have looked at what Ubisoft did with the combat in the Assassin’s Creed games, and what Rocksteady pulled-off in their amazing Batman titles – and probably felt that they had something to add to the sparring. But they don’t. What they have is clumsy and sloppy – and far too over-complicated to waste your time on learning properly. Assassin’s Creed and the Arkham games have a flow and an energy – they may seem simplistic at first glance, but what they give the player is the option to execute anything they can think of immediately, and then put that thought into action.

The Cursed Crusade is all about Tekken-esque ten button combinations and animated finishing moves that you’ll ultimately feel ambivalent toward. The game wants you to use objects (these will glow bright white as well) on the battleground during your melee, and your co-op partner can grab an opponent by the arms and hold them for you to finish off, and the game will toss in the occasional “crossed swords” sequence (or chainsaw dueling as they call it around Cliff Bleszinski’s bedstead) to try and liven up the party… but I couldn’t get the object-combat to work half the time, couldn’t care less if my partner had to hold an opponent down – they’re just as easy to defeat unrestrained – and grew quickly tired of pistoning the triangle button in a weapons-locked situation.

The more people I killed quickly, the closer I grew to another dreadful cut-scene. There are no rewards in The Cursed Crusade.

As an added facet to the game Kylotonn added “cursed” mode. During any combat situation hit L1 and you’re no longer the Templar knight you thought you were – you’re Satan’s boy-toy. You sprout horns, and have the demonic abilities to shoot fireballs, heal your partner, and detect what damaged walls hide passages. I wouldn’t hand over my soul to eternal damnation and unlimited torture for the ability to detect hidden passages – why these two guys did is beyond me. Lucifer’s pagan gift of passage detection illustrates everything terribly wrong with The Cursed Crusade.

It aggrandizes the menial.

As far as level design is concerned…? Envision Lindsay Lohan’s cervical canal, but with medieval battlements guarding the labial bloom and torches illuminating the passage. Your path is bumpy and linear – stretched out in spots and terribly dry.

Visuals:
The graphics look nice in photographs. When moving they’re less appealing. I dug the “Templar” vibe of the game – it’s one of the reasons I let hope consume me about this title. Kylotonn should have taken notes from Ubisoft and lifted most of their art direction from Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. As it stands this is a bland, dark game – and the backgrounds look like pickled asshole.

Audio:
The audio is one of the few less-cursed components of The Cursed Crusade. The voice acting is miserable, (“Denz… what are you doing in my dream…?”) but the sounds of swords ringing, guts being shoveled out, and hearts being skewered has never sounded better.

Online/Multiplayer:
If you can hustle anyone online into joining you co-op on this journey into the arrhythmic heart of inadequacy you have the gift of salesmanship friend… quit playing stupid video games and go make yourself a million dollars. If you choose to go down this road with a partner…? Then expect to thrill each other with the symbiotic pleasures of pushing wagons out of the way together, and lifting each other up onto platforms far too high for a single man to scale by himself.

This is the microbiological entry point for what passes as a co-op experience in 2011.

Conclusion:
From October 18th (Batman Arkham City’s release date) till somewhere around Thanksgiving this isn’t just another jam-packed video game release season. This is Pamplona Spain. And these games being released (Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3, Uncharted 3, Skyrim) aren’t just video games – these are bulls. To release a game with the obvious mental and physical handicaps of The Cursed Crusade into the crazed rumble of these bulls isn’t just stupid – it’s cruel.

Normally, if the game had anything at all worth celebrating, I’d feel the need to risk neck and reputation by throwing it a life preserver. But in the case of The Cursed Crusade I say let it get trampled. Let it get gored and plowed under hoof and horn. Drop a large, guacamole-tinged pile of fresh bullshit on it as well boys… bury it in the only substance worthy of its substance.

Title: X-Men: Destiny
Format: Blu-ray
Release Date: September 27, 2011
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Silicon Knights
Price: $59.99
ESRB Rating: T

Gameplay:
X-Men: Destiny is set after the death of Professor Xavier at the hands of Bastion. A statue is being dedicated in San Francisco in his memory as a way to bring humans and mutants together. You start by choosing one of three characters attending the rally. The big, dumb football star who isn’t interested in the rally at all, the rich kid, whose (now deceased) father brought him up to be part of the anti-mutant Purifiers and the cute Japanese girl, whose mutant parents smuggled her out of Japan when a wave of anti-mutant sentiment boiled over. You’d hope that with the wildly different backgrounds, the story could go off in a number of different directions, but that just isn’t the case. Aside from some minor references, to their stories, there’s very little impact on the overall story binding this game together and that’s the first of many missed opportunities in this game.

Everything falls apart as the statue is brought down (apparently by Magneto) and a massive earthquake hits and in the middle of the crisis, your mutant powers manifest. This is where you make your first, and most important, choice. You need to decide the type of mutant powers you want which will influence gameplay heavily. Your choices consist of Density Control, Shadow Matter and Energy Projection. Density Control allows you to play the game like a brawler (think Juggernaut). Shadow Matter allows you to summon dark energy forces for creating weapons and dodging abilities. Energy Projection puts the emphasis on ranged attacks, allowing you to shoot electrical energy at enemies from a distance. Each choice gives you a unique skill tree (albeit a small one) to build up your powers throughout the game.

The gameplay leans towards a standard action beat ‘em up. You’ll enter an area and get confined to that space until you kill a set number of enemies. The combat itself can be fun depending on the mutant powers you pick which is why it’s important to go with the style you’re most comfortable with.. Along the way, you gain XP which can be used to upgrade your powers. At predetermined points in the game, the action will crawl to a stand still and you’ll be given a choice between two different powers along the skill tree. These choices tend to be pretty good in letting you keep in line with your own play style. You’ll also pick up X-Genes either hidden around the environment or by completing the optional challenge rooms throughout the game. Each X-Gene unlocks a random character suit or trait. By equipping three traits and the suit of one character you’ll unlock X-Mode. This gives you access to a few of that character’s abilities. This is really designed for multiple play-throughs since the unlocks are random but favor whichever faction you’re leaning towards at the time. You’ll be lucky to unlock two or three of the dozen or so character sets available in one full game.

The story itself was written by Marvel veteran Mike Carey, and it isn’t too bad but it just feels a bit forced. You’ll meet up with all the major characters from the X-Men universe along the way and you’ll be given a number of choices. This brings us to the next missed opportunity in the game, the choices you make have very little effect on the overall story or your character in general. The choices you have are usually in helping the Brotherhood or the X-Men in completing a specific mission. Your loyalty meter will swing ever so slightly to one side or the other but you see no real effect of these choices. In a game like inFAMOUS, your choices towards good and evil gave you access to different powers and made NPC’s react much differently towards you. The sad reality of X-Men: Destiny is that after the earthquake, the city seems to have been emptied out of everyone except the Purifiers, who you fight no matter what side you’re on, and a private security force which you have very little interaction with outside of cutscenes. It’s a real shame, because with a little more effort, Silicon Knights could have given the player a very different experience depending on which side they decided to align themselves with.

You’ll also run into problems that just shouldn’t exist in a name brand property this far into the current console generation. Invisible walls abound, not just around the edges of the environments, but at times, right in the middle of them. See that open door and the entire room in the building beyond? Well you can’t walk through it. Same goes for that alleyway, or that apparent other half of the street down the side of that building. It’s doubly frustrating for someone like me who likes to explore the environments.

There are also inconsistencies all over the place when it comes to invisible walls around ledges. Sometimes you can’t walk too close to the edge of a building or drop off, other times you’ll fall right off and die. There’s no rhyme or reason to it and it detracts from the game.

The final bit of apparent laziness actually leads to some of the strangest stuff I saw in the game. Because you’re kind of locked in each area during battles, when you interact with other characters either before or after the battle and they try to leave, they’ll walk to the edge of the area, then just fade away. Talk about taking you out of the game.

Visuals:
When the game started, I thought it looked great with a unique visual style leaning towards a comic book. This, unfortunately, didn’t pan out. Some parts of the game look fantastic while other parts look downright terrible. It’s sad because in specific instances, lighting effects and textures look fantastic while in others they look like a late gen PS2 game. It’s the inconsistencies across the board that hurt this game overall.

Some environments are well thought out and have a great look and feel to them, most of Chinatown stands out as well as the U-Men labs. The rest of the game, unfortunately, looks like it was slapped together by a first year level editor. Scale is used to great effect at times where you’ll be traversing the landscape from cranes high above or fighting massive enemies, but it’s the little details that tend to suffer. The fact that the city went from completely normal to utter wasteland in a matter of moments doesn’t help.

The cutscenes are decent, but the lip synching tends to fall apart when it follows a major choice in the story. It’s really a mixed bag overall, but the graphics tend to fall more into the mediocre side of things, even with some great effects here and there.

Audio:
This is actually one of the strongest parts of the game. The sounds of the battles and your different power sets are unique and varied, but they do tend to lean on the Wilhelm Scream a bit too much.

The music in the game surprised me. The instrument choices and arrangements were a genuine treat, and not always the standard frenetic action style during fights. It definitely stood out as one of the better parts of the entire package and I’d actually be interested in picking up the soundtrack at some point.

Conclusion:
An unfortunate series of missed opportunities and mediocre elements mixed in with some potentially good ideas makes for an average game at best. I’m disappointed, because all the elements are there for a really great game but it felt like corners were cut either for budget, or time, or because nobody wanted to make the effort. It’s really a shame because this game could have been so much more.

Grade:

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