Borderlands: The Secret Armoury of General Knoxx DLC

Rich

Wow, you’ve caught me at a bad time.  All this week I’ve been either playing this, the latest DLC for the game that broke my heart, Borderlands, or the last one (Mad Moxxy’s Shitty Arena Battles) and frankly I’m sick to fucking death of fucking Borderlands.  However, this DLC does carry a few positives (which by default makes it the best B’lands DLC so far).

Billing itself as the “BEST. DLC. EVER”, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, is a collection of missions set across a number of locations linked by a crumbling highway system.  The reason for Gearbox’s self-congratulations are that this DLC finally ups the level cap (from 50 to 61) and adds a few new weapons (albeit no changes to the standard archetypes) and vehicles.

It came from the desert...

Unfortunately, as with the other DLCs, everything in this package is an excuse for massive amounts of CHORE.   You’ll need to complete this DLC (and the others) a few times if you want to hit level 61 for a start.  Then there are the missions which are scattered around in no particular order and involve plenty of searching, backtracking and repetition.  Also, none of the areas in the game have teleports so you have to trudge everywhere and, for some ridiculous reason, the map still doesn’t show you unhighlighted mission markers in your current location.

That said, there are some highlights.  The prison mission is hilarious, thanks to some excellent voice acting from the prisoners, and the Circle of Duty arena missions are vastly superior to anything we saw on Mad Moxxy’s Underdone thanks to the arena being less cluttered and because of the introduction of vehicles and rocketmen.

Midgets on skags are the mindkiller.

For the most part though, it’s just another grind.  There are lots of missions but these rarely go beyond the standard fetch quest template laid out by the main game.  Also, the DLC pulls what can only be described as the biggest cunt’s trick ever.  One of the locations has a giant bullet in it and pressing the use button next to it will drain your account by around seven million credits.  Considering that you can only hold ten million this is unacceptably shit.  Especially as you get nothing for it apart from an achievement called ‘The World’s Biggest Sucker’.

This is made even more galling by the fact that the DLC’s end boss is a level 64 uber-bastard (on both playthroughs) and has vending machines that sell top-level gear in his lair.  Which would be useful if the cunts at Gearbox hadn’t just nicked two thirds of my fucking cash.  Instead I’m shooting him with a fucking peashooter. 

Now, I’m asking nicely… please… just stop.  I hate Borderlands now.  I loved it once but now the party’s over.  Everyone I’ve played with online hates it as well.  The DLC has ruined one of the great games of 2009 and it needs to stop.  Also, haven’t you got Aliens: Colonial Marines to finish?

Score?  Fuck off out of ten.  Maybe a fuck off you game-ruining bellends out of ten, depending on how much you care about achievements.

Interactive Drama, apparently

Press X, triangle, X to read the rest of this review.

Lurk

Heavy Rain is a spiritual sequel to David Cage’s previous game Fahrenheit. That original game was fun, but eventually went downhill during the final act of the story where they tried to cram too much in and ultimately it made little to no sense. Which was a shame since it was a highly plot-driven game, veering awfuly close to an ‘interactive film’ territory.

The story for this game follows four people who are all linked by their search to find out who the identity of the mysterious Origami Killer. Someone who kidnaps children and then drowns them in rain water, leaving a small origami animal and a white orchid on their bodies. The gameplay is seen through the eyes of four different people whose plots intertwine along the way.

Club Tech-Noir moment.

Ethan Mars is the main protagonist of this game.  After his eldest son dies in a car accident which puts him into a coma, he spirals into depression. When his other son is kidnapped by the killer, he is sent on a series of missions very reminiscent of the Saw series of films. Norman Jayden is the FBI investigator sent try an capture the Origami Killer. He is an officer who is struggling with his addiction to the fictional (but awesome sounding – Ed) drug Triptocaine.

Scott Shelby is an ex-cop who is also now a Private Investigator, searching for clues about the killer apparently being paid by parents of the killer’s victims. The final playable character is Madison Paige a photographer who gets involved with Ethan when they meet at the same motel they are staying at.

I'm leaving you. I need to go back to Roseanne Barr.

With the stage set for the players, you take control of them individually, where your actions steer the direction in which the story goes. The game isn’t very free flowing and it does have a tendency to rail road you along to where you need to be for the next set piece to come up. Though if a character dies within the game then they will not show up again. So it is in your best interests to  get all of your characters to the end of the game, especially if you want to see the good ending.

When you are playing as Jayden you find clues to the identity of the killer using a pair of augmented reality glasses. You tap R1 and your view turns blue showing up clues in either green or orange. These glasses are hooked up to a network so you find out what they are immediately helping you find anything or anywhere of importance.

Heavy Rain shares a lot in common with Fahrenheit, since the majority of the action sequences are driven by various QTEs. Instead of the ‘Simon Says’ style dual sticks approach they are all done with the buttons or the right analogue stick. The way these are displayed makes it much easier to follow what’s going on in the game, though sometimes they can be slightly confusing as to what action needs to be taken. Especially at times when you need to repeatedly tap the same button.

These sections also make use of the Sixaxis motion controls, these work with varying degrees of competency. Single motions like sharply pulling the controller down, up, left, or right seems to work fine. Yet when you have to shake the controller it sometimes glitches out even though you are doing the correct actions.

As well as the QTE events, there are times where all you are doing is walking around and doing certain actions to progress the game. It can be a little difficult to figure out what it is you are doing during these moments since a prompt will come up to do something and you find its nothing more than leaning against a wall or sitting in a chair when what you are trying to do is open drawer or pick up an object for example.

Also the walking mechanic is rather awkward, you choose where you want to go with the left stick and hold down R2 to walk. This means its easier to stop dead then turn your head to choose the direction you want to go in. Rather than being to be move in a natural way, though the game does have a sort of aid to this. Say you are walking down a flight of stairs and there is a bend to go onto the second flight, then the character’s head will turn and you can just hold down R2 making them walk automatically.

Gareth Secondary Review I really liked Fahrenheit. Sure, the story went a bit tits up towards the end but the first scene is one of my favourites in video game history. So with the promise of improving on everything that was wrong with it, does Heavy Rain deliver a stronger experience? Well, not really. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed Heavy Rain. They’ve fixed the way the QTEs are displayed on screen so you can actually watch what is going on now rather than just focusing on what you have to press and…well that’s it really. The graphics have obviously been taken up a notch but things like facial expressions can still look a bit off and some of the animations as you walk around can be stiff and awkward. The controls for walking take a lot of getting used to and sometimes during the QTEs it can be hard to tell whether you’re supposed to continuously tap a button or hold it down when you’re under pressure (though it’s very rarely fatal). The story doesn’t totally descend into madness this time around though and despite some rather large plot holes and a weak twist I enjoyed the ride. It’s a tough one to judge as there isn’t a lot of gameplay here. You walk to something, move the analogue stick and something will happen, then you might talk to someone or have a chase/fight scene. All of this is done by just pressing whatever button is indicated on screen. If you come into Heavy Rain expecting it to test your skills as a gamer you’ll be disappointed, but if you want something a little different then you might just enjoy yourself. Secondary Score: 7/10

As you can imagine a game like this has a lot of voice actors and whilst the main 4 characters are very competently voiced the same can not be said for some of the supporting cast.  For a game set in New York hearing strange accents from some who seemingly isn’t a native English speaker seems to draw you out of the story on times. This leads to slight mispronunciations of words and suspect acting.

Graphically the game looks very good, with many of the character models being highly detailed. Though it can some minor slow down at time as well as some strange model clipping. Because of this at one point during the game I was being attacked by the invisible man with a floating gun on the screen being my only clue as to what was going on.

This game isn’t particularly long maybe 8-12 hours in total, but the fact there are many different endings for what actions you take during the game mean it is definitely worth going through the game for more than one play through. The story is also very compelling, meaning I spent long chunks of doing nothing but play the game. The twist at the end of the game as to the identity of the killer came as a shock. Though it is not necessarily the most logical conclusion, it still made more sense as an overall story compared to Fahrenheit, dispatching with the supernatural elements of that game is an improvement.

If you are looking for a game with a strong story with an interesting plot full of twists and then is for you. It is not a mindless game, you really need to think about your actions. Though the implementation of the game mechanic isn’t always that great it is still very interesting.

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars 8/10

PEOWWcast Episode 7: Giving The Kids Mein Kampf To Read.

Rich

PEOWWcast #7.

Present: Rich, Cale, Lurk.

Subjects: gaming round up sauce.  Bayonetta, AvP, Darksiders, Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, Sherlock Holmes vs.  Jack The Ripper and other stuff.  Yeah?

FPS/Survival Horror

Look into my eye, Rebellion.

Rich

It’s shit, you know.  Just saving you a little suspense which isn’t really in keeping with the source material of the game.  I mean those Alien films were dripping in tension and suspense.  Rebellion however have no understanding of such things at all.  Any fan of the movies could pen a more interesting story than this one and, if you’ve played the previous games, you won’t be getting any surprises here.

The thing about AvP games is that the source material gives you so much of a headstart as a developer.  Character design, environments, atmosphere and sound are already taken care of.  Anyone who says to you ‘yeah but AvP gets the atmosphere just right’ needs stabbingz because just throwing a xenomorph skin into Unreal Tournament and turning down the gamma would sort that out for you.

Unsurprisingly, the official screenshots completely do not reflect what happens in this game at all.

What we expect is that people take the source material and run with it.  Take it up a level.  Shower us with fan-service.  Throw in as many nods to the (good) films as possible, throw out any shit relating to the god-awful recent movies.  Show us stuff we haven’t seen in the films and comics.  Most importantly, though, don’t give us a game that clearly isn’t as good as the two PC games that were released roughly ten years ago.  Yes, definately don’t do that.

AvP doesn’t deliver.  At all.  You get the usual combination of three single-player campaigns and various adversarial modes, as well as the now-mandatory horde mode variant.  The story revolves around the not-very-convincingly-shoehorned-in character of Karl Bishop Weyland who, like anyone in any Aliens comic with money or influence, has decided to start experimenting on xenomorphs for profit and military supremacy.

…

…

…

Oh sorry, I dozed off for a second there.

The marine campaign is where you go for your scares.  And by scares I mean welcome to 1996, here’s piss-poor torch and a thimble full of ammo, have at the alien hordes with that, Soldier.  After a brief bit of exposition (you get knocked out, your team gets eaten, you wake up alone in a tradition Weyland-Yutani colony building) you get put into the role of a rookie marine on a one-way ticket to ShitYoPantsVille.  This calm before the storm is arguably the best part of the whole game as the tension is almost unbearable and you won’t have experienced the mediocre gameplay yet.

Maybe they don't show up in shitty 2006-style graphics at all.

After a while you’ll be plugging away at the extremely mobile xenos with little more than a piss-weak pistol while your ‘free with this week’s DIY Magazine pocket torch’ feebly attempts to show up the black aliens against the black walls of whatever fucking identical corridor or room you happen to be in.  You’d be better off using harsh language.

The marine campaign follows the Dead Space school of mission design by asking you to fix this, break that or flick that switch.  It’s awful.  No decent narrative, no fanboy pleasing nods to the movies, a motion tracker that feels like taking a Tom Tom to the north pole and some shitty boss battles.  Oh yeah, throw in some androids just to piss me off further.  I prefer the term artificial bellends though.

Next you’ve got the Alien campaign.  Remember the excellent beginning to the Alien campaign in AvP2 where you got to play through the alien lifecycle, starting as a facehugger?  Yeah?

Right, well forget it.  You start of as a captured Alien stuck in a lab somewhere.  After a bit of goading by Dr. Soon-to-have-my-motherfucking-inner-jaws-in-yo-motherfucking-skull, you escape and start getting your mission objectives from Her Royal Highness herself.

‘Break the radio transmitter’, she orders, bizarrely.  ‘I’ve got a hammer in my shed behind the gaffa tape’.   Thanks, Queeny.  Then it’s flip that switch, smash that computer.  She may as well start each order with ‘would you kindly?’ as you’re basically doing the same kind of shit that you did in Bioshock or indeed any FPS that lacks imagination.

Surely they could have done more here.  Give us some real insights into how the xenomorphs work.  Seriously, if you took away the wall-walking, you may as well be a human in this game and the Alien campaign is short, repetitive, uninspired, boring and a complete waste of your time.

The Predator gets the best campaign in the game as he sets out to clean up the chaos of this intergalactic three-way clusterfuck.  Starting out as a ‘youngblood’, your weapons and techniques are drip-fed to you throughout the story.  All the usual gadgets and vision modes are accounted for and reasonably easy to handle (Predator games are usually a thumb-mangling nightmare) and the Predator’s manoeuvrability makes him a joy to use.

Lurk Secondary Review Aliens vs. Predator is a game I was looking forward to, so much I even pre-ordered the Hunter Edition. I’m a sucker for anything with H.R. Giger’s xenomorphs in and as such I’m still moist in anticipation of Gearbox’s Aliens: Colonial Marines. So this game is just to tide me over until that is released. With three separate campaigns you’d think that this would have a meaty single player, unfortunately instead of a juicy T-bone you’re left with a McDonald’s cheeseburger. Not only are the campaigns short they’re wholly underwhelming. The marine campaign is a generic FPS using dark rooms and a torch that isn’t any use to try and set up any atmosphere. The Alien campaign isn’t any better, it consists of running about doing tasks for the queen. The awkward controls do not help you in trying to do them either. Finally the Predator campaign where you stalk and pick off the humans one by one. Or have have to fight off hordes of Aliens, apart from a couple of boss fights, it sorely lacks in variety. Multiplayer can be fun, but is ultimately bogged down by bad netcode and lack of host migration when it comes to deathmatches. Ultimately the game is lacking in depth and any kind of innovation, which is a shame when you consider how strong the source material is. Secondary Score: 6/10

As before though, the campaign is short and uninspiring and reveals little of what it means to be a Yautja.  There are glimpses though of how the planet you’re was used as a battle arena and ceremonial temple in the past which is nice and the little speeches from Karl Weyland, as you get closer to finding him, are interesting but overall it’s not even close to making this game essential.

Aside from the disappointing single-player content you’ve also got the usual rack of multiplayer modes.  However it’s a far from polished experience.  It’s not too laggy but it can take ages to get into a game and when you do the balance between the species is laughable with the xenomorphs basically handing the humans and predators their arses.  It can be mildly diverting but it won’t keep you away from Modern Warfare 2 for more than a week. Well done to Rebellion though for stubbornly sticking to the kind of spawn-point system that all other developers scrapped ten years ago though.

You also get your basic horde variant.  This pits you and up to three friends as marines against waves of aliens.  There are only two maps though – one of which is abysmal and the other which is a nice colony corridor.  The corridor one is quite nice and authentic but gets dull after a couple of waves.

On top of all of this, there are the achievements.  They are all there… ranked multiplayer achievements, near-impossible singleplayer achievements, horrible collectible achievements.  There’s nothing good here.  Yet again, Rebellion have pushed out a piss poor excuse for a game.  Low on ideas, polish and general TLC.

This game, for some reason, has its fans… mainly amongst the Alien fanboys (of which I’m one) but if you took the aliens and predators out of this game and just put in, I don’t know, robots and bears, the gameplay wouldn’t hold up at all.

The fact is, it’s been slim pickings for us alien fanboys for over a decade now so we shouldn’t be surprised and while the sub-standard graphics, weak set-pieces and uninspired writing do their level best to completely scupper the game, AvP does at the very least deliver an average FPS with some half-decent scares and stalking. Ultimately though, this is really as unimaginative a take on the AvP universe as you could ever make but then this game was always the runner-up prize and while I can tolerate them fucking up AvP, if they fuck up Colonial Marines, I’ll be stocking up on CN-20 and nerve-gassing the whole fucking development studio.

Rating: 5 out of 10 stars 5/10

Review – Bioshock 2

First Person Shooter

Please daddy make it stop.

Mark

Playing Bioshock 2 for the first time feels a lot like coming full circle. Not just for the story of the undersea city of Rapture and its plasmid filled denizens but also for Peoww as it was the first game we ever reviewed way back in November of 2007. So what’s changed in the two years since the first Bioshock?

Well it’s a decade after the events of the first game set in 1958 that had you playing as the lone survivor of a plane crash left stranded in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean only to discover the secret location of Rapture. This huge underwater city was built by an eccentric billionaire eager to escape as he saw it the decadent excess of post-war culture and interfering governments.

Nice to see fat Rab still getting work.

Upon entering the city you quickly found it overrun by Splicers, people driven mad by the over use of plasmids a new series of wonder drugs at can imbue its user with outlandish abilities like pyroknensis, hypnosis or even teleportation. By finding and using the different plasmids available you explored Rapture uncovering the events that turned it from a undersea utopia to the crumbling and flooded distopia while unravelling your own connection to the people that founded the city and eventually destroyed it.

Bioshock 2 starts a decade after the events of the first game and has you taking the role of Delta the man used to create the first ever ’big daddy’, creatures made to protect the ‘little sisters’ young girls who gather and process Adam, the raw genetic material used to create plasmids. However unlike the lumbering behemoths of the original Bioshock, Delta is a far lighter and svelter creation produced to be used as a prototype unit in testing not only the weapons and technology to arm the daddies but also the plasmids that bond a daddy to his sister.

You’ll quickly find this means that playing as Delta is almost identical to playing as Jack from the original Bioshock as Delta’s lack of armour and ordinance means you’ll have to be cautious in early confrontations as his arm mounted drill quickly runs out of fuel and his rivet gun is weaker than the conventional firearms most Splicers carry. That’s not to say Delta is totally helpless as with a bit of forethought and subtlety you can turn the environment of rapture to your advantage. There are security cameras and turrets that can be hacked and turned against the Splicers not to mention explosive gas canisters and flammable oil barrels that can become ad hoc traps or huge pools of water just asking for a well placed electro bolt.

This makes the mutiplayer look approximately 138,144 times better than it is.

Unfortunately such aids are few and far between so before too long you’ll have to rely on your basic arms – literally in the case of the drill – like the rivet gun (read: pistol), shotgun, spear-gun, 50. Cal machine-gun and grenade launcher. They all have their uses and can once again get upgraded at each areas ’power to the people’ machine but despite being ‘reskinned’ feel and handle exactly like Jack’s weapons from Bioshock. Later in the game there’s much fun to be had by using the different ammunition types like electric tripwires for the spear gun, mini gun turrets and heat seeking explosives but for ninety nine percent of the time expect to be using the basic rivet gun with it‘s inaccurate crosshairs but plentiful ammunition.

The cut and paste feel doesn’t stop at the weapons either as new plasmids and tonics are few and far between and while it’s nice that each of the new locations has the same art deco design as the rest of Rapture almost every sequence in the game will elicit a strong sense of déjà vu for anybody who’s played the first Bioshock. There are new ideas like the Big Sisters but all it boils down to is taking the big daddy template and making them faster and putting them on a crash diet. Major changes are limited to hacking and researching the various … well nine enemy types in Rapture.

Or press that big button in the middle of the pad and eject this piece of shit.

Hacking now has you stopping a moving needle when in the right area rather than the old Pipe Mania style game while research has you filming enemies with a keno camera with extra research awards being granted for different attacks encouraging you to despatch them with everything in your arsenal rather than just camping out by a friendly security camera. Camping by a camera might sound like a cheap tactic but when you realise that the Splicers respawn within minutes of being cleared from an area and on the harder levels require half a clip of ammo to kill you’ll be looking for any edge you can get in a fight especially if you’re on a gather.

With being a big daddy Delta can from time to time adopt a little sister (once her original big daddy has been killed off which is no mean feat early in the game) to go gathering Adam. She’ll direct you to a Splicer corpse that’s rich in Adam that’ll she’ll need to draw out using her needle and then process thus creating fresh Adam that you can use to buy new plasmids, tonics or other bonuses like extra health. While she is gathering the Adam you’ll be besieged by waves of Splicers all hungry for fresh Adam so you’ll need to defend her which depending on the location of the corpse can be as simple as filling both ends of a corridor with trap rivets or placing trip wires, mini turrets, proximity mines and the like for open areas with multiple entry points to cover.

If it sounds like a chore that’s because it is and if it wasn’t for the fact that you get far more Adam gathering with the little sisters rather than simply harvesting them I doubt anyone would willingly chose this option past the first mandatory gather early in the game. Which all goes towards one of the biggest problems I have with the game which is the complete lack of empowerment you feel throughout the game? Now I played the game from start to finish on the hardest difficulty with the vita chambers turned off so I wasn’t expecting an easy ride but with the Splicers constantly respawning moments after being killed off added to this the wholly generic weapons and predictable plasmids that never seem to be as effective as you’d like and crosshairs that make precision aiming impossible difficult you’ll spend more time avoiding fights than anything else and with stealth being almost impossible expect to see the menu screen far more than you’d like too when you die as there‘s no retry or reload option it just dumps you straight back to the main menu every time.

Other major problems are more technical in origin with the widescreen mode not having the right aspect ratio and the same old Unreal engine problems of texture pop leaving you looking at smooth, blank textures for half a minute before the right texture magically appears. I’ve no doubt this is down to the five – that’s right FIVE! – development teams simply reusing old code from Bioshock 1 wholesale, bugs included.

Grizzly Secondary Review In 2007 I would have gladly said that Bioshock the first was one of the greatest shooters to grace this generation. Now however I wouldn’t be able to give the game that acclaim, it was a very linear game of fetch with an occasional black and white moral choice, saint or dickhead. I will still defend the game though due to the fact that it boasted one of the most intriguing and occasionally terrifying stories I have ever witnessed. The atmosphere was breathtaking and turned an average game into a brilliant one. Bioshock 2 continues in the same mold as its predecessor, only this time the gunplay and plasmids have been tweaked to as perfect as they can be and there are more choices to the game making it somewhat more worthwhile of a second playthrough. The problem is though, the atmosphere has been diminished thanks to the fact that you play as one of the more powerful characters in the Bioshock mythos. Its very hard to feel tense when you are running headfirst into a group of bloody splicers with a giant Drill bit on your arm. A sequel to Bioshock was bound to end up being more of the same and to some that will be no bad thing but by weakening the suspense of Rapture, 2K have made the game into little more than “been there, done that.” Secondary Score: 7/10

Now you might wonder why I’ve not mentioned the game’s plot yet, well that’s because there isn’t one really. Sure there’s over a hundred audio dairies to listen to and some new characters who interact with you but to be honest it’s all totally inconsequential and just there to give you a reason to flip a switch or go hunting for the key to a door. There’s one new and importantly well written section at the start of the third act but I wonder how many people will make it far enough into the game to see it as everything that precedes it is just pointless fluff used to retcon previous events enough to justify this sequel that takes almost all its assets and queues from the previous game.

So where did the two years development time go? Well it wasn’t on the multiplayer mode I can tell you that and if it did what the fuck?!? Seriously the MP section of Bioshock 2 is without the worst multiplayer mode I’ve had to subject myself to in recent memory and I’ve played Army of Two: The 40th Day and Mortal Kombat vs. DCU. The game engine struggles to show more than two players on screen at any one time with becoming a slideshow, the weapons, plasmids and other abilities are unbalanced or just plain broken and the maps so standardised they play like reskinned maps from Turok or Timesplitters.

As an example of an uninspired sequel Bioshock 2 is perfect. The tacked on multiplayer mode and recycled characters, locations, plot twists and set pieces are all present with the only true creativity on display here how they’ve managed to essentially sell the same game again but minus the heart and soul which was arguably lifted from an old PC game that’s so much better than this mess I’m not even going to mention its name for fear of putting people of playing it. Bioshock pooh more like, no … Bioshit 2 more like, still not there … Bioshove broken glass in my cock rather than have to play that multiplayer mode again more like. Yep, there’s your quote line 2K.

Rating: 5 out of 10 stars 5/10

Puzzler

Fun with bricks.

Rich

Oh man….

I hate reviewing puzzle games.  They are always much of a muchness and with no plot to speak of and gameplay mechanics that are always a variation of either Tetris, Columns or Sokoban, usually a review more closely resembles a tutorial with a few opinions thrown in.

Well, that’s one paragraph down anyway.  I’m on a roll.

Yeah some blocks and stuff...

So what is Chime then and, more importantly, why do you need this game in your life?  Well, the obvious points of reference here are Lumines (but with a point to it, pricing that won’t leave you needing counselling and some actual challenge) meets Tetris (but with no gravity).

You are tasked with placing various shapes on an empty grid.  If you can manage to create a 3×3 square, it will become a ‘quad’.  Quads have an internal timer that can be reset by further growing the quad (adding to it so that it becomes a larger square or rectangle which will in turn increase your score).

When the internal timer runs out, the quad disappears and the area behind it becomes covered.  Success in this game usually involves maximising your coverage so you want to create big quads everywhere in order to do that.  Getting 50% coverage on a level opens up the next one in the set of five.

Yeah more blocks and stuff...

Another way to gain points is to increase your multiplier.  This is achieved by creating independent quads.  As you won’t be creating perfect quads, there will be bricks left over.  These are called ‘fragments’ and they get brighter as a bar sweeps across the screen.  After a few sweeps, any unused fragments eventually disappear which kills your multiplier (but also clears up the screen for you).

There’s the rules in a nutshell – and explained better than the rather lacking in-game instructions.  Once you’ve got that side of things sorted, it’s time to start hunting down achievements and leaderboard bragging rights.  Balancing out your quad size, multipliers and coverage is the key here and, like any good puzzler, it helps to get into the fabled ‘zone’ which is made easier thanks to the stunning dancey/trancey soundtrack (featuring donated tracks by Paul Hartnoll, Moby and other artistes).  This is taken to a further level as the sweeping on-screen bar ‘plays’ any bricks that are placed on the screen – yep, this is one of them music puzzler things even if the music side of things has little effect on the gameplay.

Steven Secondary Review Well Chime is the first game I’ve ever played where part of the cost of buying it goes towards a charity so that’s all good and nice. But the thing is I can’t make my mind up whether this game is great or not, there are only a few levels and no real sense of progression as once you’ve seen one level you’ve pretty much seen everything this game has to offer. However it’s one of those rare games where it’s dead easy to pick up and you can sink a couple of hours into it and not even notice, particularly if you get into a bit of a groove with the music, which is lovely. Whilst the basic concept of it is a bit confusing, once you get into the swing of it the game is strangely addictive and the urge to just get all the background filled in is strong. The problem though is that at the end of the day I just can’t help but think this game would be more suited to a handheld console or mobile phone as opposed to a home console. Secondary Score: 6/10

Arguably the best things about Chime are the price (400M$P – a lesson to the majority of XBLA publishers) and the fact that all profits from the game go to charity.  If that doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy, nothing will.  In an age where we, as gamers, are being literally bummed in our faces by games publishers, this mixture of charity and sensible pricing means that there is no excuse for you to avoid this game.

The truth though is that Chime is worth more than 400M$P anyway.  The gameplay steals hours from you, the music is mostly fantastic and it looks great – although the minimalist interface does have an uncanny knack of completely getting in the way.  A few more levels, a better tutorial and a bit less fannying about with bastardly hard achievements (well, one) would make this even more essential but not buying it would make you a ridiculously stingy wronghead and you don’t want that… do you?

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars 8/10

]]> http://www.peoww.co.uk/chime-xbox-360/feed/ 2 http://www.peoww.co.uk/christmas-competition-time/ http://www.peoww.co.uk/christmas-competition-time/#comments Sun, 14 Feb 2010 10:45:43 +0000 Mark http://www.peoww.co.uk/?p=4462

It’s Valentine’s Day and PEOWW is feeling the love.  Thanks mainly to our wonderful friends at OneBigGame and Zoe Mode.  You see, they’ve given us a code to give to you to unlock the full version of Chime, the game YOU SHOULD ALREADY OWN.

To win said code, email your name, rank and serial number (okay, just your name) to compo@peoww.co.uk and we’ll randomly select someone and whatever.  I dunno.

Good Luck!

Competition Rules:

• UK residents only cos we don’t know if the code will work abroad or whatever.
• The random draw to determine the winner(s) will take place on Feb 21st 2010 with the winners being notified within one week of the draw.
• All entrants must be aged 18 or over.
• Only one entry per household.
• The judges decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.  That judge won’t be Dredd (or Pickles), it’ll probably be Mark and his mad dice.
• The son of Jor-El will be my slave… forever. If not, the millions of Earthlings you protect shall pay for your defiance. *optional

Review – Mass Effect 2

Adventure/RPG

Guaranteed 100% Nolan North free.

Gareth

It’s finally here. One of my favourite games this generation has got its sequel, part two of a planned trilogy. Mass Effect 2 follows on from the critically acclaimed Mass Effect, developed by Bioware and released back in 2007. With the promise of seeing the repercussions of all your decisions from the first game, will ME2 deliver?

For those who haven’t heard or missed out on the original, Mass Effect 2 is a Western RPG, with stats, conversation trees and moral choices. For those who did play the original though, you may be in for a little bit of a shock. I know during my first couple of hours of play I was a little taken aback at how different ME2 is. Not massively different on paper, but to play you’ll be surprised at how different it feels.

Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, kills like a bastard.

The most obvious difference is the gunplay. A lot of work has gone into the third person shooting mechanics, which were adequate in the first one. It now plays much more like a stand alone TPS. It’s still not necessarily as solid as something like Gears of War, but despite an intrusive autoaim it is a great improvement over the original. No longer do guns overheat, stopping you from firing for a short period, now they require ammo. All your weapons share the same type of ammo and there’s plenty of it around so you’ll never be worried about that, you just need to reload every now and then. Whether this was a design choice from the off or a casualty of the lack of inventory though I’m unsure.

That’s right, there is no inventory in ME2. It was a massive headache in the original, but getting rid of it completely seems a bit overkill. You can adjust your weapon loadout before missions and you can upgrade your weapons, but you no longer buy and sell individual guns or armour, and there are no mods you can attach to your guns (to keep them cool or make them stronger, etc). Honestly, I didn’t miss it that much, but it is just the tip of the iceberg.

Whoop, whoop! Here comes the space po-lease.

The abilities your characters can upgrade through levelling have also been cut back, but this isn’t as negative as it sounds. Sure you have less choice in how your character develops this way, but it does mean each character is a little more individual. There’s less overlap when it comes to powers and abilities and that is a good thing. Also, no longer do you need an electronics expert in your party to hack stuff, Shepard can do all that stuff from the off and the minigames have been greatly improved for this as well.

Speaking of minigames, I have to mention the awful planet scanning one. Gone is the planet exploration in the Mako from the first game, much to the delight of many. In its place is a planet scanning minigame where you basically move a crosshair over a planet until you see a change in a graph which indicates that there are materials to be collected which can then be used for upgrades. This is the slowest process in the world, even after upgrading the speed of the crosshair and how it got past the design stage let alone make it to the final game, when so much effort has gone into improving everything else, I do not know. Thankfully there are way more planets to scan than are necessary so do not go over board when scanning and it hopefully won’t overstay its welcome, but really it should not be there at all.

The game engine itself is far stronger this time around. Graphics have been improved, especially around faces (and arses), and there is next to no pop-in as far as textures are concerned or the slow down which effected the original. Rather long load times appear from time to time but it never interrupts at important stages. Load screens have replaced the elevator scenes from the first game, which (like the inventory and planet exploration) doesn’t really improve the issue but simply gets rid of it.

Something Bioware has improved on, rather than removed, are the missions. Gone are the identikit space stations and bases from the original and in their place are varied locations with some interesting scenarios. The majority involve shooting stuff but there are a few which will have you tailing someone or exploring a destroyed ship as it teeters on the edge of a cliff, Italian Job style. These missions do add some much needed variety, but I do feel there is still a little too much emphasis on the gunplay this time around.

Mark Secondary Review The first Mass Effect didn’t disappoint with its epic sci-fi storyline and action/RPG gameplay mix that hadn’t been seen since the likes of Knights of the Old Republic and I’m happy to say Mass Effect 2 is just as good. In fact it’s several magnitudes better than even the revered KOTOR. All the cumbersome equipment and modification micromanagement is gone and has been replaced by a far quicker and far more focused system that makes exploration worth you’re while rather than just driving around the same barren ‘cut and paste’ worlds looking for differently coloured rocks. The combat too has been changed with the cover system now working and all the different weapons and biotics equally balanced. These are things that that you won’t appreciate until a few hours into the game but what is obvious from minute one is just how much work has been put into ME2. The old problems of texture pop-in and framerate lag have gone along with all those long elevator rides and super long corridors to hide loading screens, so that when you do need to load a new section the game is honest enough to tell you. All of these improvements though are just good coding and programming but what ME2 has most of all is good writing. Every character is dripping with nuance and detail, be it returning characters from ME1 or newbies like Thane or Miranda who all have an important part to play in a storyline that’s so well paced and structured that it puts most professional movies to shame. Every mission even simple ‘fetch and carry’ quests are interesting and as for the main story… well trust me it’s fucking EPIC. In summation: Mass Effect 2 is the best RPG since Final Fantasy IX. And yes, you can quote me on that. Secondary Score: 10/10

The characters and writing on the whole are a lot better as well. NPCs can be incredibly funny as you wander around cities and your squad mates are a mixed bunch, some of which will probably replace your favourites from ME1. There are more squad mates than ME1, each having a mission to recruit them and then another to make them loyal to you. I did feel that the majority of the game felt like you were recruiting individuals rather than actually moving a story a long but the magic from the first game is still present here.

You’ll be talking to people using the same speech tree as ME1, but you can also interrupt conversations at set times with a press of either the left or right trigger, depending on whether you’re being naughty or nice. It’s a fun feature that leads to some excellent moments and hopefully it’ll be expanded on next time. Indeed it is in the conversations and decisions you have to make that Mass Effect 2 feels it’s playing to its strengths.

As you’d expect, you make quite a few important decisions throughout ME2 and it’ll be interesting to see how they affect ME3. I was a little disappointed with the way a lot of decisions played out in ME2 and I hope in ME3 your decisions have a larger effect on the game world.

I urge everyone to give the original ME a try. It won’t be for everyone and even fans of recent WRPGs like Oblivion, Fallout 3, or even Bioware’s own Dragon Age may not love it, but if it does click with you then you’re in for a treat. Even if you haven’t played it though, you could just jump into ME2. You’ll be missing out on a lot of the payoff from the decisions you would have made in the original, but Bioware have made it possible to play this as a stand alone game if you wish.

The scaled back RPG elements and the overplayed shooting sections are a bit of a step in the wrong direction for Mass Effect I feel. Also the story’s reliance on collecting squad mates rather than pursuing the enemy means the momentum doesn’t truly start to grow until the very end. However, the shooting mechanics are much stronger this time around and when it relies on its characters and decision making Mass Effect 2 is just a magical as the first. These ‘problems’ didn’t stop me playing it all day every day for almost a week however, I just hope that for Mass Effect 3 they readdress the balance a little bit.

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars 8/10

]]> http://www.peoww.co.uk/mass-effect-2-xbox-360/feed/ 0 http://www.peoww.co.uk/army-of-two-the-40th-day-xbox-360/ http://www.peoww.co.uk/army-of-two-the-40th-day-xbox-360/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:13:14 +0000 Richie http://www.peoww.co.uk/?p=4638 Review – Army of Two: The 40th Day

Third-person shooter.

EA’s bad run of form continues.

Rich

When it comes to straight up, brainless entertainment, you could do a lot worse than the original Army of Two game.  Sure, it had dialogue and a storyline that would make Dan Brown cringe with embarrassment but the game itself was a bright and brash take on the Gears of War template topped up with a big emphasis on co-op gameplay and with the kind of epic set-pieces that made it feel more than a little Hollywood.  It was a solid game, let down by a myriad of flaws which never stopped the game from being likable but did stop it from being truly essential.

Army of Two: The Civil Ceremony mer like.

So when EA announced the inevitable sequel, hopes were high for an equally epic slice of shooting action but with a little more balance and polish, if not any extra intelligence.  Well it’s here now, with the clumsy moniker Army of Two:  The 40th Day, and unfortunately they’ve still not realised the potential of Army of Two.  Too make things worse though, The 40th Day is far worse than the original, adding yet another black mark to EA recent output after they peaked a couple of years back.

The game once again sees you reprising your role as one of two military contractors, Salem or Rios.  Who you pick doesn’t really matter.  They are both cocks.  But the piss-weak story (which, for some reason, is mainly told through radio logs accessed through the start menu rather than, you know, in the actual game) sees the most homoerotic double act in gaming stuck in Shanghai which is being destroyed with the kind of intensity you’d expect from a Roland Emmerich movie.

99% of the game summed up in this one screenshot.

While it all looks pretty dramatic, the majority of the destruction plays out in cutscenes rather than during the gameplay.  Once you take control, it’s really just a trek through rubble.  As with the original Army of Two, your options are to co-op your way through the game with a friend or with the dumb-as-a-post AI.  As of the time of writing, the online co-op is horribly bugged with many people complaining that the game kept kicking them out of their co-op sessions.  After three such disconnections in two chapters, Mark and I decided to go our own ways and join forces with the AI.

While playing with the AI is a lot more stable, it’s also a lot more frustrating.  Your AI partner can be given instructions via the dpad.  These instructions amount to ‘come here’, ‘stay there’ or ‘go ahead’.  You can also select the aggressiveness of your partner.  Unfortunately, the AI will often become confused so ‘come here’ is often misinterpreted as ‘stay there like an idiot even though you are being shot from literally every direction’.  The ‘aggro’ system is back as well meaning that an aggressive teammate will eventually grab all of your enemy’s attention allowing you to sneak around for some stealthy kills.  Unfortunately the levels aren’t as well designed for that kind of thing as they were in the original game and often I found that my best bet was to stick with the AI as we both blast in through the front door or do it myself and tell him to hide.

Unfortunately you cannot direct your AI teammate beyond those simple commands.  A Freedom Fighters style direction system would have been infinitely better.  Instead we have something that is a lot clunkier than it ought to be.  Also, for reasons unknown, there is a lot less emphasis on co-op actions.  Leg-ups, co-op attacks and flanking opportunities are less frequent than before and the mock-surrender actions feel unnatural to pull off with the AI.

The majority of this game’s difficulty however comes from the visuals.  Instead of the bright, clean look of the original, The 40th Day has gone with a horrendously cluttered look.  Trying to pick out an enemy from the rubble and neon of Shanghai is usually pretty arduous and things get even more cluttered if you use your GPS vision mode.   The GPS does at least give you a Dead Space line indicator telling you where to go.

You’d think that things would improve once you leave Shanghai right?  Well here’s the kicker.  You don’t.  Where Army of Two had you running amok in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, China and the States, this game is all set in one location.  Sure, level three is a zoo but not a very good one and the rest of the levels never vary at all.  This seriously limits the game’s potential.  After all, I’m sure every one of you Army of Two fans fondly remembers the Aircraft Carrier level from the first game.  Indeed, all the set-pieces are gone.  The parachute jumps and boat sections for example.  You still get the occasional back-to-back stand-off sections but these are less dramatic than the first game and seem to happen for no good reason.

Even if you’re just in the market for a dumbed-down Gears clone, this doesn’t satisfy.  The controls are badly-realised – if you’re going to rip off a game, don’t switch the ‘cover’ button for the ‘jump over cover’ one – and everything feels slow and clunky.  Add to that some truly awful hit-detection (almost Kane and Lynch levels of bad) and you’ve got a recipe for no fun at all.

Mark Secondary Review You know you might not think it but this is a remarkable game. No, really. EA Montreal have managed to take a truly blavrage game and remarkably spent two years and who knows how many millions and made it even WORSE. Sure, the first Army of Two wasn’t a masterpiece but it had tons of variety and some clever set-pieces, whereas this is chapter after chapter of bland urban decay and nondescript mercenaries all acting like the cannon fodder they are. The cavalcade of mediocrity doesn’t end there with boring, unskipable cut scenes repeated ad infinitum when you’re left high and dry by the moronic AI or when the unintuitive context sensitive controls that has you jumping crates rather than healing your team mate. I could go on and list the game’s faults – of which there are many – but the worst goes to the online play which is broken with random disconnects happening every ten minutes and game modes so plagiaristic and generic that they could have been programmed by Simon Cowell. Honestly you’d have more fun of just wanking off to a copy of guns and ammo while listening to Hans Zimmer than even trying this game. Secondary Score: 4/10

The only improvement they have made is that you can now switch the shoulder that your camera view is behind.  A much-needed feature, even if it could have maybe been an automatic choice rather than a manual one.  Also, the morality choices that pop up in the game are a nice touch.  You’ll often be presented with a choice (usually to kill someone or not) and you get to see a short comic strip sequence showing you what happens to that character after you make that choice.  It’s not much, but it’s something.

There really isn’t much more to say about this game.  Fans of the original have been let down by what is a very lazy update and newbies will be put off by the poor presentation and controls.  Sure, the less discerning EA fanboys out there will applaud the co-op play and solid difficulty but with unskippable cutscenes following many of the game’s checkpoints and a surely doomed online community, they’ll soon find themselves bored of this game.  Even the DLC-enabled horde mode won’t improve that as surely we’re all bored of seeing that implemented in every single game since Gears 2.

If that’s not enough to put you off:  Rios has an anecdote in the game about fucking a panda.  Yes, really.

The sad truth is that Army of Two remains the better game and by some margin.  It’s more varied, more epic and more fun to play.  Army of Two: The 40th Day feels limited, rushed and empty by comparison.

Rating: 4 out of 10 stars 4/10

]]> http://www.peoww.co.uk/army-of-two-the-40th-day-xbox-360/feed/ 0 http://www.peoww.co.uk/darksiders-xbox-360/ http://www.peoww.co.uk/darksiders-xbox-360/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:06:52 +0000 Guest http://www.peoww.co.uk/?p=4630 Review – Darksiders

Hack and slash/adventure

War is my shepherd.

Grizzly

2010, the mark of a new decade, era and what have you. This year may or may not mean a lot to some people but to gamers this is a promising year full of triple-A titles that jumped out of the boat of 2009 to avoid the iceberg that was Modern Warfare 2.

Darksiders has been offered the dubious honour of being one the first games to be released this year to a wanting crowd of gamers who are sick of playing their Christmas copies of Avatar: The Game. Unfortunately for Darksiders it was released on the same day as Bayonetta, a game much publicised and championed by the hardcore.

Not the best time for a sight-seeing tour.

In Darksiders you play as the most pleasant of the Four Horsemen, War, who is summoned to Earth where the battle between Heaven and Hell is running rampant and generally tearing the place apart. War soon disovers that something is wrong when he realises that he isn’t as strong as he should be and the other three Horsemen don’t show up to the party. It turns out that he wasn’t invited. To warrant the Horsemens’ appearance there are seven seals (laws) which need to be broken but one of them is still intact, causing war to inadvertantly destroy the world and the Kingdom of Man. So after being scolded and sentenced to death (surely not a problem if that’s one of his buddies – Ed) by The Council, War returns to Earth to find some answers or die trying.

So far so generic. The story is not going to win any Oscars in its own right. A game about War just generally tearing shit up would be quite uninteresting and vague to warrant any sort of interest. Luckily the supporting cast is well-rounded with some fantastic voice acting thrown into the works and some of the best characterisation I have witnessed in the past few years. Joining War is a being known as the Watcher, a character who is bound to War to make sure that he doesnt betray The Council. Mark Hamill does a very good job of bringing life to this creature and weaving a tasty thread of venom into the Watcher’s lines.  The monster and character design is also brilliantly realised, particularly with the ‘Tormented Gates’ that are in fact giant, monstrous golems made of rock who block your path due to a curse that is placed upon them.

What are you buying, Stranger?

The entire intro of the game is entirely designed to draw the audience into an epic world of conflict but is a damp squib compared to the rest of the game, War marches by numerous enemies that engage him in what seems like sub-par hack and slashery. As a first impression it does little to inflame a sense of wonderment, just a sense that you have seen it all before. The game starts to pick up once you soon get introduced to the puzzle-based dungeon areas which provide the true meat of gameplay.  Although the puzzle solving is a welcome rest from all of that heavy combat it becomes difficult to not think of a few other games that fathom the deep membrane of nostalgia.

Now you may have read many comparisons between Darksiders and the of the Legend of Zelda or God of War games and while it does ape the Zelda dungeon crawling archetype, the incremental upgrades to weaponry and new toys to play with each level mean it has little do with God of War minus the odd huge boss fight. These are the main comparisons to the game but many more begin to surface as you continue playing, the game throws a lot of references at you which may seem bizarre in context but offer some brilliant puzzles and set pieces for your trouble. My favourite and most unexpected appearance had to be that of an item which allows you to create portals, (twenty points and hug to anyone who gets where they got that idea from).  The game has many influences but they do not outstay their welcome – unlike many less-ambitious titles that clone one game style and hope you don’t notice (here’s looking at you Army of Two).

Rich Secondary Review As far as debuts go, Vigil Games’ Darksiders is quite impressive.  It mixes various playstyles (hack and slash, platforming, shooting and puzzle-solving) to great effect and feels solid, and satisfying, throughout. That said, an over-reliance on puzzle sections (the same old mix of block-pushing, back-tracking, switch…er.. pressing and using valves to adjust flood waters to access new areas) spoils things a little.  Especially around half-way through the game where your heart will sink every time you walk into a large room with even the slightest hint of a fucking switch puzzle. As much as I love the combat in this game, coming up against contrived, tedious puzzles every few minutes wears thin.  A less-than-helpful map, a few too many inventory options and a few too many rough edges presentation-wise also relegate this game from the top drawer to being merely ‘good’. Well worth checking out for the right price but not a classic. Secondary Score: 6/10

Just like the gameplay mechanics, the graphics are a bit of a mixed bag. Despite the game’s title, the game is far from dark. Instead you are greeted with a colourful, comic-style aesthetic which has more in common with World of Warcraft than Dante’s Inferno. War himself looks like a well-levelled character giving him the height and bulk of a man with short person anxiety. The world looks great though, the game shifts from the usual apocalyptic brown to the unexpected lush green clearings of a ruined city drowned in water. It is clear that Vigil has put a lot of care and effort into the way that this game has been presented. It is quite uncommon these days to find a game which offers such diversity in the hands of a keen explorer, just as well seeing as that is what you will be doing as the items and weaponry you pick up in the dungeons will allow you to traverse through otherwise unreachable areas in the earlier open parts of the game.

If exploration is not your bag though you can warp to other areas by means of serpent holes which are nicely dotted around by your good friend Vulgrim, a demon merchant who you can also buy upgrades and new attack combos from with the in-game currency of souls. You can also put hoof to floor when War rescues his faithful steed Ruin who basically acts as a very satisfying run button, allowing you to ride past foes or slash them while passing.

Darksiders does have a few problems. Due to its derivative nature some will see it as a poor pretender to the titles it imitates.  It lacks the depth of  Zelda’s dungeon sprawls and the combat has more in common with the original Devil May Cry than God of War, making it seem robust yet unfinished. It also falls victim to some horrible screen-tearing. The Watcher also is an underused character which seems strange considering the talent that voices him. These problems though are mainly just minor niggles in an otherwise excellent piece of entertainment.

This game will more than sate the hunger for fans of comic book action and is most definitely the closest that the xbox 360 and PS3 will ever get to Zelda.

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars 8/10