I played the demo for this game, and let’s just say I was less than impressed. It went from a “possible buy if I find it for 20$” to a “maybe I’ll rent it one day”. The demo, to be totally honest, was terrible. This brought down my hype for the game to zero.
So when I rented it (using GameAccess, a Canadian equivalent to GameFly), my expectations were as low as can be.
So does this surpass expectations, or is the final game just as lame as the demo? Read my review and see! (hint: it’s not a positive review)
Developer: Airtight Games
Publisher: Capcom
Date of Release: January 19th 2010
Platforms: PS3, Xbox 360, PC (PS3 version reviewed)
Genre: Third-Person Shooter
Players: 1
Rated T for Teen
Looks and sounds
Well… if this game came out in the first few months of the Xbox 360, it might have looked only slightly below average. By today’s standards, it’s quite bad. The best parts are when you’re flying, the scenery is quite well done, despite being incredibly repetitive (literally half the flying stages have the same look). And the enemy models generally look quite nice, I think they’re good.  Otherwise… the character models are quite low-quality. The character design is as cliché as it comes (the helmet Will gets some ways through the game just makes things worst… just look at the box art, it’s bad). The enemy animation is a total mess, sometimes with enemies completely skipping complete seconds of animation. I understand enemies coming out of cover, but sometimes they skip from out of cover instantly. The overall animation is not too great either, and frame-rate drops are relatively frequent and noticeable.
Sound-wise… Well, the music is cliché, boring and unmemorable. The voice acting features Nathan Drake…. I mean Nolan North, and he offers an okay performance, not spectacular but not bad. The rest of the voices range from average to bad. My big problem with the sound is that it glitches. During bigger fights with lots of flying enemies and allies and lasers everywhere and such… the sound breaks up almost constantly. Maybe I was just unlucky, but I had 3 full missions with sound breaking up all the time, it was incredibly annoying.
Story
The story is a big mess. It starts in the real world, where you get a jetpack from Nikola Tesla. After fighting alien creatures for a while, you get sucked into The Void(a “world between worlds”). There, you’re found out to be the chosen one to stop the alien’s attack, as told in a prophecy… Nothing is really explained properly, unless you read the journals. There’s a few plot-twists, all of which are easy to predict from the start. And then ending is probably the most anti-climactic ending I’ve ever seen… Not like there was much of a climax to begin with, you just get to the final boss at total random, and there’s no rhyme or reason for the rest of the game before that… It’s like they had a few interesting ideas, and jumbled them together at random. Doesn’t make for a good, or even coherent story.
Gameplay
The game is divided in 2 segments: Flying and Third-Person Shooter.
The game starts you off without a jetpack (after the short and boring opening segment with a jetpack). After a while, you get a weak jetpack that can only hover. And after another while, you get the final jetpack. Through the game, you can power up your weapons, using points you get from killing enemies, or finding them scattered around the world. This will either boost their damage or area of effect. The jetpack’s weapons can also be boosted. Both play styles let you use turrets too, which can be really useful. So on to the 2 different play styles!
Flying
I wonder… did NO ONE play Star Fox 64? After all these years, I feel not many games surpassed, or even came close to having such good flying controls. Dark Void, like most games of the genre, doesn’t get the controls right. The biggest problem is the movement(no, not the fact that it’s inverted, I’m totally fine with that in flying games). It’s incredibly loose, and really not precise. Aiming at enemies or various other targets requires good precision, but that’s never easy when the crosshair always undershoots or overshoots the movement you want it to make. That’s partly due to the fact that, when you move and stop moving the joystick, you still continue moving for a moment. So to actually be able to shoot at anything. you have to aim in the general direction of what you want to aim at, and then carefully adjust your aim until it’s centered. Which is no fun at all when you’re in a fast-paced dogfight with tons of enemies everywhere. I also wonder what’s the point of “rolling” (using the right stick), when it could have other uses then that.
Another problem for me is the “special maneuvers” you can do in the air. I have no problem with boosting and braking, those are well mapped. What I have problems with is barrel rolls and u-turns. To do them, you have to press R3, then move the analog sticks in various directions. The 2 sticks in the same horizontal direction does a barrel roll, and the 2 sticks in opposite vertical directions for a u-turn. I can’t be the only one who find this completely stupid. L2 and R2 are completely useless (you can “lock-on” on enemies with L2, but it’s stupid because it only makes the camera point at the enemy in question, and R2 gives you a freeform camera control, which is useless since you have a radar), which not use those buttons for this?
And another thing that could have been cool but ended up sucking is hijacking enemy vehicles. I mean, there’s some uses, letting you take a bit more damage (not that it matters since you have regenerating health anyways), and it gives you missiles which deal extra damage. The hijacking itself is a really badly done QTE-like sequence where you hold Circle on a metal plat up-front, and you move left and right to avoid getting hit, and then you randomly move the left stick around to kill the enemy. The animation is always the same, and the hijacking isn’t fun to do. But there’s problems here too. While you’re hijacking the ship, you can get shot at and die, or the ship might get blown up by an enemy or ally and kill you in the process. In the end, just shooting with the jetpacks normal guns is a lot safer, less time-consuming, and just as effective as hijacking. Though you can take control of ally ships, that’s not very useful either since you might as well leave them to help you out instead of losing the aircraft when you exit it.
Overall, the flying segments are bad, no ifs or buts about it.
TPS
Imagine any good, or even below average TPS that came out this generation. Now imagine if they removed the fun factor from them. That’s basically Dark Void. I’ll admit that the aiming is leagues beyond that of the flying levels, but it’s not incredible either. And I like that you can cook grenades, and the visual representation showing you how close it is to explode is quite nice. There’s not many weapons, 6 of them in total, and only 3 of them being useful (the basic machine gun, the disintegrator(basically a rocket launcher) and the sniper). The rest aren’t really useful, but they can be upgraded to have a bit more use. Now on to the bad in the TPS segments (AKA most of the game).
Enemies don’t always show reaction when you hit them, which just leaves you wondering if you actually did anything. That coupled with the fact that enemies take a TON of bullets to kill makes killing them annoying. And explain that to me: How can 50 bullets not kill something, but 1 punch can? What kind of sense does that make? The melee attacks are awkward, but they’re pretty much your most useful weapon against small enemy groups. The attacks themselves require being close enough, and pressing the melee button starts up a short 2-3 seconds animation which really breaks up the gameplay. The cover system isn’t too great either. It’s not bad, and I’ve seen worse, but there’s always a lot of you poking out, so you’ll always be getting hit. Using grenades while in cover is suicide, since you’ll never actually throw it outside of cover, it just hits what you’re covering behind and stays where you are, hurting/killing you. And enemies are terrible at taking cover, they’re always really easy to hit behind cover.
Speaking of which, the enemy AI in general is terrible. It happened in multiple occurrences where an enemy, sometimes even more than one, instead of attacking me, or moving to more advantageous positions, just stayed in one spot looking at me, not doing anything. Sometimes they’ll get close to you, when it’s obviously a bad idea since you can kill them in one hit with a melee attack. They don’t really form strategies, or actually display any kind of AI, they just… do stuff at random. Also, I don’t understand why they don’t react when you take out a grenade(can’t they see that glowing thing in your hand that you’re obviously about to throw?), instead just reacting when the grenade bounces next to them.
The most interesting element of the TPS segments is using the jetpack to jump higher, attack from the air and “flank enemies”. It’s actually the funnest thing in the game. Too bad it’s ruined by terrible camera when you’re aiming, making actually using the element effectively isn’t the easiest thing, though you can get used to it relatively easily.
The last thing I can talk about here is the “Vertical Combat”, which the developer was putting so much faith in. Well, to put it simply… it sucks. It’s like a super dumbed-down version of the normal TPS segments of the game. It’s easier, for one. You can literally go through all those sections using only melee attacks. In those segments, you “latch on” to a platform that’s on a wall/cliff, move along that wall, and drop down to lower platforms or boost up to higher ones using the jetpack(just requires pressing on Square to do it). When going down, sometimes you get “latched off” from the platform you were previously latched on to when you go down, which is a bit annoying. No such problem going up. As for the actual “Vertical Combat”, all you actually need to do is go up to each enemy separately, using your melee attack on each of them. It’s very rare that you have to do anything else, and you’ll never die in those segments since they’re so easy. So basically “Vertical Combat” is like the normal TPS segments, except you very rarely have to shoot, and you have less liberty of movement. I’m VERY disappointed by that.
Overall… if you want to play a decent TPS… pick up something else, like Gears of War or Uncharted (or their sequels). This disappoints a lot if you’ve played either of those.
Glitchy game is glitchy
Other than the sound not playing properly, the game has a few gameplay bugs. I already mentioned the crappy AI that occasionally just looks at you, or generally isn’t any good, but there’s more. Those are just 2 bugs I experienced, but I know that if I actually looked for bugs, I would have found more, easily. The first one was in the prison escape mission (I think…). After fighting a group of robots by throwing one grenade at them, I find on the ground a round-shaped item I can pick up, which is a fusion grenade. I pick it up. I look at the grenade counter just to find it’s gone. Ammo crates don’t give me any, weapon lockers don’t give me any, and obviously there’s none on the ground, and the grenade button doesn’t do anything anymore. And killing myself doesn’t correct the bug, only finishing the mission does. The other bug is after I liberate some prisoners. I go in the next room, where an enemy pops out of thin air instead of already being there (but that’s not the bug, the actual bug is a lot worse). There’s a gun on the floor, which I have to pick up and use to progress through the level. After 10 minutes of screwing around, I can’t pick it up, no matter what random things I try. So I kill myself. Only then was I able to pick it up and continue playing.
I don’t mind when there’s glitches in a game. But here there’s no rhyme or reason behind the glitches, they just happen at total random. As I said, there’s probably more to be found, considering how stupid and basic the glitches I got were. This really makes me believe that actually testing the game was not a priority, and it’s the proof of a poorly made product.
Overall
This is the second time Capcom has made this mistake. First with Bionic Commando, now with this one. Instead of making the game themselves, they gave it to an American developer with next to no experience. With Bionic Commando, it was Grin, who barely made anything beforehand(none of which was great), and with Dark Void it’s Airtight games, who has a few members from the team who made “Crimson Skies”, but, as a company, has no experience whatsoever. Both times, the games were bad. While I just want to bash the game, I see this as a good lesson for Capcom: DEVELOP GAMES YOURSELVES!  Or at least give projects to companies that have experience, and that have previously made good games. Giving projects to developers that have no experience is almost a near surefire way for the games to fail (I say “near surefire” because of Arkham Asylum).
Not to say Dark Void is ENTIRELY bad… it has a fun concept… And that’s about it. The controls are very way too loose, the flying stages aren’t fun, the TPS segments pale in comparison to any of the good TPS games this generation, the story isn’t good, the presentation is subpar. There’s basically nothing about the game that’s really well done. It had huge potential, and I’ll admit I was mildly interested in playing it before I played the demo, but it ended up not being a really good game.
At least it did generate something good (haven’t tried it yet, but I’m guessing it’s good from what I’ve heard)… Dark Void Zero, which is stupidly only on DSiWare.
This game shows the reason why I love demos: They prevent me from buying bad games.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Cool concept
- Only around 5-6 hours to complete, so you don’t have to suffer for really long
- The enemies look pretty cool
Cons
- Glitchy
- Sound breaks up
- Very below average graphics
- Lame gameplay
- Boring story
- Only one boss fight, and it’s terrible
- Really easy despite the controls being less than desirable
- “Vertical combat” is just a very dumbed-down version of the normal TPS segments
- Big monsters and hijacking is just big badly-made QTEs
- No multiplayer, removing any possible replay value
The Save Factor
Hum… The game has a starting price of $60 ($40 on PC). And that’s WAY too high. If you insist on buying it, wait until it’s $10. Or just rent it, whichever is cheaper.
I can’t believe this game sold so damn much. At least 300000 people bought this. It might not sound like a really high number, but considering how bad this game is, it IS high. It’s from an unproven developer (who previously had only released a few games including PC ports of the GRAW games and… hum… that super crappy “Wanted” game), it looked crappy in the gameplay videos and, well… I have no idea why anyone bought this at launch instead of renting it. SURE, they did a GREAT job with Bionic Commmando Rearmed, but they had pretty much nothing to do there other than up the visuals and add boss fights. Oh, and not to mention they released the incredibly crappy Terminator Salvation games a day after Bionic Commando.
This is a “game that didn’t” on just about every front and is an insult to fans of the original.
Read on and see why.
Developer: GRIN
Publisher: Capcom
Date of Release: May 18, 2009
Platforms: PS3, 360, PC
Genre: Third person shooter
Players: 1 (more online)
Expectations
Well… the gameplay videos didn’t display any fun gameplay, with the shooting being awkward and the swinging never looking as fun and smooth as it should be. But I thought it might end up okay when you actually played the game. And the reviews, while not stellar, were still not completely negative. So after waiting a few months to try it out, I thought the hype/anti-hype would die down, and it did, and I could go at it without people talking about how bad it is, or how awesome it is.
Sure, the character designs were a major turnoff, and the gameplay didn’t look interesting, and I was never really hyped for this, but I was still happy to see a new Bionic Commando game, hoping it might be good. But, as you might’ve deducted from my introductory post, this game sucked.
Why it didn’t
Why did it suck? Well, there’s multiple reasons for that, so let’s break it down by points!
Controls
The controls are bad. Very bad. They’re unresponsive, sometimes requiring multiple button presses for Rad Spencer to move at all. When it is responsive, the hit detection is so laughable what you wanted to do might not even work anyways. The worst in this case is the swinging. Basically: You aim at something, and if it’s close enough(a cursor will tell you when it is) you grapple to it if you’re holding L2. That should be incredibly simple to use. Yet just about every time I have to use the bionic arm, it doesn’t respond properly. Sometimes it hooks me up to the ceiling when I’m aiming at an enemy, or it just won’t hook up to what I want. Sometimes I’ll be right next to something, I’ll aim at it, and the arm will never deploy, causing me to fall in water and die. When you do swing, you have an icon that appears to tell you what the optimal time to let go is, but sometimes it just makes you not move at all and just fall. Normal movement, not counting the bionic arm, is floaty and full of glitches.
The combat is also awkward, since all the attacks clase-range have stupidly low range, the arm doesn’t work well so using it in battle isn’t usually a good idea (unless you HAVE to use the arm). The weapons are usually the way to go. Strangely the basic pistol is by far the worst weapon. Its accuracy is lower than the machine gun’s, since the bullets just fly out at complete random from the gun instead of going straight whether you’re moving or not (yay for the laws of physics), it’s weak (unless you do headshots, otherwise  you do more damage with your fists). Aiming your weapons is slow and clunky, moreso if you go in “zoom” mode for slightly more accurate aim. Another bad element here is health. It seems like there’s no actual health system here. You have a random amount of health and attacks do a random amount of damage. Sometimes a grenade exploding right next to you will kill you, sometimes it will just hurt a bit. Same for gunshots. Sometimes 5 people shooting you at the same time will slowly bring oyur health down, while sometimes one person shooting you will kill you in a second. It’s completely random. That’s all there is to it.
The game just doesn’t control very well.
Stupid gameplay elements
This game is filled with stupid ideas here, so let’s crack down on a few.
First: The bionic arm. Well, it’s a fine idea. The arm enables you to swing where you want, go where you want to go, take any paths to reach the next area… right? Well, no. You’re almost always limited to a set path. Going off that path will bring you into “radiation”(wtf? why is it not everywhere instead of just random spots?), which kills you within a second. So if you find a faster way to get to your destination, you can’t take it. Sometimes even paths that look like you can take(since they’re just a bit lower that the “set path”) are plunged in radiation. There’s literally no freedom here. If there’s no radiation outside of a set path, it’s just because there’s a collectible close. Let’s add water to the problems here. Some areas are randomly full of water. If you want to go through through, you have to not touch the water. Getting in water, unless it’s shallow, kills you. You CAN technically get out of water by grappling to something and pulling yourself out, but when you’re in water you can’t see a thing and you have to be lucky to find something to latch on to. And sometimes even things next to you can’t be latched on to because the game just glitches out on you. Lame.
Another thing I hated is the radar. What made me hate it? One area in the forest. Well, there’s this door I couldn’t get into because it was blocked by an energy field. I look around for a switch or something, try to find a way to get around it(radiation killed me), nothing works. After about 10 minutes I just randomly go on a nearby island and find enemies that I had to kill(which I couldn’t see by zooming on the island, of course)… So why weren’t they displayed on my radar if I NEED to kill them to advance? It’s not hard to pass right next to them without seeing them, since I ended up doing just that 3 times. What’s the point of a radar/mini-map thing if it doesn’t display anything?
Story
Now this is laughable. A random terrorist group blows up a city, and Rad Spencer has to investigate. Rad Spencer, who is going to get executed at the same time(executed because he followed orders… nice), but his execution is stopped for this mission.
The rest is nonsensical and stupid (if the premise itself wasn’t bad enough). The characters are all one-dimensional and boring. The script is laughably bad, I could stop laughing because every single line sounded stupid. It feels like it was written by a 10 year old. I love how the first 2 conversations with the bionic legs girl are exactly the same… Really.
Overall
This game is bad. There’s so much bad about it, the good(wherever it is) is definitely out-weighed by it. By far. The swinging around mechanic, which could’ve made the game a lot more fun that it is, Â barely ever work properly.
It’s lame, not worth playing. Nothing more to say. It had a lot of potential, but failed on every front.
Pros/Cons
Pros
- If you get the disc version, it can serve as an okay Frisbee, or you could break it (that would be much more entertaining than playing the game)
Cons
- Bad controls
- Bad physics
- Clunky combat
- Swinging is boring and badly handled
- Boring array of enemies
- Bad Character designs (just look at the box “art”)
- Boring story
- Characters aren’t interesting, or anywhere near likeable
- Hard for all the bad reasons
- Not as free-roaming as it should be
- Radiation kills you in a second (the fact that radiation exists in the game is bad enough)
- Water kills you (that’s acceptable in old NES Â games, and MAYBE inFamous, but otherwise there’s no excuse unless the water is dangerous for some reason… but no, the excuse here is “the arm is heavy!”… why not use the grappling hook as a propeller or something?)
- No fall damage…. UNLESS the game wants you to have fall damage (what kind of sense does that make?)
The Save Factor
Pay only $10 if you REALLY want to check this out(AKA rent it). Otherwise don’t even bother.
Sometimes, games are just a little bit too ambitious. Â And their ambitions transform into unreasonable hype and make people expect things that they frankly shouldn’t be expecting at all.
Such is what happened to The Conduit. The hype on this was massive. And it failed at just about every level.
Read on and see why!!
Developer: High Voltage Software
Publisher: Sega
Date of Release: June 23, 2009
Platforms: Wii
Genre: FPS
Players: 1 (more in online play)
ESRB Rating: T (Teen)
Massive hype
There was way too much hype for this game. And it’s mostly because of the developer. They claimed this game would use such an advanced graphic engine that it would produce graphics that are just as good quality as the Xbox 360 and PS3. If you were intelligent, you didn’t believe a word of that, or, at worst, were very skeptical about it. The problem here is that a lot of Wii-only owners clinged to this and believed everything the developer told them. Then it was told to have online to rival said opposing consoles, and the best FPS controls on the Wii.
Well, needless to say, there was massive amounts of hype and the developer had a large job ahead to live up to that hype.
Why it didn’t
Well, the biggest problem is that it wasn’t even close to living up to the hype. The graphics were sub-par, even by Wii standards, the online was only a small step beyond that of other Wii games that have online and the controls sucked in comparison to other Wii FPS, most notably Metroid Prime 3.
The graphics, while not incredibly bad, had nothing special, and was nowhere near 360/PS3 quality, making me wonder how the developers were even able to hype it up as such. The models were very basic and simple, the textures were low-quality… Nothing was worth noting here.
The online featured ways to add people to your friend list automatically after playing them, which is a step up from previous Wii games, but it quickly suffered similar problems to online Wii and DS games, featuring tons of cheaters and people glitching the game and hackers. The online quickly became unenjoyable, unless you got a group of friends to play with that you knew wouldn’t cheat. Oh, and there’s no local multiplayer… that’s BS, no matter what system a game is on.
And now the controls. Well, to be totally honest here…. they suck. There’s the constant problem of the game stopping your turning once you aim your wiimote a bit out of the screen. It was a problem on other Wii FPS, of course, but it was dealt with better on those. Oh, wait, the Wii Motion Plus was coming out around the same time, that corrects the problem, right? Well, no. There’s no WM+ support at all, which could have corrected multiple problems with the controls. Other issue: vertical aiming is restricted to a really small area. If there’s a flying enemy right above you, you’re never gonna be able to aim high enough to hit it, since vertical aiming stops after just a little changing of your vertical aiming. This is also a problem with small enemies that attack from close-up, you can’t always aim low enough to hit them. There’s other problems with the controls, of course, like bad implementation of motion controls in there. Try keeping your aim while doing a melee attack… it’s not happening. Throwing grenades is a hassle and the nunchuk is too sensitive, sometimes throwing at the smallest of movements on your part. They basically screwed up the controls as much as they could. After Metroid Prime 3 proved that FPS gameplay could be done right on the Wii, even WITHOUT WM+, why didn’t they jut mimic it?
There’s other problems with the game as well. The story is horrible and doesn’t explain anything. And you never understand why you’re the only one who can save the world, since you’re just a normal guy. Some documents and stuff are scattered through levels with some story details, but developers need to realize that it’s a bad idea to do that. If it’s just a bit extra stuff that isn’t needed to get the story as a whole it’s fine, but when most of the story is told there, it’s really stupid.
I might as well add here the completely random spikes in difficulty. I play through a few hours of the game, only dying once or twice because I threw grenades at myself by error (because of the sensitive nunchuk). Then I get to a building where tons of enemies are coming out of, and of course there’s enemy generators inside the building so unless you destroy them fast, which is pretty much impossible, you’re stuck against a lot of enemies that have deadly accuracy with weapons that can kill you in 1 hit… nice. And of course said weapon is never as effective if you’re using it. Why does the game go from painfully easy to stupidly hard in a matter of minutes? That shouldn’t happen.
Overall
Random difficulty spikes. Disappointing graphics. Bad controls. Horrible story that made no sense. Disappointing online full of cheaters and hackers. There’s not a lot of redeeming qualities in this game. The hype was just so huge, it was pretty much assured disaster. I was skeptical about it all, of course, and approched the game with caution, knowing it probably wouldn’t be that great. And I was right.
This is the perfect example of a game destroyed by unreasonable hype. And a perfect example of a game that didn’t.
The Save Factor
As of the moment of this writing, The Conduit has a starting price of $50. Way too high. The Save Factor for this one is:
$10 (there’s better FPS on other consoles AND on the Wii, get the Metroid Prime Trilogy instead)
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Well, I’m going just a bit less than a year back in the Xbox 360 library to talk about this game. I refused to play it for a long time because the trailers made it look like crap. But I finally rented it and gave it an honest chance. Did my opinion change? Well, this is a “Games that didn’t post” so obviously they didn’t change for the better.
Read on and see why this game is lame!
My expectations
Well, I’ll start this by mentioning one thing: I find that the Banjo-Kazooie games on the Nintendo 64 are almost the best games on the system (I put Star Fox 64 just a bit above them). The music was great (wacky and fun), the gameplay was just incredible in all aspects (great platforming, solid and easy to use controls), lots of moves to learn(and the great controls made them all easy to use), fun combat, being able to transform into different animals (and each controlled differently), tons of collectibles for the completists to find), hilarious dialogue, fun characters, it looked great(and frankly still does, the visual style is still quite good)… It was one of those games where I can frankly say “it did no wrong”(camera control was a bit of an issue, but what 3D game, other than FPS games, have it down perfectly even nowadays? not many, that’s for sure). And yes, it was even better than the awesome Super Mario 64.
So, when I saw the first trailer, I was ecstatic. “Holy shit, a new Banjo-Kazooie game, this is gonna be awesome”. Sure, I was put off by how they redesigned Banjo and Kazooie, but hey, I’d get used to it. And then they showed gameplay. And I didn’t think it was possible for my hype meter to go down THAT low. Why is everything vehicule-based? Why is Kazooie doing nothing anymore? Why is Grunty back(again)? WTF is going on? Add in Rare’s random immaturity when they depicted Banjo shooting a missile at Mario… What, are they claiming they’re doing better since they were sold to MS or something?
Well, let’s just say that, in one trailer, they managed to not only drop my hype, but they showed me that they also had no intention of making something good.
Why it didn’t
So after almost a year(and after getting a 360, of course), I decided to give it a rent and try it out, thinking “MAybe it’s not as bad as I’m expecting”. This is after I got over the fact that this wasn’t gonna be a Banjo-Kazooie game, but a lame vehicle contruction game with Banjo and Kazooie in the game just to get a few extra sales.
Well, the game starts by not only saying “oh, by the way, this will suck”, but mocking everything that made the first games fun(kazooie being useful and actually doing stuff, all the cool powers, the fun gameplay, etc.). Banjo and kazooie are fat, Grunty is back, but only her head. They are about to fight, but L.O.G (the lord of games) comes by, gives Grunty a robotic body and makes Banjo fit again. So what’s going on here? Well, the game is self-aware, and L.O.G is apparently responsible for making every game in existence, and he’s transporting Grunty and the BK combo into a game! The goal of the game they get transported into? Well, BK must try to get out of it, and Grunty is the vilain who has to prevent them from getting out. Oh boy, they KNEW the game would be bad… I mean, look at this lame story! Heck, the game is self aware, it KNOWS that it sucks. “Hey Banjo, your face is square, the fans will hate it!” Well, if you knew fans would hate it, why the hell did you do it like that?
So we know the premise is horrible, but how is the gameplay? Well, to put it bluntly, it sucks. They basically took away everything that made the previous Banjo-Kazooie games awesome, and replaced it with vehicle-based gameplay. Now gameplay elements include: Making vehicules, driving vehicules and moving things around with vehicules. Well, I can’t say much bad about the vehicle making, since it’s solid enough. What I CAN whine about is the crappy vehicle controls. Seriously, I’d think that the most important element for a game based around driving vehicles, at least the controls for said vehicles wouldn’t suck. Turning is horrible, the cars just randomly seem to jump around weirdly at the slightest bump in the road, and reversing is really bad. After some getting used to you should be able to at least move around properly, but it takes some practice and any minor screw ups and you’ll be crashing. It doesn’t help that the physics engine is bad. Things just randomly slide around, and when you hit something it just starts moving around randomly. In the first level, there’s those bull-like creatures… well, the physics engine sucks so badly that moving around is near impossible for them, as taking a step makes them fall on their side and start rolling down the hills.
Since the cars are in the game, you get no powers whatsoever. Just new pieces for your cars (or planes/helicopters). “Oh, there somewhere you couldn’t go? Welll here’s some new wheels!”. Why did they feel removing the powers was so mandatory? Even the normal attacks are limited to swinging the wrench around instead of having Banjo or Kazooie actually do an attack based on their skills. Why can’t Kazooie peck enemies anymore? Why can’t Banjo claw bad-guys to death anymore? Why are you stuck to equipping lame weapons on your vehicles instead of making Kazooie spit/shit eggs? This really lowers the value of the game.
So, to go through the game, you must find jiggies (jigsaw puzzle pieces…. are you surprised?). You get those jiggies for doing various tasks in various worlds. Those tasks vary from driving to places, driving to places while transporting stuff, driving to places to pick stuff up and bring them somewhere else, driving to places and talking to people… oh and there’s races… Yeah, there’s pretty much no variety in what you have to do. It’s pretty much just driving around and picking stuff up. There’s a few variations of that of course, some that require flying vehicles that have incredibly bad handling. And to ruin things even more, there’s no searching around for jiggies anymore, now it’s just looking on your mini-map and see where people needing help are… And ALL tasks are timed, giving you different rewards depending on how fast you finish them(at least THAT’S a fun idea…).
The one really annoying thing here is actually collecting stuff. Jiggies, boxes with vehicle parts. Instead of jut picking them up, you have to take them, carry them with you and transport them to different parts. Jiggies go in the vacuum in the middle, and the vehicle piece boxes go on the pink square next to Mumbo. It’s just really annoying that you have to bring everything to the middle of the hub to advance, instead of just picking them up and being done with it. And for the jiggies, you actually have to go to a jiggy dispenser after finishing tasks in the levels to get them out and then be able to actually collect them…. WTF!? Jinjo’s are also annoying, also asking for random driving-based tasks to collect them. That’s not including the Jinjos in the Hub, which, again, require you to pick them up and drive them somewhere. Even to open levels you have to take something and bring it somewhere else. Overall, collecting stuff, other than musc notes, is annoying. And I frankly have no idea why, it’s just bad game design.
So the reasons it didn’t? Well, bad controls, bad gameplay, stupid premise, making a mockery of the previous games and its fanbase…. If I played the game any longer I could probably find more things to whine about.
Does it do SOMETHING right?
I’d LOVE to say that no, that there is nothing done right, but that would be false. First, the graphics are quite nice. Â Sure, I hate the character designs for Banjo, Kazooie, Grunty and L.O.G, but the environments look quite nice. The level design is a piece of shit, but the graphics themselves are quite well done, with cool effects and textures. Also, despite the collecting being badly done, there’s tons of stuff to collect. Each task has not only jiggies, but trophies to get if you’re fast enough to complete each tasks. There’s jinjos as well, music notes, parts for vehicles and of course jiggies. If you end up actually liking the game, there’s tons of play value to it. That element was probably the only thing in the game that was kept like in the original games(almost).
Oh, and they managed to NOT screw up the music… I don’t know how they managed that…. OH, RIGHT, THEY JUST RIPPED THE MUSIC RIGHT OUT OF BANJO-KAZOOIE! They re-use the same music with minor modifications. Way to be fun and original Rare! They should’ve done the same with the gameplay…
Overall
This game is a parody of Banjo-Kazooie(a parody? screw that, it’s an insult, plain and simple). I think that it’s WILLINGLY bad. They deliberately made a bad game to piss fans off. There’s  really no reason other than that for the game to be this bad. Heck, there’s no reason to even have made this game, other than saying “You want Banjo-Kazooie? THERE, take this piece of shit, there’s Banjo-Kazooie in the title, you should be happy with that”.
I frankly feel insulted that Rare thought BK fans would like this. Bad controls, bad gameplay, stupid gameplay elements, stupid story, screwed up character design, stupid concept… Why?
It’s a simple thing to make a fun Banjo-Kazooie game, they had no trouble with the first 2. Give us powers, fun platforming, varied gameplay, interesting boss battles, humor, interesting puzzles… You know, all things that WEREN’T in this game? Instead all we got was a vehicle-based game with crappy vehicle controls. Good job Rare… You managed to destroy the best N64 series with one game.
Also:Â http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=275
The Save Factor
Well, if you REALLY like the fully-customizable vehicle element… $10
Otherwise it’s not even worth thinking about.
Okay, just to be fair… Save Factor: $5
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There are games that don’t, and games that REALLY don’t. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is one of those.
I was willing to give it a chance. Western FPS is a fun idea, possibly. But what I got didn’t amount to much.
This time I’ll go straight to explaining why it didn’t and just skip the whole “review” part of the post.
Read on! (I’ll be short on this one)
Why the game didn’t
Well for one the aiming sucked. Your crosshair turns red when there’s a target that you can hit by shooting. Simple enough. Btu almost half the time, even if the target is dead center (unless you’re close to the enemy), your shots will miss. And to add to the frustration, the game features an auto-aim function, which is basically just there to throw off your aim, moving at total random and being confused when there’s more than one enemy around. Fun! I also hate that there’s no button to throw dynamite. Instead, you have to switch weapons, so that you have a pistol in one hand and a dynamite in the other, and then you can use it. That’s pretty stupid if you ask me. Like the PS3 controller doesn’t have enough buttons or something?
Oh, and the one thing I was interested in here sadly sucks. Duels. Old western-style duels. I thought “how can they go wrong?” Well, they did. Basically, you move you analog stick so that your hand gets close to your gun. When the bell rings, you move your analog stick a bit more to get the gun out, and shoot. It’s surprisingly boring.
The game is filled with annoyances. The game constantly having to load for 5 seconds when you reach a checkpoint is the prime example. Since it’s a modern game and modern games=tons of checkpoints(so the kiddies don’t cry that a game is too hard), you’re constantly reaching checkpoints and it will stop the game to load every few minutes at best. Other annoyances include constantly being stuck because the game doesn’t do a good job of telling you where to go, and sometimes goes out of it’s way to annoy you. There’s this part in a mine where you have to use dynamite to clear debris that are in your way. Simple enough, but it’s one of the first times(if not the first time) in the game you actually have to do that, and any other time you wanted to do something like that before it didn’t work, forcing you to take alternate paths. I’m all for puzzles, but when it’s puzzling because of bad design, it’s pretty stupid.
The biggest annoyance is the story. It’s basic western stuff, kinda, but it’s very badly done. There’s no transition really between missions, it’s just “okay, now you’re here, go blow shit up!”. The characters are all lame and annoying (especially that wuss William always talking about God and stuff). They all have a total lack of personality and their character development is non-existent,. And their motives/the way they do things is just completely random and stupid. And their few attempts at comedy are pathetic at best (I did chuckle once though). And the cuscenes… damn they’re boring! It’s always just characters talking about uninteresting things, with nothing else going on. Couldn’t be much more boring than that. But overall the plot is as uninteresting as it can be, and it doesn’t feel like there was an honest effort on making an interesting story.
But the stupidest thing of all? Well, there are 2 playable characters, and for the most part both missions can be played by both, and both characters are around the same place most of the time too. What’s stupid about that? Well the fact that there’s no co-op watsoever! That’s right, a game clearly built around the idea of co-op has no co-op play. I don’t get it.
Overall
This is a very boring game overall. There are some nice ideas, like some side missions, and buying new guns and ammo (though it really sucks that buying guns for one brother doesn’t automatically transfer to the other if you decide to switch on following missions, so you have to buy new guns for the other brother). But the rest of the game is pretty badly executed overall. Bad aiming, incredibly bad story, bad characters, tons of annoyances, lack of co-op gameplay despite the game being co-op. I played this for quite a few hours.
The Save Factor
10$
There’s a ton of FPS on the market right now, most of which are better than this.
(Yeah, another FPS, it seems like a lot of those are “Games that Didn’t”)
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Well, for my first “Games That Didn’t” post, I’ll talk about a game that didn’t, just minutes ago for me.
Sometimes there are game that just don’t, and that for various reasons. Sometimes it’s bad gameplay, sometimes some gameplay mechanics are just incredibly bad, and sometimes there’s game breaking glitches. But fact of the matter is, some games just don’t. And Wolfenstein, sadly, didn’t.
Read on to see why it didn’t!
The game itself
Presentation
The starting cinematic looks great. I looked at it and thought “Wow, this looks awesome, there’s definitely lots of production value in the game”… And then the cinematic ended. The graphics too a drastic drop, even in following cinematics. Â The graphics still look not bad at all, but compared to the opening cinematic it’s weak. The basic area of the game is just browns and grays, pretty lame-looking. The other areas are darker browns and grays, with occasional green. Again, not great. Also, the framerate is occasionally choppy and there’s random drops at times.
The sounds were okay. Basic gunfire sounds and nazis screaming stuff. Nothing special here. The voice acting is okay from what I’ve seen, but far from stellar.
The story is a bit lame. Agent BJ Blazkowicz(did they ever say what BJ stood for?), from the previous Wolfenstein games, is sent to help out a group of a resistance or something. And he’s literally the only guy in all that group to actually do something. Basically he becomes an errand boy for them, though he always ends up destroying nazi bases. The story progression is pretty much “Go to that place, go to the end, pick something up, get back here”, which is a bit on the boring side. And the nazis are doing historically innacurate paranormal research to summon monsters and transform themselves and use magic to take over the world. Meh. Different than the usual WW2 game, but not incredibly interesting anyways.
Gameplay
The gameplay is normal FPS stuff. If you’ve played one FPS this generation, you already know how this one plays, since it’s no different. This one features no actual cover system, resorting to just having a crouch button instead. The aiming is actually pretty smooth, one of the few console-FPS this generation that I’m actually not having too much trouble with. The zooming-in aim is obviously more accurate, but the normal aim works quite well too.
The “special” element here is the Veil. A sort of power BJ get’s access to early in the game. Using the D-pad you can use various powers from the Veil. A force field that will stop bullets, something that will make your weapons stronger, you can slow down time and just use to Veil to go a bit faster and go through certain walls (most of the time there’s a marking to show you where to use it. This adds a few fun elements in the game. The shield protects you if there’s no cover around, the Veil lets you see things you can’t usually see, like certain enemies, the slow down can get you out of tight situations and the empower thing can make fights a lot easier by making you bullets go through barriers and such.
There’s also a fun upgrade system, where you can use money you find to upgrade your weapons. You can add scopes, make them more powerful, reduce recoil, increase magazine size, and various other things. It’s a fun system for sure. Also, in the black market, where you can boost your guns, you can also boost your Veil powers. I don’t know how the black market can do that, but they can. The quirk here is that you have to find certain books in the levels to be able to do some of the Veil upgrades, and those books seem pretty tough to find (in the time I played I only found 1).
And there’s lots of things to find. While you’re not blowing the heads off nazis, you can explore the levels, go off the normal path, to find stuff. It’s just gold, documents that explains some things about the story and the tomes of power (which I talked about earlier). If you’re really into it you can add some playtime to the game by finding everything.
The playtime is a problem here. Even by not rushing through it, you’re looking at around 6-7 hours of gameplay in single player. Less if you do no exploration at all.
Overall
It’s not bad. Not bad at all. With more effort they could’ve made a genuinely great game. But it falls short in quite a few aspects here. And, of course, there’s a reason it didn’t.
Why it didn’t
This is a big problem with me. Game-breaking glitches. This one is particularly bad, and it makes me wonder if the developers did any testing on the product. And I know for a fact that I’m not the only person who encountered this glitch. When I started up the game there was a patch, so I thought they forgot to fix a minor bug or something before printing the game, and that I wouldn’t get any game-breaking glitch. But I have no idea what that patch was for, and I did end up getting a glitch. Nice.
So what happened? Well, far enough into the game (after around 5 hours of gameplay), I get back from a mission into the Hub area (which connects to all other maps, and friendly bases/the black market, things like that). There, I get a cutscene. After the cutscene, I get killed. Some airborne enemy which I forgot existed shot a few rockets at me. So I die. I reload the last checkpoint, which was a bit before the cutscene. I get to the cutscene, but this time I skip it, since I already saw it. And then… I’m not holding a gun anymore, I can’t run, I can’t shoot, I can’t throw grenades, I can’t use melee attacks. What can I do? Walk around, and use the Veil. I can switch guns too, but that’s useless since I can’t see or use them. And anything that requires the Triangle button still worked, so if I found a turret I could still shoot stuff. Not very useful since they’re few and far between. My other alternative for combat was using the Time-stop power, which, upgraded, damages nearby enemies… not very handy and highly limited.
So my only option? Restart the game completely. I tried quitting the game and reloading my save but the glitch was still there. No matter what I do I have no guns anymore, and pretty much no proper way to defend myself.
So this game didn’t, because the developer didn’t pinpoint such a game-breaking glitch, which should’ve been caught by the developer way before release. The game might be good, but a glitch like this is a bit too much.
The Save Factor
If the glitch is corrected, and it’s seemingly a random occurrence (but if you get it, it’s game-breaking), I’d say the Save Factor for this game is:
20$ (not the best FPS out there, but worth checking out, especially for fans of the series)
]]>As for actual features, there’s my high desolate “Jobocan’s Arcade Center” posts that I keep forgetting about and hasn’t had a post in months (though I plan to do more of them soon). And there’s the monthly “Games that are coming out next month” posts which are really just there for informational purposes. But that’s pretty much all we have when it comes to features.
So here I come to announce some new features!
Read on and see what I have in mind!
So here are the 2 new feature posts I’ll be starting soon!
The Games That Didn’t
Sometimes games just don’t…. No matter how honest an effort the devs give for a game, you play a game and it just doesn’t… That’s what these posts will be about.
There are quite a few games I wanted to review, but ended up not reviewing because they were boring me too much, so they didn’t give me any incentive to play through them, or even any incentive to play at least enough to write a full review. So “The Games That Didn’t” is about just that. In each post I’ll talk about a game I was planning to review, but the game just didn’t do it for me and I ended up not playing enough to review it. I’ll tell you what I didn’t like about it and why the game, as a whole, didn’t. And I’ll give a vague Save Factor(read about it here), of course.
Not just games that will come out from now on will be featured here, I’ll look back and talk about multiple games that didn’t. (A note for the writers on the site: even if I make a “games that didn’t” post for a game you were planning to review, this doesn’t  stop you from doing a full review of the game anyways).
Challenges from the Past
“Challenges from the Past” is a different take on retro reviews. I’ll try to do something different than the usual “going back to the past playing shitty games that suck ass” thing that started after the AVGN got popular (not that the AVGN isn’t awesome, because he IS(a lot), but the number of people doing “shitty retro game” reviews with excessive swearing has been increasing since he appeared and I don’t want to jump on bandwagon). If I happen to review a bad game, I’ll still not make it a swear-feast or anything.
Before writing each post in this feature, I’ll contact everyone in the team here at The Save Points and tell them what game I’ll be reviewing. Why you ask? Well because they’ll each give me one challenge to do in said game, and I’ll try to add my own personal challenge to that.
So in addition to the normal stuff in reviews, and telling you how well the game holds up in recent days, I’ll be playing those challenges, and reporting about them. This will add an element of challenge and fun to the reviewing process. For now, sadly, I have no recording equipment, so for now this will just be written. But if i do get a way to record my gameplay straight from my old consoles I’ll try to get my challenges recorded and add those to the reviews.
I’ll only be doing retro posts about games I ACTUALLY have (no emulators, they’d make me prone to cheating to go through the challenges). As for the generations of consoles, while I don’t consider the N64 to be retro, that’s the most recent system I’ll do reviews for since some people do consider it retro. And I’ll be going back down to the NES, unless I manage to find and buy older systems. I’ll also take suggestions for games to talk about, of course.
Final Word
So there you have it, The Save Points’ 2 new features that I’ll be handling. If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to tell us!
*hopes more writers on the site will start new features as well 
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