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.
I didn’t have many expectations for this game. If anything, I was expecting it to be average and nothing more. But the game ended up being really badly made and no fun at all.
So as you can guess, I didn’t like it.
Read on to see why!
Looks and sounds
The graphics are… unimpressive at best. The character models have seemingly low poly-counts(the lion bosses look lame and lifeless), the environments are repetitive (basically every room looks the same), the enemies designs are not too great and have a massive lack of variety and the cutscenes use the in-game engine which isn’t too great. It uses some sort of cel-shading to try to hide the flaws, but ultimately fails.
The sounds are basic stuff. The music is not too bad actually, the high point of the game… The voice acting is…. Well, the lion bosses sound lame, the lame light magic guy is lame and Ayumi is okay.
Story
You play as Ayumi, a treasure hunter. She’s on some random island with ruins looking for treasure. After the first boss she becomes cursed and tried to find a cure for the curse (which, sometimes, makes a big number of enemies pop up). So now she tries harder to find the treasure since it can apparently get rid of the curse. Really basic and boring story. I skipped half the cutscenes because they weren’t fun to watch. Ayumi could’ve been an interesting character, but fails to do or say anything interesting. The setting and such of the game doesn’t help either. Random girl going to random island to find random treasure and gets random cliché curse… Not gonna win awards anytime soon, that’s for sure.
Gameplay
Where to start? Well, it’s hard to say if they wanted to make a lame DMC clone or a lame Dynasty Warriors clone…
The controls are okay. You can jump(X), use normal attack combos(Square), shoot your guns (R1), lock-on(L1), move around and use special attacks or power-ups binded to certain buttons (Triangle, Circle, L2 and R2). The normal attack combo is standard stuff. The lock-on system is quite annoying to use. Special attacks and guns target to the currently targeted enemy (which is random basically, unless you point the camera straight at the enemy you want), or just hit an area around you. What really annoying is the dodge system. You need to be moving in one direction, then push the same direction while pressing the jump button. It doesn’t work well, but above all it’s completely useless other than in one of the trap rooms.
Fighting enemies is simple at first, but it becomes a hassle really fast. At first it’s hard to see when you’re getting hit, since there’s pretty much no sign of attacks hitting you(small splatters of blood), unless it’s big fireballs. Eventually, there’s tons of enemies in a room that can hurt you just by touching you, so when there’s a lot, your combos get broken off fast. You also realize that getting hit cuts off your attack and you get a tiny amount of time where you can’t attack (other than certain special attacks), so when you’re surrounded by a lot of enemies and other flying enemies are swooping down on you(AKA ALL THE TIME), your chances to attack are quite cut down. And with so many many enemies all the time, the targeting is screwed up too.
When entering a room, normally there’s a type of enemy in particular you have to kill, and the only way to know that is killing them and checking if the “enemy life bar” is going down or not. And the encounters are usually long and boring, with many life-bars, or generators that respawn enemies that you have to destroy. Pretty much all the rooms are like that. This game is the very definition of repetitive. There’s, like, 3 trap rooms with no enemies, but they’re actually really lame and easy to get through.
Really, the fighting is all sorts of annoying, you really need to experience it to see the crappiness. The hit detection is bad, there’s bugs everywhere (the most obvious one being that Ayumi jumps at total random sometimes), and it’s just not fun at all. There’s some interesting ideas, like enemies that are weak to certain kinds of magic or attacks and such, and the combo meter to get more souls when killing enemies works fine when it’s not being stopped by annoying flying enemies. But there’s so much bad that the good points can’t make up for it.
But with all the annoyances, you’d expect the game to be really hard. But it’s all the contrary. The game is overly easy to get through. Why? Well,it’s simple. If you have enough souls, you can’t die. There’s an upgrade system in the game, requiring to gain souls to gain new techniques, but what you’ll most often be using is healing. That’s right, you can pause the game any time and heal yourself. Any trouble you may have with the game is nulled by the fact that you can heal yourself when you want. Sure, it costs souls to get them, and the cost goes up as you advance through the game. But the number of souls you get as you advance gets higher and higher, and you can revisit rooms to farm souls, so it’s really easy to get both the skills you need and still have enough to heal yourself all you need through “tough” battles. This makes the game really boringly easy.
The one almost interesting part is the boss fights. They require you knowing what techniques and skills to use. Some bosses have special barriers, certain weaknesses, things like that, and having the right build or skills can make or break the battle. But in the end they’re also a bit easy, and when you have all the skills you can easily set-up the proper skillsets you need.
Overall
This isn’t a well done game at all. Filled with bugs, clunky hit detection, annoying enemies and it’s just not fun to play. I see what they were trying to do with this game, and it was a good attempt, but in the end the final result was bad.
The story is boring, the gameplay is lame and filled with bad design, the graphics are sub-par, the story is bad, and it’s too easy. It’s a bit hard to explain, but the bottom line is that it’s not a good game.
I can’t recommend this game to anyone really. Unless you like bad games, that is.
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Just looking at this game’s cover, you know right away that this game sucks. If you don’t, you’re clearly new to Sonic.
Well, this is the second part of the “Sonic StoryBook Series” (lamest idea ever). The first was “Sonic and the Secret Rings’. Secret Rings wasn’t exactly a good game, but it wasn’t THAT bad either. After playing a while, you upgraded Sonic and you finally got some speed and the gameplay was… okay. It took quite a bit of upgrading before the game was playable enough, so it’s understandable that people quit fast. But, in the end, it wasn’t a bad game.
Now take everything that was bearable in Secret Rings and remove it all and add a sword. This gives you Sonic and the Black Knight.
Now, this isn’t a review. Well, not exactly. I didn’t finish it, only got halfway throug(fighting Arthur), and won’t ever touch this again. So this is more of a first impressions thing… Kinda.
Looks and Sounds
If there’s one thing I won’t diss too much about this game, it’s the graphics. They’re definitely up there by Wii standards. The environments and colors are vibrant and beautiful. there’s a big variety of areas, and a few of them, fields, lakes and the castle are really nice looking. The caves are a bit lame though. Otherwise, enemy and citizen design are generic and boring. The cutscenes are in a storybook style just like Secret Rings. Very light on animation, and the little animation there is is really lame.
The sounds are just what you’d expect from a Sonic game, and Sonic’s voice is fine, just like before. The music is lame though, but I didn’t pay that much attention to it so I can’t judge it properly.
Story
Now this is where the game goes to crap. Even after playing it I can’t comprehend how they thought about it, or why they thought it would be a good idea. Well, it’s about Sonic getting in a storybook about Camelot. But here, King Arthur is an immortal demon because of the scabbard of Excalibur giving him random powers like summoning evil entities from the underworld. So Sonic, with the help of Caliburn(a talking sword that says “Fool” a lot), must gather 3 legendary swords, stealing them from the Knights of the Round Table (who are still loyal to Arthur despite him being evil… don’t know how that makes sense at all), which will give Caliburn the power to defeat Arthur. Well, I can’t go much further than that, but I know there’s more to it, but really… Why? I don’t get it. Why make Arthur, and the Knights of the Round Table for that matter (though they become good guys later), evil? I just don’t get it. The story is horrible, and the cutscenes really don’t help.
Gameplay
If the story wasn’t bad enough, well brace yourselves, the gameplay is even worse.
Now, it takes the basic elements of Sonic and the Secret Rings, but pretty much ruins it all…. Whatever there was to ruin. It’s still “on-rails” (sometimes there’s an alternate path that leads to the exact same place). You pick fairies (which give rings), kills enemies, and do the objectives asked from you. There’s rails to grind, speed boosts that make it impossible to know what’s going on, and citizens you can give rings to.
What really ruins this game is the controls. Secret Rings had simple controls. Lean the Wiimote on the sides to move horizontally, jump with the 2 button(and you slide before you jump)), shake the wiimote to do the homing attack. It was simple and easy to use. Here they ruined it all. Now they added the nunchuk for movement and guarding(Z button), the A button jumps and does the homing… thing (it’s not an attack anymore) and random Wiimote waggling attacks. In theory that could be not too bad, but the controls are just badly implemented. There’s a delay when you attack, sometimes the waggling is just unresponsive and nothing happens, and it just doesn’t work really well at all. When you jump, you have to be at the right height to do the dash, if you’re not you just get back on the ground really fast. Attacking is a chore. Swinging at random brings you nowhere, but trying to do proper attacks is just as useless. Basically, you swing the remote around and hope for the best. Attacking from the air is pretty useless too, unless you’re doing the homing thing. But if you’re doing it and hit an enemy, it’s unclear as to whether you’ll be able to launch an attack or not. The controls are just broken. Nothing works as it should and it just sucks.
The only thing that’s well done here in comparison to Secret Rings is the backtracking. This really didn’t work well in secret rings, but here it’s loads better. But that’s about it.
To have some kind of control on your attacks, focus attacks(I think that’s what they’re called, frankly I don’t care) are the way to go. Hold B and slash, which brings you straight to the next enemy, and you can do it to a series of enemies. And if you wait a bit and attack when your sword glows, it replenishes just a bit of Soul Meter which is used to do those attacks. Those are really the only well done parts of the game.
There’s also boss battles, which require guarding and timing your attacks properly, but they’re barely worth mentioning. Even fighting Arthur is boring. In stages there’s gonna be citizens of Camelot and the surroundings. You have to try not to hurt them, but you can also give them rings. I actually don’t know why I’d do that, but some quests require you to do that. Giving them rings is a simple QTE mini-game that REALLY sucks. Why just not give them the damn rings?
There’s some other gameplay elements. There’s a class system, where you can be either a Cavalier, Paladin or Knight (you start as knight). Depending on which you choose, you have different skills. Those can add to your speed, change your attacks and other stuff like that. This is the alternative to the skills system from Secret Rings which was infinitely better and actually gave you customization. You can also get equipment, which give you other skills, but those are pretty limited. There’s a few cryptic systems like the title thing that gives you followers that do nothing, stuff like that.
What’s really annoying is that this is a slow Sonic game. You’re constantly slowed down to fight enemies, or do puzzles, or give rings to idiots. And even when you’re going fast, those parts are when you don’t really do anything. It’s never a fast game. And considering the combat is horrible, slowing down to fight is not a good thing.
Overall
This game is horrible. I mean… The moment I saw the first trailer for the game, I knew it was going to be crap. THEY GAVE SONIC A SWORD! What’s next, giving him a gun? Oh wait *recalls in horror the… horror that was Shadow the Hedgehog*. Well, this game sucks, that’s really all I need to say. Sega clearly don’t care about Sonic anymore. Simple as that. They don’t WANT to make a good game with him anymore.
Unless they want to make a proper game with him, they might as well just drop him altogether. He’s had a good run in his days, but Sonic is dying and Sega is doing with him what they did with the Genesis: keeping him on life support*coughsegaCD32xcough*.
I recently reviewed the Xbox 360 Onechanbara game, Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad. It was a fun little game, with simple but fun gameplay. I only rented the Wii version, but got enough gameplay from it to see that it’s a lot worse than the 360 version.
This will just be a short post. So read on!
Looks and sounds
The graphics are obviously a step down from the Xbox 360 version. But not THAT much of a step down, since the 360 version was mostly a very low grade 360 game graphic-wise. The textures are a lot worse, the models have a lower poly-count. Graphic glitches are a dime a dozen though. And there’s a bit lack of detail everywhere. But the graphics are still okay by wii standards. The sounds are pretty much the same, though some things sound a lot worse, like the chainsaws.
Story
Well… It’s a sequel to the Xbox 360 game. But it’s kinda hard to tell, since there’s barely any cutscenes or anything, other than a few when a character meets another character, and there’s barely any work done on those. The rest of the story is told through slowly scrolling blocks of text that aren’t really interesting to read. You can make the text scroll faster, but it’s never really intesresting and the story never really seems to be moving… Kinda lame on that side.
Gameplay
There’s one big problem with this game: Wii Controls. They’re badly done. Swinging the Wiimote slashes your sword (or fists if you’re using Saki’s Beat style), swinging the nunchuk kicks (or does Saki’s grabs in Beat style). That could’ve been fine… Almost. The Wiimote is incredibly unresponsive, and won’t do anything if you swing it horizontally, unless you start a weird horizontal combo that I never figured out how to do. Holding certain buttons on the Wiimote while swinging do extra things: holding 1 will let you do a special or an extasy attack by swinging the Wiimore or nunchuk (respectively), and holding B and swinging the Wiimote cleans your sword or fists from blood. There’s the most annoying part: doing different attacks. That just doesn’t really work. There’s thrust attack with Saki and Aya where you have to do a slight pause then thrust the Wiimote on the fourth attack, but it almost never works, and most of the time you’ll end up doing something else completely.
But you know what’s annoying? Despite the controls not working really well, the game is EASIER. There’s almost always fewer zombies on screen, and but random Wiimote wagglnig almost guarantees that most of your attacks will be Cool combination attacks. Those are done when you swing right when the first attack hits (just like in the 360 version), and it was hard but rewarding to do in the 360 version. In the Wii version, more than half your attacks will be Cool combination attacks, and that’s just with random Wiimote waggling. It sucks when games encourage random Wiimote waggling.
But there’s ONE think the Wii version does better: in-game tutorials! Yeah. From time to time the game stops and gives you a window explaining some of the gameplay mechanics. The 360 version didn’t do that, and consequently you had to figure all that by yourself. Well, the 360 version DID gives those tips, but only one at a time when you died (giving you a tip that has to do with how you died).
OH, also Saki has a style change this time, being able to fight with her fists. That’s cooler than the “no different fighting styles” from the 360 game.
Overall
It’s budget priced, and the price is lower than the Xbox 360 game. But it’s a lot less worth it than the Xbox 360 version. The tacked on Wii Controls are lame and unresponsive, and could’ve been handled a lot better. The graphics are worse but not too bad. The story is a lot harder to understand with the big lack of cutscenes and conversations (you CAN read the text that passes by on every chapter, but that’s a bit annoying). This game is big proof that Wii Controls can really suck if not done properly. If you want a similar game, check out Soul Calibur Legends, it at least controls are better.
Yeah, that’s it. Not very a very long review, but it doesn’t need to be longer.
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