With Xbox 360 reaching 43 million kills not too long ago, this unlocked a third map for us. I like this kind of community achievement system. Much like what was used in noby noby boy with the moon and mars. In any case, almost none of this was my doing as I didn’t have much time to toy around with this game until tonight. Yes, this is basically a review based on one night’s play. I booted up this game and immediately went for “Play Air Superiority” on Coral Island. A game mode that is exclusively based on air combat. You have to compete for air superioty of an area in the middle of the map. The first day this game came out on xbox I rushed to get it only to find out I couldn’t really play online. This was a perfect time for me to train with the airplanes. It payed off. Dogfights are FUN. I had nothing of the sort in Battlefield: Bad Company. Bad Company being my only real experience with this series in the past mind you. I played countless hours online with my buddies. You can check out my stats online if you want. You will need to login to your EA account to view this I believe.
They are bound to fix these things live on 1943 soon enough as well. It doesn’t seem to be working quite well at this time.
So far I’ve had a few achievements which are decent. I’ll try getting them all. The classes are slightly disappointing versus bad company. I’ve grown quite accustomed to the variety that game had especially when you threw in the many weapons you unlocked while playing the game. Anyways, without further ado, my review of BF1943 on xbox360.
Developer: DICE
Publisher: EA
Date of Release: July 8th 2009 (xbox360) July 10th 2009 (ps3), PC (eventually)
Platform: Xbox 360 (XBLA), PS3 (PSN), PC
Genre: FPS
Players: 1 on the console, 24 in the match
The Graphics:
Pretty similar to Bad Company. The islands are beautiful, the trees are better than most other multi player FPS of the sort. The character models and weapons are good. The explosions are sweet. But lets face it, you’re playing Battlefield to ride vehicles and shoot people not look at the scenery.
The Maps:
Playing on Wake Island is fun, the bases are nicely spread and the air strikes provide a nice capture point. The map is also shaped like a U unlike the others. I’d say this is my favorite after Coral Island.
Guadalcanal is pretty straight forward, no islands, no bay. In fact, I’d say it’s pretty similar to Iwo Jima in terms of complexity and design. So there’s four total but that’s fine. Maybe they’ll add more eventually. Dice were pretty friendly with BF:BC
The Game:
This is basically running on a modified Bad Company engine called Frostbyte. Version 2 will be used for BF:BC2 but this iteration of the game uses something almost similar as far as I’ve read. Apparently they tuned up the environmental damage but I can’t really see much of that in proof yet. I believe I’ve totally destroyed a wooden bunker. In bad company the frame would often remain standing no matter how much damage you threw at the target. Jeeps seem to plow right through trees however.
Like I stated before there are three classes. Infantryman, Rifleman and Scout. It’s okay really. I usually pick off people from afar with the riffles, rocket vehicles and machine gun up close. I rarely get the chance to get charges or repair vehicles however. Since there’s no medics this game implemented regenerative health. I didn’t see anything wrong with the way things worked in Bad Company. Medic packs and an HP bar basically added a whole lot more challenge in my opinion and reinforced the team play. Not to mention this infinite ammo business. As a sniper I can basically camp in some really obscure place and lone wolf the entire match. Which I totally did. 7 kills 1 death. I’m a bad sniper but that totally rocked anyways.
The multi player is the only aspect of this game. It allows 24 players much like Bad Company as well. I haven’t played with squads unfortunately. I loved pairing up with my buddies before, hopefully I’ll be able to do that sometime soon.
Respawns can be quite annoying if you the game autospawns you in a zone of conflict. Quite often you’ll end up getting gunned down as you get your bearings. You can toggle auto off and pick your location however. There’s three classes. No Medic. That’s pretty much the only thing that griped me. In Bad Company I’d play medic quite often.
The vehicles are pretty sweet. Planes are quite fun to fly around or try and shoot down. Tanks are pretty solid, I threw 2 rockets at one and it didn’t blow up. I’m guessing it wasn’t far off. Jeeps are fast. A nice way to travel and capture flags quickly at the start of the game.
Using the road less traveled and keeping out of sight is pretty much the best way to move around and capture objectives without getting detected too quickly.
The achievements I’ve gotten weren’t too complicated. I have a nice chuckle when I unlocked Master of your domain. I’d say they’re all quite easy to gain though. At least they didn’t do any kill count achievement like before. I detest those.
The Sound:
The theme song is always fun to hear. I miss the harmonica sounds from bad company. The shots firing and such are quite solid. I’ve noticed audio glitches though. Especially in the airplane. If they fix the small glitches I’d say it’s pretty much perfect at that point.
The Bottom Line:
I like this game. I might not play it for as long as I did Bad Company but that’s quite fine with me. Having a solid FPS like this where I don’t even need to pop in a disc is very sweet. The initial server issues were addressed rather quickly too.
Pros:
-It’s 15$
-It’s got planes
-It’s DLC, no disc
-It’s Battlefield
Cons:
-It’s another WW2 Shooter
-3 classes, limited arsenal. Not a very big con however.
-Less than realistic damage if that’s your thing
-Very few game modes
Pictures:
The Save Factor:
Honestly, I’d have purchased this title even if it was $30. Heck I wouldn’t be upset if shortly down the road a few more campaigns were added and the whole package would be 30$, I’d purchase the rest gladly. The bottom line is this game is definitely worth more than $15 and it’s quite a bargain.
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Ah GTA. I don’t know exactly what to think about this series. GTA 1 and 2 were awesome, I had loads of fun with those. But they lost a bit of their charm once they went to 3D, but they still had a similar feel to them. Comically crime-ridden cities, weird characters, and overall good humor and solid enough gameplay. I wasn’t a big fan of the GTA3 “series”, but they were still okay games.
GTAIV removed all that IMO. It became way too serious, the gameplay was clunky and didn’t feel right(running around was a chore), and the physics which are somehow praised by everyone were laughable (realistic physics =/= getting shot 100 feet in the air after hitting a wall with a car). I felt that it kinda ruined everything that made GTA… well… GTA.
So my expectations for Chinatown Wars were very low, and I didn’t even feel like trying it out. But damn, I’m happy I did.
Read on for my impressions of the latest GTA game, and, at the moment of this posting, the highest-rated DS game.
Looks and sounds
The first thing you’ll see when you start playing is that the game re-uses the point of view from the original GTA games, a bird’s eye kinda view, from above the buildings. It’s a bit modified and i uses a sort off cel-shaded 3D graphic engine. The character models are super basic but since you always see them from far away it’s not too bad. The cars are okay too, nothing incredible. But overall the visual style works very well. It doesn’t look incredible, but it more than does the job.
The “cut-scenes” though look pretty cool. You see the characters from close-up in a comic-book style. There’s no animation or anything, but it does a good job at advancing the story and showing the characters to you.
The sounds are simplistic. The car and gunshots are standard fare. There’s no voice acting, other than people screaming when you ram into them or get too close to them on the road, or a few other random voice clips. I also found none of the music to be very good. No, I don’t mind at all that all the music is MIDI, but none of t, in all the 5 radio stations, is very enjoyable. It does the job, but you won’t find yourself wanting a GTA:CW OST.
Story
You play as some guy from China who is going to work with his father, a member of the Triad in Liberty City, and you’re about to deliver a sacred sword to you uncle so that your family’s honor is kept and he can become the leader of the Triad. But during the deal your father is killed, the sword is taken and you are almost killed and left for dead in a sinking car in the river. The rest of the game you are pretty much trying to get revenge, while doing odd jobs for a few of the aspiring leaders of the Triad, to get some reputation in the Triad and to eventually help your uncle get the sword back and restore honor to your family.
Overall the story is quite enjoyable. Not overly good, but it carries the game well enough and it’s pretty interesting. The characters are pretty fun. The aspiring leaders all have good distinct personalities and are fun characters, and Huang Lee, who you’re controlling, is pretty damn funny (the kinda sarcastic bastard dude).
Gameplay
Basic gameplay
The basic gameplay is relatively simple. You run around, beat up people if you want to, steal vehicles, get chased by the police and do quests. The basic stuff is kinda fun to do, but the quests are really what carry the game.
The police is actually pretty fun here. Instead of the incredibly crappy "get out of their range" system from GTAIV, you have the option of staying away from the police (not spotted at all) for some time, or to smash police cars. Ramming into them hard enough or if they hit walls too hard, you get closer to have the police stopping to chase you. Depending on your wanted level, the police get more relentless. At level 1 they’re a bit useless and give up fast. At level 2 they try a lot hard to get you. At level 3 you’ll have loads of police on your ass and and helicopters will shoot at you. This goes on increasingly harder up to level 6 where tanks are after you (though I never passed level 3). And at any level, police just patrolling the street will also shoot at you.
The game also features a few mini-games. The most prominent is the car theft mini-game, which is done when you steal a parked car most of the time, and you must hotwire the car to get it to start(using the touch screen). Those are time based, and there’s a few of them. The tougher one(mostly because of the time limit) requires to get the same code on the car as the hacking machine and if you screw up you can’t take the car and have to start again. Of course the time it takes to hotwire cars is a bit too long when in a police chase, so it’s almost never an option in those cases. It’s just a lot easier to take a police car or a random car being driven on the streets.
Combat is pretty simplistic. You can lock on to a target (though if there’s many targets around it becomes an issue as to which target the game will choose). You have a basic one-two punch+kick attack, but you can pick up various weapons: grenades/molotovs (require use of the touch-screen, works pretty well), guns, swords, chainsaws, rocket launchers… There’s lots of variety. My big problem is the aiming. Even if you lock on, the weapon actually hitting the target is a bit random (or so it seems). But overall it works well enough.
The vehicle driving is pretty good. What’s nice is that every car controls a bit differently. Different top speed/acceleration, some different handling (some handling is rough, other can be overly slippery). There’s a lot of variety. And if you find a car you really like you can keep it in your garage and reuse it when you reload the game.
Side quests
There’s quite a lot of side-quests. The biggest one is drug-dealing. You occasionally get emails from people either selling drugs for ridiculously low prices, or buying them for ridiculously high prices. You get a lot of those emails in-between missions, and it’s pretty interesting to try and make as much money as possible. You can also stash drugs in your apartment for future selling. The people buying/selling the drugs are all dealers, and when you check their stock you’ll see stats as to if you’ll actually be able to make good profit selling his stock if you decide to buy it. Overall the whole drug-dealing part is well done.
Other side-quests are randomly found on the streets. Some random mini-stories which are usually pretty funny. They can range from killing a bunch of prostitutes(hey, they’re the ones shooting at you), giving people a thrill by driving like crazy, following some people, driving people to other places in the city. There’s a lot of variety and you can do things you wouldn’t usually do in the main game which is pretty interesting.
There’s also some other side-quests to find, of course, like destroying cameras in the city to make drug dealers lower your price and a bunch of other random stuff.
OVERALL, the gameplay is great. There’s a ton of variety, the quests are fun, there’s some mini-games and the basic gameplay is plenty entertaining.
Overall
This is a very good game. For me, it’s a lot more fun than GTAIV. It goes back to the roots of the GTA franchise, the story is fun and wacky, there’s TONS of side quests and such, the drug-dealing mini-game, while not incredible, is a nice addition (and it can become quite addictive) and the main quests are pretty interesting and varied.
Solid gameplay, fun story, fun characters, this deserves most of the praise it’s getting and a great addition ot any DS owner’s collection.
Made by Vicious Cycle, published by D3 (is it just me or am I playing a lot of D3 games lately?) this kinda came out of nowhere. What confused me was that it was called “the return of Matt Hazard” and I wasn’t familiar with the character. Well that’s just because there never WAS a Matt Hazard game before. The game was built up a bit. A site showing all his “previous games” and a bunch of previews and some advertisement.
So I decided to check it out. Not because the gameplay seemed overly interesting or anything, but the concept was potentially fun.
Read on! (kinda short)
Looks and sounds
The graphics are… early 360 stage. From what I understand, it wasn’t in their intention to make a game with great graphics. The environments look okay, but there’s a lot of variety. The character models are good. Not overly detailed, and for enemies there’s not a lot of different models for each type of enemy. The animations are simple but effective. Overall the graphics are very basic, but it fits the style the game tries to have.
The sounds are basic, nothing special here. The music is okay, nothing really memorable. The voice acting is pretty good. Matt sounds like a badass, and the other voices, for the most part, fit the characters well. There’s a few weird voices here and there, and the number of recorded lines for enemies and for Matt (during gameplay) is limited.
Story/Context (minor spoilers)
Matt is an old-school video game character. He lived a glorious life from the 8-bit era to now. His big game was Matt Hazard 3D. It eventually went down a bit when he started directing his own games, including the kid-friendly shooter “Soakem” (pronounced strangely like Socom). His career hit a low for a while, but the company making Matt Hazard games made him return in a new game, a next-gen shooter. Things almost go to a halt in the first level, where there’s supposed to be a plot twist, where Matt dies and is replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger wannabe “Sting Sniper”. But someone stops this from happening and Matt has to go through the game so that he doesn’t die, but people are trying to stop him by hacking the game and placing a ton of enemies to kill him.
The one trying to kill him is the new CEO of the company. Why? Because, although he’s a master of gaming and he finished every game ever, he never managed to finish a Matt Hazard game. And the only way to get rid of him is killing him inside a game.
It’s a rather wacky story, the few characters are fun, and what really makes the game great is all the references to the last 20-some years of gaming. You’ve got Socom, Mario, the Master Shield, Master Chef and a load of other random references. The humor is pretty nice. Don’t expect anything serious, of course. But it’s still very entertaining.
Gameplay
The game plays like just about any other Third-Person Shooter that came out this generation and it doesn’t try to be original gameplay-wise. You get a cover system which works… okay. From there you can go from one cover point to another, or move to an adjacent cover point.The rest is normal shooting. You also have a melee attack, where 3 hits =a kill. There’s not much more in the basics. Oh, well, other than the ability to destroy some cover points. Shooting them a bit “de-rez’s” them, erasing them from the game. Some enemies aim strictly for the cover point you’re at, so you have to always look out for that or your cover will literaly be blown and you’ll be vulnerable until you get to another cover point.
You get a bunch of upgrades. You can infuse fire and ice to your weapons(fire does damage over time, Ice freezes your enemies and kills them if you shoot them enough), you can get the “Maximum Hazard” which doubles your attack and gives you a one-hit kill melee attack. And the last upgrade is the Master Shield, which makes you immune to enemy attacks for a while.
One thing that is nice in this game is the enemy and weapon variety. You get pistols, dual pistols, sub machine guns, dual sub machine guns, AK-47s, shotguns, grenade launchers, laser guns, plasma cannons, and, most importantly, WATER GUNS! There’s a bunch of different weapons to use, but sadly your mostly use them the same way: headshots. There are some weapons that are strong against certain enemies. For example, water guns are good against the guys from “Soakem”, and laser weapons are good against Space Marines(both of those enemy types are strong against other weapons). As for enemy variety… Construction workers, businessman, yakuza, chefs, Soakem dudes, space marines, russians, cowboys, zombies (of course), robot girls that you have to kick (or punch) their asses to kill, beta testers, graphic designers, programmers and the most awesome of all: 2D guys straight from “Wolfenstein 3D”. There’s a ton of different kinds of enemies to pwn. All the clichés are there.
The game is pretty hard. Enemies randomly spawning (they ARE getting hacked into the game after all), you not having that much health (auto-regenerating) and the AI ranging from incredibly stupid to pretty intelligent. Certain enemies can also kill you really fast. When you learn where enemies are spawning from and such it becomes easier. And bosses(there are only a few) can be pretty tough until you figure out their patterns.
The one annoying part of the game: Quick Time Events! Why is it that gaming companies insist on using a long out-dated, awful gameplay mechanic? Some bosses are beaten by doing QTEs and they’re incredibly easy and useless. If Matt Hazard had whined about it, it could’ve been funny, but it’s just stupid and overused.
There’s also a load of glitches, both graphical and in the gameplay. I think some of those are intended though. I can’t say for sure. Some are okay, but sometimes it’s just bad. Sometimes enemies just… freeze out of nowhere, sometimes they get stuck in animation loops, stuff like that. Sometimes it’s annoying.
Overall
It’s a fun game. If it was priced lower it could be worth buying, but it can be finished in a rental, and isn’t worth much more. But it’s still something that you should check out. The humor and references to the last 20 years of gaming make it really funny, the wacky story is enjoyable.
With modified gameplay and more content it would almost be an instant classic. But, as it is, it’s a rental. There was a lot of potential there, and they really didn’t capitalize on it. I see what they were trying to do, and I loved playing through it, but it just lacks something to make it a truly unique experience. But rent it anyways.
Hey everyone, I haven’t reviewed anything lately. Â Trying to get back into this, now.
Before anything else, this game is awesome. Â Think Contra meets Unreal Tournament. Â If you want a quick adrenaline rush, look no further. Â So if you’re wondering why Crash Commando is awesome, take a look after the jump!
This game came out the same day as Soldner-X. Â While that game at a first glanced looked more interesting, given my likings to shmups, I overlooked Crash Commando and thought it was just a Bionic Commando knockoff or something, using that game’s momentum to make a few bucks. Â Oh boy was I wrong.
From what I was told, this game is a lot like Soldat on PC, so some of you might know that game and won’t need to read much more into this review to know if they’ll like this game or not. I personally never tried Soldat though, so I can’t compare it directly.
Presentation
The game looks and feels great. The graphics looks like an upscaled and smoother version of Contra shattered Soldier on the PS2 that lives up to any other PSN game standard. Â Just like Unreal Tournament, it’s hella bloody, so that’s always a plus (for this kind of game).
There is little story to the game, simply your usual red vs blue deal. (Except each side has a name I don’t remember)
While online  supports up to 12 players, there’s no multiplayer offline, which is probably the game’s only fault.  You’ll still be able to play with and against up to 11 bots, both offline and online.
Gameplay
This is an action game at its core. More then 95% of any other game that calls itself an action game.  It’s a drop-in, drop-out, Free for All/Team VS/Objectives, shoot down your  opponents into bits kind of game.  So here’s how it works.  You join a game, before spawning, you choose between 6 types of weapons, all with their ups and downs.  In example, the Sniper is powerful and easy to aim with, but takes a lot of time between shots and has a very small hit radius.  The Machine Gun gives you a fast but weaker attack and other weapons like the usual shotgun, a type of heat gun they called CAB, a grenade launcher and a rocket launcher.  There’s also some secondary weapons and some explosives that you can pick from.  During gameplay though, you’ll find yourself finding 1 of 2 special weapons, a minigun and a blue laser gun if I remember right, anyway those are awesome and will have infinite ammo but only last you for a time limit.  There’s also some body armor you can grab and some additionnal ammos.
The game is not an FPS, and is not a 3rd person shooter either. Â It’s in 2D, with two layers. Â You aim around you with the right analog stick while moving with the left one. Â That also mean that I can be on one side, then go into a door to go to the other side of the battlefield. Â From some spots, you can also see people on the other side, so you might see them coming and plan your attack/defense against them. Â Some maps even have turrets and other types of on the field weapons to be used on the other side of the map. Â There’s also a bunker you can go in to launch a missile, which you have full control of, and will even go through doors (they are more like open pathway then door though). Â When those blow up, they’ll take out everything in the screen around the missile, even your teammates.
But you might say something like, “but Dave, this game lacks something important: vehicles!”, and to that I’d tell you, shut up! There are vehicles. Â You can ride in a tank that shoots rockets or ride a jeep that has a machine gun. Â The fun part about them is that you can run over people easily and you’re much harder to being taken out while in them. Â But you’ll die if they’re blown up while you’re still in them. Â Also, you mostly have to follow a rail with the vehicles, which limits it a bit, but that’s not that bad, and I’ll tell you why.
EVERYTHING HAS A JETPACK! You have one on your character, and vehicles have jetpacks too! Now that’s awesome. Â They’re also semi-unlimited. Â Meaning that there’s a jetpack gauge, but it fills up whenever you’re not using it. Â So you can use it carefully and fly off for a decent amount of time, or enough to dodge that sniper with ease if you have the skills. Â Another skill that comes with the jetpack, is the ability to spin and dash, letting you cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time.
At this point, you’d think that’s enough features for  a $10 game.  Heck no!  You can also upgrade your character if you stay alive long enough and make enough kills.  You’ll lose these upgrades upon dying though.  But getting them can make you godly if you know how to.  The three upgrades (which you can grab in any order), gives your jetpack spin the ability to kill any opponents in its way. That’s my favorite, it’s plain badass.  The second I always pick is the auto-regen one, which heals you back to full health if you’re not hit for a small amount of time.  This one helps you stay alive when there’s no health pack near you.  The last one is a speed boost, which you could alternatively pick second, but I highly suggest the jetpack spin upgrade first, as it’ll boost your killing free really fast.  Another wink to UT, the game will tell you stuff like “DOUBLE KILL”, “MULTI-KILL” and some others.
Online
I didn’t play much online, there were some people lagging (not everyone), there were some idiots (probably farming trophies or something) and that’s about what I’ve ran into.  Although it’s nice  that the game will fill with bots until they are replaced with real people.  So it’s easy to create a game and get it started, unlike the typical FPS were no one will join your 1-man game.
Verdict
Buy it and don’t look back. Â (so I can head-shot you with the sniper)
Seriously, you don’t get more fun for $10 then this. Â It’d still be worth it at twice the price. Â This is the game to get on PSN while waiting for Fat Princess.
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Ah, Metal Slug. Represents all that is good about 2D platforming Action gameplay. When I saw that it was coming out on the DS, I thought it was a strange choice to put the game on a handheld without an arcade release, or any other release for that matter. When I finally played it (the japanese version, a few months ago), I saw it was pretty fun.
But after more play and giving it a bit more thought when it came out here, does it really hold up to previous games in the series? Read on!
Graphics
There’s something wrong here. I think they took the sprites from the previous game and just resized them for the DS screen. It doesn’t look really good. I mean, I know the DS doesn’t have the biggest screen resolution or anything, but I also know it can pump out good quality 2D graphics. They could have remade the sprites or something for the DS, just to have proper quality here.
Still, despite the sprites occasionally looking like ass, the game retains the same style it always had. The animations are as good as always, the bosses look really cool. Really, it looks almost as nice as previous incarnations, but the resized sprites just look weird.
Gameplay
It’s Metal Slug. Run around, shoot stuff, get new weapons, use your knife when you’re close to certain enemies, throw grenades, and die a lot. Nothing has changed from the older games really.
There are 6 characters you can choose from. Each has different caracteristics that give them the advantage in certain situations, or that you might just prefer using. Â Fio always starts with a heavy machine gun(+more ammo and damage with weapons), Ralf takes 2 hits, Eri has more grenades and can throw it in multiple directions, Clark can throw enemies but gets less ammo for weapons, Marco is basic but with more damage with his handgun and Tarma is better with vehicules. This can add lots of variety in gameplay.
Here you die in one hit, and it’s not easy to avoid certain attacks. When you lose all your lives(and you will… a lot), you can select a different character if you want. So if you die in a situation where you might need someone else, you can change.
Like in previous games, you get a few vehicules to drive. Each vehicule can take multiple hits, to it’s good for protection (just get out when it tells you), and they have special weapons too. This as always been a staple for the Metal Slug series and they didn’t screw it up.
The mission mode is where you’ll be wasting most of your time. You can either start from the first mission, or from any other mission you’ve reached if you want less difficulty going through the whole game. There’s various difficulties. If you’re really hardcore, hard will provide huge challenge. Easy is laughably simple. You do way more damage, have a heavy machine gun as your standard weapon, and it’s just a lot easier to deal with. Normal is hard enough.
As for DS features… Well, there’s not much. In normal gameplay, you have a map on the bottom screen, and you can move through it. Really useless. Also interesting to note that there’s NO MULTIPLAYER. This really sucks. Metal Slug, a game that’s 10 times more fun with multiplayer, doesn’t have multiplayer in its DS incarnation. The DS is capable for multiplayer, why not have that feature?
Other than the normal mode, you also  have a sort of challenge mode, which you unlock more of each time you get to a new stage in mission mode. Challenges vary from saving a number of hostages to not dying, to surviving for certain amounts of time, and each time you die or finish a challenge, you get graded. If somehow the main game isn’t challenging enough for you, the challenge mode should be.
Overall
There’s really not much to say here. It’s Metal Slug. There’s guns, explosions, it’s challenging. If you like previous games in the series, you’ll like this one. The only big problem is the lack of multiplayer. If that’s an important element for you, you might want to skip it or wait for a price drop.
Maybe not the best of the series, but it holds up well.
Greetings all, without further ado, my Gears of War 2 review.
I’ve played the campaign to completion and played a decent amount of Horde offline and online. I have not touched the other multi player modes unfortunately.
More after the break!
Story
Well, they made a bit more effort to make these muscle bound men look like humans and less like vehicles of pure testosterone. Marcus’ father is implicated in the story yet again. This time it has a bigger significance to the whole storyline. On Dom’s side, there’s a story development with his wife. There’s a new Carmine in the delta squad. Cole and Baird are pretty much still tagging along and helping out like before. They’ve added other characters that make brief but notable appearances. Each one of these, you can unlock for multi player use afterwards. I thought the story was interesting. I’m not saying this is the deepest thing ever. I do however think that for a futuristic sci-fi shooting game, it has it’s merits. Again, this game ends in a rather opened manner leaving room for a third installment.
Graphics
Slight improvement over what we had before. You can see that the UT3 engine has had it’s refinement over the years and that Epic have a solid platform to do their work on. They still have the same look and feel, but they’ve varied the environments a lot. I’d have to say that my favorite two levels would have to be the secret base and inside the worm. The latter because of certain visual effects I enjoyed. I’ve grown used to seeing the UT3 texture pop ins by now. I’ve either grown blind to it, or I just don’t look at it anymore but I’d have to say that I didn’t see it as much anymore.
Sound
Same as before, it’s very Epic. Get it? The music goes well with the game and works to highlight certain dramatic scenes and such. Keeps the same feel as the first. You’ll grow to love hearing the lancer active reload sound. Additional damage!
Gameplay
The initial Gears of War pretty much set the template for third person view shooters as far as console co-ops over the last year or so. So how does this version compare to it? It’s a solid co-op just as expected. If you’re looking for some sort of ground breaking innovation, you won’t find it here. However, why should this game seek innovation as a means to market its sequel? They’ve added a few neat things, tagging grenades to walls, chainsaw clashing, movable covers and such. I absolutely love using the shield. With the addition of Horde, I find myself wanting to play this with my friends and perfect strangers online. The principle of this game type is that you must fend off waves of enemies. Naturally, the difficulty ramps up as you progress through the waves. The notable wave are naturally each 10th wave. It will have more enemies, bigger baddies and once you complete it for the first time, an achievement. The controls haven’t changed much since its predecessor, I would say that it “feels” a little bit more responsive and less glitchy.
Difficulty
It’s not as difficult as the previous version. There seems to be fewer branching paths than before and shorter ones too. The bosses are pretty easy to understand. This is mostly where you’d have certain hiccups before. I may just find it easier due to my previous experience however.
Multiplayer
Solid co-op just like before. Added game modes for multiplayer. You can check stats online on the gears website and even post pictures! I haven’t had the chance to actually take pictures to play around with this but I’ve seen the option there. There’s even an achievement related to it! Horde is pretty fun if you’re up for a PVE, Human vs Computer type game. You may be a bit more comfortable in this competitive mode. Just stick with your team and try and survive.
Pros
-Storyline continued.
-Solid Co-op.
-The shield!
Cons
-What you would consider an end boss happens one to two hours before you complete the game.
-Seriously 2.0 will make you play this game for a fairly long time if you’re an achievement junkie.
-If you’re looking for something different, you won’t find it here.
Bottom line
It’s the game of the season. Forget CoD:WaW. You’ll be enjoying this one for a while. The previous iteration had a lot of popularity on XBL until Halo 3 and CoD4 showed up and managed to remain in the top 10 for very long. Sit down on your couch, get a second controller and have fun with a buddy!
Pictures
Pictures taken from Gears of War’s website.
Usual day in the war
Clashing of the saws!