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Review – Gears Of War (XB360)

Few games have the kind of hyperbole and weight of expectation behind it that Gears does. I mean, hell, this is the game that is meant to make, to define a console and also the game which will debut Epic’s brand new spanky Unreal Engine 3. It’s as much the poster boy for Epic’s new tech as it is the XBOX 360 in much the same way the original Halo was back in 2001/2002, and as such there are a lot of folk out there who want to see if it stands up to scrutiny now that it’s finished and out there.

Aside from a few minor niggles, Gears comes off admirably as perhaps the finest third person action adventure we have seen in recent times, with both an astounding, if a little short single player campaign and an extremely robust multiplayer mode. The single player campaign revolves around a loosely knit story going something like this: Man has pretty much depleted every natural resource on the planet Sera, a planet not too dissimilar from our own, until they stumble across a renewable energy source called Imulsion. Of course man being man, this triggers much struggle and conflict until a mysterious race called the Locust Horde, boil up from the Earth’s crust and begin wreaking havoc on the populace at large.

So there you have it, your classic humans vs. monsters premise, and rather than add any over dramatic weight to the storyline or indeed any of the characters, the plot and the charcaters that feature in them are unapologetically cookie-cutter to the extreme. You control Marcus Fenix, a true man’s man, gruff, scarred up, loud and up for some serious ultra-violence. Marcus and his gang of ultra macho misfits are basically Gears equivalent of the marines from James Cameron’s Aliens film, dumb, gruff and ready to blast anything that moves.

Thankfully, Gears’ campaign mode triumphs not in it’s story or characters but quite simply in the robust game mechanics that it has and the sense of epic scale it gives during its many frantic battles. The gameplay in Gears is set in the third person and follows a cover and shoot based approach, whereby as the enemy approach you need to find cover where you can fire and manoeuvre from. Whilst in cover there are a number of moves that are available to you such as blind firing, leaning over walls, jumping over cover, diving out of cover or performing SWAT moves to get you from one piece of cover to the next. On the first two difficulty levels staying out of cover for extended periods doesn’t really the punish the player a huge amount, try this on the appropriately named ‘Insane’ difficulty level however, and prepare to find yourself severely punished for just being out of cover more than a couple of seconds.

All of this interaction with cover is triggered by the ‘A’ button which pretty much does everything in this game. Besides all the aforementioned cover interaction, the A button makes you evasively roll, dive and also when depressed, makes your character go into a ‘Roadie Run’ whereby you holster your weapon close to your stomach and basically do a commando sprint, complete with a nice graphical effect whereby the view is concaved slightly and you get a nice shaky ‘war cam’ look. This is all well and good but it presents a problem because when you are roadie running, you tend to get stuck to various pieces of cover that you really don’t want to, because the system sees that you are pressing A and assumes that you want be behind whatever cover you are running past. More often than not this isn’t an issue, but sometimes it can cost you your life when you are trying to dash past an enemy, but then you end up behind cover with them.

Whilst the cover and shoot mechanic my initially appear to lend itself to uninspiring and perhaps even pedestrian gameplay situations, Gears spices things up sufficiently in the campaign with a number of cool, well thought out missions that the feeling of repetition is the last thing to compromise your enjoyment of the game. Even the mechanic of just reloading itself, is deeper than one would originally perceive due to the ‘Active Reload’ system. This works with a bar with a white sweet spot, and as you reload using the right bumper button, you need to get the reload pointer in that sweet spot for an optimum reload with more powerful ammo. Failure to do this results in reloading taking twice as long and potentially leaving you vulnerable. As such I feel this stands as a nice little innovation to help polish the veneer of what could otherwise be a very repetitive combat system.

Besides the long pitched cover battles with automatic weaponary and sniper rifles, Gears revels in it’s ultra violent nature with a number of gleefully nasty weaponry. The basic Shotgun for example, will quite happily sunder a foe’s body in many different directions if they are unlucky enough to take a blast at close range, creating a mess of squelchy body parts that can be kicked around the ground in the aftermath. The Hammer of Dawn is the next weapon on the list – a hugely powerful satellite laser that can be used only where there is clear sky, and is basically a pillar of light that is dragged around by an infra red laser marker which basically turns anything it touches into gooey chunks. And finally, my personal favourite, the chainsaw. Built onto the underside of the ‘Lancer’ weapon that Marcus and his gang have, you hold ‘B’ to rev up this thing for roughly two seconds and then depress the right trigger to bury it into the anatomy of whoever is unfortunate enough to be in front of you at the time. Cue the most satisfying moment in videogame history, where there is a disturbing sense of resistance as the chainsaw gets stuck in parts of your victim before fully splitting them asunder, scattering their anatomy across the camera. I’m not sure if it’s the noise of the motor or just the carnage it causes, but using the chainsaw never gets old.

Gears biggest asset remains in it’s aesthetics. Gears is quite simply a staggering visual achievement. The European influenced architecture looks so vivid, vibrant and detailed thanks to the extremely high quality of textures and HDR lighting which are used throughout. Everything looks polished to the absolute nines, from the character models (check out the skin on both the locust and the humans), to the explosions, fire, water and particle effects, Gears Of War is quite simply the best looking game I have seen to date, and amply demonstrates Epic’s much touted Unreal Engine 3 technology as a great piece of middleware tech. Even the sound, stands out as being truly exceptional with a stirring epic score, great sound effects and of course lots of testosterone charged macho voice acting.

Another of Gears’ biggest assets is it’s multiplayer and in particular just how thoroughly robust and comprehensive it is. Gears offers two players the chance to tackle the main campaign in co-op mode, either over split screen, system link or XBOX Live, with little degradation to visual quality in split screen and a pleasingly lag free experience over XBOX Live. Even better, the way the co-op mechanic works is by utilising a drop-in/drop-out system, whereby a human player can take the role of the other character at any point during any mission in the campaign. For those with a competitive streak Gears caters you too, with a number of different game types. What game types you have on offer for competitive play over split screen, system link or Xbox Live, are Warzone, Assassination or Execution.

Warzone is basically your run-of-the-mill team deathmatch mode whereby teams of opposing COG (marine) and Locust Horde players face off until the other team is dead and then move onto the next round, with the team having the most rounds won, winning the game. In Assassination, each team has a captain and the game is over as soon as that captain is killed, with the player holding the lowest score becoming the captain in the next round. Thus this creates an interesting need for strategic play to keep the captain alive. Interestingly, only the captain can pick up the larger weapons such as the torque bow or the longshot rocket launcher, but they can drop them for other players to use too making the captain a weapon carrier as well as a protectable objective. And finally, in Execution, the idea is similar to Warzone where each team has to destroy members of the other team, the difference lies in the way this is achieved. In this gametype unless a team member is eviscerated by a chainsaw or by a shotgun blast, they now have to be put out of their misery with an execution resulting in a particularly horrific curb stomp. If this execution is not done in time, the player may revive themselves by tapping ‘A’ or be revived by a fellow player in a very similar manner to how another player would revive their partner in co-op mode.

If it wasn’t for the quality of Gears’ multiplayer maps, the gameplay modes would get old quick, as truth be told there simply isn’t enough variety between just three different modes. Nevertheless, the tight design of the maps, along with the promise of additional maps (two of which have arrived as of writing) and the robust, tactical nature of the cover and shoot gameplay, ensure that Gears will be top of Xbox Live user lists for a good while to come yet.

Gears of War is simply a fantastically well thought out shooter, that strips bare what people expect from third person shooters and builds from the ground up a staggeringly epic display of what we should expect from this genre in the Next-Generation. Minor niggles aside, Epic have created a game that is more than just a standard bearer for new technology and graphical benchmarks but one whose role is equally important in it’s reinvigoration of a genre.

Overall Score: 9.2

Having enjoyed to a moderate extent Rockstar’s original Daily Mail baiting stealth game, I am a tad curious about the current lack of fervor surrounding the possible release of Manhunt 2 after RockStar Games successfully appealed against the most recent refusal by the BBFC, to classify the game for release.

When the original Manhunt was released, many gamers (including myself) believed it to be a succinct marriage of controversial subject matter with traditional gameplay (a Rockstar hallmark it has to be said). When the credits rolled up, I had enjoyed my time with the game but was not blown away by it, the ludicrous level of violence being little more than a novelty. Still, the snuff video premise of the game, combined with the gory execution style kills earned it not only a ticking off and subsequent vilification of the games industry by self-righteous liberals in the broadsheets, but also short term sales bans from specialist retailers such as GAME.

This kind of negativity is not a foreign concept to gamers who enjoy games with a mature context and that case certainly will not change in the foreseeable future. Indeed RockStar, though outwardly grumbling at having their game being pulled off the shelves and slurred by the averagely idiotic broadsheet press, must have been delighted at all the free press that their new game was receiving. By publicly making something so taboo, it just fans the fire of human curiosity as more, and more people wanted to buy the game and see what is was all about – again violence being the primary hook for said curiosity.

All that aside, and nearly three years on, we have the sequel – Manhunt 2. U.S Reviews have been unimpressive so far, finding an uncomfortable middle ground between poor and mediocre. This is largely the same game that we have played previously it would seem as it appears to be nearly as violent (the 17+ version that was granted an American release being cut down in the gore stakes) and still contains the same stealth-kill gameplay that we have grown accompanied to, both prior to and since the original’s release.

So the question is, should any of us UK folk actually give a toss about this game? I couldn’t care less, regardless of which version we’re talking about (sorry, Wii motion control on this kind of game doesn’t do anything for me, but your mileage on that may vary) the game is still no better than it’s predecessor in gameplay terms but whereas the last game was techically unimpressive, the whole snuff-video idea was a novel hook at the time.

Thoughts?

Duke Nukem Forever, a title infamous due to it’s seemingly indefinite stint in development hell, has now finally got itself a teaser trailer.

Yep, you read that right.

It’s been over six years since Duke Nukem Forever has had any video footage shown in any form. The oft-delayed and maligned title has gone through many different engine and conceptual changes since it’s announcement nearly ten years ago.

The question is, with a possibly likely 2008 release looming, has this newest generation of gamers outgrown the Duke’s macho repitoire of insults, silly weaponary, sillier enemies and gaming paraodies?

Well either way the trailer is here and looks… well see for yourself. I think it looks *okay*, but i’m not totally sold on the enemy designs (they look like the glossed plastic beasties from Doom 3 and Prey) and the engine itself doesn’t look terribly impressive either.

But make up your own minds people 🙂

http://www.gametrailers.com/game/360.html

After a disappointingly flat and somewhat soulless E3 this year, most people (myself included) had kinda hoped that the bright chaps who organised it last time (the ESA) would come to their senses and restore E3 to the fanboy pant-wetting spectale that it was in years gone by.

Well for next years shindig, E3 finds itself back at home once more in the Los Angeles Convention Centre.

However, before people get their hopes too high up, the ESA has still said that the event will be a smaller spectacle than before and the focus will once again be smaller organised presentations, as opposed to the huge blowouts that we all knew and loved prior to 2007.

The bastards.

I want my booth babes. =o)

Now that the trailer is up and the interweb has recovered from the bandwidth ass kicking it recieved, what do you all people actually think of it?

My two cents:

1) Slowdown. Yes, it’s pretty much gone. Sure, we’re essentially treated to specifc sections of the game and it wouldnt be realistic to assume that the spectre of frame rate issues is completely gone, but at *least* what was shown, was shown to run smoothly and that cant be anything but a good thing.

2) Hand-to-Hand Combat: Apparently, Rockstar have gone to great lengths to really flesh out the melee combat system in GTA IV. While the trailer doesn’t really illustrate how far they have gotten with this, what is shown is a definte sort of weight and impact behind the encounters. Again, due to the shortness of these scenes its difficult to discern much else, but at least what was shown was a start to hopefully what will be a remake of a clunky fighting system.

3) The small details. Just the small stuff like the facial expressions on the characters when talking, the spinning of the wheels on the motorcycles, the improved particle effects on the explosions – all of them just make the world seem a lot more solid and intricate this time round.

Seems like the delay until 2008 is going to be a good thing and certainly worth the wait if the improvements and changes continue apace.

What do you think?

While we wait until early 2008 for Rockstar’s latest entry in their Jack Thompson provoking series, we get a third trailer for the game due on December 6th called ‘Move up, ladies’.

Any more footage we get is a win at this point (purely just to see if they are sorting out the horrid framerate), however, the box art was recently announced and looks… just the same as every other box art for every other GTA game ever.

They also made a trailer to ‘show off’ the box art.

Pointless, or what?

Thanks for that.

Linkage below for those who fancy wasting a minute or two:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/28354.html

Review – Streets Of Rage 2 (XBLA)

When Sega announced their ‘Vintage’ range of games for XBLA, many Xbox Live players were counting down the days until the best of Sega’s 90’s side scrolling series would make its way to them, especially having already been available for download on Nintendo’s own service months previously. Yes, Streets Of Rage 2 is here and in that fine rose tinted tradition is everything you thought it was, without surprising you in anyway shape or form.

What we have here is a completely faithful Genesis/Megadrive port that replicates the Streets Of Rage 2 experience perfectly and as such, rekindles those fond memories of strolling along a street and nailing bad guys with different weapons and attacks. Just like you remember it, Streets Of Rage 2 is a whole dollop more fun when played with a friend in co-op and conversely, is also still just as pointless and bad in player versus player mode as it ever was.

Being a side scrolling fighting game, Streets Of Rage 2 was never going to win any awards for longevity, but the co-op mode, multiple characters that play differently and difficulty modes certainly stretch the experience out a tad, and 400MS points for what you get is a good deal.

Achievement wise, the game ranges from the banal (hit 10 guys with a pipe without dropping it) to the downright mind numbingly insane (get 800,000 points on the hardest difficulty starting with a single life), so don’t look for its uninspired achievements to have you coming back. Ultimately though, as with a great many retro releases, your mileage will vary depending on your love for the game as very little has been changed for this release.

The only updates that this title has received are the mandatory online modes, which are hideously laggy in versus mode (a blessing) and pretty stable in co-op, leaderboards and of course the ‘enhanced graphics’ that each Sega Vintage release provides, by enhanced read blurry.

So there you have it, fans of this old skool genre will find a good time here as the game is every bit exactly as it was. The usual XBLA features don’t really add much, and the achievements are pointless except to achievement farmers, but at 400MS points, you could do far worse and it is still a lot of fun.

Overall Score: 7.4

Hmmm, its been nearly eleven months and here I am, making a post just before I go to bed. The reason? Simple. I dont want this blog to die. In fact, I want it to thrive and flourish, as I will be shortly adding not just anime reviews but also video game reviews too.

Watch this space.

(No seriously, watch it)

=o)

~JP

Hey all,

Just a quick message to say that, no, I am not dead, i’m just not particularly pro-active at the moment. That said, this journal is *still* on the top of my to do list, so stay tuned =o)

Vague, I know but hey trust me ok? ^^

Many online sites such as Play and Amazon, as well as a whole bunch of high street stores (HMV and Music Zone) have lowered the price of the Studio Ghibli titles which were released on the Optimum label.

Classic benchmark anime such as Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind, Grave of the Fireflies, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, My Neighbour Tortoro and Howl’s Moving Castle have all been slashed in price to £8.99 each!

A steal if there ever was one. And for the uniniated, Studio Ghibli films rock, plain and simple.

Look for reviews of Studio Ghibli films hitting the journal soon.

But wait… what are you still doing here? Get your butts out the door and buy em up before the wise up and jam the price back up to £16.99!