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While I wait for Red Dead Redemption, I’ve decided to work my way back through my stack of as yet unfinished games. First up, revisiting inFamous and taking Cole down the dark path.
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Tiger returns to the masters, which is the perfect time to open the doors of their online PGA Tour game to the public.

The game is free to play after only a modest install weighing in at a little over 3mb and helps to deliver “the most accessible, authentic and feature-rich golf video game experience available through a web browser”. It marks EA’s continued expansion into microtransaction territory with paid options that provide points that unlock access to unique items and equipment. So does PGA Tour Online make it to the fairway or land in the rough?
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Can’t say I’m impressed so far, seems like they took the praise for the AC130 level and went crazy with it, nearly half of the missions I’ve played have some sort of minigame that doesn’t involve running and gunning.

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Sometimes more bells and whistles aren’t the answer.

When asked if I’d buy Borderlands after playing a very early version of the game last year, I answered rather confidently “no”. Has almost a year of refinement and a whole new change of art style changed my opinion? Read more »

Treyarch have consistently said it isn’t fair to compare their latest Call of Duty offering to Infinity Ward’s ‘Modern Warfare’, when talking about ‘World at War’. Unsurprising given the amazingly high bar set by that game, but lets go ahead and avoid talking about why it sucks compared to CoD4 and simply go with saying why it sucks on its own.

Firstly, the game opts for two very differing WWII scenarios, the Pacific front as the Americans and the Assault on Berlin as the Russians. Lacking a cohesive narrative between the two stories, jumping from one to the other feels disjointed and jarring, breaking up a feeling of progression or storyline and reducing the game to ‘do x objective for y’. There’s no sense of identity among either force. That is emphasised by the game’s attempt, with the American forces, to hammer home the brutality of war, the desperation of the Japanese forces and their willingness to do everything to slaughter the Americans. Once that dark reality sets in, you’re then off to join the Russians and mow down endless streams of retreating Germans, shattering the game’s message.

The game itself suffers from ‘Call of duty-itis’ in that it is a fairly serviceable shooter with beautiful locations, ruined by the fact the game forces you to merely run from one objective point to another. The enemies often feel more like decoration than an obstacle to overcome, especially given the reliance of Call of Duty games on sections with infinitely spawning enemies. This ruins the illusion of fighting as a force as you’ll see your comrades rush forward and be mowed down, only to be replaced by generic soldier #99 who does exactly the same, the cycle repeating until you push forward deactivating the enemy spawns.

Not that you can sit still any way, enemy bullets will penetrate cover and the opposing forces all got handed x-ray specs as no matter what you use for cover or where you are, they’ll still hit you perfectly every time. Good luck returning fire to enemies behind cover though as their sandbags seem to be armor plated, meaning you’ll have to pick your shots to the few pixels of exposed flesh. In intense firefights this can be extremely difficult and a source of frustration.

This imbalance also surfaces with the use of grenades, while your grenades will do little beyond daze your enemies unless laid at their feet, the merest hint of the grenade indicator on your HUD will prompt a quick trip to the reload screen. That is, when the indicator lights up as running when near the edges of a grenade’s damage radius it can fail to show entirely.

It as though Treyarch feel that littering every step with countless grenades or Kamikaze troops is the way to increase difficulty, sidestepping fixing the flawed AI or balancing the weapons so that every rifle feels like more than just a different 3d model.

Multiplayer is the game’s saving grace. A ranking systems where experience is earned per round, unlocking more weapons and abilities is a fantastic idea (If only it had been thought of before… oh, wait) and is spread over six multiplayer modes with strong maps, some featuring vehicles which is great for when you want to even the odds against vastly more skilled players by dispensing with all that marksmanship and just running over them with a tank.

The addition of co-operative play to the single campaign is another fantastic move by Treyarch, it allows up to 4 players to play through the campaign mode and really helps to sell the ‘teamwork’ aspect of campaign, though I invariably always ended up with at least one pacifist team mate who would spend the game lagging behind staring at the sky or their shoes. Team mates downed in co-op can be revived by the press of a button from a fellow team mate, but there is a time limit and I do feel it needed to be a little longer as those ‘infinite enemy’ spawns can make it virtually impossible to reach your buddy in time.

In summary, Call of Duty: World at War is a perfectly average shooter and were it not for Modern Warfare that’d be the end of it. But we’ve been shown now how good these games could be, so this just can’t help but feel like a disappointment. Sure Zombie mode is great fun, but the Campaign feels like penance one must serve in order to get to the fun part and there are a number of other shooters that manage to pull off a great multiplayer experience AND manage to still provide an engaging and coherent single-player storyline.

Forcibly shoved out of the limelight by Gears of War 2 and Resistance 2, Far Cry 2 is something of an unsung hero of a game for which few expectations were set and so is able to happily blow you out of the water

The Good

Like any good story, FC2 sets the mood from the offset, leaving you disorentated, confused and cursing the hell hole you are in, thankfully this is all part of the game and you’ll quickly pick up the skills needed to succeed.

FC2’s AI is superb, reacting to gun shots, investigating noises in pairs and groups will always try to out flank you and attack from behind. All this helps to unseat you and place you on edge. Was that noise behind you just the wind in the grass, a passing zebra or are you just being paranoid? For someone who loves to snipe like myself, being able wound enemies and use them as bait as they call over their comrades for assistance is a most wonderful guilty pleasure. Is it still curelty to toy with computer opponents?

Firefights are intense and often confusing, enemies shooting from cover behind bushes and trees leaving you with little idea where you are being shot at from, encouraging you to keep your head down and keep on the move instead of opting for the ‘bullet magnet’ offensive technique employed by most shooters.

Morality, like your guns, have to be checked at the door. While FC2 is set in a war torn African country and has running commentary on the morality of war and the mercenaries like your character who thrive on the war economy, at no point is the game righteous nor does it allow the player to feel as such. The missions you take are solely about the money and while there are some humanitarian side missions, these are done out of a very real need for malaria medication, not any sense of good will.

Pyromaniacs will giggle with glee at this game and those who aren’t pyromaniacs soon will be. Fires were a much hyped feature of the new graphics engine and with good reason, molotov cocktails can quickly turn into huge infernos raging through the bush and grass. It can also be a danger far greater than your enemies with backdraft from rocket launchers easily igniting the ground around you. There are few sights greater than a large fire engulfing trees and grass alike in the middle of night in this game.

Dying is no longer a frustration, thanks to FC2’s buddy system. Talking to a buddy before a mission will have them ‘rescue ready’ and should you fall in combat you’ll be treated to a series of flashes of your buddy dragging you to cover, shooting at the enemy all the way. Then you’ll be equiped with a pistol and told to pathc yourself up. A further death here will send you to the loading options, but this recovery system is a perfect way to counteract the frustration of a cheap death.

Weapon jamming might seem like a pain, but the notion of weapons degrading over time in your equipment and thus becoming less reliable works well in game. It leaves you desperate not to pick up the weapons of fallen enemies which are often covered in rust, but add just that extra challenege when you run out of ammo and are forced to throw all you can into the fight.

Did I mention the massive open environment? While most of the missions are found at the centralized hubs, there are plenty of side missions located out there and hunting for hiden diamond cases will keep the explorers happy. Racing off road through varied jungle, desert and grasslands as you keep off the roads and rivers, away from vehicle patrols and roadblocks, you really get a sense of freedom and also extreme vulnrability. You’re alone in a country filled with a lot of very bad people.

The game also offers the ability to play your missions how you want. Snipe from afar? how about loading up with RPGs and heavy machine guns to go in rambo style causing maximum damage and attention? Perhaps the stealth option is more your style, go in at night with silence sub machine gun and pistol or get up close and personal with the machette. Whatever your style, FC2 offers up the freedom to approach your objectives however you deem fit, leaving no two missions and no two games quite the same.

The Bad

While the AI is at times stunningly brilliant, there are just as many occasions where you’ll be little more than a few feet from a crouched enemy facing you who takes 5-10 seconds to react to you and open fire. They also have a number of pathing issues, getting stuck on fences and such and is even more of a problem once they are behind a wheel.

Sadly the poor also extends to your buddies, who’ll often be found popping flares and crying out for help. If you aren’t fast enough then you’ll only be able to ease their passing or pull the trigger and end their suffering. Once a buddy dies they are gone and while forcing this brutal detachment of emotions from your buddies keeps in theme with the rest of the game and story, most players will simply load up a previous save and work harder to save their favourite buddies.

Respawning checkpoints are FC2’s only real source of frustration, but clearing a road block to visit a location a few hundred yards away only to return and have to fight your way back through the road block is an unnessary waste of time and precious ammo.

Like most sandbox open worlds, travelling is a large part of the game. Impressive scenery and graphics are enough to entertain during the first hours of gameplay, it’ll soon wear thin though as you try to avoid the numerous checkpoints between you and your objective.

The Verdict

I’ve stuggled to figure out quite why GTA4 recieved so many perfect scores while it destroyed what had been an enjoyable franchise so far. Far Cry 2 is everything GTA4 should have been and could have been. Far Cry 2 is a top rate shooter with untold hours of gameplay woven together with a decent storyline and topped off with a side of gameplay freedom. It is easily, by some distance, my favourite game of the year.

It has been almost two years since LucasArts revealed their teaser tech demo of what a next gen Star Wars game might look like and with releases of The Force Unleashed on almost anything with a screen, including the iPhone, they are clearly betting on banking big with the next installment of the Star Wars saga.

The Good

Compelling storyline that is almost as good as the Dark Forces games and does well at bridging the gulf between the two movie trilogies.

The force powers are suitably impressive and combined with the destructive environments give a real feeling of raw power. Force power cominations are also satisfying and in the case of the Lightning grenade/Cannonball combo, sometimes hilarious.

Smart AI that clings to objects, each other. My most memorable moment of the game is trying to grip a stormtrooper only to have them grab onto a crate legs swinging in the air.

The Bad

Twitchy targeting can have you facing a room of enemies while you latch onto and force grip the one droid in the room.

Linear level designs, the ones that aren’t about simply going from point A to point B mix things up by having you go to point C first

Limited replay value and lack of multiplayer leave maybe 8hrs of gameplay, 12 or so if you decide replay to collect all items and unlock all costumes.

The Verdict

Visually TFU is stunning and does well to convey the feeling of power to the player especially towards the end where one of the final missions involves pulling a start destroyer out of the sky. The game is hampered by limited replay and the fact that many enemies are easy defeated by repeating the same couple of powerful combos. Once those are unlocked, much of the challenge is removed from the game leaving TFU as a must own only to devoted Star Wars fans. Everyone else will be happier renting and completing over a weekend.

Once upon a time there was a game called the Sims and it was insanely popular and made lots of money. The creator found though that diving through the McDuck vault of cash generated from the game made him bitter and twisted against the world, resenting not just the players of the Sims, but all games and set out to teach them all a lesson and began work on his revenge, a game he entitled Spore.

While that is most likely not true, it is the only explanation I can come up with for why Spore was designed as little more than a big ‘fuck you’ to anyone who plays video games for fun. The hype surrounding Spore pretty much ensured the game would never live up to expectations, but this is a game that has refined, concentrated and bottled futility and provides ample supplies of it at every turn.

The game itself is split into five eras, Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization and Galactic, with each promising you’ll be able to customize and guide your creation with limitless freedom. The creature creator certainly provides that, with thousands upon thousands of possiblities, but the vast majority of the body parts are found by wandering aimlessly around the large map looking for them. Looking for the higher stat body parts that are critical to dominance can lead to a lot of wasted time unless you feel like simply resorting to beating on the various weaker species.

Outside of the creature creation your options are severly limited with each stage tracking if you opted to kill or befriend the other creatures or head down some zen bhuddist middle path. Choosing anything other than kill,kill,kill will result in a painful lesson about the mechanics of the food chain and exactly how far down it your creatures lie. Once you get to the civilisation stage, the warrior path opens up city destroying nukes that allow you to simply bomb your enemies into submission making the two other strategies, bribe/trade or send units to attack, irrelevant.

Each of the four opening stages lacks any real depth and serve as little more than a lead-in to the galatic stage, clearly the focus of the game given the attention devoted to it. It does offer more to do than the other stages, tasking you with running missions, trading, forming alliances and even managing the food chain on your new colonies to improve their teraform rating and thus the number of facilities you can build. Again though, you are reduced to either bribing and trading with the other species or destroying them.

The overall aim of the galactic game is to reach the center of the galaxy a task made supremely difficult due to the distance to the center, numerous wormholes that never seem to lead you where you want to go and the center of the universe being occupied by a vast race, the Gorx. While every other race in Spore holds only a few paltry planets, making alliances all but worthless as the vessels they send to your fleet are unable to defend against even modest threats, the Gorx have an epic empire that once again leaves you with two choices: A systematic removal of the Gorx from their planets one by one as you journey to the center, a task requiring Final Fantasy levels of devotion and game hours, or you can stock up on repair modules and race to the center as their ships pile on with each planet you pass. The later is made even more difficult with the addition of the fact that your travel range reduces as you get closer to the center and this only allows one or two paths to the center of the galaxy, making for lots of pausing of the game and finding paths with lots of stars to get you there.

Ultimately Spore offers only a few modest hours of ‘fun’ gameplay and the creature creator is certainly where most of that joy will spawn from, I’m sure it’ll be an even bigger hit with younger players, but there’s precious little choice or control over your race and the latter end of the Galactic stage feels more like a chore or a day job than entertainment.

With EA’s decision to implement strict DRM with Spore, only allowing limited installs, which has meant many stores won’t allow you to return or trade the game, I can’t even recommend this be a game you ‘rent’. If you are really desperate for a Spore fix, just buy the creature creator and save yourself the $40 for the full game as you’ll have the only real enjoyable part of the game and avoid the many flaws, pain and deep, deep frustration that comes from playing it.