Shotgun Reviews - Locked and Loaded
There’s been a handful of people asking me for new content, so I figured it was time to cave and give them more of the Big D.
I welcome you to yet another mini-series of mine that I intend to continue; Shotgun Reviews. These reviews will be brief compared to my previous, single game reviews. They’ll generally consist of a paragraph or two, synopsizing multiple games in the same post. A lot of bang for your not-buck, so in a word, like buckshot. Enough of my metaphor though, let’s get these reviews rolling!
Far Cry 2
Far Cry 2 definitely looks good, no doubt about that. It looks like Africa; expansive savannas, stretches of desert, and lush, small growths of vegetation. The Dunia engine definitely shows off some impressive visuals, but I think they’re getting a little too much of a boner for their fire effects. Yeah, the fire looks good, it’s cool. You can propagate it pretty decently, and it will spread, (very briefly), to other dry sections of land until it goes out. This happens pretty quickly, and a blaze will never reach incredible levels, probably due to limitations of the engine, but it’s a nice effect. I don’t know if I’d be tossing it all over your logos and intro movies, but what do I know, right?
Gameplay is unfortunately where Far Cry 2 suffers. Everyone is out to kill you. No one in Africa likes you, Mr. Mercenary, at all. It doesn’t matter what you do, who you kill, or who you save, everyone will hate you. The only people that won’t shoot you, are the people inside of cease fire towns, or inside of buildings that you have to open a door to gain entry to. I understand they probably wanted to make you feel all alone in this country, but it’s a little ridiculous. You have to drive through enemy populated checkpoints that respawn once you drive far enough away from them, they’re extremely accurate and will most certainly overwhelm you if you try to be too aggressive. Another problem is the fact that you have malaria, which only serves to annoy the piss out of you, as all it fucking does is make you take a pill every hour of real time or so. You barely notice any ill effects the disease has on you, no matter what the level is. Why couldn’t they have just left this out? The weapons are decent, save for the fact that THE FUCKING EJECTION PORTS ARE ON THE WRONG. FUCKING. SIDES. Okay, the guns jam, you want to show off the jamming of the bullet in the ejection port. Fine. BUT YOU CAN DO THAT, WITH THEM BEING ON THE RIGHT SIDE! Fuck you, Ubisoft.
Final Verdict: It’s a fun little immersive shooter that let’s you ‘go anywhere, kill anyone’. But it gets old quick.
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II
Let’s get this out of the way, I love the original Dawn of War and all of it’s expansions. Well, Soulstorm is probably my least favorite expansion, but it’s still a worthy expansion in my book. There’s a shitload of races from the Warhammer universe to smack the crap out of each other with, and the point capture/defense while building up a base, then expanding was a really awesome experience. I hope you didn’t like building bases and learning new technologies, as well as getting a massive amount of different types of units to play around with. But I hope you like capturing points. A lot.
That’s what Dawn of War II is all about. It’s a fall from grace from the original if you ask me, because it’s been dumbed down to point grabbing in it’s purest sense. You send out a, (small), squad to cap a point, then you defend it. You wait for resources, upgrade your, (one building), base, then build more, (out of the very few), units. Each race, (out of the four), gets about seven or eight unique units, which is a huge downgrade from the original Dawn of War’s massive array of units. You get about two or three vehicles each side, and the rest are all infantry units. You continue to capture and hold points with these units, and then eventually you zerg their, (one building), base. It’s very anti-climatic, and even boring sometimes, especially if you play against someone who’s much better than you, or much worse. The AI is pretty decent, if rather reserved, and the inclusion of the Tyranids will make some happy, I’m sure. Personally, I’m pissed that we went from having nine races, to back to only having four, and they don’t even have Chaos Marines. Or the Tau. Fucking lame, Relic.
Final Verdict: It’s a much more simple game this time around, but it’s almost too simple to be fun.
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault On Dark Athena
TCoR: Escape from Butcher Bay was a very awesome ‘movie’ game, in the sense that, at least in my opinion, the game was better than the movie. How often does that shit happen with movie tie-in games? Anyway, I played through Escape From Butcher Bay on Xbox and it looked pretty damn good for a console game of that generation. Not only that, but the mechanics were pretty genius. First person melee combat that was visceral and intense, with stealth mechanics that were stupidly fun to play with to boot. Not only could you beat on people with an assortment of melee weapons and your fists, but you could turn a guard’s gun on himself to disarm him, you could silently break someone’s neck from behind to maintain stealth, or you could recklessly grab one from behind and take him down not so quietly. Almost all of the weapons had unique kills and attack animations, and gun-play took a backseat, which was pretty refreshing.
Fast forward to Assault on Dark Athena. Starbreeze Studios has remade Escape From Butcher Bay (EFBB) using the new engine they developed Assault on Dark Athena (AoDA) with. It’s a faithful port in that nothing has changed, nothing was removed, and nothing was added, (Well, unless you count another game). The only thing different is the new engine. It’s great for people who never got the chance to play it, and can now play it with a beautiful looking new engine, but for those that have already played through it, it’ll be nothing new. Sadly, that’s also the case with AoDA; it’s nothing new. The location is different, there’s a few new mechanics, enemies, and weapons, but overall the formula is almost a carbon copy. You’re trying to escape from something, you can be stealthy about it, or loud about it, but it boils down to dispatching anyone/thing that gets in your way, and getting to the end. Yeah, that describes a lot of games, but almost the entire time I was playing AoDA, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d done all this before.
Final Verdict: It’s great for people who have never played The Chronicles of Riddick before, but if you have, the ‘new content’ feels almost exactly the same.
The Sims 3
Okay. Now. To review a game that you can’t beat, has no right or wrong way to play, and well… gives you a lot of things to do. I played the original Sims a long while back and I had a good stint with it where I played it for a few weeks, before I eventually moved on and didn’t touch it again. When Sims 2 came out, I played it for about an hour or two, then didn’t touch it again. So why, you might be asking, did I pick up and start playing Sims 3? Curiosity, mostly. After talking to my friends, (All girls, it should be noted), they all said it was better than the first two, so despite my better judgment, I started playing it. DON’T do this. I have no fucking idea why, but I’m hooked on this fucking game. I’m already living a life, yet I’m watching and helping some other prick live his/her life. WHYYYYY!? I have no idea. But I’m actually having fun with it too, that’s what scares me.
It’s true that there’s a lot more things that you can do in The Sims 3; you can now go in and out of a living, breathing town in real time without loading, you’ll get random encounters with different people, random phone calls, random pieces of mail, and random occurrences in life and at your job. It’s the idealized life, I suppose you could say, where you can do whatever the hell you want, without real life consequences. Instead you watch some other prick take the consequences of your actions. You can be as much of a dick, or as nice as you want, to your Sim, and in turn he’ll grow accordingly. It’s basically like those fucking Tamagotchi’s, only a whole game that’s based on slice of life now. I don’t know. Something about it makes me want to keep playing, even though I know I shouldn’t.
Final Verdict: It’s addicting as all hell, and admittedly pretty fun too. But I have NO idea why!
Uplink
Uplink kind of came out of nowhere for me and really surprised me. I had heard about it a while back, after Darwinia started to get some steam, (Figuratively and literally), as it was made by the same company. As they put it, ‘one of the last of the bedroom developers’. It’s an extremely simplistic game in design, and graphically, but I’ll be damned if it’s not intense and rather fun to play.
You’re a hacker in the year 2010, working for whoever you choose to work for, and hacking into any system you wish to. It’s more ‘cinematic’ style hacking than ‘realistic’ style, but I’m sure there’s plenty of reasons for that. You have to setup your computer, upgrade it’s processor, memory, modem, and security, as well as buy all kinds of useful software for it in order to stay on top of the hacking scene and tackle harder and harder jobs. Jobs will consist of deleting files from databases, altering academic degrees, adjusting social security details, copying files, and more. It’s almost always a race against the clock, as, obviously, no one’s going to like having someone breaking into their system without permission. You have to complete your objectives before your traced or your Neuromancer rating will drop, and you’ll be fined, and possibly even have your computer confiscated and face jail time. Your Neuromancer rating determines how thorough of a hacker you are, and if you betray your fellow hackers in order to save your own skin and possibly get the Feds in on the entire hacking scene. If you don’t do anything to purposefully get other hackers in serious danger, and if you diligently clean up after yourself and deliver on your promises, you’re Neuromancer rating will continue to climb, and you’ll have a much easier time with jobs. It’s a very simple game, but very complex at the same time.
Final Verdict: Almost bare bones in terms of graphics and design, but it’s surprisingly complex and deep as well. And damnit, a whole lot of fun.
Whew. So that’s the first edition of Shotgun Reviews, hopefully you enjoyed it. More of these will come, as I continue to play games, naturally.
