Dead Space 2

Dead Space 2 is a fine example of a video game sequel that improves on what the original game offered without actually doing anything too revolutionary. It is again a polished, enjoyable, refined experience, one that takes few real risks but is solidly enough built that it is fun regardless of its lack of ambition. The biggest thing the game tries that the original didn't is turning protagonist Isaac Clarke into an actual character, giving him a voice and more obvious motives, and having his actual face appear much more often. It's a change that works, and helps give the game a bit more weight, as Isaac feels more like a person than a cipher through which to shoot a bunch of monsters.

Making Isaac into a person improves the game's ability to tell a story in general. The first game had an excellent presentation, with nice graphics and a lot of effective sound design that sold the brutally gory sci-fi horror concept despite a lot of the bare essentials not being very original. The way every bit of the interface is built into the game world itself sells the setting as a believable place, and helps you look past the obvious inspirations from previous games on movies. It was hard to care about the story though, and Dead Space 2 improves on that by characterizing Isaac and giving him more people to talk to and larger stakes for him to actually care about. It's still not a particularly intriguing or unique story, but I was at least more invested

The gameplay is pretty much exactly along the same lines as it was in the first game. You stalk your way through various corridors and rooms in a space station that has been overrun by freakishly mutated people, compelled to kill you by alien technology you don't quite understand, by any means necessary. You find a plasma cutter early on, a tool which doubles as a weapon, and use it to slice off the monsters' limbs in order to kill them. You will buy improved armor and new weapons at store kiosks, a lot of which you'll recognize from the first game, but some of which is new. It's a constant balancing act, as sometimes you'll find yourself with an inventory full of ammo and health kits, and at otherwise you'll be desperately scraping for any items you can find and hoping the next room has a save point instead of another swarm of enemies. Once in a while you'll come across a basic puzzle to solve in order to advance, usually in the form of some kind of machine you need to get working. It's all very familiar, but a bit more refined and balanced to keep you challenged but not too frustrated.

Where the game is definitely improved is in the segments where the gameplay dramatically changes and forces you to do something else. This might take the form of a zero gravity segment, which features improved controls and maneuverability over similar areas in the first Dead Space, or something else entirely. The more dramatic moments rely less on familiar video game tropes such as boss fights or the original's dreaded turret sequences, and more on creating exciting scenarios straight out of an action movie and having you struggle through them on your wits and reflexes. It's both fresher than a more typical divergence and simply more fun to experience, and definitely something I'm glad they worked on, as it was the biggest issue with the first game.

The Dead Space franchise is never going to win awards for originality, and the extent to which they expect you to play all kinds of other games and watch movies and so on to actually get the entire story, when the story itself is far from the real draw, is a bit off-putting. But you can't deny that the games are well made, and deliver on their promise of bloody shooting action in a fun and occasionally creepy setting. Some of its attempts at horror are cheesy or just downright exploitative, but you can't say they aren't trying, or making a boring product. A third full game is supposed to be on the way, and I wouldn't be surprised to find myself playing it in a couple of years.

Game Update 20: DLC Round-Up 5

It's getting close to a year since I've done of these. I'm not quite as focused on seeing every piece of content from every game I play as I used to be.

Bioshock 2: Minerva's Den


Minerva's Den has a reputation as one of the best DLC add-ons for a game ever made, and it's well earned. If you didn't need to buy Bioshock 2 first to play it, I'd say you could just skip it and play Minerva's Den to get all you need out of the experience. It serves as a sort of smaller version of the main game, again having you play as a Big Daddy and collecting most of the same equipment as you experience a story that's a lot more tightly written and emotionally effective than the main game's. It always seems a bit odd to focus on praising the narrative of a video game, especially a downloadable add-on, but Minerva's Den really is exceptionally well conceived and executed. Worth checking out even if you didn't love the main game.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution: The Missing Link


Another add-on that acts as a microcosm for the main game, The Missing Link explores a gap in Human Revolution's story and basically allows you to make a new Adam Jensen from scratch that you will use for a few hours before the story wraps up and connects back to the main plot. You begin on a ship and eventually end up on another secret base, which you can either sneak or shoot your way through until you reach the ending. Obviously this DLC doesn't capture the other side of the game that lets you just walk around and explore, and there were a few annoying aspects of the level design, particularly the way the mission requires you to go back and forth in the same space repeatedly and pass through the same extremely slow doorways until you get sick of them. But if you really enjoyed Human Revolution like I did, it's hard to say no to another clandestine base to infiltrate, especially if you can get it on sale.

L.A. Noire: Rockstar Pass


None of the DLC for L.A. Noire was very substantial, but the way Rockstar distributed it was very cool. There were several individual cases that were available for download for okay prices, but if you knew you wanted to play all of it, you could plop down a little extra for the "Rockstar Pass" and get all of it as it came out at a lower rate. It encouraged people to pay more up front with the knowledge that they wouldn't miss anything. The cases themselves seem like they were merely snipped out of the main game without much thought, some of them even revealing certain story elements that were referred to "later" in the main plot without explanation. The original game was plenty long enough, so I didn't feel cheated, and the cases themselves were a natural extension of what made the game fun in the first place. Neat investigations and adequate action sequences abound.

Portal 2: Peer Review


The best kind of DLC is free DLC, and Valve knew that when they put out Peer Review, an extension to Portal 2 that added something similar to the challenge mode from the first game that was missing in the sequel, and more importantly, added a new section to the already stellar co-op campaign. This section mixed and matched various concepts from earlier in the co-op to put together some really fiendish puzzles, creating perhaps the most difficult (and no less entertaining) Portal gameplay that I've experienced. And of course it's framed within the context of Portal's very funny and entertaining universe, which means plenty of new GLaDOS quips and robot antics to laugh at. It's hard to get a better value for your no dollars.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Skyrim came out exactly one month ago, so now seems like as good a time as any to write about it. I haven't been playing it constantly that entire time, but I have spent quite a few hours with it. I haven't finished it, of course. Not in the sense of seeing all the things there are to see, or even just completing the main story quest. I'm maybe about a third of the way through it. As far as the other quest lines, I've joined three of the five major factions, and I've only finished doing work for one of them. I've done some other side jobs, but I still have a dozen unrelated side quests sitting open in my journal, and a couple dozen other miscellaneous objectives on top of that. I've only visited seven of the nine cities, and I'm sure the other two will give me plenty of more stuff to do one I check them out. And of course I won't really ever run out of stuff to do, since the game can keep generating easy little tasks even after you get through the more detailed ones. Most games that had this much content would be maddening, but there's just something about The Elder Scrolls that makes me relish visiting its gigantic, endlessly explorable world rather than getting tired of doing the same thing over and over again.

I was about as big a fan of Oblivion as anyone, but I can't deny that that game had certain problems. Its main plot had problems; it got pretty repetitive after a point, it wasn't always the easiest thing to know why you were doing what you were doing, and there's a certain sense of letdown when you realize you aren't the chosen one, but just a guy helping the chosen one out. It also had serious gameplay balance problems - it used the same skill system as Morrowind, where you had certain skills designated as major ones, and using them caused them to improve, which is how you would level up. But it was easy to accidentally build a character that could level up frequently without actually improving your combat ability much, and since enemies always leveled up to match you, serious difficulty problems would pop up. You should feel stronger by leveling up in an RPG, but it was often the bad guys who were beefing up more than you. Skyrim fixes this mostly by removing the distinction between class skills and other skills, so working on anything will give you progress toward leveling up, and dungeons are scaled based on a range rather than an absolute value, making some places certainly tough enough to match you, but others easy enough that you can get through them with no problem. If you spend all day improving your non-combat skills without raising your combat to match, you could still run into issues, but the balance seems better.

That's not the only improvement either; almost everything about Skyrim seems like it can be described as "like Oblivion, but better". As I said I haven't finished the main quest yet, but so far it feels suitably epic enough to be the primary focus of a game this big, and I've already done some things that were more interesting than anything that really happened in Oblivion's quest. The other factions also seem to have really interesting central plots this time, and are better integrated with the setting of Skyrim itself. Rather than their being a generically named guild chapter in every city, they all have headquarters in one location, and histories and reputations within those places that make them feel like part of the world rather than a trigger to generate quests. The Daedric side quests are back and as subversive as ever, and have a lot more variety in how you come across them. In general, it's impressive how much effort the game put into making sure you always have plenty of choice in what to do next. It's hard to go pretty much anywhere without picking up a bounty on some bandit or a lead on where to find something interesting.

I also really like the place of Skyrim itself. Oblivion drew complaints for being a pretty generic fantasy setting, and I always defended it as being a nice looking and pretty interesting place. Besides, as the central political and economic hub of the whole continent, it was all-encompassing and non-specific by design. But I can't deny that Skyrim is a more intriguing place. It has a real sense of local identity that Cyrodiil mostly lacked, and thanks to the technological innovations of the last nine years, they are able to present that identity more effectively than Morrowind did. The Nordic culture is heavily influenced by, well, Nordic cultures from real life, and is a cool blend of Scandinavian and fantasy influences. And the game also represents a big shift in the culture of the continent itself, taking place some two hundred years after Oblivion, and shaking up the entire political landscape. The world just feels alive when you hear people talking about the great war between men and elves and how the citizens are no longer happy with the empire's control over them, and just adding the concept of real open conflict to the setting makes it feel more important and dangerous, even if only affects the world in a significant way when you decide it does. And oh yeah, dragons are a pretty cool enemy.

I haven't even touched on all of the things they've added for you to do if you're interested in making your own equipment. Alchemy is back, and lets you mix potions without actually knowing their properties before hand, which feels more natural. Enchanting makes more sense, as you learn effects by taking them from already existing items, and it's a more intuitive system than there was before. And crafting is really significant. There's a purpose to hunting, as you can use the hides you take from animals and tan them to make leather. You can mine ore and smelt it into workable material, and then combine the leather and the metal to make weapons, armor, and jewelry. Which you can then enchant, of course. You can also chop wood for money and cook food to give it different effects, both minor activities but ones that enhance the idea that this is a world people live in and not just a playground for you to kill monsters in. Jeez, I just realized I haven't actually talked about combat. Or the perk system, which is the main focus of leveling up. God, this game is huge.

Anyway, the game engine is definitely improved on what they had before, but it's still basically the same engine, which means it's not the most elegant experience at all times. The combat system has the same general clunkiness as before, though I won't say it isn't greatly improved. The main addition is the dual wielding system, which lets you use any combination of one-handed weapons, spells, and shields in your two different hands, allowing for a greater variety of play styles. There's still bows and two handed weapons as well, and they're also effective ways to take on monsters and bandits. My personal approach is to sneak as much as possible, and pick off enemies with my bow before they know I'm there. When I do get into a scrape, I usually pull out one of the swords or maces that I've enchanted myself, and try to keep enemies off balance while I keep myself alive with a healing spell in the other hand. But I could have a spell in both hands, or a sword in one and an axe in the other, or anything else really if I wanted to. Every time you level up you pick a stat to improve (health, stamina or magicka; they've totally gotten rid of the other stats that those three used to be derived from), and a perk, which is either a bonus to or an extra ability related to one of your skills. It could be a reduction on the magicka cost of casting spells from a certain school, or it could be the ability to zoom in when aiming with your bow. It's a system that encourages you to level up and experiment with different skills, and helps reduce the occasional monotony of taking on the hundredth dungeon full of undead or spiders or necromancers or whatever.

As I mentioned it's the same engine, which means the same occasional technical hiccup, which might cause an NPC to act strangely or an object to not appear properly or any number of small issues that can pop up. I don't fault Bethesda for having some glitches in a game this big, and I also have to note that in the time I've played I've experienced the fewest number of issues that actually break the game from any Elder Scrolls game I've tried. There's been one or two crashes, and a single objective that won't resolve itself properly, but that's about it. And there really have been improvements to the engine - more subtle animations can still be awkward, but people do interact better, and the game just looks really, really nice. It's both the graphics and just the visual design of the world. When you're on top of a mountain looking out over a grand vista, or walking through a valley and seeing the Northern Lights play off a sky full of stars and Tamriel's two moons, it can be as breathtaking as any image you've seen in a game. And then a wooly mammoth might accidentally spawn in midair and plummet to its death. And that's Skyrim.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

I really liked a lot of what The Witcher did, but some issues with its pacing and technical prowess prevented me from loving the game. This year's sequel isn't flawless, but it does address some of those problems, and really cements the series as one of the premiere action RPG franchises in gaming. Not every change was welcome, but I think overall Assassins of Kings is a better game than the original.

The game begins not long after the first ends, with Geralt protecting the king of Temeria during the siege of a castle. The game introduces you to its systems without much hand-holding, before things take a bad turn and you're more or less on your own again in a backwater town with not much equipment and even fewer friends. You can use a save file from the first game when you start off, though its greatest effect appears to be just giving you the nice equipment you had when you finished, with the actual consequences of your decisions being subtle if even present at all. I sort of like the way the game just throws you right into the thick of it, but they might have taken it too far by limiting the information on how you play it to small dialogue boxes on the side of the screen that disappear quickly and are easily missed in the thick of the exciting prologue. Thankfully the team added a proper, separate tutorial mode as part of a big free update last month, which I waited for and made the game's new systems a lot clearer.

The combat will be somewhat familiar to people who played the first game, though it's different enough that the tutorial is useful even for experienced players. You still have two swords; a steel one for men and a silver one for monsters, and you still have the five magic signs from before, with slightly altered mechanics. The different stances for different types of enemies are gone, replaced with a more action-oriented control style that lets you mix and match quick and strong attacks and move around much more freely. You also can equip various throwing knives, bombs, and traps, and use them more easily in combat than before. It definitely increases the skill required to play the game, especially since Geralt seemed kind of gimped early on until you unlock some abilities, such as ones that allow you to block attacks from any direction and do actual counter-attacks. I mostly stuck with the combat path as I leveled, though there are also the magic and alchemy paths if those interest you, which might require more forethought but are still viable. Changing the combat from basically a button-timing game to a system that requires more thought and twitch skill might not be welcome to everyone, but I thought it worked.

How much the game feels like a real RPG sort of depends on how much you want it to. I mostly stuck to the main path and focused on improving my sword skill, which made the game sort of like a Mass Effect 2-style action game that happens to have a long story and a lot of decisions to make. There are lots of side quests to pursue though that I only pursued when I ran across them, and there's also a lot of crafting and upgrading options that I mostly ignored. The decisions were the main thing that reminded me of the type of game I was playing though, especially because of how deeply they impact the course of the story. Few games really even attempt dynamic plotting like this, and the game would be remarkable for its ambition even if it didn't work. Some games of this type are content to keep the main critical path of the game the same for everyone, with the major changes being events that might have a different outcome in the moment and a slight consequence later on. Other games focus on giving you freedom and let you approach the story at your own pace, but when you do approach it it's basically the same. The Witcher 2 is very linear, but there are a number of points where a decision you make affects events not only in the short term, but how the rest of the story might play out. The flow of time will remain constant, but the players involved and their motivations could be totally changed. It's not handled perfectly, but when it works it's impressive.

And it's an interesting story too, if not the best told one. I often felt like I was supposed to know kingdoms and nobles even when I didn't get a proper introduction, and I don't know if the game was expecting me to read up on these people in the journal or be familiar with the books the series is based on or if they were just throwing me into the middle of a complicated conflict on purpose. It's easy to get lost in the family trees and the history the game is always throwing at you, but if you strip that away, there is a plot there that's a pretty decent little fantasy tale, combining elements of political intrigue and powerful sorcery in a way that pulls you into its dark and unusual world. I've genuinely come to care about the characters that carried over the first game, and I'm invested in Geralt's attempt to regain his memory, and I'm intrigued by this grand new conflict that he's gotten caught up in, even if like him, I don't understand all of it. The presentation really helps, too. The game looks pretty outstanding even though my PC isn't top of the line, combining a nice, gritty, distinctly European fantasy aesthetic with an impressive graphics engine. The voice acting is good, especially when you consider it's being translated from the original Polish, and the original score (which I'm listening to right now) is well executed if a bit safe.

As I mentioned before, the game isn't perfect. I didn't have the same problem with the ending having trouble getting on with it; in fact it's about as perfectly paced an RPG I've played. You have two nice, lengthy acts with plenty of opportunity for screwing around, before the plot reaches its climax and resolves itself with proper speed. The problems are more mundane technical ones, and they're unfortunate when so much else of the game is put together very well. The first game is difficult at times, but I never got angry at it, because I always was able to find the right combination of techniques and equipment to get through it. There were moments in the sequel though that just seemed way out of line with the rest of the game. There's challenge, and then there's enemies that are just too difficult to damage or come in groups that are too large. I was also kind of disappointed in the enemy variety; you'd think a game about a monster hunter by trade would have a few more kinds of monsters. Maybe there were more in the various hunting contracts you can pick up, but if you focus on the main plot like I did, you see a lot of the same ones. The game also failed to use the Steam overlay for reasons I could not ascertain even though I bought the game through Steam, and the scripting in the stealth sections seemed to break when I actually tried to play them. Early on there's an objective to sneak somewhere, but if you get spotted you get brought somewhere else and the story changes. That's fine, and actually interesting. But later, getting caught means you die, which means I have to reload. And every time I did, enemies would fail to act the way they should, and there would be some glitch with the sound, causing most of the effects to disappear until I went to the main menu and reloaded the save. This occurred on a couple other occasions as well.

It seems like these are the kinds of problems that would be easily noticed in play testing and should be addressed, which is what makes them seem worse than regular glitches. Ultimately they didn't hurt the game too much for me though, which is good, because I wanted to like it as much as I did. It's clear from the course of the story as it draws to a close, and also from the solid sales numbers for a game like this, that there will be a third game at some point, and it's only a matter of when. I look forward to its inevitable release, though if I wanted more right away, I could always go back and try the other half of the game that I missed.

Just Cause 2

If the first Just Cause was a dry run for testing out ideas on what an open world game about causing a revolution in a small exotic country might be, its sequel is definitely the full realization of those concepts. It's also sort of the game Mercenaries 2: World in Flames should have been; it doesn't have some of that game's best assets, like its co-op, its arsenal of hugely explosive airstrikes, and its strong motivation for the lead character, but it does execute on its central premise a lot better. It's a huge game, one that will still have things you haven't done long after you've lost interesting in doing them, but well worth the many hours it will take to reach the point.

Just Cause 2 is all about destruction and creating chaos. In fact, the main currency in the game is actually called "chaos". Building up your chaos meter can be done in several ways, mostly involving making various objects in the world explore. The simplest way to increase chaos is to complete side missions for three different armed factions that inhabit the country of Panau, which range from fairly simple tasks like assassinating a certain official to more elaborate jobs involving a lot more firepower. The game missed an opportunity by never having the factions interact, despite a lot of your actions generally working to expand their various territories. Their beefs all seem to be with Panau's government though and not each other, so you can do whatever you like without worrying that it will bother them. Gaining chaos unlocks further missions for the factions, weapons and vehicles that you can buy and upgrade from the black market, and most importantly, gives you access to agency missions, which progress the story.

If course, that "importantly" is up for debate. The story itself is mostly inconsequential, consisting of a lot of national stereotypes yelling at each other and trying to take over the country. You're really only the good guys because the player is usually the good guy in games like this. I didn't even realize that you were playing the same character as in the first game until I met another character that I recognized, which shows of how little significance the plot is. I think you can ignore the story completely if you want, as the entire archipelago that the country consists of is unlocked from the start, and there's nothing really blocking you from doing what you want. Most things you do will earn you money as well as chaos, but it's kind of a laughable commodity, as there was almost never a situation where I felt the need to pay for a specific weapon or vehicle when so many are just there for the taking.

You can run, jump shoot, throw explosives, and control a huge variety of vehicles, all of which are pretty fun. The key to the gameplay is the grappling hook, though, which lets you winch two objects together for whatever reason you can dream up, as well as zip yourself quickly across the world, cling to walls and ceilings, and even fall from any distance without taking damage. Combine it with your backpack which has an infinite supply of parachutes, and the freedom of movement you have in the game is immense. It helps make up for the fact that your arsenal never gets much more impressive than it is in the beginning. It's fun just to use the two items to fling yourself around the country, stumble upon a military base you've never seen before, and just lay waste to the delicate equipment and soldiers inside with the agility of an Hispanic Batman. It does seem a bit limiting when you can only blow up things the game wants you to blow up, like tanks full of gas, water towers, oil pipelines, and construction cranes. But there's just so many of them that it's rare to go too long without seeing something you can destroy. The problem with the game's scope is that it might actually be too vast, as I found myself frequently skipping to new locations using the extraction feature rather than traveling myself, because unless you have a plane or a helicopter, the distance between significant locations can be prohibitive.

The game is very impressive technically, never stopping to load an area, and having a nice level of detail on all the objects despite their being hundreds of them in any direction you look. The geographical diversity of this small cluster of islands is pretty incredible, and all the different environments look really nice. I starting having some slowdown and hangups with the frame rate when I was getting closer to the end of my time with the game, but they never seriously affected gameplay. Reflecting on some aspects of the game, there were definitely issues. Voice acting was generally bad and repetitive, too much of the optional content like the race challenges and tracking down hundreds of meaningless collectibles just wasn't interesting, and fighting off enemy guards and soldiers never felt like more than a distraction from blowing up everything in sight. The game really took a dive in quality whenever you were tasked with fighting a particularly tough bad guy rather than something that played to its strengths. Still, it featured over fifty unique missions that ranged from decent to pretty damn fun, which is a lot more than the first game can say, and experimenting with the grappling hook and your other gear never stopped being enjoyable. The good parts are definitely worth the small design issues.

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

FEAR 2 is an easier game than the original, and generally stuck out from the crowd less when it was released for the same reasons. FEAR was an early post-Half-Life 2 shooter that was notable for two reasons; its horror atmosphere, and the complex AI of the soldiers you fought, who seemed incredibly smart at the time, and worked together to flush you out and flank you. FEAR 2 maintains the creepy mood of its predecessor, but the combat seems much more straightforward, and designed to keep you constantly running and gunning rather than approaching every situation carefully. Weapons, ammo, health kits, and body armor are constantly being thrown at you, and the enemies seem less concerned with flanking you than they used to be. It's possible I'm just remembering them being a lot smarter than they really were, but I think it was a conscious choice to make the game a bit easier for casual players to handle. I'm no shooter expert but I almost never even had to use the ability to slow down time you gain that was so heavily featured in the first game, and I rarely died at all.

I've never thought extreme challenge was a particular asset in most games though, and I don't think I really liked or disliked the combat any more than I did in the first game. It's just a slightly different focus, and that's fine, especially when the game's setting is enough to keep you interested while the game lasts. The FEAR series isn't exactly what I'd call scary, because the plot is just sort of science fiction supernatural horror gibberish, and there's not much that's inherently terrifying about its premise. It's hard to be scared when you're constantly expecting weird, freaky stuff to happen, and the game has a couple effective jump scares, but they're few and far between. It's more what I'd call a spooky sort of atmosphere, one that's entertaining in the way it sets up horrific little scenarios for you to walk through. There's something killing people in this world besides just you, and it's almost amusing to come across the huge puddles and streaks of blood everywhere and try to imagine how it all got there.

The game bounces you back and forth between letting you explore these areas, uncovering packets of text that develop the back story and explain the characters a bit, and just throwing tons of enemies at you. There's a surprisingly good variety of enemies for a game known to be all about fighting endless hordes of clone soldiers. The different types of soldiers are immediately recognizable and have their own abilities to worry about, and the game will occasionally change up the pace by introducing heavy mechs or a couple kinds of more horror-themed enemies which require their own tactics. There's a pretty good variety of weapons as well, many of which are standard machine guns or shotguns, but the more exotic stuff is usually interesting. Once in a while you also get to pilot a mech yourself, which is pretty simple but fun for the few minutes where you're just blasting everything in sight with swarms of missiles.

It's something you miss when you don't play the previous game for a few years, but FEAR 2 is a nice step up in visual quality from its predecessor. That's sort of obvious when it came out so much later, but I still thought it was a nice looking game, both from a technical and design perspective. FEAR drew complaints for its environments being fairly dull, consisting mostly of similar warehouses and office buildings. Thanks in part to the story of the second game beginning with the nuke that goes off at the end of the first one, there's more of an opportunity for unique and memorable locations. You explore familiar areas like city streets and a hospital, but they've been turned upside down by the violence that's been happening, and there are a few other kinds of areas. I liked in the first game that the buildings you shot your way through seemed like real buildings, but FEAR 2 has a better balance between that and stuff that's still cool to look at. My favorite location was probably the elementary school, which definitely makes nice use of the juxtaposition between what it was before and what has happened to it. It also features heavily into the plot, which is generally standard horror fare, though it is pretty remarkable what pains the writers went through to make the corporation behind everything seem as evil as possible.

The game is fun while it lasts, which ends up being the length of a typical modern shooter. I was a bit confused at first about the difference between missions and "intervals", which are the only markings of story progress that you actually see while playing the game. The plot ends sort of abruptly, but it does so in a crazy enough way that it felt like a decent conclusion to a pretty wacky ride. When I bought the game on Steam the Reborn add-on was included, which I'm glad for, because I can't imagine it's length makes it worth whatever they were originally charging. It does give you another opportunity to check out all the enemies and weapons again, and tells a briefly interesting story involving an antagonist from the first game, but it's pretty spare otherwise and barely lasts an hour. It felt like a bonus mission more than a fully fleshed out add-on like other games have seen. Overall though, I had enough fun with the package for it to be worth it.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Review at Player Affinity

Bastion

In this age of development teams numbering in the hundreds and multi-million dollar budgets, it still amazes me sometimes what a handful of people can do. The group behind the actual making of Bastion consists of a couple programmers, a designer, an artist, a sound guy, and a former game critic doing the writing. Greg Kasavin was always very likable when he worked at Gamespot, and it's cool seeing one of the many journalists who have switched over to the development side actually have a tangible, positive effect on a game. He contributes to one of the best combinations of story, gameplay, and presentation I've seen in a while in Bastion, despite it being a relatively small downloadable game.

At first the game seems like a fairly straightforward brawler with an interesting gimmick of a gravelly-voiced narrator, but it quickly reveals the depth behind everything. There are eleven different and completely distinct weapons available, and you can wield any two at the same time, giving you a wide range of options from both up close and far away. You combine these with special skills you can learn or buy at the shops do further broaden your choices in combat. Leveling up unlocks slots that you equip additional spirits, which give you a variety of combat bonuses, and you can buy more of those from the shop as well, and buy or find materials that let you upgrade your weapons in a number of ways and enhance their usefulness. Combine these with the idols that let you customize more difficult encounters in order for XP and money rewards, and there is a ton of depth to explore as you play and replay the game.

Along with the truckload of options available to the player, the game has solid controls and a variety of enemies that combine in interesting ways, making the combat constantly fun and challenging without getting overwhelming. If the game focused solely on this, it would succeed on the strength of the mechanics and the freedom they allow. The game views combat though as a means to an end, of telling a story that doesn't have a ton of dialogue or elaborate backstory spelled out in an encyclopedia in the pause menu, which is all the stronger for it. The environments you explore do a lot of the talking, really selling the idea of a world that's been torn apart by a horrible, unexplained event. Of course the narrator does a lot of the talking to, filling you in on what he knows and providing more than his fair share of wit. It's like a mix of hard boiled Noir dialogue and old timey folk stories, and the lines are all sold wonderfully by the actor. His is practically the only voice you hear in the game, but you never grow tired of it as he comments on what weapons or spirits you chose or how people react to certain mementos you can find in the game.

So you travel from area to area, searching for items you need to build up the Bastion, a special structure that can undo all the damage that's been done. There's a lot of fighting, although sometimes an area will take a break from that to try out a few other things that generally work very well. Eventually things start to get really heavy, and Bastion capitalizes on the idea of a game telling you its story through the act of playing it, with a few well considered and strongly resonant moments. There are a couple choices you'll have to make, and the game actually makes you think about them rather than just letting you decide whether you want good or evil powers, which I appreciated.

And I can't finish this without getting back to the presentation. I've already mentioned the visuals, which were all done by one person and give the game a sense of style it would be sorely lacking otherwise. There's also the music, which might be even more important, as it's definitely one of my favorite game soundtracks ever. There's some instrumental tracks that set the mood for whatever the occasion may be, as well as a couple full songs complete with vocals to help punctuate the biggest moments. Combine the music with the great narration, and Bastion is one of the best sounding games ever. It's pretty replayable too, as there's a new game plus to carry over stuff you unlocked to another run through and there's no way you'll fully explore all of the different items and skills in a single attempt. It's inherently a bit breezy because of the whole downloadable-game-made-by-half-a-dozen-people thing, but it's still an extraordinarily satisfying experience.

Portal 2

I played through this game's single player mode on PS3 around when it came out earlier this year, but because of the issues Sony had getting PSN back online, by the time I was able to get the game online (and activate my free PC copy), my friends who also bought the game had already played the co-op, and I wanted to experience it the first time with someone else who hadn't seen the solutions before either. I ended up waiting until this weekend, when another friend finally bought it and we blasted through the mode in one day. All it did was cement my position that Portal 2 is my favorite game from this generation, one of the best games ever, and also probably the funniest.

In a lot of ways Portal 2 is just more of Portal, but when Portal was already one of the most acclaimed and interesting games to come out in years, that's not really a bad thing. The sequel returns you to the same general environment of Aperture's underground laboratories, but expands on their scope exponentially in multiple directions. A lot of time has passed since the first game, and you get to explore the facility's entire history, from when it was first created deep at the bottom of a mine, and moving forward through time as they built newer and more advanced additions on top of the old ones. Part of the series' fun is the vaguely sinister nature of the environment, which is enjoyably disrupted by the games' sense of humor but still detectable through little areas you stumble upon, and the second game really explores this, creating one of the most intriguing locations ever in a game, both from an art and gameplay perspective. You frequently go between sterile, carefully managed testing chambers and the industrial decay that surrounds them, a juxtaposition reflected by every aspect of the game. The frequent changes in the feel of whatever area you're in at the time keeps things constantly fresh, and along with the clever gameplay and fantastic humor, you have a single player campaign that is longer, deeper, and ultimately more satisfying than the original's.

 There's definitely a detectable shift in the general puzzle design between games. Besides replacing bouncing energy cores with laser beams, all of the discrete elements from the original return, along with several new ones, such as energy-based bridges that can be redirected with portals and various kinds of gels that alter the properties of the surfaces in the environment. The increased number of variables to work with is accompanied by a shift away from experimentation and acrobatics in the puzzles, as solutions are generally more constrained to prevent overwhelming the player with all the possibilities inherent to the new elements and require less physical skill with the controller, letting players instead focus on thinking through the proper way to address all the obstacles present. I can see why some players might regret the slight loss in freedom this represents, but I thought the puzzles were extremely well-designed and constantly thrilling to solve, a feeling I don't think will go away that quickly on periodic revisits.

And as I already briefly mentioned a couple times, the writing and voice acting are fantastic. Valve has always done a great job of having a player experience a story through the act of playing a game, though in recent years their games have gotten more and more dialogue-heavy, usually to great comedic effect, and Portal 2 is possibly the culmination of that effort. GLaDOS was already wickedly funny in the first game, and having her be only one of a few characters in the game was a great idea. The two most significant new characters are Wheatley, a bumbling robotic friend who helps introduce you back into the world of Portal, and Cave Johnson, the founder of Aperture who had been mentioned previously in content from outside the original game and who lives on in a series of recordings in the facility's lower levels. Wheatley is played very well (and often ad-libbed) by The Office co-creator Stephen Merchant, and Cave is voiced by J.K. Simmons, who is consistently one of the most affable presences in Hollywood and does a great job as well. Johnson's dialogue is necessarily limited to solitary rants, but frequently GLaDOS and Wheatley are able to play off each other to great comical effect. It's all really memorable material without falling into the Internet meme pit that bits from the first game like all the cake-talk did. As always the script does a good job of creating a setting and telling a simple but interesting plot without having to directly explain it to you, and the ending is one of the single most gripping and unexpected things I've seen in a game.

And that co-op mode was worth the wait, as well. Just the inherent possibilities of what having two sets of portals instead of one is exciting, and I was glad to see the game fully capitalize on that potential. More portals means more complex set-ups, but even beyond that, having two sets of eyes and two brains working together on a problem means Valve could design tougher challenges, knowing that they had more freedom to try truly off-the-wall stuff and could expect players to roll with it. With the Left 4 Dead series they found an intriguing way to force players in a shooter to work together in order to survive, and they continue to have success here in making a unique experience out of cooperation. With the two player characters being easily-reconstructed robots there's a perfect opportunity to encourage experimentation and the occasional bit of messing with your buddy as you know there's no true consequence for a bad idea and the challenge is in figuring out the puzzle, not avoiding death. They also felt the freedom to bring back some of the more skill-based concepts like momentum, and find ways to combine elements that never interacted in the more straight-laced single player, like the previously mentioned bridges and gels. It's also just another showcase for GLaDOS, as she gleefully scolds the two robots and tries to set them against each other while they work towards whatever she feels like making them do.

All this and I haven't mentioned the yet-again entertaining and insightful developer commentary, the great use of music (not just in the background during dramatic moments, but also as a gameplay clue with the various new toys), the clever use of trophies/achievements and title cards, and the fact that they're still finding ways to make the Source engine impressive seven years later. Valve is easily one of my favorite game developers, and they seem to only cement that further with each new release. It's a testament to what they do that despite the continued radio silence on anything related to Half-Life, I find myself only intrigued by what's possible in the future rather than truly disappointed.

Limbo

Why does it sometimes seem that despite all of the AAA blockbuster games with mammoth marketing campaigns that come out every year, it's often the small download-only games that have the best sense of identity and atmosphere? We saw it with Braid, we saw it with Flower, and now we see it with Limbo. Well, PS3 and PC players do. 360 owners got to play it last year. I'm not one of the people who have decried this gaming generation's lack of originality and innovation, but even the people who do have to admit that if nothing else, online consoles and download services like Steam have created a new market for smaller games with specific aims and purposes, something that has resulted in great little games like this one.

Much like Braid, Limbo is a 2D puzzle-platformer that uses the level and art design to help tell its brief but intriguing story. There's not exactly a lot of plot to the game; you play as a young boy who wakes up in the woods and appears to be searching for something, as he wanders deeper and deeper into a place that is both unexplainable and frightening. Traps seem to be placed everywhere to stop him, he has to avoid collapsing logs and boulders, and watch out for monstrous creatures. He gets a few fleeting glimpses of other people, but they either avoid him or try to kill him. The boy can run and jump and push and pull objects and climb ropes and ladders, but that's all he has to protect himself besides his wits and the player's skill. The game only lasts a few hours but fully explores the scope of his abilities, including some more mind-bending puzzles once he stumbles on a few unexpected things.

The game would be a lot of fun with just these elements, but its strongest asset is probably its presentation. It has a very stark and minimalist aesthetic, with only black and white used to create the haunting environments you find yourself in. The boy is just a black shape with two pinprick white dots for his eyes, and like everything else in the world is easily identifiable but still mysterious. The sound design also contributes to the creepy feel of the game. There is no dialogue at all, sound effects are sparse and pack a punch, and the music is used very sparingly to great effect. If you turn the game on and play through it without pausing, you would never once see a hint of any sort of user interface. The options that are there are actually probably too minimal, as I couldn't get my gamepad to work and there was no way to try to fix that in the game, but I appreciate how everything about the product is designed to facilitate the single purpose of playing the game and experiencing the strange world it takes place in.

I liked the first half of the game more than the second, where the puzzles felt more video-gamey and occasionally got a little frustrating. The design is just a bit more intuitive and appropriately harsh in the beginning. I was hoping for a little more from the ending too, which I can't say didn't fit the rest of the game's tone, but still seemed to lack a bit of payoff. These are small complaints for a game that I mostly loved for the three or four hours I played it. I've been neglecting playing some of the downloadable games that have been coming out, but Limbo reminded me that a game doesn't need to have an advanced, cutting edge graphics engine to impress me.

Medal of Honor

I think I liked this game more than most people, but I guess I'm a sucker for even a little bit of emotional resonance in my first person shooters. After a few years of watching Activision's Call of Duty franchise move to the modern era and absolutely explode in popularity, EA finally put together a team to do the same with their venerable Medal of Honor series, and Danger Close put together a short but solid campaign that isn't the most original thing the genre's seen in a while, but was a lot of fun anyway. I've heard about issues players have had with some gaps in the scripting, causing disbelief breaking odd situations or forcing them to restart. The only issue I had was an odd controls hiccup in the final mission, but otherwise I found it to be about as well put together as other recent military shooters.

Medal of Honor doesn't have Call of Duty's love for the over-the-top or Battlefield: Bad Company's playful sense of humor, choosing to do a more realistic take on the early days of the war in Afghanistan. It's not a completely accurate game, as you still kill far more Taliban than any reasonable soldier ever could, usually in a single mission, and the insertion of a headstrong, clueless suit-and-tie general as a villainous presence besides the mostly faceless enemy was annoying more than anything else. But I appreciate the attempt to actually depict a fairly recent conflict with some level of respect, and the game managed to sneak in a few moments that I thought were unexpectedly effective at investing me in the characters and their plights. It's too bloodless to make a really good war movie, but they helped turn gameplay moments that could have been irritating into something actually worth playing.

The score really helped there, with some nice orchestral pieces that hit all of the proper notes without going too far into cheesy territory. Even the Linkin Park song played over the credits isn't terrible. I don't really have a full appreciation for the graphics of the game because I had some difficulty getting my machine to run it properly, but after tweaking the settings a bit it ran well and looked pretty acceptable considering, besides some of the detail taking too long to pop in. The voice acting and jargon-heavy dialogue seem fine, which is good because you spend most of the game listening to a constant stream of radio chatter from your squadmates and people elsewhere. It helps set the mood of a more believable war game well.

I realize I haven't talked much at all about the actual gameplay yet. Most missions play out like a typical smaller-scaled level from a Call of Duty game, if that gives you any idea. There are moments where you're overwhelmed by enemy forces and you basically have to dig in and just shoot like crazy, but a lot of the time you're acting stealthy and well-coordinated with your team, which I like because those missions tend to have the most interesting scripting. It doesn't take a lot of true skill because you can pretty much just do what your friends are saying and come away fine, but it's still entertaining enough to go through at least once. There is one mission out of the ten that takes you out of the standard gameplay for a vehicle segment which is pretty fun, and there are a couple situations where you're just given the ability to call down various types of support and air strikes on a specific position that are pretty cool. I didn't try out Tier 1 mode or the multiplayer, which seemed like a weak attempt at replay value and a watered down version of Battlefield respectively, but they're there for people who are interested. I don't know if the game was really the best value for the money when it came out, because the campaign is pretty short and the other stuff isn't really anything that hasn't been done before. But a year later, you can probably find it for a price that's worth it.

Game Update 17: DLC Round-Up 4

Surprised it's been over a year since I've done this. But I guess that happens when you don't buy any new games for almost a year.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood: The Da Vinci Disappearance

Review at Player Affinity

Costume Quest: Grubbins on Ice


This add-on to Costume Quest was roughly one third the length of the original game at one third of the price, which made it a nice way to extend the experience a little for fans. It takes place after the original and has a winter theme, though the gameplay is pretty much the same - you trick or treat until the area is clear, fight simple turn-based battles, find some collectible costumes and upgrades, and find stuff for people. The boss fight at the end was the most challenging encounter they've made so far, although it still wasn't terribly difficult. The ending teases more content on the way, though I suspect at this point it will be another stand-alone game rather than a small five dollar chunk.

Left 4 Dead 2: The Passing/The Sacrifice


Originally, the intention was to release The Passing for L4D2 and then The Sacrifice for L4D1, tying the two games together and killing off one of the original characters. The Sacrifice ended up also being released for L4D2 though, which allowed players of that game to play with the old characters using the equipment and enemy upgrades from the sequel, as well as starting the release of all the old content in the same way. So while the two campaigns are kind of short and don't add a whole terrible lot in terms of new twists on the series, they're still pretty fun and helped Valve experiment with new ways to roll stuff out to players. The online comic that preceded The Sacrifice's release was interesting as well.

Mass Effect 2: Arrival

Review at Player Affinity

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare


Pretty darn meaty for ten bucks, Undead Nightmare completely changes Red Dead from a western-themed shooter to a game all about scraping by against a horde of zombies. Ammo is limited, enemies charge at you in groups and only go down easily from headshots, and there isn't a lot of help to be found. You'll usually divide your time between doing missions to advance the lengthy and surprisingly funny story and rescuing and defending outposts from invasions, which is more fun than it sounds. Most DLC doesn't come close to changing the game as much as this one, and it's a lot of fun. There are a bunch of other supernatural extras like side jobs involving horses of the apocalypse and sasquatches. One of the best DLC packs for the money I've ever played.

Dead Space

I've been living off cheap, slightly older games on Steam for a while now. Dead Space is another one with a sequel coming out soon, and while the original didn't sell like gangbusters, it built up a lot of cachet with regular gamers because of the things it did right. As a horror third person shooter set in space, there isn't much about the game that's original. The setting is a hodgepodge of various science fiction horror films, and to say that the gameplay was merely inspired by Resident Evil 4 would be quite generous. But it takes all of its borrowed elements and puts them into a mostly interesting whole, one that mostly nails its intended atmosphere and sense of place, and has a design formula that manages to sustain itself for most of the game's length.

You play as Isaac Clarke, an engineer of space-type objects and the loudest silent protagonist of all time (he never met a thing he wouldn't grunt at), and arrive with a small crew at a mining ship that has been sending a distress signal, and happens to have your girlfriend on its crew. You quickly realize that the cause of the distress is alien in nature, as a couple redshirts get dispatched by grotesque, flailing monsters and Isaac finds himself alone with only a (surprisingly effective) piece of mining equipment to protect himself. What follows is a long journey to basically fix every system on the ship while the surviving crew members from your ship bark orders at you, and you encounter the aftermath of what turned the vessel into a derelict mess while fighting off hordes of ravenous beasts.

The gameplay will feel familiar to anyone who's played a survival horror game before. You have to watch your resources, manage your equipment, fight off or avoid dangerous enemies, and solve rudimentary puzzles. Few things in this game even qualify for that word, as it's mostly just tracking down the right object to pick up or panel to activate, and the game even gives you a line to follow that leads you right to your destination. Occasionally things are mixed up by various environmental hazards, like an airless vacuum, or a room without gravity, or an invincible alien tracking you down. The combat is solid, with a nice feel to the shooting, a decent variety of weapons (even if a few seem pretty useless, at least without heavy upgrades), and a unique feel to defeating the enemies, as the key is to cut off their limbs rather than fill their torsos and heads with lead. There's also a couple boss fights and a minigame that involves controlling a turret, although neither are very fun and the latter in particular caused headaches for everyone who encountered it.

It's a decent enough formula, but a very easily identifiable one, and I couldn't quite sustain my excitement in continuing to go through it starting somewhere around halfway through. It's another game that seems like it doesn't like you, as it continues to shove more and more difficult and frantic enemy encounters at you and never relents with some of the more chore-like objectives. By the end of the game you're literally just dragging a giant object around for an hour while being constantly hounded by enemies. The story is decent, especially the way it's told with a combination of found audio, video, and text, as well as in-game encounters with the few surviving people you run across. And it looks and sounds nice, but all of the atmosphere they effectively build doesn't result in a lot of actual scary moments and doesn't totally make up for what I felt was quite a bit of repetition. It's a good game, well polished and mostly a fun time, but I don't think it's a great one, and I'm not exactly dying to learn more about the vast multi-media universe they created around it or dive into the soon-to-be-released sequel. I'll probably give it a shot some time, I just guess the magic wore off for me a bit earlier than most people.

Sam and Max: The City that Dares not Sleep

The final part of the third Sam and Max season was suitably large-scaled and dramatic (notice how I sidestepped using "epic" there?), and also more effectively emotional than I really expected. It was hard to be too broken up by the proceedings because the show must always go on with these two, but it still worked. Plus the ending, while perhaps a bit convenient, is perfectly fitting for the convoluted logic these characters operate on and also amusingly wraps up about three seasons' worth of loose ends. In the end, The Devil's Playhouse (that title was finally explained this time around) was to me the strongest release yet by Telltale, with more creative energy in each episode than some of their earlier stuff had in the whole season, and some of the time shenanigans make me wonder what could possibly be in store with their upcoming Back to the Future game. But I guess I should talk about the episode itself at this point.

Because of Max's transformation, it necessitates a slight shift in the formula from the other episodes. You don't get to mess around much with the toys of power (although they aren't completely gone), but there's still a gameplay dichotomy where you have to shift between two different characters to get things done. The puzzles were pretty good for the most part, although there were a couple situations where you were forced to do something convoluted when a simpler solution would be pretty obvious, or misleading situations where you're prevented from getting something, leading you to look for a way around it, but that thing itself is actually unimportant. The story pulls out all the stops, bringing back characters from all three seasons in interesting ways, and also telling a pretty good straight up monster movie plot. The scale is impressive, leading to it being the best looking entry in the series. They did a great job with the final part, and Telltale should really be commended for being the masters of serialized gaming.

Mass Effect

I've mentioned before that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is the game that got me into western RPGs. So I guess it's not a surprise that I quite enjoyed BioWare's return to the science fiction landscape. Mass Effect takes place within its own original universe, although the influences on both the design and the setting from that game and other classic science fiction are obvious. Without being a real expert on the history of the genre, I'd say the two most obvious influences on Mass Effect's world are Star Wars and Star Trek. You have the former's quasi-mystical powers and diverse alien species (Trek has aliens, but they all look like people with weird foreheads), and the latter's more adult focus on politics and how a gathering of races from across a galaxy would form a society and government together. The final result is a bit darker than both at their more adventurous, but the impact is there. There's literally an encyclopedia in the game's pause menu if you ever want to look up details on the history and specifics of pretty much any piece of back story it cares to bring up, and the amount of thought put into everything is one of the game's biggest assets.

You play as Shepard, a customizable protagonist and eventual commander of the most advanced ship in the alliance fleet. The alliance is sort of like a more militaristic Starfleet, except it only represents human interests in the galaxy. There's no real shared military, although the alliance have a working relationship with the council, a multiracial tribunal that operates out of an ancient space station called the Citadel and has influence over many things. I'm really explaining a lot of background here, aren't I? It's an interesting set up. Anyway at the beginning of the game you are given a mission that will require a ship and an elite team, and you report to both the council and the alliance. It's pretty easy to fill out your party, and from there you generally have a choice of planets with important objectives to complete. There are also dozens of optional worlds you can visit, but I'll get to those later. You fight evil robots, help or ignore troubled people you come across, talk a lot, and try to track down and stop the bad guy.

The game likes to pretend sometimes that it's a primarily a cover-based third person shooter, since those have been popular for a few years and were really blowing up when it came out, but it really isn't. Yes, you can hide behind objects and point a target at enemies and click to fire, but success is less determined by an ability to aim and shoot and more by good management of your allies, use of abilities, and having stats good enough for an invisible random variable to decide that your shots hit more than the other guy's. This didn't bother me as much as other people, I just don't see the point of the charade. Knights of the Old Republic's combat system was plenty of fun, and totally honest. You paused the game to assign actions, and chance and numbers determined whether your light saber swings and blaster shots hurt the enemy. Mass Effect playacting as a shooter just distracts from what could have been a more interesting system. I understand that the sequel actually performs like a true shooter, which is a fine direction to take, as it's at least a more genuine attempt to reach beyond the standard number-crunching RPG player.

So while I lived with the combat, what I really liked was simply learning about the different cities and outposts I was exploring, and developing my relationship with the various people in my crew. RPGs always seem to do better at creating a camaraderie amongst an interesting cast of characters than other games, if only because they actually take time to do so. And I liked my crew a lot. I talked to them after every job to see what they thought, and I did all the side quests that tied directly to their characters, not for the rewards, but because I wanted to help them out. They're a diverse group, and while the dialogue was often a bit straightforward, I still felt some level of connection to them that I just don't usually. I found myself choosing who to take on expeditions based on who it made sense to bring, not who would statistically help me in combat the most, and some of the things that happen to some of them later in the story actually made me feel a bit of emotion. It lent weight to the morality system, which is mildly interesting because it determines more what kind of leader you are rather than whether you're good or evil, but otherwise is still pretty standard.

I guess I should mention the game's biggest weaknesses, the silly mini-game that seems to determine a little too much of what happens, and the Mako, a vehicle which popped up way too much based on how much of a headache it was. Frequently when activating objects in the game, you have to solve a little game where you guide an arrow into the center of a circle while objects rotate around it nearby that you have to avoid. Fail to do so, and you either have to try again or pay a material cost to bypass it. It made some sense when trying to break electronic locks, but the game uses it for much more than that, including recovering objects from wreckage and even surveying rocks for minerals. It's a huge pain in the ass and never really makes sense in context. And man, the Mako. It's an armored jeep type thing that goes over a lot of terrain, but it's a gigantic annoyance whenever you have to use it, which is often on required story missions, and always when exploring optional planets for useful objects. It controls like crap, it's not as useful as it feels like it should be in combat, and none of the places you use it in are designed well enough to get past this. It's just a struggle every time you're behind the wheel. It would have been a bigger issue if it was at its worst when it's actually necessary, but thankfully that's not the case.

Beyond those small issues, I had a lot of fun in the twenty hours the game took me. The story was pretty good, conveyed by some decent writing and well acted by the cast, including a smattering of recognizable celebrity voices that fit their parts appropriately. The game's presentation helps immensely, although I was unable to get the full effect of the motion capture thanks to the constantly poor frame rate on my machine. I'll admit it's an old system, but it probably shouldn't have run a three year old game this choppily. BioWare's games have always had odd technical issues on the PC, and I have to imagine it's partly the game's fault as well as my computer's, because I began Dead Space recently, which came out a year later, and it can at least do static conversations smoothly. It was rare for the issues to actually impact gameplay negatively, but it was an unfortunate distraction a lot of the time. It sounded pretty good though, with the previously mentioned voice acting and strong score helping to sell the universe. Whatever problems I had, I wanted to play the sequel as soon as I finished, which is not something I've been able to say much recently. I guess the question is whether I'll play it on PC, or if the way they handle the PS3 version makes it seem worth the switch.

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men

Kane & Lynch is one of my more frustrating game experiences in recent memory, and a big part of that is I wanted to really like it. I know the game caused a fair amount of controversy around its release, but that didn't stop its premise from being interesting to me. Most modern, cover-based shooters either hinge on the same familiar military setting or put them inside varyingly likable open-world environments. To play through a Heat-style series of capers, with a couple of aging and mentally unstable main characters, and to be so totally thrown into the role of a bad guy - sympathetic yes, but still fighting cops as one of your primary foes - it seemed like a breath of fresh air.

And for a while, it was. There were a couple technical hiccups, and the basic shooting and cover mechanics could have used a bit more work, but I was mostly enjoying the scenarios they set up and finding the story and character fairly interesting. It even gets emotional better than most games seem to, if feeling a bit exploitative. The shooting really isn't very original. You find some familiar weapons, you crouch behind low walls and pillars, and you pop out to shoot whatever enemy has strayed too far from safety. You play as Kane and have some control over whatever buddies happen to be nearby, and even in single-player at least Lynch is there to help out, which adds something to the proceedings. I had a pretty bad issue with the audio for the music skipping incessantly at certain points, but this oddly played in the game's favor a lot of the time - an endless repeating, harsh but not too loud tone can often set the mood for some of the messed up stuff Kane and Lynch get themselves into. But really, it was interesting because of the window dressing and a few clever moments sprinkled here and there. If the game kept this up, I would have been pretty happy.

But it eventually goes bad in two ways - one of which not everyone will experience, and one which they will. It seemed like every time I launched the game again, it got less stable. It began crashing repeatedly during one mission, and I couldn't get the game playable again until I adjusted the graphical settings downward. I couldn't even tell what was different, but it was annoyance that the game couldn't decide if my system was up to snuff or not. After that it was mostly okay, until near the end. Without spoiling anything, there are two endings. You make a decision at the end of a mission - one choice ends the game with the first ending, the other sends you to an optional final mission that leads you to the second ending. I never got to see the second ending myself. After that penultimate level, I had to stop playing for a while, but when I tried to start the game up again I couldn't. Repeated attempts ended the same way, with a crash before I even got to the menu, with no chance to adjust anything. So I said screw it, deleted the install from my Steam library, and looked up a video of the last level on Youtube. Kind of a crummy way to end my experience.

Not that it was great at that point otherwise. About two thirds of the way through the game, the setting and tone shift drastically away from the urban crime vibe. The new location and focus simply aren't as interesting as the old ones, and nothing about the gameplay itself particularly redeems it. It wasn't bad, really, it just wasn't as fun as the game was before. It was especially annoying when it started forcing a more careful and stealthy approach on you. Believe me, the shooting works all right, but it doesn't especially support careful and stealthy.

So, a game I was liking at first ended disappointing me. And it looks the sequel might have the same issue. I'll probably check it out when it drops in price, when things like its apparently absurdly short length will be less of an issue, but it's sort of clear now that this will never be a great franchise, just successful enough to keep pushing out sequels. Which is actually worse than it totally bombing, because I'd like to see IO refocus on something they're better at, the Hitman franchise. A game is coming next year, but it would have been here sooner if they weren't dabbling in a genre they're simply not as good at.

Sam and Max: Beyond the Alley of the Dolls

The introduction to Beyond the Alley of the Dolls is great, featuring an homage to zombie movies everywhere as Sam deals with the slight conundrum of his friends taking a strange amount of delight in dispatching cloned, half naked versions of himself. The rest of the episode doesn't quite live up to this beginning, mostly because the puzzles were the least interesting and unique of the season. You were mostly using psychic toys you'd already played with before, and there wasn't much new to the gameplay, not even on the gimmicky side. It was still well made, it's just all of the fun came from the story rather than the game itself.

Luckily that story is pretty great, with ghost summoning, gigantic underground cloning facilities, Lovecraftian horrors, forbidden interspecies love, and epic climaxes at famous historical landmarks. A surprising amount of the important parts for the entire season-long arc are explained, although of course things get turned on their heads at the end in the last cliffhanger before the final episode. It all remains manageable despite the scope, thanks to solid writing and good voice acting, and it's also probably the series' most visually ambitious episode yet. If only those puzzles were a bit better! Oh well. It's still yet another good entry in the series, and a nice warm-up for the finale.

Sam and Max: They Stole Max's Brain!

As I hinted previously, the third chapter of this season of Sam and Max's adventures doesn't quite crackle with the same energy of the first two, although it still has some good ideas of its own and some inspired moments. It continues like part two did, picking up exactly where the last part left things, with Max's brain stolen and Sam pretty angry about it. Like the clue scanning and reel jumping, this chapter introduces its own unique kind of gameplay, in this case, interrogation. The first act plays like a film noir story, Sam looking for suspects around town and leaning on them pretty hard. There's a variety of ways you can interrupt peoples' stories to try and get information, and it's a neat idea. The problem is that it's not really fully explored before the segment ends, although it does pop at least once more in the future chapters.

After that, it becomes more of a standard episode in the series, though not a bad one. There's pointing and clicking, messing with some more familiar psychic toys, and of course an alternate reality that only Max is aware of that you have to prevent from happening. Actually, that part was pretty cool. As is pretty much standard at this point, the game looks pleasant, has some nice music, enjoyable voice acting and humor. I didn't like the puzzles quite as much, again because of situations where the "logical" solution might not occur to someone as quickly as it should. It ends well though, and once again teases an intriguing scenario for the fourth chapter. They could still blow it I guess, but so far this is the best series Telltale has done.

Sam and Max: The Tomb of Sammun-Mak

The second chapter of Sam and Max's third season is possibly the most inspired in the series. It all stems from the premise, which is rather brilliant. At the end of the first episode, Sam and Max discover what appears to be their own skeletons locked in a struggle, but they soon learn it's a couple of their ancestors, Sameth and Maximus, and find a series of films detailing their exploits along with a projector. Thus the game introduces its central conceit: you must play as Sameth and Maximus within these different film reels to discover the secret behind their deaths. But you can't just do it chronologically - you'll need information from one reel to get past an obstacle in another. What results is the largest causality loop I've ever seen. The characters will be unable to remember what they did earlier in the story until you experience it yourself, and get past tricky situations using knowledge they won't learn until later on. It makes no sense and it's a ton of fun.

Without the goofy central mechanic, it would still be a pretty good episode of Sam and Max. It's a classic adventure story, as you solve a riddle, ride a couple trains filled with people out to get you, and explore an ancient Egyptian tomb. There's a lot of messing with mole people and curses and accusations and fun stuff like that. It looks as nice as the first chapter, and the voice acting is still solid, helping the comedy along. The puzzles actually aren't that different from a normal episode if you just think of the different time periods as different locations, but they're still good for the series. Maximus has a totally different set of psychic toys to work with than Max did in the first episode, providing a different set of challenges. I've already played the next two chapters and didn't like them quite as much as the first two, but it's still been a stellar season for the crime fighting anthropomorphic duo.

Trine

It seems like if there's one way to get people to love your downloadable game this generation, it's to make it a side scrolling puzzle platformer. Trine combines that style of gameplay with a cute if typical fantasy setting and a heavily physics-based engine to create a game that's pretty fun, although not without its frustrations.

So to start things out, the game introduces you to its three characters, which fit so well into standard fantasy niches that that's how they're named. You get a taste of the abilities of the wizard, thief, and knight before they all place their hands on the Trine at the same time, which imprisons all of their souls and fuses them into one person. At the same time, the world around them pretty much goes to hell, and they have to combine forces to find other artifacts that will allow them to remove this evil curse from the world or whatever. You can switch between the three characters at will, and you must use all of their abilities to make it through fifteen levels of platforming and combat.

There's also a co-op mode where you can share the different forms, although I was never interested enough to try it. The game works because you only need the services of one character at a time to get past an obstacle, and having to maneuver multiple people through each situations sounds like it would just slow things down. The thief is the most maneuverable, the wizard can create objects to climb over or weigh things down, and the knight is the most useful in combat. It won't be long before you're constantly switching between them based on the situation; creating counterweights or bridges with the wizard, swinging between overhanging planks with the thief, and smashing large objects out of the way with the knight.

This sort of thing is what makes the game really fun, and honestly the constant fighting drags it down quite a bit. Besides the rare larger enemy you'll see once in a while, it's pretty much all skeletons all the time, and they get boring after a while. It's not a bad idea to mix it up sometimes, but too often you'll just find yourself sitting there, waiting for the game to move on while skeletons continually spawn in front of you. And even worse than the skeletons are the occasional bats and spiders, which are designed to do nothing but irritate the heck out of you and waste your time.

The fact that the combat is mostly a drag makes any issues with the platforming stand out more, since that becomes the part of the game you rely on to provide actual fun. There really aren't many issues, although sometimes the physics seem like they're working against you rather than for you, and by the end things seem maybe a bit too difficult just for the sake it. Especially areas like the final section of the last level. They're not exactly hard, because the game is pretty forgiving, they're just irritating. In the game's favor though, it looks and sounds nice, and the story is told in a charming fairy tale style that makes the rudimentary plot more interesting. A sequel is coming, and while I'm not exactly clamoring for more after seven solid hours of adventuring, it should be fun.