Best game in a long time

Arkham City is without doubt one of the best games I have ever played. I don’t say that lightly, I sincerely mean it. It has everything you could possibly want in a game, for starters you are Batman. But not some hobbled “I have had all my toys taken away from me and I won’t be cool till the end of the game” Batman but a “I am so freaking cool I can kill guys just by looking at them” Batman… which is nice!

You have great toys to play with and the actual mechanics of playing the game are exactly right. Fighting is at the forefront in this game and you will be doing plenty of it. But its fun, there are so many things you can do as you pound people it is just an endless joy. Then you get to throw in all your cool gadgets and you are set. But its not straight forward, do something stupid and you die almost instantly (that is a good thing as you still have to think rather than button bash).

The artwork and production value in the game is utterly stunning, the art-deco style of Gotham is extended into some weird and wonderful ideas but all of them feel at home here. While some of it is absurd none of it felt out of place. You are playing a man with no special powers but dresses up like a bat.. absurd was left at the door. On top of that the voice acting is superb, I have already mentioned my gripe so we will leave it at that. You have to praise the developers for not sticking with the established designs for the characters, they have taken some already great concepts and just improved on them with this game. It is worth playing the game just to get the the unlocks that let you examine the models in more detail (Kudos to them for including the design of Cat Woman from the animated series as a model as well).

But the standout thing here is the story. I’m not going to tell you a single thing about it that would only spoil it for you, but lets just say it was not what I expected at all and was just fantastic. There are plenty of older characters that make an appearance not just the Joker, Penguin or Riddler, and there are twists and turns all through the story. But at its heart it stays true to who Batman is and what he is about.

Final thought

This is just the perfect superhero game that I don’t you could ever really do with any other superhero. You know you are playing a great game when you finish it before you wanted and you want to start it again straight away.

*I will give you one little spoiler*
I got to beat up a shark!

Batman: Arkham Asylum was a surprise for me, I had seen it coming and it looked interesting. But when you look back at the history of super hero games it is not good. So a long time ago I gave up on hoping on a good super hero game, let alone the best one of them all Batman. How so very wrong I was, I think is has to go down as one of my favorite games of all time.. right up there with the likes of Super Mario World (SNES) and Street Fighter II Alpha 2 (Saturn).

For those that know me they know I don’t often complete games. I usually lose interest somewhere in the middle, put the game down, then never really come back to it. Arkham Asylum treads that careful line between game and cinema, an engaging story, great game mechanics, fantastic voice acting. I think between Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill you can’t not enjoy it.

You know a game is good when I have completed it a few times now and I am working on getting all of the achievements and extras.

On to Arkham City

Of course I have only had Arkham City for one day now, but it is very part the better of Arkham Asylum. Not only is the system better, new ideas have been added, but there are also all new gadgets to play with.

The city is sprawling and feels real and gritty with the various character nicely woven into it. Other reviews out there will go into the details but lets just say its great!

My only disappointment so far

The only thing I am disappointed in so far is Harley Quinn. Of course the character design is spot on, it’s just not as good as Arkham Asylum. Unfortunately they have also changed the voice, in Asylum it is Arleen Sorkin the one true voice Harley Quinn. In City they have changed it to Tara Strong. She is excellent but she is just not right.

For me Harley Quinn is as important as Cammy. She is not the most important character but she is one of the most interesting.

Anyway, the first thing about Dragon age: Origins is the choices available. You have the usual choice between 3 races, humans, elves and Dwarves and 3 classes, Warriors, Rogues and Mages (unless you’re a Dwarf) and there’s plenty of customization to be done once you pick.

Initially you play through one of 6 different origins stories depending on your race and class.  From here on the real choices that affect the whole Dragon Age world begin.

Tough Choices

Throughout the game you are presented with a number of choices which will determine your allegience to one party at the expense of another and a whole bunch of seemingly low importance side quests that appear to have little impact, many of which do have little impact but some of which you just won’t appreciate until you finish game, and it tells you what happened to the dwarf who asked for your help. Over the course of the game, a King dies and you will have a big say in who the new monarch is. Play your cards right and it could even be you as King or Queen but again, that depends on if you’re eligable – race,class and background and choices made.

Combat

Combat in Dragon Age Origins runs in realtime, but depending on your style of fighting it may seem a straight forward slugging contest, especially if it is a fight between warriors but it is quite possible to run around as a rogue and stab people in the back. You can bring up a menu and pause the action and assign each of your squad members a target and action. It’s not until you play another game that doesn’t give you a chance to pause that you realise how awesome that is (White Knight Chronicles I’m looking at you!).

The difficulty is well adjusted. Normal provides an enjoyable challenge without really causing any times where you’ll hit a point and go I can’t do this. The difficulty can be changed at any time and the console versions don’t differentiate between difficulty when handing out achievements/trophies. Easy is just that, easy. A useful way to burn through the game if you are more interested in the story but you may feel a little unsatisfied. You won’t be up against as powerful foes and things like potions will rarely be needed as opposed to vital. It is much faster though as you won’t need to pause the action to dish orders as enemies will fall sooner.

Hard and above introduce you to friendly fire, the number of times I’ve been hit in the back because I gave the ai mage access to the biggest spells in the game is a lot but in fairness much of the time it was following orders – if a group were attacking the healer, burn them all. Of course that was me being cheap and abusing friendly fire not being on. On higher difficulties I’m sure you order them around more or don’t give the AI orders to use the big spells and then you manually switch to the mage and use them yourself when the time is right.

Allies

Building up your allies to fight the Darkspawn invasion is the main aim of most of the game, these allies will be useful fodder/footsoldiers in the final fight and along the way you recruit members for your party (or not in some cases depending on your choices). Even once you recruit members, you have choices in how you deal with them which can result in them hating your guts to ultimately challenging you or at the other end of the spectrum, getting romantically involved. Allies perform better if they like you and cheap gifts only go so far, you may end up going off on side quests for them or coming to a decision and thinking twice about if you really want to do that because you know that they are going to go mental over slaughtering innocents (of course a couple are the opposite and rage at you for going out of your way to help people).

Sidequests

On the subject of sidequests there are many, many of which offer little reward other than a token reward but a clean concience. Others provide more substancial rewards in XP, gold or loot. And there is a lot of loot to be had in this game. Some people may get annoyed that they can’t carry it all and at times even if you buy every backpack you can, you will still end up passing over some although as you get further through, you don’t need to worry as much about looting as your gold rewards get bigger and some of the loot gets far more valuable than others so that you can dispose of without real fear of needing that 5 silver seeing how that helm was 3 gold. If you gotta get them all then if you buy the Warden’s Peak DLC you can store items you won’t need for a while there once you have completed it. The DLC has also some nice equipment and is a good buy.

DLC

On the subject of DLC, it’s been confirmed they will be providing DLC for 2 years! From what they have done so far, it integrates well. The Golem Shale is well worth getting and not just for his brilliant rants about birds (spend years as a statue outdoors and you’d probably feel the same), anyway he is awesome. There is a big expansion pack scheduled for March but apparently DLC doesn’t work with that, I’ll post an update once it’s out but even if that’s the case, with new NPCs, equipment and areas I expect it will turn out to be worth it, if there’s one thing I can say is that more Dragon Age is always a good thing.

So with so much more DLC to come, the potential for certain choices to affect things could be somewhat daunting but there’s no use guessing what will come. If all else fails and you don’t like how a choice ended up comes the end of the game or when a new DLC is released then you can always play through again, and you won’t mind either. I’ve been through three times and found new things each time. Using different team members at different times can give different choices and dialogues and can make fights far easier or difficult. There are still endings I haven’t seen and ideas for characters I’d like to try out.

Which Version?

If you are in the slightest bit interested in RPGs, you have to get this. Then you may have the choice of what to get it on. Well the 360 loads faster than the PS3 and the PS3 is behind on DLC because of the Sony testing program or Bioware being lame depending on who you listen to. On the flip side, the PS3 looks a bit better than 360 and is less likely to die from being on for long hours. Nikobe’s 360 started dying during DAO and my 360 started dying from Mass Effect 2 so if possible you should probably go with the PC, its better than both and has tools to let you do all sorts of modding. For the record I got the Collectors Edition on PS3. The bonus DVD wasn’t great to be honest but it had a code for more Dragon Age goodies and an armour for Mass Effect 2 which as it turns out is by far cooler than any of the other armours in the game even if statiscally it isn’t better than the pre-order bonus ones. Yes it is weird unlocking 360 content with a PS3 but well done to EA for getting it to work.

In Summary

Massive replayability with a great storyline and more content coming makes Dragon Age Origins an easy recomendation to anyone with any freetime. Actually it doesn’t matter if your time isn’t free, this is a game that you make time for. While playing you think I’ll just finish this sidequest, which leads to this and another well I’ll do this… before you know it you’ve been playing for hours more than you intended.

Tried out Modern Warfare 2 on the XBox

I entirely missed the first installment of this series. I have never been a great fan of the “Call of Duty” games, I always preferred the “Battlefield” series. I have always preferred the more open aspect of that series over the tightly scripted world of COD. I have also never been a huge fan of WWII games, they are interesting but I get the feeling they are unnecessarily limited (hence my enjoyment of jumping into a tank in Battlefield).

But I was in a supermarket, there was the last copy of the game in the shop and it was cheap, so I picked it up. Nikobe is always telling me what a great game it is. I liked the idea of the various perks in the game, not only the ones like the gunship but the ones that beef-up the useless players in the game seeing as that is the area I live in.

I know this is not going to win me any friends (and maybe the ire of the fan boys) but I can’t say I am impressed.

Feeling disappointed

The real draw for this game is the on-line games, I will come to that in a moment. Before I jumped on-line I wanted to play through the campaign, get a feel for the system before being destroyed by all the 12 year olds playing this 18 game (got to love that).

Started playing and I was very surprised. Why? because I can’t use cover in any way. “Gears of War” and “Rainbow Six” have excellent cover systems and I have come to expect this from my games. People just running down corridors and popping out in full view is just not realistic. I want to use the blocks and walls in the game, rather than them just being a method to have me killed. I know everyone is in the same boat, but not having a cover system is inexcusable. Just to take the micky though the computer can use cover (What?) yes it can hide around corners and behind doors. They can also blind fire at you, and all you can do is duck down or lay prone (just like in real life). If there is one saving grace its the face that the bad guys in the game are worse shots than Storm Troopers.

I was also a little disappointed in the quality of the graphics. The standards are high as far as graphics go and I don’t think MW2 lives up to the requirement. Its only a minor thing, on the whole it is excellent, but in places (like the first snow level) you see some strange artifacts.

Things to like

The way the sights lock onto the closest enemy when you switch to the gun sight is a great idea. Saves a lot of time and makes the game a little more fun. This is especially true when you can barely see the enemies running at you.

Although the game is very scripted, and the path you can take thought the game is limited to a very narrow path it is interesting to see the story unfold. The set pieces in the game are beautifully designed and the action sequences are a lot of fun.

Take it out for a spin, and get destroyed

As I was expecting going on-line to play is normally a disaster. I am killed constantly normally without even seeing my assailant. But the kill cam that shows you your killers point of view just before they took you out is excellent to see. The way the game makes you tougher the more you are killed is also a welcome feature.

Conclusion

I can’t say I am enamored with this game. It is well done, but I personally think there are other games out there that do it a lot better. The XBox live release of Battlefield show what can be done with tanks and mobile combat. “Gears of War” while it is OK, it has a better combat system.

All in all I think this is just not my game. It has not grabbed me like it has with other people. I know there are people who love it and I can see why they might. But it just did not do it for me. I think I will trade it in while the prices are good and get myself something else.

A simple, but fun game for XBox

Just released on XBox live is “Trials HD” a very well done motorbike trials game. After getting the demo I was hooked on this game. Its instant fun factor is evident from the start, and while it initially appears very simple it is actually surprisingly hard to master.

But this game threw me back to one of my most favorite games of all time, and game I played when often over 15 years ago on my ZX Spectrum. That classic game was called Kikstart, and it has more than a passing resemblance to this new title on the XBox.

With a pedigree like that, how could I resist buying it?

Trials HD

The initial idea is very simple. Each level consists of course, you need to get from the start to the finish in the quickest time possible with the least number of accidents.

The levels start out very simple, little jumps, easy ramps. You will very quickly make it past the first two difficulties with the minimum of fuss. But you will still have a lot of fun playing with the idea, and experimenting with the physics. Then the difficulty increases, the medium set of levels are challenging in places, and will cause some frustration but getting through them with trial and error will let you complete the levels quiet quickly.

Then comes the hard levels, and by hard I mean there is a second level of skill to this game that you have to master if you want to get passed even the training level.

This is the great secret of the game, there is a real skill to playing it and its not all about how fast you can drive. There is enough here to keep you entertained for hours, and you will be more than happy to play the levels again and again just for the shear hell of it. That is the making of a good game in my book.

Missed a trick

There are two glaring problems with this game:

First. You can not pull tricks on your bike. Its not really an issue in any way, but if you do happen to find yourself 3 stories up, flying through the air, it would be great to be able to pull a “super man”, or just stand on the saddle. It has no effect on game play, just makes it look cooler.

Second. There is a great level editor in the game. Its a lot of fun to create your own levels (Little Big Planet has re-introduced this idea, and set the bar high). The level of control in the editor is excellent, with an advanced mode if you want more control, and to create more impressive levels.

But I was hoping for a market place for other peoples levels. It was suggesting in the demo you would be able to swap levels with others. You can, but only your friends. Everyone should have been able to share their levels and get new ones. This would increase the games life infinitely, as it is you are pretty much stuck with the ones in the game, and the ones you make.

I have a feeling this is more to do with what Microsoft wants, than it is the developers. Which would be a real shame if Microsoft are crippling great ideas just becuase it does not make them as much money.

Links:

• Eurogames gives it 9 out of 10
• IGN gives it 8.3 – Impressive
• Sarcastic Games shows its not as easy as it looks
• Peoww also has a great review

The Predecessor

One of the best Spectrum games of all time

While this game is a lot of fun, there is a game that came out long before it that is almost identical in every way. Only this game came out over 20 years ago (1988 to be exact).

This was easily one of my favourite games on the ZX Spectrum, not only did it offer great game play. It could be played two player and it had a level editor built in. That was totally unheard of at the time, and made the game just astounding.

I know I have sparked your interest, so you will be please to know you can play it right now on-line.

Some more useful links:

• Crash review from 1988
• World of Spectrum – Kikstart 2 page
• Its great to see I’m not the only one who noticed the similarity to Kikstart or again here (not as original as I first thought it seems)

Conclusion

I have lost hours to this game already, just playing the levels again and again (or getting stuck). So I was delighted with “Trails HD”, I see it as a very modern remake of one of my childhood favourites.

I can thoroughly recommend it!

Does exactly what it says on the box

That is the simple title of this board game. I saw that and thought that’s enough for me and bought it. Anything to do with Zombies, or fills my need to be Bruce Campbell is a sure fire winner. The concept is simple, like every zombie apocalypse you have ever seen you are a survivor, and if you want to stay that way you need to get out of the city before it is completely overrun.

So every turn you have to evade the on coming zombie horde, plan your escape, and thwart the other survivors. What more could you want?

What you get

This is not a new game. This is a second edition of the game released in 2006 by Twilight Creations. The rules have all be tightened, and game play improved over its predecessor.

In the box:

• 100 Zombies (that’s right 100, not 10, or 30… 100. That’s enough for most people)
• 6 Shotgun Guys (the players, in 5 colours)
• 30 City tiles
• 50 Event cards
• 30 Life tokens
• 60 Bullet tokens
• 4 page rules manual
• 2 Dice (in Red and Blue if you wanted to know)

So as you can see there is plenty in the box to keep you happy

The Setup

In the city tiles there are two special tiles. The “Town Centre” tile where the players start, and the “Helipad” tile where the players win if they get there first. The “Helipad is shuffled into the bottom half of the map tiles, and the “Town Center” is put on the table, and the players are placed on it.

Everyone is give 3 life tokens, 3 bullet tokens, and 3 event cards.

How you play

Keep your eyes open, the dead are everywhere

The play is turn based as you would expect. The play moves clockwise around the table and on your go you have to do a number of things:

1. Draw a new tile card from the pack and set it down on the table so the road on the tile matches up with the road on the tiles already laid down.
   Some of these tiles are just roads, others are buildings that contain life and bullet tokens for you to collect. But every tile contains a number of zombies that need to be placed.
2. If there is a zombie in the same space as your player you have to kill it (will come to that)
3. Draw up to three event cards
4. Roll one dice, and move your player up to the number of spaces on the dice. If you meet a zombie on your way you must kill it. You can only walk on roads, or inside buildings.
5. Roll the dice again and move that number of zombies one space.
6. End your turn, and throw away any event cards you have over three.

So as you can see the actual game play is very simple and straight forward. The only complication comes when you have to fight a zombie. This is also determined with a simple dice roll. If you score 4,5, or 6 you win and kill the zombie. It is added to your collection.

If you roll less than that you have two choices. Spend a number of bullet tokens to boost your roll up to a number that kills a zombie (i.e. roll a 2, spend 2 bullet token to score 4 and kill the zombie). Or you can spend a life token and roll again.

Once you run out of life tokens you die. You then have to start again in the center of town, lose half the zombies you have killed, and get back the starting tokens.

How do you win

There are two ways to win. By either being the first to the centre of the helipad, or by killing 25 zombies. Sounds easy right?

What’s it like to play

This game is a lot of fun, but its does have a few problems. Now I have to say I have only played this two player, and I think four or six player would be a lot more fun.

When you start the game there is only the town center and tile you just placed. This might be a road, or a building. But there really is no incentive to move. Why move when there is nothing threatening you and there is nothing to collect. The game proceeds like this for a few rounds.

But after that the game is on. You are trying to get to your building, trying to avoid the zombies, and trying to find ways to mess with the other players.

Let the fun begin

Your future is all in the cards

Event cards are the key to letting you have fun, they come it three types

1. There are cards that give you extra powers for visiting certain buildings. For example the “Fire Axe” card makes you more deadly to the zombies, but you have to visit the certain building to be able to play it. To get the fire axe you have to visit the fire station.

2. Do something to the other player. The “fear” card makes a player stop dead in their tracks and miss a go. Great if you want to stop them doing something, or get them into a position you want them.

3. Zombie effects, you can move more zombies, or put down new ones.

Again simple, but if played tactically they can be every effective.

Dirty Tricks

I cleared the hospital with a grenade I got from the Army Surplus store (event card grenade can only be got by going to Army Surplus). Cleared the building of eight zombies and was sitting pretty to get a load of health tokens. Only for my lovely wife to play her “Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse” card. Filling the building with seven new zombies, with me trapped at the back of it. Suffice to say the bonus I got was totally destroyed by my wife’s cunning attack.

Bonus

The art work on the game is excellent, it has a really horror movie feel to it. From the city tiles with a great level of detail to the event cards. The design work is top notch, and the rendering of the zombies is a lot of fun.

There is also a health dose of humor in the game. Its not taking itself to seriously and that’s apparent from the very short story on the front of the rules manual that made me laugh out loud.

Not the best quality figures. But passable

Disappointment

There is little to be disappointed in, the game delivers on its promise, and then some.

But if I had a criticism it would be that the city tiles are just thin card that does not really work as well as it would have if they had been much heavier card. Also the figures are not very detailed, while this is not really a problem I just feel they could have been a little better.

Life Span

I think this game has a lot going for it, and could be one of those great games you get out when you want to have a laugh.

Its also a very flexible game. You could easily modify the rules as much as you want to make it play better for you. Twilight Creations also offer a number of add-ons for the game including a mall setting, and even a totally blank set of event cards so you make your own game.

I think that says a lot about the strength of this game. Its a very simple concept that just does its job and nothing more.

Recommendation

Buy this game, its a lot of fun. With a lot of friends you could have a great laugh.

In case you needed more proof, here is the army of the undead at your disposal

Army of Darkness