December 2009

Assassin’s Creed 2

December 13, 2009

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Eric Schabel Make a comment! / Tweet it!

If I could give out an award for “most improvement in a video game sequel,” it would have to go to Assassin’s Creed II, hands down. The original was a decent introduction to the cool concept and core mechanics of the franchise, but its lack of variety in mission structure and unrewarding exploration left a bad taste in many gamers’ mouths. Virtually all of the original game’s faults have been addressed in AC2, however, and it really makes a huge difference. Spanning five historical Italian Renaissance cities (two of them quite large) and brimming with enjoyable side missions to complement the main story objectives, Assassin’s Creed II is a paragon of open-ended sandbox style gameplay. Couple the game’s brilliant gameplay structure with gorgeous graphics and an intriguing story, and you have a gaming experience that is as unforgettable as it is enjoyable.

I have to admit, after the disappointing first installment, I was not overly excited about getting my hands on Assassin’s Creed II. Moreover, I never imagined that Renaissance Italy would be as interesting and engaging a setting as it ended up being. Free running across the rooftops of Florence and Venice feels a lot like being a fifteenth century version of Spider-Man, and even though you don’t have any webs to swing on, traversing the game’s cityscapes is every bit as fun as steering a spandex-covered hero over the streets of Manhattan. Free running is the bread and butter of Assassin’s Creed, and in the sequel it feels faster and more fluid than ever. Oh, and as the game’s protagonist Ezio, you also get to become pals with the one and only Leonardo Da Vinci.

Assassin’s Creed II isn’t entirely about running around rooftops and executing your targets, there’s also a bit of brains to go with the brawn. In fact, at times it can feel a bit like playing a Renaissance version of The Da Vinci Code, having the player decode secret passwords and manipulate images to unlock the game’s mysteries, though most of it is optional. There are “glyphs” hidden throughout all of the game’s cities, and finding them will give you a chance to unravel some of the game’s narrative. Glyphs are not the only secret objects, however; there are also a hundred glowing feathers tucked away in hard-to-reach places, as well as the tombs of dead assassins. Merely finding the tombs will not win you anything, though–you must first complete Prince of Persia-style platforming puzzles in order to claim the prizes hidden inside. Unlike the first Assassin’s Creed‘s flags, the hidden objects in the sequel actually unlock useful items, such as weapons and armor.

A monetary system and upgradable armor round out the list of improvements in the Creed franchise. Players are rewarded monetarily for completing both main mission objectives as well as the numerous side missions scattered around the maps. In addition, you can pickpocket almost any NPC walking in the streets, including other pickpockets–which it turns out pays off rather well, if you can catch the buggers. Be warned, however, that doing illegal activities such as pickpocketing, or engaging in flashy kills, can raise your “notoriety,” which is basically the Assassin’s Creed version of the star rating in the GTA games. If your notoriety is too high, you will need to bribe loudmouth officials in the streets or tear down wanted posters depicting your veiled countenance in order to remain incognito. If you fail to do so, guards will be quickly alerted to your presence, leading to all sorts of troubling interference. I say interference, because as long as you are familiar with the combat system, the only real threat of dying comes from falling from great heights, especially later into the game as your armor and weaponry improve. That being said, the combat is still quite enjoyable, especially when you pull off a cinematic “counter-kill,” or manage to disarm your opponents and use their own weapons against them.

Assassin’s Creed II is a great game. I seldom come away from a game feeling as satisfied as I was when I finished it. Even after completing the game’s main story, which took about 15 hours, I still find myself coming back to finish off side activities like finding the remaining feathers or treasure chests, and completing side missions like racing and assassination contracts. Ubisoft has done an outstanding job at creating a truly high quality entertainment experience that is worth every penny you might spend on it.

Pros: great open world gameplay, rewarding side quests and treasure-hunting, engaging story, good length

Cons: Riskless combat

Plays like: Assassin’s Creed on steroids mixed with a bit of GTA and Prince of Persia

ESRB: M for Blood, Intense Violence, Sexual Content, Strong Language

Gyromancer

December 13, 2009

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Justin Last Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Take Puzzle Quest, replace Bejeweled with Bejeweled Twist, and let Square Enix handle the story and graphics, and you have Gyromancer. You are Rivel, the titular gyromancer, and it is your job to chase Qraist (I don’t know how to pronounce it either) across the wood with your collection of Final Fantasy creatures and kill everything that moves by rotating gems clockwise – unless you happen to have a spare Magicked Mirror, then you can rotate the gems anti-clockwise once.

The obvious comparison to be made is with Puzzle Quest, and Gyromancer is different in a few key ways. First, it is based on Bejeweled Twist instead of standard Bejeweled. This is a mark against Gyromancer as Bejeweled Twist just isn’t as fun to play as the patterns don’t stick out as well. Second, you don’t really fight the enemy creatures so much as you fight the board and the concept of idle twist. In Puzzle Quest both combatants made moves, but in Gyromancer only Rivel is cool enough to rotate tiles. Enemy creatures attack when their move bars fill (it feels a lot like ATB from Final Fantasy titles, but there isn’t a penalty for carefully considering your next move), and you attack when your move bars fill. You make a move. If you made a set of three, four, or five gems, your bars fill up. If the color of the match is the same as the color of the move your move fills up a bit more. If you made a match your enemy’s bars filly up a little bit. If the color of the match is the same as the color of the move then the bas doesn’t fill up at all. If you twisted without making a match then your bars don’t fill at all while your enemy’s bars fill a lot. The system works well, but it removes you from the action more than Puzzle Quest did. Spells fire off seemingly at random, and the whole thing feels more luck-based than Puzzle Quest ever did.

Gyromancer’s campaign is split up into 12 different levels. This lends itself well to replay as each level has goals than can be met and enemies to defeat even after the boss has been defeated and the area has been technically cleared. Completing these goals is the primary way of unlocking achievements in Gyromancer as well as the best way to capture new Gyro Codes which yield you new creatures. And you’ll need new creatures. Each creature has both an affinity (color) and a level cap. Blue creatures (water) and effective against red creatures (fire), and you’ll want to trade out new creatures as you reach the level cap on your starters. You can take three with you into any level, and it pays to mix up their colors a bit so that you always have a creature that is on at least equal footing with your enemy.

Gyromancer didn’t grab me quite like Puzzle Quest did when it first released, but if you like Bejeweled Twist and always wanted to see what Square Enix could do with a PopCap game then Gyromancer is the game for you. It certainly isn’t hurting for polish, and I keep going back to it even if it isn’t the best of the genre mash-up.

Pros: No penalty for considering moves, good creature variety

Cons: Feels far-removed from combat

Plays Like: Bejeweled Twist RPG

ESRB: T for blood, mild fantasy violence 

Tekken 6

December 13, 2009

PSP / Reviews / by Andrew Passafiume Make a comment! / Tweet it!

To the delight of many fighting game fans, Tekken 6 was released this year on consoles. And like Tekken 5 before it, we now have a portable version of the newest fighter, with many of the same features found in the console version. And with several new key additions to the franchise, it’s easy to tell that the game will give Tekken fans plenty to do while on the go.

On a technical level, Tekken 6 is the best fighting game to hit the PSP yet. The sound design is fantastic, and the game looks absolutely stunning. Also, the loading times are reduced from the ones found in the console version, which is nice to have in a portable game. Namco Bandai clearly has set the bar high for how a fighting game should look on a handheld, and it might be a while before we see another 3D fighter as technically amazing as this one. 

The game features the largest cast of characters in the series history, including plenty of old favorites such as Heihachi and Law, and a few new additions such as Alisa and Bob. The roster is well balanced, with a character that is there for every kind of fighting game player. None of the characters feel broken, and with the right amount of time and patience, they can all be mastered.

A problem many people might have with playing a fighting game on a portable is the controls. But Tekken 6 controls wonderfully, with the PSP d-pad allowing you to perform several precise combos just as easily as you would on the console version. Those who have played the console version will be happy to know that the same exact move sets from the other versions are still present in this one. 

The modes you would expect to have in a Tekken game are here, including the arcade and story modes. Although the arcade mode is the same as it is on the console, the main “story mode” is incredibly short and feels like an incredibly downgraded version of the one found in the console game. Also, there are quite a few modes, including the Campaign Scenario mode, which are completely absent from the game. Considering Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection, which was a downloadable game, had all of the features of its console brother, it’s a disappointment to know that Tekken 6 is not the same. 

But despite all of that, there is still plenty of content here to keep you busy. The arcade mode itself is still a lot of fun, and it will take a while for even the most dedicated player to go through it with all characters and try to unlock all the game has to offer. The multiplayer is also a blast, although it is a disappointment that it’s only local and there are no options to hop online and face opponents. But if you’re on the go and have a few friends to play with, you won’t have much of a problem. 

Tekken 6 is the perfect game for those itching to have their favorite 3D fighter on the go. While it does pale in comparison to the console version in a few ways, it also manages to exceed it as well. Overall, it’s a solid entry in the series and a great game to have on the go. 

Pros: Solid controls; plenty of characters to choose from; amazing presentation; fast loading times

Cons: Loses a lot of features and content from the console versions 

 

Tekken 6

December 13, 2009

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Michael Walbridge Make a comment! / Tweet it!

I’m going to make a bold claim about a highly polished and anticipated sequel from a well-respected game series. Tekken 6 absolutely does not do what Street Fighter IV does, and Namco Bandai had the rare opportunity to draw converts to the fold of fighting games, a difficult task. It was in their grasp, but they made two simple but major mistakes.

 

The first one is that the training mode is lacking, and there is no excuse for it. Tekken 6 is more like Virtua Fighter 5 than it is Street Fighter IV; the characters have the better portion of, if not more than, 100 moves each. Many of these are simple and are simply the difference between holding back when you press left punch rather than forward; others are two to ten hit combos. At any rate, each character is highly complex and it takes a while to learn them all. Virtua Fighter 5, Dead or Alive 4, and even previous Tekken titles assisted with this difficult learning curve by allowing players to cycle through the moves by successfully performing them. As soon as you’d perform the first successfully, the next one would appear on the screen, and it would go until the movelist was done. This was the definitive way of learning moves. 

 

Tekken 6 does not have this feature. You can look up the move list and see the moves performed, and choose to have one specific move posted on the screen. To see the next move? You must press pause, go back in to the move list, and select it. For every. Single. One. Tekken 6 has new characters in the series, so even veterans will wish this feature were back.

 

And what do we have in its place? A scenario campaign mode, with a horribly acted story. In this mode, you run around in 3D beating people up with moves from the game, but in the style of an old-school beat’em up, complete with a horde of enemies and a boss at the end of each level (usually one of the 40 characters). If you want to see the story prologue and ending for each character, it’s through this really long mode; you unlock characters, then select the arena and fight through about half a dozen matches. But you have to unlock them all. Arcade mode doesn’t do it. Arcade mode makes you pretend that you are fighting human characters with stats and a gamertag, as if you’re playing people in the arcades in Japan.

 

The online mode isn’t up to par, either. It feels impossible to execute one-frame links or difficult combos. Most people I fought (and advanced fights I watched) featured the exact same combo or two over and over again. I know that’s a Tekken thing in general, but I can’t help but feel the lag exacerbates it. And at any rate, the code is not as atrocious at the level of King of Fighters XII, but it’s no Street Fighter IV or Blazblue, either.

 

There are literally over a thousand pieces of apparel you can purchase for each character’s model that you buy with cash earned by playing the game in every single mode, which rewards the completionist in you. It especially rewards completing all the awkward single-player modes (the campaign, incidentally, has co-op, not that it improves it too much). Also, the game is butt-ugly and looks grainy and old, so that takes away some of the pleasure of acquiring the items.

 

So there’s a campaign, and plenty of unlockable crap, some of which is funny. The outfit possibilities are amusing, something quickly learned just by playing online a while, but it’s not important. Not compared to good netcode and a decent training mode. Neither of these things are going to help make Tekken 6 “hardcore”, as it were, or expand its audience, and it’s a shame, because in an offline mode versus another player, the way fighting games were meant to be played, Tekken 6 is doing as Tekken does. There is no radical change in gameplay or the system, but with the impressive roster and new levels, there didn’t have to be. They could have just given us a some good online netcode (at least the online options are extensive) and a good training mode, and some of the people who got into fighting games from this year’s deluge (KoF XII, BlazBlue, SF IV) would have become adopters. Unfortunately, there will be fewer converts, fewer people standing around the arcade machine. This was Namco Bandai’s chance, and they blew it.

 

But if none of that matters to you, and you really like Tekken, it’s pretty much the same thing it’s always been and you can be happy with that. Previous Tekken players can pick up Law, Paul, (Armor) King, Lee, Lei, Nina, Julia, Xiao Yu, or any of the old school characters and find that their old Tekken skills are still of use. I’ve never seen such a well-rated game drop its price so quickly. Did you know that within 3 weeks it already went to fifty bucks new? I’m sticking by my theory: they kind of catered to the converted, at least, but didn’t do enough to draw anyone new in. There is nothing new to see here. Move along. Hardcore only.  

Diner Dash

December 11, 2009

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Justin Last Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Everybody with a PC and access to Shockwave.com has played Diner Dash before. It is your job to control Flo and lead her from the hectic life of corporate America through the hectic life of restaurant ownership and waitressing. It’s up to you seat customers, take orders, deliver food, drop checks, and bus tables as Flo is a one-woman wait staff through the single-player game.

The basic flow of events is this: seat customer, take order, deliver food, drop check, and bus table. To make things a bit more complicated, customers come in a number of colors, and you receive a bonus for seating the same color of person in the same chair multiple times. You also get a bonus for completing the same action multiple times in a row (i.e., take three orders in a row). As you progress through the single-player game you’ll fix up restaurants by upgrading the number of tables and buying a coffee machine (delivering coffee to already-seated customers makes them happier, which means they leave a bigger tip) before moving on to the next restaurant and doing it all over again. It’s worth noting – since the game never mentioned it – that the face buttons are hot keys: X takes you to order drop-off, Y takes you to food pick-up, and B takes you to the dirty dish cart.

Featuring 40 levels and four restaurants, you’ll have plenty to do in Diner Dash. The game starts off slow, with only two tables and one color of patron to worry about. Soon though, you’ll have more tables and blue customers as well as red. And not too long after that there will be seniors who take longer to decide, green customers, and upgrade points to spend as well. Diner Dash is the perfect example of a casual game that translates well from the PC to XBLA – even if the 360 controls aren’t quite as reliable as a good old mouse.

Single-player is lifted wholesale from the Flash game, but where Diner Dash really shines is multiplayer, and it’s available both locally and over Xbox Live. Both cooperative and competitive multiplayer is available, but co-op is the most fun as things get very hectic very quickly and you’ll need to coordinate a lot with your partner to keep things under control. The cooperative Endless Shift mode is so much fun that is makes me wish that two people could work through the campaign together.

Diner Dash makes the transition well from PC to console. The only real sticking point is that Flo is a bit floaty to control which makes it especially difficult to select the right group of customers to seat at a table. And if you have multiple tables open, there doesn’t really seem to be a rhyme or reason as to where pressing a direction on the d-pad will take them. It seems like a small complaint, but when tasks are piling up and help is nowhere to be found, it makes for some unneeded frustration. The hot keys help with other tasks, and the expanded campaign from the PC versions is welcomed. If you played and liked it as a Flash game then you’ll enjoy Diner Dash on XBLA.

Pros: plenty of levels, fun cooperative play

Cons: hard to pick out the right group of customers for seating, nonsensical table assignments

Plays Like: Diner Dash and Diner Dash 2 on PC

ESRB: E for use of alcohol 

 

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →