PS3

Bulletstorm

March 24, 2011

PS3 / Reviews / by Paul Bishop Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Bulletstorm is the type of game that makes no excuses for itself. It is brash, ballsy and unflinchingly crass, but will its over-the-top action and humor allure an audience or drive it away like a poorly-executed joke? 

Not for the faint of heart, Bulletstorm strives to be a “mature” title by throwing all sorts of adult-themed potty-language at the player. This barrage of obscenity never ceases from the cut-scenes to the gameplay, as you constantly aim to get bigger points with ever more ridiculously-named skill shots that can easily offend the most amiable player. If you can get past this one quirk though, you are in for one of the most fun and fresh shooters to come along in a long time.

Seeing an opportunity to get revenge, Grayson Hunt drunkenly rams his spaceship through the flagship of the Confederate Navy, hoping to kill the commander who betrayed him and his squad years ago. As both ships crash on the former pleasure planet Stygia, Hunt is left with knowing his impudence killed his remaining squadmates and left his best-friend Ishi a cyborg. Swearing to make things right to Ishi, they leave the wreckage to face a hostile planet filled with gangs, murderous vegetation and building-sized monstrosities to find a way off of the rock, even if it means making friends with the enemy.

As trite as the story sounds, it is well-executed to the point that you actually care about the characters by the end of the story. Minor plot twists to introduce the villain into the party worked extremely well if just to hear the brilliantly-sarcastic General Sarrano coddle his former lackeys. Voice acting is superbly done as well, as it walks the fine line between cheesy one-liners and deeper moments when characters show their conflicted nature. All of this is done while maintaining a brisk pace.

This game is all about action. Not content to be a standard shooter, Bulletstorm tries to pull out all the stops for over-the-top kills, giving them names and point values in the way of the Skill Point system. The harder it is to execute a kill, the more Skill Points you receive. Straight shooting an enemy nets no SP, scoring a headshot scores a little SP and shooting an enemy in the crotch then kicking him in the head scores more. With the combinations of leashing and kicking, there are numerous individual unlockable SPs to discover with more and more ridiculous themes.

Skill Points are vitally necessary within Bulletstorm, as they can be used at pods scattered around the game to upgrade weapons or more importantly buy additional ammunition not found elsewhere. It is this reliance on SP that drives you to try bigger and badder combinations of mayhem to feed your minimum existence so that you ultimately crave larger crowds of enemies to get multiplier bonuses. In addition, the environment is extremely versatile, allowing you to kick enemies off cliffs, leashing them into prickly plants or allowing for the random hot-dog cart to be used as an explosive device with awesome results. The game begs you to come up with interesting ways to kill your opponents. Add to that the over-the-top variety of guns and you have a smorgasbord of ridiculous annihilations possible.

Stygia itself is a marvel to behold, from lush green environments to decayed city-scapes to underground tunnels, the fast-paced nature of the game requires you to stop occasionally and look out over the beautifully-rendered landscape. It’s a double sword for the game, because you feel a sense of urgency to get to the next objective, and although the game isn’t short, it makes it feel like the end comes too quickly. To supplement that, developer People Can Fly added “Echo Mode,” which allows you to play certain levels over for time and skill trials. While this was a welcome addition, it feels like a diversion rather than a legitimate timesink. In the same vein, the multiplayer challenges you to get great SP kills against other team members, but lacks map variety.

Despite the shortcomings in additional content, Bulletstorm is a blast to play. The witty humor and solid gameplay make it a breath of fresh air in the first person shooter genre.

Pros: Quirky story, character and mechanics; beautifully executed and fast-paced

Cons: Short campaign, lackluster multiplayer

 

PixelJunk Shooter 2

March 22, 2011

PS3 / Reviews / by Graham Russell Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Sequels can take many paths. There’s the refining, fixing-the-problems approach most take. There’s the kitchen-sink option, throwing in everything you can think of. Then there’s what we call the Lost Levels approach. Like the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 (released in the U.S. as part of Super Mario All-Stars and called The Lost Levels), some games just take the first game and give you another, somewhat more challenging version. Though PixelJunk Shooter added a battle mode (and we’ll get to that later), for most of the game, the team took this latter approach. 

(Warning: spoilers of the first game ahead. Go play that one if you haven’t yet.)

You start where you ended the last game: in the belly of a giant beast. This explains the major gameplay additions from the original: new substances to manipulate and deal with. There’s acid, which essentially poisons you and kills you if you don’t quickly find water; eggs, which multiply and block paths (and hatch if wet); and light and darkness, which is practically life and death in certain levels. You venture back out of the beast and into a variety of levels, some of which are similar to the original and others which take the experience to unexplored areas.

Things play like you remember: controls are identical, though little-used moves like spins are given more significance with the new elements. Special suits change up gameplay, though now even more so with the addition of suits like the Hungry Suit that changes the game’s mechanics completely. Did you want to play Dig Dug in the middle of a PixelJunk game? Well now that’s basically what you can do. And, as with the original, you can take on the entire campaign with a friend.

As for that battle mode? Yeah, you can challenge friends to battles, fighting to rescue more scientists and using unlockable weapons against them. This certainly takes the gameplay and turns it on its head, changing things from a ship-based adventure title to a heated arena, but for something the system clearly wasn’t designed for, it’s surprisingly fun.

If you didn’t like the original PixelJunk Shooter, there’s nothing here to change your mind. If you did like it, there are many reasons in Shooter 2 to make you like it even more.

 

Slam Bolt Scrappers

March 18, 2011

PS3 / Reviews / by Graham Russell Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Slam Bolt Scrappers is a tough game to explain. Fire Hose Games’ PSN effort is part-puzzle game, part-brawler, part-tower defense and all-crazy. We think, though, that it’s worth checking out. 

In Slam Bolt Scrappers, you’re a fighter. Well, you could be a welder-looking guy, a construction worker, a demon or a girl with dyed hair, among other things. You fly around an area. (How do you fly? It’s not clear, but it’s best that you give up on trying to apply logic to this game before we get any further.) Baddies pop up, and you punch them with the X and Square buttons to defeat them. Why are you doing this? Well, when you beat up an enemy, it drops a Tetris-like block that you can drop in a set area to form squares of the same color. Your opponent is doing the same thing, punching enemies, dropping blocks, and occasionally coming over to beat you down too. 

Okay, hold tight. We’re only about halfway through.

Back to those squares. Those form towers, such as laser towers, rocket towers, shield towers or drill towers. These towers attack your opponent’s towers. The larger the square gets, the exponentially more powerful the tower is. It’s easy to form little 2-by-2 towers, but if you can manage to construct a 5-by-5 or 6-by-6 one, you’re a formidable threat.

When a player loses all towers, it’s game over for them. Fighters respawn with a time delay, and hitting buttons as prompted speeds up that process, so things stay frantic. Add to all this the ability to use invisible blocks to pick up parts of the tower and move them around, the addition of ninja enemies that drop power-ups and special levels with gameplay variations, and Slam Bolt Scrappers is the game version of an energy drink.

There are two main modes: Campaign and Battle. Battle allows for four players to take each other on, be it in teams or free-for-all. (The options here are very similar to Smash Bros., as is the menu interface. Everything is very familiar-feeling.) The game has seven different block types, and creating a battle match includes picking which to use. The game allows all seven, but it recommends three or four, and we agree that it’s the sweet spot. 

Campaign allows one to four players to take on increasingly-powerful enemies in various scenarios. The campaign mode is rather short, but each level scales to one of four difficulty levels and one to four players, and it keeps track of best times for each one. The lower levels let players learn the basic strategies, and the Expert difficulty is simply brutal. If you want to play this multiple times, it’s definitely possible. 

Technically, the game doesn’t impress, but we’re not sure the developers care that much about pushing graphical capabilities or making an awe-inspiring score. This game is bizarre, and it’s going to be bizarre even with those things. Another point that may disappoint some: there’s no online multiplayer. We don’t mind it, since the best way to play games like this is with everyone in the same room, but it certainly wouldn’t have hurt things to include it.

Slam Bolt Scrappers retails for $15, which may not be everyone’s favorite price, but there’s legitimately innovative gameplay here, and we say it’s worth it. Not everyone’s as crazy as we are, though, and it takes a little bit of crazy to like this one.

Alien Breed 3: Descent

March 15, 2011

PS3 / Reviews / by Andrew Passafiume Make a comment! / Tweet it!

When you think Team17, you think of the Worms series, plain and simple. However, back in 2009, they released the first game in a planned downloadable trilogy reviving the early-’90s Alien Breed series. And here we are today with the PlayStation Network release of the third and final game, Alien Breed 3: Descent. It tries to emulate the most popular action/horror games but ultimately fails to do so. 

The game does have some things going for it. There is a myriad of modes and options available to the player, including multiplayer and the ability to play through the entire campaign in co-op (both online and off). While the multiplayer is hit or miss, the co-op is the best part of the experience; playing through the entirety of the campaign with a friend can make up for its dull and repetitive nature.

It’s a shame that the actual core of the experience is such a letdown. You can tell that the developers tried really hard to emulate the experience found in a series like Dead Space, but they can’t quite pull it off. The campaign features a nice variety of aliens to kill and weapons to kill them with, but it mostly relies on things we’ve seen before. There are sections where you’re outside, in space, relying on oxygen tanks and with minimalist sound design. Sound familiar?

The camera doesn’t help either. Instead of offering direct control of it with the right analog stick, you instead use that to aim your weapon. Not shoot your weapon, mind you, just aim it. If they were going to go that route, they might as well have made it a duel joystick shooter. Instead, there is a separate fire button and separate camera buttons, making controlling the camera a bit wonky when surrounded by enemies. Combine that with a selection of technical glitches and you have a somewhat buggy experience.

On top of that, the campaign is just not that fun. Getting from place to place isn’t confusing, just tedious, as the objectives are a bit of a pain. Most of them involve hitting a switch to hit another switch to go through a door to hit one final switch. And sometimes you get to the switch just to find out you need to hit one more switch you passed before you can hit that switch. Sounds fun, right?

The basic design of Alien Breed 3 seems to be fine and with a friend the campaign can be fun, but trying to play this game solo will test your patience. It’s a shame, because you often see glimmers of a great game in here, they are just covered up by some poor design choices and campaign structured less like an exciting top-down alien shooter and more like one giant fetch quest. 

Pros: Nice variety of modes; multiplayer and co-op are fun; good enemy and weapon variety

Cons: Campaign is full of tedious objectives and backtracking; camera can be troublesome at times; some technical issues and hiccups

 

de Blob 2

March 4, 2011

PS3 / Reviews / by Graham Russell Make a comment! / Tweet it!

After saving the Raydians from the INKT Corporation, Blob takes a vacation to Prisma City with his new friend Pinky. In what we’re sure is a coincidence, Comrade Black and his company made it there first, and has started to take over the populace. So… we get a sequel to de Blob. 

In all seriousness, the story has never mattered in this series. It’s about getting paint and slamming things and restoring color to buildings, all to an upbeat, fun soundtrack. And de Blob 2 has those things.

So what’s new? The main campaign has a Super Mario Galaxy-like 2-player mode, where the second player shoots things and helps out in a purely supplemental way. There are co-op versions of each level with special challenges. Most of the changes come to the core challenges, though.

Most noticeable are the new side-scrolling levels, where things become distilled to simple platforming. As a quick diversion from the world-exploring main quest, a formula that wouldn’t stand on its own serves as a change of pace that works well.

In addition to these new areas, the world itself sometimes changes its dynamics. There are some places that have a similar balance to the original, but others feature unlimited, unmixable paint sources where the focus is less on resource management and more on simple movement-based challenges. There are also a few new moves, most notably a charge attack that uses a large amount of paint points to take out an enemy.

For a game all about personal expression, the original de Blob didn’t really let you do much to express your own preferences. In this sequel, players can upgrade Blob’s abilities, letting him hold more paint, take more hits or charge attack for fewer points, among other things. For purists, there’s a reward for beating the game with no upgrades, but for most people it makes the game go by more smoothly and enjoyably.

The original game, a Wii exclusive, had some rather unnecessary motion controls, like shaking to take over buildings. Now, with the series’ appearance on 360 and PS3, these have been ironed out, and without motion controllers, the game’s still fun. (The old control scheme, minus the shaking, is still available on Wii and an option for Move owners on the PS3.) 

Visually, the game’s simple but stylish, a wise choice for a multiplatform game that couldn’t push most systems’ capabilities anyway. The music is similar to the original, which is a very good thing, and the audio flourishes when going on a painting streak are still as satisfying as ever.

The one thing de Blob 2 needed to do to be a worthy sequel is retain the charm of the original while ironing out a few first-attempt kinks. To us, it seems there are checks in all the right boxes. Looking for a challenge? This probably isn’t it, but come back when you’re just looking to enjoy yourself.

Pros: Loads of fun and charm, new co-op mode

Cons: Not much challenge, jokes are usually for the young set

 

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