Soul Calibur IV

Sunday, 10 August 2008

Sorry, this review has been a while after the game actually came out, but I've been busy. At any rate, here it is.

Firstly, I'd like to say this game, in a quick pleinary before we begin, is a lot of fun, and a good time to play. But that's all. It's not going to get nominated for game of the year (and if it does, it certainly shouldn't win it). It lacks imagination and innovation, though some of the techniques used aren't justified to change. The Soul Calibur formula is pretty untouchable.

Let's discuss that formula first off. The things that define the Soul Calibur series is beautiful graphics, topped with a good, simple fighting style and an imaginative inventory, varied, but easy to chop and change to suit your own style of play. To an extent SCIV has managed to maintain this: the fighting style is still simple, easy to understand and not chocked full of thousands of combos which you have to memorise. However, the simplicity of the fighting system can occasionally be marred by a slow catch up time. Often, whilst I was attempting an attack on the lower body of the opposition (performed with down and Y, B or X) it would, first time, do a mid attack, and not adjust until the next strike. Particularly frustrating when you're trying to get around the opponents block, and you just keep striking them with no damage.

The imaginative inventory I was discussing earlier has also been damaged. Back in SC2, I remember there was a great way of acquiring weapons which involved working your way through a map. There were hidden areas, and you defeating the inhabitants often meant you won some sort of weapon or item of clothing. This system was fantastic: in fact, it was one of the reasons I bought SCIV. However, SCIV has done away with this system. You acquire new sets of items when you get 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 achievments. And weapons are unlocked when you complete the story mode. However, you can also get items by unlocking them in the 'Tower of Lost Souls'. Though, there's little point to this, seeing as you can simply buy them, and they cost next to nothing. The items in the inventory have no explanation to them and seem just to have been created for the sake of them. One good part to this system, or so it seems, is the ability of a piece of armour to affect stat percentages and skill points. This way, both your overall attack and your special moves (which you can manually select with the amount of skill points you have) are decided by just the items you carry (levelling up has no bearing on it). This is a very clever system. A bit too clever: if you care enough, you will find yourself spending hours editing your character to get the right balance between different types of skill points, just so you can get the skills you want.

The character graphics are just as beautiful as they should be: the physics are sometimes a bit off with the hair, but the character models are very good, as are the cutscenes. However, many of the backgrounds seem rushed, with water detail looking flakey at best (when the difference between the texture of water and the texture of lava is difficult to decipher, you know something's wrong).

Now there were two big marketing points for this game: things that it built on to SC3. Firstly, was the inclusion of Star Wars characters. For the 360: Yoda and for the PS3: Darth Vader. With Darth Vader's Apprentice appearing on both platforms. Now, it's true that this seems a bit stupid, and they may be right. Certainly these characters seem to have been stuck onto the game with airfix glue. But, personally, I don't see why it should be such a problem. You don't have to play as them, and they aren't fundamental to any plot aside from their own. Also, Yoda and the Apprentice (I haven't played as Darth Vader yet) have been very tastefully done. The voice acting for them is spot on, and they fit very well into the Soul Calibur role, despite DW's accusations that they are broken characters. His grounds for this are that Yoda is too short to be hit, and that the Apprentice's throw always performs a ring out. However, I contest that. The two characters have some bonus attributes because, due to their nature, they can't have their costume edited, and so they can't be given skill points. Their bonuses are just to account for this.

The other marketing pitch was the new Create-a-Character piece. To be honest, Creating a Character should be fun, and in this game, it just isn't. There aren't enough settings, and all the characters just end up looking like one of the pre-mades anyway. And even when you've done this, you've still got to go through all the palava of kitting him out with the skills you want him to have, and the armour he needs for that.

The story mode gives you a lot to unlock. A lot of characters that can be purchased, and a lot of items to buy too. But the story mode itself lacks any sort of imagination. The opening screen for each character tells you what the characters wants with the Soul Blade/Calibur, you do five stages (mostly in the same locations) and then there's a cut scene telling you that the character got what they were after in the opening screen. Far too short, far too expected, far too shit. It is tricky doing stories and cutscenes and bits and pieces for 32 different characters (33 including both Yoda and Darth Vader), but if that's the case then there should be fewer characters. The game would not harm from having only 10 characters, possibly less, as long as the stories were interesting, and their fighting styles were varied. Instead, I was forced to slog through these 32 different stories to get full completion of the story mode. Luckily, it only took me 10 hours. But is that a good thing? If 32 characters only leave a story trail that last 10 hours?

Far more promising is the Tower of Lost Souls. You get a choice to ascend or descend (descending is only an option once you've gotten to the 20th floor of ascension). The Ascending is basically a more challenging version of the story mode, involving 1 or more stages of 1-4 enemies. You have to get through all the given stages in a slot with just your starting amount of health (though you are allowed, usually two or three characters). This is a challenge sometimes, but fun. A much better time than trying to complete story mode. The Descending is just a survival mode: two characters versus the hordes of time.

There are other points: an arcade mode that leaves much to the imagination (each time through, with all characters is the same), and a well-composed, but largely irrelevant, soundtrack. But the last point that needs to be made is about the online. The online system is incredibly simple, and very easy to play. In ranked or player it's fun, especially if you just want a quick game. Most people use customised characters (and win with them I've found). However, the game falls prey to the only Live problem that such a game cannot fall prey too: lag. The lag on this game, all too frequent, just spoils and ruins play, making it more or less impossible to play. It's not always a problem, but when it is, you may as well leave the room and go find somewhere else (I don't mean on the Xbox, I mean, literally, get up and just leave the room, come back when the servers are less crowded).

It's fun, there's a lot to complete, but it can be monotonous at times. It's great if you're on school holidays or whatever, and you've got nothing to do on the long boring days when no one's out, because you can just keep playing it. But it's not anything special, not worth buying if you can wait till September when some better games are coming out. I give it a 7.

Labels: 7/10, game review, PS3, Soul Calibur IV, Xbox360

Author: random dave | Comments: | Leave Your Response?

Alone In The Dark: Review

Thursday, 3 July 2008

While i've spent 4-5 days hooked on the Bad Company multiplayer, i figured it was time to review Alone in the Dark.

To start, I found the game really enjoyable. When I first played it, I found the combat really irritating and difficult to grasp, and this led to me being chucked around a fair bit by the enemys, but now i've settled down somewhat. The Graphics are good, and the physics engine is, in a word, amazing. The way fire works is possibly alone in the darks biggest plus point. Everything that should burn, does burn. I once used a flaming bullet to put the window through of a car, and then slowly released i'd set the car on fire, and had to jump out. Moments like this make the game fun, and again, its the engine that should be applauded.

As for the story, it's pretty decent adventure game fare. You play as Edward Carnby and after a brilliant first two "episodes" escaping from a collapsing tower block, you find yourself in Central Park to solve a mystery. Yeah, the whole of central park. Central park is a pretty large place though, so you will have to use one of the many vehicles littered around to get there. In the run up to release, developers Eden used the dreaded words "open world enviroment" but this is untrue. While you have alot of ground you can cover, you dont have the Items to really go on a killing spree of sorts, and so generally you head for the nearest car and go straight for your next checkpoint. That is, when you are actually in central park. Most of your time is spent roaming sewers and hallways nervously.

This isnt a big thing however, I for one like some linearity to my survival horror and the game has alot of charm. The combination system is slightly insane sometimes, as i found out when i taped a bottle of petrol to a box of bullets and then chucked a bandage in it as a wick. Yeah, quite an explosion there.

Thats not to say there arent bad things in the game. Gameplay really needs to pause while you are using items in your coat, and the difficulty curve shoots upwards at about 4 hours into the game, a part where I didn't get any healing items for about an hour, and was stuck on "one hit will kill you" after fighting a boss and still not getting any healing items. The controls are ever so slightly clunky, although you will get used to this with time, and some of the enemys are practically invincible, requiring you to shoot 3-4 different fissures with flaming bullets to put them down. The main flaw is that there just isnt enough of it. the game clocks in at alittle under 9 hours if you know what your doing, and I finished it in around 10. This is to me its main crime as a game. I just wanted to play more of it.

Overall i'd give it an 7/10 although, if it would of been a few hours longer it would of certainly been an 8 or 9, i just struggle to justify it as a full price purchase when its so short.

The game has been soured slightly by Atari's rampage regarding poor review scores, a fiasco that veteran companies like atari should be past by this point, slinging accusations of piracy left and right, and so it's hard to review this without that coming into my head subconciously

Labels: 7/10, Alone in the Dark, Review

Author: DW | Comments: | Leave Your Response?

Vegas 2 Review

Thursday, 17 April 2008

So, having finally finished Rainbow Six Vegas 2's story mode on realistic, i not only feel like a fully trained, well equipped counter terrorist agent but i also feel like i can now discuss the game.



For a start, Theres alot of people who believe that this game is just an expansion pack and not a real sequel, much in the style that GRAW2 didn't add much to Ubi Soft's Ghost Recon series. I'm 100% in agreement with these people, but to just write Vegas 2 off as a simple expansion pack would be a disservice in my opinion. I was possibly the worlds biggest Rainbow Six Vegas fan, i pretty much played it solidly from its release in November 06, till well into 2007. As a result expectations were pretty high, and I'll happily admit to being on the verge of joyous tears as i slid my new copy of Vegas 2 into my 360's disk drive.

I'm afraid to say that first impressions were not so great. the PEC (Persistent Elite Creation)Character creator was almost exactly the same as the first one, with very little new options, and the menu screen could of quite easily been mistaken for the originals. this is nothing but cheap design in my opinion, a new game should at least get a new menu. From there on in I found i was developing a horrendous case of Deja Vu, the game used the same game engine, and the even better, the same crippling multi player host advantage.

but no matter, this was a game i loved, so i settled down, and played for a little while. My first major complaint with the game was that the maps were straight up just not as good as the originals. Again, a problem of lazy design.

It took me about a week to get through the realistic storyline, which ties in and completes the originals finally dealing with the traitorous Gabe nowak. I did like the fact that your PEC was now your avatar in story, as well as the rather bland fatigues of Logan Keller from the first Vegas, and I pretty much enjoyed the story. It had a slight problem of being a little short, but I'm going to chalk that up to laziness on Ubi Soft's part again, and fart in their general direction.

I played through the story with a good friend of mine playing as Knight, and i found that Co-op enhanced the experience heavily, as coordinating with a real person just made it all seem more natural to me.

I didn't get on so well with the single player, while i was completing it cooperatively, i trailed behind on single player at normal difficulty. I found it to be largely unchallenging, but my major upset was that they fucked up the voice commands again. I tried to tell my team to lob a grenade, and suddenly they were sprinting headlong at an enemy on a light machine gun, practically tripping over each other to get into the line of hot leaden death. So, i muted the mic.

In general, I think a lot of my problems with Vegas 2 were that it wasn't the sequel i had been rabidly expecting,and convincing all of my friends to buy. It felt somewhat rushed, and i couldn't help but feel it was Vegas 1.5 rather then the real deal. It's still a totally playable game, and I'm still playing alot of multi player, despite the lack of good hosts. I'd score it a pretty decent 7/10, because the Graphics are still pretty shitty, but the games nice and solid, even if it isnt the instant classic Vegas was.

Labels: 7/10, Review, RSV2, Xbox360

Author: DW | Comments: | Leave Your Response?