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Dragon Age: Origins is a role-playing-game made by one of the long-time-leaders in RPG developing, Bioware. The game is made to be a spiritual sequel to one of their previous highly-acclaimed classic, the Baldur’s Gate series. It’s quite interesting to see old formulas being reused in today’s games and working out quite well, when you have developers hybridizing genres and trying to make them as flashy and unique as possible. Uniqueness is all great and fine, experimenting with new gameplay types is fine, but sometimes you just want to sit down, kick back and relax with a tried and proven recipe.

For gamers of a younger age, Baldur’s Gate was a top-down 6-people-squad role-playing-game released in 1998 that focused on delivering a great story, with a lot of intertwining dialogue choices. It featured tactical squad-based combat using Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules and was set in the fantastic world of the Forgotten Realms. This was the first game using the Forgotten Realms universe made by Bioware, but it was soon followed by Neverwinter Nights and its expansions. It featured most of the concepts aside from the squad mechanic, using a single companion, but keeping the same emotional connection. This changed in the sequel, Neverwinter Nights 2, which brought back the concept of a tactical gameplay allowing two party-members but keeping the game in the same direction that was set out with Baldur’s Gate… and even earlier with Black Isle Studios’ Icewind Dale, but that’s a story for another time.

So this is what they meant about a 'mature' theme?

Dragon Age: Origins is a game for a new age, but oddly, featuring the same concepts that most people put down in the “nostalgia box” as being unprofitable to use now. Concepts such as a 4 person tactical squad system with a pause button, the heavy use of text read from books and various notes, the amount of spoken dialogue and purely the game-lenght are things that most producers nowadays shy away from. It’s been said that the modern day gamer wants fast-paced action combat, no nonsense characters and big burly men telling busty beautiful women that they’ll save the world. I’m happy to see that at over 5 million copies sold, gamers worldwide are proving to be smarter than your average 14 year old.

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Related posts:

1. News Roundup 12/10/09 – Dragon Age: Origins, Sacred Ashes mind-numbing-legendary-trailer
2. Blog – And so it ended…

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Let’s take a trip down memory lane for starters. The Call of Duty series started up in 2003 developed by Infinity Ward, followed by Call of Duty 2 in 2005, again by IW, and they both followed World-War 2 pitting you on different campaigns around Europe. Call of Duty 3 was the first incursion of Treyarch into the franchise and was the only one so far that was not brought on PC’s. The first Modern Warfare came out november 2007 and contrary to Activision’s wants, thinking it would fail and seeing the series at an endpoint, they decided to let Infinity Ward make the sequel anyway. As seen, it was hugely successful and Activision hurried to get them to work on Modern Warfare 2. In the meantime, Treyarch was already working on Call of Duty 5, set back in World War 2 again but on another battlefield. It was met with mixed reviews, mostly seen for leeching of the, then invigorated, Call of Duty franchise.

Coming down to earth in the current timeline, we have Call of Duty (6): Modern Warfare 2 which as said, antes up and strives to deliver more and better then its predecessors. Besides the usual struggles of development, the game received and continues to receive highly negative feedback on both the content and functionality of the game, from both a moral and a gameplay-related perspective. One of the main sticking points was the single-player. For reference, in this review i will use “Call of Duty 4″/”CoD4″ when i want to mention Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and “Modern Warfare 2″/”MW2″ when i want to mention Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2.

I got a F.E.A.R. vibe just now.

The single player campaign follows the same structure as the rest of the series, and puts the player in control of multiple characters showing a different side of the conflict. You get to play as a private that got pulled out of service and into a secret military force called Task Force 141 only to be killed 15 minutes in the game, as another private in the Rangers that will eventually be charged with saving DC and as different members in Task Force 141 itself  that work in the shadows saving the day. I won’t divulge much of the conglomerated, mixed and short story of the game, but i’ll stop on some issues.

The core of them is that the story is a lot grander and more specific then the one in CoD4, you are no longer fighting in a random unnamed arabian country. You’re fighting in real Afghanistan and the fighting eventually will get back to US soil in real Washington DC following a  russian invasion. These points alone make it so the game hits close to home for some people. I understand the fact of making a game focused on current real events and i don’t have a problem with the approach or the subjects, what i do have a problem with is the way the story is told and some ridiculous claims that it makes. I won’t delve much into them, but they were persistent enough to make the single-player experience incredibly confusing and a bit too ‘out there’.

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Related posts:

1. News Roundup 26/10/09 – Third person view in Modern Warfare 2?!
2. News Roundup 12/11/2009 – Modern Warfare 2 sells 4.7 million in day one!
3. News Roundup 29/10/09 – More Modern Warfare 2 controversy!

Welcome to the desert wasteland. This is your car, that's the rocket launcher on top, have fun.

Borderlands is a first-person-role-playing-sandbox-shooter made by Gearbox Software that introduces the player to the world of Pandora, and it’s many secrets and dangers, in order to find an ancient Vault that it’s said to contain everything a man could want. Gearbox Software is mostly noted for it’s success with the Brothers in Arms series, and less so with contributing and making ports of Valve games, especially in the Half-Life series. So when we get hit with a triple A title like this, it kinda makes you wonder what the guys there have been doing until now. There was a lot of media and hype around the game during it’s ‘hype up cycle’ a couple of months before the game launched. They were quirky and ‘in your face’ types of videos and really presented Borderlands as being an unique game, with a ‘chip on its shoulder’ attitude and semi-cell-shaded-graphics. And in the most part, they weren’t wrong. The game somewhat delivers on that promise and offers humorous with-attitude gameplay and gets its point across. But there are problems.

Let’s take it from the top shall we? The game’s storyline circles around a mysterious Vault on Pandora, and the people hunting it, named Treasure Hunters. You get to play as one of the four Treasure Hunters, the four classes of the game, helped by a shady blue figure of a woman helping you towards your goal. That’s all you get to start, and very few things change along the way. Seeing how  most of the game you’ll just get vague references to it, and the ending coming off as a slight rush to the finish line, the storyline does the core of what it’s supposed to do. Push you onwards to more areas with more quests and with more creatures to kill. The problem isn’t with the story itself, but with the way it is presented to the player. Early on you are told to kill a guy, which leads you to killing another guy which has something you need. Then for the next 10-20 hours of game, you’ll literally be left to your own devices, only towards the end of the game picking up and really diving into the matters that you’ve been sidestepping for most of the game. It doesn’t help that even the sidequests, are generally one-sided and dull. At one point in the game a character died, and i really wanted to find out who did it and to avenge him. Oddly, the game denied me that pleasure and continued on without saying another word.

This shotgun is so tacticool that i have a scope for my scope.

The four characters you get to choose to play as are Mordecai the Hunter, Lilith the Siren, Roland the Soldier, and Brick.. the brick. All four character classes focus on a specific type of playing the game and have unique Action Skills. Mordecai is the sniper, and can use his pet, an eagle named BloodWing, to attack his foes. Lilith is a Siren, a being that can go into a Phasewalk meaning she’ll be invisibile and move faster during it, that focuses on SMGs. Roland plays a combat/support role, being able to deploy a turret that can also heal and regenerate bullets for your team-mates. And finally Brick is a tank/rocket launcher type of dude, which has an action skill named Berserk, that has him laughing maniacally and going into a punching frenzy. The classes all behave and play out differently but besides that screen where you choose the character, there are no other references made to them in the game ever. No special quests or mentions by the NPCs.

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Did you ever want to just sit down at your computer, start a game, put on your headphones and just have a consistent and satisfying gaming session? The kind that sucks you in, that has you looking out the window in the morning, see the sunrise and wondering where the night went?  I do.. and sadly, few games nowadays have what it takes to do that to me. Risen, the new RPG from Piranha Bytes, the original makers of Gothic I/II and III, does that, and more.

Risen can be viewed as a spiritual successor to the Gothic franchise and that people that have played any of the previous titles will most likely feel right at home with it. For most, Risen is what Gothic 3 should have been.. it’s a pretty polished, involving and immersive action-RPG. Still, let’s take it from the top and delve into the game as a new player, judging the game on its merits alone.

We're not in Kansas anymore.

The game is an action-rpg, where you take the role of a nameless hero that managed to survive a shipwreck alongside a busty woman named Sara. You end up on an island, where ruins seemed to rise from the ground shortly after you shipwrecked and from there on end, you’re in control of what happens and eventually responsible for the fate of the entire island. The story unfolds slowly, mostly in the later part of the game since the first part of the game features you trying to get the attention and support of one of the two major groups on the island. You can either side with the previous ‘owners’ of the island, and join Don’s Camp, or side with the Inquisition, that took control of the island’s main city and are scouring the land for secrets hidden in the ruins, either voluntarily or forcefully.

The factions are pretty interesting  in the way they are designed. There are no ‘bad’ factions or factions that are made distinctly evil. Don’s Camp, lead by Don Esteban, the previous ‘ruler’ of the island, seems initially to look like the rebels in the story, fighting the oppressive rule of the freshly instated Order of the Holy Flame, The Inquisition. Seeing how that’s the faction you initially get pushed towards might mix with the stereotype that they’re the good guys.

Look at all that juice... (who gets the reference receives a cookie)

The Inquisition are the guys that you get a feel that they’re the bad guys at the start of the game. If you fight them and lose, they will take you to the Monastery and  force you to become a Recruit for the Inquisition. This is happening all over the island, so you can understand why people get a bad feeling about them. If you manage to stay clear of them for a while, eventually you’ll get the opportunity to join them voluntarily. Seeing how they are the only faction that allows you become a mage, it’s a very important, gameplay wise, decision that you have to make.

The thing is, that the more you advance in the story, the more you realize that everything is not exactly as you’ve been told. While Don’s gang isn’t exactly bad, they’re the mafia of the island. I usually play a good-aligned character in RPGs and i chose early on to stick to Don’s Camp.. imagine my surprise later on, when i’ve been creeped into becoming a thug for them. There was this one quest where i had to get protection money out of a local trader, and to do that i had to kill his livestock and place a skull of  his favorite cow on his bed. That was the point where i stopped and went “did i really just side with the bad guys?”. I was surprised i was duped so easily and had my emotions so easily messed with by surface conclusions and what i’ve been told. The shock was even greater later on, when some things happened and actually made me want to have joined the Order of the Holy Flame earlier in the game.

This was a great use of RPG stereotypes to make a unique experience and i solidly mark this as being a great success.

Where there's ancient temples... there's loot to be had.

One of the main stars of the game is the island itself. It’s pretty big, and lush with plants and wildlife, but the main problem i have with it is that it’s incredibly hard to get around. I’m not talking long distances, but more of places where you scratch your head and just purely can’t figure out how to get there. You check your map but it doesn’t really help. I’ve literally had to jump huge heights and hope i won’t die just to get where i wanted to go, since i couldn’t find a way down.  This problem gets exceedingly more annoying the more you advance in the game, since you’ll have to get to points you never even seen. Still, the game makes the island look pretty barren and unforgiving. Aside from Don’s Camp, Harbor Town, the Monastery and small settlements that litter the forests and plains of the game, you rarely, if it all, see any people or interesting locales. It also lacks a deal of focus points. Places that you can point a finger at and say, “that area was awesome” or “i remember this one quest in this area”. You have two swamps, a huge volcano, a lot of dungeons, a nice lake area and.. that’s all that pops in my head for the moment. The graphics make the island look gorgeous but clearly the landscape was done without any real ‘feeling’ behind it. Ofcourse, i don’t want snowy hills on a volcanic island, but i would have appreciated more variety. Since there aren’t really any ‘unlockable’ parts to the island, the places you go to when you start the game, will be the same ones that you will cross when going to battle the boss.. so it’s inevitable that you will get tired of seeing the same creek the 56′th time. You do eventually manage to get teleportation stones to move around but oddly, it doesn’t ease the feeling any.

Just chilling with ma' homies. Drinking some ale, eating some stew.

As said, the game has you on an island doing quests for the faction of your choosing and engaging in small dramas and sidequests. Most quests are interesting enough so that they are fun to do, to solve and get a reaction out of the NPC’s. The feeling of false right/wrong is also present here, you ending up frequently helping people that sometimes you wish you wouldn’t, and sometimes, even backfiring on you.

The game itself is divided in chapters. The first chapter has you roaming the island and joining a side while the second chapter involves Harbor Town, and deciding which faction controls it. The third chapter and fourth chapter have the most story-related content of the game and have you  in an underground dungeon fighting through tons of baddies and then gathering up different artifacts around the game world for.. well.. you’ll have to see for yourself. Some quests are sadly chapter based, so if you don’t finish them in that chapter, they automatically fail.

Risen, as said, is an action-RPG. What this means is that while combat is reliant on stats and gear, whether you win or lose is entirely dictated on how well you play the game. Ofcourse that this system, the combat system of the game, has to be extremely well done since you’ll be doing a lot of it. Oddly.. it isn’t. It has the same fixation and problems that it had in the previous Gothic games. The game itself is challenging, even on Normal, but what makes it even more so, is the combat. Often enemies are either extremely hard when they should not be, or are extremely easy when they should be hard.  Some enemies will even plague you hours after passing them in the ‘level bracket’ that you should have fought them in. You have three choices for combat in this game. Melee combat, featuring swords, shields, axes or staves, ranged combat featuring bows and crossbows and magic attacks, generally ranged damage dealing.

So i just came back from slaying this dragon, right? And boy, is my axe tired. *rimshot*

Melee combat is a mix of luck and stats. It all falls down to whether the enemy combos or not. When you’re pretty far in the game, and still scared of a pack of wolves that you were when you were starting, then there’s a problem. The fact of the matter is, that some battles you end up winning, and others loosing, even thou they are the same enemies, and you did the exact same things. While the game allows you to parry, dodge and offer a good deal of combos to use, it all comes down to doing charge attacks and hoping they won’t hit back. This becomes supremely clear in the mini-boss-fight before the ‘real’ boss-fight where the guy can kill you with exactly TWO hits, even thou you’re all geared up and ready to rock.

Ranged combat, while allowing you some certainty in the outcome of a situation, has you backtracking a good deal, all while poking arrows or bolts into your enemies. Bows are lower damage, but can be fired earlier, have greater mobility while aiming,  and use dexterity to be able to wield them. Crossbows have higher damage, a fixed reload time, low mobility while aiming and use strength to wield them. The problem with crossbows is that DEXTERITY is what you need to do more damage, so you end up dual-speccing both Strength and Dexterity to get the most out of them and be able to use them. The fact that with the initial release, the skill itself is bugged, progressing from level 1 to level 9 offering NO reload bonuses, even thou each level should reduce reload time by 10%, does not help the matter one bit. Only upgrading to level 10 will it offer the full bonus that it should.

Magic is also a tad unbalanced, taking a long time to head up to Rune Magic, and having to use the same “shoot, run back, shoot” tactic as ranged users do. Also now you have to bother with mana plants and potions aswell, since your mana is non-regenerable.

Overall, the combat while being a pain in the ass sometimes, generally works, and can even be fun in certain situations. But in the end, the marvels of great action-RPG combat like that of The Witcher greatly overshadows this simplistic run-and-poke gameplay.Also i’d like to note that the final boss battle is entirely unreliant on what you’ve trained so far. You can theoretically go in with a level 1 character with the required items and you can finish the game with no problems. It is kind of a let down and a good ending could have made the game really outshine it’s flaws.

Still, while the combat is generally unfulfilling and quirky , the social/crafting/utility sector is not. Sneaking around, lockpicking chests and doors, crafting potions and making magic amulets from ore you mined yourself is very fun. There’s nothing like making your own permanent +5 stat bonus potions and gulping them down afterwards, or the thrill of sneaking into a warehouse and robbing the place blind.

I’ve talked of places and people, but how is that represented in the world? How does the game presents itself and how does it look?

Where there's a waterfall...

It looks great. The lush vegetation greets you the moment you get your character’s face out of the sand. The sandy beaches and the blue sea lets you know you are truly far from any mainland. The game handles shadow similarly to Far Cry 2, paving a dark black soft shadow on the ground, really contrasting with the blooming vegetation around you. The game looks great and really drags in the atmosphere home. While the exteriors look amazing, the interiors of the temples sadly lack any real ‘look’ and seem pale and unimaginative.

They could have done something like we’ve seen in X:Men Origins: Wolverine, and have the lush jungle landscape blend beautifully with the age-old temples. Sadly, we get dusty and VERY DARK temples/dungeons, with rare squirts of lava. Really, sometimes i had to turn my brightness to max on both ingame and on my monitor since i purely could not see anything, and the ingame offers of a torch and Light Spell were far from perfect. Performance-wise, while having just a slightly high system requirement, runs smoothly on even medium PC’s nowadays, and on maximum, an E4300@2.4ghz, 3GB of ram with a Geforce 8800GTX covers it with the minimum of 30 frames per second atleast.

... there's a secret cave waiting to be plundered.

I’ve mentioned atmosphere.. And the graphics really do couple with the music to create an immersive experiance. I hate to mention Gothic again, but really, the style and sound of the soundtracks are highly reminiscent of it. It’s soothing and ambient while also making a lasting impression. It doesn’t go as high or heroic like Jeremy Soule’s work, but it has it’s own style. While we’re at sound, i’m also going to mention great voice acting. While a bit stereotypical, and lacking any real memorable  characters or lines, it’s well-done and make the characters sound exactly like you’d like them to. They went to great lengths to do it right and also managed to translate the amusing snips from the original german, into a perceptible and  natural english. All the media elements come together nicely and form a great cohesive ‘whole’ really pushing home the concept and the ideas behind the game.

You’ve probably seen me complain a bit in this review, and by now, you’re expecting something to justify why i made that very lofty and uplifting introduction. Risen is that RPG that even thou it has it’s problems and bugs.. it’s done right in that way that makes you keep playing it. If it were any other game, i would have given up after the first few hours, but the landscapes, the interesting and subtle hints that the game offers and it’s general appeal was something that i’ve not had for a good while. It’s a hardcore, old-school, level up, kill monsters and do quests type of RPG. It doesn’t try to be fancy, introduce new gameplay systems or mix it up by hybridizing with other genre systems. It’s a solid game with a solid concept done right. In the tumble and mix of games today, trying to be new and fresh, it’s welcoming to see a game still doing it the old way. It’s almost like meeting an old friend and getting reacquainted.

So, as usual in my reviews, the base line is.. Is this game worth your 40$? Yes. It’s a core RPG that any player will get some enjoyment out of it. Oldschool gamers and even those only acquainted with the last few years of role-playing-games have something waiting for them in Risen. I recommend you don’t miss out.

If you want to buy it, and want to support Cosmo’s Reviews aswell, you can click the boxart picture below to get a copy shipped from Amazon.

Related posts:

1. Blog – Risen has risen.

Meet Ashley Simms.

Twin Sector is a first-person-puzzle-solver made by Headup Games, a german-based developer without any outstanding previous games. In Twin Sector you play the role of Ashley Simms, a huge-breasted athletic woman that was tucked away in cryo-sleep, dozing off happily, until she was woken up by the resident AI of the facility, OSCAR. Also out of the blue, she has a pair of ‘telekinetic-gloves’ that she can use to push or pull objects or herself if aimed at a wall or ceiling. Noticing any similarities to Portal yet?

A whole 15 families?

The story places you on a secret base made with the specific purpose of resurrecting the human civilization in case of an apocalyptic event. You are part of a host of other humans, the best of the best, you taking the role of a professional athlete/cliffclimber/bungeejumping chick. With huge breasts. Don’t ask me how she manages to do the 100 meter dash with that amount of baggage upfront. Our Ashley also gets a very long speech as she enters the program about how she saved 15 families from certain doom in what appeared to be a suicide mission. We are controlling a real hero here. I’m sorry to be so petty in a review, but i found that to be extremely amusing.

The game focuses entirely on solving puzzles by using your telekinetic gloves. They have the property of being able to attract/repel objects, or if aiming at a solid immovable surface like a wall or a ceiling, they can pull or push our Ashley from and to certain doom.

Twin Sector is putting the drama in overdramatic.

Think of it as the gravity gun from Half Life 2,with just an added feature. The problem is that even the basis of all puzzles, the gloves, are flawed. You can charge the pull/push powers by holding down the right/left mouse buttons. All’s fine and dandy until you realize that by using them, you lose push or pull energy, a full push/pull taking some 70% of the available energy of that power. The only way to recharge that is to just not use the gloves for a couple of seconds. I found that to be very distracting from gameplay, especially since sometimes you need to do consecutive power uses. The fact that even if you have 10% energy, and the game lets you ‘charge to full’, you only get the 10% energy equivalent of the charge, doesn’t really help with the game-flow any.

Also, the puzzles themselves are no better off.

They involve you using objects around you in a sequence to get to where you have to go, and also getting yourself up to where you have to. The thing is that the puzzles are sometimes so brain-meltingly hard, or out of view that you don’t even realize what you should be doing. There were often times where i’d be sitting in a room, not knowing what i was supposed to do, using all the obvious answers, when i finally notice that i was ment to do something entirely different. A good deal of the puzzles have only one solution and only few of them are able to accommodate a more ‘think outside the box’ logic. Add in the fact that some of them also are time-constrained, having to do a sequence of fast moves to go where you have to, and you end up with a lack of willpower to go on. Not to mention that the game does not allow you to save, basing its saves on a very arbitrary and badly made checkpoint system.

The improbable probability of glass shattering that way is outstanding.

There were often times when i’d have to redo 5 minutes of annoying ‘exact’ puzzles, only at the end, right before the checkpoint, to meet a ‘tracker’, a flying drone that kills you in two blows and follows you constantly, and die,  throwing me back at the previous checkpoint. The fact that the gloves are also a tad inexact, you not knowing exactly where you’ll end up sometimes, mixed in with the trackers, time-constrained puzzles and a slew of other non-fun additions makes this one of the most annoying experiences i’ve ever had. And even if you manage to do them, right before you go “YES!”, the game crashes.. it tends to do that.

Now if we dig even deeper, the puzzles themselves have no real reason for their existence. Why would laser fields have big buttons to move them around, why are there dispensers for canisters of flammable liquids and why do you need specific objects to destroy specific doors/windows? To add another fun fact to the whole puzzle-solving, our mega-athlete character can’t even fall a meter before getting damage, and she seems to be incredibly slow-running. Again, this all mixes greatly together to create the most frustrating puzzles ever. All of this could have been forgotten if at least it was an immersive experience with good story and great characters.

Unimpressive fire effects.

Sadly, it’s not. Even from the first cutscene you notice extremely bad voice acting and animations. I know that the developers are german, and they probably gave the english localization to a cheap company, but i would have liked them to make an effort at least. I can’t believe how developers give so little credit to good sound in their game.. i know a few bad small games from indie developers that even though the gameplay was lacking, a good atmosphere and great sound made up for it. Comparing this to Portal again, OSCAR has absolutely nothing on GLaDoS.. it has no personality, no quirks, nothing remarkable about it. Even our character, Ashley, manages to sound like a spoiled Paris Hilton clone. The even sadder thing is.. this is not the worst voice acting i’ve seen in a game.

As previously said, the puzzles fit in the game world like a cube in spheric slot. The level designs are made specifically to be a sequence of puzzles and that’s it. Also, while in Portal you have the Companion Cube, in Twin Sector you have.. a ball of trash. Ironic as it seems, it’s true. The game could have very well been stripped down to 100 or so puzzle-rooms, without a real story or stuttering AI’s. It would have probably been better.

Meet the Companion Trash Ball.

The game doesn’t even look all that great. You can clearly see a lack of any real art design, it being a mix and mash of browns and grays; corridors and vents. It’s surprising that while it’s so easy nowadays to make a game look great, it even fails at that. Flames and particle effects look cheap and bland, the textures work as a purely functional surface and overall, the general look of the game is unimpressive. It’s functional for my standards, but i would have appreciated either going all the way and making it look great, or sticking to a minimalistic  style. They could have done a lot better by just cutting out parts of the game, and restructuring it. Also worth mentioning are the long loading times, given the fact that for example Red Faction Guerrilla can load a game and everything you need in under 5 seconds, i can’t see how Twin Sector needs 20-30 seconds or more to load a game. Overall the gameplay core idea was pretty solid, and if they looked at it under a different light, we’d probably have a better game.

So it’s time for the bottom line. Is this game worthy of your 30 euros? No. Not by a long shot. There are a ton of other games out there cheaper and a lot better, and plus, with October around the corner coming with a ton of great games, it’d be a shame to spend it on a sub-mediocre puzzle solver.

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That’s just one of the many awesome stories you’ll hear around the watercooler  from the people that played Red Faction: Guerrilla.  And there’s a lot more where that came from.

Welcome to Mars. Now proceed to totally destroy everything.

Red Faction: Guerrilla, also known in some circles as Red Faction 3, is a third-person sandbox game made by the same creators as the series, Volition. While initially a PS3/Xbox360 game, it got ported to the PC and launched a few days ago. Red Faction: Guerrilla (henceforth known as RFG), continues the proud tradition of Red Faction 1, introducing a system of structure damage,  Geomod 2, fallowing the introduction of Geomod 1 in the first installment. While it shares the same name, you can’t consider them as having the same source. Geomod 1 was made on the basis of creating holes in terrain or buildings with explosives or drilling equipment. It was extraordinarily awesome and even a bit before its time, but sadly, the technology never saw adaptation in other games, and it was used sparingly even in the original game.

Geomod 2, while taking away the ability to create ‘holes’ in terrain, we are given an extraordinarily complex building destroying simulation. Each building is not just a 3D model in one bulk setting, it’s a huge Lego, a building being formed of hundreds of pieces, some also being destroyable in themselves. So what i’m saying is that to take a building down, you can destroy the foundation, and it will implode on itself. You can even destroy a part of the building and watch half of it fall down over other structures, and a wide load of possibilities.

Undoubtedly this is an interesting gimmick in the least, but how does it fit in the gameplay? Well.. let’s just say that by the end of the game, you wont find it boring, during the game you’ll have fun with it and use it all the time, and  in the beginning you will be stunned at just how AWESOME it is. Now that i’ve started with the hind-end of the game, let me make a proper introduction.

Alec Mason. He's so manly he mines with a sledgehammer.

You play as Alec Mason, a demolitions expert, a guy that just got on Mars hoping for a peaceful life alongside his brother Dan. Not five minutes in the game, and ofcourse Dan dies, and you get recruited in the Red Faction, a rogue ‘terrorist’ group that fights for a free Mars. Free from the tyrannical and throughly evil capitalist scum that is the Earth Defence Force (EDF). Now, if you played the original games, you might see some connections here and subtle hints. In Red Faction 1, you played as a guy named Parker, working for the Red Faction back in the day, that was lead by a chick named Eos, that had you curing the planet of a plague and calling the EDF to save Mars from other oppressionist scum. Now you play as Mason, starting in the Parker sector, working for a new Red Faction, having to fight the former-savior, EDF, that uses the Eos sector as a headquarters. A lot of nods and intertwining with the story of the first game, all that were quite unneeded since the game acts like a reboot, but respectful nonetheless. The story isn’t particularly well done, but considering the focus of the game is the gameplay, i don’t hold it against it too much.

As said, the game is a third-person sandbox, a ways of from the scripted first-person-shooters that established the series. You have to free Mars, and to do that, you have to take control of 5 sectors from the EDF: Parker, Dust, Badlands, Oasis and Eos. You have primary missions related to each sector that you have to finish to secure it, and also secondary missions that help get EDF control down and morale up for the citizens. Once EDF has no control and you finish all the primary missions… you secure that sector. The secondary missions act more like challenges and fun stuff to do in the game. From rescuing hostages, to blowing up buildings as efficiently as you can, to riding shotgun on a bike-car-turret made of epic, win and legendary, destroying as much EDF property as you can. All in the name of freeing the sectors.

To that end, you have an impressive arsenal of upgradeable weaponry and a host of vehicles that you can ‘hijack’ or steal. Most of them geared towards the goal of destroying buildings, ofcourse, making good use of the Geomod 2 technology, but fun nonetheless. The NanoRifle especially, with it’s ability to vaporize certain parts of buildings, or just whole human enemies.

The blur doesn't do it justice, but that Heavy Walker is totally awesome.

All that arsenal doesn’t really help in the end. As you read from first paragraph of this review, it ends in ‘Then i died’. Red Faction: Guerrilla isn’t named Guerrilla just for kicks. You really are fighting a capable, working and large army by yourself. Stick too much around a base blowing stuff up and killing personnel and you’ll end up with a ton of infantry, a half a dozen vehicles with turret mounts and a few tanks, for good measure, coming down your throat.  So the game really pressures you into going in, doing the deed and getting out. Too bad that the consequences for not doing so are so low. You get a slight morale drop, which is easily recovered by just killing 3 EDF infantry in quick succession for example.

Speaking of enemies, in sandbox games, you go in with the expectation that the AI will generally suck and that i’ll be like shooting at targets downrange. I went in with the same idea, setting the difficulty to Hard. Five deaths later, i was going in the options and setting it to Normal. The enemies are as smart as they are many. They use cover efficiently, even when you destroy it, they search for a new one, they jump out of the way of cars and even some weapons, and tend to stick together and act as a group. And if you’re going to try to sneak around in this game, be aware that they will actively pursue you, use grenades to make sure an area is clear, scan around after they lost contact and a host of other behaviors  that will make the life of any former Metal Gear Solid player hard. This also translates to friendly NPC’s, being able to mount turret weapons with great effect, run after you when you want them to, and generally react in a way that wont make you pull your hair out. Hell.. it will even put hair back on. The AI was that good.

Die Mars Rover! DIE!

Red Faction: Guerrilla also looks as good as it plays. While each sector has it’s own unique feel and ‘color-palette’ to it, each of them look great. The use of certain visual effects like depth of field or glowing sun-rays really surpass their condition and make the game look unique, with a superficial blandness hiding an eloquent portrayal of what would a terraformed Mars look like. While it doesn’t look as impressive in some of the more populated sectors, i personally think that deserted areas like the Badlands with some settlements and objectives here and there had a more otherworldly and a nice touch to them compared to built-areas like Eos. The Marauder areas especially, with their warped structures made of scrap and the general sound of the zone are remarkable.

The sound department also makes a great job fitting soundtracks to each of the zones. The music in the game is not enough to be protruding but enough to make you ‘notice’ it and get a good feel of the sector you’re in. Again with my previous example.. one of my best experiences in the game was when i accidentally destroyed my car in the Marauder area, and since i couldn’t find one, i was forced to make a run for it, being chased by a lot of Marauders, firing back once in a while, trying to stay alive long enough to get out. The combination of music, effects, sounds and the general feel of the area made that experience possible, reminding me a lot of the look and atmosphere of Mad Max. If the developers were aiming for that, they hit it head on.

Before..

Now, you might think that the star of the game is the Geomod 2 destruction system, and you’d probably be right. But that’s not the prime reason i liked the game so much. It had another jewel, hidden well under its belt, which a casual gamer might not even notice or respect. The procedural generation system of the game if the best system i’ve seen in any sandbox game to date. And that’s very high praise coming from someone that played a lot of games in the genre.

After..

To give you and example of what i mean. I leave my car at the edge of the base, i go in, destroy stuff, then grab an APC and make my escape, five minutes later, i come down the same road, and accidentally hit a vehicle off the side of the road. It was the car i left there. Another example… i destroy a bridge. I can be certain, that unless i activate a mission that uses that bridge and has it reconstructed, that the bridge will be destroyed for the whole lenght of the game. Having permanent damage, a long ’scrub’ time for vehicles and a few other tricks up it’s sleeve makes it a unique pearl in the universe of sandbox games that have half the map disappear the moment you turn your back on it. Sure, compared to GTA4, we have a lot less vehicles and people roaming the streets, but sometimes i appreciate the whole ‘less is more’ concept if done right.

Returning to the hind-end of the game, the Geomod 2 technology. I’ve outlined the benefits.. that you can destroy whole buildings, and that it features realistic building structures. I mean, they hired architects to design them for crying out loud. And at the end of the day, i love what they did with the whole gameplay mechanic. There is also a Wrecking Crew mode, choosable from the main menu that gives you a set of challenges to complete, with destruction in mind. Ofcourse all results are uploadable online to share with your friends. Still, Geomod for all it’s awesomeness, it has some problems.

Huge rocket-launching megatank vs. EDF. Any bets?

The first one is that, i think due to gameplay restrictions in single player, buildings act a tad funny when you try to destroy them. You’ll often see buildings stand on just two pillars, and you’ll have to do minutiae destroying to bring it down. And that really bogs down the pace of the game sometimes. For all the mindless destruction you can cause, it kinda sucks that you have to actually stand there and check which damn part of the building is still there holding it up. Now, in the Wrecking Crew mode, you can set the level of how easily the buildings collapse. On low, it functions like in single-player.. but on high. You have a lot more realistic aperture. They fall down a lot easier, but also as you would expect to in real life. I suppose that that would have been too easy in single player, given the fact that you can have a huge number of explosives on your person at all times, but i would have preferred that, with ammo/power restrictions to weapons, rather then the ‘do more boom, less efficiently’ approach they went with.

The second problem is the price you pay for the fact that you can blow up any building. That price comes in CPU power. I’ve not talked with anyone that said they didn’t have problems with laggy gameplay once a building started to shatter and fall. Sometimes it’s so bad, that it lowers gameplay into the single-digit frames per second limit. Sure it’s for a little while, but in a heated battle, with you jetpacking all around and firing NanoRifles and Thermobaric Rockets from the hip, it’s not exactly a welcomed event. Oddly, this is the only performance nag i can find on the game. Incredibly, it loads up a save game, straight from Desktop/Menu/Load Game, in under 5 seconds. For a game that looks this good and is a sandbox, i just find that absolutely mindboggling. Why can’t other games load assets this fast?

I ain't afraid of no ghosts!

The multiplayer aspect is well done, using the same techniques that you’ve practiced in single player. You have different backpack options aswell, giving you certain powers aside from the jetpack you played with in single player, and you can use them to varying effects. A load of game types you can play, and there is an xp-gain system, but combining them is never a good idea. Certain game-types are locked until you gain a sufficient number of experiance points, and while i can appreciate the reasoning behind this, i’d rather have that as a server switch. Overall the game is very fun in multiplayer, and i’d highly recommend it if you’re looking for a new multiplayer game.

So time for the bottom line. Is Red Faction: Guerrilla worth your money? Yes. In the end the game just looks and plays well, even considering that this is a port, has great gameplay and even some replay value, and the number and size of the problems it does have is so tiny and insignificant that you’d be hard-pressed to rag on the game just because of them. I really liked Red Faction: Guerrilla and i recommend it warm-heartedly.

So what are you waiting for? Buy it by clicking the image below, and have a copy shipped off from Amazon to you in a matter of minutes.

Red Faction: Guerrilla @ Amazon.com

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A time bubble, and a futuristic soldier in power armor dying to an arrow.

I’ve yet to see a game feature time-travel in a way that was both interesting, fun and logical. ChronoTrigger reserves the title of the game that managed to get as close as possible to that idea but few others even get on the list fallowing it. On the very bottom of that list, you’d find Darkest of Days. Darkest of Days is a First Person Shooter made by 8monkeyLabs, in which your character, the last surviving member of General Custer’s army, Alexander Morris, has to travel back in time to certain periods to find some people and to generally fix the flow of time.

The game’s main focus, time-travel, is done pretty poorly. The main storyline revolves KronoteK, a company that was founded by Dr. Ranier Koell, with the task for figuring out history’s most sought after mysteries.

OHSHI---

The good Doctor disappears and some historical inaccuracies start cropping up. In the midst of this, your character, Alexander Morris, gets saved from the Battle of Little Big Horn, Custer’s last stand and whooshed away in a magical portal to the future where he gets to meet his new job. He’s now an agent of KronoteK tasked with protecting the time stream. Later on, you find out you were chosen because of some bad paperwork that caused history to leave you as missing-in-action. Imagine some Final Destination-kind of mixup. In your travels, you get tasked with saving two important people that somehow are in a situation where they aren’t supposed to be and to eventually find the Father of Time, Doctor Koell. The game is formed around a sequence of missions, unlocking as you progress. Each mission sets you on a ‘limited’-explorable free-roam maps, leaving you to do your objectives as you wish… theoretically. In practice, you generally are forced down a prewritten path, with little choice in the matter. It’s like Far Cry 2 meets Call of Duty.

No, the game dosent look that good.. ingame.

Now, this game has the loosest interpretation of ‘messing with time’ that i have ever seen. Generally in all the movies and scientific documentaries you usually see, it’s said that if any small thing is changed in the past, it can have grave repercussions in the future… Tons of paradoxes and all that. Now imagine that it translates in the game as simply ‘not killing people that have a blue aura’. Though it’s very safe to kill the rest of thousands of people, or to even shoot the blue-aura guys in the legs for them to be ‘ok’. If you’re like me, cringing at every little bit of detail that is not logical in some way.. you’ll have some problems stomaching this game.

Futuristic auto-loading, recoiless combat shotgun 1. Nazis 0.

The time travel aspect aside, you get to play with era guns in the American Civil War, World War 1 and World War 2. That aside should make this title stand out, because it’s one of few that actually tries had to use some of the eras that are usually left out of video games. Usually you are forced to use the guns of the era to ‘preserve history’ so that gives it a nice touch, if not always applying. The battles themselves are said to be highly researched and as close to historical facts as they can be. I’ll trust them with that, but historical accuracy is not always synonymous to fun.

Futuristic rocket-artillery 1. Nazis 0.

Another lacking part of the game is the performance. It doesn’t look great, even on highest details, but bogs down even the best of machines. Calling this game unoptimized would be an overstatement. I would ignore this if it atleast had something to show for it, but sadly, just saying it use PshyX and has some reflective water doesn’t cut it anymore. The game just looks like 2-3 years after its time. Althou i have to give it to them, some sequences have a lot of NPC’s on screen, upwards to about a hundred, with a lot going on around it, explosions, machine-gun fire and generally a lot of action. I was actually very impressed with some scenes where you literally felt like you were in a war. I have to recognize the fact that Darkest of Days, with all its performance flaws, manages to do some of the best action scenes i’ve seen. Now if only the AI was smarter than a dung-beetle, that would have actually been something.. but sadly, it’s a tad hard to appreciate those scenes when you see NPCs running around like headless chickens, and missing you from 2 feet away.

So why would you want to even touch this game? Let alone buy it..

Useful map is useful.

Because it has some ‘it’s so bad, it’s AWESOME’ moments. My first such experience was during the American Civil War, during a huge fight that was going to happen in a corn-field. So i reloaded my musket and my revolver.. preparing for the worst and before i get there, i meet my partner, Dexter.. which to help me out.. gave me an assault rifle.AN ASSAULT RIFLE. So the next 10 minutes, i spend grinning like an idiot, unleashing hot-futuristic-lead in the crowds of musket-firing soldiers. It was like one of those corny daydreams come true.

Concentration camp. The perfect ski resort.

Also, while i did rag a lot on the time travel aspect, it was used twice with nice effect, thou i would have appreciated to see more of that. After fighting several missions for the ‘good guys’ in the proposed battles, you get to fight as the other side, seeing how you did ‘too well’ of a job on the first, to help turn history the right way. It was a nice touch, like a little white ball rising up from the sea of brown that generally is this game. Also, you get to experience time-recurrence with you helping yourself getting out of a concentration camp. Fun stuff, but don’t try to explain it.

The city Pompeii being destroyed by Vesuvius at night. How romantic.

Spoilers ahead: The little time you spend imprisoned in a concentration camp was also an interestingly-done experience, if short and unfulfilled. It had a very oppressive air to it and you could actually notice the bleakness of it. Another fun fact was the ending sequence, with the battle in Pompeii. It was done pretty well, and had a nice atmosphere to it, with ash raining down, tons of enemies and the ability to use all your futuristic technology. It was a satisfying battle to be honest. Still, the only thing that could have make this game atleast decent, was the ending. Sadly, it ended in a very classic, and very crappy cliffhanger, leaving you to wait for Darkest of Days 2… which i doubt anyone will. End of spoilers.

So overall, is Darkest of Days worth purchasing? No. It had its good moments, but it’s definitely not worth the price-tag, especially for an 8-hour blow-average shooter. Maybe if you catch it for 4-5$ on Steam during a weekend deal but don’t even think of buying it now. Especially with the really good games coming up this autumn.

What.. you’re still here? You still want to buy it? Then click the image below and get Amazon to ship you off a copy.

Darkest of Days @ Amazon.com

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