Are you sure we got all the key points in the box art? Did you remember to add explosions? Very good!

The camera tracks a lone Agent, clad from head to toe in cybernetic armour, as he leaps across the deserted rooftops of Pacific City.  He jumps effortlessly, only seeming to graze the concrete surfaces before he hurls himself forward again.  Suddenly, wings snap open between his arms and he glides down to street level, bathed orange by the light of fire and flickering street lights.  Below, shambling mutants cover the ground like ants, moaning and baying in their lust for blood.

Cut camera to the ground.  The Agent slams into the pavement fist first, scattering mutants left and right with the shockwave.  Those unfortunate enough to break his fall explode into a green mist, the impact leaving no remnants.  The Agent stands, unhooks the machine gun on his back, and begins to fire indiscriminately into the swarm.  The mutants fall before the hail of bullets like wheat before the harvester, green blood spraying everywhere and staining the asphalt.

The scene continues for a few minutes, the only pause in the carnage comes when the Agent needs to reload.  When the last mutant falls to the ground, and the final tinkle of shell casings has echoed away, we hear the Voice of the Agency.

“Good work, Agent,” he says in a confident, authoritative tone, “now how about we see how many rings you can drive a car through?”

I’ve been struggling to write a review of Crackdown 2, because I’ve found it a little difficult to work out just what the game is trying to present to the player.  On the one hand it’s a very simplistic, fairly enjoyable sandbox game with a focus on exploration and experimentation.  On the other hand, it appears to want to imply a very deep, immersive experience that just isn’t there … and charge you accordingly.

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New and improved, Colin McRae: Dirt 2

I’ve been thinking for the past few months that I don’t have enough decent racing games and I could really do with something to tide me over until F1 2010 finally rears its head.  I was tossing up a few options when Matt solved all my problems by shipping me half a dozen different racing titles on Steam.  Colin McRae: Dirt 2 is the first cab off the rank, so to speak.

One of the first things you’ll notice is that the game probably could’ve been called Ken Block: Dirt.  Colin McRae died tragically in 2007 so he obviously played no active role in the game.  Respect is paid to him at various points but it’s the current stars of the X-Games circuit that you’ll be racing and interacting with: Tanner Foust, Dave Mirra, Travis Pastrana, a bunch of others and of course everybody’s favourite sideways shoe salesman, Ken Block himself.  That’s right, there’s hardly a Finn in sight and it’s almost like the WRC doesn’t exist which makes you wonder, really, just how serious a rallying game this is?  We’ll get back to that question later.

I’ll get the main gripe out of the way first.  I had a lot of trouble with bugs in this game.  For the first couple of days it’d take half a dozen or more attempts at starting and then restarting the game to convince it to run without crashing in the first race.  This issue eventually sorted itself but ever since there’s been regular visual glitches and random crashes.  I consulted the forums, couldn’t find any reasonable fixes but did note with interest that plenty of other people were complaining about all sorts of different bugs of their own.

The whole thing is a massive pain in the arse, to the point where I almost chucked the game in.  I’m glad I didn’t though because once you’re finally behind the wheel of a car this game is a hell of a lot of fun.

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Marine, gun and gimmick? Check.

I’ve always had a little bit of a soft spot for Raven Software ever since they released Heretic, the fantasy inspired Doom clone.  The game established Raven as a company who weren’t afraid to make something original in an unoriginal format.  The Star Trek nerd in me enjoyed Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force too, another of Raven’s creations, which turned out to offer not only a good fan service but also a highly decent Quake-inspired shooter.

So I was fairly optimistic when I picked up a copy of Singularity, Raven Software’s latest first-person shooter, as it seemed to tick all the boxes for an interesting game.  First-person shooter, with temporal puzzles and effects, set in a mutant infested Russian military research facility.  Unfortunately, upon playing the game, I was left with the lasting impression that ticking boxes was all Singularity did in the hopes of creating an imaginative new title.

The story surrounds Captain Nathaniel Renko, your typical US space marine Black Ops soldier, who’s been sent on a recon mission to the supposedly abandoned Russian island of Katorga-12 after reports of a massive electro-magnetic pulse.  After crash landing, Renko finds himself thrown back through time to 1955, where the facility is self-destructing.  While in the past he saves a scientist from a burning building, and after returning to the present day finds that time has altered radically.  The scientist, Nikolai Demichev, has used the power of Katorga-12′s experimental Element 99 (or E99 for short) to overthrow the government and has proceeded to conquer the globe.

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Previously titled (Gears of) War for Cybertron

It’s a little difficult to describe the feeling you get when you first start playing Transformers: War For Cybertron, but it must be something akin to finding a $100 bill in an old pair of dirty underwear.  It wouldn’t have occurred to you to ever look there for a $100 bill, but when you accidentally find it you’re so happy that you don’t mind the company it’s been keeping.  The entire Transformers property has fallen on hard times recently, with some questionable movies and some truly hideous games based on those movies.  That’s why it’s such a delight to pick up War For Cybertron, a game I’d only been vaguely aware of up until the week of it’s release, and find out that here is a Transformers game that doesn’t suck.

Set before the original animated series, the game chronicles the ongoing battle between the Autobots and Decepticons over their home planet of Cybertron.  Although players can choose to play either the Decepticon or Autobot campaign first, the narrative begins with the Decepticon’s rise to power and concludes with the Autobot’s scramble to defend themselves.  You can play the game solo or online co-op, with each level offering a selection of three Transformers to control.  Transformers are split into different classes, each of which have their own vehicle form and selection of special skills.

The game plays out as an over-the-shoulder shooter, and to say that this game shamelessly plunders elements from Gears of War would be putting it nicely.  Many elements of the control scheme are identical, as is the feel of both movement and shooting, and both games share a penchant for oversized bosses.  During the section of the Autobot campaign where you take on a corrupted cyber-slug, all I could think was: “Hey! Sure is Robo-Corpser in here”.  But the brilliant thing about War For Cybertron is that you won’t care.  The Unreal Engine works so perfectly in the Cybertron setting that it’s almost impossible to feel any ill will towards recycled mechanics.  Personally I felt like they could have borrowed a little more, in fact, like at least a basic cover system.

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The game to pilot the pilot system

Before I spilled booze all over the perma-link management system we mysteriously encountered technical difficulties last week, Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent was to round out the tureen (possibly even bain-marie by now) of puzzle games I had to review.  Although it might not be the most replayable of the bunch, or even the best by score, I think it’s my favourite of the three.

Developed by Telltale Games and designed by artist/animator Graham Annable, Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent is the first game to be released under Telltale’s new TV-style pilot approach.  Obviously wanting to safely diversify their catalogue, Telltale have begun producing single episode “pilot” games to gauge their reception before commiting to a complete season of episodic games … presumably to avoid making themselves another Bone.

But it’s hard to see how Puzzle Agent could avoid being green lighted after seeing what’s on offer.

Coming into this game I was only familiar with Annable’s art via the comic Dank/Dunk that he creates for the Telltale Games website, but once I’d sat down and browsed the Grickle Channel for a good half hour, seeing his angular, charcoal edged work come to life in a video game is actually quite impressive.  The game is presented almost completely in 2D, with three dimensional objects textured to look like cartoons at their edges.  The animation is also somewhat minimal, which gives the game a hand-made feel that works quite well.

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Ready for some four dimensional puzzle gaming?

Second on my platter (perhaps even tureen?) of puzzle games to review this week is Puzzle Dimension, the debut game from Swedish team Doctor Entertainment.

The object of the game is simple.  Scattered around each level are a number of sunflowers.  You roll an ornate orb over any flat surface to reach these flowers, and once collecting them all make your way through the exit portal.  It sounds simple, but the reality is far different.  There are a host of different obstacles the game will place in front of you, and gravity is multi-directional.  This means that is just a few movements you can find yourself rolling underneath the surface of any puzzle, much like the old figure eight optical illusion … or David Bowie in Labyrinth.

In fact maybe the Labyrinth analogy is more apt, considering you treat each level like it’s own maze.  Each level requires a great deal of forward planning, logic and experimentation to complete.  Some levels have multiple ways in which to complete them, some levels have a very specific path you’ll have to discover for yourself.  The difficulty ranges from the easy to the fiendish, and could easily inspire the occasional rage-quit.

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Ah, the ubiquitous Final Fantasy artwork

Games like Final Fantasy XIII come from a pedigree not unlike a royal family. It has elements of all the JRPGs that have come before it, including the bastard children that are never really mentioned and improvements made through breeding out negative elements. You get duds and revolutionaries, bigger wars, bigger guns and prettier women in less clothing. But after a little while, you realise that you’re looking at breeding cousins and that the faces are starting to all look a bit samey. You start to notice grandiose loopholes in the history and it all gets a bit convoluted in parts, trying to figure out which country in what timeline affected which scantily clad lovestory.

FFXIII is trying to be an elegant game, with high concepts. It’s nonlinear story is rife with terrorists and freedom, enemies and victims, death and fear. We start off on a train of rounded up ‘tainted’ people (called l’Cie), who are undergoing a Purge. But that’s really all the information we get before being thrown into a fight, which crashes the train and sets in motion the events which lead to the main characters being infected with the brand of the mysterious and supposedly evil fal’Cie. They must now complete their focus or mission, or risk becoming Cie’th – twisted agonised creatures who were once human l’Cie. If they complete their focus, they have an eternity of being a giant naked crystal to look forward to.

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Simple art matches the simple gameplay

It seems I’ve got a full plate (maybe even a platter?) of puzzle games to work my way through this week, starting off the the pleasantly simplistic Chains.

Created by Ivan and Philip Traykov, Chains is something of a tech-demonstration for the game creation platform AGen, which they’re also currently developing.  The AGen engine’s aim is to make the integration of game code and hardware simpler for developers in a 2D environment.  As an advertisement it’s surprisingly convincing too, as the vector graphics do a good job of translating the sophisticated physics engine running behind the scenes.

But don’t let this talk of tech-demo and advertisement put you off, because these are only things that are going to be interesting to aspiring developers.  What should grab everyone else’s attention is the fact that Chains is a highly enjoyable puzzler game with a friendly price tag.

The game is a traditional colour matcher, that makes use of a series of different challenges to keep the gameplay fresh.  Each level spawns coloured bubbles that have to be chained (see what they did there?) together to clear and gain score.  There are twenty scenarios all up, from simple score chases to rather complex balancing acts and speed clearings.  Where one level might ask you to complete chains of increasing length, another level might set you the goal of creating an exact score using bubbles of varying size.

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Violet Summer ... or her ass at least

So I’ve been meaning to play Velvet Assassin for a while now, and before you all decide to heave rotten fruit at me let me explain myself.  Firstly because I’m a big fan of the stealth genre, and secondly (and probably more importantly) because the moment someone tells me a certain game is absolutely crap, I’m always curious to find out why.

And there was no shortage of people to tell me that this game was absolute crap.

But just like a car crash on a highway, I was compelled to slow down to take a look … once the price had dropped to around $20.

The game is “based on” the real life experiences of Violet Szabo (renamed Violet Summer in the game), an undercover agent for the British Special Operations Executive during World War 2. I haven’t personally read Young, Brave and Beautiful, the biography with which Velvet Assassin has taken it’s liberties, so I’m a little unsure as to the validity of claims that Violet once killed an entire squadron of sadistic Nazis wearing only a silk nightie.  I’m guessing that’s what Replay Studios are choosing to call “artistic licence”.

The plot is standard stealth game fare, so I can’t really rip into it for being too ridiculous. Violet’s missions usually center around a singular target that needs to be killed, which for some reasons necessitates the violent murder of every other soldier in a five kilometer radius. The missions are told in flashback, recalled by Violet as she lays in a coma on a French hospital bed. Every now and then you’ll regain lucidity long enough to overhear discussions about your eventual fate, but the majority of the game is spent inside the memories.

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And possibly insulted his momma!

Another month, and we’re once again back on the trail of the Devil’s Playbox in Sam and Max: They Stole Max’s Brain! And with a title like that, the plot should be somewhat self-explanatory.  Sam, having left to go to the bathroom at the end of the last episode, returns to find Max’s head swinging open and his brain gone.  Consumed by rage and noir internal monologue, it’s up to Sam to discover exactly what happened to his friend and dole out some justice in the best tradition of the Freelance Police.

Telltale have obviously been having a lot of fun with genre this season, and They Stole Max’s Brain is no exception.  The first section of the game is spent with a hard boiled cop-on-the-edge version of Sam, helping him shake down witnesses and uncover the identity of the parietal purloiner.  To this end the game plays around with the typical conversation structure, introducing a new “interrupt” system where Sam can threaten, accuse or press his suspects for important information.  While it sounds kinda cool, there isn’t actually much change to the game’s usual mechanics, as witnesses will tell you the important parts of their testimony in uninterruptable segments, then leave you to choose which interruption to use while they babble for a while afterward.

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