Gears Of War 2 Review For The Xbox 360

In 2006 a game was released for the Xbox 360 and it became the killer app for the 360. It was also the game that went head to head in the console wars with Sony’s PlayStation 3’s Resistance Fall of Man. Many people thought that this game was going to be the new Halo for Microsoft and it was a great game but wasn’t quite a Halo type game. But it introduced players to the Locust. An alien like race that lived deep in the planet Sera which is the Earth of the Gears universe. It also introduced a mini-game called the active reload, it was basically pressing the right bumper and you have to hit the bumper when the line gets in the white zone of the reload bar. If done correctly you get unlimited ammo for the amount of ammo you have when reloading, and it adds more damage. Also introduced were the chainsaw bayonet which let you cut your enemies in half, and the curb stomp which had you stomping a downed enemies head off. A year later Gears Of War for the PC was released and it had a Brumak boss battle which you encounter only in a cutscene on the 360 version. At the Game Developer’s Conference in Febuary it was announced that Epic Games the developer of Gears Of War was working on Gears Of War 2 and it promised more gore,better story, a massive amount of enemies, and an awesome Geometry Wars meets Smash TV mode called Horde. Its apparent that they delivered on everything.

         Six Months Later……Are We Winning The War?

Gears Of War 2 picks up six months after the lightmass bombs explosion. Since then the locust seemed to stop, but it turns out that the lightmass didn’t wipeout the locust, it made them angrier. All of a sudden the Locust start sinking whole cities into the ground. So you resume playing as Marcus Fenix (or Dom if you are playing Co-Op). When you start the game you see alot more Locust and COG soldiers than you did in both Gears Of War and Gears Of War PC. You are also introduced to some new faces and you even find the female who is driving the Locust (hint hint she’s not human) some of the people you run into are Benjamin Carmine brother of Anthony Carmine from Gears 1, next is Tai a COG soldier who served with Marcus in the Pendulum Wars, Dizzy a COG soldier who drives Betty, who you will find out more in the game, and Skorge a.k.a RAAM 2.0 since he makes RAAM look like a wretch. There are even new baddies for you to face. There are tickers which are explosive Locust and can be used as time bombs, the Cyclops which you chainsaw duel when both chainsaws are clashed, there is a mauler which is a boomer with a shield and an explosive flail,there are both flame boomers and flame grenadiers, they can easily be taken down when you shoot the tanks that make them go boom. There are bloodmounts which are grenadiers riding on a Locust beast and it is the most annoying enemy in the game and in horde. There are theron guards that have torque bows as well.

   “God Damnit I’ve Lost Her Again!”

A big part of this game is Dom’s search for his wife Maria who has been M.I.A. since E Day. Throughout the entire game the only thing that Dom cares about is finding Maria. At the beginning of the game she was at the hospital you are but left shortly after you arrive. Near the end of the search for Maria Dom has a flashback to a day before the war where he is home with Maria and it shows how much he loves her and cares about finding her. But what happens when Maria is found is very dark and disturbing.

   “The Locust Are Breaking People. They were going to process me. Whatever the hell that means.”

When you and Dom are strapped into your capsule Skorge tries to kill you, but Tai and Dizzy hold him off while you and Dom go underground. When you Cole, Dom, and Carmine go on one of the Locust ships and find out that they have been taking prisoners. When you go on the second ship you make a shocking discovery, you find Tai who has been tortured beyond repair. As you attempt to help him something happens that is again dark and disturbing. As for Dizzy he is M.I.A. When you and your team get into a precarious situation your team size goes back to four. It also shows how sick and twisted the Locust are. There is alot more that occurs in the story but I won’t spoil the entire campaign.

    Time To Horde The Horde!!!!!!

One of the things Cliff Bleszinski talked about for this game was Horde mode which he described as “Geometry Wars meets Smash TV”. It is five players taking on wave after wave of Locust seeing how far they can get without dying. There is actually an achievement for beating the 50 Waves of horded cleverly entitled “Horde The Horde.” Just like in Co-Op when you get downed by an enemy your teammates have to revive you before you die of blood loss but in Horde your enemies can do executions while you are down like curb stomps,punching you, taking you as a meatshield, and there are executions with other guns as well. Of course you can do this to the Locust and again you get an achievement for doing all the special executions. But the bloodmounts are just downright annoying because they take so many shots and they can kill you with one hit.

             As Bad As The Mako

There are also parts of this game when you operate and drive a vehicle like the Mako from Mass Effect. The unfortunate thing is that it controls as horribly as the Mako. When you drive the vehicle the handling is awful, the driving is disgusting and shouldn’t have been in the game. During a sequence that happens twice where you must drive across a frozen lake that is getting pounded by the Locust and it is very frustrating  when your vehicle’s back wheel gets in the water and your whole vehicle blows up. Which Im guessing is due to the fact that the water is in fact the acidic blood from the Alien movies.

     Mixing in a Brumak and some Panzer Dragoon

As the title says you indeed drive a Brumak. All I have to say to describe it is Epic. You feel so great when you are shooting rockets and machine gun fire at the Locust. As for the part about Panzer Dragoon, there is a part where you and your team take two reavers and its on rails like Panzer Dragoon and it is a great thing to see. Since Panzer Dragoon: Orta came out for the original Xbox.

        Hits

• Amazing Story
• Great Graphics
• Using The Brumak And Reaver Are Very Fun
• Alot Of New Faces
• The Twists Are Unseen

   Misses  

• What Happened To Dizzy?
• Some Parts Are Dark And Disturbing
• Tank Parts Were Terrible
• BloodMounts Are Very Annoying
• Texture Pop-In

Closing Comments

Gears Of War 2 is an amazing game and beats its predecessor in every category. I didnt like that most of the new characters were either killed off or never heard from. But the guys over at Epic did a fantastic job on this game and from the way things go near the end of the game it is definite that there will be a Gears Of War 3. I recommend this game to people who liked the first game but the multiplayer over Xbox Live is still not everyones forte. So mainly the Call Of Duty freaks will stay away from this game.

I give this game a 9.5 out of 10

Mirror’s Edge Review For The Xbox 360

When people talk about acrobatics in games one game comes to mind or series comes to mind, the Prince Of Persia series. But now there is  new game with Parkour which is a fancier term for acrobatics. The game takes place in a Utopian city that in exchange for freedom people live in a monitored society. Since there are rebellions of sorts they  have runners which are people that travel across the city delivering messages.

Run Faith Run!

The character of Faith is a good female character since there aren’t much lead female characters since Beyond Good and Evil. She is also trying to save her sister which is a sub-plot in the game.

Really Who Doesn’t Want To See Someone Run Up A Wall?

The real draw of this game is the Parkour which means you can run along walls, tightwalk, make big leaps of faith. The thing that makes this different than Prince Of Persia since you have no special abilities you are just this acrobat and if you die you just die. There are even puzzles that can only be solved by jumping in the right order to reach the designated area. Plus you can do moves where you slide down a railing and basically dropkick the guy and punch another guy in the face.

            Takes Awhile To Master The Controls

This is one of those games where it takes a while to master the controls. Because there are some cool combinations you can do.

            Look At These Visuals. Oooh. Ahhh

The visuals for this game are downright beautiful. Most of the textures are red,yellow,white,blue. But the unique thing is that the red and white textures are part of something called runner vision. Which is pretty much Faith’s interpretation of the world. Another thing about this game is that it has no HUD, instead you have a dot in the middle of the screen to prevent simulation sickness. The way to know you are taking damage is your screen turning grey so if you want to keep the screen pretty you need to avoid the enemies. You also have the option of combat which can make things like Splinter Cell where you are sneaking away from enemies or it can be like Prince Of Persia Sands Of Time where you are jumping around the environments fighting enemies except in Mirror’s Edge the combat is good. There’s even gun gameplay, you get an achievement for not using guns.

    Hits

• Amazing Acrobatics
• Beautiful Graphics
• Good Story
• Realistic Unlike Prince Of Persia
• All The Animations Are Like Poetry In Motion

  Misses

• Controls are hard to master
• Trial And Error Can Get Frustrating.

Closing Words

Mirror’s Edge along with Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, and LittleBigPlant are magnificent IP’s this year. I recommend this game to people who like Prince of Persia and anyone who likes running across walls.

I give this game a 9.0 out of 10

Left 4 Dead Review For The Xbox 360

The zombie genre in games has been like the survival horror genre in that a few titles have mastered the genre and copycats pop up and try to steal the title of best zombie game. The games that have been masters of the zombie genre have been games like the Resident Evil series, the House of the Dead series,and the recent Dead Rising. There have also been terrible zombie games one of them being Land of the Dead:Fiddler’s Green. Now with movies like Dawn of the Dead and 28 Weeks Later zombies have been remade as strong very agile killing machines of sorts. Left 4 Dead is now out for the Xbox 360 and the PC and it is literally CounterStrike meets 28 Days Later and is an amazing game by Valve. Its a first person shooter where you and three friends attempt to escape the zombie infested area.

Movies Galore!!!!

The story structure of Left 4 Dead is split into four campaign’s/scenarios. You go from traveling to a hospital, to a dock, to an airport, and into the woods. And all of the campaigns are set up like movies with the beginning loading screen of a campaign is a movie poster and has your gamertag portraying the character for example IrishApocalypse as Louis. It even has an “in memory of” if any players have died at the final fight of the level.

              ZOMBIES!!!!!!!!!!!!

The zombies in Left 4 Dead aren’t like the zombies in Resident Evil that just walk like Frankenstein they are based off of the zombies in 28 Days Later and Dawn Of The Dead which means they run exactly like the zombies from those movies. And there are six types of zombies, the Tank which is retardedlypowerful and can knock you out in a couple of hits.Theres the Boomer which is a very obese zombie that vomits at you and once you get vomited on every zombie in the area will bum rush you.Next is the Hunter which is a hooded zombie that leaps through the air and pounces you, once down he tries to rip you apart.Theres the Smoker which as the title says is a tall and skinny zombie that shoots out his tongue and either pulls the player into a zombie infested area that the smoker is in as well or if something is in the way you get constricted.But certain times you will get pounced by a hunter while you are being constricted so it is like getting beaten up in a corner  since you can’t escape. Probably the most dangerous zombie of all is the Witch who is sitting indian style rocking back and forth and crying. To avoid dying from her claws you must avoid her and NEVER have your flashlight directed at her. If you startle her she incapacitates you with one hit. However there are two achievements involving the witch one for killing her with one shot and the other hurling a molotov cocktail at the witch thus burning the witch. Last but not least the plain old regular zombies. Their special ability is literally kicking you while you are down. When you are incapacitated they girl kick you and stomp at you.

         It Has Some Real World Effects But Is Sort Of Over The Top

There are real world effects like propane tanks making big explosions, kerosene containers making lines of fire. that the zombies run head on into, they break down doors, and at certain points they break down the walls in areas like the hospital and the church.But what is kind of disappointing is that body parts can be shot off with weapons like the Shotgun,Assault Rifle,and Sniper Rifle. It makes  the game seem unreal and over the top. But it is a really great zombie game though.

           There’s No E In Team……Oh Wait It Is?

A big part of this game is teamwork. This is not the type of game where you can go Rambo style and be a one man army. If you run ahead of your team you will get swarmed and die because you need someone watching your back at all times. All the special zombies can be taken down as a team, for example the only way to be saved from the Smoker while you are constricted is to have a teammate save you. The same goes for the Boomer, Tank, and Hunter, well not really for the Boomer because she explodes like a bomb.

             Not The Best Graphics But Not The Worst

Left 4 Dead is powered by Source which is Valve’s amazing physics engine. The graphics are not as great as Gears Of War 2’s but it is better than some of the other games out this year. Although Source is about four years old the facial structure is amazing. So even though it may not have the best graphics it still has great and fun gameplay which coincidentally is Nintendo’s whole incentive with the Wii.

     Hits

• Amazing Co-Op Campaign
• Can be scary when played in the Dark
• Good Graphics
• Fun Can Be Had With This Game
• A Great Re-Imagining Of The Zombie Genre

          Misses

• Body Parts being removable is a little over the top
• The zombies kicking you while your down is annoying
• You Get Ganged Up By The Alpha Zombies

I Give This Game a 9.0 out of 10

             Closing Words

Left 4 Dead is an amazing game and it shows that CounterStrike mixed with zombies is EPIC! Not only that the feeling that you really need to work together to survive shows is a great way to do a co-op game. I recommend this game to fans of First Person Shooters, CounterStrike, and Zombies.

Dead Space Review for Xbox 360

The survival horror genre of video games has been around for over ten years and the biggest games of that genre have been games like the Silent Hill Series, the Resident Evil Series, and Alone In The Dark keeps trying over and over again to regain their spot on top. Publisher Electronic Arts has been known for never publishing mature rated games, now that has changed. Dead Space is out now for the Xbox 360 and the Playstation3. It is a survival horror game in which you are on a mining planet cracker ship that has lost contact with Earth. You play as Isaac Clarke an engineer who along with a few military personneltravel to the USG Ishimura to find out what has happened on the ship. Into the first five to ten minutes the s hits the f and it does a clever move to make that moment scary, you are chased by an unknown life form a violent life form and you don’t have a gun so you really have to run for your life.

                    The Horror!! The Horror!!!

Dead Space is easily both one of the goriest and scariest games I have played since Silent Hill 2.The amount of twisted and sick things in this game is amazing. In most games the game over screen is usually pretty bland, in Dead Space the form of a game over screen is your character getting dismembered by the necromorphs. Plus you can shoot off every body part including the head,arms, and legs.Which can be very very bloody.

                                             Strategic Dismemberment

The whole selling point of this game is Strategic Dismemberment which is basically dismembering the body parts of the necromorphs and its not like in Resident Evil where you shoot the head, in Dead Space if you shoot the head off the enemy keeps coming, if you shoot off the legs, they crawl,if you shoot off the arms off they bite you, if you do all of the following they die. It differs from other enemies for example one of the enemies which is a scorpion-esque monster you have to shoot off the tail  for them to buy the farm. The bad thing about this concept is that you only have to remove the main limbs.

             Zero G Environments

Throughout the game you will come across Zero G (Zero Gravity) environments and it is not like certain games where it is like a jetpack it is done where you leap from one area to another. It is also like Portal because you are trying to reorient yourself. There are even certain points where you go outside the ship and  instead of having a super suit like Master Chief, Isaac has a limited air supply so you cant sit out in space and zone out to some alien techno music. To make things challenging enough certain points in the game while you are in space many enemies attack you and it can be frustrating when you die of suffocation because you couldnt get the enemies off your back. The sound however in space isn’t very noisy in fact its just vibrations bouncing off the objects in space. There are even puzzles in the Zero G envirorments like repairing the comm array.

                   Guns,Guns,and uh a Telekinetic Chainsaw?

The weapons in Dead Space are not even close to weapons in other games like the BFG,or the Gravity Hammer,and the Lancer. Instead to make things more grounded in the world you have tools that the miners would use like stasis which slows down time in the area its in its more of a crowd control weapon.There is a pistol type weapon that can change the way it shoots like vertically or horizontally,there is an assault rifle type weapon that doubles as rapid fire gun that doubles as a rotating rapid fire weapon.There’s a flame thrower which is not that surprising to see in a survival horror game,theres a crossbow like weapon that can split someone in half. And my personal favorite the chainsaw that can shoot projectile saws and has a telekinetic function where you shoot it but you can walk towards enemies with the saw reved  and equals many dismembered body parts. All these weapons have their usefulness against certain enemies for example one of the enemies that looks like its pregnant and when you shoot it with a normal gun its stomach explodes and bat like creatures emerge and try to eat you. You use stasis on the enemy and burn it with the flame thrower to kill the pregnant creature and the bats.There is also a kinesis gun which is alot like a gravity gun from Half Life 2. You aim at an object and press a button and it is almost exactly like the grav gun.

Isaac Clarke Man Of Very Few Words

Isaac Clarke is an everyman who is not a super soldier who likes killing people he is a normal person who becomes a Gordon Freeman type character. He also has a loved one who is on the Ishimura so there is one of many subplots in the game.

Resident Evil meets Doom 3

Dead Space is really a cross over between Resident Evil and Doom 3 because you are in space fighting aliens and trying to find out what has gone wrong. Also there are audio logs like the ones in BioShock and Doom 3 and its people saying what has gone wrong on the ship.

                 Keeping The Game Fresh

One of the charms of Dead Space is that whenever it seems like the game is starting to get repetitive a new monster is introduced and it really injects flavor into the game right as its starting to lose its flavor.

               The Story

I dont want to spoil the game but the story is amazing it really trumps the stories of other games this holiday season (CoD 5, Alone In The Dark,Silent Hill Homecoming) right as you think you have an idea about what happened something else happens and sometimes it can come as shocking.

       Hits

• Great Atmosphere
• Truly a scary game
• Good Story
• Great Weapons
• DLC
• Disturbing Enemies
• An amazing take on the Survival Horror genre

             Misses

• Strategic Dismemberment isnt that deep
• Frustrating Enemies

Overall Dead Space is one of the best games I have ever played and I really hope EA makes this a franchise.

I give this game  a 9.0 out of 10

By the way my pal Joel Gourdin is in the dead space comic videos as Captain Matthius.

Call Of Duty: World At War Xbox 360 Review

   In November of 2007 Infinity Ward the development house behind Call  Of Duty 1 and 2 released Call Of Duty 4:Modern Warfare and it was one of the best games of the year. The hallmarks of that game was the story mode, the highly addictive multiplayer mode, and the create-a-class. It is now 2008 and the next installment in the Call of Duty franchise is here. Call Of Duty:World At War is a first person shooter based in good ol’ WWII. Unlike most of the WWII games out there this game is in the pacific theatre. You switch back and forth between a US Marine Raider and a Russian soldier. As the Russians you battle the Germans,and as the Marines you are waging war with the Japanese which is a fresh aspect of the game.

                  The Campaign

The story of World At War is not as great as Modern Warfare’s and in my honest opinion should have been Call Of Duty 3 which was Treyarch’s first outing on the next-gen systems. Throughout the game you go to places like Pelieu, Okinawa, storming the Reichstag and other iconic places. The things you do in this game are very fun, for example you use beacon designated artillery which rains down death from above, you occupy tanks which shoots flames as a secondary option, and the funnest weapon in the entire game, the flamethrower which as the title indicates burns anything that is caught in its path. There are bad things with this game as with every other game except the best of all time (Ocarina Of Time). In Call Of Duty 4 if there was a building or door that was open you could enter it. In World At War if the door is open you can sometimes enter or you will just be walking into invisible walls. Also at certain points in the game as your sprinting you slow down for some unknown reason. The A.I. is not as good as CoD4 but at least your allies still take grenades thrown at you and throw them back at the enemies. Also the problem from CoD4 in which the enemies threw grenades like they were quarterbacks is still present, on veteran it is downright ridiculous that five grenades are at your knees. A notable part of this game is the actor who provides the voice acting for Sgt.Roebuck none other than 24’s Kiefer Sutherland. Which makes the character of Roebuck believable rather than Lt.Vasquez from CoD4 who sounded like Hulk Hogan. The bad thing about being in World War II is that there was no way to create a story like in Modern Warfare so there are no main villains other than the Axis. A part of this game that people will love is the gore. The gore in this game is disgusting in a cool way. When you shoot someone in the ribcage their ribs are showing covered in blood and when you shoot someone in the leg area either their leg(s) comes off or from the knees down will be gone. As Tommy Tallarico said in the review of Call Of Duty 1 “without gore I am taken out of the experience” and in World At War you are in the experience.

                            Cooperative Campaign

Just when you began to get sick of playing games by yourself you can play Call Of Duty: World At War cooperatively with up to four players. You can do campaign co-op which the title says by itself or competitive co-op in which you and your pals compete to get the most points. And if you thought that was enough there are death cards that are alot like the skulls from Halo 2 and 3 and they either make the game fun for example when you get a headshot on a guy he explodes. Or it could make things harder for example you only have a knife and grenades that dont actually detonate and are called rocks and that is a pain in the side. Depending on how your friends are its a fun mode.

                       Nacht Der Untoten

A reward you get when you complete the game is a mode that is like Smash TV and instead of soldiers you face ZOMBIES! You start off in a boarded up building which is actually Airfield, a multiplayer map. For the first 5-10 levels the zombies are mentally challenged being that they can take about a minute to rip off the boards and they climb in so if you want to buy a gun, knife your friends, or go to the bathroom you can do that and come back to the window and kill all the zombies. But once you get to level eleven things start to pick up and you all need to be on your A game. You do have choices in where to reside though since you can use the points you accumulate from killing zombies to open doors and move debris. In one of the rooms there is a mystery box and you spend 950 points to get a random gun and some of the best guns are MG’s,Flame Throwers, and the best one of all is the Ray Gun. Which looks and shoots like Marvin the Martians gun from Looney Toons.

              Multiplayer

The multiplayer aspect of the game remains the same from Call of Duty 4 and since there weren’t helicopters sixty years ago when you string together several kills you get Dogs. Yes, Dogs.They come out of nowhere and bite any opposition they see. The other game modes and the create a class make their returns. And when you reach the prestige levels throughout the game you unlock more create a class slots.

                 

          Closing Words

After the disappointment that was Call Of Duty 3 the guys at Treyarch have redeemed themselves and this game in the Call Of Duty series should be Call Of Duty, Call Of Duty 2,Call Of Duty World At War,and Call Of Duty 4. So if you are a fan of shooters, World War II, Multiplayer, and Fire you should pick up Call Of Duty World At War. And next year be sure to pick up Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

 

I give this game an 8.5 out of 10