Game Review: Gears of War: Judgement

The Review!

 

Welcome to the rambling thoughts of a mad man. Being the first review I have ever written (and successfully finished!), this will more than likely turn out to be a big bucket of thoughts rather than the well constructed reviews you are probably used to reading! Here goes anyway!

Gears of War: Judgement is a prequel to the original trilogy, taking place 15 years before the events of Gears of War 1. The Cogs have just won the war the Pendulum War (a worldwide civil war on their home planet of Sera), and the Locust are completely unheard of. Unlike the previous games which feature Marcus Fenix as the always cross, thick necked protagonist, this latest game follows Damon Baird. Veterans of the previous games will know Baird already as the "sarcastic one from the first 3 games". I have to admit I was apprehensive about this before playing the game, but the absence of Marcus has no impact on the game at all, and if anything, Baird's maverick style of leadership is a lot more fun to watch play out. I'm avoiding spoilers here, but you'll certainly learn why Baird no longer has his own squad by the time we first meet him in Gears 1. Augustus Cole also makes a return, along with two new characters.

So is this game radically different to the rest of the franchise? No, it really isn't, so if you don't like shooting the hell out of the Locust and occasionally hacking them in half with a chainsaw blade then you probably won't like this game either. If you did enjoy the original games however and you want more, this game is right up your street! Like the rest of the franchise, the game is split out into a campaign and multiplayer. The line between the two is becoming slowly more blurry as I will go on to explain.....

The campaign is set up a little differently than past incarnations of Gears of War games. We are still told a story and we still get pushed along from firefight to firefight, but this time the story is split out into bite size chunks. Each one of these chunks includes two or three of encounters with the Locust and at the end you get a score in the form of one to three stars. Yes this is very Angry Birds I know, but it does give the campaign far more replay value as you try new ways to get the maximum number of stars. Each level also has its own "Declassified Mission" which when accepted, alters the level to make it more challenging, but conversely allows you to get three stars more easily. These missions vary from making the enemies more challenging, applying time limits, restricting weapons that can be used etc and do make the game more interesting to play. On harder difficulties you do find yourself wondering how wise taking on a declassified mission will be!

One of the better improvements to the game is the new additions that have been added to the Cog (and Locust) arsenal that are well worth mentioning. The Markza (a personal favourite of mine) is a semi-automatic rifle that fills the middle ground between the painfully slow reloading of the Longshot and the short range of pretty much every other weapon in the game. There is also a new grenade launcher style weapon call the Booshka which takes some practice to use but is also a lot of fun. Along with a couple of other additions, it feels like then variety of weapons is much better suited to this sort of game and allows for more variation in how you play, especially in co-op mode.

Speaking of co-op play, the campaign on multiplayer also allows for a little friendly competition in the form of end of level scoreboards. So everyone can try to get the most kills, head shots and such. This makes the whole game far more fun with a few mates online if you don't fancy the playing verses other humans in multiplayer land!

The multiplayer side of the game includes the expected free-for-all and team death match modes of course (for all you traditionalists out there!), a survival mode, and an all new Overrun Mode. Now I remember playing Hoard mode and Beast mode on Gears of war 3 and thinking "Wouldn't this be great if your we're able to combine the two". Well Overrun mode is exactly that. Rather than playing as the Cogs against waves of computer controlled Locust (à la Hoard mode) or playing as lots of Locust creatures against computer controlled Cogs (in my beloved Beast mode!) you get to play against real people controlling each side. So does it work? Just about. It's a fun mode to play, but feels like a cut down version of its predecessors and is very restrictive (less beasts on the hoard side than you would expect and very specific load outs on the Cogs side). It's clear the developers were trying to ensure the game remained balanced, but somehow it just feels like you are being forced to play in certain ways. You also have to take turns on what side you are on, which can be annoying if you would rather stick with good guys or bad guys. Now that all sounded very negative so I should clarify that it is a fun mode to play, just not as good as Hoard or Beast. Which brings me on to my final gripe with the game - Hoard and Beast modes are not even present! This feels like a massive failure to me and hopefully something that will be resolved in future DLC.

The Verdict

Gears of War: Judgement falls short of what it could have been, I don't think anyone will deny that, but it is still an excellent quality game that deserves the time of anyone who has a liking for the original games and wants to gun down a few more Locust during the end days of the Xbox 360. 

Unlike a lot of games that get pumped out by developers these days, the user interface is flawless, in game glitches are rare, and I have never had to wait to get into a multiplayer game. These things might all sound like the basics, but far too many games fail in one of these areas and make the experience far more jarring than it should be. There is a lot to be said about getting the basics right.

If you want a game that is fun, has loads of replay value and achieved what it set out to do, this is it. It's not a game that will change the world, but it is worth your time and you could do a lot worse! *cough* Dead Space 3 *cough*

- Jason

SCORE 8/10

Game Review: Dead Space Two (the campaign)

Ok, I didn’t play the first Dead Space but I was told that there was a video in this one that would explain everything I needed to know about the previous story and that I could just jump straight in. There was a video, and it explained as much about the first game as a footballer could about politics. But I played it anyway and to be honest I didn’t really grasp what was going on with the story, and for a change I didn’t care because it was frickin’ awesome!

You play as engineer Isaac Clark in the sci-fi horror sequel Dead Space 2. You find yourself waking from a coma in a city crawling with ‘Necromophs’ which appear to be human corpses. They seem more like zombies in principle, but more like aliens in appearance. Anyway, from the word go you have to battle through swarms of them and straight away you get the feeling that you're fighting for your life. And this feeling never goes away throughout the entire game. 

You start in a hospital and quite quickly move on to find a large range of weapons and the iconic engineering suit. From what I grasped in the story there is something called 'the marker' that is causing all these evil things and Isaac is trying to locate it. It’s a little basic and not very interesting, but for a change the core storyline isn’t really the important thing going on here. Instead the developers have made this game extremely more personal and your character is much more focused on fighting an internal battle that is going on inside his mind. 

Hallucinations happen at really unexpected times which will cause you to jump and shoot at stuff that isn’t really there. The great part about this is that you know nothing is there but you won’t be able to help but shoot at nothing anyway. This game will keep you on your toes. You’ll be checking corners and jumping at every little noise, like a bottle falling on the floor.

Game play is great too. Isaac’s movements are really smooth and the animations are great. When you die during the game, and trust me you will die, you won’t even be disappointed because the death animations are that graphic and gruesome that your jaw will drop with shock. You can blow limbs of your enemies and then use those limbs to kill more enemies. There are even crying babies that you have to kill before they kill you. You can interact loads with the environment as well. Isaac has some sort of gravity tool that can pick up and throw items around.  Even though this game is now two years old, the graphics are still fantastic and will easily give new games a run for their money.

Dead Space 2 does seem to take you on an A to B type of rout where you have no choice about the path that Isaac will take. However, this actually works out really well. It works well because you know you have to walk down that long hallway, you know there is no other rout, and you know that at over the next thirty minutes of game play you are going to jump, shout and scream at least ten times... and two thirds of those will be at stuff like brooms falling over and lights going out. The linear rout of Dead Space 2 actually helps to serve the game and make the horror that little bit scarier.

The sound is also top notch in this game. If you have surround sound then you are in for a treat. Dead Space 2 uses this like no other game I have ever played. If you hear something to your right and you turn to look at what it is, then the sound moves perfectly in time with you. That's standard you may think, but that’s not all. The game has a way of using sound so faint that you can hardly hear it. You find yourself thinking that you should look behind you because of it, and sometimes you may end up having a little bit of a scream as something pounces at you.

There is a real huge incentive to replay the game as well. Every time you complete it you’ll unlock a new engineering suit and also be given the option to take all your gear with you from your last game. During the game you get to upgrade all your gear and this allows you to keep using and upgrading other items.  

Now if you like a challenge and feel like you want to do this game on the hardest difficulty then I strongly recommend you play it through once are twice on an easier difficulty and get that gear fully upgraded. Because not only are your enemies at their strongest, and not only is there limited health and ammo supplies, but you also only get three saves throughout the entire game. This is a game that took me nine hours on the easiest difficulty. So yeah, good luck with that if you are that crazy.

THE VERDICT

Dead Space 2 has a really boring core storyline. Luckily for this storyline, the main character has the best internal and external battles going on that it makes you forget all about what you’re meant to be doing and instead makes you almost completely focus on just surviving both mentally and physically.  The graphics are brilliantly shocking, the sound is even better and the game play allows you to choose and modify your equipment. In short this game is a terrifying thriller. It’s what Resident Evil was back in the day.

LHSRAting for Dead Space 2 – 9/10 (Xbox 360)

-Ayden

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