Game Review: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (henceforth called “Revengeance”, because, well, I can’t be typing that

LONG ASS TITLE over and over!) begins in Africa. You are Raiden, the bodyguard of the prime minister of an undisclosed African state. The first words of the game are “Three years. We’ve come so far in three years”. These are the words of the aforementioned leader and the first thought that pops into my head is “Things are probably going to go downhill for this guy fast...”

Raiden is employed by Maverick, a private military company in the not too distant future, to guard the prime minister. So he’s rolling along in his convoy, with a couple of tanks and a few dozen guards and, lo and behold, things start to go downhill fast.

The convoy is interrupted by some guy who looks like a futuristic Mitsurugi and he proceeds to defy the laws of physics and chop people, and tanks, into little bits. Well, turns out Raiden’s a bit of a badass too and isn’t very happy about this. That’s when things get awesome.

Revengeance is a game which is honest form the start. Raiden is a cyborg, he has a sword that sparks with electricity, he’s stronger than most other cyborgs and can deflect bullets. Also, he can cut really big things in half... If this is something you’re going to have a problem with then it’s probably best you don’t play the game. If you don’t like the opening scene you might not get on with the rest of the game and I can understand that, it’s not for everyone but MAN! Absurdity has never been so good!

So the president is kidnapped and after this introduction you’re thrown right into the game. You quickly learn that normal cyborgs are no match for Raiden, defeating handfuls at a time. With basic controls the game is pretty easy to learn, it’s difficult at first to get the grasp of the timing required for parrying but once you’ve had a little practice it becomes second nature. The game starts at an intense pace, and continues like this pretty much all the way through. It’s not that it’s difficult to play it’s just that it’s all action, in a good way. 

Podcast number 5 was when we first discussed Revengeance. When Paul (a.k.a. Bez) spoke about it I asked him “Is really hack and slashy?” He waffled on a bit, but in general the answer was “Not really”. Having played the game I can say this: Bullshit Paul! It is really hack and slashy! When your character is overpowered, carries a cool sword, has a combo count, kill count and ‘how many pieces did you cut this guy up into’ count it’s pretty obvious in my books that this is primarily a hack and slash game.

That being said, there are breaks in the intensity at times, with the game throwing in elements of stealth throughout. They’re the sort of stealth sections which are pretty difficult to get through undetected (or maybe I’m just a bit crap at being stealthy) but you can still hack your way out if your discovered (like I was, many, many times). Overall there was enough stealth based sections to allow a bit of time off from tapping the buttons and it was also pretty varied and enjoyable using your enhanced vision (Think of Batman’s vision in Arkham City) and cardboard box to get past enemies.

The combat isn’t just about tapping the buttons randomly as quickly as possible either. With more challenging enemies it becomes necessary to master parrying and a perfectly timed parry can set you up to enter blade mode, a bullet time sequence without the bullets. Time is slowed and a precision element of the game comes into play. Every enemy has a target square where, if hit, can chop the enemy in half allowing perfect access to their spine... As enjoyable as this is for the pure hilarity of ripping someone’s spine from their mid-air body it also serves the purpose of regenerating your health and energy bar, which you’ll need if you want to keep ripping spines out of cyborgs! This is also the part of the game where you get to see how many bits you can chop things into. I didn’t get tired of this, not one bit.

Downsides of the game are that on occasion you’ll find yourself against a wall and the camera won’t want to behave itself, refusing to point away from the wall. This makes it difficult to pull off that perfect parry at times but it really wasn’t enough to ruin my enjoyment of the game, more of a small irritation that an issue but it’s a shame it wasn’t fixed. Also, if you’re having trouble with a particular boss you’ll find their voice irritating at times, especially if you can’t work out how to block one of their moves. I think I was asked about 20 times “Does it hurt?” by a boss with a REALLY annoying voice after he stabbed me in the chest lots... yes of course it hurts, you’re FRICKIN’ STABBING ME!

You’ll also find that the characters are pretty cliché but this all comes back to the theme that the game doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s sprinkled with moments of genuine hilarity and throwbacks to previous Metal Gear games. Corny and over the top at times with moments that left me literally speechless at the absurdity of it all. For a game with approximately 6 hours of storyline Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance packs in a lot. It’s more roller-coaster than train journey and if you’ll let it, it’ll certainly take you for a ride.

Verdict

There's lots of this sort of thing

I have a dream! A dream with more games that don't stick to a 'proven' formula! With so many unoriginal games out there these days (I’m looking at you FIFA “Insert year here” and Call of Duty “Insert title name and sequel number here”) this game is a taste of something a bit different. It’s something new and for that alone it should be celebrated, even if it’s not your cup of tea. Add to that the amusement this game provides and the pure enjoyment the game provides and you’ve got yourself a fantastic piece of work . An extreme ride from start to finish, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is like the Cocaine of computer games: it’ll mess with your head get you pumped up and leave you addicted and wanting more. It might also give you a headache...

8.4/10

Game Review: Aliens: Colonial Marines

Have you ever tried sleeping on a night train? It’s brilliant in theory and at first it’s really exciting. But in practice you’re thrown from side to side, there’s the constant noise of the track, and the other five people snoring in your carriage. You spend the entire journey praying for it to end. That’s exactly what this campaign is like. You’ll enjoy the first thirty minutes to an hour and then you’ll suddenly think to yourself “what the hell have they done to this game and why won’t it end?!”

THE CAMPAIGN

Aliens: Colonial Marines is set seventeen weeks after the film Aliens and is on the same planet. USS Sephora gets a distress call from the planet and goes to have a look around. To everyone’s surprise there just happens to be an infestation of Xenomorph on the planet. Your character and those around you have no idea what is going on and are constantly asking questions that anyone who has ever heard of the Alien films would have been able to give the answer to. This right here is the start of a long trend whereby the game tries to build some sort of suspense but it just doesn’t work at all.  

The game starts off quite well though and they chuck you straight into the deep end. You find yourself battling Xenomorph from the word go and it does seem quite fun. But then something happens. For some unknown reason you find yourself shooting at other humans that have pretty much come out of nowhere. Turns out they’re Weyland-Yutani men and they’re mad. You actually fight these guys for so long that you forget that this is a game about aliens until they remind you about two hours later. Luckily for you though their A.I isn’t very well programmed so you’ll find that they’ll just stand in the middle of rooms for you to kill them. Saying that the alien’s A.I is the same but occasionally they’ll walk on walls as well. Don’t expect too much support from your fellow NPC marine chums either because they’re A.I is just as good.

Anyway the story continues to try and build suspense as it goes and fails miserably. It turns out that one of your fellow marines has an alien inside of her and you have to go on a little jolly to try and save her. I call it a jolly because the aliens really aren’t scary when you out number them and they run towards you in straight lines. After that you have to find a way of leaving the planet. Turns out whoever wrote this storyline had no imagination and just decided to steal a load of stuff from the films, rewrite some of it as if it was fan fiction, throw it all together, and call it a game.

But the writers and A.I programmers aren’t completely to blame for how bad this game really is, because whoever designed the graphics did such a bad job that I spend thirty minutes thinking that my TV was broken! How can you make graphics that bad in 2013 and at the end of a computer generation? At least make the doors and elevators look descent if you’re going to force players to stand in front of them for twelve minutes whilst the game loads up the next section.

The weapons appear to be very cool though. Well for about an hour anyway. They’ve kept the weapons from the film which is great and they do give you quite a few weapons to choose from. As well as this, as you rank up you unlock upgrades for your weapons. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much difference in the weapon choices and they all pretty much have the same specs as each other. What also seems brilliant at first but will leave you wanting to listen to traffic go by just for some variety, is the sound of the weapons. They sound just like they do in the film. This is awesome and I’m sure there would have been outrage if they’d changed it. But when you have five guns that all sound the same going off constantly for six hours.... well let’s just say this could be adopted as a new torture technique.

Most people will struggle to finish this campaign and will probably only do so because they feel that they need to get their money’s worth. But there is no chance that anyone will replay this campaign. The only reason anyone will put themselves through a second play through of this is because they’ve got a friend that hasn’t played it yet and they want to see them suffer.   

MULTIPLAYER

The multiplayer is where it was expected that this game would redeem itself. After all, there are a lot of games that have awful campaigns but really good multiplayer segments. Well it can be said that the multiplayer aspect of this game is better than its campaign aspect, but that doesn’t really tell anyone anything.   

There are four different modes for multiplayer. Team Deathmatch is one of them and by far the worst aspect of multiplayer. It’s a standard run around and shoot aliens game. Unless you’re the aliens then you’ve got to attack the marines. What makes it worse is that you still have the same weapons from the campaign, so you may as well all have the same gun. But if you’re an alien then you’re in luck because you get to choose out of three different primary attacks. The developers really messed up what they could do with both aliens and marines right here.

The next mode, which is slightly better than Team Deathmatch, is Extermination. Your class choices are the same as before and are the same throughout all the multiplayer modes. But the small difference is that the marines in this mode have to set bombs to destroy nests of alien eggs, whilst the aliens have to stop this from happening. The idea is pretty good but it’s ruined mainly by the fact that there is some sort of overlord voice telling you what is going on ever five seconds and repeating itself three or four times. It’s extremely irritating.

Then there’s Survivor mode and you have to... well survive. All this mode consists of is four marines hiding in a corner whilst four aliens run towards them. It is really boring. The only upside to this mode is that when playing as the aliens you have a bit more access to different classes. But you have to find them around the map and they’re still not a great improvement.

The final mode is called Escape. This mode is actually quite fun. It’s like Survivor but this time the marines have to make their way from one end of the map to the other. It’s quite enjoyable but at the same time you’ll find yourself thinking something along the lines of “Left 4 Dead does this so much better” and saying to your friends stuff like “Someone remind me, Why are we playing this instead of Left 4 Dead?”.

At least I can say the controls were good though. I’d be lying of course, but I can still say it. To be fair they’re not terrible, but they’re not good either. Controlling the marines is ok if not a little erratic at times, but controlling the aliens isn’t good at all. Actually it’s when you first take control of an alien that you realise how regimented their motions really are. 

THE VERDICT

Aliens: Colonial Marines is one of the worst things to come out of this franchise, and that’s saying a lot. The story seems to be a load of ideas that have been stolen from the films. Then they’ve been thrown together, mixed around, and edited to make even less sense. If the story wasn’t so boring I think people would actually be angry. The graphics do an ok job, but then have some real bad parts that are just unforgivable. Then there’s the A.I. It does the job but it should do a lot better. If you like you ‘A’ to have some ‘I’ then expect to be disappointed. The weapons and sound effects are fun to start with but they soon lose their novelty, and there is no way anyone is going to replay the campaign. The multiplayer redeems itself a little, but not by much. It has some game mode variety, but they’re all quite boring and have been done a lot better by other games a few years ago. It’s a shame that the developers have ruined this great opportunity that they were given.

  

LHSRAting for Aliens: Colonial Marines 4.3/10 (Xbox 360)

-Ayden

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Tomb Raider: Legend (6 years late!)

To celibrate my recent membership of the LHSRA Reviews I have written this: my first review. Its more of a practice really, as Tomb Raider: Legend was first released in 2006, and in anticipation of the upcoming Tomb Raider! So yeah, it's a pretty old game now. I shall review it by 2006's standards because it would be unfair to compare it to more recent games(at least graphically).

    Well this was the 7th console Tomb Raider and the first one for the PS3 & Xbox360 era, and after the abysmal Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness(PS2), Legend had a lot of making up to do.
    After the obligatory opening cut-scene which recaps young Lara's traumatic childhood experiences(a plane crash in the Himalayas, the loss of her mother, etc)Legend then opens with Lara Croft in Bolivia exploring the ruins of Tiwanaku, the real-life capitol of a real-life Pre-Incan civilisation. In her explorations Lara stumbles across another expedition, manned by identical looking armed goons, and before you know it Lara is doing what she does best: killing men(and occasionally woman), endangered animals and then falling off things.

    The plot of Legend is the typical Tomb Raider quest for X artefact(s), which has/have been carelessly left in different locations across the globe. This time X artefact is the legendary Excalibur, which, it turns out is actually now in several shards and needs to be re-forged(much like Aragon's sword in LOTR). To be fair to the writers, they have done some research into the Arthurian Legends and merged them with myths from other cultures to explain Lara's constant globe-trotting(a Tomb Raider game set exclusively in England would not be much of a game). Along with all this, it turns out that both Lara's dead parents, and her(assumed) dead friend Amanda - SPOILER: she's both alive and the main villain) are all caught up in the quest for Excalibur, and so making this particular adventure more personal.
    The dialogue isn't great, often cliched and Lara now had a slightly annoying team who talk at her via a wireless headset. Lara's team consists of an uptight English historian called Alistair and a stereotypical wise-cracking black American named Zip, who acts as your tech-expert. Whilst this makes it easier to get plot ideas across when playing without having to suffer a hundred cut-scenes, it does detract from some of the locations. It's hard to feel the isolation of being 100 feet under a mountain when your team keep nattering on and calling Lara crazy when you make a tricky jump.
    The writers seem to have taken on board some of the many observations of Tomb Raider fans, trying to make her seem less psychotic(I don't think anyone actually minded her being psychotic). The first time you have to kill an endangered species Lara expresses her regret at least. She still goes on to kill several more rare jaguars later on in that level, but who cares about wild life when you're desecrating an ancient tomb looking for loot? But whatever Lara thinks of wild animals, she blatantly doesn't give a damn about her carbon foot-print. At one point Lara travels from Bolivia to the UK and then straight to Peru for a five minute conversation. Baring in mind these countries share a boarder. Hasn't Lara heard of Video Conferencing? She should talk to Zip about that really.
    I still find it amusing the designers still call Lara an archaeologist though. As much as Lara expresses her love for ruins, tombs and ancient cultures, if there's a priceless relic blocking the door she's quick enough to smash it into shards rather than come back with a survey team and Tony Robinson for moral support.
    Over all, the plot is what you expect from a Tomb Raider game, i.e. A knock-off Indiana Jones story with a highly sexualised woman. Saying that Lara herself seems totally asexual. I get the feeling that she is neither straight nor gay, but instead has a highly usual sexual attraction for crumbling masonry, or possibly mummies.

    Now for the actual game! Graphically Legend is pretty decent for the time it was released in(2006). The ruins and scenery look pretty lush but on levels in modern locations the small details often look quite ugly.
    The locations within the game are varied and interesting if a bit short. You get to explore parts of Bolivia, Peru, Tokyo, Ghana, Kazakhstan, Nepal and, most shockingly of all, Cornwall! There is a good mix of ancient foliage clad ruins, modern areas and vehicle sections in which you get to ride a motor bike at break-neck speed and watch Lara crash into walls. Saying that, the motor biking sections are actually really fun to play, and as a seasoned TR fan, watching Lara collide with a rock spire at 90 MPH is still fun the tenth time you see it. As usual with a post Tomb Raider 1 Tomb Raider game there could be a few more tombs and a few less city inspired levels, but Legend has a much better balance than Tomb Raiders 2,3,5 and Angel of Darkness.
    The game play is a large step up from AoD. Crystal Dynamics have pretty much fused the controls of Tomb Raider: Last Revelation(i.e. TR 4) with those of Prince of Persia. Lara can climb, roll, swim, shimmy along ledges and swing on vines much more freely than in previous game, and now she has a magnetic grappling hook for those ruins in which the ancients forgot to leave handy ropes dangling over large chasms. It is also useful for grappling handy out of reach item.
    The best thing Legend brought to the game play is the ability to think your way around death-traps. I spent ten minutes on one level trying to time a jump through some vicious swirling blades only to realise that the fork-lift truck I used to smash through the wall could withstand the whirling blades much better than Lara.
    Combat, as always in Tomb Raider games, is the worst part of the game play but with the auto-aim on it's not very difficult. My major concern was the fact it was hard to switch between targets, so I was shooting at the goon with a pistol 30 feet away whilst there was a goon with a shot gun 5 feet away. All in all though the combat is still quite fun and with new close-quarter moves and obvious exploding set-pieces can make you feel like a bad ass. Probably the best combat in any Tomb Raider game before it.
    Many people might moan about the camera, which often veers off in the wrong direction during difficult jumps, but I see this as a regular part of Tomb Raider and should be embraced.

    I was actually quite surprised by how much I enjoyed going back to Legend. It has quite a few faults(most of them to do with historical accuracy if I'm honest, and blatant sexism at times - Tokyo level being the worst for this) but the game play still feels slick after 6 years, there's plenty of jumping from precarious ledges, falling into pits, getting hacked up by swirling blades and actually raiding some tombs.  I give it a decent 7.5/10. But saying that, if Legend had been a few hours longer I would have rounded up to 8.

- Mike