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: 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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A look at Bungie's new project: Destiny

Apparently Destiny has been in the pipeline since Halo 2 which is about seven years ago and it sounds like this story focused multiplayer game is going to revolutionise online gaming for consoles in the same way that Halo 2 did. Although we’ve known about this game for the past few months, Bungie have only just fed us some official snippets of information to try and get our mouths to water. Before I saw the new pictures and watched the new teaser video, I wasn’t that bothered to be honest. And now I’ve seen them, my mouth is dripping with excitement. 

 

The Story

Destiny appears to be an online based MMOFPS or “Shared World Shooter” as it is being called, and is set in the future. The story as far as we know is set after humanity has expanded across the solar system, and after it has all been lost again. Something (aliens I assume) “tried to stamp us out. No one knows exactly what” but we do know that not many survived, and those that did owe their lives to “The Traveller”.

The Traveller appears to be a huge sphere that, in a way, sacrificed itself to save humanity. Since then the few survivors in the world have built a city underneath The Traveller because this is the only place that we are truly safe. Every other city in the world has fallen and this is where we make our last stand. So in other words Destiny appears to be set on a futuristic post apocalyptic world. Now humanity has built a new home for itself we have started to explore our old planet to find that there are a number of alien races living here as well, and they don’t like us all that much. The alien races are looking for a way to finish humanity off for good.

Your role in Destiny

This is where you come in. You play a Guardian in the game and it is your job to protect the city. You’ve managed to harness some of The Traveller’s power, suggesting that you will be some sort of super solder. You have to find a way to save the city. “If you fail the last light of civilisation will go out”... no pressure then.

There are three classes that we know of that you can choose from to play as:

• ·         Hunter
• ·         Warlock
• ·         Titan

Everything about your character will be editable and unique to you. You can change your colours, edit how you face looks, amour, cape, weapons, and helmets are all changeable. The idea is that everything that you do will be rewarded, which should encourage you to comeback day after day to play this game.

Game Play

As we’ve already said this is MMOFPS. From what Bungie has told us you’ll have factions that you can join as well as your own clans that you can make. You start in a place known as “The Tower”. In The Tower you can meet up with other players for pretty much anything. By that I mean you can just sit around and chat, discuss strategies before going on a quest or just find people to team up with. From there you can go on to do the campaign missions or the large amount of side quests that will be available. 

Now here is the part that I find quite intriguing but at the same time a little worrying; bungie are making Destiny so that other players can drop in and join your mission. Once the mission is over and you’ve got your rewards/loot, you can team up with these other players or go your separate ways. We’ve seen drop in campaign before in games like Dead Island and, although it works fine, I personally find it a little strange having strangers come in on my game experience. But Bungie promise that it won’t even be noticeable and that it’ll be like a normal thing that happens.

The missions themselves are based all around our solar system which tells us one important thing: there will be space travel. With any luck this means that we’ll be able to customise our own space craft as well.

Phone App

Of course there is a phone app, there’s a phone app for everything! Yeah but this sounds like it’s going to be a little different. All Bungie have really said is that you’ll be able to keep up to date with what your friends are doing and may even be able to help them via the phone app. As well as this you might be able to edit your own character whilst you’re away from your console. But the thing that seems like quite a new idea is that the app will tell you when new quests are available. In other words the game is going to tell you that you need to play it.

The History and Future of Bungie

So Bungie, for those that have been living under a gaming rock for at least the past eleven years, are the studio that brought you such games as Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo Wars, Halo 3 ODST, Halo Reach, and Marathon... did I mention that they did some stuff with Halo? Anyone who is a fan of Halo and online gaming for consoles has Bungie to thank for this. They wrote and developed Halo until Anniversary (and Halo 4) came out. And for those of you old enough (it wasn’t that long ago really... honest) to remember when Halo 2 came out, it was pretty much the game that revolutionised online game play for consoles. This was mainly because Bungie made it so that you could join a lobby with your friends and then search for a game together. But it didn’t stop there, oh no. After the game was finished you and your friends would all still be in the lobby together, ready for the next game. Mental right? I know this is something we all take for granted these days and no one can imagine playing anything that doesn’t do this now, but this really was a huge progression in gaming at the time.

Back then Bungie was partnered with Microsoft, but they broke away a year or so ago and have recently taken a ten year publishing contract with Activision. During this time they are set to work on the Destiny universe and I’m pretty sure they have three games set to come out in this time. At the moment Bungie have their entire 360 person studio working on Destiny, so this is a pretty big project for them that they can’t afford to let fail. Bungie have also said that Destiny will be a multi-platform game, meaning that for the first time ever Playstation will have access to a Bungie game and trust me Playstation fans, you are in for a treat.

A thing to note as well is that the music composer that was with Bungie through their Halo years is still with them and is working on Destiny. This might not seem like a big thing to many, but this is fantastic news to those that where big fans of the old Halo games.

Release Date

Finally, the game has been rumoured to be coming out late this year on Xbox 360 and PS3 as well as “next generation consoles”. However, it might be safer to expect it out early 2014 instead. This is for two reasons. Firstly, this is Bungie’s biggest project and there is no way they can afford to rush this out. Secondly, Activision hasn’t put anything in their budget report that suggests that they plan on making any money whatsoever during 2013.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Activision have said in a press release that Destiny will not be coming out in 2013 - 18/02/13] 

The Verdict

Destiny looks like it is going to be the new game franchise that gives things like Halo and Call of Duty a run for their money. It’s set to be a massive multiplayer online first person shooter and it’ll be something that we haven’t seen before on consoles. You’ll fight for the survival of humanity whilst being able to edit your character in any way that you like. You’ll team up with your friends and be encouraged to make new ones in order to complete missions and get bigger rewards. As well as this there will be a phone app that allows you to procrastinate whilst you’re at work or school. So even when you’re not playing the game you can still be a part of it. This universe is set to last us ten years and although we can’t confirm when Destiny will be ready to play we can say one thing at least, and that is that Bungie plan on redefining how FPS and online multiplayer gaming is played... Again!

-Ayden

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Film Review: Wreck-it Ralph

Ralph (John C. Reilly) is a computer villain in an arcade and he’s been around for thirty years. It’s his job to wreck the crap out of things whilst Fix-it Felix (Jack Mcbrayer), well, fixes it and is loved by everyone for it. Ralph on the other hand is hated by everyone in this computer game universe, even though he’s really a nice guy who has been programmed to do a bad job. So after thirty years of being bullied for been a bad guy Ralph decides he can be a hero and goes on a quest to prove it by game jumping across the arcade that he’s in. During this film Ralph and other characters show a range of different games and characters from different gaming generations.

Wreck-it Ralph is a well animated film with some great voice acting. It has a funny storyline for both young children and adult gamers. The film is bright and colourful and very fast paced, which will keep children entertained. At the same time there are some well hidden adult jokes (similar to how The Simpsons do it). If you’re an adult gamer then you’ll appreciate it even more as they’ve sneaked in loads of little references to games and consoles (like the Konami Code). So if you have a young child that you want to keep occupied for an hour or two and you’re into computer games, then this film is perfect for you! 

Wreck-it Ralph is superb role modelling for children as well. It shows that some people that seem bad might be good and that those that seem good, might be bad. It also teaches that you shouldn’t bully people because of things that they’re born/programmed with. I know that you’d probably expect that from a Disney film, but to be honest they have a huge track record of racially and sexually profiling their characters. This doesn’t seem to happen in this film though and this made me very happy, especially with female badasses like Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch) and Vanellope von Schweets (Sarah Silverman). With any luck this will be a direction that Disney continues to go in. 

The film could probably have done with featuring more of the real game characters as they don’t really make very many appearances. However, they may have made the right decision not to give them bigger roles because if they got it wrong there would have been a lot of complaining from the gaming community. Something that they shouldn’t have done though is put in that awful ‘music’ by Rihanna, although it did fit quite well and I almost didn’t notice it until she repeated the word ‘drive’ several times.  

 

THE VERDICT

Ralph is bad, and that’s good. He’ll never be good, and that’s not bad. In fact, it’s pretty damn brilliant. This is a great story for young children, parents, and adult gamers. It sets a good example for children to follow whilst entertaining them, and has some brilliant voice acting in it too. At the same time Wreck-it Ralph is filled with adult humour and gamer references. We don’t see as many real game characters as would be liked, but it still works very well. Disney have made a great family film here and I really recommend that if you’re taking the kids to the cinema this weekend, that you take them to see this film.

LHSRAting for Wreck-it Ralph 8.5/10

-Ayden

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