#14 – Shadow Complex (XBLA)
Note: There's some controversy surrounding this game. I'm not addressing the politics of it in this review but I'll post my thoughts in the comments.
When Shadow Complex was announced a couple months ago, I was somewhat torn by it. It was described as a metroidvania style game, which I like. It's developed by Chair, who made Undertow, which sucked. But the lead designer at Chair also made Advent Rising, which I liked! But Advent Rising and Shadow Complex are based on properties Orson Scott Card is involved in, whom I do not like. The hype coming out of E3 was strong though, and then they released the trailer and I was sold. When was the last time I played a good metroidvania anyway? (Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin)
To put it simply, Shadow Complex sets a new standard for $15 XBLA games. It's a great game. It's clearly more Metroid than Vania, with no currency and a small number of weapons and bosses. It's map and method of impeding progress (doors and what not that require certain weapons to get past) are straight out of Super Metroid while it adds in enemies that you can fight in the background, and a couple of fully 3D turret sequences. The in-game cutscenes are relatively bad because the faces of the characters suffer from Unreal 3 engine syndrome but they're all skippable. The sounds are all spot on and the soundtrack fits great while you're progressing through the early game but towards the end when you're filling up on collectibles it feels a little out of place or it's completely absent.
The amount of detail in the gameworld is staggering for a game that costs so little. If they had given me a solid geometry map with unanimated models I would've been happy so long as the gameplay were the same, but this game is as beautiful as it's gameplay. The controls are very close to Metroid's with the exception of the shooting. It uses the second analog stick for precise aiming, which means taking a thumb off of the jump button. It took just a little to get used to but later I came to appreciate the level of precision I could get using the aiming stick.
I've played through the game once, with 100% map and item completion. I got to probably 90% on my own before resorting to youtube videos on how to get some of the trickier items. There's items in some really sticky areas but never so badly that you feel the designers were being cheap. The ending is wide open for a sequel (or rumored DLC) but doesn't really live up to the build up. After finding all 100% of the items, the final battle was rather simple. I guess that's my reward for persistence. I finished in a little over 8 hours, which is probably more time than I spent playing through the single player campaign of Gears of War 2, and Gears of War 2 isn't nearly as replayable.
Should you buy Shadow Complex? Yes. Double yes. It's a fantastic single player game.
#13 – Gears of War 2 (X360)
This one took about 10 days which is about 50 times faster than the amount of time it took me to beat the first Gears of War. Stupid pumping station. Stupid RAAM. Thankfully, Gears of War 2 has nothing as frustrating as either of those, though it's not without it's glitches.
I loved Gears of War and Gears of War 2 is just like the original but better. Better graphics, better levels, better balance. I never felt like any of my deaths were the result of cheap tricks or bad level design. Like I said, no pumping station situations and no damned General RAAM. There's some difficult fights and a one on one boss that is less about putting him full of bullets and more about patterns and timing.
There were a couple parts where Dom (the AI buddy) would stop fighting. He'd take cover and just sit there. At first I thought it was story related, until I realized that Dom is only an AI buddy when there's no human behind the controller. There's no reason or solution that would cripple a coop partner by stopping them from fighting. I had to chalk it up to some kind of pathing or AI glitch. It wasn't a big deal until I got to a fight in the last act where I was vastly outgunned and outnumbered. I could almost beat it alone until the last pair of enemies where without an AI drawing their fire, I was just mowed down. I had to restart the chapter, which wasn't an enormous setback and fixed the problem. It was still a huge impediment to my progress though.
I haven't touched the multiplayer. I probably won't until I can afford to buy the All Fronts collection.
Overall, 100% awesome. I'm totally lame for waiting so long to get this.
#12 – Silent Hill: Homecoming (X360)
I love the Silent Hill series. My first one was Silent Hill 2 on PS2. It was an amazing experience and I've been a fan ever since. That said, Silent Hill: Homecoming probably holds the record for the longest period of time it's taken me to finish a Silent Hill game.
I spent the last four hours (or so Katie says) playing it and though at first I was frustrated with it (for it's lack of health items and somewhat steep difficulty), I can safely say there's nothing really inherently wrong with Silent Hill: Homecoming. It doesn't have a godawful long escort mission like The Room did. The combat is a little more involved than previous games but not to the point of turning Silent Hill into River City Ransom. There's some fresh new enemies, and that ol' chestnut Pyramid Head makes a couple of cameos. He just pops his big old head in, does something fucked up, and ducks out.
I suppose my biggest complaint about it is that it's kind of boring. The enemies don't come off as scary more than they do annoying. There's a spider thing that is an utter pain in the ass as you need to duck and dodge his attacks and he's CONSTANTLY blocking yours. You encounter more living people in this Silent Hill than any of the others, yet none of them really contribute much.
The game has a couple decision points where what you choose determines the ending you get. They occur late in the game and if you save before the first one, you can revert back to that save and you'll only have to redo the last two hours of the game to get the majority of the alternate endings and then there's one more for finishing the game on Hard difficulty. I may have the gamerpoint greed to see the low hanging fruit (the decision point endings) but I probably don't have it in me to grind through the whole game again to see that Hard difficulty ending.
I won't play the Rate Silent Hill Games game because I haven't played the first three in so long but I'll put Homecoming above The Room but definitely below 2 and maybe below 1 and 3. It's a good game if you're a fan and you can get it for cheap.
#11 – Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil (PC)
This is an expansion pack. Does this count? Sure!
Though I've finished Doom 3 around four times, this is only my second time finishing Resurrection of Evil. It took even more tweaking to get running than Doom 3 did. For weapons it adds the grabber (a gravity gun) and the double-barrel shotgun. For monsters it adds the Forsaken (it's an original Doom lost soul), the Vulgar (it's an imp, and basically replaces the imp in every occasion) and the Bruiser (the size of a hellknight, shoots like a mancubus). It replaces the soulcube with the hellstone, which accumulates abilities like invulnerability as you beat bosses.
The grabber feels like a lost opportunity. RoE sticks to the Doom 3 formula of straight forward demon shooting so doggedly that it can't toss in a physics puzzle or any other use for the grabber besides tossing boxes and barrels at demons or catching projectiles and tossing those instead. So, given an opportunity, I prefered to use the grabber to save on ammo.
The hellstone by the end of the game basically becomes thirty seconds of god mode, as you're invulnerable, do way more damage, and everything else is moving in slow-mo. Until that point, I barely used it. Between the grabber and the double-barrel I felt I had enough firepower to deal with anything. It's at the end when they're tossing three revnants and two hellknights at you at once that you feel the need for that thirty seconds of god mode.
There's nothing new in the games' environments. Dig site, tech base, hell, they're all there. There's less monster closests, which is appreciated, and more demons that teleport in at will, which is not.
As far as expansions go, this one's not bad. It's more Doom 3, which I liked, with a couple new toys and a couple new targets and not much else.
#10 – Wolfenstein 3D (XBLA)
I guess you can get simpler in gameplay than Doom 3. No updates were made to this XBLA port of a 17 year old game, just shooting nazis in pixelated mazes. I played through every single level, on Bring 'Em On difficulty (that's one short of I Am Death Incarnate), and I may never play this game again. Six episodes, with ten levels per episode, makes for one long game. Here's some dead simple notes on each episode:
- Hans Grosse is harder to kill now that I'm older than 8 years old.
- Zombie nazis can eat my balls. Fuck this episode!
- Mecha Hitler.
- Completely forgettable.
- THE BEST EPISODE. Simple-ish levels with lots of nazis to mow down!
- FUCK THIS EPISODE. Hell-ish levels, lots of those damned fast nazis, nowhere near enough ammo. Imagine every step is at an intersection. To either your left or right is a nazi. Or both. You have to crawl through each step because if you run through, a nazi is going to step out and shoot you in the face. This is the first four levels of this episode! I HATE IT.
#9 – Doom 3 (PC)
This may have been my fourth time playing through Doom 3. It's barely compatible with Vista and took entirely too much work to get running the way I wanted but it works. It still looks amazing, with the exception of some blurry textures particularly on other people in the game. As far as gameplay goes, it can't get much simpler than Doom 3. Shoot demon, collect ammo, open door, end level. There's not a ton of variety to it and that's probably one of the reasons I enjoy it so much. When all you want to do is shoot stuff in a beautiful, tense environment, you can't get much better than Doom 3.
#8 – Fable: The Lost Chapters (Xbox)
Here's a classic. I just got this one last year because it was $5 and it was completely worth it. I'd heard others praising Fable back when it was released but for some reason I let it slide off my radar.
It's an action RPG, with a whole lot more added in to keep it from getting boring. It takes place in your average fantasy setting, it has a pretty storytale plot, and doesn't throw too many surprises. It works on getting you attached to your character. He doesn't speak, doesn't have a name (except Hero or whatever title you've purchased) but you're with him from birth to middle-age. Your choices determine whether he's attractive, scary, or good/evil. You can get your hair and facial hair styled, your stats influence how you appear, and you gain scars when you come close to death. You can marry, visit a bordello, own real estate, collect rent, gamble, trade goods, and so on. Everything beyond the basic action RPG elements are either minigames or just a matter of having cash on hand. I played a good character and though I never tested it, it felt like no one was off limits in terms of killing important characters. Certainly none of the mundane characters were off limits and more than a couple passersby and gawkers caught a whack from my sword while I was trying to defend them.
The game isn't very long, I think I finished at about the 15 hour mark. I did nearly all the quests but I didn't complete all the boring item hunts. I got my most powerful preferred weapon and enough experience to max out the physical stats, and put a healthy amount of experience points into the skill and magic stats and finished with the highest level of renown. A lot of the Lost Chapters content is integrated into the main story so well that I hardly noticed it. It was after I finished the main storyline and picked up on the Lost Chapters that I noticed it. And it is noticable at that point. The original Fable storyline has a definitive end and the Lost Chapters adds another area and about three more hours of capital S Story quests. It feels kind of tacked on and a little hokey but it's exactly what you can expect from an RPG expansion, more Fable.
All in all, this is one of those I'd wish I had picked up earlier so I could discuss it with more relevance but getting to play it at all is probably good enough. Looking forward to getting Fable 2!
#6 – Sins of a Solar Empire (PC)
I got this one during the deployment. It's a 4X-ish, in that you research stuff, you colonize planets, you find other planets, and you kill the other races, except unlike all other 4X games I've played, this one occurs in real time. There are three races; one whose units are cheap (the Advent), one whose units are hardy (the TEC), and one whose units are destructive (the Vasari).
It plays a lot like other 4X games that I love except that everything seems a little more tied into itself. For example, if you want to research trade ports, you need to build enough research facilities to get up to that level. In order to build research facilities, you need logistical slots on your planet. If you're all out of log slots, you need to colonize another planet. Once you get up to the level of research needed, then you can research trade ports. Once you've got that researched, you need the required amount of materials to make them. This is just one item.
It makes for some interesting strategies. When I play Advent, I take advantage of the cheap units. I'll crap out a ton of the cheapest frigates they have and zerg rush every planet until I have more than the other guys, which will drain my credits but give me a pretty big resource advantage. You can station your fleet in the way of trade lanes and just blow up enemy traders to disrupt their credit flow. The same goes for refinery ships. If you raid an enemies research facilities, they lose the ability to use what they've already researched.
The one main detractor this game has is that one game can last a long time, even in real time. My longest game so far has been five and half hours; a medium size map playing 2 v 2 against easy AI. You can selectively choose to increase the speed of research and travel and whatnot though.
In February Iron Clad released a micro-expansion called Entrenchment and that name is no joke. It added star bases (huge structures you can build for defense that can't leave a planet's gravity well), mines, and anti-structure frigates. The star bases are ridiculous. You can upgrade them with bigger guns, more armor, hanger bays, frigate construction bays, and other such things. Mines are also rather nuts. You can drop as many mines as you like, so I littered my heavy traffic areas with them and they were well worth it. Nothing got past a heavy minefield.
I'm definitely looking forward to the upcoming two micro-expansions for this one. It's a ton of fun to send my enormous fleet of death into an enemy colony only to find they've snuck some planet-bombers beyond my frontlines and scramble to stop them.
Robotica (SAT)
Last night I dug out my Saturn and it's required cables and controller, hooked it up to the TV and played 20 minutes of Robotica. Why did I do this?
Way back when I went through a glut of Robotica questions on Giant Bomb trivia. It got me interested in the game, since I can't get enough Japanese robot corridor shooters. I tracked down a copy at Game Exchange in Springfield while shopping with Jim. He's got it and said it wasn't bad.
I beg to differ. It's awful. It's slightly better than Kileak: The DNA Imperative. I got 8 levels in before I realized that there would be no saving my game. It's one long run through or you're playing the same levels over and over. In those 8 levels I saw four different enemies, two tilesets, and one ultra-shitty cutscene. Each level played exactly the same; find the key, find the exit. One key, one exit, nothing compelling you to search the rest of the level.
I'm not giving this game a "finished" number but I am finished with this game. Probably forever. I'm more likely to play through the rest of Kileak before I pick this one up ever again.
#5 – Unreal Tournament 3 (PC)
Another multiplayer game but this one actually has an extensive single player campaign. It was a lot of fun, the bots are actually kind of helpful, and there's a strange card system where if you can't beat a match because the odds are really stacked against you (such as you're playing 4 vs 6 and the enemy team also has vehicles), you can play a card with some kind of bonus like more teammates or better weapons or vehicles. I had to use one and only one for the afore mentioned 4v6w/v but that was only because I had gotten really close to beating it a couple times and was tired of playing it over and over. The last match is a 1v1 deathmatch and thankfully the last boss isn't Xan Kriegor because fuck that guy. I trounced the last match pretty easily and that was that.
There's a lame storyline in there somewhere. Try to ignore it. But buy the game, it just had a huge patch released that added Steam achievements and new weapons and maps and mods. It's making me replay the campaign for the achievements but whatever. It's fun and definitely worth the $11.99 being charged for it this weekend on http://www.steampowered.com/.
Edit: How could I fail to mention my biggest complaint about this game? WHY IN GOD'S NAME DO I HAVE YOU PRESS ESCAPE FIVE FUCKING TIMES TO GET THROUGH ALL THE INTRO MOVIES?! Seriously everyone with a line of code in the game or gave Epic a dollar to see it made got an intro movie. Everytime I start the game I have to hammer the escape button just to get to the main menu without waiting for the five minutes of intro movies to finish. What. The. Fuck?