I just beat it again on PC. 14 hours, 30 minutes. I just started Dr. Ned. Then I’ll do the Secret Armory of General Knoxx.

I’m still amazed by some of the weapons this game throws at me. A lot of them are garbage. Then you get something absolutely fucking magical. Like an accurate shotgun with high damage, fast reload, large magazine, and ammo regeneration. This is the gun that Zombie Island was made for. I can’t lose with this thing.

The transition from simple action to RTS is very smooth, and you never lose the open world aspect when you’re not in the middle of a story mission. What is kind of a jarring is that the whole first half of the game is the tutorial into the RTS side. The game has three continents and that whole first half of the game takes places on the first one alone. On top of that, there are two other factions in the game, but you spend that first half fighting against the same units you’re using. You then spend almost the rest of the game fighting the second faction, and you only really fight the third faction in the absolute final mission.

It’s pretty obvious to me that a lot of time and effort went into the first continent and first half of the game, then the rest was cleaned up and rushed through. Everything about the pacing in the second half of the game is off and rushed, and the end drops like a hammer. There’s that final RTS mission and one final action sequence and then you’re done.

Despite this, Brutal Legend is a ton of fun. It’s fun to drive around in. It takes place during the Age of Metal and the backstory and environments and soundtrack are all fantastic. It’s simply a fun world to exist in if you’re into metal. I’m pretty horrible at RTS games, and I still enjoyed the RTS battles. The controls kind of take some getting used to because they focus on your character as a leader, and so you can only issue orders to your units if you’re near them. This is probably why the first half of the game feels like a tutorial, but by time you get off the first continent, you’re definitely proficient at commanding your units.

I don’t know how to recommend this. I was turned off of it when it was released by reviews saying it was half-baked, and not that fun. It is true that it was definitely a rushed release, but it never feels incomplete. Everything is there, it’s just paced poorly. And I definitely had a lot of fun with it. I guess it boils down to whether or not you like metal. If I didn’t enjoy the setting so much, I probably wouldn’t have spent so much time playing it.

I’m pleased to report these complaints are mostly unfounded. Metro 2033 is a beautiful game with a strong narrative, even if Artyom’s motivations are somewhat unclear. I beat the game on normal difficulty without much trouble. The weapons in the game are no less responsive than those in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I knew from the start that bullets were currency in the game, and that crappy bullets existed, but I didn’t figure out how to use those crappy bullets until halfway through the game. The crappy bullets really are crappy, being much louder, less powerful, and more inaccurate. It really makes you value those money bullets and forced me to decide when it was worth shooting my money away.

Around the halfway mark, there’s a vendor who will sell you either heavier armor or stealthier clothing. I had spent nearly all of my good bullets on a better gun, which was poor foresight on my behalf because guns are everywhere. I was duly punished for it though, as I was never offered the opportunity to buy a different armor again.

I got Metro 2033 on sale, and it’s one of those games in which I wish I had bought it on release. The game is short, but it’s really immersive. I hope 4A made enough to keep developing, because I’ll definitely get their next title the minute it comes out.

I spent over eighteen hours playing this throughout the last five days, and now it’s over.

I blasted through Bioshock 2, and now I can turn my attention to STALKER: Call of Pripyat. Pripyat is the third STALKER game, and after the disappointing second outing Clear Sky, it feels like the sequel that Shadow of Chernobyl deserves. If you own Shadow of Chernobyl or Clear Sky through Steam, you can get Call of Pripyat now for $20. It sells for only $30 to begin with, but selling it for $20 through a customer loyalty program is criminal.

Once a day, at a random time, a radiation emission blasts The Zone, killing anyone not within cover and scattering new artifacts across the landscape. I had just finished a mission when the emission warning sounded. My nearest cover was a good distance away and I was overburdened with loot. The warning gives you two minutes, I make it close within a minute.

My cover is in a hillside bunker. As soon I step inside, I spot three zombies. I put a few bullets in them and they drop. No one else is coming near my bunker so I don’t bother looting their bodies. In the next room is two more. I take a few bullets for trespassing, by one that was hiding in the bathroom, and keep trying to make my way deeper into the bunker. I’m technically not safe until I’m dug in like a tick. I can hear barking inside, which could be a number of any variety of nasty mutants.

I turn my flashlight on and creep further in. I’m safe now, but I see that the barking is from a pack of mutated rats. I spray some bullets and the majority of them expire. The Zone is scorched with radiation while I sit in the dark with mutant rats running back and forth past me. The wave of destruction passes, I work my way back to the bodies of the zombies to collect ammo, bandages, food, and useful equipment before I emerge from the bunker and start on my path back to the STALKER base.

This was about five minutes of gameplay. Since Sunday I’ve spent almost six hours playing.

They’re really rather similar. The biggest difference is that since you are playing as one of the first Big Daddies, instead of your options being “rescue” or “harvest” little sisters, your options are now “adopt” or “harvest”, wwith adoption requiring you to either drop off the little sister at a port hole for a small amount of ADAM or you set them down near a corpse and defend them from splicers while they gather ADAM for you. I’m a nice guy with a thirst for ADAM so I saved all the little sisters and gathered all the ADAM that I could, so I spent a lot of time fighting off splicers.

I played on medium difficulty, and maybe I’m spoiled from recently replaying Bioshock 1 on easy, but Bioshock 2 seems significantly more difficult. You can’t carry as many health kits as you could in the first game, and I seem to remember the first one auto-using health kits when your health bottomed out until you ran out of kits. No such luck this time, and the first-aid button is on the d-pad so you can either move around or heal. The tradeoff they made here is that every weapon can be used for a melee attack, rather than having to switch to the melee weapon, which in this game is a massive drill.

Now in Bioshock 1, the melee weapon was traditional Irrational Games wrench. With the electric jolt plasmid (the first plasmid in the game), and the wrench (the first weapon in the game), you could almost beat it without picking up a single other weapon. It was a super effective combo that only got better with support tonics. You have no such luck in Bioshock 2. In fact, as massive drills go, it takes a couple support tonics to make it feel like it’s doing some real damage. It’s kind of a bummer.

The plasmids got a healthy balancing. Winter blast is far more useful than I remember it being in the first game, and even insect swarm is more fun! I didn’t really use some of the less hands-on plasmids, like decoy, or scout, or hypnotize. You get the same eight slots for them as in the first game. The tonics are better handled this time too, with no distinction being made between them. You just get a number of slots and you can fill them with whatever tonics you like without regard for their purpose. A lot of them return from the first game, with a handful of new ones suited for the changes in weaponry. Wrench lurker became drill lurker, and what not.

I won’t get into the specifics of the plot. I got the gist of the first game but some of the details escaped me, and there’s no change here. There was an achievement in the first for collecting all the audio logs, and it has been replaced in Bioshock 2 with an achievement for getting most of the audio logs that I find far more reasonable.

There’s another for getting all of the weapon upgrades, and towards the end I was beginning to get nervous because I had a lot of upgrades unfulfilled but I found them all regardless. Apparently you won’t get every weapon up to full upgrades by the end of the game, so you should be choosy with what weapons you want to use. The game has a nasty habit of giving you a new weapon right after you’ve come across an upgrade station, and that kind of sucks because you can’t un-upgrade a weapon and then use that upgrade station on the new gun.

Hacking has changed for the better, unless you’ve got slow reflexes. Instead of being a game of pipe-dream, it’s a simple needle that goes back and forth and you just need to hit the A button when it’s over a green section. Sometimes you need to hit a number of green slots to succeed, and if you hit a red slot you set off the security systems, and if you hit a white slot you take damage. It’s easier and faster than the first game, and from the start you’re given a tool to hack machines from a distance, which replaces the need from the first game to shock them with electric jolt and then run up and hack them.

There’s a multiplayer component this time. I haven’t played it, but not for lack of trying. I setup my character and tried to join a game but none were going on. Within the first week of release, this, to me, is a bad sign. Hopefully I can get some friends to play with me because a lot of achievements are tied into the multiplayer. I really hate when games do that, especially in the xbox live climate where every game has a multiplayer component and all anyone ever plays is Modern Warfare 2.

If you’ve liked Bioshock 1, this one’s a no-brainer. It’s more of the first game, but better, with only a little cognitive dissonance from making a sequel to a game that wasn’t made to have a sequel. If you didn’t like Bioshock 1, you probably won’t like Bioshock 2. It doesn’t change enough from the original formula to make it a different game. If you never played the first game, I’d recommend going through it before hopping on Bioshock 2. It’s a fantastic game, it’s only $20, and Bioshock 2 basically assumes you played the first game and doesn’t make an effort to explain the world of Rapture again.

Here’s my bottom line opinion on Republic Commando; it’s the second-best Star Wars first-person shooter. Just below Dark Forces. It has the unfortunate distinction of being the best game to come out of the prequel trilogy, and doesn’t escape the taint of the prequel’s legacy. I may even like the ideas behind Republic Commando more than I like the game itself.

Let me drop some bombs on what’s wrong with Republic Commando. The weapons sound and feel very weak. Your primary weapon is the DC-17 blaster, which is a modular weapon that is an all-purpose rifle, a sniper rifle, and a grenade launcher. Of those, I ended up using the rifle the most for it’s accuracy and abundant ammo. It doesn’t do a ton of damage, it sounds like a toy gun, and shoots way too fast. In fact, none of the weapons sound very powerful, even the powerful ones!  I would have appreciated if they stuck to standard Star Wars weaponry and sounds, like they did with the enemies, who often sound more menacing than they are.

Speaking of enemies, they all kind of behave the same and there aren’t enough of them. There are only three or four of each type. Battle droids, super battle droids, destroyer droids, spider droids. Fat Trandoshans, Trandoshan mercenaries, big Trandoshans, scavengers. Geonoshan warriors, elite Geonoshans, Geonoshan babies, yes, babies. General Grievous’s guards. That’s all of them! It makes the game feel more repetitive than it is. The Star Wars universe is teeming with life. There isn’t much an excuse for this lack of variety.

So what does Republic Commando do right? The intro to the game is great. It details where you and your squad came from, all from the first person perspective. In fact, this game takes a page from Half-Life in that the entire game is played from the first-person perspective. There are a couple of scenes where you are not in control of your character, but they’re limited.

The squad AI is not smart but it’s competent. They’ll kill enemies, heal themselves, heal you when you drop, take cover, etc. There are certain set pieces that you can order a squadmate to take position at for a specific purpose (like sniping or anti-armor) and they’re meant to be used. Your squad dies less when they’re in one of these ordered positions. The squad also has fantastic vocal banter. Each member is a personality, and I got attached to them as the game went along.

Though the levels are a little cookie cutter, there are plenty of objectives to them and no lack for fights. I was fighting in corridors, in small courtyards and hangers, on multi-level starship bridges, and in trees. They’re not as varied as Dark Forces, but each environment is well made.

And now I can get to what stops this from being a great game. They can fix the sound effects and toss in a couple more enemies, but it’s harder to change the setting. Republic Commando takes place at the onset of the Clone Wars. It starts on Geonosha even. And though it takes place over a two (three?) year span, it could have gone farther. This was a pre-Episode 3 game and it shows. It feels like a teaser leading up to Episode 3 and, ultimately, suffers for that. It doesn’t deserve to be timely movie release fodder. It deserves to be treated like a game that can stand on its own two legs. Something that can be taken out of the context of the prequel release. It doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with Episode 1 Racer, Star Wars Starfighter, Bounty Hunter, Obi-Wan, or any other godawful prequel game.

It doesn’t carry the same tone as those games. The developers did their damnedest to give this game a fair chance. They go out of their way to make  you know that you are playing an elite soldier. You’re no jedi, and you’re not fodder either. You see your share of ally deaths and the Clone War takes its toll. But you’re fighting bugs on Geonosha. And battle droids, even if they’re way more menacing than they ever were in the prequel movies. They may bleed oil, wear a metallic gray paint job (rather than the orange seen in the movies), and the super battle droids may be some tough motherfuckers, but they’re still battle droids, which are inherently lame. There’s a pitiful tie in with General Grieveous in the form of his bodyguards, which flip and hop around like Chinese acrobats, with electric sticks. They’re not threatening in the slightest, more annoying than anything, and serve only to give General Grieveous an excuse to make an unwarranted appearance.

What I’m getting down to is that in Republic Commando you are playing, in essence, a proto super stormtrooper. I wish the devs would’ve been allowed to run with that rather than get tied to the time frame that stuck them between the two prequel movies. I hope we can get another Republic Commando game, but I’m not expecting it. This franchise has legs, that get cut out from beneath it by the movies it was made to support.

The story is a lot more cohesive, and more interesting. It’s not just a dude killing everyone in his way to get to the person who killed his wife and daughter. There are different motives and they change, and the characters change. The game is short as hell, but so was the first Max Payne, and with less frustration.

Max Payne 2 is a better game than the original and, for all intents and purposes, you shouldn’t feel compelled to play through the first Max Payne before you play this one. It is a truly great game.

Visceral Games is now making Dante’s Inferno. It’s a God of War-esque button smasher. They took a low-key walk through hell and social commentary, and turned it into blood soaked tits and violence. It is a remarkable departure from the source as well as an enormous shift from the tone of Dead Space.

Dead Space has a lot of action and violence but it’s deliberate. You’re encouraged to conserve ammo by taking aimed shots at limbs. There’s an equipment upgrade system that allows you to choose what upgrades you want and how you get to them. It has a lot of scares and shocks but it’s also nearly impossible to fight off a crowd by panicking and wildly blasting away. There’s only two actual guns in the game! The rest are industrial tools!

After Dante’s Inferno, Visceral’s focus will shift to Dead Space 2. There is so little information that has excited me about Dead Space 2 that it may drop off of my wanted list entirely. From what I’ve read, it features more wide open environments, more aggressive gameplay, and a no-longer-silent protagonist! So what, they’re turning Dead Space into Dante’s Inferno in space?

For being an unreleased and, thus far, barely developed game, I am amazingly bitter and unexcited about what should be an impossibly easy sale.