Game Review: The Bureau - XCOM Declassified

Format Played: PC

The Bureau was hard-wired from the start to receive a difficult reception among critics and gamers.

Nervously sheltering under the XCOM franchise umbrella, it came across as a desperate turnaround from the first-person investigative shooter initially touted to the raging screams of a million neckbeard fanboys. More independent observers such as myself though that original vision looked like an interesting, creepy blend of The X-Files and L.A. Noire, but instead we have been delivered a more tactical third-person cover-based effort with some very light RPG elements slathered on top.

A good decision to have made? A big old "Nah" with some caveats.

With the re-emergence of XCOM as king of the turn-based strategy planet, a more immediate game in the XCOM universe seemed less of a sacrilege-fest for fans. But The Bureau ends up straddling so many fences that it forms a far less than coherent whole. Its setting is the ace in the hole in many ways, as 1950s small-town America is cracked open by towering (if generic) alien architecture and strewn with high school-jacketed corpses and infected humans. If there isn’t a body hidden somewhere who has been designed to look like The Fonz, the developers have missed a trick. Graphically it impresses as well, lush and complex environments unfolding ahead of you with nary a glitch to be seen aside from a somewhat odd framerate hit that some PC users (including myself) have reported.

The gameplay is split between combat missions and the central hub – in the former, you roll forward into setpiece arena after setpiece arena, splatting aliens with a range of satisfying powers and weapons. Time can be slowed significantly while you pass out orders to the two agents accompanying you, which allows for tactical decisions while remaining under the hammer to a certain degree. It’s a fine balance which the game just about achieves – and when it all comes together, it can feel very satisfying to pop your agents into flanking positions, slamming down turrets and airstrikes as you do so. A hefty flaw is that the targeting reticule for positioning or powers cannot move through cover – a bizarre decision that wastes your time by navigating the inevitable chest-high walls just to tell your agents to do the same. Enemy AI is fairly competent and will ruthlessly flank you if given half a chance, though the same compliment cannot be paid to your team members who have a tendency to try to incubate grenades flung at them by sitting on them and producing a less-than-pleasing explosion baby.

Unfortunately by the end of the game the satisfaction in combat has dulled through repetition, with no new alien types showing their faces after about one-third of the way through. Given the variation available from both the older games and the reboot, it’s a shame only 4 or so different aliens actually make an appearance. It’s justified in the backstory somewhat, but you get the impression throughout that said backstory has been constructed to limit the amount of work needed rather than to fit any kind of overall writing decision. Perhaps even more unforgivable is the amount of time you spend running onwards between encounters – some worldbuilding is attempted in these sections with dialogue and scenes of devastation, but more often than not you are just running through empty corridors or woodland clearings. Not since Space Marine has one game made you rack up the cardio so much for no obvious reason beyond padding.

Agents themselves have some levelling up within very limited skill trees, with a paltry 5 levels handed out to them while your protagonist rent-a-gruff William Carter has 10. There’s not a tremendous amount of variation on show and they're mostly standard powers veteran gamers will have experienced a thousand times before, with the likes of criticals, healing, aggro buffs all showing their faces. All four agent classes are fairly distinctive and have some use on the battlefield, though I found my favourite two fairly early on and stuck with them throughout. Much has been made of the agent permadeath in an effort to evoke the main franchise, though it’s hardly much of an imposition on anything but the hardest setting.

Which leaves us with the between-mission central hub area. Oh, the dull horrors of this. The hours spent strolling (since running is turned off inside your base) around corridors to have a boring conversation with a non-character in order that they can send me to talk to someone else. Or, occasionally, on a mini-mission that will likely involve strolling down further corridors to find something of little-to-no interest. For a completionist like me, it’s torture. For more normal human beings, you will escape some of this but are still railroaded through enough monotonous chats where Carter animatedly pounds his fist into an open palm so often that he seems to be punishing it for horribly onanistic crimes committed during his sleeping hours.

In short: these bits are awful tepid shite, and they should in no way have made it through to the finished game. It’s not often you’ll read a gaming writer clamour for cutscenes, even an amateurish one like myself, but all of this could be achieved with two minutes of inter-mission exposition. Said exposition would be drab however it is presented, since the story is largely not even worth mentioning. Aliens, protagonist with a haunted past, fighting back, this is our independence day, blah blah blah.

In fact, I get the feeling that the hub was inserted intentionally to break up the repetition of the combat. If this was the case, then they succeeded only in wedging deeper monotony into the middle of some light monotony. ‘Grats.

So what are we left with? Chunky combat that slowly exposes a lack of depth throughout the length of the game and interminable inter-mission sections. It looks pretty, it has a unique setting and towards the end manages to have a bit of narrative fun with the concept of third-person control within gaming. But none of that is ultimately enough to recommend a purchase above bargain-price. There are the bare bones of a decent game here, but the whole experience comes across as a polished rushjob.  

Game Review: The Secret World (Five-Day Trial Thoughts)

Format Played: PC

As no doubt all of you out there are aware, it's really difficult to review an MMO. I'm sure you're nodding your heads furiously. Most of you have probably tried your hand at it, since we're in the 21^st century and therefore slaves to pointless technology.

Inevitably the depth and sprawling content of a high-profile MMO cannot be devoured fully without a few months of commitment, and the information that influences your opinions may well be partially or fully obviated the next time an update or expansion kicks in. I'm fairly convinced that writing an MMO review in the first six months of release is utterly pointless, since that seems to be roughly how long it takes for the bugs to be ironed out and the playerbase to settle happily into its routines of grinding, griefing and massively over-reacting on the game forums.

And even when things have settled down, gamechanging expansions can slip into place that make any review useful only as long as it takes for the developer to open up a new game zone where players can play magical alien toasters and thus open up the crafting system to baked products.

With that in mind, here is a pointless two month-in quasi-review of The Secret World. This has been inspired purely by their lovely five day free trial offer, which seems to set no limits whatsoever other than time, and also seems to be hitting the general public early – no doubt brought forward by an apparent low number of initial subscribers and the slow creeping realisation at Funcom that opening up an MMO without a free-to-play model is a shockingly foolish thing to do in the current economic and gaming climate. Especially when your not-quite-AAA game charges more than the likes of World Of Warcraft, EVE and The Lord Of The Rings Online. And especially especially when you release your game in the run-up to the largest clusterfuck of AAA MMO releases in quite some time – with Guild Wars 2,, Warcraft's Mists Of Pandaria and LOTRO's Riders Of Rohan all looming heftily on the horizon like some kind of giant subscriptionless panda on a horse.

It's irrelevant to any review of The Secret World as to what they decide to charge to play it, though. If it is your kind of entertainment then any remotely reasonable price is worth paying, whether it be a subscription or a one-off payment. I have often been baffled at the puzzlement of the more mainstream gamer over people paying monthly for an MMO, before toddling off to town and slapping down £40 for 3-4 hours of modern military shooter action. £10 per hour of entertainment vs. £10 per month of entertainment. Mathematics solves all arbitrary arguments!

I suppose I should actually start talking about the game here, then. With the caveat that I have played 5 days worth of it, reached the second map of the first zone and played around to a minimal degree with different character builds. Prior to downloading it my overriding notions from reading other media were that it had been praised for the setting, the writing of Ragnar Tørnquist and that the classless system had received lots of attention prior to release but not much after the public actually got their hands on it.

In a startling break from the norm, I am here to tell you that the setting and writing are great and the classless system is a little bit lacklustre.

But the setting and writing are really good. Really, really good actually. Good for a video game in general, let alone an MMO, which is a genre often plagued by an overabundance of boar quests and massive spiky shoulderpads. Within The Secret World you play a newly imbued practitioner of the martial magic arts, recruited by one of three covert factions who manage to break free from the conspiracy theory cliché that surround them to become genuinely interesting allegiances in a three-way cold war over who exactly gets to curbstomp evil.

Just an average London home.

There are The Illuminati, somewhat eschewing their usual sinister tendencies to become fun-time fratboy political manipulators. The Templars, who leaven their goody-goody natures with a touch of stuffy class prejudice and lovely old-fashioned fascism. And finally the Dragon, who are arcane chaos mathematicians blending magic with scientific experimentation to discover the best path to the future. All of them have impressively constructed hub cities that bleed atmosphere, especially the Templar launchpad of London which is a skillful blend of London Below, crime drama cliché and Diagon Alley. Although as with the other zones the whole 'secret society' theme is somewhat clouded by the seeming high level of knowledge that everyone outside of the societies possesses about them. It's tough to work up a sufficiently spooky feeling about getting inducted into the centuries-old Templars when they are getting name-checked in the local pub and have massive banners outside their gaff advertising their presence. On the whole though, the environmental design and writing more than makes up for this.

Oh yes. The writing. I have not had the pleasure of playing a game written by Tørnquist before, but my hopes weren't high. The kind of writing that is favoured by the average gamer (let alone MMO convert) is not my kind of writing, and usually involves protagonists called Wolf Hawkenblade or something. So I was hugely surprised when his characters started off on dry, amusing and Whedon-esque pop culture-heavy monologues that I was actually interested in hearing. They manage to pull you into the game, provoke a few giggles and build a slimy horror atmosphere all at the same time. The Secret World had the potential to be a very po-faced place, and the characters you meet and their witty opinions on the awful things happening around them help to ease you in smoothly. Though there is in fact a character called Wolf. Oh well. I'll let you off, Funcom.

In fact, the excellence in execution of a seemingly incongruous blend of humour and horror in a darker-than-real-life setting initially made me feel like I was playing Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines as an MMO. That's a hell of a compliment.

It's just a shame that there is no way for you to actually interact with said characters other than listening to their opening quest or cutscene monologues and clicking on them for extra flavour speech. Your trusty avatar remains stoic and mute throughout, which while no doubt cutting down on the problems engendered by introducing actual roleplaying into an MMO (as seen in The Old Republic, where a brave attempt by Bioware results in little-to-no actual consequence on personality, quests or plot) does also leave you oddly disconnected from the supposed conversation. Even a stock male/female character voice without any dialogue choice might have helped with this. Though if any MMO was screaming out for actual roleplaying and plot choice, it would be this one.

The campest swift travel in town.

The (secret) world itself is bloated with detail and exceptional mood-setting touches. In-jokes for horror and pop culture afficionados abound. Lore pickups are strewn across the landscape and deliver information to you about areas, history and factions piece by piece until you have the whole sordid story. The first zone proper is set in what can charitably be called a Lovecraft pastiche, an island town off the coast of Maine called – ahem – Kingsmouth. A fog has rolled in off the ocean and brought with it horrible aquatic monsters that go about converting the inhabitants into rabid zombies. All three factions promptly send their operatives into the ensuing survivalist warzone, and before long you are gallivanting around town wasting the undead and their fishy chums. It has been said elsewhere that later zones are not as engaging as the first, and given how superb this first one is I am not surprised. And it's lucky that it is a pleasure to navigate, because swift travel is extremely limited. You're going to be running around. A lot.

Solomon Island, and Kingsmouth itself in particular, is swarming with a beautifully blended mish-mash of traditional and 21^st century-horror that leaves no bones unturned. Lovecraft fish monsters? Check. Resurrected cultists of unclear and unsavoury nature? Check. Weird new age religionists of uncertain motive? Check. Historical mass graves indicating some appalling past the town would rather forget? Check. Witch trials, mining fires, animated scrap golems, mud monsters, supernatural serial killers, haunted woods, kids fighting the forces of evil from a secret treehouse, Native American burial grounds, Men In Black, portals to hell, sinister occult mercenaries and remote-controlled plane perverts. All this and a pair of dogs called Tango and Cash. There is so much going on that the nuance and overall plot could very easily get lost amidst several seasons of The X-Files happening at once, and it really is a huge tribute to the writing team and designers that focus remains in firm control for a gamer who pays sufficient attention.

This is strongly aided by the design decision to severely limit the number of quests that can be carried out at once to the main story mission, one main mission, one group mission and three side missions. These probably require some clarification in and of themselves. The main story mission seems to be identical across all three factions, and is tied in to resolving the dark events happening across the zone in general. Main missions are split across the regular smack-up-the-mobs fare of typical MMOs, sabotage missions that incorporate stealth and escort mechanics and investigation missions that provide a cerebral challenge. There are also infrequent main missions delivered straight to you by a faction member when you manage to rank up within said faction, providing a minor sense of narrative difference between the three. Side missions are picked up from environmental objects and often contain a short but flavourful story unto themselves, rarely straying into the straight collect-'em-up mentality of MMO quest filler.

Main missions in general are handled via a set of progressive tiers capped with reporting back in to your faction via a text hand-in that removes the need to return to the NPC who gave you it in the first place. This, in combination with the mission limit, makes sure that you focus on the progression of one story and keeps your character flowing in one direction with no need for backtracking – which fits right in with the atmospheric, story-telling strengths of the game. However, this also means that missions often end with no sense of resolution regarding the bloke or gal who handed over the mission to you in the first place. Are they pleased with what has happened? Horrified? Strangely aroused? You'll never know, which is a shame given how well they are rounded out in their mission-granting monologues. Also, if you want to pick up a follow-up mission from them (albeit they only stock one or two missions in total, though most are repeatable should you wish to indulge in grinding) you will have to head back to them anyway.

Many players, enjoying a transport hub & chatting in random abbreviations.

The tier system means that even combat-heavy missions have a sense of story to them, and this is exacerbated for the investigation missions where your lateral thinking and puzzling abilities will genuinely be put to the test. If you're after a bit of mindless clicking producing that sweet endorphin high, these are not for you. They variously include object puzzles, scavenger hunts, scrutinising in-game images for details, hunting for real-life information and trawling fake faction sites set up by Funcom for the purposes of secreting data in amongst flavour information. It's all very fourth-wall destroying, and an utterly fantastic notion that seems so simple as to be obvious in our world of viral marketing nonsense. Some of these are tricky stuff, and I don't mind telling you that I was stumped to the point of Googling for spoilers on more than one occasion. Each time I regretted not just giving it more thought.

A contrast to the superb investigation missions are the frankly half-implemented sabotage missions, which commit the cardinal sin of introducing stealth mechanics into a game that has not been designed with them in mind. Negotiating laser grids, security cameras and such often proves to be raw luck combined with trial and error rather than skill and execution. This is made more frustrating by the one strike and dead mentality that pervades them, with rooms blowing up once you make a single mistake. That doesn't seem like effective planning for a monstrous secret society to me. Contracting and rebuilding costs alone would put them perpetually in the red.

As a whole the game seems to put a great focus on solo play – in the opening area of the Solomon Island zone there was a grand total of one group dungeon (the only type of group mission, as far as I can see), and open enemy tapping ensures that if you help out someone being smacked around by a huge crab monster you are liable to receive thanks rather than be screamed at for losing them valuable XP. There's an ongoing wrangle over this solo-friendly trend within MMOs, and one that I can see both sides of. But for something as immersive as The Secret World, it feels more appropriate than in many other games. Indeed, a strong argument could be made that this would actually have made a much better solo or co-op game than an MMO. If a similar non-MMO followup was made, I would certainly snap it up without question.

So what do we have so far? Great world and story-telling plus an intriguing mission system that just about edges past the line of its own flaws to feel refreshing and engaging. That pretty much leaves character building and combat. Which is where we start to falter and wheeze, carrying the weight of more than a decade of MMO convention.

Much was made of the classless and level-less system of character progression before release, but both of these prove pretty much to be non-starters. A character progresses via building of Skill and Ability points through an experience bar, picking up chunks of the tasty XP stuff via killing nasties, completing missions and gathering achievements and lore. This is traditional levelling up without a number attached to it, which only serves to confuse. Tagging missions with 'normal', 'hard' and 'very hard' based on your current ability and skill levels is all well and good, but it lacks nuance. If my invisible levels matter, I would much rather know exactly where I stand and what is expected for someone entering into a mission before I pick it up. Due to the nature of the ability system, levelling certainly matters less than in other MMOs – but it is still a big deal, and when something is a big deal in a game I want it to be as clear and transparent as possible.

The Ability Wheel, in all its wheel-like glory. 

Skills in The Secret World are possibly the most futile and uninteresting character progression system I have ever encountered, based primarily around very small incremental increases to your damage and survivability while also allowing you to equip better gear. Both are something that are just done for you upon achieving another level in most MMOs, and here assigning them just feels like dull busywork. Abilities are slightly better and come loaded into an ability wheel that is divided down via a choice of nine weapons (a mix of ranged and melee weapons and magic styles) that your character can diversify into. At any one point you can carry two weapons and thus utilise abilities from their wheel spokes, but if you are prepared to do some switching around then your actual ability choices are completely unlimited. Character decks are provided for guidelines on how to build effective character builds, but as pseudo-classes they remain open.

At any one time you can have 7 active abilities (i.e. combat attacks and buffs/heals) and 7 passive abilities (augmenting combat attacks and buffs) out, though these can again be switched at any time out of combat. All of this has the potential to lead to a fantastic and versatile combat/grouping system, but for several problems. The first is that the holy trinity of tank, healer and DPS is still there in full force. You can branch out into some element of crowd control or debuffer but the limited number of abilities you can utilise at one time makes you a one- or two-trick pony. Your role in a group (or your solo play technique) will largely be defined by the abilities you choose to stack, and while it is good that a player feels like they are defining their build themselves it would be very easy to construct a broken character or an ineffectual ability deck. This is easily remedied through free restacking, but it still jars that value judgements have to be made between abilities that on first glance appear broadly similar.

I suppose that smacks of laziness, but the abilities my primary character gained upon a few days of progression really didn't seem all that different. I was just hitting nasties with my hammer in a slightly different animation, with no sense of change or power increase. A couple of abilities I had to wade through on secondary spokes seemed actively worse than my starting ones, and many others differed only in about 8 points worth of damage per hit against foes running up to 4/3k in health points. It was all a choice between hit 'em, hit 'em slightly harder and hit' em less hard but get a protective buff for 8 seconds. That is even less interesting to play than it is to read.

Smacking fish monsters with glowing magic mining picks - surprisingly dull.

All this is exaggerated by the fact that while it is obvious Funcom were going for a more action-based combat than your average MMO (limited ability decks, dodgeable telegraphed enemy attacks, chunky brightly-coloured ability icons), in execution it provides a hell of a grind. It is a genre blend that others have attempted recently - DC Universe Online springs to mind - and it is most definitely yet to be perfected. The majority of mobs take a good 30 seconds to a minute to bash through solo by rotating between two or three attacks, and you inevitably find yourself weaving around the ones you don't have to engage within an hour of starting play. Given the effort that has gone into engaging the player in the rest of the game, this is highly disappointing. On the occasions when you fight a whole bunch of weaker opponents the combat becomes much more acceptable – enemies go down faster, the usually more visually impressive AOE damage abilities become appropriate and the combat as a whole often resolves itself quicker. And considering that the strengths of the game lie in exploration and atmosphere, there are a hell of a lot of areas that are so swamped with mobs that you stand no chance of strolling through them solo without a lot of careful fighting or frustrating dying.

Speaking of dying, are we really still using the whole navigate-back-to-your-body-as-a-ghost thing in 2012? Really, are we? Astonishing.

There are various other bits and pieces to round out the typical MMO roster of features, but from limited play they don't seem to offer anything new. Item augmentation and crafting, guilds (termed cabals here), achievements for killing 100 of a thing, limited PvP and suchlike. I'm fine with these things, but from what I saw they don't rock my boat enough to go into any detail here. Gear is limited to talismans and weapons, and seems less numerous than in many similar games, with only 7 talisman slots at my character's paltry current level. Appearance is based on outfit rather than gear itself, which makes for a pleasant change and is appropriate to the setting. Information on gear, stats, how to pick up lovely new outfits and the wardrobe itself are both poorly explained by a help system that is by turns very useful and massively useless. 

In addition, the build is still buggy from launch. I encountered two in partiular more than once – the tendency for a doorway or object spawn to simply no-show, thus stalling you on a mission tier with no easily apparent option to quit the whole mission and start again. Even when transplanting with a new main mission and thus 'pausing' the bugged one, when unpausing I was still stuck on the bugged tier. I am sure a workaround exists, but given my limited time I simply moved on. In a way more frustrating is the tendency for mini-bosses to dash off a short distance and reset to full health, sometimes dependent on your moving outside a poorly demarcated area and sometimes just seemingly at random. It is somewhat churlish to complain about non-gamebreaking bugs in a game as unbelievably complex as an MMO, but two months after launch these are major items that should not be cropping up so frequently.

So that's my five days with The Secret World, more or less. It is an odd and uneven gaming experience, but also one with unique strengths for the genre. I suspect it'll be a game that builds an extremely loyal and setting-obsessed fanbase (of which I may well end up one, being a sucker for story and atmosphere), especially if the less appealing quirks are smoothed out via tweaks, expansions and a well-executed free-to-play system. That might be optimistic, given the recent flurry of unhappy news regarding its ongoing development from Funcom. Still, in these days of photocopying Warcraft into different IPs, The Secret World is to be applauded for providing something genuinely different. If you're after a solo-friendly MMO that will spin a great yarn for you in a brilliantly detailed environment, this may be for you. Although ironically, given the focus on solo play, you might get the best out of the game by duo-ing up with a friend. That way you can chew through the endless mobs with due haste while arguing over which ancient occult tome you have just Googled holds the clue to finding the forbidden labyrinth of the fish-people. And I actually can't imagine a better way to spend a Saturday night than that.  

Game Review: Batman - Arkham City

Format Played: X-Box 360

May as well lead with the obvious: this is not a very objective review. I am a big DC Comics fanboy, a moderate Batman fanboy and Batman: Arkham Asylum is my favourite console game of the current generation.

Well, not is. Was.

If you asked a generic crop of gamers prior to 2009 whether a superhero title (which wasn't even affiliated with a movie or other media release) would become one of the most popular critical picks of the decade, you would be laughed out of whatever filthy stinkhole you had managed to gather them together in. And yet here we are, poring over the follow-up to Rocksteady's acclaimed original and wondering how in the hell they got it all so right.

Arkham City follows more or less straight on from the events of Arkham Asylum - a considerable section of Gotham has been walled off following a series of convenient catastrophes that have left it badly damaged and partly-flooded, and former asylum governor and certifiable lunatic Quincy Sharp has become Mayor. These two events result in a perfect storm of most of the city's thugs and supervillain types being 'incarcerated' within the disaster zone - enter Batman, stage right.

It's a setting and story as masterfully crafted as the first installment, with the decaying Arkham City as best supporting actor. As an environment it is potentially unmatched - neon glowing over Gothic architecture, gargoyles leering alongside ever-vigilant security cameras and helicopters that are both monitored by the twisted prison overseer Hugo Strange. Graphically the console experience is almost peerless, particularly in terms of lighting and textures - though there is some pop-in on the latter at times. The smallest of details become the ones that pull you in - the way the Dark Knight's cowl slowly frosts over as the snow continues to fall, the waypoints set by the player that are marked by the Bat Signal shining over the location.

Compared to other open world games the total area is lacking, but it is the sheer quantity and quality of gameplay packed into this space that puts many other game designers to shame. As well as a meaty and thoroughly engrossing main campaign that pulls in characters from the expanded Batman universe of the comics (with a hefty nod to the '90s cartoon series, as one might expect considering series veterans Kevin Conroy and Mark Hammill are back on board as Batman and Joker), Arkham City is littered with other activities. There are a series of four Catwoman missions threaded through Batman's story - entirely new tactics are needed as you whiplash and claw your way around as the faster but more vulnerable Selina Kyle.

Padding out the main missions are side quests are of varying length and depth, but mostly excellent. And varied, too. One minute you may be co-ordinating a sequence of enigmatic arcane sigils left on rooftops by a mysterious stranger, the next you will be analysing a crime scene to pinpoint the bullet trajectory left by a gun-for-hire who needs putting down. Said crime scene analysis manages to feel like a massive step-up from the limited detective sections present in Arkham Asylum, despite not offering anything fundamentally new. As with most elements in the game, it is all about implementation and the remarkably intuitive controls.

These side quests frequently involve one of a glut of Bat-villians who pop in for brief but frequently engaging cameos, leaving you wanting more. A genuinely unnerving Mad Hatter is a highlight, and is probably the closest Arkham City comes to the fourth-wall breaking Scarecrow sections of the first game.

As well as the new side quests, there is the return of Riddler trophies and puzzles for you to hunt down, this time spiced up with the chance to rescue hostages from a series of deathtraps along the way. The sheer range of options to pursue as you make your way into Arkham City for the first time can be somewhat intimidating, and indeed the opening hour or so of the game is a slight hiccup in terms of pacing. It never fails to excite, but for those gamers who have returned time and again to the far more linear original it may jar somewhat.

Throughout the writing and voice acting veers from respectable to exceptional, with Conroy and Hammill in particular providing the finest performances of their decades-long roles as the respective icons. Fan service is prevalent, with Rocksteady's love of the source material clearly shining through. As with the first installment, you will perhaps have a head start on elements such as Riddles and guessing the plot twists before they occur if you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Batman. That's not to say that you will enjoy it less if you don't, mind. It just adds extra spice for those individuals lucky/tragic enough to have such insight. The conclusion of the main campaign manages to be emotive, powerful and apt - three things that are lacking in most games, and unheard of in superhero games.

That's the content sorted, then. "But what of the control and gameplay itself, you vicious misanthrope?" I hear you scream in a thrashing fury.

Well, I am firmly of the opinion that one of the marks of good game design is the ability to make a game fun even when you are traversing the environment in order to get to the good bits. And so to the likes of Red Dead Redemption's horseplay and Assassin's Creed's turbo-parkour we can now add the Caped Crusader swooping and grappling around a wretched urban hellhole. Further gadgetry opened up later in the game enhances this, allowing you to slingshot yourself into the air at high speed and dive/updraft yourself for massively extended airtime. While exhilarating, this does suffer somewhat from a lack of fine control - which doesn't affect enjoyment of the main storyline or most side quests at all, but certainly makes obtaining some Riddler trophies and making it through Augmented Reality challenges as much luck as judgement.

Combat and stealth operate on much the same principles as the original - the former tightened and more fluid than ever, with Batman now able to counter multiple enemy attacks at once. The animation is both more varied and more brutal, and the first time you crack two thug's heads against each other while kicking another in the face you may well suffer a mild embolism while gurgling in inarticulate joy.  Gadgets have been worked into combat far more slickly as well, allowing you to set explosive traps and electrify bad guys flawlessly while spinning between them with fists and feet flying. A level of complexity has been added with armoured and shielded enemies, each of which must be dealt with by using specific takedowns.

Stealth is perhaps the least altered of all the game mechanics - which is probably for the best, since it was the undoubted high point of Arkham Asylum - and mainly consists of sneaking around picking off gun-toting victims one by one with a slowly creeping (and potentially disastrous) sense of omnipotence. Again, extra equipment has been parcelled out to both Batman and his nefarious foes to create a sense of slow escalation. Most of the technology, upgrades and combos for all gameplay elements are tied in to a levelling system that manages to throw access to sweet new devices at you just when they become very handy indeed.

When you are finished with the main package and side quests, a task which could certainly take 15 hours or more, there is a veritable smorgasbord of challenge maps and campaigns to take on. These are split into combat and stealth maps, with medals to obtain via high scores and specific takedowns per map. It certainly doesn't provide the depth of a prolonged multiplayer or co-op option, but is a potentially significant timesink if the rest of the game left you wanting more. Which it will.

Arkham City is undoubtedly my favourite game of this console generation, supplanting the first in almost every way that matters. It is a triumph of both style and substance, but perhaps the best thing one can say about Arkham City is that - even more than the original - it makes you feel like Batman. And if you have never wanted to be Batman, I'm not sure you even qualify as human.

Game Review: Warhammer 40,000 - Space Marine

Format Played: X-Box 360

Oh, I remember the days when all of Games Workshop's non-tabletop gaming output consisted of chunkily rendered, gaudily coloured pixels moving jerkily across a one-tone green background. Hell, I remember when collecting an army for one of their tabletop wargames cost less than the GDP of an emergent African nation.

But then THQ came along with the elegantly designed and balanced Dawn Of War series, first spitting out the original RTS base-building title which became a flood of expansions and then a sequel that removed many of the original's hardcore RTS elements in favour of an RPG-lite approach that proved an interesting if audience-splitting experiment.

And now they bring us their first foray into a more action-based Games Workshop release, the clunkily titled Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. Unfortunately the title isn't the only thing that is clunky. But I digress. What have they got right? Well, THQ have lost none of their obvious respect for the IP. For the uninitiated, Warhammer 40k portrays a galaxy of unending war, where fantasy tropes such as orcs and elves have been transplanted into a Gothic far-future where they spend most of their time murdering the hell out of each other. The poster boys of Warhammer 40k are undoubtedly the Space Marines - genetically-modified totalitarian religious maniacs who lead humanity on an endless crusade to purge the stars of the unclean filth of other races. It's a setting that is much-emulated, particularly in the world of gaming where many FPS lead roles are filled by suspiciously large armour-clad marines who do the main part of their marine-ing in space. The irony was not lost on 40k fanboys when internet forums lit up with refrains of "Oh no, not another shooty game with space marines in." Lol, facepalm, delicious ironing etc.

The setting is portrayed beautifully, and as Captain Titus you feel like a suitably inhuman bulky juggernaut. Imperial Guardsmen (humanity's more prosaic soldiers) view you with awe, referring to you as 'my Lord' inbetween bowing and scraping. Orks are appropriately brutal, acceptably savage and perhaps too Cockney. But they come from a long, proud tradition of Cockney orcs so we'll let that one slide.

The graphics and environments are well-designed and perhaps surprisingly well-executed for a relatively low-profile release, but the latter come with the caveat that they are extremely repetitive.

Repetitive. Oh, yes. There is definitely more to say along the line of repetitive.

Open door. Large wave of Orks and/or other spoiler-ridden bad guys. Shoot/carve them to little meaty chunks. Open door. Empty room. Open door. Empty room. Open door. Ammo stockpile. Open door. Large wave of Orks. Rinse and repeat. At one point early on I was fairly sure the game had glitched, as I seemed to be walking through a very long series of empty decaying Gothic structures with nothing to do other than trudge onwards and hope something grunting and green turned up so I could bury my chainsword in its face. There is a severe lack of variety on display. This follows through to the weapons, which while satisfying in a weighty and powerful sense, lack any real punch or much to really distinguish them from each other. Each subsequent heavy weapon you obtain feels like a slight improvement from the last, to the point where the heavy vehicle-destroying Lascannon from old-school Warhammer 40k feels like an upgraded sniper rifle.

The combat itself is bloody and enjoyable in a staid fashion, though suffering from a lack of complexity. Close combat is simple move sequences that are sometimes reduced to flailing around and button mashing in the vague hope that you will decapitate/stun the correct enemy out of the twelve or so surrounding you, some of which will be inevitable off-screen due to a camera that hovers much too close to your massive form. You will need to master both ranged and close combat to get through the campaign - indeed, for a 2011 release it is a relatively challenging game even on a Normal difficulty setting. This is partially due to the health system, which consists of two tiers. There is your regenerating Armour layer and your standard health layer, which can only be topped up through lengthy execution moves carried out against stunned enemies. This is an acceptable system, if not particularly original. However, it doesn't sit very well in a game where enemies are thrown at you in massive waves and have no problem with savagely mauling you from all sides while the execution animation is going on. In turn, this means that if you want to top up your health without dying you will need to save executions for the last enemy remaining onscreen. Some combat takes quite a while, and is populated with enemy types who can one-shot you off your feet unless you are in tip-top shape. This may well be working as intended and I might be a whinging privileged gaming pansy, but it doesn't feel right. What is the point in introducing such a relatively unintuitive health mechanic if the player feels punished for implementing it other than when the action is finished with? All of this is exacerbated by the aforementioned 'bulky juggernaut' feel of your protagonist - even with a slightly Space Marine-inappropriate roll evade thrown in, you sometimes feel unable to direct your movement within combat and subsequently just end up sitting there taking the punishment.

There are two boss fights bunched in near the climax of the game, and three or so action setpieces which feel distinctly copy-and-paste - the outstanding sequence consists of an assault across a ruined bridge alongside squads of your fellow Ultramarines and Blood Ravens, but it comes far into the campaign and is too little, too late. One well-implemented feature is the use of Assault Marine jump-packs sporadically through the campaign, which are both fun and devastating to use. You make use of them for about 20 minutes in total though - nowhere near enough to lift the general ennui. It's sad to say, but more than anything this portrayal of total war in a grim far future feels dull. As with any IP that has a legion of loyal fans, enjoyment will strongly depend on your love for the source material. But during much of the campaign I felt that the setting was all that was dragging me onwards - the story certainly isn't much to speak of, and some decent voice acting by Mark Strong as Captain Titus is pretty much wasted.

Out-of-the-box multiplayer consists of two modes - a standard team deathmatch-style Annihilation, and Capture & Control with strategic points that must be occupied by teams to earn victory points. Nothing terribly innovative there. Loadouts are determined by the now standard level-based unlocks, perks and class choices. There are three of the latter on offer - Tactical, Assault and Devastator (standard, jump-pack and heavy weapons for anyone not fluent in Warhammer 40k). Oddly, many of the weapon and class choices you can make in multiplayer have a varied feel that is lacking in the campaign - perhaps because it is a choice to use them, rather than being prescribed to you for particular sequences. And there is a certain visceral thrill to be had by slamming onto fellow players from on high as an Assault Marine while screaming "Death From Above!" loud enough to wake up your cat. For nerdy fanboys there is also an excellent customisation system to ensure your multiplayer efforts can be portrayed in whatever Space Marine Chapter colour scheme your feverish desires require.

All in all, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine doesn't offer anything more than many other Action/FPS blends on the market right now other than a decent, original setting. And it delivers a distinctly substandard experience on other areas, leaving me feel like I had just played my way through an average PS2 action-shooter that had experienced a graphic revamp for a special edition. Overall score - bleh marks out of meh.

Game Review: Gears Of War 3

Format Played: X-Box 360

If there is one phrase that I think defines the Gears Of War series as a whole, and which is more appropriate than ever for the third installment, it is 'identity crisis'. That might seem odd for a game renowned for it's overly-muscled, gruff protagonists and relatively simplistic tales of running through drab and decaying Gothic environments liberally sprinkled with chest-high walls. But I assure you it's true. Evidence? Oh yes.

Evidence A: Those emotive trailers, picking out the futility of war and a sense of impending doom with somber acoustic music trilling in the background. They work well, as a study in contrast. I like it when pseudo-space marines are chainsawing big ugly monsters to death along to Sun Kil Moon and Mazzy Star. Hardly representative of the actual mood of the games though, sadly.

Evidence B: Attempts at stirring our soft spots in cutscenes - GoW2 had the Maria scene, GoW3 has similar efforts for various characters. 

Evidence C: An ever-so-slow reveal of what is going on behind the scenes. What is the deal with Marcus' father, Queen Myrrah, the Locust themselves, dodgy research facilities etc. 

There are, however, significant unmountable chest-high walls for the success of the Gears series as a poignant tale of war and lost love on some future alien planet. Firstly, the characters are drawn permanent marker-thickly. These are individuals who struggle to have one dimension. I can't really hang on to them as people if in my head the core members of Delta Squad can be reduced down to Macho, Sad, Sciencey and Racist Caricature. Don't even get me started on the supporting cast, who seem to exist purely because the writers behind the series decided that whooping idiots increase in likeability when grouped together. You can shove in all the stirring cutscenes you like, but when they are bookended with endless sequences of the same character hollering "Woooo! Fuck yeah! Get some!" while pumping ammunition into a series of bullet sponges - well, you see where I am going with this. It is par for the course in the games industry and shooters especially, but when the likes of Halo: Reach can make me care somewhat for the fates of similar minimally-developed space marine types with less screentime something has gone badly wrong in the Gears writing camp.

The second problem is that while GoW3 does contain some answers to ongoing plot points within the series, they are by and large not the ones that needed answering. In fact, it almost seems like a whole new story set around discovering the actual identity of the Imulsion. Yep, Imulsion. The fuel they have used in the series so far that poisons people and Locust a bit. That's right. The central plot point of this story is that the fuel source they have mentioned a few times isn't quite what it seems. It's out of nowhere, and hardly riveting.

It occurs to me that I have spent all of this review so far criticising GoW3 for the story, which is so far away from being the central draw for it's fans that I am quite literally shrieking into the void. Gameplay, then.

Exactly the same as the first two installments in the series. Constrained environments, cover shooting, pleasantly physical weaponry. Enemies are far more varied now with the introduction of the Imulsion-corrupted Lambent as a fully-fledged force. They are a slight change of pace, but while they have to be approached more cautiously it is mostly a case of targetting a different soft spot than the head and forgetting any notion of using their explosive carcasses for meatshields or executions. Boss fights and setpieces happen along at a fair rate and are decent enough, but suffer from a lack of ingenuity following on from similar experiences in the first two games. Leviathan, Brumak, Berserker, Corpser, flying bit, siege. Blah, blah. Give us something new, Epic. 

Graphically the series is better-looking than ever, and benefits somewhat from a bit more variation in colour pallette and environment. You spend far more time outdoors than ever before in a Gears game, and a particularly brightly-lit and sunny opening Act (complete with beach area and green vegetation) stands out as visually striking. Some additions have also been made to the arsenal - the Digger is a tactical cover-defying armament that spits out a tunnelling Locust grenade, the Cleaver is a powerful melee weapon (which you drag behind you while running, spitting sparks) that can carve up multiple opponents for a limited time. There are a couple of duller heavy weapons as well, but the sparsity of their usage means their main function is to add variety to the multiplayer and co-op modes.

Speaking of which, said modes are the saving grace of Gears Of War 3. The main campaign is repetitive and bad at pushing the buttons it wants to push - but enjoyable nevertheless, in a meatheaded kind of way. By contrast, the co-op modes in particular feel fresh and fun in a way the campaign struggles to match. Horde mode has added fortifications to the mix, which sees cash earned through wiping out wave after wave of grubs being spent on razorwire, sentry guns, turrets, decoys and the mech-lite Silverback weapons platform to enable further slaughter. It is compulsive, exhilirating and provides a fair challenge - especially through the Boss Waves, which throw the real badasses of the Locust at you so they can tear down everything you have constructed. Success in a sequence of waves will also throw in a challenge for your team to hit - a certain number of headshots or executions in a round, for example. Completed, these result in a cash bonus and some tasty weapon-shaped treats. 

The other co-op mode worth shouting about is Beast, which is fundamentally Horde in reverse. Spawning as a series of ever-increasing Locust nightmares (paid for by earning cash again), you must wipe out a band of desperate Stranded and COG heroes under a time limit. Each wave of the 12 available pitches you against harder groupings until you face Chairman Prescott, the COG Elite and the Hammer Of Dawn. It is a natural follow-up to Horde modes and their copycats in other game franchises, and well-executed to boot. There is a real sense of escalation as you ascend the Locust ranks, and moving up to the likes of the insanely destructive but visually limited Berserker when you started out as a lowly Ticker is extremely satisfying. As a quicker option than Horde, it lets you kick back for twenty minutes or so and conduct some severe violence to undeserving individuals with some nasty creatures. More than 12 waves would have been good, but I can also see the value in a game mode that can be completed in a much shorter timeframe than the epic 50-wave Horde.

The multiplayer is much as you'd expect from most shooters in the 21st century - various familiar game modes, slightly wonky matchmaking and swiftly overrun with people who cannot have very much to do with their time other than play multiplayer Gears Of War 3. Maps are a limited range but fairly varied, undoubtedly to be increased via wallet-sapping and community-splitting DLC. It is all tied together in a experience/levelling system partially cribbed from the likes of Halo and Call Of Duty that pulls playtime together from all areas - including the main campaign - and slowly pushes you toward various non-functional unlocks, ribbons and medals. The latter two are really only for providing player titles, a couple of achievements and further unlocks. Still, it is curiously addictive to see yourself levelling up and have new ribbons added to your Stats area. Which is why it was added in the first place - we are all predictable sheep impressed by little numbers slowly edging their way towards bigger ones.

Gears Of War 3 is the perfect example of single-player gaming stagnation and multiplayer/co-op bloom. While this is the current trajectory of the industry, it is also a worrying trend. There are many gamers who prefer playing on their own, some exclusively so. It would be a shame to alienate them for the sake of further tapping into the lizard brain of the masses, and it would be even more shameful to do so not by failing to incorporate single-player, but by sending it further down the chasm of crappy writing and repetitive gameplay. GoW3 isn't falling yet, but the grip on the edge is sweaty and slipping.

Game Review: Enslaved: Odyssey To The West

Format Played: X-Box 360

I like a good flawed gem of a game, which is lucky for Enslaved: Odyssey To The West. Because while it has many strengths (some of which are moderately groundbreaking for both the genre and the medium), it also has a fair few glaring alarm bells that would scare a lot of gamers away from its charms. And that would be a shame, because it is extremely enjoyable once a rhythm is found from its blend of traditional but clunky gameplay.

One of the primary strengths of Enslaved is the story and writing – somewhat unsurprising given main writing duties were performed by novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland (The Beach / 28 Days Later / Sunshine) and the story itself is a re-imagining of classic Chinese story Journey To The West. Transplanting itself from a fantastical version of ancient China to a post-apocalyptic and overgrown American wasteland where humanity has been decimated by an ambiguously-motivated force of mechs, the setting is largely generic but manages to mark itself out from the pack via the highly detailed, lush environments and a truly striking colour palette. The latter might seem an odd thing to remark upon but after playing 1,001 brown and grey games set in humanity's downtrodden future, the vision of a gloriously multicoloured and vibrant robot apocalypse that Enslaved provides makes you feel that maybe a bit of mechanical terror wouldn't be so bad after all. The visuals are backed by a superbly gentle orchestral score by Nitin Sawhney, making it even easier to lose yourself in the world.

If you have read Journey To The West or watched cheesy '70s TV adaptation Monkey you will be familiar with the main characters. The plot centres around gruff wanderer Monkey, whose nomadic lifestyle has been rudely interrupted by Trip, a capable but naïve young woman who has been left stranded in the ruined remnants of New York. They must travel together back to her home through an unforgiving land while they realise their feelings for each other blah blah blah.

Only it isn't even a single blah. Garland, accentuated by expert motion capture actor Andy Serkis as Monkey and a similarly well-appointed support cast, has managed to weave a genuinely refreshing feel into this well-worn tale. Emotions are portrayed subtly and with conviction. Body language is utilised as much as dialogue, and both are head-and-shoulders above the vast majority of games. Even when sometime comic relief Pigsy happens along his character is portrayed with a depth and feeling that the odd knob gag fails to destroy. While fairly linear and predictable, the story itself is a highly engaging romp that pulls you in and keeps you mashing your buttons until the slightly twisty-turny climax rears its head. If you are familiar with Garland and his opinion-dividing third acts, this will come as no surprise to you. Personally, I enjoyed the hell out of it.

You may have noticed that in that steaming pile of praise there wasn't much to be said about the gameplay. Yes, well. Here comes the slight downer. Enslaved is a fairly straightforward bash 'em up/platformer hybrid, somewhat let down by a lack of innovation and clunky controls. The platforming aspect is lovely to watch, with Monkey's simian agility carrying him with grace and power from structure to structure. However, it is let down by a complete lack of danger or tension – your path is indicated through faintly glowing handholds and it is impossible to fall at any point. Later in the game some effort is made by throwing in flame jets and giant cogs and other such gaming nonsense, but the overall enjoyment granted by this aspect is fleeting and paper-thin. There are rarely multiple routes and the few secret areas you come across (filled with a few collectibles) are both uninteresting and obvious. When the current gaming landscape includes the excellent exploratory platforming of Assassin's Creed and Uncharted, Enslaved suffers badly in comparison.

The combat is somewhat stronger, but still lacking. Monkey's staff handily doubles up as a robo-cruncher and a plasma cannon to take apart pesky enemies from a distance. While both ranged and melee combat are a tad on the simplistic side and hampered by a camera that seems to have trouble making up its mind whether or not to be controlled by the player, there is nothing inherently wrong with them and the combat itself is spread out enough that the presence of only 4 or 5 enemy types throughout the game doesn't irritate. This is discounting the infrequent boss encounters, which are predictably straightforward but fun. There is basic levelling up to be done to weapons, health, shields and the rest of it. As you can tell, nothing spectacular and nothing that hasn't been done better by other games over the past few years. Indeed, the combat system in particular feels like it could have been ripped straight out of a generic PS2 game. There are also stealth-style options available throughout for sneaking up on turrets and mechs using Trip's slightly unexplained distract-o-matic tech, but it's never developed beyond the obvious technique of running a bit closer every time they shoot elsewhere

Occasionally Monkey has the opportunity to use his ‘Cloud’, a glowing disc that allows for vehicle-ish exploration and chase scenes. Like the rest of the game, it’s lovely to look at and fun to play despite being a bit on the awkward side. The storyline is pitched at just the right length for the gameplay to not outstay its welcome, with about 6-8 hours depending on how much time you spend faffing around collecting energy orbs (experience fodder) and masks (story-driven floating weirdness). Replayability is strongly dependent on how much you want to hammer difficulty levels and collectibles, and it'd be hard to make a recommendation to purchase if you want a game to soak up a couple of weeks with.

To sum up: great visuals, story, score, script and mo-capped acting. Mediocre platforming and average combat that prove fun despite themselves. If you are willing to give a game a chance and overlook its lesser qualities in favour of a narrative that rightfully deserves attention, then Enslaved comes highly recommended. If you are someone who games for the challenge, then steer clear. I suspect in the ongoing war between 'cinematic' gaming and 'traditional' gaming (and don't get me started on those two tags), Enslaved might be the most divisive release yet.

Game Review: Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days

Format Played: X-Box 360

I'm going to just get it out there straight away – I am one of the two people who enjoyed Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. To me, it was a slightly clunky cover-based shooter wrapped up in an extremely attractive package. I'm not specifically referring to the graphics, although they had a certain clean shine to them. It was more that the game was distinct from the generic tales of jingoistic military adventure or battling otherworldly monstrosities that clutter up the shooter market. IO Interactive produced a grim and nihilistic tale around two sociopathic criminals, and the thing that stuck with me about Kane (utterly amoral mercenary) and Lynch (lonely and lost schizophrenic) was how very, very pathetic they are. From the beginning of their Michael Mann-inspired, swearword-swamped crime thriller to the violent and unpleasant end in the jungles of Venezuela, they did nothing but constantly fuck up every attempt at resolving the awful situation they had gotten themselves into.

That's endearing in a very peculiar way (just like Lynch's dynamite mullet), and it was a decent stab at writing and mood pushing a shooter forward, even if the mechanics of the cover-based combat against cops and robbers alike could have used some finetuning. So the good news about this ‘reinvention’ of a sequel? Well, they're still fucking up. Badly. Set entirely in Shanghai, the plot revolves around the unfortunate duo attempting to escape the city after a poorly judged case of shoot first, ask questions later. The plot itself is one-note but somewhat satisfying, and confusingly the characters show some signs of retconning. Kane's daughter is mysteriously alive again, and Lynch's status as a 'medicated psychopath' (touted as a major selling point on the back of the box) is somewhat in doubt since he shows no signs of being either throughout the course of the game. Well, beyond the usual psychosis of gunning down everyone to cross his path – but that's par for the course in the world of TPS. And while the story maintains pace adequately, it is ticking along rather than crashing into your cortex. The original was bleak and mournful. The sequel is violent and grim. That can be enjoyed too, but when the original was carried by a more subtle atmosphere it's hard not to judge the sequel harshly in comparison.

What really marks Dog Days apart from the pack is the 'found footage' graphical style. The camera is held as if by an unnamed third party, grain and lens flare throwing up visual artifacts and blur as the action sprints from one shootout to the next. It's an impressive and unique effect, and is remarkably satisfying in the slight edge of realism it adds. The first time you headshot a random gangster only for the bullet's impact to be dissolved in pixellation as if you are watching news footage, you will feel slightly uncomfortable. This feeds the edgy angle that Kane and Lynch thrive on, but it also helps to mask the slightly sub-par graphics that mar what would otherwise be striking presentation. The character models in particular suffer from a roughness that is incongruous given the grungy but beautiful Shanghai street environments that make up the first half of the game. In addition, the constant strobing and similar effects do wear on the eyes after protracted play. I'm usually immune to such things and could probably tolerate a 24 hour Cloverfield viewing (though I might lose control from the endless preppy squealing), and still found myself saving and quitting a bit sooner than usual from mental fatigue.

The gameplay itself has been slightly tweaked, with the cover controls improved but not perfected and the gunplay less awkward but almost totally weightless. There is no element of squad command that the original did a fair enough job with, but it's not overly missed. The real problem lies in repetition, which becomes noticeable very quickly. A whole story revolving around running through various parts of Shanghai while enemies run into rooms just before or after you do is spreading a nice idea far too thinly, and in these days of elaborate setpieces a player can expect more from a purported high-profile title than a series of grey and brown rooms with some spluttering neon off in the distance. It's the nature of the world of Kane and Lynch that there were never going to be massive displays of mindless explosive action, but something more than a half-hearted, awkward helicopter ride nearing the end of the game might have been a way to break up the growing tedium. Too little, too late. Speaking of too little, the main campaign is somewhere between 3-5 hours worth of play - this is simply not good enough for a full price title in 2010. It means the repetitive nature of the run-and-gun doesn't get too old by the time the credits roll, but how much that could be credited as a plus point is debatable.

In addition to the emaciated main campaign, there is both arcade and multiplayer modes based around the heist-style multiplayer of the first instalment. Playing as part of a team of nefarious ne'er-do-wells, you can choose to be a team player or a traitor sniping your buddies in the back and stealing all their cash. An additional mode allocates one player as an undercover cop, leading to all kinds of crazy betrayal shenanigans. Both offline and online, these have the potential to pad out the package a fair amount. Again, an intriguing take on a regular formula. But if you aren't taken with the central gameplay, there still isn’t enough joy to be had to recommend it to doubters.

Having said all this, it is perhaps surprisingly easy to enjoy Dog Days for what it is. The graphical style is innovative and well-executed, though I can't help but feel that other developers will pick up on it and implement it in a fashion that will cause a lower amount of blunt force trauma on my eyeballs and a higher level of satisfaction in my reptile brain. As a visual curiosity, or a way to burn away a few hours gunning down Chinese mobsters and policemen, the game succeeds. But it falls short of the mark in too many other ways to recommend as anything other than a rainy day purchase.

Article: Confessions Of A Level 65 Middle-Earth Addict

Last night I hit Level 65.

This is a more significant statement that it appears at first glance. It carries a lot of baggage with it that might not be easily understood by non-gamers. Even many gamers might not fully grasp the reality of this development if they spend all their time behind a pad shooting Russian terrorists and/or teenagers from Minnesota.

Really, to fully get my turbulent emotions over hitting the aforementioned Level 65, you need to be an MMO player. Any of them will do. As long as they’re traditional and have levels and grinding and all that fulfilling drip-fed reward stuff. Even ~spit~ World Of Warcraft ~spit~.

What the hell I am talking about, for those of you scratching your heads and smelling your armpits, is that last night my main character on a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game called Lord Of The Rings Online achieved Level 65. He is an avatar in a persistent online world populated by other players and filled to the brim with various game mechanics and content. Level 65, to use the vernacular, is the current 'level cap'. Meaning that while my character can still get up to all sorts of exciting shenanigans in and around the virtual Middle Earth that creators Turbine have crafted, for now his development in terms of rising through the ranks of his peers (at least in terms of the direct boost levels provide) has been halted.

Now, for many MMO players getting to level cap is only the start of their enjoyment in the hobby and is something they strive to achieve as soon as possible after creating a character. The activities specifically developed for these level capped characters are typically called the 'endgame', and it's not unusual for them to be much more complex and structured than what has come before. Indeed, for many of the hardcore endgame players any time the developers spend on pre-level cap material for newer players is seen as some kind of betrayal. After all, they are the elite. The crème de la crème of gaming nerds. The Illustrious And Holy Order Of The Knights Of Repetitive Wrist Strain Injury.

To be fair, this attitude is a lot more apparent in other MMOs than it is for Lord Of The Rings Online (hereinafter referred to as LOTRO, to conserve my energy). For whatever reason the community in LOTRO prides itself on being relatively polite and friendly, with an absolute minimum of griefing prepubescents running through the pathways of Rivendell shrieking homophobic abuse at the elves. Perhaps it's the inherent maturity in the source material, perhaps the generally older player base. Personally I have always thought that the relative lack of intricate endgame raiding (an activity whereby advanced players repeatedly play through challenging content to gain loot-based rewards to further micro-tweak their characters) within this particular MMO is a major contributor. There seems to be much more focus within the world on the journey rather than the destination.

And this is exactly why hitting the level cap isn't as much of a goal for me as it is for my endgame-focused colleagues. For me it has always been about the journey, which is probably why it has taken me a whole 3 years to get from Level 1 to the dizzying heights of 65. Many players would take a month at most to do the same. Admittedly I have been sidelined a few times – not having played for a few weeks, or spent some time advanced another character (or 'alt') which gives me the chance to re-run fun earlier scenarios or try the playing style of another class. But even without all that, I doubt I would have rushed through much faster.

Reader, please meet Ulfhelm Bardsson, Captain of Dale.

A handsome chap, I'm sure you'll agree. Ulfhelm has ranged all across Eriador, the North-West of the Middle-Earth you may be familiar with from the books and films. From early days attempting to save the villagers of Archet from a rampaging band of local brigands, he has roamed the length and breadth of the lands Turbine have uploaded to my hard drive. I have decided to limit my recollections, for the purposes of brevity and the sake of your sanity, to five examples. This is Ulfhelm's Middle-Earth Top 5.

1. Investigating the Old Forest on the boundary of The Shire for the first time. Upon entering, all the textures shift and the music takes an ominous tone. Everything suddenly becomes darker and more threatening, and performing pie-delivery quests for hobbits seems very, very far away.

2. In the far North of Eriador is a frozen ice bay called Forochel. Near the far North of this ice bay is a town crafted from packed ice called Sûri-kylä. The local people, modelled on an idealised ancient Finnish culture, have arranged multicoloured lights around their dwellings. The sky is already seething with Aurora Borealis and the effect, upon rounding a corner in the snowy approach to the town, is breathtaking. I do not mean that as hyperbole. The first time I saw it I left Ulfhelm standing in place for a good couple of minutes to enjoy the view.

3. On one of many trips across the harsh stone wasteland of Angmar, Ulfhelm happens to catch sight of a couple of lower level players being cut to ribbons by a group of vicious orc soldiers. Having established that they need help rather badly, he runs towards the ridge by which they are desperately fighting for their lives before leaping over their heads at the orcs and yelling a fierce battle cry. With Ulfhelm's help the servants of The Enemy are dispatched and the travellers are free to go on their way. Before they do, one of them turns to Ulfhelm and types something through the local chat channel. "Dude!" they say. "That was well Boromir!"

4. The first major expansion for LOTRO was the well-received Mines Of Moria, which added in the notoriously claustrophic mines along with many more developments. Ulfhelm has spent a fair bit of time there, much of it lost in the winding tunnels. There are many spectacular sights to be had, but none of them quite match the experience of roaming across the windswept peak of Zirakzigil. The expansiveness of a sudden open white sky is striking enough, but to walk down to the bottom of a smoking pit and finding the cracked and battered remains of the Balrog that Gandalf fought from the base to the very top of the mountain was pure nerd joy. Even in death, Ulfhelm could not approach the creature without suffering from fear effects that cause him to lose the LOTRO equivalent of 'health'.

5. If I had to pick my favourite ever in-game discovery, this would be it. Ulfhelm has been wandering the land of Eregion for some time, which the more geeky of you may know as the lands around the gates to Moria. While traipsing around some fairly nondescript grassy hills (which generally litter every MMO), I notice a quest indicator nearby on my map. Upon reaching the location, there is Bill The Pony. Surrounded by Wargs and generally not a very happy little horse. He has obviously been cornered by them after leaving the Fellowship, and now needs my help to escape them. This, right here, is what LOTRO does best. It takes a decades-old lore and builds around it with reverence and with ingenuity. It slots you not just into Middle-Earth but into the story of the War Of The Ring in a way that does not take much of a suspension of disbelief. And I have never felt as good about anything I have done in a game – anything – as I did rescuing Bill The Pony and escorting him to safety.

Other enthusiasts of LOTRO will rage about me leaving out the first viewing of Rivendell from the Gates Of Imladris, or the pastoral beauty of The Shire, or the chilling near-monochrome of the Barrow Downs, or even meeting Aragorn, Gandalf, Frodo and the others. But while all those things are awesome in their own way, for me it is the little things.

Finding a camp the Fellowship left behind. Interacting with the side characters from the books who now have to deal with the steadily worsening situations the Ringbearer has left them in his passing. And while I have hit the cap, there is still plenty for me to see and do (and experience all over again). Hell, about an hour before posting this I hopped online to take some screenshots for this article and ended up finding an encampment of travellers from Dale being protected by some elves in Lothlorien. For the terminally short-of-attention, Ulfhelm is from Dale – and these are the first people I have encountered from his homeland in 3 years.

That might seem like a big so-what. After all, this is an MMO not a Bioware RPG. I can’t really interact with these people beyond getting given quests by them and selling stuff to them. Time for a torturously extended metaphor. Games such as the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series are like whirlwind romances. They throw interesting, hopefully complex characters at you and rattle you around in a box with them for about 30 hours. By the end, it has been so intense and driven that you end up attached to them. Would you get to the same degree of intensity on another playthrough though? Doubtful.

By contrast, an MMO is like an arranged marriage. There isn’t the same initial spark because the characterisation isn’t there to hang on to. But by the end, so much has been invested and so much has been gained from a gentle dripfeed of enjoyment that you can’t help but develop a deeper affection. That’s not me recommending arranged marriages, by the way. Not unless the wedding involves slaying goblins.

The world of Tolkien is perhaps more suited to this kind of world than other MMOs – precisely because it is a World. There is so much depth there and so much atmosphere that effectively the main character of both LOTR and LOTRO is Middle-Earth itself. Frankly, characterisation can get to fuck when I can watch the sun set from Weathertop. Not to mention the rich social interaction possible with the actually real people I play with week in, week out.

But in a way the journey is over. There will doubtless be further expansions and level caps that I can set off to enjoy, but this one part of Ulfhelm’s story – the one I started three years ago in Archet at laughable Level 1 – that is finished. It's a bittersweet experience, because I have achieved something (in a very limited sense of 'achieved') that it took more joy to work towards than it did to complete. That is in no sense a complaint. Indeed, that is exactly the way it should be.

The road goes ever on, but the miles I have left behind me will never be quite the same again.

Game Review: Limbo

Format Played: X-Box Live Arcade

There was a bit of a fuss amongst sweaty online forum-goers recently concerning renowned film critic Roger Ebert and a certain statement of his vis-à-vis games and art. Namely, that the former couldn't be the latter. This put me into a bit of a muddle, since I respect Mr Ebert a fair whack as both a seemingly intelligent and sound fellow as well as an excellent critic within his chosen field. But as an avid gamer I couldn't disagree more.

Let's see what Dictionary.com, that bastion of the Queen's English, has to say on the subject of 'art'.

"the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance."

By this definition, art is something rather subjective, not to mention easy to achieve. In fact, if we take this at face value then a case could probably made for '50 Cent: Blood On The Sand' being art. Or anything with some nice textures, really.

This is evidently not the case, but luckily for my argument Limbo is a lot more qualified as an artistic endeavour than the aforementioned gangsta-em-up. Not so much a game as a puzzle-solving experience, the first thing that hits you upon picking up the controller (perhaps aside from the finest gaming cold opening since 'Bioshock') is how striking the design is. The titular world your nameless protagonist makes his way through is painted across the screen in soft-focus monochrome that carries with it a remarkable amount of detail and character. Environments are represented with remarkable clarity despite the potential limitations of the artistic style, with a dark and forbidding forest slowly giving way to an almost Noir skyline and a grinding industrial factory seemingly constructed entirely from gears, buzzsaws and pits.

An aside: factories and warehouses in games rarely have so much as a simple, hazard-free walkway. EU-OSHA would have a fucking field day.

A gentle grain clings over the screen and the whole construct is surreal in a definitive sense - you feel you're not so much playing it as dreaming it. While the variation in environment (if not mood) makes for an interesting transition, there's no doubt that the earlier areas are far more atmospheric and unique - by the final quarter or so, the spell has dissolved to some degree as the traps and puzzles become far more 'gamey'.

The puzzles themselves are often simplistic but elegantly constructed, with a learning curve that is very well balanced through the course of the 3 or so hours it will take to play Limbo through beginning to end. There are small difficulty spikes to leave the likes of me stranded for a few minutes, and quite often near the end I found myself battering at my forehead while screaming that something couldn't be done by a sane human being, only for an alternate method or piece of control/environment trickery to slowly crystallise in the front of my cortex over the next 20 seconds. Your level of enjoyment, particularly once past the halfway mark, may rest entirely on how much you enjoy putting your faceless protagonist through the meat grinder in various ways to find a solution.

Controls are limited to jump and push/pull, which together with the relatively floaty feel of the former makes the whole thing feel a little bit like an alternate, more basic cut of LittleBigPlanet constructed by an emotionally tormented nihilist. Ambient drones and stings litter the soundtrack, which fades in and out along with the actions of your determined little boy onscreen. It all comes together to push you into a sense of disquiet that never quite fades, even past the fatalistic/hopeful one-two punch of the game's ending. At times this disquiet gives way to raw terror – one particular section where you are pursued by a twitching, shadowy spider got my adrenaline pumping like no other game since the opening corridor/rooftop chase of Half-Life 2.

You may have noticed that I have made no real mention of concept or storyline here, and that's because Limbo largely leaves it up to you to determine what the hell is happening (and perhaps more importantly, what it all means). You are a boy. You are looking for a girl. The world is terrifying and profoundly unfriendly. Other than this being an apt allegory for my life, I am really not much closer to being able to tell you what Limbo is about. And the crucial point is this – you better believe I am going to play it again, as much as it takes until I reach a conclusion. This is a game built on subtext and personal interpretation, and while fans of puzzle platformers may find a lot to engage purely on gaming merits the real appeal is the hallucinatory joy Limbo leaves behind.

When a game is as beautiful, appealing and extraordinary as this – well, it might just be art.