Do you like cars? If so, Forza Motorsport 3 is the game for you. In fact, provided you don't hate cars, Forza Motorsport 3 is the game for you. Turn 10 Studios' latest racer is an ambitious game that tries to be a lot of different things for a lot of different people, and the great news is that it succeeds at just about every turn. It doesn't matter how good you are behind the wheel; you can find a difficulty level and a handling model to suit you. And while there are plenty of options available for those of you who enjoy painting or tuning your rides as much as you enjoy driving them, you don't have to devote any time to those features to reap their rewards. Forza Motorsport 3 is a bigger and better game than its predecessor in every way imaginable, and while it's not flawless, it's certainly way ahead of the competition.
Your first race in Forza 3 is spent at the wheel of an Audi R8 loaner, and by default, there are several driving assists--including the series' familiar dynamic racing line--turned on that serve as your water wings as you're thrown in at the deep end. From there, you're free to take your career in whichever direction you choose, though with limited funds at your disposal your first car is more likely to be a Scion than a Shelby. Career mode is divided into seasons, and each season you compete in a world championship that spans several races. You don't get to choose which championships you're entered into, so you start with relatively slow showroom cars early on and must get some miles under your belt before competing in thoroughbred racecars later on. With that said, championship races are generally two or three weeks apart, and so after every race you're invited to choose another, shorter series of events to take part in. You can also ignore the calendar completely if you choose, and just compete in whichever events you want to at anytime. Either way, the options you're presented with are determined, at least in part, by the cars that you own, so if you manage to get your hands on an Enzo Ferrari or a Porsche Carrera GT early on, you don't have to wait around before putting them to work. You might even find that you can use one or two of your cars in events for which they far exceed the maximum performance restrictions, though this bug doesn't rear its competition-trivializing head very often.
Regardless of what you're driving, you're free to pick and choose which assists you want to use, and you have an opportunity to quickly alter your settings before every race. This is definitely a welcome feature, because while you might not feel the need for antilock brakes or stability control when you're driving something modest, you might not be nearly as confident climbing into a Bugatti Veyron supercar for the first time. It's tempting to make things easier by keeping all of the assists turned on, but there's a great incentive to turn them off, because every time you do so, your potential earnings increase. For example, turning off the autobrake (which you'll probably want to do right away) increases your winnings by 10 percent, and if you opt for "simulation" damage, fuel, and tire wear as opposed to "cosmetic" or "limited," you can add another 15 percent on top of that. This setup ensures that while anyone who picks up Forza 3 can spend their entire career feeling like a winner, better drivers will earn more money in the process, and rightly so. Similarly, you get to keep more of your winnings if you don't have to spend them paying for damage incurred during a race, so although it's possible to win some races by driving aggressively and using opponents or walls to slow you down for corners, you won't be doing yourself (or your opposition) any favors in the long run.
That's especially true if your opponents are other online players or a friend that you're playing split-screen with, because retaliation is likely to cross their minds at some point. Forza 3's AI is more focused on the finish line than on forcing you off the track, which makes it superior to some of the players you're likely to meet online, but it's not an intelligence that's going to pose a threat to its human counterparts anytime soon. At times, AI drivers are superb: they jostle for position, they look for openings when other drivers falter, and they know when to back off if their attempt at an overtake starts looking perilous. Occasionally, though, these otherwise believable opponents will make such silly mistakes that you'll swear they must have fallen asleep at the wheel. At Barcelona's Circuit de Catalunya, for example, it's not nearly as uncommon as it should be to see opponents accelerate toward the Seat hairpin and fly off into the gravel without ever appearing to touch the brake pedal or the steering wheel, and it's not unheard of to see different opponents making the exact same error on consecutive laps. Race incidents like these aren't something you'll see often, especially if you're spending most of your time at the front of the pack, but if you're in a closely contested race, it's less satisfying to win as a result of an opponent's incompetence than it is to beat him out of a corner or slingshot past him on a straight.
It's also slightly less satisfying to cross the finish line first if you've felt the need to use Forza 3's new rewind feature during the race, but it's a great (if unoriginal) addition to the game regardless. If you consider yourself a purist, you might feel inclined to look down on this new feature and on anyone who uses it, and that's fine, because you don't have to use it if you don't want to, and nobody is ever going to have the option of using it while competing with you online. Furthermore, if you're from the no-rewind school of racing, your leaderboard times will always appear above those of drivers who have used the rewind to correct any number of their mistakes. The leaderboards also clearly display which assists drivers were using when they recorded their posted lap times, which might ultimately end up being a better incentive for you to turn them off than extra winnings are.
As in Forza 2, your winnings in Forza 3 can be used to buy new cars (more than 400 different models are available at launch), either direct from manufacturers or from other players via an auction house. However, it seems unlikely that Forza 3's auction house will be the hive of activity that Forza 2's was, not because it has changed for the worse, but because unless you're looking for a bargain or want to offload a car that you've been awarded, there are few reasons to go there. In Forza 2, one of the main reasons to buy a car from the auction house was that it had a great custom paint job and/or because it had already had money spent on upgrading and tuning it. You can still buy and sell cars this way if you choose to, but in Forza 3 you can also deal in tuning setups, paint jobs, and individual vinyl designs without having to attach them to cars. For example, if you re-create a favorite video game character on the hood of a car and you want to earn some credits selling it, you now have two options. You can either sell it as a vinyl that other players will be free to paste onto any car that they choose (safe in the knowledge that they won't be permitted to resell it subsequently) or incorporate it into a design for a specific model of car so that players who own one of those cars can apply it to their vehicle. It's a vastly superior system to that in the last game, and because potential buyers can search for designs either by typing in keywords or by using presets like "retro," "anime," and "realistic," there's a good chance that players who are interested in the kinds of things you create will find their way to your in-game storefront.
Forza 3's car models look fantastic in their showroom and real-world race liveries, but it's the designs being created by the community that are really making them pop. That's no mean feat, because the tools that designers have to work with, while clearly powerful, don't make life easy. If you're familiar with the design tools in Forza 2, then you might be disappointed or at least surprised to learn that they haven't changed much in Forza 3. You still work primarily with geometric shapes and generic-looking icons, you still group large numbers of them together to create race team logos or photo-realistic images of your favorite Brazilian supermodels, and it still takes a lot of work to create something worthwhile. It's time well spent, though, and because there's now an option to create designs on a perfectly flat surface before applying them to a car, you no longer have to use the roof of a Mini Cooper for a canvas. Would this aspect of the game be better if you could import images from Photoshop or just scan them in? Absolutely not. Sure, it would be easier, but it wouldn't be as rewarding, and more importantly it wouldn't be fair for players without access to the necessary hardware or software. It's also unlikely that the end results would look significantly better. Spend some time checking out the top designs, as rated by other players, and you'll realize that just about anything is possible with Forza 3's design tools; you just have to get good with them.
If you're more inclined to spend your time racing than playing with geometric shapes, there's still no reason you can't have great-looking cars. Just make sure you win enough credits to buy all of the designs you want. Whether you're racing in your single-player career or online with up to seven opponents, all of your winnings go into the same pot, and so do your experience points. Leveling up in Forza 3 doesn't benefit you in the way that you might expect it to in other genres, but every time you reach a new level, you're awarded a new car, so it can be a strong incentive to keep playing long after you've told yourself "just one more race." This is especially true later in your career, because the cars you're given are among the most desirable in the game--assuming you haven't rushed out and bought them already.
Just as you would in real life, it's not a bad idea to test-drive cars before you buy them. None of the cars in Forza 3 handle poorly, and all are delivered to your garage with perfect bodywork and spotlessly clean, accurately re-created interiors. Inevitably, there will be cars that suit your driving style better than others, though, and if you don't know much about tuning, it can be tough to tame a car that's proving problematic for you--even if you take advantage of the new quick upgrade option that optimizes your car for the class of competition that you want to use it in. In Career mode you're only able to use cars that you own, but every car in the game (as well as those in your garage) is available to you from the outset for use in single races, hot lap events, and multiplayer.
Online play was one of Forza 2's greatest strengths, and the same is true of Forza 3. It doesn't matter if you're looking to enjoy a private session with friends or hop into a race with random opponents--getting your car onto the starting grid couldn't be easier, and it's hard to imagine how the subsequent races could be any better. Even in multiplayer, detailed environments from all over the world fly by at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour without ever posing a threat to the frame rate, and the game is very smart about knowing when to "ghost" players who have tried to take shortcuts or are in the mischievous minority who think it's hilarious to drive the wrong way and try to crash into other racers. In addition to regular races, online options include Drag and Drift events, as well as three different Tag variants, Elimination races, and team-based Cat and Mouse competitions. As the host of a session, the options that you have to customize these game types number in the dozens, and you can even force players to turn off certain assists or use a specific camera angle.
Those camera options include all of the usual suspects: bumper, hood, cockpit, chase near, and chase far. Another great feature of Forza 3, which will be familiar if you played the previous game, is that at any point during a single-player race or during a replay of a multiplayer race, you can pause the action to take a photograph. The in-game camera has more settings for you to tinker with than the cameras that most of us use in real life, and if you're good at photography (or even if you're not) it's possible to create some impressive images. This is especially true at new tracks like Italy's Amalfi Coast, Japan's Fujimo Kaido, and the United States' Sedona Raceway, which are great additions to the sizeable roster not only because they offer very different and enjoyable driving experiences, but also because they're set in some quite beautiful locations. If you choose to share photos by uploading them to your storefront they'll also appear on the official Forza Website, from which you can download them for posting in forums and the like.
Other than some load screens that stick around long enough to outstay their welcome before each race, the quality of Forza 3's presentation is uniformly excellent across every aspect of the game. The menus are clean and intuitive, the in-game visuals never fail to impress, and the default audio options prioritize the satisfying roars of the cars' respective engines over the 30-plus licensed tunes playing in the background. Artists on the soundtrack include The Hives, The Fratellis, Fall From Grace, Alkaline Trio, The Qemists, DJ Drunken Master, Logistics, and many more. Regardless of whether or not they're to your liking, there's no denying that the vast majority of the songs on the playlist make good driving tunes.
There's also no denying that Forza Motorsport 3 is a truly special racing game. Not only does it make simulation-style racing accessible to anyone with the inclination to give it a try, but it looks and sounds superb doing it and manages to foster an unusually strong sense of community along the way. If you have any interest whatsoever in racing games, even if you've never played one before, you'd do well to pay a visit to your local video game showroom and become a member of the Forza Motorsport 3 owners' club at your earliest convenience.
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Stronghold Crusader Extreme
You can't go home again. That's the lesson of Stronghold Crusader Extreme, a revamping of Firefly Studios' classic 2002 real-time strategy game Stronghold Crusader. This minor reimagining of an oldie but goodie is several years late for the party, a real-time relic based on antiquated game mechanics and production values. It doesn't even add much in the way of new old-fashioned game content; it simply goes after hardcore fans of the original game with a new Extreme Trail mode of play that takes you up a ladder of impossibly murderous medieval skirmishes.
This is essentially a straight rehashing of the first Stronghold Crusader. Gameplay shows every bit of its age, so what you've got here is an old-school RTS game in which you build bases, gather resources, and grind out soldiers for endless combat. You take on the role of a medieval lord commanding a settlement in the dusty lands of the Crusades-era Middle East, and must build it up by constructing the usual barracks, farms, armories, and mines. Of course, the ultimate purpose is to use this economic backbone to fund an army of knights, spearmen, bowmen, and the like, and proceed to wipe your enemies off the map.
As with most RTS games from earlier in the decade, the skirmish maps in the 20-mission Extreme Trail campaign are all about speed, not strategy. The winner is always the one who can click the quickest, which makes matches play out more like fast-forwarded street brawls than real military engagements. This is actually one of the zippiest RTS games of all time, and spectacularly tough when compared to the nonextreme trail campaign in the original Stronghold Crusader. The pace has been so amped up and the maps so packed with enemies that the combat is frenzied and chaotic.
Expect to be toast early and often if you don't have some heavy playtime with the first game under your belt. Even with this experience (which you can gain here because you get the complete original game along with the supposedly new one), it's amazingly tough to emerge victorious from even a single one of the scenarios. Multiple enemies target you in all but the very first campaign mission, and this array of foes kicks off every match by immediately hurling columns of troops at your puny little village.
Maps cram all of the factions into such close quarters that it's impossible to get started on a reasonable army before the onslaught begins. Enemy armies are typically coming over the hill within no more than a minute or two from the start of a game. It's hard to figure out what you're supposed to do to stop these assaults, given that you're always stuck battling these massive forces with just the handful of knights and archers that you start with. You have the option of dropping in companies of spearmen and macemen on the fly at timed intervals, and can erect walls to somewhat stem the tide, but this seems to only delay the inevitable as steams of enemy columns constantly rush toward your keep. All you're ever doing is keeping your head above water, not building enough strength to take the fight to the enemy.
It feels like you're being asked to jam a square peg into a round hole, too, because the speedy scenarios don't fit the ponderous underlying game design. The Stronghold series has always been more of an economic simulation than a purely military one, considering its strong city-building flavor. So you can't just whip up barracks and start mass-producing knights and bowmen. Instead, you have to build mines and lumberyards to gather the ore and wood needed for weapons, along with farms to produce the cows needed for leather. Then you have to build armories, fletchers' huts, and tanneries. After that, you have to make swords, bows, leather armor, and the like. Finally, you can order troops into production...if you've got enough manpower by way of your peasant population. If not, you need to take a moment to toss up some hovels. After all of this, you can build an army. Or at least you would have been able to build an army if the bad guys hadn't already burned your keep to the ground.
Other aspects of the game don't fit with 2008. There is an online matching service, but it's hosted through the rather clunky GameSpy Arcade system, and some sort of conflict or bug with our initial install left us without the icon needed to activate this option on the multiplayer screen. The isometric visuals of the six-year-old original haven't been enhanced at all, so you're stuck with pixelated units and a maximum resolution of 1024x768 that stretches the display to the point of blurriness on a widescreen monitor. Not that there's much detail here to blur. Units look like scrambling insects that convulse their way across the bland, blocky landscape. Audio is just as dated. The music is a repetitive martial loop, battles are loaded with tinny metal clashes, and order acknowledgements are repetitive exclamations as bombastic and dumb as something you might hear during the dinner show at Medieval Times.
Only someone who has just stepped out of a time machine will have much patience for Stronghold Crusader Extreme. Aged, formulaic, and spectacularly difficult, the game isn't remotely appealing to a modern RTS audience.
This is essentially a straight rehashing of the first Stronghold Crusader. Gameplay shows every bit of its age, so what you've got here is an old-school RTS game in which you build bases, gather resources, and grind out soldiers for endless combat. You take on the role of a medieval lord commanding a settlement in the dusty lands of the Crusades-era Middle East, and must build it up by constructing the usual barracks, farms, armories, and mines. Of course, the ultimate purpose is to use this economic backbone to fund an army of knights, spearmen, bowmen, and the like, and proceed to wipe your enemies off the map.
As with most RTS games from earlier in the decade, the skirmish maps in the 20-mission Extreme Trail campaign are all about speed, not strategy. The winner is always the one who can click the quickest, which makes matches play out more like fast-forwarded street brawls than real military engagements. This is actually one of the zippiest RTS games of all time, and spectacularly tough when compared to the nonextreme trail campaign in the original Stronghold Crusader. The pace has been so amped up and the maps so packed with enemies that the combat is frenzied and chaotic.
Expect to be toast early and often if you don't have some heavy playtime with the first game under your belt. Even with this experience (which you can gain here because you get the complete original game along with the supposedly new one), it's amazingly tough to emerge victorious from even a single one of the scenarios. Multiple enemies target you in all but the very first campaign mission, and this array of foes kicks off every match by immediately hurling columns of troops at your puny little village.
Maps cram all of the factions into such close quarters that it's impossible to get started on a reasonable army before the onslaught begins. Enemy armies are typically coming over the hill within no more than a minute or two from the start of a game. It's hard to figure out what you're supposed to do to stop these assaults, given that you're always stuck battling these massive forces with just the handful of knights and archers that you start with. You have the option of dropping in companies of spearmen and macemen on the fly at timed intervals, and can erect walls to somewhat stem the tide, but this seems to only delay the inevitable as steams of enemy columns constantly rush toward your keep. All you're ever doing is keeping your head above water, not building enough strength to take the fight to the enemy.
It feels like you're being asked to jam a square peg into a round hole, too, because the speedy scenarios don't fit the ponderous underlying game design. The Stronghold series has always been more of an economic simulation than a purely military one, considering its strong city-building flavor. So you can't just whip up barracks and start mass-producing knights and bowmen. Instead, you have to build mines and lumberyards to gather the ore and wood needed for weapons, along with farms to produce the cows needed for leather. Then you have to build armories, fletchers' huts, and tanneries. After that, you have to make swords, bows, leather armor, and the like. Finally, you can order troops into production...if you've got enough manpower by way of your peasant population. If not, you need to take a moment to toss up some hovels. After all of this, you can build an army. Or at least you would have been able to build an army if the bad guys hadn't already burned your keep to the ground.
Other aspects of the game don't fit with 2008. There is an online matching service, but it's hosted through the rather clunky GameSpy Arcade system, and some sort of conflict or bug with our initial install left us without the icon needed to activate this option on the multiplayer screen. The isometric visuals of the six-year-old original haven't been enhanced at all, so you're stuck with pixelated units and a maximum resolution of 1024x768 that stretches the display to the point of blurriness on a widescreen monitor. Not that there's much detail here to blur. Units look like scrambling insects that convulse their way across the bland, blocky landscape. Audio is just as dated. The music is a repetitive martial loop, battles are loaded with tinny metal clashes, and order acknowledgements are repetitive exclamations as bombastic and dumb as something you might hear during the dinner show at Medieval Times.
Only someone who has just stepped out of a time machine will have much patience for Stronghold Crusader Extreme. Aged, formulaic, and spectacularly difficult, the game isn't remotely appealing to a modern RTS audience.
Stronghold
Stronghold is both a real-time combat game that focuses entirely on castle sieges and a village-management simulation in the vein of Zeus or The Settlers. The subject matter alone gives Stronghold a leg up. It's been years since a game let you pour boiling oil on invading hordes, and Stronghold simulates castle sieges well enough to recommend it to those who are interested in the premise. But it's a hesitant recommendation, due to a poor interface and mediocre campaigns.
There are two campaigns, one military and one economic. The economic campaign is made up of a handful of timed missions in which you must acquire a certain target amount of goods or gold. Occasional threats in the form of bandits and animals will require you to maintain a basic militia, but the mission goals are always economic. This campaign only serves to highlight the fact that as a management simulation, the game is pretty shallow. You build woodcutters, farmers, and miners, and the goods are brought to your storehouse. You build secondary producers, who use these goods to produce weapons and food.
You must also ensure you have enough food to keep your people happy and enough gold to hire soldiers. Since taxing your people makes them unhappy, and unhappy people will leave your kingdom, you must also find ways to keep your popularity high. This can be done by providing them with extra food, churches, or alehouses. Keeping your people happy is relatively unchallenging, although it seems complicated in theory. Most of the time, providing more food will be all you need to do, and the rest is unnecessary.
The economic and management elements of Stronghold are simple, but they are just the setup for the military game. The military campaign lets you defend against sieges, and siege other castles, as well as incorporate the economic elements. In the military campaign, you play the son of a king who was betrayed and murdered. His land was divided among four men: The Snake, The Pig, The Rat, and The Wolf. You must take back your father's land piece by piece.
The early stages of the campaign act as a tutorial, and a much better one than the game's actual tutorial option. In the beginning you will have only archers to defend your castles, and that will be all you need. Later, you'll have access to pikemen. Much later, you'll get the more advanced units such as swordsmen, engineers, and macemen. Part of the problem with the campaign is that you are stuck with the lowliest of units for the first half, and then things start to escalate rapidly. Your first castle siege is also your first time using engineers, who make your siege weapons, and the trial-by-fire element comes out of nowhere. Not only have you not had practice using the units, but it will take you some time to learn how to use them.
This suggests one of Stronghold's biggest problems: The interface makes little sense. There is a series of tabs on the bottom of the screen, each of which shows you different types of structures you can build. There's a farm tab, a food-production tab, a weapons-building tab, and so forth. Then there is a castle tab that lets you build walls. To build towers, you need to go to the castle tab and then click on the tower button, which opens the tower screen. Same for gatehouses. Moats are on the gatehouse screen. Or possibly the tower screen. There's no real rhyme or reason for where some things are located. Your barracks and armory are under the castle tab, but weapons manufacturers have their own tab.
Units pose their own set of interface problems. You can group units together with the standard Ctrl+number, but if you individually select any member of that group after that, he is removed from his group. If you select your entire army in order to move it, all of your groupings are lost. This system makes little sense and renders any sort of intelligent attack strategy almost impossible in the heat of battle.
Building castle walls is another issue. You aren't allowed to place buildings or objects in areas you can't see, and the low isometric viewpoint means that any area blocked by a building or another piece of wall is off-limits. You can rotate the map to view the field from a different angle, but towers and gatehouses can often block your view so that you never see a gap in your defenses. You can lower all buildings on the screen so that you can build without interference, but it's a crude solution to a serious problem. Moreover, certain types of buildings aren't allowed in every mission, which can cause confusion. One mission lets you build moats but not drawbridges. This can catch you off guard, as your villagers will have no way of bringing goods to the stockpile if they can't get over your moat.
Not that you'll be building moats often. Perhaps because of the problems above, very few of the campaign missions actually require you to build a decent castle. Usually, you'll start with a castle and only be required to defend and repair it as necessary. Defending a castle isn't very difficult, because the artificial intelligence of your enemies is terrible. Enemies will always enter from the same point and always make a beeline for the closest structure. You are told where the enemy will enter by way of signposts on the map, so you rarely need to defend more than one side of your castle. For most of the campaign, a large group of archers and crossbowmen will take down an entire approaching army as it marches in a straight line toward your keep.
Once you get to the latter half of the campaign, the game picks up. Having access to the advanced units makes things more interesting, as engineers pour boiling oil on enemies wielding battering rams, incoming units die in pit traps, pikemen try to fill moats as archers rain arrows down on them, macemen knock encroaching soldiers off ladders, and walls crumble under the bombardment of siege weapons and tunnelers, who burrow under walls to damage their foundations. The action can be exciting enough to watch that you forget all of the game's problems and just enjoy watching your opponent's--or your own--castle fall.
Visually, the game is reminiscent of Age of Empires II. The buildings look good, but not great, and the same can be said of the units. The animations are well done, especially the motion blur on the arrows and projectiles as they fly through the air. The soundtrack is dramatic, while the sound effects consist of fairly typical funny comments from units and ambient building sounds.
Campaign play isn't your only option, and if nothing else, Stronghold provides a great deal of variety. There are a number of individual combat and economic scenarios, as well as a variety of stand-alone modes, both peaceful and combat-oriented, that let you build your castle at will. The multiplayer options include a number of different games, and it's a better challenge to defend a castle against more intelligent opponents. Stronghold has some rather serious problems. But if you can get past them, or learn to work with them, the game gives you enough options that you'll have dozens of hours of sieges and defenses ahead of you.
There are two campaigns, one military and one economic. The economic campaign is made up of a handful of timed missions in which you must acquire a certain target amount of goods or gold. Occasional threats in the form of bandits and animals will require you to maintain a basic militia, but the mission goals are always economic. This campaign only serves to highlight the fact that as a management simulation, the game is pretty shallow. You build woodcutters, farmers, and miners, and the goods are brought to your storehouse. You build secondary producers, who use these goods to produce weapons and food.
You must also ensure you have enough food to keep your people happy and enough gold to hire soldiers. Since taxing your people makes them unhappy, and unhappy people will leave your kingdom, you must also find ways to keep your popularity high. This can be done by providing them with extra food, churches, or alehouses. Keeping your people happy is relatively unchallenging, although it seems complicated in theory. Most of the time, providing more food will be all you need to do, and the rest is unnecessary.
The economic and management elements of Stronghold are simple, but they are just the setup for the military game. The military campaign lets you defend against sieges, and siege other castles, as well as incorporate the economic elements. In the military campaign, you play the son of a king who was betrayed and murdered. His land was divided among four men: The Snake, The Pig, The Rat, and The Wolf. You must take back your father's land piece by piece.
The early stages of the campaign act as a tutorial, and a much better one than the game's actual tutorial option. In the beginning you will have only archers to defend your castles, and that will be all you need. Later, you'll have access to pikemen. Much later, you'll get the more advanced units such as swordsmen, engineers, and macemen. Part of the problem with the campaign is that you are stuck with the lowliest of units for the first half, and then things start to escalate rapidly. Your first castle siege is also your first time using engineers, who make your siege weapons, and the trial-by-fire element comes out of nowhere. Not only have you not had practice using the units, but it will take you some time to learn how to use them.
This suggests one of Stronghold's biggest problems: The interface makes little sense. There is a series of tabs on the bottom of the screen, each of which shows you different types of structures you can build. There's a farm tab, a food-production tab, a weapons-building tab, and so forth. Then there is a castle tab that lets you build walls. To build towers, you need to go to the castle tab and then click on the tower button, which opens the tower screen. Same for gatehouses. Moats are on the gatehouse screen. Or possibly the tower screen. There's no real rhyme or reason for where some things are located. Your barracks and armory are under the castle tab, but weapons manufacturers have their own tab.
Units pose their own set of interface problems. You can group units together with the standard Ctrl+number, but if you individually select any member of that group after that, he is removed from his group. If you select your entire army in order to move it, all of your groupings are lost. This system makes little sense and renders any sort of intelligent attack strategy almost impossible in the heat of battle.
Building castle walls is another issue. You aren't allowed to place buildings or objects in areas you can't see, and the low isometric viewpoint means that any area blocked by a building or another piece of wall is off-limits. You can rotate the map to view the field from a different angle, but towers and gatehouses can often block your view so that you never see a gap in your defenses. You can lower all buildings on the screen so that you can build without interference, but it's a crude solution to a serious problem. Moreover, certain types of buildings aren't allowed in every mission, which can cause confusion. One mission lets you build moats but not drawbridges. This can catch you off guard, as your villagers will have no way of bringing goods to the stockpile if they can't get over your moat.
Not that you'll be building moats often. Perhaps because of the problems above, very few of the campaign missions actually require you to build a decent castle. Usually, you'll start with a castle and only be required to defend and repair it as necessary. Defending a castle isn't very difficult, because the artificial intelligence of your enemies is terrible. Enemies will always enter from the same point and always make a beeline for the closest structure. You are told where the enemy will enter by way of signposts on the map, so you rarely need to defend more than one side of your castle. For most of the campaign, a large group of archers and crossbowmen will take down an entire approaching army as it marches in a straight line toward your keep.
Once you get to the latter half of the campaign, the game picks up. Having access to the advanced units makes things more interesting, as engineers pour boiling oil on enemies wielding battering rams, incoming units die in pit traps, pikemen try to fill moats as archers rain arrows down on them, macemen knock encroaching soldiers off ladders, and walls crumble under the bombardment of siege weapons and tunnelers, who burrow under walls to damage their foundations. The action can be exciting enough to watch that you forget all of the game's problems and just enjoy watching your opponent's--or your own--castle fall.
Visually, the game is reminiscent of Age of Empires II. The buildings look good, but not great, and the same can be said of the units. The animations are well done, especially the motion blur on the arrows and projectiles as they fly through the air. The soundtrack is dramatic, while the sound effects consist of fairly typical funny comments from units and ambient building sounds.
Campaign play isn't your only option, and if nothing else, Stronghold provides a great deal of variety. There are a number of individual combat and economic scenarios, as well as a variety of stand-alone modes, both peaceful and combat-oriented, that let you build your castle at will. The multiplayer options include a number of different games, and it's a better challenge to defend a castle against more intelligent opponents. Stronghold has some rather serious problems. But if you can get past them, or learn to work with them, the game gives you enough options that you'll have dozens of hours of sieges and defenses ahead of you.
Stronghold Crusader
Last year's Stronghold was a slightly uneven combination of city builder and real-time strategy game, with an emphasis on siege warfare. It had the distinction of being the only castle simulation from a major publisher since Interplay released Quicksilver's Castles II in 1992. Aspiring warlords could forgive Stronghold's shortcomings, since the original game gave them the opportunity to build and raze walls, pillage countrysides, and launch cattle from catapults. Firefly Studios has now polished up its old game nicely and has sent it on a long road trip into the Crusades.
Stronghold: Crusader is the stand-alone successor to Stronghold, meaning you don't need the original Stronghold to play it. It takes Stronghold out of Europe and into the Holy Lands, giving it a tighter focus and a more exotic flavor. The economic missions that had you racing against the clock to fulfill contrived objectives have been removed from the game. Instead, Stronghold: Crusader places more emphasis on the fine art of defending or storming a castle. After all, isn't this what you want when you pick up a box with a knight standing in front of a castle? When players first looked at the box for the original Stronghold, they probably wouldn't have guessed that they'd be spending their time accumulating 500 units of cheese.
Indeed, the original Stronghold divided its single-player missions into two types: military and economic, though the latter, which generally involved raising crops and stockpiling resources, wasn't as popular as the military missions. It also had a single-player skirmish mode and head-to-head multiplayer. But Stronghold: Crusader presents you with many more options. For instance, you can play skirmish games against AI opponents on a number of different maps, even in multiplayer. Some are completely even playing fields, while some feature interesting balance dilemmas, giving advantages and disadvantages to each player. The skirmish maps can be played against your choice of AI opponents or in multiplayer games.
However, players who are new to Stronghold's economic model, which actually folds elegantly into its combat model without upstaging it, will likely want to start out by playing with the castle-builder option. This is a sandbox mode that, like in the original game, lets you learn the unique features of Crusader's new desert maps without having to worry about fielding an army to defend against attacks.
But the centerpiece of the single-player game is the "crusader trail," which presents a series of 50 battles, each more difficult than the last. As you play, your performance determines the ongoing date, which serves as your score. You can go backward to replay old missions, and if you do better, the date will roll back. Although this doesn't have much impact on the actual missions, it's an interesting alternative to tracking a score based on points.
Unlike the missions in Stronghold's military campaign, most of the missions in the crusader trail let you build you own castle. This makes it more like a series of skirmishes than the original game's linear sequence of canned scenarios with prebuilt castles. The crusader trail missions do a good job of incorporating specific units and strategies, and you will gradually improve your skills as it ramps up the difficulty level. In addition to a basic tutorial, there are four historical campaigns, in which each chapter highlights specific game elements, such as which units are best suited for which purposes, how to manage your taxes, and the differences between various crops. Each mission in these campaigns is like a puzzle with a historical context, which, once solved, will teach you to play better. Stronghold: Crusader has numerous options to introduce new players to the game as well as plenty of challenges for veterans of the original Stronghold.
Stronghold: Crusader makes some important changes to the dynamics of the original game. Most significant is the addition of seven new Arabian mercenary units, some fairly redundant (Arabian bows are just weaker archers), some potentially overpowered (the horse archers are a potent combination of speed and ranged attack), and some adding unique game dynamics (assassins can secretly open gate towers to let your units into an enemy's castle). The new units are all hired from the mercenary camp, which can be built cheaply as soon as you start building your castle. To recruit them, you don't have to harvest resources, construct weapons, and accumulate an arsenal in your armory, like you have to with their European counterparts. Instead, just fork over some gold, and these new Arabian units will show up.
The fact that military units come into play much more quickly in Stronghold: Crusader than they did in the original game has a dramatic effect on gameplay. Because the marketplace can quickly give you gold, which can now quickly give you an army, it's an important military building. If you're attacked, you can convert your goods to gold and hire instant defenders. To get down to conquering, there's no immediate need for iron, leather, wood, tanners, blacksmiths, or pole turners.
To be fair, mercenaries aren't as powerful as the traditional military units, but they definitely change the way Stronghold is played. Some of the scenarios can be easily beaten by simply selling off your starting goods, using the gold to hire mercenaries, and then rushing the AI. Of course, this also means you'll be attacked much earlier in a scenario. There's nothing quite so annoying as watching a mob of cheap slaves torching your outlying farms before you can marshal your defenses. The end result is that Stronghold: Crusader plays much more like a traditional combat-oriented real-time strategy game than its predecessor.
There are some other differences between Stronghold: Crusader and the previous game that may seem subtle at first. For instance, religion and ale have more impact on your people's happiness in Stronghold: Crusader. Religion cost too much gold and ale required too many steps in the resource chain to be really useful in the original game. But in Stronghold: Crusader, they have a more powerful benefit--they are effective ways to offset high taxes, food shortages, and crowding. Even better, you can improve efficiency by adorning your castle with more "bad things," like gallows and dungeons, while serving up religion and ale to counter the happiness penalties. Although these may seem like minor tweaks, they do a good job of adding more choices to how you play.
After fighting Stronghold's European warlords (who make a return appearance in Crusader), it's nice to get out and see the world. The desert terrain and buildings look great, breathing a lot of new life into the game's detailed 2D engine. The new music is rousing and distinctive, and it's always a thrill to hear the war cry when you mass-select a group of soldiers and give them attack orders. Visually and aurally, Stronghold: Crusader certainly does justice to its subject matter.
The Middle Eastern setting allows for a new architectural look and terrain set, but unlike the changes to the architecture, the changes to the terrain aren't simply cosmetic. Because you can't build farms in the desert, the patches of fertile land on some maps are important strategic points. This also makes Crusader play like a more conventional RTS, since this can take the focus off the castles themselves. Now each side has to secure fertile land to maintain a food supply in these barren environments.
Stronghold: Crusader's interface still has some of the same problems that the first game had. The building tabs are still haphazardly arranged at the bottom of the screen. There's no way to jump to the subject of important messages such as "We're under attack!" Stronghold could use more tooltips, range indicators for missile units, and a few more hotkeys to keep you from having to wade through your castles and armies to get where you need to go. Because there are no effective unit formations, the tactical AI still requires a fair amount of micromanagement to mount a successful siege, and computer opponents still seem fond of sending units in a steady trickle rather than amassing effective assaults.
But other than these minor problems, Stronghold: Crusader is a marked improvement over the previous game. Considering its new campaign options, more-satisfying single-player missions, and tweaked gameplay, it's a safe bet that fans of the original game will have even more fun storming the castle.
Stronghold: Crusader is the stand-alone successor to Stronghold, meaning you don't need the original Stronghold to play it. It takes Stronghold out of Europe and into the Holy Lands, giving it a tighter focus and a more exotic flavor. The economic missions that had you racing against the clock to fulfill contrived objectives have been removed from the game. Instead, Stronghold: Crusader places more emphasis on the fine art of defending or storming a castle. After all, isn't this what you want when you pick up a box with a knight standing in front of a castle? When players first looked at the box for the original Stronghold, they probably wouldn't have guessed that they'd be spending their time accumulating 500 units of cheese.
Indeed, the original Stronghold divided its single-player missions into two types: military and economic, though the latter, which generally involved raising crops and stockpiling resources, wasn't as popular as the military missions. It also had a single-player skirmish mode and head-to-head multiplayer. But Stronghold: Crusader presents you with many more options. For instance, you can play skirmish games against AI opponents on a number of different maps, even in multiplayer. Some are completely even playing fields, while some feature interesting balance dilemmas, giving advantages and disadvantages to each player. The skirmish maps can be played against your choice of AI opponents or in multiplayer games.
However, players who are new to Stronghold's economic model, which actually folds elegantly into its combat model without upstaging it, will likely want to start out by playing with the castle-builder option. This is a sandbox mode that, like in the original game, lets you learn the unique features of Crusader's new desert maps without having to worry about fielding an army to defend against attacks.
But the centerpiece of the single-player game is the "crusader trail," which presents a series of 50 battles, each more difficult than the last. As you play, your performance determines the ongoing date, which serves as your score. You can go backward to replay old missions, and if you do better, the date will roll back. Although this doesn't have much impact on the actual missions, it's an interesting alternative to tracking a score based on points.
Unlike the missions in Stronghold's military campaign, most of the missions in the crusader trail let you build you own castle. This makes it more like a series of skirmishes than the original game's linear sequence of canned scenarios with prebuilt castles. The crusader trail missions do a good job of incorporating specific units and strategies, and you will gradually improve your skills as it ramps up the difficulty level. In addition to a basic tutorial, there are four historical campaigns, in which each chapter highlights specific game elements, such as which units are best suited for which purposes, how to manage your taxes, and the differences between various crops. Each mission in these campaigns is like a puzzle with a historical context, which, once solved, will teach you to play better. Stronghold: Crusader has numerous options to introduce new players to the game as well as plenty of challenges for veterans of the original Stronghold.
Stronghold: Crusader makes some important changes to the dynamics of the original game. Most significant is the addition of seven new Arabian mercenary units, some fairly redundant (Arabian bows are just weaker archers), some potentially overpowered (the horse archers are a potent combination of speed and ranged attack), and some adding unique game dynamics (assassins can secretly open gate towers to let your units into an enemy's castle). The new units are all hired from the mercenary camp, which can be built cheaply as soon as you start building your castle. To recruit them, you don't have to harvest resources, construct weapons, and accumulate an arsenal in your armory, like you have to with their European counterparts. Instead, just fork over some gold, and these new Arabian units will show up.
The fact that military units come into play much more quickly in Stronghold: Crusader than they did in the original game has a dramatic effect on gameplay. Because the marketplace can quickly give you gold, which can now quickly give you an army, it's an important military building. If you're attacked, you can convert your goods to gold and hire instant defenders. To get down to conquering, there's no immediate need for iron, leather, wood, tanners, blacksmiths, or pole turners.
To be fair, mercenaries aren't as powerful as the traditional military units, but they definitely change the way Stronghold is played. Some of the scenarios can be easily beaten by simply selling off your starting goods, using the gold to hire mercenaries, and then rushing the AI. Of course, this also means you'll be attacked much earlier in a scenario. There's nothing quite so annoying as watching a mob of cheap slaves torching your outlying farms before you can marshal your defenses. The end result is that Stronghold: Crusader plays much more like a traditional combat-oriented real-time strategy game than its predecessor.
There are some other differences between Stronghold: Crusader and the previous game that may seem subtle at first. For instance, religion and ale have more impact on your people's happiness in Stronghold: Crusader. Religion cost too much gold and ale required too many steps in the resource chain to be really useful in the original game. But in Stronghold: Crusader, they have a more powerful benefit--they are effective ways to offset high taxes, food shortages, and crowding. Even better, you can improve efficiency by adorning your castle with more "bad things," like gallows and dungeons, while serving up religion and ale to counter the happiness penalties. Although these may seem like minor tweaks, they do a good job of adding more choices to how you play.
After fighting Stronghold's European warlords (who make a return appearance in Crusader), it's nice to get out and see the world. The desert terrain and buildings look great, breathing a lot of new life into the game's detailed 2D engine. The new music is rousing and distinctive, and it's always a thrill to hear the war cry when you mass-select a group of soldiers and give them attack orders. Visually and aurally, Stronghold: Crusader certainly does justice to its subject matter.
The Middle Eastern setting allows for a new architectural look and terrain set, but unlike the changes to the architecture, the changes to the terrain aren't simply cosmetic. Because you can't build farms in the desert, the patches of fertile land on some maps are important strategic points. This also makes Crusader play like a more conventional RTS, since this can take the focus off the castles themselves. Now each side has to secure fertile land to maintain a food supply in these barren environments.
Stronghold: Crusader's interface still has some of the same problems that the first game had. The building tabs are still haphazardly arranged at the bottom of the screen. There's no way to jump to the subject of important messages such as "We're under attack!" Stronghold could use more tooltips, range indicators for missile units, and a few more hotkeys to keep you from having to wade through your castles and armies to get where you need to go. Because there are no effective unit formations, the tactical AI still requires a fair amount of micromanagement to mount a successful siege, and computer opponents still seem fond of sending units in a steady trickle rather than amassing effective assaults.
But other than these minor problems, Stronghold: Crusader is a marked improvement over the previous game. Considering its new campaign options, more-satisfying single-player missions, and tweaked gameplay, it's a safe bet that fans of the original game will have even more fun storming the castle.
Stronghold Legends
It's gotten to the point that you don't know what you're going to get when you open the box of a new Stronghold game. The castle-building franchise from Hartford's Firefly Studios has gone through some significant changes over the past two years, but the latest version throws the whole formula out the window. Stronghold Legends moves the series out of the history books and into D&D-styled real-time strategy territory with mythical heroes, dragons, and dwarves. Yet while this is admittedly a nifty idea, the switch from reality to fantasy kills the historical authenticity that has long been a trademark of the Stronghold line. Even worse, everything seems to have been crowbarred into the aged Stronghold 2 engine, resulting in a generic RTS that has more than a few serious technical and design issues.
The actual gameplay in Stronghold has little to do with the earlier games in the franchise. Here, instead of building a castle and getting knee-deep into the nitty-gritty of what it was like to live during the Middle Ages, you sign up for three campaigns out of medieval mythology. In the opener, you take on the role of King Arthur, battling against the Saxons for control of Britain. In the others, you play as Siegfried, the German dragon slayer and star of a Wagnerian opera, and Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian Turk-killer best known today as the bloody inspiration for Dracula.
But nothing of interest has been done to develop these storylines or settings. Buildings follow the RTS template and feature barracks, armories, granaries, and so forth. Resource gathering goes beyond the usual food, wood, and stone, but it does so by adding an annoying level of micromanagement to what should be a straightforward grind of building armies and attacking the bad guys. A game this simplistic probably shouldn't demand the collection and processing of any resources, as mission objectives always involve straightforward building armies and killing enemies.
All of the soldiers featured in each faction are virtually identical. There is little difference here whether you're fighting on behalf of the evil forces of Dracula or the noble knights of King Arthur. Also, since the units themselves are generic, the gee-whiz factor of getting to play Count Blah and his evil minions in an RTS fades quickly. You get little aside from the same old pikemen, archers, crossbowmen, and swordsmen. There is only so much that a developer can do with a medieval setting, of course, but no effort was made to provide significantly different troops to represent the nationalities and time periods represented. A millennium passed between the King Arthur campaign of the mid-400s and the Vlad campaign of the mid-15th century. You would think that more than the color of the shirts would have changed during that time.
At least the three sides vary quite a bit when it comes to the menageries of mythological beasties that they can throw into battle. Heroes like Arthur, Merlin, Siegfried, and Vlad have special powers that give them the ability to pull off feats like casting spells, knocking down walls, and summoning magical creatures. In the Arthur scenarios, you have access to heroic knights and wizards straight out of Malory; in the Siegfried ones, you deal with figures out of Norse legend such as frost giants; and in the Dracula missions, you get to play with Halloween refugees like creepers and werewolves. All of the units fit perfectly into their settings and make the game feel like a collection of folktales come to life.
Yet while these beasties add color to Stronghold Legends, and some cool moments like giants stomping pesky soldiers with their feet and Merlin blasting archers with lightning bolts, they don't do much for gameplay. For starters, most are underpowered. Dragons, for instance, are second-rate compared to Tolkien's Smaug and can be taken out by well-placed archers. Giants can be ganged up on by regular infantry grunts like pikemen and felled quicker than you can say fee-fi-fo-fum. And just breathing on the frail Merlin seems to kill him. More play testing was also needed to root out some big problems with mission design and artificial intelligence. Most missions are laid out in an extremely linear fashion. You start at point A and kill everything until you reach point B, you defend a fortress until the clock runs out, and so on. But lack of imagination is the least of the game's issues. Enemy troops often continue patrolling mindlessly and actually ignore huge columns of your soldiers even after you've just smashed down or climbed a castle wall. They often don't react to crossbowmen or archers firing away at them, either, and sometimes choose to walk away from battles or abandon sieges. The narrator who provides tips on enemy attacks frequently comes out with lines like, "Woodsmen have seen a band of enemy troops heading this way!" right before they turn around and head back home. The game was obviously shipped without a fully functioning AI.
It also wasn't shipped with a modern graphics engine. Stronghold Legends looks like it was made with the same dated 3D technology that powered Stronghold 2, which unfortunately means that it looks like it was released around 2002. Visuals are drab and dingy overall, with blocky castles, dull building styles with little in the way of convincing detail, and terribly animated units that wobble back and forth when they run, like packs of chain-mail-clad Fat Alberts. Because there is no collision detection, battles between human armies immediately degenerate into undulating, colored blobs with no way to tell what's going on or who's winning.
Audio quality is a bit better, thanks to suitably cheesy voice acting during scenarios and soldiers' shouts during charges that really get the blood moving. Lines are repeated way too often, though, and frequently misstate what's actually going on. Once per mission, you'll usually hear something completely incongruous such as, "The enemy's ladders are on the walls!" even though you're not actually defending any walls at the time.
And even though Firefly should know its way around this engine by now, there are some serious bugs here. Crashes to the desktop are an infrequent occurrence, but the big problem is that units rarely respond properly to commands. They run by targeted enemies and often turn their backs on foes, giving them a free shot or two at you while you slowly rotate around to attack. Mass attacks directed at specific baddies always result in some units attacking and many others just standing around cooling their heels. It's best not to attack directly at all, as you're more likely to get everyone in on the action if you move close to the enemy and let the AI take over from there. Installing the version 1.10 patch didn't seem to rectify any of these issues, either.
There are some appealing alternatives to the campaigns, although considering all the gameplay problems and bugs, it's hard to contemplate why anyone would want to bother with them. Still, the three Legends Trails sets of linked skirmish maps is an intriguing idea that plays like a trio of solo ladders. Custom skirmishes with up to four players can also be played, both online and off. There does seem to be a fair number of people looking for matches online, too, so you can find games pretty easily. And a map editor is also included for players who want to roll their own skirmish scenarios.
The developers were obviously going for a you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment here by throwing D&D into their medieval simulation series, but Stronghold Legends is just another second-rate RTS. While incorporating giants and dragons into the mix may seem like a natural fit these days, as any game with castle walls in it seems to demand the addition of Tolkienesque beasties to knock them down, you've got to do more than just toss such creatures in with generic armies and buggy gameplay. This is an interesting concept that deserved more careful attention than the designers gave it.
The actual gameplay in Stronghold has little to do with the earlier games in the franchise. Here, instead of building a castle and getting knee-deep into the nitty-gritty of what it was like to live during the Middle Ages, you sign up for three campaigns out of medieval mythology. In the opener, you take on the role of King Arthur, battling against the Saxons for control of Britain. In the others, you play as Siegfried, the German dragon slayer and star of a Wagnerian opera, and Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian Turk-killer best known today as the bloody inspiration for Dracula.
But nothing of interest has been done to develop these storylines or settings. Buildings follow the RTS template and feature barracks, armories, granaries, and so forth. Resource gathering goes beyond the usual food, wood, and stone, but it does so by adding an annoying level of micromanagement to what should be a straightforward grind of building armies and attacking the bad guys. A game this simplistic probably shouldn't demand the collection and processing of any resources, as mission objectives always involve straightforward building armies and killing enemies.
All of the soldiers featured in each faction are virtually identical. There is little difference here whether you're fighting on behalf of the evil forces of Dracula or the noble knights of King Arthur. Also, since the units themselves are generic, the gee-whiz factor of getting to play Count Blah and his evil minions in an RTS fades quickly. You get little aside from the same old pikemen, archers, crossbowmen, and swordsmen. There is only so much that a developer can do with a medieval setting, of course, but no effort was made to provide significantly different troops to represent the nationalities and time periods represented. A millennium passed between the King Arthur campaign of the mid-400s and the Vlad campaign of the mid-15th century. You would think that more than the color of the shirts would have changed during that time.
At least the three sides vary quite a bit when it comes to the menageries of mythological beasties that they can throw into battle. Heroes like Arthur, Merlin, Siegfried, and Vlad have special powers that give them the ability to pull off feats like casting spells, knocking down walls, and summoning magical creatures. In the Arthur scenarios, you have access to heroic knights and wizards straight out of Malory; in the Siegfried ones, you deal with figures out of Norse legend such as frost giants; and in the Dracula missions, you get to play with Halloween refugees like creepers and werewolves. All of the units fit perfectly into their settings and make the game feel like a collection of folktales come to life.
Yet while these beasties add color to Stronghold Legends, and some cool moments like giants stomping pesky soldiers with their feet and Merlin blasting archers with lightning bolts, they don't do much for gameplay. For starters, most are underpowered. Dragons, for instance, are second-rate compared to Tolkien's Smaug and can be taken out by well-placed archers. Giants can be ganged up on by regular infantry grunts like pikemen and felled quicker than you can say fee-fi-fo-fum. And just breathing on the frail Merlin seems to kill him. More play testing was also needed to root out some big problems with mission design and artificial intelligence. Most missions are laid out in an extremely linear fashion. You start at point A and kill everything until you reach point B, you defend a fortress until the clock runs out, and so on. But lack of imagination is the least of the game's issues. Enemy troops often continue patrolling mindlessly and actually ignore huge columns of your soldiers even after you've just smashed down or climbed a castle wall. They often don't react to crossbowmen or archers firing away at them, either, and sometimes choose to walk away from battles or abandon sieges. The narrator who provides tips on enemy attacks frequently comes out with lines like, "Woodsmen have seen a band of enemy troops heading this way!" right before they turn around and head back home. The game was obviously shipped without a fully functioning AI.
It also wasn't shipped with a modern graphics engine. Stronghold Legends looks like it was made with the same dated 3D technology that powered Stronghold 2, which unfortunately means that it looks like it was released around 2002. Visuals are drab and dingy overall, with blocky castles, dull building styles with little in the way of convincing detail, and terribly animated units that wobble back and forth when they run, like packs of chain-mail-clad Fat Alberts. Because there is no collision detection, battles between human armies immediately degenerate into undulating, colored blobs with no way to tell what's going on or who's winning.
Audio quality is a bit better, thanks to suitably cheesy voice acting during scenarios and soldiers' shouts during charges that really get the blood moving. Lines are repeated way too often, though, and frequently misstate what's actually going on. Once per mission, you'll usually hear something completely incongruous such as, "The enemy's ladders are on the walls!" even though you're not actually defending any walls at the time.
And even though Firefly should know its way around this engine by now, there are some serious bugs here. Crashes to the desktop are an infrequent occurrence, but the big problem is that units rarely respond properly to commands. They run by targeted enemies and often turn their backs on foes, giving them a free shot or two at you while you slowly rotate around to attack. Mass attacks directed at specific baddies always result in some units attacking and many others just standing around cooling their heels. It's best not to attack directly at all, as you're more likely to get everyone in on the action if you move close to the enemy and let the AI take over from there. Installing the version 1.10 patch didn't seem to rectify any of these issues, either.
There are some appealing alternatives to the campaigns, although considering all the gameplay problems and bugs, it's hard to contemplate why anyone would want to bother with them. Still, the three Legends Trails sets of linked skirmish maps is an intriguing idea that plays like a trio of solo ladders. Custom skirmishes with up to four players can also be played, both online and off. There does seem to be a fair number of people looking for matches online, too, so you can find games pretty easily. And a map editor is also included for players who want to roll their own skirmish scenarios.
The developers were obviously going for a you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment here by throwing D&D into their medieval simulation series, but Stronghold Legends is just another second-rate RTS. While incorporating giants and dragons into the mix may seem like a natural fit these days, as any game with castle walls in it seems to demand the addition of Tolkienesque beasties to knock them down, you've got to do more than just toss such creatures in with generic armies and buggy gameplay. This is an interesting concept that deserved more careful attention than the designers gave it.
Stronghold 2
Store your food and raise the drawbridge, for Stronghold 2 has been released and is ready to lay siege to your computer. For those of you unfamiliar with the Stronghold series, or castle sim games in general, Stronghold 2 puts you in command of a castle. You must feed your peasants and keep them happy, build walls and towers to protect your property, and raise an army to lay siege to your opponent's castles. While there have been plenty of additions made to Stronghold 2 over its predecessor (in addition to the implementation of some good ideas), a poor story, weak artificial intelligence, and plenty of bugs mar what otherwise could have been a simple yet fun castle-building game.
In Stronghold 2, you have a lord who presides over a keep. Peasants will flock to your keep as long as they're kept happy. Happiness is dependent on several factors, including how well they eat, the amount of rats in your castle, and whether you provide entertainment for them. You'll gather various resources to place in your storehouse, and industry workers can take these resources to create advanced items, like bread, ale, and weapons. However, there aren't any complicated manufacturing trees, so don't expect an intricate economic sim game. Stronghold 2 is designed so you can focus on building up your castle and raising an army.
There are a few issues with the gameplay that are worth noting. You can't shut off just one building. You have to either shut down the entire industry or sell the building. For example, if you build three lumber camps but only want two to operate at a given moment, you have to sell the third camp. Also, some of your workers will, on occasion, turn to crime, thus abandoning the industry in which they were working. And, unfortunately, you can't shift a worker from one industry to the abandoned one. This poses a problem when the abandoned post is critical, such as your gong pit. If your gong pit worker leaves his post, and you don't notice, gong will pile up, and your peasants will be unhappy. If you're already on the breaking point of happiness/unhappiness, people will start leaving the castle (and, thus, they'll start to leave other critical industries), putting you in a feedback loop you may never recover from. These are micromanagement issues you shouldn't have to face. More alerts for when critical posts get abandoned would have been a big help.
There are two campaigns in Stronghold 2: peace and war. They're what you'd expect. The peace campaign focuses on economic missions. The king is displeased with his vassals, so you must step up and fix the economy of his nation. You'll focus on collecting a set number of resources in a mission without worry of being sieged. The most fighting you'll see is against bandits or wolves. Since the economic portion of the game is pretty basic, this campaign can be boring if you expect heavy micromanagement. The war campaign, on the other hand, throws you into missions where you not only have to build up your castle, but also attack an enemy or defend your lands. The storyline of the war campaign is weak due to boring cutscenes and poor voice acting, but the missions are structured nicely. Some strategy games can be repetitive because you have to rebuild a base every time you start a new mission. In Stronghold 2, each mission is divided into several submissions played on the same map. As a result, you don't have to rebuild a castle every time you start a new objective.
The two campaigns aren't particularly challenging. The peace campaign can have some tricky situations, but you're not going to burst your brain trying to figure out how to win. The war campaign is a cakewalk, especially once you discover the limitations of the AI. You may have to restart a few missions, but you'll soon realize that the computer follows the same strategy every time. Whether you're defending or attacking, you won't find a worthy opponent in the AI.
When being sieged, it's very easy to adapt your defenses to thwart the attack. Some missions pit you against seemingly impossible odds. The easiest way to defend against these attacks is to build a bunch of wooden walls outside your main stone ones. Ladder men can't scale these walls, and enemy troops will happily hack at the wooden walls while under heavy fire from your archers. Even if the computer has siege equipment, it will be used against your wooden walls instead of your towers or your defenders. Rarely will the computer ever be able to get to your stone walls, much less your lord (if your lord dies, you lose, by the way). When you're on the offensive, the AI won't do much to lift your siege. You can methodically pick off defenders and towers one by one with your siege equipment, all without worry of retaliation. It makes the game really boring and simplistic, which is unfortunate, because there's high potential for great battles.
We wouldn't have had to resort to cheesy tactics if the other castle defenses weren't broken. You can mount logs and rocks on your walls that can be released to cause damage to soldiers underneath. The problem is that once ladder men get close to these walls, these defense mechanisms mysteriously disappear. It's extremely irritating to spend a bunch of gold on these defenses only to have them vanish. Of course, you can exploit this to your own advantage when you're the attacker.
Once you complete the campaigns, which can take around 15 to 20 hours, there's plenty to keep you occupied, if you so desire. You can play a free-build mode, where you just build up your economy and castle with no objectives. Kingmaker is the skirmish mode where you square off against computer or human opponents in multiplayer. Single-player skirmish suffers from the same faults as above, but multiplayer has a lot more to offer in terms of strategy and castle development. Human opponents can use the fairly large number of units and siege weapons to formulate counterstrategies that make gameplay much more rewarding. You can play multiplayer using a LAN or the in-game browser, which is rudimentary but gets the job done. Unfortunately, multiplayer is also buggy, though. In one game, we were suddenly dropped to the main menu. In another game, it appeared that all three of our opponents were dropped without warning. We didn't even notice until it became apparent that one of our siege victims wasn't responding to our attacks.
The biggest change between Stronghold 2 and its predecessor is the addition of a 3D engine. You can zoom in and spin the map around to accurately place walls and structures. However, the 3D engine isn't particularly flattering, because the graphics aren't very good. Aside from the lackluster combat animations, units tend to clump together in combat, making it difficult to control individual units or to even tell what's going on in a fight. Units clip through each other, so you'll see a wagon roll right through a peasant while on its way to the storehouse. Also, the game has a low frame rate during any action, even on high-end machines. And cutscenes are in-engine, so this issue rears its ugly head even during story sequences. Additionally, the audio to these cutscenes, and to the rest of the game, for that matter, is poor. Furthermore, the voice acting just isn't very good.
There's a patch out already that fixes some issues, but the low frame rate and other bugs mentioned above weren't fixed in it. The single-player experience isn't very rewarding, although the game does let you build your own missions with the editor. You can set victory and losing conditions, and you can even make a sequence of missions in a scenario. Players can also create more-challenging scenarios here, but being able to do so isn't going to make it worthwhile to pick up this game. Meanwhile, multiplayer would have been a more redeeming aspect if it wasn't so prone to dropping players. All things considered, Stronghold 2 has too many problems to be recommendable to even the most diehard strategy fan.
In Stronghold 2, you have a lord who presides over a keep. Peasants will flock to your keep as long as they're kept happy. Happiness is dependent on several factors, including how well they eat, the amount of rats in your castle, and whether you provide entertainment for them. You'll gather various resources to place in your storehouse, and industry workers can take these resources to create advanced items, like bread, ale, and weapons. However, there aren't any complicated manufacturing trees, so don't expect an intricate economic sim game. Stronghold 2 is designed so you can focus on building up your castle and raising an army.
There are a few issues with the gameplay that are worth noting. You can't shut off just one building. You have to either shut down the entire industry or sell the building. For example, if you build three lumber camps but only want two to operate at a given moment, you have to sell the third camp. Also, some of your workers will, on occasion, turn to crime, thus abandoning the industry in which they were working. And, unfortunately, you can't shift a worker from one industry to the abandoned one. This poses a problem when the abandoned post is critical, such as your gong pit. If your gong pit worker leaves his post, and you don't notice, gong will pile up, and your peasants will be unhappy. If you're already on the breaking point of happiness/unhappiness, people will start leaving the castle (and, thus, they'll start to leave other critical industries), putting you in a feedback loop you may never recover from. These are micromanagement issues you shouldn't have to face. More alerts for when critical posts get abandoned would have been a big help.
There are two campaigns in Stronghold 2: peace and war. They're what you'd expect. The peace campaign focuses on economic missions. The king is displeased with his vassals, so you must step up and fix the economy of his nation. You'll focus on collecting a set number of resources in a mission without worry of being sieged. The most fighting you'll see is against bandits or wolves. Since the economic portion of the game is pretty basic, this campaign can be boring if you expect heavy micromanagement. The war campaign, on the other hand, throws you into missions where you not only have to build up your castle, but also attack an enemy or defend your lands. The storyline of the war campaign is weak due to boring cutscenes and poor voice acting, but the missions are structured nicely. Some strategy games can be repetitive because you have to rebuild a base every time you start a new mission. In Stronghold 2, each mission is divided into several submissions played on the same map. As a result, you don't have to rebuild a castle every time you start a new objective.
The two campaigns aren't particularly challenging. The peace campaign can have some tricky situations, but you're not going to burst your brain trying to figure out how to win. The war campaign is a cakewalk, especially once you discover the limitations of the AI. You may have to restart a few missions, but you'll soon realize that the computer follows the same strategy every time. Whether you're defending or attacking, you won't find a worthy opponent in the AI.
When being sieged, it's very easy to adapt your defenses to thwart the attack. Some missions pit you against seemingly impossible odds. The easiest way to defend against these attacks is to build a bunch of wooden walls outside your main stone ones. Ladder men can't scale these walls, and enemy troops will happily hack at the wooden walls while under heavy fire from your archers. Even if the computer has siege equipment, it will be used against your wooden walls instead of your towers or your defenders. Rarely will the computer ever be able to get to your stone walls, much less your lord (if your lord dies, you lose, by the way). When you're on the offensive, the AI won't do much to lift your siege. You can methodically pick off defenders and towers one by one with your siege equipment, all without worry of retaliation. It makes the game really boring and simplistic, which is unfortunate, because there's high potential for great battles.
We wouldn't have had to resort to cheesy tactics if the other castle defenses weren't broken. You can mount logs and rocks on your walls that can be released to cause damage to soldiers underneath. The problem is that once ladder men get close to these walls, these defense mechanisms mysteriously disappear. It's extremely irritating to spend a bunch of gold on these defenses only to have them vanish. Of course, you can exploit this to your own advantage when you're the attacker.
Once you complete the campaigns, which can take around 15 to 20 hours, there's plenty to keep you occupied, if you so desire. You can play a free-build mode, where you just build up your economy and castle with no objectives. Kingmaker is the skirmish mode where you square off against computer or human opponents in multiplayer. Single-player skirmish suffers from the same faults as above, but multiplayer has a lot more to offer in terms of strategy and castle development. Human opponents can use the fairly large number of units and siege weapons to formulate counterstrategies that make gameplay much more rewarding. You can play multiplayer using a LAN or the in-game browser, which is rudimentary but gets the job done. Unfortunately, multiplayer is also buggy, though. In one game, we were suddenly dropped to the main menu. In another game, it appeared that all three of our opponents were dropped without warning. We didn't even notice until it became apparent that one of our siege victims wasn't responding to our attacks.
The biggest change between Stronghold 2 and its predecessor is the addition of a 3D engine. You can zoom in and spin the map around to accurately place walls and structures. However, the 3D engine isn't particularly flattering, because the graphics aren't very good. Aside from the lackluster combat animations, units tend to clump together in combat, making it difficult to control individual units or to even tell what's going on in a fight. Units clip through each other, so you'll see a wagon roll right through a peasant while on its way to the storehouse. Also, the game has a low frame rate during any action, even on high-end machines. And cutscenes are in-engine, so this issue rears its ugly head even during story sequences. Additionally, the audio to these cutscenes, and to the rest of the game, for that matter, is poor. Furthermore, the voice acting just isn't very good.
There's a patch out already that fixes some issues, but the low frame rate and other bugs mentioned above weren't fixed in it. The single-player experience isn't very rewarding, although the game does let you build your own missions with the editor. You can set victory and losing conditions, and you can even make a sequence of missions in a scenario. Players can also create more-challenging scenarios here, but being able to do so isn't going to make it worthwhile to pick up this game. Meanwhile, multiplayer would have been a more redeeming aspect if it wasn't so prone to dropping players. All things considered, Stronghold 2 has too many problems to be recommendable to even the most diehard strategy fan.
Monday, 13 June 2011
SOCOM 4
Though it has a long history of bringing tactical third-person shooter action to Sony systems, the SOCOM series' debut on the PlayStation 3 failed to fully capture the excitement of its predecessors. Yet while SOCOM: Confrontation disappointed, SOCOM 4 delivers. The substantial campaign makes good use of setting and characters to create an engaging tour of duty in which squad tactics play a nicely balanced role. The online cooperative mode lets up to five players band together for stand-alone missions that can offer a serious challenge and engender a good sense of camaraderie. Those looking for competition will find plenty to like in the online multiplayer, where up to 32 players compete on large, well-designed maps in a variety of game types, including tense variants with the classic SOCOM rules that disallow respawning in the middle of a match. Both single- and multiplayer do have some issues, including imperfect stealth action, visual oddities, and intermittent network problems. Fortunately, these limitations don't spoil the fun, and SOCOM 4 makes it exciting to experience what each mode has to offer.
The campaign plays out in Southeast Asia and centers on the Strait of Malacca, a major shipping channel. You and your two Marine squadmates fight your way through the tropical countryside and into larger towns as you hunt a militant revolutionary leader who is planning to cripple the vital waterway. Early in the campaign, you link up with two Korean NATO soldiers who join your team, forming a second two-person squad. The story is fairly standard, following a typical narrative where not everything is as it seems, and offers few intriguing twists. Your team is made up of three unremarkable characters and two main protagonists who generate most of the story's appeal. The first is the American Ops Commander: the story behind his single-minded focus on the mission is an interesting facet, and you're not always sure whether you want to be on his side. The second is First Lieutenant Park Yoon-Hee, aka Forty Five: a confident and capable ally who mirrors the hard-nosed stubbornness of her male peers without losing her female identity. During intense conflicts, she isn't afraid to let the expletives fly, and her sparing use of four-letter words adds immediacy to these exchanges without turning her into another foul-mouthed stereotype. She's charismatic and expressive, offering a grounded portrayal of a female officer that stands in sharp contrast to those in comparable games. In both cutscenes and gameplay, she stands out while fitting right in (down to the occasional cliche one-liner), and this authenticity livens up the otherwise generic plot.
These two characters also reflect the two different styles of play that you encounter in the campaign. As the Ops Comm, you can command both two-person squads as you make your way through each level. Your allies do a decent job of following you, taking cover when under fire, and shooting enemies. They do commit blunders, like walking in front of you or taking cover on the wrong side of an object, and while this can sometimes mess up your stealth plans, these navigation issues aren't a big impediment. Still, your squads aren't truly effective unless you are issuing orders. Sending them to cover positions can help you ambush an incoming patrol or quietly surround an encampment, and ordering them to advance in the heat of combat can help put your enemies on their heels. Orders are easily issued with the directional pad and are limited to "move there" and "shoot that guy." You can also create a plan of attack by queuing up orders, or scrap any orders you've given by telling your squads to fall in, bringing them into a loose group around your position.
Though you can get away with just having allies in tow during some sections, your enemies don't make it easy. They are great shots and advance aggressively when they feel they have the advantage. You have to pull your weight when it comes to fending them off, using a variety of assault rifles, shotguns, machine guns, submachine guns, and sniper rifles, as well as a few different types of grenades. Though your arsenal lacks the auditory impact of many other modern shooters, it gets the job done quite well. Furthermore, you level up your guns as you use them in any game mode (cooperative and competitive included), unlocking better sights, suppressors, and underbarrel attachments. Yet despite your battlefield skill, you aren't deadly enough to go it alone. You might be able to get away with some cavalier tactics in the early going, but it isn't long before leaving yourself exposed to enemy fire will send you back to a checkpoint in a hurry. These squad-based missions strike a good balance--they spur you to issue squad orders but don't require you to micromanage. Incorporating your team into your attack plan is empowering, and it's very satisfying to fight your way through the tough skirmishes and ambushes.
The other style of campaign mission casts you as Forty Five. In these stealth missions, you must silently infiltrate and navigate enemy strongholds to gain intel and plant explosives. With two silenced weapons and the ability to stealth kill from behind, Forty Five must kill her enemies quietly or evade them silently. If one enemy raises the alarm, you fail the mission. Slinking through shadows and shrubbery provides some enjoyably tense moments, and finishing a mission cleanly is a satisfying feat. Unfortunately, there are some problems with the stealth action, including odd lighting that will occasionally show Forty Five in a virtual spotlight even though her stealth meter is pegged on "hidden." Getting a feel for exactly how silenced your silenced weapons are can also be tricky, and your ability to throw a shell casing and distract an enemy doesn't always work out the way it should. These issues can result in unwanted do-overs, but these sections are a nice change of pace, and the way they fit into the rest of the campaign is clever. After Forty Five infiltrates an area by night, you return during the daytime as the Ops Comm with a full fireteam. As you chart a new course through the environment, you recognize things from the night before, but the experience is refreshingly different. This gives the campaign a nice sense of continuity that helps build momentum throughout the eight or so hours it'll take you to complete it.
If you want to get some friends in on the action, SOCOM 4's cooperative mode lets up to five players team up online to tackle stand-alone missions that involve recovering info or killing enemy VIPs. You can tweak the settings to determine how skilled and how numerous your enemies are, and the difficulty really ramps up in the tougher matches. When you take on the hardest missions, your enemies are often aggressive to the point of wrecklessness, but their enthusiasm doesn't make it less fun or less challenging. Smoke grenades become essential to creating cover while you revive your incapacitated friends, and communicating with your team via headset or in-game waypoints can make the difference between success and failure. It's a shame there are only six maps and two objective types available for co-op play, because working as a team to take down a fierce enemy force is very satisfying. You can also play these scenarios single-player, but this is likely to appeal only to diehard challenge seekers and players grinding for weapon improvements.
However, not all the human players you encounter in SOCOM 4 are friendly--specifically, those players on the enemy team in the online competitive multiplayer mode. These matches support up to 32 players across four core game types: Suppression (team deathmatch), Uplink (capture the flag), Bomb Squad (defuse/defend bombs with one player boasting a bomb suit and improved weaponry), and Last Defense (when one team captures all three points, secondary target objectives are revealed). The first two are solid incarnations of these ubiquitous game types that succeed largely because of the impressive maps, which offer plenty of different routes and cover positions. Bomb Squad is basically team deathmatch until you locate the bomb technician, at which point it becomes a frantic hunt to kill the VIP. For the other team, it's a balance between escorting the bomb tech and trying not to reveal his position by all clustering around him. Last Defense usually begins as a tug-of-war as each team scrambles to hold the three objectives, and then becomes an all-out assault or defense, depending on your team's performance. Each of these modes can also be played with classic SOCOM rules that allow players only one life per match.
Even with the ability to respawn, SOCOM 4's multiplayer arena is a perilous place. A few shots to the body or a single headshot is all it takes to end a life, so finding cover and minimizing your exposure to enemy fire are important skills. Skirmishes are tense and exciting, doubly so when you know you won't respawn before the round is over. Though death is ever-present, the action isn't slow and methodical. You can get into some entrenched cover-based shootouts, but there's also a fair amount of running and gunning. As you navigate the spacious maps, you may see players scurrying off of ledges like cartoon characters or going prone in weird positions, and though they are consistent with the game mechanics, these visual oddities are strange to behold. We also ran into occasional network issues when, in a few matches, players lapsed out of sync with each other. In these cases, you might fill an enemy full of bullets and then watch him run away, only to get credit for the kill (or die yourself) half a minute later. Fortunately, these matches were the exception to the rule, and generally fixed themselves after the round ended.
From coastal fishing villages to fenced military installations, and from ramshackle slums to concrete urban jungles, SOCOM 4 takes you to a variety of locations throughout the campaign and multiplayer modes. The busy environments always feature a decent number of cover positions, and using the local flora to your advantage can also help. The foliage is diverse and the levels are full of nice details, though the visuals do have some rough edges and can sometimes feel a bit too cluttered. SOCOM 4 isn't a beautiful game, but its accompanying soundtrack is quite good. The driving orchestral score imbues the action with a motivating energy, while the percussive chimes and plucked strings of a gamelan interject to add a nice sense of place to the musical setting.
SOCOM 4 also supports the latest in gaming gimmickry--the PlayStation Move and stereoscopic 3D. Both the control scheme and the visual effect work quite well, providing properly equipped players with a fun way to put their purchases to good use. Yet no matter how you are equipped, SOCOM 4 has a lot to offer, despite its notable limitations. The entertaining campaign, challenging cooperative play, and frantic multiplayer firefights combine to provide tens of hours of enjoyable content, making SOCOM 4 a very appealing shooter.
The campaign plays out in Southeast Asia and centers on the Strait of Malacca, a major shipping channel. You and your two Marine squadmates fight your way through the tropical countryside and into larger towns as you hunt a militant revolutionary leader who is planning to cripple the vital waterway. Early in the campaign, you link up with two Korean NATO soldiers who join your team, forming a second two-person squad. The story is fairly standard, following a typical narrative where not everything is as it seems, and offers few intriguing twists. Your team is made up of three unremarkable characters and two main protagonists who generate most of the story's appeal. The first is the American Ops Commander: the story behind his single-minded focus on the mission is an interesting facet, and you're not always sure whether you want to be on his side. The second is First Lieutenant Park Yoon-Hee, aka Forty Five: a confident and capable ally who mirrors the hard-nosed stubbornness of her male peers without losing her female identity. During intense conflicts, she isn't afraid to let the expletives fly, and her sparing use of four-letter words adds immediacy to these exchanges without turning her into another foul-mouthed stereotype. She's charismatic and expressive, offering a grounded portrayal of a female officer that stands in sharp contrast to those in comparable games. In both cutscenes and gameplay, she stands out while fitting right in (down to the occasional cliche one-liner), and this authenticity livens up the otherwise generic plot.
These two characters also reflect the two different styles of play that you encounter in the campaign. As the Ops Comm, you can command both two-person squads as you make your way through each level. Your allies do a decent job of following you, taking cover when under fire, and shooting enemies. They do commit blunders, like walking in front of you or taking cover on the wrong side of an object, and while this can sometimes mess up your stealth plans, these navigation issues aren't a big impediment. Still, your squads aren't truly effective unless you are issuing orders. Sending them to cover positions can help you ambush an incoming patrol or quietly surround an encampment, and ordering them to advance in the heat of combat can help put your enemies on their heels. Orders are easily issued with the directional pad and are limited to "move there" and "shoot that guy." You can also create a plan of attack by queuing up orders, or scrap any orders you've given by telling your squads to fall in, bringing them into a loose group around your position.
The other style of campaign mission casts you as Forty Five. In these stealth missions, you must silently infiltrate and navigate enemy strongholds to gain intel and plant explosives. With two silenced weapons and the ability to stealth kill from behind, Forty Five must kill her enemies quietly or evade them silently. If one enemy raises the alarm, you fail the mission. Slinking through shadows and shrubbery provides some enjoyably tense moments, and finishing a mission cleanly is a satisfying feat. Unfortunately, there are some problems with the stealth action, including odd lighting that will occasionally show Forty Five in a virtual spotlight even though her stealth meter is pegged on "hidden." Getting a feel for exactly how silenced your silenced weapons are can also be tricky, and your ability to throw a shell casing and distract an enemy doesn't always work out the way it should. These issues can result in unwanted do-overs, but these sections are a nice change of pace, and the way they fit into the rest of the campaign is clever. After Forty Five infiltrates an area by night, you return during the daytime as the Ops Comm with a full fireteam. As you chart a new course through the environment, you recognize things from the night before, but the experience is refreshingly different. This gives the campaign a nice sense of continuity that helps build momentum throughout the eight or so hours it'll take you to complete it.
If you want to get some friends in on the action, SOCOM 4's cooperative mode lets up to five players team up online to tackle stand-alone missions that involve recovering info or killing enemy VIPs. You can tweak the settings to determine how skilled and how numerous your enemies are, and the difficulty really ramps up in the tougher matches. When you take on the hardest missions, your enemies are often aggressive to the point of wrecklessness, but their enthusiasm doesn't make it less fun or less challenging. Smoke grenades become essential to creating cover while you revive your incapacitated friends, and communicating with your team via headset or in-game waypoints can make the difference between success and failure. It's a shame there are only six maps and two objective types available for co-op play, because working as a team to take down a fierce enemy force is very satisfying. You can also play these scenarios single-player, but this is likely to appeal only to diehard challenge seekers and players grinding for weapon improvements.
However, not all the human players you encounter in SOCOM 4 are friendly--specifically, those players on the enemy team in the online competitive multiplayer mode. These matches support up to 32 players across four core game types: Suppression (team deathmatch), Uplink (capture the flag), Bomb Squad (defuse/defend bombs with one player boasting a bomb suit and improved weaponry), and Last Defense (when one team captures all three points, secondary target objectives are revealed). The first two are solid incarnations of these ubiquitous game types that succeed largely because of the impressive maps, which offer plenty of different routes and cover positions. Bomb Squad is basically team deathmatch until you locate the bomb technician, at which point it becomes a frantic hunt to kill the VIP. For the other team, it's a balance between escorting the bomb tech and trying not to reveal his position by all clustering around him. Last Defense usually begins as a tug-of-war as each team scrambles to hold the three objectives, and then becomes an all-out assault or defense, depending on your team's performance. Each of these modes can also be played with classic SOCOM rules that allow players only one life per match.
Even with the ability to respawn, SOCOM 4's multiplayer arena is a perilous place. A few shots to the body or a single headshot is all it takes to end a life, so finding cover and minimizing your exposure to enemy fire are important skills. Skirmishes are tense and exciting, doubly so when you know you won't respawn before the round is over. Though death is ever-present, the action isn't slow and methodical. You can get into some entrenched cover-based shootouts, but there's also a fair amount of running and gunning. As you navigate the spacious maps, you may see players scurrying off of ledges like cartoon characters or going prone in weird positions, and though they are consistent with the game mechanics, these visual oddities are strange to behold. We also ran into occasional network issues when, in a few matches, players lapsed out of sync with each other. In these cases, you might fill an enemy full of bullets and then watch him run away, only to get credit for the kill (or die yourself) half a minute later. Fortunately, these matches were the exception to the rule, and generally fixed themselves after the round ended.
From coastal fishing villages to fenced military installations, and from ramshackle slums to concrete urban jungles, SOCOM 4 takes you to a variety of locations throughout the campaign and multiplayer modes. The busy environments always feature a decent number of cover positions, and using the local flora to your advantage can also help. The foliage is diverse and the levels are full of nice details, though the visuals do have some rough edges and can sometimes feel a bit too cluttered. SOCOM 4 isn't a beautiful game, but its accompanying soundtrack is quite good. The driving orchestral score imbues the action with a motivating energy, while the percussive chimes and plucked strings of a gamelan interject to add a nice sense of place to the musical setting.
SOCOM 4 also supports the latest in gaming gimmickry--the PlayStation Move and stereoscopic 3D. Both the control scheme and the visual effect work quite well, providing properly equipped players with a fun way to put their purchases to good use. Yet no matter how you are equipped, SOCOM 4 has a lot to offer, despite its notable limitations. The entertaining campaign, challenging cooperative play, and frantic multiplayer firefights combine to provide tens of hours of enjoyable content, making SOCOM 4 a very appealing shooter.
Mortal Kombat
Most fighting games have some kind of narrative backing up the action, but few do more with it than bookend their arcade modes with a few cutscenes. Not so in Mortal Kombat's Story mode. Each fight you have is punctuated by in-engine cinematics, taking you on a journey that reboots the narrative from the first three Mortal Kombat games. The story picks up where Mortal Kombat: Armageddon left off, with Thunder God Raiden under attack from Shao Kahn, an evil emperor hell-bent on merging Outworld with Earth Realm--a process that threatens to end all life on the planet. Raiden sends a message to his past self in order to prevent that outcome, which manifests itself as a series of visions. Though he's not entirely sure what the visions mean, Raiden proceeds to help the people of Earth Realm compete in the Mortal Kombat tournament, which decides the fate of the two worlds. By using the time travel mechanic, the story does a great job of introducing new players to the series, while also giving long time fans a new perspective on events. Be warned if you're not a fan of cut scenes, though. You can't skip them, even if you've already watched them when you resume a game. You also can't choose to replay specific sections of Story mode, even after you've conquered it; you either resume from your last save or start all the way from the beginning.
You initially take on the role of the actor Johnny Cage, whose arrogant personality and inordinate sexism make him something of a chore to listen to. Fortunately, you play as different fighters as you progress, most of which made an appearance in the first three games. They include classics such as Scorpion, Sub Zero, and Liu Kang, through to later additions such as Kabal, Smoke, and Sindel, who are unlocked from the start. You're also taken through a range of different environments, which look great. They're full of detail, re-creating some of the classic environments from previous games. One moment you're fighting beside a river of blood or in the fiery depths of the underworld, and the next you're being transported to an arena filled with giant monsters and chained-up slave girls. PlayStation 3 users have the option of playing in stereoscopic 3D, and also get a bonus character in the form of Kratos, complete with his Blades of Exile. Each time you switch characters in Story mode you learn about their origins and motivations for joining the tournament, whether that's revenge, bravery, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Though it would be innacurate to say the story is particularly deep, it is entertaining, with tongue-in-cheek dialogue and a number of twists that keep you guessing--even if it gets a little absurd at times. Each character is well voiced, though, and because there's some motivation for the fighters' actions, there's more than just gameplay to keep you invested through until the end of the five-hour-plus narrative.
That's not to say the gameplay isn't enough to keep you entertained--far from it. Mortal Kombat makes a return to the single-plane 2D fighting that the series is known for, albeit with 3D models in place of digitised sprites. Your goal is to knock out your opponent using a range of kicks, punches, and special moves, such as knife throws, acid spit, and fireballs. You can chain moves together to perform combos, and also juggle your opponents by knocking them into the air and following up with additional attacks. Pulling off such moves is tricky, but things are made a little easier with a stripped back control scheme that harks back to the simple controls of the arcade originals, albeit with some tweaks. There are still four primary attack buttons, but rather than launching high and low attacks, each button now corresponds to a limb--similar to the control scheme from the Tekken series. Separate buttons perform blocks, while another performs throws. Though longtime fans may lament these changes, they actually make things a little easier, particularly if you're new to the series, as it's much more intuitive to perform low attacks by pushing down on the D pad or analogue stick.
The new controls are pleasingly responsive, with a feel that's very much reminiscent of Mortal Kombat II--that is, very fast. You need quick reflexes to dodge your opponent's attacks, as well as for finding those small openings in fights where you can squeeze in a punch and follow up with a devastating combo. Many of the button combinations for moves have been simplified. You still need speedy thumbs to enter in the button commands at the right time, but with less to remember it's easier than ever to pull off some impressive looking attacks. If you're used to playing the likes of Super Street Fighter IV, then the feel of Mortal Kombat will take some getting used to because the animation is less fluid. Moves don't string together as smoothly, so if you try to perform a combo that isn't in your character's repertoire, there's a delay between each attack, which feels jarring if you're not used to it. This doesn't make the game any less fun, though; it's just a different approach.
While the basic controls have been stripped back, a super meter has been introduced that gives you a few more options during a fight. As you receive and land hits, the meter builds up through three levels. The lowest level gives you access to enhanced moves. By holding down the block button while performing one of your character's special moves, that move becomes faster and more powerful, making it much trickier for your opponent to dodge. Fill the meter up to the second stage, and you can perform breakers--a type of counterattack. Tapping a directional button while holding down the block button breaks up an opponent's combo, letting you unleash a satisfying counterattack of your own, though getting the timing right does take some practice. Max out the meter, and you can perform devastating super combos called X-ray moves. These vary depending on your chosen character, but all are performed the same way, by holding down the block and stance buttons.
As each hit of the combo lands on your opponent, you're treated to a slow-motion X-ray view of your opponent's bones and organs being crushed in an excessive display of blood and guts that even the most hardcore of sadists will appreciate. Skulls are smashed, spines are broken, and knives are thrust into eyeball sockets, all accompanied by flying shards of bones and chilling sound effects that crunch and splat just right. Aside from the visual payoff, X-ray moves take off massive amounts of your opponent's health--so much so that it's often worth ignoring the first two stages of the super meter altogether, nullifying its strategic merits somewhat. Get the timing right and you can integrate X-Ray moves into your existing combos. They're especially useful if you're juggling--nothing screams pro more than launching your opponents into the air, landing a combo, and then, while they're completely helpless, smashing their skull with your boot in glorious X-Ray vision. While X-ray moves are powerful, they're not unstoppable; some can be blocked if they're not performed as part of a combo, and others can be dodged. They're also not the bloodiest of moves in the game--that accolade is reserved for fatalities.
Gruesome, a little disturbing, and so over-the-top they're downright hilarious at times, fatalities are performed at the end of fights. Depending on your chosen character, you can perform moves such as ripping the skin off opponents, slicing their bodies into quarters, or turning them into vapor with a barrage of explosive rockets. There are also stage fatalities that let you use the surrounding environment to kill opponents, such as by punching them into a pool of acid or dropping them onto a set of spikes and seeing their guts spill out. Traditionally, these moves have been difficult to perform, requiring complicated input commands and precise placement. Mortal Kombat makes things easier with simplified commands, some of which are the same for different characters. There's also a fatality training mode that shows you exactly where to stand and displays the button commands onscreen along with an input display, so you can see any mistakes you're making.
Strangely, that same input display doesn't appear in Tutorial mode, which teaches you the basics of fighting, such as how to punch, throw opponents, and dodge attacks. It's still useful, but if you're new to fighting games, an input display would make learning moves a little easier. The tutorial also gives you an introduction to another new addition to the series: tag team fighting. You can select up to two characters to fight on your team, switching between them using a single button. By holding down an action button while switching, you can unleash a range of tag team combos, which see your characters darting around the screen and taking down your opponent with a range of projectile attacks.
Ladder mode lets you try out your newfound tag team skills against a bunch of CPU opponents in a 10-fight tournament, though you can use just a single player if you prefer. Ladder is essentially an arcade mode where you must fight your way to the top and take on boss Shao Kahn in the last battle. Fighting Shao Kahn is difficult and extremely frustrating. He is one of the cheapest opponents you encounter, spamming you with a range of unblockable moves that seriously deplete your health bar. Worse still, you can't throw him, and if you don't manage to land a perfect combo when you attack, he absorbs the first hit and launches a counter of his own. If you do manage to defeat him, you're rewarded with an epilogue, which briefly tells you about what your character does after the tournament. It's little more than a simple voice-over set to 2D artwork, but it's a nice addition if you're craving a little more narrative after Story mode.
There's yet more content to play through in Challenge Tower, which acts as an extended tutorial, teaching you different strategies via a series of challenges and minigames that start off easy but become much harder as you progress. These range from standard fights where you can't block or use specials or have to perform eight-hit combos, through to minigames such as destroying a horde of zombies with Stryker's handgun or following a list of rapid-fire input commands to break a spell. The classic minigame Test Your Might also makes a return. You have to hammer a button to increase a power bar past a certain point, after which you unleash that power upon an object and hopefully break it. Test Your Strike is a variation on this, where you must fill the power bar to a certain point but not surpass it, which rewards precision rather than all-out button mashing. Another spin-off is Test Your Sight, which is a simple revolving-cup memory game. The Challenge Tower, Story, and Ladder modes are substantial and entertaining offerings, making Mortal Kombat one of the most content-rich fighting games out there.
That's before you even touch the multiplayer modes--the cornerstone of any good fighting game. As well as standard one-on-one versus modes, Mortal Kombat offers a tag team Ladder mode, where two players can join forces to take on the computer, or four people can do battle, with two players on each team. Online, there are even more options to choose from. Online players are divided up into lobbies of 10 players each. You can challenge any of the players in the lobby to a one-on-one or tag team match, or all 10 can compete in King of the Hill mode, which is essentially a mini-tournament. When you win a match you stay on until you either defeat all of your opponents or are defeated yourself, while the other members of the lobby watch. You can also jump into Ranked, Player, and Private matches without entering lobbies just by selecting the corresponding text, which throws you straight into a match. A leaderboard keeps track of your overall performance, based on the number of wins and losses you have. Matches are largely lag-free, though like in any online game, there are times when a bad connection causes the game to stutter significantly, making it tricky to compete.
Whether you fight online or offline, and in all but the offline versus mode, you're rewarded with coins for your victories. They are used to buy your way up the Challenge Tower if you're stuck on any particular challenge, or purchase new content in the Krypt, which is a virtual graveyard-cum-shopping-mall. There are hundreds of gravestones and corpses within the graveyard, each of which requires a certain number of coins to destroy and reveal the content underneath. Items such as concept art, character costumes, and music tracks can be unlocked, as well as more practical items such as new fatalities and Kombat Kodes, which unlock new game modes such as Headless Kombat and No Blood. If you complete Story mode, you can purchase most of the content in the Krypt, but doing so is a tedious process as you have to manually walk up to individual gravestones in first-person view and hit "purchase." Not all of Mortal Kombat's secrets are held within the Krypt, though, and there are hidden stage fatalities, Babalities, and fights to discover, as well as other Easter eggs that pay homage to the series' arcade roots.
With all that content, an in-depth Story mode, and a wide range of modes to play through, Mortal Kombat is one of the most complete fighting games around--not to mention one of the bloodiest. The return of fatalities and the addition of X-ray moves mean fans who have craved the return of gore after the toned-down Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe will have plenty to keep them amused. Likewise, the return to 2D fighting and a substantially tweaked control system have made the game more accessible for newcomers, seriously fast, and lots of fun. Plus, no other fighting game lets you knee your opponents in the groin and proceed to tear their bodies in half. And really, isn't that what Mortal Kombat is all about?
Saturday, 11 June 2011
MotorStorm 3 Apocalypse
The MotorStorm series has always eschewed simulation in favour of big thrills, chaotic racing, and exotic circuits. In MotorStorm: Apocalypse those elements have been refined to focus on what the series does best. The thrills are bigger, the racing is more intense, and the circuits are intricately designed and breathtakingly beautiful. They're also complete and utter anarchy. Earthquakes tear up roads, tornadoes hurl speeding trains at you, and helicopter gunners do everything they can to turn you into a fiery ball of twisted metal. By destroying the very ground you're racing on, Apocalypse throws up constant surprises that test the reflexes of even the most hardened racing fan, making each race an absolute delight from start to finish.
The premise behind the destruction is explained in Apocalypse's story-driven Festival mode, via a series of motion comics. They tell the story of three racers taking part in the MotorStorm festival: Mash, Tyler, and Big Dog. You first play as Mash, a rookie racer who's stowed away on the festival's ship, en route to an abandoned city. Warnings of a massive earthquake have caused the city to be evacuated, leaving only a few stubborn inhabitants. It's during the tremors of that earthquake that racing takes place, with the story focusing on each racer's progress. Though the motion comics that tell the tale are visually impressive, with a gritty and detailed look, the story itself is shallow. Why a security team known as Dusklite is hunting you is never fully explained, and the racers' motivations remain a mystery, so you never empathise with them. The story is at best a means to an end: a premise for the destruction and a way to get you from race to race.
There are also some restrictions imposed in Festival mode, which tie in with the story. You can't choose which vehicle to use for each race, so even if you're not a fan of superbikes, for example, you're stuck with them on certain circuits. However, this does mean you're given a great introduction to the various types of vehicles on offer, ranging from small dirt bikes and ATVs, through to gargantuan big rigs and monster trucks. New additions include superbikes, hot hatches, and supercars, all of which have their own strengths and weaknesses: bikes are nimble and can reach areas that larger vehicles can't, but they are easily wrecked, while supercars are fast, but their lightweight construction makes them an easy target for opponents to knock off course. The type of vehicle you're driving dictates the optimum path to take, and each circuit sports multiple routes to the finish line.
What makes Apocalypse even more exciting than most off-road games is that those paths may change during a race, with new ones created and old ones blocked off, making each track feel like a new experience every time you race it. There are nine different race environments, on which 33 tracks are based that take different routes or feature different disasters. All are beautifully designed and feature a number of disaster moments that give each race a thrilling adrenaline rush. The tall skyscrapers of The Mile High Club let you catch some serious air, but the real excitement kicks in when an earthquake hits, crumbling the road beneath you and toppling buildings to the ground just as you scrape past underneath. On Coach Party, a falling plane demolishes a high-speed straight as it screeches overhead and crashes right in front of you just as you cross the finish line. There's more than city driving on offer too. Buena Vista takes place on a beach overrun by tanks and helicopters that are shelling the mainland. A beautiful-looking mountain backdrop plays host to a barrage of planes that destroy an overhead bridge, catapulting oil tankers to the road below in a cacophony of fire and explosions.
The amount of detail that has gone into each track means there's always something going on, whether it's a building collapsing, a helicopter crashing to the ground, or a few disgruntled locals throwing Molotov cocktails at you. These events make the tracks more varied than those in previous MotorStorm games. Knowing when a runaway train blocks off a path or when the jump you're about to hit is going to crumble beneath you is key to completing a race. This is aided by the improved handling of vehicles, which is noticeably tighter than before, affording you the opportunity to make split-second decisions on the track. Using your boost wisely plays a part too, and not just in straight sections. Pulling a sharp hand-brake turn before an obstacle and then slamming on the boost is a great way to get out of tricky situations, as well as being immensely satisfying. As in previous games, you can't just hammer your boost all the way around a track; use it for too long, and your vehicle overheats and explodes. You can, however, take advantage of tracks that feature areas covered in water, as they cool your boost, allowing you to use it for longer periods of time.
Boost can also be used to ram opponents off the road, though this is the most disappointing aspect to racing, particularly when compared to the takedown system of Burnout Paradise . There are also recurring issues with the physics system, which sometimes decides that a twig or a small bump is cause enough to flip your entire car, sending it spiraling out of control into a brick wall. These moments are few and far between, though, and on the whole, racing is fantastic fun, combining a great sense of speed with clever AI opponents who use shortcuts, boosts, and nudges to hold you off first place. Racing as rookie Mash, opponents are relatively gentle, but as you progress to pro with Tyler, and to veteran with Big Dog, they become more aggressive, making it much more challenging to land first place.
Fortunately, you don't have to place first to complete Festival mode. In rookie racing you only have to place fifth or above to unlock the next race, while pro and veteran require you to place third or above. If you do manage to place first, you unlock the Hardcore Festival in Wreakreation mode, which lets you replay the race against super-aggressive opponents. Should that be too much for you, there's also an easier Time Attack mode, with results from both appearing on global leaderboards, allowing you to compete for the best time with others online. Wreakreation also houses the standard Quick Race mode, letting you race a circuit with the vehicle of your choice. You can also select from three different racing types: standard races; eliminators, a particularly manic race where the last position is periodically removed; and chase, where you must maintain a certain distance between yourself and the race leader. Further options include AI difficulty, number of laps, and whether disaster incidents take place.
Quick races can also be played locally with up to three other players via split-screen. Being able to exchange jibes with your friends before sending them hurtling off a cliff with a well-placed boost is lots of fun, even if the frame rate and visual detail do take a bit of a hit. That fun also extends to the online multiplayer, where you can take your two-player split match online to compete in races--an absolute riot when you've got a full 16 players. The same three race modes are available, though they are augmented with a perks system that lets you choose from a selection of three power-ups to use in a race. These include Swift Return, which halves the time it takes to reset to the track after a crash; Critical, which lets you hold your boost for longer; and Cheap Shot, which lets you ram people using less of your boost. Each race awards you with chips, a form of experience points, which increase your driver level, unlocking new perks. You can also unlock new player icons, driver avatars, and parts for cars, which you can use to customise your favourite ride for online races. Customisations are purely visual, though, so no matter what you add, your car performs the same.
If you're the gambling type, you can also use some of your chips to bet on the winner of a race, which can potentially double the winnings that you receive. This makes the already thrilling multiplayer that little bit more exciting, with racers strategically ramming opponents who get in the way of their bet. If you'd rather not take your racing online, there's still plenty to do in the single-player modes. Each track has a number of cards to collect that detail the history of MotorStorm. They're tucked away in some extremely difficult-to-reach areas, requiring some nifty jumping and boost skills to hunt them all down. That does give you time to admire the visuals, though, which are incredibly beautiful, especially with all the destruction going on. The Boardwalk tracks' storm-filled skies showcase a gorgeous lighting system as lightning strikes over the rough waves of the ocean, while a tornado sends shards of the pier flying across the screen. Even more breathtaking are the skyscraper-filled backdrops of the Skyline tracks, which disintegrate into piles of rubble as an earthquake shakes the ground.
If you're fancy enough to own a 3D television, then you're in for even more of a treat. Though the resolution is noticeably decreased when the game is running in 3D, this lower fidelity is more than made up for by the thrill that the 3D creates. The aforementioned shards of pier now lunge straight at you, and mud flies past your face, while the crashing bridge of Buena Vista appears to fall around you, creating a real sense of danger as you attempt to drive past unscathed. This is one of the rare instances when 3D really enhances the experience, making each race even more of rush than it already is--a real showcase for the technology. Hooking up to a good 7.1 audio system makes the experience even better, as the low growls from the engines and huge bass-filled explosions make you feel like you're right there in the middle of the action.
Regardless of whether you experience the game in 3D or not, MotorStorm: Apocalypse is a fantastic-looking game that's tonnes of fun to play. But it's the jaw-dropping track design that will keep you coming back for more, creating some of the most sensational racing you can experience on the PlayStation 3. Its few failings do little to detract from this, and with its expanded content and great multiplayer options, there's a lot more to love this time around. Apocalypse is the MotorStorm concept taken to its ultimate conclusion: complete and utter destruction. And it's a blast.
The premise behind the destruction is explained in Apocalypse's story-driven Festival mode, via a series of motion comics. They tell the story of three racers taking part in the MotorStorm festival: Mash, Tyler, and Big Dog. You first play as Mash, a rookie racer who's stowed away on the festival's ship, en route to an abandoned city. Warnings of a massive earthquake have caused the city to be evacuated, leaving only a few stubborn inhabitants. It's during the tremors of that earthquake that racing takes place, with the story focusing on each racer's progress. Though the motion comics that tell the tale are visually impressive, with a gritty and detailed look, the story itself is shallow. Why a security team known as Dusklite is hunting you is never fully explained, and the racers' motivations remain a mystery, so you never empathise with them. The story is at best a means to an end: a premise for the destruction and a way to get you from race to race.
What makes Apocalypse even more exciting than most off-road games is that those paths may change during a race, with new ones created and old ones blocked off, making each track feel like a new experience every time you race it. There are nine different race environments, on which 33 tracks are based that take different routes or feature different disasters. All are beautifully designed and feature a number of disaster moments that give each race a thrilling adrenaline rush. The tall skyscrapers of The Mile High Club let you catch some serious air, but the real excitement kicks in when an earthquake hits, crumbling the road beneath you and toppling buildings to the ground just as you scrape past underneath. On Coach Party, a falling plane demolishes a high-speed straight as it screeches overhead and crashes right in front of you just as you cross the finish line. There's more than city driving on offer too. Buena Vista takes place on a beach overrun by tanks and helicopters that are shelling the mainland. A beautiful-looking mountain backdrop plays host to a barrage of planes that destroy an overhead bridge, catapulting oil tankers to the road below in a cacophony of fire and explosions.
The amount of detail that has gone into each track means there's always something going on, whether it's a building collapsing, a helicopter crashing to the ground, or a few disgruntled locals throwing Molotov cocktails at you. These events make the tracks more varied than those in previous MotorStorm games. Knowing when a runaway train blocks off a path or when the jump you're about to hit is going to crumble beneath you is key to completing a race. This is aided by the improved handling of vehicles, which is noticeably tighter than before, affording you the opportunity to make split-second decisions on the track. Using your boost wisely plays a part too, and not just in straight sections. Pulling a sharp hand-brake turn before an obstacle and then slamming on the boost is a great way to get out of tricky situations, as well as being immensely satisfying. As in previous games, you can't just hammer your boost all the way around a track; use it for too long, and your vehicle overheats and explodes. You can, however, take advantage of tracks that feature areas covered in water, as they cool your boost, allowing you to use it for longer periods of time.
Boost can also be used to ram opponents off the road, though this is the most disappointing aspect to racing, particularly when compared to the takedown system of Burnout Paradise . There are also recurring issues with the physics system, which sometimes decides that a twig or a small bump is cause enough to flip your entire car, sending it spiraling out of control into a brick wall. These moments are few and far between, though, and on the whole, racing is fantastic fun, combining a great sense of speed with clever AI opponents who use shortcuts, boosts, and nudges to hold you off first place. Racing as rookie Mash, opponents are relatively gentle, but as you progress to pro with Tyler, and to veteran with Big Dog, they become more aggressive, making it much more challenging to land first place.
Fortunately, you don't have to place first to complete Festival mode. In rookie racing you only have to place fifth or above to unlock the next race, while pro and veteran require you to place third or above. If you do manage to place first, you unlock the Hardcore Festival in Wreakreation mode, which lets you replay the race against super-aggressive opponents. Should that be too much for you, there's also an easier Time Attack mode, with results from both appearing on global leaderboards, allowing you to compete for the best time with others online. Wreakreation also houses the standard Quick Race mode, letting you race a circuit with the vehicle of your choice. You can also select from three different racing types: standard races; eliminators, a particularly manic race where the last position is periodically removed; and chase, where you must maintain a certain distance between yourself and the race leader. Further options include AI difficulty, number of laps, and whether disaster incidents take place.
Quick races can also be played locally with up to three other players via split-screen. Being able to exchange jibes with your friends before sending them hurtling off a cliff with a well-placed boost is lots of fun, even if the frame rate and visual detail do take a bit of a hit. That fun also extends to the online multiplayer, where you can take your two-player split match online to compete in races--an absolute riot when you've got a full 16 players. The same three race modes are available, though they are augmented with a perks system that lets you choose from a selection of three power-ups to use in a race. These include Swift Return, which halves the time it takes to reset to the track after a crash; Critical, which lets you hold your boost for longer; and Cheap Shot, which lets you ram people using less of your boost. Each race awards you with chips, a form of experience points, which increase your driver level, unlocking new perks. You can also unlock new player icons, driver avatars, and parts for cars, which you can use to customise your favourite ride for online races. Customisations are purely visual, though, so no matter what you add, your car performs the same.
If you're the gambling type, you can also use some of your chips to bet on the winner of a race, which can potentially double the winnings that you receive. This makes the already thrilling multiplayer that little bit more exciting, with racers strategically ramming opponents who get in the way of their bet. If you'd rather not take your racing online, there's still plenty to do in the single-player modes. Each track has a number of cards to collect that detail the history of MotorStorm. They're tucked away in some extremely difficult-to-reach areas, requiring some nifty jumping and boost skills to hunt them all down. That does give you time to admire the visuals, though, which are incredibly beautiful, especially with all the destruction going on. The Boardwalk tracks' storm-filled skies showcase a gorgeous lighting system as lightning strikes over the rough waves of the ocean, while a tornado sends shards of the pier flying across the screen. Even more breathtaking are the skyscraper-filled backdrops of the Skyline tracks, which disintegrate into piles of rubble as an earthquake shakes the ground.
If you're fancy enough to own a 3D television, then you're in for even more of a treat. Though the resolution is noticeably decreased when the game is running in 3D, this lower fidelity is more than made up for by the thrill that the 3D creates. The aforementioned shards of pier now lunge straight at you, and mud flies past your face, while the crashing bridge of Buena Vista appears to fall around you, creating a real sense of danger as you attempt to drive past unscathed. This is one of the rare instances when 3D really enhances the experience, making each race even more of rush than it already is--a real showcase for the technology. Hooking up to a good 7.1 audio system makes the experience even better, as the low growls from the engines and huge bass-filled explosions make you feel like you're right there in the middle of the action.
Regardless of whether you experience the game in 3D or not, MotorStorm: Apocalypse is a fantastic-looking game that's tonnes of fun to play. But it's the jaw-dropping track design that will keep you coming back for more, creating some of the most sensational racing you can experience on the PlayStation 3. Its few failings do little to detract from this, and with its expanded content and great multiplayer options, there's a lot more to love this time around. Apocalypse is the MotorStorm concept taken to its ultimate conclusion: complete and utter destruction. And it's a blast.
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is a gift, gilded with moments that stay with you even after the curtains close on its dark tale of uncertain pasts and uncertain futures. Like the rare Roses of Remembrance you might find growing in this role-playing game's lush fields, these moments are carefully cultivated. They're meaningful not just because they are packed with excitement, but also because there are stakes--both personal and political. As Geralt of Rivia, your actions don't just bring you closer to the truths of your own murky history, but they also influence the tides of war. And just as you exert your power on this game's events, they work their power on you, drawing you further into a gorgeous world populated by quarrelling trolls and drunken, sex-crazed dwarves. Some bugs, combat quirks, and other foibles prove bothersome, but they don't greatly diminish the impact of exploring a dungeon whose walls ooze the agony you've just witnessed. This superb role-playing sequel offers a bold world woven together by tenuous alliances and closely guarded secrets.
The Witcher 2's phenomenal visual design isn't its defining characteristic, but it's an effective lure and makes for an immediate connection with the game's provocative tone. On the outskirts of a dwarven enclave, sunlight glistens upon a misty pond; a tower just beyond it bristles with potent magical properties; the underbrush surrounding you casts deep shadows, yet rays of golden sun coax you onward. In The Witcher 2, sights like these communicate so much. The delicate lace of a sorceress's collar gives her a regal air, yet dark makeup and dark brown eyes speak to mysteries beneath the surface. A red scar above a defiant elf's upper lip is not just a testament to past violence--it suggests a permanent scowl. Walls, cliffs, and meadows aren't just repeated textures. Look closely at the patterns carved into a stone column, and you notice how each one is slightly different. These may seem like unimportant details, but they're indicators of how much care went into every facet of this game's environments and character models.
The superlative art is rendered by equally superlative technology that ensures you can admire the rips on a mercenary's trousers, a harpy's individual feathers, and the buckles and seams on Geralt's clothing. Yet The Witcher 2 is as much about grand gestures as it is textural detail. You cross paths with a giant dragon and other grotesqueries, each of which moves with a sense of weight appropriate to the creature's proportions. Pungent colors, roaring flames, and shafts of glowing light make mainstay environments like sewers and caves a wonder to explore. Impressively, all of this beauty is rendered using DirectX 9 technology rather than the newer DirectX 11. The game is nevertheless demanding of your hardware, though it is attractive even at lower settings. A few imperfections stand out amidst all the graphical wizardry, such as mechanical facial animations, characters that pop in during cutscenes, and the occasional frame rate dip. But such quibbles are easily tolerated in this luxuriant digital world.
And what a world it is, alive with activity yet tinged with violence and sorrow. The opening moments ready you for the game's brutal overtones, showing a captive Geralt of Rivia whipped and taunted by his jailers. Geralt's defaced flesh is not an easy sight to take in, but it's thematically relevant: The witcher is scarred by his past. Geralt, once thought dead, is still piecing together his memories of a savage battle and a beauty called Yennefer. The story takes its cue from these lost memories, juxtaposing violence and sex. It also presents both as inevitable and natural results of the human (and nonhuman) condition. You can still bed various women in The Witcher 2, as you could in the original game, though you no longer collect sex cards. Lovemaking (or ploughing, as so many characters call it) is a frequent subject of conversation, and it's one of Geralt's favorite pastimes. You can bed a few different women, and the game hardly shies from nudity, handily earning its mature rating. The lacerations on Geralt's back are a stark reminder, however, that this earthly pleasure is only a temporary respite for him.
But The Witcher 2 is not primarily about sex, nor violence. It's about the search for truth. Geralt seeks clues to his past, as well as the royal assassin that ended the life of King Foltest at the conclusion of The Witcher. This man's identity is not a secret for long, but then, this is not a murder mystery; rather, it's a chronicle of discovery, redemption, and political upheaval. Geralt is blamed for Foltest's murder, but as he gets closer to the true killer, he becomes more and more involved in the region's power struggles. Not including the prologue and epilogue, The Witcher 2 is split into three acts. The first is primarily concerned with following the killer's trail, while the second greatly expands the plot, introducing so many new characters and so much lore that you might be initially confused. Yet, the convoluted plot seems poised to explode in the final episode, only to fizzle at the end. The lack of closure intimates a sequel, and it makes the final act feel abrupt when compared to the robustness of the first two.
Characters new and old both assist and hinder Geralt's quest. These include the flamboyant bard Dandelion and the earthy Zoltan, a foul-mouthed dwarf who, like most of The Witcher 2's dwarves, loves women and drink. Dwarves are a rich source of humor in most role-playing games, and The Witcher 2's are no exception. Yet, the tone is different here. These are the raunchiest dwarves you've ever encountered, yet the comedy is undercut by underlying anguish. It's initially funny to learn that teetotaling dwarves are outcasts. But when a dwarf confides that he fears being ostracized because he doesn't drink, you understand his dread. You might admire a bearded character's enthusiasm for heading to battle for the first time, but when pressed, he admits his misgivings. Aside from the occasional expository speech, most of the dialogue sounds natural, including the asides spoken by random citizens. Most of the voice actors do a good job of bringing these characters to life, in spite of the occasional hollow note. (The actress playing Triss Merigold again sounds like a random meter maid rushed into the studio for some last-minute line readings.)
The Witcher 2 is not an open-world game in the way of The Elder Scrolls games; each area is relatively contained though expansive enough to encourage exploration. The rewards for doing so aren't just pretty vistas. You might uncover a chest that can be opened only by interpreting the clues on a nearby scroll or stumble upon a giant arachnid guarding treasure. However, the game's flexibility isn't a result of wide-open journeys; it is the extraordinary ways you can influence the story and fundamentally change the direction of your future travels. For example, choices you make at the end of Act 1 not only determine how immediate story events play out, but also have a dramatic impact on the entire game. The characters at your side, the enemies you face, the dialogue--they all differ based on a series of decisions that the game never forgets. And these aren't "good" or "bad" choices: these are ambiguous circumstances with ambiguous results, which is just as well. Geralt is not interested in heroism or villainy. He navigates turbulent waters seeking neither justice nor injustice, only answers.
A number of stupendous moments punctuate your choices. Typically, the events you most fondly recall from RPGs are story related: the characters, the plot twists, the losses, the finales. By contrast, The Witcher 2 etches gameplay events into your imagination. What you remember most isn't just what you witness, but what you experience firsthand. Once such moment occurs when a large clash on a battlefield causes it to become awash with a golden supernatural mist. This moment is recalled several times later yet retains its power due to its otherworldly ambience, sense of scale, and fun combat. Its terrifying scream makes your first encounter with a harpy unforgettable. Viewing another's memory, taking on a ghostly identity, and other inspired occurrences plant seeds of apprehension: you never know what might be lurking around the bend.
If you played the original Witcher, then forget what you learned from its combat mechanics. The Witcher 2 abandons that rhythmic system for a more traditional and challenging one. You still switch between silver and steel swords, depending on whether you are facing monsters or humans, but regardless of the weapon you equip, be prepared for the occasional beatdown. You initiate standard attacks with your mouse, and you block and cast signs (Geralt's magic spells) with the keyboard. (You may also use a gamepad.) Your first encounter during the prologue/tutorial makes for a punishing introduction: Expect to die a few times as you learn just what the game expects of you. The extreme difficulty right off the bat, paired with tutorial hints that don't pop up long enough or soon enough to be much help, don't make for the friendliest introduction. But you learn an important lesson: You must tread carefully. Eventually you grasp the rhythm, which is similar to that of the PlayStation 3 game Demon's Souls. You must position yourself well and pay close attention to your supply of vigor, which is required to block, as well as cast signs; get in a few choice hits; and then block or tumble into a safer position. You may also want to soften the enemy or control the crowd by throwing bombs (blind them!) or laying traps (turn enemies on each other!), particularly during the first act, when you feel most vulnerable.
Even after you grow accustomed to The Witcher 2's combat, there are a few scenarios that are more than just difficult: They are cruel. A couple of boss fights are frustrating, as is a quest in a dark cramped mine that has multiple dwarves crowding you, all while you are hounded by fiendish foes that explode upon death. It's too easy to inadvertently tumble toward an enemy behind the one you meant to attack and find yourself in the center of a deadly mob. Yet, the action is largely satisfying and enjoyable. There's a great sense of weight in every swing. Geralt might somersault toward his victim and slash him with a steel sword or use a flaming staff pilfered from a succubus to land slower, heavier blows. As you level up and spend skill points in four different skill paths (witcher training, swordsmanship, magic, alchemy), combat becomes more manageable, and you begin to feel more powerful. And yet, the action never becomes a cakewalk, and it always retains a sense of urgency.
And so death is inescapable, but The Witcher 2 allows you to properly prepare before trying to conquer the wilds. You aren't stuck with the same weapons and armor, of course. You loot new ones or buy them from vendors, and these can be upgraded in various ways. You might also purchase equipment schematics and have a vendor craft items for you using the iron ore, timber, and other raw materials you stumble upon as you explore. You can also brew up potions and quaff them, though you can't just down a health drink in the midst of battle. Instead, you must down potions while meditating. Meditation is a returning mechanic, though you no longer have to find a campfire as in the first game. Potions are toxic to Geralt; thus, the number you can drink is limited. It might take you a while to come to terms with this "prepare in advance" approach to potions. Brews act as statistic buffs rather than immediate cure-alls, and unless you know what monsters you might be coming up against, you don't necessarily know which potions to take. When the story snatches you up into a series of battles and cutscenes, you may never be allowed to meditate and, thus, never reap the benefits potions may have granted.
It may also take some time getting used to the interface. It isn't complex but there are some minor idiosyncrasies, some of which are rather sensible. You can't hold a key to identify loot and items of interest as you can in most RPGs; instead, you activate Geralt's medallion. It's a neat way of taking a game-y function and making it seem more natural. Other interface quirks are less understandable. You can't quickly identify and sell vendor trash, for example, and there is no easy way to compare the equipment a merchant has for sale with your current stuff. These are minor quibbles, however. Not so minor are the few quest bugs that can aggravate your travels. A quest marker and journal entry may refuse to update when completing an action, leaving you to wonder what to do next; choosing dialogue options in a particular order might lead to a similar circumstance. The only solution to these circumstances is to hope you accidentally stumble upon the next phase of the story or reload a previous game save. These are disappointing errors in a well-made game with an otherwise stellar presentation.
Combat is central to The Witcher 2, but it's not the only way to pass the time. Dice poker returns and works much the same way as in the original. Proving your mettle with your fists is a more consistent way of earning some extra coin, however. You can trade blows with certain locals, though you may cringe when you first learn that doing so entails quick-time key presses--the kind associated more with console action games than computer RPGs. (Such quick-time events crop up in various boss fights and other scripted sequences as well.) Yet, the game hardly relies on them too much, and the close camera angles and barbaric punches give brawls some pizzazz. An arm-wrestling minigame is much less enjoyable, forcing you to keep a sluggish cursor within the proper boundaries. And, of course, certain characters (and the town's task board) will have some odd jobs for you, many of which involve the game's signature moral dilemmas. Who do you believe: a mythical seductress accused of murder or the elf jealous of her many lovers? When each accuser is equally unconvincing, you must carefully consider your path. And in this complicated world, just as in the real one, there isn't necessarily a right or wrong choice--or a neat resolution.
Like many ambitious games, The Witcher 2 requires you to shoulder some minor burdens; in this case, it's a finale without bite and some unfortunate bugs. Yet, you rarely sense that any given element suffered because more attention was given to another. This distinguished game makes an important statement: Visual beauty, challenging action, and game-changing decisions can coexist in a modern RPG. In one beauteous stroke, The Witcher 2 has raised the stakes. No longer need we accept that role-playing games must sacrifice the quality of one element in favor of another. Instead, we are allowed to have it all. And how wonderful that we have it right here, right now, in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.
The Witcher 2's phenomenal visual design isn't its defining characteristic, but it's an effective lure and makes for an immediate connection with the game's provocative tone. On the outskirts of a dwarven enclave, sunlight glistens upon a misty pond; a tower just beyond it bristles with potent magical properties; the underbrush surrounding you casts deep shadows, yet rays of golden sun coax you onward. In The Witcher 2, sights like these communicate so much. The delicate lace of a sorceress's collar gives her a regal air, yet dark makeup and dark brown eyes speak to mysteries beneath the surface. A red scar above a defiant elf's upper lip is not just a testament to past violence--it suggests a permanent scowl. Walls, cliffs, and meadows aren't just repeated textures. Look closely at the patterns carved into a stone column, and you notice how each one is slightly different. These may seem like unimportant details, but they're indicators of how much care went into every facet of this game's environments and character models.
The superlative art is rendered by equally superlative technology that ensures you can admire the rips on a mercenary's trousers, a harpy's individual feathers, and the buckles and seams on Geralt's clothing. Yet The Witcher 2 is as much about grand gestures as it is textural detail. You cross paths with a giant dragon and other grotesqueries, each of which moves with a sense of weight appropriate to the creature's proportions. Pungent colors, roaring flames, and shafts of glowing light make mainstay environments like sewers and caves a wonder to explore. Impressively, all of this beauty is rendered using DirectX 9 technology rather than the newer DirectX 11. The game is nevertheless demanding of your hardware, though it is attractive even at lower settings. A few imperfections stand out amidst all the graphical wizardry, such as mechanical facial animations, characters that pop in during cutscenes, and the occasional frame rate dip. But such quibbles are easily tolerated in this luxuriant digital world.
And what a world it is, alive with activity yet tinged with violence and sorrow. The opening moments ready you for the game's brutal overtones, showing a captive Geralt of Rivia whipped and taunted by his jailers. Geralt's defaced flesh is not an easy sight to take in, but it's thematically relevant: The witcher is scarred by his past. Geralt, once thought dead, is still piecing together his memories of a savage battle and a beauty called Yennefer. The story takes its cue from these lost memories, juxtaposing violence and sex. It also presents both as inevitable and natural results of the human (and nonhuman) condition. You can still bed various women in The Witcher 2, as you could in the original game, though you no longer collect sex cards. Lovemaking (or ploughing, as so many characters call it) is a frequent subject of conversation, and it's one of Geralt's favorite pastimes. You can bed a few different women, and the game hardly shies from nudity, handily earning its mature rating. The lacerations on Geralt's back are a stark reminder, however, that this earthly pleasure is only a temporary respite for him.
But The Witcher 2 is not primarily about sex, nor violence. It's about the search for truth. Geralt seeks clues to his past, as well as the royal assassin that ended the life of King Foltest at the conclusion of The Witcher. This man's identity is not a secret for long, but then, this is not a murder mystery; rather, it's a chronicle of discovery, redemption, and political upheaval. Geralt is blamed for Foltest's murder, but as he gets closer to the true killer, he becomes more and more involved in the region's power struggles. Not including the prologue and epilogue, The Witcher 2 is split into three acts. The first is primarily concerned with following the killer's trail, while the second greatly expands the plot, introducing so many new characters and so much lore that you might be initially confused. Yet, the convoluted plot seems poised to explode in the final episode, only to fizzle at the end. The lack of closure intimates a sequel, and it makes the final act feel abrupt when compared to the robustness of the first two.
Characters new and old both assist and hinder Geralt's quest. These include the flamboyant bard Dandelion and the earthy Zoltan, a foul-mouthed dwarf who, like most of The Witcher 2's dwarves, loves women and drink. Dwarves are a rich source of humor in most role-playing games, and The Witcher 2's are no exception. Yet, the tone is different here. These are the raunchiest dwarves you've ever encountered, yet the comedy is undercut by underlying anguish. It's initially funny to learn that teetotaling dwarves are outcasts. But when a dwarf confides that he fears being ostracized because he doesn't drink, you understand his dread. You might admire a bearded character's enthusiasm for heading to battle for the first time, but when pressed, he admits his misgivings. Aside from the occasional expository speech, most of the dialogue sounds natural, including the asides spoken by random citizens. Most of the voice actors do a good job of bringing these characters to life, in spite of the occasional hollow note. (The actress playing Triss Merigold again sounds like a random meter maid rushed into the studio for some last-minute line readings.)
The Witcher 2 is not an open-world game in the way of The Elder Scrolls games; each area is relatively contained though expansive enough to encourage exploration. The rewards for doing so aren't just pretty vistas. You might uncover a chest that can be opened only by interpreting the clues on a nearby scroll or stumble upon a giant arachnid guarding treasure. However, the game's flexibility isn't a result of wide-open journeys; it is the extraordinary ways you can influence the story and fundamentally change the direction of your future travels. For example, choices you make at the end of Act 1 not only determine how immediate story events play out, but also have a dramatic impact on the entire game. The characters at your side, the enemies you face, the dialogue--they all differ based on a series of decisions that the game never forgets. And these aren't "good" or "bad" choices: these are ambiguous circumstances with ambiguous results, which is just as well. Geralt is not interested in heroism or villainy. He navigates turbulent waters seeking neither justice nor injustice, only answers.
A number of stupendous moments punctuate your choices. Typically, the events you most fondly recall from RPGs are story related: the characters, the plot twists, the losses, the finales. By contrast, The Witcher 2 etches gameplay events into your imagination. What you remember most isn't just what you witness, but what you experience firsthand. Once such moment occurs when a large clash on a battlefield causes it to become awash with a golden supernatural mist. This moment is recalled several times later yet retains its power due to its otherworldly ambience, sense of scale, and fun combat. Its terrifying scream makes your first encounter with a harpy unforgettable. Viewing another's memory, taking on a ghostly identity, and other inspired occurrences plant seeds of apprehension: you never know what might be lurking around the bend.
If you played the original Witcher, then forget what you learned from its combat mechanics. The Witcher 2 abandons that rhythmic system for a more traditional and challenging one. You still switch between silver and steel swords, depending on whether you are facing monsters or humans, but regardless of the weapon you equip, be prepared for the occasional beatdown. You initiate standard attacks with your mouse, and you block and cast signs (Geralt's magic spells) with the keyboard. (You may also use a gamepad.) Your first encounter during the prologue/tutorial makes for a punishing introduction: Expect to die a few times as you learn just what the game expects of you. The extreme difficulty right off the bat, paired with tutorial hints that don't pop up long enough or soon enough to be much help, don't make for the friendliest introduction. But you learn an important lesson: You must tread carefully. Eventually you grasp the rhythm, which is similar to that of the PlayStation 3 game Demon's Souls. You must position yourself well and pay close attention to your supply of vigor, which is required to block, as well as cast signs; get in a few choice hits; and then block or tumble into a safer position. You may also want to soften the enemy or control the crowd by throwing bombs (blind them!) or laying traps (turn enemies on each other!), particularly during the first act, when you feel most vulnerable.
And so death is inescapable, but The Witcher 2 allows you to properly prepare before trying to conquer the wilds. You aren't stuck with the same weapons and armor, of course. You loot new ones or buy them from vendors, and these can be upgraded in various ways. You might also purchase equipment schematics and have a vendor craft items for you using the iron ore, timber, and other raw materials you stumble upon as you explore. You can also brew up potions and quaff them, though you can't just down a health drink in the midst of battle. Instead, you must down potions while meditating. Meditation is a returning mechanic, though you no longer have to find a campfire as in the first game. Potions are toxic to Geralt; thus, the number you can drink is limited. It might take you a while to come to terms with this "prepare in advance" approach to potions. Brews act as statistic buffs rather than immediate cure-alls, and unless you know what monsters you might be coming up against, you don't necessarily know which potions to take. When the story snatches you up into a series of battles and cutscenes, you may never be allowed to meditate and, thus, never reap the benefits potions may have granted.
It may also take some time getting used to the interface. It isn't complex but there are some minor idiosyncrasies, some of which are rather sensible. You can't hold a key to identify loot and items of interest as you can in most RPGs; instead, you activate Geralt's medallion. It's a neat way of taking a game-y function and making it seem more natural. Other interface quirks are less understandable. You can't quickly identify and sell vendor trash, for example, and there is no easy way to compare the equipment a merchant has for sale with your current stuff. These are minor quibbles, however. Not so minor are the few quest bugs that can aggravate your travels. A quest marker and journal entry may refuse to update when completing an action, leaving you to wonder what to do next; choosing dialogue options in a particular order might lead to a similar circumstance. The only solution to these circumstances is to hope you accidentally stumble upon the next phase of the story or reload a previous game save. These are disappointing errors in a well-made game with an otherwise stellar presentation.
Combat is central to The Witcher 2, but it's not the only way to pass the time. Dice poker returns and works much the same way as in the original. Proving your mettle with your fists is a more consistent way of earning some extra coin, however. You can trade blows with certain locals, though you may cringe when you first learn that doing so entails quick-time key presses--the kind associated more with console action games than computer RPGs. (Such quick-time events crop up in various boss fights and other scripted sequences as well.) Yet, the game hardly relies on them too much, and the close camera angles and barbaric punches give brawls some pizzazz. An arm-wrestling minigame is much less enjoyable, forcing you to keep a sluggish cursor within the proper boundaries. And, of course, certain characters (and the town's task board) will have some odd jobs for you, many of which involve the game's signature moral dilemmas. Who do you believe: a mythical seductress accused of murder or the elf jealous of her many lovers? When each accuser is equally unconvincing, you must carefully consider your path. And in this complicated world, just as in the real one, there isn't necessarily a right or wrong choice--or a neat resolution.
Like many ambitious games, The Witcher 2 requires you to shoulder some minor burdens; in this case, it's a finale without bite and some unfortunate bugs. Yet, you rarely sense that any given element suffered because more attention was given to another. This distinguished game makes an important statement: Visual beauty, challenging action, and game-changing decisions can coexist in a modern RPG. In one beauteous stroke, The Witcher 2 has raised the stakes. No longer need we accept that role-playing games must sacrifice the quality of one element in favor of another. Instead, we are allowed to have it all. And how wonderful that we have it right here, right now, in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.
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