Purely Review

Recently at E3, Sony showcased new gameplay for Uncharted 3 and this, coupled with my lack of reviews recently, drove me to go back and finish Uncharted 2, a game I had put off in favour of more recent releases. Uncharted 2 received a lot of attention upon its release, including 50 game of the year awards as well as many other accolades and has been hailed as one of the best games ever made. This puts me in an interesting spot as I don’t follow other reviewers like sheep. Plus I work for free so can’t be bribed by the game companies, the way IGN is. This ensures a fair review of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

The plot follows our favourite wise-cracking, bad guy Nathan Drake as he goes off in search of the lost city of Shambhala and the magical Cintamani Stone; a giant sapphire with mystical properties. Joining him on his journey is the love interest and sensible girl from the last game, Elena Fisher who seems to have done some growing up since Drake’s Fortune and has become an independent and cynical young lady. New to the mix is this years model of love interest for Drake, Chloe Frazer the new love interest who helps provide a nice contrast to Elena. Where would we be without our bad guy, I mean besides Drake, and Uncharted 2 has thrown in another race for Drake to exterminate, Eastern Europeans, with their typical stereotype Easter European boss.

The game feels like one of those feel good Summer Blockbuster films we see every year with massive budgets and over-the-top, special effect driven action scenes. This is by no means a bad thing as I go to see an Action film to be entertained and not have to think a great deal, just enjoy the ride, and that is precisely what Uncharted does. Everything is done to a cinematic standard with some impressive action scenes, whether it be jumping across carriages on a moving train whilst being chased by a hind helicopter and shot at by half the Serbian military or running full pelt across a collapsing bridge over a several hundred foot drop. It isn’t the smartest game in the world but again it makes no allusions to being smart. It is just there to entertain and on that part, it does its job well.

The Game is played third person, sellotape-your-spine-to-cover shooter style but it has been pretty much perfected since the previous game and with additions like being able to just lean the gun around cover or lob a sneaky grenade without risk is certainly a point in the game’s favour. The hand-to-hand combat has had some changes whereby close fights last longer and you need to be on your feet to dodge enemy swings which is quite inconvenient when you are exchanging punches in the middle of a heated fire-fight but then again, why the hell are you choosing to exchange punches in the middle of a heated fire-fight? Stealth Kills have been improved however, with the ability to grab enemies while attached to cover and silently take them out and some areas are so full of patrolling enemies, being an assassin is almost essential to give yourself a fighting chance when shit does go down as indeed it will.

Now for the game’s aesthetics. As with its predecessor, Uncharted 2 looks beautiful and the whole world feels really believable. The variation of environment from jungles, to war-torn villages, to Tibetan mountains keeps everything fresh as you progress and the music fits nicely to the environment although considering how often it has to change to the combat soundtrack, you don’t really get to enjoy it very often. Overall the game is pleasing to look at and to listen to with a very varied range of voice acting from Drake’s wise-cracking to Chloe’s British sarcasm all done to an excellent standard by the actors.

Uncharted 2 still retains one feature that I liked in the previous game but don’t see very often in games; where you play as a villain but still feel like the hero. Let’s face it, Drake is not a good guy. He steals, he kills, he defiles tombs but he is never in control of the situation when things go wrong and it shows a flaw in the character that makes him a lot more believable than the Iron Maiden that is Lara Croft who happily strolls into gunfights without so much as a shrug. I mean in Tomb Raider 2 a guy turned himself into a freaking dragon and she was not even slightly phased by that? Drake would have probably shit is jeans before making some corny joke and spent most of the fight, getting the shit kicked out of him before scoring a lucky break. It shows a fundamental difference in character which I genuinely like. It shows that not every player character has to be this paragon of virtue and that they can have some flaws.

Better wrap this review up before I go on ranting about all the characters and their personalities. Maybe I can make a future topic of it as they are, in my opinion genuinely well designed characters, even if they are stereotypically Action film beautiful but I think I can forgive Naughty Dog for that.

Uncharted 2 is one of those games you sit down and play just for raw fun. No great deal of mental stimulation is required but that’s by no means a bad thing. It is designed to entertain and it does just that. Some people may accuse me of calling them game stupid but I’m not. Call of Duty is an example of a stupid game in terms of delivery of narrative. Uncharted has a fairly simple plot with some nice twists but it is delivered in manner that is engaging for the audience without dragging and allows for development of character as opposed to going from gunfight to gunfight.

So does Uncharted 2 deserve all the awards it has received? In reflection to what else came out in 2009, certainly nothing I played from 2009 comes close to beating it but then again I haven’t played Arkham Asylum yet so we shall see. Important question is, is it good? And the answer is a definite yes. Its entertaining, action packed and delivers everything you would expect to see in a big-budget action film. I think this game might actually make my very limited 5 star list as I genuinely cannot think of one bad thing to say about it, besides the fact it has multiplayer.

Some of you may remember that my Crysis 2 review was full of praise for the game, hailing it as a well done sequel, doing its predecessor proud. Well I looked back on my review having given more time for Crysis 2 to sink in and have decided that I was wrong. I allowed hype to muddy my opinion of the game and as such I will review it again properly with all the hype out of my mind. I will also make a not to not review games until a decent time has past since I completed them. With that let us continue.

Crysis left us on a cliffhanger with the game’s heroes setting off to the site of a nuclear explosion to investigate the signals being transmitted by the mysterious nanosuit captain, Prophet and we all hoped that some degree of explanation as to what would transpire from there would occur.

Our Hopes were in vain it seems as the game did very little to explain the gap in what I can only assume is a ploy to get us excited for the third instalment. Instead, all we get is a regular G.I. Joe called Alcatraz getting severely fucked up in a battle with aliens in the opening mission and having his body transferred into Prophet’s suit with no advanced medical tools or machinery needed. Now these aliens look absolutely nothing like the ones in the previous game and Crysis 2 passes this off with a rather cheap explanation that different sites for the invasion yield different aliens.

These aliens have caused a spread of disease throughout New York and it is up to Alcatraz to figure out what the fuck is going on with absolutely no personal motivation as he was just forced into a suit and given instructions from the get go. The story unravels with many twists and turns full of betrayal and plot twists of little relevance involving poorly characterised characters who add very little to the game experience. This is all to drive towards the ending scene where some parts of the original Crysis is explained but still didn’t leave me with a clear state of mind. I guess that’s Crytek’s plan to make me play the next game.

In the press conferences before the games release, Crytek announced that the new suit design would give you a greater deal of choice in how you play and I thought this to be the case at first as well but in retrospect it is actually a lot more restrictive. The micromanagement of the minor suit functions isn’t really necessary and switching between them at change of combat pace is a pain in the ass so this basically leaves you with Stealth Mode and Armour Mode while the predecessor had armour as standard with Stealth, Speed and Strength all a keyboard press away to adapt to the situation. Couple this with the fact that Strength and Speed have been considerably weakened to compensate for the fact they are standard mode and add in the fact that bringing down your visor gives you a step by step breakdown of the best path to take in almost any situation makes the game almost insultingly simple but at the same time very limiting if shit gets serious, which indeed it does later on.

One thing I will give Crysis 2 is that it paces itself rather well, starting off much the way Crysis did, with you stealthing your way around, getting the hang of the suit and slowly increasing in pace, building momentum until the explosive finale which does end the game quite nicely. This is achieved more easily by the game being unbelievably short. I buy Games for the Single player mostly and this game only gave me a 7 hour campaign and for £35 that is a fucking joke. This game is actually one of the shortest I have ever played. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it actually looked good but the PS3 version seems to have gotten shafted mid way through development with the poorest visual quality of the 3 platforms and this makes me feel even more cheated since we were promised the best visual effects with the CryEngine 3 being developed for PS3 usage. That is more a development fault than a game fault but I am still going to rant about it.

I won’t even discuss multiplayer as I haven’t played it and don’t really intend to as it appears to just be Call of Duty’s multiplayer in Nanotuits.

My final gripe before I finish this review, the physics and this also kind of goes back to the tactics. We were promised the ability to make full use of New York city, with a great deal of destructibility to help us achieve our goal such as jumping through floors of buildings and such, you know, like what Red Faction: Guerilla was able to achieve and still look good back in 2009. Instead, we just got a bunch of exploding cars and barrels, with detachable machine gun emplacements and a few scripted collapsing or collapsed buildings. Sorry but that is just cheap Crytek, you’d have been as well to come clean and say “sorry guys, we overestimated scale, our bad” and it wouldn’t have felt like such a big kick in the balls. Instead, you did;t tell us and managed to make Crysis 2 feel even more linear if that was possible.

My concluding thoughts here. Crytek, you messed up I am afraid. Your game was not as good as I thought it was and pales in comparison to the Goliath that was the original Crysis. I only hope you can learn from your mistakes and focus more on making a game that delivers compelling narrative and clever gameplay instead of trying to get a perfect scale of New York City.

I will start by saying that I played this game on PS3 on a non-3D television so most likely did not get the same visual experience that most PC players or owners of a 3D TV will have gotten but hopefully that will help me pick away at the important parts of the game like gameplay, story etc. So, on with the review.

Crysis 2 takes place 3 years after its predecessor, where a mysterious plague has gripped New York and the rising threat of invasion from the alien Ceph from the first game has driven most people to evacuate. Martial Law has been declared and a private military company, Cell, owned by CryNet, the creators of the Nanosuits, is in charge of controlling the spread of the virus and protecting the city from the Ceph. You play as special forces marine Alcatraz; a member of an elite group sent into the city to rescue Dr. Nathan Gould, one of the chief designers of the super hi-tech Nanosuits. Inevitably, shit hits the fan, your squad is attacked by the Ceph and you wake up in a warehouse wearing a Nanosuit and with Dr. Gould giving you instructions. So it’s off on a journey of learning for young Alcatraz and for the player as well. I will give Crysis 2 credit for being able to tell an engaging story. The game has a great air of mystery about it as you get told very little about what has happened in the last 3 years and this isn’t helped by none of the main characters from the first game, bar one, appearing at all.

This is good though as it keeps you playing trying to find out more and more. You want to know what the hell is going on and more and more questions pop up throughout the course of the game especially with flashbacks from another character’s past keep playing in your suit. It all boils down to an epic conclusion and a great lead in for the final instalment. It is like the ultimate example of a story telling tool. First game is like act 1, setting up the ultimate question. Crysis 2 is act 2, gathering the tools and skills to answer the ultimate question question and Crysis 3 will hopefully deliver to us the answer in a clever and jaw-dropping manner.

Speaking of jaw-dropping lets get to what the game series is famous for, the visuals. Crysis 2 is very nicely refined as an overall package but when you get into the fine details especially on vegetation it kind of stumbles a bit there but this can be forgiven. No doubt the PC version is considerably more beautiful but on the PS3 I would still put Killzone 3 above it in visuals. The original Crysis for PC had better visuals but that is the price you pay for opting for console.

One thing I will say is that the gameplay let me down a little bit. I enjoyed the complete chaos of destroying every little bit of a building in Crysis, or destroying half a forest with an assault rifle in a drawn out firefight. In Crysis 2, the most you can do is shatter windows and blow up explosives in terms of physics so a little disappointed there considering there was so much potential to be had with New York city as your playground. The changes to the Nanosuit though are something I do like with Strength/Speed being the default mode and a tap of the shoulder button switching to either Stealth or Armour mode. Coupled with the minor level customisation options for each mode and the variety of attachments for your weapons does allow you to shift battlefield tactics accordingly especially if you are like me and get too impatient when stealthing only to do something stupid and get half the army shooting at me.

The AI are generally quite intelligent and communicate to each other quite well although can be rather thick when it comes to finding a dead comrade whereby they check his pulse and move on as opposed to say sounding an alarm but oh well, maybe they are all heartless people.

Another thing I do enjoy about the game is the way it handles its tutorials. Instead of lumping everything on you immediately, Crysis 2 introduces you to aspects of the gameplay as they become appropriate and make it part of the actual gameplay so it doesn’t feel arbitrary or forced but instead is an enjoyable integrated experience.

Overall, I like Crysis 2. Despite its flaws it is still a great game with a plot I genuinely found well crafted. One objection I do have though is the inclusion of collectables throughout the game. Sorry but that should not be a way to get people to replay the game. I do feel a great sense of replayability in Crysis 2 though as the Nanosuit makes gameplay so interesting and varied and replayability is essential here as the game only took me 7 hours to complete on regular difficulty. The game is a very well crafted game but I just didn’t think it beat its predecessor overall. There was so much it could do but didn’t as opposed to the original Crysis which let you do damn near anything.

The Resistance Album Cover

“The Resistance” is the 5^th official album of Muse, a British Alternative Rock band. Let me clarify right now that not all Rock fans might like this album, since it’s not pure rock. Instead, Muse have used a mixture of rock sub-genres such as Alternative rock and Symphonic rock in this album, meaning that you won’t hear that many intense guitar solos in the songs. “The Resistance” is a combination of Rock and Pop which includes songs like “Uprising” which is more rock-oriented and “Undisclosed Desires” which sounds more pop than rock.

In this review I will try to right a bit about every song in the album. Here’s the track listing, and I’ll also follow this list, starting with “Uprising”:

1. “Uprising”
2. “Resistance”
3. “Undisclosed Desires”
4. “United States of Eurasia (+Collateral Damage)”
5. “Guiding Light”
6. “Unnatural Selection”
7. “MK Ultra”
8. “I Belong to You (+Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix)”
9. “Exogenesis: Symphony Part 1 (Overture)”
10. “Exogenesis: Symphony Part 2 (Cross-Pollination)”
11. “Exogenesis: Symphony Part 3 (Redemption)”

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