Gears of War Review

Graphics: 9/10
The first thing you'll notice about Gears of Wars, is the amazing graphics. The impressive light blooms, HDR, depth-of-field, motion blur, and alot of other awsome post-processing effects.

One of them that makes the game really stand out, is the color correction used for various areas, allowing to color entire scenes with a unified color range. A setting sunset really blends the environment in a soft orange-pink color scheme, aswell as walking around in a greenhouse will have a overall green vegetation look to it. In other words, the game will be colored differently throughout the game. But unlike what many critics says, it's not all good.

There's almost none dynamic lights, and almost all the shadows have been pre-rendered and are static. Like your own shadow doesn't react at all to light sources. Just try walking around a light source and you'll notice that the shadow doesn't change its direction relative to the light, but instead always point at the same direction. This is extremely subtle, and insignificant compared to how well the game looks anyway.

The blood spurts in the game is horrible to the extent that they're laughable. When shooting things, they'll register your hit by spurting some blood that's highlighted with a thick pink outline. Not just pink, but extremely pink. Also, the spurts doesn't create any blood decals to anything, so they won't stick to the surroundings. Most often enemies will just fall to the ground, without a single drop of blood around it, but if you're lucky, you might get a small pool of blood around him. The blood pool is static aswell, and doesn't make you leave any blood footprints after stepping in it (I miss Duke Nukem).

Speaking about gore, the thing that is worth mentioning is the chainsaw manevour. You'll walk up close to an enemy, and then use your weapons attached saw, and just saw right through the body of your enemy, while blood (good looking blood, not the fugly pink stuff) is splashing onto the camera (like it would be an actual camera), leaving the enemy in pieces on the ground. You're able to shoot apart limbs, and it's really satisfying to one shot a enemy in the head so it rips off and gushes blood.

There's one thing in the game that makes everything look very granular. This is caused by the detail textures being active even while you're standing a bit away from the texture, instead of only being active while the player is upclose or zoomed in.

The particle effects are looking awsome. Rain, explosions and dust flying over the ground, everything fits well together. Decals on the other hand, doesn't look good at all, if there is any. You can throw a grenade and it will make an awsome explosion, but leave no trace behind, as if nothing ever happened. Bullet decals are just black plumps stuck to a wall.

The framerate is stable throughout the entire game, except during the cutscenes (where they actually turn on a few more effects), but that doesn't matter since it won't affect the gameplay.

Gameplay: 6/10
Let's go onto the most important aspect of a game, the gameplay itself. You'll play as a steroid pumped, grumpy old mercenary by the name Marcus Fenix. The game starts in a dark and claustrophobic cell, but you won't stay there for long, since a companion will quickly release you from your prison. From there and on, you'll always have a comrade with you throughout the game. It's normally controlled by a AI, but a second player can join in seamlessly at anytime.

Together, you'll provide cover fire for each other, or occupy a enemy while your friend will try to flank them. If one of you would die, he would just drop to his knees on the ground, loop a tinitus sound, until you come and pat his back and he'll be up again with full health. If both of you would die, or one anyone of you get gibbed, you'll have to restart from the latest checkpoint.

The checkpoints throughout the game are both stupid and annoying as hell. Instead of saving after performing some time-consuming and mundane task, like twisting a valve, it always saves right before you do it, so you'll have to redo it everytime you die. This apply to cutscenes aswell. If you die, you'll have to watch the cutscene once again. Even though it's possible to skip some of them, it's still annoying having to skip a cutscene everytime you die.

Unlike Half-Life, cutscenes are ingame cinematics that removes the control from the players. This is a design choice and adds to the overall cinematic feel of the game, but I still get annoyed when I'm not fully controlling my character.

I mentioned twisting valves earlier. This is one of the really few things, other than taking cover and fire, that you'll be able to do. Marcus Fenix allows himself to push buttons, control turrets, kick doors, blow up gasoline tanks (by shooting at them of course), and twist valves. Oh, and you get to control a really boring car once aswell. That's it!

The gameplay easily become repetitive, and if you're not into the whole take cover and shoot at things, you'll have no place here, since the story will hardly involve anyone.

There's not alot of weapons in the game, but two of them are real badasses. One of them being your mounted chainsaw, turning foes into mincemeat, and the other one is the Hammer of Dawn, which is orbital laser that will evaporate almost everything in it's proximity. It works like, you point at a coordinate for it to target, and then a huge laser beam comes down from the sky that you're then able to direct with the targeting device. Awesomeness!

Additionally, there's grenades, a grenade launcher, a shotgun, explosive crossbow, sniper rifle, two different handpistols and two variations of automatics. You may only carry grenades, two main weapons, and one handgun at all times.


Level design: 7/10
Although visually astonishing, the levels are relative simple, and feels mostly like running through several different kinds of corridors. Covers are spread throughout the levels, represented by broken cars, broken structures, furniture or concrete blocks laying around.

There are almost no physic objects, and almost nothing reacts to your gun shots other than creating that black plump decal, so you'll find yourself in a extremely static environment. But when you encounter the Berzerker, who runs through pillars, doors and even walls, you'll atleast get the feeling of a bit more dynamic environment, even if everything is predefined and very specific.

At a few points in the game, you'll get the choose which path you wish to take. It actually pause the game, brings down a menu and asks you if you wish to go either left or right, literally. The choices are always either "left" or "right".

The paths won't divide much anyhow, and will most often intersect in one way or another, or just go plain next to each other, and always connect at their ends. You won't have to worry on missing anything by choosing one path over the other. Other than that, they often present you the ability to flank your enemies, but most often that's the only way to progress anyhow.

This is a pretty mindless shooter, but it still presents you with a few "puzzles". Turn the valve, or press the button to open up a path ahead. Or at one segment of the game, you'll have to avoid the shadows, and you have to progress by lighting up the area by shooting at conveniently placed gasoline tanks. This is pretty much how deep it gets, and it almost makes the "find yellow keycard to open yellow door" feel a bit more of a intellectual challenge.

The levels will take you through environments like wartorn cities (with the essence of Save Private Ryan), ruined buildings, broken down highway, closed-off factory, greenhouse, underground caverns, and finally onto a train ride, which is the best and the last level of the game.

Enemies: 8/10
You'll mostly find yourself fighting against one kind of grunts and somekind of ceiling climbing dogs. Then there's these bigger grunts called Boomers, which are slower, have more hitpoints and wields grenade launchers. Even later into the game, you'll face a few Theron Guards, which are like quicker grunts with better weapons.

These are the main enemies, and then there's some half-bosses and bosses aswell. One of the first half-bosses are the giant Seeders, who launch flying biological drones at you. The second one, and the best enemy in the game, is the deaf Berzerker, who will run through almost anything while trying to get you. And lastly we have the grunts flying on Reevers, who're like huge, armor-plated, flying bugs, with saddles.

Then we have a giant spider, as seen from the Mad World-trailer, and of course the badass last boss himself. He's pretty tough when trying to take him down with just your AI companion, but with a real friend, he'll go down before he gets enough chance to make any resistance.

Enemy AI's are average, but they often try to take shelter behind things, and occasionally fire at you from their covers, although they're often too dumb to realize that their covers have been compromised. So it's mostly a mixture of charge straigth at the enemy, and the take cover behind everything.

Controls: 8/10
Unlike what what many critics have said, the control works pretty swell. One button to aim, one to shoot. Press A to take cover, and press A again to change cover or jump over the cover you're crouching behind. Hold A to run like a bull, and just tap A to make a roll dodge. B is for melee attacks, and you need to hold B and press fire to use the chainsaw. To interact with buttons, turrets and valves, just tap X. To zoom, just push down the right analogue stick.

The right shoulder button reloads (the game automaticly reloads when out-of-ammo aswell), and during reloading you can time it and press it again, for a quicker reload and damage boost. If you fail, you'll fumble during reloading which takes a longer time. Use the digital directional pad to equip one out of four weapons (grenades, two main weapons, one handgun). Simple as that.

Sound: 8/10
Pretty stale and clichéish dialogue. Cinematical orchestral music. Worst credit music ever. Boomers are a bit weirdly mixed, and is often heard as standing next to you, even if you're far away from them, aswell at they got a tendency to stroll around and say "BOOM". Most enemies sound alike, which might be good for consistency.

Overall:
Overall the game is looking astonishing, but beneath the surface, it's really stale, static and uninvolving. There's not much motivation to carry you through the levels, other than to get to see another cinematic, or to shoot some more grunts.

The environments seems generally fake, with their lack of physics, and lack of remaining traces from battle. Enemies will eventually disappear, and seldom leave a blood pool behind. If you break some furniture, you'll get some weird particle effect that will fade out in thin air. There's almost no decals from battles, and there's like no window that breaks, or paintings that fall down.

Physic in the game lacks weigth, and you can go and push around Berzerkers and grunts alike, as if they would be almost weigthless. Paper-physics, that don't push the player, only the player pushing them. The same goes for when riding the car, and you'll just run straigth through every obstacle, since they don't slow you down anything at all anyhow.

You're unable to jump in the game, and every edge, and even corridors are blocked off by invisible walls. As mentioned above, the environment lacks reaction to your consequences, and stuff don't react to being shot at, like bullet just goes straigth through water without causing any ripples, splashes or anything.

This game is designed for HDTV, and if you don't own a HDTV, you're screwed. I can only imagine how disorted everything would look like on a normal TV. You would be unable to read the subtitles and tutorials, since the text is even smaller than that of Dead Rising.

The story of the game is abit uninformative, and boils down to you fighting the "aliens" (Locust), sort of. It lack emphasis and you never get emotionally attached to any of the characters.

To start a new game, you must select a profile, and each profile gets one save each. There's only autosave functions in the game, and if someone decided to start a new game with your profile, all progress would be lost.

Even though you're able to seamlessly turn a single player game into a cooperative game, the same thing can't be said about trying to return to single player mode. If one of the players logout, the game will immediately quit to menu.

In multiplayer, there's not much variations, and is mostly 4 vs 4 kind of battles. Other than that, it works pretty well, and you don't have to wait for too long between rounds. But the game lacks a anti-AFK system, in case some player would just go away, and leave himself connected.

There's not much depth to the game at all, and I wouldn't really call "flanking" a tactic, since most often it's forced. You take cover, shoot at enemies, walk around enemies and then shoot them some more. Since you can't jump, the levels lacks a dimension, and feels mostly like corridors. Just keep on walking forward.

The game is very cinematic, with alot of cinematic cutscenes, cinematic music, and cinematic camera movements. It really preform well to get a feeling of overwhelming, and with the graphical effects, it's easily to become astonished. But yet again, that doesn't mean it's fun to play, and I sincerely hope that I don't have to play it through ever again.

It's definetly worth buying because of the feeling alone, but the game is generally overrated and even if it might be next-gen graphics, it got the previous-gen gameplay...

Gears of War: 8/10 (7.6/10)

F.E.A.R. Review

F.E.A.R. Review

John Woo meets The Ring, little girls with long hair and shootouts in slow motion, enter the world of F.E.A.R. This game is going to be released in two days (18th october), the same day as Quake 4, and it got a huge chance to outsell Id's latest creation.

A research experiment goes horribly wrong and a genetically engineered psychic commander goes mad and starts to control a battalion of clone supersoldiers. A special tactics force is sent in to investigate but are never heard from again, so it's now up to you as a part of the First Encounter Assault Recon (F.E.A.R) team to go in to both investigate the disapperance of the other soldiers, and to eliminate the psychic commander.

The first map is actually one of those who were created last in the development and therefore has a huge resemblance to the later additions of the game. It also acts like a tutorial and as a introduction for the game. This maps already shows the huge flaws in the level design, they re-use items everywhere and goes for the same palette theme throughout the whole game. Most often the levels are made so there's a obstacle you can't go beyond so you have to take another turn, activate a switch, and then return where you came from and you should be able to pass that obstacle. Also, it's rather easy to start to go around in circles on the levels and they feel like they've just been made longer so the game won't feel so short. A positive aspects of the levels are the lightning, sounds, placement of enemies, and sometimes the scripted horror events.

This game is all about the feeling, it really feels like you're in the middle of a action-horror movie. The music and sound effects keep your adrenaline pulsing while you run down a hallway in slow motion, emptying magazines and watch the particle dust scatter all over the place. A moment later you find yourself in a dreamlike state, surrounded by fire, demons and blood. The weapons are really well balanced, and it's as good to use martial arts in close combat as any of the weapons are. There's no feeling like slidetackeling a enemy, sending him spinning through the air and watch as his head hits a sharp corner and making his body rotate in a different angle before it lands heavily in a corner.

When running around in the levels, you'll stop time to time, just to watch the stunningly beautiful graphics, it looks better than anything that is out today, and even runs smoother than Doom 3. Water reflections, particle dust, blur effects and bullet decals that actually looks like a hole in the wall and not just a flat marker. The lightning and shadows are also impressive, and it's a wonder that it manages to run smoothly when it's combined with like five enemies with advanced A.I.

Your arsenal is based upon six different weapons and three different kind of grenades and mines. Pistol (able to be dualwielded), Combat shotgun, Sub-machine gun, Assault rifle, Semi-automatic rifle, Penetrator (Like Painkillers Stakegun, it got the ability to nail enemies to the walls), Type-7 particle weapon (Railgun anyone?), Repeating cannon (yes it's a cannon) and the Multi-rocket launcher (fires three spinning rockets). The grenades and mines are a standard grenade, a remote mine (you can stick this one on enemies) and a proximity mine.

You don't meet a huge variaty of enemies, basicly you got the supersoldiers, ATC workers, a heavy armored supersoldier, a huge exterminator robot (like the one featured in Robocop), one type of demon and some kind of stealthed ninja supersoldiers. Also you got those hovering laser shooting kind of robots. Even if there isn't a huge variaty of enemies you meet, those who you get to meet isn't the kind you want to take home and introduce to your parents, no these suckers are mean. With mean I mean they are a nasty bunch that always tries to outsmart you by attacking from multiply directions or flankning you while you're busy with their other team members. Their A.I. is the most impressive I've ever seen in a game, and even though I got a save point right before a fight, every fights turns out completly different. They take decision by themself and even refuse orders ("Move in.", "No fucking way!") from their teammates if they feel it's too risky.

Sometimes you get the feeling that this game is heavily inspired of Half-life, with the research experiment gone wrong and soldiers that wants nothing more than to penetrate you with their bullets, but all in all this is a rather different game and probably the best first person shooter that has been released since Half-Life 2. And the multiplayer is just too much fun, with the different game modes of slowmo, deathmatch, capture the flag and elimination, which all can be played either in teams or all versus all (except for capture the flag, which is always team based). My favorite way of playing deathmatch is team elimination where I run around with holstered weapons and do my matrix-style martial arts on whoever stands in my way.

All in all, it took me around 8 hours to complete the game on hard skill and I would gladly recommend it to anyone that likes first person shooters.

Gameplay: 9
Graphic: 10
Sound: 10
Design: 6
Total: 9

F.E.A.R.
More about F.E.A.R. level design

PANICS

From the guys that made Red vs Blue comes PANICS, a machinima totally made in F.E.A.R. Episode 2 was released yesterday and it looks like this could be their resurgence, after wearing out RvsB. For those of you who haven't tried F.E.A.R. yet, I recommend you to download both the single player demo and the multiplayer demo. I love their remake of the railgun, the so called Type-7 particle (accelerator?) weapon. I'm currently running around with holstered weapons and killing of enemies Matrix-style.



One thing that I noticed in the single player demo, even though I ran in a hard skill mode, the enemies had a rather strange A.I. Once they ran up behind a shelf and while I was circulating around them they started knocking down the items that was in the shelf instead of paying attention to me, their enemy. They ended up face down on the floor with bullet wounds in the back of their heads. Another thing that seemed kind of strange was after vaporizing some enemy soldiers with the Railgun (Type-7 particle weapon), the last remaining one thougth it was a good idea to jump through the window I was standing behind, and roll a couple of times on the floor. He was actually running towards me, staring at me, knowing the fate of his friends, and jumped through the window...

Red vs Blue
PANICS
F.E.A.R.

Fable

Fable is a rather intresting game, it's a very linear action-rpg where your actions add to your karma. Bad deeds makes you sinister, you'll grow horns and people will be afraid of you. Helping people out makes you look good and shiny. By sacrificing innocent people and beating up my wives I became a evil person with flies after me (do evil dudes smell bad?), but I could get my souls forgiveness by donating a large sum of money to a temple.

So this is how I looks like now.


I must say I've enjoyed the game, because I finished it three times already (not counting the extra chapter), even though you can finish it on the first day you're playing. Money have been no problem for my characters because I stumbled upon a intresting bug with my first char. I was just playing cards with a bandit and won 1000 coins, after that I exited the game, a little later I loaded my char again and was about to play cards again when the game stucks in a loop where I just gets 1000 coins over and over again. I can't control anything or move anything, so I wait for a couple of minutes, but when the money don't stop I decide to save and then restart the game. When I loaded again, I got like billions in money, just as I had hoped when I saved the game before. The screenshot below don't show all the money (I guess they didn't expect anyone to get more than 9 million) but you should add a couple of more nines before those numbers (don't know how many yet ^^).