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Thursday 14 November 2013

Dead Space 3 review


Review by Nathan Ditum
On a city street at the start of Dead Space 3, there’s a poster for a film called Tools Of Terror. It features a man in a tuxedo pulling a James Bond pose, but instead of a pistol he’s holding a wrench. He is, it’s fairly obvious, both an action hero and a blue-collar guy, and despite the fact this film is a spoof – or perhaps because of it – he’s also an accurate symbolic representation of Dead Space hero Isaac Clarke as he appears in this latest game.

"Isaac was a high-functioning spanner in a space suit."

Isaac is an engineer. It’s the thing that made him such an unusual protagonist in the original game – he didn’t talk, he fixed things and had weapons that could conceivably have been used to fix things, if they weren’t busy dismembering the reanimated dead. He was a high-functioning spanner in a space suit, but he returned the John McClane of religious hysteria and viral outbreaks in Dead Space 2.
How could the same shit happen to the same guy twice? And how could he suddenly be so good at it?
The question was raised: is Isaac best as the handyman-in-a-tight-spot or as the stomping shooter frontman? Dead Space 3 fixes on the elegant solution of pushing him in both directions at once. Progression is dependent on a series of hardware fix-ups – this shuttle, that tram system, this alien genocide machine.
But at the same time, Isaac fights wave after wave of monsters while saying things like, “I turned my back on the world because I couldn’t face what had to be done,” – and he’s not talking about an oil change or repairing a carburettor.

"Should it be a     lean horror or an explosive shooter? The game opts to be both."

The debate over Isaac-as-engineer versus Isaac-as-action-hero feeds into Dead Space’s genre identity crisis. Should it be a cold, lean horror, or an explosive shooter? The game opts to be both. This is possible because it consists of big, distinct sections: a breathless high-stakes opener (in the James Bond tradition, appropriately enough), a claustrophobic few hours in a debris field of broken ships orbiting a planet, a lengthy action push on the planet’s icy surface, and a climactic section in an ancient city.
The segments feel episodic, as though they were built by different teams and bolted together to create a varied, lengthy whole. The first major stop is a floating scrapheap, with Isaac exploring a series of derelicts looking for a way to reach the planet below. It’s an expanded echo of the original Dead Space – not just repeating the haunted ship routine, but bringing the quiet, tense and considered approach to a frozen flotilla of craft with Isaac shuttling between them.
Dusty airlocks and the grand, muffled spectacle of Isaac drifting through space are the foreground to the game’s hard sci-fi style, and it fruitfully resurrects the old, effective mix of mundane tasks performed amid calamity. The first moment of dread I’ve experienced since crawling through the guts of the Ishimura – “but I don’t want to find out what’s blocking the tram system” – confirms that this is partly the faithful sequel to Dead Space that people who still resent Isaac for learning to talk or daring to display his human face – have been waiting for.

"The game fruitfully resurrects the old, effective mix of mundane tasks performed amid calamity."

A change of pace on the surface of the planet moves Dead Space 3 into more conventional action territory. The snowstorms and wind-battered outposts are a nod to the influence of The Thing on Dead Space, just as surely as the Ishimura paid tribute to the devastation of the Nostromo in Alien, but the combat here introduces elements of cover-based shooting. There are still encounters with skittering necromorphs in corridors and vent-heavy rooms, but there are also more clearings and open spaces, and action set-pieces in the form of cliff-face rappelling (both up and down), boss encounters (tiresome), and an industrial drill that’s transformed into a giant rusty flesh-whisk (loud).
It feels as though Dead Space 3 has settled on volume and value as part of a big-fisted approach to appealing to everybody. The game feels laudably substantial, although sometimes the pacing suffers. The inclusion of any level that requires players to double back through a now-repopulated section justifies a call of shenanigans; Dead Space 3 does it more than once. And while the inclusion of optional side-missions is definitely a good thing, not just for the added content but also the opportunity for resource gathering, they can feel at odds with the urgency of the larger objective at hand. Near the close, I was offered the chance to explore one such cul-de-sac, and declined in order to continue my in-progress race against a religious fanatic to reach a control panel in time to prevent the extinction of mankind.

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Tomb Raider review


Stranded on the mythical island of Yamatai following a freak storm, 21-year-old Lara Croft's career as a videogame protagonist begins with suffering. In the opening hours of Tomb Raider she is stabbed, burned, drenched, assaulted and almost freezes to death: that's if you're doing well, meeting the demands of every linear climbing section, gunfight, finickety stealth sequence and quick-time event that presents itself. Fail any of these and you'll also watch her be crushed, impaled, strangled, mauled and so on.

"Lara sobs and trembles, and evident effort has been made to slow down and focus on the details of her experience."

This early cruelty is the game's most strikingly idiosyncratic feature. Lara sobs and trembles, and evident effort has been made to slow down and focus on the details of her experience. Hunger necessitates finding a bow and hunting deer. Her elbows shake believably when she mantles up onto a ledge. Her first human kill leaves her blood-soaked and distraught. Give it a few months and I suspect these opening hours will be what people will be talking about when they talk about Crystal Dynamics' reboot. It's certainly what they've been talking about until now.
Play on for another few hours, however, and you'll find yourself in a hybrid of third-person shooter and linear platformer, Lara trading the bleak little lethalities of life as a shipwreck survivor for a parade of regulation set-pieces: an escape from a burning building, a helicopter crash, a section where your guns are taken away, a climactic assault on an enemy stronghold.
Moment by moment, the game evolves into something more familiar. During a battle with Yamatai's savage Solarii brotherhood high up in the mountains, the camera crash-zooms onto a set of blast doors which burst open to reveal an armoured islander holding a riot shield. Stop me if you've heard this one before: you beat him by dodging his machete blows and shooting him in the back when he stumbles. Everything about this character - from his introduction to his execution - is lifted from the Big Book of Miniboss Design, Third-Person Shooter Edition (Bleszinski/Mikami, 2005).
Years trapped on Yamatai have warped the populace into an army of videogame henchmen.
Shortly afterwards, Lara hops onto the bottom rung of a ladder leading up a rickety radar tower whose topmost transmitter is her crew's best hope for rescue. Once you're on that bottom rung, the game will only accept one input: forwards. Press forward and Lara climbs: press anything else and Lara stops. There's no way to fail, though a few pre-canned moments will have a rusty rung give way and leave her hanging. There's a point where the game slips into a cutscene but pretends that it hasn't: nothing changes, with the exception that it's no longer accepting your input. Let go and Lara will keep climbing without you. Adventure game sleight-of-hand, as taught at Uncharted's School of Seven Bells - what is being pickpocketed, in this case, is your right as a player to have your agency reflected in the events taking place on-screen.

"It relaxes back into the series' matinee adventure comfort zone."

Then, after another calamitous mountainside descent, Lara emerges out onto a familiar landscape - a hub area - from a new vantage point. Your options for traversal have been expanded by the acquisition of rope arrows that allow you to pull down certain doors and affix zip-lines to particular posts. There are letters and relics to find, and secret tombs to plunder for bonus skill points. Tomb Raider becomes about gentle exploration for a while, and there's nothing particularly traumatic about it. It's very, very pretty. You forget about the multiple times you watched Lara's throat be ripped out by a wolf because you kept fumbling a quicktime event. You stop wondering if pressing the buttons to make Lara go through this carnival of horrors is not an act of cruelty in and of itself.
The memory of that first traumatic kill fades as you kneel behind another piece of waist-high cover to ping arrows into the cranii of obliging brotherhood warrior after obliging brotherhood warrior. When the game gives up on being a story about a young woman having an absolutely terrible time, it improves. It relaxes back into the series' matinee adventure comfort zone, and some of its later set-pieces are genuinely spectacular as a result.
Dangle me from the ceiling once, shame on you. Dangle me twice, shame on me.

"Lara herself is the game's standout success, particularly when she stops running."

The quality of the writing varies. Conversations between Lara's fellow survivors are believable despite their rote characterisation: nerdy twenty-something male, tough black woman, untrustworthy TV personality, spiritual Maori, and so on. Lara herself is the game's standout success, particularly when she stops running and decides to take direct action: the perceptible change she undergoes is a good example of writing, performance, and animation working together to create a sympathetic and admirable person in place of a fantasy.
The game spits out some real eye-rollers, though - it's honestly a miracle that Lara can find anything to fall off given the amount of scenery the villain manages to chew through in his relatively brief screen-time. Enemy chatter doesn't fare much better. I can think of a number of things I might say if I suddenly found myself with an arrow in my sternum, and "damn, she's a good shot!" isn't high on the list.
The real weakness of Tomb Raider's storytelling, though, is its failure to express its big ideas in the way it plays. Lara receives two pieces of advice repeatedly during the game: 'trust your instincts' and 'keep moving forward'. Both jar with the reality of what Tomb Raider actually wants you to do. 'Trust your instincts' should really be understood as 'trust Lara's instincts': or at least, trust Survival Instinct mode, which highlights objects in the environment you can interact with. Trust that this type of craggy rock will always be climbable, that these barricades will always yield to your rope arrows, that this particular type of scenery will always be flammable - and that you should always do all of these things because that's why they're there.

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Dota 2 review


Of the half-dozen people I started learning Dota 2 with, three still play regularly. Though there are hundreds of thousands of players of our approximate skill level populating the matchmaking queues, the four of us are more like each other than we are like anyone else playing Valve’s isometric wizard-’em-up.
Spending a year learning to shuffle a gaggle of fantasy heroes up Dota’s teetering stack of rules and game mechanics will do that to you: we’ve developed a secret language of our own, one that runs parallel to the talk of creeps and lanes and farm and rax common to everyone who plays the game. “Whack a ward on the donkletron I’m going to stick one up their jungle” is a sentence I can say out loud and be completely understood by at least those three people. For some reason, there’s also a lot of singing involved. It’s a lot like being a sailor.
A few months ago I was playing Dota 2 with one of those friends. He was controlling Bristleback, a gnarled humanoid echidna who specialises in punishing attacking players with a faceful of spiny quills. I was Tusk, a sort-of-Scandinavian walrus Viking who can punch people so hard that the words ‘WALRUS PUNCH!’ are briefly writ in the sky.
It wasn’t an ideal pairing. We’d allowed the game to randomly select our heroes for us, a necessary risk if you’re going to learn everything you need to know about Dota’s hundred-plus playable characters. Of the five players on our team, it made the most sense for Bristleback and I to head to our faction’s offlane: the most dangerous of the three pathways that funnel waves of AI-controlled ‘creeps’ from one side’s base to the other. Each lane is dotted with defensive towers, and cracking these defences to expose the enemy ‘ancient’ forms the basis of Dota’s strategic take on tug-of-war.
Bristleback and Tusk are both melee heroes, which meant we needed to get close to the creep line to score last hits – killing blows that dispatch enemy units for gold and experience. In doing so we made ourselves vulnerable to ranged fire from the enemy – ideally we’d have brought our own ranged character to even the odds.
We were also equally dependent on gathering gold to purchase new equipment. This wasn’t ideal, either: every Dota hero needs to gather a different set of items to be effective, and normally teams will prioritise one hero over another when it comes to last-hitting lane creeps. The game indicates which heroes are likely to be played in which role, but whether that happens is something players have to arrange for themselves.
These are the politics of a nascent Dota match, and the pairing of Bristleback and I represented a backbench compromise. We did our best to split the last hits between us, nipping to the frontline whenever a creep was low on health and being careful to deny the enemy access to our own creeps by dispatching them ourselves. There was no avoiding the odd tussle with the two enemy players opposing us, however, and by the ten minute mark we were both running dangerously low on hit points.
We’d each spent some of our starting gold on a healing salve – a one-use, cost-ineffective way of restoring health that can be cast on your own character or on an ally. Having not bothered to look at each other’s inventories, neither of us knew that we’d both bought one.
There was a brief moment of calm. Our creep line had advanced into the firing range of the first enemy tower, and it was too early in the game to have a go at knocking the defensive structure down. We backed off and waited a little way north of the river that bisects the map. I compared my health bar to my friend’s and decided that he needed to stay in the lane longer than I did. I could run back to base, if I had to, and get my health back there at the expense of time and experience points. I pushed the hotkey for my healing salve and pointed it at Bristleback, giving up my gold to keep him in the game.
A few hundred real-world miles away, in the same instant, my friend compared his health bar to mine and decided that I needed to stay in the lane longer than he did. He hotkeyed his healing salve and pointed it at me, giving up his gold to keep me in the game. Green swirls of regenerative energy sprang from both of our characters in unison.
We laughed.
“Did... did we just salve each other?”
“Er, yeah. I think we did.”
“That isn’t weird, is it?”
“I think it’s fine. Nobody saw.”
If you’re looking for a reason to commit time to Dota 2 – if you’re actually reading this review for advice and a critical opinion, rather than to see what score I’m going to give the most popular game on Steam – then, first up, thanks for being here. Second, I want you to consider what it means when two grown men accidentally lather each other in regenerative goop. It’s gaming’s equivalent of holding a door open for somebody who is already reaching to hold the door open for you: a synchronicity of kindness that speaks to a deeper shared understanding of the situation both people are in. Dota is a game where you can say the words “are you thinking what I’m thinking?” and be reliably assured that the person on the other end of your VoIP connection actually is. It might have the systems and bearing of a videogame, but Dota shares the social impetus of a sport. Its single environment isn’t a map, it’s a pitch.

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Call of Duty: Ghosts PC review


Call of Duty: Ghosts will be damned if you peek away from your screen. Boredom is absolutely not allowed as the campaign pelts you with action vignettes—including a scene directly snagged from the opening of The Dark Knight Rises—and repeats its mantra ad nauseam: “Keep moving!”
I’m in space, I’m underwater, I’m piloting a dog, I’m piloting an Apache, I’m driving a tank that handles like a Lamborghini—all without ever really learning a new skill. The Apache, for instance, is magically repulsed from the ground—it’s like piloting an air hockey disc—so finesse is unnecessary. On-screen cues tell you what you need to know as you’re plunged into an airstrike: fire flares when an enemy locks on, left mouse button to fire your cannon, hold down the center mouse button to lock on with missiles. Then go to town.
It’s fun in that it’s something exciting to see and do: a theme park ride where I’m given an airsoft rifle to pelt the animatronics with. And it’s a brilliant ride. There are pyrotechnics, car chases, submarines, and drone strikes. Once scene has me rappelling down a skyscraper and shooting guards through the windows—and then the skyscraper collapses while I’m in it. It’s every action scene Hollywood has imagined for the past 20 years packed into five to six hours of super-stylish interactive montages, and wrapped up in a goofy, inoffensive story about brothers trying to live up to their dad’s super-soldier status.

Call of daddy


It’s fun, but it’s not engaging—Ghosts’ campaign is even more passive than Telltale’s recent point-and-clickers. In The Wolf Among Us, I have choices. In Ghosts, I do the Right Thing or fail. Frustratingly, even the decision to follow the constantly barked “keep moving” order can get me killed. That repeated flavor dialog should be ignored: save heroics for the scripted moments, stay crouched, and pop up sporadically to shoot at the bad guys.
Blowing up boats while remotely piloting a drone is fun and not at all challenging.
In rare instances, I was able to part from my squad, flank the enemy, and wipe them out with the advantage, but that kind of tactical planning was a sparsely present treat. It appeared once more in a jungle mission which put columns of guards between me and my squad, arming me only with a silenced pistol and sensor to detect nearby enemies. That was the only time I was given a goal and left to achieve it without explicit instructions for every action.
That was also the only time I got a magic bad guy sensor, and that’s another of the campaign’s failings: it fires off interesting ideas and then instantly forgets about them. Near the beginning, I’m introduced to my canine companion, Riley, and I can mark targets for him to quietly de-jugular. I did that once, when ordered to, and never again. Later, I get to use a remote-controlled sniper rifle to clear out a stadium. It’s a great gadget that I’d have liked to plop down on my own a few times, but it never shows up again. Both weapons are like toys that I get to demo in the store, but never get to take home.
Sgt. Shark is awfully testy today.
But we get bored of toys after we take them home, whereas if we stay in the toy store, poking at everything that requires batteries, nothing needs to do more than light up and make noise to keep us entertained. And you won’t ever be bored, because Ghosts’ novelties are brilliant and bright, full of life and then whisked away before they can be broken open and revealed to be little electronic tricks.
If you buy Ghosts just for the multiplayer, I will say that you should at least play the campaign long enough to get to the first obligatory space scene. It’s fantastic. It’s Gravity with guns. I wish the whole thing had been in space.

Call of shooty


The multiplayer is more Call of Duty® Multiplayer. It’s about flanking, out flanking, and milliseconds of animation that determine who lives and who dies. The maps are circular arenas dressed in gray military garb, pulling assets from the dullest bits of the campaign’s setting. Instead of a space station and tropical shipwreck, the maps are Busted Up Train Yard and Overcast Snowy Place.
In most modes, death nearly always comes from behind or upon rounding a corner and shooting too slowly to avoid a knife to the gut. There’s no front line, so every kill is likely to instaspawn your foe somewhere behind you, making matches a dizzying circular chase sequence.
Getting knifed from around a corner is something I excel at.
Guns are plentiful and nuanced, though every vital stat, from how long it takes to raise the iron sights to recoil and spread, is experienced in milliseconds of surprise action. Everyone swirls around the map like disoriented flies, and I either catch glimpses of their feet under collapsed steel girders, or run face first into them as our beelines intersect, reacting with spasms more often than cool tactical awareness. At pub levels, Ghosts’ multiplayer is whack-a-mole to Counter-Strike’s chess game.
An exception is Search and Rescue, which gives teams bomb and defend objectives, and players one life per round unless a team member collects their dog tag to revive them. That encourages teammates to stick together, generating group engagements at range that I heavily prefer over darting around like an armed insect.
I also enjoy, as I have in past CoDs, the Ground War mode. With bigger maps and 12-14 players, there’s more room to breathe and more teammates to rely on during firefights. It’s in that mode that I discovered that going prone is practically an invisibility cloak. I was able to camp out by a capture point picking off enemy after enemy for nearly an entire round, often after they ran right over me. It was fun target practice for me, but probably a frustration for the other team, which eventually had to run around the perimeter until it found a back to knife.

Call me maybe


Even in the modes I enjoy, I don’t want to stay for long. The “one more round” syndrome just isn’t present for me in Ghosts. In previous CoDs, the drive to unlock and try out a new weapon might have kept me going, but that’s been replaced with Squad Points. Accrued through good play, the points can be spent to unlock any weapon at any time if you save them up. I appreciate that this is more respectful of players’ time, as well as returning CoD fans’ desire to get right to the gun they’re happy with, but it nullifies any sense of accomplishment the progression system once had.
Defending a point is easy when lying down makes you invisible.
But it isn’t just the progression system, or the complex-to-the-point-of-silliness soldier customization, or the boring killstreak rewards that make me tire so quickly of Ghosts multiplayer. It’s that, like the campaign, it’s about constant forward momentum, but unlike the campaign, it never changes. The matches go by too fast to ever develop a rhythm or personality. From one map to the next, it’s run, run, run. There are no nail-biters, no heroics, and no rivalries. There are no brilliant shots that I want to run to show YouTube, unless it’s an accidental trick grenade throw. There are no moments when I pull back from my display, rub my forehead, and say, “I can’t believe I did that.” Moments like that happen all the time for me in Unreal Tournament 2K4, Tribes: Ascend, Battlefield 4, Rising Storm, and earlier Call of Duty games.
Ghosts multiplayer is a game of snap decisions, mechanics, and mistakes—"should have gone prone instead of firing, shouldn’t have reloaded after that last kill, should have turned around instead of sprinting"—and it is freakishly nuanced and can absolutely be mastered. I respect those with the drive to master it, but it’s too bleak and severe for my tastes, and feels like preparing for ritual combat more than enjoying a game.

Actually, delete my number


The cooperative Extinction mode is much better: four players versus waves of aliens, with money earned for each kill, and weapons and defenses to buy. It’s a healthy application of a formula we’re used to, but it doesn’t do anything I wouldn’t rather do in Left 4 Dead or Killing Floor, and it feels like a side note compared to the effort put into the campaign and competitive multiplayer. When I started, the keys used to buy my character’s special items—ammo crates, turrets, and so on—weren’t even bound. My options were indicated with a four-way cross which looks like it’s meant for a D-pad, and when I did bind the keys, the menu called them “killstreak rewards.”
The aliens eat sunsets. Give us your sunsets!
That doesn’t damn Ghosts as an icky console port, because my experience was otherwise well-optimized for medium to high-end PCs. I ran it fine on a mid-range build, and on a silly-powerful machine (Core i7-4950X, 16GB RAM, and two GTX Titans) the campaign ran at a silky and gorgeous 100-plus frames-per-second, with water and lighting effects that made me stop to gawk a few times (when I was allowed to). The only technical problem I encountered was sudden framerate dips in the menus, which are a just a nuisance—the same never happened to me while playing.
The netcode in multiplayer is as robust as usual, but not better than previous CoD games. There were still a few times where I swear a hit registered on me before I saw my opponent’s character model round a corner. These details have become a part of serious CoD play—some complain, but others master the nuances to gain an advantage. I’m not in either camp: I’m only bothered when synchronization issues cause frustration or feel unfair, and so far they’ve been too slight and sporadic to bother me.
In multiplayer, you have about 30 frames in which to shoot first.
What does bother me is how tired and cold Ghosts feels. I didn’t touch on the campaign’s story much, but its attempts to tug heart strings are cringe-ably cheesy, and the multiplayer seems bored of itself, changing systems just so they’ll be different from Modern Warfare.
I don’t doubt that every gun, perk, and killstreak reward in Ghosts was implemented and tweaked with a fine brush, but painting in every individual eyelash of the Mona Lisa wouldn’t make it a better painting. That’s what’s been happening to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare since 2007—little bits have been scraped off and painted over again and again. With a broader brush, Activision and its studios might stop noodling around in the corners of Modern Warfare’s greatness and paint something actually modern.

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Batman: Arkham Origins review


In Arkham Origins we join Batman in his angsty teenage years. He’s not the stoic, Kevin Conroy-voiced Batman of Asylum and City, who calmly asks criminals to turn themselves in before he beats them up, but a hot-headed, teeth-baring vigilante who punches first and asks questions later. It’s an interesting twist on the Arkham formula, but only in terms of story. Despite the change of tone and time period, this is a disappointingly timid retread of Rocksteady’s games.
It’s Christmas Eve, and skull-faced mobster Black Mask has given the caped crusader an early present in the form of a $50,000,000 bounty on his head. Eight assassins have been hired to claim the prize, including A-listers Bane, Deathstroke and Killer Croc, and a parade of low-rent DC villains including Firefly and Electrocutioner. We also see Batman’s first encounter with a youthful Joker, and other cameos that I won’t spoil. Rest assured, you’re never short of people to punch or be punched by.
The setting this time is a snowbound Gotham City, long before Hugo Strange’s prison makeover. There are familiar landmarks from Arkham City – the Sionis steel mill and the Wonder Tower are immediately recognisable – but the layout has changed quite a bit. The addition of a southern island, linked by an enemy-patrolled bridge that’s a chore to cross, makes the city noticeably bigger than before, but it’s not as visually interesting or fun to navigate. There are too many dead ends that break your flow as you’re gliding, and the new island is a grey, uninspiring industrial sprawl.
To compensate for the increased size, you can now fast-travel with the Batwing, but the points have to be unlocked first by hacking communications towers. Otherwise, getting around the city involves liberal use of the grapnel boost, which pings you into the air when you grapple onto something.
The Riddler is back, known only to Batman as ‘Enigma’ at this point, and has scattered ‘extortion files’ (Riddler trophies, basically) around the story levels and city. Reaching some of these involves solving environmental puzzles, but none as complex as those in City. Other side missions have you defusing bombs set by masked terrorist Anarky, destroying weapon/drug caches, and intervening in street crimes. A lot of it feels like the usual open-world game filler, and it varies wildly in quality, but there is at least a generous chunk of stuff for you to do between missions.
The world-building is much better indoors. Story missions include Batman infiltrating the offices of the Gotham City Police Department, the luxurious Royal Hotel, and a ship used by The Penguin to deal arms. All are nicely crafted, with the same clutter and richness of detail that pervaded Rocksteady’s worlds. The level design itself doesn’t match the strength of the art, however. The missions are formulaic and linear, with none of the previous games’ careful pacing. There’s too much fighting, and not enough exploration of those beautifully detailed environments. You feel like you’re being hastily pushed between predator challenges and fights, rather than progressing organically, at your own pace.
At first I thought the combat was unchanged, but the more I played, the more aware I became that it was actually worse. The controls and animations are the same, but the tempo is all wrong. Rocksteady’s original system was influenced by rhythm action games, the enemies attacking almost to a beat. But in Origins, their attack patterns are more sporadic, which has destroyed that precise, rhythmic flow. It’s like a bad cover version of a great song, by a band that keeps inexplicably slowing down and speeding up. It’s recognisable, but it’s not quite right.
A new feature I do like is the Devil May Cry-inspired rating system. After each fight, the amount of XP you’re awarded is dictated by your performance. If you used a lot of variety, mixing gadgets and combos, you’ll earn more, and get a better overall rating. The same system applies to predator challenges, where you’re rewarded for using the environment in interesting ways.
Then there are the boss battles. Oh, the boss battles. Facing off against this shopping list of famous Batman baddies should have been a highlight, but they’re probably the worst thing in the game. Most involve learning and exploiting a handful of very basic patterns, while regular enemies are occasionally thrown into the arena in a half-hearted attempt to add variety. They’re frustrating, repetitive, attritional slogs, and I felt a pang of dread whenever one of the assassins showed up. To be fair, with the exception of that brilliant Mr Freeze battle in City, Rocksteady’s bosses were rubbish too.
That’s not to say there’s no new content in here at all. The detective mode has been reworked, enabling you to reconstruct crime scenes with shimmering holograms, and ‘scrub’ through them to hunt for clues. It looks great, but is actually pretty shallow. Even with all these theatrics, you’re still just holding a button to scan things. As you rewind and fast-forward through the reconstruction, red markers will appear at set points, which you then scan to reveal clues. Batman does the detecting; you just tell him where to look. A wasted opportunity, but a welcome break from all the punching, just the same.
They’ve added multiplayer too, which has been developed by Splash Damage of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory fame. This sees two three-man teams of Bane and Joker’s thugs battling each other while a third team, Batman and Robin, try to take them out. The thugs fight over Battlefield-style control points, and can call upon Bane and The Joker to help out. It’s enjoyable enough, and the predator system works well against real players, but after only a few hours I don’t feel any urge to return to it.
Additionally, some new gadgets join old favourites like the grapnel and batclaw. The shock gloves, which Batman pinches from Electrocutioner, can be used in combat to deal extra damage, as well as charge up generators to open doors. They only make your strikes slightly more powerful, but zapping enemies with electrified punches is really satisfying. It’s never really explained why Batman has access to gadgets he only first started using in Asylum and City, though. You’ll just have to suspend your disbelief.
The best thing Origins has in its utility belt is the story. It’s nothing we haven’t seen in a thousand Batman films, games and comics before, but it’s confidently written and mostly well-acted, and takes influence from established mythology without completely copying it. A standout sequence gives us a chilling glimpse inside the mind of The Joker, and elsewhere Batman and Alfred clash over the former’s increasing anger and recklessness. You’ll see one early twist coming a mile away, but otherwise, it’s a solid Batman yarn.
As PC Gamer goes to press, a player-compiled list of bugs on the Steam forums continues to grow, some of which even corrupt saves or halt progress. Few releases are without teething problems at launch, but the sheer volume present here suggests Warner Bros. have released an unfinished game, with the intention of patching it later. One bug seemingly isolated to the PC version trapped me in a room with no way to leave, and I had to use another bug to bypass it. Ridiculous. It does look incredibly handsome on PC, though. Batman’s DirectX 11-powered cape flutters in the wind wonderfully, and he carves tracks through the powdery snow as he walks across it.
Rocksteady’s solid foundations mean that, despite all these problems, Arkham Origins is still fundamentally playable. Stalking enemies from the shadows, stringing them up on gargoyles, and watching them cower together in fear as you pick them off one by one is still brilliantly empowering. But this is the worst kind of play-it-safe sequel, and makes no meaningful attempt to push the series forward.
The leap from Asylum to City was dramatic, if not entirely successful, but Origins is so similar to City – even repeating some moments verbatim – that it feels more like an elaborate expansion than a proper sequel. It’s obvious Warner Bros. wanted another Batman game on the shelves while Rocksteady worked on the next one, which makes the whole thing feel a bit cynical. Yearly sequels can bleed a great concept dry, and the Arkham series deserves better.
Details
  • Expect to pay: £40 / $50
  • Release Out: now
  • Developer: WB Games Montreal, Splash Damage
  • Publisher: Warner Bros.
  • Multiplayer: Up to 8 players online
  • Link: www.batmanarkhamorigins.com

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Dead Space 3 review


Review by Nathan Ditum
On a city street at the start of Dead Space 3, there’s a poster for a film called Tools Of Terror. It features a man in a tuxedo pulling a James Bond pose, but instead of a pistol he’s holding a wrench. He is, it’s fairly obvious, both an action hero and a blue-collar guy, and despite the fact this film is a spoof – or perhaps because of it – he’s also an accurate symbolic representation of Dead Space hero Isaac Clarke as he appears in this latest game.

"Isaac was a high-functioning spanner in a space suit."

Isaac is an engineer. It’s the thing that made him such an unusual protagonist in the original game – he didn’t talk, he fixed things and had weapons that could conceivably have been used to fix things, if they weren’t busy dismembering the reanimated dead. He was a high-functioning spanner in a space suit, but he returned the John McClane of religious hysteria and viral outbreaks in Dead Space 2.
How could the same shit happen to the same guy twice? And how could he suddenly be so good at it?
The question was raised: is Isaac best as the handyman-in-a-tight-spot or as the stomping shooter frontman? Dead Space 3 fixes on the elegant solution of pushing him in both directions at once. Progression is dependent on a series of hardware fix-ups – this shuttle, that tram system, this alien genocide machine.
But at the same time, Isaac fights wave after wave of monsters while saying things like, “I turned my back on the world because I couldn’t face what had to be done,” – and he’s not talking about an oil change or repairing a carburettor.

"Should it be a     lean horror or an explosive shooter? The game opts to be both."

The debate over Isaac-as-engineer versus Isaac-as-action-hero feeds into Dead Space’s genre identity crisis. Should it be a cold, lean horror, or an explosive shooter? The game opts to be both. This is possible because it consists of big, distinct sections: a breathless high-stakes opener (in the James Bond tradition, appropriately enough), a claustrophobic few hours in a debris field of broken ships orbiting a planet, a lengthy action push on the planet’s icy surface, and a climactic section in an ancient city.
The segments feel episodic, as though they were built by different teams and bolted together to create a varied, lengthy whole. The first major stop is a floating scrapheap, with Isaac exploring a series of derelicts looking for a way to reach the planet below. It’s an expanded echo of the original Dead Space – not just repeating the haunted ship routine, but bringing the quiet, tense and considered approach to a frozen flotilla of craft with Isaac shuttling between them.
Dusty airlocks and the grand, muffled spectacle of Isaac drifting through space are the foreground to the game’s hard sci-fi style, and it fruitfully resurrects the old, effective mix of mundane tasks performed amid calamity. The first moment of dread I’ve experienced since crawling through the guts of the Ishimura – “but I don’t want to find out what’s blocking the tram system” – confirms that this is partly the faithful sequel to Dead Space that people who still resent Isaac for learning to talk or daring to display his human face – have been waiting for.

"The game fruitfully resurrects the old, effective mix of mundane tasks performed amid calamity."

A change of pace on the surface of the planet moves Dead Space 3 into more conventional action territory. The snowstorms and wind-battered outposts are a nod to the influence of The Thing on Dead Space, just as surely as the Ishimura paid tribute to the devastation of the Nostromo in Alien, but the combat here introduces elements of cover-based shooting. There are still encounters with skittering necromorphs in corridors and vent-heavy rooms, but there are also more clearings and open spaces, and action set-pieces in the form of cliff-face rappelling (both up and down), boss encounters (tiresome), and an industrial drill that’s transformed into a giant rusty flesh-whisk (loud).
It feels as though Dead Space 3 has settled on volume and value as part of a big-fisted approach to appealing to everybody. The game feels laudably substantial, although sometimes the pacing suffers. The inclusion of any level that requires players to double back through a now-repopulated section justifies a call of shenanigans; Dead Space 3 does it more than once. And while the inclusion of optional side-missions is definitely a good thing, not just for the added content but also the opportunity for resource gathering, they can feel at odds with the urgency of the larger objective at hand. Near the close, I was offered the chance to explore one such cul-de-sac, and declined in order to continue my in-progress race against a religious fanatic to reach a control panel in time to prevent the extinction of mankind.

Tomb Raider review


Stranded on the mythical island of Yamatai following a freak storm, 21-year-old Lara Croft's career as a videogame protagonist begins with suffering. In the opening hours of Tomb Raider she is stabbed, burned, drenched, assaulted and almost freezes to death: that's if you're doing well, meeting the demands of every linear climbing section, gunfight, finickety stealth sequence and quick-time event that presents itself. Fail any of these and you'll also watch her be crushed, impaled, strangled, mauled and so on.

"Lara sobs and trembles, and evident effort has been made to slow down and focus on the details of her experience."

This early cruelty is the game's most strikingly idiosyncratic feature. Lara sobs and trembles, and evident effort has been made to slow down and focus on the details of her experience. Hunger necessitates finding a bow and hunting deer. Her elbows shake believably when she mantles up onto a ledge. Her first human kill leaves her blood-soaked and distraught. Give it a few months and I suspect these opening hours will be what people will be talking about when they talk about Crystal Dynamics' reboot. It's certainly what they've been talking about until now.
Play on for another few hours, however, and you'll find yourself in a hybrid of third-person shooter and linear platformer, Lara trading the bleak little lethalities of life as a shipwreck survivor for a parade of regulation set-pieces: an escape from a burning building, a helicopter crash, a section where your guns are taken away, a climactic assault on an enemy stronghold.
Moment by moment, the game evolves into something more familiar. During a battle with Yamatai's savage Solarii brotherhood high up in the mountains, the camera crash-zooms onto a set of blast doors which burst open to reveal an armoured islander holding a riot shield. Stop me if you've heard this one before: you beat him by dodging his machete blows and shooting him in the back when he stumbles. Everything about this character - from his introduction to his execution - is lifted from the Big Book of Miniboss Design, Third-Person Shooter Edition (Bleszinski/Mikami, 2005).
Years trapped on Yamatai have warped the populace into an army of videogame henchmen.
Shortly afterwards, Lara hops onto the bottom rung of a ladder leading up a rickety radar tower whose topmost transmitter is her crew's best hope for rescue. Once you're on that bottom rung, the game will only accept one input: forwards. Press forward and Lara climbs: press anything else and Lara stops. There's no way to fail, though a few pre-canned moments will have a rusty rung give way and leave her hanging. There's a point where the game slips into a cutscene but pretends that it hasn't: nothing changes, with the exception that it's no longer accepting your input. Let go and Lara will keep climbing without you. Adventure game sleight-of-hand, as taught at Uncharted's School of Seven Bells - what is being pickpocketed, in this case, is your right as a player to have your agency reflected in the events taking place on-screen.

"It relaxes back into the series' matinee adventure comfort zone."

Then, after another calamitous mountainside descent, Lara emerges out onto a familiar landscape - a hub area - from a new vantage point. Your options for traversal have been expanded by the acquisition of rope arrows that allow you to pull down certain doors and affix zip-lines to particular posts. There are letters and relics to find, and secret tombs to plunder for bonus skill points. Tomb Raider becomes about gentle exploration for a while, and there's nothing particularly traumatic about it. It's very, very pretty. You forget about the multiple times you watched Lara's throat be ripped out by a wolf because you kept fumbling a quicktime event. You stop wondering if pressing the buttons to make Lara go through this carnival of horrors is not an act of cruelty in and of itself.
The memory of that first traumatic kill fades as you kneel behind another piece of waist-high cover to ping arrows into the cranii of obliging brotherhood warrior after obliging brotherhood warrior. When the game gives up on being a story about a young woman having an absolutely terrible time, it improves. It relaxes back into the series' matinee adventure comfort zone, and some of its later set-pieces are genuinely spectacular as a result.
Dangle me from the ceiling once, shame on you. Dangle me twice, shame on me.

"Lara herself is the game's standout success, particularly when she stops running."

The quality of the writing varies. Conversations between Lara's fellow survivors are believable despite their rote characterisation: nerdy twenty-something male, tough black woman, untrustworthy TV personality, spiritual Maori, and so on. Lara herself is the game's standout success, particularly when she stops running and decides to take direct action: the perceptible change she undergoes is a good example of writing, performance, and animation working together to create a sympathetic and admirable person in place of a fantasy.
The game spits out some real eye-rollers, though - it's honestly a miracle that Lara can find anything to fall off given the amount of scenery the villain manages to chew through in his relatively brief screen-time. Enemy chatter doesn't fare much better. I can think of a number of things I might say if I suddenly found myself with an arrow in my sternum, and "damn, she's a good shot!" isn't high on the list.
The real weakness of Tomb Raider's storytelling, though, is its failure to express its big ideas in the way it plays. Lara receives two pieces of advice repeatedly during the game: 'trust your instincts' and 'keep moving forward'. Both jar with the reality of what Tomb Raider actually wants you to do. 'Trust your instincts' should really be understood as 'trust Lara's instincts': or at least, trust Survival Instinct mode, which highlights objects in the environment you can interact with. Trust that this type of craggy rock will always be climbable, that these barricades will always yield to your rope arrows, that this particular type of scenery will always be flammable - and that you should always do all of these things because that's why they're there.

Dota 2 review


Of the half-dozen people I started learning Dota 2 with, three still play regularly. Though there are hundreds of thousands of players of our approximate skill level populating the matchmaking queues, the four of us are more like each other than we are like anyone else playing Valve’s isometric wizard-’em-up.
Spending a year learning to shuffle a gaggle of fantasy heroes up Dota’s teetering stack of rules and game mechanics will do that to you: we’ve developed a secret language of our own, one that runs parallel to the talk of creeps and lanes and farm and rax common to everyone who plays the game. “Whack a ward on the donkletron I’m going to stick one up their jungle” is a sentence I can say out loud and be completely understood by at least those three people. For some reason, there’s also a lot of singing involved. It’s a lot like being a sailor.
A few months ago I was playing Dota 2 with one of those friends. He was controlling Bristleback, a gnarled humanoid echidna who specialises in punishing attacking players with a faceful of spiny quills. I was Tusk, a sort-of-Scandinavian walrus Viking who can punch people so hard that the words ‘WALRUS PUNCH!’ are briefly writ in the sky.
It wasn’t an ideal pairing. We’d allowed the game to randomly select our heroes for us, a necessary risk if you’re going to learn everything you need to know about Dota’s hundred-plus playable characters. Of the five players on our team, it made the most sense for Bristleback and I to head to our faction’s offlane: the most dangerous of the three pathways that funnel waves of AI-controlled ‘creeps’ from one side’s base to the other. Each lane is dotted with defensive towers, and cracking these defences to expose the enemy ‘ancient’ forms the basis of Dota’s strategic take on tug-of-war.
Bristleback and Tusk are both melee heroes, which meant we needed to get close to the creep line to score last hits – killing blows that dispatch enemy units for gold and experience. In doing so we made ourselves vulnerable to ranged fire from the enemy – ideally we’d have brought our own ranged character to even the odds.
We were also equally dependent on gathering gold to purchase new equipment. This wasn’t ideal, either: every Dota hero needs to gather a different set of items to be effective, and normally teams will prioritise one hero over another when it comes to last-hitting lane creeps. The game indicates which heroes are likely to be played in which role, but whether that happens is something players have to arrange for themselves.
These are the politics of a nascent Dota match, and the pairing of Bristleback and I represented a backbench compromise. We did our best to split the last hits between us, nipping to the frontline whenever a creep was low on health and being careful to deny the enemy access to our own creeps by dispatching them ourselves. There was no avoiding the odd tussle with the two enemy players opposing us, however, and by the ten minute mark we were both running dangerously low on hit points.
We’d each spent some of our starting gold on a healing salve – a one-use, cost-ineffective way of restoring health that can be cast on your own character or on an ally. Having not bothered to look at each other’s inventories, neither of us knew that we’d both bought one.
There was a brief moment of calm. Our creep line had advanced into the firing range of the first enemy tower, and it was too early in the game to have a go at knocking the defensive structure down. We backed off and waited a little way north of the river that bisects the map. I compared my health bar to my friend’s and decided that he needed to stay in the lane longer than I did. I could run back to base, if I had to, and get my health back there at the expense of time and experience points. I pushed the hotkey for my healing salve and pointed it at Bristleback, giving up my gold to keep him in the game.
A few hundred real-world miles away, in the same instant, my friend compared his health bar to mine and decided that I needed to stay in the lane longer than he did. He hotkeyed his healing salve and pointed it at me, giving up his gold to keep me in the game. Green swirls of regenerative energy sprang from both of our characters in unison.
We laughed.
“Did... did we just salve each other?”
“Er, yeah. I think we did.”
“That isn’t weird, is it?”
“I think it’s fine. Nobody saw.”
If you’re looking for a reason to commit time to Dota 2 – if you’re actually reading this review for advice and a critical opinion, rather than to see what score I’m going to give the most popular game on Steam – then, first up, thanks for being here. Second, I want you to consider what it means when two grown men accidentally lather each other in regenerative goop. It’s gaming’s equivalent of holding a door open for somebody who is already reaching to hold the door open for you: a synchronicity of kindness that speaks to a deeper shared understanding of the situation both people are in. Dota is a game where you can say the words “are you thinking what I’m thinking?” and be reliably assured that the person on the other end of your VoIP connection actually is. It might have the systems and bearing of a videogame, but Dota shares the social impetus of a sport. Its single environment isn’t a map, it’s a pitch.

Call of Duty: Ghosts PC review


Call of Duty: Ghosts will be damned if you peek away from your screen. Boredom is absolutely not allowed as the campaign pelts you with action vignettes—including a scene directly snagged from the opening of The Dark Knight Rises—and repeats its mantra ad nauseam: “Keep moving!”
I’m in space, I’m underwater, I’m piloting a dog, I’m piloting an Apache, I’m driving a tank that handles like a Lamborghini—all without ever really learning a new skill. The Apache, for instance, is magically repulsed from the ground—it’s like piloting an air hockey disc—so finesse is unnecessary. On-screen cues tell you what you need to know as you’re plunged into an airstrike: fire flares when an enemy locks on, left mouse button to fire your cannon, hold down the center mouse button to lock on with missiles. Then go to town.
It’s fun in that it’s something exciting to see and do: a theme park ride where I’m given an airsoft rifle to pelt the animatronics with. And it’s a brilliant ride. There are pyrotechnics, car chases, submarines, and drone strikes. Once scene has me rappelling down a skyscraper and shooting guards through the windows—and then the skyscraper collapses while I’m in it. It’s every action scene Hollywood has imagined for the past 20 years packed into five to six hours of super-stylish interactive montages, and wrapped up in a goofy, inoffensive story about brothers trying to live up to their dad’s super-soldier status.

Call of daddy


It’s fun, but it’s not engaging—Ghosts’ campaign is even more passive than Telltale’s recent point-and-clickers. In The Wolf Among Us, I have choices. In Ghosts, I do the Right Thing or fail. Frustratingly, even the decision to follow the constantly barked “keep moving” order can get me killed. That repeated flavor dialog should be ignored: save heroics for the scripted moments, stay crouched, and pop up sporadically to shoot at the bad guys.
Blowing up boats while remotely piloting a drone is fun and not at all challenging.
In rare instances, I was able to part from my squad, flank the enemy, and wipe them out with the advantage, but that kind of tactical planning was a sparsely present treat. It appeared once more in a jungle mission which put columns of guards between me and my squad, arming me only with a silenced pistol and sensor to detect nearby enemies. That was the only time I was given a goal and left to achieve it without explicit instructions for every action.
That was also the only time I got a magic bad guy sensor, and that’s another of the campaign’s failings: it fires off interesting ideas and then instantly forgets about them. Near the beginning, I’m introduced to my canine companion, Riley, and I can mark targets for him to quietly de-jugular. I did that once, when ordered to, and never again. Later, I get to use a remote-controlled sniper rifle to clear out a stadium. It’s a great gadget that I’d have liked to plop down on my own a few times, but it never shows up again. Both weapons are like toys that I get to demo in the store, but never get to take home.
Sgt. Shark is awfully testy today.
But we get bored of toys after we take them home, whereas if we stay in the toy store, poking at everything that requires batteries, nothing needs to do more than light up and make noise to keep us entertained. And you won’t ever be bored, because Ghosts’ novelties are brilliant and bright, full of life and then whisked away before they can be broken open and revealed to be little electronic tricks.
If you buy Ghosts just for the multiplayer, I will say that you should at least play the campaign long enough to get to the first obligatory space scene. It’s fantastic. It’s Gravity with guns. I wish the whole thing had been in space.

Call of shooty


The multiplayer is more Call of Duty® Multiplayer. It’s about flanking, out flanking, and milliseconds of animation that determine who lives and who dies. The maps are circular arenas dressed in gray military garb, pulling assets from the dullest bits of the campaign’s setting. Instead of a space station and tropical shipwreck, the maps are Busted Up Train Yard and Overcast Snowy Place.
In most modes, death nearly always comes from behind or upon rounding a corner and shooting too slowly to avoid a knife to the gut. There’s no front line, so every kill is likely to instaspawn your foe somewhere behind you, making matches a dizzying circular chase sequence.
Getting knifed from around a corner is something I excel at.
Guns are plentiful and nuanced, though every vital stat, from how long it takes to raise the iron sights to recoil and spread, is experienced in milliseconds of surprise action. Everyone swirls around the map like disoriented flies, and I either catch glimpses of their feet under collapsed steel girders, or run face first into them as our beelines intersect, reacting with spasms more often than cool tactical awareness. At pub levels, Ghosts’ multiplayer is whack-a-mole to Counter-Strike’s chess game.
An exception is Search and Rescue, which gives teams bomb and defend objectives, and players one life per round unless a team member collects their dog tag to revive them. That encourages teammates to stick together, generating group engagements at range that I heavily prefer over darting around like an armed insect.
I also enjoy, as I have in past CoDs, the Ground War mode. With bigger maps and 12-14 players, there’s more room to breathe and more teammates to rely on during firefights. It’s in that mode that I discovered that going prone is practically an invisibility cloak. I was able to camp out by a capture point picking off enemy after enemy for nearly an entire round, often after they ran right over me. It was fun target practice for me, but probably a frustration for the other team, which eventually had to run around the perimeter until it found a back to knife.

Call me maybe


Even in the modes I enjoy, I don’t want to stay for long. The “one more round” syndrome just isn’t present for me in Ghosts. In previous CoDs, the drive to unlock and try out a new weapon might have kept me going, but that’s been replaced with Squad Points. Accrued through good play, the points can be spent to unlock any weapon at any time if you save them up. I appreciate that this is more respectful of players’ time, as well as returning CoD fans’ desire to get right to the gun they’re happy with, but it nullifies any sense of accomplishment the progression system once had.
Defending a point is easy when lying down makes you invisible.
But it isn’t just the progression system, or the complex-to-the-point-of-silliness soldier customization, or the boring killstreak rewards that make me tire so quickly of Ghosts multiplayer. It’s that, like the campaign, it’s about constant forward momentum, but unlike the campaign, it never changes. The matches go by too fast to ever develop a rhythm or personality. From one map to the next, it’s run, run, run. There are no nail-biters, no heroics, and no rivalries. There are no brilliant shots that I want to run to show YouTube, unless it’s an accidental trick grenade throw. There are no moments when I pull back from my display, rub my forehead, and say, “I can’t believe I did that.” Moments like that happen all the time for me in Unreal Tournament 2K4, Tribes: Ascend, Battlefield 4, Rising Storm, and earlier Call of Duty games.
Ghosts multiplayer is a game of snap decisions, mechanics, and mistakes—"should have gone prone instead of firing, shouldn’t have reloaded after that last kill, should have turned around instead of sprinting"—and it is freakishly nuanced and can absolutely be mastered. I respect those with the drive to master it, but it’s too bleak and severe for my tastes, and feels like preparing for ritual combat more than enjoying a game.

Actually, delete my number


The cooperative Extinction mode is much better: four players versus waves of aliens, with money earned for each kill, and weapons and defenses to buy. It’s a healthy application of a formula we’re used to, but it doesn’t do anything I wouldn’t rather do in Left 4 Dead or Killing Floor, and it feels like a side note compared to the effort put into the campaign and competitive multiplayer. When I started, the keys used to buy my character’s special items—ammo crates, turrets, and so on—weren’t even bound. My options were indicated with a four-way cross which looks like it’s meant for a D-pad, and when I did bind the keys, the menu called them “killstreak rewards.”
The aliens eat sunsets. Give us your sunsets!
That doesn’t damn Ghosts as an icky console port, because my experience was otherwise well-optimized for medium to high-end PCs. I ran it fine on a mid-range build, and on a silly-powerful machine (Core i7-4950X, 16GB RAM, and two GTX Titans) the campaign ran at a silky and gorgeous 100-plus frames-per-second, with water and lighting effects that made me stop to gawk a few times (when I was allowed to). The only technical problem I encountered was sudden framerate dips in the menus, which are a just a nuisance—the same never happened to me while playing.
The netcode in multiplayer is as robust as usual, but not better than previous CoD games. There were still a few times where I swear a hit registered on me before I saw my opponent’s character model round a corner. These details have become a part of serious CoD play—some complain, but others master the nuances to gain an advantage. I’m not in either camp: I’m only bothered when synchronization issues cause frustration or feel unfair, and so far they’ve been too slight and sporadic to bother me.
In multiplayer, you have about 30 frames in which to shoot first.
What does bother me is how tired and cold Ghosts feels. I didn’t touch on the campaign’s story much, but its attempts to tug heart strings are cringe-ably cheesy, and the multiplayer seems bored of itself, changing systems just so they’ll be different from Modern Warfare.
I don’t doubt that every gun, perk, and killstreak reward in Ghosts was implemented and tweaked with a fine brush, but painting in every individual eyelash of the Mona Lisa wouldn’t make it a better painting. That’s what’s been happening to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare since 2007—little bits have been scraped off and painted over again and again. With a broader brush, Activision and its studios might stop noodling around in the corners of Modern Warfare’s greatness and paint something actually modern.

Batman: Arkham Origins review


In Arkham Origins we join Batman in his angsty teenage years. He’s not the stoic, Kevin Conroy-voiced Batman of Asylum and City, who calmly asks criminals to turn themselves in before he beats them up, but a hot-headed, teeth-baring vigilante who punches first and asks questions later. It’s an interesting twist on the Arkham formula, but only in terms of story. Despite the change of tone and time period, this is a disappointingly timid retread of Rocksteady’s games.
It’s Christmas Eve, and skull-faced mobster Black Mask has given the caped crusader an early present in the form of a $50,000,000 bounty on his head. Eight assassins have been hired to claim the prize, including A-listers Bane, Deathstroke and Killer Croc, and a parade of low-rent DC villains including Firefly and Electrocutioner. We also see Batman’s first encounter with a youthful Joker, and other cameos that I won’t spoil. Rest assured, you’re never short of people to punch or be punched by.
The setting this time is a snowbound Gotham City, long before Hugo Strange’s prison makeover. There are familiar landmarks from Arkham City – the Sionis steel mill and the Wonder Tower are immediately recognisable – but the layout has changed quite a bit. The addition of a southern island, linked by an enemy-patrolled bridge that’s a chore to cross, makes the city noticeably bigger than before, but it’s not as visually interesting or fun to navigate. There are too many dead ends that break your flow as you’re gliding, and the new island is a grey, uninspiring industrial sprawl.
To compensate for the increased size, you can now fast-travel with the Batwing, but the points have to be unlocked first by hacking communications towers. Otherwise, getting around the city involves liberal use of the grapnel boost, which pings you into the air when you grapple onto something.
The Riddler is back, known only to Batman as ‘Enigma’ at this point, and has scattered ‘extortion files’ (Riddler trophies, basically) around the story levels and city. Reaching some of these involves solving environmental puzzles, but none as complex as those in City. Other side missions have you defusing bombs set by masked terrorist Anarky, destroying weapon/drug caches, and intervening in street crimes. A lot of it feels like the usual open-world game filler, and it varies wildly in quality, but there is at least a generous chunk of stuff for you to do between missions.
The world-building is much better indoors. Story missions include Batman infiltrating the offices of the Gotham City Police Department, the luxurious Royal Hotel, and a ship used by The Penguin to deal arms. All are nicely crafted, with the same clutter and richness of detail that pervaded Rocksteady’s worlds. The level design itself doesn’t match the strength of the art, however. The missions are formulaic and linear, with none of the previous games’ careful pacing. There’s too much fighting, and not enough exploration of those beautifully detailed environments. You feel like you’re being hastily pushed between predator challenges and fights, rather than progressing organically, at your own pace.
At first I thought the combat was unchanged, but the more I played, the more aware I became that it was actually worse. The controls and animations are the same, but the tempo is all wrong. Rocksteady’s original system was influenced by rhythm action games, the enemies attacking almost to a beat. But in Origins, their attack patterns are more sporadic, which has destroyed that precise, rhythmic flow. It’s like a bad cover version of a great song, by a band that keeps inexplicably slowing down and speeding up. It’s recognisable, but it’s not quite right.
A new feature I do like is the Devil May Cry-inspired rating system. After each fight, the amount of XP you’re awarded is dictated by your performance. If you used a lot of variety, mixing gadgets and combos, you’ll earn more, and get a better overall rating. The same system applies to predator challenges, where you’re rewarded for using the environment in interesting ways.
Then there are the boss battles. Oh, the boss battles. Facing off against this shopping list of famous Batman baddies should have been a highlight, but they’re probably the worst thing in the game. Most involve learning and exploiting a handful of very basic patterns, while regular enemies are occasionally thrown into the arena in a half-hearted attempt to add variety. They’re frustrating, repetitive, attritional slogs, and I felt a pang of dread whenever one of the assassins showed up. To be fair, with the exception of that brilliant Mr Freeze battle in City, Rocksteady’s bosses were rubbish too.
That’s not to say there’s no new content in here at all. The detective mode has been reworked, enabling you to reconstruct crime scenes with shimmering holograms, and ‘scrub’ through them to hunt for clues. It looks great, but is actually pretty shallow. Even with all these theatrics, you’re still just holding a button to scan things. As you rewind and fast-forward through the reconstruction, red markers will appear at set points, which you then scan to reveal clues. Batman does the detecting; you just tell him where to look. A wasted opportunity, but a welcome break from all the punching, just the same.
They’ve added multiplayer too, which has been developed by Splash Damage of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory fame. This sees two three-man teams of Bane and Joker’s thugs battling each other while a third team, Batman and Robin, try to take them out. The thugs fight over Battlefield-style control points, and can call upon Bane and The Joker to help out. It’s enjoyable enough, and the predator system works well against real players, but after only a few hours I don’t feel any urge to return to it.
Additionally, some new gadgets join old favourites like the grapnel and batclaw. The shock gloves, which Batman pinches from Electrocutioner, can be used in combat to deal extra damage, as well as charge up generators to open doors. They only make your strikes slightly more powerful, but zapping enemies with electrified punches is really satisfying. It’s never really explained why Batman has access to gadgets he only first started using in Asylum and City, though. You’ll just have to suspend your disbelief.
The best thing Origins has in its utility belt is the story. It’s nothing we haven’t seen in a thousand Batman films, games and comics before, but it’s confidently written and mostly well-acted, and takes influence from established mythology without completely copying it. A standout sequence gives us a chilling glimpse inside the mind of The Joker, and elsewhere Batman and Alfred clash over the former’s increasing anger and recklessness. You’ll see one early twist coming a mile away, but otherwise, it’s a solid Batman yarn.
As PC Gamer goes to press, a player-compiled list of bugs on the Steam forums continues to grow, some of which even corrupt saves or halt progress. Few releases are without teething problems at launch, but the sheer volume present here suggests Warner Bros. have released an unfinished game, with the intention of patching it later. One bug seemingly isolated to the PC version trapped me in a room with no way to leave, and I had to use another bug to bypass it. Ridiculous. It does look incredibly handsome on PC, though. Batman’s DirectX 11-powered cape flutters in the wind wonderfully, and he carves tracks through the powdery snow as he walks across it.
Rocksteady’s solid foundations mean that, despite all these problems, Arkham Origins is still fundamentally playable. Stalking enemies from the shadows, stringing them up on gargoyles, and watching them cower together in fear as you pick them off one by one is still brilliantly empowering. But this is the worst kind of play-it-safe sequel, and makes no meaningful attempt to push the series forward.
The leap from Asylum to City was dramatic, if not entirely successful, but Origins is so similar to City – even repeating some moments verbatim – that it feels more like an elaborate expansion than a proper sequel. It’s obvious Warner Bros. wanted another Batman game on the shelves while Rocksteady worked on the next one, which makes the whole thing feel a bit cynical. Yearly sequels can bleed a great concept dry, and the Arkham series deserves better.
Details
  • Expect to pay: £40 / $50
  • Release Out: now
  • Developer: WB Games Montreal, Splash Damage
  • Publisher: Warner Bros.
  • Multiplayer: Up to 8 players online
  • Link: www.batmanarkhamorigins.com

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