Brutal Legend - Review
(for the Playstation 3)



I put aside my playthrough of the darkness to pick up this game (among some other great ones), a decision I fully stand by. After so much hype and setup for this game I couldn't ignore it. One of my colleagues is quite in fact the biggest fan of Tim Schafer the world has ever seen, and kept reminding me of the coming of "rocktober". ...So here we are.

I'm going to start by talking about the most talked about part of Brutal Legend from a critical standpoint. Eventually (about 1/4 of the way through, ish) the game turns into a makeshift RTS. You have a base, you manage resources, command troops. The difference is that your character has wings and flies around the battlefield allowing you to do this. At any point you can jump down into any part of the map and start fighting, playing songs to beef up your troops, and that sort of thing. Your character is the most powerful one so you joining the fight at the right time and place is really critical to the game's outcome.

It is a simplified RTS but I'm not sure why it's being knocked on so hard by so many people. It takes a different, neat approach to RTS style gameplay and keeps things accessible and fun, while still in the context of the game. It's definitely doing a lot more creative thinking with that genre than Starcraft 2 ever will. That said, that mode of play is quite competitive and has online VS and all that business, though it's not something I got that far into. Not that it's poorly constructed, it just wasn't quite my cup of tea. It's still a well-built multiplayer scene.

Most of the game revolves around the story, and it's awesome. Well, it plays out like every other wet dream that Jack Black tends to spew out into popular culture from the depths of his consciousness: there is a lot of rock everywhere, and he's at the center of his hellacious world being relatively awesome. In this case he begins as a lowly roadie who gets sucked into some other metal universe where he gets a hold of a gigantic axe and magical guitar that casts spells and that sort of thing, of course. You explore the world, do quests, level up your character and vehicles, and other RPG type things, though we are told that this is not in any way an RPG. Hmm. It also feels like an open-world game as you have quests and sidequests to discover as you zoom around in your homemade metal vehicle... thing. Which also shoots fire like almost everything else in this world.

Ozzie Osbourne shows up as the game's upgrade merchant. Lenny "Killmaster" Kilmister is a shaman of sorts. These appearances are both amazing and incredibly flabbergasting at the same time.

Things that the game have going for it are really stellar voice acting, vivid characters, funny interactions and plot, fun combat, and the satisfying RTS sections. It falls over on its quite bad SFX design (in places) and the difference between the combat, open world driving, and RTS feels sort of clunky. There's bits and pieces of each that aren't as well hashed out as they could have been, most probably because the game is doing so many things at once it can't possibly be super good at all of them.

It still comes together in a real satisfying way, though, and is most definitely worth checking out if you're into beat-em-ups or fighters, because one way or another, Eddie is always chopping away at demons in every facet of the game with a disproportionately large axe, which is the way it ought to be. Four stars.

The Darkness - Review
(for the Playstation 3)



I talk a lot about a game's level of "polished"ness, as it were. I feel like I should be attributing this to a healthy design cycle: if a game has realistic goals and does accurately what it sets out to do, it can be playtested and refined more before it's release. This makes it even better at what it sets out to do.

The darkness feels like it doesn't lack this polish, but it doesn't exactly have it either. It's such an inbetween experience that it gets stuck in some sort of game limbo. Some parts of the game snap together and just fit so well, and others have such painfully obvious missing pieces that it feels broken; it feels so broken you wonder if they even bothered to take some time to actually play the game to see if it was fun before they released it.

The Darkness is a very competent shooter. Like most modern shooters it comes up with something to set it apart; in this case, it uses two "darkness snakes". I call them snakes as they are long and snakey. I do not believe that is a proper name, and they are just some strands of pure evil that sprout from the main character's shoulders. Either way we just roll with it. You can attack with the snakes, nom down opponent's hearts, and summon creatures to help you in your fight. And it's not like all of this isn't fun, it is. The shooting itself feels tight enough when you actually do come across things to shoot.

So where does it all fall down? Everywhere. When your shadow friends suggest you stay in the shadows to recharge your power, where there is no obvious indication as to where is "dark" and "light" (the whole world is pretty consistently lit) and there's no obvious indication of your power either. When you set out to find a shop where a character you need to meet up with is hiding, and there's no directions, compass or map to tell you which way to go, leaving you to wander in the city for ages until you stumble on your destination. When you're left to guess at the controls your interactions with the environment without any solid tutorial. These should all come naturally... good modern games teach these things in line with the story, or tell you what you need to know before you set out at the very least. They don't leave you to guess at buttons until you get it right.

So despite doing some neat things with the genre, Darkness is somewhat forgettable as it doesn't really innovate in any meaningful way, and everything else it does as a shooter is done the same way in other shooters but better. This game came out in 2007, just down the temporal road from Halo 3 so it never really stood much of a chance at standing out. That said, it was still a fun shooter.

And that voice is still as creepy as all hell.

Borderlands - Review
(for PC)



Initially I had a very frustrating time with this game. The game was chiefly developed for the 360 and Ps3, but was ported to the PC. All versions were developed by Gearbox. They started out by saying the PC version was the best of the set and was a more in-depth experience. In one way they were right; the graphical potential of the PC version is way, way beyond what the console versions offer. The real problem lies in its online. Borderlands is a real co-op game and playing it offline just isn't the same; the online portion of the PC game is so broken it isn't funny. You have to manually set up and forward the right ports if you're behind a router of some kind, and you can't host any kind of game until you do so. This makes playing with friends impossible unless you know what you're doing. I'm lucky enough to actually know what I'm doing and got it running after several hours of frustrating senseless failure. This is the year 2009 and a PC game doing that is inexcusable.

In any case, despite a whole paragraph of initial bitching you'll have seen the four stars first. Well, that's because this game is excellent. It plays a lot like WoW, which sounds odd for a first-person shooter. But the game is quite like a stripped down version of it. It's very heavily class-based, and you modify those classes with various upgrades and mods you find throughout the game as you level up. Each class has its own ability that usually takes random benefits from the upgrades, and fits different playing styles pretty well. Trying out all the classes is pretty easy as they level up rather quickly at first and teach you what you need to know without wasting any time. You'll probably want to do this as the game is super fun and you'll want your character to fit like a glove.

That's pretty easy to do with the random and custom mods that appear in the game. You can add to your shields, health, find perks that grant you bullets, melee damage, augment how you use one of the game's eight weapon types, and more. They boast that you can find "bazillions" of guns, which is technically true but not really as each gun is randomly generated with various stats and perks, but each one still fits into one of the eight weapon categories; it's pretty much usually either an assault rifle, an awful assault rifle or an awesome assault rifle.

The main story can be done on your own if you want but it's far more fun with three other friends. There's actually plenty to the story, and more than enough sidequests to keep you moving if you need to beef up your character. But either way you'll find more than enough loot along the way to make any longtime Diablo fan happy. Most of it is quite sellable but once you find that one perfect gun for your class and level up in that department, everything just clicks.

Bottom line: it's Diablo-like, and it's an action packed shooter. Buy it on consoles if you want an easier, better controlling, more fluid experience; buy it for the PC if graphics mean everything to you or you just need a mouse/keyboard for shooters. Either way just buy it. It's great.