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Game Review – The Lord of the Rings: War in the North (PlayStation 3)

7 Dec

The Lord of the Rings has much more depth to its universe than the adventures of the Fellowship of the Ring, and it’s not just Frodo and Co. that exist in Tolkien’s world. There are plenty of other characters and stories waiting to be told, and The Lord of the Rings: War in the North is a game that does just that.

Functioning as a kind of side story to the events in the famous trilogy, War in the North tells the tale of a trio of new heroes who fight the good fight against Sauron’s minions in the northern reaches of Middle-earth, whilst the ring bearer treks down south to Mordor. With events running parallel to those in Frodo’s adventure, the action here is all about introducing new characters, locations and battles to the mix, emphasising that Sauron’s evil reach wasn’t limited to Gondor and Rohan, but did, in fact, spread all the way through Middle-earth, and if not for the new heroes introduced here, Frodo and his pals may have had no home to come back to.

As one of a heroic trio including, Farin, a dwarvern warrior, Eradan, a Ranger, or Andreil, an Elven Loremaster (that’s mage to you and me), players embark on a slash ‘em up-come-RPG adventure that takes in the sights and sound of some familiar locations of the LOTR world, as well as a selection of new vistas not seen before. Kicking things off in the famous town of Bree, home to the Prancing Pony inn, you begin with a hushed meeting with none other than Aragorn himself. This is all prior to the events in Fellowship, and so he’s still skulking around as Strider, waiting for Frodo to show up.

Things aren’t going well in the North. The dark riders are causing a stir, and a particularly evil Mordor general, Agandaûr, is planning to wipe out all resistance, operating from a local ruined city. And, yes, you’ve guessed it. You’re tasked with intervening in said plans, and have to distract the enemy whilst Aragorn locates the jewellery-burdened Hobbit.

After your briefing with Aragorn, you’re let loose into Bree, where you can shop for weapons and armour, and can talk to some inhabitants, but it’s not long before you’re free to leave and start cracking skulls and mashing faces.

Hack, slash and level up

Once it gets going, War in the North is, essentially, a button-mashing scrapper that comes with bolted on RPG elements. As one of the three characters, each of whom has their own skills and weapon preferences (and you can switch between them, if you wish, between levels) you fight your way through various linear locations, dispatching sword-fodder enemies, mini-bosses and powerful leaders, and as you go you earn experience, which you can spend to beef up your fighters. Stats like strength, stamina and magic can be improved, and each level grants you a single ability point you can spend on such things as dual wielding, evasion, better magical strikes, and special moves and so on. You can also find and equip a myriad for weapons and armour, and you can augment equipment with stat boosting jewels.

To be honest, it’s all fairly basic stuff in practise, but, it works well. Although the RPG elements are basic, the well-handled combat mechanics, which feature the usual fast and strong attacks, dodges, and special moves are married well with the levelling system, and finding better equipment to further boost your chances makes searching around for treasure chests, or looting fallen warriors essential.

The controls are simple enough too, and although you need to hold down the shoulder buttons to access special moves and ranged attacks, it’s all intuitive enough, and it’s pretty enjoyable, if ultimately a little generic, with an often clumsy camera that can obscure your view when indoors or in confined spaces.

Kill, kill, and kill again

This generic-tinge is War in the North’s real issue though. The RPG and the story elements aside, the gameplay is all very samey, and there’s little in the way of any radical features, or anything that makes this stand out as a LOTR title. The main characters can be customised, but are about as two dimensional and boring as it gets, and the constant trudge from checkpoint to checkpoint, mashing buttons to take out similar enemy after similar enemy soon becomes a little wearing. Add to this the ineffectual AI of your team mates, who, for the most part, leave you to do all of the work, and you’ve got a decent, but flawed, and occasionally dull scrapper that simply doesn’t use its license to the full.

There are some elements that do shine, such as the aforementioned RPG elements, looting ever-increasingly cool equipment, the attractive visuals and the ability to revive, and/or be revived by your team mates mid-battle, as well as cool powers such as calling down a giant eagle to take out your foes, but for 90% of the time it’s simplistic and repetitive combat. Some standout moments in the story do raise the bar, but these are few and far between. The addition of multiplayer co-op does add a big attraction though, and the split screen option is welcome too.

Preciousssss

At its heart, War In The North is certainly not a bad game. Combat is fun in short bursts, it stays true to Tolkien’s vision, and co-op is a blast, but the inevitable waning interest thanks to repetitive combat and dull characters, plus the general lack of ambition for such a usually epic franchise, drags it down a peg or two. It’s one for beat ‘em up fans and Tolkien die hards, but for most this is rental fodder and little more.

Rating : 6/10

source:denofgeek.com

Game Review : Assassin’s Creed – Revelations

15 Nov

UK Release Date: Tuesday 15 November
Price: £49.99 Format reviewed: Xbox 360
Also available on: PS3 and PC
Publisher: Ubisoft

Given that you’d have to have been in some sort of cryo-pod to have missed Assassin’s Creed (it’s only the biggest new gaming IP since Call Of Duty) we’ll assume some prior knowledge about the historical assassination simulator.

Years have passed since the events in last game, Brotherhood, and our ageing Italian assassin Ezio has traded Rome for Istanbul. He’s well beyond the average life expectancy of a normal human – let alone one with such a deadly trade – but that doesn’t stop him from zip-lining across city roofs and parachuting from towers like a young athlete.

It’s somewhat unfortunate that Revelations’ convoluted story is virtually impenetrable to all but the most devoted of fans, as they’re the people for whom this game’s going to be achingly familiar. The side-quest formats and city-rebuilding tasks in which Ezio liberates sections of the city and then rebuilds them through investments have been ripped straight from the last game, as have almost all of the core mechanics. New features such as tower-defence mini-games and first-person levels, meanwhile, are almost uniformly forgettable.

Disaster is averted, however, by what has to go down as the most assured, set-piece packed storyline yet. One moment Ezio’s racing through an underground cavern as it crumbles around him, the next we flash back to original hero Altair who’s leading an assault against his former stronghold.

Are the cracks in the series starting to show? Perhaps, but so long as the core campaign is this good, Assassin’s Creed will always have an audience.

Rating : 8/10

Videogame Review – The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

10 Nov

UK Release Date: Friday 11 November
Price: £49.99 Format reviewed: Xbox 360
Also available on: PS3 and PC
Publisher: Bethesda

Most games struggle to tell one story over ten hours. Skyrim tells dozens of stories over hundreds of hours, and it does so in one of the richest game worlds ever envisioned. Mammoths, werewolves, frost trolls, vampires, orcs, giants, spiders the size of a small hatchbacks, dragons… it’s a dangerous world out there, and it’s just waiting for a hero to step out into it and start adventuring.

Skyrim’s ecology is a wonderful thing to admire. Packs of wolves left to their own devices will bring down deer and feast on their carcasses. Giants will take their mammoth flocks out to fields to feed and protect them from predators like the good shepherds that they are. Butterflies flit from flower to flower and mudcrabs crawl from stream to stream. What really counts, though, is not the beauty or the vastness of the place (both staggering, by the way), but your involvement in this world. And that, dear traveller, is precisely what you decide it to be.

Those wolves can be hunted and their pelts turned into leather armour. Plants and butterflies can be gathered and crushed into potions. Metals mined and bashed into weapons. Wood gathered and chopped for money. Side-quests spill out of conversations, chance encounters, newly discovered locations and even books. You can train in whatever skills you choose: whether you want to be a stealthy hunter, a powerful magician, a fearsome fighter or something as humble as a blacksmith, Skyrim lets you choose your life and live it to the fullest. The possibilities are, quite frankly, overwhelming.

There’s a main questline to follow in which you’re hunting dragons and fulfilling destinies (and it’s worth noting that Skyrim’s tale is much grander than Oblivion’s so-so main story) but it’s largely irrelevant for the most part, because Skyrim is all about the story you write, not the story that developers Bethesda have written for you. And this story you write encompasses a world of towns and caves and ruins, and hundreds of people. It’ll take months just to sample it all in merely one way, let alone all the different possible ways that stem from your unique character choices.

Crucially, it’s all done with barely a hitch. We encountered the occasional bug in our surface-scratching 80 hours in Skyrim, and a couple of combat and mission quirks. But nothing that detracted from the world or the sense of being Skyrim instils into its players. It tops Tolkien for vision; Dungeons and Dragons for variety; Snyder for spectacle and almost every other game for sheer quality. Finish Batman: Arkham City quick, because once Skyrim begins you’re not playing anything else for months.

Rating : 10/10

source:sfx.co.uk
by:jordanfarley

Game Review: World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm

25 Dec


Source:Kotaku.com
By:Mike Fahey

Nothing ruins a perfectly good fantasy world like an enormous angry dragon tearing through the surface of the planet, destroying everything in its path. How does Blizzard’s ridiculously popular online role-playing game fare in the face of this Cataclysm?

That whole dragon-ripping-through-the-planet scenario is exactly what happened prior to the release of Cataclysm, the third expansion pack to World of Warcraft, the subscription-based online RPG that every other subscription-based online RPG wants to be like. The dread dragon Deathwing has returned to the world of Azeroth, leaving a swath of destruction in his wake. Newly displaced races join the struggle between the Alliance and the Horde, while sinister forces muster to take control of ancient lands uncovered by the violent emergence. The fate of the entire world rests in the hands of millions of World of Warcraft players around the globe. I guess it doesn’t sound so bad when you put it like that.

Ideal Player
Cataclysm is an expansion pack that requires the original game to play, so the ideal Cataclysm player is someone that already plays World of Warcraft, or those looking to hop into the world’s most popular MMO and don’t want to miss out on the two new playable races the expansion brings.

Why You Should Care
World of Warcraft is one of the most successful subscription-based massively-multiplayer online games of all time, and the release of the Cataclysm expansion pack brings with it sweeping changes to the way the game is played, bringing lapsed players back to the fold. If any of your friends suddenly disappeared two weeks ago, this is likely where they went.

——————————————————————————–

Cataclysm is the expansion pack that changes the face of Azeroth forever, right? Not really. The transformation of the Azeroth mainland brought on by Deathwing’s passing, sweeping changes to the way character classes progress, and new starting areas for each existing playable race came a few weeks before the release of the expansion as part of a major patch. That patch was almost an expansion pack unto itself and it was delivered to all World of Warcraft players free of charge. You don’t need to purchase the Cataclysm expansion to experience any of that.

Then what’s in the actual expansion pack? Well for starters the expansion pack gives players access to two new playable races. The Alliance gains a race of feral, shape-changing werewolves known as the Worgen, and the Horde welcomes scheming Goblins into the fold. Both new races deliver compelling new character experiences, allowing the player to take on an active role in the events leading up to their induction into their respective factions. The Worgen story is dark and desperate, while the Goblins’ tale is filled with light-hearted humor. Neither should be missed.

This half-man, half-dog creature was harmed quite often during the creation of this review.What about new high level content? Cataclysm raises World of Warcraft’s level cap to 85, giving maxxed out players five more ranks to attain as they adventure through the expansion’s six new zones. It doesn’t sound like much, especially when compared to the massive, sprawling new continents and ten additional levels included in the game’s first two expansion packs, but if you take the time to experience the intricate quest lines and atmospheric landscapes of the watery depths of Vashj’ir or the sand-choked mystery of ancient Egypt inspired Uldum you’ll discover that Cataclysm is a textbook example of quality over quantity. Each new zones tells its own epic tale, and never before have I felt like I’ve played such an integral role in shaping major events in the world of Azeroth. I’ve been a key participant in cataclysmic battles between demigods. I’ve stepped into the role of a naga battle maiden to learn how Vashj’ir came under control by that aquatic threat. I’ve even dabbled in real-time strategy during desert skirmishes that shift into a top-down perspective, giving me strategic command over friendly forces. There’s a fresh experience around every corner.

What’s in it for the raiders and PVPers? Cataclysm comes packed with three high-end raiding zones for coordinated 10 and 25-man raids to take down, plus a special raid dungeon unlocked by defeating the opposing faction in a player-versus-player battle in the end-game zone of Tol Barad. The expansion also introduces two new level 85 PVP battlegrounds: the control-oriented Battle for Gilneas and Twin Peaks capture-the-flag. Sadly I am not currently a member of a raiding guild and did not hit level 85 – a requirement for the new PVP zones – so I could not partake of this content yet.

Why didn’t you hit level 85? Because I’m a more casual type of player. I’m perfectly satisfied spending a couple of hours practicing Archaeology, the expansion’s new profession that has players flying all over the map searching for artifacts that eventually unlock fabulous prizes. Or browsing the auction house to see what sorts of ridiculously powerful items players have started selling in the Cataclysm’s wake. Hell, I’m sure I’ve wasted at least a half hour listening to the expansion’s soundtrack, which has more character than many of the players I’ve met.

And you’ve got no complaints? Nothing that requires a World of Warcraft official forum-sized rant. Solo questing feels a bit too easy, despite the fact that the monsters in Cataclysm have obviously been beefed up in comparison to the higher level creatures from the previous expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. The updated graphics for the new areas and playable races are quite pretty, but the older races are really beginning to show their age; a human looks downright primitive standing next to a higher-polygon Goblin model. The older zones have received upgrades. Perhaps it’s time to revisit those older characters.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm In Action

A Visual Guide To World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm

The Bottom Line
The traditional massively multiplayer role-playing game audience looks for one thing in an expansion pack: More content. With World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, Blizzard goes above and beyond, delivering not just more, but better content. The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansion packs may have covered more ground, but Cataclysm’s shorter journey is a deeper and more satisfying experience than anything that came before it.

Rating 8/10

Star Trek Online Review: A Piece Of The Action

1 Mar


Source : I09
After years of television series, books, cartoons, movies, and video games for both consoles and PCs, Star Trek faces the final frontier: the massively-multiplayer role-playing game.

When Star Trek Online was first officially announced back in June of 2008, fans of the series were excited, cautious, and slightly nauseous, all at the same time. The prospect of a massively-multiplayer Star Trek universe had so much potential, but just as much potential to get things horribly, horribly wrong.

There were so many questions. When would it take place? Would we be captains? Crew members? Could we play aliens? How would transporters work? One by one, developer Cryptic Studios answered the questions, and today we have our first, (somewhat) fully functioning Star Trek MMO.

Did Cryptic’s boldly going pay off, or have they gone where no man has gone before, and for good reason?

(As part of our new MMO format, I created a series of four weekly MMO Logs for Star Trek Online, to give readers an idea of how much of the game I’ve played coming into this review. If you’ve yet to read them, you know what to do. If you have, then continue on.)

Loved
Character Creation: Cryptic proved its mastery over the character creation process with both City of Heroes and Champions Online, and while you won’t find much in the way of colored spandex here, you will find enough character creation options to keep you occupied for quite some time. Would you like a short, squat Klingon? A tall, lanky Ferengi? Done and done. Choose from a nice selection of pre-established races, or go in-depth, creating your own custom alien race, injecting some of your own fiction into the Star Trek universe.

Space Combat: Star Trek Online shines when you’re dancing ship-to-ship. Cryptic has found a nice balance between the strategic combat of Starfleet Command and more arcade-style space shooters like Wing Commander, with an innovative way of granting players the sort of special powers you’d find in your average fantasy MMO. The space combat system manages to represent the power management and shield balancing of starship combat in such a way that players new to the series can easily understand it, and using your bridge officers’ special skills to enhance your combat performance was a brilliant move on Cryptic’s part. They’ve managed to make me feel like a Starfleet bad-ass, charging into battle with photon cannons blazing, while making sure I still fight in a strategic manner, as befitting a starship captain.

Star Trek Flavor: This isn’t a generic space MMO with Star Trek graphics laid over top. The developers of Star Trek Online have gone out of their way to make sure that every mission, from the shortest escort trip to long, convoluted episodic missions, is completely steeped in Star Trek lore. Not only will you find familiar friends and foes at every turn, the game carries over many of the themes of the franchise as well, subtle (and not-so-subtle) current-day political commentary included. From the moment you log in until your forehead bangs onto your desk from exhaustion, you’re living Star Trek.

Intricate Systems: While many of today’s MMO games are going the way of World of Warcraft, simplifying the game for the sake of more casual players, I come from the Anarchy Online school of MMO mechanics, where you have to use advanced math in order to dress yourself. While Star Trek Online doesn’t quite reach that level of intricacy, there’s still a whole lot of micro-management for the player to handle. You maintain your character’s inventory and skills, the inventory and skills of each crew member, and the weapons, devices, and consoles attached to your ship. As you get deeper into the game you may find yourself cultivating separate sets of bridge officers for different situations, or even keeping a stable of different ships, depending on what sort of content you’ll be participating in and what role you’ll be playing. I’ve had moments where I’ve logged on, spent an hour swapping around equipment, and then logged off, and I’m completely satisfied with that.

The Ships: You could put any avatar in a Star Trek uniform and suddenly they’re a Starfleet officer. The real characters in Star Trek Online are the ships. Star Trek Online’s starships are gorgeous creatures, lovingly rendered with painstaking attention to detail, and given to the players, who can then mix and match parts from several different styles to create their own personal star-spanning ride. Every new rank (10 levels, more or less) you are given your choice of new ships, and every time it happens you hate to see the old one go almost as much as you love the look and feel of the new, more powerful model. I love my ship more than I love some of my pets.

Auto-Party: As talkative as I can be once you get to know me, I’m actually a rather shy person around strangers. Having spent the majority of my MMO-playing days surrounded by friends eager to join up for adventure, it’s hard for me to form my own party with people I don’t know. That’s why I love Cryptic’s auto-join feature. When questing in popular areas, this option automatically groups you with others on the same mission, which greatly enhances the risks and rewards. Sometimes you’ll find new friends, and sometimes you’ll go through multiple mission branches, never saying word one to your newfound teammates. The system has its ups and downs, but I like never having to shout ‘Looking for group!’

Hated
Repetition: After you play the game for a while, you’ll start to notice certain patterns. You might find yourself in a generic starbase that looks exactly like three other starbases you’ve visited recently. Warping into a strange, unexplored system loses some of its weight when you immediately recognize the pattern of asteroid field in front of you, knowing that the station you are looking for is at the very end, because you’ve done the same thing several times over.

Ground Combat: While the ground combat in Star Trek Online didn’t wind up quite as horrible as I thought it might, it still leaves something to be desired, especially when compared to the dazzling space combat. Missions on the ground are played out with you and a host of NPC bridge crew members, some of which wind up not being quite as helpful on the ground as they are on the bridge. I can’t count how many times I’ve sprinted through a base to reach an objective, only having to wait for around a minute once I arrive while my crew tries to navigate the corridors to my position. Ground combat is also fairy repetitive. While equipment kits help ease the tedium, giving your character new powers and skills to fool around with, fighting on the ground generally involves kneeling, spamming your primary fire hotkey until the group of enemies is dead, and then moving on to the next. There are some strategic options for positioning your crew, but I haven’t found occasion to use them yet.

It’s Not Finished: Star Trek Online is a game that would have definitely benefitted from several more months of polishing before release. Bugs and broken missions are regular occurrences, and I often find myself swept into fleet actions – large, instanced battlefields with tons of enemies – without pressing the key normally required to join one, an issue that needs to be fixed before Cryptic decides to impose stricter death penalties.

On top of the bugs and the broken bits, the Klingon faction’s focus on PVP at launch is a fancy way of saying that the faction’s story content wasn’t finished yet. Cryptic is addressing this with a major content patch in March, but why release the side at all if it wasn’t all there?

While Star Trek Online might not be as finished a product as I’d like, it does have several things going for it. The developers obviously have a firm grasp on the Star Trek universe, crafting content that speaks not only of their knowledge of the franchise, but their reverence for it as well. The game manages to twist common MMO mechanics in such a way that you always feel like you’re the captain of a starship, and not just some Elven rogue with a high-tech makeover. The music is lovely as well.

But by far the biggest thing Star Trek Online has going for it is the fans. Star Trek Online has given Trekkies far and wide a place to come together, sharing their thoughts and feelings about the beloved series while playing out the dream of piloting a giant model spaceship across a field of painted stars on a black backdrop. You’ll still find the odd Captain Cannabis of the U.S.S. Blunt during your travels across the stars, but for the most part you’ll be hanging out at one constant online Star Trek convention, minus the unusual smells.

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