Format: Xbox360 | Genre: Side-scrolling action | Publisher: Microsoft Game Studio | Developer: Chair/EPIC | Release date: 19/08/09 | RRP: 1200MSP

By Daniel Lipscombe

Chair are, or should I say were, a team of little-known developers, known only for the creation of Undertow for Xbox Live Arcade.

It was an underwater diving game that wasn’t overly special, to the point where Microsoft gave it away to gamers as an apology for broken Xbox Live service. So you can be forgiven for drawing a blank on this small, Utah based-company until now. One thing you need to know about them is that they have great ambition – ambition that has now created a marriage of minds between themselves and EPIC Games.

Shortly after Chair opened their doors in 2005, they acquired the rights to the Empire property – a series of books by Orson Scott Card – and they’ve sat on those rights until today. Taking the form of a 2D/3D platforming shooter that lives on the same blood that pumps through Castlevania and Metroid, Shadow Complex runs alongside the story of the Empire books.

Though cosmetically a side-scrolling shooter, Shadow Complex may be better described as a side-scrolling adventure game. The heart and soul of this new property is in exploration and story, and Shadow Complex delivers a narrative and characters that most games yearn to create. It’s not just in the way they look, but in the nuances of their speech and the emotions they convey. Jason, our hero, is an everyday man with a military background, his girlfriend Claire a playful and charming woman. Each has real substance to their character.

//It’s in the eyes
With terrific visuals that would fool anyone who didn’t know it were a mere 700mb downloadable game, and voice acting that conveys emotion as well as any movie that springs to mind, Shadow Complex makes you feel part of something special from the opening scene. However, it’s not merely the characters that make this game so involving; it’s the environments and atmosphere. Each area is thoughtfully designed, with spaced-out cover for evading bullets, vast underwater sections with ambient lighting filtering down to the bottom, and epic boss battles that could have been extracted from the latest Hollywood blockbuster. There are regular moments at which you’ll find yourself mouth agape at the scenery and its detail.

Action sequences are filled with tension, whether you’re ensuring you’re under cover while storming a room full of soldiers, or running at breakneck speeds across the surface of a lake while timing your jumps so as not to be shot by a gunship helicopter. Each of these sections has been crafted with precision, in order to deliver an adventure worthy of the pre-release hype.

Throughout the entire game the influence of Super Metroid and other side-scrolling games is apparent, but there’s a flavour of Hideo Kojima’s work here too. Many instances would feel at home in Metal Gear Solid – moments like crawling through air ducts over a cafeteria full of Progressive Restoration soldiers chatting over lunch. In fact, even the bosses are reminiscent of Metal Gear’s – large bipedal robots that tower over regular men, with you searching for and taking advantage of weak spots to put the mechanical beasts to rest.

All of this action and drama takes place in a complex set out in the wilderness. After falling behind on a hiking trip with Claire, Jason hurries through a cavern-based tutorial to find his girlfriend being dragged into what looks like an army base by two soldiers in hi-tech suits. Jason breaks into the base to rescue Claire, and an epic story unfolds from there. Tasked with escaping from the base, Jason explores every nook and cranny for equipment to help on his mission, quickly finding his own power suit, the Omega armour.

[Continues...]

By Greg Giddens

Madballs in… Babo: Invasion is a true arcade game that fully embraces the style. You’re a head with a gun strapped to your face, and you roll around picking up different guns and destroying other faces or balls. Expected result: fast paced shooting action – and that’s exactly what Madballs deliverers. However, underneath the arcade shell is a surprising amount of innovation and strategy.

The single-player game isn’t the deepest of experiences, but it doesn’t really need to be. But the length is a problem – although the 10 levels are initially challenging, once you learn how to approach them you can breeze through them very quickly. Once it’s over, the fun dies with it, as replaying the same levels can only entertain for so long. The humour through the single-player game is excellent, not so much from the characters’ annoyingly frequent one-liners but from the hidden dairy entries scattered around each level, providing amusing release from the often hectic shooting action. The levels themselves are well-designed and varied, with good presentation through vivid colours and great fire effects. It’s amazing how much is squeezed into each area, from the copious amount of enemies to all the hidden areas and collectables. And collecting them, along with killing all the enemies, provides much more than just fulfilling your rampant needs; the experience gained unlocks more weapons and characters.

//Rolling, rolling, rolling
As you play through single- or multiplayer, you gain experience, unlocking more as you go. This omnipresent progression means every kill counts, especially as the difficulty ramps up in the single-player game’s later levels. Despite this increase in challenge, it’s certainly best to begin with the campaign, as in the multiplayer mode you’ll find yourself easily out-gunned you until you unlock some of the more powerful weapons.

There are an impressive 10 of these to unlock, each with a secondary fire mode that too needs unlocking, usually through kills with the primary fire option. Many enemies have specific weaknesses and strengths, which your fire modes are geared towards, so figuring out which mode is best for each enemy is crucial. It all adds a dose of strategy to what is essentially a traditional arcade shooter, and affects your playing style whether in the campaign or online.

Ultimately, the single-player acts as a primer for the excellent multiplayer game. Madballs in… Babo: Invasion sports no less than seven multiplayer modes, the most interesting of which are the Avatar Attack mode, which allows players to use their avatars’ heads instead of the ordinary characters (for once, the inclusion of an avatar game mode doesn’t feel tacked on) and innovative and strategic Invasion mode. In Invasion, the objective is to secure control points around the map, each of which able to be fitted with an offensive weapon or health station to support your team. It’s fast-paced, action-packed and agreeably tactical – something which surprisingly extends throughout the otherwise typically arcade experience.

The variety of game modes on offer is magnificent, and none of them feel rushed or compromised by the others. However, for all the engaging features of the multiplayer and the challenge of the single-player, Madballs is lacking in depth and nuance, so prolonged play is difficult to sustain.

For 800 MS points (£6.80), it’s a good buy. But it’s still shy of its full-priced competitors. Madballs in… Babo: Invasion is an arcade game, and it lives up to that completely: the fun is present in abundance, but it’s a casual and short-lived affair.

7/10

What does this score mean?

Format: Xbox360/PS3/Wii/PC/PS2 | Genre: Action | Publisher: Activision | Developer: Luxoflux | Released: 26/06/09 | RRP: £24.99-£39.99

By Greg Giddens

Movie tie-in games are notorious for being crap.  Very few turn out adequately, and fewer still turn out to be good. Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen sits right in the middle of the spectrum, but although it had so much more potential, it’s still better than most.

//Absence makes the heart grow fonder
We’ve been deprived in recent years of good robot games. No Mech Warrior games, no good Armoured Core games – the sub-genre has been pretty quiet. For that reason, Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen does offer an experience we haven’t had in a while, and in many ways it’s well presented. Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen is certainly a better game than the original, but there are breaks in the narrative flow that distract from the otherwise fun experience.

The story loosely follows the film, but instead of forcing you to play through scenes in the movie you play two distinct campaigns – Autobots and Decepticons. Each campaign differs from the film’s story, allowing you to experience slightly different events. Add certain missions from both campaigns together and you can recreate the film, but the decision to promote a deeper and more fulfilling role by having the two campaigns allows for a much more intriguing game.

The ideas behind the campaigns are great, but the narrative suffers with dull mission briefings and debriefings, and a perplexing lack of cut-scenes and scripted sequences. There’s no real flow to the missions: you play through one, you’re “treated” to a quick summary of what’s going on and how well you did, then it’s off to the next. The briefing area is also a rather dull environment, void of light and eye candy; instead, it’s just a holographic map of the planet with Transformers standing around it talking. Perhaps the problems with this narrative flow are more due to inherency from its film father – and one does get the feeling that, if a fresh story was created instead of loosely following the films, a better game could have been made. Either way, a cinematic show of progression is greatly lacking.

In and out of missions, you will be guided through the story by different characters from the film, all voiced by their respective actors. It’s fantastic to hear the actors voicing their videogame counterparts, but some of the lines are unconvincing, some are badly written and other times they’re badly edited together. The saving grace of the voice problems would be Peter Cullen who voices Optimus Prime, and Hugo Weaving who voices Megatron. It doesn’t matter what they say. They’ll always sound cool.

Generally, though, the voice acting isn’t too bad, and adds some much-needed life to the presentation, but the graphics do little improve upon it. Although the majority of the Transformers look great, the environments are uninspired. The main Transformers look just as good as they do in the film, but the “minion” Transformers are very generic and lacking in detail – as are the buildings, which look very plain, lacking in textures. Further damaging the presentation are the small levels, lacking in design flare. Destructible environments are missing, something that feels almost necessary due to the nature of the film. Inadequacies aside, the lighting is very good – never is it too dark or bright – and the weapons firing and explosions are pretty good as well.

[Continues...]

Format: Xbox360 / PC | Genre: Action | Publisher: PlayBrain | Developer: PlayBrain | ETA: Summer 2009

By Christos Reid

Madballs in Babo: Invasion is possibly the biggest melting pot of ideas in a game to date, let alone something for the Xbox Live Arcade. But when you’re taking cues from so many different successful ideas, is there still room for originality?

To put it simply: yes, yes there is. Without a shred of doubt, Madballs is the best XBLA title I have ever played, and will probably stay that way until they release Half Life 3 on a Wednesday for 400 Microsoft Points. There are aspects of Quake, Geometry Wars, Ikaruga and even Marble Blast Ultra. Were you ever frustrated in Super Monkey Ball to the point where you wish you could’ve attached a minigun to your roll-cage and decimated the opposition? Well, this is exactly what developer Play Brains have gone for, and it’s paid off extremely well.

The amount of features is fairly overwhelming, as it seems to contain more campaign and multiplayer options than Halo 3, so longevity will never be a problem, especially if this game gets the ton of DLC that Play Brains head honcho Scott Simpson promised us during our play-through. There’s campaign, level attack, skirmish, invasion, and a ton of others to keep you happy for a long time, but what fascinated us from the get go was Avatar mode in multiplayer.

We kid you not, this game will decapitate your Avatar, attach a gun to their head, and allow you to go head to head with fifteen other similarly body-disadvantaged Xbox Live players in a free-for-all. With a three-second default respawn time and the interesting clipping effect of watching a cannon protrude from the middle of someone’s top-hat, only to see yourself decimated due to that moment of humorous distraction is something that really does make Kingdom for Keflings less of a game and more of an experiment to see what could be done.

//Roll with it
In the campaign, playable by yourself or with friends, you have the choice of playing as one of two factions – the Babo B*D*I forces, a blue-themed force of generic do-gooders, and the rockstar-cool evil Scorched lot. Each faction has a team of five soldier classes, each represented by a different character, and a leader whose appearance can be unlocked as a custom skin for one of the classes on the team. The class choices are logical, each simple variations on their health and speed stats. The “runner” class is extremely speedy, great for hit and run attacks, but getting hit back is probably going to be the end of your play session. On the other end of the scale, the “heavy” class is slow, but can take massive amounts of punishment.

Each character also comes with two special abilities, which are varied and always great to pull out in campaign, with a select few being geared towards wreaking utter chaos when playing online. Scott’s personal favourite was Scorcher heavy class character Magmor, who has both a “super-armoured-but-slow” ability, and also one that quadruples his size, instantly killing any enemy he touches for a short time. Great for tearing through crowds, and even better when you’re using it to kill rival journalists at CVG, OXM and GameSpot at the same time in an online play-testing session.

The story puts you on an unfamiliar world, inhabited by a mysterious third faction, hostile to both the B*D*I and Scorched, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll just call them “enemies,” as essentially that’s all they are. There’s a huge amount of variety in the enemies you’ll face, and what’s even more interesting is some of them will strongly resemble characters you may even be playing right that second. Clever, isn’t it? A quick re-skin and you’ve got a new character/enemy combination, and a back-story that involves defection from the enemy side. By far the most fun enemies to take on in

[Continues…]

Format: PS3 | Genre: Action/Fighting | Publisher: Temco | Developer: Team Ninja | ETA: Autumn 2009

Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 is a difficult game to explain, in theory. It’s essentially just Ninja Gaiden 2, with new characters and all the bugs fixed. Yet it still feels like a completely new game. Allow me to elaborate.

In the build we played under the watchful eyes of Team Ninja yesterday, we were introduced to two new characters, though they may be slightly familiar depending on your gaming pedigree: Ayane of Dead or Alive fame, and Momiji of Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword. Both were playable on the day, and Rachel (the angry hammer-wielding woman from the first teaser trailer) is also planned for her own playable experience.

//Costume party
The first thing you’ll notice, if you’re sensible enough to ignore their ridiculous costumes, is that these characters seem to move noticeably more slowly than their male counterpart. Whether this is a design decision or simply the fact that, even when walking, Ryu seems to be busting a sprint animation isn’t clear. However, the focus is more on combat than acrobatics with the two new characters, a refreshing change from some of the occasional off-putting parkour forced on you with the game’s Xbox version.

Ayane’s demo weapon was a set of two short katana, wielded with deadly skill, though with her being the one to equip Ryu with the awesome Dragon Sword, this isn’t surprising. And her finishing moves  – which can be used once the foe targeted has lost at least one limb – are far faster than Ryu’s. This goes a long way in alleviating the tension you’ll sometimes feel when ten ninja are circling you as your character pulls off a lengthy death-stroke animation, allowing your living antagonists to close in. However, her swift combat skills are more than adequate, with a lot of opportunities for mashing the square button in comparison to Ryu. His main fault was that, even when wielding claws, he he would occasionally slow down as the looping attack animation wound to a close. With Ayane, it’s more a case of the combo finishing when you finish, though you’ll want to learn how to dodge, as with only two short swords, her blocking ability leaves a lot to be desired.

[Continues...]

Format: Xbox360/PS3/Wii/DS | Genre: Action | Publisher: Atari | Developer: Terminal Reality | Out now: £44.99

By Daniel Lipscombe

Are you troubled by strange noises in the middle of the night? Do you experience feelings of dread in your basement or attic? Have you or your family ever seen a spook, spectre or ghost? Who ya gonna call? Well, in the case of the new Ghostbusters game, Terminal Reality. For a company with only a very small handful of “hits” – Bloodrayne, Metal Slug Anthology, Monster Truck Madness – this Texan developer has a weight on its shoulders the size of a big Twinkie.

Any well-loved movie franchise brings trepidation. So many before have fallen, and a series like Ghostbusters holds a position so high that the fall would surely kill. So it was just as well that the game had full backing from the original creators of the acclaimed movies. With Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis writing the story and script for this entry into the famous canon, Ghostbusters the videogame is billed as the true sequel to the 1989 movie Ghostbusters 2.

//Playing the part
This game would have fallen at the first fence if it weren’t for the original cast stepping up to reprise their roles. Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson picked up their proton packs and lent their voices to a well-written and genuinely witty and intelligent script. Backing them up are William Atherton (Walter Peck) and Annie Potts (Janine Melnitz), each as funny as ever, and although Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis are absent, they aren’t missed. Each of these actors brings great nostalgia to the game and Terminal Reality has really nailed the memories.

Playing as a nameless recruit to the Ghostbusters, you’re effectively the guinea pig for new equipment. This gives you a unique viewpoint for the mayhem of this version of New York. Exploring the Firehouse HQ, you’ll discover the loving detail that the developer has put in place for fans. You’ll find an Employee of the Month chart with pictures of Venkman taken straight from the films; newspaper cuttings shown in the movie are on the wall behind the desk; the containment unit in the basement looks just as dangerous as ever, and Ecto 1 sits proudly in the lobby. With the cutting but charming dialogue of Janine playing in the background, you truly feel part of the team.

Starting your journey with the ‘Busters will see you exploring a familiar environment: the Sedgewick Hotel. The opening chapter takes you through basic training, and you’ll be out to catch Slimer from his original dwelling. This leads you onto Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and the Grey Lady from the library in the first movie. Although there’s a great sense of contentment to be busting these famous ghosts, it feels like something of a cop-out to be playing out these familiar situations, particularly considering the strength of the script. This sense of a lack of effort can also be found in the game’s design. Though each area of the game looks nice, it’s all disappointingly linear, and each stage plays out as a maze of corridors leading to the inevitable ghost that needs catching.

Each of these ghost-catching endings is considered a boss fight, which causes something of a problem. As each ghost tends to appear at the middle or end of the level, each of the endless corridors needs to be filled with something to shoot. Ghostbusters becomes a Gears of War clone minus the glorious cover mechanic. Ghostbusters isn’t Aliens, nor is it not Starship Troopers, and thus shoehorning minions of the larger ghosts to be shot at is tedious. Since when does Stay Puft have small marshmallow monsters that do his bidding?

It’s just as well that the weapons you wield to destroy these otherworldly beings are interesting and bring refreshing mechanics to the proceedings. Starting with the classic Proton Pack, you move up to a Stasis Gun that acts like a shotgun; a Slime Gun, which helps dispatch certain enemies and also can be used to solve puzzles; and the Meson Gun, acting as an energy weapon. Each is unique and can be used in many ways. The Slime Gun is possibly the best in the arsenal; not only does it dispatch many enemies, but it can also be used to tether objects and organisms in the surroundings, which add another level to the action.

//Uncooperative
Although Ghostbusters is a genuinely fun game, one does wonder whether it would be as much fun without the skins of these familiar actors delivering such witty lines. Take out the ghosts, actors and memory-sparking surroundings and you’re left with an average action game that will almost certainly leave you wanting more – unless you want to trawl through each difficulty and collect every trophy or achievement.

Which leads to one of my biggest problems with Ghostbusters. The movie has four characters; the game has five. This is screaming out for a full four-player co-op career mode, but what we have is a convoluted side-mission setup a la Ghost Recon 2. It’s such a crying shame. Busting ghosts with your friends and catching Slimer et al would be a dream, but this basic, tacked-on multiplayer falls short. The result is a game you’re unlikely to want to return to, when this simple inclusion would have added so much.

Despite some low points, Terminal Reality has crafted a world that feels like home, and fans of the movies will be delighted with what’s on offer here. But others will simply see another action game – and not a particularly solid one at that. Some of Ghostbusters’ shortcomings can be overlooked due to the subject matter, but taken on face value you’re left with a heart-warming but ultimately lifeless shooter. Ghostbusting still makes you feel good – just not as good as it should.

6/10

What does this score mean?

By Greg Giddens

Do you recall those panic-stricken moments in real life when you can’t remember which button on the controller you’ve to press in order to get out of your car?

That’s the feeling you get when a game manages to completely immerse you and bleeds through into reality. Prototype does just that. It grabs hold of you and consumes you entirely. This is what sandbox games should be like: gripping fun, personified.

Prototype places you in the now-quarantined city of New York after the outbreak of a deadly virus. You are Alex Mercer, an infected individual with extreme strength, agility and shape-shifting abilities that allow you to consume others around you, talking not only their form but also their memories – something that proves useful, as you have only a fractured memory of who you are.  Perplexed and concerned about what you have become, you hunt down those responsible for infecting you and the city, consuming them and learning more about yourself and the viral outbreak.  It’s good to see a sandbox game pulling off the narrative so successfully.  Consuming memories is both unique and interesting, and the story is a true treat to follow.

//Balancing act
Prototype starts off challenging and ends somewhere between impossible and suicidal. In this respect, the freedom you have to approach each mission and fight is both a blessing and a curse. In Prototype there is no impediment to free action, and it feels utterly unhindered with regards to what your character can do. It’s the most resounding sandbox experience I’ve ever played, but because of the sheer amount of options available in combat, finding the right mix of attacks to defeat some of the bosses or survive some of the missions is a difficult task.

Amazingly, though, Prototype never becomes too frustrating. There are often checkpoints within each mission and fight, so whatever progress you can make counts for something – and there is always the option to return to free-roam mode and leave the mission until later, when you’ve built your skills and are stronger.

The bosses and some of the infected prove strong adversaries, but the human masses don’t stand a chance unless they’re in armoured vehicles – though even then, after enough upgrades, you can handle nearly anything mankind can throw at you. You’re like a big bad wolf in a world of little pigs, resulting in a feeling of completely ludicrous betterment that’s incredibly satisfying. It’s astonishing just how powerful you can become: you’ll upgrade your abilities, and learn new ones, by spending experience points gained from completing missions and defeating enemies, and not long into the game you will have a whole collection of moves you can perform and a list of buttons to execute them. The amount of combinations Prototype demands is amazing, but more impressive is how well they’re mapped to the controller. Even with all your abilities unlocked, everything remains manageable.

Combat isn’t the only aspect with copious amounts of button combinations and options; the simple act of getting around is also rather complex. Alex can traverse the city in several different ways. He can jump large distances and scale buildings parkour style; he can also fall from any height and not take damage. Add to that the fact that his enhanced parkour allows him to literally run up any building, and you can see that the word “obstacles” means a different thing to Alex than it does to everyone else. After a few upgrades you’ll find yourself gliding, air-dashing, and even driving or piloting military vehicles.

That the options to traverse New York are plentiful and varied is one thing, but what makes Prototype so astonishing is how much pure fun it provides, especially when you embrace your darker side as a player. Simply grabbing hold of an unaware civilian, climbing to the top of the Empire State Building, dropping them off and jumping after them just to see who falls faster is a thrill time and time again.

//Short but sweet
Exploring the city is great, but it also reveals Prototype’s few weaknesses. Some of the buildings and characters are lacking in detail, and occasionally the draw distance fails to match your speed. But these few graphical shortcomings still don’t distract from the enjoyment, and since the frame rate does a fantastic job of remaining fast, the overall presentation is still worthy of a current-generation title.

It’s also a fairly short game, in terms of the main story. Prototype only provides about ten hours of this, though additional missions easily add another five hours. And even without them, the length feels comfortable, and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Besides, such small flaws are nowhere near enough to significantly damage the game. Prototype is still excellent in almost all respects, and it’s a shame the story has to end. Once it’s over, you’re bored of the additional missions and there isn’t anything left for you to do, the option is there to replay with all your abilities unlocked.  There’s no multiplayer to speak of – a rarity in modern console games – but I’ll never condemn a developer for choosing to focus on an arresting single-player experience.  Do be aware, though, that if the relatively short time-span bothers you, there are no current plans for downloadable content.

You could certainly ask for more from Prototype – more story, more variety in the optional missions, more diversity in the city locations – but it’s still one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played this year. Rarely does it feel repetitive or frustrating, and often does it feel like you’re a god among men. It’s challenging and engaging, unique and interesting, a game that deserves thorough recognition for a job well done.

9/10

What does this score mean?

By Daniel Lipscombe

In a world filled with anarchy and destruction, one would think that seeking out the ability to recreate situations of said anarchy and destruction would be avoided. There is, however, that small section of our brains that enjoys the idea of rampaging wildly around a crowded city, imploding or exploding anything and anyone. Sucker Punch have managed to zero in on that section of the human psyche and created a virtual playground for our minds to revel in the annihilation of all things inanimate or otherwise.

//Mind the ’splodes
inFamous starts as it means to go on. One of the first things you experience is a catastrophic explosion that decimates thousands of people and their homes. Waking up from the centre of the blast is Cole, the protagonist of your new adventure. You begin controlling Cole as he stumbles and drags himself from the blast zone and through a simple tutorial section, as the world continues to crumble around him. As an on-foot courier, Cole is nimble on his feet and moves through the city using parkour, which seems to be a firm trend in videogames presently.

Controlling our Cole is a joy. Moving from obstacle to obstacle is a fluid ballet of jumping and grabbing. Jumping towards a lamppost will see Cole grab it and shimmy up; jump towards the edge of a bridge and, depending on how close you are, you’ll grab onto the ledge or land on it and tip-toe along. The control system is tight and versatile, and scaling buildings is just as important as running. Climbing the exteriors to get good vantage points, look for collectibles or attack enemies from above is an enjoyable experience that provides an extra rush of energy when being pursued by any of the street gangs.

It’s worth taking the time to expand on the story a little: although it does feel like a superhero cliché, the plot maintains your interest from start to finish. With Cole waking up as strange electric powers course through his body, he is forced by fate to become a hero to the people. With best friend Zeke in tow and Cole’s girlfriend angry that his powers seem to cause so much chaos, it feels as if Sucker Punch is regurgitating old comic book stories.

With half of the citizens calling you a monster and the others revering you as an icon for change, it’s up to you which of these paths you follow. Throughout the game you’re presented with moral choices: as you approach a mission, a good/bad symbol will appear in the corner of the screen and Cole will ponder the situation, laying out your choices. In the first of these scenarios, an aid box has been air dropped into the city, but is caught up high on a monument. Do you scare the citizens away and keep all of the food for yourself, or let everyone take an equal share? Once your decision is made a karma meter will swing in the chosen direction.

Unlike many other games, inFamous utilises its karma system incredibly well. Choosing a moral path will allow you to unlock more moves and abilities for you to use. Fighting enemies, completing missions and helping or hurting pedestrians all award experience points in varying amounts; these points are then spent in the powers menu to allow you to upgrade your abilities however you choose. Starting off with a small lightning bolt that can be shot from your hands, you’ll eventually hold the powers of a Norse god after fighting the good, or bad, fight. Upgrading your powers will eventually see you hovering on static thrusters, throwing electric sticky grenades and even riding electrical wires with conduction movement.

//Energy crisis
With many varying moves on display the combat becomes as deep as you want it to be. Dealing with the many street gangs within Empire City is never a chore. The difficulty of the battles has a nice balance that will keep you on your toes: be too aggressive and storm in, and you’ll be outflanked and dispatched swiftly; hang back and your foes will hide behind cover leading you out in the open to be killed. Approaching each situation takes patience and care to save any innocents caught in the crossfire – unless, of course, you are playing as an evil character, in which case you can blast anything in sight and hope to survive the fight yourself.

The street battles here come thick and fast until you begin liberating blocks of the city. Empire City has been put into quarantine, and with the gangs shutting off the electricity and water supplies it’s up to you to turn them back on. Once you have activated the electricity or water to an area, the lights will turn on in buildings and on streets and the gangs will flee, allowing people to get on with their lives. These missions are where the game takes a turn for the worse – although at the end of each of these missions you’ll be rewarded with a new power, each one is repetitive and linear. Trawling through sewers that look exactly the same as the one before, then trying out your new power in order to escape, becomes mundane and leaves you wishing for variety – though the majority of the mission structures are excellent.

With an open world that rivals many other games on the market, you can pick and choose which missions to take on. Do you storm through the main story or complete all the side missions while you progress? The story is enjoyable with the expected twists and turns, but it’s in the side missions that inFamous shines. With a huge variety of missions on display you’ll always have something to do. Following couriers, freeing hostages, rescuing medical staff, escorting prisoners to jail, disabling surveillance devices: the list goes on. Additionally, there are plenty of collectables, blast shards from the explosion are scattered across the city and can upgrade your power bar, and dead drop messages which add to the storyline are hidden in rooftop satellites. There’s certainly plenty to keep the completionists among us happy.

//Adventure playground
Although Empire City has much to explore, it lacks a certain atmosphere of other open-world games. With no soundtrack to speak of and citizens that often repeat their limited dialogue, it is hard to fall in love with this place, despite how beautiful it looks. But it’s compensated for by the cut-scenes: hand-drawn, comic-book-style artwork tells us more of the plot in between acts of the game, and these scenes help to cement the feeling of reading that new superhero adventure supplied by DC or Marvel.

And, really, this is a superb playground to spend time in. Jumping from skyscrapers and climbing everything in sight, combined with the mayhem of battles in the streets, is a thrill. Each mission feels well-crafted, with only a few exceptions, and although it follows a convoluted story that seems borrowed from Stan Lee, you should still enjoy the plot throughout. The morality system feels natural and not shoehorned in, and the combat is fluid and engaging.

Sucker Punch has created a game that uses carnage in a beautiful, over-the-top style that will push you to try new things. A tremendous origin story that will surely lead to an inevitable and welcome sequel, inFamous will doubtless appeal to the Heroes generation. This is a game born from the age-old question: what would you do if you had superpowers?

8/10

What does this score mean?

In this desensitised gaming community, it’s weird to think that there are still plenty of individuals out there who would be disgusted and offended by the act of slicing a man in half with a chainsaw. If you decide to play MadWorld (and I strongly encourage you to do so), be sure that none of these people are around to see it. Not because the act of slicing a man in half with a chainsaw is a common occurrence – though it is – but because the acts of violence MadWorld encourages players to perform are so over-the-top in nature that slicing a man in half with a chainsaw is viewed as relatively tame in comparison, and is scored as such.

Manhunt did something like this a number of years ago, and that game’s sad irony was that its ugly exterior and self-serious underlying themes were meant to decry the very sort of entertainment it presented to us; it baited gamers with the promise of grisly violence and then shamed them for enjoying it. MadWorld does nothing of the sort. It knows that we gamers are bloodthirsty, sick-minded individuals who enjoy excessive gore as a visual payoff, and rather than condemn such gameplay, it pats us on the back and drops us into a game world where the violent, brutal possibilities are infinite. This is a game that awards you extra points for impaling a man with a street sign and holding his twitching body up to the blades of an industrial strength fan, just for the spectacle of the thing. No social commentary, no agenda – if the infectious hip-hop soundtrack and hilarious commentary by John Di Maggio and Greg Proops didn’t make it abundantly clear, MadWorld is meant only to entertain. It’s the purest kind of fun there is.

The setting is Jefferson Island as a New York look-alike, except this alternate reality has the city being taken over by a group of terrorists who transform the entire island into the stage for a TV show called DeathWatch, in which contestants murder each other for fame, fortune and an escape route. The city’s redesigned exterior makes painting the landscape red a user-friendly ordeal: hooks and fans adorn the walls, spikes and explosive barrels line the streets, and all it takes is a strategically placed furnace or meat grinder to boost protagonist Jack’s point tally to the sky. One particularly brilliant context-specific scenario has the player using a catapult to launch foes face-first into the blade of a statue’s sword, at which point one of the commentators describes Jack’s location as “the playground of death.” And really, that’s the perfect descriptor. Each level is its own jungle gym of violence, blood and mischief, nearly as open-ended in its methods of mayhem as your mind allows it to be.

MadWorld’s brilliance is that its missions are entirely open-ended in design, with certain events opening only when players rack up a set number of points by bloodily disposing of their indefinitely respawning adversaries. As such, you’ve got to be looking for ways to have fun, and when the twisted locales grow increasingly more varied as the game progress, it’s never hard. The wonderful sci-fi themed Area 66 explores what happens when an enemy is thrown into an airlock, or under a tractor beam, or beneath the engine of a rocket; a later casino level has players using bumpers to bounce their opponents around like pinballs, to decapitating them and gleefully watching their heads roll around a roulette table. Even the early levels give you the opportunity to hold an enemy up to a moving train and watch as his flesh is ground away, and if that’s not first-class, grade-A entertainment, I don’t know what is.

There are bosses in MadWorld, and they are extraordinary, though they hardly take center stage. Far more appealing are the frequent Bloodbath Challenges, which act as diversions from the “normal” gameplay to briefly delve into the sort of violence that, if anything, is too over-the-top to be a common occurrence at all. The first, and still my favorite, has players tossing helpless foes into the vacuum of a jet engine, for no other reason than “because that’s awesome.” Any of the numerous examples – batting men into giant dart boards, golfing with zombie heads – sound laughably gratuitous when taken out of context, until you realize that there’s no context to begin with. MadWorld is simply a celebration of the violence our gaming culture not only tolerates, but has come to appreciate and enjoy. At that, it trumps everything else.

What’s commendable about MadWorld is that, as a Wii exclusive, it’s treated with the level of commitment that we usually only see from the big boys at Nintendo. The game’s control scheme is dependent on the Wii remote, employing buttons when necessary but demanding a swing of the controller to accompany many of MadWorld’s most vital actions. Hold down the B-trigger to fire up Jack’s rechargeable, arm-mounted chainsaw, then give the remote a good horizontal swipe to cut an enemy across the waist, or a vertical chop to slice him down the middle. With each successful swing of the weapon, the roar of the chainsaw travels from the TV screen to the palm of your hand, in one of the few genuinely creative uses of the remote’s speaker I have yet to witness.

Some would say MadWorld is overly reliant on quick-time events, though I’m convinced that Wii is still the one console where such a tactic is acceptable. The reason Wii uses a motion sensor in the first place is to envelope the player, to truly get them involved in the experience, and few games do this better than MadWorld. I say this because MadWorld marks the first time I’ve ever thrown my Wii controller. After scoffing at the frequent warnings about wearing the included wrist strap, I was thrust into a “power struggle” in which a particularly nasty boss had me pinned down, and my only means of escape was to shake the remote and nunchuk like a madman until – without warning – I was prompted to thrust them away from one another. My controller went flying, and while no damage was done, it only comes to show what kind of effect MadWorld has on you. I was so engrossed in the on-screen action that maintaining a firm grip on the controller was not exactly a top priority.

I was hoping to bring up the game’s gorgeous visual style at some point, but honestly, it’s a complete non-factor for me. For sure, the stark black and white color scheme (with more than a mere smattering of red) is new to the video game medium, and I cannot overstate just how well this stylized approach compensates for the Wii’s technological inferiority. But perhaps it’s a testament to how intense and involving MadWorld is that, for the majority of the game, I paid no attention to the game’s visual style. Hell, I couldn’t even be bothered to hold on to my controller while playing MadWorld; certainly something as insignificant as artistic brilliance wasn’t going to divert my eye.

9/10

You always run a hefty risk with film-to-game conversions (or, in this case, book-to-film-to-game conversions), especially when you’re bouncing off a work as influential as The Godfather. Even disregarding its literary beginnings, it’s a franchise that totally epitomises a generation of filmmaking ideals, a release that paved the way for Hollywood’s previously crumbling studio system to climb back to global domination. So there’s a pretty high bar to vault over. You’re also always, without exception, going to piss off a lot of people. People who herald the original version as a universe-defining, soul-enlightening masterpiece that should never, ever be touched by anyone. When you’re making a direct sequel to something within the same medium, it’s already problematic. When you’re porting it over to a different form entirely, you’d better be ready for reactionary dynamite.

The cynic in me would say that for every stick of TNT you’ll get a big wad of cash, so it’s not exactly likely to be at the top of Electronic Arts’ list of worries. It’s also, in the scheme of things, not that important for any reason other than this one. A slow, creeping, character-led drama was never going to lend itself to a straight conversion. That’s not a big-budget, mass-audience videogame release, and I’d wager that the thousands of people who complain that they wanted something closer to the films would be lying to themselves a bit. People want explosions, fights, and the ability to drive really fast and charge down civilians. I remember someone, somewhere on the internet in the run-up to Far Cry 2’s release, asking if you could “run over zebras and chop its legs off.” That’s what we want in our games, surely. Bloodbaths of cathartic violence.

So the roots aren’t important. Suffice it to say, like the original game, The Godfather II’s similarities to the source material end with the name and a few snippets of script where relevant. That’s not a problem. This is a game, not a film, and I’d argue that trying to incessantly borrow from movie-making conventions is only going to hold this interactive medium back from potential innovation. What is a problem, though, is where EA have deemed necessary to take the fiction. In a way, I’d like to give The Godfather II the benefit of the doubt and say it’s a postmodern pastiche on ASBO culture. I don’t think that’ll stick. So we’d better look at it like this.

In The Godfather II, you’re often encouraged to beat up women.

Now, going back on everything I’ve just said and referencing the source material for a minute, wasn’t there a rather large thread in the first part of the Godfather saga involving a guy we were supposed to hate for doing just that? Yes, Carlo, his name was: a despicable character who takes joy in abusing his pregnant wife. So imagine my surprise when an early compulsory mission took me to a small bar run by an attractive young lady, and the game told me her main weakness was being punched in the face.

That’s the problem with The Godfather II. It’s not that it betrays the source material something rotten, or that there’s anything particularly broken about it. It’s just so horribly judged, through and through. In this case, the judgement seems to have been that taking Grand Theft Auto IV, adding a sprinkling of the ever-popular RPG and strategic elements, and penning a new, “mature” storyline would work. And, in a sense, it kind of does. The plot remains somewhat engrossing, even if it does occasionally take an extended cigarette break while you idly blast through a series of repetitive, loosely-connected missions. The action, though uninspired, is solid enough, and zooming around in period cars isn’t completely horrible. The strategic elements, mainly involving monitoring your finances and employing new henchmen, are perfectly functional and a pleasant enough idea. Everything works well enough in isolation – which makes it even more impressive that the experience as a whole feels like a clumsy and mildly offensive attempt to ride on the back of other people’s success. It just doesn’t quite work.

Nothing melds together to create a cohesive experience. Even the premise is maddening. You play as a mafia don… who regularly goes around behaving like an imbecilic little shit, smashing everything in his wake and generally presenting himself more like a troublesome youth than a calculated proprietor of organised crime. You’ll view myriad cut-scenes that suggest otherwise, but as far as the actual game part of the game goes, it’s all about mindless thuggery. It makes no sense.

It could have been fun. It might be, for you. Like its influences, there’s still the opportunity to ignore the main plot entirely and go on a rampage around town, stealing cars and ploughing into innocent bystanders like you’ve just graduated from some sort of vehicular crime indoctrination facility. Grand Theft Auto, even within the hard-hitting maturity of the fourth iteration, presents these segments as a respite from the rest, a chance to flex your muscles in high-powered sports cars and giggle along to the radio as citizens shout perplexingly hilarious remarks at each other before you turn them into a big blob of red gloop. In The Godfather II, when you kill an innocent bloke who just happened to amble out in front of you, people scream and cower in absolute, tangible terror. Doctors rush to their aid and attempt to resuscitate them. Onlookers cry, “what have you done?” Christ. There I was thinking mindless highway tomfoolery was a laugh.

If you get past the gut-wrenching guilt, you’ll find a series of sprawling city maps to explore. Which is a nice idea on paper, until you realise there’s no soul or character to any of the environments. I couldn’t tell you about a single location in the game, except the admittedly exciting opening sequence in Cuba. It’s all a blur. You’ll regularly find yourself driving round in circles or missing your destination completely, since everywhere looks the bloody same. It’s all brown, lifeless and disengaging. There’s not a single speck of enchantment in it.

On a more obvious gameplay note, the real issue is that, despite the added strategic “depth”, it’s not always that important to fully utilise it. You’ll have to keep one aye on your money, but the whole game is remarkably easy, meaning the tactical planning and “levelling up” seem largely irrelevant. You can send your henchmen in to do the dirty work for you, and they’ll usually come out unscathed. That’s no fun. You can go in with them, raiding every business in town, and rarely perish – and even if you do get “hospitalised” during these missions, all the game does is spring you back to the last checkpoint. Everything’s such a stroll, and it doesn’t really matter what you do in the run-up to each task. It’s completely pedestrian, and horribly monotonous.

Still, there’s an odd sense of satisfaction when you’re dangling a member of a rival family off the roof of a hotel, waiting for him to get scared enough to submit to your demands. There’s something strangely invigorating about methodically kicking in every television set in an electrical shop before the owner agrees to cough up for protection. There’s still a nagging sense of competition between the immature, comedic violence and grown-up family tragedy, one that leaves a sour and decidedly uncomfortable taste in the mouth – but hey. Not bothered about that? Sure, buy the game. You might quite like it.

But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

5/10