Man. Lazy man. Blog. Lazy blog updates. Same old story. Figured I’d keep up to date with my reviews. Voila!

June 10: The Sims 3
June 8: Velvet Assassin
May 22: Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures – The Last Resort
May 18: Bionic Commando
May 08: Phantasy Star Portable
May 01: X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Apr 21: Godfather II
Mar 23: Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars

Coincidentially, the new WordPress site preview link thingymojimbo doodad is ultra slick.

The symbiotic gameplay of the series remains virtually unchanged. You’ll spend half your time in the strategy mode, and the rest in luscious battle sequences. Combat is the visual spectacle of the game, a fair and realistic attempt to accurately scale military conflict into entertaining armchair-general form. Armies can be composed of up to twenty units, each of them potentially containing hundreds of soldiers. This feels epic on the battlefield. Movement is slow, so positioning is crucial, and being caught off-guard can irrevocably shatter morale. Thankfully there’s a pause button, so you can occasionally take a breather and plan strategies in dire moments. Useful, that, because the AI has been rejigged, meaning the computer is a little less ridiculously suicidal than it was in Roman and Medieval times.

The more the RTS genre progresses past the mould Westwood helped fashion, the fresher each subsequent update to Command & Conquer becomes. It’s almost unique now, a solitary entity extolling the hyperbolic virtues of rolling a squad of fifty tanks to an enemy base and watching everything explode between intermittent clicking. It’s big, and it’s silly, and now the Russians have a motorcycle decked out with a Molotov equipped sidecar. It’s called the Mortarcycle.

HAWX’s greatest failing is that, as ace pilot David Crenshaw, you never quite pull off the dazzling aerial moves that the various cinematics lead you to believe are possible: one in particular has an aeroplane pull a 180 degree flip in a millisecond, and unleash two rockets at a pursuing target. The whizzy futuristic technology goes down a treat, but it’s hard to fall for the illusion of being a maverick pilot when you’re cruising around a turning circle wider than the gap between reality and Tom Clancy’s personal version of it.

Levels in the single-player campaign start with a lull; the game rests momentarily on an almost frozen shot of the landscape. It’s an opportunity to bask in the game’s excellent graphics. Then a big, brash, metal drop pod collides into the ground and four squads of Blood Ravens bundle out. This is the meat and potatoes of the hefty structural change; as opposed to the army-from-scratch philosophy preached in the original, Dawn of War II has you marching around the cosmos with the same units. It’s like a big, intergalactic, superhuman, cybernetic version of the A-Team. Just without having to run from the law.

It’s ridiculous, of course. And with all the integration of 50 Cent’s musical empire – “featuring 18 exclusive new tracks” is given top billing on the back cover – there’s the perfectly understandable concern that the game will get lost by the wayside. It doesn’t, but the resulting title is one that can only boast of being average. The shooting, graphics and controls are all distinctively competent. Its scoring system works but contains no incentive. The game lacks any sense of flair or vision: its design ambitions must have been to create the most middling gameplay experience of all time. If it were a colour, it would be a perfectly pleasing, inoffensively functional grey.

The Lost and Damned exudes confidence alongside competence. It’s all the better for it. The developer might be occasionally accused of arrogance, but they’re producing material of such quality that they can get away with it. The Lost and Damned is intelligent to the point that parts of it are advancing storytelling in videogames. It is, however, juxtaposed against wanton violence, a desire to stir up controversy and shots of penises.

As an overall product, F.E.A.R. 2 is a decent mix of self-aware cliche, gratuitous and hyperbolic violence mixed with the occasional touch of subtlety and reservation. It’s a solid, dependable shooter that, in its best moments, gets your heart racing. Whilst the universe might be confusing and unfriendly for those who haven’t played the first game, the shooting mechanics should be satisfying enough for fans of the genre. And, let’s face it, that’s pretty much everyone with an Xbox 360. The ending isn’t as spectacular as the original’s, but it is just as abrupt. Which is again a shame. It couldn’t be more disparagingly abrupt unless it printed “F.E.A.R. 3, anyone?” onto the screen before the credits rolled.

Yet this shake-up of the Dawn of War formula is potentially contentious. The battles are fought on a smaller scale than the original, units are vastly more expensive, cannot be reinforced in great numbers and feel paper thin. Relic obviously want you to think about what you’re doing, as losing a few costly units is by no means a difficult task and can easily cause you to concede the game. You need to use a variety of units and put them in cover in a way that, again, mirrors but also intensifies the multiplayer experience that Company of Heroes started. Relic’s formula is becoming increasingly distilled and potent with each new outing, and whilst the system can initially seem inviting and friendly it’s not long before you realise just how much your brain has to take in and process to compete to any reasonable standard online.

If my description of the first DLC pack for last year’s stellar RPG reads like it’s merely a quest by numbers it’s because, to some extent, it is. Knothole Island’s creativity leaves much to be desired, with many of the more ingenious quests of the main game being much more interesting to play than the one’s offered up here. And in a particularly obvious attempt at padding out the length of the comparatively limited content, the village chief makes you endure pointless toing and froing to unearth keys needed to enter the aforementioned shrines in the first place. But perhaps I’m being too harsh: Knothole Island is home to three intricate, well-designed dungeons, and there are a couple of hours of decent, wholesome content and visual variety contained within.