Trigger Warning: Referencing.
(For those of you who have gone through university – this is a bad thing to be reminded of).

I’ll also need to explain a few definitions before I get my academic wank on. ‘Academic Wank’ kind of sounds like a vacuous catchy pop song, doesn’t it?

Right, I've done my bit, over to you guys.

So here we go:

University: a centre of learning that has faculties, schools, units.

Faculties: these are the umbrella topics, so Engineering, Law, Business, Computing, Arts, and Humanities for example. The faculty is what your uni degree is in, so I got a Bachelor of Arts.

Schools: the specific subjects within those faculties – Civil Engineering, Gender Studies, Tax Law, Family Law for example. These schools are what you major in, so I have majors in History, and Journalism, Media and Communications.

Units: these are the actual subjects you go and learn, which make up your majors. I did a unit in Radio Journalism, which contributed to my major in Journalism, Media and Communications, which then contributed to my degree in Arts and Humanities.

Undergraduate: Somebody who completes the bottom level of university learning. Generally most people. An undergraduate degree is a three or four (sometimes five) year degree that ends up being called a ‘Bachelor’.

Academics: the teachers and staff of a university that research things.

Academia: the fuzzy area that incorporates all university based researchers.

Discipline: the same as a school – it’s an area of study.

Theory: in this specific case, theories are beliefs that assist in the study of the subject.

Methodology: the way in which you study a subject.

I was working on a post for this site about how flash/browser-based games are showing originality far beyond that of their more expensive, branded cousins you buy in the store for up to a hundred bucks.

I never finished that article because I got so caught up in having to teach myself a new university discipline and plan what is, essentially, a thirteen thousand word article (about the length of a novella). The flash games article fell by the wayside as I waded through a miasma of half-baked theories, methodologies and concepts surrounding Game Studies.

My little library of reference material on video games now contains over eighty entries, of which I have read all of them. Including the psychology papers.

Yeah, yeah, killing sex workers is bad. We get that already.

You see, I’m doing my honours in Journalism, Media and Communication at my local university. By studying video games. Game Studies is a new field…a very, very new field.

Let’s put that ‘new field’ statement into perspective – to the universities, and specifically to arts and humanities, media studies and journalism itself is a new field. Journalism, as we know it, has been around since the early 1700s. Media Studies looks at print, radio, television, magazine and internet journalism – areas that have existed since the early 1700s, 1920s, the 1940s, back to the 1800s and then 1990s, respectively. The discipline of Media Studies is a baby in academia. My local university just began teaching public relations, which has existed and has shaped our world for decades.

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities (to many out there reading this, the equivalent is a ‘Liberal Arts’ degree) is not a very quick-moving beast. That is to be expected when you look at what it contains – philosophy, gender studies, history, and literature. Traditionally, Arts and Humanities tend to look backwards and study and learn from what has gone before. Units – those subjects you learn that then build up to a degree – can be quite modern. There is a unit being taught in Gender Studies examining Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Arts and Humanities tends not to be as modern as the units within them. This isn’t a fault, it’s simply how they work – Engineering wants to make stuff, Law has to teach legal precedent of the here and now so those graduate are able to practive it. Arts and Humanities looks at what’s already been done. This isn’t bad. Just how it’s geared to examine stuff.

Game Studies looks at what is happening now. ‘Now’ being a relative term as in academia you will find articles published in 2009 about Ultima Online at the height of its power in the late 90s. Those Ultima Online articles? There’s a great number of them and they all look at the same game from about seven different angles.

Where Game Studies really falls over due to a critical miss roll is that it doesn’t have the agreed on set of tools that other areas of academia use to study the subject with. Those methodologies and theories that I mentioned in the definitions.

Damnit, I drop my methodology on my foot for +6 damage.

The field of game studies is fractured on these points. Yes there are theories and yes, there are methodologies. Both are coming out of the wazoo, to put it bluntly.

But Game Studies goes across so many disciplines over so many fields of study it is currently impossible to find one set of theories and methodologies to study video games. Even the most vaunted of the academics can’t figure it out. There has been a lot of academic discourse (*cough* blazing rows*cough*) at conferences about it. For a while, the entire field was split between two opposing theories, that of narratology vs. ludology (I won’t go into that argument here, instead look up Frasca’s blog on ludology http://www.ludology.org/). Since then, academics can only agree that we need a combination of both theories to study video games.

This is the problem – how to study video games. The ‘How’ hasn’t been solidified yet. And while I have to sift through papers written by academics in the field of Communications, Computing, Psychology, Sociology, Literature studies, Mathematics and Business, there is no way that we can call it its own field. To date, the industry hires people from all these disciplines to work in the field. Because every field has something to contribute to video games.

It may be that it is a case of too many chefs spoiling the broth. Or it may be a case of not enough chefs of the same discipline in the room. Or something else to do with chefs.

M(*&^%^$ing Chefs. F*%*^ng.

Until all interested parties can get under one banner in the university and can agree on how to study games, we won’t have a concentrated body of knowledge outside of fan run wiki’s on an industry that is bigger than Hollywood, exports culture from every corner of the globe to every corner of the globe and is present in almost every living room.

And that is a sad thing for those of us who love games, gaming and writing about gaming and games.

There are three ways you can judge Portal 2: as a game in the broader ecosystem, as a top tier release by Valve, or as a sequel to Portal. From this perspective it is by turns a rampant success, a solid game, and something of a disappointment.

The Portal 2 story starts from an inconvenient launching pad for its writers. The original presented an abandoned research laboratory in which an insane AI attempted to test a series of subjects to death, who was in turn destroyed comprehensively by one of the test subjects (Chell). It was a delightful, self-contained and above all closed story. Portal 2 opens with a quirky AI core with a British accent who goes by the name of Wheatley rousing Chell from some type of suspended animation. He has a plan to escape from Aperture, the research laboratory, which requires Chell and a portal gun. All goes well until they accidentally wake up GLaDOS who apparently wasn’t destroyed by having all her component parts dropped into a furnace, a fact which is never dealt with in a satisfying manner. A series of events culminates in GLaDOS being replaced by Wheatley as the AI in control of the facility, and GLaDOS being put into a potato. Wheatley promptly goes mad and drops Chell through a waste tube that terminates in the old, abandoned part of the facility.

Chell, occasionally aided by potato GLaDOS, then spends her time making her way up out of the old facility back towards the test chambers above. This period is narrated by the founder of Aperture, one Cave Johnson, a man who was clearly not a hundred percent in charge of his faculties.

Upon returning to the main facility, Chell and GLaDOS take down Wheatley, whose ineptitude is threatening the continued existence of the lab. Wheatley gets blasted into space thanks to a portal placed on the moon (yes, seriously), and GLaDOS decides it’s not worth the effort of killing Chell, letting her go. Fin.

All your old friends are back, no matter how inexplicably

In essence the cast in Portal 2 expands from GLaDOS and the silent protagonist Chell in the first game to GLaDOS, Chell, Wheatley and Johnson. The dialogue is well written, funny and does a good job of providing useful game information in the guise of banter. The problem is that this good delivery is like having Ben Kingsley read Shakespeare at a football game: while you can’t fault the quality of the performer or the writing, it’s just not appropriate to the setting. In the first game GLaDOS was introduced as a quirky take on the “safety first” educational videos everyone has seen at work or school. As the game unfolded, it became clear that the references to death and dismemberment were not because the setting itself was off-beat but rather because GLaDOS was insane. Combine an insane AI with the emptiness of the labs and the complete control GLaDOS had over them, and although it had comedic moments Portal also had a definite atmosphere of creeping horror.

From the moment the automated recovery voice wakes you and commands you to appreciate art, to the closing turret choir musical number, Portal 2 is a game whose only thematic aim is comedy. The few places where music is used, it feels like yakety sax would be more appropriate than the tension inducing electronic score that is there. The feeling of isolation, apprehension and abandonment is gone and the standing of GLaDOS in the video game villain pantheon is greatly diminished. I don’t have a problem with her becoming an unwilling ally but the revised setting of the game changes the context of her personality completely. With the exception of Chell, every character in Portal 2 is amusingly demented and indifferent to human life. Suddenly GLaDOS is no longer a delusional psychopath, she’s just another member of the eccentric family.

It’s not that the story is bad, far from it. For game writing in general, it is excellent and for a Valve game it is what we have come to expect both in quality and in the style of delivery. It’s just that as the sequel to what was one of the most critically and generally acclaimed games of the last decade, Portal 2 is too different in theme and atmosphere from the original.

New mechanics that also can kill you

At its core Portal 2 relies on the same puzzle solving mechanics as the first and adds just enough variety to keep it fresh;  lasers, light bridges, evacuation funnels, aerial faith plates, propulsion gel, repulsion gel, and conversion gel. Although this seems like a lot  of new mechanics to introduce, there is some degree of functional overlap with the propulsion gel and aerial faith plates, to the point that the two rarely appear in the same puzzles. Similarly, light bridges and evacuation tunnels serve more or less the same function in the puzzles in which they appear.

It is an example of one of the many subtle improvements have been made to  the gameplay that the sometimes infuriatingly slow energy orbs from the original have been replaced by instant laser beams. Even though both serve the same purpose of activating receiver plates and being able to take down turrets, the lasers provide instant feedback to the player on whether they’ve done the right thing. Having gone back to play the original after finishing the sequel, the jumping in Portal 2 feels more intuitive with regards to height and distance and the fall speed has been slowed down noticeably. Both tweaks reduce the necessity of fast reflexes and timing, thus focusing the gameplay more on figuring out the solution to the problem rather than implementing the solution. Despite the new puzzle elements, the way in which they are introduced means that it never becomes overwhelming to figure out which particular combination is required to solve a problem. Although I did get stuck a couple of times, it wasn’t on the same puzzles as my friends, so insofar as it possible to gauge puzzle difficulty I would say Portal 2 is pitched at a nice difficulty.

Then again, the first Portal had all the same sterling properties, and a few minor improvements should be the expected minimum for a sequel. The truth is that there seem to be a lot of introductory gel puzzles, and a number of situations where the actions you need to take are so obvious that it feels more like padding than a necessary part of the game. One of the great things about the first Portal was that it was exactly as long as its gameplay could bear; Portal 2 contains an hour or two of content that really doesn’t need to be there. The section in the old Aperture research facility especially feels as though it has been put together with length in mind. Despite the fact the area is falling apart and Chell has to find way just to navigate between the broken walkways, for some reason she still has to go through every single gel testing chamber to get to the exit.

Portal 2 looks great, but more thanks to art direction than engine quality

So, where does that leave Portal 2? It is well paced but maybe a little long, well written but perhaps not true enough to the original, good looking  but unmistakably long in the tooth. It is an excellent game and example of what AAA should mean to all studios, but it doesn’t quite live up to the lofty heights of its predecessor.

Bulletstorm (alternate title 2 – All Video Games: The Video Game) a People Can Fly and Epic Games joint, seems to riff on a lot of games in it’s lineage. You have a boot with which to kick dudes, as you did in Duke Nukem 3D. You can slow time around an enemy, Max Payne Bullet Time style. You get points for kills as you (realistically probably) did(n’t) in The Club. You will face wave upon wave of enemies, reminiscent of that Serious guy named Sam. The artistic design of the enemies will bring forth memories of Borderlands. The over the top weaponry on offer smacks of People Can Fly’s other FPS title Painkiller. Counter-intuitively, this melange of video game mechanics works to form a fairly cohesive whole, rather than the expected tangled mess of tired relics of a bygone era. Bulletstorm surprises in many ways, not the least of which is a realisation that didn’t strike me until I was a good quarter of the way into my playthrough; I expected to be wading through language’s sewer in search of fast-paced, addictive gameplay. Instead, I found that what I had assumed to be a swollen sack of testosterone, heavy with compensatory cursing and violence was instead a refreshingly fun, colourful and varied shooter amid a brown sea of Call of Duty titles and clones. Let’s collectively thank People Can Fly for finally helping Epic Games discover colour, am I right?

Whilst sliding around in the magnetic boots of Grayson Hunt, the player will spend the majority of the game on the abandoned tourism world of Stygia. The game opens with Hunt and his second in command, Ishi Sato brutally interrogating and finally murdering a bounty hunter that had been sent after them by their former commanding officer, General Sarrano. A short control-familiarisation tutorial later finds Hunt and his crew plummeting toward Stygia in their freshly damaged ship with Sarrano’s disabled capital ship hurtling groundward behind them. So begins the advertised skillshot-laden blood ballet you’ve seen in countless screenshots and preview videos. Shortly into the adventure, Hunt acquires an Energy Leash from a truckcrushed member of Dead Echo, Sarrano’s crack mercenary group. It’s the leash which provides access to the skillshots, rankings and weapon unlocks/upgrades that the entire game is built upon.

Killing mutants in Bulletstorm is both varied and fun. The long list of frankly ridiculous weapons available provide ample opportunity to utterly destroy any challenge thrown at the player, almost to the point of making the game too easy. On Normal, the only real challenge will be found during the major set pieces of the game, such as the huge mining wheel chase showcased in pre-release footage. These sections aren’t mechanically difficult, but the sheer volume of enemies that are present tend to require the player to get familiar with the order in which enemies should be dealt with. A lesson which can only be learned through checkpointing and repetition.

Instruments of wholesale slaughter are generously provided to you through the use of your stolen Dead Echo leash on Confederation drop-pods scattered liberally throughout the Stygian landscape. These pods allow you to spend the skillshot points you’ve racked up on ammunition and upgrades for your weapons. Every weapon in the game has an associated upgrade which provides an alternate fire option. These things are cah-razy. The Peace-Maker Carbine (PMC), the run-of-the-mill assault rifle ever-present throughout your adventures is worthy of a whole new level of respect once it has let-forth a charged shot upon an unsuspecting victim. 100 rounds of ammunition are discharged in a single shot, shredding any enemy unfortunate enough to stand in its path. Little more than a red-hot, flayed skeleton is left behind which soon crumbles to dust. This should give you some idea of the level of ridiculousness that People Can Fly have brought to the table. The Petetrator smacks of the stake-gun from Painkiller, except that this time around the projectile is a massive, spinning drill bit which pins enemies onto surfaces for gruesome/hilarious ragdollin’. (It would be remiss of me not to mention the fact that the skillshot associated with pinning a spinning enemy to the ground with the Penetrator is called “Break Dancing”.) Your arsenal is filled to bursting with many more weapons of this calibre (pun intended). I’m reluctant to list any of them here, however as some of the highlights of Bulletstorm for me were the discovery of their uses through simple and cathartic experimentation.

Skillshots bring a retro feel to proceedings by urging the player forward by the accumulation of points. Every single time the player downs an enemy they recieve points based on the skillshot performed. These range from Bullet Kick and Bullet Slide which simply require the player to kill an enemy in mid-air having kicked or slid into them, to more complex feats such as First In Last Out – “Get an enemy airborne, kill a different enemy, kill the first before he lands”, or Sausage Fest – “Kill an enemy using a hot dog cart explosion.” Each time one of these feats is performed, the title of the skillshot floats above the downed enemy in neon letters along with its point value. The player is encouraged to vary the types of skillshots they attempt by increasing the value of each skillshot the first time they occur – a fact more relevant to Echoes, Bulletstorm’s offline multiplayer mode. Echoes is a time-attack style mode in which players attempt to speed through a level in an attempt to rack up as many points as possible. Unfortunately it seems that all of the Echoes are simply sections of the singleplayer campaign sliced up into short 5-10 minute runs suitable for just such an endeavour. Honestly, unless you’re the kind of person that simply cannot rest until they reach the top of every leaderboard they encounter, Echoes won’t prove particularly attractive. Anarchy, the online multiplayer mode is Bulletstorm’s take on Hoard mode, introduced by Gears of War. Players are required to rack up a minimum point total before the round timer expires. Anarchy is less about surviving the onslaught as it is about ensuring that, as a team, the players gain points through the creative and liberal execution of skillshots. A small number of co-operative skillshots exist which also happen to generate some of the highest point rewards available. Unfortunately, my time with the mode was marred by lacklustre team-mates and fast-onset boredom. Like Echoes, Anarchy simply doesn’t have enough depth to keep me coming back for more. I should note that this is true for any of the Horde mode variants I’ve played to date. They always seem to boil down to a number of easy levels which lull you into a false sense of security, followed by sudden and absolute devastation at the hands of an exponential difficulty curve.

The humour throughout Bulletstorm’s campaign has its tongue buried firmly in its cheek. The story turned out to be more than the assumed thin veneer of plot, applied last-minute as an excuse to include a campaign/story option in the main menu. It certainly won’t win any awards for its narrative efforts, but it did work well to drive the player through the game. Many will find Ishi, your constant companion throughout Bulletstorm annoying. I however enjoyed his company. His stoic and loyal nature, constantly at odds with the cold and temperamental robotic augmentation acquired early in the adventure serves to lend an interesting conflict to what would otherwise be a bland party of two, sharing the same agenda and motivation. The protagonist, Grayson Hunt, shows an unexpected depth of character as he leads his crew to their assumed doom. He’s no John Marston, but at least he’s not just another silent protagonist, right? I think it says a lot that the writers were able to make a group of powerfully unlikable characters likeable over the course of a game which isn’t known or marketed for its writing.

At the end of the day, your enjoyment of Bulletstorm will come down to how much slack you’re willing to give its writing and dialogue. Either way, beneath it all is a shooter which begs you to play it. The fast, refreshing and moreish gameplay on offer stands at odds with the length of the singleplayer campaign, a deficiency only made more obvious by the uninspiring online and offline multiplayer modes. You should play it, but I’d suggest that you give it a chance to find its way to the sale table at your local game store.

Honestly, I assumed it was something of a mistake on Ubisoft’s part, even Steam tend to discount games to $1 rather than ‘totally free’. Equally, I assumed I would get an email some time this week saying “our servers were teh hax0rred, sorry but we can’t fulfill your order.” Instead, today I got this:

Last week, the Australian Ubishop site was showing that nearly all of its games were available for a 100% discount. This was obviously a systems error that has now been fixed.

As you were quick enough to act on this error, we would like to advise that Ubisoft will honour this sale at the full discount. We hope that you enjoy the games, and invite you to visit our website again to view our upcoming PC lineup, and our regular promotions.   Admittedly, they probably won’t be quite as generous as the one you have just taken advantage of…

This is better than I expected, so hats off to Ubisoft. As for the snarky “just taken advantage of…” I’d like to point out that the Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood download on the front page of the store is AUD$89.95 in the Australian store, and USD$49.99 in the US store (which converts to AUD$49.71 at the time of writing). So, Ubisoft store, let’s admit we’re all taking advantage of each other when the opportunity arises, shall we?

“I’m sorry sir, Mr Reed is unavailable. Can I ask who you are?”

“My names Sam Fisher,” he growls, “I used to work here.” So saying Sam pulls out two triggers and detonates the C4 he planted on the generators earlier, sending the lobby into deep orange emergency lighting mode.

Control is given to the player. At this point I was thinking what a good badass scene this was, then I realised I wasn’t sure where I was meant to be taking my gruff secret agent friend, and it was only as the security door rolled shut I realised I was meant to get through it before it closed. Restart checkpoint

Sam Fisher walks into a vast marble clad lobby occupied by a single receptionist sitting behind a desk capable of seating a dozen more...

“My names Sam Fisher,” he growls, “I used to work here.” So saying Sam pulls out two triggers and detonates the C4 he planted on the generators earlier, sending the lobby into deep orange emergency lighting mode.

This time I knew what to do, vaulted the desk and slid under the door, at which point a guard shot poor Sam’s face clean off. Restart checkpoint.

Sam Fisher walks into a vast marble clad lobby occupied by a single receptionist sitting behind a desk capable of seating a dozen more...

“My names Sam Fisher,” he growls, “I used to work here.” So saying Sam pulls out two triggers and detonates the C4 he planted on the generators earlier, sending the lobby into deep orange emergency lighting mode.

Vault desk, slide under door, EMP pulse to stun guard, break his neck. Wait, there’s another door I need to get to in time? Oh for the love of… Restart checkpoint.

Sam Fisher walks into a vast marble clad lobby occupied by a single receptionist sitting behind a desk capable of seating a dozen more...

“My names Sam Fisher,” he growls, “I used to work here.” So saying Sam pulls out two triggers and detonates the C4 he planted on the generators earlier, sending the lobby into deep orange emergency lighting mode.

Three more times I watched this scene. The first time it was an excellent introduction to the level, the second time it was passable, by the fifth it lacked impact. It’s a simple fix: put a checkpoint after the cutscene so that if the player fails the section, it goes straight into gameplay when the checkpoint restarts. It is bizarre oversights like this one that pepper Splinter Cell: Conviction, and left just enough of a bad taste in my mouth that it marred my enjoyment of what is for the most part a very good game.

The fifth game in the now venerable stealth series, Conviction picks up the story of all around American badass Sam Fisher more or less where Double Agent left off. Sam gets dragged into doing some work, discovers his dead daughter may well have been retconned back to life and agrees to help out his old Third Echelon friends dealing with a conspiracy which, of course, goes all the way to the top. One of the things I found strange about the story of Conviction was just how ready people seemed to be to provoke, wind up, and use a man who has repeatedly proven himself one of the most cold-blooded and efficient sneaky murderers in the world. That he doesn’t shoot at least two or three of his ‘friends’ in the first act, at least just in the knee or something, is a miracle.

Ubisoft have added a few narrative tricks in the game, which were touted heavily in the lead up to its release. Objectives are projected, bat signal style, onto nearby walls and buildings so as not to take the player out of the level. When targets are interrogated, the information they give up are projected in lo-fi cinema reels onto the walls of wherever the interrogation is taking place. For the first couple of levels this results in an experience where there is a seamless transition between scenes and information is presented in a clean, integrated fashion. From the third level or so onwards either the developers ran out of time or found it too difficult to do their exposition this way and for most of the game voice overs and cut scenes between levels are used to tell the story. They’re well done, but after the slick presentation of the start it is a let down.

Having objectives displayed in-game is a surprisingly slick addition

One of the hallmarks of Splinter Cell games has always been its stealth components, and although these are still present in Conviction, there are only one or two very small sections in which being detected will fail a mission. Being detected mostly results in all the guards being alert, which is no impediment to finishing the mission and allows Sam to use some of his new tricks. Whether this reduced focus on being a ghost during missions is a positive or a negative depends on your attachment to previous games in the series, but overall it does a good job punishing a lack of stealth without forcing the issue. Sam’s stealth abilities are standard fare for the series: he can crouch to walk quietly, hide in shadows, shimmy up and down drainpipes and hide behind cover. He can also silently break necks, pull guys out of windows to their deaths and drop like Batman from places of concealment in a move the game refers to as ‘Death From Above’.

That guy's probably okay. It's only two levels up.

The game renders in black and white when Sam is in shadow to indicate his invisibility, and a giant red circle appears in the middle of the screen when an enemy detects him, so it is simple enough to track stealth. It is a lot more difficult to tell when a certain action will cause a guard to sense something is amiss. For the most part the various guards, mercenaries and assorted villains behave as you would expect or perhaps a little more stupid, which is fine. However every so often shooting out a light directly above a guard’s head will go unnoticed, other times flicking a light switch will cause five guards three rooms away to start cursing like pirates.

Because of their focus on stealth, the early Splinter Cell games in particular implied that Sam Fisher was a genuine badass, but when he was forced into a gunfight it became clear he wasn’t sure which end of the gun to use. The third person action shooting is still very poor, but it has to be to make stealth a better option than running and gunning. Conviction addresses this discrepancy by adding two very nice new gameplay mechanics: last known position and mark and execute. Last known position works by displaying an outline of Sam where the bad guys believe him to be. They then flank and shoot until either they re-spot Sam or a quite long period of time passes. Mark and execute allows you to mark targets by tapping the right bumper, up to five depending on the weapon in use. Performing a melee kill charges the execute bar, which is drained by tapping Y. Tapping Y causes Sam to one shot kill every bad guy marked, making it an excellent way to clear rooms quickly.

See dude. Kill dude. It's the Sam Fisher way.

I’m not sure if it’s because of the Michael Bay-esque escalation of the plot or because of the inevitable higher polish on the earlier levels, but in the last third of the game feel more as though it belongs in something like F.E.A.R, and not just because the levels take place in a series of abandoned office complexes. Conviction is a stealth action game, not an action stealth game, and these corridor shooter sections are an exercise in frustration because the aiming is not accurate enough and the responsiveness not high enough for high paced shooting. Often it boils down to killing a wave of enemies, waiting to die when the next wave show up to see where they come from, and repeating.

Unlike Double Agent before it, Conviction is a game with no moral grey areas, or at least Sam is happy working in the grey areas and redecorating them red. The sole exception to this is a binary choice made at the very end of the game. I won’t spoil it except to say it involves killing somebody. Considering the number of people Sam Fisher has killed to that point in the game, the suggestion that he would have some personal struggle over killing the person in question is laughable. As a result it only has the impact of determining which 10 point achievement gets unlocked. I recommend choosing one, restarting the checkpoint that starts close to the choice, choosing the other one and get both the achievements for a few moments work.

Splinter Cell: Conviction was never going to be a bad game. It is a long running series that started with one of the most important games to come out for the original XBox, and has been skillfully managed by the team at Ubisoft Montreal over its various iterations. The question was always whether it was going to be a good game or a great game. In the end it is a good game with some great ideas that missed the critical final level of polish.

Addendum: There is also a co-op multiplayer mode which Jason tells me is very good. I haven’t played it so I can’t comment.

It all started off in a promising fashion, Patrick Stewart narrating some on screen illuminated text while the opening level loaded. A noble looking medieval guy showed up at night in the rain in a small town, cue werewolves. A few well placed on screen hints told me that X was light attack and Y was heavy, just in case I’d never played an action game before. I slapped a few wolves around with my whip, then a big wolf showed up, and I got to learn about quick time events. After about five minutes it was over. I was looking forward to some hacking and slashing in a nice setting with some pretty graphics.

Want to see some combat? Yeah, so did I.

Then I learned the truth; this was not a quick opening gambit tutorial level, it was indicative of the structure of the game. Short levels which always felt as though I was just getting into the swing of them as they ended, followed by exposition which said very little in very long passages. Patrick Stewart would talk for a few minutes, then a cut-scene would go for as long again, then I would be able to whip a goblin or two before the game decided that it didn’t want me getting overstimulated by the bright colours.

Then there was the weird over world map. Every time I finished a level it showed me the completion percentage, secrets found, enemies killed, MacGuffins MacGuffed. It became unclear whether I was meant to be following the epic tale of evil forces and love lost set in a Celtic-Christian mythos or trying to get my initials on a high score board. I am not completionist in the slightest, and I don’t have that gotta catch ‘em all urge that afflicts so many gamers. Seeing a chest in a level that I can’t open until I complete another ten levels and then have to come back just to open said chest is not a motivating force for me. To me it foreshadows either that the developers felt the game was a little short and thought that adding some collectibles would help, or they think it’s good game design to make someone backtrack. Either one is a bad outcome for me.

I remember this part. It was just before a level ended

Castlevania is not a terrible game, it’s not even a bad game, it’s just completely failed to engage me. In fact it felt like the developers had done everything in their power to prevent me from engaging with the core gameplay. Which is a pity because the gameplay itself was on the delicate edge between fun and challenging and the audio and visual presentation was immaculate. I’ll probably go back to it at some point later this year when things get desperate and I need my third person action fix, at which point I will wax lyrical about the boss fights, combo system and the bizarre, non-sequitur rune covered unicorn that shows up to taxi you around. Until then I just can’t be bothered wading through the dross.

Alan Wake

Tense is a good word to describe Alan Wake. Those of you that know me are aware that when it comes to scary games or movies, I wear the little girl pants. Luckily for me, Alan Wake was creepy enough to take me out of my comfort zone, but not scary enough to have me remove the disk before getting a single achievement. I’m looking at you Dead Space. Fun story, interesting light-centric combat, solid gunplay, average voice acting and atrocious lip syncing.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

This game is absolutely what we have all been waiting for from a Batman game. The melee combat on display is some of the best to date. It is also one of the best looking examples of what the Unreal 3 engine can do. POW! BAM! BIFF! OOF!

Call of Duty: Black Ops

I can say without a shadow of a doubt that this is absolutely a Call Of Duty game. If you’ve played any of the Call Of Duty releases over the past two years then you pretty much know everything there is to know about CoDBlOps. Fun if you like CoD, buy it when it’s cheaper.

Costume Quest

Great character and core idea, very Double Fine. Lacks a certain, Schaferyness though. The basic combat mechanic becomes stale quickly as the only variety comes from the costumes that you choose and acquire during the game. Ameliorated by the short campaign. Fun, worth picking up if you’re a Double Fine fan.

Fable 3

I love the Fable series. I adore the brevity and character that they achieve with Albion and dearly hope that Lionhead can get there again should Fable 4 ever see release. Fable 3 was the biggest disappointment of 2010 (video game wise) for me. The last portion of the game was an absolute waste, only fans of the series need apply. Also fans of pressing and holding buttons and watching the same interaction animations over and over.

Fallout: New Vegas

Yes. Play this game. It’s not that buggy any more, we promise! The best of the series to date, as long as you’re not one of the die-hards that can’t stand what Bethesda did to your beloved isometric RPG with their first-persony shenanigans. Development of this particular entry fell to Obsidian Entertainment, headed up by Chris Avellone and Feargus Urquhart (best name ever) the original designers of Fallout 2

Fruit Ninja

I S-ranked this on my Windows 7 Phone. Yeah, that’s right. All 200 points. Aw yeah.

Just Cause 2

Do you like grappling bad guys to the back of Harrier jump jets and taking off with them flailing behind as you fly? Yes you do. This game is essentially like having your cake and eating it too, then blowing it up with a rocket launcher while skydiving off the top of a twin-blimp-supported flying whorehouse.

Mafia II

I got this recently for cheaps during the Steam holiday sale. It didn’t review well and I can certainly see why as bugs, poor scripting and design choices mar the experience. Luckily for me, I was a huge fan of the original Mafia and it seems that that fandom is keeping me coming back. I do love firing tommy guns at whatever while wearing a trench coat. Also, you can totally run red lights now. Just don’t break the speed limit.

Mass Effect 2

This game is one of the reasons Imperfect Pixel got it’s start. A true water-cooler game for us. Coming into work the next day after an evening of Mass Effect 2 to discuss it was almost as much fun as the crazy space-opera antics of Shepard and his rag-tag crew of misfits and also that annoying bald chick. My #1 game of 2010 (more on that later).

Poker Night at the Inventory

Telltale Games, makers of fine episodic adventure games continuing our most beloved franchises in Monkey Island, Sam and Max and most recently, Back To The Future made a new game! “Oh really? Which fantastic series are they working with now? Or are they perhaps doing something first-party a la Nelson Tethers – Puzzle Agent?” I hear you say.
“Nope. It’s a poker game. It’s got TF2′s Heavy, Sam of Sam and Max fame, Strong Bad and Tycho from Penny Arcade in there. It’s alright. Not a super deep poker simulator, but the character interactions are worth the $5 entry fee.”, I reply.
“…” you say, your mouth agape.
I nod, sagely.

Red Dead Redemption

Cowboys? Check.
Horses? Check.
Guns? Check.
Rootin’ tootinin’? Check.
Rippling equine musculature? Check.
Fantastic writing? Check.
Memorable protagonist? Check.
Euphoria engine? Check.
Incredible soundtrack? Check.
My #2 game of 2010? Check.
Worth your money? BIG CHECK.

Rock Band 3

The best rhythm game on the market. A mind-boggling amount of awesome DLC. Prepare to spend a lot of money.

Shank

If you like playing games which endorses the stabbing of multitudinous dudes, then I suggest you go get Shank on XBLA or Steam. A pretty thin story and repetitive gameplay keep this out of most people’s top ten lists. Worth picking up on sale for the art style alone.

Splinter Cell: Conviction

Third Person Badass Simulator. There are only two games that I’ve played through twice in their entirety immediately after finishing the first run during 2010, Conviction and Mass Effect 2. The new direction for the franchise and the addition of the I-Win button potential of the Mark and Execute feature in Conviction were a gamble for Ubisoft. In my opinion they paid off in a big way. My #3 game for 2010.

Supreme Commander 2

SupCom2′s detractors refer to it as a faster and shallower version of Supreme Commander. Considering my major complaints about SupCom were that it was too slow and too deep for this powerfully average RTS player, I said bring it on! Then I played it for a couple of hours and forgot about it. Says a lot, really.

The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom

A charming, beautiful and challenging independently developed XBLA title. The title music will get stuck in your brain in a good way, while the puzzles simultaneously destroy it. Not for the temporally-challenged.

Torchlight

Click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click. Yessssssssssssssssssss.

For whatever reason, the admittedly surprising inclusion of multiplayer in Brotherhood was the main thrust of the advertising leading up to the game’s release. This meant that when it was released many people, myself included, were very (pleasantly) surprised to find that it in fact included a sizable singleplayer component that I’m here to tell you is the best of the series to date.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood would have been better served by being titled Assassin’s Creed 2: Brotherhood. The game picks up directly following the events of AC2 and returns to the world of renaissance Italy and Ezio Auditore da Firenze (I pronounced that with a flawless Italian accent, trust me). In this instalment, Ezio and the Assassins are basking in the glory of their recent victory over the Borgia by relaxing at Monteriggioni when they fall under attack by the new primary antagonist Cesare Borgia. Monteriggioni is razed forcing Ezio and the other Assassins to flee. Ezio chooses to travel to Rome, the centre of Borgia and Papal power to rebuild the Assassin order and break the Borgia’s hold over the people of Rome. Meanwhile in 2012, Desmond Miles and his crew of modern-day Assassins are attempting to find the location of the Apple that was hidden by Ezio centuries earlier by scouring Ezio’s memories, locked away in Desmond’s DNA.

Returning to the world of Renaissance Italy and Ezio was initially surprising, but eventually welcome. A significant amount of work has gone into both, enough that it would have seemed a waste to have left it behind for a new time period so soon. The reuse of the engine and a lot of the underlying technical architecture has allowed for a relatively short release schedule, while avoiding the necessity of day-1 bug remediation patches we’ve come to associate with yearly releases.

The result is a beautifully realised interpretation of the City of Rome circa 1499. All of the landmarks that you’d expect to see in Rome are present, the Colosseum, the Pantheon and multitudes of aqueducts all make an appearance. The player is now able to purchase these landmarks, along with the various stores throughout the city in an expanded version of the villa upgrade minigame from AC2. All of these purchases increase the amount of money that is generated for Ezio and deposited awaiting collection in one of the many banks scattered around Rome. If you found the villa upgrade minigame in AC2 frustrating, you’ll be just as frustrated (if not more so) by it in AC:B. The building purchase locations are legion. However the inclusion of purchasable sewer entrances provides a much needed quick-travel system to the proceedings allowing Ezio to cover the vast distances of the largest city in Assassin’s Creed history. Travel time is also ameliorated by the inclusion of horses within the city walls. A cue lifted almost directly from Red Dead Redemption (by the developer’s own admittance), Ezio can now summon a horse to his location by simply whistling. The horse animations and controls are significantly improved over previous titles, but still leave something to be desired when compared to RDR’s implementation.

Ezio’s arsenal has also been expanded to include a crossbow, poison darts, and the ability to sheathe and carry heavy weapons. To complement the additional weaponry, the combat system has seen significant change. One of the major complaints levelled at the previous two Assassin’s Creed games was the fact that the combat was easy, a simple and tedious matter of waiting for an enemy to attack you and mashing the counterattack button. In a somewhat counter-intuitive move, AC:B’s counterattacks have been made even more powerful. Now, upon successfully killing an enemy, the player can use the right thumbstick to select the next target and hit X to perform a one-hit-kill. These can theoretically be chained indefinitely as long as the player can manage attacks vs counter attacks, as any hit will cancel a chain mid-progress. No longer is the combat in Assassin’s Creed a passive, cinematic-only affair. The combat looks incredible and has a level of depth which requires the player to concentrate on their enemies in order to predict their incoming attacks.

These skills can be honed to a hidden blade’s point in the new VR Training feature which fits nicely into the Animus contrivance. Challenges are put forth for the player to complete which include chaining attacks together, stealthily navigation and assassination and quick traversal. The player is rated upon completion of a challenge and issued with a bronze, silver or gold completion award depending on their performance. While not as much fun as performing these actions in the game world itself, the VR rooms provide a risk-free chance to practice using Ezio’s various abilities in a quickly repeatable environment without the player needing to seek out particular configurations of enemies for themselves.

It is also possible for the player to exit the Animus and roam about the environment as Desmond, complete with his shiny new Assassin abilities that he has learned from his ancestors. Unfortunately, aside from some somewhat interesting interactions between Nolan North, Kristen Bell and Danny Wallace it’s a forgettable addition. Emails are sent back and forth between Desmond and the other characters, but they are mostly inane, not unlike the all-staff emails you receive during most work days.

By far, the single greatest addition to the game is Ezio’s cadre of Assassins that can be called on at any time to assist in his fight. A quick tap of the left bumper will see one to four assassins emerging from the closest rooftop, doorway or hay bale ready to perforate any hapless guard unlucky enough to be in Ezio’s way, punctuated by the sound of an eagle’s call. These assassins get their start as career-murderers by being rescued by Ezio from some terrible fate wrought by the Borgia. With little left to live for, they throw in their lot with the assassins hoping for training and eventual retribution. These trainees gain gear and abilities through the completion of tasks given to them by Ezio. At any time Ezio can visit a pigeon coop to view the currently available missions and assign them to trainees for completion. Each mission comes with a financial, experience and (sometimes) material reward. The XP is split between the trainees that were sent on the mission meaning that progression through the ranks will be faster if you send fewer trainees, but will subsequently be more likely to fail. The florins earned will be deposited in the guild’s coffers for Ezio to withdraw later. I never found the mission system to be particularly difficult. In fact, throughout the course of the entire game, I only lost one trainee due to overestimating their combat ability against Borgia heavies in Rome. My trainees didn’t fail a single mission that I sent them out to do via pigeon.

This is something of a defining feature of the Assassin’s Creed series as a whole. The games aren’t really that difficult. They focus instead on being cinematic, flowing and open. The addition of kill chains, more one-hit ranged weapons and a detachment of trained killers bound to an I-Win button all lead me away from classifying Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood as a Third Person Stealth game, rather considering the direction Ubisoft seem to be taking the AC and Splinter Cell franchises, I would prefer to refer to them as Third Person Badass Simulators.

So, against my protestations within the below paragraphs, I have had to play the game twice from start to finish with a reviewers eye (that makes three times in total – the first time as just a gamer, the next two as a reviewer).

Sadly, the more attention you apply to Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent the weaker it begins to seem in comparison to other games within the puzzle adventure genre.

Nelson Tethers is possibly the least sexy FBI Agent around.   His entire realm of expertise is to solve puzzles – puzzles that threaten the fabric of the United States of America (which, as you can imagine, is not a common occurrence).  He is the one and only Puzzle Agent, even though there is an entire section of the FBI dedicated to verifying his answers.

At the beginning of the game, Agent Tethers has finally got himself a field posting, out in Minnesota – a sleepy town called Scoggin, where an eraser (Australian: rubber) factory that supplies the White House has been closed. Agent Tethers must figure out why this has happened, what has happened and who is behind all this  – through solving puzzles, talking to the townsfolk and careful, considerate and above all meticulous investigation.   Then, you can go cry in a corner.

Because it gets worse.

By the end of Puzzle Agent, I would frankly take on a Fallout: New Vegas super mutant with nothing but a rolled up newspaper, jumping on its shoulders and whacking it on the cheek screaming ‘Bad super mutant, always, always go in the litter tray’ while it tries to fly swat me with a ripped up fire hydrant, than have to deal with the big bads in Puzzle Agent.

Or have to go through the game again (which, as mentioned above, I had to).  This isn’t due to the game itself being terrible, it has more to do with the game being a brilliant and enjoyable diamond the first time around that will lose most of the shine the second time around.

Notably, nothing is terrible in this game aside from the gameplay – the story is brilliant, but the whole is struggling to be greater than the sum of the parts when it comes to Puzzle Agent.

Reviews abound comparing Puzzle Agent to the Professor Layton series of games on the Nintendo DS.  I can say both are quite similar, however there are some marked and notable differences between the two.

Both series (this is TellTale Games, after all – with the production values and talent involved, you can be certain Puzzle Agent will become a series) have a structured narrative-puzzle-narrative-puzzle style to them, with optional puzzles plentiful and never far away.

Puzzle Agent falls flat in this key area of puzzles.  Each puzzle within the game falls into a rough category of spatial awareness, logic puzzle, brain bender, rotating tiles or pathway puzzles.

Some puzzles are ridiculously easy, some are mind numbingly hard.  The first problem for Puzzle Agent is the placement of the hard puzzles within the narrative.  I’m married to a puzzle-holic math/science high school teacher (who clocks very hard Sudoku’s without blinking) and yet non-optional puzzle number two had us both stumped for a good twenty minutes (Author: interesting to note that this was the first thing to be changed in the update recently – oddly, by rotating the puzzle 90 degrees, the difficulty level was reduced significantly).  The final puzzle had us stumped for three minutes, but only due to a vague and ambiguous hint that we spent more time figuring out the meaning of than the puzzle itself.

Puzzle Agent is shocking and amateur in regards to consistency.  Some puzzles are poorly thought through, others make no apology for being so simple you don’t know why a big fat ‘I actually need to do this one???!?’ button wasn’t included on screen and others will make you shriek and pull your hair out.  Some hints give away ¾ of the puzzle, other hints will cause you to second guess everything due to their lack of clarity.  While most have been cleaned up in the update (that was obviously crafted from player feedback) there are still messy points that detract from the overall feeling and nuance of the game.  With a game that relies so heavily on atmosphere and the creation of suspense, niggly things remove the enjoyment and tension that everything else requires it.  With puzzles being the only form of gameplay, you can see how something powerful on story but lacking in this key area can cripple replay value, especially with a lack of variety in the style of puzzles.  A little more imagination and this could have been a top notch game, rather than a weird jig saw that doesn’t quite work in some cases.

What holds Puzzle Agent together is everything else.

The self depreciating/self aware humour that is a permanent companion through the game really strikes a beautiful chord.  From the FBI puzzle answer verification screen each time you submit a puzzle solution (including the collaborative tally of taxpayers dollars spent on each attempt flashing on screen) to the self awareness of the protagonist questioning why everybody in the town is obsessed with puzzles, the humour is a welcome part of the game and an aspect that, without, Puzzle Agent would not nearly be as good as it is.  Plus, it happily breaks the ongoing tension that slowly creeps into everything.

The artwork, by Graham Annable and based on his Grickle Cartoons, is simply gorgeous.  Characters almost seem like cardboard cut outs, with the rough pencil/sketch hand-drawn style exquisitely showing how much love and attention has been given to everybody and everything in this game.  Standing still, the characters look crisp and clean – but when moving closer to the screen, the edges pixelate in a way that you know has been deliberately designed.  Their movements are clunky, but again, like Machinarium, the effect in Puzzle Agent is one of deliberately chosen artistic direction, rather than laziness.

The voice acting is good.  Well, we’re not talking a chatty serialised magnum opus such as the Legacy of Kain series (in which theatre veterans were hired) – the voices do the job, and they do it well.  Some characters (I’m thinking specifically of one major character) seem overplayed and hammed up – until one crucial point in the storyline where afterwards the voice sounds so sinister and threatening that you involuntarily shiver whenever you hear the character start speaking from off screen.  It is testament to the story that such a change can occur in your perception of a character, without the character changing one ounce.  However, that character and perhaps one other stand out – the rest of the voices are simply there.

The script and the art of the story in Puzzle Agent show absolute brilliance.  When you can meld puzzles so completely with creepiness, psychological strain with overtones of flat out horror and then couple it with a constantly building tension – you have done damn well at the story.

The narrative arc is such a glorious piece of work that, upon finishing, the player has moments where everything makes complete logical, horrific sense.  Looking back, you begin to wonder why you hadn’t seen all the twists and turns the first play through.  This is where you must fight the urge to play Puzzle Agent again.  Like all good twists, appreciate it the first time but don’t go back to play again.  The ending has been ostracised in other reviews.  I can say only this:  after watching the ending, try to tell me that this isn’t some big set up for an ongoing personal story arc for Agent Tethers.  Even if it does involve massive doses of the heebie jeebies.

The writing has been spearheaded by Mark Darin, who cut his chops on earlier TellTale game series like the Monkey Island and Strong Bad series (he is also credited with writing some of the CSI video games, but I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt and ignoring that, as I hope he will in later years).  As the Project Lead, Mark Darin has obviously commanded everything with a cohesive vision. From the wry self-aware humour when Agent Tethers has to goad a diner into letting him solve a puzzle for the third time (even though the diner has had his problems fixed on the first solving and is annoyed at having to bugger up his beetle collection yet again) to the magical, mystical point where you realise there is no comparison with other games in this genre as you quietly and completely sh$t your pants out of sheer fright.

What?

Oh yes.  Dear God, Yes.  Including where the bullets end up.

(As an aside, don’t play Puzzle Agent with your kids, unless you want them to have nightmares.  I cannot underline this enough.  Puzzle Agent is for, at the youngest, mid teens.  Just because the main gameplay is solving puzzles does not mean there is no violence or adult themes to be found in here).

Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent is a puzzling game.  Some parts are beautifully crafted, others seem rushed.  Like a jigsaw puzzle that is missing a couple of pieces, if you can ignore some issues, you will find a brilliant four or five hour distraction that will let you appreciate how story and art can override bad puzzle and gameplay design.  One can only hope that they improve the series as it continues, because the first game is only just landing above average – and when you have other quality entries into the genre, improvements need to be made quickly if a unique entry is to continue being produced in puzzle adventures.

Why nobody has melded horror (or at least adult level creepiness, including a psychologically traumatised Where’s Wally character whose brain you have to rewire) with puzzles before in this style is beyond me.  After Puzzle Agent, however, I’m never looking at a stove pipe the same way again.

The story is based on Journey to the West, a traditional Chinese story anyone who was a kid in the late 80s would know best in the form of the 1970s Chinese television series Monkey Magic. Apparently Monkey Magic is more of an Australian phenomenon than anything else, so a lot of American players might simply pause and appreciate the re-telling of a traditional story in a new post-apocalyptic science fiction setting. In Australia, however, we will stop every so often and say “teehee, it’s sci-fi  Monkey Magic. The nature of Monkey was irrepressible.” And then be somewhat put off by Tripitaka being more bared-midriff steampunk chick than prepubescent Buddhist monk (admittedly a prepubescent monk played by a woman, a confusing situation for a growing young lad watching the show).

The story goes something like this: Monkey and Trip are on a slave ship which crashes for unknown reasons in the ruins of post-apocalypse New York. Trip uses one of the bands used by the mechs to enslave their victims to enslave Monkey. She can control his moves, talk directly into his brain and if her heart stops beating he dies. Monkey has to get Trip back home. Cue adventures. The story takes some gentle curves which propel the action along nicely, although I found the ending to be a bit of a predictable twist. The quality of the story in this game is not in its arc, but rather in the scene to scene interactions between the characters. Serkis’ Monkey is nuanced and understated where he could have easily overshot into a caricature. Lindsey Shaw’s Trip is better than I would have thought from her past roles. Even the comic relief, Pigsy (Richard Ridings), has some unexpected depths. It takes some doing to make a conversation between a cyborg pig fetishist and a man called Monkey about power cells or shield levels sound like anything but hackneyed mission exposition, but do it the actors of Enslaved do.

Why am I going on about the story so much? Two reasons, really. First it’s a big part of the promotion of the game; there is more space on the box dedicated to its Hollywood chops than what sort of game it is, or what it’s about. Secondly, a review of the gameplay is quite short if you’ve played games before. Observe: it’s the combat from God of War (complete with weapon upgrades and glowing red experience orbs) and the platforming from the cel-shaded Prince of Persia reboot. Competently executed, no doubt, and some of the shooting/puzzle combined sections are very good, but nothing that will change your understanding of the third person action genre. The only gameplay issue that annoyed me for more than a moment was the checkpoint system. Widely spaced checkpoints with clear save markers is fine, no indication of when a checkpoint has been reached is fine if the checkpoints are every couple of minutes. Checkpoints up to half an hour apart with no indicator that your progress will be recorded for the next session, however, is a crappy system.

Graphically the game looks great, a combination of lush green ruins and ramshackle survivor outposts that reminded me of Borderlands mashed into Uncharted. There are a few sections near the end of the game where the developers have pushed the engine maybe a few frames per second too far but it’s in the name of enormous mech battles, so it’s acceptable. There is, however, one decision in the presentation that I just don’t understand. Throughout the game, Monkey’s headband glitches, flooding him with visions of stuff (I’m not being carefully anti-spoiler here, the visions are of some pretty random stuff). These visions come in the form of photographs, and some live action video, which seems incongruous in an otherwise entirely CG game. When the big reveal comes on these visions, the decision seems an even stranger one (now I being all anti-spoiler). I’d like to think it’s a deliberate decision but it feels a little bit like they didn’t have time to model it all and just went with some stock photos instead. It didn’t take up much of the 7-8 hours I spent finishing the game, but every time it happened I felt like I was being ripped out of the reality of the game.

Overall I’d classify Enslaved as a game that would qualify as an overlooked gem if Namco had tried to release into the crowded holiday window. As it is, Enslaved is a pretty good game that shows how much difference genuine acting and writing talent can make to gameplay which isn’t earth shattering.

Final note: Below left is Nariko, the heroine from Heavenly Sword, Ninja Theory’s previous game. Below right is Trip from Enslaved. Just saying.