What It Is

Ultimate Team 10 is this year’s edition of the incredibly popular add-on for the incredibly popular FIFA series. The game allows you to construct and manage your Ultimate Team by collecting player cards (purchased using in-game currency, or more Microsoft Points if you fancy) before taking them onto the field to face-off against the Ultimate Teams of other users.

Highs

Emperor’s New Clothes
Ultimate Team has undergone a bit of a facelift. Menus are easier (albeit not as easy as they should be) to navigate and – more importantly – the trading screens are a heck of a lot easier to use thanks a new in-depth search feature. Rarer players and cards are highlighted as such too, which means that you know when you’ve managed to pick up a good thing in a standard pack of cards. As far as presentation value goes, Ultimate Team is darned smooth.

Optionally Adept
A bunch of new options for managers have been thrown in, here. You can create multiple squads as part of your Ultimate Team now, meaning that you can have one 23-player squad consisting of all gold players, one that just features your Spanish players or even one that contains just rare players. This means that tournaments with restrictions (also new this time around) are easier to enter, as you can create a 1-Star rated team for example, and switch between that and your best team within three button presses. New training cards allow player positions to be slightly modified too, so if you’re a manager who loves playing the 4-4-2 but wants Ashley Cole at left-back when his card has him as a left wing back, you can re-train him so that he’s at home in the position in which you want to play him. This is a great addition, as I can remember getting said Mr. Cole several times over the course of my time with last year’s edition, and never having anywhere to play him. Players can’t be trained up to the maximum either this time around (thankfully) as training cards only boost a player’s stats marginally for a single game at a time.

Tournament-al
New “restricted” tournaments that only allow certain types, nationalities or level of player are now on offer, and this is a grand addition. Its all well and good ditching every player you get via the auction block, but what happens when you’ve got your perfect team together and they’re locked out of a tournament for being too highly rated? Now you have to think a little more about what you’re doing in order to put together the best team of players for the task at hand. On top of this, new tournaments for both offline and online play are to be released each week, for free. You can’t say fairer than that.

It’s All About Chemistry
The Team Chemistry system has been given a total overhaul. Last year, if your players were from different nations (even if they played for the same club, week in and week out,) your chemistry rating was dented. This time, players gain chemistry from playing alongside club team-mates, players of the same nationality, and even players from the same league, so you have more options in who to play where. On top of that, the chemistry earnt from players playing in their correct formation is dealt with a little more fairly. A defender who prefers 4-1-2-1-2 will play almost as well in any other formation with four players at the back this time around – which makes a lot more sense. There are also more chemistry lines, so all of your defenders link smoothly to the midfield, whilst your midfielders and wingers link nicely to the frontmen. Again, this provides more to think about when putting your team together, and is a great addition.

Lows

Broken Promise
You may as well disregard that previous section about chemistry, because when you finally get onto the pitch, the exact opposite of what you’d expect to happen occurs. Teams with maximum chemistry play like Rotherham United, whilst teams with low chemistry play like Manchester United. The effect is so great that teams and players that should be utterly outclassed by their opposition are in with a real chance of winning every match they play. Teams with great chemistry find that their defenders have to tackle average strikers four times in order to get the ball, find that their strikers are almost always shoved off the ball when battling with a defender, and watch as their players decide to slice more than their fair share of passes into touch. It’s taken thousands of forum posts and emails, but a week after release, EA have finally announced that they are “looking into” the problem. Whether or not they decide to fix it or ignore it by declaring that they’re done with any gameplay fixes (as they did with FIFA 10’s plethora of bugs) is another story, but at the time of this article, a massive portion of the game just doesn’t work.

Care in the Community
When playing online, you’ll find that a large percentage of matches take place against absolute idiots. The FIFA Community is not the stronghold of intelligence that its players seem to think it is, let’s put it that way. Do bear in mind that these are the same players that would rather not play unless they can use Real Madrid or Inter Milan online, and would never let it get out that they once played a match as a League One side. They’ll pass the ball around their defence for 85 minutes of the match, decide that using a neon blue ball on a bright green pitch would be a good idea (given that you can now use the ball cards that you collect as your default sphere of choice), refuse to play in anything other than their home kit, quit when you score a goal after five minutes, force you to watch all three replays when they score or go close and to top it all off, if you somehow manage to finish a match as the victor, you can expect an offensive message to come your way via XBL.

EA have taken steps to stop the quitters, although they may as well have not bothered. In essence, if you don’t quit, you get a paltry bonus to the amount of coins that you collect at the end of a match. By paltry, we’re talking maybe twenty or thirty. Now, considering that a “Premium” gold pack of cards costs 7,500, did EA REALLY think that thirty coins would make that much of a difference? I think not. And, to add insult to injury, quitters essentially have a new weapon in their arsenal in that if they quit, you have to replay the tournament round again. No easy route to the final this year, oh no! This time, you’ll have to earn it, say EA. Which is grand, but I’ve been leading in a tournament final no less than SIX times now, only to have the opponent quit and force me to replay. That essentially means that assuming that each match got to half time (which all bar one of them did) I’ve wasted more than half an hour in trying to complete what is essentially one twelve minute match, and still have at least twelve minutes to go.

Indeed, EA could have allowed me to play against my friends using my Ultimate Team. This would have reduced the problem somewhat, as I could have battled it out against my mates to see exactly who’s managerial skills were better. Can you do that in Ultimate Team 10? No. The reason is – and this is from an interview with the guys – because EA couldn’t work out how to make it fair to players that don’t have friends to play against, for whatever reason. They could have just allowed us to play “Friendly” matches that come with no coin reward and no loss of contracts, but no. That would have been too tough to think up, apparently.

The Loser’s Bench
In tournaments that only allow you to field a 1-star rated team, you’ll often find yourself facing a superstar striker or demon midfielder or two. The reason for this, is that the developers have decided to include your subs as part of the overall rating for your team. So, if you want Ribery playing in your first team, you just shuffle in five hopeless players to warm the bench, in order to balance him out. Surely, this shouldn’t be the case? A better way to do it would have been to only count the on-pitch players, whilst also preventing managers from substituting anyone in that pushes their team over the tournament limit as soon as the match kicks off. Lower-rated players do receive slightly more recognition when it comes to trading because of this, it seems – although that’s nothing but cold comfort.

Virtually Redundant
You can’t use your Virtual Pro in Ultimate Team. That’s right. The player that you’ve been building up since the game came out in November, JUST to use as a key member of your team, is now redundant. Virtual me, it was nice knowing you.

Field of Broken Dreams
On the pitch, you still get the same solid FIFA action, with some notable changes. The referee seems to get in the way of the ball a heck of a lot more and to be honest, that’s all he seems to do. Players will hack you, barge you and knock you off the ball unfairly, and the referee will turn a blind eye to it a hell of a lot more than he did before. This is fine and dandy, until you’re one down with a minute to go and are heading towards goal, only to be practically punched by the final defender, with your striker looking up from his remaining good eye to see that defender now lumping the ball upfield.

Single and Hating It
Offline tournaments are on offer in their legions, and this is a good thing. The only problem is that they are ridiculously easy to beat. My 1-star team didn’t concede a goal in the first four tournaments I played, whilst scoring 73. This is because the offline tournaments are all locked to specific difficulty levels. The first one is tied down to “Amateur” mode, which essentially means that the opposition can’t pass, can’t shoot and can’t tackle. When you do finally unlock a competition that’s at World Class level or above, you find yourself playing Brighton and Hove Albion and the like, so you win easily anyway. Playing these events is an utter waste of time, especially when the coins you’re rewarded at the end of each one are so few in number.

Value for Money

A lot of folks will be surprised at the harsh line I’m taking with Ultimate Team 10, given that it is half the price of most XBLA titles, and a tenth of the price of a new game. However, what you need to consider is that unless you get INCREDIBLY lucky with your initial offering of players, you’re probably going to need to spend a bit more to buy some cards to use and given that each pack only contains three or four players, you can easily spend the price of a retail game trying to build up your team. I am aware that this isn’t required, given that you can earn in-game currency by playing tournaments. Online tournaments will be impossible to beat with your default cards though, and offline tournaments are so soul-destroyingly easy that you’ll be begging EA to take your money and give you some better players to use online.

Overall

Ultimate Team 10 is nothing more than a collection of missed steps. Some utterly confusing decisions have been made during the development process that have essentially ruined what could have been an absolute must-have. As it stands, some new things work brilliantly in the management interface, but when you get out onto the pitch – online OR offline – there are so many problems that you’ll soon grow tired of trying to make excuses to play.

Whereas the likes of the superb Dance Dance Revolution focused on the positioning of your feet, Just Dance puts all of its attentions into reading the movements of your hands. Or one of them, to be more precise. One almost wonders if that was a conscious decision, as for a fair amount of the time, it doesn’t seem to work and, really, how could it? I’m no dancer, but if I’m told to replicate the movements of an on-screen avatar whilst holding a Wii remote in one hand, it makes perfect sense that the game will do better at realising that I’m pulling off a move using that hand, than the free one.

Let’s break it down. Halfway through one of the game’s tracks – JXL’s reimagining of Elvis’ “A Little Less Conversation” – you’re tasked with turning to the side and pulling off a teddy-boy style slicking back of the hair with one hand, with the other hand being down by your side, motionless. So, you turn, and do it with the hand that holds the Wiimote. Success! You are Elvis himself! Hot Dog! (Or whatever the kids say nowadays.) Then, you turn to the other side and do it with your free hand as the game asks, with the Wiimote now down by your side. More often than not – strange, I know – you’re adjudged to have failed this move.

Think about it just for a second. Obviously, if you’re dancing “correctly” and really getting into it, I concede that both hands should be at least moving a little bit. But, there are moves in the game where you’re specifically told NOT to move the hand with the Wiimote in it. Essentially, I could be flipping the bird with my left hand, whilst my right hand remains stationary, and the game is apparently going to judge if I’m pulling off the moves correctly. I can’t see how it would work, and that’s just as well because frankly, it doesn’t.

And this is quite sad, as despite its sparse options and a somewhat limited range of tracks, Just Dance is superb fun for the fifty percent of the time that it works. If you can completely ignore the scoring system, the game can be an absolutely cracking laugh that is sure to keep many a party going – once the alcohol is flowing or the kids have been jacked up on additives, that is. And that is all that Just Dance can claim to be, a party game, since the scoring is so unbelievably random that there’s no way that a single-player mode could support itself. Perhaps this is why the game can be played by single players, but there is nothing to keep them playing – no challenges, career modes or player paths – other than their own need to keep on going. Anyway, what’s the point of playing a game that simulates dancing, if you’re ignoring the scores? Surely that would otherwise be known as just…well…dancing. And you can do that for free.

The selection of music is actually not bad for a game of this type. The likes of the awful Rednex, the slightly better Technotronic and the indescribable Spice Girls all make an appearance, along with more modern acts, and Irene Cara. Quite why The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” – a pretty much unknown tune made famous by a relatively recent Family Guy episode – puts in an inexplicable bandwagon-riding showing, I don’t know. Wait a minute; this is a Ubisoft game, isn’t it? Are they not the same company that released approximately seven hundred different fitness games last year in order to exploit the Wii Fit craze? Ah yeah, they are. Now I’m up to speed.

Just Dance had the potential to be a relatively strong game, and blew it with a half-assed engine. Dance Dance Revolution is pretty much gone, and other dancing titles never even hit our shores so there’s a gap in the market, which is proven by Just Dance’s rise to the number one slot. You can’t help but wonder exactly how good or how popular Ubisoft’s “lifestyle” titles such as this would be, if they gave their development teams the chance to actually finish them, rather than hammering them out onto the store shelves at the rate of forty a week in yet another desperate attempt to fill the coffers.

Despite the fun that Just Dance does provide when it occasionally gets this right, or when you’re too drunk to care, there’s no way I can recommend it.

Which is why I was quite surprised at how solid Dante’s Inferno initially appears to be. Some will compare it unfavourably to Sony’s God of War series and, given the amount of – ahem – inspiration EA have taken from those games, that’s probably fair. But, given the continuous plagiarism by and of seemingly every blockbuster title to hit store shelves these days, you can’t really mark it down for that. Some will comment on the downright confusing cutscenes which, aren’t particularly impressive visually and ask more questions than they answer. Again, a lot of very good games have that problem too, so to mark it down for that would be harsh, too.

You play as Dante, who is on a quest to rescue his beau’s soul from being condemned to hell for all eternity. During your quest, you must enter each of the circles of hell, defeating the keeper of each circle in order to progress to the next. It doesn’t get much more straightforward than that. Some depth is added by the ability to boost your skills via two different talent trees, with abilities in one being unlocked as you perform “holy” actions, and abilities in the other becoming available when you’re a bit of a bastard. When Dante has worn down a larger enemy for example, absolving him of his sins will fill your “holy” meter, whereas ripping him in two will add to your “unholy” meter. This works well enough and once abilities are unlocked, you can purchase them with souls that you have collected from your fallen enemies.

Graphically, Dante’s Inferno is a tad hit and miss. Climbing a wall that consists of subjects which have been condemned for all eternity is impressive, but the fact that the game takes place solely in the depths of hell leads to a feeling of over familiarity as you move between levels. The development team can’t really be criticised for that, given that the storyline requires everything to look hell-like, but I’m sure that more could have been done to spice things up.

A few gameplay niggles rear their ugly heads too, and whereas it’s entirely possible to overlook some aesthetic problems here and there, I can’t be so generous with these. Dante has many standard action/adventure hero actions available to him, such as the ability to climb, shimmy and rappel over, under and around obstacles. The first rappelling section caused me to allow Dante to fall to his death no less than seven times, given that the velocity at which he launches himself off a swinging wire seems to be utterly random. On the eighth attempt, I managed to traverse the gaps safely, played through some relatively straightforward level sections, and was then presented with yet more rappelling “fun” which pretty much made me want to stop playing. Later on, you need to attack enemies whilst rappelling, and this leads to more torment.

Problems such as this are alleviated by the pure quality of the action on offer during the fighting sections. As new moves are unlocked, the action becomes more fun as you have an array of attacking options to unleash on your foes, as opposed to just a handful of relatively weak moves. When you’re being attacked by six drone characters and five of them stand politely back to wait for you to choose whether to absolve or punish their friend, you feel that something is lost, however. When you’re desperately trying to get to a health fountain in order to prevent your death, and you have enemies on your six, taking them down whilst defending against that last death-dealing shot is superbly intense, and any other way of doing things would feel strange anyway. So why make the absolution and punishment sections work in completely the opposite way?

Dante’s Inferno does contain several puzzles to pull the game away from straight hacking and slashing. Unfortunately, the majority of them are far simpler than they first seem, and the simple way is the only way to solve them. During the “Lust” level, you’re faced with a tornado, which needs to be pierced by a ball of electricity to allow you to get inside it. A machine which fires electricity is constantly running, and you need to throw a switch to alter its path in order to aim it at the tornado, with the only problem being that the door is only visible for a few seconds, and you’re quite far away from it. Flip the switch and swing across via an overhang with your extendable blade, perhaps? Or, maybe allow the electricity to charge your blade before hammering the tornado? That would be fun! No, the answer is to flip the switch and run. Funnily enough, you could take that solution and apply it to most of the puzzles in the game.

This is a problem because without workable puzzles, Dante’s Inferno is JUST a standard hack and slash title, albeit a shiny one. Tactics are rarely required, even against the bigger enemies, and a combination of block, attack, block, attack is usually enough to get the job done. They may have shoe-horned in a multitude of breasticles and more claret than you’d see in the stands of a West Ham versus Aston Villa match, but the development team would have been better served by putting more work into making a compelling gameplay experience. I mean, really guys, extending the gameplay by including ridiculous button-mashing routines in order to pick up health, mana or to open doors? EVERY SINGLE TIME? What were you thinking? Once is annoying. Four hundred times is enough to drive you insane.

When you look at the laundry list of problems and read the story synopsis that doesn’t really make you want to play, you expect something terrible. Truth be told, the game is incredibly good fun at times and there’s always a feeling that the next boss will be absolutely immense, and THAT is why you should keep playing. The problem with that is that you’ll be using that sentence relatively often in order to downplay the combination of problems that you’ve stumbled across. Given that the work that the game is based on doesn’t really lend itself to a sequel – unless EA decide to make the series up into an ill-advised quadrology containing some of Dante’s other works, of course – I very much doubt that we’ll see any of the problems ironed out. Dante’s Inferno is cracking fun, but it most certainly isn’t without serious fault.

All we can work out is that the “new” game is going to be little more than a point release or a licensing update to appease the requirements of a contract. It would be cruel to say that the latter was true in the case of SuperStars V8: Next Challenge, although I had a heck of a time working out exactly what they’re new improvements they’re going to be promoting in order to try and sell this new version.

The game is still – obviously – based on the relatively little-known SuperStars V8 series, and still features nine (plus two unlockable) tracks from that series, which generally focuses on the warmer climes of Spain and Italy. You’ll be bombing around Mugello, Monza and Imola in no time at all thanks to much-improved loading times which is a blessing, given that I could have loaded the game quicker myself by shouting out raw binary code at my console first time around. The interface is almost identical to that first game though, and whilst the front-end is hardly impressive or smooth, everything is never more than a button press or two away.

Car tuning has been cleaned up too, with the addition of preset car setups being a godsend for non-petrolheads such as myself. Switching to balls-out speed over feather-light handling is a quick and easy process now, although those with the inclination can go in and tinker manually with gear ratios and the like until their heart is content.

On the track, one of the most annoying aspects of the first game – the unfair and random penalty system – has been cleaned up considerably. No longer will you be penalised for being rammed across a hairpin bend by an opponent, although purposeful off-track forays that are designed to give you an advantage are punished by means of limiting your top speed for five seconds or so. The improvements are welcome here, although the penalty system is still far from realistic and to be frank, is barely effective when playing on anything lower than the highest of high difficulty settings, due to the ease of which you can just block opponents from passing you whilst your engine is limited.

There are still AI problems to be had elsewhere, too. When starting from the back of the pack, a relatively compelling and challenging experience can be had as you try to carve your way up through the ranks to obtain a podium finish. When you manage to land the pole position though, you’ll find that opponents that once were doggedly determined to not let you pass them will only really challenge you if you make a dire mistake. During my first season, I managed to grab the pole for the second race at Mugello and was around 4 seconds clear of my nearest rival by the time I had reached the first checkpoint on the first lap, before winning by almost half a minute. In the next race, I started from 15^th after putting in a below-par qualifying performance, and finished in 10^th after a real dog-eat-dog battle with Gianni Morbidelli. We must have traded 10^th and 9^th position at least fifteen times during the race, but that sort of challenge is completely missing when you start from anything like close to the front of the grid. This is alleviated by turning up the difficulty, but that gives you the problem of making those battles through the lower ranks something of an impossible task.

Improvements to wet-weather racing have been made though, with some impressive effects that are missing from bigger titles. When racing in the rain, continued rain means a continually wet racing surface, but if the rain stops, the track dries out more quickly on the sections where cars have been dislodging the surface water. This gives you a clearly visible racing line to follow, and affects handling greatly. Mastering the hundreds of minor transitions from wet to dry can be the difference between first and last when these weather effects are in play, as it’s quite easy to barrel into a corner on a dry section of the track, miss your line and end up spinning off as you clip into the wetter part of the corner. This is realistic, clever and superbly done.

Unfortunately though, that seems to be about it. I’ve mentioned the changes that I can see, and everything else seems to be practically identical to the original SuperStars V8 Racing that was released in June last year. The damage system is still way off, with cars refusing to flip and bumpers refusing to buckle in anything but the most minor way possible. You still have to race as one of the licensed drivers (which, to be fair, have been updated for the new season) and you can’t even do so much as enter your own name, let alone customise your vehicle visually or try to attract new sponsors to your own racing team. The improvements aren’t enough to recommend another purchase if you took the plunge last time, I’m afraid, but those new to the series may get a kick from what is a generally solid – if little lightweight and lacklustre – simulation.

Whilst the gameplay is clearly the first thing that’s been looked at this time around, there’s still no sweet spot to be found when it comes to playing MX vs. ATV Reflex.

The title introduces “Rider Reflex,” which is a system that allows the player to control more of the rider’s shifts in weight in order to make sharper turns or prepare for a bumpy landing. In essence, all this means is that you’re required to push both sticks to the right or left in unison, with the left stick being your standard steering, and your right shifting the rider’s weight. There is an advantage to be found when leaning back when climbing to the peak of a jump, or pushing forward when descending, but that’s nothing particularly new.

Also of note, is the deformable terrain, which looks superb. In every race you take part in, every tyre mark is preserved for the duration of the competition, meaning that muddier courses become more difficult to negotiate as the cuts in the surface get deeper and deeper. On some courses, this makes some corners incredibly treacherous, and you’ll need a good helping of skill in order to get round in one piece. That is, when you’re not relying on pure luck, which you’ll unfortunately need to do with alarming regularity. Often, you’ll be bombing along a straight section of the track, only to find that you’ve hit a tiny, invisible pit in the road, causing your bike to flip up into the air or spin uncontrollably until your rider hits the floor. This also occurs far too often on sections where steering is required, with the idea being that if your front wheel is off the ground – even by only an inch or two – when you input the command to steer left or right, the bike violently whips to either side, causing you to completely lose your course, and more often than not, hit the deck. This is realistic to an extent – the front of a bike will turn quicker when it isn’t in contact with the racing surface – but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t massively frustrating. If it happens during the race to the first corner, you can recover. If it happens when you’re racing to the last corner, you can’t, meaning that you’ve wasted a good ten minutes participating in a race that you may as well have not bothered entering.

If you can get past this though, MX vs. ATV Reflex is a relatively solid and challenging title. A fair few races are on offer in the game’s career mode, and whilst they don’t support the Rider Reflex development, extra vehicles such as buggies and sport trucks are also on offer as you progress. The menu system isn’t massively intuitive, and it would have been nice to have had more options as to where you start your career, rather than being locked down to a pair of must-win races, but neither issue is a game-breaker. One thing that does irk me though, is the randomness of the scoring in MX vs. ATV’s trick system. Sometimes a basic trick such as a Heelclicker will rack you up a massive score in the game’s Freestyle mode, whilst a perfectly executed Indian Air 360 followed by a Double Hand Grab will get you next to nothing. The next time around, the reverse is true, which is just bizarre. Getting an achievement for gaining a perfect 10 from the judges on my first attempt, after falling off twelve times in two and a half minutes was nice though, even if it made absolutely no sense at all.

The problem that the game faces is that, whilst not being as much of a simulation as this is, Sony’s MotorStorm 2 has done an awful lot of what is being attempted here already, and done it better. That game doesn’t include the Rider Reflex controls, and doesn’t have to in order to provide a solid and compelling experience. Rarely in Sony’s game will you find yourself cursing at the screen as your vehicle hits an invisible bump and takes twenty seconds to consider you as “crashed” during a fast-paced race through the jungle, but that happens more than enough in MX vs. ATV Reflex to make it strictly a rental proposition. Without that problem, the score would have been undoubtedly higher as there are some sweet graphics and awesome gameplay on offer here when the game manages to get things right. Some will get more mileage out of it than me – more power to them – but with the plethora of racing games on the market that are deserving of your attention and that don’t unfairly punish you for nothing, this ends up as an also-ran in my book.

This final draft has been read, passed to colleagues to appraise, re-read, re-drafted and – finally – published. This is how I feel about BioShock 2 – not the franchise as a whole.

You see, BioShock 2 is a fantastic piece of software. Had the somewhat groundbreaking first title in the series never existed, a few story sections wouldn’t make as much sense as they do, and we’d be missing out on that first introduction to Rapture, the underwater metropolis in which BioShock is set. However, we’d still be playing a fantastically solid, tremendously detailed and effortlessly enjoyable game that stands at the very pinnacle of gaming excellence.

Yes, BioShock 2 is fantastic. Slight touches to the game engine have been made to relieve some of the minor problems of the original title, and – without reservation – they work. The hacking tool is much easier to use when you’re hacking during combat, for example, and you can even pick up a weapon that allows you to hack more pressing targets – such as cameras and turrets – from afar. New weaponry has been thrown in, with the highlight being the tremendously fun spear gun. When one shot is enough to kill an enemy, the spear gun will quite literally hang them out to dry until you head over and reclaim your spent ammo by prizing it out of the fresh corpse. It sounds gruesome and – to an extent – it is, especially when you throw Roman Candle-style explosive spears into the mix.

Fans of the series showed concern over playing as the Big Daddy character from the first game this time around and unfortunately, they do have a bit of a point. In the opening entry in the franchise, the Big Daddy characters were something to be feared. You kept away from them if you didn’t have a decent supply of ammo to hand, and certainly didn’t go near unless you wanted to lose a few health packs. Here, with you nipping about in a Big Daddy suit – as quickly as you could move as a human in the first game – a bog-standard Splicer can take you down with just a few attacks. That doesn’t seem right, and whilst the core of the game shows a heavy reliance on levelling up and actually getting to the point where you’re as strong as you “should” be, there seems to be no reasoning for why you’re so weak in the first place. A few other story elements don’t fit the bill particularly well, causing more confusion than they help to solve, and whilst I’m unfortunately not allowed to discuss them here – due to an agreement with the publisher –they aren’t particularly hard to find.

As far as bad points go in the single-player game, that’s about it for me. The multiplayer options are rushed, entirely forgettable and somewhat buggy, with console lockups occurring far too often. With that said, not a great many people will be all that concerned with the multiplayer game anyway, instead focussing on solo play. That’s fortunate for Take 2, no doubt, but I’m at a loss as to why a multiplayer mode was even included.

Some articles that I’ve read seem to take issue with the game’s graphical performance, noting that it isn’t as strong as it was in the debut title. I can’t agree with this at all, I’m afraid. Sure, there are some relatively low-resolution textures on show on rare occasions, but I feel that the critics are confusing fidelity and originality. OF COURSE the world of Rapture isn’t going to feel as fresh on the second visit. Few things do. Especially things that took your breath away the first time you saw them. I can’t see any game-breaking or notable problems with the visuals, but then again, I was interested in playing the game and pushing the story on, instead of hanging around staring at bricks to see if they were slightly rougher than they were before.

Getting back on track, all of the horror and suspense from the first game is retained, and given that this was one of the title’s main high points, that’s a darned good thing. BioShock 2 is undoubtedly a game that should be played in the dark, if you have the stomach for it.  There are very few things in gaming that encourage emotion in the way that a lone Splicer darting about in the shadows does. You can be barrelling through a level with only a scrag of health left, when you hear a voice. You instantly slow your roll and start to play more stealthily, watching out for sneak attacks and SWAT-turning around corners until…there it is…a single shadow cast upon a far wall. It HAS to be on the other side of that debris, doesn’t it? Wrong. The shadow disappears, causing you to take a sharp breath and start feverishly spinning the viewpoint all around until you’re safe in the knowledge that you won’t be bashed over the head as soon as you turn to move.

Very few titles manage to evoke emotion such as this, and even though you experienced it the first time around, the game world feels as fresh as it did back then because of it. New locations, new weapons, more enemies, more Rapture and a plethora of dodged potholes along the way. Some parts of the story fail to make any sense – although they’re open enough to be tidied up by a third game – and I’d strongly recommend that new players experience the first game before tackling this, but despite its flaws, BioShock 2 is a fantastic game that I’m not going to hesitate to recommend to all. Fanboy? Maybe, but what can I say? I like good things.

What’s worse, is that the game’s premise offers little reason to delve deeper. Aliens have found Earth, and are attacking the planet’s major cities. You and your three colleagues must defend humanity by attacking the attackers in your tiny helicopters or fighter planes. Yep, this is a shooter, through and through. There are no RPG elements or real plotlines of which to speak, although the standard weapon levelling comes into play almost the second you take down your first bandit.

Pure shooters can be good. In the modern era, we have known this since Geometry Wars took over our lives. Before that, games such as Space Invaders and the myriad rip-offs that followed it reinforced the information year after year. Those games were simple, thoroughly addictive, and not half as annoying as the abysmally titled 0 Day: Attack on Earth.

Firstly, the game’s camera is absolutely horrid. A pseudo-isometric view has been decided on here, and you’ll find your view obscured relatively often. You are given free control of the camera, although given the speed at which it moves, the development team may as well have not bothered. Frequently, you’ll get the camera in place just as you’re required to start moving it again to take on another enemy.

Secondly, unless you’re playing with three friends – who you have somehow convinced to splash out 1200 Microsoft Points in order to do so – your team-mates may as well not exist, given how bad the AI is. After a couple of levels, leech-style enemies begin to suck your energy by attaching themselves to the front of your ship. The only way to get rid of them is for one of your team-mates to put a bullet in their back. When playing with AI-controlled allies, you’re more likely to find them steering their ship into a death-dealing cloud of debris than even attempting to fire a shot at your captor. That’s another life gone, then.

Thirdly, the game insists on putting a five-minute time limit on each and every level. Some levels are scattered with six or seven enemies that you’re required to kill, with each taking up to a minute to defeat. Given the fact that your AI buddies spend more time concentrating on smaller, non-essential enemies than they do on the big guns, this turns the game from not-bad shooter into soul-destroying mess in about…well…five minutes and five seconds.

And there’s more to criticise, such as the utterly bland audio offering, but that would take more time to write about than you’ll spend actually playing the game, so I won’t bother.

I don’t think I’m being unfair when I say that I can find absolutely no reason to recommend 0 Day: Attack on Earth to anyone, other than that the cityscapes that you fight above are quite pretty. The shooting action is average at best, and the game as a whole is riddled with problems. The fact that it’s one of the higher-priced Xbox Live Arcade titles available is somewhat comedic – unless you’ve actually paid out for it, that is.

With this new version, though, a lot of the issues have been ironed out. A lot more of the “friendship” system is based on your actions in combat rather than your ridiculously American attempts at showing your companion that you “have his back,” as it were. This, it appears, is a very good thing.

Well, it is and it isn’t. You see, without the over-the-top-ness of the friendship system, the games other failings are brought into a harsh new light. You see problems where problems didn’t matter before, and the whole thing ends up coming across as being very by-the-numbers. That isn’t to say that The 40^th Day isn’t well presented and that it doesn’t provide its fair share of thrills, because it is and it does – with the early setup of Shanghai’s massive skyscrapers being brought down by terrorist attacks being a highlight. There’s something about wandering through an 80^th floor office that only has two sides to it, that brings home the rawness and desperation of the situation that your guys find themselves in. Maybe it would be unfair to accuse the development team of taking the horror and trauma of 9/11 and transporting it to a different country, so that it could be used for their own ends with the minimum of obviousness, but that is certainly how it comes across. As a gameplay experience though, I have to say that it works. It’s claustrophobic, violent and absolutely immense. Not only that, but it hints at the wonders of things to come.

And this is why The 40^th Day is such a let-down, since whilst those opening exchanges are really solid stuff, the rest of the game fades into blandness relatively quickly. Attempts have been made to differentiate it from the rest of the shooter fayre with hostage situations (that simply don’t work due to the dumbness of your AI squadmate) and little “moral challenges” that appear on each level. Deciding whether or not I want to release or shoot a bunch of pixels that represent a tiger at a zoo that is under terrorist control in a videogame would hardly have me wringing my hands with guilt if I decided to off the beast, so the point of the whole exercise is relatively moot.

Aside from the generally average setup, it has to be said that The 40^th Day does generally play quite well. The control system makes sense and isn’t cumbersome at all, and the cover system that comes into play frequently is very nicely done. There’s no switching between “in cover” and “out of cover” here, oh no. You just switch to your crouch position; head towards something that looks like it’ll protect you and – BAM! – your guy hammers into cover. To get out again, you just push away from the cover and you’re free. It works really, really nicely and is one of The 40^th Day’s high-points.

Weapon customization is one of the big selling points this time around too, and whilst you can – theoretically – make millions of different weapons with differing gun barrels, different paint, alternative stocks and whatnot, there seems very little point. A standard machine gun is enough to dispatch of most enemies, and even when you do upgrade your weapons, are you really going to notice a difference between a gun barrel that offers 8.1 out of 10 accuracy to a gun barrel that offers 8.3? Well, I didn’t. It certainly didn’t seem to help when I fired 900 bullets into the head of an enemy who had pretty much nothing but a tin wrap to protect his face. No, that part it didn’t make sense to me, either.

And that problem occurs enough that “Why am I doing this?” could very be the phrase to sum up the whole game. Logical thought seems to go out of the window when facing most of the larger enemies, with the development team deciding to falsify the game’s longevity, rather than allowing you to fire bullets at weak spots that you can clearly see in order to get the job done quicker. It may have been done before and it may be a staple of the “boss” confrontation, but when you can shoot a drone enemy’s helmet off to get a clear route to a headshot, it seems strange that you can’t pop a bullet into an unarmoured area of a larger opponent’s body in order to do more damage than firing at an armoured area.

You’ll either pick this up and play through it when you get bored of the likes of Modern Warfare 2, or you’ll miss it entirely and not be any the worse for it. If you do take the plunge, you’ll find that you’re in for a better experience than you had with the original Army of Two, but there are far too many little, nagging problems in The 40^th Day for me to be able to seriously recommend it. This is a step in the right direction for the series, for sure, but more work is needed.

“Well, you play as this woman called Bayonetta who wears glasses that she pushes up her nose with her gun and she’s a witch with crazy powers and somehow manages to carry and fire four guns…yeah…she’s got two attached to her shoes as well and no…I don’t know how she fires them but she does and sometimes she has a blade as well and whatever combination of the two attack buttons you press she does something different and there are massive old-school bosses that you have to take down and sometimes you can bust out a Torture Attack where she hoofs an enemy into an Iron Maiden or squishes them with a mechanical device that comes from nowhere and – oh yeah, MEGATON and GIGATON attacks are just insane – and on the bigger bosses you get to do Climax moves where she summons demons that are as big as the bosses and they finish the job for you and sometimes there are Quick Time Events that can be a bit annoying but are just amazingly worth the hassle because they kick off some super sweet cutscenes and you get judged and awarded for every battle you take part in based on your skill and how much damage you’ve taken. And she can slow time down. And I totally would, even if she killed me after.”

Bayonetta truly makes you feel this way. You’re assaulted with so much…STUFF…that there’s no way to sound intelligent when you’re explaining it. Divine inspiration will be required for me to make this review make any sense. Alright, any more sense THAN USUAL, smartarse.

Without all of its gun-ballet frippery, Bayonetta could be described as a relatively standard third-person action adventure. You solve the occasional puzzle en route to The Big Ending and take on enemies both large and small, who wish to stop you from getting there. What makes the game so much more than that, is the action side of things. As so artfully and delicately described before, your character is a master of weapons, both metaphysical and just plain physical. Not only does she carry a gun in each hand, but she also has a shooter strapped to either calf, which she fires…somehow. Weapons setups are customisable to a point, and you can even have two configurations available to you at one time, with a quick tap of the left shoulder button being enough to switch instantly between them in battle – which is a godsend when you’re facing multiple enemy types.

What makes Bayonetta so different to other titles of its ilk is the way in which the combat works. Your B and Y buttons are the main attacking controls, but whereas other titles would give you a button to punch, a button to kick and maybe one or two combinations of the two, Bayonetta gives two basic controls, and then HUNDREDS of combinations of the two. You may only have two buttons, but chains of button-presses up to six long are accounted for, as well as the inclusion of slight pauses to add even more variation. Throw in a totally different set of attacks when you’re airborne and you have a game that never gets dull on the offensive front. B, B, Y may give you a left kick, right hook, right kick combo, but adding a slight pause between the second B and the Y will give you a left kick, right kick, jump, box step, burst into flames, eat a cake, fly to the moon, listen to Pink Floyd, buy a Postal Order, eat more cake, have a multiple orgasm, score the winning goal, perform a perfect Foxtrot combo that ends with a bullet to the teeth. Also, if you don’t like the way in which a combination run finishes, holding down either button as you exit the combo allows you to finish with a bullet-filled flourish. Talking of bullets, a quick circular flick of the left stick, followed by a top of either attack button causes Bayonetta to go a tad gun-crazy, with the camera zooming in so you can see exactly what she’s emptying two entire magazines of bullets into, from a better angle.

All of this is required knowledge when you’re taking on some real old-school multi-health-bar screen-filling bosses, and even more so when you’re trying to pick up “Pure Platinum” awards when fighting smaller minions. Yes, the game is always watching and judges you on your attack and defensive skills on completion of each sub-sub-section of each level, rewarding you with anything from an award made from Stone, to the likes of Silver and Gold, all the way through to that priceless Pure Platinum one. The top accolades are reserved for those who avoid taking too much damage, and this can only be done by mastering the defensive jewel in the protagonist’s crown – the dodge. Pressing the right trigger causes Bayonetta to pull off an athletic leap out of the way of anything painful headed toward her. This not only looks superb, but works brilliantly. What’s more, doing it right at the very last minute pulls the game into Witch Time, where everything barring the main character slows to a crawl for a few seconds, allowing you to hit back with some pain of your own.

And this – despite the plethora of available attacks – is what makes Bayonetta such a beautiful game. Graphically, things are very nice – don’t get me wrong – but the true beauty comes from slashing an enemy with your katana, back-flipping over another who is trying to chop you down with an axe from your blindside, landing softly and then pulling out your gun and shooting him in the back with thirty bullets. Failing that, you could always go for the run-between-the-big-boss-guy’s-legs before using your blade to work your way up his back (causing damage with every step)  until you reach his head, at which point you summon a giant, demonic stiletto heel to stamp him down. It sounds crazy, but it’s a truly pure and good kind of crazy. Of course, the finishing touch is the audio performance, which is just too good to be true. The tunes are the pure hyperactive Japanese guitar-pop that Sega’s various development teams are famous for using, and the frantic nature of the other audio effects just helps to raise the adrenaline level – not to mention the smile on your face – that little bit further.

And that Big Ending that I mentioned earlier? That’s here too…and how.

What you may have noticed is that I haven’t mentioned the story one bit, so far. The reason for this is that whilst it does just enough to make the game come across as a finished product, it can be incredibly tough to follow and once you do work it out (once the game has ended), it turns out that it wasn’t particularly good anyway. The fact that Bayonetta is still one of the finest, most thrilling and downright beautiful games I’ve ever played in spite of this, stands as testament to just how damned good the gameplay really is. Miss this at your absolute peril.

One sporting subset that hasn’t grown up though, is the multi-event simulation. With their take on the Beijing Olympic Games, Sega provided a hard-as-nails Olympic mode that involved some mild career progression and at least gave gamers a reason to try each of the events more than once in single-player mode. With Vancouver 2010 though, that idea has been scratched altogether.

In fact, when it comes to the game’s structure, Vancouver 2010 is about as in-depth as Epyx’s 1986 Amstrad CPC conversion of Winter Games. That game gave you the option of playing each event individually, or taking them all on one after the other – which is essentially what you’ve got here, almost a quarter of a century later. There are three “Challenge Mountains” on offer, which consist of several non-standard challenges based on the available events. You might be asked to complete a snowboarding track without using the “Carve” (sharp turn) button, or to finish a round of Men’s Downhill with reversed controls for example, and whilst this does provide a little longevity, it’s hardly the huge step forward that the genre needs.

Another backward step is the lack of competition. It seems that as a single player in the game’s Olympic mode, you’ll be competing against just three other competitors in each event. Just as an example, at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, 29 different teams competed in the two-man Bobsleigh, and 35 entrants contested the final round of the Men’s Normal Hill Ski Jump. The sense of achievement of finding out that you’ve beaten your best finishing position in the Women’s Ski Cross by coming in 7^th this time instead of your previous best 11^th is lost here, as if you do beat that previous best performance (which was, at worst a fourth-placed finish), you’ve probably just won a gold medal and have no need to play the event again.

Even Beijing 2008 gave you eight entrants in each event, so why we only get a stingy four here, I don’t know.

As for the events themselves, the majority of them are really good fun and are very well presented. Some of the graphics are absolutely stunning, with snow textures being particularly pleasing and the lighting on the sliding events such as Luge being nothing short of superb. Highlights from the 14 events include Ski Jumping, which is presented in a clever first-person view and which works really solidly, and Speed Skating, which works nicely and can provide some thrilling close finishes, even against the CPU. Every event sits just at the right spot on the “easy to play, tough to master” scale aside from the Women’s Aerials, which is a tragic mess that every single player will want to skip. The control system for this is ripped straight out of Beijing 2008’s awful take on Diving, and the less said about that, the better.

As seems to be usual for this sort of game, setting up a multiplayer game is the way to go. With more than one person competing, Vancouver 2010 is transformed into a truly fun affair that will fill your house with screams of “He’s going! He’s going! He’s goiiiinnnnngg! BANG!” when surveying your friend’s unsuccessful attempt at pushing the Luge to the limit and huge waves of cheering when your ham-fisted mate finally manages to successfully land an attempt during the ski jump. However, even the inclusion of the awesome Go Betty Go on the game’s soundtrack isn’t enough to save the single player action. There simply isn’t enough to do, and very little reason to come back and keep playing. The quality of the events on offer (barring the Women’s Aerials) despite some surprising oversights (no Curling, lads?) makes this even more of a shame.

Darksiders proves that this doesn’t have to be the case, and that despite the abominable waves of bland being thrust upon gamers these days, there are still the odd lesser-known diamonds to be found amongst all that rough.

The game puts you in control of War, one of the Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse, who – much to his chagrin – has had the wool pulled over his eyes, somewhat. You see, the poor fellow has been tricked into kicking off the end of the world way, way, WAY ahead of time – and has to make amends for this (as well as getting a big slice of cold revenge pie while he’s at it.) The game kicks off as an ode to Devil May Cry, before proceeding to liberally draw inspiration from the likes of The Legend of Zelda, Tomb Raider, Portal, Psi-Ops, Soul Reaver, Prince of Persia, Panzer Dragoon and God of War. One would assume that the development team are all wearing neck braces, given that they must have done themselves an injury by aiming nods at so many superb titles whilst creating their own game.

But, whilst a little of this inspiration is off-putting due to its blatantness, the rest of it forms up – Transformer-style – to become a relatively solid title that really gets things done well.  With War armed with a sword as big as your car and the ability to gain new moves and equipment in exchange for some well-earned souls coming into frequent focus, Darksiders is far from your standard hack-and-slash title. This is proven during the opening gambit, which is artfully presented and which takes place during the initial invasion of Earth (Man – the third kingdom’s – obvious stronghold) by the opposing kingdoms of Heaven and Hell. People flee, buildings fall and cars are tossed around like toys – creating a superb setting for a little pre-Apocalyptic beatdowns.

Once you’ve gotten through this initial adrenaline rush, things do slow down somewhat, and become a little too formulaic for my liking. It isn’t enough to stop you from playing, but the storyline often stops dead and kills the game’s dynamism by tasking you with completing a number of similar quests in order to unlock the next section. Whether you’re being told to destroy four Shadow Demons by completing four separate timed challenges, or defeat four sub-bosses in order to unlock the next part of the plot, the pauses become frequent and something of a downer. With a plotline that is ultimately quite strong, it would have been nice if it all flowed a little better.

In stark contrast to that complaint is, strangely, my own rebuttal.  You see, for every five minutes of downtime that Darksiders provides that makes you feel as if you’ve seen it all before, the game gives you ten minutes of pure, unadulterated adrenaline. Early on, they come in the form of sub-sub-boss characters, who prove to be difficult to kill. You’ll try to dodge, jump and just blindly attack your way through them, but will end up losing more health than you’d ideally like. So, you try to work out their attack patterns to see if there’s any exploitable repetition so you don’t get…BANG!…a flaming , ten-foot fist to the mouth. BANG! Try again. This time you’ll get him. BANG! Dammit. And so it continues. When you do finally get the number of each of these small-fry enemies, you’ll be dialling in combos and pulling off some gruesome instant kills with aplomb. And just when you think you’ve mastered things – after five minutes of downtime featuring one-shot kills galore, of course – Darksiders tosses a real boss your way, and the adrenaline starts to flow once more.

Graphically, things fare a far bit better on the PlayStation 3 than on Microsoft’s box of tricks. A patch is due for 360 gamers (well, for all of them actually, not just three hundred and sixty of them) and this will hopefully bring it up to the screen-tearing and generally slowdown-free experience that owners of Sony’s machine can currently sample. The graphical performance isn’t what you’d call groundbreaking, but is handled well enough and there can be no complaints with the control system, which is accurate and responsive. My only other slight gripe with Darksiders is with the audio. For the greater part, all is well, but every cutscene seemingly takes hours as Demonic Enemy Number 14 decides to tell you his life story in a sloooow, annooooooyying, draaaaawwwll that could put you to sleep. Sure, it isn’t the biggest complaint anyone could have about a game, but it stuck with me and therefore should be mentioned.

Also of note, is the complete lack of multiplayer modes. Some will be up in arms over this, but I commend the developers for taking what is – these days –a brave step. Darksiders simply doesn’t lend itself to multiplayer gameplay, and spending more time on development of the game and less on shoe-horning in some scrappy online modes that nobody will play has clearly done the project some good.

All-in-all, Darksiders is a fun and comparatively lengthy romp that boasts a decent original story. There is an argument that suggests that some of the more grinding gameplay time could have feasibly been cut in exchange for a slightly more seat-of-the-pants kind of ride without losing too much, but that’s a coin toss, frankly. There’s no better way to decide for yourself than to give the game a go, and that’s what I wholeheartedly recommend.

1. Why are you going back to the Sands of Time storyline?

The Sands of Time universe is one that’s a real favorite of the developers at Ubisoft, as well as fans. A great thing about the Prince of Persia series is that it allows us to tell stories in many different settings, with different Princes, while always retaining some core elements that fans expect. Returning to this series is something that we’ve had in the production for quite a long time now, and we can’t wait for everyone to get a look at what we have coming up.

2. Is there any link between The Forgotten Sands and the upcoming movie?

The Forgotten Sands is not related to the film in any way, other than being based within the same overall universe from our own Sands of Time game series. The Prince from The Forgotten Sands is the same one that players controlled in Sands of Time, Warrior Within and The Two Thrones, and its story is unrelated to the film. We are very happy that the movie will expose so many people to the universe that we love so much, and very happy at the amount of talent involved with it!

3. Where does The Forgotten Sands fit within the Sands of Time timeline??

The Forgotten Sands takes place in the span of time between the original Sands of Time and Warrior Within, soon after the Prince’s adventure in Azad.

4. What is the story for The Forgotten Sands?

Following his adventure in Azad, the Prince journeys to visit his brother, whose kingdom is under siege from an invading army. In defense of his people and kingdom, the Prince’s brother is prepared to go to any lengths necessary. Through his brother’s example and his own adventures, he will learn that the mantle of leadership comes at a severe price.

5. Can you tell us about some of the powers the Prince will have?

The Prince will acquire powers that I can only refer to as mastery over nature. What that exactly means is not something I can talk about at the moment, but I think it will be extremely exciting to fans when we reveal it in more detail.

6. How would you describe the visual style in Forgotten Sands?

We are going for what we call Arabian Nights-inspired realism, in keeping with the other Sands of Time games. We have some very powerful technology at our disposal, which allows us to bring set pieces and memorable moments to life that would not have been possible before.

7. Can you explain what the combat will be like in the game?

Given that we’re designing the game with the Anvil engine, we have a tremendous advantage with the amount of NPCs we are capable of displaying on screen at once. The scale of the battles that you’re going to take be involved in when playing The Forgotten Sands are on a level that have not been seen in the series so far. Also, as was teased in our first trailer, we have some encounters in the game that will pit the Prince against the largest enemies he has ever come across, which we will be showing in more detail later on.

Thanks to Ubisoft and Graeme Jennings for their time. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands will be available on (probably) every format imaginable in 2010.

I know what you’re thinking. EA already did this with Skate-It for the Wii, didn’t they? Yep. That pretty much failed to do what it promised, too – albeit not as badly.

Calling the skateboard peripheral a “bit of plastic” is a bit harsh, I grant you. The controller is a sturdy piece of kit that benefits from solid construction, a properly grippy top – although with my board, that material that makes for that grippiness started to show a few pockmarks after only five minutes of play – and four peripheral sensors (one on each “side”) in order to read things such as your attempts at grabs and pushes. Oh, and it takes four AA batteries, is wireless, and contains a mini version of the standard 360 controller’s buttons and d-pad for menu navigation, as well as a much larger “Start” button which is designed to be activated with your feet.

It’s fair to say that for your £100, you do get a bit of kit that is well designed, and which both looks and sounds pretty good.

Unfortunately, when it comes to peripherals, a good 99.5% or so of your sense of value for money comes from being able to use the purchased peripheral for its actual purpose. For this reason, after about ten minutes of trying in vain to use the Tony Hawk: RIDE controller, you’ll feel as if you’ve wasted £99.50 on a rather complicated doorstop and the pretty box it comes in.

It isn’t that the idea is bad, as that’s far from the case. Standing on the board, sliding your foot along the floor to the side to push off (as you would do on a real skateboard) and tilting and swivelling the board to pull off tricks and steer around obstacles doesn’t sound like a bad plan. The problem is that the controller is so unbelievably slow to respond (when it decides that it actually wants to respond at all, that is) that you’ll be tearing your hair out within minutes. This is proved right from the start, when you’re being taught how to use the board. The first challenge tasks you with successfully completing ollies to collect tokens whilst the game controls your steering – and this works. Then, you’re told to ollie, and then tilt the board in either direction with your back foot, in order to pull off a trifecta of flip tricks.

After four or five attempts at this, doing exactly what I was told to by the tutorial video and watching as the game would ollie, but wouldn’t bother recognising my tricks, I finally got lucky and was thrown into the next challenge. Here, you have to do the same thing, only you ollie and then pivot the board with your back foot in order to pull off a different kind of trick. After twenty minutes of trying to get the game to recognise that I was doing exactly what it had asked me to (again), I gave up.

Deciding that the calibration may be an issue, I took a short break to calm down, before coming back and recalibrating the board – which did the sum total of nothing to improve the experience. I tried a different type of floor surface, and even exchanged my board for another at a local game emporium, to be sure that I didn’t have a piece of broken kit. Nothing helped.

In the game proper, being able to pull off tricks as and when you want to is a pretty important thing. When you’re asked to pull off a 5-0 Grind and manage to do everything but, you’ll blame yourself for not knowing how to do it. Then, you’ll blame the developers as you realise that there’s no documentation on how to do each individual trick anywhere in the game or manual. Then, when you’ve visited GameFAQs and got the instructions down, you’ll blame the game as it completely ignores your inputs. Super. This means that even if the board worked perfectly, I’d have a damned annoying and punctuated time in trying to complete the game that seems to be trying to keep secrets from the player. “I know how to do this trick, and I want you to do it. You want to know HOW, you say? Well…ha, haaa, haaaaa…that’s for ME to know, and for YOU to find out!”

That, of course, is if I could be bothered to work my way through a game that is graphically and technically poor, that it could feasibly have been released ten years ago. Random characters wander the ugly and uninteresting streets for no reason other than to draw your attention away from the fact that you’ve just missed ANOTHER ollie, or that the “technical wizardry” (the game’s claim, not mine) that the board contains has decided that even though your hand is fully over one of the side sensors, you didn’t actually want to pull off a grab trick. The manual suggests that you don’t need to cover the sensor, rather hold your hand about 2 feet away from it in order to get the best results When you do that, you look ridiculous and it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference anyway.

On top of that, despite the fact that there’s a whacking great “Start” button on the side of the controller, the game doesn’t allow you to actually use it. So, before you play, you need to press the start button on a separate controller, and also do that every time you hit a high score and want to proceed past the view of the high score table. Game design fail.

The problem is that the game SOUNDS like fun, and ultimately is for about twenty minutes or so. This is enough time to get “on-the-fence” buyers to lay down their money after someone demos the product in a store or they have a quick go on somebody else’s copy. They’ll assume that the reason that the game isn’t doing what they tell it is because of their lack of skill and that practice is required. Put simply, if you practiced until your legs fell off, you would still feel the same way. At times, it feels like it would be less painful to actually learn to skateboard.

The on-disc game has been put together in what looks like twenty-five minutes since – obviously – the package has blatantly been designed to sell on the strength of the skateboard peripheral. The downer is that that skateboard peripheral is next to useless. As far as I can see, someone came up with an idea for a controller, and Activision CEO Bobby Kotick started drooling at all the money he’d make, just like he does when a new Guitar Hero title enters development and gets shipped out the door to retailers in a total time of fourteen seconds. After all, this is the man that wants to “take all the fun out of making videogames” because fun clearly gets in the way of profit. What he’s managed to do though in this case, is take the fun out of the game itself, because Tony Hawk: RIDE is an absolute mess. You’d be an utter fool to waste £100 on this, especially when you could buy a Wii Balance Board and Skate-It (not brilliant, but at least it half works) or something like a complete Rock Band/Guitar Hero peripherals kit and still have change. The first four superior Tony Hawk Skateboarding titles and a PSOne to play them on would cost less, and would give you more entertainment for your buck. Hell, you could go into the store and pick up five completely random games for £20 a pop, and have a better than average chance of having more fun with them than you will with this absolute atrocity. I wonder how many kids will get this as their “big present” this Christmas?

The main difference between the two titles is something that will become immediately apparent. Instead of using a typical menu system to select a level or buy new characters, everything is accessed through a hub system. Essentially a hub is a large free roaming area, there’s one for each chapter of the game. It’s an interesting way of doing things but quite poorly implemented. At best it’s tricky to figure out where to go next, at other times it’s downright confusing. It does add some longevity to the game when you bear in mind each hub almost feels like a separate level in its own right but a lot of the time, it just felt irritating. I don’t want to spend 5 minutes or more trying to figure out where I have to go next, I want to get on with the story mode and progress. A little signposting could have helped this so much, even if it was just a system which kicked in after five minutes of wandering: just as a friendly reminder that the next level is near. Many players I suspect will just get impatient and not bother progressing as ultimately games like Lego Indiana Jones should be hand holding the player. The hub system also means that rather than using a character selection screen, the player must find them in each hub world, another thing that may mean you end up sticking to the same old characters whenever possible to save you the effort of exploring such vast expanses.

Getting away from the hub system, it’s fortunately not all bad. For the most part this is still the Lego Indiana Jones we’re all used to. The game focuses mostly on the new levels of The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull offering three different chapters which all cover the new storyline. This is where the bulk of the action comes in considering the other films only have one chapter each devoted to them which is a shame as the original films still provide the stronger material for the parody that the Lego series of games offers so readily. A few changes have been made to the control system behind the game, most notably you must now aim Indy’s whip to use it. Something that works for the most part, but again reduces the simplicity on offer for the younger gamer. It all feels like the original Lego Indiana Jones, and yet it’s not quite as enjoyable. It was however very welcome to see the addition of split screen co-op mode which makes playing alongside another person much easier to do.

Besides the story Mode side of things, there is the addition of the Level Creator mode. Now this won’t rival Little Big Planet in any way but it is quite fun and almost a game in itself thanks to the numerous tutorials. It’s the sort of thing that I can certainly see players whiling away a few hours on Christmas Day afternoon with. The creator mode also offers the option to create new characters and to build an adventure, which is basically linking together a number of constructed levels together. It’s a shame though that for the most part you are editing levels rather than creating brand new ones from scratch. There is also no way to share levels such as through an online service, limiting the attractiveness of the feature quite a lot. After all, why spend hours constructing something when no one else is going to see it?

There is still the wealth of humour that we’re all used to seeing in the Lego series of games which makes it endearingly cute at times, it’s just a pity that the mechanics of the game still lets things down. The vehicle levels are still annoyingly repetitive and long winded, the AI is still a little bit dodgy and prone to not responding accurately, and there are still frustratingly awkward jumps which make you want to throw your controller out of the window with anger.

Ultimately the problem with Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues is that it just isn’t as good as its predecessor. It was a formula that I thought would be pretty easy to repeat, but surprisingly Traveller’s Tale has overcomplicated things which isolate it from a key part of its intended audience: children. When you bear in mind the predecessor is relatively inexpensive to pick up now, it just seems pointless to recommend the newer of the two. If you want a family game to keep the kids busy this winter, go with Lego Indiana Jones, it’s fun for all the family. This game just gets far too irritating to be worth a look.

One thing that appeared to be another blatant cash-in was the Xbox 360’s original wireless network adapter. The thing was a somewhat less-reliable version of the £10 wireless USB dongles that you can buy for your PC, but weighed in at a hefty £59.99 here in the UK. When compared to the PS3 and Wii’s built-in wireless capabilities, that seemed a little extortionate – especially when you consider the seemingly random levels of performance that you got for your money.

Now, the company has released a new version, which supports Wireless N Draft networks. Not only that, but it still supports all of the old network types that the old version did, and supports dual band functionality for “increased speed, range and security.”

Before I moved house, I generally stuck to using a wired connection. If I found myself a cable short, I would switch to the wireless adapter and watch as my 360 (which was about two feet from my router) would only manage to get an average connection. After, I was faced with a challenge that many folks will stumble across in this age of wireless technology. Yes, I was playing on split levels, with my console upstairs and my router firmly locked in place downstairs. Not only that, but two doors and a fair distance between the access point and the console weren’t ideal, either. The original wireless networking adapter would actually establish a connection without a problem but would suffer from incredibly slow download speeds, frequent dropped connections (to the point that I couldn’t even get past the title screens of some games before being disconnected from Live) and a complete inability to use the Xbox 360’s movie rental service or media streaming from my PC.

So, with a borrowed Wireless N router and the new adapter in hand, I thought I’d put the new hardware through its paces.

And frankly, I was blown away. Initially, I connected the new adapter up and tested it with my current hardware, which is a bog-standard Wireless G affair. Instantly, I could see the difference. Instead of the “two-bar” reception that my Xbox 360 used to have, I now had four. Not only that, but whilst online play wasn’t what you could call lag-free, at least it was actually playable now. A quick test to see if I could download a 700mb demo without being booted from Live after about 100mb (as has happened with every single thing I’ve downloaded since I moved) proved successful, and all was well with the world.

Then, I switched to the Netgear Wireless N router and again, instantly noticed the difference. Not only was I getting full reception – which is crazy given the distance between the router and the adapter – but I was able to be at least semi-competitive (with the only failing being my level of skill) in Battlefield 1943 again. A few games of solid and lag-free FIFA 10 later and I was convinced that this is the way that Xbox 360 wireless networking should be done.

Two things do confuse me here though. The first is the inclusion of a driver disc – which you’re told to install before plugging the adapter in – which simply appears as a “Mixed Media Disc” when you put it into your console, and then refuses to do anything when you select it from the Xbox Guide. The fact that the adapter works absolutely fine despite this, suggests that the drivers have already been bundled with a dashboard update somewhere along the line. Secondly, the packaging is sure to confuse the lay person. If you aren’t au fait with your wireless networking, every indication on the packaging is that this is exactly the same as the original adapter, only this one supports your Wireless N network. That just isn’t the case. If you’ve got an original version wireless adapter running on an A, B or G network and are suffering from an inconsistent connection, this new version is – in my experience – likely to improve your connection. On my G network, performance was doubled and I was still signed into Xbox Live after leaving the console running for 6 hours. With the old adapter, I’d have been lucky to get ten minutes of continuous connection before being booted.

The price is the same as it was before – a somewhat wallet-busting £59.99 – but given the enhanced performance and compatibility, they’re getting close to making it worth the money. The same sort of thing for your PC will still only set you back around £25 or so but in fairness to Microsoft, they could well have stuck this on the shelves at an even larger price, whilst claiming that it was some sort of “premium” option compared to the original. They are to be applauded for not doing that, but your mileage will vary in terms of how much you’re willing to pay for wireless access. If you do decide to take the plunge, this new adapter is really the only serious way to go. I can’t stress how much better it is than the original and although prices for that first attempt will be dropping through the floor in light of this new model’s release, I’d recommend splashing the extra cash for a superior experience.

To get it out of the way now, Dragon Age: Origins isn’t perfect. Far from it at times in fact. The graphics will look distinctly dated when compared to the likes of recent hits such as Batman: Arkham Asylum, and even Bioware’s last console RPG Mass Effect. Despite not usually being bothered by poor graphics, even I was slightly unsure of just how dated Dragon Age: Origins looked. Luckily it really doesn’t matter and you’ll quickly learn to look past such flaws, even if this might not be a game to show off the beauty of your Xbox 360. Dragon Age: Origins also suffers slightly from being mostly Mass Effect with a Dungeons and Dragons style skin put on it. Even the inventory system is extremely similar, right down to the fact you can collect Codex entries which give more background to the world of Ferelden, just like you could in Bioware’s last console RPG. But again it really doesn’t matter once you’ve got into the storyline and realise that it is significantly different to be called unique, yet comfortably familiar so that you know you’re playing a game of class.

So why is it so great you cry? Well it’s down to a mixture of the enthralling storyline and the compelling gameplay. Right from the start you get the impression that this is going to be rather epic. At the start of the game you choose from one of six origin storylines covering a variety of classes and backgrounds. The first time round I chose to be a noble human warrior. My origin story involved watching my family be wiped out by a traitorous lord, and well I won’t go too much further so as not to spoil too much. It took around an hour and a half to complete the Origin story without even touching the main plotline, so I assumed that my second Origin story would be very similar for the sake of cutting down development time. I was wrong, wonderfully wrong. The second playthrough I chose to be a city Elf and experienced an entirely different story. It was as dark as the previous tale with my having to rescue women from an evil human lord intent on raping them, and again it took just as long to complete. Not that it felt like a slog at all, I was enthralled all over again. When I did reach the main storyline thread, it was nice to see completely different lines of dialogue come up because I was a different race. This wasn’t in a ‘thrown in for the sake of it’ sort of way; this was in a way that made the game feel like an entirely new game all over again.

Covering just the Origins stories will take you about 9hrs for all of them if you so wish, that’s before you even look at the main plot which took me around 30hrs to complete. It’s certainly one of the more epic RPGs available on the 360 when you bear in mind the additional many, many sidequests on offer. The storyline is a tricky one to accurately describe without spoiling. Comprising of a somewhat typical RPG style story, it also provides a sufficient amount of twists and turns to keep you suitably entertained. Bioware have evidently learnt from previous titles as many of the moral dilemmas within these quests are also more shades of grey than simple black or white decisions. I’ve been a big fan of Bioware titles for years, so it’s nice to see that the developers have acknowledged that many decisions are not as black and white as they may initially appear. One particularly memorable quest consisted of having to choose between sacrificing a mother through evil ‘blood’ magic to save her possessed son, or to kill her demonic son to end it right there. A decision that regardless of the choice you make, still feels slightly unsettling and is guaranteed to disappoint at least one of your party members.

As is frequently the case with Bioware titles, the array of party characters is quite impressive. It’s a shame that none stand out as memorably as the likes of Minsc in the Baldur’s Gate games but they still certainly hold their own. There is a hearty mix of good, bad and slightly strange all of which have their own quirks and backstory. They also don’t exactly all get along either making for some entertaining dialogue along the way if your team at the time consists of two characters who especially hate each other. I particularly enjoyed the banter between Morrigan and Alistair who quite obviously despised each other for having strongly opposing views and morals. The ability to romance each character is a nice, but common, touch although I did find myself only really doing so just to see the dialogue changes.

No RPG is worth its salt without a strong combat system and fortunately Dragon Age: Origins does a good job here, although isn’t quite as accurately implemented as the PC version. The combat system feels like a cross between Mass Effect’s and Baldur’s Gate with it being surprisingly strategical for a console RPG. The ability to pause here is extremely useful to plan out tactics. There are many moments where micromanagement is crucial and switching between characters quickly is frequently useful. There are options to adjust tactics individually to ensure that each character reacts accordingly, but at times I found it easier to control it all myself. The AI responds reasonably well and there is a wealth of options so that for example you can ensure that your tank always protects your mage, but annoyingly the system also let me down at times with characters getting stuck to walls or simply not moving despite there being enemies nearby. The combat is quite challenging, especially on the higher difficulty levels so micromanagement really is essential. It is however refreshing to play a challenging RPG, one that forces you to think ahead and consider factors such as keeping your rogue behind the enemy at all times for sneaky backstabs, and to keep your archers and mages safe from danger.

There’s a huge amount more that could be covered on Dragon Age: Origins, but it’s the sort of game that players really need to discover for themselves, no matter how much I want to continue gushing. For the RPG fan it’s an absolute no brainer and something that I am certain they will enjoy. Even those who liked Mass Effect but were previously put off by Elves and Dwarves in other RPGs should still give this a shot as despite the increased difficulty level, Dragon Age: Origins is very easy to get into. The content that is available now is vast, but with Bioware already offering 2 pieces of DLC (one included free with new copies of the game), it looks like there’ll be a fair amount of support for the future making this an even more tantalising prospect. Simply put, you’d be mad not to get this.

Billed as the first game to lavish us with the ability to leap from building to building in Parkour style, the engine powering the game was fantastic. The story was a little strange though, and if you played it for more than an hour, you had effectively seen the entire game, as lashings and lashings of repetition was the order of the day.

Fast forward twelve months, and the obligatory sequel has hit the shelves. I thought it would only take an hour or two to review as – despite spending several hours on it – that’s all the first one really needed. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

This time around, we’re – again, via the Animus – taken back to 14^th century Italy, and the memories of Ezio Auditore. From the outset, the game has a superbly different feel to it, with the more architecturally advanced Italian cityscapes providing a more suitable arena for your free-running skills. Not only that, but the control system has had some much-needed tweaks to get rid (as much as possible) of those annoying times when your character would inexplicably leap to his death when you were just trying to climb vertically to the next piece of masonry. New abilities, such as the sublime double-hidden-blade assassination and the ability to swim or row around the Venetian canals are real high points, and whilst combat feels tighter and smoother than it did before, you still get the feeling of everything happening a second or two after you actually press the button. This is due to the superb animation engine, and is something that sounds horrendous but in truth, you learn to live with it and once the story grips you and draws you in, you won’t care.

Ah, the story. Last time out, everything felt kind of disjointed. Assassinations didn’t really seem to drive the story along and each one felt much like the last and next. Thankfully, the storyline in Assassin’s Creed II is unbelievably good. When the gameplay threatens to become repetitive, a cutscene pops up that gets you interested again, or a new mission type or ability comes along to liven things up a bit. You’ll be collecting codex pages for Leonardo Da Vinci to decode, trying to find glyphs and solving the puzzles that they contain, managing your estate and building shops and the like to generate revenue in your uncle’s hometown, beating up unfaithful husbands and much more – with all of these things being completely optional tasks that aren’t necessarily required in order to drive the story along. In terms of comparisons of playing styles, the free world that Ubisoft have developed here has more in common with the Grand Theft Auto series than the first Assassin’s Creed. If you want to carry out a story mission, you can, but if you just want to wander about and take on some “freelance” work so to speak, you can do that too.

The overriding story (that of the Animus itself and accessing historical memories) is still as flawed and cheese-filled as it was, though. What’s worse is that whilst the in-game characters are really beautifully rendered and a joy to look at, the characters in the “main” story’s cutscenes are a comparative mess. The woman all look like they’ve had their mouths replaced by those from deep sea creatures, and the men are clumsy and – at some points – blocky. There are also some real low points in terms of being dragged out of the superb main game, and back into the current day. After four hours of play for example, why would I need to be brought back to the future in order to carry out movement training to prove that I’m able to control Ezio properly? I’ve been playing for FOUR HOURS already. I should have got it by then, don’t you think?

Truthfully, I wish they’d ripped out the nonsense about the Animus and whatnot, and just created a game set in the 14^th century, but there you go.

The fact of the matter is that whilst Assassin’s Creed II is not perfect for those points, and has some graphical issues (late draw-in is quite a problem), the product as a whole is absolutely superb after you’ve waded through the initial cutscenes and been reintroduced to the controls. The story will grip you; the locations will compel you to explore them and whilst the game unashamedly gets you ready to buy the as-yet-unannounced-but-surely-it-can’t-be-long-now Assassin’s Creed III, you’ll not be offended by the premise. To put that into focus, I’ll be utterly honest and tell you that I forgot that this sequel was due to hit the shop shelves until the week after it came out. I totally wasn’t bothered about being forced to sit through another forty-eight thousand hours of repetitive gameplay. With Assassin’s Creed III though, I’ll be fighting people to be at the head of the queue on release day. This is the game that the first attempt should have been, and although it has its flaws, they aren’t enough to drag it down to five-star level.  Eccellente

A majority of gamers, myself included, believe that the best GTA game created was Vice City, due to the lavish surroundings, the tongue in cheek humour and the trashy atmosphere and while The Ballad of Gay Tony isn’t set in the 1980’s it has kept what made the second 3D outing of the series great. The Ballad of Gay Tony is perhaps Rockstar at their finest, a return to form with each step through this large DLC pack treating you to something special. There is no immigrant criminal here, no greasy biker either – well that’s a lie, they do crossover in places – what we have here is a suave and very cool character in Luis Lopez.

Luis is Gay Tony’s right hand man and has the usual background to any GTA character, he’s done time in prison, he’s dealt drugs, but now he is a reformed man, of sorts, and is business partner of the infamous Gay Tony. While every instalment of GTA is about the crime and this is no different, there is one other thing that is of equal importance in this expansion and that’s the relationship between Luis and Tony.

Never has there been such a convincing duo than our two main characters. The chemistry between them is charming and even when they are threatening to kill each other when one has wronged the other; there is a bond that truly makes you believe in them. They have routine, Tony screws up and Luis saves the day, he is forever Tony’s white knight and the friendship alone makes the game worth playing. Every nuance in the dynamics of this partnership is wonderfully scripted by Rockstar, from the petty banter to the underlying emotions that if Luis ever left, Tony would fall apart and being a part of this is the expansions strongest point.

Everything else here is much of a muchness; the city feels the same, as does the wonky handling of the vehicles. There are new buildings in which to enter, but these are mostly story based, so exploration is at a minimum. But to be honest, this doesn’t really matter; the story is solid and typical of the developer. There are plenty of twists and turns, lots of missions to play through and set pieces that make the game more cinematic than ever. One particular point that stands out is a later mission wherein Luis must scare an internet blogger and does so in style, without spoiling, let’s say it takes place in a plane and the new parachuting addition is fantastic.

The actual story itself will take several hours to work through and that doesn’t count wandering off and dancing at the clubs, which is more fun than it should be, spending time with your acquaintances or jumping off of many buildings with the new base jumping mode. The addition of mission replay from Chinatown Wars also features now, meaning that each mission has targets to hit and if you miss them you can play it again to perfect them. While this may not appeal to everyone, it certainly extends the life of the content for those fans that just can’t leave well enough alone.

One of my biggest issues with the DLC is the difficulty spikes, which feel frustratingly random. One minute you will find yourself strolling through a mission which on the surface feels easier than it should have been, the next you will have to restart several times just to pass a mundane mission. One of the things that make this worse is the handling of the vehicles. Whilst the series isn’t known for realistic handling, after spending time away from the game, returning to find the cars, bikes and helicopters as unstable as they are leaves you a little saddened, especially when being unable to control a chopper as you would like and plummeting into the ocean, forcing you to restart the mission.

Despite these few hiccups The Ballad of Gay Tony is fantastic and well worth experiencing. The episode proves that Rockstar have a winning formula and I’m sure we’ll see a similar structure in the sequel to the main game. A side note to this is that Rockstar perhaps missed a trick and should have used Gay Tony and Luis in the main story of GTA4; such is the brilliance of the cast.

Anyone looking for traditional GTA will be thrilled with what is contained in this update; there is humour in the “wife/wife” partnership of Tony and Luis. There is controversy in the language used, particularly the homophobic dialogue and the racial slurs that are used frequently. While the latter can be seen as quite inappropriate at times, it is never used just for controversies sake, only to deliver authentic narrative. From the opening sequence to the finale, TBOGT is truly Rockstar wearing their crown again and I for one believe that if Rockstar carry on this trend, GTA5 will be worth the wait.

Fast forward to the modern day, and players seem to have forgotten that the city-building genre even still exists. That isn’t surprising, given that European coding teams seem to trot out version after version of their own take on the game type every other month, with relatively little in terms of improvement. The closest thing you’d find on a modern day console – until now – is the likes of the dire A-Train HX, if you can find a copy, that is.

So, Tropico 3 (the previous two titles have been PC/Mac only) steps into a somewhat uncrowded arena and therefore, you’d expect some lazy development to come to the fore as the game pretty much takes that “best in genre” crown by default. That isn’t the case, however, since the game is solidly constructed, good fun, and somewhat addictive once you get into it.

The game tasks you with building the island of Tropico from what is initially either nothing (in Sandbox mode) or very, very little (in Campaign mode.) Depending on how you choose to play, you’ll be set a specific task or goal and will start at a point in the not-too-distant past, with eras ranging from the 1950s all the way through to the present day. As the cartoony representation of Fidel Castro on the box would suggest, this island is none-too-dissimilar to the beautiful island of Cuba, and you’ll find that a lot of in-game references and tasks are based on situations that have occurred in that area of the world. Managing your relations with the USSR and – of course – the USA and in some cases, playing them off against each other, is the primary example that runs throughout your time with the game. Poor relations with one will lead to an invasion, and if you have weak relations with the other, they won’t step in to help – causing you to be overthrown and your game ended.

Such is the range of Tropico 3. Previous entries in the genre have seen you occasionally cranking the taxes up or taking out bank loans, but not many have seen you undertaking a full political career. And certainly, none have done it as well as this. You’ll be giving speeches from the balcony of your palacial home, issuing edicts such as banning the use of contraception in order to grow your population, and trying to win elections by making promises (that you can choose to keep or not, depending on who you don’t mind offending) and praising different groups. All of that of course, comes with the standard city-building and micro-management that you’d expect. Only here, you get a real choice as to how deep into that micro-management you want to go. If Pascal Valazquez has decided to “out” himself as a vocal opposer of your presidential reign, do you really want him managing your main farm? If it doesn’t bother you, leave him at the helm. If it does, select your farm, head on to the tab showing the list of the farm’s staff, and fire him. If you don’t want to go that far into things, you don’t have to, but it’s nice to have the option.

There are a good selection of scenarios and challenges on offer here, but no online play, although the ability to download online challenges designed by players of the PC version of the game is a nice one. Thankfully, for those who were looking for online play, those offline modes will keep players going for a good few weeks, I’d say, especially given that in my first attempt at the game’s first challenge, I ended up spending a good hour and a half of playing time before the Russians invaded and ended my game. That did bring about one negative point, and that is that after playing for that long, you expect the game’s climax to be well…a little more climactic than it actually is. Win or lose, you’re presented with a simple screen stating the final outcome in bold text, and that seems to be about it. There’s not so much as an animated sequence showing your island’s demise when you lose or a fanfare-encased sequence showing your people’s love for their newly-born country when you win and whilst this doesn’t spoil the game outright, it would have been nice to have something to boost the feeling of achievement somewhat.

I didn’t hold out much hope for Tropico 3 and I’m happy to say that whilst the majority of the games of this ilk that have been released over the last few years (be they PC or console-based) have been nothing short of tragic cash-ins from struggling development teams, this is far better than the average mix. In a month of incredibly strong product launches, the game is going to find it hard to get a real following behind it and this may damage the online community – if it hasn’t killed it stone dead already – but if you’re a fan of the genre, you really shouldn’t miss this. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Fast forward a few years, and we’re doing the same thing. Now though, the imagery of war is much more real and if we’re lucky – as we are in this case – we’re given a stellar backstory that however implausible, is utterly riveting. And, despite the massive amounts of hype that threatened to build expectations up to the point that they just couldn’t be matched, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has managed to survive and provides as solid an action title as you’ll see for a long time.

When you were playing at war way back when, these are the soldiers that you dreamed of being. You don’t have to go through the rigorous training, early-morning starts, emotional rollercoasters or the tactical briefings required to actually be a soldier, just so that you can take down a single tango in as non-lethal a way as possible after five hours of trekking, since you have free reign in order to save the World. You, your team-mates and a shitload of bullets was all that you needed back then, and still is. Death was but a minor setback and everything would be swathed in the grey and camoflague of war, with flames and gunfire perforating the pleasantness of the everyday locations that have turned bad. This is the war that you dreamed of; that you made in your head. Buildings burn, the wounded lay all around – some of which maybe aren’t lucky enough to be considered so – and blood splatters as your bullet finds its target and tears through a frontal cortex that just nanoseconds ago, was synchronizing bone and sinew to ensure that you didn’t get a chance to pull the trigger. Missiles explode all around as your Sergeant barks orders at you, in a way that suggests that he has more than completing the mission in mind. That always, always comes first of course, but the Sergeants here are just as worried about saving the World as you are, as well as saving their men’s – and their own – hides.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is WAR.

Controversy has surrounded Modern Warfare 2 and developers Infinity Ward, for their decision to include the “No Russian” level, which sees you aiming your firepower at innocent citizens in a massacre at a Russian airport. To put it into context, you’re playing as an undercover agent who has infiltrated a terrorist ring and has to stay undercover. Therefore, when they go to commit acts of terrorism such as this, you’re along for the ride. How do I feel about it? Well, the game does ask you a few times if you want to play through the level at all, and if you decide not to, you won’t suffer any negative consequences in terms of game completion or achievement points – and this is fair enough. As far as it stands in terms of the overall game experience well, I could have lived without it. The twist at the end of the mission is superb but still, I feel as if this “action” could have been represented in a slightly more delicate and more thoughtful way. It feels too obvious, as if – dare I say it – the entire section has been included just to provoke a reaction and to build that hype even higher.

That though, is one of the very few negative points I can find when it comes to the actual gameplay. Missions generally involve you battling it out from one area of a map to another but, until now, no game has ever made it feel as if you’re actually moving forward, slowly gaining territory. Sure, you’ve felt as if you’ve cleared a room or street of enemies before, but not like this. The South American levels featured in Modern Warfare 2 are a perfect example of how to do things properly. Every alleyway and side-street has to be covered before you can slowly step forward, lest you end up with a bullet in the back. You’ll find at times, that even though you’ve managed to get that “Checkpoint Reached” message to appear at the top of the screen, you still may have left one or two stragglers behind that could – as Shakespeare put it – do you in.

The missions are incredibly varied, too – much more so than any other game of this ilk. One minute, you’ll be blistering along on a snowmobile – taking potshots at enemy riders – and the next, you’ll be firing a rocket at a helicopter from the top of a burger joint in Middle America. It gets no better, no more gripping and no more thrilling than this. The weaponry on offer is impressive too, with everything from heartbeat-monitor equipped suppressed rifles to aircraft-downing Javelin missiles being the order of the day, each of which being wonderfully detailed and supremely deadly.

As with all good games, I don’t want to give away too much. The storyline features twists that really do pull you back to the action – should you ever tire of it, that is – and as is always the way, the things that you discover yourself are much more satisfying when you aren’t forearmed with a review that has dissected every little portion of the game at length and ruined all of the surprises.

Some have an issue with the length of Modern Warfare 2’s campaign mode and I have to say that yes, MW2 is small in terms of main-mode action, but that action is amazingly formed. Add in the challenging (and co-op compatible) Spec-Ops missions and standard multiplayer gameplay – which is superb – and you have a game that you’ll be playing for a long time to come. Anyway, I think I’d be more than happy to pay the full asking price for the campaign alone, as good as it is. I don’t see that trudging through thirty hours of boring levelling up and item collection is necessary for a game to represent good value, and I’m glad that Modern Warfare 2 has come along to back me up on that opinion.