Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers Review

Great game design teams can take a well-tread genre and throw in a change to make it feel new all over again. Portal exemplifies this, taking first-person shooter mechanics and tossing in brilliant and inventive elements from puzzle and platformer titles to make it about using your brain, rather than spilling those of your enemies. In the same vein we have the quirky indie-developed Tiny and Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers. While its challenge level and narrative are uneven, Tiny and Big nonetheless brings a unique twist to its platforming that, when paired with its fantastic aesthetic and personality, creates an endearing and delightful little experience.

Tiny and Big is the story of the two titular characters. You play as Tiny, a bookish little guy with a penchant for science, using your wits to overcome obstacles in your quest to find Big and recover your inheritance – a pair of underpants. Big’s a jerk, though, and will do everything in his power to slow you down, constantly running away and using his underpants-conferred magical powers to throw gigantic chunks of the world or levitate himself to the higher ground.

Not to be outdone by magic, Tiny’s got a few tools in his arsenal that make him deft at reaching the unreachable. If Tiny encounters a sheer wall he has no chance of jumping up, he can pull out his raygun and slice the world apart. With a few clicks of the mouse you can dynamically cut apart rocks and structures, shaving a column into a set of stairs that you can easily hop up. With your raygun it’s easy to cut up the world, then deploy a rocket booster, use your arms or a grappling hook to push and pull the stone into a configuration that allows you to progress.

At its most basic level, Tiny’s quest really boils down to a few environments you have to scale, but it manages to stay fun because each step is a little sandbox that lets you use your imagination to succeed. You could walk up to a wall and slice it into tiny chunks if you wanted, or you could just as easy do a gigantic slice that allows you to bring the whole wall down in one swoop. Sometimes I would cut stairs out of the world, still other times I might attach a rocket booster to a felled piece of stone, jump on top of it and then ride across a chasm. I died a whole heck of a lot, but forgiving checkpoints didn’t make it too much of a headache. Even when I did die, it usually was the result of hilariously poor planning, with a piece of a rock or wall coming down and crushing me.

It only takes a few hours to get through the entirety of Tiny and Big, but in this case that’s a good thing. Tiny and Big’s slicing mechanism entrances, but since you immediately have access to all the gameplay mechanics from the start, it’d grow wearisome if it went on much longer. The occasional boss battle might force you to be a bit faster with your cuts, but Tiny and Big doesn’t introduce anything new or tweak the formula throughout the story. In many ways it kind of feels like a really long tech demo with incredible aesthetics.

Really, it’s hard not to talk about Tiny and Big without spending time on its looks and music. The most valuable collectibles in each stage are cassette tapes that unlock phenomenal – and often bizarre – indie rock tracks. With so little done as far as the character’s voices -- they’re mostly composed of single sounds and grunts-- it’s nice to have fun and beautiful melodies accompanying your journey. The music feels right for the scenery, too. The look of Tiny and Big feels like someone took the cartoon Adventure Time and put it into the Borderlands engine. Along with its quirkily drawn characters, there’s just so much character in everything you see. Even the game’s menus are fun, and keep in step with the whimsical feeling of the story.

Like I said, Tiny and Big’s length is just about right for what’s included, but I’d really like to see the team at Black Pants Game Studio do more with their ingenious slicing mechanic and story. Some parts of Tiny and Big made me feel like I had to think to overcome them, but other parts felt a bit repetitive or so obvious that I wondered why the studio even bothered to put it in the game (cut a very conspicuously placed column to get across a gap? I’ve done this before…). Likewise I’d love it if the story went deeper. The funny in-game cut-scenes really show that the team has a knack for humor and making lovable characters, but in between all you have is the music to listen to. Games like this, where you spend so much time alone, need more witty banter between a companion and backstory to make the world interesting.



Source : ign[dot]com

Resistance: Burning Skies Review

Resistance: Burning Skies Review:

Resistance: Burning Skies isn't just the debut first-person shooter to grace Sony's PlayStation Vita platform. It's also gaming's very first portable twin-stick FPS, a feat made possible thanks to the Vita's powerful, PSP-topping guts. And yet as powerful as those guts may be, it's not enough to save Nihilistic Software's efforts here. Burning Skies may walk and talk like a Resistance game, but it sure doesn't play like one.

 

 

Burning Down the House

Burning Skies is set against the backdrop of the Chimeran invasion of the United States, with players stepping into the shoes of firefighter Tom Riley. Out on a routine call to a burning warehouse, Riley and his squad run into an alien threat that soon reveals itself as the vanguard for a full-scale invasion.

Although Riley is eventually (and inevitably) caught up in the larger story, his sole motivation throughout the game is personal. He's fighting to protect his wife and teenage daughter, whom he meets up with early on in the game before sending them on their way to a nearby refugee camp. Why he doesn't just join them in that moment when he has the chance is never really made clear, and it's an example that speak to the narrative's larger issues.

The story in Burning Skies lacks any of the emotional depth that made Insomniac's console outings so compelling. You can see the Vita game reaching in that direction, but the two big character moments that come up toward the end ultimately feel hollow and out of place. There's also some nodding going on in the direction of Nathan Hale's adventures, though more in the form of deep cut offhand reference that only the hardest of the hardcore fans will pick up on.

Resistance Is Futile

The narrative woes are minor complaints in the context of Burning Skies' larger issues. Chief among those is the feeling that this is little more than a wannabe Resistance game. All of the necessary pieces are here: gun-toting Chimeran forces, imaginitively designed firearms, big boss-like beasties, locked first-person perspective, and more besides. These pieces add up into something familiar, but it feels more like a Frankenstein's monster take on the FPS series than the proper spin-off that it's meant to be.

Take combat scenarios. Which ones, you ask? Try all of them. The settings may change, but the execution is largely the same each time: you enter a new area, access to your previous location is locked out, a wave of Chimera spawn in, you kill them all. Or, more accurately, they kill you a few times while you learn the spawn patterns and then you kill them all. It's a dull process, especially once the difficulty ratchets up in the late game.

The canny AI from the console trilogy is nowhere to be seen in this portable spin-off. Your enemy is definitely aggressive; Chimera forces will know exactly when and where you poke your head out of cover to pop off a few shots every single time. They'll rush your position, and occasionally show a glimmer of intelligence by working around to a flanking position. They're just as likely, however, to confuse a wall for your firefighter hero, and get stuck in a running animation as they endlessly charge a position that you were never close to in the first place.

Combine that dimwitted AI with some uninspiring level design. You'll encounter one or two sections later in the game that almost feel like Resistance on the PlayStation 3 with fights that span multiple rooms or large, open spaces. Unfortunately, these sections are much better at highlighting the flawed AI. Besides that, you'll still spend most of the game taking on the Chimera is much tighter confines, featureless hallways and rooms, broken city streets, that all funnel you along a singular tight path.

The arsenal, at least, is familiar and well thought out. Favorites like the Bullseye and Auger are joined by a handful of new weapon like the Mule, a double-barreled shotgun that doubles as an explosive bolt-firing crossbow. The weapons themselves are fine; they all feel very unique and powerful in their own way.

There's even some innovation in the form of Gray Tech, collectible power-ups that can be "spent" on each weapon's set of six upgrades. A New Game+ option opens up after you've beaten the game, allowing you to continue collecting Gray Tech. The upgrades are all weapon-specific and most of them offer some pretty effective boosts, but most players will gather more than enough Gray Tech in a single playthrough to get a sense for the good stuff.

This being a Vita game, touch controls are to be expected. Each weapon's alt-fire capability, a Resistance staple, is relegated in Burning Skies to touch screen controls. Some weapons require swipes across the screen, such as the Mule, while others require you to tap the enemy target's location on the screen.

It's a solid idea in theory, but the actual process of adjusting your grip on the Vita as you let go with one hand, tap the screen, and then grab the handheld again simply doesn't work very well. You're using these weapons in combat situations, after all, and the necessary pause in action that comes when you adjust your grip is enough to significantly diminish the tactical value of secondary weapon attacks.

This isn't to say that Nihilistic's work to integrate Vita-specific functionality into an FPS framework is a total disaster. There are a few ideas that work out well, though we've admittedly seen variations on these in two other shooting-oriented Vita games already: Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Unit 13. Both of those games, just like this one, rely on the left and right fringes of the touch screen for control options that would fit on a SIXAXIS but not the Vita's sligthly stripped-down interface.

Melee attacks with Tom's fireman's axe and grenade tosses are both relegated to touch screen buttons that are always visible on the right side of the screen. It's an easy stretch to move your thumb from the face buttons or right analog controls to one of the touch options. Helpfully, the melee attack "button" also doubles as an action button, so you can tap that to open doors and interact with mission-specific objects. You can also double-tap the rear touchpad to sprint, but it's much more effective to press down on the D-pad instead, since the Vita's design makes it possible to hit the D-pad button while still pressing forward on the left thumbstick.

Resisting World War

Nihilistic also included a multiplayer component in Burning Skies. Rather than try to deliver an online play experience that is in any way uniquely portable or Vita-focused, players can instead link up with a Wi-Fi connection and drop into competitive online matches for up to eight players in Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Survival (comparable to Halo's Infection).

Multiplayer in Burning Skies isn't bad, per se, it's just entirely unnecessary. It's built with a console audience in mind, just like the rest of the game, but it's also built like a console game. There's a system of level-based unlocks for your various weapons and their upgrades. How many players are really going to invest enough time to climb through 30 multiplayer ranks in Burning Skies' Wi-Fi-only online mode?

The unlocks are also woefully unbalanced; once you've got the Mauler, a ridiculously powerful Chimeran chain gun, or the multi-rocket-launching S.W.A.R.M., there's really no need to ever go back to default weapons like the Bullseye or Carbine.

So while the multiplayer mode in Burning Skies certainly works, there's really no reason for it to be here in the first place. The Wi-Fi requirement is certainly a technical limitation, but Nihilistic gets some blame as well for failing to come up with a multiplayer mode that actually belongs on the Vita platform.

Nihilistic had an opportunity to set the bar for FPS gaming on the Vita. Instead, we've got this halfway decent first-person shooter whose main strength is the fact that it's portable. Burning Skies is a passable time-waster in that sense, giving you plenty of corridors to run through and alien dudes to shoot. That's also the heart of the problem though. It's technically flawed in some key ways, but the biggest sin that Resistance: Burning Skies commits is its top-to-bottom lack of ambition

Source : http://www.g4tv.com/games/psv/65702/resistance-burning-skies/review/

Resistance: Burning Skies Review

Looking back at IGN's previews of Resistance: Burning Skies, the same idea keeps popping up: this is a handheld first-person shooter that feels like its console brethren. After shoehorning FPS games onto portables for years, having a true dual-stick shooter on the go is exciting -- it's just that Resistance: Burning Skies isn't. Burning Skies is a competent shooter with presentation problems that does little to thrill you.

Like most shooters these days, Resistance: Burning Skies is broken into two parts -- single player and online multiplayer. The solo campaign casts you as Tom Reilly, a New York firefighter thrust right into the action as the Chimera invade America for the first time. Tom's just doing his job and rescuing people, but when the Chimera abduct his wife and kid in front of him, he's committed to the fight until he gets them back (translating into six chapters of gameplay that should take you six or fewer hours).

“ Burning Skies is a competent shooter with presentation problems that does little to thrill you.

Unfortunately, most of that is straightforward and mindless. Tom rarely speaks, and when he does, it's rarely about his emotions. We're just some dude blasting and hacking our way across a bridge because getting there is the objective and we're hoping to find some weapon upgrades on the linear path. There are cutscenes between each chapter, but they're always told from another character's perspective. We never get a genuine moment with Tom, so why should we care about his motivation?

As such, the action is the main focus in Resistance: Burning Skies, and again, it's competent but lackluster. If you want to shoot things and peek out of cover, Burning Skies has it, but it doesn't have much more than that. Each time you run into a room, there are a bunch of Chimera to shoot. Most of these guys will just stand there and fight from one spot. Bosses are a breeze, and I think that has something to do with the way the game is controlled on the Vita.

Oddly, Burning Skies disables the Vita's ability to take screenshots.

See, the dual sticks and shoulder buttons allow for the console FPS basics that everyone knows. It's tight, responsive and going to make most feel at home. However, the Vita makes up for the buttons it's lacking with the front touch screen and the rear touch pad. You can double tap the back touch to run, and tap or hold the front touch to melee, interact with the environment and utilize each of the eight guns' secondary fire modes.

Here's where the breezy feeling meets the controls. These touch mechanics work and were only annoying when I'd accidentally melee a door or fire a tag round into the floor trying to interact with an object. However, holding the screen to fire an RPG or mark an enemy for the Bullseye takes time, and I think that's why the enemies aren't all that challenging; they're giving you a chance to use the touch screen mechanics.

There's a Burning Skies Trophy for killing a bunch of Executioners -- huge enemies each with a cannon for an arm -- but when one of these guys would show up, I'd stand in the open, tag the cannon with the Bullseye, and then empty a clip from cover. The game gave me ample time to do this without getting blown away by the beast. I didn't need a crazy strategy or to stay on my toes. It was as if the game was saying "Use the secondary now!" Even though the game does offer different difficulties, I found the ones unlocked from the get go to be like this but with less health for Tom.

In the spots where I did die, Burning Skies became all the more frustrating due to its poor checkpoint system. Sometimes, I'd start quite a ways back from where I perished (the bridge section), and other times I'd start before a pivotal moment and have to listen to the same conversation over and over (the final boss).

When you switch to multiplayer, you lose the gripes about story and the ho-hum enemies, but you don't find the hook that'll make Resistance: Burning Skies a must have. Good for up to eight players, the online options are limited at best. There are no clans, a handful of maps, and perks that are just unlockable weapons and mods from the single-player campaign. If you're aching for a handheld shooter, the game's three modes (deathmatch, team deathmatch and survival) will be here for you, but I don’t know how much of a community will sprout up around this.

Interestingly, one of my biggest complaints about Resistance: Burning Skies is the game's audio. The orchestral score is beautiful, but it doesn't seem to get used all that often. Instead, it seemed like my soundtrack was my own footsteps as I ran through single-player and multiplayer. In multiplayer, another issue arose where I'd be all alone in an area but gunfire would sound as if it was raining down on me. No matter where I was in a match, it sounded like I was in the heat of battle as long as someone somewhere was using his or her gun.



Source : http://www.ign.com

XCOM: Enemy Unknown Is Noob Approved

Confession: I've been bored as hell with all this XCOM talk. Saw the first-person shooter years ago and wasn't impressed. Proofread IGN Editor Anthony Gallegos' XCOM: Enemy Unknown March preview and didn't give it a second thought. Got assigned to see XCOM: Enemy Unknown at a pre-E3 event and wasn't all that excited.

Then, I played the introduction. Now, I can't wait to get my hands on the final product.

My problem leading up to playing was simple: I just didn't know anything about this franchise. A PC gaming staple, the original XCOM is known as one of the best strategy games around and as IGN's greatest PC game of all time. Nice accolades, but not something that means a lot to folks buying consoles in 2012.

Firaxis and 2K are counting on that. The E3 demo I played is the optional training folks can jump into -- it's built for the un-indoctrinated and walks you through deploying your four-person squad, navigating the Shadow Complex-like map that acts as your homebase, and how to fund research projects. The minutia of being able to dedicate resources to one add-on over another, to name the individual members of your squadron (who can then get killed in action never to return), to tackle missions exactly the way I want to: this stuff intrigues the hell out of me, and I know from titles such as Valkyria Chronicles and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker that it keeps me playing for dozens of hours.

The intro mode also doles out the story. Alien ships have smashed into Earth and are disintegrating the public while moving in their forces. Your four-person team is dispatched to a crash site, and you soon find a group of aliens packing mind control and laser guns.

Now, Anthony's already broken down how gameplay works and the details you'd want to know, but I actually got to play it on a PC -- with a controller. As a game that's also coming to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the controller's a big deal, and it works really well. Remember, there are no more "time units;" now, you get two actions like moving and attacking for each squad member each turn. When it's time to control a character, a movement grid pops up, you move the cursor, and you see the path your soldier will take. You can move them into cover or right into battle.

It was easy to wrap my head around, and it didn't feel like I was playing something that was meant for a mouse. Triggering an attack, tossing a grenade or firing a rocket was a cinch.

Yes, yes -- loot the gas station.

If there's a downside to XCOM: Enemy Unknown right now, it is the fact that it doesn't look that great. Environments are fine, but character models are a bit vanilla and not packing much detail. I think that might be because upgrading and outfitting is so important (a fully decked out dude was shown fighting a "Sectopod," which I hear is a big deal), but I won't know until I get more time with.

What I do know is that Firaxis is targeting a new audience with XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and it's working because all I want to do is play more, and this is from a guy who couldn't even tell you what this game was about a week ago.

Source : http://www.ign.com

BioShock Infinite delayed to 2013

BioShock Infinite will not ship this October as previously announced. Take-Two Interactive today announced that Irrational Games' upcoming first-person shooter will now release on February 26, 2013.

BioShock Infinite won't hit the skies this year.

In a statement, Irrational Games creative director Ken Levine explained that the extra development time will afford the studio an opportunity to pursue new game ideas.

"When we announced the release date of BioShock Infinite in March, we felt pretty good about the timing," he said. "Since then, we've uncovered opportunities to make Infinite into something even more extraordinary. Therefore, to give our talented team the time they need to deliver the best Infinite possible, we've decided to move the game's release to February."

In an update to the Irrational Games website, Levine also explained that BioShock Infinite will not be shown at this summer's Electronic Entertainment Expo and GamesCom.

"That way, the next time you see our game, it will be essentially the product we intend to put in the box. Preparing for these events takes time away from development," he explained.

When BioShock Infinite does ship, it will do so with great sales expectations. In August 2011, one analyst suggested the game would be a significant financial boon for Take- Two, saying it could ship 4.9 million copies.

BioShock Infinite is set in Columbia, a flying city in an early alternate 20th century where utopian ideals have given way to chaos in a sea of weaponry, plasmid-like powers, and political upheaval. Into this mess steps the game's protagonist, Booker DeWitt, a former member of the feared Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which was America's largest security company in the late 19th century. According to GameSpot's latest preview, DeWitt will enter a world where steampunk robots have replaced horses and people, and where crazed citizens foment revolution with strange powers--and lots of guns.




Source : http://gamespot.com/news/bioshock-infinite-delayed-to-2013-6375880

Starhawk Review

The greatest asset in Starhawk's arsenal is that it's capable of doing what no other shooter can. Starhawk creates a kind of chaos, unpredictability, and extraordinary spectacle that can't exist in any other shooter. This speaks to something more important. Starhawk dares to do what many others aren't: It subverts convention with original ideas. Starhawk is an action game that's comfortable in its own skin and carries itself with confidence.

It doesn't let struggles slow it down, and it makes the most of a mechanic that changes how you'll think about shooters on large-scale and microscopic levels. It throws caution to the wind and goes all in on a risk, betting that players will be receptive to something other than what they're used to.

It was a smart bet.


Starhawk Video Review


Starhawk is as much about strategy as it is action. The Build & Battle system plays a significant role in what you're able to do within the confines of a third-person action game. As you acquire Rift energy, a lucrative but dangerous substance, you can call in orbital drops to change the flow of battle. In some cases, orders even affect level design. You can build walls and mount them with turrets if you're holding out in one area, call in a supply bunker for heavy weaponry, or summon vehicles from space for usage on the ground or in the air.

This is a simple idea, and it's not as mentally demanding as a real-time strategy title might be, but it contributes enough unexpected variables to deepen Starhawk in a major way.

The single-player campaign is, perhaps unsurprisingly, absolutely meant to prepare players for the online multiplayer. This isn't a bad thing in terms of structure; it eases you into a system new to the shooter genre in an effective way. A mission emphasizing tanks, for instance, shows their strengths and weaknesses against various enemy types, while holding out to protect your base forces you to learn the best means of defense.

That said, there really isn't a singular solution for any objective. Starhawk is flexible. This is where multiplayer starts bleeding into the campaign, and Starhawk is a rare example of multiplayer design benefitting single-player direction. Missions are more contained than wide-open multiplayer maps but they're no less open to your experimentation. Yes, you're there to learn, but it's an explosive, entertaining class.

 

The podunk town of White Sands is where Graves left his bad memories.

The story is Starhawk's deepest flaw. Even though it's not a dealbreaker, it's disappointing to see the debut of this sci-fi western world struggle with such potential.

As someone insecure about his past and presently seen as an inferior being, Emmett Graves is an interesting main character for Starhawk. He's a minority, and not because of any racial classification. Graves is infected by Rift energy, the sentient substance subject to Starhawk's space gold rush. He's resisted its impulses but bears its glowing blue scars. In the eyes of those around him, Graves is as the same as any of the other mindless, violent "Outcasts" under its control. The most prominent of these people is Emmett's brother Logan, a man back from the dead and leading the charge against mankind.

This societal rejection could have created some incredible conflict between the Graves boys. Emmett just doesn't develop, and the storytelling dances around the cool world he's part of. Some questionable writing also knocks down his personality a few pegs. During gameplay, he's a cheesy action hero whose witless one-liners cement how aroused he is by his own violence. Meanwhile, comic book cutscenes portray a Graves unlike the one we play, not that his greed and disinterest in other people here makes him any more likable.

Predictably, Starhawk is at its best online, and this is where it outshines everything else on the PlayStation 3. This is one of the strongest, most enjoyable multiplayer options available, and once again the credit falls on the simple innovations. In the campaign, Emmett is the only man with the power to pull down pieces to help defend, or vehicles to take on the attack. In your typical match, there are 32 builders.

That's 32 individuals who are considering their play constantly and intelligently, and 32 people who feel extremely powerful at all times. There's nothing random about the way you play Starhawk because it's a deliberate process. What's more is that these 32 players are each changing the course of battle with every action, whether they're building an impenetrable fortress or enabling other players to take a machine-gun mounted truck for a joy ride.

Up at Noon Interview: Starhawk's a Big Risk For Dev, Sony


Starhawk disrupts multiplayer standards such as Capture the Flag, which becomes a more intense back-and-forth. No flag point looks the same because each enemy team defends it differently. If you play the role of flag capturer, you have plenty of options to get in and out, not the least of which is the Hawk ship, which makes a powerful escape vehicle in its walking tank mode (because of course you can't fly it with the flag in tow).

This is one of the most chaotic and empowering multiplayer games on any platform. Any number of tanks, gunners, turrets, and Hawks can rip buildings to shreds or take each other down. Somebody might get the jump on you for a vicious knife kill. Maybe you'll conquer a control point in Zones on your own without anyone knowing where you are. Eventually, you'll unlock that new paint job for your Razorback truck, a set of pants for your online avatar, and an equippable XP bonus.

You'll always see something on the move, a trail in the sky, a hail of bullets. There is always fire, and there is always a reason to build something. If you're smart about it, maybe your Shield Generator will hit a Hawk or land on a man as it tears through the atmosphere and smashes into the ground.

Whatever happens in the moment-to-moment action of Starhawk, you won't soon forget it.


Source : http://ps3.ign.com/articles/122/1224407p1.html

Spec Ops: The Line Demo Marches Onto PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 Ads By Google » Blog Tags Today's Most Popular Videos »

Starting today, console gamers get to try out a taste of Yager Development's 2K Games-published third-person shooter Spec Ops: The Line, compliments of a newly released playable demo. The chunk pulled from two of the game's early chapters offers a glimpse at the dark and frequently disturbing story which carries echoes of Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness.

The demo is available for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms, but on the 360 side only Xbox Live Gold subscribers can start downloading it now. Silver subscribers will have to wait until May 15 for access. There's no rush though, since we've still got a bit of time before the game is released. Spec Ops: The Line arrives in stores on June 26, 2012 for PS3, Xbox 360, and Windows PC platforms.


Source : http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/723559/spec-ops-the-line-demo-marches-onto-playstation-3-xbox-360/

Starhawk Review

The greatest asset in Starhawk's arsenal is that it's capable of doing what no other shooter can. Starhawk creates a kind of chaos, unpredictability, and extraordinary spectacle that can't exist in any other shooter. This speaks to something more important. Starhawk dares to do what many others aren't: It subverts convention with original ideas. Starhawk is an action game that's comfortable in its own skin and carries itself with confidence.

It doesn't let struggles slow it down, and it makes the most of a mechanic that changes how you'll think about shooters on large-scale and microscopic levels. It throws caution to the wind and goes all in on a risk, betting that players will be receptive to something other than what they're used to.

It was a smart bet.


Starhawk Video Review


Starhawk is as much about strategy as it is action. The Build & Battle system plays a significant role in what you're able to do within the confines of a third-person action game. As you acquire Rift energy, a lucrative but dangerous substance, you can call in orbital drops to change the flow of battle. In some cases, orders even affect level design. You can build walls and mount them with turrets if you're holding out in one area, call in a supply bunker for heavy weaponry, or summon vehicles from space for usage on the ground or in the air.

This is a simple idea, and it's not as mentally demanding as a real-time strategy title might be, but it contributes enough unexpected variables to deepen Starhawk in a major way.

The single-player campaign is, perhaps unsurprisingly, absolutely meant to prepare players for the online multiplayer. This isn't a bad thing in terms of structure; it eases you into a system new to the shooter genre in an effective way. A mission emphasizing tanks, for instance, shows their strengths and weaknesses against various enemy types, while holding out to protect your base forces you to learn the best means of defense.

That said, there really isn't a singular solution for any objective. Starhawk is flexible. This is where multiplayer starts bleeding into the campaign, and Starhawk is a rare example of multiplayer design benefitting single-player direction. Missions are more contained than wide-open multiplayer maps but they're no less open to your experimentation. Yes, you're there to learn, but it's an explosive, entertaining class.

The podunk town of White Sands is where Graves left his bad memories.

The story is Starhawk's deepest flaw. Even though it's not a dealbreaker, it's disappointing to see the debut of this sci-fi western world struggle with such potential.

As someone insecure about his past and presently seen as an inferior being, Emmett Graves is an interesting main character for Starhawk. He's a minority, and not because of any racial classification. Graves is infected by Rift energy, the sentient substance subject to Starhawk's space gold rush. He's resisted its impulses but bears its glowing blue scars. In the eyes of those around him, Graves is as the same as any of the other mindless, violent "Outcasts" under its control. The most prominent of these people is Emmett's brother Logan, a man back from the dead and leading the charge against mankind.

This societal rejection could have created some incredible conflict between the Graves boys. Emmett just doesn't develop, and the storytelling dances around the cool world he's part of. Some questionable writing also knocks down his personality a few pegs. During gameplay, he's a cheesy action hero whose witless one-liners cement how aroused he is by his own violence. Meanwhile, comic book cutscenes portray a Graves unlike the one we play, not that his greed and disinterest in other people here makes him any more likable.

Predictably, Starhawk is at its best online, and this is where it outshines everything else on the PlayStation 3. This is one of the strongest, most enjoyable multiplayer options available, and once again the credit falls on the simple innovations. In the campaign, Emmett is the only man with the power to pull down pieces to help defend, or vehicles to take on the attack. In your typical match, there are 32 builders.

That's 32 individuals who are considering their play constantly and intelligently, and 32 people who feel extremely powerful at all times. There's nothing random about the way you play Starhawk because it's a deliberate process. What's more is that these 32 players are each changing the course of battle with every action, whether they're building an impenetrable fortress or enabling other players to take a machine-gun mounted truck for a joy ride.




The Starhawk Interview on Up at Noon


Starhawk disrupts multiplayer standards such as Capture the Flag, which becomes a more intense back-and-forth. No flag point looks the same because each enemy team defends it differently. If you play the role of flag capturer, you have plenty of options to get in and out, not the least of which is the Hawk ship, which makes a powerful escape vehicle in its walking tank mode (because of course you can't fly it with the flag in tow).

This is one of the most chaotic and empowering multiplayer games on any platform. Any number of tanks, gunners, turrets, and Hawks can rip buildings to shreds or take each other down. Somebody might get the jump on you for a vicious knife kill. Maybe you'll conquer a control point in Zones on your own without anyone knowing where you are. Eventually, you'll unlock that new paint job for your Razorback truck, a set of pants for your online avatar, and an equippable XP bonus.

You'll always see something on the move, a trail in the sky, a hail of bullets. There is always fire, and there is always a reason to build something. If you're smart about it, maybe your Shield Generator will hit a Hawk or land on a man as it tears through the atmosphere and smashes into the ground.

Whatever happens in the moment-to-moment action of Starhawk, you won't soon forget it.



Source : http://ps3.ign.com/articles/122/1224407p1.html

Lone Survivor Review

When you think of "intense" games, you might recall some shooter's bullet-laden climactic scene, or a particularly impressive combo in a fighting game. But intensity doesn't just exist in moments of over-the-top violence or during awe-inspiring displays of skill. It can come from the way a game affects your mood and your mind as you play it. In that sense, Lone Survivor is one of the most truly intense games in recent memory: it's a game that, from the opening menu, grabs a hold of your senses and keeps them locked onto your monitor until the adventure is over.

The neighbors are restless.

You play as the nameless title character, seemingly the only human left after a plague has turned most of the population into faceless, shambling zombies. Despite this devastating catastrophe, you encounter other "people" with whom you can interact: a white-faced man, a man with a cardboard box on his head, and a few others, but how real these people are (and whether or not they're outright malevolent) is a matter of perspective. See, the main character is in a constant struggle against not only the mutants outside his apartment, not only his own hunger and fatigue, but sanity itself. Choices you make in the game--whether or not to carry on a conversation with a stuffed animal, for example--have real effects on how the main character keeps his marbles together; although to the game's great credit, it's not always clear what will be beneficial and what will be detrimental when you choose.

However you treat your character's mind, though, you face a series of challenges once he inevitably decides to sally forth from his lonely apartment into the world beyond. The halls of his apartment building are home to some of the aggressive mutants, but you are presented early on with a radio broadcast urging survivors to head to an apartment on the other side of the building. To be sure, you have to come back to your apartment over and over to sleep (which is also the only way to save your game) and because it serves as a base of operations for everything you do. Apart from trying to sort out the aftermath of the zombie plague, your character can focus on smaller, side-quest-type goals, like repairing a stove to cook more-palatable food (good for your sanity) or taking care of a houseplant--and all of these are centered on your apartment.

It's life's little surprises that keep you going during a zombie apocalypse.

Fortunately, a series of mirrors placed throughout the gameworld let you teleport to and from your home base instantaneously (and also serve to give you a sense of your overall health and sanity). Unfortunately, the game's mapping system leaves a great deal to be desired. For one thing, the maps are rendered in an overhead, bird's-eye-view format, while the game itself is entirely side-scrolling. This leads to a lot of going the wrong way as you try to spatially reorient yourself. Merely annoying most of the time, this disorienting discrepancy between map layout and gameplay perspective is absolutely hair-tearing during a couple of chase sequences in which you have to figure out where you're going, orient yourself properly, and avoid being killed, all in real time. Opening the map does not pause the game, and you can easily become zombie food while you're trying to remember whether it's a right or a left you need to take.


Source : http://www.gamespot.com/lone-survivor/reviews/lone-survivor-review-6374889/