Devil Summoner 2 Review

Fun combat and an intriguing story make up for the dull detective drudgery in this atmospheric period adventure.
The Japan of the mid to late 1920s was a unique blend of the old and the new as the island nation struggled to maintain its traditions in the face of rampant modernization. Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon uses this turbulent period of history to great effect, crafting a moody and atmospheric world to tell an intriguing and stylish story. Though the game suffers from inconsistent and sometimes confusing gameplay and a flawed exploratory camera, its engaging battles, addictive devil management system, and low price point make a solid case for role-playing game fans to plug their PlayStation 2 consoles back in to make a deal with a devil.

When the Yatagarasu, the shadowy organization that watches over the sanctity of Japan, has reason to believe an imminent threat is approaching Tokyo, it's up to Raidou Kuzunoha to step in and save the day once again. The young Raidou--the 14th person to assume the title of the greatest devil summoner--is dispatched to the capital to keep an eye on it and take what steps are necessary to avert disaster and maintain the balance of the supernatural world. Along for the ride is Raidou's chatty and often sarcastic feline companion-slash-mentor, Gouto, and serving as the cover for their operations once again is the Narumi Detective Agency, which is run by the carefree and decidedly dapper modern gent Shouhei Narumi. When a lovely but suspicious dame hires you to find a man named Dahn, what looks like a simple missing-persons case turns out to be anything but, and Raidou is thrust into the middle of a mystery that involves masked ninjas, giant insects, and a whole lot of bad luck.

As a devil summoner, dealing with the supernatural is Raidou's specialty, and with all the strange happenings in the capital, there's no shortage of it. While investigating for clues, he frequently stumbles across wandering devils that need to be put in their places, and calling in demonic backup of his own is where Raidou's talents really lie. Up to two devils can be summoned at a time, and by paying careful attention to your enemies' weaknesses and calling upon the right friends to take advantage of them, you can dish out some serious damage. Watch out, though, because your devils have their own weaknesses, and enemies won't hesitate to take advantage of them. You can't just let your devils do all the work, and thankfully Raidou is more than equipped to hold his own in a tussle. Getting up close and personal to show off his swordplay is his primary source of damage, and he's also a crack shot with a revolver, which hits for less damage but can stun rogue devils. Combat is in real time, and Raidou is surprisingly nimble on his feet, which makes dodging incoming hits as easy as dive-rolling out of the way.

Though pursuing the path of violence is fun with this battle system, it's not always the best course of action: sometimes it's better to chat up your enemies instead. Through careful application of the art of negotiation, you can recruit a devil to your side, provided it's in the mood and you satisfactorily answer its line of questions and comply with its demands. Constantly expanding your chthonian roster is important, because you grow as a devil summoner by gaining loyalty from your devils. Loyalty is earned by taking your devils into battle, which in turn increases the number of devils you can keep at a single time and grants Raidou higher ranks (which determines what side quests you can accept). It's also important to keep a diverse portfolio of devils, because each one has different field abilities that help with your detective work--the pagan Lilim, for example, can read minds, a power that helps you glean information that you would otherwise be unable to obtain.

When not sweet-talking or pounding on devils, Raidou busies himself by running around the various districts of the capital searching for clues. Despite the detective shtick Devil Summoner 2 has going for it, these are the weakest parts of the gameplay because your immediate goals often aren't well communicated, and there are often long stretches without combat. Furthermore, each area is displayed from a fixed camera location, and every so many steps the camera moves to a different spot. Seeing the same scene from multiple different angles can be disorienting, which makes even navigating around the world an exercise in frustration.

If you need a break from mundane story investigations, you can always return to the detective agency and pick up some of the extra case files that build up on your desk and gather dust. While most of these side quests are simple fetch missions, some of them send you to specific locations to track down and dispatch more powerful devils, and others reward you with new abilities you'll need in order to push on in the main game. You can also spend time in the dark versions of the capital to tame more devils to add to your collection, which can then be fused together two at a time to create entirely new ones in the laboratory of the Dr. Frankenstein-ish Victor, a quirky but friendly demonologist. Victor can also synthesize new weapons for you, and using either of his services can be fun and rewarding in and of itself.

The rich game world is brought to life with the Shin Megami Tensei series' trademark stylized designs and a jazzy, upbeat soundtrack. Unlike in the recent Persona games, which favored an anime look and feel for the characters, everyone in Devil Summoner 2 is rendered and animated in full 3D. Though Raidou and company look great, they're all suspiciously silent due to a complete lack of voice acting, which makes for some awkward moments during conversations. Nonetheless, the entire game positively oozes with style, which more than makes up for this and the slightly aged graphics produced by the PS2 hardware.

Though it suffers some missteps from the lackluster investigation sequences and poor camera, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon is an engaging and suspenseful adventure through an atmospheric world filled with supernatural intrigue. Fusing devils or recruiting new ones is addictive, defeating powerful fiends is rewarding, and unraveling the story is entertaining. If you're looking for a quirky and fun game to slake your thirst for an RPG, Devil Summoner 2 may be just what you're looking for.

G-Force Review

Jumping around is a lot more fun than engaging in combat in this licensed movie adaptation.

With proper training, guinea pigs can be impressive secret agents. They can learn to speak to humans, wear jetpacks for improved mobility, and even wield powerful whips in their tiny paws. Just don't expect them to carry guns. The PSP version of G-Force uses many of the same environments and enemies as its console siblings, but it strips the adventurous rodents of their precious firearms. The lack of powerful, long-range weapons limits the appeal of combat, creating repetitive and often frustrating battles against aggressive kitchen appliances. You can only whip an angry toaster so many times before the thrill fades away. However, when you take a breather from the fighting, the game picks up, relying on deft platforming segments and rewarding exploration to make sure these pint-sized heroes carry their weight. Although the game drags at times, G-Force is still a fun adaptation of the blockbuster movie.

For the majority of this 10-hour-plus game, you play as Darwin, the field leader of G-Force. A nefarious being has tampered with the delicate circuitry of everyday kitchen appliances, causing them to attack their owners with merciless force. There is a surprising amount of story interspersed with the action; unfortunately, it's not particularly interesting or humorous. Every few minutes you'll have a brief back-and-forth with your support team, and though these exchanges point you in the right direction, they aren't entertaining and crop up far too often. These interludes don't muddle the action too much, given that you can usually jump around while your objectives are being laid out, but be prepared to put up with a number of groan-worthy puns and cheesy one-liners during the course of your quest.

When you aren't stuck in overly long cutscenes detailing the fate of these adaptable rodents, you run around large 3D environments, using your jetpack to reach otherwise inaccessible objects and cracking your trusty whip to take down all attackers. Combat was the highlight of the console versions, taking advantage of a diverse array of enemies and some lethal guns to keep the fighting fast and fresh. But with your guns unceremoniously stripped away in this portable edition, the wild and wooly combat loses its exhilarating appeal. You need only mash the square button to take down most attackers, and though Darwin flips and spins with style, the lack of different tactics or weapons to play around with quickly drags these parts down. As you get deeper into the game, the appliances develop more advanced combat techniques, but this only replaces the monotony with frustration. Flying blenders are equipped with fast-moving missiles, and when you get surrounded by these adversaries, the game borders on cheap. Darwin has no long-range weapons and limited combat mobility, so trying to fight your way out of a room with projectile-slinging enemies is aggravating.

At least the platforming is a lot more interesting. Much of the game has you hopping across precariously placed cardboard boxes or gliding up to cramped air ducts, and the smooth controls make it fun to just run around the environments. There are plenty of hidden passageways with collectible discs, and though your only reward for finding these items is unlockable concept art, it's still satisfying to try to uncover all the secret nooks. Because you have a jetpack on your back at all times, your jumps have impressive lift, and you can even use this boost on the ground for a speedy dash. The obstacles are also situated to take full advantage of your jumping prowess.

It's a good thing running and jumping is fun because you'll spend a fair bit of time wandering around for your next objective. You can call up your radar at any time to point you in the right direction, but this feature varies between painfully obvious and maddeningly vague. For instance, sometimes you'll be told to "run up the stairs," which couldn't be easier. However, other times, you'll be told to "enter the second air lock" only to find out later, after much fruitless experimentation, that you actually need to destroy nine harmless robotic arms before you can move forward. There are also a number of computers that must be hacked before you can proceed, and although this minigame is fun at first, it quickly overstays its welcome. It plays like a rhythm game, with notes dropping from the top of the screen, and you must tap the appropriate button when it reaches the bottom. At certain points of the game, a few of these are crammed in quick succession, and it's boring to do the same thing over and over again to progress.

The hacking minigames give you access to the most novel aspect of the game--the ability to control those rampaging appliances yourself. During certain sections, you must command a razor-shooting paper shredder, an ice-melting microwave, and other useful tools, which provide the moments of variety G-Force desperately needs. Although there is little challenge in these sections, it's a lot of fun flying around as the devilish blenders that have tormented you so often and using their missiles to take down a horde of intelligent machines. Savor these moments because there aren't any other cool sections to break up the jump-and-whip action. Without any boss battles to speak of or any other elements to mix up the pace, you'll spend the vast majority of the game going through nondescript government facilities without anything noteworthy happening. G-Force is able to stay interesting because the platforming mechanics are so well done, but a little more variety would have gone a long way.

G-Force is an inconsistent adaptation of the blockbuster movie. Younger players should get a kick out of scurrying around the environment, using the jetpack to sprint across the ground, reach high-up places, and hunt down hidden discs. But the combat isn't nearly as thrilling and relies on just a short-range whip for the entire game. The lack of variety is also distressing, although the sections where you can control an evil appliance are fast and rewarding. G-Force may not be able to stand up to the consistently fun console versions, but this is still an engaging adventure that should keep players occupied for more than 10 hours of rodent action.

SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny Review

The first portable SoulCalibur is very good, but it lacks both compelling single-player content and online play

When you start playing SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny's single-player Gauntlet mode, a warning pops up on the screen to let you know that its bizarre story is "based on obscure fables and does not accurately represent SoulCalibur history." Fortunately, just about everything else in Broken Destiny feels very much like it belongs in the long-running fighting series. The weapon-based combat is as accessible and as deep as ever, the arenas are ripped right out of SoulCalibur IV, and the two new fighters introduced in this game are definitely a better fit than the Star Wars characters that graced the aforementioned Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game. There's not enough compelling single-player content here to make Broken Destiny a must-have if you're planning on going solo, but add a friend with a second copy of the game to the equation, and good times are guaranteed.

All 28 of the fighters on Broken Destiny's roster are available from the outset. You can also create your own fighters from scratch using limited customization tools to determine their physical appearance and then dress them up in gear chosen from a massive wardrobe, much of which has to be unlocked. There are no performance bonuses associated with clothing and weapons this time around, which is unfortunate if you really enjoyed that aspect of SoulCalibur IV, but great if you want to wear all of the matching pieces of the Santa costume without feeling like your fashion choices are compromising your effectiveness. Regardless of which fighter you choose to play as and what he or she is wearing, Broken Destiny, like previous SoulCalibur offerings, is easy to pick up and grasp the basics of. You can move in eight directions using the D pad or the analog nub, and face buttons are used to guard and to perform basic horizontal attacks, vertical attacks, and kicks. That's really all you need to know to get started, though you'll find that there are plenty of more advanced techniques to master if you check out the character-specific move lists in the useful Training mode.

Oddly, Broken Destiny doesn't feature an Arcade mode in which to pit your chosen combatant against a number of opponents en route to a matchup with a boss. In its place is Trials mode, which incorporates three distinct score-based challenges in Attack, Defense, and Endless flavors. In the Trial of Attack you're pitted against five opponents and earn score bonuses for playing aggressively and for landing combos. The Trial of Defense is a little longer and culminates in a boss battle against Algol from SoulCalibur IV, so in that respect it's a lot like that game's Arcade mode. The main difference here is that you score points and earn bonuses for guarding against your opponent's attacks and retaliating quickly. Endless Trial is a survival mode of sorts, except that your fighter regains all of his health between rounds. Seeing how many of the increasingly tough opponents you can make it past without ever losing is a lot of fun, but your score isn't based on that. Rather, every time you land a blow you earn points, and there's a score multiplier that goes up when you hit your opponent but falls back down when you get hit. The scoring system in the trials means there's some fun to be had replaying them to beat your best performances, but it's unfortunate that there's no way for you to compare your high scores with those of other players online.

Outside of quick one-on-one matches against the AI that you choose from a pseudo online lobby complete with win/loss records for different players, Broken Destiny's only other single-player content is the story-driven Gauntlet mode. Spanning more than 30 chapters each composed of multiple challenges, this mode is really just a lengthy tutorial that trains you to defend against every character in the game. Learning to effectively evade and guard against your opponent's attacks is important, and if you take the time to play through all of the 80-plus Gauntlet challenges, you'll almost certainly emerge a better player than you were when you went into it. You're not necessarily going to have much fun along the way though.

Save for a boss fight at the very end, Gauntlet mode is comprised almost entirely of challenges that last just a few seconds, and in that time you have to complete a number of very specific objectives to progress. For the most part, that means starting with very little health, avoiding an enemy's attacks, and then landing an attack of your own. You're set up to fail most of these the first time, because unless you're a seasoned SoulCalibur veteran, you're not going to know if the attacks coming at you in rapid succession are going to be high or low, vertical or horizontal, or even unblockable. Fail once, and you're given feedback from other characters that, more often than not, includes a breakdown of exactly what you need to do. That's good, because hearing the announcer say "mission failed" over and over again in a short space of time when you get stuck on a challenge can be infuriating.

As you progress through Gauntlet mode, you're introduced to throw escapes, stun recoveries, guard impacts, aerial controls, interrupts, and a number of other features that leave you in no doubt as to how deep the fighting system is. You're also exposed to facets of the fighters' personalities that you've never seen before and that, frankly, you probably won't want to see again. Yun-seong believes he's receiving messages from aliens, Zasalamel is an interdimensional peeping tom, Nightmare cries a lot, and moonwalking newcomer Dampierre has a penchant for young girls that's second only to his feelings about facial hair. In short, by the time you reach the end of the Gauntlet mode you're left in no doubt as to why the story isn't considered SoulCalibur canon. The only character who makes it through the mode with his reputation intact is Kratos, the antihero of Sony's God of War series.

In fact, Kratos makes it through all of Broken Destiny's modes without losing face. Not only does he have a formidable arsenal of moves that make him feel quite different from anyone else on the roster, but in Creation mode, the only option you have for customizing him is to equip him with very slightly different chain-blade weapons. Leather loafers, short slops, goddess gauntlets, and elf ears are available elsewhere on the roster, but the only options available to Kratos are the same outfit he wears in the God of War games and the suit of armor he can be seen wearing at the start of God of War II. Regardless, he's a good addition to the roster, and with unusual abilities that include launching himself into the air using Icarus wings and swinging from the chains attached to his blades, he poses a challenge whether you're going up against him or attempting to master his moves yourself. The same can be said of Dampierre, who employs concealed weapons and an unorthodox fighting style that frequently causes him to lose his balance.

The best way to put your skills with either of the SoulCalibur newcomers to the test, of course, is to use them not against the admittedly impressive AI but against another player in Versus mode. Unfortunately, there's no online play, but the option to play against friends locally in an ad hoc party is well implemented at least. Connecting is quick and easy, the gameplay is lag-free, and your win/loss records with different opponents are remembered across multiple sessions. Also deserving of a mention is an option to install a portion of the game data to your memory stick, which almost completely cuts out any load times between matchups, not just in Versus mode, but across the entire game.

SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny's presentation is impressive in almost every regard. Fighters are detailed and animate smoothly, the varied arenas they do battle in are nicely lit, and the accompanying sound effects make attacks feel even more powerful than they look. The orchestral soundtrack is a great fit and, in conjunction with the over-the-top fight announcer and some ostentatious one-liners from the characters themselves, it makes every battle feel like an epic encounter.

Because the bulk of its single-player content is best suited to players who already have some SoulCalibur experience, Broken Destiny isn't quite as easy to recommend to newcomers as other games in the series. However, if you're already comfortable with SoulCalibur or with similar 3D fighting systems and can live with the lack of online play, there's really no reason you shouldn't pick this one up posthaste.

The Warriors series continues to set the standard for repetitive button mashing in this dull, ugly sequel.

Released last year for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2, Warriors Orochi 2 demonstrated a stalwart dedication to the shallow, repetitive gameplay that has characterized most games in the Warriors series. This hack-and-slash button masher has now made its way to the PSP, and series fans can rest easy: All the crushing boredom of the console versions has survived the transition to Sony's handheld.

The heroes of Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors found themselves united by a time-bending, world-merging serpent king in Warriors Orochi. Warriors Orochi 2 carries on that crossover and introduces new characters to bring the full playable roster to a whopping 96. There are five stories to choose from in the Story mode: one for each of the three kingdoms of China, one for the samurai warriors of Japan, and one for Orochi and his followers. By this point, the personalities of these characters and the relationships between them have been developing for a long time across their respective series. The basic story of good versus evil is simple and easy to follow, but unless you're a series devotee, you'll likely find all of the name-dropping and much of the dialogue impenetrable. Who is Yoshimoto Imagawa? Why is he pining for a kemari partner? Does it matter? It doesn't help that the storytelling is terrible. There's the occasional cutscene, but for the most part, the game employs static portraits of characters who utter wooden dialogue. Most of the characters are unlikable, too; the historic personages who make up the cast are imagined here as arrogant nobles, sultry seductresses, and monosyllabic buffoons. The company of the heroes and villains alike is not enjoyable.

Each of the game's five stories takes you through a series of battles that play out in large environments. The action consists mostly of running around the battlefields and frequently pausing to tap the attack button for a while. This tapping results in the slaughter of hundreds of enemy troops who would rather stand in place and let you kill them than make any attempt to hinder your progress. You can also perform the occasional special attack, which is useful for more quickly defeating the enemy captains you encounter. Being powerful enough to slice through so many of your enemies with such ease should be intoxicating, but here, it's simply a chore. Before each mission, you compose a team of three characters, and as you play, you can switch between them on the fly, though there isn't generally much need or incentive to do so. Sure, there are 96 playable characters, but each character falls into one of just three basic categories: power, speed, and technique. Each category has its own special ability, but the differences between them have little impact on how they actually play.

While you probably won't often be threatened by enemy attacks, your allies are not so powerful or competent. During each battle, you'll receive constant updates on such things as shifts in morale and allies who are struggling elsewhere on the battlefield. This should contribute to the sense that battles are dynamic and large in scope, but in fact, very little of this information has any concrete impact on you as you run around slaughtering bad guys. There are conditions by which you can fail each battle, however. You will need to watch these updates for any mention that your main camp is in danger or that some ally who must not be defeated is struggling, so that you can hurry to the rescue. Repeatedly being forced to dash across the battlefield to rescue a helpless ally will make you feel like more of a babysitter than a powerful warrior.

Looking at the menu between battles--which features such options as abilities, character growth, and customize weapon--you might think that there are significant role-playing elements here. You do earn experience and level up over time. You can also fuse weapons to make them more powerful and unlock a host of passive abilities that you can equip your team with, such as increased speed or a gradually recharging a life bar. These aspects have little impact on the action, though, serving only to make you wish for a gameplay experience in which growth and development actually mattered.

Outside of the Story mode, there's the Free mode, which lets you take any three unlocked characters and play any scenarios you've completed from any of the game's five stories. There's also a Dream mode, which features 40 additional scenarios that take place outside the main story for those who just can't get enough of this action. And if you have a friend with the game, you can enjoy the monotony together via wireless play. Any battle can be fought cooperatively by two players who share the same team of three characters. There are also a number of competitive modes, but they're all dreadful. You can face your opponent head-on in one-on-one or tag-team fights, but the combat is much too shallow to make this a worthwhile fighting game. There's also the Tower mode in which you race your opponent to see who can knock more enemy soldiers off of a tower within a time limit. This race takes the dullest aspect of the game--fighting the rank-and-file grunts--and creates an entire mode around it. And there's the Steeplechase mode, which is a kind of kart racer on horseback with just one terrible track and slippery controls. Playing the game with a friend makes the experience less painful, but there are at least a million better ways you could spend your time.

Warriors Orochi 2's visuals are dated and ugly. The battlefields are drab and feel empty, and the enemy soldiers you kill by the dozens are featureless clones. The sound is equally awful. The music is a hodgepodge of repetitive Eastern-influenced melodies and generic electronica; the constant clash of swords is tinny and weak; and the voice acting veers between lifeless and absurdly melodramatic.

Fans that are looking for more of the same will get just that from Warriors Orochi 2. With its 96 playable characters and five stories to complete, there's enough here to keep series faithful busy for a long time. This game makes no attempt to reach out to anyone else, though, and everyone else should stay far away.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade Review

This 2D hack-and-slash adventure lacks depth, but the striking backgrounds make it easy to get sucked into its world.

Every so often, a game comes out that looks so incredible, it's easy to look past the small problems bubbling just beneath the surface in order to enjoy its brilliant artistic design. Muramasa: The Demon Blade offers so much more than its pedestrian combat and meandering story promise. It's a visual feast that pulls you to each new area to marvel at the swaying wheat blowing gently in the breeze, the subtle illumination of the enchanted caves, or the majestic waterfall cascading behind you. The numerous bosses receive the same level of attention, both in their fantastic visual style and their unpredictable attack patterns. But the standard action, which is too simple and repetitive to be a draw in its own right, never quite matches the inspired artistic beauty. Though the combat may be merely ordinary, the gorgeous visuals are enough to make Muramasa a memorable experience.

The story in Muramasa is split between two characters, though the tale is often difficult to follow and the protagonists are far from endearing. At the title screen, you choose to play as either Momohime, a girl who has her body possessed by a powerful swordsman, or Kisuke, a boy who just can't seem to remember who he is. You roam the lands in search of the truth, slaying demons, gods, and anything else that stands in your way. Despite the often cryptic storytelling, there are a few elements that make this dual-hero setup interesting. Although both characters travel across the same world and fight many of the same enemies, they collect different swords during their quests and square off against different bosses as well. Furthermore, the two stories spill into each other at times. Playing through a second time, with the other character, reveals more about the world and gives some meaning to all the unexplained madness.

The combat is certainly a better draw than the perfunctory story, although it delivers a skewed balance between style and substance. You can choose to play with a GameCube or Classic Controller or a Wii Remote and Nunchuk, and there is no difference between the control schemes. The majority of your offensive and defensive maneuvers are handled with just one button. Though this limits the amount of moves at your disposal, it makes for smooth and fun combat. If you tap the button, you swing your sword once, and if you tap it multiple times, it results in a brief combo. Holding this button down and moving the D pad lets you swoop across the screen, either in a side-to-side dash, rising uppercut, or speedy downward strike. This button also controls your defensive maneuvers. Holding it down causes your character to block and, if you time this tap perfectly, repel your enemies' thrown attacks back at them. Zipping across the screen, striking down enemies with impunity, and making your combo score soar is certainly fun, but it lacks depth. The majority of your battles are over in less than 30 seconds, and you won't have to change your attack strategy very often.

Every time you block an attack, your sword gets slightly weakened, and if the fight drags on long enough, it will shatter. Because your weapons are so brittle, you bring three different swords with you in battle. When you sheath a busted blade, it will slowly regenerate while you slice and dice with a fresh one. The different swords add a tiny bit of strategy to the usually mindless fights because each of the more than 100 different blades has a unique special attack. These moves are not explained beforehand, so you must try them all out in battle to see what these new powers bring. Sometimes, they let you perform a new attack, such as a spinning strike, and at other times, they imbue your character with new abilities, such as a brief immunity to fire. Swords are earned every time you destroy a boss, but they can also be forged outside of battle. The experience points you earn by defeating enemies can be used to create more powerful swords, and it's fun unlocking every sword to experiment with their special attacks.

Normal enemies can be disposed of with a few quick strikes, but boss encounters are much more thoughtful and, therefore, more rewarding. These imposing foes take very different forms, from a group of centipedes that rarely attack but have an awful lot of health, to a towering god that has a couple of flying protectors hounding your every step. Figuring out the patterns is a fun game of trial and error, forcing you to cleverly dodge their attacks until they open themselves up for a retaliatory blow. As the game progresses, the bosses become exceedingly challenging, though you can switch between the two difficulty settings at any time if you find your path frustratingly halted. Because you can level up your character and unlock new weapons, it can be fun to grind against normal enemies for a little while and then strike back at the boss that tormented you so with even more power at your fingertips.

There isn't much to do in Muramasa outside of battle. You can explore the beautifully crafted 2D world looking for hidden treasures, but the reward is hardly worth the effort. It's so easy to find these scattered objects, which are designated on your map, that they may as well not be hidden at all. The most interesting aspect of the noncombat gameplay is having another chance to admire this beautiful world without enemies chasing you or a pointless story obscuring your view. The backdrops do repeat, but they are so beautiful to look at, you'll hardly care when you come across a snowy mountain or bustling village one more time. Despite the impressive sights, it would have been nice to partake in more interesting duties when you aren't cutting down foes with a sword.

It's a shame the other elements of Muramasa do not reach the level of its amazing art, but the breathtaking visuals are reason enough to play through this adventure. The stylish combat lacks depth, which makes repetition sink in after just a few hours, but it is still fun to fly across the screen to strike down enemies with flair and test your new blades on your weary foes. And even though the normal battles lack diversity, the boss encounters are unique and memorable, pushing players to learn intricate patterns while honing their skills. Muramasa has its share of problems, but the meticulously crafted 2D art makes it possible to overlook them for long enough to enjoy this engaging experience.

DiRT 2 Review

If you have any interest whatsoever in off-road racing you'd do well to take this beautiful and thrilling game for a spin.

In Dirt 2, you assume the role of an up-and-coming race driver who's competing on the off-road circuit against such pros as Ken Block and Travis Pastrana for the first time. That's a daunting prospect, but one of the many great things about Codemasters' latest racer is that you can have a lot of fun with it and end the lengthy Dirt Tour career mode a champion regardless of your skill level. Your opponents aren't pushovers; in fact, they put up a believable fight from start to finish, but the vehicle handling and damage is forgiving, the difficulty level can be altered before every event, and a slick flashback feature gives you the option to instantly replay portions of a race if you make a mess of it. Dirt 2 isn't as realistic as some of the other excellent off-road racers that have come before it, but it's as accessible and exciting as any of them.

Your career gets off to an auspicious start when you're presented with your first car: a Subaru Impreza that belonged to the late, great Colin McRae. Like all of the 35-plus cars in the game, its performance is measured in ratings from one to 10 for acceleration, top speed, and handling. Your rides are relatively slow as your career gets underway, but as you move up through the ranks, you get to upgrade them; not one part at a time, but with the purchase of kits designed for different event types. Those upgrades are mandatory, but you also have the option to tinker with settings before each race, and the good news is that even if you don't know your downforce from your differential, there's a good chance that you can do so with some success. That's because there are only seven variables, which are all clearly explained to you, and there are only five different settings for each. It's not deep, but it's fun to play around with, and any changes that you make are immediately noticeable once you get behind the wheel.

Regardless of whether you're driving a rally car, a trophy truck, or a buggy, Dirt 2's responsive controls are up to the job of keeping your wheels where you need them to be as you navigate tight corners, big jumps, expanses of shallow water, and transitions between loose surfaces and tarmac. Every vehicle in your ever-expanding garage handles differently, but not so much so that climbing out of one and into another is ever jarring. All of the vehicles look great (both inside and out), can be customized with different unlockable liveries and interior decorations, get covered in great-looking dust and mud as you drive them, and can be damaged and deformed beyond recognition if you lose control even for a second. You can choose to play with damage that's purely cosmetic or that'll have an impact on your car's performance, though it's worth mentioning that even if you opt for the latter, the adverse effects are quite minimal. Sure, a wobbly wheel or a damaged engine will slow you down a bit, but you're never going to be limping around the track and fighting to keep yourself moving in something resembling a straight line. It's possible to total your car if you crash headlong into something at high speed, but even that doesn't necessarily have to mark the end of your race if you haven't used all of your flashbacks already.

Depending on which of the six difficulty levels you're racing at, you have up to five flashbacks at your disposal that you're free to use at any point during a race. Using them could hardly be simpler; you pause the game, initiate an instant replay of the last 10 to 15 seconds, and then resume playing from any point. While not entirely original, it's a great system because even minor mistakes can be extremely costly when you're racing at speeds well in excess of 100 miles per hour with your tires clinging to the very edge of traction. Having to start one of the lengthier eight-lap races over because of a small error would be frustrating, and while the flashbacks might seem like cheating, knowing that you have them at your disposal encourages you to push yourself rather than just get to the front of the field and then drive more cautiously to the finish.

Because your opponents in Dirt 2 want to get to the front of the field just as badly as you and they drive in an impressively believable fashion, you might even use flashbacks as a result of their errors from time to time. Sometimes the AI drivers will collide with you or impede your progress just by getting in your way; at other times, they'll have their own spectacular crashes and you'll have to act quickly to swerve around them. Opponents are less of an immediate concern in the staggered start rally stages, but in just about every other event type, you're going head-to-head with up to seven other drivers whose attitudes toward you (and comments during races) become increasingly respectful as your career progresses. The concept of you having relationships with the other drivers on the tour is an interesting one, but it feels a little tacked on because their development is linked only to your results rather than to how you drive. Forcing opponents off a track into the side of a building should at least be grounds for them to get angry, but once you've befriended them, their only response to your blatant disregard for their safety during an overtaking maneuver is to ask if you're OK.

A more successful element of the Dirt Tour career mode is the way that all menu navigation is handled from within your RV and in the area immediately outside it. This first-person menu system not only adds to the feeling that you're a pro race driver taking part in a world tour, but it also lets you seamlessly navigate both the single-player and multiplayer modes without ever breaking that immersion. For example, the desk in your RV is where you pick your next event on a world map. If you turn to your right, you can step out of the RV to look at the vehicles in your garage, purchase new ones, and check magazine covers for news on the progress that you and any of your friends with a copy of the game have made. If you turn to your left, you find a notice board on the wall where all of the multiplayer options are listed. Sadly there's no split-screen functionality, but the online options are impressive to say the least.

Every event type, track, and vehicle that appears in the Dirt Tour can also be selected online. Point-to-point and circuit-based races, as well as staggered start rally stages, are joined by a couple of more inventive modes that, while relatively rare occurrences in single-player, could well end up being the most popular online. The best of these is Domination; in this race, points are awarded not only for your finishing position but also for recording the fastest times in any of the four sectors into which every track is divided. The same number of points (10 for a win, eight for second place, and so on) is available for each sector and for the end result, which makes it entirely possible to win a Domination event without even placing on the podium. That's great because, unlike regular races, it gives you an incentive to keep trying even if you wipe out (or get taken out) on the first corner and have little hope of catching the rest of the field. Last Man Standing is a fun event as well, though because the driver in last place is excluded every 20 seconds after the first minute has passed, finding yourself at the back means you subsequently have to spend a couple of minutes watching your opposition in spectator mode.

Given how superb both the cars and the various environments they race through look, it's impressive that the frame rate rarely falters online or offline. The sense of speed is great, whether you're racing through a jungle in Malaysia, across the Utah desert, on the streets of London, or inside a Los Angeles stadium. The attention to detail at all of these locations borders on excessive given how little time you have to take in the scenery, but it makes watching the action replays all the more satisfying--even if there's no option to save them. Dirt 2's audio design is also worthy of praise because while much of your time is spent listening to the awesome revving of your engine and the energetic soundtrack that plays anytime you're not racing, there are also ambient noises to listen out for at every location and the cheer of spectators as you pass them. Perhaps the most impressive audio of all, though, comes courtesy of your codriver who, anytime you take part in a rally stage, does an excellent job of telling you what turns and hazards you're approaching. He or she (you get to choose) does so well that, unlike during other events held at the same locations, you hardly ever feel the need to glance up at the minimap of the course. Furthermore, your codriver will react believably to your driving, so if you slam sideways into a wall, you might hear a scream, while after brushing against a tree, you might be reassured that your car suffered only a scratch.

It's not details like these that make Dirt 2 such a superb racing game though. What makes Dirt 2 so special is the fact that its multiple difficulty levels and forgiving gameplay mechanics make it accessible to newcomers while offering a significant challenge for veterans of Codemasters' Colin McRae Rally series and other off-road racers. There's also the single-player mode that spans no fewer than 100 events, a suite of multiplayer options that includes plenty of different modes and leaderboards, and, of course, your sweet RV, which fills with souvenirs from all of the locations that you race at as your career progresses. If you have even a passing interest in off-road racing, you won't regret a second spent behind the wheel of Dirt 2.

Wolfenstein Review

Nazis and necromancy mix once again in this flawed but fun sequel.

Most modern first-person shooters are so very serious. They feature a whole lot of brown environments and gruff characters, but never have enough archways into alternate universes. Well, if you're in the mood for an FPS with a glint in its figurative eye, Wolfenstein is a good way to stave off the forces of evil without the in-game grumpiness that usually accompanies such endeavors. This sequel to 2001's Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a worthy addition to the series and a fun romp in its own right. The game won't set your world on fire; it occasionally stops feeling old-fashioned and starts feeling just plain old, and a number of flaws are woven throughout the gameplay's very fabric. Some awesome boss fights and memorable combat sequences prevent Wolfenstein from falling into a rut, however. Besides, you're not just fighting Nazis--you're fighting magic Nazis that conjure force fields and fly around with jetpacks.

The setup for this historical/sci-fi mash-up is typical Wolfenstein whimsy, shouldered by the ever-capable B.J. Blaskowicz. This returning hero has spilled his share of Nazi blood, so who better than B.J. to protect the residents of the city of Isenstadt (not to be confused with the Austrian city of Eisenstadt) from the ongoing onslaught? Isenstadt is the headquarters of several resistance groups that seeks to wrest the secrets of the supernatural from the hands of the Schutzstaffel. It seems the Nazis are up to their old tricks, this time harnessing the powers of a mystical force called the Black Sun for the usual take-over-the-world kind of evil. If you know the series, you know not to expect much substance or surprise, though it's too bad there isn't more to draw you into this kitschy fiction. A lot of this has to do with the technology powering the game. Wolfenstein looks a bit aged; the prerendered cutscenes look overcompressed and facial animations are stiff. These second-rate assets, along with unenthusiastic voice acting, are distracting and make it hard to get invested in your fellow insurgents. Wolfenstein's story is a throwaway that boils down to a simple premise: Throw a bunch of Nazis into the occultist blender and see what cockamamy concoction pours out.

As it turns out, this concoction doesn't offer many surprises. Though you'll get tastes of role-playing elements and paranormal wizardry, Wolfenstein sticks to the trusty run-and-gun formula that has worked so well for shooters over the years. And it does it well, sending you into country farms, sprawling airfields, and secretive corridors to see how well you can fend off the soldiers and various anomalies it flings toward you. Your tools of destruction are solid. Traditional World War II weapons, such as the MP40 SMG and the Flammenwerfer, feel excellent, so even if you run out of ammo for the more powerful firearms, you'll never lament falling back to the simpler choices. But the better half of your arsenal is essentially snatched from an alternate reality. Of these options, you'll quickly grow fond of the Tesla gun, which fires electric streams in various directions at once, and the Leichenfaust 44, which is a heavy weapon that instantly vaporizes standard enemies. As you explore Isenstadt and complete missions, you'll earn money and find bags of coins. You can then spend these spoils on upgrades for your weapons, such as diminished recoil or greater damage. While some weapons are better in certain circumstances than others, there's really no weak banana in this bunch.

The action itself is rudimentary as far as first-person shooters go. There is no cover system to grapple with; you won't peek around corners, slink in the shadows, or pilot vehicles. You can, however, enter a parallel dimension called The Veil. When you activate The Veil, the world is shrouded in a shimmering cloak. In it, you can run faster, and enemies glisten, making them easier to target. Odd creatures called geists also float about, shocking nearby enemies if you shoot them down and even creating fearsome webs of electricity in tandem with neighboring geists. More importantly, entering The Veil lets you perform three potent powers: slow down time, surround yourself with a bulletproof shield, and empower your own bullets to do more damage and pierce paranormal force fields. You can also purchase upgrades for Veil powers just as you do for weapons. Eventually, you might be turning adjacent enemies into pillars of ash when you suppress the flow of time or deflecting bullets back toward your foes when in the safety of your shield.

Similar powers have appeared elsewhere; if you've played either Ubersoldier game, for example, it's hard to dismiss the similarities as mere coincidence. Yet contrived or not, you'll need to make frequent use of The Veil. Wolfenstein is challenging when you don't use it; in spite of his regenerating health, B.J. is rather fragile. The game often pits you against a healthy (or unhealthy, in this case) number of Nazi soldiers and ninja-speed sorcerers, so you'll need to stay on your toes and charge up your Veil energy reserves whenever you see an energy deposit's telltale shimmer. That doesn't mean your adversaries are very smart. Soldiers often won't react to a grenade thrown at their feet, don't always care when the Nazi standing right next to them gets shot, and generally seem unconcerned with preserving their own lives. The challenge comes from sheer numbers--and from time to time, it will come from cheap attacks that can lead to frustration. Cloaked sorcerers and fleet-footed vixens can sneak right up and kill you in a slash or two--an occurrence that can be hard to avoid if you fail to glimpse them by chance or miss the sound effects that signal their presence. Dealing with one-hit-kill surprises like that isn't much fun, and there are a few other sudden arrivals that are almost impossible to prepare for, such as rocket-spewing meanies flying about.

Nevertheless, Wolfenstein is a fun journey that more often than not shies away from that kind of unfair trial and error. The tension of combat culminates with several fantastic boss battles, each of which requires you to think on your toes and utilize Veil powers to the best of your ability. The final boss fight is the finest of them all--the kind of exciting and extended epic conflict that you rarely see in recent shooters. Your struggles against bosses, along with some terrific set piece battles, help energize the more predictable firefights that light up the streets of Isenstadt. In a very early scenario, for example, you'll discover that shooting the containers of blue goo will cause enemies near them to rise into the air as if immune to gravity. You'll fight your way across the room, sending Nazis into the air and filling them with lead as they flail helplessly (it's unclear why they won't use their weapons once airborne, but perhaps it's best not to ask). Other memorable sequences include an escape from an underground base on the brink of destruction and an assault on a sinister stronghold that is replete with Nazi flags fluttering in the wind. Even in the less intriguing battles, soldiers flail around when they catch on fire and headshots result in a gruesome spattering of blood. If you're looking for an exaggerated and occasionally exhilarating spectacle of violence and mysticism, you've come to the right place.

These long, noisy battles make a big impression, yet a number of small flaws eventually add up to make impressions of their own. Wolfenstein displays a noticeable lack of refinement that manifests itself in a number of ways. For example, you'll open a lot of doors, often to be greeted by enemies on the other side. Yet the doors close on their own without any regard for how close you are to them--and they do so very shortly after opened. You'll often have doors shutting themselves in front of you as you shoot through doorways, and you will need to keep opening them again. Or sometimes, they'll get stuck on objects on the other side simply because so many cramped environments are overfilled with physics-enabled junk. This happened to us twice; a grenade proved an effective resolution in one case, while reloading a saved game was the only viable option in another. They way the camera view pitches to the side when reloading is a distracting departure from the genre norm that keeps you from lining up shots as you reload. Checkpoints don't always work as you'd expect them to, and there is no manual save function, so you may or may not return to the most recent checkpoint if you quit. These and other issues may seem modest imperfections, but they have a combined impact--and they accentuate some missing attention to detail that separates good games from great ones.

Upon its release in 2001, Return to Castle Wolfenstein was lauded for its incredible visuals. Wolfenstein didn't take a cue from its predecessor in this regard; your first visual impression won't be a positive one partially because the mediocre cutscenes and rigid character models are prominently displayed front and center. But while the technology isn't striking, the environmental design is terrific, and special effects, such as the electrical streams from your Tesla gun, dramatically light up rooms and corridors. The levels are highly varied; you'll trudge through sewers and battle aboard a colossal zeppelin, but the color palette and general artistic vision remain consistent throughout. The visual effect upon entering The Veil is slick; it's as if the real world is being peeled away to reveal the hidden dimension beneath. That effect, however, causes the frame rate to slightly plummet for a moment, which is a puzzling foible in a fast-paced shooter like this, though the drop is thankfully brief.

Wolfenstein's class-based online multiplayer was wholly inspired by its predecessor's terrific multiplayer modes. There are three modes total: Team Deathmatch, Objective, and Stopwatch (RTCW's Checkpoint mode was jettisoned). Objective and Stopwatch modes provide the core online entertainment, assigning the resistance team to a series of objectives that the Axis team must thwart. The main difference between these two modes is that in Stopwatch, players take turns on each team to see which can earn the fastest completion times. Regardless of which mode you choose, you'll play as a soldier, a medic, or an ever-helpful engineer. Each class also gets a Veil power of its own, though these don't mirror the campaign's Veil powers. Soldiers perform an explosive Veil strike, medics possess an area-of-effect heal, and engineers can run really fast (which is a bit freaky to watch).

Multiplayer shooters have come a long way since Return to Castle Wolfenstein was released, and even the free RTCW spin-off Enemy Territory dug deeper than Wolfenstein's throwback modes. But with eight solid maps loaded with opportunities for close-quarters firefights and run-and-gun chaos, it's hard not to like the online game. The action is constantly on the move, and the class abilities keep battles dynamic and consistently interesting. And if you don't find the game fun enough to keep you coming back, a system of unlockable upgrades should keep you interested. If you like the core gameplay, you can find greater depth in Quake Wars or more compelling unlockables in Call of Duty 4 and Killzone 2, yet like the campaign, Wolfenstein's multiplayer is packed with action, even if it doesn't represent the pinnacle of the genre.

Wolfenstein proves that even as first-person shooters progress, there is still plenty of room for traditional shooting unhindered by modern frills. Big bosses, crazy weapons, and exciting scripted firefights are the focal point of this nutty tale. It's also an ample one if you take on all the side missions and scour environments for intelligence, hidden tomes, and secret money stashes. Yet while it's pleasingly old-fashioned, the unimpressive AI, aging technology, and general lack of refinement make this sequel feel like a missed opportunity. But there are enough great battles here to keep you entertained, so while Wolfenstein may be the video game equivalent of a B movie, it's the kind of mindless merriment that shooter fans can get behind.

Ashes Cricket 2009 Review

AU Review--Australia and England's long-standing biennial sporting clash continues, this time in video game form, in Ashes Cricket 2009. While this title marks a reasonable attempt at capturing the look and feel of this gentleman's game, its inconsistent difficulty and bugs make it less of a screamer catch in the deep, and more of a fumble at silly mid-on.

The game is divided into four game types: Ashes offers five-day, five-match tests between Australia and England using the current real-world player roster; Test play features the same five-day matches as Ashes mode but lets you choose from 12 competing nations; One Day International (ODI) is a slimmed-down version of Test cricket with 50 overs of play per team; and 20 Overs, the most recent addition to the sport, provides fast action-oriented play.

While 20 Over games rely on fast scoring and big totals to keep you interested, the slow, calculated pace of Test games are more akin to chess. Ashes Cricket 2009's five-day Test matches give dedicated fans of the sport the opportunity to play out entire games in almost real time and take their team to victory ball-by-ball. Single-player matches against the CPU's unpredictable difficulty are at best challenging and at worst frustrating. Even at the easier difficulty it's not uncommon to get carted around the park for overs at a time while bowling a conservative pitched-up line, or to receive nothing but over after over of yorkers while batting.

Offline cooperative play lets you and a friend take on the CPU as you trade the strike, build a solid run partnership, and then bowl up a storm taking turns with the ball. It saves you needing to pass the controller, but it's certainly not as entertaining as straight head-to-head play, and you'll still butt heads with the game's spotty difficulty. Competitive offline multiplayer is the most compelling mode because it cuts out the irregular game AI and sees you and mates duke it out as a score is set and subsequently chased. Online you'll be able to test your mettle in both friendly and ranked matches in the various disciplines. A distinct lack of online players means you might be searching for a while to find a game, but once you do, the experience runs smoothly.

Dependable bowling is key in every game of cricket, and the bowling controls here are as simple to get your head around as placing the cursor indicating your line and length where you want the ball to go and selecting the delivery type to begin your run. Once you hit the crease, you'll need to time a button press on the accuracy meter to determine the usefulness of your bowl. Raising the game difficulty increases the precision required for you to hit the effective part of your accuracy meter as the zone shrinks in size considerably. While the bowling mechanics are simple and you'll be up and rocketing your bowls down the pitch in no time, there's also subtlety to be found here. Deliveries that swing towards or away from batsmen have different cursor types to the basic straight and slow balls. Since your aiming remains free until the ball leaves your hand, you can start your run with the marker in one place, only to change it up and bowl a completely different type of ball by moving it to a new location and hitting the corresponding delivery button. This becomes particularly useful to try and deceive both AI and multiplayer batsmen, who think they know what to expect and then get a surprise as the ball leaves your hand.

Rotating players during long bowling spells to manage stamina keeps your best and brightest from wearing out, but you'll also need to keep an eye on each player's mental state. Confidence is determined by how well you're striking the ball as a batsman and how well you're bowling and being played as a bowler. Being belted around the park while bowling will take its toll by reducing the number of different types of deliveries in your arsenal that you can throw. Streaks of successive hits raise your confidence level as a batsman, while poorly timed swings will reduce your performance at the crease, making you less likely to strike the ball sweetly.

Batting successfully in Ashes Cricket 2009 relies entirely on nailing your timing. Swinging too early will leave your stumps exposed, while going late will see you edging shots and risking being caught. Since pace varies between bowlers, getting comfortable with timing is a case of getting your eye in by playing at shots once you're in a match. To help you with the basics the game features a celebrity-voiced tutorial mode with Sir Ian "Beefy" Botham and Shane Warne, and while the training tips are useful to help you get used to front and back foot strokes, the pair's soundbytes are wooden and stilted, and the tips are repeated far too often. Once you've completed the basics in the tutorials, you might want to have a crack at the challenge modes included that focus on achieving batting and bowling goal. These include hitting six consecutive sixes, taking five wickets in 10 overs, or bowling Warney's now legendary leg break in the 1993 Ashes series to dismiss Mike Gatting. They're a good break from single- and multiplayer games, but there aren't nearly enough of them included, and they offer little replayability.

It's disappointing then that while batting and bowling are designed to be hands-on experiences--setting custom field placements, charging down short balls, and picking the right foot for the shot--fielding is frustratingly passive. Your only roles here are to nominate which end you want to throw the ball to once your player has eventually picked it up in the field and completing basic quicktime events for catches. Though there's an onscreen dive button present when you bat, there's no equivalent option when fielding, meaning that you're left to watch as the ball trickles across the boundary rope just meters in front of the fieldsman.

It's here in the field that Ashes 2009 really shows off its rough edges. Play often gets called dead much too early, at times even with two batsmen down one end of the wicket and the obvious chance at a run out. Players stand around with the ball in hand rather than making timely returns to the keeper, and dud leg-before-wicket decisions are given even when the ball pitches outside the line and clearly won't go on to hit the stumps. Batsmen make clear calls of "no" even for obvious fours and sixes, and unstopped overthrows can cause the ball to get stuck midair as players path to it and circle with confusion at being unable to pick it up. Licensing of the official Hawk-Eye ball-tracking system is a good inclusion, but its excessive and often irrelevant use, such as after fours and for catches, feels shoehorned in.

Should you find you're only interested in wielding the willow or hanging out in the sun waiting for a catch, and you'd like to skip ahead, each match mode includes a "simulate" function like those found in sports management games. Here you're able to skip ahead an over, an innings, or even an entire match by putting your faith in the hands of the game's artificial intelligence. The outcome is a bit of a lucky dip, and relinquishing control midmatch can result in poor starts turning around as the tail of your batting team wags, but you're just as likely to find yourself on the receiving end of a mid-order collapse. Simulating any aspect of your game forfeits any item unlocks (venues, trophies, or player clothing), score records, or achievements you may have earned playing the game normally. It's an inclusion very few players who are interested in the ebb, flow, and strategy of cricket will use, but if you're after instant gratification, you can simply warp ahead to the bits you want to play.

Only the two Ashes teams (Australia and England) are fully licensed, meaning you'll be given rough look-alikes with amusingly creative player names for the other countries. If you're dedicated (or pedantic) enough to take on the squad and player customisation editing tools, then you can rename players, reassign skill points, and adjust visual sliders to set things right for the entire roster. While the licensed Aussie and English players are accurately labelled, many of their in-game character models are a bit off the mark. The similarities are there, but the faces of most players appear stretched and out of proportion compared to their real-world counterparts. Character animations on the field are inconsistent and run the full gamut of natural to extremely jerky. We noticed an occasional frame-rate slip on the Xbox 360, though the PlayStation 3 version of the game appeared smoother and had no stuttering on panning camera shots.

Many of the sport's iconic cricket venues are available to play on, though like unlicensed players, they appear with pseudonyms. Crowds consist of emotionless clapping blobs of colour--on occasion appearing as hands without bodies--while advertising signs dotted around the boundaries are visible even at long distances and appear pin sharp.

The variety of modes and accessibility of controls make Ashes Cricket 2009 an easy game for players with only a passing interest in sports games to pick up. Ultimately fans of the sport will enjoy it the most, though they'll have to overlook its visuals and gameplay problems. It's good for a hit around the park during the tea break, but this game won't be replacing watching the real Aussies or English players take up the bat and ball anytime soon.

Batman: Arkham Asylum Review

You don't need to be a fan of Batman to enjoy this excellent third-person action game.

You've heard of Batman no doubt, but if you don't read comics, it's conceivable that you might be unfamiliar with Arkham Asylum. The iconic psychiatric hospital is essentially Gotham City's Alcatraz, and it has housed just about every villain Batman has ever tangled with at one time or another. Now, thanks to Eidos and developer Rocksteady, Arkham is also the setting for a great third-person action game in which the lunatics take over the asylum and only you can stop them. As Batman, you not only get to go toe-to-toe with thugs in fast-paced punch-ups, but you also employ satisfying stealth tactics, play with great gadgets, solve some remarkable riddles, and do a decent amount of detective work. In short, you get to do all of the things that you want to when you don a Batman costume in a game, provided you weren't hoping to get behind the wheel of the batmobile.

Because just about everything else needs to be unlocked, the first time you boot up Batman: Arkham Asylum, your first port of call will inevitably be the Story mode. Here, you learn that Batman has captured Joker, and as the lengthy intro sequence plays out, you see him being returned to the asylum under Batman's watchful eye. Joker doesn't seem at all perturbed by his predicament, and it quickly becomes apparent that he has deliberately allowed himself to be captured as part of a grand plan that involves taking control of Arkham Island and throwing a party there with Batman as the guest of honor. Clearly it's a trap, but as Batman (and as someone who demands more than two minutes of gameplay before the credits roll), you just can't walk away from it.

As you take the controls, Arkham Asylum wastes no time throwing you into the thick of the action. Almost immediately, you're rushed by a few of Joker's goons and encouraged to knock them out using both basic attacks and counters. Using just two buttons, you can perform a huge number of moves from Batman's superbly animated repertoire, and it isn't at all difficult to string together combos worthy of Hollywood's finest fight coordinators. That's because for the most part, at least early in the game, combat requires you to do little more than mash the attack button and then hit the counter button anytime you notice an enemy with an "I'm about to attack you" icon above his head. None of the thugs that you encounter pose much of a threat individually, but you rarely encounter fewer than three or four of them at once, and often, you'll be up against six or more. Furthermore, the vanilla thugs are joined by enemies with knives, cattle prods, and guns later on, who force you to raise your game and incorporate stun attacks and evasive rolls into your deadly dance routine. Boss battles against supervillains like Scarecrow and Harley Quinn are definitely among the game's highlights, though it's a little disappointing that there aren't more of them. One supervillain in particular makes a number of appearances, but you never actually get to fight him.

The combat in Arkham Asylum never gets overly complicated, though the number of moves and attacks at your disposal increases quite dramatically as you progress through the Story mode, earn experience points, and subsequently spend those points on acquiring new combo moves and gadgets. Throws, takedowns, and even batarang attacks can be incorporated into your combos this way, but you never need to press more than two buttons simultaneously, and the timing of your moves doesn't have to be particularly precise. Fighting against mobs of up to a dozen enemies or so is a blast, and while they're not smart enough to all just jump on you at once, they're not stupid either. Given half a chance, thugs will pull pipes from walls to attack you with, pick up boxes to throw at you, and recover weapons from fallen colleagues. Fortunately, there's one weapon that your foes seem blissfully unaware of but which Batman is incredibly comfortable with: the environment.

Your surroundings don't always have a role to play in combat, but during large set piece encounters (many of which can be replayed against the clock in Challenge mode), using them to your advantage is practically a requirement. Picture this: You walk into a large room where eight gun-carrying enemies have been instructed by Joker to keep an eye out for you. You can't leave the room until every single one of them is unconscious, and going toe-to-toe with them isn't an option because--at least as far as this game is concerned--bullets are Batman's kryptonite. What do you do? Job one is to stay out of sight, which can often be accomplished by crouching atop gargoyles mounted high on the walls that, while an unusual interior design choice, make near-perfect hiding spots from which to survey the scene using your X-ray-like detective vision. From a vantage point like that, you can perform glide kicks to swoop down and floor enemies passing nearby, perform awesome "inverted takedowns" to grab guys as they pass directly beneath you and leave them hanging on ropes for their comrades to see, and throw batarangs that serve a number of useful purposes. Or, if you need to move, you can use your grapnel gun to zip to another location. Just be sure to suspend your disbelief as you do so because you're invisible to the enemy when you're in transit.

Once you've thinned your number of enemies a bit, it's safer for you to move around on the ground, and that's when you can really start to use the environment to your advantage. You can rig explosives to bring walls and ceilings down on top of enemies, crash through windows and ceilings, hide in floor grates and emerge directly behind unsuspecting enemies, and, well, you get the idea. All of these actions can be performed quickly and easily, but that doesn't make them any less satisfying when they work.

The reactions of enemies who know that their colleagues are being picked off one by one adds massively to the feeling that you're playing as a bona fide superhero. As their numbers diminish, enemies become visibly more scared--they start to move around in pairs rather than individually, press up against walls and lean around corners, and ultimately get so panicked that they fire a shot anytime they turn a corner. Listening to their superbly voiced conversations clues you into their state of mind as well. Initially, your enemies will be quite bold, loudly making threats and musing on how famous they're going to be for killing you. But as the odds gradually shift in your favor and Joker taunts them, they exude less and less confidence--ultimately sounding like they're resigned to their fates and might start crying at any moment.

The quality of the voice acting never falters for a second in Arkham Asylum, and while Mark Hamill's Joker is unsurprisingly a standout, there are great performances from other characters too. Listing them here would be to risk spoiling elements of the story for you, particularly where the other villains are concerned. You just need to know that every character in the game is well written, well voiced, and often well worth listening to--whether it's a supervillain, a thug, an ally, or a lowly security guard.

One character that you definitely want to listen to carefully is Edward Nigma, also known as Riddler. That's because there are no fewer than 240 "riddles" for you to solve on Arkham Island, and doing so not only earns you a good number of experience points but is also the only way to unlock character bios, character trophies (detailed character models that you can examine and admire at your leisure), and Challenge mode maps. The riddles come in a number of different flavors, many of which don't involve riddles at all, and the one thing that they all have in common is that they're rewarding to solve. For example, finding hidden patient interview tapes or chronicles of Arkham affords you additional insight into the asylum's history and inmates, while cracking a cryptic clue to locate an item that you need to take a photo of might make you feel smart and, if you're lucky, earn you enough experience points to purchase your next upgrade. The best of the proper riddles are those that lead you to photograph question marks painted around the island, which doesn't sound very interesting until you realize that these question marks can only be seen using detective vision from very specific locations. That's because these elusive punctuation marks are painted in two parts at different locations that are often quite far apart, so the solution requires you to find both parts and then figure out where to take the photo from so that they line up perfectly. It's clever and compelling stuff, though it does encourage you to spend more time than you'd probably like in detective vision mode.

In fact, it's likely that you'll spend a good portion of your time with Arkham Asylum in detective vision mode even if you're not looking for hidden question marks. In regular vision mode, you just get to see that this is a great-looking game with superb animation, excellent lighting, and impressive attention to detail. But when you switch to detective vision, you can immediately spot destructible surfaces, more easily locate hidden items, and spot enemies through walls. You can even tell at a glance which of those enemies have guns and which don't because they're colored differently. It's unfortunate that the predominantly blue-with-white outlines vision mode is so invaluable because, while it's an interesting look, it's akin to reading a black-and-white photocopy of a beautifully colored comic book.

If you're a fan of Batman comic books, you should feel very at home in Arkham Asylum. There are plenty of nods and winks to inmates who don't actually appear in the game, and even some of the minor characters have neat backstories that are faithful to their previous, infrequent appearances in comics. You shouldn't feel intimidated if you're not that familiar with Batman, though, because the game does a great job of giving you all of the information you need, as well as plenty that you don't. For example, taking the time to read prominent character Harley Quinn's bio and listen to her patient interviews offers valuable insight into her motivations that might add to your enjoyment of the game, while unlockable information on such characters as Prometheus, Calendar Man, and Humpty Dumpty just adds a little flavor.

More significant unlockable content comes in the form of eight challenge maps, which come in regular and extreme difficulties for a total of 16. (24 on PS3 if you include the platform-exclusive free DLC option to play some of them as Joker, whose abilities are quite different to Batman's). The maps are based on areas that you visit in the Story mode, and the challenges are split 50/50 between purely combat-oriented sequences and stealth-based "Predator" gameplay. In the former, you're pitted against four increasingly tough waves of enemies and score points for performing combos, avoiding taking damage, executing ring outs, and using a variety of different moves. In the latter, you're dropped into a level where every enemy has a gun and your goal is to take them all down as quickly as possible. The twist is that to earn a respectable position on the leaderboard in the Challenge mode, you also have to earn medals, and in order to do that, you have to deal with some of your enemies in very specific ways. During a stealth challenge, for example, earning the maximum possible three medals might require you to perform a silent takedown from behind and an inverted takedown, as well as pull an enemy down from a walkway while hanging from a ledge.

The medals get even more demanding in extreme challenges, where you need to knock guys out while crashing through windows, pull floors out from underneath multiple enemies, and even cause three different walls to fall on three different thugs simultaneously. In regular stealth challenges, the wall-mounted gargoyles are your best friends, but on extreme maps, all of the gargoyles are booby-trapped to blow up shortly after you land on them. Robbed of these safe vantage points, you have to spend a lot more time moving around on the ground, which--because you have detective vision--you can do without needing to stop and peek around every corner. Stealth gameplay is almost never this fast-paced or action-packed, and it's rarely this fun.

Regardless of whether you're getting sucked into the Story mode or competing for high scores in the Challenge mode, Batman: Arkham Asylum does an outstanding job of letting you be Batman. Everything about this game--the impressive visuals, stirring soundtrack, superb voice acting, fiendish puzzles, hard-hitting combat--feels like it has been lovingly crafted by a development team that's both knowledgeable and passionate about the source material. Miss out on this one and the joke's on you.

Raven Squad: Operation Hidden Dagger Review

Raven Squad is 90 percent first-person shooter, 10 percent strategy game, and 100 percent bad.

Plenty of games feature mediocre voice acting, but few approximate the pain of driving a railroad spike into your ear canal. If you value sonic comfort, it's best to overlook Raven Squad when you see it in the bargain bin, which is where you'll find this embarrassing squad-based shooter in a few months' time. And yes, it's really just a shooter. Though Raven Squad has been touted as a hybrid of real-time strategy and first-person shooting, it's simply a bad FPS in which you can issue a few commands to your two squads from a top-down view. An overhead camera view isn't enough to claim that your game possesses strategic elements, and Raven Squad is so incredibly linear, and so easy, that you could never mistake your actions as "strategic" or "tactical." In addition, it is hard to look at and boring to play, so unless you're researching misleading advertising or offensive ethnic accents, you should stay far away from Raven Squad, lest it cause spontaneous aural bleeding.

The idea of an RTS/FPS fusion is intriguing, but the "new and unique genre" advertised on the game's box is a complete misnomer. In spite of an overhead camera view from which you can issue some basic commands to your two three-man teams, Raven Squad is a squad shooter--and boy, is it a bad one. You can take control of any of your six men, and each has a standard weapon (like a boring SMG) as well as a specialized weapon (like a boring sniper rifle) in his arsenal. You've seen these weapons before, and none of them are satisfying to shoot, mostly due to the nonreaction of your Amazonian enemies as you riddle them with bullets. Your thickheaded foes generally stand there absorbing gunfire, showing no signs that they are bothered in the slightest until they drop down dead. There is no bloodshed, and there are no animations indicating the impact of bullets, so you have no idea whether or not you're even doing damage. This issue further exacerbated by the fact that some weapons don't seem to hurt your adversaries if you're far enough away, though you'd think that the SMGs and rifles in question would more than cover the distance.

How thickheaded are these bad guys? They are so dumb that they don't try to take cover while getting shot, they run straight toward you while shooting, they ignore you as you walk right up to them, and they stay glued to the ground when you throw a grenade at their feet. Not that your squadmates will be receiving any diplomas, since they're equally dimwitted, wandering about aimlessly and trying to shoot enemies through walls. Yet as dense as your teammates are, you won't run into any challenges: Raven Squad, even on its highest difficulty settings, is remarkably easy. Your standard strategy works thusly: You rush directly at enemies and shoot them until they die. The mission design occasionally strays from this recipe, but you won't need to apply any thoughtful new tactics when this occurs. For example, you may need to defend civilians from enemy attacks for a period of time. To accomplish this objective, you can just park yourself at a turret and blast the small groups of enemies as they appear. In this circumstance, you spend more time waiting for enemies to emerge than you do shooting them.

The "real-time strategy" part of the game is wholly marginalized. You command just these two units and usually need to move into the top-down strategic view only to see where enemies are hiding or to quickly move your squads from one location to another. You can issue an attack order, pick up ammo and health packs, and throw grenades from this view, but an overhead view does not an RTS make. The jungle maps you traverse are exceptionally linear, so each level is paced in much the same way. You shoot up some enemies, move into the overhead view to move your two squads to the next location, and zoom back into first-person view and shoot some more. You can try to make things more strategic by flanking your foes, but Raven Squad is such a cakewalk that you'll never need to do so. At least the transition between modes has been implemented extremely well. Zooming into first-person view and back to the top-down view is slick and simple, and the frame rate holds steady during the shift.

Sadly, that transition is the only glossy element in an otherwise rough-looking, rough-sounding game. There's no overlooking the appalling voice acting. What with the dreadful deadpan of the assault team leader and an archaeologist's odious accent, Raven Squad's voice-overs may be the worst you will hear all year, and you'll want to head to the option menu to turn it down a few minutes in. Don't worry that you'll be missing out on any storytelling or deep characterization. A game in which the bad guys are called "bad guys" is clearly not interested in telling a story. There is no reason to care about any of your squad members and only the barest thread of a plot to keep you pushing forward, and the dialogue ("It's quiet. Too quiet.") is the kind of tripe that was cliche decades ago. The ugly cutscenes don't veil these sins--they just shine a spotlight on the awful character models, atrocious facial animations, and ugly textures. Environments don't look as horrendous and the lighting is decent enough, but Raven Squad's visuals would have looked old four or five years ago.

You could finish Raven Squad in around four hours. If you want to share the pain, you can ask a friend to join you in missions online, in which case each player controls a single squad. Cooperative play doesn't improve the action, but it all but removes the shallow RTS elements, since you only need to worry about your own squad when playing with others. It's also buggy. At one point, a squadmate clipped into a building and couldn't move; in another, the controls stopped responding and the mission objective pointer disappeared. Misery loves company, as they say, but it's better just to avoid misery altogether. To this end, don't bother with Raven Squad.

Red Faction: Guerrilla Review

Though repetitive, this third-person action game is a great open-world adventure for anyone with an appetite for destruction.
Of all the weapons you'll find in Red Faction: Guerrilla, the simple sledgehammer is one of the best. This powerful object has the ability to bring down entire buildings, giving you an almost tactile feeling of gleeful abandon as you watch your character leave nothing but rubble and havoc in his trail. The brutish, direct sledgehammer exemplifies what the excellent Red Faction: Guerrilla is all about. Destruction is this game's currency, and it puts its considerable wealth to good use. Mars is yours to annihilate, and while the main story is uninvolving and the action can get repetitive, you'll find plenty to like in the game's mayhem-filled single-player campaign and impressive multiplayer offerings.

Mayhem is built into Guerrilla's DNA, and its impressive physics engine realistically showcases destruction on a massive scale. The game ditches the deformable landscapes that were a staple of its predecessors, instead offering the ability to blow apart anything in the game. Any man-made object can be reduced to rubble, and every structure or vehicle--and every one of its composite parts--features its own unique physical properties. Everything from smokestacks to bridges appears to have been built with real-world engineering principles in mind, and you can see the various supports and reinforcements in their design. So to demolish a small building, you needn't take out all its walls--simply identify its support columns, take those out with charges, and watch the whole thing implode. All of this destruction is performed in real time, which means no structure collapses in the same way.

The realistic nature of this rampant destructibility is the standout feature of Guerrilla, and it will affect many of your gameplay decisions. Cover, for example, is at best a temporary haven for you and your enemies, since all walls can be demolished. Height is also of little concern--if an enemy sniper is perched on a building, you can easily destroy the floor underneath him. You can stop pursuers by blowing up a bridge as you pass it, or even level an entire building to kill all of the troops inside. It's hard not to get swept up in all the damage you can cause, and you'll find yourself wanting to lay waste to an object just to see how it crumbles simply because it's so much fun.

If it sounds like the game is frenetic and chaotic, that's because it can. Despite the fact that your character, Alec Mason, is a guerrilla--a member of the underground group Red Faction, which is trying to take out the all-powerful Earth Defense Force (EDF)--there's little scope for anything other than full volume action, even if you are trying to approach a mission with subtlety. Mason is initially an unwilling recruit to Red Faction, joining only after his brother is killed by EDF soldiers. What follows is a lengthy main storyline which is fairly cliched for the most part. Mason's motivation for revenge doesn't ring that strongly throughout the campaign, and there are very few twists and turns to keep the plot engaging.

Story, for the most part, takes a backseat to Mason's continuing mission to free Mars. The EDF have total control of the six sectors of the planet, oppressing its population of miners with a heavy security presence and upfront brutality. To free the planet, you'll have to do it sector by sector. Each will have its own level of EDF control that you'll have to lower while at the same time raising the population's morale. The game's eight different mission types will do one or the other, and in many cases they'll do both. Lowering EDF control opens up new story missions which will move forward Guerrilla's main narrative, while improving morale means more of the population will randomly jump in and support you when you get into a fight with the EDF. On the surface, the mission types are varied--for example, protect a settlement, join a group of rebels in storming an EDF stronghold, intercept an enemy shipment, destroy EDF property--but the game's aggressive AI means most missions will end up in large explosions and a hail of gunfire. You may want to take a more circumspect approach, such as finding an unguarded path into a group of structures that need to be taken down, but as soon as the first explosion hits, EDF troopers will swarm to your position to try to take you down with force. While this doesn't make the action one-dimensional, it does make it one note. Sure, you can blow stuff up in a variety of interesting and creative ways, but in the end, it's still the same thing--blowing stuff up.

It's to the game's credit (and to the credit of its remarkably robust physics engine) that despite repetitiveness, Guerrilla's destruction manages to be engaging and entertaining for the 15 or so hours it will take you to get through the single-player campaign. Even after you finish the game, you can go back into the world to complete any missions you may have skipped, as well as try your hand at the "insane" difficulty level you'll unlock after your first run through. The game is quite challenging even at lower difficulty levels, and you'll find yourself pushed to survive most large-scale fights at medium difficulty. Guerrilla has a cover function which will let you stick to walls, but it's not something you can rely on--you'll sometimes fail to stick to objects properly (particularly low bits of cover), and trying to pop out to shoot can cause you to leave cover completely.

Thankfully, the rest of Red Faction: Guerrilla's controls are solid, particularly its shooting mechanic, which feels just right. You'll be able to equip only four weapons at a time, but you can quickly switch between them by holding down the right shoulder button. Most are typical weapon archetypes--there are pistols, machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, and sniper variants--but Guerrilla does feature some unique weapons, such as the killer disc-spewing grinder and the electricity pulsing arc welder. By far the most interesting is the nano rifle, a weapon which sends out a bolt of microscopic nanites that corrode anything they hit--and this includes people as well as buildings

Driving is similarly strong, the only caveat being that most vehicles are floaty and too easy to flip.p (although any science geek can probably justify this by pointing to Mars' lower gravity compared to Earth). You won't find the variety of vehicles as in other open-world games, but what are here seem functional to a mining colony and fit within the gameworld. There are large earth-moving vehicles, smaller two-person transports, and plenty of trucks, with a surprising number of them packing onboard weapons. You'll also run across beefy mech-like walkers which are great to pilot against hordes of EDF soldiers--these are pretty rare, however, but they're so much fun you'll be left wishing there were more instances when you could use them.

You won't get to drive any vehicles in Guerrilla's multiplayer, but it does offer plenty of unique experiences you won't find in the single-player game. The game supports up to 16 players online and features the stock standard deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture-the-flag variants. All of the single-player game's destructibility adds another level of strategy to matches, as you're only ever one sledgehammer blow away from instant death, no matter how thick your cover. This makes all matches tense affairs, and camping is a definite no-no. Added to this are new items exclusive to multiplayer which can radically affect how you play. The main additions are 10 different backpacks which act as either offensive, defensive, or support aids during combat. The rhino backpack, for example, will allow you to charge straight through walls at a hiding player, while the thrust backpack can propel you quickly up a few levels to take out snipers. The stealth pack, on the other hand, will make you invisible for short periods of time, while the heal pack will quickly regenerate lost health.

Multiplayer also gives you the power to rebuild--an ability which features heavily in two of Guerrilla's three unique online modes. The reconstructor gun can repair damaged or destroyed structures and is used in the Siege and Damage Control modes. Siege has two teams taking turns to see how much damage they can do to a map, while Damage Control sees two teams fighting for control of three structures. To gain control of a structure, you'll need to destroy it first before rebuilding it for your team. The third unique online mode is Demolition, where one player on a team is randomly chosen as a destroyer. To gain points, the destroyer must wreak as much havoc as possible. These new modes are fun, and Damage Control in particular is a hectic affair as your team continually scrambles to destroy and repair the various checkpoints. Guerrilla's online component, in fact, is a definite winner--games ran almost completely lag-free during testing, with the most noticeable issue being an occasional lapse between hitting an object with the sledgehammer and seeing it crumble. There's also an offline multiplayer mode called Wrecking Crew, where up to four players can take turns in doing as much damage as they can to a certain area. Wrecking Crew is a fun little distraction at best, and it probably won't hold your interest compared to the large scope of the game's online multiplayer offerings.

The area of Mars you'll traverse in Red Faction: Guerrilla is big even by open-world game standards, but there's not an awful lot to see. There are plenty of red hills, open plains, and dust, and what few populated areas there are seem sparse in comparison to other games in this genre. It's hard to fault the game for this--after all, this is what a human colony on Mars would conceivably look like--but it doesn't change the fact that you'll be looking at dirt a lot of time in Guerrilla. That said, the game does look quite impressive. The textures on Mars and its architecture look realistic, as do many of the lighting effects with the various explosions and pyrotechnics on show. There's occasionally some pop-up, particularly in the open badlands section, but for the most part the game's problem with draw distance is obscured by small hills and other geographical landmarks that are conveniently placed in between you and the gameworld's horizon. Sound also fares well--the game's voice actors do well with their limited scripts, and the various explosions, gunfire, building collapses, and other sound effects are uniformly impressive. The solid "thunk" you'll hear every time you use your sledgehammer is especially satisfying.

You'll end up hearing that "thunk" a lot in Red Faction: Guerrilla, but you'll never get tired of it because its deep, crunchy sound is tied so intrinsically to the satisfying visual destruction you see. Guerrilla's gameplay is similar--many of the missions may feel like they're at the same, loud, all-out pace, but when devastation is this well presented, it's difficult not to get swept along by its primal energy. Red Faction: Guerrilla mixes a long and involving single-player campaign with a fun and satisfying online segment, with both adding up to a game that proves that a little chaos (or in this case, a lot) can be a positive thing.