(Editor's Note: Although this version of Guitar Hero III supports both the Windows and Mac platforms, only Windows was tested for this review.)
This is now the third review I've written for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock in the past two weeks, starting with our mega-sized Xbox 360 / PS3 / Wii review and then our regulation-size PS2 review. The newly-released PC/Mac port, developed by Aspyr, is essentially the same game with a few feature tweaks, which means console-deprived gamers now have a legitimate means of rocking out. Just be sure you've got a rig capable of some heavy lifting first.
The bulk of Guitar Hero III remains unchanged: it has the the same graphics, the same set list of licensed and bonus songs, the same co-op play, and it's bundled with the same Xplorer USB guitar controller that came with the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero II. As has been the case with previous titles, you'll strum along with notes falling down the screen through eight tiers of increasing difficulty, starting with simple songs like "Slow Ride" and "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," eventually reaching epics like Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast" and Metallica's "One."
At its core, the PC version of GH3 shares the same pros and cons as its console cousins: it doesn't mess with the gameplay and has a pretty solid setlist, only faltering in terms of the new boss battles and some increased difficulty that could make it hard for some players to get through the Medium and Hard campaigns. (We won't rehash everything here; for a full dissection of the main game, check out our Xbox 360 review).
Hooked up to a big-screen TV, it might initially be hard to tell the difference between the PC and console versions. Capable of running at resolutions up to 1920x1080, the game can look super-sharp with crisp menus and slick character models; Casey Lynch looks as hot as ever.
Unfortunately, you'll most likely feel compelled to turn those graphics down in a hurry, as we had issues with the game stuttering on our main test rig (an Alienware PC with a 2.4 GHz dual-core CPU, 2GB RAM, and a GeForce 8800GTX). Although the game ran fine about 95% of the time, it would often stutter a bit at the start of songs or at random moments throughout, a dealbreaker in a fast-paced rhythm game like Guitar Hero. Sadly, setting the graphics to low detail, turning off the crowd and physics and lowering the resolution to a prehistoric 800x600 didn't seem to help much, leaving us scratching our heads. This same machine has spent the majority of the past month running Enemy Territory, Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty 4 at 1920x1080 with barely a stutter, so the technical performance is a bit of a downer.
The PC version of Guitar Hero III also supports online multiplayer. On the plus side, the games we've played have largely been lag-free, which is something we've been dreaming about since the series started a few years ago. However, simply getting into a match may be difficult. The game has its own built-in browser to find games, but -- as has been the case with the other platforms -- disconnects and system hangs are common. The game also includes the same dizzying array of leaderboards, for which you'll create a unique account when you install the game (and don't crossover with the Xbox 360 or other platforms in any way). Finally, downloadable content is planned for this version, although exactly when and what it might be has yet to be announced.
A unique feature of this new port is the ability to play with the keyboard and/or mouse. To many people, this might initially seem awkward -- and it is -- but it worked decently for the songs we tried it on, meaning you might soon see people tapping out "Welcome to the Jungle" on their laptops at the airport (a trend we'd wholeheartedly support). Playing with keyboard-only was a little easier for us to get used to than using the mouse buttons to strum, but everything is fully configurable so you can set everything to your preference.
Finally, there are a number of little touches unique to the PC version. An audio lag calibration option is available, albeit without any way to gauge whether it's an issue or not. As of this writing, extremely distracting Intel ads dot the venues in places they don't exist on the other platforms; it's not clear if these are static ads or being uploaded dynamically, but they tend to stick out (it would be a shame if the intermittent choppiness we've had is due to ads being served). And then there's the Pandora's Box: there are no tools included to create custom songs (undoubtedly due to legal concerns), but only time will tell if the community will figure out a way to churn out new content for this version, which was huge for the PS2 version of GH2.
Overall, the PC version of Guitar Hero III is a solid port of a fairly awesome game. If not for the high system demands and random slowdowns, it might actually compete with the 360 and Wii for the best version available. If the PC is your only gaming option, you'll get plenty of rock out of Guitar Hero III: just make sure your system has some heavy metal of its own.
There's a small elevated ridge above the Concordia Divide Hydro Plant that overlooks the western side of the facility. The position is perfect for a sniper with a long-range rifle to take out targets with impunity. I discovered this place during one of the frequent Bane assaults on the facility when I found myself crouched on the ridge blasting Bane as quickly as possible yelling at my computer screen. There wasn't any thought of experience points or fulfilling quests. For a brief instant, one of the few I've ever experienced in an MMO, I was really in the moment, sucked into an alternate reality in a way usually only possible in first-person shooters. Welcome to Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa and while it's not without its problems, adrenaline junkies finally have their MMO.
Tabula Rasa takes place in a not-too-distant future in which the Earth is overrun by a malevolent conglomeration of alien races called the Bane. While our homeworld couldn't be saved, discovered alien technology allows Earth's leaders to evacuate enough people to continue the fight out among the stars. There humanity hopes to find like-minded alien races as allies and strike back. The game initially ships with two worlds to explore, Foreas and Arieki. The Foreans are ecologically-minded aliens who want the humans' help against the Bane but aren't willing to destroy their world in order to save it. Arieki is a prison colony inhabited by the criminals and misfits of the Brann race. The goal there is for the humans to convince a planet of exiles, lone wolves and misanthropes, to join a battle for the common good. Both worlds have fun and interesting storylines with well developed quests and plotlines for those players who are into that sort of thing.
The key feature of Tabula Rasa is the game's combat system. The NCSoft design team set out to redefine MMO combat and in this, at least, they've really succeeded. While the game still does traditional stat-rolling under the frenetic on-screen action, the factors that go into each roll include the players' movement, stance, cover and range. That variety turns fighting in Tabula Rasa into an incredibly fun mix of movement, positioning and moment-to-moment weapon selection. It has the immediacy and kinetic quality of a third-person action game without sacrificing the deeper strategy of a standard RPG fighting system.
To take advantage of this system, Tabula Rasa's world design team has done a masterful job crafting a sort of "living" battlefield. Enemies in Tabula Rasa don't just stand around waiting to be killed, there's always something going on whether its Thrax soldiers on patrol, a battle between Bane and AFS NPCs, native animals hunting each other or continual assaults on the player's bases. The latter event is a continual highlight of playing the game, a joyously chaotic affair filled with dozens of enemies and players shooting at each other to defend the base. Should the Bane win, this means that a whole group of quests are not completable until the base is recaptured. That's a whole different sort of fun as an ad-hoc group of player-soldiers try to coordinate an assault on a very well-defended emplacement in order to reclaim access to quest-givers and merchants.
One of the main dangers of this sort of system would be repetitiveness. Tabula Rasa avoids this through a great system of itemization. Firearms, for example, come in a variety of flavors ranging from rifles to shotguns to rocket launchers to electric netguns and fire different sorts of ammunition -- lasers, shells, electric bolts, sonic waves and others. Since the many different types of enemies in the game fight using different combat tactics and with their own array of special powers, this means that there's no one piece of "uber-gear," different kinds of weapons, armor or powers will useful in different situations. A Ranger may begin a battle by calling in a carpet-bombing air strike and then use a net gun to immobilize a few of the more dangerous opponents, switch to a rifle to take out one particular Thrax PFC, go to a shotgun to knock back opponents who have gotten too close and then switch to a laser pistol to eliminate that one annoying close-range amoeboid that just won't go away.
Other MMOs could learn a few things from Tabula Rasa's class structure. All players begin as undifferentiated "Recruits" with a few basic skills. As they level, players make choices about the types of gameplay they enjoy and move into more specialized classes. At level five they can become combat-oriented "Soldiers" or move toward the "Specialist" support classes. At level 15 these classes are further defined, eventually culminating in a fourth tier of specialized classes that slot pretty cleanly into classic MMO archetypes like "tank," "healer" or "ranged DPS." Not only do the game's classes offer plenty of variety for different kinds of players, it makes leveling up a continual adventure as the battle situations players find themselves in start requiring more sophisticated responses. The well-designed instances are built around this by offering timed objectives or widely spaced targets that force players into fire teams and put a premium on cooperation.
The real brilliance of the character system is that every player gets the opportunity to create clones of their avatar at important branch points. These clones have all the experience of the original but have all their skill and ability points refunded. It's a brilliant solution to the problem of players making a wrong choice because they can always try out the alternative. "Alt-aholics" who enjoy playing multiple characters can cut out the boring low-level portion of the game when they want to pursue a different career via a new character. Since every character shares the same inventory (items and money can be transferred between alts through the AFS footlockers in every base) it merely formalizes the way most players play MMOs and eliminates the useless "bank alt."
The bad news is that not every idea on display in Tabula Rasa comes off perfectly. Crafting is a bit of a mess, although the idea is sound enough. Crafting is designed to augment the itemization system by letting players create mods that can be attached to weapons and armor to give them various effects (lowering an opponent's armor, for example, or reducing resistances to certain types of damage). In practice the system is confusing, not very well explained in-game and gives rewards that are simply not worth the effort it takes to get them. Worse still, it sucks up precious ability points that players need for combat abilities, virtually guaranteeing that the traditional MMO "bank alt" will be replaced by an equally useless "crafting alt."
Another idea not carried off as well as it should have been is "morality quests." Much the way Garriott's legendary RPG Ultima IV challenged a player's morality, certain quests in Tabula Rasa require a player to make ethical decisions. In theory this is a great idea and the quests themselves are entertaining as far as they go. One quest line, for example, starts with a Bane Thrax prisoner of war. The player has to retrieve food for the prisoner and then decide whether or not to drug it in order to get information from them. Either choice triggers a slightly different quest chain in which the player gets in touch with an underground movement among the Thrax and the AFS that hopes to end the war.
The problem is that the main difference between the two choices is flavor text. There are no real long-term consequences to the player's actions. If there was ever a reason to have a reputation system in an MMO, this is it. It would be great if these choices would have real consequences, perhaps opening and closing major quest lines, areas of the map or offering different instances based on a player's faction standings. As it stands now they're just a mild novelty in a pretty standard MMO quest structure.
The preceding problems, though, pale in comparison to the game's puzzling lack of an auction house and an "inspect" feature. A central clearing house to trade crafting recipes and components would make the crafting system (as confusing as it is) at least a viable part of the gameplay. The other missing element is the ability to inspect another player's inventory. Not only does this provide the "Where did you get that?" moments that act as social lubricant, it would also facilitate teammate equipment coordination and make trading for those rare crafting materials infinitely easier. This is the same mistake that NCSoft's own Auto Assault made a few years ago. Fortunately Tabula Rasa is a much stronger game at launch than Auto Assault ever was and, according to an NCSoft rep, an auction house is the dev team's top priority.
NCSoft has been in the MMO business for a while and its experience shows with a launch that been remarkably smooth from a technological standpoint. The game launched with four servers and hasn't had anything but scheduled downtime in the two weeks since it went live. There have been complaints about a memory leak and slowdown from the community, though that hasn't been a problem on the (admittedly beefy) rigs we ran the game on at GameSpy. There are also scattered minor gameplay bugs, mostly quests that won't give the player credit for completing them and occasional triggers that only go off for only a few members in a party, forcing players to run missions multiple times.
Despite the problems, Tabula Rasa is off to a great start and its future potential is very promising. While the lack of an auction house hurts the game, the awesome combat, intense battlefield action, fun missions and interesting character progression is more than enough to keep players coming back for a good long while. A well-realized science fiction setting in a genre overflowing with elves and orcs doesn't hurt either. A big salute to "General British" for letting us all indulge our inner starship trooper.
If you missed Gas Powered Games' Supreme Commander when it released in February, the new expansion offers quite a few changes. We were big fans of the game when it first came out, but there's no doubt it was one of the most complex, time-consuming RTSes in quite a while, and had an unapologetically steep learning curve. Many lamented that the three factions in the original, the Cybran, Aeon, and UEF, looked and behaved too similarly. And on the surface they do resemble each other, but after hours of playtime, you learn to appreciate the differences and understand how to capitalize and manipulate them to your advantage.
GPG seems to have two main goals with the standalone Forged Alliance expansion: faster action and more diversity. Diversity is inserted primarily with the addition of a fourth faction, the more visually distinct Seraphim. Though they, like the other three, possess similar lower tier units, higher tiers possess more individuality, particularly those of the experimental variety. Accessing these differences between factions, meaning teching up to tier three (T3), requires a different kind of resource production strategy since GPG moved mass fabricators from tier one (T1) to tier two (T2). You have to be much more aware of your extractors this time around, making sure to expand your base of operations across the map until you can start churning out T3 fabricators and power plants, since extractors seem to play a much more vital role in maintaining reasonable resource rates in the early game.
Once you've stabilized your economy, which is still a significant part of the game, you can crank out some of the experimental units much more quickly in Forged Alliance. If you played SupCom when it first came out, you'll likely remember checking the build timer on your Cybran spiderbot (which no longer tramples friendly units) or Aeon colossus and realizing you could go make a sandwich and watch an episode of 30 Rock before the thing would be ready. With more rapid build times on some of the experimental units, you can now (again, assuming your resource rates are well-managed) have six or so spiderbots up and running within a relatively brief period of time. This lets you access the distinct characteristics built into each faction more easily, which is a welcome change.
The Seraphim get some interesting experimental units, including a mammoth bomber plane that, in groups, will utterly annihilate any base with devastating explosive charges. But it's not just in the experimental tier that make the Seraphim stand out. Their T3 land unit selection includes a mobile shield generator, something the UEF and Aeon get a lesser version of at T2, and the Cybran don't get at all, as they have a T2 mobile stealth field system in its place. Along with many unit types, static defensive capabilities differ across factions, like the T3 torpedo ambush system unique to the Cybran Nation, or the T3 point defense only accessible by the UEF. Units have been added in as well, including the Aeon's T3 rapid-fire artillery structure, a T1 gunship and auto-assist engineering suite for the Cybran, and a UEF T3 air transport. Returning units have been tweaked too, the most notable change we saw being the increased movement speed of the Cybran T2 destroyers. Compared to their lethargic locomotion in the first SupCom, these things have been sped up to the point where they rival some of the heavier land units. While that's certainly useful if you're playing as Cybran, we can't imagine it being very enjoyable for the opposition. Destroyers are amphibious, capable of sprouting legs and taking off across land. They also have far greater armor, offensive power and range than most other land units, making them a much more formidable unit, perhaps too much so.
Unit pathing seems to have been greatly improved as well. Before, when issuing formation-move order to groups of units, particularly naval units, they'd veer off in all sorts of odd directions. Only after a laborious, blatantly indirect journey would the units arrive at their destination. Now, as soon as the order is issued, the units turn and move more or less directly to their destination. With naval units, the change makes a noticeable difference in the flow of gameplay. Instead of having to baby-sit boats while battle rages on five different fronts, you can divert your attention to critical areas of the map with less of a nagging itch to double-check your orders are properly being carried out.
Just to be clear, such changes in no way makes the game more accessible. If you couldn't stand Supreme Commander, nothing about Forged Alliance's gameplay is going to change your mind. It has a different feel to it, but it still turns a frigid shoulder to the uninitiated, warming only after a significant donation of time. The interface, however, will make acclimating yourself to the dense RTS mechanics more manageable. If you remember, the interface took up nearly a third of the screen in SupCom's first release. Sure it kept all the necessary functions within easy reach, but there was an abundance of unused black space. The reworked interface takes up far less of the battlefield and is much less of a distraction.
Let's not forget to mention the single-player campaign, which has also gone through some restructuring. The largely disposable story kicks off with the UEF, Cybran, and Aeon banded together to fight off the menace of the Seraphim. Narrative plays out in StarCraft-like talking head sequences between missions, and during missions you'll get brief cutscenes and voiced pop-up messages from characters important to the plot. This time around, characters thankfully pop far less often to remind you of the task at hand. Though most of the characters woven into the game's narrative are derivative throwaways, the Cybran's Brackman consistently made us laugh with his insistence on pronouncing his catch phrase "Oh yes" in a cadence similar to this guy.
Six new missions are built into Forged Alliance, which you can play through as Aeon, Cybran or UEF. The same kind of tiered mission structure is retained here, though the transitions between objectives are far more abrupt and, ultimately, irritating. While you'll likely appreciate the greater challenge of this campaign versus that of the original and the ability to use high-level units throughout, the instances where the map increases in size, which happens about two or three times per mission, are trial and error affairs. Once an objective is completed and the map expands in scope, you're assaulted almost immediately with a massive wave of incoming air, land, or sea units. More often than not, you're totally unprepared for the assault, meaning you have to go back and reload a previous save to rebuild your forces using the knowledge of what's eventually to come. Just be sure to save your game right before you complete a main objective.
Then, of course, come the AI skirmish modes and online play through GPGnet. You'll find a few new AI settings in Forged Alliance, including an Adaptive AI that alternates between offense and defense as it sees fit, and tougher cheating version. Naturally the cheating AI is the most difficult to compete against because, well, it cheats. Along with a host of new maps, the online components, including the community features built into GPGnet, will keep you busy for a long while to come.
Graphical improvements are included as well, from the fancy-looking fires on damaged buildings to the overall luster of the units. If you detested the blocky robotic designs from the first game, the Seraphim's curvilinear unit and structure designs may be more to your liking. Once you get toward the later stages of a game, however, you don't spend all that much time staring at units anyway as you have to manage the action through icons with a zoomed out view. It's not a readily accessible system since you have to identify what all the icons' shapes and symbols represent. But eventually you will, and then it'll become clear how useful they really are.
Closing Comments Booting up Supreme Commander again feels like trying to simultaneously play three games of Risk without being completely sure of the rules. Even with the changes, Forged Alliance doesn't alter Supreme Commander's niche appeal. It's not a game for every gamer, not even for every RTS fan, and, quite frankly, you might be turned off even once you get to know it. It's a sprawling RTS experience that requires your constant, undivided attention, an ability to react swiftly and intelligently to the shifting tide of battle, and the patience to plan and execute long-term strategies and manage a complex resource system. It's most rewarding only when you've learned all the back-and-forths, attacks and defenses, tech tree lines and strategies, which takes quite a while, but which we were more than willing to do. If you'd rather avoid being embroiled in the augmented intensity of online play, the scalable difficulty of the skirmish and campaign modes provide plenty of opportunity to find your comfort zone. Don't expect much personality out of the narrative's characters, any memorable plot developments, or this game to hold your hand in any way, but you can be sure an excellent RTS experience lies underneath the faults.
Following up on the well-regarded GTR and GTR2, the crew at SimBin has crafted another racing simulation for hardcore racing simulation fans: Race 07. Whereas the GTR series focused on the FIA GT Series, Race 07 is primarily about touring cars. Anyone familiar with the Codemasters TOCA series from Codemasters is familiar with these cars. However, this is the FIA sanctioned WTCC (World Touring Car Championship) simulation, which brings together the very best touring car drivers from all over the world to race in an F1-style championship, many on real world circuits not as familiar to F1 drivers.
Race 07 doesn't stop at being a touring car simulation, though. SimBin has also given us a taste of open wheel racing with the F3000 series, and added several other interesting single-model series as well, such as the Caterham, Formula BMW, Radical and Mini series, each with its own vehicle type and handling characteristics.
As with GTR, the goal here is to provide a fully accurate simulation of the vehicles and an accurate representation of each series, featuring three real-world seasons (2006, 2007 and 1987) and their real-world scoring system. There are no frills, minigames or management modes in this game. You are instead given the standard single season championship mode, single race, time attack and open practice.
The game does come with various levels of driving aids to help less experienced drivers get around the course without frustration. But make no mistake: this game is not aimed at the casual racer.
One new feature is a believable weather system. It can be dry, wet or changing, with both light and heavy rain provided. This doesn't just mean that the asphalt is a darker color, either. Real rain falls from the sky and your wipers can be activated to sweep it away. This brings an additional dimension to the game as cars handle quite differently in the wet. You will need to switch to wet weather tires and alter your racing setup and driving style appropriately. As many have found out, cars don't turn as well in water!
The graphics engine continues to evolve from the GTR graphics engine which, if you go back far enough, was used by EA in their now discontinued F1 series for the PC. The bad news is, this graphics engine is getting long in the tooth. It does not scale particularly well down to older machines. By the time you turn off enough graphical options to get a decent frame rate on such a machine, the game looks many years old. Even on newer hardware, reports have been coming in of unwanted stuttering, both on Vista and XP. Even with the graphics cranked up, the game doesn't seem to raise the bar a great deal above past offerings. SimBin should be advised that this graphics engine has perhaps reached the point where it needs to be replaced, if they wish to wow users with visuals. However, if you've got recent hardware, you should find that the graphics are a detailed and pleasing interpretation of the tracks and cars in which you'll be racing. In particular, you will note the fully-animated 3D flag wavers alongside the track, the fully 3D interiors of the car, and even from outside the car you can see the drivers being shaken around, turning their heads, shifting, and leaning into each corner. Of course, the falling rain will also be a welcome addition.
A new feature can monitor your frame rate during the course of a real race, and suggest graphics settings changes to get your frame rate into the target range. Although this is a nice feature, the graphics settings are not as fine grained as I would like to see, so the changes the game makes are just to change the presets to high, medium or low, and not really tweak individual items like shadows or other frame rate killers.
The audio of the engines, cars, and voiceovers is excellent, as it was in GTR2. The development team knows how to create all the sounds of racing and if you've got a good sound rig you will feel like you are on the track. I particularly enjoy the ambient sounds of trackside activity, such as engines being revved in the paddock, cars out on the track in the distance downshifting into turns, and so on. Having been to many racing events, I can tell you that there is rarely such thing as a quiet paddock, and having the ambient noises really makes you feel like you are trackside.
Getting into the gameplay itself, you have to first know that it is all about real racing. By this I mean the kind of racing that can be compared to running a race along a tightrope, trying to go as fast as you dare without stumbling. If you are too conservative, you'll fall back. Too aggressive, and you risk falling off the track or smashing into another car. In hardcore racing games, tenths or hundredths of a second matter, and muscling other cars off the track usually harms you more than helps you. If you want to balance on the ragged edge of grip, lap after lap, consistently improving, this is your kind of game. If not, no amount of driving aids will make this a pleasure for you. Most people are going to need practice, and a lot of it, to become competent at this game. This means learning each track, spending long sessions practicing, tweaking and tuning, and otherwise getting to the point where you no longer need all your concentration just to put in a respectable lap time. If you jump into a race before you are prepared, you will quickly be overwhelmed by the AI, the track, and your own car's physics.
In looking at the quality of the physics engine for this game, I had to ask myself whether the car not only behaved as expected, but whether it transferred that information in a meaningful way to me as the driver. A great physics engine doesn't help me if the game doesn't supply the cues I need to balance the car at the edge of grip. The number one way that Race 07 does this is with force feedback. It is hard for me to imagine playing this game well without force feedback, because the game implements it better than almost every other racing simulation I've played. When you are charging into a braking zone, getting ready to start turning, you should know whether you've completed most of your braking, and whether or not the car is going to grip to get into the apex of the turn. If the car under steers into a corner, you should get plenty of warning, both by sound and feel. In this game, the wheel spring rate will virtually disappear as the rubber of your tires slides along the road with a nice tire scrub noise. You can crank that wheel to full lock with almost no effort, but the car will continue to slide forward. As you straighten the wheel and continue to slow the car, you'll feel the tension increase in the wheel as the tires bite and regain their traction. In this way, you can feather the throttle and adjust steering to find that very edge of grip where you can make your turns without pushing off the road. It is amazing how many simulations in the past have not been able to do this well. Race 07 does it nicely.
Similarly, a condition called trailing throttle oversteer (TTO), is modeled perfectly in this title. Sail around a curve with the revs high, using your maximum grip on all 4 wheels, and then jump out of the throttle. If you don't have all your driving aids on, be prepared for a spin as your rear tires lose their weight and whip the car around. A small amount of TTO can be your friend. It can save you when you are pushing the car too hard into a turn and you need to get it to rotate. You can quickly get out of the throttle, control the rotation, and ease the throttle back on to regain grip and get out of a sticky situation. The relevance to this game is that both of these conditions are modeled quite well, and provide ample audio, visual and tactile feel to the driver. After a little practice, your brain will respond on its own to these cues, and you will begin to feel more and more like you are driving a real car, and not a game. Again, Race 07 models this beautifully, and SimBin should be applauded for getting these very important behaviors right.
Damage is fully modeled in the game; it is not just recorded as a problem to fix in the pits. It will affect your ability to drive the car, with graphical tire deformations and missing bits also implemented. The game manual suggests running into a wall just for the fun of it, to see pieces of the car flying off. You can change the amount of damage sensitivity your car will have as a percentage value, depending upon how masochistic you want to be when going at it with AI or networked opponents.
Race 07 tries hard to put you in the driver's seat as literally as possible. By default, your viewing position is inside the car, where God intended it to be. This does limit your visibility, of course, but the game will do nice things for you, like turning your viewing angle in towards the apex of the turn. You can also adjust your seat position and seat height for better viewing of the road ahead. In the F3000 open-wheel cars, you are literally placed "inside the helmet", where you will see the world from behind your visor, with the top and bottom of your view clipped by your helmet.
The Track-IR peripheral from NaturalPoint is supported, and this is very important as it really lets you look around in the cockpit, bringing your mirrors into better view, seeing that car coming alongside of you, or looking into the apex of each turn by yourself. In addition, the latest and greatest steering wheels and shifters, such as the Logitech G25, have built-in profiles. Clearly, SimBin knows their audience.
Multiplayer is supported and there are various options to get into online games. The game can be installed in an offline or online mode. If you install online, you'll need to register with Steam, which will update your game as needed, supply multiplayer linkage, and licensing. I don't particularly like being forced to use a third party service in order to run my game, but that's a requirement here. If you don't want to license your software with Steam, you will need to install the game in offline mode or just pass up on the game entirely. The game also ships with a standalone server if you wish to host a league or just serve up races for friends.
So the good news is that Race 07 provides a rich racing experience, with 32 real-world racing circuits, 6 racing classes, and all the little details that hardcore simulation fans want.
There are warts, however. Aside from the aging graphics engine mentioned earlier, there are various nits I recorded while using the game. The turn indicators that pop up to help you learn the track should be a positive feature, but I ended up turning them off because all too often, they showed the wrong gear, popped up too late, or not at all. I believe they actually made things worse. There is no out-of-the-box telemetry and lap analysis software integration the way there was with GTR2. It is possible that given the similarities between the titles, the MOTEC software promoted with GTR2 can be used to analyze replays for you from Race 07, but it is certainly not provided for out of the box. The User interface for the game is a little clunky. Many times I've had to click multiple times on a button because the mouse might have slid off the button region before the mouse button was released, causing the click not to register, even though the audio blip happens to make it seem like I clicked. It just seems a little too sensitive. I had to make an effort to keep the mouse on the button and firmly click instead of 'swiping' it lazily like I often do when I'm in a hurry.
Then there are annoyances like the fact that the first time you enter a race with a particular model car, the game will leave the car setup at Default. Default is a non-track specific setup. It guarantees you're not going to be very competitive. Race 07 thoughtfully provides both a wet weather and a dry weather racing setup, but you'll have to immediately go into the setup screen, click Files, click the appropriate setup, and click load, before you even take the track. Why they could not have defaulted to track- and car-specific setups, I don't know. I often forget to change it until I'm out on the track.
Load times are fairly long on my machine. Most of the options are still available once you get trackside, but not as many visual options can be changed without exiting and reloading the track. If your machine isn't sporting a superfast hard drive, loading a track is an indication that it's time to go get yourself something to drink and come back in a few minutes.
The AI of the computer-controlled cars is hit or miss. It is usually too aggressive, both against you and against others. You will find no shortage of yellow flags in your typical race, whether you were involved or not. However, you often will be involved, as the AI shows no hesitation to dive bomb you on the inside of a turn. I found myself driving overly defensively; at least until I really felt I could attack each course. If you leave the door open just a little bit, the AI cars will force their way through. I feel that if the AI cars behaved like this in real life, there would be some penalties and more than a fair share of wrecks caused by it. Some aggression is good, of course. All real drivers have it. But most drivers weigh risk vs. reward and are often content to pressure you into a mistake, rather than just muscling through on the inside.
The adjustable difficulty levels work very well, but as is usually the case, it takes a fair amount of trial and error to figure out what percentage of speed you should be racing against. SimBin has done nothing to add value to the genre by failing to build a game that watches your abilities and sets up races that will give you a good challenge without being ridiculously easy or impossibly difficult.
The game also has a configurable replay system. You can see your best laps, and even entire races. When you do this, you'll find a new feature called "Free floating camera". You can 'detach' the camera and move it around anywhere you like. I have attached a few screenshots demonstrating this at Valencia to see a large portion of the track from the air, which is something none of the standard cameras offer. I even added a screenshot of an F3000 car going down the front straight from a grandstand seat. What a way to scout out a track if you're going to see an actual race and want to find the best seats!
Closing Comments At the end of the day, if you enjoy touring car racing but have found the Codemasters TOCA series to be too cheesy and arcade-like for your tastes, Race 07 is worth your investment. It is what touring car racing is all about, right down to the weight-penalties given to the winning cars. Online play will help you find others to race with, and all the tweaking, tuning and customization options are there for you. In addition, expect to see other tracks, cars and skins put into the game by modders who have done this for each game SimBin has put out. The game will pay for itself many times over for the hardcore sim fan who treats these games as an investment in a sim racing career. But a title like this is not as likely to win over a casual racer, because little was done to cultivate new hardcore sim racing fans here.
Perseus Mandate starts out with a whimper as you and the second F.E.A.R. team are called in to investigate happenings in another office building/warehouse/sewer complex. Instead of continuing the story of Alma and the first F.E.A.R. team developer TimeGate chose to run the story parallel to the original. While the story is, in fact, parallel, the gameplay is almost exactly the same. And while the firefights can still offer up some pretty decent thrills, the aging engine and scare tactics left us frustrated and bored. We've played this game, twice.
While there is a story, it barely matters. The compelling bits of fiction in the original F.E.A.R. were the stories of Paxton Fettel and Alma. Both of these characters are only shown in snippets with only a bare thread of connection that doesn't particularly make any sense. What we're left with is a bunch of new FEAR agents and we haven't been given any kind of compelling reason to care about them. In a game like this where bad things are bound to happen, you really have to give at least care a little bit when they do or the whole idea falls apart at the roots.
F.E.A.R. was pretty creepy and occasionally scary and Perseus Mandate tries to keep up with the original by using the same basic tricks. There are guys walking away and dissolving into ash, guys appearing right behind you, ghostly enemies attacking from the darkness, and occasional creepy sounds and environmental cues like lights falling off of the ceiling. These techniques have lost their effectiveness because a) these instances aren't presented in as slick a fashion as we've seen in the past and b) we've already seen this in the original and the expansion. There are a couple of creepy moments with enemies that try to grab you and pull you into the ground, but the other "tense" moments are confusing and more laughable than frightening.
Perseus Mandate isn't completely devoid of worth, however. If you still enjoy the firefights of the F.E.A.R. franchise, you'll enjoy these as well. The arenas where the battles take place will likely look pretty familiar. There's not a lot of imagination being used here in design. Nearly every firefight takes place across a courtyard, in a section of a warehouse with two stories and pipes, or across an office building's hallways and reception areas. Still, it doesn't make the firefights any less fun since the AI still reacts well to your moves, seeks cover, and uses grenades regularly and effectively.
There are three new weapons to carry with you into battle including a new chain-lightning gun that's effective but not as powerful as the tiny amount of ammunition found in the campaign would lead you to believe it would be, a nifty new machine gun that has a scope that can magnify light, and a grenade launcher that isn't really worth bothering with in most cases. As you'd expect from previous F.E.A.R. titles, you'll need to use any of the weapons with a healthy dose of slo-mo since the enemy AI will murder the hell out of you otherwise.
There's also a new enemy type called the Nightcrawler. These guys are a huge pain in the ass because they can move quickly (or perhaps just use the same slo-mo technology you have in their favor) are accurate, throw two grenades while vaulting off of the walls, and take about a thousand bullets to the chest before dying. They're definitely the most challenging of the enemies in the game including both the small and big mechs and are a welcome addition.
Not much else can really be said about Perseus Mandate. It has some decent firefights in levels that look so similar to the original F.E.A.R. and the last expansion Extraction Point that you'll wonder why everything looks so bad. Probably because the engine is over two years old and, like a former beauty queen that's been hanging out in the sun too much, looks prematurely old and pathetic next to younger models. Textures are even more bland when compared to modern games, models look downright sad next to games like Call of Duty 4, Half-Life 2, TimeShift, and even Jericho. One saving grace was a collapsed underground area where textures suddenly had more life and detail and used color a little more effectively.
Closing Comments We’ll make this easy. If you’re a fan of F.E.A.R. and have just been looking for more of the same firefights with a couple of new weapons and enemies, then you’re probably going to find Perseus Mandate fun. If you’re looking for something new or compelling and some flahy sound or visuals, don’t bother.
There are people who will tell you Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat is no big deal, just a prettier version of the last shooting gallery that was released last month or last year. That it's just a big interactive movie, a game where everything from explosions to enemy rushes is all carefully scripted.
Those people are wrong. Ignore them.
That's because Call of Duty 4 is arguably the finest first-person shooter of 2007, from its gripping have-you-ducking-in-your-seat single-player campaign to its addictive I-just-need-a-few-more-kills-to-get-this-cool-weapon spin on multiplayer. If you don't like it, there's a good chance you simply don't like shooters.
As implied by the title, Call of Duty 4 marks a shift for the franchise, leaving World War II behind for a modern-day story set in a fictional version of the Middle East. There are these terrorists, and this Russian ultranationalist... well, really, the particulars are irrelevant. All you need to know is that you play a few different characters chasing down bad guys in an effort to save the world.
Most of the time, you play as "Soap" MacTavish, a British SAS agent, and for a brief period, his commanding officer, Lt. Price. You'll also fill the shoes of Pvt. Paul Jackson of the Marines, as the story routinely shifts back and forth between different POVs. Part of the action happens in the aforementioned fictional Middle East setting, while other missions take place in Eastern Europe, and sometimes even in the past.
While the settings have changed, the basic combat model has not. CoD's "no man fights alone" mantra remains in force here, as you're always fighting as part of a squad, whether it's a small four-man team or a larger infantry unit attempting to rescue an M1 from hostile territory. The game is indeed tightly scripted, but as you move from location to location, you're often thrown into large-scale firefights that offer a great deal of freedom in how you approach them. In the mission "War Pig," for example, you can fight in the streets using rubble and cars for cover, or you can sneak through the collapsing buildings on both sides (at the risk of running into a few more enemies). Many of CoD's missions are worth playing through multiple times, as you'll discover new paths from point A to point B that you didn't realize were available to you.
Like the previous games, CoD4 does an amazing job of bringing its battles to life in a way that will have you crouching in your chair to duck from the constant hail of bullets. Adding to the constant feel of uneasiness is a bullet penetration system that lets you shoot through walls. If standing out in the open dodging makes you nervous, imagine how you'll feel when you think you're safe inside a building and bullets start coming through the walls. Thankfully, enemies don't abuse this ability (at least not on the standard difficulty), so it's more of a benefit to you than the other side.
CoD4 also contains a number of impressive set pieces. Without giving anything away, some are on rails, where you're just along for the ride and shooting anything that pops up in front of you, others put you on the clock and turn you loose with a time limit to achieve an objective, creating even more tension within the missions. To Infinity Ward's credit, these set pieces aren't just fun to play through, but often lay the groundwork for several interesting gambles within the story, and by the time you reach the finale, there's some doubt as to how it'll all turn out. It won't take particularly long to get through the single-player game -- maybe six or seven hours for average players -- but it's satisfying all the way through. (Be sure to stick around after the final credits roll for a little bonus.)
While the single-player campaign is outstanding in its own right, Call of Duty 4 contains one of the most addictive multiplayer modes we've ever played in a shooter. At its core, it's the same modes you've seen before -- Team Deathmatch, Domination, Search and Destroy, etc -- but it's wrapped up with an experience and achievement system that is bound to keep players up all hours of the night advancing their character.
If anything, CoD4's multiplayer reminds us of a talk noted designer Bill Roper once gave comparing Diablo's design to Las Vegas casinos: everything you do is a mini-celebration, whether it's bells and whistles going off on a slot machine or phat lewts dropping out of a dead monster. And so it goes with CoD4: there's an experience bar at the bottom of the screen, and every kill or objective you achieve adds to it. Moving up in levels gives you access to cooler weapons and abilities, as does successfully completing an endless supply of challenges, like getting x number of kills with a weapon or specialty achievements like headshots. And for every one of these successes, the game is constantly sending you positive reinforcement, prodding you to keep playing a little longer for that next cool weapon or item.
These unlockables are all rolled into COD4's "Create a Class" system, which allows you to build preset characters with different weapons, gear and abilities. For example, you might create a stock soldier with an M4 Carbine, laser sight, and deeper bullet penetration, and then a stealthy sniper class with the ability to steady his heartbeat or not appear on enemy radar. There are three categories of "perks" you can unlock: equipment (C4, special grenades), passive abilities (higher health, faster fire rate) and special abilities (make less sound when you move, or drop a grenade when you die). Combined with a wealth of weapons and gear all the way through level 55, it's hard to imagine running out of combinations to experiment with, adding an extra layer of strategy to the game.
Otherwise, the different modes will seem familiar to most players. In addition to the aforementioned Team DM, Domination (control capture points), and Search and Destroy (one team has a bomb and attempts to plant it while the other defends), there's our favorite, Sabotage, in which both teams fight over a single bomb and try to plant it at the opponent's base; it winds up playing out a little like football, with both teams scrambling to pick up the bomb and pushing back and forth. There's also the Headquarters mode, which isn't entirely unlike King of the Hill: a location on the map is randomly picked as a capture point, and both teams rush to control it and protect it for a period of time before the HQ switches locations. There's already a good number of servers up and running, there's been little lag to speak of, and most servers seem to be rotating through different game modes, keeping the games from feeling too repetitive. In all, it's one of the most impressive multiplayer shooters we've seen on the PC this year, and will undoubtedly give games like Team Fortress 2 a run for its money.
On the PC, we tested Call of Duty 4 on a pretty hefty machine with 2GB RAM and a GeForce 8800GTX video card running at 1920x1200, and the game never stuttered once in either single-player or multiplayer. It's one of the more attractive games we've seen this year, from impressive shadow and lighting effects to slick loading screens to particularly impressive character animations as your squadmates hurdle fences or dive to the ground for cover.
In fact, it's hard to find fault anywhere within Call of Duty 4. The single-player is a fantastic combination of cinematic scripting and large-scale free-form combat, and multiplayer's so addictive that it was hard to pull ourselves away just to finish this review. For those of us who like these kinds of games, they just don't get better than Call of Duty 4. That makes a perfect three-for-three for Infinity Ward, and if you've missed out on its previous Call of Duty titles, do yourself a favor and check this one out.
Nearly a year later, Epic's massive 2006 hit, Gears of War, is almost out on PC, bringing along some additional content. It's got some added single player content, three new multiplayer maps, a new game mode, and a map editor. In 2006, Gears of War was such a big success for many reasons, including but not limited to the marriage of enjoyable gameplay, beautiful graphics, and a massive marketing campaign. Now on PC, a lot of the freshness has worn off. The game's still gorgeous and offers an impressive feature set, the best of which is online co-operative play, but many of the little quirks of gameplay are still in there.
As is easy to see from the screens and video, production values are one of Gears' big draws. On PC, like on Xbox 360, this game looks and sounds incredible. It's tailored to appeal to that 18 - 35 year old male demographic by featuring ludicrously muscled heroes killing everything except each other. Watch the blood fly up in great splashes as enemies' heads explode or bodies are carved in two with a chainsaw. It's a game that really taps into that strange primal urge to do horrible things to monstrous invaders, making it addictively satisfying to repeatedly pulp an enemy face with a point-blank shotgun blast.
Some may wave aside Gears' gore as unnecessary, but the way it's implemented really makes a difference. The blood sprays from enemies as they get hit with bullets serves not only to let you know you're doing damage, but also to reinforce the game's animalistic appeal. The blood is, as gross as it sounds, a reward, and a device that meshes the visuals and sound to enhance the player's sense of power.
The story follows Marcus Fenix and his band of Coalition of Ordered Governments militia. They're fighting the Locust Horde, a subterranean race of humanoid monsters on a planet called Sera. While we don't know exactly why the Horde needs to demolish Marcus and friends, we know they're in the process of doing so, and therefore need to be stopped. The rest of the story is more or less uninteresting, serving primarily as a hollow excuse to move you through the different environments. Don't go into this game expecting rounded characters and nuance - they're not there. In fact, don't even expect some basic questions you'll likely have at the game's conclusion to be answered. Then again, this is a high-intensity action game, so all the better some might say.
This isn't a pure shooter like Epic's Unreal Tournament. It's not even a first person shooter. Instead, it fuses a cover system into the fast-paced mix, and shooting takes place from a third-person over-the-shoulder camera. If you press the cover button while near any obstacle, be it a door frame or wall section or whatever, you suck into the obstacle, sort of like if both you and your target were suddenly magnetically attracted. Marcus will automatically take cover once attached, opening up a few options for attack. If it's a good cover spot, you can blindly fire your gun around the corner, though doing so probably won't hit anything. For a more likely chance at scoring a kill, holding the aim button will pop you out into the open, let you squeeze off a clip, and releasing aim sucks you right back into cover.
What's been termed by Epic as the active reload system starts up whenever you hit R to reload manually or a clip has been spent. A meter appears in the top right of your screen with a bar moving from left to right. Should you stop the moving bar, accomplished by again hitting reload, in a bright white section of the meter, you get bonus damage bullets for a limited time afterward and you gun reloads very quickly. Stopping in a less bright white section awards a faster reload, and missing the white sections penalizes you with a much longer reload duration. If you don't try for the active reload at all, your gun reloads normally. Such a system is great fun, since it's a perpetual and useful reward system, and there's some skill involved.
Let's say your chosen cover position suddenly becomes less than ideal. Gears lets you quickly hop from cover to cover, do a quick sprint forward out of cover, or roll backwards to retreat. If you're near another pillar or wall fragment while already in cover, moving to the edge of your current cover will pop up an icon indicating you can do a rapid spin-strafe, keeping you out of harm's way as you automatically suck into the adjacent position. When not attached to a wall, Marcus can somersault forward, roll backward and to the sides, giving him plenty of movement options.
Generally this controls work well, but problems arise in many of the stages because Epic requires the sprint, roll, and suck-to-cover abilities to all be mapped to the same key. Sprinting, called "roadie running" by Epic for some reason, moves the camera down to Marcus' knees as he hurries along with his head ducked low. The effect is to make you feel as though you're running along behind, immersed in the action, and it works well. What doesn't work is that trying to sprint or roll near any kind of cover spot, which are everywhere in this game, will very frequently result in sticking unintentionally to cover. The PC version, unlike the Xbox 360, gives you another method of rolling and sucking to cover through double-tapping W, A, S, or D. Epic fans will likely find this familiar to the scheme for evasive maneuvers in the Unreal Tournament series, but they just don't work as well in Gears of War. Again, it's the problem of getting hung up on environmental obstacles. You'll dive when you mean to take cover, you'll sprint when you meant to hide behind a pillar, and you'll be frustrated far more often than you should be. Thankfully, the double-tapping can be disabled through the control options menu. Now if only Epic would separate cover, run, and roll for Gears 2…
When not fumbling with control imprecision, Gears responds very well to your commands with the mouse and keyboard. The back and forth between shooting and partaking in the active reload mini-game has a definite flow, giving the firefights a unique feel as compared to other third-person shooters. You get standard machine guns, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, and shotguns, along with more exotic weaponry like the torque bow and hammer of dawn. Though part of the arsenal may sound mundane, the top-notch weapon models and effects give them personality, and their individualized reload timers make a surprising difference in how they handle.
Packaged alongside the entertaining gameplay is an impressive feature set, particularly the option for online co-operative play. To make full use of all the online features, however, you'll need a Live gold account, which costs money (Editor's Note: Apparently the preceding two sentences were misinterpreted and caused a bit of a firestorm. To be perfectly clear, you can play co-op with a Silver account.) Though Gears is entertaining, we can't say it's worth signing up for yet another service when so many other titles out there offer full access to their online features with no additional cost. If you sign up for a Live Silver account, which is free, you can still play in non-ranked multiplayer games, though your experience is feature-limited. Assuming you already have an account, don't care about the additional cost, or are content with having limited access to the online functions, then there's plenty here to enjoy. You get five multiplayer modes and 19 maps, which should provide for lots of entertainment. For Achievement junkies, Gears PC gives you points on top of what you may have already earned with the Xbox 360 version. So even if you've beaten the game on Microsoft's console, you get credit for all the same Achievements again on PC.
Fans of the game are sure to be curious about the new single-player content, which consists of five new chapters stuffed into the beginning of Gears' fifth act. It adds an hour or two of extra gameplay, depending on how many times you're killed and forced to restart from checkpoints, and offers much of the same gameplay as you've already had before. Throughout the entirety of the five new chapters you're tailed by a Brumak, the heavily-armed monster Xbox 360 gamers never got to actually battle at Act 4's conclusion. You do get to fire bullets at the guy in this version, and it's a challenging fight playing solo on the either hardcore or insane difficulty settings. When playing co-operatively you'll notice a significant drop in challenge level, mostly because Gears' friendly AI just isn't that good.
Then there's the question of performance. Gears is still a gorgeous game, but in both DX9 and DX10 we noticed it would stutter on a regular basis. Things would run smoothly otherwise, but the regular occurrences of dropped frames were distracting. As for our system, we're running 32-bit Vista on a rig with an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU 2.40GHz, a 768 MB GeForce 8800 GTX, and 2 GB of high-end RAM. Granted, that's not exactly the best kind of rig to determine a game's performance since it's a much more powerful system than most probably have, but that's all we've tried it on so far.
We're still waiting to post a full review, since as of right now there's absolutely nobody online for us to play against. This makes sense, as the game doesn't ship until November 6th, so expect the review to appear sometime around then so we can add in what we think of the new maps, new mode, and multiplayer as a whole. If you're chomping at the bit to know how good the game is, we'll say it's definitely an enjoyable experience. The active reload and shooting mechanics make for a different, satisfying and entertaining style of gameplay, though it's marred by odd control binding limitations. Story and characters are flimsy and poorly realized as well as smothered by a deluge of steroid-infused machismo, though some might actually appreciate and enjoy this style. Think of Marcus Fenix as channeling the spirit of Arnold Schwarzenegger's John Matrix in Commando, where his appeal stems from his total inability to express himself at anything beyond a third-grader's level of intelligence. For all its strengths, we've definitely seen better single-player games release for PC already this year.
"Action-RPG" is kind of a clunky moniker. Often used for Blizzard's classic Diablo series, it describes a game design that cuts out all the so-called "boring" parts of the classic computer RPG structure in order to provide a constant stream of exciting moments. Kill monster! Get treasure! Level up! Repeat with more powerful monsters! Hellgate: London, Flagship Studios' highly anticipated "spiritual sequel" to Diablo, was created with the explicit intent of bringing that formula into the modern era of gaming. In that, the developers have succeeded. There's certainly plenty to recommend in Hellgate: London. It's an endless demon-slaughtering party with fun combat and an addictive (if repetitive) loot system. But problems in design and implementation, and a general lack of polish -- especially in the buggy multiplayer experience -- mean you'll have to work a bit to enjoy the good stuff.
The premise for Hellgate: London is pretty clever. It's 2038 and an ancient prophecy of the Knights Templar has come true: Hell has conquered the Earth and the last pockets of humanity -- the Templar, the magical Cabal and the remains of Earth's elite military forces -- huddle in magically reinforced London Underground stations plotting their eventual counterattack. Unfortunately, that's all most players will ever really understand about Hellgate: London's central conflict. Quest-giving characters in the human resistance are ciphers distinguished only by sex and the armor they're wearing; the missions they give out are generic "kill eight foozles and bring back their heads" exercises, and the actual plot is thinner than the mystical border between Hades and London is supposed to be.
The game's strongest feature is the actual combat. Hellgate: London offers players six different classes and all of them, with one limited exception, offer varied and enjoyable experiences. Play as an Evoker, for example, the game's caster-style class, and be prepared for a cautious life consisting of sneaking forward and sniping from the shadows. The Guardian, on the other hand, offers third-person melee combat similar to an arcade-style beat-em-up while the Marksman comes as close as Hellgate: London gets to a first-person shooter.
The floor plans of most zones in Hellgate: London are randomly generated, an impressive feat given the 3D environment. Zones are only plotted out when a character enters them, so every area offers its own mix of surprises: hidden tunnels, hellrifts, streets, abandoned buildings, treasure chests... Even the entrances and exits will move each time. The downside is that relying on random level design means that monsters and quest objectives will be placed without rhyme or reason. Often multiple quest objectives are placed right next to each other, or important locations will be guarded by the weakest monsters.
These randomized floor plans also preclude any real sense of "place." London is a city rich with history and places with fascinating names like "Cheapside" and "Mansion House." The Hellgate: London version of these places is an endless randomized collection of generic sewers, maintenance tunnels or destroyed streets with eight different copies of the same roofless English pub. The difference is even starker once you've experienced set-piece story battles that take place in places like Piccadilly Circus or the Tower of London; these locales do a great job of creating a feeling that the player is fighting in the ruins of London, but occur too rarely and only make everything else feel bland by comparison.
Dynamically generated loot helps keep Hellgate exciting. There's a thrill that comes from the continual hope that at any moment something really awesome will drop to the ground to replace a weapon or piece of armor the player's been lugging around for two levels. There's also a great system of equipment upgrades and enhancements that ensures that futzing with inventory as new stuff is acquired -- always one of the most fun parts of an RPG -- is almost constant.
The horrible news is that players have to manage seven tons of inventory in the pseudo-Tetris bag o'boxes that ensures they'll be spending way too much time shuffling old items around to make room for new ones. Would an "autosort" button have been too much to ask? And maybe some more storage space?
From a design standpoint, the demons of Hellgate: London aren't the most original depiction of Hellspawn ever created, but they get the job done with a nicely variegated zoology ranging from impish flyers to floating half-women trailing glowing tentacles, skulls plopped onto gorilla-like bodies that shoot explosive spiked balls, razorbacked beasts that leap into combat, a few very impressive boss monsters and much more. Their combat capabilities are equally varied. Demons will crawl at the player and then leap at his or her face, others charge straight into melee combat while still others stand back and snipe or offer protections and buffs to other monsters. True, their AI is mostly of the "run at the player and hit until one of us is dead" variety, but that doesn't really matter with this many creatures flying, flopping and shooting at the player and when their randomized composition makes every battle a brand-new challenge.
Beyond the single-player campaign, Hellgate: London's multiplayer structure is a bit unusual. There's a standard multiplayer component which consists of co-op play through the regular single-player game content. Each of the Underground stations in the single-player game becomes a multiplayer hub where players can meet, hook up for adventures, buy and sell items, trade things back and forth or just hang out showing off their latest piece of loot. Once a player or party enters a mission, it then becomes a private instance just for that group.
This multiplayer structure isn't too dissimilar to Guild Wars, subject to many of the same social issues that plague that game -- mainly that the tiny Tube stations are just too small to display more than a fraction of the player base, reducing the opportunity for casual meetings and making new friends. That said, the combat is fun and traveling, hooking up with party members and trading items back and forth all work fine (although most of folks playing here at GameSpy HQ feel the chat system is a complete mess, and the lack of an auction house is a real downer).
Sadly, nothing says that Hellgate: London was pushed out the door too early better than the buggy state of the game's multiplayer. Since the game was pushed live on October 30, the multiplayer servers have been plagued by registration problems and downtime (which, naturally, results in the official site and forums getting overloaded and crashing). More problematic are a couple of nasty bugs including frequent crashes to desktop, slowdown and lag during combat and a weird display bug that makes all the character models on screen disappear, leaving the player as just a disembodied weapon floating in mid-air. GameSpy editor Fargo ran into a reproducible bug where he'd actually lose one of his weapons every time he was dual-wielding and logged off, which, as bugs go, is an inexplicable gamebreaker.
For anyone who gets truly addicted to Hellgate, there's an option to get a premium subscription -- when the subscription system goes live, that is. As of this writing it hasn't yet kicked in. According to Flagship's marketing materials, a subscription will allow players access to more storage, more character slots, monthly content, harder game modes, new classes and weapons, pets, raids, guild tools, seasonal and themed areas, additional PvP modes, Web rankings and character viewing. To start, however, the subscription will only offer a few of these things, mostly the basics like extra character slots and inventory space, hardly enough to justify the cost of the subscription.
In the end, those who sank hundreds of hours into Diablo and Diablo II or even those looking for a relatively light, enjoyable action RPG will find a lot to enjoy in the 20-hour or so single-player campaign or the free co-op system (once the inevitable series of patches address the bugs). But for those who didn't, the short-lived mindless monster-killing corpse-looting joy just won't be enough to finish the basic story, to say nothing of a monthly subscription. If the development team had poured half the creativity and personality into the setting, character, content or story as they did into the fighting and looting, the game might have become a modern-day classic. Instead, what comes out of this Hellgate often feels a little underwhelming.
How can a game box possibly know that you, a human, are empty? Now we're not aware of the latest and greatest in retail box to content of human soul relations, but such bald, brazen statements like the one serving as Digital Spray's game title should probably be avoided to prevent unnecessary and potentially destructive conflict between the parties involved. And the game should absolutely be avoided by you, the consumer, since it's terrible.
What exactly Digital Spray was hoping to accomplish with You Are Empty is anyone's guess. It's like Serious Sam and Painkiller purged of all their entertaining bits and Doom-era progression structure pressed on top of it all. You get key retrieval sequences, monster closets where you can actually see the monsters pop into existence, poor shooting mechanics, and a arrestingly limited assortment of weaponry. There's nothing exciting or satisfying about it.
The game takes place in the 1950s in the USSR. Stalin is in power, and a shady scientist develops a broadcasting technology engineered to help spread red glory across the planet. Of course there's a problem and everyone turns into monsters. You're unaffected, so you kill everything. There's a stark contrast between the action of the game, which is nearly as simplistic and rudimentary as first-person shooters get, and the animated cut-scenes, which tell of past events in an obscure but visually engaging manner.
Throughout the game, freakish and horribly modeled enemies accost you, but never in numbers great enough to elicit the surge of adrenaline in games like Serious Sam, which is the style this game seemed to be shooting for. Instead, you get handfuls of foes, like two lanky monsters in firemen outfits lumbering toward you at a time. After that, it might be an abysmally animated busty nurse with a missing face, some sort of giant turkey, or rats. Yes, rats.
Eventually you'll fight two types of bulbous ogres, one who spits venomous phlegm and another with massive arms and a tank-top. Digital Spray was trying to go for some kind of sense of humor here, most evident in an effeminate male ballerina NPC that literally comes out of a closet. Problem is, it's just not funny, except in that utterly insipid kind of way. We laughed at the giant turkey and his urgent "gobble-gobble" battle cry, but only because it was so surprisingly awful.
Then there are the "authentic" weapons: a Mauser pistol, Mosin rifle, double-barreled shotgun, wrench, and experimental electric ball gun…wait, what? So you're fighting fat abominations in orange sweaters wielding pickaxes, heroin addict females with sickles, yet using realistic weaponry. Well, with the exception of the electric ball gun. How did that ever sound like a good idea?
Combat is nowhere close to entertaining, unless you're one of those gamers who get a kick out of bottom-of-the-barrel thrills. Enemies jump from spaces which were empty only seconds before, and often stay rooted in the same spot. If they're mobile, they'll run directly at you, or, in the winged welders' case, bounce around like idiots. There's no challenge in defeating anyone, and progressing beyond any fight is pointless since it means you'll still be playing the game.
For whatever reason, Digital Spray decided your character speed should be competitive with that of a crippled tortoise strapped to an anvil. There's no sprint key and no method of accelerating your pathetic gait. If you're making a mindless shooter where the only point is to move forward and shoot, shouldn't it be a priority to ensure your character can quickly get to the action bits?
Closing Comments You Are Empty needs a lot of things, aside from a title change. More intelligent enemies would have been great, or at least greater numbers of stupid foes. Digital Spray instead decided to throw small numbers of morons at you, give you an infuriatingly inadequate run speed, and make available one of the most boring arsenals in recent memory. It's an absolute must-bypass.
Coming into 2007, The Witcher had little momentum. After a great showing both before and at E3, more starting jumping onto the Witcher-wagon. After many years in development and many, many impressive changes to the BioWare Aurora Engine, The Witcher is finally being released to the public. The resulting game is pretty strong thanks to an interesting world rife with moral divides in a story progression that makes for hard choices when creating an identity for Geralt, the protagonist. It's a well realized and detailed world with excellent music to fill in the mood. If it wasn't for some story inconsistencies, crashing issues, and snore-inducing load times, The Witcher would be higher on our list of must-haves. As it is, we still recommend the game, but want to note for buyers to beware of the technical problems.
The Witcher's story is an unusual one for fantasy. The world is dark and grimy in the way you'd expect actual medieval towns and landscapes to be. It's full of fear, disease, religious zealotry, and political maneuvering that results in pain for the powerless populace at large. In short, it's a window into our own world and tries to expose some of the issues that we deal with on a daily basis while still providing players the chance to control an interesting character and participate in an exciting adventure. It results in some cheesiness as the writers try to shove too many modern day problems into one game, but many of the issues are tackled in a mature fashion and we couldn't help but be drawn into this flawed but hopeful world.
While tensions always seem to be high between humans, elves, dwarves, and other races of fantasy, this Polish-born tale pushes those tensions into full blown racism. While most of the epithets are cast at the "non-humans" like the elves and dwarves, the main character Geralt is not immune to the slanderous speech of the human population. While Geralt was born human, he was mutated and trained to become something both more and less. While Witchers are granted enhanced reflexes and strength and trained to slay monsters, use basic magic, and brew helpful potions, the process of mutation sterilizes them and as many observe in the game, turns them cold to others.
Thusly, Geralt's adventures are not all happiness and joy in finding new friends as they are in some RPGs. Most humans are wary of Geralt, some are downright hostile and the non-humans often have the same reactions because he's part human. From the moment Geralt leaves the confined tutorial area of his home castle Kaer Morhen, he's subjected to the fears and anger of a world looking for a reason to explode. Geralt, of course, takes a defining role at the center of that explosion, one way or another.
Geralt as the deciding factor in events is one of the reasons The Witcher works as a narrative and a game. The first couple of chapters of the adventure will offer up some moral decisions that may seem a little more cut and dry but when chapter three rolls around, the choices offered up are many shades of gray and it's hard to ever know that what you're doing is "right" by the video gaming standard of black and white right and wrong. Are you helping elves fighting for freedom and equality or terrorists that have just as much hatred of humans as humans have of them? Do the ends of preserving and protecting humanity really justify the potentially horrific means? Do I love Triss or Shani or just view them as toys for my amusement? These ideological, political, and personal decisions make the story and the game more engrossing as you sit there and wonder "what did I just do?"
The story works itself out mostly through conversation though there is the occasional action cutscene at bigger moments as well as art "slideshows" of flashbacks to previous choices when a branch of the story comes to fruition. You'll see how your decision affected you and the environment/people around you. Their intention was to provide players with a chance to see that their actions have consequence whether it's good or bad but it also proved to be a powerful tool to get us to want to play again to see outcomes from different choices. Consequences aren't always immediately understood and it's not unusual for one of these scenes to play several acts in the past and relate it to current happenings. While it's generally pretty well done, it can occasionally be a little confusing. Whether it's the translation or just occasionally disjointed story progression is hard to say.
The slideshows aren't the only odd and disjointed bits of the story. There are some presentation issues in the cutscenes that cause some disconnect from the adventure. Right after one of the best cutscenes showing Geralt departing from Kaer Morhen we're jolted forward to Geralt outside of an inn as barghests attack. There's no connection showing that Geralt wound up there, just that he's there, waiting outside in the rain with some other folks. When that happened I didn't know where I was or what brought me there, only that I was suddenly there fighting glowing dogs. While most of the game isn't like this, some extra attention to presentation could have helped.
With a bleak situation in a world filled with monsters, it would be sad if the combat didn't hold up and while it's not perfect, we are definitely pleased with it. It uses a timing based clicking system in order to keep the combat more RPGish while also making it more active. Clicking once will initiate an attack. Once that attack animation begins (usually involving several sword strokes) players will either wait for a yellow flaming sword icon (normal difficulty) or an orange sword arc (high difficulty) to know to click again to chain the attack into another combo. Attacks gain in strength the more skill points are allotted to each style. With three camera modes, players should be able to find something that feels pretty good to them in combat. I've preferred the over-the-shoulder mode since it provides up close action, but the isometric camera provides easier access to attacking different enemies since in OTS Geralt is tied to the reticule and isometric has the cursor free roaming.
The strength of the martial combat is in constant need to change between fight styles to accommodate different types of human and monster enemies. Double tapping on direction keys will also cause Geralt to dodge out of the way to get better positioning for the fight, which plays a very important role when combating certain enemies. The end result can turn into a ballet of death. When combined with signs, potions, and bombs, and the ability to charge up melee and sign attacks, the combat becomes even better. Geralt has access to five different signs which range from direct damage to causing fear or pain which can stun enemies. Stunned or fallen enemies can be clicked on for a final finishing move regardless of their health status. It makes using the correct tool pretty important when fighting large groups of strong enemies that might not get hurt much by the group style of sword fighting.
The character development system is pretty decent for building Geralt the way you wish. Each of the attributes, signs, and styles are divided into five tiers with various extra skills associated with each. Because the points are assigned bronze, silver, and gold statuses, it keeps Geralt from getting too powerful in one area too quickly and forces you to make choices later in the game about specialties since silver and gold points are much rarer. By the time the game is finished, you'll still have many silver and gold skills open on the skill tree.
CDProjekt has also tried to break up the story and combat with a couple of mini-games in the form of boxing and poker. Sadly, neither of these is really worth the time. While they can offer up a way to make money, it's more like cheating than a mini-game. The poker AI is very, very poor and makes incredibly bad decisions, even after the patch. They'll re-roll three-of-a-kinds when they have the game won, roll only one die when they need to roll two to get a straight to win the hand and so on. It's pretty sad. Boxing is dumb for an entirely different reason. Mini-games are meant to be a break in the action, offering a refreshingly different style of gameplay. Boxing is basically just like sword fighting, but with fists, and worse. If you're going to have a boxing game, why not make it more like Punch-Out! or something?
Potions play a pretty huge role in the game, especially on the high difficulty setting, which is why we're a little sad it wasn't implemented better. It's not that the system itself is broken. On the contrary, the amount of potions and effects are varied and support a variety of play styles. The problem is almost entirely with the inventory system. Everywhere you go in the world, you can collect ingredients for potions off of plants, mineral deposits, killed creatures, or stashes. Each substance has one or two possible ingredient uses. The problem is, you can't sort them easily by ingredient type, you can't look before you go to brew potions if you have enough of any type, and you'll have to constantly look back to your journal to have any clue what you need to make a potion. This is especially aggravating after you start stashing stuff at the inns (inns act as a universal bank so that you can grab your stuff from any of them). There's no sorting tool at the inns at all so you'll have to mouse over and constantly check back and forth between substances to see if you've got the right ones. Since alchemy is such a huge part of the game, the interface for it (and especially the inventory) should have been given more careful consideration. It leads to a lot of aggravation when you constantly have to run back and forth to the inn and load in and out of areas in order to get the right amount of potion made.
And it's that loading in and out of areas that is probably the biggest problem The Witcher has. Load times are loooooonnng, which can be a real bitch when running in and out of buildings inside a city since you're often conveying messages, trying to get to your stash, or completing quests. One of the main problems is that the game doesn't keep the greater area in memory when loading into a house. The load into the house will be quick, but then when you turn around and go back into the city proper, you'll have that long wait waiting for you. This is a problem even on high end computers.
It's too bad because the game really looks good. Environments are wonderful. The main city Vizima is lively and given a great amount of detail that makes it seem like a real place in this fantastic little world. The smaller towns are given nearly the same attention to detail and enough non-vital NPCs that they feel lived in. Wilderness areas are equally as easy to believe as real places. The game only really has visual problems when it comes to models. Models are used over and over, even for some more important side characters. And when it conversation, the lip synching is pretty bad as are the random animations that play. I suppose the animations are supposed to signify mood of the characters, but they come off as pretty goofy. Even Geralt looks strange standing around as his arms are always as straight as can be and look awkward. Considering how everything else looks so good, it's pretty strange.
Thankfully, most of the voice work in the game is good enough to forgive the lip synching problems. There are definitely a couple of actors that caused the cheese to start bubbling, but for the most part, especially with the main character Geralt, voice work is good. The voice work has nothing on the score, however. The composers of the music in The Witcher have done an excellent job not only capturing the feel of The Witcher's world, but also the excitement and magic of the adventure.
Sadly, the game is also not entirely stable. We've experienced numerous crashes both before and after patching the game (though admittedly many more beforehand). If you don't have a way to get the patch on the PC you play games on, we'd sadly have to say you might want to wait until you do.
Closing Comments The Witcher really is a good game and one that PC RPG fans will surely enjoy. It combines some entertaining and fast-paced combat with a well realized world and pretty decent story that branches and can end in three different fashions. With a load of choice in character creation on a point assignment and morality level, there’s plenty of reason to want to come back and play the 40-50 hour game again. The big problems mainly sit with the technical issues like crash bugs and long load times can be very frustrating. If it wasn't for those things The Witcher would have scored better here. If you can look past the technical side of things (which are still not as bad as some other RPGs released recently) The Witcher is definitely a game you’ll remember well over the years.
