Culpa Innata

The adventure genre sees a flittering rainbowed hope of redemption fall to pieces.

By: Dan Adams

This review of Culpa Innata would have been done earlier, but I was bashing my head against a wall after having to gossip with the same inane character at the same caf? about the idiotic conversations I just took part in two minutes before for the thousandth time. The adventure genre has had plenty of ups and downs in recent years and Culpa Innata, while offering up some non-linearity that in concept should help propel the point and click genre, just isn't anywhere good enough to make the positive impact that it could have had on the suffering genre.

While the concept of this future Earth itself may have a future history that's not unbelievable, the writer went off the charts trying to force half-baked philosophy down our throats. At the beginning of the story you find out that the first murder in 15 years has been committed. The society proposed in this game is highly implausible if not totally impossible, based on economic greed and selfishness. Those two ideas by themselves are responsible for more deaths than we'd be able to tally throughout the rest of history. This society, no matter how closely monitored they are by big brother or brainwashed by their educations, would be rife with jealousy and rage killings. This flawed idea is only shoved harder down the stairs by the notion that this World Union is comprised of at near 75% of the world's population. I don't care how controlled they are, what kind of education their given, or what sorts of drugs they're on, people just don't work that way. Capital crime is going to happen as long as humans are human.

If it wasn't the highly flawed premise the game provides, most of the dialogue would be bad enough to want jab ice picks in your ears to avoid any chance of further mental damage. While Culpa Innata starts out on a shaky note, it's also easy to maintain some hope that the game will right itself and at least provide a decent sleuth adventure. Instead, it turns into one drawn out, painful conversation after another driven by a pathetic investigative officer that seems more interested in the sexual habits of each character than of the actual investigation. These conversations are long, slow, and often completely unrelated to the case. True, some of that nonsense derives from the non-linearity of the questions asked so if you choose to talk about idiotic things you'll hear idiotic responses. The problem is that half the time the only questions you have to ask are idiotic questions in the first place. Much of the types of questions asked leave no indication about how you're trying to direct the path of the conversation or the attitude you're hoping to bring. At the beginning of the game, you're able to approach some conversations seriously or personably, but those options quickly seem to completely disappear and you're left floating in the breeze trying to decide whether you're about to completely waste your time or not.

The one impressive thing about all of the dialogue is that it's all voiced. That's a lot of voice work. It's too bad that saying the voice acting is weak is merely being polite. Many of the voices are so terrible, especially those trying to pull of accents (the only indication which accents they're trying to pull off is given by their ethnic background or names), and the lines read so poorly (awkward pauses and tripping over words and lines are frequent), that you'll wish you were reading instead of listening. The fact that you can't skip through individual lines of dialogue and can only skip the entire string of dialogue, is frustrating since you're forced to listen to the vocal tragedy unfold one conversation at a time or risk missing some small bit of info you need.

The actual written dialogue makes these people seem even less real. They don't use conjunctions. There's very little slang. Aside from a couple of notable exceptions, there's just no flair or personality to the characters that are there are merely annoying rather than interesting. The poor writing is only exacerbated by those bad voice actors.

Then there's the main character Phoenix. I know that she's been brainwashed into this society by her education program (the children here aren't raised by parents, but by education professionals) but the level of naivet? demonstrated by Phoenix is infuriating. She's whiny, easily offended, and quite often horrendously stupid while constantly talking down her nose at those younger than her (I'm talking to you, young lady!) and blabbering ineffectually about her rights and duties as a peace officer. For an investigator that's supposed to sit back, filter information, and analyze the answers to her questions, she's downright judgmental and stubborn enough to ignore perfectly good questioning avenues presented by responses. Not only that, while the information about the case is confidential, especially that it's a murder, she's constantly going around blabbing about every little detail in the case to every freaking person she runs into. It's amazing that the entire World Union doesn't know about it by word of mouth.

It doesn't help that the woman chosen for Phoenix, while one of the better voices overall in the game, has a weak, wavering, and overly sympathetic voice for someone that's supposed to be in a position of strength and cunning. When she becomes distraught about the fact that some shoe salesman (I'm assuming this was supposed to be a funny nod to Married With Children since the salesman's name is Al though if there was humor, I completely missed it) told her that he didn't like his job because women all want smaller shoe sizes than they actual are, I just about lit the building on fire. Why the hell am I out shopping for dancing shoes anyway? Where are the puzzles? Give me gameplay! There's no gameplay, just Phoenix talking and talking and talking about crap that doesn't matter! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

The sad thing is, there actually is gameplay buried underneath all of the idiots bonking heads and blathering about their sexual partners. The conversations can lead players down different paths and act as puzzles themselves. Going down the right path quickly will get you to the conclusion you want. Not doing so will mean you'll run out of time and have to come back another day (World Union rules indicate that you can only borrow a small amount of time for questioning each day and that small amount of time apparently is five minutes) to finish the interview. It's certainly not a bad idea, there have been many games now that show that non-linear conversation strings can offer up compelling gameplay, and if the conversations had been more interesting I would probably have had a much different response. Of course, it doesn't help that there are inconsistencies in the dialogue that result in plenty of NPCs asking questions about things Phoenix just explained to them minutes earlier.

The other puzzles are of a more traditional variety inside the point and click adventure market. While there are some overly simple puzzles and some with solutions that were a bit beyond my reasoning skills, most of them are surprisingly strong logic and clue puzzles only foiled at all by a slightly clunky interface. Adding onto the problem is that the open nature of the game means that the mix between conversation and puzzle can be totally out of whack. There are times when you'll get a couple of puzzle in a row and then have several hours of conversations before any more brain busters will pop up. If you're going to make an open world adventure, make sure it gets focused at least a little bit to provide the correct mix of story vs. gameplay.

CI's visuals are just plain bad. It's pretty clear that this game was made for people that know little to nothing about computers and maybe haven't bought a computer in several years, but why limit your own game to resolutions of "low" (800x600) and "high" (1024x768) without any further options. At least put extra resolution options under "advanced" so that people can set higher resolutions so that the game doesn't so obviously look like it should have come out in 2000. It's aliased, pixely, blocky, and ugly from a technical standpoint. If the art had been truly decent, much of that could have been forgiven. But as one of the other employees commented as he walked by my desk, "Oh man, it looks like a disco f***** your monitor!" He's not wrong. It does, in fact, look like a disco f***** my monitor and my monitor never would have consented to such an appalling act so it's doubly troubling. Apparently in the future, this enlightened society prefer bad art and prefer lava lamps and other light shows to anything resembling good taste. It's like the art director took The Fifth Element and took that ridiculous view of the future minus any of the charm or humor that tempers the vision.

Closing Comments
There are some strong elements to Culpa Innata, but overall, the excessive amounts of bad dialogue drowns out nearly all of the stronger puzzles clamoring for attention. Any hope at the beginning of the game for a stronger story being built fizzled about halfway through and strong stories are the main reason to want to play point and click adventure games. We recommend taking a pass on this or risk taking a hit to your sanity.

©2007-11-20, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Viva Pi�ata

There's a deep and engaging strategy challenge underneath Viva Pi�ata's candy-coated exterior but PC porting problems leave a sour aftertaste.

By: Allen 'Delsyn' Rausch

My mother used to tell me "Don't judge a book by its cover." Sure, it's a cliche so old it made Aesop's kids roll their eyes (though back then it was probably something like "don't judge a scroll by the ribbon it's tied with"). But the reason these things become cliches is because they represent some fundamental truth. Case in point: Viva Pinata. On the surface it looks like a kid's game about creating a garden where a variety of brightly colored papier-mache animals can happily frolic the day away. Dig a little deeper into this PC port of an Xbox360 title and what emerges is an absolutely riveting title filled with all kinds of strategic depth and plenty of challenges to overcome. Only a number of technical issues and porting problems make the game inferior to its console cousin.

The storyline -- such as it is -- posits a magical place called Pinata Island where Pinatas are grown, not made, until they're eventually called into the world to entertain at children's parties. In latter days, however, Pinata Island has fallen into disrepair as the former gardener Jardiniero is too old to continue tending the fields. The player is initially presented with a small plot of land in the midst of a trash-strewn wasteland that needs to be beaten back into a living ecosystem. They begin with a beaten shovel and a ratty watering can along with a few other tools to start reclaiming the island. The goal, of course, is to once again make Pinata Island a pristine wonderland filled with all manner of rare and valuable Pinatas.

In order to reclaim Pinata Island, the player will need to learn all the ins and outs of Pinata ecology. The lowest form of Pinata (called whirlms) is attracted to a player's garden merely by having enough rich earth or short grass. As players continue to add amenities to their garden, whether it be different varieties of plant, statues, paths, fences, tall grasses, ponds and other kinds of environments, housing for various creatures, trees or crops to drop specific types of foods, new kinds of Pinatas will be attracted to their garden. Fulfill enough of their basic needs and a Pinata will stop being a visitor and become a permanent resident. Fulfill a few more and the player can even breed their Pinatas together and make little baby Pinatas (the mating dance is very cute and completely family-friendly). As there are over 70 varieties of Pinata in the game, some of them extremely rare, there's a lot of gameplay involved in "catching 'em all."

It doesn't take too much playtime before Viva Pinata reveals itself as much more than a glorified gardening sim. This is a game with serious strategic chops. The Pinata ecology is quite complicated and while some of the earlier creatures such as Mousemallows and Pretztails don't require much in the way of upkeep, many of the rarer more valuable Pinatas will need huge amounts of garden space devoted to a particular type of terrain, the presence of certain types of plants and other, lesser Pinatas to serve as a food source. Since these lesser Pinatas each have their own requirements, running a successful garden quickly balloons into an extraordinarily fun strategic challenge. Much of the player's game time is just spent running around trying to get the garden's ecological balance just right while simultaneously weeding out red-colored "sour Pinatas" that drop angry candy that makes good Pinatas fight and smash each other. If the player is successful, new tools and new services open up and the amount of arable land increases.

The whimsical setting of the game serves as the basis for some absolutely fantastic art design and animation. The Pinatas themselves are adorable with just enough wink-and-a-nod edginess to them to keep them from being too saccharine. Watching these creatures amble around the garden is a delight as their fantastic animations -- while not actually resembling a real animal -- do a wonderful job of making the garden feel like a living space. Even better, the game offers a constant stream of delightful graphic surprises ranging from hilarious movies of the "mating dance" Pinatas perform to the capability of peeking into their housing and seeing what they're up to at home. It turns out doenuts are big fans of disco -- who knew?

Unfortunately there are a few bugs in Viva Pinata's garden, and they're not the kind you can get rid of with bug spray, either. The game seems very unstable and has been known to crash frequently because of incompatibilities with other resident programs. In our case, the game crashed every few minutes until we tracked down and shut off a small Windows add-on program that was included by the PC manufacturer. Other gamers have reported the game being incompatible with certain anti-virus programs, slowdowns on dual-core systems and graphic glitches such as invisible animals.

Then there's the manifestly not-ready-for-prime-time Games for Windows Live. We had enormous problems linking the game up with our Live account -- even going so far as to create a whole separate G4WL account for it -- only to find that the G4WL program itself is causing crashes on some users' computers. Not using Games for Windows Live isn't an option, either, as the game requires it in order to save a game (a true "wtf?" moment).

Unfortunately once we got the game working, we found that the game's minimal online capability is a tragically missed opportunity. Online connectivity consists of merely the ability to send individual items or Pinatas to online friends -- and only to those who have the PC version. Cross-platform trade is apparently verboten on Pinata Island which kind of flushes away one of the few interesting features of Games for Windows Live. The tragedy is that this is a game that could easily support the kind of vibrant creative community that's clustered around The Sims games but without the capability to create new items, breed and trade new varieties of Pinata or view or visit other people's farms, such a group will probably never form.

Other problems are endemic to the poor nature of the PC porting process. Instead of re-working the control system to be mouse and keyboard friendly, the game is controlled using an awkward system of button clicks and color-coded mode buttons. The game sports hotkeys but it often took multiple presses to get them to register during our testing. The camera can't pull back far enough to give a real sense of the garden's overall picture nor is it particularly easy to control. When a PC game is easier to control using an Xbox 360 controller (the game is control pad-compatible) than the mouse, it's a sure sign of a quick-and-dirty PC port and a great game really suffers because of it.

In the end, it's a testament to the game's charm and deeply satisfying strategy that we still wanted to play despite the problems. Wonderful family-friendly "farming sims" like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing have long been the exclusive province of consoles. Viva Pinata certainly deserves to be mentioned in such august company and it's a great option for PC gamers who don't own a console and are willing to push past the bugs (or wait for the inevitable patch). If only Microsoft could have exercised a bit more of the gardener's patience and attention to detail, Viva Pinata could have been a bumper crop of gaming goodness.

©2007-11-19, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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FIFA Soccer 08

The world's most popular sport is here again, but is it an improvement or more of the same?

By: Nate Ahearn

First things first, soccer is not soccer, it's football. For the rest of this review every time you see the word football -- and this only applies to Americans, the rest of the world will already know what I'm talking about -- I'm actually talking about soccer. The last few entries in EA Sports' FIFA series have been some of the best football that we've seen. The gameplay was as sharp as a knife, the graphics were -- well, they were PS2 graphics but ported to the higher resolution playing field that the PC provides. Heck, the games came as close as any EA football effort has come to equaling the glory of Winning Eleven 9. Is FIFA 08 the game to bring down Konami's run of supremacy? Read on to find out.

Unlike the current-gen alternative, FIFA 08 on PC does not feel like a slightly undercooked game that could have been great. What gamers will find on their aging Sony platform is a football title that has all of its ducks in a row with features to spare. Remember how current-gen users got a Be a Pro Mode that only allowed you to play in one game with only one human player taking part? Well, on the PC you can create your own all-star hopeful with three of your friends and bring them through an entire season, improving your attributes all along the way. You won't find the same repositioned camera angle and stylish icons that pop up to make the experience a bit more all-encompassing, but it's still fun nonetheless. Even if you can't take it online, it's still nice to be able to play an entire season with your buddies, supposing that you can finagle a way to house four players on one PC.

There are also a few different types of online leagues that you can join in this year's game. You and a bunch of your cohorts can pick your squads, then compete against each other in Interactive Leagues where your team's rank is tracked against other global players, or you can participate in a standard grudge match-style tournament. Either way, the action online with the PC played out just as you'd expect with only slight lag depending on the distance between you and your opponent.

The biggest change that EA Sports made to the way you'll play on the pitch this year has to do with manual controls. They're not all that dissimilar from what PS3 and Xbox 360 players will see in FIFA 08, but they do provide for a solid level of control. Basically you'll have the freedom to kick your crosses and through balls as hard as you want and in any direction possible. No more being tethered to an animation or predetermined direction, in this year's game it all depends on the position of your left analog stick and how long you hold down the respective button.

It should be noted that while the game can played on the keyboard, we highly recommend the Xbox 360's wired alternative, or any other gamepad, rather than fighting with the confines of four directional buttons. Football is a game of precise angles, and you simply won't be able to garner the same enjoyment from FIFA 08 if you don't invest in some sort of a standalone gamepad.

Other than the aforementioned manual controls the changes to the gameplay are fairly minimal. The artificial intelligence in FIFA 08 on PC isn't up to the same level as what we've seen from the Xbox 360 and PS3 retail builds, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Goals are slightly more plentiful thanks to the fact that the defenders aren't constantly breathing down your neck when maneuvering on their half of the field. We had a few scores that occurred just because we were able to dribble just outside of the 18-yard line uninhibited and blast a shot. It's not as though we were punching in six or seven goals per game, but they certainly came more often than they would have on PS3.

There are now custom formations in the game, so you'll be able to assign your players specific attacking and defensive runs and fiddle with the general formation of your team, just so long as you stay within the confines of the rules. It's another simple addition, and one that will likely be taken for granted, but the fact it's in there at all earns the game some extra brownie points.

Aside from the new modes that we've already mentioned you'll also find several old favorites that, while they haven't changed much, are still fun to toy around with. The meat of the game will still be the Manager Mode for the true soccer diehards, as it gives you total control of the moves of your favorite team. You can now assign preseason friendly matches and there are also a slew of new training options, some of which are unlockable, that will help develop your team's football prowess.

FIFA 08 also has the classic challenge mode that seems to be finding its way into more and more of the EA Sports lineup. Essentially you select a section of the world, then a league to play in. You'll then be given a specific set of win conditions, like scoring a certain amount of goals on a given difficulty and the only way you can unlock the next challenge is to beat those win conditions. The mode is simple enough but there are a ton of challenges to work through and should definitely be appreciated by the many diehard fans that are out there.

On top of that there's a practice mode to hone your skills, a lounge mode, and a tournament mode where you can participate in plenty of licensed tournaments or create your own, depending on what you're in the mood for.

The overall feeling that players will get from playing FIFA 08 on PC is one of control, much more so than what we see on Xbox 360 and PS3. You can adjust to passes a bit better, you can nudge guys off of balls in the air, and you can call defenders to your goalie when he takes a goal kick so you can stop your human opponents from getting a cheap steal and then getting an easy score. You'd be hard pressed to find anything to add to FIFA 08 on last-gen systems at this point, which makes this version feel like a fitting conclusion to an awesome series.

It's too bad that the presentation values of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 couldn't be melded with the awesome gameplay of the PC. For whatever reason EA Sports continues to port the PS2's menu system rather than deck out the game with the "next-gen" treatment that the PS3 and Xbox 360 see. As it stands the visuals on the aging game engine are definitely starting to show their wrinkles. The animations still perform well, even if they aren't as detailed as they are on current-gen platforms. While the resolution can obviously be taken up a few notches on PC, the overall detail during gameplay simply wasn't there. Another nuance that had us scratching our tiny nerd heads was the fact that the replays in the game have had their detailed ratcheted down from what can be found in standard gameplay. Player models had the look of being fudged out and featured far less detail than we would have liked.

©2007-11-19, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Beowulf: The Game

An epic reimagining or colossal disappointment?

By: Charles Onyett

If you're looking for a video game experience that does justice to the revered epic poem, a work that more or less served as the inspiration for Tolkien and all the spin-off fantasy media saturating Western society, get ready to be sorely disappointed. Things have changed in this new adaptation of Beowulf, the video game version of which differs even from the movie in its deviation from the original. Grendel's mother is much more involved in events, Grendel whines like a schoolboy over Heorot's merry-making, and the way at which the action arrives at the major plot points significantly differs. It's never exactly clear what's happening, however, as the continuity of the game's story is smashed apart by jarring scene transitions, anemic dialogue sequences, and an overall lack of personality.

Though there were certainly jarring transitions in the original poem, there's no excuse for it here. In the roughly 1300 years since Beowulf was written down, it appears all of five minutes was spent on the game's story. In it, you meet up with Grendel's mother in her den, like in the story, and then smash a button to defend against a gang of her doppelganger succubae. Confused? This happens three times, with little to no explanation of what it actually means. Eventually you'll piece things together, but the way the developers decided to make things so unnecessarily difficult to follow, especially considering they're offering a new angle on one of the classic works of Western Literature, is an embarrassment to the medium of video games and their ability to convey weighty narrative concepts in unique ways. Thank goodness Irrational made BioShock to prove story can be done correctly.

Beowulf utterly and completely fails to live up to the pedigree of the work on which it's based, and shamefully displays our society's tendency to try and cash in on a cultural touchstone. Hopefully the film's script does a better job with the rewrite than this pile of virtual garbage. If you've never read the poem before and don't particularly care about its significance and how the game relates to it, then you'll still have to sit through a narrative told with the precision of an oil spill.

On top of the regrettably muddled story, the game itself is rife with design problems, and delivers one of the most poorly constructed action sequences this reviewer has experienced all year. It places you, Beowulf, atop a hill along with your fellow soldiers, called Thanes. You're tasked with defending a stone relic, which sits behind you, against numerous waves of enemies. If only the combat weren't so imprecise, if only you could actually tell your Thanes to defend something instead of running around like addicts at a meth party, then I probably wouldn't have spent two hours unsuccessfully trying to keep this object intact. I actually had to shut down the game and restart on the lower difficulty setting to get through to the end, which, by the way, took four hours and fifty-one minutes.

Though the game is full of problems, it does seem to get the basics right. Beowulf starts out with simplistic combos of light and heavy attacks, the ability boost his Thanes' attacks, a dodge and counterattack move, and the ability to shift into carnal mode, where grabs, punches, and weapon slashes do more damage. You'll enjoy this system until you realize you never learn another move, but instead power up existing ones. Then you get out into the field and fight enemies, only to discover the exact same gameplay mechanics are repeated throughout the entire game.

The game flows like this: Beowulf enters an area, mindless monsters spawn and attack, then another wave charges, then another, and so on until the foes are vanquished and an intangible barrier goes down allowing you to progress. Sounds like God of War. On larger troll (what?) enemies you perform timed button-tap sequences to bring them down, ending with a brutal assault on their heads. Sounds like God of War's Minotaur fights. In fact, most of this game is God of War, only done with far less detail, depth, and knowledge of producing enjoyable gameplay experiences. You even get the slow-motion segments inserted into the regular flow of battle to try and make them seem more brutal, which is more or less pointless given how disposable the combat is.

Frequently you're forced to order Thanes to move a circular stone, turn a crank, free a rock, or row a boat. These sequences don't really get any more complex or involved as the game progresses, but rather get clumped together. So by the end, instead of completing a challenge that involves using your intuitive skills to adjust to a new problem based on the solution pattern introduced earlier, you just dislodge a boulder, turn a crank and roll a door all in the same room. Brilliant.

What's worse is Thanes stop working on crank-turning or door-heaving if they're attacked by even one enemy, meaning you need to defend them. Let's say you're trying to accumulate heroic points by using dodges and weapon-based attacks. First off, if you're not using one of the legendary weapons hidden throughout the game, whatever you're holding is going to break after a handful of swings. This leaves you with your fists or switching into carnal mode, the latter of which makes progress toward earning carnal points instead of the hero type. The problem with carnal mode is you can inadvertently kill Thanes, meaning it's not so good for protection. You could go grab an enemy and disarm him or snag a weapon off one of the ubiquitous racks, but then you've moved away from the crank-turning Thanes, ensuring they'll get knocked off their task. If a Thane not involved with cranking happens to get pinned by an enemy, you get the added luxury of watching the other friendlies stand still and stare at the victim, apparently content to wait for you as their buddy gets his face clawed off. In the meantime, the crank-turners have undoubtedly been interrupted.

You can choose to cheer them on, assuming you get enough space, by performing an imbecilic button input sequence. This barely ever becomes more demanding than when it's introduced at the game's beginning. As with the combat, which never evolves, the woefully inadequate Thane commands and the repetitive door, crank, and rock-freeing sections, it's more evidence that this game was never meant to be enjoyed for more than fifteen minutes, since there's nothing in it to keep you hooked after learning the basics. This is especially apparent when, at around 80 percent of the way through the game, you're asked to repeat the boat-rowing sections from the opening tutorial, only in a different setting.

One of the game's main features, the carnal versus heroic combat choices that ultimately determine what kind of ruler you're labeled as, is totally undermined by the challenges thrown at you. It's far more effective to use carnal attacks in some sections (a horribly repetitive Shadow Thanes fight comes to mind), likewise for heroic. Though you can choose which attacks to use, it feels more like the game dictates them for you, making the whole dynamic between the two relatively worthless.

But never fear, the game's monotonous, imprecise, and nauseating gameplay is given a jolt near the end by the introduction of…an ice level. Seriously? And let's not forget the wall clambering mechanics that feel like chicken claws on a sheet of plate glass.

As is not always the case with rushed movie tie-in games on PC, Beowulf comes along with a fully customizable key interface, adequate video options, and handles the third-person action fairly well. We can't really say that's a bonus, however, since it'd be similar to praising a car for having an emergency brake.

Closing Comments
Ubisoft Shanghai and Tiwak did a magnificent job of butchering the reimagining of a classic tale and providing plenty of disposable, derivative gameplay to go along with it. Though you'll eventually understand the new tale, the absurd storytelling often makes deciphering events and motivations as difficult as a non-scholar trying to read the Nowell Codex. As far as gameplay goes, I can understand why a development studio would want to mimic many of God of War's concepts, yet it's still surprising to see it done so badly. Things start out simple, and that's how they stay, right up until the very end. That is, of course, assuming you can bypass an unbelievably aggravating protection sequence where the utter uselessness of your Thanes, heroic, and carnal attacks becomes painfully obvious. What a waste of time.

©2007-11-16, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Empire Earth III

This real-time strategy sequel has some clever mechanics, but bad implementation of everything from the combat to the AI drags the experience down.

By: Dave 'Fargo' Kosak

The Empire Earth franchise was once one of the big guns in strategy gaming. The original was named GameSpy's 2001 Game of the Year, thanks to a huge scope and the best RTS editing tools available at the time. The sequel, while perhaps overly complex, was still a fantastic title catering to hardcore players.

Unfortunately, Empire Earth III has little to offer strategy fans of any disposition. Some of the hallmarks of the series have been stripped away in an effort to simplify the game. And while there are a couple of clever design elements here, they're buried under extremely poor implementation. The clumsy AI and muddled combat really drag down what might have been an enjoyable title, and feels like an unpolished product pushed out the door. You can salvage some good times out of the online skirmishes, but Empire Earth III doesn't really compete with the likes of Age of Empires III or other modern RTS titles.

Bringing Terror to Your Era

Empire Earth III boasts a timeline that encompasses human history from the ancient era to the inevitable giant-robot future. There are five distinct time periods with unique units and buildings for each. Previous games in the franchise had as many as 15 eras, which used to be one of the unique elements of the game. When you had 15 eras, it was impractical to make a beeline for the last one. This gave the game a constant tension: attack now or develop just once more? With only five eras, and only 20-25 minutes total to reach the final one, there's no reason not to rush for the finish line as players do with every other RTS on the market. "Should I attack with longbowmen or spend the next couple of minutes gaining air strikes and tactical nukes?" doesn't require Sun Tzu's military savvy to figure out, and in the process, the series loses a little of what made it unique.

Players can choose three distinct factions: Western, Middle Eastern and Far Eastern. Each has its own units, buildings, and rules governing things like population caps. The three factions are relatively balanced, although the Middle Eastern faction is difficult to play since you have to make do without walls. Western vs. Far Eastern conflicts are interesting since the former focuses on a limited number of tough but expensive units while the latter fills the battlefield with inexpensive, disposable fighters.

One good design decision is to simplify the resource model. All you need to worry about are "raw materials" and "wealth." Any resource point on the map will generate raw materials, and trade carts crisscross the map to generate wealth. The further you send your trade carts, the more money they'll generate, but the more vulnerable they are to attack. The economic model is simple but fun.

It's unfortunate that the game's elegant economics aren't matched by an equally compelling combat model. Supposedly Empire Earth uses a "rock-paper-scissor" scheme, which is intuitive when it comes to "pikemen vs. cavalry vs. infantry" but has you scratching your head when you try to figure out "robot vs. flame tank." It's worth it to field a mixed force, but thanks to the chaotic individual unit AI 90% of fights end up as inscrutable blobs of units. Since your troops often don't respond immediately to orders to attack individual units, tactics aren't really a factor.

More importantly, battles just don't resolve themselves properly. Let's take the scythe chariots from the ancient era for example. Historically, scythe chariots were absolutely terrifying. They'd charge into groups of infantry with three-foot long blades attached to the wheels, literally hacking legs off at the kneecaps. Intuitively, what do you think would happen if a huge group of scythe chariots charged at a group of unarmored slingers? By all means, it should be a slaughter.

But here's what happens in Empire Earth III: the group of scythe chariots mingles about, confused, crashing into each other and rotating in place. For whatever reason they break off into groups of ones and twos and... very... slowly... amble toward the slingers. The slingers are firing rocks at semi-automatic speeds, each volley decimating my chariots one at a time. Not a single slinger is killed; the chariots are wiped off the map. Go ahead and try to plan a sensible strategy from that!

Global Domination

In lieu of your standard single-player RTS campaign experience, Empire Earth III features a turn-based global domination mode. This is a nifty idea (similar to the campaign modes of Rise of Nations or the lesser-known Emperor: Battle for Dune), and at the global level it works well. The Earth is divided up into provinces that will earn you resources every turn. You can build up individual armies and then send them into territories to conquer (or woo) the natives or do battle against other would-be conquerors. Along the way you can research special global-level technologies, our favorite of which is "shock and awe" (when you enter a region, planes will soar overhead and bomb the enemy base just as the map begins).

When you try to conquer a region, the action zooms in and you fight a skirmish battle against the AI on terrain that matches that part of the globe. Periodically "special missions" will pop up, and some sort of scenario will play out on the skirmish map (such as rescuing and escorting a princess or defending against a sudden barbarian horde invasion). The idea is really solid, and when it works it works great.

Unfortunately, like most of Empire Earth III, the implementation isn't always right. The game doesn't always generate skirmishes that make sense. One time it placed our substantial starting army right next to our opponent's unescorted city center cart, used to build a Middle-Eastern starting city. Of course we pounced on it and demolished it, and the game told us we had won the province. It took less than five seconds; we won the map in less time than it took to load. World Domination mode is an excellent premise that falls short in execution, and doesn't do a good job of replacing standard RTS campaigns with scripted well-designed set-piece battles and storylines.

Bringing Errors to Your Era, Too

In addition to the problems described above, there are almost too many issues with Empire Earth III to list. The game AI sometimes gets itself stuck in a territory and simply stops expanding. Artillery doesn't always respond when you give it a target. Artillery range is farther than your line of sight, so you're constantly bombarding targets but can't see if you're hitting them. Even the manual is buggy, showing screenshots of a completely different game interface and pointing out features (like a tech tree screen) that don't exist.

Fortunately the game fares a little better in multiplayer mode, where there's no buggy opponent AI or mission generator to contend with. An in-game browser tracks buddies and optionally reports to a ladder for ranked matches. There are very few players online at the time of this writing, but the gameplay experience isn't bad if you get a game going.

Empire Earth III had some solid ideas behind it. The system of territory control, the balance of the economic model, and the world domination map all represent some great game mechanics. But PC strategy gamers have a lot to choose from on store shelves these days, and bugs, muddled combat, or weak AI aren't things that strategy fans have to live with. It pains us to admit it as fans of the franchise, but this Empire is definitely in decline.

©2007-11-16, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Clive Barker's Jericho

Hey kids, like blood? Wanna bathe in it? Tough, that's what's happening!

By: Gabe Graziani

After this year's E3, we had some pretty high hopes for Jericho, but we now we realize that we may have set our expectations for this one a bit too high. There's no question that the game's premise promised the kind of horror-packed experience Clive Barker has been known for... we just didn't realize that it would end up being shackled with both slipshod game design and the sort of rambling gore-for-gore's-sake plot that Clive Barker's become known for. With so many triple-A titles looking to devour your dollars this holiday, there's no need to waste time or money anything this blatantly mediocre.

Ammo From the Future

The best aspects of Jericho are the characters, but even those aren't as fleshed-out as we'd have liked. The character models are magnificent, assuming their techno-goth look doesn't turn you off. With leather straps, superfluous buckles and titanium cylinders, the detail in the models is truly inspired. While there aren't that many different kinds of enemies, they are uniformly well-rendered. The unfortunate qualifier with the enemies, however, is that they are consumed by swarms of black flies after you've killed them so you can never get a really good look at them.

Each of Team Jericho's seven members has a personality all their own; the problem is that you only learn the intricacies of a couple of them. For example, Church (the team's blood magician) was raped by her father; Cole (the reality hacker that can stop time) is afraid of the dark and being touched; and Black (the telekinetic sniper) is a lesbian. Unfortunately, that's the most you'll really learn about the team, leaving the other four members in an ambiguous haze of cliched one-liners that don't seem to have any relevance to pasts you know nothing about.

Of the team, Cole was our favorite not just because she could stop time (risking her tenuous grip on reality in order to do so), but also because she can re-supply the entire team with delicious ammunition from the future. Plus, she's a big fan of the divine proportion (or golden ratio) which is a mathematical proportion used in art and architecture, so she provides at least one non-Lovecraft-related reason to check out Wikipedia. This is in contrast to the game's plot, which, like much of Barker's work, cribs from Lovecraft wholesale.

Don't be Frightened

Playing through Jericho, you become desensitized to all of the things that are supposed to scare the crap out of you. There are only so many enemies you can run into with gaping, bloody holes where their naughty bits should be before you begin to bore of them. Oh look, here's another monster wearing some poor sod's entrails as a pull-over hoody...

Unfortunately, the environments do little to increase the terror as they remain predominantly the same from level to level. Because the team is trapped in Al-Khali (an ancient site of atrocity located somewhere in the Middle-East), the events of the game take place in unchanging sandy ruins. The only difference is that you can occasionally enjoy the poorly rendered Clive Barker touches like rivers of blood and feces and skeletal remains draping the walls. It's all so terribly contrived that it's difficult to get into the mood that Jericho is constantly attempting to foist upon you.

This could have been remedied if the enemies had been a bit smarter or inventive, but most of them simply run at you crazily. Consequently, Jericho's gameplay comes off as a decidedly "lather, rinse, repeat" affair where you enter a new area, kill the monsters that spawn and run at you and then move onto the next area and perform the monotonous experience all over again. It's not a terribly surprising formula for games of this type, but we had hoped for something a little more substantial.

Still, for fans of Clive Barker, Jericho could provide some degree of entertainment, and as we stated at the beginning of this review, it's not totally devoid of rewards. At the same time, it's difficult to recommend a game with so many lackluster elements in a world full of Gears of Wars and BioShocks (both of which managed to be scarier than Jericho).

©2007-11-15, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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BlackSite: Area 51

Who knew blasting aliens could be so boring.

By: Greg Miller

Expectations can be a bitch. If publishers want their games to get out and get onto the wishlists of Pete and Paula Public, they have to showcase screens, movies and all sorts of stuff that makes an award-winning impression. However, that quick glimpse or play test is just part of the product that's coming down the pipe. Perhaps the game will surpass the initial look or perhaps it'll fall short of the lofty goal.

Sadly, BlackSite: Area 51 is one of the games that falls short.

Coming into its release, it seems most people have a pretty positive impression of BlackSite whether it's from the impressive movies Midway's released or from previewers -- like myself -- who had the chance to play sections of the title at events such as the E3 and the German Games Convention. Those perceptions are understandable because there's a lot to dig about BlackSite on the surface.

You're cast as Aeran Pierce, a silent badass who leads a team of military grunts into battle on a daily basis. On a mission to Iraq, you come across a fragment of alien origin, lose one of your guys to it and blackout. The story picks up three years later as the crazy crap you saw in the Middle East -- grotesque men with tentacles hanging out of their mouths, gigantic exploding bugs and a bunch of creepy-crawlies -- has sprung up in Nevada and it's up to you and crew to snuff it out.

The graphics are one of the higher points in BlackSite -- and especially in the crisp PC version. When I first started my mission, I got pinned down by some hostiles behind a concrete divide. I sat waiting for the foes to run out of ammo and begin reloading when suddenly the barricade began breaking apart under their fire. Not every environment is destructible but lots of the cover you take will be. The alien shotguns look good as they glow, a massive worm beast wrapped around a bridge and swinging at your helicopter is an intimidating sight, and enemies aren't afraid to spring out from corners and come at you.

Those jump-out-at-you moments are just one example of BlackSite's attempt to fuse its arcade roots with a free-wheeling FPS. Yeah, you'll be able to wander around battlefields and come at anchored enemies from whatever direction you like, but there are going to be those moments with a single-file line of exploding bugs pours out from around a corner or you walk into an area to find enemies popping up from behind boxes just like you'd expect in your typical arcade shooter.

The news gets bad from there.

The biggest failing of Area 51 is that it's a wholly forgettable game. The first two levels (fighting in Iraq and then driving around Nevada) feel linear and empty; the characters are all lifeless stereotypes you'll never connect with (Grayson's the tattooed-cursin'-womanizin' loudmouth), the same seven or so enemies repeat over and over (Exploding bugs again?!), the story is an afterthought (alien tech was bringing "dead" soldiers back to life), and multiplayer is a shallow and generic experience (Capture the flag, deathmatch, etc.).

In fact, that basically sums up BlackSite. It's not bad, just Generic.

Early on, Midway made a big deal out of BlackSite's morale system. If you were performing well as an individual, the squad's morale would be high and they'd perform better. If you were sucking it up on the battlefield, the team would be down in the dumps and thus be less effective. That system made it into the final game, but it's worthless thanks to a terrible AI that's never helpful.

For just about every mission, you'll have two or three partners along for the ride. You can order them around using the E key -- point your reticule at an onscreen spot, click the button and the team will move there -- but most of the time your teammates are going to just run into battle, stand there, get shot and lay on the ground until you've beaten all of the foes. Hell, if it wasn't for your own inability to open doors -- you have to order your teammates to kick-in or blow-in entry ways -- there'd be no reason for their existence.

Look at my late-game battle with one of the game's Fire Brutes. This huge turtle-like bastard with a head that can shoot lasers is laying waste to an open area in the Nevada base, and it's up to me to stop it. Now, at this point in the game, I've tussled with this type of creature before. They're huge, but they have a giant weak spot on their back -- don't bother thinking that's a spoiler, the game'll tell you how to beat the things as soon as they show up on screen -- so all I've got to do is get to the baddie's backside and fire a rocket.

The first time we went toe-to-toe, I was alone and had to run through blown-out buildings and dodge body-slicing lasers. It was frantic and simplistic but fun. This time though, I had two teammates with me. We saw the bad guy, the team announced that I should provide a distraction, and they ran to their positions. I climbed into a jeep, began driving around the creature and the sparse cover, and the big guy never took his eye off me. Meanwhile, my team sat behind sandbags and buildings while screaming at me to shoot the brute. Okay. No big deal. Maybe I'd get the rocket launcher and the team would provide the distraction.

Nope.

I got the gun, and the brute kept on watching me and my team kept on sitting there. How many times would I have to die, wait for the game to reload and have to repeat the same frustrating process over and over until the dumb villain finally lost sight of me and allowed me to shoot him in the back?

Wow. What fun.

The brute isn't the only brain-dead opponent you'll be put up against in BlackSite -- in fact, the final boss is just as stupid and a bigger letdown. I'll set the stage: the government has sealed off this astrodome that used to be the base for its twisted alien experiments. You've battled huge beasts, exploding-ball spitting snakes and now you're inside this dome destroying level after level of repeating enemies as you make your way to the ground floor and the final boss. You get there, and the game grinds to a halt. You have to walk around a giant centrifuge dodging a slow-moving laser and killing bad guys. You stop the laser, move to the centrifuge's center and prepare for the final showdown -- the culmination of the game's six episodes and 34 missions.

The boss stands in the middle of the room; you hide behind a pillar and jump out to shoot him. He doesn't move. I beat him by moving slightly to the right so that I could hit him without him hitting me and shot him five times in the knee until he died.

What a formidable opponent.

Beyond my additional single-player complaints -- the PC version is really framey but has less pop-in than the 360 -- there is an online-only multiplayer mode for you and nine of your friends to duke it out in, but the modes -- deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, abduction -- stick with the game's theme of blah. The levels are wide and airy with armor and damage powerups, but there's nothing that stands out. There's no co-op (online or offline), you can't capture the enemy's flag if your team's banner isn't at the base, and CTF is only available on two of the eight maps. There is a new abduction mode -- if you're human, stay alive to remain a human; if you're a reborn soldier, kill the humans to make them reborns -- but it's hardly a purchase-saving feature.

Closing Comments
The fact of the matter is that BlackSite: Area 51 is just like every other run-of-the-mill FPS out there. You can find better multiplayer in Crysis, you can find a better storyline in Bioshock, and you can find a livelier environment in just about anything. The game underperforms in every aspect, and although that doesn't make it bad, it certainly makes it a major disappointment for everyone who was anxiously awaiting this game's debut.

©2007-11-15, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Crysis

Crytek blasts back onto the PC with the most beautiful kind of violence.

By: Dan Adams

Crysis is one of, if not the, most stunningly beautiful games we've ever seen. But even beyond that, it's a pretty fantastic shooter. Solid weapons, intelligent enemies, and fairly open level designs mix with nano-suit powers to make this one of the more entertaining ballistic showdowns in some time.

The fact that developer Crytek has figured out how to create a story that doesn't drip with cheese helped immerse us into a "realistic" and exciting near-future. Voice acting is pretty good, the in-game cutscenes are well designed to never take you out of the action, and the aliens are actually menacing and dangerous, unlike the campy Trigens of Far Cry. Crytek has obviously learned a lot about presentation and storytelling since their first effort. I found myself caring about the story that's there and wanting to kick the aliens off of our planet. If they hadn't pulled a Halo 2 at the end, I would have been totally pleased with the story that helps the game progress forward.

As with 2004's Far Cry, Crysis takes place on a picturesque island paradise lush with vegetation and surrounded by gorgeous blue water. The impressive visuals are so far beyond Far Cry's that it's hard to even comprehend what Crytek, given another few years of development time, will be able to come up with. It's not only the technical aspects that are impressive; it's the detail of the models, architecture, and textures. Whether it's the frost on the gun barrels or change in color of the nano-suit for different abilities, the little touches are everywhere. When you're staring up through the snow at the oppressive presence of the alien mothership buried in the mountain, wandering through the maze of rock and metal tunnels underneath its surface, tromping through the dense jungle, or simply looking into the face of one of the awesome character models, it's impossible not to be awed at what Crytek managed to do technically.

Thankfully, the art team was given the chance to expand their horizons from simple jungles to include the spectacularly disorienting innards of an alien ship and an ice-blasted mountainside. The inside of the ship is especially breathtaking. The greens and greys are spectacularly mixed with bright alien lights and the thin-skinned aliens themselves. The contrast between the rough rock walls covered in crystals and the heavy technology of the aliens is pretty striking as well. The character models which rival even Half-Life 2's are especially remarkable. There's not as much emotion, but the slight cartoony style chosen allows for suspension of disbelief and sidesteps the creepy Beowulf effect. Like HL2, there's a lot of detail in the facial textures and while the lip synching can be a tiny bit off-putting from time to time, these are some truly amazing representations of humans.

The one thing that you're going to have to seriously consider before purchasing the game specifically for the visuals is the power of your PC. Crysis may very well kick your computer in the balls at Very High settings. It'll look spectacular doing so, but may very well turn into more of a slideshow than you'd probably prefer and in some cases become completely unplayable. On our Vista test machine with a quad core processor, 4GB RAM, and a single 8800 GTX, we had some pretty significant slowdowns with everything on very high everywhere but the most confined spaces. Tweaking the settings in DirectX10 helped a bit (you can fiddle with the settings to get just the right mix of resolution and detail in all the settings) while running the game in DX9 solved all of our problems and still looked spectacular with everything on high. We even could run DX9 on high at 1920x1200 with a good enough framerate to be comfortable playing nearly the entire time. In those rare moments where things began to chug, it was an easy enough thing to simply change the resolution for a minute, which can all be done in game, while loaded into the game, which is another terrific feature that's sadly missing from so many other titles. Luckily, for those of you without the best computers, Crysis still looks pretty fantastic on Medium. You won't get the same features, but Crysis never really gets ugly and still looks at least as good as Far Cry even on Low, though you will get a pretty significant amount of pop in at that level.

Thankfully the gameplay in Crysis, while not quite equal to the visuals, is also well worth the while. Crytek manages to make you feel like a badass thanks to the high-tech nano-suit, which has four settings to help with combat situations. Armor helps you get through straight up firefights, absorbs more damage, and helps regenerate health and power more quickly; speed will help you zip around the environment, flank enemies and run away when in trouble; strength is good for jumping up to high places, steadying aim, and beating enemies to death; and stealth, which we used the most in our time with Crysis single player, allows you to cloak for a short amount of time. Every ability is balanced by how quickly it uses the suit's power reserve, which adds some strategy to each situation. While we found ourselves using stealth more often than other powers, levels are designed with all of the powers in mind to allow you to choose your style of play. If you don't want to use stealth very often, don't. It'll provide a different pace and difficulty level. Whatever ability you become most familiar with, switching between them is easy. You can bind them to whatever keys you'd like, but can also simply use the radial menu brought up with the middle mouse button (default). By the end of single player it'll be second nature.

The amount freedom in the level design, in terms of where you can go, is pretty comparable to Far Cry's. While the game is pretty linear for the story's sake, it's not a corridor shooter. There's a lot of wiggle room when it comes to tactics and approaches to killing enemies and the path you take through a level. If you want to simply steal a boat and jet across a lagoon to the other side, feel free, but you can also skitter around the edge near the road, head up higher into the jungle, or sneak along the shore. There are several secondary objectives that also aren't compulsory for success, but will provide little advantages of intelligence.

The human AI in Crysis isn't perfect, but it is pretty damn good. The occasional clumping of human enemies does happen, but you'll also see patrols try their best to flank you and stay spread out while the hunt you down. They aren't really scared by the fact that you have super speed and strength even if it gives you an advantage. They'll still come after you guns blazing, calling for their friends the entire time.

Being able to cloak gives the enemy the most problems. They won't be able to locate you if you use a silencer and use cover wisely since shooting disables the cloak. Shooting without a silencer will give up your position to the AI and they'll converge pretty quickly, chattering away the whole time. The trade off here is that using a silencer makes whatever gun you're using less powerful. When you do cloak and the AI can't see you, but is wary and knows you're in the area, they'll drop get into an alerted stance while creeping through the forest. If they see you cloak, they'll blast away at the spot you were last seen for a moment until they realize you're not there. They'll chatter to each other as well about whether they can see you, what they're doing, and so on.

On easy, medium, and hard settings they AI will chatter in English so that you know what they're doing. On Delta, they'll chatter in Korean so that you have no idea, which really adds the immersion. It would have been nice to have the option to use the Korean barks in other difficulty levels since there are other ways to make the game more difficult. For instance, on Delta, the binoculars, which usually provide a wealth of intelligence information, don't operate as effectively, the reticule is turned off by default, and there's no warning when grenades are thrown. We'd definitely recommend that anyone who feels they're good enough at shooters to try it, use Delta for that fact. Hearing all of the North Korean army speak in English and constantly call you a Yankee dog can break the illusion. Delta is a challenge, but isn't the same ridiculous challenge that the highest difficulty was in Far Cry. It's definitely doable here. Hopefully Crytek will patch the game to make hearing Korean an option in lower difficulty settings as well.

Alien AI is a different beast entirely. The aliens themselves are very fast and use their environment to circle around and attack you from behind, which can be disorienting and frightening in the zero gravity confines of their alien ship. Outside of the ship, you'll fight mostly alien machines. The AI here isn't as impressive, but the fights are still fun since these machines are quick and can take a pounding. They'll switch between different close up attacks, popping into the air and launching themselves at you, and firing from afar. The combination can make the battle pretty intense when a group of four machines are all using different tactics. By the end of the game, you'll be blasting your way through these machines with the help of friendly AI as the crapstorm begins in full. You won't find the friendly AI to be helpful as they are in Call of Duty 4, but it's not about being part of an army in Crysis; it's about being the army.

Most of the single player will be spent on the ground in your nano-suit in the jungle, but there are some welcome moments where you'll command a tank, air ship, and of course commandeer any number of vehicles from the Koreans. Combined with fights against armor, zero-g environments, and smaller boss battles, you've got a pretty good selection of gameplay over 10-15 hours depending on your skill level. The only real frustrating moment comes inside the alien ship. It's already disorienting because it's in zero-g, but figuring out where to go can be downright confusing at times. The single player of Crysis, while similar to Far Cry in setting and core gameplay ideas, is most definitely a well-paced and exciting experience that deserves to be enjoyed. It's got stunning visuals, terrific sound (the boom of that precision rifle is so, so satisfying), a decent story, and the nano-suit really helps you feel superior for a plausible reason rather than just "I'm Jack Carver and was special ops".

Thankfully multiplayer isn't useless this time around. While only two modes are available, both team based players and deathmatch lovers will have some action to enjoy. The team-based mode, Power Struggle, can have a steep learning curve for its complication. There are several objectives on the map, players have to purchase their weapons, energy has to be stored, vehicles can be purchased, and enemy bases have hardcore defenses. Working in a team is a must to get anything done. But once you understand the premise and can coordinate with your teammates to complete the specific goals, it does get pretty exciting. I don't know that it'll steal me away from Team Fortress 2 or Call of Duty 4, but the fact that you can purchase mini-guns, freeze rays, and tactical nuclear weapons (both handheld and vehicle based) is hard to back away from. Of course, in both modes, powers are still available, which is also much of the appeal. Enemies can jump up to high locations, sprint around the field, and even cloak. The suit regenerates at a much slower rate to balance the gameplay a little better and cloaking thankfully becomes less effective (though almost too much so) since you can see the light-bending form of cloaked players. I can see wasting more than a few hours learning the ropes and then having some serious multiplayer games. Nine maps total between deathmatch and Power Struggle isn't a huge number, but it is already more than TF2 and likely to get bigger once dedicated fans have a little more time with the extensive game editor that's included with the game (and actually is included with the demo).

Closing Comments
Overall, Crysis is definitely another win for Crytek and another one of those games that's more than the sum of its parts. They’ve created some amazing technology that’s scalable enough that many gamers will be able to play it on some setting, even if it isn’t the best, and have a good amount of fun. Those that have computers to run the game at DX9 on high will find that the amazing visuals definitely enhance the amount of immersion and enjoyment Crysis can provide. This is some fast, well designed gameplay with enough options to allow players to use their own style of attack with satisfying suit abilities and weapons. Crytek has upped their attention to detail in presentation and dropped the worst parts of Far Cry’s story. The multiplayer, while probably not enough to draw players away from their favorites, is also worth the time. While the Halo 2 type of ending for the single player left a bad taste in my mouth, it wasn’t enough to deter me from heartily recommending action fans pick this one up.

©2007-11-12, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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