Pc Game Database

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

C&C goes back to its explosive roots.

EA LA stuck to C&C's roots in Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, almost to a fault. While there are new features and tweaks to increase the pace of play, the core fundamentals remain strikingly similar to previous games in the C&C Tiberium series. Players looking for something new in their RTS aren't going to find it here, but they will find plenty of fun. The tempo has been given a jump start but this is basically the same RTS we've been playing for years and years, which will undoubtedly please throngs of fans. This time around it's just more polished and presented in its most beautiful package to date.

Seeing the Tiberium universe is a welcome reunion. GDI and Nod are still battling it out but this time they have to contend with a new alien Scrin faction. These guys have a large presence in the game though their personality isn't as strongly developed as the GDI or Nod. Along with the large campaigns for Nod and GDI, you'll get the chance to play a bonus four mission Scrin campaign after completing the other two.

Also back are the famous live-action cutscenes that fans love so much. EA stayed true to the original series with a campy, cheesy, silly sci-fi plot and we're plenty happy about it. There are a surprising number of TV and movie actors playing roles here and while their acting talent isn't exactly put to the test, they're still pretty fun to see in roles like this. Who doesn't want to see Billy Dee Williams and Michael Ironside on screen together? It's like a B-movie bonanza. The Scrin campaign cutscenes had to take a different tack since I don't think anyone wanted to see a guy in a foam rubber suit gurgling like an alien. Thankfully it's awesome and effective in its simplicity fitting perfectly into the overall cutscene structure while maintaining a definitive alien perspective.

The campaign structure progresses well. Locations range across globe on three different types of terrain. Missions themselves usually involve either base defense or destruction of one kind or another. While most missions were fairly predictable, creativity wasn't totally absent, especially in the Nod campaign where missions were designed to highlight their stealth capabilities. There's also a good variety of secondary missions on every map granting plenty of gameplay objectives. The campaign AI rarely forces your hand, allowing players to sit back and relax aside from some ramped up and difficult later missions.

Once done with the campaigns, you'll be able to sink into skirmish and multiplayer. Each of the factions has enough differences in the way they behave to keep gameplay interesting. The Scrin, for instance, are better at harvesting tiberium and aren't affected by its radiation. GDI can't send infantry across tiberium, but have some of the strongest armored units and have mobile repair bases. Nod, on the other hand, employs greater use of cloaking technology making them better at quick strikes. Each faction has a distinct feel through form and function that players will appreciate.

Whichever side you choose, gameplay can be furious. While some players might want to sit back and enjoy the relative safety of a fortified base, giving an enemy time to expand and tech up can have disastrous consequences. The design here doesn't force players into the battlefield as a game like Company of Heroes does, but it also becomes pretty apparent, especially when fighting against hard or better AI, that turtling is a poor choice if you want to win. Late game units are so powerful that letting any enemy get the drop on you is practically suicide. Pushing the action and taking over new resource points is really the only way to counteract the mad amounts of units a fully funded army can pump out.

The thing to remember is that teching up goes quick, which means that somebody is going to get a leg up pretty quickly depending on the strategies taken. As a result, those of you looking for a game you can get in and out of relatively quickly should be very happy with C&C 3. The average time for skirmish or multiplayer maps is between 15-30 minutes.

While we've found the game to be fairly well balanced in the case of most units and abilities, there are balance issues that eventually can create problems, most notably the cost vs. reward of Nod's Avatar Warmech, which basically dooms Nod in late game battles. It also seems a little odd that Mammoth Tanks can't be captured by the enemy when Tripods and Warmechs can. The GDI Juggernauts can be captured, but are barely worth the effort when the game has gotten that far. Nod gets EMP upgrades for their buggies and other nice abilities, but compared to the brutal strength of the all-purpose Mammoth Tanks and combined assault of Carriers and Tripods, Nod has nothing we've found that can stand up to a proper direct assault. That Raider Buggy EMP ability should have been the ultimate equalizer, but the EMP range is so small that it can only take out units in a short distance which makes them almost completely ineffective against a cadre of upgraded Mammoth Tanks that can destroy them before they ever get close enough to set off the device. EA has already told us that they've got balancing changes, including some to Nod's Warmech coming down the line in the 1.2 patch, but we can't comment on how much those changes will affect Nod's late game viability.

It's also a little sad that once the largest units on each side come out, earlier types of units are basically made obsolete. Once you have the money for Mammoth Tanks, there's no reason to create any other ground units. Keeping an air force in reserve is good, but Mammoth's basically account for all your needs aside from stealth scan, which doesn't matter when you blow everything up immediately anyway. It's not like this is an aberration in the RTS genre, but with a series like this, it's easy to expect more. I want all of my units to be useful throughout the match. The saving grace is that games are quick enough that issues like this often don't even arise. More than half of the games I've played never saw one of the high end units created because of the brutal push for new resources.

It's also worth noting some of the extra features EA is providing along with the game. They'll be updating www.commandandconquer.com with all of the stats from online games. You will be able to schedule matches and download replays of great matches as well. It's also notable that you'll be able to check out live matches using the Battlecast system. Some of these will undoubtedly have commentators that can use the easy telestration options to point out specific events during their live commentary. We're pretty damn curious how widely this feature set gets used. The "RTS as a Sport" mantra is appealing one some level, but even video game junkies in our office aren't really sure they'd ever want to watch other people play aside from the chance to learn new tactics.

If you're more about skirmish minus the human opponents or want to play cooperatively with a friend, you'll have an aggressive AI to battle against. The hard level AI is beatable, but provides a solid challenge. AI can be set to various types of strategy for fun or practice before heading into the sometimes wicked world of online multiplay. For those sadistic folks out there that need an extra challenge, there's a brutal AI difficulty setting that gives the computer money advantages though the AI will always use the same tactics routines and units remain the default strength.

We've had very few problems with any part of the game. In fact, our only real issue has come with a Vista machine dumping that player out of the game after multiplayer matches. C&C 3 is compatible with Vista and basically works, but we're not exactly surprised to find issues. We're basically assuming at this point there'll be issues for most Vista games close to release. On XP we've encountered no problems with crashing or performance. In fact, it's impressive that the game runs as well as it does when there are so many effects and units moving around the detailed terrain. That said, we have had small amounts of slowdown on a machine with a P4 3.2GHz, 2GB RAM, and GeForce 7800 in intense moments with many units on screen with all details as high as they go. Our Core2 Duo 2.6GHz, 2GB RAM, GeForce 8800 card system has had no such issue.

The performance is notable for while the move forward in gameplay isn't huge, the move forward in technology is pretty impressive. Command & Conquer 3 is an amazingly rich visual experience. Each of the different zones of conflict have distinct details to create the illusion of a world slowly being torn asunder by Tiberium. The battles that happen within those zones are even more thrilling. Lasers and lightning crack across the battlefield and warp the air around them, flame tanks spew hot death with similar warping effects, and buildings collapse in amazing explosions. All in all, these are some of the most impressive special effects we've seen in any RTS game.

Add models that are clean and crisp, even at an infantry level (not something they got right in 2003's Generals), and you've got a beautiful game. When two large armies come crashing together in the middle of a battlefield, it's pretty hard not to be transfixed by the incredible fireworks display. These visuals many not make a difference to the hardcore that only care about unit stat differentials and build times, but the general public will find that this is one of those titles that becomes more fun because of the quality of the visuals working together perfectly. Considering all of the graphical oomph, the fast load times are particularly remarkable for both single and multiplayer games. If you have to wait more than 15 seconds for a game to load, I'd be surprised.

As with visuals, sound work is done quite well. All of the unit acknowledgements are good and the sounds of battle are very sci-fi and powerful. C&C 3 really got the full presentation package work over here that really does help create a great cohesive entertainment experience from all perspectives.

Electronic Arts revives their classic franchise with a revamped look and old-school gameplay that still manages to keep us clicking.

By: Tom Chick

Up from the dormant comes Westwood/Electronic Arts' Command & Conquer license. This is a franchise that's been comatose, if not outright dead, for about 10 years (Red Alert and Generals are separate universes). But thanks to the team at Electronic Arts Los Angeles, known most recently as the guys that brought us the superlative Battle for Middle Earth II, it's alive and kicking again.

Don't judge Command & Conquer 3 by its single-player campaigns with their live action cinematics, in which the cast meanders through bad lighting and worse dialogue. This script seems to have been written by someone who doesn't know the first thing about the actual game. In fact, there are intel files you can unlock that demonstrate someone thought up a rich mythology and backstory for Command & Conquer 3. Why couldn't EA hire him or her to write the cinematics? The best thing you can say for these cutscenes is that they're in high definition (which takes up more than half of the game's six gigabyte install), so you can see the chintzy sets and cheap costumes in splendid detail!

Then there are the campaign missions themselves. Defend the base, destroy the base, escort the trucks, use the commando. Defend the base, destroy the base, escort the trucks, use the commando. And so on. This is tedious trick-based RTSing at its worst, where the challenge comes from gimping the game by locking out certain units or features, or by using scripting that does an end run around the rules.

It sounds pretty bleak so far, but then there's the more substantial issue of the actual, you know, game. If you're okay with playing skirmishes and multiplayer games, Command & Conquer 3 has a lot to offer. This is a slightly sloppy, mostly grand, over-the-top, popcorn RTS that's surprisingly satisfying and easily the best Command & Conquer yet. It's a perfectly suitable follow-up to Generals, and it feels very similar. Instead of the US, you get GDI. Instead of the GLA, you get Nod. And instead of China, you get the aliens. Or maybe China is Nod. At any rate, Generals obviously informs a lot of the best bits of Command & Conquer 3.

But the team has also taken many of the lessons they learned in Battle for Middle Earth II. Most of these lessons are interface related, but many of them are matters of pacing, scale, simplicity, and depth. In this regard, Command & Conquer 3 is an unequivocal success, modest in its aims and wildly successful in achieving them. The secret is that there isn't any secret, or special twist, or unique hook, or innovation. It's formulaic and unambitious, content to revisit the formula Westwood introduced back when they were competing with Blizzard as the only RTS game-makers in town. Blizzard did charm, Westwood did mindless action. This is a perfectly retro tribute to those days, but with modern graphics, a juiced-up hyperpace, and the sort of interface an RTS needs so you can wrangle it into some semblance of strategy.

This is probably the first Westwood style RTS that has almost everything you could want. It has hotkeys, easy unit selection options, ample visual cues, solid tactical AI, useful unit stances, formations, big obvious buttons, and helpful tool tips. You can even set an adjustable speed slider for multiplayer games and skirmishes. Cranked way down, Command & Conquer 3 is absolutely languid.

The hyperactivity comes from how easily things blow up. This is mostly about the destruction and only a little about the building. Doing well involves learning the streamlined counters - a place for every unit and every unit in its place - and using tactics to your advantage. This is not a game about mastering an interface, or an economic system, or deciphering poorly documented rules, or cat and mouse maneuvering (unless you're playing Nod). This is a game about making a collection of toys, and banging them into the other guy's toys, and seeing who prevails. Twenty minutes later, you're a little breathless and ready to do it all over again.

There's really only one side here. This isn't a Starcraft model with three distinct races. Instead, it's a basic template with three variations in look, flavor, and incidentals. This is not asymmetrical warfare. Everyone gets everything, with only minor differences. So whether you're GDI (the good guys), Nod (the bad guys), or the aliens (the alien guys), you're playing by pretty much the same rules, using the same tools. They have slightly different approaches: GDI is brute force, Nod is stealth tricks, and the aliens are, well, a mish-mash of stuff that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The special powers you get from your buildings aren't as dramatic as the Ring powers in Battle for Middle Earth, but they end up doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to making the sides play differently.

Of course, the sides are aesthetically distinct. GDI and Nod units both look great in that traditional way you'd expect. But the aliens are disappointing for how they're a clearinghouse for standard-issue alien concepts, all lifted shamelessly from Starcraft, Starship Troopers, War of the Worlds, and a hundred other sources. They seem to be a product of scrapbooking instead of an actual design process. This is a grandly cartoon-ish spectacle of things blowing each other up in magnificent burst of color and sound, played on maps drawn with gratuitous palettes. And it runs well, too, since this appears to be the latest iteration of the Battle for Middle Earth engine. There's no need for a new computer.

Command & Conquer 3 might be a disappointment for players who want reinvented wheels underneath their real-time strategy games. It's RTS comfort food: safe, familiar, and probably not even that memorable (it's kind of funny to see Electronic Arts pushing it as a candidate for videogaming-as-a-sport with a feature that encourages spectators). Nod's stealth, the GDI's heavy tanks, and alien bugs all come together and blow up as a sort of mac-and-cheese RTS that tastes awesome in that safe, you've-been-here-before-a-hundred-times way. But for those of us who love the genre and where it's going, it nice to know that we can still have a grand time in the same old places it's already been.

Nod and GDI square off once again in a tried-and-true RTS formula.

By: John 'Warrior' Keefer

The more things change, the more they stay the same. That old adage seems particularly appropriate for the new Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, the latest in the futuristic RTS series pitting the Global Defense Initiative against the Brotherhood of Nod. The game takes the series back to its roots with fast-paced gameplay, full-motion video sequences with familiar actors, and enough explosions to keep armchair generals on the edge of their seats. While the graphics and sound have been updated for the times, don't expect many changes in the way the game is played and how it feels. This is Command & Conquer, and the developers didn't mess too much with a winning formula.

GDI and Nod each have fairly long campaigns, with numerous missions to advance the story. GDI is trying to protect the pristine blue zones from Tiberium encroachment, while keeping the forces of a chrome-domed megalomaniac at bay. The missions on both sides take you to various parts of the world, where you must either conquer the opposition by knocking out key points, escort strategic units, or stay alive long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Late in each campaign, the extraterrestrial Scrin arrive to make life more complicated for each faction. If you persevere through both campaigns, you'll get the bonus of playing a few missions as the Scrin.

The in-game cutscenes and FMV sequences are well done, and sufficiently campy to remind fans of the series why they were missed. Joe Kucan reprises his role as Kane, the prophet of Nod, and his energy for the role invigorates the scenes that he stars in. Having the likes of Michael Ironside and Billy Dee Williams and other recognizable TV personalities doesn't hurt, either, but none seem to relish their roles as much as Kucan. The only disappointment came on a few of the Nod FMV scenes where the voices didn't lipsync properly because of some slowdowns in the video. A reboot of the PC cleared it up briefly, but it crept back in later on.

The graphics engine has been sufficiently upgraded to reflect the latest technology. The game oozes ambiance as Tiberium spreads across unprotected areas of the world. As battles rage, buildings and units deform from damage and explosions offer an extremely satisfying boom bloom. It's not quite as cutting-edge as, say, Company of Heroes, but the upside is that the game is more friendly to lower-end PC's -- we ran at a widescreen resolution of 1920x1080 with nary a stutter in framerate.

The sounds and voice acting are also well done. Units respond with their usual two- or three-word order acknowledgements, while dying units scream or holler "mayday," each adding just enough to enhance the atmosphere. And the music still offers the same pulse-pounding bass that made players want to keeping listening even when they weren't playing the previous games.

When the campaigns are but a memory, C&C3 thrives on the replayability of the skirmish and multiplayer modes. In Skirmish, you can play against a variety of AI opponents, from easy to medium to several categories of hard. There are 20 multiplayer maps to choose from, allowing from two to eight players. Players can also toggle such things as power-up crates and the amount of cash to start with.

It is when you get into the unscripted aspects of the game that the fast, frenetic gameplay comes through. As with most RTS games, it becomes an arms race as to who can build the right structures, collect the most Tiberium, and graduate to the right combination of megaunits and structures to totally overwhelm an opponent. The megaunit for the GDI is the old reliable Mammoth tank, capable of being upgraded with railguns. It already has a ton of armor and has anti-infantry and anti-air capabilities. The Nod Avatar Warmech is a new unit that has a nasty beam weapon and can also be upgraded, but only through cannibalizing parts from the wreckage of its own units. It can gain sensor arrays, a cloak, a flamethrower or another beam weapon. Finally, the Scrin have a tripod that has a nasty beam weapon as well, as well as shielding. But in the end, a group of Mammoths still tends to rule the day and lay waste to just about anything in its path.

The nuke and ion cannon have also made it back, but with more destructive power than ever before. In the original game, a nuke or ion cannon blast would take out only a few structures and perhaps a construction yard, if lucky. Now, hardly anything survives within the blast radius, and the ion cannon detonation is particularly graphic and satisfying. The Scrin have a rift generator that opens what looks like a black hole and twists your buildings and units into oblivion. Again, he who builds first (and can defend it) will get the upper hand.

Where Command & Conquer has always shined brightest is in the multiplayer arena. The game sports a ladder system for individuals and clans, and players can go at it in ranked ladder matches and unranked games using the quick match function or through custom matches. A patch for the multiplayer component is already out, but there have been complaints of timed-out connections and being booted from the multiplayer screen. EA has acknowledged some of these issues and said it is working on a fix. We were not able to get the Quick Match function to work on our PC after patching, but we did get some enjoyable custom games in. The maps are all fairly strategic and balanced, allowing the players to be gauged on their abilities and not necessarily the luck of a good random starting point.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the new multiplayer setup is the Battlecast functionality, where games can have an announcer and players can watch any battle currently being played on a 10-minute delay (to avoid spotting for friends currently playing). All of the games we were able to watch did not have an announcer, so it will be interesting to see how that feature pans out as the game's player base grows. Games can also be watched via replay once the match is over. (The game also supports voice-over IP.)

All told, C&C3 has little in the way of innovation, but that won't stop hardcore RTS fans, and C&C fans in particular, from enjoying the heck out of it. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

EA's new Battlefield 2142 map pack conducts a surgical strike on your wallet.

By: Tom Chick

One of the really neat things about in-game advertising is that it offsets the price you pay for your games. So when Electronic Arts sells ad space in Battlefield 2142, you don't have to fret about being charged for new content. Hence these three new maps and a smattering of other content in the Northern Strike expansion.

Oh, wait, that's not quite how it worked out, is it? Battlefield 2142, a full-priced game with ads, has expanded with Northern Strike, a three-map pack you can buy and download through EA Link, a mandatory store program that wants to live in your task bar. Northern Strike is arguably worth the ten bucks you're being charged not necessarily because these three maps are good, but because Battlefield 2142 is worth playing but short on content. Considering how stingy the game's map selection was when it was released, what else are you going to do? Turn to the mod community? Not if Electronic Arts has any say in the matter.

Northern Strike adds three new maps that play by their own slightly tweaked rules. You can play them in Titan mode, fighting against and eventually inside giant ships hovering over the battlefield. Or you can play a variation on Conquest mode called Assault Lines. These battles are set up as attacker/defender matches, with the caveat that the attacker can't take the defender's main base until he's seized the rest of the map. This doesn't have much practical impact on the gameplay, which is the same flag capping Battlefield has always been known for. But it does mean you can't take out the defender's assets with a coordinated deep strike. In other words, you have to play fair, and then you have to push hard against a final stronghold, probably taking heavy casualties in the process and possible swinging the score in the defender's favor.

The new maps don't have any bot support. Electronic Arts has quietly done away with any sort of single player option. This is disappointing, since the bots in the Battlefield games have gotten slightly less stupid with each iteration. They at least offered a great way to learn the smaller versions of the maps before you jumped online. Now you get to wander around an empty LAN server if you want to learn a map.

All the maps are some variation of blue. Port Bavaria is an icy blue mountainside that showcases the new Goliaths. These squat menacing personnel carriers have regenerating armor and are studded with turrets. In Port Bavaria, the attackers drive a half dozen of them to the bottom of a steep slope, at which point infantry have to fire themselves up the mountainside using the Goliath's launch pods. From here, they'll have to fight their way through hangars overlooking the valley. It's a brutal D-Day style landing that actually lends Battlefield 2142 a touch of character.

Bridge at Remagen is a blue-grey city map with a ruined bridge as its centerpiece. It's otherwise easy to confuse with the blue-grey city maps from the original game. And Liberation of Leipzig, a night-time city battle, is the moodiest and bluest of these three blue maps. Aside from Port Bavaria, it's disappointing that the artists and map designers of Battlefield 2142 can't consistently muster creative energy that lives up to the gameplay.

There are new two-man hovercrafts that look like something a meter maid would drive. They're good mainly for fast transport and also for watching new players crash while trying to steer. But like the Goliaths, they only appear on the new maps.

There are new unlocks at the top of each "tree", which can also be used on the original maps. Snipers get a decoy and improved stealth, assault troops get increased ammo capacity and a radar attachment to their smoke grenades, engineers get increased ammo capacity and a homing mine, and support gunners get a deployable short range radar and a new grenade launcher. Anyone spending points on the general upgrades get new boots that help running and falling, and squad leaders get a beacon with a shortened respawn time. Since these are each perched above the highest unlock points, you probably won't be seeing many of them. Which is no great loss, since they're mostly just tweaks.

There are also new badges, pins, and ribbons, which pretty much amount to the same thing: collectibles. These make for a pleasant carrot from time to time as you're playing. "Hey, look, I get the Arctic Recognition Service Commendation Ribbon Award Badge for playing six hours on expansion maps!" Battlefield 2142 is perhaps the only PC game to fully appreciate how pointless but gratifying it is to unlock achievements.

The fact of the matter is this is decent but minimal new content that you'll want mainly because you're sick of the few maps you were given in the original game. Electronic Arts knows this. So if you're content being nickel-and-dimed, here's your opportunity to show your support for their business model, and enjoy a few new blue maps in the process.

Ubisoft finally moves their premiere sub sim to the Pacific.

By: Steve Butts

Two years ago, Ubisoft renewed our faith in the simulation genre with an absolutely first-class submarine sim called Silent Hunter III. Focusing on the North Atlantic-based shenanigans of Germany's U-boats, it managed to balance a high level of realism with a surprisingly high level of accessibility. Better yet, it did all this within the context of brilliant graphics and a phenomenally engaging campaign. Now the designers have taken the same ideas and used them to treat submarine warfare in the Pacific. The resulting title, Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific, is every bit as good as the previous game. Though it's not without its problems, it's a sure bet for fans of undersea action.

The submarine commander has a number of tasks before him. Not only is he in charge of setting the overall route of patrol, but he also has to consider how and where to attack the enemy and how to get out of danger once before he's discovered. Maintaining the element of surprise and using your weapons to their greatest effectiveness constitute the most thrilling portions of the game. Lengthy journeys between targets is a considerably less dramatic but no less important part of the job.

First, you have to determine where to patrol in order to find enemy ships. In some cases, you might be sent radio messages from your headquarters that give you a rough idea of where enemy convoys have been sighted. In other cases, you may simply have a hunch that ships will traveling along a certain route based on where the enemy's bases are. In still other cases, you may just stumble upon an enemy by pure chance, either through radar contact or actually seeing a ship on the horizon.

After taking on a series of short tutorials that get you up and running with the main systems on your submarine, you'll be prepared to take on the enemy in the campaign or in a number of solo missions. But while the game outlines the basics of firing torpedoes or manning the AA guns, players who want to know more about the more sim-heavy options of plotting firing solutions will have to seek the information on their own.

In any case, the focus here isn't on protractors and stopwatches. The real point of the game is to put you in the shoes of a sub commander and force you to make the decisions about how you're going to engage the enemy rather than how to operate each individual station. Sure, those elements are present for players who want to enjoy them, but Wolves of the Pacific is more about the experience of being a sub commander than it is about the nuts and bolts of submarine operation.

Silent Hunter III offered a much more open-ended campaign than we saw in Silent Hunter II, and Wolves of the Pacific continues this trend. Rather than relying on scripted progress, events here unfold across the course of the entire war. There are some watershed moments that can't be missed but you're largely free to succeed and fail as you will. Some missions, like sneaking into Tokyo Bay to snap a few pictures, are relatively easy. Others, like trying to attack shipping in a heavily patrolled zone, are much more difficult.

It's a fact that submarines are the predatory bullies of the sea, taking on defenseless merchants and tankers (or god help them, even sampans), while running from fights with tougher opponents like destroyers and cruisers. Still, the wily submarine captain can sometimes seize an opportunity to take out a much stronger target, like a carrier or a battleship. The trouble is, these guys never travel without serious backup and you can quickly find yourself outnumbered. The AI here is just as aggressive as it was in Silent Hunter III, so if you bite off more than you can chew, you'll quickly be surrounded by depth charges and dive bombers.

As you progress through the campaign, you'll earn renown that you can trade in for upgrades to your existing detection equipment or for newer weapons. Whether you go with a stronger deck gun or a better air radar is going to depend on how you approach the game. Eventually you'll be able to move up from the lowly starter submarines to get more advanced models that have better performance and more torpedo tubes. Submarine history buffs will definitely appreciate the differences between a Porpoise and a Balao class, or between the lowly Mk 14 torpedoes and the fancier Mk 18s but, for gamers who don't already have an understanding of how and why these things are different, the in-game documentation offers absolutely no help.

As with the previous game, there's a wide range of realism options here that you can use to tailor the experience to your liking. Gamers who are looking for a more action-oriented approach can work without fuel limits, slow reload times, torpedo duds or any number of other common restrictions. Gamers who want the hardcore experience will want to turn off options for external camera views and plot their own firing solutions. What's great is that the game offers gamers the chance to set each of these options separately so you can set the realism and difficulty exactly the way you want it.

Wolves of the Pacific looks every bit as good as the previous Silent Hunter game. In fact, the graphics have been improved in a few key areas. To begin with, the water modeling is simply breathtaking. We've yet to see a more believable water model in any game and, given that so much of the action here takes place right at the waterline, that's a huge benefit.

Waves crash across the bow of your ship and the surface of the sea reflects moonlight and fire. Sea water pools on the lens of your periscopes and even smears the external camera for a bit as you come up from underneath the ocean. Torpedo hits send huge geysers shooting up into the air. The only aspect of the water model that's not completely believable is that the game seems to use a flat plane to determine splashes for shell impacts. You can frequently see splashes occurring above the trough of a wave. In all, it's a really tiny thing that only stands out because everything else is rendered so wonderfully.

Though there aren't the huge deformations from torpedo hits that we were hoping to see, the game seems to have a better damage model than we saw in Silent Hunter III. Different parts of ships still respond differently to weapon fire, but not so much that we can see much more specific visual representations of damage. It's gratifying to get close enough to see the holes you've punched into an enemy hull. Even better, you can sometimes even see sea water filling the space inside. When you get ships to actually explode in gouts of smoke and flame, it's a real treat.

As with Silent Hunter III, there are seemingly countless ways for ships to break apart and sink. Some list to the side before rolling under. Others go end up as they dive into the sea. Still others break completely in half and sink in two parts. Sadly, there's still no cinematic representation of your destruction here, so you're left to imagine for yourself what it might look like for your sub to implode.

Ships and ports are all wonderfully detailed. Ships have rust stains and rivets that you can only appreciate up close and there's a very realistic sheen to the metal surfaces. There's just as much detail present inside the ships. Your own crewmembers man the appropriate stations and go through the motions of the tasks before them. In port, you'll see all manner of cranes, warehouses, smokestacks, water towers and such. Unfortunately, most of the ports are rather lifeless and deserted. A little activity and a few crowds would definitely help the illusion here.

The sound effects definitely help to maintain the illusion. The creaking of your submarine's hull and the susurration of the sea provides a constant backdrop to the action. Weapons fire and impact sounds have a real sense of weight and convey the right amount of destructiveness. Voiced crew dialogue also adds to the sense of realism here but it has the added benefit of actually giving you information that you need about the world around you.

But it's not all good of course. Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific still suffers from some obvious shortcomings, some of which are an intentional part of the design, some of which are the usual bugs that accompany these types of games. In addition to the regular crash bugs, we've seen every member of the crew fall asleep all at once and been unable to end our patrols because our home port was taken by the enemy. (Even stranger, the ships outside of this enemy port were all friendly.)

While the time compression is much more robust this time around, long patrols still feel like a drag even at more than 7000 times normal speed. It would be much more effective (and fun) to take a cue from some of the flight sims that let you warp to the next moment of action. It's a real inconvenience to have the time compression switch off every time you get a radar contact, particularly when your crew is calling out the same contact every sixty seconds. The chunkiness of the interface means that any interaction with the patrol map requires you to drop the speed down to the 128x range. We might complain that you're not allowed to interact with any of the controls while the game is paused, but the pace of the game is so slow most of the time that it's not really a problem.

Ubisoft's latest Silent Hunter submarine sim is both fantastic and frustrating.

By: Tom Chick

If you like naval sims, you've probably been waiting for this one. Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific, unofficially known as Silent Hunter IV, will knock your socks off with some of the finest visuals you've ever seen in a sim. It's the stuff you'd expect, such as roiling water, atmospheric lighting, spectacular explosions, and detailed ships that break in half and leave debris and survivors bobbing in the water. Delight to the exquisite wet steel and rust textures. Thrill to the stately prow of your Gato thrusting up from the deep, followed by its proud, erect conning tower. It's sub porn at its finest.

But it's not just about the money shots. You also get the little touches, like gulls flapping around cargo ships, your boat gently rocking when you're inside the command center, and water on the lens of the periscope. This is a game about thoroughly and lovingly presenting the experience of being a submariner. Sadly, for everything Wolves of the Pacific does right, a lot of it sinks under the weight of too many bugs and an interface that's needlessly impossible to figure out.

Taking a Dive

Many of the incidentals of Silent Hunter III, also created by Ubisoft Romania, are carried over from that game's Atlantic setting to this game's Pacific theater. This time, you're in charge of an American submarine hunting Japanese shipping, dodging among the archipelagos in a grand game of cat and mouse, but with dogs and hawks (i.e. destroyers and airplanes) guarding the mice.

Dynamic campaigns in submarine sims are as old as PC gaming itself, and this one offers the latest and arguably best. Radio traffic keeps you informed not just of local sighting, but also the historical events of the war. Your orders guide you through a series of objectives that range from "Hang out here and sink any bad guys you see" to "Go to this very specific place and take a recon photo." Watch out for planes, avoid damage, and carefully husband your precious torpedoes. Oh, and be sure to watch your fuel level.

Along the way, a sophisticated crew management screen tracks experience, skill, and fatigue. You can even give your men promotions. Between sorties you can spend the renown you've earned (similar to experience points) to upgrade your sub's components or even trade up for a better boat. The dynamic campaign offers variety, challenge, and a superlative sense of personal investment.

If you want something quicker and less invested than a full campaign, there are also single patrols, canned missions, and even multiplayer games. The multiplayer support is admirable, but impractical. There's an option to play adversarial games, but the player controlling the Japanese destroyers has the unenviable task of shuffling around a bunch of ships with what looks like a placeholder interface. The player controlling the submarine gets to creep around underwater with no option for time compression. Co-op games are slightly more interesting with all players in submarines trying to get through a destroyer screen. But again, the lack of time compression means this will be too tedious for all but the most dedicated sim heads.

Control of your sub is presented from the perspective of the captain visiting various stations. Nearly every bit of the interface lets you click a mouse button to freely look around in a 3D environment, often with crew members standing around looking slightly zombie-fied (then again, you probably would too if you spent weeks at a time underwater in a little tube). The free camera is particularly rewarding in the external views, where the sub porn aspect is at its most lurid and lovely.

Unfortunately, a lot of the command interface relies on rows of buttons along the bottom of the screen, with only one row accessible at a time. It's almost like playing an MMO, but there's no easy way to move among the taskbars, and most of the buttons have no corresponding hotkey. Then there are the terrible attempts at 3D control panels for the sonar and radar stations. On the whole, the game leans on a mouse-intensive interface that doesn't fit well with the interactive 3D views.

And as you're realizing this, this is where Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific starts to fall apart. Clearly, you're the decider in terms of how deep to go, which direction to head, and when to launch that torpedo. But the wonderful graphics and complex dynamic campaign don't matter one whit when you can't even figure out what that sonar screen is supposed to mean, whether now is a good time to launch that torpedo, or why the game suddenly ended because you sank. This is one of those user-unfriendly hardcore sims that can't be bothered to meet players halfway, much less help the more dedicated among us learn the ropes.

The manual is a travesty, crammed with pages of ship pictures instead of helpful information. There's always the tutorial. Oh, wait, no there isn't. A handful of missions with laconic intros let you practice some aspects of the game, but you're still on your own in terms of figuring out what's what. Feel free to turn down the realism settings as you're learning, but don't expect it to make much difference. You'll still suffer plenty of baffling instant deaths, crew fatigue issues, misfired torpedoes, and poorly understood features. That's a pretty cool interactive protractor on the navigation map and those dials on the attack periscope sure do look cool. Maybe next time Ubisoft can help players use them.

As it is, figuring out how to play Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific is an exercise in extensive trial and error, combined with copious forum trawling. Which is a shame, because with a more helpful and patient approach, this would be an ideal game to introduce casual players to the excitement, tension, and relative simplicity of historical submarine combat. There's a reason there are more movies about submarines than there are about jets with hi-tech avionics. This is a visceral and straightforward type of warfare, with dramatic turns of fortune and an exciting hunter/hunted dynamic. Maybe in Silent Hunter V, Ubisoft will finally understand that and make this series as accessible as it should be.

Of course, the first order of business should be making the game more stable. Although you can save at any time, there's nothing quite so discouraging as losing a meticulously earned kill because you got caught up in the moment and couldn't be bothered to hit escape and click the "save game" button. That's simply not part of the Silent Hunter experience (or at least it shouldn't be). But until Ubisoft gets around to smoothing out the game engine, you should probably make it a part of your Silent Hunter experience. You'll learn the hard way after the unforgettable sound of "'Torpedo impact! Torpedo impact! Torpedo im--.' Silent Hunter IV has encountered a problem and needs to close."

There's a definite lack of polish and far too many bugs, even a couple of patches and a month after its release. On one hand, since hardcore sims are so few and far between, we should be thankful for what we get. But on the other hand, how many shortcuts should we overlook out of sheer gratitude? There's no denying that there's some wonderful work here, and it's a shame that it's so inaccessible and uneven. But even for those of us who are inclined to stick with it, Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific is a profoundly frustrating experience, in large part because of how close it is to being sublime.

Dreamcatcher brings us the world's first real time strategy game featuring tiiiiiiiicks in spaaaaaace.

By: Tom Chick

Genesis Rising is one of those ideas crazy enough that it just...might...work. You're in charge of a spaceship that's also a gooey biological organism. It sucks blood from, well, blood stations and then hatches new ships from its belly. Before sending these newborns into battle, you install weapons and powers onto them. It's certainly a unique idea, and the developers got the "crazy" right. Unfortunately, they can't quite pull off the "just...might...work" part.

The setting is outer space, but on a 2D plane. There's a restrictive unit limit, so you don't control many ships; this isn't a drag-select RTS where you throw swarms of units into battle. Instead, the fleets are small and every fighter is precious. You keep your ships healed after battle by sucking blood from enemy carcasses. This is also an important way to steal new powers, which are called "genes".

A gene is basically a weapon or special ability that determines a ship's role. Is it a stealth ship with long range weapons? Is it a buff to add armor to local friendlies? Is it shielded from short range projectile weapons, or does it have extra armor to protect it to a lesser degree from all weapons? Does it have extra speed, storage capacity, or maneuverability? It all depends on which genes you install. You can get new genes by sucking them from defeated enemy ships, or by purchasing them from the neutral traders on the map.

One of the best things about Genesis Rising is the clever mix-and-match implications of this gene system. Because enemy genes are always visible, there's a meta-game of trumps and countertrumps. The ships are frankly little more than vessels for the genes. This supposedly gives Genesis Rising the flexibility of a collectible card game.

But it all falls apart because the pacing and interface simply don't hold up. There's a handy fleet management interface along the right side of the screen, but it doesn't help with positioning ships. Neither does the minimap, which consists of a few dim inscrutable dots. The only game speed is a fast clip, and the unit control is very loosey-goosey. Ships loop around and steer ponderously and stray where you don't want them. There's no way to arrange your fleet or set unit facing. Yet, believe it or not, part of the gameplay involves manually controlling ships to avoid incoming missiles.

The gene micromanagement is even more demanding. You have to duck into a separate screen to place genes, which involves futzing around with indistinct pictures of ships and little icon tiles for genes. A ship with installed genes has a higher hit point capacity, but you have to manually heal it to capacity to take advantage of this. And when you swap genes out, you lose this capacity. This presumably discourages on-the-fly gene re-jiggering, but in practice, it just makes taking advantage of new genes a serious hassle. It also makes the gameplay feel like a refueling sim, albeit a grotesque blood-themed refueling sim.

Many genes have to be triggered manually, and even aimed. In a less fiddly RTS, this would work. But here, it's yet another thing you have to do while the game is running away from you. It's not easy to see which genes are installed on which ships, and there's no way to get a tooltip to tell what the icons are for enemy genes. A simple pause button would have gone a long way towards saving this game from its own depth. Genesis Rising bills itself as an "action RTS", but in this case, the phrase seems to be shorthand for "an RTS buried under its own busywork".

To their credit, the artists at Serbian developer Metamorf have created a universe with a genuinely creepy setting. Imagine the aliens from Prey, but instead of playing from inside their space station, you're controlling their ships. The units are ugly, wet, and wicked looking. You get slimy space whales as conceived by H.R. Geiger, part crabs, part prickly beetles, part squishy bugs. The graphics engine does a marvelous job of presenting icky creature ships and gouts of blood in space.

The single player campaign is a story where you jump your persistent fleet around among different maps, gathering ship designs and genes. There are some ridiculously cheesy cutscenes in which your plastic character (you can only do so much with the "wet" look) talks to various plastic aliens. Branching dialogue offers you a choice of poorly localized blue (good) answers or red (evil) answers. The storyline shifts accordingly. There's an interesting menageries of alien races and powers here, such as creatures who carve their ships from asteroids, ice-themed aliens, and even some standard issue human military ships, looking slightly out of place in this odd gooey universe.

The multiplayer games have some promise, but they're built around farming respawning neutral units. So rather than playing against the other player, you play against the computer for a while. When you're powerful enough, you jump the other player. He who jumps first jumps best. And micromanagement skills trump all else.

It's a shame that Metamorf couldn't come up with a better interface, or at least some way to slow down the pace of the action when it gets frantic. They have some great ideas and their universe has a distinct and visually arresting look. The gene-stealing and blood-drinking theme makes for an interesting concept with great gameplay implications. But the bottom line is that as a game, Genesis Rising sucks, both literally and figuratively.

Genesis Rising flirts with greatness, but interface issues and poor pacing make it an also-ran.

By: William Abner

It's a story we've heard a hundred times. Genesis Rising has a lot of cool and novel ideas, but inevitably falls flat due to of a lack of common sense. It is the antithesis of a game like the recently released space strategy epic Galactic Civilizations II and its Dark Avatar expansion. Whereas that game let you can tweak every feature (or even turn some off if you didn't like them), Genesis Rising is a real-time space strategy game that doesn't allow you to adjust anything at all: there are no difficulty levels, you can't pause and issue orders when you need to, and you can't even save a game in the middle of a mission. You're playing the developer's game and you're going to play it the way they want you to play it.

Genesis Rising takes place some 3,000 years in the future. The human race has pretty much conquered the known universe sans one last remaining galaxy. You're a commander leading the human army into this last galaxy, searching for an item called the Universal Heart. This hunt is the backdrop for the game's branching campaign that allows you to pick and choose your missions to a certain extent -- you even get to keep your units from one mission to the next. There's a lengthy (if a bit confusing) back-story to the campaign, but it's not important. What is important is that your ships are basically living organisms that look a lot like something ripped out of an H.R. Giger painting or perhaps a Warhammer 40K Tyranid army book.

There is a rhyme and a reason to this. Your ships, being "alive," can "suck" the genes from other ships, thereby making it their own and even morph on the fly as they acquire new abilities. In fact, it's the genes that make the game tick; in a traditional sense, they work as unit upgrades. One gene provides a ship with a long-range rocket while another gene may grant a ship a force field. There are a slew of various genes in the game and you're free to mix and match them as you see fit, even stacking the same one in order to make it more potent. This is actually one of the best parts of Genesis Rising, as outfitting your various ships with these abilities allows you to use ships in certain roles. One small fighter might be heavily armored while another might have extra speed with small short-range lasers. It's entirely up to you as to how you deck out your fleet and nothing is set in stone. You can change the gene setup on a ship as long as you have the necessary amount of blood.

If all of this gene-sucking and living-ship stuff sounds sort of gross, well, it is. In fact, the game's primary resource is blood. You need it to do everything from healing ships, using acquired genes, to even constructing new ships from scratch. It's all about the blood. You even get a slimy slurping noise when one of your ships sucks the blood out of a defeated enemy vessel, and when a large ship is destroyed you are treated to a huge explosion in which the screen runs red.

Even without the graphic display of space blood, Genesis Rising relies heavily on its visuals. This is a very pretty game full of color and excellent explosions and weapon effects. You can zoom in and out as needed and the ship detail is outstanding. The heavy dose of blood just adds to the striking visuals.

The problem is that a lot of these cool ideas are nullified because of poor implementation and a severe lack of flexibility. First, there's the game's pacing. It's fast. Once things get hot and heavy it can be extremely difficult to manage everything. There are too many things that require manual activation. For example, if an enemy ship fires a missile you must manually dodge it. This is next to impossible when you have your entire fleet engaged with a lot of enemies. Is no one piloting that light fighter? Do I really need to tell the pilot, "Um, you might want to use evasive action right about now..."

Although the game is played in space, you move on a 2D plane. The camera allows full rotation but there's no depth involved: You can't move below or above another ship. While that may seem weird considering the setting, it's could be a blessing in disguise, as it's hard enough to manually issue move commands in the heat of battle. Adding an extra axis to the mix might just make your head explode.

Some of the gene-weapons are used automatically, but many aren't, such as the force field or long-range missile. It's hard enough getting your ships where you need them to be during a fight but to also worry about everything else is just a pain. This is another example of not allowing players to play the way they feel most comfortable. If you can manage all of this stuff, that's fine, but others would like to be able to automate some of it or at least slow the pace down or pause the game while issuing several orders. Sadly, this simply isn't an option. There's also no option to save your game mid-mission; it only saves after you complete a map. Some of the scenarios are quite long, involving multiple stages, and the fact that you can't save when you want just makes no sense whatsoever. It causes repetitiveness and boredom when you have to do the first bit over and over again just because the second half of the mission kicks your tail.

Multiplayer and skirmish games are fun and a nice break from the campaign missions which are more than a bit scripted and puzzle-oriented, but they still suffer from many of the same pacing issues. Playing against a buddy cannot save the game from its own design flaws.

Genesis Rising is by no means a total loss and there's certainly some fun to be had, but its lofty potential is squandered due to some poor decisions and a rigid design that will only appeal to a select number of players. Genesis Rising is a pretty, bloody, missed opportunity.

Good ideas need good execution to make a good game.

Genesis Rising: The Universal Crusade got caught in a trap of its own making. While many of the ideas are creative and lend some interesting gameplay ideas to a space-based strategy setting where humans use blood-filled biological ships, there are a lot of simple issues and inconsistencies with interface, story and gameplay design.

The fiction behind Genesis Rising comes from an obscure European comic. After facing extinction, fractured human colonies united after the martyring of a unanimously respected leader. From there, the human existence turned into a long line of genetic alterations to themselves and the bionid ships they traveled in. Eventually humans reached the stars, grabbed hold, and shook out the other species on a religious crusade to dominate the universe.

The story in the game is set as the human empire sets out to acquire the Universal Heart, said to be the beginning of the universe. The heart just happens to be in the last (that's right, last) unexplored galaxy in the entire universe. Considering this is only 3000 years in the future, the premise is already pretty far fetched considering the incomprehensible numbers of stars and galaxies. What makes the premise of the game even more ridiculous is the human empire sending a tiny fleet in to find and secure the heart when, if they had conquered nearly the entire universe, they would probably have trillions of ships ram themselves down that galaxy's throat to choke anything living there out of existence. Instead, we get a small group of units putting around in the confining two dimensions of space that's become all the rage in space based RTS games.

The reason for the small number of units under your control is pretty apparent. Genesis Rising is all about adaptability in combat so the number of ships had to be small enough to micromanage. If you were given control of hundreds, or even just dozens, of units, it would be pretty freaking hard to sort through all of the genes, attach them to the correct ship, and use them on the fly in battle. I understand that. It just is hard to sit with that considering the resources at the disposal of the universe-wide human civilization of this fiction. I would have preferred this type of gameplay in a story with a smaller scope instead of feeling hobbled the entire way through the game. Even the first cutscene shows hundreds of ships lined up for deployment. Talk about building up false expectations. Why not at least make the main character as part of a larger invasion fleet so battles could be bigger, or at least faked to look bigger.

The story is presented via cutscenes and conversations between principal characters. The cutscenes are pretty sad, both for the horrible voice acting and lack of ambient ship sounds, and the odd main character design. Why is a captain of a mothership wearing huge armor around on the bridge? It's pretty ridiculous. On the other hand, there are some cooler characters such as Vicar Juno and the Cerebrals who you'll meet throughout the campaign.

While the tactical action can be fairly fast-paced, this campaign can be pretty dull. While the types of missions can be varied in purpose, much of the game will see you and your fleet warping into an area with three to four enemy bases -- all with fleets -- and you'll have to take them out in order to complete your final goal. Because of the relative openness of space without more interesting terrain to develop a scenario, it's hard to get a feel that most of the missions are really much different than one another. There are some differences that will have players running errands, but travel times are long enough that it can get tedious when the payout isn't necessarily a very exciting battle.

In some cases, missions just seem to last and last and last with no end in sight. In fact, there's a mission that will keep looping forever until you get fed up and attack a different target not originally designated as a threat. I was almost sure I had encountered a bug that wouldn't let me finish the mission until I got angry enough for that myself. Not fun.

After the human campaign is over, you'll get a chance to play through some scenarios involving one of the alien races, which is nice because it's sad players aren't given more of a chance to check them out. Both the ice based and rock based aliens have different ways of producing units and different abilities that could have been exploited to better the game.

The tactical gameplay, whether in campaign or skirmish, offers up some interesting options for would be commanders. During the single player campaign, multiplayer, and skirmish, you'll will get to control the mighty bionid ships. These living organisms can be implanted with various genes that grant various abilities. They can range from basic weapons genes to booster genes that allow for speed increases or special abilities that are activated manually. Genes can be swapped out on the fly allowing for a pretty large range of tactics on the battlefield and great adaptability especially when considering the many varied genes at your disposal.

The problem is, it isn't easy enough to switch the genes out in the heat of battle to make adaptability in combat really feasible. The interface, while not horrific, is clumsy at best. Removing genes from a ship takes a certain amount of time and a new gene can only be added once a slot is empty. Micromanaging battle while trying to change micromange genes can become a nightmare. While the mechanic is still cool for some of the more puzzle-like aspects of the single player campaign, most changes are going to need to be made before battle rather than during the thick of it.

The sluggish gene interface wasn't the only presentation problem either. There are a rash of questionable decisions that I'm still scratching my head about. No mid-mission save which is especially annoying in the more difficult missions with conversation and cutscenes. No pause and play which would have helped with the confusion of battles. No adjusting options while playing or keybindings at all. No difficulty levels, which results in nearly the entire human campaign being too easy aside from the last couple of missions which are pretty challenging. The mini-map is terrible bordering on useless. The camera gets moved around by cutscenes leaving your ships in the thick of battle, which can be disastrous. Holding space to select special abilities brings up huge circles over each ship cluttering the battlefield. There's more, but those are the biggest offenders.

Metamorph tried to add some open-endedness to the campaign by allowing choice when it comes to both selectable missions and conversation in cutscenes. These choices provide a false sense of freedom however as you'll end up traveling everywhere and completing what amounts to a linear campaign (aside from the last mission which offers up different choices with different outcomes). The conversation strings in the odd cutscenes do allow for variation in gameplay. By choosing a peaceful or aggressive response, the characters will respond differently though most of the time the end result will be the same.

It's funny that so much choice would be presented to the player (whether it's useful or not) when this is another space-based RTS set on a 2D plane. I understand the need for it, using all three axis of space gets pretty damn confusing to many gamers. The main problem with being confined to 2D in this particular game is that units won't adjust along the Z axis at all to get around other units, which makes little to no sense. If you want to keep you from the confusion of full 3D movement, at least allow the AI to adjust for travel in a confined space.

Thankfully, the game looks very good. Not all of the textures are particularly impressive and the color palettes and styles aren't as fantastically alien as we've seen in other space-based RTSs like Homeworld, but what's there is certainly good. Ships in particular look about as disgusting as you would expect a blood filled spaceship to look. One of the best aspects of the visual design is the ability for the ships to actually grow new parts when genes are added. Seeing a huge gun grow out of the top of your ship is pretty fun and awesomely gross. While the ships, weapons effects, and environments are all good, the rest of the visual presentation is suspect with bland type, boring interface windows, and a GUI that has to be one of the ugliest I've seen in some time.

And now for something completely different...

By: Charles Onyett

The idea of fusing first-person shooter mechanics with an open world is a tantalizing one. In GSC Game World's long awaited S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, such an experiment in genre cooking has produced some great results. The game offers significantly more content than any other FPS out there, but struggles a little when it comes to the open world. What remains consistent throughout the experience is the compelling atmosphere. The gnarled trees, bleak skies, and rumbling thunderstorms of The Zone grab you firmly by the ears and yank you across irradiated wastelands. In your first hours expect to be filled with an intrepid glee as you acclimate to the game world. A little while later, you'll likely realize the environment's limitations and yearn for more. Events kick off with your character, known only as the Marked One, tumbling off a death truck on the outskirts of The Zone. You soon meet up with a man named Sidorovich, who hands out your first tasks and introduces the fiction of the environment. As the journey progresses, you'll move through the game's various self-contained zones that together make up The Zone, from the relatively placid Cordon to the war-wracked Army Warehouses, Pripyat, and finally the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant itself, from which all things sinister seem to emanate.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s main story missions provide the most engaging experience, as completing the challenges sometimes bestows useful rewards, opens up new territory to explore, and advances the mysterious plot. It turns out the Zone's NPCs aren't the best storytellers, so to more accurately understand what's happening you'll need to regularly check your PDA; the Marked One turns out to be quite the diligent note taker. Though some of the story's twists and turns are interesting, the pacing and storytelling methods could have used some refinement. Be sure to get one of the two true endings to fill in all the plot holes. The five false ones explain very little.

In a strange twist, several of the main story missions take place underground or indoors, shifting the aspects of gameplay toward that of a traditional corridor shooter. If you really want to test out how S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s open world elements work, you'll need to embark on the many side quests The Zone's NPCs offer. Sadly only a handful of them are truly interesting. They mostly offer simple tasks such as kill a single target, wipe out a camp, or retrieve an object. The more involving ones toss you into battle with A.I. companions, though there are too few.

The game's zones, which take a minute or two to sprint across, are separated by load times, meaning you can't pass from one end of The Zone to the other uninterrupted. Upon your first footsteps in the early areas, it's an undeniably compelling prospect to trek across the dreary fields pocked with anomaly clusters to question the inhabitants and root out secrets. Though a few side quests offer valuable rewards (one particular quest in Yantar nets you an excellent armor piece), the majority give you money and bullets, both of which can be easily obtained through other means. Large quantities of ammunition for each of the game's rifles, shotguns, and pistols are available at any major vendor. Money is never really an issue in the game, since the artifacts you find lying around The Zone's fields sell for substantial sums. Aside from satisfying an explorer's curiosity and snatching the occasional artifact or suit of armor, the prizes for peeking around every corner in the Zone turn out to be somewhat lacking.

In a full-fledged RPG, you'd be rewarded with experience for beating up random baddies, or given skill points, or granted some other way of augmenting your abilities and furthering character development. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. starts out this way, as you rapidly discover more and more powerful weapons, some of which are even "+1" variations of base weapon models, but flatlines far too early. Engaging in non-essential combat is handy for picking up bandages and first aid kits, maintaining ammunition levels, and accumulating random items like bottles of precious vodka. Occasionally you'll come upon a useful artifact, and that's when exploring is most worthwhile. If you follow the storyline for about ten hours or so, you'll find you already have some of the best weapons and armor in the game, significantly diminishing the allure of perusing the open terrain. While some may think it's unfair to criticize the game for trimming features of a genre in which it only dabbles, we couldn't ignore the persistent desire for more character customization and a stronger incentive to explore.

A few other features, a fighting arena in a zone called The Bar and the ability to join up with either Duty or Freedom factions, have been implemented to divert your attention from the main quest, but there isn't a particularly forceful reason to involve yourself since the rewards aren't all that interesting. By the time you reach the Army Warehouses zone, where you'll get the opportunity to start questing with either faction to build reputation, the rewards will likely be dwarfed by the power of the arsenal and protection you already have. If you'd prefer to join up with the Freedom faction, a group whose outlook embraces hippie ideals as much as The Zone permits, you must not complete any Duty quests in the Army Warehouses zone. We mention this because the game doesn't.

What does remain interesting is the A-Life environmental A.I. system, triggered after you exit one zone for the next. Many of the side quests require you to walk back through to previous areas, ensuring you'll encounter the packs of roaming pseudodogs, bloodsuckers, and fleshes running amok across the countryside. If you take a minute to sit back and observe, you'll see the monsters attack bandits and drag around, even chew on downed bodies. You'll hear gunfire in the distance and know somewhere close by, enemy factions got too close to each other. You might even chuckle maniacally as you fire into an advancing pack of dogs, kill a few, then reload in peace as the survivors whimper, wheel, and flee in fear. Combined with the game's haunting atmosphere, these kinds of events do a great service to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s immersion factor and believability.

Another big plus for this game are the shooting mechanics, which have a touch of authenticity rarely felt in a video game. Early weapons are wildly inaccurate, for instance. Don't expect to hit enemies with the starting pistol from anywhere outside a few feet. As a contrast, the game's more sophisticated firearms feel and sound remarkably different, which works to generate genuine excitement upon discovering a new weapon. Even the strongest scoped rifles, outside of the sniper variety, are somewhat inaccurate at longer ranges, making the gameplay more engaging since it forces you to close range on the enemy. It was a worry of ours that because of the many wide open battlefields you'd be able to take down most foes before they even see you. As a result of each weapon's more spastic accuracy, this isn't the case at all.

It also helps that enemies are really weak in only one spot: their heads. Unload a full clip from a few feet away at the torso and legs of the game's heavily armored foes and they'll likely be returning fire as you attempt to reload. Take the time to line up a shot and pop one or two into an enemy's face, however, and he'll slam to the ground in seconds. The game also delivers a distinct sense of increasing personal power as you accumulate better armor, weapons, and artifacts. When revisiting some of the early zones, you'll be able to utterly shred the opposition that was earlier such a chore to dispatch, like in many RPGs.

Enemy A.I. furthers the entertainment derived from firefights, when it's working properly. Foes stay on the move once alerted to your presence, often switching between cover spots and sometimes flanking your position. For the most part, you'll find The Zone's humanoid inhabitants aren't the type to blindly charge, and generally resist the all-too-common A.I. urge to pursue through doorways and find certain death at the mouth of your waiting gun barrel.

As our adventures progressed, we unfortunately ran into many instances where the A.I. clearly screwed up. In sprawling games like this, A.I. bugs are to be expected, but it happened with a heightened regularity in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. For instance, you'll witness enemies perform the classic endless-charge-into-a-corner routine, attempt to shoot through walls, or become entirely confused and stand still during battle. When these quirks occur, in addition to a few quest-breaking bugs and other inconsistencies, it detracts from the otherwise powerful sense of immersion S.T.A.L.K.E.R. conjures.

These technical flaws are largely compensated for with persuasive intangibles, specifically mood. The graphics, though dated in places, coalesce into a stunning amalgam of unfamiliarity. Very rarely do we see games exude such a repulsive yet enchanting mystique as with GSC's title. Eerily realistic sunrises, rainstorms, and NPC battles occurring outside the sphere of player involvement produce a disarming atmospheric cohesiveness. Attention to detail in all the game's cityscapes and fields triggers a subtle sense of familiarity, even while assaulting you with the wholly alien. The game deftly slides from post-apocalyptic science fiction sensibilities to nerve-singing survival horror, keeping you constantly in a state of hesitant wonder. With such strong environmental character, it's too bad S.T.A.L.K.E.R. lacks any persuasive NPC characters. Even Sidorovich, one of the game's strongest personalities, fits snugly into a stereotypical mold.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s sounds are quite good, particularly the piercing ambient howls the float across The Zone and the startling cries of the various mutants. Weapon sounds do a great job of immersing you in the environment, effectively conveying a sense of the firearms' power. You'll find unexpected extras packed in as well, most notably a surprising amount of guitar riffs triggered when NPCs decide to park themselves in front of a flaming barrel and start to strum. There seems to be a sizable amount of voice acting in the game, but we unfortunately couldn't understand a majority of it since most ambient NPCs comments aren't spoken in English.

If you decide to head online, multiplayer deathmatch, team deathmatch, and a capture the flag-type mode called Artifact Hunt are available. Before heading out to each match, which take place on maps based on areas of the single player game, you're given a wide selection of weaponry, armor, and items to bring with you. Like in Counter-Strike, getting kills nets you cash which you can then use to buy more powerful weapons the next time around. In deathmatch and team deathmatch, you'll rank up as you wipe out more opponents, unlocking deadlier weaponry and protective armor. Though you're not going to spend a majority of your time here, it's still an entertaining diversion from the single player, and certainly adds to this game's appeal.

So what kind of hardware power are you going to need to run this thing? It may not show off all the latest graphical effects, but this game is rather demanding. While it's by no means a top of the line rig, our Pentium 4 3.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, and 512 MB Radeon X1900 system had problems at maximum settings. The game also tended to stutter quite often, sometimes pausing for three or four seconds at regular intervals, which occurred on two different Windows XP rigs at maximum visual quality. Though that isn't the best of news, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. does support widescreen resolutions, which should please many.

STALKER finally emerges from the shadow that lay over its development. Should it have stayed hidden?

By: Mike Smith

Forget everything you know about STALKER. Over the six-odd years of its development, this FPS/RPG hybrid suffered delay after delay and setback after setback, leading many to doubt whether it would ever see the light of day. To considerable surprise, it's in stores now -- and to even more considerable surprise, it's actually good.

Set in and around the ruined nuclear power plant at Chernobyl , where a second nuclear disaster has awakened strange new phenomena, STALKER doesn't exactly have a cheerful theme. You play a scavenger -- one of the eponymous "Stalkers" -- who was attracted to the reactor area in search of valuable artifacts created by these anomalous energy formations.

Think of it as a realistic first-person shooter with a survival horror-esque motif and a ton of open-ended, Deus Ex-like levels. You don't develop your character or improve your skills as in most RPGs, but you can equip various combinations of objects that tweak your defenses or resistances to damage, offering some opportunity to tweak your stats.

STALKER's levels are huge and sprawling, each big enough for many large buildings and plenty of countryside between them. You'll visit ruined cities, factories, military bases, radiation-bathed garbage dumps, and mysterious research labs. Oh, and the power plant itself, lurking at the northern end of the map like some hulking, malevolent reminder of humanity's arrogance. Friendlier zones hold towns (or fortresses) of Stalkers, complete with bars, traders and services.

Shifting from level to level, in contrast to most supposedly non-linear games, is interrupted by a loading pause. If you're expecting Oblivion-like openness, you're in for a disappointment. STALKER is way more traditional about the way it handles level boundaries and transitions, and there's a very definite (and well-managed) progression from easier ones to harder.

They're all packed, to greater or lesser degrees, with mysterious anomalies. Some are relatively harmless, but others will shred you into a fine red mist quicker than a Ukrainian can down a bottle of vodka. Some create useful artifacts over time, so if you come back later you might find valuable goodies where once there was flesh-crushing horribleness.

STALKER's story isn't especially interesting nor particularly well told. Where it succeeds, though, is how well it handles its contemporary sci-fi situation. Though it has its share of strange, pseudo-supernatural goings-on, they're woven so carefully into the game's fabric you barely notice when it crosses the line from the believable to the outlandish. When it does drop you into Crazytown, which it only does occasionally, it does it thoroughly and with terrifying effect.

While its situations may be unusual, its weapon selection will be familiar to most players: pistols, sub-machine guns, assault rifles, grenade launchers. Chunky and heavy-feeling, the weapon models exude a pleasant air of stocky Soviet practicality. Equip an assault rifle with a scope, and you'll find the gun takes up most of the right side of the screen.

Speaking of Communist engineering, abandoned vehicles litter the game's landscape. STALKER's developers originally intended them to be drivable, and as you traipse back and forth through the game's large levels, you'll wish they hadn't taken them out. You'll usually have to head back to a quest-giver to collect your reward, and as giver and objective can sometimes be separated by several levels that can lead to some decent treks.

All that radiation seems to have affected the mental faculties of the other Stalkers. They mix moments of almost prescient smartness with episodes of dismal dumbness. At times, they'll use pincer movements to trap you or surprise you from dark areas. Equally, they'll sometimes mooch around in the open when under fire, or ignore your shots altogether in favor of studying some particularly interesting patch of wall.

Everything about STALKER's graphics emphasizes the realism of the world -- even the game's less realistic objects, like the anomalies, are subtle and often hard to spot. The Chernobyl plant and its surroundings, abandoned immediately after the meltdown, are disheveled, ruined, and overgrown. It's not a cheerful place -- but then, why would it be? It's the site of the world's largest nuclear accident, not a holiday camp, and it looks the part. It's not here to wow you with its technical prowess.

Keeping most of the voiceovers in Russian, whether it was done for atmosphere or to save money, was a smart move. Having much of the game take place in a language you don't understand takes surprisingly little away from the action, and piles on the atmosphere. Unless you speak Russian, of course, in which case you're on your own.

In fact, the game's whole sound design drips class. It's equally adept at crafting quiet interior scenes where every little tap and muttering is as vital as recreating the chaos and clamor of a military assault. The eerie crackle of your Geiger counter underlines the danger of the more radioactive zones, and the subtle noises made by the anomalies are just as important to localizing them as the visuals.

Single-player has obviously been the focus of STALKER's development, but nevertheless it includes a comprehensive set of multiplayer options. It doesn't go to places most realistic multiplayer shooters haven't gone before, but the post-apocalyptic maps are well designed and decently varied. There's talk that some of the features removed by the developers still lurk in the game's code, so perhaps motivated fans will be able to unlock some extra features that'll better differentiate it from other shooters. All the same, as a second string to STALKER's bow it's more than adequate.

When Chernobyl melted down, it spewed a cloud of radioactive dust all over Europe. A similarly menacing cloud hung over STALKER's development, and given all its troubles we're fortunate to have a game at all, let alone one this good. Its setting is superb, its gameplay tense and convincing, and it boasts what are definitely the best fill-your-pants moments in a PC game for quite some time. It's hard to see how it could have turned out better.

This grandly ambitious shooter is hindered by some poor design choices and rough edges.

By: Li C. Kuo

We always applaud ambition and creativity in gaming. Nowadays we see far too little of either and when someone tries to break out of the mold it tends to catch our attention. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl definitely caught our attention. Yes, it took some time to finally reach our hands, but now that we've played the game it's easy to understand what took so long. S:SoC is a wildly ambitious title. Unfortunately, ambition alone does not make a game great.

It's very tempting to say S:SoC is "Oblivion with guns," but that wouldn't be accurate. GSC Gameworld's offering does feature an open expanse of land for you to explore, but it's not nearly as vast as what a true roleplaying game like Oblivion offers. Still, it's huge when compared to other more traditional shooters that feature linear paths. What we found the most appealing about the overall design of S:SoC is how effectively it ties into the storyline.

Welcome to the Wasteland

We all know about the disaster in Chernobyl, but in the world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., that disastrous event was only the beginning. As the story goes, a second meltdown occurs in 2006 and a 30-kilometer area around the reactor is evacuated and quarantined, leaving behind a virtual ghost town. Not long after this reports of wondrous artifacts surface, and where do these artifacts come from? Take a guess. As a result all sorts of folks descend upon the nuclear wasteland in search of these mysterious and valuable baubles. These scavengers are known as stalkers.

Your character steps into this world six years after the second meltdown. Not only are you in the middle of a radioactive killing field, but you've also got amnesia. Fortunately, there are a handful of people willing to help you get back on your feet and find out who you really are. Unfortunately, these aren't the kind of people who give away something for nothing. Thus you set off on a journey, the length of which will easily rival the playtime of many role-playing games.

A trader is your first contact. You'll start far away from the Chernobyl reactor in Pripyat. It's here where you'll get a first-hand taste of how hostile the environment you're in really is. Strange anomalies are scattered throughout the landscape. These radioactive phenomenon are definitely bad for your health. Some will appear as distortions in the air, others will look like spinning vortexes of wind, while others will look like puddles of sludge or a concentration of lightening. They will all hurt you in their own unique way so you'll want to steer clear.

Getting to Know the Locals

You'll also need to keep an eye out for mutants. These range from infected dogs to other, stranger creatures. As you delve deeper into the game you'll find stranger and deadlier mutants, such as the deadly Bloodsucker or the creepy Poltergeist. Some of these mutants will have special powers, such as invisibility or the ability to hurl objects at you via telekinesis. Other mutants, such as the dogs, will travel in packs that can tear you to bits in seconds.

As if radioactive anomalies and mutants weren't enough, you'll also have to deal with other stalkers, the Russian military, bandits, mercenaries, and various other factions that have all established themselves within the quarantined zone. Fortunately, you can make allies of your own, and not all NPCs will attack you on sight. You'll also be able to trade with anyone you meet, but really only dedicated traders in bars and other locations will be worth trading with.

Self-defense

The developers at GSC Gameworld certainly know their guns. All of the weapons in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. have made-up names, but they look and work just like real-world analogues. This means you'll find an AK-74, only it'll be called something else, but it'll still be an AK and still take 5.45x39mm ammo. This little detail is important because there are many different ammo types in the game. You'll have to pay attention to what ammo you're picking up or purchasing, otherwise you'll find yourself stuck with a gun and no compatible ammo to load it with.

For gun nuts, this won't be a problem and may even be a perk as it adds to the sense of realism in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. But other folks may have some difficulty, especially when so many ammo types look similar. For example, it's easy to accidentally buy 9x18mm ammo when you actually need 9x19mm ammo.

While you don't actually level-up like you do in an RPG, you will eventually get bigger and better guns and gear. When you start off you'll often find yourself outgunned; eventually you'll get your hands on something better, but then you'll move to another zone and find yourself outclassed again. Thankfully, this goes the other way as well. When you backtrack from a later zone to one of the earlier zones you'll make short work of any fools who happen to stand in your way.

The sheer number of weapons available will please any military buff. Shotguns, pistols, and even RPGs can be found, taken, or purchased. The biggest difference between weapons is how accurate they are. When you start off, trying to hit anything more than 50 feet away is a crap shoot. However, once you start getting your hands on better weaponry, you'll find that more bullets will go where you point them.

Staying Alive

Just keep in mind that the bad guys have the same arms you do. At long ranges you'll get hit occasionally, but if someone gets right in your face, you'll die in a second. You do have bandages and first-aid kits, and these are bound to quick keys so you can heal yourself as quickly as possible.

When you get wounded you run the chance of bleeding out. You'll need bandages to stop the bleeding. These will also recover a little health, but medical kits are what you really need when your health is low. Unfortunately, bullets and mutants aren't all that will snuff the life out of you. Radiation is a constant hazard and a bar in your inventory screen will tell you how exposed you are. If you start taking too much radiation you'll start losing health. Once that bar fills up, you're toast. The crispy kind.

When you're near radiation the screen will start to go fuzzy and you'll hear a Geiger counter ticking madly. A radiation symbol will also appear on your HUD. We just wish that the bar indicating how much of a dose you're getting would appear on the HUD as well. Instead, you have to go to your inventory screen to see it.

There are two ways to keep the effects of radiation exposure at bay. The first is vodka. Drinking a bottle of this stuff will reduce the effects of radiation on your body, but if you drink too much of it you'll get drunk. You'll weave and be much less effective in combat. Ideally you'll want to use anti-radiation drugs. These wonder-shots will eliminate all effects of radiation and reduce your radiation bar to zero.

Your suit will also protect you from exposure. Some suits are better-suited for protection from bullets while others are better for protection for radiation. Eventually you'll be able to find more advanced suits that can do both and even exo-skeleton suits that will give you the ability to carry a heavier load. Unassisted, you're limited to about 50Kg, if you carry too much you won't be able to sprint very far, carry even more and you won't even be able to move. This ensures that you're not a walking arms shop and forces you to make careful decisions about what to bring with you on a long trip.

The Long Walk

30 kilometers is a lot of distance to travel, and you'll find yourself doing a lot of walking. It's practically impossible to go anywhere without having to defend yourself from someone or something at least once. Plus, you'll need food on a regular basis to restore your stamina and to stay alive.

As you explore the quarantined area you'll visit underground factories, abandoned military bases, ghost towns, and other eerie places. The developers have done a fantastic job of conveying a sense of desolation and destruction. Everywhere you go you see signs of decay. S:SoC makes you really feel like you're alone wandering in a very strange and hostile land.

During your travels you'll accomplish tasks for people. You'll do mundane things like help a man find a lost family rifle, as well as participate in great raids with different factions as they combat each other for what little there is left to fight over. Accomplishing missions will net you rewards, cash, and information.

There is a main storyline and if you wish you can only do missions related to it. But we wouldn't recommend this. All the best gear and weaponry is obtained through optional side-quests, and if you skip these you'll have it that much harder during the endgame when you'll need every advantage you can get.

A Worthy Challenge

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is by no means an easy game. You'll die often, travel great distances, and face incredible odds. The AI is slightly inconsistent, but ultimately challenging. Sometimes they'll get stuck or shoot at walls, but when they get it together they'll rush you, flank you, or force you out of your cover with a well-placed grenade. Mutants have their own unique behavior patterns and will require different tactics to take down. At one point you'll even have to fend off hordes of zombies, and evade a helicopter gunship.

Sometimes you'll have the aid of other stalkers or factions, but most of the time you'll be alone. You'll also have a few missions that will require you to escort people. Fortunately, the story is always gripping. Piecing together what's going on is a great incentive to keep playing and resulted in us doing some massive marathon sessions. There are seven endings in all, and each reflects your approach to the game. We won't give away any other details here.

The Ugly Truth

Unfortunately, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has a number of rough edges. If you're one of the early adopters who made the jump to Windows Vista, you're in for a rough ride; we ended up using an older XP system for our review. There is a patch out now that fixes 65 different bugs, creates save game incompatibilities, and still leaves many problems unaddressed.

Sometimes the weapon models for NPCs will appear inside their arms instead of in their hands; the result is a bunch of guys who have rifles embedded into their flesh. Also, there would be times when the game would pause for a few seconds as we're just walking around. This would be after a separate load screen had appeared so we don't think it's loading anything. It's just a pause where nothing seems to be going on.

Finding a multiplayer game isn't too fun either. Every time we went online we found plenty of servers, but few that actually had anyone in them, much less enough people for an actual game. There are three multiplayer modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Artifact Hunt. The first two are self-explanatory, the third has the two teams racing to collect an artifacts that appear randomly on the map. Once a team secures an artifact they must take it back to their base.

All three modes feature a cash system similar to Counter-strike. As you score more kills and wins you'll get more cash to buy better weapons. You can also pick up weapons from fallen comrades and enemies. Multiplayer combat is quick and brutal, but straightforward and really nothing to get too excited about. It's really the single-player mode that shines here.

Ambition is Good

GSC Gameworld tried to expand the dimensions of the first-person shooter, and to some extent, it succeeded. The open game world and the great environment are all worth getting excited about, although there is a bit too much backtracking and walking for our tastes. We longed for a fast travel option or better yet, a vehicle to get us from point A to point B.

The game's also still too buggy even after being patched, as well as being filled with small problems. Typos are commonplace in NPC text, the interface for managing your inventory is annoying and clunky. It's easy to see why the game was delayed so many times, and hard to fathom how some of these kinks weren't worked out in the process.

Despite all these issues, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an effective open-ended first-person shooter with a gripping story and a fantastic setting. The graphics look a little dated (except for the great lighting effects from the flashlights at night) and the overall feel of the game is a bit rough, but it's still worth checking out. If it's given another chance, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has the potential to eventually become a franchise to be reckoned with.

Let's hope this also ends the battle for Earth.

By: Dan Adams

It's our job to review games but it doesn't always feel like a job. We love games. But titles like Maelstrom make it feel like a job. Like a crappy job. Like I'd rather be scrubbing toilets or cleaning bedpans or something. Maelstrom isn't the worst game I've played in my seven years at IGN, but it's one of the lamest. Whether it's the shoddy pathfinding or horrific voice-work, ill-planned action mode, or the insanely boring campaign, it doesn't really matter, you'll hate this game as much as I do.

Maelstrom finds the Earth ravaged by an apocalyptic flooding leaving most of the Earth underwater. What's left is scraps being fought over by the powerful Ascension corporation and scrappy Remnants who are mainly comprised of ex-military from the world's former governments. As you might expect, since most RTSs since StarCraft feel like they need at least three factions, a third alien faction falls to Earth and starts their own brand of trouble. Unfortunately, none of that trouble results in fun at any point during the game thanks to horrific controls and terrifyingly boring mission design.

Want to mass up as big an army as possible of semi-brain dead units and send it across the map while not giving a crap if you give the tactics a passing thought because there's no way in hell you won't succeed against woeful enemy AI? Maelstrom's got that.

One bright point is that the three factions have big enough differences to require at least a little thought, but the potential was there for so much more. The campaign just doesn't offer any missions to really highlight the advantages each side provides as should be the case when preparing players for skirmish and multiplayer.

If you need any other reasons to stay away, pathfinding is a good one. I'm going to guess that you're tired of the ridiculous pathfinding issues from the RTS games from early '00s. Prepare to have nightmarish flashbacks. Getting units to do anything properly is a chore and it's pretty clear that it's no fun when AI fights you every step of the way. I probably haven't seen pathfinding AI this bad since Real War came out in 2001. It's hard not laugh and cry at the same time when you see some of the in-game custcenes where the pathfinding AI can't get around itself.

Malestrom is a vortex of discarded dreams and hopeless imagination. While there are ideas having to do with terraforming and use of water that are intriguing at first, actually getting them to work efficiently or even properly is confounding. Considering the relative ease of terraforming in KD's last game Perimeter, this total lack of control or precision is kind of shocking. They're "innovative" use of the direct-control over heroes is more laughable than useable. While their shot range increases dramatically in third person, which makes taking down enemy units easier, there's nothing fun to mention. Heroes somehow manage to be both ponderous and twitchy at the same time while and having some of the lamest special abilities in the hero world to date.

The only thing that's barely above average in this game is the graphics engine, which when put up against recent games like Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes, or even War Front: Turning Point, still leaves a lot to be desired. The water found everywhere in this game is actually pretty decent. The world itself isn't horrific either but when more than a few units make it on screen or all of the effects have been turned up to their highest, the engine's lack of power comes crashing to the forefront as frame rates begin to fall.

What's even worse is that what is there for the engine hasn't been used to any great effect in the art style or animation. The art is basically non-style. It's that dumb mix between cartoony and realistic that never reaches greatness no matter how you look at it. Unit and weapon visual design is about as outrageously boring as the campaign missions. Yeah, some of the units transform into other units, but who cares when neither of those units looks particularly cool. Take the transforming mechs in particular. Watching them lumber around the field (when they're not bumping into each other) demonstrates what a sad state of affairs this game is really in. If you're going to put mechs in your game, they had better be animated cool enough to look powerful. Shake the ground when they walk. Settle for firing a powerful weapon. Kick up dust. Squash soldiers under their feet. Crash to the ground dramatically. Do something cool with them instead of a half-assed walk mixed with pew-pew lasers.

The pew-pew lasers aren't the only sad issue with the sound either. Just about every other battle sound shouts small budget. Units don't sound impressive when they move, don't have cool engine noises, weapons noises, or anything. Even worse are the voice-overs which have to be some of the worst in recent memory. It's not a good sign when you need to turn off the sound to stop ear bleeding. I should probably sue for physical and emotional damage after having to play Maelstrom for so many hours.

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

C&C goes back to its explosive roots.

Electronic Arts revives their classic franchise with a revamped look and old-school gameplay that still manages to keep us clicking.

Nod and GDI square off once again in a tried-and-true RTS formula.

Battlefield 2142: Northern Strike

EA's new Battlefield 2142 map pack conducts a surgical strike on your wallet.

Silent Hunter 4

Ubisoft finally moves their premiere sub sim to the Pacific.

Ubisoft's latest Silent Hunter submarine sim is both fantastic and frustrating.

Genesis Rising

Dreamcatcher brings us the world's first real time strategy game featuring tiiiiiiiicks in spaaaaaace.

Genesis Rising flirts with greatness, but interface issues and poor pacing make it an also-ran.

Good ideas need good execution to make a good game.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

And now for something completely different...

STALKER finally emerges from the shadow that lay over its development. Should it have stayed hidden?

This grandly ambitious shooter is hindered by some poor design choices and rough edges.

Maelstrom

Let's hope this also ends the battle for Earth.

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