Pc Game Database

Painkiller: Overdose

Highway to Hell.

Painkiller: Overdose is a throwback of sorts, to a time when the phrase "first-person shooter" meant only that—the shooting of stuff from a first-person perspective. No confusing rules, no weirdo storylines, no RPG or adventure elements. Just tons of demons and/or monsters, almost as many forms of weapons, buckets of good old-fashioned blood, and more severed body parts than a chop shop. Like DOOM, Quake and all those other straight-up shooters before it, Overdose is all about high-speed mouse skill, twitch reflexes, and inherent aggression. Though it feels a bit more dated than its Painkiller predecessors—the series began in 2004—the latest installment nevertheless manages to crank out a gory, fast-paced good time that should please anyone with a strong distaste for murderous beasts from hell.

Actually, it's not quite hell. Overdose purportedly takes place in purgatory, a bizarre place between heaven and hell that doles out as much horror and harbors as many freakish ghouls as your doctor's waiting room. That the game's definition of purgatory—a series of environments seemingly plucked ad hoc from across this big, wide world of ours—doesn't quite jibe with traditional values and doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Who really cares if you're fighting in a Japanese tea room, a desert gorge, or in the midst of some ancient ruins as long as it looks good and delivers the thrills? For the most part, Overdose does both.

As "Belial, son of Heaven and Hell," you're a half-demon, half-angel waging war against Lucifer, who imprisoned you here, and all his henchmen and hench-women. You stroll through the world, room to room or zone to zone, wasting everything you see. Each time you enter a new space, a gate or door swings shut behind you and the monsters come out to play. You are then expected to annihilate all attackers in order to open the next door to the next space.

Unlike so many games of this ilk, there are no doors to unlock or tedious puzzles to beat. You can save at any time, and the game often covers for you by saving automatically at regular intervals.

The key to Overdose is variety. For example, each of the game's seventeen levels and indeed many of the rooms and spaces within each of those levels feel and look impressively distinct from the next. One minute you're trapped in a darkened dungeon of some sort, battling the no-goodniks as much as the claustrophobia. The next minute you might be on a wooden walkway suspended over water or making your way over a sand dune or fighting your way through a rotting Grecian courtyard.

The sense of size and space is strong throughout. Towering above you are columns and mountain tops, decorative ceilings and strangely-colored skies. Beneath you are bottomless crevices of fire and murky oceans that'll swallow you whole. Boxes and barrels containing ammunition refills abound, as do vases—many with bloodied body parts inside.

But that's just a hint of the gore that awaits. Bleeding, disfigured skeletons lurch toward you, only to be blown to smithereens. Asian kung-fu masters somersault in front of you, even with the harpoon you've just launched at them sticking out of their eyeballs. And should you crank the difficulty level to "Trauma," there are so many monsters and so much carnage that the floor is literally coated with blood and assorted entrails.

The interplay between beast (be it insect, animal, robot, mutant human, giant, etc, etc) and weapon also helps keep things interesting. Some enemies just fall to pieces with the slicing and dicing "hell cube," a near-magical device and holdover from past Painkillers that does all sorts of wacky things. Others are dispatched nicely with a crossbow to the brain.

The way cool thing about Overdose's eight main weapons is that each can be used in a primary and secondary mode, effectively doubling the fun. The canon, for instance, can be used in its secondary mode to temporarily freeze an enemy in place, thus ending the immediate threat and making said enemy ripe for the picking when you have a spare moment to do so. Some of the alternate fire modes are pretty wild to be sure, so prepare to learn what they can do before you can use them effectively.

And there are other things to do besides shooting and killing and dying. When you off a demon, its soul will escape and rise above its now useless body, floating in space for a few seconds before dissipating. That's you cue to grab it. Grab enough souls and you'll enter a stage wherein you become insanely powerful. It's a rush for sure, and one you'll want to experience.

The game also offers a series of level-specific challenges, such as completing a given section by using only a certain type of weapon. You aren't compelled to play it this way, but if you do, you'll garner extra power-ups that'll really help during future forays.

Nevertheless, even with the variety of enemies, weapons, environments, and challenges, Overdose gameplay often comes down to that tried and true formula of a gazillion simultaneous enemies. So, if you're not a fan of the DOOM school of gaming, wherein your entire line of vision is loaded with bad dudes trying to smack you and eat you and gore you and shoot you, you probably need to look elsewhere. Moreover, the re-load times are ridiculously long—up to a minute on a fast PC—and that's a serious buzz kill in a game that relies so much on frantic action and forces you to re-load seemingly every few minutes. Hello God mode.

Something else to remember—Painkiller hasn't changed much in its various permutations. Accordingly, and even though it's chock full of graphical variety, it tends to look a bit old. The monsters aren't as sophisticated as those found elsewhere, the lighting is good but not spectacular, and the weapons, though certainly creative, generally don't deliver that 2007 wow factor. Likewise with the audio. Belial's constant wisecracking and whistling is funny yet repetitious. Ambient noises such as creature movement seem to get lost in the shuffle. And weapon effects alternate between impressive and disappointing.

Multiplayer Overdose is just about what you'd expect from a title of such…simplicity. The usual mini-games are here, including Capture the Flag and Free-For-All, and the gameplay options are strong. Sixteen people can play and kill and destroy together, and the frame rate keeps up pretty well. But the multiplayer arenas feel a bit small and the confines rather tight, so it's usually hard to remain unscathed for more than a few seconds.

Closing Comments
Painkiller: Overdose may be a case of déjà vu to series veterans and those who regularly gravitate to this genre. Furthermore, there are a few flies in the ointment. However, it brings just enough new material to the table and it certainly doesn't lack for places to see and things to mutilate. Ultimately, hardcore shooting fans with a taste for that semi-stupor brought on by incessant gunplay and bloodletting will devour what Painkiller has to offer and come back for seconds.

Can story win out over gameplay?

By: Erik Brudvig

Kane & Lynch may have one of the most unfortunate titles in the history of games. Although the name may inspire thoughts of racial injustice, IO Interactive's spiritual successor to Freedom Fighters and follow up to Hitman: Blood Money has nothing to do with race relations. Even so, it will manage to raise an eyebrow or two with its visceral story and characters that almost save the title from its clunky gameplay.

The game actually gets its title from the two stars of the game, Kane and Lynch. These are not your ordinary heroes. In fact, the game begins with the duo en route to death row. A mysterious paramilitary outfit that calls itself The7 breaks the two out. Kane, it seems, is a former member of the group and has a lot of money that they feel owed. Lynch, a medicated psychopath, is recruited to keep an eye on Kane while he gets The7 what they want. From there, the plot follows a series of twists, turns and betrayals with a whole lot of killing along the way.

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The best thing Kane & Lynch has going for it is that it's a game that pulls no punches. It seems that the majority of high profile games out there today have some form of violence or at least one feature that could be called morally suspect, but few reach the levels of this title. Kane & Lynch ratchets everything up a notch to the point where you should feel uncomfortable playing this game around a young, impressionable mind. It begins with killing cops and moves straight on to curse words flying from the mouths of the various characters at unheard of rates. If you like four letter words beginning with the letter "F," then the dialogue will be right up your alley.

Foul language alone wouldn't be enough to make Kane & Lynch stand out from the myriad other titles looking to gain some notoriety. This is where Kane & Lynch earns its stripes. Rather than employing a series of cheap shock tactics as so many other games have, IO Interactive crafted an intense and visceral story to go along with the game. Say what you will about the language being over the top, but these anti-heroes are wonderfully bent. It's no easy task to create such despicable characters and then give them motivations and situations that allow even the holiest of us to relate to their situation and feel for them. These are hard men put in an impossible situation. Following them on their journey is a wild and bumpy ride.

Helping to make the story and characters even more powerful is the great way they're presented. Traditional cutscenes and voiceovers are used in between gameplay, but the story and character development doesn't ever end. Kane and Lynch continue to interact, argue and reveal more of the plot straight through the action. This does a great service towards making the entire experience feel fluid and cinematic.

As well constructed as the plot is, one would assume the game would play smoothly. Unfortunately, it does not. Instead, it plays like a game that lacks focus and needs a few more months of polish. But then, most of the gameplay feels like it was pulled directly out of a game from the last generation, so perhaps more time wouldn't have done any good.

Kane & Lynch is a third-person, squad-based shooter that, on its surface, promises players the option to play with their own style. There's a squad that you can direct either individually or as a group to take up positions of cover or attack specific targets. These men will also act on their own, so you're free to ignore them if you don't want to manage them. There's a good range of weapons, a cover system, semi-destructible environments…in short, all of the check boxes that gamers look for are filled in. It all sounds pretty good on paper.

Things start breaking down rather quickly once you start playing. For starters, the cover system is unwieldy at times and useless at others. It activates by pressing up against an object, but whether you actually get sucked into the wall is rather hit or miss, too often leaving you running into a wall head first while enemies have their way with the idiot who thinks he should keep running into a ledge. Once you do get into cover, it's oftentimes useless. Either the splash damage on weapons is turned up to high or there are clipping issues because quite regularly you'll find yourself dying while huddled behind a wall.

The enemy AI has just as many issues taking cover as you do. We've seen them press up against cover that doesn't exist and take cover on walls that leave them in plain sight. That is, of course, if they're even smart enough to do that, which isn't always the case. Call us crazy, but if we saw three friends who were standing right next to us get shot in the head one after another by a sniper rifle, we probably wouldn't sit in one place to wait and see what will happen. In Kane & Lynch, we've seen the AI do just that.

Without a good cover system, the game boils down to a pretty generic action shooter. Without a good cover system, the squad mechanics often break down into sending your team ahead as bait. New enemies are spawned when you cross specific points, so walking ahead on your own usually results in a quick death when you're ambushed.

It all comes to a head during a few needlessly frustrating sections of the game. Without them, the game could be beaten in a day. With them, many people will simply give up and move on to another title. Some of these portions are annoying because of the gameplay shortcomings (Why add a stealth section when the game has no stealth engine?), though one in particular just isn't presented in an intuitive way. We won't spoil anything. You can find these sections and be driven nuts on your own, should you decide to give Kane & Lynch a shot. It's a shame that the game doesn't play as well as you would hope, because some of the levels outside of the frustrating points are genuinely cool. The night club scene is one of these, as is the prison break level.

While IO Interactive made significant steps forward in terms of presentation and story, the team appears to have been left behind by the rest of the development community when it comes to gameplay and graphics. This isn't a first-generation game -- new hardware has been out for two years. Why do we still have underwhelming explosions? Why do we still have characters that speak without their lips moving? Why are there occasional flickering textures and visual seams where those textures meet? For such a short game, it seems that it should have been possible to nail the visuals and give us the cinematic effects a game like Kane & Lynch deserves.

It's hard to imagine how the decision was made to leave out online co-op play in Kane & Lynch. You can play straight through the campaign with a friend, but only offline on a split screen. With new standards being set every day as more and more new releases push forward the boundaries of what is expected in a game, the absence of this feature is remarkable. It's made even more confusing given the fact that there is a separate online mode already in the game.

Fragile Alliance, Kane & Lynch's online mode, is unique and a great deal of fun, especially if you have a group of friends you know particularly well to play with. The setup is this: Between four and six players are charged with collecting as much money or valuables as possible and getting out alive. The catch is that you have to split your take with the other survivors. Kill them if you want the spoils to yourself, but anybody that dies respawns on the opposite team (a team that is initially only controlled by AI bots). Come back on the other side and you can collect money from any of your former teammates that you kill and are even given a bonus if you take revenge on the person that betrayed you.

The Fragile Alliance mode sounds a bit confusing when it is first described to you, but it really is a great addition to the game. It not only fits the "bad guy" mentality, it also carves an online niche for the game in a season of game releases where a title really has to stand out to get noticed. The back and forth backstabbing in Fragile Alliance is the type of mode that only gets better the more you play it. If only the cover system and AI worked a little better, this would be a hit…also it would help if there were more than four maps. It would also help if anyone were playing online. It's not a fault of the game itself, but nearly two weeks after the game was released there are still under 100 people on the leaderboards.

Closing Comments
Kane & Lynch is a game that many people will play through and enjoy simply because of the forceful story and characters. Others will find the gameplay isn’t up to speed with the rest of the gaming world and wonder why anyone would bother. Frustration should never enter into a game because of the mechanics, but with Kane & Lynch it does. Loose gameplay, a brief campaign, and a single (albeit good) online mode with four maps hurt this title that could have been so much more.

From Russia with intelligence.

By: Gord Goble

Say what you will about Adolph and his Nazi-fied cronies in real life, but there's no doubt the bunch of 'em have played starring roles in the computer gaming world ever since that world began way back in the 1980s. Such is the case once again in Death to Spies, an intriguing, intelligent, and ultimately worthwhile third-person action-adventure where stealth is the name of the game, patience is far more than a virtue, and saving your progress is more commonplace than shooting your gun.

In Death to Spies, you play the role of a World War II Soviet counterintelligence agent whose assignment is to infiltrate the Nazi machine and wreak as much havoc as possible from within. This isn't Nazi hunting a la Wolfenstein, where you shoot first and ask questions later. As the back-of-the-box PR says, this is subterfuge and sabotage all the way, and those who try to blast their way in and out of situations will find themselves surrounded and decimated faster than a wounded gazelle at a hyena convention.

Indeed, Death to Spies consistently delivers scenarios that demand so much planning and so much thought that some will undoubtedly check out long before they've finished, slamming their noggin into their desks over and over again in complete and total frustration. It's not that the instructions for each given mission are particularly complicated. They aren't, and this certainly isn't one of those games where you consistently need to refer to your briefing to remember what you have to do. Instead, it's what you find along the way—and figuring out how to deal with it—that poses the most serious problems.

Inevitably, whether you're asked to steal documents or assassinate a key enemy figure or blow up a bridge or simply meet a comrade behind enemy lines to exchange info, the true challenge is remaining undiscovered and staying alive. To do this, you must decide on which course(s) of action will cause the least ruckus and attract the least attention. Maybe you'll need to throw an object across the road to distract one guy while you surreptitiously choke his partner. Maybe you'll need to stun some dude and temporarily hide his body where it can't be found. Perhaps you can exchange clothing with the officer you just killed, steal a quieter weapon, plant a mine somewhere, release a smoke bomb to cover your tracks, then grab the uniform of a dead driver and take his truck. And maybe you'll need to do all of the above over the course of just a single mission.

Or maybe you won't. The really cool thing about Death to Spies is its openness. Sure, you're forced to linearly make your way through the missions, but the methodology you use in each given mission may be quite different from the methodology you use the next time you undertake that same mission. Painting yourself into a corner where you have no more weapons or opportunities is a very real possibility—particularly as first aid kits are an extreme rarity—but that's why the game sports so many save slots. And saving your game is something you'll do continuously.

Is there a sense of repetition? Yes, though it's not nearly as bad as some games of this ilk, where you feel more like a mindless drone working a conveyer belt of sameness. Moreover, even simple tasks are, dare we say, interesting. Picking a lock isn't merely a matter of strolling up to a safe and hitting the "pick lock" key. You're actually asked to work on it awhile, spinning the tumblers with your mouse's scroll wheel while you search for matching pins. Aiming a sniper rifle involves looking through the scope, then holding your breath for a few precious seconds to reduce the waver. Cutting through metal mesh involves breaking out your pliers from your backpack. Carrying a body adds a ton of weight and mass, therefore drastically reducing your speed and increasing your visibility.

Having said all that, some gamers will take issue with the needless complexity involved in selecting most actions. Frantically scrolling through mini-menu choices when you're on the verge of being shot or blown up is highly annoying. Surely there has to be a better way.

From a presentation standpoint, Death to Spies is nothing if not atmospheric. Nazi posters and banners litter the walls, trumpeting the virtues of a cleansed world and heralding the dawn of a new day. Lo-fidelity gramophones play scratchy recordings of old school Germanic waltzes and marching tunes. Enemy soldiers rarely utter anything apart from a few pat, canned phrases (you won't learn much through conversation), but at least those phrases sound as good and as realistic as their uniforms look.

And virtually every manmade object you see, whether an old typewriter or phone or the wallpaper or carpeting in a hallway, seems a bit dirty, a bit disheveled—as if it's been through a war. All in all, it's a downtrodden and gritty look that really helps sell the game. Curiously, the term "Nazi" is rarely, if ever, heard or seen, and the infamous swastika is clearly avoided throughout in favor of a simple cross.

Outdoors, the graphics are distinctly 21st century. The detail level is high, and the little touches—such as the swaying shadows of wind-whipped trees, the individual blades of grass, and the uniqueness of every road, vehicle, building, and even fencepost—are impressive. Snowstorms are downright awesome.

Yet Death to Spies is not free of foibles, several of which are graphically related. For instance, should you get too close to your intended victim, you may just shoot right through him. Indeed, the two of you might stand inches apart, shooting right through one another's bodies as if they were mere apparitions. And if you want to silently strangle or chloroform your target, you'd better approach directly from behind or the game won't even allow you to attempt your maneuver. In both cases, you inevitably become the proverbial sitting duck. Bang, bang, you're dead.

And the mechanics are uneven. Though you can, for example, jump over some mighty tall fences and barriers, you may or may not be able to do the same thing when attempting to hurdle far less imposing barriers. Though you can squeeze between certain objects when traveling in one direction, you may or may not be able to do the same thing when approaching from the other side.

That unevenness unfortunately extends beyond mere mechanics and into the artificially intelligent enemy. It's not that the AI is bad, because it definitely isn't. By using the transparent overlay map that displays each soldier as a calm green or wary red triangle, and by monitoring the overall level of alertness via a series of icons that appear at the top of the screen, you can generally see what they're up to even from a distance and come to understand what you can and cannot do. And we can't fault Russian developer Haggard Games for creating AI soldiers who most often mill about aimlessly—after all, instilling purpose into every soldier would be a gargantuan achievement.

However, we were disappointed to see that the discovery of a strangled officer at his desk prompted nothing more than a few minutes of high activity, after which existed a period of calming and a too-sudden return to normal. That certainly wouldn't happen in the real world. On the other hand, should you let loose with a single machine gun blast, or should a soldier shout as you attempt to off him, every icon on the overlaid map becomes instantly alert, and you're quickly outnumbered ten to one. And then you're dead again.

Closing Comments
Even with its quirks, Death to Spies is an entertaining, varied, and highly addictive pastime for those who enjoy exercising their brain as much as their trigger finger. It's intelligently delivered, credibly presented, and anything but easy. We need more solid, thoughtful games from independent sources, and this Russian import capably proves why.

The most beautiful pelvic thrusts yet.

By: Charles Onyett

Epic's Unreal Tournament 3, actually the fourth version of the series on PC, represents a blend of progressive and old-school elements. It's a nod to fans of the original UT, released in 1999, with the return of weapons like the impact hammer and enforcer, which replace bits of the arsenal from UT 2004 like the shield gun, lightning gun, and assault rifle. Moving beyond the ballistic loadout, we see Epic pushing forward their most distinct draw, the warfare mode, an augmented version of UT 2004's onslaught. While so much of this game will feel familiar to series veterans, particularly in the deathmatch and team deathmatch modes, it's with the vehicular, large-scale combat that UT 3 makes its largest strides forward, though it still doesn't move that far ahead. Mostly, it's about delivering to fans what made the series so good to begin with: insane, ultraviolent combat, gorgeous graphics, and the most nerve-searing, vein-throttling action around.

You get six modes, not including campaign, with UT 3: deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag (CTF), vehicle capture the flag (VCTF), warfare, and duel. You'll notice that's not the same list as UT 2004's modes, since it's noticeably missing assault, something I'm not too bent out of shape about. When outside of any vehicle-related modes, gameplay proceeds much as you'd expect it to. Deathmatch maps are, with a few more spacious exceptions, confined, twisted industrial complexes full of flak fire, perilous drops, and the occasional Redeemer pickup. Everyone's wall-jumping, side-dashing, double-jumping, and firing simultaneously, making for a ludicrously action-packed experienced that's always entertaining, at least up until the point where you start getting burned out. I know that happens to me, which is why I appreciate all the other modes.

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In CTF you get a translocator device to quickly warp around a map, and when vehicle are added to the mix in VCTF or warfare you get a hoverboard. Hopping onto the floating slab happens quickly with a tap of the Q key, letting you not only move more quickly, but also tag onto the back of friendly vehicles for a boost, an ability you can and often must use to your advantage in VCTF matches since you can't pilot a vehicle with a flag. The risk comes with getting shot while riding, which smashes you to the ground, stunning you for a few precious seconds, and dropping whatever you're carrying, be it a flag in VCTF or orb in warfare.

While I had a great time with deathmatch, I couldn't help but feel it dragged a little, one of the downsides of releasing a slightly altered but largely identical shooter over and over again. Though there have been minor changes over the years, with weapon speeds, damage outputs, and player movement seeming slightly adjusted for this one, and brilliant new coats of paint, it's nearly a decade now and we're still playing roughly the same game. That being said, it's still an amazingly fluid experience. If you've never played UT before in any capacity, you really have to. Using WASD double-taps to dodge around, the way the character movement feels, the sense of weight behind the weapons and the way they're balanced against each other, it's all exceptionally well done and has a distinctive style.

The vehicles, though, are the most dynamic element, evident in warfare mode. It's based on the same node capture principles as onslaught, yet warfare features some significant changes, the most prominent being a small, glowing ball. It's called an orb, and can be carried to nodes to either provide protection for your own or instantly capture the enemy's. This makes a significant difference in how a game flows, since not only do you have to keep track of where the enemy is focusing their attack, but also where the node carrier might be. A simple strategy would be to have the bulk of your forces head over to one node while simultaneously sending the orb to another, meaning you could, theoretically, capture both at the same time (assuming, of course, one was linked and the other unlinked.) What's more, once an orb carrier is killed, the orb hits the ground and a counter begins. When zero is reached the orb resets, but in the meantime anyone can swoop in and bring it ever closer to instantly capturing a node. Enemies in the vicinity can prevent such a catastrophe by sacrificing their lives to destroy the orb, forcing the other team to make the entire journey again, and possibly giving you enough time to get your own orb carrier to the right spot to advance your team's position on the field. It's another layer of depth that makes warfare a better mode than onslaught, allowing for an even more unpredictable experience as situations shift as rapidly as an air hockey puck. In addition, you'll find more types of nodes. Countdown nodes, if captured and held, can damage an enemy core without having to lower a shield. Others perform more specific functions, like lowering bridges, affecting the position of enemy cores, spawning special vehicles, and more.

UT 2004's rides return, including the Manta, Hellbender, Goliath tank, monstrous Leviathan, and speedy Scorpion, among others. A few function slightly differently. The Scorpion, for instance, no longer fires a charged energy ribbon, but little explosive spheres, and its secondary fire razor mandibles are now front-mounted instead of back-mounted. The most notable additions to the vehicles are the new Necris machines. The Darkwalker dominates the landscape with tall, spidery legs, capable of traversing mountains and steep walls, and possesses massively powerful laser cannons, which are balanced by their slow-to-adjust aiming. There's a Viper hoverbike with the ability to perform a suicide attack, hurtling itself forward at a node or core for tremendous damage as you eject safely into the air. A stealth tank, called a Nightshade, can prowl the battlefield setting time-distortion fields, spider-mine traps, and energy shields. If you've got an irrational fear of spiders, you may even be repulsed by the utilitarian Scavenger, which quickly scampers around on three short, spindly legs. Its central sphere can rocket forward with legs spinning like razors on all sides, hop into the air, or propel forth an energy orb. Then there's a new air unit, the Fury, with its own laser cannons, as well as a Necris tank, called a Nemesis, which blasts forth energy streams and can rear up to a raised position, losing land speed but gaining a more rapid rate of fire. Epic made sure to include maps with specific Necris versions, including a Necris type of the popular Torlan map from UT 2004.

VCTF is just as frantic, since instead of merely concerning yourself with players teleporting in front of you while you escape with the flag, you have to deal with Mantas squashing you under their rotors, Scorpions shredding you to bits, or Vipers running you through. And imagine what kind of improved flag defense you can muster with a few Darkwalkers strafing its position. The best experience I had with this mode was on Sandstorm, named for the blinding sandstorms that periodically burst into existence, severely limiting visual range and providing an excellent opportunity to dart in and steal the flag. As the storm subsides, it's simply a matter of getting around a horde of Darkwalkers, Scavengers, and Vipers wheeling toward you with deadly intent. No easy task, to say the least. Or you could just grab the jump boots and pop up over the middle partition.

For anyone who feels the prospect of online play to be too daunting, there are customizable bots and even a single-player story mode to pass the hours. Bots are, as you might expect, next to useless on the easiest difficulty setting, but quite a challenge higher up. They did seem to have a few problems when it came to piloting vehicles and capturing flags, however. The plot is nothing to get excited about. A cookie-cutter Epic alpha male character named Reaper and his armored skirt seek revenge against Akasha, a rogue inquisitor of the Necris alien race. Aside from a few moments when characters poke fun at the notion of respawners and the lunacy of the tournament in general, it's a generic tale. You get a few cut-scenes, voice-overs during loading screens, and some game-altering card rewards to mask what's otherwise a sequence of team deathmatch, CTF, VCTF, and warfare matches against bots. You can, however, host your campaign matches online and have others join up, but then again, if you're the type that plays UT offline, such a feature won't matter. In a frustrating turn of events, even with such a limited story, there's still a cliffhanger ending. This trend with games really needs to stop, particularly with you, Epic. You did it with Gears, now you've done it with UT3. For shame. Even if the story doesn't make any sense, even if the characters are as endearing as a toothpick, at least give use some sense of closure, instead of leaving us with an all-too-obvious wait for the next installment setup.

Aside from the frenetic online action and single-player mode, UT has always been known for its comprehensive feature set. If you're a series veteran, this is something you've come to expect, but it's worth noting for any newcomers. UT has statistic tracking, full bot support, an enormous number of maps tailored to each game mode, and dedicated servers as well as plenty of little extras like game-altering mutators, character model customization, and UI tweaking options. Community is a large part of what makes this game so successful, so expect it to be supported with more maps and mods as time goes on.

Then there are the graphics, which are practically without fault. They're done up in the traditional UT style - heavily armored, muscular characters running across industrial sci-fi settings, only now you get even more of an alien look with the Necris stages, vehicles, and character models. The game's graphical prowess serves to make more satisfying the crux of UT 3's appeal - its moments. Leaping off a stone ledge only to get smashed in the teeth by the leading edge of a Manta. Circle strafing a deployed Leviathan in a Scorpion as AVRiLs pour in from all sides. Blasting flak around a corner for a kill, executing a perfect shock core explosion, gruesomely detonating another player with your impact hammer, getting a non-scoped sniper headshot, or firing Vipers into nodes - they're such satisfying moments, made all the more impressive by the amazing visuals whirling around your constantly shifting reticule and, of course, the announcer.

Closing Comments
At its core, Unreal Tournament 3 offers exactly what its predecessors (specifically UT '99 and '04) did to make it so popular: preposterous action at blindingly fast speeds. It's all over the top, soaked in blood, nonsensical (hoverboards and stealth tanks?) and bathed in an electric light. Warfare mode is an excellent addition to the series, proving to be a deeper version of onslaught, and the additional Necris vehicles make both it and VCTF all the more worthwhile and enjoyable. Then there are all the smaller scale but still very much significant changes, like the hoverboards, warfare orbs, and slight variations to weapon functionality that work to keep the game from getting stale. Deathmatch, however, still feels very similar, and is therefore less of a draw for me. If you've been playing the series all along, expect the same sort of thing only with a sparkling graphical luster. If you've never played this game before, do so immediately. It's still one of the best shooters on the market, even if it seems to be bumping against the boundaries of its potential. Keep in mind if you've never particularly liked UT, this version will do absolutely nothing to sway you.

Is the gas tank half-full or half-empty?

By: Chris Roper, Ryan Clements

EA's Need for Speed series has long been an ever-evolving franchise, one that changes up its focus, mechanics and style every couple of years. Though the game sells incredibly well, the developer/publisher doesn't like to sit still. This obviously means that the series has had its ups and downs, and unfortunately Need for Speed ProStreet isn't one of the ups.

ProStreet is a game that doesn't really seem to know what it's trying to be. It's been years since we've seen a Need for Speed title that focused solely on track racing, with the franchise branching out into open world settings with a story, cop chases and all sorts of other things to make it stand out. ProStreet, however, goes back to the track-based racing, putting the player into race after race on closed circuits, and then sending them back to a menu after each race is over.

This setup is perfectly fine and, in this case, does work well to some extent, but there's not really a whole lot of extra "stuff" outside of the races that makes it seem like Black Box had a good idea of exactly what it was trying to accomplish. Yes, the fundamentals are there and the setup does work well, but the bulk of the presentation doesn't feel all that robust, especially when compared to what we've seen in recent years.

As well, the control scheme and arcade vs. sim aspects feel a bit confused. ProStreet adds a ton of great customization options to the franchise, which we'll get to in a bit, but the driving physics are anything but realistic. They're an odd in-between of the two and wind up in some place that really just does not work very well at all. The series has generally had strong racing controls, but those were somehow lost in the latest game.

Most of the cars in the game feel like caricatures of their real-life counterparts, but not in a good way. Most every vehicle drives like a boat and feels very reluctant to want to turn at all. Even vehicles in hardcore driving sims like Gran Turismo turn with much greater ease than most any of the vehicles found here, and yet the game isn't even trying to be ultra-realistic.

A few of us around the office drive some of the cars that you'll find in the game, like a 2007 Civic Si (which is identical to the '06 in the game) and a 2006 Pontiac GTO, and none of them handle anything like the real deal. ProStreet's version of the GTO barely turns at anything above 30mph, and doesn't really instill any sense of its 400hp engine. The real Civic Si is a nimble little car, but ProStreet's Si feels very top-heavy and slides around corners like they're covered with ice.

And though we don't drive every car in the game, it's clear that most of them, if not all, do not drive like what we would expect from the real thing. It's sad, too, because this one, huge fault brings down a game that would otherwise be fairly solid.

Though there's not a lot of pizzazz and whatnot to it as we mentioned before, the Race Day progression does offer up a nice assortment of race events for you to partake in. Each Race Day features a handful of events -- be they grip races, drag races, sector challenges or what have you -- and pretty much all of them are good fun.

Drag races start out with a mini-game where you heat up your tires before heading to the line, and then it's all about timing your shifts, using your nitrous at the right time and keeping your car in a straight line, which can be tricky when you get to the really fast cars. The tire heating mini-game can get a little old, especially since each drag race event has three runs, so you'll play the game three times in the span of a couple minutes, but it's fun to try and shave a couple hundredths of a second off your time by getting a perfect start.

The Sector Shootout challenges can be fun, but there were a few occasions where we had problems with the driver AI and the basic setup for the event. The idea is that the track is broken into a number of sectors, and if you can post the best time for a sector you'll score points. The score counts down as time rolls on. So if someone scores 350 points on a sector, but then you come through and score 360, you'll add that total to your score. Score less, though, and you'll get zero.

It's a good idea, except that it's fundamentally flawed. You begin in a staggered manner instead of all at once, so the lead car automatically has a chance to set the record for each section and score points. You don't lose any if someone bests one of your times, so the lead automatically has a huge lead. As well, if there are ten sectors on a map, and one car has set the record on all of them, and then you come in and beat nine of those sectors by a small margin, you'll still be way behind because you've gotten zero points for the tenth and the other scores were close enough that it doesn't make up the difference. Had you lost your points when someone else beat your score, everything would have been fine. But as it is, it's fundamentally broken.

The track design is decent, but nothing stands out whatsoever. All of the races take place out in the middle of nowhere on closed-off tracks, so you won't see too many interesting trackside vistas or what have you. They're also all rather flat and most of them lack characteristic turns or sections. They're all different enough that you'll quickly learn the layouts and won't be confused as to what track you're on at the start, but nothing here screams great track design.

The car customization features here are great, however. As with a number of the previous games, you can swap in new visual parts for your car and change in and out internal upgrades that'll boost your performance. What's cool though is that AutoSculpt, which was introduced in last year's Need for Speed Carbon, now actually affects performance. Changing the angle of certain parts will increase or decrease drag, which then has a direct impact on your acceleration, top speed and handling.

As well, you can now tweak a number of settings like shock spring rate, roll, nitrous boost and whatnot to fiddle with how your car will perform. If you don't know what you're doing you can just leave them at the default settings, but these let you go in and mess with the metal if you want to.

The online options also have a cool new component in that while you're perfectly capable of partaking in live races, you can also set up a Race Day for others to race in. The difference here is that it's not a live event, so other players can go in and compete at their own leisure and the person with the most points at the end of the time period wins. You can mix and match any of the event types, lock down the available cars or leave the selection wide open and basically set up the Race Day however you want. The problem with the PC version, as with other multiplatform PC games, is that no one is actually online. When we checked, the Leaderboards were empty. Nice.

Closing Comments
Need for Speed ProStreet is a disappointing effort in a franchise that has generally been rather solid. It sort of feels like EA is starting over again, leaving the open-world aspects to other games like its own Burnout Paradise, but is seems like Black Box didn't know what to do with what was left. It could have still been a decent game had the cars driven well, but unfortunately their performance is shoddy. Car lovers will find something to like here due to the customization options, but Need for Speed has certainly seen better days.

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

By: Dan Adams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Allen 'Delsyn' Rausch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Nate Ahearn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An epic reimagining or colossal disappointment?

By: Charles Onyett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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