The First Templar

Kalypso and Haemimont Games have a good relationship going. Kalypso, normally known for budget titles and odd simulation games on the PC, have substantially improved their image with the very well-received Tropico 3. Haemimont Games, who had been known for slightly obscure city-building games, created the humorous and enjoyable city-management game with Kalypso’s help. It looks like they’ll do the same with Tropico 4.

The duo is trying something odd with a new IP called The First Templar. This is a co-operative third-person hack ‘n’ slash using the Tropico engine. The Tropico engine is powerful enough for zooming into the city streets of a tropical metropolis, but can it survive a shift in genre?

The setting is eminently compelling. After the first Assassin’s Creed game, it became obvious that 13th century crusade-era video games were sorely underrepresented. The First Crusade takes a separate perspective from Assassin’s Creed. It’s a hack ’n’ slash title about a French crusader searching for the Holy Grail. Nobody knows if it’s good or evil, but the relic represents actual salvation for our knight. It seems the Knights Templar, both a powerful military and economic institution in Europe, have made many enemies across the continent. From here players will branch out across Europe, battling soldiers, mutant humans, and even the Inquisition.

Unfortunately, The First Templar is not a pretty game. Textures are stretched across the landscape, and the environments look mundane. The character models are fairly unimpressive, and aliasing is a major visual drag. Some of the buildings appear technically sound, though, a detail worth noting considering their role as accurate historical representations of real buildings.

Combat is fairly standard stuff. Haemimont wants to make the game as historically correct as possible, so fighting is mostly sword swings. However, each of the characters have skill trees to upgrade stats, abilities, and special attacks. Special attacks are tied to the zeal meter. Since there is always at least two characters fighting together, players can switch back and forth to utilize each characters special skill sets. The action feels fairly basic, and isn’t terribly fresh or new.

Thankfully, the drop-in, drop-out co-op looks promising, allowing players to roll with the French templar or one of two pals: a fellow knight and a sexy noble woman who has been declared a heretic. It’s a simple system that promises to work well due to its fundamental design.

The First Templar doesn’t encourage high expectations; it just feels like a second rate game. Heamimont has a few months to fix any problems, but the genre shift may have caused them to lose some of the je ne sais quoi that made Tropico 3 so delightful. Hopefully they can get it together for the May 10 launch.

Read more »

Yakuza 4

What made last year's Yakuza 3 great was its story. I started out as a reformed Japanese mobster (see: yakuza) who didn't want trouble, but people messed with my orphanage so I got back into the life of beating people's asses. It was a fun ride that allowed me to look past the game's flaws. Yakuza 4's story is split between four different characters who each have a part in the major plot but don't come together until the very end. Each tale is constrained with little room to grow and the overall plot is longwinded and a bit hard to follow.

In short, the lackluster narrative totally knocks the wind out of the best thing this series had going for it.

Yakuza 4 is a mafia movie in a JRPG/brawler hybrid. Through four acts and a short finale, I played as a loan shark, an escaped convict, a jaded cop and that reformed yakuza I mentioned a while ago. Each time I'd start as one of these guys, I'd begin leveling him up, learning new moves, and figuring out his personal history.

The majority of their habits boil down to punching and kicking dudes in the face. As I'd walk down the street in Tokyo's fictional red light district (the spot where nearly the entire game plays out), random people would run up and challenge me to brawls. This is that JPRG element at work. I get in the random battle, smear my opponent's blood on my knuckles, and bank experience points to make my character better than ever. As I wail on guys, I'm filling a Heat meter that allows me to execute devastating finishers like bashing a guy's head with a baseball bat.

It's fun and brutal. There's a sick satisfaction to the final blow I'd land and the slow motion tumble my victim would take while spewing out blood. I dig the fighting, but boss fights are cheap. The AI could pull off moves I couldn't and never missed a move due to the lackluster targeting like I did.

If you're keeping track, all that fighting is largely untouched from Yakuza 3. Nearly all the Heat finishers I've seen are recycled from the last game. The new characters come with unique abilities -- the policeman can parry and the con man can bulldoze people -- but outside of a few person-specific moves, it's well-worn territory. Not to mention that I spent all this time leveling-up a character just to switch to another and do it all over again to unlock very similar moves.

I had similar complaints about the last Yakuza -- you're just doing the same thing over and over again -- but back then, the story carried the game. Here, that doesn't happen.

Read more »

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

Sony and Naughty Dog were on hand at last week's Game Developers Conference to show off a bit of new content in Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. And when we say "a bit," we really mean it. The press got to see a quick cutscene revealing the game's primary villain, and then it was on to the same burning chateau demo we saw back when the game was introduced in December. Fortunately, Sony did bring along some 3D glasses so we could see how the gameplay looked with the Z-axis all poking out and whatnot. So how's it all coming along? Well, this will come as a surprise to approximately zero people, but Uncharted 3 looks great no matter how many dimensions you're experiencing.

Let's start with this new bad guy…or rather bad lady in this case. Her name's Catherine Marlowe, and according to developer Naughty Dog, she's quite the evil mastermind. Marlowe is the head of a highly powerful cabal (read: shadowy organization) that began during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. We're not entirely sure what sort of conspiracies this cabal gets up to, but we were told that they operate with a brutal task force of former special forces agents to get whatever it is they need done. Now Marlowe is after the ring that Nathan Drake carries around his neck (the yin to his half-tucked shirt's yang) because of its connection to Sir Francis Drake. Obviously, Nate would very much like to hold onto it.

Marlowe was shown being all snide and villainous in a cutscene plucked right from the game's storyline. Sully and Drake are violently knocked from a doorway into a dimly lit urban alley, likely somewhere in London judging from the well-armed guards with English accents standing by to keep our pair of heroes from doing anything stupid. To drive home the point, these guards give Drake and Sully a pretty good beatdown despite the fact that the two are dressed in surprisingly snappy formalwear. Soon enough, Marlowe shows up and has a less-than-pleasant conversation with Drake. If we had to describe her look and sound, it would be Dame Judi Dench's fun-hating evil twin. With Helen Mirren's hair. And a giant umbrella knife. Listen, we're getting sidetracked--this lady is nasty. That's the important thing.

After this brief look at the game's new villain, Sony and Naughty Dog passed out the shutter glasses to show how Uncharted 3 looks in 3D. We were situated too far away from the TV to see if there was a noticeable impact on the game's resolution with 3D enabled--an issue with recent games like Killzone 3. However, we did notice that the game's 3D effects add a pretty substantial sense of scale to the climbing and platforming sequences. In this burning chateau demo, Drake and Sully are trying to flee a burning mansion as crackling walls and support beams are toppling down around them. During those moments when Drake has to balance across a narrow beam above a massive pit of fire, or shimmy his way along a narrow ledge, the 3D effect makes the drop below seem that much more ominous. The effect is substantially more subtle during combat sequences, where nothing really popped out at us. But when you're staring down a potentially deadly ledge, the effect is much more pronounced.

Sony's GDC demo of Uncharted 3 was an impressive showing, though we'd be lying if we said we weren't hoping for more substantially new content out of the event. Still, we've got plenty of time to go until the game's November release, so we'll just bide our time knowing that Naughty Dog--with all those Game of the Year trophies on the shelves--probably knows what it's doing.

Read more »

Sega Rally Online Arcade

Sega Rally Online Arcade comes from a whole different era, a time when places like “Tropical” and “Alpine” were perfectly valid locations for a racing title, or when unnatural racing physics were applied to real-world cars. Sega Rally Online Arcade embodies this slightly off-kilter version of racing, and it seems that it could even exceed the standards of its predecessors.

Announced last month, Sega Rally Online Arcade borrows elements from previous Sega Rally titles—such as Sega Rally 3 and Sega Rally Revo—updates the cars somewhat, and takes them online. Players will jump back into the seats of the Ford Focus and Mitsubishi Evos and drift through very familiar tracks, now with online support. We were only shown three levels, and with only 13 cars to choose from, the offerings are not as varied as they were in the past.

Fans of Sega’s Rally franchise will find plenty to like. Returning tracks from previous games bring a bit of the familiar, and the active road degradation will greatly impact road control. Levels shift from dirt, snow, sand, and tarmac, and vehicles control differently depending on type. Overall, Sega Rally Online Arcade is the rally racing experience players have known since 1995.

Multiplayer is the big focus of the game, with six-player online providing a key component of the experience. Single-player will unlock more courses and cars, but online multiplayer is the main draw.

That’s really all there is to it. Sega Rally Online Arcade is an online version of a recognizable brand, a sort of “best of” for the franchise. It’ll be out later this year for PSN and XBLA.

Read more »

Tropico 4

There was a lot to love about Tropico 3. Developer Haemimont and publisher Kalypso worked hard to revive the franchise that died in 2003, and the end product was full of charm and fun, not to forget a substantial amount of polish. Now they’re working on Tropico 4, and while the game doesn’t feel like a substantial change from its predecessor, there is promise for a solid continuation of Tropico 3 type entertainment.

Tropico 3 played on the idea of dictatorship extremely well. El Presidente could be an evil man bearing low morals and a weak GI tract or a beloved hero raising the people of Tropico out of the ashes of middling third-world living. Either way, El Presidente was a dictator plain and simple, and the player wielded absolute control of the nation.

Tropico 4 builds on this concept even more. Yes, Tropico is still a small island, but this time El Presidente has higher goals. Instead of just building alliances with the Soviet Union or the US, the player’s goal is to turn Tropico into a first-world superpower.

There is a completely new focus to the game. Players still start off small, but even small actions make big changes. For example, should the player start mining, El Presidente would have to build schools, churches, and bars for the miners and their families. Bars cause problems, so police enforcement is needed, and with the boosted economy, piers are needed to import and export goods. And that’s just the beginning. If a players starts constructing amusement parks, tourists will arrive, so players have to be aware where on the island their resources are and where they should build hotels and attractions.

As the island becomes wealthier, water parks, stock exchanges, zoos and other high-end services can be built. By incorporating all of these services into your nation, Tropico can reach superpower status. Tropico 4 is very much like Tropico 3—a direct sequel that won’t reinvent the series, only expand upon it. There are 20 new missions on 10 new maps, and the 20 new building types lean toward the technically frivolous. These services signify a shift toward the new “first-world” focus of the game.

Like previous games, the decisions of El Presidente can have good and bad effects on the people. Secret police can be sent to assassinate unruly citizens, or they can be outright executed. However, execute that farmer for not selling his property, and people will dislike you. Assassinate him with the KGB or CIA, and receive no repercussions. Should colleges students protest due to educational budget cuts, you can pay them off, ignore them, arrest them, or punish them. Every action affects how the people of Tropico respond. El Presidente can keep all the money for himself, and upgrade his island in a poor manner at the expense of his people. In contrast, he can invest into his nation and have it slowly become relevant. It’s a balance players must strike on their own, and everything from forging alliances to appointing ministers will impact that progression.

The Council of Ministers is a new addition to Tropico 4. Individual citizens can be appointed to the council, and depending on their educational background and interests, they can prove helpful or hurtful. Depending on how outrageous El President’s laws and edicts are—such as substantially raising taxes on food—ministers can make it more palatable for the people. Players will also be dealing with lobbyists from different industries, indicating a much more political focus in Tropico 4.

The last new addition to the franchise is even more interactive disasters. Elements completely outside the control of the player, such as volcanoes, droughts and tornadoes, join the older disasters in wreaking havoc. Developer Haemimont knows that these were some of the more popular features in the game, so expect El Presidente to deal with natural disasters more often.

Tropico 4 is well on its way to becoming a solid sequel to Tropico 3. With new features including Facebook and Twitter support, publisher Kalypso is keeping the game progressive, while familiar gameplay will keep returning players coming back. We’ll see if Tropico 4 lives up to the surprise and success of its predecessor this April.

Read more »

RIFT

Trion Worlds is slowly unleashing its new MMO, RIFT, onto the world and it’s shaping up to be quite a worthy experience. The third round of limited beta concluded on the December 31, and fans have been able to play as both the Defiant and as the Guardians. There is a new contender in town. World of Warcraft might have to watch its back.

RIFT takes place in the world of Telara, where the Defiant and the Guardians are at war with not only themselves, but the otherworldly rifts that tear open the sky and unleash its hordes upon unsuspecting victims. Though the Defiant is generally portrayed as bad, and the Guardians as good, no side is inherently good or evil, as their motives are both sound, and both fight for what they believe in. You take on the role of a created Ascended, and are whisked away back in time (after a few tutorial quests) to prevent the future calamities that are threatening the very destruction of your world.

One thing you will come across very early on is the ability to multiclass. Starting out from four Callings, the Warrior, Mage, Cleric and Rogue, you are able to pick three out of eight available souls for each class. For instance, the Warrior is able to pick from the Champion, Reaver, Paladin, Warlord, Paragon, Riftblade, Beastmaster and Void Knight souls, and form a new hybrid class that uses skills from each soul. There are never enough points to max out all skills, so number crunchers can rest assured that they can put their skill-calculators to good use and carefully plan out their trees.

I chose the Warrior calling and found myself drawn to the Beastmaster soul, as I wanted to focus on damage as well as have a pet to help me out in battle. As my second soul, I chose the Void Knight, who specializes in anti-magic abilities and pacts and plays a more defensive role. The third soul was the Champion, the all out offensive DPS class that specializes in 2-handed weapons. Through this combination of souls, I was able to create a class that’s unique to me and my play-style.

One of the main draws are the titular rifts that can and will spawn at any moment and at any place. An outpost you might think is safe can turn into a fiery battlezone as a fire rift tears open the sky and pours demons and monsters upon unsuspecting victims. It’s then up to you and a handful of nearby players to slay the monsters and close the rift back up. These random and unscheduled events bring a sense of uncertainty, yet are incredibly fun, assuming you have players around who are willing to help you out, as these mobs tend to be quite powerful.

Every MMO faces concerns over grinding and fetch quests. Though there is no shortage of quests to take on, they all feel fresh and engaging. Whether it’s to escort an NPC through a dangerous zone, or turn lazy students into animals to teach them a lesson, I never felt bored. So far I have not encountered a need to grind at all, as quests more than compensated me with enough XP. Dying is handled similarly to WoW. If you die, you have an option to resurrect at the graveyard or run to your body and resurrect there. Once every hour, you’re also able to Soul Walk, which let’s you come back to life right on the spot.

One glance at RIFT and you’ll see that the game is absolutely stunning, provided you have the rig to maximize your graphic settings. It might not be the most original when it comes to control and overall user interface, but I think that’s what Trion is trying to capitalize on. Rather than completely reworking their own UI, RIFT plays a lot like World of Warcraft, and other similar MMOs. Though this might come across as a cop-out, it ensures that you’ll be able to jump into RIFT and feel right at home, if you’re already an established veteran of MMOs.

Small touches show the developer’s expertise in the genre. For example: I am a great offender of Alt+Tabbing to other programs during other MMOs, so I often click back to find myself being attacked or already dead. If you minimize RIFT and get attacked, the tab on your Start bar starts to flash, alerting you to maximize the window and defend yourself. It’s a feature overlooked by other MMOs, and one that will almost certainly become standard after RIFT’s release.

Trion’s promise to release a “complete and finished” MMO on launch looks like it’s slowly coming true. Even in beta, where there are bugs to be encountered, the game already plays like a charm and has me itching to go back and join my fellow Telarians.

Read more »

Dead Island

Dead Island came out of nowhere for most gamers with an extremely impressive trailer that has garnered a lot of support. It was a great introduction into the setting and tone of the game, but there wasn’t a speck of gameplay so skeptics were present in full force. I can understand why someone wouldn’t want to get too excited for a game based just off a cinematic trailer, but after seeing the game at GDC I think that all the skeptics will be pleasantly surprised.

The trailer making its way on the internet is actually just the start of the game and shows the initial outbreak of zombies. You play one of the lucky survivors who were able to make it out of the hotel with all your limbs and organs intact. When the game starts up you can choose between one of four different classes: tank, assassin, jack-of-all trades, and a leader character. This choice will affect the skills you have available to you as you level up. The developers like to call the game a Zombie-Slasher/Action RPG and I think the new genre designation is apt. Instead of focusing on the use of guns and ranged weapons like most zombie games, Dead Island is a melee focused game that forces you to get right up in the face of all of your undead opponents. The first weapon I saw was a simple boat oar but as you wander around the island you can find new weapons like mallets or even craft your own using materials found around the island such as a machete with a battery slapped onto it to give it an electric attack or bombs strapped to throwing knives to make “sticky bombs.”
I suggest not getting too attached to any weapon you find though because smashing skulls over and over again has its consequences and your wonderful new machete won’t last forever. Every weapon you pick up has three different stats connected to it: Damage, Force, and Reach. Your weapon’s reach is one of the most important qualities since getting close to zombies is usually very ill advised, but that’s not to say you don’t have some other options. Every weapon you pick up can be thrown and they do a surprising amount of damage even if you throw something as ungainly as a sledge hammer. Every zombie you kill gives experience and once you level up you can unlock skills in a couple of different trees (fury, combat, and survival for the tank class) and your health and stamina increase to take you from green horn tourist to a zombie-killing, Radioshack-loving badass.

The entire island is presented as an open world that you can travel around at your leisure (except for the zombies of course) so although you have a main story and main quest to work through there are also plenty of side quests you can do if you like such as helping a civilian you see trapped in a car surrounded by zombies. Put in some effort and you can even get a vehicle so you can go touring around the island. The demo I saw started at a beach resort and it fully embodied the “Paradise gone mad” ideal that the developers mentioned with blood filled hot tubs and gore stained surf boards but they assured me that there were other environments on the island.

Any zombie game worth its salt needs some variety to the zombies and Dead Island was not found wanting. You have your standard slowly shambling zombies as well as zombies on fire, suicide bomber zombies, zombies with weapons and a number of boss zombies. The developers showed off their Dead Space-like dismemberment gameplay by breaking the legs of some fast moving zombies to slow them down and cutting off the arm of a zombie holding a weapon to disarm him (HA!.....disarm).
Left 4 Dead has shown people how much fun zombie killing can be with a group so of course Dead Island has that as well. You can play with up to four people with drop in/drop out multiplayer. Even though there are four character classes, that doesn’t mean everyone has to pick a different class when they play multiplayer. Instead you choose your character when you start the game and that is permanent for that save file. Once you get yourself situated you can then opt to turn on the online and join anyone who would like the help regardless of their class.

So all in all, Dead Island is looking to be Dead Space, Fallout, Left 4 Dead, and Dead Rising 2 all mashed together into a Zombie-Slasher/Action RPG. No release date has been announced but keep your eye out for this game when it releases for PS3, 360, and PC.

Read more »

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

Let me explain exactly why you should be excited for The Witcher 2. It all starts with the sidequest I got to play during a hands-on demonstration of the game at Atari’s offices in New York. Tomasz Gop, Senior Producer at Witcher developer CD Projekt RED, was on hand to walk me through the game and answer some of my questions.

The demo opens with the protagonist, Geralt of Rivia, in the middle of a dwarven town, presumably on his way to a tavern – though, that’s entirely up to the player. What transpires is completely optional, “Not all players will actually get to see it, because of the non-linearity that we have in the game,” says Gop. “The locations are just one of the aspects of [the non-linearity]. So depending on how you play, you go here or there, some things are only shown to you if you choose this or that.”

Optional content is nothing new – after all, Fallout 3 famously gave you the option to nuke an entire town and multiple quest lines - but when I explain the care and depth that went into this simple side-quest, you’ll understand that Gop and his team are doing something very special.

Ahead of Geralt is a collection of dwarven buildings, huts, and shops divided by vast stone walls and set against an ominous mountainside. “It’s actually been quite complex because Andrzej Sapkowski, the author of the books about the witcher - he has described dwarven interiors and buildings and…well, it wasn’t that much of a reference. He gave us, ‘Dwarven interiors are like a reflection of their souls, they’re really harsh on the outside, and really warm on the inside.’ What do you do with that?” asks Gop.

What they did was create a space that looks lived-in and teeming with life. I head down the stairwell before me and approach a tavern entrance. At the door to the tavern is a man, and the beginning of the side-quest that progresses the demo. The problem, it seems, is that some people have been found murdered, and Geralt has been called upon to help solve the crime. Thanks to his experience, Geralt is a sort of fantasy CSI detective, able to make conclusions about what kind of monster may have committed the killings based on the state of the bodies.

From there, Geralt is to head to a crypt outside of town to examine the bodies, but I wanted to do a bit of exploring first, so I headed into the tavern. Inside were dozens of villagers, Geralt’s bard Dandelion, and a smattering of simple bar games. Each of the bar games is a simple mini-game. Arm wrestling, for example, has you using the mouse to keep a slider within a moving safe zone, while fights play out like a quick-time event.

I then spoke to Dandelion, who offered up a new song to which Geralt was not interested. The banter between the two friends shows the sharpness of the writing in The Witcher 2. It’s the kind of clever, compelling, and even funny dialogue you usually only get in a more linear Bioware RPG, not huge, open-world fare.

On my way out I checked my journal to get back to the quest, and I got a peek at the way the quest log is handled. “We actually approached the quest log from a different angle. We described the log as if it was Dandelion who writes the story of what Geralt does,” Gop explains. “If you were to finish the game and print out it out it would resemble kind of a book.”

It goes even further – Gop details what he says is a minor feature, but puts even more emphasis on the openness of the game: “Because of the non-linearity level that we have, we believe that for most people, if they have finished the game and speak about it with their friends and colleagues, it will feel different for a lot of people. So we thought, we will integrate that with social media. You will have the option to synchronize your progress through the game with Facebook or Twitter for others to see.”

Heading out of town and through the forest to the crypt where the bodies are, I get my first taste of combat. The combat in The Witcher 2 is surprisingly action-oriented, though never so fast-paced you can’t get a handle on it if you’re more acclimated to an RPG pace. Geralt has melee weapons, magic signs, and back up weapons like the bomb the developers conveniently left in my inventory. My first move was to toss a bomb into the mob of soldiers attacking me, which stunned them and left them open to brutal finishers. From there things got a bit more complicated, as the group wasn’t afraid to surround me and pound away mercilessly. Blocking and evading are an important aspect of the combat, with successful blocks staggering opponents and leaving them open to attack. Combined with magic like a force push, fireball, and shield, players must use their full repertoire to open enemies’ defenses. The combat, above all else, has a good pace to it, with give and take between opponents and a visceral feel to the attacks.

With the mob dispatched, I headed across a river, through the woods, and into the crypt. The Witcher 2 is a beautiful game – if, like me, you’re a sucker for fantasy worlds that let you run around in the woods, this game is a dream come true.

Inside the crypt, I found the bodies of the dead and made my way to the freshest corpse. From there I was given multiple options to example different parts of the body, and depending on what I found, the plot would play out differently. For example, one wound has something embedded in it, but Geralt can’t get at it without the proper instruments. “You’d actually unlock another branch of the quest, which would give you a bunch of new conclusions,” says Gop. Underneath the corpse, I find Dandelion’s poetry book. Geralt concludes that the murders have been committed by a Succubus. So off I go to question Dandelion and find the Succubus.

On the way back I’m attacked by a giant spider, and even with the demo’s generous health boost, the thing does some hefty damage. “We do not auto-scale opponents. Normally, you’d probably want to run away and come back a few hours later. It’s part of our philosophy – we don’t believe auto-scaled opponents are fun, we believe they take fun out of the RPG.”

I returned to the tavern and spoke to Dandelion, who told me that his poetry book was recently stolen. Geralt hatched a scheme to have Dandelion read the poetry book and lure out the Succubus. I headed out of town to where the Succubus should be and the game put me in the shoes of Dandelion. From there I was tasked with reciting a decent poem from multiple dialogue options. “If you were to read the volume of poetry [beforehand] it would help you in this part,” Gop explains.

After figuring out the right combination of lines, the Succubus revealed its lair and invited Dandelion in. From there I could guide Dandelion back to Geralt or down into the lair. I went with sending Dandelion to his sexy doom, to which Geralt grunted, “Fucking idiot actually went in.”

Resuming control of Geralt, I headed in to save Dandelion and confront the Succubus. “You might fight with her, or you might speak to her,” Gop explained. “If you fight with her and kill her, the quest ends. If you speak to her you will see another way to develop this quest. You can reason with her and find out more about what happened. Depending on how you play, you may have not even been half way through this quest.”

Speaking further on the non-linear narrative, Gop told me the game has 16 different endings, some of which are locked out almost immediately based on early game choices. The game is even more non-linear than the original, which was a decision made based on fan feedback. “We knew from the first Witcher that people appreciate it, because most of the praise that we had was for doing a non-linear story.”

The Witcher 2 will allow players to import their save from the original, allowing for three different openings to the game. When I asked how this affects newcomers to the series, Gop reassured me, “Even though it’s a franchise, we’re not going to do a game that people are lost in.”

As someone who has an old PC and a new-found desperate need to get my hands on this game, I asked Gop about a console version. “We would like to do a console version of The Witcher 2, we never denied that.”

The original Witcher was intended to be released on consoles, but the outsourced port of the game didn’t work out. “One of the main lessons that we learned from this [is that] whenever we want to do a console game, we also definitely should do it in-house. If we ever approach The Witcher 2 or once again The Witcher 1, we’d definitely do it in-house.”

If this short demo is anything to go by, The Witcher 2 is going to be a serious force this year. Even against the likes of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Dragon Age 2, CD Projekt’s latest looks to offer the most depth, maturity, and non-linear storytelling of any upcoming RPG – I can’t wait.

Read more »

Call of Juarez: The Cartel

Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a modern-day excursion through the seedy drug cartel business, the setting of which includes the Mexcian city of Ciudad Juárez, a town situated steps away from El Paso, Texas. It's unsurprising that the area's residents aren't entirely enthralled about what they consider a glorification of the drug-related violence they've experienced.

Juárez is regarded as one of the most violent cities in North America. More than 3,000 people were murdered within its borders last year as the result of drug trading - that's more than eight murders every day, on average. On the other side of the border is El Paso, one of the biggest 20 metropolitan areas in the US and, in contrast, a city that's rated as one of the safest in the country.

The border between the two cities is one of the most intense and storied areas throughout the entire continent. That makes for good fiction, which is why the game exists. Nevertheless, El Paso County Sheriff's Office Commander Gomecindo Lopez believes it's inappropriate.

"In games you get hurt, you die and you get another life. In real life, you only die once. This goes along the lines of narco-songs that portray cartel leaders as heroes, but both are a gross misrepresentation of who they are. They are criminals," said Lopez in a Reuters interview.

Laurencio Barraza, who works with children in Juárez, commented, "Lots of kids say they want to be a hitman, because they are the ones that get away with everything." Ubisoft's new game, he says, will only make things worse. "This glorifies violence, as if victims were just another number or another bonus."

In response to the criticisms, an Ubisoft spokesperson said, "Call of Juarez: The Cartel is purely fictional and developed by the team at Techland for entertainment purposes only."

"While Call of Juarez: The Cartel touches on subjects relevant to current events in Juárez, it does so in a fictional manner that makes the gaming experience feel more like being immersed in an action-movie than in a real-life situation."

Ubisoft has no plans to tweak the game, which is slated for launch this summer. Little has been released about the game, but you can check out its official site for a few bites of info.

Read more »

Homefront

If you are looking for a new game for your console, then you might be interested to know that a new game called Homefront is soon to arrive by early 2011. Basically, Homefront is an upcoming first-person shooter video game that was developed by Kaos Studios and published by THQ and comes with a tag line “Home is where the war is.” This game was written by John Milius, the man behind the Red Dawn and the co-writer of Apocalypse Now.

For those people who are not familiar with the story, this game is set in the near future America 17 years from now where a nuclear-armed Korean’s People Army invades the US. One of the major portions of the story focuses not only on the growth of the North Korean force, but also on the economic downfall of the US.

Homefront is basically a speculative fiction that will focus on the fall of the US so in this game the player will be invited to be a part of the American forces and make use of guerrilla tactics, take command of various military vehicles and utilized advanced drone technology. This game will come up with a vehicle- based 32-player online warfare that will make use of dedicated servers.

This game is intended to be launched for various consoles such as the Xbox 360, PS 3 and PC. However, the minimum system requirement for this game has not been provided yet. In addition to what has been mentioned about this game, this game will also feature fictional physics that will surely attract more players to play the game.

Homefront’s gameplay was also completely revised and focus more on a cinematic and character driven experience. And aside from being a single –player gameplay, this upcoming game will also come up with a multi-player component that focuses mainly on a large scale vehicle based combat. It will also feature a new battle points system that will allow players to purchase weapons, gears and vehicles. Players will have the chance to earn points by getting kills and taking objectives.

Homefront will be released in North America on March 8, 2011 followed by Australia on March 10, 2011, March 11, 2011 in Europe and April 29, 2011 in Japan. THQ is very confident that this game will become and hit and there were also some rumors that even this game has not yet been release, THQ is already planning to come up with a sequel. So always keep posted for more details.

Read more »

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Assasssin's Creed 2 was a major success and game of the year contender for 2009, continuing the saga of the assassins against the templars in brilliant fashion. Initially, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood was a disappointment. Fans were expecting a new setting with new characters in a new time period. They also weren't expecting a game so soon. They felt cheated, as though Ubisoft were trying to simply cash in on an already successful game engine.

VG Chartz went behind closed doors to see how the newest installment in the Assassin's Creed franchise is playing out as well as getting some hands-on time with the new multiplayer features. One thing is certain, Ubisoft definitely isn't phoning in Brotherhood.

The demo for the single-player began with the same trailer shown at the Ubisoft press conference, with Ezio heading toward a church as a carriage exits. Guards attempt to stop him but they are mowed down by arrows from afar. As the villain exits the carriage with armed guards, more assassin's come up to aid Ezio, evening the odds.

It then fades to a scene of Ezio in bed with a woman when the villa falls under attack. The first new feature of Brotherhood is then shown off as Ezio rides his horse through the town surrounding his villa toward the wall.
He then climbs the outer walls of the villa and mans the cannons to stave off enemy cannons and siege towers. Eventually a siege tower breaks through and Ezio has to engage in combat. The combat system has been rethought to be more action oriented rather than feeling like a minigame. Bonuses in combat are awarded for striking early and fast. Kill combos will positively affect your ability in combat as well.

The main location of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is then revealed to be Rome, which will be more than three times the size of Florence from Assassin's Creed 2. Rome will feature many famous locations such as The Parthenon.

The final single-player feature displayed in the demonstration was the ability to call upon your brotherhood of assassins. This can be something as simple as killing a single opponent on a roof to taking out a line of several guards with arrows from the rooftops. They actually showed a recreation of the E3 trailer done in actual gameplay, calling in fellow assassins to fight the new enemy type: The Swiss Guard.

Off we were then to get some hands-on time with the multiplayer aspect of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. This honestly left me feeling very mixed. The mode they made available to us gave you a target while another player was targeting you. Points are earned for killing your target, particularly with style. Points are also earned for successfully evading a predator to the point their contract is cancelled. The problem here lies in successfully being stealthy against a human opponent.

For instance, I once was stalking a target while hiding in a bale of hay. They were heading straight for me, but then starting taking a wide berth around the hay bale. As they passed, I jumped out of the hay and right into the arms of my predator. Even though I had remained invisible on his radar, he visually saw me dive into the hay and waited for me to come back out. The game mechanics gave me no way of knowing he was near.

The other problem I had was a lack of countermeasure. The developer later told me there are smoke bombs that stun predators and a pushing tactic in case your predator confronts you face to face. The problem was I never knew I was about to die until the blade was in my back. The whole multiplayer process feels like a great idea that really hasn't come to fruition successfully yet.

Nevertheless, I paid $60 for Assassin's Creed 2 without multiplayer and the single player portion of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is shaping up to be a familiar and yet vastly improved experience, estimated to clock in at a bit over 15 hours of story. Here's hoping they get the multiplayer component up to the standard set by the rest of the game.

Read more »

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Hype is a strange thing. It can kill a game that was decent by creating high expectations before the game is even out. This has made many a disappointing game seem even worse because it had been hyped as a great game for so long. There is a positive side to hype though. When you spend months waiting for a game and hyping it up to be amazing, and the game actually delivers then you have one of the best gaming experiences you could ask for. I’m happy to say that Metal Gear Solid 4 lives up to its hype and delivers in almost every possible aspect.

In Metal Gear Solid 4 you play as Solid Snake, a covert operative that has been the main character for most of the Metal Gear Solid series. The storyline is the culmination of all of those previous games, so I highly suggest that you watch one of the story recaps to better get your head around all the characters and throwbacks you’ll be seeing while playing the game. The storyline is most definitely worth the effort, although highly confusing at points, and it is easily one of the most involved and interesting stories in recent gaming. The story is mainly told through cut scenes, during which you’ll be given the option to see flashbacks by pressing “x” or to look through Snake’s eyes by holding “L1” which often shows off just how much of a lecher Snake really is. With those options in mind, there is still an awful lot of watching in this game, and if that isn’t your cup of tea then this game might not be your thing, although given the quality of the game itself I suggest toughing it out or just skipping the cut scenes.

Some new features to the Metal Gear Solid world make their debut in Metal Gear Solid 4, and all of them really add something to the game itself. On the gunplay side of the game, you now have the ability to customize your weapons. At first this seems like an unnecessary addition, but I actually found it amazingly useful for changing up my favorite gun (the M4) for different situations. These customizations are either found on the ground, or bought from a mysterious gun vendor called Drebin, from whom you can also buy an assortment of weapons, ammo, and certain items. On the sneaking side of things you now have what is called “Octocamo”, which basically is an automatic system for using the same camouflage system used in Metal Gear Solid 3. During Metal Gear Solid 4 you will usually be wearing a suit that will automatically change appearances to camouflage you with your surroundings when you are pressed up against a surface and wait for around two seconds. Not only does this mechanic allow simple designs like grass or snow patterns such as were possible in Metal Gear Solid 3, but it also allows for some very interesting patterns when you are camouflaged into carpet or a steel grate. The suit can remember two patterns from wherever you care to take them from, which you can set the suit to manually along with several other preset options. Personally I saved a pattern from a steel grating and a tile floor.

The presentation of Metal Gear Solid 4 is near flawless. From a technical standpoint, the menus were simple and easy to manage, the game had no bugs that I ever noticed and everything just had a polish to it that you don’t often see in games. Beyond the game looking polished, it’s the little additions in the menus like a camera of what’s happening at your HQ at all times, and the Japanese symbols included before the English words on the menu that makes everything seem so perfectly well thought out. There was nothing menu wise that I thought I should be able to do but couldn’t. The only technical hiccup I ever noticed was a single guard that didn’t seem to know where I was even though everyone was on alert and there were many people already shooting at me. A single mishap in a 26 hour play through is nothing to write home about however, so I’m not really going to worry about that. There are a good number of loading times between areas, none more than 5 seconds to my recollection, and the game took a very strange route for its install times. There is a large install time (around 10 min.) at the beginning, and there are also smaller (around 2-3 min.) install times between acts. None of these were really an issue for me, but I can see where one might get annoyed by it, especially if they wanted to switch between acts a few times for whatever reason.

The visual presentation is very often breath taking, especially during the cut scenes and certain unforgettable moments of the actual gameplay. My only gripe is that the shadows during the cutscenes are very jaggy and it is actually fairly noticeable at points. That is an incredibly small problem though, and may not even be an issue for most. All in all the game looks beautiful.

The audio presentation of the game grabs you right from the main menu with one of my new favorite musical scores from gaming. The ambient noise works well during all of the sections of the game, and is especially noticeable during times when you are sneaking through a live battlefield. The songs are memorable and at points old songs from the MGS series are used to help the gamer remember a certain fight or event in the previous games of the series. The use of the old songs is incredibly nostalgic and really adds to the atmosphere of some sections of the game.

The gameplay is amazingly varied and gives you an incredible amount of choice for a decidedly linear game. During Metal Gear Solid 4 your job will usually be to get from one point to another. The great part about this is the number of ways that you can actually get to that point. If you feel like sneaking that’s certainly an option, with all kinds of different paths for you to take. On the other hand, if you’re a more violent type then you can run in guns blazing and just dash your way to your objective. The choice is yours and isn’t even kept to those two major choices since you can easily find a happy medium between the two. Personally I enjoy sniping, so during these sections I would often sneak through an area on my stomach and take out anyone that got in my way from afar with my silenced M4. Along with the aforementioned sections of gameplay, there are also boss fights and other random sections that you play that couldn’t accurately defined as shooter or sneaking. I am honestly impressed with the amount of polish that these sections got while being such small parts of the game. None of them really came across as a minigame, but instead a story driven section of the game that you got to play. Almost like a playable cut scene. All in all the gameplay was amazingly fun, with an amount of choice and diversity in what you do that I rarely see.

The value of Metal Gear Solid 4 is far past the sixty dollars that you will spend to play it. Along with the main game, which can take upwards of 30 hours to play through the first time, you’ll also be given ample reason to play through again on harder difficulties (which I’m probably going to start doing myself fairly soon) as well as multiplayer options through Metal Gear Online. The online aspect of the game is a lot of fun, but my only gripe is that there didn’t really seem to be any game modes where sneaking was encouraged. Perhaps I just haven’t found these game modes, but until I do there will definitely be something missing from Metal Gear Online for me.

Overall this game is an incredible experience and a definite must have for any PS3 owner. Even if you’ve never played a Metal Gear Solid game before, I still suggest reading up on the storyline and picking this game up, you won’t be disappointed. That is actually exactly what I did since I had only played Metal Gear Solid 3 before playing the fourth installment in the series, so it is definitely possible to catch up on the story without too much effort.

Read more »

Valkyria Chronicles

The recent trend within storytelling in gaming has been to move away from linear storylines and lean on the side of player freedom, allowing a person to choose between options and in a way make their own story. While this is commendable in some ways, there is still a lot to be said about a great linear gaming experience, and Valkyria Chronicles shows exactly that. The game plays exactly how a linear game should play, putting in new functions that lend new options to the player and telling a mature story without ever resorting to gore or excessive bloodshed to prove its own maturity, something that is not often seen in a game whose story is centered on war. It also succeeds in making one of the most engaging and accessible battle mechanics to any Strategy RPG I have played.

The combat in Valkyria is easily one of the greatest achievements of the game. It changes up the regular SRPG standard in a way rarely seen. Your role in these battles is acting as the general commander on the field. At the beginning of the battle you are given information on the goals as well as the obstacles ahead and allowed to pick and choose which members of your squad will be starting in the positions available. Each turn you are given a certain number of command points which you can use to issue special commands that up certain stats of your squad members or heal a character in dire need, or you can use the points to take control of one of your squad members. Once you have chosen a squad member the camera dives into your strategic map, coming to rest in a behind the shoulder view of your chosen squad member. You now have control of the character, running with the left analog stick, manipulating the camera with the right analog stick, toggling through weapons with the square button, and taking aim with the R1 button. The character cannot move around infinitely, however, and is given an AP bar which will steadily decrease as you move your character wherever your heart desires. Once you have found a good position, or run your AP bar dry, you can then press R1 to go into a first person view and take aim at your preferred target. Head shots do more damage than body shots, a display on the upper right will tell you how many shots you will take as well as how many shots it will take to kill the current target, and a circle around your crosshairs gives you an idea of the precision of your current weapon. Once ready, you then press the X button to let your bullets, or grenades, or weird exploding lance rocket-like thingies fly.

Most of the strategy of Valkyria Chronicles comes from managing your command points as well as positioning your squad members effectively. The command point management is difficult because command points can be saved for a second turn or used for special orders, and a single character can also be used multiple times during any given turn if you have the necessary command points (albeit with a decrease in available AP each time you use them more than once in a single turn). Utilizing your command points well is often the difference between defeat and victory, and is always important if you are looking for a good rating at the end of the fight.

Squad member positioning is another key factor because every soldier with unlimited ammo (shocktroopers, scouts, engineers, and the machine guns of tanks) will let loose whenever they see an enemy coming, and also because crouching in cover greatly reduces damage and negates the possibility of head shots. These two things make where you position your soldiers for your enemy’s turn almost as important as what you do during your own turn. Placing a line of soldiers where you think your enemy is intending to go can kill off an enemy without wasting any of your own turns, and keeping your squad members in cover is essential to making sure they get out alive.

It is also important to take out the enemy’s leaders while protecting your own. There are certain characters in the game that are denoted as leaders, and having these characters alive during a fight will give you one more command point for each leader alive. This means that you will almost always have all three leader characters out during any given fight, which is one of my few pet peeves because I would’ve liked the punishment for not using the main story characters to be less severe. Though you can certainly play through the game without using them, you’ll just have less command points than the maximum possible.

There are essentially 6 different unit types in the game. The tank, which houses the squad commander, is fantastic for taking out other tanks, clearing up a group of enemy soldiers with a well placed explosion, and knocking down almost any obstructions it comes against. On the negative side the tank takes two command points to use instead of one, and has a fairly low AP amount.

Scouts are basically as their name describes, they are armed with a rifle and one grenade per turn, have extremely high AP, and are especially useful for catching sight of hidden enemies in tall grass. Their attack power and defense are fairly low however, so they can’t deal with an entrenched enemy very well and can easily die if they get caught in a crossfire.

Shocktroopers are your all around soldier, with no specific downsides to using them. They carry a machine gun and have probably the second highest defense , with about half the AP of a Scout. Shocktroopers are usually best used to run into heavily entrenched enemies and take them out using either the machine gun or one grenade per turn.

Lancers are your anti tank troops. They don’t run very fast, but have around the same AP as Shocktroopers. They only have a lance as their sole weapon, and are extremely bad shots with it. You can think of a lance as a goofy rocket launcher. When going against enemy tanks, Lancers and your own tank are really your only option to taking them out. They are provided with their maximum of three rockets to begin with and then gain one more each command turn. Lancers have very high defense from explosives, but not as high bullet defense so they are highly susceptible to snipers, which brings us to the next unit type.

Snipers have easily the lowest AP, it can be difficult to move them to where you want them, and their low defense means you won’t be running them through gunfire for very long. However they come with the best accuracy, the ability to zoom in on targets, and the ability to kill enemies with a head shot with a single round. Snipers have the same ammo worries as Lancers, however, as they start with only their maximum of three rounds, and gain another each command turn.

Engineers are probably best described as a support class. They have AP around three quarters of a scout’s and a comparable defense with easily the worst offensive capabilities. This weakness is tempered by their ability to disable enemy mines, repair tanks, sandbag walls, and refill the ammo of any squad member by touching them. Whenever you plan to use a lancer or a sniper for more than three turns engineers are your best bet, and they are the only means by which you can “heal” your tank.

One slightly unique function of the battle system is what happens to your characters when they die. When a squad member’s health goes to zero, they are knocked out on the ground and their mark on your strategic map is crossed through. You are then given 3 turns to get to and touch that character with another soldier to call a medic and safely evacuate the character out. If you do not do so by the end of three turns, or the enemy touches the fallen squad member before you do, then that character is dead and gone for your entire play through (presuming they aren’t one of three main story characters who instead are gone solely for that fight). During especially difficult fights you will find that you have to balance your objective with trying to reach the fallen, and it is fairly likely that you will lose a couple of soldiers through out the game. I really enjoy this system because it adds permanence to the death of a side character that (along with reading the back story of the side characters) can actually make you miss your fallen comrades somewhat (R.I.P. Nadine).

The other side of this mechanic is that the death of a character or two is not as detrimental as it probably would be in other games. Due to reasons I will touch on later, the members of any given class are all fairly equal in stats and are therefore mostly interchangeable for your strategies. This doesn’t mean that they are all carbon copies of one another, however, as each of your characters will have some perks or detriments based on their given side story. These vary from Walter who is cocky and therefore has a chance of lower evasion skills when his health is high, to Rosie who has a debilitating allergy which has a chance to drain her health whenever in a desert environment, or Lynn whose hard working attitude gives her a chance to take two actions in a single turn instead of one. These attributes add nuance and complexity to how you organize your squad, and also serve to give each of the characters their own story and personality.

The first thing that should clue you in on Valkyria’s linear storyline is the menu set up itself. All of the menus in Valkyria are managed through a book-like interface. From this interface you can choose to continue the story, go to the headquarters to manage troops and equipment, look at the medals you have achieved in combat, and read up on weapons, people, and “historical” events. The “Chapters” tab which encompasses the storyline is easily the best and most important consequence of this menu style. In this tab you unlock battles you can play as well as storyline events that you can watch. What makes this interface great, is that once you have unlocked any cut scene or dialogue, you can come back to that scene as many times as you want. This is a fantastic way to give the player the freedom to watch their favorite cut scenes as many times as they want, and I can tell you that I have watched a particular scene from Chapter 11 at least five times. You don’t have the same freedom with the battles on your first play through the game, but if you decide to go through the story again, you’ll then be able to do the battles as many times as you want.

The “Headquarters” tab allows you to manage the members of your squad, the equipment your squad is wearing, as well as use your experience and money earned. At the Command Center you are able to choose which 20 members of the 50 or so available candidates you want to use in the upcoming battles, which can be especially important if your current squad contains soldiers who may have allergies that will be detrimental in the next fight (I still want to know how people can be allergic to metal). In the R&D facility you can satiate your commercialist desire by spending your hard earned cash on upgrades to weapons and armor and various options for outfitting your tank. The “Training Field” is where you will utilize your experience points to level your characters. One great thing about Valkyria Chronicles is that you don’t level characters individually, but you instead level them as a class. This makes all of the members of any class mostly statistically interchangeable and works very well with the game’s death system, allowing you to miss the character that is gone, without completely screwing over your play through. After you have chosen who will be in your squad, the “Squad Barracks” can be used to choose what specific weapon model each character will use and view various information on the squad members themselves.

Valkyria’s storyline centers on the plight of a small country stuck between two battling behemoths. The East Europan Imperial Alliance and the Atlantic Federation are fighting for dominance of the entire continent of Europa (just change the “a” to an “e” and you’ll have a good picture) while the citizens of the tiny neutral country of Gallia try to ignore the conflict and go about their daily lives. Before too long, the rich resources of Ragnite (basically powers everything in the game from streetlamps to mortar shells) in Gallia are too tempting for the Empire to pass up, and they begin to invade. Gallia has long had a policy of universal and mandatory military training, and you take command of one of the squads of militia formed to fight off the coming Empire.

There are a lot of things that the storyline of Valkyria does well that should be commended. While there is very little blood in the game, the story delves deeply into many mature themes such as racism, death, and the idea that even though you are at war, the people on the other side of the battlefield are still human beings with lives and families to go back to. It is very refreshing and I am happy to see that the developers used the general atmosphere of a war movie extremely well when making their story. Also interesting is the aspects of life that the game totally ignores. Based on attributes there are some characters who are clearly homosexual, but this is simply treated as a random attribute that has very little bearing on the narrative or the stats of the character. It is an extremely mature and commendable way to deal with the subject, and I hope other developers take notice. The story is not perfect of course, there are a few clichés (every JRPG needs a love story right?), and a few cringe worthy moments mainly stemming from the inclusion of the Squad’s pig mascot, but Valkyria gets far more things right with the story than it does wrong.

The second thing that Valkyria does very well from a story aspect is giving a meaningful personality to all of the 50 characters you’ll have the ability to use. Every single squad member has a back story, their own voice acting, and their own attributes that make them unique. There’s enough variety in there that I think that everyone will find some that they really enjoy using and listening to (Walter, Cherry, and Herbert are all hilarious). You also have a lot of incentive to use every single available character, since using them for a few battles will unlock more of their back story as well as another attribute. This has been the main focus of my second play through.

There are a couple issues as far as technical presentation goes. When looking through waving grass or smoke there can sometimes be significant frame rate drops. These are few and far between however, and do not affect the actual gameplay at all due to the turn based nature of the game. On the other side, the menus of Valkyria are close to brilliant, as reading all of these events from a “book” is not only aesthetically pleasing, but also allows the player to go back to any scene that they care to watch again -- something that I hope JRPG developers in general pick up if not the book interface as a whole. The load times are fairly short, with probably only 10 seconds when the battle starts and then nothing else throughout. These loading times were tested using the optional install however, so I am unsure of how they would change without it.

The visual presentation of Valkyria is nearly breathtaking. The pseudo-watercolor aesthetics really catch the eye, and are accentuated by the painting-like border that is always on the edges of the screen, giving the game the look as though you are playing it on a canvas. With the exception of enemy non-leaders, the character models for are very unique, with very few characters looking anything like each other. I think the only little annoyance I have with the visual presentation is that no one has lips. This is a small issue, but becomes extremely obvious when two characters try to kiss. Also the "talking heads" motif common in SRPG's is used perhaps more than I would like, but I can understand that one wouldn't want every scene to be a cutscene since it's nice to be able to control the tempo of the conversations.

The music is top notch, a very nice score that will stick into your mind. I think my only complaint is that they use certain songs too much, and I wish they had spread the song use out better so that you are less likely to get tired of any given song. The voice over talent of Valkyria is great in both English and Japanese. I played through my first time in English and I found very few annoying voices, and the acting during cut scenes was usually very believable even in the more emotional scenes. As I played through my second time in Japanese I noticed a couple voice talents that will make any anime nerd happy (Maximillian being Lelouch from Code Geass for example). Also a major upside to Valkyria’s audio presentation is that there is very little text left unspoken. Unless you are being briefed on a mission every single sentence that is uttered by a character is voiced.

Even with the great presentation, Valkyria’s best aspect is its gameplay. The combination of strategy with a unique interface makes for an extremely fun battle system that has been the main impetus for me starting a second play-through. The story missions are all unique and you will find yourself fighting trench warfare across deserts, reclaiming hostages, and doing demolition work on key strategic Imperial strongholds. No two missions feel anything like each other, and the variety among them is very commendable. My only qualm with how the game played was the inability to change the sensitivity while aiming. This can make aiming with a sniper rather difficult as you try to get the crosshairs just barely where you want them. This is a minor annoyance due to the game’s turn based nature, however. The story is also extremely fun to play through and watch, with many epic moments that I find myself watching again and again.

Value is probably Valkyria’s worst point. My first play through clocked out at 32 hours, which is shorter than a lot of JRPG’s. This is tempered by the idea that Valkyria’s design takes out much of the grinding that can take up your time in other JRPG’s, so I would argue that 32 hours in Valkyria is much more value than 32 hours in your average JRPG. Another upside is that Valkyria has a lot of replay value, with more side characters to learn about as well as a great gameplay mechanic and medals to earn. I do wish that the medals had been adapted to trophies, since it seems like they are practically set up for it already, but such is not the case. There is the promise of further playtime through downloadable content in the future that allows you to try your hand playing on the Imperial side of the war, but as there will be a charge involved I can't really count this as a plus side for value's sake -- however true Valkyria die-hards will be happy for the further playtime and story development.

Those who have read all my reviews and are keeping track (so basically the staff editors and my immediate family. *waves* HI MOM!!) will notice that this is easily the longest review I have ever submitted. This game deserves nothing less. I love this title and have very few complaints. The gameplay is addicting, the story is engaging, and the characters’ personalities are very interesting. On the downside there is a lot of use of the old “talking heads” motif within JRPG story telling, some slowdown in specific points, and no one has lips (yes I’m still harping on that). Basically, if you are a JRPG fan and you don’t give Valkyria a shot, you do yourself a disservice. So go out and buy it if you own a Playstation 3, or go borrow one if you don’t, because this is the kind of JRPG that the Playstation 3 users have been waiting for.

Read more »