Dreamkiller

Psychologist Alice Drake has a special talent: She can enter the dreams of her patients and cure them of phobias by shooting the meanies that infest their brains. But Alice also possesses another amazing talent. While holding a minigun, she can contort her left arm into the most uncomfortable position without ever suffering from shoulder cramps. You'll get past the visual oddity of Alice's freaky arm in time, but Dreamkiller's other problems are less easily forgotten. This run-and-gun first-person shooter grows tiresome quickly and fails to make good use of the intriguing premise, which is a shame considering its virtually limitless potential. Some of the enemy and level designs display plenty of life and creativity and hint at the great shooter Dreamkiller might have been. Unfortunately, wonky game mechanics make this throwback twitch shooter more of an ancient relic than a welcome blast from the past.


Greenpeace won't be happy.


What a great idea: As Alice, you jump into your patients' dreams and blast manifestations of their phobias. Is the patient arachnophobic? You take on hordes of spiders with your flame-spewing fingers and a helpful minigun. Does the subject have issues with machines? You clear his head of mechanical monstrosities by shutting the robotic infiltrators down for good. You may even learn about phobias you didn't know existed. Did you know that ponophobia is the fear of working too hard? Or that maniaphobes are afraid of going mad? Sadly, the potential for a cheesy-awesome story goes untapped. Levels are preceded by scantly written case descriptions, and while the still-image story scenes are beautifully drawn, they don't tell a tale worth hearing. The setup is simply an excuse to let you unload lead into crowds of weird demonic enemies a la Painkiller or Serious Sam.

The early levels are disappointing and conventional, featuring ho-hum level design, predictable enemy behavior, and all-too-familiar hyperactive shooting. And in many cases, the levels fail to capitalize on the phobia that inspired them. It makes sense that you would be shooting creepy-crawlies in an arachnophobe's nightmares, but why are there spiders in the dreams of the guy afraid of making decisions? Too many levels feature the same old corridors and arenas you've experienced countless times before, filled with enemies that are easily outwitted as long as you stay on the move. You clear the area, a door opens, and you move through it to the next area, where a bunch more meanies await. Thus, the more typical levels get tedious quickly and don't offer much in the way of challenge, so blandness sets in long before you've moved to the next nightmare.


How long could you hold your arm in that position?

The later levels still suffer from monotony, but they also display a lot more creativity. Some of the enemies and environments are wonderfully absurd. In the dreams of a teacher afraid of going insane, you take on masked freaks clad in straitjackets that spawn from rickety asylum cots. Another patient is frightened of children and toys. In that dreamworld, you take aim at giant tin soldiers, malformed toddlers, and giant bird figurines in a surreal playroom. Storm creatures soaring through the air, giant flaming trees, and obese medics are among the more inventive foes you face. But even when they look awesome, these monstrosities don't display any smarts, so any sense of challenge comes from sheer numbers and resilient bosses. Some of the boss characters--a hooded demon, a giant robot--are fun to take on. Others--a giant fire demon, a bee-spewing tree--are either overly frustrating or much too easy.

But whether you're fighting bland robots or mammoth medics, certain game mechanics just don't work all that well. The mouselook is super twitchy, so you'll probably want to adjust the sensitivity within the game menus. More problematic is the way weapon spawn nodes are handled. Like in many other fast-paced first-person shooters, you can pick up a weapon at a specified point--but here you can hold only one firearm at a time. (You can also shoot fire and webbing from your fingers.) But weapon pickup points are also weapon drop-off points. If you walk over an empty one, you will drop your gun and be left only with your all-but-useless fire spray. It's easy to do this accidentally in the middle of a firefight; you'll be strafing about quickly while firing at some enemy or another, only to inadvertently drop your weapon while being mobbed by demons because you passed over one of these nodes. It's a bad mechanic that has no place in a fast-paced shooter.


He could stay young and chipper and he'd lock it with a zipper, if he only had a heart.


Dreamkiller makes a few attempts to be original, but they don't energize the action much. You can teleport forward, but plain-old shooting is effective enough that you rarely need to. There are also certain enemies that must be defeated by entering a portal that represents the patient's subconscious. This feature makes certain sequences a bit more challenging, but it adds little to the experience; in many cases, you can just move back and forth between portals shooting the vulnerable enemies on the way. If you become really desperate for a change of pace, you could check out the game's multiplayer options, but you'll probably never find anyone to play with. Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Conquest modes are available on multiple maps, but if the game's all-but-empty leaderboards are any indication, Dreamkiller's online play is--and will likely remain--dead.

Dreamkiller is, through and through, a budget game. The visuals are colorful but look decidedly old, the action is as shallow as it gets in a modern shooter, and the sound effects lack oomph. The premise is neat, and some of the enemy designs are legitimately awesome. But if you've been dreaming of some old-fashioned twitch shooting, you should return to the old standbys and let this sleeping dog lie.

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Posted in: Action

Cities XL

Cities XL isn't as supersized as its title would have you believe. Monte Cristo's latest attempt to knock the venerable SimCity off its throne delivers when it comes to standard city-building genre features, but its massively multiplayer online-style mode, where you interact with virtual city planners across the globe, fails to deliver. Not all of the ground-breaking elements are fully realized out of the box, so you're left with a pretty conventional city builder with a few innovations that hold promise for revolutionizing the genre sometime down the road.


Laying out huge stretches of city blocks is a snap. Instant blue-collar ghetto!


The basics of Cities XL are pretty much what you would expect. This is essentially a revision of the now-classic SimCity formula, somewhat similar to that on display in Monte Cristo's previous City Life games. You take the role of a near-omnipotent city mayor with the ability to lay down roads, build houses, erect factories and office buildings, and so on without interference from nuisances like city councillors and chief architecture officers. Construction efforts are centered on zoning. Just like planners in the real world, you lay out street grids zoned for residential development, heavy industry, high-tech manufacturing, offices, and retail stores. Then you toss in services like sheriff stations, hospitals, electrical plants, bowling alleys, and hotels to keep everybody healthy and happy. The only difference between the gameplay and wrangling with real city zoning bylaws is the ability to be specific about what you want. Instead of setting up areas for homes and establishing allowable population density, you have specific zones for unqualified, qualified, and executive workers, along with the elite upper crust. Each group of citizens is needed for specific employment. Unqualified workers, for instance, consist of a blue-collar crowd needed for factories and the like, qualified workers serve as management in offices and manufacturing facilities, and executives take charge of places like high-tech factories.

Gameplay is geared toward city-building beginners. The solo mode of play is based around 25 sandbox cities in five regions (30 in six regions in the Limited Edition version of the game) scattered around the continents of a fictional globe. Everything is unlocked from the start of play, so you can freely move between cities in green plains where it's easy to develop a thriving metropolis and cities in resource-deprived deserts in the middle of nowhere. There are no set goals or varied challenges in these locales, however, or any spicy frills like massive natural disasters, which can lead to some city-building ennui after a dozen or so hours of play. The satisfaction of laying out cities and watching them prosper is still good enough to get you hooked, but because of repetition and the always nifty sensation of playing God, there's no sense of wondering what's next.

The game's appearance is decidedly bland. While the cities themselves look realistic at certain angles due to good use of lighting in the day-night cycle and scenic backdrop terrain, zooming in low or wandering through cities with the avatar you customize at the start of play reveals little but deserted boulevards and the odd car zipping around. Virtually no pedestrians are out and about, in dramatic contrast to the often crowded sidewalks of the City Life games. There is also little street noise. The only sound effects come when you click on buildings and are recognized by a canned acknowledgement like a doorbell ring for a residence and what sounds like a dot-matrix printer for an office. The soundtrack is also barely noticeable, being a mash of woozy jazz that sounds like something Moby would come up with after drinking a few cups of chamomile tea.


Bankruptcy rarely lasts for long, if you have any experience with city-building games and know how to use loans to your best advantage.


Single-player game mechanics are also somewhat blah, especially when compared to the City Life games that Monte Cristo released in 2006 and 2008. Where those games tried a different approach to city building with six different demographic groups of citizens that you had to keep separated to avoid riots, the game design here is more of a straight-up SimCity clone. This is pretty disappointing, as the class warfare of the City Life games made for challenging urban planning. Cities XL returns the focus to money. Instead of keeping the elites and the have-nots apart, you watch the bottom line. An intuitive interface provides you with all the key information needed to avoid catastrophe. Single clicks access core economic data such as class unemployment rates, cash flow, and citizen satisfaction. Economics are straightforward, with everything based on the "build houses, then businesses" method. You have to deal with requests for police protection, fire departments, health care, education, and leisure, although the great unwashed aren't too demanding. Many buildings are locked out until you hit population levels, preventing you from going off the rails with crazy expensive services. But as much as this keeps you from doing something stupid, it also makes developing each city a paint-by-numbers experience.

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Posted in: Puzzel

Order of War Review

Order of War is a World War II real-time strategy game distinguished by its accessibility and simplicity. It's easy to learn and easy to play, eschewing base building, unit-level micromanagement, and deep economics, but it's never boring and it offers ample challenge. Although some players may miss controlling unit special abilities during each engagement, your soldiers' greater autonomy gives you the opportunity to take advantage of the cinematic camera mode, which provides a dramatic depiction of the battle as it unfolds. Order of War doesn't try to reinvent the World War II RTS or introduce anything new to this well-trodden genre, but it does excel at most of what it attempts, providing a fun and satisfying experience for veterans and newbies alike.


The Focke-Wulf FW 190s are ready for their close-up.


One important reason for Order of War's simplicity is its scope. You take on the role of a colonel and control units representing whole companies, rather than squads or individuals. As a result, it's not your responsibility to ask infantry squads to lob hand grenades at the enemy; they can do such tasks on their own. Instead, your focus is on big-picture tactics such as harnessing terrain, positioning, managing reinforcements, and calling in air support. For instance, antitank guns placed on a hill can devastate enemy armor before it closes to attack range, and swamps create natural choke points since they're only passable by infantry. The same can be said of thick forests--that is, until you flatten them with artillery. On any terrain, outmaneuvering your opponents, specifically flanking vehicles, is vitally important both to avoid their fire and to take advantage of their weaker side and rear armor. Since there is no fog of war to shield your approach from the enemy, you'll need to use multiple vectors of attack, including artillery strikes and feints, to force your opponent into a weak position. Additional ground forces and air support, such as bombing runs and paratrooper drops, can be purchased from off-map with resources collected from control points, which provide a steady but finite supply of income. Balancing your expenditures, as well as timing air support correctly, is another important consideration in Order of War.

Two other factors that make Order of War easy to enjoy are its intuitive control scheme and uncluttered interface. The precise camera controls and wide zoom distance provide a good and thorough view of the battlefield, although an even wider zoom for watching multiple fronts at once would be even better. As a rule, Order of War uses standard RTS controls for movement and attack, and every move order also works as an attack-move, which is a handy default. Manually, you can execute a move-only order to speed your units past the enemy's front line to the high-priority targets, and each time you give any move order, outlines will depict how your units can position themselves at the rally point, which allows you to set their final facing and formation. In addition to helping you position your units, the interface displays a clear attack range for each unit--friend or foe--as you hover the cursor over it, so you'll have only yourself to blame if you send your men into the firing arc of enemy rocket artillery. The rest of the interface is extremely unobtrusive, leaving plenty of space for the action.

Order of War can be quite attractive, especially in cinematic camera mode, which switches among dramatic shots of your troops in action and showcases unit models and animations that you might not otherwise appreciate. Even when the cinematic camera is off, Order of War looks nice, with striking skylines and realistically diverse terrain. On the whole, the sound is excellent, from the solid in-game voice acting to the authentic sound effects, including exchanges of small-arms fire, rumbling diesel engines, and thunderous artillery barrages. However, the incessantly repetitive musical score pollutes the soundscape and tends to stick in your head long after you've left the game. While not a game breaker, the lack of any additional music is a definite flaw.

While Order of War is remarkably easy to play, its two campaigns, each nine missions in length, can be difficult. Whether your mission is to ambush a convoy with paratroopers, destroy a massive German railway gun, or hold out against overwhelming numbers of Russians, you'll be put to the test. While most missions involve seizing all control points from the enemy, there are enough special objectives and other variations to keep the missions interesting. As you progress through each campaign, you earn experience points that you can spend toward persistent bonuses, like better tank armor or firing range. In one campaign, you lead the Americans on yet another romp through occupied France, in which preventing a German breakout from the Falaise Pocket and storming the fortifications of the West Wall are the most memorable missions. While the American missions are challenging enough to counteract any feelings of deja vu, the German campaign is more fun, thanks to awesome units, such as the King Tiger tank and the railway gun, and a two-front war, featuring epic battles against the Soviets. Unfortunately, this otherwise outstanding campaign is marred by two bugs: the mission where you defend the West Wall against the Americans often crashes to desktop, and in another mission, the victory trigger rarely fires properly. One disappointing omission from Order of War's single-player game is a Soviet campaign, instead the Soviets are represented both in multiplayer and as adversaries in the German campaign.


If you are going to attack Tigers with Shermans, be sure to hit them from behind and bring a lot of friends.

Multiplayer in Order of War doesn't break any new ground, but it's great for a quick blitzkrieg on your lunch break. MP is limited to six maps, each with two- and four-player variants, and there is only one game type, in which you must capture all the control points to win. However, the maps are well designed, with diverse terrain and natural choke points, so you do get quality if not quantity. Matches tend to be fast paced, with a one-vs.-one matchup typically resolved in under 30 minutes, partially owing to the fact that turtling is not an option, since you can't build any sort of static defenses or hide any weaknesses under a fog of war.

Overall, Order of War is a fun game that's far more engrossing than the sum of its simple parts suggests. Although it doesn't show any ambition to innovate the WWII RTS genre, Order of War roundly succeeds in delivering all the thrills, drama, and grandeur you'd expect. While some players will sorely miss details like battlefield scavenging and squad micromanagement, most will be having too much fun to care. So, if you are itching for an epic tank battle or just need a simple RTS game to bait your friends into the genre, Order of War is worth your attention.

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Posted in: Action

Mini Ninjas

Mini Ninjas is a decidedly different turn for developer IO Interactive, maker of the Hitman series. This action adventure is low on gruesome assassinations and high on lighthearted fun, but that doesn't mean fans of stealth-kill simulators, or anyone else for that matter, should skip over it. Mini Ninjas is an approachable and enjoyable game with a charming art style that brings its lively world to life. There are a few kinks that present some minor annoyances, but they don't detract too much from what is overall a delightfully plucky adventure.


Your hat can block arrows, and serve as boat or a sled.


The story is a straight-up ninja road trip. It follows the young ninja Hiro and his portly friend Futo as they embark on a mission to find their four missing ninja pals and stop an evil samurai warlord from taking over the world. On their long journey to the warlord's headquarters, the two little ninjas will find their friends, learn new spells, and battle magic samurai. There's not much narrative, but what's there is entertaining and often humorous. The cinematics that are unlocked when you find each ninja aren't included in the campaign for some reason, but they're worth seeking out in the main menu and watching. They're extremely well produced, beautifully animated, and funny to boot.

Mini Ninjas is a linear adventure split up across sprawling levels. However, the journey is more than a simple waltz from point A to point B. The broad and inviting level design encourages exploration and creates the illusion of a lush, open world. Each level has a sprinkling of hidden paths that lead to shrines, enemy encampments, or collectibles, some of which are used to mix helpful potions. You'll also find shortcuts that can lead you around a confrontation, and scenic paths that are as treacherous as they are beautiful. The level design does a great job of making the game feel like one cohesive journey, a singular quest to rescue friends and defeat the bad guys.

There are a variety of ways for you to take down said bad guys. Each character has a strong attack and a weak attack as well as a special move inspired by his weapon or personality. Hidden shrines in many of the levels will unlock new spells, like the ability to control any of the animals you find hopping around or stuck in cages. It's fun to free a caged boar from an enemy encampment and then use that same boar to chase down enemies for some sweet swine vengeance. If you'd rather keep your ninja action traditional, you can purchase or find projectile weapons like shurikens and cherry bombs. Using them isn't as fun as sending flaming meteors down on your enemies, but they're effective nonetheless.


Possess a fox for a speedy retreat, or a bear for a good old-fashioned mauling.

Despite all the options, the relatively simple combat--which doesn't usually require much more thought than mashing the attack button--gets repetitive toward the end of the game. That's because some of the spells, weapons, and even ninjas, aren't worth using. With his magic abilities and homing-attack special move, Hiro is by far the most useful character. Unless you just like the looks of other ninjas, there's no compelling reason to use some of them. The developer went to the trouble of giving each of the six ninjas a different weapon, personality, and set of animations, so it's unfortunate that there aren't more reasons to use them all.

In addition to the ninjas' various combat techniques, Mini Ninjas features a simple stealth system that lets you hide in tall grass or on rooftops. You can sneak-attack an enemy for extra damage or skip a fight entirely by staying out of sight. Sometimes it's hard to tell what enemies can and can't see, even if the stealth icon is showing that you're hidden, especially when enemy archers are on the rooftops. The enemy AI follows the same pattern in every fight: they swarm you at first sight and then spread out (or run in fear) as you thin their ranks. If you'd rather run for the woods and skip the fighting, you can do that, and the enemies won't always follow, but you'll miss out on gaining experience, which is used to increase your health, your special-move capacity, and more. It would have been nice to receive experience rewards for stealth. If you sneak or run your way through most of the game, you'll end up with an underpowered group of ninjas.

The controls are silky smooth: wall runs, stealth kills, and special moves are easy to pull off and fun to watch, because each ninja does every action differently from the other five. For example, Suzume spins her flute in the water like a motor boat, while Futo uses his giant hammer as a paddle. When you're not pressing buttons to fight, your second thumb will be at work on the right analog stick, constantly adjusting the struggling camera. It does an OK job as you run through the countryside, but it has a tendency to hang back and lag behind once you start making sudden turns, which is a real pain when you're indoors.


You can sneak your way through some locations, just don't look down.


It might not blow you away at first glance, but Mini Ninjas' consistent and attractive art style will win you over in time. The characters and environments are charmingly simple, like vector art or the 3D version of a 2D flash animation. Everything fits together perfectly, and not a single stone looks out of place in this world, making it a joy to explore every inch of every level. The time of day is different in each level, which helps create the illusion of a long journey. One level is bathed in a yellowish dusk and another in midnight blue. The difference between the three versions of the game are negligible, though if you have a PC that can run it at the highest settings, you'll get cleaner textures and crisper, more vibrant colors with that version.

The music sets the mood perfectly with authentic-sounding Japanese instruments--a lone flute accompanies your isolated exploration of a snowy mountaintop, while a chorus of drums plays as you descend during your frantic escape. The sound design balances the serious and somber tunes with silly screeches from the enemies and popping sound effects as they poof back into their original animal forms.

Mini Ninjas is a great start to what could well become a staple franchise for Eidos and IO. If you're hunting for collectibles, you'll easily spend eight to 10 hours on your journey. Even on the hardest setting, the game is never unbearably difficult. The bosses all follow predictable patterns, and fighting enemies is often optional, so most of your frustrations will come at the hands of the poor camera. But Mini Ninjas makes it easy to see past these issues and have a great time.

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Posted in: Cartoon

Ashes Cricket 2009

Australia and England's long-standing biennial sporting clash continues, this time in video game form, in Ashes Cricket 2009. While this title marks a reasonable attempt at capturing the look and feel of this gentleman's game, its inconsistent difficulty and bugs make it less of a screamer catch in the deep, and more of a fumble at silly mid-on.

The game is divided into four game types: Ashes offers five-day, five-match tests between Australia and England using the current real-world player roster; Test play features the same five-day matches as Ashes mode but lets you choose from 12 competing nations; One Day International (ODI) is a slimmed-down version of Test cricket with 50 overs of play per team; and 20 Overs, the most recent addition to the sport, provides fast action-oriented play.


This is test cricket, get used to standing around in the field for days at a time.


While 20 Over games rely on fast scoring and big totals to keep you interested, the slow, calculated pace of Test games are more akin to chess. Ashes Cricket 2009's five-day Test matches give dedicated fans of the sport the opportunity to play out entire games in almost real time and take their team to victory ball-by-ball. Single-player matches against the CPU's unpredictable difficulty are at best challenging and at worst frustrating. Even at the easier difficulty it's not uncommon to get carted around the park for overs at a time while bowling a conservative pitched-up line, or to receive nothing but over after over of yorkers while batting.

The PC version of Ashes Cricket 2009 has cut the enjoyable cooperative and competitive offline multiplayer found in its console counterparts and instead offers only online friendly and ranked matches in the various disciplines. A distinct lack of online players means you might be searching for a while to find a game, but once you do, the experience runs smoothly.

Dependable bowling is key in every game of cricket, and the bowling controls here are as simple to get your head around as placing the cursor indicating your line and length where you want the ball to go and selecting the delivery type to begin your run. Once you hit the crease, you'll need to time a button press on the accuracy meter to determine the usefulness of your bowl. Raising the game difficulty increases the precision required for you to hit the effective part of your accuracy meter as the zone shrinks in size considerably. While the bowling mechanics are simple and you'll be up and rocketing balls down the pitch in no time, there's also subtlety to be found here. Deliveries that swing towards or away from batsmen have different cursor types to the basic straight and slow balls. Since your aiming remains free until the ball leaves your hand, you can start your run with the marker in one place, only to change it up and bowl a completely different type of ball by moving it to a new location and hitting the corresponding delivery button. This becomes particularly useful to try and deceive both AI and multiplayer batsmen, who think they know what to expect and then get a surprise as the ball leaves your hand.


Pick the wrong footwork and you may find yourself trapped in front.


Rotating players during long bowling spells to manage stamina keeps your best and brightest from wearing out, but you'll also need to keep an eye on each player's mental state. Confidence is determined by how well you're striking the ball as a batsman and how well you're bowling and being played as a bowler. Being belted around the park while bowling will take its toll by reducing the number of different types of deliveries in your arsenal that you can throw. Streaks of successive hits raise your confidence level as a batsman, while poorly timed swings will reduce your performance at the crease, making you less likely to strike the ball sweetly.

Batting successfully in Ashes Cricket 2009 relies entirely on nailing your timing. Swinging too early will leave your stumps exposed, while going late will see you edging shots and risking being caught. Since pace varies between bowlers, getting comfortable with timing is a case of getting your eye in by playing at shots once you're in a match. To help you with the basics the game features a celebrity-voiced tutorial mode with Sir Ian "Beefy" Botham and Shane Warne, and while the training tips are useful to help you get used to front and back foot strokes, the pair's soundbytes are wooden and stilted, and the tips are repeated far too often. Once you've completed the basics in the tutorials, you might want to have a crack at the challenge modes included that focus on achieving batting and bowling goals. These include hitting six consecutive sixes, taking five wickets in 10 overs, or bowling Warney's now legendary leg break in the 1993 Ashes series to dismiss Mike Gatting. They're a good break from single- and multiplayer games, but there aren't nearly enough of them included, and they offer little replayability.

It's disappointing then that while batting and bowling are designed to be hands-on experiences--setting custom field placements, charging down short balls, and picking the right foot for the shot--fielding is frustratingly passive. Your only roles here are to nominate which end you want to throw the ball to once your player has eventually picked it up in the field and completing basic quicktime events for catches. Though there's an onscreen dive button present when you bat, there's no equivalent option when fielding, meaning that you're left to watch as the ball trickles across the boundary rope just meters in front of the fieldsman.


What you want to do is grab the ball like this, and chuck it as hard as you can at him.


It's here in the field that Ashes 2009 really shows off its rough edges. Play often gets called dead much too early, at times even with two batsmen down one end of the wicket and the obvious chance of a run out. Players stand around with the ball in hand rather than making timely returns to the keeper, and dud leg-before-wicket decisions are given even when the ball pitches outside the line and clearly won't go on to hit the stumps. Batsmen make clear calls of "no" even for obvious fours and sixes, and unstopped overthrows can cause the ball to get stuck midair as players path to it and circle with confusion at being unable to pick it up. Licensing of the official Hawk-Eye ball-tracking system is a good inclusion, but its excessive and often irrelevant use, such as after fours and for catches, feels shoehorned in.

Should you find you're only interested in wielding the willow or hanging out in the sun waiting for a catch, and you'd like to skip ahead, each match mode includes a "simulate" function like those found in sports management games. Here you're able to skip ahead an over, an innings, or even an entire match by putting your faith in the hands of the game's artificial intelligence. The outcome is a bit of a lucky dip, and relinquishing control midmatch can result in poor starts turning around as the tail of your batting team wags, but you're just as likely to find yourself on the receiving end of a mid-order collapse. Simulating any aspect of your game forfeits any item unlocks (venues, trophies, or player clothing), or score records you may have earned playing the game normally. It's an inclusion very few players who are interested in the ebb, flow, and strategy of cricket will use, but if you're after instant gratification, you can simply warp ahead to the bits you want to play.

Only the two Ashes teams (Australia and England) are fully licensed, meaning you'll be given rough look-alikes with amusingly creative player names for the other countries. If you're dedicated (or pedantic) enough to take on the squad and player customisation editing tools, then you can rename players, reassign skill points, and adjust visual sliders to set things right for the entire roster. While the licensed Aussie and English players are accurately labelled, many of their in-game character models are a bit off the mark. The similarities are there, but the faces of most players appear stretched and out of proportion compared to their real-world counterparts. Character animations on the field are inconsistent and run the full gamut of natural to extremely jerky. Frame rates remain smooth throughout play and during long stadium panning intro shots, and if your PC can handle it you’re able to crank the graphics settings all the way up to a maximum 1920 x 1200 resolution for sharper visuals.

Player controls in the PC version of Ashes Cricket 2009 mimic those of the Xbox 360 and PS3, but replace analog stick shot selection with the W,A,S, and D buttons. E and Q key presses step to and away from the ball, while each arrow button corresponds to its own bowling delivery or batting stroke. The controls are well within reach without needing to fumble around for speciality buttons as the ball hurtles towards your player, but there’s no option to manually remap buttons for custom configurations should you wish to change where your hands sit on the keyboard.


After losing a couple of quick wickets you might want to consider sending in a nightwatchman.

Many of the sport's iconic cricket venues are available to play on, though like unlicensed players, they appear with pseudonyms. Crowds consist of emotionless clapping blobs of colour, while advertising signs dotted around the boundaries are visible even at long distances and appear pin sharp.

The variety of single-player modes and accessibility of controls make Ashes 2009 an easy game for players with only a passing interest in sports games to pick up. The removal of local multiplayer--one of the console version's strongest features--in the PC game is disappointing, and while ultimately fans of the sport will enjoy this title the most, they'll have to overlook its visuals and gameplay problems. It's good for a hit around the park during the tea break, but this game won't be replacing watching the real Aussies or English players take up the bat and ball anytime soon.

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Posted in: Sports

Red Faction

If you judge Risen on its first act alone, you may be convinced that a better title for this complex role-playing game would be "Errand Boy." But while you spend many of the early hours as a shipwrecked message courier, you should stick with it, because things do get better. You explore dark caverns, clash with pirates over buried treasure, stab lizardmen in their faces, and earn the help of a furry friend with a talented nose. Some of Risen's issues stay with you up to the end; there's no escaping the problematic combat and a number of bugs and presentation glitches. But a large and memorable cast of characters and an array of multilayered quests will keep you pushing forward. While it's too technically inconsistent to rise to the top of the genre, Risen still provides plenty of enjoyable adventuring for RPG lovers yearning for a game they can get lost in.


The first time you see an ashbeast, he's likely to squash you.


The setup may sound familiar: You are a nameless protagonist washed ashore on a remote island after a disaster at sea. Eventually, you find yourself in a dank swamp ruled by the infamous Don Esteban, a domineering rogue at odds with both the local monastery and the leadership of the island's primary coastal town. Risen's first act drones on endlessly, sending you from one fetch quest to another (distribute these potions; deliver this message; find me some weeds) while confining you first to the swamp, then to the city, and then to the monastery. The downside is that the early hours are tedious and light on action. While island politics eventually play a large role in gameplay, there's nothing initially compelling about the faction struggles, and it takes a while before the world opens up and the story takes hold. The upside to this slow start is that you get to know the world's inhabitants. The characters make an impression, such as the stubborn and manipulative Don, the local barmaid afraid to reveal her secrets, and a mother worried about her missing sons. When a greater threat is eventually exposed and the story expands, you realize that you care about them and their fates. By the time your real enemy is revealed, you'll embrace your role as hero, because you know how desperately these people need one.

Some strong voice acting helps inspire this kind of empathy. Some of the voice-overs could have used a jolt of energy, including that of the main character, who often sounds uninterested. However, most of the acting is quite good, which is a wonderful thing, considering that almost every line is spoken as well as displayed on the screen. As your standing within your faction rises, characters will offer words of encouragement and react to your presence more positively, which lends a nice sense of social progression. Even a few of the quests themselves display personality, such as one in which you place a severed cow's head in someone's bed (an amusing reference to The Godfather). The main story regarding the forces responsible for a bunch of temples rising to the isle's surface is standard fantasy fluff, but the peripheral touches keep you involved and make the island come to life.


Sights like this offer welcome respite from the darkness of dungeons and temples.


Risen's greatest strength is the number of choices it gives you, and how well it balances them. Your choice of faction is the most obvious example of the decisions you face, and it affects which quests you can take, the skills available to you, and even how the world evolves. But even many side quests can be approached in multiple ways. Do you betray a friend and steal a pirate's bounty, or do you remain loyal and fight for your due? Do you scheme with scoundrels, or do you turn them in? These kinds of choices don't pervade the later portions of the game, but even when progression becomes more linear, the questing is still enjoyable. Not only will finding the scattered teleport stones complete a quest line, but these magical objects will make getting around the world a lot simpler. And the relationships you build with other characters add extra flavor. Digging up graves looking for clues is fun on its own because you get to explore various parts of the island; knowing you're performing the task for a character you like sweetens the deal.

Progression isn't limited to leveling, which occurs relatively slowly. As you advance, you visit trainers who teach you the skills needed to get the most out of your exploration. Eventually, locked chests won't be a problem for you as long as you improve your lock-picking skills and have enough picks (or the right spell or scroll). Some trainers teach you how to skin creatures; others help you with your alchemy skills so you can create potions out of herbs and roots, or teach you to make swords and jewelry. You also train up your combat skills and related stats, such as strength and dexterity, by visiting helpful citizens. Risen offers a lot of flexibility as a result, and the side activities are varied enough to keep you interested. For example, smithing a new weapon is a multistep process that involves using an anvil, a trough, and a grindstone (though it's admittedly annoying when you have to wait for a non-player character to finish using the tools first). Picking a lock entails entering a sequence of key presses in the correct order, and you can use a frying pan to cook raw meat over a campfire. These activities are simple on their own, but they're nice diversions between temple excursions and result in helpful items and equipment.

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Posted in: Action

Risen

If you judge Risen on its first act alone, you may be convinced that a better title for this complex role-playing game would be "Errand Boy." But while you spend many of the early hours as a shipwrecked message courier, you should stick with it, because things do get better. You explore dark caverns, clash with pirates over buried treasure, stab lizardmen in their faces, and earn the help of a furry friend with a talented nose. Some of Risen's issues stay with you up to the end; there's no escaping the problematic combat and a number of bugs and presentation glitches. But a large and memorable cast of characters and an array of multilayered quests will keep you pushing forward. While it's too technically inconsistent to rise to the top of the genre, Risen still provides plenty of enjoyable adventuring for RPG lovers yearning for a game they can get lost in.


The first time you see an ashbeast, he's likely to squash you.


The setup may sound familiar: You are a nameless protagonist washed ashore on a remote island after a disaster at sea. Eventually, you find yourself in a dank swamp ruled by the infamous Don Esteban, a domineering rogue at odds with both the local monastery and the leadership of the island's primary coastal town. Risen's first act drones on endlessly, sending you from one fetch quest to another (distribute these potions; deliver this message; find me some weeds) while confining you first to the swamp, then to the city, and then to the monastery. The downside is that the early hours are tedious and light on action. While island politics eventually play a large role in gameplay, there's nothing initially compelling about the faction struggles, and it takes a while before the world opens up and the story takes hold. The upside to this slow start is that you get to know the world's inhabitants. The characters make an impression, such as the stubborn and manipulative Don, the local barmaid afraid to reveal her secrets, and a mother worried about her missing sons. When a greater threat is eventually exposed and the story expands, you realize that you care about them and their fates. By the time your real enemy is revealed, you'll embrace your role as hero, because you know how desperately these people need one.

Some strong voice acting helps inspire this kind of empathy. Some of the voice-overs could have used a jolt of energy, including that of the main character, who often sounds uninterested. However, most of the acting is quite good, which is a wonderful thing, considering that almost every line is spoken as well as displayed on the screen. As your standing within your faction rises, characters will offer words of encouragement and react to your presence more positively, which lends a nice sense of social progression. Even a few of the quests themselves display personality, such as one in which you place a severed cow's head in someone's bed (an amusing reference to The Godfather). The main story regarding the forces responsible for a bunch of temples rising to the isle's surface is standard fantasy fluff, but the peripheral touches keep you involved and make the island come to life.


Sights like this offer welcome respite from the darkness of dungeons and temples.


Risen's greatest strength is the number of choices it gives you, and how well it balances them. Your choice of faction is the most obvious example of the decisions you face, and it affects which quests you can take, the skills available to you, and even how the world evolves. But even many side quests can be approached in multiple ways. Do you betray a friend and steal a pirate's bounty, or do you remain loyal and fight for your due? Do you scheme with scoundrels, or do you turn them in? These kinds of choices don't pervade the later portions of the game, but even when progression becomes more linear, the questing is still enjoyable. Not only will finding the scattered teleport stones complete a quest line, but these magical objects will make getting around the world a lot simpler. And the relationships you build with other characters add extra flavor. Digging up graves looking for clues is fun on its own because you get to explore various parts of the island; knowing you're performing the task for a character you like sweetens the deal.

Progression isn't limited to leveling, which occurs relatively slowly. As you advance, you visit trainers who teach you the skills needed to get the most out of your exploration. Eventually, locked chests won't be a problem for you as long as you improve your lock-picking skills and have enough picks (or the right spell or scroll). Some trainers teach you how to skin creatures; others help you with your alchemy skills so you can create potions out of herbs and roots, or teach you to make swords and jewelry. You also train up your combat skills and related stats, such as strength and dexterity, by visiting helpful citizens. Risen offers a lot of flexibility as a result, and the side activities are varied enough to keep you interested. For example, smithing a new weapon is a multistep process that involves using an anvil, a trough, and a grindstone (though it's admittedly annoying when you have to wait for a non-player character to finish using the tools first). Picking a lock entails entering a sequence of key presses in the correct order, and you can use a frying pan to cook raw meat over a campfire. These activities are simple on their own, but they're nice diversions between temple excursions and result in helpful items and equipment.

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Posted in: Action

East India Company

East India Company is a mercantilist real-time strategy game set at the dawn of the global trade age. As governor of one of the great European East India companies, you must compete against others for dominance of the lucrative markets of Africa, the Middle East, and especially India. As the commander of a private navy that includes both merchant and military vessels, you'll stop at nothing to secure a profit, which includes seizing port cities from the natives, sinking the fleets of rival companies, and forming alliances to wage all-out war. Success in East India Company derives primarily from sound financial planning, measured growth, and innumerable boatloads of exotic luxuries. In addition, you'll find it necessary to personally direct every naval battle using the "tactical" mode for resolving ship-to-ship combat, which is sadly the weakest and most tedious element of EIC's gameplay. And unfortunately, multiplayer action is limited to these lackluster battles. While not without flaws, the trading gameplay is solid and should entertain many fans of the genre; however, those lacking in patience may find the laborious early tactical battles less fun than a watery grave.

EIC includes a time of day and weather cycle; this storm ended long before the battle did.

East India Company comes with four single-player campaigns, which cover the years from 1600 to 1750. During every campaign, you'll play the East India Company of one of eight Western European nations, all of which historically chartered such companies. This excludes the Holy Roman Empire, which was presumably included to represent the short-lived Austrian Ostend company. However, there is no real difference among the factions aside from the geographical locations of their home ports. Those locations may give England and Portugal a slight advantage over the others because they are in good positions to box in their rivals. Every campaign uses the same strategic map that covers Europe, Africa, and Asia, through India. The exclusion of China is somewhat disappointing because it could have been fun to play through the Opium War time frame. However, controversial trade goods, such as opium and slaves, are left out of the game altogether.

The bulk of your single-player experience will be spent at the strategic and port views. Here, you'll build ships and organize them into fleets, buy and sell trade goods for profit, conquer ports with marines, and negotiate with foreign companies. Such missions as sinking a pirate fleet, delivering a special commodity order, or upgrading a port facility provide some variety, but nevertheless, buying and selling goods gets repetitive. Despite the availability of detailed reports about the price of tea throughout your empire, the trading game seems incomplete because you can sell your exotic goods in only one European city--your home port. When you get inevitably tired of manually managing trade, you can set up automatic trade routes, but unfortunately, these take away any satisfaction you might have derived from maximizing profits by buying, hording, and selling at the right times. As it turns out, the real key to a successful company is not micromanaging trade deals, but rather balancing how much you spend on ships, munitions, and upgrades while leaving enough free capital to buy massive quantities of spices, silk, and the like. Be careful: A few careless expenditures could wind up ruining your company. Another necessary consideration is diplomacy. If you offend enough of the other companies, your fortune will end up at the bottom of the ocean.

Despite his lack of an awesome mustache, Captain Brill was proving to be a promising commander.

East India Company's interface functions capably on the strategic level, providing easy access to the location and cargo of your ships, the main trade goods supplied by various ports, detailed price histories for everything you have sold, and more. The strategic map is not very detailed--it mostly comprises empty expanses of land and ocean--but it is clear and easy to use. The port view interface, which you use to buy and sell goods, build and organize ships, and upgrade buildings works effectively as well, but only after you switch to 2D ports in the game options. 3D ports look great and function without a hitch, but the load times are absolutely intolerable. The music in port view is a nice touch because it rotates Indian, African, Arab, and European themes depending on the port's location.

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Posted in: Adventure

Overlord II

The impish minions of the Overlord universe haven't been idle in the two years that have passed since the first game and have emerged with a host of new tricks in Overlord II. The evil little scamps have used the time off to learn how to operate machinery, wear disguises, sail the open seas, ride mounts, and get possessed by their evil master, as well as develop an uncanny talent for attacking baby seals. These additions make Overlord II a more varied experience than the first game, and while some of the issues that hampered the original have been addressed, they haven't exactly been fixed. Overlord II retains the gleeful maliciousness of the series; thus, it's still great fun to have a small army of nasty little blighters at your disposal to wreak havoc. But because the game’s auto-targeting is still haphazard, and the minions apt to do some very dumb things, you can expect some frustration to go along with your enjoyment.

Seal clubbing--not cool. But funny.

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Though the minions have evolved and you're playing as a brand new overlord this time around, the title character remains as mute and inscrutable as in the original. The game is set dozens of years after the first game, so you'll have to start your evil dominion from scratch, with the new enemy being the Roman-like Glorious Empire. The tone of the game is satirical, sharp, and more than a little silly--the elves here are portrayed as hippie environmentalists, the Empire nobles are obese snobs, and the fairies are ridiculously overendowed. Meanwhile, the soldiers act like they stepped straight out of an Asterix comic. It's all harmless fun, and while you will get to kill your fair share of cute animals, your silent, mainly charmless overlord won't really get to do anything too nasty.

Because the main character is so impassive, it's once again up to the minions to carry the charm quotient of the game. The minions are a cackling, gleeful lot of destructive slobs who are endearing in their dedication to their master, and it's a joy to watch them attack enemies, harass innocents, and act like general nuisances. You'll be well into the game before you find all four types of minions--the melee-focused browns, the flame-throwing reds, the sneak-attacking greens, and the magic-heavy blues--but when you do, you'll have a formidable miniarmy at your disposal. As overlord, you need this support because--despite your intimidating Sauron-like garb--you're no match solo for more than a few enemies at any one time. All of the heavy lifting will be done by your minions, and while you'll be able to get away with sheer force of numbers in many encounters, the toughest battles in Overlord II will require you to think hard about your minion mix and how you deploy them on the battlefield.

Initially, it can be a little intimidating to deploy your minions, and you'll need to be fairly dexterous when manipulating the keyboard and mouse. The default layout, however, is pretty easy to get used to, and is superior to the game’s console counterparts as it affords you more accuracy when directing your minions. You'll quickly get the grasp of sweeping units across the landscape, separating your minions into their respective color groups to take advantage of their unique strengths (and shield their weaknesses), and making them hold strategic checkpoints. For the most part, your minions are dependable creatures who'll find the best path to take or attack the most present danger. They can, however, still be quite dumb, which means a certain amount of micromanagement from their overlord is in order. Minions will often stop to pick up booty when there are still plenty of dangerous enemies attacking, and some are prone to aquatic suicide by trying to pick up objects close to water.

Despite their occasional brain lapses, this time around, your minions are a much more talented bunch and their most important new trait is the ability to ride different mounts. Three of the four minion types have their own specific beastie they can ride, allowing them to vastly increase their effectiveness and speed. It's satisfying to see your reds do damaging strafing runs atop their fire lizards. And breaking through a heavily shielded phalanx becomes a breeze when your browns are mounted on their wolves. Opportunities to ride don't occur too often in the game, but when they do, it's a welcome change from Overlord II's usual gameplay.

Minions ridinng wolves. Can things get any better?

In fact, variety is one of Overlord II's most redeeming factors. At certain points in the game, the overlord will be able to directly possess an underling, giving you the chance to play from a minion's point of view. These are some of the best sequences in the game, with one highlight being a stealth mission through a heavily guarded Empire fort using your newly found greens (sort of like Metal Gear Overlord). You'll also get to control some hefty weaponry in the form of catapults and arrow turrets, as well as take on enemy ships with your own minion-rowed vessel. In some ridiculous but quite funny missions, you'll be able to disguise your minions to gain entry into heavily guarded areas. Individually, these specific events don't occur that often, but collectively, these welcome additions mean you shouldn't get stuck with doing the same thing over and over again during Overlord II's lengthy single-player campaign.

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Posted in: Action

Bionic Commando

PC enthusiasts are used to feeble ports of console games, and Bionic Commando is no exception. The usual signs of indifference to the platform are all here, such as onscreen prompts that assume you are using a console controller, and laughably few graphics options. But even if you're just seeking good entertainment and are able to look past the obvious apathy shown to this version of Bionic Commando, you'll still find that consistent fun is in short supply. There are some good ideas here, and when they coalesce, you glimpse the great game struggling to escape from the shackles of averageness. You see it when you fling automobiles at a crowd of troopers; you see it in the exciting, high-flying concluding sequence. More often, however, you get the idea that developer GRIN didn't know what to do with its clever ideas. Early glimpses of a big world to explore tantalize you, but your progress is restricted by annoying clouds of deadly radiation. You'll come across new, more powerful weapons, only to discover that shooting them is just as lame as firing your default pistol. Moving about the world with your bionic arm is fun, but that mechanical wonder isn't strong enough to carry the entire experience.

It looks like an open world at first, but it's just a radiation-soaked illusion.

That bionic arm is the gameplay's backbone, and it's the source of every positive feature found within Bionic Commando. Most importantly, it's your standard form of transportation. Using it as a grapple hook, you can fling it onto posts, tree branches, and girders and swing and climb toward your destination. Stringing swings together can be satisfying, though you don't have Spider-Man-like freedom to glide about as you please. Your arm has only limited reach, so you can latch onto something only when the targeting reticle indicates that the surface is available. Furthermore, swinging has a lot of weight behind it. You must release your grip earlier than you would expect to keep the momentum going, which leads to a bit of clumsiness in the first hour or so as you become acclimated to the mechanics. If you're playing with a mouse and keyboard, you'll also need to work around the onscreen button prompts, which assume you're playing with an Xbox 360 controller. Eventually, you'll be able to figure out these obstacles and swing with ease, though certain levels are more enjoyable to navigate than others because they offer a bit more elbow room.

A glimpse of a futuristic metropolis may at first lead you to believe that there's a lot of room to explore. However, while Bionic Commando does afford you occasional, minimal leeway, you're generally pushed down a linear path. In this case, the modern replacement for traditional invisible walls (though there are some of these as well) is radiation. These blue clouds of instant death choke the city streets and coat the sides of buildings and are to be avoided at all costs. Radiation is one of the game's most common sources of frustration, because it imposes an artificial limitation on movement. You might fling yourself onto a seemingly safe rooftop only to be welcomed by this fatal mist, or reach out toward a wall but find that radiation keeps you from grabbing it. The restrictions have a big impact on the pace, and the scattered enemy encounters are far too tepid to energize the experience.

Pop goes the pistol.

These encounters are lifeless mainly because it isn't any fun to shoot Bionic Commando's lousy weapons. Pistols are often referred to as peashooters, but no other game in recent memory provides a firearm that lives up to this name so aptly. It gets the job done, but the hollow pop of each shot and the minimal visual feedback make it boring to use. Subsequent additions to your arsenal aren't much better. From an unexciting grenade launcher to a boring shotgun, every weapon lacks punch. The only exception may be the rocket launcher, which allows you to fire off multiple rockets at once, a handy feature when facing a heavy-duty aircraft. Most of the time, however, you'll be facing sporadic squads of armored grunts. They don't exhibit the most advanced intelligence, but firefights can still result in your quick death, since you can take only a few shots before needing to duck away and let your health replenish. The low point of this mediocrity is a protracted, unrewarding shooting sequence within a library that will make you long for more energetic weapons and tighter shooting mechanics.

Fortunately, you have other offensive tools that are far more interesting to use. You can latch onto foes with your arm and zip-kick them, which sends you leaping backward through the air, letting you finish off your target with your pistol or perhaps another kick for good measure. You can also grapple certain environmental objects, like cars, boulders, and barrels, and fling them at your enemies--a technique that is especially enjoyable against a towering mechanical worm that stars in Bionic Commando's best boss fight. Additionally, you can launch the same objects in the air and punch them into opponents, which is equally fun to do. There are also a few set-piece levels that put the bionic arm to good use. In one of them, you take down a series of aircraft as you leap from one to the next; in the game's final scenes, you use similar techniques to memorable effect.

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Posted in: Action

Wolfenstein

Most modern first-person shooters are so very serious. They feature a whole lot of brown environments and gruff characters, but never have enough archways into alternate universes. Well, if you're in the mood for an FPS with a glint in its figurative eye, Wolfenstein is a good way to stave off the forces of evil without the in-game grumpiness that usually accompanies such endeavors. This sequel to 2001's Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a worthy addition to the series and a fun romp in its own right. The game won't set your world on fire; it occasionally stops feeling old-fashioned and starts feeling just plain old, and a number of flaws are woven throughout the gameplay's very fabric. Some awesome boss fights and memorable combat sequences prevent Wolfenstein from falling into a rut, however. Besides, you're not just fighting Nazis--you're fighting magic Nazis that conjure force fields and fly around with jetpacks.

The Veil ensures that you'll never be afraid of the dark.

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The setup for this historical/sci-fi mash-up is typical Wolfenstein whimsy, shouldered by the ever-capable B.J. Blaskowicz. This returning hero has spilled his share of Nazi blood, so who better than B.J. to protect the residents of the city of Isenstadt (not to be confused with the Austrian city of Eisenstadt) from the ongoing onslaught? Isenstadt is the headquarters of several resistance groups that seeks to wrest the secrets of the supernatural from the hands of the Schutzstaffel. It seems the Nazis are up to their old tricks, this time harnessing the powers of a mystical force called the Black Sun for the usual take-over-the-world kind of evil. If you know the series, you know not to expect much substance or surprise, though it's too bad there isn't more to draw you into this kitschy fiction. A lot of this has to do with the technology powering the game. Wolfenstein looks a bit aged; the prerendered cutscenes look overcompressed and facial animations are stiff. These second-rate assets, along with unenthusiastic voice acting, are distracting and make it hard to get invested in your fellow insurgents. Wolfenstein's story is a throwaway that boils down to a simple premise: Throw a bunch of Nazis into the occultist blender and see what cockamamy concoction pours out.

As it turns out, this concoction doesn't offer many surprises. Though you'll get tastes of role-playing elements and paranormal wizardry, Wolfenstein sticks to the trusty run-and-gun formula that has worked so well for shooters over the years. And it does it well, sending you into country farms, sprawling airfields, and secretive corridors to see how well you can fend off the soldiers and various anomalies it flings toward you. Your tools of destruction are solid. Traditional World War II weapons, such as the MP40 SMG and the Flammenwerfer, feel excellent, so even if you run out of ammo for the more powerful firearms, you'll never lament falling back to the simpler choices. But the better half of your arsenal is essentially snatched from an alternate reality. Of these options, you'll quickly grow fond of the Tesla gun, which fires electric streams in various directions at once, and the Leichenfaust 44, which is a heavy weapon that instantly vaporizes standard enemies. As you explore Isenstadt and complete missions, you'll earn money and find bags of coins. You can then spend these spoils on upgrades for your weapons, such as diminished recoil or greater damage. While some weapons are better in certain circumstances than others, there's really no weak banana in this bunch.

You frequently break the laws of gravity. Sir Isaac Newton would not be pleased.

The action itself is rudimentary as far as first-person shooters go. There is no cover system to grapple with; you won't peek around corners, slink in the shadows, or pilot vehicles. You can, however, enter a parallel dimension called The Veil. When you activate The Veil, the world is shrouded in a shimmering cloak. In it, you can run faster, and enemies glisten, making them easier to target. Odd creatures called geists also float about, shocking nearby enemies if you shoot them down and even creating fearsome webs of electricity in tandem with neighboring geists. More importantly, entering The Veil lets you perform three potent powers: slow down time, surround yourself with a bulletproof shield, and empower your own bullets to do more damage and pierce paranormal force fields. You can also purchase upgrades for Veil powers just as you do for weapons. Eventually, you might be turning adjacent enemies into pillars of ash when you suppress the flow of time or deflecting bullets back toward your foes when in the safety of your shield.

Similar powers have appeared elsewhere; if you've played either Ubersoldier game, for example, it's hard to dismiss the similarities as mere coincidence. Yet contrived or not, you'll need to make frequent use of The Veil. Wolfenstein is occasionally challenging when you don't use it; in spite of his regenerating health, B.J. is rather fragile. The game often pits you against a healthy (or unhealthy, in this case) number of Nazi soldiers and ninja-speed sorcerers, so you'll need to stay on your toes and charge up your Veil energy reserves whenever you see an energy deposit's telltale shimmer. That doesn't mean your adversaries are very smart. Soldiers often won't react to a grenade thrown at their feet, don't always care when the Nazi standing right next to them gets shot, and generally seem unconcerned with preserving their own lives. Any challenge comes from sheer numbers--and from time to time, it will come from cheap attacks that can lead to frustration. Cloaked sorcerers and fleet-footed vixens can sneak right up and kill you in a slash or two--an occurrence that can be hard to avoid if you fail to glimpse them by chance or miss the sound effects that signal their presence. Dealing with one-hit-kill surprises like that isn't much fun, and there are a few other sudden arrivals that are almost impossible to prepare for, such as rocket-spewing meanies flying about.

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Posted in: Action

Memento Mori

Point-and-click adventure games aren't exactly known for their high levels of action, but Memento Mori is so slow paced that you want to bottle it and sell it to insomniacs. This tale of forgery and mysticism in the art world is a plodding affair packed with a mystifying plot and dreary puzzles that are about as exciting as watching paint dry. Grim settings and voice acting reminiscent of European art-house movies almost pull the game out of the doldrums at times, although the sheer ordinariness of everything else quickly drags it back down. Almost any chore you could do in your real life would be more entertaining than the tasks set before you here.

Lara spends a lot of time talking on her cell phone. And you spend a lot of time watching her talk on her cell phone.

The playable leads here are Lara Svetlova, a Russian cop turned Interpol agent now working in the art crimes division in Lyon, France, and Max Durand, a one-time forger who must now do penance for his crimes by pulling odd jobs for the authorities. A nasty Russian named Colonel Ostankovic pulls the strings on both Lara and Max, using threats to force them to look into an apparent break-in at a St. Petersburg museum called The Hermitage. Because Ostankovic is in charge of the place, he wants to keep any inquiries hush-hush to avoid being blamed for problems that may have occurred on his watch. So he calls in the dynamic duo on the sly to check on a problem with the security cameras, which have been experiencing strange outages. Lara and Max begin working separately, but as things usually play out in these sorts of things, the two investigations soon become one after assorted evil machinations are discovered. There is an interesting tale buried somewhere in here, but everything is told in such a ham-fisted way that it's hard to appreciate the spooky saga until you get near the conclusion and the weirdness starts to come into focus. Even then, there are a lot of "Huh?" moments, especially during the ominous voice-overs that often mark the switch between characters.

But the biggest problem with Memento Mori is its dull structure. Although the writers have scripted a story with some tense moments, both Lara and Max get caught up in minutiae all the time. Almost every single little task is accompanied by something petty. This is a particular problem early on in the game. Lara, for instance, kicks things off with a thrilling quest to get a new cell phone battery from the IT department at her Lyon office and figure out how to turn on a machine in the Interpol lab. Max wanders the darkened Hermitage, where the biggest obstacle is a velvet rope he doesn't think he should cross. Unnecessary roadblocks like these pop up again and again throughout the game, disrupting and dragging out the plot. Problems themselves are tedious rehashes of ancient adventure game doggerel, so most challenges feel about as natural as suddenly being forced to complete a crossword puzzle in order to cook breakfast in real life.

If you can pick an item up, you can be assured that you'll need it down the road. So you're faced with scrounging cupboards and trash bins for everything--including clogged spray paint cans, ropes, and rocks--with the assumption that you'll be able to MacGyver something out of this garbage eventually. There isn't much challenge here, either. You never acquire massive piles of junk, so you generally just have to combine a couple of recently acquired doodads or do something as basic as use tweezers to pull a letter out of a mailbox. A logic puzzle is tossed into the mix every so often to keep you on your toes, although these brainteasers are about as challenging as a Junior Jumble. If you keep your eyes open, you'll never lack for numbers to punch into keypads or get stumped trying to rewire a fuse box.

The look and sound of the game is better than everything else, though that isn't really saying much. The game is presented in vivid third-person 3D, with you navigating the detective of the moment through beautifully realized living rooms, offices, rain-swept streets, spooky museums, sunny parks, and more. Locales have a lived-in appearance, right down to the cheesy soft porn that one creep has plastered all over his bathroom walls. That said, there is a serious animation issue. There are far too many delays caused by mandatory sequences, such as opening a cell phone or closing a door. As you repeat a lot of actions and revisit a lot of the same places, having to sit through these tedious animations is very annoying.

Actual investigative work is hard to come by in Memento Mori.

The musical score is nearly as grating. A repetitive piano piece plays over and over again, hitting the same few notes ad nauseam. It's like you're listening to a kid practicing for a recital. At least the voice acting is more than acceptable. Characters have been provided with idiosyncratic lines spoken with credible European accents, giving the game an art-house cinema vibe. This is a significant achievement, too. It's not often that a game with this many Russians manages to avoid turning them into Boris and Natasha-styled stereotypes. Unfortunately, many conversations run on automatic so you only get to watch, and those where you can make choices have been dumbed down to where you pick among positive, negative, and questioning attitudes. You never get to select specific topics to grill suspects with, which greatly limits the feeling that you're interacting with well-developed characters.

Memento Mori's one big achievement is that it makes a jet-setting story of international intrigue as boring as an afternoon at the Laundromat. There are a number of alternate endings that branch off from all sorts of different points in the game, although you would have to be seriously tolerant of tedium to finish it more than once to see them. Even with the moody visuals and distinctive voice acting, this is still more afternoon-nap material than a thriller.

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Posted in: Adventure

Dawn of Discovery

Few things stir the human imagination like the notion of exploration, and few games tap into the appeal of exploration as well as Dawn of Discovery. Here, you'll sail across seas of perfect deep blue, seeking out the next little island on which to build a proud settlement. Once discovered, you'll work the land to produce all manner of goods to make your people thrive while building new ships to forge still further into the unknown. The sheer complexity of producing many of the goods you'll need and the difficulty of taking your settlements to the highest levels of sophistication prevent Dawn of Discovery from being accessible to everyone, but the tremendous depth and terrific production values make it a no-brainer for fans of the genre.

Trading goods by sea is a big part of Dawn of Discovery.

Known as Anno 1404 outside of North America, Dawn of Discovery is the fourth entry in the Anno series of historically themed city-building and trading games. Dawn of Discovery offers both a very linear campaign and a richly customizable continuous play mode. There's so much to Dawn of Discovery that most players will want to start with the more structured campaign to become familiar with the gameplay. The campaign tells a compelling tale of religious conflict and unlikely alliances between East and West, but the structure, which sends you on an endless series of quests on behalf of other global powers, makes you feel more like an errand runner for nobles than a noble yourself. It's in the continuous play mode--where you can set your own goals for victory and chart your own course for achieving them--that Dawn of Discovery is at its best.

Regardless of the mode you're playing, the core action consists of discovering new islands, building settlements, cultivating goods, and managing the needs of your populace to advance your society. The more advanced your society is, the more gold you collect in taxes, but a bigger population doesn't guarantee richer coffers. Your people have needs for food, drink, faith, company, clothing, and amusement that become increasingly difficult to meet as your society becomes more advanced. Thus, it takes careful planning to produce goods quickly enough to meet those needs while keeping production costs to a minimum and preventing your cities from operating at a deficit. Sometimes, you'll need to put other considerations ahead of the well-being of your people by raising taxes to generate the money you need to dig yourself out of debt or denying your people certain goods as you stockpile them for an important construction project. The interface makes selecting and placing buildings, as well as managing taxes, very easy.

Unfortunately, the game never educates you on how to place your buildings for maximum production efficiency. To make matters worse, the manual that accompanies the game is utterly useless and sheds no light on how to build an efficient, profitable society. This makes the initial uphill climb considerably steeper and more frustrating. But once the pieces all come together and you're able to build a flourishing city, it's immensely rewarding.

Your towns bustle with mesmerizing activity and life.

While meeting the needs of peasants is easy, the challenge of satisfying wealthier, more refined residents is considerably more difficult because you'll need to run several production facilities to produce many of the goods they require. Producing leather jerkins, for instance, requires a source of coal, a salt mine, a salt works, and a pig farm. Ultimately, you'll have dozens of production facilities in operation; some generate such basic goods as hemp, while others combine and process those basic goods into other products. You'll also likely have ships carrying goods from island to island along trade routes that you have established, which is a breeze thanks to the intuitive routing interface. Few things can make you feel more like the ruler of an empire than seeing your ships sail the seas engaged in trade and operating autonomously while you're free to focus on other things. And you'll need that freedom because there's never any shortage of things for you to supervise. Dawn of Discovery is a multitasker's dream because you'll want to keep an eye on a myriad of production flows to make sure that things are humming along properly. This ranges from ensuring that the lumberjacks have enough trees to chop down to making sure that the land is properly irrigated for the production of goat's milk. On the flipside, those who prefer a more focused experience may find the sheer number of considerations involved here overwhelming and distracting.

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Posted in: Adventure

Overlord II

The impish minions of the Overlord universe haven't been idle in the two years that have passed since the first game and have emerged with a host of new tricks in Overlord II. The evil little scamps have used the time off to learn how to operate machinery, wear disguises, sail the open seas, ride mounts, and get possessed by their evil master, as well as develop an uncanny talent for attacking baby seals. These additions make Overlord II a more varied experience than the first game, and while some of the issues that hampered the original have been addressed, they haven't exactly been fixed. Overlord II retains the gleeful maliciousness of the series; thus, it's still great fun to have a small army of nasty little blighters at your disposal to wreak havoc. But because the game’s auto-targeting is still haphazard, and the minions apt to do some very dumb things, you can expect some frustration to go along with your enjoyment.

Seal clubbing--not cool. But funny.

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Though the minions have evolved and you're playing as a brand new overlord this time around, the title character remains as mute and inscrutable as in the original. The game is set dozens of years after the first game, so you'll have to start your evil dominion from scratch, with the new enemy being the Roman-like Glorious Empire. The tone of the game is satirical, sharp, and more than a little silly--the elves here are portrayed as hippie environmentalists, the Empire nobles are obese snobs, and the fairies are ridiculously overendowed. Meanwhile, the soldiers act like they stepped straight out of an Asterix comic. It's all harmless fun, and while you will get to kill your fair share of cute animals, your silent, mainly charmless overlord won't really get to do anything too nasty.

Because the main character is so impassive, it's once again up to the minions to carry the charm quotient of the game. The minions are a cackling, gleeful lot of destructive slobs who are endearing in their dedication to their master, and it's a joy to watch them attack enemies, harass innocents, and act like general nuisances. You'll be well into the game before you find all four types of minions--the melee-focused browns, the flame-throwing reds, the sneak-attacking greens, and the magic-heavy blues--but when you do, you'll have a formidable miniarmy at your disposal. As overlord, you need this support because--despite your intimidating Sauron-like garb--you're no match solo for more than a few enemies at any one time. All of the heavy lifting will be done by your minions, and while you'll be able to get away with sheer force of numbers in many encounters, the toughest battles in Overlord II will require you to think hard about your minion mix and how you deploy them on the battlefield.

Initially, it can be a little intimidating to deploy your minions, and you'll need to be fairly dexterous when manipulating the keyboard and mouse. The default layout, however, is pretty easy to get used to, and is superior to the game’s console counterparts as it affords you more accuracy when directing your minions. You'll quickly get the grasp of sweeping units across the landscape, separating your minions into their respective color groups to take advantage of their unique strengths (and shield their weaknesses), and making them hold strategic checkpoints. For the most part, your minions are dependable creatures who'll find the best path to take or attack the most present danger. They can, however, still be quite dumb, which means a certain amount of micromanagement from their overlord is in order. Minions will often stop to pick up booty when there are still plenty of dangerous enemies attacking, and some are prone to aquatic suicide by trying to pick up objects close to water.

Despite their occasional brain lapses, this time around, your minions are a much more talented bunch and their most important new trait is the ability to ride different mounts. Three of the four minion types have their own specific beastie they can ride, allowing them to vastly increase their effectiveness and speed. It's satisfying to see your reds do damaging strafing runs atop their fire lizards. And breaking through a heavily shielded phalanx becomes a breeze when your browns are mounted on their wolves. Opportunities to ride don't occur too often in the game, but when they do, it's a welcome change from Overlord II's usual gameplay.

Minions ridinng wolves. Can things get any better?

In fact, variety is one of Overlord II's most redeeming factors. At certain points in the game, the overlord will be able to directly possess an underling, giving you the chance to play from a minion's point of view. These are some of the best sequences in the game, with one highlight being a stealth mission through a heavily guarded Empire fort using your newly found greens (sort of like Metal Gear Overlord). You'll also get to control some hefty weaponry in the form of catapults and arrow turrets, as well as take on enemy ships with your own minion-rowed vessel. In some ridiculous but quite funny missions, you'll be able to disguise your minions to gain entry into heavily guarded areas. Individually, these specific events don't occur that often, but collectively, these welcome additions mean you shouldn't get stuck with doing the same thing over and over again during Overlord II's lengthy single-player campaign.

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Posted in: Action