Man. What an ingrate.

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F.E.A.R.

I finished F.E.A.R. a little while ago. It felt a lot like Shogo in how it played (no surprise considering the developer). It wasn't that scary - I think it tried too hard. It really needed to not start with the "Oh god I'm seeing a creepy little girl" thing until an hour or two into the game to build up tension. Bullet time is kinda old hat now. The guns had nice variety, but the 'bigger' guns needed more punch to them. Also the robot enemies probably could have been cut out and the game made better for it.

F.E.A.R. Extraction Point

Went ahead and fired up the first expansion to FEAR. I'm so confused by what's going on. On the other hand, the shooter action was a little better in this game. I guess the encounters were better constructed. Also new guns. >.>

Bioshock (PC) Review

BioShock is the spiritual sequel to the System Shock games, which you may be able to deduce by noting a similarity in their names. There are a lot more similarities than that in the games, but we'll get to it in due time.

BioShock is a first person shooter (FPS) which combines elements of roleplaying games into the FPS structure. With the various in-game currencies (Money and Adam) and the weapon upgrade stations the main character's abilities are highly tailorable and get stronger as the game goes, even beyond just acquiring bigger guns.

Right off the bat, I'm just going to say this: BioShock is beautiful. I can't speak for how it looks with the graphics turned down, but with them cranked up the lighting was gorgeous and the art deco styling of the submerged city of Rapture were rendered lovingly in their full glory. If you have a system which is contemporary to this review and pretty beefy for its time, just stop reading the review and get BioShock. Your eyes are in for a feast that's worthwhile even if the rest of the game was trash. Fortunately the rest of the game is anything but junk.

The controls handle fluidly and intuitively, and the only real trouble I ran into was with ammunition management. Movement is responsive, aiming is as good as it gets in a FPS. Each weapon has a very different feel, and the wide variety of Plasmids bring great versatility to the tactics available.

Oh I didn't mention the Plasmids? They're essentially the magic of the game. You can shoot fire, freeze enemies in ice, or if you really want to do something unique you can shoot bees from your hand. New Plasmids can be found in the game world, earned by doing research on enemies, or bought from upgrade stations in exchange for Adam.

Adam is important stuff, much of the game is based around it. The enemies you fight, the so-called Splicers, have access to Plasmids as well. The iconic Little Sisters and Big Daddies harvest Adam. One of your goals is, of course, to accumulate lots of Adam so you can use it to 'splice' new Plasmids into yourself. There's a lot of Adam around in the game, but there's not enough of it to turn the player into an expert at everything. You'll have to make choices, and the game is balanced enough that you can employ a wide-range of different choices and still find success. There are stations around the submerged city of Rapture that allow you to change your Plasmid layout on the fly, so if it turns out that shooting fire out of your hand just isn't your thing, you can swap something else in instead.

There's a variety of guns, each with several different kinds of ammo. Managing the ammo is the only thing I had trouble with while playing, and often the half-second or so of lag (and sometimes swearing) was enough time to let the enemy get in a hit or two on me while changing from regular bullets to armor piercing. For weapons you have a simple revolver, a tommy gun, a shotgun, a crossbow, a chemical sprayer, and of course the wrench to hit people with. The basic guns are pretty self-explanatory, letting you fire munitions tailored for anti-personnel or anti-armored target work. The crossbow has one bolt which strings up electrified tripwires, enabling elaborate traps. The chemical sprayer can spray fiery napalm, freezing liquid nitrogen, or even lightning, letting it mimic the effects of some Plasmids. Ammo is relatively plentiful, even if the enemy doesn't drop much, there are still good supplies laying around and if desperation sets in there is always a vending machine somewhere nearby to purchase from.

Enemies come in a disappointingly small variety, considering that Adam lets splicers change almost anything about themselves. I really had been hoping to see some really strange looking enemies in the game, but most opponents were boringly too-human, even if horribly grotesque human. The general darkness of the game also worked against it here, cloaking the enemy models in detail obscuring shadow all too often. The Big Daddies are a sight to behold, especially the first time one appears; the tenth or so Big Daddy isn't so fresh and wonderful, the luster wearing off quickly. Little Sisters aren't really enemies, but the game early on gives you a choice: kill them for more Adam now, or save them from having to produce Adam for less immediate gains. The animation for all the characters is well done, but the animation used when healing the Little Sisters is particularly nice to watch with great lighting effects coming into play as the effect spreads.

The sorts of tasks given out are pretty standard things for a FPS: go here, kill those guys, get that thing, click that button, and so on. The dialogue and narration linking the tasks together is top-notch and of games like this only the venerable System Shock 2 strings together a more compelling narrative. The story progresses through various means. Obvious is in-person dialogue either spoken to your character, though there's little of that past the intro, or just chatter from enemies setting the mood and tone. Various people, including the game's two big characters, Andrew Ryan, who runs Rapture, and Atlas, who's leading the popular uprising against Ryan, contact the player over his radio. This is generally how the player gets whatever task the current mission is. The back story leading up to the player's involvement in Rapture is laid out through tape recordings that can be found scattered all over the game. These recordings are often insightful, cool, or just generally amusing, and they serve to gradually reveal the madness that's set in on the city.

I'm going to skimp on discussing the story's plot except to note that it seems somewhat weak to me, but having said that, it's well told and compelling. The big plot twist comes somewhat out of left field, I think, but once it's happened it helps make sense of some of the things that the player's been through.

Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:

Gameplay: 10

Really great gameplay. Polished controls and a wide variety of weapons and powers to pick and choose from, which help keep things fresh. The difficulty curve seems a little steep, because even performing research to get damage bonuses enemies seemed to exist solely to soak up unacceptable amounts of ammunition from my guns.

I also haven't mentioned hacking before now, but it's a handy tool to turn robots, or defenses against your enemies. It also lets you open safes and such. Sadly hacking has a sometimes annoying minigame associated with it. Losing the minigame costs the player health, so there's always a risk to trying to hack things. Fortunately if you're loaded with cash, most things let you spend cash to skip the hacking minigame.

Graphics: 10

It's not that things in BioShock are beautifully rendered, though they are. It's not that the setting is unique, which it is. The retro-styling of Rapture won me over, and would have gotten the game a 10 from me anyway. Fortunately the game is great looking and a real joy to watch.

Sound: 8

The sound is very well done. The music is appropriate, the voice acting is well done, and the sound effects are generally great.

Replay: 2

I think BioShock is a game I'll revisit in a year or so to relive the experience. Being able to swap my Plasmids around during a single game is a blessing in that it doesn't tie me down to a single playstyle, but it's a curse in that I get to fiddle with multiple builds during the course of a single game. The choice of killing or saving the Little Sisters also doesn't provide much incentive to replay the game immediately because ultimately it really only changes the far too short endings.

Other: N/A

I'm not sure what I was expecting from BioShock, but what was delivered was not it. It's still quite an awesome game, but I don't think it lives up to all the promises that were made. For instance, enemies were supposed to have motivations for what they do other than simply shooting the player a lot. This is true for the Big Daddies and Little Sisters, at least until you shoot at them, but the Splicers throughout the game are, except for a few rare incidents, pretty much just out to get the player. The level layouts also don't feel right to me, a little too contrived and a little bit too unlike actually being in buildings maybe. Once I shed myself of these notions and accepted the game for what it was, the experience turned out to pleasantly surprise me.

Overall: 9

BioShock would get a 10 from me, except that I simply don't feel compelled to replay it. It's not long-enough to make a replay daunting, it's just that there doesn't seem to be enough meat there for a second trip through. Having said that, it's an incredible experience that I can recommend to any fan of first person shooters, and virtually every fan of videogames out there.

Crysis (PC) Review

Released in November of 2007, Crysis is still, at this writing, one of the most graphically demanding first person shooters on the market. The game was also something of a commercial failure on release.

As a shooter, Crysis succeeds. Controls are polished, there's a variety of guns to use, the player's super-powered nanosuit brings a host of tactical options to the table, and there's a fair variety of enemies to fight. The graphics are great, especially when turned most of the way up.

Movement is tight, as you'd expect from a modern shooter. Switching between weapons with the scroll wheel comes naturally. Changing modes of the nanosuit is accomplished by pressing the mouse wheel button down, which is possibly the only place where the game feels unpolished. More than once while changing weaponry mid-fire fight I found myself accidentally bringing up the nanosuit window and dropping out of the mode I wanted to be in.

There is a variety of guns in the game, covering the variety you would expect in any shooter: a pistol, a couple assault rifles, a shotgun, and a sub machine gun. There are a few exotic weapons, such as the American Gauss Rifle which makes short work of certain enemy types. Generally the arms that are usable are unremarkable, but fun to use. One late-game highlight is a nuclear grenade launcher, sadly it never gets used outside of one boss battle.

The nanosuit is the real star of Crysis. In its default mode it acts as a damage absorber, using the suit's replenishing energy supply to soak damage and keep the player alive. Another mode gives the player super strength, making melee attacks into ferocious one-hit kills, steadying the player's aim while sniping, and letting the player traverse difficult terrain with super jumping. There's also super speed mode, which passively improves moment speed, but when used with the run key allows the player to sprint at vehicle-speeds; handy for getting behind a group of enemies and confusing them for a few vital moments. The final mode is a cloaking device, rendering the player mostly invisible. It should go without saying how useful that can be, either for hiding from alerted enemies, or sneaking past them.

The North Korean enemies are pretty intelligent and use squad tactics to harry the player. They try to outflank the player and catch him in a crossfire. They use grenades to flush the player out of hiding. When not alerted to the player's presence, they act mostly naturally, going about their jobs, or just leaning up against things and relaxing during guard duty. The enemy's ability to sense the player is also modeled well, with the AI responding by moving towards noise cautiously, and if nothing happens often enough losing interest and going back to their earlier task. The human enemies behave in a way that just feels right.

In addition to North Korean infantry, often the player is forced to deal with vehicles. Usually this is just a Korean jeep with a machine gun on it, which isn't much trouble. A player can also steal most of the vehicles in the game if they're found unmanned. In one stage the player drives a tank and engages in tank on tank combat against the North Koreans. Another stage has the player flying an American VTOL, fighting against flying alien enemies. The vehicle stages, and generally just being able to cruise around in a vehicle, help break up the on-foot action and give the game a little more variety.

I just mentioned aliens in the paragraph above, but if you've been to the official Crysis webpage you already knew they would be involved somehow. About halfway through the game, its focus changes and aliens overrun the island. The alien units come in a small variety of foes, most of which fly and are generally somewhat annoying to fight. Sadly for me, I had the method of their arrival and such spoiled to an extent from playing Crysis Warhead first, so I had an idea of what to expect. The main cool thing that the aliens bring to the table is a change in environment: the aliens have the ability to flash freeze terrain, turning the tropical jungle into a bizarre iced over replica of itself.

The game environments have a fair variety to them. Most of the game takes place in jungle, whether near the beach or further inland. A few stages take place inside of the alien fortress, where there is no gravity and movement is reduced to floating. There are underground areas, an aircraft carrier, and the already mentioned frozen jungle areas to round the game out. Each environment is rendered in detail and is destructible to some extent. I had fun just sitting behind a machine gun and cutting down trees and foliage in the jungle.

The plot is kind of thin, not to say that it's bad, but there's just not a lot of meat on its bones. The game ends on a cliffhanger, which feels disappointing. More disappointing is the entire second half of the game, which is spent evacuating people from the island and retreating in the face of the enemy. I understand why it's this way, because a vast alien horde appearing out of nowhere with crazy freeze rays is going to surprise most any military planner and cause unacceptable casualties, but it still feels wrong for the super soldier in a super powered suit of super armor to ever run away from enemies. At least at the very end of the game, you start to even the score up with the aliens for all the damage they've inflicted.

Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:

Gameplay: 10

As shooters go, it's really hard to top Crysis's gameplay. The variety of weapons is just right without being overwhelming, the nanosuit allows for all kinds of crazy tactics, and there's just enough variety and smarts in the enemy to keep the action from getting stale. About the only place that gameplay suffers is in the zero-G stage inside the alien fortress where it's very easy to become lost. This, however, makes up such a small portion of the game that I can't deduct points from it.

Graphics: 10

Stunning. Perhaps the best jaw dropping moment was when I happened to look up from the firefight I was engaged in and saw that a mountain was collapsing in real time. Debris rained down from it and pieces underneath the outer layer gradually became more and more exposed.

Sound: 9

The sound is nearly perfect. The acting is a little hammy, but given that the game feels like an action movie that's okay. Effects are great, and the soundtrack fits the mood perfectly.

Replay: 2

I'll be honest, I don't feel much of an urge to replay Crysis, except maybe the early parts of the game where the nanosuit provides a major edge against the North Korean infantry. On the other hand, I am eagerly awaiting an actual sequel (not an expansion like Crysis Warhead which I've played), so I don't think I'm tired of the gameplay options provided by the nanosuit.

Other: N/A

None of my friends have Crysis, so I haven't been able to test the multiplayer aspects of it, thus this review is based entirely on the single-player mode.

Overall: 9

If your computer can run it, Crysis is a must-play game for any shooter fan. It's good looking, fun to play, and just long enough to be filling without dragging on for too long. Really, with the price of the game having dropped a lot since its release, if your computer can run it, there's not much of an excuse not to pick it up and give it a try. It's essentially a summer blockbuster action movie that you can play, instead of just watch.

F.E.A.R. (PC) Review

F.E.A.R. (and I'm not going to type all those periods again) is getting to be a bit of an old game at the time of this writing, nearly four years after its release. I remember thinking when it first came out that it didn't sound all that interesting to me. The sequel, which recently was released, did catch my eye, so I thought it would be appropriate to play the original and hope that it would give me an idea of what was going on when I loaded up the sequel. And that leads us to this review.

FEAR feels a lot like playing Shogo, which shouldn't be a surprise considering they share developers. FEAR is a first person shooter that imports the tropes of recent Japanese horror movies, producing a sort of FPS-Survival Horror hybrid. It succeeds as a shooter, but generally falls flat as a horror experience.

Like most modern shooters, the controls handle well and are generally intuitive. They're also highly configurable, an option I noticed only after my fingers had gotten used to the default layout. My only gripe with the controls is that too often I found myself hitting G (which throws a grenade) instead of F (to interact with an object), or hitting Z (using a med kit) instead of X (toggle my flashlight on and off). Maybe that's not a problem for anyone else, but I wish I'd changed the controls to make that a non-issue before I had gotten used to the default controls. Only being able to carry three weapons at a time is also a bit of a downer, though I can understand from balance reasons why the limit exists. I would have preferred a system more in-line with Crysis where you can carry two main weapons, your pistol sidearm, and then a heavy weapon. Ultimately this is just a minor nitpick because guns come and go so often in FEAR that what you drop in one fight is likely going to be found just one or two firefights down the line.

The enemies are smart, very smart, or at least seem to be. They use smart tactics, rushing at the player when they have numerical superiority or using grenades to flush the player out of cover. They try actively to get behind the player and generally make a nuisance of themselves. The foot soldiers are great fun to fight against. Later in the game, robots and flying robots appear. These are much more dangerous than the normal enemies, and also are generally less fun to fight against, appearing in groups too small to use any interesting tactics the fights devolve into contests of who has more really big guns. Later on ghost-like enemies appear and attack as well, though they're more of an annoyance than a threat except in very large numbers.

The situation that pits you against these foes is somewhat cliché. A top secret military research project goes crazy and starts killing everyone. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, the research project was a crazy psychic with an army of clone soldiers that mentally controls. This is bad. So the government sends in FEAR, a small strike team dedicated to dealing with paranormal threats. You, the player, are the newest FEAR member. What a way to start your career.

As you go in to start investigating, the player character starts tripping out and hallucinating. Visions of hospital rooms, a man with a moustache, a little girl, and the crazy cannibal psychic you're supposed to be shooting flit across the screen in brutal succession. As the game wears on you can discover clues by listening to phone messages and searching laptops. To an extent the game tries to copy the story telling techniques of the venerable System Shock games, fleshing out back story as needed as the game progresses through recordings left by the people involved. This is always a nice change of pace from the more sedate Resident Evil plot advancement technique of stopping everything and forcing the player to read a couple paragraphs of text.

Shooting is a joy in the game, but it's interrupted frequently for the horror part of the game. Sometimes it's just a grotesque image appearing on the screen for a moment, other times the player is transported to an alternate world of fire and ghosts, other times the geometry changes around the player, or drops the player into a pool of blood, and so on. It's shocking the first few times, but the novelty wears off quickly. Far more effective in being creepy are the people that appear for a few moments then fade away, or the (not so) random sightings of the creepy little girl in an area. Maybe I'm jaded and knew too well what to expect from watching the Japanese horror movies that the game steals its tropes from, but except for a few moments the scares were mostly predictable. Still, the game tries pretty hard on the scare factor, and it's mostly well done. I didn't find myself rolling my eyes and wanting the scary scenes to be finished, even at the end of the game, at least.

The various characters you meet throughout the game lack the charm to really make it feel emotional when some of them inevitably die or meet some other bad end. The phone messages and radio chatter don't convey enough character and emotion to make the cast seem like more than cardboard cutouts. This is one of the few points where the developers missed the mark. Either better writing, or better voice actors, would have really helped. The one character that does have enough personality to be interesting is the villain you chase through the game, which helps to keep interest in the game going.

The other place that the developers miss the mark is in the environments. FEAR is full of offices and concrete walled crawlspaces and, it felt like, little else. Environments often have two ways through them, but they lead inevitably to the same place. Paths often curl about and double back on themselves, which actually helps prevent backtracking, since when they do loop around, it's because you've hit a switch and opened a door, and the path then leads you back to that naturally via an alternate route instead of expecting the player to hoof it back over a path that's been traversed already. That's not always the case, and the few times where the game doesn't naturally provide a way back to the unlocked door can be a bit confusing. It's also not always immediately clear where to go, despite the game being very linear in the paths. The level design is therefore kind of mediocre and repetitive.

Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:

Gameplay: 8

Good, tight controls. Mostly intuitive layout on the keyboard. Enemies are well balanced, and there's a great selection of firearms. Some frustration with the robotic enemies exists, though. And there's also slo-mo that can be toggled on and off, but that's sort of an overdone feature in many shooters these days and barely rates this mention of it.

Graphics: 8

Even compared to its contemporaries, FEAR isn't that good looking of a game. It pulls off the Japanese-inspired horror effects pretty well.

Sound: 8

Sound effects are crisp and appropriate. The ambient music fits the game perfectly. The voice acting is merely adequate.

Replay: 3

I don't think there's much reason to replay FEAR. Not with two expansion packs and a sequel to give similar gameplay without having to go through the same boring levels again. It might be worth playing through again and finding all of the phone messages and such to decipher more of the story, but I have a feeling that won't be enough to get me to replay it.

Other: N/A

Sadly I haven't been able to give multiplayer a try, so this review is based entirely on the single player experience.

Overall: 8

A very good shooter in most respects. It tries for a different ambience than most of its genre does, and pulls the horror effects off with mixed success. It's a pretty unique experience, and considering that the price of the game is down to ten bucks at places like Best Buy there's really not much excuse in not picking it up and giving it a try.

F.E.A.R. Extraction Point (PC) Review

F.E.A.R. Extraction Point is an expansion pack to the game F.E.A.R. It serves as a direct sequel to FEAR, picking up where the main game left and covering the protagonist's fight through a desolated city swarming with clone soldiers and horrible psychic monsters. Extraction Point is much more shooter-oriented than the original FEAR, filled with more difficult encounters and battles.

As this is an expansion, I'm going to refer the reader to any number of reviews of the original to learn about the graphics, sound, and controls and only provide a brief summary of my feelings about them. The graphics are good, but compared to other games from the same time period they're nothing special. The sound is very good, except the voice acting which fails to convey any real emotion or sense of urgency. The controls are intuitive and easy to handle except for my habit of hitting G and throwing a grenade when I wanted to interact with an object (the F key).

The plot continues from the end of FEAR, picking up after the helicopter the protagonist was in has crashed. Fortunately the protagonist survives. Within a few minutes of escaping from the crash site and moving down to the city streets, the play discovers that the psychic villain who was killed near the end of the first game is back. Cue all the dormant clone soldiers waking up and beginning a hunt for the player that lasts the rest of the game. Alma is back, of course, and alternately trying to save or kill the player depending on her mood.

It's a tense ride through several environments including the subway, the sewer, a church, warehouses and eventually a hospital. Along the way various characters die horrible screaming deaths as the player, helpless, watches. The game uses the same techniques as the original FEAR to try and scare the player, with Alma of course figuring prominently in the creepiness. You can expect to see pools of blood, bizarre hallucinations involving fire, and lots of semi-invisible enemies attacking in poorly lit areas.

There's a couple new enemies in the expansion, including a new invisible psychic manifestation that fights in melee similar to the stealth clones. Also new, or if it's not I at least don't remember it from the first FEAR, is another kind of robot enemy, which is just as annoying as the original ones. New enemies also bring with them new guns, including a laser that can sever limbs off of enemies and leaves cool markings in the terrain, and a Gatling gun that spits out tons of bullets at the enemy.

Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:

Gameplay: 8

Good, tight controls. Mostly intuitive layout on the keyboard. Enemies are well balanced, and there's a great selection of firearms. Some frustration with the robotic enemies exists, though. The slow motion toggle is really essential in this game, whereas in the first game it could be ignored. The new enemies hit too hard, and in the case of the invisible ones move too fast to be easily dispatched without using slo-mo.

Graphics: 8

Solid, could be a lot better for the time it was released in.

Sound: 8

Sound effects are crisp and appropriate. The ambient music fits the game perfectly. The voice acting is merely adequate.

Replay: 2

I don't think there's anything to be gained from a replay. The plot's shallower than the original FEAR, and there's not enough new and interesting gimmicks around to make going through the game's areas worth doing more than once.

Other: N/A

Some of the crazy sights seen at the end of the game don't make a whole lot of sense. I'm also pretty tired of helicopters being shot down in this series. The dead psychic cannibal harassing you says you'll have to make a choice, but you as the player never get to make one.

Overall: 8

It's good for what it is: five or so more hours of FEAR. If you go into it expecting something more, you're going to be sorely disappointed.