Shank 2 [PS3 REVIEW] [QUICK&SHORT]

Gory-Gorgeous platformer fighter that has an awesome, tight retro control system... if you can stomach the shanking.

This square-jawed brute is our hero - Shank - who just loves to..... er..... chop vegetables?

What's It All About Then?

This is Shank 2, a 2D side-scrolling brawler where you play the part of "Shank" - a guy who loves to use knives (do you see what they did there?). This is the sequel to the extremely popular 2010 original - which impressed players with it's beautiful graphics and brutal combat.

In this outing, Shank is somewhere in South America, and there's this evil dictator who is obviously up to no good. Shank is a tough hitman, out to help nobody, but the violent struggle going on around him draws him back into action.

Grab the brute, break his arm, jump over and slash that guy with the gun....
it's all in a day's work for our boy Shank.

So Is It Any Good?

+++ Retro-Perfect Controls +++
The big draw for me to this game was the controls - they are wonderfully tight and well-designed. You use square for your knives, triangle to use heavy weapons (ranging from chainsaws to sledgehammers) and circle to use ranged weapons (throwing knives and guns). The combat rockets on at an intense pace - with enemies spawning left-right-and-centre to cut up into little pieces. 


There's some extra moves that help to get you out of tight spots (launching jumps and grab/throw moves) and these allow the combat to get very tough without feeling impossible. Add to that the wide range of environmental helpers that you can use - such as explosive canisters around the place and spike pits to smash enemies into.


Basically you're never short of ways to violently kill anyone in your path - and the game keeps things tense by having quite a high difficulty level (especially on the boss fights).


If you found the combat a bit too easy then there's a Hard Mode to try as well, with less health pick-ups and more soft squishy baddies to put your namesake to. Special mention goes to the "Survival mode", which puts Shank into a small combat arena where he must take on wave after wave of increasingly powerful enemies. There's a shop system here too, where you buy bonus items to make the action slightly more bearable - but if you are still in the mood for a challenge after the main story then there's another hour or so of play here.

You can even gross-out a friend in Co-op Survival Mode!

+++ Gorgeous Graphics... ish +++

Each of the nasty ways you can dispatch baddies is animated with bright, bloody, cartoon graphics - looking truly awesome in high-def... if a little stomach-turning. Shoot grunts with a shotgun to see them splat into pieces. Throw them into rotating blades to see them splat into pieces. Run at them with a chainsaw to see them... you get the idea.


The cutscenes are just as comic-book beautiful - but the game seems to feel the need to be brutal and offensive as much as possible - so be prepared for some guts being spilled, heads being lopped off, and limbs flying everywhere.


The story that links these all up is good enough - even though one level you traipse through a swamp filled with cannibals for no good reason other than it allowed the developers to throw in some humans chomping on human bowels. It's not really about the story though, is it? It's about being a tough-as-nails hitman who slashes people to shreds in the same way you might viciously tear up a copy of the Daily Mail.

It's not just DmC's Dante who can juggle baddies with his guns.

--- Short and Brutal ---

The only bad things I can say about Shank 2 are that the game is just a little too short to be a stellar success. The main story - even if some fights take a few tries - will be over in under 3 hours. Hard Mode is there if you want it, but there's little difference in the actual gameplay. The Survival Mode again adds an hour or so, but still isn't quite meaty enough to keep me hooked for very long.

The second negative point is that with so much video violence, it all feels just a little bit cheap. Graphic nasties are thrown in for shock value alone - but when the entire game is about carving people into grillable lumps then it comes across as a little pointless. 

Basically, there's violence because it's necessary (such as taking down an evil dictator) and then there's violence because it'll make people go "Eeeeeewwww!". I found myself feeling slightly queasy at several points in the game, and it didn't really add to the experience for me.

Conclusions

The gameplay and graphics in Shank 2 are spot on - really tight and fun to play.

The difficulty level is set just right too - so you're constantly having to make the most out of the control system without it ever feeling too hard.

There is still room for improvement though - taking out some of the "filler" violence and just sticking with a longer, more-focused campaign mode and this would be a big hit.

Feel free to post comments or contributions to improve the experience!
Any images in this review are subject to relevant copyrights and are kindly provided by: http://www.shankgame.com/

Journey [PS3] [RETROSPECTIVE]

As an extra review for this week, I'm doing a review of the art exhibit/platformer game - JOURNEY - and so thought I would take the time to do a little retrospective of the two other PS3 titles by the same developers - thatgamecompany.

I'll go through them in chronological order, starting with their 2007 release, FLOW.

Flow is a top-down 2D strategy game where you control a little microbial fish/sperm and evolve yourself by consuming other, smaller microbes and avoiding bigger, nasty microbes. It was a very artistically-styled game, with audio effects delicately chiming in as you progressed. Controls were simple - and the presentation didn't bombard you with help text and Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) - which is rare and was very nice to see.

It began in the sort of environments as shown above ^^^ - where you were this fish-type floating creature and you guided yourself around levels until you were the biggest fish-sperm in the ocean. There was an almost "natural" or intuitive quality to the levels, you could tell that you weren't big enough to take on certain floaty things - and you were helpfully egged-on by sound effects until you eventually ate everything up. It was a very serene and pleasant experience.

The levels then progressed so that there was a greater variety of things floating in your vicinity, and a greater number of tricks required to beat them. From simple things like having to swallow them at a certain point in their floating pattern, or when you had powered up by eating a lot. Although fairly simplistic, the game wasn't trying to offer anything more. It was sort of like the game Snake on mobiles - there isn't any variety in gameplay features but the fun of floating around and beating levels in good enough.

Flow was well-received by gamers - the Flash version of the game got 100,000 downloads within its first 2 weeks of release and the PS3 version was the most downloaded PSN title of 2007. The style was colourful and elegant, and the controls were simple enough to get non-gamers interested. The developers then followed Flow up with one of the most beautiful titles ever made - Flower.

Flower was released in 2009, and stunned audiences upon release. Never before had a studio released such a fantastic display that straddled the line between gaming and art. The gaming community was united in its praise for the graphics - this could be one of the best tech demos ever created - and the impressive use of colour and animation.

You started off each level in Flower as a single stalk in a field. Every stalk of grass is animated, and blows around in the wind to absolutely stunning effect. You are then given  control of a gust of wind, and use it to blow the petals off the flower head and send them swirling through the field. There are then a whole bunch of other flowers in the field - and by swooping over them you combine their petals with your own until there is a giant, swirling mass of coloured petals that you control by the end of the level.

The game utilises motion-sensitive controls, so tilting the controller left and right swirls the group of petals left and right. Pulling back causes the petals to rocket upwards and swoop over in a loop - with each and every petal detailed and animated. Oh yes. They really did. Both petals, grass and backgrounds are drawn and displayed beautifully. If you ever need a game to silence an art critic who disapproves of gaming - forget Braid, that's still a platformer - show them Flower.

The game actually has a strange story played out through the advancement of the levels and small cutscenes at the beginning of levels. There's a very strong environmental/green message to the story, and  during the second half of the game you are tasked with activating wind turbines and smashing dark, metallic, industrial structures. It alludes to city life killing the planet and causing suffering - which is solved by getting millions of players to use 8-chipped superconsoles to burn through the night displaying the game on 500-inch super HD screens? Logical. OK so the artistic message doesn't quite work but it's still frikkin gorgeous and immensely fun to play through - technicolour swirling around, trying to catch the wind (cue Donovan track).

Then we move on to Journey, released in March 2012.

Journey continues thatgamecompany's trademark style - stunning visuals - refined, orchestral soundtrack - simple play mechanic. This time you are an unnamed, robed figure who wakes up at the start of the game in a desert and looks towards a distant mountain. Through directive cameras, the game indicates which way you should head, carving a path up one side of a sand dune and then sliding down the other side. You make your way to a large arena, where the first of the "puzzles" begins.

The puzzle mechanic in Journey concerns lift - i.e. how high you can reach. You can initially only jump a tiny amount, but through manipulation of the environment you gradually unlock the ability to get higher and higher - and the game allows you to move forwards. You can spend as little or as long as you like carrying this out - Journey is much more about experience than challenge. 

It is in this area that you learn of the game's new unique feature - one of the most novel co-operative modes ever implemented. In the game world, there are other real players who are just working through a Journey in the same way you are. Their actions affects your game world and your actions theirs. You can, if you so choose, sit back and let the other traveller take over. You can just race away and ignore the other traveller totally. If you want, you can stick with that player for the whole Journey - It really is up to you. And there's no chat function, no in-game messaging, no stats, no experience levels. Just players, interacting with the game and passing each other by on their own adventure. It's a wonderful mechanic that allows for some very unusual and touching elements of co-operation and communication between players - you have to try it to fully appreciate how it works.

The very small amount of communication possible is achieved through "shouting" - tap the circle button for a little yelp and hold it down to let out a loud, harmonious tone - or mix it up to create a strange, almost speech-like noise. Weirdly, as you experiment with the shouting function - which also acts as your main tool for interacting with the game world - you will often find that your online companion will start to "shout" back until the two of you are almost chatting. It's essentially baby-talk, yes, but it's novel to reduce your lines of communication down to semi-random noises. It feels almost personal..... as I said, it's quite weird.

You play through a few different types of environment during the duration of a Journey too - there's an underground, dark levels where you slide through sand in a sort of artsy racer game - there's a snowy setting where your character really feels the cold - and then there's the finale where you finaly ascend to the summit. 

The Journey can take as long as you want it to really, but most players will reach the summit within around 2 hours. So it's short - very short. The fun is then in going back - beginning a new Journey and seeing what else you can discover, what you can do differently, how else can you interact with other players - and just experiment!

There's a few challenges set as trophies - such as sticking with the same player throughout - so these add some focus and replay value to the game. It's certainly worth 2 or 3 playthroughs (just finished my 2nd at time of writing) and when it's release price was £10 then you really can't go wrong.

Conclusion

This is about as refined as you can make a game before it gets classed as an interactive movie or an art exhibit. It manages to be both compelling and beautiful - with gameplay so easy and enjoyable that you won't be able to resist just starting one...more....Journey.


There's really no other game like it - as unique as it is intriguing. Journey rewards exploration and experimentation and is much deeper than you may initially think.


To top it all off - it's cheap enough for it to be worth giving a go - and trust me, it's worth giving a go.



thatgamecompany have a wonderful gaming philosophy and style which shines through all 3 of these titles - and they stand out as some of the defining games of this generation. 
Well done.

Feel free to post comments or contributions to improve the experience! Any images in this review are subject to relevant copyrights and are kindly provided by:
http://thatgamecompany.com/games/flow/
http://thatgamecompany.com/games/flower/
http://thatgamecompany.com/games/journey/

Trine 2 [PS3] [QUICK&SHORT]

Absurdly pretty, fantastically colourful game 

that ticks nearly every box.

What's It All About?

The Trine is a magical object which binds three people together and grants them special powers.  These powers will be required in order to get through the puzzles the game world presents - with goblins, trolls, living forests, giant creatures.... and a witch with a dark secret to uncover. The 3 characters brought together in this fantasy tale are:

1. A Wizard - he has the ability to conjure objects and levitate them from afar
2. A Soldier - he has a sword, shield and hammer to fight and throw at destructible objects
3. An Archer - she has a bow and arrow, plus a grappling hook that can be used to swing to higher areas.

The action plays out as a side scrolling 2D-frame but 3D-graphics set-up - with extra powers earned by collecting hard-to-reach gems and beating baddies - and the story unravelled through small, sparse segments of text and a normally a small cutscene at the end of each level.

So Is It Any Good Then?

+++Spectacularly Colourful+++ The visuals are the big winner here - fantastic use of colour all around means that even the backdrops are worth a few minutes to stop and take a look at. Each scenario has its own colour scheme - with lighter and greener levels at the beginning, moving through to purple and blue mystical and aquatic levels through the middle, right through to black and red as we approach the climactic finale. It's great to see a game use such a variety of colours and settings in such a short game - it means that the environments never get boring and hold your attention for the duration of the story. The characters are funny and enjoyable enough to keep you interested as well.

+++ Co-op Physics Puzzler +++ Well I can't get enough of these - the use of clever tricks such as weighted platforms and levers that build in difficulty as the game progresses is great. You can get through the game on your own quite easily, and even using just the one character - but the fun lies in switching things up and getting a friend to join in and play along. There are some issues with the physics - momentum doesn't work properly and there's a glitch with the wizard's conjuring skill that I call the "magic carpet trick" that means you can fly through most of the puzzles in the game - but these flaws don't actually make the game any less playable. It isn't perfect but it works well enough to still be enjoyable.

--- Short and Unambitious --- The big problems with the game - other than it's a physics puzzle platformer with a buggered physics engine - are that the game is over too quickly and doesn't really take off. The story is well paced - revealing itself slowly until all is revealed at the end - but you reach that level so quickly that a lot of the suspense is lost. Added to that the lack of any real improvements over the original Trine and it means that while the game is very good - its graphical shine isn't matched in the rest of the game.

Conclusion

Trine 2 has charm, humour, great puzzles, spectacular visuals and a novel concept that makes for a brilliant all-round experience.

The game is great - and worth a play through for anyone - but the game isn't ground-breaking nor polished enough to grant it too revered a place in the Gaming Halls of Fame.


If they could double the size and number of levels, add in a few new gameplay mechanics and really go wild with the story - then the game would do the visuals justice.

Feel free to post comments or contributions to improve the experience!
Any images in this review are subject to relevant copyrights and are kindly provided by: http://trine2.com/site/index.php?page=media#screenshots

Nintendo DS Downloadable Games [Vol. 2] [DS] [QUICK&SHORT]

Bird & Bombs

PROS:

• Cheap - only £1.80 from the DSi Store.
• Enjoyable story - you are a special forces bird sent in with your bombs to rescue the president's daughter from a house full of ghosts. It's for kids but it's still fun.
• Simple premise and controls - you only control the angle and power of your bombs in each level to bounce off the walls, ceiling and obstructions to get the bombs into the ghosts mouths, thus blowing them up.
• Good for a while - there's 50 levels to get through with bosses at key points to keep the action varied. Aiming for perfect scores will take you a fair while longer. After you beat the main story there is Story+ mode, where you have limited bombs to complete the story levels, again increasing lifespan. Finally there's Challenge mode - essentially a tough survival mode to see how many levels you can get through before you fail.

CONS:

• Sometimes annoying definition of what "going into the ghost's mouth" actually is - due to the nature of firing bombs that bounce off walls, sometimes a bomb can pass over the mouth of a ghost and not go in. On other levels, it's almost like the ghost has a magnetic mouth drawing the bomb into it.
• The more difficult levels may make you want to smash your DS onto the floor. The deflated sigh that Bird with bombs makes every time it misses is saddening - and on the tougher challenges you will find that you fail a whole lotta times before you get it just right.

Cut The Rope

PROS:

• Cheap enough - £4.50 on DSi Store.
• The idea here is that you have to cut the rope that is holding a sweet such that it falls into a worm-thingy's mouth (bit of an object-in-mouth theme going on here). That's pretty much it - only the rope will be attached to a whole bunch of stuff that will make this a lot more tricky than it sounds.
• Some pretty complex physics puzzles later on - elastic bands stretch, balloons rise and pop and gravity keeps things in check. There are around 8 distinct puzzle elements that you will need to master - and you'll need to complete them speedily if you want the best scores.
• 125 levels of increasing difficulty - with 3 stars to collect on each level. Getting 3 stars on all 125 levels is not impossible but certainly a challenge.

CONS:

• Touch controls aren't perfect - this means that the more complicated levels requiring quick, coordinated responses regularly end in failure.
• This is a casual game, admittedly, but what exactly is the motivation to play this? To feed a fairly annoying green blob. 125 times. Could of done with a bit more than that really.

The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords

PROS:

• It was free! The whole thing cost precisely zero pennies off the DS Store!
• It's a colourful affair that has all of the fun and creativity of a Zelda title.
• Great use of the touch screen for controlling the characters - using the gadgets and interacting with the environments works well.
• Excellent multi-player and online features - playing with other gamers to fight through dungeons and earn the most treasure is enjoyable and rewarding.

CONS:

• Not quite a fully-fledged Zelda. There's a lot on offer here - and I can't really complain because it's free - but although it will keep you going for a few hours it isn't as ridiculously enormous as a usual Zelda title.
• More than once I have had level elements not work - usually in online games. This means that you can't go any further and the level timer ticks on regardless. Restarting the level normally sorts it out but it's still a pain when it happens.
• Possibly not available now to download - can't see whether it is available to purchase now that the free download period is over.

Images on this review are copyright of Nintendo and can be found at:
http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/games/dsiware/bird__bombs_16120.html
http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/games/dsiware/cut_the_rope_44901.html
http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/games/dsiware/the_legend_of_zelda_four_swords_anniversary_edition_44936.html

F.3.A.R. [PS3]

The third official title in the F.E.A.R. horror franchise is similar to earlier titles, only now you've got your dead psychic psycho brother with you at every step of the journey. 

Don't you just love getting the chance to bond with your evil, psychic little brother?

A Bit of Background.

If you hadn't worked it out yet, this is the third FEAR game, although you'd be excused as putting the number in the word is just stupid.


OK, I should start by saying that I'll be judging this title fairly critically as I'm a massive fan of the first 3 F.E.A.R. releases (the original F.E.A.R., Perseus Mandate and Extraction Point) but less so of F.E.A.R. 2. Really as they've got the high-definition consoles to test out, this should be an absolute roller-coaster. It *should* be.


These games generally involve you spending half your time shooting clever AI enemies and the other half walking down corridors where the walls start to bleed. Horror-Shooter. Get it? 


The themes are pretty dark here, the back story being so yucky that I'm not even going to go into it, sufficed to say that the freaky girl on all the cover art is totally justified in going all kill-rampage-y. If you're that perverse/curious then go play the first game. Then read the guide to the story. Grossed out sufficiently? Good. I shall continue.

Why The City Blew Up.
The story this time round is that you have now got to team up with your dead, psychic brother to go and save/kill your mother. She's about to give birth to another evil, psychic baby (who will probably cause Armageddon at some point) so the best thing to do would be to go and kill her. Pretty sure this was exactly what we've been up to the past 5 games... but whatever.


Your brother is actually trying to save your mother 'cause he loves the whole psychic murderer vibe. In the end, either you will kill your mother, your brother and the evil sprog, or alternatively your brother will kill you and save her and the baby. Win-win, right?

This is the cloud gathering as Alma prepares to blow up the city.....again.

It's Bullet Time.
The actual action is the same as in the older games (and now pretty much every FPS in existence) - you find cover, shoot a bit, run, duck, shoot, blow something up, run etc. etc. etc.


The "unique" selling points are the bullet time - wow a game where you can slow time down(!) - and the scary sections (which I'll come on to in a little while). 


The bullet time is now pretty redundant as most enemies move so slowly that you almost want the option to speed them up! Adding to the problem is that now enemies are now thick as pig shit, standing like squishy targets for you to carefully line up your aim and making minimal effort to hunt you down or flush you out of cover.


The environments have all been seen before too - ooh a subway, ooh an office, ooh a street - and so this gets pretty repetitive and dull very quickly, as well as being thoroughly dull and repetitive.

They swarm around you menacingly, and then wait to be killed like lemmings.

Horror? Don't Worry, You Have Nothing To F.3.A.R.

Tickets please.... no?.... then I will be forced to eat your head.

As you may have guessed from the pun in the heading, the horror sections aren't even scary any more. In previous games, these sections appeared out of nowhere and featured some unsettling psychological trickery - in one level you open a door that disappears in front of you, then a door appears in the floor, then your vision blurs as a little girl walks across the ceiling. It played upon your human side, confusing you and having things in the corner of the screen make you doubt you saw anything at all. It was frikkin' freaky - trust me.


In F.3.A.R., they use advanced horror techniques that may be a bit difficult to explain - things jump out at you. Er... OK that was pretty simple to explain, and about as scary as a chocolate eclair. They don't even make any effort to add some suspense into proceedings - move from the bright sunshine indoors to a grimy apartment block and surprise surprise a monster appears.


Two Sides To Every Story.

Hold the phone though! 

There's another part to the gameplay that I haven't touched upon yet - playing as your brother (who is evil and psychic, did I mention that already?).


This basically involves sending out evil psychic mind-talons to grab enemies and suspend them in mid-air. You can then blow them up with your brain, or allow your brother to take them out for you. And that's it. 

Wow. A real game-changer there. 

The depressing thing is that as you play through as the shooty brother, you are unlocking the levels so that you can go back and play them through again as the psychic brother. Why on Earth anyone would want to subject themselves to that, I do not know.


Even worse is that the game is marketed as a "co-op" title, implying that you should bring a friend along to star in the role of useless brother. A friend who you are trying to hint at to go home and never call again, perhaps.

The awesome might of your brother's air guitar impression has caused this guy's leg to fall off.

God mode to Pwnd mode.

These guys spawn out of walls. Clever AI isn't needed when you can just appear out of thin air.

Although the enemies all stand around like plonkers, the game still manages to be ridiculously difficult in places. Not throughout - so that you might consider turning the difficulty setting to "easy" - but instead just for one or two fights in the whole game.


You can run and gun through the entire level, only to be killed repeatedly by one awkward enemy who hides on a rooftop with a sniper rifle. Because of the way the checkpoint and ammo works, you can often find yourself with thousands of rounds of pistol ammo but with nothing useful like a simple rocket launcher. Not much to ask, surely?


Then to top it off, there's the buggers in the picture above - teleporty spawny armoured gits. Whenever you start to get a few hits in they run off and portal through a wall, appearing directly behind you. When there are TWO OF THEM jumping out of walls right behind you and blowing you up, only to run away through the wall again when you manage to turn round to face them, you can imagine that these sections go on for a while.


So basically, the developers thought that a few obnoxiously annoying sections would suffice to balance the difficult level out. They were so, so wrong. What is left is an unbalanced mess, where I played the majority of the game at the hardest difficulty and only turned it down for the rare levels where the teleport twins would appear.


The Climax
With all the destruction in the build-up, you would expect something pretty spectacular for the ending, wouldn't you? 


So what do you find when you finally confront dear mother? Is it:

• A giant, final boss fight?
• A freaky horror section so gruesome that run away screaming?
• A nuclear detonation levelling half of America?

No. A walkthrough section where you see a few cutscenes and then it ends. It totals up who has been the most evil brother to decide the winner and therefore the ending, and if you have been playing in single-player then this section is totally redundant as you will always be the winner.

So the child lives or dies, as does the mother, as does your brother.... urgh. I'm getting bored of this now. If you are too, DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME. It's pretty much just 10 hours of this crap.

What am I doing? I'm dying. Great.

And if you hadn't had enough in the main story, there's an online multiplayer section too. It plays out something like a barricade defence game, boarding up windows of your building to prevent hordes of baddies from getting in and eating you. 

Now either I didn't get the point, or I was playing with some players who have recently undergone a lobotomy, but basically after 10 minutes it was impossible to hold off the waves of nasties on my own. So... Dead. Bored. Switch off.

Conclusions.

There's games that deserve praise for what they bring to gaming in general. There are other games that are carried by the sentimentality that you feel towards their predecessors. 

F.3.A.R. is neither - it is a bland shooter that defiles the brilliance that was the earlier F.E.A.R. titles both shamelessly and carelessly.

I am having real difficulty thinking of anyone I could recommend this to - OK - if you like all 400 Jason  films, you might like this game. 

Though, let's face it - that's pretty unlikely.

I do not own the copyright to the images in this review. They are all copyright of WB Games and can be found here - http://www.fear3.co.uk/image-gallery.html