Crysis [PS3]

Was all about ready to say that Crysis is great - not mind-blowing but frikkin pretty and solid enough to get through.

Then came the final battle...

You play the role of NOMAD, a US Special Forces soldier equipped with an elite "nano-suit".

So What's The Story Here?

Crysis follows the story of an elite special forces unit sent into Korea to rescue some captured scientists. You have reason to suspect that a Korean General is developing some sort of top-secret weapon or other dastardly research, so the US sends some soldiers in to investigate/rescue/murderise the situation until it goes away.


The enormous island you are sent to, complete with a whole army of Korean soldiers defending it, would be pretty impenetrable with a standard army unit - but you are no standard army unit. Each member of your squad is both highly-trained and kitted out with a Nano Suit, a set of armour that gives you the abilities of super-strength and invisibility.

Sneaking up on peeing guards is now a lot easier - 100% better results thanks to the invisibility power

Is It Any Good Then?

+++ Nano-Suited and Booted +++

The nano-suit is the real game-changer here - allowing you to change your tactics on-the-fly and go from sneaky seal to violent vole whenever you want.


The suit has an energy meter, so you only get a certain amount of time using each power before you have to turn them off and allow it to recharge. This means that, although your powers make you much tougher in battle, you aren't ever invincible (or perhaps I should say, permanently invisible).


There are a lot of different way of using your suit powers as well - aside from just cloaking and strength, you can mix and match so that you silently sneak all the way over to a guard before switching to "brute force" mode at the last second and smashing him to Kingdom Come.


When you aren't sneaking and armouring yourself, you can use the suit to jump several metres into the air (over pesky walls and other such obstacles) or use it to turbo-punch enemies into dust... then the ragdoll takes over and away they fly.

When combined with the suit powers, the choice of weapon outfits in Crysis offer a good deal of flexibility in play.

+++ Brainy Battles +++

The variety of suit options isn't just for show - you really need all of those options in order to make it off this island alive. 


The enemy AI is adaptive, creative and cunning - hole yourself up in cover and you'll soon find enemies flanking you - evade the enemies for a minute and they will start search patrols to flush you out.


There are many games which have pulled this off in recent years, but with Crysis's leaning towards freedom of play, the AI gets its chance to shine.


You'll still get the odd occasion where you'll find a guard staring right at you for ten seconds before he realises "Oh, that's the guy I'm meant to be shooting", but all-in-all the AI works well and fits the gameplay perfectly.

+++ Level Difficulty +++

And while the action is challenging - you never reach an impassable wall in terms of the difficulty level. Generally, you just need to stop and take a look around your environment to find an easier way to get through.


The game tries to offer incentives for sticking with the challenge though - plenty of secondary objectives are located within well-guarded compounds and offer shiny new trophies if you succeed in all of them.


Certain sections can be a bit annoying - especially those involving vehicles or night-vision - but this is handily catered-for by you being able to simply run away if it all gets too much. That might not sound like a point in the game's favour, but I'd much rather be able to skip past an annoying section than have it ruin my experience.

+++ Tropical Paradise +++

When Crysis was originally released on PC, it turned heads because of the graphical quality - and that remains true today. It really is a blisteringly gorgeous game - with environments, enemies and special effects all adding to a rich and detailed world that would be well-suited to a Summer holiday destination (if you like shooting Koreans, that is).


This version of Crysis is updated to the CryEngine 3, which was built for console title releases. I couldn't actually pick up on any areas where the graphical quality had improved, however it certainly makes the most of the PS3's graphical capabilities and delivers a stunning HD experience.

+++ Free-Roam Fun +++

The game's open-ended play is my favourite attribute - do you sneak through/blast your way through/run away/drive as fast as you can?

In reality you can do any one of these - and with the checkpoints system in place you can actually try a few of them out to see what works. If you find that something isn't working - such as a pesky building being right in the way - then you blow it up (handled beautifully by the physics engine btw). If you find that the enemies are shooting you before you get chance to mark them, go invisible. 

For every problem, there is a solution - and most involve elite ninja powers or lots of explosions..... which are all good.

The first half of the game stands out as the most fun free-roam shooting since Far Cry.....

--- Bizarre Alien Crap ---
Right from the start of the game, you are made aware that there is something else going on on the island. You find soldiers who have been mangled, you occasionally see large shadows sweep around the corner out of sight.


So what's the islands big secret? Aliens. Frikkin aliens.


Does every free-roam tropical shooter have to throw in some sci-fi crap to satisfy another audience base? Are soldiers - or other terrestrial foes - not enough to keep the action going through the fifteen-hour campaign? Apparently not.


When aliens are worked in from the beginning, they can sometimes make for an enjoyable baddie. When you have a fantastic action shooter that suddenly jumps from "U.S. Navy Seal" to "E.T. phone home", you feel a little missold. I didn't buy this to fight aliens! I don't want you to try and scare me with tentacled floaty creatures! I want action - and from about the halfway point there is less and less action you get involved in.

And then just like Far Cry, the second half is just ridiculous sci-fi scary monster shit.

--- 101 More Things To In Zero-G ---
Worse than the fact that you have to stop fighting soldiers and move onto aliens, you actually spend a whole level floating around an alien spaceship. Again, when you make this the sole-focus of the game then it can be quite fun (see the game Prey for a good example of this).


In Crysis though, you have trekked across lush jungles, blown up villages and swam in tropical seas.... before spending nearly an hour in metal tube floating aimlessly.


The objectives in the spaceship section are obscure - you basically just float around until you find the exit, then a cutscene plays, then you shoot some aliens, get lost and spend ages looking for the next exit.


This was one of the worst uses of zero-g gameplay I've ever encountered, and I'm having a hard time understanding why on Earth they thought it would be a good idea.


--- SINGLE PLAYER ONLY ---
Another disappointing discovery was the complete lack of multiplayer. The PC version featured 32-player multiplayer action that added a great deal of play time to the game.


In the PS3 update, there is only the single player campaign. 


While I understand that getting multiplayer functionality into a game is a lot of effort, and hosting the servers will be costing money - it still feels like PS3 players are getting a raw deal here.


The single player campaign is certainly good - it's just not full price good.

--- Grand Finale ---
And then we get to the horror that was the final level. You are fighting the mother of all alien baddies to save the island and the day - when this happened:

1) One of my allies kept shouted at me -  

"Use the TAC gun! Lock on and use the TAC gun!"

I did not have a "TAC gun" and so this was getting quite annoying. When I ran around the whole level looking for one, fought for 20 minutes, then got myself blown up a few times AND STILL FOUND NO TAC GUN, it was then that I decided to consult an online walkthrough.

2) Online walkthrough - 

explained that there's a glitch in the game

Yeah, a f***ing big one. Not only was I not given the TAC gun - which it essential in order to beat the big bad boss - but worse than that, I found that the game had actually SKIPPED HALF OF THE LAST LEVEL. There a whole mini-section where you run around helping a few army guys while they inevitably got killed by aliens - but that did not happen when I first played through.

3) So I did the sensible thing and restarted the level. 

So I started the level again, wandered through bored listening to the same bland dialogue, and played the section that Crysis decided we should skip the first time around. 


It was crap. I watched some blokes die. Picked up a TAC gun (will probably come in handy) and went back out to face the final boss.


So there I was - climactic finish - then the woman starts screaming about a TAC gun and..... STILL NOTHING.


I waited. I cried. I threw some things at the TV. This was the grand finale that is frozen in time because the game has a glitch.


A glitch - as it turns out - that was present in the PC version, still present when updated for PS3, and never fixed in a patch in the 3 1/2 YEARS since release.


The final level lagged like nobody's business too. I think it's something about the enemy's "freeze" weapon - but framerate dropped to "photo slideshow" speeds every time you were fired upon (every 10 seconds) and usually during this time you were killed. 


For such an excellent game to be ruined by shoddy design in the final boss fight is just shameful. It certainly put a major downer on my spectacular victory, I can tell you.

If you're anything like me, you'll soon hate these things with a passion.

Conclusion

Crysis looks great, it plays great, it feels great. You really get the feeling that you are elite, near-invincible and awesomely-powerful - which I got a major kick out of.

Finding your own way around these gorgeous environments and choosing how exactly you want to take out the baddies is brilliant fun - and shows off their graphics engine well.

Sadly, the alien crap in the second half - and particularly the final level - left me feeling pretty frustrated at the change of pace and tone. It didn't add anything - and it almost prevented me from finishing the game.

If you can get a copy on PC - then go for it.

If you're considering getting this on the PS3, then bear in mind that it's single player only and offers nothing that you can't get on PC for a fiver now.

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.ea.com/crysis-1/images

Deus Ex: Human Revolution [PS3]

Doesn't let the family name down - 

this is a pretty darn good game.

Slight balance and difficulty issues aside, 

this is the best you're gonna get for

 a high-definition Deus Ex experience.

Welcome To The Future, Mr. Jensen
This week's big review is of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a futuristic RPG/stealth/shooter that claims to offer a fully-realised world full of dodgy characters, shadowy organisations and morally-ambiguous tasks to complete.

Human Revolution is the spiritual successor and chronological predecessor to 2000's Deus Ex, a game that has been recognised as one of the best games ever made. The original Deus Ex gained widespread praise, not for fancy graphics or technological advances, but instead for its intricate conspiracy thriller storyline that panned out through the course of the game, and the massive variety of ways in which you could achieve your goals.

The story in Human Revolution is that in the near-future the technology to "augment" human beings is becoming widespread, meaning that people can upgrade themselves with implants that allow them to jump higher, run faster, manipulate people with speech, see through walls and so on.

The corporations offering these augmentations are in a fierce competitive battle, hoping to take control of a growing and lucrative market. The governments of the world are struggling to keep up with the change, and legislation moderating the actions of these mega-companies is slow to be enacted.

You play the role of Adam Jensen, head of security at Sarif Industries, Sarif being one of the market leaders in this type of technology. At the beginning of the game, the scene is introduced when Sarif Industries comes under assault from an unknown enemy. During the carefully co-ordinated attack, several of Sarif's leading scientists appear to have been killed and Adam himself is injured beyond healing by standard medical treatments. While he is still unconscious, so against his will, he is brought back from death through the use of some pretty major augmentations.

Now this is an alright start to a game to get you in the mood - it's been done a million times before but we'll overlook that - and it serves to bring the player up to speed while introducing the key themes running throughout Human Revolution.

The only slight issue that I found was that I obviously wasn't paying enough attention during the intro video because from this point on they refer to "Dr. Megan Reed" and other characters as if you're meant to know who they are. As it turns out, Dr. Reed is an old friend of Adam's who is caught up in the assault on Sarif - but I only pieced that information together retrospectively. Maybe I should have been taking notes during the title sequence.

The guy on the right is our cyber hunk hero Neo... er... I mean Adam Jensen.

It's Good Old Reliable Dingy - Damp and Dirty Dingy Detroit!
The first major section of the game is set in Detroit - full of skyscrapers, back alleys and sewer systems to explore. O.K. that doesn't sound too appealing and in many ways it really isn't. If you want to get people engaged in your game then I wouldn't recommend making them try to figure out how the bloody hell you get around the city by wading through sewage!

Detroit is awkward to navigate - until you have earned the upgrades which make getting around easier then there's a lot of running down alleys only to find a dead end, then running through a sewer.... only to find a dead end. Once you gain the ability to lift large objects out of your way or the ability to jump super high then this gets slightly easier, however you're still running backwards and forth around a very bleak and dark city in search of your objectives.

So what is it you're actually up to here? Well for the Detroit section, you're learning the ropes of getting around and the main entities are work in this world - the police, the augmentation clinics, the gangs, the private detectives etc.

You meet up with your boss, David Sarif, who sets you a few basic tasks to complete - obviously you need to start slow after being revived from the dead - so he tells you to break into the city police station morgue. Starting slow, eh David? What in God's name was I up to before you turned me into Robocop?

The dark and dingy streets of Detroit, where you will be spending around a third of your game time in Human Revolution.

You Can Go Your Own Way

With this being a Deus Ex title, the emphasis is on finding your own way of solving objectives and there are quite a few on offer. For example, for the morgue job you can:

• Go in all gun's blazing and kill hundreds of innocent cops to get down to the morgue
• Sneak into the building and then kill a few key targets in order to gain access
• Use stealthy skills like cloaking (temporary invisibility) to simply walk into the morgue unnoticed
• Talk to a police officer who, with the right persuasion, sneakily let you down there

I'm sure there are a few other ways of completing this task - these were just the main ones that I tried during my playthrough. All of the different options are there and waiting to be found, it just takes moving the right vending machine to find a secret ventilation shaft which takes you further into the building. 

The major play styles can be summarised as follows:

1. Talker/Hacker - these are pretty much the same idea - finding the right person or computer terminal to manipulate in order to gain a shortcut through environments.
2. Stealth/Pacifist - slowly and silently moving through levels, making use of augmentations such as cloaking and X-ray vision in order to avoid killing bystanders.
3. Soldier/Fighter - which pretty much involves shooting shit and using your kill-o-death augmentations such as blades coming out of your elbows!

I know that really you could break these down in further and combine different elements to achieve your goal but these are the main gameplay routes you can take. 

Now am I alone in seeing one of these option which stands out as preferable? 

One option which just sounds frikkin awesome? 

Well I thought that the elbow blade kill-o-death option sounded like it would a laugh and so started out my first playthrough aiming down that path - to use guns and other such weaponry to blast my way through the game. 

The error I may have made was to choose the Normal difficulty setting. 

While playing the game through as a pure shooter is technically possible, it's not advisable.

Hollywood Blockbuster Shot Down

In the very first level - the morgue break-in - I tried by bloody hardest to shoot my way in. I used cover every step of the way, mixed it up with my low-level augs, varied weapons to suit enemy type - and still I was shot to bloody death within seconds each and every time. I needed to rethink my strategy.

I didn't really want to play through on Easy because I intended to play through a second time a different way on the harder difficulty setting - Deus Ex Mode - in order to earn all the trophies (achievements to you non-Sony players).

I therefore went back out into Detroit for a bit of a wander around. I found that there is actually a lot of places you can get to around the city, and when the right augments are used you can get even further.

It became clear that a lot of the best equipment and cash drops were hidden down ventilations shafts, the entrance to which was generally blocked by a vending machine, or otherwise an electronic terminal. So I bought the weight lifting perk and upgraded my hacking skill. This playthrough isn't going how I planned.

Although this looks cool now, in about 2 seconds he'll be a bloody lump on the floor.

Attention To Detail

When I started to take this approach, as an unexpected consequence I found that I really liked the little details present throughout the game. Looking at emails, finding secretly written notes, talking to the right people and trying to "play it human" to get them to talk back - there's recurring sub-plots and plenty of back story to be found here.

One fine example is when you look around Adam's apartment building. In Adam's bathroom, there is a broken mirror on the wall - clearly smashed in the centre. Then if you look on your personal computer, there is an email to the building manager, asking yet again in very hostile tones for a replacement mirror which has never arrived. In this email, the manager responds to say that "the matter is out of their hands, the mirror is simply out of stock and as soon as they have one in the warehouse, they will send it to us - please don't take that tone with me". If you then go downstairs and hack the manager's personal computer, I was greatly amused to find an email from the mirror suppliers stating "the mirror has been at our warehouse for over four weeks - if you don't collect it or arrange for it to be sent soon then we will cancel the order". Landlord 1 - Adam Jensen 0. 

Tee hee hee. 

See - it's the little details.

The "Tough" Parts Of The Game

The later security systems that you have to get past are complex and technical - until you find the ventilation shaft that allows you to avoid them completely.

I was then surprised to find that in spite of having to rapidly shift to a more stealthy and non-violent playing style, there were several sections which should have been tough and complex affairs - full of lasers, robots and turrets - that were an absolute piece of piss because they could be navigated with ease through stealth augments and a strange frequency of terrible architects:

I know, I'll have a top-secret secured room that has a ventilation shaft leading right into the guard room. Then to make sure no-one gets through this, I'll station two guards who always keep their back to this shaft entrance. Pefect! Genius!

The upshot is that these sections were clearly well designed to suit multiple approaches, and once you know how to find the sneaky paths through, you are virtually untraceable.

Guards often don't help this - when spotted you can sometimes get away by going into the nearest room and shutting the door:

Hmmm... Shall I  search in this room right here? Nah, that elite assassin couldn't have opened that door... I'd better turn and look in the opposite direction for a half a minute.... Crunch.

Then on the level shown below, where two giant rocket robot machines stalk the hanger bay, I simply sneaked around the level looking at what was available - and found a rocket launcher, several rockets and some fragmentation mines. 

HAH! SOD STEALTH! Time to go boom robot baddies!

And what happened? I blew them to pieces and the human guards in the area lost interest virtually instantly. What? After handing my arse back to me in the police station level, I finally give in and go kill crazy and it's suddenly really easy? Oh bum.

The giant creepy robot crab things crop up from time to time - but always near a rocket launcher.... hmmmm.....

Bossing You Around

Then there's the "boss" levels, and by that I mean the key story characters whose missions you cannot get out of playing through. In the boss fight below, there is no way of stealthing as the fighting arena is so confined that you are likely to be caught out pretty quickly (in spite of the big guy's painfully slow movement). You have no choice but to blast him to get rid of him.

In another boss fight, you have to be immune to a certain type of damage, and the game actually gives you a free aug upgrade if you haven't bought the right one yet. 

In a later boss "fight", you are forced to talk a guy down in front of a crowd in order to get him to reveal important information. This is greatly eased by the use of speech augs, but I understand that without them this could have been very difficult.

Even the final boss requires you to have at least some serious firepower to defend yourself with. Maybe you can sneak your way around and somehow do it another way - I found that the amount of turrets and robot guards meant that it was difficult to get past without reducing their numbers somewhat.

My problem is that for a game that that offers a great deal of choice, it is hard not to be annoyed that there is one particular way that works for each of the boss fights, and even though your choices and augmentation upgrades can help with certain scenarios, basically you need at least some skill in each of the three main disciplines - speech, stealth and soldier - in order to keep the difficulty level balanced throughout the game.

The bloke who looks about ready to pelvic thrust is one of the game's bosses.

Moral Compass

And finally the "moral" side of the game - this was pretty well worked in actually. Although the moral choice system is still present, and it is clear that your choices are leading to a conclusion based on the moral leaning of these decisions, you aren't ever punished for whatever you decide. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to play through, and there are no notable bonuses for either, except that your trophies/achievements will be better if you focus yourself (e.g. by knocking out 100 guards in a single playthrough).

The ending is also suitably open - when you get to the final level there are several key characters who you find are present within the complex. You can therefore go and speak to each of them for one last time (although I didn't quite realise it was the last time so never got to say goodbye to my boss, David... oh how sad). In speaking to them, they offer you a way to conclude the story - be it to contain the goings on throughout Human Revolution, to release the whole story to the media, or to release a modified version of the story... or one other option.

And there isn't any punishment for your choices up to that point, or after you decide which course of action to take, it just determines which ending video you see which ties all of your decisions together. The only problem comes when you forget to talk to one of them right at the end - so make sure you do! I'll have to see if I kept an older save file and go back and chat with old Davey. Then watch his video and then bang - trophy for seeing the 4 endings.

All in all I thought it was well done - and I think it was this crucial point which turned Human Revolution back into my favour. Yeah.... it was pretty good actually. Go give it a try and see what you think.

Conclusions

I didn't really like the way that I was channelled into being sneaky/stealthy rather than going all-out action techno killer. In the end though, it made me appreciate the actual variety on offer - levels are full of nooks and crannies that hold secret items and routes that are  just waiting to be found.

Although the "moral compass" system is present in plenty of games nowadays, I did appreciate not being obviously told which options count as "good", "bad" or "neutral" so you are left to find out for yourself.

When you get to the end and look back on what you have done throughout the game, you can see the success of Human Revolution - the world is there for you to experiment with, but how exactly you choose to engage will change the world that is left behind at the end.

Images in this review are copyright of Square Enix and can be found at:

http://deusex.com/media/images#

^^^Does that web address not make you think of a website for people expecting to receive a shag?

The video in this review is from Youtube and is kindly provided by:

http://www.youtube.com/user/machinima

Gotham City Impostors [SPECIAL]

This week my "mini" review is going to be slightly different. 

This week I am going to tell you a story. 

It's a wonderful adventure, with early excitement, community spirit, communication with game developers and deep, painful heartache.

I will begin at the beginning, for where better to begin a story which starts at the beginning?

How It All Began

About 2 months ago, as part of the Playstation Plus membership, Monolith and WB Games released their beta version of Gotham City Impostors. For non-gaming-geeks out there, this means a near-complete test version that is released for players to try out and then the developers can identify any problems in order to get them fixed before the full release.

The game itself was incredible - the idea here being that Batman and the Joker have fled Gotham and in their place thousands of wannabe superheroes and villains have leapt into action and are now battling it out for supremacy on Gotham's streets. They aren't the real deal however, so the well-fitting Batman costume and the tailor-made Joker outfit aren't present - instead there's bat symbols on cardboard cut-outs and purple tank tops serving as Joker gear. 

As a game, this works like a multiplayer first person shooter - you have other players on your team and you go round shooting the opposing team to win points which will help you win the match. You are randomly put in the Bats or Jokers team, and this doesn't make a difference as you don't have any loyalty to either - you're just a wannabe who wants to fight injustice/cause mayhem (whatever's on offer that day). Before battle, you select the set of weapons, skills, equipment, character types and outfits which suit your play style - and there are plenty of play styles to choose from:

• You can be a thin, stealthy sniper who uses ninja gas to turn invisible. 
• You can be a nimble rollerskater, leaping around the place at top speed and greeting enemies with a sudden shotgun handshake. 
• You can be an enormous brute stalking the town with body armour and a rocket launcher. 
• Or if you like you can be a healer, shouting into a megaphone to revive team players and turn the tables of battle. 

And the best part of it all? You can do it wearing nothing but underpants.

By completing battles you earn experience points, costume points and loadout unlocks. Experience gains you levels and earns you more loadout unlocks, which means more customisable weapons, gadgets and skills. Costume points are spent to gain new items of clothing to kit your Bats and Jokers out with.

There are also a whole bunch of challenges, like killing 50 enemies with the shotgun, or rollerskating for 10 kilometres. These have massive experience boosts associated with them, so it really is worth spending hours razzing around the map like a squirrel.

Email Number 1

So after spending around 10 hours playing the beta version, I go to the main menu to be greeted with a message:

"Profile Corrupt - Save Data may be Invalid"

Huh. Okay.... so what does that mean? It meant that all of my progress was wiped out. All the experience, all the costumes, all the hours put in were lost for no good reason.

So I decided to do the right thing and emailed the support team to let them know of the issue - this is a beta after all so they need to be informed in order to get it sorted. I didn't hear back from them so carried on playing for a while - the game was still great fun, so once they got the profile reset issue sorted then it'd be plain sailing.

Email Number 2

While playing the beta version some more, a few more serious issues started to present themselves: 

• Matches would be vastly unbalanced - like 2 low-level Bats against 6 elite Jokers. These matches would be over within minutes and were fairly boring - if you were a Bat you'd be pwned within seconds of respawning, and as a Joker it was likely that someone else had killed off all the Bats before you got there.
• Matchmaking (finding other players to play matches with) was taking longer and longer too. When I first started playing you could be in a match within 2 minutes - now it takes 5 minutes just to find a match to join.
• Every few matches, there would be some sort of connection problem where it would kick you out of a match you were playing. Again, this happened more as time went on until virtually every other match ended suddenly (and without any experience earned).

So basically, things weren't looking good. As it had been over a week since my first email, and I still had heard nothing, I decided to send another one to let them know that there were some pretty serious issues in Impostors that really needed addressing. But hey, this is the beta - they'll get this sorted out....right?

Out of Beta

After the beta trials ended, a "trial" version went up onto the Playstation Network (PSN). This was a full demonstration version of the game that was free to play for 30 minutes. I downloaded this and starting playing my free 30 minutes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found that I had to start a new profile (again). "OK", I thought, "It was a beta version and now it's a trial version so I can't expect to keep the same profile". So I played through those 30 minutes and once again loved it. See, this is the crucial point - the game itself is absolutely brilliant. It's fun, frantic, accessible, enjoyable, customisable - everything you want from an online FPS.

So.... I bought the full game. Yes, I know it was a risk but I gave Impostors the benefit of the doubt. £11.99 from my already dwindling bank account for a game that really should offer me weeks of fun.

Email Number 3

As the more astute of you may have gathered from the heading, buying the game only caused more trouble.

On purchasing the full game unlock, I opened the game to find an error message reading:

"Do you want to cancel your full game progress and go back to trial mode?"

Why on Earth would I (or anyone else for that matter) want to cancel a £12 purchase and go back to a time-limited trial? So I selected "NO!", at which point it took me to the Playstation Store to ask me to purchase the game again. I cancelled this and restarted the game. The game then loaded up fine and allowed me to play a few matches. "Phew!", I thought, "Thank goodness that's all over now!". Oh how wrong I was.

The next time I turned the game on, I was greeted by my old friend: 

"Profile Corrupt - Save Data may be Invalid"

Bugger. That's not good news. I'm getting tired of getting through the first few levels just so that I can unlock the basic customisation settings. This will be the third time! 


You must be able to work out that this must be a pretty good game for me to put up with this sort of crap, and when you get to play it, Gotham City Impostors really is a bloody good game. The maps are diverse and unique, each with little hiding places and open areas that are fun to explore. Due to the large range of characters and gadgets available, there is always someone to flush out the snipers, someone else who takes down big brutish demolition units well, and others who zoom around the map so fast that no-one can take them down (me - speedy body type, speed bonuses and rollerskates.... boo yah). 


So I sent the third email, to say that the issues I was facing in the beta are present in the full game. And that I was not impressed.

Other Lovely Error Messages

Other than just having corrupt data, the game has thrown back some great reasons for not letting me play the game I have paid for. Here are a few of my faves:

• Simply searching endlessly for players - the spinning "loading" icon just swirls hypnotically forever, and even refuses to let you exit sometimes.
• Better than that, the match countdown gets to "Match starts in 1 seconds" and then sits there for what feels like an eternity before it kicks you back out to the main menu.
• "No Gamespy Connection Detected - You Will Not Be Able To Play Online Games". So what part of this exclusively online multiplayer game am I meant to be playing? The offline challenge section? OK. Well that lasted all of 5 minutes. What now?
• "Connection with the server has timed out". The classic. Its use here borders on over overkill.

Now you might ask if there is some problem with my connection or hardware here - well I can say that I've had no problem with any other online multiplayer game on the PS3 and next heading bit will explain more - so read on.

Acceptance, Patch and Beyond

Warner Brothers Games and Monolith have accepted that there are some pretty serious issues going on here now - Gotham City Impostors Patch & Updates Info

In fact, I think I have installed the patch. Yes, it's only that I think it's installed the patch - my game version still shows up as v1.01 (whereas the messiah patch is due to be v1.05) however it found and installed a new update this week so I can only assume it was this newest one. I have still not received any of my coins and experience back, instead the game seems to recognise a "shadow" of my former profile - for example when displaying my progress in challenges the game will now display:

"Matches Completed Challenge #3: 63 matches out of 100"

right before displaying

"Matches Completed Challenge #3: 78 matches out of 100"

So..... it's still screwed. There might be a proper fix on the way, but it feels a loooong way off.

What's even more insulting is that there is hundreds of messages declaring the upcoming downloadable content with extra maps, weapons and unlocks.... even though we can't even use the current content at the moment! For goodness' sake - sort the game out before chucking more crap into this faulty mess of a game!

As should be obvious, I've put a lot of time and effort into Impostors and it is for that very reason that I feel so let down. There is an awesome game in here - I just don't get to play it much.

Conclusions
All in all, this is a really terrific game that has been let down by some pretty major design flaws - I mean, just take a look at the gameplay video above!

This has the potential to be online FPS of the year -

but at present it is virtually unplayable. 

However, if you get a kick out of loading screens and error messages 

then this may be the game for you!

If WB Games would just respond to my emails 

(or offer a bloody refund) then I might consider recalling the deadly ninja monkeys.
Oh well... here goes email number 4....

UPDATE! : On signing into Impostors this morning (3rd March) a message appeared telling me that I have gained 2500 costume coins and jumped 14 experience levels.

It appears they have finally restored my profile to the level it should be - over 3 weeks after first informing them of the issue. 

That said, I've been waiting to get into a match for ten minutes now - so the matchmaking problems are still ongoing. A minor victory?

Videos in this review are from Youtube and are kindly provided by: 

http://www.youtube.com/user/Iitten and http://www.youtube.com/user/coinoptv

Videos are subject to relevant copyrights.

Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath HD [PSN] [QUICK&SHORT]

Overview
A remake of the 2005 Xbox title that forms part of the marvellous Oddworld series - now updated with HD graphics, better character models and improved sound. The game is a first/third person adventure that puts you in the shoes of Stranger, a bounty hunter who is trying to make enough money for the surgery that will sort him out for life. On your journey, you will meet all kinds of crazy characters and villains who will either lead you to riches or to your doom.

Major Points
Kooky Colourful - The Oddworld has always been a weird and wonderful place and this 3D high-definition update only serves to remind you of just how bizarre and beautiful this world really is. Environments, enemies and weaponry are all visually superb, and the best example of this is the ammunition you use in game. Rather than standard bullets, you pick up creatures from the game world and load them up into your crossbow - as you can see in the video, the critters you fire at enemies are equal parts cute and freaky. It is unique and quirky features like this that make the Oddworld games stand out above other titles.
Cartfuls of Comedy - Everything in the game has a unique humour to it - often lost in modern games. The bounties you go after have names like "Jo'Mamma" and "Fatty McBoomBoom". All the dialogue is filled with tongue-in-cheek humour, and makes the cutscenes enjoyable to watch. Having the comedy at the core of the game, diffusing through everything from place names to dialogue, enhances the fun that can be had playing this game tenfold.
Updated or Outdated - As previously mentioned, this is a HD update of a game from 2005 -  so how does it hold up with today's standards? Well, remarkably well. The game mechanics and theme needed no adjustment and so are thankfully left untouched. The updated graphics and audio only improve upon this - now the game looks, sounds and plays fantastic. Add to this new features such as trophy support - offering some extra challenges should you find you need them - and this is a top-quality package.

Conclusion

One of those rare titles that succeeds in being both creative and playable - Stranger's Wrath works as both a reminder of a brilliant older title and as a shining example of how a HD update should work. 

The unusual humour, characters and environments that are the trademarks of the Oddworld series are all here. Better than that - they're all in HD with  remastered sound!

When this kind of gameplay is combined with a low price tag on the PS Store, this becomes an unmissable experience. Seriously. Go buy it. Now.

Videos in this review are from Youtube and are kindly provided by:
http://www.youtube.com/user/sonyplaystation and 
http://www.youtube.com/user/FMVGuy