Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space

Overview

Title: Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space

Release Date: 14^th October 2009

Developer/Publisher: Telltale Games

Genre: Action & Adventure, Puzzle & Trivia

Platform[s]: Xbox Live Arcade

Storyline

Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space is the follow up to Sam & Max Save The World, the undeniably well-received rehash of LucasArts’ classic point and click adventure series. Consisting of five brand new episodes centred around Alien abduction, Christmas and Easter, Beyond Time and Space carries on the classic Sam & Max tradition of zany humour and off the wall puzzles as everyone’s favourite Dog/Rabbit combination continue to carry out their esoteric brand of personalized criminal justice…

Gameplay

Fans of Save The World will be pleased to know that Telltale Games have left the control system well alone, meaning that the same sublime, easy to use interface is still all present and correct. This means moving your cursor (cleverly designed as Sam’s hand) over objects and NPC’ s and interacting with them via a push of the A button. Some objects are collectible (which then usually end up being combined with some other obscure item), while most are just there for Sam or Max to make some random (and regularly laugh out loud funny) comment on. When interacting with the other colourful characters in the S&M cast, a dialogue box containing a range of amusing and off the wall questions and statements will appear. Some are useless, while others must be selected in exactly the right sequence in order to progress, and it’s here that the game begins to slip up a little.

The meat and bones of any decent adventure game are its puzzles, and again, Sam & Max has them in spades – ranging from the obvious to the downright unbelievable, we guarantee you will spend many a frustrating hour trying every single combination of object; retracing your steps and scouring every room just in case you missed something beforehand. Anyone who played the first game will know the kind of off the wall humour and puzzles a Sam & Max adventure will bring, while new players may struggle getting to grips with the regularly too-big-for-it’s-boots dialogue and twisted reasoning behind a large portion of the brain teasers on offer. Obviously pre-empting this (and perhaps from listening to feedback from the first game), Telltale have dropped in a number of amusing min-games to keep you occupied and break up the clicking action while pondering your next move. From driving sections to Whack-A-Rat, these are a welcome and fun distraction when you’re totally stumped with the main game, but potentially risk conjuring up that tagged-on feeling in diehard Sam & Max aficionados.

Graphics

Bouncy and cartoony in style, Beyond Time and Space retains the stylized visuals running throughout the entire universe, capturing the comic book feel superbly. Lip-synching is a sore point, as not much effort has been put into making the cast “speak” their dialogue, but most of the time you won’t really mind as the whole thing just looks so damned beautiful.

Sound

As before, all the characters in Sam & Max are voiced wonderfully – and no expense has been spared in delivering another snappy set of scripts, which beggars belief as to how the writers manage to come up with this stuff in the first place, and just how much they’ve got stored in their locker for future releases. A minor complaint (if you must have one) is the quality of some of the speech is a bit “bitty” in places, sounding like a dodgy mp3 file played through a bad sound system.

Overall Score and Replayability

Fans of the series will love Beyond Time and Space, as it delivers the same insane puzzling action and characterization as before, and offers a good 20+ hours of gameplay across the five episodes. The fact that the overall package doesn’t bring anything new won’t make much of a difference to those fans, but in this age of accessible achievement points and all too easy gameplay, some people may just be put off by the 1600MSP price tag.

South Park: Let’s Go Tower Defense Play!

Overview

Title: South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play

Release Date: 7^th October 2009

Developer/Publisher: DoubleSix

Genre: Action & Adventure, Strategy & Simulation

Platform[s]: Xbox Live Arcade

Storyline

Gameplay

As the name suggests, Let’s Go Tower Defense Play is a Tower Defense game – but instead of being restricted to just building and upgrading towers (like Defense Grid, for instance), you also control one of the four main characters as well. This adds a slightly different dimension to the gameplay and opens up brand new strategy options, whereby you fight alongside your towers as well as racing between them to build more and upgrade the ones you already have. Coins are dropped when you kill certain enemies, and these are the resources you use to build and strengthen your defenses. Towers fire a range of different projectiles, from Baseballs to Lasers, and later on in the game a range of enemy specific towers become available, changing your strategies even more.

Each of the four main characters on offer fire a range of snowballs (Cartman’s snowballs are slower but more effective, while Stan sacrifices strength for a higher rate of fire, for instance), and each has their own special ability which can be triggered when enough enemies have been killed. Cartman can clear the screen, Smart Bomb like, while Kyle increases everyone’s rate of fire and strengthens their attacks.  Flicking between the characters is easy, with a simple tap of RB moving to the next character inline. This is a handy mechanic, as you can move your teammates around the screen and once placed, they will not move but attack any enemies that come near them – and with the sheer number of enemies on screen at any one time your allies position can be crucial. If an enemy slips past your defense, then they damage the town – and once the town’s health drops to zero (represented by a bar in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen) it’s Game Over.

Graphics

LGTDP is absolutely spot on and true to the series in look and feel, with clearly the same animation techniques used in the TV shows employed here – perhaps even harking back to the early (slightly better, in our opinion) days in places. The range of enemies on offer can be daunting, and with such a rich universe to draw on they are varied and many. Death animations are suitably gory, with heads and body parts flying all over the place in spectacularly bloody style, with not a hint of slow down to be seen at all. All your favourite South Park locations are here as well, from Stan’s front yard to the School playground and so on. It all adds up to a visual feast for the eyes that should get the fanboys and girls salivating, although those expecting animated cut scenes will be disappointed, as levels are introduced with a series of still, comic book-style panels with voiceovers instead.

Sound

Despite the lack of the full South Park theme tune, 99% of the time the action on screen is so hectic that it’s hard to notice the incidental music that skips along happily in the background to each level. As the game was developed in conjunction with South Park Studios all your favourite characters are voiced as they are in the series, and each has an amusing repertoire of comments depending on the situation they’re in. Although it doesn’t play a big part in the game, there are a few swears (usually from Cartman) which parents should be aware of before letting their kids get involved in the action. The little bits of waffle between levels is also pretty amusing, with Cartman providing most of the laughs as usual.

Overall Score and Replayability

To start with, Let’s Go Tower Defense Play is great fun as you build and upgrade your towers and pelt enemies with your team mates, all wrapped up with the trademark South Park humour and stylized animation. Things do get very boring very quickly, as games invariably degenerate into serious A button abuse as you hammer snowballs at your enemies, and unless your preparation is spot on before the match starts the amount of bad guys that slip past you and damage your town is frustrating, to say the least. There are 15 playable characters to unlock as you progress, as well as short video clips and other bits and bobs that become available when you earn medals and complete challenges, but even fans of the series will find working their way through the game to unlock them all hard going.

An Interview with Dan Greenawalt

Dan Greenawalt is a man with a vision. Creative Director of Turn 10 and responsible for bringing the Forza Motorsport series to our beloved grey box, his vision is to simply turn “Car Lovers into Gamers, and Gamers into Car Lovers” – backed up by wrought-iron and child-like enthusiasm for the latest installment of one of console racing’s most respected franchises. We caught up with him in London’s Docklands Raceway recently, and we all left feeling VERY excited about Forza Motorsport 3.

VGR: So Dan, what was your main goal with Forza Motorsport 3 – and do you think you’ve achieved it?

Dan: Well, as we mentioned back in the original pitch in 2002 the vision was to turn Gamers into Car Lovers, and Car Lovers into Gamers. So we looked at a lot of other game types in general – we were inspired by Pokemon, World of Warcraft and Dark Cloud – but also looking at our kids and watching how they play with cars, how natural their passion with cars is. I’ve got 18 month old twins, and they only have a few words, right? But I’ve got a yellow car at home, and when they play with the yellow Hot Wheel they’re going “Daddy, Daddy” and they’re building that passion for cars. So, that’s the setup – we’ve now got a game that a six-year old can play, and a pro racer can use to train, and everyone else inbetween finds a game that feels completely made for them. If you’re into JDM, or German Touring Cars, it doesn’t matter. The game automatically configures itself to your car passion.  If you’re a gamer and a controller feels natural: fantastic. If you’re a driver and a steering wheel feels natural: great. When I go to the airport, and I see a bunch of other blokes sitting around reading car magazines, I know they’re not all playing racing games, but I know they’d all love to. They’re looking at reports from the Frankfurt Auto Show, or looking at the new cars, reading the specs and going “wow, this is so cool”. Read the specs? Drive it! You know, get it in the game, crash it into a wall, paint it pink…I don’t care, it’s your car passion, and that’s what it’s all about.

VGR: Forza Motorsport is the flagship racing franchise on Xbox 360, how do you think it matches up against the likes of Sony’s Gran Turismo series?

Dan: Gran Turismo’s the granddaddy, right? Kazunori Yamauchi made a great game, I loved it back on the PSOne, it was fantastic. Our goal was to make a game for this generation, for todays gamer and for today’s modern design. So that means having the best simulation possible, better than you’ll find in any other racing game. The sort of simulation we’re doing with the tyres and partnerships we have are only possible with being a first party (developer) and being (part of) Microsoft. We’ve been doing damage in racing games for ten years now, and there’s this myth in the industry that you can’t do damage in racing games, but it just comes from having strong partnerships. So we have damage, we have rollover, we have the best simulation you’re going to find and we have beautiful graphics. Beautiful graphics are part of the bar, but what I’m most proud of is the fact that a six year old can play the game, and as you “grow up” and get more experience in the game, you turn off the assists and you begin peeling the onion back. You’re becoming a better driver, a better racer, and hopefully your passion’s getting ignited so we have a game that grows with you. You don’t find that in other racing games. I’m not saying that we’re the best, I’m saying that we’re doing some really cool, some really unique stuff here. We’re not saying we want to get involved in a land war with some other game because that would be limiting. We don’t look to copy, we look to our competitors to see where the bar is. So even Rewind, DiRT’s got it, GRiD’s got it – that’s just the bar, and any game that doesn’t have it is gonna seem outdated. We added the Green Line, and you see it in other games; Gran Turismo’s got it. That’s not to say it’s copying or not copying, but it’s my job to look at our competitors and see where the bar is.

VGR: Do you think there’s things you wouldn’t be able to accomplish if you weren’t a first party developer?

Dan: I don’t think this game would be anywhere close to popular if we weren’t a first party developer. Our AI System was done by Microsoft Research in Cambridge, and that’s not a small division of a small game company, it’s a division of Microsoft that works on crazy weird problems. They love F1 and they just wanted to make an AI System, so they shopped it around to the different places and we said “we’ll take it, that sounds pretty cool”. And of course the partnerships that I’ve already mentioned, there’s no way you’d be able to do that in another game.

VGR: Are you looking to use Project Natal for a Forza game?

Dan: The strength in my team is its creativity. We’ve got developers from Nintendo, developers from Blizzard and developers from all over the world that have come together because they have a passion for cars and a passion for technology. We’re huge gamers – I lost myself in Batman: Arkham Asylum. That game was awesome, way better than I thought a Batman game could be. I played a ton of Fallout and I had three characters at Level 60 in World of Warcraft, and my team are all like this too. So, we look at Natal and we’re just like “that is so freaking cool”. The excitement level in the team is very very high. I think there’s even more that can be done with trying to turn Car Lovers into Gamers and Gamers into Car Lovers when I look at Natal. The moment I saw it I was like “yes, I can make an amazing experience there and yes, I can get people SO stoked about cars”. We need to start prototyping, start playing with it and seeing what’s fun and what’s cool.

VGR: What was the biggest lesson you learned while making the game?

Dan: It’s not very sexy, but the truth of the matter is Team Organisation. We’ve got a giant team. 125 people on our floor plus another 200 scattered across the rest of the world working for two and a half years on a mature codebase. My job isn’t to tell them “this feature, that feature or that feature”, my job is to inspire my team. They’re such high level developers, what I do is say “look, here’s our vision – and here’s some ideas for some features, impress me”, and that’s what they do, They come back to me and I go “wow, you knocked it out of the park, that’s way better than I imagined”. We’ve kind of got pharaoh’s army here! Just having lieutenants that are incredibly creative powerhouses is the secret to being successful.

VGR: Forza Motorsport 3 is a double-disc release; can you explain what the second disc is all about?

Dan: We had a lot of DLC for Forza Motorsport 2, we had DLC Cars and DLC Tracks – and that’s what Disc 2 is – it’s a year’s worth of free DLC. The fist disc has over 300 cars, and it has tons of tracks, the full multiplayer, the full single player, it’s the full game. So you put the second disc in your console and it sees it like DLC, it installs it onto your Hard Drive, and those cars automatically work themselves into the game. It’s all very automatic, very AI based. So you can have the biggest racing game this holiday, or you can have the bigger-est racing game this holiday. We’re gonna do DLC as well. If we see a car in the Frankfurt Motor Show then bang, there it is for you to download. So the game’s just always going to be updated.

VGR: Is there anything in the game that’s a Dan Greenawalt stamped “you must try this”?

Dan: Because this game crosses such a broad spectrum, from a pro race driver down to a six year old who just wants to play with Hot Wheels, most of you will find yourselves somewhere in the middle. If you just hit A, A, A through your career, you’ll get a very unique career to you, customised based on the cars that you have, but if you really want to get that stamp of uniqueness on it, after you’ve finished your first two events in your calendar, it’s going to ask if you if you want to do a third. At that point, back out and go to the “buy car” area, and you’re going to have a lot of money – go buy a car that you care about. There’ll be over 80 cars to choose from at this point, classics, you name it. Once you do that, the career is going to start branching in huge, huge leaps. If you’re in a BMW, it’s going to feel like Turn 10 made you a BMW game. If you’re in a Ferrari it’s going to feel like Turn 10 made you a Ferrari game. Not everyone’s going to find this naturally, so it’s a good tip. You do that, you go talk to your friends, you’re going to have stories that they don’t and it’s just gonna create that car passion, it all goes back to the initial vision.

VGR: So, tell us about the AI in Forza 3 – is it better? Will it react differently to each player’s driving style?

Dan: Actually, it will even react differently based on the Rewind function. They (Microsoft’s Research division in Cambridge) created a very, very different AI system to any other game that I’ve ever worked on. Usually your AI’s scripted, they don’t drive the full physics, and that’s a good thing as a designer because I can control it. A lot of AI is like driving bumper cars, when you hit them, they don’t get out of the way and they don’t do what your car does. Forza’s always had AI that drives the raw physics, and we have to keep training it. The cool thing about this Research AI is we trained it like a kid – you don’t program it, you actually have it drive the cars and it learns how to drive the cars better, and it does things that we don’t expect. It learns bad habits and learns cool things too. The AI pressure system that I talked about at E3 was a new system that it (the AI) started, we didn’t. We actually found that it was reacting to the player following it, and we could tweak some of the variables on it to make it happen more or less. So we didn’t so much develop that, as discover it. It’s another one of the freaky things about this system. It’s continually evolving.

Forza Motorsport 3

Overview

Title: Forza Motorsport 3

Release Date: October 22^nd – October 27^th 2009

Developer/Publisher: Turn 10/Microsoft Game Studios

Genre: Racing

Platform[s]: Xbox 360

Storyline

Forza Motorsport needs no introduction. Microsoft’s flagship racing simulation has been the Xbox answer to Gran Turismo since the first installment hit the original console back in 2005. Boasting a large number of licensed cars and realistic damage modeling, Turn 10 honed the experience in it’s first 360 outing with Forza 2, offering an increased number of vehicles, more impressive physics and the much loved customization section where petrol heads could tune their vehicles to within an inch of their lives, and artists could create amazing paint jobs and sell them to the Xbox Live community. Now, with Forza Motorsport 3 they have created perhaps the definitive current-gen driving experience, hoping to attract everyone from six year olds to seasoned petrol heads and realize their vision of “Car Lovers into Gamers, and Gamers into Car Lovers”.

Gameplay

At first glance, Forza Motorsport 3’s gameplay has most of the same features as most other racers out there, until you delve beneath the surface and dig up one of the deepest and most rewarding console racing experiences known to man. Starting with the assists, newcomers and seasoned pros alike can tailor the gameplay to suit their ability. From the standard Green Line that guides you around each track to the assisted braking system, you can tweak the experience to suit your driving style, turning options on and off as you see fit. Turn 10 actively encourage you to switch these assists off by rewarding you more points when you finish a race (which I bet you cannot get in video poker online). Completing a race earns you Experience Points, leveling you up and raising your rep, unlocking further races, discounts on bigger and better parts for your chosen beast(s) and more cars for you to buy, trade, paint and tune.

Spread over two discs, there are well over 400 cars for you to choose from – the 1984 Golf GTI nestles lovingly next to the Bugatti Veryon, alongside classics like the Ferrari Dino 246 GT and the 1961 R-Type Jaguar. Each and every one of them drives differently, affected by your upgrade options and how you wish to tune each vehicle. Tuning options range from tyre pressure to how much down force is applied to bumpers and tails – and again, you can either tweak them to within an inch of their life or leave them well alone, with neither decision costing you any ounce of enjoyment. Upgrades come in over 75 forms, from engine mods to cosmetic adjustments (such as bodykits and the like) and you can choose to install these manually or let the computer optimize your vehicle for you before you start a new race. Again, depending on your level of interest in how the car performs, you can bring metadata up on screen that shows you how each facet of your vehicle is holding up during a race – tyre temperature and telemetry is all there, should you wish to view it, and if a particular car feature isn’t doing it’s job you can go back and tune it until it does (or gets worse, depending on your level of understanding of these sorts of things).

Racing is a joy, as improved opponent AI now reacts completely differently to any other racer out there (read our Dan Greenawalt interview for a further insight) – meaning that the other drivers on the road don’t stick to the race line and jostle like bumper cars, the aggressive drivers now actively try and shut you down if you get all up in their grill (so to speak) while timid drivers will back right off and avoid you like the plague. Added to this is the rewind feature – something seen recently in DiRT2 – where, if you hit a corner too fast and stack it, you can rewind the action back and cruise smoothly around the corner without so much as an ounce of drift. However, should you wish to use the feature to ram your AI opponents more than once in the same place, they will only let you get away with it once or twice, before swerving out of your way on the 3^rd rewind/ramming attempt.

The game will also automatically configure depending on the vehicles you have in your garage, meaning that as you buy, sell and earn cars you will have new races offered up to you. So should you prefer your American muscle cars to your German five-door hatchbacks, the game will feel tailored to suit your needs, and it’s little features like this that show Turn 10 has not only paid attention to the Forza community’s feedback, but are looking to raise the bar on the racing games in general.

Online and the Forza community has always played a big part in the franchise (with particularly talented members now hired onto the Turn 10 staff), and Forza 3 is no different, with improved Multiplayer options where you can tailor a race to whatever petrol-based fetish you require and the all new storefront and auction house firmly in place for online trading when the game launches.

Graphics

Forza 3 is gorgeous. Each of the 200 tracks have been lovingly crafted and, in most cases, recreated to the exact specification of their real-life counterpart. With over 60 gigs of data collected on each (including road surface changes, camber imperfections etc), the pit lanes, trees, billboards and viewing areas are all exactly where they should be. The cars themselves have been lovingly recreated, with cockpit view available in all of them (where even your rev counter and speedometer look and react differently) – as well as realistic damage modeling, with scrapes and dents appearing as and when you nudge an opponent or tyre wall. Some of the vistas in the tracks are so beautiful that, on first play through, we ended up crashing on more than one occasion after being distracted by their beauty.

Tyre deformation is a big part of this new installment, as not only can you see your tyres bending in response to the different terrain you dive on (which, if you have a large screen television set, looks amazing) it also affects your driving.

The only graphical downside are the spectators, as seems to be the case with sports that attract hundreds of different people in real life, developers never really seem to be able to nail the diversity of a crowd of people watching a race, reacting differently, for most of them appear to look the same, and have the same “waving arms in the air at random points” animations. This is a very minor quibble however, and 99.9% of the time we guarantee you won’t notice.

Sound

According to Dan Greenawalt, Turn 10 tried to realistically sample as many of the cars as they could – giving the game an overall feel of authenticity and adding to the experience of actually driving these vehicles – and for those they couldn’t, they consulted with as many companies as possible to tweak sounds they already had to ensure they got as close as possible, and it shows. Each car sounds unique and as you’d expect it to, and skids and crashes all sound suitably chunky. There are a few in-game licensed tracks to help get the adrenaline pumping during a race, with Pendulum proving a particular favourite in the VGR/Xboxer360 clubhouse.

Overall Score and Replayability

Forza Motorsport 3 is a triumph. Turn 10 have taken one of the best racing sims out there and given it a fresh lick of paint and sheen that most gamers didn’t think would be possible, but not only that, they’ve managed to craft a game that can be as arcade or as simulation as you want it, without ever compromising on quality and enjoyment. The features we’ve spoken about in this review don’t even come close to scraping the surface of what’s available in game, and we guarantee you’ll have a hell of a lot fun finding them all out just like your journey for the ever sought best online casino bonus. We simply urge you to rush out and purchase it as soon as you can, because you will find not better racer on Microsoft’s grey box. Win.

Wet

Overview

Title: Wet
Release Date: 15^th September 2009 (NA) / 18^th September 2009 (EU)
Developer/Publisher: Artificial Mind + Movement/Bethesda Softworks
Genre: Action & Adventure, Shooter
Platform[s]: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3

Storyline

Tarantino meets Tomb Raider in this highly stylized third person action adventure title, with the player taking on the mantle of vicious gun for hire Rubi Malone. Sent on a globe-trotting mission to retrieve crime boss Mr Ackers’ son, Rubi gets inevitably double crossed and sets about exacting revenge in spectacularly bloody fashion…

Gameplay

Wet’s gameplay is fun, fast, frantic and varied – based around gun and sword attacks which can be chained together with devastating effect, QTE’s, on-rails sections and the super-stylish “Rage” mode (which we like lots). Harking back to the days of Max Payne, bullet time is triggered automatically when Rubi fires off a shot during a jump or some kind of Tomb Raider-esque acrobatic lunacy (of which there is a fair bit), giving you more time to take out your enemies, but also granting you the ability to target two enemies at once. One is automatically locked onto for you, while you’re free to move the left stick around at will to take out any of your other nearby enemies. It takes a while to get used to, but with Rubi’s full 360 target capabilities it’s a hell of a lot of fun once you master it, and you’ll soon be swinging on poles, sliding down ladders and wall-running whilst cracking off head shots with the best of them.

The majority of your play time will be spent moving around each level, disposing of your enemies before entering a main “arena” style section which sees you shutting off enemy entry points and collecting score multipliers. These parts offer up more acrobatic combo opportunities than usual, and we’re sure some gamers will have great fun learning the quickest and most stylish route around as you leap from wall to ledge to pole and back again. At the end of each level you’re offered a score based on your performance (how quickly and stylishly you completed the level, and how many kills you successfully chained together), which is then translated into RPG style experience points that you can spend on upgrading Rubi’s skills, abilities and weapons strength.

Despite the main levels being largely linear and rather samey, Artificial Mind + Movement have done a great job of breaking up the monotony by throwing in some cracking on-rails levels, one of which sees Rubi leaping from car to car whilst capping bad guys in a Matrix style freeway chase, as you would have seen if you’ve downloaded the demo currently available on Xbox Live. One level in particular is especially inspired (we won’t spoil it by telling you why), completely ruined by the most frustrating collision detection and trial and error gameplay we’ve seen for quite some time.

Finally, Rubi’s “Rage” mode: only available during pre-set parts of the game (with seemingly no attachment to the main story), it echoes the Crazy 88 fight in Kill Bill, with the screen taking on a cartoon-esque black and red hue. Using Rubi’s heightened senses you have to clear the area as quickly as possible, with points accrued for large amounts of kills chained together. It’s a wonderfully stylish idea executed marvelously – although we’re deducting points for the fact that you can’t earn the right to trigger the mode once a set amount of kills are achieved during the main game, for instance.

Graphics

Drawing on Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse movies as inspiration, Wet mimics the grainy, scratchy camera style they made famous brilliantly – coupled with the over the top action, constant blood spatter and stylized characters it gives the whole game a cult 70’s action flick feel which really makes the game stand out from the pack. The camera imperfections can be switched off however, which does make some of the poorer graphics stand out – for instance, some of the incidental characters are badly detailed and look china-dollish next to Rubi, Ackers and crew. The environments are varied and interesting to look at and (despite the mediocrity of the opening levels) fit in well with the rest of Rubi’s universe.

The characters are well animated, and although the hack and slash action isn’t quite up to Afro Samurai’s limb-removing standards, the blood spatter is satisfying and some of the cutscenes are particularly wince-inducing.

Sound

Boasting the vocal talents of Eliza Dushku (Buffy The Vampire Slayer), Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange) and Alan Cumming (X-Men 2), a sleazy rockabilly soundtrack to rival Dusk ‘til Dawn and some of the snappiest in-game dialogue we’ve ever heard (penned by Duppy “24” Demetrius), Wet sounds amazing – and we guarantee you’ll be humming “Insane” by The Arkhams for days to come.

Overall Score and Replayability

Wet is a rare game, one that dares to be different and despite the odd graphical glitch here and there and linear and repetitive levels it manages to pull off enough quick fire, enjoyable gameplay a lot of titles seem to be lacking these days to warrant a spot in your “to play” pile indefinitely. With a couple of unlockable challenge modes once the main game is completed, a heap of toy monkeys to find in game and the chance to better your previous scores on the arenas Wet has definitely got a lot to offer.

Star Trek: D.A.C.

Overview

Title: Star Trek: D.A.C.

Release Date: 13^th May 2009

Developer/Publisher: Naked Sky Entertainment/Paramount Digital Entertainment

Genre: Shooter

Platform[s]: Xbox Live Arcade

Star Trek. You either love it or you hate it. You’re either one of a legion of millions of Trekkies around the world who go to conventions regularly dressed as Sulu, Data, Uhura or Bob from Engineering, or you’re one of the millions of people who cannot stand it or the one billion spin off’s the franchise has spawned since the original series premièred back in the sixties (even though Deanna Troi made The Next Generation very watchable). I fall into the latter category, and despite my generally dismissive attitude towards the Star Trek universe as a whole, the fact that J. J. Abrams has got his very talented paws in on the action (and not forgetting that I’m also a sucker for a big Spring Blockbuster at the Cinema) sparked my interest enough for me to volunteer to review Star Trek: D.A.C., which is available for download now on XBLA.

Disappointingly enough, the game is only based very loosely on J. J.’s film or the universe as a whole. It features none of the original cast, none of the new cast and almost certainly Bob from Engineering will NOT be making a cameo appearance – but instead, Star Trek: D.A.C. (Deathmatch-Assault-Conquest) does exactly what it says on the tin and avoids following the usual tried and tested third person action/adventure movie spin off angle by crafting a rather nifty little top-down online Team shooter.

Gameplay

First of all – DO NOT play this on your own. The computer controlled AI is rubbish, and you’ll find yourself swearing at it in anything except Team Deathmatch. Star Trek: D.A.C. is designed as an online multiplayer, and should be treated as such. Right…there are three different (but very standard) types of timed game on offer – the first being Team Deathmatch (self explanatory), followed by Assault (a two-round game, with the first round consisting of you trying to take down your opponent’s four bases while they try to defend, while the second round reverses the roles) and then Conquest (a Capture the Flag style game, where each team has two bases each and must defend their own whilst taking over their opponents bases).

The idea is again a very standard one, pick a side (Starfleet or Romulan), pick a craft and get stuck in. You die, you respawn elsewhere on the map. Each side has three different types of Craft on offer, although they are the same in everything but aesthetics, regardless of which side you pick.The slow but powerful Flagship (which looks like the Enterprise, if you play on the Starfleet side) takes a lot of damage and uses a targeting system with the reticule controlled with the right stick, but requires a modicum of pre-emption as it will only fire in the direction of your reticule and does not lock on. The Bomber is fairly nippy and prone to damage more easily, and is held back by the fact that you can only drop bombs behind you, requiring a slightly more tactical approach (laying covering bombs around the outside of an enemy base while your teammates capture it inside, for instance), while the Fighter is a very nippy little bastard packing the only “traditional” laser style weapon in the game, only let down by exploding too easily.

Each craft uses RT to fire, LT for a short-lived speed boost and the left and right bumpers to use your power-ups. These appear as yellow glowing orbs around the maps which, once collected, give you different powers such as a cloaking device, smart bombs or a doppelganger that mirrors your movements.There are also health packs you can collect, indicated as white glowing orbs. Pressing Y brings up a realtime overview map of the action as it happens.

It’s very much Online Team Shooter business as usual, but it’s execution is very smooth and even though it takes a while to get used to the strengths and weaknesses of each of the different Craft on offer you will find yourself assessing the situation at each spawn point and attempt to pick the right Craft, before giving up and just opting for the Flagship instead as it takes more damage.

Graphics

There’s not much to say about the graphics apart from they are simple but effective. You’d be best off playing this game on a large HD telly, as the minuscule fighters can be hard to pick out against some of the backdrops at times. Each map has a theme, however they all really just look the same but with different colour schemes and obstacles in the way – although they do look nice and get the job done well enough. Some of the explosion graphics are quite satisfying (unless it’s you being exploded), and each of the power-ups have their own distinctive thing going on.

Audio

Again, not much to speak of – the usual “epic” score (presumably lifted from the film) and laser/explosion sound bites, but you will have to rely on your Live Friends impersonating Scotty badly (I cannae do it, Cap’n – I just doont have the poo-er!) to give it that authentic Trekkie vibe.

Overall Score & Replayability

So there you have it, nothing groundbreaking and (potentially) a waste of a good licence but at least Naked Sky decided to do something a bit different with it instead. Priced at 800 points it may be seen to be a tad on the expensive side, especially when it offers nothing new – but if you’re bored of GoW2 or Halo and fancy something different in a multiplayer stylee it may be worth a look, although I would suggest grabbing the demo for a taster first.

Now, where’s my Bob from Engineering costume…

Defense Grid: The Awakening

Overview

Title: Defense Grid: The Awakening
Release Date: 02nd September 2009
Developer/Publisher: Hidden Path Entertainment
Genre: Strategy & Simulation
Platform[s]: XBLA

Storyline

Defense Grid is a tower defense game – for those of who don’t know what that means (and I expect that’s the majority of us out there), remember the scene in Aliens where they set up automatic machine gun units to see off the Xenomorphs?  That more or less sums up the genre. Obviously, this game isn’t that easy, but it is based around the premise of your home planet being under attack from aliens, and while everyone else has (wisely) done a runner, you are the only one left ready to take on the aliens, with the help of your onboard computer, who sounds suspiciously like Geoffrey out of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Gameplay

Your job is to protect your planet’s power cores from the Lost Planet/Starship Troopers-esque aliens on a variety of differently staged maps – each map holds your power cores, a series of empty spaces for you to place your weapon turrets and entry and exit points for your adversaries. Simply select an empty slot for a turret, hit A to bring up the weapon select screen and then A again to build your turret – it really is that simple. The kicker is that as you progress through the levels, each map springs newer and progressively harder layouts for you to decipher – with the onus on getting you to think strategically about where to place your turret, and which type of weapon to go for.

Weapons range from your basic gun turret up to Tesla Cannons, Rocket Launchers and Flamethrowers – each with its own strength and weaknesses, and each needing to be precisely located in order to get the best out of its firepower. This leads to a large amount of frustration as your best laid plans go to waste within minutes of the aliens entering the map, as they nab all your power cores and run off laughing at you. If all your power cores are removed, the Defense Grid powers down and that’s it, game over. The aliens themselves are many and varied, and range from annoying little blighters who are easy to dispatch, to massive boss-type characters who are slow and meandering, but heavily armoured and able to take a massive (and quite disturbing) amount of damage before giving up the ghost.

Defense Grid is all about resource management – you begin each campaign with a preset amount of money which you can use to place turrets, and each time you frag a bad guy, your resources go up and you can purchase more turrets or upgrade the ones you have. You can trade in (or sell, to quote the game) any turrets you currently have on screen, but by doing so you will only receive a percentage of their worth back into your resource wallet, encouraging you to think long and hard about each turret’s use before you place it – which, in the heat of battle, is not always an easy thing to do. For a game that only requires you to point and click, Defense Grid is one hell of a frantic experience, causing untold amounts of panic as you watch that unbeatable defense you spent ages strategizing over cause less than a blemish on your enemies – but when a plan does come together, it produces a warm, fuzzy glow and is quite simply one of the most rewarding effort to payoff ratios of anything currently on Xbox Live.

Graphics

Simple, yet effective was obviously Hidden Path’s mantra when creating this game, as you view the action from a diagonal-top down angle quite similar to Populous or Theme Park. Each map is well designed and looks different, and range from industrial areas to volcanoes and so on – you have three zoom levels, and even when you’re focused right in on the action with literally hundreds of aliens and weapon effects on screen at any one time, there is next to no slow-down. Loving touches like heat haze coming from your flamethrowers or the alien’s shields add to the effect, and you can quickly identify each alien type as it runs on screen. The only complaint we had was making out exactly what was going on when things got particularly hectic – at some points it’s literally impossible to see your enemies amid all the flame, Tesla fire and explosions, but as long as they don’t come out the other side then hey, that’s a good thing!

Sound

Defense Grid sounds good – each weapon sounds different and even when you’re on a completely different side of the map it’s comforting to hear your Lasers and Rocket Launchers firing off elsewhere. Add to this the suitably urgent musical score and it’s very easy to feel that you are actually orchestrating a massive defense bid against a seemingly unbeatable alien force. And your computer’s Hooray-Henry English accent is brilliant.

Overall Score and Replayability

All in all, Defense Grid is a very tasty package – along with the 20 standard maps, Hidden Path have also included the Borderlands expansion pack, offering an additional four maps for you to defend. Each map from the main campaign and the expansion pack has several challenge modes added on top of the standard story mode, which offers you well over 100 different scenarios to conquer. Add to this the 800MSP price tag, and the fact that XBLA is responsible for bringing yet another hidden gem onto our HDD’s and Defense Grid is pretty much a must-buy. It harks backs to the halcyon days of yore when games were as they should be, simple yet effective – it will draw you in and keep you there until you’ve conquered that map and believe us, you will WANT to conquer each and every map…download, now.

Yo-Ho Kablammo

Overview

Title: Yo-Ho Kablammo
Release Date: September 2, 2009
Developer/Publisher: Canalside Studios
Genre: Action & Adventure, Family
Platform[s]: XBLA

Storyline

Yo-Ho Kablammo suffers from a complete lack of storyline – all you need to know is that you are a pirate sailing the high seas, and the battles and challenges that you would have come across in real life have been transformed into a rather contrived multiplayer deathmatch Xbox Live Arcade game, clearly geared towards the younger spectrum of the market.

Gameplay

Yo-Ho offers up two types of game, the usual multiplayer deathmatch mode where you can compete with up to three friends either locally or over Xbox Live and a deeper challenge mode, which gives you a range of goals to achieve (score X amount of points for example) within a set time limit. These are all linked to the online leaderboards where you can keep tabs on how you’re doing compared to your fellow pirates, but (surprisingly enough) we had trouble finding anyone to play online with and the boards themselves be scarcer than a drop of rum at the tail end of a pirate-ing convention.

Controlling your vessel is tricky and should be classed as an individual challenge in itself – the left stick is used to steer but your ship is so unpredictable in it’s handling that you very rarely find yourself heading where you intended to, and more often than not you’ll just end up circling round and round in a vain attempt to get the thing to head in one solid direction. Added to this frustration is the complete inability to score a hit on any of your opponents, not just because you can only fire from your port and starboard sides (using LT and RT respectively), but your cannons are so slow to reload (no mindless button bashing here) and your AI controlled adversaries so quick that by the time you’ve lined up a shot they’ve sunk your ship and sped off with the treasure. Your only hope in these matches are the mines that will sometimes appear, dropped into the area by a passing aeroplane. All are neutral until you claim one, turning it the same colour as your ship and causing it to explode on contact with any other vessel. Unfortunately this means your opponents will also be doing the same thing, and the computer controlled AI is so quick and deft in the handling of its ships that they are able to claim most of the mines available and scoot through the gaps of any they haven’t while you struggle to occupy a small portion of the screen.

Also at play are the power-up’s – these range from speed boosts to bigger and bolder weapons, but nine times out of ten your opponents will have nabbed them before you’ve even had the chance to point your ship in the right direction, and even if you do stumble over a power-up by mistake you’ll have more trouble than usual taking advantage of it.

Graphics

Yo-Ho looks very deceiving – its big, bold graphics are bright and appealing, in a CBeebies sort of way, and even the water (although not up to BioShock standards) is nicely animated. The overall cartoony feel is happy and joyous and, like a scurvy-ridden cake with hundreds and thousands on top, belies the grot that lies underneath its rather tasty looking outer casing.

Audio

Matching Yo-Ho’s bouncy, bubbly look is its soundtrack – various nautical-flavoured ditties run tirelessly throughout and the cannons and explosions all tick the correct boxes. In fact, the only high point of the game is the clichéd pirate voiceover during the tutorial. We guarantee you’ll have more fun trying to work out if the guy doing it is an American trying to do a West Country English accent or an extra off The Wiggles than you will playing the main game.

Overall Score & Replayability

Yo-Ho is ultimately a highly frustrating experience for anyone without the cast iron will of say, a seven year old, and playtime will be confined to bouts of no more than five minutes worth of stress-induced pad destruction. It’s a shame, because the overall cartoon-esque look and feel of the game is great, and with a little more effort it would have appealed to a broader spectrum of gamers and be worth its 800MSP price tag. Quite how this got past the Dream-Build-Play judges in its current state is beyond us. Avoid.

Wallace & Gromit Episode 1 – Fright of the Bumblebees

Overview

Title: Wallace & Gromit Episode 1 – Fright of the Bumblebees
Release Date: 27^th June 2009
Developer/Publisher: Telltale Games
Genre: Action & Adventure, Puzzle & Trivia
Platform[s]: Xbox Live Arcade

The Queen’s Speech. An hour-long Eastenders special. Wallace and Gromit. Your nan spitting Brussel Sprouts all over the dinner table. Random acts of violence and depressingly interwoven sexual/family relationships (and that’s just the Queen’s speech). All stalwarts of your standard Christmas Day line-up, and it’s usually down to W&G, the dynamic plasticine duo, to bring the family together and remind us what Christmas is all about: a little bit of fun, a little bit of sentiment and a lot of laughter. It’s with all this in mind that you can see what TellTale Games has tried to achieve with their latest pseudo point and click adventure, but the studio unfortunately only manages to tick one of the above boxes – and hallelujah, it’s the one marked Fun.

Gameplay

The control system is easy to use, fluid and intuitive – move your on-screen character around with the Left Stick and although the game has been billed as a point and click adventure, it does avoid using the classic “move the cursor around the screen and find things to select” mechanic, instead opting to go with the left and right bumpers to toggle between the various interactive items that are on screen at any one time. No beefy arrows floating around the screen and no general annoyance at having to be pixel perfect with your selections, but while this helps immerse you into the universe very quickly (it’s all too easy to believe you are actually directing the action in one of their hallowed Christmas Specials), it does detract from the fact that (certainly as an older gamer) the whole nature of a point and click adventure is to hunt down those rascally objects with your cursor (sometimes revisiting an area more than once just to check you hadn’t missed anything because you were stuck at a particular point), and having them given to you on a plate straight from the off feels like you’re being led around by the hand a little too much. I can appreciate the difficulty in porting a PC mouse based genre onto a console controller, but it does make things a little too easy sometimes. The inventory system is easy to get around as well, using X to bring up the menu, with the Left Stick and A button being used for cycling through objects and selection respectively. The puzzles, however, range from the obvious to the devious – and several of them had me scratching my head in frustration, one so much so that I had to check the TellTale Games website for a cheeky hint …and in the usual forehead slapping style of these sorts of games, the answer was so obvious that I just didn’t think about it. It’s with these little touches that the game goes somewhat towards being forgiven for it’s bastardisation of the control system, but even still – some of the puzzles were a simple case of trial and error, and it would be entirely possible to bodge through the whole game in this manner.

Graphics

The graphics are gorgeous, that’s all there is to it – as previously mentioned, it’s all too easy to believe that you are watching an episode of the TV show, and despite a few lip-synching issues every now and then, it is without a doubt one of the most spot-on representations of a non-game based franchise known to man. From Gromit’s trademark speechless, exaggerated shrug of the shoulders and roll of the eyes to the little dimples and imperfections in the “clay skin” of the characters, everything about this stays 100% true to the TV Series. You can really see that a lot of love went into bringing Aardman’s classic onto the white box.

Audio

Despite Peter Sallis’ somewhat disappointing absence on Wallace vocal duties, I have to say that the stand-in is pretty damn good – 99.9% of the time, which is commendable in itself, but there is the odd syllable now and again where you’ll be wishing for the more traditional Wallace tones…but this is a rare occurrence. The rest of the cast have also been well placed, with Mr and Mrs Gabberley so far providing most of the laughs – again proving that TellTale really studied the subject matter before making any major choices in what to include. Even the in-game music stays true to the 50’s/60’s jazz-band influence made so popular in the shows.

Overall Score & Replayability

If you are a Wallace and Gromit fan, young at heart or looking for a lazy Sunday afternoon’s gaming you will be prepared to overlook the game’s flaws as playing it is just so much FUN – I can’t stress enough just how easy it is to become embroiled in the adventure, with Wallace’s trademark bumbling and over-zealous inventions and ideas causing stress to Gromit as he tackles to sort it all out, and unless you are a really hardened gamer I defy your heart to not be melted in the end by the claymation charms of this title. However, as TellTale Games are responsible for bringing Monkey Island and Sam & Max to our screens later this year, I really hope they do sort out those quibbles in time or there will be a LOT of disappointed gamers out there…

CellFactor: PsychoKinetic Wars

Overview

Title: CellFactor: PsychoKinetic Wars
Release Date: 3^rd June 2009
Developer/Publisher: Ubisoft
Genre: Shooter
Platform[s]: Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network

I’ve never been a big fan of First Person Shooters, except maybe Duke Nukem 3D, Goldeneye and BioShock – but saying that you’re an FPS aficionado because you played any of those games is like saying you’re into Hip-Hop because you bought the track Puff Daddy released after Biggie Smalls got shot – so I was slightly surprised when the opportunity to review CellFactor: Psychokinetic Wars came up and I found myself grabbing the bull with both horns, and even more surprised when I realised I’d lost a good couple of hours to online deathmatch, even though I didn’t get any higher than second from last in the any of the match rankings (which is unsurprising, as it was my first on-line FPS dalliance).

Gameplay

CellFactor started life as a tech demo on the PC which then grew into a full (free) game. With that in mind you can certainly see where the games’ origins are, as there is no story whatsoever – no interstellar war being raged between good and evil, and no key characters to fall in (or out) of love with. For the standard FPS gamer, this can only be viewed as a good thing as it rids you of any alliance or emotion, and concentrates on cold, hard death and destruction. To that end, you could say that CellFactor was designed with the multiplayer deathmatch in mind, but there is quite a sturdy single player game hidden underneath all that online bravado.

There are three different classes of character (which we’ll come to later) to choose from, each offering different strengths and weaknesses that need to be learned and invested in if you wish to progress to the later levels or indeed, take your game online. The single player game is based around different challenges and team games which start off fairly easy and get progressively harder as you continue, teaching you the finer points of each character’s pros and cons…and although this in itself is pretty damn enjoyable, you can’t help but feel that it’s just some beefed up training module for the kind of bad-asses you will encounter in the online world. In a fairly bold move Ubisoft has given its characters “Psi” abilities alongside the usual pistol/shotgun/pulse rifle/rocket launcher armoury, obviously attempting to set the game apart from the rest of the FPS genre – and it works quite well, adding another dimension to the carnage and drastically changing your in-game tactics..

Each character has different levels of Psi/Weapon ability, which leads us nicely into the introduction of the aforementioned character types. First up: Bishop (no, not him off Aliens) – she’s a cyborg with large robotic mammaries and prefers using her Psi abilities over her weapons – shooting out blue beams and such in place of bullets & missiles etc. She can also fly for a short while as well, which is quite handy for getting out of trouble quickly. The Blackops character is the only humanoid out of the three, and is a good all rounder – he uses his Psi abilities in the same way as Telekinesis in BioShock, picking up random objects and firing them at targets using the power of his mind. He can also teleport quickly from one spot to another, but you can only move to close-ish places and shouldn’t be relied on as an escape technique. The Guardian reminds me of the X-Men’s Sentinels, favouring brute force and the ability to dual wield his weapons, and instead only really using the Psi abilities to run quicker (barging any hapless opponents in the way) and leap, Hulk-like, into the air.

The games themselves range from Team Deathmatch to CTF, to Assault – personally the most enjoyable – where you must capture a “hacker” hidden on the map, take it to your opponent’s base and wait for it to upload without getting blown away. Things can get particularly mental at times, especially if you have a full house of Live players who know what they’re doing, but it always remains enjoyable and lends itself very well to “one more go” syndrome.

Graphics

Unfortunately, the graphics are all very last-gen, using similar palettes and shades as the original Halo – and several of the maps have a similar, Halo-esque feel to them. Saying that, the maps are many and varied – each with their own distinct look and feel – and it’s easy to remember exactly where you are on each. There are no cut scenes to speak of, and providing you remind yourself that CellFactor was borne from a Tech Demo it’s easy to forgive its lack of graphical flair. One small bonus is the ability to “pimp” your character with a variety of colours and accessories, earnt as you progress through the single player campaigns. It adds an air of individuality, and is quite a nice addition.

Audio

Again, the sound is very last-gen – doing nothing new in the way of clicks, pops, whizzes or bangs – sticking to the usual tried and tested pistol/shotgun/machine gun noises, and slightly grainy yells of pain, mid death. There is a female voice over during the team games, letting you know when flags have been taken and dropped etc, and during particularly frantic sessions this can be quite annoying.

Overall Score & Replayability

All in all, CellFactor is a very enjoyable game, helping to fill a section of XBLA that is sorely lacking in decent shooters – if you can look over the last-gen graphics and sound, you will find a highly addictive game that ticks both online and offline boxes and although it is by no means a Halo or COD beater, it will certainly keep you coming back for more for quite a while.

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