Andy Laub

Remember how I said I was going to play Crysis 2? I still am, I promise. I just… it hasn’t happened yet. I had planned to rent it shortly after finishing up Bulletstorm, but it was still nowhere to be found. In the meantime, reviews of Bulletstorm led me to Vanquish, a game released last year that is basically what happens when you combine Gears of War and Bulletstorm, then take Epic out of the equation and replace them with Sega.

The result is a third-person shooter in which you run around on a space station and shoot communist robots. Similar to Bulletstorm, there’s a button that lets you slide around on the ground, and also sort of do things in slow motion. And you have a gun, but your gun is special because it’s every gun (more on that later). Also there’s a button that you press to smoke a cigarette, in case you need to be reminded that this game is very, very Japanese.

This sounds like it could be a recipe for disaster, but the opposite is true – Vanquish is a very fun game. Unlike the plodding, cover-reliant pace of a typical shooter, the goal here is speed. I’ll admit that I relied on cover more than the game probably would’ve preferred, but the mechanics are there to keep you in motion a good portion of the time; rarely are there locations in battle that are truly “safe” so you have to use your maneuverability to your advantage.

I mentioned you have what is basically the gun. Your amazing, one of a kind suit of armor is impressive, but your gun? It can look at other guns and mimic them. Remember in the Transformers movie how the robots scanned the vehicles and then turned into them? That’s what your gun can do. Except it’s a little simple, so it can only remember three guns at a time. I don’t know why that distinction exists, but it does.

But your gun can upgrade itself. If you scan another copy of a weapon you already have, the first result is your ammo refills. If your ammo is full, you get a little mark next to that gun. Three marks and you get a star, and each star is an upgrade (ammo capacity, power, etc). But don’t die, because sometimes you’ll loose a mark if that happens. I’m not really sure how the logic for that works – sometimes marks were lost, and sometimes they weren’t, and the same weapon wasn’t always affected – but really, don’t die. It’s bad for your points.

Did I mention the points? This game has them! I’m pretty sure they’re a way of telling other people how great you are at this game. Or in my case, how great you aren’t. But at the same time, the game also has giant enemy crabs, whose weak points you can attack for massive damage. Then they turn into giant humanoid robots.

In short, you should probably try Vanquish if shooting things is something you enjoy. It doesn’t really take very long, and it’s very shiny.

I didn’t mean to rent Bulletstorm. Okay, I did, but it was not at the top of my gaming to-do list, nor (until yesterday) was it even on it. I’ve been itching for something new to play after finishing up Black Ops and that driving debacle game, and because Brink and LA Noire are still over a month away, I had to psych myself up for something I could play now. Crysis 2 was the immediate the frontrunner, but after many fruitless visits to the video store, it became clear that I should find something else to occupy my time.

I didn’t care for the demo of Bulletstorm until I played it the second time. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood, and by that I mean “maybe I just didn’t want to be distracted by another game so I convinced myself it was nothing special”. Or maybe I just wasn’t doing it right, because I had a whole lot more fun when I retried it. Happily, Bulletstorm isn’t nearly as difficult to get ahold of, so I was whipping guys around and shooting them in the face in no time.

Let’s take a couple of steps back. If you’ve seen any of the ads, you’ll remember Bulletstorm as being the game that encourages you to “Kill With Skill” – in other words, you’re rewarded for finding creative ways to dispose of your opponents. The most prominent mechanism in this involves your leash – an electric whip attached to your wrist that you can use to latch on to enemies and objects from a distance, pulling them toward you (and in doing so putting them in a sort of mini-Bullet Time) so you can more easily target strategic areas (like their butts). The rest of your arsenal is somewhat more conventional but still fun to use, and the points that you receive from killing guys are used to restock and upgrade your weapons.

This whole system, while creative, is a little disconcerting at first because to some extent it requires that you forget some of the things you know about shooting games. While you can certainly make your way through the game with a series of headshots from your assault rifle, to do so would be to forego everything that it’s about. While it initially seems as though ammo is hard to find and somewhat expensive to buy, you soon realize that a) you’re able to kill a LOT of enemies without using any ammo at all and b) you’ll get a LOT more points for doing so, effectively making ammo that much easier to come by when you do end up needing it. The environment in this game tends to be just as lethal to your opposition as your own sidearm – never has rebar been such a deadly force. Or cacti. Or random, dangling electric wires.

And, as advertised, that’s what makes Bulletstorm fun and special. It doesn’t hurt that it’s made by Epic, the folks behind the Gears of War series, and it certainly shows. I like to think that the game takes place in the same universe as Gears, since the aesthetic is nearly identical (big burly guys and lots of masculine gadgetry). However, the mood here (on the resort planet of Stygia!) is distinctly lighter, as is the overall setting. The weather is generally bright and sunny, and you’ll spend a lot of your time outside (or sort of outside, since this resort is comprised entirely of structures that are on the verge of or in the middle of collapse). There are a couple of Gears-like moments where you’ll end up in a cavern or sewer, but they seem to be there only to remind you of how little time you spend in them. An objective like “find your way out of this cavern” would end up spanning multiple acts in Gears of War, while doing the same here means you may not see the sun for nearly ten minutes.

Also interesting are a couple moments where it seems inevitable that the game is going to throw one of the typical shooter cliches at you (ridiculous boss fight, drawn out puzzle sequence), only to send you on your way instead. The game seems to prefer that you don’t remain in a given place for too much time, and instead pushes you along with relative efficiency and urgency – a rare and fitting move since the events all occur within a few hours. I will say that there seemed to be a disproportionate amount of falling through or off of… stuff. That’s a shooter cliche too – especially in the Gears franchise – but in this instance I honestly think they wanted to see how many times they could fit that into the story.

With all this, it would sound like there wasn’t anything not to like. While that’s somewhat true, I can name a few things:

• There were two distinct times where my teammate needed to perform a particular action to drive the story and failed to do so. The first time this happened I had to restart the chapter; the second time (later in the game), I was able to resolve it by restarting from the last checkpoint.
• While it’s nice to have them around, teammates rarely became the focus of attacks. One particular enemy can only be downed by shooting him in the back, which is impossible because he devotes all of his attention to me and me alone.
• One particular class of enemy in the middle of the game completely takes the fun out of combat, in that you can’t use any of the techniques that are the foundation of the game itself. I don’t mind it so much in hindsight, but it was really irritating at the time.
• While occasionally entertaining, the profanity can get a little stale. Also the main guy kind of sounds like Tim Allen at times.

So while Bulletstorm represents a new IP, it really isn’t an unknown quantity. Think of it as a first-person, lighter-hearted version of Gears of War and there you go. The setpieces are colossal and fantastic, and the combat is a lot of fun, so I definitely look forward to future installments.

I bought my Xbox at the end of the product cycle. It was late 2005 and the 360 had just hit the market, but I wasn’t ready to make the leap yet (mistake). The Xbox was intended as a sort of stopgap, and a way to catch the games I had missed out on in the years where my time was occupied first by the Gamecube and later by the PS2.

One of the first games I bought was Halo – a staple for any collection. It was enjoyable enough, and was really one of my first experiences with the modern first person shooter (FPS). I was indifferent to the overall art direction (generic) and level design (repetitive) but I played through it with Abe and it was a fun, co-op way to kill some time.

Halo 2 followed shortly thereafter, but for whatever reason didn’t receive our immediate attention. By the time we started to play through it, it was on the Xbox 360. Console choices aside, Halo 2 was a struggle for us to stay interested in. The frequent switch between characters and storylines was confusing, and the environments weren’t any better than the first game. We spent a fair amount of time just trying to figure out what we were supposed to do. I’m being generous if I say we made it roughly halfway through the game before it got shelved, and that was my last experience with the Halo series aside from some occasional local multiplayer on Halo 3.

So maybe it was the lull in games, or the recent release of Halo 3: ODST that made me want to try to continue the adventure. Two weeks ago I put in Halo 2 once more in hopes that my interest would be rekindled. A couple ugly, repetitive, frustrating levels later, it was becoming clear that this was not going to be the case. With no achievements to keep me motivated, it was roughly a couple of hours before the game found itself shelved once again.

Still lacking for games to play, I ended up borrowing Halo 3. I’ve been told that a) I didn’t miss much by skipping the rest of the second game and b) the third is a much stronger game. Both of these assessments proved to be accurate, for while I still experienced some of the same typical Halo frustrations, I can look back and say that I did enjoy playing the game when all is said and done.

The Good

As the first of the series to appear on the Xbox 360, you’d expect that Halo 3 would be both visually and aurally superior to the previous iterations, and it is, if only in a technical sense. I found the story to be engaging enough that I at least wanted to continue playing through the game, and the gameplay is solid as ever; even the vehicle controls felt much less frustrating than the previous games. There wasn’t nearly as much repetition to the environments which meant that I spent less time getting lost and backtracking and more time enjoying myself, and I also enjoyed that a good portion of the game took place on earth. I also especially liked the sequences where I fought alongside the Arbiter and/or the Covenant Elites – both make solid teammates.

The Bad

The thing is, where Halo was once the king of shooter games thanks to its solid gameplay, it seems like dozens of similar games have since flooded the market, some of which offer things that seem to be a staple in games nowadays. Gears of War and its emphasis on finding cover during battle comes to mind, something that a first person game such as Halo would have a hard time dealing with. The problem is, there are a myriad of situations in Halo 3 where running and gunning is the last thing you should be doing; you need to hunker down and pick off enemies from a safe vantage point, but there’s no mechanic to encourage this sort of behavior.

Aside from that, all the processing power in the world can’t disguise the fact that this is merely an update to the artwork from the original game. Obviously trying to change character designs midstream is a bad idea, so I suppose more of my issue is that I’ve always found Halo’s style to be incredibly generic. I also had trouble occasionally following the story, particularly in one sequence where I felt as though I missed a cutscene.

Fortunately for me (and for Halo 3), I didn’t go into the experience expecting something groundbreaking; I just wanted to shoot guys for awhile. Which brings me to my final critique: it’s hard to shoot guys when you can’t find any ammo.

I mentioned on Black Friday that I had taken advantage of a couple of Amazon’s video game deals, among them PS3 staples Resistance: Fall of Man and Motorstorm. I figured this would be a cheap way to beef up my library and get to know some of the franchises that laid the groundwork for this newest generation of PlayStations, and after playing them both I can see why it’s selling the way it does – poorly.

Motorstorm

Motorstorm is an off-road racing game. I’ll be honest – I wasn’t expecting a lot, and at $15, there wasn’t very much it would’ve had to do to make me happy. I played it briefly on a demo PS3 last year it seemed perfectly acceptable – all it had to do was provide some fun multiplayer and not crash. Fail.

Local play is limited to one (very bored) person. I think they made the excuse that the all-powerful God that is the PS3 couldn’t handle split-screen multiplayer. So you’ve spent months (years?) talking about how the PS3 is the be-all, end-all of console gaming, but it can’t let two people in the same room play a racing game together? Nice.

After that, I was pretty much done. The gameplay was fine, if a little unforgiving, but it’s not a game I feel like playing alone.

Resistance

There is no argument that Resistance is the better of the two. It received decent marks on release, probably because it was the only vaguely playable game available at the time. Also, it seems like it should be pretty easy to make a first person shooting game, since all you have to do is decide where and when you want it to take place. The controls are pretty much decided for you, and should never change. I am not trying to say Resistance runs contrary to this formula – I am just making an observation.

From the beginning I had intended to play through the game with Abe, much like what we’ve done with the Halo series. The story, from what I had heard, never struck me as particularly compelling (it isn’t), and so it seemed like a good “play a level here and there” type of game instead of bombing through it like I tend to do when playing alone.

And in that regard, it is good. But it’s not as good as the games it was made to compete against. The whole experience is, well, generic. The story is generic. The one class of enemy is generic. The settings are generic. And they look okay, but while the graphics go through the motions of telling you this environment is one ravaged by war and infection (broken walls, conveniently placed debris), it doesn’t hold a candle to the same style as done by Gears of War, which was released at the same time.

In both cases, multiplayer was/would have been the saving grace. Both games control just fine, and there really isn’t anything technical to complain about. But there’s nothing genuinely exciting either. I suspect that’s because I’ve seen some amazing things on the 360, and both of these games are version 1.0’s that are two years old. I hear the new Motorstorm has local multiplayer now too, so there’s that.

But as games that were marketed as AAA titles, they left a lot to be desired. I know I would’ve been pissed if I had paid $60 for either game, especially after having paid $500-$600 for the console to play it on. I’m still chafing at $15 for a racing game with no local multiplayer. Sorry. I had to.