Xbox 360 - Halo Reach

Halo Reach by Bungie

Halo Reach is the prequel to the Halo Trilogy and, as far as I know, the final Bungie based Halo game. That doesn't mean there won't be more Halo games, but apparently not from Bungie. The story begins on the planet Reach where a team of Spartans is sent, at first, to locate a beacon. Along the way, it is determined to be a Covenant incursion and is a lot bigger than first thought. Further along, it is revealed to the Spartans that there is an important item to recover. An item that plays an important part in all 3 Halo games, although, not in ODST.

Campaign Mode

This review covers the campaign mode of Halo Reach. As with most recent Bungie Halo releases, the campaign mode portions are exceedingly short. Compared to, for example, Valve's Half Life series, the Halo Reach story is thin and the levels are tiny. Even comparing Halo Reach to Halo 3, the story is thin and the levels are tiny. By short, I mean, you can blow through a level in about 45 minutes or less and there are only 10 levels or so. From the beginning to end of each level, the levels are linear and the maps are tiny. This explains why you can blow through the levels in short order.

It looks like Bungie spent the majority of the development time on the multiplayer aspects of Halo Reach rather than campaign. Each successive game has spent more time on the multiplayer (and other alternative modes) and less on campaign mode. I don't know about you, but I really don't relish the thought of playing the same game levels 3, 4 or 5 times only with slightly different modes. I did that in Halo 3 and found the subsequent playthroughs to be rather tedious and boring. I'd rather spend time playing a new game than the same levels over and over.

Perhaps the 13-19 aged gamers like this repetitive game play, but it doesn't really do it for me. I'd rather be doing something new that I haven't done before. This is why I prefer to play RPG games where there's always a new quest.

Armory and Challenges

In Halo Reach, Bungie expects you to play the game through multiple times so you can obtain all of the challenges and achievements. With Halo Reach, Bungie introduces 'challenges'. A challenge is similar to an achievement, except you receive no achievement points. Instead, you receive credits that you can put towards buying armor and outfitting your Spartan better. Presumably, these better outfits help you out in multiplayer combat mode, although that's really questionable.

When you enter the Armory, you can now modify your armor to add things like shoulder pads, knee pads, chest plates, helmets, etc. So, as you receive more and more credits, you can spend these credits on items to make your Spartan or Elite better.

Frankly, as I've said, this is really not my bag. Playing the same game multiple times just to receive credits to outfit a soldier, not a great idea. If there was some way to use your newly and better outfitted character in some kind of MMO world, I might be more inclined to play. However, the multiplayer modes in Reach are the same as Halo 3. Effectively, running around on a level with a bunch of 13-18 year olds in free-for-all combat. No thinking, just constant killing. It's like Spore, they give you an excellent character creator, but how the character is ultimately used is pointless.

Covenant

This game specifically and only deals with a Covenant incursion. The flood is not part of this game, which is unfortunate. However, there are some new Covenant creatures that are in here that we've not seen before. They're not any tougher than what we've seen, but they're here.

Story

The story is overly weak. I was expecting a solid beginning, middle and end. What we get is a reasonable beginning and a very solid middle with no ending. It ends, but nothing is wrapped up. Your character is left behind and who knows what really happened.

There were also portions that were completely ignored. Twice you run into a scarab and twice the only thing you can do is avoid it. One of those times it gets destroyed. This is wrong. In this story, we should now be able to commandeer one of those Scarabs and use it as a vehicle or commandeer a Phantom an use it. There were so many wasted instances where the story could have taken a huge leap forward and.. nothing. Bungie took the safe approach and didn't do anything new or amazing to Reach. It's definitely a 'safe' game, but there's not a whole lot here to say 'WOW' over.

Easter Eggs

What easter eggs? There may be some, but there are definitely no skulls. The skulls are received after completing the game on Normal automatically. The fun is in finding and obtaining the skulls, not simply just getting them at the end. I understand why, though, as other than New Alexandria, most of the environments are rather sparse. So, there's not a lot of cubbyholes to hide things. Unfortunate, because the secondary fun on Halo 3 was exploring and finding all of the cool hidden things. Even with Halo 3, I really wanted a lot more of this, but instead Bungie is giving us less and less of it.

Gameplay

The game plays much the same as Halo ODST and Halo 3. The exception is that they've added the nightvision mode and a couple of new weapons, but overall the game is much the same as the previous.

Graphics

The graphics haven't tremendously improved, mostly because it appears Bungie is still using the same game engine as in Halo 3. I'd rather see them abandon whatever engine they are using for something like the Cryengine 3. Much of the texture mapping, specifically the ground surfaces, are of a very low resolution. There are definitely better and faster engines out there. So, I'm not sure why they have chosen to stick with that engine.

Sound

On par with previous games. Nothing special or outstanding.

Overall

I liked the campaign mode, for what there was. The campaign mode is entirely too short and not involved enough. There should have been far more firefights than there were. Once you get the package, everyone treats you like kid gloves and the levels become laughably easy. Unfortunately, it appears Bungie spent the most time filling out the multiplayer aspects and not enough on a long detailed campaign. The campaign mode almost feels like an add-on. Like it was there only to appease those who like campaigns, but no real long term development went into this part of the game.

If you like multiplayer games, this is probably a good game. But, if you're looking for a long involved TPS/FPS, this isn't it. It's probably worth a play if you're really into the Halo series or if you intend to play the multiplayer parts. However, I would not recommend this game if you only intend to play the campaign. It's way too short and it's far too much like Halo 1, 2 and 3 and ODST. For campaign only play, you should probably skip this game and go get something like Singularity which is much more involved (even though it's mostly a clone of Bioshock).

Score

• Sound: 7/10 (average)
• Graphics: 9/10 (random low and high res textures)
• Gameplay: 7/10 (standard for Halo)
• Story: 5/10 (story not finished, lacking, shallow)
• Bugginess: N/A (no bugs, yay!)
• Controls: 8/10 (same as Halo 3)
• Bang-to-buck: 5/10 (still working through multiplayer)
• Play Value: $10 (it's worth more if you are like multiplayer, if not, less)
• Overall: 7/10 (overly short campaign mode, not enough story, lacking fights).

Xbox 360 - Alpha Protocol

Alpha Protocol by Obsidian / Sega

Here is a self-purported RPG. It gets a GZ of 2/10. In actuality, this game really isn't an RPG. It has some RPG aspects to it, but it is no where near a true Role Playing Game.

Character Creation

First, there isn't such a thing. You are who you are and you can't change that. You can change the appearance, but very limited. In a true RPG, you can choose to be male or female. You can choose classes and you can choose your outfit. There is very little of that in Alpha Protocol. You can find other outfits along the way to increase your armor, though. But these are whole outfits, not single pieces (i.e., gloves, shoes, pants, shirt, etc).

With the character creator in AP, you can change the hair to about 6 different styles. You cannot change the hair color. You can change the skin color, but again limited. You can't change the look of the face (i.e., cheeks, nose, mouth, chin, etc). You can add features like limited beards.

Gameplay

The gameplay is actually very limited. Most of the time you are sneaking around places trying not to be seen. You can go in gunz-a-blazin', but this is really counter to the missions and who knows what kind of things the game may change later as a result.

Leveling up

You do get to level up through Action Points (AP). But, you get so few it takes ages to actually level your character up in any real way.

Controls

The controls are strange choosing to put lots of different things on LT, RT, LB, RB, back and start buttons. After a while, I guess you'd get used to it, but it's really mapped in a strange way. Definitely not intuitive.

Save Points

Ok, so here is one of the major problems with this game (not that this is the only problem). Instead of a save-anywhere system, which any RPG worth its weight in salt should have, Sega opted to offer a 'Save Checkpoint' option. So, basically, you can save your current checkpoint and go back to that specific checkpoint. You can't save anywhere. This means you will have to lose a lot of things to restart a checkpoint. This is frustrating, time consuming and overly stupid. Bad decision Obsidian.

Effectively, this game only supports checkpoint saves and the saving of checkpoints can be done only after the current checkpoint is reached. If you forget to save a checkpoint, you lose the ability to go back to that checkpoint later. This is not an intuitive save system.

Quests

Well, frankly, there aren't any. You get missions and that's that. Whatever missions they give you, you do. You don't get any new missions until you complete the few current outstanding missions. In a true RPG, you should be able to find and start missions at any time. As I said, this isn't a true RPG.

Bugs

This game is completely bugged. This aspect alone was enough for me to stop playing it. In fact, there is a mission to retrieve data from a computer. Once I had completed this task, the game locked me into an area that had no exit. So, my character (and my game) was completely trapped in this space. I had no choice but to stop playing there. It is quite clear that this game was not play tested at all. From this point alone, I would recommend not playing Alpha Protocol.

Graphics

For what it is, this game's graphics are incredibly bad. The characters look low res. The levels look low res and the textures are weak. This looks like it could have been ported from a Nintendo 64 and probably would have run on an N64 also.

Overall

My recommendation is to avoid this game. It is currently far too buggy to recommend playing.. unless you like hitting bugs that prevent you from continuing the game. The game itself needs a lot of work and appears to have been released in the beta stage. Frankly, they should have saved this game until sometime in 2011 giving time to work out the bugs and increase the texture quality.

Score

• Sound: 7/10 (not outstanding)
• Graphics: 8/10 (bad textures, low res)
• Gameplay: 5/10 (average, but also repetitive)
• Story: 5/10 (no real story that I could see, just missions)
• Bugginess: 1/10 (show stopper bug, prevents game progression)
• Controls: 5/10 (needs work)
• Bang-to-buck: N/A (not completed, probably not)
• Play Value: $5 (wait till clearance, by then they might have a patch)
• Overall: 2/10 (poor save system, bad gameplay, show stopper bugs).

Xbox 360 - Alan Wake

Alan Wake by Remedy

Starting with this review, I will give the overall score right up front.

This game is a 4/10. Why? This is one game I really wanted to like, but.... Let's get started.

Story

You play as Alan Wake, a novelist. In this game, however, instead of writing a novel, Alan Wake becomes part of his own novel and must unravel the pieces before it's too late and everything is lost.

The game begins with Alan Wake and wife taking a vacation to a quaint cabin in the woods (cliche). It soon becomes apparent that there's something not quite right about the whole deal. When he visits the person to obtain the keys, he has a strange encounter that starts the whole deal of what follows.

Alan's wife disappears into the lake (along with the cabin, that supposedly hadn't existed in the lake since the 70s) and Alan must find a way to free her.

The story has a reasonably Stephen King like feel, but is marred by the unnecessarily repetitive game play. This is one game I was hoping would marry gameplay and story better than most, but unfortunately, it didn't.

Gameplay

This game is a standard third person shooter. It's not particularly inspired, but it does become both repetitive and annoying. It's repetitive because each level is nearly identical: running around in the woods trying to avoid the 'Taken' (spirits that manifest to kill you) and you must seek the next street light (that makes them go away). It's annoying because of the way the game spawns the 'Taken' to kill you (i.e., intentionally out of the camera and usually behind you). Unfortunately, each and every level is basically the same. There are a few exceptions to this when you have to avoid possessed objects instead of people, but even that becomes repetitive.

The weapons are mostly standard including a pistol and shotgun. Because the 'Taken' avoid light and seek darkness, you also have light weapons including a flashlight, flares and flashbang grenades. Unfortunately, the flashlight only removes the Taken invincibility and lets you finally kill them. You can temporarily increase the brightness of the flashlight to make it work faster (at the cost of using up the battery). The battery recharges, but very slowly.

At some points in the game, you get access to other light sources like search lights and construction lights, but these really do no better than your own flashlight. In reality, it's far simpler to run to the next street light checkpoint. And yes, the street lamps are generally checkpoints. So, it's actually far more beneficial to keep moving than to stop and try to defeat the Taken in each encounter.

Enemies

The enemies you encounter include the Taken. These are dark spirits that manifest and try to kill you by throwing hatchets, chopping you or hitting you. They are primo at ganging up on you and, worse, the game loves to make them appear inches behind you out of the sight of the camera. For this reason alone, I am downrating this game. Using the lack of camera sight to throw enemies at you is a no-no. Never ever do this. If, as a game designer, you think this is some kind of challenge, it isn't. It's an unfair tactic to the gamer. If you want to design this kind of enemy, then offer a HUD where you can see them as a dot around you. So, you may not be able to see them standing just out of the camera, you can at least see them on the HUD.

Controls

The controls are pretty standard. There was nothing horribly wrong with the way the controls are mapped or how they work.

Episodes

The game is broken down into distinct episodes or chapters, but this really wasn't necessary. So, you play for a short time and that segment ends (like a TV show). The next episode starts up and recaps what you did previously (like a TV show). You then move into the game play segment again.

The ending was a bit on the cliche side, but left you hanging enough that they can create an Alan Wake 2. It didn't really end as I expected it to, but the ending didn't really end either.

Overall

This game tried to be unique, but really ended up as a mediocre third person shooter. It's reasonably bug free, but it's still not perfect. It was also reasonably short as I was able to get through it in about a day of play.

Score

• Sound: 8/10 (eerie at times, but not that cinematic)
• Graphics: 8/10 (not bad, but shaders could have been better)
• Gameplay: 4/10 (boring and repetitive)
• Story: 4/10 (episodic format was not necessary, ending weak)
• Bugginess: N/A
• Controls: 8/10 (average, nothing new)
• Bang-to-buck: 1/10 (no replay value)
• Play Value: $10 (story is really better than gameplay, not by much)
• Overall: 4/10 (could have used more work).