Battlefield 3 Game Review

A helicopter just buzzed over my head, thirty feet above the ground. It was moving quickly, skirting around a hill, firing its main gun at an enemy I couldn’t see. I stopped running and just stared at it.

I do this a lot. Battlefield 3’s multiplayer makes me want to place a deckchair in the desert and watch the chaos happening all around. On its best maps – like the 64-player Caspian Border – every pixel on screen flickers with battle. I’ll climb to a rooftop and just freeze. In the distance, smoke stacks rise from a burning forest. In the air above me, jets twirl, chased by artillery. On the ground below, a tank has smashed through the lower floors of the building. I’ll spot a glimmer from a hillside 300 metres away, and it’ll be a sniper readying to kill me.

If someone had told me 15 years ago that this is what online gaming would be, I wouldn’t have believed them. Battlefield games have always been grand, ridiculous, futuristic designs. Wouldn’t it be cool if deathmatch had vehicles? Wouldn’t it be cool if it wasn’t deathmatch at all, but teams, and squads, and objectives, and dozens of players? Wouldn’t it be cool if there were tanks and jeeps and helicopters and jets? Wouldn’t it be cool if the maps were enormous and buildings could collapse?

Yes, it would. Yes, it is. No other modern combat shooter provides the feeling that playing Battlefield does. I love to watch that helicopter fly overhead and wonder where the person inside is going. To know that every thing I see is being controlled by another real person, each playing director and star in their own miniature war movie.

Battlefield 3’s singleplayer is not a movie. It’s a waterslide with pictures scrawled on the insides. It’s a ten-hour long exercise in contractual obligation: here are the multiple protagonists; here are the vehicle sections; here is the terrorist intrigue and appropriate level of moral grittiness. It’s an undercooked potboiler. It’s the world’s most expensive audition tape for the job of developing a Call of Duty rival.
You play Sergeant Blackburn, who starts the game by leaping onto the roof of a moving train, kicking in the back window and then shooting his way through each narrow carriage filled with terrorists.

The game never gets any less linear. At the end of the train, we’re taken back eight hours to where Blackburn is being interrogated by two government agents. He’s telling them tales of his adventures in Tehran, fighting the PLR, and you play each of his missions in turn. His story goes like this: “I shot a man, and then I shot ten men, and then I got shot and my eyes felt like they had jam on them, so I hid behind a wall for a bit and then I felt fine, and then I shot three more men, and then I threw a grenade into the next room, and then I shot six hundred more men, and then I realised that they were infinitely respawning.”

When you find the right weapon, and in moments where the level design is particularly fine, all the shooting is great. The guns feel punchy and responsive, and enemies mostly go down with just a couple of shots. A section set in Paris in the middle of the game is the best it gets. But too often, making your way from area to area, from cover to cover, feels like a dismal slog through uneven checkpoints. Death can be instant, and you’ll play through the same three or four rooms again and again until you crack the one area that’s giving you trouble.

It’s not relevant, and Hawkins is never mentioned again. Battlefield 3 is desperate to hold your attention by constantly throwing new experiences at the screen.

To its credit, it never reaches the manipulative, frothing madness of the latter Call of Duty games, but it never aims higher than providing a pretty looking slideshow, either. The jet section is beautiful, but you’re merely the game’s co-pilot, along for the ride. The tank section might put you in the driver’s seat, but only so you can be the game’s taxi driver. You survive an earthquake, rappel down a building, and skydive from a plane – but in every instance, you’re a puppet going where you’re told so the game can show you the next razzle-dazzle animation.

There isn’t a single interesting decision to be made in the entire campaign. If you ever try to deviate from the script, even during that touted moment of moral greyness, you simply fall over dead. The only reason to even keep your eyes open during most of these scenes is the terrible risk they might turn in to another tedious quicktime event.

If someone had told me 15 years ago that this is what singleplayer games would be, I wouldn’t have believed them. It would have been too depressing.

The co-operative mode isn’t much better, either. It provides six unique missions specifically designed to be played with a friend, but they serve as a kind of hardcore mode, and each is much harder than the regular singleplayer. I found them more frustrating than fun, and subject to the same connection problems as the regular multiplayer.

If you want your games to be games, don’t play Battlefield 3’s campaign. Play the multiplayer instead, where the spectacle is far grander, more exhilarating and more cinematic for being entirely under your control. It makes you want to sit back and watch.

But you can’t. Your friend just blew up the last M-COM station in the area and the defenders are falling back. You need to move up fast, so you sprint towards the cliff edge, jump and free fall. Fifteen feet above the ground, you open your parachute and land safely. It’s a moment that happens to you in the singleplayer, but here you get to do it all by yourself. It’s like graduating to big boy school.

If you’ve played Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the last game in the series, the multiplayer will be familiar. Conquest and Rush return, and so do many of the weapons. The most visible and talked about change is the welcome addition of jets, returning to the series for the first time since Battlefield 2.

You’ll spend only a fraction of your time piloting them – they spawn at base, but it’s first come, first served, and you’ll be lucky to get there before everyone else. They’re also ineffective against ground units, meaning that jet pilots are almost playing an entirely different game from everyone else.

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Bioshock Infinite Game Review

When I finished BioShock Infinite – don’t worry, I won’t spoil anything – I was dumbfounded. I wanted to tell someone what I thought, but for a moment I had absolutely no idea. I’d experienced a kind of excited panic, then total delight, then momentary confusion, and then a rush of extraordinary sights, powerful scenes and sudden twists that left me struggling to keep up.

It’s a spectacular ending. It’s just a shame it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Infinite is wonderful. Every single person who can play it, should play it. It’s a fascinating and gruesomely fun adventure in a genuinely unique, magnificent place. But the plot really does jump the shark. It jumps a lot of sharks. It jumps BioShark Infinisharks. That’s not uncommon in cinematic first-person shooters, but I mention it now because the game’s mysteries are such a big part of its appeal.

You’re on a flying city of magical racists in 1912, and that soon drops to being only the fifth or sixth most puzzling thing about your situation. Who are those two? Why are they talking about me? What’s with the giant cyborg bird? What does AD stand for? How does he know… why does she think… when did they… why can I shoot crows from my hands? And how do these pants help me reload?

The intro says you’re Booker DeWitt, a private investigator tasked with retrieving a girl named Elizabeth. But I played more like a crazed amnesiac looter, scouring the city for spare change and story clues. In cheerful contrast to the original BioShock’s deep-sea madhouse, the flying city of Columbia is still thriving, still beautiful, and still populated – albeit with magical racists. That means it can give you little pieces of these puzzles in more interesting ways, and hoovering them up into a wonky jigsaw is a joy.

I think it still would have been, even if a tear had opened in the fabric of spacetime and future alterno-Tom, stroking his goatee, had told me that the plot ultimately doesn’t add up. So I’m telling you in the hope that you’ll still enjoy the process of assembling that wonky jigsaw, without being quite so disappointed when the game itself cuts all the nobbly bits of the pieces so it can cram them together the way it wants to.

Really, it’s just a pleasure to have a game this substantial to explore – and one that gives you the breathing room to do so. You still spend a lot of time killing things in BioShock Infinite, but it knows when to give you space. You get to know Columbia as a tourist: a dazzling dream of an impossible city in an impossible place – tranquil, prosperous and happy.

Your arrival is one of gaming’s few truly perfect scenes: a chapel, floors awash with holy water, stone walls echoing with the calming harmony of a gospel choir. Stained glass dioramas flood the space with brilliant gold light, and the heat from a hundred candles creates a gentle haze. The only hint that you’re not actually in the afterlife is an occasional, very distant clanking, as some chunk of the city drifts against its restraints. It’s more than atmospheric; it’s exquisite. That kind of ridiculous artistic flair runs throughout: staggering works of sculpture, transformative use of light, perfectly judged ambience, and music that both nods to the plot and subtly changes the mood. The mileage this game gets out of the song Will The Circle Be Unbroken alone – all four times it’s used – deserves some kind of award.

Early on, the times when combat does break out are the low points. There seems to have been some internal rule against adding any exotic weapons, so Infinite’s guns stick religiously to convention: pistols, shotguns, three types of machinegun, rifles, grenade launchers and a rocket launcher. None of them let you choose an ammo type the way BioShock did, and only the revolver and shotguns are really satisfying to use. Those aren’t available in the early fights, when guns are your primary tools.

It gets better the more you drink. You acquire magical abilities by downing Vigors, which come in beautiful custom bottles relating to what they do. A lot of the early ones just let you disable and damage a group of enemies – by swarming them with crows, setting fire to them, or floating them into the air. But they get more interesting.

There are only eight Vigors, and they’re all free when you find them. You only specialise when you buy upgrades: expensive but significant perks for each, some of which introduce new rules.

I wasn’t wild about Murder of Crows until I bought the perk that creates a nest every time someone dies during the pecking process. If anyone steps on it, that nest erupts in a new flock of crows. If anyone dies during that crow storm, you get new nests! Plenty of fights involve new waves of enemies flooding into the same area, and this self-perpetuating cycle of flapping and screaming and dying is a guilty pleasure.

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Borderlands 2 Game Review

 Borderlands 2 is a first-person shooter that randomly generates the guns you find, varying damage values, clip sizes, accuracy, and even how many bullets they fire at once. It’s built like an RPG: you level up by killing things, improve your character’s abilities, and find higher-level guns to kill higher-level beasts and bandits on a rocky, backwater planet.

That was already compulsive in Borderlands 1, but here the formula’s been tweaked to ridiculously addictive effect. I think I had one or two guns I really liked in Borderlands, and the rest were necessary but uninspiring situational alternatives. In 2, I have a full loadout of weird, powerful and satisfying weapons I love, and an entire ‘alternate’ set in my backpack that I switch in and out to compare potency.

I’ve become a gun scientist. Sometimes I fill all four weapon slots with different types of shotgun and throw myself into a nest of Skags – as one does – to take notes.

The Jakobs has the numbers – 24 pellets at 600 damage each – but it’s an ammo hog, and the Hyperion’s bigger clip makes it better against mobs. But it’s hard to bench the Tediore, because when it’s out of shells, you can throw it at someone and it explodes and a new one teleports into your hands. And goddamn it, I’ve run out of Skags.

This is the game, and it makes Borderlands persistently fresh in a way other shooters never are. So it’s weird that they kick it off with a painfully slow introductory segment that strips the game of everything that makes it good. It’s ages before the first randomised gun even drops, and for ages after that, it’s all useless inaccurate trash. And although the quests later become a highlight, in the first hour they’re a maddening drag. You spend most of your time trying to figure out why your robot guide Claptrap has stopped following you, and backtracking to unstick his sloppy scripting.

It matters more than most shitty intros, because you’ll probably go through it more than once. Even if you stick to one class, you can start the game again after you complete it, taking your levelled character into a mode with new high-level enemies and loot. And if you don’t, of course, there are three more classes to try.

The Commando can throw down a turret, a play style that needs some planning: you can execute satisfying pincer movements, but it doesn’t help you escape if you screw up.

The new Siren can temporarily suspend a single enemy in the air, and her skill recharges rapidly enough to be used in every fight. It’s spectacularly cool to leap into the air to get a perfect shotgun critical on your hovering victim.

The Gunzerker can enter a rage that lets him use two guns at once, regenerating health and ammo as he goes. It’s fun, but the perks he can unlock as he levels up are less interesting: mostly percentage increases to this or that.

The Assassin can cloak, leaving a hologram of himself to keep enemies focused on his former location. I stuck with him for my main character, upgrading to give myself lots of buffs shortly after every kill. The ultimate skill in that tree let me maintain stealth if my melee attack killed someone in one hit. I could prey on groups by taking out the weakest first, invisibly eliminating each until only the toughest was left.

The main quest takes you to some cool places, but it’s often marred by disproportionately tough bosses. Dying in a boss fight also undoes all the damage you’ve dealt, wasting all that time and ammo. I once made the mistake of using the nearby fast-travel station to get to a shop to restock. Turns out you can’t travel back to that particular beacon, so I had to do the whole mission again, with all enemies respawned.

Luckily, you can level up by doing side missions first, where these problems generally don’t come up.

It’s generally well-adapted to the PC: graphics options, an FoV slider, some sensible control tweaks, and most importantly smooth and responsive mouse movement. My only issue is that levels load before the textures are ready, so everything’s hideously blurry for a moment.

I’ve been playing Borderlands 2 all day, every day, for five days – and I’m probably going to play it again when I finish this. It’s not the most consistently brilliant game, but I can’t think of another singleplayer shooter that’s given me more hours of fun. My Assassin’s second playthrough is as interesting as starting fresh with a new class, and I plan to do both.

It seems crass to judge a game by quantity, but this is quantity of quality. So if the amount of money you spend on games is a practical concern, it’s worth saying that this one is freakishly good value. Even if it’s not a concern, it’s worth saying that this one is freakishly good.

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Bulletstorm PC Game Review

 

You get moments with this hobby, where you mentally step away and realise exactly what you’d look like to an outsider. It’s not pretty. I’m playing in a darkened room, the shades pulled tight, and I’m shouting to three other people. “HIS ARSE IS OPEN. FOR GOD’S SAKE HIS ARSE IS OPEN. SHOOT IT! SHOOT IT SHOOT IT! SHOOT HIS OPEN ARSE!”

I see myself from above. My eyes are focused on the swollen buttocks of a fat man. I’ve just shot him until he collapsed, almost defeated, onto one knee. What am I doing? Is this what 2,000 years of western civilisation has accomplished? Now I’ve circled behind him and kicked open the armoured flap covering his blubbery rear end. Humankind has split the atom, we’ve walked on the moon. Now three friends and I are readying our pretend guns to fire into a fat man’s exposed anus.

Bulletstorm revels in its childishness. Kicked out of the super secret space army for questioning orders, riotously drunk ex-assassin Grayson Hunt seems to be aiming for some kind of accolade as the universe’s worst man. Stranded on a resort world overrun by murderous weirdos, his most uttered word seems to be ‘cocksucker.’ The sole female character is little more than another marine, burdened with the daddy issues ubiquitous to gaming women and dressed in a pair of breasts. I should turn the monitor off in disgust, and stalk from the room.

The compunction to kill well is magnified by the practical application of skillshot points: they go toward all of Bulletstorm’s unlocks. Those unlocks do standard things – such as increase the ammunition capacity for the Peacemaker Carbine – but they also allow access to a more unhinged arsenal. There’s the gun that fires two grenades attached by a chain. Wrap the bolas around an enemy and it’ll immobilise them on the spot, letting you kick them into their friends and press the detonator. Or deliberately aim wide of your target, sending one grenade into a solid object as the other briefly becomes a horrible strimmer, tearing heads and rending flesh in a small arc.

Each weapon has a nasty application. I found myself flipping between sidearms at each checkpoint – not because I’d run out of ammo, but because my brain had been cycling through new means of murder I was keen to try. Sifting through the game’s recorded skillshots turned me into a macabre Pokémon master, not resting until I’d collected all the heinous ways I could possibly end a life.

Bulletstorm is not art by any metric. It’s difficult to defend, like a friend you take to a party who ends up pissing in a vase. You don’t want to be associated with him, but shit, he provides an evening of excitement. It’s a game that’s very proud of the f-words it’s learnt, and it uses them a lot. Fast. Frantic. Fatuous. Full-on. And yes, that other one: fun.

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Europa Universalis IV Game Review

The developers of Europa Universalis 4 set out with an ambitious goal: to make their Renaissance-era strategy flagship accessible and intuitive to newcomers without sacrificing the depth and breadth that existing fans of the series love. The end result of this expedition is not only spectacular, but unlike the similarly ambitious explorers and colonists it portrays, it’s not going to give anyone smallpox.

Starting in 1444, EU IV gives the player the opportunity to select any significant nation on Earth, shepherding it through to 1821 amid war, dynastic politics, scientific advances, and the discovery of the New World. Par for the course with a Paradox Development Studio game, there is a lot going on. Values like Naval Tradition and Trade Steering will continue to cause head-scratching among the uninitiated. But just as your nation’s ruler can employ advisers to make up for deficiencies, EU IV has provided a peerless ally to aid your transition to world conqueror.

Your command center for the Enlightenment

This confidant is the game’s interface, which is representative of how far the studio has come from even newer titles like Crusader Kings II. All of the information you need is presented cleanly, elegantly, and with (mostly) idiot-proof tooltips. The star of the show is a new, context-sensitive hint system which can explain to you in plain, “I don’t play these games very often” English why your army upkeep is currently costing 10 bajillion gold more than it should, and why something called “Bogomilist Heretics” are a few battles away from taking over your government.

All of the menus you need to get to are easy to find—and easy to decode. Every action you need to take has a big, clearly-labeled button. Important information is shown in large, color-coded boxes and pop-ups that can easily be interpreted at a glance: Green is fine, yellow means you might want to take a look at it, and red means you failed your people, and should feel bad.

The interface isn’t the only thing that’s cleaner, more aesthetically-pleasing, and easier to read. Europa IV’s world map is rendered with vibrant detail, complete with changing seasons, animated trade routes, and detailed military unit models. It’s the studio’s first game that looks and feels truly modern, and the visuals are impressive enough that I found myself mostly playing in the raw terrain view, rather than with one of the game’s informational overlays permanently toggled on.

Europa Universalis IV is a masterwork of a strategy game. It still has its rough edges, and convoluted underlying systems that will only be comprehensible to the most in-depth and experienced players. But never before has the core gameplay been so accessible to a total grand strategy newbie. At any given time, you can get as much or as little help as you need from the interface regarding what you should be focusing on. PDS has demonstrated a precise understanding of what turned some potential world conquerors off of its previous forays, and proven its ability to improve on the formula in the right directions with the finesse of a true veteran studio.

The result of these efforts is a textured and engrossing simulation that conquers the common ground between your average Civilization V player and the long-time devotees of grand strategy. Never before have I felt that “World at your fingertips” feeling as strongly, and you owe it to your sense of discovery to give EU IV an hour of your life or two (hundred). Order in tonight. You have a world to dominate.

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Divinity: Dragon Commander Game Review

Seeing you sitting there in that anti-fracking T-shirt and German pickelhaube, with that iguana on your shoulder, mischievous twinkle in your eye, and bookcase stacked with strategy curios like Hostile Waters, Rise of Legends, and King’s Bounty, I’m 98% certain you’re going to enjoy Dragon Commander.

You’re just the kind of noveltyhungry, socially-savvy, lizardcuddling connoisseur to appreciate Larian’s splendidly eccentric mix of RTS, RPG, TBS and shmup. You’re going to love the fact that you can abandon battle orchestration at any point and go racing around maps in the guise of a giant fireball-gobbing dragon. You’re going to nod approvingly on learning that those battles are the spontaneous results of army collisions on a Total Warreminiscent strat map.

Faced by your first popularityimpacting policy decision, steampunk R&D choice, or conversation with a mercurial mercenary general, I picture you grinning like a split tennis ball. On realising that you can wed a lipstick-daubed skeleton princess, I’d be surprised if you didn’t emit at least one involuntary cackle.

But I think I also know you well enough to predict disappointment with the RTS basics. Beneath DDC’s magnificently misshapen scales is a mediocre SupCom supplicant. With no fog-of-war, negligible terrain significance, a single resource, and units that scuttle, soar, sail and slaughter in much the same way units have been doing for decades, skirmishes feel deeply conventional until you dab the R key and morph into a mythological A-10.

On the battlefield, blob tactics usually get the job done. Pump out a motley mob of gambolling Grenadiers, trundling Hunters and gaseous Warlocks, direct them towards the nearest resource or base site (buildings can only be placed in prescribed plots) and, assuming your timing is right, your aggro-amoeba is big enough, and the impressive AI hasn’t outproduced you, you should make progress. A spot of hands-on dragonplay can turn a tight battle, but may lead to potentially disastrous production lulls too. While simple ‘go there’ unit orders can be issued when aloft, sky-lizards can’t commission cannon fodder or erect new factories or recruitment centres.

What jets Dragon Commander into the realm of games-you’ll-remember- ten-years-from-now isn’t the nitty gritty of battles, it’s the plethora of characters and choices that swirl around them. The lulls between bloodbaths teem with decisions, few of which are trivial or dull. That conscription policy you nodded through a couple of turns ago? It wasn’t popular with the elves so, during the coming engagement in the elven province of Romentell, your pop cap will be far from ideal. You built a tavern in Thornburg on Turn 3 rather than a goldmine? That means you’ve now got a hand full of useful mercenary cards, but can’t afford to employ Edmund or Scarlett to lead your hirelings in the unanticipated Bhargandium battle.

Larian understand that playing an RTS doesn’t have to mean spending days as That Incorporeal Dude Who Choreographs Combat And Clicks Through Cutscenes. Jawing with generals, ambassadors and aides in the handsome interior of your mothership, the Raven, instils a palpable sense of self. You’re a bastard prince with dragon blood singing in his veins. Surrounded by quirk and colour, and free to campaign in whatever fashion you choose, it’s bally easy to overlook DDC’s lack of tactical temerity.

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Pikmin 3 Game Review

The team that created Pikmin 3 has done something wonderful. The game – a tale of diminutive aliens stranded on a distant planet – is filled with character. It has a lightness to its pace and never feels intimidating. And yet at its heart is a nuanced real-time strategy game.

This is a genre that generally offers elaborate battlefield simulators – stern creations, swathed in jargon, that are highly demanding of players. In sharp contrast, Pikmin 3 is a cheerful tale of befriending the titular local life forms, which can be controlled in groups to build, forage, fight and much else. And, as with an RTS, the player's task is to juggle priorities on the fly – appointing different Pikmin to various tasks across the playing area.

This third game in the series offers a wider range of distinctively talented Pikmin and tasks than its predecessors, and a trio of lead characters who allow for cunning puzzle solving. The controls can be a little erratic at times, but that does little to impair this glorious addition to the Wii U's game library.

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