UFO Extraterrestrials Review

Be careful what you wish for.

For years now we've been suggesting that someone out there needs to update the old Microprose classic X-COM UFO Defense. This game allowed players to manage a worldwide military organization tasked with defending the nations of the world from an alien invasion. Combining intense tactical battles with "big picture" strategic play, it ranks as one of, if not the, most enjoyable PC games ever.

Over the last few years or so we've seen quite a few titles try to recreate the magic and mayhem of the original game. Most have fallen short either by missing the point of the game altogether, or by shifting the balance too far towards an unpleasant extreme. Matrix Games' UFO Extraterrestrials fails with an entirely new third approach, sticking too closely to the original and ignoring the chance to put their own spin on things.

Players are put in charge of an alien-fighting force on the planet Esperanza. The initial base comes equipped with interceptor craft that are used to shoot down any UFOs that come within the base's detection range. Squads of soldiers and armored vehicles can be dispatched to investigate these sites and, later in the game, assault alien installations around the world. Success in these missions causes your soldiers to improve in their fighting ability and nets you some cool alien tech that you can research back at the base.

As you discover the mysteries of alien technology, you can then build advanced equipment to deal with the growing alien menace. The more successful you are in your mission, the more funding you'll get from the nations of Esperanza. Get enough money and you can even enlarge your operation by adding additional radar and intercept bases around the world.

It's a compelling design but its success requires the cooperation of several different elements. In this case, there are definitely some high points. Watching your troops improve with each mission until they develop into a highly effective alien killing force is definitely one of the game's most rewarding payoffs. Unlocking the secrets of an alien technology and then turning it on your foes is another of the game's undeniable joys. Unfortunately, tedious tactical battles and annoying limitations on base management will keep you from otherwise enjoying the things that the game does well.

There's not much of a story beyond the first cut scene and even that's not worth much. This initial cinematic not only makes a space battle between aliens and humans seem downright boring, but it also features some of the worst voice acting we've ever heard in all our years playing videogames. We fact, I hesitate to use the term "acting" here because of the stilted and lifeless performances that we're given by the voice over team.

Still, while a little story would have been nice, you hardly need much of an excuse to defend your planet from an alien menace. Here your xenophobia is pretty much taken for granted so it's assumed you don't actually need to know why the aliens are out to get you. The fact that they keep sending their spaceships flying over your head is reason enough to shoot them down and send a team out to the crash site to kill any survivors.

The turn-based tactical battles definitely convey the right sense of menace. Stepping off your troop transport is incredibly nerve-wracking. Just the mere suspicion that an alien could be waiting to get off a shot at you before you're even off the ramp is enough to get you interested in the action. This is particularly troublesome given that the enemy AI seems to be able to see much farther than you and has weapons that far outclass the ones you begin with. You'll also suffer from the lack of a simple overhead map that gives you the general layout of each level. And don't even get us started on how your soldiers have virtually no peripheral vision and no option to reserve action points for opportunity fire.

You will initially appreciate the variety of the maps but as the number of missions ramp up you'll start seeing lots and lots of repetition. Thankfully, there's lots more variety found among the aliens you'll be fighting. Each level seems to offer a number of different types of foes to fight and the smart player will eventually learn how to prioritize the most important targets. Word to the wise: don't neglect the ones with the huge arm.

The levels teem with destructible objects, which you'll really get to see the benefit of during your more enthusiastic firefights. On the other hand, the aliens don't have too many structures to hide behind and those few that do exist aren't likely to hold many aliens. More likely than not, you'll simply find your foes just hanging out in the wide open spaces of most levels or simply hanging out in the saucer waiting for you to come and kill them.

While the repetitive maps, lack of an overall view, and interface omissions impact your enjoyment of combat, the real kicker is that none of your soldiers will ever die. You can lose them by abandoning them in the mission area but otherwise, not even the most vicious alien attack will ever do more than simply send your soldier to the hospital for a few weeks. It certainly helps you to develop a stronger fighting force by the end of the game, but it also means that much of the tension is completely undone. How much can you really care about putting your soldiers in danger when the worst that can happen is that they have to sit in a hospital for a few weeks?

The only real consequence of having a wounded soldier is that they won't be available for upcoming missions. You should be upset with yourself for leading your troops into harm's way to begin with, but you wind up being more upset with the limitation on the game's recruitment options. Rather than letting you manage your own recruitment, the game gives you a set quantity of soldiers and forces you to make the best of it. You'll get new recruits from time to time, but it's not anything you have any control over. This can lead to situations where you've got lots of cash and the goodwill of the world but can't field a full team because several of your soldiers are still recovering in the hospital.

The strategic portion of the game takes place on a global level. Esperanza is divided into large zones and you'll need to make sure you build enough detection and interception bases around the planet to provide good protection for your most generous funding nations. Unlike X-COM, you can only really have one specific soldier base, so you won't get the same sense of lots of different teams working around the globe.

Many of the functions of the bases are automated for you. We already complained that soldier recruitment is entirely out of your hands. Additionally, hiring and firing of scientists and engineers is tied directly to the presence of your labs and workshops. Money for rearming and refueling comes directly out of your account regardless of whether or not you'll be running a deficit, which can tend to frustrate your economic outlook during the lean months.

The graphics are a bit outdated and suffer from some performance problems. Individual units and environmental assets look decent enough during the tactical battles, but the jerky animation and the questionable effects tend to ruin any sense of realism that you may experience. With X-COM at least you were fighting over towns and cities that gave you a sense that there was something worthwhile at stake. Esperanza has no such effect on us. I mean, why are we fighting for this crummy planet anyway?

Moving past the graphics, the sounds aren't any better and are, in many ways, worse. The voice talent leaves a lot to be desired and the music, if possible, is even more dated than the graphics. If this is what passes for music on Esperanza, the aliens can have the planet for all I care.

Closing Comments
Meh. UFO Extraterrestrials gets a few things right but it doesn't take enough chances or introduce enough conveniences or improvements to make it worth the forty bucks they're asking for it, particularly when you can grab a copy of the original X-COM for less than that. We find it particularly troubling that the few diversions the game does manage to take all seem to be in the wrong direction. Less control over your bases in the geoscape and some poor choices in the tactical system are probably the biggest offender here and it's odd that the designers chose this approach, particularly since everything else in the game is pretty much a direct ripoff of the X-COM gameplay.

The bottom line is that UFO Extraterrestrials is enjoyable only to the extent that it copies X-COM UFO Defense. With that in mind, it's hard to deny that the game has some merit, but it hardly does justice to its inspiration.

BioShock Review

Welcome to Rapture.

BioShock is Irrational's finest offering to date, as well as the swan song for the Irrational brand in a way, since they recently relinquished their longstanding and well-established studio name for the more corporate, faceless tag of 2K Boston and 2K Australia. BioShock is a first-person shooter set in the fantastically unsettling city of Rapture, a metropolis built under the sea by the megalomaniacal Andrew Ryan. Throughout your lengthy stay, you'll find options for combat as intricate and enjoyable as the story and characters are to interpretation, something that only a handful of games can ever claim to offer.

But to call this game simply a first-person shooter, a game that successfully fuses gameplay and narrative, is really doing it a disservice. This game is a beacon. It's one of those monumental experiences you'll never forget, and the benchmark against which games for years to come will, and indeed must, be measured. This isn't merely an evolution of System Shock 2, but a wake-up call to the industry at large. Play this, and you'll see why you should demand something more from publishers and developers, more than all those derivative sequels forced down our throats year after year with only minor tweaks in their formulas. It's a shining example of how it's possible to bring together all elements of game design and succeed to the wildest degree.

Customizing the arsenal.

Things kick off with your plane smacking into the ocean and your character having to take refuge in Rapture to survive. Irrational plays on the conventions of the first-person perspective by thrusting you through experiences that toy with and vastly strengthen that fragile, intangible bond between in-game protagonist and yourself. At times, it forces upon you moments of reflection, which is so important and rare in games, where you contemplate the nature of blindly accepted game conventions, which we can't get into for fear of spoiling things. It lays a relatively straight narrative path for you, but it never feels linear, a result of the gameplay as much as the narrative.

The target in BioShock, Andrew Ryan, is anything but a prototypical villain. He's a man of bottomless ambition who built a city under the sea, obsessed with the idea of what makes a man, what differentiates a man from a slave. He's the Randian hero, a man who holds his own creative vision above all else, and he's Rodion Raskolnikov's exceptional person, someone who can be excused for committing crimes to achieve a goal--and he knows it. His vision, Rapture, is clearly a colossal failure. The driving force behind the game is your quest to discover why this man's alluring vision of an artistic utopia failed so completely and why you've stumbled upon it. Even though Ryan spits out what seems to resemble totalitarian propaganda, you can't help but sympathize with him. He has alluring ideas, speaks them with conviction, and comes off as a sympathetic visionary despite his severe eccentricities.

As you continue through Rapture, you'll discover it speaks to the nature of what a single-player game is--why do we choose to play a game that isn't online, where you can't interact with others? Like reading a novel, it's to form your own impressions, to see the same events, hear the same words, and come away with a unique viewpoint. The thematic blending and twining of BioShock's personalities is so powerful, it acts like any good book or movie, assaulting you with its ideas, popping into your thoughts when you least expect it, and broadening your understanding of what a game can achieve. Instead of painting Good and Evil across the foreheads of Rapture's denizens with a neon brush, Irrational gave everyone murky motives, much like the shadowed, soaking environments you're constantly plodding through, or the blurred vision you get after walking under one of Rapture's ubiquitous waterfalls.

Hey guy, might want to check your pants!

It's the little ideas that pop up from time to time that make this world so believable: the piano plinks that resonate as you browse menu options; the guitars you can actually play randomly scattered around Rapture; the way every room is realistically constructed reflects both the heights to which Rapture managed to climb as well as the decadence and sense of voracious, selfish entitlement that brought it smashing down. You'll hear some of the voice-overs muse, "Why do they wear the masks? Maybe there's a part of them that remembers how they used to be, how they used to look, and they're ashamed." Little bits like that get tossed at you, and you don't necessarily have to absorb them--they're not essential to plot or anything, but they're instrumental in making BioShock as immersive as it is.

The game is broken up into large sections, each separated by load times. Don't worry; these aren't load times like in Half-Life 2 where the game pauses unexpectedly. Instead, the load times are logically placed and never jarringly interrupt the experience or mar the immersion. Each section comes with its own cast of NPCs who aren't mere stage bosses--oftentimes you don't even engage them in combat. Instead, you are battling their ideals and their insecurities, grappling with their motivations as much as the splicer minions who so frequently assail you.

Just because the various versions of the splicers, genetically altered humans, are the standard enemies in the game, they still manage to exhibit as much personality as the rest. They're not zombies; they're totally aware. They're regretful of their condition, yet realize that there's no outlet for them, no opportunity to express themselves or be creative, like an intelligence crippled by hopeless drug addiction. That's true in a metaphorical sense as much as it is in the literal; they're trapped in an underwater city, after all, much like you. It's almost as if BioShock's enemies want you to kill them, to put them out of their misery. Sometimes they seem overly xenophobic and at others whimsical, gallivanting about with an ironic sense of humor.

They're such eerily spirited foes you may even come to pity them. The Big Daddies, for instance, Rapture's lumbering guardians, will wander around stages banging on outlets from where their wards, the Little Sisters, would normally emerge. If you've killed or freed the little girls, as you frequently must, the Big Daddy will invariably knock again and seem genuinely confused over why nobody's coming out as they stomp and groan their way to the next outlet. It's another example of the wonderful details that make Rapture seem so alive.

Giving the splicers what they asked for.

Then there's the actual combat, which presents a huge array of options. Each weapon in the game has three types of ammunition, all with varying effects. Then you've got a range of plasmids, genetic enhancements to your character that allow for magical attacks, as well as myriad types of tonics you can equip to augment plasmids' effectiveness or buffer your character in other ways. This isn't a game where you're simply limited to an SMG or grenade launcher to attack, though you can use those if you so choose. Tell a Big Daddy to protect you with a powerful plasmid and he swats away any attackers. Set up shock traps with your crossbow darts and rearrange them with telekinesis. If that doesn't work, throw bees at your enemies. Use the enrage plasmid and enemies will beat each other to death as you hide in the corner. Then, as they're fighting, set one of them on fire and toss a chair at the other. While some plasmids are more useful than others--electrobolt and incinerate in particular--the number of ways to dispatch enemies is really limited to your own inventiveness. Had this game been rife with AI problems, the combat system wouldn't have been nearly as good. But as it stands, enemies execute interesting attack patterns, and the plasmids that alter enemy behavior actually work, though we did notice one or two occasions when the AI appeared to glitch out, making the splicer stand still as we hit it.

If you wanted to it's entirely possible to plow through BioShock using only the most powerful plasmids, but where's the fun in that? You can set up sonic traps for enemies that fling them into the ceiling with deadly force, attach sticky grenades to environmental objects and hurl them at enemies with your telekinesis plasmid, hack security bots to fight for you, or use the decoy plasmid to keep your enemies constantly guessing your real position as they absorb bullets from your commandeered machines. So while there certainly are methods of attack that can be deemed the most effective, you're really missing out on what makes this game so thrilling if you fail to experiment.

And experimentation is something you'll almost be forced into against Big Daddies, who appear in every stage of the game. You'll find the game is designed to force you to fight these things, and the damage they deal and punishment they can absorb requires quick reflexes and inventive, on-the-spot problem solving. This goes especially for those playing on the hardest difficulty setting, but even on medium Big Daddies put up quite a fight. Should you die, which as long as you're not playing in easy mode you certainly will, you get revived at checkpoints called Vita-Chambers. Though you get back some health and Eve, a bar that governs plasmid use, enemies don't. For instance, if you've been hammering away at a Big Daddy for five minutes and gotten him down to around a quarter of his health, that's exactly how much he'll have after you die and return to battle. It ensures enemies can eventually be killed with enough persistence, which might be a nagging feature for some.

One of many possible scenes of destruction.

Hacking comes into play quite a bit, since through the associated mini-game you're able to control flying bots, turrets, reduce prices at vending machines, and open otherwise inaccessible doors and safes. The mini-game itself requires you to match up sequences of tubes to allow a liquid to flow uninterrupted from one specific point on the screen to another. Various tonics in the game can modify the challenge, and you'll find the system possesses quite a bit of depth. Should you eventually get tired of hacking everything, you can always make auto-hacks through the item invention system or, if you're facing security bots, load up some shotgun shells and blast them to bits. With the PC version, hacking is a more streamlined process since you don't have to move a cursor around with thumbsticks - you just hover over with your cursor.

Besides hacking and modifying plasmids, there are a few other interesting ways to divert your attention. Embedded later on in the game, you'll find a camera that opens up a whole new system of character ability modifications. Scattered around Rapture are one-time use weapon stations that let you further augment various aspects of each armament. These aren't always out in the open, and often you'll need to consult your map to see which rooms in a stage you've missed to find them all. A nice feature of BioShock is you can revisit previous stages at certain points. Enemies will have respawned, so you can pull more money, Eve and health hypos, and various other items from their bodies while backtracking to uncover whatever rooms you may have passed by.

If you're debating which version to get, the PC version handles better. In part it's because of the greater precision with the mouse and keyboard, but also with how the plasmids and weapons are selected. With the default settings RMB switches between the two, LMB fires, and we preferred the mouse wheel to an the Xbox 360 version's bumper clicks for quickly cycling through. By hitting Shift you can bring up a plasmid and weapon selection screen if you so desire, but the mouse wheel scrolled through fast enough to stay useful. Note that you can't set LMB to fire a weapon and RMB to fire a plasmid; there's only one fire function. We also noticed the option to bind the functions "switch and fire weapon" and "switch and fire plasmid," but when we tested it out these only switched from weapon to plasmid and back again, much like the RMB default function. All weapons and plasmids are also bound to the number and function keys, making it even easier to ensure you always have the ideal attack at the ready.

One thing we were delighted to see is how effective the wrench, the game's only melee weapon, remains throughout the whole experience. Through various tonic power-ups it can even become more powerful than a majority of your firearms. Since you swap plasmid powers and tonics in at out at any of the specific vending machines, it allows you to alter your play style on the fly and utilize the full range of what's available.

Grenades are always effective.

Really the best aspect of BioShock is how well all the disparate elements blend together. Story plays out mostly through voice-overs, allowing you to stay immersed in the action as plot and character is fleshed out. The sound design is simply amazing here, from the laments of splicers and the groans and thumps of Big Daddies to the sickening smacks and cries of combat to the startlingly realistic ambient noises and humorous calls of the vending machines. Even the near-death alert, which pipes up when your character is low on health, is expertly woven into the game's overall soundscape, unlike other games that test your levels of aural tolerance with sharp and distracting beeps. Every character's voice is well acted. Andrew Ryan in particular is a joy to listen to, with enough vocal gravitas to give Stephen Colbert a run for his money.

To really appreciate the sound in this game, and not necessarily the frenzy of combat, but merely the ambience of Rapture, just stop moving your character when he's alone. Now crank the speakers, or headphones. You start to hear the metallic clanks, the otherworldly whispers, piping up at various distances away, impressing upon you the notion that this world doesn't stop at the walls around you. No matter where you are, there's always the water, a trickling undercurrent of audio, reminding you of your precarious position within this crumbling city being crushed on all sides by an indifferent ocean.

The visuals too will constantly amaze, from finely detailed industrial structures to the weapon models, the choices of which areas to light and which to leave in the dark, and plasmid effects. And then there's the water. It's so gorgeous, rippling and gurgling through every one of Rapture's hallways, tumbling from ceilings and, of course, encasing the city itself. You get lots of little details to enjoy as well, like the welts on your hand when you boot up the insect swarm plasmid, the steam jets that hiss from Big Daddies after they've taken damage, fish in tanks and in the ocean that dart away as you approach, and the flickering billboards and tattered posters that remain from Rapture's glory days. The PC version definitely outclasses the Xbox 360, mostly because of the ability to crank the resolution to 1920 x 1200. If you've got a Vista rig with a DX10 card, you can expect some heightened particle effects, crisper real-time shadows, and more dynamic water, but the game looks gorgeous regardless. On our gaming PC running a Core 2 Quad processor with a GeForce 8800 GTX, and 4 GB of RAM, it ran very well, with only a few occasions of seemingly random framerate hitches. We also couldn't find an option to switch between DX10 and DX9 modes; the game just seems to default to what's in your system, unlike Lost Planet.

If there's anything disappointing about BioShock, it's the ending. We found the resolution to be somewhat abrupt for a game in which so many things are colliding and bubbling beneath the surface. Nevertheless, it's no reason to be dissuaded.

Closing Comments
There is art here, despite what many would say isn't possible with games, from Roger Ebert to game designers like Hideo Kojima. But it's in BioShock--it's in the gorgeously realized, watery halls of Rapture. It's in a Little Sister's expression of thanks when you choose to save her, or the utter silence if you harvest instead. It's in the way the characters develop, in the testimonials of the recording boxes you pick up along the way. It's in the way the narrative is structured, and the way it blends so seamlessly with the action. Irrational had a clear vision with this game, something pulled off with remarkable precision in every department. They didn't just deliver something that's fun to play, a criterion so often cited as the benchmark of what makes a game worthwhile. BioShock stands as a monolithic example of the convergence of entertaining gameplay and an irresistibly sinister, engrossing storyline that encompasses a host of multifaceted characters. This is an essential gaming experience.

Medal of Honor: Airborne Review

The best Medal of Honor game in years, but not the best shooter in years.

After a long line of disappointing games in the Medal of Honor franchise that just never could recapture the magic successes of Allied Assault, we finally get Medal of Honor: Airborne that combines high presentation values and good, fast-paced fun. While there's definitely some good entertainment value here, the campaign is short, and the multiplayer isn't incredibly deep. Still, it's a good game overall and the best game in the franchise in some time.

Medal of Honor: Airborne takes a different approach to World War II shooters. Instead of starting players out in each linear level on a path where there's no variation, EA LA decided to let us choose where to start each mission by throwing us out of a plane. Once floating in the air, it's a matter of steering the parachute to the best location to start the fight. Where the best location is depends on how you want to play the game, a mechanic that certainly is useful if you want a challenge or find that it's more fun to start out in a certain place on a map. It also provides an opportunity to drop into a new location if the previous one was a little too difficult or even complete one of the five different skill drops (drops in very specific areas).

A compass will show the way to the various objectives so that it's easy to steer in the right direction. It's also nice to be able to land on the high ground to get a good view of the action and shoot a few enemies before jumping down. The main problem is that in some of the missions, landing in those high positions doesn't really mean much. Because of the way the game is structured, enemies will continue to re-spawn in the area of objectives so that the challenge remains consistent. In order for enemies to stop spawning, you'll have to jump down and advance the action yourself. It is possible to kill enough enemies quickly that friendly troops will be able to move forward, but that didn't happen often.

While there's a lot of choices to make about which direction to run and attack a problem from, some of the freedom provided by the paradrop is an illusion in some of the levels. Some of each level's objectives end up forcing you down a direct and linear path like a corridor shooter. It's not necessarily a bad thing since a lot of the action is fun, but the paradrop can sometimes end up feeling more like a gimmick rather than a revolutionary way to approach a shooter.

The level design is pretty good though. Each of the objectives will require some adjustments of tactics and movement. You'll find some of the levels are much more open than others but all definitely have a different feel, good defensive emplacements, and lots of increasingly difficult enemies. I can't help but feel there were some more missed opportunities to stir up more frenetic chaos by implementing bigger weapons or more enemy and friendly vehicles pounding it out. The near constant infantry vs. infantry combat is fun, but a little more variety couldn't have hurt.

When you do fight against vehicles, it's not really very satisfying. Tanks will only drive in circles around track and halftracks are only used to block entrances in the last level and can't actually be blown up. Why even put Panzerschreks in the level if they're not for blowing up the halftracks? Why make it so that they can only be stopped by killing the machine-gunner when we just blew up tanks a couple of levels ago with the same weapons?

As is the case with most EA games these days, the presentation values in Medal of Honor: Airborne are quite good. Everything from the menu system to the mission briefings has been given attention. Each mission starts inside the hold of a drop plane flying over enemy territory full of soldiers in your squad chatting with each other, cracking jokes, getting shot, screaming, and finally, jumping out of the plane. There are some terrifically animated moments in this confined and terrifying metal tube as the plane gets shelled, engines explode in fire, and other soldiers start dying.

Falling into a level is a great way to get a quick lay of the land before the real battle begins. The levels have a lot of great detail to them in the architecture, especially those levels in towns that have been shelled (such as in Operation Market Garden) and seeing the well-modeled soldiers running around shooting at you and at each other definitely sets the mood.

The illusion begins to break down when you land and find that the levels are actually very static. While there are some terrific explosive effects and dirt fountains from grenades, rubble stays attached to the ground, buildings stay upright, and the only noticeable use of physics is in the way models interact with the environment. I'm not necessarily asking for completely destructible environments here (I'm sure that creates a world of trouble for level design), but some level of interactivity would certainly have added to the believability of the levels. It's also a little frustrating that there's basically no ballistics model. Soldiers often hide behind wooden slats and boxes that would be easily chewed up by almost any of the weapons in the game especially at close range. You really shouldn't be able to duck behind a wooden fence to avoid being destroyed by an MG42.


It's probably more annoying because the weapons feel and sound really good. While no guns in a game can (or should) accurately represent the deafening crack of a real gun, it's a treat to hear a good gaming version of that thunder. The right sounds added with the right amount of recoil can help make a shooter much more fun and the guns feel that much more real and powerful, which EA has done an admirable job of here. Helping to make the weapons even more fun are the upgrades that can be acquired through use. Every time you deal damage with a weapon, you'll gain a little bit of experience eventually resulting in an upgrade. These aren't just cosmetic, they're very useful and make each of the guns much more powerful, which in turn makes you want to get them. Comparing the unequipped Thompson at the beginning of the game with a fully upgraded Thompson with a 50 round magazine, pistol grip, and barrel stabilizer is like night and day.

Occasionally, using these weapons can be a treat against the AI, who will often use cover intelligently (though will also run mindlessly at you), but these good moments tend to come more in the linear sections of the game. It's the open nature of some portions of each level that seem to create some confusion causing enemies not to respond even when you're shooting them or just stand out in the open away from any cover though this isn't to say I haven't seen AI acting smartly in more open areas.

One of the most annoying behaviors comes from friendly AI. I can't tell you how many times I've been shooting at an enemy or getting ready to throw a grenade only to have a friendly AI guy step in front of me. When shooting, it really only makes the friendly AI bark a curse or two at you but if you throw a grenade and it bounces off the stupid guy's head back into your lap, that's a real problem, especially if you've cooked the grenade so there's no time to run away.

The mix of enemy and friendly AI creates some fun quasi-squad interactions, but it also creates some ugly situations in more open areas where they often run right by each other in the open, basically stand on top of each other without fighting, or resorting, way too often, to hitting each other with their weapons instead of pulling the trigger. If I were running into a room with a Thompson or an MP40, I don't think my first reaction would be to run across the room (or an entire courtyard full of enemies, as I've seen happen) and try to beat the enemy with it. I'm pretty sure I'd pull the trigger. In fact, I always did in the game since melee combat does very little comparable damage.

The length of the campaign also may be an issue for some of you. My first time through took around 7-8 hours on the PC and second time through only took about 5-6. If you're an accomplished shooter fan, you'll definitely want to turn the difficulty up to high so that your entertainment doesn't end too quickly.

I found that the game was a bit more difficult on the 360 though that may have been relative to my mouse and keyboard skills. The higher difficulty of control also means that the game will take a while longer to complete (depending on your skills with a controller), and also means that you'll likely have to use a more deliberate pace than you might if you played the PC version where scoring headshots are much easier to pull off.

Increasing replayability is a big thing these days so Airborne does come with multiplayer, though the focus is definitely the single-player. Multiplayer action certainly has its merits and is ultimately fun, but it's not the incredibly deep experience that can be found in so many other games. What is there is some fast-paced action with some fun weapons in some small and frantic levels. You'll find your standard deathmatch modes, but the most interesting is certainly objective mode where players have to capture flags in the Battlefield style. There are only three flags around each level and capturing all of them means a win. As usual, the mechanic helps focus the action around certain locations. The most unique part of the MP equation is the ability for the Allied troops to parachute onto the battlefield. It helps create a paranoia that'll have your head on a constant vertical swivel. Any of the games can be played with or without weapons upgrades and can support up to 12 players.

Closing Comments
Medal of Honor: Airborne, while not perfect, is definitely the best game in the franchise to come along in quite a while. It may be fairly short, but those hours are pretty much one non-stop battle with Nazi Germany throughout the various paratrooper campaigns from World War II. The levels are designed well and provide a few different environmental challenges that shooter fans should appreciate. The weapons feel and sound good as well and dropping into each level from the sky adds some interest and replayability through occasionally the feature seems more like a gimmick than something to change shooters for all time. The shiny coat of EA presentation covering all aspects of Airborne certainly help with the enjoyment, but there's not quite as much variety and interaction that we're becoming used to in top-tier shooters these days.

World in Conflict Review

Everybody wants to nuke the world.

When Whitesnake starts playing during World in Conflict's single player campaign, you'll realize that it is love that you're feeling. The love of a perfectly placed artillery barrage; of a city once whole turned to rubble; of maneuvering tanks through debris to attack an important strategic location; of our most favorite nemesis, the USSR. The warmth in our hearts today isn't from family or friends, it's from the tactical nuke that wiped out a group of enemy veteran heavy tanks, mobile anti-air, and infantry that allowed our team to sweep in and claim victory in a multiplayer match of World in Conflict, one of this year's finest real-time war-games. Massive has created an excellently destructive entertainment experience that we think nearly any action junky will enjoy mightily.

Epic destruction is everywhere in Massive's latest. It's a game that's among the prettiest RTSs we've seen offering up detailed units, large well-rendered environments, and some truly spectacular special effects. The visuals in World in Conflict are brilliant on all fronts and provide an easy entry point for all comers to immediately sink in and enjoy some fast-action strategy though the price of entry may be expensive if you're only in it for the big effects. Running everything on very-high at 1900x1200 can cause some serious frame rate dips on even a computer with an 8800GTX, 2GB of RAM and a Quad Core processor when the effects really start flying. Thankfully, the game still looks pretty at medium detail, which most medium range PCs should have no problem with.

Massive has also made entry easier for the average Joe by keeping the army size down to a minimum, keeping base and economy management out of the picture, keeping game times shorter, and the gameplay more immediately aggressive. It's something Massive originally tried in their Ground Control series that they've updated and improved mightily here. It's a completely tactical approach that allows players to focus on unit positioning and the use of unit special abilities. The result is a game that's accessible to all, including that more casual demographic that's used to snorting the instant thrills provided by shooters.

This doesn't mean that the game is simple. In fact, it's not. World in Conflict focuses heavily on team-play in multiplayer (the single-player reinforces through certain mechanics) much in the way that a first-person shooter like Team Fortress or Enemy Territory does with their class balancing. While you can choose to spend your requisition points (the game's easy version of resources) on units outside of your specialty, they're encouraged to spend those points in their domain as the few units for purchase outside of the specialty are expensive. This need to balance units and function within the team, not just within the individual, is what really makes World in Conflict tick so perfectly as a multiplayer game. Players dropping in during the middle of a match, something also unusual for a multiplayer strategy game, will be able to see where help is needed and fill any void.

The paradox inherent in wanting to allow accessibility to inexperienced strategy players and the need to work smartly as a team in a strategic environment may be the multiplayer's one slight weakness. It can be frustrating to be on a team that can't work together at all if the other team is even moderately organized (if you've got a bevy of heavy tanks and no one helping with anti-air support, you're in trouble). It may not be too different from a comparable type of FPS, but those games still have the fun of being able to use your twitch skills to better others. The lack of twitch means more reliance on teammates to make the victory come. Of course, this isn't to say you can't have fun just getting in a game to roll tanks around, fire some rockets, and drop some nukes, but the truly epic gaming experiences come via teams that at least vaguely know what they're doing.

This can be especially important given the massive nature of some of the game's tactical aid devices. As you deal damage, heal units, or capture strategic locations (think Battlefield 1942), you'll gain tactical aid points that can be used on everything from radar scans to the game's delicious tactical nukes. Dropping such ordinances on friendly units is bad for business.

Thankfully, World in Conflict also comes with a crystal clear VOIP system that should help players warn of their impending destruction. It should also be a boon for new players seeking to get in touch with their teammates, learn from veterans, and participate quickly and easily in coordinated attacks and defenses. When it's clicking on all cylinders and everyone on your team is involved, World in Conflict is one of the best multiplayer games of any genre out on the market.

It's good that Massive has spent time trying to make sure their Massgate multiplayer service is clean and feature-filled. Everything from clan support to tournaments is being provided for the hardcore while the more casual player should be able to find others of their ilk quickly via player matching. Add to that the ability to broadcast games via the nifty system of cameras and telestrating tools and you've got a game built for a competitive community.

While the game was designed primarily as a multiplayer game, single-player hasn't been thrown to the dogs. The campaign provides a well presented and explosive spectacle right from the moment that the Russians invade US soil and artillery begins to pummel Seattle. It's a non-stop ride from there with very little down time to gather your wits, which fits the tactical nature of the game quite nicely and provides us adrenaline junkies a constant fix.

The story is consistently well presented from several angles. Massive not only tells the strategic and tactical nature of the Soviet aggression via terrific load-screen briefings voiced by Alec Baldwin and constant radio chatter by the main characters and leaders in the Allied forces, but also the more personal side of war via several well developed characters. Each is quite different in their motivations and the chance to learn more through the art slideshow cutscenes of phone calls home helps you invest that much more. Both the personalities of the characters and tactical information mix together in the well directed in-engine cutscenes in each mission. Finally, there are a couple of FMV cutscenes, both of which you've probably seen by now (check out one of them below) if you've followed the game at all and they mix the music and action very well together. Overall, the story presentation of the single player package is excellent.

The campaign moves smoothly from location to location documenting the war across the American Northwest, New York City, and various parts of Europe. Each of the missions offers something different and encourages players to become more familiar with each of the army types by providing only certain kinds of reinforcements. It's not as rigid as the multiplayer (you'll often have helicopters and tanks under your command simultaneously) but is great for introducing the power of each unit type by offering up opportunities to take advantage of special abilities against the enemy.

It's also impressive how the campaign teaches ideas of teamwork. It's common for your commander to give you an objective only to turn it over to an AI teammate in order to present a new objective. While that AI is guarding a strongpoint, you'll have to press forward to take another strategic objective. It's something that'll become like second nature in the multiplayer game and is offered up smoothly in the single player game. In fact, the campaign is full of the pleasant trickery that makes you feel like part of something huge when you're only commanding a modicum of units. There's so much action and destruction happening all around that you're not directly participating in that it's hard not to feel the intense heat of the explosions when in fact, you're quite focused on a small section of the battle. There were only a few objectives that will push you to split your forces farther than a few hundred meters apart.

Single player also happily provided liberal amounts of tactical aid points on several occasions allowing a huge array of explosives to be dropped near constantly on the enemy. You just don't know how satisfying it is to call in three carpet bombing raids, fuel air bombs, and massive artillery strikes all at the same time. Bliss.

RTS veterans and action fans alike should find this to be an action junky's dream, but those of you who pride yourselves on high mouse click-per-second capabilities and are OCD micromanagers may find it a bit on the easy side. I can't say I was particularly hard-pressed to complete any of the primary objectives (some secondary were more challenging), even on hard, though I've also played a ton of real-time games over the years. I'd recommend any RTS vets to pump the difficulty up to hard for sure. Part of the issue likely has to do with the enemy AI that occasionally showed potential, but mostly ran straight into the line of fire instead of taking advantage of their surroundings and special abilities. It's a little difficult to say what exactly makes the game more difficult on hard as the AI tactics seemed unchanged and didn't make use of unit special abilities like I thought it would.

Closing Comments
It’s not very often that a real-time strategy title comes along and changes the way you think about the genre. World in Conflict is one of those, not because all of the ideas are totally new, but because they’re all put together in such a successful way. This game is unlike most real-time war-games for its tactical nature and reliance on teamwork. Because of this, the multiplayer is one of the best experiences on the market. While the single player plays second fiddle to the multiplayer (at least in my mind), it also provides explosive and well-conceived missions that build up the ideas of team-play through the various objectives given and an exceptionally well-presented story. When all is said and done, 2007 is going to be an amazing year for strategy titles and World in Conflict will be there among the best of them.

Medieval II Total War: Kingdoms Review

Once more into the breach, dear friends.

Even assuming that you've played it since it was released, it's a safe bet that there are still some surprises left in Creative Assembly's Medieval 2 Total War. But assuming that you've seen everything there is to see in the game, the developer is offering up a wealth of new content in their latest expansion pack, Medieval 2 Total War: Kingdoms.

The first thing you'll notice about Kingdoms is that it takes a ridiculously long time to install. It seems like ages ago that I was shocked by a game that took up a full gigabyte on my hard drive (No One Lives Forever, I think), and the 4GB's worth of content that this expansion packs makes that seem like small potatoes. On the plus side, each of the game's four campaigns is installed as a separate file, so you can install them as you need them.

Once your two-hour installation is over and you start the expansion, you'll see just why Kingdoms takes up so much space: there's a staggering amount of new content here. Just going by the numbers alone, you'll have four large campaigns, 13 new factions, 50 new building types and over a hundred new units. Judged purely from a standpoint of quality Kingdoms is definitely worth the attention of any hardcore Medieval 2 player.

Each of the four campaigns covers a historically significant conflict from the Medieval era: a five-way fight for the British Isles, Crusades in the Holy Land, religious wars against pagans in Northern Europe, and even the Spanish conquests in Mezo-America. Each campaign comes with numerous new factions, new units (including named heroes with improved abilities), more detailed maps, and some interesting opportunities to flex your strategic and tactical muscles. Each new campaign also comes with a whole of specific presentation elements, from new cutscenes to entirely new soundtracks.

The Britannia campaign is the meatiest of the lot. Starting in 1258 players can either take on the role of England as she tries to gain control of the islands or of one of four other players -- Wales, Ireland, Scotland or Norway -- as they fight to keep England from gaining dominance. At first glance, it seems like England has the easier task here. Though she has a large empire and lots of troops, she's surrounded by enemies and has lots of problems with unrest at home. In addition to fielding enough armies to take care of the small Welsh and Irish factions, England will have to protect her coasts from Norwegian raids and keep some troops at home to deal with the inevitable uprisings that are sure to come.

In terms of the other factions, the players will have to hold out long enough for England to waste herself on other fronts. It's not so much a campaign of rapid advances as much as it is one of avoiding battle until your enemy shows a weakness. Of course, on the English side of the fight, you'll want to take out a smaller neighbor as quickly as possible to shorten the list of enemies you'll face.

Those who thought it odd that the original game didn't have more of an emphasis on the war for the Holy Land will be happy to see the Crusades campaign here. Focusing on the two Crusader kingdoms of Jerusalem and Antioch and their war with the Turks, Egyptians and Arabs, this campaign really captures the spirit of the setting nicely. There's plenty of historical panache here, with mamelukes and mailed knights clashing in front of eastern cities in the desert.

Bishops aren't quite as important as generals or spies, but this is a religious war with two very clear cut opponents. Between them sits the Byzantines with their unreliable but oh-so-enjoyable Greek fire weapons. Off the map to the east and west are other European crusaders and the Mongols. Their appearance will be a nice surprise depending on which faction you're playing and where your borders are.

The Teutonic campaign focuses on the attempts of Christian nations, led by the Teutonic Order, to convert the Lithuanian pagans. The Teutonic faction gives players a chance to get their hands on some truly amazing knights that can pretty much ride roughshod over pretty much any enemy that gets in their way. The only trouble is that most of the other factions are prepared for fighting the Teutonic Order so you'll have an uphill battle with very little chance to launch a sneak attack on your enemies.

Though there are other significant players in this campaign, the other real standouts are the Lithuanians. As a slightly less advanced faction, they won't have access to the heavy troop types of their neighbors, but they have plenty of irregular forces that are ideal for fighting in the nearby forests. Moreover, they have very powerful Holy Warriors that they can recruit so long as they remain a pagan faction. Knowing when to convert to Christianity in order to gain the significant diplomatic advantages it brings is a particularly interesting problem for the Lithuanian faction.

The Americas campaign is the biggest departure from the standard Medieval 2 model. Rather than forcing players into a contest of equals, the Americas campaign highlights the technological differences between steel and gunpowder of the European armies and the less advanced but more numerous Native American tribes like the Aztecs and Apaches. While it's an interesting historical simulation, the inequalities inherent in the setting really make it seem like the native factions are designed to lose. Spain starts out with significantly fewer troops, of course, but their technology more than makes up for it, particularly when you consider that the natives have no access to cavalry or boat transport. Sure, it's accurate from a historical standpoint, but it's not nearly as fun as the other campaigns.

Even with everything that expansion adds, it fails to address some of the series' perennial problems. The strategic level interface is still hard to read and it can be difficult to sort out what's what when groups of armies gather around a city. Building and assembling armies, and setting orders and tax rates for your cities still takes far too much time and effort. Also, the performance still seems to suffer, particularly when there are lots of units in a given battle.

AI pathfinding is still a bit wonky, both on the strategic level and the tactical level. On the overland map, armies will automatically choose to go the long way around when shorter routes are blocked by the enemy and cavalry will still run the wrong direction and stop short on charges from time to time. In both cases you can micromanage the movement to get the results you want but it's an issue that should have been resolved.

On the subject of AI, the allied AI in battles isn't always as reliable as it should be, leaving players no option but to personally direct them in battle. But since the entire allied army is led as a single unit, it's a bit unwieldy.

The new expansion also allows gamers a chance to play hotseat multiplayer with automatic battle resolution. Adding to the ways you can play Medieval 2 is never really a bad idea, but there's really no enjoyment to be found here. The strategic phases are far too long to maintain your interest during your off turns, and the automatic resolution pretty much eliminates the game's main attraction, tactical battles.

Closing Comments
Kingdoms is definitely an expansion focused on adding lots more content than enlarging the game design and its appeal to you will depend on how satisfied you are with the basic format of the core game. True, there are some surprises in the way the new campaigns play out but, dog warriors and Greek fire aside, Medieval 2 fans will be in very familiar territory here.

That said, the new campaigns are very challenging and offer vastly different experiences depending on the factions you choose so there's lots of replayability here. Getting a chance to experience four entirely new wars from a variety of perspectives is more than enough of a selling point for most Medieval 2 players but those who are satisfied with the core game's offerings won't really be missing out on any new features here.

Stranglehold Review

Killing shouldn't be this much fun.

Stranglehold is John Woo's first foray into videogames. Whether Woo was intimately involved in guiding Stranglehold or more of a watchful father, his influence can be felt in every frame. Midway has managed to capture the essence of a Woo film -- in some ways more than Woo has over the past decade. You get everything a fan could ask for: excessive gunplay, heavily stylized cinematic moments, melodrama, slow-motion dives, dual-fisted pistols, and, of course, doves aplenty. Some have called Woo's films a beautiful ballet of violence. Stranglehold is less ballet and more a mosh pit of bullets. Either way, lots of people die and little in the environment is left standing once the smoke clears.

The spiritual successor to one of Woo's most popular films, Stranglehold puts you in the shoes of famed Inspector Tequila. Chow Yun Fat comes stateside to reprise his role (though this time in English), adding a level of authenticity. The story is convoluted -- something about a kidnapped girl, a dead cop, and drug money. The cut-scenes are sometimes dripping with melodrama. But that's a good thing. Melodrama is a John Woo signature move and, like so much in Stranglehold, it helps immerse gamers in the world of Hard Boiled.

As Tequila, your job is to shoot first and never ask questions. You'll be tasked with storming through seven chapters, each of which is a lengthy expedition of violence. You'll travel through Hong Kong, from the marketplace to an extravagant restaurant/casino and on to the main villain's palatial stronghold. From start to finish every level is overcrowded with enemies and your main objective in almost all of the missions is to kill everyone and proceed towards the exit. Don't worry, Inspector Tequila isn't traveling alone. He's brought friends.

Your buddies in Stranglehold are a reliable pair of Beretta pistols. Though you do have a limited amount of ammunition, you never have to reload. This is a brilliant concept because reloading only slows down the action. And Stranglehold is not the type of game that benefits from any pause in the action. This is a full throttle balls-to-the-wall shooter. In fact, if you had to take the time to hit a button to reload, you'd probably be dead before a fresh clip was in your gun. Even in the pussy-footin' first level, you find yourself surrounded by enemies, being shot from all directions. Good thing Tequila is tough enough to shrug off a few thousand bullets over the course of Stranglehold.

If you get tired of the Berettas, there are several other weapons to choose from as you progress through Stranglehold. Among these are an M4 Carbine assault rifle, shotgun, rocket launcher, and an M249 light machine gun. You only get one weapon type per class (with the exception of the extremely powerful gold Berettas). It would have been nice to have a bit more variety in the weapons (and a flamethrower), but Midway touches on most of the essentials. Though modeled after real weapons, there's no realism in the execution. The shotty can kill from long range, for example. But Stranglehold isn't about realism -- it's about kicking a whole lot of ass.

To assist in this ass-kicking, Tequila gains access to four different powers while progressing through the seven chapters of Stranglehold. These "Tequila Bombs" are all potent powers essential for completing Woo's sequel to Hard Boiled. As you perform stylish kills, you'll begin filling your Tequila meter. As the meter fills, you can call in more powerful Tequila Bombs.

The first level of Tequila juice gets you a boost of health, which is like carrying around a medipack. Second up is Precision Aiming. When initiated, time slows and you zoom in on the nearest enemy. You then have several seconds to aim at any body part and fire a single bullet for massive damage. Each hit location has multiple animations. Shoot someone in the throat and they may clutch the wound and attempt (unsuccessfully) to utter a final word. Or be cruel and shoot a baddie in the good 'n' plenty. He'll grab at his missing member before falling over into a merciful blackness.

The third rung earns you Barrage, the most useful of the Bombs. Once selected, Tequila loads up the weapon of choice with bullets. You now have a good 20 seconds of enhanced firepower and invulnerability. With Barrage, you can tear through the environment (particularly with the shotgun) and lay waste to enemies. While many will drool over Stranglehold's slick slow-motion options and environmental interaction, for my money, Barrage is the most stunning element in the entire game. It's beautifully brutal -- especially with a rocket launcher in hand.

Lastly, you acquire the smart bomb. Hit up this final Tequila Bomb and the good Inspector spins in a circle, firing with stunning accuracy. As doves flutter about, Tequila kills every enemy on screen. It's a useful power, though it does take away the fundamental element of Stranglehold -- killing people yourself.

Each of the Bombs has its uses and initially you may find yourself ignoring them for the satisfaction of using normal gunplay to end the lives of each enemy. However, about halfway through Stranglehold, the difficulty gets a serious ratcheting up and it becomes almost impossible to complete the game without making use of the Bombs. Fortunately, you will be killing so many enemies in the final three levels that your Tequila meter fills quickly, allowing you to make use of the Bombs with great regularity.

Of course, no Woo movie would be complete without some slow-motion kills. These come in bunches. In fact, a good majority of Stranglehold is played at a slower speed. On the HUD, just below your health, is a Tequila Time meter. You can enter this manually with a tap of a mouse button. The screen is washed in a sepia tone, bullets can be seen as they slowly approach, and Tequila can aim more easily. The meter runs out quickly, but fills almost as fast.

Tequila Time also engages any time you interact with the environment or dive. The Space Bar is your greatest ally. Hold the Space Bar to dive in any direction. Time slows and people die. If you're near an object (railing, chandelier, wall, roll cart, etc.) Tequila will interact with that object and (again) time will slow. This allows for some truly cool moments. You'll be sliding down banisters, running up the spines of fossilized dinosaurs, swinging from chandeliers, and sliding across the tops of counters, popping enemies as you go.

Quite a lot of things in the environment are interactive. And you'll know about each one, as Stranglehold has every item flashing. "Hey, over here, Tequila! It's me, your old friend the banister. Come run along me!" I would hope gamers aren't so stupid that they need their hand held through every single level. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that after the first "training" level, gamers will get the idea. It gets a little bit obnoxious after a while to see the environment flashing and actually takes away some of the fun of discovering new areas of interaction.

The real problem, however, is that the interactive elements are buggy. You'll be next to a railing, hit the space bar and dive forward instead of hopping onto the rail. Or you will face a wall, expect to plant your feet and push off as you've done in the past, only to find Tequila standing motionless staring at the wall like an idiot. Now, 90% of the time, the interaction works perfectly. But that's still 10% of the time when you will meet frustration. And this is really the greatest flaw in Stranglehold, because the lack of a fluid interaction system hurts one of the title's strongest selling points.

Should you get frustrated at any of the failed interactions, you can always take it out on the environment. Just about everything in Stranglehold is destructible. Tables splinter, support columns shatter, and every spot of cover quickly erodes. Every bullet needs to go somewhere. In the chaos of the many arena battles, the game world is often left in a heaping mess. This affects gameplay, because in later stages you'll be forced to take cover. But almost every piece of cover will be destroyed given time, forcing you to move forward and never allowing the action to slow for too long.

The high level of destruction takes a toll on the visuals. While the environments look great, the characters come off as generic, with a very limited set of animations. Stranglehold has a lot of cinematic flair, but lacks the visual pop I'd expected. Considering that apples scatter when shot off a table and a dozen enemies are on screen at almost every moment, the weakened visual fidelity is forgivable. Even with today's technology, there are still limits to what can be done on screen. And pay heed to the hardware recommendations (Dual Core, 2 GB RAM, GeForce 7800) if you want the game to run smoothly at a decent resolution.

None of this excuses Stranglehold's most pressing issue: the camera. It becomes a considerable problem when leaping off walls or otherwise shifting your body in another direction. You have to manually adjust the camera to follow your movements, which is a real challenge in such a fast-paced game. However, if you turn on the "camera spring" option, this issue largely goes away. Why this wasn't made the default is curious, because Stranglehold is a much better game without the nagging camera concerns.

Another staple of Woo films are standoffs, where Tequila finds himself staring down the barrel of several guns. These moments are recreated in about a half-dozen standoff mini-games during play. For standoffs, the controls change slightly. Tequila stands still, but you can lean left and right to dodge the incoming bullets from enemies. At the same time as you are dodging, you must also aim your shot and take down the other members of the standoff. You only have a couple of seconds to take an enemy out before Tequila spins and faces the next villain and the sequence repeats. This becomes quite challenging towards the latter part of Stranglehold. Though people will come for the fast-paced action, the standoffs were my favorite part of Stranglehold. They're tense and exciting.

The single-player game only lasts 6-8 hours. On the bright side, that's four times the length of Hard Boiled. But, then again, this is $50 we're talking about. Stranglehold features online multiplayer for up to six players. It's only deathmatch and team deathmatch, which take place in a variety of locales from the game. Each match is complete and utter chaos. Every player has access to the various Tequila Bombs and can (sometimes) enter slow motion. None of this really comes together though, as players need to be in slow motion at the same time, so that there's no real advantage to using Stranglehold's primary gameplay element. And the Precision Aiming power still has the same slow-mo reticule movements, but the other players are moving in real time, so it's pretty much impossible to use.

While the multiplayer doesn't come together as well as it should, it's still an interesting experiment. Anyone who picks up Stranglehold should give the multiplayer a shot at least once, just to experience the insanity. But this isn't something that will have people playing Stranglehold for the next year.

Closing Comments
There are a lot of mindless shooters on the market, but none of them immerse you in John Woo's world. And that's where Stranglehold stands out. This is the true sequel to Hard Boiled, which means Stranglehold is more about style than substance. So, not surprisingly, the story is melodramatic and forgettable and the adrenaline-pumping action is the star of the show. Stranglehold could use two more chapters and a little more visual polish, but it is an otherwise exhilarating experience. There are plenty of "Oh my God" moments and just enough challenge to sustain anyone's interest from start to finish.

SimCity Societies Hands-on

The favorite of yor is changed pretty significantly.

One of the more stunning announcements in PC gaming this year came when EA announced that Maxis would not be developing the next version of SimCity. The fact that it also would no longer be the city planning simulation that fans have obsessed over for so many years made the ruckus caused by staunch SimCity fans no surprise. Instead of "realism" the game would focus more on the social aspects of city living. Each structure was to relate to one of several societal influences such as creativity or authority. In theory, EA and developer Tilted Mill hoped to make it a much more friendly experience to new players. EA sent over a copy of SimCity Societies to check out for ourselves after getting only the briefest of hands-on time with the game at a recent EA event.

One of the biggest differences from all SimCity games in the past is the removal of zoning. Instead, players will choose and place one of hundreds of buildings that will remain rather than grow and shrink according to the immigration and emigration of citizens. Instead of zoning, the buildings are broken up into housing, workplaces, and venues. The most difficult part of this aspect of city planning is the fact that each of the buildings has a different footprint size. Hopefully they'll add some indication and sorting function for that, but it can definitely be more of a challenge fitting all of the puzzle pieces in than it used to be when we only had to drag a zone and watch the buildings grow.

Every city will need a balance of each building type to stay at peak efficiency. Housing obviously provides a place to live while workplaces offer up jobs and venues provide a place to relax after a hard day. Cities won't just stop functioning because of a lack of one of the buildings, nor will players ever have to worry about their budgets being in the red (buildings can't be placed if there's not enough money in the treasury), but unhappy citizens won't attend work, which hurts the amount of money that you can make, which hurts the number of buildings you can place down. The game isn't about perfect management of public works and economics. It's about playing around with the different types of societies and their combinations.

When choosing a building to place you'll be presented with a lot of options, some of which will be blacked out until certain parameters have been met. Those that are available will show how much they cost in terms of money and societal value. For instance, some buildings will add spirituality to your city and some will use that energy up. So when you're looking to build a city, it helps to look down the line to buildings you're eventually planning for. If a building requires certain amounts of spirituality and prosperity and you really want to use it, you'll have to place buildings that generate both. In some cases, especially in prosperity, there aren't a ton of buildings that generate that type of societal value so you'll have to look into the future to see which buildings do provide a positive flow of prosperity and try to reach those buildings.

Thankfully, searching for the type of building you want is fairly easy. Clicking on any of the three building type icons will bring up only those types of buildings. From there, they can be sorted using the societal value icons or by selecting from a drop down menu of city types such as a "fun city" or "prosperous city" so that buildings of all value types that would go into creating such a town will show up on the building select window. We're hoping they also include a drop down menu for the society value types as well so that it can always be selected when opening the build window, but the sorting functions are good enough to facilitate finding the appropriate structure and seeing what needs to be done to unlock buildings further down the line.

One of the most challenging aspects of SCS is the optional objectives laid out by the developers at Tilted Mill. These include all sorts of combinations such as needing a certain amount of one of the societal energies (creativity, authority, etc…), a certain amount of population, and a specific level of happiness. Many of these trophies will take a considerable amount of time to reach, but come attached with specialty buildings that will become unlocked once the award has been achieved. These will definitely give players something to aim for.

While SimCity Societies is certainly different than what SimCity fans are used to, it's not without its interesting aspects. Hopefully EA will be releasing a demo before the game is released this November so that fans have a chance to see if they can appreciate the changes for themselves.