Brain Hood

Your mind might not click on hearing the name ‘Metro 2033’ unless you’re really into Russian literature. This pc game is based on a Russian novel written by Dmitry Glukhovsky which was released in the year 2005. Metro 2033 gives its readers a peek at how things will span out before the end of the world.

Metro 2033 gives us a setting in which much of the planet has been devastated and only a few humans have survived by taking refuge in the underground system of Moscow. Ever since it hit the bookshelves in stores, metro 2033 has been quite a success as more than 500,000 copies have been sold.

As the game begins, you catch a sight of what the world has been reduced to. As you and another surviving human get out of the underground system, a mutant immediately attacks, but you’ll handle it quite easily as they’re always easy to slaughter. After killing the mutant, you take on gas masks and proceed to meet your allies coming in vehicles. But now you get the real action as this time around a whole army of mutants attacks your allies and hurts them badly. Meanwhile you have to get a good hiding place and kill the mutants turn by turn again. With your allies utterly dissipated and the enemies outnumbering you, your chances to live to fight another day seem quite bleak, and in the midst of this terrifying situation, you’re taken back to how things were eight days ago so that you learn the story from the beginning visiting the Exhibition for the very first instance.

Metro 2033 Weapons

Because the truth is that the main problem with Metro 2033 is in the shootings, which is ironic in the case of an FPS. The weapons on Metro 2033 have no punch, and enemies are sometimes able to get a couple of impacts without restrain them an inch. It is logical and understandable, moreover, that if it is to represent that the weapons are coarse and patched by hand, they have questionable reliability. But what is not acceptable is that in situations modeled use under the same conditions have radically different consequences. For example, once you stop an enemy from a single gunshot, but the following may not fall until the seventh or eighth. Or you throw a knife to a bug found in the other end of the corridor and this impact with surgical precision, but instead failed miserably to throw less than five feet. Metro 2033 Weapons system is unreliable because it behaves erratically and unpredictably, causing frustration in the player to lead you to death more often than necessary. And there’s another problem: too many creatures are at ground level and are below our field of vision, making the shootings become too chaotic. Something that in most games is no problem here becomes a major handicap for the playable section.

By learning a little about the theme of Metro 2033, if you’re thinking it’s just another shooter game like Fallout 3 PC Game and Stalker, then you are mistaken. Metro 2033 review, despite being another post-end-of-the-world shooter game, offers something unique which sets it apart from other games. The developers have emphasized that they have designed Metro 2033 to be primarily a first-person shooter pc game with instances of character-development, but we definitely can’t tag it as a role-playing game. I really had fun writing this Metro 2033 PC review.

So, this is a little bit weird. Ubisoft is working on a new game in the Driver series, which is as much of a surprise to me as it probably is to you. But rather than make a lot of pomp and circumstance around it at their E3 press conference (presented by Joel McHale, seriously), they make mention of it in a press release announcing some of the titles we’ll be able to see at their booth. Huh?

Only one of two things could have happened here. Either somebody slipped up in the PR department and accidentally included mention of it or Ubisoft thinks that people don’t care enough about Driver to save the announcement. I’m honestly uncertain as to which it could be because, frankly, they both seem pretty plausible to me.

Considering Ubisoft hasn’t formally announced another entry in the Driver series, we found it a tad on the odd side when we received the publisher’s official E3 press release (that’s a new one for us too) declaring the game to be playable at this year’s LA convention. “Video games exhibited at the Ubisoft booth will include the highly anticipated Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Shaun White Skateboarding, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier, the next iteration of the blockbuster franchise Driver, and many other titles that are yet to be announced,” the release reads.

Furthermore, the company will be making its Joel McHale-hosted press conference, in addition to “other exclusive videos and interviews throughout E3,” available on its official website. Presumably, Ubi’s E3 multimedia will be available soon after the company’s June 14 press conference. We’ll have hands-ons with Ubi’s titles throughout that week, so make sure to, ya know, keep it locked.

Blizzard’s VP of product development, Frank Pearce, has confirmed to IncGamers that there are no current plans to let EU players play against NA players unless they buy the game in that region as well.

“It’ll be structured very similarly to World of Warcraft, where you’ve got the European region and players matched against the other players within their region,” Pearce told us.

Bob Colayco, one of Blizzard’s main PR reps noted “We haven’t promised anything like that,” but added “that’s something we’ll look into.”

Pearce went on to stress that it’s not all doom and gloom for intercontinental friends and “if you’re a European player and you’ve got friends that are in another region that you want to be able to connect with, we definitely want to support that,” although “it might mean that you have to access it through the US client.”

The main issue is just that you need a separate Battle.net account for each region, and a game associated to that region. Seeing how you need a mandatory physical address for your account, we were wondering if that might not be against the TOS or EULA on principle. Pearce cleared it up by saying he’s “pretty sure that’s not against the TOS or EULA, but you’d be subject to the terms of the EULA for the region in which you’re playing.”

We will shortly release the full interview with Frank, as well as a single player mode hands on preview, so stay tuned!

Uniquely, the Trauma Center franchise almost has an entire genre to itself. Seemingly content that Atlus has the ‘surgery sim cum fantastical bioterrorist soap opera’ sewn up, few developers have attempted to impinge on its territory, with DS title Lifestyle: Hospital Affairs about the only notable rival.

This may have led to Atlus taking its eye off the ball somewhat, with recent titles suffering more than many sequels from the law of diminishing returns. After all, there’s only so many times you can drain the cytoplasm, slice out the tumour, apply the gauze and rub in the antibiotic gel before the sudden need to perform CPR becomes the predictable norm rather than a shocking mid-op twist. While the games have always suffered heinous delays making their way to Europe, the fact that the still-enjoyable DS iteration Under The Knife 2 shows no sign of being localised two years after its US release perhaps tells its own story.

Sensibly, then, Atlus has decided a reboot is in order with this new Wii game, splintering the narrative into six pieces, each focusing on a different doctor and a different discipline. Gone are regulars Derek Stiles and Angie Thompson, and noticeably absent (for the most part) are epidemics of bizarre synthetic diseases. The result is the freshest Trauma title since the first Under The Knife, and perhaps the series high point to date.

Naturally, there’s still a fair bit of ‘normal’ surgery, or as normal as surgery gets when you’re controlling a red-eyed amnesiac with indie-band hair who’s currently serving a 250-year sentence for mass murder thanks to his apparent involvement in a bioterrorist attack. The mysterious CR-S01 (if CR doesn’t stand for Chiral Reaction, I’ll eat my forceps) is offered the chance to slice a mere two years from his sentence if he assists in a particularly tricky procedure that’s actually child’s play by the series’ rigorous standards. As it wouldn’t be much of a game if he immediately returned from whence he came, he naturally stays on for a few more ops, each gaining in intensity until you’re defibrillating an eight-year-old with the FBI about to burst through the ER door.

Paramedic Maria Torres gets arguably the trickiest tests, including one blistering mission where you have to keep several patients alive until backup arrives.

There’s nothing here that will be unfamiliar to franchise vets, but the controls feel more instant and precise than ever. Additional icons over wounds act as helpful reminders of which tool to pick up next, eliminating the awkward fumbling that could occur in the previous games when you forgot whether this was the GUILT strain that liked to lacerate internal organs, or the one which liked to disappear and cause random tumours. It’s as much fun as it ever was, with the frustration factor significantly lessened. A good start.

After Sakura Wars: So Long My Love, paramedic Maria Torres is the second feisty and shouty Latina with enormous bosoms I’ve played as this year. Her First Response procedures are essentially surgery combined with plate-spinning as you switch between patients at the scene of explosions, crashes and collapsed Ferris wheels. With a limited toolset you often need to improvise, jamming biros down throats, applying tourniquets to stem bleeding, and cutting victims’ jeans off to reveal that yes, they have got huge pieces of metal sticking out of their legs.

You’ll occasionally need to talk to patients to find out where they’re hurting, but often they merely shout that their friend/daughter/second cousin is trapped in the rubble, thereby giving you another ball to juggle but an extra chance to improve your score. It’s a real balancing act, perhaps slightly tougher than most disciplines, and certain to appeal to those who’ve aced the ultra-hard X missions in the previous games.

The sadly underappreciated Gothic role-playing series has been around since 2001 and has told the tale of a soft-spoken nameless hero who ventures forth into a dark fantasy world and eventually becomes a skillful archer, mighty warrior, or powerful wizard while avoiding the perils of being slain by an orc. Perhaps even more sadly, the previous game in the series, Gothic 3, was released with noticeable technical issues, despite the fact that the game also took on an ambitious graphical overhaul. Now, the series is back with a new developer, Spellbound, and a new chapter: Arcania: Gothic 4. Arcania will have a new nameless hero, a new story, and a new home–whereas the previous games were for the PC only, Arcania will also appear on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.

We recently had a chance to see the Xbox 360 version of the game in motion to get a quick overview of the game, which starts off on a fairly large “tutorial island” before shipping you off to the rest of the game, which takes place on two other, even-more-vast islands. You play as a nameless shepherd (a brand-new character) whose entire world has been turned upside down by a violent, bloody raid on his home island perpetrated by the new king, Rhobar III, who bears more than a passing resemblance to the previous games’ nameless hero. The king’s raiding party kills off all your character’s friends and family, not to mention his fiancee, so you embark on a journey to seek revenge for your fallen comrades, and you can eventually become a swordsman, archer, or wizard, just like your predecessor.

Arcania seems to be easy to control and easy to play with the standard Xbox 360 controller–your character’s various skills are mapped to quick buttons (a single button press will switch your character from magic to melee to archery), while you can use the D pad to immediately switch to different quick-use items (such as food and other healing items)–a godsend to Gothic fans who previously struggled to pull healing potions out of their packs while they were being beaten to death by monsters.

In addition to reintroducing the series’ three different combat professions, Arcania will have a skill-tree system with points that can be invested each time you gain a level, and its combat systems will be streamlined to make them a bit easier to use. For instance, melee combat will take place with a single button to attack (but will have specific combination attacks based on timing and your character’s invested skill points) plus a separate button to either dodge or block with a shield if you have one; archery will let you autolock your targets at the cost of doing less damage, or zoom in on your targets for deadly headshots once you become more skilled; and magic will have three primary schools in fire (which can be developed to rain down damaging blasts in an area), ice (which both damages and slows the speed of enemies), and lightning (which temporarily stuns enemies by causing their bodies to briefly convulse in pain).

Since Arcania’s story takes place only 10 years after the events of Gothic 3, you can also expect to see reappearances by other familiar characters in the series, such as Diego and Gorn. And again, that new homicidal king sure looks and sounds a lot like the previous games’ nameless hero…but the developer suggests that the story of how the king became what he is may not be as straightforward as it seems. The game itself will be a bit more focused around its story and will have a more-linear structure that will take an estimated 30 to 50 hours to complete for players who just want to reach the end, though there will still be plenty of side content for those who want to poke around and do some exploring.

Alan Wake begins with a nightmare.

Chased by a ghostly hitchhiker he thought he’d just killed with his car, the titular protagonist is running and stumbling through the woods when suddenly, with a panicked start, he wakes. The writer is safe next to his loving wife, the sun is comfortingly bright and the two are on a relaxing vacation together in a peaceful rural town. Everything’s okay… okay, that is, until their cabin comes alive, the wife is swallowed by an evil lake and the writer wakes up again, dangling alone over the edge of a dark cliff and wondering desperately which, if any, of these experiences is real.

Playing Alan Wake, you’ll face the same confusion. The game’s greatest strength lies in masterfully blending truth with fiction, mixing darkness with light and shifting backwards and forwards through time until you don’t trust your own perception, let alone your hero’s. Sadly, the recurring nightmare metaphor can also be extended to how you’ll ultimately feel about the game; while half of Alan Wake is an original, compelling and brightly intelligent mystery story, the other half – which you’ll sink unwillingly into over and over – is a murky, mundane slog through repetitive settings and recycled enemies.

But first, the outweighing good.

Alan Wake, anti-hero

He’s not another soldier. He’s not another superhero. Most importantly, he’s not another bland, generic videogame protagonist designed to look cool on the cover or serve as an empty vessel for the player. Alan Wake doesn’t need to accommodate and reflect your personality – he has his own.

It’s a complex one, too. He’s a celebrity novelist, as famous for punching out paparazzi as he is for writing best-selling crime books. He’s wealthy, intelligent, charming and handsome (a dead ringer for Christian Bale), yet in spite of these blessings – or possibly because of them – he’s selfish, moody and troubled as well. Alan yells at his wife. Alan drinks too much. Alan can be cruel to both his friends and fans. Consequently, however, his journey is way more interesting than someone like Master Chief’s, whose only goal is to save the galaxy. Alan must also save his soul.

Small town surreal

Both helping and hindering him in this mission is the town of Bright Falls, Washington, a setting somehow more eccentric than the protagonist himself. Visit the local diner and you’ll meet a pair of geriatric mental patients who claim to be forgotten rock gods. Wander towards the restrooms and you’ll be ambushed by a woman wearing a black funeral veil. Head over to the sheriff’s office and you’ll find a concerned citizen obsessed with changing light bulbs and a psychiatrist who specializes in treating “creative” individuals… like Alan Wake. Huh.

Though Bright Falls is incredibly surreal, developer Remedy Entertainment has done a great job of keeping the town believable, too. Billboards and banners celebrating the upcoming “68th Annual Deer Fest” are everywhere, and after you meet a radio talk show host on the ferry ride in, you can listen to snippets of his call-ins and interviews whenever you find a radio. Alan Wake even has its own in-game television series – Night Springs, a badly acted Twilight Zone rip-off that eerily mirrors the events and themes unfolding around you.

Inside 2008’s re-drawn and re-imagined Liberty City, Rockstar declined to change the shape, structure and content of the game, or even the average mission. Niko Bellic’s freedom to roam around the city was comfortably stifled by constant prompts telling him what to do next, whether it was getting in a car, following the mini-map, losing the cops, or shooting a man with an arrow floating above his head. Grand Theft Auto IV’s sandbox element was mainly punching women’s shopping bags out of their hands. Gunplay was never the game’s strongest card and GTA IV’s new cover mechanics did little to enhance it. Now, you just slog along the odd corridor with your back to the wall, instead of facing it.

Let’s not be too down: it’s important to remember what GTA does with majestic, and rarely equalled, excellence: tell stories in a way that makes you feel. Take GTA IV: Brucie was a charming mentalist, and the futility of his missions was a superbly deflating payoff. The constant pestering of your phone might have been frustrating, but it created bonds with certain characters that gave their eventual betrayal a genuine sting. The much-vaunted openness of Liberty City – and the dry and meaningless cliche that it was “living and breathing” – paled next to the lives of its mission-dispensing stars. They might not be sympathetic characters, but they’re never boring, and they’re dripping with satire that the tabloids never acknowledged.

With Rockstar’s skilled writers providing redundant reams of character dialogue and satirical radio chat, Episodes from Liberty City develops the game’s strongest assets admirably – and even fixes one of the more tedious problems of GTA IV with mid-mission checkpoints. The release as two chapters that are playable independently of one other and GTA IV, even makes sense of the game’s bipolar attitude to gritty realism and over-the-top dick-waving. If you want real, get on your bike. If you want to jump out of a golden helicopter, go gay.

The Lost and the Damned drops you into the leathers of Johnny Klebitz, the second-in-command of The Lost, one of Liberty City’s motorcycle gangs. He’s been acting up while the proper boss, Billy, went through rehab. During this time, he negotiated a ceasefire with the rival gang and got the business side of the gang (selling drugs, naturally) sorted. Basically, he’s greatly improved the standard and life expectancy of the average gang member’s life.

But this isn’t a situation that pleases Billy when he returns. He doesn’t own a Biker to Pussy translating dictionary, so he’s not sure what “ceasefire” means. And he isn’t prone to respecting the boundaries of his enemy’s territory. So that’s the journey you take on in The Lost: the role of the reasonable man forced to watch his hard work being undone by a stubborn old-timer with mental health issues. This tense relationship is so expertly written, and with such self-control, that you’ll wince at the constant anticipation of Lost-on-Lost violence.

In terms of what you do in the world, few things change. You ride as part of a pack now, and riding over the icon that appears in the center of the pack triggers bonus dialogue that you’d normally get from being in a car.

The pack mentality extends to your members – they’re not a lot of nameless, faceless people. If someone dies, they stay dead. If they’re replaced, it’ll be with less helpful rookies. Group AI and health is always something of an opaque art in GTA IV – it’s difficult to tell what help your friends are actually offering, or what damage they’re taking. You often suspect they’re simply there to add to the spectacle rather than the battle.

Beyond that (and the excellent handling on the bikes that undermines beefs about the GTA IV cars) this is classic DLC. More of the same, but with new characters that wouldn’t fit into the main story. Rockstar aren’t selling you the last level they didn’t finish by deadline.

A lot of folks never fully grasped what made games like Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto IV and Far Cry 2 truly great. It isn’t the characters or the writing or the action; those games really succeeded because of the worlds their developers built for them.

Red Dead Redemption is like that. Rockstar has created a beautiful vision of the American West and the Mexican desert, with environments ranging from desert to plains to forests and even wetlands. It’s all a sight to behold, and it would have been difficult to predict that riding a horse through vast expanses of empty desert could be such a wonderful experience. I started a second playthrough immediately upon completing the story for review, because I just loved existing in this world, to the point where even the most mundane of activities in the game were wildly compelling.

Marston’s first few assignments involve clearing rabbits out of a garden, racing horses, herding cattle and roping and breaking wild stallions. My Marston then spent his nights patrolling a ranch with a dog, looking for trespassers. He took the money from that job and played some horseshoes, and then he lost his paycheck playing poker. The stereotypical gamer would respond to this idea with disdain; “Let’s just shoot some people, jeez,” he says.

But those who think that way are missing the point. These “missions” exist to immerse the player in the world that the engineers at Rockstar have created. And it works wonderfully; by the time my Marston began to deal out some extreme violence, I was able to understand the world of 1911 New Austin (aka Texas) and the character of John Marston.

Speaking of Marston — he rides into the West at the behest of g-men who are holding his family captive while he attempts to seek out and kill a group of outlaws he used to run with. The story is slight; it’s more The Wild Bunch than Unforgiven. What that means is it’s all about the characters and how they interact with each other — more so than it is about having a really thought-provoking narrative. That’s not to say the story doesn’t have its fair share of absolutely perfect moments, like when Marston first meets the leader of the Mexican revolution; but for the most part, progression through the story feels more like a reason to explore new areas and meet some insanely interesting people than to find out what happens later in the game.

In fact, the narrative almost feels like it’s holding the game world back by having Marston talk about how urgent his quest it. I call this Oblivion Syndrome; you want to ride the land and see what there is to see and get into whatever trouble you can find, but the narrative desperately wants the player to stay focused on the mission, and the game provides Marston, if not the player, a tangible reason to do so.

This was an idea Gearbox understood perfectly when they put together Borderlands. In that game, the goal is simply to gain fame and fortune, and everything there is to do in the game is a means toward that end. Whereas in Red Dead Redemption, you might need to take on a bounty hunting job for cash here and there, but, for the most part, taking on side missions feels antithetical to the plot. Every sandbox game doesn’t need to be as loosely structured as Borderlands, obviously, but I use that example just to illustrate that sidequests need to be at least somewhat integrated into a game’s narrative so that there might actually be a plot-driven reason for them to exist.

The way the story eventually plays out, though, is perfect in that sense, assuming you don’t 100% the game beforehand. I won’t elaborate, though, so as not to spoil it.

Pros:
Beautiful and compelling game world
Cleverly written characters
Some perfect story moments
Solid acting and writing
Tangible motivation to be good

Cons:
Bland on-foot gunplay
Can’t customize controls
The side missions are antithetical to the narrative (Oblivion Syndrome)
Competitive multiplayer feels unnecessary

Saving Private Sheep puts the player in control of a Sheep commander as he tries to reclaim their grazing lands from the nefarious Wolves. The game has a nice sense of humor and presents the characters in a great way with the Sheep general offering some insight to the game and the happenings in the Sheep-Wolf war. Featuring some very easy controls, pick-up-and-play mechanics, and a quirky storyline, it’s very apparent that the game was made with casual audiences in mind. Hardcore puzzle fans might balk at the game’s relative ease, there is still some fun to be had here.

While game features a quirky premise that involves a war between sheep and wolves with an overt WWII setting, the gameplay is a pretty straightforward puzzle experience. You have to get your Sheep, represented by a pentagon, to the platform below without having them fall off into Wolf territory. You do this by clearing away blocks and other objects that separate your Sheep and the platform, tapping on them in order to destroy them. The puzzles unfold in real-time with your piece falling to the platform right as you clear pieces out of your way.

At the end of each stage, your performance is ranked, with a Bronze through Gold rating issued for solving the puzzle with a higher ranking being netted for removing fewer pieces and completing the mission in less time.

The game throws a few elements in the mix to keep the missions interesting. Some missions will give you a Wolf pentagon piece instead of a Sheep, forcing you to get them to fall off the platform instead of land on it. Additionally, there are things like metal pieces that will block your way and cannot be destroyed – only worked around, and a few other changes and challenges thrown into the missions.

Saving Private Sheep has dirt-simple controls, requiring you to touch the on-screen objects that you want to destroy in order to take them out. The game itself is not terribly challenging, and most of the puzzles can easily be completed through simple trial-and-error. The only difficulty that the game possesses comes from trying to better your score by taking away fewer pieces more quickly, thus getting you a better ranking.

Saving Private Sheep is an interesting take on the genre, offering up a fun premise and some personality. However, the gameplay itself is very simplistic, and puzzle fans looking for more of a challenge will want to look elsewhere. That said, if you are a casual gamer looking for something quick and easy to play on your iPhone, then you could definitely do worse with your three bucks.