Brain Hood

Prison Break was a really good TV series… half a decade ago. In its third season, however, its memory was indelibly soiled by a rapid decrease in quality and an equally rapid increase in outlandish plot twists, culminating in a final fourth season that felt for all the world like a hard kick to the groin for fans who’d stuck with the show.

Smart move then by devs Zootfly to focus this bizarrely belated tie-in around the pulsating premier season set in Fox River Penitentiary. As agent Tom Paxton (a ‘roided up Company patsy who never appeared in the actual show) your brief is to infiltrate the prison, get close to tattooed pretty boy Michael Scofield and – most importantly – make sure his bull-necked bro Linc ‘The Sink’ Burrows fries in the electric chair… or at least that’s the plan. Providing you can get your head around the rather contrived setup, it’s an unexpected and welcome chance for admirers of the show to catch up (and beat up) on some of the series’ best loved stalwarts.

The idea of a videogame set in a prison is interesting enough (we all remember The Great Escape on the ZX Spectrum after all): shiv attacks, sadistic guards, ‘encounters’ in the showers, smuggling contraband in body cavities, rucking in the yard, daring escapes that’d leave Shawshank’s Andy Dufresne whistling in appreciation… the material is all there, just waiting to be exploited. So what do we end up with? A linear license that’s top-heavy on rubbish fighting, unforgivably rubbish QTEs and seriously weak stealth sections.

As the new fish in this murky pond Paxton isn’t immediately able to get chummy with cautious Scofield, so is forced to voyeuristically report on him from afar. As such, he’ll need to perform certain tasks to prove his worth with the high rollers at Fox River – gigs like sneaking into the boiler room to retrieve ‘C-Note’ Franklin’s stash, or helping out mob boss John Abruzzi by spiking ‘Haywire’ Patoshik’s medication. As the game grinds on, Paxton (unsurprisingly) finds his loyalties shifting… though after you’ve beaten up your umpteenth schmoe in the silly underground prison fight club, endured countless heavy bag and bench-pressing minigames to ramp your stats up or sneaked through yet another infirmary/psyche ward/attic/sewer you’ll be begging for the lethal injection yourself.

The very same reason why hardcore Prison Break fans might ostensibly lap this up is also the reason everyone else is probably going to loathe it. See, we played this game with our rose-tinted spectacles ramped right up to their rosiest. We cheered when bullying Brad Bellic laid into Paxton, hoorayed whenever lank-locked mafioso Abruzzi turned up and shuddered at the creepy rasps of kiddy fiddler ‘T-Bag’ Bagwell – especially since the facial likenesses are uncanny and almost all the original cast are involved with voiceovers. This is fan service that verges on the stellar, even if protagonist Paxton himself is as much fun as a month in solitary.

How rare it is to hear the word ‘shithog’ used in a fantasy world. Nier is a fantasy-action-RPG with the mouth of a sailor. Rolling grasslands and ominous temples put us in Zelda territory (graphically, Nier could be super high-res N64) but the script refuses to stay put. An ancient spell book, for example, is referred to as a “little bitch”. Don’t worry, the spell book says far worse things back. It’s a talking book, of course; one of many reasons Nier is the quirkiest RPG you’ll play this year.

Mechanically, Nier is remarkably well-read, borrowing from everywhere. Action-wise, our hero is of the Kratos (or, if you’re on a tight budget, Dante – of Inferno) variety: swordings, evasive dives and lashings of blood. Into this, developers Cavia mix Bayonetta-style magics, all demon lances and house-sized fists. Our hero can also fire giant red bullets. When you fire your bullets and the enemy fires theirs, Nier looks a little like Ikaruga and shooters of that ilk. Alas, all this proves to be more overwhelming than empowering; a mistake none of the title’s influences would have made.

Elsewhere, there’s a hint of Zelda in the crate-pushing puzzles and dungeon design. And the general structure – a free-roaming field dotted with temples – is a clear nod to Hyrule Field. Add to this a dash of Monster Hunter – hunting livestock and rifling through herb patches nets you the raw materials for upgrades. Too many fetch quests are spun from this, however. While the story bombs along at a good old pace, those hoping to pad the game with sidequests will have to get used to carting berries back and forth.

More interesting is Nier’s eye for direct homage. A versatile camera often subverts action on the fly. Switching to birds-eye view turns Nier’s magic blasting into a twin stick shooter, a kind of medieval Smash TV. When a further zoom shrinks hero Nier to a tiny speck on screen we’re suddenly in Diablo territory. Entering a ghostly black-and-white mansion only to find the camera fixed at awkward angles reeks of Resident Evil. Despite not elevating the action in any way, there’s a real allure in seeing what crazy thing the game does next. In this sense, Nier reminds us of Suda51’s freewheeling No More Heroes; a sort of make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach to the RPG.

Don Bluth might disagree, but not all dogs go to heaven. Especially Jack Slate’s mutt Shadow, a vicious, possibly rabid, fusion of malamute and mountain lion with an accumulated bodycount that would embarrass Robocop. If we were Jack, we wouldn’t let that thing within 50 feet of ourselves, let alone let it sleep at the foot of the bed. In fact, we’d have it put down. Post haste.

Demonic dogs aside, it turns out that Dead to Rights: Retribution is a pretty good game, the kind of game, in fact, that we’d didn’t actually think ever got made in this day and age. Eschewing any pretensions of critical grandeur, it knows what it’s about and sticks commendably to its guns (and feet, and teeth…), delivering satisfying violence in a comic noir shell. It feels like it might have come out on Dreamcast, and some-times looks like it might have, too. But it’s all about ultra visceral, ultra-violent fun, and in this respect it delivers.

The plot, as you might guess, is suitably dark but largely irrelevant. The action is anything but, as cop-with-attitude-and-Popeye-forearms Slate takes it to criminal gang The Union and their army of brawlers, martial artists, armed punks, snipers… and fat men. They die in droves, but it’s the inventive ways in which you can kill them that frequently stole our oxygen. Jack’s armed with a progressively extravagant, increasingly sadistic roster of punches and kicks that deliver the ‘oomph’ factor. Lob in headshot-heavy shooting, a concrete cover system and imaginative – if relentlessly depressing – level design and you’ve got a scrapper/shooter that goes on a box-ticking riot. Leave your brain at the door and you’ll revel in the rampage.

If Jack’s bits ever threaten to drag, in comes faithful Shadow. A multitalented mutt, he not only accompanies Jack on his vigilante excursions (where you can order him to attack, defend territory and reconnoitre for weapons… but not cock his leg, sadly) but even stars in mini levels of his own. These bits fondly recall (well, rip-off) Batman: Arkham Asylum’s Detective Mode, as Cujo ‘smells’ through walls, identifies the individual heartbeats of his prey and stalks them around levels, before ripping their throats out and dragging the remains into some dark, undiscovered corner. It’s a welcome distraction, slickly done and adds another layer of polish to an experience that occasionally threatens to come undone thanks to crappy AI and a frustratingly arbitrary health system.

You could argue lots of the aspects of Retribution – like the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them evidence hunting sections – are underdeveloped, tantalisingly hinting at what might have been, but you’d probably be missing the point. It’s a B-grade game that dishes out the laughs with riotous abandon, swapping out pathos and plotlines for pain, pain… and some more pain. Admittedly, the first few levels actually hint at an even grittier amalgamation of Batman’s Gotham, Max Payne’s Big Apple and Condemned’s Metro City, but when the rain finally stops pouring you’ll realise just how dated – and ugly – this game engine really is. Then again, you may be having too much fun to notice.

Like drift-racer OutRun before it, After Burner is the latest Sega classic to get an HD remake and a release on XBLA. Out of the two, OutRun Online Arcade is still the one to go for – there’s much more bang for your buck there. After Burner Climax features a reworked version of the Arcade mode, which – despite looking lovely in HD and being incredibly satisfying to play – only amounts to about ten minutes of fun. Sure, you can change some variables in the main Arcade by fiddling with EX options (get a bigger targeting reticule, more credits, an auto-gun and so on), but if anything that makes your play-throughs shorter.

Elsewhere, there’s a Score Attack mode that enables you to upload your scores to online leaderboards, but that’s pretty much it. We’d liked to have seen more substance here to go with the new style and, as such, can’t quite recommend it for the somewhat steep price, unless you really, really love After Burner.