Review // Red Dead Redemption

While it makes an extremely strong first impression, somewhere along the way, Red Dead Redemption lost me. It's still a good game, but it made enough mistakes that I couldn't help but come away feeling disappointed.

Which Button Do I Press To Saunter?

It's not reductive to describe Red Dead Redemption as "Grand Theft Auto but with horses." Everything from the gunplay to the basic feel of movement to the structure of missions is almost identical to Grand Theft Auto IV, coming with the same exhilarating moment-to-moment gameplay and the same litany of problems. For example, firing a gun feels great, especially with the new Dead Eye system that allows you to slow time, paint targets over multiple enemies, and take them all out at once, but using cover still feels awkward and outdated. Sometimes everything worked perfectly and my character slid right into cover; other times he just stood there as I frantically jammed the cover button, as though on strike.

That's about how it goes in Red Dead: When everything works, it's a really fun game. When it doesn't, it can get frustrating. I failed several missions because my character refused to take cover, or decided to take cover in such a way that he could still easily be shot, or because I couldn't accurately gauge how much health I had left, or thanks to the unrealistically "realistic" movement speed and momentum that work okay in large, open areas but fail miserably whenever precise movements are needed, like indoors or near ledges. Still, the game is at its best during basic missions that involve you and a posse riding out to a set location to kill dozens of enemies, though the lack of mission variety definitely hurts; it often felt like the same few objectives were being recycled again and again.

The simple joy of having a good Wild West shootout is why the game's multiplayer can be incredibly satisfying at times. Matches generally start out with a tense Mexican standoff where all players have guns pointed at each other, and the last man standing has the advantage of a slight head start to go position himself. Despite being extremely brief, these segments became my favorite part of multiplayer. Unfortunately, it's all kind of unbalanced as the unlock system grants players huge benefits, like significantly upgraded weapons and horses, the more they play. Control issues are more evident against human opponents, and lock-on aiming, while enjoyable in single-player, turns the game into a race to see who can run toward dots on the minimap and lock-on to barely visible targets in the distance the fastest.

This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Forty Of Us

What excited and disappointed me most, though, was Red Dead Redemption's story. John Marston, a reformed outlaw, is forced by the government to hunt down key members of his former gang. The tale starts off incredibly strong and very focused, showcasing some of the best pacing, voice acting, and writing I've ever had the pleasure to experience in a video game. But very quickly, it branches off in a thousand different directions, completely losing the pinpoint focus of earlier sections. Marston is a driven man with a clear goal and a lack of tolerance for anything that gets in his way, so attempts to artificially extend the game's length by having him help everyone he meets and shoehorning obvious double crosses are audaciously transparent and detrimental to the overall narrative.

After the game's mostly sublime first act, everything falls apart. Truly interesting characters you'd just spent hours with, like Bonnie MacFarlane and the phenomenal Marshal Johnson, are tossed to the wayside and never revisited in a meaningful way. Taking their place are droves of worthless, unlikeable characters during the game's second act in Mexico that drags on and on and should've been cut entirely. Rockstar delivered a fantastic lead in John Marston, who is constantly presented as the kind of man you do not lie to or jerk around, not ever, then completely squandered it by allowing every lowlife around to lie to and jerk him around, wasting both mine and Marston's time. His tale concludes in such a remarkable way that it's definitely worth seeing through to the end credits, but the journey there is not always easy.

While the frontier presented is stunningly beautiful at times, a shocking amount of technical problems broke any sense of immersion for me on many occasions. During one mission, a critical enemy was spawned inside of a wall, so I had to restart from the last checkpoint. While roaming, I encountered a man riding a horse five feet in the air. After losing a duel mere feet away from a save point, I hit an infinite loading screen and had to restart my console. Most tragically though, were the times when the game clearly went to great lengths to set up powerful moments where songs with vocals kick in while you play. These are brilliant conceptually, but in my experience, each song was cut off within seconds because I got on or off my horse, triggering different music, utterly ruining each scene and reminding me how clumsy the game can be.

Red Dead Redemption isn't perfect. In fact, it's pretty deeply flawed in a lot of ways I hadn't expected it to be. But it takes a setting not explored often enough and makes a good enough game out of it that you should at least check out.

Red Dead Redemption / $59.99 / PS3 [reviewed], 360

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Review // Just Cause 2

Despite featuring some unforgivably bland, forgettable missions and a boring, cliched story, Just Cause 2 still might just be the most fun sandbox game ever created.

All Hail The Grappling Hook And Parachute

The amount of stupid, ridiculous shit you can do in this game is staggering. It really all comes down to your imagination. There were so many moments while playing Just Cause 2 that I saw something interesting that I just had blow up, or launch a car into, or tether to a helicopter and fly away. There's also an in-game recording and uploading feature, making it super easy to save moments like my mid-air car hijack above. The most fun I had here came from hours and hours of unscripted exploration and experimentation as I flew around the sprawling world, wreaking havoc and destruction. It's the kind of game where the sheer act of playing, even without any direction, is enough to put a smile on your face and cause you to lose track of time.

Most of the joy you'll experience will be directly linked to the game's absolutely brilliant grappling hook and parachute combination. You can grapple to anything in the world from a good distance away, then use the parachute to start gliding. While parachuting, you can use the grappling hook to keep yourself propelled, essentially allowing you to fly forever, cover ground incredibly fast, and reach ridiculous heights. You can also use the grappling hook to pull people toward you, latch onto buildings, quickly zip away from danger, hijack helicopters and planes, or tether any two things together, like a human being to a flying propane tank. I wish I could use the grappling hook in almost every game; it's that good.

What's really shocking though, is how, with all the crazy stunts possible in this game, the missions still end up being the same tedious chores you do in every other open world game. With this many tools for creating awesome scenarios, there's simply no excuse for falling back on tired concepts like escort missions where you drive a VIP in a slow limousine from Point A to Point B. There are some legitimately cool moments here, like jumping back and forth between speeding jeeps to disarm bombs or the insane final mission, but there just aren't enough of them. What makes it really insulting is that the game makes you do the exact same missions over and over for different factions.

I Barely Remember What Happened Here

Apparently you play as Rico Rodriguez, an agent for a US agency called, well, the Agency, as he tries to overthrow an evil dictator and track down a rogue agent. I say "apparently" because the story here is so bad and so poorly executed that, by the end, I could barely bring myself to pay attention to what was going on, much less care. At first, the lackluster story and awful voice acting was kind of amusing since I typically enjoy movies and games where the story is so bad that it's good, but as the game dragged on, it overstayed its welcome and wasn't so amusing anymore. In a game like this, clearly the story isn't supposed to be the focus, but it isn't supposed to bore me either.

The real beauty of this game could never have anything to do with whether or not the story is good, though. The best part of Just Cause 2 is conceptualizing increasingly dangerous and moronic stunts to pull off, practicing them again and again until you finally succeed, then thinking up some absurd way to make them even more dangerous and moronic. Topping myself became the whole game after awhile. Whereas anything scripted was practically guaranteed to disappoint, roaming around making my own fun never ceased to entertain. However, this is definitely a game meant to be played on easy difficulty. Worrying about dying will only hamper your creativity.

I highly recommend Just Cause 2. It both allows and encourages the kind of creative play that throws caution to the wind and favors fun over logic. The missions and story are a waste of time, but everything else is a blast.

Just Cause 2 / $59.99 / PS3 [reviewed], 360, PC

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Review // Heavy Rain

I don't think I've ever played a game before Heavy Rain that so skillfully straddles the line between intensely captivating and mind-numbingly boring. But the foundation laid here is exciting and should definitely be explored further.

The Most Uncoordinated People

Let's get it out of the way right now: The worst part about Heavy Rain is actually having to play it. Even simple tasks like walking from one room to another can be a huge pain with the cumbersome controls. You hold the R2 button to walk and can look around with left analog stick. It sounds easy enough, but combine that with too much character momentum and the game's jarring tendency to switch camera angles on you for "cinematic effect" and you've got a recipe for wasted time as you constantly fight to get your character to go where you intended. But the real problem is that it doesn't just feel awkward, it looks awkward, too. For a game that relies so heavily on its cinematic presentation, it's surprising that basic movement is so counterintuitive.

As for what you actually do in this game, typically you'll just walk around triggering little cut scenes of your character talking to people or opening drawers or shaving or other inconsequential actions. If that sounds like it could get boring, it's because it does. Face it: Most of the things you do in real life are extremely mundane. Well, in Heavy Rain, you do a lot of extremely mundane, realistic things, but it helps put you into your character's shoes. If you like playing the role of a character, you'll probably enjoy how refreshingly boring it can be. It attempts immersion in a much more ambitious way than most games do. But if helping your virtual kid with his homework before making him dinner and sending him to bed doesn't sound like your cup of tea, then this isn't the game for you.

While the majority of Heavy Rain plays out like an adventure game, with you calmly walking around trying to figure out which part of the environment will progress the story, that calmness is punctuated by moments of intense action. Where these moments differ from typical quick time events is in how natural they feel. Rather than appearing in the same place every time, becoming a visual distraction, the icons here appear directly over whatever they correspond to, letting you keep your eyes focused on the action. Most of the inputs usually make sense in the context of the scene instead of just being a reflex test, all resulting in quick time events that look and feel like a true evolution.

An Eight-Hour Film

The plot revolves around a father trying to rescue his son from a serial killer, boiling down to a slight twist on SAW, and three other characters also trying to bring the killer to justice. It's certainly absorbing enough that I was never really bored, but it definitely has flaws. There are whole sections of the game that are completely irrelevant and make it feel like a film that needed better editing. In fact, the female character, Madison, probably should've been cut out entirely since she doesn't really add anything that worthwhile to the plot, yet ironically, she was the only one of the four playable characters that made it to the credits alive for me.

Persistent character death is just one of the ways that Heavy Rain makes you feel like your experience with it is unique. My favorite moment in the entire game occurred in the first fifteen minutes when, playing as the father, your wife and two sons come home and you get into a play sword fight with one of the boys. It's ultimately just a scripted moment, but I felt more in control there than any time outside of the quick time events. I gave the kid a good fight but purposefully lost in the end because, well, it was his birthday. It actually felt pretty good. I talked to a friend who had also played it and he had just slaughtered his virtual son without thought. Little moments like that helped immerse me in the story.

Unfortunately though, a lot of little moments are ruined by the game's presentation, which is decidedly mixed. Sometimes, everything comes together and the game impresses with lots of interesting camera angles, stunningly detailed people and environments, and a realistic sense of style. Other times, characters look decidedly fake, the animation is unconvincing, and the voice acting sounds unnatural. The only thing that makes poorly delivered voice acting sound worse is poorly written lines of dialogue, of which the game has plenty. It doesn't get frustratingly bad or anything, but some lines occasionally stand out.

Heavy Rain is a very engaging game and a very interesting step in trying to evolve how video games work that is hopefully followed up on by other developers, but it has enough problems that I'd only recommend renting it.

Heavy Rain / $59.99 / PS3

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Review // God of War III

While it definitely drops the ball in a few key areas, God of War III is still so packed with exhilarating, memorable moments and extremely satisfying combat that the flaws are easily forgivable. It may be the weakest entry in the trilogy, but it still completely crushes all other competition.

By The Gods...

Easily the best part of any God of War game is the brutal, visceral combat, and God of War III gives you the best version of Kratos yet. His basic moves remain unchanged, just as fluid and responsive as ever, but his new tools for eviscerating foes absolutely change the game. The best of these is the new grapple where Kratos throws his blades into an enemy and launches himself forward, allowing you to get back into the fray much more quickly and move from one enemy to the next without breaking combo. It's improvements like this that make replaying the previous games much more jarring than I had expected.

A problem with the prior games is that any alternate weapons given felt so lackluster compared to Kratos' blades, but here, the new weapons finally feel like fun, worthy additions, particularly the Claws of Hades, purple hooks on chains that operate like flashier versions of Kratos' standard blades. Switching between these weapons has been simplified beautifully, making it incredibly easy to change mid-combo and get creative with your kills. The problem with all of these tools is that you're not really challenged to utilize everything in your arsenal often enough, so it's up to you to keep things fresh for yourself.

Too much of a good thing is the least problematic issue with God of War III, though. Pacing, level design, and backtracking are all a step backward from God of War II. Different environments don't feel as connected as they used to, with portals leading back and forth across the world, giving the whole game a feeling like it was loosely stitched together. There's also more backtracking than ever before which, rather than making the world feel more connected, only serves to make it feel more disjunctive as you hop back and forth through radically different environments.

...What Have I Become?

However, the biggest problem I have with God of War III is how inconsistent it feels in terms of quality and how much it rehashes from the first two games. There's nothing wrong with the premise here, that Kratos is out to kill Zeus, but the game treads such familiar ground in exploring that premise that it nears the point of mockery. Kratos is sent to the underworld for the third time, has to find Pandora's Box for the second time, and is still getting help from Athena even though he killed her at the end of God of War II. Simply put, Athena should not have been in this game and is only a drain on the story.

But almost all of these issues melt away when you're actually playing. God of War III has flaws but by no stretch of the imagination would I call it disappointing. This game is filled to the brim with some of the most exciting and impactful sequences I've ever played in a video game. In particular, some of the boss fights here are beyond epic and each ends in such a spectacularly violent and gruesome way that I couldn't help but enthusiastically describe each kill to friends, all of whom then demanded to see it for themselves. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I often had an audience when playing.

The moment-to-moment encounters with enemies and bosses in God of War III are easily the best in the genre thanks to Kratos' new moves and some very smart refinements, like completely revamped combat while climbing. As a result, even if it doesn't surpass the previous games in the trilogy in the quality of the overall package, it's often the most fun entry in the series. It's also unbelievably gorgeous both in terms of fidelity and artwork, and I frequently stopped just to ogle the amazing environments. This game is just impressive in every sense of the word.

It's unfortunate that God of War III makes the mistakes it does, but at the end of the day, those mistakes won't prevent you from having to pick up your jaw at least once per hour. It's a stunning game completely worth purchasing.

God of War III / $59.99 / PS3

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Review // Dante's Inferno

As I died for the 23rd time on the same section, I couldn't help but wonder whether the developers of Dante's Inferno are geniuses worthy of praise and study, or just incompetent. I'm betting on the latter.

God of War Minus Fun

The quickest way to describe how Dante's Inferno plays is "like God of War, but awful." The mechanics of how Dante swings his scythe and traverses the environment are identical to Kratos and solid enough, but the enemies and level design are frustratingly bad. The vast majority of enemy types can be tossed into the air and easily destroyed, eliminating all challenge, but the ones that can't just feel unfair, even on normal difficulty. You can switch difficulties on the fly, but there's such a ridiculous divide between easy and normal that neither are satisfying. The difficulty curve overall is so sporadic that by the end of the game, I just left it on easy to get it over with.

Where things get more interesting is with the level design. It's tough to tell whether the developers intended for the levels to be infuriating or not, but they definitely succeeded. For instance, while navigating my way through the Greed circle, there was a room that required me to jump from platform to platform, avoiding rotating blades and flying enemies, and if I fell, I'd have to fight a set of moderately tough enemies before climbing back up. I entered that room with essentially zero health, so getting to the exit was challenging enough, but just beyond it was another platform with a bonus collectible on it and an arbitrary pit of lava beneath.

Something about that platform made it impossible to jump to, so I died every time I attempted. But I wanted that collectible, so I kept going. I must have died at least 30 times in that room trying to get that stupid thing before I just gave up and moved on with my life. So are the developers geniuses? They certainly taught me a hard lesson about the ills of greed. But I think that's affording them way too much credit. When playing God of War, it feels like focus testing was used to make the experience as fun and streamlined as possible. When playing Dante's Inferno, it feels like focus testing was used to make the experience as aggravating and maddening as possible.

On The Losing End

But that's how comparisons between Dante's Inferno and God of War go: with Dante's Inferno on the losing end. As hard as I tried to judge it fairly and keep God of War comparisons off my mind as I played, Dante's Inferno fought harder to emphasize them. Constant interruptions to give Dante's backstory are a much more unrefined and jarring take on God of War's delivery of Kratos' tale. Unlike games like Darksiders that use other games for inspiration but have unique takes on them, Dante's Inferno just feels incredibly derivative and lazy, not helped by the fact that it does nothing better than or even as good as God of War.

Even when judged on its own merits, Dante's Inferno's story is a clumsy mess. It spends every single cut scene explaining why Dante is a vile, despicable person, but then gives him the authority to judge and either punish or absolve famous Greek figures for their sins. There's never any justification for his ability to judge others and it only gets worse as the game tells you more about Dante's past sins. The plot feels especially poorly conceived at the end when the game tries to pull off a twist that is completely undeserved and contradicted by multiple events throughout the game before fizzling out to set up for a puzzling sequel.

I'm a huge God of War fanboy; I'd like to make that clear. At first, I was willing to cut Dante's Inferno some slack because it doesn't start off that badly. But the further I got into it, the more it degenerated: It directly lifted sections of level design from God of War. It reused sound effects from Dead Space. It became more erratic and sadistic with its difficulty curve. It made less sense from basic narrative and theological standpoints. It became a hell built just for me, my own personal descent into madness, so I stopped cutting it slack and started holding it more accountable for its flaws.

In the end, Dante's Inferno mostly nails the core mechanics of God of War but fails to do anything original or even competent with them, instead crafting a frustrating, inconsistent experience that isn't worth your time or money.

Dante's Inferno / $59.99 / PS3 [reviewed], 360, PC

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Blur Beta Code Giveaway

[Update: Okay, that's it! Using a random number generator, I've selected denniservanvittig. You should get the code in your email very soon. Thanks everyone!]

Quick contest here: I have an extra code for the Blur Xbox 360 beta and I'd like to give it to one of you.

All you have to do is leave a comment below with your email address and I'll randomly select someone tomorrow afternoon.

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Review // Darksiders

I'm not a big fan of how stale the Legend of Zelda series has gotten in recent years. It's the same old story, same old dungeons, and same old progression every single time. I've been craving a Zelda game that feels fresh, that takes me somewhere new, that shakes things up. It just turns out that Darksiders is that game.

A Zelda Game Through and Through

Darksiders is like the videogame version of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup: It takes Zelda's formula and pacing and mixes it with God of War's combat, creating something new and delicious in the process. The key here is that Darksiders feels like it's paying homage to both of these games rather than just stealing from them. You can't help but smile when you've defeated a dungeon boss and there's a portal waiting to teleport you out, or when you solve a puzzle and a satisfying little jingle plays. It feels like the developers had a lot of fun making their own versions of the little touches that make Zelda feel like Zelda. More importantly, they never deviate from the tried-and-true Zelda formula:

1. Go to a dungeon.
2. Fight some enemies, solve some puzzles.
3. Get a new item.
4. Fight more enemies, solve puzzles that require the new item.
5. Defeat the dungeon boss using the item.

But even if you've never played a Zelda game before, Darksiders is still going to feel very familiar. It borrows so liberally from so many different games that it's shocking that it doesn't end up being derivative trash. Instead, it feels like a game that doesn't hide its inspirations and is better for it. You'll use the glaive from Dark Sector like a Zelda boomerang to light torches and set off bomb plants. You'll solve mind-bending puzzles with the orange and blue portals from Portal. You'll unlock increasingly brutal combat moves to make your character feel like a hybrid between Link and Kratos.

All of these different influences fit together extremely well and makes Darksiders a pure gamer's game. It never manages to surpass any of the games it borrows from, but it doesn't really need to. Darksiders does a great job mixing all of these elements together well enough that you won't even care that you can immediately identify which game inspired each new section. In fact, seeing these elements work so well together makes the very concept of Darksiders seem like a total no-brainer.

The Legend of War

Just as surprising is how well Darksiders' story comes together. As War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, you're framed for starting the apocalypse early and have to clear your name. It's a pretty typical premise, but like everything else about this game, it's executed upon well enough that a lack of originality doesn't matter. The writers never take the easy twists, instead keeping things fairly straightforward and treating the audience with a degree of respect that's definitely refreshing. Some legitimately great voice acting complements the whole experience, and the game ends on such a cool note that I actually stood up and fist pumped.

The only aspect of the entire game that I simply couldn't get on board with is the art style. Characters are wildly out of proportion and look like the artists never stopped designing them, adding more and more layers until each character looked ridiculous. I love how colorful and exaggerated the world is, but the inhabitants just look silly. In the behind the scenes extras for God of War, the designers explained that the more armor they put on Kratos, the more he lost his individualism and brutality, so they started stripping it away. Darksiders' artists would've benefitted from this philosophy.

The most impressive thing about Darksiders to me is just how good it is. Mixing so many different games together seems like a sure recipe for disaster where it tries to do everything and succeeds at nothing, but somehow Darksiders pulled it off. And in doing so, it became the Zelda game I've been craving for years.

Darksiders / $59.99 / PS3 [reviewed], 360

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