I decided to play through it with my other half in co-op and set my expectations low. Well, I was blown away. For such a simple idea they really manage to pull you into this fantasy world. The audio score is perfect, and wouldn’t of seemed out of place in one of the LotR’s films. Visually, it is also a treat, with a great use of shadows and lighting to add depth and majesty to the world.

The story is fairly by-the-numbers. Mystical land, darkness overshadows it, unlikely troupe of accidental heroes are thrown together to save the day.. you’ve seen it before. The Trine (a mystical artifact) is also a bit of clever deus ex machina that binds the 3 main characters together at the start of the game so that they have to work together to free themselves from it. The characters that make up the main playable cast are a Thief – has a grapple and a bow, a Knight – has a shield and can lift/throw objects and a Wizard – can summon shapes and move some objects with magic.

The dialogue throughout is passable and the narration between levels is competent but the main aspect that will pull you in is the gameplay. The gameplay is where it really gets you. It reminded me of what Little Big Planet could of been if they had given you some of the world builder abilities in the story mode of the game itself.

If played in coop you can have up to 3 players playing simultaneously. Or if played on your own you can control all of the characters by switching between them. Each character has unique abilities that you will need to utilize frequently throughout the levels, and, on more than a few occasions, you may be forced to improvise a different strategy if one of the abilities of the characters is inaccessible due to them being dead (until the next checkpoint) or having run out of magic. Along with this, each character obtains new variations on their abilities as they progress in the game which leads to the gameplay never becoming stale or repetitive.

It took me about 3 evenings to complete the game with my other half. We both immensely enjoyed it from start to finish. The puzzles and obstacles had us laughing at the various solutions we’d each come up with. Some which would fail, others which would work even though we thought they shouldn’t. There were also numerous points throughout that had us gritting our teeth, but we’d eventually pass them with some perseverance.

Anyway, my final verdict is that this is a game that I highly recommend. It’s beautifully designed, and has really solid gameplay, what more do you want.

I think it sits in that grey area between an RPG and an FPS that I’ve been looking for. It’s actually what I imagined WoW was going to be before it was released, an MMO version of the RTS Warcraft where humans control each unit in a battle and the results from those battles allow you to level your character.

The XP and bonus system is also a good way to give people an incentive to follow their leaders and also to play as a squad. At first I didn’t really like the lack of a killcam but on further thought, a killcam encourages a player to go off and play on his own, hunting down individual enemies that shot you, which really isn’t the point, it’s not a deathmatch game. The distance to the spawn point was also a gripe, but, again, if you are playing in a proper squad with medics and leaders you shouldn’t need to respawn as often as you should get resuscitated. The distance to the spawn also is a deterrent to spawn camping.

I’ve a few gripes still though:
1) The inability to throw back grenades is a pain. It makes holding a capture point redundant as a few grenades in the door will kill everyone or force everyone to run out into enemy fire.
2) Group comms need to be enabled outside of the game lobby and in the group menu itself
3) If I can cancel a reload by switching to my pistol I should be able to cancel a reload by using a melee attack also. The amount of times I’ve died in close quarters because my clip emptied and I’ve been forced to run around bunny hopping waiting for my reload animation to finish.

But overall it’s impressive. Definitely a day one buy for me I think.

Anyway, I was kinda getting bored with the artwork on the faceplate of the stick so started searching around the net for a way to change this. I came across this thread on the SRK Forums (if you are into Street Fighter at all you are probably already a member) and after a few emails back and forth with the guy, I designed some artworks and sent them on to him to be printed. A week after the payment cleared they arrived in the post.

That night, pretty much, I installed the new faceplate. It was such a relief for it to fit in place exactly. Usual with custom made parts that are coming from another country I always have the slight fear that they just won’t match up for some when they are being installed, which causes the headache of sending them back… etc. To have it just screw into place like the stick was always meant to have this faceplate was excellent, and I take my hat off to the guy who makes these plates.

As you can see in the gallery below. I got a second artwork printed should I ever get bored of the one I have currently. I’ve also designed a 3rd artwork which I’ll get printed in time for the release of Super Street Fighter IV (whenever that may be?)

If you have any questions or want to know the specifics of how the faceplate was installed (it’s fairly straight forward) then leave a comment and I’ll be sure to reply.

Homepage is here: mechlivinglegends.net

Download link (working at time of posting): MM:LL Beta download

So here I am, playing the game. Like always, this review will contain updates as I play:

Update 1 – 28/09/09: Oh its Valkyria not Valkyrie

A problem that is becoming all too frequent with PS3 games is trying to get into the actual game for the first time. I put in the bluray, start it up and immediately I’m prompted to install an update. 5 minutes later the game loads. I know it’s optional, but the bluray is so slow that, if given the option I’ll always install to the disk. So another~15 minutes go by before I can actually load into the game for the first time.

The game is set in some pseudo/fantasy WWII scenario, but instead of the Nazis we have the "Imperial Alliance"  and instead of the Allies we have the "Atlantic Federation", and instead of soldiers we have teenage girls and boys. The whole war has started over some fantasy mineral called Ragnite, about which I know very little at this point in the game.

I watch a fair bit of anime so the plot is really of little concern to me, they all follow a relatively linear progression. I’m mainly interested in the gameplay, something I’m finding, thus far, there is very little of.

I think I’m maybe 2 hours into the game and I’ve played all of 3 short levels. In between which there are a plethora of cut scenes and inane conversations between the characters (just watched a nice verbose discourse between the 2 main characters over the specific details of the uniforms they are wearing).

Coming off the back of MGS4, I’d really hoped the cutscene to gameplay ratio would be higher. Admittedly I’m just over the tutorial phase hump of the game, where they try to teach me the game dynamics whilst also instilling in me the overarching purpose of it all, so, for now, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

I just really hope the game starts to increase the number of playable levels soon, without having to wade through 4 or 5 separate cutscenes to get there.

Update 2 – 01/10/09: Who doesn’t love loads of menus

Played a bit further into the game now. I’m just about to invade some forested area and break the enemies supply routes. The number of cutscenes between each playable level is a joke, and the dialogue is mostly inane jabbering that adds nothing to the game for me.

On top of this, as I’ve been progressing, they’ve been adding more and more menus, and sub menus that I have to load in and out of frequently. For what? There is no reason for them. Rather than having a separate menu for equipping weapons, another menu for upgrading weapons, another menu for upgrading my squads stats, another menu for assigning squad members to my team… etc, they could of just combined all of these areas into 1, easily. Further, when you load into a menu, some character pops up to welcome you before you actually get to do what you wanted in that menu, they always have to be skipped or listened to and can’t be disabled. They remind me of the paperclip in Windows XP, except I know I am going to have to suffer them until the game is over. The Drill Sargent is particularly irritating, popping up multiple times while you are in the training menu.

The sad thing about all this, much like MGS4, is that the gameplay is actually very enjoyable. I find myself loading up the game in the time before I go to work in the morning and playing through one of the skirmishes (missions you can play as much as you want to earn XP and money). I only hope the game gets it together as I progress and ratio of time I spend in and out of menus and watching cutscenes starts to lower in comparison to how much of the game I’m actually playing.

Update 3 – 16/10/09: A.I stands for Astounding Ineptitude

Wow, has it been over two weeks since I last updated this post? This game has really been a slow burner for me. I only complete about 1 or 2 actual gameplay missions a day, at most (it’s usually just 1). My routine is this, before I go to work in the morning, I start up Valkyria Chronicles and watch the inevitable 10 minutes of cutscenes before I get to the next playable mission in the game. I then change to the HQ tab and upgrade weapons and unit stats… etc, reorganizing my squad for the next mission. I’ll then try a skirmish to get some points so I can train more and develop my weapons. I then go to work. I come home and I play 1 mission, I then see the plethora of following cutscenes laid out before me once again and go "forget this I’ll watch them in the morning"… and the cycle continues.

The game plays out like a very bad anime. Like Pokemon or Bleach (oh no I didn’t!). It tries, nauseatingly, to mirror WWII with set pieces and plot lines (i.e. I just played through an area that was supposed to be a parallel to the Nazi Jewish Concentration Camps) It all feels wrong, very wrong. I’m playing as these kids developing weapons to more effectively bludgeon and kill the enemy, whilst I’m supposed to believe they care that a building with some miners in it was burnt down. These children are sociopaths. They get up in the morning, put on their prissy outfits, makeup and do their hair into fancy buns then proceed to march onto the battle field and shoot anything that moves in the face. They then go home and talk about bugs and trivial teenager issues.

I dunno, I’ll stick with it to see it through to completion. I just hope I’m past the midway point already.

Update 4 – 16/12/09: Done!

So, 2 months later, I’m finally wrapping up this post. I can’t finish the game. Truth be told I haven’t even had it in my possession for a few weeks. The initial copy I got was a rental, then I sent that back and got a lend of the game off a friend. It sat there gathering dust for a few weeks until I gave it back to him. This game goes up there with Doom 3 and Battle Axe: Beast Rider as 1 I just could not bring myself to see through to completion.

I just had too many issues with the game; the unnecessarily involved menu system, the asinine dialogue, the clichéd anime characters, the rubbish AI and the slow, predictable and basic gameplay. I stopped just after we’d freed the Jews Darcsen from some concentration camp mine. I’m sure fanboys of the game will tell me “Oh man, it gets so much better after that point”, but I don’t care. I was a good few hours into the game and it still wasn’t pulling me in, how many hours should I of given it before calling it quits?

Anyway, for me it was a complete let down. Perhaps the hype of this being an undiscovered gem led me to expect greater things (I expected gameplay equalling Advance Wars at least) and clouded my judgement. Whatever the cause, it’s definitely a game I won’t be picking up again or recommending.

With Shattered Horizon, they have eventually done just that. What caught my eye with this was the price bracket, as I’d previously bought a Futuremark product I was able to pre-order this game directly from them for 25% off. What a great idea, rewarding customer loyalty with real world perks. If only other game publishers would adopt this strategy. So, with my discount I got the game for a mere ~€12. This price initially had me worried that I will be screwed by pay-for DLC. They are currently promising dedicated servers and free DLC but only time will tell I guess.

In game though, it loads super fast and the menu is minimal to say the least with only really 3 areas: Play, Options and Ranking, the last one I will have little interest in. So, like usual, I configure my controls and the first thing I notice is that the controls are also super minimal. You only have 1 weapon so of course you can’t pick any others, but still, I was surprised how quickly I had my controls set up (I’m a lefty so unlike you righties I can’t just jump into the game right away). After this, I configured my graphical settings and set everything to max to see if my PC could handle it. I’m using a 4870×2 and a fairly beefy PC so it should. It runs the hog Crysis fine.

After confirming my graphical settings I then noticed something else that I found odd. This companies bread and butter is benchmarks, yet there isn’t any benchmark in game to see if my PC can handle the graphical settings. There isn’t even a SP player mode so you have to jump right into a game and hope that you PC won’t start displaying a sideshow while you’re being shot at. Admittedly I haven’t really looked into the LAN options yet to see if I could host an offline game, which probably would be a better option.

Soooo…. finally, the game. I, pensively, like it. It’s different. Graphically it feels crisp and clean, what you’d expect from the sterile environment of space. It reminded me of Mirrors Edge tbh, with clean lines, blinding light from the Sun and solid blocks of colour on the space platforms and structures. The detailing is minimal though. The surface of the asteroids have fairly low resolution textures as far as I could see and there was minimal bump mapping on them. Overall it looks nice and runs well but it’s not groundbreaking in anyway. Given that it’s space it’s true to form, but even being able to enter a space station and move through a hydroponics bay for a brief bit of greenery would of been nice.

For audio, there is 2 modes you can toggle, Silent running and Sound Simulation. The Sound Simulation is the default setting. It basically is the games way of making up for the fact that sound doesn’t travel all that well in space, so playing a game where people can attack you from 360 degrees of angles in 3 dimensions and not being able to instantly hear where the bullets are coming from would of been a huge drawback and more of a gaming frustration than anything. Kindly, for space purists, there is another mode that you can enable, which makes the experience of floating through the void seem a little bit more authentic.

In this mode you mainly hear the noise of yourself breathing inside the suit and the muted sounds of your gun firing. At first I thought this mode was mainly just for a personal preference but I soon realized that it’s some form of stealth mode to move undetected. It disables the lights on your gun (which tell you which grenade is selected and how much ammo is in your clip) the booster on your backpack (leaving you with basic thrusters) and the majority of your HUD. I’ve yet to find a use for it in game, but I gather it must be so that you, when moving or trying to flank, don’t show up as a red blip on your enemies HUD.

For gameplay, it feels basic. The idea is simple, float around, get to locations, take out the enemy. You can stick to surfaces but your movement is so impaired that you largely are just making yourself a sitting duck. But then when in space you are wide out in the open and inertia plays such a big part of getting around that if you are getting shot at the chances are you will die (more so if your back is turned to the enemy as your thruster pack can be shot and explode). The booster pack is really your best friend as it can quickly make you change direction and get you to cover (which is why running in Stealth mode with it disabled is such a drawback). On top of your 1 machine gun, you have 3 grenade types. EMP (disables the enemies suit), an explosive one which basically pushes enemies out from behind cover and, my favourite, Ice. Ice basically creates a smoke screen to block the enemies line of sight. It saved me more than a few times when I was defenceless floating in the void of space.

Anyway, I only managed to get about an hour of gaming in with it. I’ll post back here with an update once I’ve some more time getting used to it and learning the levels and modes.

Update: Recorded a video yesterday to showcase the levels in Shattered Horizon.