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.

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.

However I let my misgivings lie, and installed the game (thankfully not encountering the known glitch that stops it from installing). Initial impression weren’t good, the voice acting is mediocre, the graphics are below the quality of its contemporaries and the controls feel clunky. There is an odd delay when you press jump that just doesn’t make it feel fluid. I understand why this is, as you are charging for a great jump height, but still, it took some getting used to.

If you’ve played the Hulk game on the PS2 or indeed the more recent “Spider Man: Web of Shadows” you’ll start to notice instant similarities. The gameplay is far from unique and in a lot of places feels like a blatant rip-off. Web of Shadows is pretty recent in my mind so I’ll stick with the comparisons to that.

Here are the qualities so far that the 2 games have in common: Set in New York, main story revolves around an infection breakout that turns the people into zombies but that gives the protagonist extra abilities, abilities include shooting tendrils from body, protagonist can climb and run up walls like a spider, there is a military presence in New York also that is unaffected by the infection, there a load of collectibles to get which allow you to purchase upgrades a lot of which can be found in and around Central Park and Times Square, protagonist can pick up and throw cars, during the course of the game and spread of the infection the city gets more and more chaotic… etc

On top of this, at a point about midway through the game you unlock an ability which makes you look almost identical to the protagonist at the end of Dark Sector. If this was a coincidence, it was a big one. I mean the outfit look, colour

What sets this game apart though is the ability to hijack Tanks and Helicopters. It’s a nice touch, but doesn’t really add a lot to it as they can be destroyed rather easily (and again this has been done before and better  in games like Just Cause or the more recent Mercenaries 2). The only really unique ability I’ve seen in this game is the ability to mimic and patsy people. You can walk up behind a soldier, consume them, then become them and point at another soldier to claim they are the target. It’s a nice way of creating a distraction so that you can slip into a base.

Other than that the story is rather basic, guy gets given a load of powers, wants to find out who did it to him, has amnesia… etc. Throughout all this his sister is helping him track people down, completely oblivious it would seem that  her brother, who you play, is out there killing thousands of people. To add to the mediocre plot, the voice acting is sub-par. Compared to even Mercenaries 2 it’s lacking. On top of all this the graphics and musical score aren’t a high point either. Graphically it looks below Web of Shadows in a lot of areas, and the score just isn’t memorable.

Overall, it’s a slightly above average game. It’s fun to play but won’t leave you with any lasting memories. If you are looking for a sandbox game to roam around in I’d recommend inFamous, same type of game but I’ve heard that in nearly every area it’s superior to [prototype]. I’ll give you a definite on that in the next while  though as I plan to also play inFamous to see if it really is that good. But for now I really can’t see why [prototype] could be considered any more than a rental.

What happened was that I fell in love with the game, no joke, I love this game now. I started off hating the fact I had received this game in the post, changed to mild amusement at the sackboy sixaxis movements and costume designs, laughed at the odd design of the levels and then just proceeded to think this was one of the best games I’d played in a long time. Graphically the game is simple, although it does have it’s moments (soft fabrics and materials look especially realistic and tactile) but what sets it apart is the consistent, mildly difficult platforming and puzzles. What makes it even better is the knowledge all throughout the game that it is giving you the tools to make levels equal to the ones you are playing. I literally completed the entire main campaign in one sitting over the course of a day with my better half, and as soon as I was finished started trying out some of the community made levels.

The quality and rating system is such that you can easily tell which levels have been liked by others, and so far I haven’t been dissapointed with them. This gave me the gusto to make my first foray into designing a level myself. I’ve used a few level designers on the PC and they have never been user friendly, but LBP has hit the nail on the head. Within 10 minutes you can have built yourself a rocket car, within another 20 you can of designed a complete race course to drive it along. I must of plowed a good few hours into a level I was building to test out various features and mechanics of the game, but it only felt like I’d been playing for half an hour.

This is the true test of a game in my opinion, if you can play it and become so engrossed in it that you don’t even notice the passage of time. There’s really not much more I can say about it, the gameplay is excellent, the artstyle will appeal to all ages, the soundtrack is perfect and the developers have given you, the gamer, the steering wheel. I like it so much I’ve sent back my rental copy and bought the game. If you haven’t already I’d recommend playing it, and if you are looking for that reason to buy a PS3, this game is it.

Currently I have installed “Prince Caspian”, “The Incredible Hulk”, “Bolt”, “Wall-E”, “The Spiderwick Chronicles”, “Monsters vs Aliens”, “Eragon”… etc. I have a number of other games installed, usually racing games, but my HTPC is mainly a dumping ground to try out the stuff that gets churned out shortly before a movie gets released.

The problem with movie games is the development time. They need to churn out a game, relatively quickly and they aren’t really ever meant to stand on their own. They are really made to just augment the hype surrounding a movie so as to pull in a little bit more bread for the bottom line. Due to this they are usually bottom scrapers in terms of quality. I never really pay them much attention, they are really just games for comic relief between games I’m actually serious about playing.

That was until a few days ago when I watched the review for the new “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” game on GameTrailers (embedded below) released to coincide with the movie release. The review is mildly glowing of the game, and apart from some minor gripes they liked it. A friend in work who also has the game has already completed it once and is on his second play through. I had already booked my tickets to watch the movie, so decided to get the game also to play after it.

Unfortunately the movie was well below what I was expecting. It had it’s highlights, but overall it was a let down. I came home disappointed and decided to jump into this Wolverine game right away. Immediately the opening cinematic is better than anything in the movie itself. The game loosely follows the movie and fills in the gaps, but what separates it is the gameplay. Unlike some other brawlers, they have nicely split up your time between puzzle solving and fighting. This is balanced in such a way that neither aspect of the gameplay becomes repetitive. It is equal, if not better than DMC4 or even Ninja Gaiden: Sigma. For a movie game this is amazing. I mean the developers could of taken the cheap route, followed by most when churning out these types of games and given the trailers plenty of gloss but left the overall experience and gameplay lacking. They would of still sold the game off the hype and made their money. But care seems to of been taken to raise this game above not only movie games, but also the movie itself and even games in the same genre as it (it is definitely better than Conan or Heavenly Sword).

This game is more about putting the player in the Marvel universe and not about putting them in the movie. It succeeds because the developers and designers have made a game that stays true to the personality of Wolverine and also made a game that isn’t wholly about form over function. Little “easter eggs” in the game highlight this, with nods to the TV show LOST, and the games WoW and Portal. Overall this game feels like a game made by gamer/comic geeks for gamer/comic geeks and is a breath of fresh air. It is really a rarity to find a game that has come out of a movie, a decidedly average movie, that is this good. Here’s hoping they turn this game into a series.