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.

Update 1 – 28/05/09: Now I’m the king of the swingers, a jungle VIP

I’ve been ploughing loads of free time into Little Big Planet and Street Fighter IV lately, but decided to give those a break to give this a whirl. Initial impressions are good, the dialogue is 80′s camp (I don’t know if this is on purpose or not) which is actually humorous, and the gameplay is interesting. To keep with the Bionic Arm theme of the original, a bomb has gone off in some generic city which means you can’t just walk right up to the bosses door, you need your extendable swing arm to grapple onto signposts, girders and broken bridges to swing from one checkpoint to the next. The swinging makes up the meat of the gameplay, the bones comes from what is at the checkpoints when you get there. You will usually have to fight a bunch of baddies to progress (on occasion you can go around them) but how you do so will govern what upgrades and trophies you will receive. It is usually in your best interest to see what challenges have been unlocked and complete them as soon as possible. The variety of challenges keeps the fights fresh as you are not just running and gunning. Thought has to go into how you plan to attack the next squad or outpost.

At this point I still like it. The swing mechanics can feel rather stiff at times, but I’m getting used to it. Hopefully, as more abilities unlock, the game will continue to get better.

Update 2 – 29/05/09: Doin’ it for da bling

Well I’ve decided I’m going to try and get a platinum trophy in this game. I purposely played through it on my first run in the hardest difficulty to get the Trophy for it, and after having a look at the list of Trophies (thankfully none of them are online grind trophies) it should be easily possible. Playing through it in Commando mode is tough. A lot of the time I have to resort to exploiting glitches in the levels to progress. For example I encountered 3 Biomechs blocking my path, I couldn’t go around them, and fighting all 3 of them at once at this difficulty would be suicide. So I found a ledge that they couldn’t reach and just took pot shots at them, slowly whittling away at each of there healths until I could jump in and pull off a radial move that would take out all 3 of them at once. Also, Snipers at this difficulty are an absolute pain. They track you without mistake, you really have to get used to moving out of cover, performing one quick finishing move, then back into cover before the next Sniper in the area has locked onto you.

The only consolation is that I imagine I will be playing it again now to unlock the rest of the trophies, but thankfully this difficulty level will be out of the way. The easier difficulties should be a breeze.

Update 3 – 01/06/09: Swing and a… hit!

Well I finished Bionic C0mmando over the weekend in commando mode, then finished it again a day later to unlock all of the trophies and get the platinum. In commando mode, the difficulty was insane in some places (particularly areas with snipers) but by the end it felt like something of substance had been accomplished. On my second play through I lowered the difficulty to normal (the lowest allowable setting) and while it didn’t feel like as much of a struggle, it was a whole lot more fun.

Moves I couldn’t even attempt before I now had plenty of time to pull off. for example, there are these flying baddies named “Polycrafts”. In commando mode, I had to constantly be in cover, shooting at them from a distance as they would never come close enough to allow me to grapple them. In normal mode, I was able to swing on a girder and throw myself towards them as I could take a lot more damage, this allowed me to get close enough to grapple onto them and perform an “adrenaline” finishing move, which basically pulls the operater out of the craft thus disabling it.

I thought the story was pretty solid (albeit let down significantly by the pretty bad voice acting) and the ending just made you hungry for a sequel. A few of the levels had a really good epic feel to them, an example being the boss fight against the Mohole. Everything about this was perfect, the size of the boss, the sounds and the music and the atmosphere of the level. But this is just a drop in the pond.

Overall I really enjoyed this game. I thought the musical score was excellent and the sound effects where perfect (plenty of bass used to great effect), gameplay wise it never got repetitive or boring and graphically it was solid, changing environments frequently enough so as to never feel tired. If you’re looking for a challenge, some fun, a feast of eye and ear candy or a bunch of easily obtained trophies for your collection then I highly recommend this game.

Story:  8/10

The main premise of Resistance is that instead of WWII ever happening in the middle of the 20th century, an infection spread out of Russia that caused humans to turn into these mutants named Chimera. So the game is set in the 1940′s and 50′s. In the original you fought in Britain to defend it, but for Resistance 2 you are now fighting to protect the US. The game picks up right where it left off at the end of “Resistance: Fall of Man”, where you have destroyed a Chimeran power plant and are leaving the wreckage behind. You are picked up by the American Army and taken into custody to be studied as you are infected with the Chimeran virus. The base you are at eventually gets attacked and you are given orders to find and kill a high ranking Chimeran, named Daedalus all the while your infection continues to get increasingly worse. This makes up the guts of the story. The setting in the 1950′s is really an afterthought to the story. The game could be set in the present day and I can’t see how the game would be much different, except for maybe the music that is playing on the radios and the cars you see parked in the street.

Design:  8/10

The game opens with you, as Nathan, trying to defend and escape from your rehabilitation and training facility in Iceland. This level gives you a baptism of fire as to the controls of the game (I like this, there is nothing I hate more than the mandatory, labored tutorial level) From there you are set for the game, learning the controls and the mechanics of the various weapons. A knowledge of the weapons from FoM will also come in handy. Although there are enough newer weapons to choose from that it makes the learning curve the same regardless of whether you’ve played the original. The levels are laid out in a linear fashion although they frequently have open plazas where you either going to have to fight off a boss or a number of Chimeran attacking from different sides. These plazas give the levels a sense of openess, but really you are following a line that leads you to the end of the level. The weapons themselves are also well balanced, giving you just enough of the highpowered weapons that you don’t end up misering them, waiting for a boss, and instead use them as soon as you get them. They’ve also rectified a real irritation that I had with FoM, and that was that in the later levels every Chimeran was equipped with an Auger. If you don’t know this weapon, it is single handedly the best and worst weapon in any game as it can track you through walls and also shoot through walls. A great asset when you have it but a complete pain when the baddies have it. In FoM it made most of the levels and their areas of cover useless as there was nowhere you could hide that the Auger couldn’t shoot you. You just had to keep running around hoping you wouldn’t get hit long enough so that you could take them out. The Chimeran also had an endless amount of ammo. Thankfully in resistance 2, the number of baddies with an Auger is kept to a minimum, and even still you can defend against them now by erecting a shield from the Auger or Wraith gun.

Gameplay:  7/10

What they really got right however, aside from the weapons and level design, was the pacing. There isn’t a dull moment where you are merely commuting. Even in the corridors that take you from one plaza to another they have filled them with Chimerans known as Chameleons. These creatures remain invisible right up until they are about to attack you, so you have to constantly be on your guard against them as they tend to attack whenever you start thinking that the games pace is slowing down. Also, this game has brought back boss fights, something a lot of FPS’s tend to be doing away with in favor of a more streamlined and seamless gaming experience. I personally love boss fights, they add highlights to a game and make it feel a lot more memorable. I’m sure years from now I’ll have forgotten the transitions between the levels in Call of Duty 4 but the various bosses in Resistance 2 will still be as clear as day, much like the bosses I came to expect from my favorite 16-bit era games. The games main let down, however, is it’s end boss. Some will say that the actual ending sequence is excellent, personally the last level of a game is what defines it for me. It felt like they just stopped pushing. Up until the last level it felt like everything was getting progressively more and more difficult, and then just fizzled out to wrap everything up. In my opinion they made the same mistake with the ending that they did in FoM, in that they give you some simple, arbitrary task instead of a boss or level that challenges all of the skills you have learnt throughout the game.

Presentation:  8/10

Visually, it’s almost a complete improvement over FoM. Being that FoM was a PS3 launch title this is not surprising, and I’d say most people where expecting nothing less. Style wise I can’t say that anything jumps out at me. I mean games like Final Fantasy, Gears of War and even Half Life are instantly recognizable by their visual style. Resistance 2, even though its set in a past era, really just looks like most other FPS’s out there. I mean, sure, there are some stand out moments and parts that are visually stunning, but you will always have the twinge that you have seen them before. In fact the towers, the spinners and the shells embedded in the ground are more than a little reminiscent of the Citadel, the headcrabs and the headcrab shells in Half Life 2. That being said, it was a pleasure to commute through the levels which embodied how you would imagine American cities and suburbs would look in the 1950′s if they had been overrun with mutants.

Conclusion:

Overall though the game was enjoyable to play through. Personally I won’t be getting into the co-op or versus much, but as a taster the single player campaign was enough to give me an idea of the game. This game is a definitite step in the right direction for Insomniac, a change from some of the other big let downs recently, so there is hope they can push the series further in the future, to possible rival the likes of Half life 2 instead of piggy backing off it.

Score: 7.75/10

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It is also commonly held that the only people who actually play games are children and teenagers, therefore (much like the same stereotype that gets applied to you if you like anime) if you are an adult playing video games you are obviously being immature and should grow up and watch some TV.

Both the stereotypical image and age group of gamers is wrong. Most people might be surprised to know that the core market of gamers is between 18 and 35 years old. I put this down to the fact that most people exposed to games for the first time where born in the 70′s or 80′s when it started to explode and become popular in the mainstream. These people have grown up with games and are now in their adulthood and see no reason to give it up.

I also put this stereotype down to a generation thing. My grandparents saw no benefit to TV, they viewed it as a waste of time and money. Now, with the generation that has grown up with TV it is odd to enter someones house and not see a TV in the corner. The current upcoming generation is growing up in a world where the saturation of gaming is widespread. Whether it be the casual gamer who has their Nintendo DS or their mobile phone games or the serious gamer with their “Next Gen” consoles and their custom built PC’s. They will put a gaming unit alongside their TV like it is mandatory and think nothing of it.

I couldn’t imagine my life without games. I have little interest in passive media like radio and TV, I’d rather read my news online and contribute via discussion forums or get together with some friends and play some versus/co-op games rather than watch TV and let it dictate how the story unfolds.

Gaming to me though is not only a great way to get together with friends either in the flesh or online, but there is such a variety of games that I can use it to relax in the evening, blow off steam after a hard day in work, play an active part in the unfolding of a story or feel that sense of achievement from completing something, much like the feeling you get from finishing a jigsaw puzzle or crossword. There is also a sense of confidence you get when you play a game and see yourself getting noticeably better over time as you master the intricacies of the games control.

So from now on I guess I will also be blogging about games I’m playing and my thoughts and opinions of them. I hope if you are reading this and do tend to stereotype gamers that you will maybe rethink your opinions because, whether you like or not, gamers are here to stay and I’m proud to be one of them.

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