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.

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.

I’ll be playing this game on this PC:

CPU: Intel E8500 4Ghz dual core
RAM: OCZ 8GB PC2-8000 DDRII
GFX: ATI 4870×2 overclocked
HDD: OCZ 128GB SSD SATAII
OS: Vista Ultimate x64 SP1

Update 1 – 22/04/09: Nothing new, but entertaining

So I installed this game on the PC. Install time was about 20 minutes. Once finished I tried starting the game and ran into my first issue. When I tried to change the resolution in game and apply it the game would crash to the desktop. A quick 5 minutes of googling and I found I needed to manually set the resolution by editing a config file in the games install directory. Anyway, after fixing this annoyance I was able to start the game with my desired resolution (i.e. 1920×1200) I started the game and noticed that the load times are incredibly short (it might be my SSD drive doing that though)

I’m a few levels in now and still liking it. It feels like a cross between Gears of War, Resident Evil 4 and Infernal. All of my gripes about the PS3 demo are gone, having the accuracy of the mouse  makes the game a lot better and graphically the PC version is superior (even though it doesn’t support DX10) After a few tutorial levels where the story is set up and you are introduced to your abilities and the dynamics of the game it really picks up in pace. What separates this game from your garden variety TPS is the protagonists “glaive” or boomerang blade that he can wield along with a selection of single-handed weapons (i.e. pistol, uzi… etc) At first I thought it was just going to be a gimmick that would wear thin but so far it is actually quite fun. You can use it as a melee weapon and perform take down moves with it. You can throw it blind and also use your pistol along with it, or, my favourite option so far, is to throw it and enable a sort of “glaive cam” mode where you can follow its course and change its trajectory. It’s very handy for getting enemies around corners or ones that are in cover. So, so far I’m liking it. We’ll see if this is still the case by my next update.

Update 2 – 27/04/09: Just keeps getting better… surprisingly

I’m pretty close to the end of this game. Finished quite a few chapters of it over the weekend. The gameplay just keeps getting better. I mean the objectives are fairly straight forward, but the changing level design and the abilities you are given keep the gameplay fresh and interesting. Without the glaive, this would be just another over the shoulder shooter. But the glaive, and it’s abilities really make this game stand out. Consistantly new abilities have been unlocked throughout the game. When I wrote the previous update I had unlocked the glaive and it’s after touch abilities. I now have the ability of charging the glaive with fire, ice or electricity (if a source is close to me that I can throw the glaive into). This has a much more damaging effect on enemies. You can also use it to solve certain puzzles to progress in the level. After this I also got the ability of discharging the glaive when it was near an enemy (i.e. if I had charged it with fire, I could throw the glaive at a bunch of enemies and then discharge it all at once, causing a fireball to take out everyone within range) on top of this I now also have the ability of creating a transparent shield in front of me for a short period of time or turning myself invisible so I can sneak up on baddies and perform 1 hit takedowns. All in all they have really done a great job with the gameplay.

Update 3 – 28/04/09: Finished it!

Turns out where I saved yesterday was only around half an hour from the end of the game. The end boss needed a few retries to completely beat, but unlike some games it was a pretty good crescendo. I think all end bosses should be huge and seem insurmountable at first. Like the other bosses in this game, there was some thought involved in figuring out how to defeat this enemy. You couldn’t just unload all your lead into it and expect it to fall over. It also wasn’t easy and I’d say people playing this game on a console would have a much harder time as you need to be accurate with your shots (something made a lot more difficult with an analogue controller) Still overall I enjoyed the game. In fact you’d probably need a play through it again to get more use out of the varying abilities you unlock as you have barely had them for a level before you are given a new ability to try out.

I really hope they make a sequel to this. It feels like the original Resistance: Fall of Man game on the PS3 or even Half-Life 1. It has a lot going for it, but the world it is in and the scale of the levels needs to be greatly increased. The gameplay is there and solid, now they just need to flesh out the story and have much more expansive environments. Play this game, finish it, and let it surprise you in how good it is.

**Stay tuned, I’ll try and piece together some captured game footage showcasing some of the abilities in the game**

Story: 8/10

Surprisingly, the story of X-Blades is not that bad (well it doesn’t match how bad the games title is or how clichéd the main characters outfit is). You play as Ayumi, a blonde, 20 something, treasure hunter who finds a map to a mysterious artefact hidden in some ancient ruins. However, her journey there brings her face to face with a power that will force her to choose between the light and dark side. Due to this, rather arbitrary, choice (of which you will know nothing about your first time through the game) the ending of the game will change. Without fail, unless you’ve read up about this game before hand, you will get the bad ending. The voice acting is not the best but overall the cut scenes where sparing and where a welcome reprieve from the relentless sword wielding action. The story was simple and a little hackneyed but never the less it gave purpose to the game. Plus, Ayumi is a likeable character, more so than the likes of Lara Croft. Hopefully this game will get a sequel to develop her back story more.

Design: 7/10

The game has a few design flaws. Mainly for me was the menu system which felt akin to the one used in Resident Evil 4. You have to pause the game to go into your menu to buy new abilities, upgrade them and also to heal yourself and fill up your magic bar. It breaks up the flow of the game in my opinion. They have the directions of the D-Pad assigned to your 4 pistol fire modes (of which you’ll probably only use one while playing the game). I felt only 1 of the directions of the D-Pad could of been used for switching between fire mods and the other 3 used for switching between your main powers and healing yourself. This would of avoided the need to pause the game every time you need to switch powers (which happens more often the further into the game you get). An example would be the new Resident Evil 5 demo, where they have completed removed the need to pause the game to handle your inventory.

Other than this though the game has a lot of plus points. The fighting is fluid and the camera movement rarely annoys. Technically, it ran fine on my HTPC (8800GT, 4GB RAM, 2.4Ghz C2D), no slowdown, glitches, tearing or sound issues. From such a small developer it’s a breath of fresh air to get a PC port of a game that trumps a lot of the games out for PC made by much larger game devs (spiderman: web of shadows, i’m looking at you) that suffer from a lot bugs and glitches.

Gameplay: 6/10

This game feels like half a game in terms of gameplay. The fight system is solid, so are the powers, upgrades, camera movement and flow in the fights… but that alone makes up pretty much the whole game. There are some light platforming areas every now and again, but they don’t amount to much more than jumping to a higher platform and then down again. Unlike previous, more well known brawlers, there is really no change in the gameplay from start to finish. You enter a room, the exits lock and you have to defeat a set number of baddies before the next room unlocks. Rinse and repeat this for the whole game. What changes is how you approach each fight, which is what adds to the variety and saves the game from becoming quickly repetitive. Different baddies are weakened by different types of attacks and powers that you have to remember to progress. As the game progresses, the order in which you attack becomes important also so that you can only do damage to the main opponent once some other criteria has been met (i.e. such as freezing some guards or extinguishing some flames that are used to protect your opponent) Overall it would of been nice to have some more variety of gameplay, but what it has has been executed pretty well.

Presentation: 8/10

With loads of bloom and lens flare, this game does feel very next gen. A lot of the arenas you enter are showered in light streaming through stained glass windows or soaked in golden sunlight with thick vegetation and ancient ruins. there has been a lot of attention to detail put into the world, it’s just a pity you can’t interact with it more. The cut scenes, however, are an oddity as they are actually presented worse than the actual graphics in the game, which is a first in my opinion as the opposite is nearly always true. It looks like they where trying to go for a very, cell-shaded, anime feel in the cut scenes but it has just ended up making the polygon corners very apparent and led to some odd character animations.

Conclusion:

Overall I felt the game is worth at least a rent if you are in anyway a fan of the likes of Devil May Cry or other such brawlers. The combo system is decent enough and the graphics, while they won’t make your eyes bleed, are pretty none the less. Also the lead female is running around in nothing much more than a bathing suit with gun swords Come on you knew I had to mention it eventually. Get this game for all the reasons I mentioned above, and not because you hope to see some skin coloured polygons because the novelty will quickly wear off.

Score: 7.25/10

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However, on multiple recommendations, I tried the PS3 demo of PURE and loved it. It was enough to make me get it for the PC, as I like the control over the options and the generally better graphics.

Story: N/A

Needless to say this game does not sell it self on its rich storyline and narrative. The most you will get from your respective character of choice is a “WOOHOO!!!”, “Alright, yeah!!!” or “That’s what I’m talkin bout”. But then if you expected a storyline, you really don’t know the genre. The main aim of the game is to complete the championship and get to the numero uno position. You progress through 4 different stages, starting at D ending with A. To progress to the next stage you need to unlock a new class of engine by winning a certain amount of races. You also need to win a certain amount of races to get points to unlock the next subset of challenges within the stage. It isn’t an issue though, the game is easy enough that the majority of the time you can fluke a win.

Design: 7/10

This game feels like they released it for the console then hired the janitor to port it to the PC. It has a number of deal-breaker bugs right out of the gate that would put a lot of people off this game. First, is the vsync issue in Vista. You need to force vsync to be disabled on your graphics cards or the game will fail to load. On top of this, the loading screens frequently hang, the only known workaround, which I was able to use, is to Alt-Tab out of the game which seems to work. The game itself, once loaded, runs very well so at least there’s that. What’s odd also is that these issues have been known about for a good few months now and still there has been no patch released, as of writing this, to fix them.

Aside from this the only other gripe is the ATV building section. It really slows down the pace having to go into the builder and manually upgrade parts of your ATV, most of which don’t make any difference to its performance. Some of the aesthethic alterations allowed make no sense in my opinion, there’s these tiny mudguards beside the front wheels that will never be seen whilst playing or these metal plates that are tiny and sit in front of the back wheels. Personally, if the changes can’t be seen in online play, or even in singleplayer, then development time shouldn’t be wasted adding them as an option.

Gameplay: 9/10

What saves PURE though is the excellent gameplay. I’d go as far to say that this game feels closer to the likes of SKATE or SSX than a race game like NFS or GRID. Its shamelessly all about the ridiculous jumps and stunts (see my compilation vid below). In fact most of the time I’d completely forget about trying to get first and I’d concentrate solely on chaining together as many jumps and tricks as I could muster. Thankfully, there is a race type that allows for this, namely “Freestyle” where coming first is not required, rather the person that pulls off the most tricks and gets the most points will win. There is one mode called “Sprint” which is mainly about finishing the race as fast as possible, but these are usually quite short and more of a breather level before you get back into the action.

Presentation: 9/10

PURE looks stunning. When you pre-load your shocks and jump high off a high ramp the vistas and draw distances are staggering. Each level is like a postcard of the country you are driving in, and even though it is rarely needed, it is nice that they have given the player camera control to look around while you are flying through the air in slowmo pulling off your 1080′ flip. The trick and character animations are also flawless and chain together seamlessly.

Conclusion:

Overall this game was a blast. The single player campaign is quite short but it’s merely a taster for the online multiplayer action. It manages to be something most games of its genre fail at, and that’s fun. It’s not trying to be realistic or have a difficulty curve that will have you pulling your hair out, it’s a game that you can fire up after a long day of work and be smiling within minutes at the insane tricks you are pulling off followed by the kudos from the character you are controlling on the screen.

Score: 8/10

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It’s basically just an expansion to Crysis that has a story that runs alongside the original. You aren’t really given anything more in regards the main storyline, rather it’s main goal is to expand on one of the other members of “Raptor Team”, namely Sergeant Michael Sykes (aka Psycho). In the original you play as the Raptor Team member, First Lieutenant Jake Dunn (aka Nomad) and, like some other protagonists in FPS’s, you never get to see his face and his background is never fully expanded on throughout the game. In Warhead however, you have already been shown Psycho’s face in the original so there is no need for it to be hidden. Also his personality has already been established, as a brash, jovial individual with a thick British English accent. This allows them to do something unseen in recent FPS’s and show cut scenes 3rd person to the lead protagonist.

In my opinion I think this worked a lot better than the original as you get to see the emotive reactions on the protagonists face, it also allows for some very dramatic cut scenes throughout the game where you can see the whole scene unfold rather than being tied to seeing everything through your characters eyes. I found that by the end of this expansion, the character of Psycho had a lot more depth than Nomad had been given. In fact It would be nice to be given the option to play as Psycho, instead of Nomad, in Crysis 2 (here’s hoping)

The game itself is excellent. I’ve read some differing reviews on it but overall it’s been praised, and I’d agree. I never really got into the original, I kindof just wrapped it then used it as a glorified graphical benchmark for my PC, but with this one I’ve already wrapped it once and have started right back into it again to play through it differently.

You are given various options on how to approach the levels. You can go all Arnie, change your suit mode to armour, pick up dual UZI’s, a grenade launcher and a minigun and blow up every Korean, Alien, Crab, Grouse, Vehicle, Red Barrel and poorly put together shack you can lay your eyes on. Or you can go all Ninja, use stealth and stick a silencer on all your weapons, change their firing mode to only fire one shot or tranq dart and use your suits cloaking mode which makes you invisible. I went through it first as Arnie and had a blast, I’m now playing through it using stealth and it’s just as much fun, albeit longer as it requires a bit more crawling along the ground and waiting for patrols to pass by.

This expansion fixes a lot of problems with the gameplay that I felt let Crysis down so much. The gaps between areas of combat where too large so if you accidentally blew up that parked Humvee you ended up having to change your suit to speed mode and run down the road for a few minutes until you got to the next outpost or base. This is all fixed in Warhead, no sooner have you cleared out an area then you are on to the next outpost to do it all over again. It really keeps the action rolling and some of the set pieces are absolutely fantastic. This close proximity though has it’s downside (or upside depending on how much of a masochist you are). If you are trying to play through the game in stealth you really can’t make 1 mistake, as if one of the outposts gets alerted, they are close enough together that it starts a domino like chain of alerting the next Outpost of your presence. Also, if you try to run away chances are you’ll run into another patrol and end up having to fight 2 sets of patrols. Thankfully the weapons provided are more than adequate. Every automatic weapon can be switched to single fire mode, and once you install a sniper scope on them they can be used as a sniper rifle instead. So regardless of which weapons you find, you are given enough configuration options so that pretty much any weapon can suit the type of game you want to play.

Visually, it’s simply stunning (see the gallery of screenshots I took below). If you play this game with the graphical options set to very high you’ll be blown away. The only downside is that you’ll have set the bar to a level that most other games probably won’t match for another year at least. I find that when i’m playing other games now that I can’t help but notice how inferior they look in comparison to Crysis. But still don’t let that stop you, hopefully more games and mods will be developed that make use of the excellent CryEngine 2 (I hear there’s a Jurassic Park mod in the pipeline). The other downside is the system requirements you’ll need to run this game at acceptable framerates. Crytek have thankfully utilized a few sneaky features that make running the game at even 20fps playable. There is plenty of blurring in place so that when you are running or turning around the environment doesn’t need to fully render for every inch you move. But still, I was running this game with everything at very high, 2xAA @ 1680×1050 and I was getting ~35fps, here are my system specs:

CPU: E8500 @ 4Ghz
RAM: DDRII 8GB @ 1Ghz
GFX: ATI 4870×2 @ 770/1800
HDD: 128GB OCZ SSD

This game is a HUGE ram hog, in some of the more intense areas of the game it would spike up to ~2.8GB’s of RAM usage. It was one of the main reasons why I upgraded from 4GB’s to 8GB’s of RAM. Still, I’d rather the game utilize my hardware resources then not and run badly, but still, the average Joe PC gamer will not have a PC like mine, which makes you wonder who Crytek are releasing this game for? As a technical achievement it’s amazing, but it won’t be properly acknowledged by the majority of the gaming public for at least another year. Yes you can run the game with the graphics disabled but you aren’t going to be getting the full experience. I’ve a feeling Crytek are slow releasing the individuals games of a package they will release in a year or so, much like Valves Orange Box. There are 3 parts of the main Crysis storyline and who knows how many expansions like Warhead will be released between then and now. I’ve a feeling that by the time the full Crysis story is released that the average PC will be at a stage that they can run this game comfortably. At which point they’ll bundle all the Crysis games into a nice package and sell it at a discount price to all the gamers who where previously sitting on the fence.

Overall, Warhead is definitely a game that should not be passed up by any respectable gamer. It holds it’s own, even as an expansion, amongst the likes of Call of Duty and Halo. You’ll find your dissenters of it, no doubt, but personally, I really liked it. It took the aspects that made Crysis good and removed the aspects that made it bad, they’ve also optimized the engine and also made the story a lot more dramatic. If your PC can’t handle it now then wait, don’t play it with anything disabled, a year from now a €500 PC will be more than capable of playing this the way the developers and game designers meant it to be played.

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