July 7th, 2010 by admin

OK, got a nice rest already? Well get ready for the kicking ss game review. Yeah, let’s continue our battle with the evil guys in the city!

Fortunately, there are plenty of bad guys to help you vent your frustration. The enemies arrayed against you come in two varieties. Your human enemies, the Cell, are dedicated to fighting you and your agency; your zombielike enemies, the Freaks, viciously slaughter anyone they see. At the outset of the game, you are told about both factions, assigned a few different combat-based objective types, and set loose in the city. Fighting men and monsters can be enjoyable while increasing your available arsenal and melee strength is rewarding. The deadly sticking power of the harpoon gun and the Jedi-like area effect of the UV shotgun are highlights, and the weapons you find in the environment can be just as fun. Bashing enemies with lampposts, bus stations, and park benches is an enjoyable way to flex your power, and throwing vehicles is an evergreen source of amusement.

At the same time, combat in Crackdown 2 is pretty simplistic. In the early going, you can shoot and punch your way through enemies fairly easily. And when the going gets tough, the tough jump around with a rocket launcher and duck behind buildings to regenerate health. Laying waste to lots of enemies is still inherently satisfying, as long as you don’t get caught by knockdown attacks or explosions. Both cause you to rag doll and roll around limply for an annoying amount of time, leaving you powerless to defend yourself against repeated attacks. Ultimately, the problem with combat is that it is centered around repetitive objectives. You can only clear out so many Cell strongholds and Freak lairs before they begin to feel the same.

You can mix things up by driving around the city in any car you choose or by summoning an agency car at a drop point. The agency cars handle the best and have special abilities, making them the most fun, though other cars have radios installed so you can hear actual music while you drive. The cracked pavement can give you some trouble, but races, stunt rings, and renegade orbs provide good incentive to get behind the wheel. These objectives not only encourage you to broaden your exploration, they take you places that you wouldn’t otherwise travel on foot. Just be ready for some trouble if you drive during the day. Pacific City’s civilians think nothing of gathering en masse and wandering into the street in an effort to become roadkill and especially love to congregate on broad street corners. It’s very difficult not to massacre civilians while driving, and violent police retaliation against you is the annoying result. Of course, police intervention is just another excuse to indulge in some superpowered mayhem, which is one of the chief pleasures the game offers.
The Crackdown 2 campaign can be played cooperatively over Xbox Live, letting up to four players romp around one city at a time. If you join a game, you can keep any orbs you grab or attributes you improve, though only the host keeps campaign-related progress. There are some bonus orbs that can only be collected with at least two players present, and there’s more than enough opportunity for cooperative (or not so cooperative) fun to make teaming up worthwhile. Playing chicken in stolen trucks, punching your buddy off of a rooftop, or having a corpse-throwing contest are just some of the amusing activities you can improvise in this open world. The competitive multiplayer is not nearly as amusing, offering a paltry three modes that cover the basics (shoot each other, shoot the guy carrying the thing) but don’t offer a particularly enjoyable or deep experience.

What Crackdown 2 does offer is a whole bunch of room to have fun. Exploring the vast city, grabbing orbs, pulling off stunts, and flexing your abilities can keep you entertained for hours, and it’s even more enjoyable when you have some friends along to add their own sparks of diversion. The lack of a narrative makes the campaign feel directionless and repetitive, and the different flavors of action are all tainted in one way or another. This game doesn’t significantly build on or vastly improve any of the features of its predecessor, so those with high hopes for a stellar sequel will be disappointed. Still, Crackdown 2’s core action and appeal remain very strong, and there is great potential for cooperative mayhem, making this a fun stop on your summer videogame tour.

Well this is really fun exciting game, but as a result it might spend you a little more time than usual to finish, worth it though, some people just couldn’t get enough of game time, Huh…

July 6th, 2010 by admin

Action games are best on the XBox 360, and everyone enjoys the display, so this is actually good new that the CrackDown 2 comes only on XBox 360. OK, let’s see how fun this could be!

Pacific City is under siege. Terrorized nightly by a legion of mutated monsters and daily by the rebellious Cell insurgents, this metropolis needs your help. As a superpowered law enforcement agent, you traverse the city with great leaps and subdue your enemies by any means necessary. Your abilities increase as you explore and complete objectives, bringing you new powers, guns, and vehicles. Sound familiar? If you played its predecessor, then you have a good idea of what’s in store for you in Crackdown 2. This sequel retains the appeal of Crackdown while adding a few twists that help make things feel different. Yet none of these additions are terribly innovative, and there are plenty of issues with which to contend. The scant plot leaves the campaign devoid of momentum, and as you spend most of the game accomplishing the same handful of repetitive objectives, Crackdown 2’s problems become more and more noticeable. Though almost every kind of fun you can have in this game is tainted by flaws, the fun of running amok as a supercop remains remarkably addictive, making Crackdown 2 an entertaining open-world romp.

Geographically speaking, this is the same Pacific City that players explored in the first Crackdown. It is still quite large and full of places to go, but time has not been kind to it. Buildings are crumbling, roadways are disrupted, and it generally feels like a more conflict-torn environment. The visuals are improved, and once again the cel-shaded outlines mix well with more realistic textures, creating a distinctive look. Yet Crackdown 2 looks grittier than its predecessor, and while the environments are richer and more complex, the effect isn’t always good. Environmental details don’t stand up well to close inspection, and explosions, of which there are many, don’t look very good at all. Still, it is fun to explore the city and blow stuff up, and the absence of loading times makes doing both easy.

Exploration is one of the most entertaining parts of Crackdown 2, thanks largely to the liberal placements of attribute-boosting orbs throughout the city. Green agility orbs perch on rooftops, encouraging you to climb to new heights, while white hidden orbs reward curious and thorough explorers. Most orbs are stationary, but two new types of orbs flee from you, baiting you to give chase on foot or in a car. Every orb glows brightly, and once you’ve spotted one, it’s very difficult to resist grabbing it. Collecting orbs is immensely satisfying, and there are hundreds of them scattered around the city. Whether you’re leaping impossibly high or zooming around at unsafe speeds, it’s easy to get caught up in an addictive orb-snatching binge.

The unpleasant reality of these binges is that, while leaping high into the air is exhilarating, climbing structures can be aggravating. The visuals can make it tough to tell what parts of a building you can grab on to and what parts you can’t. After a while, you develop a good eye for the environment, but there is still the looming problem of Crackdown 2’s inconsistent ledge detection. You will often jump at the side of a building to grab what you know to be a ledge, only to fall impotently to the ground many stories below. Or you’ll climb a series of windows but inexplicably fail to grab the exact same kind of ledge from which you just jumped up. Sometimes your leaping skills allow you to regain your position easily, but the higher you climb, the more time and effort you stand to lose as a result of this flaw. This makes climbing tall buildings nerve-wracking; not just because it’s tricky, but also because at any moment, you could fall victim to Crackdown 2’s inconsistency and plummet to the earth.

Though it is aggravating, this problem isn’t bad enough to ruin the appeal of exploration and orb collection, and there’s a lot of fun to be had in just roaming around. The other collectibles to be found in Pacific City are audio logs. They come in a number of varieties and shed light on your enemy’s agenda and other threats to public safety. These voiced snippets are the only substantial form of plot development in Crackdown 2, but they are few and far between. There is some mild plot intrigue, but unless you scour the city, the opening and closing cutscenes are pretty much all the plot you’re going to get. Instead, you get a disembodied narrator who accompanies you wherever you go, who is initially helpful and somewhat amusing. But after a while, he starts to repeat himself and say things that aren’t necessarily related to what you are doing. Then he becomes annoying and obtrusive, driving you to turn his voice off. Yet if you do shut him off, you’ll also shut out the audio log voice-overs, which are actually worth a listen. You could manually switch the option every time you come across an audio log, but that’s an inelegant solution to a bothersome issue.

Well, let’s call it a day, have a break and enjoy the game!

February 10th, 2010 by dace

This is the second part of the first impression of Mortal Online.

Finally when entering the game world you will find yourself alone in the streets near a town trying to figure what the hell is going down. Looking around I saw some players naked or dressed like Neanderthals flying from the top of a house – some kind of bug, rendering problem no idea, but a superb first impression nevertheless. Here you get no direction, no storyline, you are alone, your mom and dad kicked you out on the streets because you were bad, and now it’s up to you to survive. There is a help window that teaches you the basics on how to move, accessing inventory, and so on, like a knowledge base, but the introduction to this “tech demo” makes you wish to quit and uninstall. Now let me be clear here, even sandbox games must have a introduction system that gets the player in the world, teaches him the basic, makes him feel that he is exploring a new world, a huge one, with infinite possibilities. Having just a help window somewhere is useless, the player is not convinced that this is a living, interesting virtual world to explore. Indeed the outdoor graphics are good enough to keep you interested, but the performance is horrible. I believe they are huge memory leaks in the client, since at some point with many players near me (5-10), the client started to go from 50 FPS to 5, and sometimes it crashed. It could be only my problem but I doubt it, since I play most of today’s games on high details and Unreal is very good engine on good hands.

Tweaking with the engine and support I finally got some decent performance by reducing the maxLODsize from 4096 to 512 in nowengine.ini. This was my first sandbox quest, see? Since the programmers couldn’t implement graphic customization, only texture and shadows.

I explored the nearby town where some players were gathering materials from the air, since collision system it’s mess. Went outside the town and on the good side the outdoor environment is incredible, it’s huge, has good graphics and no loading screens. While outside the town I watched a player fighting some mobs and neither of them had a combat animation: they player just went to the pig, and the pig died. It could be lag or another “feature”.

After this I considered I had enough. I spent 3 hours in game only to be frustrated, quit and uninstall. So do I recommend this game to you the players? Well I’d say stay away from it unless you are real huge fan and you like unfinished games – this one seemed like an Alpha to me. I understand that they are indie developers but when you release a version to show the game to the world you have to show something decent, that has decent game design, level design, basic collision and animations.

“You WOW newb!” Wait! Wait! I am actually one of the hardcore players that love harsh PVP and sandbox games, where two of my favorite sandbox games are Mount and Blade and EVE Online (played 4 years), but there is a limit to how much trash I can take from a game while paying for it.

The game is still in open beta so don’t take my word for it, try the game, make your own opinion.

February 9th, 2010 by dace

I really like indie companies because I know how hard is to make a game without a huge financial power and in the same time some of the best games I ever played were made by indie companies, or at least small companies. Unfortunately not all indie games have the design power and industry knowledge to release a polished or complete product. Sometimes this happens because of poor management or low financial backup and sometimes because the main developers are not that good at what they do.

Mortal Online wants to be a pure sandbox PVP mmorpg, much like Ultima back in the days, but it fails horribly right from the start. I followed the game, saw some videos, screenshots, I was expecting something decent or even great, only to find a tech buggy demo which they call open beta. While I am not a big fan of accessibility sessions and I’ve been to some of them, these developers clearly never heard of the concept or they don’t understand the basic game design principles, probably both.

From the start you are thrown into the character creation screen naked, with some basic options to change his appearance, but you barely succeed on doing anything. Moving on you get to choose your race, location, skills, and some kind of of class option, but from all these pages you get absolutely no info, tooltips, you might as well be blind. At the end you can enter you character name and choose a start location from multiple options that have zero information attached to them as well where some even have place holder description “Location Description to come…”

To be continued..