Need For Speed Undercover

November 7, 2008 - EA's Need for Speed franchise has been shuffling its feet quite a bit in recent years, with games like Most Wanted featuring an open world to drive around in, while last year's ProStreet was focused entirely on predefined track racing. In a couple weeks the series will return with Need for Speed Undercover, which so far looks like a curious mix of the recent efforts in the series, but with a new focus on casual racing fans in tow.

The title opens with a police chase, which helps give you a quick introduction to the game's controls as well as the setup for the story. Underground racing has ties with crime syndicates, so it's your job to get into the racing world and take down the bad guys from the inside. To get on their good side and have them trust you, you'll have to get into a number of cop chases and cause a bit of chaos in addition to actually winning events.

Most of the story thus far has been told through live action cutscenes, shot in the style of shows like 24 and other crime dramas, with shaky camera work, quick cuts and so forth. The presentation has generally been good thus far, though a few of the scenes haven't been given the best context, so you just sort of need to nod and go along for the ride.

As for the racing itself, the game takes place in the Gulf Coast Tri-Cities area, which means there are multiple main city sections with highways and bridges connecting them. The individual city sections aren't all that large, but the world as a whole is pretty big and looks like it offers a decent bit of variety while wandering through the back roads and cutting through shortcuts.

What's curious about the game though is what seems to be a much stronger focus on the more casual racing audience. For instance, you can press down on the controller's D-Pad at any time to jump right into the closest event, even if it's miles away. In fact, this is the main way to enter an event without heading to the GPS system as you can't simply drive "into" events in the world even if you wanted to. So far, this largely seems to negate the main reason for driving around and instead just encourages you to skip from event to event.

Continuing this push for helping the casual racing audience, many of the events I've tried thus far triggers the appearance of barriers and whatnot, restricting where you can go to keep you from getting lost. This is somewhat helpful in that you know where to go, but it also means that the open world element of the game is largely lost in the race events. It's also essentially kills cross-traffic. There are some events that take place in the open world, like where you have to get in front of your opponent and keep your lead for a minute, along whatever route you choose, but the regular races have all been blocked off.


There also isn't much traffic at all, at least in the spots I've made it to thus far. I have found sections on the highway where four or five cars will be bunched up, requiring a bit of maneuvering to get around them, but then I would hit a long stretch with no vehicles. Thus far, it doesn't seem like the most populated area in the world, sadly.

Need for Speed's sweet Autosculpt system is in the game, though it doesn't appear to affect performance like it did in ProStreet, which was really quite cool. There's a car upgrade system in place here, though your driver also curiously earns stats, which ties into your performance. Earning new bumps in your Tires and Forced Induction stats is just kind of odd.

Need for Speed Undercover hits stores in less than two weeks now, so check back soon for our full review. For now, head into our gallery and video section for new images and footage.

Prince of Persia The Journey Begins

October 7, 2008 - Forget what you know about Prince Of Persia . Do your best to put the Sands of Time and its two sequels behind you. The new Prince of Persia, built on a modified version of the Assassin's Creed engine, is different from any game in the series' storied history. Sure, it still has amazing animations, death-defying acrobatics, and thrilling combat, but the new Prince is a completely different experience in almost every regard. It's an evolution of the past three titles, and if the first act (of three) is any indication, it's a step in the right direction.

The story begins with a new Prince wandering through the desert. He's calling out to Farah, who's become separated from him during a sandstorm. Farah is his donkey. Instead of finding his wayward ass, the Prince runs into Elika, a mysterious barefoot girl on the run from what appears to be an elite group of guardsmen. After a quick introduction to the combat system, you're fighting a few guards and then running with Farah into a strange new world.

The two come upon the mystical garden where Ahriman is being held captive within the Tree of Life. It is the duty of Elika and her people to guard this tree and keep Ahriman from ever escaping. But just as you arrive at the tree, the leader of the guardsmen approaches, telling Elika that the hour of their people has passed. This is your first boss battle and it doesn't end well. The man, whose identity and purpose we'll leave for you to uncover, smashes the tree and sets Ahriman free to corrupt the world.

After this point, Prince of Persia opens up. The garden is your hub, from which you can easily reach the four worlds that make up the bulk of Prince of Persia. Ubisoft has promised that the world is open. That is true. Each of the four worlds is made up of four different, connected levels. The worlds and each level are circular. To get from one area to the next, you just need to hug a wall and eventually you will come to a junction connecting to the next area. If you want to try and heal the level you're in, it's just a matter of breaking from the outer wall and venturing inward.

This set-up isn't obvious at first. It's only after clearing a few levels that the design starts to make sense and it becomes easy to maneuver where you wish. While you can go to quite a number of places at your leisure, there are some limiters. The majority of areas have magic plates that can only be activated once Elika has unlocked a specific power. There are four powers to unlock that correspond with four different plates. So while you can progress partially in certain areas, you'll often need to have unlocked the powers of a plate in that level to reach the healing ground.

If you're worried that this somehow funnels you towards certain levels first, don't worry. You get to choose the order in which you unlock Elika's powers. Unlocking Rebound magic won't just open two areas in the first world, but also areas in one of the other worlds. So while there is the somewhat typical game convention of limiting your access to certain areas, you still have the choice of which you play first. And the choices you make do matter. Each boss will release a different corruption trap into the world that will remain for the rest of play. These releases are tied to specific levels. You could avoid these levels until near the end of the game, making the acrobatic elements fairly easy, or tackle them early to add acrobatic challenge. The same level you clear at the start of the game will be quite a different experience for a friend who saves it until the end, after all of the corruption has infested the area.

The first world focuses on a single boss, The Hunter. This ruined creature was once a man who sold his soul to Ahriman. He makes an appearance in each level of this world, growing stronger with each successive battle. Fights with the Hunter are epic moments, especially if you are just getting used to the combat system.

Prince of Persia is not a button masher. Combat is built on a simple principle. You have a button for your sword, one for your gauntlet, one for Elika, and one for acrobatics. There are no set combos, no "light" and "heavy" attacks. Instead, Prince offers a dynamic fighting system that adapts based on what button you press and when you press it.

You might strike first with the gauntlet, which launches your enemy into the air, then when he is at his full height, hit the sword button for an air strike followed by the Elika button to see her launch the enemy even higher in the air and then finish with the gauntlet again to perform a grab move and throw the Hunter into the ground. Uncovering when to press a button and how to extend an attack string is one of the rewarding elements of Prince of Persia that is unlike just about any other combat system I've ever experienced. Not everyone it going to like it..........

Too Human

August 19, 2008 - Too Human is a game with a serious identity crisis. It wants so badly to be everything to everyone – a slick, frantic brawler in the tradition of Devil May Cry; an epic tale of Norse gods, power and corruption; a hardcore dungeon-crawling RPG like Diablo with swarms of enemies and loads of loot; a thoughtful meditation on technology and religion; a cinematic masterpiece – and all of it wrapped around a curious double-planed techno-organic landscape that shares more than a passing resemblance to The Matrix Revolutions.

Too Human tries its hand at all of these elements and succeeds only in proving the old adage that 'more' doesn't necessarily equate to 'better'. There are more outside influences in Too Human's final design than original thoughts; the culmination of more than a decade of on-off development is the clear culprit here.

Silicon Knights' repeatedly delayed, reworked and arguably overhyped release is, in a word, harmless. It won't move you with its writing; it won't impress you with the latest, greatest graphics; it might not even compel you to finish the adventure if you're not immediately taken with the gameplay. It doesn't push the envelope as much as it pretends to on the surface.

What Too Human will do is serve to remind you that, even in a market flooded with dystopian adventures, moralistic epics, mini-game compilations, formalist Japanese turn-based RPGs, World War X shooters and hardcore sports simulations, sometimes the genius is in choosing the right niche, sticking with it to the end and getting it right the first time.

The story is a strange journey – and being the first instalment of a planned trilogy of games, it's also noticeably incomplete. The hero, Baldur, is a member of the Aesir gods, who have sided with humanity in the long-running battle against sentient machines. Superficially, your quest is to wage war and hunt down GRNDL-1, a rogue machine, but this eventually gives way to a more conspiratorial story of gods-against-gods and the implications of overreliance on technology.

At all times, you get the feeling Silicon Knights is holding back. You're tossed into a conflict that your grunt-fodder allies are quick to point out that they don't understand – and neither do we, really. There's a fair amount of exposition between missions that starts to stitch together Baldur's strange memories and weaves them into the rest of the story. The Norse mythological slant is curious more for how incongruous it is against the cybernetic technology than anything; the whole game could've easily excised the Norse component and gone for an original race or sect to the same end.

Baldur isn't the most layered character we've played with in a while, either. He seems motivated by short-spurt bouts of aggression that are perfect for setting the scene for the game's relentless brawling, but are silly enough in the context of the story that they can be easily picked as red herrings or distractions, while the real threat is heavily hinted at to the player. Is that to say the story is a stinker? Not really – it's just painfully hard to follow in one moment and then equally transparent in others. You'll be able to pick the villains, the love interests and the show-ponies from their character design – even before they open their digital mouths.

We knew this was never going to be in the leagues of high-cinema storytelling, but the voice-acting is, at times, genuinely sub-par. The quality of the dialogue ranges from clever asides to daytime tele-movie exposition, espousing lines that you've heard appropriated a hundred times before. Watching Baldur smoulder quietly and reject the obvious advances of a certain female character has all the emotional weight of a Big Brother daily update………………………

Spider Man 3

May 4, 2007 - When Spidey puts on the symbiote -- that's the black suit for those of you who don't speak geek -- Peter Parker goes from a wisecracking hero to a skull-cracking jerk. His testosterone levels spike; he gets meaner and more aggressive. Activision and Treyarch nailed the darker concept with Spider-Man 3 the game because when I picked up the 360 controller, I lost myself to rage. In a flash, the well-to-do dork who sleeps with a Superman comforter was gone, and I became a tweaked-out, curse-word-spewing maniac who pounded on his desk and screamed to the heavens as I was screwed over by cheap bosses and badly-designed interiors. At one point, I drew back my arm to hurl the controller into my beloved TV screen and caught a reflection of myself. This anger. This rage. What had I become?

Just like Pete's decent into darkness, Spider-Man 3 goes south so slowly that it's hard to notice at first. The game opens up with Bruce Campbell acting as our familiar narrator and walking Spidey through his new-found controls. Ol' web-head can now web zip with one button; his Spider-Sense turns the screen black and white while displaying enemies in red, allies in green and objectives in yellow; and Spider-Reflexes allow the wall-crawler to slow time and counter attacks with a single button press. You get the basics down while saving some folks from a fire, and you're let loose in New York.



Lovers' spat over the streets of Manhattan.
At first, it's breathtaking. Activision says the city is 2.5 times bigger than the one in Spider-Man 2, and as the sun bathes the towering buildings in light and you somersault into different sections of the sprawling metropolis without any load times, it's easy to get swept away in the visual upgrade. You throw a web -- it comes out lax, hits something and goes taut in Spidey's hand -- and set off to bring justice to the city, which is no small task in the sandbox environment.

There are 42 missions in Spider-Man 3 that draw from the movie (Sandman, New Goblin, etc.), the comics (Scorpion, Kraven, so on) and the videogame's original content (three gangs are running amok in New York). Drop in random events such as hurt cops and gang fights that pop up as you swing around the city, races, skydiving challenges, 75 gang tokens, 35 secret tokens, 30 skyscraper tokens and 30 subway tokens, and you've got a lot for the web-head to tackle.



Spidey in black suit. He's so dark and mysterious!
Let's get the good out of the way first -- swinging through the city and taking care of random crimes, arguably the best parts of Spider-Man 2, are arguably the best parts in this game. The swinging is well animated and pointing your analog stick left or right will direct Spider-Man as to where to shoot his webbing, while the random crimes are more in-depth this time around. Sure, you have to stop an out-of-control driver every now and again, but sometimes you'll get to follow a speeding police car to a crime scene. Even better is the fact that the pop-up crimes aren't just there to be there this time around -- they play into Spidey's Crime Fighting Index. See, New York is broken up into different gang zones. These zones are visible on the in-game map as well as tracked on Spidey's stat menu. It's up to you to patrol these areas, bust bad guys and watch the zones turn from angry, gang-controlled neon to peaceful, Spidey-influenced green. The better you do, the more upgrades you get for your health and reflexes.

If the same handful of crimes in the last Spider-Man game kept you happy, the expanded roster of events -- Activision said there's three times as many events in Spider-Man 3 -- will keep you playing, but please don't take that as a ringing endorsement. Like any supervillan in Peter's life, this title's got problems.