Grand Theft Auto IV

April 25, 2008 - Criminals are an ugly, cowardly lot more worthy of pity and disdain than admiration. This is what you'll learn playing through the single-player campaign in Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV. The series cheered (and criticized) for glorifying violence has taken an unexpected turn: it's gone legit. Oh sure, you'll still blow up cop cars, run down innocent civilians, bang hookers, assist drug dealers and lowlifes and do many, many other bad deeds, but at a cost to main character Niko Bellic's very soul. GTA IV gives us characters and a world with a level of depth previously unseen in gaming and elevates its story from a mere shoot-em-up to an Oscar-caliber drama. Every facet of Rockstar's new masterpiece is worthy of applause. Without question, Grand Theft Auto IV is the best game since Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

You play as Niko Bellic, an Eastern European attempting to escape his past and the horrors of the Bosnian war. He arrives in Liberty City to experience the American dream, only to discover his cousin, Roman, may have fibbed a bit in his tales of success. Starting from nothing, Niko makes a living as a killer and enforcer, a bad-ass foreigner who appears to have no morals. The longer we stay with Niko, the more we see that there is a broken human being inside, one who would give anything to escape the person he once was.

Don't worry, GTA's famed over-the-top action and tongue-in-cheek humor are intact, but there is a new level of sophistication in the characters and the game world that raises the story above the norm. As Niko becomes mired in the death throes of American organized crime, he begins to become more self-aware. Niko's struggles with his ruthless nature never inhibit the gameplay, but instead enhance the emotional gravity of a brilliant storyline. The more absurd the action becomes, the greater we feel the very real pathos of Niko Bellic.

Much of the credit goes to the artists at Rockstar North who created as believable a city as possible. Liberty City is inspired by New York, but not beholden to it. While there are many parallels, Liberty exists in its own universe and rightfully so. Many open-world games have cities that feel as if they existed only from the moment you first turned on your console, but Liberty City looks lived in. It's an old city and each block has its own vibe and its own history.

Drive around Liberty City and you'll be able to identify each individual block. Though Liberty is filled with brownstones and a myriad of similar brick buildings, you can tell one from the other, just as you can in New York. Go to an affluent neighborhood and the street is likely to be newly paved, the pedestrians better dressed, the cops more plentiful. But head to Dukes or Bohan and you'll find streets nearly stripped of asphalt, homeless people wandering about aimlessly and criminals preying on the weak.

Watch the people and you'll witness some amazing things. At one point, I saw a woman stopped at a light, looking in the rearview mirror right before she was rear-ended by a man ogling a girl on the street. The man got out of his car and went to the woman, checking to see if she was okay. This had nothing to do with Niko or a single action I took. These were the citizens of Liberty City going about their day. And it was just one moment in a day full of incidents.

Hang in one area of the city long enough and you'll see how traffic and pedestrian flow changes as the day progresses. When it rains, people bring out umbrellas or shield themselves with a newspaper and run for an awning. Cops chase petty thieves unaware that walking down the street is Niko Bellic, cold-blooded killer. There's a perfect balance of mumbling doomsayers to remind you that the reason this city never sleeps is because it's full of nut jobs. People go about their day, only altering course when Niko inserts himself into their lives with his crappy driving or excellent marksmanship

Assassin's Creed

November 13, 2007 - In our most humble, convict opinions, there is so much Assassin's Creed gets very right that it sometimes makes other elements that tiptoe the generic line stand out a little bit more. It's not perfect - there are issues and points that will either get under your skin or not - but it never fails to entertain throughout. Here's a point to mull over that is really going to guide the rest of this review: Assassin's Creed isn't GTA. It's not an RPG - even casually. The setting is huge and somewhat open-ended, but the game structure is not. If you were hoping for a game that lets you go anywhere and do anything, then please understand - this is a platformer with action and a bit of stealth. It's not particularly deep and you can follow a straight line from one goal to the next, just traversing rooftops and through villages on horseback. If you can contend with this, then you're in better stead to enjoy what is a game that only does a few things, but does them very, very well. First of all, let's get this out of the way - the big twist is stupid and unnecessary; who knows why Ubisoft made such a hoo-ha about it. Actually, we do know why. It was for two reasons: to generate a groundswell of hype, and secondly, to avoid a backlash from players by revealing it at the end of the game and basically undermining the last 15 hours you just spent playing through it. How so? That's hard to say without spoiling things, but if you've been privy to any of the internet speculation, most of it has been spot on. By revealing this key detail at the end, it would come as a cop-out. If you took Prince of Persia and tossed in elements of Hitman and Shadow of the Colossus, the end result would look something like Assassin's Creed. In a lot of ways, the formula behind Shadow of the Colossus holds up well against Assassin's Creed. From early in the game, after going through early training levels and basic missions, the main game structure presents itself - you are ordered to start systematically bumping off supposedly corrupt, evil, violent and oppressive leaders and social figures throughout Jerusalem, Acre, Damascus and the surrounding Kingdom. You're effectively a pawn for the Assassin's Guild, where you get stripped of your rank and work your way back up the chain. However, those expecting a smooth-flowing, GTA-like experience are in for a shock. Assassin's Creed is divided into chapters of sorts, and between them you're stuck in a confined holding space where a lot of exposition occurs and you can explore the story a little further. If this sound vague, believe me, it is for your own good. This section is all tied to the 'big reveal' - and we kind of wish it had been handled differently. The structure of the game suffers from breaking away from the action after every major assassination. It literally pulls you out and away from the action while characters talk at you for a few minutes and you walk around slowly until it's time to start the next mission. It works as a plot device, but we didn't really like the way this was handled. Sometimes, a cutscene just works better. Free-running and combat are the game's strongest drawcards. Both are done exceptionally well; Altair is a master of his environment and this extends to the way you can use him to scale just about any vertical surface with an edge or jut. Ubisoft has erroneously compared the controls to that of a marionette - that's not quite right. In theory, the face buttons are assigned to body parts, but only in a very general sense. A lot of the time is spent holding down A and the right trigger to free-run - it's not exactly like you're actively controlling his legs; ultimately, you're just pressing buttons that happen to be linked to actions on screen. Clearly, running through a crowd and knocking peasants on their ass is a great way to get spotted, whereas blending in with hooded monks or gently filing past people keeps the ever-watchful eye of the guards mostly off your back. When you start running, jumping, scaling, falling or scrapping, then you start to see the rules of Assassin's Creed's engagement. Criticisms have been levelled at Assassin's Creed in this respect. On one hand, guards and peasants mostly react the same way when attacking you or chasing you, leaving them open to exploitation. If you can break their line of sight with you, you can dive into a bale of hay or a veiled rooftop gazebo to escape; that's about as sophisticated as hiding in a cardboard box in Metal Gear Solid or in a dark corner in Splinter Cell. Anyone in real life with half a brain might do a little investigating. They don't in Assassin's Creed. Nor can they hear murderous acts being committed or care too much when they stumble over the corpse of a guard you tossed over a ledge or knifed from afar. They stick to routines and limited AI rules set up by the programmers, and there isn't a lot of flexibility.

Far Cry 2

August 19, 2008 - It's that time of year again. The holiday season is coming up, and the year's biggest, or at least most-hyped, titles are getting ready for their ship dates. Among those is Ubisoft Montreal's open-world first-person shooter, Far Cry 2, the sequel to Crytek's original. This time around you won't find Trigens or the special scent and strength powers. It's just you, your guns, and a whole lot of enemies across the plains, deserts, and jungles of Africa.

We've put up quite a few previews of the game, but not until recently did we really get to experience the full game world, as before we were either seeing or playing sections specifically constructed for the demo. It's still not finished, but we still got a good sense of what playing the final game might be like. And, as a bonus, we got to see the map editor for the first time, which anyone who played Instincts on Xbox should remember fondly. With Far Cry 2, the map editor's functionality has been expanded and from what we saw, it looks as though the editor should provide players with plenty of opportunity to create a wide range of maps pretty easily on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

Console or PC players will be able to dive right into it from the in-game menu, and all subsequent map publishing and sharing amongst users and such can be dealt with within the game. Also, all created maps will be for use in the game's four multiplayer modes, so don't expect to create some kind of elaborate map and tack it onto the single-player game world. There's certainly a wide variety of tweaks you can make to your map in the editor, but you'll need to keep in mind how many objects you're adding on consoles. Too much stuff will result in slowdown and the like, but there'll be handy gauges at the screen's top that update as you add and adjust content, letting you know how close to capacity you are. And at any time you can drop into the map and test it out for yourself, just to see how things look and perform.

Upon first entering the editor, you'll be met with a flat, blank square of land. On consoles you'll bring up most of your build options through a radial menu, while the PC editor has a number of drop down menus across the top and a right side bar featuring small thumbnail images for all the objects that can be added. Before you start dropping down vehicles, structures, or spawn points, you'll probably want to adjust the square's topography. The editor lets you fiddle with the size and shape of your cursor, which you can use to raise and lower terrain as you see fit. You can manipulate terrain with a simple raise/lower function, set specific height limitations for plateaus or lakebeds, and then use the game's texturing tool to lay down grassy, rocky, sandy or a variety of other ground decorations.

It might not look all that natural right off the bat, so to give it a more realistic appearance, Ubisoft Montreal has included an erosion tool that molds the land into shapes that look as though they've been affected by elements like wind and rain. So using this tool will add some dimples in flat surfaces, sharpen slopes, and make it appear as though loose soil has been sliding down hills and piling up where the incline meets the ground. Then, once you've set your general landscape heights, you can raise or lower the overall water level to fill up or empty whatever troughs you've created. Jungles, groupings of rocks, short brush, and plenty of other landscape decorations can then be added using the collection tool. This functions just like the landscape manipulator, giving you the option of expanding or contracting the cursor size which can then simply be moved across the land, adding these trees and other features whenever you hit or hold the activate button.

Now that the general look of your land is done, it's time to maybe add in some roads and drop down some objects. Any kind of thoroughfare is constructed with a series of nodes, making it easy to pick up and drag sections of road around if you're not happy with its placement further on in the creation process. When it comes time to select objects, there are tons of options. You've got houses and shacks of varying sizes; all kinds of vehicles, such as hang gliders, trucks, and boats; and plenty of individual objects that can be littered around the landscape or combined to create large-scale buildings. Ubisoft Montreal showed off some impressive examples of this with a construction site consisting of a large parking garage, stacks of pipes strewn about, a fence and road surrounding the whole thing with a few houses in the outlying areas, giving it a realistic, lived-in look. The construction site wasn't a pre-made asset, but rather a building made from existing, smaller asset pieces used as building blocks. Another map featured a harbor loading dock, with huge cranes leaning over ships, cargo containers in stacks and arranged in rows, and plenty of paths and hiding spots in between.

At any time it's also possible to adjust the time of day as well as weather effects. So you can create a jungle map at night covered in thick fog, a hilly desert map at sunset with clear skies, or a flatter savannah map populated with grasses and short bushes that get throttled around by the high winds of a rainstorm. By dropping into the map, you'll get a chance to see how everything looks and burns, as the demo version we tried out gave you a number of Molotov cocktails to set the grass on fire. It was interesting to see how weather and wind affected burn patterns, something dedicated map editors will no doubt take into account when designing maps meant for competitive play

Devil May Cry 4

February 5, 2008 - If you want to see how far videogame hardware has come in the past six years or so, try running Devil May Cry 4 alongside the PS2 original. When it came out, back in 2001, the original Devil May Cry was one of the best looking games on the console. Now, in 2008, Devil May Cry 4 is one of the best looking games on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It's got all the cutting-edge, high definition graphics you'd expect, of course, but just as important is its gratuitous, ridiculous sense of style, full of monocled mad scientists, underground labs, Mephistophelian rivals, bulge-veined creatures, deceptively lesbian snow demons, and assorted femmes fatales.

In this, rather over-the-top, approach Devil May Cry hasn't changed a bit. Another thing that hasn't changed is the underlying design formula. In all its fundamentals, the game is the same as previous Devil May Cry titles: wade through relentless legions of underworld denizens, taking care to dispatch them with SSS-ranking aplomb, and solve puzzles to open up new areas and items. This is no revolutionary reworking, along the lines of Resident Evil 4.

Rather, it's another refinement of Capcom's signature blend of action and exploration – a blend that the company has been evolving across its big-name franchises, Resident Evil, Onimusha, and Devil May Cry. Capcom's DNA is evident throughout the game: in the way the world gradually reveals and discloses its secrets; in the gothic (and sometimes baroque) splendour of its environments; in the grace and poise of its characters; in the jarring segue from moody organ music to high-octane metal that accompanies the game's almost improbable brand of balls-out action.

Indeed, of those three series, Devil May Cry has always offered the most hardcore action, and Devil May Cry 4 is no different: it's a game that's aching for you to smash things up, whether that's the scenery, or one of the inspired selection of evil demons. It's a game that's full of inventive moments, from a snakes and ladders-style dice game, to the various skills that you acquire throughout the game, such as bouncing off special platforms, or entering bullet-time to avoid whirring blades and whizzing lasers. As usual, some of the game's finest moments arrive with the game's bosses, which are universally well designed (Capcom evidently liked them all so much they threw them in again at the end of the game as part of a climactic boss rush – which might not appeal to everyone, but provides some seriously sustained intensity).


character, it won't be spoiling anything for anyone who reads the manual to reveal that you also get to play as Dante at certain points during the game. The two certainly look similar, but Nero doesn't share Dante's laugh-in-the-face-of-danger insouciance, or devil may care attitude. They also each have a very different feel in terms of gameplay: Nero's missions are more exploratory, with a greater emphasis on puzzle-solving; Dante's are mostly all about speed, with several having a time limit of some sort.

You can see it in the rewards they each receive after beating the game's many bosses: Nero receives some new key, or item to unlock new areas; Dante receives some new weapon with which to deal ever more inventive violence. They also handle very differently in combat. Dante's strengths stem from his wide arsenal of weapons (including the utterly insane, transforming, Pandora's Box), giving him a wide range of speedy and direct styles. Nero's strengths are to be found in his demon arm, which he can use to reach enemies from afar, and the new Exceed system.