Tom Clancy’s Air Combat

Tom Clancy seems intent on conquering the videogame realm, piece by piece. First he annexed a small subgenre, the submarine sim, with Red Storm Rising, and then he gradually expanded his domain, taking more genres under his command: Shadow War took turn based strategy, Splinter Cell took the stealthy sneak’em up, Ghost Recon took tactical shooters, and Rainbow Six took first person shooters. Now his domination is almost complete and he will soon have conquered the world, in Endwar. Only the skies remain free. We hope to get any helicopter game from Tom Clancy in future.

Not for long, though, as Clancy has ordered the ranks of his Romanian developers to mobile. Clancy believes that the nation-state is doomed and that as war fare develops the countries of the world will come to employ mercenaries rather than professional standing armies. With private armies come private military airforces such as Firehawk, which is where Air Combat comes in.

You get to fly over 60 futuristic and contemporary plans including the F-I5E Strike Eagle and Rafale, subduing your enemies with a Cobra or kulbit (a complicated Russian air maneuver). The action takes place in a variety of near future environments and the focus is definitely on realism. Look at the cover and you will see the familiar Ghost Recon Advanced WarFighter HUD has made an appearance and then you will be working alongside the Ghosts from GRAW.

Thrillville: Off The Rails

It’s not an argument Thrillville seems interested in putting to bed, either. But what it does do is prove that ‘too kiddy’ isn’t always a bad thing. For a game where you have to build theme parks, it’s easy to grasp, which is both its main strength and its main weakness. There’s never a feeling of ‘oh no’ and slinking behind your sofa in fear when confronted with a new plot of land to fill with rides and stalls.

Everything is simple to set up and tweak, so it’s not long before you’re fleecing eager punters near the entrance with overpriced balloons, hiring cheerleaders to dance and setting up a hot dog stand right next to your nausea including rollercoaster. Just for kicks. Yet it’s also too easy, which is where the ‘too kiddy’ tag becomes detrimental to Thrillville and its really a very fun game. There’s not much subtlety involved beyond building, building and more building.

Often, when the groundwork is done, you just sit on your pot of gold as money accumulates beneath your bum. While Thrillville offers plenty of options to distract you from being idle, letting you take part in your rides or even flirt with your customers, you’d rather be doing something a little more worthwhile with your time. it doesn’t have the spinning plates chaos of its genre stablemates, which both makes it more relaxing to play but also some shallow.

Skate 3

The changes that have been made to Skate in this latest iteration may not be all that obvious, but that doesn’t mean they are not significant. Since Skate hit the Xbox 360 back in 2007 it has redefined what we think of as a skateboarding fun games and forced Activision’s Tony Hawk franchise to completely re-evaluate its stance. However, the core gameplay was so solid from the start Skate is not a series that requires or would even suit yearly sequels, and that means something significant needs to be added each time to justify an expansion of the series.

This time out, the focus is being brought to bear on multiplayer gaming rather than any new tricks in the repertoire. There are a couple of new tricks, but nothing game changing. What Black Box and EA have focused on is trying to harness the power and inventiveness of the online community like never before. This is being done by introducing a collection of team based challenges for online plat that test your abilities as well as reward individual skill, and we can say from first hand experience that they are a lot of fun coming in this game from the start.

Mercenaries 2: World In Flames

Revenge is a dish best served right getting shot in the arse. Or at least is in Mercenaries 2: World In Flames, the EA published sequel to Pandemic’s Xbox title Mercenaries: Playground Of Destruction. But this time, Mercenaries 2 looks set to live up to its predecessor’s subtitle, with plenty of over the top and, at times, truly insane set pieces. And the majority of these seem to involve you, standing right in the middle of a city environment or similar, rocket launcher aimed at everything around you. You see, like Playground Of Destruction, Mercenaries 2 is about the sheer destruction delight of wiping all manner of establishments right off the face of map and play some of the mini helicopter game.

As EA told us during a hands on event, if it’s in the game, you can blow it up. Naturally, we tested that claim. We blew the absolute crap out of everything within our sight and, sure enough, it all fell. Sure, some terrain and structure are there to stay and can’t be blown up, but everything else can be, even locations tied to the game’s story which then respawn when you are far away from them. Speaking of the story, it’s something pandemic is really pushing in World In Flames. This is unlike the first game, where you really had no idea who the hell the actual villain was, even when you were half way through the list of people who needed to be killed.

Super Street Fighter IV

Well, the original Street Fighter IV was pretty super to start with, but this enhanced version comes with at least eight additional characters and various other tweaks that make the game more fun and even more super. Capcom swears on scout honor that the additional content could not have been DLC, as there’s just too much to it, but has admitted that much of the game will be old news and is promising at suitable price. We think $50 would be suitable.

So far, that would be Juri, who is the only all new character to have been revealed. She’s is the first Korean Street Fighter character, and the first to practice Taekwondo, although you could argue that some other Street Fighter characters incorporate Taekwondo techniques into their styles. Juri have fire balls, but they are pink and they come out of her feet. She can also perform grab moved with her feet.

Taekwondo despite that fact that its name roughly translated means the way to strike with foot and fist is more about leg techniques than punching. So far T.Hawk and Dee Jay have been revealed, which is fitting seeing as they both debuted in Super Street Fighter II. T.Hawk is a big Native American warrior and Dee Jay is a Jamaican kick boxer. The crummy story animations from SFIV are being redone. Capcom is adding new online features to enables gamers to play as groups too.

Enslaved

Enslaved is the latest game from Ninja Theory, the devs behind painfully average actioner Heavenly Sword. Wait, come back! The one beacon of light in Ninja Theory’s last effort was Any Serkis. As well as voice acting and mocapping king Bohan, the game’s bad guy, he also directed the cut scenes and had a hand in writing the story. The game is full of fun adventure, and excitement gameplay.

Serkis has had a similar hands-on role for Enslaved. He voices and mo-caps a wandering loner called Monkey, in a story loosely based on ancient Chinese novel Journey to the West, as we are pretty sure that didn’t take place in a post apocalyptic wasteland where the last remains of the Human race fight for survival in world over run by robots.

This time the story’s written by Alex Garland, who planned The Beach and 28 Days Later. And it goes a little something like this… After a girl named Trip sticks a headband on you designed to crush your skull if you don’t obey her orders, you have to help her get home. We don’t know where ‘home’ is, but art shows a ruined New York reclaimed by Plant Life.

Dragon Ball Z: Raging Blast

If you are a follower of the Dragon Ball Z animated series then perhaps some of this makes sense to you, but considering that this supposed to be a beat em up, it really doesn’t make things easy for you. Firstly, this is unlike any fighting series in existence, and while previous entries have put in a good show up until now, particularly on the PSP it’s failed to change and has managed to develop a host of problems. Fighting in Raging Blast is a lesson in frustration.

From the lightweight tactics to the truly awful camera, it’s a game that makes very few concessions for its players. On the plus side, it nails the look of the TV series and the cel shaded visuals look impressive, especially when you manage to pull off a special move send your opponent through some of the destructive scenery. The arenas offer up plenty of room for the fast paced combat, but raging Blast has a learning curve so steep that it’s enough to put off any fighting fan. Combat quickly descends into nothing more than a flurry of quick attacks, and the subtlely of something like a Street Fighter or Soul Calibur is totally lost.