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.

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

Neither of the Lego Star Wars games deserved to sell as many copies as they have done, but we have cheerful at the thought of a half decent Star Wars series receiving such excessive success. Well, we are not that cynical about it, really: we get to play as Chewbacca, only made out of Lego bricks. What isn’t amazing about that? This is Star Wars, and no matter how basic or short the first two games seemed, they were a bloody good laugh. In gaming, there’s rarely of substitute for such a frivolous state of mind, but the asking price could end up being rather too high for two rather short easy games.

For fans that were still gnawing hungrily after the second game concluded, there are a number of notable things that you will want to come back for on the PS3. Ever wanted to play the Zam Wesell chase at the beginning of Episode II? Well, you will get your wish in this compilation, even though it was a bit rude to omit it in the first place. An online co-op mode adds more worth to the package as well, along with ten extra Bounty Hunter levels and redesigns on some of the weaker vehicle (the dreadful Mos Espa Podrace included).

Fairytale Fights

Fairytales are just a little bit twisted. Whether we are talking about Snow White or Little Red Riding Hood, they are essentially high concept morality tales that inevitably end with someone either getting screwed over, killed or, despite some pretty nasty turn of events, living happily ever after. Fairytale Fights sends up these bizarre fictional scenarios with a premise as off center as the source material, situating the players in levels where denizens of these fictional universes get sliced up for the hell of it.

To exemplify the kind of context that Fairytale Fights takes place in, the game’s hub world, a seemingly nice, innocent place, has a man cutting up rabbits with no explanation. The game’s similarly horror skewed levels are themed around classic fairytales. Take the Hanzel and Gretel level, for example: as it progresses, players will notice fat children eating the surroundings. They can be decapitated with giant sharpened lollipops, which make us smile.

The gameplay is a slide scrolling platform based affair; think somewhere between Lego Star Wars and Castle Crashers, but with an emphasis on violence- but naturally, violence fulfils a major purpose, too. There’s a dynamic slicing attack where the analogue stick can be wiggled around to slash through enemies, causing them to fall apart.

Dead TO Rights: Retribution

The first three Dead To Rights titles were forgettable at best, so we weren’t exactly looking forward to the latest in the series, Retribution. It comes as a great relief, then, that on playing the game- which is a reboot, for want of a better description, we can see it has something going for it. It isn’t a world beater, but it could easily occupy the same territory as games like 50 cent: Blood On The Sand. A laugh. A muck about. A game. We went from not really caring to actually looking forward to this one, if only a bit, in a very short space of time.

Players control ‘cop on the edge’ Jack Slate as he travels through Grant City with his trusty K-9 hound Shadow and his pocket full of bullet-time, trying to unravel a web of corruption, deceit and other such naughtiness you’d expect from an action game/movie. While the game goes out of its way to show you it has noir influences on top of the standard bombastic action, it’s all still pretty much ignorable. The meat of the game comes through the combat, which is frantic, simple to control and over the top enough to be great fun.

Tony Hawk Ride

EA’s critically lauded, intuitive yet hardcore, Skate hasn’t yet published the faltering tony Hawk series back to drawing board, but into the Uncanny Valley, or rather, its plastic peripheral equivalent. This board controller feels like a skateboard, with impressively accurate responses, but for anyone with a modicum of skateboard experience, the controls are so almost, but not quite, similar to real life, that you brain initially knee-jerks into disgusted, self preserving rejection.

Want to Ollie? Lean back reasonably sharply n the tail i.e. a bit like real life, except without actual jumping, or physics, balancing forward motion. Kickfilps? Do an Ollie and (standing regular) nudge your front foot to the left? Again, notionally like real life, but contrary to everything your body wants to do to achieve the real-life motion. Grabs? Move your hand near the area you want, but don’t actually grab, it. The quasi-reality is dislocating and demands practice.

Hawk’s free roaming levels have been (largely) replaced by narrow corridors, played in timed bursts some focus on speed, others on tricks. The linear helps you nail the core controls, but we’re more intrigued by the more open and expressive free skate arenas. Visually, it’s bright, slightly childish and basic, like a posh TH: Downhill Jam on Wii.

NBA 2k10

What with EA upping their games with Live 10, the contest for king of the Hoops is much closer this year. For us, 2K10 just edges it, despite feeling a little rough and ready next to its rival. Why? It’s down to feel, this game is just better to play.

On court, the controls are less fiddly, and the animations seem to get together better than those in Live 10, giving a more responsive feel. Shooting seems natural, and regardless of whether you think the opposition should really be draining baskets with two of your men draped all over them, every time you shoot, the result is realistic. You can’t expect a little more man like Rondo to a sink a shot from outside the D with pretty much anyone man making him. Kevin Garnett, on the other hand….

Where 2k10 lets itself down, however, is in the Al decision making. It just isn’t that smart. We saw man desperately reaching for interceptions with two seconds left on the shot clock, leaving their man wide open for easy shots. We also watched as the opposition casually threw the ball in bounds and handed us a back court violation. Shouldn’t these issues have been sorted by now?

Crash of The Titans

You may notice that, in the hallowed pages of most games sites, we journos don’t often get a chance to review kid’s games before they are released. This isn’t due to a reticence on our part, as we are keen to tell you if anything’s crap. It’s more that the publishers think that the game won’t get a fair hearing, because, we bring grown-ups, won’t understand what appeals to kids.

Well, they are wrong. We understand what they like, as we’re big kids too, we just think that most games made for children are cheaply and badly made. A kid’s game needs a highly variable level of difficulty, bright distinct colors, and tremendous reply value (it helps if it’s non violent and non sexual as well). It doesn’t have to below-res, and it doesn’t have to crippled by cross platform development but it doesn’t have to be stupid and cheap either.

Crash Bandicoot is a kid’s game, but it’s not cheap. It’s bright, it has simple stupid plot and daft character design (Crash now has tattoos, because tattoos are Cool) plus the usual agglomeration of kid’s game elements, collectables, unlockables, mini games, that encourage replay. You control Crash through a platform landscape where he beats up a variety of increasingly large baddies to save his island. Yawn.

Naruto: Rise of A Ninja

Young Naruto is a trainee ninja. He’s got a Nine Tailed Fox (Japan’s mythological spirit) bound inside his body whether that contributes to his pathological exuberance or not is in question, but his raucous behavior has earned him enmity of every single person in his home village. Following the plot of the mage and the cartoon series, Naruto gradually wins over his teachers, classmates and fellow villagers by undertaking dangerous missions and solving town problems. Its classic RPG mixed with a beat’em up, and you don’t need to know anything about the plot to pick up the game.

What you will need noticed straight away, however, is the beautifully rendered cell-shaded world. Beneath it all inst the most powerful engine, but the style isn’t just perfectly thought through. The roaming world and gradually unlocking travel and special powers make the game feel like the classic Jet Set Radio Crackdown, as you gleefully leap from rooftop to rooftop.

Everything about the game is easy to learn and it never feels like the game is holding your hand, even if it’s a touch easy. When the plot requires combat, you drop into arenas, where you can use your combos to setup Justu (Super Special Move) opportunities; if you fail, Naruto can call on his good memories to help him recover. The rich plot and endearing world means that Naruto leaves you waiting to know more about the cartoons series.

Final Fantasy XIII

There have been games that have taken much longer than Final Fantasy XIII to come out, but rarely, if ever, has a game taken this long without some sort of period in development limbo caused by financial or political maneuvering. The Final fantasy XIII did, admittedly start life as a Playstation 2 game, but that was in 2002. It’s been nearly seven years! And during that time work hasn’t stopped. Square Enix has been working away, making what could be its most spectacularly decadent project yet. We suppose the fact that the end result is going to be incredible is some compensation for the wait, but we have been sitting here hoping and begging for morsels of new information on it for so long that it’s starting to get a little embarrassing. Still, it won’t be long now.

Oerba Yun Fang. No, we’re not just mashing random letters on the keyboard, that’s the name of the FFXIII’s newly revealed sexy lady character and by Final Fantasy standards; her name isn’t really all that silly. The most interesting thing about Fang is that she started off as a man. Not in the same way as Alexis Arquetta or Nadia from Big Brother 5. No more in the same way as Lara Croft. The original character design was male, but was changed because the character team at Square Enix wanted to make Fang a sexy character. Haven’t heard of sexy man? Guess not. Anyway, they made Fang so sexy that they ended up toning down lightning’s sex appeal to differentiate between the two more.

G-Force

Guinea Pig secret agents, G-Force is the latest in a long line of ridiculous Disney creation films that turn relatively useless households pets into something high concept for the amusement of stupid children. The game is in 3D, like the film, but don’t orgasm in excitement: this is basic, Eighties two color, obnoxiously expensive Avatar stuff that James Cameron is messing around with.

Aside from causing a headache after about 30 minutes, it’s okay. Take the packed in glass away however, and G-Force is a fairly humdrum mix of imprecise platforming and mundane puzzles. The guinea pigs in this universe are apparently armed with electric whips, meaning it plays like Daxter on PSP. While G-Force is a little tedious, however, we admit that children of discount IQ will tolerate it better than us sweaty, miserable adults.

This isn’t to suggest that just because it’s children’s videogame we forgive G-Force for being pedestrian, though, Children can play far better stuff than this if they want to, Banjo Kazooie , for example, or Viva Pinata. For those poor, anti cynical children who have yet to discover the true emotional horrors of adult life, however, somehow finding happiness in a guinea pig voiced by Made director Jon Favreau, we wish them well in their 3D platform endeavors.

Shadow Complex

Before we critique Shadow Complex, a world of clarification; when we receive access to a game, that we just have to get in, magically, it jumps from the Live Arcade section and gets its very own unique style of gameplay. Falling somewhere between Contra and Metroid, Shadow Complex takes the action platform mould and majestically balances the two. Following Jason Fleming as he tries to save his girlfriend, Claire, the plot is deliberately over the top with the action hammed right up, and naturally it’s much better for it. The true, genius, however, lies in how well the title paced. Evert aspect, from taking out enemies to hiking up the slide of a cliff, is ridiculously satisfying. On the top of this, Shadow Complex, challenges you to try and find everything in its massive map. At times it will even tell you what you have missed.

Shadow Complex is also a surprisingly intense experience. Just a single run through on the Normal difficulty will keep you occupied for a fair while if you are attempting to locate every last nook and cranny. Increasing the complexity shifts expectations. Boss fights go from enjoyable distractions to genuine challenges, often asking you to completely rethink your approach. For an Xbox Live Arcade title, Shadow Complex puts a lot f its rival to shame.

Medal of Honor Airborne

The online shooter. Perhaps the oldest and most revered of all internal games. PCs have been dominant for years, with the classic twitch of Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament still drawing in huge crowds years after their release. Medal of Honor Airborne is a fairly standard but extremely well executed affair. Electronic Art’s servers are strong enough to cope with any deathmatch permutation and the inclusion of airborne drops upon respawning makes for a slightly more considered, tactical affair then most. As with the single player game, shooting, movement and combat are smooth and satisfying, nailing a long distance rile shot or a panicked grenade is particularly enjoyable. But one niggle remains: Medal of Honor Airborne isn’t treading any new ground.

With Halo 3 just around the corner, Airborne’s community is set to shrink rapidly over the coming weeks, so if you are looking for a quieter, friendlier place to do battle, then here’s a good place to start. With great map design, crisp visuals atmospheric sound, Airborne is a solid addition to the ranks of Live deathmatches, but when Chief arrives, he is going to take most of its players. Still, this is another high quality product for EA, both online and off. The company has made a u-turn this year. Once synonymous with greed now almost exclusively associated with quality.

SmackDown vs Raw 2010

Eleven games on and you’d think that this perennial series that takes silly showmanship seriously would have hit terminal velocity by now, and in way it has. If you had issue with the lumpy wadding of the wrestlers, then that feeling will remain, and if you find waiting for a promote to tell you a reversal on a grapple and then in turn waiting for the other player to follow suit repetitive, then expect no surprise. SamckDown’s play core is unmistakably similar to last year’s model but this time it’s surrounded by the greatest and possibly most libelous story ever told, your own.

WWE Story Designer is fantastic in a similar way to elements of the PC game The Movies and that’s to say it’s very impressive indeed. Scenes are built of dialogue and actions that come from a pool of 100 prescribed animations, dialogue can be written with a USB Keyboard should you want to speed up the script writing process, you can reposition the camera to frame your shots and, with a bit of imagination, the result can be too hilarious or, if you are dead inside, laboriously. The result can be uploaded to the internet for all to enjoy. Sweet.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Even the biggest first person shooters are running scared of Modern Warfare 2, but Bad Company 2 seems to have everything going to be a genuine contender to Activation’s behemoth, although EA is still playing safe and holding out for an early release. Perhaps there are still concerns over the effectiveness of the single player campaign. The first game’s story about a rag-tag bunch of gold hunting squaddies was fun, yet hardly memorable in the same way players fondly recall Call of Duty 4’s sinking ship level or playing a dying solider as he takes his final breaths. Bad Company 2 catches up with the same squad, and it’ll take more than some more sweary banter for the single player to live long in the memory. It’s telling that whatever the sequel has been shown, it’s been the multiplayer campaign everyone has asked about.

And to be fair, it’s looking even better than before. In number crunching terms alone we’re looking at 15 vehicles, over 15,000 kit variations, and 46 weapons which can be customized to make an impressive 200+ guns. New vehicles include nippy ATVs, and the UH-60 transport chopper which ships four players into battle plus an extra tow manning its mounted railguns. Taking one of these down with a full six enemies inside is a massive coup.