Originally posted by Ushgarak
But their point made about the girl being brave enough to go with the guy in these modern days is kinda spoiled by having Zelda terrified of rats, even when she is inside a giant, indestructible, metal suit. So much for girl power.
😂
I'm going to argue Musophobia. The irrational fear of mice and rats.
Originally posted by Lord Melkor
Ush, did you have a chance to play Dragon: Age Origins? I am interested in your opinion.
I'm also interested in Ush's opinion of this.
I played through the game only to stop around five minutes before the end of the game, where your about to fight the final boss. Yet I haven't launched the game in a few months and so haven't seen the ending.
I find the combat so boring and tedious, but the story and the setting was nice.
Something I have been meaning to get out of the way for a while.
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DAWN OF WAR II (PC)
I've played RTS games since their (practical) beginning, when I picked up Dune II on my Amiga. Blizzard jumped in soon after and I bought the virtual fantasy copycat Warcraft off the back of a very good demo. I then bought C&C off the back of Dune II, and took a risk with buying Warcraft 2 before it was reviewed (Blizzard hadn't quite got the reputation they have now back then) and it paid off handsomely.
Then came the wait for Starcraft. Back in the day, this game was the promised land- Blizzard was going to smash the RTS genre to pieces. Only the damn thing never seemed to come out, despite the promises inside the CD overlays of games like Diablo, saying it was due in '96. I clearly remember having an anxiety overload waiting for the damn thing to come out.
Of course, eventually it did and it became the most played game... ever in our group. The reviews were surprisingly muted, considering the legendary following it got since then. Anyway, my friends and I played the crap out of it, doing the while LAN party thing for co-op and occasional competitive goodness. I wrote missions with the editor, we moaned about various overpowered units, we'd marvel at the quality of the cutscenes, we anxiously awaited the expansion to come out etc...
But that was it for my RTS days. After Red Alert, I never bought any other C&C titles, and my whole love affair with the genre dried up. Ironically, despite the entertainment it gave me, Starcraft was partly the cause. Becoming good at Starcraft required putting a massive amount ef effort into resource management and timing of build orders, and eventually I kinda realised that... I didn't find that any fun. Starcraft was at its best when we were learning how to play it. the better we got, the less fun it became for me. Starcraft did what it did- show how RTS games really worked- too well. It showed me that... actually, I didn't really enjoy that sort of thing very much.
(My obsession after that became Alpha Centauri instead, still one of the most awesome games ever made, but still- as with all Civ games- ruined in multiplayer, because playing to win is NOTHING like trying to fully experience the game).
So for close to a decade, the RTS genre was lost to me. What exactly it was that possessed me to buy the Complete Collection of the original Dawn of War two years ago now escapes my mind. I'm kind of a Warhammer fan, but increasingly crap rules and expensive models put me off the tabletop game long before I bought Starcraft. It was a good value package- 20 pounds for the game and all three expansions. It good some good reviews, but I think it was just impulse in the end.
Anyway. DoW was great- it made me fall in love with the RTS genre all over again. Ok, sure, in the end, the competitive arena is playing to win at any cost, and that;'s never going to appeal to me. But so much of DoW DID appeal. The stripped down resource model- meaning your military units captured took control of areas in the field to provide resources, rather than messing around with dozens of fiddly peons- was exactly right for me. Nine factions- awesome! They were never going to be balanced, but they were FUN and that counted for a lot more. They just had to be balanced ENOUGH (and if one faction was stronger- well, that made it a good AI opponent). With all the expansions in, I had a vast amount of single player content to play, from the linear campaign of the original to the metamap campaigns of the last two which allowed you to play as any faction, and which Iron Lore (the now defunct programmers that made the last expansion instead of Relic) totally cocked up but it was still fun regardless.
For some six months, the spirit of those Starcraft days was revived as my friends and I duly played the crap out of these games. The Warhammer universe- being the spiritual inspirtation of Blizzard's games, after all- is extremely well suited for computer game treatment, and the simplified resource model and emphasis on in-the-field fighting, combined with decent graphics and spectacular visuals in the form of sync-kills when certain units kill each other (Force Commander kills Bloodthirster is right from Gandalf fighting the Balrog- look for it on youtube).
It still had buildings and build orders but they were very manageable. One of its schticks was to work in reinforceable squads rather than individual units, which both preserved the theme of the source material and made a great way to bring infantry masses into an RTS. The army painter, another thematic touch, also gave you a greater feeling of ownership of your units. Different races had different ways of increasing their supply, and their experimentation of entirely different ways to play with some races- like the Necrons, who work on a totally different resource model- kept the game intereting in the long term. The only thing that started to slow our platying at first was the inadequate AI, which rushed well but was not great in the long term. Luckily, a fan mod known as Dawn of Skirmish transformed the AI into... well, the best RTS AI I've ever played against- hardly unbeatable, but easily set to provide very stiff opposition that kept co-op games worth playing.
It was never going to be as popular as Starcraft- never going to be as balanced, the single player campaigns were neither as long nor as good, and it is simply not as suitable for the e-sport treatment that made SC go stratospheric in Asia. But for me, it was about perfect. A 9/10 for that game.
Obviously, the upcoming sequel to the game had me hugely interested. Funky new graphics and what-not- great! Fewer factions, of course- the Tyrannids in, the surprising omission of Chaos... actually, no factions I was really interested in playing, but I could not complain about the roster. A new approach to the campaign mode, with meaningful decisions affecting its outcome, caught between helping yourselves or helping others. RPO like progression, improving the skills of yourself and your senior officers (and no question of permanently losing those officers, often the problem with persistency in these games). Fully coop campaigns- awesome. A scaled down approach, focussing on small squad tactics... err, ok. Fair enough, but I doubt anyone was actually EXCITED by that. Kind of a shame.
Biggest of all, a whole new approach to the RTS genre. No base buidling. No unit construction in single player at all, and a completely streamlined version of it in skirmish mode, still with the central DoW tenets of capturing points in the field. Meanwhile, they were porting over all the cover, building occupation and retreat systems that hade contributed towards sister game "Company of Heroes"'s huge critical (if not commercial) success.
Minus having my favourite races in, it looked on paper to be exactly the game I wanted. So, what did I think when I started playing it?
"Mmmm... interesting..."
The thing is, from the first hour you play you immediately get the feeling that they didn't nail this one like they did the original. There are a lot of good ideas here, but ironically it may well have been better if they had done the boring thing, and just upgraded DOWII (unlike SC2, which is a direct upgrade of SC, this was only four years on and a very practical option).
Well. Let's look at the whole thing.
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Set in the far future where a degenerate Human Empire under a never-seen Emperor who has been effectively on life support for ten thousand years, the Warhammer universe sees humanity up against a vast array of alien (and internal) foes who range from the enigmatic to the psychopathic, and all sides have reasons to fight each other over time. A grim and angsty universe, the Imperium cannot said to be the good guys, though they are often the least bad. The iconic characters of the setting are the Space Marines, genetically modified super-warriors who act as special forces; small in number but capable of affecting entire campaigns with their surgical strikes, clad in vast protective armour and wielding massive amounts of weaponry.
The focus of the game is on these Marines. Whilst four factions are in the game (with bonus appearances from Imperial Guard troops in the campign), only one can be played single player, in which you play a young Force Commander leading several squads of other marines against a threat to the recruiting worlds of your Space Marine Chapter by devouring aliens the Tyrannids (who were the main inspiration for the Zerg). Equipping your squads with loot picked up in the field, RP style (and rather oddly fluff wise. Quite why your enemies are carrying all these weapons for you to use- and why you don't have the hardware you need back on your ship- is not known. Ok, gameplay over plot but... I think they used the wrong system here. This isn't Diablo. If you HAVE to control the supply of weaponry, try a more X-Com like system, where you still improve your weaponry over time but entirely internally, not just from what you pick up on the field).
You quickly notice that your units move quite sluggishly compared to other RTS games. This is part of the slow, careful, tactical movement used as the engine inherits from Company of Heroes before it. Designed to simulate World War II firefights, it doesn't feel quite right with Marines, who never struck me as those sorts of fighters. They've also had to overlay melee combat onto the system, which... KINDA works, but is imperfect. Your units automatically seek cover to hide behind, but this system is a bit crappy, and remains so a year later- frankly, it would be better off removed. I didn't think I would ever call for MORE micro-management, but this time I want to choose if I am putting my units in cover or not. I don't want them arsing around with poor pathfinding trying to find it when they should be shooting.
Yourself and your squad leaders are effectively immortal, able to be revived by each other if things go wrong. You only fail a mission if you lose the lot at once (and even then, you are evacuate to safety). You really only command a handful of people- four squads at once, with the average squad size being three men. Part of their excuse for this was to make Space Marines feel more like the elite units they are meant to be. Except they don't, because your enemies scale in level with you (enemy level scaling is always the devil's work) so even the simplest of enemy infantry is capable of killing your guys without too much hassle (ridiculous so on higher difficulty) and the top enemy units can instantly wipe out your squads with a glance. The reason you win is that you can retreat back to the nearest retreat beacon at any point and get reinforcements to top up your squads.
Which blows two of their ideas out the window at once. First, my units don't feel elite, they feel decidedly average. I am winning on reinforcement numbers alone. Secondly, I am meant to care for my persistent forces, rather than throwing them away. Care? Bollocks to that., My leaders are invulnerable; their squad members totally expendable. Lose dozens or hundreds of them- it doesn't matter a damn, they come back for free. And you can't stop them dying anyway.
They TOTALLY missed in their attempts to make this feel like I was playing the Marines. Move forward, hide, shoot at the bad guys a bit, take casualties, run away, reinforce, come back, repeat. Ironically, this felt MUCH more like playing the endless numbers of the Imperial Guard, rather than remotely like the great indestructible warriors of old.
The campaign itself involves you travelling between planets, choosing to take part in a variety of randomly generated missions, trying to secure or defend assets on those planets, whilst taking the opportunity to do plot missions as you go along. Let's get this out of the way- obviously, the random missions become boring, as there are not many types to choose from. The defensive missions are mercifully short but very rinse-repeat. The other type involves you going to kill a boss. The boss fights in the game- unusual for an RTS game, with great energy bards for the boss as if you were playing an on-rails shooter or beat 'em up, were a good idea in theory but desperately tedious in practice. The campaign structure, then, starts well, with a good feeling of choice and variety. Halfway through, it has given all it can., The missions all feel the same, and you are desperate to play though the plot and get it done with.
Sounds like I am starting to trash the game now. Not necessarily so. A lot of it is good. It looks great, of course. Unfortunately, one side effect of this is that the game really does need a lot of horsepower to run correctly- more than it really should, as the silly thing is that most of the detail is lost at the angle you play it at. When it is going WELL, with you co-ordinating melee and ranged strikes with called in orbital or artillery support, it is great fun. When I finally got a good gear loadout, with terminator armour and various enormous weapons, I really DID start to feel like marines, blasting through huge amounts of enemy forces with much less stop-starting than I did before. The plot missions are not at all bad either, with quite a bit of variety, and some fantastic battle scens- defending a city against alien attack, and the fantastic view of a Starship Troopers style Tyrannid horde bearing down on your defensive positions in the very final mission. If it could all have felt like that, they'd have been onto the winner.
Still. You are only in control of a handful of men. You miss having grand forces. it is exhausting to micro-manage them all the time (co-op play makes it much more enjoyable in that regard, sharing the burdens. I;d say full marks for co-op... only... gah. It's not proper co-op. It's... one person helping the Host. It's the Host's guys that get levelled up, his campaign that advances. All his helper gets is... a feeling of helping a friend? How crappy! They should have come up with a system where both players could bring in and level up their OWN forces.).
Having no base removes a bunch of hassle but... running back to mummy to reinforce for free is a poor replacement. You don;t get to control any vehicles. You cannot make that base-munching army of doom that is often the joy of RTS play (there are enemy bases to destroy, btw, which feels good, but I'd still rather do it with a vast force). Not that it is really an RTS, as you don;t gather any resources in single player. I know why they did it. It didn't work the way they wanted. They need to dial it back a bit.
So, onto the entirely different skirmish mode, which plays much more traditionally. You start with a base, iwth pre-built turrets, a chosen Hero who can upgrade with wargear, a basic squad of troops, a small amount of resources, and you have to go get more from requisition and power points out in the field. Req points are taken and that is it. Power points need to be upgraded with generators (like the ones you built at your base in the original) to provide you with power to buy better units. You have two tier upgrades at your base to unlock higher level troops. Victory is done by the COH style point system, where if you hold more critical points than the enemy you count down from his score of 500; first side to 0 points loses the game. You can play any of the available factions, vehicles are in, the squad system of the original is the same- seems a good synthesis of the two styles.
Well.. it's ok. I've had fun with it. It's not perfect. They've tried to make it more accessible by removing fiddly build orders and micromanagement of peons. But if they wanted an accessible game mode, they totally failed. It is HARD to play. Units die very quickly if you are not careful, and your income rate is so slow that you may never get them back. It's exhausting to have to manage all of your troops so carefully. Meanwhile, you never have enough troops to defend all of your territory, and it often takes them too long to get from A to B. Smash your enemies' power plants and you generally win the game, after his long and slow death. Meanwhile, the more units you have, the slower you get income. This is designed to stop the person who wins the first skirmish from winning the game. This makes alarm bells ring in my head- the need to introduce such an artificial balancer speaks of something amiss in the basic game design. The main result of it is that the most expensive units- like the highly impressive looking Eldar avatar- are just never used, unless you are so dominant as to have already won anyway- because you will never, ever save up enough to use them to swing things in your favour. The squad cap is pretty harsh- I always feel I am forbidden from building enough things. So it is picky, hostile to learn, and mis-paced. Oddly enough, it's actually still rather fun if you can get past all that. The basic element of fighting there works- it is just surrounded by a lot of crap.
Again, ironically... I miss the base building. Streamline it, sure. I do like the basic simplicity of the model. But... just removing it hasn't worked as well as they wanted. Remove the Peons, fine. Integrate barracks into the town hall- also fine. But I feel the game would be hugely improved if, say, building an advanced barracks and a vehicle hall, your power generators and your turrets... if these were all options still done from your base. That would, at a stroke, make it a better game. You ten need fewer requisition points (and a means to secure them), and stop making games being about trashing each other's power nodes- make the fights about the control points instead. Every time I play, I KNOW the game could have been improved that way. Such a shame.
The biggest problem? ATROCIOUS AI. It's utterly rubbish., At release, it was not just poor, it was unfinished. The AI couldn't even build many units as it couldn't use them. They patched a big improvement to it later, but the AI remains... bloody awful. You can learn to beat it within a day, and then skirmish mode has no co-op potential any more. (It can also only currently handle a max size 3vs3, a damn shame). They promised more AI improvements- they never came. The team that developed the superlative Skirmish mod for the original do not like the sequel and so they have not replicated it. And so... DpW II's skirmish mode will never have anything like the pull the original did- or even Starcraft's did. In SCII has good AI, I will enjoy its skirmish mode more than DoWII, for all its fiddliness. That's saying a lot.
But I really must mention something- DoWII's amazing post launch support. The game shipped pretty bare, but they started making major additions very quickly, including one massive update in the summer that added more skirmish content than the game originally shipped with. Amazingly, to avoid splitting the community, most of the expansion content was patched, for free, into the original game also- the new units, the new maps, even the new Chaos faction to play against (though you cannot play it yourself without the expansion). This is very good stuff.
Biggest of all was the addition of a new game mode, The Last Stand. A surivival mode, you pick one of three (5, with the expansion added) heroes and face off with two friends against twenty pre-set waves of increasingly vicious attackers. You die, of course, but you get experience points for how far you get. Experience points get you up in level- which does not improve your stats, but instead gives you access to different equipment to take., This is exactly what levelling should do- not make you more powerful, as they only end up scaling enemies to you anyway, but giving you more choices. The more you play, the further you get, the more more equipment you get to choose from, allowing you to experiment with builds for yourself and your team. The crappy AI doesn't matter as you are fighting hordes. It;s great- much more fun to play than the skirmish mode. And they put it in for free. And they are still going to put more in. All games should work this way.
So, there we go. This is the most disappointing game that I've not actually stopped playing. Bits of it are JUST good enough to have kept me intermittently interested. A lot of their ideas are good- the RTS genre does need to move. But they've cocked up the implementation in several ways, and they also missed some easy ways to have made the game better. The AI is a shocking mess, too. It's a good job that the underlying game is fun- and their post-launch support has been exemplary.
Because of that support, this game continues to evolve. Maybe it still has a few surprises for me yet. Even just adding in my favoured factions would make me enjoy it a lot more, actually.
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CARDINAL SINS: AI failure!
SCORE: 7/10
COMMENT: Right ideas. Wrong execution. A mark added on for the very good post launch additions to the game... and then a mark off for poor AI, which has made me discard skirmish mode.
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DAWN OF WAR II CHAOS RISING (PC)
A quick note on this one. This standalone expansion for the original is very customer friendly, as you can own one, the other or both and all be playing the same game, just with access to varying amounts of stuff to play yourself. Other than the long overdue Chaos faction, it adds two new Last Stand heroes and a new single player/co-op campaign. All other improvements are added for free into the original game anyway, so be aware what you are paying for.
I gave this a very good first impression on the DoWII thread. Alas, long term it disappointed a bit. The Last Stand additions are good. New maps- great. The ice terrain, with its shifting ice formations, is particularly beautiful. The Chaos faction is quite well realised- not perfect yet, but it can be expanded upon.
They didn't fix the damn AI though. Gah.
In the single player campaign, you are still stuck playing the Space Marines. Cannot even play Chaos in their own expansion? Immediately poor. Still, they quickly make up for it in other ways. You play your same guys, with a higher level cap, so you are familiar (or, if you don't have the original, it will give you some high level guys to play with). No more boring random missions- it is all scripted stuff. Yay! Chaos makes for better bad guys than Tyrannids, BECAUSE TYRANNIDS DO NOT TALK! Honestly, bugs are very boring antagonists for an RTS, as you can hardly get across any Alien-esque Horror. Chaos gives you proper villains.
Meanwhile, a new corruption mechanic allows your squads and yourself to sell their souls for funky powers and better get in game. Unfortunately, gaining corruption often twins with failing mission objectives, which makes it feel more like incompetence than a genuine choice. Also, the moral choices fail sometimes as well.
An example- alien forces are attacking a city. You need to get through the gate, but the controls are enemy held. You can jump-pack some guys into open the gate controls, but the extreme danger means they will likely die. Or you can just blow up the gate- leaving the city defenceless in future, gaining you corruption. Interesting!
Except your jump troops, even if they were not effectively immortal as discussed above, can easily open the gates and survive anyway. Well, that cocked THAT choice up...
Dodgy implementation aside, the idea is a good one and it interacts with a variable traitor mechanic- there is a traitor in the game, but who it is depends on who you play. My one made absolutely no freaking sense at all, but the idea is a good one.
Weirdly, the game still has optional missions, even though they are not random, With no benefit for skipping them, why make them optional? Why would I voluntarily miss out on content (assuming I am enjoying the game)? This is evidence of hybrid thinking. The Lead Designer has changed, and you get the feeling the team feels kinda stuck with what they started with. They need to bin the original campaign set up and start over- and I suspect this may well happen. Meanwhile, you still have the faintly silly loot pick up system. I still think it doesn't fit- and the bad guys till scale with your levelling, and I still don;t feel like an elite force (oh, and once I am killing Chaos Marines at the same scale as minor units, the whole feel has gone completely silly anyway).
Still, the missions are pretty good, there are three possible endings depending on corruption... but it is all a bit short. It's improved, but not heavyweight enough to be the renaissance for the game I thought it might be at first. Oh, and they finally put vehicles for you into the missions! Yay! And... they are CRAP. It's totally artifical, the mission is slow and boring, you don;t get to co-ordinate them with your own forces, and you use them to 'clear the way' for your own guys, which you could have done ten times faster with your own guys anyway. What a waste. Everyone screamed for vehicles in the campaign, and then they came and it was rubbish. Bleh.
So there you go. A lot of good stuff- nothing directly WRONG with it... but not much to it, especially as you can get a lot of it for free anyway. I'm still mostly playing Last Stand.
CARDINAL SINS- Same as before...
SCORE: 7/10
COMMENTS: Actually better than the original, but you don't get much for your money that you wouldn't get anyway... and really this is sticking plaster thinking. They need to tear it up and start again, like Dark Crusade did with the original DoW, to much acclaim. We'll see where it goes..
Originally posted by Peach
This amused me, just so you know.
Me too. Though I modded it away in Oblivion, along with a bunch of other stuff I didn't like. Some of us see flaws as excellent critiquing material. Others scour the internet for someone more talented than them to fix the problem.
😎
I would love to write VG reviews as well, so I'm a bit envious of Ush's awesome thread here. But I do so much homework before a purchase and am so aware of my own tastes in gaming, that I rarely play anything I'm not at least mostly pleased with. It would make for annoyingly positive reviews.
A few quickies to update on some of my recent games.
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MIGHT AND MAGIC- CLASH OF HEROES (DS)
Got this afetr a review recommendation. This is a standard fantasy "tale of five friends up against ultimate evil" sort of thing, but with a Puzzle-Quest esque approach to the combats, as in they are are based around a match three puzzle game (not actually Bejwelled style, but still the puzzle=fighting principle). There are five different factions, but the differences between them are not huge- save for their special powers, charged by taking or receiving damage, which were simply wildly unbalanced.
Anyway, the game was nice enough, but well before I was halfway through I felt I had exhausted all it had to offer. Luck plays a huge part in the fights as well, which is never quite my style.
SCORE: 6/10
COMMENT: Nice enough puzzle/fantasy game, but didn't have the lastability for me. The DS is really starting to look creaky now, too.
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RESIDENT EVIL: THE DARKSIDE CHRONICLES (Wii)
This sequel to the surprisingly good rail/lightgun shooter Umbrella Chronicles has few surprises of its own. The game does things mostly from Leon's point of view, featuring RE 2, Code Veronica and an original plotline of its own. It is very competent- better in every way than its predecessor, with better graphics, longer and more involved levels, vastly improved controls for choosing your weapon (nicked from Deadspace: Extraction) and a very good pace.
However, in the end, it's only a development, whilst Extraction really pushed what you could do with the genre and was prettier to boot. Still worth a punt though, especially if Extraction's slow pace didn't suit you.
It has taken the shaky cam from Extraction too, btw, and some reviewers found they had overdone it to a greatly distracting degree. Watch out if these sort of games can cause you motion sickness.
SCORE: 7/10
COMMENT: Very well done and a solid sequel, but comparison to other releases dulls its edge somewhat.
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PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE FORGOTTEN SANDS (Wii)
The Wii exclusive version of the new PoP releases is entirely its own game, sharing nothing but the title. In fact, it would have been better to have not shared the same title at all, and you are left vaguely wondering what 'Forgotten Sands' actually means in this case.
I was worried this was some sort of shovelled Wii semi-port, but actually it's a very encouraging well-designed affair designed for the Wii from the ground up.
Like its sister game., it is set between the first two games but actually makes no attempt to tie into continuity. At 'some point' in his early life, the Prince is off looking for a kingdom and princess of his own (mostly to impress his father). A genie he buys in a market offers him one, and he goes to check out the lead she gave him. Inevitably, it turns out to be a cursed and evil place, corrupted by a demonic form of plant life, and equally inevitably it is a strangely construct mess of broken walls, poles, hooks etc meaning that the Prince has to use his acrobatic skills to get around it and beat all the bad guys.
So far, pretty familiar. The Wii differences come in the form of using the Wii remote pointer to add to your game interaction, as in Super Mario Galaxy. The pointer can be used to use powers to freeze enemies, activate buttons and, later in the game, to make handholds appear on ledges or whirlwinds on the floor that can levitate you. This added interactibility with the environment can only be done on the Wii (at least, until Natal and Home come out on the other platforms) and really gives it a unique feel. They also nabbed the co-op mode from SMG, where a second player can play the genie, using his own pointer to aid the Prince by interacting with the world.
The game runs incredibly well. The graphics are noticably low-res in this day and age (and the character models are... not impressive), but the game constantly runs at 60 FPS and it pre-loads everything before you get there, making load times in game minimal- even when you die, you re-spawn almost at once. Incidentally, there are no rewind powers but the system is very similar to the classic PoP trilogy; just instead of rewinding time when you die you blow the equivalent of a sand tank and automatically re-appear at the start of the current challenge. If you have no tanks left, you go back to the last save point, but they are rarely that far away.
The game would have been better still but the combat lets it down. At first, combat seems free and exciting and easy, using a simplified version of the system in the first two modern games. It runs out of steam pretty quickly though, and combat is always just a chore to be got past so you can try the next wondrous free running challenge instead. Full marks on the,, btw, for deciding to not go with full motion controls for combat, as those always suck, but nonetheless the sword swiping is on the remote swing, and that means you often accidentally swing when you didn't want to.
The game keeps giving you more to do for a long time, but it unfortunately does give out an hour or two from the end, leaving you feeling you are now finishing it for the sake of it. The epilogue is nice though- a wondrous, dream-like sequence that echoes some parts of Sands of Time, and which left me feeling I must have missed some secret or other.
Talking of which, the game is chock full of bonuses and unlockables, from costumes from other games (I decked my guy out in the Sands of Time outfit) to entire bonus game modes and challenges to play through, even including the very original SNES PoP game (which, irritatingly, I actually failed to unlock first time through). One of these bonus bits you can unlock (and indeed, on occasion in the main game too) is a 2d sequence, like the very original games, but using the 3d engine- which works surprisingly well. Of course, SMG had 2d bits like that as well. Hmmm... oh well, may as well copy from the best, eh?
It is short (though as I say, full of those extras) and the combat isn't great but overall this is good stuff. Worth picking up, even in addition to the main game, I suspect. Which I have not played yet as it isn't out on the PC.
Oh, the game starts you mid-action too, in a refreshingly exciting introduction. I wish more games did that.
SCORE: 8/10
COMMENTS: Surprisingly good stuff, orders of magnitude better than the earlier Two Thrones Wii port, using the Wii's unique abilities to the maximum. If only the Wii always got this sort of attention! Shame about the unfulfilling combat though.
I am curious, Ush, about your thoughts on Red Steel 2. It's a huge improvement on Red Steel (mostly by removing literally every connection to it other than the fact you fight with a gun and sword) and the 1:1 motion controls are surprisingly well-crafted. Considering your long-standing opinion of 1:1 motion, I'd love a review.
I've not been massively tempted to buy- I hear it is rather short. I'll probably pick it up some time but I actually have a gaming backlog right now, especially after Monster Hunter Tri took out 100 hours.
But as you mention 1:1, I understand that, despite using MotionPlus, Red Steel 2 does NOT have 1:1 swordfighting. I think we can again be confident that this is because 1:1 swordfighting does not work, as I mention whenever anyone brings it up for lightsabre purposes.
Hm... that's a good point. Parrying and positioning is all 1:1, but the actual strikes are triggered by the motions without being bound to them. So with that considered, it's probably the best you can get out of a motion controlled sword.
Also, I wasn't intending to play PoP: TFS on Wii, but it sounds like it's a completely different game. About how long was it?
Main game- about 13 hours, though it really encourages you to play through again.
The bonus levels you unlock are on top of that, so that helps. Not a huge game by any means, but I understand the other version is short too.
And yes, I hear the swordfighting in RS2 is indeed fun (though I am still hearing that MotionPlus isn't as perfect as it advertised itself). I'll give it a critical analysis sometime.