Mass Effect 2

I'm sure everyone in gaming is going to do a review of Mass Effect 2, but I'm still going to toss out my opinion as well. The short version is that this is a great game with very few flaws. It's got good game play (with one exception), a great story, good graphics, good voice acting, interesting characters, pretty much everything you need to make a good video game. If you want a detailed analysis of all those factors, then go elsewhere. I'm just going to cover the high points and the low points of the game as I see them.

First a little good news/bad news. The good news is that the most annoying mini-game from ME1, the driving around on planets bit, is gone. The bad news is that they replaced it with an equally annoying mini-game that forces you to scan planets for resources from orbit. This scanning is tedious and boring and unfortunately necessary in order to upgrade your gear. This factor is the only thing keeping ME2 from being one of the most re-playable games in recent memory (edit: see below for more info).

Fortunately, that's about the only bad thing in the entire game. There's a couple of minor quests that can take some effort to finish, but the solutions are out there on the web already if you don't want to waste a lot of time. There's also a couple of bugs, but nothing major, like one minor quest that won't clear from your log even after you complete it.

The biggest plus with this game is something that I can't praise enough: the autosave. Finally, someone figured out that pausing every few minutes to save the game isn't fun. This game autosaves seamlessly before every combat, and even between waves of many combats, to the point that I almost never felt the need to save my game for fear of having to run through the same series of combats again and again.

Of course, the autosave itself is not a new concept, but I've had so many experiences in other games where I get through a series of tough fights, barely making it, and then one more enemy pops out from an unexpected direction and kills me, forcing me to go all the way back to the beginning of the series of fights because that's where the last autosave was. That never happened in ME2.

Sure, there were some tough fights, and I died a few times, but I never had to go back and fight through hordes of enemies that I'd already defeated once just to get to the fight that I was having trouble with. The autosave almost always brought me back to the beginning of the fight I was having trouble with rather than forcing me to go through all those previous hordes again. At worst I had to go through one previous wave before getting to the hard one.

I hope every game designer out there is taking notes, because this implementation of autosave is pure awesome!

The rest of the game is pretty good too, and I highly recommend it, although I recommend the PC version if your system can handle it, if only because the planet scanning mini-game is slightly less annoying using a mouse than it is using the Xbox controller. At least it is if the comments from my friends playing it on the 360 are anything to go by.

Edit: I got around to starting a new character, and it looks like it gives you a rather large starting bankroll of resources, which may make playing the scanning mini-game less necessary. I haven't played too much into it yet, so can't tell for sure, but if so this would give the game far more replayability.

Second Edit: A friend of mine who has played further into his second game says that the starting bankroll of resources is nice, but there's not nearly enough to avoid having to play the scanning mini-game quite a bit during his second play through.

Fallout 3

I finished up the main storyline in Fallout 3 a few days ago and I think it's the most fun I've had with a video game in a long time. Usually I get frustrated or bored with these games long before they're over, but that didn't happen with this one, and it wasn't because it was short. I didn't keep track, but I probably spent at least 40 hours playing it.

I've tried to pin down what it is that made it so fun, and I think it was a number of things. Possibly the biggest factor was the ability to play on "very easy" difficulty. While some people view having to replay a certain part of a game because they died as a challenging puzzle to solve, I just see it as something that breaks my immersion in the game, and forces me to repeat content I've already seen. The "very easy" difficulty level let me enjoy the game. Combat was fun instead of frustrating, and didn't feel like it was just a cakewalk, even though it mostly was.

Having to walk across country to discover new points, but then being able to auto-navigate to those points once you found them was also an important factor. It makes a nice compromise between immersion and convenience. Of course, this isn't something unique to Fallout 3 (Fable 2 uses the same basic idea), but it is well implemented. Also, the navigation system gives you notice when you are near sites of interest, and points you in their direction, keeping you from having to just constantly wander the countryside at random hoping to stumble across something interesting. This is very important in a game that features a wide-open world.

There are some issues with the game, but they're minor. A few of the layouts get repetitive after a while. The metro stations in particular get a bit old after going through a couple dozen of them over the course of the game. The same goes for the Vaults themselves, although most of them are completely optional as to whether or not you explore them, so it's not a big deal.

That leads to one of the biggest things I liked about the game, the ability to explore as much as you feel like. I could have finished the game in half the time if I'd simply stuck with the main storyline quest, and it's pretty obvious which quests are part of the main story. Instead, I took the time to track down clues leading to side quests in between doing the main ones. When I got tired of doing the side quests, then I continued on with the main quests.

One issue to be aware of is that when you finish the main storyline the game is over. You can always go back and start again from a saved game, but you don't get the chance to continue exploring the world after completing the main quest. I knew this from reading about the game, but the game itself doesn't let you know this until after you're locked into the final scene. Given that wide open games like this generally let you continue on after completing the main quest, there should probably have been more warning that that wasn't the case with this one.

I may even return to the game to do some of the side quests I skipped, but for now I got exactly what I wanted out of the experience: a fun time without a lot of frustration mixed in.

The Force Unleashed

I'm a sucker for Star Wars. I'm not a complete fanboi anymore, I have yet to see the Clone Wars movie and I think a lot of the prequels sucked, but I am still a big fan. As a result, I consider The Force Unleashed to be a mixed bag.

It's one of the better stories to come out of the Star Wars franchise in a while, but the gameplay is mediocre at best. You play Galen Marek, the Starkiller, apprentice to Darth Vader. Through a series of missions the story of the birth of the Rebellion unfolds, as well as the personal struggle between light and dark within the Starkiller. The story has a good mix of solid drama, action and the feel of Star Wars. Guest appearances by characters from the prequels, the original films and the expanded universe all serve to tie the story more closely into the Star Wars universe. The new characters introduced into the game are worthy additions as well, particularly Order 66 survivor Jedi Master Rahm Kota.

Unfortunately, the gameplay itself is repetitive at best and annoying at worst. For me good game design allows for multiple solutions to a problem, but the Force Unleashed only has one correct solution to each problem, and worse yet, similar problems often require different solutions, making a mockery of logic. For example, locked doors. In a good game you should be able to approach a locked door in multiple ways: bash it down, pick the lock, or find a key are three good options. In The Force Unleashed each locked door can only be opened in one arbitrary way, and it's not always the same way. Some times through use of the Force push power, sometimes through the use of the Force lightning power, sometimes through use of the Force grip power, but always only one of the three will work and you never know which one until you try. It's silly and frustrating.

Worse, the game has jumping puzzles. I hate jumping puzzles. At one point in particular I had to fight through half a dozen enemies, use Force grip to raise a platform, jump onto the platform, then jump onto a further platform. The problem was that the platform was at the extreme limit of my jump range, and took me several tries to get across. Each time I failed I had to fight through the same bunch of enemies. Worse still, while the enemies weren't difficult to beat, they were annoying to fight. This leads to another problem.

Frustrating and annoying is not the same thing as challenging. Opponents that constantly knock you off your feet so that you can't do anything are not challenging, they are just frustrating. The game has too many of them. It isn't as bad as it could be, but it is bad enough.

Finally, there are some un-Star Wars like game mechanics. The most obvious is that the lightsaber is pathetically weak. Even at the highest damage bonus levels it takes multiple strokes to slay simple Stormtroopers. I understand it's tough to allow for movie like damage capability while making for interesting game play, but it's still annoying.

Fortunately, the game is still worth playing if only to get the story. Unfortunately, it's not going to be worth playing again, not even to unlock the alternate ending cinematic (which you can find with a quick google search anyways). Lack of replayability, combined with a relatively short playtime, means I'd recommend renting this one.

A Tale of Two Civies

Two new Sid Meier's Civilization games came out recently, and like the fanboi that I am, I had to try both of them. Civilization IV: Colonization for the computer and Civilization Revolutions for the Xbox 360.

The first one I got was Colonization. Seeing this game come out was a bit of a surprise to me. I was a big fan of the original Colonization, but it was probably the least popular of the early Civilization type games that included Master of Orion and Master of Magic.

Colonization puts you in the role of one of the major European powers that colonized the Americas. You build up your colonies until you're ready to break away from your mother country in a revolution. You win by being the first player to successfully win a revolution.

My initial impressions of the new Colonization were very favorable. The game played like I remembered the original one playing right up until I got to the endgame. Simply put, the endgame revolution is far too difficult. I was pretty shocked since I started on an easy difficulty level which in Civ games usually means that you almost have to try to lose in order not to win. Not in Civilization IV: Colonization! Based on comments on the web it looks like the difficulty setting actually does nothing, or at least nothing noticeable to many players. Achieving a victory requires a very narrow and specific strategy, without any of the ability to explore options and play around at lower difficulty levels. That's not something I expect or accept in a Civ game.

Hopefully they'll fix this in a patch eventually, but in the meantime I have to rank this as possibly the worst Civ game ever, and that includes the games that didn't have Sid Meier's name on them.

Thankfully, Civilization Revolutions is an entirely different story. This adaptation of the game to the console is a great success. In simplifying the game for the console they managed to distill it down to some of its best elements. The result is a game that can be played to completion in a couple of hours from start to finish, and yet give you the same satisfaction and feeling of accomplishment as a game of Civilization IV that takes many times longer to play.

I find that the shorter playtime allows for more experimentation with strategy and tactics. I hate to mix things up in a regular Civilization game because by the time I find out if my strategy works or not I've already invested several hours in the game. The most you lose in Civilization Revolutions is an hour or two if your strategy doesn't work out. The game is also supposed to have a decent multiplayer mode, although I haven't tried it.

The simpler interface does lose a few nice things, like automated exploring, but the shorter nature of the game makes this less noticeable than it would be otherwise. One of the biggest changes veteran civ players will notice is the lack of workers. Development of the tiles surrounding cities is done through technology research rather than through workers. This eliminates a lot of micromanagement. You don't have to develop each city separately, you don't have to manage a lot of workers, and you don't have to worry about protecting your workers when war breaks out.

Speaking of war, I like the way it's handled. The engine is very similar to other civ games. Playing up through King level in difficulty the odds seem to be fairly reliable indicators of victory. The underdog can win, but it doesn't seem to happen nearly as often as it does in other civ games. This means that the infamous civ battle anachronisms are very rare. I'm talking here about tank armies being defeated by archers and other such silliness.

The diplomacy leading to war is also nice. Reactions tend to be a lot more predictable when you refuse a demand. Up to King level no one just declares war on you out of the blue. They only do it if you have refused a demand, in which case they do it immediately, or if you are about to win the game, in which case the entire world often turns against you to try to prevent your victory. Both situations are predictable, and therefore can be worked into your strategy.

Having more predictable results may not necessarily be more realistic, but they feel more realistic to me.

Overall, I think this is one of the best Civ games ever, which was a very pleasant surprise for me after the disappointment that was Civilization IV: Colonization.