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November 15, 2011

Review – Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 1:40 pm

review assassins creed revelations
The latest innovations in stab-simulation from stealth-murder industry leader Assassin’s Creed can be had today, with the release of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. The latest entry in the series sees the aged Ezio Auditore seeking to uncover the secrets of series originator Altair—who appears in a handful of flashback missions throughout the game. Meanwhile, Ezio also battles the Templar armies in Constantinople, and oversees the Assassin guild in that city.

Lording over your Assassin minions is much as it was in Brotherhood, with a few quirks. Assassin’s are recruited in small sidequests and can be deployed at the touch of a button to emerge from the shadows and nail enemy targets.

These disciples see upgrades through combat and can still be sent away on missions to gain experience, but the missions now have more tangible rewards—in that completely freeing a city of templar control yields continuing income and bonuses, much the way renovating shops does.

Additionally, Ezio’s Assassin forces wage a war for control inside Constantinople, whereby Ezio’s captured dens can be contested by Templar forces—resulting in Revelation’s most curious offering: a tower defense mini-game.

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September 21, 2011

Review – Driver: San Francisco

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 8:42 am

Review Driver San Francisco
Before I begin discussing Driver: San Francisco, I feel it’s important to mention that I have an issue with driving games. There’s a conversation that happens between myself and any such game I sit down to play, and it goes like this:

“Use the handbrake for sharp turns, Brad!”

“Okay, driving game—oh, I made the widest possible turn, spun out and crashed into a wall. Thanks.”

As a result of my crippling deficiency, driving isn’t usually a lot of fun for me. The driving games I play are invariably the ones where I can mitigate my incompetence with offense. That is to say, there’s a gap between me and the amount of skill necessary to win a driving game, and I close it by shooting other drivers. Mario Kart, Extreme-G, Blur—these are the games I can contend in (just barely), because I can leverage missiles and mortars and heat-seeking koopa shells against my fellow racers.

Driver: San Francisco doesn’t have any of that—but it does have something even more unusual.

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August 19, 2011

The View From X’11

X11 Toronto
Microsoft’s annual Toronto holiday showcase of all things 360 took place yesterday, and I was fortunate enough to make the event with other members of Team Sugar to check in on upcoming releases for the system.

This year’s showing was undoubtedly the largest one in recent memory, with a slew of publishers showing so many titles that the mind boggled at how to break down and digest so much content. It’s not often companies like Square-Enix, Bethesda, 2K Games, and Sega come to town, and the result was a never-ending sea of screens that left me feeling a bit dizzy by the end of the day.

With that said, I’m going to stay true to form and simply tell you what caught my eye.

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July 19, 2011

Review – Call of Juarez: The Cartel

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 9:00 am

Call of Juarez The Cartel
Out today is Ubisoft’s latest entry in the Call of Juarez series, The Cartel. Following an inter-agency task force designed to bring down a rising drug cartel responsible for a recent terrorist attack (that’s right; it’s street crime plus terrorism), the game offers three playable characters; a DEA agent, FBI agent, and LAPD officer—all of whom are preposterously corrupt and ultimately grossly incompetent.

As the story progresses, the three (supposed) law enforcement agents concoct a series of deeply stupid and massively illegal (never mind immoral) strategies for bringing down the Cartel (and achieving a handful of additional goals), most of which fail miserably—which is not surprising, on account of their flawed and nonsensical nature.

Meanwhile, a complex story of cops and gangsters with multiple agendas and conflicting (and frequently changing) agendas is weaved. Now, for clarity: this is not a story that is complex in the engaging, labyrinthine way, but rather the messy and highly confusing way. It’s never entirely clear who’s doing what, and for what reason; the only absolute is that everybody is doing something you don’t know about, and it’s going to bite you in the ass.

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May 25, 2011

Review – Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes HD

Might and Magic Clash of Heroes
Though the Great Fall of the PSN has much delayed us, that service’s howling, furious resurrection has finally allowed Team Sugar to report on the matter of Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, the HD upgrade of 2009’s DS original.

Clash of Heroes exists in some infinite limbo between puzzle game and turn-based strategy. The goal of each battle is to deplete the enemy’s health by firing attacks into his endzone—which is carefully protected by his army of units. Units can be organized to form attack formations or defensive wall formations. Additionally, specialized hero units can be purchased and employed for devastating attacks.

The primary task here is to maximize the number of actions that can be performed in one turn. The player has a limited number of moves, and while certain actions may grant additional moves, one must be mindful of the most efficient, useful maneuvers on the field. Combat, accordingly, is as much a puzzle as a strategy game.

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April 30, 2011

Review – Outland

Outland
A simulated wind raised the orchestral tension as I ran along the back of a flying serpent, dodging falling explosives while waiting for the chance to strike at the key points that beast ferociously sought to protect. This was around the time it occurred to me that anyone who yearns for developers to be given the time and freedom to create memorable and compelling gaming experiences, will undoubtedly fall in love with Outland, perhaps as severely as I have for the girl I immediately yearned to show that same sequence to.

The play of that boss encounter reminded me of Ico, and there is certainly a much longer list of titles that came to mind throughout the experience – few of which need to be named given the way Outland doesn’t simply patch together a quilt of influences, rather taking inspiration into its own folds to weave a game worthy of the player’s investment.

The lingering importance of citing those influences is that Outland shines with the energy of a game designed by people who don’t just enjoy games on some theoretical level, but enjoy playing games. In fact, Outland will convince you that the team at Housemarque grew up loving the same games you did, assuming you burned candles late into the night playing through the same who’s-hot list of 2D titles old-school gamers look back on today with teary-eyed nostalgia.

The only game that can’t escape mentioning is Treasure’s Ikaruga, the light and dark trickery of which gives Outland the means to teach a few new tricks of its own, giving the mechanics of the shooter strange but stable new legs to walk upon the land with.

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January 23, 2011

Catching up with the Brotherhood

Assassins Creed: Brotherhood
It’s not easy to get behind a franchise that has made the decision to go annual. The knowledge that the machinery has aligned specifically to bludgeon every last dollar out of the property (and the consumer) is grave in its implications. As an adherent to the existing systems for emulating assassins and their creeds, Ubisoft’s decision to Call-of-Dutyerize Assassin’s Creed was, for me, an ominous sign; the gong of some distant bell signalling the end of all things, save a string of uninspired sequels.

Then, of course, there was the multiplayer. One recalls the dial-it-in multiplayer solutions for traditionally single-player games like Bioshock and Metroid Prime and would be forgiven for groaning audibly. Equally, the human capacity to defy carefully crafted mechanics and break multiplayer game design is well known. Surely, Assassin’s Creed would have no chance of maintaining a mechanic based on careful stealth and patience among the multiplayer community.

Rarely is being wrong so satisfying.

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