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January 12, 2012

Review – Mighty Switch Force

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 12:53 am

Review Mighty Switch Force
Largely owing to the poor driving skills of law enforcement officials, the streets of the future will be overrun by blonde criminal vixens. As a ludicrously dressed officer of the law, your mission is to search out and apprehend these escapees with your trusty pistol and the ability to phase platform aiding blocks in-and-out of existence.

So not quite RoboCop, but it’ll do.

WayForward’s latest 2D offering is scaled toward creating a smaller series of incidents that fit a quick speedrun flavored agenda, which doesn’t leave nearly so much meat on the discussion bone but does make for a good and proper portable diversion. The objective of tracking down a set number of convicts per stage with the aid of a singular ability is certainly the developer’s most straightforward effort in recent memory, and creates a space where a more narrowly focused title can simply add to the layers of difficulty without losing cohesion along the way.

There isn’t as much space for the vibrant animations of BloodRayne: Betrayal or the long corridors of Aliens: Infestation, but there’s something familiar and quaint here to while away a few hours near a fireplace stoked by digital nostalgia.

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September 11, 2011

Review – BloodRayne: Betrayal

Review BloodRayne Betrayal
I am fail.

While that conclusion will come as no surprise to some, the suspicion was finally confirmed for me after clearing the first of Betrayal’s stages, wherein I was awarded an “F” grade, and the designation of “wormfood”. That the same reward awaited me at the end of every stage would seemingly suggest that WayForward’s resurrection of Majesco’s dhampir vixen is a difficult affair. And while plenty of voices across the Internet support this argument, it’s simply not accurate.

The near infinite supply of health, unlimited lives, consistently well placed checkpoints, wide-sweeping attacks, and even a laser cannon that spreads across the entire screen, make it ridiculous to suggest that Rayne’s 2D debut reaches anywhere close to the difficulty of nostalgic side-scrolling titles that kept gamers grinding their teeth and stores selling a steady supply of replacement controllers back in the day.

Betrayal does liberally sprinkle stages with cheap trickery however, situations that depend as much on luck as a mastery of the controls – split evenly between platforming sections that unleash floating projectiles while requiring precision jumping, and arena areas where waves of enemies work to drain the blood with the advantage of restricted space.

The real difficulty of Betrayal is in reconciling the shortfalls that leave a promising release far less the experience it could have been, delivering a digital title where every element that makes it excel also directly causes it to disappoint – where the high point of Betrayal causes direct gameplay hiccups that undermine the effort and expose the under-developed nature of the entire game.

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