ReviewsQU

Reviews Q to U

RF Online - PC

Wierd Korean MMO. I heard lots of hype about it being different and cool, but the couple of days play I gave it before getting pissed off does not show this at all. It's just another generic MMO with a mildly different setting trying to do the job of original thought.

Graphics Nice enough, but again, not great. Also, everyone looks exactly the same. The fucking Cybermen had more individuality.

Good points ....erm...there's stompy robots....

Bad points ...but apart from the fact that they look stompy, they are just another generic MMO race. Look at the bad points for most of the above games, pretend they are all about this one. Pretty much sums it up.

Joose

Rogue Galaxy - PS2

Very nice-looking RPG in the cell-shaded style of Dragon Quest (VIII). Combat, though is a nasty button-mashy affair that basically ruined the experience. In my view, a waste.

FatherJack

Saga of Ryzom - PC

A french developed title, I believe, and you can tell. Its all so undefinably continental. One of the rare MMO's that tries to break from the standard "heres a world, theres magic elves and orks" thing, this has some original races and a pretty original (even award winning) storyline. Also features some interesting technology such as realistic modeling of herding behavour in animals and a rather nice skills system.

Graphics Nice, but fairly bog standard. Not so bad it makes you cry, but nothing that'll make you go "oooh". Some of the creature design is rather lubberly though.

Good things The storyline is both original and good, it tries (and mostly suceeds) to do new things without breaking stuff thats tried and tested.

Bad stuff Nothing specific, unless you have a particular hatred for French things.

Score : 7/10

Joose

Silverfall (review based on demo)

Sort of Dungeon Siege-ish. Controls not only non-defianble, but can't check what they actually are. View-spin is middle-mouse, so that sucks as mine is a smooth-scrolly one which never registers. Three monsters pop out of nowhere, I click to attack. Oh, I have to click again, for each individual attack, that's rather tedious. I die. I lose all my equipment. Apparently it's in a gravestone, right where the remaining two monsters are standing waiting for me. Erm, no thanks.

FatherJack

Sin Episodes - Emergence

Short and fairly sweet actually for an action romp. Comes free with Sin 1 and it's expansion when purchased via Steam.

On it's own, it's not bad, some nice concepts, plays fairly well. It could have done with more than 3 weapons, some sections are mean to get through, but for a pure fps action romp s'not bad, just rather short.

I suspect if Ritual hadn't have been sold on (and key employee's leaving at the time), bits would have been added in the other 8 episodes, which would have probably made up a great game when played together.

Shame really, as Ritual made some rather good games, they'll be missed.

Emergence when compared to SiN1, doesn't hold a candle to it I'm afriad, the first game was much more FUN, had more interactivity in the environment (which nearly everything could be played with), more guns, more enemies, just not as shiny gfx.

Score : 4.5/10

Buzzmong

Space Empires IV - PC

Introduction

Some of you may have noticed me playing this rather a lot this weekend, so I thought I'd chuck a review together. SEIV is a turn based strategy game in the same vein as Civlisation. Starting on your little homeworld in a corner of the galaxy, and expanding across systems in order to gather more resources for your empire. New technologies are researched along the way and other races will interact in trade and war. This isn't a new game - in fact there's a Space Empires V - but apparently it's the best in the series and it's only a fiver off Steam. Better still, it's very customisable and there are player created mods for popular sci-fi settings like Star Wars, Star Trek and Babylon 5.

Gameplay

The game is played out on maps of the various solar systems. These are linked together by warp points (like wormholes) which allow ships to travel between systems. Within the sytems are planets that need to be colonised and exploited to provide space for the facilities that support your empire and the resources with which to build them. There aren't a massive amount of facilities to choose from, but that's no bad thing as planets can be earmarked for set roles and once all the facility slots are full they pretty much run themselves. The variety comes in the way spacecraft work. Every ship is built to a design created by the player using modules that have been researched. There's a large variety of these modules to do various things, but not so large that it's overwhelming. Ships can then be built in the spaceyards and formed into fleets. Most ships will inevitably be warships, but others can colonise planets and later in the game create or destroy them.

The early stages of a typical game will involve designing a simple ship with which to explore, while colonising the nearby planets in your starting system. Early on you'll only be able to colonise one (of three) types of planets, so most will remain empty. As your exploration of the galaxy continues other races will be met. Generally they're friendly and will want to trade (a simple mechanism that's automated), but they still seem to destroy your explorers given chance. Colonisation of nearby worlds isn't too taxing and expansion happens pretty quickly - it's rare to be sat waiting for resources to be generated before something can be built.

Eventually the borders between empires will become narrow enough for tension to build, and other races begin to get tetchy. By this point enough research has usually been done to enable some half decent combat ships to be built, although hostilities seem to be mostly restricted to espionage and sabotage with only a few skirmishes and lots of rattling of sabres. By this point different colony types should be available and all planets will be supporting the war machine. Even so, every ship costs to maintain and they're quite a drain on the economy. Hostile planets can be put under siege or bombed in a variety of unpleasant ways so that you can recolonise them with your own people.

Towards the end of a game technology advances will allow ships to be designed that pull asteroid fields together to create new (and usually very rich) planets. After this new stars can be created, warp points opened and closed and other stellar terrain features adjusted. Combat will by now include dreadnaughts and carriers launching dozens of fighters in large scale fleet combat.

Sights and Sounds

The graphics and sounds are a little dated, but in a game such as this that's not such a big deal. What's more, all of it can be modified either by non-official mods or, if you're feeling brave, by the player. It's functional and clear though.

Stuff that sucks

Well, it's pretty ugly. That's not a big deal and it can be fixed with mods, but it might put some off. The AI isn't brilliant and tends to contradict itself, but again this can be remedied with mods. The only real complaint I've had is that there's no consistency with how many slots for facilities each planets have, so siting your colonies is a bit hit and miss.

Conclusion

It really is Civilisation in space. A little bit simpler than Civ, but also more geared to war. Anyone looking for a game that will suck up their time, and games take a very long time, might do well to invest. For the price you can't really go wrong.

Score : 7/10

Dog Pants

Star Wars Battlefront II - PSP

I've played this on other consoles and enjoyed it enough to think that buying it on the PSP was a good idea. Oh dear, how wrong I was. The lack of a dual analogue stick makes this came become almost unplayable as there is no auto-aim feature whatsoever, and the chance of lining up a long range shot (which was always necessary in the game on other consoles) is nigh on impossible. The graphics are pretty poor as well, and add this to long loading times, well you can kind of guess the end result. Very poorly ported across to the PSP, and I will avoid all FPS games on the PSP in future, unless they've been made specifically with the PSP controls in mind.

Score : 3/10 (What should have been a quick fun game, has been turned into an uncontrollable ugly turd)

Woo Elephant Yeah

Star Wars Galaxies - PC

The star wars setting as an MMO. Be a wookie, go to tatoine and blast things. Or build houses. meh.

Graphics Alright, but nothing special. Not totally awfull, but certainly dated.

Good points Its star wars.

Bad points Its actually Everquest. It just *looks* like starwars. Plus, its a hell of a lot of work to become a jedi, so dont let that tempt you. I fear it is beyond the reach of any 5punkers.

Score : 3/10 (2 of which is purely because its star wars).

Joose

Supreme Commander - PC

Most of you won't have noticed but I have recently bought Supreme commander, and have had time to have a bit of a play test. There are 3 different box sets available from each major online retailer (Play, Game and Amazon). Each box comes with a few bits and pieces centred around one of the factions, such as a poster, a postcard type thing and also a DVD with various videos, pictures etc.

The factions As I mentioned earlier there are 3 factions. There is the UEF (United Earth Federation), Cybran Nation and the Aeon Illuminate. All three have similar tech trees and the only real difference is in the way that the units look. The UEF is basically an Earth government looking to reunite the universe as much of the human population is spread out over vast galaxies. The Cybran Nation is essentially made of cyborg-type people who were shunned by the old governments of earth and escaped to form their own. Also there is the mysterious Aeon Illuminate who are a human cult which glorified an ancient extinct alien race and looked to impress their ways on the rest of the universe.

Gameplay From what I have played of this it feels much like total annihilation. Battles are swift and most units have just one purpose (anti-ground, anti-air and anti-sea). Resources are based around a similar system to total anihilation too with only Mass (collected from certain locations on the map) and energy (created via power plants).

Graphics The graphics are pretty swish, from the missiles to the giant factory behemoth you can build. It does however draw quite a few resources and I found on high settings it was mushing even my ATI1900XTX. Plenty of options to turn down for you penny pinchers (dollar pinchers in deject's case)

Ok, finally to the conclusion... I'd say if you were a fan of total anihilation or of any modern RTS game you will enjoy this. Reasonably priced at £24.99 (for a brand new game) I can see plenty of 5punkers enjoying this game whether its for beating up the AI or fellow gamers.

Killavodka

System Shock 2 (PC)

Awesome game, good plot, good twists, fps/rpg hybrid. Scary atmosphere, well built. A must play.

Buzzmong

Tales of Vesperia - 360

Introduction

It's a JRPG with cell-shaded anime-style characters and a real-time battle system. It is the tenth game in a rough series, but only the second major one to be released in Europe in sequence on its original format, the first being Tales of Symphonia on the GameCube in 2003. Lucky US citizens have had PS and PS2 releases either side of that. Tales of Symphonia remains quite highly regarded and even second-hand copies still command prices equal or higher than those on release.

Comparisons with Final Fantasy

One of our newsfeeds recently compared it to Final Fantasy VII, but while it has similarities it is far from a clone of it.

In towns you move around a pre-rendered background and interact with things in a way very similar to FF. In dungeons you similarly have roaming enemies and a map (which didn't appear in FF until X) - but it differs in that the enemies are visible and avoidable. The overland sections look similar to FFVII in that you are as big as the towns, but again the roaming monsters are visible akin to FFXII. None of these things are exclusive to the Final Fantasy series though and I could list many more obvious parallels to other games which use those systems for travel.

Unlike FF the cut-scenes are rendered using the game engine, so it fits on a single DVD. It also has optional skits, where the characters talk to each in comic-book frames, in an improvement over Tales of Symphonia these are now voiced and the faces fully animated. Most in-game dialogue is in pop-up text windows and only voiced in the major scenes.

Battle System

The battle system however is unlike most other games - in that it has three modes of operation. In Manual it's effectively real-time action-based where you directly control the characters, mash attack buttons and try to pull off combos. Semi-auto is kind of the same, but targeting is done for you, which is better for long-range characters. Auto does everything for you including attacking according to the tactics you set (conserve mana, all out, etc). Because you have a party of up to four characters, they can be set independently, so you could control the healer while the swordsman is on Auto. There are some skills which can only be used in a particular mode, usually Semi-auto.

The Auto mode is improved from Tales of Symphonia, where you felt like you weren't doing anything at all, but it does still feel a little disconnected and takes a bit of tinkering with the tactics before you start to get used to influencing the battle more directly. You can switch between modes at will and keep yourself busy.

I like the Auto mode, it works pretty well for the random encounters. The game is too fast to specify turn-based commands and benefits from it. You don't get bored inputting commands for each character when you know the first attack is going to kill everything, nor do you spend ages beating weak monsters on the way to somewhere interesting - battles against wandering monsters typically only last between 5 and 30 seconds.

Stuff that sucks

Stuff isn't terribly well-explained. I had to load and re-do the combat tutorial as I didn't realise I was meant to be performing the actions while the instructions were still on the screen. I have no idea how the weapon skills are transferred to the characters - it says it is possible, and I have "learned" them, but they don't appear in their skills lists.

As is typical in the genre, it takes a while to get going. Not quite the 35 hours before the game gets started typical of the FF games, but in five hours play I've only encountered one "boss" fight.

Conclusion

Buy it if you like this sort of thing. It's a good example of the genre and the hybrid battle system is a good compromise between chin-stroking strategy and button-mashing, although if you're a zealous proponent of one of those, you'll find it a little light.

It's worth noting there's an enhanced PS3 version planned for the Autumn (in Japan) with extra playable characters, towns, dungeons, bosses and other content. No word on a western release date.

Score : 9/10

FatherJack

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas - PC

Runs like a zero-legged dog which has been shot and buried in concrete. Uses amazing shader model 3 effects which realistically simulate having smeared vaseline all over your screen. Stupid mandatory checkpoints ensure the bad guys have you where they want you.

FatherJack

UT2004 - PC

Shiny updated Unreal dealy.

Score : 7/10

Dr. Kitteny berk

Unreal Tournament 3 - PC

Alright, since I don't see any reviews of this around, let's get bashy.

Graphics I cannot complain at all about this: it's beautiful, but it eats lots of computer resources. It's runnable on old piece of hardware, but quite frankly on my ATI Radeon X1600 it looked like Doom 2, on my current video card, which I haven't memorized yet, it's more comparable to Crysis. It uses quite stunning new effects for a change, although most of the time, these effects also make you wonder what the fuck killed you because you couldn't see anything.

Gameplay The singleplayer mode deviates from those of the old Unreal Tournaments, in fact, this isn't even Unreal Tournament, it's more like Tabula Rasa with less RPG and more big stompy robots. In the campaign, you proceed through designated points in a fabulous unnamed planet, which makes it seem like some ghetto war for turf where you can collect protection money. A noticable thing is that the two characters who give you briefing have a black english accent thing comparable to that of MC Hammer. Otherwise, the game follows the quite pleasant shoot'n'kill-shit-esque approach of the last 4 games with the same usual gamemodes. Which is getting quite old.

The protagonist is a non-ghetto guy (for a change, yay) who has a sister (that means no sex in the game, probably), and is ordered around by two times ex-champion Malcolm who you probably fought in the last round of each Unreal Tournament previously and also bears the previously mentioned ghetto speech. The game also seems to promote spontaneous declaration of war on innocent people, which is quite good if you ask me.

Oh yes, the game stores your campaign offline and online seperately. So if you start a campaign online then login server goes down (which happens pretty often) you're pretty much fucked unless you fancy starting a new one.

Artificial Stupidity (AI) This is so long that I have to separate it from Gameplay. Basically the game features the EXTREMELY UBERDUMB and the EXTREMELY WTFPWN AI.

The earlier ones are also known as "teammates" although "blockers" would be a better expression. These uberdumb ai guys cannot take down a single guy who only has an impact hammer in 5v1, grab the flag in CTF then run around and fight stuff, get stuck in walls quite often, get inside vehicles then drive them into a wall and don't do anything for quite a while, or the most annoying aspect, in VCTF, they get in FUCKING vehicles then while I'm bringing home the FUCKING flag on a FUCKING hoverboard they FUCKING drive in front of me yelling "LOLZ!!!!111 I COVER you're ASS!!!11". Speaking of which, they have a useful habit of telling you the position of the enemy. Or it perhaps WOULD be useful if they'd like tell you where they were. When they spot a significant enemy anywhere in the map, they yell "Enemy <lol> here!". I'm still trying to figure out where the fuck is here.

The latter ones are those who use aimbots, wallhax, instagib enforcers and everything else at the same time. You may also know these bots as "the opposing team".

Sounds'n'shit I cannot think of any complaints here. The sound effects (along with visuals) are well-timed and also well in-place. Voice acting is great, despite the fact that most of them is unnecessary, except for the campaign stuff of course.

Multiplayer The game suffers from minor master server problems and other major retardation. First of all, the login server crashes quite often, quite an inconvenience. If you ever manage to log in you will notice two things in the server browser: The pings are quite high. I know. I joined a 2k ping server and it played normally. And that there are little servers. Oh yes, Epic messed up by releasing early without redirect support. Practically, this means only completely vanilla servers appear in your server browser. If we put all this aside, the multiplayer is quite enjoyable, adrenaline-rising, fast paced, and although it's full of douchebags as usual, it won't really affect your experience. Unless of course they're stealing the goliaths and ramming them into mountains.

Overall Despite all the Yathzee-style bashing on the game, I believe it's quite enjoyable. Pros are the new storyline, which finally isn't another random tournament event, the stunning graphics and sound effects, cons are the rather irritating AI and multiplayer system, but despite these, the good is still seriously outweighing the bad, and at the end of the day, you realize you are playing quite an enjoyable game.

Score : 7.5/10

Baliame