As primarily a PS3 player, and particularly in the case of Modern Warfare 2, this Story doesn’t really affect me much directly, but I do think it’s funny how this is playing out.

Knowing that this map pack won’t be exclusive to Microsoft forever I took interest into how these new maps were going to be implemented when they went live. The original story was that there would be 2 new playlists added to the fray that roll these maps exclusively across all game types, in normal and hardcore modes… with consideration to add the maps into the general playlists as more and more people adopt the DLC. I wasn’t a big fan of this approach because frankly I primarily play ground wars with is a mix of Team Deathmatch and Domination game modes. The other modes I don’t care so much for. But I understood why they’d go this route. The only alternative would be to kick players that didn’t pay for the map pack when they rolled up. As a player I feel I get booted/disconnected from matches far too often as it is.

Earlier today I noticed FourZeroTwo tweet about adding the maps to all playlists, which we knew was coming, but I’m kind of surprised it happened so soon. Not long ago, he followed up with a tweet indicating that they would be weighted heavier so to come up more often… Now this sort of shenanigans isn’t going to effect me, for the reason cited above, and because when the maps become available I’m going to get them… but if I was taking a stand and boycotting this DLC because of the ridiculous price (A stance I would completely understand as well), I would be fuming right now… enjoy your random disconnects cheapskates…

Box Art

So amongst my pillaging of Just Cause 2 over the weekend, I managed to squeeze in a little time for Red Steel 2, and while I haven’t finished the game yet, I did learn a few things about it that I thought worth sharing.

In all the coverage leading up to the release of Red Steel 2, I was drawn to the art style, I do like some cell shading in my games here and there to mix things up. And the idea of sword play on the Wii is now and will always be appealing to me, because deep down I am a ninja… The deciding factor for me was going to be that mechanics of the sword play actually working, and after the reviews went up saying that they did I went ahead and pulled the trigger and picked it up.

I concur with the findings that the controls are solid once you get used to going from swordplay to shooting/navigating, however the swordplay still feels closer to gesture controls than a true implementation of MotionPlus for the most part which was somewhat disappointing to me, but sort of understandable. Performing special attacks is easy, and makes it fun to mix up your combat. While you’re in combat the experience is very immersive and because of the controls interactive nature, you really do get into it especially during boss fights where you’re dodging heavy attacks and looking for weaknesses and openings.

Unforutnately however, once combat stops you realize that you are in a pretty small area with a few doors, and each time you go through one you need to wait for 15-20 seconds before you get into the next, which may or may not have some action for you. Instead, you frustratingly try to smash boxes and barrels for loose change. This is a problem because it completely takes me out of the experience. Instead of being so wrapped up in the action that I don’t realize how much time I spent, I am pretty much saying ok, one more room then I’ll play something else. It’s shame really, but I think this gives more credence to my opinion on Move. And while I still think this game is pretty good so far, and I will probably give it a strong recommendation for Wii owners, I think if this game weren’t on the underpowered Wii it could have been much better.

Box Art

I came into this title with no expectations, I’m generally not a fan of sandbox games due to their generally repetitive mission types, and their lack of story. I had played the original Just Cause but was not at all impressed, but the demo proved to me that they had fixed a lot of what I thought was terrible about the original and so because of that and because all of the media convinced me that I could spend a lot of time just screwing around doing cool stunts, and that sort of thing appeals to me as a gamer so I picked this up. Kudos to the marketing team on this one, they’ve won.

At this point I’d normally start by giving a brief synopsis of the story coming into the game, but I’m not going to bother with that here because, well, they didn’t… they give you enough of a background so that you know why Rico has been sent to Panau, and why you must help the 3 terrorist factions that inhabit the area. There are a couple twists that are at the bare minimum of any story told in the veil of espionage, but they are poorly set up and poorly delivered. Campy dialog is on full display here. Rico did make me laugh with a couple of his one liners, but through the bulk of the game you are treated with poorly executed, bad dialog, with terrible accents. Even understanding that to some degree its supposed to be this way, it didn’t really have the charm of a “B” movie that it was supposed to. On top of that, there was no real progression to the story. You are basically told to keep doing what you’re doing every time you complete a mission. Because of this you have no sense of loyalty to any of the characters, or any of the factions.

Now that all that is out of the way; This game looks good! some of the scenescapes you run into as your traveling around are incredible, some very convincing sunsets over open water, or mountains, etc, are very well done. The explosions look and sound great. The animation in the cutscenes weren’t great but I’m suggesting to skip them all anyway, its a waste of time.  The map itself is huge, and each of the little locations scattered through out it are unique despite sharing many assets with other areas they are constructed in such a way that 1 airport looks very different from another airport. This level of detail really stands out to me in games of this ilk, as you may remember my gripe about it in my Assassin’s Creed 2 review.

There is a lack of variety in the mission types you run into in this game, you’ve got your standard fare, hijacking, assassinations, race and pick up this parcel type missions. On top of that there are ‘stronghold’ missions where you an 5-6 useless AI goons try to raid a military base to take it over, I’m not sure I’ve had this experience in a sandbox game before, but they were sort of fun. Truth be told however, I spent most of my 19 hours with this game not doing missions at all… simply finding a new location and destroying all of the government property, and finding all the collectibles. The good news is that this behavior was encouraged, and did count towards your chaos meter, which progresses the story. Speaking of locations, and collectibles… there is an insane amount of them in this game. Literally hundreds of locations, and Literally thousands of collectibles, and the game make sure you know as you do them how little of a chunk of the game you’ve actually seen. In fact when you complete the story line, you are entered into mercenary mode, and it tells you in percent terms how far along the game you are… when I finished the story, I was at 24%. I think its safe to say that there are less story bits elements in this game than there are airports on panau… but there is a lot of stuff you can still do once you’re done. I truly feel sorry for anyone with OCD who inadvertently picked up this game… if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say you could easily spend 100 hours collecting stuff in this game, or trying to find that 1 last vehicle you need drive final achievement/trophy…

You’ll also spend a lot of time traveling from one mission to the next. Once you get to used to traveling with the parachute/grappling hook, it’s generally speaking the fastest way to get around when travelling short to mid distances. For longer trips you’ll likely want a plane which are made conveniently available in the black market shop for a reasonable fee. You can basically tell your dealer to drop in one of each type of vehicle, from airplane to tanks to four wheelers once you’ve filled the chaos meter enough to unlock them, along with any sort of ammo you may need. Your weapons and vehicles can both be upgraded using the weapon and vehicle part collectibles that are scattered around, they can be used for things like improving top speed and acceleration, or accuracy and magazine size. Its not a great or rewarding system, but it does give you some choice as to how to upgrade your hero. If travelling is not for you, the black market dealer also offers an extraction service which is effectively a teleport, but when I was playing it was just as fun to summon a jet and fly there myself. If you’re not going to enjoy the world they’ve provided you with, this game probably isn’t for you.

AAAAHHH!!

The controls felt good and intuitive most of the time, although navigating while in the stunt position sometimes felt clumsy. For example, I would be riding in vehicle that had a rear mounted turret, in order to get back to that turret you’d need to move to the ‘stunt jump’ position, and then push back to get into the turret, and similar back into the drivers seat. It’s cool that they give you that sort of control, especially why the vehicle was in motion, but in high speed situations it often just felt too long to get back to the gun and back to the drivers seat. I had similar experiences when grappling onto a helicopter. There is all sorts of fun to be had with your grappling hook though, like sticking bad guys to a jet thats about to take off, or strapping yourself to a tank and rocketing yourself to safety (don’t forget to jump off before it explodes!).

Action hero in action!

Before I give my final thoughts on this game as a whole I want to share this one event that will basically lead into those thoughts. I recall this one mission where I had several military jeeps chasing me, while I was on a long stretch of road… I hopped onto the roof, quickly shot out the front tires on a couple of the followers, one of which swerved into the 3rd creating a huge “hollywood action sequence”-esque explosion, at which time I hopped back into the car and drove off into the sunset. You don’t get moments like that in many games, particularly when you have so much control over the experience, and although they are rare because they’re fairly difficult to pull off intentionally, when it happens the game give you the sense that you are an action hero and you just pulled off something crazy. I could have just as easily tried to get away by driving, but I would have missed out on that satisfying ending. I absolutely have to commend Avalanche Studios, for creating a huge, beautiful, fun to explore sandbox for adventurers to play in, and giving players the ability to resolve the situations at hand in a way that matches their style of play. But if you are a player that just sort moves from checkpoint to checkpoint, then you’re probably not going to get the most out of this game. If on the other hand you can spend hours just roaming around looking for trouble, it should be hard for you to pass on this, just don’t expect the story to drive your experience.