Order and Chaos Online

"It's pretty much World of Warcraft"

It's been a while since i last wrote anything here and there are several reasons for this, one of them being is that there is bugger all to review but the main reason is that I've been suffering from a severe case of "can not be arsed".....or writers block as it's more professionally known to us professionals.

So as a special treat I'm going to review a game that very few of you have ever heard of at all.

Now assuming that you have read the large and pretty sub-title above then I've said all there is to say about this game. It literally is a Mobile version of World of Warcraft.  The world is split into two distinct forces known as Order and Chaos, the forces of Order consist of Humans and Elves whereas Chaos forces consist of Orcs and the Undead, (Alliance and Horde?) so already you can tell the similarities.

Gameplay is fairly simple, you wander around the world completing quests for NPC's and these are all very simple, such as to kill X number of beast Y in order to level up and become stronger. There is some PvP (Player vs Player) in the game but i haven't yet tried it out. I've been put off PvP ever since RuneScape to be honest.

One point i feel that needs to be mentioned is how well this game operates on a touch screen device. Movement is controlled via a virtual joystick in the corner of the screen and interface menus are all controlled by virtual and context sensitive buttons located on various parts of the screen.
The only problem with the control system is the in-game chat which breaks the flow of gameplay. In order to send a message you need to tap the bottom of the screen to bring up the chat box, you then need to tap the chat box to open your phones virtual keyboard (which completely covers the screen) and type out your message then send it.

Now imagine trying to do this whilst in combat, it will be awkward and will most likely end in your characters death.

Never the less it's one of those things you put up with. It's a game for the mobile and i paid just under £5 for it so I'm not expecting perfection. As with most MMORPG games there is a subscription fee of about 69p a month, but you get the first three months free and that's plenty of time to enjoy this game.

Basically in a nutshell this is a watered down version of World of Warcraft and the main plus of this game is that it's a great time killer, As long as you got a fairly decent signal on your phone you can connect and kill a fair bit of time and for £5 your pretty much getting a slightly similar experience to World of Warcraft without having to say goodbye to your social life.

 Oh and it's made by a company called Gameloft, thought i'd better throw that in there.

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Dynasty Warriors 7

"Quite possibly the worst review of the Series"

The Dynasty Warriors series has always been a sort of "hit and miss" series of games, you either don't like it and don't understand why others do, or you do like it and don't understand why you do either, simply because the gameplay is highly tedious and each game is just a repeat of the same story with only a few minor changes to gameplay.....but i love it.

The story of Dynasty Warriors is based on the Chinese historical novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" which covers the events of the Three Kingdoms (Wei, Wu and Shu) which took place between the Yellow Turban Rebellion in 184 AD up until the unification of the Three Kingdoms under the Jin Dynasty in 280 AD, however the games only ever followed the story up until after the Battle of Wuzhang Plains in 234AD.

These events are known as one of the most bloodiest periods of Chinese history and i can't think of a better setting for a game really.

Gameplay wise Dynasty Warriors 7 is similar to the other games of this series and is a very "hack and slash" game, you play as an officer of one of the kingdoms and progress through a series of levels, each level representing an important battle during the Three Kingdoms period, gameplay is in third person and mainly consists of the character engaging enemy forces on the battlefield, defeating other officers and completing specific objectives in regards to the battles strategy. Although i have to point out that the battles are incredibly unrealistic as characters can wipe out legions of troops with a single sword swing.

Unlike the previous installments of the series Dynasty Warriors 7 makes a major change to it's story telling, previous games of the series would have you pick one of the many historical characters and take part in the battles they were involved in, sometimes the series would try and alter history and have your character take part in a battle that they weren't in originally. Dynasty Warriors 7 however lets you chose between the Wei, Wu, Shu and even the Jin kingdom (which has never made an appearance in previous installments) and play each battle as a character who played an important role, the major battles are split up into several stages and in between each level there are various cutscenes and narration telling you the story of the Three Kingdoms....it's all very interesting if you care about this sort of stuff.

The art designs have once again changed with everything in the game once again getting a makeover with new character, weapon, outfit and map designs which all look a lot better then previous versions.

 Some of the new features of Dynasty Warriors 7 involve each character being able to use every weapon and not just their primary ones (doesn't sound like much of a new feature but seeing as the main advertising point of Dynasty Warriors 6 was the "new" ability to swim and climb ladders i think this is a vast improvement.......). Another new feature is the conquest game mode; this involves picking a character and forging your own path through Three Kingdom era China, (another amazing breakthrough of Omega force's development team was online Co-op for this game mode).

Now I'm going to keep this review short and summarise here, simply because there isn't much to say about this game. Dynasty Warriors 7 is quite possibly the best game in the series and a must buy for any fans of the series so far, the story telling and the flow of gameplay is greatly improved; the larger battles being split into several stages also adds to this. Also if your new to the series feel free to pick this game up as rental to try it out or buy an older version and see what you think...this game isn't everyones cuppa tea but if you can get into it you will have endless fun.

Fallout New Vegas

As we enter that period of the year where there are no major game releases at the moment, seeing as most game developers are saving them for the christmas period and simpliy because i don't get paid enough to waste my money reviewing every game thats released like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 which has recently been released and i have no intention of reviewing it....or even playing for that matter.

So until a new release comes out that i actually want to play i'll be reviewing any other older games i've found myself playing.

Fallout New Vegas was released in October 2010 and is based about 200 years after a nuclear war. The game focuses itself around a war-torn Las Vegas and the Mojave Desert which has crumbled into a wasteland. You play the role of a person known only as "The Courier" and the story begins with you being shot in the head by Matthew Perry.

Now Bethesda Softworks have this strange habit of hiring famous voice actors in order to voice a major character in their games, only for their character to die halfway through the main story and no this is not a spolier, Matthew Perry shoots your character in the face of course i wasn't going to let him live long enough to see the ending of the game with me. Anyway the only exception i can think of to this habit is Sean Bean in Oblivion, who spends the entire game talking about gods and gates you wish he did die and left Patrick Stewart behind instead.

So after being shot in the face and rescued by a robot cowboy The Courier wakes up at a local doctors office in a nearby village (because all village doctors know how to perform brain surgery) you are then asked to create yourself a face followed by the usual method of allocating points into your skill and attribute stats before the doctor sends you on your way free of charge to go in pursuit of Matthew Perry.

Gameplay wise is identical to that of Fallout 3, you have an open world in which you explore, except it is a little bit more restricted at the start of New Vegas as if you go in any direction other then south, you will most likely be killed by some giant mutated creature. The V.A.T.S aiming system also returns which is a feature that slows down combat and allows you to aim at individual body parts of your target with a percentage reading of how likely you are to hit it, this is then followed by a nice mini cutscene, amazingly blowing someones head off with this method never gets old. The perk system is still here and is pretty much more of the same as it was before, little game enhancing bonuses that can obtained by leveling up or by completing certain actions in game.
 
The karma system also returns but plays a less important roll in New Vegas as it is overshadowed by a reputation system which shows how much each faction in the game likes you, which can have an effect on the overall story and gameplay experience, for example on my first play through of this game i happened to of pissed off one of the factions by killing their soliders and stealing their stuff, i then found myself having to cross through their lands to get to my destination, they didn't like this and decided to perform the same act of merciless slaughter that i inflicted on them onto me.

A new feature of Fallout New Vegas is the hardcore mode which was designed for gamers wanting more of a challenge. By enabling hardcore mode your character will now be affected by thurst, hunger and sleep deprivation, healing items take time to work and ammo can now weigh you down,  the purpose behind this is to provide more of a survival feel to the game requiring careful decsions on what items to take with you when you embark on quests. This mode sounds good in theory and is at first quite an enjoyable twist to the game but after a while it just gets boring having to backtrack through recently explored bulidings to find the one working toliet to drink out of.

Fallout New Vegas uses the same game engine as Fallout 3 and Oblivion which means it suffers from the same problems that these two games have, the main one being that the character sprites and the enviroment don't tend to get along well with each other, so you'll often find NPC's and sometimes yourself stuck behind walls and bits of pavement or having to jump up easily walkable stairs....luckly most of these problems have been fixed now due to updates and patches.

Also when you initate converstation with an NPC, time has a habit of stopping dead and both you and the AI awakardly stare at each other almost robotic like whilst you talk to each other until converstation ends, at which point time is resumed and the hammer that was inches away from your face when time paused continues to carry on with it's path to smash your teeth in.

Following on from this i have to say that my main problem with this game is the repetition of voice actors and lines of dialogue. Countless times i've heard NPC's mutter the same lines of dialogue to themselves and to me either as i was just walking past them or in deep converstation with them. In some cases it's bad enough that you can repeat the exact conversation with a character you just had a minute ago, usually with the same voice actor as the character who told you to speak to this weird chap who is obviously suffering from short term memory loss...... Maybe thats why Matthew Perry shot me, as us two are probably the only people in that world capable of independent thought.

I also found out that if you play as a female courier it is possible to have sex with him and then kill him in his sleep......and then eat him.

To summerise if you liked Fallout 3 then you will like Fallout New Vegas as it's pretty much more of the same. It's a game brimming with fresh new content that will keep you playing for hours and hours with a good deal or replayability.

Red Faction Armageddon

So after being bugged continuously by one of my best mates (yes i do have some) to get this game i finally gave in and visited blockbuster to rent this game out for the fair price of £5 for a weeks rental and i have to say I'm quite glad i did decide to rent it.

Firstly because it is a really fun game to play, this game offers endless slaughter and destruction and it never gets old especially as this game offers you lots of different ways to cause such endless chaos such as the magnet gun which works quite simply, you fire one magnetic node at one thing (your enemy for example) and another magnetic node at something else (lets say a building) and watch as they collide against each other (enemy splats into building, lulz are then had), A gun that fires mini black holes which pretty much implodes anything nearby, or once you have completed the game your given a handheld unicorn that can shit rainbows......nuff said.

Secondly because a week is all it takes to fully complete this game, at the time of writing this i have one day left on the rental and only 4 achievements left to earn. Ok one of them is to complete the game on the Insane difficulty setting but due to the rewards given to you at the end of the game, such as the ability to purchase in game cheats and to start a new game with all your unlocked weapons and upgrades, insane mode shouldn't be too difficult.

So in Red Faction Armageddon you play the roll of Darius Mason who is the grandson of Alec Mason who was the protagonist of Red Faction Guerrilla or as i like to call it Saints Row Mars. Anyway the game starts off with a monologue from Darius before focusing on several squads of Red Faction soldiers (Darius being one of them) heading towards a building known as the Terraformer (which allows the surface of Mars to become habitable) in order to aid in it's defense from a terrorist cult who wish to destroy it and drive the Red Faction and the civilian population underground into the old mining tunnels.

Well it wouldn't be much of a game if the Red Faction succeeded in their defense now would it? Sooo the Cultists destroy the Terraformer and drive the population of Mars underground, several years later Darius is a freelance mercenary and is hired by some rather suspicious people to do some digging in some ancient temple and accidentally awakens an ancient bug like alien race which then proceeds to try and kill all of humanity (oh silly Darius) and it's up to him to stop it.

The style of gameplay has drastically changed once again and now its a third person "over the shoulder" shooter filled with linear vehicle and track sections designed to break the flow of gameplay and add moments of "awesome" to whats going on and i have to say it works quite well....It's a method of gameplay thats used over and over again in these sort of games and when its done right it creates enjoyable gameplay and memorable moments within said game.

The main thing that makes this game stand out from similar games like this is the destructive scenery and the fun weaponry. Most things in the game can be destoryed using any of the weapons available to Darius and repaired back together again using the Nano Forge which is a device attached to Darius's arm which can repair almost anything using nano particles, later on in the game you can even upgrade it using salvage which is earned by blowing stuff up to use an array of special abilities such as a protective Nano Shield.

Also like every other recent game Red Faction Armageddon also has a horde/survival mode called infestation in which you and up to four players work together to either survive against wave after wave of alien attack or to defend a building against wave after wave of alien attack. Now as most other game modes of ths type focus more on the survival aspect the whole defend a buliding thing seemed quite intresting.

Unfortunatly this is flawed as every buliding in the Red Faction universe crumbles away so easily like there made from playing cards and toothpicks, so it seems to me that this game mode requires at least a full squad to fully complete as most of your time will be spent repairing the buliding, and not killing the aliens, so your going to need other people to assist you.

Also this game features a Ruin mode which from what i can tell is just a playground for you to endlessly destroy stuff to your hearts content....because i rented this game i'm unable to fully play this game mode as it requires a code to unlock which comes with brand new purchases of the game. Alternatively you can buy a code seperatly but i'm not going to spend my money on a game mode for a rented game.

Red Faction Armageddon is an extraordinary fun game with improved game play machanics that makes it feel like it's own game which was something that its predecessor Guerrilla failed to do. Combined with a mildly intresting story and over the top weaponry this makes this game definitely worth the £5 i paid to rent it.

Also heres a note to end on.....why does everyone in this game refer to the bug like aliens as aliens..... they were on Mars before the humans were so technically we are the aliens.

Too Human

Hmmm....Where to begin... I know I'll start with why i own this piece of shite in the first place.

After a average day at work i decided to pop into Game and see what was available, after browsing the shelves for a few minutes i decided to ask the assistant if he could recommend any fun RPG's, after a few moments of him listing games i've already played, completed and probably sold back to him he suggested this game for the price of £8. So i thought...fuck it, it's only £8 and it's been out for quite some time so it can't be that shit compared to some of the other games here...(I'm looking at you Two Worlds II, how the fuck that game is selling for £35 pre-owned  i don't bloody know)

So i got home and put the disc into my xbox and loaded the game up and played it for about an two hours before i took the game out and put it back into it's case and decided to do something more productive with my time....like go on facebook.

Sooo lets move on to the game itself... From the small amount of time i cared it would seem that the story is about a war between machines and humans and its all very sci-fi. You play as Baldur a cybernetically enhanced super solider (why is it that when we are under threat of being wiped out by machines, we turn to another machine for help) who the public see as a god......no fucking idea why, i guess i didn't play that far in to find out.

The game starts with a cutscene of Baldur and a several squads of soliders getting into an APC and making their way to some sort of temple where everyone gets out and enters. At this point it took me several moments to realise that the cutscene has ended and i'm supposed to take control as theres no indication that the cutscene ended.

At first the gameplay style seems to resemble that of most third person RPG's, left joystick for moving around and right joystick for awkwardly swinging your sword....wait.. what?? This isn't right, the right joystick is supposed to be used for controling your view point like most other third person games not for attacking....this must be part of some indepth combat system i am yet to discover i thought......so when the first wave of evil machines arrived i charged at them with my sword and tear them apart robotic limb from limb.

It is safe to say i fought very bravely and died very quickly to which i was rewarded with a long and unskippable death scene, which will quickly get annoying.

So after finding my next batch of evil robots i decided to hang back and take them out from a distance with my dual pistols......wait how do i aim on this thing, ah the left bumber, this must be used to lock on to enemies and so it was and the first enemy died in a matter of seconds...a few moments afterwards the horde of evil robotic minons had reached me and proceeded to claw my face off because i couldn't change target as my aim was forever locked onto the minion i had already killed and then i was rewarded with the same long and unskippable death scene again.

I did manage to play through this game and complete the first level but then i gave up, i just couldn't be fucked with having to put up with these awkard controls which is a shame really because this game did have the potential to be an average game with an average story that would of killed a few hours at best...nothing truly amazing but fun to play anyway. Instead because of the awful control system it isn't fun to play and is a pile of shit.....and furthermore a waste of £8.

L.A.Noire

As i'm sure most people are aware of L.A.Noire is based in LA (surprise surprise) during the Noir period of the 1940's and 50's where every man wore a suit with a matching fedora and if you didn't you were probably considered poor and not worthy to be remembered during this time.

Anyway i should move on...

In L.A.Noire you play as the baby faced Cole Phelps an aspiring young policeman who has returned home after giving the Japs a good thrasing at Okinawa during World War 2 and now wishes to turn his attention to cleaning the streets of LA......good luck with that.

The game splits itself over 5 different desks such as Patrol, Traffic, Homicide, Vice and Arson each resembling a different area of the police force and each desk has several different cases to be solved before you move onto the next one. Now seeing as the Patrol desk is pretty much the tutoral for the game this leaves 4 desks for Mr Phelps to have fun with.

Each case starts out with you and your partner investigating the scene of the crime looking for evidence to peice together the mystery and discover what happened. Once you've found the right clues chances our you will then have to interrogate a witness/suspect for further information and in between these there will be various action scences such as shoot outs and car/foot chases.

L.A. Noire prides itself on it's advanced motion capture system that is designed to pick up slight human reflexes which the player has to notice and determine if the person your interogating is telling the truth, not being fully truthful or outright lying to your face. Now this all sounds good in theory but has several flaws...much like communism (which the game likes to joke about every so often as well)

One of these is that you have no idea how Phelps is going to respond once you have decided if you think the witness/suspect is being truthful/ being vague or lying. The best way to stress this point would be imagine a situation where you are unsure if the suspect is withholding information or lying and you accuse them of the former when they really lying, this leads to an intresting situation of Phelps suggesting they know more information regarding something completly different and the suspect literaly telling Phelps to go Fuck himself...... This leads to a lot of problems in the harder cases

Anyway, this is just one of the few problems on what is a great game and experience if you go into it with the right mindset. You are playing as a member of the LAPD and because of this you can't run around waving you gun and causing mayham so those expecting this to be an old fasioned GTA will be and should be disapointed.

Oh yeah and another problem with this game is that the fences are bloody invincible...this is most annoying during a car chase, as in any other sandbox style game a fence would just crumble out of the way of your car only slowing you down briefly whilst in this one the effect is driving straight into a solid wall, meaning that you have to reverse and try and catch up with your fleeing suspect....who has probably gotten away and is laughing his way to Mexico.

Also in some of the cases the game tries to shock you with disturbing images such as naked and mutalied female corpses (mainly on the homicide desk)...this is probably meant to reflect the brutal things these detectives have to see on a regular basis along with the "it's just another day at the job" sort of thing. Oh yeah and L.A.Noire jumps on the peadophillia bandwagon. One of these happens quite early on in the game where your simply investigating a traffic incident and then somehow stumple upon an underage porn industry....WTF!!

Anyway...moving on from peadophilla, the game has stunning visual effects and even has a black and white mode for those wishing to play the game in true Noir style. I of course tried this feature out.....for about 5 minutes and switched back because it really is nothing special and doesn't really add anything to the game.

Also the game kinda does what Dragon Age II does and by that i mean it saves it's main plot story for the last few hours of the game and just keeps you going with mini storys until you reach it and when you do it's nothing amazing and i found myself playing it...just to get it done and out of the way.

I'm getting tired and want to go to bed now so heres a final summary....dispite the negative things i've said about L.A.Noire above it is truly a great game and one that is worth playing if a bit repetitve at times as each case follows a similar pattern, but else do you except as all your doing is playing the role of a detective as he goes about his day job, the main flaws of the game are nothing but minor inconviences that you quickly get over with as you go into each case curious as to what it's about and whats happened. The "shocking" images are really nothing compared to other stuff thats around these days anyway (Who hasn't scene a mutalated corpse nowdays)

In short...this is a game worth playing, so if you don't wish to buy it...rent it and then rent it again...as you wouldn't of finished it in time

I've finally decided to do it

Hello anyone who has found this page or has been deemed worthy enough to be sent a link to this insanity.

I finally decided to create a page where i can review games and films for whatever reason i have for reviewing it.

If i can be arsed and nothing new has come out that i feel like i should write about, then i may review old stuff, for example my first review will be about L.A.Noire.

Sooo...keep posted because i will write here eventually.

P.S. i always wanted my own blog, not like im important enough for anyone to read it though.....One day that will change :)