LEGO The Lord of the Rings Review - Xbox 360

Game Description: Based on The Lord of the Rings motion picture trilogy, LEGO The Lord of the Rings follows the original storylines of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, taking players through the epic story events reimagined with the humor and endless variety of LEGO play. 

LEGO Lord of the Rings takes the small improvements made in recent LEGO titles and implements them in a major way. It isn’t an open world title like LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes was, but it is the largest non-open world LEGO game to date. Environments seem bigger, there’s more space to them, which allows for more complicated puzzles and platforming.

Even as LEGOlas, platforming struggles.

This does good things in terms of story telling and visuals, but it ends up hindering the platforming, one of the strongest areas of the LEGO series in the past. It’s too easy to get caught up trying to make the same jump a dozen times because it can be hard to judge how far you need to jump. Even if you do manage to judge the distance correctly, it’s all to easy to slide off the edge anyway. It’s extremely frustrating and weird when the platforming has been so great in past titles.

The formula remains pretty similar to past titles, progressing you through the story one mission at a time, while also giving you the option to return to a hub world –Middle Earth in this case– to run around. There isn’t much to do in Middle Earth, though there really hasn’t even been too much stuff in the hub worlds, so I didn’t find much of a compelling reason to explore, only ever backing out that far between play sessions.

If you have a favorite moment from one of the three films, you’re bound to see it show up in LEGO Lord of the Rings as the story that the game follows is nearly identical to the films, at least for most of the major moments. This means that the game is really well paced too. There weren’t any standout moments that felt like they went on for too long, it all felt just right. If anything, the numerous long and unskippable cutscenes were the only thing to negatively impact the flow of gameplay. They’re good for a few laughs, but if you’ve seen the films in recent years, they come off a bit unnecessary.

Choreographed Minifig Combat

Perhaps the biggest improvement in LEGO Lord of the Rings over past LEGO titles is the higher level of animation in combat. Despite the fluidity of combat in past games, it always felt like your MiniFig was swinging their weapon like an overdramatic play-actor trying to gain the attention of a talent scout. It all felt a bit unnecessarily slow, but that isn’t an issue in LEGO LotR.

Everything still controls the same, but instead of a simple swing of the sword, your character engages in a quick combat sequence that’s so smooth it almost looks choreographed. It all takes place very quickly though, so it doesn’t ever feel like you’re not in control of the character. This is best seen in action when you have a character like Legolas who uses a Bow for ranged combat and daggers for close-quarters combat. He quickly switches between the two as needed in a fluid way that moves the combat along.

Couch Co-op At its Best

As with all LEGO games, LEGO Lord of the Rings is at its best when played cooperatively with a buddy. There’s still drop-in/drop-out coop, which is just as flawless as ever, though it’s still quite distracting to have the constant flashing reminder at the top of the screen to have a friend join in. There’s a good amount of puzzles that require near-direct control of two different characters, so it can take some careful maneuvering if you’re trying to quickly swap between characters.

AI has never been great in past LEGO games, but it seems to have improved in LEGO Lord of the Rings. While they won’t be helping you solve any puzzles, they’re able to navigate obstacles without much trouble for the most part. There’s the occasional moment where they might get stuck in a fall, but that can usually be solved by switching to them and moving from the danger zone. It wasn’t a regular occurrence though, which is somewhat surprising as things can get pretty cramped during moments when you have almost a dozen characters in play at once.

100% Completion? Good luck!

It doesn’t take long to get through all three stories, roughly eight to nine hours the first time if you don’t do too much wandering, but as with all LEGO games, you’re dumped into the open-world after you finish the main story to try your hand at a few dozen hours of post-game content.

There’s still the typical challenges of finding the golden bricks hidden within the levels, but there’s also a bunch of smaller challenges, like finding all five cowboy skeletons in one level. It’s easily one of the larger LEGO games to date as you have the whole scope of the franchise available to you. It doesn’t feel too large though, as you can fast travel once you find a statue in each area that unlocks a map filled with hidden info for the area.

There’s still a few problems.

Despite a brilliant presentation, LEGO Lord of the Rings is not without its fair share of problems. It froze up and required a restart multiple times throughout the game, usually during cutscenes, which often resulted in lost progress. There was also some weird checkpoint issues where the game couldn’t determine whether to load my latest manual save from a save statue or an auto-checkpoint, so it decided to do both, resulting in a loss of progress in one spot, but the saved progression in a further area.

However, this doesn’t stop LEGO Lord of the Rings from being one of the best LEGO titles yet. It manages to find a brilliant sweet spot between linear set-pieces and larger puzzles and exploration that make it a joy to play through. The story cinematics might appeal to those who are too young to have seen the films when released, but they still managed to get a solid stream of laughs. All of this together makes it a wonderful experience for new and old fans alike.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified Review - PSV

Game Description:Before the future could be won, history had to be written. Exposing that story exclusively on PlayStation Vita, Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified explores original fiction in the Call of Duty: Black Ops universe with an all-new campaign of Special Ops missions. Optimized for gamers on-the-go, Call of Duty Black Ops: Declassified delivers the most intense handheld Call of Duty experience to date, including both Special Ops Story mode and Multiplayer combat tailored for the PS Vita.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified is a worst-case scenario. Carrying a console game over to a portable platform is always tricky business, but games like Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation and Uncharted: Golden Abyss have demonstrated that the PlayStation Vita is capable. Nihilistic Software failed in its platform-first Vita FPS, Resistance: Burning Skies, and the California-based developer fumbles badly once again in Black Ops Declassified.

Super-Sized Spec Ops
The "campaign" in Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified is meant to fill in the narrative gaps between Black Ops and Black Ops 2, sending players out on a series of missions involving familiar characters like Mason, Woods, and Hudson from the Treyarch line. There are 10 of these missions in all (with separate Time Trials for each), laid out in a menu that bears no small resemblance to the Spec Ops menus in Modern Warfare games, complete with three-star ratings next to each item.
The feeling that Declassified's campaign is a souped-up Spec Ops mode lingers after you jump into a mission as well. The franchise's focus on blockbuster spectacle in its campaigns is completely absent, replaced by straightforward runing and gunning through a series of bland war-torn urban environments. Each mission is also a minutes-long affair, though some start to feel significantly longer once the cheating enemy AI picks up steam.
Call of Duty games might be linear, but enemies have a tendency to be unpredictable due to the nature of its invisible checkpoints and multitude of spawn locations. Declassified sacrifices all of that in its campaign missions, opting instead for fixed enemy positions that make each engagement feel more like a minimally dynamic shooting gallery.
The inconsistent AI doesn't help either. Your mostly stationary goes will either draw a bead with laser precision, killing you in a few shots, or they'll forget to stop crouching and fire an entire clip into whatever object they were using for cover. This computational stupidity brings its own hilarious rewards whenever an enemy accidentally blows himself up by throwing a grenade into his own face or destroying the car he's cowering behind.
While it's certainly funny when this happens, the yuks will always be followed by the same, cold realization that you paid real money for this.

Mo' Modes, Mo' Problems
Sliding in alongside the campaign is the Survival-like Hostiles mode, which pits players against endless waves of re-spawning enemies on five different maps. This is the only marginally entertaining aspect of Black Ops Declassified, with the terrible snap-to aiming turned off (you should turn it off in the campaign as well) and marginally aggressive enemies. It's still a sub-par shooting gallery, but your foes will at least put some effort into trying to shoot you as they crowd in from all sides.
There's also a Time Trial mode which is essentially a multi-stage take on The Pit from Modern Warfare 2. You'll run through a series of speed-oriented training courses in a hunt for the best time. As with every other offline mode in the game, the five Time Trials are built around earning up to three stars based on your performance.
Of course, it wouldn't be a Call of Duty title without some kind of multiplayer mode. Black Ops Declassified features the same progression-based trappings that fans of the series have come to expect. You'll level up, unlock gear to use in Create-A-Class (accessible after level 4, 'natch), Prestige... everything carries over.

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Multiplayer in Black Ops Declassified is centered around 4v4 matches on pint-sized maps that mostly reuse assets and environments from other parts of the game. This isn't a crime in and of itself, but the map layouts lack the creativity of the console/PC entries in the series. There's nowhere to hide and very few places to run to, with matches often being won by the team that sticks close together.
That is, of course, assuming you can make it to the end of a match. There are some crippling connectivity issues in Black Ops Declassified at the time of this writing. Activision and Sony are aware of the issue -- which amounts to multiplayer disconnects and game freezing in the menus -- and are working to address it, but it remains a pretty significant problem at the moment.

Foundational Breakdown
Reading all of this, you might think that the biggest issue with Black Ops Declassified boils down to an uneven execution. Perhaps patching could fix this monstrosity, you wonder. Unfortunately, while the incredibly sparse amount of content and lame level design are both major problems, the biggest issue is how unlike a Call of Duty game Declassified feels.
The series' popularity has a lot to do with the fantastic FPS framework devised by Infinity Ward and put to use in recent years by IW, Sledgehammer Games, and Treyarch. The arsenal of firearms you're given to play with on the console/PC is a diverse one, with each gun feeling unique in one way or another.
The skin that wraps around Black Ops Declassified certainly carries the suggestion of a Call of Duty game, but the play feels "less than" in every conceivable way. Your guns just don't strike with the same punch that they do in the console games. More importantly, the aim acceleration is completely off. You can adjust the aim sensitivity in the options menu, but it doesn't help at all. The reticle acceleration just isn't right, and it effectively ruins the flow and the feel of the game, whether you're playing solo or online.

Call Of Poop
Black Ops Declassified is a disservice to the Call of Duty franchise. Its sins are so atrocious that Activision really ought to address whatever it was that happened here publicly. This is a broken game, and perhaps a half-finished game. It isn't worth your money or your time, and it effectively kills the PS Vita's chances of ending its launch year with at least one quality portable FPS in the books. You know there's a serious problem when the highlight feature of the package is an included download of the so-so (but still better) PSP game, Call of Duty: Roads to Victory.

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Far Cry 3 Review - Xbox 360

With Far Cry 3, players step into the shoes of Jason Brody, a man alone at the edge of the world, stranded on a mysterious tropical island. In this savage paradise where lawlessness and violence are the only sure thing, players dictate how the story unfolds, from the battles they choose to fight to the allies or enemies they make along the way. As Jason Brody, players will slash, sneak, detonate and shoot their way across the island in a world that has lost all sense of right and wrong.

Far Cry has always been a series with tremendous potential. The open tropical areas of the first game provided a lush setting for a fairly pedestrian adventure, marred by the eventual appearance of game-breaking mutant monsters. Far Cry 2 brought things down to earth with a gritty story of mercenaries in Africa, but suffered from irritating gameplay decisions like constantly respawning enemy outposts and a tendency for your character to have malaria attacks in the middle of firefights. Far Cry 3 is the promise of the series finally realized, with a compelling narrative driving you through a breathtakingly beautiful and hostile tropical island that challenges without irritation and guides without being restricting.

Heavy Traffic

Jason Brody is on vacation in Asia with his brothers, his girlfriend and a few other friends. They're doing the rich white American kid tour of the continent, racking up huge bar bills on daddy's Black Card and generally making asses of themselves in front of the locals, when a skydiving trip to an unremarkable island ends in disaster. They're captured by human traffickers, led by a clearly unhinged man named Vaas, destined to be ransomed and sold into slavery. Jason's Army-trained older brother manages to bust the two of you out at the beginning of the game, but gets killed because you decided to stop ten feet outside the slaver camp to read a map. Jason manages to get away, and is rescued by Dennis, a local resident who initiates the naïve but surprisingly adept Jason into the island natives' warrior culture.

From there, Jason sets about rescuing his remaining friends and ostensibly getting off the island, but slaughtering a couple thousand people changes a man, even if it's in the name of liberty. What results is a dark and sometimes drug-fueled descent into the depths of human behavior and an interesting exploration of the line between sanity and insanity, morality and immorality. Jason interacts with a number of memorable and well-written characters, each of which embodies a different vice that holds sway over the island. There are precious few "good guys" in Far Cry 3, and even Jason himself is not particularly likeable, even if he is understandable. The story is trying to do some very interesting things, and for the most part pulls them off, although to delve further into it would be to enter spoiler territory.

So Much Time, So Little To Do

Jason's odyssey takes you through 38 missions that offer the most guided and scripted experiences in the game. Here is where you'll escape burning buildings, man the turret in numerous AI-driven vehicles, explore long-forgotten tombs hidden beneath abandoned World War II era installations, and get to know the shady characters inhabiting the island. It's roughly a 10 hour journey straight through, but to sprint through the story alone is to miss the entire appeal of Far Cry 3.

The island is absolutely crammed with a wide variety of content. The immense map is revealed by reaching broadcast antennas, scaling them, and deactivating a jammer at the top, not unlike the way Viewpoints work in the Assassin's Creed series. This will reveal  the immediate area and show you available missions and activities. The brilliant part is how all the disparate activities lead into one another due to the rewards they provide.

Strike That, Reverse It

The most immediate problem at the beginning of the game is your inability to carry much in the way of bullets, loot and weapons. Jason must hunt the wildlife and skin his kills to craft bags and pouches to hold more ammo and loot. You never really see Jason from the third person, but I imagine by the time he's fully upgraded he has more pouches than a Rob Liefeld character. To move around the map and hunt the specific game you need to craft each item, fast travel is the most useful option, which leads you to outposts. Outposts can be liberated to unlock new fast travel points and eliminate enemy patrols from an area. You get bonus XP for liberating outposts stealthily, which levels you up, allowing you to buy more skills in the extensive skill trees, making Jason a more effective warrior. Collectibles in the world also provide XP, as well as loot to sell for cash which can be used to buy customization items for your weapons at the stores in each liberated outpost. Oh, and as you deactivate more antenna, weapons become free in the shop. And completing certain numbers of side activities and collection goals earns you specialized weapons unavailable otherwise. And all of a sudden it's 4AM and you have to leave for work in three hours.

Far Cry 3 is a tremendously immersive and time-distorting game. It never wears out its welcome because of the variety of tasks at hand combined with the unpredictability of the enemies and the island itself. A digital camera lets you tag enemies from a distance, making them easy to track visually even through cover. Performing recon on a target location is extremely important, but several times I found myself suddenly stalked by a tiger or a bear while I was in the process of scouting an outpost from cover. Caged predators in outposts can be freed to wreak havoc among the enemies guarding it. The enemy humans are just dumb enough to be believable, and with practice it becomes possible to torment them creatively while remaining invisible. Of course, the game is perfectly willing to accept a player who just wants to stride into camp and start shooting,  too, but you'll have to be extremely quick on the trigger, especially as the game progresses and the enemies up their arsenals accordingly.

The balance of Far Cry 3's gameplay and world is remarkable. It's challenging without being frustrating, it's helpful without being handholdy, and it's unpredictable without feeling random. It is one of the best open world shooters I have played, ranking up there with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games and the first Crysis as far as giving you a playground in which you may do as you please.

Bonus Points

Two multiplayer modes are present in Far Cry 3. Co-op is a four-player romp through various locations on the island, featuring characters unrelated to Jason's plight who ended up on the island six weeks prior to the events of the single player game. It loses the open world feel in many places, but the gunplay of the game is satisfying enough to stand on its own in a co-op setting, and there is a decent variety of mission types.

Competitive multi consists of standard modes and a very detailed weapon/perk unlock system similar to that of Call of Duty. It leverages the basic combat gameplay well enough, but by limiting things to enclosed arenas it comes off as more adequate than exceptional. Honestly the multiplayer options are mostly just nice-to-haves; the star of the show here is the solo campaign, which may explain why the online servers have been so deserted, even on launch day.

Must Buy 3

Aside from the occasional texture glitch or stray enemy phasing into a rock (a problem easily solved with well-placed explosives), Far Cry 3 is a technically brilliant and expertly balanced gameplay experience that offers an immense amount of content and a high degree of polish. At the time of writing I have put nearly 60 hours into it across two playthroughs, and will probably play it a third time on PC later on. I suggest you do the same.

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ZombiU Review - Wii U

Ubisoft seems to have approached ZombiU with a sensible formula: introduce the relatively unique properties of the Wii U gamepad and present them in the context of a very accessible and appealing zombie apocalypse. In doing so, Ubisoft, no stranger to third-party launch titles, has stepped it up a notch to deliver one of the few worthwhile original Wii U titles out of the gate.

There's something eerily familiar about the outbreak imagined in ZombiU's London setting. Granted, dark and desolate urban areas are hardly original settings in undead nightmares, but this combined with the guitar-driven score made me wonder just how much Ubisoft drew particular influence from 28 Days Later. Here, however, the fast-moving zombies don't show up until later. If you classify zombie entertainment two-pronged, as either isolated incidents that survivors can overcome or end-of-the-world events that survivors can endure, you'll find ZombiU falling into the latter category.

ZombiU is played in the first person, always an efficiently immersive approach in the zombie survival mode. Your go-to melee weapon is the setting-appropriate English cricket bat, which while durable, isn't the easiest weapon to wield, and is one of the reasons I relied more on the limited firearms or in some sections just avoided zombies altogether. Moving around worked well enough, though the same can't be said for object interaction. Whether it's going through doors or looting the undead, it can be a challenge precisely centering your camera for the needed button prompt to appear.

Of the many Wii U launch and launch window titles out now, ZombiU is on that short list of games not allowing you to make a full playthrough on the console's unique new gamepad. That's not much of a detractor here, with the secondary gamepad screen acting as a special makeshift device that allows you to detect objects and signs not visible on your primary screen. It's also what you'll refer to for inventory management, making for extremely tense situations that force your attention from the primary screen even when zombies are in the midst.

Of the many terms that surfaced during the gaming year that was 2012, "permadeath" could be the one most oft repeated. Thanks to the success of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, gamers rediscovered what it feels like to emotionally invest in playable characters without the assistance of high-production cinematics or even deep character development. ZombiU works off this concept of permadeath, but, unlike XCOM's concern for an entire squad, has you focusing your protection onto one character at a time. This creates a great sense of caution and with the first character you control almost paranoia, until that faint hope you can beat the game without dying flitters away upon first death. But die you (probably) will in ZombiU, and once you get over it you'll find it's not the end of the world. Though it can be difficult if you had stored in your backpack all ammo and items at the time of your demise. You'll have to track down and kill this last character you played, now one of the walking undead, for any chance at recovering those items. If on the way to recover these items your new character gets infected, then those items are gone for good. This leads to judgment calls on what items you ought to bring with you and what you should save in the storage container in the safehouse.

In trying to keep your survivor alive, the game provides a number of avenues beyond the standard up close and personal approach. The outdoor areas of London can be especially roomy in providing non-confrontational routes to sneak past zombies and focus on your immediate missions. These missions include anything from activating closed circuit cameras to recovering key items.

Next to Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and New Super Mario Bros. U, ZombiU ranks as one of the best local multiplayer games for the Wii U. Much like the adversarial forms of multiplayer in Nintendo Land, the asymmetrical set up of pitting players against someone with the Wii U gamepad provides a level of entertainment you wouldn't get from a regular match on traditional controllers. In ZombiU, there are the player-controlled survivors, while the player with the gamepad takes on the role of zombie summoner. In the gamepad user's eyes, it's sort of a form of "tower offense" as you're able to send a number of zombies to stop the other players.

Taking a page from the classic multiplayer conquest mode, ZombiU pits survivors against zombies in a competition to take over capture points. I was pleased with how fair and balanced the challenges were from both the zombie and the survivor perspective. One zombie type is designed to capture points while the rest are designed to torment the survivors. The latter group is an utter joy to disperse out into the field and make things hard for your friends. There's nothing like the sadistic glee of overwhelming others with fast moving joggers and spitters.

ZombiU should also be recognized as one of those rare launch titles that doesn't have the classic earmarks of a launch title that's been rushed out the door. The melee combat is a little rough, but that's compensated for by the other tools available in the game. Moreover, ZombiU's levels are developed well enough that your wits become a useful asset. The full integration of the gamepad and how it forces your gaze away from the television creates a special kind of suspense you couldn't get in other zombie games.

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