Second Opinion: Army Of Two

Army Of Two, best game so far into 2008 in my opinion. Played through the campaign about four times now. And is making my way through a last lap to get the last singleplayer achievements. Overall the game has quite easy achievements, I see no problem in getting 960 points out of this game. Though the last 40 points will probably not be finished due to the fact that the multiplayer versus mode is a bitch. Mostly cause its so complicated to get a game going. There are no parties, you have to invite your friends everytime you want to play a game, and with that I mean every single 10 to 20 minutes game.
Sure the idea of the versus mode is quite fun. Two 2 men teams face off on a map with different objectives which you get cash reward for completing, including escorting hostages to freedom, take out bad guys, destroy or protect different objectives. The team with the most cash in the bank when the time runs out wins the match.
But due to the annoying way to set up games I don’t imagine many will have the patience to go for the Retirement Savings Plan: “Earn one billion dollars in total in ranked matches.” achievement.

But playing the campaign in co-op with a friend is freakin’ awesome in my opinion and with all the weapon upgrades and customisations, masks, pimps, armour and good achievements that brings you back for more playthroughs, the game is well worth buying.

Mass Effect: Bring Down The Sky

Today Mass Effect is getting new in game content for the price of 400 Microsoft points. Worth it? Probably, if you liked the original Mass Effect.

I liked Mass Effect. I even liked it so much that immediately started a new run through it as soon as I completed it the first time. But after two, three hours into my second lap I realized that it didn’t really make that much of a difference is I was a nice guy or a bad guy, perhaps those choices have a bigger impact later on in the game.

Anyway Bring Down The Sky is a new episode in the space saga that brought you a “full scale rape simulator” if you watch the news, which means you are quite stupid. News are bad, don’t watch them.
In this episode you’ll be able to explore a new uncharted world inhabited with a race called the Batarians. Apparently some crazy extremist group have hijacked some asteroid that you can drive around with and set it on collision course with some planet that don’t want a big asteroid crashing into it.
So Commander Shepard have to get back into the saddle and get down to business bringing down the Batarian extremist dudes.

Apparently the update will be about 90 minutes long and there will be a new 50gs achievement for those who complete it.

First impression: Army Of Two

So got my hands on Army Of Two yesterday. EA Montreal made a 3rd person tactical shooter with a big focus on co-op gameplay. At least that’s what the ads and trailers been telling us for the past months. Now its time to see if it lives up to its expectations.

Before writing this I’ve only tried the local co-op splitscreen with my roomie. And so far its been an enjoyable experience, with both some upsides and downsides. For instance, I can’t understand why you change controls just to be “original”. Anyone who played Gear Of War knows that A button is for taking cover, jumping over obstacles or rolling. But in Army Of Two they went their own way and set this button to Y, with no option to change the button settings.. That’s pretty awesome right!?

Well you learn to live with the controls which actually are really solid overall. It feels right when you run, duck, slide to cover, blind fire and so on and so forth. One thing I miss though is a melee attack button. Now you melee attack by automation when you are close enough to an enemy and press the regular fire button. This can be quite frustrating since you have to stop aiming and press the shooting button again when an enemy gets to close. And if you miss, the enemy won’t be standing there waiting for you to bash his head in, he will slap you like a little bitch.

On to the game itself. The first mission is a training slash tutorial stage were you get to learn all the moves and tactics you will be using later on in the game. No one dies here, you are shooting with plastic bullets. They still hurt though
When completing the training mission you instantly get thrown into the action. The mission starts with you and your partner parachuting into a warzone. One controlling the parachute and the other one using his sniper rifle to take out as much hostiles as possible before hitting the ground. When on the ground the two marines steps up back to back to sweep of the last bad guys still standing. This is sadly something you can’t do by yourself but the back to back move it triggered automatically when you enter certain areas. Anyways, in this stance you enter something like bullet time with the standard slowmotion shooting at stupid bad guys running straight at you. Quite cool, but nothing I would miss if it wasn’t there.
There is quite alot of places were you need to use the different co-op abilities. But sometimes they feel a little strained. For example when both dudes need to go up to a door and press A to open it. Or the endless gun turrets you need to aggro stealth kill. Its good and all but sometimes you just want to shoot guys and don’t think about how to do it.

In and between missions you get to spend your hard earned cash in the weapons and upgrade shop. And its quite deep, you can get bigger barrels for more damage, bigger clips to hold more ammunition and alot more upgrades. The final thing you can do to your weapons is to pimp them, cover the guns in gold and diamonds, quite expensive but adds a bit of aggro to your weapon. Guess poor terrorists don’t like to get a shiny m16 in their face before they die..

All in all the game is cool. I especially like the way the characters look and feel. The deep upgrade and kit system, good co-op stuff to do and almost unlimited amount of bad guys to dispose of makes this game a good solid shooter that you should consider getting if you like games like Gears Of War and the likes of that.

Picking up the pieces..

So yesterday I woke up after the Tuesdays floorball game with a twisted back that would make a 95 year old man proud over how healty his back is after working 60 years in a mine shack carrying super heavy rocks all his life.
This led to a visit to the doctor and some back-crunching maneuvers to get my spine straight again. Going to work this day was not an option, though I tried to convince myself otherwise at first trying to fix my problems with a couple of painkillers, which of course didn’t do shit and I had to face the fact that I was going to be stranded at home for the day.

After being at the doctors and feeling pretty ok I decided to go through some of those games that I got last fall but never finished. For example Halo 3. When I first got it I played through the first seven chapters or something and though it was quite a dull experience so as soon as something more interesting came along I put Halo aside and never thought of it again, that’s until yesterday.

So I popped the bastard in and booted up.
The music in Halo is quite nice, gives me a calm mood and I could give the creators a big thumbs up for the start screen. Nice job!
Sadly that is the only thing that is enjoyable of this game. I just can’t believe how or why this game can be as big as it is. Everybody loves it, why the hell?!
You shoot at monsters of different happy colors, like blue, yellow, pink, purple! Its like molesting the Tellitubbies with a laser rifle.
Which brings me to the next horrific thing about Halo 3. The weapons.. Oh my god they are so weak.. My 80 year old grandmother makes more aggressive sounds than these plastic toy guns from fluffy land. I mean, compare Halo’s weapons to the guns in lets say Gears Of War or Call Of Duty were the guns sound mean, like they hurt, and want to hurt you.
Anyways, the game looks bad, sound gay and plays like a drunk fairy. I absolutely hate this game and everything around it. But since I’m a bit of an achievement whore I at least should finish the game to get those 400 points.

I had two chapters left when I started yesterday. One stage that looked as it was set inside some living things stomach. If I’d had a smellovision at home I bet it would have reeked old meat and egg farts. An insanely boring level, way to long and with running through the same buildings again and again. When finally completed you face the last level and its actually quite amusing. Til you get to the last part when you drive your warthog over an exploding halo ring with really no clue were to go. Worthless!

And what was it with the last showdown? Aren’t the final fight of a three episode long saga supposed to end with a massive battle? Now you go head to head with a flying metal ball which shoot your friend in the head and think you are just gonna accept that. And he doesn’t even put up a fight when you show him who’s boss, weak!

I am so relieved that i finished this game, cause now I can put it behind me and never touch it again, ever!

Battlefield Heroes

Battlefield creators DICE shocks with bringing us a free multiplayer shooter this summer!

Heroes is the new child in the Battlefield franchise and it will be downloadable without any cost later this year. The game is a 3rd person shooter for multiplayer only. Much like last years mini-hit Warhawk for the PS3.

Battlefield Heroes looks like a mix between above mentioned Warhawk and Valve’s popular Team Fortress 2. Cartoon styled graphics with a sense of humor, vehicles like tanks and airplanes and a leveling system with upgrades such as healing and fire-bullets.
The setting is inspired by the second world war with your typical allies and Nazi’s. When you start the game you create your character, choose side, appearance and class. Classes include the ones we’d be getting used to by now. The big bold slow heavy gunner the standardised soldier and the quick commander.

One thing that makes me very happy to hear about this game is that you won’t be needing a high spec super machine to run it. As far as we know today a 1ghz PC with 512 megabytes of ram and an integrated graphics card should do the trick, which means almost every one with a PC from before the stone age will be able to pick it up and play.

This will probably be my vacation game of the summer. Hanging out by the pool with a cold one blasting other summer celebrators to bits. I’ll see you on the battlefield this summer.

Official site: Battlefield Heros

Review: Triggerheart Exelica

So, I bought my copy of Triggerheart yesterday. And lets just first get it out in the open that if you are after some easy gamerscore points this isn’t the game for you. The achievements are though as hell, just look at this one..

12. Perfect Play: Destroy all the bosses and complete the entire game without dying at Normal difficulty or higher.

And since this is a standard one shot one kill shooter, it means you should complete the whole game without getting hit once. I guess its possible, if you are extremely patient and have more free time than you could possibly need.

Anyway, the games setup is quite simple. Left stick for movement, A button to shoot, B button to use your anchor, and any of the triggers or bumpers to release a super bomb. And you can change the button settings to your own liking, which I did and now use X to use my anchor since it felt more right for me.

The story of the game is… Who am I kidding, who needs a story in a game like this. Two flying anime girls are out to shoot a lot of bad guys with their super rapid laser cannons.
When you start the game you can choose between two characters, Exelica and Crueltear. The difference between them, except having different colored clothes is that Exelica shots wide shots and Crueltear shoots straight forward, which of course does more damage but is harder to aim with.
There are five levels in the game all ending with a boss fight. One thing that was quite cool that i noticed during my two playthroughs of the game was that the second time I met some of the bosses they were harder than the first time around. So I guess the automatic adjusted difficulty level of the bosses work.

So how does the game play? The controls are smooth and feels good. Nothing to complain about there. When holding down the A button your flying chick bursts away 200 bullets a second and it feels really good to see all ships going up in smoke in front of you.
Graphics are what you would expect from a game of this type, not great in any way but does the job well and have some old school arcade feel to it. Sounds and music is average, the music is standard Japanese high paced euro dance. Works for this kind of game but its nothing I would go out and get on CD
The sounds effects are quite dull, especially the explosions when you’ve defeated a boss, the sounds crack and sounds awful. But other than that its standard shooter blips and blops.

So is the game any fun? Well if you like shooter vertical shooters this is a hit. And with different difficulty settings, automatic boss difficult adjustment, several endings with each character and extremely challenging achievements the game has something for every one and will keep you coming back again to beat those nasty levels without dying.

One thing you could wish for would have been local co-op. Its always more entertaining to blast space ships with a friend than doing it alone.
Either way I recommend you to try it out. At least the demo which gives you a taste of the game.

6/10

 

MSG4 in June!

Finally the wait is over we now have a release date for Metal Gear Solid 4, June 12, at-least for North America but hopefully the wait won’t be much longer for us Europeans.
Along with the game there will also be a new bundle pack of the PS3 including a 80gigabytes system, MSG4 and a Dual Shock 3 controller. A perfect pack for those of you who haven’t been smart enough to pick up a PS3 system yet

From what I’ve heard MSG4 will have all the improvements that you could wish for. Better controls, outstanding graphics and the ability to play the game either sneaking around or just straight on gun-slinging mayhem (which suits me a lot better, I don’t really have the patience to stealth ).

I belive this is the game the PS3 system needs to show the haters what its capable of. So prepare your free time and wallets for the forth installment of the Metal Gear franchise. Happy hunting!

Triggerheart Exelica

This Wednesday we’ll get a new insane shooter on Xbox Live Arcade. For 800 points you’ll be able to get cramps in your trigger finger and tear off your hair in frustration of not finishing that level due to the fact that you have 200 million bullets coming at you.

Triggerheart Exelica is the game and it looks to me like a standard shooter with colorful objects to shoot and pick up. One thing that this game has that’s quite unique for its genre is that it will adjust the difficulty according to your skill level. If you have a low score when reaching the boss, he will be a little easier to take on than if you have nailed everything and scored max on the stage.

Guess this won’t make any difference for me since I will most certainly never get that far

I’ll let you know more on Wednesday when I’ve taken my spaceship for a spin.

Triggerheard Exelica on Xbox.com