PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale (Chinese + English Version)

It's easy to be cynical about a game that borrows so heavily from a well-loved franchise. And there's no question that, on the surface at least, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale bears more than a striking resemblance to Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. But this is a game where appearances can be deceptive. Underneath its collection of classic (and not so classic) characters, four-player battles, and tongue-in-cheek franchise mash-ups lies a fighter that eschews button mashing and over-the-top special moves for a deeper, more technical fighting experience.

That's not to say it's a better fighting experience because of it, though. There are three attack buttons to choose from--which don't directly correspond to punches, kicks, or the power of an attack--and each of them can be modified by using the D-pad or analogue stick. That already gives you quite the combination of moves to choose from, but the game layers on more complexity with jumps, throws, blocks, rolls, dodges, taunts, items, and super moves. The sheer number of attack options available to you can be overwhelming, particularly during a heated battle.

It's a complex system that stands in stark contrast to the game's eclectic collection of characters and cute, colourful arenas. But it mostly works--if you're willing to put in the practice. Button mashing isn't an option--at least if you want to win a fight--and you won't see the kind of outlandish, high-energy effects and special moves typical of other team-based fighters likeMarvel vs. Capcom. In some respects that's a disappointment, but your pugilistic powers do leave room for more strategic forms of combat.

Making sense of that strategy with well-timed punches, kicks, and throws, particularly amid the chaos of four-player fights, is where the challenge in Battle Royale lies. Getting a grasp on things is made all the more difficult by each character having a unique way of handling, to the point where learning to fight with one character rarely translates across to another. Kratos, for instance, moves and attacks much like he does in God of War, flinging his Blades of Athena around with a brute force that results in some slick, impressive-looking combos.

But someone like Parappa the Rapper is a trickier proposition. Chaining his moves together requires more delicate timing, and demands multiple directional commands to execute uppercuts and sweeps or to wield his skateboard to fling opponents into the air. The unnervingly cute Toro (Sony's official mascot in Japan) can change clothing during a match to switch from a karate champ to a ninja to a helmet-wearing hothead, and each outfit completely changes the types of moves he can perform.

Even unreleased games like Bioshock Infinite get the All Stars treatment.

Such complexity means that, at least initially, the only way to succeed is to try to master a single character. And even when you do it's disappointing to find that the game never reaches the silky-smooth, fluid heights of a truly great fighting game; there's simply a lack of finesse in how the characters handle, how their abilities are balanced against each other, and how their punches meet that makes for unsatisfying combat. Numerous tutorials that cover everything from basic kicks and punches to full-on combos and combat trials that put those skills to the test certainly help make sense of Battle Royale's technicalities, but never to the point where you can overcome how stilted everything feels.

There are other idiosyncrasies to contend with too. For starters there are no health bars; matches are instead won by racking up kills, either to a set goal or by simply getting as many as possible within a time limit. The only way to get kills is by building up your AP (power) meter via combos and unleashing super moves: the higher your AP, the more powerful the move. It's an interesting twist on fighting game mechanics, and changes how you approach battles.

Without the constant pressure of a health bar, you can be more reckless and go on an all out attack without fear of reprisal, especially at the beginning of fights when AP is low. When everyone's AP Is higher, and special attacks are ready, it's wiser to take a more cautionary approach. But even then the game never really approaches the sort of tension levels you might expect from a fighting game. There's none of those last second, down to the last of your health bar moments that are so tense, and so appealing.

I'm a sad panda.

Like the rest of the combat, gathering AP for special moves is tricky. Each character handles differently, going beyond simple differences of short, medium, or long-range attacks. Some level one supers can be interrupted with attacks and throws; others can't. Most level two supers can be countered only with other supers. Some level three supers kill everyone onscreen, without any input from you, while others require you to hunt down your opponents. Suffice it to say, the learning curve is steep.

There is, however, a certain charm to it all. Much of that is down to the game's eclectic collection of characters and some inventive and often amusing level design. Classic Sony characters like Sly Cooper, Parappa the Rapper, and Sir Daniel sit alongside more modern creations such as Nathan Drake, Sackboy, and Fat Princess. And, let's face it, because Sony doesn't have quite enough loveable characters to make up a full fighting roster, there are third-party inclusions too, like Big Daddy, Dante, and Raiden.

And then there are the gorgeous arenas. The bright, colourful dojo from Parappa the Rapper--complete with pointers from Master Onion--is a delightful nostalgia trip that takes a bizarre turn as the dojo's walls crumble, a city is revealed, and giant robots fire rockets at the combatants. Indeed, many of the arenas contain obstacles for you to avoid while fighting. For instance, the Little Big Planet level is in a constant state of construction, and platforms appear and disappear often. That's tricky enough to work around when you're trying to land a few punches, but the platforms soon fall altogether to reveal quizmaster Buzz, who poses a question that you must answer by standing in the appropriate area of the screen. Mess it up, and you're pelted with pies that stun you for a few seconds and leave you wide open to attack.

To reveal any more mash-ups would be to spoil many of the neat surprises each arena has to offer. But they're all well designed and span a range of games from Patapon to Killzone to the as-yet-unreleased BioShock Infinite. The environmental challenges they present, such as moving platforms, projectiles, and items like guns and swords, do stand at odds with the game's focus on technical prowess, but they can be turned off in versus mode, and for more casual matches, they do a great job of livening up the action.

For some reason, the game's visual flair hasn't made its way over to the menus that tie the whole thing together. It's a small thing, but it doesn't inspire confidence in a game when the first things you see are flat, pixelated menus laid over ugly gradients. Perhaps they're some kind of homage to classic 8-bit fighters, but whatever the reason, they are not an attractive sight. The arcade mode's character backstories aren't much better, consisting of nothing more than 2D images with a lot of Ken Burns effect.

Like with most fighters, though, multiplayer is where you spend most of your time, and thankfully Battle Royale's works a treat. Each match is completely customisable, so you can turn hazards and items on or off, set time limits, or choose how many kills are required for a win. Serious players will no doubt want to turn all the superfluous features off and concentrate on the battles at hand, but local matches against friends certainly benefit from the humorous mentality of exploding levels, and fish that you can slap opponents with.

Kick, punch, it's all in the mind.

Aside from local four-player matches, Battle Royale supports a variety of online modes. There's a hint of input delay, which might put seasoned players off, but on the whole matches are lag-free and work well. They include standard versus matches, team battles (two-vs.-two or three-vs.-one), and tournament play via ranked matches. There are also leaderboards that display your overall rank, supers per minute, and the number of times you placed first, second, third, and fourth. Cross play is also supported, so PlayStation 3 and Vita players can take each other on regardless of platform and work towards a place on the same leaderboards, which is a nice touch.

But it's hard to imagine those leaderboards being filled when Battle Royale is such a confusing proposition: it simply doesn't know what it wants to be. Its in-depth technical battle system suggests that this is a serious fighter, and it has the learning curve to match. And yet, it asks you to slap competitors in the face with a fish, or avoid the march of Patapon, when all you really want to do is concentrate on honing your skills. There are better, more fluid games out there for the serious fighter, and there are more accessible ones for those interested in a bit of silliness. In attempting to mix the two, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale merely ends up being competent at both and the master of neither.

Crysis 3

There are aliens out there in the chin-high foliage. You hear the rustling and glimpse a black carapace between blades of grass, but you can't tell if you're being stalked by a single grotesque beast, or a horde of them. You sprint through the derelict trainyard, surrounded by lush overgrowth and rusted railroad cars, then vault to the top of a car to get a better view of your surroundings. A disgusting alien leaps upon the car as well--and you gun him down with your electricity-infused submachine gun. The creature erupts in goo, and you scan the yard, looking for more telltale signs of crazed attackers.

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It's a tense sequence in a gorgeous first-person shooter. "Can it runCrysis?" was a criterion for the value of a gaming PC upon the release of the original, yet as wonderful as Crysis 2 looked, it never inspired the same system-crushing awe among PC enthusiasts. Crysis 3, however, seeks to annihilate modern PCs, many of which will suffer under the weight of its "high" setting, let alone "very high." And you can admire the fruits of developer Crytek's labors the moment you enter the first level as returning character Prophet. Your buddy Psycho gets up in your face so that you can see every pore and every facial tic. The pouring rain clouds your vision, sheets of water bending the light and prompting you to head to the game's menus and tweak the settings, seeking that sweet spot between beauty and performance.

There's no shame in lowering your settings even if your machine can handle most other games without trouble: Crysis 3 is undoubtedly a beauty even on medium settings. Crysis 2 left behind the original game's literal jungle for one of the urban type. Crysis 3 melds the two, returning you to a New York City where destruction and decay have been softened by overbearing greenery. The private military company known has CELL has erected a dome over the city, turning the crumbling metropolis into a gargantuan greenhouse in which trees take root in building foundations and rise through their stairwells towards the sky.

This mix of nature and destruction makes Crysis 3 look striking; you couldn't accuse its makers of sacrificing artistic creativity in favor of technology, though like its predecessors, this sequel aims for realism--or at least, as much realism as can be expected for a game featuring high-tech nanosuits and flame-spewing extraterrestrial walkers. The attention to detail is astounding, even in the character models, which is just as well, considering how often you get up close and personal with your co-stars. Only in a few select cases does the camera pull back and let you see Prophet from a third-person view. This means that you always see supporting characters express their anger, fear, and distrust from Prophet's point of view, which magnifies the tension of various personal exchanges.

New York City has gone green.

Indeed, Crysis 3 tells a much more personal story than the previous games, focusing on three main characters: Prophet; former Raptor Team comrade Psycho; and Claire, Psycho's girlfriend and communications expert for a group of freedom fighters seeking to take down CELL once and for all. CELL has ripped Psycho's nanosuit from his body--a painful process that has only fueled his abhorrence of them, and leaves Prophet as the sole "post-human warrior" left to fight. Claire doesn't trust Prophet, who sees him more as hardware than human, and for good reason: his nanosuit makes him increasingly prone to visions apparently originating from the grandaddy of ceph aliens known as the Alpha Ceph.

Prophet's connection to this being fuels much of the story, as does Psycho's seething desire for revenge over those that forced him to be simply human. There are a number of touching moments that spawn from rising tensions--a newfound emotional heft that the series never before portrayed. The final level, unfortunately, is problematic, because it leaves behind the game's make-your-own-fun structure and requires only a little stick maneuvering and a button press. But you can at least come to Crysis 3 with the comfort of knowing that the game brings the series' continuing story to an apparent close.

Happily, several hours of entertaining action precede this moment, and it's the game's futuristic bow that sometimes drives that entertainment. With it, you zoom in, pull back, and unleash silent fury on the human or alien grunt of choice. Firing standard arrows has just the right feel: you sense the weight of the pull and release, and feel the impact when the arrow reaches its mark.

Scorchers look terrifying, but it doesn’t take much effort to bring them down.

As before, you can activate your nanosuit's cloak to hide in plain sight, which amplifies the feeling of being a bow-wielding predator in the urban wilds of New York. Special explosive arrows and those that electrify liquid can also be a blast to play with, just for the kick of finding new ways to make CELL soldiers die horrible deaths. The bow's downside is that combined with cloaking, it makes the game too easy; you can annihilate a huge number of foes this way without breaking a sweat or fearing the consequences of being caught. It doesn't help matters that Crysis 3's soldiers and aliens are not the intelligent type. While they're not the dunderheads they could be in Crysis 2, enemies take no notice of arrows that land right next to them, run into obstacles and just keep trying to run, and sometimes ignore you even when you're in plain sight.

You can boost the level of challenge by choosing higher difficulties, and if you find that the cloak-and-arrow method is too exploitative, you can go in guns blazing. Even so, Crysis 3's battles lack the grandness of its predecessors'. Remember Crysis Warhead's raging exosuit battle? What about Crysis 2's Grand Central Station encounter with the pinger? Crysis 3's central battles are fun but not as thrilling, and its two primary boss battles are easily won, requiring little in the way of tactics. Certain stretches do a great job of drawing you into the world, flooding your vision with awe-inspiring collages juxtaposing nature's bucolic touch, the remnants of humanity's metal-and-stone triumphs, and fearsome alien technology. But the tension such exploration creates is not always relieved by explosive battle.

Yet even if Crysis 3's action doesn't usually burn with the intensity of the ceph's home galaxy, it's still good, in part because the series continues to hew its own path with regard to level design and structural openness. Crysis 3 is neither a pure linear shooter in the way popularized by Call of Duty, nor an open-world romp like Far Cry 3. Instead, its levels are sometimes large but always manageable, giving you freedom to put as much room between you and your foes as you like. The nanosuit encourages further experimentation, once again allowing you to activate the aforementioned cloak mode (which renders you invisible) and armor mode (which lets you soak up more damage). And once again, you can leap a good distance should you wish to reach higher ground in a hurry.

You can really feel the zing when using the K-Volt.

Stirring weapons into this mix makes for some rousing fun. The bow provides one way to approach battle, but it's not the only notable method of alien destruction. You can select various weapon attachments like scopes and silencers to suit your preferred approach. The basic guns feel just right: their power is properly communicated via plenty of muzzle flash and recoil animations that give the shooting a kick. A large battlefield patrolled by giant ceph allows you to pull out all the stops, firing rockets, manning rumbling battle tanks, and scanning the environment with your binoculars to mark enemies, ammo stashes, and available vehicles. But much of this action is optional: you can sprint right through Crysis 3's most intriguing battlefield, getting only a taste of what it has to offer.

Prophet isn't just limited to using human weaponry, though. The plasma-spewing pinch rifle is the most common alien weapon you stumble upon, but the incinerator is more gratifying to use, especially when you aim it at the meandering alien sentries that equip the same flame-spewing behemoth. Watching these ceph scorchers soak up all that fire before dramatically erupting is a mean-spirited delight. You equip alien cannons and mortars too, and they are enjoyable to shoot because they feel so powerful.

Stealth remains unchanged for the most part, though there are reasons to cloak yourself beyond the gruesome pleasure of a silent takedown. You can now hack into turrets, minefields, and other systems, which often means cloaking and sneaking close enough to your electronic target. Hacking requires you to perform a simple, easy minigame--and while it's enjoyable to watch a pinger walk into a hacked minefield, hacking isn't a game-changer. In fact, gaining the assistance of a ceph-murdering turret only makes the surreptitious route even easier.

They don’t call him Psycho for nothing.

Crysis 3's multiplayer modes don't encourage such exploitation, however, and are an improvement over Crysis 2's. The returning Crash Site mode provides plenty of entertainment, and is essentially a king-of-the-hill mode with a moving hill. Teams must capture and retain pods that are airdropped in, which keeps players moving around the map. Pods typically drop in open spaces, reducing the possibility of players finding hidey-holes to camp from--and allowing pingers to get in on the action. Indeed, a team lucky enough to nab a mech is sure to put it to good use, gunning down and stomping on their unlucky victims.

The addition of nanosuit powers keeps the flow fast-paced and unpredictable. One scenario: you rip a riot shield from a dropped pod so that you can defend yourself while retaining control of the area. An enemy combatant approached and cloaks, hoping to fill your backside with bullets. He uncloaks and begins to fire, and you rapidly turn and fling the shield at him, sending him flying and successfully defending your life--and the pod. The other modes--Team Deathmatch, Assault, and Capture the Relay among them--benefit from the same mechanics.

Standing apart is the new Hunter mode, which also features two teams in conflict, but with much different results. This round-based mode initially pits CELL operatives against a couple of fully-cloaked competitors armed only with bows. Your goal as a stealthed hunter is to eliminate as many operatives as possible; each operative you kill then joins you as a cloaked hunter. One by one, hunters stalk their fully armed enemies, whose main purpose is to stay alive long enough for the timer to run out. Sometimes, the mode results in CELL members camping out in a small room and running down the clock, which can feel anticlimactic for both teams. But the mode can also capture a unique sense of fear as your teammates are felled one by one, and your beeping monitor betrays the presence of a nearby hunter.

These stalkers are no match for the power of the nanosuit. Also, the power of a big gun.

Crysis 3 is stunning to look at, successfully portraying an uneasy partnership of the natural and the artificial. As the story presses on, the conflict deepens and the visuals darken; it's as if you can feel the evil spreading throughout the city. As a piece of technology, Crysis 3 lives up to the series' legacy. As a game, it doesn't reach the same heights. The campaign is several hours shorter than Crysis 2's, and doesn't reproduce the thrills that lit up the previous games. Yet on its own terms, this is a full-featured sci-fi shooter that makes it a lot of fun to torture extraterrestrial abominations with the burning rage of their own weapons.

Aliens: Colonial Marines

The Alien franchise deserves better than this. Aliens: Colonial Marines is a disappointing exercise in bland corridor shooting, dragged down by laughable dialogue and cooperative play that makes the game worse than when you adventure on your own. Colonial Marines is unremarkable in every conceivable way: it’s far too easy, generally devoid of tension, and lacking in the variety it so desperately needed. It occasionally lets you peek at the game that could have been, allowing its rare scraps of unsettling atmosphere to seep into your bones. But brief moments of dread and excitement are quickly supplanted by more shrug-worthy shooting and a general aura of “whatever”-ness.

“Tepid” isn’t likely what you want from a shooter–nor is it what you look for in an Alien narrative. Easter eggs are there for the fans of the film franchise who want them, but even when the game pays homage to the films that inspired it, the results are lackluster. A gruesome event that remains Alien‘s most well-remembered image is replicated here without a hint of fright or gusto, and Colonial Marines frequently relies on visual and dialogue references to fill in for proper storytelling. (Hey, that guy just mentioned Ripley!)

When relieved of the cumbersome cloak of nostalgia, the story gives you little to hold onto. As Corporal Christopher Winter, you join other marines on a rescue mission to infiltrate the U.S.S. Sulaco, thus initiating your post-Aliens journey through a number of storied areas from the franchise, such as the Sulaco and Hadley’s Hope. Several strained confrontations between key characters temporarily raise the narrative stakes; when anger comes to the forefront, you get a glimpse into the loyalty that bonds the marines. But most of their interactions are characterized by snippets of awful dialogue, such as, “Any thoughts on the exploding chest issue?” and “Woke up gagging on a creature like a spider, but wrapped around my face. It’s dead, sir.” Such lines are delivered without a hint of irony–or any other emotion, for that matter.

Sometimes, acid harms you. Most times, it doesn’t.

The awkward storytelling is hardly energized by character models and facial animations so stiff that humans look every bit as synthetic as famed series androids Ash and Bishop. Aliens: Colonial Marines is not a looker. Graphics glitches abound, fire and goo effects are unconvincing, and clumsy visual details–jittery transitions in and out of canned animations, abrupt game-over screens upon death–give the game an air of carelessness. Graphics may not make or break a game, but the success of a game in this universe relies somewhat on the atmosphere, and these flaws can make it difficult to stay immersed. And that doesn’t account for nonvisual bugs, such as scripting errors, and the occasions when you spawn into the game in a nigh-unusable third-person view.

Luckily, moody lighting and some creepy environments help pull you back in, though not consistently. Outdoor exploration is given heft by the sight of burning structures dotting the horizon on LV-426, and dark corridors are lined with shiny slime and gross tendrils, keeping your eyes momentarily averted from the bare textures and poor animations. You move through these places, mostly corridors, shooting down xenomorphs, mercenaries, and little else. There’s mild entertainment here and there, at least during the biggest battles. At one point, you must disconnect several fuel lines as aliens skitter across ceilings and appear along the walls, eager to close in and snatch your life away. An enjoyable rhythm can set in as you fend off waves of gross xenos before making a run for your objective. It’s satisfying to gun down an alien before it makes its way to the ground from a high ledge, and watching xenos explode into gushers of goo has a grotesque appeal.

Bella looks cross. You would be, too, if you appeared in such low-res cutscenes.

All too often, however, you just walk forward, shoot the aliens and mercs that appear with your bog-standard weapons (assault rifle, shotgun, and so forth), open a door, and do it all again. On the whole, the action lacks any sense of momentum or challenge. Aliens: Colonial Marines is exceptionally easy on normal difficulty; human enemies lack smarts, and alien arrivals aren’t horrifying–just horrifyingly predictable. You’re granted the requisiteAlien motion tracker, but it’s wholly unnecessary; you don’t need it to stalk aliens hiding in the shadows, or to avoid xenomorphs on the hunt. Enemies arrive just as you’d expect, and you shoot them.

And that’s Colonial Marines’ biggest problem: enemies come, and you shoot them down easily, again and again. The game is remarkably light on variety. A couple of battles masquerade as boss fights, but they require no strategy and are just as easy and thrill-less as the rest. The four- to five-hour campaign has no thrust to it; it feels the same from beginning to end, and the finale just drops with a thud. And by being so easy and predictable, the game lets down the license. There’s little suspense, nothing to absorb you or spur your curiosity. Colonial Marines is tone-deaf to what makes the Alien franchise what it is–and what makes the best shooters so exciting.

One level, however, serves as the exception to the boredom, and it’s telling that it’s the only level in which you don’t begin with a gun. You push forward carefully, occasionally forced to remain still lest you draw a xenomorph’s attention with the sound of your sloshing. A creature–or several–might stride right up to you, stare you down, and then return to a resting state before you are safe to continue. Eventually you must weld doors shut behind you to escape a pursuing alien’s clutches, which infuses the level with a sense of fear and uncertainty. It’s a clever, menacing sequence that puts you on the defensive.

Yawning is contagious. How appropriate, then, that adding other players to the mix doesn’t offer the needed explosive boost–it actually makes the experience less enjoyable. If you use the matchmaking option, online cooperative play requires four players to start the match. Only if you have buddies to invite–and only if you switch the networking type to “friends only”–can you limit your match to fewer. (The console versions also support split-screen co-op for two.) Your friends don’t take the place of AI companions; instead, they are added to the roster, leading to ridiculously cramped exploration in four-player matches in which players and non-player characters fight for elbow room and try to shoot xenomorphs rather than the back of teammates’ heads.

Even worse, many of these levels were clearly designed without co-op play in mind. The aforementioned stealth level–the game’s most dramatic–is a sloppy mess devoid of tension when played by a full crew. For instance, should one player move too far ahead, the others teleport to him, potentially triggering nearby aliens to annihilate a defenseless teammate. Furthermore, having others join you destroys the narrative, making certain elements of it laughably nonsensical. Co-op feels thrown together without any regard for how it affects the game’s challenge and flow.

They look menacing, but they pose no threat. Colonial Marines is remarkably easy.

Competitive play finds more success, because the unpredictability of other players leads to occasional moments of tension. All four modes pit a team of marines against a team of aliens, though Escape is the standout among them. Here, four marines make their way through alien-infested territory from one mark to the next, hoping to escape the wrath of the acid-spitting, sharp-clawed opposition. As a marine, there’s a sense of camaraderie missing from the campaign; you must have each other’s back, protecting each other from the alien onslaught while you wait for elevators to descend and steel doors to open. As an alien, it’s satisfying to slink toward the marines with your teammates and swipe your talons across their faces, hoping to down each squad member and thus bring their plans to a screeching halt.

Survivor mode hits similar notes, with four marines trying to simply stay alive for the allotted time before the xenomorph team can slaughter them. The other modes–Team Deathmatch and a capture-the-node variation called Extermination–are more mundane. No matter which mode you choose, however, you can’t escape Colonial Marines’ sloppier elements. You can skitter up walls and across ceilings as an alien, but there’s no telling which surfaces you will stick to and which you won’t. This can lead to awkward moments in which your plans falter because you have to mess with your positioning when you’d rather be messing up marines. Additionally, issues like screen stuttering when entering vents and when in spectator mode make online play feel unfinished.

Co-op is a major missed opportunity.

The first two Alien films are steeped in mystery and anxiety, qualities all but absent in developer Gearbox’s lackluster interpretation. Instead, Aliens: Colonial Marines is a shallow bit of science-fiction fluff with cheap production values and an indifferent attitude. It’s forgettable enough to deem unnecessary, which is a grievous sin for a game in a universe brimming with so much potentia

Far Cry 3 Review:

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 theS.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.

DEAD SPACE 3 REVIEW

Dead Space 3 doesn’t want to take sides in the debate over what constitutes a true survival horror game. It would rather leave the choice up to you. This is a game rife with options and flexibility, building on the strengths of the franchise with clever new ideas that let you tailor the experience to your liking. It hits a few sour notes in its story and struggles at times when it steps away from the core combat, but Dead Space 3 is a thrilling and worthwhile sequel.

Dead Space 3′s story follows closely in the footsteps of its predecessors. That is to say, it’s nearly incomprehensible. Isaac Clarke, now caught in a confusing love triangle, has been sent off to the frozen ice planet of Tau Volantis, believed to be the marker homeworld. You remember every last scattered detail having to do with markers and their sundry effects on humanity, right? If not, you’re out of luck: aside from a brief “previously on Dead Space” video buried in an extras menu, the game makes precious little effort to explain anything of remote importance. It’s an issue compounded by a dearth of interesting characters, and this ultimately makes it difficult to feel attached to anything that occurs in the haphazard, quickly moving narrative.

But no matter: while Isaac’s latest journey may not unfurl with the deftest of storytelling, it fully succeeds in ushering you from one incredible locale to the next. Whether floating in the starry abyss amid the vast wreckage of destroyed spacecraft or attempting to stay alive in a suffocating blizzard, Dead Space 3 keeps you on your toes with one expertly crafted environment after the other.

The game’s opening chapters tend to favor loud and boisterous set pieces, but once you start digging deeper into the frozen hellscape that is Tau Volantis, a feeling of subdued terror gradually builds. Where atmospherics are concerned, developer Visceral is once again at the top of its game. Interior spaces are a terrifying stage show of light and shadows, and even some of the planetside vistas are capable of making a glowing sunset look deeply unsettling. Just as creepy is the game’s sound design, which marries subtle audio effects with a restrained score to further build the tension.

Whether you’re stuck in a dark hallway or floating in space, Dead Space 3 looks fantastic.

Yet Dead Space 3 doesn’t simply mimic what the series has already done well. With its introduction of a robust weapon crafting system, it takes a significant step forward in terms of depth and flexibility. Every classic weapon, from the plasma cutter to the ripper, has been broken down to its basic components, spare parts you can cobble together at a workbench to create the most surgical or bombastic weapon you can conceive. Scavenging for parts often feels like collecting loot in Diablo: a virtually endless stream of rewards you’re constantly picking up from lockers and fallen enemies.

You start with a basic frame and then slot in tools that determine the primary and alternate fire–say, a plasma cutter coupled with a flamethrower, or a telemetry spike augmented with an underslung grenade launcher. You then add attachments that can further modify the weapon fire–goodbye vanilla grenades, hello acid grenades–and finally, plug in upgrade circuits to modify basic stats such as rate of fire and reload time. The only thing more staggering than the number of modular parts is the number of theoretical combinations. All of this weapon crafting takes a little while to fully comprehend, but this new feature adds a deeply satisfying amount of depth and strategy to the game’s core combat.

This is primarily due to the fact that your creations are never set in stone. You’re always combining new parts to meet the demands of the game’s increasingly terrifying onslaught of necromorphs, a mutated collection of zombified somethings operating in collusion to ensure you never get too comfortable behind your current weapon of choice.

Even sunsets are creepy in Dead Space 3.

As in previous titles, Dead Space 3′s combat is a methodical take on the third-person shooter that encourages aiming at the limbs of necromorphs as the most effective means of taking them down. But that roster of enemies is a wildly varied bunch, and their mutations require different approaches to combat. The basic plasma cutter works well early on against slashers and wasters, humanoid enemies who simply charge at you upon sight. But you need to modify your approach as the game mixes in different types of foes, like the chaotic swarms of feeders, those weak but agile necromorphs who attack you in massive numbers. For these, slotting in a powerful melee attachment like the hydraulic engine works well by smashing them down in wide, sweeping arcs of devastation. But later, you encounter immensely powerful foes like the snow beast, a four-legged necromorph roughly the size of a truck. This is when being able to slap a secondary grenade launcher onto your primary weapon suddenly comes in very handy.

No matter which enemies you’re up against, Dead Space 3′s combat is a brutally satisfying experience. It achieves the difficult task of equipping you with a powerful assortment of weapon parts that you can tailor to your own liking, while still making you feel tense and anxious about what sort of mutated beasts lie in wait around the next corner. The rate at which you find new upgrades for your weapons grows at an equal pace with the game’s introduction of more and more twisted enemies, leading to a smooth difficulty curve that lets you enjoy each fight while rarely feeling any sort of frustration.

One decision that has a significant effect on how the combat feels is whether or not you choose to approach Dead Space 3′s campaign as a solo endeavor. Gone is the competitive multiplayer of Dead Space 2, replaced by drop-in co-op that allows two players to journey through the entire story campaign side by side. The seamless transition to co-op play is aided by a few helpful changes.The game’s puzzles (which tend toward simplistic and uninteresting) are tweaked to allow both players to work together, while both players are shown different instances of loot on their screens to avoid fighting over who gets what.

Isaac’s new friend is an intensely grumpy fellow named John Carver, a character with a tragic backstory that’s explored only in co-op. It’s nice that the co-op mode gives you an extra bit of narrative context, but Carver rarely rises above the angry-soldier-with-family-issues archetype seen in video games countless times before. Carver’s personal story of the marker’s influence on his life ultimately rings hollow, and winds up feeling like one of the game’s bigger missed opportunities.

Even though the combat mechanics remain the same, playing co-op makes for an altogether different experience. The tension is lessened with the comfort of a friend at your side (though disabling co-op revival can restore some of that feeling), while frequent conversation between Isaac and Carver obscures much of the game’s creepy audio.

Dead Space 3 does a terrific job of using lighting to establish a tense atmosphere.

Yet at the same time, shredding your way through hordes of necromorphs with a buddy is great fun. The action here works quite well in a cooperative setting, like in those instances where one player is about to get pounced on by a necromorph and his buddy freezes that would-be killer at the last second with a well-timed stasis shot. On top of that, working with your partner to ensure you’ve assembled complementary weaponry is immensely satisfying from a strategic standpoint. So while co-op feels very different, it’s by no means worse than a solo playthrough. It’s simply a matter of taste.

That Dead Space 3 lets you choose between these different experiences is a theme echoed by the broad selection of optional side missions. These are treks into some of the most ravaged depths of each level–often feeling like a dungeon run in a role-playing game–where you can learn more about the people who inhabited these places before everything went to hell. (And collect some pretty sweet weapon parts to boot.) Some of these missions are unique to co-op, but most are available to solo players as well. Altogether, this side content can take a campaign that’s roughly 15 hours long and extend it well north of 20 hours.

Dead Space 3 is a big, generous game, but it sometimes reaches too far for its own good. Peppered throughout the campaign are various gameplay sequences intended to give you a little break from the core combat. Some of these are fun palate cleansers, like a scene where you’re piloting a rapidly failing spaceship through a minefield of debris. Others are simply tedious, like the clumsy ice-climbing sequences on Tau Volantis. These adventures in scaling sheer cliff faces aren’t that fun to begin with thanks to the awkward and unresponsive way you maneuver around on your rope, and become exponentially less fun when the game starts throwing ever larger hazards at you.

When it comes to love, Isaac is forever dancing with the wrong lady.

Yet these issues make up a small portion of a much larger package. From its terrific weapon crafting system to its deep well of side content, Dead Space 3 is a massive game rich with options and personalization. Whether you choose to approach it with a friend or by your lonesome, using a plasma cutter or an acid grenade launcher, Dead Space 3 makes fighting for survival a delight.