Red Faction: Guerilla - Quick Review

A bought this game not sure what to expect having played the old Red Faction game on the PS2 which I'm going to describe as a 'strange' game with good ideas not fulfilling its potential. However in Red Faction: Guerilla they have done a great job making this an incredibly entertaining game.

With the 100% destructible environment you can just spend hours smashing buildings to pieces with a good variety of weapons at your disposal. As well as some interesting vehicles that can release huge volleys of rockets at a time. One of my favourite things was the walkers which are large robots you can control to cause mass destruction either with mounted rockets, just hitting stuff with your huge arms or in a very agile one jumping around quickly swiping at your enemies.

This is a free roaming game so you do missions when you want. There are a lot of different types of missions, with main missions and side missions. The objected of this game is to liberate your planet (Mars) from the EDF, a sector at a time by lowering the control by performing a variety of guerilla actions like destroying EDF buildings.

As you progress through the game you unlocked new more powerful weapons and upgrades which you purchase using salvage which is basically scrap parts that are earned from missions and collected from destroyed buildings and vehicles. The online game play is reasonable once you get used to the style it is quite good and will keep you entertained for a while.

Overall this is a excellent game and if you enjoy destruction and lots of I am sure you will enjoy every minute of this unique game.

007 Quantum of Solace - Review: Better than I expected

Quantum of Solace is the first Bond game to be released on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 and I was hoping for quite a lot as I loved the classic Bond games that were for the old PS2.

It has been designed by Activision and features a very similar control system and the same graphics engine that was used in the very successful Call of Duty 4 but also has some great new features that make the game play very enjoyable. Although it is a first person game it has a very good 3^rd person cover system which allows you to blind fire from cover, a lot like the system on Gears of War. Also when near an enemy instead of knifing them or hitting them with your weapon you can perform stylish takedowns by pressing a few buttons. Although this is only in the campaign not online.

The campaign features scenes from both Casino Royal and Quantum of Solace although they are jumbled up and quite hard to follow but it is a lot better than a lot of movie games where you are doing things that never actually happened in the movie. There are quite a lot of different weapons and what is really great is that you can put silencers on a lot of guns anytime during the campaign. So you can be very stealthy and remain undetected for a lot of missions. If you can do this it makes the levels a lot easier as you do not have to fight so many people at once. Also some of the levels are designed for you to be stealthy for example in some of the levels if you are detected a tactical response team will be sent out to eliminate you making it significantly hardly to survive. There are some very good fight scenes where you will be watching Bond fighting and at certain times you will have to press the buttons that come up on the screen to win the fight. If you press the wrong one you will be finished off very stylishly by your opponent and have to try again from the beginning. During the campaign you will have to pick locks occasionally and there is a very cool system using the D-pad where you have to press the arrow that flashes green on the screen. You have three chances to mess up and how long it lasts depends on the difficulty of the lock. The lock picking screen is very nicely done with numbers flashing everywhere and each time you press the buttons at the right time a number will appear in a series of boxes to form the code that will unlock the door. This gives a very good feel to the game. You can patch into cameras during parts of the campaign to see what’s coming up next which is very useful if you’re going for the stealthy approach. Another good feature of this game is that you can change the fire mode of certain guns from single shot, Burst and automatic to suit your style of game play. During large fire fights you will often find that there is a way round just shooting and if you look carefully there is quite often a explosive nearby that you could shoot to take down a couple of enemies. It has four difficulty setting, New Recruit, Field operative, Agent and 007. New Recruit is very easy and anyone who had never touched a games console in their life could do it. However if you put it on the highest difficulty level it is very challenging. I was a bit disappointed that there were no driving missions like on the old Bond games, the Aston Martins with missile launchers attached to them were great fun to use. Overall it is a great campaign with superb game play, although the storyline is a bit hard to follow, and is quite a good length.

The online game play is excellent, there are lots of match types and they aren’t just the standard team death matches. These include games like “Golden gun” where you have to get the golden gun, by killing whoever has it, and get as many kills using it as possible. The Person with the most kills using the Golden gun wins. In another game mode one person plays as bond and has to defuse bombs and 5 other people have to defend the bombs. This sounds hard but as bond you have more health and do more damage than the people defending it. You earn points buy doing matches and you can purchase new weapons, grenades and gadgets (like the perks on Cod 4) with these points. There is an ok selection of weapons, side arms and gadgets although not as many as on Cod 4 or Rainbow Six Vegas 2. Also there are weapon attachments like scopes and silencers you can buy for your weapons. There are several different maps to play online although they lack the detail of the maps on CoD 4 they are still quite good to play.

Overall this is a very well put together game with a lot of excellent new features which makes the game very enjoyable to play. You can now get a copy for around £20 so it is well worth buying.

Far Cry 2 - Review

In this game you play as a mercenary and can work for either the APR or UFLL who are two rival factions trying to take control of the region which is in total anarchy. It is a free-roaming game so you can progress through the missions at the pace you want doing what you want. This game is all about being realistic and it is one of the most realistic games I’ve ever played.

Explosions and weapon fire is remarkable. Weapons will rust and jam more frequently the more they are used. There is an incredible destructive environment, you can burn down trees with flamethrowers, explosions will set fire to the grass and you can see the fire spread across the plains. There is also a very high-tec weather system that alters the AI of enemies according to the weather. At night the enemies have a heightened awareness to danger but it is harder for them to see you. In the middle of the day when it is very hot the enemies may be resting in the shade not very aware of possible danger however they will be able to see you coming in the distance. When near death you will have perform a life saving action like pulling a bullet out of you or you may have to relocate a limb after a fall. Every 30 to 40 minutes of real time playing on the game you will have to take a pill because you are suffering from malaria. In order to obtain these pills you will have to complete simple missions that you are rewarded with a few pills for completing.

The main missions include attacking a lot of enemy bases where you can take a stealthy approach and use weapons like a silenced MP5 or sniper or just run in spraying bullets out of a saw machine gun. The main storyline is quite long, about 20 hours of game play on an easy difficulty. The missions get harder the further you go into the game and you get a lot more money for doing them which you can spend on some of the cooler weapons like grenade launchers. There are a lot of side missions which include having to assassinate people and helping out your buddies which can be completed during any point in the game as long as you’re not in the middle of a mission. These side missions are very useful when you need a bit of money to buy a better weapon.

There is a wide range of weapons that are split into three categories, primary, secondary and special. Primary weapons consist of assault rifles sniper rifles and shotguns. Secondary weapons are mostly handguns, automatic handguns and explosives. Special weapons are larger heavier guns that include LMGs and RPGs. Also you always have a machete with you. Other things like ammo upgrades, accuracy upgrades, reliability upgrades and many more can also be purchased at gun shops. New weapons are unlocked by doing missions from the gun shops. This involves ambushing a convoy which I found very entertaining. You can hide in the bushes having planted some IED's in the road and blow the covey into pieces as it drives by or just stand in the road and fire a RPG at it. When you buy weapons there are stored in an armory next to the weapon store so you can always pick up a new weapon once you have purchased it. This is good as the weapons degrade over time. Ammo is quite easy to find and you don't have to pay for it like on Fallout 3 where I found you had to spend most your money on ammo.

There is a colossal map (50km²) that you can roam around looking for diamond cases (diamonds are the currency on this game) or clearing out enemy guard posts which are all over the map. Radio masts are also spread out over the map, from these you can get side missions which involve assassinating people.

There is a mode in which you can create your own map then play it online against other people which is great once you get the hang of it. Also people can rate your map when they play with you on it online.

One of the annoying things about this game is that you can't continue once you have completed the game (like fallout 3) and would have to load an earlier save to continue playing after you have completed it. Also it can be very long drives to destinations and driving around is very dangerous as there are a lot of enemy guard posts.

Overall it is a very exciting game with stunning visuals that is well worth buying however it is quite a challenging game even on the easiest difficulty level so I would not recommend it to anyone who is knew to FPS games. However if you like realistic games that are very challenging you will love this game.