Prototype 2: The Amazing Infamous Crackodown

Prototype 2 is the charming story of a young, naive man searching for his daughter in a Finding Nemo-esque way while gaining powers to casually flit around a city and enjoy the sights. Obviously that's bullshit, but to be honest it'd probably make a better game than what it actually is. I didn't like this game. It was shit. Truly bad. It makes The Room look like Good Will fucking Hunting.

"Alt? There is no alt! I got a fucking squiggly line key, and a fucking key with a blue triangle on it! What kind of fucking keyboard is this anyway?!"

The game itself is a pretty standard open-city experience. You run around completing missions/side quests and collecting evidence. The problem lies in the fact that it's basically Crackdown 2 but melee based. It suffers from the same problems as Crackdown: boredom, repetition and iffy storyline. You pretty much have to play the same half hour over and over again for the entire game. They throw in some stealth missions, but to be fair all you do is scan for people who are out of sight of others, eat them and then repeat. And when the people in the room have gone from 15 to 4, you would think someone would pull the fucking alarm. But no. Everyone in the game is a retard.

"emo mutherfucker"

The AI has even more problems than just that, though. Considering you're the protagonist of the game and EVERYONE is looking for you, almost all the enemies are completely useless. You can sweep through the sky and fall far enough to kill a normal person into the middle of an army base and it only registers mild surprise. You get a "watch it!" and then are allowed to fuck off an hack their system. Which makes no sense. Or if you go on a killing spree all you need to do to lose the tail is run round a corner, transform, and then it's fine. You can be halfway up a fucking skyscraper but as long as you transform off camera, the helicopters won't even care that you are king-konging it around as a ninety year old woman. It ruins any kind of stealthiness you need or any of the challenge.

"Fuck off. I fucking hate computers."

The enemies are...weak. There's no challenge and the only reason I ever died was through fucking about. Fuck, they give you an ability which makes you impervious to bullets. There's no challenge with that kind of power-upping. The only slight challenge comes from the super mutants, and even they just need the right type of attack at the right time to kill them, no biggee. And even if you do have trouble with the enemies, everyone's a health pack. Or you can run away at the speed of sound. Even the last boss is a joke. Considering he's been running around cities for ages at this point he's barely any harder than your standard enemy, and is even less as memorable.

"Oh man, and I thought my balls were big!"

The achievements are worth a quick mention. Because they're quick. It's one of those games where you get the majority of them BY ACCIDENT WHEN PLAYING. They should not be achievements. There is no achievement in doing easy fucking things. Seriously, look it up, most of them are like a tutorial. Fucking pointless.

"Lance Bertram...Blackwatch APC driver. Doesn't sound important. Fuck it, I'll kill him anyway."

Now, I never played the first one so I don't have that to compare it to, but when compared to Crackdown this game does have it's merits. Because it's a melee based game the combat is more fun than Crackdown's primarily shooting based combat. Attacks feel meaty and satisfying and each "weapon" has a special move which devastates humans or allows openings in mutants. The dialogue is hilarious in a bad/good kind of way, with the main character swearing like a beast (as can be seen from the quotes dotted around) and often it's the swearing which stops the game becoming a joke. Or makes it one. Not sure, don't care. There's a decent upgrade system which will have you searching areas (albeit for a tiny amount of time) to allow you to level up all your abilities to their fullest. Running around the city is okay, no fiddly climbing like Crackdown. But meh. That's it on the good side, I'm afraid. From what I've seen, inFamous is way better. But then again, most things are...

"I'm going to skull fuck you & suck the memories out the hole"

Peace.

Cliff Notes: Cut rate city exploration game with a repetitive mission system. Just play the first half an hour...
Rating: 4/10, and I'm being generous.
Friend Recommender: Fuck no. I'd recommend them to stay the fuck away.

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (Or: How To Confuse Fanboys)

So way back in September I played this game at GameFest and thought "hey, this is pretty neat!". Since then Capcom basically told everyone a few even neater facts, namely that you can kill Leon and you fight Nemesis/Mr X. Then they released trailers and stuff and everyone thought this game looked mad good. And then they bought the game. And then traded it back in, or would have done if Game hadn't have gone bust. And then I wrote this review.

GOOD SHIT

Right, so, the big thing with this game is that you get to play a squad based shooter against zombies, then against UBCS (Spec Ops people), and then against BOTH AT THE SAME TIME. That might not sound like anything special but when you're in a pitched battle against people who are basically dicking on you and then you get attacked by zombies: fucking frantic fun. Swinging in with that is that if you cause an enemy to bleed, he'll attract almost all the zombies over to him which is pretty much a game winning outcome. And super satisfying. The zombies also infect people sometimes, which for a while will protect you from zombies but also turn you into a zombie if/when you die  (if you don't have an antiviral spray. But they seem to drop out of half the zombies asses anyway). Again, mega satisfying to do to enemies or to do to yourself if you don't like your team-mates online....

That's all the good things about the gameplay, so before I slag it off here are the other neat-oh things: Every level has a "SHIT, I REMEMBER THAT!" section. From the fire escape ladder or chief of police's office in the Police department to the tram lift and round by Kendo's gun shop, there's something for every fan. The fact that the game starts you off with standing outside Birkin's lab while he gets shot up and then running away from his transformation shows just how hard they've tried to make this fit in with the events of Resident Evil 2/3. The part in the Umbrella facility where the security cameras feature is used to see Leon say goodbye to Ada, which almost made me cheer with fan-ish happiness. Hell, they even explain how Leon did that stupid 180 in his car at the start of Resi 2. And that's pretty much where all the happiness ends.

BAD SHIT


So a cover based squad shooter. Seems sound, right? Not if they make it so that to aim out of cover your character has to actually crouch halfway out of cover to do so. In the end I stopped trying to shoot from cover because you leave yourself so exposed. This doesn't make any sense seeing as it is one of the core foundations of this type of game, and they've basically fucked it up. Aiming down sites is piss-poor too, with the sniper rifle not hitting where you aim it or hitting invisible cover instead and the handgun weaving all over the place. Bullet drop shouldn't happen in a Resi game. It just makes everyone angry. Which means fighting the almost invincible Nemesis is fucking hard just because of the core mechanics being terrible.

The AI is fucking awful. Even worse than Sheva from Resi 5. They took her ability level and spread it over 3 people so they're all only 33% as good as Sheva is. More bullets land on them than the zombies. And yet them and their stupid accents still don't die.

Most enemies in the game can be taken down with one or two bullets to the head apart from big names (and lickers, even though it's their weak spot). I was standing at point blank range and emptied 20 shotgun shells into Ada's face and she wouldn't go down. She just wandered off. Nikolai took untold amounts of sniper bullets to the forehead and just shrugged and moved on. Now, I understand the need for bosses to be hard, but maybe the design shouldn't have allowed me to have the barrel of my gun against people's foreheads and them not go down. It just doesn't make sense and in a Resi game just looks fucking stupid.

The big thing about this game is (as I've already said) the appearance of old stuff. Unfortunately most of it is really off hand and is just thrown away. I appreciate that this squad needs to be kept in the shadows for the most part so that it doesn't conflict with the canon of Resident Evil, but every time you see something from the games...you just skip away with a big "lol, fuck that". Examples: You see Birkin, run away, he's never mentioned again. You chase down Nikolai, he runs away, he's not mentioned again. You fix the broken Nemesis, run away, he's not mentioned again. I had no idea what I was doing for most of the game and no idea why there were so many mercs fucking about in a zombie infested town. The real sad point of the game comes at the end when you've hunted down Leon and Claire and have to kill them. For untold reasons Leon is a rookie cop who is now a crack shot with a sniper rifle and Claire could 3 star every Angry Birds level with her ability with the grenade launcher. On top of that is that they are being protected by an army of mercs for no apparent reason. Mercs who can't set up a simple baricade to stop you just running past them in the final battle...

And that's when shit gets weird. You have Leon and Claire at gunpoint at the very end of the game and then you are told to make a decision: Kill them or save them (obviously you kill them, because who wouldn't?). You're magically transported to an arena style area and told to kill off half of your team and Leon/Claire EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE AT GUNPOINT. And when you win? There is a 6 second ending of: "Time to die", fade to black, gunshot. The big selling point of the game was mearly a 6 second afterthought. Disappointing. And anticlimatic. Seems to be a theme nowadays.

Cliff Notes: A squad shooter that fails at both shooting and squading plus a pointless level up system. I didn't even play the versus matches because I honestly couldn't be arsed to play any more of this shit.
Rating: 4/10
Would I recommend it to my friends: GOD NO. But if they got given it then it could make a fun-ish campaign multiplayer mode. Anything's an improvement on having doors blocked by retarded AI just standing there.