Quick reviews

This is just a quick review of games I've been playing in the past year or so. Most of these are based on the impression they left on me and maybe some of them will return to haunt this blog as full detailed reviews.

So here we go in alphabetical order

Assassin's Creed 2 - Fixed everything that was wrong with the first Assassin's Creed and renaissance Italy was a great setting. The scenes happening in modern day are still shit and the developers decision to leave two of the memory imprints from middle of the game as a DLC was totally fucked up. Probably my favourite game in 2009 even with its shortcomings. 9/10

Batman Arkham Asylum - Easily one of the best games in 2009. Great ride from start to finish and excellent execution all together. I wish the boss battles with Harley Quinn and Joker would have been a bit more innovative but still if anything this is a 10/10.

Borderlands - This is what Diablo would look like if it was a FPS set in a fallout-ish world with cartoon graphics. So in short addictive and brilliant. But fuck the DLCs. Maybe I'll get them if they manage to publish a game of the year edition with all the add-ons in a single disc. Still a 9/10.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - I'm currently not really into online gaming but I did like the single player campaign. I can totally understand why this was such a huge hit. 9/10

Dante's Inferno - Without referring to God of War this was an enjoyable and nice game until the level and enemy design just couldn't bring anything new to the table after the first few circles of hell. 7/10

Darksiders - Pretty accurately summed up as Devil May Cry meets Zelda. I had fun and there were enough cool moments for this to remain absolutely a positive experience. 9/10

DiRT 2 - Arcade driving with excellent graphics and presentation. The "extreme attitude" kind of FUCKING SUCKS because I'm not a 14 year old American kid. But once you get past that the driving is fun. 8/10

Dragon Age: Origins - Not as much fun as it should be. Also the graphics are really uneven like every once in a while they're awesome and then you see some crap textures that look like something out of the original Doom. I just don't see the love for this game and Baldur's Gate is way better. Not bad though but it's just missing something 8/10.

Forza Motorsport 3 - What more could you ask from a driving game. 9/10.

Mass Effect 2 - Just pure amazing! 9/10

Metro 2033 - Atmospheric FPS in the Moscow metro tunnels. This turned out to be amazingly good shooter and it's a shame it will probably remain an underrated piece of gaming history. 9/10

Prince of Persia - Nice and smooth platformer with annoying fight mechanics and repetitive boss battles that nearly got me to throw the controller out the window more than a few times. Sans the fighting this would be a charming game. 7/10

Red Faction: Guerrilla - I had zero expectations but this turned out to be an addicting sandbox type of game where you get to destroy a lot of stuff..I mean a lot..on Mars...With a sledgehammer. Cool! 8/10


So that's what comes into mind at this moment. I guess I have been playing pretty good games since there wasn't a single one that i would score lower than 7/10. Or maybe I have just blocked all the bad games from my memory. Or maybe they aren't just worthy enough to waste time writing about.

You may wonder why I gave Batman a 10/10 and AC2 got only 9/10 and I still claimed it to be my favourite game in 2009. I'm just that complex! But seriously I think Batman was more polished and was executed better so it deserves a better score but I still played AC2 way more.

Splinter Cell Conviction

I just finished playing the new Splinter Cell. It took about 5 hours to complete. Without dumb trial and error and sudden death parts I guess it would have taken about 3 hours to play through. This is definitely one of the shortest games this generation of consoles has to offer. Yeah yeah sure there is the coop campaign and multiplayer but still. The shortness doesn't even bother me all that much since I think most games are way too long and they get just repetitive. I'd much rather have short and interesting game that would keep me interested enough to play it again.

I'm not going to compare this to the previous Splinter Cells in any way. I realize this is a new direction the developers are trying and that's the way I'm going to treat it. I pretty much have no idea what the hell happened in the game plot-wise other than that Fisher's pissed of about his daughters death who isn't actually dead and then some evil dudes try to do something bad in Washington. That's about how much I cared about the plot. On a side note the hobo-ish Sam Fisher is awesome. He actually feels angry as hell and that kind of makes it okay to be able to take down a platoon of trained soldiers by himself.

About half of the levels are really cool and the new game mechanics in Conviction really shine. The "mark and execute" feature is nice and adds a bit of tactics into confrontations. The projected mission info and objectives being shown on the surfaces of the game world is very stylish. It's also cool when you go hiding and the color bleeds out from the screen and this is actually a pretty informative and intuitive way to show that you're concealed. The other half of levels is filled with awkward moments which the engine clearly wasn't made to handle. Iraq flashback level is totally stupid. I mean you have none of the tricks that you have just learned to use in your disposal. It's just a shooter level and a bad one with third person controls. Then you have the level where you have to avoid being seen or the level fails instantly. Not cool when you think you should be a badass killing machine with a vendetta.

Graphics are great but I still have to wonder why the fuck do they have to use prerenderent cut-scenes when you could have just used the great looking game engine. Also some of the cut-scenes have been done with the engine but they have been prerendered poorly so they look like a shitty version of the game itself. This is a sin that a lot of game companies still do. I guess it goes back to the nineties when it was cool to have state of the art cutscenes or intro videos that looked nothing like the game. And then they used screenshots of the cut scenes on the game boxes and everyone was disappointed by the time the actual game started. But now the graphics in the games are so advanced that why spend money on weird prerendered stuff. It totally ruins the mood and overall coherence of the game. At least GTA does this right.

So to sum it up Splinter Cell Conviction was a fun ride but it still has a lot of flaws. I'm kind of hoping they do a Conviction 2 and focus on just being a pissed of merc and just leave out all the dumb levels. There's no way anyone should rate this higher than 8/10.