PS3 Reviews

Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom PS3 Review

Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom is a game of odd contrasts. On the one hand, I admired its beautiful art style, its emphasis on cooperation, and its solid gameplay. On the other hand, poor graphics, awful voiceovers, and corny dialogue mar the experience. This is a game that certainly has its quirks. Look past the blemishes, though, and you will find a fairly interesting action/puzzle game in the vein of Ico or Enslaved. Cooperating with an AI-driven partner may not be the most original concept nowadays, especially with The Last Guardian gathering plenty of post-E3 buzz, but if you are intrigued by Majin’s world, or if you find yourself unable to wait for Team Ico’s next project, you would do well to give this game a shot.

In Majin, you will step into the shoes of thief-with-a-heart-of-gold Tepeu. Fearful for the future of his land after an army of dark, gooey demons begin to attack, Tepeu ventures out into forests in search of the mythical Majin. It is said that the Majin possesses magical powers capable of vanquishing the dark hoards. Almost immediately upon starting up a new game, Tepeu finds the Majin imprisoned in an elaborate series of caverns. He frees the creature, and together they set out to escape the Majin’s prison and save the world. It quickly becomes apparent that years of inactivity have weakened the Majin greatly, and thus he can only access a fraction of his powers at the outset of the game. These powers include superhuman strength and fire breath. Over the course of the game, the Majin will grow stronger and stronger, gaining new abilities that will prove useful in combat and puzzle solving. The change in the Majin’s power level will be given physical representation by the amount of plant life growing on his back. As he gains more strength, more plants and crystals will grow out of the Majin’s back, giving a nice physical representation to his growth and giving you the feeling that you are really making progress through the game.

Gran Turismo 5 (PS3) Review

After what has seemed like an unbelievably long wait Gran Turismo 5 has finally arrived. The fifth installment of the best selling racing series ever still has the most accurate handling physics of any console racer, but is it starting to loose some of its charm?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 PS3 Review

I typically begin each review with a little paragraph describing the context of my review and giving a little back story to the proceedings. Such an introduction is unnecessary here. In any context, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is a horrid abomination of a video game, and should be avoided like a plague.

Create PS3 Review

In a holiday season dominated by secret agents and assassins, it can be easy to overlook some of the smaller games. While EA was busy focusing its marketing efforts on the Medal of Honor reboot and the latest Harry Potter game, Create managed to sneak onto the market and steal my heart. Sure, it is not a perfect game. Not even close. But it does have a certain pick-up-and-play charm, and at its best, it is capable of eliciting shouts of victory and high fives just as much as most other holiday releases.

The basic idea of Create is that you must complete set objectives by building Mousetrap-esque contraptions. Like a Rube Goldberg creation, the end result will often be over-engineered and elaborate. The catch is that you are only given certain items in each level, and you may only use a set number of these items to make it to the end, so you will have to think about how best to utilize the limited objects. For example, in one early level you are tasked with getting a package on one side of a canyon through a hoop on the other side of the canyon. In order to beat the level, you must attach a balloon to the package so that it will float, position a fan above the package to blow it across the canyon, and then position another fan to blow the balloon into a spiked outcropping, popping the balloon and sending the package falling through the hoop.

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood PS3 Review

The first Assassin’s Creed was an ambitious experiment from Ubisoft that divided gamers. The game granted players unparalleled access to their environment, but conversely restricted the actual gameplay to a handful of restrictive mission types. Two years later, the second game in the series released and ruthlessly eliminated many of the issues that plagued the original release. Better in almost every conceivable way, Assassin’s Creed 2 was a huge leap forward for the franchise that set the bar for action games just a little bit higher. Now, only a year later, Ubisoft has released a third Assassin’s Creed game. Does Brotherhood mark another step forward for the franchise, or is it content to tread water?
Honestly, the answer is a little bit of both. While there are many facets of Brotherhood that feel progressive and unique, the core of the game still revolves around taking missions from various NPCs, building up your city with merchants and brothels, and of course assassinating the bad guys. These pillars of gameplay feel almost the same as they did in AC2, but Brotherhood skirts any feelings of repetition by executing its set pieces on a much grander scale. The opening missions of the game, for example, introduce the combat and horse riding mechanics against the backdrop of a frantic siege. This focus on grand action complements the social-stealth gameplay of past games surprisingly well, and it goes a long way towards making Brotherhood feel as much like an interactive movie as a video game.

Call of Duty: Black Ops PS3 Review

Activision really needs to sit down and take a long, hard look at their business model. After running both the Tony Hawk and the Guitar Hero series into the ground, you would think that they would really play it safe with their biggest franchise of all, Call of Duty. Sadly this is not the case, as the series has pumped out entry after entry every year since 2003 (including mediocre console spin-offs Finest Hour and Big Red One.) And while Black Ops has certainly been the most successful game in the franchise in terms of sales, and although it does bring a few new ideas to the table, I can not help but feel that the series as a whole is reaching the point of stagnation.
Nowhere is this point driven home more than in the single player campaign mode. Although perfectly functional, the incredibly brief story feels less like a cohesive whole and more like a series of concepts and set pieces torn directly from other Call of Duty games. The game opens with the obligatory hostage scenario, in which an enemy takes a human shield, time slows down, and you must pull off a head shot with your pistol to save the day. It seems like this scene alone has been in at least five or six games since the first Modern Warfare popularized it. From there, the game throws you into an off road vehicle chase, a few on-rails shooting segments, a scene in which you use guided missiles to destroy targets, and a “follow your AI partner and do everything exactly as he says or fail” stealth scene that has apparently become a requirement for all modern shooters. The campaign portion of Black Ops is almost embarrassingly devoid of new and interesting ideas. Worst of all, these now-standard shooter elements were all popularized by the Call of Duty franchise, making the entire game feel like a less polished highlight reel of past games. You know that a series has gone creatively bankrupt when it starts ripping itself off.

Hoard Review

I went into Hoard with almost no expectations. Other than one vague press release a made public around a week ago, I knew virtually nothing about the game. Still, the game’s description on the PSN promised much castle burning and villager scaring, which was enough for me to justify throwing down fifteen bones without a second thought. Sadly, Hoard never quite lives up to my wondrous visions of flames and chaos.

Although Hoard is technically a dual joystick shooter in the vein of Super Stardust HD or Everyday Shooter, the focus is less on the shooting (or, since you play a dragon in Hoard, perhaps it is more apt to call it breathing) and more on strategy. Burning buildings, farms, and roaming wagon carts will earn you money, which you can then deliver to your lair for points. You can only carry so much gold, though, so repeated trips to your hoard of gold will be necessary. Occasionally it will also be possible to nab a princess from one of several royal carriages that travel from kingdom to kingdom. Returning the princess to your hoard and subsequently defending her from the knights who will come to rescue her will earn you a large ransom bonus.

The Sims 3 PS3 Review

In the past, The Sims games were split into two distinct categories. In the first category were the hit PC games, which sold millions of copies and changed the way that people looked at simulation games as a whole. Then there were the console spin-offs, which mostly played like lackluster knockoffs of the real thing. Sure, they were still decent games, but it often felt like EA had to sacrifice some of the depth and flexibility of the PC games for a more “console oriented” approach. This created a large divide between the games, one which EA has finally filled in with the release of The Sims 3 on consoles. This is the closest you’ll get to a pure Sims experience without booting up a computer.

DJ Hero 2 PS3 Review

Last year’s DJ Hero product was something special. It may not have been a “perfect” game but it introduced a fun new spin on the music/rhythm game genre. Not only did it have a fantastic soundtrack but the actual idea of spinning a turn table from your home was what most intrigued everyone. The fact that it worked excellently was only icing on the cake. The sales of DJ Hero were very poor, but Activision still allowed FreeStyleGames (the developer) to make a sequel. In the sequel, they don’t improve much, but what is there is still a blast to play.

DJ Hero’s career mode is simply entitled “Empire” mode where you go through multiple cities across the world (None looking too much different than the other) touring with your own club that you are the head DJ of. Empire mode does nothing different than the standard career mode in other music games apart from being able to choose your club name and a special logo (one of which looks incredibly similar to the beautiful Player Affinity logo). This is probably a good thing as we all know what happened when Guitar Hero tried to reinvent the career mode.

Vanquish PS3 Review

Thanks to games like Heavy Rain and Mass Effect 2, interactive storytelling has taken some big steps forward in 2010. Indeed, it seems that many developers have recently been putting a great amount of effort into immersing you in dark and engrossing worlds, and gaming is overall better because of this. Luckily, PlatinumGames recognizes that not every new shooter on the block needs to be as emotional as it is bombastic, and the result of their latest collaboration with Sega is all the better because of it. Vanquish flips the bird to many recent shooter conventions, going for a sort of old-school approach to shooting, and it comes out the other end feeling surprisingly fresh because of this.