Destination: Treasure Island Review

Logical adventure games don't come along very often, so the arrival of Kheops Studio's Destination: Treasure Island is cause for celebration. This sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's classic pirate novel is long on common sense and short on the unreasonable puzzles that force so many fans of this genre to turn to online walkthroughs. Such a straightforward focus gives the game the atmosphere of a lighthearted swashbuckling quest, not the journey into frustration that adventures frequently devolve into after the first hour or two of play.

The plot picks up five years after the events recounted in Stevenson's novel. As the action opens, Jim Hawkins is now running a shipping business in the Caribbean and reminiscing a bit about his old pal Long John Silver. However, before he can wax too nostalgic, he's locked in his cabin by three of the mutinous rogues he encountered way back when, which forces him to make a quick escape that lands him marooned on Emerald Isle. The storyline is a bit poorly developed at this point, but the island turns out to apparently be the new stomping grounds of Silver. Old Long John has set up an elaborate treasure hunt for Jim, with the assistance of his parrot and a rhyming riddle that gives hints on how to unlock the island's many secrets.

It's this lengthy piratical doggerel that makes Destination: Treasure Island such a pleasure. The rhyming couplets provide just enough clues to ensure that you generally won't get too frustrated. For example, at one point you're stuck with a locked gate and given only the lines "But are you lost and running blind?/Well, friend, if you've got a black spot/Look at it and you will find." Nobody's going to win any prizes for the quality of this verse, but these lines pretty clearly tell you that the solution to opening the gate can be found by looking closely at the infamous black spot that the mutinous sailors presented to Silver in the original novel. Sure enough, an examination of the spot reveals the code needed to unlock the door and journey to the second section of the island. Likewise, you progress through the poem by section, with the game crossing off lines whenever you solve the riddles that they present. This further prevents you from getting lost or frustrated, given that you're pretty much always working on just a single problem at a time. It also makes the game friendlier to younger players, who might not be able to keep track of the various puzzle and plot threads that fill up the typical adventure game.

About the only drawback here is the similarity between the different puzzles. Most involve picking up and combining various objects, so there is something of a pixel hunt going on here. Nevertheless, all important items are easy to spot, which means that you don't have to scour every square inch of every screen. As long as you pan the first-person viewing perspective all around each location, it's tough to miss key items and trigger points important to solving the game's various conundrums. Still, there are only a few logic puzzles in the game, and most of these are readily solvable by simply reading Silver's poem and experimenting with the items in your inventory. Occasionally you'll engage in some basic memorization, as with one memorable moment when you sing a duet of "Yo-Ho-Ho and a Bottle of Rum" with Silver's parrot. Real uniqueness is added only with knot-tying challenges, where you pick from two choices to tie the requested nautical knot, and these are so simplistic that they're more annoying than enjoyable.

The look and sound of the game are somewhat dated, although not so behind the times as to be a bother. It is based on the old first-person style popularized by Myst, so play can feel a bit clunky on occasion. Despite this, you never feel limited by such static movement and the ability to spin in place and check out your environments. Many of the tropical scenes are quite picturesque, which also makes the game appear more modern than the engine that powers everything. Audio is highlighted by some great voice work from the actor playing Jim. He perfectly balances the characterization between the teen of the original story and the young businessman and sailor that Jim has grown into here. Unfortunately, the music is a bit of a letdown, as it doesn't feature any of the jaunty pirate tunes that you would expect from a game like this.

Sensible and fun, Destination: Treasure Island is a must for anyone who likes a good pirate yarn. There isn't anything here that's particularly innovative, although traditional adventures are rarely this rational and enjoyable.


By Brett Todd, Gamespot

Two Worlds

A poor man's Oblivion. This description may seem a bit damning, but it puts the game in awfully fine company when you consider the sheer greatness of Bethesda's role-playing game opus. Reality Pump's RPG certainly has it where it counts in the aspiration department, even if, largely due to some design quirks, the first-time RPG developer can't quite match the gold standard established by Oblivion last year. With that said, the epic scale of the game, along with outstanding character development, free-flowing action, and good quest variety, make it a worthwhile play for any RPG aficionado.

In an exact reversal of the problems that Oblivion players on the PC griped about in 2006, Two Worlds' biggest issue on the Xbox 360 is its PC-centric design. This is actually a welcome surprise in some ways, as PC RPGs typically boast more depth than their console counterparts when it comes to storyline, character creation, and sheer scope of the gameworld (and that is certainly the case here). However, this focus is a big problem in other respects.

For example, everything about the interface is geared for a close-up monitor. Even on a large HDTV, it's nearly impossible either to read the minimap on the main adventure screen or to determine at a glance what the icons are on the big map when you pull it up to full size. This can be a serious problem, as the gameworld is so huge and the number of points of interest so tremendous that it's easy to get lost or backtrack for miles without realizing that you got turned around somehow. Text is so minuscule that it might as well be the fine print on a mortgage. Furthermore, the inventory is a clunky affair in which you have to scroll across all of your items every time you want to use a potion or swap out a weapon. You can pretty readily tell that the whole thing was designed with a mouse, keyboard, and monitor in mind, not a gamepad and TV. Regardless, you do grow to tolerate these drawbacks after an hour or two of squinting. The game beyond the interface is worth the eyestrain, and if you happen to be playing on the PC, you won't run into any such issues.

The story is stock-standard for this sort of RPG. The backdrop deals with a war in the land of Antaloor between man and orc that resulted in the imprisonment of the orcish god Aziraal in a magical tomb. When the game opens, 300 years have passed and a dwarven mining expedition has possibly uncovered the big guy's final resting place, which doesn't bode well for relations between humans and orcs. You're a mercenary just trying to get by, one who is more concerned with rescuing his missing sister than saving the world or even looking into what's got the orcs all riled up as of late. As with most open world RPGs, you can dive straight into this main storyline and take on all of its quests, or freely wander the world while helping people and killing monsters for fun and profit. It's important to note that there is no level-balancing or similar gimmicks present here, which means that you need to finish a fair number of side quests to gain the experience and equipment needed to send Aziraal and his orc pals packing.

So the plot isn't going to set the world on fire, although the personal angle with your sister and the overall character design and development are somewhat innovative. There are no classes here, so after creating your male protagonist (there is no option to roll up a member of the fairer sex) and customizing little things like hair color and arm length, you're left to place the attribute and skill points awarded with level increases wherever you want. If you want a fighter, for example, you have to buff strength and vitality stats, and increase scrapping skills like damage and critical-hit chance. For a mage, you go with willpower and magical skills such as necromancy and the four elements. Or you could try a jack-of-all-trades and distribute points all over the place so you can whip out a sword or a spell depending on the circumstances.

There are no restrictions when it comes to the use of weapons, magical items, spells, and the like, at least in comparison with the more closed D&D-style systems. Nevertheless, most hardware does have attribute requirements that limit the really good weapons to fighter types, the really good magical staffs to mage types, and so on. On the other hand, all characters can use the alchemy pot that forms half of the inventory screen. Items like crystals and plants can be gathered throughout the game and brewed into health potions and various other elixirs that can buff your stats, or even add poison or flame damage to weapons. Overall, this is a nice extra touch that opens up the game and lets even a hardcore fighter play mage every now and then.

Fewer options are available when it comes to developing your character in the game itself, because NPC interactions are pretty blah. While it's refreshing that you're an out-for-himself mercenary instead of the usual RPG saint or dog-kicking villain, there are few choices in conversations. You always hit up passersby with the same bland questions depending on your location, and you always get the same canned responses. When being asked to undertake a quest, your choices generally include only "Yes, how much?" and "No thanks, not interested." At least the NPCs are designated with colored icons, which means that all you have to do is look for green to know if they have anything of value to say before you even start flapping your gums. Conversations also get right to the point, and can be skipped through quickly if you've heard it all before. All lines are delivered by voice actors, which adds some life to the chatter. Quality is all over the place, ranging from cheesy to dull monotone. You're guaranteed to get some chuckles out of the action-hero quips of the lead. Lines like "Say hello to death!" and sarcastic comments about the weather when it rains don't seem entertaining on paper, but the bombastic delivery is so hilarious that they work in spite of themselves.

Combat in Two Worlds is similarly straightforward. The third-person camera (you can switch to first-person on the PC, but only when you don't have any weapons equipped) allows for quick, button-mashing action that doesn't require a great deal of thought. Melee fighters can take advantage of combo attacks, although battles generally require nothing more than hammering on the left trigger as quickly as possible until the bad guys fall down. The magic system is just as basic, with a default attack that functions similarly to the melee option, and spells that can be quickly cast with cards. But even though battles are simplistic, they're far from easy. The only way to succeed when fighting on the medium or hard difficulty settings is to do a lot of dodging and running away, and to time your assaults to land in-between enemy swipes. Of course, considering that the game features a lot of combat, this sort of futzing around gets annoying fast. It's a lot more sensible to turn the difficulty setting to easy (which is still very challenging) and not deal with this dart-and-dodge fighting. Even then, you'll still get killed quite a bit. However, this isn't a hassle, given that you respawn immediately at one of the many healing shrines scattered throughout Antaloor.

The monsters that you'll slay aren't quite varied enough for an RPG of this length and scope. While scraps fly past so quickly that boredom will rarely be an issue, it seems like you're killing the same packs of wolves, bears, and boars in the wilderness over and over again. And that does get dull, because after the first hour or so of play, you've got enough experience and weaponry to slaughter these beasts in mere moments. Other creatures include fantasy RPG stereotypes like the goblinesque groms, as well as orcs, dwarves, skeletons, ghouls, and dragons, along with more esoteric selections such as Flintstones-refugee reapers, man-sized jackals, and giant bugs known as trachidis. There seems to be a good number of monsters spread through the entire game; it's just that the repetition of specific types in certain areas makes you feel like you're on a treadmill at times. Reality Pump just hasn't filled Antaloor with a menagerie quite befitting its tremendous size.

Quests provide more variety. There are dozens upon dozens of assignments available, spread all over the world. They range from standard delivery jobs to solving murders, from stealing underwear to collecting herbs, and, of course, slaughtering tribes of groms and orcs. Most of the quests are also set within a realistic backdrop of factions and interests. Groups in the game, including the knightly Brotherhood as well as the guilds representing such disparate folk as merchants and necromancers, hire you for jobs at various points. A consequence is that your reputation increases amongst different crowds of NPCs. The world itself is tied together with realistic geographical features and common teleportation platforms that let you take shortcuts after an initial reconnaissance of the map. So you can take in some postcard vistas when you want to sightsee, and when you want to just zip around, you can minimize aimless wandering with this magical transit system (or by hopping on a horse, although the nags in the game are so tough to control that it's easiest to just stay on foot).

Multiplayer gives Two Worlds a little something extra not offered by most RPGs. On the PC, Reality Pump has given the game a basic arena-combat venue where you can go online and duke it out with human opponents, but the real meat is in the quasi-MMO mode of play in which you can wander Antaloor and take on quests with online pals. About the only major differences between this option and the solo campaign is the lack of the story here and the ability to pick specific character classes from lists of warriors, rogues, and mages instead of custom-crafting a hero with stat and skill choices. This isn't quite the cooperative play-through of a full campaign that RPGers have been dying for, but it's certainly an innovative idea. The only problem is difficulty. Even the introductory quests are extremely hard, which pretty much forces you to group up with other players to have a chance at survival. Co-op play is also an iffy proposition because there seem to be only a couple dozen players online at any given moment right now. If the game gets more popular, this mode of play could really take off.

At any rate, this multiplayer mode is miles above the dreary (and laggy) limited online option available with the Xbox 360 version of the game. Instead of the cooperative campaign play that RPGers have been dreaming of, all the developer has included here are dull host-or-join game modes like deathmatch (deeply bland because of the simplistic combat system), monster hunt (better due to the addition of an objective, but still too repetitive to enjoy for long), and an RPG option where you develop a character courtesy of hacking and slashing through quests on one-off maps with up to seven buddies. The latter pales in comparison to the multiplayer offering featured in the PC edition of the game, as it features full server support that makes maps feel more like persistent worlds, along with player numbers that roughly resemble what's available in MMOs. Anyhow, the only distinction with the MP games here is a wide variety of set character classes, including specialty warriors such as the blade dancer, as well as mages focusing on the elements and necromancy. Even if you want to try these half-baked games, they're often unplayable due to frequent dropped connections and serious lag that regularly turns combat into a slide show. Very few people seem to be taking advantage of the online play at this point, which isn't exactly a surprise when you consider its quality. Ultimately, if you want online RPG action, look toward the PC version.

Visual and audio quality aren't quite fully realized. The game's artwork looks great due to gorgeous mountain ranges, grassy hills, detailed monster and character textures, and nicely varied city and village architecture, but frame-rate hitches and loading pauses frequently interrupt the action on the 360 version. Quick pauses during combat happen in virtually every scrap with more than a couple of opponents. This doesn't affect the overall playability of battles, but remains awfully annoying nevertheless. Section loads are also frequent, if brief. A little disc icon pops onto the screen every so often while you're wandering through the woods, during which the game pauses for a few seconds. This can be a little irritating, although it's certainly preferable to long loading times. However, sometimes the game pauses without flashing the disc icon, which means that the game has either additional, unadvertised loads or a few bugs. The PC version doesn't have any of these hitching issues. Much of the experience is seamless, with area loads being barely noticeable. Best of all, everything runs smoothly on even a mid-grade, single-core machine with a 6800-class video card. You need to dial the graphics back to 1024x768 to avoid choppy combat, although this is a small price to pay to get a game this big and attractive to run so well.

Audio quality is mixed. As previously noted, the dialogue is an amusing blend of cheese and action-hero clichés. Atmospheric battle effects are generally excellent, if not pronounced enough to make you aware of their presence. The same goes for most of the soundtrack, which is noteworthy only for some ethereal odes à la Enya and the fact that it was composed by '80s one-hit wonder Harold "Axel F" Faltermeyer. The only real standout tune is the ominous bass-heavy piece that eerily wells up whenever your hit points plummet to near-death levels.

If you appreciate ambitious RPGs, seek out Two Worlds. It won't make you forget about Oblivion, but Reality Pump's take on heroic fantasy adventure is good enough to consume many, many hours of your spare time. Even though there are some flaws here, especially with the 360 version of the game, this is a solid role-playing experience.

By Brett Todd, GameSpot

Medal of Honor: Airborne

It seems you can't read a preview or review of a World War II-based FPS without hearing about how many games there are in the genre. With good reason, too--it's a crowded one. But just because there are a lot of them doesn't mean there can't be some good ones. Medal of Honor: Airborne is one such game. It starts off really slow, and the whole parachuting hook is little more than a gimmick; but later on the game realizes its potential and gets good.

There's not much of a story to Airborne. It's WWII; Nazis need killing and the world needs saving. You're in the Airborne division, so you'll be jumping out of planes and doing your part to swing the war in the Allies' favor. Before each mission you're given a brief rundown on what's going on and list of objectives to accomplish. Rather than spawning on the battlefield you'll arrive in style by parachuting out of a plane. As you fall to the ground you'll want to maneuver toward green smoke, which indicates a safe landing zone. In theory, parachuting into the level is supposed to open up a whole new style of play. You're free to land wherever you want, but invisible walls prevent you from getting too clever, and nine times out of 10, when you do land somewhere other than the safe zone you'll end up dead in a matter of seconds. There are some special landing zones to discover and sometimes these areas will provide you with an advantageous starting point, but because you find most of these locations when you're already on the ground, they're of little use.

Once on the ground you'll take on waves of Axis soldiers over the course of the game's six levels. Six levels might not sound like a lot, but each generally takes an hour or more to complete, so it'll probably take most people around eight hours to finish the game. Your objectives are shown on your radar and you're free to tackle them in whatever order you choose. Between choosing your starting location and being able to pick what to take on first it might sound like there's a lot of freedom here, but there's really not--you can't start from many different places, and you have to do the same tasks regardless of the order you start them. Mission objectives range from blowing up AA guns to clearing buildings of enemy soldiers, taking out tanks, and detonating lots of explosives. On their own these tasks aren't anything unique, but because the levels are so long and feature so many objectives you often feel as though you're performing monumental feats rather than routine tasks.

The first three levels aren't very interesting. They're fairly linear, take place in unexciting settings, and don't play to the game's strengths. Starting with the fourth level the game picks up since you're given more freedom as to how you want to tackle the levels. You might decide to climb towers to take out snipers (their position is given away by a reflection off their scope), clear the area of ground troops, and then make your way into a building, while a different player might head to the building first, clear the ground troups second, and hide from the snipers rather than kill them. The game's artificial intelligence isn't very good, but at least it's aggressive. You can pick off guys as they peek around corners, but they won't just take it lying down. They'll spray bullets in your direction without looking, and they're rather fond of blindly tossing grenades over their backs. If you get too close or they get some reinforcements, enemy soldiers will charge right at you and inflict serious damage until you can fend them off with your weak melee attacks.

The controls are pretty standard on both the PC and the 360. A sprint button comes in quite handy when trying to dash from one bit of cover to the next. Once you're behind that cover, the ability to lean and fire is extremely useful, as is the ability to raise your weapon and aim using its sights. As you progress through the game you'll be able to upgrade your weapons, earning bigger clips, faster reloads, and secondary firing abilities. You can carry two weapons at a time as well as a pistol, which isn't very powerful but has unlimited ammo. Grenades are often tough to come by, but ammunition is plentiful, as are health packs, which are scattered throughout the levels. It's a good thing, too, because once you start getting hit your health depletes in a hurry.

While most of Airborne is good, it does have its share of problems. Hit detection is terrible--it's not uncommon to hit someone with three or four shots before even one registers. Many of the automatic weapons have too much recoil, making them extremely difficult to aim--a problem not shared by the CPU, who is more than capable of hitting you from across the level regardless of the gun. Your fellow soldiers are sometimes quite useful, but other times they don't do anything at all--or worse, they stand right in front of you and block your shot. We also fell out of the level a few times, though this was usually when we parachuted someplace the game probably didn't want us to. When all of these problems come together the game can be extremely frustrating, as you're forced to try the same part of a level over and over again in an attempt to find the best way to circumvent the game's sometimes cheap tactics.

Unlike the last Medal of Honor, MOH: Airborne has a solid online component. Up to 12 people can hop online and play ranked and unranked matches on half a dozen maps and a few different game types. The action's always fast-paced and for us, at least, lag-free. Interestingly enough, multiplayer is the one area where choosing where you want to parachute into a level actually lives up to the hype. As you descend you can see both friends and foes and, if you're quick enough, can land in areas that are quite advantageous--like right behind that jerk camping on a rooftop with a sniper rifle.

Airborne isn't a great-looking game, but it does run well and the visuals don't hamper the experience. It looks best on the PC thanks to higher quality textures. Outside of a few nice-looking buildings most structures are simple, and look pretty much the same, not only to each other, but every other WWII game out there. There are only a few different types of soldiers and while they aren't very detailed, you can tell one type from the next easily. At least, you can if you're up close. It's tough to tell the good guys from the bad guys when you're far apart, and it's even harder to hit them thanks to a lack of transition animation, meaning they might instantly jump from one position to the next. Weapons look great, but explosions look embarrassingly last-gen. Not only do weapons look nice, but they sound great, too. The rest of the game sounds pretty good as well. You'll hear the familiar orchestral theme from previous MOH games, and there's lots of chatter from both Axis and Allied soldiers.

Medal of Honor: Airborne is a game that rewards those who are patient enough to stick with it. The first half of the game is dull and just rehashes the same sort of gameplay you've seen countless times before. But about halfway through, things pick up and gradually get better and better until the last two levels, which are quite intense and a lot of fun to play. The multiplayer isn't anything groundbreaking, but it's quite good and adds some value to an otherwise short game. If you're tired of the genre, Airborne won't do anything to change your mind, but if you're looking to fight for the Allied cause yet again, it's a worthy tour of duty.


By Aaron Thomas, GameSpot

ThreadSpace: Hyperbol

ThreadSpace: Hyperbol his one of those deceptively deep games. It seems like the quintessentially simple arcade game at first blush, but eventually reveals itself to be one of those easy-to-learn, hard-to-master challenges capable of sponging up your spare time. Even though some pace and balancing issues--along with the near-complete absence of a solo mode of play--mar the otherwise shiny finish of this tactical shooter, the game remains intriguing both for its promise and for what it does right.

Developer Iocaine Studios began with the simple turret-shooter concept, which is practically as old as time itself, and tricked it out with strategic elements. The game is played in deep space, albeit on the two-dimensional planes of interstellar interstate highways called hyperchannels, which were left behind by an ancient civilization. These outer-space landscapes look a bit like the computer scenery in Tron due to their flatness, sparse details, and reliance on cartoony neon colors (a resemblance accentuated by the techno score and metallic weapon effects). You pilot gun-turret ships across these Lite-Brite battlefields, constantly rotating and occasionally moving both to take cover and to get a good firing line on enemies. Controls are elementary. Selecting a projectile to fire is handled by clicking on an icon on the left and bottom of the screen, while actually firing is taken care of with the left mouse button. Most missile functions are activated with a tap of the spacebar, and the camera is rotated with the mouse and the WASD keys. If you can't figure everything out on your own, an extensive series of tutorials lays out of all the particulars.

Gameplay options are somewhat blah, though. Aside from the tutorials and a couple of time trials, the only solo modes of play are skirmishes against bots. Changing the difficulty setting is the only option here, so single-player gets dull fast. The bots generally aren't very bright, and on the lower two settings they're stupid enough that they regularly blow up their own ships, and can't seem to hit the broad side of a barn when firing at you. This means that your only real choice is multiplayer, which also doesn't offer the greatest selection of modes. The gameplay types are old chestnuts such as deathmatch, team deathmatch, last man standing, and destroy objective. These games are livened up with the inclusion of three factions that influence your starting ship (there are five core ship classes that have varying capabilities when it comes to engines, projectile speed, and so forth), as well as a persistent-world gimmick in which you vote on systems to continue an ongoing war, and finally the ability to earn credits for ship upgrades.

Of course, interesting options don't matter much when few people are playing online, and the Hyperbol servers are largely deserted most of the time. Normally you can find only a single competitive match with human players, and the handful of constantly running trainee games are almost always filled with nothing but bots. So you're left with the depressing choice of either playing a multiplayer version of the solo game, complete with the same old dumb bots, or jumping right into the deep end against experienced high-level players who will mercilessly blow you to bits with their seriously upgraded ships. You too can eventually move up in level and gain access to tricked-out ship hardware, but advancement is painfully slow for beginners because the deck seems stacked against you through the first few hours of play.

No matter what selection you make, the matches favor defense. There are lots of options that enhance the strategic side of battles, maps are loaded with cover, and you can't move very far or very often due to limited engine fuel as well as slow weapon- and engine-recharge rates. Destinations have to be chosen carefully, given that you're inevitably stuck in your new spot for a few seconds while your engines rev up enough for you to move again. So if you make a mistake, you can leave yourself wide open to withering enemy fire for what seems like an eternity.

Weapons add to the sense that you're taking part in sci-fi trench warfare. Offensive projectiles such as rockets, cluster bombs, detonation bombs, and even the nuclear option presented by hyperbols and hyperplasms take second place to the many defensive choices. Certain nifty options make it more sensible to sit back and hope for a bit of good luck than to charge the enemy, including weapons such as the singularity generator, which sucks enemy projectiles into black holes, as well as the repair drone that can be used to fix up ships, the energy fences that create de facto walls, and the missile-deflecting shockwave. Furthermore, projectiles can be set up to angle after launch, so you can hole up behind objects and still curve shots right on target. So after an initial jockeying for position, you inevitably wind up with nearly everyone hunkered down behind cover, well protected by black holes and energy fences, blasting away and waiting for the other guy to screw up.

Still, matches feature an interesting blend of methodical movements and fast-paced shooting. Sixteen players can take part in games, and the cramped maps generally feature few truly open spaces, so precise tactics are frequently interrupted when you either run into a wall or wander into the firing line of a foe that has some hyperbols loaded up. There are so many options here when it comes to projectile deployment that it's always tempting to keep playing to try to figure out good tactics to get past all of the seemingly rock-solid defenses that can be constructed. Also, matches with experienced players who really know what they're doing raise the bar. If you play a few games with veterans, you soon begin to see the importance of teamwork, both when coordinating attacks and when working together to defend one another. (Buddies who know what they're doing will often help you out with some repair drones when you're helpless and taking enemy fire). As mentioned above, there is a lot of depth here; it just takes some time to explore it, and this process is slowed down by the lack of games for all player levels.

As a pure multiplayer game, ThreadSpace: Hyperbol is a bit overpriced even at $20 on Steam. But despite the balance issues and the almost total absence of solo modes of play, the innovative and addictive concepts presented here are worth checking out, even if the game as a whole isn't quite ready for prime time.

By Brett Todd, GameSpot

Medieval II: Total War Kingdoms

Conquering Europe is never an easy task, in real life and in Medieval II: Total War. It's a big place, after all, and there's no shortage of foes, as you might have learned in Sega and Creative Assembly's epic strategy game. Enter Medieval II: Total War Kingdoms, an expansion pack that offers up whole new areas of the world for would-be emperors to conquer. There's a lot of content in here for veteran Total War fans to chew through, though newcomers should probably familiarize themselves with Medieval II before diving into this packed expansion.

This expansion is like having four all-new games in one, considering that it features four unique single-player campaigns: Britannia, the Crusades, the Teutonic Knights, and, most radically, the Americas. The nice thing about these campaigns is that they don't feel like Creative Assembly just recycled a lot of content from the core campaign and called it a day. Each campaign feels like it was built from the ground up, complete with its own appropriate music, movies, units, rule changes, and more. Even some of the oft-humorous cutscenes that show in-game events have been retooled for the better. (If the "walking bush" infiltration cutscene doesn't make you smile, then you have no sense of humor.)

Even though these campaigns aren't quite on the scale of the epic campaign in Medieval II, they're still huge. Each will require hours to get through, particularly if you play through each battle rather than have the computer automatically generate the results. Though they're normally focused on more specific eras in history, Creative Assembly has done a good job of making these campaigns feel grand in their own right.

While the Britannia campaign might seem like a rehash of the successful Viking Invasion expansion for the original Medieval: Total War, it's quite different. The Viking Invasion was set in the Dark Ages, when a dozen factions tried to carve a power base. This new Britannia campaign occurs much later in history, and you'll play either as England trying to cement your hold on the islands, or as one of the smaller nations (Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Norway) trying to fight back. Playing as England may be the toughest proposition in the entire expansion, because you start out with huge swaths of poorly developed territory and must defend your land from all sides. You can easily find yourself strapped for the resources needed to upgrade your territories and field huge armies. Forts play a big role in this campaign, in that they're basically minicastles that help you defend large expanses of territory.

The Crusades campaign covers a controversial period in history, though you can play from the perspective of either the Crusader states or their Egyptian and Turkish foes. This feels like an easier campaign to get into because the scale is more manageable. It also makes for a scenic campaign, as mounted knights gallop through the desert, and distinct desert fortresses replace familiar European castles. One nice aspect is that historical events have a way of intruding upon your campaign, such as the appearance of yet another European crusade, or the appearance of the feared Mongols in the east. Each faction has its own unique units, of course, but there are also special hero units representing famous figures from history. These heroes have extra abilities beyond that of regular generals. For instance, Richard the Lionhearted can instantly rally fleeing troops during a battle.

The Teutonic campaign covers the campaign to convert Lithuania, the last pagan power in Europe. Various tweaks have been made to this campaign to model the famous militant order of knights. For instance, the Teutonic knights have a castle-oriented economy, rather than focusing on huge cities. Meanwhile, religion plays a big role in the campaign; the Lithuanians can recruit special pagan units early on, and then you can choose to convert to Catholicism and make use of Christian technology.

Finally, the Americas campaign lets you play from various perspectives, such as the Spanish, the Mayans, the Aztecs, and even the Apachean tribes in North America. This is a campaign that pits quality versus quantity, given that the vastly outnumbered Spanish forces have to rely on their advanced weapons and units to survive against hordes of technologically inferior foes. Playing as the Spanish requires you to be aggressive to earn prestige, which lets you upgrade cities. Meanwhile, the native tribes are a departure from the European, North African, and Middle Eastern civilizations. For example, they have no cavalry units (horses were introduced to the Americas by the Spanish) and rely instead on colorful and fanatically brave infantry. The game models things such as ritual sacrifices (to boost city happiness), as well as warpaths, which are the Native American equivalent to crusades or jihads.

Each campaign offers up a fresh new approach to play Medieval, and together they serve as the heart of the content in the expansion. The rest is taken up by a handful of skirmish missions and multiplayer battles with support for up to eight players. This makes for a huge package that, with Medieval II (which is required), can eat up nearly 12GB of hard-drive space. That doesn't sound like much in the age of 500GB drives, but it might make you reconsider if you're low on disk space. Thankfully, you can install the campaigns independently of each other, so if you want to play only the Crusades you can save a few gigabytes and not install the others. Each campaign really feels like its own game, complete with its own shortcut. However, installing this beast is a somewhat tedious process that takes more than half an hour.

In the end, Kingdoms packs about four times as much gameplay as a traditional Total War expansion, making it an excellent value. All of these campaigns are interesting and well done, and if you've got a yen for a particular period in history that they cover, then you should definitely dive in. Or if you're tired of conquering Europe, you've got something else to look forward to.

By Jason Ocampo, GameSpot

Instinct

Instinct is a Resident Evil rip-off with a first-person perspective that's a good 10 years too late for the party. This creation of the aptly named Russian developer Digital Spray Studios has more problems than just copying the story and bad guys from a game with a best-before date that expired in the 1990s. Everything here is ineptly made and annoying, from the dumb zombie foes to the terrible level design. Throw in big performance problems that regularly turn battles into slideshows and you've got yet another atrocity good for a trifecta of crap.

The storyline appears to be a garden-variety zombie caper, with you guiding three Russian commandos on a search-and-destroy mission to a secret facility in North Korea. You start off facing run-of-the-mill soldiers, but immediately run into what looks to be the undead as soon as you enter the base. Or so it seems. The plot continually bounces back and forth in time, with cutscenes filling in the backstory only after you've completed missions. While this style of storytelling might work well in the hands of a competent storyteller, it's just confusing here. You start off watching a clip of a drunken Russian soldier taking out a TV a la Elvis and then plunge right into the invasion of some kind of military base. If not for the blurbs on the box cover and in the manual, you wouldn't have a clue what's going on until wrapping up at least three levels.

Another big problem is the developer's decision to leave all of the dialogue in the original Russian. While it's sweet of Digital Spray to save us from what would no doubt have been mangled English dubbed by family and friends of the development team, not being able to understand anything said by your comrades in the middle of firefights isn't a great alternative. Bringing up a separate journal screen with subtitled dialogue is the only way to figure out what your pals are saying, and this is tantamount to suicide since the action continues in the background while you're trying to read. By the time you've gotten an idea of what you're supposed to be doing, the zombies on your heels will usually have caught up to you and started busily pounding on your skull. Not fun.

But this handicap is one of the few things that makes combat in Instinct remotely challenging. Enemy soldiers are total morons who frequently take cover behind explosive barrels. These barrels can typically be found adjacent to all soldiers, so it's a lot easier to just target them whenever spotted and then rely on the ensuing ka-boom to take out any bad guys in the neighborhood. Shooting soldiers directly isn't nearly as effective or as satisfying, as they absorb a ridiculous number of rounds before eating the pavement and show absolutely no signs of being shot even while you're riddling them with bullets. Not surprisingly, the zombies are pretty stupid, too, although at least they have the excuse of being the victims of a mind-destroying experiment gone horribly wrong. Regardless, they pretty much line up to be gunned down. They pose a threat only when they attack in large numbers, and even then you can still blast them to bits without much of a hassle as long as you've got a little room to fall back whenever you need to reload a weapon.

More difficulty is provided by the level design, although that's largely because of the typically terrible layout. Most of the rooms and corridors all look the same, making it easy to get turned around. Getting lost is an impossibility due to the small size of the levels, at least, although you'll sure get bored looking at the same grey metal walls, gas tanks, and explosive barrels over and over again. It's also hard to figure out what you're supposed to do in spots. Levers are never highlighted, so you can readily miss a switch that needs to be pulled to open a door. Sometimes zombie attacks are only triggered by entering a certain part of a level. You can wander around for ages looking for a door that doesn't exist only to eventually get attacked out of nowhere by finally walking into the right place.

Visuals are noteworthy solely for what have to be the least scary zombies in gaming history. Many of them are clad in tracksuits, so at times it seems like you're being attacked by packs of old-school rappers. Few details have been incorporated in the zombie models, either. Their bodies are blurry and their faces are pale blobs distinguished by rolled-up eyes and bulging veins only visible in extreme close-ups. Digital Spray has tried to give the game something of a unique look through a comic-book display mode, although all this does is outline everything with thin white lines that obscure much of the scenery. Both the regular and comic-book graphics have serious performance issues, as well. The frame rate tends to plummet when a fair number of enemies are onscreen, particularly in wide-open settings. And little hitches and flat-out long freezes are common when simply turning around during battles.

But at least bits of the audio can be effective, particularly the music. Even though the score lapses into dreary, driving techno typical of yesterday's shooters when in the middle of firefights, the atmospheric music played when creeping around in the dark on zombie levels is truly spine-tingling. Toss in some squelching footfalls when you walk through gore, the satisfying boom of your shotgun, and the efficient rat-a-tat-tat of your automatic weapons and you've got a pretty decent-sounding shooter.

Still, the many flaws in Instinct outweigh a few creepy tunes and shotgun blasts. All of the above details should be more than enough to scare you off, but if you need further evidence, please take note that saves take really long to load, there are no multiplayer modes, and that the game is copy-protected by Starforce.


By Brett Todd, GameSpot

Anacapri - The Dream Review

someone needs to tell S&G Software that it's no longer 1993. Creating games with photographs and video clips in place of digitally created images is about as culturally relevant today as a new Coolio CD, so it's hard to see what the developer was thinking when it made Anacapri: The Dream. This throwback to the era of The 7th Guest may include thousands of photographs of one of the most gorgeous vacation spots on the planet, but it plays more like something you found at a yard sale than a game you pulled down from the new releases shelf.

The line between games and movies is sort of blurred in the structure of the game. While the play style holds tight to the point-and-click adventure template, the game is constructed solely with still photos that give your jaunt the vibe of an indie film. So even though you play a stereotypical sleuth looking to solve the mystery of the ancient Obsidian Disk on the island of Capri, the atmosphere is quite different from the sorts of adventures you might be accustomed to. Thousands of photos depicting everything from seaside vistas to cobblestone roads, to the many quaint shops lining the narrow streets of the titular town of Anacapri, give you the impression that you've embarked on a real trip to the exotic Mediterranean locale. The gameworld is absolutely massive, so it frequently feels as if you're really exploring all of the crooks and crannies of the island.

However, there are prices to pay for this type of presentation and the sheer size of everything. Many of the most potentially picturesque outdoor shots are blurry or strewn with artifacts, presumably to keep picture size reasonable. Oddly, the most sharply detailed pics are the dull ones that show a shopkeeper behind his counter or an old man sitting on a bench. Regardless of quality, there is an air of absurdity to the whole affair because of the use of multiple shots of people during conversations to give the illusion of movement. Done more subtly, this might have been a good idea, and might have nicely added the illusion of movement to what is otherwise a breathless game. But all of the changed poses and expressions given to Anacapri residents are wildly exaggerated, so encounters with them come off like some sort of bizarre mime show. Finally, there are some technological issues in the install process due to the high number of photographs. There are so many photos included as single, high-resolution files that the installation takes almost as long as a flight to Capri itself. You might want to brew a pot of coffee for this one, as it takes a good two hours for all seven gigs of picture files to be transferred from the DVD to your hard drive.

Unfortunately, this time isn't well spent. The game amounts to little more than a great selection of somebody else's vacation snaps. Gameplay lacks structure, due largely to the sheer size of the island. The game itself is such an afterthought that it feels like something hacked together at the last minute to justify writing off a vacation to Capri. Although you're assisted by a hotspot system that highlights key locations on each photograph, it's ridiculously easy to get lost because the entire island is open at the start of the game. Make a wrong turn, or simply get befuddled over the game's many vague clues, and you're soon off on an unintentional sightseeing tour. Although it's relatively easy to work your way through most in-game situations by doing some careful pixel hunting, closely following all of your instructions, and continually checking the city and island maps to see where you are, you still need a walkthrough to figure out how to get where you need to go.

Adding to the confusion of Anacapri is a plot that values nonsense about the nature of reality over the virtues of an easy-to-follow narrative. As if the real-world island wasn't hard enough to figure out, you regularly have to chug dream syrup that sends you off to explore surreal lands populated by ghosts and mythological monsters. Set-piece puzzles that bypass the absurdities of the plot are the only strength here, and there aren't nearly enough of them to compensate for the awfulness of everything else. Most don't even show up until near the end of the game, such as the nifty series of sphinx riddles, and the tile puzzle that is one of the final barriers to the Obsidian Disk.

Horrific voice acting and scripting, along with some truly weird musical choices, sprinkle extra strangeness into everything. Strangers stop to talk as if they were long-lost friends, and the topics of conversation often seem nonsensical until you start looking back on things and putting together the big picture. All of the characters in the game are voiced by a handful of terrible actors making lame attempts to change their voices with bad accents, which makes even real-world interactions with people shimmer like hallucinations. The dialogue is universally overwrought, characterized by lines such as "That disk will remain a dark stain on our past and humanity forever," spoken with all of the passion of a fast-food counter jockey asking if you want to supersize your value meal. Music is frequently jarring, and bounces all over the place between poppy lounge music and driving guitar. It's like you're being stalked by somebody with a xylophone on wheels and Yngwie Malmsteen, respectively. Thankfully, there are frequent, long stretches of silence.

If it were a relic from the early 90s, Anacapri: The Dream might be worth a play for the nostalgia factor alone. A "so bad it's good" vibe also creeps into the adventure through the voice acting, almost giving you the feeling that you're reliving some fond memory that hasn't aged particularly well. But you're not, and considering that the longing for a bygone day is the only possible reason for playing this backward game, you'll soon get tired of flipping through photographs and move on to something more modern and more competently designed.

By Brett Todd, GameSpot

The Sims 2: Bon Voyage

The Sims series' unique formula of simulating the lives of little computer people as they live, love, and go to the bathroom has been successful more or less from the start. Both the original game and the solid sequel, The Sims 2, have consistently stayed interesting, thanks to a never-ending stream of expansion packs. And Bon Voyage, the latest expansion for The Sims 2, adds a good amount of variety and some handy new options that make managing your computerized families' lives even easier.

The focus of this expansion is vacations--specifically, moving your family of "sims" out of the house and checking them into a fabulous resort hotel, then hitting one of three different vacation spots: sunny beaches, tea gardens, or ancient ruins. At these vacation spots, your sims try out leisure activities, collect souvenirs, and interact with the locals, who may teach your sims new "social" gestures specific to the area.

Even though three vacation venues may not sound like much, each setting offers multiple hotels with different price ranges, but all of them have enough in the way of basic services to help your sims survive their off-time. The better resort hotels have swimming pools, hot tubs, and other relaxing activities, but they all have handy, round-the-clock room service to feed your hungry sims; beds, showers, and TV sets to take care of their fatigue, hygiene, and entertainment needs; as well as plenty of other guests to socialize with. Since going on vacation suspends the regular flow of time from their home and professional lives (so they don't have to worry about missing a day of work), staying in a hotel makes life much easier for your in-game family.

Once you're settled in a hotel, you can take a cab (or hoof it) to a nearby tourist lot. There's a decent variety of tourist areas for each venue, including shopping and recreation areas where your characters can collect many different items, such as fresh fruit from the local market, or hidden treasure from rummaging through the cabin of an abandoned pirate ship. There are plenty of new social interactions and new activities to try at these venues as well, such as building sand castles or swimming in the oceans, which make excellent group activities. This helps shift the game's focus away from always worrying about your sims' needs (making sure they aren't hungry, tired, or bored) and makes it easier to focus on getting your virtual family into a fun-filled group activity quicker. And the ample population of other sims at both resorts and tourist areas provide plenty of opportunities for characters to network, make new friends, and learn new social gestures (such as bowing, which the kimono-wearing locals at the tea garden can teach you).

When your vacation is over, your sims check out of the hotel and can return home with plenty of mementos. Aside from purchased or scrounged souvenirs, which may appeal to pack rat players who simply must collect everything, your sims may have photos taken with the game's new photo camera, which lets you snap family photos (or ask a kind passerby to get a group shot for you). In addition, if your sims had a great time on their vacation, they'll be able to choose useful bonuses to their abilities on returning home, such as increased productivity at work, faster skill learning, and, perhaps most useful, an additional slot for their immediate "wants"--the short-term personal goals each sim carries around that, when fulfilled, can lead them to true happiness.

The expansion looks and sounds about as good as you might expect from the consistently high-quality expansion packs we've seen for The Sims 2. The tourism lots and the resorts are all very colorful and look very different from the standard neighborhood lot, though some of the higher-end, amenity-packed resorts and some of the tourist areas, like the winding, mazelike temple ruins, are sometimes a bit too crowded with objects and people, so sometimes you'll have to play with the camera a bit more to keep tabs on your family. Since the game still lacks much in the way of further optimization, the sometimes-sluggish Sims 2 camera still has a tendency to slow down when there are lots of objects onscreen, especially at crowded locations. Fortunately, you can edit any of these vacation lots to your liking if you care to. The expansion's music is as upbeat as ever, and some festive holiday tunes have been added that fit seamlessly into the game, along with the new nonsensical "simlish" voice samples your characters will make as they try out new activities like playing pirate or meditating.

Most of Bon Voyage's additional content comes in the form of lighthearted and handy extras that don't seem to fundamentally change the way The Sims 2 is played. Still, the expansion adds enough variety and ease of use to be worth playing. Obsessive Sims 2 fans will probably want the expansion for the collection-based gameplay and the prospect of bonus want slots; casual Sims 2 fans should enjoy just getting out of the house and taking a holiday.


By Andrew Park, GameSpot

Guild Wars: Eye of the North

Guild Wars: Eye of the North (or GWEN, as players affectionately refer to it) is the first true expansion for the popular online role-playing game. Factions and Nightfall were both standalone products; Eye of the North requires players to own an existing Guild Wars game, and the content is available only to players who have reached the level cap of 20. This sounds limiting, and indeed, the expansion isn't going to bring new players into the fold. However, fans of the original Prophecies campaign in particular will find a great deal of content to sink their teeth into. There are new skills, a pleasant return to the story, minigames, and fantastic new dungeons. Sure, it's more of the same in some ways. But in the case of the addicting and satisfying Guild Wars, more is never a bad thing.

You can access the content from three different cities, and explore the campaign from three different perspectives. Eventually, you'll be joining Gwen (remember the little girl with the flute from Prophecies? That's her, all grown up) to fight creatures known as destroyers. The dialogue in the Guild Wars titles has never been all that great, but the narrative is interesting enough, and the cutscenes are attractive and acted well. At the very least, it's nice to see some familiar faces, and the story serves the new campaign nicely. After all, what would a return to form in gameplay be without a return to the story that started it all?

Of course, there are a bunch of challenging side quests in addition to the central mission. The ensuing exploration is great, and the quests are splintered into multiple parts that take you across new regions such as the beautiful and snowy Far Shiverpeaks. The game engine may be over two years old, but it still looks lovely, and the new areas are full of stunning architecture and gorgeous vistas. Furthermore, the missions are often full of easygoing charm. How often do RPGs form quests around Office Space references, anyway? These gusts of fresh air are found everywhere, and they complement the game's unique action-focused battles, as well as its intricate character and team builds. In other words, Eye of the North is, like the other Guild Wars products, a constant surprise. Throw in tons of new skills, and suddenly you have new and exciting ways to crush monsters and other players.

Keep in mind that the content is all geared toward player-versus-environment questing; player-versus-player enthusiasts will find little of interest aside from the new skills. However, cooperative grouping is expanded and enhanced in Eye of the North, thanks to some of the hardest dungeons the series has seen. You might be able to get through some of them with some AI-controlled henchmen and thoughtfully formed hero characters, including the famous Gwen herself. Nevertheless, with dungeons such as Raven's Point--which requires you to defeat hostiles while staying shielded in the radius of a slowly-moving golem--the severe limitations of the henchmen AI is a hindrance. On the other hand, two or three players with some decent heroes and a little patience should be able to eke through, if a decent adventuring party isn't to be found.

In addition to the continued story and new content, the lore is deepened considerably. Eye of the North introduces several new races, such as the shape-shifting Norn and the gnomish Asura. The new races include several new AI-controlled heroes, such as the Asuran elementalist Vekk, and the necromancer Livia. As before, you can customize hero characters with skills and equipment just like you can your own character, and you have some limited control over their movement. There is also the addition of the Hall of Monuments, a towering structure in which you can display high-level armor, weapons, and other items. In turn, these monuments will earn you bonuses if you play Guild Wars 2 when it's released. In fact, Eye of the North's role as a bridge between the original Guild Wars and its upcoming sequel is blatantly obvious. Not that this minimizes the quality of the new content, but in light of the major additions of Factions and Nightfall, it's a pity that there weren't more updates designed to bring brand-new players into the fold.

There are some other new ways to experience the fun as well. You can don a pair of brass knuckles and test your melee skills in Dwarven boxing, for starters. Or play Polymock, a unique Pokémon-style game in which you put creatures with predetermined skill sets into one-on-one battles. There's also the Norn fighting arena, which features a progression of single battles that pit you against a number of familiar characters. These may sound like slight diversions, but not only do they provide many more hours of quality play, they also let you experiment with skills that may further enhance your main character's build.

The most negative and positive things that can be said about Eye of the North are things that could be said about the previous games. The dumb henchmen AI, inconsistent pathfinding, and incomplete follow command are the same as they always were. Of course, if you've played enough Guild Wars that you would consider purchasing the expansion, you've learned to deal with those minor quibbles. Nevertheless, they're still there, and they still occasionally get in the way of the fun. Yet as always, the action itself is visceral and exciting, which isn't exactly something that can be said about the combat in most RPGs. It's also remarkably tactical, requiring smart choices that enable you to take just the right eight skills into battle. This is the stuff that makes the expansion worth every penny, and reminds us that getting more of the same can (albeit rarely) be a wonderful thing. If you're still playing Guild Wars, Eye of the North is an easy purchasing choice because it was made just for you, and it rarely disappoints.

By Kevin VanOrd, GameSpot

NHL 08

If you've been following EA's sports game releases on older consoles and the PC over the last couple of years, the following sentence should be of absolutely no surprise to you: NHL 08 on the PS2 and PC is a lot like NHL 07. Once again, EA has phoned it in on these versions, adjusting the control scheme a bit, adding minor league management to the dynasty mode, and calling it a day. Apart from that, the game still plays the same lightning-fast and patently unrealistic game of hockey it has since NHL 2005, and unless you're devoid of any current-gen consoles, there's little reason to take the plunge on this year's game.

The most significant change to NHL 08 on the PS2 and PC is the addition of the skill stick, the excellent control feature from the Xbox 360 and PS3 game that lets you deke and shoot using the right analog stick (PC owners can still use keyboard buttons, if that floats your particular brand of boat). Unfortunately, this version of the skill stick isn't all that great. It's certainly an improvement, but it lacks the precision of the stick movements found in the 360 and PS3 versions. Dekes feel a bit stiff, and slap shots are a pain to pull off. Half the time you wind up for the shot, your player won't slap it forward, no matter how hard you push the stick forward to shoot. Wristers, at least, seem to work without a hitch.

There's no arguing that the addition of the skill stick is a nice bonus. It's just that this skill stick isn't dynamic enough to really make a significant difference, especially when you're playing the equivalent of speed hockey. NHL 08 still feels way, way too fast to be remotely realistic. Checking is still too frequent and too heavy, and scoring is only slightly less out of control. Once you get a handle on the stick, you can still average seven or eight goals a game just by hammering slap shots (when they work) and constantly crashing the net up the middle, periodically faking out the goalie with some of your fancy new dekes. Defensive artificial intelligence is weak enough to where you can pretty much do this over and over and guarantee a win on practically every difficulty level--especially when the defense decides to start getting tangled-up opposing players in front of the net in a gigantic bunching formation, making it easy for you to move to the wing and snap one in while the goalie is screened. The ridiculous speed and high-scoring nature of the game make it relatively fun if viewed purely as an arcade hockey game, but it's not really any more or less fun than last year's game, or the year before that, for that matter.

The only other gameplay addition to be found is a goofy "buddy buzz" feature that lets players in two-player team matches tap their sticks on the ice and, as a result, send a quick bit of vibration to their puck-handling friend to let them know they're open. And the PC version doesn't even have this feature--just the PS2 does.

In terms of modes, NHL 08 includes all the same ones from last year, including European elite leagues, tournaments, the free-4-all minigame, and the dynasty mode. Unfortunately, none of the negotiation aspects of the 360 and PS3 versions' dynasty mode have made it into the PS2 or PC game, and you can basically sign free agents until there are no free agents left. The salary cap doesn't appear on the free agent signing screen, so you won't know if you're over the cap until you go into the contracts menu and take a look. On top of that, the fantasy draft option is totally busted. You can draft up to 40 players, but draft never tells you how much each player costs, and the computer-controlled teams seem oblivious to the cap. So once the draft is over, you start seeing players like Joe Thornton and Dany Heatley sitting on the free agent market because teams couldn't afford them. It's just silly.

Online play is utterly untouched from last year. Head-to-head play, leaderboards, lobbies, it's all there. PC owners can access the EA Sports Online features, like clubs, tournaments, and head-to-head matchmaking, provided they register the game online and figure out how to make the EASO installer work (it doesn't install to the game by default). The online experience is relatively smooth on both platforms, at least.

Beyond these meager distinctions, NHL 08 really just is another coat of paint over the same basic game EA has been releasing for years. Graphics have seen next to no improvement beyond a few improved goalie animations and slightly better player faces, and the audio hasn't changed a lick, right down to the same repetitive commentary from Jim Hughson and Craig Simpson that's been recycled to death at this point. While it's certainly no shock that the PS2 version would get this treatment, since it is an aging platform, the PC version's neglect is both surprising and irritating. There's no reason why EA couldn't port the 360 or PS3 version of the game to the PC at this point, and that it hasn't yet is just kind of disgusting. Either way, neither the PS2 nor PC versions of NHL 08 should be your first, or even second, choice for a hockey game this year.

By Alex Navarro, GameSpot

World in Conflict

It goes without saying that it's a good thing World War III didn't erupt between the United States and the now-defunct Soviet Union. For many of us who were children during the Cold War, the fear of being annihilated in a nuclear conflict was very real. So it's a bit strange now that we can look back at that era and have the luxury of imagining what could have been. Or we can play World in Conflict, Sierra and Massive Entertainment's incredible new real-time strategy game. This isn't your standard RTS game, as World in Conflict doesn't follow the familiar model of resource gathering, base building, and swarming armies. Instead, it feels almost like an action game masquerading as a strategy game, and it offers up a relentlessly fun and amazing new approach to the genre, one that works in single-player and even more so in multiplayer.

World in Conflict is set in an alternate-history version of 1989. Instead of the Berlin Wall falling and communism collapsing, the Soviet Union launches an assault on Western Europe, and the United States rushes its forces in to aid its Western allies. Four months into the conflict, after the US Navy has been attrited down, the USSR launches a surprise invasion in Seattle and pushes inland. In the 14-mission single-player campaign, you play as a company commander who is part of the meager US defense; there is no campaign from the Soviet perspective, though you can play as the Red Army in multiplayer. However, the campaign twists and weaves, letting you experience a sample of the European conflict, battle in remote areas of the Soviet Union, and bring the fight to New York City.

Yes, the story is a bit far-fetched, but World in Conflict does a great job of making the implausible seem believable. That's partly due to the excellent storytelling, which is spearheaded by pitch-perfect narrator Alec Baldwin. He's backed up by a great voice acting cast that brings the principle and secondary characters to life, along with a story that offers up emotional and sometimes humorous vignettes from a world at war. For instance, you'll hear a soldier's futile battle against Army bureaucracy, the phone conversation of a husband and wife, and the deliberations of the president and his top military advisors. While there's a small misstep or two, such as a gospel song in the weirdest of places, the game effectively tugs at your heartstrings, which is rare for a strategy game, especially when it concerns the fate of one character whom you presume to be entirely one-dimensional but isn't. Some of these vignettes are conveyed through in-game cutscenes, while others are delivered through graphic-novel-style drawings. World in Conflict also features some incredible prerendered cutscenes that are so good you actually wish there were more of them.

This isn't a hardcore wargame or simulation. There are far too many gameplay abstractions for that, from being able to air-drop reinforcements on the battlefield within seconds to repairing equipment almost instantly. Instead, World in Conflict is thrilling game about destruction. You get to unleash all the firepower of modern military units on an open battlefield, but you also get to experience the challenges of combined arms warfare. That's because the game has a great rock-paper-scissors combat system that captures the vicious circle of war. Tanks can kill tanks and other vehicles well, but aren't so good against infantry. Artillery can kill infantry easily, but aren't so good against tanks. Helicopters can knock out vehicles well, but are vulnerable to infantry and antiaircraft units. It's a constant chess match about what you need to bring to battle and how you use it. The game is also smart enough to limit the number of units you can control. Instead of commanding the entire battlefield, you'll have only a relative handful of units. This makes managing your units a lot easier, like when employing their secondary abilities such as popping smoke grenades to create cover when under attack.

Then there's the game's excellent resource system. You're given a pool of reinforcement points that you can use to purchase units. Naturally, the powerful units cost a lot more than weaker ones, so you've got to choose quantity over quality. But it goes a bit deeper than that, as different classes of units have different abilities. For instance, light helicopters are some of the best scouts in the game, able to locate enemies from a distance, but they're extremely vulnerable. Medium helicopters are able to shoot down other helicopters with their air-to-air missiles, but they don't do a lot of damage to armor. Heavy helicopters can eat tanks for breakfast, but aren't effective against other helicopters. So while your initial inclination might be to load up on heavy choppers and go after enemy armor, a wise player recognizes that there are many roles to play on the battlefield. If your units are destroyed, their cost is slowly refunded back into your reinforcement pool, so you can order up replacements, although veteran units are more effective, giving you an incentive to keep your experienced units alive as long as possible.

The nice thing about this system is that it effectively gives you an unlimited number or resources and units to work with, so it's fairly forgiving to nontraditional strategy gamers. If that seems a bit easy, don't worry, because World in Conflict can also ratchet up the pressure by tossing in time limits. For instance, you might have to seize a town in less than 45 minutes, or achieve another objective in far less time. The margins for error are much smaller when you're working under a deadline.

Aside from reinforcement points, the only other resource in the game is tactical aid points, which are accumulated whenever you perform a vital role on the battlefield. You earn points by killing the enemy, but you also earn points by seizing and fortifying objectives, repairing friendly vehicles, transporting infantry around the battlefield, and so on. Tactical aid is like the icing on the cake, because you can use these points to purchase all sorts of powerful and utterly cool things. You can call in air strikes, napalm strikes, cluster bombers, mortar barrages, artillery barrages, chemical warfare, airborne reinforcements, precision artillery, fighter cover, and much more. The ultimate tactical aid is also the most awesome one: tactical nuclear weapons. World in Conflict features the best-looking mushroom clouds in gaming, and when they go off the screen flashes white and you hear the high-pitched sound of electronics frying. It's essentially the chilling sound of death.

All of this takes place on large, dynamic battlefields that come alive with the symphony of destruction. Thankfully, there's barely any worry about collateral damage in the game, so if you have to destroy a city to save it, then don't worry about the insurance bill. The destruction isn't just cosmetic, either. There can be all sorts of tactical implications. Take out a bridge and you force the enemy to go the long way around, or, in a multiplayer game, to call in a tactical aid to erect a new one. If the enemy is hiding infantry in woods and buildings, making them hard to root out, call in napalm and just burn down the trees or use artillery or smart bombs to blow up the structures. Everything blows up so beautifully that there's no such thing as overkill anymore. The game looks spectacular in DirectX 9, and it's noticeably better in DirectX 10 thanks to more atmospheric lighting. If you only have a DX9 card, though, don't worry--you aren't missing out on any gameplay enhancements aside from the ability to use dual-monitor support in multiplayer games.

Pretty much everything in the game looks good, even up close. Move the camera low to the ground and you can make out all the gear on your individual soldiers. Pull the camera back and you can soak in vast landscapes. One thing the game does especially well is smoke. Drop a smart bomb on a building and it will not only explode in thousands of pieces, but it will send convincing pillars of black smoke skyward. After a heavy battle, the sky will turn black because there's so much smoke in the air. That's the incredible level of detail in this game.

As good as the single-player campaign is, though, it pales in comparison to the multiplayer game, which is fast-paced and wonderfully balanced. Imagine the first-person multiplayer action game Battlefield 2 reborn as a real-time strategy game, and you have an inkling of how World in Conflict unfolds online. This is an insanely fun multiplayer game that lets you be part of a team of eight as you attempt to destroy the enemy using teamwork and every tactical weapon in the book.

Everything about multiplayer is designed to get you in a game quickly and keep you there for hours on end. First, when you join a server there's no wait for the current game to wrap up before you can get into the fight. If there's a spot open on the server, you're deposited into the middle of the current battle when you join. Second, there's no downtime at all. In most RTS games, you spend the first several minutes hurriedly trying to gather resources and build a base and units. In World in Conflict, you order up your first set of troops and watch them parachute or airdrop in seconds later. Fighting unfolds within the first minute of each game, and it doesn't stop until the very end. Third, thanks to the resource system, if your units are wiped out you can order up some more and be back fighting within seconds.

Team coordination can be handled through a built-in menu system or, even better, the built-in voice-over-IP chat system that lets you communicate vocally with your teammates. All you need is a microphone. Playing in a relatively uncoordinated manner is still a blast, but if you play on a good team against another coordinated team, the gameplay elevates to a whole new level. Victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat (or vice versa) in intense matches where both teams are hurling all on the battlefield, from air strikes, artillery, multiple tactical nukes, and more. There's nothing quite more urgent than a team desperately trying to cobble together enough tactical aid points for a last-ditch nuke.

Developer Massive Entertainment has been making real-time strategy games for almost a decade now, but World in Conflict is undoubtedly the studio's masterwork. Everything about this game is top-notch, from the addicting gameplay to the amazing visuals. More importantly, World in Conflict offers up a refreshingly new approach to strategy gaming. So if you're a strategy fan, you should definitely try World in Conflict. And even if you're turned off by standard real-time strategy games, you owe it to yourself to try out what Massive has come up with in this exquisite package.

By Jason Ocampo, GameSpot

Stranglehold

It would be very easy for the average person to take one look at Stranglehold and write it off as a Max Payne rip-off. That's because, in a sort of round about way, it is. Midway and John Woo's video game sequel to the director's classic Hong Kong action flick Hard Boiled borrows very liberally from the mechanics of Remedy's slow-motion, heavy-action franchise, which is a little ironic and mind-bending because Max Payne was itself a tribute to John Woo's brand of cinematic action. Regardless, if you're going to make a game based on a badass cop dodging, diving, and shooting all over the place in slow-motion, there are certainly worse places to look for inspiration. Stranglehold effectively takes the elements that made Max Payne fun and uses them to its own advantage, while sprinkling in a number of original touches and gimmicks that give the game its own Hong Kong cinema flavor. It's an interesting piece of work that's more fun than it isn't, and fans of Hard Boiled ought to especially enjoy watching Chow Yun-Fat reprise his role as Inspector Tequila.

Stranglehold takes place many years after Hard Boiled, though Yun-Fat's Inspector Tequila doesn't seem to have lost a step. He's still a rogue cop on the Hong Kong police force, and when a member of the force turns up dead, evidently offed by one of HK's major gangs, Tequila steps up to deal with the situation. What follows is a sometimes confusing and ham-fisted story of gangs double- and triple-crossing one another. Somewhere in there, Tequila's former girlfriend and daughter both end up being held hostage by one of the gangs. It's a decent crime tale that's certainly better than much of John Woo's American work (though exactly how involved Woo was in this game's production is debatable), but there is still something about the whole story that feels very Hollywood. It lacks the gritty feel of the original flick, and a lot of the film's cool factor to boot. Nevertheless, the plot serves as an OK-enough motivation to get Tequila back in action and shooting people in the face--and really, that's pretty much all you need.

You will shoot a lot of people in Stranglehold. This game's body count is pretty staggering for a game that runs only about six or seven hours. Enemies come flying out of every nook and cranny of each stage, and always with guns blazing. Fortunately, they don't have the ability to jump and dive around in bullet time like our man Tequila. Though the game refers to it as "Tequila Time," this is really just the bullet-time mechanic from Max Payne given a fancy makeover. The one trick is that you won't ever go into bullet-time automatically as a result of diving around, unless you specifically have an enemy in your targeting reticle sights. There is also a specific button that puts you into bullet-time completely separate from the shoot dodging, though it's rare when you ever need to use it.

That's not the only ability he's got, either. Tequila can interact with practically every piece of scenery in a level. If you run up to a table, you can choose to slide right over it, or kick it over and use it as a temporary cover point. If you run up to a wall, you can dash up it and dive even further than usual. If there's a rail nearby, you can run up or slide down it. See a little wheel cart sitting around? You can jump onto it and roll around the area, blasting everyone silly. Pieces of the environment can also be shot or otherwise destroyed for both fun and efficiency. If an enemy is standing underneath a neon sign, shoot it and watch the sucker get crushed. Exploding barrels are all over the place, and you can imagine the havoc they wreak when shot. There are even occasional environmental puzzles that require wooden poles or planks to be shot out to create new pathways for Tequila to traverse. These are arguably the game's weakest links, in that they're often difficult to discern and sometimes take more shots than they ought to actually work. Fortunately, about halfway through the game, the developers apparently decided to just give up on these distractions and focus almost exclusively on the shooting.

There's even more on offer. Pulling off stylish moves throughout the game fills up a meter that lets you trigger one of four different "Tequila bombs." These are special abilities that do everything from recharging your health, to letting you spin around like a gun-toting whirling dervish, killing all the enemies that surround you, all while doves go fluttering off into the sky (what would a Woo production be without doves?). These special abilities are all useful, though some more so than others. One example is the accurate-shot ability, which lets you move a targeting reticle in slo-mo to any part of an enemy's body, and then watch the bullet fly directly to its target. Save for a few enemies who are especially vulnerable to this move, it's hard to ever really want to use it when the next ability up the scale is an all-out barrage of invincibility and limitless gunfire that usually lasts long enough to clear the room.

The last element of gameplay isn't so much an ability as it is a sort of minigame. Periodically, Tequila will run into a group of enemies and end up in a standoff. These standoffs quickly snap Tequila's focus around from one enemy to the next. Using both the A and D buttons to dodge and the mouse to aim, you have to take enemies out one by one whil avoiding getting shot. It's tough to do (tougher even than on the Xbox 360 version, given that the right analog stick of the Xbox controller is definitely better suited for dodging), though once you get the hang of it, it's also quite amusing to watch Tequila dart from enemy to enemy while dodging bullets and unleashing hot-leaded hits of his own. Granted, it's a silly contrivance to have only one enemy at a time firing at you; if there are five guys, why don't they all shoot at once? But it is pretty fun, so it's a forgivable contrivance.

You can't quite call Stranglehold a one-trick pony, given that it does have a few different things going on at all times. However, all those things are fed directly into the act of shooting people--and shooting them often, to boot. Accordingly, it's good that the guns are appropriately satisfying to shoot. There's nothing remotely realistic about the game's guns, mind you, though that's arguably a good thing in the context of this game. Being able to shoot a guy from a hundred feet away with a shotgun and still take him out is helpful when you've got dozens of heavily armed enemies running around. Apart from that, you've got Tequila's default pair of pistols, along with assault rifles, submachine guns, heavy machine guns, grenades, and even the occasional rocket launcher to play around with. Each gun has its own strengths and weaknesses in power and accuracy, though they rarely matter much. You get to carry only two types of guns at once, and normally you'll want the gun that will do the most damage at all times. It's also worth noting that the PC version of Stranglehold controls a bit better than its console counterpart. Aiming with the mouse makes targeting enemies much, much easier, and it generally just feels better. Some of the character-movement controls on the keyboard feel stiffer in this version, but the improved shooting controls make up for that issue.

By no means is Stranglehold an overly challenging game, but by the time you hit the third or fourth level, you'll see a noticeable jump in difficulty. That's a good thing, because the early portions of the game are a bit of a cakewalk at times, even while you're still feeling out all your different abilities. Once you get past the point where the difficulty gears up, you'll actually have to use those different abilities smartly to survive some sequences. Cover points are also helpful, though you can rarely stay in one place for very long, as the environment around you tends to get destroyed very quickly. Likewise, enemies are usually smart enough to run up and start shooting if you stay in one place for too long. The Tequila bombs become a lifesaver in a few situations, though they also tend to make a few of the boss fights overly easy. Turning the game up to the hard difficulty level fixes that some, though not entirely.

As helpful as some of these abilities become later in the game, they're not entirely required. In fact, for much of the game, you can get away with just diving around like a crazy person over and over again, periodically ducking for cover for a second or two, and busting out with the occasional Tequila bomb for good measure. In a sense, it makes the gameplay a foregone conclusion. It's not that the gameplay isn't fun, because it is. But it's not so dynamic and over-the-top that you won't ever find yourself bored due to repetition. It's enjoyable to shoot enemies and blast apart the environment in the process, but when you end up doing it the same way over and over and over again, you'll be ready to move on and hope something new comes up. It rarely does. Little of what Stranglehold does ever feels like it operates outside of expected boundaries, and the few things that are original aren't necessarily amazing enough to hold up the entire game. Again, the gameplay is solid and even thrilling in spots, but it's probably not a bad thing that the game only lasts for a half-dozen hours or so. It might have gotten stale beyond that length.

Apart from the short single-player campaign, there are some production bonuses to buy through an extras shop (John Woo himself sits behind the counter), and a multiplayer mode that's probably not going to garner much attention. It's not that it's completely awful or anything, but it feels very tacked-on. You can only engage in standard deathmatches or team deathmatches with up to six players. Though the multiplayer plays a lot like the single-player game, it's not nearly as good. Maps are a little on the condensed side, and though you can use the slow-motion mechanic in multiplayer, its scattered execution in this mode makes it all but worthless. Essentially, it seems like you can't go into slo-mo unless you and your opponents all have a full Tequila time meter. At that point it becomes pointless to fumble around with it when you could just be focusing on shooting someone, and it almost makes things even more distracting when it suddenly pops on. With limited play modes, inconsistent, cramped gameplay, and the fact that there seem to be very, very few people playing this game online, this isn't a multiplayer game to get excited about.

Stranglehold's presentation is mostly good, though it's not without blemishes. By far the most impressive aspect of the game visually is the environments, and specifically how awesome it is to watch them get completely destroyed. Whether you're in a gaudy Hong Kong casino, a lavish penthouse, or a cold, sterile-looking history museum, it's great fun to destroy the scenery. It's really quite impressive how much of every environment is destructible. It's also a boon for the gameplay, because each cover point you hide behind tends to get shot to hell very quickly, which forces you to duck and run. On the less positive side, character models are overly shiny and not especially detailed, animations are limited, and the camera periodically gets in the way of the action when it snaps to angles that are hardly beneficial to your survival.

Unfortunately, we experienced some performance issues specific to the PC version of Stranglehold. On the first test machine we tried, a single-core Pentium 3.4 GHz with a gig of RAM, Windows XP, and an nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX card, the game refused to run. Every time we'd boot the game up, we'd get one of those delightful blue screens of death that force you to reboot your machine. On a more powerful dual-core machine with 2 gigs of RAM, Windows Vista, and an nVidia 8800 GTX video card, that problem ceased, though during gameplay, the game would periodically crash to the desktop. Fortunately, the game autosaves after every checkpoint, so as annoying as this issue is, you won't ever lose significant progress. At the very least, when the game ran, it ran very smoothly, with no hitches or frame rate problems to speak of.

Audio is more consistently enjoyable than the visuals. Chow Yun-Fat joins several other noted actors for the voice cast. Dialogue is appropriately cheesy, especially when Tequila's boss keeps tossing out every angry police captain cliché in the book. Largely the voice acting is quite solid. Yun-Fat dead-reads a few of his lines, but mostly he sells the character as well as he can while speaking English. It is sort of weird that the sequel to a classic Hong Kong action flick would be entirely in English instead of Cantonese, but considering the audience, it's also not really surprising. The soundtrack is a nice mix of typically bombastic orchestral pieces and some Asian-flavored string sections, and the game's sound effects are mostly top notch, from the gun sounds right on down to the individual sounds of bullets hitting each and every type of surface.

Stranglehold isn't the sort of game that's going to set the shooter genre on fire. It's a more than competent take on an existing formula that has enough unique moments and overall challenge to succeed. Sure, it gets repetitive at times, its few forays into more action-adventure style gaming over straight ahead shooting aren't much fun, and the multiplayer is borderline irrelevant; but there's enough solid, exciting action here for any shooter fan to sink their teeth into. It's a short ride, but an entertaining one while it lasts.


By Alex Navarro, GameSpot