State of Decay

State of Decay is, essentially, a zombie survival simulator. Combat is involved, and is in fact a large part of the adventure, but the need to smash open zombie heads simply facilitates the most integral aspect -- eking out an existence in a harsh and desolate world. 

At first, State of Decay's premise seems weak. Combat is rough beyond measure, featuring simplistic button mashing and touchy collision detection, while sneaking around involves crouching and moving very slowly. The enemy A.I. isn't exactly up to snuff, either -- a zombie could be chasing you, and literally watch you crouch into some bushes, but it forgets you exist the moment you're in there. The introductory sequence lasts just long enough for one to believe this is all there is to it, but just before one's tempted to throw in the towel, it becomes so much more. In due time, players find themselves at a church maintained by some survivors, and then the real game can begin. As much a simulator as an action game, State of Decay is all about keeping this home base running, and gameplay soon becomes a matter of striking out from headquarters to raid the many houses and establishments of the abandoned town. Keeping morale high, supplies plentiful, and scavengers healthy are all part of the proceedings, and there's a lot to worry about. Worrying, however, hasn't ever been quite this enjoyable.

By searching areas within buildings, players can find weapons, health items, and valuable resources to strap on their backs and bring home. Resources consist of food, medicine, ammunition, building materials, and fuel, with each one having its own use. Searching can take a while, but you can speed up the process -- at the risk of creating loud noises and drawing a small army of the undead. This type of compromise is common in State of Decay -- trading quicker rewards for risks that could prove costly. 

State of Decay runs in quasi-real-time, meaning resources drop every real-world day, and certain actions can take literal hours to complete. Even while the game is switched off, events can occur and one may find trouble waiting for them when next logging in. Keeping supplies high, and using material to build and upgrade headquarters facilities such as infirmaries, gardens, and sleeping quarters all minimize the risk of peril. 

As the game progresses, new potential home bases can be claimed, which leads to more room for extra facilities. No base can house every type of facility though, so players must choose wisely. A training area provides a stamina boost to all characters, while a library can make them smarter and improve their ability to search for items. Personally, I found anything that culminates in stamina increases essential, as everything is governed by this particular stat. 

Whether running, jumping, breaking down doors, loading up on gear, or fighting, players need stamina for everything, and it drops fairly quickly. Zombies aren't a particular threat in terms of raw combat ability, but fighting even a handful can drop stamina considerably, slowing one's actions and making a player easy prey. On the one hand, it's a very clever way to make sure large groups of zombies are a genuine threat, while on the other it can make the simple act of moving around town without a car a complete pain in the ass. There are quite a few vehicles, though expect to go through them quickly as they rack up damage like nobody's business.

Characters gain stats in a manner similar to The Elder Scrolls, where the more you perform a certain action, the more you level up in that particular field. Hitting a lot of zombies improves Combat, which raises your health. Spending time with allies improves Leadership, which allows you to make friends more quickly with NPCs. Running a lot improves Cardio, providing vital stamina boosts that I wish would level up more quickly. One can also become proficient in blunt, edged, or heavy weapons, and unlock special combat moves with each. 

It's all very well playing a single character and leveling them until they're a killing machine, but any friendly NPC at headquarters can be played, and swapping out characters is vital. Spending too long out in the world will drop a character's max stamina, while too much fighting can cause injuries only healed by spending time at base. The more characters you have, the more backup choices at your disposal -- but if you have too many survivors, you'll need beds to benefit from resting stat bonuses. 

It's also well worth noting that death is permanent. If an ally is overwhelmed by zombies, they'll be brutally torn to pieces, leaving only their carried items behind for recovery by a fresh part member. Allies can also die out in the field if they've been sent to pick up resources and become trapped, or if they go missing as a result of too many zombie infestations. 

At the time of writing, infestations are proving a controversial mechanic. Certain buildings can become totally overrun by the undead, and will need to be cleared out. If too many infestations occur at any given time, allied characters can go missing at a rapid rate and will require swift rescue. The trouble is that infestations can occur anywhere on the map, and only nearby ones will be noted down. Finding and clearing out the hotspots therefore requires driving all around the world to find the isolated problems and eradicate them. A patch is coming that ensures only infestations close to home will cause problems, but until then, it's a hassle. 

It's not just gathering resources and keeping everybody happy that makes up State of Decay. There are story missions that can be taken on, though they're all fairly simple collection or combat sequences without much in the way of real narrative. More interesting are timed, contextual missions that regularly pop up. These can be simple issues such as tracking and hunting one of the more advanced zombie types, to full-on assaults from large zombie hordes that are roaming their way toward HQ. One can also make friends with neighboring settlements, or rescue stranded survivors to boost your own group's numbers. 

State of Decay's greatest strength is the sheer volume of stuff to do. From building outposts that expand your resources and provide limited safe havens in the field, to accepting trade requests with outsiders, Undead Labs has taken every standard idea in zombie stories and found an interesting way to "gamify" it. In many ways, this is what Terminal Reality attempted with The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, but here it actually works. There's always something new to discover in State of Decay -- in fact, it took me a few hours to realize every home had a radio room that could be used to contact survivors or locate resources. 

One can't deny this is a clunky experience, for all its depth. Menus are overly complex tabs that throw information at the player and take some time to get a handle on, while controls feel stiff and visual glitches aren't uncommon. The feeling of roughness experienced at the beginning never really goes away, and I have to say this is an ugly game in terms of interface and graphics. However, while it may not be the most elegant game available, it's no less effective for its gracelessness. It can be forgiven much simply due to how utterly pleasing the end results turn out to be. 

If I had to consistently criticize one thing, however, it's the dialog. The acting isn't terrible, and it's impressive so much audio has been crammed in, but the repeating dialog isn't especially well written, and gets only more irritating with replays, especially the "Oh, y'know, stuff" and "I shot a pony in the head ha ha" banter that drones on every time the player returns home from a run. Hearing my lovely radio operator tell me something is "disturbing on soooo many levels" every fifteen minutes made me want to toss her to the zombies.

Whatever the case may be, this $20 downloadable game offers more potential content and longevity than most $60 retail experiences out there. There may be a lot prettier games on the market or far more polished experiences, but few that can match State of Decay in terms of raw interactive entertainment. If value is a key motivator in your videogame purchases, State of Decayis a no-brainer, as it offers an absolute ton of amusement per dollar. 

I've far from described everything available in State of Decay, and that which I have detailed has a lot more to it, but I don't want this review to go on forever. This is one of those games that could be played forever, and while it's a bizarre comparison to make, one could easily call it a darker, violent version of Animal Crossing. Like Nintendo's adored series, this is a game set in a perpetual world, where gathering and growing is key, and there's no end in sight. If you choose not to do the final story mission, you can keep your little band of survivors alive for as long as you can manage, and the mechanics are just infectious enough to encourage such a goal. 

State of Decay is ugly. It looks ugly, and in many ways it plays ugly. However, there's a simple beauty underneath the frightful veneer, one that surrounds a compelling, interesting, complex, and enslaving little game. There is absolutely more to this game than meets the eye, and despite the overwhelming amount of zombie games vying for our attention, this is certainly one I'm glad to see in the world.

Few zombie games, for all their marketing power and visual sheen, can come close to providing what State of Decay does. 

Minimum PC System Requirements :

Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7

Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.0 GHz or AMD Athlon equivalent

1 GB RAM

4 GB of free space

nVidia GeForce 7600 GS or ATI Radeon X1600 series

DirectX Version 9.0c

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Preparing for a new Elder Scrolls game is like preparing to die. One must ensure they get all their worldly affairs in order, speak with the people who mean everything to them, and have a final meal. After all, once that disc goes in, the user may as well have departed from our mortal world. 

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a game that will murder you, for the time it steals from your life could rightfully be considered criminal. It is a game that will literally never end while simultaneously bringing you closer to your own end. 

This is all before the dragons show up.

The mountains of Skyrim are beautiful to behold, truly breathtaking in scale and bursting at the seams with things to see and do. Not all is well in the shadow of the snow-capped rocks, however. It has been two centuries since the Oblivion Crisis changed Tamriel forever, but the resulting peace couldn't last for eternity. Cyrodiil's expansive Empire has laid claim to Skyrim and abolished the traditional customs of its people, the Nords. An inauspicious threat of civil war hangs over the people as rebellious Stormcloaks plot to drive Imperial forces from the region and gain popular favor amongst the local Nordic Jarls. Though common folk strive to keep to themselves, events have taken their toll on every citizen.

Inevitably, it is the player's destiny to become deeply embroiled in these events, as well as many more. Yet again, The Elder Scrolls casts its adventurers into the role of a mysterious prisoner, this time due for the chopping block. However, a stay of execution is granted by the sudden appearance of apocalyptic dragons -- once thought to be creatures of mere legend. The first of these scaly monstrosities is but one of an army, as the mythical creatures reawaken all over Skyrim, and the player -- soon to realize his destiny as a dragon-slaying Dovahkiin (Dragonborn) -- must confront the beasts and save the world. 

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim can take a handful of hours to beat. That is, if you consider wrapping up the official story quest as "beating" an Elder Scrolls game. Nobody should, however, for the main plot is but a mere morsel of what Skyrim has to offer, to the point where it isn't even the most sprawling and epic quest on the menu. To focus only on the main narrative would be to ignore the deliciously macabre Dark Brotherhood resurrection, the various twisted meetings with capricious Daedric Princes, or the vengeful tale of The Companions and their grim secret. 

Bethesda's games have always felt like online encyclopedia browsing, where one opens a page, finds more interesting ones within, and ends up with twenty unread articles open before long. InSkyrim, this approach is taken to extremes, with opportunities for adventure found in every city, cave, farm and forest hideout. Thanks to the "Radiant" storytelling system, these adventures can be procedurally generated as well. While there are fully scripted quests boasting their own characters and narrative threads, there is an infinite amount of miscellaneous objectives that can appear at any point. These range from simple tasks (such as collecting a bounty note in a tavern and slaying the target) to more intricate missions (like pulling off a successful burglary for the Thieves Guild). The game is also smart enough to place objective locations in unexplored areas of the gargantuan map, improvising in order to encourage further exploration. 

At the time of writing, I have put over fifty hours into the game, and my journal menu still lists more than forty unfinished jobs. These are just the tasks I've found, and I doubt I've scratched the surface as I am willing to bet there are many finely layered quests that I still have not stumbled across. 

Of course, all this content would be meaningless if the game itself were no fun, but Skyrim is perhaps the most encouraging, rewarding and downright indulging Western role-playing game I have ever played. That sounds hyperbolic, and perhaps it is, but it's something I truly feel in my bones. With Skyrim, Bethesda has taken everything successful from previous Elder Scrolls games and mixed it with the best elements of recent Fallout installments, all while leaving behind the chaff. The result is a game as deep and flexible as Oblivion but as accessible and intuitive as Fallout 3. More importantly, it's better than both. 

Before our budding hero can embark on his or her quest, one must first work out if it's a he or a she. The in-depth character creator from Oblivion is back, offering a wealth of options to spawn warriors as handsome or ugly as desired. Every race has been given a significant visual overhaul, with Orcs looking tougher, Elves gaining harsher features, and humans receiving far more believable, subtle faces. Tamriel's exotic races -- the Khajiit and Argonians -- have benefited the most from Skyrim's fresh visuals, earning richly detailed animalistic features that cause them to look less like vaguely re-skinned humans. Each race possesses a predetermined aptitude for certain talents alongside unique special abilities (Argonians once again breathe underwater while Imperials can access the calming "Voice of the Emperor" power), but every race will be able to make use of whatever skills the player ends up choosing. 

Skyrim gives starting players all the tools they need to test every type of hero they could potentially become. Armed with rudimentary stealth, weaponry and alchemy skills, as well as a few weak spells, one's fresh-faced avatar serves as a fertile testing ground that can be specialized in many directions to suit the needs of every individual. As with previous Elder Scrolls games, there is no traditional experience system. Instead, skills gain levels with repeated use, and contribute toward a rank meter that determines the player's overall level. This creates a natural progression in which characters evolve based entirely on how one wants to enjoy the game. If a player tends to sneak around a lot, the character will become increasingly stealthy. If the player likes to swing two-handed axes around, the character becomes more proficient at wielding heavy melee equipment. The only stats you'll have to worry about are Health, Magicka and Stamina, one of which can be upgraded with each successful level gain. 

Every time a level is earned, a skill point is also awarded. Skill points are invested into various perks arranged on individual skill trees. There are trees for each school of magic, as well as light armor, heavy armor, sneaking, lock-picking, alchemy and other familiar Elder Scrolls abilities. As players become more experienced in various skills, new paths on the tree will unlock, allowing points to be sunk into ever more useful abilities. For example, the Speechcraft skill tree has perks that make it easier to intimidate people in conversations, or cause items to be sold at cheaper prices in stores. Heavy Armor has perks that grant additional defense bonuses if the character is wearing a matching set of armor pieces, while spell perks can reduce Magicka costs or even dual-cast incantations to make them stronger. Although these perks aren't quite as obvious and game-changing as those found in Fallout, they are nonetheless crucial in creating a powerful Dovahkiin. 

The natural way in which characters are built ensures a huge variety of potential warriors. My own character is a battlemage who specializes in Conjuration and Destruction magic, backing up his spellcasting with a measure of sword-wielding experience. Sword in one hand, magic spell readied in the other, I'm able to summon a daemon from the Oblivion plane and send it to charge ahead while I throw fireballs and soften up the target. Once the enemy is weak enough, I can charge in and finish it off with the sword -- which can often be accompanied by a brutal execution animation. What's great about my character is how I was able to incrementally tweak it to maximize strengths and limit weaknesses. For example, my hero was a bit of a glass cannon at first: able to dish out punishment but prone to getting slaughtered if enemies could close in. I therefore spent some time focusing on Heavy Armor, using just enough skill points to give me a defensive edge. Now I have a character that feels like a battle tank. He's slow and and has very poor stamina (you can't have everything), but he will soak up plenty of damage while devastating all but the hardiest of foes. 

This is just one potential build of many. I could have had a lightning-quick scout, or a character with Illusion magic that renders him invisible and causes enemies to furiously attack one another. The possibilities aren't endless, but they may as well be. Furthermore, dedicated players who reach the pinnacle of their talents will enjoy power equal to a demigod. By the time the character is sufficiently leveled, there's no reason not to feel on top of the world and downright almighty. That isn't to say the game becomes a complete cakewalk -- tougher enemies will rise to the challenge -- but players aren't punished for leveling up, as often felt like the case in Oblivion. 

Another change from Oblivion is the in-game menu. The menu screen features crossroad-style navigation that points to skill trees, available magic, items and the map. Simply moving in the right direction fluidly opens up the corresponding menu, allowing for easy and swift access. Unlike the clutter seen in previous Elder Scrolls interfaces, these screens are clear and clean, sacrificing pompous stylishness for pure functionality. The item menu is particularly cool, with each item fully viewable in 3D within the screen -- you can even zoom in and rotate anything in the inventory, which comes in handy for a few quests. 

Combat is dramatically improved. Magic spells are similar to the Plasmids found in BioShock, equipped to one of the Dovahkiin's hands and readied for use whenever weapons are drawn. Players can choose to have a sword in one hand with a spell in the other, or even have two spells at once. Some spells issue a constant spray of damage, while others are projectile-based; some have instant effects, and others take a moment to charge up. As with everything in Skyrim, flexibility is the essence of the experience, and players can tailor their combat to suit any preference. A large number of "Favorites" can also be mapped to a special menu that's brought up at the touch of a button, allowing heroes to change weapons and spells and use potions on the fly. 

For those not magically inclined, there's a huge variety of weapons with which to dispense death. One-handed and two-handed melee weapons are joined by bows and staves to create a healthy and versatile arsenal. Although combat retains the unwieldy hack-n'-slash flavor of prior games, things are slightly more refined, with blocking and counter-attacking given a greater focus. Fights feel so much more involved than they did in previous Elder Scrolls games, especially since every blow feels like it connects with a mighty impact. Those looking for intricate and graceful melee will be disappointed, but those who want brutal, manic, in-your-face engagements have come to the right game. 

What else is there to say? What about the crafting, smithing and enchanting? You can make your own weapons with materials found around the world, becoming an alchemist and create new potions, or imbue weapons with powerful sorcery. These systems are simple, yet require practice and dedication from those players looking to make their own gear. Even then, they don't have to if they don't want to, and can rely on shops when they get new stock. It's all up to you. 

As a Dragonborn, the hero will gain access to Thu'ums, or Shouts. These shouts are spoken in the language of dragons, and their words invoke powerful effects. As players discover Thu'ums written on walls around Skyrim, they absorb their power and gain new skills. These range from simple Shouts that blast out fire or ice to more unique skills, such as surging forward at super speed or summoning a lightning storm. Once learned, a Shout needs to be unlocked with a Dragon Soul, but to win a Dragon Soul, one needs to fight a dragon. 

Dragons are not merely scripted boss battles that have been set to occur at a few predetermined points. In Skyrim, these living legends can come at any time and launch an attack upon any location. These randomly generated creatures will start appearing in the world once a certain point in the main story has been reached, and their regular appearances dominate everything. The best time to meet a dragon is undoubtedly in a city, as guards will leave their posts to join in the fight and turn what is already a huge encounter into something truly epic.

The winged lizards swoop across the sky, raining down fire or frost on everything in their wake. They'll land on buildings, smash into the ground and provide truly memorable battles every time they show up. As a choral rendition of the Elder Scrolls theme strikes up and players struggle valiantly to bring their reptilian foe to the ground, only a heart of stone could fail to be roused. Once the dragon finally draws its last breath and begins to burn away, leaving behind only its huge skeleton, most players would be hard-pressed to not just stand there silently for a few moments, taking in everything that just happened. The surrounding NPCs will be doing the same thing, too, making these reflectively calm moments almost as engaging as the fights themselves. 

Skyrim can do epic, that's a given. It is, however, the little things that make The Elder Scrolls Vwhat it is. The game is stuffed to its brim with tiny flourishes that seem so insignificant yet make the world of difference between a game that feels like a game, and a game that feels like it's alive. Swimming in a river to catch some fish, dropping an unwanted item on the floor and having an NPC "helpfully" return it to you, gaining a trusty follower who comments on your actions and surrounding locations -- these are the things that really place Skyrim a cut above the rest. Long after gamers have stopped recounting grand scrimmages against tribes of giants, talk will persist of that time an elf tried to sell a player some drugs outside of town, or the bandits that attempted to scare the hero away rather than blindly attack. To talk of such tiny details in a game where storm clouds can be summoned at will sounds silly, but without these minor touches, the overall ambitious scale would mean much less.

Providing the backbone for all this content is a brand-new iteration of the Gamebryo Engine, dubbed Creation. The difference this makes is huge, permeating every facet of the experience from graphics to glitches. Skyrim's huge open world looks inspiring: cities and caves appear to be unique, while character models are detailed and finally resemble human beings -- or their Orc/Elf/Khajiit/Argonian equivalent.

The game's lavish sound design seals the deal and adds that final breath of life to the production. Voice acting is fairly varied as far as Bethesda games go, though certain ones are reused a lot. Still, the acting is commendable and the affected Scandinavian accents used by many of the local Nords is quite endearing. The music is absolutely sublime -- quiet and atmospheric when it needs to be, but stirringly evocative at just the right moment. 

As far as bugs go, some are bound to exist in a world so large, but I am yet to find anything game-breaking. The only persisting issue is with NPC allies, who can sometimes get lost and fail to return to their default locations. Some will get stuck attempting to perform an action, and if the player doesn't notice they're missing, they could be lost forever in the sprawling world. Other potential allies will still recognize the player as having someone with them, meaning lost comrades won't be replaced until a quest calls for a specific follower, automatically dismissing the lost one (though he/she will still remain lost). I've also had the game freeze once or twice, but one can never be sure if that's a fault of the game or the console trying to run it. Compared to previous games, however, bugs are essentially negligible, and while I'm sure the coming months will find plenty of problems, I can notice nothing so far that ruins what is an absolutely captivating experience. 

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is every single reason to love a Western role-playing game, condensed into a single comprehensive experience with nothing lost in the conversion process. It is a game that will drown those who step into its absorbing, overwhelmingly detailed world, a game that will bury you and refuse to let go. Yet your submergence will be agreeable, your burial ecstatic, and the hands placed around your throat welcomed like those of a lover's. To play Skyrimis to enter into a relationship, one that provides feelings of empowerment, yet demands total submission. 

Minimum PC System Requirements :

Windows 7/Vista/XP PC (32 or 64 bit)
Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent processor
2GB System RAM
6GB free HDD Space
Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512 MB of RAM

Dead Space 3

On a city street at the start of Dead Space 3, there’s a poster for a film called Tools Of Terror. It features a man in a tuxedo pulling a James Bond pose, but instead of a pistol he’s holding a wrench. He is, it’s fairly obvious, both an action hero and a blue-collar guy, and despite the fact this film is a spoof – or perhaps because of it – he’s also an accurate symbolic representation of Dead Space hero Isaac Clarke as he appears in this latest game.

"Isaac was a high-functioning spanner in a space suit."

Isaac is an engineer. It’s the thing that made him such an unusual protagonist in the original game – he didn’t talk, he fixed things and had weapons that could conceivably have been used to fix things, if they weren’t busy dismembering the reanimated dead. He was a high-functioning spanner in a space suit, but he returned the John McClane of religious hysteria and viral outbreaks in Dead Space 2.

How could the same shit happen to the same guy twice? And how could he suddenly be so good at it?

The question was raised: is Isaac best as the handyman-in-a-tight-spot or as the stomping shooter frontman? Dead Space 3 fixes on the elegant solution of pushing him in both directions at once. Progression is dependent on a series of hardware fix-ups – this shuttle, that tram system, this alien genocide machine.

But at the same time, Isaac fights wave after wave of monsters while saying things like, “I turned my back on the world because I couldn’t face what had to be done,” – and he’s not talking about an oil change or repairing a carburettor.

"Should it be a     lean horror or an explosive shooter? The game opts to be both."

The debate over Isaac-as-engineer versus Isaac-as-action-hero feeds into Dead Space’s genre identity crisis. Should it be a cold, lean horror, or an explosive shooter? The game opts to be both. This is possible because it consists of big, distinct sections: a breathless high-stakes opener (in the James Bond tradition, appropriately enough), a claustrophobic few hours in a debris field of broken ships orbiting a planet, a lengthy action push on the planet’s icy surface, and a climactic section in an ancient city.

The segments feel episodic, as though they were built by different teams and bolted together to create a varied, lengthy whole. The first major stop is a floating scrapheap, with Isaac exploring a series of derelicts looking for a way to reach the planet below. It’s an expanded echo of the original Dead Space – not just repeating the haunted ship routine, but bringing the quiet, tense and considered approach to a frozen flotilla of craft with Isaac shuttling between them.

Dusty airlocks and the grand, muffled spectacle of Isaac drifting through space are the foreground to the game’s hard sci-fi style, and it fruitfully resurrects the old, effective mix of mundane tasks performed amid calamity. The first moment of dread I’ve experienced since crawling through the guts of the Ishimura – “but I don’t want to find out what’s blocking the tram system” – confirms that this is partly the faithful sequel to Dead Space that people who still resent Isaac for learning to talk or daring to display his human face – have been waiting for.

"The game fruitfully resurrects the old, effective mix of mundane tasks performed amid calamity."

A change of pace on the surface of the planet moves Dead Space 3 into more conventional action territory. The snowstorms and wind-battered outposts are a nod to the influence of The Thing on Dead Space, just as surely as the Ishimura paid tribute to the devastation of the Nostromo in Alien, but the combat here introduces elements of cover-based shooting. There are still encounters with skittering necromorphs in corridors and vent-heavy rooms, but there are also more clearings and open spaces, and action set-pieces in the form of cliff-face rappelling (both up and down), boss encounters (tiresome), and an industrial drill that’s transformed into a giant rusty flesh-whisk (loud).

It feels as though Dead Space 3 has settled on volume and value as part of a big-fisted approach to appealing to everybody. The game feels laudably substantial, although sometimes the pacing suffers. The inclusion of any level that requires players to double back through a now-repopulated section justifies a call of shenanigans; Dead Space 3 does it more than once. And while the inclusion of optional side-missions is definitely a good thing, not just for the added content but also the opportunity for resource gathering, they can feel at odds with the urgency of the larger objective at hand. Near the close, I was offered the chance to explore one such cul-de-sac, and declined in order to continue my in-progress race against a religious fanatic to reach a control panel in time to prevent the extinction of mankind.

Minimum PC System Requirements :

Windows XP/Vista/7/8

2.8GHz Single Processor

1GB RAM for XP/2GB for Vista & 7

DVD ROM Drive

15GB Free Hard Drive Space

ATI Radeon X1800 XT 256MB/NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB, Shader Model 3.0

DirectX 9.0c

Crysis 3

An action hero’s weapon is an extension of their identity. They’re inseparable implements, representative of their approach to combat and justice. Bond’s silenced PPK. Batman’s iconic boomerang. Mjölnir and Thor. Even Popeye’s transformative spinach says something about him as a character.

What does the Nanosuit say about its wearer in Crysis? That the player has a need to improvise, a need to see-saw between being an assassin and being a brute. “Press Q,” reads the manufacturer’s tag on the collar, “to harden your skin like a brick wall. Press E to become as transparent as a pane of glass. Tumble dry low.”

Crysis, at its best, is a franchise that puts you in situations where the Nanosuit doesn’t do the dirty work for you, but simply serves as a springboard for spontaneous problem-solving in hazardous battle-playgrounds. Crysis 3 doesn’t deviate from this template, but it does mostly repeat Crysis 2’s interpretation of it. It’s a less sandboxy and groundbreaking one than the original Crysis, to be sure, but linearity isn’t an inherent sin. Crytek’s shooter remains one of the best-looking games anywhere. It’s acrobatic and deliberate, especially in multiplayer, and an expression of what PC hardware can do.

New New York

Crysis 3’s campaign feels more of a continuation than a reinvention of Crysis 2. You’re still in the Big Apple, though one that looks like your neighbor’s house when they’ve been on vacation for a month, leaving their mail to pile up and yard to overgrow. Paramilitary bad-guy corporation CELL has taken credit for your heroic effort in the last game, and while you’ve been asleep they’ve gotten busy exploiting some secret power source to revitalize ruined NYC. Enormous, spherical barriers called Nanodomes have been erected to accelerate ecosystem growth.

At the start of the story you’re sprung from a stasis pod by Psycho, a former fellow Raptor Team member, to join a rebellion against CELL. Psycho and others have been “skinned” of their Nanosuits, making you, Prophet, the only one on the planet. Cue the standard “you’re humanity’s savior” spiel: Prophet’s unique bond with Ceph DNA grants him new power, but also exposes him to potentially being controlled by the Ceph hivemind. Psycho’s vendetta to find out who separated him from his superskin motivates the first few hours. He joins you as a temporary companion character on missions to sabotage a few well-designed CELL facilities, like a hydroelectric dam.

My hope was that this plot and the terraforming power of Nanodomes would be natural excuses for Crytek to create a broad set of exotic environments. And my worry was that Crysis 3 might simply coat Crysis 2’s somewhat-claustrophobic city blocks with moss. In 2011, I criticized the sequel’s narrowness: “Expressing your abilities as a player demands vertical and horizontal space, and there’s slightly less of it in NYC than I would’ve liked.”

Psycho's presence isn't unwelcome, operating as a passive guide for Crysis 3's first couple hours.

"My worry was that Crysis 3 might simply coat Crysis 2’s somewhat-claustrophobic city blocks with moss."

The level design of Crysis 3 falls somewhere in between this gulf of opportunity and familiarity. “Urban rainforest” as an aesthetic isn’t really strayed from, and if anything, it feels under-expressed in that it’s never taken to its natural extreme. The world rarely seems wild. I never felt like I was in an NYC that’s been swallowed whole by the Amazon. A few areas filled with meters-high marsh grass are the exception. In one of my favorite sequences, Crysis 3 threw packs of Ceph Stalkers—melee assault units with scythes for arms—at me in a railway car graveyard submerged in a wavy green ocean under the sun.

The Ceph Stalkers didn’t bolt directly at me. They didn’t magnetize to my position like most game enemies. They darted. They took indirect, lateral routes. The stalks of grass quivered, but in a way that obscured the true orientation of enemies. I remember emptying a shotgun into the brush, still unsure if I clipped one. I felt anxiously, wonderfully lost. I couldn’t tell if I was in Central Park or Jurassic.

This was a legitimate “the floor is lava” scenario. In a panic, I perched myself atop one of the railcars, a rusty island. Four Stalkers, by my count, were orbiting the car, pouncing in the jungle bed like cheetahs. I gripped a grenade, pulling the pin before I even knew where I was going to throw it. The grass flickered at the opposite end of the ruined train. I chucked the bomb, holding my breath. Ten gallons of bubblegum blood sneezed out from behind the end of the car. A radar blip faded. The whole arc felt like playing Marco Polo against jungle raptors.

This moment—feeling alienated on Earth—is an outlier, unfortunately. Structurally, the level design has improved some: two chapters feature caves, and an above-average turret sequence or two, but mostly gone are the subways, parking garages, sewers, and elevator shafts of Crysis 2. The campaign also sprinkles in optional secondary objectives—no substitute for a proper sandbox, but they’re decent carrots that pull you away from primaries. Some are as simple as clearing a set of mines around an light armored vehicle using the Nanosuit’s new hacking mechanic (a timed button-press mini-game that’s appropriately complex). In some cases, completing these side missions grants functional benefits: liberating the LAV let me catch a ride with them through a segment of the map, operating their turret as they taxied me. In the same chapter, a mortar team volunteered their services after I killed some Ceph harassing them, unlocking the power to call in artillery strikes.

The Bolt Sniper, one of Crysis 3's terrific Ceph weapons. A CELL soldier gestures toward some higher power in his final moment.

Foreign imports

Most of what you shoot in Crysis 3—the CELL weapons—are copies of what you shot in Crysis 2. I’m fine with that: Crytek’s near-futuristic ballistic guns don’t need replacement. Instead, the number of violent bells and whistles you can attach to conventional weapons has multiplied. One of the basic rifles, the Grendel, can be mutated from a sci-fi M4 into a ridiculous death platform. Throw a miniature version of the Typhoon—a new SMG that spits 500 bullets per second—under the barrel as an attachment. Swap in a muzzle break to improve the accuracy of your first shot. Load a mag of 6.8mm AP ammo (if you’ve found one of the special ammo caches) for greater penetration. Even shotguns get access to electric buckshot.

The déjà vu of handling the same weapons is offset by Prophet’s newfound ability to wield Ceph guns. Each of these devastating power weapons pulls from a single, small magazine of ammo. They’re intentionally disposable; as long as you don’t mutilate an alien with explosives, you can steal their flamethrower, lightning sniper rifle, or absurd plasma minigun that transforms into a wide-firing plasma shotgun. Firing each of these produces the same pleasure I felt when I first fired the Combine Pulse Rifle in Half-Life 2: giving enemies a taste of their own medicine. Their power is offset by the weight they place on Prophet (you can’t leap as high when holding a Ceph weapon), and by the loss of the ability to swap freely between standard firearms and the new Predator Bow.

"The déjà vu of handling the same weapons is offset by Prophet’s newfound ability to wield Ceph guns. "

On the receiving end of these guns, though, I found the Ceph to be a little tamer than they were in Crysis 2. Ceph Stalkers are underused. Devastators, formerly the alien tanks of Crysis 2, fall easily from the basic Ceph Grunt weapon, the Pincher Rifle. Ceph Spotters, floating drone-spheres that can zap you with EMP, were almost unnoticeable in the campaign. The new Ceph Scorchers are a bright spot. When attacked, they pop up their torso like a tower shield, making them invulnerable to direct assaults. They’re scary, glimmering little scarab-tanks—even when you’re hidden, they’ll intermittently torch an area while on patrol, like a camel might casually spit.

Turning the difficulty to Supersoldier (the fourth of five settings) did make things more comfortable (i.e., uncomfortable). Some of the increased ease of Ceph-killing is owed to the ability to wield their weapons, but more of it is due to the Predator Bow, which has a unique advantage within Crysis: firing it while cloaked doesn’t interrupt invisibility. It’s also permanently in your inventory. Crytek mitigates the Predator’s power a little by making its ammo scarce, but because you can recover basic arrows from victims, and most enemies die from a single, full-power shot, the bow occasionally feels like an easy way to clear a room. I still consider it a good addition to the weapon set because it demands being careful and deliberate in a way that Crysis’ other weapons don’t.

Minimum PC System Requirements :

2.8 GHz dual core processor, Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Phenom X2 or better2GB RAMDirectX 10 graphics card with 1 GB RAM, Nvidia 400-series or AMD Radeon 5000-series.Windows Vista/7DirectX 9c16 GB free hard drive space

Grand Theft Auto IV

Ever since GTA III, they've all been standing on Rockstar's shoulders and leaping off in new directions, like war and destruction in Mercenaries, super-heroics in Crackdown, and goblins and Jean-Luc Picard in Oblivion. But Rockstar kept its eye on the zeitgeist, and GTA IV's big innovations aren't amazing physics, spectacular graphics and epic environments - although it has all those - but convenience and multi-tasking. There is no longer any wasted time.

There have been hints of this before: listening to Lazlow while you chased down gangsters, using disguised ramps to outrun the mafia; doubling up the entertainment. But GTA IV doubles up the interaction. The mobile phone is central to this, allowing you to make phone calls and text-message people one-handed while you walk or drive; networking, socialising, organising, and listening to that ringtone you downloaded for America's Next Top Hooker. It's a tool for manoeuvring between GTA's activities and gameplay ideas quickly. It feeds you certain missions, and lets you phone in the results. When you hear a song on the radio that you don't recognise, you can dial 948-555-0100 and the game will text you the artist and song name. The phone's well-realised, too; you even hear that interference noise when it's about to ring. When you fail a mission, you can answer a text to teleport yourself back to wherever you spawn after the cut-scene briefing finishes.

To replenish health, you eat food. Simple. You can also buy body armour.

You also keep your weapons when you die, so as long as you're never taken alive, you can do just that. When you succeed, the game auto-saves. Once you've wined and dined your friends and family, you can use the phone to order supplies - Little Jacob the arms-dealer will pull up in an alley nearby, Brucie will fly his chopper to a nearby heliport, Roman will send a cab. The cabs are very useful. Any cab you see can be whistled for, or leapt in front of, its customers ousted and thrown to the kerb and the driver instructed to take you to a waypoint, social venue, or any of those familiar little initials on the mini-map that initiate missions. Hit a button and you're teleported there via a short loading pause. It's pricier to do, but hey, convenience costs. If you drive yourself, GPS navigation uses the mini-map to guide you to your mission-specific destination or waypoints. However you travel, you can look around with a free-look right-stick camera, and a button for locking the camera onto targeted vehicles and individuals assists with pursuits.

Besides the phone, the second-best thing GTA IV does is realign the combat to match the Hollywood driving. A Gears of War-style cover mechanic slams your back up against most surfaces, even cars, so that you can creep up to the edge, hop to adjacent cover points without exposing yourself, and fire on your enemies with a flexible targeting system, which locks on but frees you to drag the reticule to a head, or kneecap, flick to other targets or go completely free, crouch to improve aiming or click to zoom slightly, all without tying your fingers in knots. As you approach an abandoned, rundown hospital packed with drug dealers, or tumble into cop-filled streets to affect a getaway, or jump out of an elevator in a goon-filled hotel corridor, your heart rises, where often it sank.

There's also a sense of refinement in areas where GTA has always been strong, like driving and carnage. Now you can lean out of the window and fire in any direction, providing you can direct the right analogue stick at the same time as steering and managing the throttle - slightly awkward, but then it would be - and technical advances improve basic acts of destruction. Along with tumbling lamp-posts, there are fire hydrants to crash over, innumerable variations on smash-object-and-shower-street-in-debris, and some environmental damage; actual structures maintain their integrity, but you can chip away, they hang onto bullet holes, and anything you can see through is no sort of cover. The NPCs know this, too, and rarely stay in the driver's seat for long if you lock onto them with a gun - something else you can do now, with a matching blood-spray effect on the punctured windscreens to announce the truth of your aim.

Windscreens also take a battering from heads, because you can be thrown through them on violent impact. Explosions rock you and anything else in the world - try going up to a group of people with a live grenade - and it's possible to entertain yourself by walking into moving cars, or hitting bikes at speed to send their riders into the air. You have to look before you cross the road. The effects are comical at times, but GTA IV reserves the absurd for exceptional circumstances, like a man trying to cling onto his carjacked sedan as you accelerate away. Bodies can't be broken into pieces, despite the blood, so it's never disgusting either.

Minimum PC System Requirements :

Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz, AMD Athlon X2 64 2.4Gh

1.5GB RAM

16GB Free HDD Space

256MB NVidia 7900 / 256MB ATI X1900DirectX 9 compatible Stereo Sound Card

Windows XP/Vista

Need for Speed The Run

We’ve all got an idealised image of the great trans- American road trip. Flooring the throttle down an arrow-straight road in a thunderously powerful V8 muscle car, perhaps, with On The Road Again by Canned Heat playing on the stereo.

In that regard Need For Speed: The Run nails it – you can recreate that experience perfectly, even down to the masterfully-pitched, twanging country music. This would be brilliant if the game didn’t replicate the realities of a road trip as well, which include repetitive scenery, the boredom of maintaining a largely constant speed and the realisation that at most of your stop-offs there isn’t a great deal to do.

You play as the excruciatingly smug Jack, a man so fist-gnawingly in love with himself he probably announces his own arrival in a room. He’s in trouble with the mob in San Francisco, but after QTEing his way out of a near-fatal conversation with a car crusher he’s offered the opportunity to race his way to freedom, which lies 3,000 miles away in New York. And that’s about it. For a game that’s apparently about reintroducing a plot to racing games, there’s embarrassingly little to the narrative. There are only two and a half characters in the entire game and the dialogue is rare and entirely functional. It makes the script of The Fast and the Furious look like A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.

But while the cutscenes are lacking in scripting, the action itself more than makes up for it. Unlike the vast majority of racing games, The Run is an enormously regimented experience. Each stage either requires you to pass a specific number of vehicles – the penalty for failure being a complete restart of that section – or simply beat timed checkpoints. The competition is choreographed as well: cars rubberband in relation to yours, meaning you can wear your finger out on the boost button and still end up watching an opponent nipping past on the run to the finish line. It always feels like you’re competing against the designers of the game, rather than 200-odd other drivers.

The real crime is that the game so rarely takes advantage of its tightly controlled environment. There’s a brilliant sequence that has you careening along a winding, snowy pass, dodging patches of treacherous black ice as an avalanche explodes around you. It’s a glimpse of the game The Run could have been, if it had fully embraced the art of the set piece as Call of Duty has. It’s also the only glimpse.

Instead, what’s left is a racer that claws its way to mediocrity using features we’ve come to expect from the series. There’s a huge and varied selection of cars, handling is predictable and grippy, and the engine (in this case Battlefield 3’s Frostbite 2) whips up some impressive vistas as you hammer across the US. All of these add up to a game that’s absolutely playable, but pales in comparison to Hot Pursuit’s achievements with the same tools.

The organic nature of Criterion’s chases in that game meant that returning to beat your friends’ times on Autolog was a pleasure. Not so here. After the two hours it takes to complete The Run, there’s little incentive to return to the track and watch the same things happen all over again.

There’s a good idea buried under the enormous drifts of tedium, but even EA’s signature polish only manages to panel-beat this into passable game. This should have been a modern-day Outrun, instead it’s an obvious misfire.

Minimum PC System Requirements :
Windows Vista SP2 32-bit
DirectX 10
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Equivalent
3 GB
18 GB
512 MB RAM ATI Radeon 4870 or higher performance
512 MB RAM NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT or higher performance

Call of Duty : Ghosts

What's the story?

This is the tenth of the incredibly popular main Call of Duty games, and the alternating development cycle means it has fallen to Infinity Ward to keep players interested on the cusp of a new console generation. Thus, the creators of the Modern Warfare games have begun a new sub-series: Ghosts.

Gameplay

In a strange future, South America has formed a federation that has sent an invasion north. Your character targets one of its senior members with the help of the Ghosts, an elite group that relies on stealth, though as in the previous games most of the time is spent causing mass destruction.

Highs and lows

Of course, Infinity Ward has enough experience and money to make the combat work well, which will be most important to those who play for the online multiplayer. Occasional scenes stand out, mostly for the spectacle. But the story, dialogue, and characters are uninteresting despite the inclusion of a dog, and the vehicle sections are a real drag.

The verdict

Ghosts failed to sell as many in its first week as its recent predecessors, as fans waited for shinier versions on the brand-new PS4 and Xbox One. Those who buy for the online will have their expectations met, but anyone looking for an impressive single-player campaign may do better to skip this one altogether.

Minimum PC System Requirements :

Windows 7 64-Bit / Windows 8 64-BitIntel® Core™ 2 Duo E8200 2.66 GHZ / AMD Phenom™ X3 8750 2.4 GHZ or better6 GB RAM40 GBNVIDIA® GeForce® GTS 450 / ATI® Radeon™ HD 5870 or betterDirectX compatible sound card
DirectX®: DirectX® 11

Need for Speed Rivals

I don't remember the exact phrasing, but my first encounter with the loading screen of Ghost Games' Need For Speed Rivals told me all I really needed to know about the latest title in the venerable series. The gist of that loading screen tip? "Drifting refills nitrous." A thinking man's racing game this would not be.

And frankly, that's okay. In a world where the video game racing genre is dominated by Forza Motorsports and Gran Turismo, Rivals is a breath of fresh air. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and while this is both to its gain and detriment, it's this characteristic that I was reminded of each time I began to get angry over a gameplay fault. It was also this frustration that ended up ruining what, at first, looked like a solid title.

As the Need For Speed series seems to be constantly evolving with new set pieces and perspectives in each title, it's important to point out what Rivals is - namely, it feels like a spiritual successor to Need For Speed 3: Hot Pursuit, allowing gamers to take on the role of either a police officer or a street racer. That's really all you need to know, as the few, limited elements of Rivals' story have all the depth and gravitas of Steven Seagal doing Hamlet.

If you're a racer, you just want your freedom, which consists of driving a supercar like a clown. If you're a cop, you want to make the average citizen feel safe, which is done by attempting to wreck other drivers. There's no real extrapolation of these two ideas throughout the title, so it's best just to forget about them completely and focus on the game itself.

"The mist from waterfalls, the omnipresent swirling of leaves and the sheer variety of locales made for a vibrant and entertaining world."

And what a pretty game it is. I tested it on the Xbox 360, and even on 'obsolete' technology, Rivals is visually striking. Based on reviews I've read from other, video-game specific publications, those who pick up NFSR for a Playstation 4 or Xbox One are in for a real treat. On the 360, vehicle modeling was slightly under par relative toForza 4 and GT5, but it made up for this with beautiful, dynamic vistas that were easily the equal of (or better than) Forza Horizon. The mist from waterfalls, the omnipresent swirling of leaves (really, it's cool at first but feels overdone after a few hours of gameplay) and the sheer variety of locales made for a vibrant and entertaining world to look at while traveling at 120 miles per hour (or more).

But much like that very pretty girl in high school who was a few cards short of a full deck, Rivals' good looks belie a variety of gameplay issues that keep it from being as entertaining as it should be.

A racing game needs to walk a thin line between being accessible for new players, challenging for more advanced gamers and entertaining for all. Rivals suffers from being too accessible. Gameplay features that have been adjustable in racing titles for years, such as the ability to choose between an automatic and manual gearbox or whether to run with stability and traction control on or off are inexplicably unavailable in Rivals. The computer will shift gears at all times - even when it leaves you flat-footed in the middle of a pursuit.

"In general, the physics are far more Cruisin' USA than iRacing."

This isn't a bad feature for the seven-year-old gamer who hasn't figured out that the brake pedal is there to make you go faster, not slow you down, but it's a chronically frustrating issue that left me shaking my head on nearly every play-through. The other downside of keeping all the cars hemmed in without tweakable nannies and gearbox choices is that a lot of them feel the same.

I didn't unlock the entire bevy of cars available (the selection is meaty and full of high-dollar entries), but when I went from a BMW M3 GTS racer to a Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 police cruiser and wasn't really able to tell a difference (aside from the sound and appearance), it cheapened the overall experience of the game.

Handling is largely predictable, with an elementary approach to understeer and oversteer. Pitch a car into a corner at a reasonable pace, tap the brakes and turn the 'wheel' hard enough, and the car drifts, no questions asked. Understeer doesn't really crop up unless you're going far too fast for a turn. There's no sense of feedback, although as the cars aren't difficult to handle, there doesn't need to be. Sure, you can be a bit of a tool with the gas pedal and get the car to misbehave, but in general, the physics are far more Cruisin' USAthan iRacing.

Strike two against Rivals are the events. Set at all corners of the open-world map, the series of pursuits, time trials, races and other events are good for a little while, but grow repetitive rather quickly. A similar argument could be made against any racing game, but many other titles back up repetitive gameplay with other factors like accurate physics and a clever AI that make each race, while mostly identical to the last, challenging in some new and different way. Rivals lacks those factors, and left me feeling a bit bored after running yet another Interceptor or Rapid Response mission.

"There might always be a sociopathic 12-year-old who wants to do nothing more than smash into you."

A big qualm with NFSR is its always-online nature. This seems to be a trend in video games, although this is the first racer I can recall that used it as a major part of the game, although there may be a reason for that. For example, because it's always online, there's no way to pause a game of Rivals unless you make it back to one of the Hideouts or Command Posts scattered across the map. The other thing about always-online games is that you're stuck playing with other gamers. That means there might always be a sociopathic 12-year-old who wants to do nothing more than smash into you. You can go offline and play, but you'll miss out on those times when being online really clicks.

For example, I found myself fleeing a rather sizable group of 5-0, when I came upon another racer who laid down some cover with his Pursuit Tech, allowing us both to race off into the distance and escape the pursuing cops. It's even easier when playing as a cop, as you're able to hop into anyone's pursuit and lend a hand in apprehending a suspect. When online play works, it works quite well. There are still issues - we had trouble staying connected - but we suspect it'll be some time before server and host migrations are eradicated from gaming.

The problem with NSFR is that server migrations can really mess things up. If it happens mid-event, you're forced to restart from the beginning. If you're running from the cops with a load of Speedpoints (the in-game currency) in your possession and end up getting busted because the internet has a hiccup, there's not a lot you can do there, either.

"Pursuit Techs are one of the highlights to Rivals incessant game of cat and mouse."

Speaking of those Speedpoints, they're the way racers buy all their shiny new cars, upgrades, decals and Pursuit Techs. Racers acquire them by generally being a maniac on the roads - drifting, driving too close to other cars and what not. Cops, meanwhile, earn Speedpoints by busting racers. And by "busting," we mean viciously running into them until their car's health gauge runs dry, at which point the cop snags all the racer's cash. And while it seems easier to earn Speedpoints as a cop, they're far less useful. All the cop cars are provided once you've completed the requisite Speedboard, leaving a heaping helping of currency that can only buy Pursuit Tech.

Those Pursuit Techs are one of the highlights to Rivals incessant game of cat and mouse, allowing both cops and racers to mess with their opponents with things like EMPs and tire spikes. There's few things as satisfying as playing as a cop and using the game's Shock Ram to run a racer off the road or to use an EMP on a cop. It feels a lot like calling in an air strike in Call of Duty, giving you that feeling that you're winning.

Put simply, there are other racing titles we'd pick up before buying Need For Speed Rivals. While it is a graphically beautiful game, its gameplay issues and repetitive nature make it a difficult game to burn hours playing.

When Seyth Miersma reviewed Forza Motorsport 5, he remarked that, "I've had it for two weeks and I can't stop playing it." While playing Rivals, I never had that feeling. I found myself playing in spurts rather than binges, and it's that fact alone that makes this a difficult game to recommend.

Minimum System Requirements PC :

OS: Windows XP, Windows Vista (SP2), Windows 7CPU: Intel 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, AMD 2.6 GHz Athlon X2RAM: At least 4 GB
Hard Drive: At least 30 GB of free spaceVideo: AMD Radeon 3870 512Mb or better, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512 Mb or better, IntelHD 4000 integrated 512Mb or betterDirectX: DirectX 10.1 compatibleINPUT: Keyboard and mouse