Aces of the Galaxy is a classic space shooter reminiscent of the popular “Star Fox” series. The game tries to implement a heavy replay factor into this tried and true formula, but because of a variety of minor flaws and annoyances, it fails to be entertaining long enough to experience the extra content added. However if you can look past these petty problems, there’s still some decent ship destroying to be done.

In Aces you play as a no-name human hero who has stolen a prototype spaceship from an alien race called the Skurgians. Your objective is to successfully deliver the stolen ship back to the planet earth. But as arcade shooters usually go, the story is hardly a factor in your enjoyment of the game. The star of this game is the shooting combat. It’s fairly simplistic in design. You have a machine gun, a missile launcher, and a multi-gun that can lock onto multiple enemies and destroy them all at once. These weapons serve as your offensive strategy, but should you ever need to evade incoming fire, you have the ability to barrel roll out of the way. The shooting mechanics work great, and obliterating hundreds of foes never ceases to give you a smile on your face.

You’ll have to blast your way through nine levels before you complete the task you’re given in Aces, and along the way you’ll come into contact with a multiplicity of different environments and foes. The first level will always be the same, but should you pick up a certain power-up found within any of the levels, you unlock the ability to change your course. Even though Aces requires you to complete nine levels, there’s really twenty five in total. As long as you obtain the power-up, at the end of the level you’ll be prompted with a decision to choose which path to take next. There are three variations, but in reality all of the levels are identical. One has an ice backdrop, one has a fire backdrop, and one just looks like “space.” There’s no exclusive type of enemy or challenge to any of the environments, so the choice you make, doesn’t really make a difference, you’ll still be shooting aliens no matter which way you go. So the “choice” factor ends up being one-dimensional.

The graphics of the game add a lot of enjoyment to the game. For an Xbox Live Arcade game, Aces looks incredible. You’ll see planets looming in the background, ships exploding into a hundred pieces accompanied by a glamorous fireball, and various other graphical nuances that successfully make the game visually aesthetic. But the constant explosions and effects get in the way more than you would like. Enemy gunfire has a tendency to blend in with background flourishes, making it difficult to decipher what to dodge, and what to ignore. The enemies themselves also do this quite a bit, forcing you to change your tactics from skillfully choosing your targets and dodging attacks, to just spastically firing off random shots while moving around in a sporadic fashion. You never really get a sense of what exactly is going on on-screen. The game includes a cheap copout for this problem by giving you the ability to slowdown time, providing a few seconds to think, but the action remains indecipherable no matter how much time you’re given to decrypt it.

Along with these jarring issues, the gameplay eventually becomes exceedingly tiresome, and the lack of variety in enemies and environments doesn’t help its case. Even the “bosses” of the game are identical to any other foe you face, the only difference being a shift in background music to tell the player “Hey, this is a boss” without that shift though, you would’ve never known you had just fought a boss. On top of all that it only takes thirty minutes to an hour to beat the game. Unless you’re a huge fan of on-rail space shooters, and also enjoy being a completionist then you’ll be disappointed with the lack of content in Aces of the Galaxy. I would like the mention that the game has the most spectacular end credits in a game, but that doesn’t warrant a purchase.

Wanako Studios’ dual-stick shooter Assault Heroes 2 is a sequel to the original Assault Heroes that was released in 2006. Even though the studio has had at least a year and a half to upgrade this new installment, Assault Heroes 2 is identical to its predecessor, only improving the experience, rather than adding to it. Despite the lack of innovation, Assault Heroes 2 proves to be a high quality game and is easily recommendable to any fan of the genre that hasn’t become sick of the already superfluous stock of dual-stick shooters that currently clutter the marketplace.

Similar to the first game, you play as the only surviving member of an elite force whose task is to rid the world of evil forces. There’s practically no plot whatsoever and the game doesn’t bother trying to explain why you’re at the various locations you visit. The important thing is that there are enemies to kill, and bosses to conquer.

You begin each level inside an assault jeep that’s equipped with a variety of weapons. A minigun, flak cannon, flamethrower, and freezing gun complete your arsenal of bad guy destruction. Each weapon seems to have a specific purpose. The flak cannon is perfect for reigning carnage upon enemy vehicles. The flamethrower and freezing gun can easily decimate a crowd of infantry, and the minigun can be used for anything. All of these weapons can be improved by collecting upgrades left behind by fallen enemies. Even though ideally you’d want to switch between these weapons depending on the situation, the mingun seems to perform adequately in any given scenario, so you’ll never have a reason to change up your tactics.

Should your vehicle ever be destroyed your character is ejected to the ground, where on-foot combat takes place until your vehicle respawns. The on-foot controls mimic the vehicular combat, with some obvious changes. Instead of a minigun you have a submachine gun, instead of flak cannon it’s a rocket launcher, and so on. Even though the weapons have a different name, they all have the same effect as their vehicle counterparts. If you don’t want to risk losing a life whilst fighting on foot you can attempt to locate another vehicle. Along with your assault jeep you may also find a tank, a helicopter, or even hijack one of the enemy’s rigs. However hijacking a vehicle is near impossible since enemies spawn in large groups, and the helicopter is weak, and often crashes for unexplained reasons, leaving the tank as the only plausible substitute to your jeep. Attempting to mix up the action is a nice gesture, but impractical when tested out.

Constant backdrop changes along with the cornucopia of enemy variations keep the gameplay engaging. You’ll fight across ice plains, in the jungle, on mars, in space, against foot soldiers, kamikazes, robot elephants, apes, dinosaurs, mechs, helicopters, giant bugs, and the occasional boss fight. When coupled with the variety of weapon choices you have, it’s possible to have a lot of fun playing through the campaign that spans across thirty areas.

Unfortunately, around half-way through the game you’ll start to realize that you’re repeating the same actions all the time, and the initial appeal of blowing stuff up wears off. There’s a co-operative alternative if you have a friend over or on Xbox live in an attempt to rejuvenate the stale single player. But the campaign is the only piece of content in the game.

Don’t be mistaken, Assault Heroes 2 is the crème of the crop when it comes to dual-stick shooters. The lengthy campaign is enough to warrant the $10 price tag, just be sure not to burn through it too quickly. If you’re a fan of dual-stick shooters, or want a game that accurately represents the genre, there’s no better choice than Assault Heroes 2.

“How can we advance the video game industry?” is a question that plagues many developers’ minds. The goal with most blockbuster games is to make an extraordinarily fantastic game that’s fun to play and appeals to a wide audience. Up to this point, all of these attempts have done pretty good jobs. Back in 1997 Nintendo showed everyone how single player adventures would be handled with Zelda: Ocarina of Time. A year later Valve released Half Life, a game that could tell a storyline without having any cut scenes or long dialogue portions and would make the player feel like part of the story. Since then various other games, such as Battlefield 1942, Counter Strike, and Halo 2 have shown that a strong multiplayer aspect in a game will keep people coming back, again and again to play. And in 2008, near the very beginning of the year, a game has been released that combines all three elements, perfected single player gameplay, and story, along with a strong multiplayer. That game is Grand Theft Auto IV.

In Grand Theft Auto IV you play as Niko Belic, fresh off the boat from Serbia, a new arrival in Liberty City. But before I get into why the game’s narrative and story makes it a clear game of the year contender, there’s a lot of obvious things that need to be talked about. Previous GTAs haven’t really pioneered the gameplay aspect of the industry. But everything from previous installments has been revamped and redone. The most obvious change is how cars handle. It’s sort of strange that Rockstar North has decided to redo the car physics, seeing as how that was the only part of Grand Theft Auto that worked perfectly fine. But the new change isn’t a bad thing; it just takes some time to become accustomed to. Cars are much heavier now; you can’t power slide around every corner; and car accidents are a little more brutal than before, especially since the car damage has been redone as well to look more realistic. Once you get used to breaking slowly before turns and taking your time with high speed chases instead of eagerly trying to cutoff your target at every turn, you’ll be right at home.

When you leave your car you’ll notice that on-foot controls have also changed quite a bit. Niko walks on default, changing the tone of the game from “crazy wacky run everywhere as fast as you can” to a more leisurely and controlled type of tone. Holding A will have him sprint, if you’re in a rush. But the more important change is the gunplay. Niko can take cover on almost every piece of land in Liberty City, including cars, telephone poles, walls, fences, car doors, blown up vehicles, hotdog stands, and practically everything you would actually want to use, you can. When in cover Niko can choose to aim, pop his head up, and cap a few guys or blind fire from behind his safety zone and try to hit some bad guys that way. The upgrade in tactics for the gunplay is a welcome addition to the game, and you’ll need to use it from start to finish.

With the weak-gameplay worries put to rest the only other criticism GTA games have received are their abysmal graphics. Similarly to the gameplay, the graphics are also brand new. Running off Rockstar’s RAGE engine, Liberty City has never looked so beautiful. The streets transition from night to day seamlessly, with the streetlights casting shadows around the world like a painting. The citizens of the streets all look different. You could spend a few hours on a busy street and not find two look-alikes. This really helps make the city feel alive. Along with those additions car damage has procured an overhaul. There are so many different ways your car can crash, you’ll continue to see new damage displays long after you’ve beaten the game’s storyline.

Speaking of the story, it’s actually pretty long compared to most games. It’s possible to complete in less than 30 hours if you blow through it without spending time on the other copious amounts of features provided to you. But if you take your time, take a helicopter tour around the city, race against other cars, go out drinking with your friend, or maybe just a stroll in the park, it’s easy to get the gameplay timer up to 60 hours. When in comes to the actual story itself, that’s when the true genius of this game is revealed.

As mentioned before, you play as Niko Belic, fresh off the boat from Serbia. You’ve decided to come to Liberty City because your cousin Roman has told you stories of mansions, cars, and women, all begging to be with you. Upon arrival you realize that Roman is full of lies, and he actually needs some help getting out of the myriad of problems he’s caused for himself. Niko reluctantly decides to help Roman with his debt problems, but whilst doing this Niko gets caught up in things himself. The narrative of Niko’s struggle as an immigrant is one of the more interesting stories told in today’s gaming, with many themes and subtexts sprinkled throughout. What makes GTA4’s story different from other games such as Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy is when the game takes advantage of its strongest facet, it’s interactive.

On multiple occasions Niko will be given a choice between two actions. Whether it’s killing your boss’ cheating girlfriend, or deciding to spare her, or choosing a certain alliance to affiliate yourself with, your actions have long-term affects on your character. In reality, most of these decisions do not change the storyline, but your decisions change how you view Niko and his situation. Maybe he’s just a troubled immigrant who got caught up in the wrong line of work, or maybe he’s just a sociopath who would’ve ended up killing people regardless of his history. Niko’s character is ambiguous enough to have actual discussions on whether or not he’s crazy, or just troubled. Although the decisions the game gives you don’t have any tangible effect on the gameplay itself, this is the first time I’ve ever chosen to do something in a game, and actually regretted my decision. The game immerses you to such a high degree it’s astounding Rockstar has been able to pull it off.

If you’re not a fan of the single player for some reason, the multiplayer is a reasonable substitute. With around eight different game modes, and various changes you can make to those modes, there’s a good portion of content to experience on the online side of things. The genre defying part of the multiplayer is the maps, or should I say map. With any of the game modes, you can choose to fight over the entire Liberty City, or just one of the five islands. You can have cops on, pedestrians on, traffic on, and change the setting of the frequency you’ll see those three variables. The only problem is the unavoidable lag. Most full 16 player games tend to chop up significantly. If you just have three other friends, and want to travel around the city in free-roam blowing cops up, you should be able to do that just fine, without the worry of lag. The highlight of the multiplayer is when you get a full, lag-free game of Cops N Crooks, the police against the criminals, one side trying to take the other down, before they get in their escape helicopter. When everyone in the game knows what they’re doing, you can have a lot of fun with the multiplayer for a very long time.

There’s obviously a lot more content in the game than what I mentioned here in this long-winded review. But that just shows how massive this game is. Liberty City is amazing and full of detail, the missions are entertaining, the voice acting is fantastic, the story is flawless, and the gameplay is fun the entire time. There’s a constant debate on whether or not video games will enter the realm of movies and literature as narrative pieces. When a game like Grand Theft Auto IV comes out, it’s hard to argue otherwise. This game is getting a perfect score, not because every aspect is perfect (I’m looking at you Mr.I’mInChargeOfTheSoundtrack) but because the storytelling immerses you in the game to such a high degree, every flaw in the game is forgivable. Grand Theft Auto IV is a must buy if you like video games.

It’s been a year and a half since the bells at Bullworth Academy have chimed on the Playstation 2, and Rockstar Vancouver has finally decided to bring their sandbox game “Bully” to the Xbox360. When the words “Rockstar” and “sandbox game” are used within the same sentence, the average gamer would think of the Grand Theft Auto series. It’s true that Bully shares a lot of the same qualities with its big brother GTA, but by no means should the two be directly competing for your attention. Bully is a charming game with an astonishing sense of atmosphere, and although the game has some flaws, the adventure you experience is rather satisfying.

Bully is the story of Jimmy Hopkins, a troubled kid who’s abandoned by his mom and new step-father at the gates of Bullworth Academy boarding school. He’s promptly greeted by the snobbish secretary and the desperate principal who wishes for Jimmy’s assistance. From this point forward Jimmy discovers the multitude of problems that plagues the school staff and the various conflicts between the rivaling cliques. From here Jimmy decides to help with the problems instead of adding to them.

Bully is divided into five chapters, with each chapter dealing with one of the five factions in the game. The main goal of the game is to solve all of the problems, and make sure each group isn’t in conflict with other groups, while also helping a few teachers along the way. You’ll gain each clique’s trust by assisting the main leader of the group with various missions they assign you. All of the missions you play through succeed in continuing to provide the player with new scenarios and objectives until the very end. This is a ponderous task since, unlike Grand Theft Auto, Bully has no guns, no cars, no brutal violence, and no large open world. The game is very aware of its context and setting and never tries to be something it’s not.

When it comes to creating interesting characters and storylines, few games can compete with Bully’s presentation. Every character in this game is a joy to talk and listen to thanks to the great writing and voice acting. The colorful cast of characters will keep you laughing the entire time. Whether it be the drunk English teacher attempting to hide his addictive habit, the preppies trying to protect their families’ name or even Jimmy himself chiming in with his voice of reason in many of the ridiculous, but believable scenarios.

While the story related characters are a marvelous bunch, the game also has a good sense of style on the technical side of things. The soundtrack of this game is perfect. It really captures the essence of being in high school. The innocent melodic theme as you walk around the school grounds or the suspicious score that intensifies when the action starts to get heavy, the music pleasantly fits the environment and context of each situation. And the humor manages to present itself even outside of scripted cut-scenes. The ability to stuff kids into lockers, giving some poor-soul a wedgie, and various other bullying skills never become old and maintain the High School mood of the game.

But why are we talking about laughing and music? This is Bully! Not “Across the Universe: The Game.” During your quest to fix the problems at your school you’re going to help a lot of people, but everyone you don’t help you can be a complete jerk to. Egg cars, beat kids up and spit in their eyes, make a jock pee his pants, throw marbles so teachers can slip and fall on them, or as previously mentioned stuff kids in trash cans and lockers. If you’re in High School now, or have ever been in High School, all of these activities will really appeal to you.

If you ever do manage to get bored of bullying kids there’s still an enormous amount of other activities you can do. Bully does feature a lot of collect-a-thon quests such as going around town spray painting walls, collecting rubber bands or trading cards, and finding radio transistors. However there are other mini-game orientated tasks that allow you to quickly gain cash such as mowing lawns and doing paper routes. But if you want more character related upgrades you’ll have to go to class. Since you’re in school, there is a set schedule of when classes start, whether or not you wish to attend class is up to you.
Each class has its own mini-game. Math class may have you answer a variety of mathematical equations, geography will have you match flags to places on the map, and biology class will have you perform a dissection on a small animal. There are eight classes in all, all providing their own specific mini-game and benefit. Depending on which class you complete you’ll receive a different type of benefit. If you want to work on your fighting skills you may want to show up in Gym class more often, but if you want more luck with the ladies you’ll want to go to Art class. Because of these benefits you’ll actually be inclined to go to class, and have a fun time while you’re there. It also helps that all these mini-games are available in two player multiplayer. The multiplayer isn’t online, and doesn’t even support four people, but if you have a friend over and want to see who can name more countries in South America, the multiplayer serves its purpose well.

The game runs on a 24 hour clock and each class starts and ends at specific times. If you’re caught fooling around on campus during class time by one of the overbearing prefects you’ll be sent to class. If you’re caught outside of school during class the police will drop you off at the front gates. These two authority figures will also harass you for any other misdemeanor crimes you commit. But the punishment you receive rarely ever goes past a simple “please don’t do that again” warning. Even serious crimes such as stealing a baseball bat and beating a police officer over the head with it has no serious consequence. The twenty-four-hour clock also serves other purposes such as when school closes, when curfew starts, and when you pass out from exhaustion. But all the authority figures are fairly easy to avoid or escape, so you never really have to worry about any of that stuff.

If you missed Bully the first time around, scholarship edition is a great game to pick up. The only possible complaints to have with this game are the extremely unimpressive graphics, and the laughably simplistic difficulty setting, when compared to the rest of the package these complaints seem more like cherry picking rather than actual reasons not to play this game. If you’re looking for a fun, enjoyable, and hilarious sandbox game, Bully is very easy to recommend. The game is a joy to play, and probably one of the funniest games ever made. If you’re someone who likes having fun and laughing, buy Bully (For $49.99 USD).

Since the original release back in 2001, the Burnout franchise has made quite a name for itself. With its addictive arcade style gameplay and illustrious crash mode it’s obvious why this series has become so popular. Now seven years later we have Burnout Paradise. Compared to previous installments, it’s clearly an ambitious game due to the decision to depart from the traditional menu-based style of play and adopt the idea of an open-world. Fans of the series worried that this format change would affect their love for the game, but put those worries to rest. This is still the Burnout we all know and love, adding another great game in the already fantastic series.

So what’s up with that open-world idea? How does it work? Right from the start you are able to explore every bit of Paradise City. You can do whatever you want: cruise the sights, explore some shortcuts, find a few jumps and barrel roll ramps, or if you want to get into the thick of it you can start any of the 120 events in the game. Each event begins at a traffic light within the game. While you’re cruising around pull up to a light and hold the accelerator and brake for a few seconds; the event initiates with no load time to wait through or menu to navigate around. The system is very seamless.

There are five events in the game: Race, Burning Route, Stunt Run, Marked Man and Road Rage. Race is what it sounds like, a race; the difference in this installment is that because of the open-world you can reach your destination however you want. You can choose to follow the other racers, venture on your own and hope you find your war, or you can explore prior to the race and attempt to find some shortcuts. While this may feel overwhelming at first, you discover pretty quickly that you can just go with the flow and you’ll end up reaching your destination pretty easily during the first few hours of the game. As you progress further into the game, the racer AI ramps up, so you’ll really have to learn where you’re going. It also helps that there’s only eight finish lines in the game, one for each compass direction. The race can start wherever you want, but they’ll always end in one of the eight locations making it much easer to remember what paths are fastest for which finish line. This new take on the racing genre really makes the game feel like a breath of fresh air when compared to competitors who have been re-using the same style of play for the past few years.

Burning Route is similar to race. You’re required to use a specific car and then race across town in a limited amount of time. In Stunt Run you try to find as many jumps as possible and catch some big air, while attempting to do barrel rolls, flat spins, drifts, boosts, and driving backwards. For each trick you perform you acquire a certain number of points, doing a large amount of tricks in a row starts a combo meter, increasing your score. If you obtain enough points at the end of the timer, you pass the event. The problem with these two events is that they rely a little too much on memorization of locations and routes. You’ll probably avoid these types of events until you’re forced to complete them near the end of the game, once you’ve become accustomed with your surroundings.

The Marked Man event puts you in a situation where you have to race across the city at whatever speed you want, there’s no time limit. However there are three other cars that attempt to send your car scintillating against the barriers, eventually causing your car to fulminate. If you crash too many times, you fail the event. Road Rage is related to Marked Man, instead of trying to reach a destination, you’re trying to obliterate other cars. Again, if you wreck too many times you fail the event. You can make use of repair shops found around the map to restore your car to its best condition in an attempt to increase your chance of survival. These events offer the largest amount of fun to be had, since they both combine the great sense of speed the game has, and the beautiful crashing mechanic.

Although Road Rage offers a lot of car Armageddon that’s all you’ll get when it comes to vehicular mayhem. The crash mode that’s been highly praised in previous installments doesn’t make an appearance in Paradise. Instead the crash mode is replaced with “Showtime” which is triggered by holding LB and RB at the same time. In Showtime mode your car launches itself into the air. From there you try to navigate your car into busy traffic causing as much destruction as possible. This mode provides a lot of small-scale destruction, there are no large explosions or catastrophic events that you can create, so your urge for catastrophe is never really filled. One of the greatest parts of Crash mode was the puzzle nature of it, and Showtime mode doesn’t offer anything like that. It doesn’t require much skill, it isn’t very fun, and it seems like Criterion Games knew this. There’s no mentioning of Showtime mode anywhere in the game, you can actually play the entire game without knowing it existed, but that’s a good thing, because it’s obviously the weakest part of the game.

The cars of Paradise also make a noteworthy change from preceding games. As an alternative of cars simply having different stats such as speed, boost, and strength, they’re also put into categories of “Class” now. The three classes are Aggressive, Speed, and Stunt. Aggressive is made for events such as Road Rage or Marked Man. These cars have a lot of potency so they can survive more crashes, but they’re also slower and more difficult to control. Speed class cars are weaker cars, but they have a lot of boost power. Boost on speed cars works differently from the other two classes. Instead of pressing boost whenever you want, you have to wait until your bar is entirely full, and then use all of it at once. This limits the maneuverability of speed cars since they’re unable to supply small amounts of boost when going around turns. Finally the stunt class car is sort of a mix of the two other classes. The stunt class is obviously the most useful one of them all. It’s fast, has a normal type of boost, and can also survive a good amount of damage before crashing. While the attempt to make new ways of playing the game is a good gesture, it doesn’t really work very well in practice.

After you’re finished fooling around in single player you can take the experience online. Just like the rest of the game, there are no real menus required to go online. All you have to do is press right on the D-Pad and search for a game. After a second or two you’ll be exactly where you were before, but now other players are in there with you. While online you can mess around with friends or attempt to finish all 350 challenges that are accessible to you. The challenges start off effortless with very simple and straightforward goals such as boosting for 10 seconds, but as you get further down the list and more players join the game, you get to challenges like jumping over three other players while doing a barrel roll. Although these challenges are fun, other events from single player like Marked Man and Road Rage are absent from the online gameplay. It’s rather disappointing since these game types seem to be made specifically for human interaction type gameplay as opposed to only competing against the computer AI.

On the technical side of things Burnout Paradise is a shining gem. Not only does the entire city look gorgeous but the game consistently runs at 60 frames per second. No matter how much destruction is caught on screen the frame rate never dips, it’s smooth the entire time you play. The soundtrack on the other hand isn’t as noteworthy. It’s not bad by any means but it seems kind of bizarre to have Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” in a game about crashing cars. There is a decent size of variety in the soundtrack, and there’s also a few original tracks made for Burnout Paradise that serve there purpose as background music well.

Along with the soundtrack is DJ Atomica, a radio DJ for “Crash FM.” DJ Atomica places himself rather high on the list of “Annoying announcers that won’t shut up.” You’ll constantly hear his “words of wisdom” throughout the entire game. If you lose an event, win an event, wreck really bad, or even if you’re just driving around he’ll chime in with some pointless comment. There is a way to turn off the random comments, but you’ll still hear him at the start and end of events.

So if you’re a skeptical Burnout fan, there’s nothing to fear. Burnout Paradise is another great edition in an already fantastic series. The few minor problems the game has are easily overcome by the fact that everything else is so polished and well done. Paradise makes a step in the right direction by moving to a more flexible setup than previous games, but choices such as replacing crash mode, and lacking any real variety in the events themselves keeps the game from being the best in the series. However if you’re looking for a great racing game, there’s no doubt this is the perfect choice for you.

It’s been almost a year since the public got a preview of Assassin’s Creed. Developed by Ubisoft. This stealth/action based game has received loads of hype since its first unveiling. The game has been present at almost every single major gaming event. Much has been promised — a living, breathing world that’s entirely interactive; a combat system, which is simple and fun at the same time; and finally an intriguing plot that’s been teased for quite some time now. The game has finally arrived and everyone has the same question on their mind: “Is it possible that a game with this much hype can live up to its expectations?” It’s obvious the developers had a great idea, but your enjoyment of Assassin’s Creed relies on what you expect.

(Note: The following reveals certain parts of Assassin’s Creed’s story line. If you don’t want to know the story until you play the game yourself, skip the next two paragraphs.)

So, let’s get the big question out of the way: What the hell is the story? You actually play as two characters in Assassin’s Creed. In modern day you play as Desmond Myers, a bartender who has been kidnapped by a secret organization. Their intent is to use a device to search through your genetic code. They claim that your genetic code holds the memories of your ancient ancestors. During Desmond’s segments of the game you’ll spend your time walking around big, gray, bland, open rooms. Every now and then you’ll be forced to sit through a ten-minute dialogue scene. Other than walking around and waiting, you’re pretty much watching cut scenes. This makes Desmond’s segments easily the weakest parts of the game and really breaks up the action.

The other character you’ll play as is Desmond’s ancient ancestor, Altair. As Altair you’ll play in the Holy Lands of Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre during The Crusades. Early on in the game Altair fails to complete an assignment and ends up being responsible for the deaths of a few of his fellow assassins. Because of his failure, Altair’s venerable master demotes him to the lowest rank and only allows him to live if he can redeem himself by killing nine important figures throughout the Holy Land. The story works pretty well, but the Desmond sections seem entirely useless since the story of Altair would’ve worked perfectly fine without this Sci-Fi add-on. Luckily, the majority of the game is playing as Altair, so you won’t see too much of Desmond.

(Note: This is the end of story spoilers)

With assigned task in mind your master releases you into the Holy Land. The game slowly brings you into the massive world by blocking off parts of the cities at the beginning so you’re not intimidated by its prodigious size. Despite the limitations, it’s still easy to tell there’s plenty of life and interactivity within the cities. Damascus acts as the Middle Eastern desert city, containing a very dry, but bright look. Acre is a large, dark, populated, European city, while Jerusalem is a mix of the two. Each city is unique in its own way and continues to become even more interesting as the game progresses and you’re presented more sections of the world. The downside of these cities is that there’s nothing to do. Your main and only quest is to assassinate nine people. You can explore the city looking for hidden flags for achievement points, but there’s really nothing else. This seems like a huge waste as the cities are so well done and detailed. Scaling buildings seems unique and fun in every occasion, but you have no initiative to explore.

It’s nice to take a minute and soak in the atmosphere that exudes from each city, but you still have a job to do. In order to take down each target you have to gather information by doing a various amount of side jobs. These jobs range from pick pocketing information, beating information out of someone, or eavesdropping on a conversation. It’s a good gesture of Ubisoft to give more than one way to acquire your information and making it so you don’t have to do every single side job. Unfortunately, all jobs are boring and seem unimportant. You only have to perform two or three tasks in order to start the official assassination. If you choose to continue to gather information, you acquire little bits of information which sound as if they’re supposed to help. In actuality, it’s nothing you wouldn’t have figured out yourself with a little bit of trial and error. This makes these side quests more like desperate attempts to lengthen the game rather than important parts of the storyline or gameplay.

When you finally get past the side quests and start the assassination, there’s still a lot of work to be done. There’s much danger to be found in the city: guards, drunks, thugs, and anything else that can bring attention to you. As an assassin it’s your job to go unnoticed while accomplishing tasks. The game introduces a new style of stealth called “Social Stealth.” As opposed to sneaking in shadows and hiding from everyone, social stealth is based on attempting to blend in with the crowd. This type of stealth adds quite a bit of realism to the game, making it more practical and fun to play.

Unfortunately, that’s where the greatness of the game stops and where flaws are revealed. Social Stealth is a good idea in theory, but the execution doesn’t make much sense. In order to “blend in” you hold down the A button, which makes Altair walk slower and lower his head. Apparently ducking his head makes the guards oblivious of his existence despite the fact that he carries daggers and a giant sword hangs from his waist. In some cases you’ll end up being chased by the guards, instead of running you can turn around and slaughter twenty guards, then simply walk away from the battle. Despite everyone knowing you’re the one who laid waste to hundreds of guards in a single city, there’s no reputation of you being an assassin or someone who causes trouble, which just doesn’t make any sense. For some reason, the guards just stop chasing you.

The game suffers from these types of complaints all throughout. The fighting system is easy to handle and fun to play, but when you’re faced with ten guys at once you can’t help but wonder why they don’t use their numbers to take advantage of the situation. Along with these impractical design choices, there are a handful of glitches in the game. Important figures not spawning, people randomly disappearing, visual glitches such as climbing on a ledge that isn’t there and a few other problems all occur. Luckily none of these problems are so severe that you can’t play the game, but it’s annoying when you have to redo a side quest for the seventh time because the NPC you’re supposed to talk to ran to some other location and you can’t find him.

Finally the stealth section of the game is entirely broken. Ubisoft claimed there are two types of stealth: regular Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid stealth and social stealth. Social stealth only works for people who have the patience to walk around town for four hours since it takes so damn long. And the traditional stealth gameplay isn’t even present in the game. There’s no “sneak” mechanic at all, you have to run or walk everywhere, so everyone always knows where you are. Luckily stealth is never required, more of a suggestion, but what’s the point of being an assassin if the only way you can kill people is by jumping down and slaughtering people. The game might as well have been called Rambo. Instead of bright white robes you could wear an equally useless attire, something along the lines of a giant sign that floats over your head that says “I’M GOING TO KILL PEOPLE.”

Assassin’s Creed is by no means a bad game; it’s fallen to the fate of many other games by having too much hype surrounding it. If you’re expecting a ground breaking Game of the Year quality game, you won’t find it. If you’re expecting to play an average action game, then you’ll find yourself very pleased with your purchase. For everyone else pressed for money with all the November releases, you’ll be better off renting the game, platforming around the city for an hour, and then returning it.

Stranglehold is the result of the combined effort of well-known action director, John Woo, and the game studio Tiger Hill Entertainment. The game serves as a sequel off the 1992 John Woo classic action film “Hard Boiled”. Stranglehold is primarily an action game, with some puzzle solving elements placed in minor sections of the game. The action genre has unfortunately been vacant for the past few years. If you haven’t noticed, a game like Stranglehold hasn’t been released since “The Path of Neo” two years ago. Not much has evolved for this genre. If you’re an action junkie waiting to get your fix, this is the game for you.

You play as Inspector Tequila (voiced by Chow Yun-Fat, the star of the film Hard Boiled), a no worries cop from Hong Kong. News breaks out that a cop was killed in the city.  In order to find out the entire story, you make your way to the police station. When you arrive, your chief is in the middle of a phone call with a mysterious gang, asking for one cop to go to the market section of town. You, being the hard-ass cop that you are, decide to go in alone despite your chief’s concerns. From here the game picks up rather quickly.  There are no tutorials explaining how to play the game or any long cut scenes giving you a background and introduction to any of the characters. You’ll learn rather quickly how the game works — you have guns, you shoot people. Right trigger to shoot, A to switch guns, and the Left Trigger for interacting with any part of the environment. You’ll be using the latter one most often.

Interacting with the environment can include anything from diving through the air, jumping off a wall, rolling down a cart, hanging on a lamp, to sliding down rails. They all sound spiffy and actually have some use to them besides looking very cool and giving the game a great “Action Movie” feel. The main reason you’ll want to use these stunts is to activate “Tequila Time” which is exactly like Bullet Time from games such as Max Payne or Enter the Matrix. While in Tequila Time you execute more damage to enemies and take less damage yourself. The other reason to use these stunts is to gain Style Points. Depending on how spectacular your stunt is, you receive a rating from 1-5 stars. Performing many of these stunts together creates combos for higher style points. Style points can be used to unlock videos of game development, concept art, or multiplayer characters (more on the multiplayer part later).

The single player campaign will take approximately 10 hours to complete on the normal difficulty. There are four difficulties in all. You start out with Casual, Normal, and Hard. After completing the game on any of the first three difficulties you unlock “Hard Boiled” – the hardest difficulty for those who feel they’ve mastered the game. If you want to play the game in a challenging way, the Normal difficulty is a good place to embark. If you really want to have fun with the action movie feel to the game and do as many stunts as possible, you may want to begin with “Casual” first. The game starts off pretty easy but  becomes progressively harder as the game advances through its seven levels. Unfortunately the difficulty balancing is the beginning of Stranglehold’s list of flaws.

You’ll mainly find yourself having to repeat levels over and over due to poor design choices. Enemies randomly spawn in locations out of your sight. They either pop out from doors that automatically open and close for enemies, or simply appear from behind a shelf of some sort. This is especially annoying when the enemies, armed with shotguns, take out large chunks of your health before you’re able to turn around. These types of cheap spawn points are usually the reason for sending you back 20 minutes to one of the rather rare checkpoints. This makes it seem as if you died because the game was being cheap, not because you’re an inadequate gamer.

The game tries to prevent the cheap spawn points from always killing you by giving you a few special abilities. You start out with a simple “heal” ability, which you’ll use frequently. Shortly thereafter you gain “Precision Aim,” “Barrage” and “Spin Attack.” Precision aim allows you to zoom in with a pistol in slow motion and shoot an enemy from long range. This ability is particularly fun due to the variety of death animations. You can shoot an enemy in the forehead and watch his eyes move to the top of his skull, or shoot a bullet at someone’s throat and see blood spray out of his mouth as he tries to scream. There’s the fan favorite — shooting a guy in the crotch and then observing one of the most painful looking things in the game. Barrage gives you unlimited ammo and invincibility for a limited amount of time so you can wreck carnage on your enemies. Finally Spin Attack kills all the enemies in the room with a short spiffy animation of Tequila spinning around and shooting like a mad man.

In order to use these Abilities you have to kill enemies, which builds up a green bar. There are four green bars in total — one green bar allows you to use Precision Aim, two lets you use Barrage, and three lets you do Spin Attack while Heal can be used whenever as long as you have some part of a green bar. While all the abilities are fun to use, they’re not all very practical. Spin Attack is too expensive while Precision Aim doesn’t have as much bang for your buck since you can only kill one enemy at a time. You’ll find yourself using Barrage and Heal more so than the other two abilities.

Along with the single player is a multiplayer component. Surprisingly the multiplayer is not half bad, but it’s not a multiplayer focused game. It’ll keep you interested for a few hours, but it’s nothing you’ll really want to invest much time in to. However, the game does have a very high replay value since a different amount of things can happen in a single fire fight during the single player. But anyway you slice it, you won’t be spending much time with Stranglehold due to its rather short length.

When you add up the abundance of action, intense shoot outs, enormous explosions, crazy stunts and large guns Stranglehold would be a very good action game if it came out two years ago or was only $40 dollars. If you’re a fan of crazy ridiculous action games and feel a need to play another one, then this is a game for you. If you’re looking for a good sequel to “Hard Boiled” you may just want to pick up the DVD.  There’s no thick plot or any real development of characters that makes you feel that John Woo was actually part of this game. If you’re short on cash and waiting for the big blockbuster games this Holiday Season, you may want to skip over this game. Stranglehold probably best serves as a rental unless you’re really into action games.