Published by: Bethesda Softworks
Developed by: Bethesda Game Studios
Formats: Xbox360, PS3, PC Played: Xbox360
My favourite game of 2008. I had this on release day but never really played it much and until playing this game Call of Duty W&W was my favourite game of 2008 until now. From the makers of Oblivion another classic and a game that would make my top 10 of all time, Fallout 3 plays pretty much the same. From the start you play as a baby and choose what your character will look like in future. The US is a devastated wasteland after a nuclear war, your character was born inside vault 101 a survival shelter designed to protect a number of humans for the nuclear fallout.
Not far into the game your Father leaves you and you decided to follow. Once out you will be amazed by the graphics of the wasteland, everything looks fantastic and you get that sense of being alone in the wastelands of America.
Along the way you visit small towns, mines, slave camps and much more as you fight off the enemies that inhabit the wastelands. The control system plays like Oblivion and has the same level up which allows you to gain new knowledge out of many skills which include science, lock pick, heavy and small gun etc etc. Each skill can be maximised to 100% and it’s up to you which skills you will want to learn and how to develop your character as you progress through the game.
There is a Karma level for your character which increases or decreases depending on the choices you make while in the wasteland. If you want to be a good guy just make the choices or vice versa if you want to play the bad guy. I myself chose to mix it up a bit depending on if I liked who I was working for.
You can use most food and drink found in the wasteland but the problem is everything outside the vault has radiation and this is another thing you will have to watch in your game, lucky enough you can pay a Doctor in some towns to cure your radiation poisoning at a certain price, he will also cure any addictions to medications you may pick up. All money is in Bottle Caps which you earn by completing missions, finding them in the wastelands or just selling items you have found.
Like Oblivion you can only carry so much, anything more and you will be unable to move quickly or fast travel. You can fast travel from location to location so long as you have found the location first on foot and there are no enemies around.
Through the game all options like stats, items weapons and maps will be on your pitboy, something issued to you at the start of the game. Another interesting point is you can also pick up people to assist you in some quests for a short time including your loyal dog Dogmeat if you find him. Dogmeat has been in previous games and if killed in battle he will be dead forever. This applies to any characters you meet in the game and this is my only problem. It’s nice to have things true to life but if I kill someone by accident that has a major role to play within the game to provide a quest later on if he is dead I can’t access that quest!
This game is huge, I have played over 60 hours and that’s not including the 3 downloadable content out. I won’t spoil any of the story but one more point I will cover is VATS. This stands for Vault Tec Assisted System and allows you at the touch of a button to choose a limb on any enemy you meet. You can choose the head, legs, arms, weapon or body. You can only use it a number of times but it will replenish slowly. Real-time combat is paused, and action is played out from varying camera angles in a computer graphics version of "bullet time," creating a combat system that the Bethesda developers have described as a hybrid between turn-based and real-time combat.
There are also two factions you can work for at the end of the game. One being the Brotherhood who you will notice around during the game and will help you from time to time so long as you don’t shoot at them.
Like I said at the start this is my favourite games of 2008 and although not as good as Oblivion it’s not far off.
This game gets 97%
The story and cut sense are very good slandered and entertaining throughout the game but the quick time events can be frustrating at times as they could be quite fast. The early stages when you have mini boss fights require you to finish off the bosses with quick time events but get it wrong and the boss regains half his health……………Half? It’s a bit much. The funny thing is that later in the game this no longer happens and any enemy you have to use quicktime events on still has it if you get it wrong.
As you power up the game gets easier and easier especially the end which is a little disappointing, also the length of the game is very short. I finished it in a day and a half and that’s only playing for a few hours.
This is the only problem with the game, its fun to play, a great story and I suppose it would have a replay value. My recommendation would be to start on Hard if you plan to go through it once. You can pick it up for £10 so it’s more then worth it for this price.
You can increase the adrenaline bar up to three times to max and this can be used for three individual takedowns or if you have three enemies around you, you could take them all out if you get the quicktime events right.
Shooting is another thing that annoys me in this game, aiming is slow and crap! When you take cover and then come away to shoot the aiming does not auto focus and by the time you have moved your sight the enemy has moved. Also sometimes you take a headshot and they will die straight away and other times it takes a few hits.
The last problem I have is while running away from enemies like in the Embassy level (Demo Level) while running away from shooters and you get into a fight once you defeat that enemy the camera is not always left in the way you were running sometimes you have turned around then once you finish you start running into trouble instead of away. Also maps are not always clear and to go back to a point just raised when you enter a one on one battle and there are shooters you can not break away from the fight and therefore you still get shot at and lose live.
The storyline pretty much follows the first film with some old missions included, the graphics are good and the gameplay when working can be fun to play but there are just too many issues. I wanted to like this game but it’s just full of frustrating moments and it’s way to short.
RE5 has taken a lot of ideas from RE4 like some of the boss battles and a guy with a chainsaw who takes way to many hits to kill. Most of the boss battles are fairly easy with a couple of exceptions but even these once worked out could be simple alas making a play through game much shorter to what is already a short game.
The fact you can not shoot and run at the same time brings some elements of fear but again this is taken away by the fact you have a partner covering your ass. The only time you truly feel vulnerable is if your partner runs of without you and you run into a spot of bother! Later in the game it will split you from your side kick but usually you can make it back to join them quickly or help them from a far!
I have yet to play Mercenaries and I will be going through this game again as Sheva who is played over the left shoulder.
There are a few parts in World at War that you can tell have been taken from COD4 which include a Sniper mission and also a Plane mission. Both are better in COD4 but these are still very good. There is also a tank mission like in some of the previous games however I found this very easy even on Veteran and never provided a challenge although I did get my Achievement for completing a level without dying and I felt great for getting it on a level on veteran.
I have yet to play this game on live, co-op and only briefly played on the Zombie extra mission at the end which lets you take on Zombie Nazi’s for points.
Although not a patch on COD4 this is still a very good game and high recommend by myself so If you like FPS consider this game.
You start off with a flower on screen which you will send wind in its direction to blow off a single petal. Once the petal is off you can control the speed of the wind by any buttons but I found it better using the analogue sticks as you can judge the power of the wind easier. The only other controls you need to then worry about is moving the controller left or right to go in those directions or roll forward to dive and roll back to gain height like a flight simulator. The controls are very easy to pick up and it does feel like you are flying and sometimes you forget you are controlling these petals.
Once you have your petals in control you can move over other flowers, everyone you pass will pick up an extra petal and join it to your excising petals. There are some flowers you have to go over and some that are extra, also there are hidden flowers in the game and also some areas where you can light up a single petal or briefly change the light to a colour e.g. Pink or Blue and then you can paint the grass to that colour.
Once you have lots of petals of all different colours the game really starts to shine as you can see the tail of petals following your main ones behind you as you turn.
There are 5 stages which can be completed in about 1 to 2 hours and each stage has its own music which like Rez changes as you collect petals (not saying that in Rez you collect petals but if you have played Rez you would know about the way the music changes). The music is relaxing and is tune with the style of the game.
There is a night level a wind farm and a City level to visit and I felt that the darker side of the game on level 4 was a bit disappointing but apart from that it really is a beautiful game and well worth the £6.29 download price tag from the PSN.
There are lots of bosses dotted around each level and also there are bigger bosses in the story and side quests.
The Towns are not as good as Final Fantasy towns and all shops can be found in the main street. Each town has separate areas you have to visit through a map screen featuring pubs, guilds, shops, a castle or palace and other places of interest or caves.
The map is pretty big and the game is played over two disks but it’s the side quests that will clock hours and not so much the story. I have played through doing all the side quests so I can not tell you how quick it would be to just go through the story on its own but it is worth levelling up to obtain better weapons, more money and EXP.
The bosses seem to be easier in the side quests then the ones in the story although I have read that because I levelled up so much the Bosses in the story have also levelled up gaining new and more powerful moves. I have yet to finish this game and currently on the final boss who can kick my ass with one super move which destroys all my characters. You will find that there is a lot of randomness in this game and that is what brings my score down on this game. Sometimes you ask the game to heal your characters and they will attack first then heal or you will ask them to bring your characters back to life but you can’t tell them which ones to bring back so they might bring back the ones you didn’t want. Even more annoying is later you can use a summon but when the summon dies it is still on screen so you might bring it back instead of your own team and the same goes for healing and this can cost you time and cant be avoided.
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