Fortunately Sega has FINALLY listened to the complaints, and for the first time in more than a decade delivered a Sonic game that fans of all ages should actually enjoy.

Despite being labeled as the second half of Sonic 4, Episode II is very much a standalone title; both in its lack of connection to Episode I and the fact that the entire engine has been rebuilt from the ground up. Gone is the shiny world of the original in favor of a new lighting system that delivers a more matte appearance. It’s a major change to the visual aesthetic that greatly increases immersion and delivers a more professional look. Sega has also taken the time to improve a number of animations that felt subpar, most notably Sonic’s “floaty” walk cycle. Where before it felt like Sonic was slide-walking on a frictionless surface, it now feels like his feet are firmly planted on the ground.

Speaking of planted feet, by far the biggest improvement to Episode II is the inclusion of a physics engine that understands the laws of videogame dynamics. In short: Spinny thing goes off cliff; Spinny thing keeps moving to the right as it drops. None of the “roll off the edge and drop like a rock of dark matter” garbage that made Episode I feel so awkward. You’ll also find that Sonic gains a significant amount of speed when rolling down hills, not just when running, and generally feels a lot closer to his Genesis version.

Sonic is still a bit slow when starting to run, but it takes significantly less time to get up to speed than it did in the previous episode, and there’s always the jump flip to quickly give you that initial boost. The homing attack, a much maligned staple of the Modern Sonic era, returns, but is primarily used as a means of attack, not platforming. This is possibly the best decision Sega has made as Homing Attack platforming has never been fun and often led to great frustrations.

New to Episode II is the inclusion of Miles “Tails” Prower as a companion, and the introduction of Tag Actions. Jump into the air, press the Tag button (X button on X360) and Tails will grab hold of Sonic and carry him into the sky, just like in Sonic 3. It’s incredibly convenient for both exploring and crossing huge gaps, but can be a bit tricky to use as the amount of time you can lift Sonic before Tails starts to tire seems horribly inconsistent.

Sometimes it’s five vertical lifts, other times it’s seven, and still other times it feels like you can fly forever so long as you float for a bit between lifts. It’d be easier to understand if there were some sort of gauge or indicator, but there’s not and you have to do it entirely on feel and luck. In addition to “Fly”, Tails can also use a swimming Tag Action to quickly carry Sonic through underwater segments and “Rolling Combo” to merge with Sonic and form a giant spinning ball of death that bowls through enemies and some walls. Both are incredibly useful and open up new options for platforming.

Like its predecessor, Episode II consists of four zones, each containing three acts and one boss fight; and one final zone that features only one of each. However unlike its predecessor these zones are actually new areas and not just rehashes of older material. The only exception is Sky Fortress Zone, which is basically Sky Chase Zone from Sonic 2. While not as large as the zones of Sonic 3, they are by no means small and always offer at least 2-3 different paths of travel.

Hidden within each stage is a Red Ring. While the ring itself does not appear to do anything, it does offer a collection incentive and encourages players to explore, rather than just bolting to the end. To make searching for the ring a little safer Episode II has adopted the warning signs from Sonic Generations, letting you know if the pit you’re about to jump into is safe or will result in instant death. It’s a small addition, but a good one. As per the norm, collecting 50 rings and then crossing the finish post will grant you access to the Special Stages, which play almost identical to the stages from Sonic 2.

Despite doing a number of things right, Episode II is not without its faults, namely the games’ ridiculously slow boss battles. First you have to race through the stage collecting about 50 rings. Then you encounter the boss, who goes into a startup animation that can take upwards of 30 seconds. Then you hit the boss once and he goes into an invincibility state where you may not be able to hit him for some time. Repeat until eight hits are delivered and throw in at least one more long animation after you deliver the seventh blow. In the case of the Oil Desert boss this can become extremely annoying and draw the fight out to well over five minutes. Worse still, you have to replay these animations every time you restart the fight, so if you die you can expect to watch that 30 second startup animation all over again. Most games have enough common sense to skip long animations if you’re going to be seeing them for a second time, but not Episode II. It’s a major point of frustration, especially if the boss is giving you trouble.

In addition to the solid single-player mode, Episode II also brings back co-op play, though its execution leaves much to be desired. Unlike the co-op modes of past, where Sonic was the primary focus and no one really cared if Tails lived or died, Episode II tries to level the playing field by placing an equal focus on both players. The result is, to put it mildly, a mess. The game tries to keep both players on screen by zooming out, but after it gets to a medium range it just teleports one player to the other, often the one that is further ahead, but not necessarily on the correct path. Using tag actions also causes the non-initiating player to be teleported, as does pressing the call button. While this is occasionally useful, for the most part it’s just super awkward. It may be fun for a quick laugh, but unless you’re playing with your exact double I’d recommend avoiding it.

Soncis 4: Episode II is without a doubt the best 2D Sonic game to come out in a decade. Is it perfect? No. But it manages to achieve the proper blend of classic and modern Sonic that no other game, including Sonic Generations, has been able to achieve. If you love the hedgehog it’s definitely worth a playthrough.

Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II

Developer
Sonic Team, Dimps

Publisher
Sega

System
Xbox 360 (Xbox LIVE Arcade), PlayStation 3 (PlayStation Network), PC, iOS (Xbox LIVE Arcade Reviewed)

Modes
Singleplayer, Co-op

Release Date
May 15, 2012

Price
$14.99 PS3 / PC, 1200 Microsoft Points, $6.99 iOS

*A copy of this title was provided by the publisher for review

Knowing they are not long for this world, and that the sight of said bombs bursting in air will bring much enjoyment to others, they decide to record themselves while confined in a framework made of random household objects tied together, and stylishly fling their bodies at these bombs in one last mutually destructive hurrah.

The strangest part is that most of the above is actually true. In fact, one of the prominent features of The Splatters is the ability to upload and share your most splatter-filled runs with others, through the Splatter TV feature, which functions as both a ceaseless supply of colorful snuff films and a tutorial for how to perform particularly dazzling chains of tricks.

I mentioned Angry Birds earlier, but only because this game also features colorful mascots with annoying voices who get launched with reckless abandon in order to complete a level for which the player will be awarded up to three stars based on his or her score, but honestly, The Splatters is a different game, and for the better.

For example, the quickest way to hate The Splatters is to walk into it thinking you’re supposed to launch them directly at the bombs, when in reality, the goal is to perform a bunch of tricks in order to build up enough speed to burst upon impact with a nearby barrier, showering all the bombs, scenery, and fellow Splatters with the colorful liquid inside.

Not unlike Super Meat Boy, the player’s multiple failures are documented in the form of staining the level with bits of the characters, which is interesting, as The Splatters also lends itself to the idea of repeatedly trips through a level.

The game sports a rewind function that is as intriguing as its name is deceptive. Time still moves forward, and objects retain all of their momentum gained or lost, but the direction of every moving object switches to its exact opposite. The game’s respect for the laws of physics and utter disregard for those of time travel take some getting used to, but they lend themselves to some of the most complex tricks in the game; rewinds turn slides into halfpipes and Splatters into wacky extend-o-hands that reach across a level to engulf a bomb, only to fling the both of them back to a more favorable area of the level with the mere press of a trigger button.

Certainly, the myriad of tricks that can (and must) be performed in The Splatters has a learning curve tied to it, but then it becomes an arsenal that can be used to clear a level in any number of ways, and not just the one hinted at by the come-hither gold trinkets that light the suggested path like so many coins, bananas, or golden rings.

Speaking of golden rings, in The Splatters, you really do “gotta go fast” – the game has a crazy sense of speed that is reflected not only in its visuals and sound, but also in its gameplay; take too much time to consider a shot, and the combo multiplier will reset. This, in theory, is a great way to raise the tempo of the game, but unfortunately, this combo timer continues while, after clearing a level, more Splatters and bombs are being set up, requiring the player to either memorize a level’s setup or blindly perform any trick as soon as the level is set up just to keep the combo going.

There is something about the characters’ faces in The Splatters that makes me want to punch them if it didn’t mean getting my hand covered in a bunch of goop in the process, but maybe that is part of the reason that it is so fun to launch them all to their explosive deaths. If you’re a fan of distorted physics or colorful things exploding, this is definitely a title worth checking out.

The Splatters

Developer
SpikySnail Games

Publisher
Microsoft Game Studios

System
Xbox 360 (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

Modes
Singleplayer

Release Date
April 11, 2012

Price
800 Microsoft Points

*A copy of this title was provided by the publisher for review

Players begin as an unknown victim, looking up at Ryu before suddenly finding themselves able to control his movements – leaping from a balcony to slice into an enormous glowing deity with a series of obligatory quick-time prompts in tow. This quick sequence of events will make sense once players have come full circle, chasing a well financed doomsday cult across the globe, but it did little to ease the cynicism I admittedly brought to Team Ninja’s latest addition to the Ninja Gaiden franchise, and seemed to give merit to the scorn critics have been heaping on the title since its release.

However, the game shifts gears rather quickly, with Ryu responding to a terrorist group demanding his presence, and leaping into the streets of London to slice through the first of many soldiers offered two days of fast paced action I’ve gladly sunk my blade into.

This doesn’t entirely take away from complaints that the title is too straightforward and simplistic – because it definitely is – but rather that the truth of those accusations offers up an experience that is still inviting. Setting the game to normal difficulty presented some occasional bottlenecks, particularly during later stages, and aside from evading or blocking before slashing repeatedly, the nearly non-existent learning curve allowed me to keep the momentum of the story moving along quite nicely, which was appreciated since I actually enjoyed the story – no one is more shocked than I am about that.

There are plenty of legitimate complaints to lodge throughout the experience, and yet this straightforward affair finds a still pleasurable balance between ludicrous action sequences that feel empowering and overwhelming swarms of enemies that are often rather satisfying to slash a path through.

And insofar as others have no complaints about running around with Nathan Drake as he shoots countless mercenaries ad nausea whilst solving a few puzzles before wrapping up another adventure, I’ve still found a reasonable amount of entertainment on this trip with Ryu as he slices through helicopters, spider tanks and an obligatory dinosaur.

The Lords of Alchemy are intent on ushering in a perfect new world by extinguishing the existing one, which kicks off a series of stages that take Ryu across the world, from major cities to secret research facilities, and even a visit to Ryu’s village. Standing between Ryu and his objective are waves of soldiers, often appearing in thick pockets of armed resistance, which will require players to wear the symbols off at least two controller buttons while clearing the path forward.

Ryu has two primary sword attacks, with most situations working a light attack and occasional confrontations requiring a heavier swing of the blade. As enemies swarm around Ryu, the player’s responsibility is evading or blocking incoming attacks and responding with one of these two options – while maybe throwing a few daggers from time to time. The game’s primary agenda is to present a pocket of enemies, leave the player to grind through them for 15-20 minutes, and then sheath Ryu’s sword as players move forward and automatically regenerate health before encountering the next wave.

Rather than decapitating or slicing limbs off enemies, players will find opponents ready to take an impressive amount of damage, becoming more bloodied as Ryu slices into them. As a result, when you have ten or so enemies surrounding you, blood will be the key means of keeping track of which enemies are closest to staying down for good, because they really do like to pick a gun back up as soon as possible. Ryu can literally slice into enemies, bringing steel against bone, hammering a button prompt harder to cut through for more extensive damage, as well as finish off enemies who were going to fall down and die if only given an extra moment to do so.

Enemies vary from soldiers with guns, rocket launchers and blades of their own, to attack dogs, freakish genetic monsters, monk like warriors, and a few demonic creations I couldn’t hope to give a name too.

The game struggles to break up bouts of combat with scripted direction, sequences where Ryu needs to wall jump or perform a Kunai climb – holding both triggers to stick to a wall and then alternating taps of each to ascend it. Most often the game will use helicopter gunships, which are always happy to appear and fire off a barrage of missiles to change Ryu’s course through a stage. It isn’t long before Ryu receives a bow, allowing him to fire back and jump into the air to gain a brief slowdown and auto-target advantage.

Since all of this sounds straightforward, I guess I’d better get on with what I found enjoyable.

Despite the familiarity of the formula, there’s a progressive rise of difficulty and balance that kept me playing – I suppose what I like about this is that it feels balanced while repetitious, as if there’s nearly always just enough variety and numbers in enemy ranks to push my health to the limits, but see me emerge victorious in the end. Anytime you hack and slash there’s a certain exhaustion that passes from the controller to the mind and body – somewhere in that mix, I still felt like I was working to survive these encounters.

Enemy variety leads to different concerns during battle – if you ignore someone with a blade, they’ll likely stab you, but if you ignore someone with a machinegun you’ll find yourself riddled with bullets. While dancing to the same old song, I was constantly scanning the area for the most lethal threat, and anytime I didn’t, I quickly found myself taking heavy damage for the ignorance. This often made the same pocket of enemies a changing threat that played out with subtle differences depending on what I focused on during replays, including a certain element of recurring chance when I scored lucky strikes.

Performing repeated strikes that leave enemies bloodied but whole is a strange shift, but it’s clear that Team Ninja attempts to convince a greater sense of the physical by having players hammer a button to saw into opponents. The effort isn’t entirely unsuccessful, but remains a curious change of direction all the same.

Between these sessions the game would suddenly spring a surprise helicopter attack, or simply leave me on a rooftop to contend with one – dodging missile barrages while I hurriedly tried to fire back arrows. And then Ryu would gain an opportunity to leap from the building and slice through the helicopter with his sword, landing on the wing and waiting for a chance to strike at a gunpod. As much as I loathe quick-time events, they do convey a sense of the physical. Ryu isn’t opening a jar of pickles, he’s stabbing a monster in the brain, and I have to admit that light use of these sequences wins me over and offers a welcomed break from the grind of regularly scheduled combat.

While the game is very linear in direction, offering no pickups or skills to really master along the way, the first half of the title is well scripted. The first three quarters of the game offer interesting set-pieces and introduces a series of increasingly difficult enemies that offer patterned attacks to recognize and respond to. For better or worse, I found myself caught up in the pacing and hurriedly chewing through enemies to discover what the game might still have left to throw at me. While the last two stages devolve into terribly familiar patterns to stretch out the play, I was already too invested to surrender.

Team Ninja seeks to explore the humanity of Ryu, who is cursed very early in the game, with the dragon blade absorbed into his body and poisoning him with the blood of all the lives it has taken. The most immediate effect is your arm will glow red when you’ve killed enough enemies, allowing you to unleash a rage attack that will automatically cause Ryu to slice through some of the constant herd surrounding you.

The other side of this is that Team Ninja is interested in exploring Ryu, but also slightly baffled toward how they might accomplish that goal. There’s a consistent conflict between the idea of Ryu as a bloodthirsty monster, and as an honorable man keeping a promise to a young girl. The closest Team Ninja comes to drawing something interesting from the idea is when the player holds down a trigger to carry the child while hideous mutations jump at them, but beyond this, the morality falls entirely to cinematics that hope to imply many things Team Ninja can’t seem to find ways to convey within the play.

Ninja Gaiden 3’s most notable void is that it seems to simply forget the ninja element very early on. While Team Ninja wants to take the series in a new direction, the result is a series of half explored ideas and mechanics that briefly appear, only to be quickly forgotten. For instance, Ryu can walk slowly behind an unsuspecting enemy to perform a stealth kill. But while the game advises players to give this technique a try early on, the option simply vanishes as no further opportunities to use this knowledge appear throughout the game.

The same neglect attaches itself to the Kunai climb and wall running, which never find means to feature in the grinding combat. The only means of breaking up grind sessions is to jump into the air to fire off arrows, which is admittedly useful for dealing with snipers and exposing cloaked enemies. While this doesn’t result in a shorter gaming experience, it does lend to an idea that stages could have had a more developed series of challenges, but for some reason fell back to repetitious combat. So I can’t deny loyal fans have reason to complain, because it is clear that there was much more intended versus what was delivered by the final product.

Boss battles are the only time the game convinces a sense of being a ninja, where blades often meet and players will find it necessary to wake up to the art of blocking and evading attacks while waiting for a window in which to strike. There are brief moments where a larger enemy might charge and give players cause to slide underneath them while slicing at their belly – memorable but short lived.

The game includes online modes that allow players to work alone or with a friend to grind through enemies, scoring higher when meeting certain kill requests. The grind of the story mode takes away any real emphasis for spending time here however. What is slightly more interesting are clan battles, where players can simply tear into one another online, using stealth ninja walks to cloak themselves and hammering buttons to win decisive strikes – though likely not interesting enough to encourage repeated visits.

Ninja Gaiden 3 falls far short of meeting expectations toward setting a new agenda for the series, and yet the safe route presents an opportunity for a wider audience to sample a franchise that may have previously intimidated many with the legend of its merciless difficulty.

The final stretch of Ninja Gaiden 3’s story runs short on even basic ideas and fresh assets, but maintains a momentum that encourages completion. This is far from the worst action game one could drop money on, but also a poor contender for longevity. With that said and stressed, the linear direction and absence of complicated controls does offer a title that is easy to fall into, and perhaps finds sympathy from me because even decent action experiences seem harder to come by these days. Simply put, Ninja Gaiden’s most pedestrian offering still delivers an enjoyable experience.

Ninja Gaiden 3 is certainly a shallow experience, and my enjoyment of it may say something shallow about me. But there simply aren’t many action offerings that are this easy to pickup and feature production values of this caliber, so that even when the game dips into tedium near the end, I never regretted the time invested.

Maybe it’s shallow of me to admit that just this once, I was fine with not learning complex chains and moves, with a game I could come back to a week later and not feel it necessary to run through tutorials again. As such, the game leaves the door wide open for anyone looking for a quick action experience, and while I certainly grasp why many fans and critics would rather Team Ninja explore this with a different IP, I can’t deny that there’s a reasonable amount of fun to be had in the blood and carnage being offered here.

Ninja Gaiden 3

Developer
Team Ninja

Publisher
Tecmo Koei

System
PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 (Xbox 360 Reviewed)

Modes
Singleplayer, Multiplayer

Release Date
March 20, 2012

*A copy of this title was provided by the publisher for review

The joint 2D side-scrolling shooter from Digital Reality and Grasshopper Manufacture places the emphasis entirely on that flickering flame, with a time clock often reserved for boss battles in other shooters continually ticking down throughout the entirety of this game.

Make no mistake, every second within Sine Mora counts, because allowing time to slip away is the only way to die.

While the lush scenery encourages taking in the sights, players must keep a constant eye on the countdown clock ticking away at the top of the screen. Rather than taking traditional damage from enemy fire, hits subtract time from this clock. The immediate solution is to earn extra time by quickly destroying the waves of opponents invading the screen, with even the smallest of these adversaries able to unleash large spreads of brightly colored bullets seeking to punch the player’s clock. Dispatching enemies also provides a wealth of pickups to grab between the bullets, including additional time bonuses.

Weapon pickups supply a powerful sub-weapon unique to each pilot that players take flight with, such as wide laser bursts, cluster bomb type attacks, and an energy sword. The player’s primary fire provides a gauge to fill with pickups to increase power, and though taking damage will result in players losing spheres from that gauge, these float away to offer a chance for quick fingers to reclaim them. Additional pickups include score bonuses and a shield that becomes briefly active after collisions.

Keeping time on the mind, there is also a capsule pickup that fills a blue meter, which slows down time as long as players hold the trigger or until the gauge depletes. This is essentially Matrix bullet time for shooters, offering a chance to slip through complex bullet patterns and reclaim lost fire pickups, or simply providing more time to focus fire on the core components of larger enemies.

Separating itself further from other entries in the shooter genre, Sine Mora is strongly guided by narrative, featuring a complex tale of time manipulation that follows a father’s attempt to save his son and another pilot’s quest to save her people. Told with Hungarian audio and English subtitles, each mission is bookended by some rather heavy philosophical monologues about the nature of time, and provides some small insights into this Imperial ruled world seemingly populated entirely by animal-people.

The flow of narrative also features heavily in the play of each chapter of Sine Mora, with each of those chapters broken into multiple stage segments to provide missions directly advancing the story. Because narrative segments and scenarios play out during missions, players are given the option to fast forward through conversations rather than skipping them entirely – this isn’t the most eloquent solution for those looking to immediately get to the business of bullets, but the setup is hardwired into the game’s story mode.

Creating multiple stages for chapters means that players will travel between vastly changing landscapes rather quickly, moving from clear blue skies to fiery industrial zones and then suddenly diving below the water to navigate caverns. And though I’m accustomed to longer stretches of play through larger areas, it’s hard to complain with the results here, which allow the game to continually deliver burst action sequences without delay. This also means that waves of enemies and patterns don’t replicate ad nausea simply to keep the clock alive with fresh kills, opting instead to drop the player into tightly designed kill zones. The shorter stage approach also provides space for more varied environments, with each path leading to one of Sine Mora’s numerous boss encounters.

The boss battles of Sine Mora borrow inspiration from anime, science-fiction and military designs to create a dizzying amount of opponents that are simultaneously familiar and yet freshly imagined through the gloss of the game’s dieselpunk dressings. The term might leave you imagining Mad Max as a shooter anime in the sky, and though it certainly implies an idea of a loud and messy world, much of Sine Mora’s lovely scenery is incredibly pristine, from island locations to an Imperial megalopolis. At the end of the day, dieselpunk means whatever Grasshopper and Digital want it to mean, but there’s certainly space to suggest it is much like steampunk, sans the steam and with a heavier emphasis on mounting weaponry everywhere possible.

Many boss encounters provide large scale but typical military fare, from airships and submarines to battleships and a cargo train, each hiding a plethora of weapons waiting to take players down. But there are also mad anime designs at play, from a giant mechanized robot warrior and enormous insects to construction equipment that will eagerly swing chains and saws at the player while also opening fire.

At one point you’ll fly inside a mega-structure, trying not to crash while waiting for it to rotate with you to shoot power cores, with the game constantly seeking to stress a sense of the physical, particularly with enemies that can push or pull the player.

The scale of boss encounters causes several to split into sections, with a few of these bosses too massive in scale to fit entirely on the screen, and leaving the player to cut through defensive sections before reaching the core. This means that fast hands can overcome sections rather quickly, though every inch of these bosses unleash as many bullets as possible in the shortest amount of time.

When you’re done chewing through the main story, the game also offers boss training modes, score attack, and an arcade mode – the latter offering a notorious “insane” difficulty setting for those in a hurry to crash and burn.

Arcade mode offers a chance to fly through individual stage environments with planes and pilots from the story mode, including their unique secondary weapons.

Arcade mode also presents new options with the time capsule, which can still be used to create the bullet time effect, but can also be changed to allow players to use the capsule gauge to deflect incoming fire, or turn back the clock for a chance to erase fatal mistakes – offering a staggering amount of possibilities to meet your quick fix shooter needs that a helpful screen will keep track of.

While many studios hope to earn the loyalty of the shooter faithful, it’s very rare for a console designed shooter to deliver on the level that Sine Mora does. It’s far more often the case that several of the elements necessary fail to achieve a balance that merits long term admiration or commitment, from the visual and audio to the bullet patterns, enemy designs and tactile sense of interaction.

The visual fidelity here lacks an easily named equal, with gorgeous backdrops of naturalized beauty and gritty industrial areas equally overrun with stunningly designed military machinery, playing out a familiar game against audio composed by Akira Yamaoka. Every mobile unit shows accentuated design flare and unleashes patterns of fire that earn placement with offerings from legendary lords of the genre like Treasure and Cave.

But Sine Mora isn’t important simply because it’s the prettiest stranger at the dance this year, though it certainly is one of the best looking shooters you’re likely to see anytime soon on the 360. There’s never any sense that corners were cut during the production, with small ideas emerging within stages beyond a time manipulation system that encourages the curious to take flight at the same time as giving shooter fans fresh options to master.

Like many great artistic accomplishments, Sine Mora borrows a plethora of varied elements to create an entirely unique atmosphere in a way that makes you forget the bits that inspire it – that makes you believe the entire effort emerged from a vortex of brilliance. And in pushing the expectations for the genre and digital distribution simultaneously, Sine Mora easily joins the very best shooters available, and is unquestionably one of the finest shooters ever created specifically for a console.

Sine Mora

Developer
Grasshopper Manufacture, Digital Reality

Publisher
Microsoft

System
Xbox 360 (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

Modes
Singleplayer

Release Date
March 21, 2012

Price
1200 Microsoft Points

*A copy of this title was provided by the publisher for review

I suppose Silent Hill is a bit like the town Freud might have built, where the subconscious takes physical shape and the only way to survive the demonic torture chamber unleashed is to shine light on the darkest recesses of the mind, exposing what visitors have failed to resolve on their own and desperately tried to bury.

The earliest visits to Silent Hill began with physical searches, whether it was Harry Mason searching for his lost daughter, or James Sunderland chasing the chance to see his wife again. That latter search set the bar for a series about people burdened by the past, forced through a cathartic process while wandering those streets. It’s a legacy that frames Silent Hill as a twisted parental hand that isn’t really trying to kill people, but rather, attempting to heal them.

Silent Hill is a psychological meat grinder, with people going in one end and the crank slowly turning to show the raw meat at the heart of each. It isn’t surprising that the premise has created formulaic entries in recent years, such as 2008’s Homecoming, which seemed to create a patchwork quilt from previous releases. But 2009 saw the release of Shattered Memories, which attempted to include the player in the analytical process, and regardless of your feelings toward that release, that experiment created a Silent Hill title that was unquestionably unique.

There are times that Downpour appears to bridge the gap between those points, mixing familiar mechanics and mind games to find brief moments that feed on the player to create some space for empathy with the trials of convict Murphy Pendleton. But as the truth about Murphy comes to light, the complicated narrative misses any opportunity to truly create a character that earns enduring sympathy or comprehension.

After surviving the crash of his prison transport bus, Murphy finds himself at the outskirts of Silent Hill, and the fresh setting seems to open possibilities as developer Climax plays up jump-fright moments. Murphy’s first encounter with the screamer witches that litter the game comes as one suddenly pounces on him, an event that found me often using the button dedicated solely to looking over Murphy’s shoulder.

Player’s will reunite with the familiar as well, insofar as a sometimes clumsy combat system is concerned. Murphy can pick up various objects scattered around areas, from fire axes and crowbars to rocks should you find yourself desperate for a weapon. When enemies start swinging furiously at Murphy, players can block incoming attacks, but the dance often involves backing off momentarily before closing in for a heavy swing of whatever blunt object you may be wielding.

Since weapons will wear and break overtime, swapping them along the way becomes essential, and there’s never any shortage of available objects, except for those times the game intends there to be for specific reasons. Firepower takes the form of the sometimes available shotgun and pistol, which also make suitable melee weapons in a pinch. While combat lacks eloquence, there’s a certain brutal adrenaline rush as Murphy knocks enemies down and has the option to deliver fatal blows that leave him visibly winded for a moment.

When not exploring dilapidated rooms for clues and puzzles, or breaking locks and boarded up passageways, Murphy will sometimes find himself temporally transported to Silent Hill’s “other realm”, which shares a certain visual relationship with Hellraiser – complete with screaming corpses inside cages and spikes mounted everywhere imaginable. During these sequences, a malevolent dark void will appear and pursue Murphy, forcing players to dash through endless hallways that offer small mazes ahead of an exit. Escape will often spit Murphy out at the next plot point as he moves through the landscape of Silent Hill and deeper into his own secretive past.

Downpour continually shifts gears, from chase sequences and forced scenarios where Murphy is exploring a particular location, to the open streets of Silent Hill where players are suddenly cut loose to wander around the abandoned homes and given the option to tackle side-quests. All the while enemies roam the streets, randomly appearing during the search. Grabbing at the reasoning behind the game’s title, Downpour uses recurring rain storms as a threat, drawing out larger groups of enemies who are more dangerous during the rain, which is understandable given that no one likes to be wet, and also making it advisable to get off the streets entirely rather than fetching an umbrella.

While the side-quests don’t offer an opportunity to learn much about the town or Murphy, there is a curious cathartic act in performing some of the good deeds they encourage, whether returning stolen goods to rooms in an apartment building, or releasing caged birds. But while there are plenty of papers and scraps of information about the former inhabitants, there’s no real connection to make with another living soul here.

It’s worth a thought or two, because freeing a bird was something I did simply because the option was there, lacking any narrative significance and offering little toward a better understanding of Murphy. There were countless times I activated switches or grabbed objects simply because Downpour is a videogame, and in a videogame you should horde items and hit switches. The game never manages to use narrative to drive purpose, and for every good fright or idea it has, it follows the cookie-cutter guide to making Silent Hill enough times to wear down good impressions.

There are early moments in downpour that kept me optimistic, whether the game was testing to see how long I’d run down an endless corridor, or asking me to orchestrate a school play to suddenly find the set come alive and my search leading me inside a gingerbread house. Downpour isn’t short on ideas that stand out in my memory, but it is hard up for tying them together. Rather than a cohesive experience, there are fragments worth mentioning, such as the Dolls – phantom women that haunt the hollow bodies of bloody mannequins and force Murphy to smash those porcelain frames to bits.

But again, for every good idea Downpour has, it seems to drop it as quickly as it comes, often devolving into a situation where the player is grinding through areas that seem to stretch on forever. Players will enter a building, fight a series of enemies and solve a puzzle, and then enter another part of the building to do the same thing all over again. And the tricky bit is that there would be nothing wrong with that if any of these actions carried the weight of an unfolding narrative. Searching the wrecked rooms and constantly using the map to guide myself through Silent Hill is a task I’ve gladly accepted in the past in order to learn more about the characters involved.

But as the story progresses, facts remain vaguely wrapped in shadows. Murphy blames himself for the loss of his son, but the secretive manner in which the game treats that loss never allows the truth to really unfold – we learn Murphy has murdered someone responsible, and yet still blames himself above others, but we never really feel the weight of that layered guilt. The player is asked to accept the significance of these events and relationships because they simply should. The sticky bit of this complaint is that every Silent Hill game is secretive, but the most successful releases offer juicy bits of character insight to chew on long after the playing is over, a consideration that is entirely absent here. Eager fans might dig deeper, but there’s very little dirt to dig through before one is simply grasping at straws.

There’s barely any mention of the life Murphy had or the mother of his lost son. Murphy remains a strong silent character who apparently finds means to put his anger to rest in Silent Hill, but for the life of me I couldn’t tell you how or why – I get that Murphy accepts that vengeance is wrong, but the realization feels forced and hollow. Instead of introducing characters from his life, or based on his life, we chase a girl who knows secrets, I assume because horror games should always have one of those. Any chance to create a link between the player and Murphy seems to be ignored in favor of physical manifestations based entirely on notions of law and order and rather straightforward ideas of right and wrong.

And then as Murphy apparently achieves peace, we are suddenly presented with the weight of the female prison officer in pursuit of him since the crash, the game then digging up links attempting to explain why she’s been so completely hostile. And laying the foundation for the link between these two characters sacrifices defining either one of them in a way that makes me care, and the truth becomes such a matter of fact that the only resolutions come from properly laying blame for the past rather than really understanding or resolving it.

The hesitation to develop the complicated plot further leaves Downpour serving up elements of Silent Hill like a Silent Hill sampler versus a game with definitive direction and purpose – though the game thankfully skips any cameos from Pyramid Head. Character relationships make or break a Silent Hill game, determining whether I invest myself in those misty streets, or just grind toward the end as a chore.

Every now and again the game will present a challenge or idea that shines brilliantly, and the frustrating bit is that the developers seem to immediately back away from those accomplishments, as if the content is somehow mimicking the same strong silent nature of its protagonist. It’s aggravating because of how often the atmosphere can work, how often the tension shows on Murphy’s face and encourages me to ignore the occasionally hiccupping visuals, or how often the lonesome songs playing on the radio add to the sense of isolation and loneliness pervading the experience – at least until enemies being appearing so often that they lose any air of initial dread.

Of the few characters within the game, the friendly postman suggests that Murphy simply accept the situation, because “this isn’t about what you want.” The advice still lingered on my mind after reaching the end of Downpour, and I think it’s the most apt summation of the experience. If you’re willing to accept that this is Silent Hill and that you should just “go with it”, you may discover plenty of elements to enjoy along the way. But as a title justifying the continuation of the most significant horror franchise in gaming, Downpour is more likely to leave you out in the cold and has little to no long term value to offer players or the series.

Silent Hill: Downpour

Developer
Vatra Games

Publisher
Konami Digital Entertainment

System
Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 (Xbox 360 Reviewed)

Modes
Singleplayer

Release Date
March 13, 2012

*A copy of this title was provided by the publisher for review

Holding your own hands out defensively, the figures taunt you while closing in, offering only a few choice seconds to decide which target is worth the solitary bullet in your pistol.

So what are you going to do, Mr. Would-Be Hero?

Perhaps taking down the toughest of the bunch will cause the other two to surrender, though they might suspect you have no more bullets and rush in for the kill. Or maybe you’ll accidentally pull the trigger and give the game away with the hollow click of an empty chamber. Recurring combat situations constitute a tense game of poker in the post-apocalyptic streets, where roving gangs guard their territory like hungry dogs.

With an emphasis on survival, players are never allowed to feel confident, twisting the notion that finding survivors offers a sight for sore eyes in the grey and lonely world on display. Having more than a single bullet occasionally allows one to feel like a millionaire, but the only reliable rule is that shooting an attacker who also has a gun will, at the very least, allow you to claim another shell from that weapon.

Players can often wait for an attacker to approach with a confident grin before using their machete for a sneak attack throat slice, which helps even the odds before falling into another game of gun bluff. Of course, thugs armed with guns will shoot without question, and every encounter becomes something of a puzzle rather than a traditional test of marksmanship.

Drawing the pistol allows players to auto-target enemies, demanding that they back off. Some of them will and some of them won’t, and eliminating those that challenge you is essential to survival. With bullets at a scarce premium, everyone becomes a waste of ammo.

This game within a game commands attention, because it’s such a constantly changing variable and unique examination of the realities of the situation that the developers are able to simply pepper the game with groups of villains to break up the fetch questing nature of the story. And this game of chance that leaves players sniffing out the toughest in the bunch rarely wears thin throughout the five hour experience.

Acrobatic climbing serves as a counterpart to combat, whether players are scaling buildings to reach a goal, or simply attempting to escape the deadly dust of the streets that constantly drains stamina. But fleeing the tension of the street doesn’t offer such a free breath of air, with the stamina gauge ensuring that players remain ever mindful of their limitations.

Stamina and health are represented by a straightforward bar at the top of the screen, with exertive acts temporally draining stamina. While standing or walking on solid ground will allow stamina to recover, exhaustive acts will shorten the bar and require players to use supplies to stretch it out again. The toxic plume of the street will also drain the bar, and reaching higher ground is the only means of recovery. This means that climbing requires players to find the shortest routes possible, constantly in need of a safe break point to recover or risk falling to their death. It also means that scaling halfway up a building with only half a stamina bar can quickly spell disaster, but supplies are never as scarce as people on the street might have you believe.

The game also offers players climbing pitons, which can be used in the middle of a climb to create a recovery point for stamina and offer a moment to strategize during longer climbs. Players will eventually receive a grappling hook as well, though this provides a means of traveling backwards after reaching a goal rather than offering any really fresh opportunities to explore the collapsing infrastructure.

Climbing through this crumbling urban play park offers the chance to scale at least one immense structure though, a skyscraper where players will crawl through hallways and then pop outside to use railings and ledges to climb ever hire before reaching the top. And then when you reach a floor and find thugs looking for a fight, the two halves come together rather splendidly.

The dense fog of the city reminds me of Silent Hill, but leaves me stunned at how many ideas are being turned over for a new spin here – not dramatically mind you, but with enough of a tweak to create a game not easily compared to any other release in recent memory. With that said, be aware that there are many problems at work in the stitching that salvages this game for digital distribution – from graphical hiccups to at least one checkpoint error that set me back further than I’d have liked when so close to the end of the game.

Most issues are far from game breaking, but certainly undermine the atmosphere with the lack of polish that often finds you somehow climbing onto an object while slightly next to it. The tricky bit of complaining here is that the elements worth attention outshine the most polished efforts of more standard releases on the platform.

I Am Alive is the story of a man simply looking for his family after a catastrophic event, documenting his search with a camcorder diary to leave a record behind should he fail. It never quite has the time or depth to capture the desperation of his search, but achieves an entirely different emotional range in the events that delay that quest. As players are given the chance to help some survivors cling to an idea of life, and as they move from the cold streets to the warming fires, there’s an unsettling achievement that is at times earnestly chilling.

Not every survivor of “The Event” that has devastated this world is looking for a fight. Some people huddle by fires and take aim to simply protect themselves, while others are looking for some shred of kindness in a world degrading into animalistic survival. This is where the game falls short of reaching greater heights though, offering zero long term investment with that world or the people still inhabiting it.

Players can help stray survivors to earn a retry point, which are admittedly useful but also a bit of a bribe for forcing acts of kindness. Helping survivors will cause them to babble on a bit about life, but ultimately devolve into a quick “hello” and “goodbye” that falls far short of establishing any emotional bonds with players. This isn’t necessarily the worst complaint, given that I wanted to invest more of myself in the atmosphere of that world, but is also why the environment feels plenty flat, offering little to explore in the piles of rubble and making most objects equivalent to bags of cement for all the interaction available.

And yet there’s an incredible atmosphere that grabs at the dog eared paperback feel of the content. The desperate fight for supplies to sustain life never really takes shape to get the point across, and yet a great deal is offered with quick flashes and hints, from strange meat that suggests acts of cannibalism to a hotel where women are forced into sexual submission for a ruling gang.

A pile of bones or hanging corpse in certain areas can suggest so much about the men you encounter nearby, that it drives a desire to cut them down and subtlety draws out connections with the player that the forced moments of narrative can’t hope to accomplish.

The game still sinks into a series of chapter based fetch missions, where players are dispatched to achieve “x” or “y” in order to reach an ending that doesn’t really fire on all cylinders. Ubisoft’s cinematic story sequences, which are told through camcorder recordings meant to reach a solemn and thought provoking ending don’t achieve a fraction of what simply exploring the world within does.

I’m left with a mixed appraisal given that the short ride and limited replay value hardly prioritizes the purchase – but I Am Alive is simply so damn interesting at times that everyone with a controller needs to take a walk through the streets of this devastated world. If you’re interested and willing to wander around those ruined streets, there are plenty of ideas to chew on in the play, along with a fantastic amount of potential to build a nightmarish dream on.

I Am Alive

Developer
Ubisoft Shanghai, Darkworks

Publisher
Ubisoft

System
Xbox 360 (Xbox LIVE Arcade), PlayStation 3 (PlayStation Network)

Modes
Singleplayer

Release Date
March 7, 2012 Xbox LIVE Arcade / April 4th, 2012 PlayStation Network

Price
1200 Microsoft Points

*A copy of this title was provided by the publisher for review

Remedy uses the show to frame a standalone entry point for gamers not familiar with the original 2010 release, but this play of events might also serve as a conduit for Alan from his prison within the Dark Place. While radio broadcasts within the game give glimpses into a world that has continued without Alan, conversations and manuscript pages suggest that the writer may be using the television show in his quest to return to his wife and former life.

Remedy continues to revel in the possibilities their horror series stirs, giving fans plenty to chew on regarding the writer’s fate. The only certainty is that players must find a way to stop Mr. Scratch from trapping them in a campy horror narrative, and that Alan’s journey through the night continues within this American Nightmare.

The story mode of American Nightmare unfolds across three key set-pieces – a rustic motel and diner by an oil derrick, an observatory, and a drive-in theatre. Aside from the shift toward a pulp horror aesthetic, the most significant deviation from the original game is space, with these areas offering more compact environments.

Players won’t need to run through seemingly endless forests to reach locations, finding themselves instead delivered to areas where a series of nearby objectives await them. This move doesn’t sacrifice a sense of isolation so much as tighten the pacing, with players never long for discovering events that move the story forward, along with recurring bouts of action against Mr. Scratch’s dark minions. There are still reasons to wander slightly off course however, and standing in these desert locations whilst staring off into the distance convinces an incredible sense of space beyond the player’s reach.

The tightened focus makes American Nightmare feel much more objective based than the 2010 release, with Alan fetching items or activating valves and switches, each of these goals waiting to unleash a wave of opposition with the Taken returning to cut Alan down. Alan still fights these creatures by using his flashlight to break the darkness protecting them and then proceeding to fill them with bullets until they explode. Aiding a quicker pace of action, the flashlight recharges much more quickly, almost making batteries unnecessary, and Alan also sports a three bar health meter that is again regenerated whenever he steps into protective light – if players only lose part of a bar, it will regenerate without light.

Areas offer a great deal of ammunition, including supply boxes that will restock any weapons currently being carried. Where the original game focused on supplying key weapons at certain times, American Nightmare encourages players to find their favorites and stick with them – including the satisfying ‘thunk’ sound made by the new nail gun.

While there are no coffee thermos’ to discover, players will still find manuscript pages in each of the areas, offering insight into characters as well as questions surrounding Alan’s attempt to escape the Dark Place. The looping nature of the story makes finding pages trickier, but the radar will offer some assistance in the search. Finding these pages is essential for unlocking a series of weapon crates placed throughout the game. These crates require a certain amount of pages to be opened, and offer heavier weapons such as the combat shotgun, assault rifle, sub-machine gun, and magnum.

The Taken have also evolved, with familiar grunts joined by the splitter, who will multiply in two if hit by focused light, a giant that takes several more shots to down and casts a very intimidating shadow, and an enemy that is formed by swarms of birds and is able to jump back into the air to gain the upper hand. If this is leading you to conclude that action is a more consistent occurrence in American Nightmare, you are correct. Fighting the Taken is also a more streamlined experience that allows for an easier flow of combat – Alan even turns his head to warn you of incoming threats. But fans should recognize familiar elements and habits, and not be concerned that Alan is simply machine-gunning his way through an empty set of stages.

Players won’t be using light to bring words into physical existence this time around. Instead, Alan has written paragraphs that offer him a chance to change reality, assuming he can make the events that are written happen. This task is accomplished by lightly interacting with the environment, placing or changing objects to match the words on a page. It’s an adequate means of allowing players to feel as if they have a hand in creating a new reality, but still consists of pressing ‘X’ to accomplish ‘Y’ – and there’s every reason to want for a better solution.

Keep in mind that most other games would escape such light criticism, and blame Remedy for convincing me that they are often skating around the discovery of truly brilliant new ideas about interaction and the relationship between words and reality.

This new word game ultimately leads to Alan trying to recover a signal that will arm him with the means to change the ending of the entire story, starting the looping narrative that sees him revisiting areas three times. The idea of revisiting set-pieces might sound horrible, and there were brief moments where I expected it to be, but Remedy’s script creates changes with each revisit that staves of cursing the repetition.

There’s a measured paced to difficulty, which slowly rises until you reach the final stages and Remedy uses music and hordes to capture that same sense of glory from the rock stage of the original game. Chewing through the story mode should keep you entertained for five hours depending on how long you linger, and there’s certainly reason to, with tormenting television signals from Mr. Scratch and radio broadcasts featuring old friends that offer insight into what may be going on while Alan has been missing.

American Nightmare also features an arcade mode, which Remedy has setup as the emphasis even though fans will immediately be pulled toward the story first and foremost – plus you’ll really want those manuscript pages. The premise of survival mode should be familiar to FPS-minded gamers, with Alan using evasion and weapons to survive until the sun rises – 10 minute bouts against increasing waves of the Taken. At the start of each stage, the emphasis is on gathering weapons and flares, particularly in finding the weapon crates from the story mode to gain a quicker means of dispatching enemies.

There are five primary sets, the cemetery, ghost town, oil field, caves, and trailer park. Earning stars with high scores will unlock each, including a second variant of these stages that gives new meaning to the word ‘nightmare’ as the Taken overrun Alan. Despite the familiarity of the concept, the arcade mode does strike some fresh ground.

Maintaining kill streaks while keeping supplied on health and ammo within the ten minute timeframe is incredibly challenging. You can bend the rules a little, say by leaving a single grenadier enemy alive, who will toss easily avoided grenades while you scurry around and resupply. But this takes away from your time, and grabbing a score worth bragging about doesn’t allow for poor time management. Players are also going to have to work hard to earn enough stars to feed the demands for unlocking additional stages.

The pull of arcade mode is the way the Taken aren’t soldiers firing bullets and forcing you to take cover to find a moment of peace. Much like a zombie horde, there’s no relief to be had during these bouts, save for the temporary aid of light to heal wounds. Several sessions have found me sure of my supplies only to be engulfed by enemies attacking from every direction and quickly depleting a full stock of ammo, offering some sincere stress that makes the dawn a welcomed sight.

American Nightmare’s arcade mode offers an easy means of revisiting a key element of Alan Wake, which certainly isn’t an easy game to jump into for short bouts of play. Those arcade stages create a space that is easy to revisit, but may be a harder sell for those that saw combat more as a necessary distraction to the narrative. But the combat is fluid and dramatic, with a theatrical edge to the evasive slowdown and bursts of light that drives back enemies, creating a survival challenge not easily comparable to others.

If action doesn’t interest you, this release might feel a bit light. While story mode is an easy justification for the visit, the arcade mode is the larger reason for investment and revisits, so if you aren’t keen on playing simply with the battle mechanics this may become a difficult purchasing decision.

Keeping in mind that I’m a card carrying fan of Alan Wake, I’ll suggest that the level of presentation in a story mode that is half the length of many modern retail releases, along with an arcade mode that gives fresh replay opportunities, shouldn’t leave fans of the series feeling any buyer’s remorse – this level of quality is sadly rare on Xbox LIVE Arcade. Whether or not American Nightmare can serve as a standalone gateway drug to newcomers is a question I don’t feel qualified to answer – all the more reason for even more of you to play the original game.

American Nightmare provides a more focused product that the DLC that followed Alan Wake’s original release, offering a story that is more structured, but still allows fans to pick for tidbits to their heart’s content. The supporting characters aren’t as endearing, acting more as immediate conduits of help or information for Alan, colored by the pulp horror style Remedy has said to be aiming for here, which mostly seems to show in the new enemy designs more than anything else. But from the moment the game begins, American Nightmare stirs memories of the original Alan Wake and captures many of the elements that have kept me waiting to find out how Alan’s journey through the night would continue. If you’ve been in the same boat, then you really don’t need my help making a decision here.

Alan Wake’s American Nightmare

Developer
Remedy

Publisher
Microsoft Studios

System
Xbox 360 (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

Modes
Singleplayer

Release Date
February 22, 2012

Price
1200 Microsoft Points

*A copy of this title was provided by the publisher for review

While the academic world has yet to reach that same conclusion, developer Trapdoor has embraced the idea with their Xbox LIVE Arcade release, Warp, employing a play mechanic that isn’t long for grabbing attention as the screen fills with meaty chunks and flailing limbs.

Featuring an abduction story that sympathizes with the alien’s point of view, an adorable extraterrestrial crashes on Earth and is quickly taken to an underwater government facility for painful probing and testing. The player’s first steps involve a series of tests conducted by curious scientists, but it isn’t long before contact with a strange glowing orb grants the plucky alien teleporting powers, offering the opportunity to study anatomy off walls freshly covered with human organs while making an escape.

Warp’s primary play mechanic places a dot of light ahead of whichever direction players happen to point the nameless alien, and the press of a button teleports it to the spot marked. Players can also teleport inside of certain objects, which mostly consists of various canisters but also includes the scientists and soldiers occupying the facility.

Once inside an object or person, rotating the left thumbstick will cause an expansion that quickly creates a delightful explosion. Leaping out of a person before the explosion occurs will often cause people to simply pass out and spare players the gushy aftermath, but such sympathies would rob players of the guilty fun the game encourages them to revel in.

Exploding people does get repetitive, and eventually I began sparing those that didn’t present direct opposition. But the game seeks to encourage bloodlust by showing stats from friends on Xbox LIVE, which might tempt some into trying to claim the record.

The teleporting problem solving certainly reminds me of Portal’s Aperture Science Lab, but Warp manages to employ a retro science-fiction aesthetic, and that cartoonish bent helps make it safe to laugh like a lunatic while exploding the first dozen people that happen to cross your path. After this subsides, the stealthy puzzle challenges find continually clever means to put that warping ability to more productive use in the escape attempt.

The road to freedom is filled with rooms of working scientists and armed guards searching for the escapee. Our hero can warp into most rooms with a top down perspective lending insight into what may be waiting, aiding players in hiding from scientists who will summon guards and deadly turrets. Whether passing through rooms unnoticed, or taking out all opposition, it’s advisable to look before you leap. Many rooms are connected by a central point of interest, such as a generator supplying power to a locked door that must be destroyed – though the game will turn this on its ear later by requiring players to supply power to certain areas as well.

You’ll initially find areas beyond the reach of your warping abilities, but gain extra powers while progressing through the facility in a largely linear fashion. You’ll be able to create an echo of yourself, which can be used to cause soldiers to shoot targets and each other while trying to hit you. Eventually that echo will be able to swap your location with another person or object, perfect for leaving a soldier beyond a locked door as you move forward. And you’ll also gain the ability to propel objects the alien can teleport inside of, which helps in striking distant targets and shielded guards.

Gaining all these powers opens the way for multiple solutions to opposition, lending a sense that one can break the rules by being free to explore alternatives to most scenarios. Security will heighten as players progress, requiring creativity as soldiers begin using energy shields that protect them from teleport attacks, as well as energy screens that create obstacle courses and traps. Puddles of water also pose a hazard, temporally suppressing the alien’s abilities – though that doesn’t become a majorly recurring problem. Being unable to explode shielded enemies makes it necessary to hurl projectiles at them or avoid them altogether, creating tighter spaces while leaping back and forth between rooms.

The facility offers repetitive scenery, with laboratories only occasionally broken up by industrial areas where cranes and lasers offer new challenges. The gleaming white walls of scientific research will quickly become covered in blood of course, and the game directs players rather well – I only needed to check the map twice for guidance.

Eventually gaining all the powers will give you run of the joint, but also paint a clear target toward the exit, which makes it easy enough to finish the game over the course of a day. There’s not a lot of reason to explore, but players will want to hunt down delicious grubs, which can be used to augment alien abilities – players can use these to silence their movements for greater stealth, cause their echo to make a small explosion, or speed up their movement, among other options. The only other target of interest is film canisters, which can be destroyed to setback government research.

A few boss encounters pop up along the way, managing to work with the established mechanics rather well considering the one-hit-one-kill policy of this stealth title. A constant checkpoint system will save you from ever falling too far back should you die, but the boss encounters will want you to watch the cinematic that sets them up each time you replay – holding down the B button to skip them saves sanity.

Warp mixes the array of guards and security traps with evolving abilities well enough to stave off exhaustion, though the relatively short length of the title helps too. Finding the trick to proceed is never overly difficult, though there were a few turret puzzles where I simply crossed my fingers and warped like hell across the screen to spare myself some occasional frustration.

When the primary ride is over, Warp also offers a handful of challenge rooms to test your ability to speedily warp across an area as well as dispatch armed guards. Despite the short length, the game gets as much mileage as it can out of its warping mechanic. While Warp is sometimes rough around the edges, the curious grunts and squeals of its protagonist offers quite a bit of charm, and the play mechanics inspire a fair amount of experimentation with a stealth title that manages to encourage fun rather than exhausting patience.

Warp

Developer
Trapdoor

Publisher
EA Partners

System
Xbox 360 (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

Modes
Singleplayer

Release Date
February 15, 2012 (PlayStation 3 & PC March 13th, 2012)

Price
800 Microsoft Points

*A copy of this title was purchased by Gamesugar for review

Powered by comic book source material, The Darkness II continues to serve as an oddity in power-fantasy gaming, with Jackie Estacado’s superhuman abilities offering players a check via the weight of conscious felt purely through the narrative.

The Darkness hits us with something applicable on many levels, with a power that makes Jackie great at what he does, which just happens to be killing people. But it also consumes him via its usage, with each act of power surrendering more of Jackie to The Darkness that works to consume him. And while Jackie’s relationship with The Darkness plays out this way, the consequences of this union emerge entirely through the relationships within the game rather than any play mechanic that might attempt to spank players with the parental hand of morality.

This allows The Darkness to actually brush against a pursuit often cited but rarely achieved, creating a game that does cater to those gamers simply looking for a few hours of visceral tentacle murder as well as those players inclined to read and write lofty words about the more subtle potential being tapped.

The Darkness II continues to offer the opportunity to consider consequences without the weight of heavy handed intention, though the game also struggles with subtlety, at times slipping into preachy forced moments hoping to stress the narrative effort at work beneath the layers of blood players can paint the town red with.

There is no escape from The Darkness, which whispers in the player’s ear, an ever-present and ominous companion that the player forms a partnership with. As The Darkness allows players to smash and slice through waves of villains, there’s an unnerving comfort that develops with those hungry tentacles that beg the player to feed them hearts and impale enemies when the bullets run low.

Using The Darkness to grab an opponent and rip through their chest is a gloriously bloody spectacle necessitating repeat performances throughout the game. But when the action fades and the player is left standing on a heap of corpses with those two hideous eels of tentacle death hissing and spitting and separating Jackie from every other character in the game, the player is very much alone. What The Darkness brings to gaming is an elegant means of considering the cost of any external aid that might make it easier to achieve our goals.

It’s no small accomplishment that the player feels a sense of alienation from other characters as missions necessitate a growing relationship with the powers provided by The Darkness. The mafia storyline that finds Jackie now the head of a crime family peppers his home with a crew that quickly feels like family, making the sting worse when those same characters start to separate themselves from Jackie as he becomes newly consumed.

The opening scenes of the game tap the spirit of Martin Scorsese’s film Goodfellas, with the same type of characters that one quickly wants to like, despite knowing that they carry out terrible acts. The restaurant intro to the Darkness II is a hearty shout out to Ray Liotta’s narration as the camera panned past quirky mobsters during the good old days of gangsters captured within that film. But aside from light attachment to the supporting cast, it is still Jackie’s relationship with the now deceased Jenny, his childhood love, that serves as the dominate character relationship. That Jackie spends much of his time keeping a vigil to his dead girlfriend only increases the feeling of loneliness that pervades the game

Jackie’s fight with a brotherhood intent on stealing The Darkness will still see him suffer the loss of family here, but Jenny remains the loudest drumbeat signaling the ultimate consequence still being endured since the events of the original game.

That first game also set an incredibly high bar in allowing the player to absorb and develop a deepening relationship with Jenny – the only game I’m aware of where players can curl up on a sofa with their girl and watch the entirety of To Kill A Mockingbird if they so choose. Players were also free to get up and leave early while the film continued playing, offering options that went far beyond the binary morality still dominating the idea of choice in gaming today.

The Darkness II is challenged by the fact that there’s simply not as much to Jackie’s character without this relationship, and so the game must dig up the past in order to challenge players with Jackie’s dying humanity via the last lingering connections he has to the world beyond The Darkness.

With a lesser degree of subtlety, players will step into pockets of memories, moments Jackie shared with Jenny – such as meeting her in a quiet diner. These moments are not without weight, with the music playing familiar songs as Jenny dances into view, and the sense of peace such moments stir driving the pain Jackie feels from reliving these memories beyond the screen and into receptive players. Colored by my own experiences, I can only add that the pain of remembering better days of quiet happiness resonated within me.

And yet despite such sparks, there’s a pervasive question of choice being juggled within the game’s narrative as well as the game’s design, which leaves the notion of choice floundering as the game moves away from subtle suffering toward a more supernatural notion of reclaiming Jackie and Jenny’s relationship. The physical action of the gameplay would carry a game devoid of narrative, but there is a sense that the first half of the game brushes against a potentially great accomplishment in offering players deeper emotional investment here.

Simply put, players never really possess the freedom to chose pain, to actively torture themselves by lingering within memories of Jenny, and I can’t help feeling that such an option would have carried the torch of the original game and presented players with the most painful and romantic story of lost love ever realized in videogame form.

The game instead falls into familiar trappings with an alternate world Jackie often awakens to between missions, suddenly finding himself an inmate within an asylum, with characters from the game serving as patients and officials in a world working to deceive and distract Jackie.

This approach is not without some genuinely clever moments, such as an inmate with two sock puppets on his hands that mimic The Darkness. But adding the real world together with memories of Jenny and sudden trips to the asylum needlessly complicates the narrative with a familiar gimmick. And that tired question of insanity versus reality culminates in a final choice within the game that wants to provide a deeper set of ideas, but feels like an entirely safe design decision that avoids greater narrative potential.

For all my criticism regarding what the narrative might have achieved versus the sparks it manages to strike, the core play mechanics of The Darkness II accomplish fresh feats of empowerment for players to embrace with open arms.

Quad-wielding allows players to multitask those tentacle death eels of The Darkness and firearms simultaneously, using the bumpers and triggers of an Xbox 360 controller to quickly fill enemies with bullets while flipping others into the air and tossing sharp projectiles through their innards. From the moment Jackie embraces The Darkness, players are presented with an overwhelming amount of ways to kill people. As impressive as the many colorful options for murdering opponents are, the fine tuning of the mechanics is an equal source of awe.

Digital Extremes has gifted The Darkness with shooting mechanics that are every bit as fun as the supernatural powers offered by The Darkness. Gunplay is no longer a half thought alternative as nabbing headshots while staring down the sights works as well as using those tentacles to tear enemies into two slabs of beef. The dual wielding of weapons even presents subtle shifts of focus, with Jackie’s aim narrowing while firing both guns at once to fill a single enemy with lead, or just as easily firing at enemies at opposing angles. At the same time, The Darkness allows players to alternatively throw projectiles, slash enemies up or down with the aid of the thumbstick, or grab stunned enemies for brutal tentacle executions.

There are also points where these two opposing approaches to violence cross and compliment, such as grabbing and holding car doors as shields with The Darkness while firing dual pistols or heavier automatic weapons.

As players progress and gain dark essence points through murderous acts, the eating of hearts, and finding lost relics around town, a four section skill tree offers the opportunity to develop new abilities for both The Darkness and gunplay, allowing players to briefly use The Darkness power as ammunition for their guns as well as increase reload times.

Investing points toward developing The Darkness also provides abilities such as suspending enemies briefly in the air for projectile shenanigans, gaining greater amounts of health from slain enemies, and performing increasingly brutal executions among other options. Since players won’t be able to unlock every one of these abilities with a single playthrough, there’s definitely reason to discover and cater to one’s preferred style.

It seems worth mentioning that I never caught myself favoring weapons over The Darkness or vice-versa. There’s an earnest harmony in the relationship that really would keep the game mechanically relevant in the complete absence of narrative.

The Darkness II also sports a unique visual style meant to give the game a comic book feel that ties back to the source material. It’s not that familiar level of cel-shading that creates a cartoonish vibe, but rather a style that lends a slight surrealism to characters and environments. And while that style choice certainly gives Digital Extremes a look to call their own with this sequel, it also allows the game to unleash a brutal degree of ultra violence with a safe sense of visual detachment from reality.

What I found most interesting about the visuals was the way some areas felt creepier for the slight obscuring of realism, in particular the mannequin factory where broken replicas of the female form were scattered around rooms where slightly opened doors exposed glimpses of actual women enslaved in sexual servitude. The Darkness II doesn’t toy around in presenting the suffering and misery of Jackie’s world, with areas that speak volumes with decay while also offering practical opportunities for gunfights.

There’s a certain level of offense meant to demonize some characters, but the game also strikes at some legitimately disturbing imagery. And at other times the game’s visual style softens with scenes of Jenny, grasping an immense emotional range that can move from complete misery to soft nostalgic palettes, leaving an impression that makes trips to the asylum a chance to catch one’s breathe and curiously recover from the trip.

The game never needs cut-scenes, though there are times where you aren’t in control as certain situations play out, and as such I never felt disconnected from the events. There are two instances where you’ll take the darkling for a spin, but otherwise you’ll plow through the campaign in 5-6 hours. Depending on one final choice you may even finish the game earlier than you’d like.

The stages present great variance, with the brotherhood’s quest to take The Darkness from Jackie deploying villains that will use light at every opportunity to temporally rob him of his powers. Such times make guns essential in taking out light powered enemies in addition to streetlights, generators, and the headlights of vehicles. Still, as the final confrontation with the brotherhood unfolds, the game falls into offering rooms that favor overwhelming players with enemies to make the last steps of the game a real grind.

It’s a shame, because it didn’t feel like that before hand, with no endless hallways and the like. But by the end The Darkness II definitely falls prey to old tricks that made me desperate to reach the ending.

With that in mind, The Darkness II chooses to cut the campaign a bit shorter than most other FPS’, offering a co-op minded alternative with Vendettas mode, which acts as an additional campaign giving players a chance to co-operatively tackle pocket missions that work alongside the primary story of the game.

Given the option to play online or locally with another player or on your own, there are four selectable characters, each with their own powers and traits. Inugami wields a sword called the Kusanagi and can use the swarm ability of The Darkness, while Shoshanna is armed with a gun called the Arm of the Night and uses the gun channeling power of The Darkness. JP Dumond carries the Midnight Stick, which can pick up and toss enemies, as well as The Darkness ability to summon black holes that swallow nearby enemies, while Jimmy Wilson wields a Dark Axe and has The Darkness power to summon darklings to feast on opponents.

Players can either work through the Vendettas campaign, or tackle quick burst assassination missions via the Hit List, which offers additional missions when playing online. Each of the four characters also possess a single skill tree to apply Dark Essence toward, giving quite a bit to chew on after the main campaign has been completed.

Admittedly I’m always a fan of pocket sized missions that can flesh out a game by adding sidesteps to the narrative wealth of the release rather than simply tacking more mindless missions onto the primary campaign for the sake of length.

I keep coming back to the idea of choice in The Darkness II, particularly because a very promising stream of ideas is cut short by the choice to create a game that could in-turn leave the door open for another release. The game is determined to create the space for another game in the series, which isn’t surprising, but it is a frustrating limitation to what could be accomplished if we weren’t always concerned about what’s next.

That choice sacrifices the ability to do anything necessary to drive home the fundamental idea of gain and loss presented with The Darkness powers. There was a huge opportunity for players to explore guilt and pain or ignore it entirely, and in the end that potential is pushed aside for a more typical attempt to physically reclaim lost loved.

If I nitpick, it’s only because I do believe that potential is there, though falling short of my idealized wants doesn’t make this release any less significant. The Darkness II stirs plenty of ideas and is on a very short list of titles that can leave players emotionally exhausted with narrative pursuits every bit as challenging and engaging as the core play mechanics.

The problem is that the game never manages to tie these ideas together into an experience that feels fully realized and cohesive, with a final stage that works to setup another game beyond this one, undermining play mechanics that fight to lift the game above the breakdown that loses the strong focus established through the first half of the game.

The flip-side is that the game doesn’t really come off the tracks until the final moments, with everything beforehand convincing me to forgive a finale that feels like a slap in the face. Even when it falls into familiar trappings and strays from the accomplishments of the original release, The Darkness II continues to offer a fresh experience with unique ideas, and in a genre stuffed with timid familiarity, such pursuits are certainly worthy of your time and investment even with the mixed results.

The Darkness II

Developer
Digital Extremes

Publisher
2K Games

System
PlayStation 3, PC, Xbox 360 (Xbox 360 Reviewed)

Modes
Singleplayer, Multiplayer

Release Date
February 7, 2012

*A copy of this title was provided by the publisher for review

How are the two games similar?

Let me count the ways…

-A visually striking 2D platformer with 2 player co-op? Check.

-Presentation framed around a man reading a storybook? Check.

-Protagonist equipped with a whip-like weapon used to lasso enemies into spheres that can then be tossed at other things – as well as being used to grapple and swing from hooks? Check.

That isn’t to say that this game is simply Epic Yarn starring a decomposing octopus girl. The combat system, while not more refined, is much deeper. Also, it is possible to die in Scarygirl, and it is possible to die a lot.

Therein lies the most noticeable mechanical difference between Kirby’s Epic Yarn and Scarygirl; while the former wants you to make it to the end of the game with little effort and explore arts and crafts projects they call levels with minimal consequence, the latter starts out with a similar philosophy, but at some point decides that it instead wants to see how much crap you’ll put up with for a chance to get a glimpse at the next colorfully macabre landscape.

Granted, Scarygirl presents a series of beautiful landscapes – the kind you wouldn’t expect to find in a downloadable title. For the sake of comparison, I took a peek at the game’s 2D source material, and I was amazed at how well the developer was able to add an extra dimension to that work within the game.

Sadly, Scarygirl suffers from a problem shared by many pretty games; the graphics often get in the way of the gameplay. On many an occasion, objects in the foreground will completely block a generous portion of the screen, leaving you blindly mashing the attack buttons, hoping you’re hitting whatever enemies are hiding behind them.

Blindly mashing the attack buttons, by the way, is a perfectly viable way to get through most of the game, whether or not you can see the enemies, but I’ll elaborate more on that later.

Sound is a curious and mixed bag deserving attention here, varying between good, serviceable, and entirely non-existent. When the game begins and players are collecting mass quantities of gems, the action sounds like you’re running your fingers across a wind chime – a cool effect that supplements the ambiance of the game.

The narrator also has a generous portion of gravitas, spending the time it takes for the game to load to further the story in a pleasantly organic way. Unfortunately, the further you make it into the game (nine words that could begin many statements about Scarygirl), the more objects you encounter that are inexplicably silent in the play and interaction.

When you’re fighting a giant mechanical dragon for instance, and it approaches you to shoot flames in your direction, you’d expect those flames to make some sort of roaring and/or crackling sound, not a silent and/or nonexistent sound.

There are also a few airships with huge cannons that are apparently enchanted by some sort of sound-cloaking spell, because when it fires said cannons, which shoot out balls twice the size of Scarygirl, they make not so much as a peep. Also, I have no idea what an axe getting reflected by a force field sounds like, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not total silence.

All in all, Scarygirl is a game that confuses the ears.

For the most part the platforming in Scarygirl is competent, but it has its hiccups, particularly when navigating the game’s ubiquitous rotating platforms; if you land on a platform while it’s rotating, the game has a really hard time deciding whether or not you actually landed on it. There are also moments where you’ll really lament the fact that no matter how hard you press the jump button, Scarygirl will always jump the same height, especially in some of the later parts of the game where if you jump too high YOU WILL IMMEDIATELY DIE.

Fighting the bad guys in Scarygirl is an experience that starts out similarly tolerable, if not somewhat delightful; the tentacled protagonist has a series of combos of light and heavy attacks at her disposal, and can buy more of them using the gems collected throughout the game.

However, that potential is undermined and essentially tossed into the dustbin given that, for the most part, players can just mash the two attack buttons and kill anything; the only motivation you have to not do that is that Scarygirl is able to use near-dead enemies as weapons by grappling them. Unfortunately, unless you know the precise number of hit points an enemy has, and are meticulously counting the numbers flying off of their heads, you will more than likely kill the enemies mid-combo.

And when the game flips the switch from a “fun little button masher” to “frustrating fights with those damn blue guards armed with poles and swords twice as long as your reach,” you’re going to need to grapple as many enemies as you can, leaving you chipping away at half-beaten enemies with light attacks until the purple grapple icon shows up, giving you the “OK” to do so – a terrible strategy when there are TWO OR THREE MORE DAMN DIRTY BLUE GUARDS BEHIND IT WHO CAN REACH YOU FROM BEHIND THE STUNNED ONE.

Sorry, I just had to vent – there’s this one level near the end where the game just drops a crapload of some of the strongest enemies onto this small flat surface, and you fight them 3-9 at a time, and after you die on that a couple dozen times, the game just stops being fun. That being said, there are difficult enemies in this game that are actually pretty interesting to fight – particularly the bosses, who each have a unique weakness that you have to figure out, rendering them stunned and ready for an open can of button-mashing.

In addition to the several hours of gameplay that you’ll experience going through the game the first time, there is some replay value to be had. Several of the levels split off in multiple directions, adding some variety for revisits. Counter-intuitively, there are also bonuses to be had for accomplishing certain feats in each level, such as finding every gem, and if you want to do that, you’ll probably have to take both paths each stage offers. There’s also an online leaderboard, if you want to show off your combination of sick fighting skills and obsessive gem collecting.

Maybe in the end, this game isn’t that much like Kirby’s Epic yarn after all. Scarygirl is like a rainbow puppy making stool on your carpet; you want to get angry at it because it’s so hard to control, but then you see its adorable eyes and colorful coat, and can’t stay mad at it for too long.

Also, the puppy is missing one arm and has a tentacle for the other.

Also, I am not good at similes.

Scarygirl

Developer
TikGames

Publisher
Square-Enix

System
PlayStation 3 (PlayStation Network), Xbox 360 (Xbox LIVE Arcade) (Xbox LIVE Arcade Reviewed)

Modes
Singleplayer, Local Co-op

Release Date
January 18th, 2012 (Xbox LIVE Arcade) / January 24th, 2012 (PlayStation Network)

Price
$9.99, 800 Microsoft Points

*A copy of this title was provided by the publisher for review