Recent reviews by |iG| Vertigo

It's been 26 years since Streets of Rage 3. Since then, us fans have been forced to fill the SoR-shaped hole in life by setting up boomboxes and wandering down the streets bodyslamming people, but it's just not the same. No matter how many times you explain to the judge that you're an off-duty cop bringing down a massive crime syndicate, they never listen. It's even worse when you find actual gangsters to punch, because they tend to have guns. But now there is a new Streets of Rage game! Finally, we can kick criminal scum in the 'nads until their healthbar is empty, with no pesky jail sentences to worry about.

It's not the first time that a classic Sega series has been resurrected in recent years, with Sonic Mania setting a hell of a benchmark. After 70+ hours of 1080p side-scrolling face punching, my opinion of SoR4 is similar to that of 2017's blue-rodent-exercise-simulator revival: very fun, a spot-on recreation of the classic mechanics, lovingly made, effectively modernised and with some worthwhile feature additions... but misses the original tone a little, and has a few iffy design decisions. A-

The foundation of a great fighting game is a satisfying and intuitive combat loop. The fighter should feel like an extension of you. This was key to the original games, and because this one sticks so closely to the moveset of Streets of Rage 2 (plus a couple of new moves), it nails it. It lacks SoR3's running ability though, which may make the game feel slow to some.

Oh my flying spaghetti god, so many characters. Four to start with, including Axel and Blaze from the original games, aged up to fit the timeline (Axel looks like he's spent the last decade drunk in a dumpster). All have subtle differences in their moveset, giving each a unique playing style.

Mid-way through the campaign you unlock literal coolest human Adam, and repeated playthroughs add fighters copy/pasted from the previous games. By the end you'll have 17 playable chars, although the low-res Megadrive sprites look a bit out of place. All the *new* characters are hand-drawn at 60FPS, the animation is absolutely glorious.

SoR4 is a seriously beautiful game. Despite being 2D it has a lighting engine, so the neon street signs, fire glows and spotlights reflect perfectly off the characters moving below them. Backgrounds are bursting with details you'll spot more of with each playthrough – boardgame players in Chinatown, cooks working in restaurants, rats scurrying around sewers, gang wars raging.

The art style is a bit different to previous SoR games, French flair added to the already curious Japanese-American mix of the existing series. This is very much a modern looking game though, whereas the similarly detailed and lovingly made Sonic Mania was designed to resemble what a 2D Sonic game in the late '90s could have looked like.

The way the AI works is a key difference to SoR2/3. In those games, enemy behaviour was heavily randomised, so you’d just cross your fingers and hope the RNG gods would prevent them countering you. In 4 though, every enemy has a weakness (typically a lateral axis grab) and often broadcasts their attacks beforehand. The game is more predictable, so more skill-intensive: if you get caught, it's because you've done something wrong. The key is to learn enemy behaviour patterns, and pick up tricks that aren't actively taught to you. But as the difficulty escalates and more enemies flood the screen, it becomes increasingly tricky to anticipate the behaviour of every single one. There's a high learning curve.

One fun touch though is that for the first time in the series, there's infighting: you'll meet gangsters and police, and if they cross paths, they're just as likely to attack each other as you. If you want, you can sit back and watch them fight.

The biggest design ethos change in SoR4 is that the older games were designed around even the best players getting continually beaten up (literally nobody gets through SoR2’s factory elevator without losing lives on high difficulty, for example), so regularly threw extra lives at you. But in 4, the game is balanced around the player being able to avoid getting hit *at all*. There are no extra life pickups in the levels themselves, instead they’re won by earning points.

The main point-winner is the new Combo system: keep dealing damage, your score goes higher. Get hit, *even once*, the combo breaks and you get nothing. To win extra lives you’ll need to keep an unbroken combo going through a large chunk of the level. It can be extremely frustrating. If you’re a new player, stick to Easy, otherwise you’ll have a rough time.

SoR4's campaign is the longest in the series (except for the gargantuan fan-game Streets of Rage Remake) – typically 1.5-2 hours. I don't think they could reasonably have made the campaign any shorter after 26 years' wait, but it does mean that it's uncomfortable to get through in one sitting. The devs have anticipated this, and the default way to play (Story Mode) is one level at a time, with your lives resetting between each one, so you can still complete the game if you do badly at some point. The old-school one-sitting format is now called Arcade Mode, and because extra lives are so rare, it's the game's ultimate challenge. There are also multiplayer modes (competitive or co-operative; online or local) and a Boss Rush. When you add in the 17 playable characters too, the amount of replay value in SoR4 is off the hook, if you will excuse the appropriately '90s expression.

Cutscenes are all skippable, and beautifully animated. The writing is an improvement on SoR3's, with some fun dialogue, but the ending feels abrupt and anticlimactic. Anticlimax is a problem in the game generally: the campaign becomes challenging early on, and doesn't particularly escalate. Regular enemy encounters are often tougher than bosses. You don't really get a sense of penetrating the heart of an evil empire, as in the previous games. And while the music is fantastic, very funky, great to punch Galsias in the face to, it doesn't become darker as you approach a boss or the late stages of the story. Like Sonic Mania, there’s not the same sense of importance, seriousness, epicness, escalation and peril that made the best parts of the original games so memorable.

There is an optimal point at which SoR4 is extremely enjoyable, between 4 and 20 hours' time logged. It's after you've learned how to play properly, so can pull off combos, dance skilfully around enemies, kick some serious arse, have some serious fun. But after that point, you'll start chasing S-ranks on higher difficulty modes, maximising your score under the toughest conditions. This is when you bounce up against the frustration of the unforgiving combo system, and find yourself replaying the same section time after time, trying a new approach, taking damage, restarting. This is how I've racked up 77 hours in a game with a <2 hour campaign, and by this point I'm grinding my teeth. If they patch the game so that combos get banked when you’re hit instead of being cancelled entirely, the frustration will end and I can finally return to the blissful contentment of hours 4-20.

Streets of Rage is ultimately about the satisfaction of kicking arse to funky music, and 4 does that supremely. If you're an existing fan then there may be some nits to pick, room for improvement. My opinion, SoR1 still has the best music, SoR2 is still the overall standout, SoR3 adds things I occasionally miss in the others. But 4 is a work of art, and I would argue it has the series' most finely-honed gameplay.

If you've never played before, this is as good a place as any to start. And good news, it's awesome.

It's part game, part skill trainer. Rocksmith is a bit like Rock Band or Guitar Hero, except you use an actual guitar and play the actual song for real.


Kind of, if the flint is a metaphor for your ability to use a guitar. Like Rock Band, it comes with a selection of songs (such as Muse's Knights of Cydonia or the Ramones' Blitzkrieg Bop), with more purchasable via DLC. As the song plays, blocks move down the screen to show you which string and fret to hit when the blocks reach the bottom of the display. The game functions like an amp and FX pedal, so your guitar sounds correct when you're playing the song.

There are a few other modes to play. You can play arcade-style mini-games which are controlled by the guitar, training individual skills such as bends, slides, harmonics, chord memory and fret muscle memory. There's a jam mode, in which the game can show you the notes in a key, and then you play whatever you want, with whatever guitar effects you want. And there are video tutorials, mainly for new guitar players.


A guitar or bass guitar, obviously. Electric is best, but you can play the game with an acoustic guitar by setting up a microphone to catch what you're playing.

To input the electric guitar into the computer, the best way is to use a jack-to-USB cable, such as Rocksmith's own Real Tone[www.amazon.co.uk]. You could also plug it into the mic or line-in ports if you have the right cable/adaptor, but apparently that won't work as well. The Real Tone cable is the only way to play in Rocksmith 1 without hacking, so is probably the best thing to use.

Rocksmith 2014 does have a mode in which you can play 'unplugged', with no input to the PC, although obviously this means the game can't tell you how accurately you've played.


Stop that! I cannot sanction this buffoonery.

But yes, Rocksmith 2014 is a sequel to 2012's Rocksmith. They're similar, but have enough differentiation that I still play both. Original Rocksmith is much more game-y, more like Rock Band, in that there's a campaign where you play gigs to earn points to unlock songs and features. There's more of a sense of progression and entertainment than with the sequel.

Rocksmith 2014 drops the campaign mode, so there's not the same immersive sense of fun... but it's vastly more polished, receives occasional updates beyond just the song DLC, and adds new features such as the ability to play a setlist of random songs for however long you'd like (which is how I play the game 99% of the time).


You've probably heard that you need to play a lot of guitar in order to develop the muscle memory to play it well. Rocksmith makes this endless repetition entertaining, so you're far more likely to get good. It's fun in its own right, without factoring in that it's a productive way to spend your time.

However, being a lazy person who likes to play along to songs but doesn't take the time to delve into the lessons or jamming tools, I haven't found that I've particularly learned much over my 400+ hours of the two Rocksmith games. It's massively developed my ability to quickly find my way around a fretboard, but that's been my main take-away. I rarely remember the songs' notation afterwards. If you want to actually learn, you'll need to be proactive about it, not just play and have fun.

But it's suitable for any level of guitar ability. If you're brand new, there are the built-in lessons to get you going, and also the songs have stripped-down notation (like Easy mode in Guitar Hero) that's easier to follow until you're ready to play the full song. You can also play sections slowed down, so it's easier to find the chord or note before strumming. And if you're an expert, there's a sizeable library of songs to learn.

Technically, the game can be slightly irritating as its note detection isn't perfect. Sometimes you have to play with absolute precision and clarity for the game to recognise you've hit the right note, and it can be discouraging when you're more-or-less there but the game counts it as a miss. Some people might see that as an incentive to play better, but personally it makes me play less instinctively, ie. worse. Usually though, the tech does work well.


Well, you don't have to be a geologist. But if you have a guitar, it's a fun way to pass the time and sharpen your skills.

It's tempting to give The Line a thumbs down, given that I did not have a good time and it seriously bummed me out. But the thing is, that's pretty much the point of the game. Ever watched Platoon and thought "damn, I wish that was me"? Well, maybe find a good psychiatrist, but also definitely try Spec Ops: The Line because it will scratch that itch without the considerable distress of having to be Charlie Sheen.

So while it initially seems to be yet another piece of Modern Warfare-style hooah military porn, it doesn't take long for a metaphorical nun to enter the room and punish you for vigorously exercising your assault rifle. (That's a metaphor we can all relate to, right? No, just me? Alrighty then.) Turns out The Line is more about the horrors of war than the thrill of whipping out your beefy gleaming weapon in front of a bunch of guys.

Pretend I'm narrating the rest of this review in Al Gore's voice, because from here on out it's super serious. The set-up is that Dubai has been partially evacuated before an apocalyptic sandstorm, leaving the remaining population isolated and starving. A US army battalion disobeys orders and stays in the city to look after its residents, but as supplies dwindle, the colonel institutes martial law and starts executing civilians. You play a Delta Force operative sent in to investigate the city's comms blackout and renegade battalion. You arrive to find a hellscape of bodies, fire, ruination and blinding sand.

And that's the happiest part, before your actions descend the Delta Force team into a pit of trauma and moral degradation. I won't throw any spoilers in here, but The Line forces you to do some pretty horrendous things that made me feel sick. You're usually given some degree of choice, but only enough to feel even worse about it. There's also the fact that the enemies you're gunning down in droves aren't invading aliens, demons, mad cultists or endangered wildlife poachers, they're American soldiers who tried to do the right thing and ended up stuck in the moral pit that you're teetering over. While the shooting dynamic is fine (third-person cover-intensive linear shooter - think Call of Duty crossed with Gears of War), you can never wholly enjoy it because of who you're fighting. In fact, it's often hard to tell if it's your enemies talking or your squadmates.

Like Apocalypse Now, it's loosely inspired by Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, and has that film's sense of surreal horror too. It's more like Platoon in terms of the feeling you get, and the way camaraderie can give way to hate. The campaign is short, less than five hours, but the choices you can make along the way add a little variety to things, including a Mass Effect-style final level that allows several different endings (four according to Wikipedia). There's multiplayer and co-op, but given that the game has been out for a while, those are best sampled with friends rather than waiting to hook up with a rando.

Feels bad, man, but it's a unique game that aspires to emulate some of cinema's most powerful projects. I'd much rather hide behind the level of dissociation you get from watching this sort of thing in a movie, but if you really want to feel that horror on a personal level, here's your game.

This isn't a recommendation for general gamers. If you're really into first-person shooters, sci-fi or the history of gaming then this is definitely worth your time, but there's a reason why nobody talks about Unreal 2 today - it was a let down.

During development, Unreal 2 looked like it would become the ultimate shooter of the early 2000s, matching Half-Life's record in setting a radical new benchmark for the genre to follow. An epic 20-hour story spanning numerous planets, with a rich cast of characters who you'd get to know along the way. It would bring RPG elements into the mix, with customisable weapons, dialogue trees, characters who would behave differently based on how you talked to them, and a story that would evolve based on your choices. This might be sounding familiar to you, and that's because it also describes Mass Effect. Think about how huge an impact that game had - Unreal 2 was trying to do the same thing in a full-blown first-person shooter, nearly five years earlier.

Don't get me wrong, although Unreal 2 has a lot in common with Mass Effect, the later game does most things better. Unreal 2's development was troubled, and ended up as a shadow of what it was intended to be. According to the Liandri Archive[liandri.beyondunreal.com], half the content was cut. Most importantly, completely the opposite of what was promised, it turned out to be highly linear, with near-zero RPG aspects. Although there is a dialogue system, you're just choosing which order to hear things in, so the story and characters are always the same. And with multiplayer and modding completely stripped so as to avoid competition with Epic's Unreal Tournament 2003, there's little replay value, so the game was largely forgotten after a few months.

So with the disappointment out of the way, how is it as a game, in the present day? In some ways it's pretty damn impressive. It takes you to a huge variety of environments, some of which you'll never forget - one lands you on a planet-spanning organism (complete with towering cilia hairs, oceans of mucus, pus fountains and pissed-off antibodies), another takes you to a biomechanical quasi-aqueous hellscape that looks like HR Giger working on The Abyss. Elsewhere there are sunsets, lakes, rolling hills, deserts, swamps, icy tundra, high-tech fortresses, and most of the planets are populated with weird animals. It's quite beautiful.

While the dialogue isn't what was promised, the characters are relatively compelling for the nascent standards of February 2003, and this is actually the earliest FPS ever to give me an emotional reaction to its storytelling. It tells a Firefly-like story of troubled ex-military types patrolling the galaxy's backwaters, becoming embroiled in a conflict between powerful organisations. (Interesting sidenote there, Unreal 2 and Firefly released just months apart.) It's a bit clumsy, lacking the polish of later AAA titles and feeling like a lot more narrative and character building had originally been planned, but there are definite feels to be had.

The audio is spectacular, sometimes sounding like a THX demo, and features music by the same guy who'd later compose for Mass Effect. And despite being a human generation old, Unreal 2 still looks pretty good - the game's technology was too advanced for 80% of systems at the time, with dynamic lighting, lipsync and particle effects on par with games from over a decade later. Often the low-resolution textures are the only sign that it's from the 2000s. It helps that it's absolutely dripping with detail, and feels like a labour of love.

Weirdly though, it doesn't feel like an Unreal game at all. It does contain Skaarj, the Dispersion Pistol and a few universe references (Liandri Corporation for example), but all feel like they were originally other things that were tweaked to provide an Unreal connection. The atmosphere is totally different, there's no shared visual language, the lore doesn't quite fit, modding is nearly impossible. And while the original game sheds its age by delivering one of the best shooting experiences ever designed, the combat in Unreal 2 is only average. There are positives - weapons sound good and there's a vast variety of ways to take enemies out... but the balance is strange (monsters are near-ineffectual yet human gunners can wipe you out in seconds), there's little indication of where you're hitting, most enemy attacks are hitscan, bodies vanish after a few seconds, and most critically you move agonisingly slowly (that one is fixable with some Notepad-fu). It's a bit unsatisfying. Not necessarily much worse than Half-Life 2's gunplay, but remember this is supposedly the sequel to Unreal, the king of combat, the sovereign of survival, the primarch of pwning, one of my favourite games ever made.

On the plus side, the gameplay is peppered with radio conversation between the (fully voiced) player character and your allies, and you occasionally fight alongside (very basic) AI soldiers, so you don't feel as alone as in most previous-generation shooters. However the flow of immersion is hurt by frequent cutscenes, loading pauses or pointlessly strolling your ship. (Yes, it has a hub ship to explore between missions just like Mass Effect, except there are only three NPCs and their interaction is limited.) And although the engine allows open environments, the level design is extremely linear; this is very much an on-rails experience. The main player choice is which weapon to use, as there are a dozen, nearly all with alt-fire modes.

Being from 2003, how does it run today? Well surprisingly Unreal 2 has a 1080p widescreen setting in-menu, and crashes are rare. If you check the comments section for this review, I've detailed how to increase movement speed, widen your field-of-view, re-enable the startup movie, shorten the map loading times, fix the main crash that some people experience, and how to dodge rockets. But if you don't need any of that, the main thing to remember is that you need to manually quicksave because the game has few checkpoints.

Wrapping up though, it's a creative ~7-hour sci-fi experience with artistic/cultural merit, still rather pretty and an interesting point in gaming history. Just be prepared for massive linearity, some clunky story beats and middling combat.

Interestingly, Unreal 2 did finally get a multiplayer component months after launch, and it was one of the best team-based online experiences I've ever had. Then a few weeks later, Infogrames-Atari cut funding, the master server died and Unreal 2's developer Legend went bust. Somewhere out there, there's a parallel universe in which Legend had all the time and money they needed to realise their vision, and Unreal 2 became one of the biggest names in the industry.

This is a very tentative thumbs down; it'd be thumbs-middle if Steam supported it.

The reason for this is Stick of Truth. For the most part, Fractured But Whole basically reprises everything about that game - the graphics, exploration, customisation, progression... *Just* enough is changed for it to be a sequel rather than a standalone expansion, but only barely. The biggest changes are the writing, a more complex combat system and the fact that it's considerably more expensive. Twice as much, at the time of writing.

And I'm not sure that it's the better game, either. Combat is enjoyable when the enemy is challenging, but like Stick of Truth, this is not a tough game. This meant it took a long time to really start getting into the experience.

The writing is a big part of this, too. Through most of the game, good, non-recycled jokes are few and far between - I spent the first ten hours without even cracking a full smile, let alone laughing. Most of the gags are call-backs to South Park episodes and superhero franchises, but they're just references, usually lacking punchlines. Stick of Truth didn't quite feel like top-drawer South Park writing, but Fractured But Whole feels close to the bottom. (But Whole... close to the bottom... eh, I'm probably not in any position to criticise this game's jokes.)

...This changes when you really get stuck into the meat of the narrative. FBH's story weaves together elements from several different eras of the show, with a hint of contemporary politics, superhero movies and of course the player character's magical fart chamber. It's somewhat funny when it gets going, but more than that, it's just really engrossing. This is also the time that the combat starts to pick up (especially if, like me, you suddenly realise that this is a game which needs playing at maximum difficulty). So by hour 20 I was having a great time, but that is a hell of a long time to power through.

There are some deeper concerns too. Some of the stuff the game throws at you to do is just nasty - beat up sex workers, join the police to attack black families in their homes, lap dance for older men (as a 10 year old, remember)... Cartman's notebook is full of graphic sketches of fellow kids having sex, and the collectibles are those soft-hentai posters from the Tweek ♥ Craig episode. South Park's often traded on shock factor, but there are some things in this game which left a really bad taste in my mouth. (...Which shouldn't be a surprise after spending hours playing with But Whole. Ba-dum-tsh.)

So. The game is longer than Stick of Truth (I finished SoT in 24 hours and FBH in 35), and if you liked that game then you'll probably like this one too. But I can't recommend it to anyone else when an almost identical game with better writing is so much cheaper.

Abzu is more of an interactive experience than a conventional game. There's exploration and hazard avoidance, but that's not the reason to play this. The reason is that it's an astonishingly beautiful digital art piece, showing you life underwater in a way nothing else ever has.

It's a story-based game but there's no dialogue - this means things aren't spelled out for you, so your reading of the events may differ from another player's. According to Wikipedia it draws on Sumerian mythology, and it sees you on a quest to restore life to the ocean.

The technical achievement is extraordinary. If you watch a lot of nature documentaries, you probably have an instinctive sense for how a school of fish looks when it's evading a predator or how a shark's movements relate to someone it's watching. Amazingly, Abzu bridges the uncanny valley, despite a minimalist art style. It's due to the perfect realism of the animals' animations, and the AI systems that make them behave in a believable manner. Combine this with Unreal Engine 4's lighting system, and you have an utterly mesmerising piece of work - it really is like being down there. Albeit, as you follow the story, Abzu's environments become far more populated than the strained ecosystems of the real world.

So, you restore life to the ocean. You can explore sunken classical-style cities. You can watch dozens of species of astonishingly real-seeming marine life, interact with them and even hitch a ride on their fins or flanks. And there are big emotional hits, as you get to know an animal that's been particularly maligned in popular culture, and resurrect dead wildlife (some of which is a palaeontologist's dream come true). In all honesty, by the late stages of the story, I'd gotten teary-eyed. From a game.

Downsides? The control scheme is quite clunky - it takes a while to get used to, and due to the need to keep the gamepad's trigger pressed in order to move, my hand gets pretty sore. There's also very little challenge, although that's beside the point as Abzu is more about the exploration and immersion than anything else. And it's short, although those few hours are by far the most memorable ones I've spent with a screen recently.

If you have any fondness for animals, the ocean or raw artistry, I can't recommend Abzu strongly enough. Masterpiece.

* What is it? *

2D platform game, an official but fan-made sequel to Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog games of 1991-95. You use momentum, reactions and precision to control a vividly coloured anthropomorphic animal around a world full of robots, traps, hidden rewards and opportunities for massive bursts of speed.


* Will I be interested? *

If you like any 2D action games, trying Sonic Mania is pretty much essential. I'd also suggest it to those who enjoy movement-intensive 3D games like Unreal Tournament or Rocket League, as the satisfaction comes from mastering a versatile physics system. It's suitable for all ages, but younger players may have some frustration.

If you don't like fast games, this one probably isn't for you. I heartily recommend tea-drinking and Backgammon.

A new player should run through the story in about two hours. Considerable replay value is added by three five playable characters with unique abilities that allow you to play the game differently, local multiplayer modes including 4-player racing, lots of unlockable features and the sheer number of routes you can take through the levels. If you're familiar with Sonic games, Mania is a bit longer than 3 & Knuckles, and there's more to do. It'll take closer to 20 hours to win all the unlockables and explore every route, and if that's still not enough then the Encore expansion adds further replayability.


* How does it compare to the old Sonic games? *

Mania really does feel like a true sequel. The game's presented in a slightly pixellated 1990s style, but feels modern due to the widescreen resolution options, rich music and high framerate - plus the sheer amount of detail.

The physics are an exact emulation of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and Mania retains that game's combination of vast multi-tiered levels, precise platforming tests, lots of high-speed sections for adrenaline junkies, and concealed routes or items for explorers. Tails and Knuckles have their full abilities from that game, Sonic also has options of the Sonic CD peelout dash or the new addition of an instant spin-dash after landing from a jump.

The levels are absolutely crammed with references to the original series. Even Knuckles' Chaotix gets a look in. Some levels you flat-out revisit - eg. Green Hill and Oil Ocean - but they have new layouts, and incorporate mechanisms from other parts of the series (for example, Flying Battery has Wing Fortress' badnik emplacements and fan platforms, Death Egg's antigravity, Sandopolis' sinking pools and Wacky Workbench's electrified cables). There's more that's reprised than pioneered in Sonic Mania, but it's so mixed together and smartly developed that it feels fresh.


* What's not so good? *

If you know the old games inside out - or have dismissed them out of hand as child's play - it may be a surprise to come to Sonic Mania and find just how challenging it is. Finishing is fairly easy, but finishing well requires very careful play - continual rushing doesn't work unless you really know what you're doing. That's fine, but some of the difficulty comes from obtuse design decisions. A few stages are so enormous that they're tough to finish in the 10-minute time limit, many areas can't be returned to for exploration if you breeze through too quickly, some traps feel excessively evil, and... the bosses. Let's talk about those.

Mania's bosses are definitely a mixed bag. Some are fun and inventive, but many are too lengthy for a game with a ticking clock - they rarely allow you to deliver more than two hits between their long attack cycles, no matter how good you are. It's often unclear how to fight them without hurting yourself (hell, 60 hours in, I'm still confused by the missile-jumping physics in Studiopolis Act 1's boss). And most irritatingly, it can be unclear when you can even hit them - some bosses have periods in which they're on-screen but can't be touched. This lowers the sense of immersion in the game's physics, so is arguably Mania's biggest gameplay problem.

So nothing seriously gamebreaking there, but some rough edges that would probably have been smoothed with Sega's intense 1990s playtesting.


* Personal gripes? *

The only thing that's really missing from the Sonic experience for me is the tone. Mania is presented as something that shouldn't be taken seriously, whether you're looking at the happy party-style boxart, Sonic and Knuckles' unusually bright in-game palettes, the cheerful expressions, the use of Dr. Robotnik's even goofier Eastern name Eggman, the irreverent cutscenes, or the (admittedly great) soundtrack inspired by the Japanese version of Sonic CD that gives the game an upbeat disco feel.

This all misses the attitude that Sonic had in the early '90s - he was introduced to the world with a smirk, finger wag and nonchalant pose against a muted cover. The music was evocative first and funky second, the art design and stories majored on industry vs nature. Sonic 2's Western cover has Robotnik looking almost satanic, Sonic & Knuckles's is the essence of cool. The comics introduced doom-laden narratives and a character who was equal parts superhero and narcissist (Nigel Kitching cited The Fonz as a key character influence and Terminator for storylines).

Sega has gradually been making Sonic a more typical children's animé property over the years, and while Mania thankfully spares us from Sonic's 1998+ redesign, the more universally appealing cool-factor of the Megadrive/Genesis era isn't quite fully realised here.

When you're getting into that level of nitpicking though, you know you're looking at a great game.


* Conclusion *

While Sonic Mania is a throwback to an increasingly distant time, don't let that fool you, this is the sort of game that's inherently fun, and easy to pick up. The original games haven't *really* aged much, because 21st century technology isn't needed to make a 2D platformer, and the world's best game companies were focusing on them back then. So being a proper sequel, Mania feels fantastic.

Is it as fun to play as Sonic 1-3K? I'm not sure. The level design certainly aids replayability a lot more, with multiple routes pretty much everywhere (whereas even Sonic & Knuckles confines you to a singular path more often than you might realise). But Mania's areas are so long and complex that some of the later, harder levels wear out their welcome. Sonic 3 may be a lot simpler, but there's maybe more joy in that. Mania is in the same league though, and far more enjoyable than series side-projects Sonic CD and Chaotix. Best special stages in the series too.

There are also some issues in the Sonic games' original design that maybe need addressing. The elaborate levels make you want to explore, but the gameplay dynamic doesn't incentivise this - one mistake loses you everything you've found, and most of the pickups don't have a lasting effect. It might seem sacrilegious to tinker with a dynamic that's sold millions of games since 1991, but another sequel could be improved by lowering the punishment for exploration, or amping the rewards.

Ultimately though, Mania is a tremendous 2D action game, and something I'd been unknowingly wanting for 23 years.

It's been a long wait, and a game that a lot of us thought might never happen. The six years since Dawn of War 2: Retribution saw the series' publisher go bankrupt, with developer Relic gutted during the resultant fire sale. Like a Necron Warrior though, Dawn of War has finally arisen after its apparent demise.


**What is it?**
DoW is a series of action-heavy strategy games, in which you use tactics, terrain and unit choices to dominate the field.

It's based on the Warhammer 40,000 sci-fi property. Think of traditional fantasy tropes - orcs, elves, wizards, demons, monsters and a fractured human empire - and set them in space, thousands of years in the future. Knights become Space Marines, eight-foot tall superhumans in powered exoskeletons. Elves become Eldar, alien mystics who live in space-borne Craftworlds, preserving the remnants of their fallen empire. Orcs become Orks, a warmongering barbarian horde who jerry-rig the technologies of other races into cruder but more brutal weapons. Wizards become psykers, whose powers come from an immaterial parallel universe, home to cruel daemons that can use the psyker as a bridge to the material realm. I'm simplifying - it's a breathtakingly deep, rich and dark universe.

Dawn of War 3 provides a story-driven campaign, and a skirmish mode that you can play online or against the AI.


**How does it play?**
It's a more action-oriented spin on the traditional real-time strategy game. There's *some* building and research involved, but it's mostly about pushing out combat units to control the small number of resource points around the map, and disrupting your opponent from doing the same. Every unit has a specialisation - slow or fast, ranged or melee, disruptive or damage-per-second, stealth or durability, anti-tank or anti-infantry. The key is using the right units at the right time and place.

It's not really a game for people who like to 'turtle' - sitting in your base behind defences, repelling borders until you've amassed enough troops to roll out. You *can*, in some campaign missions or against easy AI, but in high-level play the game isn't designed for it. There are few turrets or mines and no walls, so if you sit back and let your enemy control the resources around the map, you'll be steamrolled by a larger and better-equipped army.

DoW3 ships with three races. Eldar are a mobile force designed for fast strikes - all their buildings can be teleported around the map or used as portals, and each unit has a regenerating shield, so never takes any losses if your attacks are quick. Orks swamp the enemy with numbers, and each unit can be upgraded by looting scrap from vehicle wrecks. Space Marines are about making a hard push with orbital reinforcements, after which they're relatively vulnerable.


**What's changed?**
DoW2 was a major departure for the series, shrinking the scale to a handful of squads micro-managed around cover-strewn maps. The new game is closer to the original, with large armies and towering super-units.

One of the few elements carried over from DoW2 is the ability to choose your commander before the match. Rather than just one, you choose three 'Elite' units, which can be summoned onto the battlefield by spending Elite Points which are earned over time. These range from versatile squads, such as Warp Spiders, through to heroes such as the Ork Warboss, to super-units such as the Imperial Knight. More Elite Points are needed for the tougher units - the super-units can annihilate whole armies of tier 1 units in seconds, but take a long time to earn. The start of the game also allows you to choose buffs that apply to the rest of your army.

Completing missions or online skirmishes wins you points that you can spend to unlock new elite units and buffs. This gives an added sense of achievement for beating a match, but currently there's very little reward for winning an AI skirmish.

Cover plays a smaller role - there are only about as many cover locations as resource points. Cover locations are capturable, generating a 'bubble' - gunfire will only damage the bubble, not anything within it, and only a few melee units can enter an enemy's cover bubble. Once the bubble's been destroyed by gunfire, the cover's gone forever.

One of Dawn of War 3's most noticeable traits is how much micro-management (micro) has been stripped out. Few squads are upgradable, and the diminished cover system means that unit position is less important, and some of the more fiddly abilities have been simplified. There are very few buildings to make - the Space Marines just get three unit generators, a technology centre and a Listening Post turret that you build on resources. That's a step forward from DoW2, which had almost no building whatsoever, but is some way short of DoW1's depth. Technologies are mostly limited to health/damage boosts, all from one building.

For those of us who play these games primarily for pause-heavy bouts against the AI, this streamlined approach limits the game's depth, but it should make online play a lot more accessible, as it's easier to govern the vast armies you can generate.


**How's the campaign?**
In my opinion, DoW3's campaign is one of the best in the series' history. Storyline's fairly typical, but the gameplay has a tonne of variety, and there are some incredibly memorable sequences.

Each mission sees you control a different race, so it's not as human-focused this time around. This gives you the considerable pleasure of seeing the story from the Ork perspective - written and acted like far-future football hooligans. It's a similar trick to the one Winter Assault pulled in 2005, allowing you to sample the various races without playing any one so much that they wear out their welcome.

The gameplay is inspired by Winter Assault too. Each mission offers something very different, ranging from maps that're falling apart, through to climactic escape missions, to time limits, to Last Stand-style heroes going it solo, to classic turtle-then-steamroll. The most common dynamic is limited base building with the enemy or environment exerting some pressure to draw you into battle.

It's also quite long. It took me 26 hours, but I played on Hard mode with *a lot* of turtling, exploring and procrastinating, so that's on the longer side of what you'd expect. There are 17 missions, each took me 1-3 hours.


**How's skirmish mode?**
Skirmishes only have one gametype right now, Power Core. You have three objectives: destroy the shield generator (which acts as cover for units inside it), then you can destroy a large turret, then you can destroy their power core to win the match. Each team has a set of these to defend. Meanwhile, as usual, control resources around the map, spend resources on units, buildings and tech.

Map design is similar to DoW2's - sprawling and mostly chokepoint-free arenas. Thankfully, because the population limit is so much higher now, you can spare squads to defend your resources, so don't have to pull your core forces back to swat down pesky enemies that sneak behind your lines. Still - as a natural turtler, I'd appreciate some narrow chokepoint-based maps added to the list.

There's not much variety in skirmish right now - just the three factions, when DoW1 eventually reached nine, and Warhammer 40k has 30 to choose from. Just having one gametype limits replayability too, and Last Stand is particularly missed. If you're primarily buying for skirmishes, it might be better to hold off until the game's discounted.


**Conclusion**
If you're playing for the campaign, there's a lot to enjoy here. Fun, diverse missions set in the WH40k universe. Skirmish on the other hand, while still fairly well-crafted, doesn't have enough variety yet, and is arguably a little short on depth.

I suspect Dawn of War 3 can be significantly improved with expansions or DLC - if Sega decides the game has sold well enough to warrant it. Fingers crossed.

Stick of Truth's a surprisingly engrossing RPG, and a good entry point to the genre for South Park fans.

It's clearly a console game, with limited options and no modding ability, fairly low difficulty level, and plays very well on a gamepad. And it's not particularly long for an RPG - you can get through the meat of it in around 16 hours without rushing.

However, it's great fun. You can explore the entire town of South Park, sifting through shops and houses for items, and as you progress through the main story, you'll unlock new abilities that allow you to reach new areas of familiar locations. Levelling happens very frequently, via two separate systems - one skill tree is unlocked by amassing 'friends' on South Park's pseudo-Facebook (accomplished by completing quests or exploring), and the other is unlocked by gaining XP from combat.

Combat happens very often, whether you're just wandering round the town or engaging in quests. It's turn-based, with you controlling an ally (such as Kenny or Butters) as well as your own character. There are several different damage types, which can multiply each other (for example, if you set an enemy on fire, then farting on them will cause much more damage). Weapons range from throwable tampons to ninja stars to Cartman's "respect-mah-authoritah" truncheon, and you can modify all of them to have additional properties.

Player customisation is epic. There is a VAST range of outfits, ranging from SWAT uniforms to Crab People cosplay, all of which give you different perks, and can be customised with different colours and abilities. You can find glue-on facial hair, makeup, wigs, and get a nosejob at Tom's Rhinoplasty to look like David Hasslehoff. And though you can only select a boy (for story reasons), you can get a makeover to pull off a very convincing lady-boy.

Graphics are... South Park. The whole thing's totally seemless, with your character appearing in cutscenes with full outfit customisation, and it does feel like a really long episode of the show. Particularly given that the voices are all accurate (most of them being performed by Trey Parker and Matt Stone anyway, who were intimately involved in the game's development).

Writing's a little bit hit-and-miss. Though you can thoroughly explore the town, meet most of the show's characters and perform sidequests for them, most of these off-piste sections aren't particularly funny, and are more fan service than anything else.
The focus of the writing is very clearly in the main story. It's funny, imaginative and shocking, and doesn't *require* you to have a knowledge of the show (though it helps). It doesn't have the rapid-fire succession of inspired random weirdness that made the show great originally, or the cutting satire that's kept it so successful in recent years, but it does have a gargantuan helping of the body humour (toiletry and sexing, basically) that's always been a South Park staple.

Let's put it this way. If you like the idea of slapping Nazi zombie cows with large pink vibrators, or of harnessing the aromatic powers of your colon to subdue gun-toting SWAT agents, stop reading and hit the 'buy' button.

Intro
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Max Payne 3 is a solid action game, let down by issues with replayability and series continuity.

It's a cinematic third-person shooter, set in present day Sao Paolo (Brazil) and New York. You play an alcoholic, ex-NYPD detective-turned-bodyguard in a dark story about crime and corruption. As in most modern third-person shooters, the action is based around moving from cover to cover and popping out to take quick shots, but in this case you'll be aided with slow-motion and balletic dodging.


Playability
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The gunplay is a great example of the genre. You'll find a ridiculously varied arsenal throughout the game, ranging from silenced pistols to grenade launchers, all of which are fun to use. You're rewarded for accuracy, are encouraged to switch weapons often, and can resort to other methods if you're running low on bullets (grenades, melee action if you're close enough, vehicle emplacements, and lots of objects which explode if sufficiently abused).
It feels like it's 'on rails', and you're mostly just doing what the game's producers want you to, but diving sideways in slow-motion to nail a perfect headshot feels great. You'll regularly find combat arenas that are complex enough to give you a variety of methods for tackling them.

The storytelling is less successful. With the exception of Max himself, the characters are all very shallow, and impossible either to care about or to genuinely despise. Voice acting is jobsworth (again with the exception of James McCaffrey's soulful Max Payne), facial animations are wooden. The story snakes around in such a way that I found myself frequently forgetting what the whole point of that section was; it doesn't feel like there's a unifying drive to it.

It's stylishly 'directed' though, feeling very much like a Tony Scott film. And HEALTH's soundtrack is utterly spectacular - the two elements in combination are highly immersive, feeling like you're powering through a monster hangover. This helps you get inside Max's head, as he tries to quit his vices and get his life back on some vague semblance of a track.

It's a good-looking game for the time, and there's a wide variety of options to scale the graphics back if you're playing on an older machine. Levels are bursting with detail, characters are rendered in gloriously high definition. Max himself has a vast number of costume and appearance changes over the course of the game, so every section feels fresh.


Replayability
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This brings us to the subject of replay value. I haven't touched multiplayer, but there's quite a lot to do. For starters, it's a long game - 12 hours on my first playthrough - with several levels of difficulty.
Secondly, there are collectibles hidden throughout the game, which unlock various perks (upgraded weapons, cheats and new features). Other perks are unlocked by grinding out accomplishments (for example, number of vehicles destroyed). There's a regular, satisfying sense of progression on a level beyond the basic narrative.
There's also a score-based 'arcade' mode, in which you're awarded points based on how stylishly you tackle the level, and finally a very difficult time-based mode. These all take place during sections of the main story.

There's a big problem though. Most of the storytelling sequences are cutscenes, and these take up a huge chunk of the game (I'd estimate around 20%). During the cutscene, the next level loads, providing a seamless experience - but no matter how fast your computer is, **nearly all of the cutscenes are unskippable**. While that's fine on your first playthrough, it annihilates the replay value, and undermines the fun-factor. And as mentioned, the story you're forced to sit through isn't exactly The Godfather.


Series continuity
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If you're a fan of the series, there are even bigger problems: despite the inclusion of Bullet-Time and voice of James McCaffrey, it does not feel like a Max Payne game.

Gone is the fluidity of the PC-focused older games - the new one borrows from console-based shooters like Gears of War, with an emphasis on squatting in cover, rather than balletic John Woo-ian carnage.

While the levels are dotted with hidden collectibles, there's very little interactivity. In the first two games, almost every object in the world could be manipulated in some way - you'd find yourself rooting through every cupboard for a stray magazine, a painkiller or a new weapon; scanning every roofline for a hidden area. In MP3, once you've found every collectible, on subsequent playthroughs you'll just be running through the levels and shooting people.

Gone are the mod tools, as is the "guns, lots of guns" approach - you can only carry a couple of weapons at once, and the system to toggle between them feels very awkward on the PC.

This is the first Payne game not to be written by Sam Lake, and it shows. Gone are the old characters. Gone are the OTT metaphors and verging-on-parody film noir musings. Gone is the eccentricity, fine detail, romance and sense of humour. The story is utterly disconnected from anything that's come before, and has nothing to do with Max as a person. It feels like Rockstar just wanted to create a game of Tony Scott's film Man On Fire.
And Max isn't written like Max. He swears, he's devoid of wit, he has a new and awkwardly fitting set of values. He even *looks* wrong in his facial expressions, lacking a sense of strength or focus. It's not the first time Max has changed appearance, but in every way except the (admittedly better than ever) voice, he doesn't feel like Max.

Then again, Max Payne 2 felt like a closed story, something which arguably didn't need another sequel. That's a shame, because it's such a beautiful thing to play, which more than a decade later the world feels like it needs more of. Max Payne 3 may be a huge break from the past, but remains a solid shooter, and unlike its predecessor it does feel ready for further sequels. Better ones, hopefully.


Conclusion
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When you learn to disconnect it from the earlier games, you can't help but be swept up by the ride. It's well made, and a blast to play. But thanks to those unskippable cutscenes, you won't be coming back to it for a while.