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This bitch here, told everyone she was pregnant... then, built a crib on her front lawn and placed an add in CraigsList looking for baby clothes.
A 21 year old preganant woman showed up to trade clothes... this bitch killed her, cut open her stomach, pulled the baby out, and claimed it as her own. Unfortunitly, the baby also died.
As terrible as all that is... how could you meet this woman and not think she was crazy?
Look at her... look at the eyes.
I find myself unable to look away. I think I'm in love.
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** VIKING: BATTLE FOR ASGARD **
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This is a simple, 3rd person hack and slash adventure. There's no multiplayer and no online play, but I'd still give it a good 7 out of 10 simply due to it's enjoyable, mindless fun. It's got just enough variety to keep you interested but nothing too over to the top. You learn a few combos, find a few beer kegs, and kill everyone that gets in your way. Sweet graphics, cool moves, decent violence, and a fairly sweet soundtrack... for those of you into Heavy Metal, I suggest turning off the game music and listening to a Dimmu Borgir album the entire time you play this game. If you do... 8 out of 10.
You're a viking named Skarin that dies on the battlefield only to be revived by the goddess Freya in order to lead the mortal 'army of man' against the evil goddess Hel and her force of undead 'champions'. It's up to you to rally what's left of the viking warriors into battle in order to fight your way across the land to Hel's mighty tower and defeat her once and for all... thus releasing her evil grip from the mortal lands.
Gameplay is pretty straight forward. You'll start on the shores of an island with a few viking warriors who are trying to set up a base camp. Your numbers will be low and you'll be tasked with exploring the island looking for other vikings to join the fight. The island is completly open ended allowing you to go wherever you please but regardless of where you go or what order you do the tasks in, the gameplay is all largly the same.... kill stuff.
Each island will have a castle... and that castle needs to be seiged. To do so, you'll have to meet a small list of requirements. This list is short, and sounds like it has a lot of variety to it but in the end, each task is the exact same: Go to a place, kill some enemies. It sounds boring, but if your a fan of hack-n-slash, it's really a lot of fun. The maps are all well made, and there's a good variety in where you can find viking warriors. Sometimes you come across a few tied up to a pole in the middle of nowhere, other times you'll be tasked with liberating a conqured lumber mill... and sometimes, you'll be required to sneak your way through a heavily gaurded outpost looking for runestones that will help you summon dragons when you finally choose to seige the local castle.
And, impressioned vikings are in areas controled by Hel... you can always tell prisioners are nearby due to the lack of color and overall dreyness of the surrounding area. Once a section of map has been liberated, light returns to the area and the flowers and grass grow healthy again. It's a nice touch and a good way to guide you in the right direction... when in doubt, head towards the darkness.
You got your basic combos to start with and you'll instantly realize that Vikings don't take the act of killing lightly... within the first 5 minutes, you'll be hacking off heads and severing limbs in no time. Each kill garners you a little bit of experiance and money, and with enough experiance and money comes the oportunity to buy a few new weapons and a good variety of new limb-severing moves. By the end of the game you'll have a huge arsenal of ways to cut a man in half and best yet, killing blows happen in slow motion... which somehow rarely seems to gets old.
When basic swordplay isn't enough, you'll be able to buy a few magic spells... these aren't anything fancy, but it is enough to change up the fighting a little bit. Activating the spells gives your sword a magic power that, depending on the spell, stops the enemy dead in his tracks. You have the usual three.. fire, lighting, and my personal favorite, ice. You'll find that these come in quiet handy towards the end of the game, but none are ever required to do anything.
The game takes place on 3 diffrent islands. Each island is representational of a 'level' so although each island is completly open-ended and can be explored freely, it is not possible to travel between islands at will. In otherwords, you can't get to island 2 until you finish all the tasks on island 1. But once you reach island 2, there's no going back to island 1 ever again. Then again, outside of the achivement based collectables, they'll be no need to go back so you won't mind.
Building your army is pretty straight forward. Find some guys in a cage, kill some guards, open the cage and release them. After releasing the prisoners, they'll help you fight and kill any nearby enemies you may have left behind... so it's up to you to decide if you want to try to kill everyone yourself, or just the few you have to kill to reach the cage in order to recruit help. A nice, little touch.
Ocassonally you'll have to enter an area where there are too many enemies to kill by yourself. That's not to say that you can't try... but it's pretty damn hard, if not downright impossible. In areas like these, you'll be able to sneak around undetected and use your wide array of stealth-killing moves to dispatch only those enimes that you have to. Stealth kills are easy to execute and often times result in cutting a person in half from behind. Simple, but enjoyable.
There are a few mini bosses you'll come across, Giants and Champions, but they largly play out exactly the same. They're just like every other enemy, but much larger and require far more hits to drag down. Once injured the final blow can be dealt through a series of button timing events.
Once you've completed all the sub tasks you'll be given the option to seige the local castle... which is where the real fun comes in. When you seige a castle, you'll be placed in a huge army vs army meele fight where you'll be tasked with finding, and killing, local summoners who are constantly summoning undead to the fight. It's a lot like Dynasty Warriors but way more compact and chaotic. Best part, dying has no effect here as each side has a summoner that's willing to bring anyone who falls in battle back to life.
This is where the one flaw in the game starts to show though. The combat, although good, is lacking a key feature... a targeting system. As you fight, your character will just randomly jump from enemy to enemy mid-combo with no real user control. Most of the time, this works well... but durring big fights like this it's largly undesirable as there are just far too many targets nearby to worry about killing them all. Instead, you only need to focus on the summoners. Summoners, however, protect themself with a series of Totem Polls located in a small area around them. You have to destroy each totem poll before being able to attack the summoner directly. The problem occures when you try to attack a totem poll, but find your character ignoring the poll for a nearby enemy often times resulting in many undesirable deaths. These large scale fights would be so much easier if there was a way to tell the character to ignore the mass of enemies nearby, and focus only on the improtant ones. The final boss features the same general mechanic and becomes far more dificult to defeat because of it. It doesn't ruin the game, but it can get a bit frustrating.
Once a castle is seiged, you'll move on to a new island where the tasks of rebuilding an army start again.
That's pretty much it... explore, kill, upgrade... rinse, repeat. I personally loved it. The graphics where sweet, the water effects where the best I've ever seen, and reardless of how complex other games get, it's always fun to just button mash your way to victory from time to time.
Also, it comes loaded with lots of easy achivements. One solid play through on 'hard' is all you'll need for all 1000 points.
Personally, I'd like to see a sequal...
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** INFINITE UNDISCOVERY **
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This game is about as badly sterotypical as you can get for a JRPG... you're a lame, socially outcasted teenager with no self esteem who mistakenly joins up with a small party of wondering warriors on a mission to save the world. The party itself, is just as equally bad. Your cast of characters includeds all the basic sterotypes... the generic strong man, the sensative leader, the untrusting overbearing jerk, cute children for comic relief, a robot, an animal, and of course, the super attractive female that runs around in a short skirt all day giving you the sex eyes. You, of course, are far to under-confident in yourself to notice.
Story wise, the game is no diffrent. Like a lot of failed JRPGs it's long, and needlesly drawn out with little or unsuprising plot twists. The idea is that, in this land, everybody born under the light of the moon is given a magical power as a gift from the widly worshiped moon-God. These powers vary and can give the person containing them anything from the ability to control fire, to the ability to heal the wounded... basic RPG stuff. There's a catch though... the moon isn't always shining and sometimes people are born when no moonlight is present. These people are outcasts... being unblessed by the moon-God they are considered unworth to live amongst the blessed and are thus, forced to live outside the walls of the big cities without the protection of the government and armies within. One day, a really power madman creates the 'Order of chains' and begins traveling the world using all of his power to chain the Earth to the Moon... nobody really knows why, but doing so has caused many of the wild animals in the area to become mutated or overly agressive. Only a small band of warriors lead by "The Liberator" have the power and the nerve to fight the Order, sever the chains, and free the people once again.
It probably sounds kind of interesting, but it's not. Instead of a thrilling story of adventurers fighting an evil army of villians with the power to create and control magical chains, you spend your time wandering flatlands killing snakes and sitting through tons of badly rendered CGI films that contain little action. This is probably the biggest issue the game suffers from...
There are TONS of CGI movies in this game. I get that it's an RPG so there's going to be a lot of story, but this game over does it. Every time you enter a new map, you get a cutscene. Every time you go to a new town, you get a cut scene. Everytime you meeta new character you get a cutscene. When you walk back outside from meeting said character... you get a cutscene. Everytime you run into a boss you get a cutscene... seriously, you can't take 15 steps in this game without being forced to watch a cutscene. It's just too much. You open a door... cutscene. You go upstairs... cutscene. You leave the building... cutscene. Anytime you do anything that just slightly progresses the story, it's fronted with a cutscene. If you need to leave town to continue the story, leaving town will bring on a cutscene. Sometimes they even appear when you find save points on the map. It gets old fast, and becomes very annoying because none of these cutscenes are skipable.
That last part is pretty important... NONE OF THE CUTSCENES ARE SKIPABLE. It's not a problem at first because you want to watch them. But it becomes a huge problem later when you realize that often times, long boring cutscenes come between a save point and a boss fight... meaning every time you die, you have to re-watch the same movies over and over and over again just to try to win one fight. It happens a lot and there is no way around it. Worse yet, the last save point in the game comes before 15 minutes worth of movies... meaning if you die durring the last boss fight and have to try again, you have to watch the same 15 minute long movies again. It literally took me hours just to try the last fight a small handful of times. Very agrivating.
What's worse, is that none of these cutscenes are exciting... they don't feature explosions or swordfights. No, almost every cutscene in the game is a CGI film of the characters standing in a circle talking to each other. Considering the game was originally japanese and there's no way to turn the japanese text on, you're forced to watch tons of badly voiced acted scenes of people standing around talking... and often times, their mouths don't even match up with what they say. Which is even more annoying when the dialog is moronic and often revolves around people repeating what others have said. Example...
He's not sick.
He's not?
No, He's getting stronger.
Stronger?
Yes, stronger?
GASP! How can that be
Let me explain
Yes, please explain
It's the magic spell
the magic spell?
Yes, the magic spell.
Picture hours of that... badly voiced, hours of that. What's worse, is that not all the scenes contain audio. Although most of them do, other, more improtant scenes, don't have any sound to them at all... and these are usually the scenes that inform you of where you need to go. Why didn't they finish the american audio? Not enough money to pay the actors? Lazyness? We'll never know...
Gameplay wise, the game doesn't improve. The combat is in real time so no more waiting for your turn to choose "Attack". Instead, you have your basic array of combos and the ability to use special moves from current party members. But this is widly flawed. For instance, you have to hit one button to bring up a list of characters, then another to select the character... then another to choose which move to cast. Sometimes here, you're forced to then aim the move, and yet another button to execute it... the action doesn't stop while this happens so it has to all be done in real time. It's largly impossible and just not worth it.
Teamate AI is alright... but they strangly refuse to refil their own MP when it runs out. Which wouldn't be so bad, but accessing the menu to use items, doesn't pause the game. This means, you can get attacked and killed while trying to find a potion to use on yourself or a teamate. If a teamate runs out of magic durring a bossfight... that's usually the end of their magic, you won't have time to refil them.
The game world looks amazing and maps are huge... but largly empty, confusing to navigate, and have almost nothing to find. They're pretty to look at, but you quickly learn that there is no need to explore them. Ocassionaly you'll find a chest containing a potion, but that's about it. And the time required to reach the chest, wasn't worth the reward. Cities are no diffrent and most of the castle rooms buildings are completly empty, or contain little more then random NPCs withzero information to offer.
I don't get a lot of time to play video games so often times I play 2 hours tonight, and not again for 3 days. Because of this, I ran into another problem... It's easy to forget what's going on, what you're suppose to be doing, and where you're suppose to be going.
Unfortunitly there are no ingame hints or directions to be found... if you forget, you're fucked. The start menu offers a little, one sentance, summary of the current events; but it's rarely helpful. One example, "The team needs to return to Edward and give him the medicine". This may sound helpful but it's not. It's only helpful information if you already know where Edward is. If you don't know where he's at... there's no ingame way to find out. Why the game doesn't tell you to "Return to [town] and give Edward his medicine"... I'll never know.
Overall, the game is long, predictable, and boring. The monsters are lame, the controls are bad, and there's zero content outside of watching the story (no minigames, no collectables). If you're a lonly 12 year old with very few friends and no chance of getting a girlfriend in the next 10 years, check it out... this game is aimed at you. But if you're an adult or a socially accepted person, you'll find the generic characters annoying and the story downright laughable
0.5/10
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--- TURNING POINT: FALL OF LIBERTY ---
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I knew this game was going to be kind of clunky when I rented it (it has a user score of a 4 out of 10) but I just couldn't help myself.... I'm big on experiancing the story of a game and this one seemed unique.
The idea is that Winston Churchill dies before WWII starts altering the history of the events that got America into the war... so America stays out of the fight, until Nazi Germany invades New York.
The game starts off with you as a New York construction working building a skyscraper when the german planes start flying overhead. You have to climb down the steel beams, get yourself a gun, and start fighting back... it's WWII, but on American soil.
It's a FPS... but a pretty mediocre one. The game is clunky and slow, the enemy AI is terrible, hit detection is questionable, and the game is riddled with bugs. None of these are show-stoppingly bad, but it makes for a sub-par game overall. The fact that the game is only about 4 or 5 hours long, doesn't help either (or does it?)
My biggest complaints come from the games lack of overall polish. For a game that's all about fighting WWII in America, they don't do a very good job of reminding you that you're in America. Most of the game takes place in ally ways or empty streets that look like the could be anywhere... there's a distinct lack of American culture in the game. There's a few minor scenes featuring the Sears Tower and the White house, but that's about it... I'm 3 stages away from finishing the game and I think I've come across one American flag the entire time. With most of the buildings being generic shells and almost zero reffrence to American pop culture (music, movies, scenery, etc..) I often forget that I'm in America at all when playing.
The stages can also be annoying to navigate. They're pretty striaght forward for the most part, but it's often times confusing to figure out just where the map is trying to lead you. Sometimes you'll come across a hole in the floor that the game expects you to jump into... but other times, a real similar looking hole will be an instant death trap. It's the same with rubble... sometimes rubble will turn into ramps or will be a crossable byproduct of a newly created hole in the wall... other times it's use as an unpassable stage boundry, but it can get confusing to figure out which is which. Many times, in the first few levels, I've almost gotten my character stuck by trying to jump over rubble that's suppose to be an invisable wall. To make matters worse, the developers tried to add in a bit of platforming so on occassion you'll come across a stack of boxes or a wall you can climb, or edges/ropes you can hang from to reach new areas... but there's never any really clear indication of when this is possible. Once you do it, it seems so obvious, but durring your inital playthrough it's hard to figure out what wall is there as a boundy, and which one is there to be climbed.
None of this would be that bad if it wasn't for the terrible checkpoint system. Checkpoints are far and few between and dying means going back to the start of the last checkpoint. It's annoying to have to kill the same 4 rooms of enemies multiple times just because you mistakenly jumped in the wrong hole. There was a particular fight I kept losing not because I wasn't good enough to win, but because I didn't know what to do. It turns out, in this scenario, that my enemy is immune to bullets and must be punched to death. I sure wish the game would have told me that before my 10th try... it doesn't help that there is no punch button either. Instead, when you approach an enemy a fist icon appears on the screen allowing you to trigger a close combat fight. This would be ok, but like all interactive objects in the game, the icon is hard to trigger and often times doesn't display when you think it should. Often times I can't trigger the fight simply because I'm too close.
Too close for close combat?
The stages are littered with your typical trash... abandoned suitcases or building rubble. But unlike modern games where these are free floating objects that get kicked out of the way when you walk... these peices of trash are actually parts of the map. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten backed up into what feels like a corner durring a gunfight just to find after the carnage is over, that I'm being blocked by a suitcase on the floor... backing into objects is an unavoidable aspect of FPS games, but I find it happens far to often in Turning Point. Constantly I'm struggling to back out of doorways and I somehow always manage to get stuck on the stupidest of things. Annoying... especially when you have to reaload at a checkpoint after getting unfairly killed by a doorknob.
Durring the game, you're given objecives that tell you where you need to go and what you need to do next. Unfortunitly, the game does this poorly. Durring the game, all you get is a message that says "Objective added", and it's up to you to pause the game and read what that objective is. These objectives are small and vauge making me wonder why they don't just appear on the screen... there's plenty of room for the words "Destroy the tank" on screen... why do I have to pause the action?
There's a small variety of guns but nothing to brag about and story wise, the game is hit or miss. There's not a whole lot of 'story' going on outside a few one or two minute cut scenes between stages. Most of these are generic bullshit though... you meet some guys in the army, ride in a truck, watch a new story about the Nazi attack on TV. It's enough to keep you interested, but not enough to make up for the shortfalls of the actual gameplay. There's a few scenes that you can tell are suppose to be 'epic' but fall short due to the general bland gameplay... blowing stuff up is only satifsying if it was satisfying to reach the point where you set off the bomb. Sadly, this game lacks that thrill.
Loading times are bad and you'll experiance a fair amount of lag durring the single player experiance while the game tries to load new parts of the stage or the next scripted event. Planes crashes just aren't that great when you miss most of the crash due to single player lag. It does little but make an already clunky game come off as that much more clunky and unresponsive.
That's not to say that it's all bad though. There are some cool experiances to be had and although the story in generally bland and uneventful, it is interesting to hear the story of WWII through a diffrent path in history. Regardless of how average the gameplay is, fighting in a Nazi controlled white house does have its fair amount of joy... the graphics are decent and the music, although nothing that reminds you of being in america, is solid and fits well with the game. There's a few scenes where you run into American refugees that are cool, and it is cool to walk onto a scene of Nazis searching apartment buildings or fighting with random citizens trying to protect their families.
If you got nothing else to do and you like FPS games, rent it. It's not terrible, it's just not great... it has a ton of flaws that drag it down but none of these make the game difficult to play or too overly frustrating. They'll be the occasional "I'm lost" moments and you'll probably have to replay a few sections of a stage... but I've played games that where better made and far more aggrivating to play. I'd consider it a casual shooter... it's a bit short (4 hours) and the enemy AI is stupid and slow, so I wouldn't suggest buying it. I'd say it's worth a rent if you're really really bored but just don't go into it with high hopes.
