Darkest Hour (Mod Review)

Overview: Darkest Hour is one of the “Big Three” mods for Red Orchestra, a Realistic WW2 FPS that originally began as a UT2003/2004 mod. When it was first released, it was a nightmare due to some hidden bugs that caused the Mod to become nearly unplayable. Now that the patch came out, is it worth the download?

Plot: It’s WW2 on the Western Front!

Gameplay: The overall gameplay feels like the mod version of RO: Combined Arms. Realistic and gritty. Since this mod takes place on the Western Front, it brings in a lot of original content. 2 new sides (Americans and British), new skins, new vehicles, new guns, and plenty of new maps. Before the patch, the game tended to crash every few minutes, but now that ain’t a problem now.

Graphics: It’s starting to show off it’s age due to the fact that the UT2004 engine ain’t exactly brand new, but it has it’s charm. It looks really gritty and dirty, which is suitable for a realistic WW2 game like RO.

Sound: Before the patch, the guns all sounded underwhelming and generic. That’s probably because the team didn’t really have a full fledged Sound Engineer working with them at the time when they were developing the mod. Now with the new patch, the guns sound a lot better, but it’s still hit or miss.

Reviewer’s Final Opinion: If you’re a hardcore vet of Red Orchestra, this mod is a must-have.

Links: http://www.darkesthourgame.com/

Age Of Chivalry 1.1.0 (Mod Review)

Overview: A semi-tactical, semi-difficult, all-heroic medieval mod for Half-Life 2. Team Chivalry has delivered in the past, with a small fanbase and a mediocre report. However, with their newest update (1.1.0) they have fixed all but the tiny tolerable bugs that made their earlier version receive such a disgraceful opinion. They have polished their work to a fine sheen, and added many personal touches that make the newest version of Age Of Chivalry yet more epic in every way.

Plot: The Mason Order versus the Agathia Knights. The plot is loosely set, with generally the Masons being “evil” and Agathians being “good”. The description of the maps on the Loading screen seem to tell a larger tale, but one I couldn’t find on their main website (located here).

Gameplay: I found the gameplay to be slightly more intriguing since it’s 1.0.0 release. New weapons such as the Warhammer make load-out an interesting array of choices, but I tend to always stick with ball-and-chain. Since there is no crosshairs, aiming with throwing knives, throwing axes, crossbows, bows, and catapults can be daunting at first, especially since you are using your eye and not a helpful line on the screen. The objectives still drive the maps along, although there seems to be too many “Break this with your giant sword” tasks.

Graphics: This game got a definite polishing. The menus, HUDs, and other various interfaces have all been updated to a sleeker, yet appropriate design. New maps have been introduced, including the famous Helm’s Deep which most people seem to enjoy. The animations still need some work, like when loading a bolt on the crossbow or one of the random times you seem to kill your enemy without your sword moving. It still looks better than most mods out there, and much better than AoC 1.0.0.

Sound: Still a breathtaking clamor of metal striking metal, screams and shouts and arrows whizzing by, complemented by great music and inspiring battle-cries. You will feel like you’re in the Middle Ages.

Reviewer’s Final Opinion: This mod guarantees many epic moments and battles. If you enjoy knights, swords, and castle sieges then this mod is for you. It’s fun, cinematic, and very well-done.

Wii Fit (Wii Review)

Overview: Wii Fit is about maintaining and losing a small amount of weight. The games/fitness exercises are fun and challenging, and the game is best played with a group of friends or family members.

Gameplay: When you look at the big box and read “Wii Fit” you think about fitness equipment and really working out; a game where you lose a lot of pounds and get stronger. This hardware/game isn’t meant to replace your exercise equipment or the gym membership you bought/signed up for but never used. Wii Fit is all about having fun, creating goals, self-awareness of weight (most likely fat) and losing a few pounds. Wii Fit has a nice variety of games/fitness exercises; yoga, strength training, aerobics, and balance games. Wii Fit is really fun and unique, however, there is one downside; only a small amount of games in each category. The games are fun and very challenging (varies depending on the person) and you can also increase the difficulty if you want more of a challenge.

Graphics: About the same level of detail as Wii Sports. Nothing amazing nor spectacular, but it does it’s job.

Sound: The sound quality is pretty good and what you would expect from Nintendo. The music is nice and the sounds are just right.

Reviewer’s Final Opinion: Overall, Wii Fit is aimed at making fitness fun and exciting for the whole family. It was not created to help lose huge amounts of weight, but instead giving people self-awareness, creating goals and maintaining/improving your health. Wii Fit is too expensive for what it offers. It would have been nice if they would have included a few more games in each category.

First Strike (BF 2142 Mod Review by Consumerist)

Overview: First Strike is basically SW: Battlefront 2, but for Battlefield 2142. It’s somewhat underwhelming as it doesn’t really take much advantage of the engine.

Plot:

Gameplay: Imagine SW: Battlefront 2, but with better graphics. All this mod amounts to is a shoddy copy of Battlefront 2 or a simplified Battlefield 2142. You’d think they would’ve exploited the Titan Mode for awesome capital ship battles in space. Sadly, all the capital ships in the space battles are uncontrollable and pretty much motionless, and the mod doesn’t even use the commander feature either.

Graphics: As I said before, the graphics are much better than SW: Battlefront 2 but they aren’t as good as Battlefield 2142’s graphics. I’m not a graphic sage so I usually don’t have much to say on this subject.

Sound: Instead of using the iconic actual Star Wars soundtrack, they replaced it with mediocre filler orchestra music. John Williams will NOT kill you in your sleep for using his music in a Star Wars mod. In my playtime, I only heard the Star Wars theme once, which is disappointing for a Star Wars centric mod. Surprisingly the sound effects are much better. Sure the X-Wings don’t sound like X-Wings, but the guns are pretty accurate.

Reviewer’s Final Opinion: I’m aware of the fact that the developers of this mod did a lot of hard work in creating this, it just seems merely average to me. Nothing really new. But if you’re a devoted follower of Star Wars games/mods, you should definitely download this and give it a try.

Get a Life (Mod Review)

Overview: An obscure mod for Half-Life 2 was recently released. Sporting an intensely-convoluted plot, HL1-ish weapon skins, and the most hilarious voiceovers you will ever find in a game, Get a Life reminds everyone who plays that you should never release a game 50% complete.

Plot: You are Alexander Somebodysomething, a pale-faced leukemia victim with expert knowledge of weapons handling, medical aid, and absolutely no fear. A billion zombies, gigantic poisonous hairy tarantulas, and watching your fellow man die horrifying and nightmarish deaths does not sway you the least. You live in a swanky apartment with your cheeky scientist sister and her pet spiders. You wear a baseball cap for fun, listen to the radio, and work at a job that could use a regulation protocol or two. Apparently leukemia victims can handle complex machinery that regularly explodes into fiery bursts every few minutes, but somebody’s got to do it, I guess.

Gameplay: The game runs on a painfully linear path, with 9 out of every 10 doors being locked. The puzzles are childishly simple, with cut-scenes directly showing you where to get the next puzzle piece; the difficulty is reduced to being led by the hand. Firefights are uninteresting. Zombie levels always became a game of Whack-a-Mole. Healing never took a break. I found myself popping medkits every chance I got. It was a pain.

However, the bullet-time ability (though it wasn’t explained at all) was interesting and new, but nonetheless completely devoid of usefulness.

Graphics: The flashlight is replaced by a flare gun, the flares being unable to bounce off grates or zombies without dying into a few pitiful sparks. The crowbar has evolved into a rusty pipe. Zombies now wear name-tags. Headcrabs became spiders. Fast zombies are now Nemesis look-alikes, the Antlion guard fell into some red paint, and somewhere along the way G-Man joined the Combine army.

Most of the guns have the Half-Life 1 feel to them, especially the grenades. Get a Life doesn’t try hard enough to cover up the Half-Life defaults that came with Hammer SDK, almost everything either being directly stolen or ridiculously disguised. The only original graphic would be the skin of the protagonist.

The level design was beautiful for the most part. Fluidity was lacking, though, as backtracking was inevitable. After the boss battle with the red-painted Antlion guard, the game took a dead halt in level progression. There were two not-so-obvious puzzles that I believed were just the level designer being superb at subtleness, but I was wrong. Let me explain:

I was in a large warehouse with nowhere to go. After defeating the antlion boss, I tried every button and door. Nothing. I saw these barrels stacked up next to this cleverly constructed mountain of boxes. Using the barrels as stairs, I carefully climbed the mountain of boxes only to find myself trapped in a glitched void. So I tried another path, and after a long loading screen, found myself in a red-lit underground ventilation nexus. There was an unbreakable wall of barricaded planks that my pipe couldn’t bust, and about a dozen scattered explosive barrels. Naturally, I gave the level designer credit for such a crafty puzzle. I stacked the explosive barrels against the wooden barricade, and blew them up. It did nothing. I then got a little upset and went back outside, and after a long loading screen, was in the warehouse once again. I saw the debris piled up from when the antlion guard fell through the ceiling. I thought, perhaps, this is the puzzle the level designer has been drawing me towards. I tried climbing the debris and got pinned between two broken walls, stuck and motionless. I gave up and quit.

Sound: Music was swell, but didn’t have enough.

Voiceovers, horrible. The British cottonmouths who did most of the voices had no feeling, and no intelligence. The sentences written in the subtitles had more emotion than the dead-faced voice saying them. Every character rushed through his lines without pause or break between periods. It must’ve been a poor department during development, or its quality was completely ignored and the sound files thrown in with a cringe from the team.

Reviewer’s Final Opinion: You can download it, if you want, but you aren’t missing anything. There’s no inspirational storyline, no new and exciting graphics, and definitely no satisfaction in playing.

Gran Turismo 5: Prolouge (PS3 Review)

Overview: Welcome back to the fast and furious lifestyle of GT5:P. We have a watered down version of what we can expect GT5 to be. Unfortunately the game is seriously lacking what troubled GT4.

Plot: You drive cars for money. That’s it.

Gameplay: The cars for once handle not like a real car would handle. There is massive under steer and over steer which hasn’t been present in previous games. Otherwise it makes for a great game.

Graphics: With all Gran Turismo Games you expect a certain flash of realism. This game is no exception. Each car is finely made like your favorite piece of china. BUT WHERE’S THE DAMAGE MODELS? Once again we are left with nothing at all that can satisfy our taste to smash a Nissan Skyline going 220 into a Ferrari Formula one car and watch the pieces fly.

Sound: Imagine a sunny day in Sonoma and you live right next to the track at Sears Point. Now take the sounds you hear in the distance and put them right next to your ear

Reviewer’s Final Opinion: If your a die hard fan of the Gran Turismo series then I’m sure you already own the game and love it. But for even the faithful to the game it seems like a waste of money. Overall I’d say unless you have an extra $40 to spend it’s only a rent.

Grid Wars 2 (PC Review)

Overview: Grid Wars, kinda like Geometry Wars

Plot: No plot, you shoot circles, triangles, anything that moves lol.

Gameplay: You shoot, get points, get powerups, repeat.

Graphics: Looks old school, not like Audiosurf though(don’t have it yet).

Sound: Retro

Reviewer’s Final Opinion: Well, after playing Grid Wars, I seem to notice something. There was this feeling that I have played this before, and it turns out, back when I was playing PGR2(Xbox), I was playing Geometry Wars, and this is basically a rip-off of it. Now, it looks better than GeoWars, but thats it. So, if you care about graphics and GeoWars, then download Grid Wars, but if you didn’t like GeoWars, then don’t download since it is the same damn thing.

Gish (PC Review)

Overview: Gish is a definitive indie game that, like most indie games, boasts a unique physics engine. In this case, you command a sentient ball of tar investigating the sewers of a city while using the properties of your tar-based, gelatinous form to circumvent obstacles and enemies. At 5 bucks in its initial 50% off release on Steam, I figured it would be money well spent. But I was wrong. This game was so horrible I want my 5 measly dollars back.

Plot: You are Gish. You are made of tar.

That’s when it stopped becoming interesting for me. When you start the game, a slideshow of grossly-disfigured drawn characters haphazardly hangs the plot like a trashbag would replace a broken window on your car. A meaningless story about Girl is captured by Evil Thing, taken into Sewer, and waiting to be rescued by Gish is not a summary, it’s probably very close. I just don’t want to start up the game again to recheck. Immediately, Girl’s love interest (disturbingly enough a ball of fanged tar, I don’t want to know how they met), Gish, slithers to the rescue.

Gameplay: It was frustrating. Very frustrating. The game couldn’t have made it more unclear as how to do anything besides the generally obvious, and that was “WASD makes you roll”. It took me a difficult time to figure the rest out. This button made me tense up. This button made little cilia grow out of my skin. This button makes me fall into a slump of pudding. I didn’t know what I was doing. And I still don’t think I fully do.

Eventually I cracked the puzzle of how to work the game, and I was on to the next level. It got a little tougher, with several deaths caused by not timing my bacterial cilia to grow out of my skin to attach to the ceiling to avoid the monster, because every time I actually try killing a monster my slow girth causes me to fall not on its head but in its brown claws.

The next levels were impossible, with me ending my short-lived experience on this game soon after. Jumping became my greatest fear, and in sidescrollers all you ever do is jump. But when you jump with Gish, you either fall into some pit of conveniently-placed anti-tar death contraptions, or you didn’t get enough momentum in your headstomp on the enemy, or you rolled just a wee too fast while sticking to the ceiling and the force detaches you from your perilous grip to fall on more anti-tar death contraptions. I stopped playing when the game made me play the same level five times because I couldn’t grasp the concept of calculated tar movement. The only part I enjoyed was pressing that one button where you slump into pudding so you slip through a tiny hole like you’re a clog being flushed out of the pipes. Those tiny holes were few and far in-between, naturally, as they were the best moments.

Graphics: Somewhat amusing, though not inspiring. You see tan blocks, black blocks, grey blocks, dark brown blocks, the occasional cracked block, and if you’re lucky, water. The character Gish was interesting at first, but you quickly tire of his repetitive collection of four or so faces. The enemies were twitchy, appearing as animated storyboard cartoons come to life. When you destroy an enemy, they explode into brown globs, and being in a sewer that was just distasteful.

Sound: I don’t remember. It wasn’t good enough to remember.

Reviewer’s Final Opinion: I want my five dollars back. And I can’t believe the price shot up to $10 on Steam, ridiculous. Avoid Gish. You’re better off with one of the dozens of better physics simulators.

Armadillo Run (PC Review)

Watch this video first.

Overview: A physics-based puzzle game that really hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. This king of Rube Goldberg machine simulators isn’t even supported on Xfire, yet Phun is, a real tragedy. It’s an excellent brain bending mind puzzle that boasts a user-friendly, polished interface along with realistic physics.

Plot: Get the Armadillo from Point A to Point B any way you imagine.

Gameplay: You’re given a handful of materials, and your imagination. It’s up to you how you’re going to transport the Armadillo to the winning zone. Build a bridge and let gravity do the work? Construct an elevator that works on pulley systems, use momentum and inertia to throw the Armadillo, it’s up to you!

Graphics: Clean, solid, and simplified. Most physics simulators follow this same theme.

Sound: Every sound you expect to hear is heard, and in good quality. You won’t have to deal with this as a serious issue. It just works.

Reviewer’s Final Opinion: Worth the 20 dollars, and it would be a shame if you didn’t download the demo from its website ( http://www.armadillorun.com ). The levels get intense, since I am not creative when it comes to near-infinitely open-ended solutions, and I still haven’t beaten the game even though I purchased it when it came out! You won’t regret this buy.

Here’s one of my own creations:

Carpathian Crosses (Mod Review)

Overview: Carpathian Crosses, one of the Big Three mods for Red Orchestra, just recently came out on the 11th of April 2008. Many people are wondering if this mod is worth the 324 MB download. Well, I decided to download this mod and yes, it’s definitely worth it.

Plot: What do you expect, it’s bloody World War 2 on the Eastern Front!

Gameplay: It’s more or less the same as Red Orchestra’s gameplay. Fast, intense, deadly, and gripping. This mod introduces a whole new side (The Romanians) to play as in the game, and as usual, they bring in new weapons and changes to the overall gameplay. The Romanian weapons pack a lot of punch and are satisfying to use(like the Steyr M95 bolt-action rifle). In addition to the tanks and guns they add in, they also introduce a brand new support weapon (The Mortar) which is so awesome in my opinion, should replace the annoying Airstrike Artillery which is present in the original Red Orchestra game. It’s so satisfying to bombard an area with enemy troops with that thing. There are some problems with the mod, like the map glitches and the fact that in some scenarios, the Romanian troops look so similar to Russian troops which isn’t good since in several occasions, I team killed 3 people thinking they were Romanians.

Graphics: Since the mod is made for Red Orchestra, which runs on the Unreal 2.5 Engine, it doesn’t really look great compared to games of today. It still looks nice though in a gritty way.

Sound: The sound is excellent! It really adds to the atmosphere! Try running this mod at full volume, you won’t regret it!

Reviewer’s Final Opinion: Yes, this mod is definitely worth the 324 MB download! You can get the mod at http://www.carpathiancrosses.com

Trailer: