What initially drew me into Valkyria Chronicles, and what kept me playing for as long as I did, was simply how the game looked. Seeing the storybook scenes in motion is a must, as still pictures do them no justice. I would love to watch someone with more ability than myself play through the game just to see what is next. Characters are expressive in spite of not being overly detailed; equipped weapons actually change when swapped out. The protagonist’s tank, featured prominently in every mission I got to, changes with new equipment as well, becoming just as important and likeable as any other character. Everything is polished and consistent, from the layout of the menus to the literal book that the story unfolds in. Valkyria Chronicles looked more than good enough to distract me from how frustrated I was getting from the repeated ass kickings I was getting - at least for a while.

Combat in Valkyria Chronicles is something of a real time-turn based hybrid. The action stops while the player chooses which character to move, then swoops down to a third person shooter perspective. From there the player takes position and shoots in pseudo real time, the action only stopping when it comes time to take aim and hope in vain that the bullets go where the gun is pointed. Here is where things began to fall apart for me; as soon as the ‘action’ dropped into third person I assumed that my crosshairs meant something. They are more of an approximation of where the shot might go than anything else. Nothing for me is more frustrating than taking the time to line up a sniper shot after boosting his accuracy, only to have him miss the same shot he made seconds before. This randomness felt oddly out of place and is really what turned me off of the game in the end. I don’t think it is any more difficult than other games of its kind, but I do think that straying further from its progeny would have been a change for the better.

It really is a shame; I want to see more of the game, but after missing several shots with my tank only to have three Empire tanks make the same shot all in a row, the final one being a critical hit that blew the top clean off my vehicle (with no warning) an hour into a mission, I just don’t want to go back. The real time part of the combat feels like a tease; in the end it is no different than Disgaea or Final Fantasy Tactics or anything else in the genre. If you happened to like those and don’t mind that a significant part of winning relies on virtual dice rolls, you can do worse than Valkyria Chronicles. It is the most visually striking game that I have played in a long time. While it may not have converted me, if Sega ever releases a game that looks like this but allows me to control what is going on, instead of pushing pieces around, I’ll be the first in line. As it stands, it is an excellent addition to a relatively niche area; it’s just not for me.

What I found most surprising about this game was how much better combat felt since the first game. Battles already felt personal and satisfyingly crunchy in a way they don’t in most shooters, but in 2, things are stepped up to the next level. Slamming into cover and bursting enemy skulls with a barrage of bullets feels incredibly convincing considering how outlandish the visuals are.

Blending art and science in the way all great shooters do, where this game really shines (much like its predecessor but even more so), is in its level design. It all feels very deliberate, each fight working out like a little puzzle, especially on the higher two difficulties. It’s outstanding in how much it does with the basic concept of taking cover, and throws new ideas at you until the end. Simultaneously simple and deep, mindless fun and a thinking man’s game, tiny and enormous, it should be taught at game design schools.

In its campaign, Gears of War 2 too often strays away from this winning strategy by means of gimmicky driving and rail-shooting sections, so it has more bad stages than its predecessor, but it has far fewer frustrating ones (the game still leans over the difficult side of the fence, though). And everything underneath is so solid anyway that any frustrations are forgettable. The encounter-to-encounter stuff is pretty much as good as video games get.

It may be silly to even mention in a review now, but Gears of War 2 deserves high praise for its visuals. Most will probably find its art style unappealing at first glance, but I think my roommate put it best when watching me play the game’s final stage, saying “these graphics are perfect for this game.” If when the first time you played Crysis, you thought that no game had ever looked more realistic, when you play this game you’ll think that no game has ever looked more like a painting.

Gears of War 2 is video game shooting at its best. And that’s all there is to it, really. It’s molten fucking hot; don’t spend your money elsewhere this holiday season. And this is coming from someone who hates reviews that sound like advertisements.

Bethesda has decided to stick with their Oblivion Engine, for better or worse. Advantages include Bethesda’s familiarity with its tools, and various improvements to the engine. Disadvantages include a strange conversation perspective (like Oblivion, we zoom right into our friend’s face as we speak to them, the world behind pausing mid-step) and Bethesda’s continued penalization of ranged combat. Bows never worked particularly well in earlier Elder Scrolls titles; on top of having to aim carefully there was still a high chance to miss until your stats with that weapon were high enough, and this tradition has continued. This isn’t just frustrating, but needless and unintuitive. While I have a deep respect for dice rolls, having them effect your accuracy so greatly makes these weapons uninteresting at the lower levels, and results in constant saves for convenient reloads should you get unlucky. This was a problem in the earlier Fallouts, too, but I’m guessing this design decision wasn’t retained on account of a desire for meaningful progression or a deep respect for Fallout’s foibles and personality.

On that note, the Fallout universe has been diluted. I’m not speaking of child-killing here, that’s something I’m quite thankful to be free of, but the warm welcome this world offers. Fallout 2 featured a suffocatingly harsh cast, and some characters were memorable simply because they were friendly: this tradition has been lost. Fallout 3 offers a warm welcome with Megaton, your first home city. And while you do have an option to free yourself of it, it’s somewhat strange that the city even exists. Its residents don’t seem particularly crazed, aside from a few cult members, and the guy who runs it is protective and fatherly, qualities that seem more appropriate for a character that exists in The Elder Scrolls rather than Fallout. This is not some Episode 1 shit, it’s not a terrible disservice to fans, but Fallout’s spirit feels more alive in Fallout 3’s dangerous environments than its surprisingly polite characters.

Fallout 3’s environment is one aspect that’s been greatly improved. Exploring vaults (not unlike the one in which your character was raised) and new areas are infinitely more interesting than they were before. That’s not to say they’re going to surprise you; dungeons play out in familiar ways. You risk health and ammo for rewards, and sometimes that risk pays off, sometimes not. But as you do more of these, your encyclopedia grows, making your second and even third characters’ progression more fluid. It’s here Bethesda has played to their strengths, the novelty of discovery and satisfaction of familiarity resulting in a whole greater than the sum of all parts.

After 40 or so hours of play, Fallout 3 feels like something of a mixed bag. Bethesda’s decision to package Elder Scrolls as a Fallout game feels forced, and while it’s a fresh aesthetic, the Fallout universe isn’t used particularly well. Ultra violence is still featured, and you’ll hear “fuck” and “shit” from time to time, but poor characterizations make this world feel transparent. Still, if you’re a fan of Bethesda’s games and you can forgive these missteps, Fallout 3 offers a lot of silver lining, and it’s worth the time you put into it.

First and foremost, LittleBigPlanet is a platformer. Ordinarily this would be worth quite a few bonus points for me; 2D platformers are few and far between these days. The last really good one I played was New Super Mario Brothers, and that was two years ago when I still had a DS. That game knew exactly was it was and reveled in the old-school-ness of it. LittleBigPlanet, on the other hand, was not content with just 2D and had to try to pry in just enough of the third dimension to make playing the game an absolute chore. As trite as it may sound, the game controls terribly. There is no option to use the d-pad instead of the analog stick, so movement feels mushy even before the exaggerated physics come into play. It is impossible to do anything with precision; jumping is awkward, landing worse, and just running over loosely wobbling obstacles a matter of luck instead of timing and skill. No one is actually good at this game, they simply have enough patience to try over and over until little scrotum boy bounces just the right way.

It unfortunately does not end there. Moving between planes is inconsistent; sometimes jumping forward a level is not possible, other times it leads to instant death by bottomless pit. Telling which plane you are on at any given time is also a matter of guesswork, leading to death by falling behind a platform into the aforementioned bottomless pit. For a game this insufferably pleased with itself, it just isn’t any fun. After two levels I wanted to wring the John Clease sound-alike narrator’s neck. Even the look of the game quickly becomes annoying, busy being almost photorealistic and uninteresting at the same time. The level design swings wildly between boring and easy to actually creative but impossible. I would love to take Mario for a spin through some of the later levels - maybe he would actually land on a platform once in a while instead of waving his arms, trying to be cute on the way to another inadvertent and unavoidable death.

There is of course much more to LittleBigPlanet than just falling into pits and making obscene gestures with custom avatars. The ability to create just about any level imaginable with the included editor is a big selling point. It is unfortunate that playing through the included levels to unlock items is required; it feels like being punished for something someone else did wrong. The editor itself is difficult, but not impossible to use. Mouse support is probably a bit much to ask for, but it would have been nice. The ability to play through other users’ levels for free is also welcome, though as brilliant as some of them are, they are still saddled with the same control problems from the main game. Think of playing with Lego while wearing mittens, then coat everything with ice. I am amazed at what some people have had the time and skill to come up with, I just wish I could play them in a different game.

Making a level editor the selling point of a game seems like a cop-out to me. It almost feels like admitting that you have a great set of tools but have no idea what to do with them, then selling them for full price with the hope that someone else will. Sony has been lucky; the community has come through and made some great levels for their broken game. It is a shame that no one will see any benefit from it. LittleBigPlanet is begging for an in-game economy, something like the coppers system in Trackmania. Players there are rewarded for their creativity with in-game currency. It’s not as good as really getting paid, but it is better than the trophy awarded for having five people download your level. It also doesn’t hurt that the game attached to the tool set is good in its own right - something LittleBigPlanet cannot hope to claim.

The problem is not that there is nothing new in Silent Hill: Homecoming. On the contrary; more has changed with this title than any previous, and that includes The Room. The famously bad combat is now just annoying instead of painful; I still ran past most enemies, but when I did have to fight them, I at least had a chance (and my weapons didn’t break, screw 0rigins). The game of course looks better, but many of the new graphical flourishes are cribbed directly from either the movie or other games; the influence of Silent Hill: The Feature Film That Tried Really Hard is readily apparent, and from the walls peeling away when changing worlds to a silly and canon-destroying cameo from Silent Hill 2, most of it looks cool but adds nothing. It might as well have been called Silent Hill: The Movie: The Game, only it’s several years late.

Since changes to the combat system actually made fighting easier, the puzzles are more abstract and difficult than ever to make up for it. I quickly succumbed to the temptation of GameFAQs; there are barely enough hours in a day to play everything that I want to play this time of year as it is. Spending hours on a sliding block puzzle or context-free riddle is just not an option. It should come as no surprise that this ruined big chunks of the game for me. Part of the fun, or terror, or the previous games was figuring out puzzles while being constantly worried about some refugee from a Japanese tentacle rape anime accosting you from behind. Even the puzzles became frightening; Silent Hill: Homecoming took the puzzles one step too far, past “hard” and right on to “almost impossible,” and cheating was the only way for me to keep going.

Silent Hill: Homecoming is far from all bad, though. The bosses are some of the best the series has seen: grotesque, unnerving, but beatable. Most of the cut scenes were very well done, in spite of borrowing heavily from Saw and High Tension to name a few. The game is definitely gory, but it skirts the line between icky and nauseating very well. I can only recall one or two times that it sank to the level of Condemned 2, which both my dinner and I definitely appreciated. None of this changes the fact that the game had Silent Hill on the cover, and that I had serious expectations for it for that reason. I wanted to be frightened, and I was not. Of course, if the game didn’t have Silent Hill on the cover, I would never have played it; without the now slightly tarnished moniker it would have been just another dark third person action game with loud noises and spooky music. It looks like the only really scary series left is Fatal Frame, and playing the latest in that series would require buying a Wii.

Make no mistake about it - Sonic Chronicles is a slow game. And not just by Sonic the Hedgehog’s standards. It seems almost implausible then that it captures the spirit of the classic Sonic titles, and is competent enough to build an exciting, enthralling and extremely fun game out of what many dismissed as a dead franchise. Rebirth? Not quite, but certainly it is the beginning of change for the iconic SEGA mascot.

Unusually for a handheld game, Chronicles rewards extended play. Featuring gameplay mechanics similar to the Mario RPGs of the past, the game plays out at a very fractured pace. Plot wise, and you have probably already guessed most of it, someone is messing around with the Chaos Emeralds and it is up to Sonic and his roaming gang of fuzzy vigilantes to save the day. But despite BioWare’s almost impeccable narrative credentials, we’re not here for a gripping tale and they don’t really fully deliver one either. The plot simply provides context for a series of chapter based romps across the world map, battling numerous foes in pursuit of the mysterious and ominous Dark Brotherhood.

All your favourite Sonic friends are along for the ride; Miles, Knuckles and Amy are series stalwarts, and the inclusion of Sonic Adventure era companions such as Rouge and Big the Cat can be hit or miss depending on your feelings toward them. Regardless of personal preference, each fills a party role mechanically and contributes to the battle system, enhancing the fighting with special abilities and group powers. There are even some unexpected allies that join you, throwing up all sorts of questions best left to dedicated Sonic fans to answer.

To explore the game, you navigate an isometric overworld in a distinctive illustrative art style. The inclusion of loops and ramps is a bit of a distraction here, because traversing them is hardly fluid and requires context sensitive button presses on the touchscreen to activate them. Yes, you collect rings, and as you guessed, you can spend them on new items and bonuses. Losing that critical fast pace makes this exploration less of a furious race and more of a sedate expedition. Navigation is also sometimes highly confusing, as the maps themselves are drawn in such a way that it is sometimes hard to differentiate scenery from walkable terrain, a problem I encountered often when peeking around every corner and nook. Breaking up the flow of your travels even more are frequent random battles, which play out in a turn based system mashing together aspects of Partners In Time and Elite Beat Agents. So much so, in fact, that as the game progresses you develop a rhythm to the battles, sometimes able to work on autopilot; such is the repetitious nature of the encounters. Boss battles and varying monster types break up the monotony well, allowing you often to fully unleash the skills you have acquired meatgrinding the minions, which is often flashy and loud and requires careful timing and touch screen interaction.

At its core, Sonic Chronicles is an RPG, and BioWare have infused the fast paced frenetic action of Sonic with a plethora of plodding conversations and dialogue options. At times this begins to really grate, especially when the random battles pile up with them to create an extremely disjointed experience. But if you can get past this, you will find a charming and altogether vintage Sonic game that includes all the hallmarks of the series as well as a little of that BioWare innovation on the role playing side. Not suited for commuters or gamers with short attention spans, Sonic Chronicles manages to really capture what was so attractive about the characters and setting of the very first Genesis titles. It is the attention to detail and a huge step in a new direction that really sets Sonic Chronicles above other iterations, and one which I hope continues.

This is an extremely competent game, impressive in every area with few minor problems. Chronicles is always slow paced but constantly feels on the verge of blistering speed and excitement. Capable of wowing you with incredible visuals and your traditional BioWare plot twists, it creates a sense of nostalgia among diehard Sonic fans, while also having the hooks to draw in new people to the mesmerizing world of the Dark Brotherhood. All this in a Sonic RPG? Yes, it really is true.

The other strongest aspects of Dead Space are its visual and auditory design. You’re mostly in corridors on a spaceship, sure, but both the character and environmental art are surprisingly and subtley unique. Space feels actually vast and empty, and scares go way beyond monsters just jumping out at you. It drips with as much atmosphere as BioShock, but feels more honest and more real.

One of the main contributing factors to Dead Space’s immersion and realism is the lack of any sort of heads-up display beyond the pause screen (which higher-ups at EA forced developer Redwood Shores to include). The problem here is that, when you think about most of the tricks they used to remove the HUD, they don’t make sense. Why would a Playstation or Xbox button symbol show up on a door on the Ishimura when Isaac nears it? Why would his health be displayed on his back? What the hell are those save stations?

Where this game really loses it, though, is in its pacing. On a small scale, it actually works incredibly well, as scary sequences flow perfectly into dead sequences, which flow perfectly into red-hot action sequences. But, on the grand scale, it’s a miserable failure. Every couple chapters, there are great moments that should keep you playing through to the end, but the stuff in between is the slog of slogs for games this generally exciting. If the game had been half as long, it would have been twice as effective.

It’s hard to come up with any more valid complaints than that, though. It’s engrossing, fun, progressive, tightly designed, beautiful, has top-tier production values, etc. etc., but it lacks that “je ne sais quoi;” a hyped-up game released in the fall needs to mean something. Halo had it. Gears of War sort of had it. Dead Space does not. Largely thanks to its pacing issues and where its story ends up going, it is forgettable.

So Dead Space is markedly progressive. Or modern, at least. It’s much like Assassin’s Creed in that respect, but the difference between the two is that, in the end, Dead Space is still an enjoyable experience. It’s hardly the next step in the lineage of its genre (so far: Resident Evil 4 to Gears of War), which is unfortunate because nothing on the horizon looks like it could be, but it’s still more worth your time and money than most games coming out this holiday season. It was clearly made with care, and by a team who knows what is up, but tripped up a few times.

The greatest success of Fable 2 is in the game environment Lionhead has cultivated. Sharing coherency between the first title in the series was a great move, revealing to you past locations, changed and twisted by five hundred years of development and technological advancement. At the centre of this brave new world is Bowerstone, the former medieval fortified town of Fable is now a sprawling industrial metropolis complete with districts, factories and spooky mansions looming above. This effect is repeated throughout the game, with small villages becoming ruined marshland, rugged bandit camps becoming Tortuga-esque pirate hideaways, etc. The amount of change in landscape is not just cosmetic - with Fable giving you narrow corridor paths to traverse, Fable 2 broadens the road, giving you wide open fields, entire towns to visit, and a landscape designed from the ground up for openness and freedom of movement. Combat can take place in choke points or in the middle of no-mans land, in the middle of the ocean, or on the edge of mile-high cliffs.

This brings me to the incredibly satisfying and solid fighting mechanics. Three aspects of combat from Fable have returned; swordplay, magic and ranged warfare. Here, they are each mapped to a separate button, allowing you to switch between them at your leisure. Experience from battles is awarded to you based on how you approach it. Slice a bandit’s head off with a longsword and you will get strength experience, while incinerating him with a high level fireball will net you a bounty of will points. Interestingly, this makes your decisions quite limited; with each tier escalating in XP cost, you can be the master of one route or be mediocre in them all. I found it best to pick a side and stick with it, increasing your combat effectiveness but decreasing your versatility, especially since once you get into the upper echelons of the skill system, your combat potency becomes Godlike.

As a result of this, there is a major imbalance in the game - the magic is all-consuming and grossly overpowered. Not only can you cast spells indefinitely with no mana system to speak of, you can slow down time to provide you with even more breathing room with which to charge that level five inferno. Playing a wizard character very quickly became repetitive and boring, with each fight playing the exact same way - instant-cast time lapse, a high level raise dead spell to summon minions from the earth to fight for you, then throwing out fireballs constantly until everything is dead. This worked on bandits, on hobbes, on enormous forest trolls and shrieking banshees. Mixing up this formula at all, even with higher level spells, almost always resulted in more difficult and lengthier fights.

Worse still, even a light dabbling in magic drastically alters the appearance of your character; luminous blue veins of magic traverse your entire body even after the briefest of will use. My gun-totin’ highwayman shouldn’t end up looking like a totemic being of pure magic just because he needed to use a stun spell to escape from some lowly Hobbes.

Furthermore, the character customization feels perhaps more limited than Fable, despite giving you far more options. The problem is that all but a select few result in a goofy looking character with terrible attributes and no real reason to exist in that state. The clothing and weapon stalls are also inconsistent in their stock, sometimes providing you three out of five pieces of an armour set with no other vendor in the game offering the remainder. You just have to wait for weeks in game time for them to restock. These minor sacrifices for gameplay in the effort to make the world more believable are almost universally annoying and arbitrary. Shops run out of stock all the time and you find yourself fast traveling all over Albion in search of one stick of celery.

The breadth of items for purchase and discovery is nice, but again, it feels limited because only a small amount are useful. You get an almost endless amount of potions from quests and looting treasure chests, but even consuming them out of battle is a massive chore. You have to enter the three-tier deep menu system to even drink one, which brings you out of the menu to watch your character drink it, then collect up the experience orbs. Every single time. There is no world map to speak of, meaning you either have to learn the landscape entirely or follow the annoying bread crumb trail (which is either permanently on or permanently off, never context sensitive) or be lost all the time. Changing equipment or items in your inventory is equally excruciating, with perhaps the worst UI I have seen in an RPG for a long time. It is too slow to load, always fighting your intuition and often doing the opposite of what you want. For example, to find out where a quest takes place, I have to set it as a destination rather than it just telling me. Or how about being forced to select each item of clothing to dye individually rather than letting me apply it to the whole set. I have encounted game lock-ups, 30 second loading times and artifact effects just from the menu system, which feels slow and painful already.

This clunkiness in UI design is mirrored in the D-pad context-sensitive button placement, which only ever brings up potions to quick use when on extremely low health, meaning more times than once, I died because it was too hard to use one on anything less than critical HP. Or the numerous times it selected a fattening pie to use as health restore instead of my rack of potions, meaning I ended up becoming the world’s premier purveyor of slimming celery just to combat my puzzling girth. Using expressions too required another menu system; it does not let you assign hotkeys and will never suggest any that you would want to use. For instance, when I walk up to a group of children in the market and I am playing an evil being of pure hate, and it suggests I dance to them or do a sock puppet show with my hands.

Fable 2 is a tarnished experience because of the inconsistency in the design. Some aspects are incredibly slick and well implemented. The dog companion that follows you throughout is staggeringly realistic in animation and behavior, and genuinely useful in gameplay use by finding you hidden treasure and finishing off fleeing enemies. But on the other side, the game breaks this immersion by having repetitive NPC interactions and meaningless quests. Most reward nothing but gold and renown, both of which can be harvested quicker and easier by sitting in Bowerstone market and hammering swords at the blacksmith or dancing for large crowds.

Ultimately it means that your mileage may vary with Fable 2. The world itself is breathtaking in style and feels complete and living. References to the first game are constant and almost always tongue in cheek. But then the game throws out all of this good work with a terrible UI and a patchy narrative. The game ends before it gets going and often features arbitrary plot devices and a predictable conclusion. The main quest is perhaps too weak to benefit the wide variety of side missions and extra curricular activities. Approach with tempered expectations and you will be pleasantly surprised. Expect an earth-shattering narrative and interesting interactions, and you will wind up somewhat let down.

Fans of the character and fans of comics in general, so long as they have a console to commit to the process, should absolutely be playing this game. It is the best superhero game that has ever been published and played. I am indeed a fan of the character, but I’ve barely read any of the comics. I watched the animated shows when I was young, I saw the movies, and as I said, I played Spider-Man 2 more times than I rightly should have. That being said, I know next to nothing when compared with actual fans of the Spider-Man comics. My knowledge for any given comic is random and serviceable; I know that the man Mary Jane almost married in the second movie becomes Man-Wolf in the comics, and I know that Jon Favreau’s character in the recent Iron Man movie marries Gwyneth Paltrow’s character in the comics.

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the characters or plots of the source material will enjoy Web of Shadows the same way they enjoyed Iron Man when it hit theaters this summer. In-jokes about the comics themselves and mentions of other characters pile on in this game, and it’s good to see that someone has a sense of humor about it, rather than tying together as many keen references as they could muster. At one point, Spider-Man needs to enlist some sort of professional scientist / genius to solve a growing problem in New York, and tries calling Reed Richards, aka Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four. After being put through an automated answering service, he is told by the robotic voice in the phone that Richards is helping out in another galaxy. Tony Stark is the next viable option, but in the midst of making the call, Spider-Man admits to himself that if Iron Man could be defending New York City, he would be (unlike the movie version, the Iron Man of comic lore is a New Yorker). It’s refreshing to have the Marvel universe tied together so neatly (because really, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, X-Men, Daredevil, Iron Man, and many other Marvel comic lines take place in New York - it just makes sense), with an especial focus on Spider-Man and that series’ main characters, but without forcing itself to include anyone irrelevant to the action at hand.

That being said, the interactions between Spider-Man and other Marvel characters not of his franchise are what make the situation seem so desperate. If Wolverine of the X-Men and Spider-Man need to team up with Wilson Fisk (you may know him as the big bald bad guy that beat up Ben Affleck in Daredevil) and defend Tony Stark’s skyscraper with S.H.I.E.L.D agents, then yeah, things are getting a little rough. In previous titles, Spider-Man would have to solve Spider-Man’s problems, and nothing else would even exist. It feels good to play as Spider-Man, but it feels even better to be playing firstly a “Marvel universe” game and then worrying about whose particular role you’re filling.

In this case, the wall-crawler’s expertise is required. The only real villain of the entire game is Venom, who is quite easily the most iconic counterpart to Spider-Man’s heroism. Just because Venom is Spider-Man’s villain, though, doesn’t mean that this is why poor Peter Parker feels responsible for controlling his chaos. In an early cut scene of the game, after a beautifully choreographed and cinematic opening sequence, it is revealed that Eddie Brock’s alien symbiote is going looking for bigger and better things. Spider-Man’s manipulation of his black suit relies on the symbiote as much as it relies on Eddie Brock to become Venom, and so when the liquid black creature begins spreading like an infection around the island, Parker feels that he is the one to blame for underestimating the danger involved after blinding himself to it with his own abuse of the power.

The city itself seems alive and more realistic than ever before. It’s not completely destructible, but watching things crumble and explode is never a detraction in a fight between brawling super characters. Before Venom’s symbiotes spread too far, the regular pedestrians of New York greet Spider-Man as he should be greeted. He is cheered on, waved at, and called out to. This breathing city undergoes severe changes throughout the game, though, depending on Spider-Man’s actions and the development of the symbiote invasion. Donning the black suit with a click of the left thumbstick in front of previously supportive New Yorkers earns you fearful, condemning reactions. Spider-Man goes from public icon to public enemy throughout the course of the branching plotline, and the world around you acts in kind.

As it gets further on, though, the graphical and artistic beauty of the visual design is dogged down by some strangled sections of slowdown due to too much action. The enemies tearing up Manhattan become so overwhelming, and the constant counter-strikes from S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives only add to the strain put on the process of displaying everything at its usually pleasant and smooth framerate. As much as it sucked, it only happened three or four times by the time I finished the game. The only other issue I had with the game was the camera (twice) trying to show me an angle I no longer needed. I crawled up a wall, and when I flipped onto the roof, it was trying to point in directions that didn’t show me anything I needed to see. Switching from wall-crawling to web-slinging to roof-running jerks the camera around, but it rarely ruined anything.

Glitches and chugging framerates are popular topics for bad game reviewers, though. Honestly, I couldn’t bring myself to give one shit about the writer that gives this game a bad score and chalks it up to those two reasons and some personal complaints about voice actors that didn’t sound like the songs of sweet cherubim. Yes, it could have used some polish here and there, and the dialogue seems a little rushed and out of sync on occasion, but I’m not going to grade this game any lower because of such insignificant details that are far outweighed by the majority of this fantastic game.

The sense I had of the entirety of my experience with this game was overwhelmingly amazing. Real morality issues are not just explored by the characters in the original and compelling plot, but left up to player choice. None of the choices feel artificial, either, leading into alternative endings in a fluid manner without breaking stride or failing to affect one another. To say these things about a game that focuses on excellently implemented combat between Spider-Man and hordes of zombified New Yorkers melded with a symbiotic alien life form is incredible in every sense of the word.

Everything about Web of Shadows was done very well. The fighting feels more like what Spider-Man would do than ever before. The animations are stylish and reminiscent of the art of its comic origins. Little things, like webs needing buildings to cling to (as in Spider-Man 2), are great, and not drowning when falling into the river is even better. Even quick time events, an optional target-locking system, and an initial tutorial sequence are handled well, appearing without ever getting in the way of the game. There is a leveling system based on experience gained during said combat, unlocking new moves that really only affect combat itself, rather than asking the player to spend points upgrading things like swing speed. Side missions have Spider-Man repeating sequences found in regular missions. For instance, if you enjoyed escorting that armored car as it rescued civilians, there’s probably an opportunity to do it again without quitting and loading an earlier save. As opposed to hearing “My ballooooon!” over and over, this system is much more player-friendly.

All of this and more combines into one great game that anyone could spend a weekend with. Here we have a video game collaborating elements of comics and graphic novels with elements of good action movies and throwing between it all some really fun and challenging gameplay, and that in itself is deserving of so much praise. Anyone who enjoys good games should be checking this out. As well, any fans of Marvel comics or Spider-Man in particular are bound to love it.

Also like Portal, it’s host to all aspects of puzzle video game: cognitive leaps (like The Legend of Zelda), managing time and resources (like Lemmings), and even, to my surprise, real-time action. Reactions, even. It’ll keep you on your toes and always excited to see what the next stage will bring. The best video games are the ones that are about the unknown, and the ones that play with your expectations.

What I found most impressive about World of Goo, though, was its story. In the first few worlds, the plot is kind of scattershot, but once world four begins “everything changes” (according to the game - not a spoiler). It’s reminiscent of Rez in that way, and it’s even thematically similar, somewhat. But it’s way more coherent, but still far from obvious, and with much more to read into. It is video game storytelling done right: while you play, through the gameplay, and with minimal cut scene and text. There’s no shitty writing or voice acting to get past, and it actually has depth. It has things to say. It’s like if Braid was actually something instead of just trying to be something. And most games aren’t even trying. It’s even funny, but I think we’ve all had enough of the “tighten up the graphics on level three” geek in-jokes at this point.

So if you’re like me, and you love video games but are too often frustrated by them, World of Goo should be near the top of your list of games from this year to check out. It’s not a game that’s enjoyable despite its terrible, terrible flaws, it is actually great. It’s one to feel good about.