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.

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.

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.

Since completing the game on super easy mode, using cheats, I have gone back to play it once, and I did much better only because after finishing, I realized that every one of the reviews I’ve read on the game so far was wrong; this is not a button masher. If you can smash down on the buttons controlling force powers and lightsaber slices and finish this game without dying, you’re a freak. The combat really does depend on whether or not you have the specific move or ability to exploit any given enemy’s weakness. If you do, they go down after a short while. If you have spent your points elsewhere, leveling up a totally different power or buying whatever you think sounds cool, you might have issue with some of the enemies. While unlockable combos and special moves may work very effectively on certain combatants, pretty much anything can be taken down eventually, if not very quickly, by simply using all your basic abilities in tandem. A creature might fall apart if you use move A, and it has the special ability to just not give a shit if you swing a lightsaber at it, but ignoring both of these and hitting it with lightning, a force push, and then the lightsaber will almost always bring it down. I can’t define such a game as a button masher, but it’s not as reliant on its leveling system as it would like to be.

The game itself is too hard on the player. I remember distinctly the infamous scene from all the trailers where the player character pulls a Star Destroyer from the sky and smashes it into the ground. I also remember that the directions on screen when you actually get to do this little event are completely wrong. The segment is impossibly difficult to figure out, and in an age of simply turning to my computer while the game is paused to figure out if anyone has any advice on the subject, I found that players all over were expressing disgust toward this particular challenge, and I had to discover its secret on my own. Once again, the directions on screen were not only unclear, but wrong.

It seems to be designed to challenge the player with very few rewards. There are 32 unlockable costumes in the version I played, and they’re ridiculously hard to gather up. You would think that after getting to the end of the list, you would be able to play as Darth Vader or at least Darth Maul (both of whom appear in the game). No, you can definitely unlock the Emperor and run around tearing shit up as the blur of CGI robes that fought Yoda in the Senate chamber, but Vader is nowhere on the list. To me, this doesn’t even make sense, considering the fact that you start the game as Vader in the prologue level. He’s certainly ready to be played as, but no, apparently you’d rather play as Bail Organa or the Stormtroopers that got their heads smashed in by Ewok traps.

Very little in the game keeps the players’ desires in mind. You wanted to pull down the Star Destroyer, and they made it insanely hard and confusing to boot. You’ll want to see some cool unlocked costumes, but the majority of them are simply bullshit. You wanted to blast shit apart with the Force and see the world crumble around you, but there’s little to be done beyond what is made painstakingly obvious. The puzzles are unintuitive, romantic subplot is strangling, and almost all other expectations are left wanting.

However, this game is more than just any science fiction romp. Yes, there are some disappointments to be had by those expecting condition A and item B, but I think it’s impossible not to try to consider the experience as a whole based on its established universe. Yes, the game focused on combat and that combat is shoddy at best, but the game is also based in the Star Wars universe and needs to be thought of in the same manner as the films, if only for a moment. George Lucas had his usual bullshit requirements, like a funny / dumb sidekick droid, a romance, and a bla bla fucking bla, but thankfully for fans, the old man’s influence left the whole remarkably unscathed.

Sam Witwer, an actor I now particularly admire, provides the voice and likeness of Starkiller, our protagonist. His character’s eventual redemption and switch from Sith badass to Jedi hero is clear and expected from the very beginning, yes, but he pours himself into the role like he’s playing Hamlet. He makes watching the development not just tolerable but believable thanks to the fact that he’s acting as if he’s taking part in what the game actually is: the missing Star Wars movie. There was a great story to tell here, and while it was given to us in a different medium and surrounded by half-assed gameplay, it is not to be dismissed. Fans of the Star Wars universe should definitely experience this game. While it is a chore at times, and the rewards are not for the casual player, the kind of people that enjoy Star Wars despite the movies will love it. Every beautiful cut scene is accompanied by your favorite music from the films, and it really does come across as a better movie than game, and that movie is better than any of the original or prequel trilogy.

Rock Band 2 forces its players to enjoy the experience the designers intended, and it comes off better for it. With the first game, I had a few characters (enough for each instrument to be played in Career) and breezed through the setlist. In this game, you make a band, and then make a character, and that band, no matter its makeup, goes through World Tour mode in order to unlock all of the songs. You must play in different cities and venues and complete various challenges to unlock different cities with different songs, etc etc.

Rock Band 2 is a solid game, and from what I hear, the peripherals are all improved as well. I know the drums are better, but I’ve yet to even see, let alone play with, the new guitar. Harmonix definitely had its end-users in mind when creating every aspect of Rock Band 2. They know their game is a fun band-like experience now in World Tour mode, but even Quickplay has its improvements. Players creating their own setlists and turning on ‘no fail’ mode is pretty much guaranteeing the game’s success at a party.

I’m glad to say that this game is even better than the first. Rock Band was fun, but it definitely had its fair share of requested fixes and additions, and Harmonix has listened to their fans and done what was asked of them, which is a great thing to say of any development team. With the sequel, we are not just paying for a chunk of songs at a time, but all of the little details that make exporting the first game in order to be played via the Rock Band 2 disc totally worthwhile.

NHL 09 keeps most of the gameplay mechanics of previous years, subsequently adding some new ones. All of these have their flaws – the lift-stick seems to work too well, the one-handed dekes serve no purpose in anything except the shootout – but imagine flipping the puck behind an opponent’s redline, racing in and fighting for it by lifting his stick and crunching him against the boards, gaining possession, protecting the puck behind the net, passing it out in front, and wiring a one-timer past the goalie. These realistic, yet adrenaline-filled moments happen often in NHL 09, and you’ll find yourself on the edge of your seat more often than not.

This year’s edition also adds in “Be A Pro,” an extended feature of the mode in last year’s FIFA title. In “Be A Pro,” your goal is to win the Stanley Cup by taking control of an existing NHL player or goalie, or creating your own character and starting from scratch. If you create your own character, you must start on the third line of an AHL farm team and work your way up, which is a nice touch for fans of the sport. When in control of a goalie, this mode becomes a bit of a chore; if you’re on too low of a difficulty, you become bored for half the game from lack of shots, but play on a higher difficulty and your opponents score on you with ease – the game gives no indication as to what you did wrong. Players, on the other hand, are much more fun to control. It takes a bit of time to get used to playing your position, but once you do you’ll be making plays and shooting pucks like a pro. “Winning the Cup” takes a long time, though, and while your coach gives you goals, it feels like the player progress is arbitrary and very slow. This mode, however, makes you feel the most immersed in the game, as playing with one player feels the most like playing real hockey.

Part of what makes the mode so engaging is the camera angle, situated right behind your player in a 3rd-person-action perspective. This is finally possible thanks to a retuned animation system that makes everything, especially checks, look much more like the real thing. The animations, at times, still look a little choppy, but overall the game does a good job of immersing you with its fluidity. Where the realism takes off, however, are the models and sounds. The jersey textures have been given an overhaul and look much more mesh-like, while the player faces have also been retouched. The sounds are at their finest, with the commentating, for the most part, being extremely spot-on. Coupled with coaches yelling, skates carving, sticks slashing and the crowd roaring, it makes for an engrossing experience. A roommate walked by the TV at one point and commented “If I didn’t see you guys holding controllers, I actually would have thought I was watching and listening to the real thing.”

The online modes are also worth mentioning. This year, along with the standard quick-game, there are also leagues you can choose to play in, both in control of a team, or in control of an individual player with other gamers controlling the other teammates. While I personally don’t have the patience for modes like this, it’s nice to see something new, and something fans have been begging for years to have (though how many will actually make use of it is still to be determined).

NHL 09 succeeds because everything new that it tries works wonderfully, and everything old has been refined. The core game almost comes off as speed-chess: you know the options your opponent has and he knows the ones you have, the question is who will bite. It’s these tense moments, the risk-versus-reward aspects handled in fractions of a second, which truly propel NHL 09 past other sports games. It is the greatest sports game released this generation, and truly one for the hall of fame.

Pandemic have managed to cultivate an entire sub-genre with their successful Mercenaries franchise. It isn’t a sandbox, because that has walls. This game is much more open, giving you more capability for imagination and ingenuity. It allows you to tackle situations in so many different ways, using such a huge variety of tactics and strategies that no two play sessions will be the same. Mercenaries 2 is more than a box of sand, it’s the whole damn beach.

Beaches are just one thing you will be seeing a lot of in the lush and vibrant Venezuela presented in the game. There are geopolitical machinations, evil bad guys in white linen suits, backstabbing and revenge, enough one-liners and kiss-off lines to fuel a dozen B-movies, and plenty of twists and turns as you rampage all over South America wreaking havoc and chaos. Featuring neatly rendered cut scenes and plenty of radio conversations, it provides a brisk pace to ferry you from one side of the country to another, creating pockets of action and drama as you go.

But in that respect, Mercenaries 2 is a precision guided bomb, focusing on one very specific aspect of game design and leaving many others by the wayside. If you expect high quality narrative or even a coherency of plot, then look elsewhere, because story isn’t a high priority here. It is just context for your actions, in many ways simply explaining why the developer wants to give you this fancy new playground in which to mess around in.

Well what is this x-factor that the game can deliver that nothing else can? It satisfies a primitive urge ingrained in our minds over millennia, a rush of adrenaline and endorphins that can only be achieved under special circumstances. Simply put, Mercenaries 2 lets you blow things up over and over again, and it never gets old. It is the most basic of design choices, allowing the player to demolish everything, and on paper seems simple. But in practice achieving such a lofty goal is a monumental achievement. Everything can be destroyed in this game. And I do mean everything. Every building, every skyscraper, shack, warehouse, bunker, treetop high-hide, oil tanker, industrial refinery, etc. The jungle itself can be razed to the ground if you so wish. You can detonate, demolish and destroy to your heart’s content.

The genius of this doesn’t become immediately apparent until you play a few hours of the game. In fact, because this is such a detraction from standard game design, you will often find yourself incredulous that you really can level every building, sometimes assuming that it isn’t interactive or is a fixed position, and finding often by accident that it isn’t. Following a slow burn introduction that allows you a taste of the weaponry to come, you fight your way to the center of an island and rescue an HVT, or high value target. This mechanic is repeated often throughout the game and is the evolution of the deck of cards featured in the previous iteration. If you extract an HVT in a chopper alive, you get paid double, and in Mercs 2, money is everything. With it, you can purchase weapons, vehicles (including everything from motorboats to attack helicopters), and airstrikes.

From a lowly cluster bomb which can pepper a small area with light shrapnel, to 10,000lb fuel air burst devices; endlessly satisfying to use, you can call them in using several methods. Once you recruit a jet pilot in the early parts of the game, he can deliver most of the advanced bombs to the battlefield immediately, using smoke canisters or electronic beacons. Even the method of delivery allows you to be creative, positioning a bunker buster so that it pierces through two buildings at once, or placing a cruise missile strike in the basement of a parkade so that it takes out the foundations. Attaching a beacon to a vehicle will home-in the strike on that position, allowing for surprise attacks or the destruction of moving targets. These aren’t tools of destruction, they are toys.

The inclusion of an oil supply resource system means that each time you call in an air strike, it uses a set amount of oil, which you collect by stealing supply drums, tankers and storage containers secluded all around the world. This means that you can only go for a certain amount of time in the field before you run out of oil, making stocking up before missions essential. Upgrades to your oil supply cap can be purchased from various factions when you become friendly with them, making your combat effectiveness more potent. This creates an impulse pacing to the game, making each mission a battle of attrition between the enemy and your own supplies, creating tension and superb action as you make each bomb count.

The factions are where the meat of the game lies. Starting off, you are introduced to two rivals, the UP, or United Petroleum forces, mercenary groups and insufferable capitalists trying to protect their exploitation of the Venezuelan people, and the PLAV, or People’s Liberation Army of Venezuela, rebel fighters based in the Amazon jungle fighting the former for control of their country. Both give you missions to attack the other and you must choose which one to really support, because keeping all factions happy is a tough job. And there are plenty of them, including Rastafarian pirates, loyalist Venezuelan military, and foreign powers looking to get their hands into the situation. Each one has unique vehicles and weaponry you can purchase from them, making your choice of faction support affect your battlefield abilities. For example, the PLAV sell the powerful Daisy Cutter bomb, allowing for imprecise destruction, but the UP forces have many more support abilities, strafing runs and transport helicopters. Each one is unique and features a plentiful supply of missions and challenges for you to do for cash and rewards, which is often simply capturing an outpost of the enemy, killing everyone inside.

When you enter an enemy base and start wrecking stuff, you won’t immediately lose favor with that faction unless they call in your actions to their superiors on the radio. You have a few seconds to incapacitate the person calling you in before they send reinforcements. This creates a frantic highpoint to an assault, as you dash across the camp to bludgeon a lone soldier to death before he can finish dialing 1-800 HELP US. Or you can just drop a bunker buster on his head, leveling the tent he is in, the surrounding tents, and half the hillside they sit upon.

Really, that is what Mercs 2 is about. Freedom to approach a situation any way you like. You can go in stealthy and plant C4 charges all around a camp, then exfiltrate with a bang, or you can just nuke the site from orbit, just to be safe. No really, you literally can deploy nuclear weapons on the battlefield. Sure, the whole country will be pissed off at you, but in Mercs 2, you have the means, the motivation and the money to take them head on. World in Flames is not just a catchy subtitle, it is an accurate description of what this game is like. You can and will destroy everything, the whole time laughing with glee as you create new and incredible ways to scorch the Earth.