Posts Tagged ‘Mercenaries’
Red Faction Guerilla Game Review–The Best Red Faction Game Yet
Recently, a game landed onto the Xbox 360 that left me a little cold. It was called Red Faction; Guerilla, and was yet another sequel to the first person shooter original and first sequel. And when I first laid hands on this one I sighed in the deepest resignation and dragged out my thesaurus hoping I could find a new word for “craptacular”. Seriously, I’m so very tired of first person shooters. There are so few good ones.
But then I got it in, and I’ll tell you, I was pleasantly surprised. Surprised is almost too weak a reaction, but is it really possible to be pleasantly shocked?
Anyway, you play a miner whose focus is in demolitions freshly landed on Mars a while after the earlier events of Red Faction. The Earth Defense Force, which for some reason isn’t even ON Earth any more, is acting as an occupation force on Mars, backing up pretty much ever evil move that the Ultor Corporation (THQ just loves the name Ultor, I guess) makes. This is doubly odd since, originally, the Earth Defense Force was a collection of GOOD guys who assisted Red Faction. So much for that, huh?
So now you’re on planet, and the EDF just wiped out your brother for “crimes”. No one really bothered to tell you what they were before they blasted him with what looked like a vulcan cannon, or before they came after you and discovered that you had explosives in your trailer (you’re a mining engineer with a demolitions specialty, remember?) so you, in response, joined Red Faction out of necessity and the desire to get payback for your dead brother.
The game itself plays a lot like some other titles, especially Saints Row, Grand Theft Auto, Just Cause and Mercenaries, and offers many of the same elements. You can steal cars, which look a lot more like moon rovers and have apparently enhanced suspension to handle the rocky terrain better. You’ll roam around a map with multiple zones, blowing things up, knocking things down, and shooting holy hell out of the EDF in an effort to wrest control of Mars away from them and put it back in the hands of the people.
There is a truly incredible variety of things to do in this game, make no mistake about that. Within my first few minutes I had blown up several abandoned buildings, collected scrap from said buildings to upgrade my weaponry and hardware, and shot about thirty five stormtroopers—err…EDF troops. I do enjoy a game that’s about more than walk from point A to point B and shoot whatever wanders in front of you. As a result, this may actually be my favorite Red Faction game just by the sheer fact that it actually includes something different to do.
Granted, it’s not that much different from a first person shooter—its biggest difference may well be just a matter of perspective (no pun intended), but with the addition of driving and setting explosives and collecting items, it does elevate the game slightly above its predecessors. It’s a good rental, no mistake there, but whether or not it’ll be a good buy depends on just how much you like shooter games with some solid action.
Army of Two Game Review–Of Mice And Men, The Shooter Game
Playing through Army of Two is an experience that’ll leave you sad, in a way. You’ll want to enjoy this game–you really will–it’s just that the game won’t actually give you very many good reasons to do so. And yet, when it actually DOES, you get your sense of hope back, only to have it quashed once again by virtue of having no further reason to enjoy it.
The plot of Army of Two, sadly, won’t be a huge help either in terms of making you love this game. You follow Army Rangers Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem as they become disenchanted with the army and leave to join a private military contractor outfit called SSC, Security and Strategy Corporation. From there, they’ll be running various missions over the course of fifteen years, and even be indirectly involved with a scheme you may have seen recently in theatres—to privatize the military. And they’ll even work to bring about the downfall of said scheme, which is kind of weird considering they’re working for a company that would directly benefit from such a scheme. And, even better, after fifteen years with SSC, they start their own company, Trans World Operations.
Yes, that would be the pun…two guys who make an army of two, who eventually become the army of TWO as an acronym.
This is actually a pretty fair storyline, and will send you all over the world doing a whole bunch of awesome stuff in an effort to keep organizations like yours, and the one you’ll found, strictly on the sidelines. Of course, the problem with Army of Two is that you’ll have almost nothing to DO with any of this awesome stuff because you’ll be too busy running around and shooting stuff.
Much has been made over the fact that, if you’re playing alone, you get an AI partner. This definitely qualifies as an interesting development, if it weren’t for the fact that your partner has mental candlepower somewhere in the crustacean range. Seriously—I was holding a car door to use as a shield for this brain-dead troglodyte in Somalia so that he could get behind me and shoot. I figured he’d be able to aim easily since I had my car door held in a fashion that suggested that every car in Somalia has somehow been reinforced with some kind of steel plating (seriously, folks, if you’re ever in a gun fight don’t use the car door as cover. Any round of any serious power will blow right through it. You’re MUCH better off ducking behind the engine block, because that thing requires a chain hoist to move. But I digress.).
Wait…where was I? Oh yeah, moron with the car door. Anyway, I’m holding this thing, and I discover that my partner is so brain-damagingly stupid that I not only have to hold the cover up but I also have to walk him in FRONT of the enemy I think he should shoot because his skill with a rifle marks him as a CLEAR graduate of the Spooky Mulder School of Firearm Use (motto: We’ll empty an entire fifteen-round clip into a swamp but we STILL can’t hit an alligator the size of a small car from a range of eight feet.). And don’t even get me started on what happens if you give your partner a boost up to a ledge or overhang or some such and he gets shot before you can get pulled up to join him. That’s just annoying.
You’ll also get to dress up in costume, including wearing patently ridiculous skull-shaped face masks (yes, that’s a brilliant move…nothing like going into combat with absolutely ZERO peripheral vision! Clearly, their time in the Rangers taught them this.) and when you do a whole lot of killing you’ll be allowed to give your colleague a congratulatory fist bump to let him know he done good, because otherwise this knuckledragger would have nary a clue that he was doing something right.
Special side note: Army of Two must have some kind of problem with the military because they make it ABUNDANTLY clear how much more awesome it is to be a private military contractor.
Anyway, if you ever wanted to play a first person shooter from third person perspective and thought it would be awesome if Lenny and George from Of Mice and Men could handle the action, then Army of Two is the game you’ve been spending long nights awake for. Otherwise, just walk on past and maybe try ANOTHER first person shooter.
Mercenaries 2: World In Flames–Hours of Fun, But Only A Few
Oh no you didn’t. Didn’t you, oh no?
You didn’t pay me what you owe me, and now it’s over for you.
Chances are good you recognize those two lines from one of the strangest video game promotions of all time, the ads for Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. Not since a boy’s father attempted to molest Lara Croft in an autograph signing line and believed he was buying a “Siggie” has video game advertising been quite so strange. But we’re not here to talk about the vaguely operatic advertising–we’re here to talk about the game.
The plot of which is fairly simple–you play one of three mercenaries (a tough Swede that regenerates health faster, a big, strong black guy who can carry more ammo and a sprightly Asian girl who runs the fastest) who’s just been royally screwed over on a contract in Venezuela. Naturally, that sort of thing is bad for business, and thus you’ve engaged your own services in trying to get payback on an epic scale, writ large across the very face of the oil-rich country. In doing so, you’ll have to balance your public perception and your perception of several different factions, all with a vested interest in Venezuela, including an oil conglomerate and a group of oddly Marxist rebels getting funding straight from the People’s Republic of China.
I’ll say up front that if you played and enjoyed the original Mercenaries game, then its sequel will be a thrill for you that’s downright unfathomable. It’s a step up in virtually every way, with more weapons and more things to do and more things to blow up and everything else right on down the line. The game looks better, plays better and sounds better than the original, which looked, played and sounded pretty nice to begin with. You also get a better variety of vehicles–I definitely don’t remember the option to drive motorcycles in the first Mercenaries, and I certainly enjoyed the new addition. And there’s always, of course, plenty of atavistic thrill involved in running amok with a large quantity of automatic weapons and a panoply of explosives. That’s just always fun.
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