Jakkar

I was unable to push past around two hours with this game, despite a promising beginning with excellent art direction, seemingly depicting a survival shelter designed during the fashionable sixties or seventies, reminiscent of old TV series like Space 1999, or Blake 7. Unfortunately the English voice-acting is agonisingly poor, and in places illegible without subtitles due to poor quality recordings combined with overbearing background music. Visuals are adequate, even pretty in places, including that rarity in action-horror - dark rooms are actually dark! Animations, particularly facial animations are extremely stilted and out of date, however. The combat is the heart of the game, given that even two hours in there seems to be rather a lot of it, and this is what murders the experience for me - fights are simple exchanges of 'block' 'strike', 'block' 'strike' repeated until the enemy turns into a sluggish ragdoll with a snarl or a groan. Repeat ad nauseum. Firearms combat appears to do nothing to alter AI, and merely drills off enemy HP until they either slump, or experience a gory limb removal. Default movement is a very slow, floating jog, giving the protagonist a manner both camp/effete and slightly creepy. You can slow this down further with a walk button, held constantly rather than toggled, but the walk is a sort of sleepy, unconcerned saunter more suited to a summer evening than a living nightmare. Beyond that is yet another reiteration of the Gears of War sprint, blurring and shaking as you hurl yourself like a charging bull into walls, using the local geometry to steer. Lacking any real physics implementation, you'll simply slide off the richly detailed but utterly static environmental clutter, and your stamina for combat and running will inexplicably recharge within half a second, almost rendering it irrelevant. What can be said... Some opportunist took a promising indie game and turned it into a low-budget Polish Dead Space with poor localisation and crude features - and I'm talking about the updated version with 'significantly enhanced combat' here - I can't imagine how bad the original must have been. A tragic waste, an overwhelmingly boring, formulaic copy-cat ****, that fails to copy the best parts of its predecessors while slavishly mimicking the use of picked up notes (all irrelevant and boring), clunky third person melee combat and bland shooting. Cargo cult game design at its finest. Play something else, but hope these developers get to use their skills on a better directed project one-day.

This isn't Serious Sam. To call a Sam game repetitive would seem redundant, but I can find no better word to describe the cause of the boredom and frustration I felt in trying to complete this game. Taunting you for hours, initially, with gameplay necessitating the use of cover while reloading low-power modern military weapons and fighting firearm-wielding humanoids mixed up with 'endless spider crab things', it finally opens up to real large-scale setpiece runs against hordes of foes, but forgets any of the lessons of pacing and most of the depth and fun inherent to enemy behaviour in the original games. Eventually you come to fight hordes so large it feels more like a gruelling job of endlessly mopping the same floor in a club toilet as wave after wave of drunkards arrive to vomit across the tiles. You will spend hours simply 'wiping' massive groups of identical enemies with sustained fire, the pattern of projectile dodging repeating ad nauseum until you're subconsciously going through the motions unharmed. To counteract this most of the larger enemies and many smaller examples can do catastrophic, ridiculous amounts of damage to Sam, and one mistake can send you back to your last quicksave. If you play above Normal difficulty there will be so very many of these. Animations are dreadful, enemies are a mixture of poorly recreated old and illogical new, most foes follow the precise same AI routines and the level design is complicated yet utterly boring. Dialogue is unbearable and has none of the deranged snappiness of the classic games, focusing instead on crude, peurile humour and military grunt cliches. There's also far too much of it, in cutscenes instead of voiceover. A very bland copy of the original information database makes a return in painfully 'console' form, with no controls, no text scrolling, and a very slow wait for any information on the subjects in question. In the end the only thing I liked about it was the way Gnaar's heads explode when you unload a coach gun into their optic orbit. Painful. I'm going to buy the HD classics on Steam now to cleanse myself of this travesty. I don't know what happened to Croteam to lead them to lose the soul of Sam so completely, and attempt a poor copy years later.

I can only lend my support to TomB's review. I have no wish to waste more of my life on such a disappointing game, beyond meeting the 150 character minimum for this review. The developer simply lifted the gameplay, attacks and animations from their previous and vastly superior game Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, then constructed this mess with a minimum of effort, assets or testing. Destroy exactly the same base 20 times over, try to understand the incoherent yet bland plot. The challenge lies in finding a way to enjoy this.

One of the finest games of the 200#'s, Red Faction: Guerilla is the first mainstream game since Shadow of the Colossus to truly offer new technology and gameplay design. Additionally, the desolate atmosphere of Mars and the sense of paranoia - either of the EDF or of worse things in the desert is second to very few games, while the depth and variety of AI behaviours both in combat and in general are superior to any other open world game I've played. If you play at a high difficulty and let your imagination take you, Red Faction: Guerilla will straddle the lines between Action, Stealth, and RPG. Offering freedom, emotional engagement with the AI as they fight and die across Tharsis, and varied tactical opportunities as you are granted absolutely free reign and a wide variety of equipment to take out hundreds of optional targets by any means available. Expect difficulty, expect the AI to be both deadly and foolish in turns - expect them to act like fallible humans, and be prepared for the brutal collateral damage that will occur when civilian rebels play with explosives and large vehicles. The downsides of the game include a poorly ported Multiplayer experience, now utterly inactive - and at times bizarre spawn-rates of EDF vehicles that can mob you to death with a single-minded determination to ram you until your vehicle explodes. Additionally, while the setting is fantastic, the storyline as depicted in cutscenes and missions is very much a homage to the eighties, bearing more in common with the cliche and distinct Good and Evil moralism of Total Recall, or Robocop. It's cheesy as hell, and quite simplistic. The background depth of the world shown in the subtle behaviours of colonist AI and the hand-crafted designs of towns and ruined structures, however, is fantastic - you can believe in the Mars of Red Faction: Guerilla as you can in the worlds of few other open world games - here, it feels alive, more akin to Morrowind's Vvardenfel than any sterile, constantly-respawning city of Grand Theft Auto. Both technologically and atmospherically, RF:G provides an incredible gaming experience, one of very few action games that can satisfy my imagination like a classic RPG, or the freedom of Hitman: Codename 47. Give it a try - it costs very little today - and support Volition by trying out their next release; Red Faction: Armageddon.