Portal 2: Part 1 - single player

First thing I want to say about this game is that this game is fricking AWESOME.
I completed Portal 2 in about 14 hours. That does include finding and completeing all Singleplayer achievements.

I found every puzzle GREATLY enjoyable. No matter how easy or hard.

I had 107s of fun getting to the end of a puzzle using the wide variety of tools around the map including:

• Spiralling tractor beams pick up objects (or you) that touch them, and move you along the beam backwards or forwards depending on the colour of the beam blue or orange;
• Laser beams which can be used to destroy hostile turrets, shoot into switchs similar to using a box on a button but instead it can only be done by a laser;
• Sunlight bridges which allow you to walk on pretty much anything heh pretty 1337 ehh?
• Repulsive gel which can be spread around the test room and used to jump higher when you land on it you will go higher depending on how high you jumped onto the gel from;
• Acceleration gel which can also be spread around the test room and when walked on greatly increases walk speed;
• Portal gel which can also spread around the test room and be used to place portals on surfaces the gel has hit.

Graphics. Not the best Graphics I have seen for a game in 2011 but definently enough for me to stop somtimes and just look around the map

Here is a GameSpot video review VIA youtube:

Mass Effect 2 Review

Shooting people in the face, Punching people in the face, Pushing people out windows, talking with people about their feelings -.- Mass Effect 2 has all of this and more.

I enjoyed the multiple conversation reply options with alot of the different answers depending on the situation of the conversation deciding weither you get paragon= good or renegade= evil points or deciding weither you enter a battle or not.

There is plenty of different classes to choose from each with unique abilitys.

There is plenty of different conversation options and classes to choose from to give the game a large amount of replayability.

Mass Effect 2 is filled with sidestorys, sidemissions to complete and plenty of planets to explore to give plenty of extra gametime and interesting characters to meet.

Remember to be careful with your conversation options because just 1 conversation can be the difference between a crew member hating you or a crew member being loyal to you and increasing the strength of their combat abilitys.

It is very important to remember to talk to your crew members because they can give you missions which can improve crew loyalty to you, get more xp, explore more of the map and the overall story of the game.

I greatly enjoyed the length of this game It took about 15-20 hours to complete on LOWEST difficulty and that is without completeing all the side content: missions, planets, sidestorys. etc..

Mass Effect is totally worth your money that you pay on steam which is 19.99 USD or 39.99 USD for the digital deluxe edition

Brink

Brink Review - PC Review at IGN via kwout

Brink is exactly what the name says - on the brink of being a great game. A good game, shows a lot of potential, not quite reaching fantastic.

This time I'm not going to write about the game, I agree with Peter Eykemans at IGN:

Brink PC Review by Peter Eykemans at IGN via kwout

I went to find about Brink because my Steam buddies were playing it, and comments like this:

"one shining aspect is SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain). Using SMART, holding a single button lets you navigate up walls, over obstacles, and through the game world. Depending on your body size, you can do more or less with movement, but overall this finesse is fantastic. Nothing in Brink feels quite as good as sliding under gunfire into someone, taking them out with a shotgun."

made it sound interesting.

Some other reviews complained that NPCs were poorly programmed, either weak (no challenge) or overpowered or without a good backstory of their own. The strength imbalance things must have been fixed before I got the game, but the lack of individual stories for characters remained. I'd also been warned about lag - but that also seemed to have been resolved before I tried it out.

I would have liked more rewards to earn, and challenges specific to weapons to unlock attachments for those weapons.

The story was very novel for me - my brief synopses interested my mum, and we would like to have seen the story go further. In Red Dead Redemption they revealed the story slowly, enticingly, while you played; but in Brink they threw most of it at you in the lead-in trailer. There were interesting story developments from the different campaigns but I want to find out where the story can go.

I had 24 hours of game play before getting bored.

If there is to be a 'next', for me to play it, it needs to go "beyond the brink": A story off the Ark; another playing mode like 'capture the flag' or team death match - something to mix it up a little bit; perhaps some more interesting and more even weapons.

Mount and Blade: Warband

There is plenty of hours of play to be found in this game and a massive amount of replayability.

There is a great variety of weapons ranging from:

• Daggers
• Spears
• Swords
• Axes
• Crossbows
• Bows
• Polearms
• Staves.

I extremely enjoyed how open worlded this game is the freedom you get.
The range of roles you can play in this game each affecting the world around you in different ways:

• A Bandit: raiding villages and caravans and sneaking into forts to sell your goods. But remember the more bad things you do the lower your reputation (honour, trust) gets with villages and nations.
  
• A Trader: looking at the stock exchange in different towns and then buying,transporting, and selling your goods at different towns for the most profit.
• A Lord: recruiting and training great armies, joining a nation and invading your enemies to become owner of villages, forts and even cities.
• Or combining all 3 into a combination of awsomeness.

Great thing about this game is that even if you decide to play like one of these 3 you aren't stuck with playing that you can always start training your units for sieging purposes or start trading or start being a meany and stealing from the poor - developing your character.

I had a great deal of fun improving my reputation with Lords and Villages over the land to the point where they would follow me into combat against my enemys and to the point were they would support me in gaining land

There is a good range of Battle scenarios:

• Defending a village that is under attack;
• Sneaking into a fortress to rescue random lords;
• Fighting on an open battlefield with each battlefield being near unique depending where it is on the world map;
• Invading a fort where you either have to climb ladders to enter the fort and fight on the walls until you have destroyed their forces. or have your soldiers push a large seige wagon which plants a walk bridge for you and your troops to use once it gets close enough to the walls.
• And defending a fort which is pretty much the same as above but instead you are the ones on the walls and they are the ones pushing the seige wagon or climbing the ladders.

The graphics were ok for a game back in 2009 but definitely not the best from the year.

I was often encountering glitches with the world map after I left a town but this did not ruin the game for me just made it a bit annoying.

I definitely think that this game is worth the 30 dollars at Steam, even for the one play through.

Brutal legend

Gameplay.
One great feature in Brütal Legend is that at the end of every mission you are given the chance to go and upgrade or explore the world or do sidemissions before the next part of the main mission no matter how storyline vital that mission is.

You have 2 weapons: your Axe of Pure Awesomeness, and your Guitar. The Guitar can be used to hit the enemy with lightning or shoot an enemy into the air with a firebomb detonating from under them. You can also use the Guitar to summon your car, melt the faces of your enemy within range that have faces and don't have face protection, make a rally point which automatically orders new troops to come to that location in Stage battle (more information on stage battle further down), and much much more.

Your axe is your main damage dealer and is for close quarter fighting, whereas your guitar is mid-long range attacking and also stuns the targeted enemy for about half a second-1 second if used enough on the target.

There is plenty of after game completion stuff to do. For example:

• You can go around the world looking for serpent statues. 10 serpent statues will give you a stats bonus like: health increase, health regeneration increase, guitar strings cooling down quicker.
• Looking for Ormagoden Orbs which reveal more story behind ormagoden God Of Metal.
• And many other statues/relics you can find

There are also plenty of side missions to do: ambushes on enemy, riding the Death Rack to rain death upon your enemy, races, helping cannon targeting, and the occasional unique sidequest. You can only do each sidemission once but they are there for the entire game even if you decide not to do it when it first becomes available to you.

Another great feature is that while you are driving between missions or exploring or just running over random animals for fun and to see some guts/blood (this can be turned off in the games settings in the options menu) you can listen to different metal/rock songs that you unlock through finding statues and progressing through the game.

There are multiple animals for you to stun and then mount. Mounts can be used to travel or fight with instead of using your car; although when you use animals as a mount you don't get to use your music player until you use your car again. There are still random songs in certain areas so you don’t have to worry about having nothing to listen to while riding a mount other than your car.

And if you are bored of playing by yourself beating up defenceless animals (or bored of getting beaten up by animals) you can go to online mode and play stage battles.

In stage battles you spawn and command your troops from the ground or from the sky. You can fight with your troops, upgrade your stage to unlock new units or upgrade certain units. In the game mode you use fan tribute as a resource. You can gain fan tribute by making a merch booth on a fan geyser. And then build an awesome army of Metal and Rock and then march on to destroy the enemy's stage.

Stage battles can be played against the computer or against real players. You also get to play stage battles throughout the campaign.

There are 3 different teams you can play as: the Iron Heades, the Coil, and the Black Tear.
The Iron Heades being variously deformed humanoids you play as through the campaign; the coil being demons, and the Black Tear being undead people who fell to the sadness of the black tear in the Black Tear Rebellion years ago.

The Coil specialize in strong units but fewer units;
The Black Tear specialize in large amounts of units and are great against infantry;
The Iron Heades are a mix of both: able to amass a fair few troops and still able to do good amount of damage.

My preference is the Iron Heades - mainly because I got to know them throughout the campaign and developed strategies.

One other type of relic that you can find and then pull out of the ground is a vehicle entrance which you can enter and it will automatically take you to the underworld. The underworld is where the titans are and where you can upgrade or paint your car, get new guitar strings (each with different unique powers) or generally upgrade your guitar, upgrade your Axe of Awesomeness, and also buy rock statues of the different people who are in the campaign. While in the underworld you meet Ozzy Osbourne who gives you your upgrades, and makes jokes. I on occasion went in and out of the underworld to see if he would make new jokes.

You can team up with your troops in stage battle mode unlocking a special ability while you are teamed with them.


Graphics. The graphics are pretty good. Extremely smooth graphics for a game in 2009.

Throughout the game I don’t remember ever seeing any glitches or faults in the graphics.

Awesome particle effects when using abilities such as: guitar lightning, firebomb, facemelter, car weapons.


Story.
The game starts off as you: Eddie Riggs, a roadie for a rockband, sent into the past into a world of rock and metal music. Where he meets the group Iron Heades and begins helping them to liberate their people from the rule of Lyonwhite.

There is a lot more to the story but I doubt I can say more without releasing spoilers.

Halo Reach review

Graphics. I really liked the graphics very detailed with the grass and trees I also liked the water detail they did the graphics for explosions and flames very well.
They did the jet pack visual effects very well I didn't see any glitches with it.

The assassination effects looked really cool instead of it being just whack them with weapon you actually pull out a knife and stab them in the back.


Gameplay. I liked the variety in weaponry and vehicles.

Plenty of armor power ups like the jet pack,armor lock which pretty much makes a unbreakable shield around you that can only be destroyed by being run over by a car or vehicle,bubble shield which makes a bubble that lasts a few seconds and is able to sustain much damage before being deactivating,evade which allows you to roll out of the way of grenades,missiles and enemy vehicles,also there is sprint which allows you to run much faster than normal great for swapping cover,active camouflage which makes you invisible when you are standing still or walking slow running will make you more visible to enemy's and the same with shooting your weapon, and my favourite a hologram which you can active and make it run to a certain spot very good for trying to flank the enemy.

I liked in the campaign they introduced new armor ability's slowly and weapons so you wouldn't rush through them all.

I really liked being able to buy and customize my character with the different colours and armour.

I also liked that the hostiles weren't to easy to deal with and took some planning to deal with.

I got between 1-3 hours of game play with each mission.

Another cool thing was the forge mode being able to create buildings statues hidden caves and more.

I am glad they made it so you cant dual wield in halo reach to keep it in line with halo combat evolved.

Storyline.
I really liked how they connect halo reach to halo combat evolved the original by explaining why they were looking for the weapon in halo combat evolved and how they knew about it.
Also how they explained how cortanna was in halo combat evolved.
I gave it 4 out of 5 stars.

Fable 3 review: ehhhh

Graphics. I was a little disappointed in the graphics they didn't change alot from the fable 2 graphics.
I saw a few bugs where the hair would stick out of someones hat or helmet and then go back in.

I was a disappointed with the loading screens a bit disgusting and weird I preferred it when it had the area as the loading screen like in fable 2.

When digging in fable 3 I would have preferred it if the dirt graphics were a bit better and actually being able to see the dirt on the spade instead of just digging up nothingness and then have dirt appear out of nowhere and then disappear when it gets to the ground

Game play. I would have preferred a larger variety of enemy's.
again like in fable 2 it was a bit too easy for my liking and mostly the same reasoning with the death system.

I wasn't to fond of the changes they made to the experience system and the range of ability's completely changed it instead of having your 4 experience groups will,skill,strength and your normal experience they replaced it with guild seals and you use guild seals to get expressions, level up jobs and get new spells.

The weapon evolvement was pretty cool made the weapons a bit more exciting instead of the same thing through out the game.

I would have preferred it if there was a bit more king options I think they really rushed the king stage of the game.

There is a lot of quests to do although they are mostly easily finished in a few minutes.
The real estate was pretty cool fun to do was pretty easy to maintain because you could just have a look at all the houses and buy adjust prices from your map in the sanctuary
the real estate was a bit harder than in fable 2 which I was happy with because the reason it was harder is because you actually had to be playing to get gold from it unlike in fable 2 where you could buy some houses then not play for a week or so play again and have a few million gold in your bags also when you buy houses in fable 3 you need to check up on your houses time to time and repair them.

There was a fair few finishing kill moves for example jumping off hands and snapping neck with knees or parrying then slashing them with sword or the classic turning head into pancake with hammer.


Storyline/Spoiler alert
The idea of having to build an army to overthrow your brother the king I liked but I would have preferred it to go a bit longer than only half the game

I didn't like the final half of the game you have to fight this enemy called the darkness with only a small story behind it and that is that it attacked Aurora and it wants to kill everyone in Albion
so you have to save up 6.5million to get proper defences for your people.

I think that the darkness was a bit pointless and instead after overthrowing your brother it should have been a bit more focused on the kingdoms economy.
Although I was glad there was a finally boss fight
I gave it 3.5 out of 5 stars




Update: pc version

I got the Fable 3 PC Version a few days ago and to be honest there wasn't really any improvement in the game except for the smoother graphics.

Also I found I could hear the sound effects better in the pc version. When I played the xbox I couldn't hear the voices through the sound effects and music. This could be because I was using a headset for the PC. But I did not have any on the xbox so I had to keep the volume loooooowwwwwwwwwwwww.

The aiming for weapons was a bit easier in Fable 3 PC but that's mainly because I am use to pc games.

Red Dead Redemption

One of the things I liked about the was that the storyline wasn't quick. I hate it when games are short and completeable in 1 day.

The story was interesting I havent quite seen a storyline like that before at first you have to find one of your old workmates/friend and arrest him because of the crimes he has commited and take him to the government

One of the things I am looking for in a game is to be able to finish it and then still want to finish it again and i didn't quite find that in red dead redemption




****SPOILER ALERT****
I was a bit disapointed at the end at bit to easy and it felt like I was in the starting spot again
I also didnt like it how the that you played characters changed I found the new character AKA your son to be a bit more rude he speaks a bit ruder to the animals you skin and mount unlike your first character who trys to comfort the mount

Fable 2 review

I've completed it 3 times and all 3 profiles are rich and own most of the properties and are all masters of melee and 2 are masters of all 3 skills and I still like to play it.

First time took me a few weeks although I was still learning. Second time through it took I think 1 weeks and then third time around 2-3 days without intense playing.

Gameplay
Plenty of hours of gameplay; plenty of abilities to learn; so much to find in the game.
Storyline was okay; the game was a bit easy although unlike in Fable 1 in which if you die in the middle of a mission without a res potion you have to restart, in Fable 2 if you die in the middle of a mission without a res potion you only get a scar and lose all exp that is on the ground and then you can get right back up and keep fighting.
I found the ending cutscene a bit too long

modernwarfare 2

Gameplay

. I liked the campaign a lot. its not entirely concentrated on the 1 character but instead you play as 3 different characters on different missions.
hours and hours of gameplay which is great if you like to stick to a game for as long as possible but dont want to be repeating it all the time.
I found multiplayer alot of fun funny killcams.

this is just a small clip of me sniping on multiplayer

Graphics.

graphics were awsome very detailed.
Ive recently made a few videos on hiding spots for multiple maps on multiplayer I think there will be some links inside the video that I have placed above.
scenery is one of the most important things in multiplayer often people will prone in the bushes and be almost invisible in certain maps.

Just Cause 2

Gameplay. A few of the things I liked to do is drag people from planes cars and helicopters.
Another fun thing is climbing buildings with a parachute and a grappling hook yeah I know: sounds ridiculous.
Another thing is driving my car over a cliff and watching the car spin around and around and around and then somehow survive the fall W.T.H.



There is plenty of play time: it took me over 14 hours to just get 27% of the game done though painfully I cant finish the game because when I finish the second last mission the game quits on me and I can't make a new profile!!!
Plenty of achievements to work on.

Graphics. Good detailed (realistic) graphics which is awesome: the scenic detail in the rocks, plants (shapes of trees), grass, roots, moving tree leaves.
Just Cause 2 has the best underwater graphics (again, the scenery: waving seaweed, starfish, shifting light patterns) I have seen though I haven't been underwater in many games. The character even appears wet when he comes out of the water.

War Rock vs Combat Arms

While I was loading War Rock I realised that it had the same HackShield as Combat Arms (mum these are both first person shooter games) and both have the problem with hackers. I found, last time I played Combat Arms, there were a lot less hackers than War Rock.

The graphics for Combat Arms are better War Rock's, possibly because War Rock is older. By better I mean: I think the scenery in Combat Arms was maybe a little more detailed; but also the guns look better.

CombatArms has a larger variety of game modes than War Rock. For example I loved quarantine mode. In this mode there is a maximum of 16 players on the server all on 1 team; there is a 20 second timer and once that timer gets to 0 a proportion of players will become zombies - and for up to the next 3 minutes the zombies try to convert everyone else that is trying to stay alive. How to stay alive? RUN... RUN...RUN. Or: have everyone team up in a room and just defend with mines, flamethrowers, machine guns, shotguns and sniper rifles. I say those weapons because they are the most effective. Or I've seen some people just blow themselves up with bombs - chickens.

CombatArms has a larger variety of weapons that you can get without actually spending real life money. I liked the SCAR because it did good damage at short and medium range with good accuracy and the G36E which performs even better damage than the SCAR but can also scope and was a bit more accurate.

Another good thing about CombatArms is that you dont have to pay for maps.