Games 1/19/10: Army of Two: The 40th Day, Alien Breed Evolution E1, Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
Army of Two: The 40th Day
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Alternate version available for: PSP
From: EA Montreal
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood, intense violence, strong language)
The things that polarized players of 2008′s “Army of Two” return either mostly or completely intact in “Army of Two: The 40th Day,” and depending on what side you’re on, that’s either somewhat unfortunate or the best news this review could provide.
That’s because, feelings about the things “AO2″ did aside, it was those things that made it a wholly unique third-person shooter in an era crawling with them. “Day” is designed to be played with a friend (or, failing that, a surprisingly capable A.I.-controlled partner), and while its attempts to stress the value of teamwork come off as pretty contrived, they’re also pretty effective if you’re willing to play along and take advantage.
For its part, “Day” at least learns from some of its predecessor’s missteps. It still places a premium on one player drawing fire while the other moves around and flanks the enemy, and it still communicates this technique with the occasional enemy who only takes damage from behind and an entirely manufactured “Aggro” meter that shows which character has the enemy’s attention and which is free to advance and find cover.
But while the first game compounded these techniques with levels so obviously designed to take advantage of them in terribly obvious ways, “Day” offers larger, more open-ended environments that afford players considerably more strategic freedom. The set pieces are pretty cool to experience just on a visual level — war-torn Shanghai falls spectacularly apart while the action pushes forward, and some buildings become so torn that indoor and outdoor levels blend together — and the ability to tackle them numerous ways is never a bad thing.
With that said, the increased scope regularly finds “Day” elongating fights, trotting out soldiers as if from a clown car to engage in battles that sometimes drag out longer than seems reasonable. That, along with a puzzling save system that often places checkpoints right before (not after) unskippable cut scenes players potentially will have to watch multiple times, represent the game’s most unfortunate slips.
One also could argue that “Day,” broken down, is just one similar firefight after another for five or six hours. But while that’s somewhat true, “Day’s” gunplay and control fundamentals are so sound that the moment-to-moment action is too fun to grow stale during any reasonable sitting. That’s especially true for those who take advantage of the staggeringly deep weapon customization system, which allows players to customize and outfit their arsenal (and, with armyoftwo.com’s help, their outfits) in the same manner a racing sim lets them customize cars.
As it did with “Two,” “Day’s” teamwork methodology trickles down to multiplayer. The campaign, as mentioned, is playable via local or online co-op. And while the competitive multiplayer modes — deathmatch, territory and objective-based — are the usual standards, the unique team distribution (up to five teams of two players each) and special techniques that arrangement entails give “Day” more legs than if it was just another third-person shooter doing the same old thing.
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Alien Breed Evolution: Episode 1
For: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
From: Team17 Software
ESRB Rating: Teen (blood and gore, violence)
Connoisseurs of 20-year-old computer games might remember the Amiga game “Alien Breed,” a fairly traditional overhead shooter in which players defended the corridors of a spaceship from waves of aliens bent on hijacking the ship and taking humanity down with it.
Two decades and numerous technological advancements on, the premise remains unchanged in “Alien Breed Evolution: Episode 1.” A new ship is under attack by a horde of bug-like aliens, little human life remains aboard, and the object — fight off the aliens, escape with your life — hasn’t changed.
Because this is a $10 downloadable game and not a big-budget reboot, “Evolution” is, indeed, little more than an evolution. Polygons constitute the graphics instead of pixels, but the action still takes place from an overhead perspective, and it rarely gets more complicated than “shoot aliens, go to checkpoint, trigger switch, repeat.”
Taken for what it is and within the constraints of its old-fashioned sensibilities — and it’s important to emphasize that these old methods most definitely aren’t for everyone anymore — “Evolution” gets far more right than it does wrong. Like “Shadow Complex” and “Bionic Commando: Rearmed” before it, the game deftly mixes 3D graphics and 2D perspectives, resulting in animation and visual effects that weren’t even imaginable during the Amiga’s prime.
The general gameplay benefits in kind. Doubling back to avoid encroaching aliens, for instance, is easy because the animation and controls are so fluid. And while this isn’t a dual-stick shooter in the same vein as “Geometry Wars” and its ilk, “Evolution” uses both joysticks to great effect, making it easy to strafe and shoot when aliens attack from multiple directions. As contemporary solutions to old gameplay problems go, “Evolution” gets the important stuff right.
With that said, there’s a reason these games don’t appear as often as they once did. “Evolution’s” moment-to-moment gameplay is fun, but it sticks to a formula, and little happens in the last chapter that doesn’t also happen in the first. A secondary Assault mode, which supports co-op play (two players, local or online) and ditches the exploration in favor of punishing players with ridiculous waves of aliens, is a nice bonus. But that mode is as straightforward as it sounds, and no part of “Evolution” dares to be different than the many overhead shooters that preceded it.
Consequently, it’s a bit puzzling that “Evolution” is coming at us in three episodic installments. The first episode’s gameplay and production values make it an excellent value in its own right, but its storytelling — to say nothing of the iffy end-episode cliffhanger — leaves a lot to be desired. Whatever lies in store for the second episode, it’ll need to provide more than a continuation of a story that, so far, isn’t terribly engaging. Paying $10 after 20 years for an updated take on “Breed” is an entirely recommendable act, but dropping another $10 a few months later won’t be if episode two is nothing but more of the exact same thing.
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Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
Reviewed for: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
Also available for: Windows PC
From: Croteam/Majesco
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, violence)
Price: $15
Here’s the easy part: “Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter” is a perfectly proficient high-definition repackaging of the PC first-person shooter of the near-same name. It looks sharp (albeit unmistakably aged), moves at a recklessly high speed, and includes four-player co-op support (online only) for maximum fun and insanity. The harder part is whether, in 2010, you want to play a 2001 shooter that itself is a callback to (or arguable parody of) shooters from 1996. All the hallmarks of old shooters — brain-dead AI, tissue-thin storytelling, enemies that spawn behind you from nowhere and create occasion for very cheap deaths — are here, and the perks one from a 21st century shooter are completely nonexistent. That isn’t an altogether bad thing: “Encounter” comes alive as a brutally tough test of twitch reflexes more than just another series of engagements against the same old enemy, and its weird sense of humor and wonderfully bizarre enemy design are a callback to the days when arcade games stopped at nothing to break players first and entertain them second. Given how quickly contemporary games drop to $20, “Encounter’s” $15 tag is $5 too high, but for the crowd that loves this game as much now as it did then, a return on investment is assured regardless.