Last Game Completed - Rated and Reviewed

[Eli Vance]

Sine Mora

Gorgeus, diverse and plays like a dream. One of the best shmup's made to date.

10/10

[hollywooda]

Max Payne 3:-

After playing so many chest high walled shooting gallery's this gen Max Payne is a refreshing, exhilarating blast of full blooded fire fights, where
the rule book for modern gaming survival & gameplay is pretty much thrown out the window & replaced with action scenes that will top most Hollywood
blockbusters this summer, it is just edge of your seat stuff.

If you enjoy challenging gameplay that might require a few tries & definitely the odd break! here & there then crack up Max's difficulty setting, go for
free aim & prepare for a really rewarding experience.

Max Payne 3, has all the hallmarks of a Rockstar game, its slick, cinematic, character driven and with a soundtrack that throughout the game doesn't just provide
background noise, but actually sets moods & helps to elevate your hearts Bpm.

This might not be everybodys cup of tea here, as i think for me a big reason why i enjoyed MP3 so much is because i got sucked in by Max's character & the awful world he
found himself in, others may just see this as a very samey, slightly old school game, that lacks modern gaming comforts.

But if this is a game you think you might enjoy, not playing it is just letting one of this gens best games pass you by.

9/10

[Bob]

DiRT: Showdown - ***

The more you play the more you get the feeling it's been a little bit rushed (No surprise given that it follows almost a year after DiRT 3). There's some areas and tracks that are reused from the DiRT trilogy (The Baja track is lifted almost exactly from the first game) and yet given that the games a bit tight on locations and tracks.. Surely they could of put together a greatest hits package of stuff from the three previous games. Snow and weather are really underused.. there's one snow track lifted from DiRT 3 and that's it..

It starts off well with a nice mix of events but then they don't get developed and either repeat exactly the same or just peter out. By the last tier of events it's pretty much a mix of races and 8-ball (racing with cross overs).. and to pad it out you have to start doing 8 lap events.. bizarrely there's no option to rewind on the races either.. so if you get barged off or retired near the end.. you have to start again.

The balancing could've done with more polish and there's a couple of things you'd of thought more play testing might have noticed.. often on the last event the announcer will shout "last lap " at teh start of the race when he obviously means last race. Also the AI often struggle with the cross over races.. knock them into the wrong lane (Which happens all the time) and they don't know how to get back for a while.

It's also got a very short single player campaign.. I saw the credits roll last night after 3 or 4 hours and polished off the last couple of medals about half an hour later.. I need to get all golds .. but that's probably another hour at best.

It also does a very annoying sign into Codemaster racenet which can take ages.. If you're not on line you have to click a button to try and sign in. There's no "I'm offline" option. Get the 360 error message, go back to the game again, click the button again to proceed and then start the game. Then when you start to play it comes up with another option to sign in and you have to tell it your playing offline again. There's an option to have it not ask you again but it forgets that when you restart..

Overall you get the feeling it was going to be a downloadable snack and they've tried to pad it out.

[Johnny Shoulder]

Overall you get the feeling it was going to be a downloadable snack and they've tried to pad it out.

I had that feeling about DS when I first saw it.

[The-Marb]

^^^Apparently aimed at the US market as they dont care about rally.

[j2000_nr]

Assassin's Creed: Revelations

Ok, I loved Ass 2 and Ass: Brotherhood, I had played them both for ages and enjoyed every moment of them.

Then I played Revelations, apart from Ezio looking older I'm at a loss to see how it is different from Brotherhood, oh no, wait, I know, it's the Hook Blade. Right, with this being the only obvious thing that's different that caught my mind, I fail to see how it warranted a boxed release.

The gameplay is what you'd expect, solid and, on occasion actually fun.

But what it lacks is the 'wow' factor that I would have have expected from the last game with Ezio in (one of my fav game chars btw)

I'm not entirely sure what the revelation was actually supposed to be. The ending was utter tosh, it didn't answer anything. Will it be continued in Ass 3? I dunno.

I'm glad I've played this game, but I have no intention of playing it any more, now that I've finished it.

[Johnny Shoulder]

What is this Ass you are loving over, J2?!

[j2000_nr]

What is this Ass you are loving over, J2?!

Mate it was amazing, just totally wicked I loved it, every single bit of it.

Doesn't take away from how crap Revelations is though.

[The-Marb]

Joyride Turbo

Dont know why i picked up this controller based kart race from the makers of Kinect Joy Ride (which apparently is rubbish) but after trying the demo and for 800MP i thought id give it a go.

Suffice to say, although its not going to recive any GOTY's, for £6.50 is pretty good. Solid controls, nice game mechanic that means you have to pick up bits to your cars on the track to unlock new vehicles and a stunt mode that comes across like a rcing equvilient of orb-hunting in Crackdown.

The tracks can be a little dull and theres only 10 of em but if you like a simple budget kart racer id reccomend it.

***

[ClownTrousers]

Max Payne (or "it's not FAIR!")

Max Payne 3 is very silly. His name is Max Payne for God’s sakes. He could have been called Hugh G. Cock, Denholm Genes or Pubic Doghound and it would have been no sillier.

Sadly, Rockstar missed the meeting where everyone was laughing and joking and making pistol fingers and saying what a silly name Max Payne was – let’s have some fun with that, let's roll with it. No, while that meeting of jollity and smiles and pow-pow was going on, Rockstar was outside smoking a dog-end. In the rain. While crying. And muttering “I didn’t ask to be born you know” to itself. And thinking about getting a tattoo. And listening to My Chemical Romance on their iPod. And briefly considering slamming their bedroom door.

You see, Rockstar have taken Max very seriously. He gnashes and wails and whinges and moans and bitches and blubs and at no point ever do you have any sympathy for the gin-soaked twat. Yeah, Remedy’s Max was always me-me-me and the kind of guy you didn’t want to end up talking to at parties (“So, do you think my entire family died in a blaze because I’m boring?”). He was always more self-obsessed than Madonna in the mirror room at an amusement arcade. But every now and then there was a chink, a slice, a smidgeon of life. Nowadays, with Rockstar’s doom-laded teenage angst, Max is a parody of a parody. He can’t go for a shit without comparing it to the emergence of a dark cloud from the buttocks of despair.

The man can slow-motion groin-shot eight goons while falling out of an upside-down exploding boat (AWESOME by the way - kick-cock awesome). He can knee-slide across an open-plan office and KABOOM dead baddie KABOOM dead baddie, graceful dive, KABOOM KABOOM KABOOM you is all cadaverous motherfuckers. He can swandive through the window of a DJ booth kersplatting bad guy after bad guy through the face, chest and, most importantly, nads. And yet when he lands, and the room is a glorious, blood-soaked ode to his majestic glory - he takes pity on himself. Oh life is soooo hard for a pirhouetting slo-mo gunslinger of the apocalypse.

It brings you down, you know? I’m having fun with the mechanics and the bullet time and what have you, but Max isn’t. Maybe once, just once, he could break the goddamn fourth wall and wink back at the screen. “Isn’t this fun?” the wink would say? But no. No. Instead Rockstar have hired a sixth form poet to write his neverending internal monologue. At one point, Max says “I wouldn’t know right from wrong if one was helping the poor and one was banging my sister.” First off, this sentence was written by someone with the IQ of a shoe – it’s lame, cheap and stilted. Second of all, Max – someone banging your sister isn’t necessarily wrong. If it were, Max, I’d hate to be your brother in law as you bounce around the lawn in ultra slow motion unloading round after round into his now-flaccid genitals.

The game? The game is fine. At times as you screech your way around a room doing headshot after headshot and it all *clicks* it’s up there with the best of them. In terms of atmosphere, Rockstar, as usual, have nailed it – Sao Paolo is portrayed brilliantly. The favela level is one of my favourite levels of recent times. Sure, it’s got Rockstar’s usual clunkiness and Max, out of bullet-time, moves like a barge. But as a game? It’s great. Problem is, by the end, I never wanted to spend another second in the company of Max Payne.

[The-Marb]

Nice review CT but cant agree. I dont think the dialogue or tone is any more dour or badly written wthan previous titles.

If anything the occasionally clunky gameplay is what lets it down, all the stuff surrounding it is pretty near perfect ...IMO.

[hollywooda]

Yep this is the 3rd game if you didn't like the monotone dialogue you probably should of given this a miss.
Marking it down for it is kinda like going to see a Transformers film then complaining its all about big robots that just transform??...

[ClownTrousers]

They don't just transform. They also .... Love.

Sure, just an opinion anyway, you're more than entitled to disagree*


* be wrong

[hollywooda]

They don't just transform. They also .... Love.

Sure, just an opinion anyway, you're more than entitled to disagree*


* be wrong

How dare you tell me I can disagree!, I'm completely entitled to agree with you if I want! please like you make me sick.



Nahh that's cool dude, I just think you took MP all a bit to literally.

[Bob]

Depends on the quality of the dialogue.

I was concerned at the change from Comic book noir.. Throwing cash at something doesn't always make it better.