City 16

Merry Christmas people! Or, as I don’t expect you to actually be visiting this site on Christmas day, Merry whatever day it is you decide to read this post (less catchy, I know.)

It’s finally happened: I can’t think of anything to put in this introductory section. No pithy quips and observations about the year 2009, no non-sequiturs, absolutely nothing. Typically I went into this project with absolutely no thought as to what the ramification would be, namely over a week of trying to think of something a bit different to say about my picks at a time when almost every gaming website is publishing overviews of their own.

Ways the world didn’t end in 2009: Black hole, asteroid, Rapture, nuclear attack, biological attack, Shaq attack, Sarah Palin, Gerard Butler.

As we end this uncomfortably named decade some professional review sites have been trying to run down the best games of the last 10 years. What sort of madness is that? Sure, I attempted to gather a list of people’s favourite games of all time but they were implicitly the views of a single person, done with the proviso that one person can’t possibly have played every release and that their choices will be heavily influenced by personal taste.

Trying to create a list of the best, or most important, games of the last decade, with all the weight of expectation, the tricky distorter of hindsight and the venomous ire of internet dwelling gamers? Fuck. That. I’ll stick with sharing my favourite releases of the last 12 months.

Speaking of which, my submission for #7 is:

Battlefield 1943

Hey look, it’s not all indie-obsessed naval-gazing. I enjoy pretending to shoot people on an island during the second world war too!

The Year of Our Lord 2009 is coming to a close. Hopefully this will mark the end of having to say ‘two-thousand-and’ as a prefix to the year name and we’ll move to the more sensible ‘twenty’ . Sure we’d only be saving two syllables but over the course of the remaining 990 years of the millennium those two syllables will start to add up.

By which I mean to say the 9th best game of 2009 is:

Flower

If you read any gaming blog around the start of the year you couldn’t escape the talk of Flower, thatgamingcompany’s follow up to flOw. Chances are, however, it won’t be appearing on many Top 10′s around the internet because, inevitably, just as suddenly as the buzz surrounding the game came, it disappeared again. To be honest I was a little worried when I decided to include it on this list. Was the game really as good as we all thought it was back then? Did we all just get carried along by the hype and general feeling that this game was important?

No. It turns out that Flower is still brilliant. The game asks you to take control of a breeze within the dream of a flower, bringing life and restoring nature to the world by collecting petals as you travel past flowers, making them bloom. Needless to say it drew praise from critics and ‘games-as-art’ bloggers and criticism from the legions of forum-ites who, so upset with the lack of anything to kill, dismissed it as pretentious arty bollocks.

That’s a shame because Flower’s essential genius is that, aside from its ideas and themes, it is a really well made and enjoyable game. Three things deserve highlighting. Firstly, it looks beautiful. Surprisingly, given the theme, the visuals don’t look natural but are instead stylised with a hyper-colourful flair with each level having a distinctive look with a different colour palette to accompany it. Secondly the sound design is excellent. Every flower you bloom explodes in an orchestral flurry that, no matter when you trigger it, fits in with the background music. Essentially it does for orchestral ambiance what Rez did for Japanese electronica. Thirdly, and perhaps most impressively, the controls feel both natural and responsive. This was somewhat of a surprise because Flower exclusively uses the Playstation 3′s near universally terrible Sixaxis motion controls. To date it’s the only game that uses a motion controller that didn’t have me fighting against the control system to play it, and I include the Wii in that.

Of course, as is true with all great games, the overall experience is far more than the sum of its parts. Frustratingly, and I realise I’m not helping here, the weight of discussion behind it detracts from the actual product: simply a well made and relaxing little indie game. With that in mind I’ll finish with a video.

What could be better than blowing some petals around the place? Find out my 8th favourite game of the year tomorrow.

Ah, the hallowed tradition of the end of year Top 10. These lists are meant to be a considered reflection of the very best the year had to offer. What they’re not meant to be is a hasty collection assembled by me frantically checking the copyright date on the back of game boxes to remember what actually came out this past 12 months… Try and pretend I didn’t do that.

Over the next 10 days I’ll be counting down the results of my ‘considered reflections’. Calender fans will have noticed this will put the number 1 reveal on the 25th December. It’s almost like I planned this! (I didn’t.) A quick note: Two games that would have otherwise made it don’t get included because I’d simply not played them enough. These are, predictably, Dragon Age: Origins and Assassin’s Creed 2. Technically I’ve probably played enough AC2 to warrant including it, but its predecessor turned into a shit pile for its last couple of levels so I’m not going to risk it.

So, was 2009 the greatest gaming year yet? In short, no. Publisher’s crippling fear of Modern Warfare 2 seems to have pushed many of the big releases to March of next year. The big exception to this rule was Sony, who seem unable to release a game without previewing it for 5 years before hand and, as such, were unable to release most of their big titles anyway. What 2009 did bring was a great variety of smaller downloadable titles that, thanks to the big dogs running for the hills, managed to get some attention. The shortlist was surprisingly large and surprisingly difficult to cut down with some of the year’s big AAA releases losing out to low-budget indie titles.

Except ignore all of that because at number 10 is:

inFamous

With spots 1 through 9 decided I finally had to face up and decide whether I liked Infamous or Prototype the most (um, yeah… Spoiler: Prototype doesn’t make it. I’m rubbish at this suspense thing.) My flatmate offered up that Prototype looked more fun, but that doesn’t help unless I decide to do a ‘Top 10 Games That Look Fun’ and I’m not that desperate for content. Yet. Certainly Prototype offered more scope for joyful and aimless dicking about but was pretty flawed elsewhere. All things considered, and looked at as a cohesive whole, Infamous was simply the better game.

As a game Infamous has hints of the original Mafia, in that its open world setting doesn’t actually have a whole lot to do outside of the main missions; rather the space and freedom lend credence to the story being told. Of course Infamous’ goals are much less lofty than that of Mafia. Despite the main character’s melodramatic moodiness the truth is that Infamous is a silly game and it’s silly by design. The true aim of the game is to create the feeling of being a comic book superhero, something it captures perfectly. It helps that the main character, Cole, is an original creation not burdened to the rules and stipulations of comic book publishers protecting the image of their heroes. The people who criticised Infamous for only allowing the player to grow in power by being cartoonishly heroic or villainous seemed to entirely miss that that was the whole point.

The other criticism lobbied against the game was far more valid, namely that the electrical powers of Cole were essentially a superpowered re-skin of typical shooter controls. It’s true that many of the powers were substitutes of the gun, the grenade, the shield, the melee et al. That said, this gave the combat a familiarity in the initial stages while it also set up gradual unlocks of more fantastical powers to give the game a proper sense of progression and growing power. Also, as I’ve written about before, the act of moving your character through the world was satisfying as all hell.

Coming tomorrow: Number 9 of this numerically predictable countdown.

Impressions from the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Beta

At every stage the enemy has overpowered us, driving us further and further back behind our own lines. Our forward base fell easily, lost amid the confusion of approaching M1 Abrams and sniper fire. For a while we held them at the town, cutting through their lines with mounted KORN missiles and .50 cal turrets. Despite our efforts a scouting party were able to slip past our defense and plant charges in our base. We fell back but they took the bridge easily. By the time we’d retreated back to the harbour fatigue was creeping in. They sent waves of attackers to puncture our defense and it didn’t take them long to wear us down. We have retreated as far as we can. 6 of us are now holed up in the second of our two remaining bases, on the second floor of an abandoned industrial building. The enemy will be here in a matter of seconds. They have the numbers and the heavy ordinance; but we still have our weapons… And we have resolve.

I never really enjoyed the Conquest mode of the original Battlefield: Bad Company. In it you had two teams: the defenders had to defend gold crates while the attackers had to destroy them. If they did this in a limited number of spawns they would take that base, regain a number of spawns and push up to the next base. If they could do this to all 5 bases on a map they won the game. My not enjoying it isn’t really the fault of the game mode, or even the maps included with the game: it was mostly because I couldn’t find a class I enjoyed enough to stick with. I either ended up ignoring the subtleties of each class, and thus being a bad teammate or just picking sniper and feeling that familiar cold disinterest in the overall fight itself while I concentrated on finding a good safety bush from which to annoy people. Battlefield: Bad Company 2′s beta consists of one map running that exact same mode (except the targets are now generic control points, the game having dropped the gold run theme of its predecessor). We (meaning my flatmate, my brother and I) have been playing it for most of this last week and I’ve finally taken a shine to the mode. It helps that the map they’ve included has produced some of the tensest final moments I’ve experienced in an online game in a long time. It helps more that the medic is now worth a damn.

Of course it will surprise no one that knows me that I’m back singing the praises of a medic class but for the last stand at Bravo to have any chance of working every one of the 6 to 8 people that will generally camp out up in the map’s final control point needs to be using their chosen class to full capacity. If the medic’s not reviving the defenders, if the assault class isn’t dropping ammo for the snipers and if those snipers aren’t killing people then the point will fall and the game is lost. It’s also essential to have a squad member or two staying up their with you so, if you do die, you can respawn straight back into the base.

As a medic my job is simple. I lay a health pack by the control point and another at the far end of the building, where the snipers hide out. If someone else on our floor is killed then self-preservation is out of the window and I have to jump in with the paddles to get them revived before they’re forced to spawn outside the base. If someone on the ground floor, the home of Alpha station, is killed then they’re on their own. In between all this I have to try and actually kill people. The medics gun is large, has lots of recoil but also a large clip. This means that kills are few and far between but often just hitting the enemy is enough. This not only ensures they are weakened when one of the ground troops spot them, but it also marks their position for every defender to see, allowing a sniper to get a fix on them. When we’re all working together the points start to rack up dramatically.

+20 Assist
+10 Heal
+10 Heal
+20 Squad Heal
+20 Squad Heal
+40 Critical Assist
+50 Kill
+50 Revive
+10 Heal
+10 Heal
+50 Kill
+50 Avenger Kill
+50 Squad Revive

Those last 3 came from a glorious moment when an enemy managed to make his way up the stairs to the control point. He’d killed my squadmate, a fellow medic, but in the general confusion all I saw was the icon on the minimap marking a revival opportunity. I get out the paddles, run to the corpse and jump in, reviving my teammate and electrocuting his killer to death in the process.

At 70 respawns to go the task seems insurmountable, it gives the attackers too many attempts to break your defence. At 40 the adrenaline is starting to surge. You still don’t think you stand a chance, but part of you dares to believe you might just hold them off. Eventually, assuming it has all gone right for you (and it often doesn’t) you look at the enemies spawn counter and see the number 14. That’s the point at which you know you’re going to win the fight.

They destroyed Alpha base. As a ground level point with no real cover to speak of it was inevitable, but still it means the enemies entire efforts will be redoubled onto us. More of our side have joined us now, having fled the burning wreckage of Alpha. Cover is low, most of the walls have been blown out by tank fire, and one of the new arrivals, unaware of the snipers nest half a klick to the north, takes one to the chest. Keeping as low as possible I run over to him, using rubble and debris as makeshift cover. No pulse. I pull out my paddles and charge my mobile pack. I smile darkly as I contemplate shouting ‘Clear’ in a room packed with soldiers pinned down by sniper fire. On the second paddle he emits a sharp, loud, surprised cough, covering me in blood. He notices the celebrations before I do, my ears rendered deaf through the sound of my own heartbeat. The room is cheering, the enemy has retreated back. For now, we have won.

It’s taken one map and a more robust class system and already I’m enjoying Battlefield: Bad Company 2′s online mode far more than I do Modern Warfare 2′s. Of course, being brilliant won’t help with the legions of people who only ever seem to buy Call of Duty games but, even without them, 2010 is looking like a great year for last stands.

! – SPOILER WARNING: This post contains spoilers for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and, specifically, for That Level, entitled No Russian. I’m not talking mild ‘tiptoe around the content’ spoilers either; I’m going to be spoiling the shit out of this thing. If you have any plans at all to play MW2′s single player campaign then, seriously, don’t read this. – !

The first time I hadn’t even meant to play it. A friend was round and I was just dipping into the campaign. Being further ahead of me in the story he would sometimes interject with a “this bit’s awesome” or a “this level is a bastard”. You probably know the type.

My plan was always to play No Russian properly: no people, sound up, lights off. We’re experiencing a medium in its adolescence and I’m always interested when a game looks like it might be genuinely unsettling, especially if that game is billed as the biggest release of the year. Before I even know it’s coming, though, the screen has gone black for just a little too long. The only sound is that of guns being checked and ammo being loaded. Finally the visuals fade in and I… my character is stood in an airport.

“This is…” my friend begins. “I know,” I reply, cutting him short. I can’t remember at what point the contents of Modern Warfare 2′s most controversial level were spoiled for me. I don’t even think anyone had to set it all out in front of me, instead the puzzle was pieced together by a snippet here and a mention there; a hundred reviews and previews and discussions and whispers, each one doing their best not to reveal the content but going about it in slightly different ways.

“Remember – No Russian,” says Makarov, the terrorist leader who I… my character has been sent undercover to befriend. “This level isn’t that bad,” says my friend, the terrorist sympathiser who seems intent on cajoling me to unleash hell. We… my character and the cell he’s infiltrated walk into the airport itself and open fire on the unsuspecting, and unarmed, civilians. Here’s the thing: I do find it unsettling. I don’t want to kill these pixels but, at this point, I’m unaware of how the mechanics of the level work; whether non-participation would lead to suspicion and failure. Worse still I’d be showing myself up in front of my friend, who’d just admitted to having no problem gunning down the legions of cowering men and women. In the end I… my character walked the terminal picking off the mortally injured as they dragged themselves across the floor. I deliberately aimed just to the side of a crowd of people, winding up killing another crowd I hadn’t noticed in the background. I’d linger just a beat to long on visual cues like the departures board ticking over into a wall of ‘Delay’ signs. Still, I… my character was complicit. I felt numb.

The thing about No Russian: no matter what issues I have surrounding its execution as a level, or even its inclusion in Modern Warfare 2, in me it succeeded in its goal. Whatever its failings, that was and always will be my honest initial reaction. The game does a great job of hightening the atmosphere within the level itself. The long build up and fade in; the enforced slow walk of your character; the clean mundanity of the setting in contrast to the dusty war torn locales of the rest of the game; the underlying, unsettling, pulsating background ‘music’. Even the civilians themselves have animation models not present in the rest of the game. They’ll drag themselves across the ground and, in some cases, those too injured to even do that will be dragged to safety by others. Everything in the level is designed to provoke a reaction from the player. Mission accomplishes right? Not entirely…

I played the level again earlier today in order to see if it would provoke a similar reaction. It didn’t. After an initial, cathartic, round of gunfire in the opening section’s main bulk of passengers I had no problem moving from room to room killing everything in sight. There was no particular pleasure to be found in it but neither was any of the unease of my initial visit. In the time between my two playthroughs I’d become aware the level plays out exactly the same way whether you participate or abstain from firing completely which, ironically, destroys most of the atmosphere. Even on my first go I realised that the level dissolves completely once the tactical assault teams arrive, bringing the game back to its usual, familiar territory as you become more concerned with staying alive than with what the level is trying to achieve.

This man has clipped through his suitcase. Way to take me out of the moment, computer game.

It’s unfair to expect the level to evoke the same emotions on revisiting, but anecdotal evidence suggests that most of the people I’ve talked to felt no real issues when playing it. Most raise the point that you can do far worse to civilians in many other games. Certainly I have no problem with mowing down pedestrians in GTA, my favourite pastime in Prototype was punching citizens into meat chunks and in Fallout 3 I smiled with evil delight as the town of Megaton erupted into a mushroom cloud of my own making. I can’t entirely explain why this level was different for me but I have a couple of theories. Perhaps perspective plays a role: I’m less aware of an identifiable character in a first-person shooter and the genre itself has a standing tradition of casting you as the hero, saving mankind from aliens or terrorists or Nazis, often single handedly. More likely I think it’s due to the amount of RPGs and adventure games I have played. I’m used to assuming a role and to connecting with a story because they are the elements that those genres tend to emphasise. Are gamers who primarily play shooters prepared to allow themselves to be drawn in to such an attachment? It seems slightly at odds with what they look for in a game.

I feel it’s important to make something clear: I’m glad No Russian caused the response it did in me. Even if the level had provoked the same reaction had I played it alone, and I’m not entirely convinced it would have, I wouldn’t have skipped it. Games shouldn’t shy away from including mature content when the definition of ‘mature’ extends beyond tits and swearing. That said my biggest issue with No Russian is that, tonally, it doesn’t fit in with MW2 at all. Frankly it’s a ridiculous game. the preceding level culminates in a snowmobile chase and, just two levels after, you’re protecting America from an all out Russian invasion. If Jack Bauer went postal in a public place, gunning down civilians left and right? That’s the kind of out of place juxtaposition we’re looking at here. Even the narrative set-up to No Russian itself is handled poorly, with little background given to the terrorists or their ideology. Even a cutscene to give some contextual information about their beliefs would have increased the purpose of the levels inclusion tenfold. Instead we’re left with some cookie-cutter speil about them being Evil. At best the whole thing seems somewhat of a gimmick and is rendered slightly tacky for the fact; at worst it’s a poorly realised exploitation piece designed to court controversy.

And yet… It worked. My initial response was my initial response. For better or worse Modern Warfare 2, by its mere profile alone, has managed to set the bar for emotional set-pieces in an FPS. If a developer can come along and wrap that same sense of unease into a properly defined narrative then a true classic could be born.

With Friday afternoon off work I sat down for a bit of light gaming and ended up flitting between most of the games I’m currently actively playing. Here’s what occupied my time:

16:00 – Torchlight

Goddamn, I really need to remember to turn off the framerate overlay in screenshots.

I finally relented and bought Torchlight after the overwhelmingly positive reviews and feedback about the game. I was initially hesitant because, having not played action RPGs like Diablo before, Torchlight appeared to be a seriously grindy click-fest. It turns out that Torchlight is a seriously grindy click-fest. I’m a little worried for the future condition of my mouse to be honest. Still, having my fears justified showed me that my fears weren’t really justified; Torchlight has a lot going on to keep you invested. Primarily this is done with loot, of which you come across a ridiculous amount: my inventory was filled before the completion of the first level of the dungeon.

There are other touches that keep things interesting. Your character’s pet is especially useful. Not only can you load up his inventory with unwanted goods and send him back to the town to sell them but you can actually get him to learn spells which he’ll automatically cast in battle (mine currently summons skeletons). Also, if you feed him fish, he turns into different monsters for a limited time: both useful and batshit crazy.

I would have probably played this for a few hours but a Steam notification of a PC Gamer event (I don’t even own Killing Floor Steam, damn you) caused the thing to crash out, so it was probably time to move on.

17:00 – MAG

This is why I don't usually take my own screenshots for console games.

It’s always a pain to figure out exactly what you can talk about when it comes to beta testing. From what I understand we’re now free to talk about MAG, Sony’s upcoming 256 player online FPS, since the public beta opened but are still under NDA for anything from the private beta. I hadn’t actually played this since the first phase of the private beta but with the newest public phase arriving with a host of changes and, most importantly, 24 hour servers I thought I’d give it another try.

The concept is well executed. 256 people is clearly a ridiculous number for one online match but the game does a good job of assigning squads to different missions. This means that, while you often aren’t directly aware of the sheer scale of the battle as you focus on your specific task, your job can often be made easier or much harder based on the performance of the rest of the team. This is all good stuff but the game is let down, for me, by its pace. Dying is particularly painful because of the long wait to respawn and the trek from the spawn point to the objective. Thanks to the people who seem to have been testing it continuously for months this happened to me a lot. Part of the problem also seems to be the controls, which are slightly less responsive then I’d have liked. They fall just the wrong side of that almost imperceptible line in which you go from blaming yourself for dying to blaming the game.

Eventually I tired of being killed by someone named X_K1lla_X and moved onto a multiplayer game that gets it right.

18:10 – Modern Warfare 2

The AC-130 is much less creepy here than in the first game due to the fact you're helping out a friend.

I was avoiding the single player campaign because I was approaching That Level and listening to Ivor Cutler, as I was at the time, wasn’t really conducive to fully appreciating it. Instead I switched between the multiplayer and the special-ops missions.

Multiplayer remains pretty much unchanged from the first Modern Warfare. This isn’t a criticism, as its one of the most playable online shooters around. Rounds are fast paced and frantic and the control system is not only tight and responsive but also well tuned. This is most notable with the console auto aim: its good enough to compensate for the weaknesses of using a controller in an FPS without being so accurate that all battles turn into a simple quick-draw event won by whoever started shooting first.

The special-ops missions would turn out to be the revelation of the night. Essentially they’re a series of mini-games and set pieces that reward you with stars for completing certain challenges. More importantly they’re playable in split-screen. As people filtered into the house throughout the night we’d spend much of it passing the controller round and playing through different missions. A particular favourite became the missions requiring one person to get to a particular point on the map while the other player provided air support from an AC-130 gunship. Co-operation is the key; as is shouting at your gunman for bombing you on the ground, or at your ground soldier for getting themselves killed in a house where you’re powerless to help.

19:50 – Borderlands

I’ve not posted about Borderlands before, which is surprising given just how much I’ve played it over the last few weeks. At this point I’ve completed the campaign once and am now on my second playthrough, essentially a New Game + option that starts all the enemies at a much higher level to mirror your character’s progression. Normally I wouldn’t replay a game for months after the first completion, but Borderlands follows the model of the action-RPG grind fest (see Torchlight) so closely (and the story is so ludicrously pointless) that as far as I’m concerned I’ve still not completed it as my character’s not hit the level cap and there’s still loot to be found. Borderlands’ gimmick to cover up the grind and repetition is to be a really good, tactile shooter. Not a bad gimmick all said and done.

This time I decided to re-spec my character’s special moves. A complete skill reset can be purchased which lets you try out different customisation paths. I put most of my points in elemental effects which cause damage-over-time to enemies. Between that and a couple of ridiculously overpowered weapons the game has pretty much ceased to be challenging but remains great fun.

I picked off a couple of missions throughout the hour or so I played it, mostly the ones involving boss versions of regular monsters, killing Skagzilla and Mothrakk with relative ease. I was particularly pleased to note that, with my new multiple types of elemental damage, enemies would bleed multi-coloured numbers before they eventually died. It’s like they were repeatedly being beaten over the head with a tricky tax-return.

Past Everyone’s Bedtime – Elefunk

Seeing as you’re probably wondering: Elefunk is a PS3 physics based puzzler that requires you to build a bridge to allow an elephant to cross from one side of the level to another. Despite its cutesy appearance the game is brutally difficult.

I’ve no idea why we returned to this Friday night (more accurately Saturday morning). When we first went through the game, always three to four of us heavily drunk, we got stuck on a particular level and didn’t return to the game for over a year. Tonight, inexplicably, was the night we came back and beat that damn level and, with renewed vigour, progressed further into the game.

I like playing puzzle games communally. It’s a true reflection of team-work, with nobody jostling for position or kudos, just building upon each others ideas until you collectively reach a solution. Elefunk is perfect for this atmosphere due to its trial and error nature. After your first attempt at building a structure you can send the elephant on his way, nervously looking for all the weaknesses that appear, so when he inevitably falls into the chasm below you know where start strengthening. Its also, fortunately, a good game to play when you’ve been drinking; there are no leaps of logic to take, the game works purely off architecture and engineering.

So these are just some of the games that have been occupying my time. Feel free to share your current gaming playlist in the comments, although God knows I’ve got enough to keep me occupied for a while to come.

Emails containing a code for the God of War III E3 demo were recently emailed to a random selection of European PS3 users. Obviously I was one of these people. Here’s my impression of that very demo:

There seems to be a lot of expectation surrounding the upcoming God of War; a level of scrutiny beyond that which most Sony first party titles receive. This is unsurprising really as the first two God of War games for the Ps2 stood out as the high water mark of the hack ‘n slash genre. To put the potential fears of fans of the series to rest straight away let me say that GoW3′s core combat system is as good as that of the previous games. Perhaps though, this raises a problem in itself. With two really good hack ‘n slash games in its lineage, is it enough for God of War III to be a really good hack ‘n slash?

In reality the answer is probably yes. Unfortunately there is the sense that the developers themselves weren’t quite convinced. Even in the short running time of the demo, probably no more than 10-15 minutes in length, the game bombards you with a number of different mechanics to get Kratos from one fight to another. This wouldn’t have been a problem if these gimmicks, which range from platforming segments through to riding along a series of harpies (while stabbing them), felt as fluid as the combat itself. As it stands the game is constantly breaking you out of the moment for increasingly aggravating set-pieces that only highlight how much fun you were having. In one section, for instance, you have to use the recently detached head of Helios, god of the sun, to light a pitch-black path. This is about as much fun as it is in any other game that has tried it and I can only hope it doesn’t turn out to be a regular requirement throughout the game.

Because dark corridors are always fun!

As I’ve said, the combat that is present is both solid and enjoyable. This is mostly due to the control system and move list being imported wholesale from the previous games. On the one hand this ensures that series veterans will be able to get instant gratification from the the start but, by the same token, leaves everything feeling a bit too similar to what has gone before. Where the demo really starts to stand out are in the, admittedly small, new additions to the combat, such as a section that ends with you controlling a wildly thrashing cyclops to break up a tortoise formation of shielded guards. The true mark of this game will be its ability to provide enough interesting extensions to the well-established combat to keep the game feeling fresh.

This will feel instantly familiar to series' fans.

Also returning are the controversial quick-time events. To give God of War its due these have always at least been properly contextualised, with the buttons you are asked to press at least matching up to the actions they would normally correspond to if you did have full control. The death animations that underlie these events are unflinchingly brutal with minotaurs being eviscerated, a cyclops having his eye pulled out and Helios’ head being ripped from his body. Their appearance on the overlay, however, with each button appearing at the far side of the screen does mean you are often too distracted to actually see the action (much in the same way that the visuals in Rock Band et al. can only really be appreciated by those not participating).

Much of the processing power seems to have gone towards gore.

Overall the God of War experience remains relatively unchanged, with all the joys and annoyances that that brings. While it remains to be seen whether the developers can give enough diversity to the games’ combat and tighten up the non-combat sections it will undoubtedly be received well by fans and probably even draw in some newcomers. If the gameplay on offer in this demo is any reflection of the game as a whole, however, it may not quite be the classic that people seem to be expecting.