Singularity

Reviewed Platform: Xbox 360

Other Platforms: PS3, PC

In the past I have wondered “Why are there so many games out there that are playable but have such bad storylines?” When I say playable I don’t necessarily mean good gameplay, I just mean gameplay that is enjoyable. Wet was like this. I despise the game, but it was alright to play. Same goes for the 2008 iteration of Prince of Persia. But I can’t actually think of a game that had a good storyline but I hated every second I played it.

Well, that was until Singularity, which has one of the most interesting storylines I’ve played recently yet with gameplay that just pissed me off. See, the story involves time travel. I’m a sucker for time travel. I just find time travel extremely interesting. I love things like Chaos theory, which is exactly what this game deals with.

The main character, Renko, accidently alters time right at the beginning of the game by saving someone in 1955 who turns out to now rule the world in 2010. And it is ALL YOUR FAULT! You spend the rest of the game attempting to right your wrongs whilst everything around you attempts to kill you. If this was a film it would probably be pretty good, and I recommend watching any Let’s Plays that are around on the internet.

I say watch the Let’s Plays because then you wouldn’t have to play the game. At the heart of a game is the gameplay. It’s what sets apart video games from other forms of media: interactivity. But it all feels so lacklustre, so is no fun to play.

The shooting is possibly the least fun part of the game. For an FPS that is just inexcusable. When shooting the enemies it doesn’t feel like your shots are actually connecting. You can unload half a clip into a normal soldier and he will shrug it off. Don’t the developers realise that bullets don’t just tickle. They kill you.

It gets even more annoying when shooting the mutants. Rarely does it looks like the shots are actually having an effect on the enemy. They just keeping running at your to tear your to shreds when they get nearby. And boy do they tear you to shreds!

Forget the size of your life bar. It’s pretty much useless to think that all of those dashes next to each other show you having a lot of health. When any enemy hits you your health will go down fairly quickly. The only ways to get your health back are through stimpacks, which give you health straight away (but are very rare), or health packs, which are everywhere. I admire them for using health packs in an age when it’s all about the regenerative health. However, the animation for using a health pack takes up so much time and within that time you can still keep getting shot, meaning that using one just delays your death.

But nothing takes down your health more than the Phase Ticks. Fuck these things. Seriously. Fuck them. If Phase Ticks ever became real I would devote my entire life to hunting down every single one of the bastards and making them pay. What these things do is run right at you and explode, kind of like the Tickers from Gears of War 2. Unlike the Tickers, though, you have no time to react to them. They are tiny and hard to shoot. And when they come along there is a lot of them, and I mean a LOT! When you first see them you are guaranteed to die over and over until you realise how you are meant to beat them: run, hide, and try to blast them.

On top of all of this terrible gameplay we have something that just slightly bugs me: a lack of subtitles. Now, hear me out on this one. There are some audio issues in this game. There are a few game that have this issue and the issue is that if you turn to face away from the person talking you can barely hear what they are saying. Hell, you have audio logs everywhere which you need to stand right next to, facing the audio log, hoping some evil thing doesn’t come behind you to shank you up. They never do, but you still keep turning around just in case. Subtitles would solve this issue. Also, it’s equal rights: helping the hard of hearing (though I’ll admit I just want them because I like listening to music when gaming).

The TMPis pretty cool, but using it in combat is rare, unless it's against Phase Ticks!

All of this builds up to a surprisingly great finale, which the game really doesn’t deserve. In this section the gameplay doesn’t feel too bad because it is all fast paced, so you are concentrating more on living than the terrible controls. That is, at least, until the actual endings, which all seem pretty rushed, two being more of an epilogue than anything. One of these endings is somewhat fitting, it just didn’t seem like a great conclusion to this game.

So, like I said, go see a Let’s Play of the game. It will probably look good, but that’s because someone else is playing it. Yes, the game is very pretty and the story is very good, but when you sit down and play Singularity it just doesn’t feel fun at all.

Final Verdict: 3/10

Call of Duty: World at War (Originally posted 05/03/09)

Reviewed Platform: Xbox 360

Other Platforms: PS3, PC, Wii, Mobile, DS, PS2

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a great game. In my own opinion it was possibly the strongest game in the entire Call of Duty series. It decided to no longer stick to fighting the Nazis. Now we were to fight today. This was Modern Warfare. We were fighting the perceived enemies of the West in the 2000s.

All was well and happy as we saw our fellow Englishmen die right in front of us in the final battle and the Americans being brutally massacred within a nuclear explosion. Both of these moments took my breath away as I felt so connected to these well rounded characters. Thank you Infinity Ward for a fantastic game that I have played many times.

Now it is Treyarch's turn. It would seem that Infinity Ward and Treyarch take it in turns to develop Call of Duty games for Activision. Because I was so enamoured with CoD4 I decided to play Call of Duty 3, developed by Treyarch, which was alright as a game, but not fantastic. I know it was made with technology that was not as good as the technology used for CoD4 but that was not the problem. Firstly, the story was bad in that I felt no attachment to any characters, which didn't make me enjoy the experience.

And then there is my pet peeve with games like this that are set during World War 2, and that is this: you end up fighting off half of the German army within each trench you enter. Now, it really doesn't seem historically accurate to me that a mere Private ends up attacking what appears to be the place where Nazis spring up from the ground to rip your nipples off. I am so glad that within CoD4 there was no moment (to my recollection) that every single member of the Ultranationalist party comes along to brutally sodomise you whilst you hold on to Captain Price's moustache. But I digress.

Now on to the game I am actually going to review. It follows Call of Duty FOUR in the series so evidently I am reviewing Call of Duty FIVE. Sorry, but it isn't. It is Call of Duty: World at War. Not Call of Duty 5: World at War. Just Call of Duty: World at War.

Okay, so they have now decided not to number the sequels from now on. I can see their reasoning behind this as, sadly, World at War is actually set in World War 2. So Treyarch have decided to take a step back and not continue with Modern Warfare. Okay, okay. Fine. I can deal with that. It'll make new members of the series confused but okay, whatever.

I think I may as well get off this petty stuff. Hopefully it won't harm the rest of the series.

This game has also tried to be a special one within the series as it now takes us away from the European front, but now we get to go to the Pacific Theatre. Cool, that worked really well for Medal of Honor: Rising Sun. I had a lot of fun with that game. But now they have decided to ruin fighting in Japan for me by giving me three recurring characters who are absolute gits (who made such an impression on me that I forgot their names and didn't care when two out of three of them died on me), Banzai troops that knock you to the ground and give you half a nanosecond to actually kill and finally, you guessed it, millions upon millions of Tojos (their words, not mine) to dispatch before deciding that we should bomb a tonne of places and then go home.

Then we have the fact that every single American soldier decides to swear like a sailor whenever they stub their toe. I mean seriously! The swearing within this game could not be any more gratuitous. The word “fuck” is constantly chucked about as if we were going into battle with a battalion of chavs who had to swear after every word, including the curses. I don't mind swearing, I just find it pointless. It never seems to fit in with what they are saying. “Abso-fucking-lutely” Why not absolutely? CoD4: Captain Price can't get a helicopter to the bridge in time: “Useless Wanker!” The shit is about to hit the fan. Of course he'd swear! 

Then we have the terrible AI. Your team mates fail at killing any of the enemies. By the end of the first mission your character should end up becoming Lord High Ruler of the Universe for the amount of Japanese warriors he has killed. This wouldn't be so bad if there weren't so many warriors coming after you. And when I say coming after you I mean YOU and only YOU! Emperor Hirohito must have put a bounty of your head for 10 trillion Yen. You play on Veteran and they will all be chasing after you with bullets with a heat seekers on them, which won't fare well with your health. But don't worry, hide for a bit and you'll be back to normal. I love that about these games. I guess you just assimilate the bullets into your system and rebuild yourself with the materials, giving yourself a metallic organs and bones (which would explain why you can take so much punishment, I suppose). 

Oh, and then we have the grenades. My God the grenades. I need a paragraph on its own to talk about grenades. Even on Recruit they have some form of homing device on them. No matter where you are, no matter how many enemies there are, you will have four or five grenades drop at your feet. You can't throw them back because once you send one on its way to the nearest enemy you'll have the others blow you into tiny pieces. None of your team get 'naded. Just you. They must have something that repels these grenades, because they are always safe. You get no time to shoot. You get a grenade up the arse. They are annoying. That's the reason the Japanese lost the war. They put all their war effort into creating as many grenades as possible rather than better weapons.

Well, that's out of the way. Now on to the other half of the game.

Then we have the other half. The Russian part. And... I liked it. The characters were well rounded and the plot was interesting. Walking forwards to slowly put the Red Army's flag on top of the Reichstag was a good touch, especially as you are wounded, and it made me feel as if I were a part of the war. It kept more to the old formula within CoD4, but wasn't as good. All I can really say. It was a better part of the game.

By the way, where are the British? We played a major role in the war, with all of 1939-1945 having the British fight in it. We were there for it all. But we never crop up at all within this entire game. I hear the British are in the PS2 and DS versions, but why not on the Xbox or PS3 versions? Confuses me.

Now, the online element of CoD4 was absolutely amazing. I played it constantly and went through several prestiges. Yet now I feel that Treyarch has let the series down yet again. They used predecessor's online gameplay and made the maps massive and open. Now, one of the great things about the CoD4 online, I felt, was that it was very close quarters and there was cover to hide behind. World at War decided to take this element and throw it into the bin, introducing vast landscapes that allow snipers to see everyone and kill them. However, sometimes the problem is  actually not being able to find anyone. The maps are so big that everyone tends to be on the other side of the map, eliminating any sort of tactics that include flanking and... flanking. Actually, the only tactic is to flank, but that can get some kills. 

The dogs are a bitch, too. I like that it's easier to kill the replacement of the helicopter, but we still have very little chance against them. And they should definitely not put points for killing dogs on the score. I do, however, like the fact that experience for assists is given relative to the damage given to the enemy. A lot fairer than +2 every single time. Basically, the online was like Halo 3: fun, but only with friends and only if played fairly rarely.

Nazi Zombies is a good mode, but can get boring after a few goes, and Co-op absolutely sucks. It just does unless you put on cheats to make it a little bit challenging. That's all the can be said for those.

As you can tell I am not an absolute fan of this game. There are some really good points but it is just extremely adequate. Very, very adequate. Playable, but not for long periods of time. I'd rather play CoD4.