A lot of the ‘big’ titles pass me by, as does the latest technology. Lately I’ve spent most of my time being a Rainbow in Kindle’s xbox live game: Rainbow Rapture. A game that costs a meagre 80 Xbox points, has one button, and has kept fellow Two Dude’s reviewer Alex and myself thoroughly entertained competing for the high score.

Ah the high score, Remember when achieving them made a game, not the premiss? No one went on about Centipede’s reactive scenery. No one cared if that the surface of the moon in Moon Patrol was green, but I digress. The point is my new era of gaming is playing new simple games like Speedrunner HD, another XBLA game, which once a couple of friends arrived at my flat (yes, I live sans-mum) provided a pleasurable evening of backstabbing.

My point? What exactly defines this new era of gaming? Why is it I watch King of Kong over and over again wishing I was world Donkey Kong champion when surely I should be putting on my Mass Effect 3 Commander Shepard mask and weeping at the cut scenes deep contextual angst. I think the answer is I’m becoming an old gamer. Being thirty I give myself five years before the new “Total Immersion Coma’ is released. A Kinect game which encourages slow breathing, with as little movement as possible, and who’s scoreboard is dominated by Tibetan monks.

I believe the true thing to be celebrated about this new era of gaming is not multi billion dollar games escaping our atmosphere, or Kinect games channeling the essence of the funky chicken, or even my beloved Rainbows. I believe what should be celebrated is choice. Never before has such diversity been offered to us gamers. We can play blockbusters, we can wave our arms around hoping something happens, we can play new and classic arcade games, all on the same games system. We have entered a era defined by choice. You can spend your money on Kinect titles like Kinectimalz and waste away the hours petting a tiger with the co-ordination of a stroke victim, or purchase Pac Man Arcade and go for the world record. You can even buy Mass Effect 3 and become the Shepard of humanity. Personally though I’m sticking with my rainbow and leaving others to the Funky Chicken.

If you didn’t give a monkeys about the third instalment of the Max Payne series, then this may help. It’s the latest video from Rockstar showing off the slick cinematic stylings of our favourite perpetually miserable but trigger happy detective.

Over to you cheesy voiceover guy…

“If you are going to remake an old game, don’t balls it up.”

When I saw the first trailers for Starbreeze’s Syndicate, I felt a funny feeling in my abdomen that approached my brain at lightning speed. It was excitement and joy. The images of an old classic, remade into a Deus Ex-style shooter with real-time hacking and glorious weapons. There was even a four-man-team co-op mode that made you have to work together.

In short, this promised to be amazing. I played the Co-Op demo and I felt that the excitement would never end. The feeling was about to pop out of the top of my head when I remembered that games always look better in hindsight and nostalgia. Would this really be a trip back to glorious memory town, or was Starbreeze about to take a dump on my early gaming years?

The Lowdown

Syndicate is divided into two very separate experiences. On the one hand you have the single player campaign mode and on the other, the co-operative, mission-based gameplay. With the exception of the aesthetics and weapons, the two are very, very different types of game.

In the single player, you are in the role of Agent Kilo, a born and raised killer, working for a nation-sized corporation called Eurocorp. As an agent, you are basically a cross between a hitman, security agent and hacker, fighting against the agents of other Syndicates and Corporations for control of technology and information. Being an ungodly killing machine, you can fall for miles without stubbing your toe, twist a man’s head around without breaking a sweat and break chains with your bare hands. You are involved in a twisting (predictable) plot of deception, betrayal and revenge, leading to questions to who Kilo really is and what is he fighting for.

The problem is that even with predictable plot points, it should be clear who Kilo is. He is a murderous cyber ninja with all the social graces of a mutant starfish. There is very little character development and although the voice acting is good, the shallow and short story seems to waste those talents. The only mute in the game (Kilo) is the one who could have really benefited from a voice, and given the world revolves around corporate politics, some interaction would have been amazing, especially to show how certain twists in the plot had affected him. I felt about as much connection to the main character as I did to the guy I just murdered and violently defiled. You can’t feel emotionally sympathetic to a man who levels up by stabbing a device into somebodies ear and horrifically pulls a computer chip out of their mangled, dead brain.

Because obviously these are the actions of a sane mind, questioning the morality of their actions.

The hacking aspect of the game is fairly limited too. You are given three major functions; the first is to cause a person to pop a grenade in the middle of his buddies, the second to get said target to turn on his friends then commit suicide if no one is left and the third is to make the target’s weapons backfire, leaving them vulnerable for a brief amount of time.

Once the hilarity of watching some armoured cock-farmer commit murder/suicide has worn off, I found myself not using hacks at all, aside from the contextual ‘breaching’ to control turrets and fight bosses. I could have gone through the whole game with just my pants-wetting, fire-laser and been fine.

Add to this that the campaign mode only lasts a good 6 hours for anyone with a decent history in FPS games, and even then the campaign leaves a lot to be desired. On the up side however, the music (mostly dubstep remixes of the old Syndicate theme) is very heart-pumping, and the original score is likewise perfect for the setting. Aesthetically, the game is everything you could want, however the repetition is unfortunately all too apparent. The game takes place in only three moderately memorable places: a transport hub with some backstage factory lines, a run down slum in the middle of the game and then a high-tech, high-rise tower for a couple of chapters. It was all very bland, and suffers a lot from the J.J. Abrams school of eye-scorching bloom effect.

The co-op mode is by far superior to the campaign in which you play one of four agents. This mode is actually much closer to the original game than the campaign and takes a very singular approach to the missions, each one its own self-contained excursion. There are a lot more hacking options, such as giving the team shielding, healing and damage buffs, each one selected by your loadout. By the time I had my hardened, bastard-smashing  defender up to spec, I felt a sense of achievement and actually appreciated my team rather than spamming mic obscenities at them for being chip-hoarding, gutter-sluts.

Wub wub motherfuckers! Skrillex says hi!

You also have to increase your guns and equipment by chip-ripping hardened enemies, stealing blueprints and then acquiring points through gameplay. This way of levelling up also nets you talent points to further customise your agent; causing them to suffer less damage or increase their accuracy.

What caused me to feel disappointed is that the missions were just too disjointed. There was no story, except for a minor briefing at the beginning. I had no feeling of camaraderie short of gameplay mechanics and it would have been nice to see the missions flow into one another. It was like playing the VR missions in Metal Gear Solid all over again, because although you may get good points, it is just the same old bullshit after a while with no real feeling that you have advanced your character as a part of any kind of story.

To me, it seemed as if the the two halves of the game are like toast and butter. When taken alone, there are some outstanding flaws (such as the mission-based co-op could have used a full storyline but keeping the mechanics – or the dreadfully short and bland campaign that had excellent aesthetics), but if they had just come together, they could have been so much better. A buttery slice of toast seemed to be well within the grasps of the developers, but for whatever reason, they just couldn’t put the two together.

I felt underwhelmed with the whole event and increasingly disappointed. Much like a housewife who has a mechanically uneventful sex life, I can’t help but look further afield to upcoming games like Mass Effect 3 and Borderlands 2 to satisfy my needs. As I stated in my XBLA Waffle post about remakes, we need to move forward instead of remaking the old greats.

Now it’s time to go clean Starbreeze’s fecal matter off the year 1993 and prepare myself for more wub-wubing.

At least the soundtrack is worth a replay.

It is with great pleasure that I can retract that statement, and say in terrified sincerity that the people who designed Asura’s Wrath were the kind of demonically possessed lunatic who somehow garbles together the plans to a doomsday device that will later be used as a plot point in some shitty ghost film.

In madness comes brilliance.

The Basics

You play Asura, one of eight Demigods who is out for revenge after your demigod buddies frame you, ‘kill’ you and then banish you to some form of afterlife while they wreak merry havoc on the planet. This revenge is the driving force – not only in the story, but also behind the insane power behind Asura himself. In the process of handing you your arse, your buddies also end up kidnapping your daughter and killing your wife. Asura then proceeds on a twelve millennium long (no lie) revenge bender to get his daughter back and avenge his other half.

At first, Asura is pretty much in the dark, so he is limited to blindly using his basic powers against moderately minor opponents. Such enemies come in the form of the Ghoma, a black-and-red, obviously corrupted version of normal animals. Although the reason for them being there is never really explained, the fight in the intro of the game gives you a good impression of how destructive the creatures can be when one hatches out of the planet like it’s a fucking egg.

That’s the earth giving birth to the most ungodly tapeworm in existence. Mother Nature needs about fifty trillion tons of Bran to shift that.

So on his rampage of revenge, Asura must combat his former buddies as well as the impossibly large swarm of Ghoma; all the time trying to protect the mortal population. Needless to say it proves to be a bit of a bitch to do, however, as he gets more… wrathy and arm-gifted, Asura’s power increases and he beats back bigger and more deadly enemies with increasing ease. It seems the madder Asura gets, the more arms he grows and that in turn adds to his destructive power. There are times when he is completely without arms, and he resorts to using his head and feet. There is one battle that make me involuntarily spasm with joy when he defeats a twenty-foot tall Buddha with machine guns for arms… with a headbutt.

Presentation

The levels are set up in the exact way you would watch an anime series. You play the first part of an episode, a screen pops where a commercial would appear, then another screen comes up as if the commercials had ended and you are back into the action; much like when you watch a real anime series on DVD. When you come to the end of the episode, you are given a brief synopsis and preview of the next episode before you progress. It’s pure genius. You are actually playing an interactive Anime and it really shows when the animation style and actions are so incredibly well rendered and smooth that you would swear you are watching a movie.

What really stood out for me was that they managed to cover texture pop-ins by making the pre-rendered texture fuzzy, as if looking through a softened lens. It keeps the immersion and even adds to the atmosphere. I honestly wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for my hawk-like senses.

Oh… and there is a mandatory hot springs bath episode. Just saying.

No one is pressing that stick up, buddy. No. One.

Gameplay

Ah, yes. The Gameplay.

This is where the game does not make any ground-breaking changes. If you take away all of the immense, immersing story and the blindingly beautiful graphics, you have some very basic forms of combat. In the start, the game is basically a Panzer Dragoon-style rail shooter which progresses into a bit of a button-mashing action game which then diverts into a series of Quick-Time Events (QTEs) in the middle of boss battles; a sequence that is used again and again throughout the course of the game. On top of that, the game is not incredibly challenging. I died once on my first play through on normal, but in the end, it was not enough to stop me playing on.

It’s simple and it’s fun. The use of gauges to change the section of a boss battle or continue in a level has been seen before in the Naruto Ninja Storm games, but lacks depth for the hard-core gamer who wants a challenge or something new. If you are not drawn in by the setting, I can foresee you becoming bored with this game, very quickly.

Overall Perceptions

I marathoned this game in a night. This will probably tell you two things. The first thing is unfortunately a bad thing. This game is short in comparison to games such as say… Skyrim; which, let’s face it, is a time vampire of the worst (best?) kind. Combined with the fact that this game will only take about 6-8 hours to complete (depending on difficulty settings) and a majority of that is cut-scenes and story, you can pretty much count this as sitting through an Anime series in a night while occasionally pressing X to punch a hole into the planet.

The second is this: I couldn’t put the fucking controller down.

For all it’s length and gameplay flaws, this game is an epic. It is a huge story of betrayal, revenge, ass-kicking and punching the floor so you can rocket into orbit (I shit you not). It is beautifully presented and as I stated in my preview, the use of QTE’s made it feel like I was having an impact rather than just plugging away. I wanted to get a spot-on button press so I could punch one of my betrayers into the stratosphere a bit harder, even though the actual result was a negligible increase in my wrath gauge.

Yes, this giant dicknugget is bigger than the planet. Punch him in his face!

I wanted to see more and more until I was satisfied. I wanted to see the world burn around the corpses of my betrayers and indulge in some manly, oiled-up screaming at the sky. Everything is blown well out of proportion and impossible in the realms of any physics, but it didn’t matter. I had so much fun, I have already played it through again on a harder level to unlock the awesome bonus of artwork (which is amazing) as well as some mechanical increases in the form of other gauges; some of which reduce damage or reduce the cool down of your special moves.

In Summary

Asura’s wrath is amazing. Although the gameplay is nothing new, the stylization, the music and the storyline are innovative, original and involving. Unfortunately, the length and limited replayability of the game makes it hard to justify the price tag $49.99 out here in the US. If I had paid two thirds of that tag, then I believe it would have been a good buy, but I cannot truthfully endorse anyone spending the same amount of money on this game as they would for Skyrim or The Darkness 2.

Whether you buy this game now or later, you are missing out if you pass it by. Although the die-hard, anti-anime crowd will think this is a colossal waste of time, those who are fans of the massive battles and over-the-top characters will simply squeal in delight when you find yourself doing battle on the moon with your former master, or blasting down fleets of spaceships with rage-fueled lasers.

It’s madness, pure and simple… but it is the kind of madness that is infectious… and fun.

We’re all friends here, so let me be honest: I felt cheated by Borderlands (the first one). It was all very pretty and I loved the environments and atmosphere… but to claim that it had billions of weapons is a bit like saying chips with vinegar is a completely different meal to chips with a bit more vinegar. That and the ending was such an anti-climax it made me wish I’d done something useful with my life like maybe writing a play, learning crochet, or being in a coma.

It’s alright though, Borderlands 2 is coming with enhanced prettiness and even more hyperbole about its gun-count, hurrah!
Hey, Gearbox: would a half-decent ending be too much to ask for second time round?

Tomorrow sees the US release of EA and Starbreeze’s FPS reboot of the isometric classic, and with it comes a spanking new launch trailer, which, much to my confused tiny mind looks rather compelling.

I’m optimistically (naively?) hoping that a decent pace of story will give some atmosphere and immersion to the single player campaign instead of what we saw in the disappointing co-op demo: a shallow, frantic race to the next area with at least one comrade going AWOL, consistently and repeatedly running ahead into the nearest shower of bullets. Hero.

As always, thoughts welcome below or via that there twit-thing: @TbWblog.

Breadsticks, lesbian wizards and dragon flatulence all in the latest instalment of the excellent Two Dudes Review. This time we see Jay and Alex larking about in the woods to review Bethesda’s epic Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Be sure to like the video on youtube and you can follow @jaycowle and @alexinvert on Twitter.

As some of the hardcore modders will know and lament, the Skyrim creation tool that was previously to be released in January has been pushed back to February. But it’s ok for two reasons. Firstly: that’s the month we’re in! Secondly: they have released this very tasty video to tease us silly, and my word it looks wondrous.

More information on Bethblog.

Group: (SYMPATHETIC CLAPPING)

Me: Something about the environment, the atmosphere, the narrative, the tension… was just so right. The moment when The Darkness restrains you as you are forced to watch your character’s girlfriend’s execution by the mafia is among the most shocking and moving I’ve ever experienced in a game. But the story… it would pull me in then… (SOBBING)

Group Leader: Please, go on. You’re amongst friends.

Me: (SOBBING) …it would make me play through hours upon hours of repetitive FPS gameplay just to see more, like as if the Sopranos made me dance like a puppet for an entire day just to watch a single episode. I know I should feel used and manipulated, but somehow… I still loved it.

(Sobbing turns into hysterical crying, group hug ensues, etc. etc.)

Yup, it’s a lonely business being a fan of The Darkness, so how does the second instalment look like it’ll hold up?

In the Darkness II, you yet again play anti-hero Jackie Estacado, who has eschewed The Darkness (the demon that possessed Jackie in the first game) in all its tentacally glory for the peaceful hum-drum life of a mafia boss. Let’s face it, if a big tentacled demon held you back as your other-half was shot in the face you probably wouldn’t want them hanging around either.

Enter The Brotherhood, who, in attempt to take The Darkness for themselves, coax it back to the surface by ruining Jackie’s day and making him feel a bit cheesed-off. All he wanted was to sit down for a nice meal with a couple of ill-looking women.

So far so good, we’ve had a little bit of story and the acting’s all very nice. The gameplay is a similar affair to the first one, and the combat system makes it satisfyingly easy to make separate hand / tentacle attacks. For example you could shoot with one hand, reload with the other whilst a spare tentacle nonchalantly pins a bad guy to the nearest wall by using the nearest parking meter as a javelin.

The combat, particularly the tentacle attack, is satisfying and brutally visceral. However the gruesome execution moves, although excellently animated, take too long to play out. There are also only 3 execution ‘sequences’ which take up the whole screen for the duration of the move, leaving you vulnerable to other assailants, as if you were trying to perform a careful dissection in the middle of a mosh-pit.

Frustrating then, that these moves earn you the most essence (read: xp), so if you’re a bit of an xp whore like me, you’ll find yourself using them a lot. This x… err… essence, allows you to unlock new ‘talents’ through talent shrines which show up every now and then.

Believe it or not, tearing through waves upon waves of hapless Brotherhood goons can get repetitive. Part of me thinks they should’ve probably checked the health and safety policy before signing up, but it must save their employer’s a fortune on redundancy pay, so every cloud eh?

The demo states that sequences do not appear in the same order in the full game. I hope that the repetitive nature of the action is a result of this and exclusive to the demo. In the 40mins or so worth of playtime I ripped through about as many orange jumpsuited clones as I care to. Clear area, recover health, next area, clear area. Rinse, repeat.

Another orange-jumpsuited goon to the slaughter. Sigh.

Some fine details remain like the way your tentacles sizzle and recoil in pain when you are stood in the light, but the visual style of the entire game has taken a very different direction. Dubbed “comic-book noir”, the pen n’ ink style doesn’t go quite as far as the toon-tastic Borderlands, but it’s a far cry from the HD textured gloom-fest of its predecessor, of which I was a massive fan. And why wouldn’t I be? It looked fantastic. In fact I didn’t even notice The Darkness II’s pen n’ ink effect straight away, only that “it doesn’t look quite as good as the first one”.

Stylistic decision? Or just good old fashioned laziness? I’m not so sure.

The game is also extremely rumble-happy. The idea to have Jackie’s voice vibrating through your fingertips is all good in theory but in practice the sporadic spurts of rumbling fire off at completely different times to the syllables that Jackie is actually saying. It creates the annoyance of some video going out of sync with its audio, but tactilely. A sort of kinaesthetic lip sync if you will. An odd experience, and a first for me; it just happens to be a not very comfortable one.

I have high-hopes for The Darkness II, especially after such a promising launch trailer, but like a whispering demonic voice inside my head I can’t shake the thought that it will be fun but only for a short while. Never underestimate the power of a good story though, I would’ve jumped through flaming hoops if The Darkness I had asked me to. Naked.

The Darkness II demo is available on PSN, Xbox LIVE and Steam.

At the time of writing, the cheapest places to preorder the Darkness II are:

PS3 – The Darkness II from Simply Games – £34.99

Xbox360 - The Darkness II from Simply Games – £34.99

PC – The Darkness II from The Hut – £24.85

We start off with the familiar friends list, with all the usual features such as status notification (online / offline) and active conversations have a wonderful glowy speech bubble.

The Steam friends list

If you are logged into Steam on a PC at the same time as the mobile app, the desktop will greedily gobble any received messages, preventing the phone from getting so much as a whisper. Beta teething problem? I hope so.

It was also unclear as to whether I was receiving all of my replies, but to be fair this could have just been due to the wonky nonsense I was spewing from my fingers.

The profile system doesn’t seem to have been too marginalised by the appification process either, offering most of the information of its desktop counterpart. Game time, screenshots and videos are all present. No trophies as yet, bah! I shed not a tear for their absence.

From the friends list you can casually slide the menu out to wander around to other usual steam services like news, the store and groups.

One of the most useful things I can foresee with this app is making sure I don’t pass on a bargain while I’m skydiving, snowboarding and all the other things I’m too scared to actually do. Let’s check out the store.

Lovely, complete with tabs for featured, new, popular and my personal favourite: specials. After a bit of scurrying around I found our old friend: The games under £7 / £4 filters.

Alright let’s get in depth, because I’m so bloody dedicated to the cause I’m going to buy a game. For a whole £7. That’s right, look impressed.

This is where landscape mode comes in handy. It’s screenshot time, bitches!

Space! Who doesn’t like space? I’m feeling saucy. I think I’m gonna buy it.

Fortunately the purchasing process is well integrated with the steam system and all went nice n’ smoothly. Hurrah! Yet another game I definitely am going to review…

So there we go, Steam Mobile in a nutshell. It’s shiny, it’s slick, and it works (y’know except for that message gobbling thing). Unless you were totally delusional and expecting some sort of remote play function and / or make the tea (it is called Steam): it does everything you’d expect of it.

Well done Valve, jolly well done.

Visit the Steam Mobile app page for more.