Platform: PC

Darksiders is a game that is utterly derivative of Zelda. You are tasked with exploring various “castles,” each of which gives you a new power that will open up new areas on the map. Some of these new powers include Link’s hookshot, Eopna the horse (named Ruin here), a magic musical instrument, double jump, and the Portal gun is thrown in for good measure. However, unlike a Zelda, this game is supposed to be dark and edgy. It’s kinda like a modern superhero movie where they try to make a kids’ franchise dark and brooding. I can’t wait for the reimagining of The Wonder Twins.

You play War−one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse who snarls his way through the entire confusing story. As far as I could tell there’s a war between Heaven and Hell and the seven seals have been broken or some such nonsense. Honestly, I had no idea what was going on. The characters are stupid and undeveloped and the fictional world makes no sense. It seems like every dialogue sequence contains a line or two about, “you know this is the law!” followed by a meaningless battle in order to stay within regulatory boundaries of this unspecified law. Apparently, the world beyond is a boring government bureaucracy.

Story aside, the game isn’t that bad. How can you go wrong when you rip-off one of the best games of all time? The castle puzzles are pretty good, and the boss battles are satisfying. What this game lacks is the sense of exploration that you get with Zelda. There weren’t many moments when I was tantalized by some seemingly unattainable treasure that required a power I was yet to aquire.

One final complaint is that this was a super sloppy PC port. Controller support was crap. I had to download an xBox controller emulator to play the game. The game ships with a corrupt intro video that prevents the game from launching. The fix is to delete an AMD video in the install directory. Lastly, a recent Windows update broke the video in the cutscenes. Only the bottom half of the screen was visible. That required rolling back a Windows update which did all sorts of weird things to other programs. I own the sequel, so I hope they fixed those issues for that game.

This game had one of the best trailers ever. None of the narrative spark that permeates the trailer is in the actual game. The closest thing you get is a few paragraphs of backstory on the character selection screen. This is unfortunate because Dead Island is a big open world game that gives you no incentive to explore it’s lush and detailed map. Rather than tell a story or develop characters, the quests are of the fetch and return an item variety. Even the opening cutscene is an insult. It consists of the worst “beeyotch”-laden rap song a 12-year-old wannabe gangsta could come up with.

The combat mechanics are fun and keep the game going for a while. But without the narrative hook, the chopping and bludgeoning just becomes tedious. The game doesn’t even let you play it as a pure action challenge because it uses a horrible recovery from death system that removes any real challenge in defeating particularly tough segments. Hit a thug, die, come back to life and hit him again… repeat until you win. Such a disappointment.

The Icewind Dale series is built on the same game system as the Baldur’s Gate games. Unlike Baldur’s Gate these games are focused more on the fighting and less on the story. As far as I’m concerned that’s a good thing. These old Infinity Engine games are just filled with pages and pages of boring fantasy text. It’s hard to get a sense of character and mood when every NPC has a ridiculous apostrophe-laden name like “Yxbudur’zmutkimdu.” Just point me towards a horde of goblins and let me click them to death. Icewind Dale II is very good at just keeping the monsters coming and follows a very linear progression from area to area. Not until the later chapters do you start to get bogged down with quests requiring putting specific items in specific containers to solve puzzles. The shift of pace was a little jarring and took me a while and a few jumps to a walk-through to get past some areas. I prefer the sword as a puzzle solving tool.

Many of my old complaints about the D & D system still apply here. There’s too many numbers thrown at the player and it’s difficult to know which weapons are more powerful than others. The magic system is immense and it was just too much work to figure out which spells were best against which enemies. C’mon devs, us gamers are lazy! Give us a tutorial mission or two for each class. All that said and in spite of my ignorance of the subtleties of the rules, the combat is fun and satisfying. I hope recent Kickstarter projects attempting to modernize this game system are sucessful.

Costume Quest feels like an off-hand idea thrown out there at a pitch meeting. I’m sure the designers had just taken their kids out trick-or-treating for the first time and thought to themselves, “Geesh, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a game where you were trick-or-treating and your costumes gave you superpowers!” Well, it might have been cool except for the fact that knocking on doors only to have repetitive battles is not fun at all. If there is one thing Doublefine Studios is good at is creative art direction and silly dialogue. Much like the critically lauded Psychonauts, this game is dripping with style and creativity. But, also like Psychonauts, the actual game play is just ho-hum. The game is just a lot of walking around, picking up candy and then having the occasional timing-based (ala Mario RPG) and strategy-free battles. This game was entertaining for about a half hour but got old really fast.

Syberia II picks up right where the first game left off with you racing by train into northern Russia in search of the mysterious island of Syberia. Of course there are plenty of obstacles along the way and lots of new and fantastical places to explore. The writing here is top-notch (with the exception of the completely redundant side story of Kate’s employers attempting to track her down) and I genuinely cared about the characters and their fates. My usual complaints about point-and-click adventures still apply here, but I never felt the game was (too) unfair with its puzzles.

Oblivion is a huge, open-world RPG made by the same folks who made Fallout 3. In fact, it plays very much like Fallout 3 in terms of quest structure and interaction with the world. The main storyline is not terribly interesting, but I found myself getting sidetracked by the optional quests and dungeons that litter the entire world map. I must have spent the first ten hours of the game trying to recover from a vampire’s bite. I also wasted a lot of time in the colorful expansion world of the Shivering Isles. When I finally got around to completing the main quest it took about 5 hours. The fun of this game is more in the exploration of the world map and character building by honing your various skills. Combat is fun but can be hectic and confusing if you are fighting alongside an ally. In the end it’s just a click-fest in which you are just trying to time your health potions and spells when there is a moment between the attacks.

I’ve been playing a lot of adventure games these days. In Syberia you play Kate Walker, a lawyer working for a high-powered corporate client who is looking to close the deal on the purchase of a Wonka-esque toy factory. As you journey farther in the story and get closer to your goal, the world becomes more and more fantastic. The graphics showing all this wonderous worlds and characters are certainly a step up from The Longest Journey. The pace may be slow, but I liked most of the puzzles. The voice acting is very good and I really enjoyed the story. The game ends a bit abruptly so be sure to have Syberia II installed and ready to go so you can continue on your quest.

Fresh off of completing Broken Sword, I decided to continue my point-and-click adventure gaming with The Longest Journey. Like Nico from Broken Sword, April Ryan of TLJ has one of those early nineties reverse mullet hairdos, short in back and long in front, but that’s about where the similarities between these two games ends. TLJ is far more epic in scope with your standard video game “you must save the world from certain doom” plot. The game is massive, but it is broken up into smaller digestible chapters that could generally be completed in one sitting. Early on in the game I got stuck a few times and had to turn to the ‘net for hints, but once I got a feel for the type of puzzles to expect I was able to get through most of the puzzles on my own. The biggest help came when I realized that by hitting the ‘A’ and ‘S’ keys, I could cycle through my inventory without having to navigate through menus and icons. There were still a few times when trial and error were all I had to go on. In hindsight, I’ve really come to appreciate the subtle built in hinting system in Telltale Games’ titles like Sam & Max.

During game play, April and the other on-screen characters are low-polygon 3-D models set against pre-rendered backdrops. They must have only slightly upped the poly-count for the cut scene animation because April still looks and moves like a textured balloon animal. Grim Fandango predates this game by a year or two, but, because of its character stylization, looks leaps and bounds better.

Graphical shortcomings aside, The Longest Journey managed to engage me the whole time with its fantastical story telling and likable characters. I didn’t quite understand the need to insert F-bombs and other adult language into what should have been a safe PG-rated game. I thought it didn’t quite fit in with the dragons and whimsical tree people, but I guess that supposedly makes the game more serious and mature?

Broken Sword is a point and click adventure game from the ninties. You will spend most of the game playing as George, the bumbling American tourist who unwillingly gets entangled with murder mystery involving clowns, dirty handkerchiefs, The Knights Templar and a photo journalist named Nico. Nico has a mysterious back story that is gradually revealed in the opening sequences of the game. These early scenes in which you control Nico are the “Director’s Cut” sections of the game. I found it to be a little bit of a let down when the game switched to George as the main character. Nico was so much more interesting to play and learn about. With George, however, there is a lighthearted sense of humor that makes it worthwhile to listen through all the spoken dialogue.

As far as adventure games go, this one is very easy. The puzzles don’t require much thought, and in most cases you simply need to click through all your options and make sure you’ve hit every highlighted hotspot on the screen. But I was okay with the simplicity. There were a few puzzle-puzzles (ala Professor Layton) and the standard adventure game combine-this-with-that puzzles usually made logical sense. In the end Broken Sword is a well told story with a nice art style and lots of humorous characters.

Mass Effect 3 is the satisfying conclusion to the Mass Effect trilogy (ME1 & ME2). The Reapers have finally come to reap and it’s Shepard’s job to unite the galaxy against them. Along the way you meet up with old allies (the ones you didn’t kill last time around), fight with all sorts enemies and hide behind a lot of cover.

The game plays more or less the same as the last one with the linear levels and cover-based combat. The graphics are about the same but they no longer have a film grain effect on top of everything. The place where all the Mass Effect games excel is in the storytelling. A lot of gamers complained about the ending, but I thought it was good (I did play the “extended cut”… a benefit of waiting until after launch to buy a game). There’s not much more to say other than this is an excellent game and well worth the 90+ hours of play time it will take to complete the entire trilogy. It’s the best sci-fi I’ve seen since Firefly and Serenity.