The Good

• New event types add even more variety to both solo and multiplayer sessions
• Difficulty and assist options cater to new and experienced drivers alike
• Cars, buggies, and trucks all look great and handle superbly
• Fantastic presentation
• Supports both online and split-screen multiplayer

The Bad

• YouTube functionality is limited

Rating

Dirt 3 is a superb off-road racer that adds some great new features and improves upon its predecessor at just about every opportunity. When DiRT 2 was released in 2009 it boasted a lengthy and varied career mode, numerous multiplayer options, and uniformly excellent presentation. Its sequel loses none of those things and also makes some great additions to the formula.

Split-screen multiplayer with support for two controllers is now an option, there are more vehicle classes to choose from, gymkhana events and snowy conditions pose fresh challenges, and new multiplayer modes put interesting automotive spins on some first-person shooter favorites.

Dirt 3 brings a lot of superb content to the table, and because it offers a plethora of customizable difficulty settings and assists, newcomers and veterans alike can enjoy its excellent off-road action.

Regardless of which difficulty level you play at and whether or not you take advantage of stability and braking assists, Dirt 3 handles like a dream. There are dozens of great-looking modern and vintage vehicles in the garage, and you race them on all manner of surfaces and in changing weather conditions, but getting behind the wheel of one that you haven’t driven before is never a problem.

The controls are responsive, and while it’s certainly possible to mess up so spectacularly that your ride loses panels and becomes deformed to the point that it’s unrecognizable, there are gameplay mechanics in place that ensure you don’t feel the need to hold anything back. Even as you hurtle along narrow dirt trails and around icy hairpins, Dirt 3′s cars, trucks, and buggies encourage you to push them harder by using excellent audio and rumble feedback to let you know that you’re not quite on the edge yet.

Demanding new gymkhana events in which you’re challenged to perform tricks in specially designed arenas reinforce how excellent Dirt 3′s controls are. In these exciting sessions you score points for crashing through carefully positioned destructible blocks, and for performing donuts, spins, slides, and jumps.

String different tricks together to get the crowd pumped, and you build up a score multiplier; display anything other than masterful control by colliding with something, and your multiplier goes down. It’s not entirely dissimilar to performing combos in a skateboarding game, except that the tricks are significantly less complex.

Stringing successful tricks together against the clock is still plenty challenging, though, and as a result, gymkhanas are great practice for other events. Once you can make a car dance around a cone and slide at speed through a gate or underneath a truck, getting it around a corner in a race doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

Every event in Dirt 3, whether it be a point-to-point rally through a Kenyan desert, a head-to-head race in the Aspen snow, or a circuit-based rallycross event that weaves in and out of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, demands precise driving.

You can get away with a few collisions here and there, particularly if you take advantage of the five flashbacks at your disposal to correct your mistakes, and it’s entirely possible that you might find finishing in first place too easy if you’re an experienced player.

Turn off some of the assists, crank up the difficulty, and switch from cosmetic damage to realistic damage, though, and you’ll find that Dirt 3 is exactly as challenging as you want it to be.

At the other end of the scale, if you’re new to off-road racing and looking for a way into the genre, Dirt 3 has you covered. In addition to the aforementioned assists and other options, it’s the first game in the series to offer a dynamic racing line like those seen in both the Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo series on consoles.

That racing line can be invaluable as you learn your way around Dirt 3′s 100-plus circuits and stages; position yourself poorly as you take a turn or jump over a crest, and you might make a subsequent corner unnecessarily difficult. Also invaluable in the events where she’s available is real-life co-driver Jen Horsey, who always delivers the information you need in a clear, concise, and timely fashion.

(A male alternative is also available, as is an option to have either co-driver use more complex and detailed language.) If you listen to her carefully, rally stages that wind through the forests of Finland or around the lakes of Michigan don’t seem nearly as daunting.

You still won’t have much time to admire the impressive scenery or to contemplate the foolhardy fans that occasionally run across the track ahead of you, but you’re far less likely to wrap your car around a tree or crash through a barrier and into the crowd.

Many of the events in Dirt 3′s lengthy Dirt Tour career mode span multiple back-to-back races at the same location, but the game does an excellent job of keeping the action from feeling stale. After finishing the first of three rallycross events in dry conditions, for example, you might race the next during a grip-changing downpour and then the final in wet conditions after the rain clouds have passed and your visibility is improved.

And in point-to-point rallies, racing the same stages in different directions can make for a very different experience, especially if you’re under a desert sun one stage and having to use your headlights to cut through the black of night the next. Also lending variety to your career is that you invariably have several different events to choose from.

The dozens of events that compose the Dirt Tour are organized into four seasons that must be completed in order, but your progress through each season is anything but linear, and you always have the option to return to events that you want to replay in an attempt to improve upon your position or best score/time.

Your progress as a driver is measured in reputation points, which are earned after every event. You score points for podium finishes, for not using your flashbacks, and for completing any team-specific goals. Teams aren’t a big deal in Dirt 3; where in some games you’re expected to commit to them for entire seasons, here you can drive for a different one every time you get behind the wheel, if you wish.

Early in your career only a couple of teams have any interest in you, but as you earn reputation points and level up, more teams (and by extension, more cars) become available to you. Your choice of team before any event is likely to be motivated by its car first and foremost, but the number of reputation points that the team is offering for completing its bonus objectives is also a consideration.

Sadly, you don’t get to see what the actual objective is when choosing, so your decisions aren’t nearly as well informed as they could be. Regardless, none of the challenges are so difficult that you’re filled with regret for choosing a particular team; most involve simply reaching a certain speed, finishing with no damage, or making it through an entire event without ever spinning or rolling your vehicle.

On top of the events that form the four seasons, Dirt Tour mode boasts a number of unlockable extras that add to its longevity considerably. For starters, there are world tours specific to each discipline; choose to race and subsequently do well in point-to-point rallies, and you unlock a rally world tour with dozens of those events.

Furthermore, you can unlock a playground of sorts in the form of London’s Battersea power station and its surrounding area. Here, not only are you free to practice gymkhana techniques, but you can also complete a number of varied challenges to earn extra reputation.

These challenges include everything from completing jumps and performing tricks in specific spots, to crashing through fences that divide the different unlockable areas and locating hidden Dirt 3 logos. Visiting Battersea makes for a welcome change of pace, and it’s also a great way to prepare for some of Dirt 3′s more unusual multiplayer offerings.

In addition to online versions of all of the conventional races, rallies, and gymkhana events, Dirt 3 features some unique vehicular versions of modes that you might already be familiar with. Transporter, for example, is a capture-the-flag game, while Outbreak is an Infection-style game of tag in which your car turns bright green when you’re hit by an infected player.

Another highlight of Dirt 3′s sizable multiplayer suite is Invasion, a game in which you score points for crashing through cutouts of alien robots but lose points for causing collateral damage when you crash through cutouts of buildings. This mode, perhaps more than any other, puts the skills that you pick up in gymkhana events to great use, because you have to be both fast and precise to beat other players to your targets.

Some of these multiplayer modes can get a little too chaotic at times (when everyone descends on the flag at the same time in a relatively confined space, for example), but it’s still a lot of fun and hugely satisfying to win or even score a single point in a closely contested session.

Split-screen multiplayer for two is also supported, and like the online play, it’s practically indistinguishable from playing solo where the game’s performance is concerned. The only noteworthy difference is that you don’t get the option to drive using the cockpit camera.

With the exception of gymkhana events and joyrides around Battersea, split-screen races with a friend in any of the available disciplines (rally, rallycross trailblazer, head 2 head, landrush) can support up to six AI drivers competing alongside you.

Advanced options, which are also available when you host unranked Jam Session games online, include allowing custom vehicle setups, forcing manual gears, and choosing between visual and full damage. Basically, whether multiplayer or solo, you can play Dirt 3 however you like; it can feel like a forgiving arcade game, a challenging simulation, or just about anything in between.

Regardless of how you play Dirt 3, there’s no denying that, like its predecessor, it looks and sounds fantastic. Despite the fact that you rarely get to stop and admire the environments, the level of detail in them is great, and the cars–while not quite up to the standards set by the best that Forza Motorsport 3 and Gran Turismo 5 have to offer–are even better.

Seeing these brightly colored vehicles get caked in mud and snow and take believable damage from impacts is a treat, and the incredible noises that their engines make never leave you in any doubt about the amount of power you have at your disposal.

Audio is impressive across the board: you get plenty of feedback from whichever road surface you’re driving on to let you know how well your tires are gripping, and the licensed soundtrack with tunes from the likes of Chromeo, Drive A, Hudson Mohawke, RJD2, and We Are Scientists is appropriately eclectic and energetic.

Dirt 3 improves and builds upon its superb predecessor at just about every opportunity. The new multiplayer modes and gymkhana events are great additions, and if you’re interested primarily in traditional racing disciplines, it has more than twice as many routes to race in more varied weather conditions and in an even greater selection of vehicles.

The option to upload replays to YouTube isn’t as exciting as it could be, given that you’re limited to 30 seconds and there’s no other way to save them, but this is a small blemish in an otherwise superb game.

Whether you’re a veteran of the Dirt series and the long-running Colin McRae Rally series that preceded it, or someone looking for a way into off-road racing, Dirt 3 is the game you should be playing.

The Good

• Beautifully dark and creepy version of Wonderland
• Smooth, graceful controls
• Unusual weapons make for fun combat
• A good length, with lots of hidden objects and areas to locate

The Bad

• Gameplay doesn’t evolve, leading to tedium
• Puzzles and other attempts to vary the pace are rarely fun
• Audiovisual glitches can distract
• The other versions include the original Alice; this one doesn’t

Rating

In Alice Madness Returns, the heroine of American McGee’s Alice has not escaped the demons she worked so hard to banish. The Wonderland of her imagination has been mangled into a dark and demonic caricature, filled with even more torturous hallucinations than she last encountered.

Alice’s mind is a dark place indeed, and in this long-awaited sequel, we discover that the real world isn’t any sunnier. Creative and creepy visuals give this action platformer a twisted and surreal vibe, drawing you into a land inhabited by fire-breathing doll babies and squirming leeches.

The action doesn’t display the same kind of creativity, unfortunately. The game recycles the same basic ideas over and again, and its failure to grow and challenge leads to occasional tedium. Nevertheless, leaping and floating through an eerie oversized dollhouse and a Japanese-inspired dreamland is a joy, and there are enough hidden secrets to make it worth inspecting Madness Returns’ grotesque nooks. Alice Madness Returns is a fun but thoroughly ordinary game that takes place in an extraordinary setting.

In American McGee’s Alice, the titular dreamer had seemingly overcome her insanity. A fire at her home had killed her parents and sister, leaving both her mind and her imagined Wonderland in shambles. She eventually triumphed over the Red Queen and her own madness, but it seems that this victory was a temporary one.

Alice is still under medical care, struggling to remember the circumstances that led to her family’s horrific end. Her psychiatrist urges her to forget her past, insisting that doing so is the only way to wellness. Yet forgetting proves a formidable task, and soon Alice finds herself once again lost in her imagination, where Wonderland lies in ruin.

To save herself, she must save Wonderland, and vice versa. But this is not the curioser and curioser world author Lewis Carroll dreamed up when he wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Rather, it is a place of nightmares, where the card guards that once protected the Red Queen are now undead monstrosities, and hobbyhorses are not playthings, but deadly weapons.

Wonderland itself is Madness Returns’ finest attribute. Each chapter explores a different visual theme, some of them impossible to describe in a few simple words. Rusted platforms float against a cloudy yellow backdrop, next to clock towers from which giant forks and teapots dangle.

Gnarled vines twist into an off-kilter heart above a giant castle whose spires lean in all directions. Alice’s clothing changes from chapter to chapter, and her flowery prints and blood-red fabrics subtly match the level art. Wonderland is not the only place you explore, however.

At the start of each chapter, you wander about an increasingly morose London. This vision of that city is more grubby and industrial than even Carroll’s contemporary Charles Dickens conjured, drained of color and inhabited by impossibly wrinkled old crones and filthy fishermen.

This world is not flawlessly rendered, however. The game pauses at bizarre times, sometimes at surprising length, to load data. Audio is an occasional issue as well: characters might talk over their own lines and are sometimes drowned out by the ambient music. At least that music is evocative, if not as excellent as the original Alice’s score. The occasional tinkling of a toy piano and the buzz of low double basses provide fine contrast to the pounding drumbeats that accompany battle.

Alice is generally a dream to control due to the effortless way you can string multiple jumps together and float gently downward. When you drift or perform midair leaps, flower petals blossom in your wake, emphasizing Alice’s grace in a graceless land.

The smoothness of motion makes bouncing from springy mushrooms and catching drafts of air a delight, and rarely is timing or landing a leap a struggle. All this is possible with the mouse and keyboard, but the oversensitive mouselook will have you reaching for a controller, which offers the best experience.

Either way, you get caught up in freewheeling around this unusual place for a while, scanning for secrets and admiring the view. You can shrink yourself to minute size and enter keyholes, where you might find lost memories, Madness Returns’ equivalent of audio logs.

You come across floating pig snouts and can shoot them full of pepper from your pepper grinder to uncover new pathways. Hidden treasures are scattered all over, and hearing the telltale snort from a nearby snout elicits a pleasant Pavlovian response: you hear the oink and immediately move into scouting mode.

Every so often, Madness Returns’ level layouts displays a glimmer of creativity, such as when playing cards flip and slide into view, extending your path. However, reaching your destination is a usually predictable affair. You spend a lot of time jumping onto floating surfaces and into gusts of air so that you can flip a switch that creates another set of surfaces and gusts.

Sometimes you need to drop bombs to weigh down pressure plates, shrink to miniscule size to bring invisible platforms into view, or run under a spiked ceiling threatening to slam down on you. But Alice: Madness Returns has a limited bag of tricks, and so you frequently perform the same actions in the same context. Monotony too often results, particularly when your objectives are simple fetch quests.

(Some residents of Wonderland are unwilling to divulge information unless you do them petty favors.) Levels have no sense of momentum: were it not for the unique environments, you could replace one sequence with any other and not even notice, and navigation is barely more challenging in the penultimate chapter than it is in the first .

Luckily, combat freshens things up, due in part to the horrific enemies you face. Hideous monsters dripping with black ooze fling projectiles from above, and goblins wielding dinnerware threaten to stab you. Each enemy requires a slightly different technique to bring down, and Alice is fortunate enough to have the right tools for the job.

First up is the returning vorpal blade, Madness Returns’ version of a light attack. The hobbyhorse does strong attack duty, while the pepper grinder is your basic ranged assault weapon. Then there’s the teapot, which you can think of as a grenade launcher, as well as your parasol, which you use to block incoming attacks.

Once you get accustomed to the patterns and weaknesses, the vile fiends aren’t difficult to fell. But while fights aren’t often challenging, facing multiple enemy types at once is still fun, because you must use your entire arsenal in a single battle. Many battles are too easy to feel like anything but filler, and the sticky target lock can push the camera into awkward positions. But the sound of porcelain shattering when you slam your hobbyhorse into a wretched freak crusted with dolls’ heads is worthwhile compensation.

Alice: Madness Returns occasionally tries to enhance the proceedings by wandering outside its comfort zone. You slide down ramps, solve some puzzles on a chessboard, jump about in a two-dimensional version of Wonderland, and so forth. The attempts to vary the pace are admirable, but in most cases, the execution is less than ideal.

For instance, there are sequences in which you take control of a rolling doll’s head and navigate in 2D and 3D alike. It’s a neat idea, but the too-close camera and some awkward transitions in and out of third-person and side views frustrate.

Running from a gigantic executioner should have led to pulse-pounding chases, but these sequences have you running toward the camera. It takes a special game to make it fun to run toward the unknown, and Alice is not such a game. An underwater shoot-em-up, a musical minigame–you might welcome the change of tempo at first, only to discover that these sections whistle a boring tune.

It’s disappointing that while the console versions include a code to download a port of the original Alice, the PC release does not include a copy of the game that introduced players to this distorted world. Madness Returns is not a lesser value without the inclusion of the original, however.

It’s fun to move through Wonderland as if carried by a summer breeze, bringing a touch of beauty to its contorted imagery. It’s a shame that the game never expands its fundamentals. Looking back on time spent with Alice Madness Returns is like remembering a vacation from your childhood: you remember where you went, but not what you did.

Yet Alice’s broken psyche is so tortured, her waking nightmare so vivid, that you’re tempted to push forward to see what deliciously morbid sights yet await. Playing Alice Madness Returns isn’t as exciting as looking at it, but you’ll still enjoy getting lost in this twisted fantasy adventure.

The Good

• Easy to set up for quick sessions
• Several different competitive modes
• Challenge levels teach you how to take advantage of advanced mechanics
• Great fun in multiplayer with friends

The Bad

• Deck construction is extremely limited
• Dull campaign mode
• Bare bones presentation

Rating

Magic The Gathering Duels of The Planeswalkers 2012 offers fast, fun games of Magic The Gathering, and the PC edition is the best, thanks to its mouse-driven control scheme. It’s hard to believe that Magic The Gathering is almost 20 years old.

The revolutionary collectible card game has had a massive influence on games, both tabletop and electronic alike, and it continues to drive at the forefront of an industry it established. For all of its popularity, however, it’s not an easy experience to translate into video game form.

While Magic The Gathering Duels of The Planeswalkers 2012 doesn’t offer all of the varied nuances and experiences that make the physical version of Magic so compelling, it does a serviceable job of translating the card game into a quick, easy-to-play format that casual players and veterans alike can enjoy–provided they can get past some of its caveats.

The rules of Magic The Gathering involve players drawing magic power from varied sources, casting environment-altering spells, summoning creatures and fighters big and small, conjuring powerful magical artifacts, and using them to beat the crap out of each other.

There’s far more nuance than that, of course; there are several different “colors” of spells with varied strengths and weaknesses, as well as numerous types of monsters and items with distinct traits and abilities. Magic is a strategic and competitive game that requires a great deal of forethought and reaction.

Magic The Gathering Duels of The Planeswalkers 2012 simplifies things somewhat from the original card game by making the complex structure of Magic more palatable to newcomers and casual players. Rather than carefully choosing and constructing your deck of tricks card by card, you play one of several different preconstructed decks with distinct play styles, advantages, and drawbacks.

As you play through the various single-player modes, you unlock new decks to use, as well as earn additional cards to augment each deck. Play itself is also streamlined and simplified, as Magic The Gathering Duels of The Planeswalkers 2012 consolidates certain beginning and end phases of turns in the regular game into two “main” phases with a combat phase in between.

While hardcore Magic players might balk at the changes–the inability to create a custom deck from scratch, in particular, will certainly turn off a few veterans–they help make the game a lot easier to dive into for a general audience.

There are numerous play modes available in Magic The Gathering Duels of The Planeswalkers 2012. In Campaign mode you battle computer opponents, earning new decks and additional cards as you progress. In between matches are also optional, clever puzzle challenges that set up an established game situation–usually disadvantageous to you–that ask you to make smart use of the game rules and card abilities to turn it around.

Going through the standard Campaign mode will also unlock Archenemy mode, which is new to the 2012 edition of the game. In this mode, you and two computer-controlled players take on a single, highly powered opponent who can bend certain rules and play powerful, environment-altering “scheme” cards each turn.

There’s also Revenge mode, where the opponents you beat come back with bigger, more powerful decks. Unlike many other games in the card battle genre, there’s no overarching story or any sort of dialogue with characters going on during the campaign; you just beat one guy and move on to the next. It’s a bit of a disappointment because it would have been nice to interact, even superficially, with the world of Magic The Gathering’s interesting characters and settings.

If you don’t feel like trudging through the campaign, there is a quick-play mode that will let you set up a game against up to four computer opponents in a standard winner-takes-all competition. The variant modes are more interesting, however; besides Archenemy, there’s also Two-Headed Giant, a two-versus-two team competition where you and a computer-controlled buddy (or a local player) combine forces and share a life pool while taking on an opposing two-player team.

Competitive play against other human opponents is the biggest draw, however, and it’s done quite well. You can play either standard or ranked matches against friends or random players in any of the available game variants (though Archenemy, due to its nature, is unavailable for ranked play).

Getting a group of friends together to play good-natured matches against each other or collaborate in one of the team play modes is tons of fun, but going up against random opponents is still something of a crapshoot. A common complaint in the last iteration was that players would disconnect if they started to lose a ranked match.

“Cord pulling” out of a match in Magic The Gathering Duels of The Planeswalkers 2012 is now counted as a loss toward a player who disconnects, but there are still other ways to grief an opponent, including stalling for as much time as possible. Online bugs also seemed to be present in rare cases, as we encountered a match where the game simply stalled forever as a player tried to activate a card ability, forcing us to concede.

While Magic The Gathering Duels of The Planeswalkers 2012 can be a lot of fun, much of the enjoyment you potentially derive from the game comes from finding Magic The Gathering interesting to play. The graphics are merely adequate (don’t expect any cool animations of the monsters you summon, for example) and the sound effects are nondescript and inoffensive.

The major advantage of the PC version over its console counterparts, however, is its easy-to-use, mouse-driven controls. With a simple move of the mouse and a click, you can play cards, pause the game to plan a counterattack, check the illustrations and text of cards, and get detailed information on game terminology. While these controls improve the interface substantially, they don’t entirely make up for the rather plain presentation.

As it stands, Magic The Gathering Duels of The Planeswalkers 2012 provides a way to enjoy a simple game of Magic The Gathering and its limited customization options, serious control issues, and lack of extra flair keep it from being as interesting an experience as it could be, but you can still have a good time by getting a bunch of online or offline buddies together for games because at $10, it’s certainly more affordable than going to your local card shop and buying cases of cards.

The Good

• Core shooting action is satisfying
• Complementary powers make co-op a blast
• F***ing Run is an unusual and exciting multiplayer mode

The Bad

• Unimpressive visuals
• Story lacks scares or surprises

Rating

Nothing is more terrifying than the unknown but unfortunately, F.E.A.R. 3 doesn’t seem to grasp this, and it lays bare all the mysteries of this series of paranormal shooters, moving the story forward but stripping away its power to get inside your head and keep you up at night.

But while F.E.A.R. 3 may disappoint as a horror game, it satisfies as a shooter. The campaign is good fun in single-player and especially enjoyable when played cooperatively with a friend. And the game’s multiplayer modes present some thrills for those willing to work with others to survive.

F.E.A.R. 3 follows hot on the heels of F.E.A.R. 2′s startling conclusion, but returns us to the protagonist of the original F.E.A.R., the genetically designed supersoldier known as Point Man. The events at the end of F.E.A.R. 2 have triggered a paranormal catastrophe of biblical proportions in the city of Fairport, and Point Man is eager to make his way there and help out a former squadmate caught up in the chaos. Point Man’s not alone, though.

His homicidal brother, Paxton Fettel, is along for the ride. Point Man may have put a bullet in his brother’s brain in F.E.A.R., but Fettel isn’t about to let a little thing like being dead keep him down. The brothers form an uneasy alliance, but despite the tension between them, the story progresses predictably.

There’s a pleasant sense of closure that goes with seeing the brothers confront the painful reality of their shared past, but there aren’t any surprises or scares that will stay with you once the story has run its course. The visuals also won’t work their way into your subconscious. F.E.A.R. 3′s graphics are plain and lag behind current standards.

As a result, the creepy living rooms, city streets, and food courts you fight your way through aren’t quite as creepy as they should be; the environments lack the convincing level of detail to fully pull you in. The sounds are more effective; the loud blasts of gunfire heighten the intensity of firefights, and the ethereal wails that accompany ghostly visions may unsettle you a bit, even if the sight of them doesn’t.

Point Man and Paxton Fettel are both playable, but when tackling the campaign alone, you must first play each stage as Point Man to unlock the option to play it as Fettel. Regardless of which character you’re playing as, F.E.A.R. 3 is, at its core, a corridor shooter that shuttles you from one small area to another and sees you constantly beset by groups of enemies.

Although the core action doesn’t evolve much over the course of the game, the firefights remain exciting. The assortment of pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, and other weapons you can employ feel powerful, and the smooth controls make aiming and shooting a pleasure. And your melee attacks, which include a sliding kick that can send enemies flying like rag dolls, make it fun to sometimes forgo the use of guns and charge your enemies.

Most of your time is spent fighting soldiers in the private army of the evil Armacham corporation, and these enemies keep you on your toes by flanking your position, though they also occasionally do dumb things like get stuck while coming down stairs.

All of the areas in which shoot-outs take place provide ample opportunities for cover, but a lot of cover is destructible, and it’s a thrill to frantically dash from one position to another as your cover is blown to smithereens. F.E.A.R. 3 prevents the shoot-outs from growing tiresome by providing atmospheric periods between firefights.

For instance, a few quiet minutes spent making your way through a defiled superstore build up the tension before the bullets start flying. And although Point Man and Paxton are figurative killing machines, the occasional opportunity to take control of a literal killing machine and make things very unpleasant for your adversaries is a lot of fun.

At a few points during the campaign, you can commandeer two types of armored power suits. These powerful, lumbering contraptions make the assaults of Armacham soldiers laughable, and shooting helicopters out of the sky from inside one of these machines is a delicious taste of destructive power.

As Point Man, you have an edge in battle courtesy of your unnaturally fast reflexes. These let you trigger slow motion for brief periods, making it much easier to line up that perfect headshot or deal with an overwhelming number of assailants.

There’s nothing novel about the ability to go into slow motion in shooters anymore, but it’s still cool to see the air vibrate in the wake of a speeding bullet that whizzes past your head or to watch as what’s left of an enemy explodes in a bloody mess. Paxton lacks his brother’s heightened reflexes but makes up for it with other talents.

As a specter, he can’t pick up guns (though he’s still vulnerable to bullets), but he can suspend enemies helplessly in the air and fire deadly blasts of energy from his hand. He can also take possession of soldiers even from significant distances, and it’s liberating to zap into the body of an enemy from across the room.

A meter drains while you inhabit a body, and if it runs out, you’re returned to spectral form. But enemies you kill leave behind psychic energy that you can use to refill your meter and prolong your possession time, encouraging you to take risks and not hide behind cover for too long.

Paxton’s abilities are enjoyable to use in single-player, but it’s when you tackle the campaign cooperatively that they really shine. The player controlling Paxton can suspend enemies in the air while Point Man pumps bullets into them.

Paxton can zoom into the body of a distant enemy to flank a group of foes, and then Point Man can trigger slow motion and attack from the front. The constant opportunity to make a coordinated use of the brothers’ complementary powers makes working with a partner a joy and distinguishes this game’s cooperative play from that of many shooters in which all players have the same abilities.

F.E.A.R. 3 also has four multiplayer modes for up to four players. Soul King is a competitive mode in which players start in specter form. You take possession of soldiers and collect souls from fallen enemies, and the player with the most souls is declared the victor when time runs out.

Players lose half their collected souls when killed, so scores can change suddenly even in the final seconds, which means that even those with a decent lead over their competitors shouldn’t get too comfortable. In Soul Survivor, one player is corrupted into a specter at the beginning of the match, and that player sets out to corrupt the others, while the human players work together to survive. Both of these modes offer some quick thrills but aren’t likely to keep you coming back for long.

In Contractions, you and your fellow players work together to survive against wave after wave of increasingly powerful enemies. Each map has a stronghold in the center, and between waves, players can either repair damaged barricades on the structure or venture out into the surrounding area to grab crates and return them to the base, providing weapons and ammo for future waves.

The necessity of rebuilding and stocking up during the brief time between waves encourages teams to communicate well and devise a strategy for survival, and as the situation grows increasingly dire in later waves, this mode becomes more and more suspenseful. The most unusual of all the multiplayer modes is F***ing Run, in which you must hurry through areas while enemies attack you and a towering wall of death pursues you from behind.

The wall moves quickly, leaving you no time to dillydally, and if any one player comes in contact with the wall, the mode comes to an end for all players. As the wall gets closer, the screen goes gray and the controller vibrates wildly, and because the stakes are so high, the prospect of being swallowed up by the wall is one of the most pulse-pounding positions F.E.A.R. 3 places you in.

In the end, F.E.A.R. 3′s campaign doesn’t quite excel. There are few surprises or standout moments, and those who remember the relentlessly creepy atmosphere and edge-of-your-seat scares of the original F.E.A.R. may lament the fact that this game feels like a military shooter with light horror elements.

But although F.E.A.R. 3 won’t terrify you or leave you gasping for more, it’s a solid shooter that satisfies from start to finish.

The Good

• Outstanding amount of depth
• Loads of replay value
• Features solo and multiplayer campaign and skirmish modes

The Bad

• Can be confusing in the beginning, due to the absence of hands-on tutorials
• Dated graphics and repetitive audio
• AI is nonsensical at times

Rating

Storm Frontline Nation is smack-dab in the middle. Colossai Studios’ turn-based strategy game occupies the neutral zone between encyclopedic franchises such as Hearts of Iron and mainstream fare such as the Civilization series.

But this captivating saga about an all-out global war in the near future is anything but a middling effort. A tremendous amount of depth and replay value are the big positives here, along with aggressive enemy artificial intelligence that turns every campaign into a war for survival.

Anyone who has experience with voluminous games of grand historical strategy, such as Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, and Victoria, will immediately know what Storm has in store for you. The main difference here is the time frame. Where those games deal with history, Storm Frontline Nation deals with the very near future.

It is January of 2012, immediately following a war that has caused oil exports from the Middle East to be virtually shut down. As a result, economies have collapsed, and big players in the USA, UK, France, Russia, and Germany are fighting over the scraps, namely oil resources in places like the North Sea and North Africa.

The story campaign takes place in Europe and North Africa, where you take control of one of the big five nations noted above and deal with hundreds of conquerable provinces and cities. Victory conditions involve everything from building up an army, to sending a spy to steal research from an enemy capital, to simply building facilities like naval bases.

You can also forgo the story and go for the open campaign. This option features some 45 nations, including all of the smaller nations in the region, such as Spain, Egypt, Greece, Austria, Slovenia, and so forth. You get a ton of replay value, because every country comes with a unique range of pluses and minuses.

Running Greece, for instance, is a whole lot different from running the US, so moving down requires big changes in how you conduct yourself with neighbors. Situations where you might want to throw your weight around tend not to work out so well if you have only a tiny military and not a whole lot of cash at your disposal.

Some of the playable countries seem ridiculous, though. Taking over countries like Montenegro, Morocco, and Estonia is nearly pointless, because they just don’t have enough power or territory (although having just two territories to look after sure does cut down on the management duties) to provide an interesting game.

Choose one of them, and you’re generally stuck either trying to survive onslaughts from bigger enemies or staving off boredom while watching the big guys go at it for black gold.

In campaigns, you play as the leader of an entire nation in a far-reaching game of geopolitical conquest. On the main map screen, you guide the fortunes of your country through turns that last a month of real time. This is where everything begins.

Here you declare war on the Swedes, produce conventional units like tanks and planes, sneakily order up weapons of mass destruction like nukes and biological weapons, stage covert ops like assassinations, ink treaties with those nice guys in Russia, advance research levels to gain nifty new weapons, and so forth.

While the sheer number of things to do is impressive, most of the options are somewhat scaled back from those in other grand strategy games. There is no massive, varied cultural tech tree as in the Civilization games, for instance. All of the tech levels earned generally just open up bigger and better ways to kill enemies, like suitcase nukes and bioweapons such as anthrax and smallpox.

The options stop well short of kitchen-sink territory. At the same time, this doesn’t quite make Storm more manageable than many of its genre predecessors, largely due to a terrible tutorial system of blurry videos that walk you through the interface and some strategic and tactical features.

Fully interactive tutorials would have made a big difference. Visual quality is dark and murky as well, making it hard to tell units apart at times. Audio is equally unhelpful, including a musical score that sounds like something heard over the closing credits of a straight-to-DVD action flick, and repetitive unit acknowledgements that consist of nothing but the unit name, often mispronounced.

Still, at least the interface is intuitive for the most part. You have to fiddle around at times (uh, how do you build a nuclear research facility again?), although generally you can work things out in no more than a few minutes of experimentation. Story mode also provides many missions that serve as guideposts pushing you in the right direction when it comes to building your navy for eventual North Sea attacks or getting a spy over to the UK to see what it’s up to, for example.

There isn’t a whole lot of time to hang out micromanaging anyhow, so it’s a good thing you can find your way around in short order. Nations are extremely aggressive. Multiple wars seem to always kick off by February 2012, the second turn of the game.

This keeps you on your toes and lets you know that you can’t sit back and play statesman. It gives the game sort of a Risk vibe. But at the same time, it’s hard to make sense of what’s happening. There are a lot of head-scratchers here. Slovenia annihilates Hungary for reasons unknown. Ukraine declares war on the Slovak Republic. Greece attacks everybody.

The US invades Tunisia. Lithuania signs a biological nonproliferation treaty. Campaigns seem to always turn into massive free-for-all brawls where you never know who is going to align with whom. There are always a good dozen or two treaties on the go, featuring defensive alliances between odd bedfellows like the US and Montenegro or Egypt and Russia.

It’s all cool and chaotic, in that you never know what’s going to happen next. It’s also pretty much senseless. So if you’re looking for a game to mirror what you read in Foreign Affairs every month, keep looking.

When the bullets start flying, the action shifts to a turn-based combat screen where nations handle diplomacy the old-fashioned way. You guide units into battle on hex-based grids overlaying photo-realistic maps with enough details regarding terrain, weather, supply lines, and the like to satiate all but the most demanding wargamer.

Battles are fairly small-scale, with just a handful of units per side in the field at any given moment. Turns take place simultaneously, not consecutively. So lining up enemy infantry for a bombing run might be foiled by the bad guys simply moving out of the way.

Enemy AI is quite astute, with your opposition knowing how to defend the three control points per map that you need to seize to declare victory. They often grab high ground, for instance. You can skip battles and have the computer resolve them automatically, but it’s not a good idea since the scraps generally turn out poorly for you.

In addition to the campaigns, you can fire up one-off customizable skirmishes. These scraps aren’t as interesting on their lonesome without the arching national plots linking everything together, although the tactical depth can carry you through battles for a time.

The one-offs can offer a lot if you fancy yourself more of a general than a prime minister. Multiplayer options are available for both game types, as well. All of the multiplayer is handled through direct IP links and local LANs, however, which makes it awfully tough to line up opponents.

Although Storm Frontline Nation does not fit into an easily defined category for those looking to classify the game as either a hardcore geopolitical sim or a lightweight, board-game-style effort, this is still a good game. The solid design, smart AI, and frenetic combat can keep you fighting and refighting World War III for many hours.

The audio and visual presentation is dated, and the lack of a good hands-on tutorial that steps you through the many intricacies of the interface and rules is unfortunate. But even with these drawbacks, Storm Frontline Nation is a game that tests your tactical abilities and has so many options when it comes to choosing nations to play that the replay value is nearly limitless.

The Good

• Rich interplay of movable elements and natural forces
• Attractive environmental design
• Surprisingly competition-friendly Challenge mode

The Bad

• Problematic AI pathfinding
• Controls not suited for fine manipulation
• Not optimized for the PC

Rating

From Dust provides a rich world full of engaging challenges, though there are some frustrations even a god must suffer. What if you had the powers of a god? The earth would shift at your whim and the seas would tremble at your touch. You could raise mountains, divert rivers, and transform dry deserts into lush forests. From Dust grants you these powers and more, and it’s satisfying to wield them as you try to safely usher a small tribe of humans through a perilous world.

Yet, for all your world-molding abilities, you are not omnipotent. Like the villagers you shelter, you must contend with the inexorable power of nature. From the subtle influence of gravity and erosion to the devastating forces of volcanoes and tsunamis, nature compels you to adapt to survive.

This task can get difficult, especially when imperfect controls, finicky pathfinding, and unforeseeable disasters conspire against you. Joining these in-game problems are a number of PC-specific shortcomings, including limited visual options and an Internet connectivity requirement. Despite these unwelcome elements, the challenge of being a lesser god is an engaging one, and From Dust makes it even more enticing with appealing visuals and evocative music.

Before you begin to bend nature to your will, you must first secure an Internet connection. This is not only necessary to download the game from Steam, but also required each and every time you play the game. From Dust syncs with Ubisoft’s uPlay service and won’t launch if you can’t connect.

Once you are connected, it’s best to let the game load to the menu screen before trying to use any in-game Steam functions because any activity may cause the game to freeze or prevent the menu from loading properly. Alt-tabbing out of the game also caused a visual glitch when we resumed playing.

And speaking of visuals, don’t expect a full suite of options to help you maximize performance; screen resolution, display mode, refresh rate, and adapter version are all you get. These issues don’t spoil the experience, but they do make it feel like you aren’t playing the best version. The PC version does boast sharper visuals than its Xbox 360 counterpart, however, and it allows multiple save files to better accommodate multiple users.

You slither around the world of From Dust as a small wormlike cursor called the Breath. Your basic ability lets you gather substances into a hovering ball, move them wherever you please, and then release them. You begin with simple applications of your skill, like gathering soil and building a land bridge across shallow water or sucking up water and dousing a fire. The Breath acts as a holding tank, but once you release a substance, it conforms to the laws of nature.

Water flows, soil settles, and lava hardens into implacable rock. In addition to exhibiting these natural tendencies, the three substances interact with each other in important ways. Flowing water can wash away soil, and lava evaporates water even as the water cools it more quickly. Understanding these elements and the underlying rules of the physical world is crucial to success in From Dust, and Story mode introduces them to you at a manageable pace.

Watching your early attempts to manipulate the landscape get balanced out by natural order is not only instructive, but also visually pleasing. Water sluices down hillsides, resisting your control, and deposited soil spreads out, diminishing your earthen works. Lava is a particular highlight.

It oozes and flows, changing density and temperature, and watching its mottled glow cool into shiny rock is a delight. These natural processes are accompanied by rich sound effects that punctuate your every action. Grinding and sucking noises give your substance-gathering efforts some weight, while an outburst of birds cawing and flapping signals that disaster is imminent.

If you toggle your view in closer to the action, you can hear fire crackling, villagers singing, and the creaking, burbling flow of lava. The sights and sounds make the world of From Dust look lively, and the interplay between substances and natural laws make it feel alive.

While there is joy in simply wielding your powers and experiencing the effects, your goal is to safely usher a tribe of people through each level. In Story mode, you must guide them to all of the tall ivory totems in each level so they can build villages and then send them through a stone passageway to complete the level.

Making the villages accessible and keeping them safe are your two primary endeavors. Sometimes this can be accomplished simply by manipulating substances, but more often than not, you need more than just your basic abilities to ensure safe passage. Many totems, once settled, grant you temporary powers that are crucial to success.

Being able to evaporate water or put out fire can save your villages from annihilation, while jellifying water enables you to carve out a biblical seabed passage for your people. As it expands your abilities, From Dust also makes things more challenging, ensuring that you have to make good use of your full repertoire.

In addition to the power of breath, there are a few other helpful elements. Stones grant villages the ability to repel fire, lava, and water, and sending a villager to retrieve this knowledge from a stone is often your best hope for survival, especially when tsunamis roll in and volcanoes erupt.

Unfortunately, this is also where you can run into problems with From Dust’s pathfinding logic. You can only set destinations for the humans; it’s up to them to get there. Though they are generally good at finding any bridges you have built, they are sometimes stymied by a puddle of water or a small hitch in the terrain. These obstacles can sometimes be tough to identify, especially given the (admittedly realistic) translucence of water.

Traveling villagers do recalculate routes in an effort to take the quickest path, and though they are often successful, they also take some baffling walkabouts. Furthermore, because the game automatically determines a knowledge bearer’s return path, you might watch him run right by a village that is threatened by lava to first deliver the protective knowledge to another, safer village.

Depending on your current situation, these pathfinding problems might merely irk you, or they might derail your plans with disastrous consequences. It’s one thing to deal with the capriciousness of nature; it’s another to suffer from the flaws of man.

Another natural occurrence you must take into account is foliage. Each village spawns a small circle of soil and vegetation, and this vegetation automatically spreads to all nearby dirt-covered land, providing there is some water nearby.

If it spreads far enough, you unlock new challenge levels and descriptions of in-game phenomena. However, if any part of your forest comes in contact with lava, it catches on fire and doesn’t stop burning until you extinguish the fire or it consumes all its fuel (and any villages in its way).

Fire can also be started by fire trees, one of a few special plants that can help or hinder you. The tree of water releases a stored torrent that can extinguish fires or drown villages, while the explosive tree provides your only tool for manipulating rock.

Gaining the ability to pick up and replant these trees opens up new strategic possibilities, but it isn’t always easy to position your cursor directly beneath them, especially when the explosive trees have done their thing (they grow back if replanted).

There are three ways to maneuver the Breath around the world, each with its own shortcomings. If you use the mouse, you lead the Breath along like a snake on a leash. When you stay in the central area of the screen, the camera remains static and you can move the Breath with precision; when you move toward the edge of the screen, the camera begins to move and you lose precision control.

You can also use the WASD keys to move the Breath and the camera as one, but the scroll speed makes this better suited for moving large distances than manipulating substances. A combination of the two works relatively well, though you’ll likely feel that there must have been a more elegant solution.

You can also use the Xbox 360 controller, but the controls are a bit touchy, and it can be quite difficult to make fine movements. This isn’t always an impediment to success, but it does cause problems when you need to micro-adjust a path that the AI doesn’t like or remove a pesky puddle so your villagers will agree to travel to a totem.

Getting to know the humans’ movement patterns can help mitigate the pathfinding and fine-control issues, but some levels hit you with environmental upheaval that you simply can’t anticipate. There is usually a warning when a tsunami will hit, but what about the spring you unearth that drowns your village? Or the volcano that suddenly claims a hillside and sets off a vicious wildfire?

Adapting to these unforeseen circumstances is sometimes frustrating, but it also contributes to the unpredictability that makes From Dust so engaging. Consequences you didn’t expect or slow changes to the landscape that turn into imminent dangers force you to adapt quickly and find creative solutions.

Though the pacing is uneven, offering too many static levels and a few drastic difficulty spikes, From Dust’s Story mode does a great job of teaching you how to mold the world and testing your prowess and adaptability.

Challenge mode provides a fun proving ground for those skills. It consists of 30 levels that last a few minutes at most and set specific victory conditions. The purpose-built maps offer a wider variety of unique puzzles than appear in Story mode, though the quality is a bit uneven.

Some are mere physics showcases in which the solution is exceedingly simple; some are brutal races against the clock that demand precise manipulation. The ones that require you to think beyond your first instincts and really flex your understanding of the From Dust world are the best, though each offers at least the small pleasure of seeing what the developers have concocted.

Making your way through all 30 is indeed a challenge (and first you must unlock them all in Story mode), and online leaderboards that track your times provide surprisingly effective fuel for competition.

You may have solved a challenge one way only to find out that other players completed it with drastically better times, indicating that there is more to the level than you might have guessed. The key here is that you earn bonus time for completing your actions early and letting events run their course, so finesse and simplicity are paramount to scoring well.

Challenge mode provides a great complement to Story mode, and together they make for a satisfying amount of content. From Dust doesn’t offer the heady feeling of omnipotence, but it’s a lot of fun to have to contend with the greater forces of nature as you try to exert your influence over this raw, lovely world.

The churning sea, the flowing lava, and the burgeoning forests create a vivid sense of life that is amplified by the light percussion, ambient music, and lively animal vocalizations. Though this PC port suffered some bumps in the transition, and the gameplay can still be uneven and finicky at times, it’s definitely worth taking up the manipulator’s mantle in From Dust.

The Good

• Fleshes out government operations with ministerial appointments
• Personalized interactions with faction leaders and foreign powers
• Expands the economy to include imports, as well as exports
• Great sense of humor

The Bad

• Very similar to Tropico 3
• Missions rely on and repeat the same handful of general objectives

Rating

Tropico 4 is a bit like Fidel Castro. Although similarities between the two aren’t so great that the CIA will be sending the developers at Haemimont Games a box of exploding cigars anytime soon, the two share the same philosophies about change.

Just as the Cuban dictator seemed to spend his entire 50 years in power wearing green fatigues, an army cap, and mirrored sunglasses, the latest addition to the series of banana republic simulations comes dressed in nearly the exact same getup as its predecessor. Tropico 4 is another likeable and engaging take on Cold War city building in the tropics, but it looks, feels, and plays much the same as 2009′s Tropico 3. El Presidente is resting on his laurels this time around.

First impressions are not good. Series veterans loading the game up for the first time can’t help but be shocked at how little has been added in the way of new features. If anything, Tropico 4 seems stripped down in comparison to its predecessor, at least at first.

The opening cinematic is a dull balloon ride over an island instead of the military assault previously featured, and your first mission is noteworthy right away, with the omission of goofball DJ Juanito. It’s hard to figure out why this first-rate bootlicker was removed from the game because his nonstop (if repetitive) quips gave Tropico 3 a lot of its personality.

The music is still a peppy mix of Tito Puente-ish Latin rhythms, and the visuals are a slightly upgraded yet cheerful splash of Caribbean color that make even run-down shacks and tenements seem somehow appealing. Nevertheless, the game seems a tad lifeless without Juanito chirping propaganda in the background.

New announcers have been added, along with comments from members of citizen factions, but the script is so bland that you only wake up to take notice of what’s being said when somebody utters a hot-button word like “rebels.”

Gameplay has been structured along second-verse, same-as-the-first lines. The structure mirrors that of Tropico 3 very closely. As before, the game is solo only, with a 20-scenario campaign where you play itinerant dictator El Presidente, as well as a sandbox mode.

One-off challenges made by users are available through an in-game browser as in the last game. Support has been added for Facebook and Twitter updates, so you can brag about your banana farms or something, but that’s as close as you’re going to get to true multiplayer action. Still, the missions are lengthy and feature loads of layered objectives.

So there is a lot of content here, even if the continuing lack of more conventional multiplayer might turn some people off. No matter how you play, you have total control of a series of islands with different features, resources, and weaknesses like local volcanoes and earthquake fault lines (natural disasters have been dialled up in the new game to be an ever-present menace). You can play as an absolute tyrant, ordering assassination, stuffing people into prisons, and rigging elections.

Or you can be a benevolent strongman who plays fair at election time and promotes freedom with TV stations and uncensored newspapers.

The setting has been shifted from a metropolis to a cartoon Cold War dictatorship. Building a happy, healthy island that doesn’t revolt requires feeding people, employing people, entertaining people, and preaching to people. So you continue to build farms, health clinics, factories, bars, cinemas, cathedrals, power plants, and so forth all to keep your people from sticking your head on a pike.

Politics remain a huge dimension of the game and have even been bumped up in importance this time with the addition of a cabinet. You appoint islanders or bring in foreign experts to serve as ministers of portfolios like the interior, foreign affairs, and the military.

If you don’t have these experts in place, you cannot issue policy edicts. Even though this is an interesting idea, not enough is done with it. This added layer of management merely forces you to spend money on constructing a ministry building and then hiring people before you can click on edicts, which are largely the same as in Tropico 3.

Factions play a bigger role than before. Instead of the anonymous rabble-rousing capitalists, commies, environmentalists, nationalists, and the like from the last game, Tropico 4 assigns each group a leader with specific demands.

So instead of just looking at the almanac to see that the tree huggers aren’t thrilled about all of your clear-cut logging operations, you now get the likes of Sunny Flowers barking in your face about stopping logging and building a wind turbine. If you do what these goons ask, you earn respect and other bonuses.

If you ignore them, their happiness drops. Foreign powers get into the act, too. While the US and the USSR remain the only two superpowers with the power to topple you or hand out aid, you’re forced to deal with the EU, China, and an anonymous Middle Eastern Arab country.

These other nations act just like the factions. Kooky stereotypes like a foppish Brit, a US senator who looks like Tricky Dick, and an Arab who’s the spitting image of Yasser Arafat regularly pop up onscreen with demands for cash, exports, policy changes, buildings, and so forth.

This new system both personalizes the game and brings missions to the forefront. Now, you know what you’re supposed to be doing at all times. In a way, the game kind of takes you by the hand because the factions, nations, and even foreign businessmen you occasionally partner up with give you so much direction.

This comes with pluses and minuses. While these nudges make the game easier to play–and a real treat for city-building newbies–they also make the missions seem a little more linear than you’d expect in this genre. One word of warning, too: All of these characters are played very broadly.

Those easily offended should probably close their eyes when the buck-toothed Asian guy appears. Still, it’s hypocritical to take offense at a game like this, which is actually very dark when you stop to think about what you’re doing. If your hackles are raised at things like racial stereotypes out of old Bugs Bunny cartoons, you probably shouldn’t be playing a game that lets you portray monsters like Papa Doc Duvalier.

Economics have been expanded as well. Instead of just exporting goods to the docks and over the horizon, you can now import them. All of the items in the game, from raw goods to finished factory products, can be viewed in a new section of the almanac. Just a few clicks there allow you to open yourself up for business.

This might be the most successful new tweak in Tropico 4, although even it doesn’t alter things much. The main change that it introduces is the ability to run your islands like low-wage sweatshops. Instead of producing and gathering raw goods, like wood or iron on your islands, you can now import the stuff and turn it into pricey finished goods like jewelry, furniture, or even weapons. In an odd way, this is the creepiest aspect of the entire game because even assassinating foes isn’t quite as icky as exploiting poor people to make cheap goods for spoiled Westerners.

Unfortunately, none of these additions really alter how you play the game. Missions still roll out the same way, with you building the same old of farms, clinics, churches, schools, tenements, and police stations, often in the same order. A handful of new buildings, like an expanded range of tourism attractions that include aqua parks, offer a bit of variety, but they make so little impact that you find yourself constantly asking, “Hey, wasn’t that in the last game?” Repetition is a real problem.

As compelling as the game can be at times, with such vibrant islands, a great sense of humor, and easy-to-master mechanics, you fall into a rut and find yourself repeatedly building the same islands. Many missions run well over two hours in length, too, forcing you to sit there and watch as counters run up to reach winning objectives like set numbers of exported goods or online followers.

This can get very frustrating because you can often see that you’re going to win a good 30 or 40 minutes before the goals are completely fulfilled.

Tropico 4 has gotten broader but not deeper. While the tweaks to the economy, government, and mission assignments make it a better game than its predecessor, you go over the same old ground too often. Still, these changes make for a marginally better game, and newcomers to city building should find the game very easy to get into, thanks to the mission structure and constant advice.

But, most of these improvements would have served a stand-alone expansion or an add-on pack much better than a full sequel. Tropico 4 is a likeable and engaging sequel that expands on its predecessor but doesn’t offer much new depth.

The Good

• Mostly authentic look at infantry combat in WWII
• Extremely challenging, due to realistic modeling of damage and cover
• Atmospheric, well-designed maps

The Bad

• Single-player campaigns afflicted with terrible AI
• Has a very steep learning curve for new players

Rating

Getting killed in Red Orchestra 2 Heroes of Stalingrad is not like the usual death in a multiplayer first-person shooter. Most games in this genre see you dying heroically with the bodies of enemies all around you. Here, death comes very quietly.

Typically, you die without a clue that anything is wrong, taking a single bullet in the head fired by an unseen enemy. This is both the appeal and the frustration developer TripWire Interactive’s shooter sequel, as the World War II combat here is so realistic that you have to approach every battle like a real infantryman or you risk dying the quick and brutal death of a real infantryman.

A few features have been added to the gameplay to make things a bit easier on raw recruits–most notably a pair of single-player campaigns–but this game remains one of the most authentic and unforgiving shooters on the market. It is sure to thrill serious students of warfare and sure to frustrate run-and-gun players looking for a quick WWII-flavored fix.

You know the old saying that you never hear the bullet with your name on it? That pretty much sums up how combat works in Red Orchestra 2. The core of the game is a relatively typical territorial control mode in which teams of up to 32 players on German and Soviet sides battle over the wasteland terrain around Stalingrade circa 1943.

But the battle mechanics are much more brutally realistic than in most shooters. Even though you take on the roles of standard multiplayer shooter troop types like riflemen, assault soldiers, and snipers, there are absolutely no concessions made to make it easier on you. There is no targeting reticle here. When you want to aim your rifle, you need to do it the old-fashioned way: by looking down the barrel and using iron sights.

Furthermore, there are no graphics to denote ammunition. If you want to see what you’ve got in the clip, you need to manually check it, and even then, you only get a vague idea of how many rounds you have remaining through text like “You have about half of a clip left.” Most notably, single shots can and do kill.

If you do something completely normal for the average shooter but incredibly suicidal in the real world, like charge through an open field toward an enemy-held ruined church, you will die. Chances are good that you will never hear or see the shot that kills you because it will come from the gun of a hunkered-down, smarter opponent who takes the time to line up shots from behind cover.

This is the blessing and the curse of Red Orchestra 2. There is only one way to play this game: You need to be incredibly patient, work with your teammates, and approach every situation just as real troops would have when fighting for Stalingrad during WWII.

All of the limitations of the weapons here make it impossible to snap off quick shots with any sort of accuracy, which means that you have to take time to find a good firing position and then shoot carefully. Rapid firing means wild firing, which just alerts enemies to your position and gets you a bullet in the face.

It also increases the chance that you will lose track of the number of shots that you have fired and empty a clip at the wrong time. If you don’t shoot smartly, you inevitably run out of ammo at precisely the moment you need it and, again, wind up with a convertible skull.

This might not sound like a great deal of fun, and it isn’t at first. Initially, the game seems chaotic and random, with a lot of sudden, unfair deaths inflicted on you by dug-in enemies that kill you without revealing their positions. You never know where they are until after you’re dead, which is when the camera helpfully swings out and focuses in on them in their hidey holes.

But after you spend some time with the game, you can’t help but get hooked on how exacting a challenge it offers. If you get into matches with experienced teammates who work together, you can learn a lot just from letting them take the lead as you watch how they approach maps, clear buildings of enemies, and secure locations.

Tension is ratcheted high because you never know when death will call. The pressure of having everything on the line all the time really pushes you forward, encouraging you to keep playing and building up your skills. You never even realize just how tense you are when playing the game until something happens that you don’t expect, like an unseen Russian clubbing you over the head with his rifle butt–whereupon you practically jump out of your chair in surprise.

Maps are extremely well done, sticking to the expected realistic WWII battle terrain experienced by the German and Russian troops scrapping it out in and around Stalingrad. The design and architecture complement the style of play demanded here as well.

Lots of rubble and blown-out buildings afford the cover necessary to keep breathing and ensure that the battle takes place in such close quarters that you frequently jump out of your skind. So you have at it in shattered city streets, rustic farms, deserted villages, cramped infirmaries, crowded rail yards, and claustrophobic offices.

This isn’t the most attractive shooter that you’ll play this year, but it runs very smoothly on even midrange machines, and lag is never an issue even when playing on a server packed with 64 players. Nevertheless, it is loaded with a morose sort of war-worn detail that sets a time and place as effectively as any bleeding-edge visuals.

Frills like cutscenes are also extremely well done, playing out like old newsreels shown in theaters before movies back in the day. The visual presentation effectively immerses you in the grim struggle. Audio is of a similarly strong quality, although both the martial music and vocals cut out occasionally, forcing a reboot to get out of this unintentional silent-movie mode.

Despite its devotion to authenticity, Red orchestra 2 isn’t entirely realistic. Problems are caused by a handful of noteworthy flaws. At times, it can be tough to properly attach yourself to cover. It’s a little too easy in the chaos of battle to wind up on the wrong side of some rubble and unwittingly expose yourself to enemy fire.

Sometimes you have to get ridiculously close to the cover-providing object to bring up the option of hunkering down. Another more serious issue comes with firing. Bullet drop is supposed to be part of the physics model, but it’s hard to see much of an effect, at least over the distances involved in the included maps.

Aiming high to compensate for gravity pulling bullets toward the earth seems to mainly result in missing high, so the mechanics appear to be a little off. The most troublesome flawt may be of the technical variety, however: occasional random crashes might take you from Stalingrad to your Windows desktop in a hurry.

The new single-player mode has its share of drawbacks as well. The campaigns are something of a turnoff for newcomers because the bots are dumb. They mindlessly rush enemy locations, run around in circles jumping over the same broken-down fence, and occasionally ignore both orders and enemies.

Bad guys are equally stupid, particularly when it comes to ignoring your presence, so there is a bit of a tradeoff here. Still, the two never balance out because you’re usually taking the offensive against dug-in enemies and need the assistance of allies to storm these locales.

Orders can be given to nudge your buddies in the right direction, at least. Regular reinforcements mean that you can eventually overcome the actions your stupid squadmates perform in the field, although in the absence of smarter squadmates, you can wind up forced into attempting suicidal one-man charges over and over again.

As a result, the solo missions are only marginally entertaining and serve more as extended tutorials familiarizing players with the controls and overall flow of combat than proper new modes of play.

How much you get out of Red Orchestra 2 Heroes of Stalingrad really depends on how much time you put into it. This is a demanding, slowly paced game of authentic infantry combat where success depends almost entirely on your patience and willingness to wait out opponents.

If you approach it properly, you can’t help but be impressed and captivated by the grim majesty of the multiplayer battlefields. But with that said, this game pretty much defines the term “acquired taste.” The challenge and sheer intimidation of getting started are almost overwhelming, and the numerous problems with the new single-player mode actually make it more likely, not less likely, that players will quit out of frustration before seeing what the game’s all about.

This is a realistic WWII shooter that is worth trying, but the unique and unforgiving nature of its squad warfare means that you need to spend a lot of time learning the ropes. If you can make the commitment, go for it; you’ll be rewarded with one of the most intense experiences in shooter history. If you can’t make the commitment, stick with something more forgiving and avoid the inevitable frustration because death comes early and often in Red Orchestra 2 Heroes of Stalingrad.

The Good

• Ability to turn leagues off and on is a great addition
• Immense depth and interaction
• Tutorial mode to help new players
• Better contract negotiations

The Bad

• 3D match engine is poor and slows everything down
• Could still overwhelm first time players
• Occasional unrealistic glitches

Rating

The widow maker that is Football Manager is back with Football Manager 2012 and with 800 new features, there are improvements across the board. Football Manager veterans know that the series is all about evolution, not revolution. It has been evolving steadily for almost two decades now to become so vast and complex that it’s not really an entry-level game anymore.

Even experienced players who have missed a few iterations are likely to find the sheer depth and number of options daunting. Everything is in here–from dealing with agents and mollycoddling egotistical star players to fending off scoop-hunting journalists–as you try to mold your team of virtual hit-and-hopers into a trophy-harvesting machine. This year’s introduction of a much-needed tutorial mode helps to steer newcomers through the labyrinthine options and is a great addition.

One area of improvement has to do with the transfer market, with the contract system being tweaked to streamline the process. There are so many elements to consider–duration of contract, win bonuses, appearance bonuses, goal bonuses, promotion bonuses, agent’s fees, relegation release clauses, non-promotion release clauses, minimum fee release clauses, promotion bonuses, loyalty bonuses, sell-on fees, and a whole metric boatload of other stuff–any or all of which might be demanded by the player.

When contracts are offered, players make various counterdemands, and with so many variables, negotiations can get rather convoluted. This year, a padlock symbol appears next to each clause for the first time. Clicking it sets that element as nonnegotiable, saving time and making it easier to keep a cap on your spending.

Team talks include a new level of depth, thanks to the addition of different tones of voice. When you address the lads before matches, at half-time, and after the final whistle, you can be aggressive, passionate, calm, cautious, or reluctant in your manner, and each tone has its own associated set of comments.

If you choose wisely, players will respond positively. If you choose poorly, they might lose motivation or maybe even go into a strop. The more you learn about your team, the more you come to understand how to coax a positive response from individual players. If that’s too long winded for you, you can always let your assistant manager take the team talk, which gets you into the match far quicker.

This ability to delegate responsibility has become more and more important as the Football Manager series has evolved in its complexity. Almost every element can be left up to your backroom staff members to deal with, and they call regular meetings to keep you in the loop. What’s more, they also make suggestions that you can quickly take action on with the click of a button. Of course, you can also micromanage every facet of the game to your heart’s content if you want.

You can interact with players, set training schedules, talk to the media, badger the board for extra funds, wheel and deal in the transfer market, hire and fire backroom staff, and issue individual instructions to each player on game day.

One of the cumulative problems with layering on new features year after year is that squeezing more and more functionality into a creaking interface without having it break isn’t easy. Football Manager’s presentation underwent a major overhaul a couple of years back, but the problem of presenting so much information clearly without the need for dozens of screens remains.

The Overview screen addressed this, and this year it’s been made more powerful for players running the game at higher screen resolutions. The higher the resolution, the more info boxes you can fit on the screen. As before, you can choose which boxes you want displayed, allowing the main screens to be customized with the information you want to see at a glance.

An interesting addition to the formula is the ability to turn leagues on and off at any time during the game, which is something that’s been missing for years. Previously, you were stuck with the leagues you chose to activate when you started a new game.

Now, if you fancy a season in Portugal, you can activate the Portuguese league as playable and look for a job there. Likewise, you can shut down any playable leagues you have sucking up processor power at any time. The more leagues you have running, the slower the game will run.

The 3D match engine has been improved with a couple of new views, more animations and more featured stadiums. It’s still not great, though. Given the current benchmark of 3D football games, there’s simply no place for such rudimentary and inexplicably processor-hungry graphics.

The classic 2D match display is still preferable for aesthetics and functionality, allowing you to cheer for those small, colored circles one moment and curse them as fatherless heathens the next; punch the air when they score and slump–head in hands–when those awful words “But it won’t count” appear in the commentary bar. Raw emotion though is what football is all about, and Football Manager delivers it in spades.

It can be frustrating when things start to go wrong; you’ll be tearing your hair out trying to understand how your side managed six wins in a row, yet all of a sudden, it can’t find the net with the exact same tactics and starting lineup.

There’s an occasional sensation that the game is playing you, that if you start doing too well the wheels will inevitably come off. Then, just as you’re on the brink of hitting reset it throws you a bone. To misquote the immortal words of Michael Corleone, “Just when you thought you were out, it pulls you back in.”

There’s a little bit more of just about every element compared to the 2011 version. There is better scouting and more interaction, as well as lots of tweaks and streamlines, but there’s nothing monumental.

It really depends on how important it is to you to start off the game with all of this year’s transfers in place, bearing in mind that a season into the game, everything will change anyway. Football Manager 2012 remains the only football management sim you need and don’t expect an easy ride, especially if this is your first dalliance but if you stick with it, though, it could change your life.

The Good

• Deep and varied multiplayer competition
• Awesome array of vehicles
• Many gorgeous environments
• Rewards teamwork handsomely

The Bad

• Campaign is disappointing and dull
• Only six cooperative missions
• No way to practice jet flight outside of multiplayer

Rating

When it comes to virtual battlefields, nobody does it quite like the Battlefield series as it has a long history of creating sprawling conflict zones where players have an exhilarating range of ways to make powerful contributions to the war effort but the competitive multiplayer mode in Battlefield 3 stays true to tradition, delivering an online combat experience that is amazingly addictive, immersive, and exciting, with refinements and new elements that make the familiar action feel fresh.

Unfortunately, the stale single-player campaign fails to capitalize on the strengths of the series and feels like an off-brand imitation. The six cooperative missions fare better and offer a tougher challenge, but only the competitive multiplayer provides a compelling reason to buy Battlefield 3. With online battles this excellent, though, that reason is all you need.

There are many factors that combine to make these battlefields as good as they are, most of which will be familiar to series veterans. Nine great maps set the stage for up to 64 players to fight it out in a variety of urban, industrial, and military locations.

These places all look beautiful, though the grassy hills and blue skies of the Caspian Border are naturally more appealing than the drab urban corridors of the Grand Bazaar. The maps vary widely in size and offer diverse environmental elements, including claustrophobic tunnels, coastal roads, desert plains, and a variety of multistory buildings.

Many man-made structures can be damaged or destroyed by the explosive tools at your disposal, creating new infiltration routes or removing cover positions. The maps are designed to create opportunities for combat at all ranges, and the element of destruction lets you manipulate the environment to create even more.

Combat is not just about where you are, but also about how you get there, and the variety of vehicles is one of the things that makes Battlefield so uniquely engaging. Small maps might only have a Humvee or a light armored vehicle, while larger ones boast buggies, tanks, amphibious transports, helicopters, and jets.

There are a few variations within each class of vehicle that make them better suited for troop transport, anti-infantry, antiair, or anti-vehicle combat, and learning how to get the most out of each one is a blast, even if you’re sometimes the one getting blown up.

Whether you’re piloting, gunning, or just going along for the ride, vehicles offer a key tactical element that can change the tide of battle when used by a savvy squad. Using a vehicle well can earn you powerful upgrades and bonus weapons, but it can be tough to get the hang of the flight mechanics for helicopters and jets.

It’s a shame there’s no way to practice flying them outside of active multiplayer matches (with one exception), though you can take comfort in knowing that you are at least entertaining your fellow players when your jet nose-dives into a mountain.

The maps and vehicles allow for a great degree of strategic freedom, but choosing your class and loadout is the first and most important decision you make before spawning into combat. Abilities and weapons have shuffled around a bit since Battlefield Bad Company 2, so now the assault class slings health packs and totes defibrillators, while the support class carries light machine guns and ammunition boxes.

Engineers still thrive on vehicle support/destruction, and recon delivers long-range death. New gadgets like robots that can arm charges (engineer) and mark targets (recon) give players more to look out for on the battlefield, and claymores and mortars (support) ensure that the engineer class isn’t the only one packing an explosive punch.

Unlockables include class-specific weapons and gadgets, gun-specific sights and attachments, and specializations that can make you tougher and deadlier. Focusing on one class to unlock higher level gear has its advantages, but so does spreading around your progress in an effort to be more adaptable to the ebb and flow of combat.

Regardless of what loadout you choose, there are a lot of ways to earn points for your actions. In addition to kills and kill assists, you can now earn points for suppressing enemies who are subsequently killed by your teammates. When a player is suppressed by enemy fire, they suffer from blurred vision and decreased accuracy.

This disorienting tactic can help you mitigate the effectiveness of enemies who are peppering you from a prone position, which returns in Battlefield 3 after being left out of the Bad Company games. Battlefield 3 may be a successor in name to Battlefield 2, but in spirit, the competitive multiplayer is a refined version of that offered in Bad Company 2.

Nevertheless, it will be immediately familiar to veteran players of either game, though fans of Bad Company 2 will encounter a few other small but notable differences. Buildings are not easily destroyed in Battlefield 3 and underslung grenade launchers are, as of now, far less prevalent.

Furthermore, you can’t just run up to someone and stab him in the face for an instant kill; you need to get in two swipes or sneak up from behind. Nor can you simply rely on explosives to destroy M-COM stations in Rush mode because arming and detonating the charge is now the only way to progress.

As with the previous Battlefield games, the focus is on teamwork. Diverse loadouts encourage you and your squad to make complementary choices, and point bonuses reward you for working together. Every vehicle is better with teammates in it, and even the simple act of spotting enemies is an effective way to contribute to your team’s efforts. Teamwork is woven throughout the fabric of Battlefield 3′s multiplayer action, and when your team is working well together, it’s one of the most gratifying experiences you can have in a game.

Battlefield 3 also has six cooperative missions that require teamwork on a smaller scale. These stand-alone sorties have a narrative connection to the campaign, but they are tougher to complete than most campaign missions and you can unlock some nice weapons for use in the multiplayer. Setting up voice chat with your teammate is helpful here, especially in the stealthy sections, because the spotting mechanic doesn’t sufficiently differentiate enemies at long distances.

Your foes are fairly tough, even on normal difficulty, though some unexpected quick-time events can also catch you off guard. The most notable mission here puts you in the cockpit of a helicopter, which provides the only chance outside of multiplayer to practice your flying skills. Earning all of the weapon unlocks requires repeat playthroughs of these missions, so it’s a shame there aren’t more of them to keep you busy.

Finally, there’s the campaign. Battlefield 3′s single-player adventure tells a harrowing tale of a fictional modern conflict. It follows a familiar formula by delivering a short campaign with diverse combat scenarios and dramatic set pieces. The story is solid and has some good acting, but the “Now tell us about this mission” interrogation mechanic makes the structure feel stale (having made a notable appearance in last year’s Call of Duty Black Ops).

The focus on realism makes the unrealistic elements like the heavy-handed linearity, quick-time events, and reckless foes even more noticeable, but most disappointing of all is the campaign’s utter failure to capitalize on any of the series’ strengths.

The lively personality of the Bad Company games is nowhere to be found, nor is the operational freedom on which the series has thrived. When you climb into the cockpit of a fighter jet, you are merely the gunner in an on-rails sequence rather than the hotshot pilot.

There are some gorgeous environments and a few exciting sequences, but these are outweighed by the overly familiar cityscapes and set pieces that were clearly inspired by other shooter campaigns from the past few years. This contributes to the pervasive sense that this campaign is not only outdated, but also outclassed.

Fortunately, Battlefield 3′s competitive multiplayer is among the best in its class, providing immensely rich and immersive combat zones. These are complemented by the slick browser-based Battlelog, which serves as the hub from which you access each game mode.

With EA’s Origin software running unobtrusively in the background, Battlelog tracks your unlock progress, displays your stats, and enables you to join parties and launch games easily. Battlefield 3 may not offer much beyond the multiplayer, but there are so many ways to contribute and feel like a powerful soldier that after hours and hours of playing, all you’ll want to do is play more.

• Captures the brutality of the Warhammer 40K universe
• Entertaining mix of shooting and melee action
• It’s fun to don a jump pack and stomp on Orks.

The Bad

• The mindless slaughter lacks variety
• Dull story, dull characters
• Lame final boss

Rating

Warhammer 40000 Space Marine is on the shallow side, but it still serves up plenty of “waaagh!”. If you’re a Warhammer 40K fan, you’ve dreamed of taking up a chainsword and carving Orks into bloody chunks of flesh and bone and Warhammer 40000 Space Marine plants you in the heavy boots of an Ultramarine which lets you do just that. The viscera fly in this third-person shooter/melee hybrid.

They stain the ground and splash against your screen, yet the brainless hordes continue their assault, crying out their familiar “waaagh!” before presenting themselves for slaughter. Warhammer 40000 Space Marine is simple fun, and a treat for fans of the franchise–and for anyone who delights in the ceaseless bloodletting of bad guys. It is, in fact, a little too simple. As entertaining as it is, the game lacks the variety, the memorable moments, and the sense of scale of the finest shooters.

After you annihilate yet another great mess of greenskins, the question arises: Is this all there is to it? With some exceptions, yes, that’s all there is to it, and it’s hard not to wonder what might have, should have been. But the action is so satisfying, and the atmosphere so grim, that you’ll want to see the adventure through.

What Warhammer 40000 Space Marine does best is capture the spirit of its universe. The Ultramarines’ weathered armor is so heavy and hardy, they don’t so much wear it as it wears them. As you push through battle-worn trenches, the Orks’ makeshift machinery erupts from the ground, shaking the earth. Roaring greenskins in rocket packs rush past, providing a touch of comedy amid all the carnage.

And such carnage it is. Enemies erupt in soggy displays of goo, yet the waves continue, your foes’ bloodthirst overcoming their sense of self-preservation. When you carve your chainsword through these forces, the buzz is so authentic that you can almost feel the green flesh being torn away from your foes’ skeletons. The visuals and sound both work hard to promote this brutal atmosphere.

The story, on the other hand, is as dry as the battlefields are sodden. (To wit, the opening cutscene begins with a sequence featuring the ever-exciting storytelling device called “words displayed on a monitor.”) As Captain Titus, your role is to mow down Orks and, later on, the forces of Chaos. You and your comrades speak in lofty, stentorian tones and act as mere pawns of the plot.

The main players are voiced well but are as forgettable as can be, everyone filling their assigned roles but rarely giving you a reason to care about their destinies. The story is too simple for the plot “twists” to feel anything other than inevitable, and while the cliff-hanger ending sets up a sequel, you probably won’t feel all that curious about what might happen next.

All the blood lets you know your enemies are good and dead.

Not that the promise of more Warhammer 40000 Space Marine is a bad thing. The action is a fun mix of third-person shooting and melee. The sense of weight to the movement, the camera perspective, and the weapon selection interface might at first bring to mind Gears of War, but the similarities are superficial.

You might be clad in weighty armor, but you aren’t burdened by it. Aiming is swift and smooth, allowing you to gun down dozens of targets without breaking a sweat. When the crowd gets too close, you can swing your chainsword (or axe, or hammer) about with ease, the Orks spraying so much gore it’s a wonder there aren’t puddles of it to wade through.

And unlike in Gears and its ilk, there is no cover system. Warhammer 40000 Space Marine wants you to keep busy, not remove yourself from the action. The health regeneration system also complements the “kill, don’t hide” mentality: to restore health, you perform a grotesque finishing kill. This doesn’t mean that each enemy is a quick pick-me-up waiting to be harvested, mind you. You are vulnerable during these lengthy moves, so you must be careful not to leave yourself open to gunners or other attackers.

Succumbing to death while executing a long fatality can be irksome, but a little tactical thinking should keep that from being a frequent occurrence. In any case, while the final acts have their challenging moments, Warhammer 40000 Space Marine is not particularly hard, so frustration is uncommon.

And so you put an end to the masses of meanies threatening the Forge World you protect. And it’s fun, due in large part to your arsenal. You always have your bolt pistol (or its plasma equivalent) and its unlimited ammo when necessary, but it’s better to take aim with the bolter, an assault rifle with a good kick to it.

It’s effective at surprisingly long range, and strong sound effects and a good sense of impact make it fun to use. (You can see the blood spewing from enemies hundreds of feet away.) The scoped stalker bolter is a nice toy, too, best used to take out distant gunners before wading into a sea of daemons with a death wish.

The melee action has bite to it as well, though Warhammer 40000 Space Marine is more shooter than hack-and-slash. When you get to the hacking and slashing, you mostly just pound on buttons and perform the occasional brutal execution. Fury mode–in which you become a temporary tornado of carnage–breaks up the repetition with some snazzy slow-motion visuals and extra helpings of Ork intestines.

Warhammer 40000 Space Marine eventually falls into a predictable rhythm: you plow through the multitudes that infest the game’s endless corridors, occasionally pausing to hear a bit of plot exposition and ride some elevators. And then it all happens again.

Some of these corridors are actual facility hallways; others are the kinds game developers create out of debris that just so happened to have fallen in such a linear way. It’s a familiar trick to be sure, but it stands out here because there aren’t many attempts to make these passages feel like anything more than passages.

In fact, this is one of several ways in which Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine relies on the tried-and-true elements of shooter design, but fails to inject them with an amount of creativity that matches the amount of bloodshed. The legions of Chaos arrive in time, but not before hours of greenskin butchery in which one sequence feels much like the last sequence.

And even when Chaos Marines and daemons replace or join the Orks, you needn’t do a whole lot that is different from before. There’s too little to break up the pace. The boss fights are few, and the only one that veers from the “shoot it until it dies” mold–the final encounter–is an easy quick-time event, not the breathless battle this ferocious universe screams for.

It’s good to have fellow marines at your side, even if they don’t ultimately make much of a dent.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t an occasional change of pace, and though they are welcome, you wish there were more such detours. At a few different points, you’re gifted with a jump pack. With this equipment strapped to your back, the joy of flight enhances the standard combat, allowing you to slam into the ground and destroy your foes, or at least cause them to stumble.

The open environments and freedom of movement make the jump pack sequences a hoot, but it’s such a pity that the pack isn’t standard equipment. These moments are over before you know it, and you’re back to the usual gunning and slashing after the game offers its excuse for ripping the jump pack away from you. (There’s no room to fly in this cave! You ran out of fuel!) A short excursion upon a gargantuan war machine has you fending off some airborne sentries, which is fun.

But like the rest of the game, Warhammer 40000 Space Marine never takes the next step to go from standard to spectacular: no thrilling battle aboard this massive entity as it trudges toward its destination, or no chance to fight alongside it, for example.

Online multiplayer at least helps mix things up, and like the single-player campaign, it captures the tone of the universe but never goes the extra mile. There are two modes: Annihilation (team deathmatch) and Seize Ground (capture and hold).

The modes (and maps) are few, but Warhammer 40000 Space Marine’s shooting mechanics and explosive weapons make for an amusing online distraction. Before you begin, you choose a loadout, and as you gain multiplayer levels (which happens at a good clip), you earn more loadout slots, as well as the ability to customize your loadouts with more weapons and equipment.

One such bit of equipment is the jump pack that graces the campaign, which makes it fun to zoom into a combat hotspot, down a few foes, and then soar back into the air, possibly doing some additional damage to the remaining combatants with your thrusters. If you prefer to sacrifice maneuverability for firepower, you can take the heavy bolter along, and even brace yourself in place for greater accuracy.

Beware mysterious glows: they’re a bad omen.

The large maps feature plenty of architectural elements to break up your line of sight, giving both close-range and long-range specialists a chance to make a difference. And like in many modern shooters, you earn perks that improve your firepower, armor regeneration, and so on.

But even if you’re a low-level flunky, you still get the chance to stand up to the big boys: you can adopt the loadout of your killer before respawning, which is a great touch that keeps the early hours from being overly frustrating. The paint-by-numbers modes aren’t inspiring, but at least what’s here is solid, if not particularly top-notch.

Speaking of painting, you also get to customize your online avatar with various patterns, emblems, and colors. The ability to unlock more assets might be the strongest reason to stick with Warhammer 40000 Space Marine’s online play–certainly if you’re a seasoned Warhammer 40K fan who has lost countless hours to painting miniatures.

In fact, it’s the “Warhammer” part that Space Marine does best. You get to don the famous armor and fend off the forces of Chaos, bolter and chainsaw in hand, on battlefields where rusted structures puncture the clouded orange sky.

If only the game had done more than send endless waves of Orks and daemons toward the dangerous end of your meltagun. Warhammer 40000 Space Marine is a good start, as mindless as it is.

• Varied open-world setting
• Strong cooperative play
• Melee combat is grisly fun
• Good zombie voice acting

The Bad

• Uneven visual quality
• Weak characters
• Poor human voice acting

Rating

A schlocky, gruesomely fun action role-playing game awaits you on Dead Island. From a distance, Banoi looks like a holidaymaker’s paradise: a tropical island in a sparkling blue ocean, home to a luxury beach resort. Get closer, though, and you’ll spot blood on the sand (and on the walls, and in the swimming pools). Zombies are shambling around by the beach bars. They’re munching on corpses by the surf shack. Time to rethink that vacation.

Much like its once-idyllic location, Dead Island isn’t as it first appears. It’s got zombies in it, but it’s not a survival horror game. It’s played in a first-person perspective and has shooting, but it’s not a first-person shooter. And whatever that slow-motion trailer would have you believe, it’s not a stirring emotional experience. Dead Island is a schlocky, open-world action role-playing game that favours grisly melee combat above all things.

Knife to meet you.

Dead Island’s expansive sandbox setting spreads inland, beyond the Royal Palms Resort into city and jungle environments. Its RPG nature is clear in the prominence of quests, doled out by harrowed survivors in the makeshift shelters that form quest hubs.

Similarly prominent are RPG staples such as talent trees and numbers, always the numbers: levels, weapon stats, damage, and experience point scores popping out of enemies as you hack away. There are also satisfyingly vicious weapons to be improvised, upgraded, and creatively modded, and a robust online system supports the four-player co-op in which the game is best enjoyed.

Its failings are many but minor, for the most part. The quality of visuals is uneven. Ditto the voice acting. The characters are weak, and the story is a flimsy hook on which to hang the action. Combat is unrefined, and never more so than in the humdrum sections that pit you against shooting human enemies barely smarter than their undead equivalents.

The prevalence of drab quests in sewers in the second act is likewise off-putting. All the flaws and missteps amount to a game that is frequently ropey but, thanks to its ambition and scale, nearly always entertaining. There’s nothing perfect about what Dead Island does, but it does so much, and does it well enough to give you a good time.

Another friendly islander.

The bulk of your time on Banoi is spent exploring and questing, roaming from hub to hub, foraging items to build weapons or complete missions. Zombies can sometimes be avoided: you can often run around them, amassing a slavering, jogging zombie horde in your wake.

More fun, though, is hopping into one of the game’s multi-seater vehicles, mowing down the undead as you speed along the island’s roads. Some of the best times Dead Island has to offer are those spent cruising in a truck with three friends in cooperative mode, zombies shedding experience points as they bounce off the bonnet.

Dead Island also shines in missions that have you risk life and limb in a sortie to a petrol station, and are best experienced in co-op. Here you might park up in the forecourt then fend off waves of the walking dead while your buddies fill up petrol cans and toss them in the back of the truck.

On the journey back to base, your driver might get your ride jammed up between wrecked cars. You might have to pile out to defend the vehicle and its cargo while said driver works desperately to get it unstuck. Dead Island is the kind of game out of which anecdote-generating scenarios naturally, pleasingly emerge–not unlike its zombie-bashing co-op forerunner, Left 4 Dead.

A Royal Palms Resort blood bath.

So yes, Left 4 Dead: the undead elephant in the room. If the petrol-gathering mission sounded a lot like Left 4 Dead 2′s Scavenge mode, that’s because it is. Dead Island lifts liberally from Valve’s zombie shooters in other places, too, and beyond the obvious resemblances.

Its boss enemies look like leftovers from a Left 4 Dead casting session, approximating the various special infected in that game. Among them is a charger type, a spitter type, and a boomer type. Still, it’s hard to begrudge a game for being derivative in a genre as derivative as zombie horror; you could even call it a loving homage, if the bosses were better rip-offs–none are as intimidating as a tank or as creepy as a witch.

The weapon system resembles that of another zombie game, too–this time Dead Rising 2. Though there are guns to be had, they arrive relatively late; melee and throwing weapons are the order of the day, with emphasis on slicing and bludgeoning the enemy. You find basic weapons, such as knives, scythes, and baseball bats, lying around.

You can’t craft them from scratch, but you can upgrade and modify them at workbenches found in hubs to create, for example, nail-spiked bats and machetes that deliver paralysing electric shocks. It’s a shame weapons degrade irritatingly fast over time; a prized weapon you’ve upgraded and modded to the max might not last too long once you break the cover of a quest hub, leaving you to improvise with scavenged oars and hat stands.

When you take those weapons into a fight, prepare for gore enough to fill swimming pools. Injuries are dynamic and gruesomely vivid, encouraging you to lop off limbs and heads. That the combat is only mildly clunky comes as a surprise–there aren’t many successes in the field of first-person brawling.

It’s grimly satisfying to slice off a zombie’s arm with a single, well-aimed swipe, but the system would benefit from a more refined way to block and dodge. As it is, mastery comes from closely watching enemy attack animations, jumping out of the way where possible, and punting zombies back with a well-timed kick in the face.

Kicks, in fact, become the unlikely centrepiece of your arsenal, in virtue of being nigh-on uninterruptible and at zero cost to stamina. Swinging other weapons, especially heavy ones, drains your stamina bar, as does sprinting. Weapons can also be thrown–from time to time you find yourself at low health, furiously backpedalling while you lob the contents of your inventory at your pursuer (they can be recovered from his corpse later).

Meet your first quest giver.

When guns do show up later in the game, they are only passable; Dead Island doesn’t excel as a shooter. The guns would be a welcome change of pace in combat, at least, if they didn’t come hand in hand with the living, breathing human enemies carrying them.

Like many zombie stories, Dead Island is determined to teach us that humans are thereal monsters; you occasionally face off against gangs of smugglers, guards, and opportunist punks, but the clashes are mostly tedious sweep-and-clears, turning a brisk action game into a so-so shooter.

They feel tacked on, seemingly without even situation-specific voice acting from the player characters: one screams her usual zombies-are-eating-me line (“They’re tearing me apart!”) when being shot in the head by distant smugglers.

Levelling is par for the course in a role-playing-heavy action RPG, complete with talent trees for customising characters which offer, for instance, options to increase damage or durability of certain weapon types. You level up quickly as well, thanks in part to frequent checkpointing and the minimal penalty for dying: a death tax that skims off a little of the money you’ve earned by completing missions and scrounging from abandoned suitcases.

If you die, you generally respawn a few metres from where you dropped, ready to plunge back into the zombie fray. It’s a generous system, though it minimises any sense of dread or tension.

What do vegan zombies eat? Graaains.

Any remaining traces of terror are wiped out by the characters themselves, who run the gamut from flat to flat and obnoxious. There are two basic personalities among the four playable characters: both of the female characters are disillusioned cops trying to make it in a man’s world, both of the men are faded superstars trying to recapture former glory days.

Their voice acting is equally lacklustre (in sharp contrast to the cast of zombies, whose groans and angry screeches are alarmingly good). Thankfully, cutscenes are skippable.

The game starts stronger than it finishes, with the first act host to the most visually attractive, most open-feeling location: the beach resort itself. On the other hand, later acts deliver the blueprints for the best mods, so you can at least have exotic hardware for hacking through the enemy in the second act’s overlong, under-fun sewer sections.

Besides, you can start a second game with all the inventory and character progress of your first, letting you do battle with level-appropriate enemies and your best weapons back in the winning environment of the Royal Palms Resort. Here, among the palm trees and beach huts and gleaming spilt blood, the game looks its best; later, the environment designs are much less inspiring, and poorer compensation for the stiff character animation.

A quest-led trip to Ocean View Bungalows.

Dead Island deserves credit for backing its multiplayer-favouring action with a reliable system for joining up with other players online. We played online for hours without a hitch, with equally smooth experiences playing alongside friends and match-made strangers. If you play alone, the other three characters aren’t added in under computer control, though they still appear in cutscenes.

As a sandbox action role-playing game based on killing zombies with friends, Dead Island is a proposition rich with possibilities, and it exploits a good deal of them, if imperfectly. There’s easily 20 hours of content in a single playthrough–much more if you’re exploring the Polynesian paradise sandbox and messing around with trucks as much as you should be. If you don’t step off the boat expecting a taut horror experience, a masterful gun game, or compelling characters, you’ll have a bloody good time with Dead Island.

• Car handling is predictable, but thrilling
• Co-Op Career is great fun with a friend
• Extremely faithful to the real sport
• Realistically captures the fragility of modern F1 cars

The Bad

• Very steep learning curve assumes you have a lot of F1 knowledge
• You may need a force feedback wheel to master the handling

Rating

F1 2011 builds on the success of Codemasters’ first F1 title by developing its most impressive features and fixing many of its flaws. The car handling and visual details are significantly better, and the new Co-op Championship mode presents an exciting new way for friends to experience the intense racing together. The complex driving physics and rules could become frustrating for motor-racing novices, but Formula One fans will enjoy this incredibly faithful depiction of the sport.

The graphics are much more realistic this year.

The visual improvements over last year’s game are striking from your very first lap. The desaturated lighting has been replaced with a realistic colour palette which better conveys the famous Grand Prix atmosphere, from the fans in the grandstands to the scarlet Ferrari and gleaming chrome McLaren.

More attention has been given to the cars, too. Each team now has its own steering wheel design, complete with bespoke animations for gear changes and other steering wheel functions. Circuit marshals can be seen waving flags, and the LED caution lights dotted around each circuit work realistically.

Bodywork reflects far more of the environment than in F1 2010, and damage to tyres can now be seen in the texture of the rubber on each wheel. Such is the attention to detail in the car models that you can even see the front wing flexing and bending as the cars bounce over bumps, just as during slow-motion footage from a real race.

Impressively, Codemasters has achieved all of these visual additions alongside a remarkable improvement in the game’s frame rate, which helps you to take in much more of the environment at high speed or on congested sections of a circuit.

Along with upgrading the graphics, the audio now more accurately mimics the real deal. Engine notes are now much more aggressive, as are the gear-change sound effects and the sound of the car hitting the rev limiter. You can even listen to the noise of the tyres on the road to predict the wheels locking up under heavy braking.

The enhanced sound gives experienced players much more feedback with which to understand their car’s behavior. Additional improvements have been made to the race engineer character who feeds advice to you over the car radio. In F1 2010, the advice was often irrelevant to your race, but in 2011 you are fed information specific to the cars closest to you on the track and given much clearer advice about how to best look after your fragile F1 car.

The fragility of the car is the most important change to the game this year and does a fantastic job of capturing the care needed to drive a racing car. You must find a careful balance between pushing hard and prolonging the life of your tyres. In real F1, the more damage you do to your rubber, the more often you must pit; the same is true in F1 2011.

You must also control your fuel use so that you can safely make it to the finish of each race. If you use the “fast” fuel setting for too long, you will drain the fuel tank more quickly, forcing you to drive slowly later in the race to improve your fuel economy and make it to the finish.

A new feature on the heads-up display tells you exactly how much fuel you have left by comparing the number of laps left in the tank with the number left to race. All of this attention to detail will be loved by F1 fans but may frustrate those less familiar with the sport.

The race engineer does give advice about when to push and when to drive conservatively, but much of his advice assumes you have a high level of F1 knowledge, using terminology which can be confusing if you’re not familiar with the real sport. However, fans will appreciate how similar the radio chatter is to real life.

Car handling in F1 2011 leans heavily towards simulation. You can choose from a variety of assists, such as traction control, braking help, and a dynamic racing line, but the series still doesn’t have any tutorials to help novices feel comfortable with the incredible acceleration, braking, and cornering speed of an F1 car.

However, the alterations to the vehicle physics make this one of the most authentic racing simulations around. The remodeled suspension system gives the car a more believable sense of weight so that you can now feel its mass moving during corners, allowing you to predict slides and correct them appropriately.

Sudden spins caused by bumps and kerbs, a major problem in the last game, are a thing of the past. The different tyres are simulated impressively as well. Soft rubber creates great grip but wears out quickly and can be damaged easily, whereas harder rubber offers less grip but is much more durable.

The new physics make driving with a standard gamepad a much larger challenge than before; a force feedback steering wheel creates a greater connection between you and the car. A wheel also makes the game much easier to master by allowing much more subtle steering inputs. These aren’t always possible when driving F1 2011′s twitchy cars with an analogue stick.

Wet weather driving takes extra skill and nerve.

The twitchy handling is especially evident in wet weather, which is now far harder to cope with than in F1 2010. Should it begin to rain while you are using a car setup designed for dry conditions, the car will understeer horribly going into corners and oversteer aggressively on the exits, often even if you switch to the correct intermediate or extreme wet tire.

If you have the correct wet car setup, you still need to be very careful, as a relatively minor mistake could cause a spin. Along with the tough handling in these situations, the visual effects for water spray are even more frightening in this year’s game. Driving closely behind another car in heavy rain is akin to driving with your eyes shut. It demands extreme bravery and really captures the crazy conditions seen regularly in the real sport this season.

Should you lose control of your car, you will quickly become familiar with F1 2011′s detailed damage system. With a big enough impact you can knock off your front wing or lose a wheel, but the game also helps you understand that F1 cars are sensitive even to minor incidents.

If you lose your entire front wing, you will notice a massive loss of grip, but you can also lose smaller pieces of your car through minor contact. You lose less aerodynamic grip from these incidents, but they still have a subtle negative impact on handling. Puncturing a tire is a much less random occurrence this year as well. If you run off the racing line you will find that your tyres pick up small amounts of dirt and debris; do this too often and a tire might deflate.

It is almost a shame that AI cars make very few mistakes in F1 2011, as it means you rarely get to see one of the game’s most welcome new features: the safety car. In Formula One, following a major accident which leaves debris or even a stationary car blocking part of the track, the safety car is released from the pit lane to drive in front of the F1 cars for up to two laps while the track is cleared.

In the game, you do not have full control behind the safety car. There’s a speed limit, but you can weave from side to side to keep heat in the tyres and brakes. Once the track is clear, the safety car pulls back into the pits, and you can resume racing.

It might sound like a dull prospect in a video game, but it has become an important part of modern Formula One and is believably implemented in the game. You can turn it off if you would rather not use this feature, but serious F1 fans will really enjoy the need to quickly consider changes to their race strategy since the slow speed behind the safety car removes any gaps between cars that were built up during the race.

All this detail may prove too complex for casual F1 fans, but if you just want to play short races with fewer of the strategic factors in play, then F1 2011 allows for that. Career mode now lets you choose three-lap races as well as the previous minimum distance of 20 percent of a real Grand Prix. Setting up the car is also relatively simple.

You can pick from preset car setups based on the weather conditions, or if you have more mechanical knowledge you can alter almost every aspect of the car to fine-tune a custom setup. You can also choose short or long race weekends. Long includes the real format of three practice sessions and three qualifying sessions, whereas short reduces practice and qualifying to one session each.

Players looking for medium distance races will be disappointed to find the 30 percent race distance has been removed from the game this year; the choice now jumps from 20 percent (about 15 minutes per race) to 50 percent (45 minutes per race).

The career mode is very similar to that of last year’s game. You must start with a low-ranking team and meet qualifying and race objectives to improve your reputation and attract interest from the front-runners. Along the way you can also opt to complete research-and-development objectives by beating a set lap time in practice sessions.

Doing so awards you with upgrades to your car’s performance. In addition to competing, you answer questions from the press between race sessions. How you answer each question from the three options available affects your relationship with your team and interest from others.

The effects of your responses are made clearer in this year’s game through press clippings shown at the end of each weekend, so you can see how your comments are being reported in the media. Career mode and indeed all of the other race types have been made more rewarding by new cutscenes depicting your driver celebrating in the parc ferme if you place in the top three. It’s nice to see your efforts celebrated, though it’s strange that Codemasters decided to implement this style of cutscene instead of the more iconic podium celebrations.

The AI drivers provide stiff competition.

Though Career mode has changed very little, the wheel-to-wheel racing is now much better. AI cars aggressively defend their position on most difficulties, intelligently moving to the inside line to protect the obvious overtaking route. As in last year’s game, they can sometimes move to defend too early, giving you the chance to overtake them on the outside, but this happens a lot less in F1 2011.

The AI drivers are also much more consistent across all of the circuits in this year’s game. You no longer find that they are too fast at some tracks or too slow at others, and they certainly don’t struggle in fast corners like they did in F1 2010.

Just as in real F1, you have two new overtaking tools at your disposal in F1 2011: KERS (kinetic energy recovery system) and DRS (drag reduction system). KERS offers you a power boost at the touch of a button. You can use only a certain amount each lap, but if timed correctly, it can help you keep up with a faster car or defend your position from someone coming up behind.

It’s also a terrific aid in qualifying, as finding the best places to use it on each track can shave valuable tenths of a second off your time. Pressing the DRS button opens a flap in the rear wing to reduce aerodynamic drag and increase top speed. This can be used only when you’re less than a second behind the car ahead and only at certain points on each circuit. Combined with KERS, it can make overtaking much easier on the harder difficulties.

Pit stops have also been improved. The AI mechanics now cope far better when the pit lane is busy and release you back into the race with great efficiency, instead of holding you stationary for a ludicrous amount of time after changing the tyres.

In addition to Career mode and the single-race Grand Prix mode, F1 2011 includes a new scenario-based time attack game called Proving Grounds. Here, you are given a specific car, weather condition, and circuit, and you must set the fastest lap time possible, without being able to alter the car setup or tire choice.

This creates a fascinating level playing field on the game’s leaderboards, but if you prefer to set up the car yourself, you can still choose to play the more traditional Time Trial mode.

Competitive multiplayer in F1 2011 can be split-screen or online. The split-screen mode offers only single races, but it can include a full grid of AI cars and all of the various parameters from the single-player game. The frame rate is solid as well, allowing for exciting gameplay that doesn’t suffer from slowdown.

Online, up to 16 players can take part in three-lap races, qualifying sessions, or tougher multiplayer games which include qualifying followed by a longer-distance race with pit stops. Unlike last year’s F1 game, the 2011 game fills the remaining spaces on the grid with AI cars so you always have 24 cars competing. In the long races in particular, this makes for satisfying competition and lots of strategic options.

Looking after your fragile car is key.

The big addition to multiplayer is the brand-new Co-op Championship, which lets two players drive for the same team during a single championship season against AI cars. This fantastic new mode has you working together to bring success to the team in the Constructors’ Championship, all the while knowing that only one of you has the chance to bring home the Drivers’ title for the team.

Do you help each other out with your car setups and upgrades in order to benefit the team, or do you hold vital information to yourself to cement your position as team leader? These ongoing personal battles, versus striving for team success, create a fascinating situation which brings fresh excitement to online multiplayer in the racing genre.

In order to be a successful team you must find a delicate balance between achieving the best team result at each race, while still out-performing your team-mate in the run to the Drivers’ Championship.

F1 2011 is a great sequel which captures the fragility of an F1 car for the first time and features significant improvements over its predecessor. Its extremely steep learning curve will frustrate many novice racers but will delight serious F1 fans.

You may need a force feedback steering wheel to master its handling at the most difficult level, but F1 2011 is a tremendously faithful re-creation of the sport, offering rewarding and strategic racing that simulation fans are sure to be playing for a long time to come.

• Innovative design blending FPS action with hands-on RTS mechanics
• Solid balance with classes and weaponry
• Good variety of maps with interesting, intricate cityscape designs
• Smart map design leads to intense battles for key resources

The Bad

• No solo play, bot support, or even playable tutorials
• Can be quite chaotic unless you’re in a match with experienced players
• EMP grenades can be exploited

Rating

Nuclear Dawn is finally here, and it’s good. That comes as welcome news to shooter fans who have been waiting for the game to emerge in a final, commercial form since it initially arrived way back in 2006 as a Source mod. Those with patience have now been rewarded with an innovative and exciting hybrid game that welds real-time strategy and first-person shooting together into a (mostly) cohesive whole.

There are some rough spots when it comes to presentation, and the lack of interactive tutorials and single-player modes make it hard to get into. But seen at its best with experienced players willing to work together (and follow orders), the game is an impressive, intense multiplayer shooter with tactical depth.

From down in the trenches, Nuclear Dawn looks and plays just like any other FPS.

At its heart, Nuclear Dawn is a fairly traditional multiplayer-only shooter based on a generic story of a postapocalyptic war between two factions called the Consortium and the Empire that roughly resemble Yanks and Commies. (In case the comparison isn’t totally obvious, the Consortium is the blue team and the Empire is the red team).

It is the late 21st century, and the world has been pretty much wrecked, presumably by the nukes of the game’s title, but the two factions are still battling over the irradiated rubble.

The lone mode of play currently available (the developers have promised more) is a Warfare option in which teams composed of up to 16 players per side fight for control of resource points that give commanders the energy needed to construct buildings as in a usual RTS game. Victory is earned by fighting through the enemy lines and obliterating the bad guy’s bunker.

The basic design is smooth and professional. The four available classes have been well thought out, with each having particular skills and vulnerabilities that slot nicely into a rock-paper-scissors formula. You have the heavy-gunning and armored but sort of slow exo vulnerable to the quick and cloaked stealth operatives; assault troopers with visors that spot those sneaky cloaked guys; and support soldiers who heal and repair.

Kits within classes let you further specialize. So support can choose to be medics, engineers, or even flamethrowers; assault can trick out an infantry SMG, a sniper rifle, or a grenade launcher/shotgun combo; exo can pick between the standard chaingun and siege rocket launchers geared to take down enemy buildings; and stealth can trade off arm knives for sniper rifles. Most of these additional weapons become available over the course of play as long as your commander is doing his job in the bunker and researching them.

There are no overpowered weapons and no killer classes to unbalance the game, yet you’ll undoubtedly get a bit frustrated at times by cloaked stealth troops insta-killing you with arm knives, and enemy grenades that arrive without any warning or audible sound effect.

The moat glaring exploit is with EMP grenades used by engineers. These nifty little devices totally shut down buildings for lengthy periods of time. Use them effectively, and you can pretty much close off spawn points and mess with a team by preventing its troops from spawning back into matches.

You can battle this tactic by building spread-out spawn locations, although this presupposes that most of your team is aware of the EMP tactic at the very start of the match and is prepared to counter it. Otherwise, you can be taken completely off-balance, and your match can be ruined by just one or two engineers sneaking through the lines and getting into your main base.

Fail to tackle these sneaks right away, and you’re almost guaranteed to lose. EMP grenades are also problematic when it comes to new players who don’t know anything about this strategy, because you can enter a game and find yourself unable to spawn for a minute or more.

Frenzied battles around resource points are a huge part of the fun in Nuclear Dawn.

Map terrain is an atmospheric mash-up of six postapocalyptic locales, such as blasted London and New York cityscapes, an Asian subway system, a snowy military base, and an anonymous Arab city now ruined and left to the sands. All the maps are designed more for quick, smart play than for looks.

They are also just the right size to promote intense fighting while leaving enough room through plentiful streets and corridors to make you think about what you’re doing. Much of the design is centered around maintaining good flow during combat and allowing for choke points that can be taken advantage of by smart commanders who know how to effectively deploy gun turrets.

As a result, there are very few good camping locales. You can camp if you want to, of course, especially with a sniper rifle in high areas on maps like the New York map. But there are so many ways to access every spot on the maps that you tend to find yourself tracked and killed in short order.

Victory always runs through the primary resource point that sits near the center of maps and attracts troops to serious firefights early in most matches. Control the center of the map, and you stand a very good chance of winning the game.

What sets Nuclear Dawn apart is its RTS element. Every map sees one player serving as a commander who oversees battles from a bunker. The commander has the ability to play the game much like a traditional real-time strategy game by dishing out attack and defend orders and constructing buildings like spawn points, gun turrets, supply stations, armories, and so forth.

As noted earlier, commanders also order up research, so your side gradually gains access to new structures and new weapons that can be custom-fitted to troops on the fly in armories.

The lack of a good tutorial mode is unfortunate.

Of course, this is where matches succeed or fail. Get a good commander who knows the map, knows how to place buildings and turrets, knows how and when to order research, and issues smart orders to troops, and you can have a blast. Games flow spectacularly well with a good commander, as long as you have teammates who know the importance of teamwork and listen carefully to what the boss tells them.

You feel like part of a real military team, being given specific intel about where the bad guys are forming up or when you have a chance to set up a spawn point close to the enemy command base and blitz him for a sudden, surprise win. Conversely, if you don’t have a good commander, or are stuck with a bunch of rookie players who aren’t sure what they should be doing, matches can blow up into chaotic messes.

It can be very bad if you’re in a match with a good commander and a bad one, because the rout is on almost as soon as you spawn in (this is often where you see the EMP exploit at its ugliest). Ineffective commanders can be dumped via mutinies, although matches are usually well out of control by the time enough players get together to vote out the boss.

Another problem is that there is no solo way to play to learn the game. Nor are there any interactive tutorials. The only primer you get before being tossed into the deep end of an online game is a handful of dull videos that outline some basics.

This isn’t nearly enough assistance to help you get into a game that is so reliant on teamwork, where how you play is key to how much enjoyment you get out of everything. So first impressions aren’t favorable, and the initial learning curve is quite steep. As a result, the servers aren’t packed with matches at the moment. You can always find one or two games in progress with enough players to have a good match, but generally that’s about it.

More so than many games, Nuclear Dawn is what you make of it. Go into a match with a smart, hands-on commander and experienced players who are willing to take orders, and you will be rewarded with a white-knuckle tactical struggle. Go into a match with players who don’t know what they’re doing, and you’re guaranteed to get into a sloppy brawl.

Still, the great enjoyment that can be had in the former matches makes it worth your time and energy to struggle through the latter. Nuclear Dawn is an intense first-person shooter/real-time strategy hybrid that has a lot to offer when it comes to teamwork.

• Defensive improvements make matches more balanced
• Player impact engine creates a range of realistic animations
• Compelling online modes
• New online matchmaking makes games fairer
• Excellent presentation

The Bad

• Single-player modes remain largely unchanged

Rating

FIFA Soccer 12 is the definitive football game: challenging, addictive, and with more excellent features than ever before. Distilling the world’s most popular sport into a video game isn’t an easy task. Aside from capturing the atmosphere of the game–the satisfying thump of boot on football, the on-pitch dramas created between player and referee, and the ferocious roar of the crowd as the ball sails into the back of the net–there are other considerations too.

Some players want to manage their teams. Others want to live out their dreams of football stardom. Still others want to put their skills to the test against the best in the world, all the while clamouring for as realistic an experience as possible. FIFA soccer 12 lets you do all of these things and more.

For the first time, the PC version uses the same engine as its high-def console counterparts. As a result, it not only looks the part, but also gives you access to the same excellent new features, such as the tactical defending system, player impact engine, and head-to-head seasons.

It’s the new EA Sports Football Club that’s the real draw, though, bringing with it an addictive levelling system that pits you against the world’s players, keeping track of your own progress and that of your favourite team too. Not only is FIFA soccer 12 the best game in the series, it’s also one of the most exciting, accurate, and complete sports games around.

If you’re a longtime FIFA player, then the changes to defending in this year’s game might come as a bit of a shock. A new tactical defending system has been implemented that drastically changes the way you play. In previous versions of FIFA, a common tactic when defending was to hold down the two “pressing” buttons, which sent players in to close down attackers and win the ball, requiring little in the way of skill.

That tactic no longer works. Instead of rushing in to take the ball, your player now just tracks the attacker and remains a few feet away, keeping him held back. This system of containing the opposition requires more thought than simply sticking a leg in and hoping for the best. You have to actively time when to tackle or decide if it’s better to simply hold a player back, rather than rush in for the ball, miss the tackle, and have the opposition pass.

If the opposition does get past, you now have the option of jostling them–that is, pulling on their shirt or using your player’s arm to hold them back. This is a neat feature that brings the game closer to how the real-life sport is played, with new player animations making it look more realistic.

Be warned, though; pull too many shirts, and the referee won’t hesitate to throw a yellow, or even a red, card your way. Other improvements to the animation lie in the new player impact engine. This adds a physics system that simulates the impact between two players during tackles or other forms of contact.

If you go in for a particularly aggressive tackle and slam into the player, the resulting animation is rarely the same twice, depending on the build and strength of the two players in question. Both or just one of you may end up in a heap on the pitch, while passing players leap over fallen bodies to get past.

On the whole, the system works well, adding another layer of realism to the game. It’s not infallible, though, and there are times when you see some comical rag-doll-physics-like animations as players flop over the pitch.

Sending one to the back of the net is as satisfying as ever.

More tweaks to the controls come in the form of precision dribbling, which enable you to control the ball more accurately in close quarters. For example, when you get near the touchline, your player automatically knows he’s there and retains tighter control of the ball to keep it in play.

The system also affords you the ability to use small, quick touches to control the ball, letting you perform sharp turns and making it easier to beat the opposition’s defence. You can shield yourself from other players while dribbling too, rather than being rooted to the spot like in previous games, giving you another way to get past defenders.

These enhancements make FIFA Soccer 12 the most realistic representation of the sport yet. Scoring goals is trickier, with teams working together to implement strong lines of defence, but the game is all the better for it. You have to work harder, with a greater amount of skill required than ever before. These changes make those moments when you manage to score all the more satisfying.

You can break out your newfound dribbling and defending skills in a number of modes, many of which have carried over from last year. These include Career mode, which lets you compete as a single player working through a 15-year career; as a player manager, where you manage your team’s lineup and compete on the pitch; or as a manager, where you take a backseat to the on-pitch action and instead focus on tactics and building up your squad.

There’s something for everyone, and if you tire of one mode, you can easily switch between them at any time to mix things up. There’s also an array of tournaments to play through, from the F.A. Cup through to custom leagues and knockout tournaments.

A combination of new and returning online modes make FIFA Soccer 12 the most feature-packed version of the game yet. New this year are Head to Head Seasons and Online Friendlies. Head to Head Seasons is an online league, split into different divisions.

You start in division 10, and at the end of each 10-game season your results determine whether you get promoted or, at the very least, avoid relegation to a lower division. You get three points for a win and one for a draw, with the number of points needed for promotion getting increasingly higher as you progress.

Each division also has its own cup to win, starting with the EA Shield for lower divisions, through to the Premier Cup for the top tier. Tournaments for cups take place every few weeks, so you’ve always got another chance to compete for some silverware if you miss out the first time. Your performance is tracked too, so you can see how you compare to the rest of the online community, with a table showing you how many players are in each division.

Online Friendlies is an evolution of unranked matches from FIFA Soccer 11. While you still play friendly games against your friends, the results are tracked. Every friend you play against creates a new season, with the two of you having 10 matches in which to earn more points and beat each other.

At the end of the season, the winner receives another trophy for the cabinet. This makes playing against your friends all the more exciting, particularly if you’re competing in regular matches, giving you all the excitement of the ranked leagues without having to play with strangers.

If you do delve into playing with random opponents, though, things have been tweaked so matches are fairer. Instead of searching for a match and then picking a club–which usually results in everyone playing as a five-star team–you now pick your team before searching for an opponent.

The game automatically finds an opponent with a similar level team and takes into account your division, skill, location, controls, and Did Not Finish percentage (rage quitters beware!), ensuring that most matches are even.

Whichever mode you play in–online or offline–all your hard work is kept track of in FIFA Soccer 12′s excellent EA Sports Football Club. At its simplest, the mode keeps track of your experience points, which are awarded to you in any game mode, giving you an overall level that you can compare to others worldwide.

It’s only when you delve deeper that the real fun begins. You can choose to support any real-life club from around the world, with your accomplishments and experience going toward them, regardless of what team you’re playing as. This gives your favourite real-life team an overall position on global league tables, with the league resetting each week to allow for fresh competition.

Fans of smaller clubs aren’t at a disadvantage either, as scores for each team are based on averages, so even if you team’s fan base is outnumbered when compared to the likes of Manchester United or Real Madrid, you’re still in with a shot.

There’s never a dull moment in FIFA.

Competing to progress your favourite team up the table, even if it is a virtual one, is very compelling. Seeing your team slip down even one notch on the leaderboard is enough to spur you on to play more matches. There are also plans for EA Sports Football Club to incorporate real events from the world of football.

These will include different challenges and storylines to play through. For example, if Liverpool beats Everton in the real world, that could be turned into a FIFA challenge where you could replay the match and try to avenge Liverpool. It’s an interesting concept, and how well it works depends largely on any drama going on in the real world, and the ability for EA’s dedicated writing staff to turn that into an interesting challenge.

Integration with other FIFA games, such as on mobile devices and social networks, is also promised, letting you earn experience points regardless of which version of FIFA you’re playing. And if that’s not enough for you, the FIFA Ultimate Team mode that was released for previous games as DLC is now included for free too, letting you build a team of players by competing in matches and trading player cards.

Whichever mode you play in, you’re treated to the slick presentation that the series is famed for. Menus are easy to navigate, the commentary is exciting and well delivered, and the visuals are much crisper and more detailed than those in FIFA Soccer 11.

If you’ve got the right hardware, FIFA Soccer 12 on PC looks even better than its console counterparts. It’s easy to recognise your favourite players as they line up on the pitch, with official licences ensuring they sport the right kit too.

And with the addition of the player impact engine, animations are more realistic than they’ve ever been. Excellent online modes and improved player handling further cement FIFA Soccer 12 as football at its best–gloriously deep, rewarding, addictive, and as close as you can get to the real thing without donning a pair of boots.

• Lots of vintage teams and players
• My Player mode is now immediately engaging
• Amazing presentation
• Lifelike animation
• Some gameplay tweaks bring this even closer to the real thing

The Bad

• Occasionally cheap AI
• Some out-of-place animations

Rating

NBA 2K12 retains its crown as the best basketball franchise by offering a number of worthwhile improvements across the board. Michael Jordan was renowned for making small improvements to his game during the offseason. His opponents would think they had a grasp on what His Airness was capable of, only to find that he had added post-up moves or a fall-away jumper to his already-impressive repertoire.

NBA 2K12 has taken a few notes from the former Bulls’ star. Last year’s entry was already the most realistic simulation of professional hoops ever released, and a number of small but important tweaks make this year’s edition even more engrossing.

A revamped My Player mode makes your quest to turn your benchwarmer into a Hall of Famer more engaging than in years past. A slew of historical players and teams, complete with accurate television presentation for every era, also make this the definitive package for anyone craving some roundball action.

There are a smattering of tiny flaws, such as occasionally prescient artificial intelligence and a couple of wonky animations, but you have to hunt for reasons to be put off by this experience. The greatest player who ever lived has been retired for years, but the best basketball game around is just entering its prime.

The most noteworthy addition to NBA 2K11 was a mode that allowed you to participate in a handful of Michael Jordan’s most famous games. In NBA 2K12, history is an even larger focus. Fifteen of the greatest players of all time are represented here, and you get to take part in some of their most important games.

Teammates, opponents, and coaches are lifted straight from their eras, and the expertly designed presentation ensures that everything looks just as it should. Play as Bill Russell in the early years of the NBA and you see the action play out through grainy archival footage.

When you select Julius Erving’s Sixers’ teams, however, the muted tones of the early ’80s shine through. These touches add a layer of authenticity to a package that is already bursting with it. And, unlike last year, you don’t have to hit certain statistical milestones to complete each challenge.

Previously, this focus on raw numbers forced you to become a ball hog, which sapped away the excitement of taking part in classic showdowns. Now, if you’d rather light up the net with Joe Dumars than with Isiah Thomas on the Bad Boy Pistons, the choice is yours. And when you win a game, you unlock those older teams, so you can stage your own competitions.

No matter which era you happen to be playing in, the presentation is incredible. The sights and sounds mirror the real thing with meticulous detail. For anyone who grew up watching the NBA, it’s hard not be whisked away by your nostalgic memories as you see these digital creations move just as they should.

Take the flamboyant Dennis Rodman. If you find yourself at the charity stripe, you see him chuck the ball indifferently toward the hoop just as he used to when he was an active player. Shorts change in length and tightness through the eras, while players juke and lean with lifelike movement.

Commentators also document the action with an air of confidence and understanding rarely seen in a video game. Small animations that you wouldn’t expect further cement just how amazing this game looks. When you slam into a player who is attempting a shot, you may reach out to grab his wrist after the whistle blows, to prevent him from falling.

It’s stunning how many details are hidden in NBA 2K12. However, there are some odd moments when the facade fades away. Some animations, such as when you throw a pass on a fast break, look strangely robotic. And it’s jarring to see modern advertisements in throwback games. But the presentation is mostly top notch, making this game almost as much fun to watch as it is to play.

If you look closely, you can see Rip pouting.

Another big improvement has been made to the My Player mode, which has been overhauled to make it much more accessible than in previous years. In earlier games, after you created your character, you would have to take part in dull development league games until you were called up to the big leagues.

While it may have been a realistic way to achieve success for borderline NBA talents, it was incredibly boring. Now, you play in one exhibition game before you’re drafted and then you get to show off your stuff against the best players in the world. Although progression is quicker, it’s just as rewarding as before because your goal is ultimately to get your bust displayed in the Hall of Fame.

You just get to skip to the fun parts much earlier. Plus, an interview process has been incorporated that helps to develop a stronger connection to your character. Teams drill you before the draft and reporters toss softballs at you after games, and what you say determines how others view you.

This may still feel like a small step rather than a giant leap–because you have only a small amount of control in these matters–but it does a good job of keeping you invested for your entire career. Climbing the mountain toward immorality in My Player takes a lot of work, but it’s empowering to watch your player grow from an ordinary scrub to a perennial all-star.

The off-the-court aspects of NBA 2K12 are impressive across the board, and this high quality comes across in the action as well. There aren’t many changes from last year’s game, but there’s little reason to drastically tinker when the results were already so good.

Finer control over your character’s movements gives you even more versatility on the offensive end, and there’s a handy training camp to take you through the paces. There’s a smooth flow that replicates the real thing in exacting detail, and the artificial intelligence is smart enough to shut down your offense if you get too predictable. You need to run plays, move the ball smartly, and shoot when an opening presents itself or you’ll find yourself down by double digits before you can say Luc Richard Mbah a Moute.

Hard-nosed AI is a good thing, but NBA 2K12 sometimes crosses over into cheap territory. Opponents might know what you’re doing even when their back is turned or intercept a clean pass, and rare as these occurrences may be, they are maddening in a close contest. They don’t smother the fun, but in a game that is usually so realistic, these blemishes stand out.

Drexler wasn’t even the best Clyde in NBA history.

NBA 2K12 isn’t hugely different from last year’s version, but enough additions have been included to make it exciting for fans hungering for some hardwood hoops. More vintage players, small gameplay tweaks, and the same great presentation you expect make this the best NBA game around.

Plus, Association mode can now be played offline and online, which gives you even more freedom in designing your dynasty. Like Michael Jordan during his playing days, if NBA 2K12 had simply rested on its laurels, it would still be the best out there.

• Impressive artistic design
• A host of charismatic characters
• Enjoyable array of weapons and items
• Speedy and gratifying vehicular action

The Bad

• Numerous visual bugs
• Inconsistent textures
• Story isn’t strong enough to make you care about the primary conflict

Rating

Though plagued by technical issues, Rage creates an engrossing world full of thoughtful detail and solid shooter action. The postapocalyptic future is looking pretty good. From the moment you step out under the brilliant, cloud-studded sky of a ruined world, Rage proclaims its artistic prowess.

As you drive along dirt roads through narrow canyons among the hardscrabble outposts of civilization, every environmental element pops with thoughtful details. As you converse with the people you meet, their expressive faces and believable dialogue make you eager to hear what they say next.

This is an attractive world that makes you excited to go exploring, but there is disappointingly little to find off the beaten path. The richness of Rage makes you wish it were even richer, and you may also find yourself wishing for a better story, more robust ways to enjoy this world with friends, and, above all, better technical execution.

There are numerous visual problems that crop up with various video cards, and the texture detail is disappointingly inconsistent. Though Rage still offers an exciting and rewarding adventure, the PC is not the best platform on which to enjoy it.

The early hours of Rage’s PC launch were plagued with problems, and many still linger as of this writing. Nvidia cards are still prone to screen tearing, while AMD cards see issues with freezing and wonky character animations. You need to do some research to determine the best drivers for your system, and even then, you may be stuck suffering through some glitches.

There aren’t a lot of graphics settings to tweak here, and even on high settings, Rage is inconsistent. Some textures look stunning, while others are blurry and mundane upon closer inspection. These technical shortcomings make the PC version inferior to its console counterparts, but the excellent artistic design still shines through, making Rage an attractive and enticing game.

Having slept snugly through an extinction-level event in a sealed government refuge, you awaken to find that your fellow sleepers were not so lucky. Alone and unsure, you step out into the world, encounter some savage locals, and end up indebted to a local sharpshooter. He explains that survivors like you haven’t been seen in a long time, and proceeds to ask you for a favor.

Thus begins your journey of helping out the friendly folks of the Wasteland with your natural affinity for driving, collecting, and killing. Each new person you meet is a delight, thanks to stylish character design, expressive animation, and great voice acting. It’s a pleasure to visit the local bar where the freckled proprietor pays you a regular bounty and the garish dealer entices you to play another round of a collectible card game.

This is a world where a sweet young lady teaches you about a flying implement of decapitation, and the puffed-up mayor sends you on a delivery run to a hand-wringing doctor and his possibly sentient mechanical familiar. Rage’s characters are so charismatic that you’ll likely be disappointed when your conversations end and will be eagerly anticipating the next interaction.

The towns and settlements where you find these folks are richly detailed and beg to be explored. Observant players are rewarded with a raft of thoughtful artistic touches, including some cute references to certain iconic video games. As you travel outside these havens and around the spacious environs, you encounter the skeletal remains of freeways and industrial complexes set amidst striking sandstone cliffs and scrubby vegetation.

While the large scenery usually looks fantastic, many smaller elements lack detail, which can create an unpleasant contrast when you are taking in the sights. Despite the inconsistent textures, Rage still makes you want to stop and gawk at the world around you, and the mercenary path you take gives you plenty of opportunities to do so.

Your core missions eventually take a more purposeful path, but Rage does a poor job of drawing you into this crusade, so your quest to ensure a better future for humankind never feels more urgent than your task to bring a boozehound his missing moonshine. It’s a shame that the game doesn’t leverage its enticing world to create a stronger, more compelling adventure, but it’s still fun to explore and inhabit the Wasteland.

You have razor blades on your knuckles, he has a tire around his neck. Fashion is different in the future.

Not all Wasteland inhabitants are friendly, however. Packs of bandits have taken up residence in their own little communities, and each group has its own look, combat tactics, and interior decorations. Keeping an eye out in these dens not only gives you a sense of how your enemies live, but can also yield ammunition, guns, collectible cards, and a wealth of detritus that can be sold or used to build helpful items from schematics you acquire.

A timely bandage or health boost can toughen you up for a challenging fight, while a bladed wingstick or spidery robotic ally can add crucial firepower to your cause. Your bandit enemies shoot accurately and use cover, while your mutant enemies just run headlong toward you, albeit with some surprising evasive maneuvers.

Despite the health items, replenishing health, and rechargeable defibrillation power at your disposal, you can die if you aren’t careful. Still, Rage isn’t a very difficult game, and you may have to increase the difficulty level in order to feel the threat of death looming over you.

The shooting mechanics are solid, and though the guns in Rage’s arsenal are fairly conventional, each one fires with a nice sense of weight. Things get interesting when you incorporate the many weapon-specific ammunition types, such as one that can turn your humble pistol into a powerful hand cannon.

Some types merely deal more damage, while others add an extra explosive or electrical kick. The latter are helpful for taking down mechanical enemies, while the time delay on the former lets you take sinister delight in watching your enemies realize they are about to explode.

Enemies in Rage die with style; some crawl on the ground, mortally wounded but still trying to kill you, while others lose limbs, heads, or complete corporeal integrity. Though it can be odd to fill an enemy with bullets and have him react only to the last one, dealing brutal death is still satisfying.

When you’re not engaged in firefights or friendly conversation, you spend a lot of time driving around the Wasteland. The various four-wheeled vehicles you come to own are fun to whip around in, and the stunning scenery is a constant source of enjoyment.

As you drive from one area to the next, the quality of light changes to create a nice sense of travel. Bandits frequently come after you, and with the application of firepower, expendable items, and some judicious ramming, you assert your vehicular dominance.

There are items for field repairs if you take too much damage, and if you find yourself about to explode (or hung up on a rock or guardrail), you can call for a tow and instantly travel back to the nearest town for a reasonable price. You can upgrade your ride or earn a new set of keys by racing on the Wasteland circuit, but your opponents rarely put up enough of a fight to force a photo finish. The car improvements are worth your time, but if you want a tough race, the competitive online multiplayer is the place to go.

In Road Rage, up to four racers can compete in a few different modes that reward good driving and skilled shooting. Some are straight-up demolition derbies, while others require you to grab fallen meteors or race through checkpoints while avoiding your opponents’ onslaughts.

Road Rage is a fairly shallow experience, despite the variety of cars and weapons that you unlock as you level up, but it’s a worthwhile diversion if you crave competition. You can also team up online in two-player cooperative missions that are very similar to some of the solo missions you embark on in the campaign.

These so-called Legends of the Wasteland are nicely bookended by voice-overs that make you feel like your exploits will be talked about for years to come. In these stand-alone sorties, you must make do with a preset loadout and whatever you can find in the environment, killing enemies while trying to avoid damage in order to preserve your score multiplier.

This mode currently suffers from sporadic bugs that cause strange flickering around character models, which can make your teammate look multidimensional and your opponents hard to headshot. Nonetheless, these are solid challenges to overcome, but with only nine missions, they’re more of a nice bonus than a compelling reason to play.

No ATV is complete without a longhorn skull.

That honor belongs to the lengthy campaign, which can last upward of 20 hours for avid racers and diligent quest seekers. Though the story gets a bit too cliched, there is a robust amount of adventuring to be done in a world that rewards you for your attention.

It’s a shame that your explorations are marred by Rage’s technical shortcomings, and only time will tell how much patches will be able to fix these problems. Rage is better enjoyed on an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, but regardless of which platform you play on, it still offers a rich and rewarding adventure.

Ensemble Studios has long since made a name for itself with its extremely popular Age of Empires series of real-time strategy games, so the company’s latest game, Age of Mythology, seems risky. Not only is this the first Ensemble product to feature a fully 3D graphics engine, but it’s also the first to stray from the purely historical context of Age of Empires and delve into fiction.

In the game, you’ll still find the sort of realistic armies of cavalry, spearmen, and archers you’d find in Age of Empires, but they’ll be fighting alongside the likes of medusas, minotaurs, sphinxes, mummies, frost giants, trolls, and more. So don’t expect Age of Mythology to help you ace any history tests. And yet, much like with the Age of Empires games, you still could easily end up learning a thing or two while playing Age of Mythology.

While the game may not be a simulation of any battles that ever actually took place, it offers great insight into three core historical civilizations and their beliefs, which collectively helped shape much of the world as we know it. More importantly, Age of Mythology executes its concept extremely well, in a manner that should please fans of Ensemble’s previous real-time strategy games as well as many of those who might have found the history-themed Age of Empires games a bit dry.

The developers of Age of Empires have outdone themselves once again with Age of Mythology.

Age of Mythology doesn’t make any huge departures from the conventions of real-time strategy gaming, but rather represents arguably the most refined example of the genre to date. If you’ve played any other real-time strategy game lately, especially Age of Empires II, then you’ll feel very comfortable getting started with Age of Mythology, a highly complex game that will seem remarkably intuitive.

If you’ve played a lot of Age of Empires II, then you’ll get the impression from Age of Mythology that the designers spent their time further adjusting the gameplay conventions that they themselves have already helped pioneer and coming up with lots and lots of clever twists to give the game plenty of appeal, depth, and lasting value.

You’ll also note that Age of Mythology immediately comes across as a highly polished product–fully featured and carefully documented, Age of Mythology is also elegantly designed and surprisingly easy to explain despite its unusual concept.

Most real-time strategy games let you play as a certain number of different factions. In the case of games like this year’s Warcraft III, the relatively small number of playable factions still makes for outstanding gameplay due to the very substantial differences from one faction to the next.

Yet in the Age of Empires games, which featured numerous different playable civilizations, the differences between these were much less obvious–many of the factions shared units, strategies, and graphics. Age of Mythology essentially combines these two philosophies by offering you the chance to control one of three radically different civilizations–the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Norse–as well as three different subsets of each one, based on these respective cultures’ major deities.

There’s variation even within each subfaction–during the course of a match, you’ll get to ally yourself with a number of different minor deities, each of which confers its own unique benefits on your civilization. And not only does allegiance with any of the game’s deities give you special bonuses, but you also get a one-time-use miracle, a unique mythological unit of some sort, special technology, and more. The option to choose from three civilizations, nine major gods, and 27 minor gods adds up to a huge amount of variety.

Three distinctly different civilizations are vie for power in the game: the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Norse.

At its core, Age of Mythology does play a lot like Age of Empires II, as well as other real-time strategy games. A typical match will still require you to spend considerable amounts of time and attention on gathering various resources and building up your civilization, then on producing vast armies, researching numerous technologies and upgrades, and commanding your forces in large battles.

The game’s resource model is very similar to that of Age of Empires II, with one exception. You once again need ample supplies of food to build new units and advance from one stage of civilization to the next, and food is once again obtained from hunting, gathering, farming, or fishing. You once again need gold to research new technologies and construct military units and structures, and gold is mined from clearly visible deposits you’ll find scattered about each map.

You’ll also need to chop plenty of lumber. Stone, the fourth resource of the Age of Empires games, is not a factor in Age of Mythology, though there is a fourth resource: favor. Favor represents the powers of your civilizations’ gods and is used for summoning your civilization’s powerful mythological units, as well as gaining some divine technological bonuses.

One thing that each of the game’s three civilizations have in common is that their temple is one of their most important buildings. It is there that mythological units are summoned and other divine enhancements are granted. However, civilizations each gain favor differently.

Greek villagers can be ordered to pray at a temple, which gradually increases favor. Egyptian workers can construct monuments to their gods–four different, successively larger ones–that generate favor. And the Norse earn favor by waging war. Civilizations also each have different types of hero units available, which specialize in defeating mythological units. The Greeks have a handful of legendary heroes such as Odysseus, Jason, and Heracles.

The Egyptians have priests and a pharaoh, a powerful leader that can be used to speed construction of buildings, increase production, or serve as guardian of his people. The Norse can produce innumerable helsirs, mighty warriors that are most favored by the gods.

The way that the different civilizations generate favor and the way they must incorporate their heroes into battle make for a lot of interesting gameplay right off the bat. For instance, the Greeks can generate favor pretty easily, but cannot have as many heroes in the field as the Norse.

Meanwhile, the Norse can have plenty of heroes in the field, perfect for dealing with the Greeks’ large mythological armies, but cannot earn favor as readily as the Greeks or Egyptians can. Furthermore, the different civilizations gather and use resources differently. The Egyptians don’t build structures as quickly, but do not use wood for making them.

The Norse use their burly infantry for construction, while their worker units are used only for gathering resources. The Norse also use oxcarts as mobile drop-off points for resources, rather than the stationary structures of the other civilizations.

Of further note, hero characters are the only ones that can retrieve relics that can randomly be found on most maps. In Age of Empires, retrieved relics generated a small but steady surplus of gold. However, Age of Mythology has a number of unique relics that confer dramatic bonuses.

It’s therefore more important than ever to actively scout the environment, if only to discover relics early on and keep them out of your opponents’ hands. You also need to search for new settlements, since, unlike in Age of Empires II, you can’t just plunk down a new town hall anywhere. You need additional settlements in order to grow your population limit, and in Age of Mythology, settlements are deliberately spread out so as to discourage overly defensive play.

It may be clear by now that Age of Mythology has a multifaceted balance system that’s far, far more intriguing and complex than the relatively simplistic rock-paper-scissors balance systems seen in most real-time strategy games. Besides having different resources to manage, and myth units and hero units to summon, you also have a wide variety of conventional forces at your disposal, including various foot soldiers, cavalry, archers, siege engines, ships, and more.

Some of these are specialized to be exclusively well suited against certain other types of units, and all can be upgraded. While myth units can often make short work of conventional forces–units like the cyclops and the minotaur can slay most human soldiers in a single blow–you absolutely need to balance your myth units with your standard armies.

For one thing, myth units can’t be produced as readily as conventional forces can. For another, conventional soldiers are well suited for overwhelming enemy hero characters, which, as mentioned, are the biggest threat to your myth units.

To make things even more interesting, as you advance through up to four different ages over the course of a single battle, you’ll choose between two different minor deities at each of these points. While progressing through the ages was a purely linear affair in the Age of Empires games, having these options in Age of Mythology lets you play a little more reactively and puts a certain strategic consequence on being the first to advance in age.

An expert player that learns of his opponent’s allegiance with, for example, Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, may then proceed to focus his efforts on training units that are effective against archers, since Artemis’ powers bolster the Greeks’ archer units. Of course, the player that advanced sooner should have a technological advantage to offset this.

Generally speaking, battles in Age of Mythology have a similar feel to those of Age of Empires II, meaning they’re often big, brutal, and quick. Defensive structures and buildings aren’t quite as resistant to damage here as in Age of Empires II, and that game’s ubiquitous trebuchet is nowhere to be found. However, using long-range but vulnerable siege engines to crack enemy defenses remains a key aspect of gameplay in Age of Mythology.

Myth units are extremely powerful in battle, and can defeat small armies on their own. You’ll need hero characters to stop them.

The game uses a highly intuitive interface that’s very similar to that of Age of Empires II and offers many of the same enhancements. Float your mouse pointer over virtually any object in the game, and you’ll get concise yet thorough descriptions of what it is, what it does, and what it’s good for.

You can also access a technology tree that includes hypertext links to considerable amounts of historical information on all the game’s units, gods, and monsters. During gameplay, automatic unit formations, good pathfinding, production and research queues, and generally intelligent autonomous behavior on the part of your units all help to minimize the amount of micromanaging you’ll have to do.

In another nice touch, units with special abilities use those abilities automatically–however, this can actually be used to the advantage of the player taking on those units, since he can force them to waste their special abilities on inconsequential targets.

At any rate, despite all the automation, you’ll absolutely need to make every moment of every match count if you plan to play competitively, and you’ll have to balance overseeing your civilization with scouting and managing your battles. But at least you won’t have to spend any time micromanaging any of your individual units.

Actually, one issue with Age of Mythology is that most of the units in the game appear very small, and hero units in particular–though they’re distinguished with a slight glow–can be tough to pick out of the fray. Hotkeys are available for quickly cycling through all hero units, though, as well as for locating any idle villagers.

For that matter, hotkeys are available for pretty much all the game’s actions and can be redefined as you see fit. You can’t simultaneously select as many units in Age of Mythology as you could in Age of Empires II, so you’ll have to be prepared to use multiple groups of units simultaneously.

But in another great touch, Age of Mythology visually represents your unit groupings with onscreen banners that indicate the makeup of that group–you’ll be able to quickly distinguish your cavalry group from your siege engine group, for example.

Age of Mythology includes a linear, story-driven single-player campaign spanning three dozen missions, which let you control Greek, Egyptian, and Norse forces as you progress. Some decent-looking cutscenes using the game’s 3D engine are used to drive the story along, which concerns an Atlantean hero and his legendary journeys on land, sea, and beyond.

The mission variety in the campaign is good, and four different difficulty settings ensure that just about anyone should find a suitable challenge from the computer opponent. The campaign also does a fine job of introducing you to most all of the game’s units and concepts contextually, or it’ll at least give you some opportunity to play around with most of the units, technologies, and structures to get a sense of how everything works.

While some of the campaign missions do feature some unusual circumstances or objectives that change, the game’s story isn’t incredibly engaging, not that Age of Empires II fans would expect it to be. These players will probably make a beeline for the game’s random map mode, anyway.

Age of Mythology offers tremendous lasting value in either its single-player or multiplayer mode.

The random map mode is much like that of Age of Empires II, except that it lets you choose from a significantly wider variety of settings, from the deserts of Egypt, to the frigid plains of Scandinavia, to the mythological Greek underworld. You can play with or against as many as 11 other computer-controlled players, and their behavior can be adjusted independently of each other.

Different gameplay variations like those of Age of Empires II are available and include deathmatch (which starts you off with plenty of resources) and conquest (where only a military victory is allowed), while the default setting grants victory to whoever wins through conquest, through building a wonder, or through capturing all settlements. The robust, highly replayable random map mode will be the core of the game for many players.

For many others, online play will be the option of choice. Age of Mythology incorporates a much more streamlined, integrated multiplayer mode than that of Age of Empires II, and it’s functionally similar to what’s been found in Blizzard’s and Westwood’s recent real-time strategy games.

Most notably, there’s a feature that lets you automatically find a willing opponent looking for a similar type of match. We were able to quickly find online opponents at all hours, and Age of Mythology seems to run smoothly and stably in multiplayer over a decent Internet connection. Ensemble and Microsoft’s service even tracks numerous statistics for each player and ranks them relative to the competition.

Due to the complexity of this game and its broad range of options–and due to the inclusion of a complete scenario editor that lets anyone so inclined attempt to build a custom map or mission–Age of Mythology seems certain to enjoy the same sort of long life online as its predecessors.

Age of Mythology is a great-looking game, filled with bright colors and carefully detailed animations. You’ll see Egyptian slingers whirl their weapons menacingly as they charge into battle. You’ll see minotaurs gore their victims, sending their unfortunate foes flying.

You’ll see some impressive divine powers; Egyptian god Thoth’s meteor and Horus’ tornado are among the most spectacular. As mentioned, the game’s units, and to some extent the buildings, can look a bit too homogeneous on first impression, but with time you’ll learn to differentiate everything at a quick glance. And you’ll consistently be entertained by the entire look of the game, which uses lots of ambient animations to make the world seem alive.

Fans of classic films such as The Clash of the Titans andJason and the Argonauts will note that Age of Mythology attempts to re-create the same sort of dynamic as the battles in those films. When you see a small band of human forces come across even a single myth unit in Age of Mythology, you’ll just wince as the myth unit invariably deals grievous damage to its mundane foes.

The combination of historical and fantastical units on the battlefield gives Age of Mythology a style all its own.

Age of Mythology also sounds terrific. It has a stirring musical score that’s distinctly different for each of the civilizations, and unit voices are done in the three cultures’ native languages. The campaign’s cutscenes are in English, but its voice-over is still very good, giving you a strong sense of the different characters’ personalities even when the rapid-fire missions don’t leave much room for development.

Plenty of memorable audible cues are used to signify various in-game events deserving of your attention, and the sounds of battle are convincingly done, though a bit subdued much like in Age of Empires II. Those stepping into Age of Mythology after having played Warcraft III might miss hearing many different responses from each unit, but overall, Age of Mythology is as much a pleasure to listen to as it is to watch.

Of course, what’s most important is that Age of Mythology plays remarkably well. Featuring lots of interesting, inventive design decisions, plenty of fun-to-use units, and tons of variety, Age of Mythology is the last real-time strategy game you’ll need for a long time. It’s a necessary addition to any real-time strategy fan’s collection, and the game is accessible enough so that even those without much experience with the genre should be able to pick up and enjoy the game without getting overwhelmed.

Novices and die-hard RTS players alike will all note the remarkable amount of care and quality that clearly went into every aspect of Age of Mythology–the sorts of things that have already established Ensemble Studios as one of the leading developers of real-time strategy games and that now reinforce the company’s position as a leader and innovator in one of PC gaming’s most competitive and most popular genres.

Warcraft III The Frozen Throne is an impressive expansion pack for a remarkably good game, and anyone who enjoyed Warcraft III needs to get it. The sign of a truly great expansion pack is when, having played it, you realize you could never go back to the original game. After all, truly great expansion packs don’t just add new content–they add real depth, and fundamentally make the core game better.

Blizzard Entertainment knows the drill when it comes to delivering these sorts of products. Its follow-up releases for 1998′s Starcraft and 2000′s Diablo II were so effective and so good that many, many people are still playing both of those games today, all these years later.

Given Blizzard’s track record with expansion packs, it’s understandable that fans of the company’s games would have very high expectations for Warcraft III The Frozen Throne. Last year’s real-time strategy game was a very tough act to follow on any number of levels, and yet Blizzard has delivered a terrific, full-featured expansion for Warcraft III that makes an already outstanding game significantly more so.

The Frozen Throne features four single-player campaigns and completely revitalizes the skirmish and multiplayer gameplay.

To say the least, there was a lot to like about Warcraft III in the first place. The game’s single-player campaign delivered an interesting and engaging story told from four unique perspectives, its online multiplayer mode was the best in the real-time strategy genre, its four distinctly different factions featured numerous viable strategies and tactics, its gameplay was focused on action and rewarded skill and practice, and its powerful scenario editor let you design your own missions or entirely new gameplay modes using the game’s great-looking 3D engine. Basically, The Frozen Throne adds to and improves on every single one of these features, and more.

If you enjoyed Warcraft III’s single-player campaigns, you’ll be pleased to know that Warcraft III The Frozen Throne offers at least as much if not more single-player material. The campaign picks up where Warcraft III left off, in the aftermath of the banishment of the burning legion.

The renegade half-demon Illidan and the death knight Arthas are at the center of the story, as both of these power-hungry characters are seeking to take control of a world already ravaged by conflict. You play the campaign missions linearly, just like in Warcraft III, starting with the night elf sentinels, then moving on to the remnants of the human alliance, and finally taking control of the undead scourge. There are more than two dozen sizeable missions in all.

The campaign missions offer remarkable variety from one to the next, and it’s not a stretch to say that these represent the most skillfully designed single-player scenarios in any real-time strategy game to date. Recognizing that many players have long since grown weary of the standard formula of having to build up a base, raise an army, and then attack an entrenched enemy, Blizzard accordingly included this formula in only a few of Warcraft III The Frozen Throne’s campaign missions.

Some of the missions grant you access to multiple armies, each charged with its own important objectives. Many missions feature clever variations on familiar strategies. Some limit the types of units you’ll get, which may prompt you to develop a newfound appreciation for some of Warcraft III’s less-intuitive strategies.

All the missions are story-driven and seem plausible enough in the context of the game. The campaign packs in a lot of surprises, perhaps more so in the mission design than in the story itself, and it offers a significant challenge that will help bring you up to speed on some of The Frozen Throne’s new gameplay additions.

New heroes such as the blood mage add depth and complexity to Warcraft III. And they’re just plain cool.

The plot of the campaign is sufficiently epic, and the superb voice acting and memorable character designs effectively drive the story along. But this isn’t the greatest story ever told for a couple of reasons. There’s actually a lot more buildup than resolution in what ought to have been a culmination of the previous game’s storyline.

Furthermore, Warcraft III The Frozen Throne’s plot just doesn’t give you anything to latch on to–there’s no single central character, and since you’ll be playing both as and against numerous characters over the course of the game, you’ll sometimes find yourself wondering exactly whom you’re supposed to be rooting for.

It’s an interesting approach to be sure, and it’s similar to what Blizzard did with the stories of both Warcraft III and Starcraft: Brood War, but the real issue is probably that none of Warcraft III The Frozen Throne’s characters are particularly likeable–they’re charismatic yet despicable, good-natured yet foolishly naïve, or vengeful to a fault.

Then again, most real-time strategy games–and most games in general–don’t even try to create such complex characters, so the fact that you can even criticize the finer points of the game’s story speaks to its impressive depth.

The orcs are conspicuously absent from the main campaign, but they’re central to a bonus campaign in which you play as a half-ogre beastmaster who befriends the orcs, who’ve just settled in a new land. This campaign plays less like a real-time strategy game and more like Diablo, as you’ll persistently control just the beastmaster and his small entourage while exploring a map and its surrounding areas, completing quests, gaining experience levels and better gear, and more.

All this is actually quite entertaining, though the bonus campaign isn’t balanced as well as the core missions, and it becomes pretty easy pretty quickly. Also, enemies will respawn on the map after a while, and it can be tedious to have to slog through the same underpowered foes every time you have to backtrack. The bonus campaign is fun anyway, and the cliffhanger ending promises more of the same in the future.

Warcraft III The Frozen Throne adds three beautiful new types of environments that look even better than the original game’s maps, several new units to each of the game’s factions, and new abilities for some of the original units. Many of the new units are designed to counter particular strategies–specifically, to counter spellcasting units–and each faction’s air force has also been bolstered by at least one new support unit.

So while the night elves’ faerie dragons or the humans’ spellbreakers won’t replace your frontline troops (though the night elves’ gigantic new mountain giants certainly might in the late game), adding a few of them to your army can make a big difference.

In one of its most meaningful additions, the expansion also introduces a fourth hero character for each side, and these are featured prominently in the campaign–you’ll gain an appreciation for most all their powers in the single-player mode and can then use these powerful troops in multiplayer matches.

Though each of the new heroes is very likeable in its own right, the undead’s crypt lord, which looks like an enormous stag beetle, is probably the most impressive. All the new units also sound great, and some have some very funny things to say when you click on them repeatedly.

The improved artificial intelligence makes The Frozen Throne quite fun to play on your own, but Battle.net is still where the real action is.

On top of all that, numerous new neutral units and buildings figure prominently in the expansion. Some fans of 1996′s Warcraft II were slightly disappointed when they realized Warcraft III had no naval combat, but now, in some scenarios, ships are available. Just like in Warcraft II, you’ll have access to a troop transport, a destroyer, and a battleship.

The naval combat is as simplistic as ever, but its inclusion is still a nice touch. More importantly, in some scenarios you can recruit a number of neutral heroes that normally aren’t accessible to each faction. The four sides can also build a new type of structure from which they can purchase hero items, such as potions and magic scrolls, as well as items that are specifically useful only to their faction.

Considering how much depth there was to be found in choosing from or choosing combinations of the three heroes per side in Warcraft III, having many additional such characters and all these other things makes the gameplay even more interesting and more complex.

The Frozen Throne also features numerous gameplay balance adjustments and interface tweaks, though almost all of these are now available in a downloadable patch for anyone who owns the original game. Many units and buildings have lower costs than before, making the early part of a Warcraft III match go by even faster as you quickly muster a respectable force.

New early-game defensive structures are available to discourage hero rushing, a popular tactic in the original Warcraft III. The upkeep system has been adjusted to let you marshal larger armies without incurring a penalty to your income, and the unit limit has also been increased slightly. The system used to determine how different weapon types affect different armor types has been overhauled to better balance ranged, melee, flying, and spellcasting units.

Several difficulty settings are available for skirmishes against the AI (which fights like a pro at the toughest setting), whereas the original game didn’t offer any difficulty levels at all and was pretty punishing for more-casual players. All these changes are in fact improvements, though they do cater to more-experienced players (there’s also an option to play

Warcraft III The Frozen Throne with the original Warcraft III rules, if you wish). Whether or not you’re an advanced player, online matches still tend to not last longer than 30 minutes, making Warcraft III the perfect real-time strategy game for both quick sessions and marathons.

Online multiplayer over Battle.net is also improved, thanks to the implementation of player clans and automated tournaments, as well as some other minor improvements. Now you can gather up nine or more of your friends and form a clan on Battle.net, which allows you to have your own private chat channel and your own internal rankings systems and lets you compete against other clans on a dedicated clan ladder.

Tournaments, meanwhile, adjust the rules of the game and strictly enforce a 30-minute time limit. Blizzard has also included numerous new multiplayer maps, as well as a few fun multiplayer scenarios based on popular user mods. Battle.net is running as smoothly as ever, and at this point in time, just after the expansion’s release, you’re virtually guaranteed to find fierce competition at all hours. The best Battle.net option remains the arranged teams mode, where you and one or two friends can quickly get into matches with teams of the same relative skill level.

One year later, Warcraft III is better than ever, thanks to The Frozen Throne.

Not only does it play better, but Warcraft III The Frozen Throne also looks and sounds just as excellent as Warcraft III did a year ago. The new units and map types are colorful, dynamic, and highly detailed. There’s new music for all the factions, and the new tracks fit in well with the original themes.

New intro and ending cinematics that are on par with the high-quality Warcraft III CG sequences bookend the campaign. Warcraft III The Frozen Throne also features an improved version of the world editor utility that gives scenario designers more and better options for creating complex and original new scenarios, in addition to straightforward skirmish maps.

All things considered, Warcraft III The Frozen Throne is an impressive expansion pack for a remarkably good game, and anyone who enjoyed Warcraft III needs to get it. It’s more expensive than the average add-on (and requires the original game to play it), but it offers much, much more.

Blizzard Entertainment, due the commercial success of its games, is in the privileged position of being able to spend seemingly as much time as is necessary to create highly polished, long-lasting computer games and then support those games for a number of years. And judging from this latest game Warcraft III The Frozen Throne, the company seems to be taking full advantage of that position.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 is quite probably the most entertaining and enjoyable golf game ever released. In the mid- and late-1990s, PC golfers had a half-dozen top-shelf simulations from which to choose. But when the tech market and the economy took a tumble, at the turn of the decade, so did computer golf.

Today, there are just two serious contenders: Microsoft’s Links and EA Sports’ Tiger Woods. Fortunately, they’re both exceptionally good. In fact, the latest version of the Tiger series, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004, is quite probably the most entertaining and enjoyable golf game ever released.

Though not quite as clinical as Links, it builds upon last year’s impressive edition in several key areas and adds enticing new perks, such as an improved career mode and fully customizable golfers. For pure on-course excitement and graphical wizardry, Tiger Woods 2004 will be awfully hard to beat.

With Tiger Woods’ “game face” feature, creating a fully customized persona is very easy and tons of fun.

Let’s look at the raw numbers, which, for this year’s iteration, are extraordinary. For starters, the game offers an amazing 18 courses, including veteran venues Bay Hill Club & Lodge, Colonial Country Club, Pebble Beach Golf Links, Poppy Hills Golf Course, Prince Course at Princeville, Royal Birkdale Golf Club, Sahalee Country Club, Spyglass Hill Golf Course, St. Andrews Golf Links, TPC at Sawgrass, and TCP of Scottsdale.

New for 2004 are Couer D’Alene and its floating green, the intimidating Bethpage Black Course, Hawaii’s gorgeous Kapalua Plantation Course, Pinehurst No. 2, Virginia’s The Highlands, and TCP at Avenel. And if 17 real-life locales aren’t enough for you, you can always engage in a little fantasy.

Born from the minds of the programmers at developer Headgate Studios, and existing only in the digital world, The Predator is a stunning and treacherous imaginary course set in the wild undergrowth of the South American rain forest.

Once you’ve determined your setting, you’ll want to decide on your virtual persona. Tiger Woods 2004 gives you plenty of decisions here as well, offering no less than 14 touring pros, including the enigmatic and talented Vijay Singh, the long-hitting John Daly, and, of course, Tiger himself. That the only LPGA personality to make the grade is the young and attractive, but unproven, Natalie Gulbis is interesting, to say the least.

Yet predesigned players are just part of the story. For Tiger Woods 2004, Headgate has devised a golfer creation facility that’s second to none. Dubbed “game face,” this nifty system allows you to construct the entire physical makeup of your custom golfer, piece by piece.

You’ll start with the head, where you’ll decide on such minute details as eye shape, facial hair color, chin size, and eyebrow placement. Moving on to the body, you’ll choose whether you’re a muscle-bound oaf, a skinny waif, or something in between. You’ll attire your computerized image and even add accessories, like wristbands and eyewear.

And you’ll make your adjustments graphically, morphing your alter ego via a comprehensive series of sliders and buttons. To increase the size of his forearms, for example, you’ll move the forearm slider to the right while witnessing his incredible growth spurt in real time.

Though some will undoubtedly use the game face feature to concoct hideous creatures that have no place on a golf course, others will use it in the way it was intended–to duplicate their own physical appearances. The fact is that Tiger Woods 2004 is the first golf game to allow you to re-generate yourself digitally, and the results can be quite remarkable.

Like last year, Tiger Woods delivers an impressive roster of golfing opportunities. For many people, the key to the game will undoubtedly be its five levels of difficulty. In rookie mode, virtually anyone–even ultra-newbies–can get through a round of golf without too much shame or grief.

At the intermediate level, those little hooks, slices, and incorrect reads that scarcely affected your shots in rookie mode will really begin to take their toll. At the top–expert level–any deviation from perfection will show itself. Here, all forgiveness is out the window. You’re compelled to delve into the game’s finer points and make use of your entire arsenal of shot-making weapons if you ever hope to stand a chance of a decent showing.

As usual, Headgate offers both two- and three-click traditional swings and a mouse-motion variant. It is the latter of these, the TrueSwing (pioneered by Headgate in Sierra’s gone-but-not-forgotten PGA Championship), that is the real star of the show. Enacted by your golfer in real time, and duplicating the same sort of motion you’d use when swinging a real club, TrueSwing has come of age and is now so perfectly programmed that it must be considered the preferred method for serious golfers.

In Headgate’s version of the mouse-motion swing, the tempo and pace of your entire backward and forward movement has an impact on the final result. So too does the point at which you stop the mouse, the length of the movement, and the amount of side-to-side deviation.

You can even opt to perform horizontal side-to-side TrueSwings if your desk is too crowded to allow vertical up-and-down mouse movements. After your shot, the game delivers painstaking analysis of each factor of your swing, thus allowing you to work on perfecting the speed of your backswing, the general tempo, and/or the side-to-side variances.

When you’re finally ready to take to the links, Tiger Woods 2004 really begins to show its stuff. Perhaps you’ll open with a few minutes of practice on a putting green, driving range, or chipping area. Maybe you need to perfect a given hole on a given course. No matter what you want to do or where you need to do it, the game will oblige.

Newcomers will undoubtedly want to engage in a little competition. They may do so by selecting a casual round and then choosing their favorite game type. Tiger Woods 2004 offers more than a dozen game options and scoring variants, including skins, scramble, shootout, Stableford, and the nifty skills competition.

The most exciting golfer of all time launches a massive drive from the first tee at Scottsdale.

For all the trappings of a televised PGA event, tournament is the way to go. Here, you’ll battle against a full roster of competitors. Those fairways and greens that seemed a little lonely in the casual rounds are now packed with cheering (and groaning) spectators.

In fact, the fully 3D fans of this year’s edition are easily the most convincing of any golf game to date. Add the new announcing tandem of real-world broadcasting icons Gary McCord and David Feherty, who trade banter, offer advice, and generally deliver far more accurate and believable commentary than last year’s Feherty-Bill Macatee duo, and the ambience becomes very convincing indeed.

Advanced players will want to take the big step beyond single tournament play, entering a full season of events. Three seasons are offered by default, but you can add events, alter the rules, and generally customize the structure to suit your preferences. However, if you really want to see all that Tiger offers, you’ll want to enter the game’s career mode.

By jumping into a career, you get to experience a feature set not offered in other golf games. You’ll begin as a poverty-stricken chump with a lot of desire but very little skill, and thereafter you’ll work your way up the ranks. You’ll compete at an amateur level at first, where your opponents are really quite horrendous, flubbing shots and knowing virtually nothing of course management.

Furthermore, the game tends to be seriously forgiving at this lowest level, allowing your drives to fly straight and pure and your eight-foot putts to consistently drop into the cup. As a result, you’ll soon be well on your way to advancing to the next level, where things begin to get considerably tougher.

Featuring dazzling scenery, dramatic camerawork, and believable galleries, Tiger Woods 2004 is the prettiest golf game on the market.

What makes Tiger’s career mode so intriguing is its seemingly limitless versatility. You don’t simply play a series of standard 18-hole events; you do whatever it takes to win money and advance. If that means accepting a closest-to-the-pin challenge from some club monkey at the local practice facility, you do it.

If you’re asked to enter a long drive competition, you do that too. If Ping offers you a sponsorship deal, you grab it and don as much Ping apparel as possible. Nine-hole skins games, hazard extrication, recovery challenges–it’s all here. Along the way, you’ll win trophy balls, gold medals, and, of course, money.

With the extra bread, you can buy lessons and enter more competitions. You’ll also pick up skill points, which you’ll then use to turn your mediocre short-hitter into a menacing long-ball pin-seeking machine. Of course, it is imperative you do improve, as the shot-making becomes that much more difficult in the following levels.

Unfortunately, the career mode is still not all it could be. Lessons, for example, are not particularly informative. Take the flop shot, for example. You’ll head to a given fairway, where the proper application of a flop shot is curtly explained in a single paragraph of text. You are then told to flop your way on to the green.

Rather than slowly learning the proper flop technique through practice and drills, you are suddenly and magically able to do it. Total lesson time: 30 seconds or so. Granted, the lesson costs you a few hundred dollars of your winnings, but it just doesn’t feel right buying your way to better golf.

And, strangely, the career doesn’t offer a season-by-season schedule of tournaments. It actually feels somewhat ad hoc, preferring to keep you constantly entertained by its unusual parameters rather than ever delving into the career of a PGA player. Though definitely fun and exciting, it never allows you to feel the rigors of real life.

Conversely, the game’s presentation leaves little to be desired. Building on last year’s exemplary effort, Headgate has created the prettiest golf game to date. It’s tough to say what’s more impressive–the golfers or the environment–but both are superb. When you first take to the course, you’re immediately struck by the fluidity of your golfer.

In a perpetual state of movement even before he strikes the ball, he effectively replicates all the machinations, all the twitches, and all the preparation of a real pro. His real-time swing is smooth and accurate, and it’s noticeably varied, depending on his position and the lie of the ball.

The animations become even more impressive after his shot. If he is moderately successful, he may tip his hat to the appreciate crowd. If he pulls off a long putt or drops one on to the green from 250 yards away, he’ll pump his fist, look triumphantly to the heavens, and perhaps do a little jig. You’d swear you’re watching a televised broadcast, except your golfer looks so much like you that you know it can’t be.

The environments are, in a word, fantastic. Flags flap in the breeze as flocks of birds fly overhead. The sun gleams and emits the most convincing lens flare. Animated translucent fog banks skitter across the fairways, and surf pounds up against the shorelines, sending clouds of foam skyward. Individual rain droplets flitter down on the course, thus impeding your ball’s ground movement. At sunset, everything takes on a warm orangey hue. It is a superb show that must be seen to be appreciated.

To further enhance this incredible visual spectacle, Headgate has incorporated the most stunning camerawork to grace any golf game. When you launch a drive, the camera follows the ball through its flight path to its final resting position, over the treetops and down close along the grass.

If it’s a particularly good shot, you’ll see an instant replay–perhaps from a reverse or aerial position–that adds even more drama to the proceedings. Prime putts are often shown from a magnified ground level perspective–up tight to the hole with your own gleeful image prancing proudly in the background.

Though Tiger Woods 2004 doesn’t follow the traditional Links approach of multiple concurrent cameras, most golfers will find they won’t really need them. Aside from the standard overhead map positioned on the right side of the screen, players can move the fully customizable main cam to virtually any position within that particular hole.

Reverse views, distant aerial perspectives, remarkably tight close-ups of the stance and the lie–it’s all possible. Once you’ve settled upon a given perspective, you can switch to that view again, on any subsequent hole, by merely clicking the right mouse button.

Tiger’s latest soundscape is solid. As alluded to earlier, Feherty and McCord are informative, rarely annoying, and sometimes downright funny. The sheer number of commentary sound bytes has been increased from previous versions, and the chances of hearing erroneous remarks have been dramatically lowered.

Ambient effects are varied and believable. There aren’t too many birds–as was the curse of many golf games of the past–sensitive crowds, or running water sounds. Galleries do tend to overreact on some shots and underreact on others, but it’s not too distracting.

Tiger Woods’ instant replay tracks the ball throughout its flight path, delivering vivid aerial perspectives of courses like Pebble Beach.

Even with its multitude of options and game types, players will want to occasionally seek out a little human competition. For its latest golf effort, EA Sports has ensured this is easy to do. Whether you prefer hotseat, network, or Internet golfing, the game obliges.

Certainly the quickest way to drum up a willing partner or four is through the EA Sports Online service, where we found no shortage of evil people waiting to whomp us on any given course. The game proved solid as a rock, through our cable connection, though we couldn’t help but wonder how some of these players got so darned good.

With Headgate now firmly in command of the Tiger Woods series, it has taken the game to new heights. Not a quantum leap forward from last year’s installment, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 nevertheless cleans up a few problem areas and adds several welcome amenities. Links veterans may argue, but the title for the most entertaining golf game is most definitely in Tiger’s corner, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004.

Far Cry isn’t just a stunning technical accomplishment. It’s quite possibly the best single-player first-person shooter experience for the PC since Half-Life. For almost a year now, the gaming world has eagerly anticipated the arrival of the next-generation wave of first-person shooters.

These new games would finally begin to take advantage of the powerful graphical features that hardware companies have been incorporating into their video cards to deliver unprecedented visuals.

But while we’re still waiting to see the fruits of the labors of storied developers like id Software and Valve, Crytek, a relatively obscure German developer, has managed to beat everyone to the punch with Far Cry. In fact, Crytek almost delivers a knockout blow. Far Cry isn’t just a stunning technical accomplishment. It’s quite possibly the best single-player first-person shooter experience for the PC since Half-Life.

Welcome to the jungle.

In Far Cry, you play as Jack Carver, a guy who’s been hired to sail a mysterious woman around the Pacific. However, Jack’s ship suddenly comes under attack. After washing ashore on a tropical island, sans the mysterious woman, Carver must investigate his surroundings so that he can find her and eventually rescue her from an army of heavily armed mercenaries.

From this point, you’ll delve into a story that combines the epic adventure of Half-Life with the bizarreness of The Island of Dr. Moreau, along with a good, healthy mix of Jurassic Park-style tropical island creepiness. You’ll explore facilities worthy of Half-Life’s Black Mesa, battle it out with brutally tough opponents, and assault a volcano stronghold in a James Bond-inspired finale that also offers a nightmarish vision of hell.

Without a doubt, Far Cry has the most advanced graphics seen in any PC game to date. Everything in this game looks amazing, and the level of verisimilitude is unprecedented. Jungles actually feature dense foliage that consists of trees, plants, and tall grasses, and this foliage is filled with birds and insects.

Beaches have blinding-white sand, and the surf slowly laps ashore. The character models are some of the best we’ve ever seen in such a game, and they’re richly detailed and animated. The game also incorporates real-time lighting and shading effects to a degree rarely seen before, so when you walk in the jungle, you actually see the shadows of overhead leaves flickering on your rifle.

In some of the larger indoor levels, the shadows of oncoming opponents are projected in larger-than-life form onto walls. Intense heat blur from lava streams distort the atmosphere. And a near miss from an enemy rocket will black out your vision–as if you got the wind knocked out of you. You can’t help but be pulled in by the sheerimmersiveness of the game.

During the many firefights in Far Cry, you’ll go up against cunning opponents, such as mercenaries who know how to use cover. They’ll run between cover while shooting at you along the way. The lushness of the jungle usually means that these engagements turn into cat-and-mouse affairs, where you slowly stalk your prey.

The jungle is so dense, however, that you often can’t see your enemies until you’re practically right on top of them. Sound plays an important part in the game at these moments, because you can track opponents by their sounds, and they can track you by yours.

You can throw a rock to create a distraction, and you can crawl around the jungle to make as little noise as possible. Stealth can play a critical role in the game at times, and one of the few complaints we have about it is that the enemy artificial intelligence seems to have a very low detection threshold. If you make the slightest noise, all the bad guys in the vicinity go to full alert, rather than investigating further.

Black Hawks will be the bane of your existence.

The sound effects in the game contribute heavily to the creepy atmosphere. For instance, you’ll be working your way through a dark indoor level and you’ll hear disturbing noises up ahead. Then someone you didn’t realize was there will suddenly say something, and you’ll jump out of your seat.

In the jungle, birds will chirp overhead, and insects will buzz in your ear. When a helicopter approaches, you’ll hear the thrum of the rotors getting closer and closer. You can eavesdrop on conversations by using the combination binocular-sound microphone featured in the game.

These conversations tend to be enlightening because you can find out what the mercenaries are worried about or what’s up ahead. The voice acting is corny in a way that fits in with the over-the-top action movie feel of the game.

You can also use a variety of vehicles, including jeeps, hang gliders, and boats. However, these aren’t as tightly integrated into the game as they could have been. For instance, jeeps are pretty much restricted to moving along on roads, because there’s very little open country on the islands.

You can get into some wild chase scenes, but driving around exposes you to detection, so it’s usually better to go on foot, if you can. And it’s certainly unnerving to see mercenaries using vehicles against you. In particular, Black Hawk helicopters will swoop over the jungle to hunt for you, and there are plenty of wild moments where you’ll have to try to fight them off. And in homage to Half-Life, an Osprey can fly over, and mercenaries will rappel to the ground. At night, you can see the headlights of approaching vehicles, which gives you time to either hide or set up a hasty ambush.

The game limits you to four weapons at a time, so like in Halo, there’s a tactical element present that makes you weigh the positives and negatives of each weapon. All the weapons are taken from the real world, including the M4 carbine and the G36 assault rifle. It takes a bit of time to familiarize yourself with each weapon, especially since each has different characteristics, such as recoil.

The G36 is hard to aim while firing, and the P90 submachine gun has a high rate of fire but does less damage. Hit location is also important. Headshots usually result in kills, while mercenaries have body armor that makes them resistant to hits to the torso. There is a rudimentary physics engine in the game that lets you knock over objects and hurls bodies in the air, but it’s not as fleshed-out as it could be. For instance, a wooden crate will float in the water, but it won’t shatter, even if you fire a minigun at it.

You can drive vehicles from a third-person perspective, which is easier.

Far Cry features a loading technique that’s similar to the one used in Half-Life and Halo. There’s generally one long load at the beginning of each chapter. Then the entire level, no matter how large, plays seamlessly after that. The game only pauses for a fraction of a second every now and then to autosave your progress.

Otherwise, there’s nothing that takes you out of your suspension of disbelief, so you always feel as though you’re actually exploring a tropical archipelago. The game uses a checkpoint-style save system, so you can’t manually save your progress. If you die, you’ll start back at the last checkpoint, which only takes a few moments to load.

The inability to quick save the game isn’t as annoying as it seems, since the checkpoints are generally spaced within reason. However, there are a few moments where it feels like the checkpoints are few and far between, which can be frustrating when you die and have to restart. At any rate, publisher Ubisoft reports that a quick-save feature will be added in a downloadable patch for the game.

The single-player campaign packs more than 20 hours worth of gameplay, which is an impressive amount in this day and age–when most first-person shooters feature campaigns that are half this length. And the developers manage to do this without making it feel like they’re recycling themselves through the campaign.

As you slowly uncover the plot, there’s always something that will awe you, stun you, or scare you. Just when you think you’ve seen it all or you’ve gotten to the point where most games would end, the designers keep on going and up the ante even more.

The multiplayer portion of Far Cry is competent but not nearly as spectacular as the single-player game. There are only three game modes–free-for-all, team deathmatch, and assault–as well as a limited number of maps for each mode. Moreover, all the maps are quite large in size, which means that if you only have a handful of players, then you’ll spend a lot of time looking for someone to kill.

You’ll also spend a lot of time just moving around the map because sandy surfaces restrict your movement speed. Additionally, movement speed is reduced by the specific weapon you’re carrying. There are a few vehicles in multiplay, but they’re not too useful during combat. The jeep, for example, has an open-air driver’s compartment, which means there’s no protection at all from bullets.

And there are not a lot of places to drive because the thick foliage and rough terrain limit vehicle usage mainly to roads. Some of the weapons also feel horribly unbalanced. For instance, the rocket launcher does a tremendous amount of splash damage, and the sniper rifle can dominate a match over long ranges. There are also a handful of other oddities in multiplay. Most notably, if you pick up a weapon of a certain class that you already possess, the new weapon disappears as though you picked it up, but you won’t actually have it in your inventory.

The lighting and shadow effects in the game are incredibly impressive.

As expected, you’re going to need to have some serious hardware to run Far Cry as it’s meant to be played. While the game will run on lower-end machines, you’ll have to tone down detail settings. And with older video cards, you won’t get much of the graphical eye candy in the game. From our experience, we recommend a 2GHz machine with a DirectX 8.1 or 9.0-compliant video card.

However, Far Cry could very well be the killer app people have been looking for to justify upgrading, because it looks that good. And, frankly, running the game with a lower detail level means you lose a lot of the jungle foliage, which reduces your level of immersion in the game. It should be noted that Crytek’s execution is superb. Aside from the multiplayer quirks, we experienced no stability issues and no bugs.

This is an impressive accomplishment considering the complexity and ambitious scale of the game. The potential for this technology is exciting. Not only do we expect third-party developers to license Crytek’s engine to power their own games, but Crytek also includes editing tools with Far Cry, so modmakers will get to develop their own ideas.

Far Cry is a stunning game in so many ways. It certainly raises the bar for graphics to new heights. And yet, it’s not just a technology demonstration. In Far Cry, the graphics are just one of the ingredients that submerge you into the experience. The developers exhibit a growing sense of maturity throughout the game.

It’s as if they themselves were learning how to use the graphics engine in conjunction with the AI, sound, and level design to create a superior gameplay experience–one that starts out impressively and, for the most part, just keeps getting better. The result is an awesome thing to behold, and it’s an even better thing to experience which makes Far Cry one, stunning game.

• Gorgeous, cutting-edge graphics
• Solid, engaging single-player gameplay
• Excellent voice acting
• Counter-Strike: Source offers great multiplayer

The Bad

• Disappointing story
• Somewhat lackluster AI
• Game is a bit easy

Rating

It’s hard to believe that, prior to Half-Life 2, Valve had really made only one game. Of course, it was a masterpiece. Half-Life single-handedly reinvented the first-person shooter, putting the emphasis on cinematic pacing and complete immersion in the experience.

As a result, it paved the way for many of the outstanding first-person shooters that have followed. And while there was little question that there would eventually be a sequel, no one could have imagined the long and torturous development process that led to Half-Life 2. Well, it’s time to forget about that, because Half-Life 2 has arrived.

And, in many ways, this big-budget sequel does what it sets out to do: Half-Life 2 is a technically amazing, sharply honed first-person shooter that pulls all the tricks that made Half-Life such a beloved experience. With that said, many of those tricks feel more than a bit familiar now, and the game itself is saddled with a disappointing story. Still, that doesn’t stop Half-Life 2 from being a very impressive and engaging shooter, and a faithful follow-up to one of the greatest PC games of all time.

It’s time for you to once again take up your submachine gun and take out all the foes threatening humanity.

In Half-Life 2, you once again assume the role of Gordon Freeman, the theoretical physicist and dimension-hopping commando who saved the world from an alien invasion at the end of Half-Life. Or did he? Half-Life 2 starts you off facing the infamous G-Man, the mysterious blue-suited character from the first game.

At the end of Half-Life, the G-Man offered you a choice: work for him or die. Since there would be no sequel if you chose the latter, Half-Life 2 assumes you chose the former, and you start the game in a train entering City 17 for your introduction into this new world.

City 17 is a run-down urban center that’s the equivalent of the Warsaw ghettos during World War II, but instead of Jews being rounded up to live in City 17, it’s all the remnants of a defeated humanity. Half-Life 2 takes place an untold number of years after the Black Mesa incident, but it’s clear that much has changed.

A mysterious enemy known as the Combine has conquered the planet and installed a human puppet government to carry out its rule. Black-clad security forces patrol the streets, while propaganda blares endlessly from omnipresent video screens.

If there’s one thing that Valve does extremely well, it’s capture a sense of atmosphere–this vision of a dystopian police state is chillingly effective. But you won’t spend a lot of time soaking in the scene before you’re thrust into the struggle to defeat the Combine and free humanity.

As soon as the shooting begins you’ll join an essentially nonstop battle that will last the remainder of the game. Like the original Half-Life, Half-Life 2 is presented as a nearly seamless experience–you play entirely from Gordon Freeman’s perspective, there are no cutscenes or perspective changes to take you out of the moment, and are there no narrative jumps that skip ahead in time. (At least, there are none from your perspective.)

There also aren’t very many long loading times to interrupt the flow of the game, as all the levels are discreetly broken into sections, and when you transition from one section to another, there’s only a slight pause for the new section to load (at least, on a high-end PC). Put it all together and the game’s single-player campaign, which will probably take you between 15 and 20 hours to complete, comes off as a very long day in the extraordinary life of Gordon Freeman.

In case of alien invasion, find Gordon Freeman and break glass.

The original Half-Life was highly cinematic in nature, the virtual equivalent of starring in your own blockbuster sci-fi action movie. Who could ever forget the first time a headcrab leapt out at you from a dark corner? Or the moment when the commando tossed a satchel charge into the sewer pipe you were hiding in?

The movie analogy is apt, not only because Half-Life 2 packs a few cinematic moments of its own, but also because, like most movie sequels, it plays it safe and doesn’t deviate much from its storied predecessor. Half-Life 2 doesn’t revolutionize the genre, instead sticking with the familiar formula of run-and-gun action, occasional puzzle-solving, and scripted sequences established by Half-Life. And it’s an effective formula, for the most part.

The game gets off to a rousing start, as the opening levels combine these three ingredients masterfully. You start off on the lam from the Combine, armed with only a pistol and your wits, and embark on a chase through a train yard and tunnel system that’s filled with all sorts of hairbreadth escapes. The sense of pursuit hurtles you forward so quickly that you don’t have much time to admire the cutting-edge graphical prowess on display.

After you reach safety, Half-Life 2 settles into a more conventional and familiar style of play. Aside from a detour through a deserted town full of all sorts of booby traps, there are a lot of echoes of the original Half-Life in Half-Life 2–so many, in fact, that there’s a strong sense of déjà vu at times. Still, it’s hard to knock Valve for not wanting to tinker too much with a proven formula, and Half-Life 2 is as fast-paced and enjoyable as its predecessor.

The graphics in Half-Life 2 are simply stunning to behold, and the level of immersion is unmatched.

Clad in your rugged hazard suit, you’ll battle your way forward against all manner of enemies, only to recover quickly by picking up health packs and recharging your hazard suit at energy stations. Some of these foes are familiar, such as the headcrab and the barnacle, while others, like the manhacks (essentially flying buzz saws) present whole new challenges.

Meanwhile, you’ll be armed with a formidable arsenal, most of which is recycled from the first game, such as the submachine gun, shotgun, crossbow, and, of course, the ubiquitous crowbar. These weapons haven’t changed much, and they feel roughly the same.

There are only three new weapons, including the pulse rifle, which is a sort of beefed-up energy rifle with a devastating secondary attack and a meaty sound to it. Much more fun are the pheropod–otherwise known as “bug bait”–which allows you to summon and control vicious ant lions, and the gravity gun, which can be used to pick up and manipulate objects.

The gravity gun is one of the great new features introduced by the game. Thanks to the new physics engine, it has all sorts of applications in and out of combat, and you’ll spend a lot of time tinkering around with it. It’s just as useful for picking up and hurling a grenade back at an enemy as it is for solving any number of puzzles in the game.

Most of these puzzles are clever but not too difficult, particularly if you’ve played previous shooters, like the original Half-Life. Half-Life 2 also features a fair number of jumping puzzles, though nothing on the frustration level of Xen in the original game. The jumping puzzles are a weakness in Half-Life 2, but thankfully you can take a more aggressive approach and bypass most of the jumping altogether.

The other noteworthy additions to the gameplay are vehicles, specifically an airboat and a high-speed buggy. While these sequences offer a visual rush, they’re also not too far removed from some of the rail sequences in the original Half-Life. In many instances, you’ll be funneled down a narrow channel or road with little chance to explore or veer off the beaten path, battling enemies in a high-speed engagement.

You’ll then encounter an obstacle that requires you to jump out of your vehicle and solve a puzzle to proceed. The controls and physics in these sequences are a bit loose, but the vehicles are fun to drive, especially when you get some room to maneuver.

You’ll be on your own during most of the game, but there are levels in which you’ll have the opportunity to fight alongside allies, both alien and human. Some of the best team moments come later in the game, when you’re battling the Combine in the streets and buildings of City 17, with large-scale battles going on between groups of humans and the Combine’s huge, spiderlike striders.

You never really develop any attachment to your teammates, though, as they tend to be very disposable, and replacements are available at regular intervals. And teammates have a tendency to get in your way in cramped interiors–while they’ll slowly move out of your way, it’s still a little annoying.

In addition to taking on teammates, you’ll occasionally have the opportunity to set up sentry guns to assist you in defense. The toughest sequence that we encountered in the game involved setting up a handful of sentry guns in a defensive alignment, and then holding out against waves of incoming Combine soldiers.

The “bug bait” is one of the three new weapons in the game, and one of the most unique, because it allows you to control ant lions.

Surprisingly, Half-Life 2′s story is one of the most disappointing aspects of the game. The first half of the game feels a bit unfocused, while the second half seems rushed. Even worse, the story leaves behind a mess of unanswered questions, and it doesn’t touch on any of the lingering questions left over from the first game.

Valve likes to leave tantalizing hints and tidbits everywhere in the game, but few of these actually develop into anything interesting, and by the end you’re left wondering what the game was all about. In many ways, Half-Life 2 feels like the middle chapter in a much larger story, and it suffers as a result.

Another surprise is the somewhat disappointing performance by the game’s artificial intelligence. Even on the tougher difficulty levels, most of the humanoid enemies don’t seem to show the same kind of intelligent behavior that they did in the previous game.

They’ll seek cover and then peek out to fire, but invariably they’ll charge at you, making it easy to take them down. And maybe it’s due to some of the weapons being a bit overpowered, but most opponents don’t present much of a challenge at all–a few rounds is usually enough to stop them. There are a few fearsome foes in the game, not the least of which are the larger ant lions, which will tirelessly pursue you while you frantically unload every bullet you have at them.

Then there’s the strider, the 50-foot-tall, walking, organic tank that fires devastating bursts and can spear you with one of its legs if you get too close. But for the most part, Half-Life 2 is a surprisingly easy game, even on the tougher difficulty levels. Case in point is the end of the game, which feels anticlimactic–you’re given a horrendously overpowered weapon to use against relatively weak opposition.

Your AI teammates can be very helpful in a fight, but they can get in your way indoors.

Half-Life 2 uses a checkpoint save system, allowing you to quickly restart at the last checkpoint if you die, and there’s usually a checkpoint right before most of the game’s combat zones. The checkpoint system is effectively employed throughout most of the game, and it allows you to immerse yourself into the experience without having to worry about saving the game constantly. Saving the game manually is an option, and it’s helpful in one or two passages where the checkpoints are spaced too far apart, but it also takes you out of the moment.

Half-Life 2′s presentation is extraordinary, thanks to the new Source engine. Even though Half-Life 2 debuted a year later than originally anticipated, it is still very much a cutting-edge game, featuring state-of-the-art graphics technology. While Doom 3 features superior lighting and shadowing, it didn’t really succeed at bringing a credible and cohesive world to life.

Half-Life 2 does, and the environments in the game are simply stunning, from the plazas and streets of City 17 to the rusted interiors of an abandoned factory. There’s also some excellent level design in the game, including a deserted town full of deadly traps and the gaping interiors of an alien citadel. The engine does a great job of rendering both indoor and outdoor environments, and there’s a lot of eye candy to absorb if you have the hardware to handle it. Most surfaces nearly glisten with the latest shader effects, and the textures are sharp and richly detailed.

One of the big new features is the incorporation of physics into the engine, and that has an effect on the visuals as well. Basically, everything moves and behaves as it ought to, so when you hammer a strider or a gunship with a rocket, it shudders and recoils from the impact.

Characters also move in a lifelike manner, and the animations are smooth and believable. You’ll also discover that objects in the environment can be used against you–there’s nothing that zombies like more than to hurl a metal barrel in your direction. On the other hand, you can use the gravity gun to hurl objects about, or even to pick things up and use them as a shield.

While Gordon Freeman doesn’t say anything, you’ll quickly discover that some of the best parts of the game are when a character has a one-sided conversation with you. This also lets Valve showcase its remarkable new facial technology, which brings human characters to life like never before.

You can literally see the gleam in characters’ eyes when they speak, and they can display a wide range of emotions, from fear to familial pride. It also helps that Valve enlisted notable talent to supply the voices for many characters, including Robert Guillaume, Louis Gossett Jr., Robert Culp, and Michelle Forbes. The voice acting is superb, and the script itself features wit, warmth, and humor.

The script is filled with warmth and wit, and the realistic facial animations are nothing short of amazing.

The sound effects are also well done. Once again, it’s the little details that stand out, like the buzzing noise of manhacks as they approach and the clatter of a gutter pipe as something climbs up to reach you. As in the original game, there’s very little music, and what’s here is electronic in nature and reserved to emphasize important moments, such as when you’re headed for a showdown with a major foe. Most of the music is forgettable, but there are a few standout themes, one of which is recycled from the original game. Meanwhile, the multiplayer aspect of Half-Life is veritably a game in and of itself.

Rather than build a new multiplayer component based on the single-player campaign, Valve has instead included Counter-Strike: Source with Half-Life 2. The original Counter-Strike was developed as a free team-based multiplayer mod for the original Half-Life, and it quickly grew into one of the most popular online first-person shooters in the world.

Valve even released a retail package of Counter-Strike, and earlier this year there was an updated retail version, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. Counter-Strike: Source is the updated version of the original Counter-Strike, bringing the graphics in line with the powerful new Source engine and making a few tweaks, but otherwise keeping everything else the same.

Counter-Strike: Source updates the popular online game with Half-Life 2′s graphics engine, making an already good game even better.

If you’ve missed out on the Counter-Strike phenomenon these past five years, the idea behind the game is simple: Two teams–the terrorists and the counterterrorists–battle it out in a series of fast-paced rounds to see who will win a match. The easiest way to win a round is to simply eliminate the other team, but there are other routes to victory, depending on the map.

For example, counterterrorists can attempt to rescue hostages and deliver them to safety, while terrorists can plant bombs and protect them until they explode. Your success can influence your success in future rounds, as there’s a monetary reward for your team’s performance, which you can use to purchase realistic weapons and equipment for the next round.

Counter-Strike: Source features updated versions of some of the most popular Counter-Strike maps, including Dust and Office. Since these are essentially the same maps that have been played since 1999, they were battle tested and balanced years ago. There have been some improvements, however.

Counter-Strike: Source implements a physics engine that lets you push objects around using gunfire, though this has relatively little tactical value in the game–you can’t barricade a doorway with desks, or drop an object onto an enemy below.

Nevertheless, there’s little question that Counter-Strike: Source is an exciting, well-balanced game of tactical combat. It’s also a highly social game. Its appeal lies in the fact that even if you’re killed early, you can still sit back and chat with other players, or simply watch the match. Since each round lasts only a few minutes on average, there’s not much downtime before the game resets and you’re blasting away again.

Finding a game isn’t a problem, either, as Valve released Counter-Strike: Source more than a month before Half-Life 2, and there are hundreds of servers and thousands of players online at any given time during the day. Meanwhile, the standard built-in server browser can get you online in seconds, and you can sort by number of players, ping, and map.

Admittedly, for a beginner, Counter-Strike: Source can be a daunting experience. It’s easy to feel like an outsider, as an entire culture has evolved around the game, and most of the players online know what they’re doing, which can be intimidating.

On the other hand, Counter-Strike: Source is relatively easy to pick up, and it doesn’t take too long to become proficient at it, though it will take far longer to reach the skill level of the better players online. Then again, the release of Half-Life 2 should mean lots of new blood on the Counter-Strike circuit.

While Counter-Strike: Source is an undeniably valuable addition, it would have been nice to have seen a multiplayer component based on the single-player game.

While it’s hard to argue against Valve including Counter-Strike: Source with Half-Life 2, it would have been nice to have seen a multiplayer mode based on the single-player game that takes advantage of some of the single-player game’s settings and weapons.

The original Half-Life shipped with such a mode, and it was fun to play with some of those settings and weapons in a multiplayer arena. There are some genuinely interesting weapons in Half-Life 2′s single-player mode, and it’d be fun to see what the gravity gun, for example, could do in a multiplayer setting, particularly with all the physics turned on.

Still, Counter-Strike: Source is capable of providing countless hours of online play if you’re a fan of team-based shooters, and it’s a safe assumption that the game isn’t going to cool off anytime soon.

When you combine the strong single-player campaign of Half-Life 2 with the popular online play of Counter-Strike, the result is one of the most complete and compelling first-person shooter packages available. While Half-Life 2 breaks little new ground, it’s still a superb and engaging first-person shooter, as well as an amazing technological accomplishment.

• Engrossing, addictive, and fun blend of action and strategy
• Open-ended gameplay
• Fast, exciting pace
• Colorful, beautiful graphics
• Charming sound and music

The Bad

• Minor stability issues
• No multiplayer
• Will cause you to lose sleep

Rating

The original Sid Meier’s Pirates is one of the famed designer’s most beloved games, which is saying a lot. After all, Meier is responsible for some of the greatest games ever made, most notably Civilization. Sid Meier’s Pirates, first published in 1987, is renowned to this day for its addictive blend of action, strategy, and role-playing.

And the good news is, with this newly released remake, it’s clear that Sid hasn’t lost the magic touch. This new Sid Meier’s Pirates is an amazing, wonderfully lighthearted game that boasts an intoxicating blend of strategy and action, and as such it’s a dire threat to your professional and personal productivity.

The Caribbean is brought to life vividly, thanks to the beautiful and colorful graphics.

In Sid Meier’s Pirates!, you play as a pirate out for revenge against the evil Spanish nobleman who wronged your family. At least, that’s your initial reason for going to sea. The beauty of Sid Meier’s Pirates is that this open-ended strategy game lets you live the glorious life of a swashbuckler your own way. You can pursue the career of a privateer, a treasure hunter, an explorer, or a trader.

More often than not, you’ll dabble in all those fields at the same time. You’ll sail the Spanish main, trade broadsides with other ships, engage in dashing swordfights, search for buried treasure, sneak into hostile towns, and dance with many a governor’s daughter along the way. Your character will age over time, so your ultimate goal is to amass as much fame and fortune as possible before you retire, at which point your pirate will go into the hall of fame and you can start all over again.

The game’s prologue explains how your wealthy merchant family was imprisoned and how you escaped as a young boy. Now, years later, it’s up to you to save your family, vanquish the evildoers, and get rich along the way. The first thing you’ll do is choose a name for yourself, as well as a specialty, such as sword fighting (which is useful in duels), navigation (which makes you sail a bit faster), or wit and charm (which help your dancing skills).

You also select a nation to align yourself with, which determines which ports are friendly to you, as well as a time period, which affects the starting balance of power in the Caribbean. After that, you’ll begin in your tiny ship in a great big sea that’s alive with commerce and activity.

Sid Meier’s Pirates is remarkably easy to pick up and play (in fact, you can practically play the entire game without lifting your right hand from the numeric keypad on your keyboard), yet that simplicity belies a considerable amount of strategic depth. Your first stop will be in port, where you can pick up a letter of marquee from the local governor, which basically gives you the right to sink any ship not flying that nation’s flag.

You can also swing by the tavern to get the latest gossip (which can reveal useful info, such as the sailing of a treasure ship), purchase a useful item from the mysterious guy in the corner, or hire a bunch of scurvy knaves for your crew. After you check in with the shipwright, who patches up any damage and can upgrade various components of your ship, you’ll visit the local merchant, where you can provision your ship and purchase or sell trade goods.

When sailing around the Caribbean, you can go anywhere, though you’re limited by two constraints. The first is food. You can carry only so much food, and the bigger your crew, the faster your food will disappear. While this doesn’t sound much of a problem, in an age when sailing voyages took weeks and even months, it becomes an issue quickly.

Thankfully, you can always pull into a friendly port, or hijack a nearby vessel and commandeer its food. The other constraint is the morale of your men. Your salty crew members expect a fair share of the plunder when the voyage is over, and you’ll have to keep them happy by bringing in the income–otherwise they’ll start to desert you in droves.

What makes Sid Meier’s Pirates so compelling, though, is its exquisite pace. There’s just so much for you to do when you’re sailing about the Caribbean, and you’re never too far from accomplishing some kind of goal, whether it’s finding the final part of an important treasure map or chasing down some dastardly nobleman who wronged your family.

This pacing makes it easy to get drawn into the game and even harder to stop playing–you may well discover yourself looking up from the game and realizing that you’ve spent the entire night playing.

At the heart of the game is the sense that it’s essentially a series of enjoyable, fast-paced minigames stitched together. In the span of half an hour, you can easily wage several ship battles, dance with numerous governors’ daughters, sneak into an enemy port, and dig up a stash of buried treasure.

Battles involve using the wind to maneuver yourself into position and then unleashing a powerful broadside.

When your ship engages in battle, the game zooms in on the immediate patch of ocean (including any nearby landmasses, rocks, and shoals) and you have to maneuver into position and then fire broadsides at the enemy. These battles last only a couple of minutes at the most, but there’s a great deal of tactical depth to them, particularly at the harder difficulty levels.

Not only is the enemy more cunning at harder levels, but you must also factor in the constantly shifting wind, which affects your ship’s maneuverability. Ideally, if you’re upwind of an opponent (which is called “having the weather gauge”) you can control the battle. And to capture a ship, you must use different ammunition, including medium-range chain shot to destroy sails and rigging and short-range grape shot to whittle down the opposing ship’s crew.

That last one is the most important, because if you try to board a ship, there’s a chance you’ll have to fight its captain in a duel, triggering the sword-fighting minigame. Defeat the captain and you can capture the ship and sail it into the nearest port, where you can sell it and its cargo for a profit and then pay a visit to the governor for your reward.

You may also have the opportunity to dance with his daughter, and if you charm her, she may reward you with a valuable piece of information. You’ll then go out to sea to repeat the cycle all over again.

Perhaps the most difficult minigames involve sword fighting and dancing, due to the fact that they rely on fast reflexes. (This can be tough, especially since some strategy fans aren’t used to twitch-based games.) To keep things simple, sword fights are highly scripted in the sense that they all unfold the same way.

During a bar fight, for instance, if you’re winning, you’ll always knock your opponent off the balcony, and if you’re losing, he’ll always chase you back up the stairs. Push him back far enough and the barmaid will break a bottle over his head, knocking him out. The only thing you have to worry about is timing the right swing at the right moment, and parrying or dodging his swings.

Meanwhile, during a dance, you have to quickly respond to the dance cues that your partner gives you, or else you’ll stumble and mess up. While both sword fighting and dancing can be difficult at first, they get much easier once you learn to recognize the patterns. Plus, you can purchase or acquire special items to make both minigames easier, such as a superbly balanced sword that lets you swing faster or dancing slippers that give you more time to react to a cue.

Charm a lovely governor’s daughter by dancing well and she’ll reward you with something valuable.

When you need to infiltrate a hostile port, you’ll encounter the sneaking minigame, which is sort of Pac-Man in reverse. Your goal is to skulk around the mazelike streets of a town, avoiding the town watch. If captured, you’ll be thrown into jail, where you’ll rot for a few months before they let you go.

At the easier difficultly levels, dodging the guards is incredibly easy, but at the harder levels, it’s a lot tougher. Thankfully, you have a few moves at your disposal, such as the ability to scale walls, knock out guards from behind, and duck behind bales of hay to hide. The suspense can be high at times, especially when you narrowly weave between several guards.

Then there are the turn-based land battles that occur when you try to raid an enemy port or face off against the main bad guy at the end of the rescue-your-family storyline. In these, you have three kinds of units at your command: officers, sailors, and buccaneers. Officers and sailors are melee units, while buccaneers are armed with muskets.

In battles, you have to maneuver your units to take advantage of the terrain and try to destroy or demoralize the enemy. You can flank enemies or use the jungle as cover. Win the battle, and you will not only plunder the town, but you’ll also have the ability to switch its allegiance, thus earning you points with a particular faction.

The Caribbean of Sid Meier’s Pirates is a colorful place, and the game approaches the subject matter with a light touch. The pirates are charming rogues who like to sing drinking songs, the stuffy army officers are bombastic buffoons, and the ladies are all lovely.

In other words, these are sorts of characters who would feel at home in an Errol Flynn movie or Pirates of the Caribbean. The game has a beautiful art style that’s simple, clean, and packed with all sorts of graphical frills. The cotton sails on your ship softly glow in the warm sun, and beneath the glittery ocean water you can see dolphins and porpoises swimming in your ship’s wake.

The game’s audio effects are also lighthearted and soothing, from the sound of water lapping against wooden hulls to the distant crack of cannons firing. Above it all is the game’s wonderful soundtrack, which mixes historical tunes with memorable original themes. It also helps that the characters in Sid Meier’s Pirates speak in a sort of The Sims-like gibberish, which adds to the game’s overall charm.

The map keeps track of all your accomplishments and failures, as well as the lovely ladies who have crossed your path.

Sadly, Sid Meier’s Pirates didn’t make it out of the shipyard without a few flaws. The game suffers from some minor stability issues, which caused it to crash on one of our test systems every few hours. Thankfully, the game autosaves every time you enter port or battle, so you never lose much progress when it crashes.

You can save the game manually as well, though you’re not allowed to name saved games, which can cause a little confusion, especially when you have multiple characters. There’s also no multiplayer, which is a noticeable omission, since it would have been fun if you’d been able to go head-to-head against another player in the naval battles. Finally, the game is incredibly easy on the beginning difficulty levels, so you’ll need to ramp up the difficulty level to find the appropriate level of challenge.

Nevertheless, this is still a completely engrossing strategy game that will easily consume countless hours. While the average pirate career might last only about 5 to 10 hours, there’s tons of replay value here, as you can play on harder difficulty levels, try out different approaches, and check out different sailing eras. With its engrossing gameplay, impeccable pacing, and charming presentation, Sid Meier’s Pirates is quite simply one of the most enjoyable games to come out in years.

• Well-designed, interesting skill system and action-packed combat
• Tons of content–huge volume of cooperative and competitive activities
• Lavish presentation makes the whole world of the game look alive
• Technically marvelous–runs fast and smooth, loads almost instantly
• Has something for just about everyone

The Bad

• It can be difficult to find a good group of willing players for cooperative missions
• The gameworld is beautiful, but lacks cohesion

Rating

While it’s tempting to compare Guild Wars to any number of other fantasy-themed role-playing games, there’s really never been anything quite like it before. It innovatively and successfully combines many of the best, most addictive properties of action RPGs, online RPGs, and competitive multiplayer games in one beautifully produced package, which offers a tremendous lasting value yet none of the monthly fees typically associated with online-only games.

The first title from developer ArenaNet, Guild Wars threatens the entire online RPG establishment with its bold design. More importantly, it’s a very impressive game that’s rewarding on many different levels and can be tremendously appealing for any number of reasons.

In the world of Guild Wars, the men are men, and the women are runway models. Oh, and it’s awesome.

In Guild Wars, you play as a hero from Ascalon, your typical fantasy province that’s fallen on hard times, thanks to relentless assaults from fearsome creatures called the charr. Ascalon seems huge and wondrous as you begin to explore it and its outskirts. But it turns out to be literally just a tiny portion of the richly detailed and shockingly gigantic world of Tyria, which you’ll explore during the course of an adventure that’s truly epic.

Meanwhile, the other half of the game consists of competitive battles between teams of players, set in various types of arena events. It’s action packed, it’s tactical, and it’s sporting. It’s definitely more involved than a pick-up-and-play first-person shooter, but it’s relatively easy to learn and certainly difficult to master.

Unlike many other online RPGs, which often take a lot of flak from their audiences for lacking a definitive endgame, Guild Wars gives the impression that it was built with the endgame competition as a primary concern. However, one of its big surprises is just how much noncompetitive content there is.

Even if you have no interest in player-versus-player battling whatsoever, Guild Wars will still provide you with more than 100 hours of quality gameplay, which you can tackle either alone or together with other players pretty much every step of the way.

The core gameplay in Guild Wars is reminiscent of action RPGs like the Diablo series. It lets you navigate countless big, winding maps filled with enemies and treasure, and combat is frequent and fast. You can’t climb or fall from ledges, so at times, the design of the maps feels pretty contrived.

However, the generally linear layout mostly just helps to keep you focused. The game’s interface is clean and intuitive, and offers a few neat perks like a minimap that you can scribble on to help you communicate with your team. You have free reign over the camera perspective, so you may choose to play from a first-person viewpoint all the way on out to a bird’s-eye view.

Although, a third-person behind-the-back angle seems to deliver the best of both worlds, because you’ll get a close look at the game’s gorgeous graphics and plenty of room to see on your character’s periphery. When you see an enemy (whether it’s a computer-controlled creature or an opposing player), you may target it with a hotkey or a mouse click, and then attack it with your ranged or melee weapons. Most of your combat will be focused on using your different skills, though.

You can have exactly eight skills readied at a time, which correspond to the number keys on your keyboard. Which eight skills you bring to battle and which skills you discover during your adventure is really at the heart of what makes Guild Wars such a compelling experience.

It’s what levels the playing field in PvP and keeps the action manageable even when things get really intense. Each of the game’s six character classes has 150 unique skills, and each one has its own little icon graphic, description, and purpose. For the most part, skills are not inherently better or worse than other skills–they’re just different. Depending on how you’ve developed your character or your role in a player team, the skills will be better or worse for your circumstances.

Many skills have obvious uses, while many are much more specific to certain types of situations. Some will serve you better when exploring the role-playing portion of the game, while others will be better suited to PvP battling against real opponents. It’s definitely an interesting selection process. It shares a lot in common with collectible card games, and similarly offers a very satisfying reward whenever you discover that great, new skill that makes you feel much stronger while also causing you to make significant changes to your overall strategy. Guild Wars’ skill system is a resounding success.

Creating a character is a quick, straightforward process of choosing a gender, appearance, and character class. You’ll quickly notice the game’s striking character design right from this point. Even prior to that, though, you’re asked to make an important choice: whether to build a standard role-playing character or a player-versus-player-specific character.

If you choose the former, you start out as a first-level neophyte on a foreboding day in Ascalon’s history. And if you choose the PvP option, you skip all the way through the 100-odd hours of questing and storyline and begin with a high-level character decked out with powerful equipment. He or she can then jump right into some competitive matches, but cannot participate in any cooperative gameplay.

An absolutely huge story-driven role-playing adventure awaits you, though you can cut straight to the player-versus-player skirmishing if you prefer.

The idea behind these two options is pretty obvious. Players who’d rather not muck around with leveling up and pretentious fantasy storytelling needn’t even bother with it, and they can instead jump straight into the competitive game. Or, players who want to get their feet wet before diving into PvP combat, or who want to ignore PvP entirely, may do so during the course of the adventure.

It’s not quite this cut and dried, though, because Guild Wars wants you to experience both aspects of the game, regardless of whether you think you do or not. Specifically, if you cut straight to the PvP, you’ll find that the vast majority of the different character classes’ skills are locked away, waiting to be discovered during the course of the role-playing portion. Custom weapon parts can also be found in the campaign, which can later be used in PvP.

So, it’s possible that players expecting Guild Wars to be a light and breezy experience will be disappointed, because this is a deep, enthralling, and potentially very time-consuming game. While combat in Guild Wars rewards skillful planning and coordination between players, many of the best Guild Wars players will surely be the ones who invest the largest number of hours into the game–not only honing their talents, but also seeking out the best skills and equipment in the role-playing portion. Fortunately, the role-playing portion is on equal footing with the PvP, so chances are you’ll enjoy the opportunity to experience both, and appreciate the game all the more for it.

Guild Wars is one of those games that you can easily play for long stretches while losing track of the hours–suddenly it’s dark out, or light out, as the case may be. However, in contrast to many other RPGs, there’s very little about Guild Wars that inherently demands a lot of your time all at once.

It was clearly designed from the ground up to allow you to play in brief spurts, for minutes or maybe for an hour at a time. The PvP battles are action-packed affairs along the lines of what you’d expect from a competitive shooter. The role-playing quests and cooperative missions are typically less than an hour long.

Also, you never need to worry about saving your progress or logging out in a safe area, because you can quit whenever you want to, and you’ll always restart in the nearest town with all your skills and experience intact. There are no severe or permanent penalties from getting killed–just a temporary hit to your maximum health and energy levels that goes away when you get back to town.

Guild Wars offers single-player, cooperative, and competitive experiences each in turn.

From a technical standpoint, the game is a marvel. It boots up and quits out instantly, downloads software updates quickly and automatically, and runs wonderfully in a window if you prefer (you do need to be connected to the Internet whenever you’re playing, though).

Unlike in other online RPGs, logging in and quitting out is painless, and your character is also capable of instantly teleporting between all the cities and towns you’ve ever visited, at any time. These locations effectively serve as lobbies, and they’re packed with players looking for other players to be their teammates. Or, if you can’t find a good player team (or don’t want to), the cities and towns let you fill out your team with computer-controlled henchmen.

For better or worse, these henchmen aren’t as good as the real thing. Later on in the adventure, they’ll be ill equipped to help you through some of Tyria’s most dangerous environments. We also had them bug out on us on several occasions, either by getting stuck in the environment or flying off to who knows where.

But the game generally makes it really easy to start and restart quests and missions, and finding willing players to work with is also fairly simple, which makes the occasional problems with the henchmen easy to dismiss. There’s another issue that has to do with the game’s cities and towns, which is that they can be overwhelming because they can be filled with so many players.

There’s no simple, obvious way to get into a group, short of clicking on the different people you see and then clicking a little plus icon that invites them to join you, so chat channels tend to be filled with requests from players looking for teammates.

Also, there’s no easy way to compare your pending quests with your teammates’ pending quests short of just chatting about it, so it can be especially difficult to find a willing group to go questing out in the wilderness, versus taking on the cooperative missions that start out in town. And there’s some slight but noticeable lag when you type chat messages. For a game with player community at its heart, Guild Wars seems somewhat devoid of amenities for enabling players to meet one another.

Furthermore, since Guild Wars makes it so easy to jump around the world, as well as to start up and exit out of the game in the first place, the player community doesn’t exactly seem warm and friendly, on the whole. For example, if a quest or mission doesn’t go well, random teammates are liable to quit without any warning, which can be frustrating to those left behind.

As with just about any online game, the solution to this sort of issue is to play with friends instead of with strangers. To this end, Guild Wars actually has another leg up on most online RPGs, in that it lets you freely communicate with any other player in the gameworld, while most online RPGs limit you to communicating only with players on the same server, which contains its own instance of the gameworld.

Many of the cities in Guild Wars are absolutely packed with other players.

Guild Wars uses a different sort of technology. Towns and cities that have too many players in them are automatically split up into “districts,” akin to separate chat lobbies, while missions and wilderness areas are always uniquely generated for the player team, so you’ll never encounter random players or seas of already-killed monsters when you’re out exploring the world.

For the most part, that’s great. But to an extent, it’s actually a double-edged sword, since the fairly abstract manner in which the gameworld is set up diminishes some of the sense of immersion. It’s difficult to fully appreciate the scale and the dangers of the world when you can freely and instantly teleport between the areas marked on your map.

In other words, Tyria doesn’t feel quite as cohesive as it could have, with the extremely brief but frequent loading screens between maps, and the fact that the towns and cities are all inundated with out-of-character banter. Additionally, the key story sequences are presented in full speech, which is nice, but most of the questing is conveyed through small text-based pop-up windows, which aren’t very engrossing, especially not in the context of the game’s otherwise-outstanding presentation.

For that matter, the rewards for the game’s dozens of different side quests often aren’t even pertinent to your character. So the questing system can sometimes seem unfocused. It’s mostly just there to give you more of a reason to explore the gameworld at your own pace–which, luckily, is enjoyable enough on its own.

There’s definitely a learning curve involved in getting proficient at Guild Wars, at least as far as the PvP gameplay goes. For one thing, because the game features a nonstandard character class system, which encourages you to choose both a primary and a secondary profession from six different options (for a total of 30 different combinations), the result is having to learn lots of obscure abbreviations like “R/N” and “Mo/Me” (referring to ranger/necromancers and monk/mesmers, respectively, just in case you were wondering).

Fortunately, the role-playing portion of the game mostly does a great job of introducing you to the different layers of gameplay at a steady pace. You’ll start out being able to casually adventure on your own (an optional early quest invites you to group with just one other player).

Later, you’ll be able to form groups of four, then six, and then more. Each time, it feels like a significant upgrade, requiring you to rethink your place in the team as well as your overall strategy. Eventually, teaming up with other players starts to feel like a necessity rather than a simple choice. Some of Guild Wars’ final quests are both very open-ended and challenging. And they also serve as a primer for the sorts of PvP battles you could later proceed to engage in.

It’s a lot of fun to experiment with the different character classes and skills in the game.

While you can participate in random PvP battles, the odds are good that you’ll meet up with (or will go in already knowing) some like-minded individuals with whom you’ll want to form a guild. Forming a guild mostly just enables you to readily communicate with other members of your guild, though you can also customize a unique insignia that all your guildmates may proudly wear on their flowing cloaks.

Being a member of a guild also allows you to get the most out of the game’s PvP elements. International PvP competitions between guilds are already taking place, as players from all around the world battle it out in multi-team skirmishes, pitting their best combinations of skills and tactics against each other.

When spells and counterspells are flying, as melee fighters close the distance with ranged assailants and supporting forces, the action can get hectic and very exciting. And since you can have literally hundreds of different skills to choose from across your two professions, you ought to have your hands full for a good, long time. So if the solo and cooperative portions of Guild Wars start to take on a certain monotonous feel after a while, leave it to PvP for a complete change of pace.

It sure doesn’t hurt that Guild Wars is so easy on the eyes. This is an excellent-looking game, both from a technical and from an artistic standpoint. Character designs are fresh takes on fantasy conventions. Each character gender/class combination has a unique and memorable look, plus many options for customization (as well as some unique and amusing social animations), so you won’t be seeing many clones of yourself while running around in Tyria.

The various creatures you’ll encounter are also imaginative and interesting, varying wildly in shape and size. Though, sadly, none of them bleed. The environments of Guild Wars may be the biggest attraction from a graphical standpoint. This is one beautifully detailed world, offering up larger-than-life versions of pretty much every type of environment you could think of, all rendered in a vivid, soft-focused look that gives the game a dreamlike quality that totally works.

In spite of all this, Guild Wars runs great even on relatively modest systems, and even when tons of people are running around or duking it out. The game’s few graphical rough edges, such as how characters seem to pop in piece by piece when you enter a new area, wouldn’t even be worth mentioning if the superlative graphics didn’t make them stick out a little.

If you only buy one computer game this year, it might as well be Guild Wars. It’s got what it takes to keep you happily entertained for a very long time.

The game doesn’t sound quite as impressive as it looks, but that’s kind of an unfair way of putting it, since Guild Wars sounds great. A symphonic musical score by renowned composer Jeremy Soule helps imbue each of Tyria’s distinct regions with its own personality, and while the music is of uniformly high quality, it can start to grow a bit repetitive as you explore within a given type of environment.

The sounds of combat pack a good, solid punch, and different types of weapons and skills in turn make distinctive noises, which all tend to fit the action well. Guild Wars also has some nicely done ambient sound effects, but given the nature of the gameplay, you’ll end up hearing a lot of the same effects over and over.

Interestingly, you can actually hear your otherwise-silent character speaking during some of the cutscenes, which will probably make you wish you could hear his or her voice more often, such as in tandem with the different social animations.

It seems like a common observation among longtime game players that games have gotten shorter and smaller over the years. The rigors of game design are such that it’s generally just not reasonable to expect games that are both of very high quality and that are also very long, but at the same time, there’s something to be said for a tightly paced gaming experience. Still, you can never have too much of a good thing. But Guild Wars comes awfully close and it pulls out all the stops to win you over.

• Beautiful new environments
• Fun and varied world-PVP objectives
• Lots of great new dungeons
• Great orchestral soundtrack

The Bad

• Some quests are very repetitive
• A lot of preexisting content is now obsolete

Rating

World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade is a superb example of exactly what an expansion pack for any game.  should be. When it was released in November 2004, World of Warcraft raised the bar for the massively multiplayer genre, and more than two years later, none of its would-be competitors have even come close to matching it.

Even at launch there was very little to find fault with in Blizzard’s first MMOG offering, and thanks to regular free updates and no shortage of feedback from a community that now numbers more than 8 million players, it has continued to grow and evolve into an even bigger and better game.

With the recent release of World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft has never been better, and while you don’t need the expansion pack to continue playing, it’s hard not to feel like you’re missing out in Azeroth without it.

In the draenei the Alliance finally has a race that measures up to the Horde’s tauren.

Like any great expansion pack, World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade doesn’t just offer more of the same, and it doesn’t cater exclusively to experienced players. It offers a lot more of the same, and it also adds a number of new features that can be enjoyed by newcomers and level 60 veterans alike.

Perhaps the most significant additions introduced in World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade are the blood elves and the draenei–two new playable races that have made the paladin class available to the Horde faction and the shaman class available to the Alliance faction for the first time.

Both of these races have quite fascinating backstories that are revealed both through their respective intro movies and via in-game quests and conversations with non-player characters. Like the eight previously existing playable races in Azeroth, the blood elves and the draenei begin their adventures in specially designed starter areas where you can play without having to worry about bothersome high-level opposing players for the first 15 to 20 levels of your character’s existence.

Thereafter, the new races join the rest on one of Azeroth’s two continents, where there are more than enough quest-filled environments and dungeons to keep you busy to level 60 and beyond.

It’s only possible to advance beyond the original game’s level 60 cap if you own World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade, which unlocks new player skills and talents for characters through to level 70. It’s conceivable that you could advance through many of the levels post-60 without ever visiting the new Outland realm, but it’d be a far more time-consuming and less profitable process because quests in Outland offer significantly more experience points and gold.

Furthermore, Outland is the only place where you can advance your chosen professions beyond the previous skill cap of 300 to gather all-new resources and craft powerful new items. All of the existing professions such as leatherworking, alchemy, cooking, and enchanting can now be pursued to a maximum skill level of 375, which is also true of the new jewelcrafting profession.

Along with engineering, jewelcrafting is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and useful professions to pursue in World of Warcraft right now. Every profession in the game serves a purpose, but many of the items that can be made by weaponsmiths and tailors, for example, are no better than those that regularly drop from enemies and subsequently appear in major cities’ auction houses.

As a jewelcrafter, you’ll initially spend your time and resources making simple rings and necklaces that afford their wearers small attribute bonuses. As your skills improve (and the materials you need become less common and more expensive), you’ll learn to make powerful trinkets, rings and necklaces that can be used to buff the attributes of other party members as well as your own, a handful of weapons, and gems that can be socketed into new pieces of armor and jewelry to make them even more powerful.

Skilled crafters can make items that have empty sockets for gems, and you’ll occasionally be offered them as a reward for completing a quest. For the most part, these items are quite hard to come by, though, since they rarely drop from anything but dungeon bosses and the like.

Choosing gems for your socketed items gives you an opportunity to tailor your gear to your character’s chosen talent spec and play style, and many classes even have multiple endgame armor sets to choose from now for the same reason. Bonuses to basic attributes such as strength, stamina, agility, and intellect are now augmented by bonuses to far more specific skills, such as attack power, dodge rating, and hit rating.

Before World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade, it was generally quite obvious whether or not one item was better than another, but there are so many different factors to consider now that choosing which equipment to use often has as much to do with personal taste as anything.

If you’re not already wearing epic gear, expect to replace everything you own within hours of going through the Dark Portal.

Even the relatively common gear that’s available in Outland is better than much of the rare and epic equipment that has been dropping in Azeroth for the past two years. Those of you with complete sets of epic armor will find that it’s good enough to get you through most of the new continent’s quests and dungeons, but everyone else’s equipment becomes obsolete within hours of them stepping through the Dark Portal.

The new gear serves to lessen the gap between hardcore dungeon raiders and more casual players, and as a result, the Outland quests are neither too challenging for relatively inexperienced players nor too easy for those in the minority who can truly claim to have “beaten” the original game.

The fact that the playing field has been leveled somewhat also makes player-versus-player encounters more enjoyable now than they’ve been for some time, which is just as well given that almost all of the new Outland environments have PVP objectives and rewards.

You’re free to ignore these world-PVP objectives if you wish, but they offer a welcome distraction from the occasionally repetitive nature of questing, and you don’t need to devote an awful lot of time to them to enjoy the benefits. In Hellfire Peninsula, for example, capturing three strategic locations will earn you PVP reward tokens that can be put toward a new ring, weapon, or gemstone.

And in the Bone Wastes of Terokkar Forest, the first faction to simultaneously control all five of the PVP towers is rewarded with six hours of damage and experience bonuses anytime they do battle in the area. Perhaps the most interesting world-PVP objective can be found in picturesque Nagrand, where the Horde and the Alliance are constantly battling for control of the small town of Halaa in the center of the map.

The faction that controls Halaa can purchase special items and turn in quests there, and they will be protected by up to 15 high-level guards anytime they visit. The rival faction, on the other hand, can climb aboard wyverns and fly overhead on bombing runs in an attempt to kill the guards before storming the town, although the takeoff and landing points for the wyverns can be temporarily taken out of commission by players on defense.

Flying mounts that can be used exclusively in Outland are another significant feature of World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade, although it’s not possible to drop bombs or to perform any other kind of attack while you’re riding them. Level 70 players flying on these mounts still have a significant impact on all PVP, though, because they’re able to move between objectives and battles much more quickly, and they can leap down to the ground to join a fight in an instant.

While they’re very expensive to buy, flying mounts are worth every piece of copper, silver, and gold that they set you back, not only because they offer a distinct advantage in world PVP, but also because there’s no better way to take in Outland’s occasionally breathtaking scenery.

The new environments are undoubtedly among the most breathtaking that World of Warcraft has to offer.

Although still quite beautiful, the original World of Warcraft’s visuals are certainly starting to show their age after more than two years. Masterful texture work and lighting belie some quite rudimentary geometry in places, and World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade is no different.

With that said, the expansion pack’s environments are undoubtedly among the most impressive that the game has to offer, and when you’re not busy trying to complete a quest or doing battle with rival players, there’s plenty of fun to be had just exploring them and keeping an eye out for previously unseen creatures, rare enemies, and such.

Regardless of whether you’re questing or taking part in PVP, World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade caters well to solo and grouped players alike, although a number of the harder quests are impossible to beat alone. This is also true of the game’s dungeons, which are specifically designed for groups of between 5 and 25 players and are instanced so that every group gets an identical challenge.

World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade adds more than 20 new dungeons to World of Warcraft (not all of them are in Outland), ranging from those that can easily be completed inside an hour through to truly epic undertakings that will take even the most skilled groups around 10 hours or so (across multiple sessions in the same week, if necessary) to get through. Many of the new dungeons can be played on a more difficult “heroic” mode once you earn the right to do so, pitting you against much stronger enemies that drop superior items if you manage to defeat them.

In the past, only the largest and most challenging dungeons in Azeroth have pitted you against enemies that were really interesting and that required groups to think very carefully about their tactics, but in World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade, these qualities have found their way into smaller dungeons and, to a lesser extent, into the world as a whole.

Many of the enemies that you’ll be killing for quests early on are able to use skills similar to what players have, for example, so beasts will stomp to stun you, hunters will trap you so they can attack from range, some species will play dead when their health gets low, and others are able to vanish and reappear behind you in much the same way that a rogue player might.

When it comes to boss encounters, the majority of enemies that you face in World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade require groups to do something a little cleverer than just have a warrior or feral druid “tank” them while every other player either does damage or heals. Defeating the most challenging bosses invariably requires every player in the group to know their role and to be on form, and it certainly doesn’t hurt if they’re wearing good armor and carrying powerful weapons either.

The fact that the group sizes required for most new dungeons is smaller than in the original game is a double-edged sword–getting 10 players together is obviously a lot easier than getting 20 or 40, but in a smaller group, you have to be much more selective about who comes along, so depending on which class you play, it won’t necessarily be easier to find a good group to play with.

As is the case in all massively multiplayer games, your experience in World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade will be shaped largely by the other players that you interact with. Playing alongside a good group or guild can enrich your time in the game to no end, while having your corpse camped and getting killed repeatedly by an opposing player will undoubtedly have the opposite effect.

In our experience, players who delight in making others’ lives a misery are certainly in a small minority, but they’re out there, and it’s unfortunate that they’re often the most vocal in general chat channels.

Many of the new dungeons are designed for groups of five players.

Third-party voice-over-IP programs remain the most effective way to communicate with players who you’re actually interested in interacting with, particularly if you’re playing through a challenging dungeon where there isn’t always time to type messages to each other.

And when you’re not listening for warnings or instructions from players that you’re grouped with, you could do far worse than to have the game’s excellent orchestral soundtrack provide a constantly changing backdrop for the animal sounds, enemy grunts, ambient sounds, and weapon noises that accompany the action onscreen at all times.

The sound design in The Burning Crusade never fails to impress, and while the Russian accents of the draenei can take a little getting used to, the game’s voice acting is generally very good.

If you’ve already spent any serious amount of time with World of Warcraft then you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from its first expansion pack. It’s true that some of the new quests can feel like a grind, and it’s also true that World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade’s arrival has rendered much of the old endgame content all but obsolete.

World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade is a superb example of exactly what an expansion pack for any game should be, though, and the gulf between World of Warcraft and the pretenders to its throne is now wider than ever.

Command & Conquer Red Alert is developed by Westwood Studios – whose seminal Dune II created the real-time strategy category, and whose Command & Conquer (along with Blizzard’s Warcraft II) represents the highest achievement in the genre to date. Command & Conquer Red Alert has the pedigree of a champion and a premise to match: Albert Einstein applies his theories of relativity to time travel, hurtling back in time to assassinate Hitler before he ever comes to power.

The plan works, and with Hitler out of the picture, Nazi Germany never materializes. But unfortunately, the Red Menace does, with Russia’s Stalin turning a burgeoning war machine towards the West, raining destruction and terror on those unfortunate enough to find themselves standing in his way.

And that’s where you come in, on either the Allied or Soviet side. Allied players will rely on stealth and surprise, while those aligning themselves with the Soviets will place their bets on brutal force. Overall, we like the Soviet side better, especially since players are given the freedom to play the bad guy to the hilt.

In the first Russian mission, for example, the player is informed of a partisan uprising in a small village, and gets marching orders that only a sadist could love. “They are enemies of the people,” intones a cold-hearted Stalin, “Destroy the town, and kill everyone in it.

” The meeting room slowly dissolves to the now familiar overhead map, covered with tanks, soldiers, and assorted other perpetrators of mass mayhem, all eagerly awaiting the player’s command to exterminate the enemy.

The design and functionality of these units is arguably the best ever in a real-time strategy game, and certainly the best since the aforementioned Dune II. The variety of forces and structures is unmatched, providing players with an almost unlimited palette with which to paint their strategic strokes (the only flawed unit is the Soviet sub, which inexplicably will not attack ships that come within its weapons’ range).

Better yet, the units of the two opposing sides aren’t mere copies of each other, but instead maintain a sort of karmic balance. For example, the Allies’ aptly-named Destroyer, which can relentlessly attack land, sea, and air units from long distances, is countered by the Soviet MiG, which packs a powerful punch and is absolutely devastating in numbers.

The Allies’ Medic, who can literally restore life to the barely breathing foot units, is eerily matched by the Soviet’s brutal Attack Dogs, calamitous canines that can wipe out a half dozen troops in matter of seconds. This not-the-same-but-somehow-related unit design permeates the game, and gives Red Alert a level of depth and complexity that will keep players occupied for months on end.

Another huge plus is the level design found in Red Alert’s one-player game. The forty or so levels consistently strike the right balance between long, drawn out wars of building and attrition, and short intense bursts of behind-the-lines conflict, convoy protection, and hostage rescue.

The levels are also fair: You won’t need to send troops out to explore the undiscovered regions, then restart the scenario with this illegitimately acquired knowledge. You also won’t be forced into using any particular strategy to “solve” the “puzzle” a mission presents – the number and variety of units means there are literally dozens of ways to take any given piece of territory.

And last but not least, Command & Conquer Red Alert doesn’t require overwhelming force to win. With the right mix of troops, the right plan, and the right timing, you can handily win battles that would otherwise appear to be heavily tilted against you. All of these factors encourage exploration and risk-taking relatively early in each scenario – bringing a sense of unpredictability and adventure to Command & Conquer Red Alert that is all too often missing from games of this type.

The action is punctuated by cutscenes which dramatically illustrate a key moment from or result of the previous mission – an Allied bridge being blown to smithereens or a Russian sign being crushed by an Allied truck. As you might expect from Westwood, the animated cutscenes are simply awesome. The mission briefings with live actors are less impressive – the writing and story are fine, but the acting is awkward at times (Stalin’s romantic interlude with a female aide is particularly difficult to watch).

The cutscenes are beautifully complemented by Red Alert’s SVGA gameplay graphics. Whether the smoke trailing behind an air-to-air missile, the fiery glow of an explosive chain reaction, or swarms of HIND helicopters mercilessly gunning down a land-based target, the visuals are consistently smooth and convincing.

The higher resolution also means that a large portion of the battlefield is visible onscreen, allowing quick and easy monitoring and control of units over relatively vast stretches of territory (Luddites who disagree with the above are welcome to play the DOS VGA version of the game, included at no charge for nostalgia’s sake and for the benefit of those with less advanced systems).

And Command & Conquer Red Alert is as much fun to listen to as it is to watch, with crisp, realistic sound effects and more of the Westwood’s trademark techno-cum-military musical accompaniments.

As you’d expect, Red Alert includes a full array of multiplayer options, and compatibility with just about every type of network protocol. We’ve only scratched the surface of the multiplayer game, but we can report that it is so good that Quake’s reign as king of the hill at the GameSpot office may be nearing an end.

There’s also a skirmish option that can be used for practicing on multiplayer maps even if no one else is around – and the computer AI is good enough to offer legitimate preparation for a human opponent. It’s a compelling package – one of the best you’ll find in the world of PC games. Command & Conquer Red Alert belongs in the same category as Civilization II and Quake, games that followed legendary predecessors and immediately eclipsed them.

After generating more hype than any unreleased game in history, Quake is finally here. And it makes good on its promise, big time. With no compromises, no excuses, and no bull, Quake delivers an edge-of-the-seat adrenaline rush that begins the moment you set foot in its darkened halls.

If it sounds like I’m gushing about this game, I am. Quake is a masterpiece on every level, with its ominous atmosphere, silky-smooth animation, incredibly well-balanced gameplay and level design, and unparalleled soundtrack. Once again, the team at id Software has created a no-apologies, ultra-violent gorefest sure to be the new battleground of choice for single and multi-player combatants worldwide.

The most important distinction between Quake and the drove of first-person action games currently available is that it’s set in a true 3-D world. Compared to other titles, Quake’s enemies and objects have an entirely new level of depth to them – you can view any game element from any angle with consistently smooth and realistic results.

The architecture of the levels is much more sophisticated than it is in competing titles; so are the real-time animations, which include such effects as explosion particles flying in every direction and enormous, spike-like objects shooting out from hidden compartments. The true 3-D environment also allows totally new attack strategies, like bouncing a grenade off a wall in order to blast an opponent skulking around the corner.

In Quake, you can attack (or be attacked) from almost any angle or altitude. But gone are the days of merely pointing your gun in the general direction of your enemies and blazing away; if you want to hit something, you’re going to have to aim your weapon carefully. That’s not as easy as it sounds, because the Quake interface breaks rank with the standard control set of previous id software titles. The new system takes some getting used to, but once learned, provides an unmatched level of control.

A three-button mouse is almost a must, since it allows you to simultaneously move, turn, and fire in any direction. Although it’s possible to play with the keyboard or a game pad, most players will find that in underwater and Deathmatch situations, only the mouse will ensure mastery over both the environment and unruly opponents.

And speaking of unruly opponents, there’s only one way to deal with them: violently. Quake sports a wicked complement of weapons–grenade and rocket launchers, shotguns, lightning guns, and a nailgun that’s so fun to fire I ran out of ammo just shooting it at the walls. (Note to beginning players: Don’t shoot at the walls and run out of ammo until ALL of the monsters are dead.)

A host of power-ups are also hidden throughout the game, and collecting them can instantly shift the balance of power both in single and multiplayer battles. These items include the Circle of Protection, which gives you 666 hit points, enough to go toe-to-toe with just about anyone; the Ring of Shadows, which makes you invisible (except for the two glowing eyeballs your enemies can spot floating in space); and Quake Power, a true humdinger that dramatically increases the damage levels of all your weaponry (you can open up a family-size can of whoop-ass on anyone once you’ve collected this icon).

All this is backed by graphics that are awesome in their own right. The creatures that fill the game’s four worlds and 28 levels are, as you might expect, sick, twisted, and perverse. The visceral effect of the bloody grimaces and entropic bioforms is intensified by animation that’s unusually smooth and utterly convincing.

The first time I was attacked by a hook-wielding enemy, I actually dropped the mouse and backed away from the computer. (Second note for beginning players: Don’t drop the mouse and back away from the computer until ALL of the monsters are dead…)

The graphics are perfectly complemented by sound effects and ambient tunes from the darker regions of Trent Reznor’s musical mind. Simply put, this is the best soundtrack ever created for a computer game. Reznor’s eerie sounds and unsettling background music push Quake’s already dark and creepy atmosphere into the realm of pure evil.

Yes, “kill, and keep on killing” is clearly the message here, and with Quake’s 28 artfully balanced multiplayer maps, it’s a hard message to resist. I spent two days playing against Quake’s design team in Deathmatch mode (third note for beginning players: Don’t EVER play Quake’s designers in Deathmatch mode), and the experience was truly unforgettable.

Quake’s designers have created Deathmatch environments that reward skill rather than luck, and are filled with nooks and crannies and other lovely places to hide while you wait for the unwitting opponent to stroll by. And if merely killing your opponents isn’t enough (and for the guys at id, it apparently isn’t), Quake includes a set of extremely debasing death messages – “Player 1 sucks down Player 2′s rocket,” for example – along with an easy-to-use chat system that enables you to add a few custom pokes of your own.

Much more could be said of Quake, but I’ll leave the rest for you to discover. The hype surounding this game has been almost unbearable, but in the end, Quake deserves every bit of advance – and until now, unverifiable – praise it has received. If you’re into action games, and even if you’re not, you should be playing Quake right now – it’s as good as PC gaming gets.

At first glance, Total Annihilation, with its much ballyhooed 3D terrain and more than ten dozen units, appears to be nothing more than another in a long line of real-time games with a few minor innovations. But in this case, the innovations work. Cavedog has done a commendable job of taking the basic mechanics of real-time strategy and using them to create something new: A game that relies less on constant mouse-clicking than careful planning and strategic thinking.

Initial impressions of Total Annihilation may be misleading. Fire up a campaign and the first few missions will seem like nothing more than another Command & Conquer clone, albeit one with strikingly realistic terrain and a great symphonic score.

But as you play deeper into the game, or play a few multiplayer battles or skirmish missions where your opponent is less forgiving, the complexities of the game begin to become apparent. Total Annihilation is a game about balance, from the tightly interwoven resource management scheme to the very diverse units.

It’s hard to talk about one without the other, and resource management provides a great tightrope you must walk to keep the army strong, both in numbers and brute force. You need the two resources in the game (metal and energy) to power and build your units. Unfortunately, metal is usually rather scarce in the early parts of a mission (later you can salvage wreckage from destroyed units), but you can build generators to convert energy to metal.

This solution to the metal shortage poses another problem entirely: Your units need energy to fire their weapons, and these generators use a great deal of power to produce a small amount of metal. Building a massive army of units is fine, but won’t help you much if you don’t have enough energy to keep them firing.

The units themselves – robotic mechs, vehicles, aircraft, and naval vessels – provide more to the balancing challenge. The stronger units are devastating but require a great deal of power and move very slowly. Large tanks and ships take a great deal of time to simply turn and fire at a target, and large bombers often must traverse the entire length of a map to turn around and make a second run.

As a result, you must create balanced forces, small units to hold the enemy while the big guns ready themselves. There’s no “ultimate weapon” like Red Alert’s Mammoth Tank or Warcraft II’s Ogre Magi – there are only more powerful weapons that have equally powerful disadvantages.

And then there’s the Commander, your strongest unit, your fastest builder and possessor of the devastating D-Gun that destroys units with a single shot. The Commander provides another great strategic conundrum – he’s your best warrior, but it’s risky to send him into battle because once the Commander’s gone, the mission is over.

Total Annihilation is full of great features. The 3D terrain – pre-rendered maps with tall mountains and deep valleys – plays an important part in strategy, as units situated at higher elevations have a much wider firing range. Units can take cover behind trees, but these trees – and whole forests – can go up in flames with a single stray shot.

When units are destroyed, complete with bass-heavy explosions and a slight shaking of the map, shrapnel flies everywhere, and structures and troops unlucky enough to be hit by the flying debris take damage, adding to the need for strategic placement – just standing and firing at the enemy will cause your units to get destroyed very quickly.

Your units gain experience, and with five kills they become veterans with much more accurate firing ability. You can also give units numerous commands at once (simply by holding down the shift key), so that minor tasks can be queued while you go off to worry about more important matters. These types of details make Total Annihilation great, and every time you play you’ll discover some subtle little feature that makes you want to change your tactics and try something new.

There are a few small details that could have been improved. The opening missions of the Core campaign are set on a metallic backdrop that is somewhat confusing, making the area in your line of sight and grayed-out; invisible areas look very similar.

The manual is a little on the skimpy side, and the lack of any tutorial to demonstrate the game’s mechanics seems like an oversight, especially in a game where many players will bring tried-and-true real-time tactics, only to find they’re almost completely useless.

There’s also the lack of a dedicated server for Internet play and the noticeable lack of a scenario editor. Finally, there’s the Commander AI bug, which makes the enemy AI send his Commander into battle early on in skirmish missions, causing most to only last a few minutes (Cavedog has promised that a patch for this problem will be released shortly).

But in the face of all that is right about Total Annihilation, these minor details are fairly easily overlooked. If you’re looking for a real-time strategy game that adds some new features without breaking from the standard formula, Total Annihilation may be too foreign to satisfy your needs. But if you’re looking for a game that is challenging and rewarding on entirely new levels, Total Annihilation is highly recommended.

Sid Meier’s Gettysburg may be the first release from newcomer Firaxis Games, but it has all the polish and appeal of a Meier classic. This outstanding real-time wargame recreates the pivotal, three-day Civil War battle fought on the rolling terrain around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in July 1863.

Playing from either side of the conflict, you can take part in a single scenario or a campaign depicting the entire battle. Campaigns typically comprise seven scenarios and are dynamically strung together according to your performance in battle.

For example, if you and the Confederate army can rewrite history and capture the high ground south of Gettysburg on July 1, you can earn the option of launching a fictional evening assault on Culp’s Hill. In all, the game includes 25 predesigned scenarios, along with a random scenario option that allows for near-endless replay value.

Also contributing to the game’s replay value is the fact that no two campaigns unfold in exactly the same way. All of the scenarios are available in both single-player and multiplayer mode, but the game does not include a scenario editor.

Right from the start, Sid Meier’s Gettysburg draws you in with its elegant interface and rich artwork. A nicely animated briefing prefaces each of the scenarios and adds tremendous atmosphere. Once you transition to the gameplay screen, you get more preliminary information, including a rundown of your objectives, your best troops, and the availability of reserves and reinforcements. In most scenarios, you will command a few brigades of infantry (each made up of three to five regiments) with at least one battery of artillery in support.

As a scenario begins, you must very quickly assess your situation and issue orders to redeploy your troops, as the default start positions are rarely effective. The clock is ticking, but the clean interface makes it easy to issue orders. To move a regiment, simply click on it and drag a line to the desired destination.

You can move entire brigades this way as well, though the process is not as intuitive as it could be: You must select the brigade’s commanding general, drag a line to the destination, then choose a formation for the brigade to assume upon reaching that spot.

Each unit’s movement and fighting quality is affected by a variety of conditions, including its formation, experience, morale, and location. For example, a regiment with friendly units on either side will fight more effectively than one that is being flanked. Similarly, units ordered to charge a hill bristling with artillery will take a serious morale hit (not to mention several large, round iron hits) and will probably soon retreat in disarray.

Each scenario lasts about 30 minutes, but the computer will add some time at the end if one side is within striking distance of an objective. In other words, you don’t win when you capture an objective – you win when you capture and hold it.

As in the real battle, the high ground is the key to victory and you won’t have any trouble finding it on the beautifully rendered battle maps. Capturing that ground is another matter, as the AI can be quite formidable. Fortunately, the computer’s style and effectiveness are completely customizable. Looking for a challenge? Try taking on an “aggressive, indirect” Confederate foe on the highest of the game’s four difficulty settings.

The graphics and animation in Sid Meier’s Gettysburg are excellent and show tremendous attention to detail. Best of all, the graphics convey a reasonably accurate sense of scale – these are huge armies we’re talking about, after all. The sound effects are also admirable. Shots ring out, rebel yells rise above the din, and your troops will even shout out to indicate that they’re being flanked.

On top of all this, the game offers excellent and apparently stable multiplayer support over TCP/IP, IPX, modem, and serial links. Simply put, this game is about as solid as the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. Sid Meier’s Gettysburg has all the right ingredients to please Civil War buffs, hard-core strategy fans, and maybe even some casual gamers adventurous enough to try something new.

In addition to being a very good adventure game, Grim Fandango features great writing and beautiful art direction. Adventure game designers face a difficult task. The genre is by its very nature linear and serves primarily to tell stories, but without puzzles, there’s no game. Combining these two elements is the challenge.

The story must be intricate and engaging enough to make the inclusion of puzzles seem plausible, and the puzzles must be clever enough to not jump out as an artificial roadblock for the story. It’s the rare game that meets one of these goals, let alone both. But Grim Fandango, the latest from Tim Schafer of Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle fame, achieves this delicate combination and more. In addition to being a very good adventure game, it features great writing and beautiful art direction.

Grim Fandango is based upon Mexican folklore, set in the land of the dead. You play Manny Calavera, employee of the Department of Death and travel agent to newly dead souls who are just setting out on the treacherous four-year journey to the ninth underworld.

Employees of the DOD, as it is called, are souls who must work off debts from their previous lives in order to earn their own passage to the final resting place. To pay off the debts, agents must accrue a certain number of premium souls, those of the virtuous who have earned more pleasant means of passage, the ultimate of which is the Number Nine, a bullet-train that makes the journey in a more desirable four days.

But Manny is down on his luck. His clients never qualify for the premium packages. And even when he meets one that does, the saintly Mercedes Colomar, he can’t seem to find a suitably saintly mode of transportation, reluctantly setting her off on foot into the dangerous world beyond.

But Colomar’s case will lead Manny to the discovery that all is not as it seems in the DOD, and he will set out on his own journey to set things right. The game follows four years of Manny’s afterlife as he travels through a variety of fantastic locales, searching for Mercedes and the real source of corruption.

You will lead Manny through the city of El Marrow, the port town Rubacava, a mining colony at the edge of the world, and the gates of the ninth underworld itself. Each location is distinct, with its own atmosphere and interesting characters.

The visual design is consistently great, drawing upon various Latin American sources, such as angular Aztec stonework and the stylized Day of the Dead skeletons, and using them to create modern buildings and vehicles such as cruise ships and casinos. The sound is equally impressive, with great voice acting, distinct sound effects, and a diverse and subtle score by Peter McConnell which ranges from mariachi to jazz.

But the writing is where Grim Fandango earns the most praise. Parodying film noir cliches has become a cliche unto itself, and Grim Fandango thankfully avoids the obvious. This isn’t just a faux Sam Spade mystery.

Instead, the game draws upon darker and more complex sources, with Chinatown, Casablanca, and even David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross lurking in its shadows. And there are very few jokes in the game, but it is funny. It derives its humor from its situations and characters (such as Manny’s oversized sidekick, Glottis) without making fun of itself, helping to create a believable world.

The puzzles help to maintain this believability. While traditional in nature, they are worked into the storyline well. And they are varied, both in style and difficulty. For the most part, you’ll have a series of known objectives to complete before moving on to the next locale. These objectives are complex, though, and often the solutions will have multiple parts. You’ll undoubtedly be stumped more than once, but the solutions are logical and subtle clues are plentiful.

Grim Fandango is not a typical LucasArts adventure. It’s the first from the company to dispense with traditional 2D animation and move to the more cinematic 3D style made popular with Infogrames’ Alone in the Dark games, and also utilized in Origin Systems’ underrated Bioforge.

It uses a keyboard-driven interface instead of the traditional point-and-click, and Manny signals significant objects by turning his head and looking as he passes by. Grim Fandango overcomes the major problems with this style, so only rarely will you be frustrated by disorienting camera-angle switching or feel lost because of an obscure exit.

It would be remiss to avoid mention of Grim Fandango’s minor technical faults (such as the strange behavior exhibited by almost every elevator in the game). But these are unfortunate drawbacks to an otherwise great game. The one real problem with Grim Fandango is that the end comes too soon.

This isn’t because Grim Fandango is too short (it should take most a good two- to three-dozen hours), but because the designers have created a rich world that you won’t want to leave, filled with memorable characters that are hard to say goodbye to and don’t be surprised if you’re sad when it’s over.

Myth II Soulblighter is about as good as a computer game can possibly be. It would have been easy for Bungie to just leave things alone after Myth The Fallen Lords. The game was a huge hit, met with critical acclaim at nearly every turn, and continues to be one of the most popular multiplayer games on the Internet.

But thankfully for gamers, Bungie went back to the drawing board to craft a bigger, better Myth. Thus was born Myth II Soulblighter, a game with the untainted heart and soul of its predecessor, along with slicker graphics, better gameplay, enhanced multiplayer options, a vastly improved interface, and a pair of powerful editing tools. Basically, Bungie left no stone unturned in its quest to improve an already solid product. As a result, Myth II Soulblighter is about as good as a computer game can be.

The game takes players to a time 60 years after the events of the original Myth, when peace reigns and the once busy Legion has very little to worry about. But this pleasant state of affairs is about to change. Responding to reports of brigands terrorizing a small village, a small group of warriors stumbles across a much bigger problem: Undead creatures are popping up all over and, even worse, the Fallen Lord named Soulblighter is behind it all.

The single-player campaign comprises 25 missions, each of which is remarkably well designed and – on the harder difficulty levels especially – enormously challenging. Scenarios range from simple skirmishes and NPC escorts to the infiltration of a massive keep and even some indoor missions.

Fans of the original game’s Shadow of the Mountain level will love Myth II Soulblighter’s The Great Library and Redemption levels, along with a number of other great defensive missions. The coolest (and creepiest) level in the game is one in which you must make your way through a haunted dungeon, where friendly and hostile ghosts appear and disappear without warning.

One of the other memorable missions sees you wading ashore to silence the cannons of a nearby keep, all while hordes of Soulless rain their spears down on you. Another has you and your troops racing for the last bridge to safety, which you must then destroy to keep your pursuing enemy at bay.

Bridge? Keep? Yes, Myth II Soulblighter makes extensive use of large buildings and interactive terrain to liven up the 3D battlefield. During the game, you’ll run across massive fortifications, destructible bridges, a working drawbridge, a ship, a windmill, and a slew of other eye-popping items.

The enhanced 3D engine also supports a number of other new features, colored lighting and shadows, and an underlying terrain mesh that’s four times finer than the one used by Myth. The result is a smoother-looking game with more realistic settings.

Other, more subtle features like the increased ambient life also help to create a more realistic environment. Chickens peck around in the villages, deer bound through the forest, and various birds soar overhead on most maps. Of course, you’re not limited to looking at these creatures, you can interact with them as well (meaning that you can blow up most of them).

The ambient sounds are also enhanced in Myth II Soulblighter. Between the sounds of wildlife in the background and Dwarven bottles exploding, there was never a moment of silence in the game. If you listen carefully, you’ll even hear some really funny chatter among your human enemies (the whole bit about the world’s biggest turnip had me cracking up).

The music that plays during the great narrative premission screens is outstanding, but I never noticed any music at all during the missions. This was a little disappointing, but I can’t say that it really detracted much from the gameplay.

Although the animated cutscenes in Myth looked good, they were too brief and cryptic to convey much of a story. The Bungie developers must have agreed, because they went out and hired a new animation studio to do the Myth II Soulblighter cinematics. The results are astounding. The cutscenes are still brief, but they look fantastic, and you can always tell what the heck is happening – or at least what is being implied.

As with most sequels, Myth II Soulblighter is chock full of new units on both sides of the battlefield. Dwarven mortars, Samurai-like Heron Guards, and friendly Trow will all chip in for your cause. There are no forest giants this time around, but believe me, the Trow more than make up for that loss. The rest of your forces comprises the familiar warriors, berserkers, and dwarves.

The archers are still there also, but they now have the added (and extremely cool) ability to shoot fire arrows that ignite the countryside where they land. Soulblighter’s forces include familiar foes like the Thrall, Soulless, Ghol, and Fetch. A few new and dangerous enemies have joined the ranks as well, including the werewolf-like Myrkridia, the fireball-hurling warlock, the pig-like Maul, and the black-armored Stygian Knights.

The AI and pathfinding for all units has been improved, so your troops don’t mill about endlessly when they can’t reach their initial destinations. There are some glitches with Myth II Soulblighter’s pathfinding, such as the ludicrous conga line your warriors form while chasing down an enemy unit, but for the most part, units move and behave much more intelligently than in Myth.

Myth II Soulblighter’s interface and controls are also more intelligent than those we saw in the original Myth. Players who found the keyboard camera controls confusing in Myth can now move and rotate the camera angle simply by moving the mouse.

I personally found this more confusing than the old method (which you can still use), but there are undoubtedly some gamers who will welcome the mouse option. A handy control bar now runs alongside the bottom of the screen, providing easy access to commonly used commands and unit formations.

Also, you can tell a unit’s health status simply by passing the mouse over it. Formation facing is much, much simpler than that clunky “gesture click” system – you can either turn your troops with the left and right arrow keys, or hold the mouse button to turn your troops at will (an arrow appears on the screen to help you line up the troops properly).

Perhaps the biggest interface improvement, however, is the addition of well-written, easily understood mission objectives at the beginning of each and every mission. No more stumbling around the woods looking for the mystery goal – all your objectives are clearly spelled out, plus you can even look over a few mission-specific tips to help get you through each level.

For those who found some of the levels in the original game far too difficult, Myth II Soulblighter features a vastly improved set of difficulty levels. These are well stepped and let gamers of any talent and interest level jump in and enjoy the world of Myth II Soulblighter. Kudos to Bungie for making the game so approachable for novice players without sacrificing the challenge hard-core gamers crave (and those higher difficulty settings can be pretty damn hard).

Hard-core Myth fans will also appreciate the improved multiplayer support in Myth II Soulblighter. The game offers a ton of new multiplayer features (such as player alliances) and scenarios (several of which involve the aforementioned ambient life in strange and unusual roles). Bungie.net has also been updated, and the performance of games over Bungie’s free service seems faster and more reliable in general.

Rounding out this epic game are two of the tools Bungie used to create the game. Fear and Loathing are powerful editors that players can use to craft their own missions and maps. Though you’ll need some practice to master these complex utilities, they can be used to create and modify Myth II Soulblighter levels in just about any way imaginable. These tools should certainly prove popular to the thousands of devoted Bungie.net users, as the service lets players easily exchange custom maps.

Myth II Soulblighter does have a few minor problems, but nothing that detracts seriously from the overall gameplay. An automatic save between missions would be a welcome addition. This is a common enough option in most strategy games and would eliminate the need to save your game at the beginning (or end) of every mission.

Also, though a fairly thorough briefing prefaces each mission, it would be nice to get at least a hint of which direction you should move on some missions. The Deceiver was a particularly confusing level, with bad guys on all sides, and the proper path was difficult to spot. Lastly, the game did crash a few times while loading up a new level, but infrequently.

Bungie basically improved all the good features in Myth; added a number of gameplay, multiplayer, and graphical enhancements; and then threw in some slick and powerful editing tools to boot. The end result is Myth II Soulblighter, one of the best games to be released this year, and one that should easily find a home in any serious gamer’s library.

Rayman 2 The Great Escape is a colorful 3D platform game. It contains no extreme violence, no geysers of blood, no official license from Smith & Wesson, and no foul language – in short, it’s not what currently passes for “mature” and “edgy” in interactive entertainment. It could be easily dismissed as a simple game directed at children, except that it also happens to be one of the best games of the year.

Rayman 2 The Great Escape’s concept is not particularly original. The game takes its basic framework from popular console platform games such as Super Mario 64. You explore a series of connected environments collecting objects (glowing stars called Lums), learning new skills, and returning to previously visited areas to re-explore them and dig out secrets you may have missed the first time through.

The underlying purpose behind all of this activity is the hunt for several rarer objects, in this case four magical masks that can release a creature called the Polokus, who will rid Rayman’s world of the evil Admiral Razorbeard and his robotic pirate invasion force. Within this familiar structure, Rayman 2 displays an exuberant ingenuity and technical excellence that make it significantly more than just another Mario clone.

The original Rayman featured rich colors and an attention to visual detail that set it apart from its competition in the 2D side-scrolling platform genre. Rayman 2 takes the same lush aesthetic and successfully transforms it into a seamless 3D world.

While the game’s geometry is not particularly complex, each of its levels is expansive and beautiful thanks to amazing textures and vibrant lighting. You’ll travel from verdant forests to the shores of vast glowing oceans, and from flying pirate ships to moonlit bridges.

Due to the game’s consistently unique artwork, each of these environments, while not at all realistic, is utterly convincing as a real place within Rayman’s world. It would be a pleasure to simply walk around Rayman’s levels, even without the underlying imperative of the game itself driving you forward – a sure indication of a great design.

The game’s character models have a lot in common with its levels. They’re highly stylized and geometrically simple but succeed by being well animated and exceptionally expressive. Rayman 2 The Great Escape’s characters even perform some effective physical humor, which is a rare occurrence in games. There are moments of real wit in Rayman 2 The Great Escape, created almost exclusively through the character animations.

The music and sound effects are also excellent. The character voices are especially noteworthy; all of the creatures speak in a fantasy language accompanied by English subtitles. Each type of creature has a distinct sound to its dialect. For instance, Rayman’s helper Murfy – a cross between the Cheshire Cat and a flying frog – speaks in an urgent indecipherable whisper that belies his huge grin and is both more effectively disturbing and genuinely weird than anything in all 70 hours of Shadowman.

Unlike many other flashy games, Rayman 2′s excellence extends to its relentlessly inventive gameplay. The developers have included a huge number of different play styles, and almost every one feels both solid and complete enough to be the entire basis for its own game.

A few are trotted out just once, never to return, though you won’t miss them since there’s always some new activity around the next corner. These are just a few of the exploits in store: Waterskiing behind a river snake, taming then mounting a living, two-legged mortar shell like a bucking bronco, rafting down a river of lava on a giant berry, and flying an exploding barrel of black powder.

Rayman 2 The Great Escape has 40 long levels full of constant and challenging surprises. Each one contains plenty of secrets and can be completed entirely to unlock a unique, level-specific bonus area, which adds some nontrivial replay value.

The game’s difficulty level is not selectable, but Rayman 2 The Great Escape does a good job of acclimating you to the basic skills during its first half before removing the training wheels and forcing you to combine your mastered techniques in the series of increasingly complex boards that compose its second act.

A good eight-button gamepad is almost a necessity to enjoy Rayman 2. Attempting to simultaneously move, jump, strafe, shoot, and control the camera with the keyboard would probably suck the fun right out of the game for most players. Unfortunately, Rayman 2 The Great Escape doesn’t include a way to remap controller buttons, which is a bad choice in a game obviously designed to be played with a gamepad.

The only other frustrating aspect of Rayman 2 The Great Escape is its save system. Each level is accessed through a central hub area. You can only permanently save your progress when exiting a level and returning to the hub. However, within a level there are multiple “soft” save points where you can restart if you die as many times as you want as long as you don’t quit the game. Why the developers chose not to let you save the game permanently at these points is a mystery.

Minor complaints aside, Rayman 2 The Great Escape is a great game that takes a shopworn genre and infuses it with so much style and conspicuous creativity that it becomes new again. It’s whimsical in the best possible sense, fun to play, and easy on the eyes.

It makes competing games with more “mature” themes seem downright offensive by comparison, not for the iniquity of their content, but simply for their relative lack of invention. Unlike many other flashy games, Rayman 2 The Great Escape’s excellence extends to its relentlessly inventive gameplay.

The Longest Journey is one of the best adventure games in years. Like a hybrid of classic Sierra and LucasArts games, it tells a great fairy tale filled with characters that you’ll remember long after the game is over.

The Longest Journey is about a young woman named April Ryan, a visual-arts student who lives at a boarding house in a small, bohemian area in the city of Newport called Venice. While these locations suggest Southern California, the geographical setting of The Longest Journey is never stated; it’s just a large city of the future.

And while The Longest Journey’s setting may be the stuff of science-fiction clichés, the game never resorts to the typical dystopian predictions. In fact, Newport seems very much like a modern metropolis, only with flying cars.

April has some problems. She’s a runaway who has left home because of her father, though the exact reasons she left are never stated. She has a huge art project due, and she can’t seem to get started. The guy who lives across the hall is a crude, arrogant jackass who won’t leave her alone. And most importantly, she’s being plagued by strange dreams that seem a little too real.

The game begins in one of these dreams. April is standing high on a cliff, overlooking a strange land. On this cliff, she meets a dragon and a talking tree, and she is visited by a strange, malevolent mass that sends her careening over the edge – and back into her bed.

When she awakes, you begin to learn about her life. If there’s one problem with The Longest Journey, it’s that the opening is a bit slow. It’s loaded with expository dialogue about April, her friends, and the city. While this isn’t a problem in and of itself, it seems strange that there is so much exposition right off the bat, when you’ve yet to meet any of the characters or visit the places mentioned.

These conversations would have been much more interesting had they come a bit later in the game, once you’ve actually familiarized yourself with the places and characters you learn about.

During the first chapters of the game, you explore April’s life. You meet her friends, you go to her school and to her job at a local coffee house. It seems like boring stuff, but it accomplishes an important task – as you take part in her routine, you begin to really care about her and her comrades. Her friends all have the hallmark concerns of people making the transition to adulthood – school problems, turbulent love lives, and bad jobs.

The game gets more interesting once the truth behind April’s dreams becomes more apparent. You learn that there are two different worlds: Stark is devoted to science and technology, while the other, Arcadia, is devoted to magic. April has the rare ability to “shift,” to move between these two worlds.

These worlds, which were once one but came to be two, are fascinating, and you’ll be eager to learn more about both their history and their future. April’s dreams and some strange occurrences in both worlds are taking place because the division between the worlds is being eroded. And April is the one who must restore the balance.

Once the truth is revealed, the game begins to take place in both worlds. April cannot control her shifting, so moving from one world to the next takes place at times both opportune and otherwise. In both places, April meets a fascinating range of characters.

In Arcadia there’s Abnaxus, a representative of the Venar, who live in all times at once. He’s a copy editor’s nightmare, as he shifts tenses midsentence and often midword. Then there’s Burns Flipper, the foul-mouthed hacker who rides around in a little hovercar. Even the most minor character is interesting in The Longest Journey, and you’ll find yourself concerned with all of their fates.

It’s a testament to designer Ragnar Tornquist’s storytelling ability that you become so attached to everyone you meet. His game follows the blueprint laid by the classics of the fantasy epic, even as April’s eccentric mentor begins teaching the reluctant savior. But it’s also an original story that’s filled with interesting settings and people. The Longest Journey is sometimes sad, sometimes funny, and sometimes scary. At times, it’s all of these things at once.

The worlds are brought to life with rich, detailed graphics. The character models may not be extremely detailed, but they are good-looking and diverse. The background scenery is colorful and varied, and no two locations look the same. The sound is even better, because of the nonintrusive ambient music and excellent character voices.

It’s commendable that Funcom took the time to create a great English translation of the game, especially considering that it may not ever be published in the States (the translation was done for the U.K. version, which was published in April).

The puzzles in The Longest Journey are fairly standard, though they get better as the game goes on. In the beginning, you’ll have to use some of your inventory items in illogical ways. But later in the game, the puzzles become more intuitive and fit better into the story.

The Longest Journey’s complex and interesting story is what’s most important. It deepens as you get further into it, and once it’s over you’ll still be thinking about all the subplots and how they tied together. And the conclusion is bittersweet – it’s uplifting and rewarding, but there’s a strange sense of sadness to it as well.

The only criticism that can be leveled at the ending is that the epilogue does little to wrap everything up, so it’ll leave you wondering what happened to many of the characters after April’s task was completed.

But the end does allude to a sequel, and anyone who plays the game will be more than happy at the prospect of one. It’s not that The Longest Journey leaves you unsatisfied – it’s that it leaves you wanting even more.

Just when it seemed as if first-person shooters had run out of ideas, along comes No One Lives Forever to reinvigorate the genre. Two years after the release of Half-Life, a first-person shooter has finally arrived that’s so stylish, so ingenious, so well written, so well acted, and otherwise so great that this review won’t have to include the expression “it’s no Half-Life” – except for right there.

No One Lives Forever takes the impressive enemy artificial intelligence of Half-Life, the stealth features of Thief: The Dark Project, and the gadgetry of the console shooter GoldenEye 007 and then combines them all with a unique, colorful ’60s setting and a great sense of humor. The resulting game’s unrelenting inventiveness shows in virtually every aspect of its design.

Although you might expect that it’s somehow inspired by Austin Powers, No One Lives Forever’s inspirations actually seem to be drawn simply from the same cultural well as the Mike Myers comedy. The game’s plot is part Avengers and part Our Man Flint, with a little Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs thrown in for good measure.

The story itself isn’t especially engaging: The good guys, an international antiterrorist organization called UNITY, attempt to foil the world-domination plans of the bad guys, a mysteriously well-funded group of homicidal lunatics called H.A.R.M. But this simple plot acts as a framework on which the designers have strung a great number of brilliantly absurd details.

Someone at Monolith had the bright idea to portray the cutscenes in the game using cinematic flair, rather than with bland camera angles typical of most games. By locking the camera down and framing each shot as if it really were from a movie, the designers have given the game a singular look that really sets it apart from the competition.

The acting in No One Lives Forever is so good and the dialogue is often so sharp that it’ll cast a pall over your memory of previous action games and might even ruin your experience with future shooters that are any less impressive.

Thankfully, the gameplay in No One Lives Forever is every bit a match for the execution of its story. The game includes close to 60 levels spread over 15 diverse and often brightly lit and colorful environments. Expect to spend more than 20 hours finishing the single-player game.

The action alternates between missions in which shooting at things is the primary goal and levels wherein the game’s heroine, Cate Archer, must sneak undetected from one place to another. Some missions combine the two elements in surprising ways. True to the game’s spy theme, stealth is always rewarded, even though it’s not always strictly required. At the end of every level, you’re ranked on your performance, and a large part of your score is based on remaining unseen.

Unlike many other shooters before it, No One Lives Forever never settles into a boring routine. After a few more-standard shooting or sneaking sequences, the game always adds an interesting twist. It’s a testament to the game’s ingenuity that to describe the setting or action of many of the levels would spoil a lot of the fun of experiencing these sequences for the first time.

But to give you some idea of what to expect, here’s a description of just the very first mission. You must protect a clueless yet surly ambassador from assassins as he stumbles around the streets of Morocco. First you’ll stand at a window and snipe enemies as they appear at various spots in a building across the street.

Then you must sneak to another room, without alerting any civilians to your presence, where you set up a new sniper nest for another round of protecting the ambassador. Once you’ve finished this sequence, your room is besieged by a group of thugs, and a wild, close-quarters gunfight ensues. This is all in the first level of 60.

Every gunfight in No One Lives Forever is very exciting thanks to the game’s truly outstanding artificial intelligence for enemy characters. For starters, you won’t ever witness an enemy running in place or bumping into things as in many other shooters.

It’s almost startling to realize just how much of an effect that one detail can have on your sense of immersion in the gameworld. But the developers have done much more than rectify that problem. Namely, your enemies actually appear to care whether or not they live or die. In large groups, they’ll assault you head-on. But alone or in pairs, they’ll often run for cover and then switch position if they notice you’ve moved.

They’ll knock furniture over to hide behind, they’ll stoop down to investigate the bodies of their dead coworkers, and they’ll even hunker down behind tables, stick their weapons over their heads, and spray suppressing gunfire blindly at you.

The enemy behavior seems to be partially scripted, but replaying a battle using different tactics will often result in different enemy actions. What adds to the illusion that you’re taking on real, live opponents is that you’ll frequently sneak up on henchman engaged in long, often hilarious discussions to pass the time while going about their tedious jobs.

These conversations range from a critical reevaluation of the Edsel to an argument over correlation versus causality as it relates to beer consumption among criminals. Delivered in a deadpan style that perfectly matches the dialogue, these ancillary conversations are one of the best parts of the game. You’ll replay levels simply to hear dialogue you may have missed by alerting the guards to your presence.

The motion-captured animation of the game’s characters is also top-notch. Although there aren’t a huge number of different character models, they’re so well animated that they can express emotion through body language alone. And you’ll notice other impressive details such as how enemies killed at the top of stairways will actually come tumbling down.

It’s true that the characters in No One Lives Forever don’t take damage in so many ways as in Soldier of Fortune; you can’t vivisect them into forty bloody pieces. But a single head shot will usually take an enemy down, and chest hits appear to be more damaging than targeting a limb, all of which is more than enough to reward accuracy over wild shooting.

The graphics in No One Lives Forever are powered by the newest version of Monolith’s Lithtech engine. It seems a little less technologically advanced than either the Unreal Tournament or Quake III Arena engines. There are no curved or reflective surfaces on display, and items you’ll find throughout the game frequently appear blocky.

But it’s hardly an issue. Regardless of how many triangles the engine is spitting out, the art direction in No One Lives Forever is spectacular, and the graphics are colorful and always interesting. The game even saves and loads data quickly, unlike other recent Lithtech-engine games.

The game’s sound effects and ’60s-era music are excellent as well. Different game actions have different themes, which actually segue from one piece to another without a jarring jump cut. It’s a subtle effect that’s one of many other features that make No One Lives Forever seem so polished.

To live up to the single-player game, the multiplayer experience of No One Lives Forever would have to be pretty spectacular. In short, it’s not, though there’s nothing really wrong with it either. There’s a built-in game finder, plenty of character models to choose from, four deathmatch levels, and six maps designed for a capture-the-flag variant called H.A.R.M. versus UNITY.

The problem is that most of the elements that make the single-player game special – the acting, the dialogue, the sneaking, and the precisely orchestrated gun battles – are simply absent from the multiplayer game. However, the multiplayer mode does have a few interesting elements.

For instance, motorcycles and snowmobiles are provided to help you traverse a couple of the larger maps. But ultimately, there isn’t a lot to differentiate the multiplayer component of No One Lives Forever from that of most other shooters.

Whatever minor problems or shortcomings there are in No One Lives Forever are dwarfed by the technical expertise, sheer creativity that went into it and the fact is that Monolith Productions has finally delivered an undeniably superlative action game.

Unlike Black & White, no other PC game to date has so effectively combined so many seemingly incompatible elements into one highly polished game. After three years in the making, Lionhead Studios’ first game manages to live up to the extremely high expectations after all. It’s a massive game about lofty concepts–gods and miracles–and yet the game is genuinely funny.

The scope of Black & White is so far in excess of a typical game design that it seems surprising that the finished product turned out so polished and so playable. Still, its many different elements require a lot of explanation–the game has lots of mainstream appeal, but its sophisticated mechanics may quickly confound more casual players.

Black & White is clearly a labor of love by designer Peter Molyneux and his staff. While some aspects of it take getting used to, and can even be frustrating, there’s just so much to see and experience in Black & White that its shortcomings should not turn you away from this incredible game.

The environments and special effects are stunning throughout the game

Because so much about Black & White seems so unusual, it’s only natural to be curious about exactly how the game plays. It’s definitely true that some aspects of the game simply defy categorization–however, it’s also the case that, at its core, Black & White is a strategy game that’s reminiscent of several of Peter Molyneux’s previous games from when he was at Bullfrog Productions.

You play as a god, depicted throughout the game merely as a disembodied hand, and your object is to gain the worship of villages throughout the world. You have complete control over the 3D perspective of the game and complete control over more or less everything else in the world. You can personally see to making villagers work more efficiently.

As you gain more followers, your sphere of influence grows over the land, eventually encompassing other outlying villages, which you’ll have to convert to your faith. Their belief in you is quantified within the game, and the more faithful villagers you have, the greater the territory you control, and the more potential you have for creating miracles–which are essentially magic spells.

Your giant creatures can engage in hilarious brawls

You inspire belief in villagers by doing anything godlike. This is one of the more interesting parts of the game, because it’s so open-ended and really rewards your creativity. If you want to convert a village, one perfectly viable approach is to help out the villagers for a while.

You can drop food and wood into the villagers’ stockpile; you can shower rain onto their crops; you can impress them with miraculous spectacles, such as flocks of doves; you can protect them with magical barriers; and you can even send in friendly missionaries from one of your converted towns.

If you repeat one of these types of actions continuously, it’ll have less and less of an effect on the village. This forces you to try lots of different things, but of course, you don’t have to play nice. A much quicker approach can involve unleashing divine cataclysms such as fireballs and lightning storms upon the town–they’ll believe in you in a hurry once their precious village is ablaze.

You can kidnap townspeople and bring them over to your village or fling the heathen villagers across the sky, to the terror of their former neighbors. You can even send massive boulders smashing through their buildings. An evil approach may be quicker–but then again you’ll inherit a shambles of a town once it submits to you. This makes the good approach rather more suitable for when territorial gain is important, and it usually is.

Other gods in the game usually have the same goals as you do, and during those times when more than one god is vying for control of a single village, the game can actually turn into a rather frustrating stalemate, since converting a village takes awhile.

And even though territorial expansion is important in Black & White, you must simultaneously consider many other factors. For one thing, while your villages are autonomous, they’re not quite as self-reliant as you’d wish they were. Their supplies of wood and food–the two main resources in the game–tend to run dangerously low, as the availability of either food or wood in the environment tends to be limited.

As such, you’ll constantly need to be there to make the supplies appear out of thin air by casting the appropriate miracles repeatedly. Besides this, constructing new buildings in town can be a difficult process. It requires that you first build scaffolding in a workshop by assigning a few villagers to the task.

Depending on the building you want to make, you’ll need to combine up to seven pieces of scaffolding, and once that’s ready, the building itself requires still more resources and personnel. It’s a very involved process that’s more cumbersome than it ought to be, especially since your townspeople won’t usually build anything on their own. They’ll just complain about needing more houses until you lay the foundations yourself.

There are other types of roles your villagers need to fill. By picking them up and dropping them in a context-sensitive area, you can assign them to specific tasks and thus make them your disciples. For instance, you can create a forester by placing a villager next to a tree, and you can likewise create fishermen, craftsmen, farmers, builders–even breeders, in that case by dropping the lucky citizen right next to a member of the opposite sex.

Your villagers will do all these things even if you don’t specifically assign them–but creating disciples costs nothing, and these types of villagers seem much more efficient. It’s important not to make all of your villagers into disciples, though, because disciples are so hard at work that they typically won’t pray for you at your temple (whereas regular villagers will).

It’s these prayers that bestow upon you prayer points and make it possible for you to cast miracles, so balancing how many disciples you have is an important strategic consideration throughout the game. Fortunately you can turn disciples back to normal villagers just by picking them up and shaking them around.

You can’t directly control the world outside your sphere of influence

All this is meant to suggest that Black & White is by no means a simple game, nor is it easy to play. Fortunately, its lighthearted appearance–not to mention its spectacular graphics–makes it easy to get into. But actually learning all of the nuances of the core strategy game will take you awhile.

Part of the problem is that the game’s 50-page manual, while fairly informative, doesn’t go into any depth. So for better or worse, you’ll have to experiment a lot before you get a good sense of the game. Furthermore, the game is difficult to control, at least at first. The designers were determined to craft an invisible, fully mouse-driven interface for the game.

This goes a long way toward making the game look better and seem that much more ambitious, but at the same time, there’s a good reason why most other strategy games feature onscreen interfaces and require the use of a keyboard as well as a mouse. At any rate, camera control in Black & White, using just the mouse, is hard to grasp.

You hold the left mouse button and drag the screen around to scroll. You click and hold along the edges of the map to pitch and to rotate the view. You use both mouse buttons at once to zoom in and out. You can bind all of these functions to keystrokes if you’d rather not use the mouse exclusively. Regardless, except on a very fast system, the camera control in Black & White is also rather sluggish.

The good and evil advisors like to give you their perspective

The developers also came up with a very interesting concept for manipulating objects and casting miracles in the game, and it’s mostly successful. You can pick up and drop pretty much anything. If you want to throw something rather than let it fall, you just flick the mouse in the desired direction before letting go of the object–rather like a game of shuffleboard.

To create a miracle, you actually need to trace a particular pattern on the screen while holding down the right mouse button. These are all simple shapes, and you’ll memorize them in short order. For instance, the deadly miracle called “mega blast” requires you to trace a pentagram in the air.

The only problem with this system is that you may find it isn’t perfectly responsive–it can take a couple of tries to get a miracle to happen, even after you’ve had a lot of practice. Fortunately you can also create miracles by clicking on the appropriate miracle icon along the perimeter of your village hall.

In spite of all this, most players will agree that the giant creatures are the best thing about Black & White–each god commands one as its personal avatar. You can teach the creature to mimic pretty much any of your own godly interventions.

The game’s sophisticated behavioral artificial intelligence makes it fascinating and very exciting to watch the creature learn any number of these things. The good news is that this aspect of the game–even though it’s secondary to the core strategy game in Black & White–is even more satisfying and at least as involved. You gain your choice of creature after about a half hour of play. It starts off with the mind of a baby; it’ll wander around, clueless but curious.

As its curiosity inspires it to try many different things, you simply gesture with the mouse to give it positive reinforcement (by petting it lightly) or negative reinforcement (with a slap, or even a beating), depending on whether you want it to act that way again. You can guide where it moves by using one of several special leashes, which can also influence it to learn more actively, to act more kindly, or to act more aggressively.

Creatures will also begin to learn miracles as you cast them in their vicinity. Soon, you can turn your giant cow (or ape, or tiger) into a farmhand by teaching it to water your crops and to toss food and wood into your stockpile. You’ll also have to train it to eat a certain diet–you can pretty much convince it to try anything at least once, which can be very funny–and you’ll even have to encourage it not to relieve itself on your temple.

Your own alignment in the game, which is gradually determined as you act out of good or out of evil, is totally independent of your creature’s. This gives you a lot of flexibility. For instance, you can play as a purely evil god, but you can pamper your creature like a spoiled child and teach it to right all your wrongs.

You can thus effectively convert a village by wreaking havoc on it yourself and then having your creature come in to relieve the damage. The bewildered villagers will soon be yours. Of course, you can also teach your creature to be hateful and violent.

In either case, as you play, your creature will gradually grow larger and its appearance will also begin to shift with its moral alignment. This effect is done so subtly, and yet the result is so dramatic, that it’s easily one of the more impressive aspects of the game. Your disembodied hand will also gradually change, depending on your actions.

Your creature will grow to become a valuable ally and a loyal friend

You meet your creature in the single-player campaign, which comprises a number of different scenarios tied together by a rather mundane story about some powerful artifacts and a wicked god called Nemesis. There are a ton of optional little quests during the campaign, many of which are interesting, and like the rest of the game, these are often open-ended.

Throughout the campaign, and especially early on, you’ll be aided by your conscience, represented by a nasty little devil and a kindly old man. These companions help walk you through the game and offer you conflicting advice about various situations.

Once you find it, your creature will follow you throughout the campaign and also into stand-alone skirmishes against the computer and even into online matches against human opponents. Creatures can even engage each other in single hand-to-hand combat in a hilarious parody of a martial arts showdown.

These fight sequences look great, but they’re a little hard to control, and it’s too easy to fight defensively. But otherwise, since there are many different forms of animals to choose from in Black & White (though most are hidden throughout the game), a seemingly unlimited variety of ways of training your creature, and so many optional quests during the long campaign, that both the creatures and the campaign prove immensely appealing.

Most everything else about the game is equally well done. Black & White looks extremely impressive. You can zoom in to see your individual villagers’ faces or zoom all the way out until your island is just a small spot in the water, and from any distance, the game looks great.

There’s an immense amount of detail in the graphics, and the creatures look especially good, what with their vast array of different facial expressions and other behaviors. The sound in Black & White is equally remarkable, and much like the graphics, it too features a dramatic scale of effects. You can hear villagers singing and applauding if you get right up close to them, or, high in the sky, you’ll hear little save the wind.

And you can hear practically everything in between as you zoom around. The voice acting in the game is great, though your advisors can begin to get repetitive after you’ve played awhile. Luckily you can toggle them off. The ambient music in the game shifts depending on your alignment, and it sounds very good either way and it never overwhelms the game’s sound effects.

The interior of your temple gives access to many of the game’s features

There’s much more to be said about Black & White. Its multiplayer mode is interesting since you can pit your trained creatures against those of other live opponents, but the selection of maps is very limited, and the very gradual pacing of the game makes the prospect of playing through an entire multiplayer match seem intimidating.

Even so, the multiplayer seems to work smoothly, and you’re bound to find plenty of opponents thanks to the integrated GameSpy support in the game; and, in an amusing touch, chat messages in multiplayer actually come up in word bubbles as though your creature were doing the talking. The game has a few other gimmicks–if you register and play it while you’re online, it can actually sync up the game with your local weather patterns.

You can also sync it up with your e-mail (if you use Microsoft Outlook), and the villagers will take the names of contacts from your address book. Black & White is also one of the few games to support the new force-feedback mouse technology, which provides subtle tactile stimuli as you float your mouse around the game. It’s not a bad effect, though it won’t dramatically improve your experience with the game. Lionhead Studios also plans to support the game continuously through its Web site by offering downloadable creatures and more.

One thing is certain: Black & White is huge. It looks and sounds stunning, and its combination of gameplay elements and game mechanics is completely unique. The game can be extremely open-ended and can be extremely funny, and the better your system, the better the game will look.

Some of Black & White’s game mechanics aren’t as enjoyable as others, and some are even rather frustrating. Furthermore, the game has a rather steep learning curve, and though it’s a real-time strategy game at its core, it lacks the action-packed pacing of many other games in that genre.

Even so, a direct comparison between Black & White and any other game really isn’t appropriate, because the fact is that no other PC game to date has so effectively combined so many seemingly incompatible elements into one highly polished game. Black & White will continuously surprise you, and it takes a miracle for a game like that.

Merging newfound accessibility with revolutionary graphics and stupefying depth, Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2002 is a program of monolithic proportions. Like its immediate predecessor, 1999′s daunting Flight Simulator 2000, Flight Simulator 2002 invites its guests to experience virtually every conceivable parameter of civilian piloting while exploring virtually every conceivable corner of this planet.

Yet any further comparison between the two is not unlike comparing a typical fastball with a Randy Johnson fastball. Microsoft has simply blown the top off the civilian flight simulation genre with its latest iteration and, in so doing, proven that dearly departed competitors like Flight Unlimited III never really stood a chance. Whether you’re a nervous tenderfoot or hardened devotee of desktop flying, this is the Flight Simulator you’ve been waiting for.

Flight Simulator 2002 is a major improvement on its predecessors.

The statistics alone are staggering. For Flight Simulator 2002, Microsoft has added more than 1,000 operative airports to FS 2000′s already astounding 20,000–for a mind-numbing grand total of more than 21,000.

It has upped the number of flyable aircraft from 10 to 12, including series newcomers such as the humungous Boeing 747-400, the Cessna 172S Skyhawk SP, and the largest single-engine floatplane currently available, Cessna’s $1.5 million amphibious Caravan. Returning from past editions are the Boeing 777-300 and 737-400, Cessna 182S Skylane and Skylane RG, Bell 206B JetRanger III chopper, Learjet 45 business jet, Extra 300S stunt plane, Schweizer 2-32 glider, and the ancient Sopwith Camel.

Users may also import aircraft from previous and current versions of Flight Simulator and Combat Flight Simulator, although substantial tweaking is required before said aircraft are fully recognized and operational. Even the game’s system requirements are colossal, ranging from a 650MB minimum to a full install of 1.5GB.

But it’s unquestionably Flight Simulator 2002′s surprisingly glorious and massively modified visual presentation that makes this the finest civilian flight simulation ever to appear.

Critics and customers alike have long heaped scorn upon the Microsoft franchise–and rightly so–for its painfully sluggish frame rate and often bland incidental scenery, particularly when judging it against the smaller yet markedly more attractive and smoother world of competitors like the aforementioned Flight Unlimited. Suffice it to say that such disapproval is no longer warranted.

Not only does Flight Simulator 2002 paint as pretty a picture as did Flight Unlimited III, but it also does so on a quasi-global scale. Of its 21,000-plus airstrips, more than 60 are paired with partially and fully realized cityscapes that put to shame the detailed cities of prior editions.

In fact, the structural scenery in prime centers such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong is so dense, so authentic, and so smartly blended into the landscape that you’ll swear you’re flying over the real thing. Less-populous locations like Las Vegas are no longer a sparse assemblage of area-specific buildings plopped in the midst of a vast wasteland.

Now, a quick tour over the strip reveals more than a dozen finely crafted casinos and such detail as the Luxor skylight, the Mirage volcano, numerous legible billboards, and a Bellagio fountain that actually gushes water as you approach. That the entire gambling district is surrounded by what looks like a real city is indicative of what’s in store throughout the game.

Depending on their location and importance, even small urban zones bear resemblance to their real-world counterparts. Midsize towns such as Bullhead City, Arizona, and Redding, California, have been upgraded from generic blotches and one or two haphazardly positioned structures to the thriving communities they really are.

Bullhead City is noticeably larger and bordered on the west by the Colorado River, which bends and curves almost precisely where it should. The downtown Redding core is a bit underdeveloped, yet its buildings are faithfully low-level and the surrounding countryside authentically treed. Interstate 5 bisects the town, and alternate byways sprawl in all directions to nearby Whiskeytown and Shasta Lakes and further northward to majestic, snow-capped Mount Shasta.