Apr 16, 2010

Saboteur

Looks aren't everything. Worth: $17
based on 360 retail


Voulez-vous shoot Nazis avec moi?
Plusses: mission design, lots of stuff to blow up and shoot, surprisingly good driving, city-as-jungle-gym a la Assassins Creed, sprawling game world, palpable sense of being the underdog.
Minuses: story, voice acting, art direction, characters, character animations, graphics are totally last-gen.

This game is weird, but once I got the hang of it I had a great time. It looks and sounds like crap, but the controls and character handling are solid and consistent. I liked using dynamite to take out Nazi sniper towers and fuel depots. The variety of weapons is actually better than other WW2 games because the game designers made the decision to include some high-end fantasy weapons like the fictional MP-60 that spews bullets like water out of a garden hose.

Driving around Paris doesn't feel like the real Paris at all, but it was still fun to clamber around on the Eiffel Tower, Arc de' Triomphe, and Sacre Cour. The use of black-and-white to indicate occupied territory as opposed to full-color for the liberated areas was even more striking than I thought it would be. Once I opened up some of the city to the full-color of denazification, the black-and-white Nazified areas were positively chilling. I anticipate that this design feature will be heavily ripped off in future games from other developers because it did a great job of motivating me to colorize the entire city.

Apr 10, 2010

Assassin's Creed 2

Party like it's 1499. Worth: $60
based on 360 retail


Italians tend to be very nurturing, until the stabbing begins.
This is the best single-player game I've ever played. Everything about the experience is so polished that even titles from game-making giants like Bungie and Epic pale in comparison to this masterpiece of interactive entertainment from Ubisoft.

Plusses: story, graphics, camera, control scheme, dialogue, voice acting, art direction, game world.
Minuses: none (although a Co-Op mode would have made this the best game of all time for eternity).