Maximum PC Games RSS Feed

Left 4 Dead 2

Will Smith — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:30:00 -0600

Does the world really need a Left 4 Dead sequel already?

We love killing zombies. When Left 4 Dead came out, we feared that eventually we’d tire of returning the walking dead back to the hell from which they spawned, but it turns out we didn’t. However, we did quickly tire of the lame “optimal” ways that hardcore gamers developed to beat Left 4 Dead campaigns in the most efficient—yet boring—manner possible.

Enter Left 4 Dead 2. The biggest change to the established formula is the redesigned finales and crescendos—those mid-level events that attract unending hordes of zombies. Instead of simply finding a good closet and holing up for 15 minutes, popping out only to kill the occasional tank, the crescendos now require you to keep moving—either to reach a goal or collect and deliver items. The zombie closet is no more, and we don’t miss it at all.

Additionally, the five campaigns are more connected—one picks up where the last left off—and more dynamic, with multiple paths through key bottlenecks in the levels. The available paths—as well as rain, fog, and other dynamic weather effects—are controlled by the improved AI Director. As before, the Director monitors the overall status of your party—health, weapons, ammo, and progress through the level—and automatically adjusts the challenge to maintain tension while not overwhelming your party. The Director does this by sending zombie hordes, limiting ammo and weapons, and spawning the special infected.

This lovable uncommon is ready to entertain the young ’uns by juggling, riding unicycles, and eating your brains!

And the special infected are back—with friends. In addition to the classic hunter, smoker, boomer, witch, and tank, Left 4 Dead 2 adds three new specials: the charger, the spitter, and the jockey—all designed to force players to keep moving and make it easier for infected to split up even good human players, which is important for both single-player and versus. Additionally, each campaign has a unique type of uncommon common zombie. These undead are not much stronger than garden-variety zombies, but each has a unique power, making the uncommon common more difficult to kill.

In Left 4 Dead 2, the zombie models are much more dynamic—taking damage, losing limbs, and acting much more ragdoll-y.

Naturally, there’s a host of new assault rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, and pistols; but L4D 2 also adds special ammo types, grenade launchers, and melee weapons. Whether you’re talking about the katana, machete, cricket bat, or chainsaw, we love the melee weapons. While you give up your pistol slot to carry a melee weapon, it’s dead useful for one or two members of your party to go melee to serve as the frontline against big hordes.

With a stomach full of deadly, deadly acid, the Spitter’s job is to put a stop to your forward progress.

Last but not least, there are a couple of new game modes. For aficionados of versus mode, which pits a team of human-controlled humans against a team of human-controlled zombies, there’s Scavenge mode. Scavenge puts the combatants on small maps with tight time limits. Human players must collect fuel and return it to a generator, while the zombies try to prevent that. Because the action is condensed in a relatively small area, it’s much more intense than more traditional versus battles we’re accustomed to. We also really dig the new Realism mode. Realism requires players to headshot zombies, while removing the auras that make it easy to identify friendly players, weapons, ammo caches, and other items from afar. Because you can enable Realism at any difficulty level, it helps bridge the jump from Advanced mode to Expert, although we don’t recommend turning on Realism if you’re not playing with your regular group.

Each campaign has a unique uncommon common zombie, which you’ll find mixed in with the rest of the horde.

Our only real complaint with Left 4 Dead 2 is that the Source engine is beginning to show its age, especially in areas where there’s any kind of ground cover, uneven ground, or foliage. While the new character animation system and ragdolls are amazing, it can’t hide the fact that this engine is approaching its 10th birthday. Despite some graphical shortcomings, the game is a blast to play, and delivers an experience whose only real rival is its predecessor.

The bad news is that finales in Left 4 Dead 2 force you into the open. The good news? Pyrotechnics!

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Dan Stapleton — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:15:43 -0600

The Bat is back

We’ve been saying it for years: The moment they stop messing around with rushed, under-funded movie tie-ins and make a real Batman game, we’ll have a huge hit on our hands. With Arkham Asylum, Rocksteady has proved us right—this game finally does justice to the Dark Knight by recreating the monstrous foes, the dark, gritty atmosphere, and Batman’s legendary fighting skills to near perfection.

Arch nemesis Joker, in particular, is a masterpiece. Voiced by Mark Hamill (reprising the role from Batman: The Animated Series) and modeled and animated with some astonishing detail and lighting, he’s genuinely convincing as the deranged, murderous clown who turns the tables on Batman by seizing control of Arkham, Gotham’s supervillain lock-up.

Fights against these 'roid-raging thugs are exciting, but the game goes back to this well a few times too often.

Arkham itself is a joy to explore. It’s a semi-open world that grows as new areas are unlocked by the story and by Batman’s expanding array of gadgetry; each section is loaded with unique details and secrets planted by the Riddler, and subtle (and some not-so-subtle) changes every time you pass through prevent it from ever getting dull. With PhysX turned on, cosmetic improvements like loose papers picked up by the wind, swaying cobwebs, and crumbling stone walls enhance the atmosphere noticeably.

The single best part of the game—the one that will have you playing over and over in challenge mode—is its amazing fighting system. Anyone can jump in right away and feel like a great fighter taking on a group of five or six of Joker’s thugs, with some basic button-mashing resulting in surprisingly smooth and flowing combat animations. With practice, you’ll get the hang of the finer points of combos and timing, turning you into an unstoppable fighting machine capable of beating the crap out of a dozen or more opponents without them laying a hand on you. Rarely does a game make you feel like this much of a badass.

Sonar's for wimps. Detective vision can see henchmen's tiny brains.

Being a bullet-permeable hero, Batman takes an entirely different approach to armed thugs. Using stealth (and convenient stone gargoyle perches) the goal is to isolate and pick the baddies off one at a time. It can be frustrating for players who prefer a direct approach, but Batman has a secret weapon to speed up the process considerably: Detective Mode. Switching this on allows you to see all nearby enemies through walls, so as long as you look before you leap you’ll never be caught with your pants down when you make your move. It’s so effective, in fact, that we felt guilty using it and left it switched off most of the time. It makes a gorgeous game look ugly, anyway.

If not for some repetitious mini-boss fights, the barely interactive “detective work,” and the checkpoint save system, we’d have virtually nothing negative to say about Arkham Asylum. Even the mouse and keyboard controls, often a weak point of cross-platform third-person action games, are elegantly done and arguably better than the gamepad. This is Batman at his best, and you don’t get much better than that.

ARMA 2

Evan Lahti — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:00:40 -0500

Pilot any plane, shoot any rifle, get blown up by real tanks

To the shooter enthusiast who laments auto-aim, refuses regenerating health, tires of over-protective cover systems, balks at recoilless rocket launchers, and rolls his eyes at infinite respawns, Arma 2 is a love letter perfumed in cordite.

You’re a member of Razor Team, a Marine squad deployed by the United States to assist the Chernorussian government against a well-armed insurgency. Your fire team hits the ground with weapons and equipment modeled after real-life counterparts, tackling objectives with patient tactics as the conflict evolves into a full civil war.

But narrative (even if it’s more of an asset to Arma 2 than its predecessor) isn’t the draw. For gamers who grew up with titles like Comanche, the original Rainbow Six games, and Operation Flashpoint (which was also created by developer Bohemia Interactive), Arma 2 is a platform of comprehensive war realism that appeases those who value complexity, don’t mind obscure keyboard shortcuts (hit Enter on your Num Pad to change between first/third person), appreciate accurate audio modeling (if a tank explodes a mile away, you’ll hear it five seconds after it actually blows up), and know that an M-16 can’t kill someone from three miles away (hello, Call of Duty).

Pull up! For newcomers to simulation games, piloting this UH-1Y and other aircraft takes practice.

The “ultimate military simulator” tagline isn’t far off, but it does come with some well-attached strings. Namely, buggy code that can’t always keep up with Arma 2’s ambitious attempt at realism. For every moment of accurate weapon physics and war atmosphere, there’s a corresponding miscue of brainless AI or broken mission scripting. You can fly teammates over a war zone in a C-130 transport plane to execute a tactical air drop, but sit puzzled when parachuting 10 feet from the ground lets you land unharmed.

Realistic ballistics modeling will have you compensating for bullet-drop and recoil during firefights—but if you’re shot, your AI teammates usually leave you writhing on the ground because they forget to heal you. Fighting against unscripted AI in an unrestricted, 225-square-kilometer slice of fictional Russia means you apply the tactics you want to, but strategy won’t count when an enemy rifleman ignores the bulky shrubs you’re lying prone in and snipes you from a half-mile away. Call out targets with a fully voiced (in Russian, no less) command system, but cringe when your war buddies shout like a Speak & Spell running on dying batteries.

Disciplined tactics and squad maneuvers are key to getting ahead in ARMA 2. Ramboing into a war zone won't get you very far.

Whether or not these incongruent bits of design break the game or just distract you from the fun at hand depends on your patience. And as most of them are AI-related, it’s fortunate that the prime moments still exist in co-op mode. Loading into aircraft with a few buddies, laser-marking an APC while a teammate drops a bomb toward the target, calling out military jargon over voice chat—Arma 2 thrives on these emergent war scenes; it’s at its best when your actions, and not the game itself, are scripting the battle.

That openness-of-experience extends to a deep mission editor that will delight modders. And graphically, Arma 2 has system-busting credibility. Explosions feel organic and the motion blur and first-person head-bob when you sprint is incredibly immersive, but for all but owners of the beefiest systems, the unscripted AI means the frame rate dips as more objects and action enter play.

If looking down the barrel of dozens of nuanced firearms, unpredictable warfare, and plugging in a flight stick float your gamer boat, Arma 2 is a refreshing shift from mainstream gun games that suits the PC’s complexity, even with a few bugs.

Prototype

Logan Decker — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:30:00 -0500

An open-world brawler with lots of guts

Not many games let you turn your arm into a long steel blade and cut people in half—top half going this-a-way, bottom half going that-a-way. Even fewer let you turn your hands into giant claws to cut off your victims’ legs, too. And as far as we know, not one has ever let you run diagonally up the side of building, skitter over a collapsing fire escape, and take a leaping vault off the roof as your hand—now a 50-yard whip—tags a hovering ’copter and reels you toward the cockpit to the horror of the doomed pilots. Such is the awesome power you’ll wield in Prototype, Activision’s apocalyptic and wildly entertaining third-person action-adventure.

Events begin grimly, as Alex Mercer wakes up in a morgue. He quickly discovers that he’s become a nearly indestructible shape-shifter capable of creating weapons out of his flesh and disguising himself as anyone he consumes, among other interesting abilities—such as making giant spikes pop out of the ground to skewer his enemies. So, when the amnesiac Mercer wanders topside into a plague-ridden Manhattan and finds himself pursued by crazed pedestrians, the military, and genetic mutants, he doesn’t hesitate to break out the cutlery.

Alex's Blade Arm is one of the most effective--and gruesome--weapons in Mercer's repertoire. No word, though, on whether or not you can take it on the plane.

Prototype’s plot is sabotaged by inconsequential characters and the “Web of Intrigue,” a video montage of your victims’ memories that cough up bits of backstory. Like its enormous but undifferentiated re-creation of Manhattan (which you can traverse by running straight up the walls of buildings and leaping rooftop to rooftop from Battery Park to Harlem), Prototype substitutes scale for detail. But that’s fine with us, because Prototype is all about combat and improvising new techniques in crowd control.

The game never lets you settle into a comfy routine. A quiet infiltration into a military base turns into bloodshed when a genetic detector sees through your disguise; that tank you hijacked won’t last long against rocket launchers wielded by ground forces; and that airstrike team will pursue you relentlessly through narrow streets and underpasses and over rooftops until you go down or they do. As the difficulty scales up, so do your powers, which can be upgraded by cashing in the “Evolve Points” you earn throughout missions (keyboard and mouse controls actually have an edge over gamepad controls, thanks to faster swaps between your expanding catalog of abilities).

Once you've latched on, you can bring it down, or hoist yourself up to it for a nasty hijack.

Through the 14 hours of single-player missions, Prototype’s Manhattan essentially becomes a canvas upon which to indulge and refine Mercer’s spectacular badassery. Smash tanks with a 40-story freefall, lash yourself toward a copter with a Whipfist, eat the pilots, and rain missiles on rampaging genetic mutants from the air. And if you’re overwhelmed, let ’er rip with one of your kick-ass Devastator attacks, like the Air Tendril, which pierces everything in the same zip code with your own intestines.

Yes, a less pulpy story and more detailed Manhattan would have been welcome, but what Prototype does well it does awesomely well. Even better, after you finish the story mode, Prototype lets you start a new game with all your accumulated powers intact—why save Manhattan, we thought, when we could rip a hole through it instead? With great power comes great irresponsibility.

The Game Boy: Dear Consoles, Never Change – Love, MPC

Nathan Grayson — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:00:00 -0500

It’s been nearly four years since the Xbox 360 helped consoles get their graphical groove back, which – of course – kicked off the current console generation. Time flies, doesn’t it? The Xbox 360, then -- if we’re going by Tech Standard Time (TST) -- should now be on its last legs. A dinosaur on its death bed, facing extinction by the meteoric approach of a new “next-gen” Microsoft console. But it’s not. In fact, if Microsoft and Sony have things their way, the current console generation will keep on chugging along for another five years.

Not long ago, for us PC gamers and our beefy, ever-evolving rigs, this would have been a moot point – or even a nice bit of superiority to hold over console gamers’ heads. “Our graphics are prettier than yours! Neener-neener-neener!” But times have changed. PC exclusives are few and far-between, and many are only one mediocre first week of sales away from being ported to consoles (*cough*Crysis*cough*). The large majority of games are unable to take full advantage of PC hardware, because consoles and their aging innards are holding everyone else back. Sorry state of affairs, ain’t it?

And I couldn’t be happier.

Why? Because we’ve finally reached a temporary cease-fire in the war over who can render the most realistic videogame graphics. And so, in order to differentiate their games from the bump-mapped masses, many developers are getting creative.

For instance, lately I’ve been wading through WET, an over-the-top action game from Bethesda and Artificial Mind and Movement. Unfortunate title aside, the game’s chock full of excellent ideas – the greatest of which, I’d say, is its aesthetic. Basically, WET’s a playable grindhouse/pulp film. As you sail through the air in slow-mo and pile up a body count of something around 6.7 billion, punk music blares and your character tosses out all sorts of B-movie-friendly one-liners. To top it off, all the action is wrapped in a film grain, and when your character kicks the bucket, the film reel tears and pops. In between gameplay sections, the game even airs old-timey film-style commercials, promoting things like church attendance, hotdogs, and something called a “Personality Pickle.”

Here’s the thing, though: While WET’s gameplay is certainly enjoyable, the whole package wouldn’t be anything special without its 70’s-era trappings. Instead, it’d just be another of Max Payne’s innumerable dual-pistol-totting, fourth-dimension-warping clones – sans Mr. Payne’s perpetual constipation-face, thankfully. Point is, WET lives and dies by its aesthetic. The game’s many constituent parts are glued together by a palpably pulpy vibe, and that glue is the game’s main selling point. So move over, big men in gray armor – and take your blah-brown war-torn landscapes with you; WET’s taking gamers to new places, and it’s not the only game betting the proverbial farm on an interesting aesthetic vibe, either.

Recently, Gearbox Software announced that Borderlands ditched its paint-by-numbers Gritty Future for a wackier, comic bookish style. Now, this is hardly the first time a game’s ever been cel-shaded before, but again, Gearbox allowed the vibe created by this artistic evolution to seep into its game’s every pour. And so, with a new darkly humorous aesthetic at the wheel, Borderlands’ characters and world are now a whole lot livelier, as are its commercials and box art. Borderlands has taken on an attitude – an identity all its own. And the game wears that oddball sensibility with pride. In fact, as evidenced by the aforementioned commercials and box art, that sensibility has become one of Borderlands’ main back-of-the-box bullet points. It’s something that I, at least, couldn’t imagine Borderlands without. And so, as with WET, the clothes make the man (or woman, as it were.)

So, how do consoles figure into all of this? Well, until Microsoft or Sony decides to fire the starting gun on a new console race, the majority of developers will continue working with current graphical technologies. Based off the eye-popping styles of Borderlands, WET, and games of the like, this means more inventive art styles, aesthetics, and videogame vibes for us. However, assuming the PS4 and Xbox 720 Pop Shove-It up their graphical arsenals along the same lines as prior “next-gen” consoles, realistic graphics will be in vogue again. After all, what gets people all riled up when new consoles launch? That’s right: shinier cars, hyper-detailed skin textures, and – for some reason – ducks.

Here’s hoping, then, that the current console generation sticks around long enough for the paint to dry on this new trend toward unique aesthetics. I mean, no offense, Marcus Fenix and other members of the League of Ordinary Videogame Heroes, but I’m ready for something fresh.

The Sims 3

Dan Stapleton — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:10:46 -0500

Such a leap forward it feels more like The Sims³

By now, when people think of The Sims franchise, they think of a virtual dollhouse in which you guide little idiot people through the mundane details of their lives rather than living your own.

That reputation is both well-deserved and unjust. Now in its third iteration, you still have to worry about getting your Sims to a bathroom before they wet themselves. On the other hand, it can be so addictive that it often feels like there’s someone watching you on his PC monitor, selecting you, then clicking on your computer and choosing “Keep playing The Sims 3” from your radial menu. If you’re lucky, he’ll let you go to the bathroom.

You can create a Sim jerk using traits like Evil and Mean Spirited. Dan also enjoys gardening.

Fundamentally, The Sims 3 is a very similar game to its predecessors: You juggle the needs and wants of a family of Sims to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise. What has changed is the revolutionary increase in scale. Previous Sims games locked you into a single lot, and if you wanted to take your Sims elsewhere you’d have to sit through an epic-length loading screen. The Sims 3 loads an entire town, which both frees your Sims to stroll down the street or drive across town, and expands the number of characters living in the world at once from a handful to dozens, simulating an entire community. The ability to quickly zoom out and view the whole area alone puts this version head and shoulders above The Sims 1 and 2.

Without making any other earth-shattering changes to gameplay, nearly every aspect of the game has been overhauled and enhanced. Personalities are much more complex than before—each Sim is a combination of five out of more than 60 available traits, making their interactions deeper (but still easy to manipulate). Each Sim has wants, which provide you a constant stream of things to work toward, and there are rewards for accomplishing minor and major tasks. The house building and furnishing toolset has improved with features such as a very clever visual sorting interface, allowing object placement on a finer grid and the ability to create your own color schemes.

I can see my house from here! And everybody else's house, the City Hall, the gym, the hospital....

Not everything works so well—the inventory system, for example, feels a bit sloppy and unintuitive, and there’s no good tutorial to teach you to use it. Pathfinding gets wonky when two Sims want to use the same object or cross paths. The lifetime rewards you’ve been earning points for by completing each Sim’s wants all this time? With a few exceptions, most are boring and anti-climactic. And there’s still that annoying period of down-time while you watch your Sims sleep every night.

Even so, it’s difficult to imagine a Sims fan not being ecstatic over this game, and its accessibility makes it an excellent introduction to new and non-violent gamers. Heck, the ability to invite over the neighbors, switch into build mode, and wall them into windowless rooms until they expire gives even anti-Sims (and slightly sadistic) hardcore gamers something to love. Allowing you to play virtually any way you want is The Sims 3’s greatest strength—you are virtually guaranteed to find a way to enjoy it.

Plants vs. Zombies

Will Smith — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Popcap's follow-up to Peggle brings hardcore tower defense to your backyard

Plants vs. Zombies takes the familiar desktop tower-defense formula—defensive towers line a path and shoot at endless waves of mindless automatons—and turns it on its side... in your backyard. In typical tower-defense games, you manage one path (and one set of baddies at a time). In Plants vs. Zombies, you have to manage five or six lanes and you have to plant your botanical towers in the same lanes the undead baddies walk.

The game starts simply; you have a few lanes to manage and one or two types of zombies. The number of lanes you have to manage and the number of plants you have at your disposal increases quickly, although the difficulty ramps up slowly over the first several hours of play. You’ll eventually unlock about 50 different plants, each with a different function. Some will form the backbone of your sun economy (sun is the currency you exchange for each plant you place), some are purely offensive, some are purely defensive, and some fill various support roles.

To keep you in check, new zombies are continually introduced. Each different zombie type has new (frequently hilarious) powers, ranging from simple helmets and screen-door shields that let the undead absorb more damage, to Pogo-Stick and bungee zombies that can leap over your defense. Each type of zombie has multiple plant counters; for example, the balloon zombie, who floats happily over your defenses, can be countered by balloon-popping cacti as well as by the Blover, which generates a mighty wind that blows away flying zombies.

At the higher levels of Plants vs. Zombies, you'll need to use every plant in your arsenal to defeat the hordes of undead.

At the beginning of each level, before you select the plants you’ll use, you’re presented with a preview of the attacking zombies. With that knowledge, you can tailor your arsenal to counter the attacking zombies’ special abilities. The game’s 50 levels are set in a variety of environments (all around your suburban homestead, natch), including the front yard, the backyard, and nighttime scenarios. With different environmental challenges in every area and dozens of different zombies to counter, no one strategy will work in every level. Unlike many other tower-defense games, during the 20 or so hours that you play Plants vs. Zombies, you’ll constantly find yourself adjusting your basic strategy to utilize new types of plants—or even trying something entirely new.

Along with the 50 levels of Adventure mode, you’ll unlock another 30 or so mini-games, challenges, and survival boards. By completing these challenges, you can earn cash to spend on upgrades to your plants, additional seed slots, and other powerups. Eventually, you’ll also unlock the Zen Garden, a plant farm where you can grow seedlings to full-size plants. Keep the plants watered and fed and they’ll generate a ton of cash for you.

Kill enough zombies and you'll earn the coveted Golden Sunflower Trophy.

Plants vs. Zombies brings something new and very fun to the tower-defense genre, but it takes a long time for the difficulty to ramp up enough to challenge aficionados of the genre. That’s our sole complaint with the game, however. It’s a perfect pick-up-and-play lunch break diversion, and definitely worth its $20 price.

Demigod

Dan Stapleton — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:30:58 -0500

An epic battle of wannabe gods, Internet permitting

It is said that a great game is easy to learn but difficult to master. Demigod has the latter part down—the former, not so much. Veterans of the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients, from which this game draws much of its inspiration, will have an easy time grasping the excellent concept, but to most other players it’s a very new form of multiplayer role-playing game, and the lack of tutorials makes learning the ropes a challenge.

To make a long, superfluous story short, portals on both sides of a symmetrical map spew out waves of AI-controlled troops that clash in the middle. Controlling a single powerful character, your goal is to push the tide of battle back at the enemy and topple their citadel. It sounds fairly simple, but thanks to a blizzard of game elements such as eight character classes, structure and minion upgrades, item purchasing, and flag capturing, Demigod becomes extremely complex.

Epic battles rage as escalating waves of minions break against powerful demigods.

The demigod characters, all of which have loads of personality and detailed fighting animations, are divided into high-damage assassins and supporting generals (teams can mix classes freely), and each has a unique skill tree. Assassins, like the enormous Rook, specialize in dealing damage directly, while generals, like the spirit-rising Oak, outsource some of that duty to summoned minions. Neither type has a clear upper hand, but generals tend to be more demanding to master and are more vulnerable to the game’s subpar pathfinding, which strands minions on every corner.

Battle is extremely tactical, and victory depends on knowing when to give up pursuit of a wounded enemy, when to retreat behind defenses yourself, when to seize a window of opportunity as the enemy waits to respawn, how to best use your demigod’s powers to complement your allies, and finding a balance between spending your money on improving your demigod with items or your team with citadel upgrades to buff up minions and tower defenses. After both teams have gotten the hang of things, it’s a very suspenseful and fluid sort of war where the tides of battle can swing wildly back and forth, and victory is seldom certain. The only thing that’s difficult to overcome is if you allow the other team to gain experience and level up significantly faster than you do—then your godly goose is cooked.

The Vampire Lord raises an army of tick-like soldiers from defeated enemies to do his bidding.

But for what is primarily a multiplayer game (single-player skirmish and tournament options are identical to multiplayer, except against bots), Demigod has some extremely finicky online matchmaking. Stardock and Gas Powered Games have been very aggressive in issuing patches to resolve the maddening problems, but as of this review, it takes a lot of gentle coaxing and crossed fingers to get everyone connected properly for a custom six-player game. The reward for suffering through the connectivity issues is great, but spending 20 minutes setting up a game only to be dropped moments from victory has a way of dampening enthusiasm.