Maximum PC - Games

Batman: Arkham City Review

Dan Scharff — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:05:42 +0000

The ultimate Batman experience

To say that Batman: Arkham City is the best licensed game of all time is like saying Oreos are the best chocolate-and-cream sandwich cookies; sure, it's praise, but it's meaningless praise given the competition. A more impressive feat is that outside of the comics and graphic novels, Batman: Arkham City is the single best representation of the Batman property ever created.

A veritable who's who of Batman history, Arkham City manages to weave in just about every major Batman character, from Alfred to Zsasz. The main storyline focuses on Batman's fight to take down Arkham City from the inside out, all while dealing with the ever-present Joker threat. The tightly constructed narrative moves seamlessly from story beat to story beat, villain to villain, as it builds to a satisfying and surprising finale. It helps that every member of the voice acting cast is pitch perfect, from the brilliant psychotic lunacy of Mark Hamill's Joker to the gravelly snarl of Kevin Conroy's Batman.

The real star of the show, however, is Arkham City, the walled-off penal colony that serves as the game's setting and expansive hubworld. Arkham City's faded art deco splendor and gritty industrial slums come together to uniquely capture the seedy, noir soul of Gotham. This carefully selected cross-section of toppled landmarks, burned‑out tenements, and rusty factories provides the perfect backdrop for Batman to do the usual Batman things.

Batman danced with the devil in the pale moonlight. And won.

And that's the true triumph of Batman: Arkham City—never before has Batman felt more like Batman. The caped crusader effortlessly grapples and glides his way around the city, flits from shadowy rooftops to darkened alleys, and makes full use of an impressive array of gadgets and utilities in his quest to clean up the rugged streets of Arkham City. Traversal is faster than ever as Batman literally flies across the city, and the open nature of Arkham City's world lets you smoothly transition from exploration, to stealth, to straightforward fisticuffs.

The free-flowing combat of Batman: Arkham Asylum makes a triumphant return in Arkham City, and with significant improvements. The core concept is still a two-button, timing-based system, focusing on strikes and counters and quickly moving from one target to the next. This go 'round, however, Batman has brought all his toys to the party. His utility belt is overflowing with handy gadgets which he can quick fire in the middle of combat without even breaking his combo.

Adding to the dynamic feel of both the fighting and the city at large is Nvidia's PhysX engine. Batman's cape clings and flutters realistically, dust and fog swirl around the legs of back alley thugs, leaves and trash float around the dilapidated streets, and shards of shattered glass and rock litter the broken pavement. The additions are subtle, but add significant atmosphere to an already detailed world.

Thanks to Nvidia's PhysX, the terrified look on this thug's face is hidden by a leaf, as guest star Catwoman kicks his skull in.

And yes, even without PhysX, Batman: Arkham City is simply a phenomenal-looking game. The power of the PC is in full effect here; crisp hi-res textures and expansive draw distance ensure immersion even when viewing the entire city while gliding on high. Unfortunately, the game's performance takes a serious nosedive when DirectX 11 functions are enabled. While the game can run smoothly for stretches in DX11 mode, the frame rate will randomly, and fairly frequently, plummet to 5fps or lower, ultimately making the game unplayable. It's a shame too, as the DirectX 11 features look particularly nice, significantly enhancing the look of cloth and skin textures, and making characters appear decidedly less flat and plasticky than in DX9 mode.

There are a handful of other niggling technical issues, as well. The game's keyboard and mouse controls, thankfully, are not among them. The layout takes a bit of getting used to—this game uses a ton of buttons, thanks to 12 gadgets and several combat combo buttons—but feels better than a gamepad in the long run. The annoyance is simply that control settings cannot be changed when the game is running. In fact, no game settings can be changed once the game is launched—they can only be changed through the launcher application, before the game boots. Also, while we encountered no catastrophic errors, the game does take fairly long to boot, and we had several crashes with GFWL, forcing us to exit the program and restart.

Minor technical shortcomings aside, the PC version of Batman: Arkham City is clearly the definitive version of the definitive Batman experience. While it's a shame that the month delay between console and PC wasn't enough time to iron out all the kinks, the PC version still controls the best, runs the best, looks the best, and will provide you with the best Batman experience money can buy.

$50, www.batmanarkhamcity.com, ESRB: T

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Review

Nathan Edwards — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:05:29 +0000

Oh, hello, Dragon Age. Didn't see you there. Morrowho?

Skyrim is torn by civil war: A weakened Empire struggles to retain control of the province, while rebel Nords vie for self-determination. Dragons have returned after centuries, and nobody knows why. Undead infest the crypts, cairns, and barrows, and more dangerous things haunt deep Dwarven ruins. Elsewhere, ordinary people are living their lives. Guilds struggle to reclaim past glory, shopkeepers try to scrape by, lovers quarrel, and everyone could use your help. Time to make your mark on the world.

Skyrim is a first-person RPG with a wide array of skills and abilities, loosely clumped under three main archetypes: the mage, the warrior, and the thief. Unlike earlier Elder Scrolls games, though, there are no tagged skills or premade character classes. Play the game how you like, and your character gets better at what it does most. Our first character was a flame-casting, axe-wielding Nord, but there are eight other player races and innumerable play styles, and Shouts add a new kind of mana-less magic to the game. The game’s voice acting (for the most part), interface, and graphics are also leaps ahead of Oblivion’s. Combat is more satisfying, if a bit repetitive after a while. Even killing dragons becomes almost routine as you increase in power.

You saw a mudcrab the other day? We saw this.

Skyrim’s main quest is an incredible tale that brings you from one end of the province to the other, from the highest mountain to the lowest depths, and encompasses stealth, diplomacy, adventuring, exploration, and a lot of combat. But it’s a greatest-hits collection for a prolific band. It’s a good starting point, and you’ll get some of the best content, but if it’s the only album you listen to, you’ll miss most of the material, including stuff that’s better than any of the hits. With superhuman focus you could beat the main quest in maybe 25 hours, but that’s not how you should play Skyrim. Even running from one objective to another, we inevitably got sidetracked for hours by something—a small town, a crypt, a ruin—we spotted in passing. We clocked 55 hours of play time before reluctantly focusing on the main quest and still felt we’d just scratched the surface. One editor has put 90 hours in and has barely touched the main quest at all.

It wouldn’t be a Bethesda open-world game without a heaping tablespoon of weirdness. Animals judder into the landscape or appear hundreds of feet in the air, then fall to their deaths. Every guard you meet complains about the arrow he took in the knee. Books and plates render slightly inside the shelves they’re on, then go flying across the room. A giant’s club rises into the air like a helium balloon. At times, the game would crash to desktop every hour or so. Good thing there’s a mod for that.

Dragons require a lot of percussive maintenance.

That’s one of the best things about playing Skyrim on a PC. In addition to the graphical superiority—consoles ain’t got nothing on Skyrim at 1920x1200 at Ultra settings—the modding community corrects for bugs and idiosyncrasies faster than the developers. Look past the inevitable nude mods, and you’ll see high-res texture packs, patches to fix Bethesda’s blocky faces, interface tweaks, and more. This isn’t to say Skyrim is a really buggy game. The few bugs that aren’t fixed by patches or mods aren’t enough to dampen our enthusiasm for the game world or the story.

If Skyrim was only as good as Morrowind or Oblivion, it’d be unskippable. But it’s much, much better. It’s certainly the best game Bethesda’s ever made, and one of the best we’ve ever played. It’s not without weird bugs and quirks, but the gameplay, story, and amount of content are all staggering, and we’ll be playing it for months to come.

$60, www.elderscrolls.com, ESRB: M

Battlefield 3 Review

Dan Scharff — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:56:33 +0000

Behold the Chimera!

There is a creature in Greek mythology known as the Chimera. The Chimera was an unholy patchwork of a beast, a combination of lion, snake, and goat. Battlefield 3 is the software equivalent of a Chimera—a beast of a game stitched together from disparate parts.

Battlefield 3’s single-player campaign is undoubtedly the goat. The game resorts to every dirty funneling trick to keep you on its chosen path, ranging from invisible walls to flat-out killing you and forcing a reload if you wander. You’ll spend much of the game running a high-speed conga line with your AI squad mates, dashing from one checkpoint to the next.

Battlefield 3 offers an expansive battlespace that can go from desolate to crowded in a heartbeat on 64-player maps.

The action remains maddeningly scripted when you reach those checkpoints. Ever-present mortar, grenade, and rocket explosions, combined with seemingly random enemy spawns, leave you waiting behind cover while the game essentially plays itself. Make your presence felt and your AI squad mates will do their best to get you killed by bumping into you, shoving you out of “their” cover, and getting in the way of your shots, all while the enemy seems to target you exclusively.

And if ever there was a game you didn't want to play staring at teammates’ backs, it's Battlefield 3. This game boasts the most photorealistic graphics we've ever seen, with crisp textures, smooth animation, and almost no texture pop-in, a feat made all the more impressive by the game’s high fidelity and remarkable draw distance. The Frostbite 2 engine's hyper-realistic volumetric effects add to the visual wow factor: Black smoke belches from burned-out tanks, sand blows across desert wastelands, and every explosion ejects chunks of dirt and plumes of dust skyward.

EA’s digital-distribution and DRM system, Origin, plays the part of the snake, slithering into your Battlefield 3 experience whether you want it or not. While we suffered no technical or stability problems with Origin, the client is wholly unremarkable. It gets the job done, but it pales in comparison to Valve’s well-established and feature-rich Steam. EA’s Battlelog, the web-based launcher that serves as BF3’s main menu, is equally unimpressive: Managing and communicating with friends is cumbersome, voice chat is absent, and trying to set up a game with a large group is nigh impossible.

The Frostbite 2 engine delivers unparalleled lighting effects and stunning, near-photorealistic environments.

Thankfully, Battlefield 3 roars where it matters most: Multiplayer is nothing short of sublime. Classes are extremely well balanced, weapons are varied, and the leveling and unlock trees entice you to keep playing without overwhelming new players. The game features five competitive modes: squad deathmatch, team deathmatch, rush, squad rush, and conquest. In typical Battlefield fashion, vehicles play a big role, especially in the larger maps. The spectacle of 32 or 64 players firing devastating tank rounds, crashing helicopters, and shooting down jets leads to jaw-dropping “wow” moments of emergent, chaotic goodness.

So, is the Chimera that is Battlefield 3 held back by its worthless goat element and its sneaky snake component? Yes, but not all that much. Battlefield 3’s unparalleled immersion factor and fantastic online modes render it the go-to multiplayer FPS well into the foreseeable future.

$60, www.battlefield.com/battlefield3
ESRB: M

Star Wars: The Old Republic Review

David Murphy — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:13:39 +0000

A fabulous single-player experience in a massively multiplayer online game

Star Wars: The Old Republic (TOR) comes with a buffet of a story for an MMO, but you only get to fill your plate once. From decisions as significant as choosing your character’s class specialization to events as trivial as responding to dialog options, much of what you do during your character's main story has a lasting and permanent effect. We like the feast: BioWare’s masterful use of instanced environments creates more captivating gameplay for the solo quester than most any other MMO.

But this is BioWare’s first foray into the massively multiplayer world, and it shows. TOR is more a role-playing game you play alongside 999,999 friends than a true MMO. BioWare either poorly integrates or completely misses the mark on many of the elements that define an MMO. On the upside, the beautiful blend of voice acting and dialogue options in each of TOR’s many quests should earn the game a celebratory parade through the Yavin 4 throne room. And while the scripted quests (occasionally punctuated by John Williams’s familiar score) are immersive, they make the rest of the game’s environments seem stale by comparison. TOR’s non-instanced “generic” areas just aren’t very player-interactive. The Nar Shadda casino, a cold and lifeless location that cries out for mini-games and interactivity, is just one example. And don’t get us started on TOR’s cantina music.

Keep an eye out for clickables (or killables) during normal quests, and you could earn some tasty experience from self-updating bonus objectives!

Whoever designed TOR’s sprawling landscapes (and transportation flowcharts) deserves to be Force choked. Traveling feels like marathon training until you gain the Sprint power at level 15, or player vehicles at level 25. Even then, you can probably alt-tab out and watch the full Battle of Hoth while you auto-run your journey between planets, space, and your ship to fulfill various missions.

TOR isn’t designed so you can amass armies of friends to take out a faction leader, nor is it even really geared for generic player-versus-player prior to level 50. It’s telling that even on a PvP server, it took us until level 27 (out of 50) to encounter our first enemy player in the wild. TOR’s instanced PvP matches are simple and fun—yes, even Huttball—but BioWare’s decision to have power-boosted lowbies play alongside top-level characters is baffling.

TOR’s general combat is challenging and interactive. It includes targetable combustibles that can deal significant damage to nearby enemies, and pop-up bonus objectives that give players more of a reason to fight. That said, the boss fights of TOR’s group instances, or Flashpoints, aren’t very impressive through mid-game: The strategies are simple and the tanking and spanking is prevalent.

And then there are the omissions: TOR’s space combat system is more Rebel Assault than TIE Fighter, and it’s pathetic to see no Flashpoint matchmaking system beyond shouting “LFG” in general chat. There’s no true guild support beyond just having one, no in-game achievements for the boastful, and absolutely no UI customization or add-on support to speak of. The game’s Legacy features—beyond granting a player access to a last name around level 30 or so—are even labeled within the game with a big fat “coming soon.” Come on.

But no MMO can go from Padawan to Jedi Master (or Darth) in a single launch window: If BioWare can complement the game’s excellent single-player experience with more of the MMO genre’s successful staples (including a stronger implementation of the features we enjoyed in, say, Star Wars: Galaxies), then The Old Republic could very well be the “prequel” that beats out some of the MMO landscape’s big original titles. How many times do you get to say that about anything Star Wars?

$60 (Standard), $80 (Digital Deluxe), or $150 (Collector's Edition); plus $14.99 per month
www.swtor.com
ESRB: T

The 30 Best PC Game Soundtracks of All Time

Dan Scharff and Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:20:29 +0000

Game soundtracks get no respect. Not to sound like Rodney Dangerfield, but despite years and years of amazing music coming from games, gaming music is often treated by the public the same way your mom treated your 3rd grade art project. A dismissive pat on the head and a "good work, Danny, this is beautiful!"…followed by it being promptly buried under calendars, grocery lists, and "real" art on the refrigerator.

Things have been particularly rough for PC soundtracks where, due to a lack of audio hardware uniformity, music in the pre-CD audio era was a wildcard at best. Hell, even well into the late '90s there was no guarantee a PC even had a soundcard. Still, despite the limitations, we're not ashamed to say we not only respect PC game soundtracks, we flat out love them! The good ones at least.

Comparing soundtracks from different genres and different eras is extremely difficult and entirely subjective, which is exactly why we didn't compare them: The 30 soundtracks are listed in no particular order. Only one "rule" applies—we're only referring to original compositions here, licensed soundtracks need not apply.

Make sure to click on the game name / composer to take a listen over at youtube, and let us know your favorites in the comments.

Rage Review

Dan Scharff — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:39:40 +0000

Fast, frantic, fun…forgettable?

Before Rage was released there were a lot of unanswered questions floating around. Could Id make another genre-defining shooter? Would the six-plus years of development and the much-touted Id Tech 5 engine yield a sufficiently impressive result? While these are certainly appropriate questions for both reviewers and gamers to be curious about, we found ourselves haunted by another, seemingly trivial, question: What does the title Rage mean? Only after playing completely through could we truly understand.

Rage pulls off an impressive feat: It manages to have a lot of personality despite having minimal character. While you may not care about the paper-thin story or remember any character names, you’ll probably notice something unique in just about every NPC—the grizzled‑yet‑vaguely lonely face of the mute knife mini-game guy, the windstick girl’s exuberantly animated hand gestures and bubbly voice, the too-cool-for-school posturing of the town tough guy as he leans against a wall. The devil is in the details, and Rage gets the details right.

Rage, rage against the dying of the…well, just against the dying.

This subtle depth is mirrored in Rage’s gameplay. First off, the weapons “feel right.” The shotgun has just the right amount of spread, kickback, and stopping power. The assault rifle strikes the perfect balance between rate of fire and recoil. What’s more, the game manages to keep every weapon useful and relevant throughout by providing numerous alternate ammo types. You can transform your humble pistol into a mighty magnum or miniature sniper rifle with the right rounds, or even change your crossbow from a silent killer to a mind control device.

Rage’s visuals have an equal amount of depth, but nothing there is subtle. The Id Tech 5 engine is on full display, providing a smooth frame rate while maintaining a stunningly high level of detail and draw distance in its lovingly crafted environments.

These environments are further enhanced by how the enemies interact with them. Not content to simply duck behind cover, enemies will move around in truly organic fashion—hopping off walls, vaulting over debris, clambering along pipes, and hanging from guard rails. These fully articulated animations meld seamlessly with the game’s damage and physics engines to create a real sense of weight, inertia, and natural motion as enemies juke, stumble, and flip back in reaction to your shots.

Driving shows off the great-looking environment but gets stale by game's end.

That’s not to say the game isn’t without some stumbles of its own. Rage uses an extremely nonintuitive keyboard/mouse control setup. Toggling between weapons is simple enough, but trying to switch ammo types or assign quick-use items is a bit of a chore, and clearly designed with controllers in mind.

The game’s driving portions, while technically proficient, feel like little more than filler material between missions. Worse, the world you drive through is just open enough to make you want to explore it, but not big or fleshed-out enough to actually support that. By the time we’d finished the game (about 12 hours to do just about everything the game had to offer), we had little desire to jump into the driving battle rallies that serve as the game’s only competitive multiplayer options.

So, what then does the game’s name mean? Absolutely nothing. Then why “Rage”? Well, it’s short, it’s snappy, it’s angry, but most importantly, it just looks and sounds cool. And that’s exactly what Rage the game is about: It’s about looking and sounding cool; it’s about headshots, driving fast, and blowing stuff up. And while it might feel shallow at times, this rule-of-cool philosophy permeates every aspect of Rage’s design—from the fast, flashy gunplay, to the lavishly animated enemies, to the ludicrously detailed environments. The result is a game that’s fun as hell but probably won’t leave a lasting impression on either gamers or the shooter genre.

$60, www.rage.com
ESRB: M

Halloween Thrills: 15 Of The Scariest PC Games Of All Time

Brad Chacos — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:05:29 +0000

Halloween means different things to different people. For some, it means taking the kids out trick-or-treating; others use it as an excuse to dress like Lion-O and Cheetara and drink excessive amounts of alcohol. This gallery isn’t for them. No, this gallery is for you, our fellow PC gamers, for whom Halloween is the perfect reason to turn off the lights, jack up the volume, and try not to pee your pants as angry demons, hungry aliens and the troubled ghosts of psychic children try to turn your virtual character’s insides into your virtual character’s outsides.

Below you’ll find 15 of the scariest, spookiest, downright most horrifying games we’ve ever played, ranging from first person shooters filled with cheap scares to scripted adventures that include some of the most intensely troubling scenes we’ve ever seen. Sorry, Eternal Darkness and Clock Tower fans; this article’s PC only. No doubt we’ve missed a hidden gem or two – including Dead Space, which narrowly missed the cut – so be sure to share your favorite scary games in the comments.

Dead Island Review

Dan Scharff — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:00:45 +0000

Where shambling mess meets blunt object

Ever dreamed of a vacation on a tropical island paradise? Ever dreamed of a vacation consisting of bludgeoning, shattering, stabbing, slashing, shooting, burning, electrocuting, and exploding hordes of bathing-suit clad zombies? Well, then Dead Island is the place for you!

Dead Island, the latest from Polish developer Techland defies simple classification. It is instead defined by the many games it seems to lovingly, if not shamefully, pull inspiration from. The survival horror themes borrow heavily from Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, and latter-day Resident Evil, the setting is reminiscent of Far Cry in climate, detail, and scope, whereas the game's structure and core mechanics are drawn from Borderlands with a dollop of Fallout 3 mixed in. Essentially it's an open-world first-person survival horror action RPG. Yeah, it's a mouthful.

The game begins with its own version of Spring Break gone wild. Unfortunately, the wildness exceeds the typical MTV-style hijinx (concerts, drunkenness, regrettable orgies, etc.) when a full-blown zombie outbreak is unleashed upon the unsuspecting bikini-clad denizens of Banoi (henceforth known as Dead Island). Your character, one of four possible zombie-slaying warriors, is immune to the zombie scourge. While the "heroes" each have a brief introductory bio, it’s essentially irrelevant—they're are defined by their combat abilities, not their (nonexistent) story and depth. This is hardly a fault, as Dead Island isn’t really a game about story; still, even after playing the game for upwards of 50 hours, I can barely remember the character names and instead think of them by such monikers as Shrill Sword Lady or Cocky Jerk Throwing Guy. There is one thing the characters have in common: they're all annoying, and you'll be sick of the three or four repeated reaction lines they spout non-stop within minutes.

Camera? Check. Babe in bikini? Check. Underboob? Check. Zombie corpses and barrels of blood? Check. Broken physics engine? Check. All the key elements of a porn recording session.

While a first-person experience, Dead Island is kind of a bizarro FPS. Where in most games shooting is the focus and melee combat feels tacked on and clunky, Dead Island is the exact opposite. You'll spend the majority of the game using a plethora of melee weapons, from commonplace items like sticks, oars, and wrenches, to tricked-out electrified machetes and flaming baseball bats. You'll use these homemade weapons of mass destruction to dispatch your zombie foes in truly brutal and gory fashion.

Melee combat feels weighty and substantial. The weapons have a very tangible heft, and the speed, range, and swing style are different enough from weapon to weapon to make each type feel distinct. Edged weapons are quick and can sever limbs, but tend to have short range, weak durability, and minimal ability to stop and knock down enemies. Blunt weapons tend to swing slower and can't sever limbs, but generally have greater range, durability, and impact, plus they can break bones—not severing limbs, but making them equally useless.

All weapons can also be thrown, which is also a key form of inventory management to get rid of the otherwise worthless fodder weapons that you'll find littered all over the environment. Thrown weapons can thankfully be recovered (they don't flicker and fade away 90s brawler style), but occasionally if you wander too far away, the area will reset and the item will disappear. While throwing is a useful mechanic—and the primary combat strength of one of the playable characters—it leads to some head scratching situations—like how a thrown baseball bat will do more damage than a swung one, or how explodable fuel tanks and gas canisters can be detonated by throwing a stick, but not by powerful melee attacks.

It's a good thing the throwing mechanic is so useful, since firearms seem to follow Japanese RPG logic in terms of usefulness—in other words, guns suck. Early in the game they're extremely rare (I found a mere one gun over the first 10+ hours of gameplay), and ammo is equally limited. Sure, the firearms give you range, but the accuracy is crappy when not in iron sights mode, and the damage is the same, and oftentimes lower, than a good melee weapon. This severely hamstrings one of playable characters, who focuses on firearm combat.

Firearm failure aside, Dead Island's action is simple, brutal, and satisfying. Whether it’s smashing a zombie’s ribs with a crowbar or stomping through the skull of a downed infected, impact feels heavy and real. Zombie limbs are liberated with geysers of glorious gore, and shattered bones and mangled intestines are on full display as you flay the flesh from your undead foes.

I don't think "one shot, center mass" is gonna work here…

The game's non-gore related mechanics aren't quite as successful. While looting and leveling serve as the primary carrot-on-a-stick mechanics to keep you drawn in, these aspects often feel synthetic, contrived, and video game-y in a game that otherwise aims for the usual survival-horror style of gritty realism. Much like other loot-based games, the loot uses color-coded rareness indicators and procedurally generated descriptors. This works well in fantastic settings where the items are imaginative implements of destruction with whimsical design and effects that match their gaudy names. It doesn't work quite so well in Dead Island when you're finding a Level 12 Dependable Homemade Diving Knife or a Level 34 Tiring Flimsy Wrench.

Also, while smashing zombie brains continues to be fun for many hours, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Dead Island is a long game. Too long. Playing through the game without getting sidetracked will probably take a good 25-30 hours, and you can easily put in double that if you want to explore every inch of Dead Island. Act I, the resort section, is the highlight of the game, as the area is beautiful, detailed, and strikes a wonderful balance between combat, survival, and exploration. The game's focus gets narrower and narrower as it progresses, and once you've come up with a go-to gameplay style (kick, slash, stomp, repeat, etc.) and found your favorite weapon(s) you'll find yourself just running from quest marker to quest marker, largely ignoring everything in between.

The game does offer a decent amount of replay value, not really by playing as the other characters (as they're not compellingly different enough to warrant a whole new playthrough), but mainly through its multiplayer. Dead Island supports a streamlined hop-in, hop-out cooperative gameplay, where an onscreen prompt will pop up when a potential multiplayer companion is nearby. Jump in and you can accompany 1-3 other players through their own zombie misadventures.

Multiplayer is a vicious and violent good time, but it highlights some of the weaknesses of the game as a whole. Difficulty is very uneven throughout, with some areas being very slow with multiple players, and other areas being almost impossible to survive solo. Playing multiplayer also inherently changes the gameplay, becoming less about survival and exploration and more about non-stop fighting, looting, and trading. Also, while hopping in to a multiplayer game is easy, hopping out? Not so much, as there's a good chance your quest progress won't be saved.

Fear my green-coded, Level 9 Dangerous Wrench!

And, unfortunately, multiplayer progress not saving is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the technical problems of Dead Island. The game is beset with serious performance and stability issues, from terrible tearing and microstuttering to random crashes, and save deletion. Many users have reported unplayable framerates—and clipping, lighting, and collision issues are present in many areas—and particularly noticeable in multiplayer. Nauseating motion blur, stick figure shadow maps, extreme light bloom, and a muted color palette also diminish the otherwise nice looking Dead Island. To make it worse, most of the graphics options, even simple ones like FSAA, are only changeable through altering archived game files in notepad.

Perhaps the most damning sin, however, is Dead Island's extreme case of consolitis in its UI and control design. The game supports mouse and keyboard or controller, but it's clearly designed with controller in mind. The analog swing control method—the preferred style of melee combat—is not even usable on mouse and keyboard without file modification. Targeting uses a non-toggleable auto-aim-like reticle that snaps in on specific enemy body parts—not terribly noticeable in melee, but horribly consolized when throwing or shooting. Inventory management and the radial weapon-switching menu are infuriatingly slow and unwieldy with a mouse and keyboard. And, some of the game's quick time events, like shaking off zombies or smashing through doors are goofy with mouse and keyboard controls.

Ultimately, Dead Island is a lot like its own weapon degradation system—it hits hard at first, but eventually falls apart. There's a lot of fun to be had, particularly for those partial to stats, numbers, loot, and multiplayer co-op, but—perhaps to be expected from such an ambitious, genre-defying mashup—not everything quite comes together. Much like the shambling, limb-dragging zombies you'll face by the boatload, Dead Island is an always-gory, always-brutal, cobbled-together mess that could use just a bit more brains.

$50, www.deadisland.com, ESRB: M

The F2P Revolution: 25 Killer Online Games You Can Play For Free

Alex Castle — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 23:40:15 +0000

One of the biggest trends in gaming over the last half-decade has been the rise of the free to play (F2P) online business model. You might have heard it called “freemium,” or the pejorative “pay to win,” but whatever you call it, it’s here to stay.

You may not have heard of all the free to play games coming out recently (they don’t tend to have the same marketing budget as your Battlefields and Call of Dutys) but you should probably be paying a little more attention. Sure, some of them are a little shallow, or unfair to non-paying customers, but there are F2P games in every genre, and a lot of them are top notch.

So why pay to play? Read on for our list of 25 top-notch free online games. For each game, we'll tell you what you get for free and what costs money, so you never get surprised.

Game Theory: The Dark Allure of Transhumanism

Thomas McDonald — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:50:59 +0000

Modification of the individual has been at the core of the gaming experience since the inception of the role-playing genre. It wasn’t until System Shock (1995), however, that designers started probing the deeper issues beneath these newfound powers. System Shock’s spiritual descendants—the BioShock and Deus Ex series—continue to explore this nexus point where issues of gameplay intersect with one of the developing moral and ethical issues of our time: what it means to be human.

Humanity finds itself at a crossroads. Humans have always used their free will to alter the world around them, their own views of that world, and even their appearances. The parallel acceleration of genetic research and nanotechnology, however, are opening the building blocks of human life to tampering, from the moment of conception, and before. It’s unthinkable that these technologies can be deployed without fundamentally redefining what it means to be human.

This is the crossroads where Adam Jensen finds himself in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which takes place only 15 years in the future. The game may try to take a neutral stance on the issue of transhumanism by allowing the player to choose Adam’s reactions, but the narrative itself makes hash of this neutrality. These technologies begin with a new golden age in which people are relieved of crippling disabilities, before they fall prey to the same old power plays among governments, corporations, and those who simply refuse to follow the program.

The designers may well be warning about the dangers of transhumanism, but the gameplay itself undercuts this message. After all, your success is based upon Adam getting the best mods for the job. Adam is ultimately allowed some reflection upon just What It All Means, but since he’s spent the past 30 hours punching through walls or fading to invisibility, any words of protest against a modified humanity sound a bit hollow.

The fact is, these mods work out pretty well for Adam, as they probably will for any individual. But the chaos engulfing the world of Human Revolution shows us that society is more than the individual.

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