Driver San Francisco

This is the first of the Driver franchise that I've played.  It has similar free roaming elements to the GTA series, but you are confined to a vehicle and "shift" into other vehicles - effectively taking over the driver.  That said, they did do a fantastic job with car drifting/weight/road texture - it felt great.

However, this shifting mechanic quickly turns you from hero to villain as you begin carreening innocent commuters into oncoming traffic to fuel your own brand of brutal vigilante justice.  This isn't just a matter of innocents being in the crossfire, you are put situations where you must directly sacrifice multiple bystanders to do something as absurd as win a street race.

The story begins with Jericho's prison-break and a car chase, ending with you getting crushed by a giant semi.  This gifts you with increasing power to shift into other vehicles, and as lame as a story mechanic as this may sound, it actually works.  Spoilers below so be careful.  Gradually this shifting starts affecting your mind and you start having more and more strange episodes.  And then ...

Well - you're actually in a coma, and the missions end up helping you figure out the motivation of Jericho's plot so that when you finally awake, you are able to have a final non-shifting car chase to take him out.

I had figured out the coma thing early enough that I thought it was just a stupid vehicle for cost savings of keeping you in the vehicle, but tying it into piecing together Jericho's plot was a bit of brilliance.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

 Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, simply put - is a fantastic game and it looks beautiful on XBone.

The gameplay elements are very similar to Assassin's Creed or Batman Arkham in the open world.- but perhaps over simplified, there were few hiding places so orcs didn't pursue relentlessly and oftentimes gave up after you were out of sight.

Where this game turns into 110% win is with what they termed the "Nemesis System".  Orc captains are given additional skill effects and resistances, and are much more difficult to kill as they are oftentimes escorted or immune to abilities or quick to heal.  If any orc in Sauron's army kills you, even a grunt - they are promoted and given more of these skill effects, creating a virtually unique set of adversaries per game.

Additionally, there is a great deal of fight memory - as you fight a captain, he will remember and taunt you ".. you gonna run away again?"  In my game, I had one poor guy I threw into a fire - I thought I had killed him, but apparently he survived and repeatedly would come back more and more damaged until he only had a sack on his head as 'Soandso the disfigured'.

The game is great, but it is pretty one dimensional and extremely repetitive - you must like fighting orcs.  There is a story backdrop - and beautiful cut-scenes, but nothing more compelling than revenge.  Like Assassin's Creed, I bet the next game using the Nemesis system will be amazing.

Where the game went wrong, IMHO - is when we started being able to dominate these orc captains.  The process was oftentimes even easier than killing your foe, and since there are no limits to how many you can control - eventually I dominated myself out of all my adversaries.  Having this particular gameplay mechanic forced the player to be "super powered" by some other entity, and corrupted a potentially epic long-running story into an episode to be resolved.

Reus

Reus is a god-game, you play as four giants that have the ability to manipulate the planet and encourage the planet to re-seed itself with people when you awaken.  You do this by terraforming to create biomes and providing food, gradually people move in and become your region-specific ambassador which unlocks further abilities.

The placement of the animals/food/minerals affects the neighboring resources, and the presence of these ambassadors allows for certain upgrades.  For example, blueberries can be transformed into either strawberries or apple trees depending on what you have upgraded - and placing them next to animals might increase the food production in the zone around them.  You are given missions that want you to encourage the growth of a certain amount of food/gold/technology in an area.

Interesting mechanics, that's like saying it has a "great personality" though.  The game is in a word - boring, it was all the pleasure of organizing your school folder.  If you are going to make a god-game, you need to allow the player to have a malevolent pathway as well, or some sort of conflict rather than mission achievements.  Sure, the giants were able to crush villages - but that was really just stripping the land to prepare for some other settlements.

The game could be vastly improved by adding a tyrant giant, maybe even computer controlled that you can battle against with your minions.  ... or prehaps having you play as one giant, trying to make your people the dominant species.

Will not play again ...

Hitman - Agent 47, Silent Assassin and Sniper Challenge

I've changed the rules after my painful Painkiller experience.  Now games where I bought the "full pack" only require a cursory examination provided I play the main game to completion.  With that, I went through and played a few hours of each of the other still pending Hitman games.

I love the Hitman series.  It's a game designed to be played over and over again in attempts to do things in that perfect "Groundhog Day" style.  Invariably first attempts end up being a shootout through guards as you learn other ways to interact with your surroundings and learn the patterns in the environment.


Hitman: Codename 47 is the origin story, in which Agent 47 learns about his origin - he is a clone created by the DNA combination of his first four targets.  This stayed unplayed in my "active" list for a long time, as much as I love the series, I couldn't get past the clunkiness of the interface.  

I next tried Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, whose plot revolves around the kidnapping of your friend and employer, Father Vittorio.  Agent 47 agrees to do a few missions for the Agency to enlist their assistance in tracking his friend.  The interface and controls were much better in this installment, but the story was pretty thin.  Both of these games felt like they belonged on a PS2 with their lack of shadows and angular geometry.
 

I was first under the assumption that this was just another in the line, but Hitman: Sniper Challenge was created in 2012 as a teaser single mission companion to Hitman: Absolution.  You do nothing but snipe from a locked position, but the scene is filled with other targets and potential for eliminating your targets in a variety of ways. It created an interesting game of "pick-up sticks" where you had to find the untended bodyguard leaning over a balcony or wait until he walks under a scaffold filled with wine casks to eliminate him.  Additionally the scene is filled with flair bits while you're scanning around that increase your score multipliers - like destroying all the evidence a stripper left behind, or garden gnomes.  Fun game - and with a fast reload that encourages you to try and complete all the challenges.

Painkiller: Hell & Damnation

At last I reach the end of my Painkiller journey.  The first in the series brought back some Doom style nostalgia, as did the second .. the third, fourth, fifth - and now the culmination of the series.  

Kudos to the marketing division that masked this turd.  I ended up buying and suffering practically the entire series in anticipation of seeing what they came up with in H&D -- which boils down to a new weapon effect of making mobs your minion fighters.

Invisible barriers abound, absurd monster spawnpoints, recycled weapons - but perhaps the biggest insult is that after playing through each of these games, I make it to the first boss and realize that it's the same boss you fight in the first game.  Yes, this is a remake with a new title and a (intentionally?) misleading description.

This license has been milked to the point they're just squeezing udder flesh.  Buying this game is like buying something from a spam marketing campaign, like I've justified some idiot marketing imp who is at this moment in eager anticipation of shoveling out the next game.  I feel dirty and manipulated.

Legend of Grimrock

Legend of Grimrock hearkens back to classic dungeon crawl Apple II games - consider it the spiritual descendant of Wizardry, or the dungeons of Ultima and Bards Tale.

You play as a party for 4 convicts thrown into a dungeon that will serve as either your tomb or trials for your absolution.  Since it's not turn based, you are able to get away with slight cheats you would not be able to otherwise.  One such strategy would be strafing around a 2x2 grid attacking and retreating before the creature strikes back.

Much of the game appears to be governed by Zelda-ish type puzzles; find the way to open a gate, locate the key, trigger pressure plates in a certain order, etc.  This is what stopped me playing after 5 hours, there were far too many instances where I was looking for the hidden buttons or trying to figure out what door opened up when I triggered a lever - if it were a roguelike, I would probably still be in the depths.

When resting on levels, you occasionally are visited by a voice that hints at a greater story - all I really got out of it for as much as I played was "find me at the bottom of this place".

There is a development kit as well, and you are able to create your own adventures and a sizeable fan base building them.  This could be a great toolkit to realize some of the classic D&D modules.

Rage

"I expected more"

Rage is a game that seems more like engine proof-of-concept than actual game.  The gameplay is along the classic Doom style, you are blocked off to areas where creatures spawn and you shoot them.  The character animations initially look great as in they have very realistic texture mapping, but they animate like Chuck E Cheese animatronics.

After a fairly stunning opening cinematic, the story devolves into everything you would expect - nothing that you haven't seen before.  It's a bad offspring of Borderlands and Fallout - the world is very static, your interactions consist of picking up ammo or touching the door buttons.  You are a "vault survivor", you help wasteland establishments, unlock weapons and shoot enemies where the mission givers tell you to drive and shoot them.  There are allusions to "The Authority" - and indeed you eventually fight against some mutant troops and tougher humanoids, but there was no overarching terror, no amazing cinematics and nothing really compelling you to be mission bitch for these other survivors.

All in all I get the sense this a game to showcase an engine, and would have been a great vehicle for some other company to make a compelling game with.

Painkiller: Redemption

  

When the most recent Painkiller game released (Hell & Damnation), I bought the full franchise because it was like $2 more ... I have now seen the error in my ways.  There is only so far Doom nostalgia can take you.

The best I can say about Painkiller Redemption is "it's the last one I have to play before the one I wanted to play".  This is another mod-turned-release game, given a new soundtrack but is again just wave after wave of the same enemies you encountered in the previous games.  Though the pitch is that the music is "metal", it's not songs - it's more of a non-stop metal loop.   Dun-dun-dig-de-dig-de-dig .. Dun-dun-dig-de-dig-de-dig .. Dun-dun-dig-de-dig-de-dig .. You'd be better off putting on your own music.

I played on easy mode so I could side-watch the end of Supernatural Season 7, but even with this worthy distraction and playing on easy mode - I won't be playing past the first level.  There is a lot of backtracking and no real intelligence as to why/what spawnpoints were working or where you need to go. 

The Shivah

Oy vey!

Rabbi Stone is a depressed rabbi whose congregation is failing.  When a police officer visits and tells him that a previous congregation member was killed and left him a sum of money, he goes to sit shivah with the widow.  He also feels guilty for having kicked them out of the congregation 8 years ago, and finds a few clues that sets him on a path of the killer.

Much of the game play involves dialog choices and clicking on various room objects, there are lots of red herrings objects and dialog choices though.

All in all it was a well put together story of rabbi mafia.  It was difficult at times to see what to do, specifically when fighting the evil rabbi - but in general giving the "rabbinical response" was the best solution (answering with a question).

Game play was pretty boring, I probably wouldn't have bought it if I had spent a little more time investigating - even though it was only a two hour commitment.

Nier

Nier is a JRPG with a fairly interesting storyline and mehhh gameplay mechanics.  I love crazy plots, and this one ended up being really good - but the effort in backtracking through quest areas, the lamesauce "shades" instead of cool textured bosses, countless load screens, the amount of sloowww dialog you had to suffer though made me almost put this down multiple times - and indeed put me asleep more times than it should.  The save system forces you to be at a mailbox to save, so if you do fall asleep - you have to wake yourself up enough to backtrack or finish what you were doing.  That said - and like Dune, it was worth trudging through to get to the meat of the story.

This will be chock full of spoilers, so play this if you don't want to ruin the twists.

You start by defending your daughter Yonah from a shade attack, but things go wrong as she invokes the help from a mysterious book.  Cut to 1300 years later (yes) - and you are in a town with your daughter who is sick with this shade-scum stuff and you befriend a floating book who becomes your magical fount called Grimoire Weiss.  Through a series of not-so-interesting missions that essentially boil down to "find the big shade and kill it", you meet your other party companions - Kaine (foul mouthed, scantily clad chick) and Emil (emotional 12 year old with Medusa powers).

When fighting off a giant shade that attacks the town, Kaine sacrifices herself to be turned to stone in order to block a shade behind a door and your daughter is kidnapped by The Shadowlord.  

 Cut to 5 years later (I assume you've been searching the whole time for clues as to where Yonah is), Emil finds some obscure letter on how he can unpetrify Kaine, but becomes a freakish skull boy in order to get the power to do so.  Back on your main quest, and in typical RPG fashion - you collect the keys to enter the Shadowlord's lair where you fight Devola and Popola - the town main quest givers and your previous helpers.  In the course of defeating them, they reveal what's truly been going on.  The shades you've been killing are the last vestiges of humanity that have been corrupted, and everyone "alive" is a vessel waiting for the reunion with these souls that have over time unfortunately developed a sense of self and purpose.  The shade that has infected Yonah is the actual Yonah, and the Shadowlord is you - trying to reclaim their bodies.

When you defeat the Shadowlord in combat, Yonah-shade stops you and runs to her father saying there is another girl inside that misses her father as well.  She sacrifices herself, you execute the Shadowlord and presumably live happily ever after.

In new game+ you are given additional cut-scenes to humanize the shadow creatures you must destroy.

Magic 2014

I've played magic the card game like a fiend, starting when the comic book store I frequented talked me into buying a few beta decks.  It depresses me somewhat when I search ebay and see what an alpha black lotus can go for these days, I had three (one mint).

This game relies on that nostalgia though, there is no story or incentive - just a few dialog blops telling you who you need to attack next. The interface works well, and might be a great vehicle for playing other humans.  I only played the computer opponents, who each had a perfectly crafted themed deck.  Most took two games to beat, the first to see how their cards combo-ed together, but the AI was pretty basic - focused mainly on performing the 'trick' to their decks and never reacting to the style I used the entire game built on the starter deck, a green trampler.

Was it fun?  "Sure" - I suppose now that I've beaten all the main players, I could try and beat each of these opponents with the different themed decks I unlocked.  ... Nah.

As a vehicle to multiplay with other humans, this game is probably good. -- personally I would love to have constructed one of the great old decks I had played in the past.  But I didn't want to buy or spend 100 hours making them, so I'm done and uninstalling until 2015+.

Assassin's Creed 3

I have a long history with Assassin's Creed, I'm a huge fan.

I use it to describe what can be done in a modern game, how you are doing more than playing - you are a participant in a digital book.  I describe with great enthusiasm the moments where I climb a tower to rescue someone, only to find you have been tricked and she is actually about to be hung in the courtyard - how I turned around and leapt from the heights with chills and a "NOOOOO!!" to come save her.

A.C.3 tells a few stories.  First you play as Haytham through some introductory missions, who you later learn is a Templar - and then as Kaniehti:io, his illegitimate Indian son who trains as an Assassin.  The story follows the early America's with the Templar's siding with the British, and inspiring Kaniehti:io to revenge by burning his village.

The game does a good job in pointing out that no side is really "pure", the Assassin's want freedom - the Templar's want order and control.  You see evils done by both sides, and Kaniehti:io teams up with his father at some points when they have common cause to do so.

Also interwoven through the game are missions with Desmond to retrieve power supply modules to fuel the complex they have found and eventually open "the big blue door of energy".  As he travels through the area, Juno the hologram speaks with him about all the attempts they made in the first civilization to try and deal with a massive solar storm that threatened the world.  Nothing they tried worked (without "too obscene a cost"), the only semblance of surviving was to build themselves into a computer matrix to warn future civilizations.

Apparently this massive energy surge was going to happen again, because Desmond chooses to sacrifice himself (the obscene cost) - to restore Juno, despite warnings that she has a more nefarious purpose.  Juno is somehow now able to shield the planet from the cataclysm, and then apparently go dominate all mankind or something.

At times I felt like this game dialed it in as far as actual gameplay is concerned, there WERE fun missions - but oftentimes my mission was simply "Travel from A to B to get your next cut scene", or my personal favorite "kill this rabid dog standing here."

Re-evaluating goals

I've been re-evaluating my goals.  

After opening the refrigerator door of my Steam Library so many times, everything looks like last weeks meatloaf.  To this effect, I have decided:

• Games that I bought in a bundle/sale - I must play at least two of, but the rest should be considered "free with the upgraded purchase".
• I will know if a game is terrible after 2 hours, there is no need to suffer a full 10

Dead Rising 3

This was the game that almost pushed me over the edge to get the Xbox One, and probably would have if there was backwards compatibility.  I was a huge fan of both flavors of Dead Rising 2 (the normal and the fan requested "Off the Record"), it was an obvious progression from #1 and they got it the way Dead Island didn't.  It's fun to build overpowered combo weapons and wade through hordes of undead like a badass, but that can't be the entirety of your game experience.

Dead Rising 2 had amazing psychos impeding your progress, each one a window into intense crazy.  Dead Rising 3 uses the same construct, but the psychos are for the most part - lackluster.  

In the effort to make the game more approachable, the game has been dumbed down way too much.  Instead of having to learn where items are to craft them, or making it one of a few crafting tables - you have the ability to combine anything at any time, even autoselecting the craft pattern for you.  Plus you are given a locker at a number of different safe houses where you can create with no resources any weapon you've previously crafted.  It got to a point I wouldn't really bother creating anything but the most recent collected blueprint so I would have the template and then use these safe-houses for my overpowered combo weapons.  The same can be said for the craftable vehicles - there is no challenge to create them, you can't even be interrupted while constructing.  If your vehicle blows up from overuse or crashing - there are simple vehicles all over the road to jump in and drive, but I would only drive to my car ports and load up on my next zombie crusher.

Even though the obvious answer would be to force myself not to play with these enhancements - it's my job as the player to come up with an easier / better way to manage my inventory or required resources, if it's designed into the game to be easy - I'm going to do it easy and look for an easier way even.  This is exactly what I did - when a survivor mission was to bring 5 pieces of zombie flesh, I didn't collect them - I went to a safehouse and created 5 from my locker.  There is no need to pick up a shotgun hoping for the chance to find a machete, oftentimes very obvious crafting items were left together in a pile of detritus, and combo craft-able cars were parked right next to each other.

Was it fun? "sure"  Was it worth it?  Yes and No - it got played and will continue to get played only because it's the only okay title we have for Xbox One.  I really expected more.

Anna - Extended Edition

This is a mind-twist/horror game with a clunky point-click interface and unintuitive puzzles.  I'm going to assume that most people are playing with some sort of guide because very little of what I've done makes any sense outside of the recipes they spelled out carefully some books.  Many times I fell to clickity-clicking everything in the environment with a new inventory item I picked up.

You play as someone in a dream(?) who feels compelled to explore a house he feels he knows.  In the course of exploring the house, you hear voices of a man arguing with "Anna", it's later you have an Angel Heart moment where you realize that you are the man.  The story is that you fell in all consuming love with a statue of Mary Magdalene (Anna?) and stole it from the church after you were kicked out for obsessive worship.  In either jealous rage or perhaps to end your torment, when your wife found out, she destroyed it with an ax.  You snapped and presumably killed her and your children.

They do a good job of messing with your mind.  I think it was to my overall benefit that I played so long without a guide, I would get to a lulled and slightly annoyed state - then a door would slam, or I'd hear someone screaming for help, or weeping - and it would jolt me back.  One thing they did very well are their line-of-sight gags, changing things that are just out of visual range (think "Weeping Angels") - I had a few good jump scares when looking back over my shoulder.

There is no combat, the only way you can perish is by losing your sanity - which was about four hours in for me when I decided to follow a guide and plow through it.

Painkiller: Resurrection

I've played enough of this one to call myself "done".  This is a fan-made installment, and it plays like it.  But not in that cool, "wow I can't believe they were able to take it there!" way -- moreso in a "hey, I recognize that game asset" way.  I only played the first couple levels - which are repetitive enemies spawning in areas with panel doors that open after you've killed X waves.

Painkiller: Resurrection is the next in the Painkiller line, you start out as a hitman who botches a job getting himself and a busload of innocent people killed.  Once again you become a minion of someone in Purgatory, and your mission is "kill".

I only played the first two levels before giving up on it - I read the Wiki to see if anything amazing developed in the story.  It is your typical "Hunt this demon with the help of another demon, oh wait - doublecrossed - kill them both" storyline, with one possible twist -- there are three endings Bad/Good/Neutral.

The Twilight Zone (bad) ending has our hero returned to life, but at the precise moment he botches the job again.  In the Hollywood (good) ending, you are sent back to the night before the job and "decide to be good".  I'd like to think if I continued - I would get the Tarantino (neutral??) ending, where you are given an epic sword and made champion of Purgatory. \m/

You should skip this one.

Spec Ops : The Line

It's a shooter.  Room after room after room of guys to shoot and collect bullets and new weapons from.  No better or worse than anything current in that regards, it uses all the shooter standards like flashing red screens when you take a bullet, but everything heals if you don't get hit for a few moments.

So really you would have to rate Spec Ops by the story, which is told through the cutscenes between these kill rooms.

You are the leader of a squad, I think you were sent to either investigate what was going on - or communicate with some lost troop in Dubai, which was hit by the mother-of-all sandstorms.  The city is devastated, much of it buried under a mountain of sand.

As you are discovering what happened to the city - you are placed in increasing uncomfortable choice situations, like allowing civilians to be killed in order to save someone you are trying to rescue.  This is reinforced by your squadmates who occasionally bitch you out about the choices you make.  They even force you to burn a whole troop of enemies by raining mortar fire, and then show the charred civilians they made you blow up.

The connected people in Dubai knew of the impending doom of the storm, and kept it secret from the public - evacuating themselves.   A hardcore general and his faithful legions stayed to help evacuate, but got stuck and the place went all Lord of the Flies.

You fight your way through his legions and desperate bands of survivors - but when you make it to him, he is already a desiccated corpse - so presumably this all has been your descent into madness.  You invented a dark nemesis to excuse your actions, thinking back to early memories where reality flickers back and forth between what you saw.  ... "The horror!  The horror!"

This game tricked me into thinking I was going to play as a soldier, not a Marlow in some downer art project.  I never got a sense I was going crazy - I thought my buddies were losing it, and I was getting pissed off at the stuff they were making us do.  I tried and died so many times to do the right thing in this game, they force you to push terrible buttons and then guilt trip you for doing it.


If it wasn't so forced, it really could have been epic though.  Have your choices affect which of the three of you go completely nuts would have made me play this multiple times.

XBOX One

I was given an XBOX One for attending a developers conference recently and jumped at the opportunity.

This was before doing the math, now I realize that being given an XBOX One is like being given a Skylanders toy, it's only the beginning of the investment... I got past the first obstacle, but now I'm in for a penny, in for a pound.

After turning it on and having it discover my wireless, it proceeded to molest my internet - first downloading a 650 MB (!!! someone forgot something big) patch, then the 36 GB (!!!!) racing game that came with it.    Forza Five.  ..  yep, like an Italian Maître d trying to count your dinner party size.

I'll give it a true review after I've put in my hours, but initially - it's pretty.  But it's .. racing.  Super detailed ... but racing.  Very accurate cars (probably?) ... but racing.  There are probably some really really cool features to it, but - it's plain old racing.  I've played very fun racing games in the past, at times I enjoy blasting through towns at breakneck speed, most often being chased by police in Need For Speed, or exploring the world in Test Drive Unlimited 2.  This is racing circuits, only.  Racing, only.

I need a second controller and a game now (no backwards compatibility?  Seriously?).  Cha-ching says M$.

FTL: Faster Than Light

FTL is a game that has you fleeing across multiple galaxies with important intelligence information, hounded by an overpowered "Rebel Fleet".  You move stop to stop across the randomly generated system, each planet a randomly generated event - fighting pirates, rescuing research stations, escaping asteroid fields and purchasing upgrades.  You want to touch as many locations on a map before the fleet catches up to your exit point and you can warp to the neighboring galaxy.

Scrap is your currency from combat and events, spent on upgrades for you ship - hiring crew members, purchasing weapons and upgrading systems.  Not only do enhanced ship systems help you directly in combat, but adding devices like a crew transporter might be important for certain scripted events (for example if you encounter a space station being overrun, you might be given an additional option to rescue a crew member).

If you make it all the way across the galaxy to deliver your information, you have to fight the mother ship a few times.  I have never destroyed it utterly, I beat it down once and didn't realize it would reconfigure and I would have to attack it again, my second attack was pretty pathetic.

Once your ship is destroyed, you have to start completely over - it's not debilitating, and I find a vicious cycle of wanting to take care of the easy first galaxy and get the maximum upgrades to my ship or see if the shops have my favorite weapon stocked (BM2 laser).

I like this game so much that I purchased it for iPad.

Sins of a Solar Empire

This game is probably one of the best RTS 4X games out there (explore, expand, exploit, or exterminate to win) out there.  "Probably" because I just don't get these games.  The way I play - 4X is exxxxterminate and RTS ends up becoming a long drawn out ordeal.  I can't help but build the maximum number of ships and slow march across the map, leaving a wake of either supporters or corpses.
 
The learning curve was steep, the tutorial could have used a  few "applied knowledge" missions to get novices like myself going.  I was building and upgrading with no clue as to any benefits or limits or requirements - oftentimes looking through multiple trees of potential upgrades for things like how to colonize hostile planetary types.  The ship research trees were even more complicated, between ship designs, additional weaponry and enhancements.  Thankfully, research is based on time/resources rather than having an escalated cost like a leveling system.

I ended up becoming a master of rapid expansion, and claimed huge amounts of resources early on.  Even if the enemy attacked one of my controlled planets, oftentimes I could distract them long enough to extract a huge toll or bring in support from each of the neighboring planets.  Meanwhile my expansion crew has claimed half of the galaxy.  Cue music, begin slow march.

I've seen the beautiful screenshots for this game, but I think that's more fan service being able to zoom in that close - that's just now how it plays out in the game.  I never drifted much closer than 50,000 feet above them looking straight down the flat plane of the galaxy.

Here is the view I typically had.

Now that I've committed the required hours to the game, and even though I only played as TEC Rebels, I'm pretty sure I won't play this again without a smack-talking rival.  Solo matches end up being a 2 - 4 hour ordeal, not a quick fix.

Darksiders 2

I loved playing as the Horseman War in Darksiders 1, and though it was pointed out to me that the game is similar to "Zelda" I was caught up in the story, mainly because I was deeply involved in it -- someone cracked the seals and released me to wreak havoc and mass destruction, but I was punked?  It was time to go to town, recover my powers, find who framed me - and make him pay.

.. and I did.

The final scene leaves you speaking with Uriel, and feeling epic and SO ready for Darksiders 2:

Darksiders 2 ... You play as Death, and though the idea is badass - the implemenation is dumb-ass.  You are a sass talking goofball little brother to War, with a mission to rescue your brother by resurrecting humanity.  Albeit not a bad motivation for a character, but again - the implementation made it a stupid video game, not an epic struggle.  You are a worker bee for every person you encounter and each has an agenda or task for you to complete before they offer you aid.  Almost invariably you end up getting double-crossed and having to kill the person you just got the Thingofmightypowerup for.

If I'm Death - and my focus is to rescue my brother from the corrupt Charred Council, and you offer me a mission of retrieving the Stone of Whocares from the Valley of Notonmypath, you can stuff your mission in the cavity left behind by my reaper blades, I've already walked past your corpse.

Though it has some epic looking bosses, the mechanics of fighting are a bit too button mashy.  The early creatures are easily dodged, but eventually you become reliant on gear upgrades rather than skill because they set so many creatures at once against you that there isn't a way to avoid damage at all, which turns it into an AOE / DPS race.

The game is Zelda on steroids, every section has a locked door, or the perfect combination of awkward weight plates to step on for gates to raise and lower, you have to traverse of the same section numerous times as various pathways open.  They try to add different mechanics to add to your navigation puzzle solving experience, like a portal gun and the ability to split yourself into two people.  Navigation and climbing puzzles just .. isn't .. fun, without the mechanics of climbing and navigation being fun itself.

One of the things they did brilliantly in the game, however, is the way you restore your saved game.  While loading, you are given a number of scene sketches while the Crowfather summarizes the recent game accomplishments and reminds you what you are to be doing -- leaving the start screen as an idle Death animation, once you click start - the scene simply pans back and you begin in the correct area.  Seamless.

I'm glad I played it, but I'm not planning on any DLC.  I'd play a sequel, because I enjoyed #1 so much and I'm invested in the characters -- War really was "Leonidas badass".  But then, that is the same reason I saw Highlander 3 in the theaters ...