Beyond two souls

Beyond two souls

Beyond two souls, released on the 11th October 2013 is an interactive drama - action game for the PlayStation 3 console, it is highly regarded as one of the best motion games ever and with its deep story and characters it is one of the best stories of all time.










 

The plot of the story is very deep and is going to take some time to explain, so I'm going to summarize it in a couple of words... it's about a girl with a connected entity called Aiden. Oh yea the girl (Jodie) is played by none other than  Ellen Page, other characters include famous actor Willem Dafoe who plays Nathan Dawkins who is a head doctor at a facility. It begins with eight year old Jodie in the facility learning to control her entity called Aiden, but Aiden isn't easy to control as he is rather a troublemaker and doesn't want to be stuck with Jodie forever. In one scene Jodie is invited to a girls party, where you control her as she attempts to socialize with others, this doesn't go so well, as Jodie ends up getting bullied and is locked in an under the stairs cupboard, so when Aiden lets her out you can choose to leave the house or take revenge on them by controlling Aiden. We all know what everyone would pick, so I'll leave it at that for now, I don't want to ruin all of the game for you so to finish a brief description of the plot... The game shows you different parts of Jodie's life and how she has to cope with certain things like the CIA, homeless people and much more.

To review the game play would be quite ridiculous as there isn't much. The game consists of you moving the right  stick to where the white point is to move the story along, you can control Aiden by pressing triangle, and in most cases you control Jodie by simply moving the left stick... And that's about it for the game play. This is probably the games only downfall as without much game play it is simply just a movie with some interactive points.

 

 

The game was developed by Quantic Dreams who also developed Heavy Rain, it was first announced by CEO David Cage at Sony's press conference during the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2012, on the 27th April 2013 a trailer was released and under an hour's game footage was shown. The game didn't receive the best of reviews, Metacritic gave the game a disappointing  72/100, IGN gave the game a criticizing review as they said the game was too passive and it's plot was too muddy. Which I find quite strange as in my opinion, it's one of the best stories I've ever seen in a game.

The bits that I like about the game is of course the story as Ellen Page did a brilliant job with the voice acting and really brought the character (Jodie) to life, and the fact that you can control Aiden and do all sorts with him such as knocking things over, choking people, possessing people and scaring the crap out of people is brilliant. But with its positives, there are negatives and the biggest negative is the game play, you can only do several things within the game, there is no exploration and you can't do much with Jodie and that's the biggest disappointment.

To conclude the game has one of the best plots I've ever had the pleasure of playing, but with its lack of game play, I can only give the game a decent 7/10.

Pikmin 3

PikMin 3

Pikmin 3 is a strategy game developed by Nintendo for the Wii U. It is the direct sequel to Pikmin 2 which was released in 2004 for the Nintendo GameCube. The game is quite recent as it was released in Japan on July 13, 2013 and has took the world by storm.

The plot of the game is quite simple as the people of Koppai have a shortage of food, and 3 people have to search for a different planet to then gather food for Koppai, they find a planet which they call PNF-404. When they arrive they encounter small groups of aliens called Pikmin, each Pikmin has its own ability, red Pikmin are immune to fire, blue Pikmin can't drown when they enter water, and in Pikmin 3 there are two new types of Pikmin, these are; rock Pikmin and pink Pikmin. All of these Pikmin are at your disposal when you try to gather food, and doing this by solving puzzles in the process.

The game has received positive praises, this is due to the complex puzzles which are fun to play, it has pretty decent graphics for a Wii U game and the game play is quite fun as the dialogue is funny as it has Sims elements in the speech. The Sunday Times gave Pikmin 3 the highest amount of stars (5) IGN gave the game an incredible score of 8.8/10. During its release week in Japan it received the best selling game of the week award, selling 93,000 copies in several days, 115,000 copies have already been sold in the States in its debut month.

What I really like about the game is the puzzle solving element, there aren't too many games at the moment which includes puzzle solving, and in my opinion Pikmin 3 is the best at the moment. There needs to be more games like Pikmin 3, and it's a shame that there isn't. The only downfall I can see for this game is that the market is too big at the moment for first person shooters, sports games and 3rd person action/shooter games, and the worry is that with this game being a real time strategy game it may get lost with its competitors.

To sum up this review, I believe that Pikmin 3 can revitalise the puzzle game genre and with it nearly being 2014, more companies can look at this game and say that we need to make games just like this. The positives outweigh the negatives and that is why I am giving this game a score of..... 9/10!!

 

Uncharted: Drakes Fortune

Uncharted: Drakes Fortune

Uncharted is a adventure action game, where you play as the character Nathan Drake and the main story aim is to find El Dorado (The city of gold). It is rated as one of the best adventure games of all time and is up there with Lara Croft - Tomb Raider.

 

 

Uncharted is developed by Naughty dog and was published by Sony computer entertainment America. It was made on the Naughty dog engine 1.0 and is only available on Play station 3, to the dissatisfaction of Xbox fans. It was the first game of the Uncharted series and more have followed like sequel Uncharted 2: Among thieves, it was originally announced at E3 2006, it was developed for 2 years and then made its big release at the end of 2007. It received very good reviews by critics, it got a very good score of 88 by Metacritic and it sold 4.6m units worldwide.

The game play itself is smooth and crisp and the graphics was top notch at this time of the year, except maybe for the mouths of the characters where it does seem to be lacking finesse. The plat forming elements allow Nathan to jump, grab, swim and move along ledges and perform other acrobatic actions, when facing multiple enemies the player can use either melee or range for the shooting, these third-person elements were compared by many reviewers to Gears of War. The game starts out with Nathan Drake and Elena Fisher discovering the coffin of famous explorer Sir Francis Drake who is the ancestor of Nathan, however the coffin only contains a diary pointing the location of El Dorado, from then on it is the pursuit of this famous city.

 

What I really liked about this game is the story, as the pursuit of El Dorado is quite intriguing and does make for great storytelling. The game play itself is decent enough but I don't think I would compare it to Lara Croft just yet, Tomb Raider defined this genre and to be honest I don't think it's getting knocked of its pedestal just yet.

To conclude, the story is the best part of this game with likeable characters such as Nathan Drake and Elena. The graphics are great for this time and even though in the newer games they are better, this game does still deliver in that department. But my biggest issue is that it could have been more successful if it was also released on Xbox but that's just my opinion.

7/10

Red Dead Redemption

Red Dead Redemption Review

Red dead redemption is a game based on a fictional western storyline, it is a sandbox genre game which was made in 2009 by the same company who makes the Grand theft auto series (RockStar). There are not many games like this and if there is then they certainly don't come anywhere near this fantastic game.

 

The game came out in the year 2009, it was published and developed by RockStar and was distributed by Take-Two Interactive. As of Vgchartz the game totalled a great 5.70 million units sold and on Metacritic the game received a score of 95 which is nearly the highest score which you can receive.          On a personal thought, I believe the game to be one of the best I have ever played and is definitely deserved of its high score of 95. Of course every game does have its negatives, its biggest negative is that there are plenty of people who aren't into this type of game, not everyone loves a great western story and they choose to stick to their guns like Call of duty and FIFA. This game is still very enjoyable today, can it compete with GTAV... I'm not too sure and with the lack of sequels to the game you can clearly see that RockStar is not turning their heads to this game any time soon.

It takes quite a while to get into the game as when you start you are hit with quite a long cut scene which takes up about 4-5 minutes of your time, but once you start diving into the deeper story plot you realize how well thought of this games story was. The game focuses on the tale of John Marston who you could say is quite a cowboy, his first aim is to go out and get a gentleman named Bill Williamson, but I'll leave it there for you to go out and play it for yourself.

 

 

The graphics were very good at this time, which to be honest isn't that long ago and can still compete with the biggest games today, and the terrain in the game is absolutely incredible with the yellow sandy desserts to the hard roads in some parts of the game, it really doesn't disappoint. But with the next generation consoles coming out soon there isn't any room for these graphics. But what I really like about this game is the fact that this is very different to other games out there at the moment and I believe is why this game is still popular today and have crushed the competition around that time.

John Marston is a very likeable character and even though the ending is quite disappointing you would still be by his side if you kept playing the game over and over again. I've got to admit it the other characters in the game annoy me, it's not because of their accents but because they are extremely dull and have no life to them.

To conclude the game is a pleasure to play, with no multi player it does take a hit in my opinion but with a score of 95, where the recent GTA received a 97 you could say its a major achievement. With a high amount of achievements to unlock and aim for, you will not be lacking in enjoyment and fun. I give it a 8/10.

Dead Or Alive 5

Dead or Alive 5

Dead or Alive 5 is a fighting action genre based game, where you have pick a character and either fight the computer or a fellow friend of family member. It is one of the leading fighting games in the world to date.










 

Developed by Team Ninja with partnership Sega AM2 at its core was released in North America on September 25 2012, September 27 in Japan, September 27 in Australia and on September 28 2010 was released in Europe. It is available on Play station 3 and Xbox 360 and is the first Dead or Alive game to have a multi-platform basis since Dead or Alive 2. It got a reasonable score of 76 on Metacritic where the Dead or Alive Plus got a decent score of 80 on VITA. It sold quite a disappointing 0.39m units which is nowhere near Red Dead Redemption.  But even though it didn't receive the best of reviews it is quite fun to play when you are playing against a person rather than the computer.

There are different game modes these are; Story mode, Fighting - Versus, Arcade, Time Attack and Survival.  The in game graphics are quite good, but I believe that for around this time the graphics could have possibly been better, the developers could have took note from the bigger games around that time of the year. Around September the game would have had a lot of competition, of course in Japan and the rest of Asia this game is huge, but for the rest of the continents the game was bitterly disappointing. The game does have humor as each character does have their own unique abilities, these could be from drop kicking to funny break dancing during the fight. The music in the game is very Tekken as its fast paced and something you could head bang to, but for me... not so much. The controls in the game is quite simple, which is to mainly button mash, but if you are a experienced Dead or Alive player then you will most likely know the moves and most of the controls going into this game.













 

What I like about this game is the Versus mode, where you can play against other people and not the boring computer to see who is the best bikini babe fighter, in my opinion the game is pretty pointless without the Versus mode and it really does save this game from becoming horrid, unless your into girls in bikini's beating the living hell out of each other.... which actually doesn't sound that bad to be honest.

In short this game isn't the most exciting game to play, and if you had to choose between story mode and versus mode then I would kick you until you chose versus mode. The soundtrack and the weird looking maps do make the game better, but to finalize I will probably not put this game into my top 10, the game gets a 4/10 from me.