Resident Evil 5 - Untold Stories Bundle (DLC, Xbox 360)

We couldn't think of a good caption. So, implied rape.

Writer's note: This is a review of a Downloadable Content for the full game Resident Evil 5. If you haven't please go read that. Also, ahead are spoilers of a couple downloadable chapters, and the main game if you haven't played it already. Proceed with caution. I also apologize for lack of pictures. Blogspot feels like being an ass to me and I don't wanna sift through HTML code.

So, the Untold Stories bundle consists of every bit of DLC for Resident Evil 5, except for Versus mode. All of this includes the costume packs, Mercenaries Reunion, and the two extra story chapters Lost in Nightmares & Desperate Escape. These two extra chapters take place around Chris and Sheva's adventures and explore parts of the story that have mostly been established, fleshing them out into two full-length game chapters worth the adventure. I chose to bundle them together in one review because they're similar to each other and they can be downloaded as one. It also prevents me from having six different reviews all stemming off of Resident Evil 5. I can't be that lazy and spread it over six weeks of updates... but it sure is tempting.

First up is Lost in Nightmares. For those of you who have played Resident Evil 5, you'll remember that before Chris met Sheva, he and Jill went to confront Spencer (the head of Umbrella) hoping it would lead them to Wesker, which it did. This is where Chris lost Jill and these are also the events that Lost in Nightmares expands on. And expand it does, where the main game would have you believe it was a rather straight-forward mission they were on, here in this chapter it's far more fleshed out, all harking back to the old days of Resident Evil with creepy atmospheres, hefty text diaries to read and even an easter egg that turns the camera into a fixed security-camera like style of the older games. It's obvious Capcom was trying to please older fans with this chapter, but were they successful?

I'd like to say yes. While there's nothing here that actually scared me, I was washed over with nostalgia when I would backtrack a couple times through halls solving miniscule puzzles. Here you'll find yourself playing with the team of Chris and Jill. (technically for the first time in the entirety of Resident Evil) The first portion of this chapter takes place in the main hall, and a few branching rooms of one of Spencer's mansions. Throughout this main portion you'll be gathering items, weapons, solving one or two simple puzzles, and even saving your partner from a good ol' crushing ceiling trap. It's all a welcome, slow-paced meander through creepy halls, all so you can proceed forward into the dank, gross underground torture chambers of the mansion.

And it's here, in these gross undergrounds that you'll encounter your first enemy. He's a large, hooded, multi-toothed bastard with a giant eye growing on his shoulder, and wielding a huge anchor. At first you'll think you can take him with little problem. But when you find out that his grab move is an inescapable death-grip, you'll be panicking just to get a shot off into his weak point on his back, trying desperately to run past him and hoping your partner is close enough to save you should he grab you. There's definitely more than one of these guys, and their sheer death-dealing power will make you panic and run with your heart racing (especially when there's two of them) a good feeling that the Resident Evil series has been missing. Unfortunately, these guys are the only enemy in the chapter (aside from Wesker) and they're literally just a re-skin of the Executioner with some boosted stats from the main game. Reskinning would make sense, but it's still quite lazy for such an interesting looking enemy. Because he shares the same animations, it's awkward to watch him swinging his anchor wildly just like the axe man because his anchor constantly clips through the cramped, narrow hallways. The animations just don't fit this chapter's claustrophobia. It's rather dissapointing, but regardless these guys are deadly, and (if you don't want a cool gameplay spoiler, proceed to the next paragraph) there's even a part where you lose your weapons and you must kill up to four of these dudes using cranks and ceiling spike-traps. Being the bait for that isn't comfortable.

After you've escaped from the gross-ass sewers, it's time to confront Wesker. It takes place in the exact same room as the cutscene only now you get to fight him, making a total of four Wesker fights throughout Resident Evil 5 and it's DLC. This particular fight with Wesker is actually quite different from the main game ones (again, good gameplay spoilers coming up) in that there's nowhere to hide, so rather than hiding you must provoke Wesker into attacking you and hope you're good at Quick Time Events, otherwise you'll be suffering some serious pain. Along with the new way you must fight him, he also comes packed with a couple extra moves and a bit of attitude, such as the ability to send you flying back at a wall, then laughing right in your face as you're trying to recover. Unfortunately, the QTE events being pretty much the only way to open him up for attack, it's a shame they aren't responsive. I can't tell you how many times I've obviously pressed the required X, and still been hit by him, and an AI partner isn't quite helpful here. I find that they tend to try and shoot Wesker rather than punch him off me, made worse by the fact he dodges bullets. But regardless, either you've gotta dodge his moves and smack him, or have your partner smack him when he's busy on you. Survive for a set amount of time, OR inflict enough damage, and the chapter ends, showing the cool fight scene from the main game and giving you your score.

So that's the gist of the chapter, but it sounds like one round would be enough right? WRONG! Thankfully, this DLC chapter boasts a few thing inside it to keep you playing at least a few times over. As you raise the difficulty for example, the game becomes significantly harder beyond just tougher enemies. For example, at one point the mini-bosses stop showing up on the GPS radar on Professional, and on some difficulties they may even begin to spawn inside the first mansion area, totally throwing you off guard. Also spread throughout the level is hidden score stars. Shoot these as you would a BSAA emblem for more score. While the only thing you can unlock from finding them all is an achievement, they're still fun and well hidden if you like that sort of hunting thing. Alongside difficulty changes, the game will randomly swap out it's weapons. While the area they spawn remains the same, what weapon actually spawns there is different each time. What might be a shotgun one round, could be a simple machine gun the next. Overall, Lost in Nightmares is a fun chapter that brings itself back to the good old days of Resident Evil for the most part, and is worth playing over and over.

Moving on from that is Mercenaries Reunion. This particular incarnation of Mercenaries technically comes with Lost in Nightmares, and the big deal about it is that it features new characters. Originally, you'd have to unlock these characters by purchasing the different bits of Resident Evil 5 DLC, and this is a vicious move, so the Untold Stories Bundle is definitely your bet. Among these characters is two different costumes of Chris and Sheva, Josh, Excella, and the most significant additions are the supporting characters from Resident Evil 1. Barry Burton and Rebecca Chambers. Among the new characters however, you won't find any new stages but the stages have been altered a little from the main game Mercenaries. Time bonus locations are changed, and depending on the stage, the frequency and types of mobs have been tweaked to change difficulties. Some stages are tougher, and some have been significantly nerfed. It's all a somewhat fresh experience, and the new characters here have some incredibly amazing moves. Barry has the ability to headbutt someone so hard their skull will rupture open. That's fucking manly.

But the Mercenaries Reunion is called Reunion for a reason, the inclusion of Rebecca and Barry. The original Mercenaries characters can't be brought into Reunion and as a result you're stuck with the eight-character roster. Now don't get me wrong, I do like Josh and Sheva, but I would have gladly chopped these two to include Wesker, and especially Jill in her STARS outfit. It's a reunion, and the full STARS team are the people that deserve to be here, not these newcomers. It's a rather kick in the balls, because many people were hoping Jill would get to fight alongside Barry once again. Still, despite that rather shady move, the characters are all blazing fun, and Reunion is just as awesome as it's predecessor, more even.

Finally, we move on to the extra chapter Desperate Escape. Again, if you've played the main game you'll likely remember the fight with Jill Valentine, and that after you freed her of Wesker's mind control, you don't see her again till the end of the game when she's on a helicopter with Josh. Desperate Escape covers that entire area in between. Apparently what had happened is that Jill passed out after departing from Chris, later to be found by Josh. Throughout this chapter you will play as Jill and Josh, both on a mission to get to a control tower, and radio their friend "Doug" (a character exclusive to this chapter) for a helicopter so they can later help Chris and Sheva. This chapter however, is nothing like Lost in Nightmares. Rather, Desperate Escape pumps up the action to the absolute maximum. As you make your way through the world you'll hardly have a moments rest. Dangerous enemies, spawning mini-bosses, and constant explosions will rock your world as you struggle to proceed through the chapter just to get to the end.

Even at the end , you'll find yourself having to survive on a rooftop for what is only a few minutes, but with the absolutely ruthless enemies, and the mini-bosses that spawn in coming at you, it seems like an eternity just watching the seconds tic down. The entire chapter is a crazy run through hell, and it's made even more interesting by the fact it shares some replay value similar to Lost in Nightmares. Weapons here are randomized even moreso, and while you won't find any emblems or special stars to find, the enemies often come across as random too. Even going so far as the entire mob-list could be completely different in one run. What may have been normal town Majini and axeman first, could turn into military Majini and constant Reapers on another run. It's insane, heart-pumping, and you won't always know what to expect so it's definitely something you'll play more than once.

Finally, if you're looking for a serious challenge, these two chapters are your bet. On Professional difficulty, both chapters hold back not a single thread, and it'll get to the point where you'll be wondering how it's physically possible. Sometimes it was ludicrously hard to the point I almost broke a controller, but Desperate Escape has an achievement called "Run the Gauntlet" for a reason. It truly is a gauntlet, one that will test even the most hardened, veteran players.

FINAL SAY:
As far as I'm concerned, this entire pile of DLC was well worth my.. what is it, seven dollars? Microsoft points are weird. Anyway, Lost in Nightmares was a well-loved harkening back to the old games, and Desperate Escape goes to the complete other end of the spectrum, challenging me to my wits end. While I'm a little agitated at Mercenaries Reunion for putting in Excella rather than a STARS Jill, it's still a fun, worthy alteration on the original formula that I'm glad I payed for. If you need more Resident Evil 5, here's where you'll find it.

Virtua Quest (Playstation 2)

The first skill you get. And it's super shiny!

The Virtua Fighter series is a long-standing well-respected fighting series that focuses less on being wild, and seems to put itself more into serious, realistic fighting. (aside from broken arms still working fine) As with many well-established franchises however, this one got a strange, hyper-crazy spin-off called Virtua Quest. It delved into the world of outrageous enemies and moves, and turned into a beat-em-up rather than a one-on-one classic fighter. Was this for the best? Continue reading. Do it.

Virtua Quest takes place in the not-too-distant future, on the man-made island of Acropolis, where people in this time period have grown tired of their actual lives, and have taken to living inside virtual reality, nowadays called the Nexus. Strangely, the servers they live in just represent normal stuff like shopping malls or cities, although a VR server is a good place to safely explore a jungle. Well... it's not so safe here. (Even more strange is that the people living like this haven't become horrendously fat as a result of technically sitting on their ass all day. Everyone is miraculously skinny.)

You are the young, suprisingly deep-voiced (and spiky-haired enough to rival Dragonball Z) Sei, and you are new to the Nexus. In order to make money for his friend Hayami to finish building an air-bike for a race - this plot point disappears very fast - Sei must take on the role of a Hunter. What Hunters in Nexus do is go to abandoned servers, where only security programs remain, and then find bits of data lying around which they can later sell to make real money, or for the purpose of gameplay, upgrade their own skills.

The aspect of the reality outside of Nexus however will never come into your gameplay. You'll never find yourself leaving the Nexus except in cutscenes (and even then Sei just dicks around his room and computer), and personally I would have liked to done some things to get Sei off his ass. Yknow, like ride that air bike damnit! But you're stuck inside the Nexus. So the way this games level progression works, is that the Hunter site is your hub, where you can talk to people for small missions, buy upgrades and tools, take training, and most importantly choose which server you want to go to. Servers are just levels that you must run through from start to finish, but when you enter a level for the first time you can't leave till the end. The reason for being unable to "logout" the first time you go in, is that every server you log in to is taken over by a nice ol' evil corporation named Judgement Six, and there's a big baddy called a Root User blocking your exit. Sei learns this in about five minutes of joining his first server after he meets up with a blue-haired girl Toka who warns him to leave, and once he finds himself unable to logout she tells him he must defeat the Root User. Then she leaves mysteriously and you're left on your own to fight through the level towards mister big boss man.

Now how you actually fight is a different story. It's a rather simple system, but it is more complicated than most beat-em-ups. To the point where you're able to put variety into your combos, but you won't find yourself having to vigorously memorize commands or forgetting them. You have your basics. Left analog stick to move, circle button to do a basic attack that can turn into a three-hit attack (or more if you buy certain upgrades) square to block and X button to jump, and even double-jump. You can attack in the air or on the ground, but you have special abilities called Virtua Souls.

These are rumored powerful discs in the Hunter world, and Sei is the only one that can see these special bits of data and throughout the game you will find them. Some from cutscenes, some from doing a bit of well-rewarded exploration. Should you find one, you are thrust into a single isolated room with a famous Virtua Fighter. Turns out all those tournaments in the whole series were just to study the fighters' moves and use that data to create super-soldiers. Who knew? Regardless, once you find the data corresponding to a fighter, you will battle this person. Should you defeat them (and sometimes that can be nigh-impossible) they will teach you a powerful move straight from their own roster.

All these moves fall into different categories. Strike, Jump, Dash, Throw, Floater and Charge. You can equip one move in each of these categories at a time, for a total of six powerful Virtua Fighter moves, all of which are mapped to different combinations of the triangle button. For example, pressing Triangle and Circle together will perform whatever throw move you have equipped, and there certainly is a good variety of moves. Yet you must be willing to explore the level thoroughly as well as going back to previous levels for ones you couldn't physically obtain before. Every time you use these moves, it takes up a little bit of your SP (Synapse Power).

When this bar drains, you are unable to perform any Virtua Soul moves until it refills either of it's own accord (slowly over time) or by using your basic attack on enemies and things. (which is much faster) Also linked to your SP is a move called Synapse Break which you can initiate with the R1 button. By doing this, you go into a hyper-mode that causes enemies you send flying to float in the air in slow motion for a long time, allowing you to string vicious combos as well as having the SP bar absorb any damage you take directly. So, that's pretty much how you fight.

The less hostile aspects of your character comes in his ability to climb about the environment. He can grab onto ledges, shimmy, run on walls, and most importantly use his wire. The wire is a long, florescent pink whip that shoots out of Sei's glove and, while it can be used to attach to enemies and fling yourself to them quickly for more combos, it is mainly used to grab onto floating orbs throughout the level. (And it also provides plenty of suggestive humor.) By doing this you can travel in a few different ways. Yellow orbs simply swing you back and forth and you must time the jump properly, green ones will take you straight where you need to go, purple ones will swing you in a vicious circle which requires your most pristine timing, and anything else I may have forgotten. Unfortunately, these orbs are scripted to specific spots, and your wire isn't good for much else making it a rather unexplored aspect of the game.

And this wire is where I'll start with the games control issues. For me, I do enjoy punching or kicking a guy in the face with an overzealous flashy move but the controls are stiff and often times get in the way, even so far as causing you to lose. The wire and camera being some of the biggest offenders. The wire is controlled with the right analog stick, but flicking said stick in any direction will still cause the wire to shoot out only where Sei is facing (thankfully it locks onto important stuff) and the only way to manually control the camera is by pressing the L2 button which repositions it directly behind Sei. These two functions are hardly mapped well and with the functionality of the wire they could have well been switched. Leaving the wires' mechanics untouched and allowing the right analog stick to freely control the camera. But that isn't how it works, and it's a big offender when you're trying to see what you're doing. Not to mention I've fallen off ledges countless times trying to fumble around the camera.

Other control problems come directly into your fighting. There's no move-canceling function, and combined with the fact that a lot of your moves have a deadly-long cooldown phase, you'll find yourself attacking a giant robot only to see him swinging his arm and you have no way of avoiding it because you're already attacking. There is a dodge-roll move you can buy, but occasionally it's a little unresponsive due to being mapped right onto your block button; Though it can get you quickly out of a jam, often you'll find yourself diving right into an angry fist. None of this prevents me from enjoying the game like the guilty pleasure it is, but I'll admit it's basically a game breaker.

Finally, the enemies you fight are a bit of a downer as well. No doubt the bosses are fun, all the way from the blonde super-Terminator in the first level, right up to the multi-tiered final boss. But the enemies in-between are nothing to fire up about. It's basically the same few types of enemies over, and over again that have been shamefully reskinned and had their health upped. It's a let-down and makes you get bored real quick and easy.

But despite it's flawed execution, the game does at least become innovative with some of it's concepts. While these don't do much at all to redeem it's faulty controls, they can still be appreciated. The upgrade system for one is rather unique in how it works. Instead of just buying upgrades more, and more, you have a 3 by 3 by 3 cube of squares for an upgrade grid. Excluding the very middle block which you can't use, you have a total of 26 blocks to work with, and upgrades come in the form of what look like Tetris pieces I guess. The more powerful the block, the more space it's likely to take up. You can buy these, or find special ones hidden throughout the different worlds. It's a system that works well, and even puts in a bit of puzzle-solving should you reaaally want to squeeze in that extra attack power.

In the middle of all that, you also have a cute little floating companion named Bit. You can find food to feed Bit to change three statistics on him, all relevant to what you feed him. Depending on how his stats raise, or lower, he may transform from bunny-themed, to a dog or octopus or bear or cat or whatever. Each different Bit will help you in a different way. It's small, but it's actually pretty cool. Unfortunately it's likely you'll find yourself sticking with the default as he helps you find important items.

The other good end of the game comes in how the story interacts with levels. Or at least that's how I'll word it. With the whole "virtual reality and servers" theme, the game can feel free to jump straight from a shopping mall, to a construction site, to a medieval japan level with no transition needed, and this prevents the game from repeating its own design throughout the full experience and allows the art direction to be colorful, pretty and at least does the work just fine despite how desolate some levels are. Each level can at least be appreciated for as much as the graphics will allow. My personal favourite level is the final one, and (note, possible incoming spoilers) it doesn't try to represent any Earth structure, it's simply the inside of a computer. Black, blue, grids, floating streams of data, the entire last level is just all too cool. I wish it wasn't one of those levels that you can't actually come back from, because when you finish, it gives you the "The End" screen and you have to reset your PS2. But regardless, as a final level should be, the last one is my absolute favourite.

Graphically wise, you can put this game in at average. The character models are designed well enough, the world is colorful, textures do their job rather well without aliasing, and it's all done with just a little polish. Just a little. There's nothing spectacular here, but nothing that'll cause your eyeballs to hurl either. Not much to say there. Soundwise the game isn't too amazing either, probably worse even. While most of the sounds are okay, some of them come out dull, quiet, or just not right. The acting is on another shelf though, so lets tackle the cutscenes all in one.

In cutscenes, you'll definitely find no blockbuster names or astounding, immersive fluid body animation. It's all cheesy, and quite typical of a lot of Japanese media, with over-extended emotions and whispering being a totally unheard of concept between these people. Watching the characters awkwardly spaz, yell, and go into unneeded deep thought can be humorous to the point of "it's so bad it's good", but there's moments where it's just hard to watch and you'll keep an eye on your bedroom door should anyone burst in and witness what unholy mass of crap you're watching.

FINAL SAY:
Virtua Quest is at least ambitious and there's things in here you can appreciate, but it's best you borrow this and play before deciding if it'll be a guilty pleasure style game for you. Its high points are the concepts, unique upgrade system and the fact it rewards exploration as well as giving good replay value with hidden items. Unfortunately it lacks the finesse in it's controls to hold up on it's own, with unresponsive commands, deadly-long animations and things that need the rust taken off them. Don't get me wrong, I do like the game and will play it, but I'm willing to admit it's just not good. With the concept it put forward, SEGA should have teamed up the thinkers, with some better programmers to make an actual good game. You can pass on this, it won't hurt my feelings. But I'll still be playing it regardless because I find it fun. I just won't heavily recommend it.

Resident Evil 5 - Versus Mode (DLC, Xbox 360)

I found this picture... and I just had to use it. I'm sorry.

Writer's Note: This is a review of a Downloadable Content for the full game Resident Evil 5. If you haven't already, please go there first.

Versus mode was a piece of DLC that was announced just before Resident Evil 5's release, and then put forward a couple weeks after. Naturally this irritated people as it shows disrespect for the consumer, but that's not what we're here for. Versus mode is a set of four extra gameplay modes that can host anywhere from two, to four players, and in all these modes the players will be competing against eachother for a hefty sum of points. These modes include Slayers and Survivors, both of which are Free-for-all games that can be played with two, three or four people. Then there is team variations of both those modes that require the full four people, and the teamwork works just the same as the main game.

For avid Mercenaries players on the main game, Slayers will be familiar (as will Team Slayers). It is much the same concept here. Get high combos, kill all the enemies and gain as much points as you can. Although now you have a couple extra factors. These being that you're competing to do better than the other players at Majini killing, you can respawn after death, and the person (or team) in last will receive a double-score bonus until they're at least in third. It's a lovely concept indeed, and one I like to go and try out every now and then but the problem is that the competition creates unbalancing issues in your strategy. Time is very important here as well but in the opposite way. You want to be killing as many enemies as you can, but can't let the time limit extend unless you need that extra time to get ahead. This mode would be fine and all, but often times it turns out you're casually plucking away at enemies and you're in the lead, then suddenly once the time runs out the other team jumps ahead by tens of thousands of points. After the game is over, you look at the scores to notice they had bunches more enemies at their hands. This unbalanced traffic of the games' mobs causes much more frustration than you would want, and it's obvious that Slayers wasn't altered much to make up for competing enemies. Balancing issues are also evident in that the Slayers and Mercenaries loadout are the same. So while any character could kick ass in Mercenaries, the different strategy here in Slayers doesn't transfer well over to these same weapon sets.

Then we have Survivors, or of course Team Survivors. The objective here is to damage other players for points. Now, while hurting, and then punching a player in the face to kill them is worth massive points, Capcom made the right decision for points by making every shot you land give you points as well, not just kills. With tank controls like this game has, a decision like this was genius. The more powerful the weapon you're using on the person, the more points you get for each hit, and headshots count for 1.5x the normal amount of points. And thankfully here, character loadouts are different. You start with either a pistol or machine gun, some grenades, ammo and a healing item to start you out. Tougher weapons are gained by finding them across the map, taking them off dead players or killing big bosses in the map for their drops. Yes, the normal enemies are still running around to make your day worse, and they will drop ammo and other items for you like crazy, so they are a target if you need some goodies; But they won't give you points. Player kills will.

Unfortunately these stages for Versus are the same ones pulled directly from Mercenaries. The problem here for Survivors is that some of these stages have certain dead ends, so a team could literally climb up a ladder to a dead end, and they basically win the match, because they can gun down anyone who climbs up. It's severely unfair and, while a sniper rifle will help this on some stages, it's impossible to fight against this tactic on most maps. And, even with the nerfed loadout we still have unbalanced characters. You'll basically find yourself picking the people with fire grenades as a start. Setting a player ablaze will cause them to flail their arms about in a burning animation for a few seconds leaving them open to fire (haw haw, get it?) while flash grenades are useless cause your giant "1P" logo can be seen through the flash anyway, and frags must be ridiculously close to a person to do any real damage. More balance problems comes in that, if you're getting your ass kicked you're gonna have crap weapons while the other people have all the best ones, and soon you'll find yourself unable to get better ones and as a result, unable to put up a fight. So again, Survivors is very unbalanced but that doesn't prevent it from being fun.

What prevents it from being fun is the players that play it. Resident Evil 5 brought over with it, the ability to change to the RE4 control scheme, and this brought a nasty trick with it. With one instant, a player can literally be aiming to either side without going through any turning time whatsoever. So a player can literally run beside you, and you won't even see them turn at ALL, then you find a shotgun in your skull blasting you to bits. It's terribly cheap, and with the tank controls you simply can't fight it. Pretty soon you'll find yourself having to get rid of the comfortable side-strafing ability to use the control scheme for this unfair, brutal tactic that near breaks the game. It's hard to tell if this was an intended trick by Capcom, or if it's a glitch because this same ability was president in Resident Evil 4, and it could acceptably be used to your advantage; But here, it's just a mean, cheap tactic to use and if you ever find SOMEONE who doesn't do it, you'll find a bit more fun to be had.

The other reason these players ruin the game is that they abuse a "quick-rocket" glitch. The rocket launchers are instant-kills, but they're slow and bulky, it takes a second to haul the thing onto your shoulders and aim properly and that's why normally they'd take careful planning to use against someone. Except for this glitch. It allows a player to quickly whip out the rocket and fire it at you in less than half a second. So basically, they look at you and you explode. It's frustrating, cheap, and the worst part is, out of these two major issues Capcom has shown no interest in fixing it, the bastards. Oddly enough, you'll find that these players always choose to be the Jill character. So now she's ruined for me and playing as her feels dirty.

And if it isn't cheap, glitch-abusing players, you'll find yourself stuck with people that are just downright stupid. You'll often have people that join into a lobby, and don't realize that the teams are unbalanced. It seems they don't know that you have to have two people on either team and they refuse to switch, which holds up the whole lobby. Once in game, these are often the same players that won't listen to you as a partner. Requesting healing items, ammunition, anything you desperately need will go unheard to their ears. You'd think that kind of teamwork would have carried over to them from the real game.

FINAL SAY:
Versus was a fun experience when I was naive and first came into it, but I soon realized the terrible reasons I was losing, paid more attention to it and I very rarely win a match using legitimate fair tactics. With unbalanced gameplay, glitch-ridden combat and far too many things that have been blindly overlooked, unless you have a few friends that play nice this won't be worth your five dollars. Feel free to pass on this. I kind of wish I did. I could have spent my 400 points on something much better. I simply can't enjoy this mode. Unless you're a person who thinks using glitches to win is okay (and if you are you're scum) then don't buy this.

Survival Crisis Z (PC)

Never did like kids.

Now here's a game you probably haven't ever heard of, but it's from an indie developer you might know of. Ska Studios, back then simply known as James Silva. I've said about Ska that they've never made a bad game, and the same applies to this early title of theirs. While it has it's quirks, bugs and some inconvenient over-looks, this is definitely a game worth trying, playing, and best of all it's free now!

Survival Crisis Z offers to throw you into a good old zombie apocalypse... or at least that's what it seems like at first, and it does this with two modes of play. Story Mode, or Arcade Mode. We'll start with the latter. In this Arcade mode you take your character, and are thrust into a random portion of the city to fend yourself off against wave after wave of increasingly deadly hordes of zombies and whatever other creatures the game wants to throw at you. You will do this by mostly shooting them, but you will pick up special guns, and powerups to help fend yourself from the zombies. The powerups can even be stored for later use, though only one at a time. The funniest of these is a shopping cart. This turns you into a high-speed, invincible death-mobile of a man sitting inside a shopping cart. It's crazy fun, and this isn't the only powerup of it's kind. Other special things in Arcade mode usually come in the form of wave-specific mutators. Some waves will suddenly make everything dark so you can't see behind you. Some waves will cause fat exploding zombies to rush you en masse. And some will even cause the spot you stand on to become a hill, making it harder for the zombies to get at you, and this hill will move with you. It's interesting to watch the landscape warp in such a way.

After a while, Arcade mode will get brutally hard, but as you earn more and more points the game will give you rewards. You can even unlock a cute little Tetris-style minigame, but the most significant of these, is the ability to customize your character's appearance. From a humble businessman, to a burnt SWAT member literally missing his face. So no doubt Arcade mode is where you wanna go for a quick monster-murdering romp, and it's also where you want to go FIRST, to get used to the games controls.

So now let's move onto the serious bulk in the game, and that starts right as you boot it up. When you start a new character, the game will ask you your name, gender, and then more importantly it'll ask you what class you'd like to start as. The difference between them being that they all have different starting abilities, but they can all be evolved to the same point. You always have access to all the skills no matter who you start as. I went with the Doctor, because regenerating health and a high-power revolver is a godsend. Finally, the game will also ask you what faction you would like to be in. Neutral, Rebels or SWAT. The last two of those are two human organizations who have begun warring against each-other while Neutrals are just people indifferent to both sides. Yknow, typical zombie apocalypse stuff. All of this stuff will determine how you start out, your disposition towards the factions and how they act to you, and of course your appearance which you'll want to change if you have unlocked it in Arcade Mode. Once you've done all that wonderful picking, select Story Mode and you'll have a choice of three episodes. I'd of course go with Episode One to start off but if you're feeling brave...

So now you've chosen your starting corners. After a small, cryptic and slightly unnerving opening cutscene, you will suddenly (and I mean suddenly) find yourself in the middle of a street, inside a small randomly-generated town with no clue as to what you should be doing. This is the games most crippling point, is that it boots you out the front door on your ass and expects you to know things. So you'll find yourself wandering around town for a bit, shooting a few zombies here and there once you figure out the controls, and eventually, you'll come across a dude with a knife inside a building. He'll come up to you, spend about five minutes explaining a bunch of stuff like he's the god of knowledge, telling you not to waste your ammo, and to go do safehouse missions. This becomes irrelevant as soon as he starts running into zombies trying to be knife Rambo.

But this guy is your first partner and you're stuck with him until he dies; this is just one of many features the game has. The game is technically free roam, and to progress with the story, you must do story-based missions. This can be done two ways, but the factions are what you need to get to these, so lets explore the organizations first. Rebels and SWAT are self explanatory, and both factions own buildings throughout the city, as do Neutral parties. For each safehouse of these three factions there is a leader. This is the important guy. You can talk to him for missions, guns, items, and even skills you can buy. You receive money for all these by completing missions, or finding money conveniently placed throughout the world in suitcases or dead corpses along with other items. For Rebel or SWAT buildings, you can talk to this man to do side-quests that ally yourself with that faction, while making you a target to the other one. If you talk to the leader of an enemy faction, you can bribe him to take the bounty off your head if you wish; Though if you've heavily invested yourself into either side, this becomes extremely expensive. So decide wisely, or decide neither.

Even if you decide to side with someone though, Neutrals are still neccessary to your success, as they're one of the only ways to unlock story missions. The way you do this is to go to the leader of a Neutral safehouse, and request a job. This usually consists of taking a package, or taking a person to another safehouse in a limited time. You have plenty of time to do this, and when you're done, you earn a profit based on usually the distance from point A to point B. When you return the package/person to the point B safehouse leader, if he's Neutral (which is most of the time) then you can finally request a story mission, and as you progress further and further through the stories, you'll eventually come to the end of an episode, and once you finish an episode you move onto the next, randomly generated plot of city. This is how you progress through the game, but it's not the only thing you can do.

In case you've been wondering, there is another faction... and it's you. If you so wish to, you can waltz on into a safehouse, talk to the leader and pick an option to start a takeover. For neutral safehouses, you'll be fighting off a brutal onslaught of zombies, and usually the smaller the room is, the worse off you'll be. For SWAT or Rebels, you'll be doing a hostile takeover, killing waves and waves of their members until the house is yours. In either case, you're shown the difficulty level before you confirm you want to do this, and you will have to use all your skills, survival ability, and any items necessary to survive because these mini-game wave fights are an absolute gauntlet to get through. Tesla-balls and turret sentries are your friends more than anything else. But once you do become successful, the house belongs to you, and now you've opened up the game to so much more.

In addition to being able to access story missions instantly, and sleep for free, you can now draw in profit, and better NPC partners to your side. As you take over more, and more buildings, you have three factors that go up with each one. Profit, how many NPC's you have, and how good their weapons are. All the way from getting 2 cents for killing a zombie, and maybe having one guy with a knife - to getting tens of dollars from every zombie kill and always being gauranteed to have a four-man posse of flamethrower and heavy machine gun wielding badasses. But don't get too attached to these badasses. While it's easy enough to keep them alive with medkits, if you're rushed by an incredibly fast and sudden wave of zombies or other creatures, your partners can dissapear in the blink of an eye, until you recognize their mangled corpse attempting to take a bite out of you. As well as, should a partner be badly injured and you can't help them with it, you may well find yourself having to listen to them talk about not feeling well, and eventually begin vomiting up blood. If you can't heal them they'll become a zombie coming to eat your flesh, and a fast one at that. It's especially saddening to lose one because the NPC's have their own personalities. Sometimes they don't get along, while other times, they get along so well you want them to make it through the whole, long episode alive with you so they can escape and get married and all that sappy stuff. Once they get mobbed by a bunch of zombies coming from a window, it's sad, and disappointing but that's something great to be had in this game.

Of course, you may feel a little less bad for them if you pay attention to their AI. You'll find that they may like to run headfirst into a group of zombies when they only have a knife, or they might fumble trying to get around a wall and get close to you again when you've moved on from one building. But these issues become second-nature to accept when you're on your fifth successive survivor cause the others die, and that's actually quite the problem. You'll find that your survivors die even more because, while you can achieve better-equipped survivors, these badasses must be new. Older ones can't be re-equipped, so whatever weapon you find them with is whatever they're permanently stuck with. It feels kind of bad to have to drive two knife-wielding innocents into a mob of zombies so they'll die and open up space for someone with a better gun.They also tend to get themselves killed because they must stand still to talk. While reading the nice snippets of conversation they have to offer can be nice, them stopping abruptly leaves them a sitting duck for hungry mouths and they aren't exactly sensitive about when they choose to speak. So just let your first couple die off till you can find ones with big shinies.

And these problems of overlooked design don't stop there. When you swap over an episode, you'll lose all your buildings, profits and other stats except your inventory and skills from the last episode. So really, there's no point in doing a bunch of buildings until you're on the last episode. And finally, beware this; When you do the absolute final mission, you can't go back into the game. Your screen will forever be stuck in a black limbo until you restart a new character. So once you've had one run-through, you should make your way through the game up until the last mission, then do all your free-roaming building-stealing fun.

So, fun! I've spent too long not talking about the gameplay so here goes. Survival Crisis Z is presented as a shooter from an isometric angle. I'd recommend goofing with the options until you can get a WASD and Mouse combination working, because the game becomes too hectic to play otherwise. Hectic it is, and it is oh so satisfying. You'll start out with basically one type of enemy, and that's zombies. You'll fight either old, decayed slow zombies, or the fresh ones. The ones that have recently been turned. These ones are fast, and vicious because they haven't had time to decay. As you move on you'll begin encountering more paranormal enemies... and places. One of my favourites being the "children". These are crazy little buggers that you can't see. Until they're really close to you, then they appear, and your entire world transforms into an insane asylum until you move away from the ankle-biters, or kill them. So if you're surrounded by a good mob of them you're likely to start feeling a little uncomfortable because you'll be running away, panicking and the world will constantly be changing around you. These are a very unique, fun enemy and the game is full of these.

The game also tends to do paranormal things around you. For example, you'll be exploring an empty room, exit it, then come back inside immediately and you'll find the room flooded with a mob of crazy zombies that want to eat your flesh. Or you'll be exiting a safehouse - all of which are normally devoid of undead life - and suddenly a huge swarm of flesh hungry monsters comes bursting out of the door you just left and into the streets when they had nowhere to come from in the first place. It seems like an accidental loophole in game design, but it's honestly a good one and it keeps you on your toes.

So to fight these threats, you'll have many, MANY things at your disposal. From a handgun, revolver, shotgun, all the way to a military-grade heavy machine gun, or the ever-so-deadly flamethrower. These are easy to access in your inventory, because when you pull up your inventory it pauses your game. Here you have multiple sections to your HUD, three of which are interactive. Up top is your items. These consist of smokes, bombs, health, small food items, and even things you can mix and combine to create useful items or dangerous drugs. In the middle is your weapon and health wheel. You'll cycle through your weapons with directional buttons, and the red circle surrounding them represents your health. Try not to let this go down. On this screen you can also see how much ammo you have for each gun. Third, we have the skills section. Here you can view and use your skills that you have bought from safehouse leaders. Some of these are passive, while instant-use ones will show you what items you require to use them. These range from running fast, all the way to sentry turrets, and making C4 that can literally blow up an entire building.

Finally, we have the other miscellaneous stuff, like fatigue, hunger and your commodities. If your fatigue and hunger become far too low, you'll notice your character become slow, and your screen will begin twitching as a sign of unfocus. While it takes a long time to die of hunger, being brought down to a snails pace is deadly in itself, so you must sleep and eat to keep these going. This brings me to commodities. These consist of things like Food, Electronics, and a couple other things I forgot. Food is used automatically once your hunger hits zero to prevent it going negative, so always keep a healthy stock of food. The other commodities are used to make items, or initiate skills. One skill allows you to craft items out of commodities, while another lets you randomly disassemble your inventory into usable coms. The game is well thought out, and all in all it's presented simply, and usable. But, not user-friendly as it can take a while to figure out how the whole experience works.

Aesthetically wise, the game boasts a good, believable and properly disturbing audio track, all the way from the screeching white noise of the world changing around you, to the good loud bang of a gun (and it certainly is a bang) and of course the shuffling of good ol' zombies. But graphically... well, it's not gonna break the game. Some of the textures are good and pleasing, but sprites and such are cartoonish, and honestly downright ugly at times; And this is all spread out over a very repetitive world where buildings are not memorable, and you'll be checking your map constantly. Still, even if the graphics are bad, the game does show some creativity with it's artistic direction. The console menu is always in an LED-style red print with static overtop of it, and it's charming despite the actual graphic capability. These factors don't hurt the game for me, but if graphics are a big deal for you this is something you'll have to fight your way through to get at the sweet, delicious game candy.

Finally, the game boasts a rather unique system of dungeons. Occasionally you will come across a random grate in a room. This is a rare chance, and when you do come across it, you have to decide whether to enter it now, or never. When you leave the room, the grate will disappear so you can't go off and prepare yourself for the trials underneath. So, do you think you're ready? Cause if you are, and if you happen to survive the dungeons' dangerous halls, then you'll be heftily rewarded. From some real good amounts of items, to even very very special, secret items.

FINAL SAY:
Survival Crisis Z boasts almost perfection over the concept of a zombie apocalypse and even throws in some crazy paranormal twists in here and there. It had some design flaws and things that seem carelessly overlooked, but if you know what you're doing the game will love you and you'll love it back. So prepare yourself to face some seriously dangerous, paranormal and flesh-eating monsters as you fight your way through this apocalypse, not to mention the dangerous humans that may fire upon you depending on what you've done. So download it now right here! It's free!

Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360)

Dental care isn't good in Africa.

Now before I get into the meat of this, I'd like to say that the golden ages of Resident Evil have certainly gone and past. No more are the horror-elements, intense ammo conservation, cinematic camera angles down hallways, and just all those things that made it what it was. Ever since the more action-oriented Resident Evil 4 hit shelves, it became an instant success. No doubt, Capcom will follow the action road valiantly now and while I'm sad about it, I'll stick it for the ride; Because at the end of the day, Resident Evil 5 was an amazing, and most importantly fun experience; Still is too!

The story set up here is very bold and full. Since the fall of Umbrella (the evil zombie-making dudes of long ago) their bio-organic weapons such as viruses and monsters have fallen to the hands of the black market and terrorists. Chris Redfield (a long time protagonist of the series) is now a member of the BSAA, an organization dedicated to fighting bio-weapon threats all over the globe. Today, he is coming to Kijuju, Africa. Think of the movie Black Hawk Down and you've got a good idea of your surroundings. Here he is greeted by an African BSAA member by the name of Sheva Alomar. She is here to make his time as an American in Africa easier, and she will now serve the purpose of being your co-op and/or AI partner through the game. Then suddenly, after this greeting the game throws a curveball into the story that will throw any long-standing Resident Evil fan off balance. Chris flashes back to a gravestone of one Jill Valentine, another long-standing protagonist. "Whoah, what? When did this happen?" you may ask. This is how the story will set you up and no doubt the rest of the story is just as bold in it's presentation and plot points, although much of it is shamefully Hollywood and predictable.

How you will move through the game world and survive is where the real fun comes in. Most of the time your gameplay will consist of being rushed upon by hordes of angry people with everyday weapons, sometimes even a long-range weapon. These people are called Majini, and they are hunting you down because they are irreversibly infected with a parasite known as Las Plagas, which was featured in RE4, though here it is even more volatile. Using your guns, and a slew of very fun satisfying melee moves, you are to survive this ordeal by any means necessary. Usually that means killing the people running at you with hatchets. All of this is presented in-game with a close-following over the shoulder camera save for special cinematics.

Now the controls are what normally turns people off. Resident Evil 5 has still paid respects to it's older brethren by keeping intact many of it's old staples, though it has taken the liberty of giving the player the ability to side-strafe, making movement much easier and smoother. What normally turns people off the game is that, in order to attack, you must aim. And when you do aim, you stand still. You must stand still to shoot and most people HATE that you can't run and shoot at the same time. What they don't understand is that this system has been in Resident Evil since the very beginning, and it forces the player to think a little more strategically, make quicker and accurate shots, and it also prevents you from just backing away while gunning down the hordes with ease. So you stand still to shoot at the enemies. Your other method of attack is Melee. You can either use your knife, which is mapped to the LB button and doesn't take up space, or you can shoot your enemy in specific spots to open up an opportunity to hit them. For example, Chris can shoot an enemy in the leg, and while they're stunned it is an opening to get close, and perform an Uppercut. This will damage (and possibly kill) the enemy while saving ammo and knocking other enemies in the immediate vicinity onto their asses. Melee is a must, and yknow what? It's just plain fun to shoot a dude in the forehead, and then punch him in the face. Add this together with the fact that you can chain together attacks with your partner, and overall you have a unique, and well-performing combat system.

So that's how you fight. But where you put these weapons brings in another thing that outsiders to the Resident Evil franchise hate. Before each mission, you have a giant inventory you can stuff anything you want inside, but in-game the same doesn't apply. You and your partner have a 3x3 inventory totalling 9 spaces per person. Each item takes up one of these spaces, while things like ammo will stack into one slot. A lot of the older Resident Evils did this same type of system, and I can see where other players are coming from. An AK-74 (seriously) will take up the same amount of space as a plant or 50 handgun bullets. But this simplicity helps to make organization much easier, and the limited space does have to make you THINK of what items to take with you and what to leave behind. I rather like the nine-space system. You can also request any item from your partner (except for weapons. It's to prevent new players from getting rocket launchers) or give them something they'd need. To top it off, anything you place in the up, left, right and bottom squares of your inventory will be mapped to your directional buttons for easy access so it's smart to have three weapons, and a healing item on those particular slots.

Even more controls come in the form of partner actions and commands. You can interact with your partner in a variety of ways. From simply saying "Thanks", telling them to "Go" or punching an enemy off their back as well as saving them from the brink of death, you and your partner's cooperation is needed, and the AI will always listen. I found the AI partner to be just fine, great even. She (or he) will never use healing items if it isn't a reasonable time, she's more accurate than a beam of light, and will even hand over ammo of her own free will should you be running low. And in the heat of battle, you can order her into Attack mode which causes her to stray away from you and use more powerful guns. If you keep her in Cover mode, she'll stick close, and continue using her pistol. Remember that this is vital. The only problems the AI may have is that sometimes they appear to be fumbling around the map a little, she may not react to immediate dangers towards you unless you yell for help, and not to mention she occasionally makes some odd choices. But nonetheless, Capcom has a history of making terrible AI and this is an exception to that.

Finally, and my last point I'll voice on the gameplay because this is becoming a long review, is that of quicktime events. Resident Evil 4 has them in abundance, to the point it became a natural reflex to PRESS X TO NOT DIE. However, here RE5 can fall flat. It does still have quick-time events, but almost all of them come in the form of offensive actions like kicking or punching... or stomping. There's next to zero quick-reaction life saving ones, so when they do happen you're suddenly unprepared and you find yourself having to restart because of being caught off by one of the few life-saving QTE's.

As it is obvious so far, I'm highly fond of the gameplay. How unique it is, and that it takes more thought than just "point your guns at the people and shoot". But one of Resident Evil 5's strong points comes in the visuals. Resident Evil has always been on the cutting edge of graphic technology, and while I'm not one to judge a game based on this sort of thing, here it is nothing short of absolutely amazing. Textures are smooth, believable. The houses are real, enemies move realistically, your characters animations seem fluid and satisfying just to watch, and all the guns you have at your disposal are oh so purdy. Top wrap it all up you'll be travelling through wasteland villages, marshes, oil fields and even ancient ruins, all of which are fantastically done. It's just a full treat for the eyes, topping most any game of this generation, and it'll probably hold it's own even in the next. Visually, the only thing I might complain about is a couple direction choices. One is the shaky camera in action-heavy cinematics. I've never been a fan of shaky cameras and they're not necessary for a good scene as far as I'm concerned. The other complaint is that Chris and Sheva are pointing their guns at people in nearly every cutscene. It'd give the characters a less bland look if they'd let their arms down for a second, especially since their tiny pistols won't do fuck-all to the mass of giant bosses they'll be fighting throughout the game.

Since that was visuals quickly wrapped up, let's move onto sound. Soundwise, this game isn't so strong in. The best of it is that the voice acting is absolute top-quality, believable and some of the characters you'd just die to hear talk more and more. But in other areas, this isn't so. The music score is - while pleasing - not quite as amazing at the game seems to think it is; But it no doubt does the work. The other aspect of sound that may fall flat are some of your guns. While most of them sound, and even feel right, a couple of them sound like throwing a pillow onto a pond, an unsatisfying grind of dust and weak metal. However these weapons are far and few between thankfully, as weapons like the M3 shotgun sound hard, and angry. So overall, the sound is well done and does the work properly, though falls on a dead note in some areas.

And then, after you're done the game, you still need stuff to do right? Well the game is high and mighty in this regard. After completing the game, you unlock the ever so important Mercenaries Mode. This is a timed score-attack mode where you gather time, and must kill as many enemies in rapid succession as you can for high combo counts, and directly related high scores. There is eight stages to play from, most of which are altered versions of maps found in the main campaign, and each stage pits you up against different mobs, and mini-bosses to fight, all of which are worth different point values of course. The real fun part? If you didn't like your partner, this is the only mode where you can go full on solo, and it's a different experience to be a one-man ass-kicking juggernaut punching machine. Or you can go Duo mode. The only problem here is that you cannot bring an AI partner in here, so offline players are almost left in the dust... almost. Thankfully the game has a fully-featured split-screen for both it's story and Mercenaries. So train your parakeet to use joysticks or something. Finally for mercenaries, you can unlock up to 10 different characters to choose from. Each of which has a different item and weapon loadout (no you cannot take your main story weapons in here) but for the most part you can apply similar strategies to each of them. Problematically, there is some balancing issues between characters, but since there is no player versus player you'll find here it ain't a big deal. Mercenaries is an excellent mode that extends the game length by days even.

The game has many, many more things to strive for and unlock. An extra couple of costumes you can get for finding hidden emblems throughout the main story, small figurines of all the characters and enemies in the game for you to look at and admire, and special guns to unlock. One of which is a wonderfully-fun triple-barreled shotgun called the Hydra. Oh yes. However, the only unlockable here I won't agree with, is Infinite Ammo. You can unlock this for nearly all your guns and while it is a nice novelty to entertain yourself with, it becomes old and drab because you limit yourself of many of the games doable actions, especially partner communication. It wouldn't be such a problem but, nearly all online co-op games you go into will have infinite ammo turned on. It irritates me to no end and I find it boring.

FINAL SAY:
Resident Evil 5 followed up on the last Resident Evil game fluently, and rather than trying to stay relevant to horror it simply built itself around fun. While this can be definitely a bad thing, Resident Evil 5 is nothing short of an awesome, amazing and wonderful experience that can be sunk into with weeks worth of play hours. So go get yourself a copy, and start mauling angry parasitic villagers.

Naughty Bear (Gold Edition, Xbox 360)

How can you go wrong with this? Lets find out.

Imagine if you will, that you are a social outcast; Living in the tiniest community, where every single person has hated you, laughed at you, poked fun at you and even the authorities don't try to console you. Then, one day, you hear of a big birthday party and you are the only one not invited. You decide to show up there with a present anyway. What happens next? They laugh at you. They laugh at your attempt to finally show you're capable of being friends. Then you return home sulking. What do you do now?

Well, Naughty Bear addresses this problem by throwing the present in the fire, and going on a homicidal Teddy Krouger rampage to punish all the bears by killing, maiming, scaring, and making bears go insane to get his revenge. This is the concept behind Naughty Bear, and you will be the one to perform all these nasty, rude actions towards the cute fluffy resident teddies of Perfection Island.

How you will go about this, is by sneaking around the woods, bushes where the other bears can't see you. Skulk around, sabotage items, set traps, scare the bears. Make them paranoid, or just go outright and kill them with an axe, or a revolver. All this is done to - here comes a kicker - gain arcade style points. Yes. You get to be on the killing side of a Slasher flick to grab millions of points. And you get points for absolutely anything. For darting past a window, they'll see you, which'll make them get paranoid, giving you points. For bears finding another bear that you've made terrified, those bears will become worried, giving you points. You get points for destroying things, sabotaging things, but the best that you can do, is showing the bears how Naughty you are. For example, killing someone right in front of them so they all see it, giving you tens of thousands of points.

I'll give you a great example of what I do. One real good way to start, is, once you've scouted out the area, and you know what is where, I like to find a bear who's wandered off alone. I'll set a bear trap down on the floor for when he has to come back. When he gets stuck in it, I run right up, and give him a big ol' scare. At this point I could have just snapped his neck, but now that I scared him, he's now terrified, and he's also limping cause of the trap. I'll duck back to the woods, and wait. Once he comes across the other bears. All those bears will start freaking out upon seeing an injured bear. And quickly, I can run in, and pin the injured bear to the floor, and shove a hatchet in his face six times in a row, and make all the others watch. That right there is probably worth a hundred thousand. Not to mention when they're all busy panicking, I can try and hide in a closet and wait for them all to barricade themselves inside that room, thinking they're safe, I'll jump out and scare the shit out of them and begin slapping bears left and right.

And that's just one of many tactics you are here to employ. Thankfully, the game also has a couple systems in place that encourage you to use different methods and explore different weapons. The first of which is your score multiplier. Whenever you're doing... well, whatever, this multiplier will go up and up, and the higher it is, the more points you're getting for whatever you do next. Ideally, when it gets to around 75x or 100x you'll want to do some of the worse, more rich stuff. Like killing! The other thing, this one being highly important, is the system of "depreciating events". The more you do a certain action, the less points it's worth. So, axing all the bears over and over won't do you well; But not that it isn't a fun option if you wish.

Unfortunately, some of the games problems start here. It's not exactly clear what's affected by the multiplier, and the depreciation. Things like smashing windows depreciate easily, and are affected by the multiplier, but I remember making three bears in a row kill themselves, and they all gave me the same amount of points, despite the multiplier fluctuating and what I thought would be depreciating score. When a player realizes this, it might well put them into just doing the same thing over and over, and really with this game you need to make your own fun.

Some more of the games problems come in detection, and in the case of multiplayer, (more on that later) buggyness. Often times when I'm trying to sneak up behind a bear, it'll take some swivelling behind him for the Scare command prompt to come up. The same problem happens with bears who are fixing a stove, opening a fridge, etc. As for bugs, multiplayer is near-well broken. Even if you're the host of a match, every button you press takes about a half second to react. There's lag in EVERYTHING you do online, making it feel like you're pulling your bear by a string. The game doesn't exactly have deep controls that require cat-like reflexes, so this is a problem I could well pass on, but there is points (and this happens almost once per game) where there will be an intense lag spike, and your screen will freeze every second. This usually goes on for nearly a minute and it kills the mood there. Of course, all this is assuming you get a game that doesn't disconnect within the first few seconds. I'd say I've completed one out of every eight matches I try. It's a shame.

And finally for bugs, if you're an absolute achievement whore, steer clear of the Gold Edition disc. While it does come with all the DLC, all the achievements (or trophies) for the DLC are completely broken and will never work for you. The company has made it clear they aren't fixing this so you'd have to buy the DLC separately with a normal disc to get the shinies.

Unfortunately, the game's problems do not lie in just bugs. While this IS a point-grabbing game, it still could have done to rid itself of some of the repetition that plagues the game in a lot of aspects. There's literally only four areas in the game, and it places them in different combinations across all 7 (10 with DLC) episodes. This makes it easy to jump right into another episode, but the problem with just four areas I don't even have to explain.

Repetition is also the same for things like animations. Some of them are alright, and a lot of them are unique. Every weapon has it's own special killing cinematic, but the environmental objects, not so much. Naughty Bear uses the exact same animations for burning a bears face onto a stove, OR grill. Here it makes sense. Something hot you press their face on to kill them. You don't have much leeway for uniqueness there. But it starts to become a little old when the same animation is used for conveyor belts and rotary record tables. Even still it makes sense. Press their face on something dangerous, but it just becomes ludicrious when I discovered this same animation was used for a sink. How pressing their face sideways into a sink kill them, I don't know. But it's certainly lazy.

Repetition is clearly the games worst offense. But that doesn't mean it's bad by any means. If you're a person who loves going for gold, then every time you start a round you'll be drawn in by wanting to do well enough to get a gold medal, whilst hearing the games cheesy, satire children's show narrator yelling "WELL NAUGHTY!" through your television. It's a giddy gratifying feeling, and every bit of the game is made enjoyable by the nature of it's satire, poking fun at cutesy shows and Care Bears. It also helps to curb some of it's repetition by introducing special bears in later episodes. These include alien bears, robot bears, ninja bears but certainly, the most hectic of them all is the Zombear chapter, because the Zombear's will be busy trying to eat all your targets, yet you still gain points trying to comprehend what you'll do in the chaos. It's a game that you'll buy to have a fun romp through when you don't want to do anything else, and for me that doesn't mean once a few months. I play this game at least once a week. It's just fun, straight and through.

And finally, like I said I'll get to the multiplayer. If you can GET a game physically going without disconnecting, you have a slew of options at hand. The time of day (which can range anywhere from a foggy green night to warm summer day) the map (pick one of three stages, each one is pulled directly from the campaign) and the game mode of which you have four (or eight with DLC) to choose from. There's a surprising amount of people playing, and with patience, you'll get to have some fun with two, three, or a maximum of four bears in one lobby.

The multiplayer modes are as follows. Assault, where one team must protect their statue. They can do this by murdering the other team before they can hurt the statue, setting traps, barricading a door, that sorta thing. Then, the players switch teams and the team with the most wins at the end of the entire match wins. Often though, these end in ties. The next is Cake Walk. A golden cupcake is spawned randomly in the map. You must find it, pick it up and hold it for as long as you can. Every second you have it adds up to your score, but you can't fight back. So you'll have to swerve, trick and ween through bears to keep yourself alive while holding it, until they kill you. When they do, respawn and go find them. Kill them back and take the cake. Next, we have Golden Oozy. This is similiar to Cake Walk, but the person who finds the gun, must start shooting other bears. The ONLY way to get points is to kill bears with his gun, so be ready for an onslaught if you do pick it up. Finally we have Jelly Wars. Three bears must go round the map collecting jellies, while the fourth player will play as Naughty Bear. He must prevent them from collecting all five jellies by all means neccessary. This involves killing, sabotaging, and setting traps mostly. When a normal bear does die, he is put into a penalty zone, and one of the living bears must use a phone in the level to call them back in. Kinda like freeze tag. Multiplayer is an enjoyable experience, and losing is okay, because killing is just as silly as ever. Disconnecting however, not fun.

FINAL SAY:
It's buggy, repetitive, and sometimes downright lazy, but there is lots of fun to be had here. If you're willing to pile through the bad of the game, and don't have TOO much a need for multiplayer, then this may well be worth your money. I would recommend a full purchase, not just a rent, because this is certainly an experience I will at least be sinking a few hours into every month.