Sleeping Dogs: A Review

I finished Sleeping Dogs today, and I'm here to tell you that you should probably go out and buy it.

If you ever wondered how Shenmue 3 would pan out, this is pretty much it assuming Ryo turned into Jackie Chan: Supercop and started mashing heads into freezers. As someone who has spent a reasonable amount of time wandering around Hong Kong (and also wrote an altogether too long dissertation on the politics and symbolic imagery of 90s HK cinema back in Uni) I was dying to see how this would pan out.

After an hour or so of playtime, I was close to being overwhelmed at how damned Hong Kongy everything was. That first walk around the market? INCREDIBLE. I think the devs went for trips to HK to record the sound and capture general observations, and it shows - everything from the ding ding the shops make when you walk in / out to the perfectly replicated noise of the pedestrian crossings is all here. My opening game highpoint was jumping up onto some rooftops and suddenly hearing a class of kids singing a song from off inside one of the buildings, complete with instruments. I just stood around for ten minutes soaking it all in.

The scene setting here is phenomenal, and the moment a downpour hits with those neon signs on either side of you (and passers-by covering their heads with their newspapers), there can be no doubt you're in Hong Kong. I even heard ringtones on phones that were blazing away when I was over there last. Or how about the way your guy nods his head while walking around in a club. Or how clubs will be empty save for the odd floor sweeper at morning time. Or how secluded spots may have a hobo sleeping rough if you venture there at night. Or how I winged a pedestrian in my car only to find passers by had whipped out their phones and started filming me. Or the time I escaped a car chase by popping a wheelie and driving over the top of an oncoming car which smashed into my pursuer.

Or. Or. Or.

I could go on, but it's better to discover a lot of this stuff for yourself.

The Gameworld

It isn't huge, divided up into four chunks that try to give a flavour of various zones of Hong Kong - this isn't a replica, because that would be crazy. However, it's a little bit of a let down to find that parts I was dying to see in the game were pretty much AWOL.

There is no Kowloon. There is, amazingly, no Tsim Sha Tsui. You won't find the famous waterfront with the Star Ferry, the walk of fame or Chungking Mansions.

These are all 100% iconic chunks of Hong Kong cinema and it's jarring to find them absent. There was also no MTR. As an additional method of transportation and also a place to have some dubious antics happening, it's a shame this wasn't included.

I also need to mention the crushing blow that was Victoria Peak. When I saw it was on the map, I was practically salivating at going up on the tram, maybe walking around up there at the top and basking in the view.

What you get, is a series of ugly high gates made up of bars with a little gated door to walk through. You go through about two of these, and find the view, the money shot, the show stopper is a poorly drawn skybox (hidden behind more bars!) that doesn't even appear to be fully finished down on the bottom right hand side. You can read a bunch of people similarly crushed here, along with a video that shows the peak minus the hideous railings - so much better.

At one point I heard the ding ding of the tram and got my hopes up, only to find it went chugging past inbetween the two sets of fences. So that was crappy.

Other than that, this is the closest virtual reproduction of Hong Kong that you'll see for quite some time. Even accounting for the (required) differences, you'll be running through a slice of street or driving past an area and think holy crap, I know that bit! It's a lot of fun.

The Characters

Special mention to the voicework and script here - the lead character, Wei Shen, is brilliantly acted and the majority of the supporting cast are very well done. You can even go on a date with Emma Stone, and Lucy Liu puts in an appearance at one point. I can't recall anybody major flubbing their lines, or anbody else for that matter. Even the random people on the street are well done (with one "invisible" exception - more on that later), and most of the places you live in usually have a few characters hanging around who have their own little stories acted out as the game goes on. Another nice touch.

The Story

You're an undercover cop looking to rise in the ranks of the Triads and take them down from the inside. What this means in practice is a story that picks up a lot of the main beats from the best HK action films around and makes them its own. The Big Brother / Little Brother dynamic is quite important in this one, and any number of memorable scenes set in hospitals and docks to cemetaries and tea houses are all in here. It covered most of the things I'd want to do myself from my HK action movie checklist, so I'm entirely satisfied with that.

It's tight, it's focused and it gets to the point. I found myself blitzing the main missions just because I couldn't wait to see what was going to happen to Wei next. Well played.

The Gameplay

Everything is tied into your character's skillset, from dating to finding in-game objects to selecting clothing to wear (which gives bonuses, but can only be worn if your "face" level is high enough).

The fighting is great fun, slamming a dude's head in a car door or a spinning fan never gets old and the bullet time triggered by leaping over an object while shooting is THE BEST THING EVER (tm). They also develop the "find an item" gimmick from open worlds, making you return them to a Dojo where you can (again) select moves to learn. Makes things a bit more interesting. There's also car racing, gambling, debt collection and a heap of random "help me please" missions along with various in-world happenings.

Rounding that off is a set of multi-tiered undercover cop missions that loosely skirt around the main story. Drug busts don't end well - after beating the goons and hacking CCTV, you're supposed to mark the dealer and have him arrested. What this means in practice is you wait for a shield to appear over a guy's head and press the button. Bit of a waste, guys.

The Music

Oh man, the music. I already mentioned it here, but there's a definite 70s vibe to a lot of the OST. I've come across so many musicians I wasn't familiar with. To name a few, Burn Out by Cinematic Orchestra, Emika, System by Terry Lynn, Art of Xen by Jay Price....amazing, amazing stuff.

The Bad Things

There's always some. Here's my list of "could have done better":

1) Camera issues. This tends to be a problem in open world games, but there's somethng....not quite.....right about the viewing angle when driving. It seems rather low, and a common solution seems to be holding up on the thumbstick a little to gain a better view of your surroundings.

2) YMMV on this, but the first selectable option is "new game", with "continue" below it. I'm willing to bet cash money that someone, somewhere accidentally did this at least once. I've no idea if that would wipe your saves or not.

3) When leaving a clothing shop, the immersion is suddenly broken by a terrible disembodied voice that for all the world sounds like someone in the Wu Tang clan yelling "TAKES GUTS TO WEAR THAT".

What the Hell?

4) Characters in the game world will just straight up vanish if you turn your back and walk away a little bit. This seems to mostly affect "story" characters, ranging from main missions to smaller favour jobs but it's annoying all the same.

5) Police. I like that the game is built with the notion that you're an undercover cop in mind; no GTA style rampage here, if you go gun crazy (assuming you can find one) or just start running people over your ass will be grass in no time at all. The problem is that the cops teleport in right behind you (and in some cases in front of you!) and start letting rip with a volley of handgun and shotgun fire.

If they're chasing you on foot, they'll never....ever....stop or grow tired or lose the scent. It doesn't seem to matter if you bust some parkour moves or not. The buggers are just...there, somehow. Car chases are much the same. Other open world games at least have the cops roll in around a corner or come in waves to give you the chance to escape; what's in the game here is silly, but it's another YMMV moment.

In Conclusion

I've put about 20 something hours into the game, and that's allowed me to complete the main storyline and a chunk of side content. I'm still only about 60 to 65% towards total game completion though, and it'd be interesting to play through again as an actual undercover cop instead of "oh well, nobody will miss the ten pedestrians I bundled into my car boot and drove off the pier when nobody was looking".

Despite being shunted from one publisher to another, this is absolutely a game you should play if you're even remotely interested in martial arts, Hong Kong and stabbing a dude with a fish while dressed up in the yellow Game of Death jumpsuit.

Seriously.

Into the Wind by Bei Bei: Well worth a purchase

Sleeping Dogs is a very good game indeed. The music is phenomenal, and a curious mix of jazz, classical and straight up Bruce Lee 70s vibes. You haven't lived until you've staked out a drugs bust with that tune playing in your car while sizing up the best way to take down 18 or so heavily armed goons down the nearest alleyway.

I wasn't familiar with the artist linked above, and did a little Googling. Sure enough, the album containing that track (and a bunch of others from the game) is available to buy for 69p in the UK, and (from the looks of it) $9.99 everywhere else.

It is fantastic. You know what to do...

Girlfriend Mode: Please, somebody take the shovel away

What's amazing about the latest videogame fiasco isn't so much the latest tipping point ("girlfriend mode", just in case she holds the controller upside-down HAHA) as fact that it keeps on happening over and over again in the first place.

Steps for success:

1) Say something anybody with ten seconds experience in talking publicly about stuff could tell you is a bad idea on the grounds of it being a) silly b) offensive to a decent slice of your paying audience and c) silly

2) Watch as it becomes the focal point of said article, exploding across the internet at a million screaming people an hour

3) Ensure the head guy says something that suggests he hadn't actually seen the article in question before weighing in

4) Dig that failtrain all the way down to Chinatown in a horrible, horrible example of "it's broke, so I did the exact opposite of fixing the shit out of it".

There is a time and a place to use the "...but, but..." defence, and this sure as Hell isn't it.

When you raise legitimate questions in the minds of people who potentially buy your stuff (or just wonder why person x said silly thing y), you don't repeatedly dismiss them as "sensationalists", especially when most of the objections I saw flying around were entirely reasonable. It's also probably a bad idea to retroactively throw in the term "boyfriend mode" after the lightning strikes, despite it never being called that and only focusing on females in the original context.

This is the president of the company, and everything he's tweeting in response to the fallout is only making things progressively worse, not better (no, it's not a good thing when you're the #1 trend on twitter if it's because lots of people think you did something silly). Add this to the original comments in the Eurogamer piece, and I'm once again reminded that - just like in the Mass Effect 3 pr meltdown extravaganza, this stuff wouldn't keep happening if game devs selected to be the mouthpieces of the industry were actually trained in the art of talking about things and stuff.

Like...where is the PR rep in the interview gently correcting the clearly soon to be disastrous direction the discussion has taken? Where is the formal prep talk before the interview takes place? If there had been one, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have been talking about girlfriend mode. Why do people in the games industry keep doing this? Even the "pro" industry talking heads like Cliffy B skirt dangerously close to the edge of the pit, and despite being mostly positive here it still comes across as somewhat.....hmmm.

Let's put it this way, when people are suggesting that a sane solution is for the supposed-to-be-impartial gaming press to advise the people they are interviewing that their words are poorly chosen, something has gone horribly wrong. The gaming press should do their level best to not be doing something like that at all times.

I mean...look at this. Here's the Eurogamer news editor having to ward off claims of "sensationalism" and all the rest of it, in admirable fashion I might add. On the other hand, I guess there's no danger of Eurogamer handing out free pr tips anytime soon.

So far, there's been a reasonably sensible post on Kotaku about this and not much else. However, given how these things tend to go down I'd almost be willing to bet cash money that this thing just gets worse when the inevitable "No, people are wrong because..." articles appear on gaming sites starting from tomorrow.

My advice? Take the lumps, apologise, give up and move on. Anything else will result in generous helpings of failure and pretty sweet jokes.

Max Payne 3: Trust us now, it's time to let you go

If you told me I'd be doing nothing but grumbling about a new Max Payne game, I'm not sure I would have believed you. However, here it is and here we are. If you don't want to read this long dissection, then you can summarise a lot of the frustrations by clicking this link.

If you're still with me, then here comes a rather long, somewhat spoilerish ramble. I also spoil the ending to Splinter Cell Conviction, but I don't think anybody will care about that. I should also add that the soundtrack for this game is fantastic, and well worth buying.

Where is Max and what have you done to his bullet time?

Anyone familiar with the early games knows Max is not a guy to screw around with - a quick tap of the button and he dips into bullet time which is typically the most efficient way to take out a room full of goons waving uzis. Max Payne 2 deepened and enhanced bullet time by making Max plunge into a more bullet timey state of mind the longer you blasted bad guys, culminating in that sweet 360 degree spinaround cam when reloading.

All in all, bullet time lasted quite a while. Yet I can't help but think Rockstar seemed to view bullet time, the key mechanic of a Max Payne game, as a hideous instant win button and nerfed it completely. As a result, Max is in bullet time very, very briefly compared to the other two games (to say nothing of how long he takes to go into his shootdodge jump, being shot to pieces while VERY SLOWLY PREPPING HIS LEAP). Worse, the meter seems to refill quickly if you go into cover (!) or if you kill a dude. What this means in practice is lots of hiding behind walls while AI flank into positions you can't recover from but more on that later.

Let's put it this way, something has gone very wrong when Max Payne, MAX PAYNE, king of bullet time spends less time in that mode of action than random characters in other games that aren't Max Payne. And yet...bullet time, even the copious amounts of it in MP2, doesn't come close to an instant win. Skillful use of the more open, non-linear environments (no need to jump in this game, because you're mostly running around on a flat surface unlike the heady heights scaled throughout MP2) combined with a wonderful reload ability are the way you get through a level. Simply running around in bullet time will get you whacked.

Even the slo-mo reload animation is functional and not simply a graphical gimmick, because it gives you the breathing room to keep track of where all the goons are while the camera spins. Yes, a spinning camera becomes a tactical gameplay mechanic. How cool is that?

I was extremely excited to see how bullet time developed from 2 to 3. The answer is, "it got downgraded and if you press a button you run around slowly for a bit".

Of course, you have all the bullet time you can eat but only when the script demands it - see the plunge through the window of the nightclub or the ride on the trolley in the police station for proof of that. Otherwise, Max is spectacularly unspectacular.

This is not a good thing, especially as the ever present targeting dot from the first two games only appears when you aim, leading to precious seconds of bullet time wasted as you continually correct yourself.

I hope you like three hours of unskippable cutscenes

Oh God, the cutscenes. If you want to play through this game on the higher difficulties and maybe try some of the other modes out, think about this - no fewer than nine hours of your life have sailed by while a fairly mediocre (and occasionally nonsensical) story play out on the screen with no way to get rid of it. The old games let you whizz through the comic panels, and let you stay in control of Max while the rest of the story progressed. Here, you'll come to dread that most terrifying of enemies - your walk slowing to a grind as you wander up to a door, triggering Max doing something like going through the door, looking at the door, rambling to himself by a door, walking to somewhere, hiding behind something, so on and so forth.

The art director must have had a thing for Kane & Lynch too, because the shaky cam and streaky effects presumably there to indicate drunkeness and withdrawl symptoms are MIND BOGGLINGLY ANNOYING and do not help when bolted onto three hours of waffle.

Why can't I shootdodge through the door? Why can't I open it myself? Why can't I get into cover myself? Why couldn't half of this stuff left me in control of Max? Why is it frequently used as a crutch to manoeuvre Max into stupid situations the player wouldn't have put him in?

Frustration Galore

I've killed my fair share of dudes in games. Specifically, I've killed my fair share of goons in Max Payne games. This one doesn't know whether it wants to be a cover shooter, or Max Payne. It sends out mixed messages and the gamer is punished for it. People will tell you you're playing it wrong; "Oh, you're not supposed to play it while hiding in cover", even though the mechanic is all-pervasive and comes with an endless stream of waist high cover. More often than not, playing as Max Payne and attempting to use bullet time will get you killed in seconds.

Poor scripting, baffling design choices and cutscene incompetence all compound this and leave you reeling. Here's some of my low points. I'm not sure if they're in order, but you'll get the idea. A couple of these, I could have handled. But the below isn't even the full laundry list of issues and there's only so much you can take before suspecting the game dev is going out of their way to punish you for not playing the game their way. I'm just not sure who would want to play it like this:

* Alarm bells start ringing once the stadium level begins and you're swarmed by goons in overtly CoD military gear. And they start throwing grenades. And you can't throw anything back (Max must have lost the use of his throwing arm since MP2). I hope the game doesn't take me into a jungle setting fighting paramilitary CoD-lite goons with gunboats and rocket laun.....crap.

* Ammo collection is erratic and makes little sense. Often I'll be low on ammo but instead of picking up the bullets on the ground in the form of "matching gun x", I have to drop the gun I have with the 3 bullets in favour of the new one. This doesn't happen all the time, why does it happen at all?

* After every cutscene, the game auto defaults back to a single handgun - even if I have no ammo in it. Oh look, I'm now dead. Thanks for that. This also happens in multiplayer, even if I'm carrying dual handguns handing an instant advantage to anyone with a two handed machine gun. 

* Gun pickups are also illogical. If I'm running around with a uzi and a handgun and the handgun only has (say) 6 bullets but the uzi is full, trying to pick up a replacement weapon often results in Max DROPPING THE FULLY LOADED GUN IN FAVOUR OF ANOTHER HANDGUN WITH LESS AMMO. Now I have less bullets than when I started out and I'm still packing the nearly empty pistol. Oh look, I'm dead again. Thanks for that.

* You quickly realise that Passos is perhaps the worst AI companion of all time. I think in the entire game, he's scripted to kill maybe 3 guys and you can take those guys out yourself if you're quick enough. Otherwise, his game plan is to shoot like a stormtrooper while whining at you endlessly. Who thought that was a good idea? Worse, the game rewards you at being awesome by punishing you with instadeath. The level where you have to storm a sort of military museum and you're pinned down by about ten dudes shooting right at you?

If you manage to get to the entrance before everyone up top is dead, running inside to creep up and kill the goons won't work because you're treated to a cutscene of Passos running out and dying horribly. Remember when Mona Sax killed a bunch of dudes in the MP2 funhouse? Yeah, that worked fine guys.

* Some cutscenes lead to total stupidity, in the form of the game handing you back control as Max runs towards a group of enemies WITH NO COVER. The inside of the boat on the Panama level is a perfect example of this presumed attempt at "excitingly cinematic". Similarly, the level on the roof of the collapsing hotel - you fight your way through an incredibly annoying set of goons as the building crumbles around you, reach the end and can only trigger a cutscene by running out of cover.

Surprise, you get a cutscene of a fully body armoured bad guy waving a chaingun from a roof above you, and control is handed back with Max standing IN FRONT OF THE COVER, and defaulted to a handgun. Which, in my case, had no bullets in it.

* Your guns are endlessly taken away from you, often with no reason behind it. When you first emerge onto the upper portion of the hotel, you've planted a bunch of C4, killed everybody and stocked up your guns and ammo in an armoury. You clamber up a ladder, and...the next section starts and you're back with the silenced pistol from the start of the level and a machine gun nearby with about 8 bullets in it. Words cannot express how infuriating this is.

* The last stand mechanic is broken when combined with a slow, ungraceful Max. Going down on the floor often means you kill the dude who shot you, get up incredibly slowly (while taking damage), fall over again, kill the dude who shot you, get up incredibly slowly (while taking damage), fall over again and die. This renders the feature all but meaningless on hard or above.

* More of a storytelling thing, but in the brothel we see various couples having sex in a rapid-fire cutscene. All of the women are naked; the men are of course either fully clothed or wearing boxer shorts, because heaven forbid we see a penis, an actual penis, in a videogame. Right bro?

* Laser sighted guns. Late in the game, you're given a reduced selection of weaponry and the bulk of it ends up being these laser sighted guns. These weapons may have the worst wobbly useless aim in the history of gaming. The moment you aim, the sight vanishes and when it's actually onscreen, it jerks all over the place. This isn't what you need when taking on those police station rooms full of SWAT officers. Protip: switch the sight off with the back button on the xbox controller, I'm assuming you can do this on other platforms.

* Almost everything Max does is stupid. Even after he decides to "confront his demons" by, uh, shaving his hair off and wandering into the favela the very first thing he does is listen to a small child and walk down a SUSPICIOUS LOOKING ALLEYWAY. Cue ambush. I know Max is supposed to be at a low ebb here, but I was practically screaming at the TFT by this point. Similarly, the build up to the favela rescue of the sisters was built up heavily, and when the inevitable cutscene kicked in I was ready to see Max burst in through the window and slow-mo shoot those assholes in the face.

What actually happened, was that Max walks through the door, yells a bit then hands over his guns and someone dies. Let's not even get started on his "those poor, poverty stricken people" observations on sighting the favela before walking in and turning it into an orphan holocaust. Or the insanity of Max blaming himself for not being able to stop an entire military outfit from burning his employer's building to the ground when everyone else in Brazil seemingly had the smarts to hire an entire military outfit. Max is at fault because is boss is too stupid to realise that two guys aren't enough? Okay.

Random questions: what happened to the handcuffs Max was wearing in the police station? Why does the cop appear in the sex club Max walks into, making sure he vanishes via the magic of cutscene before the shooting starts? Why does Max call himself fat when he looks like a big guy with muscles? I have lots more of these. I'm going to stop now.

* You get an achievement for not shooting [a guy] at the end. Why? I have no idea. Is this some sort of redemption for Max? Probably not, because he then goes on to kill a ton of other dudes. Plus [this guy] was a massive asshole, why wouldn't you kill him? All the while, a rambling dialogue plays in the background while Max talks about him becoming the thing they wanted him to be. It's all very serious until you realise the next section is firing infinite rockets at jeeps and an aeroplane.

* When it wants to, the game straight up cheats and breaks the established rules of the game to further the direction of the story. I have issues with games that resort to breaking your skillset because that's all they have left to throw at you. Splinter Cell: Conviction, pushing you into a final level where narrow corridors and indestructible light sources take away any of the stealth powers you thought you had while turning it into a straight up gun battle, is particularly guilty of this (and don't get me started on the final cutscene, where - spoiler alert - Fisher decides to rescue his friend by exploding what sounds like half the building and shooting everyone in sight with non silenced weapons).

Wait, where was I? Oh yeah, rule breaking. In the church shoot out, Passos tells you a guy on the balcony above needs to be killed. Try as you might, the game wants you to go upstairs to kill him so a bunch of goons can appear downstairs where you were originally. Dip into bullet time - doesn't matter, his asshole whack-a-mole head will slide down faster than you can pop him. The moment the reticule goes near, down he goes into hiding.

After this, you're left wondering how many other times the game will arbitrarily decide to break your bullet time and Max seems even weaker than before, because now he's not only dealing with strange controls and gun mechanics (hey, why don't you do an awkward roll which puts you out of cover when picking up a gun, instead of just picking it up), he's also dealing with the heavy hand of scriptwriters who decide when your powers work and when they don't.

* The game constantly feels like it's making shout outs to levels from earlier Max Payne games, yet the newer versions aren't as good or as interesting. The sniper mission in MP2? Navigating Mona across the construction site, while getting into different positions, taking down the goons and sniping the waves of bad guys chasing Max. Here? You're in a fixed position, don't do anything other than shoot 2 or 3 slowly moving guys at a time and Passos even tells you the exact location of each gunman.

The escape from the apartments in MP2? Multi tiered building, some simple puzzles, a little bit of platforming, collapsing fire escapes, that AMAZING cavalcade of goons on the rotating staircase which becomes a flying body frenzy in bullet time. Here? You creep past windows of goons with laser snipers, the building explodes a bit and you run off to the rooftops. It's better than the Brazil levels, but it isn't a patch on the original incarnation which had more meat to it.

The police station in MP2? It's great, you can walk around and listen to calls, annoy the guys watching the TV, observe a line-up, wander down to the cells, flesh out the story. Here? Your cuffs magically vanish after being taken in so you can shoot the place up. And that's pretty much it.

Did you ever hear a guy in the toilet? You can jump up and see him reading a paper. It's that attention to detail that generates new discoveries, even now.

Finally, for sheer inventiveness nothing on offer here tops the escape from the hospital mission in MP2 where Max has to arm himself before the lone gunman, formerly less than nothing on the "severe threat index" becomes the single biggest problem he's ever faced due to not having any weapons. What use is bullet time when you have no bullets?

"I'm coming for you!" and that single crack of thunder. Brilliant, panic inducing terror. Compare to the panic on offer here which usually comes from the game auto selecting a handgun with no bullets while standing out in the open. This level also wisely rewards the player with a stairwell escape packed with an endless supply of mooks to mow down. You haven't lived until dipping into bullet time, slow-mo blasting your way through and coming out of it right at the bottom.

Or how about chasing Gognitti in MP1? Come to think of it, where are the goons with actual personality talking about things before you crash their numerous parties? The bad guys here are just pincushions to be filled with lead, non-speaking, non-interesting, non-anything bad guys that will pipe up in a cutscene if you're lucky.

* Where is the weirdness of the storytelling? The same game that used to reference Norse mythology is just a straight shooter with Max swearing all the time. The storytelling device using the televisions has gone straight too, replacing the handful of shows that not only told their own story but reflected aspects of Max and his journey with "blah blah here's a news broadcast".

It's like playing Alan Wake feels more like playing Max Payne than Max Payne 3. This is a strange sensation to have.

MAXIMUM REDEMPTION

Well, sort of. Did you roll your eyes in amazement when you saw that the increased difficulty levels reduce your bullet time? Because the thing we really want in a hard Max Payne game is reduced bullet time and more bad cover shooting!

Roll no further, because should you manage to complete the game on Hard - and I did, while mashing my face into a desk - a glorious sunrise will appear, in the form of Old School Mode. I'm not sure why this wasn't the default mode or at least available from the start, but it's a mode that keeps difficulty high while removing the broken last man standing mode, upping the pills (as far as I can tell) and increasing the bullet time / meter refill.

You know, so you're actually playing the game like Pax Payne.

Ultimately, it's the developer's biggest mistake that this wasn't the default setting, because the extra boost in bullet time just about cancels out the majority of the design flaws that cause so many BUT THAT'S NOT EVEN FAIR BECAUSE moments.

It's still a challenge, but the game suddenly feels like it's playing fair and Max is on an equal footing with the dozen or so heavily armed and heavily armoured goons flooding into each location.

Max Payne 3's greatest tragedy is that a good chunk of people who played it will never actually unlock this mode. I reckon the reviews and general feedback would have been much better. Instead of setting out a million words above raging about the design decisions that broke my brain, this entire review would (for the most part) say "Yeah, that Max Payne 3 was a blast and you should pick it up".

Instead, I'm saying "If you can deal with the crazy difficulty spikes, frustrating design and endless blah blah cutscenes twice over in an effort to unlock Old School then you'll probably want to buy it".

I was hoping I'd have a ringing endorsement; instead, it's a cautious thumbs off that occasionally gets torn off in a doorframe to make myself feel better.

Binary Domain: Rhymes with "Buy This Game".

I just finished a game that had been sitting on my "to do" pile for months and months. That game is Binary Domain, and I was horrified to discover that it only sold 20,000 copies at launch. The videogames industry is bad and you should feel bad.

The last time I came away from a game feeling this pumped (mixed in with absolutely nail biting moments of OH MY GOD THEY'RE DEAD THEY'RE ALL DEAD NO WAIT THEY'RE ALIVE YAY) was the finale of Mass Effect 2. Everything you do here can get your team killed, and I'm still not sure if it's possible to save everyone / get the whole team horribly murdered.

That alone is replayability you can take to the bank, especially as my first runthrough chalked up a considerable list of casualties. I got the end I wanted for my character, but I have a feeling I could have done so much better for the team which becomes a primary concern as the game winds to a close. I mean, nobody is a Mordin or a Zaeed but you won't want to see anybody get smeared across a wall.

Despite looking like a fairly generic shooter, it mixes a fairly intelligent plot concerning transhumanism bereft of the "I'm so smart and angsty, look at me" trappings of Deus Ex (doing a better job of it into the bargain) and mashes it up with the Suicide Mission of Mass Effect 2, stretching it out over the entirety of an eight or so hour long campaign.

The bare bones of it are that you lead a team against an endless army of increasingly large robots, managing your team mates, their abilities and their loyalty levels. Everything from your (frequent) interaction with them on the battlefield to how your orders pan out (and associated daredevil antics) will decide how the game challenges you, how the team operates and even who lives or dies. Levels are varied, the numerous setpieces veer between spectacle and odd bouts of timer countdown tension and a couple of excellent vehicle levels break things up nicely.

Typically you have a squad of three or four with you, occasionally walking into absolute fragfests where your entire team goes up against what seems like every robot on Earth at the same time. The QTEs are well done and the plot seems to delight in throwing curveballs at you - there were a number of occasions where I sat rolling my eyes at the direction the story was telegraphing, only to be pleasantly surprised when it pulled the rug out from under me.

One particular character's trust level seemed to take what was going to be a rather frustrating cliche - that I couldn't even physically influence as it took place in a cutscene - and turned it on its head. One of many "fuck yeah" punch the air moments. Binary Domain has a few scenes like that, and beyond shooting things in the face (while arguing with your antagonists at the same time) you really don't know which direction the story will go in towards the end.

It sometimes felt like playing Vanquish from the perspective of a team of regular grunts, instead of Dude Mc Awesome in his robocyber ninja suit - especially when fighting the (often massive) enemy bosses, who'd certainly give some of the cyborgs from that title a run for their money. I never felt threatened by the enemies in that game - here, you're powered down appropriately and the team is absolutely crucial to evening the odds. That may not be for everyone, but I loved the Hell out of it.

Unfortunately, this game had no fanfare, no marketing and (from what I can gather) came out at the same time as Mass Effect 3 which is a great way to launch your ship and set it on fire at the same time. It's entirely possible there won't be a sequel, which is a horrible, horrible shame and it takes pride of place on my shelf alongside Alpha Protocol as "things that should have another go but probably won't get one". And this is a hell of a lot more polished / fun than AP. If you were hoping for some sort of Suicide Mission 2.0 in Mass Effect 3 and were given three month's worth of PTSD as a result of what you ended up with, you could happily wash away some of that nasty aftertaste with what's as close to the next best thing as makes no difference.

If you wanted your suicide run a little longer and decked out with a bigger team onscreen, there's absolutely no excuse to delay buying this game any further. It's big, it's colourful, it carries a nice line in humour, the characters aren't douchebags and the tension of endlessly making decisions / looking after your squad as they walk into their worst day ever is pretty much through the roof near the end of the game. If I can somehow work out how to juggle the team throughout the six chapters in a way that gives everybody enough trust / loyalty to survive the finale, you can bet there'll be a few more rounds of punching the air in celebration.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have robots to slaughter in a manner befitting a group of big goddamn' heroes.

Arkham City: What went wrong?

[Note: I'm surprised to find that this semi-rambling commentary on my not so good experiences with Arkham City got lost in the Posterous edit pile. I'd forgotten how much this game annoyed me, so better late than never. Looking back, I think my initial "what are you even doing" response to this game still rings true for me.]

Arkham City is one of the most user unfriendly packages I've ever seen in years of gaming. I'm more than a little surprised given how good the first game was.

Peeling open the tin reveals...uh....some flyers with DLC codes and a promo leaflet for another game. Where are the instructions? Oh well, the game must tell me everything I need to know.

Confusingly, the game begins with Catwoman. There are a few basic fight prompts, but no indication of how to do takedowns, keep bad guys down permanently (come on, I don't remember given I played the first game an age ago) or anything else. When you switch to Batman, you realise that no - the game dumps you on a rooftop and it is not actually going to tell you the first thing about what you have to do, how to play, how to fight, how to keep the bad guys down, how the new gadgets work, how the old gadgets work, situational context for using said gadgets and etc.

This is the first time in a long time I've been pretty baffled by a big release. Worse, I started on Hard so about fifty pastings later I thought I saw a menu telling me I could change the difficulty at any time. Either I imagined it or the menu was wrong, because all I could do was start again on Normal.

This is not going well.

I decide to take a break from my opening game fiasco and redeem the other DLC code - a "store exclusive" piece of content called the Joker Carnival. So of course, I type in the code on the dashboard and am told the "Code has already been redeemed".

What.

If you're going to butcher one of the hottest sequels to one of the hottest games in recent years by chopping up single player content into DLC, you better hope the damn things work. As it turns out, there's four pages worth of complaints about my issue on the official forums and forty plus on other DLC problems. Nobody is helping or assisting those with problems as far as I can see.

Well, no problem - I'll contact Rocksteady technical support. Except - the game didn't come with instructions, but their website says to contact technical support via the method listed in the game package.

So hey, this is going well.

I ended up sending two emails asking who to contact about the problem to their info@ address - of course, I didn't get a reply because I was asking about a problem instead of sending them a drooling missive or asking where I could buy something.

I also pinged their Twitter feed, but it's too busy promoting 10/10 review scores and launch parties.

In the middle of all of that, I discovered a rather long thread wondering where the instructions were due to people not actually knowing what the controls were, how to do Riddler challenges and everything else I already mentioned.

It seems Rocksteady didn't know where their instructions were either, because the only way I was able to find them was via a random forum post saying "here they are" posted a few days ago. Hilariously - or not - there are apparently errors in some of the commands listed too.

Am I the only one that thinks this is at least a little bit unacceptable? Exclusive content that doesn't work, DLC code issues galore, missing instruction manuals and a lack of any kind of tech support to assist with those problems?

 But of course, who cares because the box has a 10/10 sticker on it and best game ever so run out and grab it, kids. I don't think I saw a single review for this game mention there are no instructions. How is that possible? Surely not everybody was issued some strange instructionless review copy?

Wow, I haven't even got to the game yet. Well okay: the raging "best game ever" style 11/10 reviews all seem horribly over the top. The intricate focus and stealth / planning aspect of the first game have been replaced by a city that is effectively dead and contains no content, unless your definition of content is "beat up the same bunch of guys over and over again as you go from location A to location B".

Because you're in a "prison city", there are no random pedestrians to rescue (unless you count the "political prisoners"), and absolutely nobody in the entire city besides goons to beat up.

That's it, that's the entire city content. I was hoping for a lot of deep city based interaction, but all it is is a dead zone populated by goons that you'll quickly get tired of flying over while trudging from A to B each time you decide to do a main story mission. Oh, you can perform some OCD style collect em up nonsense if you want (pop 10 balloons, shoot 15 security cameras, smash six penguins or whatever) - but I can only imagine the sort of skull cracking boredom you'd have to be suffering from to want to actively do that.

The actual story missions? Yeah, those are good. I have a horrible feeling the "city" aspect of the game is going to severely reduce the amount of main mission content and it's going to feel quite short by the time I'm done. There's also strange moments where the game arbitrarily decides things for you - early on, I was finding locked security consoles that I couldn't hack because I needed to download "Municipal access codes" or something. Okay, fine - I guess I have to go look for those codes. But later in the game during a main story mission, I'm trapped in a room, need to hack a console and Batman says "I need to download Municipal access codes" and then just goes and does it. Hello, immersion breaker.

Let's put it this way, it isn't a good sign that I'm enjoying the Predator room challenges more than the main game.

There's balls, there's big balls and there's BioBalls

You have to hand it to a marketing department that can come up with something like this. One of the ballsiest marketing ploys I've ever seen...this is how you make monocles pop out and launch themselves into orbit.