Legendary Review (Xbox 360)

Sorry for not posting for awhile. I've been busy with the personal life, but here I am back with another review. Expect another post this week whether it is a review or something special because I feel I need to make it up to you all. Anyways, here is my review of a game called Legendary. I hope you all enjoy it, even though I went on more of a rant than just being a proper critic. As I've stated before, I want to test all different ways of writing a review before settling on one specific way. Well, as always, thank you for reading!

Legendary Review

I hope your spring break went well because it isn’t too good on my side since I just finished a game on the Xbox 360 that goes by the name of Legendary. It was developed by Spark Unlimited; never heard of them before. The reason why? They apparently have only made two other console games consisting of Call of Duty: Finest Hour and Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. This explains why Legendary feels like a pigeon dumpling to my face.

“Wait a minute Mr. Geek, you can’t say the game sucks just because the company hasn’t released a solid amount of games,” says the random child that will force an explanation out of me.

You are right, little confused child. I can’t say that, but I can say it for the reason that I’ve wasted six to eight hours of my existence playing this game when I would have had a better time trying to figure how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop.

So where to start this review? Oh, I know! The story (or lack of)! Plain and simple, Pandora’s Box is found and then opened releasing creatures into the world that destroy everything and guess who has to save the day? You! You play Charles Deckard, the mute idiot who claims to be a professional thief, but apparently he can’t even get his keypad decoder to work and ends up opening the box. Now, why did he open the Pandora’s Box you ask? Deckard was hired by Lefey, leader of the Black Order. We all should know anyone who runs an organization with a name like the Black Order is bound to have all sorts of evil in him. This soon turns out to be true as Lefey wanted the artifact to rule the world. He has his blonde, sub-par attractive employee, Vivian, to help you with the job. Once Deckard and Vivian find out what Lefey is up to, they try to stop him along with the help of the Council, a military group that works against the Black Order. And that’s it. There is nothing else in this weak narrative. It is good versus evil and we all know what happens. There is a twist—one falling under the category of lame—at the end but I will not ruin it for you. If you really desire to know what happens, check it out on Youtube. I’m pretty sure it’s up there somewhere and you will be saving around seven hours of your life for something worth doing.

There is a little something I omitted from my cliff notes version of the story I stated, and that is Deckard’s left hand. Other than him keeping silent for the whole game Pandora’s Box imprinted his hand (a.k.a. impaling it) with…wait for it… power! The Council labels his left hand the Signet and feels it is a necessity in closing the box and stopping Lefey. This feature would be cool if the damn thing had more than two different uses! With your impaled limb you can absorb the fairy dust left behind by the creatures’ corpses. This is called Animus. As you vacuum the fairy droppings, all of it is stored into the Animus tank displayed by the sphere in the bottom left corner of the screen. With Animus you can use the Signet to heal yourself or send out a shockwave of energy. And there you have it. You use the Signet to power up some machines but who cares about that? What’s the point of giving us some light up masturbation hand if we are not given any other powers for it? Talk about being ripped off. It would have been neat to have the ability to control some enemies, or freeze them where they stand. But alas, Legendary does not grant the player to do so.

The first person shooter (FPS) side of the game isn’t that great either. First off, Deckard has to be the whitest man alive because he can not even jump two feet in the air. Some professional thief he is. Controls for the most part are ok. All your basic FPS elements are there: crouch, reload, aim, shoot, and grenade toss. The problems are with the weapons. There are actually a total of only eleven weapons in the game which include Molotov cocktails and grenades. This would be decent if the nine weapons were somewhat memorable, but they are not. They are just present day guns that are in almost every other FPS. You are allowed to carry two heavy weapons, one small arms weapon and your axe. The problem is that most of the guns will pose no threat to the enemies charging at you. These enemies will soak up entire magazines! Later on in the game this is not too much of a problem since some stronger artillery is given but for most of the game I found myself using my axe more than my assault rifle and pistol. When playing a first person “shooter” does it really make sense to use an axe more than guns? No, it doesn’t.

That was only a fraction of how frustrating combat is. I know I said earlier you get the help of the military organization, the Council, but they are no help at all. It’s not entirely the A.I.’s fault—although that is terrible in and of itself as most teammates will blatantly run into an enemy’s kill zone—as it is more the fact that everyone dies. If you have some troops following you (or if you have anyone in proximity of you), they are most likely going to die in some scripted. For most of the time you, and only you, will have to take out every living thing in the vicinity. Combat also becomes really monotonous as you end up feeling like you are fighting the same enemies over and over. This takes out any enjoyment because you do not feel like you are doing much for the world after you destroyed your five hundred seventy-sixth werewolf. There are times when you fight human enemies, courtesy of the Black Order, yet it is obvious the soldiers are rehashes of the same character design. This is the same for the members in the Council. If you take a second to look, every soldier is only a variant from the same three models. The same goes for the creatures that have emerged from Pandora’s Box. As great as Griffiths and werewolves are there is not a multitude of beasts to fight against. It is saddening that they had such few creatures in the game when the source material has countless.

Another frustrating element is how often enemies will attack from all angles. Soldiers and monsters will constantly charge your front and rear to try and cut Deckard’s life short and this sometimes includes the room you had just cleared. This situation increases largely when the Black Order can get the creatures to fight on their side later on in the game. But that only proves this one statement: Enemies are very obnoxious in this game.

The Black Order soldiers are not what drove me crazy because a headshot, for the most part, will put them down. It is the creatures who escaped form the box that will drive you into the mouth of madness for one reason and one reason only: respawn. That’s right. These creatures will respawn over and over again until you either leave the area or find someway to shut down where they are coming from. This can really get under your skin when you are working on one of the games few puzzles while a surprise fireball hits you from behind every couple of moments. And if this game succeeded at anything it would be creating some annoying enemies. The worst enemies are these little fairies called Nari. When they are in pixie mode they are invulnerable. You can only kill them if when they transform into their half lizard, half little boy mode. This forces you to wait as they fly in circles around you only becoming vulnerable the moment they attack. Adding to the Nari are the werewolves. They are not as annoying as the Nari but they make no sense. The game tells you that a werewolf isn’t permanently killed until it is decapitated. If this is not done the werewolf will regenerate in a short period. This is where a paradox occurs because if you do end the beast’s life another werewolf will respawn in a couple moments. There soon becomes no point in killing the werewolves because either way they will return to torment the player some more.

I tried to see if online could redeem this title at all but that, not surprisingly, did not go over well. My entire experience with online only added to the theory that this feature was rushed into the package. I played on the Xbox 360 and to my sad, sad surprise; there was only one online mode. There is no deathmatch, team deathmatch, or capture the flag. This is surprising because these three modes appear in almost every online shooter. What you have to do is kill werewolves with your teammates and fill up your Animus Tank—an actual machine that holds Animus—before the other team while stopping them from doing the same. Many players will lose interest after the first round (if there is even anyone still playing this game).

I would like to say the music in the game will make your ears bleed but I can’t because there is hardly any music. Throughout the game, out of the six times I heard music playing it was the same tune three times. When the songs did play it was only for about thirty seconds at a time. The soundtrack does nothing for you so I suggest you play some music from your hard drive. The rest of the sound in this game consists of up and downs. The creatures sound pretty good with their roaring and hissing and crawling, but the guns sound weak adding to their uselessness (with exception for the rocket launcher although a little more boom would have been nice). The graphics did not help the feel of the game either. They seem unpolished and uninspired. They are passable for a next-gen game but I would expect more coming from the Unreal Engine. Environments are boring, minus the opening scene of New York getting destroyed by Griffiths. Both the character and (most of) the creature designs are awful; one example being the Fire Drakes which happen to be bland stone textures on fire. As much work as the graphics needed I would have rather Spark Unlimited work on gameplay to make the experience somewhat enjoyable.

However, after all of this the game reaches its biggest flaw: it’s boring. I never got into the story or cared about any of the characters and the creatures do not awe players in any way, shape or form. The game did nothing to stand out. Not even halfway into the game I realized Legendary, like many other FPS games in the market, will be long forgotten. The game is also really easy and most hardcore gamers shouldn’t have a problem plowing through this. There is a hint at the end of the game of an impending sequel but I doubt that we will never see that arise due to this game’s flaws nor will many even care. I do not recommend this game in the slightest. If you really need to try this, rent it. But, I’m warning everyone! Let your curiosity go and learn from Pandora’s mistake by leaving this unopened.

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood Review (Xbox 360)

Here it is! The review of the week: "Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood" in honor of last week's announcement of the new sequel in the franchise. Read it, love it, talk about it and as always, thank you for reading!

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood Review

If there are two things I love, it's westerns and video games and when they come together like white t-shirts and water I’m as excited as kid who just got his first happy meal. That’s why I was so excited when I got my hands on Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood developed by Techland. To give you some history, this game is actually a prequel to Call of Juarez which was released in 2006 on the PC and Xbox 360.

Developed by the same company the game was a decent first person shooter (FPS) but had some elements that ruined the fun. The game had a great story along with having players control two characters by the name of Reverend Ray, a gun-toting, bible quoting priest and Billy Candle, a whiny teenager that has to hide and sneak around for most of the game. After the death of his father and mother Billy is on the run the law that suspects him of killing his parents. When Reverend Ray hears this he grabs his bible and six shooters to bless and kill everything in sight as he hunts down Billy. Players were switched between characters getting two sides of the story and enduring different styles of gameplay. Ray is a strong character running into the fray blasting left and right while Billy was weaker but faster and focused more on stealth. Some players didn’t like this switch because the stealth element felt incomplete but I liked the change. The other faults were that everyone walked like robots, the shooting mechanics weren’t perfect and some graphical problems hindered the game. All in all, even with the online multiplayer, the game didn’t have lasting appeal.

Well, the developers at Techland saddled back up to fix these problems with a prequel. Released for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, this game planned on taking everything great from the first along with some new elements to give us players a better experience. And by golly they did! The game is a major step up from the original and enhances our understanding of the great story this series has. Sure, there are some things that could’ve been worked out a little better but we’ll get into more detail very soon so keep your trousers on straight and your gun hand ready as we ride through this western tale.

The story of Bound in Blood goes a little something like this. Brothers Ray and Thomas McCall begin their journey by fighting in the Civil War… on the Confederate side. And yes, that’s the same Ray from the first game but he isn’t the cuddly bringer of heaven’s wrath and fury upon the world, priest/gunfighter we know and love from the first one. No, in this one he is a shoot first; ask later, trouble starting, horny man. But he is still is awesome. Suddenly realizing their home will be overrun by the Yanks, they leave their post to protect their family. This in turn causes their commanding officer, Colonel Barnsby, to vow revenge against such deserters. Ray and Thomas succeed by saving their younger brother William, a priest, but their mother had already passed away. Shedding a quick tear the McCall brothers go on the run getting into fights and killing a lot of people. They plan to return and rebuild their home once they have to money to do so. This in turn leads them to hunt for the treasure of Juarez; a treasure that is said to be cursed and bring torment and suffering to any who search for it. Not caring about that they head down to Mexico to begin their treasure hunt. Now, the one thing Ray and Thomas fight about more than actual gunfighters is women. Ray and Thomas have obviously never heard of bros before hoes because they threaten to kill each other over a woman. So, when they meet Juarez and his lovely girl, Marisa, all hell breaks loose. First, Ray wants the girl then she tricks him and falls for Thomas, it’s a whole mess that you need to play the game to find out how it unravels. Of course this is all going on while Colonel Barnsby is playing man hunt with the brothers because he wants to use the treasure to restore the Confederacy. Throughout the game, William will whine and complain to them about righteous ways and sin. I don’t mind him spreading his religious outlook on them because religion is a heavy aspect in both this one and the original, I just wish his voice wasn’t so damn annoying! It’s like shoving a crow’s beak into my ear and letting it sound off as loud as it can every three minutes. But he kind of warmed up to me since he manned up a bit toward the end of the game. I won’t say anymore because I don’t want to spoil anything for you all but don’t think that the story is complicated or confusing. It’s actually a really well thought story that I can’t really explain without spoiling it so trust me when I say the story is interesting.

In Bound in Blood you have the ability to play two characters but not like the first game which automatically switched you back and forth. In this one you are allowed to choose who you wish to play as at the start of each level. Unlike the first game, the stealth element has basically been completely removed (except for the part where you can shank people silently in a corn field). Ray is still the crazy, run in and stuff your face with lead gunfighter he was in the first game, only he doesn’t have his bible this time. That made me tear a bit but I fought through it. Thomas is the more agile, whip using, long ranger gunner. This is a great idea as the game allows the player to choose whatever play style suits them in order to complete the game. Now through almost every level except one, the brothers are together. They help each other climb ledges, flank enemies and work cooperatively. The sad thing is that there is no co-op. This game seems like it was built for that aspect with the fact that two brothers work together throughout the game. It’s too bad really. This game could have received major kudos for some co-op play.

Bound in Blood is a level based game. Once you complete a level you see a cutscene and shift to the next one. But there are some free roaming sections to the game where you can take up side missions if one so chooses. This is great but I feel we were taunted with what we could have had: a complete, free roaming, FPS western game. Oh, Techland, you tease. The gameplay is basic FPS style gameplay. What’s different about this game is that there are no heavy machine guns (except the turret) or lasers or mines and whatnot. These are classic late 1800 weapons such six shooters, rifles, bow and arrows, and shotguns. All take a certain time to reload and will have normal FPS players taking a slight learning curve. But that was the west and the sooner players can get over that the fun will begin. There are horses to ride which are a fast way to get around but you won’t need them in most levels and they never look too good (design wise) anyway. You can also buy weapons from the various shops in the game that are much better than any you will find atop a corpse you just created. Remember, the better the weapon, the faster the reload and the stronger the damage. Once you get over the weapons, the shooting mechanics work great. You aim, shoot, and the people die. Flawless. There is a small cover system where you Ray or Thomas will latch onto a wall or a chest high wall and you can control how far they stick their heads out but the two or three times I used the cover system I found this to lead me to my death more than it ever helped me. You can also zoom in, dual wield, and go into bullet time. Bullet time will really help out as you clear out all enemies on screen in just a couple moments. Just point your reticule at each of the enemies and watch Ray or Thomas pour out lead faster than a chain gun and the best part is that every bullet will hit. Awesome.

Two things that both characters will have to face off with are boss fights and duels. The boss fights aren’t hard but they can kill quickly if you get caught off guard. They’ll hide behind cover frequently can deal heavy damage in only a couple hits so keep your eyes open when you face them. The duels on the other hand are all about reflexes. You have to try to keep your character’s hand close to the gun while keeping your enemy in your sights. Then, when you hear the bell, draw your gun and shoot. This seems really easy but throughout the game I never understand exactly how to work this. I’m used to Red Dead Revolver’s way of pulling down the joystick to grab the gun, push back up to draw the pistol and then shoot. How I completed this game I have no idea because I found myself randomly jerking the right joystick and luckily completing the duel. It’s really obnoxious because it seems the enemies move back and forth in the duel just to annoy you. I mean, when was the last time you saw a duel and both gunslingers walking around in circles? Every duel I’ve ever seen they stood in place. I mean, they may have walked around a bit to get themselves pumped up like Jada Pinkett-Smith at a concert but they always planted themselves like banzai trees before the actual draw. Nonetheless, I beat the system and showed the man that I am a true geek.

Next to the single player is the online multiplayer. There isn’t any splitscreen (another tear) but the online play is fun. There are a good amount of modes and maps which is what online play needs. Like normal, we have the twenty four player deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag and a fun mode titled Wanted where one player is considered wanted and the others hunt them down. These are fun and necessary for any type of online play but the one I found my self playing the most was Wild West Legends. In this mode each team has to complete objectives in order to win the match. One team will have to destroy a mission objective while the other team must protect it. These objectives range from famous western stories many may have heard about such as the hunt of Billy the Kid to the Magnificent Seven’s stand against the bandits. Each map features a different legend but my favorite is the bank robbery. The Outlaw team must break into the bank, bust open the safe with dynamite, steal some horses from the barn and ride out of town while the Sheriff team must stop them from completing any of these. This is the only game where I have ever played a good ol’ western bank robbery and it’s a blast (literally! (bad joke, I know). An interesting feature is the fact that the game doesn’t keep track of kills or deaths. Instead the game deals with bounties. The more kills you get the higher your bounty and the higher chance of people trying to kill you. When you kill another player you receive the amount of money their bounty is, giving you the incentive to try to take out the more experienced players. With this money you can buy upgrades for your characters (for that match only) or unlock more playable characters online each with their own advantages. The online play is fun and should last quite awhile as players try to claim more and more bounties. The only problem that I truly have is that you can’t duel anyone online. I would love to show how fast my random jerking of the joystick is against other players (One more tear. My last one, I promise. I’m not a wimp; I’m just in touch with my inner self).

The sound in the game is amazing. The voice acting blows so many games out of the water. Sure, William may get annoying and I want to give him a backhand at times but all the voices fit game. Listening to two brothers bicker has never sounded so good. The music is pure western and works with the fast paced action. You won’t find your self humming the themes after you shut the game off but they fill a void in order to give a complete experience. All the weapons sound powerful whether it is a meager pistol or movable turret. All the clicking and the little trinket noises that come with each gun from reloading to making the bullet leave the chamber add to this western outlook.

The graphics also stand out and surpass the previous game. The character designs look outstanding especially Ray and Thomas. Even the run of the mill enemies look pretty good. People don’t walk like robots anymore or move around awkwardly from the first person perspective. Like I said earlier, it never looks good when you ride a horse and the design of the horse looks pretty bad too. The back of their head looks like a mesh of expired cottage cheese. But that’s only a small portion of the game. The environments are absolutely beautiful. You’ll travel through towns, battlefields, gold mines, hideouts, open deserts, and forests, all looking unique and detailed. Each area feels fresh and different from the previous which will help make the experience last longer. Fans of the first game may even recognize a couple places.

Overall, this is a great western game. The first may have been a disappointment to some but this prequel fixes many of the problems while keeping all that was great and adding a couple new gameplay elements to blend it all together for an enjoyable game. Some things need to be fixed or designed better but this game delivers on its promise. It has a great story that should pull almost all gamers in and the acting only increases the odds of that happening. Everyone needs to at least rent this game and give it a try. It will not refine the world of gaming as we know it, but it will give many gamers something really enjoyable. So, I beckon to y’all. Saddle up them horses, pull out them ol’ six shooters and get yourself ready for showdown.