The Forza series has always prided itself upon it's uber-realistic approach to the racing genre. Forza can be simply described as the mirror-opposite of racing titles like Burnout and the upcoming Blur & Split Second: Velocity. For the true petrol heads out there, you may not want to read this review! :-)
GRAPHICS & PRESENTATION
+ Wax on! Wax off!! Graphically, Forza is an absolute delight to look at. Every car model is rendered with painstaking detail. Each race track, from New York to the Nurburgring, has been recreated in perfect detail also. There is very little to criticise. Lighting is put to excellent use with shading and light sourcing hitting the cars and tracks at the correct angles at all times. Reflections are virtually jaw dropping with every car having a crisp visual sheen.
= You're so vain! This may just be me being picky but, as nice as Forza looks, it does seem a bit sterile in places. Now maybe this is because I prefer tracks that have been created from imagination and not reality but everything looks a bit too clean for me.
SOUND
= I've heard it all before. There's nothing bad about the SFX or music in Forza but there's nothing that really stands out either. Each car sounds like they should from small engines to muscle cars. Screeching tyres and revving engines sound like....well....screeching tyres and revving engines. It's all appropriate but nothing outstanding. Music is fairly un-inspiring stuff and I found myself hitting the mute button after 10 minutes and listening to my MP3 player instead.
GAMEPLAY
+ Look what I made! One of the first things that needs to be mentioned here is the level of customisation. There are 400 cars in the game and every single one of them can be tuned and tweaked to racing perfection. From tyres to suspension to steering, there's enough here to keep the most ardent car-fiddler happy for hours on end. And once you've finished tinkering with the inside you can then customise your ride with a paint job of your choosing. Forza's paint+vinyl editor is so detailed it boggles the mind. If, like me, you have no interest in fine-tuning but want your car optimised for the races ahead there is a very handy quick tune tool before the beginning of the race! :-)
+ It's just like Ebay! After certain races and events you'll be given cars as prizes but if you're really impatient you can always go into the in-game auction site and try and win cars there for a fraction of the original price. Not only cars but custom paint jobs are available too. You can place your own items for sale and make yourself a few credits in return.
- This isn't an RPG. After each race, you're given a set amount of XP which is determined by the position you finish in, the difficulty you raced on and the amount of damage to your car. You can reach level 50 for your driver and level 5 for your chosen car. This is okay in itself but when you constantly have to race and re-race the same tracks it becomes very boring, very quickly. Turn 10 games claim to have over 100 tracks in this game but many of those are simply shortened or reverse tracks of the originals. And when there are 6 seasons in career play which contain an ever increasing amount of races....well, you do the math! Grinding, thine name is Forza 3!!
- Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz! I like to think I can give games credit where it's due but I'm making an exception here. I'm not sure what happenned during development of Forza 3 but someone, somewhere forgot to make this game FUN. Y'know, what games are meant to be. I have never played a game that is so emotionless, lifeless, stark, sterile, humourless and boring. Please bear in mind that I am NOT biased against realism. I used to play all the TOCA games on the PS1 and since then have played many games that are realistic. Forza 3 just doesn't feel like an involving racer at all!!
SHOULD I BUY OR RENT?
Definitely rent first. I cannot, in all good conscience, recommend buying this game.
Forza 3 is an Xbox 360 exclusive. Hours played: 40+ on medium difficulty (Realism mode is for sadists and masochists)! Developed by Turn 10 Games.
Achievement difficulty: 5/10. The only reason it's a 5 is because the 'Solid Gold' achievement will take you a VERY long time! Every thing else is easy.
Showing posts with label Microsoft Game Studios. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microsoft Game Studios. Show all posts
Friday, May 7, 2010
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Crackdown Review for Xbox 360
When Crackdown was coming out a long, long time ago, it's sales were boosted by the fact that if you bought the game you would get access to the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. That led practically every gamer to assume that this game would suck and the beta was just a way to get us to buy it. Well it did get everyone to buy it but the surprising thing was that Crackdown was actually good. It was fun and addictive. I've definitely spent my fair share playing the game back in the day so I thought I would give it another go to review it for the site.
Gameplay
+ Be something more than human - Think of playing Grand Theft Auto when you're just messing about with the world. Personally, that's what I felt was the only draw from the GTA series and Crackdown evolves that fun.
Being that you're a genetically enhanced super cop, you can do everything better than a normal person. At first you can jump around the height of a one-story building, toss trash cans, drive special cars, toss grenades that make small enough explosions to almost take out one person. As you use these skills to annihilate gangs, you'll get orbs that pop out from the defeated that swarm into you, leveling up your abilities. By the time you've maxed out your skills, you can jump 4-5 stories high, use explosives that will now take out an entire city block if not more, pick up and toss tanker trucks.
As you level up, your character's appearance also changes. He'll gain anything from new armor, tattoo, and hairstyles, to piercings and facial hair. My favorite of all is when you level up your driving and the car you're using changes with you. Not only will the car gain it's own abilities and just become all around better, it will physically change it's appearance every time you step in and out. Imagine a modern BMW transforming into the batmobile (not the tumbler) before your eyes. Every time I get in and out of the car, I actually stop what I'm doing just to see it go from normal to super and back to normal. Great stuff!
+ Do what you want, when you want to - There are specific tasks for you to do in Crackdown but you're never forced to ever do them or do them in any order whatsoever. I'm actually sure that it's more likely you'll get hooked to leveling up your agent than actually progressing through the game.
+ So many orbs, so little time... - Everyone feels this in Crackdown; You jump onto a building and collect a batch of agility orbs and it explodes into little orbs everywhere! Then you see another batch on the roof of a building across the street. After grabbing that one, you'll see another, and another, and another until you collect all 500! People will normally state this as the number one reason why they began to get addicted. And what a wonderful affliction it is.
= Now what? - Even given all of the things you can in Crackdown, it seems that a lot of the fun comes from yourself. What do you want to do in this no-limits playground? If you run out of ways to make your own fun, it can get boring really fast. When it comes to doing the normal missions and side missions, they don't really feel different enough to stop the feeling of monotony. It's not a terrible problem but extra motivation to keep progressing through the game would have been nice.
Story and Presentation.
+ Wanna star in a comic book? - I can't recall this exactly but I remember reading a developer diary when the game was still in development, and they were talking about what they were trying to go for with the visuals. They said the director had this view of a city overrun by gangs and the like but he wanted it to look like it came out of a comic book. They nailed it perfectly. I've seen cel-shading in games before (Jet Set/Grind Radio series, Zelda Windwaker, Sonic Shuffle, Borderlands, etc) but this one seems to do something different to give it that awesome comic feel. The textures and effects have this hybrid aesthetic of looking hand-drawn and being real at the same time.
= Only if you want to... - While not having the most enthralling story ever, it does enough that when you do make progress, you feel like you've accomplished something worthwhile. The end of the game was a pretty decent surprise, decent enough to make me want to know exactly what happens next.
Graphics
= Style over substance - They easily nail the look they're going for but the game doesn't look much better on either a HDTV or a SDTV. These graphics will never blow you away. They just do enough to get the unique visuals to work.
Sound
= Humdrum - You really shouldn't care. It does have a soundtrack when you drive around sporting many multi-lingual sounds. I say, just use your own music and wreak havoc to your preferred music style. You won't miss the sound effects either.
Should you buy it?
Rent it. And I think that everyone should, too. There will be those of you who love it and will buy it the first time you level up a skill. For everyone else, I'd suspect you'd have fun, just not enough to justify a purchase.
This review was kinda tricky because there just isn't a whole lot to talk about when it comes to Crackdown. It boils down to how much you get out of the gameplay and how many "You gotta hear this" kind of stories you create. Just go out there and give the game a go. Just beware, collecting orbs is extremely addicting.
Crackdown was developed by Realtime Worlds and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox 360. Played on Tough difficulty for 20+ hours only collecting 467 out of 500 agility orbs.
Gameplay
+ Be something more than human - Think of playing Grand Theft Auto when you're just messing about with the world. Personally, that's what I felt was the only draw from the GTA series and Crackdown evolves that fun.
Being that you're a genetically enhanced super cop, you can do everything better than a normal person. At first you can jump around the height of a one-story building, toss trash cans, drive special cars, toss grenades that make small enough explosions to almost take out one person. As you use these skills to annihilate gangs, you'll get orbs that pop out from the defeated that swarm into you, leveling up your abilities. By the time you've maxed out your skills, you can jump 4-5 stories high, use explosives that will now take out an entire city block if not more, pick up and toss tanker trucks.
As you level up, your character's appearance also changes. He'll gain anything from new armor, tattoo, and hairstyles, to piercings and facial hair. My favorite of all is when you level up your driving and the car you're using changes with you. Not only will the car gain it's own abilities and just become all around better, it will physically change it's appearance every time you step in and out. Imagine a modern BMW transforming into the batmobile (not the tumbler) before your eyes. Every time I get in and out of the car, I actually stop what I'm doing just to see it go from normal to super and back to normal. Great stuff!
+ Do what you want, when you want to - There are specific tasks for you to do in Crackdown but you're never forced to ever do them or do them in any order whatsoever. I'm actually sure that it's more likely you'll get hooked to leveling up your agent than actually progressing through the game.
+ So many orbs, so little time... - Everyone feels this in Crackdown; You jump onto a building and collect a batch of agility orbs and it explodes into little orbs everywhere! Then you see another batch on the roof of a building across the street. After grabbing that one, you'll see another, and another, and another until you collect all 500! People will normally state this as the number one reason why they began to get addicted. And what a wonderful affliction it is.
= Now what? - Even given all of the things you can in Crackdown, it seems that a lot of the fun comes from yourself. What do you want to do in this no-limits playground? If you run out of ways to make your own fun, it can get boring really fast. When it comes to doing the normal missions and side missions, they don't really feel different enough to stop the feeling of monotony. It's not a terrible problem but extra motivation to keep progressing through the game would have been nice.
Story and Presentation.
+ Wanna star in a comic book? - I can't recall this exactly but I remember reading a developer diary when the game was still in development, and they were talking about what they were trying to go for with the visuals. They said the director had this view of a city overrun by gangs and the like but he wanted it to look like it came out of a comic book. They nailed it perfectly. I've seen cel-shading in games before (Jet Set/Grind Radio series, Zelda Windwaker, Sonic Shuffle, Borderlands, etc) but this one seems to do something different to give it that awesome comic feel. The textures and effects have this hybrid aesthetic of looking hand-drawn and being real at the same time.
= Only if you want to... - While not having the most enthralling story ever, it does enough that when you do make progress, you feel like you've accomplished something worthwhile. The end of the game was a pretty decent surprise, decent enough to make me want to know exactly what happens next.
Graphics
= Style over substance - They easily nail the look they're going for but the game doesn't look much better on either a HDTV or a SDTV. These graphics will never blow you away. They just do enough to get the unique visuals to work.
Sound
= Humdrum - You really shouldn't care. It does have a soundtrack when you drive around sporting many multi-lingual sounds. I say, just use your own music and wreak havoc to your preferred music style. You won't miss the sound effects either.
Should you buy it?
Rent it. And I think that everyone should, too. There will be those of you who love it and will buy it the first time you level up a skill. For everyone else, I'd suspect you'd have fun, just not enough to justify a purchase.
This review was kinda tricky because there just isn't a whole lot to talk about when it comes to Crackdown. It boils down to how much you get out of the gameplay and how many "You gotta hear this" kind of stories you create. Just go out there and give the game a go. Just beware, collecting orbs is extremely addicting.
Crackdown was developed by Realtime Worlds and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox 360. Played on Tough difficulty for 20+ hours only collecting 467 out of 500 agility orbs.
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