Bioshock Infinite OUT TODAY!

When I finished BioShock Infinite – don’t worry, I won’t spoil anything – I was dumbfounded. I wanted to tell someone what I thought, but for a moment I had absolutely no idea. I’d experienced a kind of excited panic, then total delight, then momentary confusion, and then a rush of extraordinary sights, powerful scenes and sudden twists that left me struggling to keep up.
It’s a spectacular ending. It’s just a shame it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

“The plot really does jump the shark. It jumps a lot of sharks. It jumps BioShark Infinisharks”

Infinite is wonderful. Every single person who can play it, should play it. It’s a fascinating and gruesomely fun adventure in a genuinely unique, magnificent place. But the plot really does jump the shark. It jumps a lot of sharks. It jumps BioShark Infinisharks. That’s not uncommon in cinematic first-person shooters, but I mention it now because the game’s mysteries are such a big part of its appeal.
You’re on a flying city of magical racists in 1912, and that soon drops to being only the fifth or sixth most puzzling thing about your situation. Who are those two? Why are they talking about me? What’s with the giant cyborg bird? What does AD stand for? How does he know… why does she think… when did they… why can I shoot crows from my hands? And how do these pants help me reload?

The intro says you’re Booker DeWitt, a private investigator tasked with retrieving a girl named Elizabeth. But I played more like a crazed amnesiac looter, scouring the city for spare change and story clues. In cheerful contrast to the original BioShock’s deep-sea madhouse, the flying city of Columbia is still thriving, still beautiful, and still populated – albeit with magical racists. That means it can give you little pieces of these puzzles in more interesting ways, and hoovering them up into a wonky jigsaw is a joy.

“You get to know Columbia as a tourist: a dazzling dream of an impossible city in an impossible place – tranquil, prosperous and happy.”

I think it still would have been, even if a tear had opened in the fabric of spacetime and future alterno-Tom, stroking his goatee, had told me that the plot ultimately doesn’t add up. So I’m telling you in the hope that you’ll still enjoy the process of assembling that wonky jigsaw, without being quite so disappointed when the game itself cuts all the nobbly bits of the pieces so it can cram them together the way it wants to.
Really, it’s just a pleasure to have a game this substantial to explore – and one that gives you the breathing room to do so. You still spend a lot of time killing things in BioShock Infinite, but it knows when to give you space. You get to know Columbia as a tourist: a dazzling dream of an impossible city in an impossible place – tranquil, prosperous and happy.
Shops, blocks and districts waft wonkily through the air, listing as they cruise in to dock with each other. Bells chime, children play, locals picnic. There’s a fair on, and everyone’s out in their 1912 Sunday best. The sun is dazzling, the views are breathtaking, and everyone you meet is chattering happily. As heavy metal clamps lock a tailor’s shop in place, I realise the times on the sign outside aren’t their opening hours: they’re arrivals and departure times.

Your arrival is one of gaming’s few truly perfect scenes: a chapel, floors awash with holy water, stone walls echoing with the calming harmony of a gospel choir. Stained glass dioramas flood the space with brilliant gold light, and the heat from a hundred candles creates a gentle haze. The only hint that you’re not actually in the afterlife is an occasional, very distant clanking, as some chunk of the city drifts against its restraints. It’s more than atmospheric; it’s exquisite. That kind of ridiculous artistic flair runs throughout: staggering works of sculpture, transformative use of light, perfectly judged ambience, and music that both nods to the plot and subtly changes the mood. The mileage this game gets out of the song Will The Circle Be Unbroken alone – all four times it’s used – deserves some kind of award.

“Your arrival is one of gaming’s few truly perfect scenes”

Columbia is a less restrictive setting than BioShock’s Rapture, and each district has a different vibe. That makes your adventure through it fascinating, and each new area exciting to discover. Even close to the end, you’re visiting remarkable new places with radically different moods.
I keep wanting to say that it’s ‘directed’ brilliantly, the elements fit together so well. But that’s not the right word, because the other thing it does well is keeping you in control. There are no cutscenes, no switching to third person, no agency-limiting tropes like mounted gun sections. The few times you’re not free to move are generally when your character physically wouldn’t be.
Maintaining that respect for the player, even when you need to tell a character-driven story, is a rare and wonderful thing. Like Half-Life 2, Infinite doesn’t feel like a game made by frustrated filmmakers. It feels like a game made by people who know how to make films, and decided to make something else.

Early on, the times when combat does break out are the low points. There seems to have been some internal rule against adding any exotic weapons, so Infinite’s guns stick religiously to convention: pistols, shotguns, three types of machinegun, rifles, grenade launchers and a rocket launcher. None of them let you choose an ammo type the way BioShock did, and only the revolver and shotguns are really satisfying to use. Those aren’t available in the early fights, when guns are your primary tools.
It gets better the more you drink. You acquire magical abilities by downing Vigors, which come in beautiful custom bottles relating to what they do. A lot of the early ones just let you disable and damage a group of enemies – by swarming them with crows, setting fire to them, or floating them into the air. But they get more interesting.

“There seems to have been some internal rule against adding any exotic weapons, so Infinite’s guns stick religiously to convention”

Charge lets you dash to a group of enemies and hit them with explosive force. Return to Sender absorbs incoming damage while you hold the button, then releases it as a projectile when you let go. Undertow can knock enemies back with a wave of water – often the end of your day, in a flying city. Or you can hold the button down to reach out with Donnie Darko-style tendrils and yank distant snipers to your doorstep. The water even holds them still while you line up a headshot.
Some of them form natural combos: soaking wet Undertow victims are really hoping that you’re not going to- oh, you’re electrocuting them before they can get up, classy. Enemies currently being pecked to death would like to request that you don’t set the crows… well, they’re on fire now, but for future reference.
There are only eight Vigors, and they’re all free when you find them. You only specialise when you buy upgrades: expensive but significant perks for each, some of which introduce new rules.
I wasn’t wild about Murder of Crows until I bought the perk that creates a nest every time someone dies during the pecking process. If anyone steps on it, that nest erupts in a new flock of crows. If anyone dies during that crow storm, you get new nests! Plenty of fights involve new waves of enemies flooding into the same area, and this self-perpetuating cycle of flapping and screaming and dying is a guilty pleasure.

You can tweak your abilities a little more with Gear – like the aforementioned pants that mysteriously help you reload. I also carry three magical hats, two spare shirts, a spare pair of shoes, and I’ve now upgraded to pants that make me explode when I land from a great height.
The system is insane and wildly incongruous, but it does allow for some entertaining configurations. If someone walks into one of my crow traps, I can then land on them to set the crows ablaze. If they try to hit me, my hat electrocutes them. And by then they’ve taken enough damage that my shirt will let me break their neck with one blow. This causes my shoes to heal me, as a reward for getting a melee kill.

“I’m wearing pants that make me explode when I land from a great height.”

Vigors are very similar to BioShock’s Plasmids, of course, and Gear is the new version of its Tonics. Alone, they’re not enough to make Infinite’s combat much better than BioShock’s. But it is, and for a different reason: space.
The game’s biggest fights take place in huge open areas, sometimes several city blocks, and metal Sky Rails snake through the air between them. These rails are inverted rollercoasters: you hold a magnetic wheel gizmo that lets you dangle from them, then ride their curves with improbable speed. This changes the format of combat completely: instead of ducking behind cover when you’re in trouble, you leap up and ride off, too fast to be hit. As you zoom along you can aim for a landing spot, pounce on an enemy, switch to a different rail or – best of all – leap onto a hoverboat.
These boats swoop in at the start of a fight, touring the combat space before settling on a spot from which to pelt you with rockets. If you’ve got the sea legs for it, you can leap onto one of them as it’s cruising around, smash all its troops off, then jump off when it drifts near enough to another Sky Rail. The battlefield itself is in motion.

The final new element in Infinite’s fights relates to Elizabeth, the woman you’re here for. She can open ‘tears’ in space that lead to alternate universes. In combat, those universes seem to be full of heavy weapons, medkits, and turrets that are mysteriously on your side. She can only do it at predefined points: you see a ghostly image of the various things she can bring in at different spots, and you press ‘use’ on one to order her to make it real.

“If this isn’t sounding contrived yet, I’m not explaining it properly.”

If this isn’t sounding contrived yet, I’m not explaining it properly. These tears are the very heavy hand of the level designer offering you a menu of choices, and they often make the fights feel staged. You can only open one at a time, but that decision is almost always an easy call: of course you want the turret. When you need health, opening the medkit tear is just one more press of the ‘use’ key, then you can bring the turret back. These things might as well be part of the level.
Elizabeth herself is nice. I liked her. If you were hoping for something more – perhaps even the fabled Strong Female Character™ – you might be disappointed. When you’re together, she’s relegated to the role of caddy, limited to passing you a new weapon when you run out of ammo, and only ever using her own abilities when you command her to. And when you’re separated, the plot repeatedly underscores how helpless she is without you. Again, this is not unusual in videogames, it’s just that the sublime introduction to Infinite’s story led you to expect more from it.
You do have a handful of really lovely character moments with her. But the few times that she does something of her own free will, the significance of the act is undermined by the plot’s broken logic, and so is the chance of building a more interesting relationship.

It’s awkward: I want to tell you why the plot failed for me, but I have to be vague. It has many, many leaps of questionable logic, but the ones that really hurt are when your terrible predicament seems to be the direct consequence of decisions that didn’t make sense at the time.

“your solution to a simple logistical problem is the equivalent of setting off an atom bomb to clear a cobweb”

At one point, your solution to a simple logistical problem is the equivalent of setting off an atom bomb to clear a cobweb. So when anything bad happens from then on, you’re thinking, “Boy, it almost seems like setting off that atom bomb was an insane, unnecessary and irrational thing to do.”
You don’t set off an atom bomb. That was a metaphor.
The worst culprit is the ending. The plot’s final emotional sting is an action that just doesn’t seem like it would achieve anything. It seems to be assuming some new rule about how this world works – but since those rules were never established, any drama that hinges on them feels arbitrary.
That completely deflates the ending’s potentially enormous impact. And not just for me: two other reviewers and I discussed it at length, trying to come up with a compelling version of the logic, and none of us could find one.

But all these scenes, even the stupid ones, are depicted with the same artistic flair I gushed about earlier. Even as you’re wondering why the hell anyone is doing any of this, you’re thinking, “God, that is beautiful, though.”
In a sense, that beauty makes it even more of a shame that the writing doesn’t manage to put all this spectacular work to better use. But it also means that these moments end up being emotional anyway. It’s like a surreal arthouse movie where nothing really makes sense, but where each scene is strangely compelling nonetheless.
It’s a weird note to end on, after a game that’s so magnificent in so many other ways. But it doesn’t change the conclusion: BioShock Infinite is something extraordinary, and no one should miss it.

Crysis 3 review

An action hero’s weapon is an extension of their identity. They’re inseparable implements, representative of their approach to combat and justice. Bond’s silenced PPK. Batman’s iconic boomerang. Mjölnir and Thor. Even Popeye’s transformative spinach says something about him as a character.

What does the Nanosuit say about its wearer in Crysis? That the player has a need to improvise, a need to see-saw between being an assassin and being a brute. “Press Q,” reads the manufacturer’s tag on the collar, “to harden your skin like a brick wall. Press E to become as transparent as a pane of glass. Tumble dry low.”

Crysis, at its best, is a franchise that puts you in situations where the Nanosuit doesn’t do the dirty work for you, but simply serves as a springboard for spontaneous problem-solving in hazardous battle-playgrounds. Crysis 3 doesn’t deviate from this template, but it does mostly repeat Crysis 2’s interpretation of it. It’s a less sandboxy and groundbreaking one than the original Crysis, to be sure, but linearity isn’t an inherent sin. Crytek’s shooter remains one of the best-looking games anywhere. It’s acrobatic and deliberate, especially in multiplayer, and an expression of what PC hardware can do.

New New York

Crysis 3’s campaign feels more of a continuation than a reinvention of Crysis 2. You’re still in the Big Apple, though one that looks like your neighbor’s house when they’ve been on vacation for a month, leaving their mail to pile up and yard to overgrow. Paramilitary bad-guy corporation CELL has taken credit for your heroic effort in the last game, and while you’ve been asleep they’ve gotten busy exploiting some secret power source to revitalize ruined NYC. Enormous, spherical barriers called Nanodomes have been erected to accelerate ecosystem growth.

At the start of the story you’re sprung from a stasis pod by Psycho, a former fellow Raptor Team member, to join a rebellion against CELL. Psycho and others have been “skinned” of their Nanosuits, making you, Prophet, the only one on the planet. Cue the standard “you’re humanity’s savior” spiel: Prophet’s unique bond with Ceph DNA grants him new power, but also exposes him to potentially being controlled by the Ceph hivemind. Psycho’s vendetta to find out who separated him from his superskin motivates the first few hours. He joins you as a temporary companion character on missions to sabotage a few well-designed CELL facilities, like a hydroelectric dam.

My hope was that this plot and the terraforming power of Nanodomes would be natural excuses for Crytek to create a broad set of exotic environments. And my worry was that Crysis 3 might simply coat Crysis 2’s somewhat-claustrophobic city blocks with moss. In 2011, I criticized the sequel’s narrowness: “Expressing your abilities as a player demands vertical and horizontal space, and there’s slightly less of it in NYC than I would’ve liked.”

Psycho’s presence isn’t unwelcome, operating as a passive guide for Crysis 3′s first couple hours.

“My worry was that Crysis 3 might simply coat Crysis 2’s somewhat-claustrophobic city blocks with moss.”

The level design of Crysis 3 falls somewhere in between this gulf of opportunity and familiarity. “Urban rainforest” as an aesthetic isn’t really strayed from, and if anything, it feels under-expressed in that it’s never taken to its natural extreme. The world rarely seems wild. I never felt like I was in an NYC that’s been swallowed whole by the Amazon. A few areas filled with meters-high marsh grass are the exception. In one of my favorite sequences, Crysis 3 threw packs of Ceph Stalkers—melee assault units with scythes for arms—at me in a railway car graveyard submerged in a wavy green ocean under the sun.

The Ceph Stalkers didn’t bolt directly at me. They didn’t magnetize to my position like most game enemies. They darted. They took indirect, lateral routes. The stalks of grass quivered, but in a way that obscured the true orientation of enemies. I remember emptying a shotgun into the brush, still unsure if I clipped one. I felt anxiously, wonderfully lost. I couldn’t tell if I was in Central Park or Jurassic.

This was a legitimate “the floor is lava” scenario. In a panic, I perched myself atop one of the railcars, a rusty island. Four Stalkers, by my count, were orbiting the car, pouncing in the jungle bed like cheetahs. I gripped a grenade, pulling the pin before I even knew where I was going to throw it. The grass flickered at the opposite end of the ruined train. I chucked the bomb, holding my breath. Ten gallons of bubblegum blood sneezed out from behind the end of the car. A radar blip faded. The whole arc felt like playing Marco Polo against jungle raptors.

This moment—feeling alienated on Earth—is an outlier, unfortunately. Structurally, the level design has improved some: two chapters feature caves, and an above-average turret sequence or two, but mostly gone are the subways, parking garages, sewers, and elevator shafts of Crysis 2. The campaign also sprinkles in optional secondary objectives—no substitute for a proper sandbox, but they’re decent carrots that pull you away from primaries. Some are as simple as clearing a set of mines around an light armored vehicle using the Nanosuit’s new hacking mechanic (a timed button-press mini-game that’s appropriately complex). In some cases, completing these side missions grants functional benefits: liberating the LAV let me catch a ride with them through a segment of the map, operating their turret as they taxied me. In the same chapter, a mortar team volunteered their services after I killed some Ceph harassing them, unlocking the power to call in artillery strikes.

The Bolt Sniper, one of Crysis 3′s terrific Ceph weapons. A CELL soldier gestures toward some higher power in his final moment.

Foreign imports

Most of what you shoot in Crysis 3—the CELL weapons—are copies of what you shot in Crysis 2. I’m fine with that: Crytek’s near-futuristic ballistic guns don’t need replacement. Instead, the number of violent bells and whistles you can attach to conventional weapons has multiplied. One of the basic rifles, the Grendel, can be mutated from a sci-fi M4 into a ridiculous death platform. Throw a miniature version of the Typhoon—a new SMG that spits 500 bullets per second—under the barrel as an attachment. Swap in a muzzle break to improve the accuracy of your first shot. Load a mag of 6.8mm AP ammo (if you’ve found one of the special ammo caches) for greater penetration. Even shotguns get access to electric buckshot.

The déjà vu of handling the same weapons is offset by Prophet’s newfound ability to wield Ceph guns. Each of these devastating power weapons pulls from a single, small magazine of ammo. They’re intentionally disposable; as long as you don’t mutilate an alien with explosives, you can steal their flamethrower, lightning sniper rifle, or absurd plasma minigun that transforms into a wide-firing plasma shotgun. Firing each of these produces the same pleasure I felt when I first fired the Combine Pulse Rifle in Half-Life 2: giving enemies a taste of their own medicine. Their power is offset by the weight they place on Prophet (you can’t leap as high when holding a Ceph weapon), and by the loss of the ability to swap freely between standard firearms and the new Predator Bow.

“The déjà vu of handling the same weapons is offset by Prophet’s newfound ability to wield Ceph guns. “

On the receiving end of these guns, though, I found the Ceph to be a little tamer than they were in Crysis 2. Ceph Stalkers are underused. Devastators, formerly the alien tanks of Crysis 2, fall easily from the basic Ceph Grunt weapon, the Pincher Rifle. Ceph Spotters, floating drone-spheres that can zap you with EMP, were almost unnoticeable in the campaign. The new Ceph Scorchers are a bright spot. When attacked, they pop up their torso like a tower shield, making them invulnerable to direct assaults. They’re scary, glimmering little scarab-tanks—even when you’re hidden, they’ll intermittently torch an area while on patrol, like a camel might casually spit.

Turning the difficulty to Supersoldier (the fourth of five settings) did make things more comfortable (i.e., uncomfortable). Some of the increased ease of Ceph-killing is owed to the ability to wield their weapons, but more of it is due to the Predator Bow, which has a unique advantage within Crysis: firing it while cloaked doesn’t interrupt invisibility. It’s also permanently in your inventory. Crytek mitigates the Predator’s power a little by making its ammo scarce, but because you can recover basic arrows from victims, and most enemies die from a single, full-power shot, the bow occasionally feels like an easy way to clear a room. I still consider it a good addition to the weapon set because it demands being careful and deliberate in a way that Crysis’ other weapons don’t.

CELL soldiers are beautifully-modeled action figures, covered with overlapping military kit.

Invisible war

It’s remarkable how well Crytek’s UK division has made Crysis’ overpowered pajamas work in multiplayer. Migrating the mechanics of invisibility and near-invulnerability into a balanced arena can’t be easy. Online play, like the campaign, does feel more like a renovation than original work. Even one of the 12 maps, Skyline, is a reskin of the popular Crysis 2 level of the same name. But this whole side of the game feels as affectionately made as it did in 2011, and anyone that played the previous multiplayer should welcome more of it.

Some of the mode’s cleverness comes from Crytek worrying more about what’s fun than what makes sense within Crysis’ canon. In multiplayer, the Nanosuit’s stealth and armor powers operate on two separate batteries, not a shared pool. You can cloak and then immediately activate armor mode with no penalty. This wrinkle encourages a heavier use of stealth—armoring-up, bagging a kill, and then cloaking away is a viable getaway maneuver.

What I love about the the ubiquity of invisibility in competitive play is the way it makes seeing and listening necessary skills. The pace of movement in multiplayer—fast respawns, bottomless sprinting stamina—exceeds Call of Duty, but I rarely fall into the tired meat grinder mindset that I usually do in that franchise. It’s mitigated by two things: a killstreak system that doesn’t shower skilled players with ridiculous bonuses (you also have to earn rewards by retrieving enemies’ dropped dogtags), and the need to observe the world around you and absorb every drop of audio to stay alive. The sound design, vibrant and functional as it is in the campaign, clearly communicates threats and events. Footsteps betray enemy positions. Distant, crackling firefights let you know where you’re needed. Metagame accomplishments don’t overpower the moment-to-moment combat. When you penetrate an enemy’s armor, it crunches like a trillion walnuts, an effect that coincides with a shower of neon marbles falling off an enemy’s body.

“The the ubiquity of invisibility in competitive play makes seeing and listening necessary skills.”

Imitating the campaign, multiplayer maps are also sprinkled with the new alien guns. They operate as arena-style power weapons, but their rarity and limited ammo assures that they never grant more than a handful of kills. Their presence doesn’t fundamentally change Crysis’ multiplayer into Quake or Halo, but it does make it more interesting. As does the addition of passive aircraft on some maps. On certain modes, you’ll spot an empty CELL VTOL. It hovers softly around the map like a turret-strapped ice cream truck. Hopping into it makes you a target, but even though it’s as slow as a crippled carousel horse, I loved the platforming challenge of sprinting up a ledge and leaping in before it flies away. You feel like Bruce Willis.

Hunter is Crysis 3′s best multiplayer mode.

Creative mode design also continues to be a strength. Among eight modes, the stand out is Hunter, an asymmetrical, infection-style game type that matches two Nanosuit players against 14 CELL soldiers. Unless they’re hit with an EMP grenade, the Hunters are permanently invisible, with Predator Bows and a bottomless stealth battery. Everyone has sparse ammo. Playing as the prey, CELL, you feel like a bunch of teens thrown into a two-minute horror movie—you’re equipped with a proximity alarm, which pings like a paranoid steel drum whenever a Hunter is close.

“You feel like a bunch of teens thrown into a two-minute horror movie.”

It’s such a wonderful rearrangement of the mechanics. As a Hunter, you feel a ton of urgency, as a CELL, you’re balancing the safety of sticking with your teammates against the potential protection of isolating yourself in a far-off corner of the map and hoping you get ignored. There are also massive body shields in the environment that CELLs can pick up. In my finest moment, I cornered myself with one of these as Hunters encircled me. With my doom a certainty, I threw the shield at a cloaked player in front of me, crushing him with it in a final blaze of hilarious sacrifice.

Post-modern

Even with all the praise I’ve thrown at it, I worry about the longevity of Crysis 3’s multiplayer, based on how people seemed to abandon Crysis 2’s after release. It’s a minor tragedy that people don’t seem to see Crysis as a multiplayer game. They still think of it as the GPU-eating titan it debuted as.

Really, it’s both. Crysis 3 is launching with the same advanced settings Crysis 2 took months to add. That includes high-resolution textures and DirectX 11 support, and all the effects knobs you’d expect: shading, lens flares, shadows, water, anisotropic filtering, and more. Less scientifically, it looks as good and plays as well as anything on the platform. Every particle effect—from the flash of sparks when you pull the trigger on a Typhoon, to the radial detonation of an airburst arrow—is candy coming out of a piñata. CryEngine’s lighting makes mundane corners of the world feel authentic. The score, too, is outstanding, retaining its hints of Hans Zimmer despite the composer no longer being involved. Every moment benefits from the thudding, modern action movie music (that never resorts to dubstep in a search for relevance), songs intermingled with understated electronic sounds.

Crytek hasn’t pushed itself with Crysis 3. Compared to the wonderland that say, Far Cry 3 drops you into, its world is low on moments-of-awe per hour, and on the hours you’ll spent in it: I finished in about nine. The legacy left by Crysis, assuming this is the last we’ll see of the franchise in the near future, is much different than the craterous impact the original game made in 2007. It’s still a terrific, dazzling action experience with a core mechanic that empowers you, and ultimately, this feels more like Crysis 2: Episode 2 than a sequel that deserves your maximum enthusiasm.

StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm review

StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm was designed to be a competitive sport, so it’s only fair that it nicks some of sport’s idioms. The most important of these is cribbed from football: it’s a game of two halves.

The front half: a 20-odd mission campaign with a steadily evolving spread of controllable units spurred on by an earnest, overwrought story of revenge. Dig through that, learn the game’s many long and greasy ropes, and you’ll find the back half: a competitive strategy game so finely balanced and so tactically varied that people are able to play it as their job.

“Watching your host chew Terrans into scrap metal and ripped flesh is consistently enjoyable.”

No matter your experience with Heart of the Swarm’s predecessor, Wings of Liberty – first of Blizzard’s planned three StarCraft 2s – it’s the campaign you should start with. Not simply because it does an appreciable job of teaching new players the basic mechanics for one of the game’s three races – the Zerg, the swarmy stars of this StarCraft show – but also because it’s incredibly well put together in its own right.

Heart of the Swarm delivers on its titular promise early on, quickly gifting players with control of masses of units. The Zerg are numberless in the game’s fiction, and this justifies control of a screen-filling carpet of Zerglings a few missions into the campaign. Wolf-sized Zerglings, like many of the Zerg’s units, are cheap, quick to produce, and disposable in application. But in giving me control of such a vast number of them, Heart of the Swarm not only cemented the differences between it and predecessor WoL, it made me feel powerful. Pointing a host of clawed monsters at a Terran target and watching them chew it into scrap metal and ripped flesh is consistently enjoyable – especially with a physics engine that now ensures torsos and limbs go flying into the distance with appreciable force.

At the heart of said swarm sits Kerrigan. She’s the game’s cover star, and comes in two flavours in both HotS and the series fiction. She started life as a Terran ghost: a human super-sniper with brain-melting psionic powers. After some advanced Zerg gribblification, she grew a natty pair of bony wings and had her entire body turn sparkly purple, taking on the moniker ‘Queen of Blades’. It’s no spoiler to mention she flits between these forms in Heart of the Swarm – the game plasters her Zergified face all over the loading screen – but no matter her appearance, she retains a set of enemy-shredding abilities that get more powerful as the story progresses on.

“When it tries to be po-faced, it’s quite silly; when it tries to be silly, it’s very silly.”

That story is silly in varying ways, with varying degrees of success. Kerrigan begins proceedings trapped in a Terran lab. Semi-friendly to her captors – Valerian Mengsk, son of Terran despot Arcturus Mengsk, and other friends of her beau Jim Raynor – she’s no longer in her guise as the Queen of Blades, de-Zergification having rendered her more human in appearance. A breakout is followed by daddy Mengsk’s intervention, and Kerrigan is propelled back toward her Zerg swarm, and re-de-re-Zergification.

Her story is one of blind, stabby revenge, a tale of crossing the galaxy and interacting with its most powerful beings with the express intentions of offing one beardy dude for being really, really annoying. When it tries to be po-faced, it’s quite silly; when it tries to be silly, it’s very silly, a pulp sci-fi story dictated by the surprise success of characters and plot coined in the late 1990s. It feels like a resurrection of that era of nuance-less science fiction – a time when space marines could be space marines, horrible chitinous monsters could be horrible chitinous monsters, and the two could fight without origin stories or complex motivations – but Blizzard are happy to embrace StarCraft’s origins, not attempt a reboot.

In embracing it, they justify Kerrigan’s semi-mystic power, and subsequently her in-game powers. These increase in impressiveness as she levels up: an early ability enables her to lift a handful of enemies into the air, their little arms waving as Kerrigan’s army nibbles at their legs; a mid tier skill lets her conjure six acid-filled Banelings out of the ground, ready to hurl at nearby opponents. Her final few abilities are ridiculously powerful: one allows her to call in her vast Leviathan ship. The beast hovers malevolently around the map, prodding things to death with sandworm-sized tentacles.

The Leviathan skill can be replaced by a portable nuke, or by a set of drop pods Kerrigan can call in to spawn an entire army at a moment’s notice. Her skills sit on a tech tree, and demand that players choose between two (later three) abilities at certain levels. Kerrigan acts like an action-RTS hero on the battlefield, and players have the ability to outfit her for a range of functions. She can be given a set of healing and buffing auras and told to stand next to the bulk of your army, or you can build her – as I did – for pure damage output, speeding deep into enemy ranks, chucking blasts of kinetic energy, and darting back out with a city-sized spaceship in her wake.

“Your newest organic toy is always ideal for the mission ahead – but victory is never assured.”

That’s not the only action-RTS influence in Heart of Swarm’s campaign. A number of missions feature the endless streams of dumb AI units that characterise that genre (originally born from Blizzard’s games: the circle is complete). One mid-campaign level is fringed by a constant battle between two rival Zerg factions. Their two streams meet at the bottom of the map, extra forces sometimes spilling off to attack Kerrigan and her own brand of Zerg at the top of the area. The persistent creep conflict is technically superfluous to completing the mission – Kerrigan need only survive for 25 minutes – but a bonus objective requires crossing the stream, necessitating a serious battle plan on higher difficulties.

All of Heart of the Swarm’s campaign missions are this thoughtful. The story introduces new units at a deliberate pace, inevitably making your new organic toy ideal for the mission ahead – but victory is never assured by simply building lots of new unit X. Each mission has a gimmick to go alongside its new Zerg arrival: an early stage on the ice world of Kaldir introduces flash freezes that root the local Protoss to the spot for a minute at a time, allowing systematic destruction of their bases. A later mission asks Kerrigan to harvest meat from indigenous creatures on a jungle planet: a task that required me to build up my base, push out onto the map with a sizeable force, kill the critters, send a worker Drone to collect the meat, and protect it on its journey home, all while stopping my opponent’s forces from destroying my meaty treats or attacking my base directly.

There’s no one way to win in singleplayer. Chris – playing the game through on hard – had trouble with a level that introduced Swarm Hosts to Kerrigan’s arsenal. He ended up eschewing the pustule-covered siege units entirely and built up a combined force of Roaches and Banelings to win the day. I took a different path and spawned a flock of Mutalisks to do the same job in another way.

“The Zerg army Kerrigan controls is made powerful by multi-tasking and distributed thinking.”

This choice is hardcoded into the game. As well as Kerrigan’s personal tech tree, I was able to choose one of three specialisations for each of my units – increased health, damage, or speed, for example – decisions I could alter between missions. Heart of the Swarm also offers irreversible decisions: each controllable unit earns an evolution mission that displays two options for improvement – players have to pick one. I gave my Zerglings wings, letting them jump up cliffs, made my Roaches spit debilitating acid, and tweaked my Ultralisks so on death, they crawled inside a cocoon and came back to life a few seconds later.

Later levels give Kerrigan full control of the swarm’s Zerg strains and multiple bases from which to produce them. On normal difficulty, these felt more like showcases than strategy – too hard to lose against a lacklustre enemy showing, and more an opportunity to breed a few of my favourite units and give them names. There’s less time to introduce people to Charles von Broodlordingtons on hard and brutal difficulties. These demand serious skill and RTS mechanics, particularly when the Zerg army Kerrigan controls is made powerful by multi-tasking and distributed thinking. If you can hack these, you’ll do well on Heart of the Swarm’s multiplayer ladder

That multiplayer forms Heart of the Swarm’s second half. It shares units with the campaign, but there are hefty differences: it’s played at ‘faster’ speed compared to the campaign’s ‘normal’, and it assumes a familiarity with keyboard shortcuts, expansion timings, map knowledge and unit counters that the singleplayer rarely does.

“HotS doesn’t remove any units from Wings of Liberty’s online mode, resolving to tweak rather than cull.”

It’s almost exactly the same as Wings of Liberty’s multiplayer. Heart of the Swarm doesn’t remove any units from that game’s much-loved hyper-competitive online mode, resolving – after threatening to ground the Protoss Carrier spaceship – to tweak rather than cull. Some examples: Terran Reapers still jump up cliffs and carry infantry-shredding pistols, but they no longer require a tech lab attachment on a barracks, and now regenerate a small amount health over time. Medivacs still heal nearby biological units, but now come with turbo-charged boosters that grant them a few seconds of faster flying time.

The Medivac speed upgrade allows Terran players to multi-task with abandon, dropping squads of infantry units in vital places across the map. Before, they would’ve lost said squad had the enemy reacted fast enough; now, they can simply pack them up and boost off into the sunset. The Terran versus Zerg matchup was once dominated by Siege Tanks – now players, from professional down to the online ladder’s bronze league denizens – are using Medivac drops against Zerg opponents.

A few tweaks were more substantial. The Protoss Mothership was little used by the race’s players, crowd’s often cheering if one was constructed in a professional game. Now it’s available earlier, for cheaper, as the Mothership Core. It comes with the same range of abilities, but a drastically reduced health pool, making its application complicated, but rewarding: mass recall allows careful Protoss to surgically strike their opponent’s base before flitting back home in an instant to avoid danger.

Tweaked units are joined by downright new ones. Strangely, for a Zerg-focused expansion, it’s the Protoss who’ve earned the most interesting addition: the Oracle is a fragile floating green bulb that can destroy worker units in a few blasts from its lasers. It also comes packaged with a set of spells that careful Oracle drivers can use to aid their army, or provide vision of an enemy base. The professionals are yet to figure out its correct usage, but it’s Heart of the Swarm’s most interesting new multiplayer unit.

“Tweaks and additions change the complicated metagame in wonderful ways.”

Pros have had less trouble figuring out the new Terran Widow Mine. Mines can burrow – in this position they hop out of the ground and latch themselves onto anything that steps within their radius, blowing up and beginning a 40-second cooldown before they can re-explode. Widow Mines were the breakout stars of the most recent Major League Gaming championships, Terran players finding hidden, automatic bombs easier to use than the Protoss’s complicated Oracle.

These new units are rounded out by one or two additions per race: the Zerg Viper and Swarm Host, the Protoss Tempest, and the Terran Hellbat. To the untrained eye, these are small, piffly changes that feel like a poor haul given three years of development time. Those untrained eye owners will see the same StarCraft 2 as before, a thimble-full of new units changing very little: the actual mechanics of competitive, base-building, classic RTS are unchanged.

But even to my semi-trained eye – I’ve logged more than 500 hours of Wings of Liberty 1v1 multiplayer – these tweaks and additions change the complicated metagame that’s built up around StarCraft 2 in wonderful ways. The Oracle promotes Protoss harassment and multi-tasking, a first for the race that’s relied on sitting back and building up multi-unit ‘deathballs’ before rolling over the map like a golden fist. The Zerg Viper and Swarm Host finally give the swarm the options to deal with Terran Siege Tank lines, the latter distracting the Tank’s guns while the former yanks it out of position with its abduct skill. And the Terrans have already altered fundamentally at the hands of highly skilled players: once the turtler’s favoured race, they’re now characterised by multi-pronged assaults and fine control.

Heart of the Swarm’s success comes in opening Wings of Liberty’s superlative multiplayer up, making a variety of strategies viable again, rather than perpetuating the one right way to play a match-up. It also retains that game’s fantastic matchmaking system: Wings of Liberty sunk its talons into me on launch when I played my first online game and eked out a win, the game matching me against a player of similarly limited skill. It’s StarCraft 2′s ability to provide a consistently close, tense match that makes it such a thrilling multiplayer game, and Heart of the Swarm chooses opponents that suit my skill level: after fifty multiplayer games, I’ve won about half of my games – the ideal percentage.

“It’s SC2′s ability to provide a close, tense match that makes it such a thrilling game.”

But none of Heart of the Swarm’s multiplayer additions and tweaks will mean a thing if you’re not invested in the process of playing online and increasing your ladder ranking. Those people have a fifteen hour glossy, deep, and – on harder difficulties – strategic campaign to busy themselves with. Those Wings of Liberty veterans for whom the campaign is a distraction from the process of league ranking promotion will find an essential multiplayer mode made all the better for its new faces.

Those who bounced off both of StarCraft 2′s halves with Wings of Liberty’s launch won’t find anything to draw them in here. Beyond balance changes and nods to MOBA design, Blizzard are playing the same classic RTS game as they were in the late 1990s, one that can feel anachronistic and dated against more forward-thinking strategy peers. But both parts of Heart of the Swarm’s RTS whole – multiplayer esport and solo campaign – are so finely balanced and so cleverly produced that, to borrow another sports idiom, Blizzard have moved the goalposts.

Gears of War: Judgment Review

(Photo: Microsoft/Epic Games)

Have a seat, Marcus and Dom. Time for some other hulking soldiers to lead the fight against the Locusts.

The two stars of the Xbox 360's stellar shooter franchise Gears of War step aside for comrades Baird and Cole in the prequel Gears of War: Judgment, a faster-paced action game that features all the chainsaw-filled goodness and intensity players have expected from the series.

Taking place before the start of the Gears of War trilogy, Judgment follows Kilo Squad and its leaders, the wise-cracking Damon Baird and Augustus Cole (known to many players as "Cole Train"). They're joined by cadet Sofia Hendricks and Garron Paduk as they try to save the city of Halvo Bay from a Locust onslaught.

The campaign starts with Kilo Squad on trial, recounting the events of Halvo Bay before a colonel with the Coalition of Ordered Governments (COG). The events of the campaign that players participate in are based on testimony from squad members.

Scattered throughout the campaign are "crimson omens" on walls representing optional, declassified sections of a mission. The declassified portions add a layer of difficulty to combat segments within a campaign chapter. For example, some sections may require players to use only shotguns or limit their ammunition, while others add more challenging Locust enemies such as Corpsers or Reavers. Perhaps the most challenging are moments where vision is impaired by darkness or heavy dust clouds.

Players earn up to three stars for each stage, and "declassifying" a mission will speed up the process. These stars go toward unlocking items for Judgment's multiplayer and cooperative components. Players can also win prizeboxes that unlock additional experience points and weapon skins.

Judgment handles like the traditional Gears of War title. The A button is your best friend for evading enemies, performing "roadie runs" to escape danger and to find cover. Players use the right bumper to reload, jamming their weapon or reloading more quickly depending on timing. Of course, there's also the wonderful weapon selection from Lancers with chainsaw bayonets, Boomshots, Longshots and Gnasher Shotguns. Fresh items are tossed into the mix, including a Breechshot, a sniper rifle without a scope, and a grenade launcher called the Booshka.

The pace is a bit quicker compared to the Gears of War trilogy. Developers at Epic Games ditched the directional pad, making access to weapons and grenades easier. Players now simply toss their grenades while carrying a firearm. Also, they can quickly switch between a pair of weapons with the Y button.

The boost in speed is necessary, considering Judgment tosses every powerful Locust enemy at players from the very start, from smaller wretches to the all-new Rager that grows stronger and tougher after players shoot them. The campaign also takes inspiration from Gears of War's popular Horde mode, as some sections require players to survive waves of Locust to advance. It's pure chaos, but in an exciting way.

A scene from the Aftermath campaign in 'Gears of War: Judgment.'(Photo: Microsoft/Epic Games)

Once the Judgment campaign is complete, players unlock a second, shorter Aftermath campaign that takes place alongside events in 2011's Gears of War 3. Baird and Cole are still the stars, as they revisit Halvo Bay.

There's also a handful of online cooperative and competitive modes. The popular Team Deathmatch returns, as does Execution, where two teams of five fight to kill each other within a set time limit. Judgment adds a Domination mode, which fans of first-person shooters such as Call of Duty or Battlefield will recognize. Players must capture targets on a map and hold them to earn points.

The star of multiplayer is Overrun, which pits a Locust team against COG soldiers protecting a generator. COG members choose one of four classes: Scout, Engineer, Soldier or Medic. Each boasts a special ability such as building turrets or handing out ammunition. Players operating as Locusts start out small, fighting as Drones, Tickers or Wretches before earning points and upgrading to more powerful foes such as Serapedes or the Kantus. It requires more strategy and teamwork compared to other Gears of War modes, making it far more enjoyable.

On the strictly cooperative front, Horde mode is replaced by Survival, which is similar to Overrun, only players operate as COG soldiers fighting off waves of Locusts trying to destroy a generator. It's a decent option, but not as satisfying as the epic matches players can put together in the traditional Horde mode.

Fans of the trilogy should find Gears of War: Judgment an exhilarating expansion and another worthwhile reason to rev up the chainsaws.

Publisher: Microsoft

Developer: Epic Games/People Can Fly

Platform(s): Xbox 360

Price: $59.99

Rating: M for Mature

Release Date: March 19

The Elder Scrolls Online Just Might Be Awesome!

Just to get it off my chest, let me count the ways in which Elder Scrolls Online isn't like Skyrim, Oblivion, or Morrowind – the series’ most recent (and famous) entries. Merchants don't have limited supplies of money, and you don't trudge along as though you're carrying the world once your bags are filled. You can't attack friendly NPCs, and the folks you can kill don't drop the exact items they were wearing. Elder Scrolls Online lets you rummage through most crates and collect items such as skill books, but you can't physically pick them up and drop them at your leisure. Role-play lovers, despair: you can't sit in chairs. Most heartbreaking of all, you can't revisit low level zones and still find a challenge even at the highest levels. That's already a pretty hefty grab bag of caveats that may turn off a chunk of the Elder Scrolls fanbase, but it's a testament to the quality of the work that ZeniMax Online has done here that I felt as though I was playing a genuine Elder Scrolls release nevertheless.

They certainly get the ambiance right, beginning with my arrival on the parched island of Stros M'Kai via a ship in the vein of Morrowind, as well as in the countless NPCs I encountered with fully voiced choice-based dialogue options. Moments of beauty were many, particularly when I made my way to the leafy orcish island of Betnikh around level 5. The serene interface recalls the immersive simplicity of Oblivion's display of health, magicka, and stamina, although number-conscious MMO veterans can activate a more cluttered interface by clicking the Alt button. What little I saw of crafting – cooking, specifically – involved a system of experimentation similar to that found in Skyrim. The questing, too, went far beyond throwaway text to justify killing the pirates of Dwemer I encountered; at times it affected the development of my own story progression. In one, for instance, I helped rescue a thief named Jakarn from prison and then recapture his stolen gem, only to find a grumpy orc named Moglurkal waiting outside the dungeon for us and demanding the return of the jewel. In contrast to other MMORPGs, I had the option to lie about having the jewel, and I took it. Had I not, I wouldn't have seen Jakarn popping in to help me and give me new quests on Betnikh.

My four or so hours of hands-on gameplay in ESO brimmed with moments like these, and the choices felt much more meaningful than the simple light/dark options of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Even better, you don't have to worry about your punky leveling buddy forcing story decisions on you that you don't want to make. I saw this most prominently when a colleague I was grouped with made different decisions as to how to handle a poisoned ship captain; I gave her an antidote and let her live, she let her die. But even though we were grouped and in the same room, I saw events unfold differently, and later, the captain came to my aid when I needed her help. I'm looking forward to seeing how it unfolds throughout the whole game, as I found that ESO offered a rewarding single player storyline that never comes close to ditching social elements so vital to MMOs. In fact, with open mob tagging, shared servers, and spell combos that require two or more players, it promotes it.

Sword Play

The combat feels very much like what you'd find in an Elder Scrolls game; the bad news (particularly for melee-oriented players) there is that means it's subject to the series' signature stiff animations. But here's the thing – I felt as though I was actually hitting stuff. Playing with a sword and shield, I reveled in the familiarity of using my left mouse button to both block and bash for spell interrupts, and immediately found myself holding down the right mouse button for power attacks and merely clicking it for lighter ones. It's fun, but I was dismayed to learn that I couldn't play Elder Scrolls Online as I usually play Skyrim – specifically, as a stealthy archer who whips out either daggers or swords in close quarters. I could use the bow (although the arrow's trajectory looked more like I was tossing it than firing it), I could sneak by pressing Control (although stealth bonuses, I'm told, won't unlock until I've leveled medium armor a ways), but I still found myself frustrated when I couldn't whip out my sword when my quarry finally reached me. For that, I was told, I'd have to wait until level 15 when weapon swapping unlocks.

The concept could work well, particularly since a new action bar pops up every time you equip a new weapon, and Elder Scrolls Online's take on this mechanic offers a far greater range of customization than what you find in Guild Wars 2's similar interface. Indeed, there's another reason why I'm looking forward to trying it out in the future. By far the biggest announcement of the day is that Elder Scrolls Online will feature first-person combat after all, and while my experience with it was limited to watching a minute-long video of an early build set in a graveyard, I loved what I saw, particularly for the promise it holds for archery.

Alas, one reason why the first-person perspective sounds enticing is that I never really warmed to the appearance of the Breton I chose out of the three available races from the Daggerfall Covenant (along with orcs and Redguards). His muddy features suggested he'd be far more at home in Oblivion than Skyrim, but I nevertheless appreciated the way I could make the most minute adjustments to everything from his build to how he squints. Elsewhere, the freedom of development was well-suited to my fairly rushed playthrough to level 7. True to Elder Scrolls (particularly before Skyrim), the three available classes of Dragonknight, Sorcerer, and Templar were more like suggestions than set-in-stone templates, and I appreciated the ease with which I was able to transform my Sorcerer into a bow-wielding, medium armor-wearing ranger. If that isn't Elder Scrolls, I don't know what is.

The Right Moves

It's too early to make judgments, but even in its current form, I could see myself logging into ESO regularly to satisfy my personal craving for more Elder Scrolls content. I'm also happy to see that the design so far seems focused on exploration and questing rather than grinds. There are no raids, after all – "That's not Elder Scrolls," says Game Director Matt Firor – but there are four-man dungeons and three-faction open PvP with sieges in the beleaguered province of Cyrodiil. From the live dungeon run I saw, they play with a dynamism akin to what you find in Guild Wars 2 but with a welcome degree of control, springing Elder Scrolls Online's embrace of the so-called trinity of heals, DPS, and tanks. ”Dark Anchors” – a dynamic grouping component – also open from Molag Bal's plane of Oblivion, but in all honesty, they bore such a striking similarity in both concept and appearance to Rift's titular rifts such that I worry they'll get old fast.

For all the risk that an MMO presents for a franchise that’s been rock-steady in its adherence to the MSORPG (massively single-player role-playing game) discipline, I’ll say this about ESO: I wanted to keep playing. I wanted to find out what lay at the end of an unmarked riddle quest I'd found in a half-buried treasure chest, and I wanted to find adventures lay in wait in the alleys of Daggerfall. All this is but a scratch of what I encountered in Elder Scrolls Online over four hours of gameplay, and if ZeniMax can maintain that drive to keep exploring up to and past the level cap of 50, their creation might just be worthy of the Elder Scrolls title after all.

 Bioshock Infinite Game Trailer

NOTE:  Please check back with us on 3-29-13.  (After the release date) That will give us some time to write a detailed review of the game after it has been tested.  But until then, you can read what we know about the game so far in our review below.

Bioshock Infinite Review

The highly popular video game series Bioshock is about to have a third installment currently due on March 26^rd, 2013. Because the release date has been pushed back before, this version has become one of the most highly anticipated video game releases of the past few years.

The Bioshock Infinite Preview

This third game in the series, Bioshock Infinite lifts itself up from the underwater settings that dominated the first two games to be set among the clouds. The game itself is set in 1912, the floating city of Columbia is held aloft by dirigibles and features a number of beautiful graphics, cityscapes and being set in the clouds brings this game a new feeling unlike the first two entries in the series.

Your character is Booker DeWitt, a former detective who has been disgraced and stumbles across a new case. Your mission is to find a woman named Elizabeth who has gone missing in this flying city of Columbia. Once a beautiful, respected city flying around the world representing America, it has for the past dozen years disappeared into the clouds and has developed a highly armed and dangerous populace.

The Bioshock Infinite Release Date

One of the more troubling aspects about the new entry into the Bioshock series has been the release date being pushed back until March 26^rd, 2013 and no assurance that it will not be pushed back even further. Many Bioshock fans have eagerly awaited this third installment and the previews alone are almost torturous in a sense. In comes as no surprise that “Bioshock” has become the most highly searched keyword in recent months.

The Bioshock Game Trailer

The two minute trailer, released back in August of 2010 was certainly one of the most vibrant and exciting trailers for any video game release. Starting with a classic red herring indicating an underwater city, our view is from a character that is hurled out a window by some unseen force and plummets downward through the floating city of Columbia.

As we fly downward, we see stunning images of buildings supported by dirigibles with that unmistakable atmosphere of the US at the turn of the 20^th century. We briefly get a glimpse of a woman who may be Elizabeth before the same dark force that hurled us out the window pulls her back into the darkness.

A Little Bioshock History

From what we have seen, the previews and trailer along with the past two entries in the Bioshock universe there is little doubt that this entry is poised to be one of the games of the year. With the beautiful setting, attention to detail and robust mystery element that have many different levels, Bioshock Infinite promises to provide plenty of thrills and adventure set inside this fascinating world.

It goes without saying that the fans of the series will flock to the game, but given the delay in the release and the anticipation that is building, it would be no surprise if this version out-sold the previous two and reached an entire new audience of gamers hungry for new challenges.

As one of the most anticipated releases of 2013, Bioshock Infinite promises to be one of the boldest first person video games on the market. With its stunning setting and involving mystery plot, Bioshock Infinite looks to be well worth the wait.

Game Images

Another Game Trailer  -  A City In The Sky  -  Columbia!