Saints Row The Third

Xbox 360, PS3 £49.99, PC £39.99, Volition/THQ

Saints alive! It’s barking mad! Before leaving Stilwater, setting for the game’s two previous outings, an every-which-way crazy bank raid erupts and the Saints – now celebrities – find themselves being asked for autographs amidst hails of gunfire and while downing helicopter gunships; this intro packs more action than some games muster in their entirety.

There follows some barmy character-customisation: has sporting a bunny suit always been your fancy? Who is anyone else to judge? From then on, the water is anything but still. Once in the city of Steelport, you romp around a psychopath’s sandbox trying to conquer the gangland competition and earning dosh and ‘Respect’ RPG upgrades by as many fairly foul means as possible.

What is there to say about a game which defies all that’s sane and holy and will have your partner or parents gazing horrified over your havoc-wreaking shoulder? In a GTA-free year, Saint’s Row The Third more than steps out of the shadow of that bullyboy of a game franchise, carving out its own distinct neighbourhood while defying the dictates of decency (and seemingly the laws of physics, too). Its main story missions, and plenty of nefariousness on the side, never let up: everything from crashing cars in insurance fraud scams, exposing yourself along a public highway (only for a dare, honest!), and just destroying stuff with tanks and helicopters.

Developers Volition have gone so far beyond any semblance of normality in their creative vision it’s a wonder they got their hands free from those straight jackets to program anything. Saint’s Row The Third is huge fun, eschewing such niceties as plot in favour of weapon-toting mayhem and bitch-slapping celebrity culture with a clunking ‘Apoco-Fist’ slam dunk while it’s at it. And it’s all done, gloriously, in the worst possible taste.

Verdict: A mind-boggling, gun-toting, tongue-poking triumph  9/10

Nick Cirkovic

Dark Souls

Xbox 360, PS3 £39.99, From Software/Namco

The tricky part of Dark Souls… is simply staying alive.

This is a tough game. As with its PS3 predecessor Demon Souls, expect fearsome fantasy encounters and the promise of frequent deaths. Do not approach this game unless you are prepared for the challenging adventure that awaits. Hours of intense, deadly combat, a devious open world full of monsters (ranging from rats to towering giants), and the elation of slicing them down to size.

You play an ‘Undead’; escaping from a prison in a mysterious world, you learn of your role in an ancient prophecy to lift a curse that has befallen the land – a curse that will see you constantly resurr-ected upon death, your humanity sucked away, bit by bit. Your first quest is to ring two bells located across this ancient land. This plot develops at a deathly pace. Quite literally.

You are given little guidance and no handholding save for the mysterious glowing graffiti on floors or rare summoning of other players to fight alongside you. The world is surprisingly open and you are encouraged to explore, but be prepared to stumble into the lair of many a beast. Curiosity will definitely kill the cat.

Choosing one of 10 standard archetypes (Warrior, Thief, Pyromancer, and so on), your aim is to kill enemies and absorb their souls. This allows you to level up or purchase equipment. When you die, you drop these souls and resurrect at a bonfire. You must return to where you fell to retrieve your most recently dropped souls but any older ones are now lost.

In the unfortunate tradition of Japanese RPGs, the controls and UI are not the most intuitive. Most of this feels deliberate: the game wants you to be completely prepared for combat at all times, and allows you some D-Pad shortcuts. Trying to pause and choose a different weapon halfway through a battle means you didn’t prepare. But the interface is still clunky and the controls need a combination of three button presses just to make your warrior jump.

Graphics are good, and the environments have a haunting quality – expect dark shadows cast by high castle keeps, dense murky forests and dilapidated ruins. Areas may seem labyrinthine at first but soon reveal clever shortcuts; the brilliant level design provides glimpses and hints to far off treasures or terrifying enemies that lie in wait. Progress is made by lighting bonfires you can respawn at should you die (which you will – and often).

There is a huge variety of unique enemies, each with their own set of attacks and weaknesses. This is no dungeon hack’n slash. Careful management of your stamina and blocking are the keys to success. Your principal action – attacking – displays the greatest range of animations that satisfyingly convey weight, poise, readiness and power. Don’t expect the same level of finesse to extend to the rest of your character. No shimmying along ledges or “Nathan Drake” style gymnastics. Your sole concern is combat, and the art of staying alive.

Sound design opts for a sparse audioscape, making Dark Souls a foreboding, solemn affair. Your character is tight-lipped too, leading to some stilted and one-sided conversations. Plus for a game that relies heavily on reading enemy movements and attack patterns around you, it’s a shame positional audio is so weak.

While it looks and plays like a single-player game, Dark Souls does something more. The wonderful interconnectedness of everyone’s games, via the graffiti visible to other players and the chance to be summoned or invade another player’s game, leads to some of the most memorable moments.

I was summoned by another player to help kill the boss by the first bell tower. Boss defeated, the game returns me to my world. A minute later, I hear the bell tolling in my game. Certain actions performed by players are shared live across games throughout the world. The more you play, the more you will discover the full extent of this concept.

While at times Dark Souls may feel as if it’s draining you of your will to play, perseverance pays off – there is so much to discover. It’s tough, unique and certainly not for everyone, but I can’t deny that its finely-tuned combat and secrets hidden in a world of dark beauty have an enthralling quality that make me want to go back for more.

Verdict: You'll die - a lot - but the rewards are well worth it  9/10

Alexander Norman

Rage

PC £34.99 XBox360 PS3, £49.99, id Software/Bethesda

Imagine the creators of Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein in cahoots with the makers of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout and you could be looking at a match made in post-apocalyptic gaming heaven. Id have brought all of their FPS mastery of yore to the making of Rage, while the Bethesda influence offers a post-asteroid strike Earth in the same condition of grungy, irradiated dilapidation familiar to anyone who has gone walkabout in Fallout 3.

But for all its impressive trappings, for all the fine detail of the non-combatants with whom you come into contact, the wastelands and shanty towns and major conurbations of barter and blood-letting you stroll into, for all the tweaking and upgrading of armour and weaponry you can tinker with here, the fundamental appeal of Rage can be reduced to just three letters: FPS. And when it comes to first person shooters, id have serious previous. Its ultimate success or otherwise as a single player campaign (maybe 10–12 hours overall) is largely down to whether all those trappings either enhance or hamper blasting the crap out of everything that moves with flair and abandon.

The storyline is as denuded as the landscape: you wake up with a major world headache in this one; the only survivor in a cryogenic smash-up, your unfortunate comrades turned to dried fruits in their hibernation pods.

The world has changed; we spent our time worrying about the euro crisis, global warming and the unreal expectations the X-Factor encourages in the disenfranchised young, and then it all just went blam, anyway, when a bloody great asteroid hit.

Mad Max has gone way beyond Thunderdome in this particular future, and there is little else for a former super-soldier to do but drive around – having been invited to do so by a motley assortment of NPCs offering rewards – in souped-up demolition derby wheels and, on arrival, start killing stuff before the stuff starts killing him. Mutants, bandits, motor-cross madmen – they’re all here. As are some stock old faithfuls in the weaponry stakes: pistol, shottie, machine gun, sniper rifle, crossbow, with the addition of more finicky killing friends like explosive bots and the wingstick, a three-bladed boomerang capable of giving enemies a very nasty haircut. Id know how to give their stock weaponry that good, solid clunking ‘kill feel’, and one of the game’s greatest strengths is the enhancements you can add to these vanilla friends: extended ammo clips and Pulse Rounds for the shotgun, ‘Fat Boys’ – juicy, high-calibre rounds – for the pistol, and so on. You can even resort to fisticuffs if you feel like it.

As you would expect from an id Software title, it’s in its gunplay that Rage truly excels. There’s a back-to-basics, arcade feel to the firefights – except that there’s nothing basic about id’s Tech 5 engine, or AI that simply refuses to charge at you in a straight line and will have you climbing up the wall (while it does, literally, that) as you blast precious ammo away. This is splatter-gun savagery of the very highest order. When it’s not having an identity crisis, this FPS is hard to beat. For all its rusty, sun-scarred open environments and its Mega Texture processing, this game is essentially about running down corridors and killing things. Aye, there’s the rub; because it also tacks on a Motorstorm-style driving element and a cursory bit of RPG, which, as the game progresses and levels are recycled, simply gets in the way of the gunplay.

Mercifully, we are spared portentous cutaways and cod-philosophy from game story writers who think they are Dostoyevsky. And if you like driving around in assorted customised wheels, the odd race here and there, then all well and good (the multiplayer is essentially made for boy racers – surprising given the FPS pedigree of the game’s creators – although there is also a two-player co-op mode thrown in). But having to drive to places all the time just to kill stuff has an irksome element of “Are we there yet?” about it. It’s not the sort of repetition you might necessarily welcome; unlike repeatedly shooting things with varying degrees of skill, which you probably will. This is especially true when the driving is a far less sophisticated affair than the shooting. The bandages in your inventory seem somewhat redundant alongside the game’s self-heal element (oh, for the days of Medal of Honor, dying to find those thin-on-the-ground health packs on Omaha Beach), indicative of the cursory RPG nod, but the self-help defibrillator is a neat touch (and rather welcome during a near-death experience when a mutant is breathing oblivion down your throat).

At its best, Rage is the most satisfying brain blaster you’ll have the pleasure to play in a long while (until, perhaps, the imminent arrival of Serious Sam 3 in all its unreconstructed, Arnie-style arcade killing glory). It has a classic FPS feel to it – old, rolled gaming gold when you’ve a gun in your virtual hand – but now burnished by slick, streamlined, up-to-the-minute gaming engine technology. There are moments when Rage incites the wrong sort of anger, but these are quickly forgotten when you plunge into yet another flying-bullets-and-limbs FPS maelstrom.

Verdict: Killing in the first person is all the rage again  7/10

Nick Cirkovic

Dead Island

PC £39.99 Xbox 360/PS3 £49.99 Techland/Deep Silver

Zombies, thousands of 'em. Resident Evil, Call of Duty, Left 4 Dead and hundreds more on the horizon. Infecting our games, spreading from genre to genre. Launching in the wake of the hype surrounding that fantastic award winning promo video, Techland revealed very little about Dead Island’s actual gameplay until close to release. I was surprised to find RPG elements with skill trees and experience points. Slaying zombies results in a burst of blood and numbers adding towards your characters proficiency with certain weapons and survival instincts. You choose one of four survivors who seem immune to the undead infection. Each shares the same story but differs in skills. Off you head into one hell of a holiday, full of selfish NPCs, buckets of blood and many fetch quests.

What’s odd is the occasional difficulty spike and curious cut-scenes and co-op elements. The game can be played single player with drop in and out online co-op (which has been slightly unstable for this reviewer) but I believe the game was clearly designed to be tackled multiplayer. Many of the cut-scenes seem odd when you’ve been playing alone. Up to three other players can drop in and out as if teleporting into your game to help cleanse the island zombies but it makes me wonder if L4D style NPCs were considered at some point? This may explain difficulty spikes and the dubious addition of characters during cut-scenes.

The fictional dead island of Banoi looks so good I'd like to holiday there myself. After they've scraped up the bodies and shampooed the carpets perhaps. The graphics engine does a remarkable job of rendering golden beaches with distant glimmering waves, multi-layered urban environments and dense jungles with sun rays cascading through the foliage. Interior locations are also atmospheric and you sense much attention has been paid to crafting this horrific paradise.

About halfway through you'll recognise familiar zombie cries and your characters curt mission acceptance. Apart for ambient sounds of the resort, jungle or city, the audioscape doesn't develop much. It's nice to hear a wide range of accents from NPCs highlighting the fact it's a holiday resort, however the voice acting (for an island infected by zombies) feels a little stale.

A little FarCry with a dash of Left 4 Dead means you have the perfect package of great looking environments to explore and legions of brain dead holidaymakers to send packing. Dead Island is let down by missions that begin to bore after your seventieth fetch quest and co-op that whilst fun, does little to reward the players other than resurrect a dozen more zombies to dispatch. But fans of hack’n’ slash slaying who don’t mind the stats will no doubt squeeze enough life out of Dead Island to make the trip worthwhile.

Verdict: Discover the other side of paradise in this zombie slasher 7/10

Alexander Norman