Recent reviews by Mountain Man

This is a nearly perfect sequel that improves on its predecessor in almost every way.

"Welcome back, Commander."

XCOM is a game that tests your understanding of probabilities. If you think it should be impossible to miss three 75% chance shots in a row, or that a 95% chance is a guaranteed hit, then you're going to have a bad time. This is a game that will punish you for your mistakes, mercilessly grind your successes under its heel, and basically conspire to beat you at every turn, leading to a tense, addictive experience that will knock you down and keep you coming back for more. It works because while the game is brutal, it's fair, which has inspired fans of the series to coin the phrase, “That's XCOM, baby!”

That was the introductory paragraph for my review of XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within, and in my admittedly biased and perhaps not-so-humble opinion, it remains a perfect summation of the series.

Humans lost the war against the aliens, and now things are more desperate than ever. Whereas XCOM: EU/EW had you attempting to fend off a hostile invasion of Earth, XCOM 2 gives you the more onerous task of taking back the planet. You are once again outmatched, outgunned, and forced to carefully shepherd your limited resources. Everything you do is part of an elaborate balancing act, and no matter what decision you make, you will constantly find yourself wishing you had just a few more resources and a little more time.

The most significant change is in the strategic layer. In the previous XCOM, it was a largely static and passive affair; XCOM 2, on the other hand, places you aboard a mobile base called the Avenger that can fly around the world in pursuit of missions. Each mission takes a certain number of days to complete, and so you must choose if you want to spend, for instance, 3-days attempting to recruit an engineer, or 5-days recovering a supply cache, or 7-days making an important contact with a resistance cell. The most important missions of all, however, are related to the mysterious Avatar Project which appears early in the game and serves as a constantly advancing and nerve wracking doomsday clock. Once it reaches zero, it's game over for you -- and the human race. Completing certain missions will slow the Avatar Project’s progress and give you a little breathing room, but you can't ignore it for long.

Things aboard the Avenger will be immediately familiar to XCOM veterans. Instead of excavating rock, you clear out defunct alien machinery and fill the holes with your own facilities. This is also where you cue up fabrication and research projects and manage your personnel of soldiers, scientists, and engineers. I don't know if there's a “correct” order in which you should do things, but I do know that pursuing course A when, perhaps, you should have gone with B can make things more difficult, or at least it seems to. Should you equip your soldiers with sturdier armor or with weapons that pack more punch? Obviously the correct answer is “both”, but that doesn’t answer the more pressing question of which one you should research now. It's all part of the complicated juggling act known as XCOM.

The tactical game is largely the same with one significant addition: concealment. Since XCOM is now on offense, your soldiers start some missions with this important advantage. As long as they stay out of areas marked by a red eyeball, your troops will remain hidden, which gives you the opportunity to open combat with an ambush. The overwatch mechanic is given a new role here, because when it’s used from a concealed position, your soldiers not only have the opportunity to shoot at enemies scurrying for cover, but there’s also no aim penalty. Used correctly, an overwatch ambush can give you a critical leg-up on your opponent. Of course accidentally exposing your position before you’re ready can have dire consequences, so be careful!

Once you’ve broken concealment, missions play out much the same as they did in the previous game where you and the aliens alternate turns with each unit given two action points each. However, greater objective variety, an expanded roster of deadly foes (some of which you will learn to greatly fear), and the new procedurally generated random maps ensure that you’ll never face the exact same mission twice. Certain mission objectives are paired with a turn limit which denies you the luxury of using “overwatch creep” to slowly crawl towards your goal. You’ll have to play fast and smart and take some risks to complete your mission before the timer expires, but this also leads to some of the game’s best and most tense moments. This feature has received criticism from some players, but I like it and feel that XCOM 2 would be a lesser game without it.

There are five careers available to your soldiers: the Ranger who packs a shotgun and a sword for powerful melee attacks; the Grenadier who can carry multiple grenades and use his weapon to launch them further than your other soldiers can throw; the Specialist who is accompanied by a flying drone and is an expert at hacking into things that other people don’t want him hacking into; the Sharpshooter who is as deadly with his sidearm as he is with his sniper rifle; and the Psi Operative who can wield powerful psionic abilities to aid his allies and befuddle his foes. Each successful mission grants your soldiers experience points and eventually access to new combat skills and cosmetic accoutrements that allow you to give your soldiers their own distinctive look and personality, which makes it even more painful when one of them inevitably biffs it, because it’s not generic soldier #27 but the ever reliable Lieutenant Bill “Mainframe” Rogers, the happy-go-lucky Specialist with 18 missions and a dozen kills under his belt. Once a soldier dies in XCOM, he’s gone for good (unless you’re a dirty rotten save-scummer), so it’s important to always have trained soldiers in reserve.

Most importantly, XCOM 2 is fair. Harsh? Yes. Unforgiving? Certainly. Brutal? Without a doubt. But it is also fair. Just because you missed a 90% chance shot or two doesn't mean the game is cheating. A 90% chance to succeed is, afterall, a 10% chance to fail. But I'm not being entirely honest. Those who have delved into the inner-workings have discovered that the game does cheat a little, but only in the player's favor! For instance, if you have a run of bad luck, the game will quietly increase your chances of success to prevent things from becoming too frustrating.

The point is simply this: anytime the random number generator results in your best soldier getting dropped by an unlucky critical hit, just smile and say, “That's XCOM, baby!”

I will end this review with some general observations: The gameplay feels smoother and more refined in this outing, possibly owing to Firaxis focusing exclusively on the PC. The graphics, too, have received a noticeable upgrade, and I especially like the destructible environments which make it possible to deny your enemies all-important cover by blowing away the wall they're hiding behind (they, of course, can return the favor!).The developers even retained the “action cam” which shows an occasional close-up of your soldiers in action on the battlefield. I think it's a neat feature and was happy to see it return. Feral Interactive was responsible for the Linux and Mac ports, and they did an outstanding job as always (though I can only speak for the Linux version, which is what I run). While some have reported poor performance, I have personally not encountered any notable issues. Finally, the native Steam Controller support is excellent and is my preferred way to play.

Frankly, I can't think of anything negative to say about XCOM 2. I'm writing this in mid-March, and I'm wondering, is it too early to declare this one of the best games of the year?

“That's XCOM, baby!”

XCOM is a game that tests your understanding of probabilities. If you think it should be impossible to miss three 75% chance shots in a row, or that a 95% chance is a guaranteed hit, then you're going to have a bad time. This is a game that will punish you for your mistakes, mercilessly grind your successes under its heel, and basically conspire to beat you at every turn, leading to a tense, addictive experience that will knock you down and keep you coming back for more. It works because while the game is brutal, it's fair, which has inspired fans of the series to coin the phrase, “That's XCOM, baby!”

The premise is this: the earth has been invaded by extraterrestrials, and in keeping with the trope, they are aggressive and more technologically advanced than us mere humans. The XCOM project is an international organization, and you, as its commander, are given the unenviable task of protecting earth from the hostile invaders. Failure to diligently carry out this objective will result in member nations panicking and pulling funding, which means fewer resources at your disposal and eventually defeat if enough nations leave you high and dry.

Gameplay happens in two phases: base management and missions. Your base is depicted in a really cool cutaway view, showing your facilities deep underground. While it's not the most functional presentation, the attention to detail is amazing, and you can zoom right in close and see what your personnel are up to. It's purely cosmetic because all of the real work happens in menus, but it's still fun.

During the base management phase, you can visit the “Situation Room” to get an overview of how close member nations are to panicking, assign research and construction tasks to your science and engineering staff, maintain your fleet of interceptor aircraft and satellites, hire new recruits, customize and train your soldiers, and expand your facilities. It's a balancing act because you have limited resources, and each task takes a period of time to complete, so it's important to prioritize your most critical tasks first.

Once you've organized everything to your satisfaction, you head to Mission Control and click “Scan For Activity” which advances time, completing your various projects and discovering alien activity around the globe. Sometimes there will be multiple simultaneous attacks, but since you can only respond to one of them, you again have to balance various considerations, such as the expected difficulty of the mission, what sort of rewards you will receive upon successful completion, and how close each nation is to bailing on you. This is when the real fun begins as you dispatch your troops to deal with the alien menace.

Before launching a mission, you have one last chance to fine-tune your roster of soldiers (initially four, but you can eventually have up to six) and their equipment, and then it's time to head out to the field. Missions take place in a three-quarter perspective turn-based arena with you and the aliens alternating turns, and each unit gets two actions per turn (however, using a weapon will end that soldier's turn even if it's their first action). This is a perfect realization of Firaxis' “less is more” game design philosophy, because each action you take carries so much weight, and it keeps the pace of battle fast and exciting. Some people criticize this portion of the game, saying that it's too easy to leapfrog your soldiers from cover to cover, putting them in “Overwatch” which gives them a free shot if the enemy moves into their line of fire, and simply waiting for the aliens to come to you, but this isn't necessarily the best or most effective strategy. Sometimes you need to be more aggressive, especially during abduction missions where you have to kill the aliens faster than they can kill innocent civilians; then there are the time-limited “meld” canisters you'll want to collect which appear as part of the Enemy Within expansion (which I strongly recommend). Furthermore, “Overwatch” comes with a to-hit penalty, so there's no guarantee you'll take down the enemy anyway, and even with your most carefully laid plans, things can fall apart in spectacular ways, leading to your soldiers being injured – meaning they'll be out of action until they've healed – or, worse, killed. It's amazing just how quickly the tables can turn, so it's always important to stay on your toes because sometimes even a single mistake can cost you the mission.

As your soldiers participate in – or perhaps I should say survive – missions, they gain experience and are randomly given a specialty such as sniper, support, heavy, and so on. As they continue their careers, you can choose from a variety of special abilities like smoke grenades to make it harder for your enemies to draw a bead on your troops, or allowing your sniper to target any enemies within another soldier's line of sight. You can even customize your troopers' appearance, nationality, the color of their uniforms, what sort of head gear they wear from full battle helmets to stylish fedoras, and even give them personable nicknames. All of this is ultimately a cruel tease, however, because it seems like just as you start to become attached to your individualized soldiers, they get brutally killed in a hail of gunfire and their names enshrined on the Memorial Wall where you can revisit your depressing failures whenever you want.

Ultimately, XCOM is a vicious slog to your own inevitable defeat at the hands of a superior foe – there's a reason the sequel takes it as a given that the humans lost the war – yet despite it all, I love this game. As I said earlier, it's brutal but fair. Yes, there are times you're at the mercy of the “random number generator” gods, but the majority of the time, if you lose, it's your fault. The reason people think the game cheats is because they remember their losses, like that time they missed two 95% chance shots in a row (and, yes, that is statistically possible), but they forget their wins, like the time they took a desperate gamble on a 40% shot and got a lucky critical. That's XCOM, baby!

The presentation is excellent with attractive, detailed visuals and solid sound design. I especially like the “action cam” that is occasionally triggered during missions and gives you a ground-level view of one of your soldiers taking out an alien (or alternatively, an alien taking out one of your soldiers), or showing one of your troopers kicking down a door or vaulting over a counter. It's a nice touch and happens infrequently enough not to wear out its welcome. On the Linux side, Feral once again has done an excellent job giving us Linux fans another top-notch game.

I would also strongly recommend buying the Enemy Within expansion. This is a proper, old school expansion pack rather than a soft sequel in that the new features are seamlessly incorporated into the base game. You get access to more soldier upgrades, more maps, more missions, more enemies – basically a more complete and fleshed out XCOM experience.

Good luck, Commander.

Another epic soundtrack for this epic game.

I had never heard of Sabaton before this DLC was released, so I looked them up. Here's how Wikipedia describes them: "Sabaton is a power metal band from Falun, Sweden formed in 1999. The band's main lyrical themes are based on war and historical battles." This 5-song soundtrack is oddly fitting as you storm your way across the globe seeking world domination, and the lyrics perfectly match the tone of the game. Lyrics like:

A Life Time of War
By kings and queens
Young men are sent
To die in war
Their propaganda speaks
Those words been heard before

Two ways to view the world
Brought Europe down in flames
Two ways to rule
Has man gone insane?

Carolus Rex
All that's thine shall be mine there's no stopping me
All over Europe my rule shall be questioned by none
All I see give to me that is my decree
My will be done

The Lion From the North
A storm over Europe unleashed,
Dawn of war, a trail of destruction
The power of Rome won't prevail,
See the Catholics shiver and shake

The future of warfare unveiled,
Showed the way that we still walk today
Der Löwe aus Mitternacht comes,
Once more he is here for war

Power metal doesn't get much better than this with crunchy guitars, snappy percussion, growling vocals, soaring harmonies, and some surprisingly complex melodies. Sabaton is a tight, musically solid band, and anybody who likes hard rock is sure to enjoy this addition to Europa Universalis IV. If you own the two Guns, Drums, and Steel soundtracks then this is a perfect compliment.

If you're on the fence about buying this, look up some of the songs on YouTube.

So... does the Steam Controller live up to the hype? Yes. Yes it does. :)

The Steam Controller makes a great first impression. The packaging is an attractive blue color with a picture of the Steam Controller on the front. A cardboard sleeve slides off, and the top hinges open to reveal the controller along with a USB cable, a wireless dongle, what's called a "wireless extender" which is basically a single-port USB hub so you can put the dongle out in the open to improve connectivity, and finally two AA batteries. The controller itself has a mini-USB plug allowing it to be used wired or wireless.

The fit and finish of the controller is very good and easily on par with any other controller I've ever used from Microsoft or Logitech, and all the buttons have a firm, crisp feel when pressed. I've seen some people complain that it feels "cheap", but it's not. The actual quality of the materials and construction is as good as any other similarly priced controller on the market, and all the buttons and control surfaces feel solid with nice tactile feedback. The other common criticism is that it's too light weight, but it's actually slightly heavier than a 360 gamepad* (see postscript), so I'm not sure what these complaints are based on. All in all, it seems like a quality piece of hardware.

Ergonomics take a little getting used to. Contrary to almost every other controller design on the market, the hand grips curve up instead of down which seems intended to raise your thumbs above the touchpads to make them easier to operate. If you've used a 360 controller for any length of time then the ABXY buttons will initially not be where you expect them, and those with smaller hands may find reaching the X button to be a bit of a stretch. I personally find that all the controls rest naturally under my fingers; however, I do have larger hands, so your mileage may vary.

It's worth noting that you can't hold the Steam Controller like a 360 gamepad with the handgrips pressed tightly against your palms and your thumbs laying flat across the controls. If you hold it with a looser grip with the bottom paddles resting on the tips of your fingers, your palms away from the hand grips, and the tips of your thumbs used to actuate the controls then the Steam Controller is actually very comfortable with every control surface and button easily within reach, and I've used it for a number of extended play sessions without fatigue.

In addition to the physical click of the buttons, there is the much advertised "haptic feedback", which is subtle but seems to actually work as advertised. For instance, moving the analog stick outside of the deadzone gives a subtle "bump", and sliding across the right touchpad produces a series of "clicks" to simulate the motion and drag of a track ball. Pretty cool, and it's fully configurable through the Steam Controller interface. The Steam Controller also features motion controls which detect the orientation of the controller and are incredibly precise and responsive.

Set-up was plug-and-play; however, you do have to be in Big Picture Mode to gain full functionally, which is a minor hassle but one that's easy to live with. In-game, the controller works as expected, and diving into the configuration options is quick, easy, and reasonably intuitive, and good thing, too, because you're going to spend a lot of time there at first fine-tuning everything to your liking (just press the Steam button on the controller to open the Steam interface from within game; press again to close it). Any input offered by the PC can be mapped to any button or control surface on the Steam Controller, so it's incredibly flexible. You can map multiple commands to a single input – for instance, you can have a full deflection of the analog stick trigger the "run" hotkey in an FPS shooter – and you can even add toggles that give you an almost bewildering array of additional options. For example, you can have your left touch pad set up to simulate the scroll wheel of a mouse but with the click of a button, you can turn it into a four-way direction pad. Or you can use the innovative "Touch Menu" which produces a small on-screen grid of anywhere from 2 to 16 assignable virtual buttons that can be navigated using the touchpad, and each touchpad can have its own Touch Menu! Is anybody out there crazy enough to try and play an MMO with the Steam Controller? Because you probably could!

In fact, I could spend quite a bit of time just discussing all the various options, because this is by far the most configurable input device I've ever used, and Valve keeps expanding the possibilities with every update. There are even some unusual and unexpected features like the ability to deaden the touchpad input when you pull the trigger to prevent your aim from shifting when you shoot, or a double-tap input, so you can, say, zoom in simply by double-tapping the touchpad. Another novel feature is the "joystick as a mouse" for games like Dying Light that show you keyboard prompts instead of controller prompts if they detect a mouse input. This feature allows the Steam Controller input to be read as a joystick so that you get the appropriate prompts without giving up the speed and precision of a mouse.

I recently experimented with using the left touchpad as a joystick input which works much better than I expected. Haptic feedback is used to give you a sense of where you are on the pad, and a strong "bump" lets you know when the virtual joystick has reached full deflection. It's extremely accurate and responsive, and the larger surface gives you superior fine control compared to an analog stick. When the first Steam Controller prototypes were released, they didn't have an analog stick, and everybody went nuts calling this terrible design and exclaiming, "How can you play games without an analog stick!" It turns out that this actually makes for a great experience, and it's quickly becoming the one I prefer.

Let me give you an example of a game that I've played using the Steam Controller, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor:

Mouse-look is bound to the right touchpad; a virtual analog stick is bound to the left touchpad; the analog stick functions as a four-way D-pad; right-trigger soft-pull activates and zooms the bow while a full pull fires it; ABXY and shoulder buttons are default; the left bottom paddle is mapped to X while the right is mapped to A; and finally, the gyro sensor doubles as mouselook.

Just a a few notes about this: Using this configuration works incredibly well. Trying to aim with the bow using an analog stick always frustrated me because lining up a target was extremely fiddly, but aiming with the trackpad and fine-tuning with the gyro is so fast, smooth, and precise that it's almost like using an aim-hack! The haptic feedback produces a real sense of weight, momentum, and drag, so it really does feel surprisingly like using a physical trackball. Mapping A (run/climb) to the bottom-right paddle allows me to keep my right thumb on the trackpad which makes it easy to look around while running and "steer" my character. Using the left touchpad for movement takes a little getting used to, but once I got the hang of it, it's really an amazing experience. Being able to quickly slide your thumb to change direction is faster, more comfortable, and more precise than using a physical analog stick.

Bottom line: the Steam Controller worked with almost every game I tried, including first- and third-person games where it's a worthy alternative to mouse and keyboard. I'm really happy with the Steam Controller.

Valve didn't make just another PC gamepad, they made the PC gamepad!


Postscript
* Weight measured with a digital postal scale

Steam Controller (w/ batteries): 9.9oz / 282g
Seam Controller (w/o batteries): 8.3oz / 234g
Xbox 360 gamepad (wired): 8oz / 229g

It's a novel game but very short. I wouldn't pay full-price for it.

I will attempt to keep this review spoiler free for people who haven't played the game, but I can not promise that I will entirely succeed. If you're interested in The Stanley Parable then take my summary to heart since it's an admittedly unique game that you'll spend a few hours with and then probably never touch again. It lasts for about the length of a motion picture (or one of those self-indulgent “director's cuts”) but it has less replay value than most movies.

So what is The Stanley Parable? It's ultimately a narrative driven exploration game that deconstructs the idea of player choice in video games and exposes it for what it really is: the illusion of choice. No matter what ending you arrive at – and there are several which ironically depend on the player's choices – the game designer is always in control, and this is made quite explicit by the witty script and wonderful voice work of Kevan Brighting playing the role of The Narrator.

If you obey The Narrator every step of the way then you'll “finish” the game in a matter of minutes, and so the meta-game emerges where you continually restart from the beginning in order to find all the branching paths and other secrets, some of which actually depend on restarting the game. But all of this can be accomplished in just a few hours, and once you've gotten your fill, there's really no compelling reason to play it again. It's an interesting experiment in game design and not much more.

But is The Stanley Parable art? Some people insist that it is, but I don't think so even though it perhaps comes closer to art than most games. The very fact that it has rules and explicitly defined goals by way of Steam achievements says to me that it's not art (in one amusing instance, The Narrator goads the player for doing something simply to get an achievement). Art is about free-form expression, and anything that railroads or otherwise arbitrarily limits the audience's experience removes it from the category of art as far as I'm concerned. Is there a “correct” way to listen to a piece of music? Or view a painting? Or watch a movie? Or read a novel? No, but in the case of The Stanley Parable, there is clearly a correct way to play even if the player can go left when The Narrator tells him to go right.

In the end, while I like the idea of the game and can appreciate what the designers have accomplished, it's hard to recommend spending $15 on a short-lived novelty, so consider my “thumbs up” to include the caveat “but only if you buy it at a discount; the bigger the better”.

Postscript
I know there are people who love this game and will strongly disagree with my opinion, so I will invoke the late Roger Ebert's stock defense: Did I, or did I not, accurately describe the game?

A darn good action game that borrows heavily from the Batman Arkham series but is all the better for it.

You could be forgiven for calling this game Arkham: Middle Earth. It has so much in common with Rocksteady's Batman games that you would swear that protagonist Talion is a distant relative of Bruce Wayne. The combat controls are virtually identical, the map looks suspiciously similiar, orcs that you can interrogate for special information are marked in green like the Riddler's goons, and you can even enter the spirit world to find clues and spot enemies through walls, very much like Batman's "detective vision"! I don't say this as a criticism but only because the similarities are impossible to ignore. But you know what? It works. This is a fun and compelling game, and it's always a treat to play in J.R.R. Tolkien's universe (although the look and feel of this game is definitely more influenced by the Peter Jackson films than Tolkien's novels, a fact that may bother purists, but would a purist even be playing this game in the first place?).

You as play Talion, a Ranger captain who lives and works near Mordor's Black Gate at a period set some time between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, but when his family is killed by Sauron's minions, he somehow finds himself cursed with the inability to die, or rather the inability to stay dead, and so he sets out to seek revenge. The story is told through a series of rather excellent cutscenes featuring terrific animation and top-notch voice acting. And even though the story is standard fare for a video game (it's no Tolkien, I'll say that much), I actually found myself drawn to the central protagonist simply because of the high-quality of the cutscenes. It's a pity that there's no apparent way to rewatch them without playing the whole game from the beginning.

I would describe this as an emergent action game. It's open-world in the sense that you're free to go wherever you want whenever you want, and you can complete quests in the order of your choosing, but there are really no significant choices to be made, and despite the nice scenery, there's no sense of exploration and discovery, either. Everything is clearly marked on your map, and highlighting a point of interest gives you a marker that guides you to your destination. Furthermore, individual locations are fairly generic, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to get around the gameworld on your own without the markers to guide you since one area of the map looks very much like any other area. Even after 30+ hours of play, I never developed the sense of familiarity with the setting like I did in any of Bethesda's open-world games, or even the Borderland series. Shadow of Mordor is not the sort of game where you discover secrets or happen across a new vista.

But that's not to say the game itself is not compelling and fun. The free-form combat is very smooth and engaging with great animations, although the kill moves are quite brutal (the M rating is well-deserved), and you have a wide variety of maneuvers to help you dispatch your foes. You can even mount certain wild beasts and fight from their backs. It can be a lot of fun wandering into a band of twenty orcs and emerging without a scratch, although this does take some practice. As you complete missions and murder orcs, you will gain skill points that can be used to unlock new abilities for Talion, but it's pretty straightforward, and you'll easily have every skill and special ability available to you by the end of the game. You can also collect special runes from dispatched orc captains to add to your weapons (a sword, a dagger, and a bow) that introduces a level of customization to your character. Talion is a nimble fellow, too, and can scale virtually any cliff or wall he encounters, a useful ability when he wishes to remain unseen, and he can use certain parts of the environment to his advantage, like upsetting a nest of morgai flies to scatter his foes and make it easier to reach an objective without raising the alarm.

I think what really sets Shadow of Mordor apart from the crowd is its nemesis system which is almost a game in and of itself. The world is populated by a couple dozen persistent orc captains and warchiefs who represent your greatest combat challenges. If one of them kills you, or if he successfully flees from you in combat, he will increase in power and be harder to kill the next time, so you have to consider whether or not engaging a captain is worth the risk since repeated failures could lead to creating a high-level orc who will be very difficult to put down. Furthermore, if a standard orc kills you, he will be immediately promoted, so the roster of captains is constantly evolving. To help even the odds, each captain has weaknesses that can be exploited, but you can only learn about these weaknesses by interrogating certain low-level orcs known as "worms" who are identified by a green icon. Sometimes a captain might be impossible to defeat without knowing his weaknesses, so interrogating worms is often essential for success. And it gets more complicated from there.

The orc captains have their own internal power struggles, and you will see them rise through the ranks by betraying each other, or hosting feasts and hunts to raise their standing. These events generally happen "off camera" while you're out on your adventures, but you can also interrupt them by activating procedurally generated mission markers that will give you the opportunity to kill the captains to keep the orcs in turmoil and weaken Sauron's army. You eventually gain the power to dominate an orc's mind so that he does your bidding, and a major part of the game revolves around turning the orc army against itself and helping your branded captains rise to the level of warchief.

Shadow of Mordor's visuals are very attractive with clean textures, realistic weather and time-of-day effects, and superb animations, so I have no complaints there. Performance in Linux is pretty good, and although benchmarks show that it lags behind Windows in terms of raw speed, I still found it smooth and responsive, so hats off to Feral Interactive for another fine port.

So bottom line, this is an enjoyable and well-made game that does exactly what the developers set out to do and will give you dozens of hours of entertainment romping through Tolkien's Middle Earth sandbox and murdering orcs. And I haven't even mentioned the volumes of canonical Middle Earth lore that Monolith managed to cram into this game.

It's easily the weakest of the Arkham series, but it's still a decent game in its own right.

Developer Warner Bros Games Montréal must have been both excited and trepidatious about playing in Rocksteady's Arkham sandbox. How do you follow in the footsteps of two of the greatest games (Arkham Asylum and Arkham City) released in the past decade? Well, predictably, they played it safe and low-key. This is a by-the-numbers Arkham game that feels surprisingly unrefined despite the fact that it's the third game in the series.

Warner Bros Games Montréal got the basics right, at least. The combat is as engaging and addictive as ever, but the developers did change things up slightly. Unlike the previous two games, you can only counter enemies who display the "I'm gonna hit you!" lightning bolt indicators above their heads with Batman's counter move (default is Y on the Xbox 360 controller) whereas Asylum and City let you use your basic attack to disrupt a thug who was getting ready to punch; furthermore, you can't cancel an attack in progress to perform a counter move. There are also moments when Batman can be hit during uninterruptable animations -- such as a special takedown -- where in previous games, the attackers would politely wait until Batman had finished before continuing their assault. The upshot of these changes is that you have to be more aware during combat and know when it's safe to use certain attacks. This is what people are complaining about when they say that Warner Bros Games Montréal "messed" with the combat timing, because the fisticuffs feel slightly more stilted and less free-form than the earlier games. Some people actually enjoy the increased challenge this brings to the table, and while the combat is still fun at a core level, I can see why some folks are disappointed. This is one of those “individual mileage will vary” sort of things. Predator challenges, on the other hand, are identical to the previous games, so there's really not much to say about them (that's a good thing).

Moving Batman around his environment is still basically entertaining as you glide and grapple and swoop your way across Gotham City -- although I can't figure out why Warner Bros Games Montréal changed how the grapple launcher works. In Arkham City, it would propel Batman above buildings making it easy to get around; in Origins, it gives Batman a little extra momentum but doesn't launch him into the air, so you spend most of your time flying between buildings instead of over them. It's one of those little things that changes the overall feel of the game for the worse.

And there is a lot of ground to cover in this game, so you'll be gliding and grappling and swooping a lot, which brings up one of the game's weaknesses. This is a massive game world, but there's so little to see and do that the size feels like a waste. Criminals, and only criminals (where are all of Gotham's law-abiding citizens?), cluster in small, infrequent groups. There are Enigma packets (this game's Riddler trophies) scattered here and there but certainly not with the same density as Arkham City, and there are no Riddler puzzles to solve, where you have to decipher the Riddler's clues and scan the appropriate pieces of scenery. As the game progresses, you do get a variety of objectives which essentially boil down to finding something and destroying it (Batman apparently doesn't have a lot of finesse), but there's little reason not to make a beeline from one objective to the next since there are so few distractions along the way. Basically, it's just a big, empty game world that's darker and more drab than Rocksteady's games. Let me summarize it this way: the game world is twice the size of Arkham City, but it feels like there's only half as much content.

The one new innovation in Arkham Origins is the crime scene feature which has Batman donning his detective cap and analyzing a scene to find clues and piece the evidence together. This probably sounds familiar, but unlike previous games, it's a less passive affair and requires the player to scroll backwards and forwards through a holographic reconstruction of the crime in order to find evidence, such as where a briefcase might have landed when a victim was thrown off a roof. The reconstruction is created in the 3D space inhabited by Batman, so the player can walk around and view it from different angles, which is pretty cool. It works well, and it's actually a lot of fun. It would have been great if Warner Bros Games Montréal could have done more interesting things like this in order to make their game stand out from the crowd.

Warner Bros Games Montréal's other big addition to the franchise are the numerous centerpiece boss battles, and it does seem they put more care and attention into them than Rocksteady, but the end result is, unfortunately, more tedious than exciting with each encounter wearing out its welcome long before the villain is subdued. I really didn't mind the boss battles in the earlier Arkham games because even though they were simpler in comparison, they were over quickly and didn't drag down the overall pace of the game.

The voice acting is strong despite the absence of veterans Kevin Conroy (Batman) and Mark Hamill (Joker). Roger Craig Smith does such an outstanding job imitating Conroy that most people probably won't even know the difference, and Troy Baker's Joker, while not a spot-on Hamill impersonation, is still pretty darn good -- I suppose the internal logic here is that it's a younger Joker, so he's not as grizzled and weathered as the older version played by Hamill. The rest of the cast turns in topnotch performances as well, so no complaints there.

The story, well, what can I say, it's a video game story (as I always say, if I want a good story then I'll read a book). It's a lot more focused than Arkham City but not necessarily more engaging or interesting. It features a younger Batman only two-years into his nocturnal career, distrusted by police but on a first-name basis with every major criminal in Gotham. I forgot about the chronology and was surprised early on when the caped crusader was attacked by police officers who still consider him an outlaw. In the end, the story serves its purpose and gives some context and motivation for Batman's actions in the game world, and that's all I really expect from a video game story. (The most hilarious moment for me was when Batman had to "sneak" into Gotham Police HQ, telling Alfred, "I have to get in and get out without being seen." He then proceeds to beat the crap out of every police officer in the building. Like I said, Batman doesn't have a lot of finesse.)

So is the game worth playing? I'm giving it a thumbs up only because Steam doesn't allow a neutral rating. It's fun for the same reasons that Arkham Asylum and Arkham City are fun, but it has so little content and adds so little to the Arkham formula (apart from the crime scene analysis) that you really won't miss out on much if you skip Origins and jump straight to Arkham Knight. If you're contemplating this as your first foray into the Arkham universe then I strongly recommend you start with Asylum since it's a much better game. If you're a completionist or just can't get enough of Batman then buy this when it's on sale. It's not a bad game, all things considered, it's just an average one in a series of exceptional games.

(This is a review for "Guns, Drums and Steel Music Pack" for Europa Universalis IV)

Awesome grand strategy game
+
Awesome Nordic heavy metal
=
Awesomeness overload!

This is one epic soundtrack. And, yes, it is heavy metal, a big-hair, head-banging reimagining of the original soundtrack, so don't buy this expecting authenic period music, or you will be disappointed like the people giving this DLC a thumbs down (and who apparently didn't read the product description very carefully, because it says quite clearly that it is "metal music").

The main theme is replaced, but in-game, you get a mix of the original songs and these metal remixes, so it's rather eclectic. And if you ever get tired of it, just disable the DLC from the launcher.

If you're unsure, search "guns drums steel" on YouTube where you can listen to the entire soundtrack and know what you're in for. I personally think it's pretty cool.

It's just another LEGO game, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

If you've ever played a LEGO game before then you already know exactly what to expect from LEGO The Lord of the Rings. There are no surprises here. Having said that, this is a fun and well-made game that fans of The Lord of Rings films will enjoy. Of particular interest is the overworld which allows you to walk from one end of Tolkien's Middle Earth to the other with no loading screens. Not at first, of course, since certain parts of the map will be locked off until you've completed the requisite story level, but once you've finished the story mode, you can walk from Hobbiton straight through to Mount Doom without stopping. It's not to scale, so the trip will only take you a few minutes, but it's still very cool, and the sights along the way will be familiar to fans of both the books and the movies.

The individual levels are very enjoyable and contain lots of puzzles and secrets, most of which can't be accessed your first time through since they require the right character, so you'll want to go back and play them again in Free Play mode which gives you access to every character on your roster; however, you may want to wait until you've beaten the game because then you'll have every character you need to tackle every challenge, and finishing the game isn't hard since it's virtually impossible to fail. If your character dies, you lose some studs (LEGO currency that you use to buy special unlockables) and your character is immediately resurrected on the spot, so even the most ham-handed gamer should have no trouble being able to make it to the final cutscene.

LEGO games are known for their humor, but I was somewhat surprised at just how funny these cutscenes are. Since they use dialog from the movies themselves, the animators had to be creative, and there are endless visual gags like the possessed King Theoden briefly nodding off while talking and Grimma Wormtongue elbowing him in the ribs to get him talking again, or Lurtz taking down Boromir with bananas and chickens fired from his bow (trust me, you'll never look at Borormir's climatic scene the same way again). Who knew that the films' relentless severity lent themselves to so much humor?

The game looks good with its colorful, high resolution textures and lighting effects. We're not talking Arkham City quality, of course, but it does the job, and the music is great because it's taken straight from the Howard Shore soundtrack, so no complaints there. I did run into several minor glitches throughout the game, such as characters getting stuck in the level geometry or suddenly freezing in place while the game carried on around them forcing me to restart from a checkpoint, but this was relatively rare. Finally, multiplayer works great with the innovative dynamic splitscreen, and my boys had fun playing through the game with me. I might even go so far as to say that this is the recommended way to play.

Buy this game if you're a fan of LEGO games and The Lord of the Rings, but if you've had your fill of LEGO games then move along because there's nothing to see here.

A decent enough adventure game and a treat for fans of Sherlock Holmes.

I won't say this is the best adventure game I've ever played, but I enjoyed it for what it was worth. The fact that I'm a big fan of Sherlock Holmes did help me look past some of the game's rougher spots, but I'm not sure someone else would be so forgiving. The overall narrative, suffice it to say, is no match for the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle originals, but it's enough to hold the game together, which is really the most you can expect from a video game story.

I called this an adventure game, but I think "puzzle game" might be a more fitting description. Who knew the denizens of Victorian London were so fond of locking their secrets behind intricate logic puzzles? You will encounter around two-dozen puzzles throughout the course of completing the game, and while I didn't find the puzzles particularly difficult once I understood them, the rules and operations of the puzzles were sometimes vague, so it wasn't always obvious to me what I was supposed to do, or if it was obvious, it wasn't obvious exactly how I was supposed to go about doing it. I suppose that's part of the gameplay experience, figuring out exactly what the puzzle is and how to solve it, but there were times I honestly wasn't sure if this was intentional or simply poor game design. No matter, walk throughs are easy enough to find on the internet these days if you need a prod in the right direction; alternatively, the game does present the option to simply skip a puzzle if you're well and truly stumped, but what self-respecting gamer would choose that route?

There are also the more traditional adventure game puzzles that have you exploring your environment for clues, picking up everything you possibly can, and occasionally combining various objects in your inventory so you can proceed. Thankfully, the game has a "Sixth Sense" feature where you press the spacebar to momentarily have points of interest highlighted for you which eliminates the frustrating pixel hunt.

The presentation is a somewhat mixed bag. The environments and character models are generally oustanding with great attention to detail and lots of atmospheric touches that really make Victorian London come to life. The overall character animations are good for the most part, but the lipsynching is atrocious with the characters frequently flapping their lips for a few seconds after delivering their lines, which I found distracting, and the voice acting is average at best. I never really took to Watson's melodramatic delivery where every line is spoken with an awkward urgency, and Holmes speaks in a drone, sounding almost bored at times, as if the whole business of crime solving no longer interested him. Curiously, the bit players you encounter throughout the game are often better acted and sound more convincing then the stars of the show.

The game controls well enough with a mouse and keyboard, although the mouse movements felt somewhat sluggish even with the sensitivity turned up to maximum in the settings. I played mostly from the third-person perspective which gives you a good view of your surroundings, and while a traditional adventure game perspective is offered, I found the controls too awkward (although people with a gamepad seem to have good success playing from this perspective). I'd like to pass on a couple of tips on controlling the game since I'm not sure if it's mentioned in the manual: 1) you can use the mouse wheel to quickly scroll through individual items in your inventory; this is a lot faster and more convenient than opening your inventory screen, although you still have to open it if you want to combine one object with another; 2) if you have a bunch of hotspots clustered together, you can click the left-mouse button to highlight one and then use the WASD keys to cycle through them until you've highlighted the one you want; click the left-mouse button a second time to activate it; otherwise it's just way too fiddly to try and maneuver your character into the right position.

I realize this review might seem overly critical, but none of the criticisms I've noted are fatal, and I did spend an enjoyable 14-hours completing this game. With the noted exceptions, the puzzles are clever and fun to solve, and I have to say again that I found the art design to be terrific making each area a joy to explore, particularly when I came across obscure references to the original Conan Doyle stories. If you're a fan of adventrue games, and especially Sherlock Holmes, and you think you could look past the weaknesses I've noted, then I would recommend this game.