Game - Call of Duty: Ghosts (Xbox One)

Duty called, but I pretended I was out.

"What's the difference between a Taliban training camp and an Afghanistani primary school?"

"I don't know, I just fly the drone."

This is the video game version of that joke.

Odin wasn't known for his lightning-hurling proclivities but FF: The
Spirits Within had already taken Zeus. Twelve years ago.

In a series which, of late, could be accurately renamed Morally Questionable Drone Strikes, Infinity Ward, Raven, Neversoft and whatever other deranged mish-mash of former Activision employees is making Call of Duty this week have produced the ultimate long-range power fantasy. Set twenty minutes into the future, the Middle East has been destroyed (What? All of it?) by some sort of nuclear accident, and the oil-producing nations of South America have banded together to form a Federation - and, naturally, because they're an empire-building global superpower that isn't the US of A, they're immediately and inexplicably evil and begin invading and conquering other countries for their natural resources: I don't know if this is a breathtaking lack of self-awareness or a confused attempt at satire. But protagonist Logan and his brother and father running around the shifting and crumbling San Diego as it's destroyed by orbital bombardment at least looks very impressive, and is a nice showcase of the sort of destruction that the next generation of CoD can bring us. It's just the whole "making it all actually mean something" bit that Ghosts fruitlessly bashes its head against like a sparrow on a well-cleaned window.

To kick off the story, America has constructed the space-based superweapon from G.I. Joe: Retaliation that drops tungsten rods and can obliterate whole cities from complete safety at the press of a button. The implications of America building and having sole control of such a weapon are - I should hope - deeply unsettling, but don't worry: it's only a deterrent, and a necessary tool of freedom-preservation. However, when it's hijacked by the Federation in a genuinely-impressive space-based prologue segment that blends Gravity and Moonraker - which is sadly only used once more in the story - it suddenly becomes a dangerous totalitarian tool of sudden and unavoidable oppression that cannot be allowed to exist. This sudden and bizarre determination to paint America as the poor shy little victim who keeps getting wedgied and having its lunch money stolen by the big nasty world would be hilarious if it weren't played so wrong-headedly straight.

The titular Ghosts: the first video game franchise to be birthed
from what some guy in another game wore on his head.

US military grunt Logan Walker and his brother Hesh (what sort of name is that?), two brothers stamped out from the 'Generic White Guy Protagonist' machine, begin the game under the command of their father Elias, fighting the Federation alongside the rest of the rank-and-file, but soon find themselves inducted into the secretive, legendary 'Ghosts' unit - of which their father used to be a member - in order to bring the fight to the Federation and their mysterious military commander Rorke: a former Ghost. Personally, the problem with this kind of plot in a 'gritty' and 'realistic' (snigger) shooter is that there are no supermen. Give them the daftest codenames and the ponciest balaclavas you want, the Ghosts are still just guys, and calling you elite when you play them feels as ridiculous as it is. Logan doesn't run any faster or jump any higher or shoot any better when he's a Ghost than he does when he's a grunt, because all that's determined by the player, so what the hell's the point in trying to pretend that being a Ghost makes a blind blithering bit of difference to anything? The Ghosts don't have any more impressive technology or ruthless methods or special skills than the SAS or the Rangers or even the FSB from the other games. So what's the point of them?

After the orbital devastation, San Diego is looking a little ruff.

For a good while, Call of Duty was very good at avoiding the "America! EFF YEAH!" school of whizz-bang shooty-fun. The boots on the ground in Modern Warfare were very oo-rah and aggressively patriotic but generally seemed to have their hearts in the right place and it wasn't really their fault that their headlong charge into danger resulted in dramatic nuclear annihilation for them, a city and, shockingly at the time but setting a rather predictable trend for the series, the player character. Ultimately, it was left to the quiet and elite throat-slitters of the British SAS to quietly clean up the mess, but it wasn't "Britain! BLOODY HELL YES!" either because they were just a tad sociopathic about the whole thing.

Here, it's essentially America Vs Those Dirty Underhanded Brown People, except the enemy leader is of course former-Ghost Rorke, because even a french-fries-and-freedom hating coalition of foreign superpowers need whitey's help to win their wars for them. Rorke has all the hallmarks of a very effective villain: he's always several steps ahead of the heroes; he has a seemingly endless arsenal and army; he has a doomdsay weapon and a suitably villainous mode of transport; he's always doing cool, villainy things, and - in grand Call of Duty interactive cutscene tradition - tanks the most absurd injuries and keeps going.

This screenshot is so totally dull I can't even think of a decent
caption for it.

The thing is, Rorke is just too good. He's not too good in the way that Batman or Superman are just too good, but in the way that Resident Evil's Alice is just too good. His strength, resourcefulness and constant victories come not from genuinely effective villainy or important story stakes-raising, but from the simple fact that the writers unaccountably fell in love with their bland creation and refused to allow him ever to lose - like a child in the playground who keeps bringing out his 'everything-proof shield'. He feels like a Frankenstein's monster of the successful bits of other villains, at one point shamelessly ripping-off wholesale Bane's jaw-dropping plane hijacking from The Dark Knight Rises, with the added ridiculousness that player character Logan is still inside the hijacked plane when Rorke detaches the cables and drops it God-knows-how-many feet to the ground, and somehow survives.

Ghosts is at its best in the space and scuba sections that give
you a whole extra dimension of movement to consider when
picking your fights. Pity that's about fifteen minutes in a six
hour campaign.

Do you remember the sequence in Modern Warfare 2 when Soap, alongside Captain Price, stalks through a snowy alpine forest with a silenced sniper rifle, picking off patrols and guard dogs while avoiding detection? And do you remember the even better version of that in one of the Spec Ops missions that asked you to do the whole thing without Price's voice in your ear telling you who to shoot, and when, and when it was safe to move? Well, the ludicrous plane-drop leads into a wonderful sequence where, cut off and wounded, you have to proceed through a lush jungle to reconnect with your squad while avoiding Federation patrols who outnumber and outgun you in every conceivable way. You have a suspiciously Alien-like motion tracker to help spot incoming soldiers, but the making of the level is the cramped and brilliantly-lit jungle, in which you can practically taste the pulpy, orchid heat rolling over you out of your screen, and which is designed less like a level and more like, well, an actual jungle, with no linear paths and no landmarks or obvious bits of lighting and signposting to point you in the right way. So you creep forward slowly, stopping and looking around desperately whenever a little red dot blips on your tracker or a shrub rustles a few feet away, making your way painstakingly towards the green blob vaguely in the direction of your objective. It's a masterfully tense sequence - one of a sadly meagre few in the game - that offers something a little different from the typical run-and-gun of most levels.

Someone clearly got a bit confused when ordered to wear his
shell-suit in the combat zone.

As for the gameplay, well, what did you expect? It's Call of Duty. The shooting is, as ever, lightning-quick and the guns feel satisfyingly punchy and weighty bits of kit. You advance through the levels, pressing the left trigger to look down the sights at the seemingly-endless assortment of brown people the game spawns for you and pressing the right trigger to make them fall over until there aren't any more coming, with the now de rigeur breathing spaces where you crouch behind a stack of boxes and fiddle with a PDA to remotely snipe/bomb/dog-attack, which turn up just frequently enough to be predictable but just infrequently enough to be more of a gimmick than a bona fide game mechanic. There's a tank mission, and a slightly disjointed-feeling helicopter assault, a scuba bit with insta-kill sharks, an abseiling-down-the-side-of-a-building-while-shooting-through-the-windows bit that lets you catch a falling photocopier with your face, and one shining but brief moment in the penultimate mission where you go into space again, and then back down to terra firma for an ending containing the requisite number of vehicle crashes, cutscene injuries, scenes of stumbling blurrily around with blood on the screen, alternating LT and RT to crawl towards something and Pressing X to Not Die.

And then, to cap it all off, writer's pet Rorke emerges from the same submerged trainwreck you did, having spent several more minutes under than you did during your near-drowning experience but apparently none the worse for wear from that or the .44 slug you put in him, and abducts your helpless form to render the ending more or less utterly futile and make way for a sequel that a story this predictable, frustrating and, frankly, disconcertingly racist probably isn't ever going to get. Or at least shouldn't, if there's any justice in the world.

The evolution of the Call of Duty series can be marked out by the
sheer volume of superfluous bric-a-brac it's possible to have stuck
to your guns increasing with every instalment.

The first Call of Duty for a new console generation, Ghosts had the opportunity to truly do something new to the franchise, especially after the bloated extravagance of MW3 couldn't really think of anything to bring to the table other than far too much more of what MW2 had. At the very least it could have tried to think of something new to say about war. Instead, the usual flag-and-bald-eagle-waving, it's-not-evil-if-it's-us-doing-it patriotism nonsense gets trotted out in service of a short but meandering, surprisingly uneventful and certainly uninvolving storyline, with a pointless protagonist and his cardboard brother, and a villain who lacks even a tenth of the personality of a Shepherd or a Makarov but unaccountably has ten times the survivability so we'll probably have to deal with the dull git again at some point.

5.5/10 - Instead of resurrecting the franchise, the appropriately-subtitled Ghosts just lingers past its welcome and rattles the old chains some more.

Film - Hear My Song (1991)

The man that makes the blarney.

Hear My Song is a gentle, whimsical Irish musical comedy co-written and directed by Peter Chelsom (Hannah Montana the Movie, but don't let that put you off) - very, very, very loosely based on a true story. It concerns a failing huckster of a Liverpool music hall impresario, Micky O'Neill, whose already-on-the-rocks establishment - in which his best act is impersonator Franc Cinatra, whose only resemblance to Old Blue Eyes is his hat - comes under threat of closure at just the same instance as his relationship with his girlfriend Nancy takes a sharp nosedive into "it's complicated", while her mother looks at him like a slimy con-artist who doesn't deserve to lick Nancy's boots. His solution to both these problems? Find Josef Locke, famed Irish tenor who fled the English taxman back to his native shores (there, that's the first true part of the film) - leaving behind "a beauty queen, a Jaguar sportscar, and a pedigree dalmation, all of them pining" - and bring him back for a command performance. Except the man Micky books as "Mr X" isn't Josef Locke (and a mysterious man called Mr X who many believed to be Josef Locke is the second and final true part. Told you it was 'loosely'.). Micky is fooled by the impostor but Nancy's mother, the beauty queen (Shirley Anne Field, The Pink Panther Strikes Again) left behind by Locke, isn't, and Micky's relationship and business are ruined. The only thing for it? Travel to Ireland, meet up with an old friend, and go on an endearingly quirky rural journey to find the real Josef Locke.

'Smoking in a pub' makes Hear My Song an Unintentional
Period Piece.

Leading the talented cast is co-writer Adrian Dunbar (Ashes to Ashes, The Crying Game) who plays Micky with an affable oily roguishness - like an Irish Han Solo, but with fewer lasers and more lying. From an actor who seems to have largely - before this role and since - played sleazy, cold-hearted criminals, it's a surprisingly amiable performance that keeps the audience on his side even as they wince at his spiralling lies and tut at his contemptibly obsequious wheeler-dealing, and the script happily piles on slice after slice of humble pie for him to eat - or be force-fed - until he's finally been knocked low enough (and then down a few more rungs for good measure) to be worthy of his vivacious girlfriend and his own business. His  misadventures with compatriot Fintan O'Donnell as they meet with unhelpfulness and suspicion from the rural Irishmen they ask for information about Locke, and then are given the runaround by Locke himself and his cronies, result in more than their fair share of humiliation and comic injuries, including but not limited to bar fights, alarmingly unsafe impromptu dentistry, near-blinding, and almost being thrown off a cliff. Throughout these scenes, Dunbar demonstrates a finely-judged willingness to look ridiculous and be humiliated in the role without ever sending it up. Dunbar allows the true nuance of the performance to shine through in his scenes with Locke and later with Nancy, as Micky realises that humility and sincerity can be more persuasive than the silverest of tongues.

"If Locke doesn't want to listen to my offer, perhaps I'll have
to leave this enormous cow's head in his bed."

Joining him as Fintan is stalwart Northern Irish actor James Nesbitt (Murphy's Law, The Hobbit), who only misses out on being the incompetent comic relief to Dunbar's straight man by dint of the pair of them actually being near-matched in buffoonery, though Fintan is less devious and slippery than Micky and consequently comes in for significantly less abuse. The pair abound with Irish wit and one-liners as they wheedle, coax, charm and beg their way past unhelpful Irish locals to the even more unwelcoming tax-exiled tenor himself. Micky wryly implores Locke to think of the effect his return would have on his female admirers, assuring him that "there won't be a dry seat in the house". In another instance, he admonishes Fintan that he is "drivin' like a madman". "You think this is bad?" his friend replies, "You should see me when I'm on me own!". Micky's reply is to remark that "sure I'd hate to be with you when you're on your own". Despite such dry deadpanning, they also demonstrate an affinity for slapstick in a scene in which, surely inspired by the old joke about the men who find an enormous hole in the ground while out walking in the woods, they throw a log down an ineffably deep well, and then fall over themselves trying to stop the cow tied to the other end of a very long rope following it down.

"Is that a bird or a plane, Mr Luthor?!"
"Wrong film, Ned."

Appearing as the main man himself is American actor Ned Beatty (Superman the Movie, Deliverance, Silver Streak), who I presume was chosen for his visual resemblance to Locke - though his Irish accent is perfectly serviceable as well, even if he doesn't actually do the singing parts himself. Generally unseen until the final third of the movie, Beatty damn-near steals the film away from the leads as the tax-exiled and reclusive Locke, whose large profile and initial menace upon his discovery make him resemble nothing so much as an unwisely-awoken bear. Locke is technically a criminal by English law, and so his introduction is swiftly followed by his threat to drop the investigative duo from a cliff, but Beatty plays the role with a twinkle in his eye and it's hard to say what's threat and what's showmanship. He swiftly warms to Micky and Fintan after (what else?) having a drink with the pair, and he agrees to come back to England with Micky for one last sell-out performance to revive his failing club. There's a very nice scene where he reflects with Micky on the difficulty of living up to the legendary image that has grown up around him. Spotting some young women of the kind who used to scream for him at the music halls, he asks "Do you see those girls, Micky? Would you like to be responsible for their dreams?". It's a sobering scene, as Locke reflects on the danger in a comeback that might expose his failings now that his old fans' rose-tinted glasses have worn out, but it's appropriate that the faded romantic Locke is ultimately the one who pushes Micky into realising the importance of winning back Nancy. The singing itself, dubbed by Vernon Midgely, is utterly fantastic, and while Irish tenors may be something of a niche product to sell to today's music buyers, the songs chosen to represent Locke's oeuvre here are pleasant and melodic but also rich and powerful. William "Porkins" Hootkins (Star Wars: A New Hope) has a small, amusing role as the comically theatrical show-off Mr X, and David McCallum (NCIS, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) crops up throughout as the detective who's made it his life's work to track down the elusive Locke, and has started to lose his grip on sanity for his troubles.

 

Nancy had always found Micky's large ears his most 
fascinating feature.

Fresh from drama school in the small but key role of Micky's dentist girlfriend Nancy is the sparkling Tara Fitzgerald (Brassed Off, Sirens), who probably achieved the fastest typecasting of any actress in history when she leapt out of bed, very naked, just minutes into the film when an incensed Nancy storms out of the bedroom after Micky fails to adequately convince her of his devotion. It's a genuinely funny scene, and Fitzgerald impresses with both her bravery and her comically furious delivery - hysterically shrieking "vice versa!?", Micky's feeble rejoinder to her mid-coital cries of "I love you!", as she pulls her dress on and runs off into the night - but a cynic might say (and he will) that it's hard to shake the feeling that Fitzgerald is being used as a "thank you for watching" present for the audience. I'm sufficiently well-adjusted that I don't feel the need to sign myself 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' whenever a thespian tackles a scene in the nude - one could hardly appreciate Fitzgerald's body of work if it were otherwise - but there's a time and a place and it just doesn't sit quite right in this quirky and whimsical oddball of a film. But, in the interest of balance, I can't say the film really serves the character all that badly either. Nancy is an unusually strong rom-com love interest, and Fitzgerald's performance, full of gamine charm, is at its most nuanced in her early scenes, compassionately but firmly holding Micky at arm's length for the eventual good of the relationship. It's a shame that neither Nancy nor mother Kathleen really appear much outside of the first and final acts, as the film is sorely lacking any kind of feminine influence for the majority of its runtime, but Fitzgerald makes more of her role than its brevity asks of her, especially with some charming facial expressions in her wordless first scene where she reacts to Micky's serenade at his club, and a scene near the end where Nancy puts her own spin on one of Micky's classic spiels and out-shysters him. Her stand-out moment, perhaps predictably, is the reconciliation in Nancy's office: we can see that her impulse is to forgive and forget but she must, sensibly and cautiously, reassure herself that Micky truly is changed first. These scenes can often be overplayed and melodramatic, but director and actors resist the temptation to wring cheap tears and fuzzies from it, and the scene is all the more real and affecting for it.

This film might hold some kind of record for 'number of times
a crowd is addressed through a microphone'.

It's quite a clever move by writers Chelsom and Dunbar to tie together Micky's personal and professional goals in his single 'quest', as Micky's attempts to win back his nightclub, given that he doesn't seem to deserve it, probably wouldn't have been sympathetic enough by themselves. In many ways, this film is your standard rom-com plot, in that boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy makes amends and learns some lessons, boy gets girl back again. Far too many films make the basis of the break-up some trivial and unlikely misunderstanding, which has the side effect of making the man look dense for failing to just spit it out and the woman look paranoid and vindictive for jumping to conclusions and refusing to listen, in what the writers surely must realise is a tremendous disservice to both genders - not to mention a very poor indicator that the relationship itself will last any longer than the ending credits. It's a disappointing but predictable trap to fall into: if the relationship is to survive, the cause of the temporary rift naturally cannot be a real deal-breaker. The cleverness of Hear My Song is not that it subverts the gender roles of the offender and the offendee, but that it alters the dynamics of the relationship instead. Nancy's mother Colleen was a risk-taking beauty queen who probably had her share of ill-advised beaus (Josef Locke, for one), and Nancy herself has clearly carried on in the same vein, taking a bit of a punt on Micky in the hope that the slippery exterior hides a heart of gold - sadly, she is being all too reasonable when she concludes that it does not. The break-up between the sheets feels like just the latest in a long line of minor but cumulative hints that Micky just isn't as invested in this relationship as she is. Yes, Micky is unworthy, approaching both his club and his girlfriend with the same strings of evasions and broken promises, and does need a few life lessons courtesy of his adventure to reevaluate his priorities. It's only when he's trying to convince Locke to return that he realises that getting his club back is only a secondary consideration to repairing his relationship with Nancy. Although Micky undergoes the customary herculean tasks and abject humiliation, Nancy neither sees nor demands them, and their final reconciliation comes about not through overblown romanticism as we might expect, but simple humility and compromise. You know, like it does with real people and not movie caricatures.

No witty comments here. Just... wow. What a gorgeous shot.

Director Peter Chelsom clearly has an eye for visual flair, composing some striking and often amusing shots - there's a particularly nice revolving shot around Mr X as he plays up his sense of mystery by fluttering a magically-produced dove around his hand, and the coven of lady owners of Micky's club all crammed onto one couch has to be seen to be believed. The Irish countryside is photographed beautifully although, to be even-handed about it, it would perhaps be more remarkable if they hadn't made it look spectacular, given what they had to work with. But Hear My Song truly comes alive at the night scenes, the dull grey washout of day replaced with the stark blues and blacks of night and the burning golds of candlelight and chandeliers. The film ends in a sort of low-key version of The Blues Brothers: no car wrecks, but with a final belter of a performance surrounded by police, as McCallum's unhinged detective smashes a crane into the club in desperation to stop Locke's show.

In terms of tone and style, although it is slightly more musical, Hear My Song owes a substantial debt to Bill Forsyth's fantastic 1983 film Local Hero, in which an American oil company rep ends up falling in love with the rustic and eccentric Scottish coastal town he was supposed to be persuading to sell up. Although happy to throw their heroes into bizarre and sometimes humiliating situations, and though they maintain a somewhat whimsical state of heightened reality, both films develop their characters with a fondness and attention that raises the plot above the sitcom level of city slicker vs crafty yokels, and with a perfectly small-scale focus that ensures their happy endings feel earned rather than given. For all that, Hear My Song is not perfect: the lures of some gentle comedy, clever dialogue, snappy music, amusing (for once in a blue moon) relationship drama and even a naked Tara Fitzgerald aren't quite enough to grab you into a meandering first act that's essentially the film lacing its shoes up for thirty minutes; the offbeat, almost-surreal musical humour (Micky's two large helpers spontaneously bursting into dance on the street and being mistaken for buskers, for example) is infrequent enough that it can come across a little forced when it does crop up; and the final ending scene might be a little stagey and saccharine for some, if indeed the whole film isn't. However, it's my review, and Hear My Song has fine acting, witty banter, humorous situations, colourful characters, Irish stereotypes, brilliant music, and a quirkily original story. Go watch it.

8/10 - Worth at least a tenor

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Game - Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark (Xbox One)

Transformers: Lack of Distinction

High Moon Studio's War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron did for the Transformers video game franchise what Arkham Asylum and Arkham City did for Batman's, albeit not quite in such a commercially or critically acclaimed way: a compact, focussed first game telling a new story in a colourful, familiar universe, and a second, looser but deeper second game expanding on the same story and, come the end, setting up an interesting new direction for the series. Larger-than-life portrayals of well-known characters abound, garnished with fan-pleasing references and faithfully overwrought dialogue (it's a wonder there's any of Cybertron left with Megatron and Optimus chowing down on every bit of scenery in sight) to prop up a brand new story.

Shiny Age of Extinction Optimus lacks a little of the boxy
retro charm of Cybertron Optimus.

Now, to tie in with Michael Bay's Age of Extinction, the series falls into the hands of Edge of Reality (Because High Moon are working on the real sequel? Please?), that bridges the gap between both War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron, and the 'classic' Transformers of the game and the jagged, metallic Transformers of the Bay films, positing an ancient and powerful artifact - the Dark Spark - fought over by Autobots and Decepticons on Cybertron, before falling through time and cropping up centuries later when the 'Bots and the 'Cons have relocated their fight to Earth. As a story, it fits fairly neatly between War and Fall - a few continuity errors around the Insecticons and Megatron's rebuilt body notwithstanding - but doesn't really follow on from War or particularly lead into Fall. The war rages, the Dark Spark turns up, the Dark Spark is dealt with, the war rages on. Rise of the Dark Spark, then, is the Arkham Origins of the series: a shallower, less polished prequel no-one asked for, whose main successes come from re-using the tried and tested tools of its more adept predecessors. But this comparison is a little unfair... on Arkham Origins, which at least managed to be wholly technically competent, even if its initial promise is hastily bundled aside to make room for more fanservice cameos, and it tries to get by mostly by trading on the goodwill earned by previous instalments and reusing their party tricks... wait, which game am I talking about here?

Dark Spark is not sunk by its technical issues, but it certainly springs a few leaks it could do without. Loading screens between missions are longer than those in any new-gen game this small have a right to be, and even though there are multiple opportunities to disguise the level loading with the arduous walk-and-talk sections that slow down the pace of the mission to something akin to a gaggle of elderly women walking abreast down a narrow corridor so you can't get past them, there are still plenty of times when entering a new area will briefly freeze the game as it loads in. If this weren't grating enough, the programmer who placed his miserly allotment of checkpoints before every unskippable cutscene he could find needs to be suspended by his knackers from the roof of Activision headquarters, and be constantly told he'll be released in just a few minutes. The environments in the movieverse Earth scenes are generally drab, mid X360 era-looking graphics, with less detailed, more plasticky character models to match (Finding it a bit difficult to make a good-looking game when you can't reuse High Moon's assets, eh?), and with virtually no variation from the mission structure of running down a corridor shooting enemy robots, then running out of the corridors into a large open arena and shooting enemy robots, then back into corridors again, like a succession of small cardboard boxes tied together with string.

Jazz and Optimus sneak into Kolkular with the stealth and
subtlety all Transformers are known for.

Still on the technical side, and there are some improvements. Particle effects, at least, are significantly flashier and prettier, with the explosion and fire effects, particularly (heh) those associated with Grimlock's flame breath, looking impressively pyrotechnic. Most character models are also very pretty and look at least a little shinier than they did in Fall, although there was also a strange graphics bug throughout the game that caused reflective, metallic or luminescent surfaces - guns, walls, crates and, oh, say, Optimus Prime's entire back - to become speckled and translucent, especially when in motion. Though present throughout, it appeared most pronounced in areas of purple light - wouldn't have been a problem for the chromatically varied Fall of Cybertron, but you visit a lot of Decepticon bases in Dark Spark and the 'Cons really love them some purple.

Combat is a mixed bag. Melee combat feels clumsy and underwhelming, when both lightweights like Bumblebee and enormous bruisers like Optimus Prime use the same striking animation and deal the same amount of damage, and characters' swinging arms tend to only bear a tenuous relationship to the actual effective area of their strikes. For ranged battle, by contrast, the guns all have a pleasing weight and heft to them, and their upgrade trees feel well thought-out enough that a fully-upgraded weapon is substantially stronger than its vanilla counterpart without being game-breakingly overpowered... (except for the Riot Cannon which is, as the achievement for getting 100 kills with it tells you, 'Totally OP') but then, the guns and the upgrades would feel this way, because they're exactly the same as they were in Fall of Cybertron. Exactly. The. Same. Edge of Reality hasn't even felt compelled to add a single new weapon, and this is especially painful in the uninspiring Earth sections which are in sore need of some spark of originality about them... plus, I can't believe that neither side has tried inventing a new weapon in the millennia between the two settings.

Optimus' favourite weapon, the Path Blaster, is a devastating
hand cannon that blasts Decepticreeps into scrap.

Another missed opportunity in combat comes from the total lack of any situations or set-pieces requiring you to change tactics. There's nothing like Fall's defence of Iacon with the aid of Metroplex's artillery cannons, or the Decepticons' wheeled and then airborne assault on the Autobots' energon carrier. The variety in Transformers you play is much less than previous games, with only three or four missions as Decepticons - Soundwave, Shockwave, Swindle - and most of the Autobots missions casting you as Optimus Prime, Cliffjumper or Bumblebee. Unforgivably for a Transformers game with the power of new generation consoles behind it, enemy robots do not transform, and if the enemy aren't changing their tactics or their forms, there's no real inducement for you to, either. Unlike its predecessors, Dark Spark's levels rarely give you much need to change to vehicle form. Shockwave and Jetfire's levels are large, spacious and frequently devoid of floor often enough to make flying a necessity, but land-based vehicle forms will see less use than a D&D player's bedsprings, except for one mission as Optimus which forces you to transform right at the start to drive down some tunnels towards Megatron's fortress... tunnels that will look rather familiar to anyone who played Fall of Cybertron. Hey, if they're going to reuse all these assets, I'm sure they won't begrudge me reusing this criticism. 

Grimlock's particle effects are very pretty indeed... the same
cannot be said for his poorly-textured, jagged model.

This is all the worse for the moments of genuine enjoyment and Transformer-ness that do occasionally crop up in spite of Edge of Reality's best efforts. During Jetfire's infiltration of the ruins of Trypticon, in which he comes across a secret band of Starscream's soldiers harvesting Energon, I used my jet mode's missiles to bring down the enemy air support before strafing the ground troops with rapid laser cannons, the rocket-firing soldiers falling and exploding under the hail of burning light. I then swooped low, screaming down out of the sky before transforming mid-dive, landing in the middle of the frazzled survivors and unleashing a special ability that blew them into slag, before taking up my handheld rapid-fire repeater and charging the entrenched enemy positions further along the landing platform. It was one of exceptionally few moments where I actually felt like a Transformer, and not just a colourfully armour-plated Marcus Fenix.

One very significant changes involve levelling and equipment. Instead of purchasing weapons and upgrades from Teletraan 1 terminals using mountains of your hard-earned energon shards, carefully weighing up cost and benefit and prioritising your favourite weapons, you now unlock Gear Boxes in Bronze, Silver, Gold and Prime when completing challenges, getting achievements or levelling up. They can gift you with any number of unlockables, including new weapons, weapon upgrades, online characters, TECH abilities, and special HACKs new to this game - essentially the game's version of Halo skulls, adding challenge or mutations to the campaign while increasing XP - but the fact that they're unlocked totally at random instead of deliberately purchased removes the sense of achievement from acquiring a powerful upgrade, and leaves you without the option to deliberately unlock or spec the weapons you like. To make matters worse, having to pause the game and open each box separately from the menu results in your gifts - many of which will by the later stages be duplicates that are converted into TECH abilities - flashing up one by one no matter how hard you stab A, and it's a teeth-gritting exercise in tedium.

In the final showdown, Optimus has a throw down with Lockdown

who gets knocked down and taken downtown.

Now, voice acting is where these games have always excelled, and here is no exception. Leading the cast are, of course, definitive Optimus Prime Peter Cullen and scenery-chewing Fred Tatasciore as Megatron, with the usual assortment of Nolan North, Troy Baker and Steve Blum thrown into the mix. Most of the Decepticons are growling, bellowing psychopaths, while the Autobots are pure, unfailingly heroic paragons, but the cast do a good job of differentiating between the characters and giving them each a distinct personality (something the Bay films could have learned a thing or two about), and the sniping, scolding and verbal backpedalling between Megatron, Shockwave and the wheedling, devious Starscream makes for some of the game's vocal highlights. The cast are working with a somewhat weaker script than on previous outings, with dialogue ranging from the flat to the overblown - even for ham-meisters Megatron and Optimus - and lacking much of the spark (heh) and humour of War and Fall, but the performers bring a lot of life and much-needed conviction to the otherwise fairly thin story. However, on the villain side for the movie portions, we have Lockdown, who differs so vastly - along with the rest of the Earth levels, to be honest - from his movie counterpart there scarcely seems any point in making it a tie-in at all. Not only is he not British (boo), but he acts significantly out of character as well. After acquiring the Dark Spark in the prologue, he instantly becomes a ranting megalomaniac - a Megatron-lite - obsessed with power, domination and destruction. Oh, the writers saw this for the flaw it is clearly enough to continue giving Lockdown lines expounding on his desire for profit and trying to justify his new appetite for destruction with the promise of future payment, but by a bot's actions shall ye judge him, and Lockdown exhibits none of the mercenary attitudes or professional detachment that managed the impressive feat of making a character in a Michael Bay film interesting.

Megatron, who already is a ranting megalomaniac, is not significantly altered by his acquisition of the Spark, which is in itself a problem. Megatron - here looking as spiky and shiny as he did in Fall, which is wrong because this is his post-rebuild look after being squashed by Metroplex at the beginning of that game - is supposed to be ascendant here, as the Decepticons come closer and closer to crushing the Autobots forever. Yet, within two or three disjointed missions of Megatron attaining the Dark Spark, Optimus Prime is infiltrating Kolkular, Megatron's fortress, with the intention of destroying the Spark and his old enemy at the same time. Naturally, permadeath being as welcome in this franchise as a Sex Pistols concert in St Peter's Basilica, this second objective isn't achieved, and Megatron scurries away with the usual serious but recoverable injuries to scheme another day. However, the Dark Spark fails to endow Megatron with the phenomenal cosmic power its awe-inspiring legend suggests it has, and after a fairly weedy boss fight with Megatron and some reanimated, brainwashed Transformer zombies created by the Spark, the universe-threatening MacGuffin is dispatched and summarily fired into space. Consequently, we have a plot which drags a lot in the earlier sections and then wraps everything up far too neatly and quickly towards the end, and unlike previous games there's never a sense of a wider war and higher stakes going on beyond the confines of the playable characters and their missions.

Soundwave's highly targeted form of pest control is a rare
moment of inefficiency for the logical, robotic Decepticon.

There are far too many occasions (i.e. more than one) when the game stalls you in a room and throws constantly respawning goons at you with all the predictability and ease of a pop-up shooting gallery, without any background dialogue to divert your attention, or even give any clues when the tedious onslaught might be trickling to a halt, perhaps the nadir of which is a tortuous segment as the enormous Combaticon-formed Bruticus outside the gates of Kaon, which mainly consists of waiting for your one-hit-kill AOE move to come off cooldown, using it on all enemies at one entrance, slowly lumbering over to the other entrance, and then waiting, rinsing and repeating until comatose/the level is completed, whichever comes first. Dark Spark is desperate, however, to remind you that it's a movie tie-in and the relevant sections are contractually obliged to be worse than any of the developers' original plot points on Cybertron, so the Earth-set endgame levels throw a few more respawning waves at you, with the added pleasure of Lockdown's terminally uninventive mercs taunting "Let's see what we've got" so often it probably amounts to psychological warfare.

Even thirty-foot robots drop contact lenses sometimes.

Playing as the hulking, tanky, damage-dealing damage-soak Grimlock briefly makes for a nice change of pace, as you sweep Lockdown's mercenaries aside with your mace in robot form or crumple them underfoot in your dinosaur form... exactly as it did in Fall of Cybertron. In that game, Grimlock's thunderingly powerful dinosaur form was a reward for building up enough rage to earn a limited amount of time to just go T-Rex and mess some 'Cons up. Unlike Fall of Cybertron, Grimlock's entrance here is an embarrassingly damp squib, as his dino-form crashes weakly through a gate to absolutely no soaring response from the background music, the gate bashing aside like a bendy bit of polystyrene and Grimlock unleashing a pitifully mewling roar - a textbook lesson in why not to make cutscenes in the game engine if ever there was one. Rubbing salt into the wound, he looks stunningly last-gen, and not late last-gen to boot, and his animation for transforming from dino to robot form is clunky; the moment when they simply swap from one character model to the other is painfully obvious. While it feels initially empowering to stomp mercs underfoot, it quickly becomes repetitive, and their lack of damage, combined with Grimlock's extreme resilience and execution move which restores him to full health and shields while making him invulnerable during the animation means that there's virtually no challenge in the level and a half we're given to play him in.

Drift forsakes his swords-only vow to dispatch his most hated
foe... a fuel barrel.

There's a fair amount this game does right, but it's very difficult to award points for it because Fall of Cybertron did it first, and RotDS often comes across as little more than a rushed expansion for the earlier game, hoping to earn a little more green by piggybacking on Michael Bay's latest overblown, under-brained CGI-fest, to the plot of which even the movieverse sections bear virtually no relationship to anyway other than the presence of Lockdown and the redesigned Optimus. The Cybertron-set sections of the game are fun but only serviceably so, bringing back the same - exactly the same - thrills and set-pieces of the previous games with some slightly shinier character models and better effects, though marred by a lack of spark (heh) in the dialogue and a story that somehow manages to be both paper thin and convoluted. The movie-verse segments, however, (i.e. the bits where Edge of Reality had to finally do some damn work of their own) take a noticeable dip in quality, with bland character models, blander and uglier environments, annoyingly limited enemy chatter, and weapons, gameplay and enemy models so utterly identical to those in Cybertron that you won't believe the two sections are supposed to be thousands of years apart.

Though the tried-and-tested formula of the previous games is alive and well enough to make this one of the better movie tie-in games out there, most of the good points Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark can raise in its defence are there because Fall of Cybertron, especially, used them already. The result is a game that, by general standards, is patchy but serviceable and diverting enough for a time, but by the standards of its franchise is a disappointing entry, and one that is hopefully only a stopgap before High Moon is given back the reins of the franchise into which they managed to breathe so much more life than any other developer before... or since.

4/10 - No more than meets the eye

Game - Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor (Xbox One)

Rings of power can be hazardous to your elf

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is an open-world action-adventure game, developed by Monolith and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, an expanded/alternate continuity to both the film universe of Peter Jackson and the book universe of J.R.R. Tolkien, and perhaps most remarkably, a licensed game that is not only good, but exceptional. Set between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Shadow of Mordor portrays the gradual and insidious return to power of Sauron and the amassing of his orc armies, unbeknownst to the rest of the world.

The Tower of Sauron sports the latest in the Spiky Self-Mutilation
line, from Obviously Evil Combat and Casual Wear™.

The player is dropped into the leather boots and furred cloak of Talion (Troy "Everyone That Isn't Nolan North" Baker), a gruff, macho protagonist with a gravelly-voice and a severely underdeveloped sense of humour, and a dead family, presumably churned out by the same factory that manufactured Marcus Fenix, Booker DeWitt, Batman and Aiden Pearce. A Ranger assigned to watch over the Black Gate after some misdeed resulted in his exile from Minas Tirith, Talion is assigned with making sure no foul creatures arise from the wilderness to threaten the civilised world, along with his fellow brothers of the Night's Watch- No, no, wrong series. After a brief prologue which introduces combat - through Talion's sparring with his son - and stealth - sneaking up on his wife to give her flowers - a raiding party of Uruks surprise-attack, and Talion and his family are slaughtered in a dark ritual designed to summon a long-dead elf wraith (Alastair "Turian Councillor" Duncan) and bind it to the Black Hand of Sauron, who led the attack along with his Cenobite-reject cohorts the Hammer and the Tower of Sauron. Something goes amiss, however, and the wraith is bound to the body of Talion, preventing him from truly dying and giving him an array of special and often sinister abilities. Sort of an own goal for the forces of darkness, there.

Real men don't use scabbards for sword storage.

The game's plot is your standard 'unravel the hero's amnesia and get revenge on his family's killer' bumf, though with a Lord of the Rings flavour that makes cleverly economical use of source characters while using its original characters to tell the bulk of the story. Talion isn't especially compelling but makes a serviceable protagonist, although more interesting is the elvish wraith and his mysterious connection to Gollum (which feels logical and well thought-out as opposed to an attempt to shoehorn in some franchise faces) and his role in the history of Mordor itself, although he carries the usual 'licensed adaptation' problem that anyone familiar with the lore of the source material isn't going to be remotely surprised when his identity is revealed. In any case, Talion and the wraith's quest takes them all over Mordor, from the barren plains of Udûn to the lush greenery of Nurn, as they meet a host of colourful characters. But the best stories Shadow of Mordor has to tell are the ones you make yourself...

Ugruk Flesheater likes walks in the park, reading, thinks Gondor's
foreign policy is "self-destructively partisan and built on short-
term thinking", and enjoys eating the flesh of his enemies.

The game's most notable feature is the much-touted Nemesis System. Randomly-generated Uruk captains with unique names and distinctive armour and accessories, each with their own fears, hates, strengths and weaknesses, exist in a constant and organic state of flux, fighting each other over promotion, food, bragging rights and impressing their Warchiefs. Existing captains will rise in status (or die) as a result of succeeding (or failing) in their personal quests and struggles, whether they're holding a feast, hunting wild animals, or sneakily ambushing a rival, and other captains or unnamed grunts will be promoted to fill the gaps they leave in the hierarchy. The constantly-evolving structure of the Uruk armies keeps you on your toes as a player, and you need to keep an eye on what the more important captains are doing, because if you let them rise too fast in the ranks you may find them a bit stronger than you might have liked when you do finally cross swords.

The shifting power relationships and unique personalities of the Uruks give you ample scope to put Sauron's armies in disarray. You could just slash and stab your way through a captain's underlings and then slash and stab him until his position becomes vacant. Or, you could 'dominate' an Uruk with the wraith's mind control, gaining intel about the fears and weaknesses of your target captain. Then you could set him on fire, set a swarm of insects on him, or set free a caged beast, and watch him dissolve into gibbering terror, fleeing for his life and losing face in front of all his buddies. You could infiltrate a feast he's holding in his own honour, and poison the grog barrels and wipe out his entire retinue. You could watch over his duel with a rival captain, and weaken him with arrows from stealth so his competitor can finish him off for you. If you're feeling particularly kind-hearted, you could choose a captain or even a rank-and-file Uruk and, carefully safeguarding them in their power struggles or secretly nobbling their opponents, help them climb all the way to the top, and then finish them off just as they achieve all their orcish dreams. This becomes especially rewarding in the second half of the game, when the wraith gains the ability to 'brand' Uruks, which allows you to give commands to dominated Uruks, inserting sleeper agents into the hierarchy, stealthily shepherding them up into the rank of Warchief's Bodyguard, and then activating them at a crucial moment and watching them butcher their former master and take his place. Then, you can order your pet Warchief to attack another chief. Play your cards right, and every single ranking member of Sauron's army could be in your control.

Gubrat the Foolish's patented "nice doggy" Caragor-taming
technique has yet to catch on throughout Mordor.

As uruks gain in prominence, or kill Talion, they will acquire more Power - the game's measure of Uruk status - and acquire new strengths and resistances while losing weaknesses, so even a lowly, rank-and-file swordsman could be promoted to a nigh-unkillable Warchief if he gets enough lucky hits on Talion in a fight. Warchiefs are always the largest and most heavily-armoured Uruks you can come across, but the sheer number of captains vying for power and trying to backstab their way up the ladder means that Warchiefs have to be drawn out through trickery before Talion can introduce them to his arsenal of sharp things. Avenging yourself and your family on the Black Hand will seem like a mere trifle to finally beheading that bastard Uruk who's let you get mobbed by his buddies and then impaled you with a sneaky thrown spear the last three times you've gone after him, especially because he will remember that the last time you fought, he killed you or you ran away, and he'll taunt you about it. This works both ways, and if you dispatch a captain with an arrow to the face, he may unexpectedly return from the dead with an eyepatch on or a bag over his head, grumbling at you for ruining his good looks and having an axe to grind.

"Stay very still boys. The glowing-eyed deathbeast may
lose interest."

You'll be fighting Uruks for most of the game, but there are also caragors, territorial lion-like beasts that can eventually be mounted; ghuls, vile little goblin-like creatures that live in caves and burrow out of the ground to ambush you; graugs, which are larger than cave trolls and look a bit like rancors; and the three Black Captains of Sauron's army that killed you, and who form the campaign's slightly disappointing boss battles, being no more difficult to fight than a particularly resilient Uruk captain. I would have liked to see more of the Uruks' smaller, runtier cousins - the regular orcs and goblins - to mix up the combat a little, but the Uruks themselves come in so many shapes, sizes and colours that it feels churlish to level too many complaints at enemy variety. They all sport Warhammer 40K style aggressive-Cockney-thug accents, with varying degrees of eloquence and grammar, and can often be heard reminiscing on their latest acts of evil or grumbling about poor promotion prospects, unreliable slaves or how the Captain doesn't notice them. Captains with names like "Lashbag Giggler" will just titter and chuckle maniacally instead of speaking, and one charming and rotund fellow, when I had him on his knees and the execution prompt ready, pathetically asked for a last meal, which I found so endearing I tousled the little scamp's bald, scarred head and sent him on his way. You will almost certainly get more attached to particular, recurring Uruk captains than you will Talion or some of his allies, except for the wraith who has an enjoyable line in tactless honesty.

"No fair! Why Uruk not get ghost friend like Man-swine?!"

Combat is very much in the Arkham series mould (by which I mean it's virtually identical): attacking with X, countering with Y, stunning with B and evading with A, and performing special combos with various combinations thereof. As in the Arkham games, you can switch to a ranged weapon - the elf's wraith bow - with the left trigger, and the ranged view and the left bumper act bring up a Detective Vision-alike, taking out most of the colour and detail of the landscape, making common Uruks blue, Uruks with intel green, and captains red. Finishing moves are plentiful and visceral, and you'll probably never tire of the metallic squelching that comes with sliding your longsword through an Uruk's guts before booting him off of it and turning to your new target. Especially gruesome (in a delightful way) are the beheadings, not just for the way that the Uruk's head sails into the air in slow motion, pained shock or dumb gormlessness written all over their faces, but for the sense of achievement they bring: plenty of Captains you kill by whatever means will not come back, but when you cut their heads off, you know they're gone for good, and if they've been a thorn in your side for a long time, it's all the more satisfying to put them to rest permanently.

Uruks hate their campfire sing-songs of 'Kum Ba Yah' being
interrupted.

Talion is much squishier than the armoured Master Wayne, however, and it's very easy to become overwhelmed in combat with multiple Uruks, especially if there are spearmen and archers outside the melee, who will have no qualms about firing into the crowd to try and take you down, and because it's possible to attract twenty or more Uruks to a single brawl, you may well lose track of who exactly is attacking you and when. You're perfectly capable of taking on legions of Uruks while suffering nary a scratch, but the addition of captains and shielded enemies that are immune to particular attacks or can counter you in return encourage you to mix up your tactics and not charge headlong into prolonged encounters. Getting hit even once can throw you off your rhythm, making it more likely that you'll be hit again and, what's more, cancelling your combo and denying you access to the special moves you can only activate once you reach a certain number of hits. Useful weapon-upgrading runes that are dropped by slain captains can allow you to regain health when using execution takedowns and other little bonuses, which do make a material difference to how you engage in combat and allow you to feel markedly stronger, but never provide so much utility that you become untouchably overpowered.

"Ah yes, 'Ringwraiths'. We have dismissed that claim."

The free-roaming aspect of the game provides the usual glut of collectible objects, sidequests, unlockable abilities and upgradable weapons, as well as slaves to rescue, wild beasts to hunt and herbs to pick for the game's Hunting and Survival challenges. Talion can scale buildings and sheer cliff-faces Ezio-style, meaning there are no real barriers to going wherever you want, and allowing a breadth of tactical options for how to approach a mission or assassination of a troublesome captain. There are special challenges that Talion can undertake that test his swordsmanship, his stealth or his archery, which eventually reforge and upgrade his longsword, dagger and bow respectively. The two maps (Udûn and Nurn) are large enough to allow plenty to do without cramping it all up, but small enough that the commute from one side to the other never becomes tedious. It's all immensely diverting and adds up to plenty of things to do when you've polished off the campaign, although the freeform nature of the game can sometimes work against it. For example, by the time I started the early missions that introduce the concept of the Nemesis System by having you clear the way for the incompetent Uruk Ratbag to become a Warchief, I'd already been doing plenty of exploring on my own for several hours and was intimately familiar with how the system worked, and certainly not in need of a tutorial extended over five missions or so explaining it to me.

Like most free-roaming games, Shadow of Mordor is strongest when it tosses you a bunch of tools, drops you in a sandbox and lets you mess around to your heart's content. Eliminating particularly irritating captains, assembling an army of branded Uruks and generally playing around with the Nemesis System is far more involving than the main amnesiac revenge-by-numbers campaign, though this is bolstered by pleasing and context-appropriate cameos from characters like Gollum and Saruman the White, and piecing together the wraith's history and his wider role in Middle-Earth lore is significantly more interesting than main character Talion's tired motivations. With excellent replayability, fun and diverse side activities, simple but satisfying and elegant combat, impressive visuals and a brilliant innovation in the Nemesis System, Monolith's Shadow of Mordor uses a familiar license to break new ground while remaining faithful to the source material and being tremendous fun to boot.

8.5/10 - Fine combat, fun enemies, great adventure, and MY AXE! Er, sorry.