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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.

Game - Ryse: Son of Rome (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.

Game - Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (PS4)

Snake? Snake?! SNNAAAAAAAKE!!

Never having played a game in the Metal Gear series before this – I know, I’m a heretic – except for an extremely brief flirtation with, I think, Metal Gear Solid on a PlayStation emulator and a go at the demo for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, where I took issue with the silly made-up word adorning the title and a control scheme I found somewhat unintuitive to say the least, I was only vaguely sure of what to expect from Ground Zeroes. I knew enough to be aware that the general plot of the series is about as easy to get a grip on as a greased ferret at a foam party for the National Prosthetic Hands Society, and a few visits to each game's relevant Wikipedia pages and some aspirin later I was forced to concede defeat to the impenetrably tangled Japanese Knotweed infestation that is Hideo Kojima's writing. 

The plot concerns two of Snake's allies from Peace Walker, Chico and Paz, who have been kidnapped by a mysterious Black Ops group and are being held at a black site prison camp in Cuba. Head of the MSF, Big Boss, formerly known as the original Snake, (Kiefer Sutherland replacing series stalwart David Hayter as VA) goes in under cover of night and rain to get them out. Having done so, by way of more or less faffing about depending on the player, Snake evacs the pair by helicopter, whereupon he has to rummage around in Paz' guts to extract a bomb placed there by villain Skullface. Almost immediately afterwards, she reveals that she has a second bomb inside her (Where, you ask? The game doesn't want you to know, and I don't think I want to know either) and leaps out of the helicopter and explodes. It's a fairly short single mission making up the game's story campaign, although individual playstyle will make some difference. There are several bonus Side Ops after the main mission, although all of them take place in the same location at differing times of day.

"No, I won't kill you. Not before I've shown you my Kurt Russell
impression."

I can’t really comment on the replacement of David Hayter with Kiefer Sutherland, but Hayter’s reported Twitter antics would hint that either he does have a secret role in The Phantom Pain, or he’s taking his replacement in good spirits, or he’s just gone looney. Sutherland says very little, all told, in the Ground Zeroes campaign and even less, verging on nothing, for most of the Side Ops. Primary voice acting honours therefore fall to Robin Atkin Downes (Halo 2's Prophet of Regret and Saints Row the Third and IV's British Player Voice) as Kazuhira 'Kaz' Miller, one of Big Boss/Snake's closest allies at the MSF. Also making up the colourful cast is Skullface, a mysterious agent who seems to literally have a skull for a face (subtle), and probably couldn't be more obviously evil if he were voiced by Tim Curry and walked onto the scene with ten puppies skewered on a broadsword.

Even with special goggles and years of training, Snake still
can't see what the hell is going on with this series' plot.

Honestly, I have a hard enough time trying to understand the Snake Family Tree of clones, alternate names, codenames and titles, and that's before I try and understand how they all fit into the plot. I think I understand that Big Boss used to go by 'Snake' when he worked for The Boss who became a traitor and died except she was actually a double agent who didn't really defect who was kept alive as the AI for a Metal Gear and Snake was the one who killed her while he was calling himself Naked Snake, and Solid Snake, Liquid Snake and Solidus Snake are all in some way clones of the original Snake who is now called Big Boss except for when he's sometimes called Snake or Punished Snake or Venom Snake and was the bad guy of the very first game which was just called Metal Gear and he's also the rival of Major Zero who is also called Cipher which is also the name of the organisation that he formed in opposition to the MSF and oh no I've gone cross-eyed. Enjoy the gameplay by all means, but if you're going to try and actually understand the plot to this series you should come prepared with several flowcharts and timelines worked out, and probably a few grams of whatever Kojima was smoking as well.

Gameplay-wise, MGS V: GZ feels like a newer and fresher take on the series. Granted, the last MGS I played was the first one, but it certainly felt to me that the control of SnakeBoss was much tighter and more responsive than I might have expected. Many stealth games that are all about stealth and evasion, like most of the Splinter Cell series before Conviction (which probably went too far the other way, to be honest) or the Hitman games before Absolution, tend to deliberately punish the player for arsing up the stealth by having unresponsive or awkward combat, where the best thing to do is perch yourself on one side of a doorway with your gun arm protruding through and shooting the enemy as they line up at the door one-by-one until you've emptied the map of them and can go about your sneaky business with impunity (anyone who's ever started a firefight on Blood Money's 'Curtains Down' level will be intimately familiar with this technique). Ground Zeroes' shooting isn't Gears of War, or even Hitman: Absolution, but the shooting is responsive enough; the limited roster of weapons have some real heft to them; and there's always the option to shoot a dead guard until you've turned him red all over, which should please fans of GoldenEye or Perfect Dark who have all tried this many times without exception.

You can't see these guys' faces, so they must be the villains.

However, Ground Zeroes is short, and I do mean short. I have probably spent more time in a single level of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory than I have in this game's entire story mode. It would probably take more time to read the Wikipedia summary of the rest of the series' plots than to complete Ground Zeroes' story mission. I have generally worked on a per hour scheme for working out if a game is worth my money. If I spend more hours playing it then I spent pounds to get it, it must have been worth the price – you will notice that films, whether on DVD or at the movies, do not even approach this level of fiscal efficiency (books, on the other hand, must therefore be some of the most cost-efficient things you can buy). Well, the entire solitary mission that composes this game’s story mode could probably take you as little as ten minutes or as much as ten hours depending on how stealthy, methodical or downright silly you feel like being. If you're feeling particularly emergent, you could probably knock out all fifty or so guards, drag them onto a helipad, pile them around a mountain of fuel barrels and blast them all hundreds of feet into the air like corpse confetti. I went into Ground Zeroes knowing it was short, and come the end of the story mode, even with all the side missions still to do and multiple achievements still to get, I still felt a little as though I'd just played a rather expansive demo and I would rather like the full game now, please, if you don't mind. It takes a bit of an adjustment, and I certainly wouldn't like to see every fairly large game that gets released from now on try the same tactic, but I can certainly recommend Ground Zeroes as an investment, provided you don't pay too much for it. Get it pre-owned or just wait a little for it to come down would be my advice, but it's certainly a fun stealth-'em up while it lasts.

Insert your own exclamation mark and BWING sound here.

Perhaps with this shortness of story in mind, the game’s achievements have been designed to extract as much value as possible from the game itself. Achieving an S-rank on the main mission and all the Side Ops – likely to be the most difficult achievement Ground Zeroes offers – will probably take more than whatever amount you paid for this game in hours to complete on its own, requiring obsessive plays and replays at varying speeds with varying levels of stealth to work out where the main objectives are; where any side targets or missions can be found; where guards will be and when; which guards need to be knocked out, which need to be avoided, and which won’t get near enough to bother you at all; and what combination and order of managing all these elements will nab you the highest point score while minimising penalties. You could hoof those optional prisoners over to the LZ on your back for a tasty 4000 points each, but it could add an extra ten minutes onto your time, and each to-and-fro trip increases the chance of those guards you avoided spotting you or the ones you knocked out returning to groggy consciousness and sticking an M16 barrel up your jaxie and blowing your colon out through your stupid eye-patch while you practice your fireman’s lift. And even if they don’t notice you specifically, your attempt at stealth could still be shot to buggery by the slightly daffy allied helicopter AI, which likes to indulge in a cover-blowing scenic flyby of the entire prison camp almost every time it dusts off.

Like any 'B-List' or 'C-List' type game that is competent and even fun, but never original - the sort of thing you'd never heard of before you see it on the shelf temptingly priced at £4.99 - your opinion of Ground Zeroes is likely to be influenced mainly by how much you pay for it, and the kind of expectations you have going in. If you want an epic, sprawling sandbox, or a devilishly intricate and punishing stealth experience, you probably won't find it here in exactly the form you want. But get Ground Zeroes cheap, and play it a lot, and you will probably discover a satisfying, unpolished gem of a game. It's obviously intended to be a small but tantalising appetiser to The Phantom Pain, and if it's going to be like this, all I can say is: bring on the main course.

7/10 - A Solid entry in the series, but certainly not the Big Boss.