World in Conflict (PC)

It goes without saying that it's a good thing World War III didn't erupt between the United States and the now-defunct Soviet Union. For many of us who were children during the Cold War, the fear of being annihilated in a nuclear conflict was very real. So it's a bit strange now that we can look back at that era and have the luxury of imagining what could have been. Or we can play World in Conflict, Sierra and Massive Entertainment's incredible new real-time strategy game. This isn't your standard RTS game, as World in Conflict doesn't follow the familiar model of resource gathering, base building, and swarming armies. Instead, it feels almost like an action game masquerading as a strategy game, and it offers up a relentlessly fun and amazing new approach to the genre, one that works in single-player and even more so in multiplayer.

World in Conflict is set in an alternate-history version of 1989. Instead of the Berlin Wall falling and communism collapsing, the Soviet Union launches an assault on Western Europe, and the United States rushes its forces in to aid its Western allies. Four months into the conflict, after the US Navy has been attrited down, the USSR launches a surprise invasion in Seattle and pushes inland. In the 14-mission single-player campaign, you play as a company commander who is part of the meager US defense; there is no campaign from the Soviet perspective, though you can play as the Red Army in multiplayer. However, the campaign twists and weaves, letting you experience a sample of the European conflict, battle in remote areas of the Soviet Union, and bring the fight to New York City.

Yes, the story is a bit far-fetched, but World in Conflict does a great job of making the implausible seem believable. That's partly due to the excellent storytelling, which is spearheaded by pitch-perfect narrator Alec Baldwin. He's backed up by a great voice acting cast that brings the principle and secondary characters to life, along with a story that offers up emotional and sometimes humorous vignettes from a world at war. For instance, you'll hear a soldier's futile battle against Army bureaucracy, the phone conversation of a husband and wife, and the deliberations of the president and his top military advisors. While there's a small misstep or two, such as a gospel song in the weirdest of places, the game effectively tugs at your heartstrings, which is rare for a strategy game, especially when it concerns the fate of one character whom you presume to be entirely one-dimensional but isn't. Some of these vignettes are conveyed through in-game cutscenes, while others are delivered through graphic-novel-style drawings. World in Conflict also features some incredible prerendered cutscenes that are so good you actually wish there were more of them.

This isn't a hardcore wargame or simulation. There are far too many gameplay abstractions for that, from being able to air-drop reinforcements on the battlefield within seconds to repairing equipment almost instantly. Instead, World in Conflict is thrilling game about destruction. You get to unleash all the firepower of modern military units on an open battlefield, but you also get to experience the challenges of combined arms warfare. That's because the game has a great rock-paper-scissors combat system that captures the vicious circle of war. Tanks can kill tanks and other vehicles well, but aren't so good against infantry. Artillery can kill infantry easily, but aren't so good against tanks. Helicopters can knock out vehicles well, but are vulnerable to infantry and antiaircraft units. It's a constant chess match about what you need to bring to battle and how you use it. The game is also smart enough to limit the number of units you can control. Instead of commanding the entire battlefield, you'll have only a relative handful of units. This makes managing your units a lot easier, like when employing their secondary abilities such as popping smoke grenades to create cover when under attack.

Then there's the game's excellent resource system. You're given a pool of reinforcement points that you can use to purchase units. Naturally, the powerful units cost a lot more than weaker ones, so you've got to choose quantity over quality. But it goes a bit deeper than that, as different classes of units have different abilities. For instance, light helicopters are some of the best scouts in the game, able to locate enemies from a distance, but they're extremely vulnerable. Medium helicopters are able to shoot down other helicopters with their air-to-air missiles, but they don't do a lot of damage to armor. Heavy helicopters can eat tanks for breakfast, but aren't effective against other helicopters. So while your initial inclination might be to load up on heavy choppers and go after enemy armor, a wise player recognizes that there are many roles to play on the battlefield. If your units are destroyed, their cost is slowly refunded back into your reinforcement pool, so you can order up replacements, although veteran units are more effective, giving you an incentive to keep your experienced units alive as long as possible.

The nice thing about this system is that it effectively gives you an unlimited number or resources and units to work with, so it's fairly forgiving to nontraditional strategy gamers. If that seems a bit easy, don't worry, because World in Conflict can also ratchet up the pressure by tossing in time limits. For instance, you might have to seize a town in less than 45 minutes, or achieve another objective in far less time. The margins for error are much smaller when you're working under a deadline.

Aside from reinforcement points, the only other resource in the game is tactical aid points, which are accumulated whenever you perform a vital role on the battlefield. You earn points by killing the enemy, but you also earn points by seizing and fortifying objectives, repairing friendly vehicles, transporting infantry around the battlefield, and so on. Tactical aid is like the icing on the cake, because you can use these points to purchase all sorts of powerful and utterly cool things. You can call in air strikes, napalm strikes, cluster bombers, mortar barrages, artillery barrages, chemical warfare, airborne reinforcements, precision artillery, fighter cover, and much more. The ultimate tactical aid is also the most awesome one: tactical nuclear weapons. World in Conflict features the best-looking mushroom clouds in gaming, and when they go off the screen flashes white and you hear the high-pitched sound of electronics frying. It's essentially the chilling sound of death.

All of this takes place on large, dynamic battlefields that come alive with the symphony of destruction. Thankfully, there's barely any worry about collateral damage in the game, so if you have to destroy a city to save it, then don't worry about the insurance bill. The destruction isn't just cosmetic, either. There can be all sorts of tactical implications. Take out a bridge and you force the enemy to go the long way around, or, in a multiplayer game, to call in a tactical aid to erect a new one. If the enemy is hiding infantry in woods and buildings, making them hard to root out, call in napalm and just burn down the trees or use artillery or smart bombs to blow up the structures. Everything blows up so beautifully that there's no such thing as overkill anymore. The game looks spectacular in DirectX 9, and it's noticeably better in DirectX 10 thanks to more atmospheric lighting. If you only have a DX9 card, though, don't worry--you aren't missing out on any gameplay enhancements aside from the ability to use dual-monitor support in multiplayer games.

Pretty much everything in the game looks good, even up close. Move the camera low to the ground and you can make out all the gear on your individual soldiers. Pull the camera back and you can soak in vast landscapes. One thing the game does especially well is smoke. Drop a smart bomb on a building and it will not only explode in thousands of pieces, but it will send convincing pillars of black smoke skyward. After a heavy battle, the sky will turn black because there's so much smoke in the air. That's the incredible level of detail in this game.

As good as the single-player campaign is, though, it pales in comparison to the multiplayer game, which is fast-paced and wonderfully balanced. Imagine the first-person multiplayer action game Battlefield 2 reborn as a real-time strategy game, and you have an inkling of how World in Conflict unfolds online. This is an insanely fun multiplayer game that lets you be part of a team of eight as you attempt to destroy the enemy using teamwork and every tactical weapon in the book.

Everything about multiplayer is designed to get you in a game quickly and keep you there for hours on end. First, when you join a server there's no wait for the current game to wrap up before you can get into the fight. If there's a spot open on the server, you're deposited into the middle of the current battle when you join. Second, there's no downtime at all. In most RTS games, you spend the first several minutes hurriedly trying to gather resources and build a base and units. In World in Conflict, you order up your first set of troops and watch them parachute or airdrop in seconds later. Fighting unfolds within the first minute of each game, and it doesn't stop until the very end. Third, thanks to the resource system, if your units are wiped out you can order up some more and be back fighting within seconds.

Team coordination can be handled through a built-in menu system or, even better, the built-in voice-over-IP chat system that lets you communicate vocally with your teammates. All you need is a microphone. Playing in a relatively uncoordinated manner is still a blast, but if you play on a good team against another coordinated team, the gameplay elevates to a whole new level. Victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat (or vice versa) in intense matches where both teams are hurling all on the battlefield, from air strikes, artillery, multiple tactical nukes, and more. There's nothing quite more urgent than a team desperately trying to cobble together enough tactical aid points for a last-ditch nuke.

Developer Massive Entertainment has been making real-time strategy games for almost a decade now, but World in Conflict is undoubtedly the studio's masterwork. Everything about this game is top-notch, from the addicting gameplay to the amazing visuals. More importantly, World in Conflict offers up a refreshingly new approach to strategy gaming. So if you're a strategy fan, you should definitely try World in Conflict. And even if you're turned off by standard real-time strategy games, you owe it to yourself to try out what Massive has come up with in this exquisite package.

Streets of Rage 2 (Xbox360)

While the original Streets of Rage always stood in the shadow of Capcom's genre-defining Final Fight, Sega's homegrown beat-'em-up series really came into its own with Streets of Rage 2. Released two years after the original, Streets of Rage 2 offered markedly refined gameplay and improved presentation, both technically and stylistically. The game was released on the Wii Virtual Console earlier this year, and now it's on Xbox Live Arcade with a few new bells and whistles.

As with any beat-'em-up worth its salt, Streets of Rage 2 starts off with a kidnapping. The victim this time is Adam, one of the three playable characters from the original Streets of Rage, and the perpetrator is the satisfyingly named Mr. X, the same crime boss whom the three of you thought you had defeated previously. And so, returning characters Axel and Blaze, along with newcomers Max, a wrestler, and Skate, Adam's similarly color-coordinated, Rollerbladed younger brother, hit the mean streets to beat their way through hundreds of increasingly bizarre thugs.

While there were minor differences between the three playable characters in the original Streets of Rage, they're much more pronounced here. Most significant is that each character has a special attack that effectively replaces the ability to call in an artillery strike from the first game, though even basics like run speed, attack strength, and how grapple moves are executed look and feel unique to each of the four characters. Other additions, such as a lunging attack, improve the overall depth of the game. You certainly end up mashing on the attack button more often than not in Streets of Rage 2, but there's enough variety to keep the action satisfying.

Part of that variety comes from the enemies you'll face. While they find strength in numbers, with plenty of generic hoodlums padding out the population, you'll face unique foes like Muay Thai kickboxers, XXL baseball players with a penchant for belly flops, kung fu masters, lunatics with jetpacks, spiked-shoulder-pad-wearing road warriors, and more. The constant stream of street toughs is interrupted regularly with a boss fight, usually against some imposing hulk of a man. Part of what keeps Streets of Rage 2 fresh throughout is that characters from early boss fights often show up later as little more than cannon fodder. It also helps curb some of the enemy repetition that is endemic within most beat-'em-ups.

Though you can solo your way through the eight action-packed levels, it's arguably better with a buddy. The game facilitates this with single-system as well as online co-op play, and save for a few minor hiccups, the online co-op seems to work pretty well. The same can't be said for the online versus mode, with which we experienced chronic lag issues. The versus mode is just a best-of-three brawl between two characters, and though the lag makes it basically unplayable, it wasn't much of a selling point in the game's original release.

All of this action is great fun to watch as well, thanks to the large, stylishly animated characters and the variety of environments you'll fight your way through, with plenty of background detail and sharp parallax scrolling effects. As with Sega's previous XBLA releases, Streets of Rage 2 features an enhanced visual mode that softens the sharp pixel edges on the now 15-year-old graphics. It's a trick that worked pretty well on the simple, cartoony visuals in Sonic the Hedgehog, but in Streets of Rage 2 it obscures some of the great background detail, and gives the characters an odd, embossed look. As good as the game otherwise looks and plays, though, it might be the music in Streets of Rage 2 that stands as its greatest asset. Underlined with a cacophony of battle cries, death knells, and the various cracks and thumps of hand-to-hand combat, Yuzo Koshiro's poppy, synthesized soundtrack is consistently catchy and evocative, and it lends a greater sense of drama and urgency to the action.

Though Streets of Rage 2 for XBLA doesn't feature the sound-test mode where you can listen to the game's catchy soundtrack on its own, there are other perks, such as the ability to save your progress at any time, full online leaderboards, and some fairly attainable achievements. Streets of Rage 2 is one of the best beat-'em-up experiences you'll have anywhere, and this is a really solid version. For 400 points, or about $5, it's a great deal for a classic game.

Blue Dragon (Xbox360)

Blue Dragon is not a game that is going to elicit a strong reaction from you. It's not terrible, or particularly great or memorable, so the most remarkable thing about it is how unremarkable it is. It's big: three DVDs big, thanks to loads of cutscenes and voice clips. But it isn't grand and sweeping, and it isn't particularly charming, either. Blue Dragon is simply "there." If you wanted to play a Japanese role-playing game on your Xbox 360, this will get the job done. If you wanted to play something that makes an impact, you'll need to keep waiting.

The game is held back foremost by the story. Main characters Shu, Kluke, and Jiro have had their village destroyed by a land shark. Oh, not the one from Saturday Night Live. This one's mechanical, and it sets into play the main story, which consists mostly of chasing hypervillain Nene across one of the blandest, most unexciting fantasy worlds in recent memory. The narrative is 50 hours of lukewarm plot development that meanders sleepily along until the third disc. The conclusion packs some excitement, but not enough to justify the preceding hours of boring build up.

As if the poor pace of the story isn't enough, the lead characters are barely worthy of bit parts in better RPGs. Shu mostly pumps his fist and proclaims with a raspy whine that he will never give up, which will at least make you thankful that someone cares about the whole affair. Kluke just widens her eyes and looks sweet, and Jiro's most interesting idiosyncrasy is how he waves his hand dismissively when he casts a spell. The two additions to the party, Zola and Marumaro, manage to make things a little less bland. Zola tries, anyway, with her sultry voice and cool demeanor. As for Marumaro, well, he's an annoying, screechy-voiced feline whelp who will make you appreciate the more boring characters. There are occasional attempts at humor, and you may chuckle in spite of yourself: Marumaro's crush on Zola is an occasional source of amusement, for example. Yet most attempts to establish character are simply forced, so the few quiet moments your party members share have no emotional resonance whatsoever.

Everything else just feels like a struggle to rise above the story, and there are some mild successes in this regard. To start with, there aren't any weapons. Instead, your party members have shadows in the form of--you guessed it--blue dragons, and they do all the fighting and spellcasting on your behalf. It's like having constant summons, and it's fun to watch your shadows pummel the enemy, whether by standard attack or spell. The battles themselves aren't anything special and don't do much with the usual turn-based formula, but there is a decent variety of skills to mess with during encounters.

Blue Dragon tries to stand out from the pack in a few other ways. First you have the class system, liberally borrowed from the similar mechanics of Final Fantasy V. Each character starts with a set of available classes, and as he or she levels, so does the equipped class. Over time, you open up more classes, and you can switch from one to the other at any time, as long as you aren't in battle. It's a flexible system because most spells and skills you earn for one class can be transferred to others. The biggest problem is that your characters, who are already lacking personalities, lose even more individuality; they can be anything you want at any time, and the chances are that they'll be effective in every area. In fact, to earn better abilities and unlock some of the insanely difficult achievements, you're forced to switch out classes all the time. Flexibility is a good thing, but the way it's done in Blue Dragon makes every already-predictable character become an even more generic jack-of-all-trades.

Despite the weirdly generic way your characters turn out, the game also has an "attack circle" battle system, which is where you'll get the most satisfaction from Blue Dragon. You'll never run into any random battles, given that you can pick and choose your fights. However, when you are ready to jump into the fray, you can string encounters together in a chain. You do so by getting close to multiple enemies, pulling a trigger, and choosing to battle everyone in your attack radius. It's a great system that offers a reward, such as increased agility or physical defense, between successive battles. Furthermore, depending on the class and skills you have equipped, some attacks can be charged up by holding the A button, though doing so will likely change the turn order. That's another nifty system, because you will always need to weigh the potential benefit of the stronger charged attack versus handing your foe an earlier turn.

But don't get too excited about the minimal random-battle grind, because instead, you have random item inspection. You can walk up to almost anything and find gold, items, and other things. It's not just a matter of opening the scattered chests or checking out the occasional random barrel; everything is a potential hiding place. It has the double effect of encouraging you to check every single thing you pass in the hope that something is in there (surely it makes sense that gold would be hidden inside a stuffed turkey), as well as giving you plenty of potions and money. It's obviously helpful to have a bunch of stuff, but it's also part of another minor shortcoming: Blue Dragon is super easy. Potions and spells are really cheap, it's easy to get gold, and you'll outlevel the artificial intelligence with a minimum of arbitrary battles. The final disc ramps up the challenge a bit, but you should still be able to get through it without any major difficulties. Thankfully, there are a few minigames scattered around to break things up, which makes for a nice change of pace. You'll attack other spaceships with your own vessel, guard a traveling caravan of wagons, and perform contextual button presses here and there.

The visuals are polished and colorful, but they also lack character. Akira Toriyama's character design isn't nearly as interesting as the awesome, detailed work he did in Dragon Quest VIII. Admittedly, the shadows are pretty cool to look at, as are many of the enemy designs, such as the awesome mural monsters. The battle camera is also well done, and it zooms and swoops cinematically during critical hits and other pivotal attacks. But in keeping with Blue Dragon's nothing-special sensibilities, free-roam environments are endlessly boring and often striking in their emptiness. There are also a lot of blurry depth-of-field effects that make objects in the distance appear all fuzzy when the camera focuses on the foreground. It's overdone and feels like a trick to make the graphics look better than they really are. It's also worth noting that battles often result in a notable amount of sluggishness, which doesn't make a lot of sense, considering that nothing appears to be pushing the limits of the hardware. Nobuo Uematsu's score fares better, mostly because it stays out of the way. His battle rock music is fine, but its repeated so often, it loses its impact.

Blue Dragon may be the first Japanese RPG we've seen in a while on the Xbox 360, but it's also totally forgettable, telling a story that didn't beg to be told in a game that doesn't do much to stand out. If you're into role-playing games, you'll find that Blue Dragon is long and mostly serviceable, but it doesn't give you much back for all the time you'll spend on it. Let's hope there's another RPG for the platform soon that gives us more to sink our teeth into.

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened (PC)

If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft had ever collaborated on a novel, the duo might have come up with a spooky saga a lot like Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. This adventure, the third in Frogwares Game Development Company's series featuring the protagonist of such classic mysteries as The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four, pits the deerstalker-wearing detective against the horrors of the Cthulhu mythos. While that combination may sound more like fan-fiction cheese than a pulp-fiction dream team, the tale here is told brilliantly, and the adventure mechanics are as faultlessly logical as the legendary sleuth himself.

That doesn't mean that the game is easy. On the contrary, Holmes and his sidekick, Dr. Watson, have to be extremely careful and observant to stop cultists from setting off Cthulhu's alarm clock. The big difference between The Awakened and the average adventure with its walk-through-prompting leaps of stupidity is that you can figure out all of the challenges that come your way if you approach them as Holmes himself. This means that you need to closely examine your surroundings, keeping an eye out for footprints, scraps of cloth, bits of fiber, and other nearly imperceptible clues that can help you unravel the mystery. In fact, this mystery begins with a missing servant and turns into a globe-spanning investigation into (cue Lovecraftian purple prose) indescribable eldritch horrors from beyond time and space!

However, the game isn't a tedious pixel hunt. If you scan all of the backdrops with Holmes' or Watson's practiced eyes, you'll spot important items almost immediately. Such key areas as desks and shelves can also usually be zoomed in on, so you know when something needs a look-see with Holmes' trusty magnifying glass. There is a great sense of consistency and internal logic at work here that keeps you on the right path as long as you scrutinize everything in sight. You are also presented with the odd bit of old-fashioned adventure-game goofiness. At one point, you McGyver together a blowgun out of a pipe and a hypodermic syringe, but much of the time, it feels like you're a real detective running down leads and collecting clues.

Yet simply observing everything and slapping together makeshift weapons won't prevent cultists from summoning Cthulhu. There are a lot of puzzles to solve during the course of the game, including a couple of combination door locks, a devilish clock conundrum that must be solved to open a safe, a few extraordinarily tough ciphers, and even one challenge to draw the bloody pentagram that serves as the sign of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. Holmes must also take evidence back to labs (both in his famous flat at 221 B Baker St. and elsewhere) and examine it under a microscope or cook it up with other solvents in a mechanical contraption to separate the elements. Some of this can be a little finicky. Sometimes you have to use a scalpel or tweezers just right on a piece of evidence slabbed under the microscope. Hot spots in the game can occasionally be a touch tricky to activate as well. Still, the hands-on feel of these various challenges more than makes up for a few minor technical issues.

Visual presentation also makes it seem as if The Awakened is right at your fingertips. Unlike the traditional third-person adventure or stutter-step Myst clone, this game is depicted in first-person shooter style. You look through the eyes of Holmes or Watson and have complete range of movement in full 3D environments that are attractive and atmospheric. The story also takes you all over the globe, so you get to sleuth your way from London to Germany to New Orleans and back again. Some of the background scenery is a bit flat, although the characters are beautifully drawn and loaded with such detail that you can see the pores and 5 o'clock shadow on Watson's face. Lifeless street scenes are all that interfere with the illusion of stepping into the 19th century. For example, Holmes' neighborhood in London is practically deserted in the middle of the day; the only citizens in sight are a newsboy member of the Baker St. Irregulars, a hansom cabdriver, and a woman selling flowers. This sure isn't the bustling capital of the Victorian world brought to life in Doyle's short stories.

Audio is straight out of the BBC. Although the acting and dialogue are unsurprisingly more workmanlike than the fantastic Sherlock Holmes TV adaptations from the early '90s starring Jeremy Brett, everything remains entirely believable. However, some of the cutscenes are rather wordy, and there isn't any way to skip them or even fast-forward through specific lines. In some ways, this actually adds to the gameplay because it forces you to concentrate on every word spoken, much like the obsessive Holmes would have--or not. Holmes is awfully talky and obnoxious a lot of the time, so there are moments when you long for the ability to just hit the escape button to shut him up. The soundtrack is also sufficiently ominous and worthy of a TV show or movie. Unfortunately, slight audio clipping mars the main score on the menu screen and during level loads.

Both true to the character of Sherlock Holmes and a rip-roaring pulp adventure in its own right, The Awakened is a must-play game. Mystery lovers with a taste for the supernatural will feel right at home with this slice of Cthulhu-infused Victoriana.

warhawk (PS3)

Warhawk is a 32-player, multiplayer-only shooter from Sony. It has ties back to another Warhawk, an early game for the original PlayStation that focused on the warhawk itself, a fighter jet that can convert to hover mode and back again. You probably don't remember it, which hardly matters, because the multiplayer focus of the PlayStation 3 Warhawk game leaves it with no real story and no real sense of the war you're fighting. This game has a stripped-down feel, but the exciting gameplay certainly makes up for those feelings. This is blue versus red across multiple modes and maps, in the land or in the air. And it's excellent fun.

The real story of Warhawk isn't about the epic conflict between two opposing sides. It's about how this game has been made available. If you want it immediately, it's a downloadable purchase from the PlayStation Store for $39.99. If you're desperately in need of more things to put on shelves, or if you want a voice-chat device, you can buy the game in stores for the standard $59.99 in a package that comes with a wireless headset, some behind-the-scenes video, and a full manual. There's no functional difference between the two games, so it really comes down to personal preference. The downloadable version does not come with instructions at all, which is sort of messed up. Other games on the PlayStation 3 have had Web browser links built in to load up offsite manuals and things like that, but Warhawk has none. So the only way you'd know that you need to push the L3 button to talk or find out about the zones mode is to fumble around for yourself or go to Sony's site, where it has a downloadable manual available. But even that manual, which comes in the box with the retail version, doesn't explain everything, such as some of the terms used in the ranking screen.

It's a good thing, then, that most of Warhawk is incredibly straightforward. It's easy to jump right into a game using the game's server browser, and there seem to already be plenty of people playing at all hours. If you've ever played something like Battlefield 2 or Star Wars: Battlefront, you'll probably take to Warhawk's brand of team-based multiplayer shooting quickly, as it's a simplified take on that experience. The maps have bases strewn about that your team can capture. Capturing them gives you a place to spawn, or if you're playing in the zones mode, it'll help you earn points toward winning the game. You spawn on foot, with nothing but a lowly pistol and a couple of grenades. But at bases and spawn points, you can usually find a host of weapons. These include an assault rifle, flamethrower, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, and binoculars, some of which you can use to call in air strikes. You'll also find plenty of vehicles, such as jeeps, tanks, and the warhawk itself. And in some fortified areas, you'll find turrets that shoot flak or homing missiles, which are very, very effective against incoming aircraft. All of this balances out nicely because the ground troops can take out vehicles with the homing rockets from the rocket launcher, the turrets can defend base positions against air--but not as well against other vehicles--and the tanks are usually sitting ducks for warhawks to plink away at with swarm missiles or cluster bombs.

One of the major gameplay differences between Warhawk and other similar shooters is that you'll find a ton of aircraft on most of the maps. Sometimes you'll feel as if half of the game's 32-player limit is buzzing around, dogfighting overhead, or attempting to strafe ground targets. This gives it a unique feel, and it's a lot of fun. Warhawk controls well regardless of what you're piloting too. You can play around with controller sensitivity to get things just right, and, if you like, you can fly the warhawk using the tilt sensing of the Sixaxis controller. However, the tilt support never feels responsive enough to be useful in tense situations.

Warhawk comes with five different maps. Before you get all up in arms about how low that number looks, each map can be configured for different game sizes, so there are configurations for small, medium, and large-sized games. Each map also has a dogfight configuration, giving you more warhawks to use. The different configurations make the maps feel totally different, giving you different strategies to work with and so on. This means that playing in an eight-player game can be just as thrilling as a 32-player fracas. There are also multiple modes. Team deathmatch works as you would expect, with control-point captures giving you new places to spawn but no real points benefit. Capture the flag is a standard two-flag CTF mode that puts flags in each team's main base. Zones mode creates colored circles around each base, and the goal is to earn points faster than the other guys by holding more zones than the other team. The zones link together if you hold the right ones and level up your control over them to make the colored circles bigger, which brings in even more points. Lastly, there's a deathmatch mode, which can be fun for dogfights, but this is very much a team-based game, so playing with no team to back you up isn't as much fun. You can also play online with a split-screen, which allows multiple players to play online from the same machine. On top of playing on the Internet, the game has support for LAN games.

Outside of the game, you can chart your progress to look at your rank and medals. You'll earn ribbons for a variety of round-specific accomplishments, such as finishing first on the winning team, getting 10 antiair kills, not shooting your teammates, and so on. Badges and medals also take your global counts into consideration, giving you awards, such as a meritorious service medal. You'll get this award for capturing the flag 100 times, defending 100 zones, capturing 500 zones, and then getting two flag captures in the same game. That's sort of steep, but it certainly gives you something to shoot for as you play. As you rise in rank, you'll unlock additional head, shirt, and pants types for your soldiers, giving you a clear way on the battlefield to see if someone's totally raw or a honed online killing machine.

Warhawk will run in 480p, 720p, or 1080i, and the game looks really nice overall. Its greatest visual feature is that you have a very long draw distance, giving you a clear view of things that are really far away. For example, on one map, which is made up of a series of high islands, you can sit in your base and see turrets moving in bases far, far in the distance. Armed with a sniper rifle, you can practically reach across the entire map and knock fools out. The equipment looks good, and it also blasts apart really well. Exploding warhawks cause burning hunks of metal to fall out of the sky, and it looks great. The game sound is also effective, with good weapon noises and explosions. Warhawk, unlike most online PlayStation 3 games, has voice chat, which comes in handy.

Regardless of how you get it, Warhawk is a great multiplayer shooter and one of the first of its kind to land on the still-new PlayStation 3. It offers just enough content to justify its price tag, but more importantly, it plays well, with just the right mix of tactical considerations and finger-on-the-trigger action. With hooks in there for additional map downloads, it'll be interesting to see how this one develops from here.

BioShock (PC)

While on the surface it might look like little more than a very pretty first-person shooter, BioShock is much, much more than that. Sure, the action is fine, but its primary focus is its story, a sci-fi mystery that manages to feel retro and futuristic at the same time, and its characters, who convey most of the story via radio transmissions and audio logs that you're constantly stumbling upon as you wander around. All of it blends together to form a rich, interesting world that sucks you in right away and won't let go until you've figured out what, exactly, is going on in the undersea city of Rapture.

BioShock opens with a bang, but the overall plot focuses more on making an emotional impact than an explosive one. The year is 1960, and you're flying over the Atlantic Ocean. One mysterious plane crash later, you're floating in the water, apparently the lone survivor, surrounded by the flaming wreckage of the aircraft. But there's a lighthouse on a tiny island just at the edge of your view. Who in their right mind would put a lighthouse this far out? You swim closer and discover a small submersible called a bathysphere waiting to take you underwater. After catching a breathtaking view of what's below, you're sent into the secret underwater city of Rapture. Masterminded by a somewhat megalomaniacal businessman named Andrew Ryan, this city is driven by its own idea of total freedom, with capitalism completely unhindered by governmental meddling and science unhinged from the pesky morals of organized religion. Sounds like the perfect society, right? Well, even before you step out of your bathysphere and into the city, it becomes obvious that everything has gone horribly wrong down here. The city is trashed, and genetic freaks called splicers roam around, attacking anything that gets in front of them. At the heart of the matter is a powerful, corrupting substance called ADAM, which makes all this genetic tinkering possible and allows you to get your first plasmid power, the ability to shoot lightning out of your fingertips.

Character customization is a key trait in BioShock. You have a limited but increasable number of spaces in various customization categories, and you can totally reconfigure all of your different plasmids and tonics at will, at no charge, at specific locations in-game. Plasmids are the active, weaponlike genetic enhancement. Many of these are very straightforward. Incinerate lets you burn things and melt ice. Telekinesis lets you use your left hand as if it were Half-Life 2's gravity gun. But others are a little more subversive. Security bullseye is a little ball you can toss at enemies, causing any nearby security cameras, turrets, or sentry bots to point in his direction. Enrage can cause enemies to fight one another. Insect swarm causes your arm to shoot bees at your enemies, which unfortunately is far less cool-looking than it sounds. You can also place decoys, plant swirling wind traps for enemies, and so on. While it's fun to mess around with a lot of the indirect attacks, facing your enemies head-on with the more direct plasmids feels a bit more effective.

Tonics are skills that are slotted just like plasmids, but they have passive effects, like sportboost, which increases your movement and melee attack speed, or natural camouflage, which makes you turn invisible if you stand still for a few seconds. So if you want to make your swinging wrench attacks more powerful, you can slot up things like wrench jockey and wrench lurker, which increase your wrench damage on all attacks and when catching opponents off-guard, respectively. Add bloodlust, which gives you some health back every time you club someone with your wrench, and you're a melee master with health and plasmid energy (called EVE) to spare. You can also slot some defensive stuff, like static field, which zaps anyone who touches you with a electric radius effect, and armored shell, which reduces the damage you take from physical attacks. There are more than 50 tonics to collect, giving you plenty of options to play around with.

Most of those plasmids and tonics will have to be purchased using the raw ADAM that you collect from harvesting vessels called little sisters. They're little girls with a big needle that they use to collect the sought-after stuff from dead bodies, and they're protected by the baddest enemies in the entire game, hulking armored monsters called big daddies. This is where the game makes you decide to be selfless or selfish. If you harvest the girls, they die, but you get 160 ADAM from them. If you free them and return them to normal, you get only 80 ADAM. There are a limited number of girls to deal with in the entire game, making it very possible that you won't be able to collect every single purchasable plasmid and tonic, so choose wisely. Either route has benefits and consequences, and there are story considerations as well.

Before you start thinking this is some kind of role-playing game or something, let's stop right here and say that in addition to all the toys that plasmids and tonics for you to play around with, you're also going to be carrying around some more conventional firepower. Your melee weapon is a wrench, and you quickly collect a pistol and machine gun. Being that this is 1960 filtered through the isolation of an undersea world that has the art deco style of the first half of the century, the weapons aren't nearly as high-tech as the genetic code in your body. The machine gun is your basic tommy gun, and the grenade launcher appears to have been cobbled together from coffee cans and other spare parts. You'll also get a shotgun, a crossbow, and so on. You can also collect different types of ammunition, such as exploding buckshot for your shotgun or missiles for your grenade launcher, and upgrades that increase damage, speed up reloads, and so on. The weapons are functional and the upgrades are pretty good, but the firing action isn't nearly as exciting as a combat-focused first-person shooter would be. The weapons are loud but don't feel especially right, and seeing shotgun blasts not even do 50 percent damage to an unarmored human target (on the default difficulty setting) just feels wrong. But that might also say something about the general lack of enemy variety.

There are five types of splicers to deal with, and these are your primary enemies. The splicers are humans who have messed around with ADAM too much and have essentially lost their minds. Now they wander around the city like junkies in need of a fix. The only real difference among them is what they're carrying. Leadheads have guns, thugs have blunt objects, nitros toss explosives, Houdini splicers can teleport and shoot fireballs, and spider splicers can crawl on ceilings and toss hooks at you. As you go through the game, they get tougher to kill, but there's no real visual indicator as to why that's so, leading to some of the weapons feeling a bit weak. Headshots simply shift from killing enemies immediately to not killing enemies immediately. This makes smart use of a combination of plasmids and conventional weapons the best tactic, though even those tactics don't involve much. The same one-two punch of shocking enemies to stun them and following up with a whack with the wrench is a perfectly viable tactic throughout the entire game, depending on how you've placed your tonics.

You'll find more important human characters at certain points in the story, and though these are set up like boss fights, these guys are just more powerful and resilient versions of existing splicers. You'll also have to deal with security robots, turrets, and cameras, though these can all be hacked via a neat little hacking minigame to bring them over to your side, allowing for more indirect combat options.

Then there's the big daddy, which comes in two configurations. The bouncer has a huge drill arm that is used to, you know, drill into people. The rosie likes to launch explosives in your general direction. Both of them are fairly nasty, because they move quickly and dish out a lot of damage while not taking very much from most of your attacks. They protect the little sisters, who are invulnerable to your attacks and can only be dealt with once their protecting big daddy is dead. The big daddy is hardly unbeatable, though you may die a few times while facing your first few. Death in BioShock is barely even a setback. When you die, you're reconstituted at the nearest vita-chamber and sent on your way with your inventory intact and most of your health.

This isn't a reload, so everything is as you left it, even the damage that you've already done to any surviving enemies. So you can wear down a big daddy by just running at it again and again with little or no care for your health. That can get tedious, of course, but having that possibility is a blessing--and a curse. On one hand, you're free to try out new things, like plasmid and tonic combinations, with no penalty if you equip some bum techniques. On the other, there aren't any real gameplay consequences, so playing with skill isn't rewarded. You could fumble your way through the 15 or 20 hours it'll probably take to properly explore Rapture and still see everything there is to see. This, along with three selectable difficulty settings, leaves you with the impression that the game was made to cater to a wide audience, but the hard difficulty setting doesn't actually impact things like artificial intelligence or force you to play any more skillfully to succeed. The enemies still mostly run at you mindlessly while attacking, occasionally getting into scraps with one another or breaking off to find a healing machine, but they take longer to kill and hurt you more when they hit.

While the world of Rapture is rich and filled with interesting little tidbits, the game does a tight job of keeping you on track. Aside from two cases where you must collect a certain amount of specific items in order to proceed, you always know exactly what to do and where to go to do it, thanks to a handy map screen and an onscreen arrow that points you directly at the next objective. These helping hands feel almost a little too helpful, but in the event that you get really stuck, you'll appreciate the additional hint system that very plainly explains what you need to do and where you need to go to move forward.

You won't miss a ton of locations by sticking to exactly where the arrow points you, but the story fills out a lot more when you find and listen to as many audio diaries as possible. Hearing various characters talk about the problems leading up to Rapture's current disheveled state really fills in the blanks nicely and should be considered mandatory if you intend to play the game. Hearing the voices of these wide-eyed idealists as their world falls apart makes the whole game feel more human. Playing through without listening to any of these optional audio clips would make the game quiet and, actually, fairly confusing, as you'd be proceeding with no sense of backstory about Andrew Ryan, fish magnate Frank Fontaine, and the bit characters who comment on their increasingly hostile struggle.

It certainly helps that the environments you find throughout the game look amazing and practically beg to be explored. For something as potentially dingy as an underwater city, you sure do get a lot of different looks as you move along, from the boiler rooms and workshops of the city's core to the forest that helps keep the entire thing oxygenated. You'll also get a lot of great views of the sea through windows. In addition to a terrific artistic design that ties the visuals together, the game has a very strong technical side, provided you have a machine that's built enough to handle it. Unreal Engine 3 is under the hood, and all the requisite bells and whistles are along for the ride. If there's one thing you need to know about BioShock's graphics, it's that the water looks perfect. As an underwater city that's slowly falling apart, it's no surprise that you'll find plenty of leaks. Whether it's standing water on the floor or sea water rushing in after an explosion, it'll blow you away every time you see it.

But BioShock isn't without flaw. The game has been released with a host of technical issues, ranging from a total lack of audio on some machines to issues with the SecuROM online activation, which under normal circumstances is designed to prevent you from activating a retail copy on more than two machines. The game is also available through Steam, though all of the same audio stuttering and other issues that some players are experiencing in the disc-based version carry over to the digital version as well. While it's a sad truth that no game is ever released in a completely bug-free state for 100 percent of its users, these issues appear to be pretty widespread, and if you're at all skittish about waiting for a patch after you've purchased something, you might want to wait until at least one patch is released before buying BioShock. In our experience, we got the game running with some minor audio stuttering on a Windows XP PC, and can't get any audio at all on our Vista test machine. All of this makes the Xbox 360 version's stuttering issues (which seem to only happen on some consoles) pale in comparison.

Aside from having different technical problems, the differences between the Xbox 360 and PC versions of BioShock are fairly minor. The mouse and keyboard support works exactly as you'd expect, and using a mouse makes the combat a touch easier, since aiming for the head is usually easier with a mouse than with a gamepad. But if you're after that console-style gamepad experience, BioShock has full support for the wired Xbox 360 controller. If you're at a loss for which version to purchase, it comes down to the quality of your PC. If you're running a high-end DirectX 10 machine, the game looks better on the PC. It also has DirectX 9 support, and even running this way, it's possible for some facets of BioShock, like texture quality, to look sharper than the 360 version if your machine can handle it. But when you factor in the current bug list for each version, or if your PC isn't especially recent, the Xbox 360 version is a safer bet.

In addition to some nice period music that plays from jukeboxes or record players, you'll get some terrific music that helps set the creepy, uncertain mood. The weapons sound good and loud, and everything else just sounds right. The voice acting, which you'll hear plenty of throughout the game from both living characters and their posthumous audio recordings, really brings the story together and helps give it all an emotional impact that most games lack. You'll also hear splicers mumbling, humming, and singing to themselves as they scavenge the environment, which helps give the game a creepy vibe. The quality and depth of things like this are what set BioShock apart from other games and make it something really special overall.

If you're the kind of player who just wants yet another action-packed shooter, BioShock probably isn't for you. Its weak link is its unsatisfying no-skill-required combat, which might aim this one just over the head of the average Halo fan. But if you want to get a little fancy, there's a lot of fun to be had with some of the game's more indirect fighting methods. It builds an amazing atmosphere by using terrific graphics and sound to set a creepy mood. But BioShock's real strengths are as a compelling work of interactive fiction, and as a unique ride through a warped world with some great payoff built into its mysterious plot. If that description has you even the least bit interested, you'll definitely find BioShock worth playing--but you still might want to hold off for a patch or two, just in case.