Blazing Angels 2: Secret Missions of WWII (X360)

Blazing Angels 2 is a fairly straightforward mission-based flight game set against the backdrop of World War II, much like its predecessor was. But instead of sticking to the facts like the first game tried to do, the sequel heads off into that not-so-lofty "what if?" territory that World War II-themed games eventually seem to get to, where Nazis are either resurrecting dead humans and making horrific zombies, or building huge Tesla coils and prototypical laser cannons and other then-impossible technology. This game goes for the latter, giving you a bunch of prototype technology to fly and fight against, some of which was just out of reach back in the 1940s. At the same time, a handful of improvements make Blazing Angels 2 a better game than the previous release, though some spotty difficulty progression makes the single-player a little uneven.

The story and characters from the first game have been tossed out, though the basics are the same. You play as Captain Robinson, and you quickly hook up with some wingmen to form an elite squadron that gets into the places that other, lesser pilots couldn't touch. Your team gets involved in some hairy scenarios as you track down a German special weapons division that's turning out a bunch of new technology vital to the fight. So along with protecting key civilian targets in major American cities and bombing bases, you'll also have missions where you have to take out airfields, then land to steal prototype planes and escape. You'll also guard escaping trains, shoot missiles out of the sky, and even take on huge bosslike crafts, like plane-spewing zeppelins, big cannons aimed at Red Square, large Tesla installations, and so on. The game does a good job of moving you around from place to place, which keeps you from getting bored of any one area and constantly has you doing different things in different planes.

Of course, it all eventually comes back to you dogfighting enemy planes. Not too far into the game's 18-mission campaign, you start getting secondary weapons like rockets. You get a lot of rockets and it's a snap to replenish your supplies, so at this point, your machine guns become almost totally useless. You later get homing rockets that make blowing up enemy planes a trivial, meaningless task. This means that most of the game is so easy that you'll finish missions on the first try, though that feeling of extreme air superiority fits with the spirit of your elite squad. The lone exception is the eighth mission, which has you guarding Moscow's Red Square against German attackers. The game isn't particularly clear about what you need to do to protect the square from being destroyed, which makes this one mission a little harder than the rest. But for the most part, it's smooth sailing. A little too smooth, perhaps.

You'll upgrade your planes as you play using points earned in each mission, and you should have more than enough to buy everything by the end of the game. Different upgrades include better gun sights, faster-firing machine guns, armor and maneuverability enhancements, and so on. One upgrade makes your missiles explode if they get close to a target, which means you don't even have to score a direct hit to take out most planes. In combat, you'll be able to order your wingmen around a bit, and each guy has a special ability, just like in the previous game. One wingman will come back and taunt enemies to give you some breathing room, a skill you'll probably never actually need. Another will go on an aggressive attack and take out a handful of enemies, which is much more useful. The third is a mechanic that will occasionally repair your plane, though unlike in the first game, you don't have to hit a sequence of onscreen buttons to perform the repairs--he just fixes it automatically at checkpoints.

The single-player campaign is pretty satisfying, though it won't take too long for players to bust through it, and you'll probably earn almost all of the campaign-related achievements as you go. That's not automatically bad, as flying around and blowing up everything in sight using a variety of destructive tools is actually quite fun. There's also a multiplayer side to the game, and it offers a lot of different modes and options for solo flights, team games, and cooperative play. The catch is that there seem to be very few people playing the game online, and aside from a solo dogfight here and there, it seems impossible to find anyone playing in any of the other modes. For what it's worth, the multiplayer matches we were able to actually get into weren't very exciting. Many matches take place in skies filled with little power-up icons that you can collect to reload your weapons, repair your plane, get double damage, and so on. The power-ups just don't really fit with the vibe of the rest of the game and make the whole thing seem a little hokey. On top of that, if you have a laggy connection to other players, they'll skip around so badly that no one will be able to hit each other. Being able to play cooperatively through the campaign missions is an attractive offer, though, so it might be worth convincing a handful of your friends to get a copy so you can all play together.

Blazing Angels 2 looks a bit cleaner and more colorful than the first game. The ground looks nice, even up close, and the various plane models look realistic. You can go in and swap around the colors for each plane and also unlock additional paint schemes. The game's effects and explosions look OK, and for the most part the game has a good, smooth frame rate. The audio gets a little too repetitive in spots, as the main theme for the game seems to play every few minutes in one form or another, eventually getting a little grating. There's a lot of voice acting throughout the missions and a handful of between-mission cutscenes, and most of it is good enough. You might not like the movielike feel the game is going for, though, because the Germans and Japanese have really awful accents and speak English most of the time.

Blazing Angels 2 is a very clear improvement over the original game, though the balance has swung over to the easy side in this sequel. And, of course, if you like your WWII games to be historical and rooted in fact, you probably won't enjoy flying a prototype jet under the Golden Gate Bridge very much. But if you're after a loose, simple game where you get to fly a lot of different, crazy planes and blow up a billion German fighters, you'll probably have a good time.

Heavenly Sword (PS3)

Ever since it was first shown, Heavenly Sword has drawn comparisons to God of War. Like SCEA's flagship franchise, Heavenly Sword has great production values, exciting combat, and an enjoyable story with interesting characters. What it doesn't have is length, clocking in at just six-and-a-half hours from start to finish. So while it's a great game, it's a great game you can beat in one sitting.

Like God of War, Heavenly Sword starts off with what appears to be the death of the game's main character, so the story is told via flashbacks. In this case it's a young woman named Nariko, an outcast who was thought before she was born to be the one to fulfill her peoples' prophecy surrounding the Heavenly Sword. The titular sword is a dangerous weapon that grants tremendous power to whomever wields it, but at the cost of that person's life. Nariko's clan has protected the ancient weapon, but they've grown weak and find themselves under attack from King Bohan, an evil despot who wants the sword for his own use. In this desperate hour Nariko's people and even her father are finally forced to admit that she is their only hope. The game's story is well written (if a bit predictable), and the characters are brought to life by some fine performances by the actors who portray them.

There are a few rudimentary door-opening puzzles and a handful of situations where you'll have to quickly press a button that appears onscreen as you make your way through the linear levels. But most of your time with Nariko will be spent killing thousands of enemies in her quest to keep the Heavenly Sword from falling into Bohan's hands. Nariko has three different types of attacks that she can perform by standing in a specific stance. Speed attacks are performed by pressing the square or triangle buttons. Her ranged and power stances are done by pressing the L1 or R1 buttons respectively. Attack combos can be strung together by pressing square and triangle in specific patterns or by switching from one stance to the next midattack.

Using combos and attacking with style are important not only because they're the quickest way to defeat an enemy, but also because they're the key to unlocking more combinations and even bonus content. Each consecutive attack you perform without getting hit fills a meter that's divided into thirds. Perform enough combos and you'll earn a new combo; reach the second and third level and you'll unlock making-of movies, artwork, and more. You'll also gain access to superstyle attacks along the way. When you've earned enough style points you can hit the circle button and trigger a short cutscene where Nariko finishes off a foe with creative flair. It's certainly beneficial to learn a few combos, but you can get through the game just fine doing the same few over and over again.

However, you'll need to vary the position you attack from. Some enemies are only vulnerable to certain attack styles and some can be attacked only with a successful block or counter, both of which are tied to the three different stances. As bad guys attack, they'll flash a color that indicates what kind of attack is coming. If it's a speed attack you don't have to do a thing; Nariko will block it on her own. If it's a power attack though, you'll have to quickly press the R1 button to block. If it's red, it's an unblockable attack and you'll need to roll out of the way by moving the right analog stick. Counters are performed by quickly pressing the triangle as an attack is imminent. They're a great way to quickly dispatch an enemy, though they're tough to time when you're surrounded by a few dozen people, all attacking at different moments.

Heavenly Sword keeps things fresh by mixing in a second playable character and a few different play styles. For some of the game you're placed in the role of the lovably quirky Kai, a bizarre catlike girl whose favorite "game" is to shoot bad guys with her crossbow. She can't fight at close range, and can only create separation between herself and the enemy by pushing them off of her. The awkward switch from one camera angle to another that occurs when you go from running to aiming makes it tough to get a shot off, so the levels where Kai's on foot and fighting aren't her best moments. It's good, then, that most of your time spent as Kai has you simply shooting bad guys with the game's enjoyable motion controls. By continuing to hold the fire button you can control Kai's arrow midflight in slow motion by tilting the Sixaxis left, right, up, and down. Nariko has a few levels like this where she mans a cannon and wields a rocket launcher as well. Kai's sections are sometimes a tad too long, but it's quite satisfying to guide an arrow across a level and then land it in a soldier's groin or head.

Overall the game's combat is a good mix of being easy to learn but deep enough that you don't feel like you're just hitting the same two buttons and seeing the same attacks over and over. This is an impressive feat considering how shallow the game's enemy artificial intelligence is. Rather than challenging you with smart bad guys with a wide range of moves, the game simply tries to overwhelm you with numbers. Sure, some are fast, some are strong, and some shoot arrows at you, but none of them exhibit any sort of creativity in their attacks. Even the bosses, who at least attack in new ways, aren't particularly clever and are challenging only because their life bars are seemingly endless. Slightly repetitive or not, it's hard not to have a blast when you're controlling a lone heroine against more than a thousand enemies, all of which are onscreen at once.

Heavenly Sword is elevated by its top-notch presentation. Nariko's attacks are beautifully animated and flow seamlessly from one to the next with only a little slowdown here and there. It's a little disappointing that there's not more visual variety to the soldiers, but the few types featured are all well designed and easy to tell apart. This is important when you're trying to use a certain fighting style to take out a specific enemy in a crowd. The levels are gorgeous and have an almost hand-painted look to them--especially when viewed from afar.

Many games come to a screeching halt when telling their story via cutscenes, but this is where Heavenly Sword excels thanks to is its main characters, which are all wonderfully designed and animated: beautiful, compassionate Nariko; oafish, sympathetic Roach; evil-yet-funny King Bohan (portrayed by Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in Lord of the Rings); and the curious, catlike Kai. The cutscenes are gorgeous, marred only by some lip-synching issues and a frame rate that sometimes stutters at the start. You really get a sense of the characters' personalities just by looking at them and watching them move. A well-written and often surprisingly funny script is brought to life by Hollywood-quality performance from the actors, who fit their respective characters perfectly. The inclusion of English, Spanish, German, French, and Italian voice options ensures that just about everyone can enjoy the performances, too. The music is a mix between orchestral movie-style tracks and more modern-sounding instrumental pieces with an ethnic flair to them.

Add it all up and Heavenly Sword is a fantastic game from start to finish. It's just a shame that it's not longer. The developer made the wise decision to keep the action tight by not including any fetch quests or backtracking, but skilled players will probably finish the game in a little more than six hours, and it probably won't take longer than eight hours for anyone else. There are some DVD-style extras to unlock and you can play it again on "hell mode" once you've beaten it; just don't expect to get much more than a great weekend for your $60. If you're OK with that, you won't be disappointed in Heavenly Sword.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo DS)

It's kind of shocking when you think about it, but despite the Nintendo DS's nearly three-year lifespan, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is the first Zelda game to hit the system. The good news is that it was worth the wait. Phantom Hourglass is essentially a sequel to the GameCube Zelda adventure The Wind Waker. It retains the art style, surrounding world, and plot of that game, but it revamps the mechanics for DS use. The result is a game that is unmistakably Zelda, with its perilous dungeons, tricky puzzles, and engaging boss battles; at the same time, Phantom Hourglass is a unique and innovative entry in the series due largely to its exclusively touch-screen-based control scheme. Everything you do in the game involves taps and swipes of the stylus, from traditional fights and puzzles, to new and specialized functions that really change the way you think about playing a Zelda game.

Phantom Hourglass picks up almost directly where Wind Waker left off. Link is sailing the high seas with his pirate pals, including Tetra, who has forsaken her Zelda namesake and returned to her roguish ways. At the moment, the crew is on the hunt for a fabled ghost ship, one that purportedly contains a great treasure but also has a nasty habit of making people disappear. Of course, the ship magically appears, and Tetra bounds off to search it. Unfortunately, a shrill scream signals that something's gone wrong, and the ghost ship departs into a thicket of fog. Link leaps after it but ends up in the drink, and he eventually washes up on the shore of a populated island. This is how the game explains away the absence of Link's abilities and items, despite the fact that the game takes place just after Wind Waker chronologically.

Upon awakening on the island, you're greeted by an amnesiac fairy who takes you to a kindly old man who explains a thing or two regarding the ghost ship. Though he warns you away from getting into such business, minutes later you've got a sword in your hand and you're learning the basics of combat. Not that there's a ton to learn, mind you. To make a Zelda game on the DS work, the control mechanics have been simplified to rely only on taps and movements via the stylus on the touch screen. Moving Link requires you to simply drag the stylus in the direction you want to go. You tap an enemy to lunge at it with a slash, do a quick swiping movement to execute a broader slash, and draw circles around Link to perform the spin attack. You also have the ability to roll by drawing small circles at the opposite end of the screen. All of this sounds pretty simple and works about as well as you'd hope, apart from a few moments when you may roll in the wrong direction (and off a cliff), or accidentally slash something when you're just trying to turn around. However, most of these small gaffes are relatively harmless, and by and large, the responsiveness of the controls is spot-on.

The game probably wouldn't be very interesting if all you did was run around and tap on bad guys to kill them. Fortunately, there's a great deal more to it than that. Apart from your basic sword combat, you'll also find yourself messing around with some other DS-centric mechanics, like blowing or shouting into the microphone for various reasons. Additionally, you will pick up many of Link's trademark items throughout the game--such as bombs, bombchus (which are little mobile bombs that scurry around), the bow and arrow, the boomerang, and the hookshot--and you'll often have to use them to set up various enemies for the kill. These items behave just as you remember them, though with a number of DS-specific mechanical twists that give them whole new life. For instance, with the boomerang, you can now draw with the stylus the path you want it to take. The same goes for bombchus, who will follow your exact drawn path to any target. The hookshot can be used like normal to help Link leap across open crevices, as a tightrope to walk between two ledges, and as a slingshot to launch Link across wide gaps or repel enemy fire.

These items all tie directly into the game's dungeon and puzzle design. Though not as markedly complex as some of Link's previous adventures, Phantom Hourglass contains several challenging and fun dungeons to traipse through, all of which contain a number of tricky puzzles that require some creative item usage. Experienced Zelda fans may find Phantom Hourglass' dungeons to be less of an endeavor than other games in the series, simply because these dungeons don't rely as heavily on elaborate bouts of backtracking and generally aren't enormous in size. That doesn't mean the dungeons aren't fun to solve, mind you. They might not be quite as epic as other Zelda games, but there are plenty of engaging and periodically perplexing puzzles to solve along the way, as well as some truly exciting boss battles that often make stellar use of both screens on the DS.

Dungeons would probably be even tougher to deal with if it weren't for the fact that you can now write notes and draw pathways on your dungeon maps. It sounds like a small addition at first, but as you play, you'll discover it's actually one of the most revolutionary features in a Zelda game since, well, ever. Simply being able to sketch pathways over invisible platforms and keep a detailed track of which doors you've hit, which switches need to be hit in what order, and the like, is a huge boon and eliminates a lot of aimless wandering from the equation.

Interestingly enough, you get your dungeon and island maps from the very moment you step foot in or on them, though you do have to track down sea charts to open up new areas of the world. Given that this is a Wind Waker sequel, you will be doing a fair amount of sailing from island to island, but unlike Wind Waker, it's not quite as involved a process. You simply draw a route on your map, and the ship sails there automatically. Over time you'll gain a cannon to fight off sea creatures and pirates (and the occasional sea monster boss) as well as a grappling arm to salvage treasure. Picking up treasure is actually a minigame in itself, in that you have to guide the arm down to the depths and back again without hitting mines that are scattered about.

Sailing was the big thing that some folks felt dragged down Wind Waker significantly. It's much easier and less time-consuming here, so that issue is pretty much nonexistent. However, that doesn't mean the game is totally devoid of pacing problems. The main culprit is the Temple of the Ocean King, the very first dungeon you enter, and one that you will have to come back to several times throughout the game. It's not a bad dungeon by itself, and in fact is probably the most overtly challenging of them all due to the fact that the phantoms that walk its halls are invincible and the temple itself will literally suck the life out of you. To make it through, you need to stand in a safe spot or have the Phantom Hourglass handy (an item that protects you for as long as there is sand at the top of the glass).

The problem is that each time you come back, you have to bust through the same levels you beat the previous time around to get to the next section of the temple. Items you acquire later in the game, such as bombs and the hookshot, make getting around a bit easier on subsequent visits, and at the halfway mark of the game, you do get a save point that lets you bypass the first half of the temple and skip down to the second half. Regardless, you'll still be replaying those later levels as the game goes on. It's just one of those tedious things that feel like artificial lengthening of the game more than anything else.

Nevertheless, apart from that one fault, Phantom Hourglass' main quest is a deeply engaging adventure that gives you plenty to do throughout. You can probably finish the quest in about 14-15 hours if you don't hunt around for all the various uncharted islands and sunken treasure chests scattered about the world, but you should, because there's some neat stuff to find.

Once you're done with the game, there is actually a multiplayer mode you can check out. If you ever played Pac-Man vs. on the GameCube (or, more recently, on the DS in Namco Museum DS), this mode might seem slightly familiar to you. One player controls Link, and the opponent has control over several phantoms that can be guided by drawing paths for them with the stylus. Link has to try to collect as many triforce shards as he can and bring them to his base, though he slows down considerably while carrying shards. If a phantom reaches him, his turn is up, but if he reaches a safe zone, the phantoms lose sight of him. This goes back and forth with players taking turns on each side for multiple rounds, and the player with the most shards at the end wins. It's not a spectacular mode by any means, but it's amusing enough as a distraction, and it can be played online against players worldwide. In the few games we tried against mostly Japanese players, performance seemed quite solid, with no noticeable lag.

The graphics, on the other hand, are extremely noticeable. It might be hard to believe that Nintendo would be able to shrink down a game as gorgeous-looking as The Wind Waker, but that's just what it has done here for the DS. Of course, some sacrifices have been made. Character models aren't quite as sharp or colorful, and the world itself isn't nearly as large. But you still inhabit a sizeable world, and everything in it looks spectacular. From the goofy animations and facial expressions of the characters, to the beautiful scenery as you sail around the ocean, this is top-tier work as far as graphics and artistic design on the DS are concerned. One thing to note is that when you're wandering through islands and dungeons, everything is handled with a sort of top-down perspective, not unlike some of the older Zelda games. All the characters and environments are 3D, but the fixed camera angle does a great job of framing the action.

There isn't any voice acting in Phantom Hourglass, but you do get plenty of funny and enjoyable text dialogue to read through. There are lots of memorable characters in the game, and the lack of voice samples isn't much of a hindrance because the expressions on their faces and the great dialogue get the point across. The soundtrack isn't exactly the most memorable of all Zelda scores, but there are plenty of familiar-sounding tunes to accompany each sequence that fans are sure to appreciate.

Ultimately, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is a superb effort and pretty much what you would want from a first entry in the series on the DS. It's got a few pacing problems, and those who demand traditional control schemes will probably be turned off by this game's control methodology. But really, even if you're convinced you hate the notion of touch-screen controls, you owe it to yourself to give this game a try. Phantom Hourglass implements its control mechanics so seamlessly into the standard Zelda game design that it's hard to imagine anyone not appreciating it on some level. There are few games on the DS that take advantage of the touch-screen technology as well as Phantom Hourglass does. It's a must-play for any DS owner.

Project Gotham Racing 4 (Xbox360)

With 2005's Project Gotham Racing 3, Bizarre Creations ushered in a new era of racing on the Xbox 360 with a game that continued the long-standing quality of its Project Gotham series with amazing graphics and extensive online options. Here we are, two years later, and Bizarre has turned in the fourth game in the PGR series, one that opens up the vehicles list a bit and adds to the online fun, yet still follows the tried-and-true PGR formula. In short, Project Gotham Racing 4 continues the series' tradition of brilliant visuals and fun gameplay, and adds to the list with new rides and weather effects that must be driven to be believed.

Weather abounds in Project Gotham Racing 4. In fact, along with motorcycles (more on them in a bit), weather is one of the biggest additions to PGR 4's gameplay. Dense fog, ice and snow, and, of course, lots and lots of rain are examples of the variety of weather conditions you find yourself driving through, and each affects your vehicle in a different way. The most successful weather implementation in the game is the rain effects.

Visually, it's stunning; rain droplets bounce off the hood of your car, or your windshield when driving in first person view, and they'll collect into pools of standing water that become a hydroplaning nightmare for your car or motorbike. In fact, pools of water strategically placed in the optimum braking zones are part and parcel of the tracks the Bizarre crew has carved from real-life locales such as Tokyo, Shanghai, and New York City. Find a way to brake early, or deal with the consequences of slamming your car into a wall after surfing across the water. The water effects in PGR 4 are entirely convincing, while the snow and ice effects are slightly less so--only in a video game would you attempt a lap of the ice-laden Nürburgring in an Enzo Ferrari and make it across the finish line in one piece--and typically pose a serious challenge for your throttle control skills.

While the game's weather effects are often simlike, PGR 4's car handling still treads the fine line between arcade approachability and simulation depth. You can hop into a car right away in the game and begin turning laps without fear of spinning out or locking your brakes in a tight turn. It also helps that the car list is more varied than the "all exotics, all the time" roster of PGR 3. This time around, the list has opened up a bit more to include everything from the pokey Mini Cooper S to F1 replicas, and even a pickup truck. Certainly at the highest classification, PGR 4's car list is as exotic as it comes; it's nice, however, that the roster includes a more representative sample of low-end models this time around. As in the past, the game doesn't feature vehicular damage beyond the merely cosmetic.

Then there are the motorcycles, which make their series debut here. As with the car list, the two-wheeled choices include everything from the relatively modest Buell RR 1200 to the frighteningly powerful MV Augusta F4 Senna. When it comes to handling, the motorcycles in PGR 4 have their ups and downs. Bikes are extremely easy to drive--there's no split between front and rear brakes to worry about--and it's tougher than you might think to get yourself thrown from the saddle. Toss in the fact that bikes are extremely quick off the starting line (due to their power/weight ratio) and that kudos--the in-game currency you earn as a result of stylish driving in the PGR series--are typically easier to rack up on a bike than in a car (thanks to endos, wheelies, and a responsive drift model), and motorcycles seem almost overpowered.

True, the fastest cars in the game will typically be quicker than the bikes but, in our experience, if you can grab an early lead in PGR 4 on two wheels and can maintain some consistency in your laps, you'll be awfully tough to beat. Bikes have their control quirks; for instance, when coming out of a turn, you'll want to let go of the analog stick in order to bring yourself back up smoothly, as manually bringing your rider upright can result in serious overcorrection errors. But for the most part bikes aren't much of a challenge and, as a result, aren't really as fun as we were hoping.

Regardless of your vehicular predilection, you will have plenty of road to drive on in this game. In addition to earning medals for beating challenges in the arcade mode or turning laps in the time attack mode, you'll have plenty to do in Gotham career, the anchor of the single-player mode. The goal here is to become the number one driver in the world by progressing through championships and invitational events strewn throughout the PGR world. The events are based around a calendar, so you'll have access to only a handful of races at any given time.

These races comprise of a variety of the challenges--including hot lap, cone challenges, eliminator, gate challenges, kudos vs. time, and standard street races. Kudos determine your overall position within a particular challenge; in addition to earning a bonus for finishing well within a race, any additional kudos you earn are added to your overall score. At the end of a championship series, you're awarded championship points based on your result and move up the ladder accordingly. In addition, you can buy items such as new tracks and cars, and even a custom Xbox Live gamer picture, with the kudos you've earned in races.

On the default difficulty level, we were able to win the Gotham career mode in just over three calendar years (or between 10 and 15 hours in real time); at the hardcore level--where the competition is significantly tougher--it will likely take a good deal longer. In addition to standard championship events, you can also try out the occasional invitational, optional race challenges based around a single vehicle; win the challenge, and you'll add that vehicle to your ever-growing garages. Interestingly, the cars available to you for certain events can vary in total performance--and there's really no reason other than personal preference for you not to choose the most powerful vehicle available to for an event.

While zipping your way through career mode won't take that long, the game's online play is just as compelling as in the past. You can race in single and team events through a variety of race types such as elimination, street race, cat and mouse, and the new bulldog mode. In our experience, online performance was slick and mostly lag-free, with the game's frame rate dipping only in the sharpest of corners with multiple vehicles piling up. While you're online you can even check out the new PGR On Demand service, which lets you upload photos and race replays for others to watch and rate. With some simple paint tools, you can even customize your cars a bit. It's not nearly as extensive as the customization options in a game like Forza 2, but at least it gives you the chance to give your online ride a unique flair.

Beyond being a fun racing series, the PGR series has come to be known as a standard-bearer for visual style, and that continues in spades in Project Gotham Racing 4. New locales such as Shanghai, Macau, and Quebec are all lovingly reproduced in the game. Blast your way down a neon-soaked night track in Shanghai with the Oriental Pearl Tower looming in the background, and you'll be hard-pressed to think of a game that has done as much with urban landscapes as Project Gotham Racing 4. That level of visual quality doesn't come at the expense of performance, either; again, for the most part, the game runs at a rock-steady frame rate. Certainly, it's one of the most impressive-looking games of the year on the Xbox 360. The soundtrack for this game is just as varied as PGR 3, featuring a healthy heaping of world, rock, hip hop, jazz, and classical tunes, though the quality of the individual tracks doesn't seem to be as strong as in the previous game. However, the only music gearheads will care about is the roar of the engines, and thankfully PGR 4 delivers here as well, with a huge variety of authentic-sounding engine sounds that change in tone and quality depending on the driving viewpoint you prefer.

With such an intense level of focus trained on the weather effects in PGR 4, it makes you wonder what the team at Bizarre Creations could do if they threw their hat into the simulation ring and took on the Forzas and Gran Turismos of the world at their own game. Still, that doesn't take away from what Project Gotham Racing 4 is: a worthy successor to the previous games in the series and a game that will create entirely new calluses on the hands of racing fans.

Stranglehold (PC)

It would be very easy for the average person to take one look at Stranglehold and write it off as a Max Payne rip-off. That's because, in a sort of round about way, it is. Midway and John Woo's video game sequel to the director's classic Hong Kong action flick Hard Boiled borrows very liberally from the mechanics of Remedy's slow-motion, heavy-action franchise, which is a little ironic and mind-bending because Max Payne was itself a tribute to John Woo's brand of cinematic action. Regardless, if you're going to make a game based on a badass cop dodging, diving, and shooting all over the place in slow-motion, there are certainly worse places to look for inspiration. Stranglehold effectively takes the elements that made Max Payne fun and uses them to its own advantage, while sprinkling in a number of original touches and gimmicks that give the game its own Hong Kong cinema flavor. It's an interesting piece of work that's more fun than it isn't, and fans of Hard Boiled ought to especially enjoy watching Chow Yun-Fat reprise his role as Inspector Tequila.

Stranglehold takes place many years after Hard Boiled, though Yun-Fat's Inspector Tequila doesn't seem to have lost a step. He's still a rogue cop on the Hong Kong police force, and when a member of the force turns up dead, evidently offed by one of HK's major gangs, Tequila steps up to deal with the situation. What follows is a sometimes confusing and ham-fisted story of gangs double- and triple-crossing one another. Somewhere in there, Tequila's former girlfriend and daughter both end up being held hostage by one of the gangs. It's a decent crime tale that's certainly better than much of John Woo's American work (though exactly how involved Woo was in this game's production is debatable), but there is still something about the whole story that feels very Hollywood. It lacks the gritty feel of the original flick, and a lot of the film's cool factor to boot. Nevertheless, the plot serves as an OK-enough motivation to get Tequila back in action and shooting people in the face--and really, that's pretty much all you need.

You will shoot a lot of people in Stranglehold. This game's body count is pretty staggering for a game that runs only about six or seven hours. Enemies come flying out of every nook and cranny of each stage, and always with guns blazing. Fortunately, they don't have the ability to jump and dive around in bullet time like our man Tequila. Though the game refers to it as "Tequila Time," this is really just the bullet-time mechanic from Max Payne given a fancy makeover. The one trick is that you won't ever go into bullet-time automatically as a result of diving around, unless you specifically have an enemy in your targeting reticle sights. There is also a specific button that puts you into bullet-time completely separate from the shoot dodging, though it's rare when you ever need to use it.

That's not the only ability he's got, either. Tequila can interact with practically every piece of scenery in a level. If you run up to a table, you can choose to slide right over it, or kick it over and use it as a temporary cover point. If you run up to a wall, you can dash up it and dive even further than usual. If there's a rail nearby, you can run up or slide down it. See a little wheel cart sitting around? You can jump onto it and roll around the area, blasting everyone silly. Pieces of the environment can also be shot or otherwise destroyed for both fun and efficiency. If an enemy is standing underneath a neon sign, shoot it and watch the sucker get crushed. Exploding barrels are all over the place, and you can imagine the havoc they wreak when shot. There are even occasional environmental puzzles that require wooden poles or planks to be shot out to create new pathways for Tequila to traverse. These are arguably the game's weakest links, in that they're often difficult to discern and sometimes take more shots than they ought to actually work. Fortunately, about halfway through the game, the developers apparently decided to just give up on these distractions and focus almost exclusively on the shooting.

There's even more on offer. Pulling off stylish moves throughout the game fills up a meter that lets you trigger one of four different "Tequila bombs." These are special abilities that do everything from recharging your health, to letting you spin around like a gun-toting whirling dervish, killing all the enemies that surround you, all while doves go fluttering off into the sky (what would a Woo production be without doves?). These special abilities are all useful, though some more so than others. One example is the accurate-shot ability, which lets you move a targeting reticle in slo-mo to any part of an enemy's body, and then watch the bullet fly directly to its target. Save for a few enemies who are especially vulnerable to this move, it's hard to ever really want to use it when the next ability up the scale is an all-out barrage of invincibility and limitless gunfire that usually lasts long enough to clear the room.

The last element of gameplay isn't so much an ability as it is a sort of minigame. Periodically, Tequila will run into a group of enemies and end up in a standoff. These standoffs quickly snap Tequila's focus around from one enemy to the next. Using both the A and D buttons to dodge and the mouse to aim, you have to take enemies out one by one whil avoiding getting shot. It's tough to do (tougher even than on the Xbox 360 version, given that the right analog stick of the Xbox controller is definitely better suited for dodging), though once you get the hang of it, it's also quite amusing to watch Tequila dart from enemy to enemy while dodging bullets and unleashing hot-leaded hits of his own. Granted, it's a silly contrivance to have only one enemy at a time firing at you; if there are five guys, why don't they all shoot at once? But it is pretty fun, so it's a forgivable contrivance.

You can't quite call Stranglehold a one-trick pony, given that it does have a few different things going on at all times. However, all those things are fed directly into the act of shooting people--and shooting them often, to boot. Accordingly, it's good that the guns are appropriately satisfying to shoot. There's nothing remotely realistic about the game's guns, mind you, though that's arguably a good thing in the context of this game. Being able to shoot a guy from a hundred feet away with a shotgun and still take him out is helpful when you've got dozens of heavily armed enemies running around. Apart from that, you've got Tequila's default pair of pistols, along with assault rifles, submachine guns, heavy machine guns, grenades, and even the occasional rocket launcher to play around with. Each gun has its own strengths and weaknesses in power and accuracy, though they rarely matter much. You get to carry only two types of guns at once, and normally you'll want the gun that will do the most damage at all times. It's also worth noting that the PC version of Stranglehold controls a bit better than its console counterpart. Aiming with the mouse makes targeting enemies much, much easier, and it generally just feels better. Some of the character-movement controls on the keyboard feel stiffer in this version, but the improved shooting controls make up for that issue.

By no means is Stranglehold an overly challenging game, but by the time you hit the third or fourth level, you'll see a noticeable jump in difficulty. That's a good thing, because the early portions of the game are a bit of a cakewalk at times, even while you're still feeling out all your different abilities. Once you get past the point where the difficulty gears up, you'll actually have to use those different abilities smartly to survive some sequences. Cover points are also helpful, though you can rarely stay in one place for very long, as the environment around you tends to get destroyed very quickly. Likewise, enemies are usually smart enough to run up and start shooting if you stay in one place for too long. The Tequila bombs become a lifesaver in a few situations, though they also tend to make a few of the boss fights overly easy. Turning the game up to the hard difficulty level fixes that some, though not entirely.

As helpful as some of these abilities become later in the game, they're not entirely required. In fact, for much of the game, you can get away with just diving around like a crazy person over and over again, periodically ducking for cover for a second or two, and busting out with the occasional Tequila bomb for good measure. In a sense, it makes the gameplay a foregone conclusion. It's not that the gameplay isn't fun, because it is. But it's not so dynamic and over-the-top that you won't ever find yourself bored due to repetition. It's enjoyable to shoot enemies and blast apart the environment in the process, but when you end up doing it the same way over and over and over again, you'll be ready to move on and hope something new comes up. It rarely does. Little of what Stranglehold does ever feels like it operates outside of expected boundaries, and the few things that are original aren't necessarily amazing enough to hold up the entire game. Again, the gameplay is solid and even thrilling in spots, but it's probably not a bad thing that the game only lasts for a half-dozen hours or so. It might have gotten stale beyond that length.

Apart from the short single-player campaign, there are some production bonuses to buy through an extras shop (John Woo himself sits behind the counter), and a multiplayer mode that's probably not going to garner much attention. It's not that it's completely awful or anything, but it feels very tacked-on. You can only engage in standard deathmatches or team deathmatches with up to six players. Though the multiplayer plays a lot like the single-player game, it's not nearly as good. Maps are a little on the condensed side, and though you can use the slow-motion mechanic in multiplayer, its scattered execution in this mode makes it all but worthless. Essentially, it seems like you can't go into slo-mo unless you and your opponents all have a full Tequila time meter. At that point it becomes pointless to fumble around with it when you could just be focusing on shooting someone, and it almost makes things even more distracting when it suddenly pops on. With limited play modes, inconsistent, cramped gameplay, and the fact that there seem to be very, very few people playing this game online, this isn't a multiplayer game to get excited about.

Stranglehold's presentation is mostly good, though it's not without blemishes. By far the most impressive aspect of the game visually is the environments, and specifically how awesome it is to watch them get completely destroyed. Whether you're in a gaudy Hong Kong casino, a lavish penthouse, or a cold, sterile-looking history museum, it's great fun to destroy the scenery. It's really quite impressive how much of every environment is destructible. It's also a boon for the gameplay, because each cover point you hide behind tends to get shot to hell very quickly, which forces you to duck and run. On the less positive side, character models are overly shiny and not especially detailed, animations are limited, and the camera periodically gets in the way of the action when it snaps to angles that are hardly beneficial to your survival.

Unfortunately, we experienced some performance issues specific to the PC version of Stranglehold. On the first test machine we tried, a single-core Pentium 3.4 GHz with a gig of RAM, Windows XP, and an nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX card, the game refused to run. Every time we'd boot the game up, we'd get one of those delightful blue screens of death that force you to reboot your machine. On a more powerful dual-core machine with 2 gigs of RAM, Windows Vista, and an nVidia 8800 GTX video card, that problem ceased, though during gameplay, the game would periodically crash to the desktop. Fortunately, the game autosaves after every checkpoint, so as annoying as this issue is, you won't ever lose significant progress. At the very least, when the game ran, it ran very smoothly, with no hitches or frame rate problems to speak of.

Audio is more consistently enjoyable than the visuals. Chow Yun-Fat joins several other noted actors for the voice cast. Dialogue is appropriately cheesy, especially when Tequila's boss keeps tossing out every angry police captain cliché in the book. Largely the voice acting is quite solid. Yun-Fat dead-reads a few of his lines, but mostly he sells the character as well as he can while speaking English. It is sort of weird that the sequel to a classic Hong Kong action flick would be entirely in English instead of Cantonese, but considering the audience, it's also not really surprising. The soundtrack is a nice mix of typically bombastic orchestral pieces and some Asian-flavored string sections, and the game's sound effects are mostly top notch, from the gun sounds right on down to the individual sounds of bullets hitting each and every type of surface.

Stranglehold isn't the sort of game that's going to set the shooter genre on fire. It's a more than competent take on an existing formula that has enough unique moments and overall challenge to succeed. Sure, it gets repetitive at times, its few forays into more action-adventure style gaming over straight ahead shooting aren't much fun, and the multiplayer is borderline irrelevant; but there's enough solid, exciting action here for any shooter fan to sink their teeth into. It's a short ride, but an entertaining one while it lasts.

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts (PC)

When Company of Heroes shipped last year, it proved that there's plenty of life in the World War II real-time strategy genre if companies take risks and innovate. THQ and Relic's superb real-time strategy game did that by blending in so many cutting-edge elements that it made the battlefield come alive like rarely before. Thanks to impressive artificial intelligence that made soldiers move and act like the real thing, as well as the tactical implications of a spectacular and fully destructible battlefield, Company of Heroes was a game that rewarded smart and quick thinking. With an excellent single-player campaign and thrilling multiplayer gameplay, it was also named GameSpot's 2007 PC Game of the Year. Now, just slightly a year after it was released, THQ and Relic have released Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, a fairly straightforward and satisfying follow-up that delivers more content for would-be Pattons to enjoy.

Opposing Fronts is more of a pseudosequel than an expansion pack. You don't need the original Company of Heroes to play it, though if you do you'll be able to select from the US Army and regular German Army factions from that game in skirmish matches. Otherwise, you'll be restricted to the two new factions introduced in Opposing Fronts: the British Army and the German Panzer Elite. These factions both get their own campaign that, when combined, make for a longer single-player experience than Company of Heroes. Interestingly, the campaigns are staggered so that they're in nonlinear order. You'll begin with the story of two German brothers battling against the daring airborne assault of Operation Market Garden, and in the following campaign you'll leap further back into the past to participate in the British Army's lengthy and bloody assault on the French city of Caen.

The heart of the expansion can be found in the new factions. Both play quite differently from the US and German factions in the first game, and though you needn't have played Company of Heroes to dive into Opposing Fronts, it's hard not to shake the feeling that the British and Panzer Elite are designed for veteran players. That's because their mobile nature makes them a bit more of a handful to control than the prior factions. To clarify, the Panzer Elite is built around the idea of hard-hitting and fast-moving combat groups that can race around the battlefield, either to counter what the enemy is doing or to exploit an opening. To that extent, the Panzer Elite doesn't so much lock down territory as it bulldozes its way across the map. Thankfully, Panzer Elite infantry can repair vehicles during slight pauses, but you won't have a lot of time to hunker down before another situation needs putting out.

At first glance, the British Army seems to be built similarly around the idea of mobility and defenses, given that it has mobile headquarters units that can relocate around the map. However, the British also excel at building things: devastating howitzer emplacements, mortar pits, slit trenches, and more. As one might expect, the campaign missions highlight each faction's abilities quite nicely. In the brutal house-to-house fighting of Caen, the British can call in the dreaded "creeping barrage" that shatters enemy lines. Likewise, the Panzer Elite can punch through Allied defenses and raid around their rears to capture or destroy landing points for airborne forces.

Opposing Fronts doesn't add any significant new gameplay features to Company of Heroes. The most noteworthy new additions come courtesy of the new faction doctrines, such as scorched-earth tactics for the Axis. These upgrades let you booby-trap buildings so that enemy infantry who enter them are in for a big surprise, and also let you blow up strategic objective points to deny them to the enemy. Both factions have three different upgrade paths to choose from, and these can help tailor the game to your style or tactical situation.

Multiplayer was a key part of Company of Heroes' success. The destructible battlefields and finely balanced gameplay can make for countless nail-biting moments online. Finding battles was also easy, thanks to the top-notch server browser. Not surprisingly, Opposing Fronts doesn't tinker with what's not obviously broken. The only caveat is that it's a bit difficult to find a game online around launch, so hopefully the community will pick up. If you can't find a match, there's also skirmish support with a wide range of AI opponents. If you want to learn the basics, you can lower the difficulty to pushover status. On the other hand, if you want to test your skills against ruthless and relentless opponents, then just ramp up the difficulty. As before, there are two game modes. There's annihilation, which is basically a standard deathmatch that can be played from one-on-one up to three-on-three, as well as victory-point control mode, which is a great alternative to annihilation. That's because victory-point control forces you to battle for three control points on the map. If you let the enemy hold on to them for too long, you'll lose, so there's a constant level of tension throughout most of the game.

The presentation and production values are excellent, and it never gets old watching buildings collapse or vehicles explode in huge fireballs. Artillery actually carves out craters that infantry can use for cover. If the enemy has a defensive chokepoint, then you can use your tanks or artillery to blow open another path. Opposing Fronts does add weather effects, such as a heavy rain that drenches the battlefield, but for the most part the visuals are otherwise indistinguishable from last year's game. Even with DirectX 10 support, which was added to Company of Heroes via a patch, it's hard to see any huge improvements. Still, the graphics remain impressive and still feel fresh. The audio is also excellent. Both campaigns have their own unique music, and the British campaign in particular is inspiring. Furthermore, the sounds of battle are some of the best around. If there are explosions onscreen, you hear them full-on; if you move the camera away from the explosions, they become muted and distant.

Opposing Fronts doesn't revolutionize the genre like its predecessor did, but at the same time, no one has really caught up with Company of Heroes yet, either. Sure, games such as Supreme Commander push the science-fiction RTS genre in cool new directions, but the World War II RTS genre has yet to learn the lessons of Company of Heroes. With Opposing Fronts, THQ and Relic keep a great thing going.

The Settlers: Rise of an Empire (PC)

When you think of city-building game franchises, chances are pretty good that The Settlers isn't the first name that springs to mind. Although German developer Blue Byte may have been topping the charts in Europe with these sedate simulations of medieval life for nearly 15 years now, the series has never gained the stateside prestige of something like Sim City or even Caesar. But this second-rate status might be coming to an end with the latest addition to the line. The Settlers: Rise of an Empire is the most fulfilling game in the series, adding easy-to-play charisma to the usual Middle Ages economics and trimming much of the micromanagement that made playing past releases in the series as much fun as doing your homework.

Despite the aggressive subtitle, gameplay here compares more closely to building an ant farm than it does to building a real-time strategy empire. As with previous Settlers games, the focus of the solo campaign is a mix of stereotypical city building with traditional Age of Empires-like resource gathering and soldier recruitment. Most of your efforts continue to be centered on developing a medieval city, which means you spend virtually all of your time constructing resource-gathering huts, erecting castle walls or gates, and trading with neighboring villages.

This kinder, gentler vibe is furthered by a barely-there storyline about pacifying the wilderness to restore the once-great Darion Empire, presumably built in the last Settlers game, Heritage of Kings. Quests are almost all about building and restoring--not fighting. However, they are so tightly developed and filled with busywork that you don't have time to miss battles. You deliver clothing/food to towns in need, fight off Vikings marauding through coastal villages, light signal fires to open up trade routes, stage festivals to get your settlers hitched to comely wenches, and so on. It's all pretty linear and predictable, although at least Blue Byte put enough thought into things to avoid the old "collect 20 food" or "collect 50 stone" objectives that make you want to put your head in an oven. All of this easygoing stuff is bolstered with a somewhat precious appearance. The landscape is cartoonlike and brightly colored, while characters boast watermelon-sized heads, as well as massive doll's eyes. Yet the art design showcases impressive medieval architecture, while the voice-acting is by turns serious and cheesy, which lets the game sit on the fence dividing gritty from cutesy.

Sound familiar? It should sound familiar because Blue Byte's been mining this vein since Bill Clinton was in the White House. The one big difference between the new and old formula is across-the-board simplification. Chopping wood, catching fish, mining stone or iron, gathering herbs, collecting honey from beehives, and the like is accomplished in Rise of an Empire by simply building the necessary huts in the immediate vicinity of the resources in question. These resources are denoted on the maps with icons, such as metal bars, rocks, and deer. The goods produced are then automatically collected by settlers and shipped off to your settlement's storehouse. From there, they are in turn dished out to the butcher shops, tanneries, weavers, dairies, candle makers, and so forth that keep your serfs happy, healthy, as well as fully clothed. Even trade dealings with friendly neighbors are a snap because loads are shipped out automatically by cart the moment that orders are given. So there is never any need to fuss around with trade routes, no need to load and unload carts, or any of the other hip-deep busywork that frequently wrecks economic-style sims.

Of course, not everything runs on rails. Blue Byte has tossed enough trees onto the tracks to keep missions from becoming too much of a grind (although you do pretty much rebuild the same city in every mission, so don't expect to completely dodge repetition). The biggest addition is the knight, a hero unit of sorts that acts as the leader of your faction in missions. There are a total of six knights in the game, each with unique names and abilities. You earn them as you progress through campaign missions and then get the chance to choose one of them as your main representative in upcoming assignments. It's an interesting system that lends a fair bit of personality to how campaigns play out. Still, too many knights are burdened with nearly useless powers, such as entertaining settlers with singing and boosting the amount of cash that winds up on the collection plate after sermons in the cathedral. With such options as Lord Marcus, who can recruit swordsmen and bowmen on the cheap, or Lord Hakim, who can turn enemy battalions into friends, you'll rarely bother with the others. For example, Lady Alandra and her healing powers or Lord Elias with his skill at feeding the hungry seem weak in comparison.

Dividing the map into separate territories is another new wrinkle. Knights can claim neutral lands by simply building an outpost there, while enemy-held regions can be seized by destroying or occupying the rival outpost. However, this whole concept doesn't add much of a strategic layer to battles because destroying an opponent's outpost causes all the buildings in the territory to self-destruct. So you never get the chance to wage back-and-forth battles for key castles or get the opportunity to make hard decisions, such as razing settlements or attempting to conquer them to win over the citizenry. You just duke it out over resources, but most maps are so well stocked with wildlife, sheep, and the like that there is rarely any need to go to war to provide your peasants with sausages or woolen undies.

It isn't all bad where territories are concerned, however. Climatic conditions vary dramatically across maps, which can really affect how you manage resources. For example, Northern territories have shorter growing seasons that force you to build up food stocks when the weather is pleasant, as well as rely on wild game and fish, while southern regions are so warm that it's hard to keep crops from burning up. None of these climate zones is overly extreme, although they do establish a sense of place so that you're not just working with the same generic terrain over and over again.

Just a few quality-control concerns keep Rise of an Empire from being one of the most polished Settlers game in the history of the franchise. Mainly, it doesn't quite feel finished, even with the installation of the massive patch that you are forced to download the first time you fire up the game. Crashes are an ongoing concern in campaign play. Windows occasionally pop up with error messages saying something like, "text not found." Performance problems can cause lots of stuttering when scrolling the map and serious frame-rate jitters in busy towns, even with details at midrange settings. Every now and again, you'll run into an artificial intelligence hiccup where settlers can't find a resource even though you've placed a hut pretty much right on top of them. Multiplayer also seems somewhat unstable because of frequent crashes, both when navigating the matchmaking lobby and actually playing online. It's a shame that it works so poorly because the multiplayer maps feature wildly diverse terrain and place more of an emphasis on traditional RTS play (meaning that you actually get to fight here) than the resource-heavy, often pacifistic campaign.

Thanks to its appreciation of old and new, The Settlers: Rise of an Empire has a lot to offer both longtime franchise followers and newcomers who wouldn't know a serf from a surfboard. It could sure use another patch or two or three to address some bugs, but this effort still does an impressive job of moving the Settlers series closer to the big leagues.

Skate (PS3)

Plenty of skateboarding games have come and gone in the years since the long-running Tony Hawk franchise reinvented the genre. Most failed because they simply attempted to duplicate the arcadelike, fast-moving gameplay of Activision's series. After running unopposed for years, Activision's got some new competition in the form of Skate from Electronic Arts. At times, this simulation-style skating game feels as though it was built from the ground up to be the anti-Tony Hawk, and aside from both games taking place on skateboards, the two don't have a whole lot in common. This is largely thanks to Skate's very cool control system, which puts all of the meaningful controls on the controller's two analog sticks and triggers. It's an awesome system that makes tricks feel more involved and entertaining. Unfortunately, you'll be applying this control scheme to a series of challenges and goals that aren't quite as good, and an extremely unstable frame rate certainly doesn't help, either.

Skate puts your skater movement onto the left analog stick. The right analog stick controls how you move and flip your skateboard to do tricks. For a simple ollie, you hold down on the stick to crouch then snap it up to jump into the air. Kickflips and heelflips are accomplished if you come up slightly left or right of center. Shuvits happen when you hit down to crouch, then roll the stick around to the side and up to the top. These are the basic tricks, but they get significantly more complicated. The triggers are used for your left and right hands, so when you're in the air, you can use these buttons to perform grabs. Once you've grabbed onto the board, you can tweak it around with the right stick for different types of grabs. It's an instantly intuitive system with the depth to keep you going for some time, but it isn't perfect. A lot of the tricks are done in extremely similar ways. So when some goals call for specific tricks, like a nollie 360 flip, you might find yourself attempting the trick again and again, only to have some other trick come out. This gets totally frustrating in spots, especially in S.K.A.T.E. competitions, where you have to duplicate someone else's trick exactly to stay in the game.

Grinding in Skate is as simple as lining yourself up with a rail or curb, getting airborne, and landing on the grindable edge. Well, it sounds simple on paper, anyway. In practice, you'll have to really work to line yourself up because the default camera is a low, off-to-the-side angle meant to duplicate the look of a dude following you on his own board, holding a video camera the whole time. Your skater is large on the screen, meaning he'll block a lot of your view--he doesn't seem to become transparent often enough to let you get a clear view of the action at all times. Also, Skate is very big on timing. The height of your ollies or other tricks is dependent on how long you crouch and how fast you snap the stick up. It'll take some time before you're hitting every rail, flipping in and out, or landing in manuals all over the place. The whole system is also purely skill-based. You don't receive skater statistic boosts, unlock new tricks, or the like. Everything is available right off the bat. The only stat that increases is your own personal skill with the sticks.

There's a loose story to Skate's career mode. It opens with you getting slammed by a bus and going in for surgery. This justifies the way you can reconfigure your skater's face and body type in the typical EA style of analog sliders. Once you're back on your feet, you're out to get noticed, so it's time to start recording footage and winning events. The different goals in the game give you some variety, but you'll have to get good at all of them if you want to get to the top. Because you're trying to get covered by two different skateboarding magazines, you'll have to complete a lot of photo goals, which ask you to perform specific tasks on specific objects. Some of the tasks are simple, like reaching certain point scores, while others will demand that you pull off longer grinds, flip specific tricks into grinds, or land in manuals. You'll also encounter multiskater competitions, such as timed battles for the most points, best trick contests, or slalomlike downhill races. There are also free-form footage goals, where you're given a set of tasks that must be performed within 30 seconds. The catch is that you can do these anywhere, so half of the process is figuring out which part of the city is conducive to your task. Some of them require you to skate in no-skate zones, which are patrolled by security guards who will push you over if they catch you. Some require you to do huge grinds, do a lot of spins, remain in the air for 10 seconds, and so on. The film goals are probably the trickiest ones in the entire game.

As you make your way through the game, you'll open up additional skate spots within the city, including such indoor locations as the Plan B Warehouse and the X Games Stadium. Aside from entering these indoor locations, you can skate around the city without seeing a loading screen. But if you decide to warp right to a location, you'll see some lengthy load screens. The distance that you can warp without loading also seems a little random. Some goals have you skate long rails or cover what doesn't seem like that much ground, but if you try to warp back to the other side of the goal, it'll stop and load. When you're stuck on a goal and trying it again and again, the loading becomes really grating, as do the unskippable menu animations that pop up when you fail a film goal. This all sounds like small stuff, but it really gets magnified when you're stuck trying the same thing over and over.

In addition to the career mode, you can play several multiplayer events, such as jam, which is a timed session that is won by the highest scorer. For these events, the city gets broken down into smaller areas. A couple of jam locations are in fairly small areas, like residential-sized pools. When the game sticks you into these spots and there are four players in the game, it just becomes chaos. This is because there isn't enough room to skate and you're left constantly bumping into other skaters, which isn't much fun at all. You can also play S.K.A.T.E., get into best trick contests, races, and so on. The online performance can be a little spotty and seems to really depend on the connection speeds of the other players, as well as your own. This means that one player with a slow connection speed can bring the whole game down. In a game that's so focused on accurate timing, it's pretty lame to randomly drop into slow motion. But when it's all working, it's decent.

The differences between the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of Skate are a bit of give and take. The PS3 version has slightly better control, solely because its looser analog sticks are more conducive to fast trick snapping. The game has motion control support, which lets you steer by tilting the controller instead of using the left analog stick. It's disabled by default for a reason, as the huge dead zone and imprecise motion makes playing the game practically impossible with it turned on. Skate is also limited to four players online, as opposed to six on the Xbox 360, which can be a bummer in some spots; but considering how crowded some of the areas can get with six skaters, this can be a blessing in disguise. But any points the PS3 version earns are totally negated by its awful frame rate. Whether you're playing alone or online, the game drops frames all over the place when anything starts moving quickly. This is a very timing-oriented game, and having a frame rate this bad really hurts the gameplay.

There is also a community aspect to Skate. You can use a replay editor to capture video footage of your performances or snap screenshots at any point and share them publicly. These can then be viewed through a menu in the game or through the game's Web site, which is nice because the person you want to show your skating exploits to doesn't need a copy of the game to see them. These items can be rated and commented on, which is a sharp idea that expands on the sorts of things that EA has done in the past with Burnout or some of its sports games. The only catch is that, as of this writing, the Web site is sluggish and pretty buggy, making it hard to navigate, as well as see the best footage.

Visually, Skate has a realistic look to it that fits with the overall atmosphere of the game. The skaters look good and the animation is great when it's running smoothly, though a few of the up-close talking segments that show polygonal versions of real-life skaters look a little weird.

Like other sports games, Skate is filled with plenty of sponsored equipment and other product placement. For the most part, it feels fine; getting sponsored by board and shoe companies is an integral part of the game's career mode, and that part never feels too aggressive. But it crosses the line in a few spots, like whenever you meet a pro skater. It shows that skater skating a line and doing some nice tricks, but then it zooms up to give you a very deliberate view of his skateboard, trucks, wheels, and shoes, flashing the sponsor logos on the screen all the while. Also, there's a weird bit of reverse product placement in the game because EA and Adidas teamed up to produce some limited-edition shoes. These are introduced and advertised in the game, complete with promotion codes that get you $50 off them when you beat the skaters who endorse them. It's awfully blatant, but it's actually pretty unique. It helps that the shoes are sort of rad. The game also downloads new ads for billboards and other surfaces as you play, though there aren't enough ads, resulting in some cases where you'll see the same stupid billboard 10 times as you skate up a single street.

The soundtrack is a really weird mix of music that doesn't actually play through most of the game. On the default settings, music is ambient. This means that whenever you get close to a skate-friendly spot where skaters might gather and actually have a radio, you'll start to faintly hear music coming from the direction of the spot. If you like, you can set it to directly play the music, but most of the soundtrack is a little sketchy, and the way the game opens with Booker T & The MG's "Green Onions" every single time you load it up makes you feel like you're turning on some awful Jim Belushi movie rather than getting ready to play a realistic skateboarding game.

Aside from the weird soundtrack, the in-game audio is really great. There are lots of great skateboarding noises, especially the way the wheels skid when you do powerslides or land hard and turn. The game also has something like color commentary, which comes from the invisible kid who's "holding" the in-game camera. He'll call out to other pros as you pass by, congratulate you on good trick lines, comment when you stack and break some bones, or impatiently whine when you set the controller down then walk away. His presence is pretty good and gives the game some personality.

While Skate has a handful of issues that hold it back, it has a ton of potential. It's a solid first start for what hopefully will become a regular franchise. With some more refinement and a few more things to do, this could probably be the best skateboarding game around. It's definitely worth playing, if only to get your hands on the trick system; but if you're stingy with your money, you could probably get enough out of it with a rental.

Halo 3 (Xbox360)

Regardless of how you felt about its cliffhanger ending, there's no denying that Halo 2 was a gigantic success that raised the bar for what we, as a game-playing society, expect out of a good console-based first-person shooter. In the years that followed, plenty of games attempted to duplicate the Halo formula, with varying degrees of success. But there's still nothing quite like the genuine item. Luckily for all involved, Halo 3 is a positively amazing package that offers extreme satisfaction across all of its different parts. Maybe now you can finally retire your Halo 2 disc and really move into the next generation of games.

Halo 3 is an interesting mix of established protocol and intriguing new stuff. For example, the gameplay doesn't stray too far from Halo 2, which, in turn, didn't exactly reinvent the original Halo. Don't take that as a negative, because it means that Halo 3 plays extremely well, with the same types of light tactical considerations that have made the series stand apart from other, faster-paced shooters. The balance between your guns, your grenades, and your melee attack has always given Halo a unique feel in the genre, and those same considerations apply today, both in the campaign mode and in multiplayer. You'll also have new weapons and items to consider, such as a host of Brute weapons. One example is the spiker, which is an exciting automatic pistol that fires quickly and decimates opponents, especially if you're holding a pair of them. Another is the mauler, which is a one-handed shotgun that can level enemies up close. You'll even find weapons so huge that your movement speed slows when you carry them. When you use these weapons, the camera pulls out to a third-person perspective so you can see your missile pod, plasma cannon, or flamethrower as it fires. And then there's the gravity hammer. Originally shown in Halo 2 (where it wasn't usable by the player), the gravity hammer is a large melee weapon that will wipe out most regular enemies in one swipe. Needless to say, it can be especially fun in multiplayer settings. The end result is gameplay that feels wholly familiar without retreading the same ground too heavily.

The campaign is structured in much the same way as past Halo games, with multiple chapters and effective streaming that ensures you'll see load times only between chapters. There are also lengthy vehicle sequences to break up the on-foot action. You'll pilot the classic Halo vehicles, such as the Ghost, a hovering one-person craft that's fast and deadly, and the Warthog, a dune buggy with a turret mounted in the back. You'll also see new vehicles, such as the Brute Prowler, which is a two-person vehicle with turrets. Like in previous games, the vehicles are fun to use. Also similar to previous games, the artificial intelligence can't drive very well, so if you're playing alone, you'll usually want to grab the steering wheel rather than the weapons.

The concept of "equipment" is new to the series. These deployable special items have a variety of effects. The most obvious example is the bubble shield: You (and your enemies) can walk through it, but bullets and explosions bounce right off. It's especially entertaining when your enemies use it, given that you can just walk through and bash them with the butt of your gun. You'll also find items that make your shields regenerate more quickly, and others that drain enemy shields and stop their vehicles dead in their tracks. These items also show up in multiplayer, where they're a little more interesting.

Halo 2's ending was widely criticized for being too much of a cliffhanger and leaving you with no sense of progress or resolution whatsoever. It's good news, then, that Halo 3's story doesn't suffer from that problem at all. It opens immediately following the events of Halo 2: The Covenant is on its way to Earth, continuing its religious zealotry and attempting to activate the floating space weapons known as Halos, which could destroy civilization as we know it. The Master Chief and the other Earth forces of the UNSC are in hot pursuit to stop them, with newfound allies such as the Arbiter coming along for the ride. We'll spare you the specifics because they're quite compelling and should be seen firsthand. All you really need to know if you're on the fence about Halo 3's campaign is that it's a delicate balancing act that manages to provide satisfying closure for the trilogy, make perfect sense of all the cryptic events in Halo 2, and leave you filled with anticipation for more adventures set in the Halo universe. Not bad for a game that will take most players between 10 and 15 hours to finish on one of four difficulty settings.

But you'll probably go through the campaign more than once, thanks to the inclusion of a strong co-op mode. Previous Halo games have let two players go through the campaign; Halo 3 ups that number to four players and lets you do the whole thing over Xbox Live, if you so choose. This is a really fun way to experience the campaign's nine chapters, and you can choose to go through them in any order, provided you've already played through it alone. Furthermore, this method of play (which you can also do alone) lets you turn on scoring in campaign mode, in which you earn points for kills and lose them for dying. This adds a sense of competition to the co-op, and there are also achievements associated with finishing chapters with high point totals. You can also customize the experience a bit by turning on a series of unlockable modifiers that open up as you collect hidden skulls. The skulls are stashed around the game, and some of them do things such as increase the amount of damage you'll need to deal to take an enemy down, remove the heads-up display and make your weapon invisible, and so on. This gives the story-driven section of the game some more replay value, although it doesn't get significantly more difficult as you scale up the number of players. Consequently, finishing the game on legendary difficulty is a breeze if you're rolling through with three experienced fellow triggermen.

In addition to the four-player co-op action, you can also play competitive solo and team-based multiplayer matches with up to 16 players on 11 different maps. There's a lot of depth to the multiplayer modes, ranging from simple stuff such as deathmatch and team deathmatch (still referred to as slayer and team slayer here), to more objective-based gameplay such as capture the flag. Another similar mode is called territories, in which the two teams fight to defend or attack various control points around the map. You'll also find a mode called infection, where a percentage of the players start as sword-wielding zombies and must convert the members of the other team by killing them, until only one non-zombie remains. Each of the maps can handle any of these game modes.

Like in Halo 2, you can customize these game types, and there's more to customize this time around. You can change things like starting weapons, the weapons that appear on the map, whether the motion sensor is active, the force of gravity, the game speed, whether the players all have active camouflage or not, and much, much more. The multiplayer is as strong as it has ever been thanks to the addition of new weapons and tweaks to old ones. Swords have been made much more interesting this time around: If two players run at one another with energy swords and attack at the same time, the swords clash and the players bounce off one another. This makes all-swords matches totally wild. The gravity hammer is also big fun in multiplayer matches, both because it crushes enemies that are foolish enough to get too close, and because you can smack incoming rockets to bat them away, which makes for an interesting game of baseball.

The weird thing about this last concept is that, with the addition of the Forge, you'll actually be able to build some sort of crude baseball variant if you want. Forge mode is a map editor, but not in the 3D modeling sense that you're used to seeing in PC shooters. You can't edit level geometry with Forge, but you can spawn, remove, and move objects and items around the level. All of the editing is done in real time, and you can pop in and out of edit mode by pushing up on the D pad. You can also play this mode with other players, letting everyone run around in edit mode to spawn Warthogs, rocket launchers, and whatever else is already on the map. On the surface, that doesn't sound so exciting. But in practice, it's a weird and potential-rich addition to the game because there are a ton of little secrets and tricks you can use to manipulate the objects in ways the developers may not have intended.

For example, take the fusion core. It's Halo's version of the exploding barrel, and by default, it blows up when you shoot it or drop it from a significant height. It also takes 30 seconds to respawn. You can modify it to respawn every 10 seconds and, with help from another player's rifle fire, you can coax it into respawning in midair, where it tumbles to the ground and explodes every 10 seconds. Naturally, if you surround that spot with more stuff that explodes, you'll have a fun little physics-based bomb that respawns and explodes every 10 seconds. If you've ever messed around with Garry's Mod, a similar physics-based toolbox for Half-Life 2, then you'll recognize this as a simplified take on that idea when you start using it for more than simply adding a few weapons to a map or moving spawn points around. Though many players probably won't get hooked on Forge tinkering, it's an extremely powerful addition that may just take over your life.

You'll be able to easily share your Forge creations with other players via a handy file-sharing system that lets you quickly send map configurations and gameplay types to your friends. You can also set a certain number of items as publicly shared, and users can go to Bungie's Web site to browse and rate the shared items. Additionally, you can flag items for download on that Web page, and the next time you fire up Halo 3, it'll download the items you've marked. It's a very slick interface that makes moving stuff around very easy.

You can also use the file-sharing options to send screenshots and saved films. Saved films are replays of action from any of the modes in the game, from campaign to multiplayer to Forge sessions. The game automatically stores the last 25 or so sessions, and you can choose to save them more permanently from there. Once you've got them, you can edit them down to key kills, weird single-player behavior, or the strangest Forge stuff you can come up with, and then save them for sharing, just as you would with a map or game mode. Much like Forge, the saved-films feature doesn't really sound like much, but Halo 3 is a very replay-worthy game, and you'll probably run into plenty of little moments that you'll want to save for posterity. Another nice touch is that the films aren't locked to one perspective. You can detach the camera from your player and fly anywhere on the map, or change it to any other player's view, as well. The only real issue is that rewinding and fast-forwarding are a little clunky. So if you've got something you want to save that's at the end of a 45-minute session, you'll have to hold down the fast-forward button for a long time to get to that moment, and if you miss it, rewinding can be a real pain, too. Once you've figured out the little idiosyncrasies of footage manipulation, it's not so bad.

Halo has always had a very strong artistic vision, and the graphics have always been just good enough to convey the necessary imagery without becoming huge technical powerhouses. That's not to say that the game isn't technically impressive, because it maintains a smooth frame rate throughout, and looks very sharp overall with plenty of great lighting and other nice effects. But the visual design overpowers its technical side and really stands out. Given that the game takes place in a wider range of locales than the previous two games, you'll see a lot of different, colorful environments, including deserts, snow, jungle settings, great-looking building interiors, and more. The enemies, many of which are returning from past games, also look great.

The sound in Halo 3 is a good mix of old and new, much like the rest of the game. You'll hear the familiar Halo theme music and variants thereof. You'll also hear plenty of great new music, including one suspenseful track with a heartbeat-like sound that manages to get your heart pounding as well. Most of the voice cast from Halo 2 returns to voice their respective characters, and they again turn in terrific and believable performances. You'll also hear a ton of combat dialogue, both from the marines that fight by your side as well as the enemies you're fighting, who don't seem to appreciate it when you kill one of their comrades. Our favorite line from the Covenant was probably "You've killed my brother for the last time," which is pretty hilarious.

As games start to consider user-generated content, it's becoming clear that more and more games will be ready to give you back just as much as you're willing to put into them. On the surface, Halo 3 is every bit the sequel you would expect it to be, in that it delivers meaningful upgrades to both the story-driven and competitive sides of the package. However, it's the addition of the Forge level editor and the saved films that give the game an even longer set of legs, legs that will probably keep you running at full speed until Bungie figures out where, exactly, to go from here.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (PC)

If you took 2003's freely downloadable Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and mashed it together with the Battlefield games, you might come up with something like Quake Wars. Of course, the whole business of the original Enemy Territory's Allies and Axis have been replaced by the humans and Strogg from the Quake universe, but the basic nature of the gameplay is unchanged. Two opposing teams still duke it out while attempting to complete a series of objectives, though this time you can jump into a bunch of different vehicles and aircraft to carry out your assaults. The concept itself isn't really new, but it's put together extremely well, and its mission-focused gameplay will appeal to veterans of these types of shooters, as well as those who have previously been intimidated by them.

The year is 2065. The Strogg race has attacked Earth in order to process its raw materials into a fuel called stroyent. If you've played any other Quake titles, you'll know some of the history here, but it's mostly irrelevant in the context of Enemy Territory's multiplayer action, so let's cut to the chase: You join either the human Global Defense Force or the alien Strogg team, and then shoot your enemies in the face.

Obviously, it's a tad more complex than this. First, you need to choose one of five classes before each match. The GDF classes will be familiar to any RTCW: Enemy Territory player; the Strogg classes have different names than the human ones, but they all boil down to the same roles. GDF soldiers and Strogg aggressors are your typical frontline troops; medics and technicians heal in the field; and so on. Don't assume that correlating classes are all exactly the same, though. GDF field ops can drop ammo packs, for example. The similar Strogg oppressor doesn't need to drop ammo, since the alien weaponry doesn't require any. Instead, oppressors can set up a tactical shield to protect infantry or vehicles.

Other differences are subtle, but no less important. For example, GDF medics can revive downed teammates almost instantly, while it takes a few crucial seconds for Strogg technicians to do the same. On the other hand, technicians can use their healing stroyent tool on enemies, too, which creates a forward spawn point--a handy skill, indeed. Then you have GDF covert ops versus Strogg infiltrators. Both can disguise themselves as the enemy, but covert ops can use an explosive surveillance camera to spy on the opposition, while infiltrators can send out a handy drone to do battle with enemies from a distance. These differences aren't huge, but they give each faction a different feel and are balanced well.

Once you've spawned into the map, the game will give you incredibly clear objectives--and in most cases, more than one. Teams share a primary objective, and as the battle rages and one team is successful in meeting its current goal, the objective will shift. There are secondary missions to complete as well, and they will change depending on your class. You may need to take out enemy radar, heal teammates, blow up gates, and so on. The end result of this focus is that you never wonder what you should be doing, and even newcomers to this kind of action will feel that they contributed. Additionally, as you continue to play, you will earn medals and gain persistent ranks--provided you are playing on ranked servers. You'll also earn bonuses within your current campaign as you gain experience, such as improved weaponry, faster sprinting, and more, depending on the amount of XP earned and the class you are playing.

All the emphasis on missions results in intense firefights that occasionally involve Quake Wars' small assortment of vehicles and aircraft. The specific mission objectives usually keep the action contained to a few pockets of concentrated activity, though, so if you like the Battlefield formula of controlled chaos, you might miss the insane flurry of action coming at you from all sides and above. If you prefer to get comfy in a tank turret or in the cockpit of a chopper, you'll still be able to fulfill that role. But with objectives shifting from outdoor areas to indoor sewers and bunkers, you can't singularly focus on getting into the air or plowing down every enemy in sight. Don't take this to mean that Quake Wars doesn't offer its share of heavy action, however. You'll still get your fill of visceral, bloody battles--though they are usually confined to the ground.

You can also create a fire team as in the original Enemy Territory, so squad organization functionality is there, though it's not as necessary as you would expect. One reason is that when you undertake a secondary mission, you can see who is sharing it, thereby creating a sort of ad hoc squad. The other is that Quake Wars does not support voice chat, so you simply don't have the opportunity to issue commands to your fire team easily. Of course, you can use a third-party voice client, though that would have you chatting to all of your teammates, rather than a single squad. Now that the Battlefield series has set the squad-based chat standard, it's unclear why the functionality would be left out. The missions are so clear that your path is usually fairly straightforward, but if you're joining a random game and still want to contribute to the fullest extent, it would be nice for the game to give you the chance to talk to the other members of your fire team.

Shooting stuff in Quake Wars feels terrific. Both GDF and Strogg weaponry have the right weight and firing speed. Even the default weapons for nonassault classes, like the Strogg Lacerator, are effective in battle and handle well. Small details, such as the amount of time the barrels on the Hyperblaster rotate before they begin firing, feel properly balanced. Vehicles and aircraft are easy to manage as well. Oddly enough, though, some ground-movement controls are tied to flight and vehicle controls, so if, for example, you want to change the key binding for your Tormentor's thrust maneuver, you'll be changing the sprint key as well. It would be nice to have vehicle controls separately customizable from within the game, and we're at a loss to explain why players would be forced to edit configuration files to make such a simple, standard change.

There are three ways to play: on a single map, a three-map campaign that takes place across a single continent, or in a two-round duel on a single map in which teams compete to see who can complete their assault faster. There are 12 maps in all, and they hold up to 32 players at a time--though every server we have seen supports no more than 24 players. Most of the usual near-future environments are covered, from cratered wastelands to frozen tundra. The maps themselves are balanced well, with plenty of buildings for cover, and lots of hills and valleys to mix things up.

Yet prior Quake games captured the aura of futuristic warfare better than Quake Wars does. That is partially due to the open-environment design--and the very nature of the setting. However, there is no real eye candy to set your sights on here, so while the maps look very good, nothing really paints a detailed picture of a war-torn world. Indoor areas in particular are mostly bland and functional, but even terrain lacks detail, thanks to flat textures. Even explosions and fire effects lack pizzazz. Lighting is often spectacular, however, especially in the foliage-rich areas, and vehicles and turrets are richly detailed. The draw distance is also incredible, without any noticeable fog or polygon pop-in. Character models are good too, but the animations are a bit awkward. Luckily, the game runs reasonably well. The din of battle sounds good, and the weapons are obnoxiously loud, in a good way. The voice-over commands that you can play are grating, though, and the tone of some of the lines (like the GDF's snotty "You're Welcome!") seems out of place.

If you're an Enemy Territory veteran, this is the logical next step for you. And if you've been turned off by team shooters in the past, this one may change your mind. The accessible, objective-focused gameplay won't be for everyone, especially those into the chaotic, freeform warfare of other team shooters. But all told, Quake Wars is great fun and should provide FPS fans with a lot to sink their teeth into.