Iron Man (Xbox360)

Held captive in a cave by soldiers armed to the teeth with weapons of his own design, Tony Stark ponders his fate. Faced with the ugly truth about the world he has helped create, he resolves to turn his genius to other purposes. Stark constructs a high-tech suit of armor and becomes Iron Man, embarking on a quest to ferret out the evil fueled by his creations and salvage his shameful family legacy. Iron Man, a game recently released in conjunction with the feature film, parallels Tony Stark's plight. Iron Man dons the high-tech suit of wide-open game spaces and shiny visual effects and tries to leave the old stigma of movie-based video games behind. Zooming around and blowing up stuff does have its thrills, but that new-suit shine grows dull about halfway through the game as the difficulty spikes drastically while the level design flatlines. After that, there's just no reviving Iron Man.

Iron Man begins in the cave where Tony Stark constructs the rudimentary rough draft of what will evolve into the iconic hot-rod red and gold suit. After his escape, the plot diverges from that of the movie, following similar themes while pitting Iron Man against a host of enemies that fans may recognize from the comics. Levels are bookended by cinematic cutscenes that generally show a little bit of character interaction and then a lot of Iron Man flying hither and yon. Only Robert Downey Jr. and Terrence Howard have lent their voices and likenesses to the game, and their performances, like the cutscenes themselves, are adequate.

After the initial, linear tutorial level, Iron Man is set loose into open battlefields for every subsequent mission. Flying around these large spaces is one of the more entertaining bits in the game, given that they are satisfyingly big and look quite good while you're screaming around them at high speeds. On most levels, the terrain is thoroughly contoured and provides plenty of opportunities for flying low through valleys or ducking behind ridges to evade enemy fire. With detailed suit animations that help bolster the sense of speed, Iron Man is at his best when flying into or out of battle.

Actual combat is a different story. Of the myriad martial means at Iron Man's disposal, the missiles and repulsor beam are the most useful, but also the least exciting. It's difficult to take on groups of enemies while flying; not only will you soon pass them by, but you'll also likely stir up more enemies while coming back around for another pass. As a result, the most efficient way to deal destruction is to hover in the air near your foes, firing repulsors constantly, shooting your missiles whenever they recharge, and dodging the constant barrage of incoming missiles. It's a shame that a game with such wide-open spaces steers you toward such a limited combat style, but it's really the only way to succeed against the brutal difficulty of the second half of the game.

Iron Man's other weapon, the unibeam, is very powerful but takes precious stationary seconds to charge up, seconds that you rarely have. As you beat levels and upgrade your suit tech, this charging time shrinks. You can also reroute your auxiliary suit power to direct extra juice to your weapons, but that power is best reserved for boosting your life support. Even with these tweaks, the abrupt increase in difficulty shrinks your available charging windows down to almost nothing. Using the unibeam is doubly risky because it draws power from your suit, power that you'll constantly need to recharge your life meter. Five or six missiles to the chassis while attempting a unibeam charge are enough to force your suit to power down, which you want to avoid (especially later in the game) because you can recover from a power down only three times before failing the mission.

One amusing element of Iron Man's combat system is the ability to grapple enemies. When Iron Man is close to a foe, he can grab onto them, triggering the unit-specific grapple animation. Most of these require a spat of frantic button tapping or a timed button press, and they result in the spectacular destruction of that unit. Breaking helicopters in half and ripping the lids off of tanks is great fun the first few times, but eventually it becomes more of a hassle than it is worth. However, grappling missile batteries or howitzers is often worthwhile because this lets you control them for a few shots and take out a few stubborn enemies quickly. You can also grapple incoming missiles while in flight and throw them at whatever you like, which, in addition to making you feel like a rock star, is a powerful way to deal damage. Unfortunately, the timing is tricky to get down, so more often than not you'll receive a face full of missile for your troubles. Furthermore, later levels are so thick with missiles that in the time it takes to catch and release one, five more will have crashed into your head.

Iron Man is reasonably entertaining for a few hours, but then things turn sour. Each level follows the same template that has you taking out a few consecutive groups of targets, then moving on to deal with the superweapon or supervillain (sometimes both). This is fine for a handful of missions, but it quickly grows stale. You'll likely complete the first half of the game's 13 levels with relative ease, but the latter half is a totally different story. Enemies abruptly increase in number and become much tougher, and the air fills with enough missiles to cause a partial solar eclipse. Constant dodging and frequent retreat behind hillsides to recharge your health are essential survival tactics, and even elite evaders will experience their fair share of failure. With no checkpoints to break up the lengthy missions, failing is incredibly frustrating, and it'll take a strong measure of grim determination to soldier on to the end.

Beating certain levels will unlock them for play in the One Man Army mode. This places you in familiar level environs with a time limit and a number of enemies to kill. If you complete your goal, you will unlock one of five classic suits from the Iron Man comics, which you can then use should you choose to replay any level. These might delight Iron Man fans, but if you're really going to attempt levels again, the customizable Mark III suit that you use throughout the campaign is your best bet.

Iron Man makes a decent opening argument against the just-another-movie-game stigma. However, by smacking you with a punishing difficulty spike instead of striving for more complex mission structures, it sacrifices most of the goodwill it garners in the early going. Completing the game is a frustrating trial with no substantial reward, and even sympathetic jurors will have a hard time ruling in its favor.

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (Xbox360)

If the original Rainbow Six Vegas felt like the first night of a trip to Sin City, its recently released sequel feels like the second; a little worn, but still a lot of fun. There's still a casino's worth of content and the best gameplay this side of Caesar's Palace. Plus, the introduction of a sprint button not only increases your speed, but also quickens the pace of the entire game. On the other hand, the cooperative play has been pared down a little and the expanded experience gains are about as glamorous as pillow mints--even if you are grateful for them. A third night of this might be too much to handle, but if you like to place bets with bullets at all, you'll definitely want to put some money down on Rainbow Six Vegas 2.

Despite the name Tom Clancy in the title, the Rainbow Six games are hardly known for their ace storytelling skills. Having said that, the way the original Vegas ended on such a terrible cliffhanger ending, when all it really had to do was give you a reason to kick some terrorist butt, was especially disappointing. Fortunately, the campaign in Vegas 2 makes no such errors. You no longer play as Logan Keller. Instead, you hunt terror and save hostages as a custom character referred to as Bishop in the campaign. Although the specifics of the overarching story are pretty easy to lose track of, one thing is clear: There are terrorists and you have to get them before they get Vegas. However, there are a couple of great scenes in the campaign. For example, there is one where you're supposed to meet up with a guy to find chemical weapons, only the terrorists meet up with him first. Because he's wearing a communication device, you can hear the proceedings as you make your way through the level. First, the terrorist in charge rails angrily, then the guy pleads with him, then the terrorist rails some more, and then the guy starts screaming "NO, NO, not THAT!" Then there are no more words, just animal noises of pain, fear, and more than a little loathing. Other moments don't seem quite as authentic, especially those that involve civilians. While it's nice that they're in the game, you'll occasionally lose if you fail to prevent the terrorists from executing one of them. That's just plain silly because it's unlikely that a group of commandos would leave a bunch of terrorists and weapons behind because Hank the Hostage bit the dust. Also, it's so easy to die in Vegas 2 that you really don't need the extra "game over" screens.

Just like in the previous game, you play through each stage with your two not-so-trusty sidekicks. They're like roulette wheels in the way they oscillate between deadly efficacy and utter helplessness, though the odds are actually stacked in favor of them doing the right thing. Their normally smart, super-effective behavior actually makes it even more striking when they get stuck behind the occasional box. The campaign isn't very long, but it has its share of awesome firefights and is a good way to warm up for the online play.

Although many of the locales aren't the first ones that would come to mind if someone asked you to imagine a shootout in Vegas, they are inventive, nonetheless. There are a few nondescript warehouses, generic loading docks, and lame industrial areas that could just as easily be in Rainbow Six Fresno. But, then, there's also the theater level. This is a full-on replica of a decadent theater complete with stage, backstage, seats, and a balcony. The tricky thing about it is that one team has easy access to the balconies, while the other is pinned by the somewhat open stage. If a player from the latter group can make it across and exit stage left, hopefully with a close-range weapon like a shotgun, he can get all No Country for Old Men on the snipers watching the action below. How quickly the hunters become the hunted.

The best way to cross any open space in Vegas 2 is to sprint, and that can now be accomplished with the push of a button, which is similar to what you've done in nearly every shooter that's come out since Gears of War. But unlike the reckless and half-blind dash in that game, Vegas 2's version is easier to control. It's also more versatile because you can sprint sideways, as well as forward. However, when you see a grenade rattle on the ground in front of you, you'll wish you could also sprint backward (you can't); realism be damned. Sprinting is a small, minor addition to a great big game like this, but it has a major impact on Vegas 2's pace and gameplay. It's obviously a good thing to be able to run a little faster when you're trying to close in on a flash-blind enemy, and it goes with the shotgun like peanut butter goes with jelly. Sprinting around a corner while pulling the trigger on a shotgun blast before the gun is even half on the screen and catching your enemy with a mouthful of buckshot is one of the sweetest kills the series has seen. Less obvious and less gory is the overall effect on the pace of the play. Sprinting provides a welcome shot of adrenaline, especially online.

Speaking of the Internet, online play used to be the only place you could go to level up your soldier and unlock new gear, but that is no longer the case. You can now gain experience points, ranks, and equipment by playing through the offline content. And, it's all universal. If you become a sergeant by playing the heck out of terrorist hunt campaign, you'll still be a sergeant when you log onto your system's network. The main perk here is that by playing through the single-player campaign first, you'll enter online play with a few weapons and clothing-customization options already unlocked. This really doesn't add anything to the game as much as it fixes a minor flaw with the original--you should have been able to gain experience points offline all along, although it didn't matter to most players because the online content is such a huge part of the game. This meager expansion of the experience model is also noteworthy considering Call of Duty 4's recent strides in the developmental department. When it comes to creating your character as you play, Vegas 2 has pretty meager cards.

Despite this, the options for online players have actually slimmed down a little when you compare the original with the sequel. Previously, four players used to be able to tackle the campaign cooperatively, but now, that number has been reduced to two. That may sound crazy and retroactive, but four players can still tackle terrorist hunt. And to the game's credit, it's easy to drop in or drop out of the two-player campaign. There is one co-op issue, though, that makes no sense: the fact that your two computer controlled companions are both controlled entirely by only one player. The other player feels like an awkward stepparent: You know you have good advice, but the kids just won't listen to you. It's clear that giving each player one minion would have wreaked havoc on the stacking and breaching system, but there are ways around this issue. If it were easy to transfer control of one or both minions between the two players, the tactical options would have been even broader, and both players would feel like they got to play with the nifty order giving.

The other new additions are multiplayer modes: team leader, total conquest, and demolition. Team leader is the most creative because it blends a VIP-style match with elimination play. As long as your VIP is alive, your guys can respawn at will. But once he drops, every death is final. Coming back after your leader has been assassinated is possible, but not probable. Total conquest isn't a complete departure from the conquest mode featured in the original Vegas; now, you must hold three transmitters for 30 seconds. This is a fun, frantic mode because your objective is constantly changing between assault and defense. You always know where to go, and you usually have a good idea of where to find the enemy. Finally, demolition is a classic bombing mission where one side tries to blow up a target while the other tries to defend it.

Though that last mode is old school, the graphics are anything but. Though there are occasional instances of texture blurring and fill-in during frantic online play, there will also be times when you'll get blasted by an unseen enemy because you were too busy admiring the walls. And what walls there are in the game. From the gritty, sweaty walls of Kill House to the deep red and dimly lit papering in the theater, Vegas 2's walls are unmatched, except perhaps by BioShock's. The characters look good too, especially when you're shooting them. Blood spurts from bullet wounds, splattering nearby walls as the gun noises pound and the controller rumbles with approval. Well, the Xbox 360 one does, but more on that later. The music and sound effects are also excellent. The audio queues are as clear as they are life-saving, and the music is rousing. The track in theater is especially epic and unusually operatic for a military shooter.

Though there are differences between the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of Rainbow Six Vegas 2 that make the 360 version slimly preferable, both unequivocally capture the same excellent experience. The lack of rumble in the PS3 controller is still a drag. Also, it takes a little longer to find a good PS3 online game for three reasons: fewer people are playing, you can only see a match's latency once you've joined, and you will randomly be unable to connect to certain servers. But the graphics are comparable and the gameplay is identical, so overall, the PS3 version is easy to recommend.

And that makes it better than most games because Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is the best tactical shooter on the market. It doesn't gamble as much as it should and, instead, seems to take cover behind the formidable foundation established in the first game. But to its credit, Rainbow Six Vegas 2 does make one big gameplay tweak and provides another highly playable single-player campaign. It also provides a decent suite of cooperative options and more excellent online multiplayer. Though its experience system is now clearly behind the one found in Call of Duty 4, no game has a better control scheme or more satisfying tactical play. This ace belongs in every shooter's hand.

Sins of a Solar Empire (PC)

There's a blissful nirvana strategy gamers yearn for, even though experiencing it usually involves a considerable loss of sleep along with a steep drop in productivity for days on end. Sins of a Solar Empire is one of those rare games that can deliver an incredibly addictive experience that devours a healthy chunk of your life, and you won't mind a bit. Not bad for a debut game from a relatively small developer. Ironclad and publisher Stardock should be proud, because they've delivered one of the most original, compelling strategy games in recent years.

Let's get this clear: Sins isn't anything like a typical turn-based space strategy game such as Galactic Civilizations or the granddaddy of the genre, Master of Orion. Instead, this is a real-time game--but don't let that make you think that it's Command & Conquer in space. Though it's in real time, Sins unfolds at such a leisurely pace and can happen on such a gigantic scale that you'll easily manage five or six gigantic fleets at a time as you battle across multiple star systems that contain dozens of worlds.

The game is set in a distant future where the Trader Emergency Coalition--an alliance of various human worlds--bands together in the face of two threats. The first is the Advent, an offshoot of humanity that has embraced an alien philosophy and has come looking to spread the word by force. Even direr is the Vasari, a mysterious alien race that seeks the annihilation of both factions. Sins lets you play from the perspective of any of the three factions, which are approximate mirrors of one another.

Like many space strategy games, the action begins with you in control of a single planet, and from there you must explore the rest of the system worlds, locating planets to colonize, as well as resources that you can exploit to fuel your research and ship-building needs. Sins isn't as ambitious as other space strategy games that task you with taking over a galaxy; instead, the action is limited to a maximum of five local stars, each with a network of planets around it. Travel among planets is limited via strict space lanes, so some planets are natural choke points. Planets themselves come in four varieties. Terran and desert planets can be colonized easily, but to settle ice and volcano planets you must research the appropriate technology first. Asteroids can also be colonized, but they're so small that they can support only tiny populations, making them ideal for outposts.

To support your expansion, you'll have to build a plethora of vessels. Scouts explore the planetary systems, locating ideal worlds to colonize with colony ships, as well as providing advance warning on incoming enemy fleets. Warships come in three classes. The smallest are frigates, and they include frontline combatants, siege vessels that can pummel planets with nuclear weapons, and missile platforms. Then there are larger cruiser-class vessels, such as escort carriers that can deploy squadrons of fighters and bombers to heavier warships. The crème de la crème, though, are the capital ships, which you can build only a handful of. Capital ships are huge, expensive, and powerful, but they're also like the characters in a role-playing game in that they can level up as they gain experience, making them more powerful and unlocking unique and potent abilities. The ability to gain experience creates a powerful dynamic, as you want to get your capital ships into fights so they can level up, but you also want to protect them from danger, because the loss of them can be devastating. However, if you get a task force of high-level capital ships and smaller vessels together, you'll have a force to be reckoned with.

Good strategy games force you to constantly make decisions about where to allocate your resources, and Sins does an exceptional job of this, mainly because you'll usually find yourself having to juggle where to invest your precious resources. There are three resources in the game: money, metal, and crystal. Money is generated by having large planetary populations or by building trade stations. Metal and crystal can only be harvested on small asteroids. Building warships or structures, making planetary improvements, and conducting research consumes large amounts of these resources, and usually you'll have a shortage of at least one of them, which forces you to make some difficult decisions.

It's also possible to engage in a bit of diplomacy, though Sins takes a different tack than a lot of other strategy games. You can do the standard diplomatic maneuvers like declaring a nonaggression pact or forming an alliance with someone, but to do so, you've got to prove your worth to that faction by pursuing missions it puts toward you. For example, one faction might task you with destroying a certain number of defensive structures of another faction. Successfully completing the mission will earn you favor, though not completing the mission will earn disfavor. In order to form an alliance with any faction, you'll have to complete several missions for it.

Then there's the pirate system, which is a brilliant way of waging war by proxy. The pirates are third-party raiders who launch attacks periodically. You can influence whom they attack by raising the bounty on one of your opponent's heads. However, this creates an eBay-like bidding war, where factions are trying to either get the bounties off of their heads or put them on opponents they really need attacked. The danger is that when you bid, you actually put money into the pot that you can't withdraw, even if you lose. That means that if you get into an astronomical bidding war and win, the bad news is that in the next round, the opponent already has a mountain of money in the auction that you have to overcome. The other danger is that the more money there is in the bidding, the bigger the pirate attack will be. It's a pretty slick system, though its one flaw is that it requires you to babysit each auction when it happens, a process that takes a minute or two. Given that attacks happen every 10 or 15 minutes, this is an activity that takes away from the overall pace of the game.

All of this sounds like it might be a handful to handle in real time, but Sins unfolds at a stately, almost leisurely, pace. The action is fast enough that you're constantly busy making decisions, but it's rarely frenetic to the point where you're overwhelmed. To help you manage a huge empire, there's an innovative empire tree on the side of the screen that gives you an outline of all of your planets, fleets, and factories. Let's say you have a fleet battling in a distant system and taking losses. Without zooming away from the battle, you can select a nearby shipyard and start ordering up replacement ships that can automatically join the fleet. With the empire tree, it's relatively easy to manage multiple fleets consisting of dozens of warships each.

If Sins has a downside, it's that larger-scale games will easily take hours upon hours to resolve. Medium-size maps will chew up six to eight hours, often to the point where you will be looking at the clock and wondering just how effective you're going to be the next day on about three or four hours of sleep. Larger games can take even longer at the default speed settings. Things would end a lot faster if there were alternate victory conditions or if the artificial intelligence would surrender after it clearly has no chance of winning. Instead, you have to pulverize each enemy position before the game ends, a process that can take a while. One thing that you can do while you're finishing someone off, though, is to work on accomplishing achievements. The game has its own achievement system that rewards you for remarkable performance, such as wiping out a certain number of enemy capital ships or settling a pirate base. One dastardly achievement challenges you to win without researching a single military technology.

The game features random maps and scenarios, but one thing that's missing is a campaign. Still, Sins of a Solar Empire is an excellent single-player game and one that translates well into the multiplayer realm, especially since it's a lot harder to beat a human opponent than it is a machine. The built-in server browser connects to Ironclad Online, where it's easy to create a multiplayer game or join up with others. The one thing to keep in mind is that, for the sake of brevity, it's usually best to go with small maps in order for the game to resolve in one sitting. Though it's possible to save a multiplayer game, it will take a considerable amount of dedication and scheduling by all parties involved to tackle a huge game.

Finally, the game's visual presentation is excellent. It's not a graphically flashy game, but it works on many levels. The ship designs look cool up close, and watching fleets slug it out is always fun. Pull the camera back, and ships and squadrons are replaced by distinctive icons, giving you the big picture even when you've zoomed out and are looking at a solar system as a whole. The interface is also quite elegant, and it scales nicely to a wide variety of display sizes. The audio and sound effects aren't quite as distinctive, and the music provides some decent sonic wallpaper.

In sum, Sins of a Solar Empire is an absolute must-have if you enjoy strategy games. It's an addictive, deep game that elevates space strategy to new levels. At the same time, it provides a fresh, original take on one of the oldest and most revered subgenres in all of strategy gaming.

Burnout Paradise (Xbox360)

Is there any developer buzz term more meaningless these days than "open-world gameplay"? Let's face it, it's kind of been done to death at this point, so you have to look on with a bit of skepticism when a developer touts the concept as the next big thing for its franchise. It's understandable, then, if Burnout Paradise's concept freaks you out a little bit. Burnout has, by tradition, been a fairly structured arcade racing game up to this point, and one would have to wonder exactly how well an open environment would serve the series' crash-happy gameplay methodology. Evidently, the answer is quite well. Developer Criterion has invented a world wonderfully suited to Burnout's nature, a city built exclusively to cater to your destructive whims. And while a few design hitches here and there get in the way now and again, by and large Burnout Paradise delivers an experience that is both true to the Burnout name and wonderfully fresh-feeling all at once.

The star of the show is Paradise City itself. Coming complete with the titular Guns 'N Roses song (because Burnout: Night Train or Burnout: Mr. Brownstone probably wouldn't have been as catchy), Paradise City is, at first blush, a pretty standard racing game city, complete with all the usual landmark locations and boring background traffic. But it quickly becomes evident that Paradise City is meant for a greater purpose than just being a simple city to race around in. In effect, the city is a blank slate, a pristine canvas on which to paint your own obliterative masterpiece. The simple act of driving aimlessly around the city constantly presents new roads, shortcuts, and destructible objects for you to experience and, often, destroy. Nearly every intersection of road hosts a new event of some kind, and even after you've worked your way through the game's progression of driver's licenses (the only specifically linear portion of the game design), you'll still be finding new things you didn't even know were there.

That might sound a little overwhelming, especially if you've grown accustomed to the rather specific brand of racing that Burnout has always subscribed to. And at first, it most definitely is. Though the in-game tutorials do a decent job of explaining the event types and basic mechanics, you're initially left to your own devices and only have the small minimap to guide you through the many twists and turns of the city as you race--unless of course you want to hit the pause button regularly and use the larger map, which is a bit annoying to do. Those well accustomed to Burnout's previously track-based racing model might find having to explore to find the best route to the finish a bit frightening, but the good news is that it doesn't take a great deal of time to get a feel for the city's various ins and outs.

Until that time, you will experience some trial and error (with a heavier focus on the error), but the funny thing about that is that while you may initially find yourself failing races, it's not often you have to just go back and keep doing that same race again and again. The focus of Burnout Paradise isn't on doing specific events so much as it is about doing whatever you feel like. If you fail a race, odds are that there are roughly a dozen starting points for other races near the finish line of that previous race, and unless you've done them all, you can just hit up any one of them to get another notch on your license. Toward the very end of the game, when you've bested the bulk of the game's events, you may find yourself lamenting the lack of a quick return feature to get back to a race's starting point. But for the majority of the game, it's not really an issue.

It's a strange design to get used to initially, but once you do, it becomes incredibly rewarding. You can spend hours at a time just dawdling around the city and still make forward progress within the game. Don't feel like racing? Just go break through shortcut gates or bust up billboards, which are tallied up as you break each one. Or, track down one of the cars you unlocked on the road and take it down to add it to your collection. Or, you can opt to pick a road and attempt to "own" it. There are two types of events associated with each of the major roads in the game. Time trials are as you'd expect--you simply start at one end of the road and start driving down it, attempting to get the fastest time you can. Secondly, there are showtime events, which are the game's effective replacement for the crash mode found in previous installments of the series. Whereas crash mode was sort of like a puzzle mode in the way it made you create elaborate car crashes out of painstakingly built traffic designs, showtime is the polar opposite. These are elaborate car crashes born from little more than a bunch of nearby cars and your ability to control what is, in essence, a sentient car wreck.

In a word, showtime mode is absurd. The goal is similar to crash mode in that you're aiming to create as much damage as humanly possible, with various types of cars offering up different cash bonuses that feed into your final score. All the while, you can move your busted husk of a car around by pressing the boost button, which causes you to bounce around like a rubber ball. Again, totally absurd, but also totally awesome. It might lack the puzzling nature of the crash mode, but for pure visceral thrill and laughs-a-minute wrecking, showtime mode delivers in spades. It would have been nice if Criterion had found a way to have both the crash mode and showtime mode coexisting, as neither would make a particularly good replacement for the other; but on its own, showtime is a great deal of fun.

A number of other elements from previous Burnouts are also missing or altered here. The lack of aftertouch (the mechanic that let you steer your wreck into opponents during races and take them out) is a real bummer, as it makes wrecking during races a pure nuisance rather than an opportunity for more destructive glee. Traffic checking is absent as well, though it isn't sorely missed. The racing artificial intelligence has seen a bit of tweaking here and there. You still get the sense of rubber banding that the series has always employed, but as the game goes on and the racers get tougher, your opponents become more aggressive and don't just tank right before the finish line. By and large, the game is actually a bit easier than the last couple of Burnout games, but the challenge toward the later stages of the game definitely ramps up significantly.

The racing itself is as exciting as it's ever been. Standard races are intense and thrilling, road rage events are full of wreckful delights, stunt runs have you jumping, barrel rolling, and flat spinning all over the place, marked man races are tense fights to the finish line as multiple enemy cars bop you around trying to wreck you beyond repair, and burning routes have you taking on challenging time trials to earn new cars. If there's any flaw to be noted with the core game design, it's maybe that there aren't enough event types. There's no shortage of events and random stuff to do, but running the same event types, and even some of the same specific events again and again, can grow a bit tiresome after a while. After each license upgrade, all the events you've raced (except for burning routes) reset, so you end up doing a lot of them over and over again. This wouldn't even be an issue if there were a greater variety of event types, but as it stands, there are only those few, and you may wear out on doing races and marked man events again and again.

If you do get a bit bored with the single-player action, you can always hop online and race against others. Doing so is quite seamless. Simply press right on the D pad to bring up the online menu, and then decide if you want to join up with other existing games or create your own. Online in Burnout Paradise is quite a different animal than that of previous Burnout games. You don't just hop into a lobby menu and pick races to engage in. Instead, the city itself is the lobby, and while the host decides what he wants to unleash upon you, you can just mess around and do whatever you like.

When hosting, you have the ability to both race and take on challenges. Races are of your own design, with you setting the beginning and ending points anywhere in the city. Challenges are set, and there are literally hundreds of them. The trick is that there are a limited number of challenges depending on how many players are in a group. There are 50 challenges for two players, 50 for eight players, and 50 for each denomination in between. This means that once you've exhausted all the challenges for two players, you'll have to get three, then four, and so on and so on if you want to complete them all. That might prove unwieldy for those who don't have a lot of friends online to play the game, but at least the challenges themselves are creative and fun. The challenges range from competitive bouts of drifting, crashing, and jumping to cooperative versions of all the same stuff. It's an inventive mode to be sure and an exceptionally fun one when you've got a good crew of friends to play with.

It also bears mention that while online, you can use the PlayStation Eye or Xbox Live Vision Camera to take shots of your rivals online. When you take down a rival player that has a camera hooked up, the cam will take a mugshot of that player's reaction. It's kind of a neat feature that, unfortunately, will probably be abused by all manner of nudity over the course of the game's lifespan, but that's inevitably what happens when you let people do things with cameras.

Paradise's visual presentation is precisely the kind of top-notch work you've come to expect from the series. Once again, the game sets a standard for how a sense of speed should feel in an arcade racer. This game is lightning fast, and the frame rate in both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game holds up regardless of the chaos onscreen. The car crashes in this game are absolutely fantastic, thanks to some dynamite particle effects and camera work in each and every mangled wreck. Cars deform to wonderful effect, scrunching up like an accordion in head-on collisions and bending and twisting nicely in other situations. The only thing that continues to look a little weird is the total lack of drivers in all the cars around the city. It's understandable that Criterion would leave out mangled corpses or what have you for the sake of an E 10+ rating, but it still looks strange seeing all these disembodied cars driving around like a society of Turbo Teens.

It's also worth noting that Burnout Paradise is a game that commands an HD display, and not just for full graphical effect. On the standard-definition TVs we tried, we found the minimap to be borderline useless unless we squinted like crazy. On an HD set, the minimap is detailed and blown up enough to rely on, but when playing in standard definition, it simply became a hassle to use.

If you're looking for differences between the two versions, you won't find many. The PlayStation 3 version looks maybe a hair crisper than the 360 version, but that's about the only visual difference to speak of. On the flipside, the 360 version has a slight edge in that you can use custom soundtracks to drown out the miserable collection of songs EA has amassed for the game. There are a few highlights that fit well with the theme of high-energy racing, but the vast bulk of the music consists of irritating modern rock that's about as ill-fitting as humanly possible. Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" might, itself, be a car wreck of a song, but it doesn't fit the vibe of the game at all. Add in the collection of original Criterion-produced guitar rock tracks from previous Burnout games that sound like they were culled from Joe Satriani's nightmares, and you have a pretty unpleasant musical experience all around. The annoying radio DJ who pops up now and again to give hints, mock you obnoxiously when you fail, and make one glib comment or another about something going on in the city doesn't help matters. He's merely an annoyance that probably wouldn't even be worth mentioning save for the fact that you cannot turn him off. At least the sound effects are still top-flight in every regard. Crashes thunder, engines roar, and tires screech with terrific clarity all throughout the game. If you've got a surround-speaker setup, it's all the better.

It's entirely possible that some people might not enjoy Burnout Paradise's significant shift in direction, specifically those who simply wanted another incremental Burnout sequel. Indeed, Paradise is anything but incremental, and while it might prove a polarizing experience for some, most will likely appreciate what a radical overhaul this game really is. The open-world design isn't just a lazy gimmick--it's a wonderfully executed concept that doesn't rob the game of the series' most beloved tenet: the act of driving fast and wrecking hard. If you're one of the people who tried the Burnout Paradise demo and formed a rather negative opinion of the game, you're not alone. But if you have any affection for the series, you really owe it to yourself to give the full game a look. The demo did little to truly represent what a superbly fun racer this game can be.

Metal Slug 3 (Xbox360)

For years now, SNK has been turning old ideas into new money by rereleasing its puckish Metal Slug action games on various home consoles, both in stand-alone and compilation titles. Metal Slug 3, arguably an apex for the series in terms of fresh ideas, narrative strength, and overall insanity, has now arrived on Xbox Live Arcade for 800 points ($10). That's a little steep for what is little more than a competent port of a seven-year-old arcade game, but it's still a manic, absurd experience that demands multiple plays.

While the original Metal Slug was a military-themed side-scrolling shooter with lots of cartoonish embellishments, the series became aggressively bizarre by the time Metal Slug 3 rolled around. Fatigue-wearing enemy soldiers barely register as cannon fodder as you face off against gigantic crabs, infectious zombie hordes, tentacled alien invaders and their slimy human clones, and more. You've got an array of high-impact weapons to fight them off with, as well as the various vehicles, or "slugs," that you'll happen upon, which range from tanks to weaponized ostriches. The game is rife with gigantic, wonderfully detailed boss fights, as well as plenty of sequences that stray from the standard side-scrolling action, including some great underwater and space sequences. This is just an incredibly inventive shooter, and the last few levels are some of the most purposefully outlandish in any game.

Having originally been an arcade game that depended on a regular infusion of quarters to operate, Metal Slug 3 can be incredibly--at times unfairly--difficult, though you can adjust the number of lives and continues you get, as well as the overall difficulty. It's also pretty short, and you can easily beat it in under an hour, though not without missing a huge number of alternate paths and weird little secrets. There are weapons, slugs, and entire groups of enemies that you probably won't see on a single play-through, making it a game that begs to be revisited.

Not much has been done to Metal Slug 3 in bringing it to Xbox Live Arcade. There has always been an obsessive amount of detail to the visuals in Metal Slug, and they still look good in HD, though old-timers will note that a filtering effect has taken away a lot of the pixelated edges, and that by default, enemy soldiers do not bleed red. There's local and online support for up to two players, and it works, though we noticed some pronounced frame rate issues in two-player games, and the online is highly susceptible to laggy conditions.

Ultimately, the things that might prevent you from enjoying Metal Slug 3, such as the number of times it's been released on other systems, its relative price point, and the lack of extras, are peripheral to the experience itself. If these things don't concern you, then you'll have a blast.

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.

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.

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.

BioShock (PC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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