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.

Lost: Via Domus (All)

According to the television show Lost, in 2004, Oceanic Airlines flight 815 crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Whether you think the survivors are stranded on an island or bottled up in a different location, Ubisoft has added one more survivor to the mix in its latest adventure game. Lost: Via Domus tells a good story, but it's far too short to justify the game's price of admission.

In Lost: Via Domus, you take control of an amnesiac photojournalist who was also aboard the fateful transpacific flight. During the game you must slowly regain your identity through completing quests, talking with the other survivors, and correctly identifying clues during flashbacks. Early on you find out you had a camera on the plane with you. Evidently one of your photographs made another survivor mad enough to want to destroy the photograph and kill you. The events in the story unfold in a great parallel to the TV series. Most of the game's storyline occurs during the first two seasons of the show, but characters appearing in season three of the show are also included in encounters and exposition. The core characters are all there: Jack, Locke, Kate, Sawyer, Charlie, Claire, Sun, Jin, Hurley, and Sayid. Tom, Ben, and Juliet--of the Others--appear as well to ensure that the hostile, we-were-here-before-you storyline is kept alive and well.

The environments are hands down the best-looking part of the game, particularly on the PlayStation 3. The as-seen-on-Lost locations and the few new environments are beautifully and accurately rendered. The lighting, feel, and sounds of the environment are all spot-on. Frequently, we found ourselves walking out to precipices just to take in the sights or zooming in with our camera to see how detailed the hatch's bookshelves were. The crash site looks true to the show's pilot episode, even if the chaotic initial few minutes don't play out exactly as they do in the TV series. The areas look great, and their diversity keeps you from feeling like you're spending too much time in one place.

The biggest problem is that there is not enough gameplay to fill more than seven hours, even if you go out of your way to find all of the Easter eggs, take in all of the sights, and unlock all of the achievements available on the Xbox 360. The bartering, exploring, hot-wiring, and occasional pistol-firing sequences are all a clear part of the Lost milieu. You'll spend so much time in the fuse-plugging minigames, though, that you'll feel like an electrician by the end of your adventure. That's because the same minigame is played when you need to access everything from old hatches on the island to the crashed jetliner's fuselage.

One standout portion of the gameplay is the way photography is used in the playable flashback sequences. At the outset of each trip down memory lane, you get a glimpse of a torn-up photograph. From that flash, you have to use your camera to take a picture to match the broken image as the sequence of events plays out. The same sequence will loop repeatedly for you as you try to zoom, focus, and position the framing to match what the image was. Upon successfully capturing the required image, you are then treated to a cutscene with a portion of the main character's backstory. The whole premise makes flashbacks interesting, immersive, and enjoyable. The fact that flashbacks fit so well within the main character's photojournalist vocation also makes the functionality feel natural and engaging.

Interacting with the cast should be enjoyable, but that isn't always the case. Your character's dialogue isn't always voiced, but when it is, his comments are often natural and believable. At other times, however, his remarks get repetitious. The voice acting in Lost: Via Domus is generally decent, but the lip-synching leaves a lot to be desired. Aside from the occasionally great delivery by Hurley or the infrequent encounters with the Others, most of the exchanges look and feel flat. Even the nicknames delivered by Sawyer crash and burn most of the time. The characters are instantly recognizable but generally fail to do their real-life counterparts justice. Also, the 360 version has some instances of inconsistent shading on the characters' faces.

All three versions of Lost: Via Domus look and perform in a similar manner. The PlayStation 3 version looks a little cleaner and brighter than the others, but it can be played only after a seven-minute, onetime install. The PC version allows for seamless mouse-and-keyboard controls. The Xbox 360 version looks a little darker than the others. Still, you'll get the same story and a pretty similar experience on every platform.

For the most diehard of Lost followers, the time spent with the game will be enjoyable. Unfortunately, it is over way too fast. Via Domus is full of little hang-ups, and it requires some knowledge of the show that could potentially isolate outside players and keep them from becoming immersed in the gameworld. Ultimately, this game can be recommended for purchase only to the most diehard of Lost fans.

No More Heroes (Wii)

In the bizarre California metropolis of Santa Destroy, your trainer encourages you to get naked for your workout, and hired goons bemoan the loss of their spleen when cleaved in two. If you've played any of director SUDA-51's previous games, especially 2005's Killer 7, this kind of irreverent and ironic humor won't come as a shock. What may surprise you, however, is that while No More Heroes brandishes a similarly high-concept story as its love-it-or-hate-it forebear, it features plenty of rewarding, visceral action to complement the intrigue. The eccentricities guarantee that you've never played a game quite like this before--but it's the exciting, blood-spewing combat that will keep you constantly enthralled.

If you need further proof of this game's nuttiness, consider the story. As Travis Touchdown--an action-figure owning, porn-collecting, card-collecting obsessive--you find yourself caught up in the melodrama of a real-life assassination leaderboard. Armed with your trusty beam katana (obviously meant to approximate a Star Wars lightsaber), you slice your way through a dozen killers in your quest to earn the number one rank. Narrowing things down to such a simple description doesn't really do the narrative justice, though, since the absurdity of the premise permeates every aspect of the game--its characters, its references, even its gameplay. The sexy, sophisticated Sylvia taunts Travis with her French accent and feminine curves over and over, only to leave him high and dry; boss characters sing lounge music in baseball fields and attack you with killer shopping carts and prosthetic legs; and you earn side money by mowing lawns and filling gas tanks at the local service station. It's pure insanity, but you won't be able to avert your eyes.

No More Heroes' combat is its shining star, and not enough can be said about its over-the-top, cheerful violence. Armed with your weapon of choice (you can upgrade your katana or purchase new ones, provided you earn enough coinage), you'll take on a decent number of mercenaries on any given mission. You'd think that since you're brandishing a lightsaber, the game would force you to swing the Wii Remote to approximate the experience. Instead, basic combat is on the simple side: You swing your weapon using the A button, and perform hand-to-hand moves using the B button. Remote-waggling is reserved for finishing moves, but it's important to note that every kill is finished with such a move, so there's no shortage of wrist movement here. If you deliver your final blow with your katana, it may be as simple as a flick to the side, while at other times, you can jerk both the Nunchuk and the remote for a theatrical, painful-looking wrestling move. The combination of old-fashioned button-mashing and high-energy yanks and waggles makes for fun, often breathless encounters, and while the same basic movements account for the bulk of the action, it rarely feels repetitive.

Much of this has to do with the exuberance of No More Heroes' brutality. Each enemy spurts seemingly endless showers of blood and coins, so expect to see your screen filled with red streams and golden glitter when you manage a sideswipe through multiple foes at once. It's quite cartoonish, actually: Everything kicks into subtle slow motion when you divide a foe in two, a ring of stars rotates above a stunned enemy's head to the sound of bird chirps, and a small slot machine spins at the bottom of the screen after every finishing move. It's not just for show, though--earn a triple match, and you activate one of your darkside powers. In one case, the entire screen goes gray, and a single button press allows you to attack each foe, one at a time, with a spectacular, stylish thrust. In another, your foes slow to a crawl, allowing you to carve them up with greater ease. These temporary power-ups are awesome to watch and an exhilarating reward for successful combat maneuvers.

There are some subtleties to the combat. When you are locked onto an enemy, you can block attacks and deflect bullets, and use the control pad to dodge. You'll take a higher or lower stance depending on how you hold the remote, may need to stun enemies with a kick before you can damage them, and in some cases, have to defeat them by using alternative means. For example, in several side missions, baseball players clad in Warriors uniforms pitch baseballs at you, and you have to bat them through an entire row to defeat them. You also need to pay attention to how much electricity your katana has, as well as your own health. You can find power-ups to fully recharge your saber, though you can also charge it up by holding the 1 button and shaking the remote up and down (which also results in a pretty lewd-looking act onscreen--and in real life, for that matter). You'll find plenty of health chests scattered about when needed, though apart from boss fights, you'll rarely need them: As fun as the combat is, you won't often find yourself teetering on the verge of death.

The crux of the action is found in No More Heroes' numerous and impressive boss encounters, where you'll use these subtleties to your advantage, though they don't usually present a foreboding challenge until the final few fights. Yet they're still enormously entertaining, thanks to your opponents' melodramatic (and often hysterical) soliloquizing, interesting attacks, and pure wackiness. Holly Summers launches missiles at you from her fake leg, while Stage magician Harvey Moiseiwitsch Volodarskii locks you up in the box used for his disappearing act--an attack that kills you instantly if your Nunchuk-flailing skills aren't up to par. Bad karaoke, thinly veiled Star Wars references, and killer hand buzzers are among the many highlights, and just when you think that things couldn't get any stranger--well--you're forced to reevaluate.

When you aren't fighting, you can roam about Santa Destroy on your motorcycle in a free-roaming, Grand Theft Auto-inspired manner. You shouldn't expect the kind of spirited freedom a GTA title provides, though. While there are some traffic and pedestrians, the city is really your key to moving from one mission to the next, and doesn't reward you with any meaningful surprises. That isn't to say there isn't anything to do outside of combat, though. In fact, to stay in top form, you'll need to go out on the town. There, you can make some purely cosmetic purchases, such as some new T-shirts or a spiffy new jacket, though your money is better spent on more impactful upgrades. A trip to the gym, presided over by the creepy Thunder Ryu, will reward you with a few minigames and a stronger body. You can purchase new katanas and upgrades from Doctor Naomi, or videotapes that teach you new wrestling moves from the local rental shop. Once you're done shopping, you can perform more side missions, or head back to your apartment where you can pet your cat, save your game by sitting on the toilet, or try on your new clothes.

The mission structure isn't as fully fleshed out as it could have been. Generally speaking, after each boss fight, you unlock only two new missions, and while you can revisit any mission as many times as you want, many of them are identical, so you may wish for a little more variety--especially when most enemies you face in a mission are the same. Still, there is plenty of diversity to be found. For example, in some missions you may need to slay every enemy without taking a single hit, while others may occur entirely in dark mode, or may allow you to only use wrestling moves. The crazy side jobs that you need to take before unlocking new missions are also nutty enough to keep you fascinated. You'll deliver coconuts that apparently weigh a hundred pounds, wash graffiti off of walls, and scour the beach for hidden mines. They're simple tasks, to be sure, but they use the motion controls well and are just crazy enough to make you wonder what weird job you'll be taking the next time around.

In keeping with the stylish combat and crazy dialogue, No More Heroes' visual design is brimming with strong color choices and benefits from some crisp cel-shading and well-done shadows. Clean textures and exaggerated animations are among the many visual highlights, and some of the kookier boss designs are terrifically insane. There are some graphical issues, however, found mostly in the frame rate, which has a tendency to slow down a bit when you're zooming around on your bike or dicing up a half-dozen foes at once. Nor is the game a technical powerhouse, relying on its powerful art design to carry the load and content to leave its edges jagged. In fact, No More Heroes seems keenly aware of its technical shortcomings: Its minimap and health indicator are pixelated by design, and the menus themselves hearken back to the 8-bit days, as if to embrace the game's focus on style over technical prowess.

The sound design is terrific across the board, however. Not only is the off-kilter soundtrack the perfect complement to the ongoing zaniness, but the sound of combat is loud and quirky, down to the bloodcurdling cries of your delimbed opponents and the tinkling flow of coins into your coffers. The remote's speaker is used quite well here, emanating the prototypical groans of your katana to fantastic effect. The speaker is also used to simulate a call on Travis' cell phone, and done so well you will probably hold the remote up to your ear as if it were an actual receiver. The voice acting is pitch-perfect in most cases, down to Sylvia's lugubrious French sarcasm and Travis' immature bloodthirstiness.

A fairly standard play-through will probably net you around 12 hours of gameplay your first time through, though you could blow through it quicker if your goal is simply to get to the end as quickly as possible. But even with the element of surprise removed, the fantastic combat is more than enough reason to revisit No More Heroes. This time, SUDA-51 has delivered a game that can match its absurd premise with equally stimulating gameplay, making for one of the most unique and satisfying action games in recent memory.

Assassin's Creed (Xbox360)

Assassin's Creed will stay with you long after you finish it. Here is one of the most unique gameworlds ever created: beautiful, memorable, and alive. Every crack and crevasse is filled with gorgeous, subtle details, from astounding visual flourishes to overheard cries for help. But it's more than just a world--it's a fun and exciting action game with a ton of stuff to do and places to explore, rounded out with silky-smooth controls and a complex story that will slowly grab you the more you play. Make no mistake: Assassin's Creed is one of the best efforts of the year and a must-own game for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners.

Not enough can be said about the living, breathing world that you'll inhabit in Assassin's Creed. As assassin extraordinaire Altaïr, you'll explore three major cities of the Holy Land in the 12th century: Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre. Each city is beautifully rendered from top to bottom and features meticulously crafted towers that reach for the sky, bustling market squares, and quiet corners where citizens converse and drunks lie in wait to accost you. As you wander the streets (and rooftops), you'll push your way through crowds of women carrying jars on their heads, hear orators shout political and religious wisdom, and watch town guards harass innocent victims. Altaïr has a profound effect on this world, but the cities are entities all their own, with their own flows and personalities.

The visual design has a lot to do with how believably organic everything feels. The cities are absolutely huge, and though you don't get full exploration privileges in the first few chapters, they eventually open up to let you travel seamlessly from one side to another. Everything is beautifully lit with just the right amount of bloom effect, and almost everything casts a shadow, from tall pillars to Altaïr's cloak. In fact, sometimes the shadows get to be a bit much and may make you think for a moment that there is artifacting on your screen, when in fact it's a character's head casting a shadow on his or her own neck. Every object, from scaffolds to pottery, is textured so finely you feel as if you could reach out and touch it. Animations are almost as equally well done. Altaïr scales walls, leaps majestically from towers, and engages in swashbuckling swordfights that would make Errol Flynn proud. And he does it all with fluid ease, generally moving from one pose to another without a hitch. Minor characters move gracefully as well, though one of the game's few visual drawbacks is the occasional jerky animation on the part of a citizen. However, it's easy to forgive, considering that the cities are populated with thousands and thousands of individuals. In fact, these tiny blemishes are noticeable only because everything else looks so incredible.

What you hear is even more impressive than what you see. At the top of a temple, you hear little but the rush of wind, the twittering of birds, and the barking of a far-off dog. In the most populated areas, your ears will fill with the din of street vendors, the pleas of beggars, and the occasional humming. It's never too much, though, and the game does a good job of making sure you hear what you need to hear (for example, the cries of citizens who need your help), without filling your ears with pointless noise. All these effects, along with the clangs of swords and groans of assassinated foes, are outstanding. The voice acting of the supporting cast is similarly remarkable. Conversations are completely believable and delivered with the perfect amount of solemn dignity. Oddly, the weakest link is Altaïr himself. Actor Philip Shahbaz does an all right job, but he isn't up to par with the first-rate acting of his fellow troupe. Rounding it all out is a beautiful orchestral score that is most notable for its subtlety. Many of the game's most impressive moments are accompanied by lovely musical themes that add even more threads to the game's rich living tapestry.

Fortunately, the story that binds it all together rises to the occasion. Actually, there are two related stories in play. The unfolding drama of Crusades-era Palestine is a mere memory, forcibly pulled from a modern-day bartender named Desmond by a resolute researcher using a machine called an animus. The memories aren't Desmond's own--they are Altaïr's, stored safely in the hapless subject's genetic code. We follow Altaïr as he assassinates nine public figures at the command of his master, and as the common thread that ties these men comes into focus, so does the true identity of Desmond's captors. There are no cutscenes in the traditional sense; every bit of story exposition and dialogue flows smoothly from the gameplay and takes place entirely within the game engine. The ending is confusing, and it blatantly leaves open the possibility of a sequel, but it's a small blemish on an otherwise stirring tale. Altaïr's world is not one of absolutes. His assassination targets aren't always evil, and Altaïr isn't always likable. As he is fond of reminding us, "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted."

Of course, such an authentic world would be meaningless without a lot of fun things to do in it. Thankfully, Assassin's Creed is endlessly entertaining in that it features a fine mix of stealthy exploration, tight platforming, and exciting combat. To discover the whereabouts of your assassination targets, you must first follow up on possible leads. There are several different mission types in this regard. In some cases, you sit on a bench and listen in on secret conversations. At other times, you will closely follow someone carrying an important letter that you'll pickpocket. Alternately, you can beat the information out of your target. Most missions are relatively easy to pull off in the early stages of the game. But once the guards and townspeople start recognizing you (or you alert them to your presence too close to the scene of one of your crimes), they get a little tougher.

There are also some optional tasks, such as rescuing innocent townspeople from the clutches of guards. The reward for doing so is a group of vigilantes who will hang out in the area afterward and hinder any foes chasing you. It's also a good way to try out Assassin's Creed's combat, which is surprisingly satisfying, considering the game's focus on sneaking around. You can pounce on enemies using your hidden blade (an incredibly rewarding one-stab kill), or use throwing daggers to take enemies down from a distance. However, your sword is your melee mainstay, and though the hack-and-slash combat may seem simple at first, it gets more challenging once you unlock the various countermoves. Often, you'll have a dozen or more attackers to fend off at once, but though these fights can be a little tricky, you'll never feel as if you're in over your head. In fact, the few circumstances in which you are forced into combat--such as a late-game boss fight against a seemingly endless crowd of attackers and their leering leader--are challenging and require some pitch-perfect timing to counter every strike and lunge.

Nevertheless, brute force is rarely the best way to handle a situation. You want to slink unnoticed through the crowds, but you can draw attention to yourself in a number of ways--whether it be galloping past a guard station on a horse, knocking pottery off of someone's head, or getting so frustrated by the various beggars that you fling them away from you. (And trust us--these are the most aggressive panhandlers you'll ever meet.) If you antagonize the guards, they'll give chase. Yes, you can stick around and fight, and though it's never the easiest option, breaking stealth does not damn you to death like it does in other sneaking games. But why not lure them to a rooftop? Once up there, you can grab them and fling them to the street below. Or if there are too many of them, you can jump across the rooftops gracefully until you find a hiding place, such as a nice bale of hay or a curtained garden. Once you're hidden, they'll break chase and you'll be free to roam about.

You can also seek refuge in small groups of scholars who serve as mobile hiding places. It's a bit contrived to walk into a stationary cluster of scholars and have them suddenly start moving simply because you're there, but it gets the job done. Actually, if there's any drawback to the usually excellent gameplay, it's how synthetic certain elements feel. Vigilantes are always in the same spot, missions reset if you don't get them right the first time, and those same guards will be harrassing that citizen, an hour after you pass by. It's easy to forgive these quirks though, given the easygoing flow of the world surrounding these pockets of gameplay.

Climbing up buildings and jumping around the rooftops is fun and breezy, thanks to effortless controls that strike a great balance between ease of use and player input. You can leap across alleys and scale walls with the pull of a trigger and the press of a button, and though it's possible to launch yourself from a wall or hurtle through a vendor's booth by accident, these moments aren't very common. You'd think that a city specifically designed to let you climb structures and caper about the roofs would look overly artificial, yet there's never a moment when you will think to yourself, "Wow, that looks like a place where I'm supposed to jump." The architecture looks completely natural, which makes Altaïr's abilities all the more exciting to pull off. The environments don't look as if they were created for him to climb around on; he just uses the hand he's been dealt, as any good assassin should.

In Assassin's Creed, the greatest joy comes from the smallest details, and for every nerve-racking battle, there's a quiet moment that cuts to the game's heart and soul. Climbing towers to uncover portions of the map is a simple mechanic but forever satisfying, thanks to the beautiful vistas and soft musical themes that accompany the view. Even the drunks that pester you are amusing and fun, though their constant shoving is more than annoying, especially if you are trying to pickpocket a pedestrian or eliminate a target without a fuss. It all makes your missions that much more compelling, and you'll be inclined to explore every nook and cranny and take on every optional task, just for the fun of it. There's a ton of stuff to do, and even when you've exhausted your official tasks, you can search for the collectible flags and crosses strewn around the cities and countryside. You could probably plow through the main quest in 20 hours if you're lucky, but completists might spend close to 50 hours finishing every quest and gathering every collectible.

There are few differences between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. PS3 owners are blessed with a slightly more solid frame rate, although the 360 version features a little more contrast in the lighting, so it's pretty much a wash. But regardless of which platform you go with, you'll have an amazing and unforgettable game. Assassin's Creed is the kind of game you tell your friends about, and one that should be in your collection.

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.

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.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (PC)

Perhaps I'm just a bad leader. Even though I don't get my men killed that often and they diligently trot out "nice shooting, sir" when I make a headshot, I don't get the impression they're happy. Or even conscious, to be honest. They don't talk to each other, they don't joke, they don't complain about being told to walk backwards into a firezone. Occasionally, if left to his own devices for a while, one will pathetically inquire "sir?" in a voice that sounds like a slightly butchered C-3PO awaiting instruction. But that's it. It's creepy. That's why I've started tackling missions on my own, leaving my squad back near the insertion point to stare blank-eyed at the floor. I might well be in extreme danger as a result, but at least I no longer feel like I'm being followed around by three shop dummies wired up to dog brains.

Such unease aside, GRAW 2 on PC is a significant revision from its earlier console incarnation, especially in terms of squad control. A new overhead tactical map mode means long chains of orders can be set for one or all of those dog-robots in the guise of men, even down to the direction they face and the width of their firing arc. While this does mean your control over your Ghosts (for the uninitiated, they're a squad of near-future US commandos fighting insurgents) is absolute, a certain self-sufficiency has been sacrificed. These guys can only do what they're told. More positively, this means GRAW 2 is entirely your game - your dog soldiers will only do your dirty work if you're canny enough to tell them how to do best do so. Your own glory is never snatched away by gung-ho AI.

There's a real pleasure to setting a skirmish up then watching it be played out exactly as planned. Your men move into position, there's a handful of bullet noises, and one by one the red diamonds that signify enemy locations blink out. It's over in seconds. These Middle-Eastern terrori... ah, 'Mexican renegades' are no match for US might, it seems. ("Thees ceety, what haff we done to her?", asks a Mexican loyalits you're allied with as he regards the ruins of Juarez. "It's called the price of peace," responds your character, apparently only just holding back a yee-haw afterwards). You don't need to fire a shot yourself, though conversely being an accomplished mouse-jockey means most skirmishes can be mastered without your mates on the easier difficultly settings. In either case, such military precision, if you get it right, rarely fails to raise your mouth into a smug half-smirk. While GRAW 2 might be lacking personality, this is certainly a slick game. The tactical map is far easier and more intuitive than anything involving the word 'tactical' usually tends to be. Its odd, satnav omniscience is not a requisite either - you can direct your men through the FPS HUD instead, with a couple of mouse-clicks sending one or all of them to anywhere within sight distance.

This is just dandy if you're only sending them to a wall five metres away. Unfortunately, if they're a way off from your position, they're agonisingly slow to catch up. Give such an order and half the squad will stop to have a think about it first, often just stand still or only go halfway. The maddening AI problems of the beta code we had a look at a few weeks back have been fixed somewhat - there's no getting stuck on a rock and running on the spot until the end of time here. Instead, anything that might cause pathfinding breakdown is sometimes entirely ignored, requiring your giving multiple orders to coax your glassy-eyed compatriots over to where you want them. Particularly ridiculous is getting them to the extraction helicopter needed to finished most missions. You'll sit inside it on your own for a good couple of minutes while they bimble unhurriedly over and squint at the doorway in apparent bafflement. It's like having your bus wait at one stop for ages whilst a pack of doddery pensioners struggle to climb the step and fumble for the correct change. Only you're supposed to get out of there before a bomb goes off, and they don't seem to care.

Enemies aren't much better. There's similarly no life to them - faceless and identical, they wait where the game spawns them, created alternately as either hawkeyed sharpshooters or villains from a Bruce Lee movie, running into the path of your fire one by one. Notch up the difficulty and they're all suddenly crack snipers, changing the nature of the game entirely from the fairly straight FPS it is on Easy or Normal to almost a strategy game, wherein you spend most of your time on the tactical map, placing your men and orchestrating flanking manouvres. It's a gruelling challenge this way, where a single mistake brooks complete failure - frustrating for anyone with a lingering desire to be Arnie, but a well-realised itch-scratcher if the one hit, one kill approach of Operation Flashpoint is your cup of death-tea.

The net effect of the blatantly robotic AI on both sides is that GRAW 2 feels at all times like a simulation of war, not war itself. And of course it is, as all games with guns are, but there's very little of the adrenaline of, say, Call of Duty here. Everything hinges on how you set up the combat, rather than the combat itself, which is somewhat perfunctory. One could argue, of course, that this is how an impeccably-trained death squad should be, and that the pop-gun feel and sound of the firearms is far closer to reality than the juddering mega-splodes of Doom-y weaponry is. Me, I want something that gets the heart pounding, not just the knowing raise of an eyebrow as I overlook the resulting pile of mathematically-decimated corpses.

So, an improvement on the (initially) buggy port that the first GRAW on PC was, but even with the pleasingly significant interface and visual tweaks over the console version, this is still very much a an adequate but not spectacular sequel to an adequate but not spectacular tactical shooter. It's GRAW, but a bit better, and that's it. Certainly, it's without doubt one of the more accomplished depictions of that cold-hued near-future-war videogames have been so hung up on of late, but it's not even slightly trying to improve gaming.