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.

Unreal Tournament 3 (PC)

Unreal Tournament 3 probably shouldn't feel as fresh and as exciting as it does. When you get down to it, UT3 doesn't change a lot of the things that you liked about Unreal Tournament 2004. It's still the same fast-moving and action-oriented first-person shooter. Yet the game's new maps, the requisite graphical overhaul, and easy-to-understand gameplay modes all feel great. The way the shooter genre has changed over the three years since the previous game is also a factor. With most other games slowing things down and going for a more realistic, militaristic pace, UT3's hypercharged gameplay explodes out of the gate feeling refreshing and new.

The UT games have never been about single-player action, but like in the previous games, there is a campaign mode in UT3. It's a series of matches against bots wrapped around a basic but uneventful storyline. The big switch this time around is that Unreal Tournament is no longer a sport. Now it's war, and you play as a character on the hunt for revenge against an evil Necris woman who led an assault against unarmed civilians on your colony. You and the survivors of the attack join up with a corporation, fight to gain territory held by other corporations, and so on. It's little more than a five- to seven-hour training mode to help you get up to speed on the maps and the modes so you can go into multiplayer with a fighting chance. One cool addition is that you can play the campaign mode online with up to three other players. Although joining other humans to combat the artificial-intelligence-controlled bots isn't exactly the most fun you can have in this game, it's more compelling (and easier) when you're playing with other people. You can set the skill level of the bots, too. At the lowest setting, they're complete idiots that won't even bother to turn around and fight you if you start shooting them from behind. The highest setting, godlike, is appropriately stiff, though not entirely impossible. It's just tough to fight against opponents who rarely miss.

The maps you'll see in the single-player campaign are the same maps you'll see online, at least until the mod-making scene shifts into high gear. You'll get into matches using a typical PC-style server browser, but the game tries to keep you away from a full list of every server running by moving you through some console-game-style menus to filter down to the gametype you want to see. UT3 comes with six different modes of play. Deathmatch is the standard free-for-all battle. Team deathmatch, as you'd expect, breaks you up into two teams. Duel is a one-on-one mode where two players go at it while other players spectate. All three of these modes are played on the same set of deathmatch-friendly maps. UT3 also has a standard capture-the-flag mode, complete with the translocator, the teleporter gun that has made UT's take on CTF stand apart from most others. There's a new vehicle CTF mode, which takes the standard CTF concept and places it onto larger battlefields. As the name suggests, you have a number of vehicles that you can use toward your goal of grabbing the opposing team's flag and getting it back to your base. The largest mode is called warfare, and like onslaught mode before it, it's played on even bigger maps, with more vehicles.

Warfare is a node-based mode where each team has a base with a power core that needs to be damaged and destroyed for a victor to be declared. The power core is linked to other nodes at various spots in the map. You must push forward, capture nodes, and link them together until you've got your team's nodes linked to the opposing team's base. At that point, you can damage the enemy core and, ideally, blow up it for a victory. There's a ton of pushing and shoving back and forth across the map when two great teams square off, and it's also the most strategic mode. It differs from onslaught mode by offering secondary objectives, like unlinked nodes that can be captured to give a team forward spawn points and access to more vehicles and a countdown node that will occasionally drain energy from the enemy core if you control it. Each of the objective-based team modes comes with its own set of maps.

Overall, the map quality is high, with plenty of symmetrical, interesting level layouts for the objective-based modes. One deathmatch map, called Gateway, has multiple areas that look really different, all of which are linked together with portals. You'll also get a new remake of the classic Unreal map Deck. Furthermore, the Unreal mod community has always been pretty rabid, so you know it's just a matter of time before someone makes one of those "giant world" levels where you can hide in a sink drain and snipe people with an instagib shock rifle while they float down into the bottom of a bathtub. Yes, that's right, the instagib mode is also back in the game, along with a handful of other basic mutators you can use to make quick changes to any of the modes.

The weapons in Unreal Tournament 3 should be old hat to anyone familiar with the series. The shield gun has been ditched in favor of the impact hammer, and your default weapon is the slow-firing enforcer pistol, but beyond that, the weapon differences feel limited to minor balance changes. The bio rifle's gooey projectiles seem to do more damage, which makes it somewhat more useful. The secondary fire on the flak cannon seems as if it flies out at a slightly higher, slower arc, which forces you to make a few changes to how you aim. But again, the changes are minor. The rocket launcher can still lock on, the sniper rifle is still great fun for headshots, and the redeemer is still a huge missile that you can guide into targets to cause a nice, big blast that's handy in some of the larger vehicle CTF games. But when isn't a large explosion handy?

The other gameplay changes also feel relatively minor. Recent UT games have employed an adrenaline counter, which built up as you killed enemies or collected large pills around each level. When the meter was full, you could activate a special ability, such as invisibility or regeneration. This system isn't present in UT3. Also, the rules for double-jumping after a dodge move seem to have been altered a bit. Again, these are minor differences that don't really get in the way or drastically change the overall feel of the game, but they're noteworthy just the same. A more dramatic difference is the hoverboard, which is in vehicle CTF and warfare. The hoverboard lets you pick up a little more speed, which is useful on the larger battlefields. The catch is that getting hit while on your board knocks you over, which gives enemies more than enough time to finish you off as your character slowly arises from the ground. You can even do tricks while on the board, which isn't useful for gameplay purposes but is still totally rad.

Unreal Tournament 3 uses Unreal Engine 3, the same basic set of tools that powered Gears of War. As such, this is a really great-looking game on high-end machines. But even if your PC isn't top of the line, the game scales better than most, giving you a playable experience on midrange machines as well. But, of course, the game is at its best when you're exceeding the game's minimum requirements, in situations where you can run at a high resolution and still get a great frame rate. It supports widescreen resolutions, but playing in widescreen actually gives you a smaller view of the overall action, given that the game appears to cut off the top and bottom of the 4:3 view to fit it onto a wider monitor. UT3 certainly isn't the first PC game to have this problem, but given its highly competitive nature, cutting off parts of the screen seems to be a pretty bad solution.

The game's textures, character models, and animation are all top-notch when you've got everything turned up. Characters can be tweaked and modified using different torso pieces, shoulder plates, and more. The handful of levels that have running liquids in them have good-looking water effects, too. Overall, it's a very sharp-looking game if your machine can hang with its higher settings. The audio fits right in with what you'd expect a UT game to sound like. The music is high in energy, the explosions and gunfire sound great, and the character voices, which occasionally pipe up to taunt you when you get killed, fit right in as well. The announcer is appropriately loud and booming when calling off your head shots, killing sprees, and the like.

It's a very basic, straightforward package, but don't take that to mean that UT3 is a no-frills sequel. With its variety of modes and its occasionally crazy high-speed action, UT3 still feels very different than the typical first-person shooter coming out these days. On top of that, it's very exciting and just as much fun now as it has been in previous installments. UT3 has more than enough content to keep you busy, and with mod-making tools included in the package, the potential for more user-generated content in the future is certainly present.

Mass Effect (Xbox360)

Developer BioWare has always been at the forefront of progressive storytelling in games, so it's no surprise that Mass Effect's story is one of its best yet. It's got a unique take on the chase-the-bad-guy-across-the-universe plot, and just when you think you've got everything figured out, the game throws you yet another surprise. BioWare has created a politically charged universe with an exhaustive backstory and filled it with a bunch of interesting, multifaceted characters. Combined with an exciting and unique combat mechanic, it makes for a fun and absorbing experience that you'll want to see through to the end, just to see how everything turns out--even if the game isn't perfect by any means. In fact, it's surprising that so many small annoyances and glitches made their way into a game of such general high quality. Still, most players will be able to look past them and enjoy Mass Effect for what it is: A terrific role-playing game with great production values and fun, exciting action.

As in most role-playing games of this nature, you begin by customizing an avatar. You play as Commander Shepard, potential savior of the galaxy, but there's plenty of room to mold him or her as you see fit. Physical customization isn't as deep as you'll find in something like last year's Oblivion, but the system is relatively robust, letting you choose from a variety of preset features, and even letting you round everything off with a scar. Shouldn't every badass commander have one? Of course, you'll also choose a class. In this case, you've got six to choose from, each with various strengths in combat, tech, and biotics (Mass Effect's sci-fi equivalent of magic). More impressively, you will select a few autobiographical tidbits--and these choices aren't just for show. Through the course of the game, characters will refer to your past, and your resulting dialogue options will allow you to react to their comments with various degrees of humility, wistfulness, and scorn.

The narrative is pure space opera, yet there's no denying that BioWare has created a tale of surprising depth and appeal. Surprise number one: Humanity is not the political center of the universe. We don't have a seat on the galactic council, or even a representative on the Spectre squad, an elite group of special forces whose members are given wide berth to solve political and military challenges as they see fit. In the meantime, a Spectre has gone rogue, ransacking ancient artifacts and unleashing the violent, robotic Geth race on an unsuspecting galaxy. As Shepard, you pursue him across the Milky Way, visiting one alien world after another and discovering the fallen Spectre's intentions along the way. He isn't the best villain ever created: He disappears for the bulk of the game, which makes finding him feel less urgent than it should. Still, the journey to the game's exciting end is one worth taking.

In true BioWare fashion, you'll be navigating through loads of dialogue trees throughout the game, and how you respond can have life-or-death consequences--though you shouldn't take that to mean that you need to brood over every decision. Oftentimes, multiple choices have the same result, a somewhat transparent trick that makes it seem as though you have a lot more impact on the conversation than you really do. At important junctures, however, your decisions can affect how missions play out. You can turn friend to foe, console (or devastate) a suicide-attack victim, or exploit evil corporate executives for fun and profit. And it all plays out amid an intricate melodrama of political intrigue and racial prejudice, and in a galaxy populated by fascinating, complex characters. There are pages ripped from the Star Wars and Star Trek playbooks, certainly, but quirks such as the interesting speech patterns of the overly-formal Hanar alien race, or the nomadic structure of the Quarian flotilla--a galactic government that's always on the move--make Mass Effect's version of the Milky Way a unique one.

When navigating dialogue, you'll also be earning paragon or renegade points, which is the usual light-versus-dark system we've come to expect from the developer. Unlike in Knights of the Old Republic, however, your decisions here will not affect any abilities you have. However, the intricate relationship between the story and the game proper means that these decisions still affect gameplay--though that effect is usually an indirect one. More interestingly, your paragon and renegade meters are separate, rather than being at opposite sides of a single spectrum. It's a subtle but effective choice that lends itself to Mass Effect's shades-of-gray fiction, where light and dark aren't mutually exclusive.

The main quest starts you on a huge space station called the Citadel, but takes you across a small series of planets before reaching the game's exciting final moments. Not that you're stuck with the main story, since you can pick up a good number of side quests along the way. Some of them are simple and relatively self-contained, while others will send you across the galaxy to uncivilized planets and derelict spaceships. This involves bringing up your galactic map, selecting a destination system, and going planetside to kick some alien butt. There are multiple regions to choose from, and often multiple solar systems within them, but while that sounds intimidating, it's not nearly as mind-bogglingly huge as you would expect. In any given system, you can usually only land on one planet--and on each of these planets, there are usually only a few things to do before you get to your destination. More surprisingly, once you've finished the mission, there's never a reason to return. Aside from the annoying thresher maws (more on these later), there aren't any hostile indigenous creatures, so once you've dispatched your foes and scavenged for loot, it's time to move on.

When you first land on a planet, you drive around in a rover called the Mako. The thing's possibly the most resilient vehicle ever created in a game. You get dropped onto the surface from hundreds of feet in the air and drive up impossibly steep mountains without much difficulty. Too bad that the driving portions are undoubtedly the weakest of the game. The weird bouncy nature of the rover and the fact that gravity is the same on every world (even Earth's own moon) are both suspect issues, though they don't really affect gameplay.

The rocky planetary design and Mako combat mechanics can really be a downer when combined together. You can spray machine gun fire or launch shells at your foes, and it works fine, provided you are on the same level as your enemies. However, the Mako's turret, for whatever reason, can't move up or down. The result is that bullets don't necessarily land where your crosshair is, so if you're on higher terrain or your target is too close, those endless clips you're unloading are useless (though you can hit enemies above you without difficulty). It's sometimes maddening, since in many situations, the enemy base is nestled below you in a crevasse, and you're forced to either get in closer (often a death sentence in an area swarming with tough foes like the robotic Geth colossi), or get out and try to take on the toughest foes of the game on foot. Be careful if you get out of the Mako in areas like these though, since your adventuring party can slide into a deep valley and get stuck very easily, which forces you to either return to the Normandy (your ship) and return to the planet, or reload a saved game.

The other issue here is with the aforementioned thresher maws, which are sandworm-like beings that burst from the ground, spew deadly goo at you, submerge, and emerge elsewhere. These encounters can be really exciting, since the things are tough to take down and keep you on the move. The problem is that the game doesn't check on the Mako's position before respawning the thresher maw. Multiple times, we had the creature emerge from directly underneath us, which either resulted in an unavoidable insta-kill or getting stuck in the thresher's geometry while the camera jittered madly. That's just not fun, and you will find yourself avoiding flat expanses on planets just to avoid these problems.

Thankfully, on-foot combat is a lot of fun. You'll accumulate six total teammates, two of whom can accompany you on missions at any given time. They have a variety of talents, and each of them is special in his or her own way. There's a variety of guns to choose from, from pistols to shotguns to assault rifles, and each weapon can be outfitted with various upgrades that may increase stability, add scanners that bypass disrupted enemy radar, and more. You can also outfit special ammunition, though you always have unlimited ammo.

On top of that, some characters have magic-like powers called biotics to mess with. It's worth noting, however, that these powers are focused on manipulation rather than direct offense. You can push enemies back with the throw power (awesome to behold at higher levels), lift them in the air, or create a vortex that sucks enemies toward it (another great use of Mass Effect's fun combat physics). Engineers have some nice abilities as well, such as the ability to sabotage weapons from a distance, which makes your enemy's weapon explode, or the power to turn robotic enemies against your own foes. As a rule, your teammates aren't a liability, though they aren't governed by the most advanced artificial intelligence we've ever seen. But provided you micromanage them as described below, you'll not only be getting the most out of the experience, you won't be apt to notice any drawbacks to the AI.

The combat feels like it belongs in a third-person shooter at first, but if you continually approach it this way, you'll die. A lot. Like in many previous BioWare RPGs, you're meant to pause, survey the situation, and perform your actions. As long as you stick to that method, you'll find combat to be a lot easier than it first appears. You can set your party members to automate their actions, simply perform defensive powers on their own (the better choice), or only perform powers on your command. Holding the right bumper brings up the command wheel, which lets you assign orders to your companions, as well as perform your own abilities. You can also take cover behind walls or other objects, though this mechanic isn't all that helpful. Once you get into the groove, battles are rather enjoyable, with a flurry of bullets and biotic powers flying around. The joy of flinging the Geth around, filling them with shotgun shells, and watching them drop from the ceiling after lifting them in the air is a joy few RPGs can approximate.

The spoils of battle are always a fun reward for a job well done, and loot ramps up pretty well. You can also open up various lockers and containers for more loot, though it's best to level one of your party members in the decryption skill for the more difficult-to-open ones. To open locked containers, you have two equally odd choices: Either perform a minigame that resembles the overdone contextual button presses we've seen in far too many games of late, or smear omnigel on the container, which is an all-purpose goo that opens cabinets, repairs the Mako, and, we suspect, may also eliminate ring-around-the-collar. It sounds like a silly mechanic, but all things considered, it's a perfectly legitimate way of keeping the user engaged in the looting process, and it makes you feel like you earned the resulting spoils.

As you can imagine, you'll be doing a lot of fiddling with your inventory, what with all these weapons, upgrades, and party members to deal with, but this is another stumbling block that could have used some streamlining. The menu interface isn't terrible, though on its own, it's a bit clunky. But it's the little things that add up in a game that requires you to spend so much time in menu screens. First annoyance: In some menu screens, you can't hit a button simply to escape to the previous menu. For example, in the weapons upgrade menu, if you decide you don't want to make any changes, you can't just leave the menu--you have to choose something, even if it means scrolling to the top of the list and selecting the same upgrade you already had equipped. In other cases, such as when you convert an item to omnigel, the menu jumps back to the top of the list, which is vexing. You can't even deselect a power from the ability wheel in combat once you've chosen one. You can change the skill, but on the frequent occasion where you will want to change your mind after selection and not cast one at all, you're stuck wasting a skill and waiting for it to recharge.

Other problems rear their heads as well, such as the occasions when you or your party members get trapped on level geometry, which forces you to reload your last save. But you'll be apt to forgive them in light of the depth and variety to be found here. It's fun to get to know your crew, conduct a clandestine romance, or turn Shepard into a hard-line exclusionary (or a racially sensitive diplomat). You could finish a fairly complete play-through in 40 hours--standard for a role-playing game--but there's enough contextual content to make it worth a second play, if only to explore your renegade side, try out other romance options, or see another of the multiple endings. On the other hand, if you ignored the side quests and stuck with just the main storyline, you could be done in 15 hours or less.

Mass Effect's visuals are excellent. Facial animations are among the best in gaming: Characters move their lips believably with the dialogue, further expressing themselves with subtle tilts of the head or with a slight raise of the eyebrows. Character models are beautifully detailed, such as with your Krogan teammate Wrex, whose every wrinkle and ridge is carefully textured and molded. There are some technical hitches, however. The framerate can dramatically dip at the worst possible times, and there is a lot of texture pop-in. There are also frequent load times--some of them hidden by elevator rides, others popping up in the midst of exploration. Nevertheless, Mass Effect looks wonderful. From an artistic perspective, the game looks great, if not quite original. Planet outposts tend to use only one of two interior layouts, and environments owe a lot to games and films of the past (much of the game's look wouldn't be out of place in a Halo title). But even with the obvious inspirations, Mass Effect still conveys its vision clearly, thanks to meticulous character designs and dramatic set pieces, such as the Citadel itself.

It's also one of the best-acted games in recent memory. An all-star cast including such well-known actors as Fred Tatasciore and Seth Green bring Mass Effect's characters to brilliant life. Not once will a drab line delivery or overzealous histrionics get in the way of your immersion. The soundtrack is evocative, with just the right amount of sci-fi shimmering to round out the occasional symphonic swelling. Sound effects are great across the board, from the robotic yammering of the Geth to the din of a planetary blizzard filling the room with its high-powered whooshing.

All told, Mass Effect is a great game with moments of brilliance and a number of small but significant obstacles that hold it back from reaching its true potential. But in the end, if you like RPGs and want to spend some time in an absorbing sci-world populated with a bunch of unique inhabitants, you'll definitely have plenty of fun with this one.

Stranglehold - Preview (PS3)

Our latest look at Midway's Stranglehold takes us to a marketplace that, by its inclusion of tutorial segments and the generally easy pace of the action, looks like it will probably end up being the first level in the game, though the unfinished Xbox 360 version we saw was only a section of the entire game, so even that isn't set in stone.

This third-person action shooter attempts to capture the nonstop, graceful gunplay and stuntlike acrobatics that are commonly associated with John Woo's work, and in those terms, it's feeling pretty satisfying. The left trigger in the Xbox 360 version is used to dive in any direction, though it's also a context-sensitive control. If you're standing near a glowing object or surface, like the handrail on a staircase, Inspector Tequila will hop onto the rail and let you run right up it. The level also has plenty of carts, and running at these and diving causes you to dive onto the cart, which starts rolling forward. You can steer it a bit while you shoot at enemies.

Stranglehold is clearly taking a lot of inspiration from the Max Payne series, and as such, the game also makes a big deal out of slow-motion "bullet time" effects. Here, it's called tequila time. You can enter it at will, but the game also defaults to automatic use of your slow-motion power. If you dive sideways or slide down a handrail while aiming at an enemy, the game slows automatically, making it easy to line up shots and take out enemies. It's a bit different than Max Payne, though, as it slows down only when you're actively trying to line up a shot or pointing at an enemy. This makes more economical use of your slow motion, which is governed by an onscreen meter. The meter appears to refill fairly quickly, though, so running out of slow-motion time was never much of a problem during our stint with the game.

The game looks pretty good, and you can tell that a lot of work has gone into making sure that Chow Yun Fat's character model looks like the real deal. The game has a cover mechanic that lets you hide behind pillars, corners, and so on, and during these sequences, you get a good, up-close look at Inspector Tequila himself. Just like the real thing, he always seems to be wincing as he endlessly fires dual pistols, shotguns, and other weapons at his foes.

You also get a good, up-close view of things during stand-offs. These sequences happen at specific moments in the game, where you end up getting surrounded by multiple gunmen. When this happens, everything gets slow and your movement control is limited to leaning left and right to avoid bullets. The right stick becomes a more focused aiming reticle, and you need to quickly take out each enemy while leaning to avoid their incoming bullets. It's an interesting canned sequence that handles this action-movie standby in a pretty cool way.

With Stranglehold due out in August, it won't be long now until we get to see how the whole game comes together. The action definitely feels just about right, so it's up to the story sequences and voice acting to see if it can form a cohesive, cool package.

Rock Band - Preview (PS3)

Guitar Hero was just a jam session compared to Harmonix's next effort, Rock Band. We got to try an early version of the ambitious new rhythm game at an Electronic Arts press event in advance of E3. (EA is merely distributing the game to retail; Harmonix and new parent company MTV are handling the actual development and publishing duties.) As rhythm game fans are no doubt aware, Rock Band will flesh the core Guitar Hero concept out into a full band experience, featuring lead guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. In other words, Harmonix is basically blowing the doors off the original formula it helped create a couple of years ago. EA had prototype guitar and drum controllers, a microphone, eight demo songs, and a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon on hand at their event, and for some strange reason, we felt compelled to spend all our free time at the event glued to the Rock Band Demo kiosk. Let's just say it wasn't the free beer that kept us there.

Of course, you've been clamoring for Rock Band's set list as much as we have, so here's what Harmonix had to show at the demo: The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again," David Bowie's "Suffragette City," The Hives' "Main Offender," Weezer's "Say it Ain't So," Nirvana's "In Bloom," Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper," Black Sabbath's "Paranoid," and Mountain's "Mississippi Queen." Even better? All but the last two of those songs will appear as original recordings by the artists themselves in Rock Band. Harmonix is leveraging MTV's enormous record-industry clout to ensure that as many original recordings as possible will appear in the game; purportedly, the only songs which will be covered in a studio are the older ones for which no master tapes have even survived.

On the gameplay side, Harmonix hasn't messed with what's already worked in multiple Guitar Hero products. Mechanically, the two guitar players in any given song will see the exact same fret-board-based five-note patterns they're familiar with. The drummer will see his patterns in the middle, between the two guitar tracks, and this track will show only four notes, to correspond to the four pads on the drum controller. A solid line will appear on the drum track indicating when you need to hit the bass drum pedal. Finally, the song lyrics will run along the top of the screen, using a style similar to those you've seen in numerous Karaoke Revolution and SingStar games before, and singers will get to hit the mic with their hands to approximate a tambourine or cowbell in some songs. If you were wondering how Harmonix was going to fit all this gameplay onto a single screen, you'll see in the screenshots that there's still plenty of room left over for denim jackets, mohawks, and flaming frets in between all the gameplay interface elements.

If Harmonix hasn't shaken up the gameplay model that made Guitar Hero great, it's certainly bolted some interesting new mechanics onto that model. Like in Guitar Hero, you'll build up a points multiplier as you play without missing a beat, and this time around the bass player can achieve a 6x modifier, compared to 4x on the other roles, because bass can get a little dry sometimes. Harmonix is specifically emphasizing Rock Band's multiplayer action with some of these new features. For instance, sometimes you'll hit a "unison phrase" section of a song that will require all players to perform perfectly for the duration of the phrase to nab a big score bonus. Luckily, all players can select their own difficulty levels before a song, but if one of your bandmates fails out of the song, you'll be able to bail them out by pulling off exceptional performance.

You'll actually get to go off the rails from time to time in Rock Band and freestyle a little. Singers will encounter sections where they can sing (or shout) whatever they want for big points (the louder the better, of course). Similarly, drummers can play their own fills during preset sections of the song. But the best of these features, from what we saw, was the wild full-band flourish that happens at the end of a particularly rollicking song. You know how a good band will draw out the end of a big song and improvise for a few bars before pulling off a huge simultaneous finish? Yeah, you get to that in the game. Everyone will flail on their instruments (or scream into the mic) as the points rack up and the song finishes with a big bang. Hey, we saw it work brilliantly in action--this is going to be a half-decent party game, we're pretty sure.

Harmonix is going all-out to extend the Rock Band experience beyond your own console. For starters, you'll be able to create your own rocker by choosing from tattoos, ripped jeans, piercings, and various ridiculous hairstyles. You can use that custom shredder in the game's four-player online mode, but even better, you can join up with some friends to create a persistent band that you'll all belong to, even on the Harmonix Web site. Our favorite part, though, is that the game will generate custom loading screens and band T-shirts based on the custom appearances (and presumably, on the silly name) that you've come up with for your characters and band.

So about those controllers. As we mentioned, the devices EA had on hand weren't finalized, but the new Fender Stratocaster-style guitar controller and the drum kit were looking quite solid. The drums are no-frills--you've got four pads and a pedal. But the guitar blew us away. Unlike the previous Gibson controllers used with Guitar Hero, Rock Band's guitar isn't immediately recognizable as a toy; it basically looks like a miniature Strat. The colors and styling are extremely consistent with the real thing, and there are some nice nods to detail, too. The five-way tone switch on the body actually works, letting you subtly adjust the sound of your guitar in-game. The fret buttons aren't colored on their face--you just get a small colored bar on the edge of the neck instead--which preserves the authentic Stratocaster look. Easily our favorite new feature, though, is the addition of a second set of fret buttons right up next to the bridge for wailing during the most enormous solos. Clearly there are people with a hand in this game who know how to rock with deadly efficiency.

Needless to say, we're extremely excited about the direction Harmonix and MTV are taking with Rock Band. It's not putting the rhythm genre on its ear the way Guitar Hero did, but it's evolving that initial concept to such an extent that it's practically a new experience anyway. Stay tuned for a whole lot more to come on the game next week at E3 and in the months leading up to the game's release on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 later this year.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma (PS3)

Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox was a true modern classic. It featured smooth, challenging gameplay and amazing production values. It was, in short, one of the finest games of its generation. In 2005, its gameplay was reworked and expanded for a second release, Ninja Gaiden Black. And incredibly enough, the third time's the charm. No, Ninja Gaiden Sigma isn't a true next-gen sequel, nor is it a simple port of the Xbox release. But it does add a good deal of new content, both subtle and obvious. If you're a Ninja Gaiden enthusiast, you'll want to see the new chapters, reworked levels, and slicker graphics. And if for some reason you missed it before, this is a must-play game. The action is intense, focused, and certainly not for the faint of heart. It's also among the most satisfying in all of gaming and remains as awe-inspiring as ever, three years after its original release.

So what's changed? The biggest addition is that Rachel the fiend hunter is a new playable character. She's a badass buxom babe who gets three chapters of her own, and a few levels in mission mode, too. She may be top-heavy, but she still manages a good number of terrific moves. Her minicampaign isn't as expansive as Ryu's: She's limited to using the warhammer and has only a single magic attack (called sorcery, rather than ninpo). The chapters are remarkably refreshing though, particularly because Rachel isn't as agile as Ryu--though a swing of her hammer does a huge amount of damage. Playing her requires you to adjust because her levels are interspersed among the others, so as the game's groove shifts, so must yours. Along with her chapters come new cutscenes, new bosses, and even a few feminine touches that humanize a story that was (and still is) more summer blockbuster than art house drama.

Her chapters aren't just disconnected additions, however. Ryu's chapters are shifted and reworked to give greater context to Rachel's. In fact, every level offers unexpected surprises, both big and small. In some cases, it's as simple as different items found in treasure chests. In others, the significance of the adjustments will catch you off guard, but pleasantly so. For example, one of the central chapters of the original Ninja Gaiden featured a straightforward puzzle to end the sequence. Now, a replica of an earlier boss returns, complete with a few new attacks to round out the surprise. Throughout the game, you'll find new enemies to uncover, such as glowing spirits and soldiers on motorcycles. You'll even get to play with a new set of weapons: Dual swords called Dragon's Claw and Tiger's Fang.

The changes are great, and they do more than throw in stuff for the sake of stuff. In some cases, they refine the pace and address frustrations of the original to make for an even tighter, more centered experience. One such change is the addition of a shop near the final save point before a major, difficult boss fight. It sounds insignificant, but it soothes a large frustration from the original and keeps the difficulty level steady without removing any real challenge from the boss encounter itself. Needless to say, there are countless additions, subtractions, and modifications, and they run the gamut from superficial to substantial. For the most part, all of them are for the better. The only questionable one is the ability to shake the Sixaxis controller to give more power to your ninpo skills. It feels needlessly tacked on, and shaking the controller doesn't really jibe with the general slickness of the other controls. Thankfully, it's the only element that stands out as unneeded among legions of improvements.

And if you haven't played Ninja Gaiden? Well, there's no better time than the present, and you won't need any previous experience with the series to understand what makes it excellent. Ninja extraordinaire Ryu Hyabusa is on a quest to recover the legendary Dark Dragon Blade and avenge the destruction of his peaceful village. Along the way, he meets Rachel, who is on a vision quest of her own. Their two stories mesh nicely in a single-player campaign that may take you 25 or more hours the first time through, depending on your skill level and prior experience with Ninja Gaiden Xbox.

The story never takes center stage, though it has the proper over-the-top sensibilities to frame what the game is really about: kick-ass action in the form of throws, slashes, wall-running, and acrobatic tumbling. If you think a ninja should be able to do it, you can do it in Ninja Gaiden Sigma. The controls for doing so are smooth and seamless, and aside from a few camera angle issues, at no point will you feel you have to struggle with the controller to pull any of these moves off. They result in astounding sequences of somersaulting, swordplay, offensive magic (called ninpo), and countermoves that are as gratifying as anything found in gaming. And as you progress through the game, you can upgrade your weapons, add new attacks, and earn other enhancements.

As you may have heard, Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox was a difficult game, and it's no different here. That isn't to say it's as tough as Ninja Gaiden Black, nor does it ever reach punishing levels. But it is no walk in the park, and newcomers may find it initially intimidating. If you've already cut your teeth on the series, you may be inclined to think that Sigma is a little easier, though that is due more to certain level design tweaks than it is to a reduction in challenge. In particular, Rachel's first chapter may strike fans as a little too easy thanks to a nice smattering of health potions, but the impression won't last once you reach her later appearances. As it is, you'll encounter armies of strong, agile opponents of all sorts, both human and, well, not so human--and you'll fight them in a variety of environments, from winding city streets to subterranean caverns.

Some of the most touted improvements in Ninja Gaiden Sigma over the original release are in the visual department. That isn't to say that it looks exactly next-gen, because there are signs of porting in the form of some bland textures and a few other blemishes. But it looks great, and a side-by-side comparison reveals a lot of nice enhancements in elements like shadows and color saturation. Animations are particularly spectacular, and Rachel's movements are as sleek as any of Ryu's. The sound effects and soundtrack remain the same as before. Still, as with the visuals, the audio additions are beautifully woven into the rest of the design, so nothing seems out of place or glued on.

And once you're done with the tour de force the first time around, you've got new difficulty levels to try out, stand-alone combat missions to play, and in-game leaderboards to peruse. There's simply a lot of game here, and the fact that this is a retooling of a three-year-old title for a new audience shouldn't dissuade you from playing it. Whether you're a series veteran or a newcomer, the in-your-face action of Ninja Gaiden Sigma is as exhilarating now as it ever was, and the new, slickly embedded content is surprisingly meaty. Play this game.

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.

Colin McRae- DiRT

Fans of Codemasters' Colin McRae rally racing series are in for a surprise with the publisher's newest title, DiRT. DiRT has more in common with Digital Illusions' Rallisport Challenge series than the Colin McRae games of old, putting a greater emphasis on a variety of off-road racing disciplines, as opposed to sticking hard and fast to traditional rally racing. That's not to say that rally fans will be disappointed with the game. DiRT veers a good bit further into arcade territory than earlier games in the series, but it is still a blast to drive, and absolutely stunning to look at.

Let's just address that elephant in the room right off. There have been plenty of driving games of late that have been visually impressive, but very few live up to the visual fidelity displayed by DiRT. This game is a technical achievement in car design, track design, and damage modeling. To begin with, the cars are beautifully rendered, highly detailed models that are as fantastic to look at as they are to destroy. Damage modeling is one of the most impressive aspects of the game; you can lose bumpers or doors, break glass, tear up the paintjob, and roll your ride into a crushed, deformed mess. Tracks are equally beautiful and destructible. From the rain-slick tarmac tracks of Japan and the dusty backroads of Italy to the muddy, gravelly countryside of the UK, DiRT nails every environment wonderfully. The game also uses lighting to fantastic effect, not just to emphasize how shiny and reflective the cars are, but to give each track an individual atmosphere. Driving around desert mountains in the washed-out haze of late day is an amazing sight to behold, for sure. And if you feel like tearing up these tracks, you can bust through fences, barriers, bushes, and anything else not held to the ground with concrete. All the while, dirt, mud, or gravel will kick up against and often stick to your car, making the game's namesake seem entirely appropriate.

As amazing as the game looks, all that detail comes at a bit of a price. Performance is not always up to snuff, especially in races with multiple cars on the track. The frame rate is a little choppy during single-car rallies, but once you get a group of other cars racing with you, the game practically turns into stop-motion animation, especially if all the other cars happen to be bunched up with you. This is more of a consistent issue on the 360 version, though the PC version is highly taxing even on high-end hardware, so you're likely to run into some performance problems unless you're running a top of the line machine. Longer-than-average load times also tend to rear their ugly head (primarily in the 360 version). Even still, the game never becomes unplayable because of the crummy frame rate or lengthy loads, and at worst, these are merely annoyances.

The quality of the presentation doesn't begin and end with the in-game graphics either. Even the menu system is immaculately built. It's hard to describe it, except to call it a bunch of floating boxes with selectable options that zoom in and out as you select them. Even the loading screens are cool because they display real-time statistics on your game, such as your favorite tracks or vehicles, your average speed, and even your favorite driving surface. Menus are usually a forgotten element of a game unless they're specifically bad, so the fact that DiRT's are notable for how good they are says something.

Audio is not quite as immediately impressive as the visuals, but it is great all the same. Engine noise is probably the best aspect because each car has a definitive and unique sound to it that feels just right. Crashes and other racing effects are also excellently produced. The soundtrack isn't licensed, but the instrumentals that play over the various menus and replays are quite solid. The only damper on the category is your codriver, an obnoxious, bro-sounding dolt whose dialogue sounds like it was written by a nonnative English speaker and whose only reference for the language was reruns of Saved By the Bell. Lines like "Smooth and steady; I'm Mr. Smooth, and you're Mr. Steady," and "Yeah! We won the championship! I'm so stoked!" are funny once, but then they're annoying from there on out. At least he gives you some good info on the tracks before you race.

Once you've snapped out of the trance that DiRT's fantastic presentation tends to lull you into, you might remember that this is a racing game and that you do actually have to play it. It's a good thing it's a fun one. The game includes six different racing disciplines, which consist of rally, rallycross, hillclimb, CORR, crossover, and rally raid varieties. If you don't know what half of those are, don't fret. The game does a good job of easing you into the game's style of racing, with both some rather simple early races, as well as an explanatory narration by extreme sports maven and current Rally America champion Travis Pastrana.

Granted, even if you've never jumped into a CORR race in your life, DiRT isn't exactly a difficult game to grasp. You're racing down a course by yourself, trying to get the best time possible, or racing against other cars, buggies, or trucks on dirt and tarmac tracks. Most of the differences in gameplay come from how the various vehicles handle. There is obviously a big difference between driving a speedy Mitsubishi FTO and a massive racing big rig (yes, they actually have those). But even with all the differences among disciplines, the racing is always easy to pick up and play. DiRT has a decidedly arcade-driving sensibility that makes all the vehicles relatively easy to race with from the outset. Once you've gotten a feel for how all the different cars and tracks feel, you can simply crank up the difficulty, which in turn makes your opponent racers much more adept, and also leaves your car far more open to terminal damage. On the highest setting, all it takes is one good front-end collision to send you packing.

As realistic as the damage incurrence can be, the rest of the game definitely maintains an arcade mentality. Nearly all the vehicles have a decidedly floaty feel to them, one that seems to overcompensate for nearly every minute turn of the analog stick (if you're playing the PC version, you will need a dual analog controller of some fashion to play the game properly). It's not unmanageable or anything, but it's far from realistic. By the same token, the game's physics are often a bit silly, especially in wrecks. That's not an insult by any means because the exaggerated physics lead to some absolutely spectacular wrecks in many cases. But there are some eye-roll-worthy moments where you'll see a car tilt from lying on its side all the way back upright for no good reason or drive sideways up a cliff to land back on four wheels.

Floaty feel and wonky physics aside, DiRT is still a great deal of fun to play. Once you get a feel for the controls and up the difficulty a bit, the racing can be intensely challenging, addictive, and immersive. It's especially immersive if you happen to take in one of the game's two exceptionally good cockpit camera views. There's a zoomed-in view and a view that's a bit further back. Both views give you a great sense of being in the driver's seat, even going so far as to let you look around inside the car via the right analog stick. Not enough racers do the cockpit camera that well, and DiRT is worth lauding for doing it especially well.

As fun as the racing can be, it wouldn't be worth much if DiRT didn't offer up plenty of ways to experience it. Fortunately, it does the job. Apart from being able to take part in single races and events, as well as a series of championships, consisting of multiple races each, DiRT also has a lengthy, involving career mode that has you working your way up a literal pyramid of events. Winning races earns you points, which unlock new tiers of the career mode and cash, which you can use to buy new vehicles or liveries for said vehicles. With more than 60 career events, nearly 50 vehicles to unlock, and more than 180 liveries to buy for those vehicles, that ought to keep you busy.

The one feature that DiRT skimps badly on is multiplayer support. There is multiplayer, but just barely. Only two disciplines--rally and hillclimb--are available to play in multiplayer. But wait, aren't those the two disciplines that don't have you competing directly against other cars? You bet. Essentially, you're dumped into a lobby with potentially dozens of other players, and from there, you vote on which track you want to play. The available list to vote on is always random, and there's no option to pick a different car or even search for a lobby with specific cars/tracks available. Once you're in a race, it's merely a time trial against all the other players. You can see how you're doing in the real-time standings, but that's all. While the Colin McRae series has never been known for great multiplayer support, the total lack of online racing in a game that debuts several wheel-to-wheel racing types is a gigantic tease and really disappointing.

That said, the multiplayer support is really the only thing about DiRT you can call truly disappointing. On every other front, DiRT delivers a racing experience that's a lot of fun to play and visuals that are such a joy to watch that you can even bring yourself to forgive the shoddy frame rate. All around, DiRT is a class act, and it belongs in any racing fan's library.

Overlord (PC)

While most genre-bending games are content to dissemble just one convention, Overlord takes on two. Not only does it attempt to subvert how you perceive Tolkien-esque high fantasy by essentially putting you in the role of the dark lord Sauron, but the game also plays like a real-time strategy game masquerading as a third-person action RPG. It's all very promising, since real-time strategy games can be such slaves to convention; and it's rare for a game to focus so exclusively on encouraging you to explore your darker impulses. Though the game's controls take some getting used to, and its exploration of evil could use a little more bite, it's generally pretty successful.

As the titular overlord, you begin the game having just been resurrected by your minions, and your dark kingdom is in shambles. Your dark tower is a ruinous mess, you've got but a handful of subservient followers, and the local villagers are cowering in fear of forces other than yourself. This simply will not do. Powerful practitioner of might and magic that you are, you could go the hands-on route in rebuilding your tower and crushing the wills of the peasants; but then, what's the point of being the overlord if you've got to do everything yourself?

This is why you have minions, the scampering, mischievous little gremlins that are the heart and soul of Overlord. Though the game presents itself as a third-person action RPG where you control the overlord, it's more of a real-time strategy game. Either way, it's a very good-looking game, with the kinds of soft lighting and quaint high-fantasy settings that characterized Fable, though once you get past the aesthetics, it proves to have more in common with Nintendo's Pikmin games for the GameCube. Though you can perform some basic magic and melee attacks as the overlord, it's your minions that will be doing all your heavy lifting. The control scheme for Overlord is a little unusual, since you'll be controlling the overlord's movement as well as the minions'. The PC version offers both mouse-and-keyboard and dual-analog gamepad control schemes, and they're both totally useable, but they've both got their fair share of quirks.

Thankfully, the minions are generally pretty smart. They'll follow you around diligently, and if you take a route that they're unable to follow you on, they'll either stop in their tracks rather than commit hara-kiri, or find an alternate route. You can control your minions' movement directly by sweeping them around using either the right analog stick or the mouse, depending on which control scheme you've chosen. Alternately, you can lock onto certain objects, or simply point in a general direction, and your minions will head over there and perform the appropriate action. If the object can be smashed, they'll smash it. If it's an enemy, they'll attack it. If it's something they can use, such as a weapon or a piece of armor, they'll equip it. If it's gold, or a potion that restores health or mana, they'll bring it back to you. You'll also find lots of quest-specific items that require a team of minions to carry to specific locations, as well as various path-blocking obstacles. You can also command your minions to stay in a specific position, effectively guarding it.

Death doesn't even seem to bother them too much--nor should it, since they're pretty easy to replace. Every time you kill something in Overlord, be it man or beast, it leaves behind a little piece of life essence, which you can collect and store. For every piece of life essence you have, you can summon another minion, though there's a limit to the number of minions you can have at your command at one time. Simply watching the minions carry out your will can be fun, because you get the sense that they really love their job. They scream and cackle gleefully as they latch onto an enemy, and they beam with pride when they return to you with found treasure. Though you'll hear many of the same exclamations from your minions over and over again, the voice work brings a lot of personality to your swarming horde, and to the game in general. Watching your minions wreak havoc can be so satisfying that it makes up for a lot of the problems that the game develops.

Overlord starts out strong, and the first few hours offer some light and easy fun as you sweep your horde of minions across the countryside, slaughtering sheep and peasants and pillaging anything that appears even remotely pillageable. There are some RPG trappings to the game, in that you can upgrade or buy new weapons and armor, learn new spells, and increase your capacity for health and mana, as well as the number of minions that you can control at once. Still, the story is pretty linear. You might have more than one quest available to you at a time, but usually you'll find that one of those quests cannot actually be started until you finish another quest. As the shadow you cast over the land continues to grow, you'll face halflings, elves, bloodthirsty unicorns, an undead horde, dwarves, and more. In addition to the all-purpose brown minions you start off with, you'll earn the ability to summon more specialized types of minions. Red minions are fire adept, green minions are impervious to poison and have some minor stealth abilities, and blue minions can travel through water, are strong against magical enemies, and can revive fallen minions.

The game takes its time introducing the different types of minions, and you'll be several hours into the game before the strategy elements of the game start getting complicated. The tightly designed environments of Overlord are very deliberate in their layout, often requiring you to direct a single type of minion. It's not difficult to alternate between controlling one type of minion and another when you're not under the gun, but there are certainly moments where it'll feel like you're struggling against the controls as you're juggling multiple groups of minions and trying to issue a series of specific commands. Luckily it's not hard to toggle the camera from a behind-the-back third-person perspective to a pulled-back overhead perspective, both of which prove useful in different situations. It's certainly satisfying when you're able to get past one of the game's involved boss fights, even if it's partially out of relief that you won't have to deal with that again.

As much as the game likes to cast your character as a ruthless and malevolent overlord who cares for nothing but power and chaos, your capacity for true, genuine evil feels a little limited. Motivations aside, the nature of the quests you take on aren't that different from what a high-fantasy hero would be up to. Yes, you can choose whether certain characters live or die, and there are situations that can be resolved with varying degrees of bloodshed, but the choices you make have little impact on the course of the game. Good and evil are subjective concepts, and if there are no real negative consequences, there's no way to determine if your actions qualify.

Overlord is an enjoyably mischievous experience that blends real-time strategy and RPG elements to unique ends. The satisfaction of running amok with your legion of wickedly enthusiastic minions is what makes Overlord worth playing, and it's plenty compensation for controls that you'll occasionally struggle against and the limitations on just how evil you can really be.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (PC)

The Harry Potter series of books has captured both the minds of children and adults alike. The movies haven't disappointed either and are amongst the highest grossing films of all time. For some reason, the video games that have been released alongside the movies haven't been able to reach the same level of quality that the movies and books have achieved. The latest game, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, continues that trend. There's a faithful re-creation of the Hogwarts campus to explore, but once you've seen the sights, there's not much else to do. Even the most diehard Potter fans will grow tired of seeing the grand staircase as they return from their umpteenth fetch quest.

Order of the Phoenix follows the story of the book and the movie of the same name. After narrowly avoiding expulsion for using magic in front of a muggle, Harry finds that Hogwarts' new defense against the dark arts teacher seems to have it out for him. To make matters worse, Voldemort is threatening to rear his ugly mug again, and Harry fears that the school will be unable to defend itself. With the help of Ron and Hermione, Harry rallies the students together to form Dumbledore's Army in an effort to ready them for a fight against the dark lord. This all makes perfect sense if you've read the book, but the story's exceedingly difficult to follow if you haven't read it because vast segments of the story are told via brief full-motion video cutscenes and newspaper clippings. It's easy to understand how a three-hour movie might have to leave bits and pieces out, but it's puzzling that an eight-hour game can't tell even the most basic aspect of the story.

Though the game's box says you'll get to play as Sirius Black and Dumbledore, you do so for less than five minutes, so you'll spend nearly the entire game controlling Harry. Ron and Hermione will be by your side the whole time offering hints on where to go or what to do next. You'll also encounter every recognizable character from the Harry Potter universe along your journey. The game starts off with a tutorial where you'll learn basic spells like wingardium leviosa (levitation), reparo (repair an object), accio (pull an object toward you), and depulso (push an object away) by helping people fix broken dishes, pack their suitcases, and move furniture--not exactly riveting stuff. On the PC, PlayStation 2, PlayStation, 3, and Xbox 360, you cast spells by pressing a button to point your wand and moving the right analog stick in a specific pattern. Rotating the stick clockwise will cast reparo, pressing down twice will cast accio, and pushing forward twice will cast depulso. You can also use the keyboard and mouse on the PC and this works fine. On the Wii, you'll hold the remote vertically then tilt it forward to cast depulso. To perform wingardium leviosa, you'll raise both the Wii Remote and the Nunchuk to lift the object then move the controllers around to maneuver the object. This works surprisingly well, and it makes it feel as if you are actually casting spells, which goes a long way toward making the game more enjoyable. The PS3 does use the Sixaxis' motion controls, but tilting and twisting the controller as you hold it in your lap doesn't add much to the experience.

Later in the game, you'll learn combat spells. These are cast in the same way as noncombat spells and mostly use the same patterns. But there will only be a few instances where you'll need to perform these combat spells because there's hardly any dueling in the game. This is probably a good thing because the combat isn't very good, and it's tough to tell if you're actually hitting someone. Even during the last fight, you just stand there casting the same spell over, waiting for a cutscene to signify the end of the battle.

Once you've learned some basic spells, it's off to Hogwarts, which is faithfully re-created in a game for the first time. The Hogwarts campus is absolutely huge, which is both a blessing and a curse. Fans should really get a kick out of seeing the grand staircase in motion and candles floating above the tables in the great hall, as well as sneaking into Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. But traversing back and forth across such a large area quickly becomes tiresome. Once you find the proper passwords, you can use the passages behind paintings as shortcuts, but they don't cut that much time off the journey. Another problem is the in-game navigation system. You're given a map that lists all of the different areas on campus, as well as the location of each person you need to find. Once you've highlighted the person or place you're looking for, footprints will appear on the ground to lead the way. Unfortunately, the footprints are black, so they're difficult to see; they don't appear far enough in front of you, so you're constantly forced to stop to wait for them to appear; and the camera will often switch angle midstride, so you don't know which way you're facing.

You've got a huge campus and healthy number of spells at your disposal, so you'll no doubt be doing all sorts of awesome things in incredible, mystical places, right? No. You spend most of the game running around trying to inform everyone as to the whereabouts of the room of requirement. You'll pick a character on the map, follow the footprints, and then tell people about the meeting place. In almost every single case, they'll have a reason for why they can't go. Of course, you've got to help them. This means you'll run all over Hogwarts collecting items, moving benches, fixing things, and helping people with their homework. This is how you spend the entire game. It's literally one fetch quest after another. Being able to pick the quest you want gives the illusion that you've got the freedom to do what you want, but the game is extremely linear in that there's only one way to accomplish any given objective. And sometimes you'll be performing the same exact task over again, such as when you're helping to disable the school's intercom by moving benches then pouring a potion into the speakers. You do this, not once, not twice, but five or six times; each time in a different room.

Performing one menial task after another would be bad enough on its own, but other issues conspire to make it worse. The game does a decent job of showing you where people and places are, but once you've met with someone, you're quite often on your own when it comes to figuring out how to help him or her. For example, at one point in the game, you must help a kid find five talking gargoyles. Now, you've encountered several talking gargoyles to this point, but for some reason, you can't tell the kid this and you must find the gargoyles again. Not only are you doing something you've already done, but the map doesn't show you where these gargoyles are, so you're forced to scour the entire campus in an effort to locate them.

When you're not playing the role of messenger boy, you'll spend much of your time cleaning up Hogwarts by putting statues, paintings, and urns back together. You can also search behind curtains for giant chess pieces, move blocks to find hidden plaques, light torches, and even sweep floors. These tasks are actually pleasant diversions for a short while, and you can unlock extras by performing them. But the tasks speak poorly for the game as a whole when sweeping the floor is a highlight. Another way to pass the time is to play chess, exploding snap, and gobstones. Gobstones (think marbles) and exploding snap (pick out matching pairs of cards) are simple but fun. Chess plays similar to Battle Chess and is actually quite engaging--if you've played chess before. The game will show you the moves that each piece can make, but there's no tutorial mode, which may leave many younger players clueless.

Visually, Order of the Phoenix is all over the place. Many areas of Hogwarts, such as the grand staircase or great hall, look spectacular and are very detailed. However, many of the hallways look the same and are largely empty. Combat spells look really cool when you cast them, but there are so few duels that you'll rarely get to enjoy seeing the spells in action. At first glance, character models look just like their movie counterparts and are quite nice. But once you see them in motion, you'll notice that they all look kind of like zombies. Things are even worse in the cutscenes that utilize the in-game engine. Characters stare blankly off into the distance, they face the wrong way, their mouths often don't move when they talk, and they'll appear then disappear from view for no apparent reason. The PS3, 360, and PC versions look the best. Other than lower quality in-game cutscenes and some nasty aliasing, the PS2 and Wii versions hold their own, though the PS2's frame rate is pretty iffy at times. Having the actors from the films voice their characters in the game goes a long way toward immersing you in the experience, even with the shoddy cutscenes and script. The familiar musical score is here and suits the game perfectly, which kind of makes you wonder why it was used so little.

It's hard to imagine that the video game version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will appeal to anyone. Older fans of Harry Potter will enjoy exploring Hogwarts for a while, but they'll soon be bored to tears by the low level of difficulty and the tedious objectives. The younger set will also get a kick out of seeing the sights and will appreciate the forgiving difficulty, as well as the simplicity of the tasks at hand. But they'll quickly grow tired of using their favorite character to perform a seemingly endless parade of chores. If being the most famous wizard in the world were this boring, there wouldn't have been more than one book.

TrackMania United (PC)

Slot car fantasies come to life in TrackMania United, the latest addition to the zaniest, most addictive arcade racing franchise to ever hit the PC. French developer Nadeo may stick a little too close to the original TrackMania and its sequel TrackMania Sunrise, but the concepts introduced in those games have been refined to near-perfection here. Dozens of insanely catchy tracks, fantastic online support, and a few new gameplay hooks will have you craving the next race the second you finish the last one.

If you decide to download this game from Steam (the only place it's available in the US), be aware that this a racing-game throwback--not the usual hardcore sim with a capital "S" that you tend to get on the PC. Ripping around and having a blast is the point here, not running telemetry until you can blow the doors off everyone at Daytona. Vehicle types here come with loose physics and a slidey feel more fitting of toy cars than of real hunks of metal and plastic. Cars even bounce when they fall from great heights, whether they hit pavement or water when they come down. Tracks are even more fantastic, typically featuring insane jumps, hoops hovering in midair, snowboard-style half-pipes, precipices high above desert canyons, and tropical-island highways that come to abrupt dead ends. And if you can think of a design even nuttier, you can make it yourself with the powerful, easy-to-use track editor.

All of this speedy craziness is experienced in three modes of play. Race is the most down-to-earth option. Like in Sunrise, you run time trials alone or against gold, silver, and bronze pace cars. However, opponents are just ghost cars to push you to better times, as you can't collide with them. Races take place in seven different track categories that unlock as you collect a requisite number of gold and silver finishes. Categories offer different scenery and racing styles. Stadium, for example, sees you guiding formula one-style cars around racetracks in concrete domes, while Desert features trucks on dirt roads. Rally boasts rally cars on grass in windmill-laden pastoral Europe, and Snow takes you to the mountains on ATVs.

Repetition is a bit of an issue when racing, despite the dozens and dozens of tracks included in the game. Each map type repeats the same scenic elements, only varying the time of day and adding glitz like red sunsets and neon nights. Still, you don't spend enough time on any one track to get bored. Tracks range from 10-second drags in the opening stages to slightly more winding treks that take a minute or two to complete. Also, the challenge is strong enough that you can find yourself running a race a couple-dozen times in a row to try to catch the perfect performance of the gold car. Just the slightest mistake puts you in second place, so don't underestimate the toughness of what looks to be a shiny, happy arcade game.

Racing can also be taken online. TrackMania United boasts an awesome online community in both Europe and North America, which lets you hook up with a race day or night. Lag is a slight problem at times, although typically only when loading and starting races. Once you get going, everything smoothes out. Nadeo keeps online leaderboards for different tracks, and also allows you to check your times against others by running official races in the solo mode. So if the basic gameplay doesn't keep you playing, trying to hit the top of the charts likely will. There seem to be thousands of different tracks available over the Net as well, testimony to the game's European fan base and the usability of the editor. These tracks can be downloaded and installed on the fly, although you need to purchase them in solo gaming with coppers earned from activities like posting good official race times.

But while races and the challenge of besting online times will hook you, platform mode will keep you coming back for more. This fiendishly addictive game (a revamped take on Sunrise's ramps tracks) challenges you to simply make it from start to finish without hitting a checkpoint restart too many times, but that's easier said than done when you have to deal with jumps that don't line up, holes that drop you into watery graves, tunnels that whip you around like a pinball, and outrageous one-after-the-other leaps to floating platforms suspended in midair. These tracks beautifully balance learning with driving skill. Even after you've run through a track a few times and memorized its pitfalls, funky driving is still required in order to stay on the road. This means a lot of trial and error...along with a lot of laughing as you continuously miss turns and cinematically sail off ramps to plummet hundreds of feet into the drink in front of gorgeous sunsets. Swearing alternates with the laughter, though, as getting a gold medal requires perfection, and perfection is gamepad-throwingly hard to come by.

Compared to the above, the puzzle mode of play is a big letdown. As in Sunrise, this option sees you building tracks from a top-down perspective. It's an interesting concept, though it seems as out of place with the other two modes as pizza does with rice, and solutions rarely seem logical. As the other options are such pure fun, puzzle really isn't worth much of your time.

But while puzzle makes you question what the developers were thinking, the visuals make you ask how the heck they managed to make a game look this good and run this fast. Frame rates fly on even a low-end machine, and tracks load in seconds (restarts are instantaneous), even though the appearance of the game hasn't been compromised at all. Tracks are designed around postcard vistas like tropical beaches, historic countrysides, and snowy cliffs. Big jumps often trigger the camera switching to a panoramic view of the action, further emphasizing the attractiveness of the backdrops and adding a Fall Guy feel. In-game advertising is the only sore point. When you're logged in online, the scenery is marred by billboards. It's not like tracks are clogged with signage, though, and the ads are region-specific (in Canada, for instance, you get billboards for Rogers and those irritating Bell Canada beavers), so you might see something of interest. Still, having to endure commercials in a retail game is every bit as galling as having to sit through ads in movie theaters.

Audio quality almost makes you forget about the annoying sales pitches, at least. Atmospheric effects are dialed way down for what should be an over-the-top arcade game with lots of squeals and smashes, although the selection of great tunes on the soundtrack mitigates this minor issue. Each song matches its setting, so you get a nifty country honky-tonk in desert races, a scratchy hip-hop beat in the city, and so on.

Overall, TrackMania United has a dreamy, fantasy vibe that could fulfill a kid's slot-car dream. Veterans of the previous two games in the series might find it too much of a been-there, done-that sequel, but it's perfect for anyone who appreciates speed, imaginative track design, and a definitively offbeat take on running cars around in circles.

Call of Juarez (PC)

We know about the genre known as the spaghetti western, but is there such a thing as a pierogi western? There is now, thanks to Polish developer Techland's Call of Juarez. An Old West-themed first-person shooter, Call of Juarez fits snugly into the solid little niche that games like Gun and Red Dead Revolver have already taken up residence in. The game is similarly hard-boiled and filled with gunslinging, horseback riding, train robbery, and all the other staples of the western genre that you might have already gotten your fill of. Still, for as few risks as Call of Juarez takes across the board, it's a well-made genre exercise that's more often entertaining than not.

The game puts you into the boots of two distinct characters. Billy Candle is a half-white, half-Mexican drifter of sorts who had been on the hunt for the legendary Lost Gold of Juarez, a treasure trove of gold buried somewhere within the titular town. Unable to find it, Billy decides to come home to the town of Hope to visit his mother and stepfather--only to find them murdered upon his arrival. The other character is Reverend Ray, Billy's step-uncle and the town preacher. Ray's a reformed gunslinger now dedicated to spreading the Lord's word, but when he hears of the ruckus going on at his brother's farm and arrives to see a panicked Billy running away from the bloody corpses of his brother and sister-in-law, Ray vows vengeance, and begins tracking his step-nephew until he can satisfy it.

The dynamic of having two playable characters would be more interesting if there weren't such a distinct separation of quality between them. The more entertaining of the two, both in story and gameplay, is easily Ray. Voiced by an actor who seems to be equally channeling Sam Elliott and the creepy priest from Poltergeist II, Ray's sequences are filled with enough amazing, self-righteous bible quoting immediately followed by heavy amounts of murdering that you almost wish they'd gotten Samuel L. Jackson for this role. Heck, Ray's even got what we'll affectionately refer to as a "bible button." One of the weapons he can hold is a bible, and if you press the fire button while he's holding it, he'll start reading random passages to any nearby enemies, who will then stop for a second to listen, at which point you can shoot them in their stupid faces. That's either genius or awful--or possibly both.

Apart from using the gospel as a weapon, you spend most of your time as him running around, shooting various hombres, rustlers, outlaws, and other unsavory individuals. His primary weapon is a pair of six-shooters, which he can actually use to bust into a slow-motion "concentration mode" when he draws them from their holsters. Doing this gives you a pair of targeting reticles you can guide toward any nearby enemies and then unload upon them. Ray also gets to engage in some straight-up gun duels against other gunslinging baddies. These are essentially the bulk of the game's boss fights, though they're very quick. In these fights, a counter ticks down, and when you get to the end, you quickly pull back and then press forward on the right control stick to draw. Once you do, your reticle pops up and the scene goes into slow motion again, though the reticle is a little off-kilter, as you did draw rather quickly. It's up to you to aim and shoot before the other guy offs you. You can't call these sequences brilliant, or even especially original (Red Dead Revolver had some similar mechanics), but they're fun all the same.

Less fun and generally more irritating are Billy's sequences. Billy can fire the occasional pistol, and even exclusively use both a bow and arrow and a whip, but nearly all of the scenarios he finds himself in revolve more around bad first-person platforming and overlong stealth sequences than any form of real action. The stealth stuff isn't bad, exactly. Billy can find shadowy or otherwise dark areas to hide in, as well as use bushes and boxes to hide behind, and that all works pretty much as advertised. The issue is that all the stealth bits take way, way too long. Waiting for your enemies to slowly wander through their patrols so you can move from shrub to shrub is about as fun as it sounds. In a few cases you can run and gun it if you want, but you're rarely ever properly armed for these types of situations, and as you are without uncle Ray's concentration ability, Billy just isn't quite as useful for gunfights. So instead, you're stuck spending 15 minutes just trying to navigate one camp full of bandits.

Less tolerable are the bouts of climbing and swinging. First-person platforming has never been a good idea, yet for some reason developers keep trotting it out in these sorts of games. It doesn't work here, either. Billy can climb up short ledges, use his whip to grab onto branches and other elongated protrusions, and then swing from one ledge to the next. The main problem here is perspective--when you're jumping around in the first-person, it's sometimes difficult to gauge the distance of jumps, so you end up trial-and-erroring it until you get just the right amount of distance. The whip-swinging thing seems neat at first, but it can be tough to get the right amount of swing momentum to hit certain ledges. Again, it's a trial-and-error process to figure out how much you need to climb up the whip to get the proper angle. And like the stealth bits, these scenes are just overly protracted. There's one obnoxious fetch quest in the middle of the game where you have to climb up a giant mountain for nearly a half-hour (counting time needed to die and start over), just to grab an eagle feather for some cranky old Indian, only to have to spend another several minutes jumping your way down. Creating a degree of separation between the two playable characters wasn't a bad idea, but this was perhaps not the ideal way to go about it.

Horseback riding pops up now and again for both characters, and it's an enjoyable distraction from the usual trudging around that you do. Controlling the horse is initially a bit of a pain, but once you get used to it, it's both a quick way to get places and a fun way to engage in combat. There are a couple of scenes where you'll find yourself blasting away at other bandits on horseback. Aiming while on a horse is tough, but that makes sense.

Controls on the PC version of Call of Juarez are, as you might expect, significantly different than the 360 version's. Aiming is certainly simpler with the use of the mouse, and whip swinging is actually a little easier as well, as you don't have to fumble around with analog sticks. However, other mechanics are made a bit clumsier by this control scheme. Ray's concentration mode now requires you to press two buttons at once to holster his weapons, and horseback riding, which was already unwieldy to control, is even tougher to deal with on the PC. The crouch mechanic also needs some key remapping to be useful, as the key has to be held down while you move, and default setting of the CTRL key just isn't comfortable.

Another key difference between the PC and 360 versions of Call of Juarez is content. None of the extra missions or gun duels that the 360 version has as separate modes are present in the PC version. At least you still get the same 8- to 10-hour campaign, as well as the same multiplayer mode. LAN and online versions of the multiplayer are available, too. The multiplayer is pretty typical class-based FPS-style action. You can play as either a rifleman, a gunslinger, a sniper, or a miner, and there is a variety of modes like deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, VIP, and so on. The four classes are reasonably well balanced (though in skirmish modes, snipers seem to rule the roost), and there are enough different modes to keep the action interesting for a while. It helps that the game isn't kneecapped by bad weapons, as some historical FPSes tend to be in the multiplayer arena. All the weapons pack a nice punch, though each class is only assigned a pair of specific weapons, a primary and a secondary. There are no weapon pickups on the various maps. All told, the multiplayer isn't remarkable, but it can be fun.

In terms of presentation, Call of Juarez is all over the map, especially as far as graphics go. Environments are definitely the high point. As you wander around the game, you'll see tons of attractive Old West scenery, from mountain vistas to desert plains. It's great-looking stuff that's made better by some nice lighting effects and solid texture work (save for a few occasional ugly spots). On the other side of the coin are the character models. The people you encounter all have that sort of Doom 3 overly shiny thing going on, and they even look a bit mutated to boot. Animations tend to be stiff, clipping issues pop up quite often, and any time you catch a glimpse of what your own character model is doing, either in a reflection or a shadow, or just by looking down, you'd think you were controlling an animatronic robot from some ghost town tourist trap. Still, the problems are mostly outweighed by the positives, and the game as a whole looks good.

It looks noticeably better if you happen to have a video card that supports DirectX 10. On the higher resolutions, environmental details and grass/foliage are much denser and cleaner looking. Lighting and shadows are also more impressive. At the same time, even on a high-end PC, the game chugs a bit while running on the higher resolutions. It's nothing game breaking, but the frame rate drops quite a bit. It's also worth noting that on multiple test PCs, loading times for each chapter and multiplayer map were over the top.

Audio is less scattershot. Apart from some great sound effects and a soundtrack that nicely captures the atmosphere of the era, the game has mostly solid, if slightly hammy voice acting for nearly all the characters. Billy is the only one who didn't fare very well, as the actor who plays him sound like he's in as big a rush as possible to get out of the recording booth, but pretty much everyone else is on their game and delivers an entertaining performance.

As ham-fisted and generic as Call of Juarez can be at times, it does enough right to transcend its various issues and turn in a pleasing shooter. It does the Old West motif well, the gunslinging (and bible slinging) are a lot of fun, and the capable multiplayer modes have enough going for them to give the game a bit of staying power. It doesn't quite rise past the ceiling established by other recent western shooters, but it's good, solid fun all around. That said, if you have the choice, you should probably look to the Xbox 360 version. The PC iteration is good, but its lack of content for its price tag and slightly dodgy DX10 support prevent it from being the ideal choice.