Bryce, the protagonist of NeverDead is immortal, and like him you will tire of this gimmick rather quickly. Konamis latest third person shooter brings very little to the table in terms of innovation to a genre that sees at least one major release per year. If NeverDead is any indication of what TPS fans can expect from the genre, theyre in for a bumpy. Read on to learn why NeverDead should have never happened.

NeverDead narrative centers on Byrce a demon hunter who works for a secret organization. His day job has him slaying monsters, defeating bosses and containing outbreaks of a hellish nature. What makes Byrce unique is the curse of immortality. This immortality isnt the standard invulnerability youll find in other works of fiction. The game makes it very clear that Byrce feels dismembered limb, penetrating bullet and enemy attack.

The games dismemberment mechanic is its sole new addition to a genre that often follows a similar pattern: The protagonist defeats waves of enemies with the possible option of taking cover and defeating bosses. Throughout the campaign Bryce is able to lose his arms, legs as well as his head. Once a limb has been lost the only way to recover them is by performing a combat roll over them. This means that you cannot simply walk to reattach your lost limbs. You will find yourself performing combat rolls even in areas where there is little threat of being harmed simply because youve lost your leg.

Ive already shared that the dismemberment mechanic doesnt bring anything new, and unfortunately the core mechanics dont fare much better. Bryce has two different fighting styles to choose from going out guns blazing and using the butterfly blade which is conveniently mounted to his back. The default weapons including assault rifles, small machine guns and pistols feel almost like peashooters. You will pump countless rounds into some of the enemies only to find out that only drop after six plus bursts. The sword fighting fairs a little better but still has some awkward control issues. In order to use the butterfly blade you must press the hold the left trigger to engage the sword and then flick the left stick to swing the sword. The sword play is satisfying but there is no connection between the direction you press the stick towards and the animation that plays. The sword combat would have flowed a lot better if it had been mapped to a button rather than the left stick.

The level design in NeverDead could be described as clich at best. Youll spend the opening hours of the game playing through levels like The Asylum, The Museum and The Police Station. Each level features a number of objects youd expect in each setting desks in the police station, pieces of art in the museum and broken windows in the asylum. Unfortunately these objects tend to repeat and at times it can feel like entire sections themselves repeat.

In early previews of the game I found your A.I companion Arcadia to be more than capable of handling herself. She does a decent job at helping dispatch an entire room of enemies even when your fully dismembered shell come to your aid. Now that Ive had the ability to play the game on multiple difficulty settings I cant exactly give the same praise to Arcadia. Playing for a short period youll think that the companion A.I is more than capable but a few levels in one of the games central flaws become apparent your friendly A.I is are never in trouble because the enemy never target her. You are the constant target of all enemies on screen regardless of the situation, making the entire point of the friendly partner completely pointless. In a mew robust title the support characters are able to hold their own and provide some level of support while leaving the major hurdles to you. In other games these characters are sometimes overwhelmed or surrounded. This creates a sense of urgency and pressure on you to perform and save your companions before they meet their end. NeverDead never achieves this by providing a seemingly invincible sidekick.

The awkward controls, haphazardly implemented dismemberment mechanic and repetitive gameplay could be excused to an extent if NeverDead wasnt filled with technical issues. During the opening chapter I came across a few collectables that would have granted me valuable XP if the game would have let me use the dismemberment mechanic properly. Oddly, there are sections in the game that will prompt you to use moves that you either havent learned or purchased yet. I also came across a few instances where Bryce was presented with a power-up with no explanation as to its use. Add to this seemingly random moments that will have you flying across the map as a severed head and a few levels where you can escape the levels geometry and you have a game that feels half finished.

At the end of the day NeverDead seems to be Konamis answer to the Devil May Cry series. At first I thought I was drawing parallels that didnt exist but the more I think about it the clearer they become. Both games feature a demonic (or cursed) protagonist who uses self-depreciating humor to lighten the mood, both characters wield guns & swords and both games plots are almost undecipherable. Sadly, NeverDeads humor falls flat, the gameplay is repetitive and at the end of the day it will make you want to play a much better game. It is hard to recommend NeverDead as a purchase or even a rental given that there are much better third person shooters on the platform, even if those games are a few years old.

I remember it like it was yesterday. Sitting there in my college apartment, my roommates clamoring on about some fighting game that one of them brought home to play on our trusty Dreamcast. I thought to myself Great – ANOTHER fighting game that I have zero interest in. You see, my relationship with fighting games up to this point was not one for the ages. I had some interest in Mortal Kombat II, though I never could really get the hang of the fatalities. And… thats it. So I plopped down on the couch, ready to spit forth a stream of vitriol towards the game, the purchaser and the whole idea of fighting games. Then the title screen booted up and I saw the logo for Soul Calibur. Fast forward many hours into the early morning, and we were all still in our living room, myself included, playing the game. Everyone had settled into a character that made sense to them, and overall, not one person was dominating the whole game the entire time. It worked, and it worked very well. That was the first taste of Soul Calibur for me, and it remains the only fighting game series that I have ever purchased and played extensively.

From that point on I bought or played every major game in the series. The only one I dont own currently is Soul Calibur 3, because at that time I did not have a PS2. All throughout this time Astaroth has been my main character. Something about his brute strength was alluring from a gameplay perspective. Or to put it another way, I liked swinging a huge axe around and making opponents cry.

So here we are at Soul Calibur V. Namco Bandai have bolstered the roster even further than before, with 30 characters and even more that can be created with the robust character creation feature. The challenge here is this: If you are on the fifth iteration of your game, how do you keep it fresh without completely alienating fans of the series who have been with you all this time? Thankfully, though there were a few mis-steps along the way in my opinion, this was accomplished with a pretty good result. Lets go into some details, shall we?

From a gameplay perspective, you are given a host of normal options. You can play against the computer, play against a friend on the couch next to you, or play online against foes all around the world. Heck, you can even watch two computer-controlled fighters compete if you would want to, though I never understood the allure of such a feature. From a single-player perspective you can go through a storyline mode that I actually found quite interesting. You play mainly as Patroklos or his sister, Pyrrha, as you progress through a well-told tale featuring those two prominently. The storyline is developed by using a combination of manga-esque comic panels and in-engine cinematics, and the result is an effective way to push a surprisingly-deep story forward while keeping things interesting. One gripe I have about this mode is that you basically have to learn one or two characters movesets at the offset or else you wont be too successful here. I wish there was a story-line single-player mode for each character. This isnt a huge loss, but it certainly is missed from where I sit.

There is so much that has gone right in the game. The graphics are stunning, the music is as epic as one would expect from a Soul Calibur game, and the controls are tight and responsive. I personally make do with just the analog stick on my 360 controller, but my friends go with the d-pad, and either way its not difficult to execute even the more advanced moves. There are, however, some things that were rather confusing for me. First of all, I cannot for the life of me realize why they saw fit to do away with an infinite time limit when playing a match. I get that in tournaments they have standard timings and things of that nature, but why on earth would there be no option whatsoever for unlimited match times? When I have a bunch of people over to play a Soul Calibur title, often times the matches can go on for some time with all the defensive maneuvering and posturing that goes on. Nowadays with Soul Calibur V we have to keep a tight eye on the clock and it has forced a more aggressive play-style this time around. This just doesnt feel right.

Text by Anders Frederiksen

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. That is… Wow, that is a bunch of syllables, like forty, or two hundred. However many it is, that is some title, and the game it belongs to has a lot to live up to, and not from just the title alone. The front of the case proclaims the list of mega stars involved in the development of this game, and without going too deep inside baseball, this is a game with some history, in the development, story, and gameplay.

This is a open world RPG set in Amalur which is a brand new world, one that R.A. Salvatore helped create, and has written something like ten thousand years of history for (give or take an epoch or so), and it shows. So much so that the world, and back-story of it all feels overwhelming at times. Here are just the races of the world that have speaking rolls, far as I can find: Almain, Varani, Ljosalfar, Dokkalfar, Gnomes, and Fae… Oh and those first four are what you can select as you player character, which are pretty much human, human, wood elf, and dark elf, got it? Me neither.

The story is very good, dealing with some interesting ideas throughout, not with out a few holes here and there but nothing I found egregious. Story quests lead you across the large world map, introducing colorful characters along the way. Some choices must be made, but nothing as granular as a morality system as the role the game casts you in eschews the need for a good/evil gauge by placing you outside of the weave of fate while being able to affect the fates of others. But as the story is one of the things Ive liked the most, I am going to leave it at that.

Sound overall is quite good, with music being top notch. The voice acting is very good, my major complaint being the guards in the gnomish city and the clips that play from them as you run past, and while many, many actors lend their voices, you will hear repeats now and then. I just wish the hero had a voice.

Graphically it leans more to a WOW style aesthetic, meaning more of a cartoon or comic book look, rather then a photo-realistic style. It works very well; there are times that you will really find you are swept up in the vistas. The animation is also good, with high points being the fate shifting finishing moves, which all feel very brutal.

Onward to the gameplay and combat, all aspects of which are handled nicely. Melee combat is easy to get the hang of, and feels really good no matter your choice in arms. On that note weapons are long swords, great swords, war hammers, daggers, fae blades, staffs both long and short, and chakrams. All feel unique and appropriately weighty for the type of weapon youve chosen to fling about the battlefield, with skill tree abilities and spells woven into the fray of it all. The combat is somewhere between the heavy combo and finesse focus of a Ninja Gaiden or Bayonetta, and tip-tap rhythm of Fable 2 or 3: very easy to pick up but with enough depth to be interesting hours and hours in. Skills and abilities fall into three basic paths. Might handles sword and shield, hammers and other tank style buffs and abilities. Finesse is for those that want daggers and stealth, bows and speed. Sorcery provides a more hands off approach with spells, and what might as well be fantasy pistols, elemental control and bladed boomerangs are offered in this path as well.

Text By: Anders Frederiksen

I am old enough to have had an Apple II when it was almost top-end computing, that was a real long time ago. I loved the original Choplifter, played it for hours with my dad, flying back and forth picking u
p survivors and shooting bad tanks. Now let’s talk about this latest entry in the ongoing HD-ifying of games from days long past.

Right up front, this is totally Choplifter, 2.5D action, fly right, don’t slam the chopper into the ground, pick up dudes, go home. That is the basic core of the gameplay. Sure, there are small changes to missions, such as, you start with some Rangers that you need to drop off, before you can pick them and more dudes back up, but picking up survivors and dropping them off, is pretty much the basic and prevailing mission type. It works fine and is fun for most of the game. Oh, also, ZOMBIES!

Graphically it is serviceable, but no more then that. I would have liked them to have had some fun with some of the missions, as the subject, and title are rich with opportunity to do parody art styles. I would have love to see 3D versions of the original art and maybe some crazy art styles, but all we get is tiny modern war machines.

The controls are a slight variation on the standard dual stick shooter, move with left, aim with right, trigger shoots, done. Well alright, they’ve added the ability to pivot using the bumpers, and shoot toward the screen to take out gun dudes that are off path. Now thats not to say that the controls lack finesse, they don’t at all. If anything the game just doesn’t do a very good job showing you how or why you would want to. But there is an awesome sense of satisfaction, when you FLY into your base at top speed, and pull up just short of slamming into your helipad, making a soft and safe landing. The momentum of the chopper feels good, aiming takes some getting used to, but works fine once you figure it out.

Sounds boils down to the same thing you will hear in any modern combat game. The chopper makes a nice whomp-whomp sound, guns sound equally decent. Best of all the audio is the voice clips that the survivors say when you pick them up and drop them off, some truly laugh out-loud lines, but wow is all the dialog cheesy.

Somehow the simple mission style, sharp cheddar-y dialog and voice work, upgrade-unlock-chase (that is in every game these days), and straight-forward controls do add up to having some real charm. While it isn’t going to set your world on fire, it is a good solid ten minutes to burn title. I don’t know that the full price of 1200 Spacebucks is the right price for this one, but 400 seems too low (what ever happened to most XBLA titles being 800 points?). So if you fondly remember playing Choplifter from Apple II, Gameboy, or the arcade, give this a look. Otherwise, the heavy retro stylings might leave you feeling flat