A couple years ago, a developer called Trion Worlds, made up of a bunch of industry veterans with $100 million in investment capital from China, put out a fantasy MMO called RIFT. RIFT was actually really good. It had a wonderfully flexible class system, a highly fleshed-out world that emphasized exploration in interesting ways, and dynamic content in the form of, well, rifts.

This context is important, because despite the solid shooting action in Trion’s most recent title, Defiance has in large part forgone what made RIFT great.

Unlike RIFT‘s traditional MMO mechanics and fantasy world, Defiance is a third-person-shooter set in a post-apocalyptic, futuristic version of the Bay Area, a place I actually lived in for much of Defiance‘s development. Despite the faster-paced style of gameplay and the unique, real-world (kind of) setting, Defiance‘s true draw is the TV show tie-in, which Trion Worlds says will make mention of events in the game and vice versa.

Indeed, seeing the computer-generated version of Grant Bowler on “Episode” missions is pretty novel, though with the show yet to air as of publication, their characters hold no impact, and very little backstory is ever given to really make me care. The storylines in Defiance (the game) are generally very hokey across the board, in fact, and with Episode and Storyline missions running in tandem, it’s possible for the chronology of events to get screwy.

I did a series of quests for a character called Cooper, for example, and then in an Episode mission I was introduced to him for the first time. So if story is really important to you, maybe hold off on picking this up at least until the show starts to air.

On the other hand, if you want a pretty neat MMO shooter, you could do worse than Defiance. There is a reasonable variety of enemies, the AI — while not mind-blowing — will definitely challenge you at times, and there’s a surprising amount of content for a game with no subscription requirement. More impressive, though, is the range and variety of weapons.

There are your standard pistols, SMGs, shotguns, rocket launchers etc… which serve as overarching weapon classes, but within each of these, individual weapons can act completely differently. One shotgun might discharge two shells in quick succession before needing to be reloaded, while another might have fifteen rounds that have a great amount of scatter. A grenade-launcher might require you to manually detonate the grenades, or they might explode on contact, or they might bounce like crazy, or they might release a cloud of smaller grenades. Each new weapon feels like a new weapon, and that’s very impressive.

So it’s a shame that, outside of the shooting, Defiance feels quite shallow. There are racing side-missions that can feel kind of clumsy, but other than that, there’s nothing really driving you to explore this terraformed-version of Marin. There aren’t loads of little secrets littered across the land. There are a couple, and they even play BioShock-style audio when you find them, but they’re so few and far between that the world of Defiance often feels very empty between shootouts.

But if you don’t much care about things that don’t involve killing, there’s plenty. Lots of official missions are scattered across the world, and even just going to a ruined structure or a pulled-over truck is likely to pull you into a sort of mini-mission. It’s quite a lot like Guild Wars 2, in that stuff is always happening all over the place, and you can jump in and shoot some dudes or leave it be.

Defiance‘s one carry-over from RIFT, if you can really call it that, are the Arkfalls. They’re events that strike specific locations in the world and put a global marker on the map, encouraging you to check it out. Players tend to flock to these because, like RIFT‘s rifts, there are very good rewards available, and they often lead to neat global boss-encounters. When these massive player clusters happen, though, Defiance‘s servers sometimes struggle to keep up.

Luckily there is instanced group content too. Runs tend to be in the 15 minute range and have at least one boss encounter, with some loot at the end. The dynamic here is very similar to the solo-instances you tend to play through in the main story missions, except tuned for extra players. Player classes — which, like Borderlands, tend to revolve around a single ability — aren’t really taken into account.

There’s no tank/healer/damage dealer trinity, though you can sort of skill your character out to fill a specific role if you want. But beware — while RIFT let you switch roles on the fly virtually for free, changing your character in Defiance comes with a hefty currency cost.

Unfortunately, even during the best of Defiance‘s content, there are regular and very frustrating bugs. The client will crash for numerous reasons, characters will endlessly repeat dialogue, and if you tab-out of the game while driving, sometimes you’ll tab back in to see your car flying through the air impossibly. One of the most frustrating and regularly occurring bugs causes your character to be interrupted when doing almost any action a couple times a second, until you go to the menu.

That menu, and the entire user-interface, by the way, is clearly built with the console versions in mind. Buttons for equipping perks or destroying items are hidden down the bottom, there are nonsense radial menus, and chat is heavily de-emphasised. This is set to change soon, but for now it’s going to be frustrating for PC gamers to work through.

If the idea of a show and a game growing in tandem excites you, or you’re desperate for a new multiplayer shooter, it might be worth checking Defiance out. But maybe give it a couple weeks to find its feet and let the first episode or two of the show air first. Defiance has promise, but it needs a little more work.

Good:

• Quite a lot of content.
• Some of it is even sorta dynamic.
• No subscription required!
• A surprisingly large number of varied weapons.
• Plenty of emphasis on shooting bad dudes.

Bad:

• Little emphasis on stuff that doesn’t involve shooting or driving.
• More bugs in the game code than on the battlefield (and there are a LOT of bugs on the battlefield).
• The story will make you grimace.
• Definitely feels ill-suited to the keyboard/mouse setup at times.

Product for this review supplied by Trion Worlds.

When the title of a game references both Nazis and the undead, and sees fit to also verify that it’s an army of them rather than just one or two, you can be sure of one thing: it’s either going to be a fun, tongue-in-cheek romp, or it needed to trick you into thinking it was going to be a fun, tongue-in-cheek romp because it’s not very good.

In this case, it’s the latter.

Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army is a shooter that swings between first and third based on whether you’re sniping (which is probably a lot of the time) or run-and-gunning. It takes the sniping component pretty seriously, much like Sniper Elite V2. A lethal shot at a certain distance or greater will initiate a kill-cam that shows, in gruesome detail, your bullet piercing the skin, bone and organs of your undead victim. If you manage to line a couple foes up, it’ll also show the bullet then proceeding into whoever was standing behind. It’s cheesy and triggers far too often on its default settings, but it’s a little morbidly enjoyable to watch a (Nazi) zombie’s eye explode in slow motion.

The campaign comes with 5 levels, each broken up into several segments joined by safehouses a la Left4Dead, and like L4D, Nazi Zombie Army is built for co-op. Playing through the campaign alone is slow, tedious, and repetitive. After about 20 minutes, you can generally guess how each new little level chunk is going to play out – you’ll need to stake out a spot near the edge of the map and try to take down a wave of zombies as efficiently as possible. At some point, an explosive zombie or two will probably charge at you, and maybe a few quick but fragile skeletons. Later, you’ll probably see a heavily armored zombie with a machine gun. Repeat this several more times per level.

With three other pals, it’s still pretty tedious and repetitive, but it moves a lot quicker and as a result feels a little more fun. But playing with friends raises its own problems. The slow-mo kill-cam becomes nothing more than a sped-up momentary disturbance, and running around with three other dudes blowing undead brains apart really removes you from the careful, stealthy, positional gameplay you might expect from a sniping game. There’s no stealth gameplay when you’re playing on your lonesome, either, but it’s a little less rushed and arcadey.

Either way, though, it often feels more like you’re walking between shooting galleries than playing anything with tactical depth. There’s a basic cover system that could have provided interesting gameplay if 99% of your foes weren’t melee, and the other 1% essentially capable of ignoring your cover. The game client itself is also unstable, prone to freezing, and on one occasion, having the graphics freak the hell out — see below.

But Nazi Zombie Army’s biggest issues is that I just don’t care about anything I’m doing. The story makes no sense and is barely expressed, my motivations are unclear, and my character, or any other for that matter, has no voice or personality. I’m also shooting Nazis who are also zombies, which you would think would be satisfying, but I’m doing it in Nazi Germany, where the Nazi zombies are theoretically only really going to be able to harm other Nazis. So, really, every zombie I shoot feels like a small victory for Nazism. It’s really quite confusing, and feeling motivated to kill yet another zombie gets harder and harder the more you play.

Good:

• You can see a Nazi zombie’s eye explode really, really slowly if you want.
• It’s only $15.

Bad:

• You’re helping the Nazi’s rid their land of the undead for some reason.
• It doesn’t feel like a sniper game or a fast-paced shooter, but something uncomfortably wedged in the middle.
• Very repetitive, and keeps a depressing tally of how many zombie’s you’ve shot. (SPOILER: lots.)

Crysis 3 is like that friend you had in high-school who topped every class, was on a bunch of sports teams, and yet still had time to hang out with you. It fills you with awe and envy all at once, and then you find out that he has a weird thing for poodles, or he won’t eat anything with the letter L in its name, and that super-human shimmer dulls a little.

Crytek are historically known for pushing the graphical boundaries with their games. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that a good portion of Crytek’s game sales come solely from people who want to use the latest title as a graphical benchmark for their machine. It helps that the games have been pretty good, and Crysis 3 is no exception.

Set a couple decades after the events of Crysis 2, Crysis 3 is the story of a suit. I know this because every second line of dialogue mentions the Nanosuit that your character, Prophet, is wearing. Prophet himself? Not so important. That suit, though… that’s where it’s at. The Ceph and CELL factions make a return, and Crysis 3 also brings back the character Psycho from Crysis: Warhead, and gives you ample time to get to know and love the back of his bald head.

And it is, yes, an astoundingly well-rendered bald head. Everything in Crysis 3 is a visual masterpiece, so long as you have the hardware to do it justice. Running on a GeForce GTX 680, Crysis 3 ran at an average of about 30 frames during the more hectic sequences, with every feature maxed out. And it looked absolutely superb (all the screenshots you see here were captured on my machine). I regularly halted my progress to look at a gorgeous stream, or mess around in the grass, or shoot a squirrel.

It’s so stupidly gorgeous, that there are moments that make Crysis 3 feel ill-suited to the FPS genre, with all the blood and user-interface effects crowding out your view of the wonderful scenery. It should have been a first-person-looker.

But like the rest of the series, the mechanics in Crysis 3 provide the groundwork for a huge amount of fun. All the mechanics from Crysis 2 have carried over with the exception of the ability to stick to cover and peek around corners. You can still sprint (this time without expending energy), kick cars, jump massive gaps, stealth, and boost your armor. The removal of the cover system, while a bit of a bummer, has made room for the introduction of a hacking mechanic.

Battlefields are scattered with mines and turrets that can be hugely threatening if you wander in unprepared. But with hacking, which involves a short timing-based mini-game, you can turn these threats to your side, perhaps taking out a few foes that were otherwise hidden from your view. Hacking provides a substantial amount of tactical depth in a game that is already crammed with options for the player.

Most of the game is comprised of surprisingly large set-pieces, some of which span kilometers entirely seamlessly. You’re typically given an objective or two, and a marker tells you where the objectives are. How you actually get there, though, is totally up to you. I found myself taking what I assumed was the best path there, only to later find there were half a dozen totally different ways I could have gone about it.

I could have also used a long-range weapon to deal with my enemies or tried to sneak up into melee range for a stealth kill. Or I could tweak my weapon with several different modifications to change how it aims or fires or how much ammunition it can hold. Or I could tweak my actual suit abilities with upgrade points that are scattered throughout.

But for all of the great things in Crysis 3, there are still a few missteps. Later in the campaign, the game eschews its open-world vibe and throws a rather awkward and very linear driving portion that plays clumsily, and undermines some of the values the player has come to expect.

The middle portions of the game are also a great deal stronger than the final chapter or two. During the better portions, the focus tends to be on the fun of playing hide-and-seek with deadly dudes in the massive playground of New York. It plays to Crysis‘s strengths; mobility, choice and breathtaking visuals. The latter portions, by contrast, are visually drab and often lock you into much more narrow areas, with fewer tactical choices and more frustrating – but not necessarily more difficult – foes.

It also introduces a frankly ridiculous invulnerability mechanic which removes all of the challenge from what is meant to be the most tense portion of the game. It’s silly, and once you understand how to make the most of it, even the toughest aliens become trivial. And by “the toughest aliens”, I mean the final boss. So that’s disappointing.

There are also a handful of bugs. Twitchy corpses, objects that fall through the world or fly through walls, and sound clips that skip or cut out completely are all fairly frequent occurrences. But they’re not really frequent enough to ruin the overall experience. And they certainly don’t affect how frickin’ awesome overgrown New York looks, so get over it you dumb baby.

The campaign is pretty short – about six hours, give or take – but there’s a comprehensive multiplayer suite with your typical ranking system and item unlocks, and all the suit-powers and weapons from the campaign. You may want to avoid using Quickmatch, as it threw me into a game in the UK, where I had a 700+ ping (I still totally came second. Yeaaaah) and instead rely on local servers – coincidentally, did you know games.on.net is running 25 Crysis 3 multiplayer servers right here in Australia? How about that.

There are also a whole bunch of story-related collectibles, if you really want to dig down into Crysis‘s pretty silly plot. Crysis 3 isn’t the greatest shooter ever made, but it’s hugely entertaining, lets you play creatively, and is currently the single best way to fry your video card. If that’s not a great reason to check it out then I don’t know what is.

Good:

• Look at those graphics.
• Seriously, look at those graphics.
• There’s also a game that goes with those graphics.
• And it’s pretty fun.

Bad:

• At least until you get to the driving sections
• Or the last couple chapters.

Special Forces: Team X might as well be called “A Video Game” for all the good a title that generic does, especially because it’s not entirely generic. Certainly, Special Forces isn’t the most original game around –- it’s a third-person cover-based shooter, for crying out loud -– but it has some new elements, and its execution is pretty darn solid.

Before you zip over and buy it, know that SFTX is multiplayer-only, and doesn’t come with a huge amount of content. Instead, SFTX relies on modular content to keep you interested. Whereas your Counter-Strikes and your Calls of Duty will have a handful of completely different maps, SFTX has a whole bunch of map pieces, each one-by-three in size, with three laid out next to each other to make a 3×3 grid map. You (and the other players) get to vote which map pieces make up the map in a given round.

The upside to this system is that quite a large number of possible map combinations exist, and the differing results can provide totally different play experiences. Some of the map segments emphasize lots of indoor, close-quarters combat, while others have big, open spaces littered with rubble to duck behind. The downside is that — due to the fact that they all have to be visually cohesive — it tends to feel like you’re stuck in the same place forever.

That modularity is shared by a broad range of character customisation options, with weapons, gadgets and aesthetic options unlocked through leveling up. So far there has been no obvious imbalance in the weapons, so playing a low-level character doesn’t feel like you’re at a severe disadvantage. You get rewarded with experience points for basically everything you do anyway, so growth is fast.

Special Forces: Team X really tries to play up the team-based aspect of the game, and to that end they increase your rewards if you stick together. But the range of what counts as sticking together is perhaps smaller than it ought to be, and as a result it can feel as though you’re being punished for trying a coordinated flank or for splitting the enemy’s fire. And some of the game’s various modes definitely fit the team-mentality more than others. Capture Point and High-Value Target (where one player is super valuable) certainly make buddying-up worthwhile, but Team Deathmatch tends to favour sides that don’t clump up for grenade volleys. Capture the Flag tends to devolve into a turtle-match, which is just sort of the nature of that game type anyway.

The cover and movement system is a little inconsistent. Sometime it feels great, and sliding against walls and rolling across the ground flows as naturally as an adorable, fresh-faced baby deer being swept downstream to its untimely demise at the hands of millions of litres of water.

And sometimes you find yourself asking why exactly the game thinks it’s fine to slide over the boxes here, but take half a step to the left, and the boxes are less inviting to your frictionless buttocks than the washed-up, bloated corpse of a baby deer, whose torso bursts open at the slightest nudge of your peachy pants-cheek, releasing toxic gasses that make you pass out and miss your graduation, and when you get home your mum asks you where your pants are and why you’re covered in gooey fur and if you’re on drugs and you have to live at Derrick’s house for a week.

Good:

• Effective modular map system
• Broad but fair character customization

Bad:

• Visually unchanging. Why is this construction site so important that they fight over it literally forever?
• Sometimes boxes love it when you slide over them. Sometimes they don’t.

Know what makes a great party game? Action RPGs like Diablo. You get to run around with friends, blowing up monsters and collecting sweet loot. They can be really hard, but often they reward you so frequently that every little roadblock gives you the chance to pick up some amazing new mace or helmet.

Know what else works well with some pals? Those LEGO movie-themed games. They’re simple, colourful, easy, and relatively brainless.

Where the two meet, you’ll find Dungeonland, a co-operative hack-n-slash that feels a little like Diablo burst through the seven layers of Hell and found only the colourful, simplified world of the LEGO games. Except things aren’t made of blocks, and… well, it’s not actually anywhere near as fun as that sounds.

Mechanically, Dungeonland sounds great on paper. There are three character classes – the Mage, Rogue and Warrior – and each has two special skills, a basic attack, and panic-button ability. The special skills can combine across classes to some extent to provide a well coordinated team an extra layer of potency. The skills, along with several passive things, can be tweaked via an in-game shop to change your style of play, too. You can be a hugely aggressive, in-your-face Rogue, or you can step back and be a little daintier, attacking from range and even dropping a barrel of potions for your injured friends-Rogue.

Sounds cool so far, but unfortunately a lot of the core skills – such as the Mage’s Ray of Awesome, which makes a target ally invulnerable for as long as you can keep casting it – are extremely passive. You cast it, and you can do nothing else but run around for as long as you want to keep it up. The Warrior has a passive shield-thing which makes him invulnerable too, and the same limitations apply. This means that playing as an effective team often means running around doing no damage but trying to keep a foe’s attention while your Rogue friend tries desperately to make up for all the damage you’re not doing.

Dungeonland is very much built for a coordinated team. If you don’t have some friends you play with regularly, you’re not likely to get very far. Dungeonland’s cartoony visuals mask very challenging gameplay. There are some AI-controlled bots, but even on the simplest difficulty they flounder uselessly. And unfortunately, you really need them to stay alive.

Failure is measured by a shared pool of lives. If an ally collapses and you can’t revive them in time, your entire team loses a life. If you’re out of lives and other ally dies, it’s game over. Even if you and the other ally are in perfect health. And when that happens, regardless of how far through the dungeon you were, it’s all over. You gotta start again.

There are three dungeon-styles currently available, all of which ooze personality and play on fantasy and theme-park tropes wonderfully, and a Dungeon Maestro mode, which is far and away Dungeonland‘s highlight. Rather than fight trolls on the battlefield, Dungeon Maestro gives you a birds-eye view of the dungeon, and the ability to place traps, spawn monsters and generally screw over the players in the dungeon. It’s hugely fun, but not especially well-tuned. It’s typically super easy to wipe out three players in a few short minutes, even on one of the lower difficulty levels. Dungeonland does not favour players in the actual dungeons.

There are lots of unlockables, both aesthetic and functional. In particular, each class has a couple unlockable variants, and most of the best stuff for Dungeon Maestro mode is locked behind a stack of coins (which you can actually earn quite easily). But given the overly-passive and often overly-punishing nature of Dungeonland, it may not hold your interest long enough for you to bother.

Good:

• Loaded with personality.
• Dungeon Maestro mode makes ruining friendships a blast.

Bad:

• Skills feel very passive and unheroic.
• Very punishing, especially when you’re playing solo.

Our review copy of Dungeonland generously provided by Green Man Gaming, where you can buy Dungeonland for a mere $9.99. Thanks, GMG!

We have four copies of Dungeonland to give away in a secret competition! To enter, leave a comment on this article that uses the words ‘Ray of Awesome’ somewhere inside. We’ll pick four winners at random at midnight tonight and send them PMs with their game codes. Tee hee!

The old chocolate-and-peanut butter adage states that two good things can sometimes combine to create something far greater than the sum of its parts. FORGE, a Kickstarter failure but Steam Greenlight alumnus is banking on this premise.

FORGE is an online multiplayer class-based shooter in the same vein as games like Team Fortress 2, but with a little twist — it uses mechanics and tropes pulled from fantasy MMOs.

There are five classes available: Assassin, a high-damage melee stealth character capable of removing a player from battle for short periods of time; Pathfinder, a long-range bow-wielding class with poisons, traps and snares; Pyromancer, a ranged damage-dealer with strong area-of-effect damage capabilities and high mobility; Shaman, a support character with very little potential damage output but plenty of healing; and Warden, a tanky, protective character that excels at disrupting enemies and strengthening allies.

Each of the characters is beautifully rendered and animated, as are their spell effects and the environments that make up each battleground. FORGE confidently showcases its own art style that sits somewhere between RIFT and Age of Conan, and never strays or shifts in visual quality. You could easily be forgiven for thinking that art was a huge priority for FORGE, especially once you start playing (or take a look at the credits and see dozens of artists and almost no game designers).

FORGE has a few really cool gameplay features. All characters can wall-jump, and maps are to some extent designed with that added mobility in mind. The Pyromancer can even do a rocket-jump style ability to get to normally out-of-reach positions. Some of the maps, like the medieval town one, provide a lot of interesting gameplay options just by virtue of being able to reach the roofs of the buildings.

But the core combat mechanics feel sloppy and unintuitive. There’s a cross-hair in the centre of your screen that, were this a typical shooter, would function as an indicator of the trajectory of your projectiles. But in FORGE it functions more like the targeting circle on a World of Warcraft-style MMO – you can’t throw a fireball at a rat if you don’t have the rat selected in WoW, just as you can’t fire an arrow if you didn’t have someone pinpointed on your screen when you clicked the button.

This results in some odd scenarios where an enemy strafing back and forth from behind a wall is easier to hit when you’re targeting them behind the wall. The game redirects the arrow’s trajectory mid-flight if they step out because it’s essentially locked-on.

This gets especially weird for abilities with casting times, like the Shaman’s heal. It feels like whoever is under your cross-hair at the end of the cast should be the one getting healed, but it’s whoever was under it at the start, even if it was no one at all. It also means that you can click heal over someone, turn almost 180 degrees away from them, and they’ll still feel the benefits. The system undermines the responsiveness of FORGE‘s movement almost entirely.

Then there’s the default control layout which, in an effort to be more ergonomic, is spread across the keys around WASD, even though the on-screen hotbar looks very traditional. It’s certain to feel totally unnatural for any experienced MMO player. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it potentially asks you to undo years of muscle-memory.

Players get experience points for various in-match activities which can be used to buy level-ups for any of the character classes. A level-up doesn’t actually make you stronger necessarily, but it lets you customise a character’s stats, like armour values, movement speed or energy pool. Increasing one stat requires you to decrease another.

Having a level-up system in an MMO works because it actually makes you stronger, gives you a reason to keep playing, and allows you to learn the mechanics of the game at a comfortable pace. Having a similar mechanic in a classless shooter like Call of Duty works too for the same reasons. In a class-based shooter, however, it has the potential to really discourage varied play and on-the-fly class switches to better suit your team. The end result can be (and has been) matches with four Pathfinders, three Assassins and nothing else.

Leveling up a character is meant to unlock “focus skills” which  new skills that you can swap in over a skill you perhaps don’t use very much. They’re not actually implemented  right now though. Neither, for that matter, is the ability to choose your server, or your map, or your game type. The end result is the overwhelming impression that FORGE is pretty… but also pretty incomplete.

Good:

• Strong and consistent visuals
• Nifty mobility options and interesting level design

Bad:

• Combat is unintuitive at its very core
• Entire features are missing

FORGE is available on Steam for $19.99.

Reviewing an MMO expansion is sort of like giving a game a physical. It’s an opportunity to look at the new content that the expansion has added to the game (which, for a World of Warcraft expansion, is never a small amount), but also to look at the state of the MMO as a whole. Because, as more and more content is added to the same product, there’s always a risk that a game might lose its direction or momentum, or make older content completely irrelevant. A really good expansion will find a way to not only make advancement fun, but create a new experience for players who want to go back to their roots.

Mists of Pandaria goes about this through three different methods.

First: The addition of the Monk class means that players can level their way up to the newly elevated level cap of 90 with a  whole new set of skills. The Monk is a very versatile character, somewhat akin to the Paladin in terms of flexibility. Each specialization option conforms to one of the three group roles of tank, healer or damage-dealer. Being a leather-wearing class, the tank option, called the Brewmaster, doesn’t have the raw damage-mitigation of the Warrior or Deathknight and instead relies on the ability to redirect damage back at enemies. Brewmasters also passively delay portions of incoming damage, letting healers keep them alive through bursty situations. Mistweavers, the Monk’s healing option, blend their heals with damage, but at the cost of not being able to focus their heals as effectively as a Priest. The damage-dealing Windwalker option focuses on melee damage and high mobility.

It’s a fun class to use, and the flexibility means you’re never without a function in a group, but the rate at which players acquire new skills makes the early levels quite tedious. The fact that you also have to level one from scratch, unlike the Death Knight which unlocked and started at level 55, means that the fun of a Monk is mostly limited by how well you can tolerate levelling through old content for the umpteenth time.

This is where the second method of reinvigorating leveling comes into play – the Pandaren race. Players, regardless of whether they’ve actually purchased the expansion or not, can now play as the fluffy, beer-gutted joke race subtly introduced in Warcraft III. The Pandaren have potentially one of the most powerful racial abilities in the game – Epicurian – which doubles the statistical benefits of eating food. Any high-level player knows how important maintaining a food buff can be. They also come with a short-duration crowd-control ability, take reduced fall damage, and gain a boost to their rested experience rate. This, at least, should make leveling a new Pandaren character a little quicker.

Pandaren players begin on a new sub-continent called The Wandering Isle. It’s a fairly small, highly polished island set on the back of a turtle, and Blizzard has nailed the aesthetic. It’s colourful and varied, and the sight of the giant turtle flippers flapping in the water is highly memorable. But as an introductory zone, it’s not one of the best. It’s a little too polished, leaving players following a very linear path with little reason to stray and explore and learn on their own. The zone also leaves the introduction of the two warring factions too late and doesn’t really explain what the ideologies of the factions are. Not an issue for experienced players, sure, but a newcomer may find themselves choosing their faction based mostly on the description slapped in front of them at the end of the quest line, and not based on experience. Seeing more of each faction in action would have made the choice more impactful.

Once your choice is made, it’s back to your standard Azeroth, with one difference – the third feature to cut through that leveling tedium – the Pet Battle System. From level 5, players can get training which allows them to use their non-combat pets in, well, combat. It’s a turn-based battle system where each pet has a type and a selection of abilities, each with their own type as well. Some types are stronger against others. In addition to the pets you can acquire through questing, from vendors, or are mailed to you for buying games or cards, a lot of pets are found in the wild. In fact, the strongest pets tend to only be found in the wild, and only if you’re lucky. The Pet Battle System is genuinely a lot of fun, even if it is a blatant rip-off of a certain Nintendo property. The ability to match-make battles at any time, and with any level of pets, is a really nice addition. And even with the slow-pace of combat, fights can still be exhilarating, often coming right down to the wire.

But let’s face it. No one is buying Mists of Pandaria because they really love pets or pandas. They want to push their characters up to the new level cap of 90, to explore the titular Pandaria, obtain new loot, do new quests, dungeons and raids.

Pandaria is, without a doubt, the most beautiful landscape in World of Warcraft so far. Every expansion brings something new to the table visually, and Mists hasn’t broken that streak. Each area in Pandaria has its own unique visual style, be it massive stone spires topped with cascading trees, open green plains ripe for farming, rolling foothills that lead to intimidating snow-covered mountains, or a piece of once-beautiful land ruined and darkened by conflict and the living manifestations of hate and aggression. No part of Pandaria is unappealing, and no part is lacking in detail. A huge amount of care went into crafting the land, and the most exciting part of the expansion for me was when I could finally scour the land on my flying mount, admiring all the subtleties I missed from the ground.

But the same care wasn’t taken with questing. Mists, for the most part, deemphasized the vehicle system introduced in Wrath and used heavily in Cataclysm. The great majority of quests in Mists involve you killing something, collecting something, or collecting something from something you just killed. And the framing of these quests is inconsistent. Sometimes a quest will show an entertaining, complex cinematic that totally puts you in the mood to go slice some bugs up, and sometimes an NPC gives you a half-assed, occasionally typo-ridden, bit of dialogue. It’s a shame, really, because the quests that try something new, like the martial-arts training montage, do so much to add to the feel of Pandaria.

There’s also a distinct lack of difficulty in Pandaria’s questing. The only times I felt challenged were when I brought that challenge on myself. Vanilla World of Warcraft would regularly put you in situations where you couldn’t reliably fight one enemy without having to deal with two of its friends at the same time. With Mists, Blizzard seems to actively avoid giving you tough situations like that, and instead loads your enemies up with extra health and high-damage, but easily avoidable, abilities. I felt no more challenged doing level 85 quests than level 90 quests, and found the most enjoyable part of questing to be when I stumbled upon a rare enemy intended for small groups, and took it out solo.

The endgame is what most WoW players are concerned about, though, and Mists comes packed with the standard array of heroic dungeons, raids and PvP. The new PvP maps are actually very enjoyable, and provide two completely new game-types. One is a murderball-style format where players hold an object as long as they can, but with four potential balls up for grabs. It’s chaotic and enjoyable, but highly favors teams with dedicated healers. The other is a capture-point map, but the points are mobile and move along set tracks. Think the Payload maps on TF2, except there are three payloads, and they appear at the beginning once they reach their destination. This is, in my opinion, the more enjoyable of the two. It splits the action up in a manageable way and encourages interesting team movement and composition.

Scenarios are the other major addition to World of Warcraft’s endgame lineup. These are mini-dungeons for teams of three, tuned for whatever roles you have available. Some follow silly side-stories while others further progress the expansion’s story arc of factional conflict. They fill a niche for players who feel intimidated by tougher group content, but for everyone else, the rewards are negligible and the challenge almost non-existent.

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria is a very solid expansion. Some say the best yet, and while that point could certainly be argued, I believe that Mists falls just shy of the high water mark left by some of the previous expansions. In trying to cater to everyone, Mists at times forgets to service the hardcore, the people who have been subscribers for almost eight years. But if you’ve been playing World of Warcraft for that long, you probably don’t mind the occasionally flat quest or easy leveling, because you’re already chasing epics on a new class, from a new race, in a new world.

Good:

• Pandaria is gorgeous
• Pet battles are the surprise hit
• Two brand new PvP battlegrounds, and they’re both entertaining

Bad:

• Quests and storytelling swing in quality between superb and lazy
• There’s little to challenge experienced players

Let’s just get this out of the way now: the Pet Battle System introduced in World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria is a massive Pokemon ripoff. And that’s totally fine by me. For years, fans of the Pokemon franchise have cried out for a Pokemon MMO. The thought of an open world filled with hundreds of adorable little monsters to find, battle, collect and train is tantalizing at the very least and yet Nintendo has never capitalized on it.

Well, you snooze you lose, Nintendo. Blizzard stepped up to the plate and has mimicked the Pokemon model, or at least the core elements of it, to a tee. The little non-combat pets players have been able to collect since World of Warcraft’s launch now each come with a potential move-set of six abilities, and a passive ability determined by the creature’s type. Mechanical creatures, for example, will revive themselves after they’re killed with a small amount of health, while beast-types will deal extra damage when their health drops below a certain threshold.

Stats are simplified down to health, damage and speed, and each pet can only use up to three different abilities in battle, making the whole system much simpler than Pokemon’s. But that doesn’t mean it’s actually simple. There’s complexity to the Pet Battle System, and it stems from the way pet abilities can affect the battlefield. Only in recent years have Pokemon games begun to experiment with persistent effects, whereas WoW has happily adopted weather effects, lingering poison clouds, and healing mists that remain regardless of who switches in or out of the fight.

The result is a system which, thanks to the huge number of pets out there to use, gives players a gigantic number of feasible team composition options.

I’ve experimented with damage-over-time teams and teams with lots of evasion. My current setup is built around outlasting the opponent through copious healing and damage-over-time. And it’s extremely easy to see how well your team stacks up against others, as the in-built matchmaking does a surprisingly good job of pairing you up against a team of approximately equal strength.

There’s a whole series of sub-quests that will take you across all of the continents to battle AI-controlled trainers too, though the difficulty curve seems to have a few speedbumps. Unlike the Pokemon games, which often makes levelling your pets feel like a side-effect of your journey across the region, most players will probably find times when they have to buckle-down and grind out a few pet levels. And while there are many, many pets to catch, unlock and level, the locked-down skill system means that you won’t ever really be able to surprise your opponent with a fire-elemental that spits ice.

That said, of everything in Mists of Pandaria, the Pet Battle System has attracted the most interest from me, if not the most time. I instinctively check my my mini-map for new pets, and become actively excited when I encounter a powerful new one. And unlike the PvP or Dungeon systems, Pet Battles are something I can do while I’m having my lunch or waiting for the rest of my guild. It’s a Pokemon ripoff, yes, but it’s a well-executed one that fills a niche without feeling overtly tacked-on. Kudos.

Mists of Pandaria marks the fourth expansion for World of Warcraft, a game that has been around for close to eight years. Despite World of Warcraft‘s long reign as the most popular subscription-based MMO, it’s tough to ignore the shifting trends of its slowly shrinking audience. These first days in Pandaria have shown, quite starkly, the effects that other high-profile MMO launches have on World of Warcraft since it reached its launch-peak with Cataclysm.

Anyone who had played during a previous expansion launch will recall how chaotic it is. Thousands of players funneling into a couple of specific zones, all competing for a limited number of quest objectives. You can barely get anything done, because it feels like every possible monster spawn-point is being camped round-the-clock, even during off-peak times.

Mists, by contrast, has felt quite empty. There are still people, but the terrain isn’t crawling with them the way it had in Cataclysm, Wrath of the Lich King or The Burning Crusade — and the last two even split players into different areas in an effort to make it less chaotic. Pandaria only has one primary arrival area. That’s not to say that it’s bad, because everything I’ve played so far has lived up to Blizzard’s high standards, and many innovations from other MMOs in the last couple years have been implemented to various degrees. But it does feel a little sad. Even the Pandaren starting area lacks hordes of new Pandaren Monks.

Putting that aside, there have been relatively few launch issues with Mists of Pandaria. Servers have mostly been stable, and although I’ve seen screenshots of hilarious-looking bugs that cropped up in the first few hours (see above), I have personally only experienced a minor issue where the victory theme from the Pet Battle System looped instead of actual battle music.

Actually, the Pet Battle System has attracted more of my time over the past couple days than it perhaps should have. Anyone who had paid attention to Blizzard’s announcement of the feature knew how similar to a certain monster-filled Nintendo series it sounded, and the reality is that it is indeed basically a Pokemon side-quest.

And it’s great. I’m genuinely, unironically enjoying it.

And, strangely, although Cataclysm‘s setup seemed darker and everything leading up to Pandaria seemed to be quite tongue-in-cheek, the general tone has been much more grim than most of what we’ve seen in World of Warcraft. There’s no looming threat like Arthas or Deathwing — instead it’s you and your faction causing strife in what was previously a very peaceful land.

After this long playing World of Warcraft on and off I was ready to go into Mists and hate everything about it, but I’m slowly being charmed. There are certainly some questionable elements – some of the dialogue and accents strike me as, well, a little racist – but World of Warcraft‘s undeniable charm is ever-present. And while some of the usability upgrades Blizzard added in the past, such as the Raid Finder, have been controversial, the changes to the Talent and Glyph systems seem to be almost universally preferred, and have made playing my mage a substantially more varied experience.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Pandaria has on offer, so look forward to a review in a few weeks where Pandaria is thoroughly disassembled for your reading pleasure.

How is Pandaria going for you? Share your experiences in the comments!

In case you haven’t been paying any attention in the last year or so, Blizzard has another World of Warcraft expansion on the way. World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria is due out in a matter of weeks (the 25th to be precise), and with it comes the introduction of the first new class since the Death Knight, and the first new class that is immediately playable regardless of your progress. The class? The Monk.

Tying in with Mists‘ whole Eastern-culture-theme, the Monk is a martial-arts expert. It’s a leather-wearing class like the Druid, even at the level cap, and also like the Druid class, the Monk is hugely flexible — able to fill almost any gap in a group.

Unlike the Druid though, the Monk can’t switch roles at will in quite the same way. And the Monk has a new resource system revolving around Chi (it’s changed a lot since its introduction at BlizzCon last year), which is earned by a few moves and spent by several others. Monks also use the energy system, unless they take on their healing role, which swaps the energy for standard mana.

The three possible talent specialization options available for the Monk are the Brewmaster, suitable for tanking, the Mistweaver, suitable for healing and the Windwalker, which is your damage-dealing option.

What the Brewmaster lacks in raw damage-mitigation, he makes up for in utility. The Brewmaster has a spammable area-of-effect slow that deals high threat and has a chance to make the enemies caught in it hurt themselves instead of whoever they’re attacking (probably you!). He also has ways to direct damage around the battlefield, and can create his own personal damage-absorbing shield. He’s still quite squishy, but passively delays a portion of incoming damage, which gives healers an extra window to keep him alive.

The Mistweaver puts a large emphasis on heal-over-time spells, and many of the Mistweaver’s spells will automatically choose their target, or jump between players. Playing a Mistweaver consists of some elements that may ring familiar to Shaman players, as Mistweavers can drop structures that heal nearby allies. Mistweavers also have quite decent damage potential, as healing stats are simultaneously converted into damage stats while in Wise Serpent stance. Mistweaver players gain all this at the cost of bursty healing and the ability to control their heals as well as a Priest might. But, Mistweavers get to drop green balls of healing power for allies to run over. So that’s pretty cool.

Windwalkers are going to be an absolute pain in PvP, as they’re extraordinarily mobile. Flying Serpent Kick, for example, sends the Monk flying forward for a surprisingly large distance. He can then hit the ground anywhere along the path, dealing damage and substantially slowing any nearby foes. The Windwalker also has ways to redirect damage, though whereas the Brewmaster is happy to direct it away from allies and towards him, the Windwalker is all about flipping that damage back on his foe.

Perhaps you’re wondering if the Monk is right for you. The best way to describe the playstyle is somewhere between the Death Knight’s methodical rune system, and the Rogue’s burst capabilities. To play a Monk effectively, you have to carefully choose how to generate and spend your Chi, as Chi is used for your core skills, and your ability to generate it is limited by your energy supply. It’s a much faster, more tactile class than what we’re used to in WoW, and leveling one up should be a good deal of fun — but 85 levels is a big gap to close to catch up to your friends.

With Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet has polished the entire MMO experience into something seamless and beautiful. Advancement in the multitude of systems in Guild Wars 2 is as simple as playing the game however you normally would…

…with one exception.

The crafting system in Guild Wars 2, while pretty simple, is tuned in such a way that actually leveling it up at the same rate as your character takes some planning and a little discipline on your part. In most MMOs, leveling up crafting is a case of finding the cheapest but highest-level recipe you can craft, and making it over and over again until another cheap, high-level crafting option opens up.

Guild Wars 2 still has some of that, but with the recipe discovery system — which requires you to semi-blindly place recipes into a crafting window and hope for the best — the big emphasis, and the fastest way to level your crafting, is on experimentation.

With the exception of the Chef skill, which has its own set of patterns, all of the crafting skills have a fairly easy method for advancement. It sounds strange, but the best way to boost your crafting is to craft as infrequently as possible.

As tempting as it might be to use your materials as soon as you acquire them, the best way to advance is to only refine raw materials until you no longer advance from it (you can stop when the option becomes blue too, usually), then do the same for creating the crafting components from those refined materials. This is where it gets a bit tricky though, because a lot of crafting professions have a lot of options here.

To make the absolute most out of the materials you have, you need to spread your crafting out across virtually all of your options. Discovering new recipes, which is best done by using the same dozen refined materials and components in different combinations, awards vastly more experience than repeatedly crafting the same item, even if it’s a strong one. So, if you’re a leatherworker, you would want to refine all your cloth and leather scraps into bolts and leather squares until you gain little or no experience from it. Then you want to go through your list of possible crafting options (shoulder padding, shoulder straps etc) and spread your materials fairly evenly across them.

This includes making insignias, because that’s where most of your discoveries come from. Be very careful with the insignias, too: the materials are expensive. Once you’ve got, say, three of each crafting option and several of each insignia, it’s just a case of systematically making as many new combinations in the discovery tab as you can. You should get a couple skill levels per discovery, and it should get you up to the next tier of materials, or at least very close.

The downside to this method is that most of those crafted goods are likely to be several levels lower than whatever enemies are dropping. But you can simply sell the goods on the Trading Post, or break them down back into their raw materials and sell those instead.

The upside, and its a pretty massive upside, is that you should always be caught-up in crafting by the time you reach the next tier of materials in your exploration. You should also even get a few free level-ups just from crafting, and it’s one of the easiest ways to fulfill the experience-without-dying requirement for your monthly achievement.

Have fun!

A lot of really excellent games have come out since World of Warcraft‘s last expansion, Cataclysm. One of those games was even from Blizzard themselves. So even if you, like I, have not really involved yourself in World of Warcraft since seeing what Deathwing did to Azeroth, there’s still time to catch up before checking out World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria.

Time away from an MMO can make it difficult to get back in. Stat gaps form, players change, and sometimes entire systems undergo revamps. World of Warcraft also features an actively evolving world and storyline, which can make it even tougher to know where you stand. Here’s the absolute basics to ensure you’re not totally lost come September 25.

The World…

Deathwing has been defeated, and as of right now there are no overarching threats to the inhabitants of Azeroth. This time of relative peace has, ironically, allowed the tension between the two player factions of the Horde and the Alliance to build.

Varian Wrynn, the king of Stormwind, has firmly positioned himself at odds with the Horde, though he isn’t acting outwardly hostile like the Horde’s new warchief Garrosh Hellscream. Hellscream, in fact, has been vying for a full-on war with the Alliance since Wrath of the Lich King, and in Mists of Pandaria that looks set to occur.

His outlandish, warmongering behaviour has become so volatile that neither faction can really abide him, and Blizzard has revealed that he will in fact be the final boss of the upcoming expansion (the Deathwing of Mists, if you will). Bearing that in mind, Horde players are still obliged to follow his rule until then — as traitors and challengers to his title have been known to be quickly cut down. Alliance players can keep doing whatever they like, really. Their leadership is fine (and boring!).

…and you

If it’s been a while since you’ve played, your character has likely undergone some pretty sweeping changes.

The talent system has gone from a complex tree that ultimately feels like a maths puzzle, to a hyper-basic choice every 15 levels. Talents no longer provide passive benefits like increased damage, but are instead a specialized, and often very powerful, new ability. Some of these harken back to the older talent system from days of yore, but many are new, and the system puts far less emphasis on filling a single role as much as providing avenues of flexibility.

For passive increases, the Glyph system has been reworked to provide a much greater difference in the Major Glyph slots, and minor cosmetic changes (such as goofy polymorph options for mages) in the Minor Glyph slots.

Everyone now has vast amounts of gold, but that’s okay, because gold is mostly useless (until the Black Market comes with Mists). If you want to buy gear or do basically anything, you’ll need to collect one of the many, many other currencies floating around such as Valor. Some of the old currencies you might have had have also probably been converted into something more useful.

Engaging in content and finding social circles is also much more streamlined, as in addition to the Dungeon Finder function from Wrath of the Lich King, there is now a Raid Finder and a Guild Finder.

If you still can’t find someone to play with despite all these tools at your disposal, then chances are you aren’t actually playing World of Warcraft and might accidentally be spacing out while staring at a WoW-themed mousepad or something.

A great number of changes and additions are still yet to come with the launch of Mists, but you still have until the 25th to get to grips with those. Stay tuned as we explore more of Blizzard’s newest world.

Five years after its initial announcement, Guild Wars 2 is officially live. You are no doubt chomping at the bit to start killing gigantic fire elementals, but before you step into Tyria and leave all your Earthen friends behind indefinitely, there are a few basics you should be aware of.

Explore Everywhere

Guild Wars 2 is quite gorgeous looking, and ArenaNet wants to make sure you know this. That’s why they’ve hidden little secrets all over the world. Sometimes it’s a chest at the end of a jump-puzzle with some decent loot, and sometimes it’s a vista – a special marker that shows a short cinematic of the local area. There are also plenty of semi-secret events off the beaten track that dole out plenty of experience. Don’t just follow your story markers; explore all you can and you’ll be greatly rewarded.

Experiment With Crafting

Most MMO crafting systems are pretty straightforward – you learn a recipe, which tells you exactly what you need to craft and item, and once you’ve got all the necessary materials, you slap it together. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t work that way. To make the most of crafting here, you’ve got to blindly try to combine some items at your crafting workstation. Guild Wars 2 will give you some hints and help you narrow down your materials into a craftable item, but its still up to you to try interesting item combinations.

Use All Your Weapons

Unlike other online games, Guild Wars 2 doesn’t require that you hit certain levels to learn your core abilities. Instead, they’re all tied to the weapons your profession can use. Even if the sword you’re currently using is a little stronger than the bow you just picked up, try switching to the bow. You can learn new abilities by killing a few enemies with it, and it’s a good idea to get some sense of what weapon is able to bring to the killing fields. Try experimenting with different combinations of one-handers too, as they can completely shift a profession’s playstyle.

Do Everything

There is a lot to do in Tyria, and it’s all worth doing. Guild Wars 2 keeps track of how much you have done in each area of the world, and gives very good rewards to players who complete entire areas. Be sure to visit all the points of interest and vistas, and absolutely chase down every skill-point marker, as they are core to your character’s advancement. And try to do all the major events in a zone, because that tends to be the most effective way to level up. If you manage to max out a zone, look forward to some sweet loot and a load of cash and experience.

Fight For Your World

You don’t have to be high-level to compete in PvP. In fact, you can do it from the get-go. If melting faces is your pastime of choice then check out the World vs World (vs World) feature in Guild Wars 2. It pits three servers against each other in massive, open-world, objective-driven combat. Help your world hold key points on the map and everyone will enjoy powerful benefits to all aspects of gameplay, from crafting to damage reduction.

Generally, when you’re buying a PC port of a console game, you’re doing it for one of two reasons: you don’t own that console and the game is so amazing that you need to have it anyway, or the port offers an excellent selection of graphical options and upgrades. Maybe down the line, the ability to mod the game in weird and wonderful ways will come into play, too.

For Darksiders II, right off the bat, we can eliminate the second reason. The PC port offers only the ability to change your screen resolution. The visuals are otherwise identical to its console counterparts. That, however, is not the greatest sin of Darksiders II.

There are shockingly few strong action-RPGs of the Darksiders variety on the PC, likely for the same reason that there are so few fighting games: human hands don’t bend on a keyboard the way they’re needed to in order to pull off the button combos so central to these games. It’s uncomfortable and clumsy, and as Darksiders II has no option to customize key layouts (update: tehwes points out in the comments that you can un-intuitively do it from an in-game menu apparently, just not the main one) and the default key settings are unintuitive, your best bet is to plug in a gamepad or Xbox360 controller. It’s not completely unplayable with a keyboard and mouse, but it is pretty close.

Assuming that you’re now looking at Darksiders II for reason number one – you’ve only got a PC and you think you’ll like the game – then Darksiders II may actually provide you with many hours of enjoyment. The aesthetics are colourful and exaggerated, and shift greatly in tone after the first major part of the game, and while the story threads that are intended to push you from dungeon to dungeon are little more than whisps, the dungeons themselves are full of clever platform puzzles and really test your spatial-awareness. They’re also lovingly designed and crafted — visual details and gameplay clues are everywhere, and an intelligent layout means you rarely retrace your steps.

Combat is fast and responsive, but lacks some variety. Most advanced moves are timing-based and other than the abilities you get from skill-points, which all have a Wrath cost associated with them and as such can’t really become a core part of your combos, they’re store-bought — making them feel optional and mostly unnecessary. Instead, loot is used to spice up the swordplay (or scytheplay?), which does a fine job but never delivers that Diablo moment where your jaw drops at the sheer numbers.

There’s a certain formula that Darksiders II follows which it stoically refuses to break. For lack of a better word, we’ll call it the Zelda formula. Essentially, it’s the “you need the magical pebble of Steve the Merciless – it’s in that dungeon over there” formula. There’s a moment towards the middle of the game where you’re sent to fight in an arena. Sweet, sounds like it’s time for some epic boss battles, right?

Nope! It’s a series of three mini-dungeons to find some dumb crystals. Zelda games follow the same formula, but break it up with a richly fleshed-out world full of silly and serious side-quests and mini-games. Darksiders II only has its combat, for better or worse. If you’re alright with that, then absolutely check it out.

Good:

• Clever, efficient dungeons.
• An appealing and unifying art-style.
• Swift, frantic combat.

Bad:

• Nearly unplayable without a gamepad.
• Highly formulaic. Though if you really love the formula, this could be excellent!

Darksiders II is available on Steam for $49.99.

Inversion, The Gears of War-style cover-based shooter, has at last come to PC after releasing for consoles back in June. If you’re unfamiliar with Inversion, it’s basically a game for bros, where bros bro it up together (bro-ily). It also features gravity-manipulation as its core gameplay twist, and makes sure you use it, for better or worse, about once every thirty seconds.

Players fill the shoes of Davis Russell who, on his way home from work as a police officer in Vanguard City, happens upon the curious sight of painted men with guns killing innocent civilians. He and his partner rush to the aid of the civilians by blasting these painted men in the face and extremities (all of which pop like grapes) with shotguns. Yet not all is as it seems and hell begins to break loose, resulting in the hasty fall of humanity and a life of servitude under the Lutadors – the apparently-alien race these painted men are members of. From here, Davis and his partner must break out of prison and wreak havok on their new overlords.

Inversion suffers from terrible-beginning-syndrome (Cure TBS now!), and the first half of the game is horribly generic. The stages for gunplay are simple and straightforward, and while that doesn’t necessarily change later, the addition of certain gravity elements and free-floating zones begin to complicate things. Also, the story is absolutely ludicrous until you learn a key fact towards the end of the game. That said, even the big reveal doesn’t explain why Davis is completely obsessed with his daughter’s kidnapping, but showed no apparent grief for the death of his wife in the first ten minutes of the game. It also doesn’t explain why a fully-grown, highly-trained police officer needs a second fully-grown, highly-trained police officer to help him lift a roller-door every five minutes.

If you’re going to pick up Inversion, you’re going to pick it up for the gravity-themed mechanics, which vary in quality. The “Gravlink” tends to function basically like the gravity-gun from Half-Life 2 with an additional lock-down ability, and estimating its area-of-effect can be difficult and can result in some frustrating moments.  The free-floating areas, on the other hand, provide new territory for the cover-based shooter genre, and can make choosing when to slide between spots of cover challenging and rewarding. There’s also something weirdly satisfying about watching an enemy spiral away after being shot between platforms.

The Gravity Anomalies which hurl the player into new gravitational vectors provide some stellar-looking moments (like running down the side of a sky-scraper as a firefight happens on the ground), but are ultimately underutilized as a gameplay mechanic due to Inversion’s ultra-linear design. There’s never a moment where you get to flip back and forth between Gravity Anomalies as you’re swarmed by enemies, trying to get the best angle or lose them behind interestingly-placed cover. They end up being used mostly for the brief disorienting effect.

Coming from the consoles, Inversion has a decent set of compatibility options, with a few different shadow and texture quality settings to choose from, and the ability to toggle on or off various fancy lighting and anti-aliasing options. It’s nowhere near as many as your standard PC exclusive, but it’s more than many other recent ports have offered. And it runs extremely well, though it’s also not exactly a graphical powerhouse. If your PC was top-of-the-line three or four years ago, you should have no problems popping a few Lutador heads.

Good:

• Free-floating areas breathe fresh air into cover-based shooter’s withered old lungs.
• It gets better after the first half.
• The crazy reveal kind of makes most of the plot oddities (and the whole gravity mechanic) make sense! Kind of…

Bad:

• Some of the dialogue may make you cringe so hard your teeth explode in your mouth.
• Most of the gravity mechanics are underutilized or end up being simple puzzle-fodder.
• It doesn’t necessarily get better-enough after the first half to make playing the first half worth it.