Ah video games, the perfect addition to sedentary afternoon.

A good two years ago, we gamers were blessed with “Dead Space”, a nice little third person shooter for the Xbox 360 and PS3. The game was full of blood and guts and had a pretty gripping story line that would be right at home with any number of horror flicks.

If you’re a TV watcher, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the ad campaign for the sequel, i.e. “Your’e Mom’s Gonna Hate It”. The commercials promise even more gruesome game play and a full fledged continuation of the story. As of last week, the game was released to the public and we were able to find out if our mom’s would indeed hate the game.

I’m a long way from being done with the game but from what I’ve seen in 3 chapters? It’s pretty damn great!

As for the mechanics of the game, much of it is identical to our run through the Ishimura back in 2008. The controls handle the same. The seat of your pants trek through dark and shadowy corridor game play is the same. There really wasn’t anything wrong with the first game in these departments, so there’s nothing wrong with reusing it once again. Things are so close, you can access your original upgraded Plasma Gun from your “Dead Space” game save!

There are a few new additions to the formula, such as quick time events if you find yourself pinned down by a creature. These are simple so they don’t become to troublesome. The other big improvement comes in the graphics department which is flat out great. The dark steel environments of the game come to life in smooth high res graphics and all of it ties together to make a damn engrossing story. Those high res graphics help make this one hell of a gory game as well!

After three chapters of game play, this is obviously not a full review. It is enough for me to confidently say ‘this game is awesome, go play it now!’. The scenes are all filled with tension and foreboding and makes for some of my favorite ‘horror gaming’ I’ve had on the 360 in awhile. You all know me…I’m a bit jaded with all the horror movies I’ve watched and reviewed over the years. Dead Space 2? This one has made me jump a dozen times so far! Sure, a lot of the jumps are due to the cheapest b-movie ploys known to man. They deploy them in great fashion though!

So consider this a preview as I don’t have any more time to spend talking bout it. I have a few more chapters to tackle before the day winds down!

Quick Edit: Holy crap, I just found this awesome Dead Space 2 Rig Hoodie over at the Visceral Studios Store. Time to figure out how to talk the wife into letting me blow $60 on a sweatshirt!

The Xbox world has been graced with a bunch of new titles as of late. For the consummate gamer, it’s been a good time! I was recently disappointed by the length of Lucas Arts’ latest Force Unleashed venture so my take on the latest slate of games was a bit bleak. Thankfully, Namco came out with Enslaved: Odyssey to the West which promised a lot of platforming combat and got the message boards talking. Being a big fan of blindly bashing stuff and climbing walls in new and interesting ways in my video games, I decided to give it a shot.

To dive straight in here, Enslaved is pretty great all around. The graphics and environments are top notch. The combat can be a bit repetitive over time but at it’s base, it’s solid so that makes it pretty decent. The platforming portion is good; it’s varied and mixes in a lot of well thought out puzzles to work through. There’s two pieces that make this game good though; the story and the motion capture used to bring our main characters Monkey and Trip to life.

You all remember Andy Serkis right? The guy that brought Gollum to life and has proven himself to be a master of the motion capture arts? Well, he’s at it again as the man of the hour, Monkey. Everything from facial expressions to body movements are top notch and help to pull you in. Joining him his Lindsey Shaw as Trip. If you have young ones in your house, you may recognize Ms. Shaw from “Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide”. If you don’t have kids, you may not know her so well. She does a great job though as trip!

As for the story, Enslaved throws us into a post apocalyptic future where we join Monkey and Trip as they try and escape from a slave ship. Based loosely on the Chinese novel “Journey to the West”, this disastrous setting is our own. The game opens in the overgrown wastes of New York City. Trip wants to get home to her father who is over three hundred miles away. Knowing she can’t make the trip on her own, she slips a slave control band on an unconscious Monkey and forces her to help him home. The character dynamics between Serkis and Shaw are top notch. You’ll find yourself feeling sorry for the two as you play along. You’ll even find yourself laughing quite a bit too. It’s not all heavy handed drama here.

As for game play, we spend the entirety of the game as Monkey helping Trip to get home. The two work together to solve various puzzles and make their way through the ruins of the city. Throwing in the concept of using two characters to make their way through the game is a nice change to the standard run and gun or ‘parkour’ antics of other games. Large parts of it are pretty straight forward but you will spend quite a bit of time sitting back to think your way through a given situation.

While nothing earth shattering, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is a solid single player game that will scratch quite a few itches. You’ll have some thinking to do, a story to enjoy and some bots to beat the crap out of. What more do you need for your daily dosage of escapism?

had a nightmare once. All light and color had leached out of the world, all of us were running around in the dark. We were clueless of what we were going to run into, we just knew that there was something out there in the dark coming after us and they weren’t coming to become fast friends. I vaguely remember my sister was kidnapped and I was trying to find her, but every step I took I found myself locked into another harrying puzzle that threatened to end my short life. It was pretty scary.

It was even more scary when it dawned on me I wasn’t having a nightmre, but playing a video game. A weird and darkly magical game that looked innocent on the outside but contained a dark world packed with menace and hard puzzles. A game called LIMBO from Play Dead Games.

We’ll make this little review quick and to the point to start out; wow, what a trip.

Available now on the XBOX Live Marketplace for 1200 points, “LIMBO” is a striking little bit of game play. I can pretty much guarantee that the first thing that will captivate you with this game? It’s going to be the graphics. They’re amazing for a monochrome color pallette and unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. The world comes to life through silhouettes and shadows, making dangerous things that may bite hard to find and other thigns you happen to come across a bit of a surprise. With the entire game painted in this low color pallette, you would think that the gimmick may become tiresome after a bit. But no; Playdead actually manages to grow the graphics throught the game with foggy renders of weird locales and backdrops that help to make this dark little world come to life.

Beyond the spooky environs picture above, you may be wondering why this is being reviewed on a horror site? To be honest, it’s not a real horror game per-se. The game is gruesome though, especially for a black and white game! You never see more than just the blackened silhouette and lighted eyes of your character but you will see things like his head popping off, the trails of blood and guts and his in probably broken body as the great physics engine kicks in while you work through the world. For monochrome, these moments are surprisingly effective. There’s no blood red or anything to that effect. Just enough of an outline so that you know what you just caused to that poor little boy. All of which serves as a perfect underscore to a miscalculated step.

As for Gameplay, LIMBO pulls inspiration from a number of sources and genres, the primary being the puzzle genre. You’ll work through one puzzle after another throughout your progress mixed in with a touch of platforming and other types of game. There’s no out right combat, simply puzzle solving. If solving said puzzle happens to end in the death of a giant spider? So be it.

The best part of LIMBO that makes it outshine many puzzle quests is that the game is down right hard. It’s common to see games of this type plateau at a certain point, carrying the same level of difficulty until the end of the game. In LIMBO, the challenges are balanced delicately as the grow throughout the game. Early on you’ll find yourself feeling cocky at solving a few easy puzzles. Then you’ll stumble into a brain buster that will stump you for awhile. You’ll restart over and over as you try and approach the problem from different angels, repeatedly dying and starting again. Eventually, you’ll find that one small piece you were missing that will allow you to move on to the next challenge, which will stump you all over again.

Plain and simple; LIMBO is a fantastic game from the Xbox Live Arcade. It will dazzle you with its pretty black and white setting it will make your brain go to work to figure out how to get through. The game seldom slows down; you march straight from one challenge to the other. The sense of accomplishment and plain old curiosity to see what’s going to pop up next will carry you through to the end. Well worth the 1200 points!

Go to Hell.

No really, that’s the driving plot point behind the new EA/Visceral Games title Dante’s Inferno! Based on the original epic poem “The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri, we traverse the nine circles of hell in search of Dante’s wife Beatrice. Apparent by the inclusion of the phrase ‘Dante’s wife Beatrice’, you can tell there have been many creative liberties taken with the original subject material. But it’s okay. If we wanted to stick straight to the classics, this game would be much drier in tone that what it is.

“Dante’s Inferno” has been anticipated quite a bit by gaming community, myself included. When the demo hit Xbox Live and the Playstation Network, it was met with luke warm excitment. Many people had mixed emotions about the combat and the enemies contained within. The biggest sin that the demo commited, and what continues to be the most vocal slam against the game, is that it is a direct clone of Sony’s God of War series. I’m not a “God of War” purist; I’ve only played the very first game when it came out on the Playstation 2. This means that the comparison isn’t qutie as vivid in my mind. From what I remember though, there are indeed many direct transfers of gameplay mechanics going on here, but it doesn’t have to ruin all of your fun. There are other problems here that can handle that on their own.

The gameplay mechanics at work are pretty simple overall. Mash the X button for a light attack, Mash Y for a heavy attack, B for your magic cross and A…just isn’t used a whole lot. Combine any combinations of these with your right and left triggers and Dante will dance about in gory glory. These simple controls work fine and are easy to pick up. It’s nice to have a low learning curve so no complaints there. The problems arise in the enemies early on in the game.

Throughout the first few levels, the very same levels that you would have seen in the demo, the enemies have a nice awe inspring variation to them and feel just challenging enough to fool you into thinking you’re working for your goal. As you pass beyond this first circle of Hell and onto the portions of the game that were not previewed already; the enemies do not change much. The developers may add on an extra doo-dad to the skin of an enemy you already faced and they will definitely add some extra hitpoints to them as well. This doesn’t really add any extra challenge to the creatures you face, it simply turns them into a damage sponge. Essentially, you just have to mash on the buttons a bit longer. Up through the first five to six circles, we do manage to get one new enemy to face per level which is okay, but more variation would have been great. Outside of these new additions, you’re just hacking away at the same old bad guys, just longer.

Where we do finally get some good variation is in the major level bosses that you face sporadically throughout your descent into hell. These bosses amanage to be pretty awe inspiring; they are gargantuan in size and strike you with the worry of ‘how in the hell am I going to kill this?’ as they should. Most of them manage to be figured out easily enough, providing just enough challenge without feeling too easy or too hard. There’s satisfaction in finishing off a level boss which helps to prod you on further along.

The other major gameply element at work here is puzzle solving. Much like “God of War” before it, you will encounter many of them along the way. The puzzles generally provide a decent challenge that can be solved in a handful of attempts, other may stump you for a bit causing you to sit back and think through your strategy. None of them felt game-breakingly frustrating which was nice. The problem is that the puzzle aspect of the game is the biggest portion of gameplay. I like puzzles as much as everyone else but as the early press releases for this game showed, it was to be filled with many grotesque and fantastical denizens of Hell which you were tasked with laying to waste. There is some of that, but none of it feels like the scale you would expect to face while traipsing through the bad place. Puzzles will come one after another while enemies are sprinkled throughout a level. Nearly everytime you have a combat encouter, you will find yourself locked into the area by magic gates that refuse to open until you’ve defeated everything within. Then, you march on to solve some more puzzles until the next time you are locked into an arena. Not quite the glorious battle against evil I was hoping for.

Despite the game play faults, the one aspect that Visceral Games nailed was in artisitic direction. The landscape throughout the nine circles is gruesome and disturbing, feeling perfectly like you expect Lucifer’s crib to appear. Even the character designs are outlandish at first blush, elliciting many moments of ‘holy crap, I can’t believe they did that’ and the like. Un-babptized babies with blades fused to their hands? They have them. Lust demons with large phallic tentacles escaping from their nether regions? They have that too. Each fits the theme of their own personal circle quite well. The problem is that after five or six circles, they simply stop giving us new ones to ogle. Shocking the first time, a bit boring each consecutive time after.

“Dante’s Inferno” is not a bad game by any means, but it did fall pretty far short of the expectations given early on in the PR campaign. As you can see, the game only came out on the 9th; the game took a mere seven hours to complete on the medium difficulty. Short games have their benefits and “Dante” unlocks a New Game + mode that allows you a second play through with your upgraded stats. For a $60 title that glorifies marching into battle against Satan’s army, I would hope for more than seven hours of game play. Closer to fifteen would have been better at least.

Despite my problems with the game, I still found myself drawn to press on so I could what was next. This worked well in the beginning as your environements change as you progressed but there is a turning point in the middle of the game that those changes come to a halt and things begin to feel more bland. The “God of War” purists are going to hate this game because they are going to see it as an inferior product. For those of you like me who aren’t quite as die hard or never played “Dante’s” spiritual successor; there is still a lot to be enjoyed here. It’s just that the buy-in is pretty steep for amount of enjoyment you get.

Give it a rental so that you don’t feel that sting of $60.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been quiet for the last week. There’s a few reasons for that, the primary one being one hell of a cold that laid me low for a good three to four days! However, even though I’m fast approaching the far side of ‘mid-30′s’, I still find myself believing today what I believed when I was a kid; nothing makes a cold better like video games and a juice box! Luckily for me, my onset of the plague happened to coincide with the arrival of “Darksiders” from Vigil Games and helped to pass the time in between those moments that the fever rendered me unconcscious.

It’s the end of days; angels and demons are falling to earth to wage their final war and bring the apocalypse upon mankind! Among them comes War, the Fourth Horseman who is tasked with bringing balance to Heaven and Hell in the end of days! The only problem is; once War arrives, he realizes that the other three horseman have not arrived. When he faces off against Abaddon, leader of Heavens forces, War learns that the Seventh Seal was never broken and Armageddon was never meant to start. Which means, something fishy is going on in the cosmic forces and War is tasked by the Charred Council to find out the answers!

I’ve said this a few times before; I love me some end of the world stories. Taking control of War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse is a pretty natural fit! Though the story is farily basic throughout the game, there is enough of a carrot to keep you pressing on to hear the next step in the saga. It won’t blow your mind, but it will entertain and that’s what counts! Mix in level design and backdrops that are excellent in their crumbling humankind decay and it really is a good bit of fun. The story also sets up well for a sequel or two which given what we’ve seen so far, is a pretty exciting accomplishment.

The story and artwork aren’t really the things that are going to trip your trigger here in “Darksiders” however. That nugget comes in the form of some flat out addictive and fun gameplay that will be hauntingly familiar to anyone who might call themselves a gamer. The thing is, “Darksiders” takes its gameplay directly from two stellar sources; you have the excellent dungeon crawling and puzzle solving of Zelda: Ocarina of Time mixed with the gory and meaty combat of God of War! So not only do you get a healthy dose of old school Zelda fun, you get the satisfaction of beating the crap out of giant demons as well. All tied up with a pretty little end of the world bow.

This potent combination manages to entice and hold attention and makes for a great game experience. You will see a reptetition in the monsters you battle with along the way, however they will be suitably scaled in dificulty as you march up through the ranks. As well, there are enough different common monsters models to help keep the combat from growing too terribly stale which is nice. The puzzle play early on is fairly basic as you would expect and grows in difficulty as you make your way through the world. There is never really a moment that the puzzles feel too brain breakingly hard, but they are still satisfying without feeling too basic. The difficulty does ramp up fairly high in the late stages of the game for the puzzles but combat does not scale quite as well which does manage to leave a few of your final battles feeling a bit over simplified. Regardless, with the package that you’ve traversed up until that point, you really don’t mind because you’re having so much fun.

The benefits of “Darksiders” far outweigh its shortcomings. The controls are solid enough when it counts, though there is room for improvement. When fighting giant demonic beasties who swing with their mighty oversized paws, it would be handy to have a quick and responsive dash button at hand to help avoid the carnage. While there is a dodge button available too you, it often feels a bit sluggish which throws off your attacks when trying to stay alive from time to time. Again, not a game breaker, but it does require some getting used to in order to over come the delay and in this game, dodging attacks is a pretty integral battle strategy. Beyond that, the controls for the additional Zelda-esque secondary weapons such as the ‘Cross Blade’ (Boomerang) work well enough.

In the end, I play a ton of XBox 360 games throughout the year. There’s generally at least a rental involved for any given new release just to give you an idea. “Darksiders” however is the first game in a few months that has completely sucked in my attention to an almost obsessive degree. Often times I have the attention span of a gnat, other times I become so narrow focused on whatever game I’m playing my wife starts to wonder if I died back in the man cave or not. This is a time that she almost considered calling in the search party. Well, more realstically, she thought about just locking the door to the man cave, but still. The point is still the same! The game will hit you hard with its ‘just one more’ level design and the fights are fun enough to watch with War’s over the top death animations to make you smile. All in all, this is a great game which I highly recommend you to play.

If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s anything post apocalyptic. I love it. “Mad Max”, “Six String Samurai”, anything that borrows their aesthetic? Good stuff. If you mix this setting with some great action, I like it even more. When word of Borderlands came down the pipe, I was pretty excited to say the least. Now that I’ve gotten my hands on the game and seeing myself staring down the barrel of level 21 one already, you could say that I’m as pleased as a mutant psycho.

Now, I’m aware that Fallout 3 came out first and many may think that they are the same game at first blush, but there are a lot of differences here. Many differences which for me, makes “Borderlands” the better game. I’ve tried my hand at “F3″ a few times now. It is a good game game, don’t get me wrong…it’s just not my cup of team. The first problem is the huge time commitment required to get through the game, the second is that I found the shooting mechanics to be frustrating. This is magnified by the fact that I’ve never been stellar at any shooter, but it bugged me all the same.

Borderlands” comes along and it cures many of the frustrations I had with “F3″, which leads me to being hooked on this game big time. The shooting works, and works well for a 360 controller. There is a good mix of up close sniper fire and run and gun sub machine gun play. Mix this with the sheer amount of guns and upgrades that show up throughout the game and it is damn near staggering. I’ll warn you now, if you’re a loot fan as far as games go, this is going to hook you hard. And don’t go falling in love with any particular weapon that you pick up. Chances are you are going to change weapons four or five times throughout an hour’s playtime. It’s that plentiful.

In addition to the solid gun play, the other hook for “Borderlands” is an RPG system stat system that makes it just that more fun than your standard ‘run to the end’ FPS shooter. The system is weak as far as RPG systems go, but mixed with the shooting and looting, it works great. The quest system also helps greatly as it gives you actual way-points and goals to work towards through the game. Too many times, I become distracted or bored in a typical FPS. It just seems repetitive. “Borderlands” quest system helps to break up this monotony.

Currently, I’m at the halfway point of the game and there are a few problems that have popped up from time to time. One of my main gripes is repetition. The enemies that you see at the beginning of the game? Get used to them, they’re going to come back. A lot. There are different variants of each enemy type but at the core, they’re all the same. Whether this changes later on in the game, I can’t say yet. It is still fun to watch them die though, so that’s a plus! I’ve also found some problems with the way point system, in particular when it comes to tracking down particular quest items. The way-points will get you in the general area of an item but when it points to a location, your item could be anywhere in the vicinity. Not where they make you think it’s sitting. The beauty here though is that neither of these problems are game breaking and are simply minor annoyances. With the fun of running quests and running and gunning throughout the map, you forget about them fairly quickly.

I’m no expert on video games by any means, but I do know what I like. With “Borderlands”, I’m having the most fun I’ve had since playing Batman: Arkham Asylum. And I had a ton of fun with that! The game is simply engrossing over all and easy to lose some hours too, which I think are important traits in a video game.

If you’ve read up on this game, you’ll be aware that the co-op play through is supposed to be even better than a single player run. I haven’t tried this out myself as of yet, so I can’t speak to it. I can tell you that friends who tried out a 4 player co-op run this past weekend are still talking about it, so that’s a good sign. The difficulty scales with the number of players, as does the loot, so if you’re an Xbox Live aficionado, you should definitely keep that in mind.