Peggle

Unicorns, dragons and owls coming up.

It's hard to describe this game in a simple manner without it sounding like a pile of pants. Take a vertical drop board, add in a lot of brightly coloured pins and bricks, most of them blue, some of them orange and give the player several ball bearings they can drop in from the top of the play area. Watch it bounce around the area like some Two-Penny Shove It arcade until it hits the bottom and any of the pins and bricks it hits are removed from play. Rinse and repeat until all orange pins and bricks are gone or the player runs out of balls.

Doesn't sound like much does it. Thankfully, Peggle is a lot more than that.

Lots of levels on offer

Peggle, fundamentally, is similar to Pachinko where in balls are dropped down a table of sorts and depending upon where they end up and how they get there, players are rewarded with more balls and such. In Peggle, players are rewarded with points based upon various combos and qualifiers such as attaining a long shot to reach a target orange, or hitting several oranges consecutively. There's also other bonuses coming from hitting the randomly chosen pink peg which will boost your score for the remainder of that shot.

Annoyingly, the most prickish looking ones are the most useful.

Each usual level has a limit of orange blocks (not including special challenge levels), the more blocks that are removed from play, the higher the multiplier within the game for that round, boost this with the pink peg and you can really start stacking up with extra balls to help you clear the level of all oranges. On top of all this, there's the "bucket" that steadily sways back and forth along the bottom of the arena, land your ball in that and you instantly get another ball to play with.

Take aim, fire, wish for the best.

That's not all though, you've a selection of colourful characters that also have a special ability. Be it having a longer projection distance, explosive impacts, temporary flippers like a pinball table, flaming destruction that passes through blocks, a touch of the random selection, an instant return ball, multiball, improving shots and more. Though you need to play through the adventure mode first to unlock the characters, a second play through will give you the ability to choose whomever you wish for every level.

Ooh look, themes!

It's a simple game, almost too simple in some regards but there's a lot of charm and appeal here for people to enjoy time and time again. Whether it's trying to play through and beat all of the levels or taking on the task of beating high scores, or going one step further and attempting the challenge modes where players take on a multitude of tasks from beating levels with fewer balls, beating a series of levels with one set of balls, beating a level with a minimum requisite score and in some cases, a combination of all of the aforementioned criteria. 

The alien gets to blow things up, no fair!

Thanks to the easy 'pick up and play' learning curve, even the first few levels slowly introduce the bonuses and specials, allowing players to get to grips with the physics of the game before we start hitting them with a gradual trickle of new features but the crowning glory likely goes to the music and audio of the game, in particular the rendition of "Beethoven's 9th" every time that you succeed in beating the level which plays with enough frequency to always feel like you've earned the win that you've achieved.

Harder to see here, but parts of some levels also move.

It's a game for many. For those who want to master every possible trick shot and every single special ability to maximise their gaming potential and scores or for those that want a quick pick up and play session with little need to commit a huge amount of time to the game. Peggle is a peg that fits many a hole.

Resident Evil 6

This game interests me on various levels. For a game with this much clout to it, I find it surprising but entirely unjustified that people are going in with attacks on its presentation; it changes and deviates from a supposedly socially-accepted norm for a genre that, as a series, it created itself; it has fallen into the 'marmite' selection of games where people either love it or hate it (and one or two spread it on toast). It also has zombies in it and other such fun monsters that need a royal arse kicking, preferably with a magnum or something more lethal.

In essence, we've 5 games in one based around various levels we get to see during the game. 3 games are the main story mode where you'll progress from A to B, killing the infected, undead, brown bread and done-up-like-a-kipper enemies that need more than just a smack in the mouth to fix and solve the situation of "how to get from living enemy to dead enemy" which has plagued almost every video game villain/opponent since day 1.

Control wise, it plays very much like a third person shooter in that "over the shoulder" view used within the series back with Resident Evil 4. Items and weapons are on two inventory wheels and the new addition to the system is the advent of health pills that can be popped in rapid succession for oneself or a downed partner to get them back in action more quickly. Weapons effectively remain with the characters the entire time rather than the inventory switching around used in RE5 between rounds, opting instead to have things bought through experience points gained including infinite ammo for each weapon type. It does take a short while to get used to the new system but feels a lot more intuitive than RE5 managed to make itself but not as efficient in its deliver as RE4 was when it adjusted to the 3rd person camera approach.

The first story is the campaign with Leon Kennedy and generic new face mcbreasty having shot the president in the head (after becoming a zombie, sadly) and taking the slowly building and suspenseful approach to a long build up to an actual zombie attack with the obligatory jump scares. The first run through of the first level takes elements from previous games and even self-references situations from the first game Leon was in, where in people are fighting through the streets against zombie infections. It takes roughly an hour or so to get from the start of the first level to the end of the first level and packs in so much that it would have been most of a game in its own right back in the mid-late 1990s.

Large building, check. Sewers, Check. City scapes, check. Meeting other survivors, check. Watching them get killed horrifically in nasty attacks as a result of their own stupidity, check. The only thing missing from the first level is the underground huge complex that turns up in level 2. Then we hit the plane in a rather jaunted fashion to China and blow up a dinosaur that sprouted out of a man and back again while juggling a forced little 3way situation between Leon, McBreasty and Ada Wong. Nobody really wins on that.

This particular game is set and based around gradual and slow builds towards the medium level enemies that result in being challenging, if only because of the lack of availability of higher power weapons, which can be seen in other sessions. The main focus is on the zombies as the slower and more predictable enemies and leaves for the game having a slower felt pace towards the general feel. Almost as if it's a "beginners" session for the game, and becomes a little jarring in the cross over sessions with the faster paced characters that have fought tougher opponents (i.e. the ones with real guns or can do instant-kill moves against our protagonists).

As a campaign, it feels more of a return to the original games (barring the helicopter/train crashes and huge monsters fighting around buildings with lightning strikes from the heavens. It's the big budget Hollywood special remake of the gritty original B-Movie, no cast, games.) If anything it feels like a subversion of the movie industry doing big money remakes of films and losing all the tact and subtlety of the original games. Most noted when the plane crashes in China, fire-balling everything out, spotting another character UPON a train, before walking out and meeting 2 other characters involved in the plot and fighting the big stalker monster of the game, before meeting the other characters in a fight then riding another train out while battling a giant monster.

After the 3rd act it goes WAY overboard compared to the first two acts that manage to build suspense and give a slow rolling inertia to the pace and setting of the game, then it goes all Michael Bay on us and loses its integrity. But still pretty to watch the CGI fireworks. It depends on your preference, yes the genre has changed from what it originally and occasionally dips into the Hollywood banding and because of the way CGI can be made, there's little limit on the excessiveness of what can be achieved.

Second story is the Modern Warfare take on the zombie invasion, with no zombies. Starting off instead in China with Chris Redfield, series staple rock punching hard case, and a new guy, Mr ArmyYoungDisposableMan who looks better on the cover of magazines advertising 'generic new man' specials. Following the two on a mission to rescue people while blowing up buildings and shooting idiots with spider like faces in masks that shoot back. Very little to do with zombies and almost entirely apart from Umbrella and other such previously established names and organisations. Yet this makes sense, we're DONE with Umbrella, and we're looking at the world wide view and other companies taking the remnants of Umbrella and making their own contraptions and creations/creatures. Going beyond Raccoon City and STARS to the BSAA and the world wide prevention of B.O.Ws and punching them out (if you're Chris at least).

The 2nd story runs a bit of the back-story showing the former group of soldiers with Chris and FreshFaceMan taking on small militias of enemy soldiers and giant monsters too large and impractical to develop and use in small skirmishes as overkill, and too large to use pretty much anywhere else as being too big and inviting tanks, choppers and planes to open fire on them.

This might be expected with the key players armed with machineguns, rifles and the more heavy duty weaponry and as such, get to have the fun time of taking on the greater number of enemies and the more gung-ho approach to the gaming, in their quest to find the villain that caused all the big problems in the flashback and turned Chris's team into a bunch of muppets with a few syringes in a grenade. (Yep... makes sense in ... never), before enjoying a pointlessly destructive fight with a giant snake, chases through cities against a sports car that would destroy the speed limit while in a Humvee. Attacking an aircraft carrier, attacking ANOTHER aircraft carrier with a Harrier, then going deep underwater to battle the big bad monster to end the world, and having a very long-winded battle against what is more accurately described as a translucent foetus.

Again, the story escalates from being pseudo realistic/appreciable, to becoming full on crazy-bullshit within a level and a half and never going back on that. It's a shame when the game forgets the situation that it has started upon and whether through the use of too large a department in making the game, or some people just not getting the right memo about consistency.

The third story starts off as possibly the more interesting of the 3 main games with the storyline being that Sherry Birkin (daughter of the great inventor/asshat, William Birkin) has gone the super powered healing route and now not under government surveillance, is allowed to roam free in working for the government to find and locate Jake (Wesker's son) whose blood holds the cure to the current virus outbreak. Basically, she needs him to come along and play nice, everyone else is not playing nice, so he's a ninja with speed and power moves while she's got a stun rod.

It basically sums up the start.

Through their story they get chased down by one HUGE son of a bitch that makes Nemesis look like a midget, with interchangeable guns and a cage. Most of their story is running from this guy or other indestructible creatures (like the creature with the chainsaw of flesh... yes...I said that) and fighting various troops or monsters. Or running from a tank, before they too end up underwater and fighting the big guy again in a fist fight brawl that apparently works despite spending the whole game and a 6month period of imprisonment, shooting him with Gatling guns, shotguns, explosives barrels, dropping buildings on him, ramming him with an industrial drill taken from Total Recall, dunking him in lava for yet ANOTHER return (instant bad guy, subtract legs) to the final magnum in the face.

There's an attempt to highlight how a bad guy can be money grubbing one moment, human the next and not having to be tied down to whomever his father was and how avenging death is not necessary when there's guys to shoot that explode into insects and various monsters that can worm wriggle their way back together and give you an Alien Chest burst death if they get close enough to kiss you. By the time the "story" comes about, you won't give two shits and you'll be busy running up combos that Bruce Lee would have called bullshit upon.

And that seems to be the biggest issue with the game. Part way through the story, plot and everything that has been built up, is thrown aside and destroyed by the urge to one-up itself in a poor display of disregarding everything previously established to show a wank-fest of explosions, big special effects and the like of which would have cost millions in a film. Which in itself is destroyed when things like this in the game DON'T cost that much to make. But with the emphasis on this supposed big-budget situation, atmosphere and plot are shoved aside and relegated to the back seat.

Given the game has that co-operative function, used again since the RE5 attempt, there's pros and cons to the involvement of other people. A good partner can aid the game and blitz through the system with remarkable ease and battling bosses can be made easier (depending upon the boss). The AI can have issues with trying to get back to yourself to get you picked up and healed, while another player will (usually) put it in higher priority. Though you could get some boneheaded player that will be walking around every situation and taking their sweet time and eventually fall into various traps over and over. While the AI won't do that. They could also fail Quick Time Events while the AI never does. The use of another player can speed things up with considerable difference to not using them, IF they know what they're doing.

At various points in the plot, the game will pause for approximately 60 seconds, at points where multiple characters intersect from other storylines, to find other players who are at that point as well. Case in point: After Leon and Busty McTitty crashes down from a jet-plane, they encounter Jake and Sherry and a fight kicks off with the giant Nemesis-Wannabe in a scrap yard where a double-decker bus is sitting. At this point, the game will try to connect with someone else playing the game, in the same point on the Jake and Sherry team, and combine the 4 together for the fight, including having a person from each pairing, having to combine forces in a Quick Time Event. Incidentally, anyone dying fails it for everyone. It's an interesting way of engineering this all together though the costs for failing are rather high where someone random is joining the game. This has everyone joining up with everyone else at least once (if the game permits this in the settings) with Jake and Sherry teaming up with Chris and NewbieSoliderMan three times during their respective campaigns.

This however does run nicely into the much more interesting aspect of the online mode where the game has bottle neck points of enemies attacking which can be populated by other players, playing as the monsters. Ranging from zombies (with an assortment of weapons) to dogs, lizard beasts, fly-people, worm-filled monsters, powered zombies, knife-wielding troopers, mutant crows, walking pustule bombs and armour-plated goliaths, all with the sole purpose of screwing up the players by attacking and hopefully killing the main heroes. You can respawn as many times as you want until they heroes leave that particular area.

In easy mode, it can be a real chore to batter someone down to the critical point and then deliver a killing blow, more frustrating when you do all the work and the AI makes the kill and even MORE frustrating when the other player quits like a pansy. A good team up with another player allows for 2 people to stalk and try to kill the hero player(s) and although only one of them can make the final kill, it's actually a very rewarding feeling when one of you distracts the player so your partner can sneak up behind them and deliver the killing blow.

Personal preference goes to the worm-filled skins that can effectively instant-kill someone if they grab a hold of them and then it becomes instant worm-face snogfest death. Hilarious and you know it's just pissed off someone else's day.

Other vs. modes include the mercenaries modes where players pick a character and try to survive and score as many points as they can within an arena until the time runs out or they kill everything, including the involvement of hidden bosses or super monsters such as fatty-boy zombies, lizards and a whole host of nasty pieces of work. Modes where you take control of the biggymonster of the game and try to kill everyone else within an allotted amount of time or playing a sort of vs. mode where the more monsters you kill, the more spawn in your opponents arenas. They're an interesting subset of the game and have a level of appeal but to be honest, I'd much rather have more of the Trolling Mode where you get to be the monsters. It's a lot more fun, in some cases more fun than the story mode, trying to hunt down and kill someone else and ruin their fun.

It's a very mixed bag for the game, it has good points, it has bad points, and it has terrible banging-skull-against-wall points. It can be appreciated if you can REALLY suspend your belief for some of the cut scenes but that's going quite a stretch for the game that already has the supposition that not only do zombies exist, but people are freely making monsters in competing companies/organisations. It's the attempt to make a move into a bigger and more expansive world within the Resident Evil franchise but it's taken in far too wrong a direction akin to the excessive sequalisation. If Resident Evil 1 is the same as Saw, then Resident Evil 6 is Saw with people lobbing nukes at each other while dropkicking helicopters of explosives towards Blue Whales. It's only really the name that's keeping the same and the use of a few characters from earlier instalments, but the game isn't the same.

Not to say it's a bad game, it's a responsive game, it's a good co-operative experience, it's a great trolling-session with the bad guy mode, but it is a bad addition to the established order of the franchise. It's the difference between Alien and Alien 3, some good ideas and most of the film done really well but very different over all in sense and feeling that the film tries to stay loyal to the roots but goes about it in such a convoluted way, that it misses the point it tries to make and might have fared better as a stand-alone experience rather than part of the series.

At the very last, naked breasty boss with tentacles for the shot gunning! Will the next game just have full on mutant porn?

Battlefield 3

It's difficult to review a game that is as segmented as this, namely because you have effectively 2 games in one here. The first being the actual single player mode which I'll be breaking down, and the multiplayer mode which I'll also be breaking down. Then after, have a breakdown and go on a 2 week bender of drugs, drink, hookers and games, without the drugs, drink or whores. Well... maybe the hookers. The old motto, Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a good looking corpse. Those that said that, never saw a kid die in an industrial blender. Or an acid bath.

But still.

The Battlefield series has long been known and popular for its almost unrivalled online gaming functions, 64 player battles fought on huge maps, with respawning and regenerating lives until either time runs out or until all lives have been sufficiently expended for one side to cry home to mummy. With each increment of the series, the games have taken place in wars across the ages, even in the future, with this instalment being set in the "Tomorrow" war of near future-land and featuring long term hot-cold, on-off again bed buddies, the Americans and the Russians.

Never quite sure why the world seems so focused on having the Yanks and Ruskies going toe to toe for so many games, they do it in the whole of the Modern Warfare series, in various Battlefield games etc. Why not don't armies take on the Japanese? Because they'd be stormed by giant robots and ninjas that blast nukes from their hands. Nobody takes on the British because nobody can be bothered with the small island of tough bastards that wouldn't shoot people but rather punch bullets into their enemies before giving them a dry slap and telling them to 'man the fuck up.' Or is that just Manchester?

Battlefield 3 takes the side of some guys in the American forces and occasionally some guy in the Russian forces, trying to work out through a series of flashbacks, what has happened, where some guy is and what happened to a bunch of nukes that might be around. The plot follows main-generic-white-guy being interrogated about missions that fucked up, things they were told and found out while skipping out to other people doing other missions in that fun, non-cohesive plot way that people seem to enjoy (read: have forced upon them) that allows a player to enjoy tanks, planes and other such vehicles when the real forces have specialisms that wouldn't involve them doing such things in the real world.

War is fun, fighting is awesome and people need their shit fucked up. Hoo-hah.

The levels involved are a rather straight forward affair, giving a mix of large open areas of combat, close area combat with an obligatory level involving stealth, flying a plane (painfully badly made), driving tanks, barricading against army onslaughts and breaking through large buildings and skyscrapers. Most of the levels offer nothing more than a flavour of the online mode except for the airplane level. This has to be a contender for “Poorly made, poorly executed” level of the decade.

Being dragged through a long scene with nothing going on, the flight warm up, then having the plane take off by the pilot which is NOT you while you occasionally look around and fire a few missiles and flares at attacking planes before doing what seems to be a compulsory element of warfare gaming, Infra Red bombardments. It's painfully slow, removes almost all interactivity and becomes a stop-go snore-a-thon just to painstakingly do something that either could have been done in a few seconds of cut scene or could have had the player started already by being in the damn air while under attack.

There are, elements that could be boss battles in the game, which are just Quick Time Events and depending upon where you are when they happen, might be fatal or just need repeating. It's another break from the norm of game play that you'd usually not expect but save for the idea behind boss battles supposedly being of something difficult, you can't really have that in a "realistic" shooter game. A realistic shooter can't suddenly have a cyber demon pop up and take 50 rockets to down while you yourself limp like a kid with skinned knees at the merest graze of a bullet. The balance is gone and though it might be amusing for a few seconds, you're changing the game again just to balance and quantify doing something unrealistic. So QTE's are a possible way to go though to make a "boss"/"final boss" in such games without going the scripted "keep doing x until you meet y" route.

Possible idea for future games, any time the final boss turns up early and can be shot, the rest of the game should be playable with huge story changes. Just a thought.

Control wise, it's the fairly usual affair of run, move, look, shoot etc, learning the grenade buttons; crouch/prone buttons might be a little awkward at first if you've been playing other games of a similar nature. Driving tanks and jeeps is fairly straight forward except the trigger becomes accelerate and flying helicopters is like rubbing your stomach with one hand, patting your head at the same time with the other hand, then changing over every few seconds, while on a unicycle. It takes an effort to master and thankfully it's only in a co-op level.

For all intents and purposes, the single player mode really does gear the player up for the online multiplayer mode and the non-stop chaos those online modes entail. While there is a story, it's nothing we've not seen before and has the same usual predictable twists and faults one would expect, there's nothing really new here or shocking, and that includes the supposed shocks that are meant to make us go "oh wow no really?" when the story line copies other shocks from other games that were done far better than this is executed.

Each level gives you a load out of weapons and equipment and forces you to utilise them, a main weapon, a pistol, grenades and usually some specialist equipment to help achieve the objective. It gives players the chance and opportunity to test out and use various equipments and weapons, such as RPGs, while stealing enemies’ weapons will also give you the chance to experience those too. Making you a war-fare time Robin Hood in stealing from the rich to give to the poor, and by rich I mean dead, and by give I mean shoot in the face.

Co-operative mode within the game allows for 2 players to work together (assumption) to try and overcome 6 different missions ranging from large open areas, to different aspects of the single player missions, to flying a helicopter and being a gunner for it. If the other player dies, they can be picked up like a healthy handshake and ass-slap will repair their fatal wounds, like a gaping head wound would be fixed in that fashion.

IF (big if there) you can find and use someone that knows how to play or can be relied upon to not bollocks up the entire mission, you can get into a circumstance where people can actually flank, pincer and cover each other without feeling silly about it. Some events and missions require very specific timing and the margin for error down to the time it takes most people to realise light has gone round the planet. Thankfully the stealth mission isn't failed if you're revealed and you can just brute force it afterwards.

Even in the hardest mode, the game is fairly forgiving if one person plays keep away from the bullets and just revives the person who is out in the open whenever they drop the floor, but given that, guns and weapons feel accurate and not as spray and pray as have been seen in other games. The iron sights in weapons seem to hit opponents with regular consistency rather than missing outright and stands as a feature passing over to the online multiplayer too.

All in all, the single player mode feels very tacked on and with a predictable story, only serves to cement itself as nothing more than a training session for the online game which the series is more famous for.

Having said that, the online mode is double-edged sword.

The premise is simple; you start at rank 1 and can be one of 4 types of specialist from the first aid guy that never picks up his downed colleagues, engineer guy that is the only real defence against tanks, except for, another tank. Support guy with the big machineguns and toys and Sniper guy who smells really bad and sits away from everyone else, like most gamers do at an outdoor family event.

Each class has its own weapon sets and inventory to be chosen and more is unlocked as the levels progress. The more someone uses a specific weapon, the more items they unlock for that weapon such as new scopes, handles, undertow launchers, stands, silencers, or bigger equipment like first-aid paddles, mines and explosives, rocket launchers and remote control robots. The game has these classifications set up to ensure that nobody is able to do everything and the emphasis is on team play. A sniper with a lock-on guide will be great use to an engineer with the right rocket launcher for massively long range attacks doing more damage. But otherwise just paints up a bright dot on the screen that might as well say "it's a fucking tank".

Likewise first aiders require dead people to help or can drop health packs, support people can drop ammo for others and engineers can (if equipped) repair tanks and vehicles. Teamwork is the name of the game and unless you're on the rather pointless "Close Quarters" maps, you're not likely to be able to Rambo the game for your team (unless you're really agile in a tank and a damn good shot) it's unlikely you'll survive unscathed for a whole round and not need to respawn.

There's a lot of variation in maps, some will have players taking and holding an objective, some will have the defend/attack system of playing with HQs, others are of the "get a flag and hold it as long as you can" type, some levels are straight kill fests of one team slaughtering another, other levels are vast open, sprawling areas populated with tanks, planes and god knows what else to give the impression of a full scale (poorly organised) battleground.

Once into a game, you can either solo it within your team, or be put into squads, randomly being put into squads is a veritable lottery of whether it benefits you or not. Some of the perks for players can be attributed to the others in the same group, from more ammo, to being unshakeable in combat, to running faster and longer than others. If they leave mid game or switch teams, your bonus that they provide for you, drops immediately. Rather reminiscent of the old "It's my ball and I'm going home". Though some of the perks are rarely felt significantly within the game.

Following suit with the Battlefield games is the highly destructible arenas, most buildings can be blown through and holes punched into walls with grenades, walls shredded and used as sniping points, areas of cover blown apart and removed from play. Need to get on the other side of a wall, hit it with a tank, C64 or grenades and you'll likely get through.

Vehicles are an odd mix-up, of players either working well together to get lots of kills with drivers and gunners working well in tandem, or someone jumps out and buggers off to enjoy something else, there's almost a feeling of being forced to remain in a vehicle with someone while you're flooring it around the map up until the point of the enemy blowing you up, almost like a very dysfunctional marriage.

There is a lot of fun to be had by the game and the game plays out very well with large scale battles, though there's always the issue of respawn and dying straight off if you start with squad mates rather than the HQ, but the HQ spawning tends to leave you miles away from the action. At times though you'll hit highs of flanking squads of people and slaughtering them all before they realise you're there and then to be spun around and throat slashed by someone who steals your dog tags and runs off, likely to be gunned down by someone coming to your aid.

As with anything that relies with online play, there will be griefers, there will be those exploiting things, there will be those taking the piss, trolling and making life shitty for others. But a balanced team set up with equal skilled players, will make for a very thrilling game.

It all depends on if you can tolerate being so dependent on others for a good game, while lacking the ability to reach through their TV, grab them by the headset and garrotte them with the damn cables.

Multiple: Far Cry Blood Dragon

Sometimes a game can take itself far too seriously. Sometimes a game strives to have itself believed and struggles at the yoke of reality wherein it sets up its own rules and tries ever so hard to keep to them as if this is the universe you're looking into through your window of screen/television. Sometimes games fail horrifically at the meagre standards these games set themselves and ultimately end up being just faded pastiches of themselves.

And then a game like Fry Cry: Blood Dragon comes along lampoons everything these games have tried to do but being so overblown, so overboard and cliché-spouting, meme riding, trope ridden infestations of pure awesome. Far Cry: Blood Dragon (FCBD from here on) is a game that takes the modern sandbox shooter, strips away most of the bullshit (what little is left is heavily made fun of within itself), pumps it full of the neo glory that was the late 80's and early 90's and just has fun with itself in a good way, not the creepy way YOU do each night. I've seen the footage on YouTube and you should be ashamed of yourself.

The premise is simple enough, you're a cyborg (85% cyborg, 15% man+) tasked to drop in on an island and stop the danger threatening the world. But even this is ridiculous beyond compare with the opening description being "It's 2007 and the Apocalypse has had an Apocalypse" you realise this game is just going to be silly about everything and you're going to be brought along for the ride. You're tasked with taking out the dangerous threat of your cyborg series creator while armed to the teeth with guns, bombs, grenades and all manner of fun laser based surprises. Upon reaching him, you're captured, stripped of weapons and thrown to the games' title-giver, the Blood Dragons (Think dinosaur that fires lasers from its eyes and you're on the right track). You now have to shut down the whole operation, stop the experiments, stop the monsters, save the day, kill the bad guys and get the girl.

It's as 80s action movie set in the future as you can get and it's just raw fun.

Virtually everything (even the display of the game looking like some neo-punk virtual cyberpunk punk, punk... no I lost my thread there... It looks neon!) looks like it belongs in some stereotypical neon night club of some seedy underground scene bathed in black lights. Guns get upgraded with more lights than Blackpool Tower and the idea of stealth is bullshit if you're walking around like a beacon of shining focus, but as long as you're quiet, it counts.

Nearly any iconic scene of any iconic movie is represented in some fashion or another in this game with references as long as my arm and back (no dick jokes there today... oh wait...) ranging from the helicopter intro in Predator, to Terminator's synth backing ambience (and voiced by Mr Michael "Got Killed By Terminator At The End But Fuck Wasn't I Bad Ass" Biehn which just adds to the 80's nostalgia as he recants lines from Abyss, Aliens, Terminator and so on.

The game also pokes fun at various other games such as forcing the player to sit through the mandatory "here is how to play the game" while your character moans and swears his way through it while the HUD actually takes the piss in other ways by telling you to "Press A to confirm you can read" before telling you in explicit detail which muscles to engage and biomes of the brain to activate to press the button again. While there are collectables in the game, you'll actually want to hear your character swearing at the futility of it all, VHS tapes referencing other films will leave you with clues to what they're supposed to represent.

There's a multitude of weapons in the game though you can only carry 4 or carry one of the heavier weapons like the minigun. Each gun is upgradable to higher and more powerful standards and each gun is a reference to something else. The pistol looks more at home as Robocop’s side arm, the shotgun called the Galleria 1991 referencing Terminator 2's year of production AND a location within the film highlighted by the T-1000's response to a group of kids. The sniper rifle is the Cobra Cannon from Robocop, montages taken from Operation Wolf and Commando. If you know the pop-culture of films and arcade games from 30 years back, you'll get most of the references and some of the more modern ones. I personally can't vouch for the Far Cry 3 references and as such, I can't make cross references here.

Your exploits will range from combating cyborg wildlife from snakes to large cats, all of which can be stalked and killed or taken down with quick time events if you let them grab hold/attack and in some cases HAVE to be done this way. Assaulting bases which double up as speed travelling locations of which you can rush in and butcher everyone, stealth your way through it all, drop the shield and welcome in the Blood Dragon (though you might have to kill it yourself later) giving you various methods of completing objectives and each base can give you specific side missions to complete for further upgrades to unlock, which is always positive to give you a reason to sidestep the main quest and do something else though pointless items like cash etc are best left alone in game design.

A lot of the current gens’ first person shooter restrictions are lifted here. Been a long time since I played a game with no fall damage, infinite sprinting, most of the special moves already unlocked etc. It makes for a welcome return BUT it does feel that there have been some corners cut on this one. There's no messing about with inventories, just grab the gun, get the ammo and shoot the hell out of whatever opponent approaches, or steal a jeep and drive off for a bit, hang gliding a while through canyons and avoid sharks. The action, like most 80s gun toting testosterone fuelled explosions fests of pure man balls of steel, doesn't let up from start to finish with the cheesiest plot line one could imagine and the cut scenes... 8bit graphics never looked so pornographic.

I won't spoil the big ending but I will say that it's well worth the effort to get there and pick up something B.A.D.A.S.S as opposed to avoiding something A.S.S.H.A.T earlier in the game.

It's not all glory and greatness though. It might be hard at times to actually get to the location you're trying to navigate to and ignore the random brawls between scientists and soldiers on the roads while the bigger dangers are running out of ammo in huge fights and forcing you to utilise stealth in a game almost exclusively geared towards firepower. A stealth element here is fairly out of place in this game and the mechanic behind it seems rather hit and miss at the best of times, particularly with rescue missions that require stealth and often becomes a case of rush in and kill everyone BEFORE (hopefully) they kill the target you're after.

The game does become repetitive when you're seeking to break down bases left and right for the bonus weapons and powers because taking on multiple Blood Dragons at the same time is deadly if you're not adequately equipped AND know their weak spots. So the side missions become essential to a point but once you're maxed out on levels and on equipments, you're a walking tank for the most part and even more so when you've got the ultimate weapon in the game, which looks like it's been stolen from Krull.

It is however a fun romp through nostalgia but without it, it's a simpler step in gaming where complications are removed and an entertaining, if more single-minded, game is put before us to enjoy.