Mass Effect 2

I was pleasantly surprised by how awesome this game is. The beginning starts off with a bang, quite literally, as the Normandy-SR1 is blown to bits by an unidentified spacecraft. And like many captains before him, Shepard goes down with his ship.

This is where your journey starts, 2 years later in a research facility under siege, where you're fortunately resurrected, told to grab a gun and fight your way out.

Quite an action-packed start to what I fell is going to be a great game. I'm only about two hours in but I'll talk about the graphics and gameplay.

Quite honestly, it looks a ton better on PC than ME1 did. The environments especially seem to have a richness and detail about them that really give them life. As do the characters, although still slightly stiff around the face, it's the body language that really stands out. Bioware did a great job on the animation, no doubt they probably used motion capture and I applaud them on that decision (and applaud them even more so if they didn't!). They move with such subtly yet with so much emotion my dad, who walked into the room while I was playing, asked me if I was watching a movie. He really just stood there for about half a minute watching Shepard shout at the reporter lady (renegade style). Job well done Bioware, job well damn done.

Although, many have said it before, the writing in this game and the way the lines are delivered is quite excellent. One little niggle though, is that sometimes the syncing is off. This is most prevalent in humans, it sort of ruins the moment.

Now onto gameplay. They've overhauled quite a few things in Mass Effect 2. One major change is the weapon system. In the previous game, guns had an infinite amount of ammo, but would stop firing if they heat up too much, you'd then have to wait for it to cool down, akin to reloading it. This worked well, but thinking back now it kind of lessened the intensity in shootouts as you'd just have to wait for your gun to cool down. In Mass Effect 2, they've introduced what they call heat clips, which are ejected once you fire your gun to keep it cool. Which makes sense, and also adds more intensity in the firefights, which was missing from the first. It also encourages you to think more tactically, use the last grenade launcher ammo on the group of enemies flanking you, or the giant mech in front of you? Those kind of situations. I like the system and hope they stick with it for Mass Effect 3 (inevitable).

Alright, I'm ending it here. If you liked Mass Effect 1, and Sci-Fi Action RPG's, you will love this game. Complex story branches, great characters, good combat, overall awesome game with lot's of re-playability.
 

Rome: Total War

Yeah, I may be a little late to the war and this game has been sitting on my Hard Drive for a long time, unplayed. But today I was bored and decided to give it a go. I've played the Empire: Total War demo and the menu here is pretty much the same, along with those little quotes displayed above the loading bar. It's a great, simple and clean interface.

So anyway, I decided to start on the prologue campaign just to get through tutorials and whatnot. And I really got hooked, I'm naturally a sucker for RTS's ever since those days when Age Of Empires first released, such glorious days. Anyway, the first battle was a small scale one meant to teach me how to command my troops, basic RTS stuff. After I won my first battle against those pesky barbarians, I was back onto the world map, which I think is a very clever idea. It's an easy way to manage your troops and cities, with little details such as carts and boats travelling around, trading goods. It's a well executed and nifty little idea.

Graphics are as expected from a 3 year old game. They do the job but what's really well done is the sound. You can zoom down to ground level to "march" beside your troops and the sound of their clanking armor and the chorus of a hundred stamping feet really immerses you in the battle. One thing I dislike though, is that there is no blood. At all. It ticks me off but I'm sure there is a mod out there that implements it.

Now let me talk about how it played. Well, I did have some issues when commanding some of my units to go to "x" through route "b", they'd usually take the longer route; "a" to "b" to "c" for example. It didn't happen enough to make the game annoying or lose me a battle. But it does sort of make your tactics uncoordinated. Aside from that you really do get that sense of controlling an army, and the battles really do feel epic.

What more can I say? I'll definitely be playing this more, along side Empire: Total War, which I purchased a few days ago for £6 (thank you Steam).