Of course I’m bloody not. As anyone who’s seen the trailers, previews or the previous game can attest, The Darkness II was always going to be an adult title. A big feature of this game is the executions – you can grab a man by the legs and bisect him through the groin for a lovely move called “The Wishbone”. You’ll spend an awful lot of your time looking for beating hearts to refresh your health. And, of course, you can rip a man’s head from his body, both with and without his spine.

I played through two different builds of the game. One was a specially constructed demo rooted in the game but designed to tell a coherent story and showcase various different features. The other was a trip through the aforementioned brothel, showcasing the combat and environmental tactics that you’ll need to employ.

The biggest change between this and the original Darkness game is the introduction of the Darkling, a scuttling creature who tells you what to do, helps you in battles and occasionally lets you take control of him. Cue vent-crawling exploration puzzles and other knee-high sneakery.

I’ll skip the story bits of these builds to save you all from spoilers. You’re the dude from the first game. You have some horrific demon powers that only work in the dark. Everybody wants to kill you. For those who haven’t played the first game, said demon powers consist of giant snake-like tentacles with pointy, pointy teeth that erupt from… actually I don’t know where they come from. Somewhere out of your back presumably, or maybe your shoulders. Possibly your neck, though given their thickness you would think that would impair your ability look up and down. Good blood supply though.

Okay, let’s presume they come out of your back and curl around so they’re floating on the periphery of your vision whilst not impairing your ability to pick up guns with your human hands. As Jackie Estacado, your job is to kill and/or violently dismember basically everyone you meet.

Sure you have a gun. Sure, you can grab car doors and riot shields with your demon-snakes, to protect you while you shoot the bad men with your puny human weapons. But it’s far more fun to grab the shiny metal poles and fling them across the room, impaling distant enemies through the chest. Grab the weak men by their squashy arms and tear them limb from feeble limb. Plunge your gleaming fangs through their puny rib cages and devour their dripping hearts, still warm and pulsing, fresh red blood arcing through the air to leave glistening trails of…

Wait, what was I saying?

Oh yeah, I’m talking about a game, right. A game and certainly nothing else *shifty eyes*. You’ll run around some dark city streets ripping people apart. Then you’ll run around a carnival after-hours ripping people apart. At some point you’ll run around a subway platform ripping people apart. Eventually you’ll run around a brothel ripping people apart and that’s where it gets interesting.

The brothel is conveniently low on power – something to do with part of it being under construction so there’s a big room filled with throwable metal poles and lights running on generators. For some reason that I can’t really remember, you’re beset from all sides by dudes who want to kill you. The game turns into a nightmare of trying to kill dozens of enemies while smashing generators and avoiding flash grenades that will blind you and cause your tentacle-demon-snakes to retract into wherever it is they go. Me? I died a LOT.

There was more to this demo but I’ll be honest. I got bored after the fourth attempt at this room. It’s a difficult game and, while I like a good story, I don’t really have much interest in shooting out lightbulbs. Those of you who enjoy gory dismemberment and light-based obstacles (i.e. Alan Wake and The Darkness fans) will probably have a great time. There’s some pretty good voice acting and the cut scenes I saw show that they’ve made a good stab at a proper narrative. This is shaping up to be a solid game. It’s just not my sort of thing.

The Darkness II will be out in Feburary 2010 on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360

“Your basic Arachnid warrior isn’t too smart but you can blow off a limb and it’s still 86 percent combat effective. Here’s a tip: Aim for the nerve stem, and put it down for good.”
– Carl Jenkins, Starship Troopers (1997).

I completely overlooked the first Dead Space game when it first came out back in 2008. It wasn’t until the start of this year that I finally got round to playing it. What a surprisingly great game it turned out to be. The original Dead Space was easily the most atmospheric and genuinely scary game I’ve played since Dungeon Master’s Chaos Strikes Back expansion many, many years ago. It’s totally immersive, cleverly written, damn scary and very violent. I had real trouble scraping myself away from my PC.

So after finishing Dead Space on the PC and then Dead Space 2 demo on the Xbox 360 I was itching to see what scares and disgusting horror the full Dead Space 2 game had to offer. Thankfully, I wasn’t to be disappointed.

This ain’t Kansas

For those Dead Space veterans amongst you, Dead Space 2 will feel very, very familiar; like a well loved pair of slippers or your favourite seat in the pub. Visceral Games is evolving the Dead Space games in a way similar to the way Ubisoft is handling the Assassin’s Creed franchise. It’s evolution rather than revolution. Your character – Isaac Clark – is now easier and more responsive to control, has access to more deadly weapons and has discovered the power of speech. He can also heal himself without having to open up the inventory screen. This is a simple but very welcome skill as now you can keep Isaac alive even in the most heated of battles. He can’t however, leap tall buildings in a single bound. I imagine that will appear in Dead Space 3 along with saving small children, finding lost kittens and defeating evil geniuses.

The kinesis ability has been given a little upgrade as it can now slowly recharge itself, if you can be arsed to wait long enough. Dead Space 2 encourages you to make better use of your environment by littering the place with all sorts of objects that suddenly become deadly when projected at high speed across a room. Teddy bears, train tracks and toy planes are everywhere. Obviously I went off to see if I could kill a Necromorph armed with a teddy bear, which proved to be a fun and surprisingly successful trip. The flaw in this plan to make the player uses object to kill rather than guns is that ammo is still pretty abundant. It is present in sufficient quantities (almost every Necromorph carries ammo) for it really only to be a problem on a few occasions. Even then I just popped by the nearest store and bought a shed loads of ammo.

You will probably blast your way through the game, occasionally taking out Necromorphs using kinesis-powered projectiles, as I did. However, in the heat of battle, I just couldn’t be arsed to pick up a random object and fling it at the big, scary monster, when I could just blow its legs off with a single shot. Top tip – the pointy bits of Necromorphs are surprisingly good at killing other Necromorphs.

Guns, guns, guns

The arsenal available to Isaac has been bolstered by the arrival of 4 new weapons – rivet gun, detonator, javelin gun and hand cannon. Of these, the detonator gun is coolest as it shoots sticky mines. What’s even better is the ability to deactivate any of the planted mines and re-use them later. For the nervous player, laying mines everywhere to snag the unsuspecting Necromorphs is a handy stress reducing tactic. The hand cannon is an incredibly powerful foam glove, which requires you to have completed the game on hard or zealot mode to unlock it. Whilst wearing the glove, in primary fire mode, Isaac says “bang” and in secondary fire he says “pew” to kill things. Seriously! Watch the video by BigKahuna22 to see what I’m talking about.

Although Visceral Games have added these new weapons it is still hard to beat a fully upgraded plasma cutter; it is so wonderfully powerful and accurate. With the gameplay geared around blowing limbs off every Necromorph in sight and the plasma cutter is so perfectly suited to this task, why would I want to pick anything else. Whilst the detonator gun is great for protecting you from being ambushed by sneaky Necromorphs and the ripper gun (essentially a chainsaw) is ideal for close quarter destruction, I always relied on my plasma cutter.

The locator feature has been made more powerful now. It can now show you the route to the closest store, save point, bench (to upgrade your weapons) or the next objective. This means that you spend less time doubling back to save your game only to find a save point was just beyond the next door. I like the fact that the locator has to be activated. It is not an always on feature like in the Fable series of games. This means that your screen isn’t constantly filled with a glowing line, almost demanding that you follow it without question. One quirk of the locator is that it can show you the areas that are worth investigating for hidden goodies like power nodes. Simply go in the opposite direction to the route shown. Try it. You will find it works amazingly well.

Zero-g sections are much more involved as Isaac can activate/deactivate the magnets on his boots. This ability coupled with the 4 movement jets on his suit allows him to float round anywhere within the zero-g environments. This makes controlling Isaac a breeze which is essential during the various zero-g engineering jobs that you have to complete. Just like in Dead Space, these sections are a lot of fun, as you jet around the station fixing giant solar arrays or engaging in a space battle with some Necromorphs.

Even the store has had a graphical overhaul, which I think makes it even less user friendly. In the first game you had a nice clear, crisp, simple store interface. Now it’s cluttered with unnecessary graphics of all the different weapons, ammo and other items. Making it pretty does not make it good, or more functional. Ok, it’s not a game breaker and you do get used to it, but still. Bring back the original store’s simplicity.

A much discussed change before Dead Space 2 was released was giving the gift of speech to Isaac. Mercifully they have picked a decent voice actor. Hearing Isaac speak does give him a lot more character as you can relate to him as a real person as he- complains, argues, gets really pissed off, tells bad jokes and laughs (occasionally). For me, I felt more sympathy hearing him struggle to deal with what was happening to him, than I did in the first game.

Beep, beep, beeeep

The scary, disturbing, uneasy atmosphere that this game creates is really second to none. From the moment you start the game, your nerves will be repeatedly shredded. To achieve this Dead Space 2 utilises a whole variety of techniques from the simple, dark rooms and corridors in which you struggle catch a glimpse of any lurking Necromorphs to random sounds and surprise Necromorph attacks. At one point I had to pause the game as I’d been startled to death by an alarm clock. Yes, an alarm clock.

I was exploring a very dark room looking for ammo (as usual) and as I was leaving the room an alarm clock beeped. Doesn’t sound scary, does it? Well, given that the level was crawling with Necromorphs, the music was doing its best to unnerve me and my distinct lack of ammo meant, I was a little on edge. The last thing I wanted was a Necromorph to turn up behind me. So I would have jumped at pretty much any loud sound at the point. In this case the culprit was a little innocent alarm clock. I blew the crap out of it anyway.

The setting of the game is now a giant complex called The Sprawl on the moon Titan. You find yourself battling Necromorphs in kitchens, bedrooms, children playground, shopping malls as well as airlocks, Solar Arrays and other spacey locations. This is real-world sci-fi. That is, environments that look familiar and aren’t too outlandish. Personally, I think this makes the game more unsettling as you can imagine yourself wandering around that shopping mall only to be attacked by hideous space monsters and god-awful advertising. Although, I do hope that when we do colonise other planets the technology doesn’t break as much as it does in this game.

Bulletstorm, whose tag line is “Kill with Skill” is not a game that takes itself seriously, especially with score bonus names like “sausage fest” and “”gang bang.” This is a shooter from the Duke Nukem school of alien killing, and it looks like it could be a lot of fun.

Bulletstorm is due for release on the 22nd Feb 2011 on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.

You will be able to try out the Dead Space 2 demo from the 21st Dec on Xbox 360 and a day later on the PlayStation 3.

Dead Space 2 is due for release on the 28th Jan 2011 for Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3.

Exor Studios’have recently announced that you can now download and play a demo of Zombie Driver. The demo consists of the first 3 levels from the game.

You can download the Zombie driver demo from the usual download sites (FilePlanet, Gamespot, BigDownload.com) as well as Steam.

Zombie driver is out now for the PC

The latest game from Exor Studios’ is Zombie Driver. A game that appears to be solely based on that tried and tested combination of zombies and cars. It’s not exactly original, but looks fun none the less, and its got zombie dogs. Grrr arrrgghhh woof!

According to the website, Zombie Driver will feature:

• 17 story missions with sub quests and bonus objectives
• Huge, free roaming city, infested by thousands of brain hungry zombies
• 6 different cars including an unlockable super car
• 9 different upgrades for each car
• All cars can be mounted with miniguns, flamethrowers and rocket launchers
• All weapons have 3 upgrade levels which come with unique features
• Dynamic combo system with tricks and hordes of zombies to try it on
• Many vicious zombie types including even zombie dogs

Here’s a trailer showing your typical Zombie Driver gameplay. Drive car, splat zombies. Awesome.

Zombie driver is due for release on the PC in Nov 2009

What is it?

A first person shooter with spooky bits (sorry, paranormal events) and a plot!

Is it fun?

Oh yes, but it will scare the pants off you.

Is it worth the money? (£26.99 from play.com)

Yes, yes, yes!

Why?

The underlying creepy ambience to the whole game which makes even walking down an innocent looking corridor a most unnerving experience as frequent “paranormal events” mess with the lights and manipulate doors at will.
Also the use of flashbacks, showing some very gory cut scenes, further heightens the general sense of unease you experience whilst playing. Let’s also not forget the ghosts who wander about the levels, behaving in some quite disturbing ways and disintegrating before your very eyes.

The game looks spectacular as well, after you’ve done a bit of tweaking at the start to get the best out of your setup as F.E.A.R is a bit of PC killer. This takes about 15-20 mins and then you’re away.

You get to cause mayhem with a whole host of guns, grenades and remote timed mines. This is an 18-rated game so it contains a lot of gore. For example, you are treated to a fountain of blood when you blow someone’s head clean off or get to watch as soldiers turn into a fine blood red mist when blown up by a well placed mine. There is also a lot of graphic swearing, especially when people get shot and wounded.

Also the enemy AI is at least vaguely intelligent, with units communicating with each other and using boxes, furniture and anything else around to give them some cover during the fantastic firefights which occur throughout the game.

You also have your “bullet time” ability at your disposal to slow everything down, making firefights even more spectacular and very Matrix-like!

Tense, violent, beautiful, disturbing, gory and damn enjoyable.

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