Pc Game : Lord of the Rings: Conquest

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Towering oliphants loom over the battlefield, raging toward the Rohirrim. Orcs swarm around, brandishing rusty blades and thirsting for blood. Yes indeed, developer Pandemic Studios seems to be taking great pains to create a hack-and-slash game that stays true to its source material. Expect to see these sights and many others in The Lord of the Rings: Conquest. Two famed settings, Pelennor Fields and Minas Tirith, are home to some levels that we recently explored, and we're here to report on the experience.

YOU SHALL NOT PASS!

First, we should mention that in each of the campaign missions that we played, we could choose from four total character classes, both at the outset and within the missions: scout, warrior, archer, and mage. The warrior's broadsword may be the most obviously authoritative, but the other three classes have obvious advantages. Scouts wield daggers and are swift to attack, so if you like quick, stylish moves, you'll gravitate to this class. Archers, of course, are equipped with a bow and arrows, and you may find their triple-shot and poison-arrow skills particularly handy. Or if you're a fan of Gandalf, perhaps you'd rather test out the mage class, which uses lightning bolts as its main attack.

The first mission that we tackled was Pelennor Fields. The initial goal was to destroy some siege towers. There were a few ways of doing so, but we took the sneaky route: sabotaging them by setting them on fire. However, even as a warrior, we found that slicing our way through the hordes to get to the towers was harder than it looked. The field was simply swarming with angry orcs, and we were able to dispatch a good number of them with our sword, using both standard attacks and a variety of violent-looking combo moves. Trolls, on the other hand, were a much greater threat, and just getting near one could mean instant death. The best solution was simply to avoid the fight altogether, leaving plenty of elbow room for the hulking trolls. Eventually we were able to maneuver into position and set the towers aflame, though in each case, we had to lure a nearby troll away from our destination. The sequence was challenging and surprisingly strategic.

The next portion of the level involved getting close to enough to some oliphants to climb them and take them down. Getting into position was a bit of challenge, considering that the stomping heel of a pillaging pachyderm generally means instant death in almost any scenario. Once we were in the right spot, a flip of the trigger initiated a short climbing sequence that was vaguely reminiscent of Shadow of the Colossus, and once we'd climbed far enough, a God of War-style button-mashing sequence felled the behemoth once and for all.

The Minas Tirith level that we checked out was more straightforward, and we got to see multiple classes in action. Here, the main goal was simply to fend off a stream of invading enemies as they spilled into the stronghold. Seeing the mage in action was probably the most interesting sequence. Flashes of lightning and fire filled the screen, and orcs and trolls alike fell at the power of such commanding magic. Playing a scout during this section was rather fun too, given that the steady rush of foes was complemented by the quick dagger play. The controls seemed fluid, so it was easy to pull off impressive-looking combos and slice up familiar, menacing meanies in the process.

Ringwraiths will figure prominently in one of the more interesting online modes.

We didn't get to take part in any multiplayer action, though the game will include two-player cooperative play. More intriguingly, the game will support online 16-player adversarial modes. The most familiar of these modes is Conquest, a mode that fans of Pandemic's own Star Wars: Battlefront games will recognize. Here, teams will attempt to capture control points across the map while defending their own. However, you won't be stuck roaming around with just your teammates; battles will remain large in scale, and non-player combatants will join you in the fray. You will also be able to mount a horse (and even better, a warg!) to aid you in your travels. Two other modes sound equally interesting. In Ringbearer mode, one player will begin the match as Frodo, who must deliver the ring. Other players will join the match as ringwraiths, fighting each other as they search for the diminutive hobbit. Should a wraith capture Frodo, that player will turn into Frodo and take over. The other mode that we heard about was Stronghold mode, which is a Risk-style strategic mode in which teams fight one another on various maps to take over the various territories of Middle-Earth.

If you like the setting and look forward to getting your own hands on The Lord of the Rings: Conquest, you won't need to wait too long: It is due to be released for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC in 2008 during the holiday season. If you prefer your action to be more portable, you will be glad to hear that a Nintendo DS version is also in the works, though we have no details to share at this point. We will bring you more information on The Lord of the Rings: Conquest as it becomes available.

Pc Game : Mirrors Edge

Pc Game : Action, Pc Games 0 comments

Like its heroine, Faith, Mirror's Edge tries to hurdle some significant obstacles, but unlike Faith, it can't always make the leap. No doubt, this fascinating action platformer possesses its share of innovations, from a first-person perspective to a clean and crisp visual style, yet it looks to the past more than you may initially notice. This is a modern-day iteration of an old-fashioned platformer, in which you're meant to play and replay sequences of jumps, grabs, and slides until you get them perfect, or at least perfect enough to continue. But unlike its ancestors, Mirror's Edge is more about speed and momentum, and when you can connect your moves in a flawless stream of silky movement, it's eminently thrilling and satisfying. Unfortunately, Mirror's Edge has a tendency to trip over its own feet, keeping you slipping and sliding blissfully along, only to have a tedious jumping puzzle or hazy objective put the brakes on. Leaderboard chasers looking to set a speed-run record will find Mirror's Edge to be pure gold. Others will give up, alienated by the inherent trial and error of the game's basic design. At the very least, there's nothing quite like it, and it deserves a cautious look from anyone who appreciates games that hew their own path.

No matter how fast she runs, Faith can't always escape danger.

Faith is a runner, in more ways than one. In the oppressed society of Mirror's Edge, runners are an underground network of couriers, carrying sensitive information and documents from sender to receiver. The content of these messages is never clear, and it doesn't matter much; rather, the story's conflict revolves around Faith's sister, a cop who is framed for the murder of a mayoral candidate who promised to bring change to the totalitarian government and bring hope to the runners living on the fringe. Soon, Faith is running for a different reason: to uncover the conspiracy at the heart of the murder and clear her sister's name. The story is straightforward, but it's interesting enough to keep you involved, and though it ends with a sequel-hinting cliffhanger, it wraps up things enough to feel fulfilling nonetheless. More intriguingly, the story plays out between missions in stylishly animated cutscenes, as well as scenes within the game engine itself, which also look attractive but feature a completely different art style. Both types look good, but the disparity is a little odd.

And so you run, across rooftops, through train stations, and along walls. As you run, you pick up speed and are able to string a number of moves together in rapid succession. You can slide under pipes, bound over railings, and leap across impossible-looking chasms, among other techniques. Of course, the most obvious twist in Mirror's Edge is that you do all of this from a first-person view, rather than with the typical third-person camera that we've come to expect. It's an interesting spin, if not wholly new, and it has a way of immersing you as you speed toward your destination. Actions such as balancing on a narrow beam, sliding under a ledge at top speed, and tumbling when you land a long jump are fun to execute and look neat, but it may also make you wonder how much fun it would be to see what Faith looks like when she pulls off these neat stunts, which isn't possible in this game.

Nevertheless, Mirror's Edge excels when you hit that snappy stride, and once you've found the best route through a particularly tricky scenario, it's exhilarating to rush through it without a care to weigh you down. But this doesn't happen the first time you do it, or even the fifth time. You will need to experiment and hone your skills, given that a simple mistake can send you plunging down onto the street below, or will at very least interrupt your stride. You're expected to play each level multiple times to learn the routes that best propel you along, which is great the 10th time around but is often an infuriating series of false starts, mistimed jumps, and full stops during the first few attempts. If you need a hand, you can hold a button to activate runner vision, which turns the camera toward your destination, but it's an imprecise solution that sometimes points you toward a short-term objective and at other times points you toward your long-term goal.

Geronimo!

Another inconsistently helpful tool comes directly from the game's impressive art design. Mirror's Edge is a game of visual contrasts, in which stark white environments contrast with vivid colors. It looks beautiful and clean, and it's a great way of demonstrating both the bleakness of an authoritarian society and the unique manner in which a runner would see the world--as an array of landing points and jumping opportunities. Important ramps, doorways, ladders, and other points of interest are painted in a vibrant red, which is an important visual cue in some of the broader levels. However, this element too is delivered inconsistently; in some cases, the red hue may not fade in until you are close to the pole or vaulting point in question, and in other cases, Mirror's Edge expects you to figure things out without this visual assistance.

For a game that relies on so much forward momentum, Mirror's Edge has a way of bringing the pace to a halt. Sometimes this is because of the nature of trial-and-error gameplay: fall, die, reload checkpoint. At other times, it's because you're faced with an intricate jumping puzzle that eschews the sense of speed entirely, such as one that has you descending into the depths of the water-supply system and then up again. These aren't bad, but they're not particularly engaging, either; you're likelier to feel relieved rather than fulfilled when you reach your destination. Or you'll be zooming along, only to find yourself in an elevator, reading the news crawl on the wall's electronic panel while the level apparently loads in the background. In all of these cases, you're torn from the experience and reminded that this is, after all, just a game.

Armed enemies further complicate matters. It's best to run right past them when possible, but their bullets have a way of bringing you to your knees as you rush around looking for the best escape route. Some foe-heavy scenarios are particularly annoying, such as a sniper-loaded sequence in the final level. You can confront the threat head-on in some cases, but it requires careful planning and excellent timing. You can perform some close-combat moves such as jump kicks and punches, but these are best when used as hit-and-run tactics; trying to engage in melees with more than one or two enemies at a time is a quick path to the most recent checkpoint. Conversely, you can disarm an enemy in a quick-time event, pressing the disarm button when your foe's weapon flashes red. If you want to hold on to it, you can fire off a few shots until the clip runs out. However, Faith is ultravulnerable to gunfire, and the gunplay is loose and unfulfilling. If you have trouble keeping things in check (it takes some split-second timing to land a pitch-perfect disarm), you can enter a limited-use slow-motion mode, which comes in handy and makes some of these action-focused moves look cool, though it ultimately doesn't add much to the gameplay.

If you can overlook the array of quirks long enough to find your stride, you'll want to check out the beat-your-record races and level speed runs. Both modes feature online leaderboards, and both cater to the players likeliest to get the most out of Mirror's Edge. In a sense, the single-player story is simply a practice run for being a virtual show-off, yet the players repeating these levels (who will learn them to perfection) are also the ones likely to see Mirror's Edge at its most thrilling. You will want to break out an Xbox 360 controller if you want to get the most out of the experience. The keyboard-and-mouse setup is decent but occasionally awkward, and it can't compete with the interesting (but intuitive) gamepad controls.

You'll be seeing red, both literally and figuratively.

The unusually crisp visuals have seen some nice additional touches on the PC, such as fluttering industrial plastic over a few doorways, and symbolic flags undulating in the wind. The audio also deserves high praise. Sound effects such as Faith's breathy heaves and plodding footsteps are authentic touches that heighten the sense of speed and tension. The voice acting is equally terrific, but it's the pulsing, driving soundtrack that impresses most. Its rhythmic flow augments Faith's most fluid runs, whereas subtle ambient chords fill in the silence during downtimes. The superb musical journey culminates in a fantastic vocal track that plays during the game's final credits.

Pc Game : NARC

Pc Game : Action, Pc Games 0 comments

Midway's classic side-scrolling shooter, NARC, was a real one-of-a-kind game when it hit arcades in 1988. And really, it's remained unrivaled in its ability to have it both ways. As a pair of hyper-badass Jerry Bruckheimer-style narcotics agents, you would use a fascistic level of force against any and all involved in the drug trade, including dealers, junkies, and prostitute-killing clowns--you know, everyone. It was a giddily surreal take on Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" mantra, and its absurd violence arguably paved the way for games like Mortal Kombat. All this manic fun is completely absent in Midway's modern remake of NARC, which comes off as a halfhearted third-person action game barely worth its budget price.

Where are my dumpster-hurling PCP addicts?

Though you're still out to bust up the bad guys, the brightly lit setting of the original NARC has been traded in for a darker, seedier attitude and more backstory. And it's fairly obvious the designers had their eyes on Grand Theft Auto the entire time. The game aims for the same moral ambiguity that will cause players to explore the finer interactions between pedestrians and baseball bats in Rockstar's criminal action series, but NARC doesn't have the actual goods to back it up.

The idea is that you can be a good cop or a bad cop, but it doesn't really work out that way. Alternating between two different cops (who play identically), you go on a series of missions to bring down a drug cartel, which usually involves shooting lots of bad guys or making sure specific good guys don't get shot. Along the way, you'll pick up an assortment of street party favors, including weapons, cash, and, of course, a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, laughers, and screamers. The good cop will turn in all the evidence, ensure the public safety, protect, serve, and all that. Meanwhile, the bad cop will add weapons to his personal arsenal and will either sell or use the drugs he confiscates.

Drug use is a central theme in the game, and the idea is that using drugs will give you an edge...but at the price of addiction. In a rather grotesque take on substance addiction, the game treats drugs like power-ups. Marijuana will slow down time but allows you to aim in real time, à la Max Payne. (Incidentally, NARC also makes Cypress Hill's "Hits From the Bong" or The Stranglers' "Golden Brown" play in your head while you're stoned.) LSD gives all pedestrians gigantic bobbleheads and makes the "bad guys" easily identifiable by giving them devil heads. The most beneficial, and thus, most addictive of the drugs is the fictional "Liquid Soul," which is basically like the super star for Mario, making you invincible and making all your attacks extremely potent. It's novel to check out the effects of the different drugs a few times, but their already-limited usefulness is hampered by a tedious inventory system that makes it unnecessarily difficult to go from using drugs to using guns.

Any of your illicit behavior will affect your "badge rating," and when your badge rating falls far enough, you'll be suspended and won't be able to take on more missions until you set yourself straight. The real rub here is that there's really little motivation to be a good cop. If you get hooked on dope, an easily acquired pill will free you of any monkeys that might be on your back. And if your badge rating gets too low, it only takes busting a couple of drug dealers, hookers, taggers, or muggers to get back into the chief's good graces. The process of identifying perps is pretty easy, especially for the street dealers, who are marked with the icons of the drug they're selling. However, the actual process of arresting them is needlessly contrived and convoluted, with a lot of button mashing and swinging power meters. It feels more like you're playing a golf game than a gritty crime game.

There's definitely the promise of an open-ended "sandbox" experience in NARC, but frankly, there's not enough to do when you don't have a specific mission objective to attend to. You can bust perps or try to sell drugs to random pedestrians, but there's no depth beyond that. The urban sprawl doesn't really sprawl that far, and the clunkiness of the controls keeps the actual action from being reason enough to play. The pedestrians are all pretty stupid and are, for the most part, content with milling about aimlessly while occasionally being victimized by criminals.

All this is rendered with Vis Entertainment's aging State of Emergency engine, which was last seen powering the also-budget-priced Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick. The attraction of this engine was originally its ability to render State of Emergency's teeming crowds of rioters, favoring a volume of motion over the finer details of polygon counts or texture resolutions. NARC doesn't benefit from there constantly being a riot, so all you really get out of it is a lot of flat, dull-looking environments, simple and repetitive character designs, and lots of darkness. Did we mention that it's always nighttime? This is indicative of the exceedingly overbearing "edginess" of the game. Plus it lets the edges of your vision safely fade away, rather than doing it in the daylight, where it would look like wicked-bad pop-up. Neither the Xbox nor the PlayStation 2 versions of NARC take advantage of the power of these consoles, though the Xbox version predictably looks just a little bit better, with slightly shorter load times and less slowdown. There are other small, subtle presentation features found in the Xbox version that just aren't there on the PlayStation 2.

This marks the second half-assed GTA clone to feature Michael Madsen. We're just sayin'...

The closest NARC comes to redemption is in its sound design...or more specifically, in its soundtrack. The environmental sounds are dreary, and the voice acting performances from Bill Bellamy (Def Jam's How to Be a Player), Michael Madsen (Free Willy), and Ron Perlman (Police Academy: Mission to Moscow) are uniformly phoned-in and mismatched. There are also some fantastic sound bugs that will cause the game to start shrieking like it was junk sick. Anyways, back to the soundtrack. Along with a good half-dozen rap tracks produced specifically for the game (you can tell they're for the game because the words "narc" and "Midway" are featured a lot in them), you'll hear some good drug-themed licensed music, like Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel's "White Lines" and Curtis Mayfield's "Pusherman." These quality tracks, which go far in giving the game's attitude some actual credence, are just not enough.

If you strip away the patently silly drug effects and the forced attitude, NARC is an unimpressive mission-based third-person action game. It's also short, rife with bugs, and basically not a lot of fun to play. That it carries the same name as an enjoyable and knowingly bizarre arcade classic is downright misleading and can only lead to disappointment. The best way to avoid that disappointment is to listen to Mrs. Reagan. Just say no.

Pc Game : Saints Row 2 { DVD 9 }

Pc Game : Action, Pc Games 0 comments

With the release of Grand Theft Auto IV now less than two months away you could be forgiven for forgetting all about Saints Row 2. After all, Volition's upcoming sequel to the other open-world crime-themed action game doesn't even have a tentative release date yet. We're told that it'll be arriving this year, though, and we recently had an opportunity to check out an early version that already incorporates plenty of new features.

Set a few years after the events of Saints Row, the sequel will see you reprising the role of a Saints gang member who, in the years since the first game, has risen to power and become the leader of the gang. With that said, the first game forced you to play as a male character, but that's not the case in Saints Row 2. We spent some time with the new character customization system during our meeting, and it's clearly something that Volition has spent a lot of time improving. You can not only play as a male or a female but, since those options appear at either end of a sliding scale, you can choose to play as someone whose appearance isn't obviously either of the two. Other sliding scales you can play around with will affect fitness level and age. You'll also be able to determine your character's ethnicity and modify his or her facial features.

You play as the same character you did in Saints Row, regardless of whether you opt for a similar appearance or even the same gender.

Character customization in Saints Row 2 won't end there, though. After settling on a look for your gang leader, you'll want to figure out how he or she moves. You might choose a guy who walks like a gorilla, a ballerina, or any of the numerous options in between. You'll also need to choose a voice, favorite taunt and compliment actions, and fighting style. Available taunts--which are presumably intended for use primarily in multiplayer games--will include such classics as the middle finger, the tea bag, and the wanker. Compliments will include a salute, thumbs-up, riverdance (don't ask), and many more. The number of fighting-style options available to you will increase as you defeat gangs in the story mode and add their moves to your arsenal.

The story mode will pit you against three rival gangs, all of whom are hoping to fill the power vacuum resulting from the Saints' fall from grace. It's a similar setup to that in the first game, but there appear to be plenty of changes and improvements planned for Saints Row 2 that'll make it a worthy sequel. For starters, the city of Stillwater is now considerably larger and barely recognizable as the same location from the first game. This, we're told, is the result of urban renewal efforts on behalf of a large corporation. All of the existing neighborhoods have been given a face-lift, and all-new neighborhoods have been created as a result of the city's expansion to the west. You'll be able to visit the interiors of well over 100 of Stillwater's buildings this time around, including no fewer than nine gang cribs that you can make your own as you progress through the game.

If you've played Saints Row, you might remember that cribs were primarily places that you could save your game, change your clothes, and store your car collections. In Saints Row 2 you'll still be able to do all of those things, and lots more besides. We were shown one of the new cribs during our meeting, a two-story building that looked pretty run-down. It looked so nasty, in fact, that we were surprised to see several gang members hanging out there in the hope that they'd be chosen for an upcoming mission. Fortunately, as you accumulate money you'll have the option to spend it on upgrading the place. The crib customization options don't appear to be nearly as numerous as those for your character, but they're a welcome addition nonetheless. Options for the crib that we visited during our demo included upgrades for the table, the bed, the home theater, and the stripper pole, as well as "cheap," "classy," and "ultra modern" decor. Spending money on your crib will increase the amount of respect that you earn for completing missions and other objectives, and it'll also make your fellow gang members more effective when they're fighting alongside you. Other features promised for cribs include different radio stations to listen to, a more intelligent wardrobe system that lets you group individual items of clothing into outfits, and garages that can store motorcycles as well as cars. (Your Jet Skis, boats, helicopters, and planes will need to be kept elsewhere.)

Your crib doesn't look like anywhere you'd want to spend any time on day one.

Once our guided tour of the crib was over we were treated to a look at one of the early stronghold missions from Saints Row 2, in which you'll be tasked with taking out a base of operations belonging to the drug-running Sons of Samedi gang. The stronghold was a well-guarded trailer park that looked quite different from any location in the first game, and we were pleased to see that you'll have plenty of new moves and weapons in your arsenal when you're taking on enemies on foot. The new over-the-shoulder view for precision aiming will undoubtedly prove useful, as will the option to take other characters hostage and use them as a human shield. Gang members and cops will purportedly react differently to you depending on who your shield is, and the Sons of Samedi certainly seemed a little reluctant to fire at one of their own on this occasion. Your enemies will have the ability to hide behind human shields as well. The only new weapon that we got to see during our demo was a satchel charge, which sticks to anything it's thrown at and can then be detonated manually. The resulting explosions were pretty huge, and the potential for creative uses of the charges (you can turn a car or even an enemy into a moving bomb, for example) have us crossing our fingers that they'll be included in the competitive multiplayer arsenal.

Volition and THQ aren't really talking about the multiplayer features of Saints Row 2 yet, except to say that they've learned a lot from the first game and won't be making any of the same mistakes again. What they did tell us about, though, is the option to play through the entire story mode cooperatively with a friend. That's an exciting prospect, to say the least, especially when you consider some of the other activities and "diversions" that you can earn respect and money from in Stillwater. Saints Row 2 will purportedly introduce a number of all-new activities in addition to "the good ones" from the first game. The insurance fraud game in which you attempt to cause as much damage to property and to yourself isn't going away, of course, and promises to be a whole lot of fun with two players working together. Incidentally, all of the activity missions will be optional, since their function is to provide comic relief from the main story, which deals with revenge and is apparently much darker than the first game's.

Based on what we saw during our meeting, Saints Row 2 is shaping up to be a strong sequel to 2006's Saints Row. We look forward to bringing you more information on the game's multiplayer content and other features as soon as it becomes available.

Earlier today, during a meeting with THQ and Volition, we had an opportunity to play Saints Row 2 for the first time. Joining us in the city of Stilwater was the game's lead designer, James Tsai, who was kind enough to play through a stronghold mission and a helicopter activity with us in the two-player co-op mode before the session degenerated into an infinite-ammo-fueled rampage.

Saints Row 2 promises a user-friendly approach to cooperative gameplay that'll let you jump in and out of online co-op games at any time, regardless of how far into the campaign each player is. You'd have to be pretty dedicated to playing alongside a friend to completely avoid playing solo for fear of getting out of sync with each other, after all. You'll be able to help other players out with missions that you've already beaten, of course, but what's really neat is that when playing alongside someone who's a lot further into the story than you you'll have the option of playing through their missions as well. Said missions would almost certainly be unavailable to you in single-player mode at that time, but the game will remember that you've beaten them in co-op and, when you reach them in your own story, will give you the option to skip them accordingly.

Screenshots of the Sons of Samedi trailer park are in short supply, apparently, so here's one of an unrelated locale.

The mission that we played through during today's session tasked us with taking down the same Sons of Samedi stronghold that we were given a brief tour of the last time we saw Saints Row 2 in action. The stronghold is a trailer park where the Caribbean-influenced gang manufactures a designer drug known as Lower Dust. Our goal was to destroy five trailers being used as labs, and thanks to a cheat that afforded us infinite ammo for every weapon in our arsenal, we had no shortage of toys with which to accomplish it. Favorite weapons on this occasion included a shotgun, an assault rifle, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and satchel charges. The two guns were effective at close- and long-range, respectively; the RPG was useful because it locks on to targets pretty quickly if you position your crosshair over them; and the satchel charges are a lot of fun because they adhere to just about anything (or anyone) you throw them at and can then be detonated manually.

While playing through the stronghold mission we were free to work as closely with or as independently from the other player as we liked, though since you'll have the ability to revive each other when you die it's definitely a good idea to stay pretty close. Simply taking the shortest route through the mission and blowing up the five trailer labs wasn't terribly difficult with two players, and even with numerous gang members attempting to stop us we rarely needed to worry about retreating into cover so that our health could replenish. Our first play-through of the mission was a little underwhelming, to be honest, but that's only because it was a little too easy to beat with an overpowered arsenal that we hadn't started to get creative with yet.

That all changed on our second play-through. Landing satchel charges on a stationary target as big as a trailer isn't very challenging or particularly satisfying, but landing those same charges on cars as they drive by or even on unsuspecting pedestrians who then go into a panic is infinitely more enjoyable. By sticking a couple of charges onto a car and then driving it toward one of the trailers before bailing out and hitting the detonate button, Tsai also showed us how seemingly innocuous vehicles can effectively be turned into powerful missiles. The new cruise control feature that lets you keep your vehicle's speed constant while freeing up your accelerator thumb for other things proved useful here, though its intended purpose is really just to make drive-bys easier. By adhering multiple charges to a pedestrian and then detonating them individually it's even possible to "juggle" the target using explosions to keep them in the air, and when the day comes that we're allowed to capture our own footage of Saints Row 2, you can bet that'll be one of the first things we try.

Another fun feature of Saints Row 2 that we experimented with while playing through the stronghold mission is the ability to grab pedestrians and use them as human shields. Gang members and cops are somewhat reluctant to fire at their own people when you're hiding behind them, and even innocent civilians that gang members will fire upon without a second thought do a good job of soaking up bullets for a time. When you no longer need your human shields, you have the option to execute them with a quick headshot (that doesn't work with the RPG, we discovered; you just break their necks instead) or simply push them away--preferably toward a fire or fast-moving vehicle so that there's no danger of them trying to exact revenge.

The helicopter activity that we played through next will, like other activities, be completely optional as you progress through the game. On this occasion we were tasked with providing air support for a friendly vehicle that was being used to complete a drug deal and coming under fire from rival gangs. In co-op mode, helicopter activities have one player jump into the pilot seat while the other uses a chaingun and laser-guided missile system to take out hostiles. The chaingun seemed a little underpowered on this occasion, while the missiles were perhaps just a little too quick and easy to fire and forget.

We completed the activity from the gunner's seat with a minimum of fuss after shooting down a number of enemy helicopters and blowing up plenty of hostile vehicles on the streets below. We were eager to pilot a helicopter for ourselves, though, so we had Tsai show us to a location where we could jack one and just fly around without having to concern ourselves with objectives. Predictably, the controls for the chopper were a little more complex than those for cars and bikes, but they're still quite easy to pick up. Your accelerator and brake buttons are the same as they are on the street, except that they can also be used to influence altitude, you still steer with the left analog stick and move the camera with the right, and you can use the shoulder buttons to rotate left and right.

And here's a great screenshot of the helicopter that we used to explore Stillwater.

The work-in-progress demo version of Saints Row 2 that we were playing on this occasion afforded us the opportunity to explore only a portion of one of islands that make up the gameworld. From our vantage point inside a helicopter flying high above, though, we were still impressed by the scale of the environment and by the variety of the neighborhoods that we could see. As we flew from one end of the island to the other, we left the trailer park behind and headed toward a large, modern-looking city before ultimately ending up at a museum site that incorporated what appeared to be the ruins of an ancient temple. That's where we ditched the chopper (OK, crashed it) and decided to have some more fun with satchel charges before bringing the session to an end. A few hundred explosions later we still weren't bored of them, and we'd managed to attract the attention of several SWAT teams by the time we reluctantly put down the controller.

Pc Game : The Royal Marines Commando

Pc Game : Action, Pc Games 0 comments

By Sea, by Land

1941 and the German War machine is ravaging Europe. The British intelligence obtains classified documents detailing the development of a new type of German “U boat” submarine. This technology will give the Nazis worldwide naval supremacy and a great advantage over the allies. The Royal Marines Commandos are sent into action.

Lead the British commandos on intense missions in France, Africa, Scotland and Norway
Experience astonishing graphics, dynamic lighting, breathtaking effects and outstanding AI
Battle the Axis armies using realistic weapons originally used by both British and German soldiers

System requirements