Microsoft has good reason to offer a lower priced Xbox One system. Sony’s PS4 (also released in Nov., 2013) has sold about 2 million more units than the Xbox One, even with the help of the exclusive title Titanfall which analysts said could sell 6 million copies by the end of 2014.

Microsoft also announced that Xbox Live members will no longer need a Gold membership to access entertainment apps such as Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu Plus, Twitch, Machinima, ESPN, MLB.tv, and others among the available choices at the Microsoft store.

Also today, Xbox Live added the GoPro Channel app for Xbox Live Gold members to stream and curate GoPro video content through the Xbox 360 console. Microsoft says the GoPro Channel app is being developed for Xbox One and will be launched this summer.

“The GoPro Channel app will bring the best of GoPro originally-produced and user-generated content into the homes of millions of Xbox Live Gold customers,” said Adam Dornbusch, Head of Content Distribution at GoPro.

Escape Goat is a prime example of the old adage “Never judge a book by its cover.” I first played the game some time back when it appeared on Xbox Live Indie Games. It’s still one of my go-to examples of decent games that are sadly drowned beneath the sea of junk that makes up the XBLIG ghetto. Unfortunately, whenever I recommend Escape Goat, people seem instantly turned off by the visuals, and I can’t really blame them. You can now find Escape Goat on both GOG and Steam, and while the presentation might not be particularly appealing, trust me when I say that if you give the game a shot you’ll find a pretty fun and challenging puzzle platformer at a very reasonable price.

The core gameplay of Escape Goat is incredibly simple. You are a goat stuck in a dungeon and must use your abilities to navigate rooms, each of which is about one screen in size. You can double jump and you have a dash move that can be used to dart forward to avoid obstacles or move certain blocks. You also have a mouse friend that you can send into areas that the goat is too big to access. Some levels feature a magic hat, which gives you the ability to swap places with the mouse and is vital to solving that particular room.

The goal of each room is simply to reach the exit. Accomplishing this requires a mix of both platforming and puzzle solving. The exit is always blocked in some way, and opening the path involves hitting switches, moving blocks, or otherwise manipulating the environment. Most rooms are also full of ways to kill you, be it traps, bottomless pits, or the skeletal reapers that will assail you with fireballs as soon as they see you.

The main game features over 60 rooms, divided amongst some ten regions with different tile sets. Each of these regions usually has about six rooms with their own unique set of challenges and themes. For example, there is an ice themed tile set with ice blocks that are too slippery for the mouse to traverse. Another tile set is based on a mad science theme and is full of moving platforms, traps, and electrical barriers that instantly kill you.

Despite the fairly simple base mechanics, Escape Goat throws some really clever and challenging puzzles the deeper you get into the dungeon. Rooms where you must use the magical hat in particular are usually pretty interesting, often requiring you to keep sending the mouse into areas the goat can’t reach so you can swap places to accomplish some task that the mouse is incapable of doing. The fact that the mouse takes time to scurry around the level results in some clever puzzles based on timing.

One in particular involved having to ride a moving platform through a series of traps. There were two sets of switches, red and blue, that would deactivate one set of traps, but activate another. You’d have to hit a blue switch to deactivate some traps, but then send the mouse to a red switch out of the goat’s reach to deactivate the next set of traps before you got to them, but after you passed the last set of traps. The fire themed region is another example of clever traps based on timing that often required you to maneuver exploding barrels and goad the reapers into shooting at them at the right time.

If there is one issue I’d levy against the game’s puzzles it’s that some require a bit too much trial and error, especially the timed puzzles. A handful of rooms drop you into a life-threatening puzzle that you must figure out within a few short moments before being killed. The limited time in which you have to glance over your options often means you have to repeatedly die several times before it becomes apparent what you even need to do. These timed puzzles become more common towards the end of the game, where the puzzles are often pretty complicated with little margin for error.

Once you beat the main game, which will probably take you a little over three hours, you’ll unlock another set of even more hellishly devised puzzles. These puzzles, numbering a bit over two dozen, are designed to push your platforming and puzzle solving skills to their absolute limited. Even the easier ones are more complicated than most of the puzzles in the main game, so expect a really tough challenge from this advanced campaign. If you need even more goat-based puzzle-platforming, the game comes with an editor that makes creating and sharing new rooms relatively painless. With the recent Steam release I think it’s safe to say that Escape Goat could find a decent little cult following of players devising unbelievably devious challenges for you to try.

I fully admit that Escape Goat doesn’t look too appealing at first glance. It is easy to write it off as “just another retro-inspired indie puzzle platformer.” We certainly aren’t lacking those these days, and Escape Goat‘s 8-bit aesthetic (which doesn’t even look as good as many other games out there with 8-bit pixel art) doesn’t make it stand out too well among its peers. However, if you give it a chance, you’ll find a solid game that is pretty good at what it does and has a nice amount of content for the meager $5 price tag. You can currently find the game on GOG, Steam, the developer’s website, Desura, IndieGameStand, and GamersGate. There is also a sequel in development that is expected to come out sometime this year.

Monaco is an action game that gives you and up to three friends the opportunity to break out of jails and rob banks or rich old men. While the game attempts to give you the feel of a theft film it really hits it’s stride as a fast-paced puzzle game. While stealth exists in the game it’s clearly just a tool you’re supposed to use when breaking open vaults as fast as you can.

The game’s over-arching story isn’t quite as interesting as the dialogue between all the colorful characters. You get one of every stereotypical character of a heist movie but can only use four at any time by playing coop. If you’re playing single player you can only use one character per mission and your decision on who to play is based more on who’s best for that level and less about who you’d really like to play.

The different characters are wonderfully created and also allow for a lot of creativity on every map. If you want to run through the map and put every unsuspecting guard to sleep then you can be the Cleaner and have a few less guards to deal with. If you want to sneak around and rush in and out of vaults then you can play the Lockpick and while your friend is cleaning out the guards you can get the score. There are eight playable characters that each have one magnificent strength although if you’re not playing multiplayer you’re going to need to be more picky about who you take into each mission.

The game’s controls and mechanics are beautifully simple. Your directional controls are the standard W, A, S and D unless you are playing on an Xbox controller. If you walk up to a lock or computer you will begin to unlock or hack it. This applies to any usable object in the game including bushes you can hide in and traps you can disarm. When you pick up an item like a health pack or a shotgun it’s usable with the left-mouse button and the weapons aim with the mouse. It’s clear that the developers took steps to streamline the controls so all the mechanics work with the least buttons possible. It’s a fantastic standard they set and it makes the game feel simple while allowing you a huge variety of options to complete every mission.

The game’s visuals equal the controls in simplicity but not always in a good way. When playing the game for the first few missions you may get confused at what’s going on but that tends to lend to the mastery aspect of the game. It would be nice to assume this is entirely intended by the developers but it feels like there just wasn’t enough time to give any more depth or care to the game’s graphics. As long as you find a reason to enjoy it Monaco’s art shouldn’t bother you too much.

That being said the game uses plenty of squares and geometric figures but it’s definitely not classical pixel art. It definitely wins some points for it’s bold direction and it’s a nice breath of fresh air in an indie market that’s become saturated with retro pixel art. The way the characters animate on the screen definitely feels unique.

Although I haven’t played on a large screen (I’m playing on my PC) I hear that you’re going to need one to play coop on the same rig and I understand why. The game’s camera will keep every local player on the screen so if two players are on either side of a large map you can imagine how much harder it could be to recognize every icon in the level. This is of course something that’s hard to avoid in a game like this so if you’re going to play with friends on a couch make sure your screen is big enough.

The music sounds like it’s right out of a silent film which is a nice take. It was done by Austin Wintory who worked on Journey and it shows. The music will change depending on what you’re doing at the time and it’s a nice addition to an already great-feeling game. Sometimes it can throw you off but usually it’s a nice indicator that you’ve made a huge mistake.

Regardless of what visual setbacks may exists for certain setups the game is definitely a treat. It’s been in development since 2009 and although that seems like a long time it feels like it required a lot of trial, error and even happy-mistakes to become as great as it is now. I suggest picking this game up with a few other friends and running through the campaign in a night or two. Every mission will be better if it was with the same crew you played the last few levels with.

The only mechanic this game is missing is the option to betray your crew which happens in every heist movie but this may occur in the story somewhere.

The game has great pacing and I enjoy the story because I do love my heist movies. The game is worth fifteen of your hard-earned dollars, on Xbox or Steam.

What’s yours is mine.

Overview

Well, Black Ops is back with vengeance in its sequel, Black Ops II, and it would seem that Treyarch actually had some new tricks up their sleeves. Black Ops II, to my knowledge anyway, is the first in the series to bring choice and alternate story routes to your gameplay experience. It would seem the company is trying to make a break from its usual one track story and actually putting some serious effort into diversity this time around.
If you haven’t played one of the other seventeen Call of Duty games and this was a first for you, then you actually managed to step in on one of the good ones. Call of Duty, your fairly typical first person shooter is a game mashed FULL of guns and gadgets. As of the first Black Ops in the franchise there are three modes that allow you a fairly wide range of entertainment: Campaign, Multiplayer, and Zombie Mode. In each mode your goal is fairly straight forward, shoot the enemy (preferably in the head!), with a couple of variations in multiplayer mode such as “confirm you shot them by picking up their dog tags”, or “shoot them so that you can blow something else up down the road”. Almost any way you play it, there’s shooting of some kind unless you’re of the rare “knifing” persuasion. In Call of Duty, FPS also stands for “First Person Stabber”, which multiplayer actually allows some variety in for Black Ops II. Ever wanted to stab someone with a golden knife and NOT be at the top of an ancient sacrificial Aztec pyramid? Perfect, because Black Ops II has you covered! Either way, the game is great for any gun fanatic out there, old or new, and even those that want to use some future weapons that spew over nine thousand bullets a second.

Campaign
Our story begins with a short music video montage of the backstory for a character named Raul Menendez who is our villain for this short action packed hell-ride (sooooo much fire!). At a young age it would seem Menendez tried to rescue his sister from a burning building and somewhat succeeded, though his sister is in pretty bad shape. Before I go any further, here would be a good place to mention that you should be extremely careful with the “graphic content” option given to the player by Treyarch. You don’t really get a choice with introduction, but if that churns anything in your stomach, I seriously recommend turning graphic content off, because it was a rather disturbing ride in the beginning and the end of the story with it on. Anyway, getting back on track, it turns out that the warehouse Menendez and his sister were trying to escape from was actually burned down intentionally by an American for the insurance money and thus an evil mastermind is born with hatred against rich people. Hooray! No racism this game! Mostly anyway…It would seem that you do spend an inordinate amount of time killing Cubans, in the future or the past. Personally, I would never have guessed that the best equipped elite mercenary of the future would hail from Cuba, but you learn something new every day.

The story is split across three characters with missions in the near future of 2025 and the past ranging from Vietnam through the 1980s. While you’re busy dredging up backstory in the 1900s, you switch back and forth between Alex Mason, the brainwashed CIA operative from the first Black Ops, and Frank Woods, his partner; however, the majority of time is spent in the year 2025 as David Mason, son of Alex Mason hunting down the monster, Raul Menendez who always seems to be one step ahead of you. This is, of course, when you get to play with all the fun new gadgets.

Gadgets are a bit of a plot item in the newest Black Ops: winged gliders, harriers, drone support of multiple kinds, and even smaller stuff like mountainside traversal grapple partner swings (what?). I’m not even mentioning guns here or their attachments, like the introduction of the Storm PSR sniper rifle which fires through solid objects the longer you hold down the power button, and that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Another innovation this time around would be the introduction of Strike Force mode, which allows the player to take the position of a Commander on the field with a limited number of troops and a specific objective and time limit. Now, I always play the campaigns of Call of Duty on Veteran for my own amusement, but I don’t know what I was doing wrong with Strike Force. The instant my guys got on the field and somewhere near an objective they got absolutely destroyed and I lost every Strike Force mission I went in on. Maybe it was because of Veteran mode, or maybe because I’m just terrible at it, but either way it was different, difficult, and even a bit clunky for Treyarch’s release standards. You can’t just keep trying at them either. The number of troops you have is limited to the number of missions you’ve done, but the Strike Force content also disappears after a specified number of missions are completed. So, if you don’t know what you’re doing the first time around (like me!) and you lose all your troops, which just keep coming in to get mowed down unless you quit the mission early or win, then you have little to no chance of completing any of them, which really disappointed me.

Zombies
Zombie mode has evolved once again and I must say I’m a fan! Masochistic survival mode is still there, and shinier than ever, but is it really getting a story that’s more comprehensive than a three page comic book? Yes! In a loose homage to Scooby Doo and the gang, grab some machine guns and jump aboard a bus to look for clues as to why the zombie apocalypse is really happening! This new system allows some players to stay in one area while others ride a rusty bus to a totally different mini-area for alternate supplies and different “parts”. These “parts” are a piece of the new crafting aspect and allows the player(s) to MacGyver defenses and access-ways of many kinds all over the maps. Of course, the whole thing still works off of points, so make you shoot every last zombie you find to make bank! I would even say the level designers have figured out a way to make the maps more claustrophobic and scary with the addition on the brown mist that surrounds each area. Stepping into the fog gets the player an intimate experience with a creature reminiscent of the head-crabs from Half-Life and isn’t recommended unless you’re in the bus. Environments are also mutable, and even change without player intervention at times. Too many rides on the bus gets the roof torn open, staying in the initial starting zone gets the floor cracked open and spewing Hell-fire, that sort of stuff.

Multiplayer
The general format of Call of Duty multiplayer hasn’t changed too drastically, and there are plenty of new guns, new maps, new weapon attachments, and all of the other shiny bits and baubles. They’ve now included a mini Adobe Photoshop to edit your emblem to perfection, the ability to camouflage your tactical knife (always important!) and, of course, the ability to leave a calling card on your enemy. Gone are the days of Halo’s tea bags I guess. Even taunting has gotten a face lift as of 2025.
Call of Duty has, once again, flip flopped on the subject of dedicated servers, and, while this isn’t a super exciting bit about multiplayer intended to amp you up and get you ready to go with Black Ops II’s new multiplayer, it’s important to mention. Dedicated, or mod, servers allow players themselves to administer a server and to modify it as they see fit. Treyarch has decided that this breeches the integrity and security of the ranking system, which, to the rest of us means: you have to play and level up our way or it’s not fair to everyone else. I see the argument, but I personally found the most joy and innovation in the client modified servers I played on in older games in the franchise, which I will miss dearly. Furthermore, the server files are being locked away too which prevent people from renting or buying their own servers to host Black Ops II. This has been most unpopular with PC gamers looking to control a clan server. I have heard from several people who feel that Treyarch has alienated them and their preferred play style. These people are players who would have otherwise been looking forward to the newest game in the Call of Duty franchise, but now boycott it.

My own experience went something like this: upon entering my first multiplayer bout on Xbox Live, I was greeted by the whiney prepubescent complaining I am always met with when I’m on the chat system. Of course I had joined a match half way through, so going through now and muting people would simply be wasting my team’s time. Telling myself that I just have to get through this, I finished one round and then started to do my tradition of muting everyone except for my party, and, as I tried, an option popped up that made me ecstatic. “Do you want to mute all players except party members?” Dropping my jaw in amazement I quickly hit yes and was rewarded to see a bunch of tiny mute symbols next to nearly everyone’s name! It’s probably a sad reflection on me that this is the first thing I got really excited about in the game, however it’s something I know a lot of the more mature Xbox Live players hate dealing with. The rest of the games I played were pretty routine.
1. Start Round
2. Run with team around first corner
3. Get face blown off by rifle of some kind
4. Respawn
5. Run around corner
6. Repeat steps 3, 4, & 5 until death in step 3 is no longer caused by rifle, but by air strike and promptly remove step 5 from rotation until end of game.
I can tell you though, from looking at the stats of three of the twenty some odd people on the map, that it IS possible to have fun and do well. How much time and effort you want to put in to getting that good and having fun is up to you though.  Plus, this stuff’s getting easier with the addition of my favorite attachment, the “target finder” that puts a giant red diamond around your enemy when you look down your scope.

Alright, two things before I go into my review of CAPCOM’s latest game.  One, I read somewhere that the 6 on the cover of the game looked like a giraffe enjoying some quality time with a manatee and now I can never unsee it.  For two, this is my first Resident Evil game so I have no fan bias one way or another about the game except for maybe the fact that I normally enjoy a good shooting game where brainless zombies try to eat my face.  That being said, the term “zombies” was rarely used in the game, and they certainly weren’t brainless if you play any other campaign other than the Leon-Helena one. In fact, this game’s got arguably better/clever enemies than Battlefield’s or Call of Duty’s AI depending on which campaign you play. The game consists of three initial paths and a hidden fourth one if you beat the others. Now, the game doesn’t qualify it this way, but each of the campaigns has a distinctly different feel to it as well as slightly different play styles.

The tutorial/prelude has you play Leon. So, naturally, I picked his story as my first experience. What I think CAPCOM was going for here was the “traditional” zombie experience with a couple of disgusting mutations to satisfy the level of gross that I presume the fanbase has come to expect. Before I continue, I want to mention that playing this campaign made me want to put the game down and never play it again, let alone try the other storylines, though I discovered later they were worth it. Leon and Helena share some of the most wooden dialogue together and, after a few chapters, I finally understood that the two of them together form one intelligent human being. People will be in the process of becoming a zombie buffet and Leon will announce to Helena that they need to go save them, which just makes no sense because he just watched them get their limbs torn off. Helena, thankfully plays Captain Obvious for a moment and reigns him back in to the task at hand. A few zombie attacks later and Helena spends an entire boss fight refusing to shoot an actively mutating monstrosity because she’s too busy crying. It takes like ten active trigger events with Leon yelling the entire time for Helena to get over herself and shoot to reel her back in. Speaking of active triggers, this is also the button mash campaign.
Sadly, this is also the most predictable horror game I’ve played. Ever. It’s almost completely the fault of the game mechanics too. The game will decide to just take over certain aspects of your character at any given time which gives away too much and allows the player to ready themselves for a possible scary encounter. They might’ve thought that this would build suspense, but the level of irritation I got when I am randomly unable to run or move in any other way other than a slow walk with my gun down by my waist completely breaks the illusion of immersion. It goes as far as to even disallow the firing of the character’s gun for sections of story at a time. The game tries SO hard to forcibly immerse you in the plot that it physically hurts you in the process. Irritation and frustration build instead of suspense and adrenaline and before you know it you just want to throw the controller.
The game does have some very satisfactory melee takedowns and finishing moves that actually do distract from the awful gameplay mechanics for some time. This lasts until you realize that the death animations for the zombie you just roundhouse kicked in the teeth has the head free floating in place as the body falls to the floor with a giant pulled texture of skin still linking the two. This is particularly frustrating when the body just jumped up off the floor and your only choice was to kick it in the face leaving this giant flap of skin obscuring your vision allowing for even more zombies to get the drop on you.
When you get tired of being jumped constantly, you may decide you want to try playing with a little precaution. What do you do if you see a body lying on its side or sitting in a chair with blood all over it? Shoot it, right? Nope. You can’t shoot bodies preemptively in Resident Evil 6. Not allowed. So, whether you see it coming or not, you have no choice but to trigger the zombie’s predictable lunge at your knees. Eventually you’ll get tired and, out of shear boredom, you’ll end up holding the B button ( Xbox360 controller), or you’ll be lucky enough to have a tip show up on a loading screen that informs you that you can actually interact with Helena. By “interact” I mean you can “Praise” her, “Thank” her, tell her to follow (which she does anyway), tell her to stay (good dog!), or tell her to move up. This doesn’t really work though because any time you tell your partner to move up or take the lead they give you the professional F— you. Helena will say, “Not right now”, because “right now” is just not the time to listen to orders in the apocalypse. My favorite is, “Can’t it wait?“, because you clearly didn’t tell her that for any reason. You’re just wasting her time, right? I’m really not even sure why it was made into a button because the only function it serves is to distract you while a zombie eats your brains.
On that line of thought though, let’s talk about buttons that should exist. In the zombie apocalypse, one might think it an intelligent idea to be able to jump. But wait! The game didn’t say it was ok to jump over THAT table, only the one next to it. You also cannot jump over dead bodies lying on the floor. You CAN trip over them, however. Yes, CAPCOM has seen fit to include a trip animation, and not a jump button. The end of the world is also clearly not the time to open a door any other way than gently caressing the door with one hand and leaning face first into the dark unexplored room. Never mind locking the door behind you or barricading it to prevent attacks from behind.

You have no choice but to experience EXACTLY what the game wants you to, and if you had other plans, too bad because this train is going nowhere but where the railway track tells it to at exactly the predetermined speed coded in. The level design in Leon and Helena’s campaign is utterly unimaginative, linear, predictable, boring, and lazy. There’s even a part where you’re looking down at a foggy road and they just flat out left the road black thinking that some heavy fog would cover it up.

The first time I died in this game was via an ambulance crashing through a pile of cars and splatters you against the side of a gas station while you’re paralyzed by a zombie whose sole job is to scream loudly in your face. I’m sorry CAPCOM for standing where your linearly designed map tells me to go to as you freeze me in position just so that an ambulance can run me over. It’s not even a scripted injury. It’s an actual death that counts against you in your final score after the Chapter is over. Oh, yeah, by the way the game’s been scoring you this whole time, which nobody decided to tell the player. What exactly are you getting scored on? Accuracy, deaths, kills, etc. Hopefully you didn’t decide to test fire any new guns you picked up along the way, because it will prevent you from picking up anything useful when it comes time to buy some skills. Yes, the game has been dropping random chess pieces all over the place with “point” values assigned to them, so I don’t really know how I possibly could have misunderstood. Clearly the currency of the survivors of the apocalypse is…gem encrusted chess pieces? I really have no idea where that came from. Perhaps it was something from a previous game I didn’t play and it was explained there, but I felt pretty dumb cramming studded pawns and knights in my pockets while I ran from hordes of screaming zombies.

Once I was finished nursing my wrist from all the hardcore hand holding going on in the Leon-Helena campaign, I ventured a trial run of the other two campaigns and found very different experiences. The Jake-Sherry campaign was heavy on the maze and environmental mechanics (explosive barrels, etc.), while the Chris-Piers combo focused on what added up to be super-human modern warfare against bio-weapons. What confused me with this campaign was that you get an entirely new graphic user interface. Both of the other storylines had basic GUI, but now that you’ve joined the BSAA you get perks.

You are also thrown into open combat with seriously intelligent “BOWs” as they’re called. I never quite heard what the acronym stands for. Anyway, these Infected are creative, intelligent, and utilize better team tactics than Veteran mode Call of Duty AI. I really can’t even call them zombies anymore. These guys use machine guns, snipers, camouflage, group tactics, and more. The time I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore was when someone in my squad said, “They’re rolling up a tiger tank”, and, as a hint, my reaction involved a LOT of profanity. If you ignore the mutations, the game is honestly a fun modern warfare experience, but that’s hard when the enemies turn into human-scorpion hybrids which carry uninfected civilians on their backs as cover. Finally I could give the game some credit for innovation. Playing through the entire Leon-Helena campaign, I’d come to think that the only innovation CAPCOM was going to come up with was the trip animation and the fact that you can click down your joystick to choose whether or not you want to make your character left or right handed. The game still wasn’t scary by any means, but at least the Chris-Piers campaign wasn’t anywhere as linear as the Leon-Helena one. Jake and Sherry even had some clever and funny dialogue going back and forth for a while. For the first time in thirty hours I actually enjoyed the gameplay and even dared to immerse myself in the story. Yeah, the same texture pulling glitches were there, there still wasn’t a jump button, and my steroid pumping main character still looked like a damn fool tripping over bodies left and right, but it was enjoyable. I really just think CAPCOM tried too hard to add too much content and it backfired on them. If they had just stuck with one storyline, really ironed out the glitches in the art department, and spiced up the Design aspects of the game, I think everyone would have been a lot happier, but they didn’t and I’m forced to say that this game is really just not worth the play.

The game itself worked so well as a break from reality because the game never took itself too seriously. Jack, your nemesis in Borderlands 2, is “the most perfect ass” to quote a friend. He’s constantly jabbing you with the most immature insults and you tell yourself that it won’t get under your skin, but damn, you can’t ignore it. Before long you’ll find your eye twitching and your knuckles going white as you listen to Jack insult you in the most imaginative ways –

Jack – “I’m wracking my brain trying to think of a name for that diamond pony I bought. I was going to call it ‘piss-for-brains’ in honor of you, but that just feels immature. Hey, maybe ‘Butt Stallion?’”

Just the same though, the game doesn’t pull any punches, and anybody buying the game should be prepared to have the game rip out your heart and sauté it in your own tears especially if you played the first Borderlands. Gearbox certainly didn’t pull any punches in making this game a memorable experience whether you play alone or with a friend or three.

If you normally play games alone though, I might stress that the game is easily one hundred times better with a friend because you actually have someone there to exclaim and laugh with as the ridiculous antics of Jack get progressively more homicidal. It’s simply a better experience when shared with someone else, and I think that can be said about a lot of games. Gearbox certainly did a remarkable job when it came to gauging their players’ moods, emotions, and adrenaline. The game never once ended an emotional peak incorrectly and it was a fantastically smooth ride throughout the game.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the play style, let me explain a little bit. You end up on a planet, which, for all intents and purposes, is lawless and is inhabited by bandits, hick colonists, and a whole lot of bad asses with more guns than you can imagine. Every living thing on the planet, and even most inanimate things, has a gun you can rip from its obliterated remains. As long as you have a weapon you can get a better one and that mechanic combined with a nearly infinite number of guns gives you a constantly evolving style of gameplay, which Gearbox deserves to be extremely proud of.

I’ve found in my experiences that cooperative gameplay is a nesting ground for glitches, the most memorable and entertaining of which would probably be from Fable 3 if any of you have played it. Borderlands certainly didn’t have anything on that level of ridiculous, but they did have some. My partner and I did occasionally have issue reviving one another even when we were practically standing on top of each other, which often resulted in the death of one or both of us. This wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t happen most often in the Circles of Slaughter half way through one of the last waves of enemies. It definitely caused a lot of frustrated groans and ice cream breaks were completely necessary after those happened.

The UI had its frustrations too, of course.  I found that having the “dismount from vehicle” button and the “travel” button on the same key caused a lot of unintentional dismounts and often ended in my partner and me running on foot looking for a new Catch-A-Ride Station when we got to a new zone.
This game was also the first game ever to actually keep me entertained and interested in every side quest. For once they weren’t just another way of grinding out levels and instead actually brought more depth to the game’s phenomenally designed NPCs. My favorite side quest involved a string of tortured souls leaving messages behind referencing a gun with an unimaginably terrible curse that I won’t spoil for you so that you can discover on your own. Just know that it’s totally worth the side quest, and you’ll probably end up throwing the gun off the highest cliff you can find.

If you know what quest I’m talking about, you’ll understand why I’m going to mention the sound of the game next, which was extremely satisfying from headshots to gun fire effects. Most of all the character voice was spot on and unique for every major and minor NPC. I was also a huge fan of the smooth gradient transition from normal voice to radio voice when you walk away from an NPC who’s talking. That way you don’t have to just sit there absently while the character gives you the mission and its backstory. I’ve never enjoyed, in real life or games, when someone wastes my time and I really appreciate it when the game company takes that into consideration.
I’ve got some questions though. The New-U stations are Hyperion owned and Jack is owner of Hyperion, yes? He spends the entire game trying to kill you off and any time you do actually die, you use a Hyperion New-U Station to resurrect. That just seems counter-productive to me. A lot of games play off the dying thing by having you play from a save point as if you never died, but Borderlands turned it into a mechanic that they flaunt. Personally I think that they should have just slapped a different company name on the New-U station and called it done, but they kept Hyperion on it and it confuses me.

The tech trees were also stuffed with great new innovative mechanics to have fun with, but a few were less effective than others. Clearly the game is about guns, guns, and more guns, but when you have a tech tree that builds melee skills from level five and upwards I expect melee to be a viable option and a play style I can enjoy from the first point I put into the tree. Instead, melee generally becomes useful around level twenty to twenty five. Of course, it’s not really an issue in the end because you can re-spec your talents for a more than reasonable price so you can level up with guns primarily and switch over in your thirties to the melee-centric tree to at least try it out.
The level design of the game was well laid out. With that said, my co-op partner and I continued to run into small collision volumes that just had no business being where they were. Suddenly when driving the Light Scout we’d just find ourselves doing random one hundred and eighty degrees spins accompanied by a crashing sound when nothing was in the road at all. We also ran into a bit of an issue with some forgotten UDK material and texture applications as you can see in the picture below.

This glitch, if it really was a glitch, really seemed almost more like an easter egg homage to UDK so I’m really not that bothered by it.
Overall, Borderlands 2 is the perfect response to any emotional situation you might be having. It’s a perfect way to let out aggression when you’re mad. It will make you laugh when you’re feeling down and, once you’re feeling better, you’ll continue to have a good time for as long as you want to play the game. Best of all, Borderlands 2 has tons of content and I assume the DLC will be worth waiting for. It certainly doesn’t get stale and is a perfect game if you want to invite some friends over with their laptops for a good old fashion LAN party.