A few Games I've played recently: Pc Edition

After the unprecedented success of my last post (a comment!) I feel I should continue the list with the Pc games I've recently played and enjoyed. This week I'll talk about the large, studio-made games I've been playing.

In a world containing GT5's 1000 unique cars, a game that only has a single type of car shouldn't really be anything to get excited about. If however that car is an F1 car, and the game lets you race it through a complete season including testing, quali and racedays, and the opposition on track are actually named after the real life drivers, then I get very excited. honestly one of the best bits of the game is the fact that it's all fully licensed. Outbreaking Fernando Alonso is much more fun that outbraking "Player 2", especially as I'm a McLaren fan.
The racing itself is brilliant as well, the tracks are beautifully realised and the difference between driving on slicks and wets in the rain is monumental. Thankfully codemasters included their brilliant 'replay' system, that lets you rewind a few seconds if you make a mistake, something that is invaluable when you put it in a wall after 15 laps of Monaco (I'm not sure if I've ever concentrated as hard as I did during that race). It's a game that I'll keep coming back to, just for a race now and then, and certainly more once the new F1 season starts. I now have an intimate knowledge of all the tracks on the calendar, and it makes watching races on TV much more fun when you know exactly where the braking points and racing line are on a corner.

Just Cause 2 is just plain fun. It has lots of problems, but if all you want to do is run around a HUGE island paradise, blowing stuff up, this is perfect.
The storyline is a bit sketchy, but it really takes a backseat to just creating chaos on the island. Creating chaos is actually the aim of the game, you gain chaos points by blowing things up and disrupting the government, and racking up enough of them unlocks the next storyline quest allowing you to progress in the game, but creating the chaos points is reward enough in itself.
At one point while I was playing, I attacked a military base on a motorbike. I drove the bike as fast as I could towards the gates and at the last second jumped off and opened my parachute, floating gently over the walls while the bike rammed into a petrol tanker and exploded, killing 3 guards. I landed on a roof, threw a few grenades before grapple-hooking'ing my way up a tower, and then hijacked the helicopter the government had sent to kill me in mid air. I then used the helicopter to destroy the remains of that base, and another, before I was badly damaged by another enemy helicopter, so I jumped out of mine, grappled onto the new one, hijacked it and flew off, while the burning remains of my original aircraft fell to the ground and exploded, destroying a jeep full of soldiers.
Just seeing and experiencing the island is a good enough reason to play the game. It is the most massive open world I've ever seen and takes probably 20-minutes to fly across in a helicopter (to run it would genuinely take a day). It varies from thick jungle to snowy-mountain-tops and there's an enormous city, complete with skyscrapers you can climb and base-jump off. There are also 3 airports (that I found), oil-rigs, harbours, nuclear bunkers, factories, and literally hundreds of villages and towns dotted around the landscape.


Dragon Age is another huge game, but in a different way. I have currently played about 32hours, and I'm at 27% completion. It's good, clean, RPG fun, and I've really enjoyed fighting my way up towers and down dungeons. The storyline is good so far, nothing spectacular, but it's keeping me playing which is no mean feat considering how much time it can take up. The combat system is solid: you can either play real time, or pause the game during the combat and issue commands before restarting it again. So on easy battles you can let your party get on with it themselves (you assign tactics to each of them, so they know what to do in any situation) and in harder battles you can stop/start second by second, micromanaging every spell and ability. This variation means you can relax and concentrate on exploring a lot of the time, but when you need to win a tough battle, there is enough depth for you to dive in and make sure the right enemies go down early, and everyone gets healed.


Another game that deserves a mention is Mafia 2. This storyline driven third person shooter is really good, and very well made. The game creates a fantastic 1950's feel, with the costumes, cars and music absolutely spot on, and the casual conversations you hear the public having help to immerse you even further.
The storyline itself is fantastic, I was genuinely excited by the twists and turns that it takes you on, and at times it felt more like a movie than a game, with great voice acting and a terrific script. The shooting is fun and satisfying, and the fist-fights are well designed.
It markets itself as an open world game, but I really didn't find myself exploring that much apart from when I had to go somewhere to complete a quest. I suppose it is a credit to the writing that I felt the need to progress the story all the time I was playing, rather than venturing out to steal cars and cause havok.


Next week I'll write about the indie games I've been enjoying lately. Steam had a sale last week, and I stacked up on loads, some better than others.