E3, random impressions

• Pipomantis
• Friday, July 13, 2007 | 4:18 AM
• 5 comments

PS3

UNCHARTED: DRAKE'S FORTUNE

Willing to be the PS3's savior, Naughty Dog's Uncharted : Drake's fortune impresses.

Very close to a game like Tomb Raider Legend, the game wanted me to climb alongside some fort, then to shoot some bad guys in paradisiac environments. Graphically, we are truly in some tropical island. The sun shines, the place is really beautiful, very clean, and our hero is classy with his little Indy side.
The handling during exploration is just awesome. We jump from lianas to lianas, we climb rocks, and everything happens without a single problem. If you fall a few meters behlow and die horribly, it will be your very fault. The game is much more problematic during the combats, because of an inaccurate cover system. Hard to beat Gears of War on that one. Just to say, it was easier to leave gunfights and go kick some ass with my fists and feet, which is really fun, otherwise.

Uncharted is on a good way to become PS3's Tomb Raider, with a fun, action-filled adventure. A little work on the cover system, and we'll get a really good game. Back to work, guys !

HEAVENLY SWORD !

Finally! We could get a private session with a sexy demo of Heavenly Sword, Ninja Theory's showcase for the PS3.

First thing to know : The game is just beautiful. The environments are clean but they're just appetizers for the "plat de resistance" : Models quality. Noriko is the victim of a great work. Her clothes, her face, her hair, she has a grace I never saw in the previous trailers.
The demo directly begun with a well-known sequence : the Quick Time Event on the gigantic ropes. Impressive and fun, this passage suffers a tiny default (just quibbling right here) : its easiness. As a matter of fact, the buttons to push arrive way too early and break the urgency feeling inherent to that kind of sequences (remember RE4's knife combat sequence). Yet I imagine that the difficulty will increase, making an idiot of we when you'll read this after you play the game.
Then came the first combat phase. 3 different weapons (your average blade, a huge sword and the famous chains alla God of War) unleashing an impressive power onto your enemies. Interesting thing, you get from a weapon to another without any interruption. It may be visually strange, but it adds a really pleasant feeling to the game, like a good ol' Devil May Cry (even if Dante still manages to have an animation when he draws his sword).

So the game is really fun, but it lacks something, perhaps a little more soul. But, maybe I could have seen one if I knew how to execute impressive combos. All my apologies, lovely readers.

BLACKSITE !

Playable at Barker Hangar, Midway's FPS is full of promises.

Technically nifty, the game immediatly sets an ambiance, as well as the 360 marketplace demo. No more rainy gas station, but a dry and hot set looking like south-african landscapes. The handling is quite good, and commanding a squad has never been so easy. "Starship Troopers"-like are soon rushing from everywhere, and it's a real pleasure to blast them one by one when they arrive, climbing fences, coming from rooftops, or others. Too bad they were clearly undernumbered in the level I tried.

Clearly not game of the year, but a nifty FPS, like the first Area 51 was.

TIME CRISIS 4 !

What was happening at Namco's during the conception of the PS3 gun for Time Crisis 4? Alcohol? Drugs? A macabre murder story? We'll never know. Yet, an ORANGE handgun may not be the best way to kill terrorists.

Fourth iteration of a no more resourceful saga, this Time Crisis doesn't make any effort to get the IP on its feet. Faded graphics, lazy models, no major gameplay feature (here at Barker, of course), that wasn't a treat. As I was bored to death (and crying over the first Time Crisis corpse), the gun started to twaddle, probably because of all the lights in the hangar.

In every case, I can't say I had fun playing Time Crisis 4, I'm expecting a lot more from Wii's Ghost Squad, which really brought something to the genre when I played it on arcade.