Review barrowed from Gamespot.com

On the hostile, bandit-ridden planet of Pandora, there is one thing that draws off-world attention: The Vault. This mysterious alien structure is rumored to hold treasures of fantastic power and wealth, and so it attracts fortune-seeking corporations and individuals alike. In Borderlands, you are one such individual, but the satisfaction of unlocking the Vault’s secrets pales in comparison to the rollicking good time you’ll have on your way there. Borderlands is all about the journey, not the destination, and like most trips, this one is much better when you have some friends along for the ride. Solo players can still have a good time, because the bloody and entertaining combat is paired well with rewarding loot and engaging experience systems. But Pandora is a lonely place for a solitary mercenary, and lone wolves will find the pace deliberate and the friendly characters too few and far between. Those who take advantage of the four-player online cooperative mode will experience the game as it’s meant to be played. The pleasing rhythm of killing enemies, gathering loot, and cashing in is punctuated by fighting bosses, completing quests, and leveling up. As a solo merc, this rhythm is slow and methodical, but as a team, the pace quickens to an invigorating clip and pretty soon you’ve spent hours having a riotously rewarding time.

The world of Pandora has a dusty, run-down feel, yet it manages to be vibrant and eye-catching at the same time. The art style features black-line borders and a colorful palette that give the game a not-quite-comic, not-quite-cel-shaded look. It takes some getting used to, and its technical execution is less-than-perfect . Yet what Borderlands lacks in precision it more than makes up for in style, and hours into the game you’ll still be appreciating the thoughtful design touches that bring this world to life. Though the different environments occasionally feel too similar, there is enough distinct detail to keep them from blurring together. Your vanquished enemies also do their part to keep things visually interesting by dying in a variety of gruesome and entertaining ways. Bodies explode, limbs fly off, and burning enemies occasionally disintegrate from the ground up until only the mask of their face is left hanging in midair. It sounds (and is a bit) horrifying, but when the mask drops comically to the floor and finally burns up, don’t bother stifling that chuckle. The art design resonates well with Borderlands’ irreverent sense of humor, and the game is playful without feeling too goofy.

You travel through this world as one of four characters, each with a unique look and attitude. You don’t really get to appreciate the character designs if you play solo because you have no AI teammates, but you do hear frequent quips that give you a little bit of character-specific flavor. The most important difference between characters is the action skill, which is a special ability that can give you an edge in combat. The Hunter can release a vicious bird of prey, the Soldier can throw down an automatic turret flanked by shields, the Siren can turn invisible and speedy, damaging all enemies in the vicinity, and the Berserker flies into a damage-resistant rage and delivers brutal punches to his enemies. You unlock these abilities after playing for a short while, and not only are they all fun to use, but each one can be customized in a couple of strategically distinct ways. You can tweak and upgrade your ability by investing skill points in appropriate skills. So, for example, upgrading the Hunter’s bird of prey not only can increase the amount of damage it does, but can make it attack multiple targets, steal health from them, slow them down for easy sniping, and cause them to drop more loot. Expanding your action skill makes you more deadly in combat, and it’s one of the most rewarding parts of leveling up. Killing enemies, finishing quests, and completing in-game bonus challenges earn you experience points, which in turn earn you a new level. Leveling up boosts your overall fortitude and grants you a precious skill point to use however you see fit.

You can also spend your skill points on other improvements, and each character has three different skill trees that highlight different tactics and abilities. So the Soldier can essentially become the team medic by developing the skills that allow him to shoot teammates to regenerate their health and that make his turret create a healing radius. Or he could choose to become more deadly, increasing his turret damage and combat rifle performance. Though your weapon proficiency improves based on how much you use a given weapon type, different characters have skills that favor different types of guns, so it’s to your advantage to play to your character’s strengths. The Berserker can certainly become proficient with the sniper rifle, but his melee-focused action skill and preference for rocket launchers make him a better choice for wading into the fray. Though the branching skill trees offer intriguing ways to specialize, your initial character choice has the biggest impact on how you’ll go through the game. Fortunately, each character is fun and deadly in his own way, so you can’t choose poorly, and you’ll probably want to experience what each one has to offer. Playing cooperatively allows you to enjoy and benefit from the other characters’ abilities, something you don’t get to appreciate when playing solo, unless you start a new game.

Expanding your abilities and leveling up is one of the main ways that Borderlands consistently rewards you. Loot is another. Loot can be found in containers, dropped by enemies, or given to you as a quest reward. It includes money, ammo, shields, mods that boost and alter your grenades, mods that boost your skills, and, of course, guns. Guns are classified in familiar categories: pistols, submachine guns, shotguns, combat rifles, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, and so on. Each class feels distinct, and the shooting mechanics are well tuned and satisfying, which makes it fun to blast baddies. Base damage, clip size, fire rate, accuracy, and bullet spread are just some of the variables within each class, and some guns have more exotic features, like bladed pistols that increase melee damage or a shotgun that also shoots rockets. They can also do elemental damage, which comes in a variety of flavors that put a special kind of hurt on and can even do damage over time. Equip an incendiary gun if you want to burn flesh, or a corrosive gun if you want to deal extra damage to creatures with tough hides.

Unfortunately, dropping items is also the only way you can give them to your teammates, and there’s no way to exchange ammo or money. If teammates are using the same type of gun, this can lead to some problematic ammo shortages, which is another reason to play to your character’s strengths. This can also lead to disputes over who gets that fancy new shotgun, so it’s best to have a gentleman’s agreement in place over how to handle these issues. Borderlands allows you to resolve disputes by melee attacking a friendly player and challenging him to a duel. If your teammate melees you back, a colored dome pops up and the two of you fight to the death. The loser doesn’t actually die, just loses some health, and there’s no way to put a wager on the match, so the victor doesn’t necessarily receive the spoils. As long as you’re playing with a respectful group, you should be able to avoid loot-hoggers and the like, but it’s still a bit disappointing that there isn’t a better way to pool and equally distribute your collective resources. Still, joining other players online is easy, even if you all have characters at different levels. Borderlands does a good job of adjusting enemy difficulty to accommodate more players, though the larger the level gap, the easier it will be for higher level players, and the tougher it will be for lower level players. It’s worth noting that the story-related missions–that is, the ones you have to perform in sequence–reflect the host’s progress, and players who are behind the host may not get credit for completing certain missions.

Having some friends on your side makes things a lot more pleasant, given that about 99 percent of life on Pandora is your enemy. Human enemies range from bandits that are smart enough to wear shields and take cover to psychos that light themselves on fire and sprint toward you, screaming about rending your flesh from your bones. The local wildlife is universally hostile and includes skags (toothy dog-beasts), spiderants (armored insect monsters), rakks (raggedy death bats), and scythids (wriggling prehistoric grubs). Every type of enemy appears in various incarnations, ranging from young and weak to badass and on fire. These variations are generated anew during each encounter, so even when you kill a clutch of enemies in that same gully for the fourth time, it will be a different bad-guy loadout. You’ll fight hundreds of each enemy type throughout the game, and the fact that groups are varied goes a long way toward staving off repetition. The two-seater vehicles also offer some locomotive variety, and many of the areas are much more fun to traverse on four wheels than on two legs. You can conjure the lone vehicle type from the many Catch-a-Ride stations. The touchy handling takes some getting used to, and you can run into some exaggerated physics problems when crashing into rocks. However, there’s nothing quite like vehicular homicide to stave off bandit-killing fatigue. In or out of a vehicle, the simple act of killing enemies is pretty fun, and since you’re constantly reaping loot and experience rewards, even repeated encounters have some incentive attached to them.

The combined incentives of killing enemies, gathering loot, cashing in, and leveling up are the main driving forces in Borderlands. The various quests you undertake cover a good variety of motivations, but most follow the pattern mentioned in the previous sentence. The 1 percent of life on Pandora that isn’t your enemy will often have quests for you, though only a handful of characters are voice-acted. Of these, there are a few standouts, including the bumpkin car-rental mogul and the borderline sociopath archaeologist, but for the most part Borderlands offers precious little in the way of non-player character contact. This makes playing solo a lonely experience. Though the action is still satisfying and the world is still interesting, solo players will have a slower-paced adventure in which the flashes of comedy also serve to underscore how sparse those flashes are. The main story is thin and the final encounter is pointless and thoroughly unsatisfying, so anyone hoping Borderlands will deliver a climactic conclusion is almost certainly going to be disappointed.

After you uncover the secrets of the Vault, you are once again set loose into Pandora, where you are free to quest on and remember why you enjoyed your previous hours with the game. Borderlands has tens of hours of quests to fulfill, and you’ll likely find yourself enticed back to explore new skills, find new guns, and kill more enemies. Though the core action doesn’t change drastically over the course of the game, it is woven together in such a way that once it ensnares you, you’ll want nothing more than to plunge into Pandora at any chance you get. Combat is satisfying, and upgrading your skills and equipment is engaging. The constant stream of loot and experience is rewarding, and sharing it with some friends makes the experience that much richer and more exciting. Despite its hostile (albeit stylish) environment, Pandora is a great planet to visit if you want to shoot some stuff. Just be sure to bring some friends along for the ride.

The danger when discussing such a classically constructed game, of course, is that it’s tempting to rely on a soundbite tick-list of influences to set the scene, so let’s get that out of the way. The obvious reference points are the side-scrolling exploration of the original Prince of Persia and the three-way ability-based puzzling of Blizzard’s cult 1992 gem, The Lost Vikings. Mash those two together, add a splash of LittleBigPlanet’s physics-heavy gameplay, and you’ve got Trine.

You’re in control of three characters. The first we meet is Zoya, a thief. You guide her through a sacred temple, in a neat opening section that doubles as a simple tutorial, until she stumbles across the Trine – a magical artefact of unknown power. Next we meet Amadeus, a wizard, who investigates the disturbance in the temple and also finds himself bound to the Trine. Finally, there’s Pontius, a gruff knight whose bullish determination to defend the realm makes him the third hapless soul to be caught up in the adventure about to unfold.

From this point on you can swap between each character at will, and use their unique abilities to explore each stage. Pontius has the most obvious default ability – he’s a fighter, and his sword and shield offer essential protection against the various foes ranged against you. His strength also means he’s ideal for smashing through weak obstacles or cutting ropes, and he can also lift heavy blocks and throw them. Zoya, on the other hand, excels in ranged combat. Her arrows can be charged up to shoot across the screen, while her grappling hook makes her the most nimble of the trio, able to swing and swoop to platforms and areas beyond the reach of her companions.

Amadeus is mostly useless in a scrap, but his magical powers prove central to many of the physics puzzles. Click the right mouse-button on an object and you can levitate it around the screen. The left button allows you to draw objects that will appear in the gameworld. To begin with, you’re restricted to summoning a simple box, but as you progress through the game you’ll collect XP vials that allow you to upgrade the powers available to you. The same is true of all the characters.

It’s a testament to how well balanced the game is that while the abilities develop in lots of interesting ways, they never overwhelm the gameplay. The three characters always form a neat Venn diagram of overlapping skills, all of which are intuitive in their use. Levels are linear and traditional in their side-on 2D design, but what brings them to life is the often-wonderful animation, full of lovely little touches, and a robust physics model that is central to most of the key challenges. Combined with the carefully chosen abilities of each character, the heightened reality of the environment is liberating. Sometimes the solution to a problem is obvious, but there’s rarely just one way of tackling a given situation and unlikely ideas often reward the player with hidden bonus items.

It’s this flexibility that ultimately makes Trine more than just a pleasant trip down memory lane for puzzle-platforming fans. Between the balanced abilities and the engrossing gameworld, it’s a game where the unspoken question, “I wonder if I can…” is almost always answered in the affirmative. As a result, progress always feels delightfully organic and logical, and while it’s possible to get a fair distance into the game without too much lateral thinking, those who take the path of least resistance start missing out on more and more useful secrets. Before long you’re using Amadeus to conjure boxes above skeletal archers, crushing them flat before jamming the box onto deadly spikes, which provides a safe haven from where Zoya can grapple up to a hidden area, to open a chest and find a bonus item that benefits Pontius.

Yet another whimsical game that has potental replay value

After seemingly vanishing from entertainment after the disaster that was “The Pacifier,” Diesel has been popping up with the redone and extended game “Escape from Butcher Bay” newly titled “Dark Athena”, The new “Fast and Furious” movie, and now he’s playing a driver in Wheelman. It’s a game that I wanted to love; the concept shouldn’t have worked, but Diesel has just enough anti-Hero charm that it could have turned out to be a fun title. Unfortunately, all of that charm is completely overshadowed by clunky execution at just about every turn.

While your character may have the likeness and voice of Diesel, you’ll be spending your time in Wheelman as Milo Burik, the persona you take on to go undercover as a wheelman to criminal organizations in Barcelona. A man in a suit explains to you at the start that there’s some sort of incredibly dangerous item on the loose in Barcelona, and it’s up to you to get it. You’ll also get some occasional hints via in-game e-mails that you’re on the right side of the law, and that’s about as much of the story as you’re going to get.

Video games are often knocked for having weak writing when compared to almost every other form of media, and Wheelman is really a perfect example of this. When I say that a story is “difficult to follow,” that means it wasn’t a very interesting story, so keeping track of it can be tough, since I don’t really care. The story in Wheelman is impossible to follow. I really tried to figure out what was going on in the game, and while some missions have very obvious connections to the others, I was never able to figure out what was going on in the main story.

An extreme example was a mission that didn’t have any lead-in. There weren’t any cut scenes to vaguely explain the situation to me beforehand, so when I started the mission, I was given a text prompt that told me, “The tube is at the construction site,” and I needed to get it. When I got there, a three-way gang war going on, and no one was on my side. Everybody wanted this cardboard tube, and I had absolutely no idea why.

Beyond the incoherent story, Wheelman mimics the concept of Grand Theft Auto and tries to move the focus to driving, with some vehicular combat thrown in for good measure. This is the one area where Wheelman really succeeds. The combat is so over-the-top and ridiculous that for a while, you can’t help but have fun doing absurd things with your car. Your main mode of attack is what the game refers to as “vehicle melee,” where a simple button press causes your car to suddenly slam sideways. Apparently every car that Diesel touches gains the ability to turn its tires sideways, and it’s fantastic. Trying to fight several cars at once while speeding through the streets of Barcelona is an intense experience and about as thrilling as the game gets.

This starts to wear thin after a while, though, and it can become extremely frustrating as the game wears on. The amount of enemies you have to deal with becomes seemingly infinite during several missions. Thankfully, Wheelman gives you several other ridiculous abilities to use. While firing out of your window is pretty standard fare, if you build up enough “focus” from doing crazy stuff like speeding and ramming enemy cars, you can enter two different bullet time modes, which highlight weak points on enemy cars. Shoot the highlighted circles a few times, and the car magically explodes. It’s both ridiculous and extremely satisfying.

Now remember I said there are two versions of this “bullet time”  move? One has you sticking your gun in front of you to shoot, which is great most of the time, but on rare occasions when you manage to build a solid lead on the cars shooting at you, the second version has you spin the car around 180 degrees and go in reverse while you shoot. This move usually produces a childlike grin when you can get it right, but swinging the car back around after that move usually results in you slamming into a wall. This makes the move significantly less bad-a$$.

By far the single most absurd thing at your disposal is what’s known as “air jacking.” Not content to get out of a wrecked car and run over to a fresh one, Milo is apparently capable of climbing onto the hood of his current ride, jumping over to a fresh ride and stealing that at breakneck speeds. While you weren’t looking, Milo apparently learned how to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Jumping around between cars is just the kind of crazy stuff that makes the chases in Wheelman enjoyable. Even when your car is down for the count, doing something as ridiculous as taking someone else’s car without ever touching the ground keeps the chase going and looks cool in the process.

That is about where the positives end for Wheelman.

Let’s talk about the AI during these car chases. As long as you keep moving, enemies will chase you down, pull up alongside you, shoot at you and ram you. When you decide to slow down or get out of your car, things go south in a hurry. Enemies take far too long to regain their bearings, so it’s easy to get ahead of the enemy by driving like an old lady for 10 seconds. Even worse is that the enemy is at a complete loss when you decide to get out of your car and run around on foot. Some of them will still shoot at you, but stopping, getting out and running over to a new car is a surprisingly effective tactic.

Trying to control these battles is not exactly easy either. While you have a few options for using the keyboard, none of them feel particularly good, especially when you have to switch between using the arrow keys for car combat to the mouse when you need to use a gun. Thankfully, Wheelman supports the Xbox 360 controller, so if you can plug it into your computer, the controls are much better.

As for the mission structure, there are a ton of things to do in Barcelona, but none of it requires that you do any exploring. You can bring up the city map at any time and click on any task. Regardless of whether it’s a main mission or side mission, you’re instantly teleported to the location and inserted into the mission. There are a variety of side missions, but none of them are very interesting so it’s difficult to find the motivation to keep going.

As far as story missions go, Wheelman suffers in largely the same way that most sandbox games suffer from mission design. Every mission boils down to driving somewhere, getting out of your car and shooting a bunch of people, and driving somewhere else. Sometimes, you’re even chased. Wheelman is no exception to this rule, which is a real shame because the part where you get out of the car is underwhelming. The on-foot gunplay is some of the least inspired, bland and dull combat I’ve seen in a shooter in the last year. No one told the developers that the on-foot combat needed work, so they stuck it in just about every mission, which is unfortunate because it’s a real sore spot. The AI is sub-par, the gunplay is sub-par, the animations are laughable, and the difficulty is nonexistent.

Wheelman runs on the Unreal 3 engine, which often means you don’t have to try very hard to get visual gold for your game, but Wheelman manages to alternate between the higher end of average-looking and muddy and bland. Cut scenes are the strongest part of the visual experience, so although the script was impossible to follow, careful attention was given to ensure that these setups would be visually striking. Once you get in the game, all kinds of things start to go wrong  choppy animations, collision bugs, muddy textures and physics bugs  none of it really meshes. The city doesn’t even manage to capture much interest; it’s clean and colorful, but it doesn’t really stand out as being memorable. Much of the city also features banners that are riddled with advertising. If there’s one thing that I learned during my treks through Barcelona, it’s that “The Spirit” comes out on DVD and Blu-ray soon.

On the audio front, Diesel is about the only thing the game has going for it. His cheesy one-liners are what he specializes in, and the game makes good use of it. Everyone else is overacting with heavy accents, just to let you know that you’re in Europe. The sounds of the city are hardly noticeable, and although there are several radio stations that you can listen to, they take a back seat to the action and end up being completely forgettable.

With a main story that will take most gamers about eight hours to complete  assuming you don’t give up on it before then  there really isn’t a reason for you to keep playing once you’ve finished it. There’s also no multiplayer component, which is extremely disappointing because the vehicular combat was just ripe for multiplayer goodness.

It’s probably a good thing that Midway handed Wheelman to Ubisoft when it did because Midway needs games that will sell and make a profit right now, and Wheelman is not that title. I can’t recommend it at its current price point. The car combat is fun for a couple of hours, but everything else is riddled with so many problems. This is a fun game to play, while waiting for that next great game to come out, but it is definitely a play, beat, and uninstall.

At the outset, Mercer is a much easier character to control than he is to understand, especially if you opt to play with an Xbox 360 controller on your PC, rather than a mouse and keyboard. Making giant leaps, gliding through the air, and even running up the sides of skyscrapers are effortless actions. You could probably make it from one end of Manhattan to the other in a straight line using nothing more than the sprint button if you really wanted to, since it’s the only one you need to scale buildings, barge through crowds, and overcome obstacles like cars and rooftop air-conditioning units parkour-style. No fall will ever hurt you, no obstacle is impassable, and there are very few enemies who can keep up with you when you’re at full clip. Combat is also relatively simple early on, but as you progress and learn more about who and what Mercer is, his repertoire of moves grows exponentially until remembering which button combinations or keys trigger which moves in which of his five forms becomes something of a challenge. You certainly don’t need to remember how to use every single move you unlock with evolution points, which are earned by doing just about anything, but it’s unfortunate that even after picking favorites you might find yourself having to hold down up to three buttons (a trigger and two opposing face buttons) simultaneously to perform them. You don’t need to do anything quite that crazy on your keyboard, but there are a lot of keys to remember.

Regardless, combat in Prototype is a blast. Using the Function keys or a slick radial menu that slows down the game any time you call it up, you can shape-shift into different forms that morph your arms into blades, a whip, and hammerlike fists. You also have the option to use more conventional weapons dropped by enemies and, eventually, to hijack tanks and helicopter gunships. The latter are especially fun, because you can use a whiplike arm to latch onto them in midair–even while falling from another helicopter that you’ve been shot down in. One benefit of having all of these options available to you, as well as the ability to disguise yourself as any human character that you “consume” (read: absorb) to regain health, is that many of the already-varied story missions (as well as a couple of the boss fights) can be approached in a number of different ways. For example, if you need to destroy an item inside a military base, you could attempt it in one of the aforementioned vehicles, walk right in there and set about killing or consuming everything that moves, stand on a nearby rooftop and throw things, or even disguise yourself as a soldier and distract the real military by pointing at a nearby character and declaring that he’s the enemy. As a soldier look-alike you can even call in airstrikes from your unsuspecting comrades, but you get only a very limited number of these. Some missions, and almost all of the optional challenges scattered across the island, force you to play a certain way, but for the most part you’re free to use the environment and everything in it however you see fit.

It’s almost impossible to play Prototype without feeling like Mercer is an overpowered character at some point, but any time you start getting too comfortable, there’s a good chance the game is about to change things up on you. To give specific examples would be to risk spoiling the game’s story for you, but suffice it to say that new enemies and hazards are introduced, moves you’ve come to rely on might not always be available or effective, and as time passes, Manhattan becomes an increasingly perilous place to be. The difficulty curve is nigh on perfect, and the fact that you’re continuously adding new moves to your arsenal to combat new dangers helps keep the gameplay from getting repetitive.

The same can’t be said for the scenery unfortunately. Save for a handful of landmarks like Central Park and Times Square, much of Prototype’s Manhattan starts to look the same after a while, and because the whole island is yours to explore from the get-go, it never changes. With that said, moving around the island is so much fun as Mercer that you inevitably end up exploring anyway, and there are 200 glowing orbs to find around the city to encourage you to do so. There are a number of other things to do outside of story missions as well. Optional timed and score challenges include checkpoint runs across rooftops, battles in which you must remain disguised as a soldier and use only conventional weapons, gliding toward targets and trying to land in the center, helicopter strafing runs, and more.

Perhaps the most interesting challenges are those in which you have a time limit to consume a number of highlighted pedestrians in different areas of the city. These pedestrians, of whom there are more than 130 to find both during challenges and during regular play, are special because they each have some knowledge of what’s going on in Manhattan, and when you consume them, you’re treated to a brief montage of their relevant memories. Few of these contain much information individually, but they’re slickly presented, and unlocking a large number of them adds an extra, dark layer to the occasionally predictable story that’s well worth the effort. Similarly, if you choose to infiltrate military bases and consume specialist soldiers inside, you can learn abilities from them (how to fly a helicopter, for example) or improve your effectiveness with guns. Prototype’s core story missions can be beaten in less than 10 hours, but you can comfortably double that number on your first play-through if you’re not in a rush and take the time to check out all of the optional extras.

If those extras include the aforementioned military bases, you’ll find that Prototype’s camera definitely isn’t at its best when Mercer steps inside a relatively small, confined space. It occasionally has trouble keeping up with the action outside too, but it’s rarely detrimental to gameplay and you can always pan it down yourself after running up the side of a building if you want to make sure you land on the roof, for example. Furthermore, there’s a lock-on targeting system that will keep enemies in view at all times, which is especially useful during boss fights. It can work against you on occasion, though, because on a street crowded with civilians, zombielike infected, and abandoned taxicabs, hitting the lock-on button will almost always default to one of the cabs, or a bench, or a chunk of concrete, or some other inanimate object. That’s great if you’re looking for something to throw at a troublesome helicopter, but less helpful if you have almost no health left and desperately need to consume some folks.

Targeting innocent civilians isn’t encouraged, incidentally, but Mercer isn’t a character who shows any remorse as he tears up Manhattan and is a danger to anyone and anything that’s living. And make no mistake: Prototype is a truly brutal game when Mercer is on the warpath. Enemies will be cut in half horizontally, torn in half vertically, have holes punched clean through them, and be decapitated, skewered, and even used as projectiles. And all the while, there’s a plentiful (though not overly excessive) supply of blood spilling onto the streets. These particularly gruesome kills are accompanied by sound effects that do a decent job of letting you know exactly when an enemy’s flesh is being compromised, and screams from the crowd and radio chatter from the military do an excellent job of reminding you that the trouble in Manhattan isn’t always at Mercer’s location. Mutants and the military can be played off each other on occasion, and a quick look at the city map makes it easy for you to identify which neighborhoods are controlled by which group and which are contested.

Frequently, battles that you’re not directly involved in can be seen playing out as you negotiate the rooftops above, as can large crowds of fleeing civilians and mutants shambling toward their prey. Prototype isn’t a game in which any one visual element is remarkable, but it looks good, and the frame rate generally manages to stick close to 30 per second even when the number of characters and the amount of action onscreen border on insane. Furthermore, Mercer is brilliantly animated, which makes the parkour, the combat, the shape-shifting, and especially the gliding between rooftops all the more satisfying.

That’s a word that can be used to describe almost every aspect of Prototype, and although there’s no multiplayer component, you’re free to remain in Manhattan long after you’ve beaten the story or, if you prefer, go through it a second time while retaining all of the powers that you already unlocked. Prototype is good enough that you’ll almost certainly want to keep playing either way, and even if you don’t, there’s more than enough fun to be had here in a single play through for us to recommend the game without hesitation.

By Justin Calvert, GameSpot

In the opening cinematic, lithe protagonist Faith tells us of the Flow, the way that Runners — information couriers in the game’s sterile, totalitarian metropolis. “Rooftops become pathways and conduits, possibility, and routes of escape. The Flow is what keeps us running, keeps us alive.” While narrative in its delivery, her sentiment echoes the design aspirations of Mirror’s Edge, a first-person adventure like no other where the world is viewed as more than a shooting gallery or a tactile means to an end.

It gets things very right very early, distilling its first-person platformer ambitions into a very manageable control scheme. One button stands in for all “up” actions — jumping, hurtling over obstacles, scuttling up vertical surfaces, and pulling Faith onto ledges — while another is for all “down” actions: sliding under pipes, ducking into vents, and tucking and rolling out of dangerously high jumps. It’s a sublimely simple setup and allows for the level design to take center stage. Once you’re familiar with Faith’s abilities and their limitations — imparted through a much-needed tutorial — it’s easy to see potential routes through the world.

As the setting and story establish themselves, you receive plenty of reasons to run. And Mirror’s Edge is simply at its best when you’re doing so — the game subtly funnels you through its environments, and the visceral momentum of running communicates a need to keep going. Seeing Faith’s hands and feet in her field of vision (when appropriate) and the physicality of her animations — like throwing her weight into opening doors and picking up speed as she runs — goes a long way toward conveying that same urgency.

The surroundings — mostly rooftops, office buildings, sewers, and subways — are meticulously built, aesthetically and structurally. The glimmering, over saturated world is striking in its composition, a vivid but effectively stark interpretation of Mirror’s Edge’s conformist culture. It straddles the line between solitary and lonely; sure, police are regularly at your heels, and dispatcher/fellow runner Mercury is always an earpiece away (assigning objectives and barking at you to keep moving), but the world feels sparse at times and vastly underpopulated with normal people. Scurrying through abandoned office floors is exhilarating, but this could have been even more so with a bustling crowd of worker bees dropping their coffee as you hurtle over their heads. And I’d love to see, say, a mission amid a pack of fellow runners. The game’s few foot chases really get your blood pumping and hint at the possibilities of what a more scripted design focus could accomplish in places.

I wish they’d stuck with the first-person perspective for all narrative purposes, too; the cartoony, stylized cut-scenes seem oddly pedestrian when contrasted with the in-game ones, which convey more than enough style while maintaining a purposefully mature tone. At least the sound design is universally excellent, with a phenomenal ambient soundtrack that fits the world like a glove, and Faith’s strained and measured breathing takes the immersion a step beyond.

Faith’s Runner Vision helps lead you through the world, highlighting specific objects in red as you approach them and effectively designating the correct path. What first appears to be hand-holding evolves into something much more substantial — as you advance, red’s increasingly associated with confirmation rather than instruction. It doesn’t lead you; it tells you that you’re indeed going the right way. But thinking more ambitiously can certainly pay off, as most environments feature at least one “advanced” route. Experimenting with unsure jumps and leaps of Faith (pun intended) doesn’t always pan out, but they feel incredibly satisfying when they do. The harder paths also make use of Faith’s fancier maneuvers, such as pulling her feet up for tighter jumps, executing Prince of Persia-style wall-running, and making 180-degree turns in midair.

Mirror’s Edge slows down at points; the more thoughtful platforming sections aren’t always as engaging. They provide a nice change of pace, and methodical action can be fun…but having to think your way through a series of jumps isn’t nearly as satisfying after having just done it on instinct for long stretches. The lack of an on-demand “restart from last checkpoint” option compounds this. In one very large, platforming-heavy room in a latter section of the game, I scaled my way to the top and hit several checkpoints along the way, only to slip up and fall all the way down and survive, leaving me with the option of doing it all over again or quitting to the main menu and reloading.

More problematic — and perhaps more inherent to general game design — is the way Mirror’s Edge makes you retry certain sections of the game. Especially when forced into combat (which I’ll get to in a second), I forcibly replayed many 30-second portions of the game until my trial-and-error approach just worked. Thanks to the fundamentally in-the-moment design, the illusion breaks when you have to repeat the same 10 seconds for a second time — never mind countless subsequent times. The checkpoints aren’t always ideally spaced, either, so I had to replay sections I’d mastered just to get back to the parts I needed to try again. And with some actions never really clicking with me I found myself bottle necked in a few places.

One of Mirror’s Edge’s most amazing accomplishments: It empowers players to run away from enemies rather then engaging them. But in the few times you’re forced to, or rather want to  fight, combat’s a bit inconsistent. Accomplished with a single button in combination with jumping and ducking (for jump kicks, sliding kicks, or even wall-jumping into a kick), you can either bludgeon foes into submission or, ideally, attempt to disarm them. This takes a very specific window of timing, which you can extended by firing up Faith’s reaction time, which slows everything down and provides a few extra seconds to think and react. Disarming only takes a single button press when an enemy’s gun turns red, but it doesn’t always work when it should; you can fire a few rounds from an enemy’s gun once you get your hands on it, but I found myself casting most weapons aside to maintain my speed and minimize casualties. Mirror’s Edge is ultimately a game about love, not violence, and considering how refreshing it was to play from a first-person vantage point without the barrel of a gun bobbing along, I wanted to keep it that way as often as possible.

While most elements of Mirror’s Edge’s are refreshingly new and unique, I found it even more interesting when it stepped outside its comforts, a subway escape, hopping across the tops of speeding trains, or a very brief but surprising “boss” encounter. These few moments elevated the game even higher and left me swimming with ideas of what the next Mirror’s Edge could be. And that leads me to the inevitable quandary — is this simply a great game that stands on its own innovations, or is it a great first game that hints at the potential for so much more? I’m inclined to go with the latter, but I can’t deny how expertly it delivers on its most important ambitions (and the package is complete, too: Chasing downloadable ghosts for leaderboard Time Trials will keep you busy long after the eight-hour story wraps). As a game steeped in immediacy, Mirror’s Edge is an absolute must-play despite its idiosyncrasies. And as a pied piper for progressive design in first-person gaming, it’s all the more important.

There are four campaigns in Left 4 Dead, each spanning five levels. The first four levels end in safe houses (places to heal and rearm free of the zombie menace), and the final level ends in a desperate stand as you wait for your rescue vehicle to arrive. You’ll travel through urban, suburban, and rural areas, each one grim, desolate, and littered with evidence of the apocalyptic event. You never learn exactly what happened, but the rich environments and thoughtful graffiti set the stage expertly. One campaign on normal difficulty (the second of four tiers) takes about an hour to complete, so you’ll soon become familiar with each set of maps. Although the limited selection and grim, overcast color palette can sometimes feel a bit repetitious, the dynamic enemies, varying weapon and ammo spawns, and ever-changing human factor combine to make each play-through feel surprisingly unique.

Left 4 Dead stars four charismatic survivors whose appearances and personalities add an immersive element to the game. They each banter in appropriate, often amusing ways when healthy, and they become more subdued and anxious when injured. The character models are top-notch, and there’s nothing quite like looking at the macho biker when he is injured and seeing fear creep across his face as he begins to doubt that he’ll survive. Seeing the relief on his face when you heal him is almost as satisfying as the relief you’ll feel when your AI allies heal you. Their team spirit doesn’t stop there: they’ll shout out when the find ammo or health, and, crucially, will pick you up when you’ve been incapacitated by an enemy.

For all of their good qualities, you’ll definitely appreciate your fellow survivors more when there’s human controlling them. AI teammates are definitely competent when it comes to killing the infected, rescuing you from the enemy’s clutches, and reviving you when you’re down. However, they aren’t particularly keen on using explosives or defending strategically, so while you choose to camp out on an elevated platform to better defend against the horde, they generally won’t be inclined to join you. Though you can certainly end up with equally uncooperative human teammates, you can at least communicate your strategy to them or, in a pinch, call an on-the-fly vote to boot them from the game.

When you play with one or more competent teammates, Left 4 Dead is an absolute blast. Even if you’ve played every level many times, you’ll still find the infected are distributed in different, unpredictable patterns. They may be milling around in a parking lot, half-oblivious to your passing, or they may come screaming at you from around a corner or over a building. They look nasty, run fast, scream hideously, claw viciously, and, best of all, they die in a wide variety of superbly animated ways (often with explosive decapitations or flying limbs). You might get jumped in a hallway, stairwell, both, or neither. Each area of the level becomes a potential battleground, so you have to be constantly vigilant, ready to make a defensive stand or rescue a teammate at a moment’s notice.

The difficulty changes as you play. The game throws tougher, more numerous foes at dominant survivors and offers periods of respite or more frequent resupply to beleaguered teams. You carry one primary weapon, like a shotgun or assault rifle, as well as one (or two) pistols with unlimited ammunition. You can also pick up pipe bombs and molotov cocktails, which are each fantastically deadly in their own unique ways. These powerful explosives, along with primary weapon ammo and health boosts, are vital to your survival. However, supplies are often hidden in rooms that are slightly off the beaten path, and slowing down to explore more areas will put you at higher risk for a zombie attack. This risk-reward element adds another strategic consideration, which further ramps up the tension. There are so many ways that your journey could go awry, from human error to strategic miscalculation to flat-out zombie inundation, that you’ll have to be constantly on your toes to adapt if you hope to survive. It is this tension that keeps each campaign uniquely challenging and makes survival so fantastically rewarding.

Of course, your goal isn’t always survival. When you play Versus mode, it is often the exact opposite. Two teams of up to four players each compete for points in this mode. Survivors earn points by progressing through the campaigns, though only two of the four are playable in this mode. The infected earn points by damaging and killing survivors, and the teams switch sides at the end of each level. Furthermore, the infected players spawn as zombies with special powers. Boomers vomit on survivors, marking them as targets for the ravenous horde of normal zombies; smokers lasso survivors with a long, frog like tongue; hunters pounce and viciously tear survivors apart; and the rare tank just smashes everyone with his massive bulk. It’s frightening enough to encounter these uniquely deadly enemies in the campaign mode, dealing with their disgusting sounds and vicious attacks that seem to come at the worst times. It’s a whole different level of horror when you know it’s your friend who has pinned you down and is clawing out your guts.

For survivors, Versus mode is a faster-paced game because the longer you take, the more opportunities the infected have to ambush you. For the infected, it’s a whole different Left 4 Dead experience. Instead of fighting your way through an endless, nebulous enemy force as you drive toward your objective, you have to plan and execute targeted strikes on a small, mobile group. The areas you once plotted to defend now become grounds for ambush. There are even certain walls that the infected can climb or break through, creating entirely new routes for moving through each level. Zombie players have to be careful because they are much weaker than survivors and can easily fall victim to bullets from any of the game’s well-tuned weapons. However, they will continue to spawn until the survivors die or reach safety, so they have multiple opportunities to spring attacks throughout the level. It’s very satisfying to vomit on your survivor friends, summoning the horde to devour them. It’s a whole different level of awesomeness to drag them out of the resulting chaos and slowly choke them to death as they desperately call for help.

Between the tense campaign and the frenetic Versus mode, Left 4 Dead offers two distinct flavors of multiplayer action that are equally delicious when enjoyed with friends. The single-player experience (and the marginally better but somewhat sluggish split-screen mode) isn’t as tasty, simply because the friendly AI can’t compare to a human teammate. Between play sessions, you may find yourself craving more maps, but once you’re in the game, you’ll be so consumed by your quest to survive that you’ll likely be grateful for your knowledge of the terrain. It’s a tricky proposition for a game to serve up such seemingly meager variety, but Left 4 Dead does so with panache, and gamers will likely be enjoying this recipe for a long time.

This focus is obvious from the first hour of the game, in which character creation and story exposition are beautifully woven together. It’s an introduction best experienced on your own rather than described in detail here, but it does set up Fallout 3′s framework: It’s the year 2277, and you and your father are residents of Vault 101, one of many such constructs that shelter the earth’s population from the dangers of post nuclear destruction. When dad escapes the vault without so much as a goodbye, you go off in search of him, only to find yourself snagged in a political and scientific tug of war that lets you change the course of the future. As you make your way through the decaying remnants of the District and its surrounding areas (you’ll visit Arlington, Chevy Chase, and other suburban locales), you encounter passive-aggressive ghouls, a bumbling scientist, and an old Fallout friend named Harold who has, well, a lot on his mind. Another highlight is a diminutive collective of Lord of the Flies-esque refugees who reluctantly welcome you into their society, assuming that you play your cards right.

The city is also one of Fallout 3′s stars. It’s a somber world out there, in which a crumbling Washington Monument stands watch over murky green puddles and lurching beasts called mirelurks. You’ll discover new quests and characters while exploring, of course, but traversing the city is rewarding on its own, whether you decide to explore the back rooms of a cola factory or approach the heavily guarded steps of the Capitol building. In fact, though occasional silly asides and amusing dialogue provide some humorous respite, it’s more serious than previous Fallout games. It even occasionally feels a bit stiff and sterile, thus diminishing the sense of emotional connection that would give some late-game decisions more poignancy. Additionally, the franchise’s black humor is present but not nearly as prevalent, though Fallout 3 is still keenly aware of its roots. The haughty pseudo government called the Enclave and the freedom fighters known as the Brotherhood of Steel are still powerful forces, and the main story centers around concepts and objectives that Fallout purists will be familiar with.

Although some of that trademark Bethesda brittleness hangs in the air, the mature dialogue (it’s a bit unnerving but wholly authentic the first time you hear 8-year-olds muttering expletives) and pockets of back-story make for a compelling trek. There are more tidbits than you could possibly discover on a single play-through. For example, a skill perk (more on these later) will enable you to extract information from a lady of the evening, information that in turn sheds new light on a few characters–and lets you complete a story quest in an unexpected way. A mission to find a self-realized android may initiate a fascinating look at a futuristic Underground Railroad, but a little side gossiping might let you lie your way to quest completion. There aren’t as many quests as you may expect, but their complexity can be astonishing. Just be sure to explore them fully before pushing the story forward: Once it ends, the game is over, which means that you’ll need to revert to an earlier saved game if you intend to explore once you finish the main quest.

Thus choices are ruled only by your own sense of propriety and the impending results. For every “bad” decision you make (break into someone’s room, sacrifice a soldier to save your own hide), your karma goes down; if you do something “good” (find a home for an orphan, give water to a beggar), your karma goes up. These situations trigger more consequences: Dialogue choices open up, others close off, and your reputation will delight some while antagonizing others. For example, a mutant with a heart of gold will join you as a party member, but only if your karma is high enough, whereas a brigand requires you to be on the heartless side. Even in the last moments of the game, you are making important choices that will be recounted to you during the ending scene, similar to the endings in the previous Fallout games. There are loads of different ending sequences depending on how you completed various quests, and the way they are patched together into a cohesive epilogue is pretty clever.

Fallout 3 remains true to the series character development system, using a similar system of attributes, skills, and perks, including the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system from previous games for your attributes, such as strength, perception, and endurance. From there, you can specialize in a number of skills, from heavy weapons and lock-picking to item repairing and terminal hacking. You will further invest in these skills each time you level, and you’ll also choose an additional perk. Perks offer a number of varied enhancements that can be both incredibly helpful and a bit creepy. You could go for the ladykiller perk, which opens up dialogue options with some women and makes others easier to slay. Or the cannibal perk, which lets you feed off of fallen enemies to regain health at the risk of grossing out anyone who glimpses this particularly nasty habit. Not all of them are so dramatic, but they’re important aspects of character development that can create fascinating new options.

Although you can play from an odd-looking third-person perspective (your avatar looks like he or she is skating over the terrain), Fallout 3 is best played from a first-person view. Where combat is concerned, you will play much of the game as if it is a first-person shooter, though awkwardly slow movement and camera speeds mean that you’ll never confuse it for a true FPS. Armed with any number of ranged and melee weapons, you can bash and shoot attacking dogs and random raiders in a traditional manner. Yet even with its slight chunkiness, combat is satisfying. Shotguns (including the awesome sawed-off variant) have a lot of oomph, plasma rifles leave behind a nice pile of goo, and hammering a mutant’s head with the giant and cumbersome supersledge feels momentously brutal. Just be prepared to maintain these implements of death: Weapons and armor will gradually lose effectiveness and need repairing. You can take them to a specialist for fixing, but you can also repair them yourself, as long as you have another of the same item. It’s heartbreaking to break a favored weapon while fending off supermutants, but it reinforces the notion that everything you do in Fallout 3, even shooting your laser pistol, has consequences.

These aspects keep Fallout 3 from being a run-and-gun affair, and you shouldn’t expect to play it as one. This is because the most satisfying and gory moments of battle are products of the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, or VATS. This system is a throwback to the action-point system of previous Fallout games, in that it lets you pause the action, spend action points by targeting a specific limb on your enemy, and watch the bloody results unfold in slow motion. You aren’t guaranteed a hit, though you can see how likely you are to strike any given limb and how much damage your attack might do. But landing a hit in VATS is immensely gratifying: The camera swoops in for a dramatic view, your bullet will zoom toward its target, and your foe’s head might burst in a shocking explosion of blood and brains. Or perhaps you will blow his limb completely off, sending an arm flying into the distance–or launch his entire body into oblivion.

This anatomically based damage is implemented well. Shooting an Enclave soldier’s arm may cause him to drop his weapon, shooting his leg will cause him to limp, and a headshot will disorient him. But you aren’t immune to these effects, either. If your head takes enough damage, you’ll need to deal with disorienting aftereffects; crippled arms mean reduced aiming ability. Fortunately, you can apply healing stimpacks locally to heal the injury; likewise, a little sleep will help ease your troubles. You can also temporarily adjust your stats using any number of aids and healing items. Yet these, too, come with consequences. A little scotch or wine sounds delicious and offers temporary stat boosts, but you can become addicted if you drink them enough, which results in its own disorienting visual effects. And, of course, you will need to deal with the occasional effects of radiation, which is a problem when you drink from dirty water sources or eat irradiated food. Radiation poisoning can be cured, but you’ll still need to weigh the healing benefits of certain items versus the resultant increase in radiation levels.

This all makes for a remarkably complex game that’s further deepened by other elements that add some gameplay variety and help the world feel more lived-in. Lock-picking initiates a decent, if odd, minigame that simulates applying torque to the lock with a screwdriver while twisting a bobby pin. The hacking minigame is an interesting word puzzle that requires a little bit of brainpower. Or if you fancy yourself more of a blacksmith than a wordsmith, you can earn and purchase schematics to help you create weapons using the various components scattered around the land. More of an interior decorator? No matter: Should you acquire the deed to an apartment, you can decorate it and even outfit it with a few helpful appliances. The jokester robot comes free.

Although you’ll be spending much of your time wandering alone out in the wastes, or perhaps with a companion or two, there are some memorable cinematic sequences. You will join soldiers as they take on a giant boss mutant, spearhead an assault on a famous DC landmark, and escape from a doomed citadel while robots and soldiers fill the air with laser fire. It’s a good mix, paying off the atmospheric tension with an occasional explosive release. Your enemies put up a good fight–often too good, considering that enemies that were a challenge early on can still be tough cookies 5 or 10 levels later. This scaling difficulty makes your sense of progression feel a bit more limited than in other role-playing games, but it feels somewhat appropriate, considering the game’s open-ended nature and inhospitable world. After all, if skulking mutants weren’t a constant threat, you wouldn’t be afraid to peek into the dark corners of the Fallout world. It should be noted that unlike previous games in the series, you cant take a completely peaceful approach to solving your quest. In order to complete the game, you will have to get into combat and kill off some enemies, but since the combat system is generally pretty satisfying, this shouldnt be a serious problem for most players.

Fallout 3 takes place in a bombed-out, futuristic version of Washington DC, and in the game, the area is bleak but oddly serene. Crumbling overpasses loom overhead and optimistic 1950′s-style billboards advertise their products with sunny catchphrases. It looks impressive, and you move around the wide-open wasteland with nary a loading time, though you will encounter loads when entering and exiting buildings or quick-jumping to areas you’ve already visited. Numerous set-piece landmarks are particularly ominous, such as a giant aircraft carrier that serves as a self-contained city, or the decrepit interiors of the National Air and Space Museum. But the small touches are just as terrific, such as explosions that produce mushroom-like clouds of flame and smoke, evoking the nuclear tragedy at the heart of Fallout 3′s concept. Character models are more lifelike than in the developer’s prior efforts but still move somewhat stiffly, lacking the expressiveness of the models in games such as Mass Effect. The audio in every is marvelous. Most of the voice acting is great, some sleepy-sounding performances notwithstanding. Any game’s atmosphere can live or die by its ambient audio, and Fallout 3 rises to the challenge. The whistling of the wind and the far-off sound of a gunshot are likely to give you a chill, and the slow-motion groans and crunch of a baseball bat meeting a ghoul’s face sound wonderfully painful. If you get lonely and want some company, you can listen to a couple of radio stations, though the frequent repetition of the songs and announcements grates after a while. The soundtrack is fine, though it’s a bit overwrought considering the desolate setting. Luckily, its default volume is very low, so it doesn’t get in the way.

You should play Fallout 3, it offers a deep and involving journey through a world that’s hard to forget. It has more in common with Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series than with previous Fallout games, but that is by no means a bad thing. In fact, Fallout 3 is leaner and meaner than Bethesda’s previous efforts, less expansive but more intense, while still offering immense replay value and quite a few thrills along the way. Whether you’re a newcomer to the universe or a Fallout devotee, untold hours of mutated secrets are lurking in the darkest corners of Washington.