It’s hard not to get caught up in the hype surrounding either Starcraft 2 or Diablo III, but of the two releases, I’ve found my excitement for Diablo has been far exceeding that of Starcraft even though I’ve never played a Diablo game. That I’ve never played Diablo probably has a lot to do with it, in fact—I played Starcraft extensively when it was first released, and so I know what to expect with Starcraft 2. Diablo III and the hack-and-slash RPG genre that it lords over, on the other hand, is new to me.

Because Diablo III is still a long way off, I thought that it might be a good idea to take a plunge into hack-and-slash to get an idea of what it’s all about. Enter Titan Quest, which I’ve heard many people speak of as being the best rehash of Diablo’s decade-old game design to date.

I managed to play the game until I reached Act II of the storyline as a level 19 Warrior/Hunter, and couldn’t bring myself to go any further. In spite of this, it’s important to mention that at no point during my time with the game did I particularly want to stop playing it, but I’ll get back to that later. First, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this game.

Titan Quest is forgettable for a number of simple reasons: boring environments, boring enemies, brain-dead combat, and a worthless story that is presented in an archaic MMO style.

One of the things that an RPG has to get right is environment. The whole point of playing an RPG is to be immersed in the world in which the game takes place. The world of Titan Quest is completely linear, completely repetitive, and completely devoid of life. The game is structured so that each quest takes you from one human-populated settlement to the next, and between each of these settlements are regions populated by enemies. Unfortunately, if you’ve traveled through one of these enemy-populated regions, you’ve traveled through all of them. Every cave looks the same, every ruin looks the same, every enemy encampment looks the same, and every tree and rock formation looks the same. Once in a while the colour palette may switch from green to yellow, but that’s all you’re going to get. It all looks very pretty, but no matter how good an environment may look the first time you see it, after the twentieth time, you’ll wish you were looking at something else.

Traveling through the world also doesn’t provide the player with the feeling that they are on a Grand Quest in an ancient, magical world. Every time you look at your hero’s progress on the world map, you’re very clearly reminded that the game is shepherding you through narrow corridors from one village to the next. And once you clear through an area, you have very little reason to go back, aside from backtracking to the merchant in the nearest village to clear up space in your inventory for more loot.

Matching the repetitiveness of the environments is the repetitiveness of the enemies. You’ll kill the same animals, undead, spiders, cat-people, lizard-people, bird-people, and insect-people over and over again. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the combat was interesting, but it isn’t. That I chose warrior as my main class may have had some impact on the dynamics of the combat, but I doubt that other classes would be any more interesting. The combat involves clicking on an enemy and holding down the mouse button till that target is dead, and then moving onto the next. On only the strongest bosses did I ever run the risk of dying, but a good supply of health potions and vigilantly watching my health bar was all that I needed to get through even the hardest of battles.

The story is presented through speeches by NPC’s that bookend each quest or sub-quest, and there are a few NPC’s in each town that add some colour to the story, but it’s all very forgettable. The motivations for each quest just don’t matter. All you’ll care to know is that you have to get from point A to point B, killing everything in between and opening every ‘Pile of Bones’ and ‘Majestic Chest’ along the way.

And that’s essentially what this game comes down to: killing and looting. Looting gets you new equipement that boosts your stats, and killing gets you experience which allows you to boost your stats and fill in your skill tree. But I found even the skill tree to be a tiresome aspect of this game. Your character can have two specialties, and each specialty has its own skill tree. When I took my first look at each tree, I figured out exactly what skills I wanted my character to have, but the process of filling each tree is incredibly slow. As a level 19 character, I had accrued just about 60 skill points (you gain 3 skill points every level), and had only reached the second of six skill tree levels of each of my two specialties. Simply unlocking all six levels of one skill tree takes eleven levels worth of skill points, and that’s before actually investing any points into skills. On top of this, maxing out any individual skill requires 6 to 12 points.

Unfortunately, the only thing that could increase the complexity of the combat in Titan Quest would be a wide variety of skills and skill combinations to choose from. That the addition of skills takes so long means that through the majority of this game (at least through the portion that I played), you have only a handful of abilities to choose from.

I mentioned earlier that although I couldn’t bring myself to play Titan Quest past the first act, at no point during my play-through of that first act did I think about quitting the game. I see this not as a positive aspect of Titan Quest—”it wasn’t so bad that I wanted to stop playing it”—but rather a commentary on games in general. The only things that would keep someone playing a game like Titan Quest is loot and character-building compulsion, or just the fact that playing a game mindlessly is easier and requires less effort than doing something else. Unless a game is so poorly designed that it actively makes you want to stop playing it, it is so easy to just play through games without actually asking yourself, “Am I having fun?”

I wasn’t having any fun playing Titan Quest.

The recent price drop and new slim PS3 was enough to convince me to round out my collection of current-gen consoles, and of the already-released PS3 exclusives, the game that I was most eager to christen my new system with was Uncharted. I’m of fan of the recent Tomb Raider games because they are the closest things to an Indiana Jones game that I’ve played, and Uncharted seemed to take what I like about Tomb Raider and combine it with the stop-and-pop gameplay of Gears of War. How could it go wrong? In a lot of ways, apparently.

The game consists of a few standard gameplay elements: gunfights, platforming, puzzle-solving, driving (ski-dooing, in this case), and just for the hell of it, quick-time events. There are problems with each of these, though gunfights deserve to be discussed first because they are what you spend most of the game doing.

The most notable problem with Uncharted is that the enemies are bullet-sponges. They can take so many bullets to the body that my go-to weapon was a handgun because of its assuracy and lack of recoil, and gunfights became a largely un-dynamic headshot shooting gallery, where I would stay rooted behind cover in one spot waiting for the enemy to pop their head out enough for me to put a bullet in it. When I would miss with a handgun at a long range, though, and hit anywhere else on an enemy’s body, the AI would have an annoying habit of stumbling just enough to get outside of my reticule and then perform an animation that I suppose was intended to make the character appear to be trying to get out of the gunfire that I was raining down on him, but instead just looked like some sort of stiff dance move. I understand that on first thought, adding stumbling and bullet-dodging animations to the enemy AI characters makes sense–it’s not very realistic for anyone to remain standing in direct gunfire or to not so much as flinch after being shot–but I can’t understand the thinking that went into deciding that the solution to this problem would be to have the enemy AI perform the following sequence of events:

(1) Get shot in the chest
(2) Stumble as if tripping over a curb
(3) Perform awkward dance
(4) Recover and drop back behind cover
(5) Pop up again a few seconds later in nearly the same spot in which you just got shot.

These design decisions don’t do anything to improve the believability of the enemy AI and increase player immersion, so what purpose do they serve, aside from making gunfights more of a chore than they have to be? Adding to this is that all of the gunfights feel extremely long-winded. It might have something to do with the fact that it takes so damn long to kill anyone, but enemies also jump out at you frequently and in large groups–you’ll kill a room of people only to have a whole new group of them appear almost immediately afterwards. Because of all this, if I was playing the game for any extended period of time, the gunfights became more a chore to get through than anything else, and I would dread finding open spaces filled with cover, because I knew that an ambush was coming. Dreading the shooty parts of a game that is all about the shooty isn’t good.

Next up: platforming.

When you make an ‘Indiana Jones’-style treasure-hunting platforming game, a variety of interesting environments are key. Tomb Raider knows this; Uncharted doesn’t. Uncharted has one interesting environment that is stretched out for the entire game. You go from back and forth between samey-forests and samey-ruins before being thrown a couple of bones at the end, neither of which are particularly inspiring. Though Tomb Raider has that over Uncharted, neither game has completely figured out how to solve the leap of faith, though Uncharted doesn’t perform poorly in this regard. The distinction between what you can and cannot grab onto, and what gaps you can and cannot jump over, will sometimes come down to trial-and-error. If you think you can make it, you probably can, but there are a number of spots where I had to leap to my death a few times before figuring out which was the right way to go.

What’s left to discuss of the gameplay is the puzzle-solving, driving, and quick time events, and all each of these can be addressed with a question:

- Why bother putting puzzles that are so brain-dead easy that they are essentially equivalent to a toy I had as a toddler, where I had to match plastic 3D objects with the corresponding hole that they would fit into? They shouldn’t even be called puzzles, but rather arbitrary barriers.

- Why combine realistically unresponsive Ski-doo control with a ridiculously unrealistic explosive barrel-avoiding mini-game? It felt like I was playing an unresponsive River Raid.

- Why slot 4 quick-time events into an 8 hour game, and why expect the player to be able to react quickly enough if they only happen once every two hours? Each one was basically an automatic arbitrary death.

The final problem that I have with this game is your character’s progression through the environment. For a majority of the game, you’re following clues in Sir Francis Drake’s journal, and the path that the journal takes you on doesn’t make much sense. You’ll go through secret passage after secret passage, only to walk into a location that the enemies had found using a staircase or a door. It feels like none of the clues or secret passages serve any purpose other than having you travel through every corner of the small location in which the majority of the game takes place. And every other part of the story is basically B-movie filler.

All of this leads to one question: With all of the negatives things that I’ve had to say about this critically-acclaimed game, why did I finish playing it?

In spite of everything, Uncharted isn’t a bad game. As long as it’s played in short bursts, it’s a moderately fun action game with beautiful graphics that is just short enough in length to keep you playing until the point where you see the light at the end of the tunnel and think, “Well, I’ve played it this long, so I may as well finish it.”

This review is based on having played this game for ten hours, so there may be more to this game that I haven’t yet experienced, but I doubt it.

Set in a fictional country in Africa, you begin Far Cry 2 as a just-landed mercenary sent to kill a notorious-but-elusive arms dealer. After a relatively lengthy opening and an introductory mission, you’re thrown into the open world with a knife, a gun (along with the ability to buy more), and a map and GPS unit that conveniently point the location of all available missions.

From a graphical perspective, traveling through the world of Far Cry 2 is a joy: trees and bushes react so satisfyingly to the character, the vehicles, and bullets, that I found myself going out of my way to drive and walk into them; the buildings, grass, and animals all look fantastic; and I could spend ages simply guiding a boat down the world’s various river networks. Taken on its own, the world is an environment that is truly immersive, and that’s why it’s so disappointing that the developers saw the need to use almost every other element of this game to break that immersion.

The most obvious place to start is with the NPC characters. Aside from your mercenary buddies (who only appear in a few select locations and situations) and the people in the world’s one small city, the entirety of the NPC population is male, armed, and hostile. In your day-to-day traveling through this world, every single person you encounter will try to kill you, and will recognize that they should be trying to kill you the second that they spot you. And you run into a lot of people in this game. The world is absolutely littered with guard posts, both on- and off-road, so even when trying to avoid a guard post marked on your map, chances are you’ll run into one that isn’t. Because of this, whenever you have to travel between any two points in the world, you will inevitably do the following:

(1) Constantly watch the map for the next guarded location

(2) Stop your assault jeep (the only vehicle with a gun turret, and as a result, the only vehicle you’ll be using consistently in the game) some distance away from the post

(3) Shoot everyone

(4) Leave your smoking Jeep behind and take the same-model-but-different-coloured Jeep from the guys you just killed because it’s faster than fixing your own

(5) Drive for a few minutes (constantly watching the map) and then do it all again

After performing this series of actions for the hundredth time, you’re going to get the urge to speed through these outposts, but since your enemies will chase and gun you down in their own Jeeps, its best to just kill them all beforehand.

The enemy NPCs aren’t all that smart either, but what these guys are missing in brains, they make up for in aim. And God help you if there’s a sniper among them. I play on an SD TV, and though the distance at which NPC snipers can pick you off when in the open is realistic, it’s maddening (not to mention anti-immersive) having to spend minutes letting yourself be shot, using the shot-indicator to find their general direction, and then scanning that direction for a little white stickman who’s recognized you as a hostile from miles away. This becomes infinitely worse when you’re in an environment with trees, because they can see you when you can’t see them. Throughout the game you’ll find yourself shooting blindly into trees and bushes hoping that you’ve hit whoever’s shooting at you enough times to make them stop.

The vision and accuracy of the NPC’s in Far Cry 2 is offset by a generous health and death system. Your health bar is separated into segments, and they will regenerate as long as you haven’t dropped below that particular segment. You also carry around a number of syringes with you that will fully heal you, and the number that you carry can be upgraded by a couple of levels. Finally, if in spite of all this, you still don’t manage to stay alive, one of your merc buddies will revive you and drag you out of harm’s way.

Although all of these death-prevention mechanics balance out the dead-on accuracy of the NPC’s, none of them are particularly elegant. I can’t imagine how large a quantity of self-injected drugs are flowing through my character’s blood stream, and it’s innerving knowing that my “best friend” (who was randomly assigned by the game, and who I dislike tremendously) is watching my every move, waiting to swoop in and pull me out of danger. These design decisions make even less sense when you consider that the unarmored NPC characters all take an ungodly number of bullets before going down. Why not just make enemies easier to kill and remove the voyeur friend with the hero complex? Speaking of NPC’s going down brings up another design decision that makes little sense: sometimes when an enemy absorbs twenty bullets and finally falls, he doesn’t actually die, but crawls away slightly and then proceeds to shoot you with his pistol. Finding enemies is hard enough in this game, but finding enemies that are sitting on the ground in a grassy, hilly environment as they slowly shoot you with a pistol? How is this positively adding to my gameplay experience?

I could go on: every single mission is exactly the same (travel to location marked on map, kill everyone, take shining yellow thing/blow up weapons cache/assassinate target), you can jump between the driver’s seat and the gun turret on the jeep with one button press, but can’t on the assault boat, zebras crumple like paper if you drive anywhere remotely near them, hang gliders are extremely disappointing to use, cars break down and explode like crazy—if the game areas didn’t frequently reset, every single road would be packed with wrecked and smoking cars that I’ve left behind in favour of a non-smoking or non-exploded version (that was promptly abandoned when it too inevitably broke down).

This isn’t a bad game. It has a fantastically immersive world and art design, competent gunplay, repetitive missions, and whole bunch of annoying design choices that break any and all immersion. If you’re looking for a shooter and have already played Gears of War 2, COD 4, BioShock, The Orange Box, Halo 3, Left 4 Dead, and Rainbow 6, you could pick this up, I guess.