The Final Stage

Ensemble’s hotly anticipated console RTS Halo Wars is finally upon us. And we are all asking the same thing: can an RTS work on a console? Breathe a sigh of relief when I tell you, yes. And not only does the game work, it works well. There is one other big question surrounding this game, how does the Halo franchise work when put in the hands of someone other than Bungie? Incredibly well.

Halo Wars takes place 20 years before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, meaning all new characters and settings, which is far from a bad thing. Ensemble creates a wonderful story that hooked me more than either Halo or Halo 2. You start on Harvest, with the Humans and Covenant still fighting over the planet. Anyone who has delved into the Halo lore is going to love this game for showing you some of the things it does (don’t worry, no spoilers here). And people new to Halo, or who never really got that into the story, will love how accusable the history of the universe is made. As if a grade A original story weren’t enough, a Halo Timeline can be found in the extras menu, with key historic points in time to be viewed once you find them (represented by black boxes) in the Campaign maps.

Game play wise Halo Wars is quite an accomplishment. Many have tried, and failed, to successfully bring a Real Time Strategy game to home consoles. Of course, almost all of these games have been ports of PC games, and of course trying to compress a keyboard’s worth of controls to the ten or so buttons a console has is not going to work. Ensemble took the only logical step and built Halo Wars from the ground up specifically for the Xbox 360 controller. While this results in a more simplified RTS than genre fans might be used to, it in no way produces a shallow or empty game.

For Halo fans the big draw to Halo Wars will be the campaign for it’s story and what it adds to the Halo Universe. For RTS fans, the main draw is going to be the online multiplayer, which works flawlessly. You have the choice of 1v1, 2v2, or 3v3 game types for either offline (with AI) or online play. The game also supports system link, if anyone still does that. As I said, the online play comes off near perfect. Match making is quick and pairing opponents by talent level results in fair fights, usually. Gamers have the option of 6 different leaders to choose to play as, all with their own unique abilities and units. The end result is variety, as rarely will two games ever go the same way. With a good selection of maps, and I’m sure more to come, multiplayer seems to be able to provide an endless amount of play time.

Final word on Halo Wars is that it is worth the $60, both for Halo Fans, and RTS fans alike. Anyone who has been dying for an RTS on the Xbox has finally gotten exactly what they wanted. Although the campaign is a bit short, it was still very enjoyable, and I have no doubts I’ll play through it again. Did I mention that the campaign is Co-op? Online multiplayer is amazing and very fulfilling. The game looks and sounds absolutely amazing, and the cut scenes are some of the prettiest I have ever seen. Ensemble really could not have ‘ended’ on a higher note.

In 1979 the movie Alien showed us one thing; Space is scary. 29 years later, Deadspace shows up to tell us that, well, no not really. Deadspace shows up promising to bring new life to the nonexistent survival horror genre. Fans like myself rejoiced at the prospect of a new exciting property to scare the hell out of us. Sadly when I thought I’d be playing the next big thing in the Horror game genre, I found myself playing a very repetitive and bland action title.

Deadspace puts you in the gravity boots of Isaac Clarke, an engineer on the USG Kellion. You along with the rest of the crew, which apparently consists of only two other people, are on a mission to respond to a distress call from the UGS Ishimura, a large mining vessel. It also appears that Isaac’s love Nichole is on the derelict ship, though no real back story to this, or any of the other characters is ever given. When you arrive on the Ishimua, it becomes very obvious very quickly that something horrible has happened. The crew and the ship have been infected and taken over by Necromorphs, and alien life form that kills you, then reanimates your dead corpse into horrific monstrosities. The plot slowly advances as you and the others begin to figure out the pieces to what happened. Missing parts of the story are told via logs that you collect, very similar to Bioshock. These logs come in audio, video, and text format, with the text being almost worthless as the letters are too small to read. Not that this really matters though, as the story is very bland and generic, taken from any Sci-fi alien infestation conspiracy movie.

Of course a mediocre story can be overlooked if the game excels in game play features. Sadly Deadspace didn’t really deliver here either. Deadspace is played in typical 3^rd person view, only with the character all the way to the left of the screen. This becomes a problem in a lot of battle scenarios, as your health is displayed on Isaac’s back, and the camera tends to move so that your view of the health gage is blocked. Of course your health being displayed on the characters back does sever the purpose to eliminate the standard HUD, and the game does this very well, allowing for a deep level of realism and immersion.

Isaac has an arsenal of 6 different guns that can be unlocked and purchased throughout the game, which is really pointless as the first one you get is the best, and can carry you through to the end. Deadspace tries to set its self apart from other ‘shoot the monster in the head’ games by eliminating the head shot. The game does this by instead making it so that you have to dismember your enemies. See necromorphs are too tough to succumb to a regular old headshot. Only but slicing off all of their limbs can you inflict enough damage on them to kill them. It’s a cool new idea that quickly becomes as simple as shooting a zombie in the head. The game features about 5 different enemies, not counting bosses, all of which are killed in the exact same way. And all of which use the same attack strategies. It seems the developers forgo that enemy AI can handle more than just the ‘run at the player and try to kill them’ command. Every time you enter combat from the first to the last time you fight the same enemies who attack you the same way and are killed by the same process. Combat becomes very redundant and after a level or too seems more like a chore than a pulse pounding fight for your life. Another very annoying thing is the amazing spawn ability the necromorphs have. You can kill everything in front of you, turn around to walk away, and two more enemies will spawn right where you were just standing. I hoped that at this point in game design we were past the magically appearing monsters. Guess not. The creature design of the necromorphs also seems horrible uninspired. They look like nothing more than Doom rejects, and there is hardly any difference in design from one creature to another. In fact two of the 5 bosses are just big masses of tissue with tentacles sticking out. Should you be unlucky enough to die at the hands of these beasties, you will either just fall over dead, perhaps with your head loped off, or you will have to suffer through a painfully long and unnecessarily bloody death scene. Generally these involve you being impaled on one of the creature’s blade arms, as they slowly hack off your limbs one by one, eventually decapitating you and slicing you in half. These death sequences are not cool, like Leon being chain sawed in Resident Evil 4, but just over the top and seem like they’d be more at home in Hostile 3 or Saw 6. And die you probably will, as health and ammo are horribly scarce. The game makes up for this by allowing you to buy ammo, but stores are generally located at the very begging of the level where you have no need for them. And as you inventory is terribly small, even after you upgrade your suite, you don’t usually have enough room to hold ammo for more than one gun at a time anyway.

The game does feature more than bland combat and walking down dark hallways. There is the occasional puzzle to be found. These however are even more disappointing than the combat you had to endure to get to them. They seem to serve no purpose but to waste time. And seeing as the game can be completed in less than 10 hours, they don’t even do that well. Seriously, the puzzles in Deadspace are not fun, they are not difficult, and they don’t even make you scratch your head for a moment. Except to wonder why you had to do them in the first place.

The game consist of 12 levels, spaced apart by a boss battle every 2 levels. The bosses are just as easy to beat as the normal enemies in the game, and generally take much longer than they should. By the time I beat the sixth level, yes half way through the game, I was ready to be done. Deadspace is supposed to be a survival horror game, but does more with merging horror and action shooters than even Resident Evil 4 did. What I mean is there is very little horror or survival in this game. It is really just a straight 3^rd person action shooter. The developers tried to add some cheap slasher movie scares, but none of them pay off and you see them coming a mile away.

Deadspace also features many moments when you must entire either the vacuum of space, or a zero gravity room. The space vacuum moments are pretty cool, but the zero gravity rooms tend to be annoying. Camera angles get very confusing and finding your next objective is more of a pain than ever before. To ease that suffer though, Isaac has one more trick up his sleeve. By clicking in the right stick a blue light will project along the floor briefly in the direction you need to go. This is a great addition, as the in game map is totally useless.

Deadspace is not exactly a bad game, despite all of the above griping about it. The game is absolutely beautiful to look at. There are some moments on the ship when you can see out into space that really are breath taking. Isaac does have some cool tools to use as well. Kinesis is really as it sounds. It gives you the ability of telekinesis in the form of a gun. This is used to solve puzzles, and can also be used in combat. The best example of this is once you slice an arm blade off of an enemy, using the kinesis gun to throw it at another incoming monster. Isaac’s other cool tool is his Stasis gun. This is used to slow objects down, or even to freeze enemies in their tracks. While these offer some slight variation to the standard combat, it’s really not enough to make it spectacular. Where Deadspace really takes succeeds is in player immersion. As mentioned above, there is no HUD; everything is presented in game as part of the world. Also, all of your menu actions take place in real time, so healing or switching a weapon must be done strategically in battle; otherwise you open yourself up for attack.

Over all I was disappointed by Deadspace, though I think this might be partly due to the expectations I had for the game. Of course it is also due to the fact that Deadspace offers no challenge, is incredibly repetitive and losses its charm very quickly. There is possibility to expand the Deadspace universe with a sequel or two, and should EA choose to do so, hopefully they will think about expanding the game play over all. In closing, Deadspace is not amazing, but it’d not a terrible experience either. But if you are looking for a next-gen survival horror game, skip this one, and go play Silent Hill Homecoming.

We here at The Final Stage encourage you to go out and vote today. Make sure that you are a part of history. Don’t miss your chance to have your voice be heard.