Two Specific Game Reviews blog - Admiral_Nemo

Two Specific Game Reviews

I bought a two games a few days ago: Mirrors Edge and Crysis Warhead and I thought I'd dedicate this blog to writing something about these games. Minor spoilers may find its way into my reviews.
Both games are EA, I hope that doesn't put you of when reading this, they do come with good stuff now and then...

First up is Mirrors Edge, this game is a first person freerunning/parkour-style game. You play as the female main character in the story, Faith. You are a runner and a surviver outside a system that is corrupts and limits peoples free will. As you play the game, you will discover a plot against the runners.
The story is told as you play the game and in the cutscenes and animations between levels who are made in 2d rather than the 3d style of the game, which gives it quite a unique feel.

Gameplay can be hard sometimes, you get a simple introduction course in the beginning on the training grounds and that's about it. Throughout the game you have to improvise your way through several tricky moves and that combined with not always being sure where to go makes the game a real puzzle-like challenge which reminded me sometimes of Portal and how you could get stuck in a place not knowing what to do and then after many times of trying and failing, it hit you like a bombshell and you thought you were an idiot for not realizing what to do (at least, I did).

You have a thing called runner vision, it allows you to see what objects you can grab and also shows you the way in most cases. With runner vision items you can use to jump of, to grab or to hang on to show up in red.
Combining many moves while running can keep you have a flow in your running, you can also combine moves in combat with the blues, cops, which there are plenty of. They are annoying in the beginning, especially the ones in the helicopters however in the end it becomes quite a lot of fun to kick them in the face.

The attention to detail in this game is amazing, and there is some humor as well.

I'd say all of this makes Mirrors Edge a great game, sure, there are some minor setbacks. For example, you need a pretty good computer to be able to handle the physics in this game and since you cannot save the game whenever you like you'll end up doing loads of thing you don't want to do twice many times over. For example, I got stuck at one part, a helicopter had me pinned down and I needed to make a run for it making some really hard moves jumping over a huge gap. After you made the jump, there are some easier jumps and then you need to beat some cops, this was quite early in the game so I wasn't very good at that. I was pretty glad I made the jump finally but when I got to those cops, I got killed and I had to do it all over again, this was very frustrating after many failed attempts...

Rating this game, I would give it 9 out of 10 points for the idea alone. I much appreciate the developers made it in first person rather than third person since that never gives you a perfect view of your situation.
For the graphics 9/10.
Story 7/10
Music 7/10 as well
Therefore I rate this game 8.5/10

Now for the second game I bought. Crysis Warhead is a stand-alone expansion game based upon the original Crysis. There really isn't much else to say except it is an awesome game. I never played the first Crysis game so please correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Warhead is a continuation of the first Crysis story about an alien invasion on Earth. You play as a soldier in a nanosuit which gives you loads of cool abilities like cloak, armour, enhanced speed and enhanced strength.

There isn't really much else to say about the story of Crysis so I'll move on to gameplay. When I played Crysis 2, I found it very easy to get through all the levels, I have played it on every difficulty level from Soldier to Post Human Warrior and I must say it was almost just as easy on every level. This was really because of one thing, the cloak mode in Crysis 2 works a lot longer than in Crysis Warhead. So when I started playing Warhead, I thought to myself: "Well, it was pretty easy on normal so why not start on Hard right away...". Hmm, hard was really hard in Crysis Warhead, not only was the cloak as useless as a broken egg-timer, my armour was weaker and I found it harder to aim my rifles. It was fun though, I did not feel in necessary switch back to the normal difficulty level.

Crysis Warhead takes place somewhere in Korea while Crysis 2 takes place in New York, there was a big difference and I'm still not sure which game I like the most.
I do like the (kinda) realistic gameplay of the Crysis games, sure the NPCs are dumb and yes I realize that a lot of the weapons are somewhat to accurate and overpowered but I like that you can hide and wait to strike rather than constant hit and run attacks.

Though Crysis Warhead isn't the longest game to play, if you're good you can probably finish it in one day but it is quite a challenge. Various levels require a lot of focus while aliens keep flying around you and shooting little bolts of whatever it is that these aliens shoot.

Because Crysis Warhead has such great graphics, it's often a joy to just look around (if your computer is good enough). If only more game developers made hugely expensive and complicated engines for their games, maybe the gaming world would look a lot better...

So, I rate the gaming experience of Crysis Warhead 8/10 for good gameplay.
Graphics 9.2/10
Story 5/10
Music 7/10

Therefore I rate this game 7.5/10

I haven't done much modeling lately but here is my last model:

That's about it, thanks for reading this long blog or if you're just visiting my page sorry for making you scroll this far down, I realize good mouses don't come cheap and scroll-wheels are usually the first to break... I'm so sorry.

Have a nice day!

Admiral Skeybar