game-critic.net

The next chapter in Creative Assembly’s line of strategy games has now been released. It furthers the setting of their last release which took place in Japan. This time however you are not only facing Japanese forces and trying to unite the empire of Japan, but trying to either fight off American rifles, or trying to stay true to your sword as a Samurai. The game is set in the Boshin War, a war between the Shogun, who wanted things to stay the way they were, with swords, sake and traditional pure japanese culture, and the Emperor of Japan who had a keen intrest in anything Western. (Anything that goes bang is good!)

The start of the game lets you chose exactly this, and it is a very important choice to make. Either you pick the Shogun who has decades, if not millennia of tradition, or you chose to be the leader of the farmers with picks and later more advanced weaponry coming from the uncle in the West. I found that starting as the Emperor you have a bit too much opposition in the start of the campaign. At one time I found myself with more than 7 revolts per turn, and a year has 4 of these turns. It does get better however, and in the end I found myself with more modern and effective armies than my enemies.

Ninja!

What I found to be a problem in the newer Total War games were the sea battles, the ships were slow and I almost never had a chance to impose any sort of tactic on my enemies. In Total War: Shogun 2 this has been somewhat fixed, and the boats/ships actually react to commands in this game. A new addition to the sea battles is the steam powered boats. I don’t know quite what to think about them as they’re not that much better than their opposites with sails, however it is nice to have the chance to build them. Steamer or not, what makes fleets so important is the new chance to have the fleet bombard battles happening close to sea, and many times this helped me win almost impossible battles.

Steam boats!

Trade is as usual important in this game, one can make trade agreements with european powers to increase wealth and I found that this was what I earned most on as the campaign ticked on.

In short, the game has had an overhaul in both the difficulty settings, the AI, and some of the rough edges have been polished away. It can now be quite hard to win a battle against a fewer in numbers enemy. They hide, move well and make it generally harder to win. I was left with a bit of dissapointment about how little of a chance the traditional forces had when I had aquired western technology, but I guess these games have to be somewhat historically correct – and the samurai did lose the Boshin Wars.

Game Critic score: 4/5.

Pictures from Creative Assembly/Sega.

Almost five years ago now I was sat in front of my TV with a brand new game in my hands, it was Mass Effect. A week later I had gone through what I then thought was one of the most exiting gaming experiences of my life. It had it all, action, a great story line and epic adventure. The game made a benchmark of which all other RPG’s had to try and follow. It was like being a squeaking little girl, anxiously awaiting a creation of Justin Bieber half bred with the Jonas Brothers all in one (or whatever it is little girls like these days) that I played through one level after the other.

Now five years later I am faced with the same swarm of butterflies churning away at my insides when thinking of how I felt when I first received Mass Effect 3 in my mailbox – fresh from BioWare/Electronic Arts.

Even though the first Mass Effect had its cracks and was a bit lackluster in the action department, I could easily ignore that on account of the epic story that was unfolding in front of my eyes. The creators seem to have realized this too, as the sequel had been corrected in many ways. Less glitches, more action, and in my opinion a better combat system came with the more polished Mass Effect 2. In Mass Effect 3, even more of Miyagi’s wax has been applied and coupled with a couple more years in graphics development has led to what I feel is an awesome gaming experience.

Source: Bioware/Electronic Arts.

Now, onto the game itself. (Spoiler alert!)

Mass Effect 3 is an epic action adventure set a couple of centuries ahead in time. In those two hundred or so years, mankind has made new discoveries of races and big technological breakthroughs. As usual the player takes control of Commander Shepard, a character that most gamers now a days should have a thorough knowledge of(If not – shame on you!). And as per usual the main enemy is the Reapers, a race of robot aliens who hates anything alive. From the previous games we found out that they reside in between galaxies where they wait for a longer period of time before they completely purge anything in reach of life. We also find out that they believe that these actions are the only ways to preserve the fragile balance between organic and synthetic life.

Finally you get to kill the floating squids and put an end to their terror. However this won’t be the first thing you have to do in this new chapter of Mass Effect, a lot of the earlier parts of the game is spent on trying to convince the different races that they should come together and fight the reapers instead of each other. In fact, in many parts of the game I thought to myself “Well, this is it. It’s all going to hell.”, it is this feeling of doom and gloom, and of hopelessness that makes this final chapter of Mass Effect into such an epic game.

Source: Bioware/Electronic Arts

The music lifts this whole experience to another level, kudos to Clint Mansell who keeps delivering such awesome Star Wars like tunes that awaken feelings the author thought he lost when he turned eleven. The game is not without faults however, long loading times, little to no development of weapons and armor and a somewhat weird decision to have the player chose between the original way of having the story told in dialogue and cut scenes. Overall however, this game is so solid that a Reaver could not break it.

Game Critic score: 5/5.