Up until about April last year, I’d boot up Skype and do a video call with then Auckland-based radio announcer Glenn Williams and we’d talk video games. Lots and lots of video games. I think we first started doing the Tuesday segment about 2009 – my very first chat to Glenn was actually while I was standing in an exhibition hall at the Los Angeles Convention Centre during E3. I remember my phone almost running out of battery.

Anyway, mid-last year Glenn and his partner decided to up and leave New Zealand for London and the radio segments stopped. It wasn’t long before I actually missed doing the segments with Glenn and it actually felt like something was missing every Tuesday – so when Glenn contacted me in early December saying he was going to do a New Year round-up with all his guests that would run in early 2013 I jumped at the chance.

So, in early December I again booted up Skype (this time just audio, not video) and over the course of an hour or so we recorded four or five 10-minute or so segments on video game-related stuff to look forward to in 2013 (as well as one which rounded up some of the highlights of 2012). They were played on Radio Live recently but as I was on holiday and didn’t have a lot of time to listen to the radio I missed pretty much off all of them – but Glenn has come to the rescue and uploaded all of his recordings to Mix Cloud.

By the looks of things, three of my recordings made the cut and they’re here and here. The third sessions is still being uploaded. I’ll update this post when it’s been uploaded.

Have a listen and let me know what you think.

The last time I played a Sims game it didn’t end well.

In fact, it ended pretty badly, actually.

You see, it ended with my virtual children being taken away by virtual child services because they had neglected to do their virtual homework, instead preferring to stay up all night and play.

Thankfully, there are no virtual children for me to look after in SimCity, a re-imagining of the original world-buiding game that first graced PCs way back in 1999. I’m grateful for that.

The Sim games have always had that magical ability to turn the mundane and ordinary task  into time sinks, and the original was no different with its amazingly simple concept: take a piece of land and build a bustling city on it. It was virtual city management where you had to manage all the successes and failures that growning cities do. It proved to be an incredibly addictive game, from what my jaded memory can recall.

The game spawned several sequels (and recently SimCity 4 was on special on the Christmas Steam sale), as you’d expect, but none of them held the magic that the original did. SimCity 2013 is aiming to bring back what made the original game so good: After some hands-on time, I can say Maxis has succeeded. It was one of my most favoured games during hands-on time at a recent EA event in Sydney.

Even SimCity’s producer Jason Haber agreed that more recent SimCity games had got too complicated.

‘‘Part of the goal was to appeal to a lot of SimCity players. We know that the trend for SimCity was for it to get more complicated and have a lot more graphs and spreadsheets and we wanted to make sure that it was more accessible to those players who were nostalgic players, as well as those who were new players, that previous SimCities weren’t.’’
SimCity has little details: When you build a house, little builders arrive in their vehicles, their little legs carrying them around the building site. When a home is completed, removal vans arrive to help Sims move into their new homes. A cruise liner plies its way down an estuary behind the houses. Residential, industrial and commercial zones. Smiley faces above Sims and their homes means that they’re happy.

Haber says that what you do in one city can ultimately impact on what happens in surrounding cities. Take Trashtown, for example, a city that he made to demonstrate what he meant. Trashtown, as you have no doubt guessed, is a town where all the rubbish from other cities goes to. The city transforms as more and more rubbish is dumped from surrounding cities.
When it comes to making cities, Haber says the only limit is your imagination. “You can build roads under bridges, bridges under bridges. The only limit is your imagination. It’s the only limit to what you can create.’’

During a demonstration of SimCity, Haber showed the data layers that work underneath the game play. Data layers let you drill down into the sub-layers of the ground, perhaps see what valuable resources are there, where there is more water for water towers, where there is oil that can be drilled for. But data layers can also be used to get more detail about underlying problems in a city. Take Montevegas again, the casino town where Haber was able to work out who was visiting the city as a tourist – but also where most of the crime was happening. IT turns out most of the criminal activity in Montevegas was stemming from the central police station – because the  holding cells were too small, so lots of criminals were having to be released onto the streets. The problem was fixed by building another police station.

Demolishing buildings is as easy as clicking on the bulldozer icon then clicking on the building you want obliterated. It collapses in a cloud of dust. Smiley faces above dwellings and buildings mean your citizens are happy: sad faces mean, well, they’re sad. SimCity is a game with depth. The attention to detail is impressive, too: when you click on a plot to build a house, builders pull up in their vans and start working on houses. Removal vans arrive when the homes are ready, unloading furniture for new owners. A cruise liner flows down a wide river. Click on any car driving around and you’ll see the aspirations of the occupant: “Geoff couldn’t find some cheap chinese food. He’s going home to read” (I can’t remember if any Sims are called Geoff so I made that name up. I’m sure Sims could be called Geoff). There are also natural disasters to cope with: a meteor strike ended the demo.

‘‘There is a lot of complexity there and asking whether it’s as complex as you want it to be is a very broad statement but there’s a lot of depth for people to look into. Even with the crime data layer that I showed today, I can see that there’s lots of crime but I can dig a little deeper and find out where is the crime and look a specific buildings and know that there is 87 criminals coming out of that building. So I can dig deeper and deeper to find out what is going on.’’

I asked Haber what he thought the appeal of the SimCity games was:  ‘‘I think everybody has a different reason they like it but for me it has a lot to do with the experimentation aspect. I like to try things and see what happens, see how they [the Sims] react and by doing that, something else comes up and I’m like ‘OK, how am I going to solve that problem?’ and I find with SimCity even after a certain stage I get so addicted: I’ll sit down and start playing and before I know it hours have passed but it’s really fun. Even the fact that I can take a city and compete with another person to see who can make their city the most productive but in the process of doing that, on building the same city on the same plot, I learned new things, I laid out my roads a little different, I had my supply chain working a little different, had my oil wells in a slightly different place. To me having that experience and rebuilding each time, and having it still be fun and intriguing, and learning something new every time, really made me feel that there’s so much to do in this game.’’

Haber says while there are a finite number of scenarios that players will face the Sims aren’t backwards in telling you what they need. “Things will change based on what city plot you’re playing and how you’re building your city. The Sims will ask you for what they want: wealthier Sims will ask you for education, if you’re in a coal town they might suggest you go digging for coal. There are more universal things: nobody wants dirty sewage in their back yards so all Sims will tell you what they want but it’s a more emergent style of game play.’’
The important thing for us is that it is a game first and while we do a lot of research into how these systems work, it doesn’t mean we’re going to make it exactly mimic the real world. That’s not what our goal is: our goal is to make it fun but evoke that feeling of the real world.’’

‘‘For me, I love this one. To me it does evoke the feeling of the original SimCity, which was one of my favourites. I think it’s sort of the same, but different. It definitely feels like SimCity, which to me was something that was really important – it needed to feel like you were playing SimCity the moment you touched it – but it does feel different.

Haber is a fan of classic and indie games and he tries to bring his love of those games to the games he works on.  ‘‘For classic games, the core game play was important and they didn’t have the graphics to support that. It was about the game play and making sure that it’s fun and to me that’s the inspiration I try to bring to every game that I work on, including SimCity, and it’s something the whole team was behind. Of course we want it to look great (and it does) and play great but that core game play is very important.”

SimCity is out for PC and Mac in February next year. Word is that SimCity will use require an “always on” internet connection to play. I didn’t have the chance to ask Haber this in my what turned out to be only nine minutes of interview time. It was supposed to be 15-minutes.

Metro 2033 was something of a surprise for publisher THQ.

A survival horror game based on the novel of the same name by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky, it told the story of a post-holocaust Moscow and a young man called Artyom, born in the city’s underground Metro system, where survivors of a nuclear attack now live. On the surface roam unspeakable horrors called the Dark Ones.

The game was played from the perspective of Artyom, and the action took place mostly in dark tunnels of the metro and in the radiation-laced streets of Moscow. The game’s global communications manager, Jeremy Greiner, told me over the phone from Sydney that he believes Metro 2033 was misunderstood by THQ when it was released.

”Metro 2033 turned out to be a cult hit. It flew under the radar. It wasn’t understood by THQ at the time and it didn’t get the marketing push that it should have. It was the gem that not everyone knew about.” Not surprisingly then, Metro Last Light, the sequel to Metro 2033, has THQ’s solid backing, complete with a big marketing drive that includes a live action series setting the story.

Metro 2033 had two possible endings: a ”good” one and a ”bad” one, depending on the player’s actions throughout the game, and Greiner says Last Light carries the narrative on after the events of the ”bad” ending.

Metro Last Light, like 2033, is a little different from most shooters in that it strips away some of the most common on-screen elements, most noticeably the mini-map and the health meter. In Metro 2033, players had to monitor the effectiveness of the filters in Artyom’s breathing mask by keeping an eye on Artyom’s wristwatch. Ammunition, too, was scarce throughout the game, forcing players to scavenge bodies and lockers. When Artyom was injured, blood would splatter the screen.

”By not having an on-screen mini-map telling you where you must go next and by stripping away the HUD [heads-up display] and user interface, it makes things more challenging for the player, says Greiner. ”Metro 2033 and Last Light are all about immersion in the game world and when there is a pop-up on-screen it makes you realise you’re in a video game. It pulls away from the experience.”

Greiner says developer 4A isn’t concerned about the other shooter games on the market but just making the game that they wanted to create with a strong narrative. ”Metro Last Light has lots of emotion and geopolitical themes. It’s a highly detailed world and the conversations, too, deliver a strong narrative experience.”

I asked him how much of the developers’ political leanings are in Last Light. ”A lot of the guys [on the development team] lived under the communist regime so I’m sure that will shape their political and cultural beliefs.”

Greiner believed gamers will be surprised with Metro Last Light and how it handles traditional first-person conventions.

”I think with Metro Last Light, gamers are going to have an ‘Aha’ moment, a revelation, and will question how they used to play shooters. Last Light will challenge how you play shooters in the way you do. You’ll ask why do you feel a certain emotion and it breaks out of the regular shooter mode. With the breathing masks, for example, you have to change air filters yourself – the game won’t do it for you. I feel that in other games you’re conditioned to do things in a certain way but in a game like Last Light, where you challenge yourself, it’s rewarding.”

I woke up this morning with extremely sore calf muscles. How sore? The sore that travels up and down your muscles when you walk around.

I blame former American NFL player Alex Molden for those sore calves. Well, not him personally, I’ve never met the guy, but his virtual self in Nike + Kinect Training, the fitness program for Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor that will get me athlete fit apparently. I think it was the fitness assessment he put me through that bought about those tight calves (and, perhaps, pushing a big gear on the big when I really shouldn’t have been). He was so nice about it the whole time, too.

Disclaimer: These are not my calves. Actually, I don’t think I’d want calves that big.

Nike + is quite a scientific piece of software, unlike other console-based fitness programs  I’ve tried in the past where you might have to wear pick ups on your arms or the exercises were just a little tame: Nike + Kinect Training is based on some serious scientific principles and will push you to your limits (hence the sore calves). By the end of the assessment phase, sweat was dripping off me and my wife thought I’d been soaked with a hose.

That’s console Alex on the left and if it was a screen capture of my workout, that would be me on the right.

The second day (today) was a strength-based workout and it was 30 hard minutes – then at the end of it console Alex asked me if I wanted to do another 15 minutes or try out some challenges so I could brag to my friends! I politely declined: my body had been through enough, what will all the lunges, squats, star jumps, core training exercises, bunny hops, virtual hurdle jumping  and other strength-based moves I’d put my 40+ something body through. Again, the sweat was pouring off me.

I’m impressed with how well Kinect is tracking my body movments, too,  as I’ve been quite critical of Kinect in the past. The voice commands work really well here, too: understanding my Kiwi accent flawlessly most of the time. Sometimes I had an on-screen message pop-up saying “Move back” but sometimes I just couldn’t: I’d moved the furniture as far back as it would go, and a handful of times the Kinect though my jiggling right arm was a signal to pause the game, so it did – mid-session. I just yelled at it to resume session and it did.

Most exercises are 30 seconds in duration, meaning you have to do as many of that exercise as you can in the time limit, or are in reps of 15, and the intensity is high enough to keep you motivated. I also liked how console Alex was able to “notice” that my positioning wasn’t quite right and he’d ask me to correct it – then tell me “Nicely corrected” when I’d done so. Kinect games have come a long way since simple party games like Kinect Sports.

I’m playing golf this afternoon so I’m hoping today’s strength exercising this morning will help in my driving. It’s unlikely, I suspect: I’ll still suck.

A press release this morning announcing that free downloadable copies of Batman Arkham City, Limbo and Vanquish will be available to PlayStation Plus subscribers from December 5 is another compelling argument for PlayStation 3 owners to sign up.

It’s also a strong stance that Sony sees the PlayStation brand as a games player first and foremost. And with the PlayStation Plus service now available to PS Vita owners (who will be able to download Mortal Kombat and Kyhtt Underground for their handheld device from mid-December), Sony is sending a signal to its rivals that it values its user base.

A PlayStation Plus subscription will cost $89.95 for a year (or $24.95 for a 90-day subscription), which gives PS3 owners access to a library of 14 free games, and as many as five new games a month.

Last month, I downloaded Just Cause 2 to add to my instant game collection, and other games that have been offered in the past few months have included Borderlands, Bulletstorm and Resident Evil Gold Collection. Add in 1Gb of cloud storage for both PS3 and Vita, and PlayStation Plus seems like a damn good deal for PlayStation 3 owners, given that a single AAA titles cost more than a yearly subscription.

If there is any catch to PlayStation Plus it’s that the games only remain in your collection for as long as you’re a member of the service and once a game has gone from the service, it’s gone. If you stop subscribing you won’t be able to play those games anymore (but re-join at a later date and they become replayable). If you’re a died-in-wool PlayStation owner, thought, it seems remarkable value.

Dave Hine, the head of PlayStation in New Zealand, told me earlier this year that Sony saw PlayStation Plus as giving gamers ”an opportunity to get an invaluable amount of value in the instant game collection” and that for the $90 annual subscription fee, PS3 owners got 30 times the value of their membership cost if they took advantage of the game collection scheme.

Frankly, a PlayStation Plus-style service is the sort of thing Microsoft needs to look at offering its Xbox 360 owners, especially Gold members who pay around $80 for a yearly subscription. The main benefit for Xbox Live Gold subscribers over their Silver membership counterparts is that they can play games online: Silver members can’t do that.

I have a Gold Xbox Live subscription but to be honest, I don’t do a great deal of online gaming so pretty much it’s $80 wasted, but if Microsoft offered free game downloads for that price and for the duration of my subscription, it would become a more attractive proposition for me. It would prove an incentive for me to remain a Gold member.

So, who else has tried out Sony’s PlayStation Plus service and what are your thoughts? Would you be keen to see other hardware makers, such as Microsoft, offer a similar type service for their hardware?

Little Big Planet Karting
From: Sony
For: PlayStation 3
Classification: G
Score: ***

Sack boy, that hessian-covered floppy toy, has become something of a bone fide superstar for Sony. He’s a real celebrity in the world of virtual game characters.

He’s bounced through worlds of jelly and magical puppets and ridden through spooky tunnels in a mine cart: now he can add kart racer to his resume as an activity he’s tried when he eventually retires from adventuring and settles down for the quiet life.

LBP Karting feels like a Little Big Planet game, with the soothing voice of Stephen Fry gently offering advice as the narrator and tracks that have a painterly feel to them, adorned with whimsical monuments to silliness like wrapped presents and spinning wheels. This is unmistakeably a Little Big Planet game.

The premis is simple, though: race your kart around the track to victory, using a variety of jumps and short cuts to cross the finish line first.  The story involves Sack boy having to rid Craftworld of the Hoard threat.

As with all kart racing games, you’ll start in last place on the grid and have to race your way to the finish but the racing can become frustrating at times as the computer-controlled opponents are incredibly aggressive, especially when they pick up offensive weapons (driving over a weapon will enable it).  I lost count how many times an unavoidable missile slammed into my Sack boy from an unseen foe behind me, with no way to avoid it,  forcing a re-spawn a few seconds later – only to be shortly followed a few minutes later by another missile.

Also like all racing games, learning to drift around corners is a must so you learn early on the need to master being able to slide around corners: do it for long enough and it’ll give you a speed boost.

The co-operative play is fun, but then any game that lets you beat a family member who is sitting right next to you is always fun and as in the other games featuring Sack boy there are prizes to pick up. There’s also a track level editor which, like the other level editors in other LBP games, is intuitive and masses of fun.

After a while, though, the racing starts to feel a little familiar and then it clicked: the developer behind the Little Big Planet Karting is United Front Games, the studio that made that other PS3 racer that features weapons and jump pads to speed you to the finish Mod Nation Racers. The two games share a genetic link.

LBP Karting is a solid kart racing game but with Mod Nation Racers having come before it, it almost seems like a repetition of that game but set in the Little Big Planet universe. It’s solid without being remarkable.

I tested out LBP Karting using both the standard controller and Sony’s Move steering wheel, a T-shaped peripheral with a slot that you plug Sony’s Move motion controller into.

Unlike a normal racing steering wheel, the Move wheel isn’t circular but has a handgrip either side but the right one twists – perhaps it can be used in motorcycle racing games as a switch beside each grips lets it be swung up, almost taking on a handlebar-like appearance.

Above the left-hand grip is the familiar Sony controller D-pad, above the right grip is the face buttons (circle, cross, square, triangle. It also has two triggers and two bumper buttons as well as a start and select button. There are also paddles for any racing games that call for manual gear changes. I used the Move steering wheel in several co-operative races in LBP Karting and it works but it was almost too sensitive: the slightest touch in either direction would send Sack boy and his kart careering off in the desired direction.

I’ve approached this review of Halo 4 differently from other reviews.  I could have done the traditional “gameplay, graphic, sound, MP” review but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to tread the tried-and-true. Halo 4 is about the relationship between Cortana and Master Chief and I wanted to get that across. Read it and let me know if I’ve succeeded or whether you think I should have just done a traditional review. Oh, I have touched upon Halo 4’s Spartan Ops content or multiplayer: I haven’t had time to look at those yet.

Also, I’ve done my best to avoid spoilers – I think I’ve succeeded. Apologies if I haven’t.

At it’s very heart, Halo 4 is a kind of  love story.

Not a love story where boy meets girl, they date for a bit then elope off together, ladder in hand, but one where the boy is a hardened soldier, who does what he is told without question and can wield a DMR rifle  like no other, and the other is an artificial construct, who acts like a mother, a sister and a confidant to the boy. They share an inseparable bond, the sort of bond that could only be formed when you’ve experience what the boy – Master Chief  – and Cortana – the girl – have experienced.

They’ll do anything for each other and Halo 4 is about Master Chief and Cortana and the bond they share.

At the end of Halo 4, there’s a message from 343 Industries, the fledgling studio embarking on the new Halo trilogy, just before the credits roll. It opens: “Every great journey begins with a small step. This is our beginning”. And what a great first step this game is, even if it feels a little familiar at times.  That said, Halo 4 feels like a Halo game should, plays like a Halo game should but 343 have infused it with a little of their own DNA.

There was no doubt that 343 had a lot of pressure to deliver a great Halo experience, especially after the phenomenal job former custodian Bungie did. For me, though, this is the best Halo game yet: better than Halo 2, better than Halo 3. This is the only Halo game where I really connected with the Master Chief and  Cortana.

Set  four years after the Halo event, the game’s opening salvo begins with the Master Chief being woken from five years of cryo-sleep by Cortana.  The UNSC ship they’re on is under attack from a rogue group of Covenant  who have abandoned the peace treaty between their race and the Covenant. Halo 4 is also a game about a new enemy, the Prometheans. Right off the bat, Halo 4 is visually stunning game with a level of richness and detail in the environments I’ve not seen in the series before.

Embedded all through the game, though, is the relationship between Master Chief and Cortana. She’s old now: most constructs only last seven years service but she’s into her eighth year. “I won’t recover from rampancy [an AI form of Alzheimer’s],” Cortana tells the Master Chief as her behaviour gets more and more erratic. Master Chief suggests a solution:  “Don’t make a girl a promise you can’t keep” she replies. It helps that Cortana is voiced, again, amazingly, believably, by actress Jen Taylor. She is the star of this show.

This time, too, Master Chief seems to be coming to grips with his human side and prepared to make his own decisions, rather than do what his superiors tell him.  Halo 4 lets us in, just a little, into the psyche of battle-weary Master Chief who, up until now has suppressed his human side. He’s now reflecting on his humanity. I connected with Halo 4 unlike any game in the series before it.

I keep going on about the relationship between the Master Chief and Cortana but for me that’s the focal point of Halo 4. Yes, there are enemies to kills – and the combat is very good – and objectives to complete, but at times I thought that 343 was playing it just a little safe in terms of game play: sometimes when I entered a complex I just had a feeling that I’d have to push three buttons  and they’d be lots of enemies between me and my objective, and generally I was right. Maybe they will take more risks with the other two games in the series.

To me, the dominant thread throughout the game  is the relationship between soldier and AI: where it has got to after 10 years together. In one poignant moment, as Cortana stares out at an artificial sun, fighting to keep her rampancy under control, she says to Master Chief: “Before this is all over, promise you’ll figure out which one of us is the machine.” It was a moment that struck a chord with me.

But at the risk of being accused of glossing over the other aspects of the game, I should get down to game play specifics, I guess. You’ll see that I haven’t addressed the game’s many multi-player modes or the episodic Spartan Ops content. I just haven’t had the time to even look at those yet. I’ll do those soon.  I promise.

The Covenant Elites seem smarter this time around, more agile – or perhaps it’s that my reflexes aren’t what they used to be – and when it comes to confrontation with large foes, like Hunters, I’m more likely to take the cowards route and stand back from a safe vantage point and bombard them with explosive weapons than take them head on. Don’t judge me for it.

As you’d expect, there’s vehicular combat: flying a pelican is great fun as is the mantis, a bipedal mech armed with rockets and a gattling gun. You can also drive a Scorpion tank sometimes, if you want: I used one as much and as often as I could. It saved Master Chief getting tired from walking too much.

And not only is there a new development studio but also a new composer behind the soundtrack, British producer/musician/composer Neil Davidge. For me, though, apart from one tracks, Arrival,  Davidge’s work  just doesn’t match the lofty compositions of Marty O’Donnell, the American composer who created Halo’s memorable soundtrack. The audio, too, must be mentioned: weapons sound meaty, vocal work is done superbly and things just sound wonderful.

At the end, though, I keep coming back to the relationship between Cortana and Master Chief. That’s Halo 4 crowning glory. Sure, the game play is solid and the visuals rich, but the story of Cortana and Master Chief is the meat here. And I liked that.

Sorry, I just realised I hadn’t posted this review which I wrote last month. My apologies. So without further ado, here is my Darksiders 2 review, a game that I liked. A lot.

As one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Death isn’t the sort of chap you’d assume you’d like much, if at all. so you wouldn’t automatically assume he’d be a chap that you’d actually like – but I liked Death in Vigil’s Darksiders 2, the follow-up to an action game that featured one of Death’s brothers, War,  and great voice acting from Mark Hamil.

OK, so Death isn’t the sort of chap you’d take home to meet your mother, but despite his often mean-spirited comments to some of Darksiders 2’s NPC, he’s actually a likeable character. As likeable, I guess as you can make a man who wields fiery scythes and hammers that can smash an enemy in one blow.

Darksiders 2 runs parallel to the events of Darksiders (in which War apparently jumped the gun in bringing about the end of the human race) which Death wanting to confront the Charred Council to see why War got such a hard time. He smells a conspiracy.

Darksiders 2 is a much bigger game than the original,  in both scope and ambition. The game world is huge, which some sequences reminding me of God of War 3, where the lead character is dwarfed by the environment he has to climb. It’s like that in Darksiders 2: in an opening location Death has to negotiate a frozen landscape, giant chunks of ice crumbling has he climbs and shimmies along.

He’s not alone: at the push of two buttons Death’s horse, Despair, green flame licking his equine limbs, appears. It makes traversing the wide open landscapes much easier – but Despair can’t go everywhere, and Death will say as much, reminding you that he must go alone at times.

Combat is a mix of light and heavy attacks using Death’s scythes, as well as Redemption, a pistol that belonged to his brother Strife (another of the Four Horsemen), and defeated enemies will drop more powerful weapons (scythes, hammers, claws, axes) and chest littered about the game world – wonderfully opened by a ghostly pair of winged arms that rip the chest apart – contain potions, clothing items and weapons. Some weapons are possessed and by “sacrificing” other items to them they’ll take on the more powerful characteristics. The colour of collectible items indicates their rarity – and Death can also sell items to non-player character, using the money to buy new attack moves from the Makers, a race of Scottish-accented giants charged with keeping the Cauldron and the Tears of xxx safe from the corruption that has appeared.

Death has a more powerful attack mode, called the reaper, which is activated when he has gathered enough wrath energy from defeating foes. Activate Reaper mode and a giant more horrifying form of death appears and will wreak havoc to all those around him. It’s good for when Death finds himself overwhelmed by enemies, which happens quite a bit.

Darksiders 2’s combat has an almost mini-RPG element to it, which each successful strike popping a number above an enemy’s head, indicating the amount of damage Death has inflicted – or received.

Death is an agile fellow, too, able to leap from suspended pillar to suspended pillar, scramble up walls and flip himself off wall-mounted studs. He can also swim, handy for negotiating many of the water-flooded dungeons.

The game has also introduced a feature seen in many games these days: the ability to fast travel from one location to another. It’s a welcome addition and means once you’ve completed an objective you don’t have to backtrack to the next location. Seeing as Death is a creature of the ethereal realm the fact that he could fast travel seems entirely plausible.

Gameplay involves wall climbing, obstacle negotiating and puzzles (some require more in-depth thinking than others) involving pressure switches activated by glowing balls that Death can roll into place. Then there is the constructs, magic-infused creations formed by the makers out of rock, which Death can ride and use to activate out-of-reach locks (the construct can fire a chain that Death can walk along).

Like all good action games, Darksiders 2 is punctuated by boss battles near the location of key mission objectives, and the first battle was a pain in the proverbial, but chip away at it and you’ll find a game that has a solid combat system, a wonderous world to discover and a surprisingly likeable lead character.

Some of the dungeons go on for too long and sometimes I was wishing to myself that the end of level boss, which usually indicated the end was in sight would just appear. It’s also a little jarring to have the game freeze mid-corridor while the rest of a level is loaded and I hit one glitch mid-boss battle, where my lumbering opponent got stuck on a piece of scenery, making defeating him and his vulnerable spot all the more enjoyable.

Darksiders 2 was a game that pleasantly surprised me, but then, that shouldn’t be a surprise, given that Darksiders was so good. Darksiders 2 is a game that features a rather likable lead character, despite the unusual job description on his CV. Recommended by me.