It’s a sad truth that I’ve been let down by a great number of games recently. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I’m having more fun with Final Fantasy XII and Thief: Deadly Shadows now than I have with most of the newer games I’ve tried.
I haven’t gotten very far into Far Cry 2, and I plan to give the game more of a chance once my current Final Fantasy XII spree ends, but my initial impressions of the game are not good. The whole malaria thing doesn’t add to the game at all – frankly, it’s annoying. And the open world reminds me of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which I did not like at all.
Some of the things I’d liked most in Crysis and the original Far Cry seem not to be present here. There’s no detection meter which shows when enemies see you, and you can’t lie prone. I’ll grant you that I’m less than two hours into the game, but initially, I’m disappointed.
Mad World was even more of a disappointment. I’d expected the frantic action of SmashTV, the cheezy old-school plot of Running Man, the humor of No More Heroes, and maybe the beat-em-up goodness of Double Dragon. What I got was repetitive running around, stabbing signposts into the necks of foes who might as well all be carbon copies, all for points. The violence existed only for violence’s sake, and the difficulty quickly goes from far too easy to way too hard, with very little time in any kind of sweet spot. The story is closer to Escape From New York than Running Man, and there’s little of either movie’s charm to be seen. The segments on the bike are terrible, and I quit the game just after beating a big Sumo Wrestler wannabe who kept throwing helicopters at me.
I guess the happy ending to this article is Galactrix. Initially, I was terribly terribly disappointed. The loading times on the DS are frequent and long, and the touch controls are the absolute worst I’ve seen in any DS game. It frequently takes me 5 or 6 tries to select an item from a list menu. I’ll touch “Get Missions” with the stylus, for example, and instead of highlighting and selecting that item, it will cause me to fly a bit away from the planet, which is especially annoying since it then takes me 2-3 seconds to bring up the menu again and try to select an option again.
The game has a definite learning curve,and once I’d gotten past it and begun to unlock more of the game’s different minigames, it got fun. And it began to grow as addictive as Puzzle Quest. Because of my first two complaints, I don’t find it to be as good a game as Puzzle Quest, but I’m enjoying it.
