Heroes Over Europe

HEROES OVER EUROPE Platform: Xbox 360 Publisher: Ubisoft I’m actually not sure whether this game is any good or not. I am sure I hate it.Heroes Over Europe is an arcade-y flight sim set during World War II. The entirety of World War II. You play three separate pilots as they fight the whole war (an American initially pretending to be Canadian, a Brit, and a New Zealander), from the initial skirmishes before anyone was even sure there was going to be a war, to the final bombing of Berlin. As should be obvious from the title, it focuses on the European theatre, as it’s the sequel to Heroes of the Pacific, which focused on the fight against the Japanese. It has its charms! Tracing the evolution of fighter planes over the course of the war is a lot of fun—I really enjoyed the progression from the first mission, strafing tiny tank convoys in France, to the later and frankly breathtaking mission where I was escorting a wing of 20-ish flying fortresses over the Atlantic. I’m not an aviation nut, but flying through the big wing of B-17s showed me why some people are. Here’s my gripe: The missions are long. Very, very long. And they consist of many objectives, one after another. These objectives are often very difficult, not in terms of requiring great skill and innovation, but in terms of being completely bullshit. (Hey, there’s a bunch of depth charges in front of that three ship convoy. They are tiny targets and almost impossible to spot! Detonate them all with your machine guns before any of the ships runs into one and explodes!) Pass one objective, and you need to do the next. There is no way to save mid-mission, so if you get fed up and quit on the fifth bullshit objective of the mission you’ve been trying for the last forty-five minutes, you will need to perform the first four bullshit objectives over again when you return to the game. Really, it’s aggravating, and I’m surprised I managed to finish the thing. This is very bad design. Bad enough to make me hate the game even though the flight mechanics and some of the setpieces are actually pretty cool. MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE 2 Platform: PlayStation 3 Publisher: Activision Playing this game was a strange experience. Basically I hated it until my second playthrough with unlockable characters. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is the latest in the series of games that started with X-Men: Legends. In them, one to four players take control of a team of four Marvel characters (chosen from a much larger roster) and travel through a variety of levels beating up mook enemies and the occasional bosses. Not for this series are the elaborate movement gimmicks of, say, the Spider-Man games—camera is set to overhead, and characters can mostly just run around on the ground, though some can hover or use other movement methods that are, effectively, hovering with an attached special effect. Each of the controller’s four face buttons is a different attack. Enemies look different but mostly attack the same way. Playing by yourself, you can switch between your four characters—the ones you’re not playing are computer controlled. With two players, each controls two characters. With four players, each controls one. I don’t know how three-player works. Those who appreciate the Gauntlet games of yore might find something appealing here; I found it repetitive and dull—there’s a lot of characters, but they mostly play the same. This one bases its narrative on the recent Civil War miniseries, where Captain America and Iron Man get into a big fight over whether it’s right to make superheroes register their identities with the government. Iron Man is pro-reg, Cap is anti-, and each rallies a superhero army—Iron Man tries to track down and imprison Cap and his allies, while Cap’s forces try superheroing on the run to win public opinion to their side. Like in the miniseries, the game tries to pretend that both sides have valid arguments while not actually giving any to the pro-reg team (when you start using mind-controlled supervillains to bolster your forces that’s a clue you probably need to re-examine your ideology), so the story is a bit lacking. The weird part is, playing through the game will eventually let you unlock some of the afore-mentioned supervillains—notably Green Goblin and Venom. For my masochistic second playthrough, I decided I’d go pro-reg and picked an all Thunderbolts team (old Marvel superteam of villains pretending to be heroes, recently getting more attention): Green Goblin, Venom, Penance, and Songbird. Suddenly the game was fun, because unlike every other combination of characters I tried during my first playthrough, the Thunderbolts actually have neat synergies, and Green Goblin and Venom actually seem to control in meaningfully different ways from the mass of generic superheroes comprising the rest of the game. So, in short, I found it was a good game, but only after I’d forced myself to play through it once as a bad one. UNCHARTED 2: AMONG THIEVES Platform: PlayStation 3 Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment I did not like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. I found it overhyped. The much-celebrated graphics never appealed to me; the colors were too bright; the platforming was simplistic, climbable wall ridges popped too obviously out of their environment, colored differently like that one background item in old cartoons you know is on its own animation cel because a character is going to pick it up. This worked in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time because graphics back then weren’t photorealistic yet, but Drake’s Fortune tried to provide these lush, environments and then had obvious videogame elements sort of pasted over them. And there was too much gunplay. Firefights were too long and too often. I got really tired of fighting through sixteen guys with AK-47s only to have another wave thrown at me. Christ. I have to rant like this to preface the following statement: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves has none of those problems. It is, in every way, the game everyone was saying the first game was. It has awesome graphics and fucking awesome gameplay. The level design is lush with use of bright colors offset with enough darker colors for the brights to really pop. Environmental features stand out as climbable because they look like the sorts of things Nathan Drake can climb, not because they've been highlighted so you, the player, can spot them against the background. It has the only really cool-looking virtual snow I’ve ever seen in a video game. Plus the game incorporates nice stealth options into the combat. 99% of the time, if there’s going to be a fight, you can pull off an ambush and stealthily kill, oh, half of the enemy forces before getting into a big shootout with the other half. This is so much more satisfying than the first game’s endless waves of enemies. The one thing I didn’t hate about the first Uncharted was its sharp writing and characterization, and it is if anything stronger here. Claudia Black shows up as a new love interest for the title character, and since I loved Farscape I get all fanboy about that. Then she actually delivers a strong performance instead of just being a gimmicky celebrity casting choice. Woo! It’s a really good game, especially if the first one didn’t impress you. STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD