Zeno Clash II Review

Combine first-person punching with liberal doses of mescaline, and you also might be able to design a game as insane as Zeno Clash II. ACE Team brings the weirdness in this beat-'em-up, a game every bit as bizarre as its 2009 predecessor and unfortunately mediocre in the end. Just like the first entry in this wacko franchise, this game is far more memorable for its surreal atmosphere than its artless fighting mechanics. Although the button-mashing brawling zips along quickly enough to be somewhat hypnotic, the main reason to stick around for the eight or nine hours of the campaign is to see what kinds of dengue fever dreams the developers have concocted.

Zen and the art of punching.

As in the first Zeno Clash, you play as a guy named Ghat, who lives in an alternate dimension called Zenozoic, which is populated by all manner of creeps inspired by Hieronymus Bosch paintings. Everything here is off--way off. The plot is completely incomprehensible. There is a good tutorial that walks you through combat, but it doesn't touch on anything else in the game. So you're abruptly dropped into this crazy world without any sort of preamble about what's going on.

You begin by helping your adoptive sister, Rimat (who seems to hate you for reasons never entirely clear), spring this lurching freak called FatherMother from the jail cell that he/she/it was tossed into by a mouthless monarch called Golem. Then you move into an adventure that resists any sort of explanation. It is virtually impossible to sum up what's going on here, even after finishing the eight- or nine-hour campaign that makes up the sole mode of play (which can be played solo or online cooperatively). Even the dialogue is incomprehensible, with the meaning of many lines chopped into bits, and with many assumptions that you've played the first game in the series.

Reality is a long, long way from anything in Zeno Clash II. Landscapes are populated by freakish fauna never seen on this planet, impossible architecture, and outlandish extra touches like disembodied heads and hands on furniture. The entire game has been designed to keep you off-kilter; even basic background details are skewed. Roads run in insane directions. Steps wind around like something from an M.C. Escher sketch. Bookshelves inside buildings are at crazy funhouse angles. Birds are randomly tethered to the ground. Trees sometimes sprout trumpets that alternate between spewing water and blowing bubbles.

Enemies and non-player characters that roam the world tend to be bipedal humanoids, but after that, all bets are off. You encounter elephant men, dwarfs in hoods, three-fingered goons with furry satyr legs, giant bloody creatures that resemble plucked versions of Big Bird, and all manner of deformed monstrosities that combine various human and animal features. It all looks attractively nightmarish, but the strange nature of everything is also intimidating, with so many weird details littering the landscape that the huge levels in the campaign (which is far more open than the more linear levels in the first Zeno Clash) can be needlessly bewildering. This is a particular problem when you have to solve the game's handful of puzzles, because it's hard enough to figure out what things are supposed to be, let alone figure out what you're supposed to be doing in the midst of all this madness.

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Top Five Skyrim Mods of the Week - Tardis Travels

This week Seb and Cam hob aboard the Tardis to travel through time and relative dimensions in Skyrim. Also, they build a shop.

TARDIS - Time And Relative Dimensions In Space by ShatteredSteel
Steam Workshop Link

Grace Darklings Elven Scout Armor by Grace Darkling
Skyrim Nexus Link

Your Market Stall by wgstein
Skyrim Nexus Link

Armored SabreCat Mount by tumbajamba
Skyrim Nexus Link

Superb ENB-RL by sung9533 and Alakan
Skyrim Nexus Link

Subscribe to Top 5 Skyrim Mods of the Week on YouTube and never miss an episode.

April 27 / April 20 / April 13 / April 6 / April 2 / March 16 / March 9 / March 3 / February 22 / October 20 / September 9 / August 11 / July 28 / July 14 / June 30 / June 16 / June 2 / May 19 / May 5 / April 14 / April 7 / March 31 / March 24 / March 17 / March 10 / March 3 / February 25

By Sarah Lynch, Associate Producer

When not busy curating her novelty t-shirt collection, Sarah can be found shouting endless streams of nonsense into the great void of the internets. Greatest life achievement: finally having her very own crocheted Link hat.

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Top 5 Skyrim Mods of the Week - Tardis Travels

Great show as always.

I loved the Tardis, I also loved the Sabre Cat Mount... The market stall is a good idea, all it needed, in order for people to come along and actually buy something is...

A SALES PITCH SHOUT? 

A shout that comes with the mod, that allows you to talk as a Cockney Market Seller in the voice of Ray Winston or better yet Del-Boy Trotter.

Now that would be excellent!?

Lovely Jubbly.

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Top Five Skyrim Mods of the Week - Tardis Travels

This week Seb and Cam hob aboard the Tardis to travel through time and relative dimensions in Skyrim. Also, they build a shop.

TARDIS - Time And Relative Dimensions In Space by ShatteredSteel
Steam Workshop Link

Grace Darklings Elven Scout Armor by Grace Darkling
Skyrim Nexus Link

Your Market Stall by wgstein
Skyrim Nexus Link

Armored SabreCat Mount by tumbajamba
Skyrim Nexus Link

Superb ENB-RL by sung9533 and Alakan
Skyrim Nexus Link

Subscribe to Top 5 Skyrim Mods of the Week on YouTube and never miss an episode.

April 27 / April 20 / April 13 / April 6 / April 2 / March 16 / March 9 / March 3 / February 22 / October 20 / September 9 / August 11 / July 28 / July 14 / June 30 / June 16 / June 2 / May 19 / May 5 / April 14 / April 7 / March 31 / March 24 / March 17 / March 10 / March 3 / February 25

By Sarah Lynch, Associate Producer

When not busy curating her novelty t-shirt collection, Sarah can be found shouting endless streams of nonsense into the great void of the internets. Greatest life achievement: finally having her very own crocheted Link hat.

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FPSF - FireFall Beta

I kept hoping for a VERY long time that they would announce this game for consoles. I really don't have a powerful enough PC for it. It's been years, and still no word, which sucks because I sure aren't spending $$$$ to build another rig just to play it. If they release it on the PS4, that's fine I'm all for that, but otherwise I can't play it. 

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Don't Starve Review

Like in any extreme survival situation, the early moments of Don't Starve's grueling-yet-fascinating struggle to stay alive are electric. Suddenly the clock is ticking. Confidence is high as you first explore a vast open-world wilderness teeming with danger. From trapping a rabbit for the first time to crafting an axe to chop precious firewood before nightfall, every minor accomplishment that keeps you ticking is immediately gratifying. But as the days draw on and dodging death's icy grip gets harder, the rigors of this unflinchingly brutal roguelike adventure chip away at your patience.

Don't Starve casts you in the unfortunate role of Wilson, a scientist who has been mysteriously transported to a strange and deadly world by a demon-gentleman. With little more than a quick greeting, your adversary vanishes, and you're left alone to figure out how to stay alive. Story and dialogue are pretty minimal, aside from a few encounters in the super tough adventure mode, which is accessed by first locating a portal hidden in the randomly generated survival mode world. The hands-off nature of the story is a strength, allowing the heavy atmosphere and outstanding visual design of this grim land draw you in. There's little time for dalliances anyway. A great many things in the game's eerie world are out to kill you from the get-go.

Survival doesn't come easy, but there's an undeniable thrill to the challenge. Your first few minutes of exploration hinge on harvesting whatever basic resources you stumble upon: a few twigs, some flint, rocks, a handful of grass. Collect enough of these raw materials, and you can make an axe, a torch, rope, a spear, and other crucial tools that increase your chances of survival. Don't Starve's deep resource harvesting and crafting system brings previous open-world games like Minecraft and Terraria to mind, and it's one of the game's strongest hooks. Figuring out how to put each item you collect to good use is a fun process of experimentation. Basic items are relatively easy to cobble together with minimal materials, though creating science and alchemy stations also pushes you further down the crafting rabbit hole by unlocking tons of more elaborate item recipes to pursue. Of course, staying alive long enough to build everything is another story.

Dangers are frequently stacked against you in inventive and sometimes frustrating ways. Exploring, scavenging, harvesting resources, and building are best done in the day. Without a torch or a campfire to provide illumination when night falls, you will be torn to pieces by the demonic creatures that roam the darkness within seconds. Building a fire isn't enough either. You have to have enough wood or other fuel sources to keep it lit throughout the night, which creates a constant state of near panic every time the twilight phase of the day/night cycle arrives. Getting caught without the necessary ingredients for a fire or ample burnable materials to last the night spells instant doom.

Changing seasons also usher in new problems to tackle. Live long enough, and winter rears its frosty head, bringing subzero temperatures that cause you bodily harm if you venture too far from a heat source. Admittedly, these interesting wrinkles add depth and additional difficulty to the already challenging survival mechanics at play. They sometimes tip the scale too far, however, particularly given the plentiful supply of other potentially life-ending obstacles thrown in your path.

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Soul Sacrifice Review

Many games require decision making, but Soul Sacrifice emphasizes choice more than most. Everything, from the abilities you possess to the monsters you battle, is subject to choice: to save or to sacrifice? This notion is ingrained in both story and character progression, presenting you with limitations and dilemmas that make this grim monster-hunting game very appealing. Decision making alone isn't the only reason to give Soul Sacrifice a try. It's rich with evocative characters, has creatively fiendish enemy designs, and is coated with an effective layer of gloom and doom. Pleasingly, the captivating presentation and narration overshadow the game's repetitive tendencies, and the weight of every decision makes the otherwise straightforward action a truly thought-provoking affair.

Before your journey begins, you're locked away in a cage made from flesh and bone, awaiting sacrifice at the hand of the ultimate sorcerer, Magusar. A mysterious book, the chatty Librom, emerges from the remains of the sorcerer's last victim. Part necronomicon and part snarky companion, Librom is your portal to the past of Magusar's former partner, and through it, you experience Magusar's rise to power. As the game's quest hub, customization menu, and glossary, it's an inventive approach that suits a portable game quite well. The lack of an overworld is odd at first, but since you're a prisoner, it makes sense in context.

While reliving the life of a sorcerer once sworn to hunt possessed humans and animals, your primary charge is simple: defeat and sacrifice your enemies in order to rid the land of foul beasts. You trudge through rotten wastelands to frozen caves, casting spells, pummeling enemies, and dodging incoming attacks while managing your limited pool of resources. Every mission has clear-cut conditions; you must defeat a set number of common enemies, locate hidden items, or topple horrific archfiend juggernauts. In order to surmount the often difficult campaign missions, you're often forced to beef up your character by undertaking optional Avalon Pact missions. This is unfortunate, since most Avalon Pact missions lack challenge or variety, especially in the first half of the game. It's a blessing, then, that there are so many interesting side stories peppered throughout to distract you from the repetition at hand.

You head into every mission with a set of six abilities, or offerings, ranging from melee weapons to summon spells. You start with a small selection, but every mission rewards victory with new offerings based on your performance. An offering can turn your arm to stone, heal your party, trap your enemy, and even stop time. Without a stock of offerings, all you can do is run. Offerings can be used only a certain number of times during the course of a single quest, though sacrificing enemies and tapping into one-time-use environmental pools lets you replenish an individual offering's cast count. If, however, you get sloppy and sacrifice all of a particular offering during the course of a mission, you must wait until the end before replenishing your ability to use it.

Coordinating the relationship between your various offerings is critical during the challenging archfiend battles, and losing access to just one is often enough to tip the scales in your enemies' favor. You could carry more than one of a particular offering into battle, but it's better to diversify your capabilities. Thankfully when you possess multiples of a single offering, you can sacrifice the extras to boost the cast count of another. Like most actions in Soul Sacrifice, this action carries ramifications. The decision to boost an offering's cast count diminishes your resources for fusion, a process that lets you create completely new and advanced offerings. Fusing offerings isn't critical to success, but it gives you a chance to delve a little deeper into the elemental variations for most of your existing inventory.

Once an enemy is defeated, it's up to you to choose whether to save or sacrifice its soul, permanently boosting either your stamina or strength stat, respectively. Souls also act as replenishments during battle: sacrifices refill some of your offerings, and saved souls restore a bit of health. The decision usually comes down to your needs at the time, but the smart player will take the time to coordinate their decisions. Since your choices effect skill levels, you may find that too many snap decisions shape your character's traits in ways you never intended. However, outside of a few pivotal instances, your decision bears little weight on the story at large.

While you don't have equipment in the traditional sense, you can equip sigils, which are symbols carved into your right arm. When you defeat enemies and absorb their soul shards, new sigils are unlocked. Each sigil has two conditions attached, but the second becomes active only when you've struck the proper balance between sacrificing and saving your enemies, reflected by the affinity of your arm, and determined by your tendency to save or sacrifice.

Like gathering new offerings for fusion, you may find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to grind through old missions to acquire the right ingredients to produce a new sigil. That's not so bad, but limiting certain abilities to your arm's affinity seems unfair given how it's managed. You have to spend resources on lowering your life or magic levels, and then replay missions in order level up the opposite levels. Sacrificing items and resources is one thing, but asking the player to sacrifice hours of hard work takes the notion of sacrifice a bit too far for the game's own good, especially when you consider the repetitive nature of most missions.

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How Jedi Duels Inspired a Cyberpunk Swordfighter

Michael Chang, creator of the third-person swordfighting game Blade Symphony, meets the man who inspired him to dive into game design: Mike Gummelt.

Behind every great idea, there's a spark of inspiration. Video games are no different, and as the next generation of developers unveil their creations, you can often spot the source of their ideas. A few weeks ago, I met with Michael Chang, creator of the stylized swordfighting game Blade Symphony. Seeing the game in motion, I was instantly reminded of the lightsaber combat from Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast--and this wasn't a coincidence.

As it turns out, Jedi Outcast--a game now over a decade old--was a major influence during Blade Symphony's development, and Chang himself had been a regular in Outcast's lightsaber dueling community. I was then surprised to learn he had never crossed paths with Mike Gummelt, the man who designed that saber combat system. Now, in the almost hour-long interview below, these two developers meet for the first time to deconstruct Outcast's lightsaber mechanics and talk about classic samurai movies. It's a highly technical discussion of a game that greatly impacted both of their lives.

Blade Symphony is a third-person swordfighting game unlike anything I've seen recently in the fighting genre. It combines classical architecture, cyber ninjas, and an extremely robust combat system into a high-speed blend of slicing and dicing. As Chang describes it, in Blade Symphony, "you're basically playing filmed and staged swordfighting. We didn't want to go hyperrealistic. It's not supposed to be a swordfighting simulation; it's supposed to be highly stylized and fluid."

Blade Symphony began as a humble Half-Life 2 mod using Valve's Source engine. In 2011--after Chang and his team merged with fellow modders Team Dystopia--a Blade Symphony Kickstarter campaign was launched to help make the game into a full retail release. The campaign was a success, and today, development is running strong on Blade Symphony. An early version is now available through Steam's early-access program, and on the game's official page.

Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast was the fourth game in LucasArts' Jedi Knight series (assuming you include Dark Forces). It mixed third- and first-person combat with an array of lightsabers, blasters, and Force powers. This diversity of weapons and powers could lead to some hilarious scenarios if you--like me--switched on the game's console commands and spawned an entire army of Lando Calrissians to fight by your side. And to push off a building. And to battle a Rancor.

The game was a critical success--garnering a 9.0 from GameSpot's own Amer Ajami--and was praised for combining several different mechanics and modes into one, well-executed package. For a dedicated segment of the Outcast community, one-on-one lightsaber dueling became an obsession. Within this futuristic fight club, there were no Force powers or fancy gadgets, just the purity of saber-on-saber competition. This robust fighting mechanic, designed by Mike Gummelt, took on a life of its own and would ultimately inspire a young Michael Chang to create Blade Symphony.

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Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon Review

Great 1980s movie montages featured plucky underdogs, perhaps played by Sylvester Stallone, or maybe Ralph Macchio, demonstrating their determination to triumph over the forces of communism, bullying, or stodgy adults who don't believe in the power of young love. They were accompanied by properly cheesy pop hits, possibly performed by Joe Esposito, or maybe Deniece Williams, creating a wonderful audiovisual time capsule that could have only originated in that fabulous decade. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon understands the power of the '80s. When its inevitable montage comes, you probably won't know the music, but you'll know the type. It's the kind that would have been sung by Michael Sembello, or Kenny Loggins, or Foreigner. If you're a child of the decade, you'll be glad that Blood Dragon knows you so well.

Pro tip: don't stand so close to exploding C4.

Don't worry, though: if the 1980s are before your time, or if you don't retain any nostalgia for the decade of parachute pants and the Brat Pack, Blood Dragon stands on its own without relying on references, though it packs in plenty of them. This downloadable spin-off of 2012's Far Cry 3 is a fantastically entertaining first-person shooter with more clever dialogue and action-packed hours than most full-priced games. At $15, it's a better deal than every Cabbage Patch Kid you ever loved, every Tears for Fears record you ever spun, and every Muppet Babies episode you ever viewed. Combined.

Well, perhaps Blood Dragon isn't quite that valuable. Nevertheless, it's hard not to be charmed from the moment it begins. Low-resolution cutscenes introduce you to Rex Colt, cybercommando. Rex is voiced by '80s mainstay Michael Biehn, better known for appearing in films like The Terminator (as Kyle Reese) and Aliens (as Dwayne Hicks). Biehn's forced rasp is the perfect complement to Rex's nationalist badassery, and his sincere line delivery makes several scenes all the more hysterical. Consider this dialogue: "I swore an oath to a special lady. Lady Liberty. She taught me that winners don't use drugs." It's a corny line right out of a War on Drugs-era public service announcement, but in the context of an offer to have dragon blood injected into Rex's veins. Meanwhile, you "rent" (that is, collect) VHS tapes of movies with titles like Bourne to Dance; this particular film features a special teacher showing his student "the kind of love he's never known before…the love of dance."

You don't need to know the '80s to get Rex's repeated oral sex gags, of which there are far too many. Nor do you need to know the past to understand that calls of "no" during a consensual sex scene would have been inappropriate in any decade. Luckily, most of the jokes aren't so juvenile, including video game cracks that make fun of red exploding barrels, game-violence controversies, and even Ubisoft's own games, like Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed. (Listen for bits of throwaway dialogue about girls with tribal tattoos and feather collecting.) The tutorial sets the tone straight away, telling you to press a button "to demonstrate your ability to read," and loading screens helpfully inform you that if you need a hint, perhaps the next loading screen will have one for you. Not every joke is so obvious--you may not notice or get nods to erotic artists and prison documentaries--but the gags are there, making Blood Dragon one of the funniest games in recent memory.

Of course, an '80s-focused game wouldn't be complete if it didn't look the part, and Blood Dragon certainly makes proper homage to its inspiration. Cutscenes look as if they could have been ripped right out of the original Metal Gear, or Shadow of the Beast, complete with the muddy reds, purples, and blues that characterized them. The same color scheme, in turn, infuses the first-person gameplay, as if you're traversing the game's medium-size island while wearing dark magenta sunglasses. Small audiovisual touches, such as the way Rex sometimes takes a blowtorch to his cybernetic arm when healing, and buzzing sounds to indicate Rex's part-mechanical nature, enthusiastically sell the roboapocalyptic setting. And by the final hour, which lends a sly twist to common action-game power trips, you'll appreciate how Blood Dragon uses nostalgia and humor to say something about the state of modern shooters.

Blood Dragon isn't just an homage to great memories, however, but a terrific game in its own right. If you played Far Cry 3, you will recognize the structure. Enemy bases are strewn about the island you explore, and by annihilating all of the enemies that patrol them, either silently or forcefully, you convert them to your cybernetic cause. Meanwhile, you move from mission to mission, infiltrating dams and rescuing endangered trash-talking scientists, using semi-futuristic variants of familiar weapons--a sniper rifle, an assault rifle, a bow, and so forth--that handle like their standard Far Cry 3 counterparts. In time, you upgrade most of these weapons; your sniper rifle's bullets gain an explosive charge, your shotgun gets a flaming kick, and so on. You earn access to weapon upgrades by finding collectibles and performing side missions, and you earn other enhancements, such as the ability to perform silent takedowns on heavies wielding flamethrowers, by leveling up. There is no skill tree or anything like that: when you cross the necessary level threshold, you gain new skills automatically.

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