It was great seeing Square Enix having a presence at GAMES 11. They have a lot of work to do to wash off the bad aftertaste they left us with the flaw of Final Fantasy XIII. We were lucky enough to get behind closed doors of this demo.
The demo of Final Fantasy XIII-2 takes place 2 hours into the game. You start off with Serah, Lightening’s younger sister, and Noel jumping out of a time portal. Tagging along the party is a Mogul that can transform into Serah’s weapon or be as a guide. We only got very little information about the story in the demo. The group encounters a huge monster called Atlas, the main enemy in the game. Through out the demo, you will be fighting Atlas in multiple battles and each time you are trying to make as much damage as possible so that he’ll be weaker in the end battle. For example, there is a sequence at the end of a fight, where multiple flying ships attack Atlas. The amount of damage they make depends on how rapidly you press a button. This brings us to the improved battle system. The game uses a polished version of the Paradigm Shift system. They have introduced cinematic action sequences that takes place in-battle and they put the player through quick time events. Another addition to the battle system is the allies. Every enemy you fight can be summoned in the next battle.
The demo continues with Serah, Noel and Mogul exploring the world. Yes, we can confirm that the game is not linear! There are many paths you can take and hidden secrets you can discover with the help of Mogul. You will find Spheres in these hidden places that earns you skill points. This encourages the player to explore the world of Gran Pulse. There is also an improved Mog Clock system that can make you take enemies by surprise and give you an advantage if you attack them fast. Heck, you can even ignore enemies and not fight them.
Going back to the demo, after meeting a person in the game, you are told about a “device” that you can activate to weaken Atlas. The interesting part is, it’s an option. You will get a choice, whether you want to fight Atlas or go look for the device before that. This adds more diversity to the game and makes it less linear. In this demo, we were shown what happens if you go for the device. After a lot of exploring, we finally reached the device and we were attacked by a red shadowy figure that took us to another dimension. This is a Temporal Rift, a new addition to the gameplay. It is basically a series of puzzles you have to solve in order to advance. The one we saw involved platforms that disappeared when you passed them as you are collecting crystals on the way. These puzzles are sort of a palate cleanser from the long hours you spent JRPGing. After finishing the puzzles, we were sent back next to the “device”. When the device is activated, a sequence shows Atlas’s power weakens and you are ready to take down that ugly beast. The demo ended just before the big boss fight so that we can try it ourselves.
Frankly speaking, I was not very impressed with the new mechanics. QTEs? Puzzles? This is how you make the game better? But I hope all of these addition don’t compromise the beauty and essence of Final Fantasy games. I’m glad the game is not linear anymore and you can actually interact with town folks and do side quests. The xbox 360 version will be on one disc only, does this mean the cinematic sequences will be compressed? We will have to wait and see.
Release Date: January 31, 2012 in North America and February 3, 2012 in Europe
Another day of gaming and shooting footage. We spent most of the time trying out the rest of the games and attending behind closed doors demos. And of course, more sweaty stinking gamers! Here are the pictures of Day 2
This is the first game I jumped over 3 nerds to try. Asura’s Wrath is an over-the-top action game developed in collaboration between CyberConnect2 and Capcom. It tells the story of Asura, once a revered deity, he was betrayed by his fellow gods and stripped of all his powers and now vengeance begins. I was really excited to try this Japanese craziness.
The demo I played was basically a huge boss fight. You are fighting a God 100 times your size. After a cutscene, Asura starts hurling towards the boss and the game becomes a rail shooter with fireballs thrown at marked ares on the god as you are dodging projectiles. Once you are close to the boss, the game switches to a series of quick time events (QTEs) and if executed successfully you move to another sequence of shooting but this time in mid-air. Afterwards, The god calls down a huge flying ship that you have to take down, and once you do, you go into an awesome fighting scene. Both you and the boss are be running side by side firing fireballs and missiles at each other in a side-scrolling mode. The amount of stuff happening in the screen is tremendous! Once you finish the next QTE sequence, the 1000 ton god knocks you to the ground and butt-stomps you. Asura is not pleased with this! Mashing buttons in anger will make Asura grow 4 extra limbs and with a series of punching by flaming limbs, Asura sends the god out of earth and into space. Now the god is not happy, so he summons one of the 7 deities to destroy you. And of course keeping up with the game’s over-the-top ridiculousness, the deity is about 5 times the size of the earth!! Yes indeed! The huge deity is floating in space surrounding earth and promises Asura’s death. With one holy finger going through earth’s atmosphere like a flaming meteor, Asura is pretty much screwed if this was normal game. But this is Asura’s Wrath of course, so what happens? Why asura will smash the huge deity’s finger with his 6punching limbs and brings the deity’s end!
I was really impressed with the game. I’m a big fun of quirky games and gigantic boss fights. The graphics and music are not the best in this game but the action in the cut scenes are really beyond anything I’ve ever seen. The gameplay is fun but I can see myself getting bored with it if they did not throw in other mechanics. To be fair, I only played a boss fight so there must be some other parts in the game I haven’t tried. Controls are not as tight as I hoped they’d be, moving the curser during the shooting part feels too sensitive. I hope the game will be more polish when released and I’m looking forward for it.
Tomb Raider is a well known series that started back in the 90′s. But with the years, the game stopped being original and fun. So Crystal Dynamics decided to take a different direction with the series. We were lucky enough to see this 25 mins demo of the new game. This title is a re-imagining of the tomb raider we all know. The demo was a portion of a vertical slice of the game that tells us where the game is headed.
The story of the game is a prequel to the previous titles. It take’s you through the first adventure Lara Croft ever took during which her plane crashes on a mysterious Island. When she wakes up, she finds herself held captive by the natives of the island. In the new game, we see a smart and resourceful Lara but also afraid and vulnerable unlike the Lara we know. The experiences she will go through in this game will shape her into the Lara we all know.The first part of the demo is the same one that was shown in E3 2011. It was sort of a tutorial level teaching you the game mechanics as Lara makes her way out of captivity. We will focus more on the second demo.
The demo is set in a part of the island during a rain storm. In this part, Lara meets Roth who was with her on the airplane. Roth was badly injured during an attack by wolves and Lara needs to get a first aid kit to help him. This is where the gameplay begins. You make your way to a cave up on a mountain by climbing and traversing the world in a very similar fashion to Uncharted games. The objects in the levels are very dynamic and some platforms you get to can collapse and change your approach to the same place. You can use “Survival Instinct” view to see objects that can be manipulated in the environment highlighted much like the Eagle Vision in Assassin’s Creed series. This view will also show you a location beacon and foot tracks to where you are suppose to go. After you get the first aid kit, you make your way out of the cave and encounter some wolves and this is where the game switches to quick time events. After finishing the object, we saw a little bit of the UI. in each area there will be a basecamp where you can access the UI. the UI is divided to 3 parts: Fast Track where you can travel from one basecamp to another, Survival Skills where you use experience points to upgrade skill, and finally the Salvage where you can craft new weapons and equipments.
Tomb Raider looks very promising and has a lot of potential. The sound design and music are both amazing and creates an astonishing atmosphere in this bleak island. The great graphics and lighting also adds to the great atmosphere. Unfortunately, there was no playable demo and we did not see any combat. But we trust Crystal Dynamics to make this game everything we hope for and not just another Uncharted clone.
The biggest and most highly anticipated video game event in the Middle East is back!
Like last year, GamingBros will be covering the event bringing you the latest updates from the convention. We will be interviewing people from the gaming industry as well as gamers from the showfloor. We will also bring you gameplay footage from upcoming games like Uncharted 3, Batman Arkham City, Mass Effect 3 and much more. And don’t miss our coverage on the brand new PS Vita.
The Games Alliance Middle East Show (GAMES) has come to life through a strategic partnership between the top gaming companies in the region: Microsoft, Pluto Derinton Games, Red Entertainment and Sony PlayStation. With over 50,000 visitors last year, GAMES 11 is expected to have a bigger and better gaming festival.
Event Timings:
Thursday 22nd Sep: 2pm – Midnight
Friday 23rd Sep: 10am – Midnight
Saturday 24th Sep: 10am – Midnight
Venue: Dubai Mall Ice Rink
For live updates, follow us on Twitter on @gamingbros
We are back after a long hiatus. All of us got busy with our boring lives, but we had to get back to the fun interesting part of our lives and that is gaming.
We are currently working on improving the website but that will take a while. Until then, expect more updates and reviews.
When a triquel comes to mind, you would think there would be improvements in all aspects, having experienced the complete opposite in many other gaming titles, I feared that Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood would fall under the same fate, well I was wrong.
Starting off right where Assassin’s Creed 2 ended, you play as our all time favorite assassin Ezio roaming around Rome and completing memories. The single player is very much like the previous Assassin’s Creed games and to some, it is the best part of Brotherhood. The gameplay is very familiar and brings back the excitement that I felt when playing the previous Assassin’s Creed games. One thing I will say is that the story doesn’t advance too much and therefore doesn’t really feel like a sequel to me, I would call it Assassin’s Creed 2.5.
As always, Assassins Creed developers get better at what they do as the Assassin’s Creed series moves on. In Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood I can truly see how a series of games can be modified until perfected. An example of this is with the combat of Brotherhood, where the slight tweaks from Assassin’s Creed 2 makes it perfect. Another advancement is the sheer size of the game. With loads of sub-missions to complete to only have you distracted from completing the main mission of the story.
Now for the biggest addition to the Assassins Creed’s saga, Multiplayer. In multiplayer, you play as a wide variety of Templar’s that have been assigned a target which you have to kill. In this game mode, put simply, you run around looking for your target to assassinate while someone else is chasing to kill you at the same time. The multiplayer is very original, as many would agree that it is the most refreshing multiplayer of 2010. However after a couple of hours of playing, I experienced that it can get very repetitive and somewhat boring. Within 2 days I already had lost interest in the multiplayer and went back to player single player mode.
One issue that I felt regarding Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood was the difficulty. To me, difficulty of a game is very important. As I sort of enjoy repeating a level or stage a couple of times before progressing. This is something that Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood lacks, its just too easy. Because of the fact that now you can train other assassins by sending them on missions, and using them to help you fight is just not demanding enough. Memories become to simple and not in the least challenging and therefore I feel that this aspect of the game really brings the overall rating down.
All in all, if you are craving some more Ezio action then this is definitely worth the time. Being able to run around, climb towers and kill guards is always fun and because of this it will still be one of the favorites of 2010.
After a year of waiting, Activision release yet another edition to the Call of Duty Series, Call of Duty: Black Ops. Holding the title of one of best selling games in the last decade, Black ops does not disappoint. This game has so much content that it’s hard for me to justify to myself to play another game.
I’ll start with the single player mode. It came to a shock to me, but the campaign mode isn’t your average shoot everyone you see game. It has a great story and can be comparable to a lot of your other single player games. With a combination of good graphics, great voice acting and just awesome story you will always want to go to the next chapter and continue to blow things up. One complaint I have is the length of the campaign mode, Finishing it on my first sitting, 6 hours, was kind of disappointing but was not surprising as I expected Treyarch developers would spend more time on the two other game modes.
Next comes Nazi Zombies. This is a co-op game mode where you can battle against AI with three of your friends, fighting a horde of human/dog zombies with only a couple of bullets left in your shotgun. Its definitely a game mode that everyone should try and I can bet that everyone will love it. It’s tough to find anything wrong with this game mode as its one of the more laid back part of Call of Duty: Black Ops.
Finally we come to the biggest part of Call of Duty: Black Ops, multiplayer mode. It’s been three weeks since I was waiting in line at the midnight release of this game and I currently have 4 days of playing time on this mode. The multiplayer mode is just like any other call of duty game having smooth game play, great graphics and the highest selling point to me, the fast pace of the game. Introducing the CoD points just makes the multiplayer that much better. However, this mode really tests a player’s skill and if you thought you were good at older call of duty games, wait till you try a gun that has so much recoil you can’t even hit your enemy.
The thing about Call of Duty: Black Ops that makes it a great game is balance. Unlike Modern Warfare 2where some guns/attachments/perks combinations were impossible to beat, Black Ops best feature is the balance that they made between guns. A problem that everyone found in Modern Warfare 2 was the lack in community service. To this day, developers of Modern Warfare 2 have released 3 patches, whereas with only three weeks into Black Ops, they have released nine patches and this is a huge deal to players like myself. The few minor problems I experienced were problems like server lag, frame rate drop, large knifing range and just bad spawning, which I have experienced on both the 360 and PS3. However, I am very confident that Treyarch are doing everything they can to patch these problems. Comparing the multiplayer on Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops, Black Ops is without a doubt, a “funner” game, mainly because it is much more difficult to do well on and gives people a challenge and that’s what I love about the game.
In conclusion, If you are looking for a game that keeps you from doing any studying for class, than this is the game for you. Black ops‘s fast pace is definitely the highest selling point to me and is exactly what I was looking for in a multiplayer game. Therefore Call of Duty: Black Ops should definitely be a game you buy this year.
