Steam and Gears

It’s Saturday 24th July and as the summer rushes by I find myself at the end of yet another week with so much gaming behind me. My recent obsession with World of Warcraft has continued but I find Team Fortress 2 taking a back seat to other games I’ve been playing.

A big part of this week for me has been Steam and the awesome free content they’ve been distributing, unfortunately their three free days of Lead & Gold: Gangs of the Wild West hasn’t been as fun as it potentially could have been. After pitching down the settings on the game to a level appropriate for my computer I tried to head online to find my first match but was met every time with messages about the client not being able to connect. I refused to be defeated though and this morning tried to access some games once again but it crashed upon hitting the ‘join game’ menu the first time and the next two times it locked up, forcing me to restart my machine. It was at this point that I concluded that I probably wasn’t going to get anywhere butting my head against the multiplayer menus and reluctantly deleted the game from my machine.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom for free demos this week though as I decided to take a peek at Ubisoft’s real-time strategy title R.U.S.E. I went in with some deal of scepticism, partly because of the developers’ seemingly believing that they had created the be-all and end-all of RTS games. R.U.S.E. is no ground-breaking revolution to the strategy genre but it did present itself as at the very least a solid strategy game. The way you play and the units you play with aren’t that different to what you’ll find in any other strategy game but the thing that the game aims to set itself apart from other games with are “ruses”, special abilities that are supposed to help turn the tides of battle. I never got a very good sense of being “rused” myself but I have to admit that launching fake offensives and camouflaging all my units within a certain area was fun to do and when used correctly the ruses really can give you that advantage in battle. All in all I didn’t find R.U.S.E. an excellent game but it wasn’t a bad game.

I also finally returned to Gears of War 2 as I had been meaning to for countless months and finished the game. Going back to Gears of War I was reminded why I feel I’ve never enjoyed the series as much as most other people seem to have. The gun mechanics feel great and Gears of War 2 in particular has some great environments and set-pieces but I feel there are some fundamental issues with the game that I have major gripes with. Mainly I feel that the cover mechanics feel very clunky, I often find it hard to make Marcus get to exactly where you want him to be in fast-fire situations, he seems to clumsily fail to snap to cover and make a meal of trying to move between cover. This feels like a major problem when the game is so cover-based and I can’t help but frequently wish that movement felt more fluid. The lack of impact I feel when using some guns also seems out of place when compared to the weight in the movements of the characters and I also have trouble believing in the emotional side of Dom when he seems to switch back and forth between weepy husband and meat-headed killing machine in a split-second. Despite my complaints though, I do think the Gears of War games are of a high-quality and I’m looking forward to what Gears of War 3 has to offer.

Of course this week’s blog would not be complete without talking about Alien Swarm; the new free top-down shooter from Valve and for a free game Alien Swarm is very good. Aesthetically the game borrows heavily from the Aliens movies but it successfully delivers a strong sense of atmosphere, has enjoyable combat and the mechanics of a whole team working together are pulled off very well. I advise anybody with Steam to try out the game and look forward to playing the community content out there for it. There were some serious network problems earlier in the week but thankfully those seem to have been cleared up in the last patch.

I guess that concludes another blog. Thank you for reading and I promise more disjointed rambling next week.

-Gamer_152