This Week In Xbox Live Demos! #3 - Cops! Mythical Beasts!

 This week, we have two games that are as dissimilar as two things can be without being opposites. One is a cops vs robbers style racing game, while the other is a cute third-person action platforming game with an awesome giant beast that you guide around. The good thing about these two games is that I haven't followed either of them before this demo, so I knew practically nothing about them! Oh wait, that's how it's been for all of these so far!

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

According to the demo's intro, this game takes place in a town where all the streets are very well designed for racing really fast, so crazy people brought over crazy cars and started racing. Apparently, the municipality didn't design the roads for this reason, and so they had to make crazy faster cop cars to keep up. So, you drive cars! The game has a social networking-style front end to it, with walls you can write on and stuff like that. I just chose the option that said RACE CARS because I would like to race cars. There are two races in the demo, a cop one and a street-racer one. The street-racing one is locked unless you have a buddy who has downloaded the demo also, so just a warning if you were going to play this. I played the cop mission first, and guess what. You race a car. And then you use boost. If you've played Burnout: Paradise, you'll know how this controls, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It feels good. Your task is to stop a street race going on by ramming all the cars until they blow up. Y'know, like police officers do. You have road blocks and spike strips available, but in the demo they are not very useful. The road blocks have a giant gap in the middle where people can drive through (seriously, what the heck, cops), and the spike strips can only be deployed behind you, which doesn't sound that bad until you remember that chasing after things usually doesn't involve being in front of them. Now, I don't have any friends with the demo, so I couldn't play the other race, but I'm going to assume that it's the same except instead of chasing and ramming cars you're trying to get away and also ramming cars. 

Final Conclusion: You race cars. It plays like Burnout, and has a pretty cool concept.


Majin and The Forsaken Kingdom

This is a game that I had no idea existed until I saw it on the Marketplace, so I didn't know what type of game it was until the moment I pressed go. Turns out, it's a third-person action game! Okay! In this game's animated-but-actually-just-still-pictures intro, a boy goes into a forest to awaken a giant monster to help him abolish evil. This is a traditional big friendly giant complete with a low, goofy voice and incomplete grammar. I kind of like the monster, but it's such a stereotype at this point that it's kind of annoying they just made him exactly like all other friendly monsters. Because he's so retarded, you need to tell him exactly what to do. You hold right trigger to open up his command menu, and then press one of the face buttons for four different commands. It's not very complex at all, and it's all real time. You can tell him to attack people, follow you, wait, or you can feed him. These are context-sensitive depending on the object you're pointing at. The enemies are pretty strong health-wise so it's quite necessary to use him because it would take forever to kill a group of them by yourself. You fight for a bit, and then you do a short stealth bit in order to pull a lever, and then fight a boss. Maybe it's just me, but I thought the demo was kind of meh. The fighting controls aren't particularly good, and telling another thing to fight dudes for you does not really help make it more fun. I do like the way you acquire "friendship shards", and when you kill the crazy darkness monsters your character gets covered with black goo. Also, your character does a cool thumbs-up whenever he levels up and I really like thumbs-ups. The demo actually ends in a cool way too, where instead of showing a trailer, it shows a bunch of questions you might have, and then says, "Hey, maybe we'll answer these in the full game!" I like this better than, "HEY BRO YOU CAN BLOW SHIT UP WHOOOOOOAH". 

Final Conclusion: Maybe I'm just jaded, but I didn't like it very much, despite it's stylistic choices.