Cam's Eye View: WWE All Stars for the PS3 and 360

Hey, everyone, welcome to the New Year! WOOOOOO! It is 2012 and time for more new games and time for me to make them into game reviews. I decided to spook you all a little and do something different with this year’s first review. I decided to review a sports game! I know, I can hear you all gasping, since out of over 200 reviews, I haven’t really reviewed any sport games. This is mostly my fault for being biased towards these games. The other fault though is that sports games come out year after year after year. They don’t take their time and make something special, they usually do it to make money for the consumers who do enjoy and play sports games. Don’t get me wrong, I love the thrill when you play a football game and you are running down the field and no one is tackling you. I understand why these are popular to some extent, but they don’t really make me want to review them or put the money down for these games. I just want to play a sports game that is over the top and arcade-like, and doesn’t result in a realistic simulation of that specific sport. This is where this first review comes from, WWE: All Stars. Admittedly, the sports games are turning into the Guitar Hero and other music-based franchises, where we are getting kind of tired of seeing them, but WWE: All Stars decided to take a more fun approach, with an odd, but cartoony art style, more arcade style gameplay, and not too simulated like every other sports game out there. Let us see if this game succeeds! This is WWE: All Stars for the PS3 and 360. There really isn’t any story here, and all I could say is that all of the famous wrestlers old and new are in this game, and it’s a fan-serviced game where you can fight Andre the Giant with Rey Mysterio and take him down with your finishing move. Let’s move onto the gameplay then, shall we?

The gameplay, instead of being a tedious wrestling simulator, is more like an arcade wrestling and fighting game. You have your usual wrestling mechanics like pin downs and ringside take downs, but there are some light and heavy fighting moves like punches, kicks, throws, and even special moves that are easy to pull off. In the normal case of each match, you will either need to knock out your opponent or pin him down for 3 seconds. There are special cases, like in the cage match, where you need to knock out your opponent and get out of the cage as fast as you can. In extreme rules, you fight in a normal match, but can use weapons like 2x4’s to add some extra damage. Sometimes, you will be fighting only one opponent, or in make a million viewer episode, forced to fight multiple wrestlers at once. There are other modes, like tag team, where you team up to take down another team of wrestlers. The 3 main campaigns will have you fight the Undertaker, another will have you fight Randy Orton, and the other one has you fight against D-Generation X as the final opponent. A fun feature is the dream match-up fights where you can choose from either one or another wrestler that was paired up for a “dream match” like the Ultimate Warrior vs. Sheamus and they show live footage of both wrestlers, which is pretty cool. There is also online multiplayer with the usual suspects that you can play with offline, like cage match, and or just brawl each other to the ground. There is also a character creator, but due to the kind of silly art style, you won’t be able to truly make a dream wrestler. Either way, there is a lot to do with this wrestling game to keep you going with simple and easy to-get-used-to controls, a good deep combat system, multiple wrestlers old and new, and other things that make this game worth a purchase around the 40 dollar range, or simply for hardcore wrestling fanatics.

The graphics and art style are pretty silly-looking. The art style makes all of the wrestlers sometimes look the same body-wise with their over exaggerated muscle bound bodies. The graphics just get the work done. Don’t expect them to be Castlevania Lords of Shadow or Uncharted 3 good. The licensed music, like in Splatterhouse, really works here as you do get pumped a little when you see yourself go down to the ring and see the other wrestlers you will be going against. It is definitely how wrestling is in real life, over the top and flash-over-substance mixed with fake wrestling. Oh, and I don’t care if I offended you by saying wrestling is fake since it’s somewhat true. There are also some small bits of humor put in, like when in one cut scene, one of the wrestlers advertises his own game to the masses and the other looks at him like an idiot. Either way, they did as good of a job as they could do using the Unreal 3 engine.

However, there are some major faults in this reboot and makeover of the wrestling game genre. There is no god dang training or tutorial mode. This made getting used to the controls and knowing what you can do with the controls really awkward and clunky, making for some unfair and terrible first fights. I mean, I am not saying that I need my hand held, but a proper training or tutorial stage would have worked so much better with this game where you can learn about the controls and techniques you can pull off. I took off a whole point from the score because of this one screw-up. Another major complaint I have is that the AI can be a mixed bag. One fight you are breezing through this fight with no trouble at all and the next fight, you are struggling to get out of harm’s way since you can’t block well or dodge attacks easily. Difficulty should be given to us slowly as we play through the game more and more as we get to the end and not just random spikes in difficulty. It is the same problem with games like Virtual On Marz where in one fight, I am having a huge issue with taking down two opponents, and then after a couple of times fighting the same fight over and over, the AI just got dumb and I got lucky. The next few complaints are just minor, but do add up. The cage match is tedious since it isn’t just taking down your opponent, but you also need to get out of the cage and do a timed button press to get out successfully. That is tedious and not needed. The other is that the Unreal 3 engine is showing its age and in the character creator, everything looks blocky, but that could easily be the art style that makes everything blocky.

Overall, for the first major sports game to be on my list of reviews, this one is pretty good. Maybe the future of wrestling games and or sports games can learn from this little experiment. I have wished for years that sports games be more than just simulation games of that specific sport. While this game does have some minor flaws that keep it from being perfect, I could still recommend this to anyone who is looking to get into wrestling or sport games. Hope you all are having a great beginning of the year and hope you all come back for more.

This game gets a 7 out of 10

Alter Echo for the PS2and Xbox review

Sometimes, it just sucks to be a reviewer and a gamer at the same time. It sucks more when that specific gamer/reviewer is also a tester for a game company like me! I say that because a lot of games recently have shown that the company that made the game, didn’t test it well enough, which just makes my blood boil to the extreme. I know it can be because of budget or time, but there is no excuse to release a half-baked product. Speaking of half-baked products, let’s take a look at one of Outrage’s last games, Alter Echo. Released in 2003, Alter Echo was released during the time when other games like Panzer Dragoon Orta, Devil May Cry 2, Silent Hill 3, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Beyond Good and Evil, Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando, Jak 2, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time were released. So, why was this game somewhat overlooked and only given an average rating from reviewers and critics? I can think of a few reasons.

The story starts out with a ship heading to a planet with a young shaper called Nevin, who can use a substance called Plast to shape it into anything he wants. He is accompanied by two other people, but is quickly separated from them by an unknown attack on their ship. Nevin then falls to the planet they were approaching, but is saved by a new form of plast called echo plast. The echo plast then gives Nevin a new shaper suit and the ability to turn into three different forms.  It is up to Nevin to stop whoever created the echo plast, save his two friends, and get off the planet. So yeah, to fill in a void I left out of the plot, the echo plast was made by a powerful shaper named Paavo who went nuts and was the one who shot down the ship Nevin was on. 

The game play featured in Alter Echo is an action/plat former/third person shooter/stealth. Nevin has three forms he can turn into. His first form is his default form, called sword form, which has nothing to do with the sword form used in Kamen Rider Den-O. He can basically do strong attacks and normal attacks in this form, and isn’t anything different than what other action games have shown. I will say that it is a lot better than the first Jak and Daxter game’s physical combat moves. His next form is a bulky muscular suit of armor with a big gun called gun form, and still doesn’t have anything to do with the gun form from Kamen Rider Den-O. In this form, Nevin can take out long-range enemies and groups of enemies quickly by the giant gun he uses. He can also stand in certain areas and become a turret-like gunner, and shoot down enemies in one area. The final form is the stealth form, which turns Nevin into a tropical tree frog on steroids. No, I’m kidding, but he does look weird and you can see the form on the front of the cover on the box. He can basically lunge at enemies and slap them around, go invisible and get back turrets, and launch enemies into the air with his tongue. During the game you can upgrade all your forms with more moves, better armor, a better sword, and you get the idea. Another main gimmick of the game is to control time to take out multiple enemies. You basically have to play a game of Snake, controlling it with the directional pad or face buttons and go over enemy icons or over controls to unlock bridges and such.

The graphics in the game are surprisingly colorful. I was surprised to see so much color since it seems like during the mid to late 2000’s, people forgot we could use color in games and not just gray, brown, and black. It gives the game a very comic book feel, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was based on a comic book. The music is also fun to listen to, but isn’t worth finding a soundtrack for. The voice acting is well, half and half. Some people do a good job and some just don’t do a good job at all.

Now, it is time to give this game a well-deserved beating for all the bad parts it has. First off, the camera is far too close to the person. I mean, look at camera angles from games like God of War 3 where it gives the camera a great position to be in, giving the player enough room to see what is going on around him. The enemies can be really cheap since during the rest of the game, you end up fighting enemies who are guard-happy and are very tedious to kill. It seems like they can hurt you faster and easier than you can. Another thing that annoys me about the forms is that during the beginning part of the game, you get all three at the get-go, and then the villain, the jerk that he is, takes them away from you. I mean, if you were going to take them away, then why give them to you in the first place?! The biggest thing that I just HATE about this game are the bugs that frequently pop up. The bugs I am talking about is that the game kept freezing on me and it had an issue with reading the disc. I mean, what kind of cheap testing team did Outrage have? No wonder they went out of business. They just made poorly made decisions, like “hey, let’s not advertise the game or have a good group of game testers!” Stuff like this annoys the ever-loving heck out of me! I mean, if it’s not ready, then don’t release it where a player can only get in an hour and a half of playing and then the game crashes and can never be played again unless you start a new game. What were they thinking?! Did they think the showstopper bugs were not important, or did some moronic tester not report them and instead went partying? Another issue I have is with the facial expressions on the people. They all look the same throughout the game. Did they just watch the most depressing film ever and not want to live? Well, I didn’t want to live either after finding out how bad this game is. Another thing that I have an issue with this game is that no one has ever seen fit to report in their reviews that the game kept crashing on them or freezing. Were these people stupid or were they focusing on something else and just didn’t know the game crashed or froze?

Overall, Alter Echo had interesting ideas, but was not executed at all very well, the combat is sluggish, the plot is boring, and the game kept crashing and freezing on me. Avoid this game at all cost! Heck, I would play Dark Void again and watch The Never Ending Story 3 rather than play this game. Now, I’ve got another candidate for my list of games to blacklist and destroy.

This game gets a 2 out of 10

E3 2009: Marvel Super Hero Squad - E3 2009 Trailer

I wouldn't get this game but this is something I would give my nephew.