reviewgame(English) blog

There are a lot of good things to say about how Turbine have approached The Lord of the Rings Online’s source material. They have carved from Tolkien’s words a remarkably individual game world that not only bears very little resemblance to the ridiculously popular films, but also to any other MMO in the industry.

Say what you will about how the gameplay in LOTRO is similar to that of World of Warcraft, but what makes this MMO special is how well it immerses you in a quality atmosphere. And Moria is, frankly, the most atmospheric game world I’ve seen in a while.

Bizarrely, you actually start outside Moria, and unlike WOW, EverQuest, Ultima Online or any other MMO, you spend a fair amount of time unlocking the expansion’s extra content. It’s somewhat of a large-scale tutorial for the new legendary items, weapons that level with your character (see box out), as well as a scene setter for the rest of the expansion as you fight The Watcher in the Water and break through the Hollin gate.

Most of this takes place in cinematic solo instances where the Watcher’s slightly underwhelming tentacles whip at you and drown your dwarven allies, until you can come back with your well-levelled weapon and fight it back into the depths.

Luckily, you can put away your thesaurus of the mundane once you enter the halls of Moria, as Turbine have made one of the most astonishing in-game areas ever. This sounds hyperbolic until you travel around the titanic interiors of Khazad-dûm, riding through hallway after hallway of ruined dwarven masonry. Everything – even the most benign hallways housing your average merchants – seems to tower above you and stretch off below you in a way that I imagine MMO developers have been wanting to do for years.

Even though you know, deep down, that the huge drops below you lead to nothing and that the hallway ahead of you probably just has more goblins in it, Moria succeeds in instilling true dread, giving you a stomach-churning romp to level 60. This expansion recreates that horrible uncertainty from the days of Ultima Online, where you’d creep down a hallway unsure of whether you were about to get ripped in two by something in the dark. It’s varied too, with the expected instances including some awesome historical quests – including a battle against a Balrog and others – that let you understand how Moria became the way it currently stands.

Players can also start playing as a Runekeeper or a Warden, LOTRO’s two newest classes. The Runekeeper is a classic magic user class, focusing on either doing massive damage or healing their teammates, with each damage/healing spell making its particular school more effective. The Warden strings together abilities to activate gambits, that can be offensive or defensive depending on what you choose to make each one with. They’re both interesting additions to LOTRO, and their utility shines in both solo and group situations.

This is all good, but once in Moria there’s a certain point you shouldn’t travel alone. This is both for your safety and your own enjoyment. Attempting to frolic around this expansion like a whimsical knob-end can and will get you killed (trust me, I’ve tried it). Turbine have made Moria inhospitable to an extent – while you won’t get killed in the safe areas, travelling outside of them on your own is a risky, slow-going business, and only when you can team up with one or two friends does the world really open up.

While it sounds obvious considering that Mines of Moria is a high-level expansion, it’s not a forgiving solo product. This isn’t to say it’s impossible to go it alone, and it’s certainly not like Vanguard or Age of Conan as far as solo-unfriendliness, but there’s so much content that is both more enthralling and fun when you’ve got back up.

As the first paid-for expansion that Turbine have done for LOTRO, Mines of Moria shines. While it’s hardly the most revolutionary product ever to be released, what it tries to do it does well. There may be extra levels to grind through, but MOM’s treats are in the form of juicy lore and an actual storyline that digs hungrily and deeply into unexploited Tolkien myths. If you’re into LOTRO, you should be buying this immediately, and if you’re not, now might be the time to sign up.

Fallout was just the start of a floodtide of apocalyptic explore-’em-ups. Borderlands is the next wave, an open world RPG that plays closer to a traditional shooter than the clunky pistol flailing of Bethesda’s effort. Oh, and you can explore it with up to three friends. In jeeps.

The place is Pandora, an ancient planet rumoured to hold vast wealth and riches in an mysterious vault. That rumour once sparked a goldrush, fuelled by recently discovered alien technology. Now Pandora is a wasteland of rusted settlements and abandoned spaceships, inhabited by angry wildlife.

Playing as Rolland, the game’s jack-of-all-trades character, I spawned in a ramshackle settlement that looked like an Old West town built out of spaceship debris. A nearby bounty board offered me a list of RPG missions: poison skag dens, kill 10 skags, collect skag pearls… folks ’round these parts really don’t much care for skags. That might have something to do with the fact that they eat people. There were also a few missions for collecting parts, but my trigger finger was too itchy for that type of work.

My first skag kill was spectacular. Just outside the town gates a skag pup lunged at me; I fired my pistol five times, and the fourth shot caught him in his gaping mouth, mid-leap, for a critical-hit kill. Despite Borderlands’ RPG influences, there’s no behind-the-scenes dice-rolling going on here – your bullets go where you aim them regardless of your character’s level. In a pile of regurgitated bones (skags, like owls, swallow their prey whole and then cough up indigestibles like bones and guns), I found a couple of grenades and a handy new scoped pistol that inflicted fire damage. I almost felt sorry for the skag pups as I levelled up twice from massacring them. In the final game, levelling up would let me improve skills such as Rolland’s deployable turret, but for now it just made me generally more powerful.

The hunt took me further away from town, and I soon encountered a band of level six bandits. At level three, my instinct (influenced, perhaps, by the intimidating skull icon above their heads warning me I was outmatched) was to run, but my Gearbox advisors kindly suggested that running away is something a wuss might do. Never one to resist peer pressure, I took a few shots at a bandit and watched a small chunk disappear from a blue bar over his head. That bar turned out to be his shield, which meant I had my work cut out for me before I even harmed a hair on his head. The bandit was joined by a couple of allies behind him with automatic weapons, pinning me behind some rocky cover.

I knocked out the first enemy’s shield, but my scoped pistol ammo was running low. I made a quick dash for cover closer to the first bandit, switched to a shotgun, and unloaded on him. Down he went! But my manoeuvre had crossed that fine line between bravery and stupidity, and his friends gunned me down mercilessly before I could turn their fallen comrade’s higher-level weapon against them. I did get off a few parting shots in a Left 4 Dead-style incapacitated state from which, if I’d had a co-op buddy, I could have been revived. Also, if I’d somehow managed to drop another of the bandits, I’d have gotten a second wind. But no.

I respawned back in town, and reinforcements arrived in the form of a Gearbox employee playing as Mordecai, a thin and lanky hunter. Or so I thought – but the first thing he did was pick a fight. Meleeing another player does no damage, but it’s the Borderlands equivalent of slapping someone across the face with a glove. My honour demanded that I accept his challenge, so I smacked him back. A countdown began, and suddenly a force field sparked to life, surrounding us and creating an impromptu duelling arena out of a section of the town from which only one man would emerge. Since my character was two levels above his, a few shots from my shotgun ended the duel quickly.

We decided to settle our differences on neutral ground, so he led me to one of Borderlands’ arenas: underground facilities stocked with weapons and a computer system that allows you to temporarily equalise combatants’ levels and weapon sets for the purpose of settling grudges, Quake III Arena-style. On a small circular map with a catwalk spanning its length, I eked out a 3-2 rocket match victory. Arenas are a just-for-fun minigame within the vast shooter world, perfect for satisfying that PvP itch when you’ve had enough of your co-op partner’s crap.

Afterward we went on a bandit-killing spree, clearing out an old mine where they’d set up camp. Highlights included catching an unfortunate melee bandit in a crossfire and ripping him apart; watching my teammate blast away using an assault rifle with explosive rounds; me trying to throw a grenade but accidentally deploying a turret that ended up being much more effective thanks to the added firepower and the cover provided by its shield generator; killing three bandits with one proximity grenade; and reviving my ally three times when he got himself in over his head.

I also got to play a short four-player co-op mission, although this was on the Xbox version of the game. We drove a pair of Runner buggies out into the desert: I manned the high-powered gun turret on the roof and picked off pursuing bandit patrols as they attacked, demolishing them in satisfying fireballs. We arrived at a rock formation impassible by buggy, so we crossed on foot. Suddenly the earth shook and a huge creature emerged from beneath the ground. This, I was told, was the rak hive – a walking colony of bat-like animals that were terrorizing the nearby settlement.

Fighting the urge to comment on what its mouth looked like, I equipped a shock-enhanced sniper rifle and backed off, targeting the hive’s four white eyes and popping them one by one like enormous zits.

That was a lot like whacking a beehive with a stick, and winged creatures poured out of holes on the mammoth’s back, swarming us. My allies covered me while avoiding the hive’s stomping feet, swatting the fliers out of the air with shotguns, enabling me to focus on bringing the beast down. The raks’ agitation intensified at the loss of their home, and they practically blackened the sky with their swarm – a sign of a good time to make a tactical withdrawal if I ever saw one.

As a fast-paced shooter, Borderlands already delivers – weapons, enemies, co-op, and PvP action are all there and up to expectations, and looking fantastic thanks to the new art style. The question of whether it will be a game we’ll want to keep playing revolves largely around how well Gearbox integrate the RPG elements, which were mostly only hinted at during my play. But CEO Randy Pitchford has wanted to make this game for a long time, and has no intention of wasting the opportunity.

“Mixing the genres like this is one of those holy grail pitches that you’re just like, ’someday, somebody’s going to do it.’ Well, we’re doing it now, man!”

The first BioShock – one of the most critically acclaimed games of the generation – didn’t leave much open for a sequel. Story-wise it’s got enough plot twists to fill an entire season of Lost and the rock-solid conclusion wraps things up pretty satisfyingly for Jack and the Little Sisters. But despite all that – and even without the original developer at the helm – 2K’s bravely going back to Rapture for the sequel.

Ken Levine and 2K Boston have set sail. In their place is newly formed 2K Marin, a team comprised of both a handful of BioShock veterans and other “enthusiastic” newcomers, all led by the designer of the first game’s best level.

“BioShock is a hard act to follow,” proclaims creative director Jordan Thomas, maker of the excellent Fort Frolic and Thief’s famous Cradle. “We wanted to make sure that we could surprise you no matter what you were expecting. BioShock had a unity with the systems of play underneath it that hadn’t really been seen before and it also offered hard choices to the first-person shooter player.

“So for BioShock 2 we had to trust you with more difficult moral decisions and allow you to shape your own role in the narrative in a way that is new and surprising – and that means adding new mystery to Rapture.”

It’s been ten years since the events of the first BioShock, and the remaining inhabitants have slipped even further into the depths of desperation. The once underwater utopia has become even more flooded, ruined and full of absolute mentalists struggling to survive and desperate for ADAM.

But after a ‘monster’ runs amok kidnapping little girls along the Atlantic coast, Rapture’s sprung back to life again… and there’s another story to tell.

Thomas is talking to us via the magic of technology in 2K’s plush London offices, where we’re visiting to take a first look at the 2K Marin-developed sequel via a pre-recorded gameplay demo, including extended scenes from this released footage.

Our demo kicks off with the distinctive, haunting sound of a little sister’s song; “Mr. Bubbles, Mr. Bubbles, are you there?” As the player character comes to we realise he’s face down on the floor, a puddle revealing his true face… it’s a Big Daddy.

A radio crackles in our ear. It’s Dr. Tenenbaum, the guilty guardian of the Little Sisters from our first voyage to Rapture. “Hello? Hello? You can hear me, yes? Wake up, your time for sleeping is over.” Our Big Daddy climbs to his feet, his yellow visor reflecting in the watery floor as he regains his focus.

“As you can see, BioShock 2 allows you to step into the boots of a Big Daddy,” pipes in Thomas. “One of the things that allows you to do is master the Big Daddy’s signature weapons, the best known of which is the drill,” he says, as the main character smashes through a wooden door with his man-sized toy.

Off the bat BioShock 2’s undoubtedly a better looking game than the first. Lighting in particular has advanced well beyond the last time we saw the city and flashing lights and streaky shadows ooze the kind of atmosphere Rapture thrives on.

There also seems to be more detail lavished on this decayed section of town. In the first room our Daddy comes stomping into, a huge section of the splintered, wooden floor is missing. A group of Splicers are huddled directly below.

“As a Big Daddy, garden variety Splicers like these guys are not as much as a challenge for you, they have to attack you in large groups,” says Thomas – and he’s not joking. With a roar and a thud we drop down into the room below, a beautiful but battered art deco wonder that’s distinctly BioShock.

In a visceral multi-man fight our Daddy launches himself across the room, battering disfigured Rapture freaks through the air, flinging fireballs with his left hand and then piercing others in a huge bloody explosion with his drill.

Fighting as a Big Daddy is definitely a visceral experience and looks to fit right in with their role in the first game. With a violent spin of the drill our character scares the bejesus out of the remaining Splicer who swiftly legs it and escapes off into the darkness. Hard as nails.

“As you probably noticed from all of that fire coming out of his hand, you don’t just play any Big Daddy in BioShock 2, you play the very first. A kind of prototype who’s able to think for himself and is able to use the Plasmid tools.”

This time around, Thomas explains, not only can you use the fiery, icy and often sparking Plasmids from the first game, but you can also use them in conjunction with your more traditional Big Daddy guns and drills. This teaming of gunplay and mutant powers makes possible “exciting new combinations of punishment,” 2K claims, though few examples have actually been revealed.

In one example demonstrated to us, in a battle shown off in the above linked footage, the Daddy sets wind-infused cyclone traps, and then blasts them with fire to create flaming tornadoes of death.

So there’s the opportunity for some generally exciting and strategic combat combos in our second visit to Rapture. But even as Mr. Driller’s giant, angry uncle, there’s still something for you to be afraid of in this new Rapture.

As our Daddy progresses through the leaking, broken city streets, the encounter starts with a noise. A clank and a scrape signals a skeleton silhouette scrambling through the shadows at lightning speed. We enter the darkness to investigate, a flashlight revealing upturned tables and endless, rusting ruin. Then, as he turns the corner, we get our first glimpse…

She’s the Big Sister. A twisted hybrid of Little Sister and Big Daddy. An ominous red light glares from her scratched and rusted helmet and rows of leather straps cover her unnaturally thin body.

On her shoulder is a cage used for carrying little sisters, and stretching from her arm is a long, bloodied needle used for extracting fresh ADAM from corpses.

Moving at freakishly swift speed the Big Sister slashes across the huge viewing window at the front of the room in a single jump, piercing the glass and causing the ocean to come exploding into the room. Chairs, tables and everything else whoosh around the Daddy’s head as he’s submerged by the ocean. Then, unlike the footage released on the net, he steps back up. He’s underwater.

“As you can see, being a Big Daddy has its advantages,” pipes in Thomas. “Among them is being able to go outside and explore the ocean surrounding Rapture.”

It’s a beautiful sequence. Floating room ornaments are knocked aside as the Daddy exits Rapture through the broken window and steps out into the ocean. Hundreds of tiny bubbles and particles surround the Big Daddy’s vision, dancing with his every movement.

A comforting string soundtrack accompanies our discovery of a giant sunken ship, its huge propeller standing erect in the seabed. Tiny fish swim in groups through the picturesque undergrowth, and a small cove is home for sunken plunder – presumably from the downed boat – including a video recording by Tenenbaum. “She is taking girls and turning them into creatures like here. All of this… it is my fault.”

“In BioShock 1, the ocean was very much a character,” says Thomas. “It’s always with you, but at a distance. In BioShock 2 you finally get to meet it face to face.”

As our Daddy stomps across the seabed, kicking up dirt and bubbles, we notice a viewing window displaying a familiar sight. It’s the statue of Atlas Jack discovered in the opening of the first game, this time even more ruined than it was ten years ago.

With his watery adventure over, the Daddy enters an airlock to re-enter Rapture as the liquid’s drained from around his head. Here’s our first glimpse of another key feature in BioShock; the Little Sister’s themselves.

“A Big Daddy is a pretty special role to play in the BioShock ecology. It changes the way that the world responds to you and the way that you have to act to it. But the most important change is in the way that you interact with the Little Sisters. We call it adoption.”

A Splicer is wrestling with a young girl, desperate to harvest her ample supply of ADAM. A quick drilling to the head puts an end to that encounter and at first, the little one is startled. “Mr…. Mr. B? It’s you! You’re all better again!”

In BioShock 2 players have the option to harvest the Little Sisters but now you can also make the choice to adopt them. Usually you do this by taking on other, traditional and mind-conditioned Big Daddies in battle and nicking their little friends. However, this particular Little Sister seems to have already lost her guardian…

In a touching interaction the Daddy hauls the Little Sister onto his back, and now you’re off to go ADAM farming for yourself. “Let’s go find an angel Mr. Bubbles…”

In the neighbouring room he discovers a glowing corpse, indicating that it’s fresh and full of mutant goodness. With a press of X the Little Sister hops down and gets to work, leaving the Daddy to protect her from the Splicer onslaught it initiates.

The resulting battle is another seen in the released footage. The Daddy discovers a huge Rivet Gun – the one used by the Rosie variety of Big Daddies in the first game. It’s another visceral, angry fight with fire-flinging, shots to the head and a drill that Black and Decker could only dream of.

As the fire burns down and the ADAM needle fills to capacity, a dinosaur roar shakes the room. “But there’s someone else in Rapture who has a special relationship to the Little Sisters,” pipes in our voiceover. “… And she’s always watching.”

Almost out of nowhere the furious Big Sister moves above our heads at terrifying speed. She’s in Rapture to make sure that relationship between Rapture’s homegrown Big Daddies and newly-introduced Little Sisters isn’t interrupted… and your character (not a proper Big Daddy remember) is doing just that.

“Mr. B… Mr. B… Big Sister doesn’t want you playing with me…”

A piercing roar sends books, chairs and room ornaments spinning around the Big Sister’s body in an awesome psychic wave. One by one she projects them directly towards the Big Daddy’s visor and with a final, lightning-fast tackle he’s knocked unconscious. The BioShock 2 logo appears. The demo is over. We need a cigarette, even though we don’t smoke.

BioShock didn’t need a sequel. But from the impressive scenes we were shown in our demo – and the undercover features promised for the final game, including a more horrific story and deeper Plasmid trees – we’re glad Rapture’s up for a revisit.

With the undeniably talented Jordan Thomas at the helm, there’s a good chance the sequel won’t disappoint. But there are still plenty of questions to be answered. Look out for our exclusive chat with the 2K Marin team online shortly.

// Screenshots

Five years ago people would openly mock you for using “Google” as a verb. Five years before that, you’d have your teeth kicked in for using “email” as a verb. And before hit 2001 single Party Hard was released, the word “party” was rigidly considered a noun in most civilised social circles. Now we’ve got a new doing word courtesy of Raven: “Wolfenstein”, meaning to take regular World War II history and skew it in a hugely entertaining, highly embellished and occult-twisted way. You might as well tear up the dictionary now.

Our trip to Raven’s snowbound studio in Wisconsin gave an insight into how “Wolfensteining” is achieved: scanners are used to, and this is no joke, turn genuine Nazi trousers into 3D models – apparently to get the creases “just right”. Once the entire uniform is downloaded and turned into a workable model, they use it to dress a skeletal-faced Third Reich hellfiend. Authenticity still means a lot to Raven, despite absolutely everything you see on these pages.

Spying game
Before I’m ushered into a dimly lit room to play one of Wolfenstein’s opening levels, I’m presented with the game’s introduction cinematic. This movie is spectacular enough to warrant its own appraisal. It’s night on a German aircraft carrier, some panicked sailors rush up behind a man standing on deck. He wears a long captain’s jacket, and is staring wistfully at the moonlit horizon. “General!” yelps one of the crewmen in a bad German accent, “Ve believe zer iz a spy on board! Should ve delay ze missile launch on London?”

The camera pans back to the supposed General. He turns around to face the sailors – it’s ‘BJ’ Blazkowicz! The hero of the game! The General was the spy all along! Shocker! Before they can register their surprise, the sailors are shot dead. Anti-aircraft guns turn on BJ as he ducks behind crates and does magnificent cartwheels about the place. Finally cornered, he reaches into the pocket of his stolen jacket and pulls out a medallion, the mysterious centrepiece of the game – it explodes with light, and the Nazis are seared to death by occult energy.

You should now be getting a measure of exactly how shamelessly ridiculous Wolfenstein is. If you’re still not convinced, here’s how things carry on: having killed most of the Nazis, BJ hijacks a Stukka bomber and flies it to safety. Behind him, the carrier explodes for no discernible reason, and thus the incredible, unbelievable adventure begins. Wolfenstein is, as it’s always been, an insidious mix of science-fiction and history. Real-world weapons sit comfortably alongside ray guns and an alternate dimension is casually layered atop our own. This dimension is called the Veil, and from a certain point in the game onwards it can be entered into at any time at the push of a button. In spite of these off-kilter leanings, the game opens in a straightforward manner.

Wolfenstein’s first scenes begin with you emerging from a train car to meet a member of the Kreisau Circle (who are themselves Wolfensteined into a gun-toting Resistance group, rather than the mundane, politically focused reality). A jaunt through some sewers brings you to a military train yard, a place jammed with swastikas, sandbags and mysterious tankers. You’re handed an MP40 and some grenades, and what follows is a fairly solid, if by-the-books, shooting experience.

Swastika masala
Wolfenstein is, on the face of things, a very decent WWII shooter. The trappings of Bavarian architecture, train yards, cobblestones and chateaus reek of early Call of Duty games – certainly a benchmark worth aspiring some years ago, but hardly something even approaching revolutionary today. At this point, the ability to slip into the Veil dimension hasn’t yet been revealed and the game plays out with a worryingly straight, trope-ridden face.

What we’ve seen of Wolfenstein’s non-occult stuff is plain and unremarkable. id’s Tech 4 engine has failed to afford the title any real graphical distinction, while the art style ploughs the same ragged WWII furrows we’ve seen time and time again in other shooters. Mounted guns summon waves of enemies, glowing transparent yellow boxes invite you to stick dynamite on doors, a compass guides you from one room to the next, and AI allies dawdle about meaninglessly as you one-man army your way through the Nazi ranks.

Veiled threat
This was going to be the bit where I stop and gibber on about how the Veil – that wacky paranormal twist – rescues the rest of the game from mediocrity. But it’s worth first pointing out that Return to Castle Wolfenstein had similar occult leanings, and its realistic bits didn’t need bolstering by anything especially strange. In fact, a lot of people would argue that the zombie bits detracted from the experience.

Wolfenstein, however, is definitely in need of some backbone, and the Veil is Raven’s attempt at inserting some spine into proceedings. Your first encounter with this world comes about when one of the train yard’s mysterious tankers erupts in a shower of blue flame – gravity takes a well-deserved break as unfettered Veil energy causes debris, guns, bodies living and dead, to float upwards towards the train yard’s ceiling. Panicking Nazi soldiers fire madly in all directions, their attention rightly turning from you to being suspended 20ft above the floor. You, though, remain safely on the ground.

Naturally, I began to wonder what it would look like if a floating Nazi were to be shot in the stomach in such an environment. So I tried it, and it’s satisfyingly punchy. The floaty blokey doubles up in pain and wheels gently and helplessly towards the far wall. The zero-G effect is only temporary, and in a matter of seconds all and sundry fall back to Earth with a thud and a clatter. It’s not long until another tanker explodes and you’re surrounded by even more sky-bound bigots. This time I used the opportunity to hurl a stick grenade at the flailing soldiers with comical effect, as their limp corpses were violently punted hither and tither. In celebration, I nudged a floating cash register with the butt of my MP40 and watched it gently tumble through space – the zero-gravity stuff is a really pleasing effect.

Twilight zone
Exactly what the Veil is hasn’t been properly clarified yet, and may never be. At times it’s an energy, a substance, a dimension, a philosophy, and in some cases it’s ammunition. Once you’ve unlocked the medallion’s abilities (the medallion itself acts as a sort of conduit for Veil energy, if you’re keeping notes), it appears as a meter in the bottom left corner of the screen, and using your Veil abilities depletes your reserves.

Another level is fired up, this time we’re in the streets of Wolfenstein’s fictional city, fighting our way towards a Nazi-controlled church which is spewing a pillar of filthy green energy into the sky. I’m now in full control of my Veil powers, and can at any point flip between dimensions. I’ve also unlocked one of my Veil abilities, Mire, which slows time to a crawl and allows me to dance between sluggish enemies. If you like, you can call it bullet-time and be done with it.

The effect of dimension hopping isn’t unlike slipping into night vision mode in Splinter Cell, or putting on a pair of 3D glasses while driving. The screen is tinted a deep, dark green, elements of the environment change shape, and the sky transforms into a tumultuous expanse of swirling carnage and destruction. You move faster in the Veil, enemies are highlighted and so easier to spot, and critical objects such as exploding barrels are painted a stark red.

Odd alien creatures called Collectors also float aimlessly about the world, invisible to all but you. They drink from pools of Veil energy like a sort of delicious occult milkshake. Shoot them and they erupt like fleshy exploding barrels, electrocuting foes in the real world.

And so, by flipping things between normal and green and occasionally slowing things down, I made my way from one end of a heavily defended road to the other. Wolfenstein’s levels are semi-open ended, offering various routes to your objective. In this case I could’ve forced my way through the middle – the most direct route – by relying heavily on my Mire ability to avoid being turned into a fine red mist by racists’ bullets. Instead I crept along the building fronts, at times clambering along rooftops to get the jump on unsuspecting tyrants below. Certain walls, marked by a Black Sun logo, don’t exist inside the Veil, so by flipping into that magical dimension I could often saunter through solid brick and properly surprise a bunch of devious huns.

Raven promise that this open-endedness will appear throughout the game, and that parts of the city will be open to exploration at any time. They’re quick to assure, however, that this isn’t an open-world, free-roaming city, but that at the same time it won’t be as linear as old Wolfensteins.

As is tradition for the series, Nazi treasure can be found stashed throughout the world, and this treasure can now be used to purchase upgrades on the black market. Your MP40, for example, can be fitted with a silencer for stealth, improved rifling for accuracy and a drum magazine for more ammunition. Veil powers can be purchased here too, though Mire is still the only ability Raven are willing to talk about. These marketplaces are physical locations in the world – one a straightforward black market front, the other only available inside the Veil, a mystical outlet of craziness known as the Golden Dawn.

Reality is further unhinged by the appearance of the Nazi’s Veil-powered superweapons. Heavy Troopers are armoured soldiers wielding powerful particle cannons and capable of sending out explosive shock waves – they also have a penchant for bursting through walls when you least expect. By slipping into the Veil I was able to highlight their weak points – sparkling transistors rather helpfully placed on their shoulders. Dodging the vintage automobiles being hurled about the place by the Heavy Trooper’s particle cannon, I popped his shoulder pads and brought him to his knees.

The particle cannon is a meaty weapon, and Wolfenstein’s world is built to accommodate its destructive abilities. It tears through wood and turns cover to dust. AI Nazis run from you, desperately trying to seek safety as you blast green lightning death in all directions. The Veil might give you an edge in combat, but it never makes you feel overly powerful. The particle cannon, on the other hand, transforms you into a sort of Nazi-slaying messiah.

Using this weapon I pushed forward to my final objective – the spire of energy erupting from the ruined church. In the tighter spaces of the church grounds, the defensive abilities of the enemy AI really start to show – they duck behind gravestones and stay low when under fire. They won’t push forward either, as they’ve nowhere to push forward to. They’ll retreat from grenades, and can so be forced into easily compromised positions. On this occasion, I’d effectively herded the enemy into an indefensible corner of the church’s facade, managing to take them out before they had a chance to regroup and take up better cover.

Once inside the building the source of the energy was apparent: an oversized desk toy comprised of three massive spinning rings. The entire thing glowed with occult energy, and by jumping into the Veil I could see that each of the rings was host to a conspicuous weak point. Mire slowed the rings down to a crawl, and with a few carefully aimed shots from my MP40 the contraption began to spin itself into oblivion, spewing out unfocused Veil energy and generally making a proper old mess.

A zombified Nazi (in an authentic uniform) promptly appeared and tore my face off, which is where the playtest came to an end – just as things were getting interesting.

Raven are still holding a lot of their cards close to their chest, and while much of the content they’ve shown so far has us slightly concerned (the warmed-up WWII guff being the main offender), the features they’ve yet to give us full access to are enticing. The level structure and the exploration, the weapon upgrade systems, and the yet to be revealed Veil powers – there’s a lot still to be seen here, and there’s even more to be Wolfensteined.

After two less-than-stellar instalments (ProStreet: a bit dull, Undercover: a bit broken) it’s time for the Need for Speed series to make a change. And changed it has.

A shift in developer and a shift in focus has ensured that the aptly titled NFS: Shift is the most promising instalment in EA’s racing series for almost as long as we can remember.

Veteran race sim studio Slightly Mad (which houses the core team behind the excellent GTR games – though SimBin disagree) is at the helm, which should mean Shift is a more realistic, all-round polished package.

With simulation in its blood then Shift expectedly sports all the traits of a Gran Turismo-style driving simulator. Picking up the pad and jumping into as race around a very PGR-style London track reveals a tighter, more demanding driving dynamic with red and green racing lines guiding us around the course with all the safety and efficiency of a trained F1 driver. And there are no spinners on the cars, either.

Virtual Zonda Fs terrorise the track with engine roars recorded from their real-life counterparts, with handling grounded in reality. Make the slightest mistake while and your motor veers disastrously off course. A cheeky bump from a rival can also end your race early.

Even at this early stage (the game’s only been in development for a year – the technology for longer) Shift is the most technically impressive Need for Speed yet.

Car models, track sides and vehicle interiors are awash with levels of detail most genre entries simply can’t afford. Shift’s even pushing out some visual techniques such as detailed soft shadows, full-screen anti-aliasing and a rock-solid framerate.

Over 70 cars are promised including high-tuned and exotic super cars, while tracks include both real-world and fictional locales.

Slightly Mad’s proprietary engine’s pushing a detailed physics system, full vehicle damage and advanced AI that dishes out personality traits to AI drivers, who are said to be capable of developing grudges against you.

But by far the most definitive feature of Shift is found during its in-car view. Unlike the comparatively sterile cockpit of Forza, Shift attempts to emulate the effects of g-force and vision blur.

As your motor accelerates the game recreates the feel of g-force by subtly tilting the camera backwards. Slam on the anchors and your camera ‘head’ will jolt forward. It’s a simple but effective way to further immerse you in the experience. At speed the interior starts to blur out, as your focus sharpens on the road ahead.

It also looks like the dev is trying to outdo Codemasters in the damage stakes too. Slightly Mad says it’s spent a stupid amount of time trying to emulate these realistically and, frankly, it shows.

Steamroll your supercar into the barriers and you’ll be rewarded (or punished) with a violent, head-snapping crash. Veering too close to another car will send your vision disco dancing with the impact, while a not-so-subtle motion blur effect simulates the feeling of being “dazed and confused” by a high-speed impact. It’s like having a flashbang go off in your helmet.

But not everyone enjoys the interior view so in third-person and bumper cam views g-force and collision cues are applied to the HUD.

The technology behind this new Need for Speed was never in question though. It’ll be interesting to see if the London studio can deliver solid online modes and plenty of track variety, areas many would say Need for Speed has been lacking in the past few versions.

// Screenshots

Players of the original Patapon are guaranteed to feel a little surge of happiness when they begin Patapon 2 by beating out the familiar ‘pata-pata-pata-pon’ chant that makes their Patapon march from the left to the right of the screen. That’s because Patapon is one of those games – much like its stable mate LocoRoco – that’s infectiously feel-good. Returning to its toe-tapping tunes and weird little one-eyed dancing warriors is like coming home after a spell away.

Game sequels traditionally do one of two things. They either play it safe and give you more of what you enjoyed last time, but even better, or they bring in major changes and hope that fans of the original don’t get too upset. In the case of Patapon 2, the developer has gone very much for the option of keeping everything much the same as before with a few minor tweaks to try and justify a second game.

Army of Pon
So, you’re commanding an army of Patapon on a march through one level after another filled to the brim with collectable spoils, obstacles, oversized creatures to fight and boss battles. For those unfamiliar with the first game, Patapon cleverly mixes strategy with rhythm (and a spot of resource management), calling on the player to command units using the beat of a drum. The PSP’s four face buttons are turned into drums – ‘pata’, ‘pon’, ‘chaka’ and ‘don’ – and these, in turn, are used in different combinations to form commands. So, if you want your army to move forwards, you tap ‘pata-pata-pata-pon’. To defend it’s ‘chaka-chaka-pata-pon’. Providing you get the rhythm right, your Patapon respond and vocalise your command in helium-ingested high-pitch.

Some things have changed, but – aside from the introduction of an oversized Hero Patapon who comes with a special attack – there’s nothing new that actually affects the core gameplay. Of course, there are fresh levels, and those levels bring new monsters and a higher level of detail and depth than before for both the visuals and tunes.

However, jumping into Patapon 2’s opening levels is nowhere near as exciting as it is in fellow sequel, LocoRoco 2. Basically, you’re doing exactly the same as you were before – attacking, defending and marching from one problem to the next. The new stuff is only noticeable once you start levelling up your Patapon and collecting heroes.

Musical evolution
This aspect of the game is where things have really evolved – literally, with the introduction of a comprehensive Evolution Map that lets you create all sorts of different Patapon types by trading items you’ve collected throughout the levels. Here you can beef a basic Patapon up into a Pyopyo or Buhyokko, depending on which fighting style you want for your army, and recruit three new Patapon types as well as the new, but unimaginatively named, ‘Rarepon’. As before, you can also equip your existing Patapon with all sorts of helmets, swords and arrows you’ve collected. Sadly, as it was in the first game, if you lose a pimped-out Patapon in battle and don’t recover his body, then that little fella is gone for good.

From the menu screen, you also get access to the new ‘Paraget’ (described as a gateway to the Hero World) which gives you a load of sub-levels to play either alone or in the new multi-player mode (which comes with some fun mini-games, too) in order to earn Parachari and buy treasure chests filled with rarer items.

There are new features then, it just doesn’t feel like they go far enough. While the sound of the Patapon chanting ‘pata-pata-pata-PON!’ felt invigoratingly original before, now it’s starting to grate a bit. Change the tune, guys. And while LocoRoco 2 got the balance between old and new just right, Patapon 2 has nothing that matches up to rolling down a hill encased in a giant afro. Yes, it’s a better game than the original – the fleshed-out levelling up system, meatier tunes and four-player mode see to that, but if you’ve already marched to the beat of Patapon’s drum, you may find this sequel bores more than it thrills.

With Hawx, the Tom Clancy series couldn’t be further from tradition. Instead of ultra-realistic, tactical battles we’re now flying a plane 30,000 feet in the air, firing 152 missiles at baddies we can’t even see. War has changed.

The hallmarks of the franchise are there; the hi-tech mission briefings, rock soundtrack and rubbish CGI general chatting away in the top corner of the screen. Even the Ghost Recon team make a cameo appearance down on the ground. But the most Clancy thing about Ubisoft’s unashamedly Ace Combat-esque flight sim is the Enhanced Reality System, or ERS, which crunches numbers to put all sorts of virtual reality mischief in the pilot’s display.

It’s Hawx’s answer to the ‘Advanced Warfighter’ bit in Ghost Recon, only more interesting. With the ERS turned on the computer plugs you straight into Tom Cruise’s brain, holding your hand and arrow-pointing you through the skies to make you a hardcore hotshot without going anywhere near the RAF.

With it on, virtual ERS ‘hoop trails’ guide you through routes you wouldn’t usually take, mostly resulting in your plane arching up into the sky and then nose-diving back down at the exact point your targets swoop past your nozzle – exactly in time for you to give them the good news with your missiles.

The feature does a good job of making air combat flow, feel cinematic and actually become accessible to players outside of the Microsoft Flight Sim crowd. Unfortunately, because this view is hampered with a milk float-calibre turning circle, the clever ERS guides don’t prevent you from feeling like you’re consistently drawing village-sized trail circles in the sky trying to chase down a target.

Missions start off extremely sluggish – the usual ‘protect this’, ‘kill these’, ‘fly around in circles trying to point yourself at a tank’ mission clichés are queued up for too long, and the ERS system, beyond making shootdowns more accessible, isn’t enough to wash off the feeling of ‘Ace Combat-ness’ and lack of real new ideas from the first hour of the game.
The plot has you leading the marketing team-named H.A.W.X. team (High Altitude Warfare… erm, X) in its last mission under the US Airforce. After the finale your squad of ace pilots join a Private Military Company to make some real dollar. Then it’s plot twists and it’s big battles ahoy in a very forced Clancy plot… but then the brand’s attraction has never been the story.

As soon as the game unlocks the ability to turn off the ERS, it picks up pace. Turning off your computer assistance with a double tap of the triggers whooshes the camera into a super-far out third-person (fourth-person?) view, and suddenly it feels like you’re playing with tiny plastic toys.

Sluggish air pursuits with all the dexterity of a Tesco shopping trolley are replaced with more intense dogfights. Empty, flat fields make way for spectacular cityscapes and even the boring ‘defend, kill’ mission structure is mixed up eventually.

Playing with the ERS off feels almost like a different game entirely; dogfighting becomes a sport. Instead of endless turning circles and stat-filled, calculated swoops through hoops, ERS-off mode transforms air battles into vicious, third-person cat and mouse chases, where at any point you can slow down, turn on a dime and fire back in your opponent’s face. Just like Top Gun.

The trade off in your new found manoeuvrability is that if you slow down too much during your 180 antics your plane will stall, sending you plummeting towards the ground unless you level up horizontally and hit the throttle.

Of course this means veteran players can pull off even more hotshot moves, flying above the clouds and then stalling down into the fight – an easy way of bursting into the action in multiplayer bouts.

As missions enter full swing you’ll learn to use the two ERS modes to their advantages; with it on you’re more precise, can navigate easier and perform bombing runs easier. With it off you’re a sky dominating, dogfighting master.

The zoomed-out third-person camera angle (which cannot be turned off) will be controversial to many as it kills much of the immersion from peaking out from the confines of a dial-filled cockpit.

But it does offer a better perspective of the jet-dancing chaos – and at its best, provides an epic view of some of the most visually spectacular air combat battles we’ve ever seen – just watch the video on this page.

It’s undoubtedly the best attribute Hawx has to offer the genre and Ace Combat would do well to nick it. But ultimately Hawx is not as polished or even as consistent in mission design as Ace Combat – flying through trees on the ground for example isn’t even second-looked in Hawx.

Four-player drop in, drop out co-op feels like a missed opportunity. Instead of chucking four pilots at a single army of rock-hard baddies, arguing over who bagged which kill, Hawx simply multiplies the number of enemies on screen. While this might up the challenge this leaves campaign bouts feeling less like strategic and more like separate solo experiences.

Hawx could do with a fair bit of polish before it (inevitably) comes around for a second flight, then – and a sluggish start to the solo campaign doesn’t help much either. It’s far from perfect, but the ERS formula does provide a small but much needed fresh idea to the tired genre, which means many Clancy and Ace Combat fans alike will be glad they played it.

Over the last 15 years, the mainstream of gaming has shifted from highly-prescribed, two dimensional trips from A-to-B into sprawling 3D cities – whole worlds! – where the player finds their own way. The public reaction? You can hardly hear the demented applause for the over-excited gasps. But let’s be honest: open worlds are a big backwards stumble. They’re not progress. They’re not even what you really want.

Consider the backlash against GTA IV. Despite a rapturous original reception, popular opinion now holds that it’s too po-faced, too serious and too lacking in easy-access unrealism to be fun. It’s just too big and open!

The argument then invariably turns to Saint’s Row 2, and how that game – by contrast – is stuffed so full of things to do you end up achieving them without even realising you were going to. You can hardly steal a car, piledrive through a windscreen or attack one of its suspiciously multitudinous scantily-clad women without some kind of award, minigame or event popping up. This, the argument goes, makes it wildly superior, as if quantity were the sole measure of fun.

The quality of Saint’s Row 2’s events never seem to figure. It’s enough that you can take a hostage and get into a police chase with hardly a thought, so never mind that the cop AI is so simple there’s no point, or the vehicle handling so soft and safe you could serve it to babies instead of apple puree. Or that accusations of misogyny, anti-intellectualism and cruelty have never been entirely quashed.

Do you know why this witless game is defended by so many? It really is because there’s so much stuff to do; so much easily-come-by stuff it effectively negates being open-world at all. That’s its trick. It has none of GTA’s realism, and consequently never has to deal with the reality of the actual (open) world. Try walking in your real-life neighbourhood. It’s unexciting. Rockstar have unravelled great strings of tangled, believable streets before us, but – believably – there’s actually little or nothing you can do with them.

On the other hand, SR 2 mimics more traditional, prescribed games in that it constantly plonks something in front of you and lets you get on with playing. And a significant amount of gamers are so desperate for this kind of guided, ‘linear’ (such a dirty word!) experience they overlook the fact that what’s been plonked in front of them is a tame, massless and empty hologram of something fun.

The answer is obvious. Developers should stop wasting years building great cities – and trying to make them interactive – and instead spend years creating interesting things to do. Then they could put all these interesting, high-quality things in a mostly straight line of a game and let us get on with enjoying them. You might dub this approach ‘new linear.’ Try saying it without the dismissive lip-curl characteristic of such outmoded ideas as black and white television, LP records or a National Health Service. Linear! Linear! And relax.

Having to commute by taxi to the fun is a backwards step. Welcoming poor quality fun because it comes in quantity is a backwards step. Games that line up amusing things to do, then set you down at the start, are on the mainline to pleasure, progress and the future.

We’re talking about the most enduring of all PC games. A game that predates the 200 issues and 15 years of PC Gamer, and that has helped define what PC gaming is. A game that has adapted and evolved, remaining not just relevant, but essential.

Its template was crafted by its original designer, the name above the title, the man who has become synonymous with PC strategy games. The game is Civilization. The man is Sid Meier.

When Sid started work on the first Civilization back in 1989, the initial inspiration came from two key games of the era: Sid’s own Railroad Tycoon, and a certain city-building game by Will Wright.

“I was playing SimCity,” Sid confirms, “which was one of the first games that was really about building and creating things as opposed to blowing them up.”

Railroad Tycoon had that same creative impulse. It featured would-be barons building a railroad empire, starting with one train and a single track. It was a fresh take on strategy. The good news: “It worked,” Sid says. “Especially when we started adding things like finance and competition.” Searching for another subject to apply these ideas to, Sid and the rest of the team at Microprose came to the conclusion that “the history of the world seemed like a good place to go.”

Turning 6,000 years of human history into a game wasn’t quite the giant leap it at first appears. “Part of it,” Sid says, “was actually that we’d played SimCity and thought, ‘OK, what’s bigger than a city – the whole world!’ We’d all played Risk, and a game called Empire, so we had the idea that the world was manageable if we approached it in a certain way.” Ironically, one game Sid hadn’t played was the Francis Tresham-designed city- and nation-building boardgame Civilization, set around the classical Mediterranean, although others at Microprose had. Tresham’s earlier game ‘1829′ helped inspire Railroad Tycoon.

The development process for Civilization was all about prototyping. An early version was up and running in the time it would now take a team to choose the font for the design document. “We actually had something playable within a couple of weeks of talking about the idea,” Sid says, “and from then on it was constant iteration. Almost every day or two I’d have a new version and Bruce Shelley, who was my producer partner on the game, would play it.” This pattern would continue for the next year or so, with every new version tested to see whether what was added improved the game or not.

The earliest pieces of the Civilization jigsaw to fall into place were the more traditional board- and wargame aspects: cities, units, combat. Technologies were an early addition as they provided the drive for a civilisation’s advance through the game’s massive timeframe. But as the team added, they subtracted. “We actually took out a number of features,” Sid says. “We had a whole second level of technology. I remember beer drinking was somewhere in our alternate technology tree. Other elements, such as the Wonders of the World and government models were added to keep challenging the player. “We were also evolving the AI at the time,” Sid remembers, “because that was part of what made it interesting.”

‘Interesting’ isn’t a word you’d associate with gaming today, where more urgent, catchy terms are used to attract, such as ‘dynamic’, ‘thrilling’ or ‘visceral’. But ‘interesting’ is a charming and yet entirely appropriate description for the unique quality that Civilization has. It’s something that clearly stems from Sid himself. “We have a philosophy of ‘interesting decisions’,” he explains. “Each decision has a couple of variables that change based on the current situation. If you’re in a war it might tilt your decision-making a different way than if you’re aiming for an economic victory. There’s never obviously one best path with the others there to take up space. It’s more that each path you could go down has something interesting about it that might make sense in a certain situation.”

There’s one aspect of the Civilization series that’s crucial to this interesting decision-making, an aspect that helps make Civilization so immersive even though it seems distinctly old fashioned and potentially distancing – the fact that it’s turn-based. “It gives you time to think about your decisions, which allows us to give you more interesting things to think about,” Sid says.

“If you’ve only got three seconds to make a decision, it can’t be a very complicated decision,” he reasons. “However, if you can take as much time as you want, you can start to trade off economic versus military versus political versus culture. All of a sudden you’re thinking, ‘Well, what if I built this?’” Having that time to imagine immerses you.

So in a sense, the player in Civilization is filling in those gaps between the turns with their thinking, making it a real-time world in their head? “Yes, you’re playing in real-time,” Sid agrees, “but you have the time that you need to plan and you don’t feel rushed. It doesn’t make sense in a game that covers 6,000 years of history for you to feel rushed.”

As development on Civilization continued, further elements were added, including those that drag down many a burgeoning civilisation: pollution and unhappiness. But they didn’t quite work out. “I think if I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn’t do them,” Sid admits. “It became more work than fun, but at the time it added to the seriousness of the game, helped make it successful… People felt they were learning a little bit more about the world and that it might be good for their kids to play.”

With its historical theme, Civilization has always had something of a whiff of education about it, even if Sid and the Microprose team had no grand ambitions in this area. “We weren’t trying to convince you that nuclear energy was a good or bad idea, or that this form of government was better than that,” Sid says. “It was not our intent to espouse any political philosophy.”

And far from being a educational fact-fest turned game, Civilization was practically the opposite. “We did some research but one of the jokes around here is that we do the research after the game is over, just to justify whatever we decided to put in,” Sid admits. “A lot of the decisions we make are about what’s most fun for the player and then we can always find some historical fact to justify whatever it is.”

When it was first released in 1991, Civilization was a slow burn with sales growing gradually as word of mouth spread. “We would get letters,” Sid says, “from gamers describing how they started playing at five in the afternoon and at three in the morning they realised they were still playing.”

As the months and years rolled on, the feedback from the growing community of Civilization players kept coming, bringing home to Sid how powerful the idea of being a game designer was. “Most of the letters we’d get were almost a standard form,” he explains. “They were like, ‘Dear Sid. I liked your game Civilization. Here are the five things I would change to make it a much better game.’” These armchair designers would get their chance with the release of 1996’s Civilization II.

A former number one in PC Gamer’s Top 100, Civilization II built upon what worked in the original, and improved the graphics and sound in line with the five years’ of technical advances between them. But, just as with the first Civilization, not every idea made it into the final release. “One of our initial designs was to have minigame battles,” Sid reveals. “We prototyped that and found that it totally stopped the flow of the game. It really detracted from keeping you in the moment, from your role as overall leader.”

It’s an intriguing insight into Sid’s design philosophy, that this switch from the strategic to the tactical, between two different mindsets, was rejected. “If you’re playing at the strategy level, you’ve got a couple of things being built and you’ve just discovered this new civilisation and you’re wondering what they going to do. Jumping into a tactical game, you mentally unload all this information, load in some new information, do that, then try to get the old stuff back again! It’s just a better game without that extra level of complexity.”

Speaking of complexity, Civilization II – in response to player feedback – attempted to include more and more leaders, units and civs. “We tried to satisfy some of those requests,” Sid explains, “but I think we learned that more is not always better. Finding the limitations of what the player could deal with before it stopped being fun was one of the main things we learned in Civ II.”

The longest-lasting innovation introduced in Civilization II was modding, fulfilling the ambitions of many of those who wrote letters to Sid. Fuelled by players creating new mods and maps kept the game alive for years, with the most popular additions making it into official expansion packs. That creativity surfaced in other ways too, as players analysed the systems at work in the game, and invented tactics – such as the infamous Infinite City Sprawl (where players decimate landscapes with vast urban sprawls) – which were never conceived by Sid and lead designer Brian Reynolds. “The problem was, as designers, we played the game the way we intended it to be played,” Sid admits. “We didn’t try these strange strategies.”

Five years elapsed before Civilization III in 2001. Much had changed behind the scenes. Sid, with longtime collaborators Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs, had left Microprose to found Firaxis – they’d already released the Civ-in-space-like Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Meanwhile competitors Activision released Civilization: Call To Power I and II. Legal tussles over who actually owned the brand name Civilization meant lawsuits and settlements, with Sid at Firaxis no more than an interested onlooker. “We never expected to work on Civ again because of the whole corporate situation,” Sid says. When the dust settled, the rights to the Civilization name finished with Infogrames/Atari. They in turn approached Firaxis to build Civilization III.

“Civ III was a homecoming for us,” Sid says. “It was all the ideas that we’d thought of over the years, things we’d picked up from the community – I know at one time we had a 200 page document with all the suggestions we’d got – and huge leaps in technology, stretching the Civilization template with things we hadn’t done before.”

But therein lay a potential danger. As he’d learned on Civilization II, more could mean less when it came to how enjoyable a game was to play. “We looked back on the flight simulator genre which had gone before,” Sid remembers. “Flight simulators started off as easy but after a number of years they became incredibly complex. If you hadn’t played Falcon 5 then you really had no chance of figuring out Falcon 6.”

“We could clearly make a Civilization of however much complexity we wanted to,” Sid continues, “but that wasn’t necessarily the right answer. Civ III grew a fair amount… We felt we reached the complexity limit with Civ III. Computers had gotten to the point where they could totally overwhelm a player – with Civ I we knew we were finished because we ran out of memory! [Laughs] By the time we got to Civ III, we had to figure out on our own where to draw the line.”

That line embraced a new culture system, new buildings with new functions, a deeper military system, and some of the prettiest 2D graphics ever seen in a strategy game. It also continued Civilization II’s success with the mod community, producing mods like the excellent Rhye’s & Fall.

For all its success, though, Civilization III now seems like a waypoint on the journey towards even greater glories. Civilization IV is the culmination of the design developments across the whole Civilization series, building on the discoveries of, and learning from the blind alleys ventured down by the previous Civs, their expansions, mods and the many games inspired by them. It is the game where the potential of the ideas at the heart of Civilization were fully realised.

With Civilization IV, gamers could choose to play as a scientific, cultural or economic power and genuinely compete with those traditional Civ bullies, the warriors. And it is a game that can be played properly against human opponents. It is nothing less than a masterpiece. “Multiplayer had been a goal from the beginning,” Sid says. “A lot of the testing was done in multiplayer mode during development, which added a different flavour. There was a lot of focus on balance as when you have four or five people playing they’re very sensitive, so there was a lot of time spent on the game rules.”

Civilization IV also filled out other areas, introducing separate religions as a major factor, and replacing a few government models with a flexible civics system – an idea Sid had toyed with in Alpha Centauri. Even more flexible, the myriad new unit promotions – where you could turn warriors into specialist city raiders if you were so minded, or give catapults the ability to cause near genocidal levels of civilian deaths.

Just as importantly, Civilization IV stripped out a masses of micromanagement. “We wanted to introduce some of these bigger concepts. To do that we had take out some of these things that were happening at a lower level.” So, out went pollution, saving an enormous amount of endgame worker drudgery, and out went corruption and waste. Civilisations could manage, leaving you with the more important decisions.

Looking back across all four Civilization games, and the 14 years they span between them, the striking thing is not how different they all are but just how similar they feel. “We were amazed by how much some relatively small changes could affect the game,” Sid agrees. “We were playing with the amount of food or the amount of resources that would come out of a certain square and just a small change there had a really profound effect on the game. That caused us to be pretty careful about change to the fundamental system and that’s probably why there’s a consistent feeling to all the games.”

One thing there has never been any question of changing is the Civilization series’ turn-based play. For Sid, the reasoning is straightforward. “We’re giving the player enough things to think about, to anticipate, to plan, that they’re drawn into the game and feel that they’re in control. That’s a fundamental goal of ours – are you playing the game or is the game playing you? Are you in control and thinking ahead or are you always one step behind and trying to figure out how you can catch up with the game?”

The great trick that all the Civilizations have pulled off is to combine the abstract with the tangible. They have melded the almost impossibly ambitious concept of covering 6,000 years of history, yet keeping the player focused on the movement of simple, understandable concepts. “You never feel you don’t understand the rules,” Sid says, “but they interact with each other to create problems that really make you think and that’s what draws you in.” Game design sounds so easy when it’s explained by Sid Meier – playing the Civilization series makes you realise what a profound and subtle craft it really is.

The early levels of Mirror’s Edge are the ones that best communicate the joys of the game, because they’re the ones that best deliver the free-running dream.

That is: you, in an urban environment, gracefully inventing your own path from point Here to point Over There. You hop over fences, slide under pipes, run along walls, rebound off buildings and vault from ledges – all of it ideally without breaking stride and all of it from a first-person perspective. It’s smooth, fast, exhilarating, and its creators do it wrong, all wrong.

The main character is Faith, a Runner. Runners are acrobatic postmen, travelling via rooftops to illegally deliver messages the sender doesn’t want intercepted by the spying government regime. Faith’s sister is on the other side, a police officer who’s framed for murder. That prompts Faith to investigate. Cue lots of running. While that’s all fine, the real star is the unnamed city in which all this takes place. It’s the playground you’ll be bounding across, its insides a mixture of primary colours and modernist furniture, its outsides sparkling like a glitterball. Most dystopian futures in computer games are bleak, ruined worlds, but there’s a tangible reason why more of this city’s residents haven’t rebelled: because it’s a really, really nice place. Who wouldn’t want to live here? Even the rooftops are swept clean.

You’re assisted by something called Runner Vision, which highlights certain items of scenery in red. A ropeline that can be slid down, a pipe that can be climbed, a handily placed chair that can be used as a springboard. Runner Vision makes snap decision-making easier, but the levels still encourage a thoughtful mode of play. You want to stop, look around, work out how to get up there and then implement your solution. You want to play it like you might play Portal, as a series of environment-based puzzles.

Instead, the game becomes infested by cops and snipers and SWAT teams and helicopters, all serving to hurry you along. The initial levels are direct enough that you can work out where to go while sprinting, but as the environments become more complicated, the red objects also become less overt. You want to stop more, but the enemies never let you.

Imagine you were playing arcade racer TrackMania and while arcing from one ramp to another, police started shooting you. More directly, imagine you were having fun and then people came along and started shooting you while you were having fun. Running is great, being constantly pressured in to running away is not so much. Yet it proves unavoidable. Each chapter is structured in basically the same way, with you bounding to the top of a building and then having to flee when the cops – or ‘blues’ – burst in to bust you. This frequently involves them coming through your only exit point, meaning you either have to run past them or go through them.

Going through them means punching and kicking them to the ground, or performing a disarm move. Disarming is essentially a quicktime event, accomplished by hitting the right-mouse button when their weapon turns red mid-attack. The addition of Reaction Time, better known as bullet time, slows their movement and makes this much easier. Regardless, it’s satisfying to watch your leg appear from the bottom of the screen and slam your opponent’s head in to the ground. You can then either use your newly acquired gun to dispatch the other enemies or toss it to one side immediately. The weapons are forgettable, but discarding them lets you affect the same awesome, nonchalance of characters in The Matrix.

Note that I’m saying nothing bad about the implementation of combat. It’s clear that the developers don’t want this to be thought of as a traditional shooter: there’s no way to reload your gun and carrying it slows you down, hindering your ability to perform jumps. Yet although you’re armed with the perfect skills for evasion, this also isn’t a stealth game where you can avoid alerting enemies. While it’s possible to complete the game without firing a single shot, for pure reasons of convenience you’ll likely turn to aggressive solutions before too long.

The issue is that the combat hinders rather than enhances the core pleasure of the game. It’s precisely because the rendering of free running is sublime that its constant, violent interruption is so frustrating. The world feels physically solid in a way other games don’t. Walk close to a surface and your hands will raise and press against it. Fall slightly short on a jump and your arms will reach out and scrabble at the surface to pull you up, while falling slightly shorter still has you gripping the ledge with just your fingertips. Try to wall-run on an uneven surface and you’ll slip and end up on your backside. Not hurt if the ground was close, simply embarrassed by your clumsiness. The quickening screen bob as you gather speed, the sound of trainers slapping on concrete, even the way your screen tilts and turns: there’s an attention to detail here that places you firmly within this beautiful city. And it gives you the means to perform stunning acrobatic feats.

Recently, when walking past a nearby building site, PC Gamer’s Production Editor Tony Ellis remarked about how cool it would be to run along the tops of the cranes, like in Casino Royale. Mirror’s Edge has a level where you do exactly that. That made us all very, very happy.

I just want to make it clear, though: at no point did Tony suggest that it might also be cool to use those same physical talents to run away from a bunch of snipers. That would be rubbish.

Let’s also make it clear that when attempting that moment of crane leapery, I fell to my death half a dozen times. You’re not always going to time those jumps correctly. You’re going to fall and die sometimes, forcing a retry, and there’s no quicksave. This proved occasionally frustrating, particularly when a death happened after a scripted ambush I was then forced to walk into a dozen times, but mostly checkpoints are well placed, quickly re-loading and sending you back to just before your failed leap.

That scripted ambush is one of the situations where the game takes control of your viewpoint for the sake of a brief cutscene. Although the loss of control is abrupt, it’s preferable to the game’s occasional and jarring leaps into 2D animation. Faith is likeable, a rare humble protagonist who’s willing to express something other than detached sarcasm. There’s even some thematic nuance, though much of it is derivative of other work. But when the game is beautiful and steadfast in its commitment to the first-person perspective, suddenly jumping to 2D is bizarre and ugly.

What will annoy some of you far more is the length. The story mode is short – I completed it in around six hours. But this is only slightly less than it took me to complete Call of Duty 4 and it doesn’t feel unfairly truncated, despite the room left for the inevitable sequel. I must say that I appreciated it for not padding the experience needlessly.

Also similar to CoD4, it’s improved on the PC, being easier to make jumps using a mouse and keyboard and with PhysX support, it makes fist-smashing through glass even more satisfying. But then, this is a world wiped so clean that I frequently walked into glass walls without realising they were there.

Despite the lack of multiplayer, there are two other modes that extend the life of the game: Speed Run and Time Trial. Speed Run is the story mode levels with an added timer. This forces you to complete each level flawlessly in order to reach the end within the time limit. Time Trial, meanwhile, is set in specific areas of those same levels and is entirely devoid of enemies.

Hey, wait a minute, devoid of enemies? Time Trial essentially turns the game into the aforementioned TrackMania, placing a series of checkpoints on a level that must be hit in order and giving you times to beat to earn either one, two or three stars.

Did I say devoid of enemies? Reach the end once and the next time through you’ll be racing against a ghost of yourself. NO ENEMIES?
No enemies at all! The Time Trial mode removes the game’s one major irritation, turning it into a game purely about movement and iteratively improving your performance.

Playing the story mode is worthwhile, and you’ll need to complete it to unlock all the Time Trial levels anyway, but there’s an argument to be made for this mode being Mirror’s Edge distilled into its pure form.
Which only serves to underline the key frustrations of the game. It’s ambitious in a multitude of ways, both in making a platformer from a first-person perspective and in its implementation of free running. It succeeds in both these things, creating an essential experience in the process. But it’s stymied by its attempts to combine those new ideas with the traditional first-person shooter model.

It’s as if someone told them that people were scared of new things and that they should instead take something familiar and put a clock in it instead. In other words, it’s really, really good and you should play it, but damn, it could have been superb.