Chances are that you already know if you’re going to like Starcraft 2. If you’ve played any of Blizzard’s games then you’ll pretty much know what to expect: an accessible if somewhat cheesy game with high production values and extensive multiplayer support. I could go into detail on the unit balances and the intricacies of battlenet, but those are not really important. In fact, the important parts of this game, really, are the multiplayer and the campaign, and I imagine a sizeable chunk of consumers would disagree with me on the latter point.

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Most people think time is like a river, that it takes a team of workmen and an army of earthmoving vehicles to restructure, but I have seen the face of time and I can tell you they are wrong.

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I’ve decided against better judgment that I will make up a word in this review, keep an eye out for it. It’s very much needed as Singularity is quite a “mish-mash” game, but stick with me as it’s also quite wonderful. Raven have done most things right and only a couple of things wrong, keep a checklist handy as you may need it.

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Striking is the word that comes to mind. Both in visual style and gameplay, striking is a word that pretty much encapsulates Plain Sight. It’s a multiplayer game with a fairly simple, if unusual, concept – playing as ninja robots (which alone is a hybrid that automatically makes the game 15.8% more awesome) you gain points by killing other players. So far, so straightforward. However, to actually convert those kills into a cold hard score, you have to kill yourself by self destructing.

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As a concept, it shouldn’t work. A sequel to a game which was both a console exclusive and a single player focused iteration of a popular series gets a release on PC and turns out to be a serious competitor for Modern Warfare 2′s multiplayer crown? It certainly helps that the pedigree of the larger series is that of course of one of the best loved multiplayer franchises for the PC in Battlefield, and DICE certainly remember their roots this time around.

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Last semester, I had a module at university devoted entirely to the alien films. This culminated in a screening of the Alien Vs Predator movie which, as I’m sure you are aware, is very Paul WS Anderson in every regard. This was a bit annoying, having come to the film expecting something like Monolith’s rather snazzy AvP2. I gather that Rebellion’s original crack at an AvP game was rather good, but I missed it myself. Perhaps I was too young, or it was overshadowed by something else, I can’t remember. What this means, however, is that Rebellion’s return to the franchise is, for me, similar to Anderson’s film. It has a lot of expectations to live up to.

Does it manage it? Well, short answer, it doesn’t fail.

Aliens vs Predator drops you into the boots/exoskeleton/fashionable fishnet hunting gear of one of three characters: a Colonial Marine, or the titular Alien or Predator. The game gets off to a good start by having the three races control in subtly different manners, providing a different feel to each portion of the campaign.

Each race embraces different styles of play, from the pure run and gun antics of the marine (coupled with a bit of survival horror at times) to the more stealthy predator and aliens. While your time with each character in singleplayer is relatively brief, perhaps three or four hours, the knowledge that their stories all tie in with one another is a blessing.

AvP’s story takes place on a colony run under the watchful eye of Weyland-Yutani, the evil ultra-corp that any fan of the series will recognise. Karl Bishop Weyland has spent a great deal of time and money on this specific colony, unearthing an ancient predator ruin while simultaneously entering into some ethically and morally dubious research regarding the xenomorphs. Naturally, something goes wrong, the aliens escape and the predators turn up to ensure that no primitive human is going to take possession of their revered dead/technology. And when things go bad in the arse end of space, the Colonial Marines are the ones sent in to clean things up.

As plots go, it’s not going to win any awards, but it will keep you entertained long enough to be worthwhile. A generous scattering of audio logs help to flesh it out to some degree, but they are not essential to understand the motivations of the newest member of the Weyland family, merely an insight into some of the various characters you may hear about.

The three interconnected plots fit quite well, although they never truly overlap. You’ll go to the same places in the three campaigns, lending some credence to the argument that it is artificially lengthening the game, but each time the challenge will be different. For the marine, a march through a deserted garrison may be concerned with trying to deal with the bleeping of your motion tracker, desperately searching the scene for that one scuttling horror lurking in the shadows. For the alien perhaps you are that horror, trying to find your way from one side to the other without an army of synthetics blasting your limbs off. Even the predator, with his cloak and dagger mentality, will have a different challenge, trying to sabotage a specific system so that he can reclaim some much revered technology.

Rebellion have done a good job of nailing the motivation and feel of the characters, although they have made some unusual design choices in order to achieve this. The aliens and the predators are mostly perfect, both fast and deadly, strong when played in line with their movie mentalities and the perfect fodder when not. The marines, however, fare somewhat differently.

At first, all seems well. When the demo came out, there were complaints that the marine had no crouch ability, although this could easily be explained away with the notion that you should be spending the game running, always moving, otherwise you’ll be lunch. At first, this seems to ring true. Standing still in multiplayer does indeed equal death, and singleplayer is much the same; standing your ground against a rampaging horde of xenomorphs is a sure-fire why to see the game over screen. Then you reach the end portion of the marine campaign, and the synths are introduced.

For those of you not familiar with the series, “synths” are androids designed to appear the same as humans, but to have all the expected mental superiority. They are, technically, bound by the Laws of Robotics, but Weyland-Yutani have circumvented these rules and invented combat-synths. What this means, then, is that these robots have perfect eyesight, perfect aim and can shrug off recoil like nobody’s business.

They can also crouch and take cover.

I had never truly realised how useful the crouch key is in a fire fight until I didn’t have it any more. Trying to fight the synths as a marine is an exercise in frustration, your ridiculously huge boots give away your position instantly, and they will be ready for you. Perhaps in the future, knees have been made obsolete by genetic engineering, or some hideous disease has resulted in deformed children with no joints, but it is suddenly very jarring when presented with enemies that fight back.

This is avoided in the other campaigns being as your primary goal is to go unseen. While you can survive a straight up fight if you are skilled, it feels like a personal failure to get spotted, much as it does in Splinter Cell for instance. The fact that you are largely reliant on melee combat encourages this, with gruesome animations for stealth kills and successful counters in combat. The combat itself can be reduced to a rock, paper, wrist-blade equation, but by the time it starts to grate you will be moving onto the next campaign, so it’s not too big a deal. Also, the predator’s cloak no longer draws from his energy reserves, which is just wizard.

I have a problem with the multiplayer, however. That problem, put simply, is that I hate it.

As a disclaimer, I’m not particularly fond of competitive multiplayer at the best of times, but clever ones will allow you to have fun even when you suck. Team Fortress 2 and Modern Warfare 2 manage this extremely well. AvP doesn’t. The matches are very fast paced and you will die a lot, but that’s fine; you don’t have much downtime and the game result is never a forgone conclusion.

The problems arise firstly with the maps. While they are deliciously detailed, with one being particularly memorable for replicating the pyramid from the AvP movie complete with moving walls, they are just too small. This is exemplified by the game’s inability to find a safe place to spawn you, often resulting in just dumping you in front of an enemy, leading to a never ending stream of spawn deaths or, worse, the death train.

The death train comes from the game’s trophy kill system, all the gory one-button kills from the singleplayer but transplanted into multiplayer. Using one is largely pointless, as the time it takes to complete will allow any nearby enemies (and there will be many owing to the tiny maps) to get behind you and prepare one of their own. This can repeat to a ludicrous degree, only stopping when the next man to board the train is a marine, owing to their lack of a trophy kill. The simple solution would be not to use the trophy kill at all, but then you have to contend with the annoying melee system, which ceases to be fun once lag gets involved. Even on the newly implemented dedicated servers, you’ll be lucky to see a ping below 100, which doesn’t seem much, but is just enough to make timing your punches and blocks harder than it needs to be.

My biggest gripe, however, is survival mode. All my problems with the competitive multiplayer can be written off or explained away as it not being my kind of game, and there may even be some legitimacy in that, but the failures of survival mode cannot. We were promised a compelling co-op experience wherein we and three friends would fight off the slavering horde on a number of maps. What we get is two maps (unless you shelled out for the special edition, then you get an exclusive extra pair) that are little more than a square room. It just seems so lazy, as if they’ve gone ‘here’s a room, put some aliens in it, done’. They could have put choke points, deployable turrets, doors to weld, anything. Allow you to relive that scene from Aliens when they are holed up in the colony and preparing for the inevitable alien onslaught. I don’t say this often, but they could have learned a lot from Killing Floor.

Overall, AvP does well at replicating the feel of the universe and the character of each race, at least in singleplayer. You never feel as though you are retreading your steps as you progress through the campaigns, and the individuality of each is maintained throughout, although by the third time you reach the final map you might be losing patience. It is unfortunate, then, that for every good decision Rebellion made they seemed to balance it out with a poor one.

Personally, I think that Rebellion could have adopted a few of Monolith’s innovations to the series, especially in the multiplayer department. The game does feel a little like a step back in that regard, with the multiplayer component being a bit archaic for my tastes, especially when the predecessor had such entertaining options as Lifecycle. Apart from the presentation, which is above par, there is a bare-bones feel to the whole product which hurts it more than a little. That said, however, it is still worth a go if you are a fan of the series, or a decent place to start.

Xeno Clash

I admit it, I like UK Truck Simulator, I have had loads of fun driving up and down the road network of the UK delivering my furniture here or my logs there. Surprising really, I was expecting to play it for an hour and give up, but I constantly get pulled back into it knowing that I have left it with a delivery due in Plymouth in 12 hours, a long hard slog from Felixstowe.

Unfortunately not everything is sunshine and roses with this latest truck simulator from SCS, developers of European Truck Simulator and the 18 Wheels of Steel titles. Simply put it feels incomplete and rushed to release.

The game boasts that you can travel to 18 of the largest cities in the UK. Where then I ask are important cities such as Bristol and Leeds? Bristol not appearing is a big bugbear for me; one of my first deliveries in the game took me from Cardiff to Cambridge. Travelling along the M4 after the Severn Bridge (lacking any tolls) was a strange experience without travelling past Bristol. I was constantly wondering where all the towns and cities along the important M4 corridor were. The lack of important cities along the motorways is a grave disappointment.

What is worrying is the large number of incomplete and inaccessible roads that you come across. One of the most obvious examples is the missing link road between Southampton and Dover, on the in-game map you can even see the start and end of it just outside the two cities, but you just can’t drive on it. Another puzzling aspect of the road network in the game is the fact that you can only drive into London from the northern stretch of the M25. Why you are unable to enter the city from any other direction is beyond me.

These problems with missing roads and a lack of important cities may be some of the more glaring issues, but there are others which have an even greater impact on the realism of the game. Take the motorways, the British speed limit on them is 70mph, in UKTS it is 60mph, it is very annoying to get a speeding fine for travelling at the speed you should be allowed to. Entering a town or city is a bizarre experience, the speed limit suddenly drops from 60 to just 30 even when you are still driving on a dual carriageway. A perfect example of the problems with the speeds in the game comes when you are driving on country roads which are posted at the national speed limit. Coming across cars and trucks travelling at just 30mph leaves you struggling to overtake on the tight twisty lanes.

UK Truck Simulator isn’t all bad, it really is quite enjoyable when you look beyond these problems. There is a sense of adventure travelling all around the country making sure you arrive at the depot on time without damaging your cargo. If you arrive late or with a damaged load you will lose some of your earnings, and in the early stages of the game you need every penny you can get.

You start the game choosing from one of three companies to work for. You will start with a measly share of the profits from your deliveries driving around in a C class truck which is nice and basic, if a bit slow. Once you increase your reputation through delivering on time without speeding, or delivering damaged, cargo other companies will ask you to work for them with an increased share of delivery profits and a nice new truck thrown into the bargain. During the game a mysterious friend named Steve will send you messages boasting about how great his life has become since he went freelance and set up his own business.

Once you have done your fair share of working for others you get to follow in Steve’s footsteps and go freelance. You start off with just yourself and one truck, but once the money is coming in you are able to purchase garages around the map where you can store more trucks. You will also be able to high other drivers to do your dirty work for you. If one of these gelatinous tapeworms isn’t living up to your high standards you can sack him and hire someone new and watch the money roll in.

It may be a truck simulator, but it is surprisingly fun to play. It is just a shame that it feels unfinished, hopefully SCS will release a patch to address the problems, even if they don’t add any new cities just making the road network work right would be a great step forward. For now though, UK Truck Simulator has to be a miss.

Fun but needs a lot of work under the bonnet.

It’s very hard to write this review. I adored the original Bioshock for its ability to deconstruct some of the major issues with videogames, the mindless subservience to the designer’s whims. It was so surprising and powerful that what short comings the game had, and there was a fair few, were immediately overlooked. With its parent casting such a tall shadow, can Bioshock 2 possibly pull another surprise out of the bag?

In truth, no, it can’t.

Some time has passed since Jack’s murderous rampage across Rapture, although not that you’d really notice that from looking. Rapture is instantly recognisable as the same cesspool of human detritus that it was before, from the deformed inhabitants to the rusted and dilapidated city itself. Following the first game, a power vacuum has installed Sophia Lamb, a sort of Anti-Ryan, as the dominant figurehead in what remains of this underwater utopia, and she doesn’t much care for you.

As the pre-release gubbins has no doubt made you aware, Bioshock 2 places you in the armoured boots of one of the very first Big Daddies, Subject Delta. In a fitting introduction to the character, the game begins with your zealously protecting your adorable charge, a Little Sister, by brutally slaughtering a few splicers. It’s that power you remember from the first game, the terrifying Big Daddy with the power to bat you across the room with a flick of the wrist and the speed to catch you before you hit the ground. You’re a badass with a drill for an arm, and this is just the opening cutscene. Then Dr Lamb rocks on up with the Big Daddy controlling Plasmid from Bioshock 1 and makes you shoot yourself in the face.

My first thought when this happened was along the lines of ‘Why couldn’t we do that in the first game?’, closely followed by a moment of confusion as the game begins proper with you waking up. I knew Big Daddies were tough, but man! It is at this point where the game gives you control and the charming veneer begins to slip.

For a game that places great emphasis on you playing a Big Daddy, it never really manages to pull off the feeling that you are one of these behemoths. Even towards the end, weapons done up to the nines with shiny baubles that make you sneeze lightning, you’re still too fragile. The real Big Daddies have the same amount of health as a mountain, requiring you to slowly chip away at them while trying to maintain your distance. There are times you can stumble across them crushing a group of splicers easily. You, however, can be felled by a handful of lucky shots.

In the first game this was forgiveable. Jack was an outsider, unspliced and fresh faced, and was therefore allowed to be squishy and weak. Delta is a genetically modified giant welded into a metal suit, and yet this has no impact on the game at all. When you jump you may hear the clang of metal on ground as you land, but for all intents and purposes you may as well be wearing a flannel shirt for all the good it does you as armour.

This is not for want of trying, of course. The weapons you wield are suitably Big Daddyish, from the drill arm and the rivet gun to the mini-gun and the hilarious speargun. But there is a disconnection between them and you that doesn’t sit right. The rivet gun is the main offender in this regard, the in-game model being gargantuan when sat on the floor and disturbingly tiny when held in hand. The drill doesn’t fare much better. Once upgraded it does become astoundingly hilarious, grinding a hole through various foes as they writhe in agony, but all the while an irritating fuel gauge saps some of the joy out of it.

There are only so many issues that can be explained away by the polyfiller that is the word ‘prototype’. Yes, Delta is a prototype Big Daddy, but putting constraints on a player character that similar NPCs don’t have is just annoying. The other Big Daddies could survive a direct hit from a nuclear bomb, leave their drill running for days and defeat an army, so why can’t you?

That’s not to say the game hasn’t made some improvements. As a game, the mechanics are now quite a bit tighter, especially when it comes to hacking. The previous game presented you with a water rerouteing minigame, the splicers around you politely waiting for you to finish tinkering with your turret before they returned to braining you. Bioshock 2 has done away with this, replacing it with a much shorter minigame that doesn’t pause the action. This means that combat hacking is much more dangerous to do, leading you to having to decide whether taking that turret is really worth it.

Or it would, if it weren’t for the invention of hacking darts that allow you to tap into a system from a distance, even ignoring the minigame altogether if you use the rarer variety.

This is how Bioshock 2 seems to work, for every innovation it makes (like a free item from a vending machine for a particularly difficult hack) it detracts from it with something daft (such as the painfully linear nature of the game). This is made all the more painful because so many of the problems are things that the original game dealt with quite well and have merely been reintroduced in the sequel.

But nothing in the game is more frustrating than the Big Sisters.

The ADAM gathering missions with the Little Sisters tend to be rather fun, give or take the odd bit of computer cheating by spawning splicers in dead end corridors, and when it comes to shoving the little tyke into a vent or sucking our her brain slug you can’t help but feel you’ve bonded with her. Every time you harvest or heal one, however, there is a chance that you will earn the ire of a Big Sister.

A deathly shriek will sound, the screen will blur, and ‘Warning, a Big Sister is approaching!’ will flash on the screen. You have scarce seconds to prepare your defences, ready your weapons, and then in she strolls, lithe and athletic in her raggedy uniform. In she strolls to kick your arse.

The Big Sister, as well as being a bullet sponge and demonic gymnast, has some serious Plasmid action going on. They are everything the Big Daddy isn’t: quick, athletic, psychic and unashamedly hostile. This is not a problem in and of itself, everything else in Rapture is out to kill you after all, but the sheer frustration caused by one battle with a Big Sister is unbearable. As they leap, stab and burn their way around the room, you’ll notice that even a top level plasmid and firearm will do little against them, and it all seems so arbitrary.

If you recall, the original idea all those years ago was that Bioshock 2 would focus on a number of disappearances from the mainland, all orchestrated by one spooky Big Sister. This same Big Sister would stalk you throughout the game, an ever-present enemy that could strike at any time. In the final game, the Big Sister’s are random encounter bosses rather than characters, dropping by to annoy you and ultimately die after a painful battle of attrition. The feeling of trepidation just isn’t there, replaced with the knowledge that the Big Sister’s shrill howl signals five or ten minutes of abject vexation.

And this is all so ultimately painful because Bioshock 2 could have been as great as its predecessor.

I like the characters for the most part. Lamb is a poor replacement for Ryan, but he is a tough character to beat. Your new radio operator is entertaining too, and there’s a particular character you meet later in the game who delivers some fantastic lines. And while the story is no-one near as coherent or self-aware as the original’s, it is well maintained by the return of audio logs, continuing to flesh out the Bioshock universe even in a tangential manner.

Special mention goes to a certain section of the endgame, and you’ll know it when you get there, which is so charming and beautiful that it seems so out of place. You get a glimpse of what everyone wanted Rapture to be, which serves to not only heighten the feeling of sadness at its current state, but also the pity felt for its inhabitants. You get a window into their madness, and suddenly it all makes sense.

And this is why Bioshock 2 is so disappointing. Throughout the experience it feels as though it’s trying to emulate its father rather than create its own impression. For every problem it fixes it creates a new one elsewhere, and it’s lacking that one identifiable moment where it all comes together, that one big reveal. It is and can be a fun game, but it never really does what it sets out to do. You never really feel like a Big Daddy, the Big Sisters are never really a source of trepidation, the story doesn’t quite feel right. Although, that said, the one thing it does very well is make you care about the Little Sisters you adopt, which is something in its favour. A little scamp giggling ‘X his eyes, daddy!’ as you immolate a wayward Splicer does wonders for the father/daughter bond.

I know it sounds like I’ve been railing on the game, but I have to make it clear that it’s not a bad game. Any other game from any other series would probably be getting praised at this point, but Bioshock 2 feels like a step back from its predecessor in a way. It does many things right, but not enough. If you liked the first Bioshock you will get some enjoyment out of this game, but don’t go looking for anything as awe inspiring as the first time around. It just doesn’t quite manage it.

Good but overshadowed by its big daddy