November in XBox360 (The story so far…)
November has certainly been quite the month for the Microsoft’s XBox360 with bags of brilliant games all hitting the market at around the same time. For me, my first purchase was a no-brainer:
Fable 2 has been hugely hyped over the last few months and I couldn’t contain myself when it was released. Unfortunately, despite the hype, Fable2 didn’t really hit the mark – the combat is almost two simple and seems to be lacking in depth, the campaign is stupidly short (especially for someone who doesn’t do much multi player at the moment!) and the ending was, well, abrupt. I think if there was a chance of DLC being released within the weeks following the release, I may have hung on to it, but with not a lot to keep me interested, I found myself trading it in within two weeks of release. It’s sad really, because the game had so much potential.
With my birthday having just passed, I received quite a few (6!) Game vouchers and decided to pop to the shops and see what was out there. The games that I’ve been most interested in are Left4Dead, Mirrors Edge, End War, Gears 2, Fallout 3 and Farcry 2. I had enough for two games, with a bit left over, so I went for Gears of War 2 and Far Cry 2.
I really want to get my hands on Left for Dead after the awesome demo on Live, but decided not to get it, because a) it wasn’t out yet and b) I’m probably going to be offline for a couple of months, so multi-player focused games weren’t going to be much use to me until the new year.
I was concerned that Gears of War 2 wasn’t going to make it on my purchase list due to it being quite heavy on the multi-player but I decided to give it a go, since I’ve heard that the story is good and that horde mode is seriously addictive. I managed to get about an hour into the local co-op story mode with my sisters other half and have really enjoyed it so far. We also gave the horde mode a try and found we completely sucked at it, only making it to level five before getting pwned by the baddies. HopefullyÃ? I’ll do a little better when I have a crack on my own later on. Before long we resided to some local one on one multi-player action which would frequently result in bloody chainsaw battles or stalemates as we both spent all our time hiding behind cover – games like this definitely require more than two players for maximum enjoyment.
Last night, I gave Far Cry 2 a try and have really enjoyed it so far – blasting around the African Savannah in a 4×4 is quite a giggle, as is setting fire to mud huts with a flame thrower. I initially tried the traditional run n gun approach that you usually associate with first person shooters but quickly found myself being perforated with lead slugs from the militia that roam the game. I soon found that a bit more of a tactical approach would be necessary – my favourite of which is throw a napalm grenade in one side of their camp and then attack from the other direction, popping them all in the backs while they try to tend to the fire. I still have a lot of hours to put into this yet but so far, I’m absolutely loving it.
Next games on my hit list are the GTAIV downloadable content which should be out sometime before the end of winter and Halo Wars – the Halo Universe RTS game (something I’ve been gagging for for months). I may also consider picking up Red Alert 3 to tide me over until Halo Wars comes out…