We form opinion on hundreds of things each day. Is the weather agreeable? Does this sandwich taste like cat food? Reaching an informed opinion on all the stuff we’re exposed to is far too much like hard work. So rather than incrementally classify, we slap a big, fat label on it and file it away for future reference. To divide and label is an inexorably human mechanism; one we employ whether faced with an information overload or driven by pure gut instinct.

360 Magazine labels developers; we categorise them as either scavengers or hunters. The former takes whatever the latter leaves behind, consumes it, digests it, and shits it out having added its own unique flavour. We don’t wish to diminish what these developers do, because providing more of the same is of vital service to the industry. Without them games would be scarce, so we welcome the second-rate Call Of Dutys and counterfeit Half-Lifes – they fill time between greats.

Do these developers employ talent? Hard work? Knowledge and skill? Yes in all cases, but it takes more than the sum of these parts to make a game like this one. It takes a knowing of not just how, but why it’s doing what it’s doing. It takes the bravery not to merely happen upon the carrion left by other, fiercer predators, but to strike out on one’s own. And with Forza Motorsport 4, Turn 10 has returned from the hunt, dragging with it a mammoth carcass; a tusker bull. We’re done with that analogy for now, but we may bring it back in our closing remarks.

Forza Motorsport 4 is the first game we’ve played that’s enhanced by Kinect rather than encumbered by it. For us, Kinect is synonymous with two simple questions: Is it easier/better than using a controller? Is it more fun than using a controller? The answer to both is almost never yes.

Autovista, the much-touted mode that encourages those with Kinect to walk, fiddle, and muck around with a selection of the world’s most beautiful cars, feels like a natural extension to the drama out on the track. The car models are the most detailed ever to appear in a videogame – close enough to photorealistic to fool the casual eye (see above). Sure, we were able to find flaws, primarily in the game’s want of decent antialiasing (removal of jagged edges), which are all the more jarring when everything else appears as real as the room you’re sat in. But to criticise Forza Motorsport 4 on that basis would be the equivalent of returning a free bar of gold because it’s upside down.

Not every car in the game has an Autovista version. Quite the contrary; only about five per cent do. That number isn’t all that surprising when you think about it, firstly because rendering either the individual stitches on the interior upholstery of a Ferrari 458 or the machined aluminium dash of a Spyker C8 represents an astounding investment in man-hours. And secondly, because there isn’t a huge amount of interest in getting a look at what purrs beneath the hood of a Toyota Aygo or a Chevrolet Spark. Yet, the inclusion of these cars in Forza Motorsport 4’s various race modes is every bit as important as the giant on whose shoulders the game’s vast array of super, hyper and full-blooded race cars stand. They are needed both for contrast and for pure fun.

Dan Greenawalt, the game’s creative director, has stated publicly his belief that Forza Motorsport 4 is the best-looking game of this generation. We find ourselves in wholehearted agreement, but why this game, why now? What has spurred the birth of this glamorous automotive wunderkind? A need to show there’s life in the old box yet? A need to cause Sony’s efforts to appear pedestrian? Or perhaps it’s merely the result of a transcendent love for the subject matter? The truth is, it’s all of the above, but whatever the cause, the result is the same; that Turn 10 has produced visuals so surprising that the looks on the faces of those either playing or observing it for the first time are as if invisible anglers are straining to reel in their eyebrows.

As well as Autovista, there’s also photo mode, in which we can photograph any of the 500 cars in the game, irrespective of their Autovista inclusion. Because these are the very same models that appear during a race – when the engine also has a track and 15 other cars to render – we’d have expected them to be of a distinctly lower quality. Nothing could be further from the truth. Putting any of these cars into one of the game’s photographic environments (countryside, warehouses, the Top Gear studio and more) reveals that, if anything, they’re even more convincing than those in Autovista.

You can’t lift the bonnet, beep the horn, or admire the limited edition issue plate on the inside of the doorframe, but from the outside, these cars look closer to real than anything to appear in a videogame up to this point. With just five loaves and two fish, Turn 10 has rendered 16 of these, a track, and the best physics model we’ve ever seen at a constant 60 frames per second – a miracle on a par with anything in Jesus’s ‘Best of’ collection.

Finding grip. It’s a term you’ll hear frequently in professional motorsport. To enter a corner at precisely the right speed and attitude is to walk a tightrope. Too slow and there lies lost time and a momentary struggle to realign, too fast and our tyres might as well be made of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rubber. Maintaining the limits of our car’s grip through a corner is not a case of simple guesswork. Like real life, it’s a cocktail of feedback, memory and feel. For the first time in a Forza Motorsport game, all three are necessary. Anyone watching one of Formula One’s in-car views will see the struggle to find grip in action; a jiggling of the steering wheel into each turn while at the limits of braking. This is not a struggle with the feedback, transmitted through the steering column, but a battle to find the point where the grip bites.

We play on a wheel, and appreciate that, though optimum for enjoyment, it’s a setup that won’t account for the majority. While we cannot vouch for any such grip-seeking wobbles being useful with a standard controller, the physics do remain constant. So let’s be clear: you do not need a wheel to enjoy this game, but there is a difference between ‘pleasure’ and ‘cargasm’, and for the latter you’ll need a wheel. After three straight days battling to find grip in a Ferrari F50, our arms droop limply over this keyboard like liquorice bootlaces. Painful? Yes. Worth it? Also yes.

The primary catalyst behind the improvement in vehicle handling is Pirelli’s involvement. There is no guesswork and no approximation. Pirelli tests the various compounds, then provides the data to Turn 10, which plugs it all right into the game. The difference between the handling model in Forza Motorsport 4 compared to its predecessor is like night and day – though we’ll admit that since we’ve never worked as professional racing drivers, until now we had no idea what day looked like.

Forza Motorsport 4’s career mode is called World Tour, and as much as it purports change over the career modes of the previous games in the series, the mechanics of it are all but identical. Race through several increasingly lengthy seasons in increasingly lively cars, each event presenting the player with a choice of three races specific to class, manufacturer, or model.

Every so often, Turn 10 throws in an event that isn’t straight-up circuit racing. These involve chasing a fast car through slow traffic, knocking bowling pins over, driving slalom through cone gates and so on. They do the job for which they’ve been designed; they add variety and prevent the majority circuit racing from dragging, even though a change of car every now and then pretty much accomplishes that on its own.

With up to 16 cars on the track at any one time, Turn 10 has had to implement some pretty hardcore AI to keep things from degenerating into the world’s most expensive bumper car simulator. Rather than choose how well we want the AI to race, their difficulty setting takes place entirely in the background; win races and they become tougher, lose races and watch as they barely make it around the track in one piece.

Background AI is preferable to setting the difficulty ourselves, because doing so always feels like answering awkward questions such as ‘How much do we want to win?’ and ‘Can our delicate egos really take on the crippling effects of the hardest difficulty setting?’ But age-old problems wouldn’t be age-old problems if they were easily solved, and this solution births some minor issues of its own.

Speaking for ourselves, we tend to win races more often than not due to a diligent and life-long fascination with both motorsport and the videogames that simulate it. But, it isn’t all that long winning races in World Tour before the AI cranks itself so high that doing so in untuned cars is next to impossible. Though driving faster and in better cars, it’s not the AI’s raw speed that scuppers us, but their aggression and their tendency either to swipe us off the track, rear-end us, or to drive five miles wide, blocking us completely and leaving us with little choice but to either barge them off the track at a hairpin, or admire their beautifully rendered backsides.

Since true joy can only be found in laps that are both fast and clean, the only way to avoid this fate is to sit on the starting grid for a couple of minutes, get in a few clean laps and accept last place until the AI cranks itself back down a little. Or, we can tune our car to a point beyond the means of the AI to catch us, which is precisely what we did with our Ferrari F50. Either way it feels like cheating.

In Rivals Mode, Turn 10 provides us a host of single-lap racing events; Top Gear track days, hot laps, drag and so on. Rather than enter a time and see how we do on the leaderboards, we can download the ghost of one of the performances further up the rankings than us and race it until we either beat it or give up, earning experience and credits for our efforts either way. Among strangers, this is more addictive than heroine roulette; among friends it would be the finest community innovation since party chat, but that accolade goes to Car Clubs.

We’ve already started our own and topped out the world leaderboards; something that’s helped immensely by the mere fifty people playing Forza Motorsport 4 at the time of writing. Start a club, give it a name, invite your friends. Joining provides them with a clan-style three or four letter abbreviation before their name, all members have access to every car owned by the entire collective, and there are Car Club leaderboards in every category: circuit, rival, drift, drag and so on.

Sadly, with limited column inches, many aspects of the game must go unexplored in this review, though we can assure you, not in real life. There is so much here to play with, to enjoy, to grit our teeth at, to hope we don’t fall from the grip high-wire, to push that little bit further. Forza Motorsport 4 is beautiful, immersive and represents a giant step forward for console racing.

Turn 10 has our deepest respect and our most sincere admiration for what is not merely the finest racer of this generation, but the finest of all time. It’s a game that gives so much and yet will continue to do so long into the future as pockets of Turn 10 staff add cars, tracks, challenges and other content.

The lion’s share of the studio, however, already has the next big game in its sights. Told you we’d bring that analogy back.

5/5

Gears Of War 3 is: The woohooing of unfeasible hunks of battle-tempered meat, a game-on-game upgrade of the COG arsenal that results in evermore splendid detonations, and the relentless onslaught of enemies who, now in lambent variety, constitute a macabre menagerie so varied as to feel not entirely unlike a day at the zoo – one with a couple of dozen guns and the insatiable urge to shoot all of the animals in the face.

It’s a game of tweaks; a place of honing and of taking the tried and tested mechanics of the series and polishing them to a fine lustre. Because, taken on their own, most of its enhancements are insignificant, as a collection, however – as a complete thing – they seamlessly coalesce to form something altogether new; an experience that’s part Gears Of War circa 2006, part bastard child of the last five years of evolving game design.

Games are unusual as an entertainment medium. They constitute the only place it’s okay to talk about technology in relation to the overall experience. Movies, once upon a time, were similar. Up until around a decade ago, when CG was still reaching for the sense of on-screen reality heralded by Messrs Golum, Binks and others, the subject of how good or bad a film’s special effects were was a regular point of discussion. These days, we take it for granted that anything that can be imagined can be put convincingly onto the screen – a luxury that’s thus far learned neither subtlety nor self-control. Instead, each studio competes to put on the biggest UFOs and the giantest, badassiest robot fights for the benefit of popcorn users.

Games, by contrast, are bound and limited by the box on which they must run, and so as we enter the twilight hours of this generation, it becomes ever more important that what little bit more juice remains is squeezed out. What is difficult to fathom in Gears Of War 3 is just how Epic Games has managed to squeeze it this dry. Certainly, we expected tweaks to Unreal Engine 3; it may have been a minor marvel five years ago, but with id’s Tech 5 and Crytek’s CryEngine 3 proliferating among third-party developers, gone are the days when it could afford to sit idly on its laurels.

But visual improvements over Gears 2 are immediately obvious. Environments are richer and more detailed, and with that, so too is new life breathed into the game’s characters. Light and shadow and rocks and greenery and the wind in the grass are all rendered with a fresh approach to detail that has rarely if ever been encountered, either in Epic’s own stable of titles, or by any third party developers using its engine. This alone would be impressive enough, but not unexpected, unlike say, doubling the frame-rate to a fairly steady 60fps, which outside of the occasional stutter during busy cut-scenes is exactly the improbable feat that Epic has accomplished.

So it’s pretty. But as well as pushing the Xbox 360 hardware substantially further than it has been to date, Epic’s underlying focus is to put a final end to the only criticism to crop up time and time again; that its gameplay is too stop-start – that our ability to dominate the enemy is provided at no cost to the patient player, thanks to the ever-presence of small, indestructible walls to hide behind. The very question that Epic now answers with a justified air of confidence.

Gears Of War 2 attempted the same feat, but the solution Epic came up with was to shift the battlefield itself rather than the dynamics of its actual gameplay. Rather than achieve the desired affect, battles pitched on the back of a Derrick or inside a giant Riftworm threw up the same set of problems, albeit on a world in motion. We still sat behind a wall and waited for the enemy to pop its head up while allowing our health enough recovery time to ensure victory.

Not so in Gears Of War 3. Few of its battlefields shift to provide the illusion of dynamism. Instead, dynamism is breathed through its every orifice. Through the game’s weapons, which now include such gems as the Digger Launcher, a gun that tunnels beneath any and all cover for an instant down of any or all of our four-person squad, and the One Shot, a sniper rifle whose power from the elevated positions of its operators renders cover entirely inconsequential. And the enemy AI has also seen a complete overhaul. The Locust, including the lambent variety, now charge at us, diving over our cover to down us with a kick to the face. And unlike previous editions, much of the cover itself is destructible, forcing us to move frequently.

While in the post-play analysis it’s fairly easy to put all these adjustments together and establish the cause of why we’re playing Gears Of War 3 in a way that’s different from the way we played its predecessors, during gameplay we barely noticed, instead putting its apparent freshness down to an umbrella attribute known simply as ‘feel’.

There’s very little in the game’s story that can be talked about here. Not that it isn’t worthy of mention – far from it – but being the series’ conclusion, it’s a place in which a narrative kick up the arse must be applied in order to reach any sort of terminus by the twelfth and final hour (depending on difficulty). Fear not, however, you will not find any spoilers here.

What we can do is talk about the effectiveness of the story in general terms. Story and games are a tricky subject as you’re no doubt aware, a fact that’s evident in any number of games whose budgets suggest they really should do better. The provision of enjoyable gameplay is often coupled with an incomprehensible narrative – much of the Call Of Duty series arguably fits this description.

There are many who criticise Gears Of War on the grounds that its lughead cast can barely form a sentence that doesn’t start with ‘Yeehaw!’ but to do so would be to miss the point. From the moment the first Gears Of War began back in 2006 to the end credits at the conclusion of the trilogy, it all makes perfect sense. In game terms, that’s an achievement. More, it’s actually gripping, and against our better judgment we find ourselves playing those last few hours not just to see the next spectacular set-piece, nor even obliged by our professionalism to see the credits roll, but for the same reasons we cannot put down a gripping novel: we simply must know how it all ends. And that, no matter its pitch towards either ultra-violence or gung-ho heroism, is currently the highest compliment we can offer.

In fact, the only moments in which the game fails are when its attempts at pathos – to milk our sympathies beyond the point they can reasonably stretch to – are far too obvious to have the desired effect. To a British audience, certainly, these are moments that, far from creating sympathy, instead see us cringe.

Like most great shooters of this generation, Gears Of War 3 pays careful respect to the changes of pace required to keep things interesting. More than its predecessors, that means more sections played on the rails than ever before. Before you scoff, we’re mostly not talking about staple high-speed chases while operating a turret on the back of a jeep that we’ve become so used to. Though those certainly play their part, Gears Of War 3 sets out to prove that there are a million ways you can dress them up to feel different from one another that neither boredom nor repetition ever play a part.

Gears Of War 3 is terribly playful when it comes to viewpoint. The opening chapter in which the COG’s battleship is attacked by a Leviathan (Gears Of War’s very own Kraken), is played from multiple angles; first from the point of view of Marcus and Dom, ending in a disaster whose perpetrator is none other than one Augustus ‘Cole Train’ Cole, and then from the perspective of Cole himself, who through trying to do the right thing, elevates the game’s state of emergency to catastrophic panic. As Marcus says during the game’s later stages from a quagmire of deep doodoo (to paraphrase) ‘I don’t like it when things get better, it always means they’re about to get a whole lot worse’ – a mantra on which the entire series appears to have been built.

New to the series are mechs, or Silverbacks and Loaders as they’re known in Gear-speak. Much has been made of these in the preview phase leading up to the game’s release, but to be honest, they appear so rarely as to prove mildly inconsequential in the grand scheme. At the start, we have to use Silverbacks to assist in taking down the Leviathan and there is one section late in the game where the density of the enemy is so great that without the handy provision of one of these walking tanks, our chances of survival would be negligible. The latter type, the Loaders, are ‘borrowed’ from Cameron’s Aliens and provide the more utilitarian function of moving story-crucial objects of a size too big and heavy for its muscle-bound cast of characters.

Outside of the game’s combat, or the extreme and unexpected twists in its story, that’s the type of thing we spend much of our time doing; flicking switches, or engaging in back-to-back mini-missions that provide us both with goals to focus on in the short term, as well as a steady trickle of satisfaction –  of getting the job done.

As we’ve come to expect from a Gears Of War title, boss battles are a veritable jewel in its crown, and that’s more the case here than it has ever been previously. Vast, seemingly impervious enemies crop up in staccato fashion to lend even greater variety to the ebb and flow of play. And unlike those found in the recent Deus Ex: Human Revolution, they feel very much at home in the Gears universe. All of them are thoroughly entertaining, and while they very often follow the Miyamoto technique – big entry, big roar, cue music, destroy three weak points to kill – we get the feeling that they’re more a respectful homage than any accountable form of plagiarism. That many of these battles required four phases of attack rather than three feels like an in-joke – one that never fails to be appreciated with a wry smile and a knowing wink.

And there are moments of great humour. Coupled with Gears Of War 3’s dour story concerns, we find ourselves laughing frequently. It’s littered with myriad humorous touches; fourth wall-defying one-liners and little easter eggs that have us, to this moment, looking back and enjoying the smiles they still bring to our faces. Note to readers: early on, when you come across the kids’ playground be sure and climb up into the playhouse and try the slide.

Gears Of War 3, reviewed here for its single-player campaign only, could only ever be the best in the series if it wishes to keep the IP alive, and with a healthy amount of excitement for whatever Epic next intends. It accomplishes this with great ease, exceeding expectations technically, narratively, and successfully evolving the Gears formula beyond the confines of the stop-’n-pop jail in which it once found itself a contented, yet troubled prisoner. It is everything we expected, gloriously multiplied beyond hope. It is a fitting end, but also a brand new beginning.

5/5

Modern first-person shooters tend to funnel us along a singular path, a fact that has more to do with technical limitations than it does creative inadequacy. They (and when we say they, we mean ‘The Man’) don’t want us to go through any door we like, use whatever weapons we please or outsmart, rather than outshoot, the AI, because they are (The Man is) too busy spending all our console’s resources on flashy graphics that are microscopically superior to the competition. No, you’ll go through that door, holding that gun, and you’ll shoot them while collecting bullets with your insta-healing face.

There’s nothing wrong with that, we suppose. Like watching a summer blockbuster, the parts of the brain that cost energy, the problem solving parts, shut down. We run along with the right trigger held down, everything dies, we win. Applause.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution resolutely hates the notion that this formula constitutes gameplay. While the frontal assault technique is there should we want to turn it into every other shooter we’ve ever played, we can also keep a low profile, take down bad guys with either lethal or non-lethal force, stay out of sight completely, or we can hack every part of the enemy’s security, even turning automated defences against them.

Human Revolution purports choice in much the same way as BioShock did. Players unlock gradual upgrades that can be customised to varying effect. In place of Plasmids are Praxis points. During the opening scenes, player-character Adam Jensen is injured in an attack on Sarif Industries, the biotech giant that employs him as its chief of security. After the obligatory reconstruction montage (which had us humming the A-Team theme tune – you didn’t need to know that, but there it is), Jensen is informed that most of his augmentations are currently switched off, to be brought online gradually so that his body doesn’t reject the implants. Convenient, sure, but also one of the better excuses offered for the gradual unlocking of powers that’s staple to the RPG genre.

And make no mistake; Deus Ex: Human Revolution is an RPG, or at least, it wants to be.

We’re told that if we earn, buy, or find Praxis points, we can unlock our dormant abilities at a faster rate. We’re also warned that we’ll need to specialise, because there won’t be enough Praxis to unlock every one of Jensen’s abilities. Probably what Eidos Montreal needed to make a little clearer was just how much we’d need to specialise. By the time the end credits rolled, we’d unlocked around half of the total number available. We advise you give some serious thought to the type of approach you want to take before you get stuck into it.

Many of the problems we have with Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s choices are related to this limited levelling concept. We chose stealth and hacking as our specialities and ploughed most of our Praxis into the attributes associated with them: hacking of cameras, robots, safes, doors, emails and so on, as well as soundless walking and temporary adaptive camouflage. But in doing so, we cut ourselves off from taking on each situation in a different way.

Choice is a good thing for two reasons: for one, it’s more involving, but more importantly it allows us to vary the way we play. If there are four ways to accomplish an objective, chances are we only have the attributes to make use of one or two of them, so despite Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s purported sense of freedom, its upgrade system rather than any artificial or geographical borders, is the primary device at work limiting it. Increasing our powers doesn’t open up the game world, instead it paints us into a corner. Our Jensen may be the best hacker out there, but he can’t shift that heavy wheelie bin out of our way when we really need him to.

There’s this guy we know in real life; he’s a microbiologist (for the purposes of this review, we’ll call him ‘Jack’, because his name is Jack). In his chosen field, specialisation is the only way forward. One microorganism would be researched and understood, then some small part of that microorganism, then some small part of that part and so on. “Every microbiologist in the world is the foremost authority on something,” he says, “trouble is, when I apply for a job, it’s a million-to-one shot that it’ll be the thing they’re looking for.”

And that’s exactly how Deus Ex: Human Revolution feels. Levelling is a case of catching up with whatever the game’s increasingly unwelcoming environments throw at us. ‘Robot hacking… we really need robot hacking here. Note to self; upgrade it when we get some Praxis so that next time we’re in this situation we won’t be short of the skills we need.’ Trouble is, next time we don’t need robot hacking, we need strength, or slow-fall, or social augmentation, or more battery power. There’s always something, and that has a mildly detrimental effect on the gameplay. We’re always on the lookout for games that treat us like intelligent human beings, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s approach is one of the best we’ve come across. There are no reams of text to wade through, no tiresome ‘VR’ levels to train in. Instead, situations of complexity offer the option to sit back and watch a short, narrated video on the subject. If we want to learn by stubborn trial and error (and we live for that shit) that option is there for us too.

The game’s propensity to let us off the leash runs to every part of it. Shortly after the game begins, we’re set loose in downtown Detroit. It’s a relatively small area when set alongside the likes of GTA IV or Just Cause 2 – very small, in fact. But it’s bursting with stuff and begging to be explored. Take a look around and you’ll find NPCs offering side-quests, street rabble discussing the state of the world, hobos camped around burning oil barrels, the members of various gangs eyeing us from shadowy doorways. It’s clear that Blade Runner has been an inspiration here: the way the hazy streets are furnished in neon, technology and sweat, how the hard orange light pours in through oversized corporate windows just a little too often for thematic coincidence. But there are other influences to be seen here, too. The author William Gibson, a man charged with the invention of cyberpunk has a hand, as do any number of anime. Ghost In The Shell, Cyber City Oedo 808 and Appleseed all feel as if they’re playing some small part in its design.

These influences have shaped the hacking system in Deus Ex: Human Revolution to feel how it appears in most ‘good’ science fiction; like a war between mind and machine. Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s hacking mini-game is superior to every other; it’s deep and takes time to master. We could go into a page or two on how it all works and how our various upgrades affect each facet of it, but such details are better left to the discovery of its players. Suffice to say that, while initially bewildering, in the longer term it satisfies deeply.

Brownie points are also won through clever use of atmospherics. When the game is quiet, it’s really quiet, but as tension mounts, it uses a series of increasingly pressing audio and musical cues to add urgency where needed and calm where not.

Our list of minor gripes, however – while none prevent Deus Ex: Human Revolution from being, overall, a very decent game – is extensive.

There is a problem with the game’s character animation. From what we can tell, the majority have been animated by hand rather than motion capture. This lends the NPCs – as well as Jensen himself when we’re looking at him rather than through him – an awkward, Marcel Marceau quality, every gesture overstated, every subtlety misjudged.

Worse are the facial animations. Rather than hand-animate, or performance capture each speech, Eidos Montreal has instead employed a middleware package called FaceFX. Although the software allows comprehensive tweaking, we get the feeling that little of this was applied. The lip synch is like a dubbed Seventies kung fu movie; The Return Of The Five Deadly Venoms perhaps, or Fake White Panto Beards Of Fury. Truly, we have not seen a triple-A game this generation with facial movement that’s less realistic.

The dialogue leaves a lot to be desired too. It’s functional, sure, but it comes across neither naturalistic, nor as proper drama should. This, plus the shonky facial animation, limited our ability to empathise with the characters in any meaningful way, which is why our usual ‘second time through, be an arsehole to everybody’, became the MO for our first run instead.

Once upgraded, Jensen’s social skills receive a pheromone ejection system that allows him to cleverly manipulate NPCs. It’s paper, scissors, stone. There are three discrete personality types – alpha, beta and omega – split into a three-row readout. As they speak, bars register in each personality type. When it comes time to persuade them, we can use this information to choose the correct dialogue option. Most NPCs are a mixture of personality types and all answers will please one type, while angering another, so the trick is to pick the rock to blunt the scissors, just not the rock that angers the paper.

Any game that offers its players a special power or two tends to rely on that empowerment to keep them interested. The thought of experiencing Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s violent future world through the eyes of a special operations security enforcer crammed with more sci-fi juju than the starship Enterprise is an appealing one. Adam Jensen should have been unique, almost superhero-like. But he’s not the only one with superhuman implants. From your average NPC on the street, through urban gang members, all the way to the game’s ‘boss’ characters, every sap, hobo, and counter clerk has something enhanced. It should be great fun being Superman, but if everyone else is also Superman, what’s the point?

This is quite off-putting. We found ourselves asking just how many amputees we’d see in real life on the street in, say, a year? One? Two maybe? In Deus Ex, most people have robot arms, legs or both. But ‘Ah!’ you say, ‘if those limbs are stronger and better then it makes sense that everyone will want them.’ What we say to that is. Here’s the offer: we’re going to saw off your arms and legs and replace them with clunky-looking bits of machinery that are – a bit – stronger than the ones you have. Would anyone in their right mind say yes to this proposal? No, it’s a lot of sci-fi for sci-fi’s sake. Most certainly, parts of Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s world are highly unconvincing.

It may seem that we’ve been a little harsh with our criticism of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but it’s a complex game and its minor faults take column inches to properly explain. Make no mistake, this is an excellent game, but it’s some way off perfect. Choice is an addictive drug. Where Deus Ex: Human Revolution offers us a little, we take it, we try it, we’re hooked and we’re back for more. When there is no more to give, however, there begins to creep regret.

Whether the prison walls are far distant or close by, you’re fenced-in either way, and in some small way at least, we’d have rather Eidos saved us the long walk, pleasant though it was.

4/5

Specs:
Dimensions: 52 x  112 x 159cm
Weight: 42Kg
Designed for platforms: PC, PS3, Xbox 360
Racing wheel compatibility: Any Racing wheel on any platform. Extra plate required for official Xbox 360 wheel.
Monitor compatibility: Fits any VESA mountable screen up to 37″ and 18Kg
Price: £279.95 (basic model), £349.95 (Pro model – reviewed)
Buy Online: GT Omega Racing

Pros: A very sturdy chassis which supports a large range of driver sizes, a monitor up to 37″ inches and 5.1 surround speakers. Incredibly comfortable for long stints behind the wheel
Cons: The until doesn’t fold down (though the front and rear sections are easily unscrewed), it’s incredibly heavy and the steering wheel adjuster isn’t particularly convenient

The GT Omega Racing Simulator comes in two flavours. The basic model – priced at £279.95 – offers a sturdy chassis and connectivity for a plethora of popular racing wheels across console and PC platforms, an elevated platform for your pedals and a full-size racing seat in red and black faux leather – basically, everything you need to get started. The model reviewed today, however, is the Pro version which also comes complete with a VESA mount for your monitor (supporting up to 37” / 18KG screens), a console table to keep your kit on, a H-shift gearbox mount (for the popular Logitech G25 and G27 racing wheels), twin speaker stands at the rear (for 5.1 surround sound support) and a 360 swivel keyboard and mouse platform that can be mounted on either the left or right side. Conveniently, these extras can be purchased separately and easily added to the basic mount, but the price difference between buying the separates and going for the Pro model makes the latter the much more affordable route.

Although we were a little petered with the lack of printed instructions in any of the three boxes we received, full instructions can be found online at the bottom of the GT Omega Racing website. Of course, instructions are for wimps, not adrenaline fuelled racing racing fanatics, so we went it alone and actually found it all pretty self explanatory, assuming you have an idea what the finished unit actually looks like. As mentioned, it’s useful to have an extra set of hands to help fit the incredibly heavy racing seat to the frame itself, but once the bolts were fitted, the final parts all slotted together with relative ease. The unit also comes with tools you’ll need to put it together, though you’ll need a decent Phillips screwdriver to do the job properly. In all it took us about 40 minutes on the first run through (sans instructions). This could easily come down to 20 minutes with a bit of practice. Suffice it to say that the build quality is excellent, and it’s immediately apparent the frame is plenty sturdy enough to support a large driver without the worry of shaking the bolts loose on a frantic hairpin.

Our only real bugbear in terms of its build design is the lack of adjustment on the steering column itself. Although it is actually possible to change the height and distance of the wheel, it uses a number of bolts to hold it steady, so there’s no quick adjustments. That said, you’d need to have two drivers of distinctly different sizes for it to make any meaningful difference, and we’d certainly rather a solid base for the wheel, than something that could shake itself apart after a few uses.

Verdict: 4/5 Stars
Although it takes up quite a bit of space, the GT Omega Racing Simulator is clearly built to last with plenty of structural support for both the full-size racing seat and pretty much any racing wheel and pedals combination you can throw at it. Also, while the material that covers the racing seat is knock off, the racing seat itself certainly isn’t. It’s fully sprung, adjustable and reclines just like the real thing. In fact, it is the real thing. The whole package looks impressive and very comfortable to use, but it’s also incredibly heavy – weighty enough to require two people to comfortably connect it to the chassis itself. Ultimately, it’s a massive investment at £349.95, but one we can’t help recommend for serious racing sim fanatics who have the space for a semi-permanent set-up.

Developer: Infinity Ward Publisher: Activision Price: 800 MS Points

The Call Of Duty hype machine has been at full speed for a number of years – six, in fact – and has reached the point where whole generations of gamers are riding the wagon without any idea of the relatively humble origins of the series. Thankfully, then, Call Of Duty Classic has come along to reintroduce all those starry-eyed kids to where it all began, as well as remind the rest of us where it all came from.

First and foremost, those newcomers won’t be at all impressed with what’s become the enormous gulf between the visual quality of then and now. The HD upgrade has largely done this last-gen title no favours. The problem with simply increasing the screen resolution of old graphics is that you’re left with the same low polycount and texture detail, meaning what’s happening on screen will often be made to look older and creakier than it ever did next to the smooth lines of the 1080p resolution.

Still, a playable, well-constructed shooter can’t be bogged down by something as simple as lousy graphics. Starting up Classic just after we’d been unfortunate enough to play through the woeful Rogue Warrior, we were more sensitive than ever to the difference between an imaginative, well paced and atmospheric campaign and a pile of dross starring a blowhard, swearing idiot. Classic is certainly an example of the former, containing many glimpses of the brilliance we’d see in the future.

So while Classic misses out on many of the pyrotechnic effects and bombastic, mood-building set pieces of its successors (particularly, naturally, Modern Warfare), the basic, duck-and-cover experience you’re left with contains enough pure COD action that it’s instantly recognisable, utterly playable and loses almost nothing in the translation.

In fact, one or two things even feel like gains – finite health, for example. While we initially hated the idea of returning to such a dated concept as – shock – dying when your health bar runs down, we found that the lingering concept of facing genuine, instant death by the next bullet somehow enhanced that oppressive fear of being Private Grunt, dropped alone into a village just outside Normandy and forced to fend for yourself for a while. And anyway, there are more than enough health packs lying about, and a careful bit of resource management keeps you in fine fettle most of the time.

Still, that feeling of fragility is perhaps what Classic (and, indeed, Call Of Duty 2 after it) tends to hinge on. Way before you were Soap MacTavish and were hurtling through Russian ice bases taking on whole armies on your own, you were simply a tiny cog in an ill-equipped, ragtag machine facing impossible odds, and Classic’s a great reminder of that fact.

Taking in three different campaigns, spanning (in COD tradition) the experiences of three different soldiers, you’ll first find yourself fighting with the Americans, while embroiled in the invasion of Normandy around D-Day, as well as attacking the Bavarian Alps to rescue two British officers (one of whom is named Captain Price, incidentally). Next, the British missions deal with the airborne part of the Normandy landings, known as Operation Tonga, followed by the “Dam Busters” campaign at the Eder River in Germany. The Russian campaign deals with the Siege of Stalingrad, even taking in such details as Pavlov’s House, before shifting to the Vistula-Oder Offensive on the Eastern Front. Epic? You bet. It almost feels like Infinity Ward didn’t expect to ever make a sequel or spinoff, so conclusively and accurately does this game cover the popular key events of World War II. In this way, it’s a truly excellent and comprehensive simulation of the war; nevertheless, you still can’t help but think how amazing it would have been to play these historical moments with the later games’ improved controls and a little bit more graphical kick.

Ropey graphics aside, this is still an excellent Infinity Ward history lesson. It just can’t hope to hold up to its more advanced descendants.

Score: 3 out of 5 stars

//Publisher: Zen United //Developer: ArcSystem Works //Number of players: 1-6 //DLC: Yes

You’ve got to hand it to Capcom – it has really breathed new life into the beat-’em-up. Super Street Fighter IV has just been released, titles like Marvel Vs Capcom 2 and HD Remix are available to download on Live Arcade, and it’s opened the floodgates for a slew of contenders, all wanting to take the Japanese giant down.

The latest combatant to step up to the mark is Arc System Works’ BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, quite possibly the prettiest 2D fighter you’re ever likely to see on next-gen hardware. After wowing us offline with its motley range of bizzaro characters and solid fighting mechanics, we were eager to see how it would stack up online. We’d be lying if we weren’t concerned that a small niche publisher wouldn’t be able to create the tight netcode needed for a proper online experience.

Problems immediately arose when we tried to just jump into a quick match. Try as we might, it was impossible to get into a game due to the connection constantly resetting. Regardless of whether we tried jumping into a Ranked or Player match, the end result was always the same: lengthy waits and gnashing of teeth while we watched the on-screen ticker constantly tell us that we couldn’t connect.

Capcom’s finally bitten the bullet and announced Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds. It’s apparently going to have more characters than ever before (which will be amazing, as the last one had 56!) and by all accounts looks like it’s going to follow the rather 2.5D graphical stylings of Streetfighter IV.

In case you’re not already a die-hard fan, as you should be, here’s a quick review of the XBLA re-release of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, which we printed last year back in issue 55.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2

Several attempts have been made to convert Capcom’s superlative fighter mash-up to home formats, yet it was always the relatively niche Sega Dreamcast version that had the edge before.
Luckily, the 360 contains more than enough grunt to get everything on screen cooking, so even when you’ve both thrown all your fighters into Team Combos and the screen’s full of lasers, robotic panthers and butt-stomping Juggernauts, not even the slightest frame is dropped. That means that this 56 character epic of a battle is as amusing and immediate as it ever was, with almost literally every character to ever appear in a 2D Capcom fighting game present in some way or other, with one or two new faces along for the ride. Giant cactus in a sombrero, anyone? Check.
While fighting purists will find little of interest after a few hours, the focus of the ‘versus’ series always being far more on madcap specials and outrageous visual jokes than elegant combos or cancelling systems, the rest of us can look forward to a frenetic blowout of fighting, with more famous faces than you can shake a stick at. 5/5

Mark Morris, MD of Introversion, talks smoking jackets, Rage Against The Machine and super-hot chicken wings in our latest dev Q&A.

How you know this person:

Mark’s the MD of Introversion, a developer that has worked on crazy hacking sim Uplink, nuclear war sim DEFCON and has just released Darwinia+ on XBLA.

Describe your latest game in three words:

Stick. Man. Slaughter.

When you were growing up you wanted to be a…

Spy. I was quite into James Bond and I wanted to save the planet from the baddies.

What was the first videogame you ever played?

Probably something like Horace Goes Skiing way back on my first Spectrum 16K.

Name one game you wished you’d made:

Portal. In my view this was Valve at its absolute finest.

What one animal, vegetable or mineral would you like to see more of in games?

Traffic Wardens – they’re animals. Someone make a Left 4 Dead mod with traffic wardens.

Do you have, or have you ever had, any of the following: a monocle, a leather jerkin, a handlebar moustache?

No, but I do have a pipe and I really want a smoking jacket.

Currently listening to…

Rage Against the Machine.

What’s your guiltiest pleasure?

I’m addicted to super-hot chicken wings. I’ll sit in my hotel bed in my pants and eat a whole plate… there’s a nice image for you.

Best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

If you don’t know the answer, find the person that does.

When you’re not gaming you’re…

Being thrown around the karate dojo by my not-quite-sane sensei.

Mass Effect 2 will see its UK release in just two days’ time. If you’re finding it difficult to wait till Friday then check out our awesome review of the game over on NowGamer.

As always, let us know your thoughts on the review and the game itself below.

Abandon all preconceptions at the door, leave all tentative notions in the cloakroom and do away with those nasty afflictions you may have that cause you to shun something that looks a bit different, or doesn’t have the words ‘modern’ and ‘warfare’ in its title. Bayonetta has arrived and has reminded us once more why Platinum Games is a development team that should be celebrated until the end of days.

Bayonetta sees players take control of the titular witch as she searches for clues to her forgotten past. Yes, it’s hokey, it’s an amnesia story and it features an awful ‘English’ accent from the little girl (while Bayonetta’s is strangely good, we should add). But this would be to miss the point, and to ignore what’s really going on. We won’t claim this is high art or even particularly clever, but the tale is told with wit, charm and a snappiness missing from most of the po-faced nonsense we are drip-fed these days. If Bayonetta were to have a scene similar to Gears Of War 2’s Dom/wife/hand-cannon one, it would be handled much better, simply because it would be handled with humour. Very much self-aware, the game makes reference to countless Sega and Capcom classics, from Viewtiful Joe to Okami and Resident Evil to Sonic – and lest we forget the level with the remixed After Burner music track, or the Space Harrier level later on in the game. It’s cliché on the surface, but dig a little and you have a subtle satire on the games industry today, laced with a lot of love for the very industry it pokes fun at. Keiji Inafune said the Japanese games industry is ‘finished’. He hasn’t played Bayonetta, then.