Video Game Reviews @ The Temple

God of War 3 – So… that was as expected. It was fun, sure. Blood and guts is fun. Mashing buttons and ripping things apart is fun. QTEs are fun. But you could apply that exact same description to the last two games. I’m not really sure what the point of this one was. Oh yeah, it’s pretty. Well, GW2 was like 20 years ago. In my mind, it looks exactly like this one, so the graphics don’t really do much for me. So, same game, different textures. Nothing new. Fun, but old. Good distraction, fine way to unwind after months of being unable to play a video game, yep. But not really that special objectively.

Prototype / Infamous – So I played both of these games near each other, I might as well compare them directly, since I’ll be doing it indirectly in separate posts anyway. They are both super-hero type games, you have powers, you run around a city doing fighting stuff and climbing buildings. Infamous has a morality structure, prototype does not. As always the good/evil choices are pretty easy. There’s no gray or anything, but it’s kind of neat either being a famous hero or a hated villain as you walk around and see posters and people’s reactions. Overall the story of Infamous is probably better. Not that it’s amazing, but it seems like they put more effort in to it, and the end is pretty cool. Prototype is a hell of a lot more fun, though, I gotta say. To some extent, that is a result of Infamous’ choices, not its failures. That is, Infamous decides that you can only glide, and that to climb a building you have to hop from window to window, like Assassin’s Creed. Prototype says fuck that, you can literally run up the side of a building, leap off, fly for 3 city blocks, do a little air jump, fly some more, do ANOTHER air jump, fly some more, and then finally glide down. I can cross half the city in a single bound in the time the Infamous guy is still jumping past the 8th window. It’s not necessarily bad of Infamous to choose to make you slightly less powerful. But leaping around like a bad ass is much more good than climbing your 90th fire escape. Fighting is similarly streamlined and fun. In infamous hand to hand is pretty useless, mostly due to your limited range and limited ability to close range, and relative fragility to getting pounded by other guys’ guns while you fight one hand to hand. Prototype meanwhile is just chaos leaping from guy to go smashing them, pulling them in half, picking them up and destroying all their friends with their body. Plus driving tanks and helicopters is NEVER a bad thing. Again, it’s not like Infamous tried to do that and failed, they tried to do something different. But if I had 5 minutes to smash around a city, I’d definitely spend those 5 minutes in Prototype.