'Budget Price' Review: Project Sylpheed (X360)

"Project Sylpheed is a space shooter/sim, and it surprised me"

I wasn't honestly expecting much from this game, and at first the controls felt awful and way too arcade-y for my tastes, but after couple of evenings, I really started to enjoy the game. Yes, it does get repetitive, as the only thing you really do is shoot down spacecraft of basically four variety: fighters, attackers (think of bombers), small spaceships and large spaceships, with a few special ones mixed in. However, it's no more repetitive than any average shooter, like quake or unreal tournament against AI opponents. If you're fine with battling against AI, then that's not a problem with this game.

The story is fairly short and simple, cliché but entertaining. You're playing as Katana, a cadet flying a new type of special fighter on a training mission, when some rebel forces attack, and the whole affair turns into a galaxy-wide war. I hated the last mission, but everything else until then is great fun.

The flying physics are semi-realistic. You can float around on inertia alone, but there are some special moves that break this rule, like a 180 degree sharp turn, which is pretty much the only way to avoid collission if you're heading towards a giant ship while on afterburners. You also slow down quickly after using afterburner, rather than retain the gained speed. There's also quick side-rolling to dodge fire or collissions. Fighters can't seem to collide in each other though, but rather go through each other. Such occasions are quite rare though.

The thing about the weaponry in this game is that it favors targeting multiple fighters at once, as well as very heavy weaponry that can take out huge battleships in couple of attack runs. It's more arcade than dogfight. I learned to adapt though, even though I'm more fan of space sims like Conflict: Freespace (on PC). Special maneuvers allow firing with multiple weapons at once, slow motion aiming and quick ramming attack. There's a good variety of weapons, but many of the new ones you gain are just improved versions of the old ones.

Missions consist of basically attacking, defending or escorting, but the difference is simply just where and when you apply your attacks. For most of the game you also have a wingman, and 2nd flight consisting of two fighters, which you can give a few different kinds of commands. Nothing genuinely effective though, as even such a simple command as 'defend that target' doesn't exist. The commands don't make much difference except if you send your buddies in the center of an enemy fleet. Then they can get shot down. Normally they all survive. The only thing that really sucks about missions is that they have a time limit. Even if you've just eradicated 99 out of 100 enemies, and the time runs out, it's game over. Very frustrating artificial difficulty factor until you've learned the controls well enough to not run into the limit so easily.

It took me about 4 or 5 evenings to finish the game, but I enjoyed playing it over for a second time, to collect the remaining weaponry. Achievements in this game are medals granted after missions if certain objectives were met. They're pretty easy to gain on the second playthrough at latest.

Music is decent, sometimes even great. Voice acting varies. Announcers in battles are good, but some plot characters sound shallow.

All in all, doesn't last for very long, but is a surprisingly fun space shooter/sim.

Scoring:

Visuals: 8/10
Audio: 8/10
Gameplay: 8/10
Lasting value: 7/10

Overall: 8/10

Review: LEGO Indiana Jones (Xbox 360)

"Quite fun platforming and puzzle solving."

Got this bundled with my 360. Thought it'd be too childish for me, but I actually enjoyed it once I bothered trying it. It's the first LEGO game I've tried, so I didn't really know what to expect.

Basically, what you do in this game is control one character at a time (out of 2-4), to jump and climb around, solving fairly straightforward puzzles (I never got stuck for more than a few minutes at worst), consisting of mostly fetching an item to operate another, to build something out of LEGO blocks to be used in a variety of ways, or to destroy something by smashing or throwing something at it. Occasionally you get areas with bad guys, which you punch and kick around, or you can pick one of their weapons (if they were carrying some) and use them. Since it's a LEGO game, you got no blood, just people and things turning into heaps of LEGO blocks.

You can switch between the available characters, to take advantage of their special skills to reach certain places, like women jumping higher or smaller character crawling through tunnels. The problem with this is that oftentimes the characters you are not controlling, are doing either nothing, or something completely stupid. They can hardly even fight back when surrounded by baddies. It's really annoying to be chased by a bad guy, wanting the other characters take care of it, while you concentrate on some more important task... but it never happens. You gotta get rid of the bad guy yourself, and usually by then another bunch of baddies appears. It gets annoying pretty fast. Luckily, you don't have lives in this game. When you 'die', you only lose some money you've collected during the current stage. And there's tons of money, so die as much as you like.

With the money you collect, you can unlock special characters to be used in freeplay mode (once you've completed a stage, you can play it again with any of the characters you've unlocked), to fetch treasures you couldn't find or reach in the story mode. The treasure only counts towards completion percentage of the game, so all that is optional, if you're not planning to complete the game to 100%. It's not a big challenge though, so why not. I played the game for less than a week and got about 85% completion, plus over half of the achievements unlocked for the game. It's easy Gamerscore points at least.

The story part of the game is split to three stories, each loosely based on the original Indiana Jones movies. The cutscenes are fairly funny, though it helps a lot to understand them if you've seen the movies. You just might wonder why that one guy suddenly runs for a cup of water and drinks from it near the end of the Last Crusade, if you haven't seen the movie.

Things get a bit repetitive, but the stages aren't very long, the puzzles are easy-ish and you can't die, or have to start over the entire stage, so it's good fun for a week or two of casual gaming.

Scoring:

Visuals: 9/10
Audio: 9/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Lasting value: 7/10

Overall: 8/10