Publisher: Acclaim
Developer: Acclaim
Genre: Beat-'Em-Up
Release Date: Nov 18, 2003
ESRB: MATURE
ESRB Descriptors: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence
Number of Players: 1 Player
Ancient Rome and, more specifically, Roman gladiators have always made interesting subject matter for various mediums of entertainment. Throughout the years, numerous films, including the Academy Award-winning classics Ben Hur and Gladiator, featured some of the most epic gladiatorial action sequences every created and made heroes out of these enslaved Roman warriors. Strangely enough, however, there haven't been many good action games to feature Roman gladiators in any really serious capacity. Recently, this has all come to change, thanks to Acclaim's Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance, an action adventure game rooted deeply in a style that combines Ridley Scott's Gladiator with some of the more mythical aspects of Roman history. Gladiator does have some shortcomings, as its simplistic and frequently flawed gameplay can prove to be problematic. However, some excellent production values and an intriguing plot ultimately make the game most certainly worth checking out.
Sword of Vengeance focuses on the life of one Invictus Thrax, a Roman born into slavery, who eventually rose through the ranks of gladiator battle to become the champion of all gladiators. He was also once favored by the Roman emperor, who promised him his eventual freedom. However, at the beginning of the game, we learn that the emperor was mysteriously killed and replaced by Arruntius, a sinful, vice-driven madman who has plunged Rome into its darkest times. Arruntius has decided to demolish the city of Rome in favor of a new capital city named Arruntium, to further commemorate its unholy leader. To celebrate the demolition, Arruntius stages a grand gladiatorial event, with Thrax at its epicenter. Thrax fights valiantly but is inevitably killed at the hands of an unseen and seemingly inhuman opponent.
Upon his entry into the afterlife, Thrax is accosted by a pair of twin boys dressed in theater masks. They are revealed to be the sons of the Roman god Jupiter: Romulus and Remus. They explain to him that the gods are greatly displeased with Arruntius' ascension to power and reveal that all of this is largely due to assistance from Phobos and Deimos, the gods of fear and terror, respectively, who are also the sons of Mars, the god of war. Thrax is charged with the task of restoring Rome to its past glory and eliminating Arruntius--a task that Thrax is only too happy to accept.
Gladiator is, essentially, a beat-'em-up game with swords. At your disposal, you have two basic attack buttons, which can initially be strung together into some rudimentary combos. You also have a magic button and an all-purpose action button. The action button comes into play in any number of different ways. Some examples include situations where Thrax must jump across a ledge, glide down a rope, use a key in a lock, pull a lever, and so on. Any time one of these actions is performed, it is done through an in-engine cutscene, so the action itself doesn't actually require any skill on your part. The game's basic attacks and magic attacks can be upgraded and earned through challenges. Challenge points are scattered pretty much throughout the game and usually entail slicing up a specific number of enemies or breaking a number of different objects in a set time frame. Through these challenges, you'll earn new magic attacks, like Herculean battle magic, which makes you much stronger and faster. You can also earn the power of Pluto, which brings up spirits from the underworld to assist you in battle. Other items, like new axes, better swords, and the like, can also be earned, in addition to improved combo attacks.
Minimum System Requirements
System: 1 GHz Intel Pentium III or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB
Hard Drive Space: 1300 MB
Screen Shots
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Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance
Cold Fear
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Darkworks
Genre: Horror Action Adventure
Release Date: May 17, 2005 (more)
ESRB: MATURE
ESRB Descriptors: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language
Cold Fear is the first action-horror title under the Ubisoft brand. The game is set in a dynamic environment on a stormy sea, including intense combat, intelligent enemies, and a high element of the shockingly unexpected. Your life jacket won't be sufficient. Players step into the role of Tom Hansen, a U.S. Coast Guard who is sent to board a drifting Russian whaling ship in the middle of a howling storm on the Bering Sea, who will discover there is no safe place here. On this constantly rocking and shifting ship and a mysterious oil rig, players must turn their interactive surroundings to their advantage to take down human enemies and enemies that aren't human any more - and save their own life. [Ubisoft]
Minimum System Requirements
System: 1 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB
Video Memory: 64 MB
Hard Drive Space: 2200 MB
Other: 2000 / XP ONLY
Recommended System Requirements
System: 2 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 128 MB
Hard Drive Space: 2200 MB
Other: 2000 / XP ONLY
Screen Shots
MegaMan X8
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Genre: 3D Platformer
Disney's Tarzan: Action Game
Genre:Adventure (PC)
Publisher:Disney Interactive
Developer:Eurocom
Release Date:Q2 1999 [North America]
Background:Your jungle home is alive with danger... elephant stampedes, ferocious crocs and leopards with bad attitudes. It's tough to be an orphan raised by apes, especially when humans arrive and change your world forever. It'll take all of your animal instincts and more to survive this wild adventure so, prepare to get in touch with your inner ape.
Min System Requirements:
Windows 95/98/ME/XP
Pentium 200 MHz+
32 MB RAM
50 MB free disk space
256 color video card (3D acceleration with 4 MB recommended)
4X CD-ROM
16-bit sound card
Windows compatible joystick or gamepad optional.
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The Thing
Publisher: VU Games
Developer: Computer Artworks
Genre: Horror Action Adventure
Release Date: Aug 20, 2002
ESRB: MATURE
ESRB Descriptors: Blood and Gore, Violence
Given the bleak track record of movie-to-game translations, The Thing--based on John Carpenter's 1982 horror film, which was itself a remake of the 1951 Howard Hawks original--comes saddled with some understandably low expectations. Against the odds, it's actually good. In fact, if it weren't for a general scarcity of terror and a control scheme unsuited to its action-oriented gameplay, The Thing would be great.
Rather than retelling the movie's plot, the game starts right where the movie ended. You're sent to investigate the pair of Antarctic research stations that provided the setting for the film's events. Along the way, you'll run across various survivors and fellow investigators, with whom you can team up. This is The Thing's most innovative idea. At any given point, you can have as many as three computer-controlled teammates traveling with you. You can hand them weapons and ammo, heal them, and give them simple dog commands such as stay and follow. Because the thing itself is a parasitic infection, nobody knows who's infected and who isn't.
Teammates each have a trust meter that gauges how firmly they believe you're not a thing. Various actions, such as healing them, helping them in combat, and giving them equipment, all raise this trust level, while other actions lower it. If a companion doesn't trust you, he (they're all male) won't follow your orders and may eventually even attack you. Each person also has a fear level. As his terror rises, he becomes more unhinged. If nothing is done to relieve his fear, he'll eventually go crazy, at which point he may become totally unresponsive, kill himself, wet his pants, or start firing his weapon blindly. Roughly the same actions that increase a team member's trust in you will also quell his fears. Of course, any of your companions may actually be a thing, meaning at some point he'll transform into a monster.
In theory, this fear/trust/infection system sounds like a great way to capture the film's atmosphere of unremitting paranoia. In practice, however, it has little impact on the game. The actions that earn your teammates' trust and lower their fear are all things you'd be doing anyway--arming them, supplying them with ammo, healing them, and fighting monsters. So while it's possible for a sidekick to lose his mind or turn on you, it'll never actually occur except as the result of a conscious decision on your part to make it happen just to witness the results. Only once during the short seven hours it took to finish The Thing did a team member ever succumb to fear, and that may have been a largely unavoidable part of a puzzle sequence.
The threat of companions turning into things is less a source of terror and more a minor inconvenience, since the things are generally no match for your weapons. When a teammate turns, you'll kill him and move on. It's generally no great loss, both because existing team members often don't follow you across level transitions and because new members are available at regular intervals. Every other video game is about a solitary hero fighting a horde of monsters, so just having a coterie of armed guards--even if some of them are things--actually further undercuts the game's horror quotient.
In fact, The Thing is really more of an action game with monsters to shoot than a moody survival horror piece. The hallmarks of the survival horror genre--a relatively frail hero and a scarcity of munitions--simply don't apply here. As in a traditional run-and-gun shooter, weapons, ammo, and health are abundant, and your character can take a real beating. At no point will you be low on health and down to your last few bullets. Compared to you, the things themselves are pretty weak. You'll often find yourself chasing a thing as it flees in terror from your flamethrower. So in some sense, it works as survival horror from the thing's perspective.
However, as an action game, The Thing is largely successful. The controls are its only real drawback. You view your character from a third-person perspective. You can look left and right with the mouse, but not up and down. In order to look up or down, you need to hold in a free-look key, during which time you can't move. Unless you're in the free-look mode, aiming is automatic. It's a control scheme much more suited to a console gamepad (The Thing is also available on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox) than the PC's combination of a keyboard and mouse. Having no auto-aim (or even an option to toggle it on or off) and a persistent free-look--essentially the de facto standard in third-person PC games--would have made for a much more satisfying control scheme.
Other than that, though, The Thing is a good shooter. The teammate AI is great in a fight, and there are a lot of well-staged battles. One that takes place in a small building being attacked from all four sides by waves of things is especially intense. The puzzles are lightweight, but generally intuitive. The game has an almost perfect blend of story and gameplay--interesting things happen without intruding on the ongoing action. The game even utilizes a limited save system that, with a few exceptions, is lenient enough to avoid being frustrating.
The Thing is kind of short, it's not especially effective at making you feel afraid, its most intriguing gameplay elements are somewhat extraneous, and it suffers from a wonky control scheme. Yet, thanks to some high production values and consistently interesting action scenes, The Thing rises above these flaws. It could have been great, but in light of the checkered history of movie-licensed games, being good at all is a pretty impressive achievement.
By Erik Wolpaw, GameSpot
System: PII 400 or equivalent
RAM: 64 MB
Hard Drive Space: 600 MB
Recommended System Requirements
System: PIII 600 or equivalent
RAM: 64 MB
Second Sight
Publisher: Codemasters
Developer: Free Radical
Genre: Sci-Fi Action Adventure
Release Date: Feb 18, 2005
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Blood, Mild Language, Violence
Copy Protection: StarForce software protection technology contained in one or more versions of this game.
The psychically powered adventure Second Sight was released last September on the three major consoles, and now it's hitting the PC with the same story and gameplay, better graphics, and a budget-minded price. Developer Free Radical is more famously known for twitchy first-person shooters than involved action adventure games, but the team has imbued this one with an interesting storyline and satisfying gameplay that blend to create a rewarding experience with its own unique identity. Despite a few rough patches, Second Sight proves to be an entertaining ride while it lasts.
You'll take control of John Vattic, a battered amnesiac who awakens in a medical facility with no clue of how he got there or why he's so banged up. Pretty soon, Vattic figures out he has got an array of nifty psychic powers at his disposal, so he sets out to discover how he ended up in this state and why so many shady characters seem to be after him. The game uses a neat (and effective) narrative device that tells two parallel, intertwined stories. In every other level, you'll flash back six months to Vattic's involvement in Operation Winter Ice, a secret mission to investigate the doings of a crazed scientist in Russia. The way the game feeds you small morsels of the backstory as you play through the events of the present makes for a compelling plot that fosters a genuine desire to find out more about what's going on.
In gameplay terms, Second Sight is essentially a stealth action game with useful psychic powers included. Vattic can back up against walls and peer around corners; sneak up quietly and knock out an oblivious enemy; or go for a headshot with a tranquilizer pistol to silently eliminate a foe from afar. But then he can also use his telekinesis to fling objects (and enemies) around the room or project an astral version of himself to traverse areas that aren't accessible to his corporeal body. Other powers include a simple healing effect, a psychic attack projectile, and the extremely useful charm, which renders Vattic invisible to enemies (but not security cameras) for a short period. The game does a good job of presenting you with situations where using your mind powers or shooting a bunch of guns are equally viable strategies.
Free Radical has a lot of experience with shooters--TimeSplitters has been its biggest property to date--so it's fitting that the shooting in Second Sight is well implemented. You'll be able to pick up an assortment of pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, and sniper rifles from enemies, and the game provides a loose auto-targeting system that lets you fine-tune your aim for headshots. There's also a useful sniper-rifle effect that pops up your scope in the lower right corner rather than switching you to a disorienting first-person view. The psychic powers are a lot of fun to use in both puzzle and combat situations, but it's nice that the game lets you fall back on good, solid firearms if that's how you want to play.
What's also fortunate is that, with a few exceptions, you're not hitched too tightly to the stealth yoke. Many times (depending on the mission), you'll be free to shoot up an entire room, then lay low until the alarm ends and you can go on your way. Some levels do require you to be secretive, punishing you with an endless and overwhelming force of enemies if you're caught. But just as often, you'll get to run in with guns (and brain) blazing if you're itching to get your action fix. Having a choice between the two styles of play makes the game more interesting.
Second Sight has been mapped surprisingly well to the PC's keyboard-and-mouse control scheme. Auto-targeting is as easy as holding the right mouse button and flicking the mouse between targets, and once an enemy has been targeted, you can slide the crosshair up toward the enemy's head for a quick kill. You can scroll through your weapons and psychic powers quickly with a mousewheel, and it's easy to maneuver Vattic with the WASD key configuration. The camera is mouse-controlled and has a habit of hitting walls, which can temporarily skew your perspective, but for the most part it's easy to get used to and works out nicely.
There's a little more to do in most of the game's 17 levels than just shoot or mind-zap enemies. Several levels introduce a buddy mechanic that sees you fighting alongside one or more friendly non-player characters, and one of these levels even has you leading around and protecting a member of Winter Ice who has lost her mind. You'll also tap into computers a number of times throughout the game, and Free Radical has devised a simple graphical interface for them that, at the appropriate time, lets you read e-mails, copy files to disk, control doors and security cameras, and even play a couple of bare-bones arcade games. This may sound trivial, but it's far more gratifying than running up to a terminal and just hitting the "use" button. A fair number of the puzzles fall into the old standby "throw a switch" or "take an item from point A to B" categories; however, in this game, the designers often find interesting ways to work your psychic powers into the solutions, which keeps the game fresh.
Second Sight has got some cool ideas, as well as some noticeable shortcomings. In general, things feel a little rough around the edges. The physics model is functional but shoddy--objects will occasionally continue to move indefinitely or pass through walls after you've bumped them. The enemy artificial intelligence isn't extremely bright; at times it's unrealistically easy to evade foes after an alarm has been sounded, while at other times it seems like you've been caught for no reason. None of these problems are glaring enough to detract from the game in a significant way, but together they do lessen its impact.
If you've played any of the console TimeSplitters games, you'll recognize the many stylistic similarities that are present in Second Sight. The character models are chiefly responsible for this, as they feature caricatured, cartoonlike qualities that give them a lot of personality, especially in the many cutscenes. What really brings the characters to life are their expressive facial and bodily animations--they emote really well, with an exaggerated manner that's consistent with their features. You'll get a lot of variety (if not overwhelming detail) in the backdrops, too, as you travel from Dubrensk, Russia, to various locales in the United States. The game eschews lots of fancy graphical effects in favor of a clean look, which is now even cleaner on the PC. In addition to the higher resolution and frame rate that you'll get on modern PC hardware, the textures and special effects look sharper, helping the game stay more or less consistent with contemporary PC games even though it started out on consoles.
Second Sight is story driven and has a lot of cutscenes, so naturally there's a lot of spoken dialogue. Fortunately, the quality of the acting is reasonably high. Some characters sound more natural or appropriate than others, but overall this is like what you'd hear in the average animated series. The music is quite good in the places where it successfully lends a slightly sinister mood to Vattic's harried quest for the truth. The sound effects are also of a high quality. Whoever came up with the sounds for the psychic powers deserves credit for making them sound convincing, since there's not exactly a frame of reference for what they should sound like.
Second Sight is a respectable single-player adventure that shows Free Radical is capable of making more than just first-person shooters. It's got some flaws and it's not very long or replayable--you'll probably finish it in 12 to 15 hours, without much incentive to go back to the beginning--but it's fun while it lasts. Better yet, the game is available on the PC for only $20, which we think is a pretty fair price for a weekend's worth of solid action.
By Brad Shoemaker, GameSpot
Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium III or Athlon at 1GHz or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB
Hard Drive Space: 1000 MB
Other: Windows XP/2000; Supported Graphics card; DirectX 9 Compatible Sound Card
Recommended System Requirements
System: Pentium 4 at 2GHz or AthlonXP 2000+ or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Hard Drive Space: 1000 MB
Other: Windows XP/2000; Graphics Card: GeForce FX 5xxx or Radeon 9xxx
Screen Shots
Eragon
Publisher: Vivendi Games
Developer: Stormfront Studios
Genre: Fantasy Action Adventure
Release Date: Nov 14, 2006 (more)
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Blood, Mild Language, Violence
Offline Modes: Cooperative
Number of Players: 1-2
DirectX Version: v9.0c
Eragon the video game is based on the movie, which itself is based on the book of the same name. It's a typical fantasy world full of dragons, wizards, and magic, which would seem to lend itself well to a video game adaptation in the vein of the very good series of Lord of the Rings action games that came out alongside those movies. In fact, the Eragon game bears a striking resemblance to those Lord of the Rings games, which only makes sense because the games were all developed by the same company. But while the Lord of the Rings games were well-polished action games, Eragon feels unfinished and lazily thrown together. It's the same basic hack-and-slash principle that's readily accessible to just about any fan of the film, but Eragon feels like a skeleton of a game that's been padded out with some licensed content. There's not nearly enough to make the game interesting or even remotely worth playing, though. The action is mindless and repetitive at best, and buggy and unresponsive at worst. In addition, the presentation ranges from bland to ugly, the game is short, the fixed camera angles are frustrating, and there is no online play.
Even for a straightforward action game, Eragon has very little to offer.
You control Eragon, and you start out as a relatively feeble farmer. You have a sword and a bow, and you quickly learn to use magic, as well. There are 16 levels in the game, with a couple extra levels if you're playing the Xbox 360 version. You'll spend most of your time on foot, fighting wave after wave of generic enemies. You have a quick strike, a powerful strike, and a block for melee combat. You can string together combos of the two strikes to pull off special moves like grapples or knock downs. But even with those few moves, the action still boils down to mashing buttons until your thumb (or your brain) goes numb.
The enemies are all easy to kill, but they do take quite a few hits. So you can hack away at a foe uninterrupted for several seconds before he finally goes down, only to repeat the process with a dozen more enemies. It doesn't help matters that the hit detection is spotty at best. You'll often find yourself swinging away and watching your blade go right through your foes with no effect whatsoever. You can use a bow in the game to pick off enemies from afar, but since your bow does even less damage than your sword, you'll have to spend a long time slinging arrows at an enemy before it finally dies. There are some platforming sections in each level that require you to shimmy along ledges, climb up buildings or other structures, leap small gaps, and tiptoe across narrow beams. None of it is the least bit interesting or challenging, and it ends up feeling perfunctory and pointless.
As a dragon rider, Eragon is able to use magic, which factors into the combat in the game. The magic does actually make for some enjoyable moments, such as when you light enemies on fire and watch as they run off a cliff in a panic, or when you use magic to pull enemies off a high ledge. But even though you can do some fun things with a couple of the magic spells, it does very little to liven up the combat in the long run. Aside from pushing and pulling enemies and lighting them on fire, you can shoot magic arrows and use your magic to interact with the environment. Certain objects in the environment can be moved or rearranged using your magic. It's not very interesting, though, because you can't choose what you interact with or how you do it. Instead, it's usually along the lines of moving a conveniently placed pile of loose boards to create a makeshift bridge between two platforms.
Being a dragon rider, you do get to fly around on a dragon from time to time, but it's not nearly as fun as it sounds. The few flying levels in the game play like a rail shooter, where you fly around on a predetermined path and shoot enemies with magic arrows or blast them with your dragon's fire breath. The levels are simple loops, so you fly around in circles and kill the same enemies as they respawn endlessly. It's like being on a very tedious treadmill, because you never actually get anywhere. You just kill enemies until you've met the predetermined quota for the level.
You can easily beat Eragon in six hours, and once you've done that there's no reason to go back and play it again. Perhaps the only good news is that if you're playing the Xbox 360 version of the game, you can get some easy achievement points by completing each of the short levels on normal and hard difficulty settings. Other than that, there's not much to do in Eragon. A second player can join in at any moment during the game to play cooperatively, but the co-op suffers because both characters have to move in unison to keep all the action contained within one screen. This means that unless your partner moves with you, you can't go anywhere. It's also frequently possible for one character to get stuck behind an object in the environment if the other character moves too far ahead. One solution for that would be to let you play the game online, where each player has his or her own screen, but that feature is conspicuously absent. It's not a major loss, because this game isn't any more fun cooperatively than it is solo, but it's just one more way in which Eragon comes up short.
Another way that Eragon fails to impress is in its presentation. The game looks best on the Xbox 360, but even then it doesn't look good. The character models are all blocky and undefined, and although it's common in games of this type, the fact that there are only a handful of enemies to face just makes the game look and feel cheap. You'll see the exact same mobs over and over throughout the entire game. The fact that many of the levels look quite similar also makes the game feel repetitive and shallow, as if each level is exactly the same as the one before it. The character animations are no better. The few canned animations look decent, and some of the finishing moves are pretty brutal (and bloody if you're playing the PC or Xbox 360 version), especially for a T-rated game. However, most of the time the animations are stilted and jerky, and you'll often see enemies or ally characters get stuck behind objects and twitch wildly or clip through solid parts of the environment.
Eragon also has an extremely frustrating camera. The game employs fixed camera angles, so you have no control over your perspective on the action. That means that if you're behind an object, you're left to fight blind, which happens much more often than it should. The perspective also sometimes hides the path that you need to take to progress through the level. For instance, you might have to hop up and grab a ledge and pull yourself up to the next area, but with the fixed perspective, you won't even be able to tell that ledge is there.
Call for Heroes Pompolic Wars
Publisher: Strategy First
Developer: Quotix Software
Genre: Role-Playing
Release Date: Jun 26, 2007
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Blood, Fantasy Violence
Number of Players: 1 Player
DirectX Version: v9.0c
As the back of the Call for Heroes: Pompolic Wars box proclaims, "It is the darkest of times." Well, that's certainly true enough for anyone who installs and plays the game within. This action RPG from Quotix Software hits new lows in mind-numbing combat and ridiculously confusing level design.
Judging by the credits at the back of the manual, just two people made this one, and boy does it ever show. The twosome worked off a simple template of making a 3D copy of Diablo, but didn't include any of the depth or catchiness of that classic dungeon crawl. The single-player story (there is no multiplayer) about battling the monstrous hordes of a demon named Pompolic is told solely on the first page of the manual. There are no cutscenes, dialogue sequences, or anything else to tell a tale in the game itself. RPG elements are also MIA. Instead of rolling up characters, you make a one-or-the-other choice between a male warrior and a female amazon, and then bestow a name and a special ability (from a whopping list of three choices per class) upon the hero that you select. And with that, it's off to explore a succession of 15 generic fantasy castles and dungeons.
And you really do have to do some exploring. Unlike in most hack-and-slash dungeoneering games, levels in Call for Heroes aren't strictly linear. Instead of just cutting down skeletons and goblins from Point A to Point B, you instead must delve into every nook and cranny of each level to discover all of the dark soul artifacts and open up a portal to the next level before a timer ticks down to zero. Initially, this is refreshing. Far too many action RPG dungeon crawls are so slavishly devoted to linear level design that they play themselves, so finally getting an alternative could have been a very good thing.
Unfortunately, though, the alternative here is an absolute mess. There is no rhyme or reason to the level design at all, and there is no mini-map tracking your expedition, so you feel like a rat running around in a maze. Levels are also totally isolated from one another, giving you the impression that you're fighting through disconnected battle arenas, not making your way through any sort of story or campaign. Each level seems to have only a half-dozen or so noteworthy architectural elements, too, which leaves you adrift with no distinctive landmarks to indicate where you are at any given moment. Monsters also typically spawn in when you grab a power-up like a health potion or a dark soul, too, leaving you without a sense of place when it comes to specific fights. Welcome to a hack-and-slash treadmill.
Making matters even worse is the incessant, stupidly difficult combat. Packs of monsters constantly swarm you, forcing a lot of scrambly fighting and fleeing that further screws up your sense of direction. From the second level on, the number of creatures on your tail is so insane that you mostly just scurry away from them and hope that you happen to pass the dark souls before you get killed. All of this fighting does at least lend the game a certain white-knuckle intensity. It seems like you're forever stuck with your hit points in single digits, leaving you constantly afraid that a random swipe from some goon is going to send you on a dirt nap. Also, you have to restart levels from scratch when killed, which adds even more pressure to the hacking and slashing unless you've lucked out and found one of the rare respawn icons.
Still, everything goes on too long and is far too repetitive to be the least bit enjoyable. Each Call for Heroes level takes a good half-hour to finish, and you spend every second of that time either fleeing without any idea where you're going or click-click-clicking on the bad guys. There isn't any excitement in this monster mash, as you're whaling away on just a handful of types of beastie in each level. Creatures in the game nicely blend "kill-myself-if-I-have-to-kill-another" fantasy archetypes like skeletons and zombies with bizarro beasts like fireball-spewing floating orbs (the spitting image of Doom's cacodemon) and spindly-armed ET look-alikes, but there just aren't enough different monsters to prevent your brain from locking up with tedium. You'll wallop forty or fifty spiders in one level, then a few dozen one-armed zombies in the next, then a veritable Shriners convention of Doom balls in the next, and so on.
Variety isn't a part of your arsenal, either. Although you accumulate different weapons and armor along the way, there isn't that much of it. You generally pick up one good new weapon per level, for instance. Battles can be livened up by activating special class abilities that are picked when you level up, or by collecting coins that let you activate god mode for a limited period of time, but you don't need any of that fancy stuff; most of the time you'll be happy (well, "happy" is a relative term) to just click-kill your way through monsters.
Minimum System Requirements
System: Intel Pentium IV 1.6 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 64 MB
Hard Drive Space: 1300 MB
Recommended System Requirements
System: Pentium IV 3.2 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 1024 MB
Video Memory: 128 MB
Screen Shots
Devil May Cry 3 Spacial Edition (ReUpload)
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Capcom
Genre: Fantasy Action Adventure
Release Date: Oct 16, 2006 (more)
ESRB: MATURE
ESRB Descriptors: Blood, Suggestive Themes, Violence
Game Information
Sound: Dolby Pro Logic II
Number of Players: 1 Player
DirectX Version: v9.0c
System: 1 GHz Pentium III or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB
Video Memory: 128 MB
Hard Drive Space: 4700 MB
Recommended System Requirements
System: 2 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent
Video Memory: 512 MB
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