Every now and then a game comes along that just doesn’t need a review, where every preconception and bias you have in your head is right on the money. From the second SEGA revealed the werehog dynamic Sonic Unleashed became one of those games. But wait, haters don’t celebrate just yet, and fanboys wipe away those tears, Unleashed isn’t as bad as you might think.


To some extent Sonic Unleashed is the game of two halves that it was predicted to be, with the Sonic stages easily rising above the werehog’s, however things aren’t quite that cut and dried. For one the game is far less buggy than 2006, and the last ‘proper’ Sonic effort to get a PS2 port, Sonic Heroes. For the most part you won’t get randomly thrown to your death or fall through the floor, everything feels a little more finished.

The game opens with an impressive CGI cutscene that lays out the plot, Eggman, for reasons known only to himself, is seeking to unleash Dark Gia - a demon that lives in the planets core, which tears the planet apart continent by continent. By night Sonic is transformed by Dark Gia’s evil energy into the controversial ‘werehog‘, tasked with restoring the continents, stopping Eggman, and finding a cure for himself.

The daytime stages have Sonic ripping along at lightning speeds, switching from 3D to 2D (or an approximation there of), enemies and obstacles get in your way, with alternate routes accessible by timing jumps and chaining attacks. It’s not true to say that these stages faithfully recapture the 16 bit glory days, they’re too short and relentless for that, however they are a capable re-imagining of the old style.

Each full Sonic level is followed by a handful of shorter ones, these use the same stage, or a modified version there of, but alter the conditions for success. More often than not you’ll have to acquire a certain number of rings, but you may also have to complete the course without taking a hit, or even race it as a time trial gaining extra time for each checkpoint you pass.

The Werehog stages are naturally more sedate affairs, favouring combat to Sonic’s reflex tests. While you do level up and expand your moveset, combat is essentially a combination of the square and circle buttons, with a dash of triangle to spice things up. There is a grab move to learn, but as you’re usually surrounded it’s difficult to find the time to use it, more useful is the ‘unleashed’ mode, a kind of berserker mode that’s best saved for some of the tougher enemies.

To join the action are some simplistic platform sections. These areas tend to focus on the Werehog’s reach and grab moves, seeing him swing from poles, catch a ride off enemies, and shimmy along ledges. These sections are actually fairly competent, they feel like they’re intended for the younger market, nothing too offensive or hard, almost like a well produced licence game, quite in contrast to the daytime stages, which can offer a real challenge.

It’s not all good news however, the graphics on the daytime stages leave a lot to be desired, they are suitably bright and colourful, but textures are stretched, buildings look simplistic, and Sonic is spiky for all the wrong reasons. There are a couple of instances in the later night-time stages that require leaps of faith, a problem solved if you were allowed control over the otherwise solid camera. The most infuriating aspect of the werehog stages are his tendency to sprint while you’re attempting to correct a landing or line up a jump, more often than not this results in you sprinting to your death. A few of the moves aren’t really explained adequately either, the ‘unleashed’ mode surprisingly doesn’t get its own tutorial (surprising because the game otherwise really likes to hold your hand), and you’re never told that to get distance from the spinning poles you must leap on the first spin.

There’s also the matter of the life system, to some extent it adds a degree of difficulty to the game, a reason to keep you honest. But you cannot add to the stock 3 lives, meaning that when the game does ramp up the difficulty, or even when it falls down and costs you lives, you’re punished far too harshly and dumped back to the largely needless over world. No where is this felt more than the final, epic, boss battle. You are faced with a 3 part fight, spread across numerous cut-scenes, with which you are equipped with 3 lives total. Unfortunately it is on this section that the game has a habit of glitching, sending you sideways off a jump or launching you between two boost hoops. The final part too can cost you a few cheap lives with its countdown element and ramped up difficulty, forgivable if you can just restart that section, but massively frustrating if you die 1 hit from the end and have to start the whole battle again.

Sonic Unleashed really is a game of two halves in so many ways. At times it feels like it’s aimed squarely at the younger end of the market, capitalising on Sonic’s new audience, at others it gets difficult and fast enough that only a gamer with a bit of experience will make progress. A game solely based around the daytime levels would undoubtedly been the way better route, they feel fresh and unique, allowing SEGA to display some of their old characteristics, however the night stages are not nearly as bad as you might expect. Neither section is destined for classic status, but it’s not quite the atrocity many were expecting.

Ever played a game so god damned good, that was perfect for you in every conceivable ( or as near damn-it!) that when you go to play a game from the same genre, it just doesn't compare to that game and thus the experience is spoilt. No matter how good that particular game is, its just not that other game



This is what Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 is to me. It came as something of a suprise that it would be as good as it actually is, and I've been unable to emerse myself into a JRPG since its European release earlier in the year, and believe me, I've tried. I've tried everything from returning to Final Fantasy XII, to starting Rogue Galaxy and even visiting my previous favourite Japanese RPG, Final Fantasy IX and none of them have that same feeling I get from making my way through Tarturus gradually making my way through each floor, gaining levels for the various Persona's that the lead character has enabled at that particular point. Then leaving Tarturus and with it the Dark Hour and heading back into the games "real" world to go to school, socialise and increase the bond between the character and the Persona's even further.

The game places you in the role of an unnamed boy, new to the city of Tokyo, who, along with a group of others, is able to be awake during a certain time of day unseen by ordinary people. This also means he can summon a Persona using a device called an Evoker, which resembles a gun. The Evoker is pointed to the head in order to force the Persona out of each characters mind.

Basically, this group of teens have taken it upon themselves to find out why and how the shadows that live in this particular time frame (called the Dark Hour) are gaining in strength and why they are beginning to have some kind of an effect on ordinary peoples frame of mind.

The core gameplay is setout into two distinctive styles, by day its pretty much a typical Japanese dating sim, wherein your relationships with those around you, and how well you are doing academically, affect your characters stats and the strength of the links to the different varieties of Persona's he is unable to summon. By night the game becomes an (optional) dungeon crawler, as you work your way through the games dungeon, floor by floor till you can go no further until the next lunar shift. Gradually the story progresses, with the majority of the key points taking place on the night of a full moon and you're able to fight your way through a new section of the tower with more difficult enemies.

It's all fairly simple RPG fair on the surface, but the game lends itself well to being played in small doses as and when you have the opportunity, or fully dedicating your time to it. Purely because of its calendar based nature, it never really forces you to play or rush at any particular point as each section of the tower is of an easily manageable size and certainly doesn't take around thirty visits to tackle. Anyhow, that would be impossible due to characters becoming fatigues or ill, or your time being taken up with other things such as socialising and studying.

However, what we have here isn't just Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3, this is the FES edition, which includes a whole new game chapter weighing in at around 30 hours of gameplay, plus additional elements added to the original game such as extra Persona's, a weapon fusion system, plus a harder difficulty setting for those who really want to test themselves. Certainly one of the best RPG's in existence, go buy it.

Sega's superb crime brawler finally makes it to these shores, and it's well worth the wait!


It’s a bit of a difficult time to release a PS2 game, and as such it’s a strange time to be reviewing one. Do you hold it up to the next-gen standards of the newer consoles or forgive its creakier moments as being unavoidable. Lucky for both me and Yakuza 2 then that there’s not much to compare it to on the new-gen yet.

Should you not have played the excellent prequel, Yakuza 2 is essentially a 3D take on the brawler genre of yesteryear, complete with light RPG, a sprawling city, and GTA style missions to complete.

The most noticeable thing about the first game was the superb story, and it’s no different with the sequel. Full of intrigue, back stabbings and twists, the plot touches on revenge, family ties, inter-clan warfare, foreign mafia’s, kidnapping and even a love story. For the most part even the peripheral characters are well developed with fleshed out personalities and a unique selling point. On occasion they do feel a little incidental, possibly because there’s so much going on, only really existing to move the plot on or to set up a twist.

The plot is helped along by some outstanding cut scenes, which while not as sharp as the next-gen are superbly directed and impeccably performed. The first game took some stick for it dubbed voice acting, some of it justified, but the Japanese actors really bring something to the game. They are of course more suited to their characters than their American counterparts, but each treat their role with utter seriousness, nailing each and every line. Graphically the cut scenes have a bit of Rockstar style motion blur, but the textures hold up well and the animations are particularly well done.

While the game does offer lots of missions and side quests, the vast majority of them boil down to beating up bad guys, so it’s a good job that the fighting holds up. The combat starts off shallow, but quickly improves once you start levelling up. There’s a decent amount of combo’s at your disposal, throws and grab moves, weapons to pummel people with and of course the infamous ‘Heat’ moves. You could argue that once you unlock some of the better combos you’ll tend to spam them, you will need to vary your move-set to beat some of the tougher and more intelligent enemies. You also have a Heat bar that raises as you land attacks, once filled you can activate special context sensitive moves that are guaranteed to put a sadistic smile on your face.

As already mentioned you can level up improving stamina, increase the combo’s and add new and special moves to Kazuma’s repertoire. Experience is gained by completing missions, eating (which also restores health) and fighting, once you have a certain amount of filled bars you can exchange them for the new moves. You can also sell items and receive money from fights and missions to buy food, health items and garments that can be equipped to increase Kazuma’s stats.

There are a few niggles with the game, most of them hangovers from the first game. Item management is needlessly difficult, should you fill up your 9 item slots, which you will do with just fighting rewards and tissues, you have to either dump stuff or head back to your headquarters and switch them out, and you wont always have access to your H.Q. There are missions that have nothing to do with the plot yet must be completed despite feeling like nothing more than filler, side quests to soften Kazuma’s character. You also will sometimes get stuck in a combo when fighting, leaving yourself vulnerable, and on occasion you will also find yourself getting knocked down as you’re getting up off the floor, which needless to say feels a bit cheap.

Even with its glitches there is little around that can compete with Yakuza 2 on any platform. Its combat is immensely satisfying, with the Heat moves in particular being gleefully violent. While the plot is utterly compelling, as good as any crime movie of the last few years (bar the odd filler chapter) it shouldn’t be understated how funny the script is. It could be argued that outside of the cut-scene Kazuma’s cold personality is eroded, but it’s worth it for the geek fights, one liners and of course the giant baby fighting.

Yakuza 2 is so deliciously over the top sometimes it embarrasses the rest of the gaming climate. Even with its epic twisting plot it still feels every inch a video game, the crunching fighting moves, the ridiculous side quests, visiting and taking part in host/hostess bars, and of course the tiger fighting (well worth the wait to get to!).

I cannot overstate how much of a gem this game is, it is as fitting an encore for the PS2 as anyone could ask for, and the perfect antidote to the po-faced action that has so far dominated this new generation. Do yourself a favour and make sure you don’t miss out on this wonderful crime epic.

NK Playmore is really pushing the companies history of 2D fighters out there onto more recent consoles, particularly the PlayStation 2, and Art of Fighting Anthology is no different, although this time round, theres 3 fighting games on one disc at a nice low price of £12.99. The problem with the Art of Fighting is that it doesn't really have the following that the likes of Street Fighter or King of Fighters has, so its hard to judge a retro compilation made up of games I've not really played before, especially as the bundle has no extras bundled into it, this is purely just the 3 games ported to the PS2. Something that immidiately strikes you is just how poor the sprites look, its incredibly jarring and its difficult to get over that feeling that this was released at a budget price because of its proposed lack of quality, then you realise you are forcing yourself to remember that these games are sixteen years old, they're going to look incredibly rough around the edge, go back to a release of Street Fighter 2 from that time and you'll feel exactly the same, but it does feel odd that SNK Playmore haven't tried to tidy the sprites up a little bit for the more powerful hardware the game now finds itself on. Something else that grated was that it felt incredibly stiff to pull of punches and kicks, nevermind link them together, theres none of the speed that is apparent in other games of the genre so when you go to press another button to try and chain a punch to the previous one for a quick one-two jab, you feel like your timing was all wrong as the game was slow to react to your actions. However, stick on Art of Fighting 2 and you begin to see some of these problems addressed, sprites look tidier, the games a little quicker and the whole experience is much more enjoyable, and the same applies to At of Fighting 3 where everything is improved once again and the game feels like one of the more modern 2D Beat-em ups that SNK Playmore has put out in recent years onto Sony's system, and for the a little over Ten English Pounds its well worth picking up to see a bit of the genre's history away from Capcoms Street Fighter franchise, particularly if you enjoy 2D Beat-em ups. Duane Weatherall

onic Riders really didn't do well critically, but commercially it seems enough copies fell off of shelves into the publics hands to warrant another instalment. However, the whole idea is an incredibly odd one, Sonic the Hedgehog, the fastest character in gaming, racing using a hoverboard against other recognisable characters from the Sonic universe aswell as some that have been created just for this franchise. As said, its an odd concept, you'd think a racing game starring Sonic the Hedgehog would be better suited to an on-foot style game, like Sonic R on the SEGA Saturn, so it feels quite wrong for Sonic and co to be flying around futuristic, almost Wipeout-esque circuits on hoverboards similar to those seen in Criterions Trickstyle or Airblade. In fact the game is very very similar to Trickstyle, a very early Dreamcast game I might add, and it suffers from the same sort of problems as that particular title did way back in 1999. Namely that the screen has far too much going on at any one time, leading you towards feelings of confusion and annoyance as you make more mistakes than you really should be doing, especially as the game feels like its aimed more at the younger generation of Sonic fans who have seen him in shows such as Sonic X rather than the likes of myself who grew up with Sonic during his 2D heyday. The fact that the screen is too busy isn't the only problem either, controls feel stiff, yet somehow clumsy, and the games never really clear as to what you actually have to do in order to win a race meaning most will give it one or two tries and give up declaring it as too difficult, again, this is a huge problem when your core audience is less likely to stick with a title until they've mastered it enough to actually win a race, something that took me a little while to achieve. Its because of these problems that I fail to see anything positive about Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, and feel its only carrying the Sonic branding in order to try and shift a few more units than it may have done if it had been a standalone title, although to be frank, the manner in which Sonic has been dragged through the dishwater over recent years has left a bitter taste with all but the most die-hard of fans and newcomers to the "Hedgehog with Attitude" that is difficult to shift, and Sonic Riders does nothing to alleviate that. A shame as it'd be nice to see SEGA and Sonic back at the top again. Duane Weatherall

ake two parts Virtua Tennis, one part Mario Tennis, and mix in a whole ton of SEGA nostalgia and you have yourself SEGA Superstars Tennis. Sound good? Well, it is, if you happen to be a big fan of what SEGA have done in the past. Y'see while Nintendo present you with characters from their best known games in their sports tie-ins, SEGA Superstar Tennis relies upon you knowing some of their back catalogue, well, at least more than just Sonic the Hedgehog anyhow, although its unsuprising he has a big part to play, and will no doubt be the first character most people use. But its not just SEGA's most famous output that makes an appearance, theres also showings from Ulala (Space Channel 5), Beat (Jet Set Radio), AiAi (Super Monkey Ball) and even the long forgotten Alex Kidd, amongst others, whichcan only bring a smile to those who favoured a SEGA console over the opposition at least once in their life. Courts too are themed on SEGA franchises, with all the above titles getting their own courts alongside others which don't have any in-game character representation, such as House of the Dead. Of course, none of this would count for anything if the game played terribly, and you'd be forgiven for being wary of it based upon alot of SEGA's recent output, but rest assured, Sumo Digital have taken the engine from Virtua Tennis 3 (which they also ported from the arcades over to the XBox 360 and PS3) and built a highly entertaining game around the engine and nostalgia they had at their finger tips. Not only is it highly entertaining, but as with its sibling its incredibly accessible to begin with and has quite a bit of depth to its gameplay the more you play it. However, its not without its problems. Games can feel a little too easy to win at times, the first 5 tournaments or so I managed to get away with just hitting the ball from the left of the court to the right side, and whilst its always good for a game to start off easily and make things that bit simpler for you to get into it, this level of difficulty goes on for far too long and is only affected by the rather random feeling special abilites that each character has that are activated by keeping a rally going until the star around your character is completely yellow and glowing then hitting the pre-designated button. Although these can be just as harmful to your game as they are to your opponents, especially against an AI opponent. But, as a SEGA fan of old, I find this game incredibly charming and entertaining, I've not been the only one to get enjoyment out of it either as my young daughter loves watching the characters run around the screen hitting the ball back and forth which shows that this is a game that the whole family can enjoy it together. Duane Weatherall

rince of Persia: the sands of time is a platform game, it is a rather odd platform game since you are taking control of a real person. Not a ferret, not a fat Italian guy but a real looking guy. I know it's confusing but you'll just have to accept it and move on. The story for Prince of Persia is a simple one. You grab the dagger of time which lets you control time, this comes in pretty handy when your house has rotating death blades at every turn. You then go home with your nifty new dagger and everything is nice until you unleash the sands of time! What do the sands of time do you ask? They turn everyone into evil sand demons of course. It is then the Princes task to get revenge on the guy who turned your daddy into sand. The gameplay is split into 3 different kinds. There is the platforming, the combat and then puzzle solving. One of these works perfectly, one works okay and one doesn't work at all. Let's get the awesome type of gameplay out of the way first. Platforming. You know it well I'm sure. Jump from place to place, jump on round platforms, square platforms and of course those really evil small, spinning platforms Nintendo are such big fans of. The platforming in PoP is done a bit differently though. you can run on walls for a start. You have a few controls available for platforming. You can press R1, this is responsible for running along walls, spinning around on poles and generally looking very cool. X lets you roll or jump off something if the moment calls for it and a quick tap of circle will see you letting go of whatever you were holing onto for dear life. That's it really. These three simple actions make up the bulk of the platforming. The platforming sections are put together very, very well though. You will normally enter into a large room. You will then get a quick cutscene of where you need to be. Let's go with down at the bottom of a very tall room. You will then need to use the three simple controls detailed above. Ubisoft make you use these controls in the most fiendish of ways. To get to the bottom of this very large room you will have to run across a wall, kick off the wall onto a pillar, then jump onto three or four more pillars before having to land on a platform that collapses a few seconds after you land on it making you go KERRPLUNK or in fact KERRSPLAT. It's then up to you to figure out where the hell you go from that collapsible platform. It sounds heinous doesn't it? Don't worry, if you die, it's your fault. The platforming could never be called unfair. The controls do exactly what you want them to do when you want them to do it and I never got to a point where I though, "I'm never going to do this!" although I did often think "Whyyyyyyyy, damn you to hell!!!". I loved every minute of the platforming though. Now onto the section that works okay. The puzzles. It's not that the puzzles are rubbish, far from it, they are well thought out and there are plenty of clues. the problem is, they just aren't welcome. The platform sections are like mini riddles that you have to solve so to put 'actual' puzzles in the middle of the platforming puzzles seems to be a waste of time. If puzzles are your thing though then you will probably get a big kick out of trying to solve these ones. Now to the bad bit, the combat. I just don't know where to begin. You have a lot of moves at your disposal in PoP, spinny attacks, strong attacks, flippy attacks. The lot. It's easy to get into but takes time to pull off the more tricky moves, the problem is, there's just too much of it. After every platforming bit there is a big combat section and it's just unwelcome, it has no place in the game. The fights can also be rather unfair. They suffer from the whole, 'smacking you while you are down and not letting you get back up' gameplay that was perfected on the mega drive. This, mixed with the fact that the fights are super boring since you will just keep on doing the same move over and over again makes the fights a horrible gameplay experience. However, the platforming in this game is perfect. It's worth slogging through the fights just to see what they have come up with in the next room and you will find yourself smiling when you go into a place and see whirly blades and time activated doors because you know it is going to challenge you but you will manage it in the end and that's what games should do. If it wasn't for the fights in this game then it would score a perfect 10. The combat would break most games but the platforming will keep you hooked and that's why it still scores so highly. Bob Syko

can't think of any game that has had such a huge impact on games as tomb raider. Everyone knows what tomb raider is. Gamers, non-gamers and even grannies could probably tell you a bit about tomb raider, even if it was just, "it's that game isn't sweetie, have a werthers original". It's impact on games is massive and although the series declined in quality and stayed exactly the same it always proved immensely popular. The of course core had to go and mess it all up with....I won't mention it's name for it would hurt my mouth. Everyone thought that Tomb Raider was dead and buried, myself included when it was revealed that Crystal Dynamics had got hold of the series. Although at the time I was unsure about a British series being handed to the Americans they proved they could make a decent game with Legend that took the tomb raider formula and jazzed it up a bit. It was a decent title but I got the feeling CD were playing it safe. The combat in the game for instance was simply put there so it could be sold as a 'high octane action adventure!!!!!' in the commercials. The thing that mattered about the game though was the platforming and puzzles. Both of these elements were quite excellent and made up for the boring combat and motorcycle sections. The reason for the short history lesson? I thought since this was a remake of the first one it would be apt is all. Anyway, onto Cd's latest effort. The story (for those that haven't played the original). A rich business woman hires Lara for a job to go and grab the scion of power, or something equally cheesy which she was searching for with her father before he died. Lara of course says yes because of her personal interest and goes off to raid some tombs to get it. With this being a remake it has a lot of the same locations as the original so you will instantly recognise the intro and the key locations like the Spinx and the forgotten valley. Thankfully though it isn't just a straight remake like resident evil was. There are new sections, the first level for example sees you starting just before your poor guide gets eaten by wolves. You have to trek up to him and then you see the rest of the intro from the original game. The gameplay in this one is pretty much the same as legend with some of the pointless, showy stuff taken out. The flash light is no more and she can't jump off peoples heads.The combat thankfully takes a back seat in this one. No more human killing (I know, you are shocked a tomb raider game doesn't involve genocide?). Just poor psychotic animals who want to take a bite of Lara's well toned posh bottom, even the animals are fairly spread about so you can get on with the excellent jumping and puzzles. You jump about the same as legend and the platforms are all of the same type. Slidy bits, grippy bits and indeed swingy bits. One problem with the platforming however is that a lot of the platforms should be in reach but because the game doesn't want you to go that way then Lara won't grip on. Other jumps should be out of reach but you can make them meaning that you are often confused where to go next when there is a platform right in front of you that she can't make. Even worse, sometimes that platform that is just a short hop is the one you have to go to but the game seems to be against you. An example of an annoying jump that you think you will never do is in the coliseum. You have to swing on a rope then jump onto a grippy. If you are swinging so that she ends at the grippy on her swing then she won't grab on. You have to lower the rope right down and swing so that she is miles away from the grippy. You let go and she just seems to defy gravity and fly upwards to the platform. This doesn't happen often but the fact that it happens at all if annoying and confusing. The puzzles in this one are great as well and challenging without being too hard. You can even solve a lot of them by shooting them. Now that's my sort of puzzle. QTE's are back in this one as well which I could do without but they aren't bad. You have to jump about in them and avoid whatever it is that's trying to destroy you at the time. Everything is done like it would be in the game though. if you have to dodge an enemy then you press circle. if you have to shoot something then you press R1. This makes them nice and easy so you don't have to try them again and again. What really makes this game shine though is that it has gone back to what tomb raider was about. Raiding tombs, not killing people for trying to steal a box of cakes. You don't actually fight any humans yourself. the fights with Larson, the kid and whatever the big, bald black guy is called are all done by QTE's which is nice since I was really dreading the fight with the Kid since he was a bugger to get in the first one. In the fight with Larson it is actually shown as a bad thing to kill somebody! Which shows that maybe the developers are wanting to get away from that side of the game in future titles. the scene where you fight Larson is actually quite touching. This Tomb Raider has done exactly what it needed to do. It shows that Crystal Dynamics can make a fantastic Tomb Raider game if they put their minds to it and it has shown that Lara is at her best when she is raiding tombs and solving puzzles, not when she is killing soldiers/mobsters/security guards because they are in her way. The game has reminded me why Lara was such a success on the PS1 and it's made her just as likable now as she was then. Now I just have to wait until they make the next 'proper' Tomb Raider and see if they do actually want to go back to raiding tombs and shooting puppies or if it was just that they had no choice with the remake. Bob Syko

he expression "a curate's egg" originally meant something that is partly good and partly bad, but as a result is entirely spoiled, and it could very well be applied to the game Mafia on the PS2. Despite interest in the Italian underworld being as strong today as ever - as the continued success of The Sopranos shows, the game itself never fulfills its promise, and extended play shows how. It starts with a wonderfully cinematic FMV sequence, the camera swooping across the harbour of the brilliantly named city of Lost Heaven then through crowded city streets to a small restaurant where our "hero", Tommy Angelo is telling his story to a sceptical detective, all backed by the stirring string section of the Bohemia Symphonic orchestra. He begins by explaining just how he ended up working as chief driver for the infamous Salieri gang and the game goes back in time to the early 1930s to when he was just a humble taxi driver. Another excellent cut scene later and you find yourself in charge of a 1920s taxi cab charged with escaping from rival gangsters and it is here that the first big let down occurs. In the cut scenes the cars are objects of Art Deco beauty, all clean lines and glistening chrome, weaving their way through vibrant city streets. In reality however the graphics are muddy looking and they are extremely awkward to control. To be fair, this may well have been what early automobiles actually handled like - but how many of us regularly used the Model-T Ford in Gran Turismo once we had unlocked it? Very few I would imagine, for the simple reason that it was very little fun, which applies equally here. For example, the first car you are given is called a Bolt ACE 4 door. It has 22hp and can hit 45 mph. Eventually. However you would be advised not to approach this speed as the wheels are as thin as Nicole Ritchie's arms and the brakes may as well not be there for all the good they do. It should really come complete with a man holding a red flag to walk in front! As the game progresses and the years pass the cars do improve, but they never feel instinctive to drive and the handling remains too stiff for you to ever totally enjoy using them and makes police chases a lot more difficult than they need to be. And it is all too easy for you to attract police attention - speeding, jumping red lights, bumping into another vehicle and walking around with weapon in hand are all law breakers and thanks to the ill-defined graphics you often cannot spot the cops until you are on top of them and it is too late for you to do anything. All cars come with a manual speed limiter, which restricts them to a 60km/h top speed which although making journeys a lot more dull than they need to be at least ensures that you avoid police attention and with the handling and brakes being as bad as they are you can at least take corners without drifting on to the opposite sidewalk. The next disappointment comes when you exit your vehicle. You use one stick to control your forwards/backwards movement and the other for the left and right. However it is extremely sensitive so unless you are careful you end up gazing at the ground which necessitates constant correction. When under fire it is far too easy to end up facing the wrong way and end up wasting ammunition while taking hits. It does have a lock on but sadly it only seems to work if the cursor is close to the enemy anyway and even then it does not always do its job. However, my major problem is the loading times, which are frequent and epic. For example a typical mission may include; Loading...cut scene to set up mission...loading...pick up car and weapon from the compound...loading...drive across town to objective. Are you crossing the Giuliani bridge to the other side of town? Add another huge load time as you enter the second half of town and another when you drive back to base later. You then face another load when you reach your destination. And it is not as if the whole city loads up each mission. For example, after carelessly hitting a pedestrian I was being pursued by a couple of police cars. Hoping to lose them in Chinatown where the last mission was set and that I now knew like the back of my hand, I took a sharp left turn - and hit a barrier! The whole of the area was no longer accessible and would remain so until the game decided that I should visit there again. It is a shame really because the actual missions themselves are generally well-scripted and varied. An early highlight for me was one which involved me paying a visit to the Corleone hotel/brothel, locating and eliminating the manager and a loose-mouthed prostitute, culminating in a huge explosion and a chase across the rooftops by the police and ending in a shoot-out in a cathedral with the family of a gangster who I had murdered in a previous mission and whose funeral was taking place. Other favourites included a Hitman style assassination on board a paddlesteamer and the truly magnificent final mission set in the museum complete with epic musical backing with a piece written for that level only and it is times like that when the game is able to transcend its limitations and truly shine. In fact, most of the in-game sound is of a high standard, the voice acting always staying the right side of Godfather style parody and remaining totally believable, although the music played while driving is repetitive and the less said about the gangsta rap piece played over the end credits the better. What else is there to do other than the missions? Not a great deal unfortunately - Lost Heaven may give the impression of being a GTA style sandbox style game but is in reality a lot less open. There are the races, where you take on several rivals on a selection of tracks taken from various sections of the game, but they are for the most part far too easy and merely add up to an afternoons tedium. They also expose all the flaws in the handling and all you get for winning are extra vehicles that can only be used in the even more pointless Free Roam mode. In this you can either begin in the countryside, which I toured for 30 minutes without encountering anything of interest, or in the town where you can work as a taxi driver (although with the speed limit in place, the Crazy Taxi series has little to worry about), shoot gangsters and...little else. At least you can replay your favourite missions whenever you want once you have completed them. In conclusion, this could have a been a great game. It is tightly scripted, well acted and the missions show more imagination than you might expect. However it is let down by the mechanics - the games engine is simply not up to the task asked of it, whether in the cars or out of them and the results, like the Curate's egg, mean that the game itself is spoiled.

ife's full of mysteries, wouldn't you say? In a world where nature is tamed ever more with technology there's something comforting in knowing that there's still stuff out there to be discovered and explored. Everything from lost kingdoms and life on other planets, to answers to questions that have plagued mankind for millennia. Questions like: Why does toast fall buttered side down more times in direct proportion to the cost of the carpet? Why didn't God design men to have retractable testicles? And why is it that whenever my friend produces a packet of Cheesy Puffs I feel an irresistible urge to smash them with my fist? Never fear, there's a species that has all the answers (doom-laden of course) - the Conspiracy Theorist. As if modern life didn't give us enough to worry about we now have to be wary of Bigfoot rampaging through the back garden, evil corporations lacing our breakfast cereal with nanobots to spy on our intestines, and even if you do manage to find an insurance company who'll insure you against alien abduction you'll still have to contend with the unsavoury (ha ha! [sound of gunshot]...huurk!) urges around packets of Cheesy Puffs. Phew! No wonder we want computer games for escapism! Well, you'll find little of that in Area 51 for a number of reasons... In Area 51 you're immersed into the heart of conspiracy theory land and although the focus here is mainly on aliens, most of the well known conspiracies and unexplained phenomena get a look in here somewhere. Taking place at the top secret base of the same name, nestled away from the eyes of an unsuspecting world, naughty scientists and shady secret organisation "The Illuminati" have been working with the aliens in a dastardly pact to create bio-weapons. As is always the case in these games, something goes horribly wrong when a whistle-blowing scientist releases a virus. The first Hazardous Materials team is missing, presumed toast, and it's now up to you and your team to sort out the mess. Playing as Ethan Cole (HazMat Team Bravo's nifty scanner man) you're eased gently into the game with a quick practise at the weapons range, a bit of poking around and a chance to eavesdrop on some conversations which tantalise you with snippets of horrible mental pictures as to what the hell is going on further down in the base. From then on it's 'Kill Everything' mode. Your team will baby-sit you for a while and they'll take the lion's share of the shooting if you let them. You're free to roam but you'll constantly be distracted by your teammates telling you to hurry up and get going. It's an attempt to keep the pace fast but if you want to explore it can get annoying. Things get better when you're alone, and you'll find yourself wanting that time to come as soon as possible. The action can get quite frantic, not only from the quantity of enemies lurching fast and haphazardly at you in the darkness but from a massive amount of gun recoil. There's a 'spray and pray' element until you get used to it. Pistol, machine gun, shot gun, grenades...they're all here, mostly available as dual wield, and some alien weapons are available in later levels too. In addition to these you can further rend and splatter enemies with the alien hybrid transformation powers Ethan will find himself acquiring through...'unfortunate circumstances'. Ah, but his trials are our fun, so we get to play around with Incredible Hulk style ripping of skin and alien-o-vision too. There are a few side objectives to break up the pace of slaughter, the usual seeking out of key cards, protecting a person from waves of nasties for a set time or disabling an obstacle. They're distracting and add little to the atmosphere, but you're not away from the action for too long. In game graphics are nothing ultra special and you'll be wishing there was a little more variety in the enemies and base design, though there's a few nice uses of darkness. Use of blood is a different story. Although copious amounts appear to be smeared around the floor and walls, it never looks or feels right. For a '15' rated game you wouldn't expect it to be gratuitous or ultra gory, but it stands out as inappropriate and at times it... looks a little silly. No expense has been spared when it comes to cut scene graphics. They are fluid, highly detailed and exude gloss. Perhaps no longer anything special to those intitiated into the joys of the next gen consoles, but for the Playstation 2 they look lovely. For a first person shooter supposedly laden with action, horror, suspense and otherworldliness, the music and sound effects do a dismal job of conveying it. the music is wholly unremarkable, staying firmly in the background and barely acting as an indicator that 'something is happening'. Hey, who am I kidding here: its blandness is borderline offensive. Weapons sound adequate but shotgun fans will be disappointed by the dull 'poof' from the one on offer here, even when dual wielded. The voice acting boasts some big names but you can't help thinking that the money used to hire these people would've been better spent elsewhere. Like on infusing this game with some actual soul! You get the feeling Marilyn Manson was chosen in an attempt to tap into his teen fan base after his 'alien' image on one of his albums, and that David Duchovny was chosen to exploit his X-Files link. The latter uses the same bland, monotonous drone regardless of whether Ethan is angry, inquisitive or mournful. The quality of the supporting voice actors is refreshingly good. SO...it's a first person shooter with guns and the ability to transform into an alien hybrid. What else is new? Well, as Ethan wields the scanner in the team you also get to hunt out dossiers and objects which you can scan as data bank items. These 'easter eggs' mention something about the object, or provide files on well known unexplained phenomena and conspiracies (with a healthy dose of artistic license to make it look like Area 51 is responsible for all of them) such as Nikolai Tesla's HAARP, crop circles and Bigfoot. These snippets are great for sparking an interest that makes you want to find out more about them but too many of the items contain an alarming amount of techno babble or something boring like the alloy composition of a tube. Find enough data bank items and secrets are unlocked, though many of these will not seem worth the effort once acquired. All this is very well, but a game that offers nothing radically new to the genre is inevitably going to be compared to its peers. We get to fight in turrets, but it's been handled better in Halo. We get flashes of psychological horror through e-mail finds, but they're no-where near as effective as Resident Evil's 'Itchy-Tasty' diary entries. Secret bases and HazMat teams? Half-Life still rules supreme. The multiplayer is good fun, but the very nature of multiplayer means that a game has to be utterly broken and buggy for multiplayer not to be fun. All the ingredients of a first person shooter and action/suspenseful plot are there, but Area 51 feels like a bland, empty, first person shooter by-numbers experience encased in some gloss. A couple of rare moments of genius throughout the whole experience (the faked moon landing for example) are not enough to save this from being underwhelming and average. If you find yourself 'missing' about 8 hours of time, save yourself the hypnotist's fees and check your console. You'll probably find the Area 51 disc in there and your mind has blanked the experience of playing it from your memory. If you enjoy any old excuse to shoot things no matter how generic, or seriously have to collect anything featuring aliens, you might enjoy this game if you can find it in a bargain bin. For those who expect a little deeper entertainment and soul from thier games, here's one where you should pay attention to the friendly officer when he orders "Move along, people!" Nothing to see here". Helen Weighill