The Legends of Rock n’ Roll are the gods of the metal fantasy world under attack by demons found in Brutal Legend. Eddie Riggs, a roadie from the future, has been pulled into the Heavy Metal World where he must help the good (heavy metal) triumph over the forces of evil (hair metal).Brutal Legend opens with Eddie Riggs, the best roadie in the world, at a large concert, working at a heavy metal show. Unfortunately, the words Heavy Metal have taken on a bit of a different meaning and the music sucks. After saving the guitarist from falling to his death, his set collapses and in a combination of events, he is transported to a Heavy Metal Fantasy World.

This is the first time you get to play and you are immediately in battle. The game asks you if you would like to see and hear all of the blood, guts, gore, and profanity or if you would like them to dull it down for you. Of course, I kept the blood, guts, gore, and profanity.

After you pick up your axe, you get a few tips on the fighting mechanism in the game and you are on your way. The controls are simple with basic movement, camera control, and a button mashing fighting style.

When you finish fighting through the first couple of waves of foes, Eddie will build the Deuce, a ‘50s style hot rod that you use for transportation throughout most of the game. The Duce is awesome, and it gets even better when you visit Ozzy, the metal god, and get some upgrades done to it.

The Deuce is not the only thing that you can upgrade. You can also upgrade your Axe and Guitar weapon with electrical bolts and Fire. Everything is purchased with Fire Tributes (the in-game currency), which are also used to purchase new attacks and an array of other items.

For the most part, this is a typical action game when it comes to gameplay. But, during the major battles, it turns into a Real Time Strategy game. The RTS parts of this game felt a little awkward and unfinished. During the RTS parts of the game, you have to build “Merch Booths” and gain fans so you can build up an army to beat your opponent. The RTS parts of the game are also cool because during them, you become part demon and have massive wings to quickly move around the battlefield.

The graphics are good, featuring rock and roll relics as tall as mountains and creative creatures and people. The effects in the game a great, with flowing electricity and blood splattering battles. The graphics are neither ground breaking or revolutionary, but they are good.

This game also comes with a multiplayer, which is just an extended, customizable version of the RTS you find in the game. It doesn’t really play very well, and for the most part, it is a little boring.

Even though you are playing through the game as Eddie Riggs, you never really see him as anything but Jack Black. Lets face it, this game is the Jack Black show.

That aside, the story is actually decent. This is an original story that does not fall into the sleuth of other typical action games. The tie-ins of concert life into the storyline are awesome and it has a good combination of Action and RTS Gameplay. Unfortunately, the ending of the game is extremely unsatisfying. Put it on your Gamefly GameQ and play through it one time.

Building a team of multi-talented members ready to follow you into the densest battles that you could imagine, spilling blood across the battlefield, can be quite an experience. Now add the customization of a game like Dragon Age: Origins and you have a game with potential to win Best PC Game or Best RPG… oh wait, it did.

When you start the game, you are asked to choose between a human, elf, or dwarf. While most games would pretty much end there, Dragon Age goes a lot further. After choosing what character type you are, you then chose your player type, between Warrior, Mage, and Rogue, each type with its own set of special abilities.

I chose an elf warrior, so most of this post will be base on the gameplay that I experienced in this role.

Based on what you chose, you will begin the game in a different area of Ferelden, a dark kingdom located where death and violence lurk in every shadow. You travel throughout the kingdom of Ferelden during the game, finding new villages and areas to play mini-quests. Ferelden is an extremely large place with many different areas to explore.

The storyline is completely different based on the choices you make at the beginning of the game. 12 different storylines can be played through in Dragon Age: Origins. I chose to be an Elf Warrior from the Alienage in the city of Denerim. I chose to start in a place where elves are not well respected, poor, and frequently must fight for their lives.

The core of the game, no matter what story line you chose, is the fight against the blight, an army of Darkspawn lead by a malicious dragon known as the Archdemon. You will come across many small, scattered groups of Darkspawn throughout the game, but they are only considered a blight if they are lead by an Archdemon. This is also when they are the biggest threat.

After choosing your story line, you start by placing some points on your attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Willpower, Magic, Cunning, and Constitution. After beafing up your attributes, you also need to choose what skills you want. These vary based on if you are a human, elf, or dwarf, and if you are a warrior, mage, or rogue. Starting in the slums of the city of Denerim, I chose to add the skill of being a thief.

This all sounds a little confusing, but it plays out in a way that makes it very easy to understand and use. You increase the skills that you have based on the amount of points you put on certain attributes.

So, now that you are ready to start the game, you are placed wherever you chose and must complete a few trivial tasks before moving into the real battles and core of the game. I had to save a group of female elves from being raped by the prince of Denirim.  After doing this, I needed to get out of the city, so a friend of my mother’s, a Grey Warden, escorted me out. After leaving the city with the Grey Warden, Duncan, I was taken to become a Grey Warden myself.

The Grey Wardens are an organization of the most elite and feared of warriors, dedicated to the destruction of the Darkspawn in all of the lands. Throughout most of the game, you will find that the Grey Wardens are frowned upon due to the lies of the tyrannical “hero,” Teyrn Loghain.

After you become a Grey Warden, the real journey begins. You must go to several different locations throughout the Kingdom of Fereldon to gain allies and find willing and able warriors to fight by your side against the blight.

You will build a small team that travels with you at all times to help you battle through all of your encounters with Darkspawn, thieves, and anyone else who gets in your way. I was a warrior, so I tried to keep a mage, a rogue, and an extra warrior with me at all times. I used the mage to deal all of the distant damage, keeping her away from direct harm. The rogue was used to open locked doors, chests, and armoires. The third team member was Shale, and DLC stone warrior that can deal some serious damage.

DLC is another piece that makes this game so good. The above-mentioned Shale is not just a downloadable player to join your team, but an entire mini-quest that you have to go through to unlock the character. As I said before, Shale is an extremely powerful force that can throw massive amounts of damage to your opponents.

You will find that in the game, the decisions that you make when you are talking to people effect how the game is played out, unlocking new skills, finding new and powerful items, and a ton of amazing mini-quests.

The mini-quests are so great, that sometimes you do not even realize that they are not part of the main quest. This is why it took me nearly 50 hours to complete it one time through. I went through and tried to do as many of the side quests as possible. I cannot keep myself from talking to every single person that I walk past, which is why I found myself spending 5x more time on mini-quests than on the actual quests.

The Good

Character customization is incredible with a lot of different way to create your own persona.

The core story itself is strong. Building an army to battle an army of Darkspawn lead by a massive dragon known as the Archdemon is pretty cool and the steps that you have to take to get there make it even better.

This game has the one of the best replay qualities that I have ever seen. You can essentially play through 12 different story lines, which can be played out in just about any order and find thousands of different ways to get to the end of the game.

For an RPG of such massive caliber, the graphics are great. They aren’t pushing any graphical boundaries, but they are amazing.

Combat in the game is simple, but extremely effective when you add in all the skills and abilities.

There are huge amounts of weapons that can be found in the game, some with the ability to have enchantments placed on them that can add a lot of additional damage such as ice, fire, spirit, and lighting damage.

Like the weapons, a lot of armor, and other items such as rings, necklaces, and belts can be found or purchased to beef up each player.

You have control over the people on you team, which is pretty standard in this type of game. The great thing that BioWare has done is give you the ability to change your teams abilities, skills, the weapons they use, the armor they wear, and the accessories they wear to improve each character.

The ability to improve and add skills based on your decisions in each conversation, like the decision I made to betray the urn or Andraste so that I could drink the blood of a thousand generations of dragons.

The Bad

The only bad thing about this entire game is after the ending. You will be faced with an extremely difficult task in the end of the game, fighting against endless waves of Darkspawn and eventually the Archdemon. It is a great ending to a game, but when you finish this and order is restored to Fereldon, be prepared to be upset. Any standing mini-quests that you had yet to complete are no longer accessible, even if they had absolutely nothing to do with the blight.

The only other thing you can do when you finish the game is play through the very short DLC mini-quests. Though these mini-quests are fun, they are no match to exploring the massive depths of Fereldon.

Final Thought

I willingly put 50 hours into this game in about a week. Even though you can’t finish your mini-quests after you finish the game, it doesn’t really take away from the overall gameplay. Even though I lost some mini-quests at the end, I was ready to restart the game and play through one of the other 12 storylines. This is an incredible game, and it belongs on the shelf of every gamer.

EXTRA

If you got the PC version of the game, it came with the Dragon Age Toolset, a completely limitless and expansive way to create your own game within Dragon Age. The toolset offers modders and editors the ability to not only create the environments, but also the ability to do your own voice-overs, sound design, cut scenes, cinematics, and even the visual effects that accompany them. Check out the video below and go over to the BioWare website for more information.

!!Spoiler Alert!!

Assassin’s Creed 2 begins with a quick overview of what’s going on. If you’ve played the original game, then you know what’s up. If not, then its ok too. It begins with a quick minute and a half overview of the first game and you jump right back into it. Returning as Lucy, your Animus doctor from the first game, is the one and only, the beautiful, Kristen Bell. Lucy then helps you escape from William Benadict’s facility (only to put you back into another ghetto rigged Animus in a warehouse, but that comes later.)

Now you, (Desmond from the first game) see a side of Lucy that you have never seen before. What we’ve seen so far has been Lucy behind the Animus computer and that’s about it. Now, she is straight up kicking people’s asses in order to get you out o this building. You are fighting as Desmond, and Desmond is not very good. Desmond is actually horrible compared to what Lucy is doing.

You arrive at a warehouse where Lucy’s team is awaiting to get you right back into the swing of things. This is where there is a ghetto rigged Animus, awaiting your arrival.  What is revealed to you at this point in the game is the fact that you are being trained to be an assassin. Every time you go back into the Animus, you are retaining all the moves and skills from your history’s counterpart. Speaking of which, here we go back into the real core of the game.

A nice addition to the game is the looting. You are able to pick pocket people for additional funds if needed. The amount of funds that you are able to acquire from each individual person depends on what area you are in, and how they are dressed. This is a really a great aspect of the game.

An hour into the game, and you have not yet killed anything. It kind of defeats the purpose of having a game called Assassin’s Creed, when you are not killing anything. You begin as a lowly street kid named Ezio who is constantly getting into fights in the streets between a rival gang and Ezio’s gang of merry bandits. At first, around two hours or so of the game, you are literally an errand boy for your family. I am just going to say, it was very boring so far.

One of the errands you run for your family is delivering a message to a political figure to prove that your family has not committed treason. Well guess what? That political figure is a back stabbing F#$%!. So of course, our family is put to death, and then you go hell bent for revenge. This is where you first start actually killing people. YAY!

During this game, you become great friends with the one and only Leonardo Da Vinci. You bring him these pieces of parchment called Codex pages. He deciphers them and it gives you either more gadgets or more health. Not to mention, he also creates this machine that fly’s. You only really use this machine once, and you have to fly over bonfires to have the flames lift you up again. It is a pretty exciting time in the game, but only lasts around twenty seconds.

Bottom line

The coolest new feature in the game is the double blade assassination. You can literally walk behind two people and assassinate both of them at the same time. You are also able to blend into the crowd by walking side by side with a group of people. You are also able to sit down on a bench to lower your alert rate from the guards. Another cool feature was looting. You are able to pickpocket whoever you’d like, whenever you’d like.

You are also now able to make money from a city that you rebuilt. It’s called the VILLA. You rebuild it by paying an architect to renovate building in the city. You can also buy paintings from all the cities on the map in order to boost the amount of money that your city is worth. Over time, there is a chest in the VILLA that accumulates money. You are then able to go and collect the money whenever you get around to it.

Your uncle Mario makes a Nintendo Mario Bros. reference. When you see him for the first time, he literally says “It’s a me, MARIO!!” I’m not going to lie. It was funny.

There was a glitch where you get stuck in wall in Venice. I was in there for about 5 minutes before I gave up and restarted from the last checkpoint. It really made me upset.

If you have played the first game, you understand that you reach a certain point where you say to yourself “Damn, I have to do that again?” This game gets so repetitive like the first one, which was kind of hard to finish. There was a point where I really didn’t care to finish the game. I did. I was not impressed. Oh yea, and of course they left it open for a part  3.

Assassin’s Creed 2 took at least 2 ½ hours for the game to pick up and finally be worth playing. Once that happens, your already ready to give up the game and say “F%!$# IT!! I’M DONE!!”

!!SPOILER ALERT!!

You end up being the child of Altair. SURPRISE! Not really though.