| 3 | Rage | 60Hz. Same mission setup as Fallout 3, Dead Island, Borderlands. |
| 3.5 | Dead Island | Like Fallout 3 but with zombies. Last memory is chap 8, 53% 21h |
| 3 | Red Faction: Armageddon | Played 48% 5h30min so far. It's trying to be Dead Space / Gears of War / Resident Evil. At least you get to wreck some tiny buildings, but it's extremely linear. I'm still hoping it will suddenly open up and become the lovely open world kind of game RF:Guerilla was, but I know it won't. |
| 2 | Portal 2 | More of the same. Slightly less crap graphics, now it only looks 6 years old and now 12. Probably played 3 hours, so I'm told there's a whole more hour in there waiting for me. |
| 3 | Dead Space 2 | It's Dead Space 1 with 1% refinement. Too bad I've already played the first. Couldn't be bothered with much more than disc 1. |
| 3 | Bulletstorm | Played maybe 5-7 hours. It's gears of war in color, nothing more. |
| 2 | Exit | 1000 boring levels to keep you busy. Horrible controls. |
| 3.5 | Braid | Pretty good timewarping puzzles but bad platforming/jump mechanics. meh |
| 5 | Limbo | Beautiful well-composed 3 hour puzzle. Great atmosphere created by good sound and graphical effects like filters. |
| 4 | Singularity | Extremely similar to Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 and 5, with some puzzle elements borrowed from Portal and a few visual effects from Silent Hill. This is by far the most linear game of the above mentioned. There's no backtracking, no replay value, no second playthrough, and every section of the game is like 3 rooms, then a door is closed behind you and you're presented with 3 new rooms. This linearity I think helps telling the story which is pretty well presented, and thankfully without lots of boring cut-scenes. You get checkpoints every two meters, except of course in those few places you actually need them. The weapons are fun, but with no open world to play around with them, their variation is kind of moot. I'm guessing the game is some 9-12 hours depending on if you check all pieces of storytelling placed throughout the game. Playing on normal difficulty would probably have been best, as easy is way too easy. |
| 3 | Alan Wake | More linear than an audiobook and darker than an Anal Kawe, this shooter/cutscene lasts about 8 hours. The first impressions of the one hour long episode 1 are pretty good, but there's not much more to it after that. The story is told pretty well, but not interesting. The visual effect when the enemies are around is pretty cool, but that is the only effect and it is used throughout the whole game, no variation. Why did they throw in the pointless coffee thermos achievement? Why do I keep losing all inventory at least once per episode? Definitely a "rental". I'm sure the reason this game got pretty good reviews is cause reviewers actually had time to play through it in a short time, part thanks to checkpoints being set at every footstep you walk. |
| 2 | Lost Planet 2 | Supposed to have offline splitscreen coop, but instead of a real splitscreen, this game has that shitty split like Resident Evil 5. You get a fourth of the screen each, and then half of your tv is left black. I didn't buy a 46" tv to play at 23", thank you. After a boring 5min intro cutscene, the game started out looking like some old n64-game, after barely seeing what to do and what was where, we gave up and never returned. |
| 2 | Darksiders | Crap button-mashing dmc/gow clone. Horrible tearing, bad camera and flimsy controls. Nothing zelda-like at all, why did reviewers and others keep saying it was similar? |
| 3.6 | Lego Indy 2 | Like the previous Lego games but more polished. Check out their new cool splitscreen solution. |
| 3 | Wolfenstein | Good standard FPS action with good controls. The game would have got a 4 if it hadn't deleted my saved progress twice. I heard it might be related to the consoles internal clock not being set. |
| 4.5 | Borderlands | Coop GOTY. Thankfully there's no gameplay-time counter in the game. The splitscreen offline coop works well, though I heard the PC/PS3-versions online play is very bad. Only a few small annoyances I would have wanted fixed; Let me disable the hold-X-to-replace-gun feature, I never needed that, and it was just in the way when quick-looting. Picked up weapons should have been placed in a new list so I can more easily compare them to previous weapon I've chosen to keep. Streamline the startup procedure of the game, why not an option for just "continue where you left off?" which would login both coop-players, pick the character you had last time and start the game, probably not possible with the 360's user profile system though. Also, the rocket launcher was crap, it had the properties of a slow sniper rifle. Ever heard of a shockwave? |
| 3.1 | Overlord 2 | It's like Overlord 1... |
| 3 | Batman: Arkham Asylum | The closest to an interactive movie you can get. The story is pretty good, and you barely play at all, just walk from one cut-scene to another. |
| 4 | Shadow Complex | Imagine our beloved SNES Super Metroid 2d remade with Epic's Unreal "cube of meat" Engine, giving it that modern Gears of War feeling, that is: sluggish high latency controls, tearing, buggy physics making bodies jump around forever after dying. This is a glimpse of half of what we could have got if Nintendo had bothered releasing a modern console and made a new 2d Metroid for it. The game is about 6h long, possibly another hour if you backtrack to collect some extra upgrade. The game is worth playing since there's a lack of similar games out nowadays, but why couldn't we get a SNES Metroid + more? Build on that and make it better, don't give us something LESS 15 years later. The only new things you get are really just cause of modern hardware, i.e. higher resolution, lighting effects, polygon characters, cut-scenes, voice-art etc. The game does have good music at a couple of places, though very few, what's up with that? Using a proper d-pad instead of analogue controls would've been much better too, sadly the 360 lacks one. The game should have been bigger, but given the price (1200 poins = approx 118 SEK, 16gbp, 18.6eur, 32aud, 26.7usd thanks to MS' shitty point cards system), it is quite a good deal anyway. The game was far too linear for my taste, this makes me just want to finish such games to get over with the cut-scenes and crap, but if there's no replay value, then bah. I know Super Metroid was quite linear looking back at it now, but not this much. Why does the game upgrade the main gun and armor now and then? It's not like you can miss the upgrade and there's no effort involved in getting it. It feels like nothing more than another cut-scene. And oh, you got 4 alternative weapons to choose from on the d-pad, guess what, they're not in the 4 directions, you have to flip through them with the left and right buttons. |
| 2 | Ghostbusters | Nice idea with original cast voices. The game looked more fun in the trailer, but destruction in the hotel restaurant was far from satisfying, and the capture of ghost procedure was tedious and didn't leave much room for skill. Awful tearing and low framerate too. Got bored after ~1h. |
| 4 | Dead Space | 18hrs of Resident Evil 4 ripoff - and that's a good thing. You got the suitcase upgrade, the healthbar upgrade, save place, merchant place, and weapon upgrades with the same features: reload time, ammo, damage, although in Dead Space the upgrades are laid out in a map-style configuration, just like in Final Fantasy X. Great ambient sound. I wish you could go back and explore, RE4 had the same problem. The game had a massive bug at the final boss, make sure you stand in the middle or front of the area, I didn't and had to replay it. Stunning fact: there's no tearing!. |
| 3.5 | Prototype | ffffffuuuuuuuuuu, prototype was boring. cut-scene, loading screen, cut-scene, hold RT to sprint to the next checkpoint. if enemies are in the way, button mash X. repeat. and try not to fall asleep under the extremely boring cutscenes. of about 1 hour of "gaming" i only got 17mins of gameplay according to the statistics screen. millions of tutorials, tips and hints before you even get to play anything. the game tries to be cool and live on visual effects while giving you crap controls and boring gameplay. After finishing the game in about 8 hours, I must say it's a bit more fun than gta4. it passes the time, but is way too shallow. Rockstar should've used this engine for rendering manhattan. |
| 4.5 | Red Faction 3: Guerrilla | GOTY so far. I actually played this one to the end, all 26 hours of it. Great gameplay with lots of destruction, rally driving and easy aiming shooting. There's lots of cool different weapons and a variety of vehicles. The number of cut-scenes and their lenghts are kept low, which is great. What would've been absolutely super is a split-screen coop campaign mode. There are a few things that ofcourse could be done better, some I can forgive and others not. inexcusable:
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| 2 | Terminator: Salvation | A crappy Gears of War ripoff with graphics that could be mistaken for previous gen xbox. Horrible tearing, laughable face textures, amazingly silly T800 walking animation. The only thing making it playable for a while is the offline splitscreen co-op. |
| 2.5 | Bionic Commando | Okayish looks but gets repetitive after 10mins. The whole spider-man swinging mechanics don't feel entertaining at all, partly cause no laws of physics applies. |
| 2.5 | Onechanbara Bikini Samurai Squad | 2-player splitscreen coop. Slashing zombies with swords while wearing a minimal bikini in a quite crappy game engine using bad controls and a camera that never points where you want it to. |
| 4 | Resident Evil 5 | Near identical to RE4 but better graphics and an optional drop-in co-op mode. On the downside though, there are lots of things that got worse since RE4. If you happen to have the 360 dashboard set to 1080p, and who wouldn't since most people with a HDTV has 1080p, then the game has the worst tearing in history, unforgivable, it ruins the graphics and makes it way worse than the gamecube version. This ruined the impression for me during the first 3 hours I played, until I googled the 'fix' to set the dashboard to 720p, now there's practically no tearing. More things that got worse in RE5:
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| 3 | LOTR: Conquest | Seems to be quite crap, and would get a score 2 if it wasn't for the co-op splitscreen which makes all games 1 score higher right away. It seems to be a simple button masher. |
| 3.5 | Tom Clancys Rainbow Six Vegas 2 | Pretty good and well made, fun in co-op splitscreen. You can easily lose track of each other, but there's some on-screen map for finding each other again. The settings are of course boring since it is supposed to be 'realistic', killing monsters and zombies is much more fun (like gears of war). |
| 3 | Left 4 Dead | It has splitscreen co-op... not much more reason to play it. |
| 3.6 | Gears of War 2 | Near identical to the first game, but this time in color and longer! As before, the co-op mode is what makes this fun. |
| 4.6 | Fallout 3 | 18h into the game, so far superb! GOTY. The only big complaint I have is the (always terrible) tearing, even in the intro cut-scene. |
| 3.5 | Lego Batman | Best Lego game so far. Fun co-op. Still stupidly buggy and crap graphics. It however runs at full hd on the xbox360 so it looks better than the previous games. This and the fact that the wii version this time had waggling (pointing the batarang with the wiimote) is good reason to play it on the 360 instead. |
| 4.5 | GTA4 | Annoying flickering shadows, just like most modern games. Laggy low framerate. Story about stupid people you don't care about killing other stupid people you don't care about either. Graphics which barely makes it visible if it's day or night, good weather or raining. Fun sandbox gaming, which really is what this is all about. Missions seem easier than previous GTAs, which made me play more of them. EDIT: increase in-game brightness and contrast and the game will look much better! |
| 4 | Army of Two | Plays just like a polished Gears of War (co-op splitscreen) but without the monsters. Supposedly not very good in single-player mode. 8h long. |
| 3.5 | Gears of War | Fun in co-op splitscreen. Almost black and white graphics, with a touch of dark red for blood. Quite buggy and slow controls. 7h long. |
| 2 | The Darkness | Boring story. Dated graphics. About 3 small "levels". 7h long. |
| 3 | Portal | Fun tech-demo. 2-3h long. |
| 2.5 | Halo 3 | It has splitscreen co-op. Average graphics and super boring story with a faceless bloke trying to be cool. |
| 4 | Overlord | Fun Pikmin-ripoff. Too bad about the 360's noise. |
| 1 | Turok | Why did they bother making this? It has nothing new not seen in other games. On top of that, it has sub-standard graphics showing off UE3. |
| 3 | Assassins Creed | |
| 2 | Beautiful Katamari | |
| 3 | BioShock | |
| 3 | BlueDragon | |
| 4 | Burnout Paradise | |
| 2 | Dead Rising | |
| 2 | Lost Odyssey | |
| 2 | Devil May Cry 4 | |
| 2.5 | Earth Defence Force | |
| 3 | The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion | |
| 2 | Rainbow Six Vegas | |
| 2 | Time Shift | |
| 2 | Virtua Fighter 5 | |