Star Wars Outlaws – The Friendly Bandit Life

Warm up your speeder, and make sure your blaster is powered up. It’s time to wreak havoc in the criminal underworld of Star Wars to establish yourself as the boss! Well, actually, you won’t be doing that… at all. For a game being set in the underbelly of society, the people here are for most of the time well-spoken, friendly, and forgiving. Sure, there will be the occasional betrayal, and people getting blasted for seemingly petty things. But the situation is not that dire to be honest, and besides, that’s not your objective anyway. Star Wars Outlaws plays it incredibly safe for walking into the territory of murders, corruption, and robberies; boringly so, even.

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Star Wars: Bounty Hunter – Jango’s Adventures

Star Wars: Bounty Hunter is a remaster of an old PlayStation 2 game, which I did not play back in the day. This means that my review will be purely based on my experience with the remaster on PC. My first impressions is that this a damn fun game that makes you feel like one of the legendary bounty hunters from the Star Wars universe. However, as with almost every game, fun is only allowed in small quantities mandated by publishers and probably the state. Jokes aside. While Star Wars: Bounty Hunter begins excellently, it starts to show some serious cracks in its design after a few hours of gaming, disappointingly enough that it affects the whole feel of the game in retrospect.

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Jurassic Park: The Game – Barbasol Edition

Jurassic Park: The Game is a Telltale Games production, so you know what you are getting when starting this piece of interactive media. It will be all quick-times events of various difficulty, spliced with stiff cartoon animations and the occasional point & click adventure puzzle of old thrown in for good measure. What it got, and what makes it unique, is the wonderful Jurassic Park license. And what do you know, they actually do a good job of using it, with a minimum of cringe-inducing scenes and flat-out lore contradictions.

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[Book Tip] Crysis: Legion by Peter Watts

Crysis: Legion is an adaptation of Crysis 2, which means it’s for the most part just a retelling of the plot line from the game. It’s not my favorite kind of gaming-related novel, since, well, you already know how it will play out and how it will finish. However, Crysis 2 is in a unique situation, as the lead in the game does not talk. Not exactly the best way to add characterization to the protagonist. Who even is Alcatraz? – might be asked a couple of times during the game. The story can also be hard to follow as little is explained, especially not how we went from the jungle fighting in first Crysis to now battling aliens and mercenaries in the heart of New York. Luckily, Crysis: Legion remedies this!

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Crysis: Warhead – Going Psycho

More tropical island fun in Crysis: Warhead can’t be a bad thing, right? Well, probably not, but it can be somewhat of a disappointing experience if the fundamentals of the game change too much. See, Crysis: Warhead is more of the same, but they dropped the more simulated and highly immersive feel of Crysis, for a more “high-octane” action adventure with guns. The problem with this is that there are just too many scripted moments and an overload of on-rails vehicle chases. Hope you like turret segments! They also ditched the immersive aspect of keeping you in first-person all the time, even for the cutscenes. Now, the game constantly jumps in and out of your body and displays the scenes in very awkward third-person acting.

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