Rotastic

Vikings are not the only individuals who crave a life spent gliding through the sky. A ragtag group comprising an elf, boar, and reanimated skeleton join the party, though the only difference between these cartoon characters is their appearance. No matter which you choose, your goal is the same: swing from suspended points in the sky collecting gems, destroying barriers, and performing other odd jobs. Each level takes place on a single screen, and you have to complete your objective against the clock to move on to the next level with as high of a score as possible. Based on how effective you were in completing your task, you're given bronze, silver, gold, or platinum helmets, and when you unlock enough, you open up harder levels. It's an elegant system that is hounded by problems; chief among them is inconsistent controls that make unlocking the later levels a grueling, arduous plight that usually ends in aggravation.

Rotastic uses just two buttons. By holding A, you grab on to hook points, and you continually swing around them in a circle until you let go. If you want to change direction, just tap a bumper button. Grapple points dot the sky at strategic places, and you have to swing from one to another and then back again to collect gems hovering around you. For the first few levels, things run smoothly, and the easy-to-grasp control scheme makes it possible to forget what your hands are doing as you leap impressively from one hook to another without a care in the world. Bonus points are given if you pull off a trick--such as forming a figure 8 or other specific shapes--and there's simple pleasure to be found in the balletic manner you move. Without obstacles to get in your way or intense objectives forcing you to move in specific ways, the tutorial portion exhibits the surreal freedom of flight.


Like martial artists, Vikings wear different colors based on their talents. Clearly, he's a neophyte.
However, everything comes crashing down once the difficulty ramps up. The controls perform admirably when neither time nor precision are working against you, but this only lasts for so long. Once you have to hit switches, avoid buzzsaw blades, and break blocks, it's apparent that you don't have the proper tools to progress. The trick to successfully moving from one place to another comes from mastering your trajectory. By figuring out where you're going to land based on your angle of movement and speed, you can fling from one point to the next without many problems. But this is much easier said than done. There's no margin of error in Rotastic, so if you aren't a master of geometry, prepare to be frustrated frequently. In instances where you just have to land on a flat plane, it can take two or three attempts before you release at the right point. And even after getting where you want, you're liable to bounce right past your objective or miss it by the slimmest of margins. In later levels, you have to get past buzzsaw blades moving in asynchronous patterns or rush through closing gates against a timer, and there's little fun in repeatedly trying these grueling challenges only to come up short.

Every difficult level has the same problems because the controls are not up to the task. Levels require ultraspecific movement, and it's incredibly difficult to consistently pull off these exacting requests. Because of this, you often complete a stage by the skin of your teeth, which means you earn a mere bronze helmet. Without getting a high enough score for silver or gold, you can't unlock the later levels, so you're left replaying earlier stages with the desperate hope that you luck into a better ranking. And success does feel like luck in Rotastic. To get a high score, you have to pull off a string of almost-perfect moves in quick succession, and admittedly, it is a rush when you nail everything just as you should. But it's a rare moment when everything comes together, and you can only marvel at the implausibility of your landings. Did you really bounce off of two adjacent walls to nab that purple gem? How did you find room to squeak past that spiked log to hit the switch? The answers always come up the same: dumb luck. You never feel like a superstar because replicating these feats of brilliance is nearly impossible.


Boars don't fear death because they don't have souls.
The roughly 70 single-player levels should keep dedicated players busy for a few hours, and if you crave more swinging action once you've gone through the gauntlet, there's a four-player, offline-only multiplayer mode as well. There are two different ways to play. Deathmatch involves slamming into your friends or trying to cut their rope so they fall into a bottomless void. Collect is the same thing, except the winner is determined by how many gems you nab, though it's still more entertaining to send your friends plummeting. Multiplayer is more fun than the single-player counterparts because everyone is plagued by the same handicap: imprecise controls. Because of this, slinging yourself willy-nilly through the world is goofy fun, given that there's no real punishment for failure. Sure, you may fall into a pit or miss out on collecting coins, but who cares? You're just challenging friends in some good-natured competition. Still, there isn't a draw to hook you long term. After playing two or three matches, the shallowness of the experience is overwhelming, so even if you enjoy multiplayer, you'll be hard pressed to find someone to join you.

Rotastic ultimately feels like it could have been released on a mobile device for one-tenth of the price. It doesn't take advantage of any of the Xbox 360's technical wizardry, and the simple control scheme combined with the shallow gameplay would be ideal in five-minute bursts while waiting for your train to arrive. Sadly, Rotastic exists only on a console that's tethered to a television, and it's hard to justify shelling out 800 Microsoft points ($10) for this forgettable experience. With better level design and controls that allowed you to move with precision, Rotastic could have offered a quiet respite from the spectacle of most big-budget retail releases. But there are too many frustrations for it to slide into that role. Rotastic briefly soars through the air, but it quickly plummets back to the earth with a dull thud.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge

Sometimes the best way to distinguish your game among others is to incorporate elements across genres into a single, coherent gameplay experience. On paper, this gets people very excited—-think about Halo, which gives players shooting, driving, and flying all in one beautiful package. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of work to get every component working properly, and if one malfunctions even a bit, the entire experience can be ruined. Enter Hunted: The Demon’s Forge.
Hunted was designed as a “dungeon crawler” of sorts, but with typical RPG elements blended with cooperative combat. There’s Caddoc, the gruff sword-swinger, and E’Lara, the nimble elf archer. There are no other choices—-by maintaining these two characters, each one can undergo a unique story arc and personal crises can be… oh, who are we kidding? These are just silly archetypes that we understand immediately, and they actually work well enough within the context of co-op battles. Don’t expect anything epic, but the lighthearted jibes and exchanges between them provide some nice relief as the game plods along.

Although either character can technically be used across a variety of combat scenarios, their specializations in ranged or close warfare form the core of the game. This is particularly nice in multiplayer because it’s strangely more consistent than the single-player campaign. This is mainly due to your assignment to a character, rather than having to constantly worry about switching back between them—-which can only be done in specific contexts, mind you. Why the game couldn’t allow players to freely switch characters at any time is a mystery; even Donkey Kong Country managed this trick, after all.
Unfortunately, the melding of slashing and shooting doesn’t work out quite as smoothly as one might hope. It’s easy to get turned on by this premise, but Hunted simply doesn’t deliver on its primary design. By the time you’re an hour into the game, very little novelty awaits you. In the past, many games have spruced things up by adding new abilities or significant rewards to keep things fresh. Instead, Hunted feels drab and stretched thin as you go along. The combat is awkward and repetitive, and the AI is terrible. This is often forgivable among foes, but in any game with friendly AI, the problems become a major headache. Your companion often behaves erratically, lagging behind or charging ahead when they shouldn’t and generally making a mess of things. It’s a bit like the stress of bringing a date to a formal event, only without having to leave the comfort of your living room. Somehow I doubt that was the intended selling point for the game.


Another disappointment lies in the narrative itself. While technically you could produce any game with a “fantasy” flair, a product from Bethesda is held to a higher standard. If a fantasy story isn’t rich enough to make the player feel utterly submerged in the world, everything tends to turn rather silly after a while. The intrinsic intrigue of an investigative mercenary duo will die down if clues are not offered along the way—-even little bits of tasty substance to keep curiosities piqued. A lot of people might have been able to overlook this, but this area feels very lackluster and lends the impression of a rushed product.


All told, Hunted offers a modicum of playing pleasure on a slow weekend, but a rental would be safer than a purchase. The visuals seem dated in a few spots, and in fact, the game sounds better in most areas than it looks. The music is particularly strong, probably one of the few things that Hunted gets right, but scarcely enough to warrant a purchase. Irksome gameplay and unpolished graphics keep Hunted grounded in the realm of “decent at best.” With so much potential, it seems a more serious execution could offer better things in the future.

Magic: The Gathering Duels of the Planeswalkers

f you’ve read my review of Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012, you’ll know I’m more or less pleased with its slick digital take on my favorite card game. DOTP 2012 does an excellent job of both teaching new and intermediate players the finer points of Magic the Gathering, while also acting as a fine time-waster for ‘pros’ like myself. That being said, though the core game did its job quite well, this minor expansion is really only worth picking up if you’re one of the few people who hasn’t moved onto playing the actual card game yet.

The real disappointment is that the expansion focuses almost entirely on the Archenemy format, which unfortunately does not lend itself well to this game’s lacking A.I. and underpowered deck options. In Archenemy, three players work to take out the titular archenemy, a player commanding a doubled life total and a deck of extremely powerful scheme cards. At the beginning of the archenemy’s turn the top card of the scheme deck is “put into motion,” causing untold devastation to the three allied players. Though Archenemy battles were available in the original game, players now get to play the part of the final boss, and its honestly pretty fun the first time you decimate your three opponents. But once you realize how hard it is to actually lose a game, the excitement quickly fades.
The probem is that DOTP 2012 does not offer specific decks tuned for playing Archenemy, forcing you to use the exact same decks as in the one vs. one campaign. This means that the archenemy seems to have an almost overbearing advantage, facing off against three decks meant for single-player games, all while gleefully ripping ridiculously powerful effects from the top of the scheme deck. The scheme cards were designed to be so powerful to give the archenemy a chance against three overpowered opponents. Using these game-breaking effects in order to blast such ridiculously terrible cards as Suntail Hawk is really just a downright bore.

Another major concern is that this expansion does nothing to tune up the enemy A.I., which continues to make some rather routine mistakes. I watched one computer opponent suicide rush his bears towards my much larger creatures for no reason other than to watch them die, while another opponent wasted a card to return a skeleton from their graveyard to hand, ignoring the fact that the skeleton could’ve simply reanimated itself.
Perhaps the most notable error came during one game, where I found myself in control of a gigantic elf army and moved to put their commander onto the battlefield, a creature who would turn my entire lot of forest-dwelling pretty boys into a swift-footed clan of unstoppable forest-walking death. Luckily my opponent, the dreaded vampire lord Sorin Markov, cast his Disfigure spell… killing one of my little pieces of elf cannon-fodder, for some reason ignoring the commander entirely. I slammed in with my long-eared brothers and won that game quite handily, wondering what line of code told this feared vampire to kill my most irrelevant creature and ignore the elf lord of impending doom.

Anyhow, though I see this expansion as a bit of a design mistake, I’m sure there are those for whom the few new multiplayer extras are enough of a selling point. Three new decks are available for play,  and there’s even new cards to be unlocked for the original decks. It’s also a fun sneak peek at some upcoming cards and new planeswalkers. Basically, the new single player campaign is useless, but if you’ve been having a blast playing online then sure, pick this one up. Though I still think you’d be more satisfied heading down to your local game store and enjoying the game the way it was meant to be played.