Goatmoose

Every now and then I like to quickly review some recent rentals I acquired through GameFly.  I often end up reviewing games that are years old, but sometimes things slip through the cracks and people forget about stuff.  Also, it partly allows me to examine how certain games have held up over time.  Something that was decent a few years ago might be terrible now that we’ve seen how things can progress.  So here we go…

Jurassic: The Hunted

This is a game I had absolutely never heard of until one day discovering it in the bowels of GameFly’s shooter section.  It came out in November 2009 but looks like it is two years older.  The plot is basically this – your plane gets sucked into a vortex and crashes somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle.  Time is all messed up and other people that were on the plane with you have aged into old men, having been living in this area for decades now.  The place is also plagued with raptors that need a good killing.

Obviously, the story is ridiculous and the plot is not the reason to play this game.  The voice acting and character depth are trash, and overall anything related to story elements is trash.

That being said, the game is somewhat fun in an odd way.  Despite being completely linear, requiring no cognitive work whatsoever and being terribly repetitive and unimaginative, it entertains you for a brief time as a simple, casual shooter.  There are small elements that attempt to add to its depth, such as the adrenaline mode that allows you to slow-mo target the dinos’ vitals for added pain, but nothing really changes the fact it’s just a basic barebones shooter.

The whole game took me 2.5 hours to beat from start to finish my first playthrough on regular difficulty.   Once you beat the game on regular, you open up a harder difficulty for a second play.  Ironically, this difficulty ends up being easier because the game presents you with a one-hit-kill weapon about two minutes in.

Most of the achievements are fairly simple.  To get all of them, you’ll have to play through twice.  For me, that wasn’t worth it – as I didn’t regret playing the game once, but I had no interest in doing it again.  The sign of a true rental-quality game.

As a perk, it’s almost always on Available Now status through GameFly.  If you have a plan that offers more than one game at a time, this will hardly impact you, and is an easy one to rent and mail back the same day after you’re done.

Dead to Rights: Retribution

I had not previously played a Dead to Rights title before this game, so for me, this was a new experience.  I knew little about what it was before renting, only that it had modest reviews and involved guns – criteria usually good enough for me to merit a rental.

There are a lot of positives to the game – the combo gun/fighting gameplay works pretty well, the canine companion element is a fun diversion from the pace of the rest of the game, the storyline is decent and the game looks pretty good visually.  The weapon variety is nice enough, the fight sequences allow a lot of variation (taking people hostage and kicking them off a roof is joyous) and there are definitely much worse action shooters out there.

On the negative side, the AI can be ridiculously stupid at times, the game certainly has its dry points and extra drawn-out sections and doesn’t change much from level to level.  By the time the 7th or 8th of the 10 levels came my way, I was looking forward to the game being over.

Since I type these particular reviews from a rental standpoint, I’d consider this game very worth your time.  If you had bought it, particularly back at launch for full price, it would be a serious letdown and certainly isn’t worth too much of your cash.  It doesn’t do anything new, isn’t innovative against any of its competitors and in a few years (if not already) will be a forgotten note in the slue of modern action games that involve shooting, fighting, bullet time and average-quality stories.  But as a rental, it’s an easy play, offers a sufficient amount of fun to justify its time in your home and you can send it back and move on with your life.

John Woo Presents Stranglehold

This title is practically antique on the 360, released in September ‘07.  And quite frankly, I hated it.

John Woo behind a camera is great.  Chow Yun Fat-ish main characters in gun-fu films is great.  Apparently those things in a now 3+ year-old video game are poop.  This game’s story is terrible, the voice acting is abysmal, the controls are junk and its fast-action mandatory bullet time movement gets old after about a half hour.  The graphics are terrible, the story is short and the multiplayer has long been rendered nonexistent.  I played halfway through this game before I just couldn’t take it anymore and it went back in the envelope.

If you read reviews of this game on IGN and GamerNode, they’re not too bad.  But they were written years ago.  I think I might have enjoyed this game much more in 2007, too.  Sure, it has its cool moments.  It flows in a very Chinese action movie sort of way.  It pretends to be a film, rewarding you for doing ridiculous action movie things like shooting guys while hanging on a chandelier or sliding impossibly across a long, set dinner table while double-wielding magnums and popping baddies in the eyes.  But to me, today, this is all novelty, and not interesting enough to make up for a game that lacks in all other areas.

Rent it if you really want to, but it’s easy to shrug off.

Clive Barker’s Jericho

Wow, talk about old and crappy.  This game is practically free to buy brand new on Amazon ($6.99), and can be rented any day of the week.  If you’re a PC gamer, you can buy it new for $0.99.  It came out in October, 2007.

And it’s worth every penny.

I haven’t disliked something with such passion in a while.  This game makes Jurassic: The Hunted look like the greatest game ever made.  I can’t even express its stupidity.

The best quality this game has is the ability to play as six different characters who all have different skill sets and abilities.  Too bad that’s the only good quality.  Every single other element of this game is crap.  I don’t even want to say anything else.  It’s infuriating.

There you have it.  Happy renting.