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Jun 22, 2007

Battlefield 2 Modern Combat

Xbox Review

Military shooters keep popping up like dandelions. It's sometimes hard to tell them apart. Heck, even their commercials look identical. EA's Battlefield series has always carved its own path, however, with its unique large-scale warfare. But the landscape of consoles is a different battleground altogether, and this series both flourishes and flounders in its new setting. On consoles, your game needs a single-player campaign mode; there's no getting around it. Instead of slapping a half-assed ...
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Feb 15, 2006

Battlefield 2 Modern Combat

Xbox Review

Halo 2 is a right bastard. It may be one of the best games ever conceived but its brilliance has had a harmful effect on Xbox Live. Once mightily populated servers are now as empty as Gary Glitter's diary. We tried to get a game on Burnout Revenge the other day and there were dustballs rolling across the tarmac. So it's going to take a cracking game to make people give up their Halo 2 habit and play something different. Battlefield 2 is the one to do it. The most impressive aspect of the ...
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Jun 22, 2007

Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance

Xbox Review

Unlike what the news would have you believe, the only crime stemming from Grand Theft Autos popularity is the theft of its own content. A petty crime at best, but the market is about to be inundated with two-bit clones trying to muscle in on San Andreas turf. ...
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Mar 7, 2006

Black

Xbox Review

Forget everything you think you know about Black. It isn't to first-person shooters what Burnout is to racing games. It's not an over-the-top explodaganza that lets you destroy anything and everything you see. Hell, you can't even tear chunks out of most of its walls. What it is, though, is a fast-paced shooter that takes long, loving looks at its guns as often as possible. There's a ton of pre-designated stuff to destroy (plenty of it explosive) and the intensity ramps way up in later levels, ...
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Feb 22, 2006

Black

Xbox Review

Expectations, eh? While Black is technically flawless, painstakingly designed and probably the best single-player shooter on PS2, we can't help but feel a little disappointed. Why? Because it doesn't keep its promise to "do for first-person shooters what Burnout did for cars". Burnout changed the way we looked at racing games, with its speed, hypnotic structure (one nudge meant an instant crash) and benchmark graphics. Black's victory isn't innovation, but execution. Forget the plot - its ...
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Mar 24, 2006

Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII

Xbox Review

Screaming low over the roofs of London while unleashing a scorching fury of bullets into a formation of hapless Nazi pilots brings a joy that warms our justice-loving hearts for days afterward. Executing a flawless barrel-roll in between the legs of the Eiffel Tower to evade a German ace hell-bent on swiss-cheesing your fuselage delivers unmatched satisfaction. While tooling around in a WWII plane may not sound complicated, that lack of complexity is exactly what makes it such good ...
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Dec 14, 2004

Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space

Xbox Review

Rewind your mind a little bit. Remember Blinx: The Time Sweeper on Xbox? A curious time-bending platformer fronted by a terrifyingly ugly cat, it delivered little on its promise of allowing you to control the world around you as if you had a VHS remote control - pause it, rewind it, record it, speed it up. All we got was a messy, frustrating game with all the logic and order of a monkey house.Fast-forward back to the present. Blinx 2 is better than the original, but not by much. Gone are the ...
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Apr 2, 2004

Breakdown

Xbox Review

It's arguable that upping the amount of manual labour in a game can sometimes be a good thing. Having a strong work ethic (as in, say, Morrowind or Shenmue) can be a way of grounding the player in the game world, of strengthening the illusion through a deliberate use of dullness. Small wonders become greater when they feel like you are getting a reward. Entering a new town in Morrowind feels all the more exotic, actual and populated when you've just had to trek across a square mile of ...
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Jun 22, 2007

Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood

Xbox Review

A quickfire sequel to Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, Earned in Blood has been developed with feedback from the playing community in mind - hence the improved AI (evident both in the enemy and your own squadmates), enhanced multiplayer modes and the increase in urban combat. You play as Sgt Joe ‘Red Hartsock in a story thats part retelling of Road To Hill 30s events (from Reds perspective) but mostly an entirely new story that takes place on D-Day and the days beyond as the 101st ...
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Feb 15, 2006

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30

Xbox Review

"I can't shoot there, Sarge." Simple, scary and powerful words. When you hear them in Brothers in Arms, be assured that they carry more weight than Vanessa Feltz's slippers. You're hunkered down behind a hedge with your fire team, bullets whistling past your ears. There are two machine gun emplacements buried deep in the foliage up ahead and you can barely make out the landscape, let alone the whites of their eyes. You went out on a limb to get round the back and Hartsock and Leggett can't ...
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