Penumbra: Black Plague

When last we left Philip, the protagonist of last year's first-person horror adventure Penumbra: Overture, he had just been knocked out cold in a dank underground lair. This sudden cliffhanger was just about the only truly annoying moment in Frictional Games' freshman effort, though, because the Swedish developer did yeoman work setting up both a macabre mood and puzzles rooted in the real world. Now, the series comes to a close with Penumbra: Black Plague, a superb sequel that continues with the creeps and common-sense conundrums.

As with Overture, the biggest selling point in Black Plague is the physics-dependent design. The Lovecraft-influenced story about a young man investigating an underground base in Greenland--apparently contaminated with some sort of infection--is decidedly weird, but not nearly as original as the puzzle design. Everything in the game is based on real-world logic, but not the Bizarro World nonsense that dominates traditional adventure games. All of the problems here are tied to accurate physics and environments that are packed with objects that can be directly manipulated. There are no pixel hunts, no running around to pull a dizzying succession of levers, no directing laser beams at mirrors, and no slapping tape on a cat to make a moustache. Here you simply explore spooky underground settings to try to escape by picking up and sliding around boxes, rocks, chairs, crates, flares, or other sorts of detritus.

Every action you take is modeled on real-life movements. To open a drawer, you've got to use the mouse to click on the handle and then pull the mouse back to mimic sliding it open. Doors are opened the same way, with a click and a pull. Throwing a switch is accomplished by grabbing it with the cursor and then sliding the mouse downward. Wheels are turned by rotating the mouse. These sorts of motions can be a touch finicky at times, especially when hauling around long objects, such as planks or shelves, that get too easily snagged on doorways and walls, but they do a fantastic job of underlining the reality of your situation. Philip's body is even a part of the simulation because you have to be careful not to step on objects that you're trying to drag. Unlike so many other first-person games where you're basically just a formless mass behind a camera, here your character has real presence.

Puzzles are similarly realistic. Rather than collecting bits of random junk as in a typical adventure, you deal with situations as they come, utilizing only objects at hand to solve problems. This switch can actually be awful tricky to deal with if you're an adventure-game veteran. It's hard to believe that all of the tools needed to get past a barrier like a locked door are laid out in front of you so clearly. So you can spend many minutes crawling around looking for the trick or gimmick that bars your way in traditional adventure games, never realizing that the first step to a solution here is often as simple as picking up a rock to smash open a door, throwing a plank over an abyss, or ripping a wire out of a circuit box to kill the power that is keeping a door locked. You still need to take a good look at your surroundings for hints and MacGyver your way through a lot of locked doors, but there are no ridiculous leaps of logic. Anyone with a dash of patience and a pinch of common sense should be able to finish the game without recourse to a walkthrough.

This true-to-life design also makes Black Plague damn scary. With everything so rooted in reality, it's easy to lose your sense of place and feel like you're really stuck deep underground. The visuals are a few years behind the times, although in some ways, this actually enhances the grimy look of your subterranean prison. Also, most of the textures are reasonable, given that they're not pushed to depict anything more sophisticated than rusty walls and bloodstained floors. Because you spend all of your time fumbling around in the dark, anyhow, audio is more important than the visuals. Black Plague delivers here, with sparse sounds like distant whispers and rattling that could either be right beside you or far off in the distance. Atmospheric effects and music are just disorienting enough to keep you on edge at all times.

All of the irritating cheese from Overture has been stripped away too. Both combat and stealth mechanics have been pretty much entirely eliminated from the game. You can still fight when necessary and duck into the shadows to dodge enemies. But there are no more frustrating dealings with patrolling dogs and no need to try to swing a pickaxe into a skull. The latter is most welcome because the decidedly unfriendly battle interface from the first game made the occasional scrap with those demon dogs a real pain. You do run into hostile creatures every so often, although these occasions are few and far between. Gruesome sentries show up just often enough to maintain tension. Hiding out for a few moments is generally all that's required to ditch baddies, which leaves you alone to deal with puzzles for the most part.

The one big drawback with Black Plague is that it ends rather abruptly. Any experienced adventure gamer can wrap the game up in four or five hours, which makes it a little too brief even for its bargain-bin price tag. Such brevity and a dissatisfying conclusion might be more forgivable if a third Penumbra was on the way, but this sudden finale is a bit annoying given that this is the end of the line for the series. Nevertheless, Black Plague is fun while it lasts and definitely recommended for anyone who enjoyed the first game.

Lost: Via Domus

According to the television show Lost, in 2004, Oceanic Airlines flight 815 crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Whether you think the survivors are stranded on an island or bottled up in a different location, Ubisoft has added one more survivor to the mix in its latest adventure game. Lost: Via Domus tells a good story, but it's far too short to justify the game's price of admission.

In Lost: Via Domus, you take control of an amnesiac photojournalist who was also aboard the fateful transpacific flight. During the game you must slowly regain your identity through completing quests, talking with the other survivors, and correctly identifying clues during flashbacks. Early on you find out you had a camera on the plane with you. Evidently one of your photographs made another survivor mad enough to want to destroy the photograph and kill you. The events in the story unfold in a great parallel to the TV series. Most of the game's storyline occurs during the first two seasons of the show, but characters appearing in season three of the show are also included in encounters and exposition. The core characters are all there: Jack, Locke, Kate, Sawyer, Charlie, Claire, Sun, Jin, Hurley, and Sayid. Tom, Ben, and Juliet--of the Others--appear as well to ensure that the hostile, we-were-here-before-you storyline is kept alive and well.

The environments are hands down the best-looking part of the game, particularly on the PlayStation 3. The as-seen-on-Lost locations and the few new environments are beautifully and accurately rendered. The lighting, feel, and sounds of the environment are all spot-on. Frequently, we found ourselves walking out to precipices just to take in the sights or zooming in with our camera to see how detailed the hatch's bookshelves were. The crash site looks true to the show's pilot episode, even if the chaotic initial few minutes don't play out exactly as they do in the TV series. The areas look great, and their diversity keeps you from feeling like you're spending too much time in one place.

The biggest problem is that there is not enough gameplay to fill more than seven hours, even if you go out of your way to find all of the Easter eggs, take in all of the sights, and unlock all of the achievements available on the Xbox 360. The bartering, exploring, hot-wiring, and occasional pistol-firing sequences are all a clear part of the Lost milieu. You'll spend so much time in the fuse-plugging minigames, though, that you'll feel like an electrician by the end of your adventure. That's because the same minigame is played when you need to access everything from old hatches on the island to the crashed jetliner's fuselage.

One standout portion of the gameplay is the way photography is used in the playable flashback sequences. At the outset of each trip down memory lane, you get a glimpse of a torn-up photograph. From that flash, you have to use your camera to take a picture to match the broken image as the sequence of events plays out. The same sequence will loop repeatedly for you as you try to zoom, focus, and position the framing to match what the image was. Upon successfully capturing the required image, you are then treated to a cutscene with a portion of the main character's backstory. The whole premise makes flashbacks interesting, immersive, and enjoyable. The fact that flashbacks fit so well within the main character's photojournalist vocation also makes the functionality feel natural and engaging.

Interacting with the cast should be enjoyable, but that isn't always the case. Your character's dialogue isn't always voiced, but when it is, his comments are often natural and believable. At other times, however, his remarks get repetitious. The voice acting in Lost: Via Domus is generally decent, but the lip-synching leaves a lot to be desired. Aside from the occasionally great delivery by Hurley or the infrequent encounters with the Others, most of the exchanges look and feel flat. Even the nicknames delivered by Sawyer crash and burn most of the time. The characters are instantly recognizable but generally fail to do their real-life counterparts justice. Also, the 360 version has some instances of inconsistent shading on the characters' faces.

All three versions of Lost: Via Domus look and perform in a similar manner. The PlayStation 3 version looks a little cleaner and brighter than the others, but it can be played only after a seven-minute, onetime install. The PC version allows for seamless mouse-and-keyboard controls. The Xbox 360 version looks a little darker than the others. Still, you'll get the same story and a pretty similar experience on every platform.

For the most diehard of Lost followers, the time spent with the game will be enjoyable. Unfortunately, it is over way too fast. Via Domus is full of little hang-ups, and it requires some knowledge of the show that could potentially isolate outside players and keep them from becoming immersed in the gameworld. Ultimately, this game can be recommended for purchase only to the most diehard of Lost fans.

Assassin's Creed

Assassin's Creed features one of the most unique gameworlds ever created: beautiful, memorable, and alive. Every crack and crevasse is filled with gorgeous, subtle details, from astounding visual flourishes to overheard cries for help. But it's more than just a world--it's a fun and exciting action game with a ton of stuff to do and places to explore, rounded out with a complex story that will slowly grab you the more you play. The PC version has a few more issues than its console counterparts, and the keyboard-and-mouse controls strip away some of the smooth magic of exploration. Nevertheless, if you don't mind plugging in a gamepad and have a system that exceeds the system requirements, you'll find the same free-form travels and atmospheric game world that console owners enjoyed last year.

Not enough can be said about the living, breathing universe that you'll inhabit in Assassin's Creed. As assassin extraordinaire Altair, you'll explore three major cities of the Holy Land in the 12th century: Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre. Each city is beautifully rendered from top to bottom and features meticulously crafted towers that reach for the sky, bustling market squares, and quiet corners where citizens converse and drunks lie in wait to accost you. As you wander the streets (and rooftops), you'll push your way through crowds of women carrying jars on their heads, hear orators shout political and religious wisdom, and watch town guards harass innocent victims. Altair has a profound effect on this world, but the cities are entities all their own, with their own flows and personalities.

The visual design has a lot to do with how believably organic everything feels. The cities are absolutely huge, and though you don't get full exploration privileges in the first few chapters, they eventually open up to let you travel seamlessly from one side to another. Everything is beautifully lit with just the right amount of bloom effect, and almost everything casts a shadow, from tall pillars to Altair's cloak. In fact, sometimes the shadows get to be a bit much and may make you think for a moment that there is artifacting on your screen, when in fact it's a character's head casting a shadow on his or her own neck. Every object, from scaffolds to pottery, is textured so finely that you'll feel as if you could reach out and touch it. Animations are almost as equally well done. Altair scales walls, leaps majestically from towers, and engages in swashbuckling swordfights that would make Errol Flynn proud. And he does it all with fluid ease, generally moving from one pose to another without a hitch. Minor characters move with less aplomb, but that's easy to forgive, considering that the cities are populated with thousands and thousands of individuals.

On a high-powered PC, these elements look even more stunning than they did on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but the splendor comes with a price: The minimum requirements to play Assassin's Creed are surprisingly high, particularly where the CPU is concerned (a dual-core processor is mandatory). On one test PC that runs Crysis at a respectable frame rate on medium settings, Assassin's Creed slowed to a crawl at lower settings. A high-end test machine ran the game with much better results, though with some occasional slowdown.

What you hear is even more impressive than what you see. At the top of a temple, you hear little but the rush of wind, the twittering of birds, and the barking of a far-off dog. In the most populated areas, your ears will fill with the din of street vendors, the pleas of beggars, and the occasional humming. It's never too much, though, and the game does a good job of making sure you hear what you need to hear (for example, the cries of citizens who need your help) without filling your ears with pointless noise. The voice acting of the supporting cast is similarly remarkable. Conversations are completely believable and delivered with the perfect amount of solemn dignity. Oddly, the weakest link is Altair himself. Actor Philip Shahbaz does an all right job, but he isn't up to par with the first-rate acting of his fellow troupe. Rounding it all out is a beautiful orchestral score that is most notable for its subtlety. Many of the game's most impressive moments are accompanied by lovely musical themes that add even more threads to the game's rich living tapestry. We did run into some audio glitches on two of our three test systems, however, in which sound effects would occasionally stutter and hitch. The game's readme file included a potential workaround for this issue, though in our case, it didn't solve it.

The story that binds it all together rises to the occasion. Actually, there are two related stories in play. The unfolding drama of Crusades-era Palestine is a mere memory, forcibly pulled from a modern-day bartender named Desmond by a resolute researcher using a machine called an animus. The memories aren't Desmond's own--they are Altair's, stored safely in the hapless subject's genetic code. We follow Altair as he assassinates nine public figures at the command of his master, and as the common thread that ties these men comes into focus, so does the true identity of Desmond's captors. There are no cutscenes in the traditional sense; every bit of story exposition and dialogue flows smoothly from the gameplay and takes place entirely within the game engine. The ending is confusing and blatantly leaves open the possibility of a sequel, but this is a small blemish on an otherwise stirring tale. Altair's world is not one of absolutes. His assassination targets aren't always evil, and Altair isn't always likable. As he is fond of reminding us, "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted."

Of course, such an authentic world would be meaningless without a lot of fun things to do in it. Thankfully, Assassin's Creed is endlessly entertaining in that it features a fine mix of stealthy exploration, tight platforming, and exciting combat. To discover the whereabouts of your assassination targets, you must first follow up on possible leads. There are several different mission types in this regard. In some cases, you sit on a bench and listen in on secret conversations. At other times, you will closely follow someone carrying an important letter that you'll pickpocket. Alternately, you can beat the information out of your target. There are also some tasks specific to this version of the game. Oddly, some of these new missions feel more contrived than the others, such as timed sprints and escort tasks in which guards execute scripted attacks as you move to your destination. Since the game's greatest strengths lie in its unscripted events, these additional tasks feel less organic than the others. On the other hand, missions that let you silently assassinate rooftop archers and fling guards into market stands are more interesting and fit better into the game's sandbox world.

There are also some optional missions, such as rescuing innocent townspeople from the clutches of guards. The reward for doing so is a group of vigilantes who will hang out in the area afterward and hinder any foes chasing you. It's also a good way to try out Assassin's Creed's combat, which is surprisingly satisfying, considering the game's focus on sneaking around. You can pounce on enemies using your hidden blade (an incredibly rewarding one-stab kill), or use throwing daggers to take enemies down from a distance. However, your sword is your melee mainstay, and though the hack-and-slash combat may seem simple at first, it gets more challenging once you unlock the various countermoves. Often, you'll have a dozen or more attackers to fend off at once, but though these fights can be a little tricky, you'll never feel as if you're in over your head. In fact, the few circumstances in which you are forced into combat--such as a late-game boss fight against a seemingly endless crowd of attackers and their leering leader--are challenging and require some pitch-perfect timing to counter every strike and lunge.

Nevertheless, brute force is rarely the best way to handle a situation. You want to slink unnoticed through the crowds, but you can draw attention to yourself in a number of ways--whether it's galloping past a guard station on a horse, knocking pottery off of someone's head, or getting so frustrated by the various beggars that you fling them away from you. (And trust us--these are the most aggressive panhandlers you'll ever meet.) If you antagonize the guards, they'll give chase. Yes, you can stick around and fight, and though it's never the easiest option, breaking stealth does not damn you to death like it does in other sneaking games. But why not lure them to a rooftop? Once up there, you can grab them and fling them to the street below. Or if there are too many of them, you can jump across the rooftops gracefully until you find a hiding place, such as a nice bale of hay or a curtained garden. Once you're hidden, they'll give up the chase and you'll be free to roam about again.

You can also seek refuge in small groups of scholars who serve as mobile hiding places. It's a bit contrived to walk into a stationary cluster of scholars and have them suddenly start moving simply because you're there, but it gets the job done. Actually, if there's any drawback to the usually excellent gameplay, it's how synthetic certain elements feel. Vigilantes are always in the same spot, missions reset if you don't get them right the first time, and those same guards will harass that citizen an hour after you pass by. It's easy to forgive these quirks, though, given the easygoing flow of the world surrounding these pockets of gameplay.

Climbing up buildings and jumping around the rooftops is fun and breezy, though keyboard jockeys should be warned that the mouse and keyboard don't deliver the best way to experience the game's fluidity. With a controller, the face buttons are mapped to correspond with Altair's head, hands, and legs; with a keyboard and mouse, the wonder of that arrangement is lost. It's also a bit tougher to time counterattacks using the mouse buttons, though players without controllers needn't worry too much: It's still a relatively comfortable setup. Of course, you can attach a controller, and we were able to use two different gamepads, including an Xbox 360 controller, with success.

Regardless of your preferred scheme, you can leap across alleys and scale walls with ease, and though it's possible to launch yourself from a wall or hurtle through a vendor's booth by accident, these moments aren't very common. You'd think that a city specifically designed to let you climb structures and caper about the roofs would look overly artificial, yet there's never a moment when you will think to yourself, "Wow, that looks like a place where I'm supposed to jump." The architecture looks completely natural, which makes Altair's abilities all the more exciting to pull off. The environments don't look as if they were created for him to climb around on; he just uses the hand he's been dealt, as any good assassin should.

In Assassin's Creed, the greatest joy comes from the smallest details, and for every nerve-racking battle, there's a quiet moment that cuts to the game's heart and soul. Climbing towers to uncover portions of the map is a simple mechanic but forever satisfying, thanks to the beautiful vistas and soft musical themes that accompany the view. Even the beggars that pester you are amusing and fun, though their constant shoving can be annoying when you're trying to pickpocket a pedestrian or eliminate a target without a fuss. It all makes your missions that much more compelling, and you'll be inclined to explore every nook and cranny and take on every optional task just for the fun of it. There's a ton of stuff to do, and even when you've exhausted your official tasks, you can search for the collectible flags and crosses strewn around the cities and countryside. You could probably plow through the main quest in 20 hours or less, but completists might spend many more finishing every quest and gathering every flag.

The PC version of Assassin's Creed isn't the superior one, but this is a case where translation to the PC resulted in some minor hiccups rather than obvious gaffes. If you don't have the opportunity to play it on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, you should pick up a copy and immerse yourself in its memorable world. It's the kind of game you want to show your friends even if they're not into games, and if you have a high-powered computer, it's one that should be in your collection.

Insecticide: Episode 1

Insecticide isn't a straightforward adventure as much as it is an adventure and a 3D platformer pushed together with little care as to how the parts fit. Many of the platform action sequences are dull, repetitive, and seem to have been shoehorned in at the last minute to jazz up what would have otherwise been a traditional point-and-click adventure. So the end result is a haphazard mishmash that won't appeal to fans of either genre.

You play Chrys Liszt, a rookie detective working with her rather Sipowiczian senior partner, a cockroach named Roachy Caruthers, on investigating a homicide--er, insecticide--at the famous Nectarola soft drink plant. The plot is a cutesy, offbeat take on film noir with bugs playing all the key roles, like a combo of '70s TV cop shows, A Bug's Life, and Planet of the Apes. It's the far future city of Troi where the world has been taken over by insects, which have evolved in the wake of what seems to have been a nuclear war. Cockroaches and their buggy brethren now run the show, while mankind has been shoved aside to live as dimwitted hominids who are little better than third-class citizens. This bug world isn't a whole lot different from our own, however. Insects may have survived nukes, but they have the same problem with crime that we do and the same grizzled, seen-it-all-before cops out there trying to deal with it. You've seen it all before in dozens of crime movies and TV shows, albeit not with bugs in place of the usual human stars.

At least the writers do a good job of sending up this noir setting. Insecticide is loaded with puns, inside jokes, and references to old sci-fi shows. The goofiness is so broad that you can readily tell that the lineage of the game goes back to the days when LucasArts was making the adventures that all the cool kids wanted to play. Much of the dialogue is balanced between appealing to kids and adults. References to the "wingless protection program," lines like "Don't be a pupa," and all the characters with buggy cop names like Silverfishberg or McMantis mean that you'll alternate between giggling and groaning, depending on your age. Lines themselves aren't typically all that funny, and everything is sold more as a broad satire than a pure comedy. Nevertheless, the whole presentation is handled with such cheer and the voice acting is done with such a perfect Saturday-morning cartoon bite that you won't much care.

What you'll likely care more about is the ham-fisted way that the adventure and 3D platform game styles are slammed together. The levels switch between the two styles of play, so it feels like you're playing two entirely different games instead of a blend. Adventure levels are generally pretty good, if unimaginative. Many quests are of the straightforward "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" variety, with you playing as the delivery girl. For instance, Roachy has a case file you need, but he can't remember where it is on an empty stomach. So it's your job to jog his memory with a dung donut and coffee. Nothing here requires you to strain your synapses too much. Most of the puzzles involve nothing but common-sense solutions. The biggest challenge to your sleuthing is posed by the graphics, which are so dark that they often obscure plot points and important objects. There is no way to adjust the gamma from within the game, either, which means that you either live with the gloom or adjust your video card's gamma setting from Windows. Even if you do this, you have to tweak the setting enough to wash everything out.

Platform levels are focused solely on mindless running, jumping, and gunning. Chrys races from point A to point B blasting a succession of bad-guy bugs that slide in and out of cover like targets in a carnival shooting game. The only break in the monotony is provided by the regular gulping down of health packs that come in the form of Nectarola pop cans. This all gets old really fast because of repetition and a number of overly finicky challenges that require more dexterity than the clunky control system provides. Walking across wires, for instance, which you do on more than a few occasions, is often made rather difficult by the way that Chrys's feet seem to stick in place when she's in tightrope-walker mode. This is more than a bit annoying, especially when you're trying to dodge electrified lines powered by trains rushing underneath. At any rate, the action sequences are so lame that you rush through them to get back to the mediocre adventure game as soon as possible. They come off like somebody's last-minute idea to spice up an old-school adventure. That might have been a reasonable idea back when Insecticide was a Nintendo DS game, but the shooting stuff is totally unnecessary on the PC.

You'll never stop smiling while playing Insecticide Part 1. But even though you'll have a friendly, likable enough experience with this winning story and setting, the actual gameplay disappointingly blends the old fashioned with the awkward. Spending a little more time refining the platform levels--or just ditching them entirely--would be a good idea for Part 2.

Patriots: A Nation Under Fire

Is there any thought more frightening to an American than the thought of another massive terrorist attack on US soil? Absolutely: the prospect of having to play through Patriots: A Nation Under Fire. This budget-priced first-person shooter creates a nightmare scenario of a massive, countrywide terrorist attack that leaves many major cities destroyed in a nuclear holocaust and the remaining populace under siege by masked guys with guns and unplaceable, threatening-sounding accents. It then piles on the nightmare by encumbering you with intensely clumsy cover mechanics, a level of challenge that borders on unfair, and absentminded artificial intelligent cohorts who make fantastic bullet shields but aren't useful for much else.

Patriots starts out with a lengthy narration sequence explaining how terrorists basically popped up out of nowhere and started blowing stuff up. Not that you'd necessarily expect taut, captivating fiction from a budget title, but that block of narration is about as much story as you'll ever get out of the game. Evidently you play as a blank-slate National Guardsman who's been called in to the local armory to suit up, only to find it overrun with terrorists. From there, you take on a series of almost totally unrelated missions until the terrorists have been bested or you've given up and uninstalled the game. For sanity's sake, the latter is probably the smarter option.

Even on the easiest difficulty level, it becomes clear early on in Patriots that a certain a certain amount of patience is required to survive. The number of terrorists the game starts throwing at you as soon as you exit the armory is insane. Apparently, every terrorist in the world got together and formed some kind of supergroup, because the numbers you'll end up killing over the course of the game are staggering. At the very least, you can't call these enemies dumb. Save for a few dummies who stand around vacantly just waiting for you to shoot them, the majority of these guys know how to grab cover and are crack shots, so unless you can find cover immediately, you're hosed.

And therein lies the comedy, as the game's cover mechanics are woefully inadequate. The game places plenty of abandoned vehicles and random crates around its stages for you to cower behind, but there are no covering mechanics beyond a cover toggle. You press it to duck, and press it again to stand back up. You can't look out from cover to shoot, blind fire, or do anything that might be considered, you know, tactical. Your best bet in most cases is to just wait until the AI soldiers on your side of the fight kill off as many of the nearby terrorists as they can before they're inevitably murdered (AI good guys know how to kill--just not how to avoid being killed), then quickly run to the next objective point. AI soldiers seem to endlessly respawn until you've completed each mission objective (in many cases, to rescue defenseless hostages who tend to get shot rather easily), so standing around and killing guys is less useful than just trying to run away and avoid getting shot while blasting any enemy that gets within five feet of you.

Adding to the frustration of it all is the obscenely limited amount of ammunition you're handed throughout the game. There's a decent variety of guns to play around with, but almost all of them are woefully lacking in bullets. It seems as though half of every mission consists of just running around, trying to dig up enough ammo to move to the next point. Over time the game slowly but surely gives you more and more ammunition, but it also throws more and more terrorists at you, which keeps the balance decidedly not in your favor. Even when you've got piles and piles of dead terrorists lying about the place, their weapons ripe for the picking, you rarely collect enough ammo to be useful for more than a few minutes. An even more ridiculous problem is that there's no automatic reload function, so every time a gun runs out of ammo, you have to stop to reload it manually. It just so happens that most times you'll run into this problem while you're being shot to death from all directions. Top it off with the fact that the level of aiming precision with pretty much any gun besides the sniper rifle exists somewhere around just aiming for the sky and hoping the bullets fall to the ground on a terrorist's head, and you're not going to have much fun at all with the game's shooting mechanics.

Patriots presents itself about as poorly as the average budget title tends to. The graphics are chunky and bland, with character models, animations, and environments that look as if they came out of a Counter-Strike knockoff circa 1999. The explosion and death effects are supercheesy, in the sort of way that causes rocket-launcher blasts to create tiny puffs of fire that somehow turn enemies into several badly textured chunks of meat. Occasionally the game does up its whole terrorists-in-Middle-America thing in an interesting way, sticking you in a suburban neighborhood or major city that's brimming with bad guys. But the environments themselves are tiny and ugly, and many of them seem to reuse a lot of the same basic design elements. Clipping problems also present constantly, with arms, guns, and dead bodies morphing into various pieces of the environment on a near-constant basis. The audio is markedly worse than the graphics, even. Terrorists shout such wonderfully original lines as "kill the infidels!" over and over again until the words have basically lost all meaning, and your guys barely ever speak, save to curse once in a while about nothing in particular. Gun effects are marginally decent, and the music is the sort of generic, supposed-to-be-exciting-but-isn't noise that you've probably already heard in dozens of other games.

The premise of Patriots: A Nation Under Fire is a bit silly in its over-the-top methodology, but it's not inherently a bad one. The problem is that nothing is done with it. The story is left for dead the moment the first mission pops up, and from there it's an onslaught of bad missions with worse combat that go on and on until the game finally gives up and ends. This one's a losing fight any way you look at it.

Alien Shooter: Vengeance

Painfully generic name notwithstanding, Alien Shooter: Vengeance is no Brand X game. That title is both blah and misleading, as this Sigma Team effort is actually a gung-ho retro take on the action-packed isometric shooter genre that had a brief moment in the sun about a decade ago, not the second-rate FPS that the box cover implies. The game may be a little too self-consciously old-school for some, but the action is so fast, furious, and blithely bloody that it's hard to resist getting swept up in the carnage.

Old-timers will quickly note that Alien Shooter: Vengeance resembles the two Crusader games, No Regret and No Remorse, that shot up DOS PCs way back in 1995 and 1996. For those of you who haven't got enough gray in your beard to remember that duo, the simple concept behind those games saw the viewing perspective of a standard kill-everything-that-moves FPS switched to an isometric, third-person camera. Sigma closely follows that template here, keeping the focus on the action but also adding some interesting, light squad tactics along with character creation and RPG elements similar to those seen in the likes of X-COM and Jagged Alliance.

The story itself is pretty bare-bones. It's the postapocalyptic future, you're working as a mercenary for the MAGMA Energy Corporation (described as "the leader of many things energetical," whatever that means), and a lot of ugly aliens need to be blown away. Chances are you've heard this sort of thing a few times before. This skeletal framework is sufficient to support a game where you do little more than smear ET blood all over the walls, and Sigma has done great work with the RPG aspects of the game. Rolling up initial characters is spiced up with the ability to pick a special perk. These options are fairly limited, encompassing just eight different choices, but they include some nifty ideas modeled after what you could give your character in the Fallout games and are given similarly humorous descriptions. For instance, you can be a vampire, with the ability to suck health out of enemies, or a hypnotist, who gets to take over the minds of baddies. Beyond this, though, the RPG personality of the game is limited. After picking a perk, you choose from between eight premade characters, although at least during gameplay you level up and can apply experience points to buff typical shooter skills like the ability to use pistols, shotguns, and machine guns.

Not that any wimpy RPG stuff is necessary. Frenetically blasting aliens is Alien Shooter's sole reason for existence, so in this respect the title is dead-on. The game's personality is a cross between Robotron, DOOM, and Serious Sam. Pretty much every mission is a corridor crawl to find some item, rescue a few trapped buddies, or simply kill a big bad. You regularly get trapped in rooms and swarmed by thousands of bugs (literally--the game tracks your kills and they seem to go into four digits each and every level). Many areas are dimly lit or pitch-black, so you have to move forward carefully using the narrow beam of a flashlight to pick up any aliens scuttling your way. And the carnage is typically so intense that by the time you've finished with a room, you'll have painted every last inch of the floors and walls with alien blood and gore. It ain't pretty, but it sure gets the adrenaline flowing.

Aside from the killing, though, there isn't much here. The nonstop blasting gets a bit numbing after a little while, so the game is best taken in short doses. There are lots of secret areas to discover, but little to find in them aside from power-ups, weapons, and ammo, and these items are so prevalent in the main sections of levels that you don't need to do any wandering to pick up more of them. Most of the exploring is pretty simplistic, too. Generally, if you see something green, you should run up to it, as it's likely a power-up or a button activating a secret door. If you see something red, that means no-go, or that you need to find a key to open that particular door. You can jazz things up by skipping the campaign for survival mode, which comes in a last-man-standing variant where you blast bugs until you drop, and a career option spread over five levels. Neither option changes the complexion of gameplay, of course. The same can presumably be said about multiplayer, although this couldn't be tested as it only supports LAN and direct IP connections.

The look and sound of the game are totally retro. While there are supposed to be more than 50 types of alien to shoot, most look like typical variations on praying mantises, slugs, and a couple that seem sort of like dinosaurs. Movement and animations are clumsy, although this ultimately helps reinforce the game's throwback flavor. Explosions are just fantastic, however, and colored lighting gives many levels a suitably eerie air. Audio is limited. When the lights go out or the doors close and you get gooned by a phalanx of bugs, you get the stereotypical driving heavy metal tunes that have accompanied shooter shooting since the early '90s. Other than that, though, the dialogue is as sparse and as roughly delivered as you'd find in an old Sega Genesis cart. Again, this seems entirely intentional, so you'll get a kick out of the sound if you remember playing games like this back in the day.

You probably need to have the nostalgia gene to really get into Alien Shooter: Vengeance, but you don't have to be an old fogey to get some base-level enjoyment out of this gleeful shoot-'em-up. Look past the dumb name and give it a shot

Spider-Man: Friend or Foe

Although the Spider-Man movies have been credited with helping comic-book movies mature and take a more sophisticated turn, the problem with all of these complex, serious heroes and villains is, well, that they're all so complex and serious. They lose sight of the fact that Spider-Man is far more entertaining when he's wheelin' free and crackin' wise rather than stressing out about the whole "with great power" thing and generally being riddled with angst. The webslinger is in loose, smart-aleck form in Spider-Man: Friend or Foe, a beat-'em-up that doesn't get bogged down in character development. Instead, the game puts the focus on the kind of combat that's simple but showy, with an art style that reminds you that comic books shouldn't necessarily be so somber.

The big concept twist that Friend or Foe offers up revolves around Spider-Man teaming up with some of his most memorable foes. In a reference to Venom's origin story from Spider-Man 3, some unknown mastermind is using shards from the meteor that spawned the symbiotic suit to brainwash villains such as Doc Ock and the Green Goblin to do his bidding, as well as to power an army of holographic monsters called phantoms. With the help of S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury, you trot the globe, recover the shards, and free the brainwashed villains, which turns enemies into allies. As thin as the premise is, the game's jokey, playful tone makes it seem less far-fetched, and it ultimately serves its purpose of letting you fight alongside some of Spidey's greatest villains, a concept that manages to stay novel throughout. You'll also team up with other heroes along the way, including Spidey regulars such as Prowler, Black Cat, and Silver Sable, as well as b-team favorites such as Iron Fist and Blade. A big part of what carries the humor in Friend or Foe is the quality of the voice work, which is consistently great.

The basic structure of Friend or Foe isn't terribly interesting by itself. You'll travel to some exotic location, such as Tokyo, Transylvania, or Nepal, where you'll beat the holographic snot out of the phantoms before facing off with a brainwashed villain. The phantoms come in just a few different varieties, and though they get stronger over time and change appearance between locations, the same tactics seem to work pretty well from start to finish. Although the boss fights are presented differently, they all rely on the same basic strategy of throwing objects at the villains from afar. They can occasionally be a little time-consuming, but they're never particularly challenging.

There's really not much else to the game beyond the fighting, either. There's a little bit of exploration, in that there are DNA samples and secret arenas scattered throughout the game, but more often than not you'll just stumble over them in the course of playing the game. Spidey can double-jump and use his webbing to swing over small gaps, but platforming is minimal. When you do die, be it at the hands of an enemy or from falling off a platform, the only penalty is that you'll lose a couple of tech tokens, a type of in-game currency that falls out of defeated enemies and smashed objects. You use the tech tokens to upgrade the abilities of Spider-Man and friends.

It's pretty much all fighting, all the time, against the same handful of enemies, with no consequences for dying. The whole thing can be wrapped up with a bow in less than six hours. So what makes the action in Friend or Foe interesting? A lot of it rests on the combat, which manages to be both accessible and somewhat dynamic. There's a single attack button that you can use to tap out some simple combos, but it's Spider-Man's web-based abilities that bring a lot of panache to the game. The webslinging abilities let him grab enemies from afar and launch them into one another, into the ground, or right off the edge of a platform.

You'll earn additional web talents over time, including the ability to shoot projectiles and wrap enemies up, but your starting abilities seem to be the most useful. They're also the most visually interesting, though admittedly some of the actions look more exciting than they might otherwise due to exaggerated physics that cause everyone to linger in the air before gravity pulls them back down. It's very easy to string these moves together, and even though it's not much of a challenge, fending off a dozen enemies at once with a constant flurry of attacks can be pretty satisfying.

It can be a real kick in the pants to fight alongside some of Spider-Man's greatest villains as well, and you can switch back and forth on the fly between controlling Spidey and his sidekick. When controlled by the artificial intelligence, your sidekick can take care of itself pretty well. As awesome as it might sound to finally get to play as these villains, the sidekicks simply don't have as many abilities as Spidey, which makes them inherently less interesting. This ends up limiting the appeal of the game's two-player support, although it's consequently less disappointing that there's no online play.

The experience of playing Spider-Man: Friend or Foe on the Xbox 360, PC, and Wii was pretty consistent across platforms, though there were some predictable discrepancies. The PC version demands a good gamepad, and we found that the game provided seamless support for the Xbox 360 controller. The game plays it pretty safe on the Wii, in that it relies on motion controls only for secondary stuff such as switching characters and performing grab modifiers. All three versions feature the same clean art style, which isn't technically demanding, but it looks sharp. The environments favor clean textures over complex geometry, and each location features a distinct look while keeping with the overall cartoony feel. The character models are nicely embellished, and some of the animations--Spider-Man's in particular--look terrific. The PC and Xbox 360 versions look pretty comparable, though on the Wii there's some pretty jagged edges, some minor frame-rate issues, and a little fuzziness that diminishes the look of the game, if only somewhat. It seems worth noting that the achievements in the Xbox 360 version are pretty fabulously easy, and they require only a little extra effort beyond finishing the game to earn the full 1000 points.

The low level of challenge, the cartoon-inspired look, and a tone that favors humor over pathos certainly make it seem as if Spider-Man: Friend or Foe was designed with a younger, less sophisticated audience in mind, but for what it is, this is a well-crafted game.