If you didn't play Crysis, Warhead's story may be initially confusing, given that you hit the ground running with little exposition. You play as Sergeant "Psycho" Sykes, the brash Brit who was a bit player in the original game. Psycho tends to play by his own rules, always willing to ignore orders and jump into the fray if that's what the situation requires. The story runs parallel to the events of Crysis, though his strident attitude--and a dramatic cutscene near the end of the game--definitely make this Psycho's tale, even if the actual plot remains the same. In any case, you and your US Special Forces team are investigating a tropical island besieged by North Korean invaders. However, your greatest menace comes in the form of aggressive aliens that turn the luxuriant jungles and glowing beaches into a frozen wasteland. You and your teammates, clad in nanosuits that grant you special abilities such as super strength, temporary cloaking, super speed, and additional armor, confront both threats across a variety of large environments. Psycho's brazen confidence does more than just establish a gutsy protagonist: It sets the stage for a more focused and intense series of battles that keep the pace moving more smoothly than before. Warhead still offers some of the same kind of sandbox levels, but thoughtful enemy placement and map bottlenecks keep downtime to a minimum. You can approach assaults on beachfronts and Korean encampments in a number of ways, so if you're a stealth enthusiast, you can employ your suit's cloak setting and sneak in, or attach a silencer to your sniper rifle and take out your human foes from a distance. If you would rather employ hit-and-run tactics, you can jump into the heat of battle, cause a ruckus, and use your suit's speed function to zoom away. However, Warhead is clearly focused on the guns-blazing approach, gently nudging you into full-on encounters with its mission objectives, character dialogue, and level design. When you reach primary and secondary destinations, you'll get besieged by large numbers of enemies, both human and (later on) alien. Given that human foes also don nanosuits, they're not necessarily quick to fall; as a result, these sequences are exciting and challenging, and you'll need to use your suit abilities and cover opportunities to your advantage. The easily triggered explosions of enemy vehicles and hazardous barrels further intensify these pockets of activity. A number of set-piece battles confirm this slight shift toward action-packed mayhem. Your first encounter with a hulking alien war machine may not have the same impact as a similar one in Crysis, but it happens earlier than you'd expect, and it establishes the alien presence with adrenaline-fueled drama. That battle is a wonder, as is a later defensive mission that has you fending off a series of aliens, and requires you to shift focus frequently and use every weapon in your inventory. Another great sequence is a train level that, at first, seems much like similar sequences in a number of other shooters. You can stay on the train and use turrets to gun down the opposition, as expected--but you can also jump off and engage the opposition at any time, giving even this near-cliche sequence plenty of replay value. A linear journey through an underground mine is the obvious misstep in regard to level design, given that it never so much as hints at the open-ended action that makes Warhead a superb shooter. If you played only that level, you also wouldn't see the host of improvements that power the action, particularly the improvements to alien artificial intelligence. The general design means that these robotic rivals will occasionally still be floating around above you, but they have more obvious smarts now, and they find ways to pummel you with ice pellets while remaining just out of sight, staying on the move, and using cover more often. Human enemies also seem more aware of their surroundings, flank you more often, and activate their nanosuits' armor to minimize damage. They also use the limited visibility that the jungle affords them quite well, hiding in brush to stay just out of sight. There are some remaining problems, particularly if you take potshots from a distance. Occasionally, the AI won't react when you snipe at an enemy, and foes using turrets will sometimes let you walk right up behind them. On the whole, however, Warhead makes clear improvements over the original in this regard, which in turn makes for better combat overall. Vehicles feel sturdy, which is just as well, because you'll be driving them often, either to cover ground more quickly, or just to take pleasure in mowing down enemies with your mounted weapons. You can have a good deal of fun blazing a trail through the jungle while showering your foes with steel death, and the destructible environments further exaggerate the devastation. A scene in which you speed across the tundra in a hovercraft is done particularly well, offering a good sense of speed but pushing you into enemy hotbeds, giving you the chance to stop and fight or zip away with a quick glimpse of Koreans riddling aliens with bullets. The improved vehicle handling is also noticeable on one of the new multiplayer maps, on which two teams battle in--and out of--the tanks and helicopters scattered about. This is good stuff, and it showcases Warhead's new Team Instant Action mode, a mode noticeably missing from the original Crysis. It's just good old Team Deathmatch, but it's done well, and the maps are improvements on those of the original. Snipers are still a threat, but the size of the maps are better suited to deathmatch battles, and more thought and care seem to have gone into small but important factors, such as weapon-cache placements and player spawns. The Instant Action and Power Struggle modes are still accounted for, and many of the original maps return, offering a large suite of online options that make online Warhead combat more appealing than its predecessor. Note that unlike Crysis, the expansion requires the online component to be installed separately, and isn't accessible from the single-player game. Both online and off, Warhead is a beauty. As mentioned before, the game looks better than Crysis, and it runs better too. A test machine that struggled a bit to run the original at high settings ran Warhead smoothly with the same settings. Yet as much as you may have heard about Crysis' technical prowess, you'll still be impressed when you feast your eyes on the swaying vegetation, surging water, and expressive animations. Don't overlook the improved art design, though, which surpasses the original's oft-sterile look thanks to several striking vistas, such as one featuring an icy naval vessel stranded in the frozen tundra. The audio is almost as terrific. Various creaks and groans make heading down a narrow glacial pathway all the more harrowing, and weapons sound appropriately powerful. The voice acting is strong, and the understated soundtrack sets the right tone without ever getting in the way. Warhead's single-player campaign should take you no more than six hours or so to complete, but not only does it invite multiple play-throughs, it costs only $30--and doesn't require you to own the original. In other words, there is no reason why anyone with a capable PC shouldn't play Crysis Warhead. It's more focused, it's more intense, and though it doesn't provide as much of the sandbox feel as Crysis veterans would wish for, it still delivers on every other front. Play this game. 
All of the claims you may have heard that Crysis could only run on nuclear-powered supermachines were greatly exaggerated. But if for some reason you worry that this stand-alone companion to the ultragorgeous first-person shooter will bring your PC to its knees, you should know that it's highly scalable and ran smoothly on a number of machines during our testing. It also looks better, with clear attention given to the game's artistic sensibilities and the lusher, denser environments. But rest assured, developer Crytek has enhanced more than just the graphics engine. Vehicles are more fun to drive, firefights are more intense and focused, and aliens do more than just float around you. More emphasis on the open-ended environments would have been welcome, but a more exciting (though shorter) campaign, a new multiplayer mode, and a whole bunch of new maps make Crysis Warhead an excellent expansion to one of last year's best shooters.
Santa going postal, staking an emo vampire, and taking the Soul Train to hell are just a few of the insane moments crammed into Telltale Games' absolutely hilarious Sam & Max Season Two. This outstanding compilation pulls together the last five episodes in the ongoing adventure series starring Sam, a McGruff-style dog sporting a suit and fedora, and Max, a murderous, smelly rabbit. Most fans have probably already played these games, as they have been released online over the past year, but if you missed these games when they were first released, the low price and ton of extras make this collection worth the purchase price.
Welcome to hell. It's sort of like a fiery IRS office, so bureaucrats would love being condemned to this place.
Anyone who loves classic adventures will have a great time with these surreal, zany shorts. Sam and Max fashion themselves as "freelance police," private detectives who get into one zany mess after another while trying to solve crimes in a zany cartoon world. This means that all of the tales here are laugh-out-loud funny, yet also dark and more than a bit disturbing. You should probably just enjoy the pop-culture jokes riffing on everything from The Exorcist to The Mod Squad and skip putting too much thought into the delightfully twisted minds who came up with the game's bizarre yarns.
But the puzzles themselves aren't as off the wall as the insane stories of the adventures included here. Your tasks are generally based on common-sense logic, even though the end goals deal with nutso objectives like exorcising Santa Claus, figuring out what Charles Lindbergh and D.B. Cooper are doing as babies on Easter Island, and checking out the absurdly bureaucratic Hell LLC. There is a structure to everything that Sam and Max do, so you don't have to fool around with nonsensical adventure game logic or collect a bunch of worthless junk to use at some future date. Tasks are always focused around picking up just a couple of key objects and using them in the right places, nifty conversation trees with consequences to each dialogue choice, and arcade minigames where you do things like box rats and race cars. Everything flows along at a great pace, and your duties are mixed up so that you never get bored with one style of puzzle. Even if you do get a little weary of the sheer strangeness of everything, machine gun pop-culture jokes about the real world keep you grounded and laughing. The biggest design issue is too much backtracking, in that you have to frequently drive back and forth between episode locales and Sam and Max's home office and surrounding neighborhood to solve quests.
The look and sound of the missions are striking. Visuals are done in a Saturday-morning-cartoon style, with lots of bright kiddie colors blended with sharp edges. Everything is just a bit askew, like you're viewing Sam and Max's world through a funhouse mirror. Style is everywhere, right down to the opening and closing credits of each episode. The only drawback to the visuals is the camera angle, which is a little too close to the action in many scenes and can't be manually rotated past its on-rails 2D position to look all around the 3D landscape. Audio effects are dead-on, from the restrained insanity of Max's voice to the 8-bit arcade music played whenever you have to deal with the obsolete computers that operate the Pimplecar Garage.
Elmo would not be amused. You have to presume that the Sesame Street copyright lawyers wouldn't be, either, although nobody's fired off a cease-and-desist letter yet.
And when you finish up the adventures themselves, you can check out the extras that make this compilation something of a director's-cut version of the original download-only games. Over four hours of audio commentary are included, along with the "Sam & Max Nearly Save Christmas" cartoon short and a bunch of random collectibles such as trailers, outtakes, and concept art. None of this is absolutely essential, and the Christmas short is already available free online, but taken altogether you've got a sizable grab bag of extra goodies for collectors.
The only disappointment in Sam & Max Season Two is that it ends too soon and leaves you wanting more. Each episode can be played through in just a couple of hours, although you would be best advised to drag out the experience and check out everything you can click on for the extra laughs. This series is a great example of how much creativity, intelligence, and humor can still be poured into this classic genre. So, bring on season three.
Dracula again? Vampire fatigue is a legitimate feeling that you might encounter when ripping open the shrink-wrap of Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon, given that it seems like Bram Stoker's infamous creature of the night has already been the focus of a lot of adventure games. This latest one, the third in a franchise that started nearly a decade ago with Dracula: Resurrection and Dracula: The Last Sanctuary, doesn't bring much new to the table. Developer Kheops Studio sticks to the ancient adventure-gaming formula that it has specialized in with previous releases such as Return to Mysterious Island and Voyage, and spins a dull yarn in which you research the biggest bloodsucker of them all in 1920s Transylvania. Busywork puzzles and stone-age visuals further drain the rest of the creeps out of this supposedly scary saga, which unfolds more like an uninspired detective story than an ominous encounter with a legendary monster.
No Dracula-inspired game would be complete without a spooky grave.
The plot isn't what you would expect from a Dracula-inspired game, although you can't characterize that as a good thing. For a change, you don't play Van Helsing or any of his descendants. Instead, you take the role of Father Arno Moriani, a priest sent to Transylvania by his bosses at the Vatican to investigate a recently deceased Romanian doctor who has been declared a candidate for canonization. The good father soon finds out that the doctor held some odd views regarding a number of strange deaths in the village, and he finds his assignment quickly changed from sainthood vetting to disproving the existence of vampires. So you spend most of your time undertaking scientific research and questioning professors, not tracking down Dracula and his pointy-toothed pals. More time is spent with test tubes than with stakes, and you don't actually encounter any vampires until the very end of the game.
Another novelty involves moving the setting from the stereotypical Victorian age to the 1920s, when Romania was still reeling from the devastation caused by World War I. This doesn't make for many differences when it comes to gameplay, although shifting the game into the 20th century does allow for more-varied artwork involving semimodern touches such as telephones, trains, electric lights, and chemistry equipment. However, the overall visual quality is fairly poor, despite good use of shadows and fog effects to create a spooky mood. Most scenes are grainy, and character models are afflicted with slow-motion movement tics that makes it seem like everybody you meet is underwater. Voice samples often sound vaguely slurred in a rather similar fashion, lending a surreal vibe to many conversations that actually enhances the eerie nature of your investigations.
Gameplay offers some similarly unwelcome surprises, at least after you get past all of the "Brand X" stuff. Dracula 3 is dry, traditional, and stilted. Nevertheless, there is one big changeup here in regard to puzzles. The designers chose to move away from cliched vampire plot devices and play up a more modern "It's the 20th century--there are no such things as vampires!" vibe that apparently seeks to explain bloodsucker fear as mere peasant legend. This is a nice switcheroo from the standard stake-the-fanged-guy credulity that usually accompanies any game about Dracula. But it's also pretty disingenuous in that you know from the very beginning that Father Arno won't be discovering that vampires are just make-believe after all. That would have been a cool surprise after all of the buildup about Vlad Tepes, neck hematomas, and weird blood disorders, but it's hard to pull back from supernatural explanations when you've got Dracula rising from his coffin on the cover of the game. So the story eventually goes right where you see it heading from the beginning, despite the lame attempts to fake you out.
Drawing blood in such an antiseptic fashion isn't what you expect in a game supposedly about hunting down vampires.
Such an approach to the story also, ahem, bleeds a lot of the gothic-horror atmosphere out of the game's gloomy rooms and foggy street scenes. Puzzles seem more often based on science than superstition. At times, it feels like you're more of a Sherlock Holmes than a priest, with only the ability to flip open a Bible to read inspirational quotes reminding you that this protagonist wears a collar and a crucifix around his neck. You even walk step by boring step through scientific experiments at a couple of points; for example, you're forced to wade through the amazingly tedious process required to draw your own blood and then do tests for type and other issues with multiple blood samples. It's all a bit much, especially when the procedures are so true to life that you actually have to wash your hands a few times. Other types of set-piece logic puzzles are more appropriate to a horror setting in that they involve broken artifacts, ancient tomes, drawing pentagrams, and so forth. Yet even these brainteasers are cumbersome and time-consuming. Considering that these puzzles generally aren't difficult to figure out, you're not solving mysteries as much as you are tediously filling in the blanks until the game lets you proceed.
Adventure gamers with a taste for methodical puzzle-solving could appreciate Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon, whereas everybody else will be too busy stifling yawns to feel any chills running down their spines. This is a vampire-inspired adventure by the numbers that holds few surprises in its dry puzzles and dated presentation values.
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway looks set to carve a niche for itself in the overcrowded World War II genre. But Ubisoft and Gearbox's insistence on qualifying its historical accuracy is becoming rather jarring. We were recently invited to central London to meet veterans of Operation Market Garden, the battle that features prominently in the game. The ex-servicemen offered their personal take on their involvement in the turning point of the second world war, which was both fascinating and moving to hear. The problem is that the game wants it both ways--it clearly wants to honour the soldiers, but it can't help glamourising the act of war itself.
Covering and flanking are at the heart of combat in Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway.
Take the first level, for example, where we managed to score a headshot on an unlucky German. The camera moves from the first-person perspective toward a third-person view of your victim, at which point the directors of The Matrix take over and frame the blood-splattering, cranium-popping spectacle in painstaking slow-motion detail. On the second level, the same viewpoint is used to highlight the damage of a grenade as the explosion sent the limbs of two soldiers spiraling off in every angle.
If you're not surrounded by war vets, though, Hells Highway looks like it will be a more entertaining experience. The game has great cinematics with the obligatory Band of Brothers/Saving Private Ryan cinematography, while the excellent tutorial mission eases you into the game's cover-based combat system. It's heavily based on the "find, fix, flank, finish" combat style actually employed during the war, which means you have to pin your enemy down and then attack from a different angle to finish him off. You can use your teammates in either the fixing or flanking role, but you need to fire at the enemy until the red circle above his head turns gray to indicate he's been pinned down.
We got to fight alongside two different sets of teams during the first four levels--regular assault squads that use rifles and a bazooka squad for more explosive support. Both teams are easy to command--you hold down the left trigger to pull up a cursor and then point to where you want them to go. If you point at enemies, they'll start firing automatically, but if you try to send them somewhere dangerous, they'll automatically take cover and fend for themselves. On one occasion, our bazooka squad simply refused to pop out from around a corner to fire at our target, but otherwise, the system seemed to work just fine.
The game has a gritty, realistic visual style and features some stylishly directed cut-scenes.
One standout feature is the destructible cover, which really comes into its own at the beginning of the fourth level. You can hide behind fences, but the wooden planks break apart under rifle fire, so you need to keep moving. Sandbags are a more solid defense, but they can be completely destroyed with a direct hit from rocket fire. There's no health system per se, but if you're out of cover your comrades will tell you you're in a vulnerable position, and the screen goes red if you become too exposed.
Adding to the violence we talked about earlier, Brothers in Arms features some fairly adult themes. Your AI teammates argue or bicker, and we even heard a couple of strong expletives in the cutscenes. While using a windmill as a lookout point, we saw a young farm girl being dragged into a barn. When we got back down to the ground and went to investigate, we saw how she'd been strung up by the German forces and left to die. There was also a moment when we headed into town to be greeted by a vicar, only to see him get shot by the advancing Germans shortly after.
The graphics in Hell's Highway are impressive, with faces that are visibly scarred from battle, as well as character models that are detailed right down to the dirty fingernails and scratched-up equipment. One of the coolest ideas was the achievements system, which is based on the Kilroy illustrations that real soldiers made in World War II. Bored American infantrymen inscribed drawings on the side of buildings to show that they'd been there, and you can earn achievement points by finding them hidden around the levels.
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway looks like an interesting new take on the FPS genre. The game has been in development for a while, during which time many other World War II shooters have made it to market. However, the cover dynamics and team play differentiate it from such series as Medal of Honor and Call of Duty. We've also yet to see the multiplayer game, which we hope will add longevity to the single-player experience. The game is due for release on the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 on September 26.
