Saints Row (18)
Verdict: Bling with no zing.
Platform: Xbox 360
Rating: 3½/5
When you first enter the ghetto of Saints Row you know exactly where you are as a kind of self perpetuating deja-vu pervades throughout the city of Stilwater - every bit of car jacking, gunning, pimping, driving action blurs into one old memory you’re sure came from somewhere else. Welcome to GTA: San Andreas part deux.
As the new kid on the block in Saints Row, you find yourself at the end of a barrel in the middle of a present day gang war. Enlisted by your saviours you whole heartedly join in the fight and embark on a city wide trail of destruction.
As well as scrapping with rival gangs there’s a predictably big sandbox city full of stuff to see and steel. Ensuring you don’t skip it all, a certain level of respect must be achieved before tackling the main gang related missions and to gain respect you must seek out a variety of law breaking jobs.
With a whole host of entertaining careers like insurance fraud, escort duties, assassinations and heavily armed vandalism, you’re sure to be busily distracted as you burn round the city in a freshly stolen, pimped out car, modelling your latest bling.
Attempting to iron out GTA’s flaws, Saints Row smooths out the experience by making navigation easy, fixing combat controls and introducing quick saves. While it does this commendably it falls short by merely limiting itself to this - there’s no progression from the formula, no innovation beyond slight tweaks and online play.
Lamentably, features have been sacrificed like the RPG style character building and the lack of vehicles other than cars and trucks is criminal, further serving to paint Saints Row as a more limited package, despite it’s confident and ballsy sheen.
It also misses that vital satiric spark that elevated GTA’s wit beyond its superficial crudeness and lacking an engaging story, iconic music and the artistic direction that defined so much of Rockstar’s controversial series, Saints Row delivers below its potential.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then this is some of the best knock-off jewellery money can buy.

Metal Slug 5
Format: PS2.
Disappointingly sluggish.
In this age of 3D, polygon filled, bump mapped, shadered and bloomed graphical technology, it’s always refreshing to settle down with an old-school 2D pixel pushing game. There’s something about the art direction - the fact that the designers have to squeeze so much character out of what basically amounts to a collection of different coloured squares is testament to why the pixel art scene is still flourishing. Paul Smith has jumped on the bandwagon and with Malcolm Mclaren doing the same with chip music (electronica made using old gaming technology) these retro stylings are thankfully here to stay.
The Metal Slug series is one of the last champions of 2D on home consoles although even it has succumbed to 3D with a new, soon to be released title. Starting out on the legendary NeoGeo it has carved out its identity as an over-the-top, run and gun two player shooter with distinct cartoon stylings, wildly imaginative design and of course its trademark humour and the titular Metal Slugs - super deformed tanks and various other combat ready vehicles and animals.
Metal Slug 4 was developed by a different company to the rest of the series and was a disappointment to many fans. With Metal Slug 5 the game was back in its creator’s hands so did it reclaim the series’ throne? Unfortunately not.
From the outset the game runs at a noticeably slower speed to usual and as soon as the action really gets going (there’s little time when it isn’t) the game hits criminal slow-down. For a series that has speed and mayhem as its trademark it’s game destroying and unforgivable. The PS2 should be able to handle it so it seems to be victim to sloppy porting (from the arcade version) and lazy programming.
Elsewhere the game treads the same old ground but seems to have lost some of the spark that made the series great. Environments are more detailed and there’s a more convincing depth of field but overall the game just lacks the imagination and humour of old - it’s as if they made it on auto pilot.
A lot of the humour still resides in the sprite animation - the stupid expressions and the way characters move but it lacks the insane comic situations, the B-movie parodies and the over the top boss battles. Riding a freshly thawed woolly mammoth with a side mounted vulcan cannon shooting zombies, panicking soldiers and snow throwing yetis whilst avoiding becoming one of the undead or a snowman is what you’d expect from Metal Slug (specifically MS 3) but this kind of action is lamentably missing and replaced with something far more generic.
There are some entertaining moments like the car chase level with its exaggerated jumps but they are fleeting and prone to the ever prevalent slow down. Lacking the branching pathways of Metal Slug 3 and much of the imagination and humour it’s only made worse by the shortness of the game and the unwise decision to include infinite credits which means it’s a brief, disappointing affair.
5/10

Just Cause (16+)
Verdict: Too much smoke, not enough mirrors.
Platform: 360, PC, PS2, Xbox
Rating: 3½/5
Thrusting you into an over-saturated world of acid pastels, panoramic vistas and enough over-the-top action to make James Bond jealous, Just Cause chucks you out of a plane into free falling, car jacking, island liberating fun.
As Rico Rodriguez you’re the CIA’s secret weapon, a latino warhead with a mullet and a one man regime change working to overthrow the unsavoury government of San Esperito.
With the lush equatorial island providing a massive playground, you can go where you want in predictable GTA style as the graphic engine does stunning work at rendering vast draw distances, populated roads, detailed foliage and gorgeous skies.
Separating Rico from every other action hero is his handy ability to open a parachute at any opportunity. Base jumping and paragliding are also par the course and used in conjunction with a grappling hook, the opportunity for ridiculously impossible and unlikely stunts becomes the norm as every vehicle becomes a ticket to the skies.
With obvious potential for imbalance, the relative ease of some missions caused by paragliding appears to be offset by the crazed homing missile A.I. of the self replicating cops and robbers, tipping the scales the other way.
Despite some thoughtful design like the vehicle drops, extractions and forgiving checkpoints that ensure you’re never stuck in the middle of nowhere for long, Just Cause rests a little too much on it’s flashy showmanship and overwhelming size to cover up its flaws and thin veneer.
With stiff controls, twitchy vehicle handling, a dumbed down auto-aim, intrusive way points and enough blur and bloom to make me never want to drink absinthe again, it lacks the final tweaks and that certain something that turns a game from average into awesome.
Where it works well it does it with great panache and even as a tech demo it certainly demonstrates what the graphic engine is capable of with great verve but it’s depth of experience fails to convince of more than that.
San Esperito - its a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Ninety Nine Nights
Verdict: Repetitive, derivative button basher.
Platform: Xbox 360
Rating: 2½/5
Like a pavement trader selling knock off perfume, Ninety Nine Nights has definite whiffs of Otogi, Kingdom Under Fire and Dynasty Warriors about it as it attempts to abuse the power of the 360 to raise the carnage bar in the hack n’ slash genre.
With awful voice acting in check you lead your army into battle against roguish goblins and assorted fantasy cliches and plough your way through their ranks with fantastic looking neon imbued attacks and magical nukes.
The armies can number in the thousands and things are at their most intense when the screen is impressively awash with generic, hard to distinguish soldiers as both sides collide in a confusing brawl.
Thankfully you can’t hit your own neutered soldiers (who act more as a shield than a sword for you), so mindless button bashing works wonders. In fact it works too well as swathes of monsters fall before your mighty weapon with ease and when you’ve pulled off super-mega-hyper-doom combo number 3 for the 100th time, things quickly begin to lose their shock and awe.
You’d think wading into vast battles with your magically charged sword and cutting down groups of foes with Sauron like ease would be endless fun but without challenging enemies beyond the ‘i’m bigger, therefore I hurt you more’ mentality the challenge becomes one of making sure your thumbs are well oiled and your mind switched off.
It’s not all plain sailing though because difficulty spikes rear their ugly head and cause you to curse the lack of a checkpoint system where death means playing from the start of the long, muddled battle again and your thumbs cry murder. Judicious use of health refill chests and careful timing of genocidal magic attacks will eventually see you through to the next laborious level.
While the story treads familiar ground there is a moral subtext beneath the ‘good vs evil’ conceit which shows a darker side to the day-glo warfare. It’s just a shame there isn’t more depth or polish to the gameplay too.
Think toilet water rather than eau de toilet.

DeadRising (18)
Verdict: You've got a bit of red on you.
Platform: Xbox 360
Rating: 4 stars
Ever wondered what it'd be like to be trapped in the Victoria Centre on the last shopping day before Christmas and all the irate shoppers have turned into a hungry horde with a blood lust for human flesh? No? Oh, maybe that'll explain why i'm writing this from the comfort of a padded cell...
Anyway, wonder no more because DeadRising allows you to live out that fear/fantasy for a rabid, tongue-in-cheek 72 hours as you seek to gain the inside scoop on the zombification of a middle American town.
As Frank West, Photo journalist, you can either chase the story and find out why the town's folk have developed a lumbering gait or spend your time helping survivors. With a punishing time limit, save structure and a mall full of zombies it's hard to tackle both so which do you choose? That moral dilemma is yours.
Initially armed with just a camera, Frank has to make do with some DIY tactics and the shopping mall is a veritable cornucopia of makeshift weapons - handbags, skateboards, boomerangs, plant pots, frying pans, chainsaws, toy swords, lawnmowers...the list goes on and on, not to mention the inevitable arsenal of guns at your disposal.
Controls are satisfying, if a little clunky and the game uses the weapons to create diversity in combat while an RPG style levelling up system gives you new moves and upgrades as you progress. With obvious nods to GTA and Resident Evil 4, it's a sandbox style game that exudes B-movie charm and is full of hidden minutiae that only hours ofexploring, slaying and experimenting will unearth.
The multiple endings, crazy bosses, freeform missions, improvisational gameplay and a unique save system that keeps your upgraded character for each restart, means you'll be taking photos and bashing zombies right though the dawn of the dead.
With such blood red confidence it's a shame that it's held back by some annoying problems - the poor inventory system, weak AI, illegible on-screen text (for the majority of us without HD TVs) and an awkward save system mean it's a flawed but immensely fun game that'll make you see shopping in a whole new light.