The first of many.

I’ll call these “rapid reviews” because I didn’t actually finish either game, so I can’t fairly call them full reviews. I did not play them from beginning to end, I played them from beginning to whenever I got bored as hell.

As mentioned previously, I have an XBox 360 now. However, I can’t afford to keep myself stocked up on new games, so Gamefly is my source of gaming sustenance. It is very unfortunate that I didn’t enjoy my first two games, because Gamefly’s turnaround time is garbage when compared to Netflix. It takes Gamefly roughly a week to get me a new game, whereas Netflix takes about half of that. I suppose that’s what happens when the closest distribution center to Milwaukee, Wisconsin is in Pennsylvania, I guess. It’s still cheaper than renting games from a brick store in the end. …Anyway, that’s a completely irrelevant tangent. On to the reviews.

Resident Evil 5
The Resident Evil games were among my favorites as a kid, and it’s somewhat strange as its the series that has helped me bond with a lot of people in my life that I normally wouldn’t have. My step-dad and I took turns working our way through the first Resident Evil. Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill were that way for me and my grade school best friend. It’s a series that, at one time, was very special to me. When I put Resident Evil 5 in my console, I was bracing myself for a return to the games that I had invested so much in once upon a time.

Good lord did I get tired of this game quickly. The controls have changed very little from, what, 13 years ago? 14 years ago? This is not a good thing. It fit the games back in the late 90s and early 2000s, but the idea that they’ve stayed that way on current-gen consoles is baffling. They are slow and cumbersome, and while I understand the argument that certain things need to be that way to make a survival horror game even the slightest bit frightening, I don’t need to enjoy it. I’m playing a super ripped soldier, I think the character I control should feel quite a bit more athletic.

I’m also not big on joining online games with people I don’t know whatsoever, so I wasn’t interested in playing the game co-op. I wanted to play it solo. It turns out that’s a terrible idea. Most of the horror in this game came from the fact that Sheva, my attractive female sidekick, could not manage her inventory if our lives depended on it. Oh, right. They did. If I gave her bullets, she would try her best to place them in everything except for the bad guys in front of us. If I took her bullets away, she ran around punching everything that looked the slightest bit rickety to see if there were any sweet, sweet bullets hidden inside. If I said screw it and loaded her inventory with herbs so she could stand back and hold my healing items for me, she found every possible opportunity to waste them. If I stubbed my toe, she would throw herbs at me. If I took even a scratch from a zombie, she would run over and rub herbs all over my glistening biceps. Quite honestly, I’m not even sure where some of the herbs went. She was making herself salads with them for all I know.

And every time I got a game over in the game, it’s because Sheva got her ass kicked and then I got mine kicked trying to save her. Personally, I consider the game unplayable solo, but I’m sure people have had better luck with it. As I said, I didn’t finish this game. Far too frustrating for me.

Prince of Persia
Prince of Persia is the second game I got through Gamefly, and I had quite a bit of fun with it. Sadly, that fun only lasted a few hours, because I came to realize the entire game was more or less the same as the opening sequences. The narrative wasn’t strong enough to keep me going, so I stopped playing once I was all parkour’d out.

This game’s artistic style is beautiful. I cannot stress that enough, this game is pure eye candy. The Prince himself has been mocked elsewhere for his colorful plumage, but I really enjoyed his character design. More than that though, I loved Elika. Both her appearance and the way she moved. Her model and animations just made her feel light, the sort of girl that you’d swear can’t weigh more than a feather. It was really quite perfect.

The acrobatics were fast paced and fun, and the interactions between Elika and the Prince during it were well coordinated and really made them feel like a strong pair. If Elika was in your way, she didn’t just block your path or get shunted in the other direction like some games that try the tag team thing (I’m looking at you, Resident Evil 5), the two of you maneuver around each other in a smooth motion. It was fantastic. The crazy high-flying stunts the two of you pulled off were fun to watch, especially through the many-tiered environments they give you to explore. You also didn’t need to worry about Elika’s well-being. Ever. Not while jumping off of tall cliffs are running across walls or lazily swinging your sword at demons. She existed only to help, never hinder.

The problem is the entirety of the game is exactly the same. Jump, climb, slide. Climb, slide, jump. Jump, slide, jump, climb, slide, jump. There’s some combat to break it up, but the combat system is terrible. Elika and the Prince have been leaping and climbing and flipping all over creation, but the second you’re faced with a battle, the two of you have damn near forgotten how to move. I don’t expect a Bayonetta out of the combat system, but I expected more out of a game that gives us such lovely acrobatics.

The environments also struck me as being a little too large for the purpose they served. They’re fun to move through to get to the boss, it’s fun figuring out how all of the platforms line up to gather the post-boss collectables, but you often have to go back and forth through the same areas repeatedly. Just look at this map.

The Temple is your starting point. It’s also where you need to return every time you have enough Light Seeds to “power up” Elika and allow you to explore new areas. The game is non-linear, so each power up opens different areas in each quadrant of the map. Each dot is essentially a small level, the difficulty going up slightly the farther away from the Temple that you are. When you’re trying to travel from one end of the map to the other, it gets really damn tedious. Returning to the Temple from the farthest reaches of the map just has you running through areas you’ve traveled through multiple times already, devoid of meaningful enemies or challenges. I love the environments, but I don’t want to go back and forth through them a dozen times over the course of the game. Adding quick-travel options would have made this much more tolerable.

The power ups themselves are somewhat of a bother, too. The power ups give you things like the ability to fly or scale buildings or whatever else after touching the proper points in a level. It’s mandatory to progress to the more “difficult” parts of the map. The problem is these things are not very fun, they’re glorified quicktime events where you push Triangle a lot and then sometimes you need to tap your joystick so you don’t slam face first into a low-hanging branch. The more powers you acquire, the less parkour you’re doing.

The acrobatics were the entirety of the game’s fun to me. Between these power ups and the constant back-and-forth travel, the game didn’t have a lot going for it. It’s very sad, because I adored the aesthetics. Elika is one of my favorite female companions in a game like this. I just couldn’t justify putting more time into the game. I didn’t feel like it had anything left to offer after 4 hours or so. I wanted more Elika, I wanted more of the Prince, but at that point in the game it felt like I would have more luck turning to the murky depths of FanFiction.net or DeviantArt.