<-250x250 Square - left->Yes, that’s right, another dose of “hand-to-gun” combat and shooting piece of action that is somehow a remix of the original games from the Painkiller series. Some time ago I presented to you a review of the Battle Out Of Hell add-on to the game which actually brought some refreshing graphics and a really tweaked engine – such novelties are a considerable “effort” for many developers. What does this new game from the series bring to the table? Merely a new story to wrap the game scenario around it: the engine is pretty much the same one used in the Battle Out Of Hell, so nothing new about that, even the graphics look similar and were probably created in pretty much the same way as before. Since this wasn’t a real game to begin with, but rather a game mode that evolved into a stand-alone game - we shouldn’t expect very much either, only the fans of the series could appreciate it. However, the loading times between levels tend to be hilarious after a while, but the game requirements are similar to the ones from Battle Out Of Hell.

The game story is connected to the fight between good and evil, just like in the previous games, though it adds a sick twist in the plot – a male angel was seduced by a demon lady and they had a child who had both demonic but also holy features. Although it wasn’t his fault, he became soon the enemy of both sides, as they feared him because of his mastering of portals between the Heaven and Hell. And so, there was a pact that was signed (thematic entry from the Painkiller game series) in order to destroy the “creature”. Cerberus, the guardian dog of Hell was ordered to destroy the wings of the half-angel, while the traitor angel Samael was watching.

game trailer
Nobody even suspected that they might need to use the portal powers of Belial, the “wretched creature”. They tried to control him, to use him, and he was pinned down into a cage with enchanted locks. These locks would react only to Lucifer’s command. When Daniel defeated Lucifer in the Painkiller, he also set Belial free without knowing it. And because he was released, Belial started looking for revenge on “the mad dog” and Samael.

This is what this game is all about – the levels are organized into 3 big chapters, each having 5 “episodes”, each getting Belial closer to his purpose. For every fighting sequence in the game there is exactly the same scenario – you will take the role of Belial, and enter an area and a door shuts behind you with a big noise. The demons are spawned almost instantly one after another and you will have to “dispatch” them all, unless you wish to get stuck in the same level, over and over again.

The “episodes” are each one more stupid than the other, making you fall asleep by seeing how predictable the enemies will get. The repetition is very boring and there’s nothing changed but the surroundings and the types of the enemies. I’m going to mention though a few instances where I had “some” fun. While I was shooting ninjas in the “Japanese Massacre” I remembered a good joke: if you wish to get a ninja salad, just go among them and tell them something “nice” about their mother – this totally applies in this level, although they are the ones to become “salad” splattered on the walls when the gamer uses the “skeleton”-shotgun. Next, you will arrive in the Desert, where you will “shake-hands” with the Egyptian mummies, bugs and wannabe pharaohs in their lame attempts to bring some damage to our traveler. The scorpions that turn into bugs are the most hilarious types. But then again, what do the crazed spell-casted templar knights (standard or huge sized) have to do with Egyptians? There’s no answer to that as there is no logic that could explain a lot of silly and scripted apparitions from the game. And as if this wasn’t enough, we go even into Star-Wars and Asteroids with this story – that was really not necessary, the whole game is a SF-like adventure, so why bother? If you use your shotgun and the demon head with the laser-beam out of his eyes long enough, the level will be finished pretty quickly.

Another “ammo-demanding” stop is the Black Tower – the first boss-battle. Next, you will have to jump-through a Nuclear Plant and an Animal Farm, and as new element, you will gain a new weapon during the shooting spree, that operates on toxic waste ammo.

The ancient Vikings won’t give up that easily their fortress from Ragnarok and you will have to use excessive force to get rid of the annoying magicians who throw telekinetic hits at you. At the end of this level you will have to take your best shot at Cerberus, the dog that ripped apart Belial’s wings. Between this chapter end and Samael’s Lair there are just a few stops, each being filled with enemies you’ve seen before in the first series of levels, but in a large number this time, especially the Haunted Valley (candy-like images and trees – the realm of tales about witches, moving trees and bad tempered knights, all of them with nasty habits that need to be cured …permanently) and Loony Park (that is a total “remix” of the Loony Park from the original Painkiller - Battle Out Of Hell, except for the fact that you get no free ride on the electric cars, and because of that it is a total failure – not only the music is annoying, but there are all over again the same lame characters from last time; the addition of the “pirates” and the ships was a very good one though!).

Of course, as expected, you will have to fight against Samael, once you reach his place. First you will have to deal with some more giant knights and then use any weapon you like to produce heavy damage with and knock off Samael.

The sound in the game was very much the same as in the Battle Out Of Hell, but the music was a bit different, even the ambiental sounds, as there are specific areas of some levels where you will have to go through.

game presentation
Digitainment mark: 5 out of 10 (for lack of innovation)

Developer/Publisher: DreamCatcher, Mindware

Website with demo:
http://www.projectoverdose.com/

Buy: $39

Another new game made its way onto my desktop and goes by the name “Clive Barker’s Jericho”. It’s about a “special-ops” team heavily armed and trained to deal with occult dark powers. This game is based on a story written by the horror-fiction author Clive Barker. While in my opinion, he is not exactly an outstanding writer, the way in which his story has been implemented is impressive and the level of details in some areas is quite amazing.As far as PC specs go, the game needs Windows XP or Vista, AMD X2 or Intel Core 2 Duo as CPU, up to 4 GB of RAM (yeah, the more the better), and a graphics card from the current generation of ATI HD 2xxx or GeForce 8xxx. Even if in the game requirements some older cards are mentioned as well – it’s not worth playing this game on old hardware so that you’d be getting 3-4 frames per second, it spoils the fun completely. As for the required hard drive space, 4,5GB will be enough for a full installation. This game has been rated M (mature) due to the use nasty language in some levels – but seriously, I think such insertions bring color into what would otherwise be just a simple (as opposed to outstanding) game.

Game Intro
The game story is also the common background that brings us to the action from the first chapter – we find out that there was a “firstborn” long before Adam and Eve, who was neither light or dark, but dangerous and beautiful at the same time, and since he had a disturbing appearance, the Almighty banished him into the Abyss. The Firstborn kept waiting and tried to get out of the Abyss and there were 7 Sumerian priests who stopped him from getting out but at a great cost. Since then there was always an order that would train 7 warriors to stop the Firstborn from escaping, but none of the members of those teams has made it back alive, which gives the player a very “optimistic” view upon the game ending.

There was a special unit created in 1930s, called the Department of Occult Warfare, which was meant to fight against the dark spiritual forces. One of the Nazis from the German division, Arnold Leach, was a valuable member until he was expelled for extremely violent and cruel behavior. He has done so much evil that he was secretly placed on a list for assassination. While it appeared initially that the assassination was successful, he has found a method to survive and was never caught. The action in game starts in present day in the city of Al-Khali, where the team members are ordered to search for a Swiss Guardsmen squad. They find the bodies of the guards horribly mutilated. During the first mission that goes beyond the original quest, the captain of the Jericho squad dies, killed by Arnold, but his spirit comes back to possess each of the bodies of the members of Jericho squad in order to lead them into victory.

Before I go deeper into details, I need to present you the characters, especially the three ladies from the team who are hot! They all are typical characters, but there’s more to them than meets the eye:

The Captain Devin Ross is a war veteran, and is very skeptical towards the paranormal phenomenon. As squad leader he has very good skills in organization and management. His psychic skills involve healing and reviving other team mates who are wounded or hurt badly. His weapons are the “Patrioteer” (a 5.56 mm G36C assault rifle as primary) with a semi-auto shotgun (XM-26 as secondary). After he dies in the game, at least from a physical point of view, he can enter in any of the team mates’ bodies and control them. This ability can be used on short distances, and any of the members with Ross inside them can gain healing abilities.
Captain Devin Ross
Corporal Simone Cole is the one handling the intelligence (she is a genius!) and information processing. She also is in charge of getting supplies for the rest of the team, by “downloading” them – now that’s quite interesting to go on a mission and never to run out of ammo! Actually she “rewinds” time in the ammo belts so that they are full again. Also her powers explain the checkpoint system within the game. She is really amazing when she presents to the team various data and background info on the surrounding areas where they are located. She can spot the weak points of the enemies and can use her X-86 submachine gun to fire extremely accurate shots, by using her face-mask with zooming options. Since she is a reality-hacker (ok, that sounded weird, but here’s how it works) she can manipulate space and time so that everything goes into slow motion while she keeps her fast speed – and that lasts about 12 seconds – enough to heal a team mate or to inflict big damage on fast opponents in very a short time by use of the second power, “firestorm”.

Corporal Simone Cole
Lieutenant Abigail Black has a reserved attitude and is a telekinetic sniper - guiding the bullet - a pretty similar procedure to the secondary fire of the Redeemer from the Unreal shooter games. She is my favorite character because she is in control of the team for most of the time after the captain dies because of her accurate fire power and team management abilities (she helps Simone get back to her senses in the Crusade level). Even if Delgado jokes about the fact she is “into girls rather than boys”, she throws back “cute” one-liners to keep up the “exchange of kind words”. Her powers are focused on telekinesis, and beside the ability to control a bullet in order to shoot multiple enemies with one shot, she can also throw or break items out of the way in order to clear the path. She is very amusing when she says “I hate when you do that” to Ross, when he enters her body. She has a techno-gothic look and outfit and has high hopes just like any other member that the team might be able to return home alive.

Lieutenant Abigail Black
Wilhelmina 'Billie' Church is a ninja blood mage and she is the assassin and also works as scout for the Jericho team. She is trained in stealthy arts and is Delgado’s girlfriend. As weapons she prefers the katana sword, but she is also using an Uzi-fire-style automatic gun because the squad imposed it on her. Her magic abilities include the creation of a blood ward that blocks and slows down the enemies, while the other power is a fire ward that causes heavy damage to the demons. She can also open blood seals, but we can see that only in cinematic sequences.

Wilhelmina 'Billie' Church
Sergeant Frank Delgado has a Spanish origin, and his powers are the result of a long study of alchemy and shamanic arts and wisdom. One of his arms is cased within a protective metal shell that contains Ababinili, a fire-flame spirit that Delgado uses to summon in order to burn down the demons while the fire-snake feeds on them (“Feeding time!”). As weapons he has a big and heavy 7.62 belt-fed chain-gun that compensates for his lower dexterity, called “Hell’s Keeper”, and “Pain”, a semi-auto pistol. His main magic power is pyromancy as mentioned above and the secondary skill is creating a wall of flame around himself and the team that shields from environmental or physical attacks from the demons.

Sergeant Frank Delgado
Father Rawlings (the chaplain in the military) is a preacher with a southern American accent, with a high level of knowledge of the history of the Jericho squad and the real purpose of their mission. His strong personality makes him assume command in some occasions when he knows better than Ross what needs to be done. His weapons are two custom made handguns (dubbed Faith and Destiny), that have 3 fire modes. His powers obviously have to be connected to the divinity, and thus he can heal team members with his Ghost Healing power from a distance, and his second power is the exorcism ability, but it is manifested only in the cutscene with Hanne Lichthammer, a sadistic German officer, in the World War II level and at the end of the game.

Father Rawlings
Xavier Jones is the “ghost” of the team – he can literally render an astral projection of himself outside his body and flip switches or open doors with the help of telekinesis or burn fuel containers with his pyromancy abilities. His weapons are a “Patrioteer”, just like the one Ross has at the beginning of the game and a XM-26 semi-auto shotgun. The others think of him as a law-enforcer, like before the ending level of the game.

The Spiritual Projector - Xavier Jones
The levels in the game are pretty much linear and you will have to pay attention to all the details and everything the characters have to say to find out as much information about the missions as possible. The action in each section of the big five levels follows a straight pattern – “kill all demons and move on”, and that can be really annoying after some time, especially when you will encounter the same type of demons in areas you wouldn’t expect to. Also, make sure the “sniper” chicks stay behind the squad and the “big-guns” stay ahead – so that there would be a balanced attack. The historical mission series starts in Al Khali, in present times, when the team finds out that they’re actually meant to fight for something else than just finding the Swiss Guards. Almost at the end of this level, Arnold shows up and kills Ross.

In the World War II, the level name gives the timing when the action happens (“not where are we, but rather when are we?” says Rawlings) this is where you will meet some Flamethrowers for the first time - make sure you take them down as fast as possible. When you get to be in Rawlings’ body, in a movie sequence involving the exorcism of Hanne Lichthammer (who is later destroyed by Billie who slits her throat), you will use the divine powers to chase away the evil spirits. She uses very bad language in order to distract Rawlings. I also enjoyed the company of the 3 English blokes who help the team go further.

In “The Crusades” level, your team will split in half for a while leaving you to work only with Delgado, Abby and Billie. Once you finish slaughtering some very ugly allegedly “doomed templar knights”, you will find back the other members of the team and help Simone Cole to get over her fears and scary thoughts. They too have been dealing with ghosts of children. The Bishop Maltheus Sinclaire was a horrible person but also insane – he built an army of children against the saracen armies of Saladin, because he thought their innocence would protect them. Obviously, they were killed by the soldiers and they remained furiously as ghosts in the Bishop’s chapel hoping to get revenge for their deaths – the activity of the Jericho team renders the Bishop’s spirit vulnerable and they destroy him. After that, they go happily to the Heavens.

The next chapter takes us through another historical age, that one of the Roman rulers, namely the governor Cassus Vicus (in the Roman Provinces). He was thrown into this place because of his terrible crimes and he erected a palace, some temples and even a coliseum, not to honor the old gods but for himself. After defeating his champions in the arena, including big and disfigured gladiators, you will also get to fight with him. What bothered me the most is that there isn’t a progress bar telling you how much more shooting is required to kill an enemy – you can only guess by looking at the demons and listening to the sounds they make. Vicus is too obese to move himself too fast and so he hangs by a metallic mechanism that carries him in a circle type of movement. When he is finally defeated, he opens a new portal that takes the team to the next level.

Sumeria is the last big level that has a lot of twists and turns, many of them based on defeating double enemies, one at a time, as they tend to work together and you need to guess which of them is providing the energy for the other. This is where Lt. Black (Abby) takes control again as hers is the first body that Ross finds when they are “teleported” by some rays of white light. At the beginning you just have to reunite the team members and move on to the next area where you have to recreate Antadurunnu (to join his body parts) who claims he can help you end well the mission.

However, things will start looking suspiciously to Delgado who thinks Antadurunnu will betray them, having in mind the prisoners they have seen in the Crusade palace and in the Roman Provinces, who were doomed to spend their time in torture for eternity. In the end, Delgado shoots Antadurunnu and they go through the portal to defeat the Firstborn. Make sure you know by now how to use the magical abilities of the characters because as soon as he will try to possess any of the team members, they will have to strike back by using their magical skills. The normal ending shows how the Jericho team goes deep into the water to escape, while Arnold "assumes" responsibility for the destruction of the Firstborn. Some rumors hint that if you finish the game in hard mode, you will battle on the plains of purgatory as Ross against Arnold and that you have to make sure you sink his eyes deep within his brain in order to defeat him.

The sound in the game was pretty creepy in some areas, after all, this is supposed to be an action-squad-horror. The ability to switch among characters is rather new and interesting – that way you won’t have time to get bored. The music is merely ambiental and has nothing special. This is somehow compensated by the visual effects, especially when you use the magical powers of each member of Jericho. The controls should be very familiar to any gamer who likes shooters.

Digitainment mark: 7 out of 10 (penalty for the scripted events – those were so annoying!)
Designer: Clive Barker
Developer: Mercury Steam (the game engine bears the same name – the Mercury Engine)
Publisher: Codemasters
Website: http://www.codemasters.com/jericho/

The sequel of the highly acclaimed Operation Flashpoint promises to redefine the FPS genre when it comes out in 2008.

Operation Flashpoint 2 has been in production at Codemasters Studios for two years now and the largest development team ever assembled is working on it, so…we might be in for something really amazing, let's hope so.

<-234x60 Half Banner - right->Set in modern-day theatres of war the game will offer realistic conflict scenarios that will give players the impression they really are taking part in a war. The game is said to offer different military classes to make the warfare experience even more believable and a multiplayer component which will create battles at an impressive scale.

The game will use a new FPS variant of Neon engine technology, the company’s proprietary middleware.

More details about Operation Flashpoint 2 will be available this summer.