CryGear of BioFortress Duty 3: Shadow of Episode 2

Over the past few months, there has been a massive influx of triple A FPS shooter titles, allowing you to finally sate your uncontrollable blood lust in a way that doesn't involve lots of elaborate planning, heavy-duty trash bags, or midnight trips to the dumpster. I know it's hard to keep them all straight, so I've compiled this handy list to help you out. Hey kids, feel free to print this out, circle the ones you want for chrismahanakwanza, and send it to your grandma so you don't end up with Xtreme Paintballz under the tree/candles/kwanza thing.

Halo 3 - This is the big one, ladies and gentleman. With a marketing budget surpassing the GNP of several small countries, there is no way you don't know about this game. No movie or game can ever live up to an over-saturation hype scheme like this, but Bungie's newest (last?) Halo game falls particularly short. This game is simply one action set piece after another, very thinly strung together by monotonous and anti-climatic run-and-gun sections. The "series of set piece" style game is not inherently evil, but Halo 3 does it without emotionally drawing you into the world (see Call of Duty 4), without making you care about the paper-thin characters (see Half-life 2), without giving you any degree of freedom (see STALKER), and without creating a compelling locale (see BioShock). Sure, the multiplayer is good, but there's nothing here we haven't seen in games that don't charge a monthly fee to play it. Even the much-lauded replay feature has been featured regularly in PC games since Counter-Strike was launched 7 years ago. If you played the original Halo, congratulations, you've played Halo 2 and 3. Stick with those memories and skip this summer blockbuster of the gaming world.

Gears of War - I'll be honest, I haven't gotten very far into this one. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what everyone liked about this game. Gears is apparently engineered for some niche group of gamers who enjoy shooting blindly around corners, just-plain-dumb AI, insultingly hyper-macho characters, nauseating shaky-cam, writing that consists of mono-syllabic sentences like "Shit." or "Sweet.", and having the game assume control of their viewpoint to say "HEY LOOK AT THAT RIGHT THERE! HOW COOL IS THAT, AMIRITE???" Like that girl in your chemistry class, this game is beautiful but dumb dumb dumb.

Call of Duty 4 - Linear, story-driven shoot-em-up done (mostly) right. COD4 is everything you could ask for from this style of shooter, from the compelling campaign, to the amazing graphics, to the way the game pulls you into it's world. The designers have clearly taken the age-old principle of "Show, don't tell" to heart, as many of the games most fun and breathtaking moments take place with you in complete control of your character. The downfall of an attempt to create a engrossing experience like COD4 is that one serious flaw can rip a player out of the carefully constructed world and remind him that he is, after all, playing a video game. The guilty party in this case is the enemy spawn system. Throughout the early levels of the game, we are taught that each area has a given number of enemies, and if we wish to survive, we must take our time, hunker down, and take them out one by one. This formula is thrown at the window at seemingly random points of the game, where we are expected to break cover and charge the enemy position. If we follow the previously established rules, we are faced with an endless firefight as an infinite number of enemies spawn out of view, then rush out at us as if that house/shed/bunker/ was some kind of terrorist clown car. The moment you realize that no matter how many Deliberately-Vague-Nationality Freedom Fighters you kill, they will keep coming is the moment the illusion shatters. Simply adding an auditory or visual clue that you need to move your squad up would have been enormously helpful. This complaint is honestly just nitpicking a fantastic game (to say nothing of the also-fantastic multiplayer), but it is such a tragic flaw that I feel compelled to point it out. Please do yourself a favor and pick this one up.

More to come...