Going to Get Edumacated: Encleverment Experiment review

Encleverment Experiment is a mix between the thinking games made popular by games like Brain Age and Big Brain Academy and party game-show games like Buzz!. But this game isn’t as clever as its name may lead you to believe.

The game is broken up into two parts. The first being the once-day tests that will track your progress in memory, math, reaction time and patterns. The variation in the tests are pretty basic and act more like glorified flash card exercises than a mental workout. One test will have you memorizing objects as they fall onto the screen, while others will have you lead a dog on the trail to find his misplaced bone and another will have you complete basic arithmetic problems before time runs out .

The problem with the tests is the goals aren’t as intuitive like with other games like Brain Age. So, if you want to just skim over the instructions, which there are a lot of, and get right to the game you’ll end up scratching your head wondering what’s going on pretty regularly.

Another issue is the difficulty of the quizzes can vary between the ridiculously kindergarten simple to the downright pulling-your-hair-like-you-did-for-your-SATs-because-you-were-too-busy-to-go-to-the-prep-classes hard.

The best worst example is the face recognition quiz. You are shown a face for a few seconds and asked to memorize the features after which you’ll be given four faces to choose from. In back-to-back questions, the faces I was asked to choose from had no similarities what so ever–I was asked to memorize a woman’s face and I was given one that looked like a man–and then the next question had nothing but small variations in the nose and upper lip between all four choices.

The next part is the game show. Here you’ll compete in the quizzes with computer opponents, or if you can find someone else that’s willing to improve their mental abilities through the Xbox, a friend. The game show basics are all here. You and your opponent will go through the tests and compete for points so you can unlock more in-game mascots that will keep you company as you play. This section of the game some more playability because of the computer opponents you’ll face, but it’s not a big enough difference from the daily tests.

Aside from the inconsistent difficulty, Encleverment Experiment is an average thinking game with a funny and engaging presentation and with an art style and narration that seems like it’s pulled off of a Saturday morning cartoon. But the real problem with this game it missed the bus for the mental-exercise craze that was all the rage a few years ago. With other games, like Big Brain Academy, that got the degree of difficulty and playability just right then Encleverment Experiment can’t compare. But if you need a quiz game for the Xbox, this would be an OK choice.

More Mutants than You can Shake a Stick At: Marvel: Ultimate Allaince 2 DLC Review

article was originally featured on sleeperhit.net

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 updated its roster with five more characters from across the ever-expanding Marvel Universe and added more challenge-room missions to use them in. The characters added for this DLC are: red symbiote and long-time Spider-man foe, Carnage; the leader of Wakanda, the Black Panther; and the mutants Psylocke, Cable and Magneto.

The selection of heroes offered in this content bundle is a good mix of well-known characters, like Magneto and the Black Panther, as well as some lesser-known characters like Psylocke. A plus for this DLC is each of the five characters plays drastically different from each other, which is refreshing since the majority of the original cast’s play style was very similar.

Like the original 24-character cast, the new heroes are great adaptations, and they look like they’ve been ripped from the pages of a weekly comic. On the powers side of the game, each character continues to control differently. The two standouts are Carnage, who plays like the animalistic nature of Wolverine mixed with the brutality of Venom, and Psylocke, who is agile and deadly like Daredevil and Iron Fist.

The underperformers of the group are Cable and the Black Panther. Cable is strongest when he stands back and shoots at bad guys with the hefty cannons he brings to the party. This is understandable because of his comic book back story, but it makes for some awfully boring button mashing. The Black Panther, on the other hand, gets up close and personal like the majority of the characters already present in MUA2 and is just more of the same.

Fusion powers stick to the same routine like the original content of the game, with one exception. When Magneto and Wolverine team up to perform a targeted attack, Magento lifts Wolverine’s metal body into the air and hurls him at the soon-to-skewered enemy. This attack is technically just like the other targeted combinations in the game, but this attack in particular has a warm place in my comic-book-nerd heart because it’s something you’d expect from the panels in a weekly book.

Beyond the characters, the DLC offers more missions to run through. The high point of these missions is the Overlord stage where you can fight Magneto in all his metal-manipulating glory. These missions add some replay value to the game, but only for another couple of hours. The characters and extra missions in this DLC pack add some nice touches to Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, but it still isn’t enough to warrant throwing ten more dollars at it. If you absolutely need more characters, then by all means go for it. But otherwise, you might as well save your money for the comicbook shop.

Fairytale Fights Review

article was originally featured on sleeperhit.net

Gamers kill dinosaurs, roll random things into balls, and control a plumber as he kicks and stomps mushroom monsters into the ground. There are some weird games out there, but Fairytale Fights is the first time gamers take control of well-known bedtime story characters in their blood-covered escapades in fantasy land, and for good reason.

Fairytale Fights is an M-rated brawler set in “once upon a time” where players pick from Beanstalk Jack, the Naked Emperor, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood, and relive classic fairytale stories. But these aren’t the stories you grew up with.

Players are tasked with quests like finding the three little bears’ porridge pot and saving the princess all while hacking their way through an endless amount of enemies, all of which squirt blood like there is no tomorrow. The game looks like it’s a kid’s cartoon on an LSD trip. The colors are overly vibrant and pop off the screen, and the character models look like they’re something taken from the warped minds that came up with the Happy Tree Friends.

Fairytale Fights is an interesting idea and a fun game to look at, but, like the head cheerleader back in high school, that’s all it has going for it. This game is boring, overly simplistic, and lacks any real reason to play more than five minutes.

The game’s combat, which should have been the highlight of this god-awful experience, is overly simplistic. All the combat is controlled through flicking the right analogue stick. It is intuitive by design, but it’s held back by the complete lack of depth. For hours on end, or as long as you can stomach playing, all you will be doing is flicking the stick without any skills or abilities to upgrade.

The game is spiced up with special moves called “Glory attacks,” but it still isn’t fun. After you slaughter enough make-believe character, you’ll be able to pause time and jump between enemies to smack them around. Too bad the Glory attacks aren’t functional. When you try to jump between multiple enemies the game is particular about how close the enemy has to be, even though there isn’t a visual cue to judge distance. This makes the Glory attacks more of a pain to use than they’re actually worth.

As players prance through the forest, a plethora of weapons–like swords, candy canes, and wooden spoons–are available in bladed, blunt, ranged, or thrown varieties. All of these have different levels of attack power. Bladed and blunt weapons will be what you’re working with most the time, and the only real difference between the two is if you want to chop your adversaries into more manageable pieces.

This is the other highlight of the game, albeit a small one: the amount of blood splattered with bladed weapons is hysterical. After short skirmishes the colored background will be covered in the blood of wolfs, would-be prince charmings, lumber jacks, and the crumbs of gingerbread men. The violence is entertaining for the first 20 minutes of the game but, like the rest of Fairytale Fights, its appeal is outlived by its monotonous game play.

This game is wait-in-line-at-the-DMV boring. The levels lack any sort of pacing and stretch on longer than what should be allowed under cruel-and-unusual-punishment laws. To make matters worse, there are sections in the levels where you’ll be blocked from progressing and forced to satisfy an undisclosed kill count before you can continue. This is mind-numbingly bad, because for the majority of the level you can avoid all enemies until you hit these invisible walls where you’re forced to actually play the game. Some life is pumped back into the game with small puzzle sections and light platforming elements spread throughout the levels, but the puzzles are simple process-of-elimination problems and only last for a couple of minutes.

The platforming elements are worse than the puzzles because of the terrible camera and awkward control scheme. The camera is too far out and is often blocked by stage pieces in the foreground. Once you figure out where you’re supposed to jump, the controls will be so unresponsive that you’ll die over and over on a simple jump. Not to worry though, there is no life system in Fairytale Fights so you can respawn again and again to relive all the fun you’re having.

If it isn’t clear by now, here it is: avoid Fairytale Fights. This game could’ve been fun if it came out 10 years ago and was in an arcade where you paid a quarter instead of full retail price. Adding insult to injury, this game has a grab-bag of aggravating problems that’ll make you curse the time you spent playing.