Red Faction: Guerrilla

I came in like a wrecking ball.

A long time ago, back on the PlayStation 2, I took a punt on Red Faction, a first-person shooter set on Mars whose gimmick was that the environment around you was entirely destructible. Couldn't see a way through? Whip out your rocket launcher and make one. Enemy hiding behind cover? Reduce that cover to rubble.

It got a sequel that I also played, but by the end of both games, I couldn't tell you what they were about, beyond blowing up walls. Their selling point was fun, but not so long-lasting, and any desires for a third game felt largely hopeless - I certainly wasn't bothered about getting one. What else could they do?

How about an explosive third-person smash 'em up where you can knock out entire buildings with a sledgehammer as you fight against the EDF and take Mars back, guerrilla warfare style, in Red Faction: Guerrilla?

At the time of release, I wasn't really interested. Now? Well, let's find out if I was wrong.

[PROTOTYPE]

"My name was Alex Mercer, and my work is almost done."

Source // Steam

It's easy to compare games to each other, especially when they share the same kind of DNA. Open-world American city besieged by viruses and plagues and a huge military presence, watched over by a single white man with no memory of how he got all these powers or why he was chosen to have them in the first place - because surely they are behind this, right? Whoever they are...

Are we talking about inFAMOUS or are we talking about [PROTOTYPE], another comic-book-like story of a guy with a lot of questions capable of causing an insane amount of damage to everything that stands in his way of the answers?

The two games were compared to each other a decade ago and it's easy to see why. While it took me a couple of years to get around to playing inFAMOUS, it has taken me more than a decade to get around to [PROTOTYPE] - should I have tried to save Manhattan sooner? Or are we just in this to save ourselves?

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

"The city is out there for the taking, just waiting for an enterprising man like myself, and you're making penile jokes."

We're not finished with Grand Theft Auto just yet, but we are taking a bit of an unexpected departure to the handhelds of the day, with a callback to the top-down GTA's of yesteryear, in a story set very much in the thick of the GTA IV present that we've seen so much of.

When I said Liberty City is full of stories, I meant it, and Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars follows the criminal (obviously) life of Triad member Huang Lee, returning to the city to avenge his father's murder, and whatever other shenanigans he'll inevitably become embroiled in for various criminal enterprises.

It might look like a step down from Episodes of Liberty City, but this little package can still pack a punch.

Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony

"I should be sent to prison, shouldn't I?"

As I'm sure you know, you can't have a game called Episodes from Liberty City without a second episode, and The Ballad of Gay Tony has, according to some, gone down as one of the greatest GTA games of all time. For a shorter, more episodic experience, what does that say about just how well crafted a piece of entertainment this is?

Club owner "Gay" Tony Prince is borrowing money from the wrong people, and his business partner and bodyguard Luis Fernando Lopez is the man to solve all his problems, of which there are many, and they are bonkers. The kind of bonkers that only a GTA game can offer.

Let's hit the streets of Liberty City one more time to see them under the glitz and glamour of the neon lights of the night.

Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned

"Just say the word, sugar, and we'll ride off into the sunset."

You must be doing something right if episodic downloadable content for a game that was already certain to be included on a must-play games list is, itself, a must-play game. That's exactly what Rockstar did, not once, but twice with Episodes from Liberty City, two new stories for Grand Theft Auto IV, the first of which is The Lost and Damned.

Johnny Klebitz leads the Lost MC in the absence of its president Billy Grey, and the two are not quite seeing eye-to-eye on how it ought to be run, and when a game is set in Liberty City, you just know that means something violent and illegal is about to occur.

Saddle up and get ready to experience an even grungier side of an already pretty miserable city.

Fuel

You can climb those mountains.

Source // MobyGames

The Earth is pretty darn big, isn't it? Compared to people, I mean. There's an awful lot of land out there, and several video games aim to capture that kind of scale with huge maps for players to run across, drive through, and explore in whatever fashion they like.

Most, however, stop after a reasonable distance. A city. An island. A fantasy countryside. A fictionalised representation of America. Fuel didn't stop until more than 5,500 square miles had whizzed by, and it's not a sprawling fantasy action RPG, but a post-apocalyptic racer.

A tad ambitious, no?

Borderlands

Pre-WUB WUB

Players love getting rewarded with new loot. Whether it is heaps of cash or experience to splurge out in shops or level-up screens, or new weapons and equipment to push your characters towards their strengths and personalities, getting more, better stuff, again and again, keeps us engaged.

So open-world first-person action-RPG shooter Borderlands gives its players lots of stuff. Like, more than a bucketload of it. Think three and a half million different weapons alone. I hope you like gathering loot. Or maybe 'swimming in loot' would be a better phrase.

Saints Row 2

"Have you changed your hair?"

Grand Theft Auto started out as a criminal playground where you got up to mischief first and missions second, before it morphed into the heavily story-driven critiques of modern America we've seen since GTA III. Sure, you could go on a rampage for the fun of it, but it was always a side event, something you did when the story was done, or the story wasn't interesting to you.

What if there was a game about running a criminal empire that put the fun back into being the absolute worst person in the city? Where missions weren't separated from silly shenanigans, but made of them? Where you could be the kind of badly dressed asshole you always wanted to be and still not look out of place in a cutscene?

Cue Saints Row 2.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

"Cheeki Breeki!"

When your most important survival tool is a rusty bolt, you know you're living in some sort of Hell. When you're playing the prequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, you practically confirm it.

Not much has changed between Clear Sky and Shadow of Chernobyl. The world is still full of other-worldly artefacts and an awful lot of radiation, death can still come for you before you know it, but entire factions are vying for control over whatever is left, and you're in the middle of it all, a walking anomaly.

I didn't have the most successful of times in Shadow of Chernobyl, but I was intrigued by what it tried to do. Is the expandalone story of Clear Sky an easier entry point into this harsh universe, or just more of the same?

Get your bag of bolts ready and we'll find out.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Wanna go bowling?

What can be said about Grand Theft Auto IV that hasn't already been said about Grand Theft Auto IV? It was the next big GTA title, the first for four years, here to show off the next generation of consoles. Everyone wanted to see what it was capable of. Could the leap from San Andreas to IV be as big as the leap from GTA2 to GTA III? Would it live up to the hype? Was the push for realism going to make or break it?

When we look back on the GTA series, it often feels like GTA IV is a bit of a forgotten child. It's grey and miserable, the streets of Liberty City grubby and soulless. Wouldn't you rather be on the sun-soaked sandy beaches of Vice City? Wouldn't the countryside of San Andreas provide a better time? Well, yes, I think I would rather spend my time in any of those settings, but if you asked me what actual GTA game I wanted to play the most, I might be tempted to say GTA IV and mean it.

I've played through the PlayStation 3 version a couple of times, but at some point in 2017, I decided that it was time to play the PC version. I grabbed some screenshots that I guess made much more sense in the moment than they do now...

Let's see what I can remember first, and then we'll have another crack at it.

Far Cry 2

"To break a man's will, to break his spirit, you have to break his mind."

Source // PlayStation

I liked my time with Far Cry, difficult though it was, but it wasn't my first taste of a Far Cry game. That would be in the form of its sequel, Far Cry 2, developed by a different team entirely and making its way onto the PlayStation 3, where I could actually play an open-world first-person shooter.

Like other titles in the genre before and since I spent a sizeable amount of time roaming a fictional African country consumed in war, and causing just as much - if not more - carnage by my own hands. There must be something about the immersion of a first-player game that hooks me, and if it's the attention paid to the little things, then Far Cry 2 is an example of showing us how it's done.

Grab your bottle of malaria pills and pick the least rusted weapon you can find, because we're about to be thrown into the furnace.

Fallout 3

Oblivion. Oblivion has changed.

Source // MobyGames

"I don't want to set the world on fire." Where were you when that Fallout 3 trailer landed? Alright, as far as monumental occasions go, the trailer for Fallout 3 isn't exactly earth-shattering, but this would be the first Fallout title in a long while, and not only was it coming to consoles, but it was coming from the folks behind The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I could not be more interested. Oblivion With Guns was coming.

My literal first encounter with the series was an afternoon at a friends house, watching him on his computer, but I consider Fallout 3 to be my introduction to the Fallout universe. For those familiar with the isometric RPGs of the past, the drastic switch to a first/third-person perspective would be controversial, among many other topics for discussion, but for me, this was simply kinda cool. I played the hell out of Oblivion and wanted to play the hell out of Fallout 3 as well.

And so I did. Bugs and glitches and all.

Fable II

You can pet the dog.

Source // Microsoft

I wasn't too pleased with Fable. Even with the English language being correctly represented through all kinds of colourful accents, a lengthy beginning section sapped all the enjoyment I may have had for the game itself, and I haven't gone back to it since.

Perfect time to see if the sequel has improved on things, then. Enter Fable II, open-world action-RPG where everything matters, and by everything, I mean how long you maintain a fart for. Don't understand? Neither do I.

Burnout Paradise

Oh, won't you please...

Source // Steam

It's fair to say I was never mad for the Burnout series. Enjoyable, but I wasn't desperate to own or play each and every title. When the series went open world, giving players the playground that was Paradise City in Burnout Paradise, it still wasn't a title that entered into my thoughts.

So far as I can tell, it wouldn't be until 2011 when I got it as part of the apology deal for the massive PSN outage, and even then, I was more interested in inFamous and whatever else I downloaded. But, eventually, at some point in time, I played Burnout Paradise for some six hours or so, and it wasn't bad at all.

When was that and what did I get up to? I've got no idea. It might as well never have happened, so let's consider this hectic street racer a fresh new title to sink my teeth into. Probably right into the dashboard, if it's a Burnout title...

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

"Get out of here, Stalker."

As of 1986, 'Chernobyl' means only one thing, and it doesn't matter when you were born, you know what that thing is. The exclusion zone is still home to life but not quite as we know it, and the mysterious nature of an entire city being effectively frozen in time and swamped in radiation inevitably leads to other-worldly stories.

Video games are no stranger to the call of Chernobyl. We've already gone through the eery stillness in one of the greatest levels in video game history in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and now, sort of via a book and film, comes S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, an alternate reality first-person survival horror game set in a region where nothing is quite as it seems.

Do we have what it takes to survive?

Crackdown

"Skills for kills, Agent. Skills for kills."

Source // MobyGames

If Gran Theft Auto Online has taught us anything, it's that sandboxes full of criminals and vigilantes don't need stories to be successful. In fact, all those cutscenes and running to mission start icons and endless conversations with every character under the sun just get in the way.

So Crackdown drops you into a sandbox full of criminals as a super-cop on a mission, but dispenses with basically all the explanation and all of the cutscenes and just tells you "these bad guys need to go, and we don't care how."

And there are a lot of bad guys in town...

Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress

"All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead..."

Source // Wikipedia

Do you like Rogue but want more? NetHack not enough for you? Do you want all the empty, black spaces on your terminal screen to be full - absolutely crammed full - of characters you didn't even know were in the ASCII standard? And do you then want that fantasy world to be staggeringly huge, span a good few hundred years of simulated history, and be incomprehensible, nonsensical, yet insanely detailed, all at the same time?

Then you might - might, mind - be looking for Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress, or Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress, or better yet, Dwarf Fortress, the game that is almost literally like no other.

There are games you dread to start up, games you fear setting eyes upon, and then there is Dwarf Fortress, as impenetrable to new players as a good fortress should be. This post is going to be something, alright, but I know for sure it won't be useful.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Your blogging skill has increased.

An open-world first-person action-RPG where you can, if you want, leave items scattered about your house, on tables and shelves, to admire whenever you popped back into town. For some reason, when I first heard about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, this what was I couldn't quite believe.

I remember asking, on GameFAQs, if I recall, whether you could, actually, have that level of realism or immersion in Oblivion. I, having only played dumb little console games, was amazed. Easily amused, you might say, and I was desperate to get hold of Oblivion for my PlayStation 3.

Cyrodiil is threatened by the Mythic Dawn, a group of up-to-no-goods intent on opening Oblivion gates - portals to Hell, essentially - and welcoming the inhabitants into town. How distracted by sidequests will you be to help the Blades find the Emperor's only surviving son to save the day?

Test Drive Unlimited

Just taking it for a little spin...

The Test Drive series of racing games have been around since the late 1980s, but they've never come with the glitz and glamour of the Gran Turismo's of this world. To be fair to Test Drive, though, it's not a series that really aims to compete with Gran Turismo. It's more closely related to the likes of Need for Speed, where outrunning the police is as common as racing your opponents.

That kind of gameplay wasn't of interest to me back in the day, so I never bothered with any Test Drive title, and that includes the many open roads of Test Drive Unlimited, an open-world drive around Hawai'i.

Open world driving? Before Forza Horizon? Before Burnout Paradise? Ok, what have I missed here?

Just Cause

"I can't believe I get paid for this."

While I do prefer games to have a great story and be focused on what they do, sometimes you just need a playground of one sort or another. If you want your playground to be a third-person action kind of thing, full of ridiculous combat and over the top stunts, then Just Cause might just grab some of your attention - and if even has a story, should you want to pursue it.

The island of San Esperito is run by a dictator that needs to be overthrown, and you're just the man to help get things moving, Agency operative Rico Rodriguez, channelling as much Antonio Banderas as he can muster.

Will this island paradise end up tourist-friendly? Let's find out.