Advent Rising

Although I do believe they have no intention of finishing the trilogy of this game, I would love to see it. It's storyline is very good, even a bit unique. The only two downsides I ever found in this game. One being the targeting system. Auto lock+FPS just does not mix for me. Oddly enough I didn't even realize till probably 3/4 of the way through it that I could lock on target for guns and not just powers. Other one being that the hard mode is mainly just more enemies and your biggest problem ends up being ammo. Glitches are rarely a problem. I have yet to encounter one that either caused a real problem or happened more than once. Very stable game. I honestly find $5.99 lower than what it should be.

Imagine if you combined Halo with Jedi Knight and a story written by Orson Scott Card. Sure, a lot of reviewers panned this game, but that just goes to show that you can't always trust reviewers.

... after reading the reviews here. There's a particular one by "Akalabeth", that kind of sums it up pretty good, though probably a little too offensively. I'm not going to reiterate all of it, but basically he's right - The backstory itself, setting and all, is pretty solid. But it's not really presented well. The game starts off with a bang and builds some serious pressure, only to lose it a couple of checkpoints later. Action and story is then continuously hampered by "defend ...", "hold the ...", "survive ..." and whatnot series of waves of (identical) enemies. Basically you shoot alien waves in various places. There's also a good bit of backtracking involved. Also you don't get close to any characters, including your own. it just doesn't happen. It's always about humanity, not individual humans, which alienates the player from his avatar. sometimes objectives aren't immediately clear; Im not sure it's some kind of bug, but I had to look up the current objective via the menu multiple times. Other times you get on-screen messages of what to do next - as you would expect. I personally found the combat not particularly interesting, especially while you have to rely on weapons in the first part of the game. It gets more interesing with powers, though. The (auto-)targeting system, while optional, is implemented oddly. Unlike other reviewers I think tha graphics have aged badly. Everything looks bland and sterile. Controls aren't too great, either. I could not find some middle ground for the mouse, it was either dead slow of painfully fast. I had a lot of crashes when cutscenes triggered until I installed the fanpatch from http://www.miketyndall.com/setz/Advent%20Revising/ which seemed to get rid of it. So in conclusion I have to agree with many other reviewers about how it could have been so much more. As it stands it's still nothing more than a very mediocre game, and definitely no particular enrichment to my Good Old Games.

While I have limitless respect for the work of Orson Scott Card, I can only guess that he was caught in the middle of a Star Wars binge when he was asked to pen the script for this game. The game tries very hard to emulate Star Wars while at the same time doing everything it can to differentiate itself. While this sounds like I'm slamming the game, this is actually praise. After all, Star Wars (the older movies, anyway....and the last one of the new films) is pure awesome. But you have to understand why I became just a little bit skeptical when the main character learned to levitate objects with his mind. The game starts as a slightly above-average third-person shooter (with a handful of slightly irritating bugs) until you unlock said ability. Then you can begin using my favorite maneuver, one that I decided to name the 'Pluck and F*#k' maneuver. Any time you are high up, on a cliff, or there's a pool of lava beneath you, you can simply use the Lift ability to pull them up into the air and either throw them or drop them to their instant death. THIS NEVER GETS OLD. All you have to do is keep an eye out for an opportunity to use the maneuver, like a window, any kind of perilous drop or nasty substance beneath you, and you're set to use the Pluck and F&%k. At one point, I was in a volcano, lava all around, and I dropped 20 enemies into the lava in a row, giggling like a madman the entire time. And there are many, many moments made out of sheer awesome in this game, like trying to stay alive while a ship disintegrates all around you, or the brilliant tactical decision at one point to abandon ship and suit up in zero-g gear to assault the enemy ship ON FOOT, leading to an awesome sequence of gunfights on the exterior of the enemy ship. Or a race through the aforementioned volcano to get out before it explodes. Now for the fun part, the game's flaws. The game has a nasty tendency to crash after completing a level, and while this would be crippling, the game saves your progress anyway, so there's no real loss there, it's just a little jarring and irritating. While the game won't hold your hand throughout, it has a few moments where you'll be completely lost as to what to do next. Bosses are notorious for this, especially the second boss, whom you face on two platforms connected by an extremely narrow walkway. I shot him until I ran out of ammo. I hit him with my jedi -- err, I mean -- MIND powers until I was blue in the face, and at no point did the game indicate that none of this was doing any good. I had to exit the game (after dying eleven or twelve times) and look up a walkthrough to find out that the power I didn't use -- the one that appeared to be absolutely useless -- was the one I was supposed to use, I just wasn't using it at the right TIME. Doors occasionally don't open when they're supposed to, requiring you to fiddle around, jumping next to them and so forth to trigger the magical spot that opens the damn thing. Now for my favorite flaw of all... <SPOILER ALERT> Don't read any further if you don't want plot aspects revealed to you! This is quite possibly the most depressing game I've played since Indigo Prophecy. It's that bad. Everybody dies - EVERYBODY! Humanity is almost completely wiped out in the second hour of gameplay. I'm sitting there going, 'my god, how much worse can this get', when all of a sudden, the main character's fiancee drowns more or less right in front of him. At that point, everyone the main character knows or cares about is dead. He cries for about thirty seconds, and in the VERY NEXT CUTSCENE, he's flirting with a woman, the only other human around, like nothing's wrong. How on earth is that even remotely realistic?! Everyone he's known has died in the last day and a half. If he's not a full-blown psychotic at this point, then he should be completely withdrawn, unable to talk, much less flirt! Instead he just blows the whole thing off, like he's been the sole survivor of an apocalypse before, and it's no big deal. Come on! All around, however, this is a pretty tight game, and in my opinion it is only the bugs that keep me from giving this a full 5/5. For six bucks, you really can't go wrong on this one, if you like shooters or space operas, pick it up.