Demo Reviews

I've just got a hold of Red Dead Redemption, but as playing that is going to be a pretty mammoth undertaking, I thought I'd do some posts in the meantime!

I was in London this weekend to see some friends over from the other side of the world. Made the mistake of walking down Oxford Street, and happened to walk past Primark... The combination of the close press of a million souls, the 30°C late afternoon heat, and the already fairly ground-in Evil of Primark combined to create something akin to the 3rd Circle of Hell. I manged to avoid its Abyssal pull, and thought I was through the worst.

Then we got on the Underground.

Anyway, I've also been playing a couple of demos.

I gave Transformers: War for Cybertron a whirl, a game I've had fairly mixed feelings about. I was initially excited when I heard about it because... well, it's Transformers, innit? And it could never be as bad as the absolute mess of CGI Michael Bay released as a film, could it? Then my initial excitement turned partially to doubt; surely the whole point of Transformers was they were robots in disguise, right? That's why they said it in the song. I've never been completely comfortable with the Cybertron based parts of the Transformers continuities, and here was a game based entirely on Cybertron.

The demo was multiplayer only, not really the part of a game I look forward to most. Still, it gave a reasonable idea of what the robot-on-robot action would be like (fairly clunky and visually indistinct, as it turns out), and while it didn't strain my underpant elastic at first, I've chewed it over in my brain for the past few days and have started to warm to it. I think a single player mode with a bit more character and charm is exactly what I'm looking for, and I hear that's exactly what the game has. Still, I do hope that the vehicle modes in the full game are more inspiring than they are in the demo; just about everyone in the matches I played stuck to the robot mode, a sad indictment of a game based around Transforming robots.   

The other demo I tried was Blur, a collision of Burnout and Mario Kart. There is honestly no other way to describe it. The action is pretty eyeball-searing, but I think the fun of both the above games comes from clustering around the TV with your housemates, handing out the beers, and then squealing obscenities at each other. Maybe if I'd played Blur in such surroundings it would've jumped straight to the top of my most wanted list, but, as it is, it's probably going to stay low priority at least until it comes down in price.