The action is great but needs a little polish. Hayden controls fairly well, but I have to get used to the setup. A little awkward at first; you’ll accidentally dive around with Hayden until you get better. Handguns, shotguns, and machine guns fire differently enough from each other, giving much variety to combating the hordes throughout. Also enemies can overwhelm you if you’re not careful. The real meat and taters is the Glaive. This three-bladed discus of death can slice and dice enemies and is useful for environment puzzles(which break the monotony of killing everything you come across).

So far, I’ve unlocked the Steal(snatch distant objects and bring them to you), Aftertouch(long-distance control), and Absorb Energy(add fire, ice and electrical) abilities thus far, and it makes for some satisfyingly gory combat. Enemies come at you en masse, but the AI at times can be a little suspect(monsters can hung up in doorways/corners, soldiers hiding where they can easily be shot, etc).

Man, did they need a real writer or what? It’s a shame Tom Clancy or Orson Scott Card didn’t pen this. What could have been a great Splinter Cell/RE 4 (mix of government intrigue/free game downloads/science fiction)just appears to be phoned in and rushed. Not enough background, lot twists, and decent voice acting considering Mike Rosenbaum’s voicing Hayden. Damn near random storytelling for what could have been X-Files or something. A director’s cut(ala Ninja Gaiden Black) could REALLY fix this if the developer was still interested. Sadly, I don’t think the sales may justify this due to the current price drop.

The first mission pretty much sets up how the rest of the campaign is going to flow. That may sound repetitive, especially since the game doesn’t offer any real variety in mission-structure (like safely directing a damaged plane through an anti-aircraft field, or destroying satellites in space), but surprisingly, it never becomes tiring. AC6 clearly wanted to be a large-scale, air combat title first, compared to the other AC titles, and it never backs down from that, nor fails to excite. However, the biggest problem you’ll encounter, thanks to the mountains of targets that pop up, is being able to lock on to a specific object. This actually has been something of a slight issue since AC4, but it wasn’t big enough to moan about… until now. You’ll find yourself in many situations where a target is clearly in front of your plane, but it just keeps choosing things off in the distance. There are even times when you are five feet away from an object you want to hit with your missiles, yet the lock on believes the AA Gun, which is almost off screen,like download free games, is more important. Why couldn’t the developers just program this where it would first pick the closest enemies? How hard is that?

Also, conforming to blockbuster action movie standards, the story that appears among missions is okay. It starts off promising when the war heats up in the first mission, but it quickly goes downhill afterward. You’re following three different groups of people during the war, who, conveniently, come together right at the end to deliver a plot device as the final mission begins. That was their entire purpose. Okay… yes, the other purpose was to show the war from differing viewpoints. However, the thing is, you just don’t care about any of them. They don’t really appear on screen that much, and when they do, they say their lines with such one-dimensional delivery. You know something’s wrong when the trailer has more of an emotional pull than the complete cut-scenes. Really, the only positive I can say is that the graphics during these cut-scenes are shockingly better and more detailed than anything you see within the missions. Thankfully, they give you the option to skip the cut-scenes and get back into the action.

I never found myself complaining about the music, and that’s enough for me to give it a good rating. Nothing stunning or mind-blowing here, but it’s solid.

It could be described as a “Metal Slug ripoff” but it really adds so much more than that. Observe: By the second level I was madly scrambling to avoid the attacks of a giant mechanical bee while carjacking innocent bystanders. In one of the levels you go through the first 2/3 on a snowmobile. You get to ride a giant yeti. There are free download sections where you momentarily recover your lost spaceship and go kill people in space, which provides a change of pace from the norm. It varies, but always seems to deliver. Unfortunately, The Behemoth could have spent a bit more time checking the game for bugs. On my first play through I threw a grenade at the head of a giant green boss and my screen exploded into a sudden whiteness with a line of erroneous code on it, forcing me to reset my game. It’s a minor complaint in the end, though MAKE SURE you have your autosave function on.

Your alien has had his spaceship stolen… oh noes >.> Your job is to help him go get it back. Once he gets it back, the Russians accidentally hit it with a missile. The next time he gets it back, he gets captured and taken to Area 51. It’s nothing special, but it fits.

It’s no Perfect Dark or anything, but Alien Hominid shines in multiplayer. 2 players at once can play through the main game, which leads to a lot of shouting, screaming at your friend, and just generally having fun. You and your buddy (or buddies) can also play some of the various minigames, which range from an entire, 4 player enabled, 201 level long set of PDA minigames which are surprisingly addictive to Neutron Ball, which is like basketball, but more violent. With 1 more person, you will be playing this for hours on end, guaranteed.

When it comes to the core of the game, if you are at all familiar with the old adage “Sticks and stones may break my bones…” then you should know what to expect. Back to Stone is little on dialogue and big on thrusting you into the action, even from the start. This is an action/adventure game that focuses very heavily on your character and what he can do. The hero is the leftovers of some bizarre experiment, an experiment which granted him the ability to turn monsters into stone. With this power, when you defeat a monster, it becomes a rock. And before the rock crumbles, you can use it to reach higher ledges, slam it into other enemies, or slide it onto a switch. Several stone-based puzzles abound, and most of it is pretty clever and entertaining. It’s just a little disappointing the rock idea wasn’t taken a step further to allow you to pick up, carry, and throw stones or even to use them in more elaborate situations like building a bridge across a lake.

Another offset of the experiment has turned this hero into a demon hybrid. If his health reaches a certain point, he will transform into his own monster. However, there isn’t any significant difference between being human and being demon. They play the same. Only seldom are you required to be a human to talk to another human. But since you have demon roots, you can call on a powerful spell to help wipe out bigger enemies. Filling this magic meter requires collecting gems. Gems aren’t just lying around willy-nilly, though. They only appear when you’ve placed a stone on a green switch. It sounds like it would be a hassle to fill your meter, then, but it actually only takes a couple gems to do so, and having to solve mini-puzzles to get it is more rewarding than just fighting monsters like some download free games for pc game and hoping one of them drops something useful.

Back to Stone sticks to the isometric view rather rigidly, though. Pushing up on the D-pad actually moves you up and to the right. Pushing right moves you down and right. It’s disorienting and very difficult to get used to. Why they couldn’t just map the movement to the buttons directly, I don’t know. It isn’t like they have eliminated the option to move straight up or down, either, because all you have to do is hold two buttons to get this result. It doesn’t make any sense.

Finally, there’s story mode, which is the normal game. In story mode you are greeted by an opening movie to give you the background information of what’s going on and then start your adventure in the tutorial. You discover that your mission is to rescue the five baby frogs and this will remain your sole mission in every level of the game. This may sound like it become boring and repetitive, but it never ceases to be fun. Your mission is to jump around the level dodging enemies, not drowning, not falling off cliffs, and just basically not getting yourself destroyed in whatever means that particular level has in preventing you from winning. I mean you will encounter a ton of obstacles in your path on your way to rescuing the frogs: running from a giant boulder a la Indiana Jones, dodging lawn mowers, avoiding ghosts, making sure you’re not crushed, electrocuted, or impaled. To complete the level you will jump, send out homing signals to your children, and eat insects with your tongue. All of this may sound near impossible except for the fact that there are power ups scattered around all the levels. The power ups you find are actually various colored insects just hovering in a stationary spot. A purple one, for example, indicates an extra life. There are other power ups, like quick-hop that makes you jump faster and auto-hop that lets you hold down the d-pad and jump without having to press it. These will benefit you greatly and help you reach your goal of defeating Swampy. There is also a set of 25 gold coins with a blue outline scattered around the stage. You will want to make sure you don’t miss any of these because gathering them all will cause you to unlock a secret that the game has to offer. These secrets are definitely worth your while and you won’t want to miss them. Also, you usually alternate missions between Frogger and his wife, Lillie Frog. They both do the exact same thing, but I guess the developers wanted to add variety to the playable characters.

I do have two complaints about the gameplay in Frogger 2, though. First, it is sometimes hard to judge exactly where on the path the enemy is located causing you to think you are ahead or behind the enemy only to find out you’ve just been killed because you were standing on the spot. A good example of this is when you’re on a three block wide path and an enemy bird flies across it at various locations. I was killed quite a few times simply because I couldn’t tell where the bird was, unlike the free games to download. Another complaint I have is that you cannot make your frog turn and face a certain direction. Instead, you have to push the d-pad and that direction to hop a space and face that way. Let’s say you are on the edge of a cliff and there’s another cliff a double jump away but you are facing away from it. You have to simultaneously double jump to that other cliff while pushing left which is a lot harder than it sounds. Frogger constantly either double jumps the direction you’re facing or hops off the edge.

The sound and music in Skies of Arcadia are geniunly good. Everything you would expect to hear with a typical rpg is hear, from soft ballads during emotional scenes, to mellow yet upbeat scores for towns and the like. The music really fits the scenarios as well, for example if you travel to a desert town, it sounds like you are sitting in saudi arabia(assuming they actually play that music over there). Sound effects and spell effects in the game come off crisp and clear, never making you wonder where that groan you just heard came from. However, there are no real voice overs, excluding the countless oh’s and eh’s coming from each of the characters, as well as one-liners spurted out at what seems like random and can at times throw you off, while at the same time not totally detracting from the experience. It’s just plain annoying.Oh well, in the end its all easy on the ears.

This game truly is beautiful. Character models are large, although at times appear blocky during combat, with various facial expressions representing how they are feeling at the time. Each one is drawn out well, and creates a very distinct feel so that you arent confusing them with some other character from some other game. Everything in this game is stunning. Dungeons are very spacious, with gorgeous smooth textures and spectacular lighting effects scattered throughout. It seems, however, that just a little bit of everything, whether it be forests or a town or the sky itself, that the color scheme is a tad on the bland side.However, the spell effects are very impressive, especially some of the later bosses.Regardless, Skies of Arcadia is breathtaking.

In a role playing game, probably the most important aspect is the gameplay and battle system. Surprisingly enough, this is Skies of Arcadia’s weakest point. Everything outside the battles are fine. Controls are responsive and the menu’s are easy enough to figure out. Inside the battles, the controls are good. You use the tried and true turn based system, with special moves you can learn as the game progresses by collecting items called ”moonberries”, and a slew of magic spells.An interesting twist in Skies of Arcadia is that you can change the color of your weapon, thus giving it an elemental power such as fire or ice. Also, you gain magic for that specific element faster by using that colored weapon in battle. Although all of this seems great, there simply aren’t that many special moves and spells to learn, thus forcing you to hear a character yell out the name of a move 10 or more times during a boss fight. Also, during the beginning, you get in a good amount of pc games download or airship battles, but as the game goes on and you learn tougher spells and special moves, it seems like the enemies fly away for the winter cause you rarely get attacked. Also an interesting twist in Skies of Arcadia are airship battles. You basically take turns with a solo opponent doing a variety of things, such as using crew members to get special abilities during the fights, and shooting your ‘’super” weapon, depending on the ship you have. This is all done on a four by four square, or three by three, depending on the # of party members you have. You then choose what you want to do and it goes from there. Although its a cool addition, its seriously slow moving and I found myself bored, especially when I fired my ‘’super” weapon and it only took off a millimeter worth of life on the enemy’s life bar and I then realized I had to sit for 30 minutes throughout the battle waiting and watching. Yet another addition in the game is searching for ”discoveries”, which are undiscovered artifacts in the world. It presents a cool little mini-quest, but can be very time consuming, especially with the random battles you deal with while searching. In the end, Skies of Arcadia’s gameplay is good, but is too generic for some hardcore rpg’ers wanting a taste of something new.

The game consists of a single player campaign and online matches. The single player campaign can actually be played co-op with up to 3 other friends. Finding a game is not hard if you go that route. Playing alone though, you get some wingmen like when you go to a club. But playing co-op, your friends now become the help and you lose the wingmen commands. I will put my trust into my friends’ hands thank you. When playing there was no lag to be had so it was smooth experience, though the lack of system link play caught me off guard. The campaign just makes you shoot down targets until the opposing force retreats or you have killed every one else so that some target is safe. The maps however are pretty huge so you might find yourself spending a lot of time flying for a couple minutes until you get to where you need to be, especially if you just died.

There is a sort of progression system too where you earn ranks and levels unlocking new weapons and planes as you go which is cool but feels just not that satisfying since by the end of the campaign, you get most stuff you want or need so you don’t feel like coming back for that. Playing the game Co-Op is the best thing about this game and for me, I can’t remember how awesome it was to just yell at my friend and say, “can you see me? Get this guy off me.” It makes you feel like you can count on your friends, or not. They let me down too.

I wish the game had more variety in missions. Especially considering this is supposed to take place in a war, you don’t get many dog fights where it’s a crap load of planes flying around and everyone is targeting you. Its just not as intense as it could be. The campaign is short too and has some retarded story about PMC’s. Why a PMC would start a war with the and try to nuke a city is beyond me. Wouldn’t they just want to make a quick buck like in Army of Two? However I still appreciated this game a lot more since you fight in real locations unlike Ace Combat. I just couldn’t get past hearing Estovakian military and Gracemaria defense. I felt like I could care less about what happens to those people. But when you are flying over a few places I have been, then it’s on! And oh yeah, when some punk wants to shoot at my friend Scott Mitchell, well then you just made me mad.

The multiplayer is OK. That’s pretty much it, just ok. With only up to 8 players, you don’t get many intense fights and its not very much fun to use any of the other cool weapons you get besides lock on missiles.

Usually the first thing you notice in a game like this is the graphics and one cannot help but compare these to other titles like Ace Combat 6. Well, I will say that Ace Combat had the better looking plane models. Here the planes don’t leave you in awe. Don’t get me wrong, they look good but they don’t have a cinematic quality like they did in Ace Combat or even in some games download full version sequels. The ground however looks better here and with the use of real world maps, one really does care and about where they are flying and may take a look at familiar sites. The ground doesn’t have blurry textures but they are not detailed so the look of them is kinda lost. Explosions and other effects definitely look good here, like looking into the sun for that glare or the smoke trails left by your missiles. And when looking at the game with the ‘Assistance off’ option, the game looks really good.

That brings up the ERS system the game uses. It is just a system that brings up these colored triangle rings that you fly through. The computer sets them up so you get fire at another plane or hit or get to a specific objective. It is a neat idea that follows the whole, next generation warfare idea but just takes the fun out of the game. Don’t use it and just use your instincts.

Gameplay wise, its like diablo, or even some games download full version…except with guns, you point and click to attack an enemy, and like every RPG, you can get better guns and what not, this is an interesting setup, but point and click shooting is very disjointed, and can be very maddening, especially against tougher enemies, clicking an enemy to death with your standard machine gun could just as well strain you hand, but again, you get better weapons along your journey.

The camera is pretty bad, considering that its pretty much one consistent view, you do have the ability to look around, but its very limited, and can’t be put to much tactical usage, it would have been nice to look around the whole ship, its maddening sometimes, mainly cause its kinda hard when you are trying to take cover.

Level design isn’t very intuitive, mainly cause its point A to point B, you sometimes get to paths, but they don’t change up anything, just a couple objectives here and there, but they end up in the same place, basically you get to look at something different down each path.

Soon after the few cut scenes end, it’s time to bring out your guns and shoot. Haze is a first-person-shooter with all the basic commands the average gamer expects from the genre: You bunny-hop, can throw a grenade, and do a melee attack. You fire a very basic group of weapons of assault rifles, shot guns, sniper rifles, and heavy duty machine guns (and throw in a flamethrower). Thankfully, Haze has fluid controls, as you can easily switch from one weapon to the next, throw a grenade and jumping and running without any mix-ups about which button does what. You can also hop onto vehicles (if there are any) and either jump into the driver’s seat or sit on the manned turret and spit some lead. However, you can’t shift to different parts of the vehicle, making entering vehicles a bit of a tedious affair.

However, what makes things a bit interesting is the different sides you could choose to play. Mantel, on one hand, could inject themselves with a drug known as nectar. When going high with this drug, troopers are stronger, their enemies glow yellow (making them much more visible) and allow the player to be more durable in the line of fire. The Promise Hand, however, plays as sneaky devils, because they could play dead, dodge-roll, plant mines, and salvage weapons for bullets. These differences aren’t certainly groundbreaking like some games download full version options, but they add a bit of spice to an already good gunplay, forcing players to adjust their approach somewhat when they step into a battlefield.

Speaking of multiplayer, Haze offers nothing but the basic: Team deathmatch, single deathmatch and assault mode. All the maps aren’t too bad (the Mantel Carrier map) is my favorite, and assault mode is the best out of the three since achieving objectives and preventing the other team from doing the same could create tense moments!

Pretty much, MSA throws worries about a story out the window and instead concentrates on massive amounts of gunfire, explosions and general mayhem, just what you would expect from its old-school shooter roots. Rocket launchers, shotguns, flamethrowers, and Mech-type slugs give plenty a MSA a high-powered arsenal. Using the slugs gives you the chance to turn the metal table on your enemies by jacking the slugs (planes, tanks, and Mech-style robotic-looking giant man-o-wars) and using them to your advantage in battle. That’s MSA’s great charm: for those looking for a great handheld shooter that packs a major action punch, MSA is a perfect fit. Concentrating solely on shooting everything in sight, MSA provides plenty of shooting action that old-school download game for free gamers will appreciate, including the Big Boss battle at the end of every stage that will test your shooting game skills.

With only five levels to play, there’s not a lot to MSA. But this is not only old-school in its gameplay, it is old-school in its challenge difficulty too. Face it, games including Metal Slug were a lot tougher and more challenging to defeat back in the day, and MSA doesn’t wuss out by lowering the difficulty level for today’s gamer (although there are two difficulty settings to choose, even the “normal” setting is a hellacious challenge). It’s a good thing that MSA is so tough, because there are only a few hours of gameplay necessary to invest to actually get through the entire game, which is okay if you’re only looking for a day’s worth of gaming diversion, but doesn’t endear itself to those looking for a game that has a lot of replay value.