ESRB Rating: M Platforms: PS3, 360, PC Developer: Ubisoft Publisher: Ubisoft Release Date: 12/04/12

Note To Parents: This is not a game for children! The ESRB M rating (18+) on this game is not exaggerated!

You are on vacation with your friends in Bangkok partying and having fun. You all decide to go skydiving and land on the beautiful and exotic Rook Island with a gorgeous jungle environment, luxurious beaches, all kinds of wildlife, and controlled by INSANE PIRATES. You play as Jason Brody on vacation with a friend, your brothers, and your girlfriends when you are taken captive by pirates led by their insane leader Vaas. You escape and must rescue the others, but unfortunately you don’t have the necessary skills. A foreigner living on the island decides to teach you the ways of a warrior and your journey begins.

Far Cry 3 is an open world first person shooter that incorporates a randomizer for non-story related world events. This means that when roaming around the world hunting, taking over outposts, treasure hunting, or just driving around, the events that occur will never happen the same way twice. For example, while trying to take over an outpost a group of pirates arrive out of the blue in a jeep and threw off my strategy. I died. So I figured I would wait for them to pass before attempting a takeover again, but they never showed up because the events are randomized. This adds an extra level of difficulty that you can’t plan for and can be frustrating at times. But overall, it enhances the play experience.

The game has plenty of side quests, mini-games and secret locations to find while exploring the world outside of the storyline and all types of vehicles to get you where you want to go. You could literally spend an entire week just doing side quests, mini-games, and exploring. The graphics are great and gameplay is straight forward with an arsenal of weapons (once you activate radio towers) to fit all play styles. You can use a brute force frontal assault or take out enemies using stealth.

The storyline in Far Cry 3 is compelling, unique, and dark. It will take you on a journey into the depths and depravity of humanity. You will work with both tribal resistance to pirates and the CIA to rescue your friends and family from pirates involved in Human Trafficking and the international drug trade.

Overall this is great game and a must buy for fans of open world FPSs!

An asteroid is hurtling toward Earth and you are one of the few chosen to be placed in suspended animation in an Ark to help rebuild civilization after the Earth is habitable again. You awaken 100 years later to find…

Rage comes to us from the creators of Doom and Quake. The game attempts to combine a wasteland survival game like Fallout with a combat racing game. Both aspects of the game are fun to play but become repetitive because the game world is small and every area is associated with multiple missions/objectives. You will go through every wasteland building/area twice along a specific path for missions. The second time through, you will go along the same path but in reverse. The “open” world area is used for racing and vehicle combat so after the first few races in a given area you have explored everything in the open area.

The graphics are good, the combat racing is fun and frustrating at times, some of the characters are unique and funny, and there are a few mini-games that you can play to pass the time. Unfortunately the storyline is somewhat derivative and dialogue outside of the story line is minimal.

My biggest problem with Rage is that it could have been so much better! You can see it has the makings of a great game but unfortunately falls short. This is situation where more is less. Combining these two game types resulted in a mediocre wasteland survival game combined with a mediocre vehicle combat game and a mediocre final product. This game would have been good 10 years ago but doesn’t stand up to today’s standards.

ESRB Rating: M
Platforms: PS3, 360, PC
Developer: Arkane Studios
Publisher: Bethesda
Release Date: 10/09/12

You are Corvo Attano, Lord Protector of the royal family of the fictional plague-ridden city of Dunwall. The Empress is killed, her daughter is kidnapped, and you’re framed for it all. How will you get your revenge?

In your pursuit of the culprits behind the Empress’ death you will have various upgradable weapons and supernatural abilities to help you along the way. One of the coolest is the teleport ability. It allows the player to literally teleport anywhere within a certain range to get around or behind patrols, or to reach higher location and roof tops. I wish the developers would have increased the overall range of this ability but that doesn’t diminish its effectiveness for assassination or to get out of trouble. If you’re playing this game I suggest you acquire and upgrade the teleport ability before anything else.

Dishonored is all about choices and gamer’s play style. Every decision you make in this game influences the world and the ultimate outcome of the game. The developers created a Chaos system which regulates the world depending and the ending on the amount of chaos the player causes in the pursuit of objectives. If the player openly attacks police or civilians the chaos meter will increase and the chaos system will deploy more police, patrols, and plague ridden rats throughout the city making the entire city a nightmare to get through.

The developers further incorporate choices into the game by allowing players multiple paths to reach the objective and multiple lethal and non-lethal ways to eliminate the target in every mission. The player can chose to take the brute force path, various secret paths accessed by completing side missions, stealth pathways, sewer pathways, and even rat pathways by acquiring the possession ability and possessing rats.

The graphics in this game are great. Half-Life 2 art director Viktor Antonov created a unique whale oil powered, early industrial city based on turn of the century (1900) London. The player with walk through dark, plague-ridden streets with sick “weepers” and rats waiting to attack anything that comes too close to the lavish hallways and rooms of the wealthy upper class within the city. The player will have to contend with walls of light, rocket launching tower turrets, and unique Tallboy patrols based loosely on Half-Life 2 striders which are elite troops that are very tough to take on with a frontal attack.

I loved this is game and it is great for fans of first person shooters and stealth combat. It has a compelling storyline, plot twists, excellent action, and was visually stunning. Dishonored is definitely one of the best games of 2012.