May Play

I believe it was Forrest Gump who said, “I am not a smart man!”. Never has a game had me sat on that white bench eating chocolates quite like Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason (PC), a first person suspense thriller of the highest order. Feeling defensive all of a sudden I should stress it wasn't the puzzles in the game that had me head scratching, as good as they are, but rather the story itself. I lost count of the WTF? moments as a female voice, accompanied by postcards depicting cave drawings, told me about some tribe doing a runner from slavers and then turning on their leader in a forest. Exactly what this had to do with the Russian nuclear icebreaker trapped in the Arctic I was investigating, I really have no clue.

The game seems to have split reviewers as it doesn't sit comfortably in any particular genre. It's played out as a first person shooter, but don't let the guns fool you. There are puzzles that need to be overcome in order to progress, though they are never excessively challenging and function as a way of telling the story of what happened to the stricken ship and her crew.

There are numerous breaks with gaming convention along the way. Rather than health and medi-packs your survival is dependant on your body heat. Finding hot pipes, burning embers, or even light bulbs becomes all important. Weaponry is incidental as while the guns you find are necessary, it is a shooter of a sort after all, you're not gunning your way through enemies with unending supplies of ammunition, but rather using weapons selectively as and when required. The enemies themselves are in the main members of the crew who have become a kind of possessed semi human, and I'm desperately trying not to use the term zombie but failing miserably to come up with a suitable alternative, with the exception of a couple of what could be classed as end of level bosses.

The character you play through the game is a geologist who by a rather fortunate happenstance is gifted with psychic ability. This ability gives you flash backs to some of the events leading up to the ship becoming stranded in the ice. It also gives access to the games primary selling point. Mental Echoes. A number of frozen corpses you come across still have some form of essence that you can use to relive their final moments. In doing so you alter the physicality of your surroundings by correcting their error. For example, accessing the mental echo of a body lying in front of a door leads you to finding a piece of the hinge allowing the crew member to repair the door and escape, which on returning to your own mind has resulted in the pathway now being cleared and the door open.

Of course any self respecting physicist will by this point be having kittens (biologists not withstanding) and screaming terms like 'causality' and 'paradox', and they certainly entered my head on a number of occasions.

At the start of the game there is the not uncommon step of taking you through the gameplay mechanics as you are approaching the ship across the ice. As far as I could tell though, the bodies (yes plural) I was coming across and reliving those final moments of were my own, which lead to my first WTF? moments. On completion it does link back to the start and so corrects itself to some degree, though I was still somewhat perplexed.

There's a horrible term from the past, the 'interactive movie'. Used to describe dreadful FMV titles it has thankfully disappeared from the lexicon, though my personal feeling is that Cryostasis is what an interactive movie should be. It's blend of thriller and investigation driving the story forward makes it compelling viewing, while all the actions of the protagonist being directly controlled by the player means it is still very much a game rather than some passive experience.

Unfairly being labelled a Russian BioShock prior to release may have raised interest but also expectations. Gameplay if more akin to Condemned or Fahrenheit than Rapture's Plasmid and fire-power driven action. Visually the environment is repetitive, you're on a ship in the Arctic after all, though the ice effects, and particularity the melting frost on the walls, are beautiful to behold and never get tired.

Despite my confusion I thoroughly enjoyed Cryostasis and found it to be a breath of frosty fresh air.

The same can't be said of Wheelman (360). Vin Diesel has professed a love of games and so in addition to making mediocre formulaic movies he's now responsible for mediocre formulaic games.

It's easy to dislike Wheelman. The story is farcical in so much as the plot sees Vin driving cars and getting mixed up in a gang war to save a woman from his past. Edam-orific. The Barcelona scenery is colourful and comic as opposed to the gritty realism of GTA IV. The out of car controls are cumbersome and combat against the woeful AI opponents simply reinforces that this is a driving game and you need to get back in a car without delay.

Whatever the developers may have been striving for, one thing they have not delivered is a rival to the afore mentioned GTA IV. This is not a sand box action adventure game. This is a relatively open arcade driving beat-em-up. Preposterous actions like 'Airjacking', which sees you driving behind a target vehicle and then jumping from your vehicle onto the target in order to capture it, wouldn't be seen in the same neighbourhood as Nico Bellic. On that basis a fairer comparison would be to something like Burnout Paradise, which is certainly superior in the driving stakes though loses out in the destructible terrain and lack of vehicle melee combat. Yes, vehicle melee combat. Racing down a street and an opponent pulls up alongside? Shunt your vehicle sideways and give them a crumple zone slap. Ridiculous and hilarious when pulled off. As you progress even more ridiculous moves become available, such as turning the car through 180 degrees while maintaining directional motion so you can shoot the driver of the car tailing you. Not something you could do in the family Zafira, I'm sure.

If Midtown Madness met Road Rash after a few too many and got friendly in an alley, this would be the illegitimate offspring. It's not the best driving or racing game by a long way. It's certainly not the best beat 'em up, obviously. It is arcade tomfoolery and great fun. A game to hire for a weekend of tearing around Barcelona and frightening your sub woofer with Mr Diesels dialogue.

Finally a quick word about Plants Vs Zombies (PC). It's £6.99 on Steam. 'nuff said.