Spending time with Red Orchestra 2, Sengoku, Driver, Space Marine

Sep 23, 2011 20:41 GMT  ·  By

Andrei Dumitrescu: The fall video game launch season has begun and the quality this year has been pretty high for the games to arrive this far, a fact that can also be gleaned by taking a quick look at the games that are part of our Review section.

This weekend I plan to spend some more time with the multiplayer side of Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad, the multiplayer focused shooter which thrives on realism.

It's not an easy game to love for me for both objective reasons, like the weird dropped connections, and subjective ones, like the fact that I have long lost my competitive edge in cooperative first person shooters.

Still the game does such a good job of simulating how urban combat in World War II would have felt that I come back to it over and over even when frustration tends to set in.

When dying on snow filled streets becomes too much for me I plan to move on to Sengoku, the most recent grand strategy title from Paradox Interactive, which aims to persuade players interested in medieval Japan that war is the worst way of conquering territory.

Andrei Dobra: I'll spend this weekend cruising through the streets of Driver: San Francisco, racing all sorts of vehicles and, in case I get bored with them, just shift into the body of another driver in a new car. While the story mode of the game is pretty straightforward, there's a huge variety of other activities, from regular races to escapes from the police and other such challenges that make spending time in San Francisco even more exciting.

When I won't be wreaking havoc in California, I'll be representing the forces of the Space Marines or Chaos Marines in the multiplayer mode of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. While it's pretty slow at the beginning, as you progress through it, you unlock new perks and features, as well as new objects with which to decorate your own online character.

There aren't a lot of maps or game modes as of yet, but I'm confident Relic Entertainment will deploy new features soon enough.