Gaming Today

GameFront 2010: The Year’s Pleasant Surprises and Last Straws
GameFront 2010: Most Disappointing Video Game Delays
Call of Duty: Black Ops Multiplayer Guide
Back to the Future: Episode 1 Review

GameFront 2010: The Year’s Pleasant Surprises and Last Straws

Posted: 28 Dec 2010 11:37 PM PST

The year is winding down, which means our GameFront 2010 feature series is also winding down. As we come ever closer to embracing 2011, too, we ease up a little on our rhetoric. OK, so maybe that’s not really true.

This feature is all about expectations and what about this year in gaming defied them, for good or for bad. Expect strong rhetoric.

Phil Owen

Pleasant surprise: Fallout: New Vegas

I think I was probably expecting New Vegas to be a pretty OK game. And then I played Alpha Protocol, Obsidian's other 2010 game. That was a disaster in so many ways, not the least of which was its utter lack of vision.

New Vegas, however, is a game of almost unprecedented vision. It's a game that was longer and had a larger scope than Fallout 3. It has a million sidequests, but doing said sidequests never feels like dicking around because most everything you do in the game factors in to the main plot somehow. There's a focus to this game few RPGs have ever dreamt of having.

With this game, Obsidian has shown it has a much better handle on this type of open-world RPG than Bethesda, or any other developer, really, ever did.

Last straw: Heavy Rain

OK, David Cage, you had an interesting idea for a game with Indigo Prophecy, but that ended up devolving into a lot of annoying and ridiculous nonsense as it went along. That was all right, because it was your first go at it. Heavy Rain, though, is much worse than Indigo Prophecy, though, and it proved that your priorities are all f–ked up when you're making a game.

Yeah, you can set a mood, but you don't think it's important to have quality voice acting in your character-based drama? You're OK with leaving a bunch of massive, gaping plot holes in the already very silly and dumb story you created even though your game's success is wholly contingent on the story being effective? You're very lucky that gamers have incredibly low standards.

Heavy Rain, then, was a “last straw” for me, because it made me realize that if this whole “interactive drama” thing is going to work, then some other developer — like Rockstar or BioWare or Remedy, to a came a few that would do it well — should venture into this genre. With Quantic Dream being the only folks holding that flag for it now, interactive drama will never be truly effective. There were a lot of warning signs on Indigo Prophecy, and QD apparently learned nothing from their mistakes.

Phil Hornshaw

Pleasant surprise: Assassin's Creed Brotherhood

There were a couple times when I had to feign enthusiasm for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood before it was released just to do my job. Other people like those games, I had to tell myself, so this news post is worth writing up.

Even though Assassin's Creed 2 is garbage.

The Assassin's Creed series up to now has been an abysmally boring, tedious attempt at an open-world Prince of Persia that has FAILED at every turn. Seriously, I can't fathom why people like Assassin's Creed 2 especially, in which the combat has been made more annoying than in its predecessor and the controls are, more often than not, designed to help you kill yourself.

Then I had to review Brotherhood, and I anticipated several days straight of being annoyed before finally penning a review condemning squeezing out another AC game a year after the last that was just as lame.

So yeah, Brotherhood is a surprise — because it's great. Just about every issue I had with Assassin's Creed 2 has been addressed, in some form. Horses are available everywhere. Combat has been tweaked so that gang-beatings are far less common. Many buildings have lifts to save you the trouble of scaling them over and over again.

I can see why people like Assassin's Creed, and why I've bothered to play the games at all, now that the B.S. has been stripped out in a lot of places. I'm much more willing to wander around in Rome when I can get where I'm going quickly. Just the ability to call additional assassins to a fight makes the game much more appealing because I know each battle isn't going to be a grind anymore. Brotherhood is a game I actually want to play.

And it has an interesting, challenging multiplayer mode that doesn't totally suck, to boot.

Last Straw: Useless f–king collection quests

Listen, game developers, because I'm about to blow your brains out your ears — no one likes collection quests. No one. No one likes scouring Alan Wake's stupidly large forest areas only to discover nothing, and then maybe later come across a can pyramid or thermos in a really obvious place. No one cares about finding Borgia flags, feathers, artifacts and whatever the hell else is packed into AC Brotherhood.

So stop putting these in games PLEASE. Dropping 500 random objects into a game that earn you an achievement for collecting is no longer acceptable, and it's not clever. It's an artificial means of extending gameplay, it's boring and it's a waste of a player's time. Slapping an achievement on something dumb just because you have 50 achievements to burn and couldn't think of anything else does not constitute good game design.

Here's the issue: every stupid game at this point has huge, irritating collection quests. It's not just a few games, like tracking down 100 packages in Grand Theft Auto 3 or 4 for the challenge. It's finding all 2 billion orbs in Crackdown. Thermoses, can pyramids, manuscript pages, TVs and radios in Alan Wake. Meaningless pins that commemorate your minor changes to the game world in Epic Mickey.

If you're going to add game content to this stuff, then that's one thing — finding the manuscript pages in Alan Wake wasn't all that bad because they enhanced your video game experience, and at least if you managed to track down the collectibles in Splatterhouse, you were left with naked pictures. But in most games, you get nothing but a pat on the back in the form of an achievement. That's actually kind of worse, because now everyone you play games with knows what a sad little hermit you are that you sat on your couch and found every stupid object hidden in Assassin's Creed, and it amounted to absolutely nothing. Providing gamers who like your game with a gofer job for the sake of hitting all the achievements is just lazy.

I can't handle obsessively checking every corner of Dead Space 2 for audio journals, staring at my screen until I get a headache to find one goddamn COG tag in Gears of War 3, or getting killed over and over because I suspect there's an Intel package past that throng of enemy soldiers in the next Call of Duty.

Do you have fun tearing apart your house when you lose your car keys? No? Then stop making us look for virtual car keys in your video games. We're here to have fun.

Phil Owen note: Yay Crackdown 2 orbs. There were 800 of those f–kers. And that game is built so that you kinda have to go looking for them, which sucks because I learned long ago to ignore collectibles.

Ross Lincoln

Last Straw(s): God Of War III

I didn't want to hate God of War III, I swear. I love God of War and GOWII, and seeing how other PS2-exclusive franchises had been updated, like, well for PS3 (for example, Ratchet and Clank Future), I expected A) that they would provide more of what we love while B) vastly improving everything they can. I was readier than hell for more hilarious carnage and epic Kratos being a dick to everyone in the Agean while laying the smackdown to the Greek Pantheon action.

Unfortunately, the only thing God of War III managed was to sour me on the entire series. Put simply, GOW3 is a lazy, tarted up PS2 port that adds nothing original to the series, and in fact is something of an embarrassment. Sure, the graphics are fantastic, but it's PS3; graphics would only be noteworthy if they sucked — or if they're the only thing fantastic about it. Well, not the only thing. The sex mini game was also wonderful. But everything else is either exactly the same as the PS2 installments of the series, or they're worse.

Plot and Characters: Terrible, if only because Kratos is an even more paper thin, one-dimensional character than ever before. Every line of dialogue is nothing but Kratos refusing to use contractions while glaring angrily at everyone. And the story simply peters out, even if the ending is kind of interesting. Somehow they managed to take what seemed to be a story leading to a massively incredible climax and make it excruciatingly boring.

Controller mapping and sensitivity: The controls worked exactly the same as in previous games, but ended up being a thousand times more annoying because they didn't really need to be. I get why the camera is fixed during land-based combat. But having the camera remain fixed while trying to glide or swim just sucks. But these were forgivable in the sense that it's obvious that GOW III was a lazy cash-in. But the fact that the quick time events and certain actions in regular gameplay were so easy to f–k up (falling to your doom when performing gliding command exactly as instructed) simply because of the fixed camera and insensitive buttons practically caused a stroke.

Save points, f–king save points: I admit this is the well from which all of my hate sprung. In 2010 there is simply no excuse whatsoever for a game that actually forces you to seek out a specific location in which to save, particularly so the auto-save sucks large and you end up having to play out large swaths of game just to get to a point where you can take a break and turn off your machine for a while. GoWIII wasn't the worst offender — Dead Rising 2 and Lost Planet 2 are probably worse — but the fact that the previous GOW games were of vastly higer quality than either of the other 2 franchises made this absurd, lazy throwback to the previous gen unforgivable. Every time I had to hack my way to yet another save point I became angrier and more frustrated until I just stopped playing. I finally forced myself to finish the game because I had a review to complete. I haven't touched it since.

God of War III was the last straw. Cheap, frustrating and so obviously intended to be a pS2 game that was clumsily updated for PS3 in the most shallow possible way, I disliked it so much that it has not only ruined my ability to go back and enjoy the previous two games (kind of like the last 15 minutes of BSG), but deterred all interest in playing anything remotely connected to the franchise in the future.

Phil O note: I was totally with GOWIII for like the first 20 minutes. But after Kratos fell into Hades (again) it lost me very quickly. And it really did turn out that it blew its load right there at the beginning, which is lame as s–t. So f–k God of War III and f–k you, Ross, for being completely wrong about the end of BSG.

Shawn Sines

I was pleasantly surprised that neither Move nor Kinect were shoddy Wii replacements. I realize a lot of core gamers scoff at the concept of making games more accessible, but the Kinect and Move brought innovation to two game systems that were beginning to stagnate.

The Move really shows the potential for the wand-based motion control, while Kinect, despite some small issues I believe will vanish with software updates – like space requirements and skin tone detection problems – shows a huge potential future for intuitive controls.

For my last straw I'd have to say Military First Person Shooters are now dead to me. I played Battlefield Bad Company 2, Medal of Honor, Black Ops.. and you know what.. they're all just the same crappy games from different publishers and developers.

I accept that these titles are popular. I even accept that at one time I loved the Call of Duty/Medal of Honor formula before they were formulas and became the Madden of shooter games. Innovation is hard when 12 year old and 40 year old gamers alike throw money at you for the same retreaded gameplay and a few new maps.. I understand that, but until something really drastic evolves from these games I'm checking out.

GameFront 2010: Most Disappointing Video Game Delays

Posted: 28 Dec 2010 03:54 PM PST

It happens every year. Anticipated titles poised for the busy end of the year release window slip, slide and fall into the following year.

While 2010 was a good year for games and there were titles to be excited about, there were some that we thought should have been on our systems sooner than 2011. There are also games that we expected early in 2010 that took delay after delay to arrive (I’m looking at you Gran Turismo 5).

Here are the games our writers were most disappointed with when they didn’t hit their original launch windows, or when they did find a release date it was later than we’d expected.

Gran Turismo 5

Phil Owen

This wasn't painful for me because I was really excited about the game, because with a few exceptions, I don't get excited about upcoming games until they're within my reach. (I'm ADD enough that it's easy for me to completely forget about things when they aren't right in front of me.) GT5, though, because of what it is, would not leave me alone this year.

It was delayed twice in 2010 after being delayed what seems like three or four dozen times over its production cycle, and so it was always time for a GT5 joke. The problem for me was that, because it had been delayed so many times already, all the good jokes had already been used. That doesn't stop the internet, as you know.

You better believe I partied really hard when the thing actually came out in November.

Crysis 2

Ron Whitaker

After what we were shown at E3, several of us were interested in getting our hands on Crysis 2, if only to melt down our current gaming PCs with it.

Imagine our disappointment when we found out that it was delayed all the way into 2011! While the folks at EA have attributed this delay to simply wanting more time to polish the game, as well as moving it into a more favorable marketing window, we know what's really going on.

That's right, it's a conspiracy to get new video cards out and make me buy one. I see right through your lies, EA.

Portal 2

Phil Hornshaw
There was one thing I wanted for Christmas this year. One game I was hoping to take on during my very short vacation. I knew early this year I'd only have a few days to head back home to the Midwest from Los Angeles, and that those days would pretty much suck as I traveled between various family members and friends, trying to see everyone in a personal hell of obligations, punctuality, and disappointed parents claiming I'd ignored them.

But I'd have Portal 2 to get me through. Or at least, that's what I thought.

Turns out, Valve delayed Portal 2. Like it delays everything. Of course, intellectually I knew that this was probably going to happen, but emotionally, I kept watching trailers of cute, hilarious robots running through Aperture Science facilities and almost feeling the future warm glow of my Xbox helping to wash away my holiday stresses.

Supposedly, Portal 2 is due in the early part of next year, and when it comes right down to it, there's no game I'm more amped up about.

Meanwhile, I'm stuck at home with only iPhone games to keep me from drinking to excess after I race from one holiday feast to another. N.O.V.A. 2 and Infinity Blade are fun, but neither of them has GLaDOS.

Little Big Planet 2

Shawn Sines

I’m not even sure that Little Big Planet 2 was originally announced for 2010, but right now that doesn’t matter to me. What mattered is that I was ready to play it this holiday and instead I’m waiting until January 2011. I realize Media Molecule and Sony probably executed some grand scheme to give the title a nice boost.

Little Big Planet experienced a lot of love from folks like me – reviewers, family men, etc., but didn’t perform as well as expected just after its initial release. Maybe the post holiday delay, pushing LBP2 into the still pretty dead January release window, was a ploy to let it stand out from the Call of Duty: Black Ops crowd.

Unfortunately, it was a harsh delay for a different reason in the Sines household. Little Big Planet and ModNation Racers are our family fun games. While we spend hours whiling away in these titles, both are beginning to show their age and we’re ready for the new hotness that is LBP2 and it’s game design features. Not getting such a wonderful, family friendly multiplayer title for Christmas means we can only look forward to Winter fun when we don’t have the time set aside to just game, game, game.

Sure, I’ll be lined up on release day in January, but I – and the whole clan – were disappointed that we had to wait.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Multiplayer Guide

Posted: 28 Dec 2010 03:07 PM PST

You’ve fired up Call of Duty: Black Ops, and you find yourself lost in a sea of CP and a ton of other players walloping you with radio-controlled cars. That’s okay — we all start out at the bottom, and while Black Ops has a lot of similarities to previous iterations of the series, there are some nuances to the game that new players can miss.

So we’ve put our heads together, and died countless times, to provide you with a multiplayer guide for Black Ops that lays out everything we’ve learned about climbing the CoD ladder.

Be a Team Player

Much of Black Ops’ multiplayer modes are team-based, and for some reason, players have a tendency to clam up and run around madly whenever they join these games — and never play as a team.

But joining up a team of individuals is a great way to lose a lot of games. Players who don’t communicate will always lose to players who do, because for every kill you take on your own, the rest of your enemies are finding ways to take you out. They know where you are, they’re moving in groups, they’re making decisions about what killstreaks to mobilize against you: meanwhile, you’re one guy shooting whoever you run up against. It’s a bad situation.

But if you come into a game looking to maximize your strategy with the talents and assets of your teammates, you’ll be able to customize your play style to the team: with a role to fill, you can be a more successful player. Sticking with a winning team will help you level up a lot faster.

Think Fast, Move Slow

The various maps in all Call of Duty games, including Black Ops, have lots of places where players like to sit and wait for careless opponents to stumble through a doorway and get blasted. Several maps have lots of interweaving interior areas with lots of blind corners, and all of them could potentially be a good place to get killed.

If you don’t plan to camp yourself, it’s tempting to try to cover lots of ground with your sprint ability — but try to resist the urge. Sprinting takes a few seconds to cool down after you use it, and if you happen to be hauling through a map and stumble onto enemies, especially if they get the drop on you, you’ll be unable to escape certain death.

So only sprint when you must: when you need to cover a lot of ground, or when you have to escape from gunfire. When you’re pushing through interiors, it’s best to go slowly with your gun up anytime you might be about to walk into a trap. Even taking out one or two guys lying in wait is better than taking a death just because you weren’t patient.

Hit the Deck (and Use Other Stances)

In Black Ops, you have three different stances: standing, crouched and prone. Most people you run into will be standing tall when you fight them, or at most jumping around. They usually don’t drop to the other two stances, and lots of players aren’t ready to deal with players who aren’t standing at full height.

Long story short: Learn to hit the deck when you run into a player. Black Ops has a feature that lets you dive to the ground, and if you can practice that move, you’ll make yourself harder to shoot while you return fire on opponents.

Maximize Your Killstreaks

You might have noticed how irritating those exploding RC cars can be as you're running around Black Ops' various maps, and there's a reason they tend to blow you up: 1. they're easy to get, 2. they're small and sneaky, and 3. they can take out multiple enemies. The RC car is a perfect example of using killstreaks to your highest advantage, because the car is almost always a guaranteed kill.

Another early killstreak reward, the SAM turret, is a different kind of interaction altogether. It's less about killing enemies, like most killstreaks, and actually functions to stop a lot of the killstreaks teammates get, like care package drops. And this can happen.

Killstreaks are most effective when used to augment your own play, or in response to the play of your opponents. It's the same principle as if you were sitting at a poker table: if you notice enemy players are calling a lot of care packs, switch to a class that rolls out a lot of SAMs. If you keep running into groups of enemies and getting steamrolled, send in RC cars. Learn what your tools are, and roll them out against your opponents as appropriate.

Save Your CP

Leveling up through play is important, but earning the game’s currency, CP, is what will really allow you to find your perfect load outs and play methods. Most of the time, you’ll earn CP when you hit a new level or complete challenges, which is why it’s important to keep track of what challenges you have available to you.

While you’ll need CP to buy attachments, killstreaks and other stuff throughout the game, you can also spend CP to make CP, so it’s important you keep some money on hand at all times to use it to gamble. Wager matches and Contracts are both important ways of earning additional CP, but they’ll cost you an entry fee to enter each one. You’ll need ante money.

There are a lot of cool things you can purchase for your Black Ops gamer card to customize your look, but it’s always better to resist the temptation and hold back your CP for new items and weapons. The best way to get better at Black Ops is to find your perfect load out(s), and that means unlocking new stuff. Once you find a combination that compliments your play style, you’ll always find yourself more successful.

Sign Some Contracts

The Contract system is the quickest and often easiest way to snag more CP. Whenever you load into a session, you should buy new contracts you feel confident you can earn. Get a few contracts you’re comfortable with and you can continue to buy them over and over once their cool down expires.

Contracts break down into three different categories, with each customized to cater to a certain sect of player. Be careful not to sign up for contracts you don’t think you’ll be able to do, because they basically amount to a waste of money.

Mercenary Contracts: Using Specific Weapons
More often than not, Mercenary Contracts boiled own to what kind of weapon you’re using, and racking up a lot of kills with it. They break down into three types by number of kills, with Cruelty being the lowest, then Ferocity, then Brutality, which require 75 kills in 40 minutes of play to unlock.

Mercenary Contracts are handy if you can find one that applies to a weapon you’re comfortable with, but don’t get suckered into using a gun you aren’t really prepared to handle just because there’s a contract available for it. Trying to pull down a bunch of sniper kills when you’ve never picked one up is a recipe for wasted CP.

Specialist Contracts: Specific, Weird Actions

When you snag a Specialist Contract, you’re signing up to do something out of the ordinary. One of the more simple ones demands you stab an enemy player in the back; another asks you to steal care packages from enemies.

Specialist Contracts that are easy can be fun, but they’re also deceptive — the ones that seem easy can often be a little difficult to fulfill. You’d be surprised how tough it is to find an enemy to stab in the back.

Pick your Specialist Contracts carefully and consider what you’re going to be doing when you buy them. You don’t want to join up with a team and then be the guy screwing around, trying to get grenade launcher kills when your team needs your help taking a fortified position.

Operation Contracts: Rewards for Different Game Modes
The simplest set of contracts gives you rewards for being successful in different game modes. The positive part of Operation Contracts is that they get you changing up your routine and playing different kinds of games.

Like the other contracts, don’t rush into anything in Operations until you’re comfortable with what you’re attempting. Hopping into a game type you’re not familiar with will just get you frustrated if it also costs you CP. Meanwhile, once you know what you’re doing, you can make fast and easy cash with your Operations Contracts just for playing normally.

Killcams, Replays and Statistics

You can get a ton of information from dying in Black Ops, provided you’re paying attention. Every time you’re killed, the game gives you the option to watch a few seconds of footage from the player who killed you. Lots of times, it can help show you where people are hiding or how they’re approaching a situation in order to take you out. It can also show you what you’re doing wrong.

The Theater Mode in Black Ops is equally useful, especially when you’re getting dominated by a particularly good player. You have a free chance to watch anyone who’s besting you in their element, for an entire game, to see how they play and how they beat you. You can learn a lot from other players.

After you hit Level 10, you get access to all kinds of statistics about how you play the game, including rundowns of where you land hits on enemies. If you tend to hit enemies in the knees, you need to adjust your gameplay and work on your aim. There’s a lot of information, about all kinds of different aspects of your play, and the smartest players use it to make themselves better.

Back to the Future: Episode 1 Review

Posted: 28 Dec 2010 10:48 AM PST

Reading up on Telltale’s continuation of the Back to the Future story a few months ago, I was (I think reasonably) a little worried. The franchise is still one of my favorites and was a formative part of my childhood, and frankly I was worried we were going to end up with some kind of Star Wars prequel garbage.

The game carries a somewhat cartoonish art style and was slated to be released in several episodes, and after reading the possible scenarios that fans were voting on over at Telltale’s website, things seemed like they could go either way.

Thankfully for all us BttF fans, Telltale went the right way — it developed a great addition to the franchise, handling the license with all the reverence and attention to detail necessary to make a truly responsible game based on an amazing series of movies.

Telltale has created a point-and-click style game here, and while it was a bit of a surprise at the outset as you take control of Marty McFly, following instructions from Doc in the parking lot of the Hill Valley Mall and preparing to send Einstein the dog back in time, it really does seem to be the best method of conveying the Back to the Future feel in a game.

And if nothing else, the first two- or three-hour episode of the game captures the intangible feel of Back to the Future. A lot of time has been spent here to get the nuances of the series down pat — Christopher Lloyd turns in a great performance in his return to the role Doc Brown, and A.J. Locascio’s turn as Marty McFly is absolutely spectacular. He doesn’t just nail an impersonation of Michael J. Fox, he has a deep understanding of Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly. The result is pitch-perfect casting for the two major roles, with a lot of great supporting characters throughout.

And the writing, too, finds a way to mine new material while maintaining the Back to the Future atmosphere in its full glory, undoubtedly in part because of the writing involvement of Bob Gale, part of the original writing team with film director Robert Zemeckis. Picking up the story not long after the events of Back to the Future III in 1986, we’re treated to a scenario that finds Marty wondering what happened to the out-of-contact Doc Brown, hoping he’s all right. Of course, Doc isn’t, and not much time passes before Marty’s working on tracking down the distressed inventor in some other era of Hill Valley’s past.

The first episode features the return of the DeLorean, as well as many of the main characters, and after some detective work, you’ll find yourself making a trip to a new era in Hill Valley’s past. Of course, the Tannen clan is back to play the roles of villains, which feels exactly right, and the new era (which I’ll not spoil since figuring it out is part of the game, although it’s not exactly a secret) feels like another logical step forward in the Back to the Future progression.

Not everything is perfection in Episode One, although the game does hit a lot of marks. As I mentioned above, the writing is great and finds ways to capture the series’ signature humor, which was a great relief. This first installment manages to recall important parts of the movies without replaying the same gags — Doc’s huge amplifier, for example, is the solution to one of the first puzzles, but Telltale is never rehashing, only paying homage.

It’s the gameplay side that sometimes falls short. Being a point-and-click game, Episode One has that annoying tendency to let you wander a room for a while, trying to figure out just what object you’re supposed to interact with in order to move forward. One sequence in a soup kitchen was particularly confusing in the moment, although once it came together it made much more sense. A few other puzzles have you backtracking to multiple different places and interacting with several characters, but without a firm plan in mind of what exactly to do, it feels a little like just taking stabs in the dark.

Although a few of the puzzles are a little strained, others are kind of inspired. A moment in which Marty has to activate several different objects to keep an experiment from failing, using prompts from another character having an argument in the next room, is just a great idea — exactly the kind of thing these characters would try to pull off.

Telltale has helped to mitigate the confusing puzzle issue with a tiered hint system, which helps a lot. The first hint you take gently nudges you in the right direction, while the last, usually of three or four, flat out tells you what to do. That doesn’t exactly help with the problem of figuring out what you have to click on, though.

Character interactions aren’t quite as interesting as they could be, as well. When the game is presenting story dialogue, everything is fine — when you’re choosing from multiple dialogue options in order to move forward or convince someone to do something, you generally have to exercise all of them in order to move on. In an era in which dialogue choices in games like Mass Effect are important choices to the progress of the game, working through all four or five choices in Back to the Future, only to get nowhere, breaks your immersion in the game.

Even with a few minor flaws, the first installment of Back to the Future is all optimism. If the rest of the game is this good, it’ll definitely be worth the time and money; if it’s better, the whole package could manage to be great. The part that matters the most to me — a working Back to the Future story worthy of carrying the name — is well-treated here.

Pros:

Nails the Back to the Future atmosphere
Great writing and story are strong additions to the franchise
Spectacular voice work
Some puzzles are interesting and intuitive
Point-and-click works well for keeping the story at the forefront
Art style works for the series

Cons:

Point-and-click puzzles get a little confusing
Story and action gets a little cartoony toward the end of the episode
Lots of time wasted trying to figure out exactly where you have to go to solve puzzles