Fantasy Earth Zero

Fantasy Earth Zero Hand-on Preview:

Square Enix and Gamepot have teamed up to bring us Fantasy Earth Zero. It’s not Final Fantasy and it’s not Earth (as far as I can tell) but it’s far from zero. When you first step into the game you’ll choose from one of three classes - Scout, Sorcerer and warrior. I chose a Scout for starters.


Obviously scouts are ranged types, warriors are melee types and sorcerers are magic types. In regards to races you’ve only got one, Human. But you can choose your gender. Once you’ve got your character sorted you then move on to faction choice. There will be five, but at present are only two. This will simply give you a nation to belong to so that you know whom to fight for territory which is one of the underlying mechanics of the game.

Honestly, I’m a bit disappointed in what the game looks to be offering. I had expected far more, some massively interesting story, some unique battle system or some outstanding environments. Instead there are severely restricted environments in which you can’t even meander through the forest which give it a sort of MMO on rails feel. The graphics aren’t that outstanding either and the character models are blocky. The faces look like masks hastily slapped onto polygonal heads and they’re generally less than what one would expect from the likes of Square Enix.

There’s a lot of walking to and fro, as in many MMOs. Fantasy Earth Zero doesn’t give you a run option and there’s no auto-walk so that means you have to spend a lot of time just holding down a movement button going from point A to point B making the game very dull and boring at times. Aha, I found the autorun (it’s not on the in-game controls chart).

Even in many of the instanced areas you’re pretty much walking from encounter area to encounter area. The listed features on the main site say "attack, jump, dodge, run and experiece fast-paced, exciting combat." Well, there’s attack, jump, dodge at least.

The game uses what appear to be multiplayer instances called fields. However, there seem to be some problems with this at present where you cannot always create a field in order to complete a quest. I’m sure it’s just some technical problem that they will sort out over the course of the testing phases.

Fantasy Earth Zero has a skill learning process, like many RPGs but it’s limited to pretty much just attacks from what I’ve seen. My scout does also have the ability to hide but other than that, after seven levels of progress, it’s all attack skills. That seems quite one-dimensional to me. I have yet to see any kind of crafting in the game as well so it looks to be a mostly PvP-focused affair after you grind through enough levels to get into that facet of the game.

There are loads of NPCs just standing idly by waiting to chat with you. Which one sells something that is of use to you? Oh well you won’t know that without actually talking to them. That then means that you need to wander about until you find the right person for what you’re hoping to accomplish because each sells class specific gear instead of one big shop with all of it.

There are some interesting mission types that play into the fight for territory. When you are on a field with a tower you can build obelisks which then expand the territory under your control. As you gain more and more territory you do damage to the opponent’s tower until it is destroyed. But you can’t get to these missions until you’re of a certain level and that means a lot of mindless grinding until you can do something more interesting. A very limiting feature I must say.

If the whole point of the game is to take place in these battles for territory, then hindering your ability to participate in them seems counter-productive to me. Plus, insisting that you grind and grind just to get to them also sort of makes the game less fun. It’s sort of like saying, here’s this really good key lime pie, but first you have to eat this huge pile of stale biscuits.

Now I did manage to get into a battlefield, and was unable to do damage to the creatures inhabiting it, which of course meant a very quick death for me. I’m not sure if that was a technical glitch and that at such a low level I shouldn’t have been in that area or something else. But I hit them with my skill-powered attacks and did zero damage.

Overall, I think the game has a long way to go before it’s both ready for gamers and worth the time investment. That’s not to say it won’t be either. Just right now I felt like it was too much running around and not enough payoff.

Iron Man 2

Source: GameSpot

Review:
It's pretty evident from the start that even Sega knows that its original Iron Man game wasn't all that it could have been. Therefore, the new team working on the game is going to great lengths to make sure that the follow-up, Iron Man 2, not only plays better than its predecessor, but also stays true to what Iron Man, the character, is all about. This is apparent with the new control scheme: switching between hovering and flying only requires some manipulation of the left and right analog sticks--a simple press forward on the left stick pushes Iron Man forward through the air in flight mode, while the right analog stick controls his direction.



Interestingly, something else that has been streamlined is the way that Iron Man's suit functions. Instead of manually switching between different power modes (more power to shields versus more power to weapons), the game automatically switches these modes based on Iron Man's current status. If he's on the ground, then Jarvis (Tony Stark's robo-butler and onboard suit AI) changes the power flow so that Iron Man's shields and weapons recharge at a faster pace while the navigation systems power done. Conversely, to zoom through the air at top speeds, Jarvis switches things around so that most of the suit's juice goes toward the boosters, depleting some energy from weapons and shields. The whole system makes sense, and best of all, it doesn't do away with a mechanic that otherwise gives the game a slightly more strategic feel.

And those aren't even the only changes made to the suit. At any point, you can switch between different melee sets, meaning that if you want Iron Man to use kung fu, then you can select the kung fu melee set. This gives Iron Man a few more nimble and quick punches and kicks that he might not have in the default setting. There's also a brute force setting where Iron Man's just a little bit slower but his attacks pack more power.

Not all of the attention is focused solely on Iron Man. Quite a bit of attention is also being paid to the environments and what Iron Man can do within them. In fact, in our brief demo, we got a glimpse of an indoor area--an arc reactor-powered factory--where Iron Man has to plow through groups of massive robots before finally making his way to the reactor and destroying it. The sequence afterward has you, as Iron Man, escaping from the factory as it explodes around you. It's sort of like the exploding Death Star sequence from Return of the Jedi. After making it outdoors, we got a glimpse of another aspect of the game that the development team is working on: destructibility. While it was certainly possible to create massive amounts of damage in the original Iron Man game, the version of it in Iron Man 2, in a way, is much more precise. Iron Man can destroy roofs, doors, and all sorts of other objects before taking down bigger things, like an entire building.

What's also interesting about this outdoor environment is that it looks a little less like a flight sim where everything generally appears small. There's seemingly a lot more detail in everything, and generally speaking, enemies seem to be much larger and more substantial than in the previous game. But some things that definitely are bigger in Iron Man 2 are the bosses. At the end of this demo, we got a glimpse of a massive spider tank that has multiple target points that Iron Man has to take out before striking the final death blow. We got to see an even bigger boss, which fans may recognize as Crimson Dynamo (who also isn't in the film), at the end of the demo in a teaser trailer, and to say that he completely dwarfs Iron Man would be an understatement.

From just about every angle, Iron Man 2 already appears to be a drastic improvement over the original Iron Man game. And best of all, the game's story is also being worked on by well-known Marvel scribe Matt Fraction, who is helping to ensure that in-game Iron Man and Tony Stark speak and are represented in the proper way. Iron Man 2 is scheduled for release next year.