Genre: Low sci-fi, with third person, over the shoulder shooting action, action-horror game. Premise: You play as Hayden Tenno, a clean-up guy for the CIA who suffers from a rare disorder, where he can’t feel pain (congenital analgia).  You’re set down in the middle of a fictitious ex-soviet block country to perform a clean-up operation.  Whilst there he’s infected with a bioweapon and this is where the fun really begins. As Hayden slowly mutates, you set about making sure that the weapon can’t get out and cause any more trouble than it already has for the nearby locals.  You’ll see only one friendly face during the entire game that isn’t Hayden’s.  Everyone else has gone quite mad. Why I played it: I was hunting around for a game to replace my Bioshock needs.  Quite handily it combines elements of it with Resident Evil 4 this therefore makes Em a very happy girl J

Characters: There are various characters, but one really only need concern yourself with and that’s Hayden.  In terms of characterisation though you don’t really learn that much about the other characters, and in a way it’s a shame as there is a relationship between Hayden and Nadia that could have been explored further, but this is an 18-rated game and I should not expect such nuances to feature.  All in all, you don’t play this game for characterisation, but it is obvious whom the real bad guy is.

So you can take or leave them, or slice them into tiny bits.

Gameplay: The abilities that are bestowed upon Hayden after he’s infected involve him obtaining a three bladed weapon referred to as the ‘Glaive’.  At first you can only throw it at enemies with not much finesse, and then you gain abilities like ‘added touch’, which enables you to slow down time and control the Glaive’s flight path it gets interesting.  As the game progresses you gain other abilities to use with the Glaive such as one hit kills, shield, elemental damage and stealth.

It’s hard to describe just how awesome the Glaive is to fight with, and you will probably end up using it more than your customisable guns.  That’s right, there are guns, and grenades, but the Glaive will become your primary means of clearing out areas.  You’ll truly learn the joys of decapitation.  OK and you can brawl with the enemies and perform finishing moves on them.  You can also dodge enemies and hide behind scenery and fire from it’s cover.

But darlings, the Glaive!

What could be improved: There needed to be more work on the story, and greater characterisation as a by-product.  At times you are left wondering as to what the heck is going on, but you tend to forgive this aspect due to the combat system.

Admittedly the combat sometimes gets a bit repetitive, however there are numerous methods you can go about killing the basic enemies.  The boss battles also sometimes leave you running for a gamefaq, as it’s not always obvious what you should do, especially when the bosses have moves that kill you instantly and you’re too busy spending time dodging these to figure out how to kill your opponent.

Overall: The main reason for playing this game is to mess around with the Glaive, but remember, you don’t start out with this first.  The average ratings that this game has received in other reviews are quite justified, but if you enjoyed the deployment of third person, over-the-shoulder action in RE4 then you’ll probably enjoy this game enough to play it through once.