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GB Review: Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (360)

Aaron Dunlap — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 13:22:38 -0600

The same feeling I had playing the game.

I do not dislike this game. Dislike is a passive sentiment. I actively hate this game. This game drove me completely bonkers, entirely independent of any scandals or controversies floating around lately. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is a very poorly designed product, with a story that tries way too hard to be gritty and comes off as adolescent; a completely useless aiming and control scheme; lazily designed levels, and a downright infuriating save and checkpoint system. When a game pisses me off, I stop playing it; but when I'm reviewing it, I have to soldier on and take the continual emotional beatings it provides. After playing Kane & Lynch, I hate my life, myself, and my Xbox 360.

Click here for an explanation of our review and scoring format.

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is a game that wants to be a lot of things and fails at them all. Surely foremost in their attempts is to be a "bad guy game." Either Eidos or IO Interactive probably took the popularity of their Hitman franchise as a sign that people like games where you play as a "bad guy" and decided to take that to an extreme. What they overlooked is that why we love Agent 47 so much isn't that he's technically bad, but that he's a sympathetic character and a master at what he does. He's cold and collected: all he knows is assassination and he does it better than anybody on the planet. He's not after money, glory, or fame. Usually, he's after the truth or vengeance. Kane & Lynch, on the other hand, contains two of the most contemptible characters of all time who do absolutely nothing to redeem themselves.

As soon as the game begins, Kane (our "hero") and Lynch (our perpetual AI teammate) are busted from a prison transport on the day they're set to be executed (why the HELL would they be transporting prisoners in death row on the very day of their execution, or at all?) and within 60 seconds of control being handed over you're blasting cops. Dozens of cops, in fact. This game is a practical cop-killing extravaganza. That's not fun for me. Maybe a few 14-year-olds with social issues might enjoy the thought of killing hundreds of cops in a game, perhaps due to some resentment they hold because a cop took their weed once. The ridiculous amount of cop shooting might be understandable if we could grow to like our main characters and wish for their survival, but all we're ever told about these guys is that they're cold-blooded killers.

Whenever there is a chance for a character to be developed so as to be slightly likable, the game plows right over it. Lynch is apparently completely insane and has occasional bouts of extreme violence as we witness him killing all of the hostages in a pathetic bank robbery mission early in the game, and later we discover that he killed his own wife. There's some pills that are supposed to help but, well, they're running out. Kane attempts to find nobility in character by really wanting his daughter to like him, but those glimmers of humanity are wrought pointless a few seconds later when Kane comes up with another deftly moronic plan to solve the next problem. In an attempt to "gritty" up the experience, the writers decided to pepper nearly every line with obscenities. The script begins to sound like it was scribbled into the back of a Mead notebook during after-school detention. Lines like, "Shut the f___ up, what are you f___ing talking about?" occur on a minute-by-minute basis, and just come off as lazy or pathetic. As the game continues, instead of learning more about the characters and coming to like them, we come to despise them.

Look, cops! Better shoot them!

Michael Mann movies, which this game very desperately wants to be associated with, often feature nasty villains as main characters but always, always contrasted with a good main character. Heat has Robert DiNiro's character doing awful things, but Pacino is there to serve as a moral mirror. Same with Collateral's Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx characters. These movies aren't good because they're about bad guys killing innocents, they're good because they show the highs and lows of moral character. Kane & Lynch is all lows, and very low lows they are.

This game also wants to be a next-gen shooter, of course, but it surely doesn't try very hard. It has a similar control to Hitman games; games where the use of guns is practically discouraged except in rare cases, but in this game shooting is often your only option. Aiming in Kane & Lynch feels sluggish and sloppy, and accuracy is a complete joke. For what we eventually learn to be as a paid mercenary, Kane is absolutely worthless with guns. That would be fine and even interesting if it were supposed to be a plot point, but the game is almost entirely nothing but shooting. No problem-solving, no stealth, no outrunning, just shooting. Eventually the game slips into the war genre as you find yourself in the middle of a Cuban civil war for absolutely no reason.

There is a "cover system," a popular trend in next-gen games where you can stick yourself to corners and surfaces and shoot around them. Here it feels tired and slapped-on. You don't hit a button or anything to stick to cover, you just sort of have to wander up to a surface and push the analog stick in every direction until perhaps the Gods of Play Mechanics decide to get off their asses.

Anything that would make this game feel "next-gen" is alarmingly absent. The graphics are very bland and there is practically no dynamic lighting. Every surface seems to have this unnatural universal lighting with no account for light sources, making it feel like a cartoon.

Level design is quite poor. There's a level that takes place in a Tokyo nightclub where you're supposed to kidnap the owner from her office. So you get to her office and Lynch carries her while you shoot your way out. Who is shooting at you? Night club guards, all 5,000 of them, all with guns. Of course they shoot at Lynch too, who is carrying their boss, which is why they're attacking you in the first place. Anyway, while you're in her office a guard on the roof shoots at you through a skylight, and then you leave the office the way you came in, fighting off the dozens of guards with pistols who can all zero in on you in a pitch-black nightclub amid hundreds of stampeding clubgoers . Then you get to the roof, and the lady escapes and runs back to her office. Do you follow her? No, you cross the roof and then drop down through that very same skylight into her office and grab her again, then fight your way through the night club again, only this time all the guards have submachine guns. Lazy, lazy level design.

There is often little sense to what you're supposed to be doing or where you're supposed to go, and usually the only thing to do is go by the objective marker placed on your crappy radar/compass feature. Problem is, that radar thing disappears after about 10 seconds, and to make it come back you have to click the left analog stick (and it'll just disappear again). This becomes interesting when you're running to avoid getting shot and you can't click the stick while moving, so you have to stop dead in your tracks just to get the radar to come back so you can see where you're going, and by the time you've oriented yourself the thing has already vanished.

"Grab The Cocaine" -- My life-long motto.

From a next-gen game I expect some kind of variation in gameplay. There are even a few times when the game pretends to be giving you some variation, but then forgets to carry it out.

Take the beginning of the second level, for instance. Kane needs to get something from his safe-deposit box from a bank, so obviously he decides to rob the place. Your first objective is to put some knockout gas in the air system, and Kane actually says he'll "bypass the guards," so I'm thinking that means elude them. So you walk into the rear parking lot and a guard will see you and approach you. Kane says he's just looking for his car, but the guard doesn't buy that, so he starts to shoot you, then another guard raises the alarm. Mission failed.

I restarted this level at least 10 times before I figured out that I'm supposed to kill the guard, then quickly kill the second guard before he can raise the alarm. Fine, but why did the game tell me I was doing something different? Then in a later level, which takes place in Tokyo (believe it or not, a completely separate trip to Tokyo from the nightclub level. Actually, this game transports you from LA, to Tokyo, back to LA, then to Tokyo again, then to Cuba, and so on without any sense, logic, or direction). You and a crew of four other guys have just had a big shootout on an upper level of an office building wearing window washer outfits (for no reason), then you take an elevator down to the lobby. While in the elevator, your crew changes into suits so as to elude the police or guards. Awesome, a sneaking mission! Wrong. You exit the elevator, and then for no reason the Tokyo police are shooting at you. There's no "whoop, our cover is blown" and there's nothing done to raise suspicion. The whole thing with changing outfits was completely pointless other than to segue into a Tokyo streets shootout, followed by a Tokyo bus station shootout, followed by a completely jarring transition to Havana.

And the biggest failure of next-gen technology: the save system. This game uses a checkpoint system, where each level has about six checkpoints and if you stop playing for any reason (such as when the game freezes your Xbox 360, which it did to mine twice) you have to restart the boring, poorly designed level all over from the beginning. This is an absolutely infuriating element, and would have been the reason I'd have stopped playing if I didn't have to review the damn thing.

Thapa, I order you to get yourself killed... Nice work.

Kane & Lynch also wants to be a squad commanding game. In early levels, you just have Lynch to boss round but eventually you add on a crew of four guys. They're all useless. If you tell them to follow you, they won't. If you tell them to go someplace and secure it, they'll go there and die. If you tell them to kill someone, they'll run right up to him and shoot him from two feet away instead of from cover.

In fact, the game's only real unique feature is destroyed by the squad system. If you take too many hits, instead of just flat-out dying Kane will sort of keel over until either Lynch or another teammate comes over and hits you with a shot of adrenaline and brings you back or you eventually die if nobody can reach you. If you do this too often, however, you'll overdose on the adrenaline and die outright. When you go down, any one of your AI teammates can bring you back with the adrenaline, but if any of your AI teammates goes down, only you can hit him with adrenaline. If one of your teammates dies, mission failed. Even though there will be teammates closer to your fallen comrade, you have to stop what you're doing, cross an open battlefield, and dose him, keeping in mind that if he went down someplace it's because that's a very dangerous place to be, and you're kind of a sitting duck when you're reviving someone.

Kane & Lynch only has one online mode on the Xbox 360, a clever little thing called "Fragile Alliance" where everybody in the game starts out as allied crooks trying to rob a store or bank protected by AI guards or police. Whatever you steal gets split with everybody, so if you don't want to share you can grab the loot and then try to kill all your co-crooks and keep it all for yourself. When you get killed, you respawn as a guard or cop and your job is now to take down the remaining thieves. It's a good idea in theory, but is broken by the following elements: if you die and respawn as a cop and die again, you're done. No more repawns. Also, the game doesn't really let you know when someone has turned traitor, which is a major turning point in gameplay. You have to figure it out for yourself, which can get pretty confusing. Every time I played, some loser would start killing teammates from the very start of the level; nobody would get any cash, and the game would be over in two minutes. Also, about 60% of the times when I tried to play, I would get an error that would kick me to the very first game menu.

There is a co-op mode, where your split-screened buddy can play as Lynch, but there's no online co-op so the whole thing is rather worthless.

This is a bad game. It had promise, but it was clearly pushed out the door way too soon. It's no big surprise, really, this is Eidos's only holiday release for this year and they wanted it to be good so bad. Instead of giving IO Interactive the time and resources they needed, however, they spent all their money on advertising and hoped that would cover up for a poorly designed product. I really wish they would have just made another Hitman game instead, and considering there's a freaking Hitman movie in theaters, wouldn't this be the perfect time for a new Hitman game? I would have taken one or two levels of the quality of Hitman: Blood Money to this rushed, convoluted, lazily designed, buggy, aggravating, unpleasant disaster.

And if I must say any more: there is a boss battle against a tractor. Yes, a tractor.

Publisher: Eidos Interative
Developer: IO Interactive
Release: Nov 13, 2007 Interactive
MSRP: $59.99 Interactive
Also on: PC, PS3 Interactive

Get Ready To Hate Your TV: Spike VGA Awards Back

Aaron Dunlap — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:25:45 -0600

If you haven't yet gotten your fill of actors with movies to promote and barely-relevant musicians being fed lines about video games from a teleprompter, or truly worthy games being beat out for awards by games that aren't even out yet, or just wanting to throw your remote straight through your TV, it's time for more Spike Video Game Awards!

Yaaaaaay!!!

Hosting again this year is Samuel L. Jackson, perhaps still riding the gamer cred he earned by doing a movie about an aircraft laden with pheromone-wild asps. Also expect many gratutious references to a particular brand of soda beverage named after the condensated water vapor that gathers on Earthen agglomerations of dirt and rock, including an entire award category "fueled" by it.

Also, hot chicks with cheat codes. Because that's what gamers want, right? They want hot chicks who read off cheat codes. I know that's my fantasy. Me being a mid-adolescent troglodyte. I also loooove TAG body spray; I hope they advertise too.

Actually, the "advisory panel" this year is made up of some actually respectable names in the gaming journalism industry, including Dan Hsu, Chris Baker, Jeff Gerstmann, Andy McNamara, Chris Kohler and other people I often see at E3 and other events but never bother talking to even though I'm sure they're all really interesting people. Whether their ratings for games have any bearing on whether games "win" is doubtful, however, as this show really knows its audience and therefore Halo 3 will win every category, even those it is not eligible for.

This mess show airs on Sunday, December 9th at 9pm but films on Friday, December 7th. Check out the attached link for a list of the categories.

GB Review: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Single Player (360)

Aaron Dunlap — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:20:00 -0600

Terrorists are bad. Shoot bullets at them.

The best first-person-shooter of the year. Better than Halo 3. If you need me to say more: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is nearly perfect on all accounts. Instead of picking a few gimmicks and rubbing our noses in them, weakening the rest of the game, this game just gets everything right. Unless you were expecting a tactical shooter like Rainbow Six and will cry if that's not what you get, this game should thoroughly entertain and enthrall any curious FPS fan.

Click here for an explanation of our review and scoring format.

The WW2 market was already well-established when we came in, and we stomped all over those guys. We're going to do the same with this."

That's what an Infinity Ward developer told me at this year's mini-E3 as I watched him play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. He's right, on both accounts. Before Call of Duty was released on the PC, games like Medal of Honor and countless strategy games had already swept up the World War II gaming field. With much trepidation I loaded up the demo for that game, but 30 minutes later I was blown away.

What made the original Call of Duty and its sequel, Call of Duty 2, so great was that it didn't rely on gameplay gimmicks or trends to stand out. These games stand out because they are good -- in every possible way. There's a visceral sense of immersion in Infinity Ward's Call of Duty games, Modern Warfare included.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is an excellent game, even though it lacks many of the elements we've grown used to in our shooters. Lately, for a game to stand out it has to have its own special element. Some games tout their super-duper-advanced enemy AI, Call of Duty 4's enemy AI isn't remarkable but it's good enough. Other games smack you in the face with their tactical elements like using smoke grenades and flash-bangs to clear rooms; these are present here but only as options, not as the only way to play. When a game has one of these features it becomes a one-trick-pony, cramming the developers' bright idea down your throat as if there would be no way to get along without it. Cover systems, blind firing, squad commands, crazy goggle effects, and spy gear like snake cams and motion detectors are all things we've come to expect from any game not taking place in 1944 Normandy. None of those are present in COD4, and none of them are missed. What is in many ways a straightforward shooter somehow manages to get it right.

Ghillie suit? More like Silly suit!

The story is not important, or altogether very interesting. What needs to be known is that you play as both a British SAS operative and an US Force Recon Marine, two organizations that collectively represent some of the most bad-ass humans on earth. Your enemies are terrorists with no affiliation to any actual capital-t Terrorist outfits. The game is polite about not shoving the story down your throat, but players interested in participating in it can find plenty of depth by paying attention to dialog.

Unlike previous Call of Duty games, which have all had players taking over a variety of different soldiers from different countries, the stories and paths of the two main characters you play as influence and intersect each other as the game progresses.

Be you SAS or Force Recon, gameplay is entirely the same. Follow your squad mates, shoot the bad guys, don't get shot yourself. The variety comes in how the missions unfold in front of you. Sure, you're not allowed to roam around freely (a common and confusing complaint against Call of Duty games; what were they expecting, Grand Theft Auto: European Theater?) but it rarely ever feels forced. There are safeguards in place to keep you from wandering off-path, but this is War; if you strayed away from your squad-mates you'd just die anyway. The loadout of weapons is pretty realistic, with the Special Ops protagonists being equipped with the types of guns they would be and the terrorists all carrying inexpensive and ubiquitous AK-47s. There were a few times where I picked up expensive, Special Forces-style weapons like the G36 and P90 from dead enemies, leaving me pretty confused.

I wasn't entirely impressed with the "feel" of the weapons as I have been with other games like Black. Unlike the MP40s and Thompsons from Calls of Duty past, these are beefy, extremely powerful weapons that only very well trained people can use effectively, but I just wasn't getting that feeling from the game. The assault shotguns especially felt weak and ineffective. Models, sounds, and animations for the weapons are all superb, however.

One thing I've seen a lot of games try and fail to pull off is material penetration. In this game, a person hiding behind a plaster wall or a wooden box is not safe from your bullets. There's an unnatural satisfaction that comes from seeing an enemy duck behind a corner, shooting a few rounds into that wall, and seeing his legs slump out from behind the corner. This system is effective but, again, doesn't shove itself down your throat. You aren't constantly put in situations where you have to shoot someone through a wall so the game can say, "See? See what we did?" and removing all the fun of it. Instead, it just feels natural.

Instead of trying to assault us with its genius gameplay features, this game assaults us with cinematic beauty. If Call of Duty had any trademarks, it would be those cinematic moments that put you into an incredible moment instead of just showing you. Some things like storming the field of Stalingrad with hundreds of comrades and no weapons or shooting down bombers with a flack cannon just can't be forgotten. There are elements of Call of Duty 4 too where the visual beauty and scope of my actions just overpowered me. Running through a war-torn city at night, in the dark, with night vision goggles on and IR sights and beacons dancing from my squad-mates while smoke trails from enemy RPGs cascade overhead like party streamers with explosions and gunfire in the distance while I try to keep sight of the red flares being shot by a stranded tank I'm supposed to find and protect, it is a defining element of the game not because of any story relevance but for how well this game can suck you into its gunpowder-laced atmosphere. It may sound silly, but instead of feeling like I've done these things in a game it feels like I've done them for real.

I feel like I've really carried a javelin missile launcher on my shoulder and fired damn near half a million dollars worth of anti-armor warheads at enemy tanks that I couldn't see but were not out of targeting range for the launcher. I feel like I've really stared down the scope of a .50 caliber sniper rifle and watched the wind sweep a flag so I could compensate my aim as I waited for a green light to take out a high profile target from an impossible distance. I feel like I've manned the cannons of a AC-130 gunship and, well, I don't want to spoil it.

The incredible graphics, controls, music, and 6.1-optimized digital surround sound all come together to make this game more of an experience than an activity.

Get to the choppah!

Looking back at the game, I start to notice a few things that other games have tried to do cinematicaly and failed. I've seen other games slip into slow-motion to emphasize an important action you're supposed to perform, but never have I seen it done (before this game) without being annoying. Other games have tried having attack dogs, but none have seen so vicious as in this game; for some reason I have this moral qualm about killing dogs, to the point where if I were escaping prison and they sent dogs after me I probably wouldn't be able to kill them to protect my position, but I was unusually eager to blast the little buggers in this game. Other games have had small moments where you can make a small decision about whether or not to kill someone with some immediate effect, but never so subtly as here.

There's even an element that reminds me of a rather ham-fisted late moment in Splinter Cell: Double Agent but works much better here in the climax of Call of Duty 4.

It's important to remember, though, that this is not a tactical shooter. As I've said, there's no squad commands and you don't have to flash-bang every damn closed door you reach as in Rainbow 6: Vegas (my favorite Xbox 360 shooter up until now). Some people may be disappointed by that, but I came to enjoy it. Your characters aren't leaders, anyway, they're taking the commands, not giving them. This makes everything feel much more participatory and less invulnerable. Towards the end, however, things did seem to stray into Tom Clancy territory as far as one elite squad needing to save the world, but I guess when you're writing your own stories instead of cribbing them from history books it doesn't hurt to crank up the stakes.

Another problem I'd been having is the uneven difficulty at times. A little bit of a challenge is a good thing, but the ends of some levels just seemed ridiculously hard to me until I figured out that the game really wanted me to play it one certain way. My biggest problem with difficulty was that the enemies all seem to have near-mythical accuracy with their grenade throws. They never miss, they never over-throw or under-throw. Even if you can't see an enemy, his magic grenades will find you. I sometimes wondered if this was done intentionally just so you'd discover the ability to pick up and return thrown grenades, but it seems a little over-the-top to me.

The single player campaign mode is short but dense. I was able to power through the game on Normal difficulty in around five hours, but I had a deadline to meet. Beating the game unlocks three things: a final bonus level that is a recreation of a common special ops exercise, a terrorist siege on an airplane with a VIP hostage (I think this may only be available if you don't skip the closing credits), Arcade mode, and cheats mode. Arcade mode is the campaign mode with the addition of points, a nice fun way to replay the game without feeling like you're just replaying a game. Cheats mode is kind of what it sounds like: the ability to enable cheats while playing. Cheats are unlocked by collecting enemy intel items scattered throughout the game.

I could go on (and on and on) about the good things in this game point by point, but I'd just be wasting both of our time. All that needs to be said is that this is the best single player shooter of the year. Is it better than Halo 3? I think a drunken stumble through a knife store would be better than Halo 3's single player campaign (relative to its hype, anyway). Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare beats it and anything else this year by a longshot, Half-Life 2: Episode Two included. You cannot be let down by this game.

Another thing that Infinity Ward developer told me at E3 was, "We're going after Halo 3 with our multiplayer mode." The multiplayer in Call of Duty 4 is arguably bigger than the single player, and the multiplayer beta really caused a stir a month ago. Does it have what it takes to compete with Halo 3's massive online experience? Find out in our review of Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat's multiplayer mode coming shortly.

Be sure to check out our multiplayer review of this title, located here.

Won GameBump's Best Shooter of 2007

GB Review: Beautiful Katamari (360)

Aaron Dunlap — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:44:26 -0600

Rolling stuff into a ball: one of this game's many new features.

This is a $40 game that can be beaten in a day and offers next to nothing over its $20 predecessor. Personally, I find the gameplay more irritating than enjoyable, but even the people who have chugged the Katamari Kool-Aid won't find their money's worth here. Series fans looking for more should maybe rent this game and get it out of their systems, and people who want their first taste should get Katamari Damacy on the PS2 for half the price.

Click here for an explanation of our review and scoring format.

This iteration (that word was chosen carefully) of the Katamari series is my first. I somehow managed to avoid "Katamari Fever" as most of the gaming hipsters I knew were logging hours into the bargain-bin-priced PlayStation 2 game, then its sequel, then the PSP port. I always thought it seemed a bit simple, but I didn't avoid it by design or spite, I just never got around to it.

I thought Beautiful Katamari on the Xbox 360 would be a good place to start. With between two and two million times the processing power of the PS2, the 360 should allow for so much more compelling, dynamic, and... well, beautiful gameplay. That's what I thought, anyway.

The core gameplay element of Katamari games (roll stuff up into a ball) has breached our social zeitgeist and therefore is no surprise to me. What did surprise me is how indifferent I was to it. I've heard people unravel all kinds of charming prose about the Zen nature of the games, the calming, subtly addictive qualities of rolling crap up into a ball, so I was trying really hard to see what they saw.

To me, it's just a repetitive game with tedious controls where you push a ball around that picks up items smaller than the ball until the ball grows larger and larger objects may be collected. Lost on me was any kind of charm or endearing elements. After an hour or so of staring at the pale, bland, near-nauseating graphics on my HDTV I felt like I was missing something. I felt like the sort of people who saw the finale of The Sopranos and said, "So, wait, what happened?" or the people who can't figure out the point of Candy's dog in Of Mice and Men. I wondered if there was a hidden camera somewhere or perhaps some kind of two-way mirror where scientists were studying and annotating my frustration.

Is the charming little ball-rolling game a giant, black monolith and am I a Neanderthal-monkey-man mindlessly waving my arms at it?

Or maybe this game just isn't that great. Maybe having to click through page after page of unintelligible gibberish from the King of Whatever character before I can play a damn level isn't that cute. Maybe having words appear all over my screen, blocking my view as I'm trying to play isn't so Zen. Maybe the primitive save/load system and tedious menu system isn't the greatest thing since sliced garbage balls. Maybe spending the first 6 or 7 levels in the same bland, complicated environments isn't a quirky design element. Maybe this is just a game that I don't like.

Drop some acid and this game might start making sense.

When I played through Halo 3 without having played any previous Halo games, sure I was (very) lost with the single-player campaign -- that's just poor story design -- but I was at least able to play the game without knowing the full backstory. In Beautiful Katamari, the backstory is meaningless but the gameplay is what I don't understand.

Even if I really dug the gameplay, I couldn't pretend that this felt like a full game. It feels like a minigame, the sort of thing a better game might display during a loading screen while a real game is loading. There's very little variance in modes; it's either "you've got this much time to roll up this much stuff" or "lets see how long it takes you to roll up this much stuff." The mere insinuation that I'm supposed to be choosy about the specific items I collect when the control scheme and camera seem to be actually working against me is laughable.

I'm told that Beautiful Katamari offers very few additions from previous games. New here is an added element where you're also scored based on what types of items you collect with your magic ball o' junk and not just size, and an online multiplayer mode that is the definition of tacked-on. At $40, this game may be discounted but it's twice the price the original PS2 game and offers next to nothing in exchange for the extra twenty bucks.

If you love Katamari games, you may absolutely love this game as well. However, I'm supposed to review games based on how they stand on their own. For failing to bring anything new to the table for established fans and for failing to provide any value for the price, I cannot recommend this game.