Archive for category Xbox 360

“Ezio! I meant for you to keep running not to start climbing the walls! Why would I want you to take a dive from ten stories up onto solid concrete below? Keep climbing!” Don’t be surprised if early on in your play time with AC2 you hear yourself yelling out to your covert assassin to control a bit better. The mechanics never entirely meliorate but you get used to them enough to enjoy directing Ezio a la free running and parkour-esque scaling through beautiful Renaissance-era Italy. Add varied objectives, engaging combat, side missions that you’ll actually want to take on, and you have the ingredients to spruce up AC2 for even those who soured on the original. Further control streamlining will be a task left for the third act.

Rating: B

Following in the footsteps of EGM and, most recently, Mitch Dyer’s “One Paragraph” reviews I bring you…well, basically the same thing. Short, one-paragraph reviews on games that are not necessarily recent, but games I’d still like to take a critical eye to. In reality, it’s just a way to trick myself into writing and updating this blog more often. Let me know what you think!

Xbox’s Indie section is, much like the iPhone’s App Store, filled mostly with pure and utter crap. Miner Dig Deep is one of the gems that serves as a counter to that statement. Simple, yet elegantly designed, MDD gives you a mine and a few tools to make it to the center of the world — presumably. Each incremental upgrade nets you a satisfying return on your investment (wait until you go past your initial pickax) and it keeps it up for 6-8 hours. Whether you treat it as a sweet background game when catching up on podcasts or an exemplary model for the 80 MS-point Indie game, MDD successfully pulls you in to digging its lucrative quarry and loving every minute of it.

Rating: A