A little shake-up in the way we post reviews today, this review is a composite of a handful of demos I played on XBOX Live over the weekend. I recently fixed the wireless router that hooks my XBOX to the rest of the home network, so all the games I had queued up flooded down the wire and I found myself with a lot of stuff to play. So, without further ado, here we go!

Burnout Paradise

FAIL

I've heard good things about the Burnout games, so I got TWO Burnout demos. The Burnout paradise demo takes 6 minutes to get from "start the game" to "you have control over something." If I wasn't planning on writing these reviews, I wouldn't even have played it. But I stuck it out for you guys, and made it to the game.

The game constantly interrupted me with unskippable voiceovers and tutorials. I don't care what I can do on xbox live, I want to do something RIGHT NOW.

Anyway, the game is alright. It's basically the driving bits of GTA4, but prettier with slightly better physics. Also, when you do something cool, there's this over stylized camera that it switches to. Whatever you're doing, be it "CRASH" or "JUMP" or "GET GAS" shows up in huge bloody letters on the screen, and the camera slows down, goes into over-exposed-color mode, and swirls around the car. It's cool the first time, then gets old because when you come out of the camera view you're sometimes facing a wall, so you go right back into the "CRASH" camera. Crashing seems to have no effect on gameplay, which is fun at first, because it encourages exploration. However, crashing ALMOST enough to wreck your car leaves you in a "DRIVEAWAY" state, meaning you can technically limp away from the crash, and therefore have to go find a repair shop to fix your car. It's stupid that crashing into a wall at 60mph has no effect, but 45mph will cripple your car.

All in all, I had a moderate amount of fun with this game, but the demo was ultimately boring, and that's not a good thing. Plus, taking so long to start is a major negative for me. I give it a FAIL. There's much better games out there, even as a demo.

Burnout Revenge

WIN

Burnout Revenge, however, is a MUCH better demo. Instead of the free-form city exploration style of Burnout Paradise, the demo places you on a closed track on a country road. Your goal: knock as many of the other drivers off the track as possible until either your time runs out or your car is totaled. You get more time for totaling the other cars, so if you run out of time you're doing it wrong.

The over-stylized camera is back, but because the crashes are of OTHER CARS instead of yourself, it's way cooler. Plus, when you leave the crash cam, you're guaranteed not to hit anything for at least half a second. The game places you back in the middle of the road, and removes immediate obstacles. I played the 2 minute demo probably 40 times, that's how fun it is to ram people off the road over and over. The game hints at a dozen other modes aside from the "road rage" mode. If they're smart, the demo would be the second most awesome mode, so that they can't be accused of demoing only the "good parts." Even if all the other modes blow, the game is worth picking up just for the road rage mode.

Crackdown

EPIC WIN

Ok I admit, I played the Crackdown demo for 3 hours. Crackdown is what Grand Theft Auto IV was supposed to be. Honestly. Image GTA4, remove the dialog, and make the main character a superhero. You can jump 40ft, pick up and throw cars, run across rooftops shooting people in the head, and throw sticky bombs that you can trigger later once your target approaches. The weapons system is clean and concise, the combat is fun and varied, the vehicle sections are
entertaining, and the graphics are gorgeous.

I've heard from reviews that Crackdown eventually gets boring. Lacking a strong story, there's nothing to push you forward once you get sick of picking up cars and throwing them at pedestrians, scaling skyscrapers, and shooting rocket launchers at crime lords. But seriously, but the time you get bored of that level of awesome you've already gotten your money's worth. Definitely a must-buy.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest

WIN

Imagine Star Wars Battlefront II, but instead of Star Wars it's Lord of the Rings. That's it. For some people, that sentence would be enough to convince them to buy it. For the rest:

The game works very much like Battlefront. You have large, semi-open levels full of bad guys and good guys. You choose a class (which determines weapons and special moves) then attempt to capture enemy flags, capture objective points, or just kill all the bad guys. The enemy does likewise, and winner-take-all.

The classes are nice and varied. In the demo it walks you through 5 classes: Human Warrior (wielding a sword, capable of flaming sword attacks), Elven Archer (wielding a bow, capable of acid arrows, flame arrows, and multi-arrows), Human Assassin (wielding dual knives, capable of becoming invisible and performing an assassinate move that instantly kills unaware enemies), Wizard (wielding a staff of lightning, capable of shooting lightning bolts, fireballs, walls of force, and healing spells), and finally Isildur.

The combat is pretty good, the classes are relatively well balances (archer is worthless unless you're in a good ranged attack position, which doesn't exist in the demo), and the combat is fast based and exciting. It's hard to combo your attacks, but eventually you get used to the rhythm and can pull off some pretty crazy moves. Each class has at LEAST 6 attacks, sometimes more, and the attacks can be chained together. It's pretty cool. You don't switch weapons like in Battlefront. Instead, X, Y, and B control light, medium, and heavy attacks, and holding LT or LB during attacks will unleash modified attacks.

Conquest supposedly supports split-screen multiplayer, but like so many demos multiplayer isn't available. I'm going to tentatively give this a "buy" status until more is known about the multiplayer.

Resident Evil 5

EPIC WIN

Resident Evil 5 is just like Resident Evil 4, except it looks WAAAAAY better, you have a sidekick, and everything is in real time. The demo allows you to choose between "run through a maze of houses until you get eaten," "defend a shack until you get eaten," and "run through a third environment until you get eaten."

This game is punishing. And not punishing as in "the enemies are impossible to kill" but punishing as in "maybe if you were a little better, a little faster, a little more accurate, you'd still be alive." You'll die, every time, for a long time, until finally you find the exact position, the perfect combination of defenses, that will allow you to stem the slaughter for long enough to escape.

PLUS, having a sidekick means they changed to a real-time inventory system, so there's no more "holy crap what was that PAUSE" in this game. If you're holding a pistol with two bullets and you turn around and "bag over the head chainsaw-wielding guy" is right behind you, you'd better have the inventory location of your shotgun memorized, bub, or off with your head.

Resident Evil 5 is definitely a must buy when it comes out if you like survival horror. Yes the controls are terrible, and yes the enemies are way overbalanced, but if that weren't true it would just be a "kill the zombies" game instead of a "survival horror" game. If you're not always about to die, it takes "survival" and "horror" out of the picture.