Análises recentes de Cosmo

For a free, community-made, standalone mod, Portal Stories: Mel is an incredibly solid and polished experience. It plays like a full, Valve-quality Portal campaign clocking in at 7+ hours playing time.

The puzzles are mostly on par with the Portal 2 experience with a fair but challenging difficulty curve. A few of the more difficult sections require the player to find new ways to exploit game mechanics that they may have taken for granted in the original Portal games. Multiple times I found that thinking "How do I move that cube from Point A to Point B?" was asking the entirely wrong question.

An accurate simulator which depicts the experience of driving around in Daft Punk's car.

Do you like arcade-style shoot-em-up platformers where you fill the screen with bullets?
Do you ever wish you could rewind the game a few seconds to before you made that one mistake?
Do you like taking the measured, methodical route to collect all the shiny things in the stage?
Do you enjoy performing the perfect speed run?

Do you want to do all of these at the SAME FREAKING TIME?!

As a generic, cover-based third-person shooter, it's an average game. Think "Uncharted" or "The Last of Us", except all the exploration, environmental puzzle solving, and character development is stripped out, leaving only the combat.

The single-player experience is a series of combat arenas littered with waist-high walls. Each zone punctuated with a resupply cache at every checkpoint. It feels like a compilation of maps meant for the co-op mode of Conviction and it shows. Aside from the story missions, there are several game modes for the missions (no detection, clear the room, and clear the room for X waves).

It's arguable that replayability is built in to the maps due to the score attack mechanism which grades you on your performance in non-lethal (Batman), silent lethal (Solid Snake), and noisy (Michael Bay) playstyles. Why a secret agent -- with a history in covert wetwork -- would be rewarded or even commended for kicking down doors and emptying an auto-shotty into a warehouse full of armored goons is beyond me.

Once again, the concept of darkness is binary, as it was since Double Agent (PC/360). Due to the large number of enemies with night vision goggles and flashlights or the environments which are lit with dozens of light sources per square foot (many of which are ambient or otherwise indestructable), using shadows -- the original hallmark of the Splinter Cell series -- is pretty much useless, anyway.

Stealth is no longer about stalking your prey, waiting for the perfect time to strike from the shadows. Instead, "stealth" has devolved to camping at a corner, dangling from an overhead ledge, or just sprinting up behind an enemy (provided you've specced your equipment for maximum stealth) and mashing the kill button. Speaking of overhead ledges, senior citizen Sam Fisher is more nimble and spry than ever before, able to scale the 10-foot high walls of an office building with the ease of a young assassin Ezio Auditore.

Haven't bothered with the competitive multiplayer mode, so I can't comment on it.

Much like Conviction, this is Splinter Cell in name only. If you must buy, wait for a deep discount. Better yet, just buy an Assassin's Creed title as that's pretty much the direction that this franchise is headed.

***Anti-recommendation.***

This is an incredibly bad port of the XBox360/PS3/Wii (Current-Gen) version and is riddled with unpatched bugs. Between this and the XBox/PS2/GameCube (Last-Gen) version with the same name, the Last-Gen version is better than the Current-Gen version by leaps and bounds.

Stealth, once a delicate management of light and sound, has been dumbed down to a traffic light indicator of "he probably can or can't see you."

The iconic night/thermal vision goggles which once defined this series have been rendered useless. The thermal mode has an effective radius of about 5 feet and can no longer see though thin doors or curtains. Night vision is little more than a pointless green filter which hardly gets any use due to the large number of daytime missions. For the most part, you'll just rely on your Soliton radar, anyway.

Cutscenes used in both versions of this game are completely devoid of the context provided by the Last-Gen story and feel more or less shoehorned into the Current-Gen version. Subsequently, the entire set-up for the sequel, SC:Conviction, is barely even hinted at. The Last-Gen version, by contrast, made the character motivations for the sequel hook abundantly clear.

If you want the stealth-based gameplay of the classic Splinter Cell, pick up the original or Chaos Theory. For the modern, Uncharted-style cover-based action shooter, just skip straight to Conviction.

Avoid the Current-Gen version of Double Agent at all costs. Save yourself the trouble and just watch the Let's Play of both versions of this game on YouTube.