Here’s one of the stranger creatures.  Say what you will about some of the less appealing aspects of the game, you can’t fault them for not coming up with original ideas.

I have fought a ton of polar bears in games over the years.  When I was playing Everquest, the first character I played seriously was a barbarian shaman, and you have to go a long way from your starting area before you STOP fighting polar bears as a barbarian.

I’ve also see a lot of media over the years tack the “were-” prefix on to just about anything.

This is the first time I’ve seen the two together, though.  So, points to Buffstone for making me stop, look at my iPhone screen, and say “seriously, the hell?”

I wasn’t really part of the Pokemon generation.  When the show started airing in Japan, I was living in Los Angeles which was home to several Japanese video stores, so I saw the first six or so episodes, bought some of the merchandise – let’s face it, them pokeymans is cute – and didn’t really pay much attention to the whole thing.

I also have never played any of the assorted Facebook games which revolve around making you wait to do things unless you’re willing to pay for the privilege of not waiting.

So, “Montowers ~Legend of Summoners~” is new to me in a couple of ways.  It is a no-holds-barred cash grab designed to make you sweat and grovel for tokens, earned ever so slowly through game play but conveniently available in bulk lots in the in-app store, and it revoles around the catching and raising of various monsters to do your bidding and fight for you.

Also it falls neatly into the category of games I HAVE played an awful lot of over the years, that being games designed to pander to the basest instincts of man.

I don’t usually write pic-heavy posts, but it is just so darned convenient to take screenshots on the iPhone, I can’t resist.  I warn you in advance.

The plot, as it were, of Montowers is that you’re a resident of a peaceful, bucolic land, just minding your own peaceful, bucolic business, when all of a sudden massive monster-filled towers pop right up out of the ground.  Like daisies!

Obviously, you can’t stand for this, so your next order of business is to storm these towers, killing or enslaving the occupants of each floor with an eye towards making your peaceful, bucolic land all peaceful and bucolic again.

In this pursuit, you are aided by a peaceful, bucolic, demonic assistant with the traditional fashion sense of demonic assistants throughout literature, to wit:

Oh, Japan.

Anyway, the basic gameplay of Montowers is pretty straightforward.  First, you fight a bunch of different monsters:

The actual combat is pretty simple and you don’t have a lot of input.  If you notice the little red area and the little golden circle up above?  Well, the little gold circle bounces back and forth and you have to tap the screen when it passes over the red area. If you hit it just right, your monsters get to attack before the other guy.

Defeating an enemy monster gets you experience and very occasionally potions or tokens.  If you’re lucky, you get to capture the monster you just fought.  Kind of.  What you actually capture is a “monster coin”, which can be turned into an actual monster through a summoning process which involves mining up raw materials and then hitting “summon” and waiting.

The cooler the monster, the longer the summoning time and the more raw materials you need to collect.  These raw materials, by the way, have their own respawn timer, so you’re waiting for ther materials to respawn so you can start the actual summoning timer.  So far, the longest summoning timer I’ve seen is 50 minutes.

These timers can, of course, be reduced or eliminated by spending tokens, which leads naturally to the aforementioned cash shop where you can load up for ever-so-reasonable fees.

Thankfully, all of these timers run in the background, even when you’re not playing, and the game integrates into the iOS notifications system – so you can, for instance, mine up all the available resources and then start summoning a monster from its coin, exit the game and eventually you’ll get a popup on the home screen telling you that you can mine for more stuff and collect your latest monster.

These same resources are used in increasing your monster’s level, which increases its attack rating and hit points – very useful stuff – and tends to either bolt on more and more protective armor – if it’s a male monster – or take said armor away if not.

Boy monsters:

I suppose, technically, a skeleton is about as gender-neutral as you can get, but I am classing it as a boy monster just because.

Girl Monsters:

I’m not actually griping about this, mind you.  I am firmly in the game’s target audience, after all.

The game supports the iPhone 4 retina display, so the art is all high resolution and pretty and stuff.  Sadly it’s not an iPad app as well, but I suppose it’s really designed more to be the thing you’re carrying with you and occasionally interact with when it makes your phone chirp and ask for attention.  Kind of like a tamagotchi, when you look at it like that, though it won’t actually starve to death and accuse you of being a bad parent.

In the final analysis, it is rather a satisfying experience.  Leveling up your monsters and blowing through the ever-more-difficult tower levels is fun and – thus far – not terribly stressful, and collecting the monsters as you catch them ticks all the appropriate checkboxes in the part of the brain that likes to put all of your DVDs in alphabetical order and has a set of 50 state quarters in a little blue book.

It’s very slow paced, of course, due to all the timers, but once you actually get a few monsters summoned and raised you can go and fight other monsters as much as you like – there aren’t any artificial lockouts there.  It’s not a social game, meaning that you’re not under pressure from your friends to pay-to-play more to catch up with them, so any buying of tokens is entirely dependent upon your own patience level.

I’d write more here, but I think my gathering timer is up.  Got to get back to catching them all.

A few years ago, upon the disturbing realization that I’d hand-imported a PSP from Japan just so I could have it in white, then bought a bunch of games for it that I hadn’t really played, I embarked upon what I called the PSP Appreciation Project, a rather fanciful way of saying “hey, I ought to play some of these games.”

My recent foray into tower defending, then, would mark the start of the iOS Games Appreciation Project, which is at least ten times cooler than the PSP Appreciation Project in that it has a better acronym.

Electronic Arts, for all that I’ve been harboring a 25-year-old-grudge against them, does put some effort into their iOS efforts, and – even better – seems to put them on sale regularly.  It’s how I came to own Mirror’s Edge for iPhone, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it affair but one with a surprising amount of style.

When the console version of Mirror’s Edge came out, in 2007 or so, it was a terrible seductive world, all stark white and splashes of red, scored with enthralling ambient music, wrapped in a promising story of fractured future utopias, and – for me, at least – mind-bogglingly difficult.  That is to say, I downloaded the demo, utterly failed to complete the demo, and put it aside as something I could never possibly appreciate.

The iPhone version has the same design style going on but, well, is something that I was actually able to play.  The shift in perspective from 1st-person to 3rd-person is, I think, largely responsible for that, though the frightfully intuitive touch controls help a lot.

At an hour or so to play through, it’s almost more tech demo than actual game, but you can always replay levels if you want to try collecting all the collectibles or going for speed runs.  Even if you don’t, it’s an hour that I found well worth the 99 cents.

For the price – free, at the moment – , it’s hard to find any complaints with Fantasy Defense.  I will admit that it did crash a fair number of times while I was playing, but the levels are usually over in less than 10 minutes so it never gets too frustrating.

There IS s a bit of a difficulty spike right about the point where you hit level 40 (of 50).  This is probably where the developers would like you to drop some cash in the convenient in-app store to power up your units a bit, and I actually feel a little guilty that I never did.  I did have to spend a couple of hours near the end  of the game going back to earlier levels and grinding experience before I could actually beat some of the final levels, and dropping 99 cents on some in-game currency would have saved me those hours of grinding, but I’m slightly more proud because I stuck it out.

Oddly, when you DO beat the last level, your reward is a static screen with music playing and no way to get back to the application.  It’s not even a particularly attractive picture:

Now, I did point out in my last post that the developers kind of went over-the-top with the whole Heroic Anatomy thing, and it was therefore a little bit of a surprise to find out that they had, at some point, gotten just a little tiny bit of shame and decided to cover up their artwork JUST a little, most notably on the Ice Mage and Blaster units.

Here, for example, are the mage character portraits from in-game:

…and here are what appear to be the original character portraits.  Sorry about the low resolution on this but it does get things across.

Oh, Korea, what are we going to do with you?

Anyway, quite recommended, especially as it’s free and can be finished without giving in to the siren call of the in-game-item-store.

This is a pretty normal way for me to get hardware, by the way, through the hand-me-down process.  It’s a beautiful thing.

Anyway, I immediately loaded up all sorts of network management software on it and it’s made a great portable VNC device.

I bought some games for it, as well, but I really haven’t given any of them more than a cursory glance.  After all, when I have the iPad with me, I’m usually at home and have other things to do.  I have not yet, therefore, flung any birds or cut any ropes.

I did, however, stumble across a recommendation to try a tower defense game called “Fantasy Defense”, and this has become the first iPad game that I’ve put more than about 10 minutes into.  It’s only my third foray into the Tower Defense genre, mind you – I’ve played through Defense Grid: The Awakening and Plants Vs Zombies before, and quite enjoyed both, but not to the point where I felt the need to go looking for more games in the same mien.

Fantasy Defense is a Korean game and is, at least for the moment, available free of charge from the iTunes store.  There is, of course, a facility in the game where you can buy stuff, so that is presumably where they hope to make their fortune.

Specifically, they hope to make their fortune from impatient players, as the stuff you can buy from the in-app store all seems to be, at best, slightly more effective versions of stuff you can earn by playing the game.  Like, if you can buy a thingy that makes your hero 40% more effective with in-game currency, you can buy a thingy to make your hero 50% more effective with real money.  So far, anyway.

The gameplay isn’t anything too groundbreaking.  Monsters come out of portals and follow paths towards your base.  If enough of them reach your base, you die.  You get a limited supply of resources to start, these resources are used to place units and upgrade units, your units kill the monsters walking towards your base and you get more resources every time they kill a monster.

You can also place a single “hero” unit on every map, quite powerful and best placed at a choke-point.

I’ve only gotten through 5 of 50 maps, but so far it is wonderfully addictive and I foresee a fair bit of this game in my immediate future.

I do have one tiny quibble with the game, and that is that the characters are depicted as, err, heroic fantasy tropes turned up to eleven, and then turned up a couple more notches.

Take, for example, the “champion” hero.

I’m not sure what’s worse – the massive bejeweled codpiece or the take-your-own-eyes-out shoulderpads.

As bad as he is, the Archmage hero is, well…

I’m all FOR being pandered to, but this poor woman looks to have a medical condition.

The final hero, the bowmaster, is a little less over-the-top, in that her breasts are ONLY about the size of her head:

And sadly, even the grunt units suffer from a certain top-heaviness that could really stand to be dialed back a cup size or ten:

The monster design is a little more sensible, and I’m a fan:

Normally, when I see this sort of thing, I just have to kind of sigh, shrug, and say “oh, Japan, what are we going to do with you?”

I guess I’m going to have to extend that sentiment a little further west from now on.

That said, I got a ton of play time from a reasonably small financial outlay.  I’m used to dropping, oh, let’s say twenty bucks on your average 10 hour action title, playing it through once and putting it on the “finished” stack.  That’s cheaper than most forms of entertainment right there, though the occasional $50 5-hour game does skew things a little.

I paid $36 for Blades of Time and played it for over 50 hours, having fun all the time.  Any way you look at it, that’s a pretty good entertainment value.

I finally ranked up to “Master”, which took a lot of multiplayer hours.  In all those hours playing the online mode, I only ran in to one other Master-ranked player, so I feel pretty proud of that as an accomplishment.  I don’t know if there’s a rank above master, but I do know that it would probably take me 15-20 hours more playing to find out.  I don’t have that kind of devotion in me.

I am a boy-type person and I am allowed to admit this.

Anyway, despite a metacritic score hovering in the 50s, there were apparently enough other shameless boy-type people out there to justify a sequel, of sorts, though the publishers really aren’t pointing out the connection between that game and the just-released Blades of Time. The main character has the same name, sure, and carries a pair of big swords, and is more or less in the same line of work – that is to say, Resource Extraction By Killing Things And Taking Their Stuff, but the character designs have been tweaked to pander just a LITTLE less and the events from the other game are never referenced.

Before I move on to that game, one last word on X-Blades. When i played it in 2009, it surprised me primarily by being engaging enough that, when I was done with the story and unfortunate enough to get the Bad Ending, I started over and played through it again to get the Good Ending. I pretty much don’t ever do this.

Blades of Time, then, has also managed to pull off the unexpected and unlikely. That is, after I finished the storyline, I decided to take a look at the online multiplayer and have been enjoying the heck out of it, again something I pretty much never do.

To step back a moment, before I continue on talking about the game’s online component, I’ll take a moment to cover the single player game. You play as Ayumi, a blonde pig-tailed lass who apparently belongs to some sort of treasure hunting guild. Your guild has a sphere thingy that allows people to travel to “Dragon Land”, a realm of epic loot and great danger. They reserve the privilege of traveling to Dragon Land for the best and brightest of the guild, so you of course bust in to the ceremony where they’re sending people treasure hunting, kill all of your former guild mates and take their place. Once IN Dragon Land, you find that there’s no way to get back without invading an ancient temple and blah blah blah you have to kill a lot of stuff to get home.

You have the normal assortment of ways to interact with your hapless victims; you can kick them in the head, hit them with things sharp and pointy or simply shoot them. You also get a few magical abilities, standard stuff like throwing fire and so on.

The HOOK, as it were, is revealed in the game’s title. You can manipulate time itself. Basically, you hold down a button for a minute and watch yourself and everything else “rewind”, then release the button and watch it all play out again with the ability to move around and do things while it’s playing out. You create copies of yourself while this is happening, which allows for some genuinely bad-ass moments where, for example, you are shooting the same giant boss alien god robot thing from five different angles at once, or ripping open its armor so another copy of you can step in and stab it in the newly exposed vulnerable bits.

Also it’s used in some rather annoying button puzzles, where you have to stand on, for example, three buttons at once. This is less epic.

In a further example of telling Physics to get stuffed, you can, well, not precisely fly, but you can jump to an enemy flying 10 feet above your head, stab it a bit, jump from it as it dies and grab one of its friends, jump off HIM after you’ve stabbed him a bit and continue until you run out of flying enemies, at which point you realize that you are actually in mid-air over a bottomless chasm and do a little Wiley Coyote thing all the way to your doom.

I did eventually get the knack of finishing a spectacular air combo with a jump to a nearby piece of solid land, but I did die a few times before I got a feel for that.

Another thing that stands out is the game’s lack of hesitation in killing the player. Ayumi is a pretty fragile character and can’t take many hits before dying. To keep yourself alive, you have a few evasive moves – which you will get very familiar with – and the ability to heal yourself with the touch of a button, with only one small catch: to heal yourself, you have to charge up the heals by gaining Rage. To gain Rage, you need to hit things, and if you stop hitting things your Rage goes away. Playing more aggressively, then, and taking more risks, becomes your best bet for actually surviving. It’s a really neat mechanic.

I have not played many games in this genre, mind you, so I don’t know if this is all just stuff it’s ripping off from other titles. I’m still liking it.

One thing that it definitely DID take from another game, and here we come back to an earlier part of this post, is the multiplayer, and this is what has its claws hooked in me right and proper.

A few weeks ago, a friend talked me into trying League of Legends, and I hated it. I liked the whole thing where you were attacking enemy turrets, supported by a host of cannon fodder, killing the other side’s cannon fodder as it tried to destroy YOUR turrets, and eventually beating the other guy back to his base and destroying it. That was good.

On the other hand, I hated the slow pace, the overhead view and the mouse controls, and I especially hated the 5 on 5 format.

The multiplayer in Blades of Time is, therefore, just about perfect for me. It’s one-on-one (or one-vs-CPU, or two-vs-CPU) League of Legends-style objectives, from the point of view of a brawler, and it is super fast paced. You beat stuff up, you earn medals for stuff like number of bullets fired or number of combos, you collect runes from randomly spawning chests, the medals and runes eventually turn into upgrades for your character and you get progressively more powerful. Furthermore, since you CAN play offline games against the computer, you can get some basic upgrades accomplished before you throw yourself into playing with other humans. It’s addictive, and it’s impressive that they put so much work into the multiplayer aspects of a budget sequel to a very poorly received game.

Anyway, if anyone is still reading this, I will finish by saying that it’s a pretty neat game and available for PC and Mac from Steam. You should go buy it, play through the 10-hour single player campaign, and then join me online.

Well, technically, the only part of the game that’s a hidden object game is the cover art, reproduced here for your brief puzzlement.  US on left, Japan on right:

Did you see that there’s actually a guy on the cover?  It took me a while, too.  There’s no shame.

Anyway, I originally bought Gunvalkyrie back in April of 2007.  That’s five years ago, now, come to think of it.  I really am not good about getting right to games.

Back then, I played a little bit of it and felt like there was a decent game in there, unfortunately hidden behind a control scheme that was a bit dense, but it fell off my radar pretty quickly.

After reminding myself of it last week, I was inspired to give it another go.

Now that I’ve dug it out of the box that all non-360-compatible Xbox games had been stuck in, managed to coax our old Xbox back into service, and put the last three days into seeing what I could do about that control scheme, I can verify that there actually is quite a decent game in there, partly because it draws you in with a bizarre plot centered around Great Britain conquering the world and seeding the galaxy with colonies (in the late 19th century, mind you) and partly BECAUSE the control scheme is so bizarre compared to other 3rd-person games.

Take, if you will, the Assassin’s Creed games.  They use a pretty bog-standard control scheme which isn’t difficult to pick up.  Run around with the left stick, steer with the right stick, and it has a single button that puts you into Awesome Assassin Mode, where you hold down the button and run forward and your on-screen character does Amazing Parkour Stunts and you get a vague sense of smugness at how awesome you are.

Gunvalkyrie is as far from that familiar and accessible control scheme as you can get.

Your character IS capable of pulling off some terribly impressive aerobatics, but actually getting them done is left in your hands and depends entirely upon you learning a set of controls that are… well, not BAD controls, just terribly, terribly unique and entirely non-configurable (you can’t even invert the view axis!).  It makes constant use of the stick buttons, the “L3″ and “R3″ buttons as it were, and the result is that you are pressing DOWN on the pad at the same time as moving the pad most of the time.  The sound of the controller during a heated boss fight is, well, remarkably similar to the sound of a Guitar Hero controller being used to play a particularly heated solo.

The result of this is that, once you start getting the hang of using the thumbsticks in ways that no game before or since has asked you to, there’s a tremendous sense of satisfaction.  The game has a meter on screen which slowly counts up as you perform more and more mid-air stunts in hazardous conditions (you must be near an enemy for it to count up) without actually being hit or touching the ground, and when the meter fills you turn into a Massive Badass for the next 10 seconds, invulnerable to incoming damage and with your weapons turned up to 11.

Managing to pull this off during the final boss battle, during the brief period of time when the boss was actually vulnerable, and after 20-some failed attempts at beating the final boss, is going to stand as one of my all-time triumphs.

I am not, by and large, a fan of “hard” games.  I like running through games as, well, a bit of a tourist to be honest.  I’m the reason they PUT “easy” settings on games, and I am also the reason why developers like Smilebit DON’T add a difficulty setting – they don’t want tourists to finish their games!

Every single person playing this game has to face the same challenges in the same way. The result is that, once you get the control scheme down, once you suffer through the platforming HELL that is the Naglfar’s Pit level and put the requisite hours in to figure out how to beat the bizarre bat-winged-cherub last boss, you are in a very small crowd of gamers who have done the same, and it feels good to be there.

I’m so stoked, in fact, that I am going to dig out my copy of Ninja Gaiden and…

…wait, I’m not THAT crazy.

I never owned one as a youth, but spent endless hours playing on the console whenever the opportunity arose, usually in the form of an in-store demo kiosk or at the house of a friend.

Knowing that, I also knew that it was a forgone conclusion that I would be buying the Yars’ Revenge rehash.

Of course, as a more prudent chap now than in my earlier years, I did wait for the inevitable Steam sale so that I could pick it up for five bucks or less. I then more or less sat on it for several months before getting around to playing it.

Should I start with the bad or the good? Let’s go with good.

Yar’s Revenge is hella pretty and the design aesthetic is designed to reach right into the lizard brain of any science fiction geek and give it a good squeeze. It’s a nice mix of futuristic floating industrial complexes and creepy organic caves, the enemies are insectoid or mechanical or a mix of both, and – in a nod to modern sensibilities – your mutant fly-thing character from the first game is now a hot girl with four arms and a predilection for wearing shapely Powered Armor with Strategic Cutouts.

There’s enough plot in place to cover the needs of any shooter – you’re a slave who’s been conditioned to fight for her conquerors, you break the conditioning, realize the plight of your people and, well, the game is called Yar’s REVENGE and you’re Yar…

The gameplay is classic shooter gameplay, the sort of thing that hasn’t significantly changed since Scramble, to wit: You are moving from point A to point B, where you will fight a boss. While you are moving you have limited maneuverability but are always moving forward as things try to kill you and you try to return the favor.

Yar’s Revenge livens the amusement-park ride style of game up with a fun scoring system and a weapons system that adds a touch of strategy, but it is, at its heart, a new incarnation of, say, Space Harrier or Panzer Dragoon.

That last is in no way a complaint.

For complaints, now we must come to the bad parts.

Firstly, this genre of game usually doesn’t give the player a whole lot of choice in movement. Generally you are either moving a character with a fixed target, or you are moving a target indicator with the character following the target.

Yar’s Revenge uses the twin sticks of the Xbox360 controller – and the game pad is the only reasonable way to play the game, by the way – to move both the character and her completely separate targeting reticule. You then use all four triggers and occasionally the face buttons to fire weapons or select powerups.

Until you learn to look at the screen as a whole and manipulate both character and target to, say, aim at the weak point of a boss with the right stick while simultaneously dodging incoming fire with the left, you are going to be constantly bumping into things and getting shot, and your hands will be in terrible pain after an hour or two.

After the controls become second nature, you will be darting around the screen like a heavily-armed hummingbird, effortlessly dodging barrages of incoming fire and raining laser death upon your enemies, also your hands will STILL be in terrible pain because the control scheme was made for players with the same four arms as the protagonist.

It reminds me terribly of Gunvalkyrie, another game with fantastic visuals for the time and with a control scheme that actively rewarded those willing to put in the time to learn it but which was not designed for humans with human anatomy.

In addition, the game has difficulty settings labeled “easy” and “normal”, but there is a yawning gulf of difference between the two. While I had trouble completing even the first level on “Normal”, switching the game down to “Easy” resulted in my coasting through the game in a matter of about two hours, often killing bosses without bothering to dodge their attacks or use any of my shield powerups.

I like easy games, but a middle ground might have been a nice thing.

As you might expect, then, it’s also quite short, a mere six stages and out. They are some of the best looking stages I’ve seen in a while, but it’s still a very quick game.

These are things that I was able to forgive the game for, and your enjoyment will likely be based on whether you can do the same.

Less forgivable, though enjoyable from the point of view of someone who is leading up to a miserable pun, is that this game – which is about shooting giant insects – is full of bugs.

For a few examples: when you launch the game for the first time, you have the option of choosing a Dx9 renderer or a Dx10 renderer. Upon choosing Dx10, the game would invariably crash for me.

When using Dx9, I was able to set graphical options – for example, to set the game to 1920×1080 and fullscreen – and those options would stay in effect until such time as I exited the game and came back in, upon which time the game would revert to a windowed 1024×768.

Furthermore, this was obviously designed as an XBLA title and they reused assets in a somewhat inconsistent way when making the PC version. The tooltip for “Exit Game”, for example, reads “Return to your game library”, and the on-screen powerup display shows icons of the Xbox360 controller, but in-game tutorials tell you to press keyboard keys for things, even if you’re playing with a controller.

There are also some graphical elements that are cut off when playing in a 16:9 aspect ratio. I’m not sure what those are, unfortunately, I just see the borders of windows taunting me from the top of the screen.

I had fun with Yar’s Revenge, though it definitely didn’t make itself easy to love, and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes the genre, with a couple of caveats:

First, don’t bother if you don’t already own a game pad.

Second, wait for the Steam sale.

Last year’s Green Lantern movie was a bit of a confusing mess, trying to mash the highlights of a character with 50 years of backstory into 2 hours and failing miserably in the process.

Granted, Green Lantern is one of those characters that’s a bit tricky to deal with and one where comic writers have had to balance the “superhero who fights supervillans on earth and is a member of the Justice League” aspect of the character against the “space cop who’s responsible for handling emergencies on thousands of planets” side of things.

The movie tried to do both and didn’t do well with it.

Rise of The Manhunters, on the other hand, focuses entirely on the space cop aspect and is better for it.  It’s a 3D brawler type of affair with occasional Space-Harrier-style flying levels and just enough plot glue holding them together that it kind of makes sense.  Said plot will take you to four different planets, and I was actually pretty impressed with the effort put into giving each world a unique environmental look.  Granted, this may have been helped by the natural low expectations that come when playing any movie tie-in game.  The assorted ring constructs you create are nicely flashy and have a high cool factor to them, though some of them really didn’t seem appropriate for the character.

To be just a little geeky for a moment, making a giant suit of powered armor to stop around in is a Kyle thing, not a Hal thing.

Anyway, you spend 10 levels beating up robots and aliens, you earn experience points so you can unlock new abilities and upgrade your skills, you have to hunt down things hidden randomly in the environment to boost your innate abilities, occasionally you must solve simple puzzles of the “rotate these rings until they form a shape to unlock the door” variety… It’s pretty generic on that front, but you do eventually get proficient enough with your various abilities that you start chaining them together to in viscerally satisfactory ways as you beat your way through a bunch of robot mooks.  Really, that’s the best reason to play one of these games.

It did lose some serious points with me the first time I fought a slightly-larger enemy and had to go through a quicktime event to finish it off.  I’ve had more than enough of that, thank you, and there is little more annoying than enemies with QTE armor.

Fortunately, the game does allow you to – if you can’t be arsed to deal with QTEs – simply hit whatever you’re fighting more times to kill it.  For that alone, it deserves some credit.

Oh, except for the final boss.  I actually had to take a second go at him because I failed the “Press circle to not die” moment, which was tooth-grindingly vexing.

Overall, it’s a good way to wash the lingering disappointment of the movie out of your brain.

There’s a Wii version as well as the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, and I’m given to understand that it’s a bit of a different game so I may check that out one of these days.  I’ve been given to understand, however, that I should go into that with even lower expectations, so “One of these days” will probably be “when I see it for five bucks or less”