Triple play: 3 quickfire reviews for Crysis 3, Defense Grid and GerminatorJuly 28, 2013 by

I'm a little behind on writing reviews for games that I've played in the last month or so. Therefore, I've summed up my experiences into a few quickfire reviews! I just got a Playstation Vita, so look for a hardware review soon as well as more Vita reviews in the future mixed in with my usual Xbox 360 reviews. BLEEP BLOOP! BEYOND!

Crysis 3 (Xbox 360)

Crysis 3 is a first-person shooter than plays well. The mechanics are fluid, and the game runs smoothly. It looks pretty great, though you'll likely get bored of its mostly gray and brown color palettes. The voice acting isn't terrible, but the story is a pretty standard kill-the-invading-aliens sort of thing. Even on the hard difficulty, I didn't find that I needed to use most of the weapons or abilities that you can unlock. The bow and cloak powers were sufficient, even though there aren't nearly enough sequences where stealth is rewarded, and you can't get creative with or chain kills the way you can in Far Cry. The multiplayer is horrible, and the campaign is short. However, this game was available to me through a cheap Amazon deal, and it was worth the price I paid for the amount of fun I did have with the single-player game. This was my first Crysis game, and it didn't really sell me on the series. But I enjoyed the ride for what it is. My score: 7/10

Defense Grid: The Awakening (Xbox 360)

This tower defense game was free recently to Xbox Live Gold subscribers. I'm glad I didn't pay for it, but it was a fun distraction for a little while. If you've played tower defense, you already know what this game is about. Waves of enemies come onscreen, and you hope to place different types of towers around the map to destroy them before they reach the exit. But Defense Grid is very vanilla with its towers — you've got your standard machine gun, flamethrower, etc., that we've all seen a billion times. Although you get one generic laser beam power to clear an area once in a while, that's all you ever get. And there are no heroes or interesting upgrade trees for towers. Even more frustrating is the fact that towers behave very randomly. Despite having an enemy near my map exit that was (A) within range of a tower and (B) would require only one more shot to be killed, I time and time again saw that tower target a different enemy on an adjacent path and lose the mission when it didn't actually need to. What I'm saying is defense grid is fun for a little while, and I found a good challenge in its initial campaign. But it gets tiresome, boring and frustrating without doing anything remotely new. My score: 5.5/10

Germinator (PS Vita)

If you've played the popular iOS game Peggle, then you've basically played Germinator. You shoot colored balls at similarly colored balls, and some of them have special abilities, like clearing all the germs in a straight line to the left and right of themselves. There are a ton of modes and a decent 'story' mode, though there's really not much of a story. This game's free to Playstation Plus subscribers, so there's no reason not to try it. The colorful, fast-paced gameplay is enjoyable, and the game is actually pretty fun even if it's not entirely original. My score: 6/10

Xbox Live: Thunder Hokie PSN: Thunder_Hokie Twitter: @joshuadelung

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