I’m liking the look of Darksiders more and more each time I see it. The gameplay does seem derivative of other action platformer titles, but I don’t see anything wrong with that. I don’t mind if a game looks or plays like another one, as long as it is entertaining. If we avoided things only because they looked like other things then we never would have had that crush on the girl at the record shop who looked like a punky version of Cameron Diaz, and then where would we be?

Note that this is the UK version of the video. Darksiders hits Australia on January 7.

If you preorder Darksiders at EB Games – and only EB Games – you’ll score yourself the ‘Guide to the Underworld’, a 100-page book featuring:

* Darksiders Graphic Novel – Prequel based upon comic artist and Vigil Games founder Joe Madureira’s vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
* ‘Joe Mad’ Concept Art – Exclusive in-depth look at the creation of the epic Darksiders
* Exclusive Fold Out Poster – Original concept art illustrated by Joe Madureira
* War’s Weapons Feature – Master the weapons of Darksiders with this exclusive guide

Plus, you’ll get a code to unlock an in-game weapon called the Harvester, described as:

“This powerful weapon belongs to the rider of the pale horse. Its enormous, fearsome blade can cleave through flesh, bone, and even the ethereal demons of Hell. Though its jagged blade is deadly, the power locked within makes its master like unto a god.”

It’s $108 RRP at EB. Here, have another screenshot.

For a guy who hates drawing horses, he sure did a fine job with Ruin. Such a fine job that ruin simply jumps to life right off of the page, in one of the cheesiest developer diary video tricks I’ve ever witnessed. It’s close to Doug Henning cheesiness, and that’s no small feat. Still looking forward to the game, as long as Madureira promises never to do anything like that again.

Alas, there’s no Mark Hamil voice over to be heard here. But Moon Bloodgood gets a line and everything is as epic as you’d expect it to be. Enjoy!

I’m sure comic-book-author-turned-game-designer Joe Madureira is pretty sick of hearing that for the last eight years or so. But here’s hoping his game will make you forget all about war-torn worlds, burly swordsmen and huge gauntlets.

Oh, wait…

Darksiders, for those of you who don’t know, is about one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, War. Turns out, there was a false Apocalypse and somebody set War up to take the blame. War’s bosses glue a creature called The Watcher (voiced by Mark Hamil) to his fist and kick him back down to Earth sans most of his powers to figure out what went wrong.

Gameplay follows War through a series of environments on the ruined Earth. The map itself is huge once you open it all up, necessitating both a warp function you unlock later in the game and a badass horse called Ruin that serves as your ride. You also have to do a lot of backtracking to areas as you learn new abilities that open up places you either couldn’t reach or see initially. Not only are you getting mystical powers like the ability to see into the Realm of Shadow with a button press, but also weapons and items that might remind you of a certain green-clad Nintendo icon.

It was about halfway through my tour of Darksiders with Hayden Dalton that the Zelda connection clicked. We’d just entered a room with several giant spiders and a puzzle element to it that was more complex than the usual go-here-kill-this kind I’m used to in action/adventure games. There was a grappling hook involved and something that looked like a spikier version of Link’s boomerang.

“The puzzles are akin to Zelda,” he explained after successfully dodging a huge spider dropping from the ceiling a la the Great Deku Tree dungeon in Ocarina of Time (only yuckier because Darksiders is big on blood and puss).

Dalton went on to say that Darksiders is about 40 per cent puzzles to 60 per cent combat/level exploration — and even the combat itself is something of a puzzle. In addition to planning for what weapon upgrades to buy (because you can’t afford everything in the game on the currency you earn in one playthrough), you’ve also got kill types to consider and a Wrath gauge to fill. Killing enemies in the old fashioned way nets you souls — which are the game’s form of currency. However, there are three different types of soul and only one of them can be used to buy weapon upgrades, while another fulls your Wrath gauge and the third restores your health.

The best way to go for soul-gathering is probably the special kill button. This happens when you beat an enemy within an inch of its life and then the B button icon pops up, prompting you to pull off a fancy special kill. You can ignore this button and just keep thrashing said enemy how you were thrashing it — but going for the special kill nets you more than one kind of soul currency. Also, that button prompt might give you the chance to ride on an enemy’s shoulders to trample other enemies for more souls. And once your Wrath gauge goes up all the way, you can activate your Chaos Form overdrive which makes War more super-awesome-kill-guy than he usually is for a short amount of time.

Having cleared the gross spider mini-boss, Dalton continued on our tour of Darksiders. We encountered a sexy angel (voiced by Moon Bloodgood) who was bitter about being left behind on the post-apocalypse planet to clean up after War’s mess; a flying griffin creature that we totally stole from said angel’s buddy; and the ominous Black Tower that looms in the background of most levels ’til War finally finds a way to reach it.

The Black Tower level Dalton demoed for me looked the most like a Zelda dungeon of anything else I’d seen that day — but it also reminded me of another game. Apparently, it takes something like two hours to complete and you get a nifty portal-making gun that turns the whole thing into a giant puzzle, like, well, Portal. The cool thing about Darksiders’ portal gun though is that you can shoot portals through portals to solve puzzles and you can change the velocity at which things pop out of the second portal hole once they go through the first. This means you can make crazy super-jumps to get enemies’ heads during fights from across the room where said enemies can’t even reach you.

All in all, I walked away from Darksiders with a pretty good feeling that I’d seen a tasteful pastiche of action/adventure games with a solid coat of Joe Mad’s storytelling — instead of a hollow rip-off of other action/adventure games that hides behind a comic book author’s big name. Also, Mark Hamil was there and that makes everything better.

A couple of fast facts for the road:
1) There won’t be a demo.
2) The basic game is 15-20 hours, but completionists will take something like 30 hours and still not be able to afford every single weapon upgrade in the game.
3) There are no quick time events.
4) War doesn’t level up, but his weapons, abilities and equipment do if you’re spending souls on them. So if ever the game seems too hard, grind a bit and buy some upgrades.

Darksiders ships on January 5. If it sells well enough to warrant a sequel, let’s all start begging Joe Mad to include random pages of Battle Chasers #10 on the loading screens in Darksiders 2. That would awesome.

Granted, Russia would probably be a whole lot less interesting to gamers if it were portrayed as an idyllic fantasy land with happy pink bunnies and stuff. So it’s a good thing that Metro 2033 sticks to the post-apocalyptic wasteland guns and kicks them up a notch.

Let’s back up a bit and convince you that this isn’t some fancy rip-off of Fallout 3. Metro 2033 is based on a book, first of all, written by Russian blogger-turned-novelist Dmitry Glukhovsky. In Glukhovsky’s bleak vision of the future, the known world has been visited by a nuclear holocaust that killed and irradiated everything on the surface of the planet. The only known survivors are those that happened to be in underground places when the whole thing went down (hence the name “Metro”). In Glukhovsky’s novel (which was originally published for free on the Internet), the story follows a boy named Artyom whose only vision of the world the way it used to be come from postcards he collects throughout the dystopian network of Metro societies.

The biggest difference that I can stress between Fallout 3 and Metro 2033 is the fact that Metro 2033 picks up only 20 years after the nuclear Holocaust. People haven’t quite adjusted to the changes in the environment and weird, upsetting things are still happening on a daily basis in the Metro colonies. Strange “anomalies” occur deep underground that cause hallucinations and some ominous force known as the Dark Ones keep making off with or mentally corrupting what’s left of humanity.

The story of the video game picks up at the point in the novel where Artyom leaves the safety of his Metro station, Exhibition, to go on a mission to Polis in order to stop the Dark Ones. Our first look at the game spans both a flashback to the early days of safety in Exhibition and a midpoint level where Artyom’s almost reached his goal while travelling across the ruined surface of Russia.

The first thing you notice about Metro 2033 is the minimal interface. To keep track of health, weapon ammo and whether or not the air in your immediate area is safe to breathe, you’ve got to pay total attention to Artyom’s first person view. You can see individual rounds of ammo in your cobbled-together gun and know that he’s in danger of dying if his vision begins to go red or he starts coughing and choking.

Slapping on the gas mask in contaminated areas affords you a little more in the way of a HUD (though you also have to put up with condensation on this inside of your mask). For one thing, you know your mask isn’t doing its job if cracks begin to appear in the faceplate or the glass shatters altogether. For another, you get a nifty watch that keeps track of how much air is left in the mask. But other than that, there’s very little in the way of “game-y” stuff we’re used to from other shooters – even your map is a physical thing that Artyom pulls out to look at in a first person view.

The minimalist HUD drives home how tough life in post-apocalyptic Russia is. Everything around you is broken or rotting, so scavenging for replacement supplies like spare gas masks is particularly stressful but completely necessary since there’s not much that humanity can make down in the Metro to survive on. For example, weapons made down in the Metro system are crappy and break easily, while the old school weapons from the surface world are so rare and awesome that their ammo serves as currency. So this puts the player in a constant tradeoff between having the best ammo in the game that will actually kill stuff in a few hits, or having enough “money” to upgrade the crappy guns you can buy underground.

The second major thing you notice about Metro 2033 (and the second major thing I can stress as completely different from Fallout 3) is how expressive all the non-playable characters’ faces are. In the early Exhibition level, Artyom encounters a whole host of dirty, disheartened Russians living underground in their little city from mothers with young children to feed to injured, bitter men who like to gamble. Faces are completely animated with no paralyzed chins or cheekbones or dead, vacant eyes that move right when you talk to them and bodies move in the ways you expect them to as NPCs open doors, talk to one another or climb aboard underground handcarts.

The only thing that you might not notice right away about Metro 2033 is the combat. This is either because you’re too used to first person shooters or because you’re not playing the PC version with its spiffy (and optional) NVIDIA 3D glasses. Indeed, when we first saw a shootout on the Xbox 360 version with some weird looking werewolf/rat things, we were sort of indifferent. But later, in an enclosed tunnel with 3D glasses on, those werewolf/rat things suddenly looked a whole lot more upsetting as they swarmed our handcart and made off with the limp bodies of other passengers.

Combat seemed even more visceral in 3D after entering a stealth section where we had to creep along with night vision goggles past enemy NPCs. An NPC would suddenly round a corner where we happened to be crouching and his 3D rifle butt suddenly seemed way too close to our actual face – never mind poor Artyom’s. This compounded the stress level we were already feeling from having a cracked gas mask and knowing we had to go down into a contaminated tunnel to get past the rest of the NPCs.

However, it might relieve some of you to know that you don’t have to stealth your way through Metro 2033. Apparently, there’s enough ammo and combat leeway in the game to support Artyom going through an area with guns blazing. That’s not the route our demo master went with, hence our sudden spike in stress when that NPC turned up too close for comfort. But it’s nice to know there’s a choice, there, since the linear game gives you very few others.

Metro 2033 is being developed by 4A Games which has among its number some developers from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games (which are also set in post-apocalyptic Russia) and will be out for the PC and Xbox 360 in 2010. A PlayStation 3 version isn’t planned largely because the developer doesn’t have much experience programming for it – so that could change with time if Metro 2033 the game is as much a cult hit as the novel turned out to be. Expect about 10 hours of solid gameplay and maybe look into getting yourself a PC rig that can support PhysX and NVIDIA DirectX 10 (maybe even DirectX 11, if NVIDIA feels like letting the developer go for it).

P.S. Yes, they’re working on an English translation of Metro 2033 the novel – it might even beat the game to US stores next year.

It was my reputation among team Kotaku that got me assigned to reviewing what has proven to be the best wrestling game I’ve played in a decade — Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010, which is also the only wrestling game I’ve played in a decade. I guess everyone thought I’d be perfect for it. Maybe they know that the only website that I pay to read daily is a pro-wrestling site, a site that allows me to read about the often-mediocre happenings on modern wrestling shows without having to watch them. Perhaps they know I imported Bret Hart’s autobiography from Canada and Ohio Valley Wrestling DVDs (when Paul Heyman was booking OVW shows) from Ohio. Or perhaps it’s that Hulk Hogan thing I did.

Regardless, you’d think that someone who has loved video games and, I guess, loved pro wrestling, for much of his life, would love the melding of the two. But I started this new game, the latest in the annual releases of THQ-published, Yukes-developed modern wrestling games, with almost complete alienation from the genre. (I have some professional embarrassment about this, since I’ve been to Yukes’ studio in Yokohama and met the wrestling-obsessed people there. I even got a great tour that included a look at the back rooms that reek of body odor every summer as the team sleeps in the office while cramming to finish their game by fall). This new game brings to the series a revised Royal Rumble, an enhanced Create a Finisher option, a new training arena, revised rosters, new storylines and — the big feature — the ability for fans to create and share their own storylines. But it was all new to me. And, wouldn’t you know it, the game is fun and… intellectually stimulating? Yes.

Loved
The Basic Flow: WWE pro wrestling games, as fans would know, are 3D fighting games played from a quasi-overhead perspective and battled on the surfaces of wrestling ring and floor, with the walls of a steel cage or the top of a destructible announcers’ table sometimes also in play. You win not by eliminating an opponents’ health bar but by executing enough minor and major strikes, throws, dives, taunts and more, all of which either damage to the opponents’ body or build the momentum of your own wrestlers’ adrenaline, which enables a successful pinning (or submission or count-out) victory. In other words, the game treats wrestling as if it’s a hybrid of combat and performance, with the player driven by more competitive intent to maim than in the real thing. It’s a good system that demands the player learn how to smoothly chain their moves to build momentum. And it is a a rewarding one, as Yukes has managed to capture and animate hundreds of moves that transition from one to the next with, of all the rare qualities in games, grace. Winning a match in this game is a performing pleasure.

The WWE Recreated: Even a lapsed fan of WWE such as myself stumbles across Smackdown on Friday nights or remembers older episodes of Raw well enough to see that Edge’s shoulder-twitch during his ring entrance is true to life, that Shawn Michaels’ super-kick should look as perfect as it does and that selecting Shelton Benjamin will grant the player access to a cool set of moves. The game’s venues, from the pay-per-view-specific entrance ramps to the backstage announce areas, look perfect. The tone of violence and sex — an endless parade of T&A and at least one storyline involving a female wrestler sleeping her way to the top — matches squarely with even today’s toned-down WWE. The announcing sounds right, issued by (mostly) the right people. This game is very WWE.

The Thesis-Worthy Story-Editor: Of all the new features this year, conveniently marked “NEW” in the game’s menu for people like me, the best and most interesting is the storyline editor. In the past, wrestling game fans could create their own wrestlers, customise move-sets and even, more recently, chain pieces of animation to create new match-ending finishing moves. In the new game, players can craft a storyline, mixing matches that include player-defined outcomes with story-advancing sequences. The latter scenes are comprised of WWE-related locales (rings, locker rooms, offices) with wrestlers, a variety of conversational and confrontational emotions, adjustable camera angles, selectable music and crowd-noise background sounds and, most importantly, player-written dialogue. The system’s interface has some rough edges that players can work around but is nonetheless fascinating.

This is what you’d write your thesis about: Pro wrestling is already an odd blend of fake sport and acted drama, something fans appreciate as real and unreal at the same time (We know that John Cena is a man really named John Cena, but we also know that the Undertaker is not really a man who has risen from the dead. We buy into the idea that the Stone Cold Stunner hurts, because it looks like it does; we laugh with The Rock that the People’s Elbow does not hurt, because we know that he knows that we know that his big elbow move is a love tap at worst). In a wrestling game, that reality/unreality gets twisted some more, as the action in the ring is made to seem both more real than it is in real life (The depicted action in a WWE game involves hurting an opponent thoroughly enough to win, not simply entertaining the crowd through fake-fighting) and less real (The moves in the game, animated without fear of causing bodily harm, are made to look more impactful, thereby exposing how deadly and illegal they ought to really be). The new game’s story editor knots these strands of truth and untruth even more. Maybe gamers have been able to re-arrange games through mods for years. Maybe they’ve been able to puppeteer fake lives through The Sims for over a decade. But now we can mangle and morph the pseudo-reality of real celebrities through the WWE. We could craft a storyline in which CM Punk demands to know John Cena’s favourite colour and then wrestles the answer out of him (I did this. Search for it on Xbox Live using the keyword phrase “Favorite Color”). We could make a storyline in which WWE Diva “A” falls in love with WWE Wrestler “Z” but is seduced away by the Create-A-Wrestler character who you designed to look just like a muscular Bill O’Reilly. (I did not do this.) You’re playing with sort-of real lives. You’re creating officially-sanctioned slash-fiction. You’re kind of writing the next Indiana Jones adventure at the same time that you’re kind of writing the next thing for Harrison Ford to do. The layers of reality and unreality are dense.

The Unintended Consequences: Maybe a simpler way to praise the interesting aspects of the Create A Storyline editor is to mention that I downloaded a storyline called something like “One Night After Raw,” and after meeting a condition to have Shawn Michaels win a match, and after sitting through a series of backstage vignette’s written with not the best user-generated spelling, my Shawn Michaels was then ambushed in the ring by three definitely-not-licensed wrestlers from rival company TNA. For years wrestling fans have wanted to book Raw themselves. Now they can do it virtually, for me to play through. Too bad the game’s canned announcers were still plugging the WWE website instead of reacting to what this one user created.

The Royal Rumble: The game has a revised button-mashing mini-game for eliminating people in its Royal Rumble. The 30-man elimination match is often the most fun pro wrestling match of the year, so any improvements that more authentically let me, as Vince McMahon, team up with The Great Khali to flip some-user’s Street Fighter Sagat over the top rope is ok by me.

The Sense Of Pain: WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 is one of those eye-catching games that other people in the room, who may be tired of the Bret Hart and Mankind books on the bookshelf, can’t help but be drawn into. Why? I believe it’s because the animations are so good that they look like they connect and that the moves hurt, which, given the combat that is supposed to be depicted here, is a victory.

Hated
Poor Counter-Attack Training: The game’s menu-screen training arena allows players to swiftly try and learn many of the basic single or double-input commands needed to execute the extraordinary variety of maneuvers available in the game. Consider, for example, that you may want to make your wrester who is standing next to the ropes in the ring either jump over the ropes, crawl under them, wind up on the apron of the ring or on the floor or not do any of that and climb the turnbuckle… or take the padding off the turnbuckle. And there’s a button combo for each of those. offence is easily learned and joyfully executed. But the trick to mastering the game seems to be the execution of a single-input counter-move. The same button counters anything. Animated prompts appear during training and in the game’s matches to alert the player that a window to counter has opened. But those windows close so quickly that that game does a poor job teaching the player how to execute this key move well.

The Online Limitations:The WWE game’s online competitive wrestling worked fine and minus the lag I saw some complaining about on message boards. But I found the skill-level-matching inadequate. I can breeze through normal difficulty but can’t find a player online who I can beat? I also can’t easily re-find my uploaded wrestling storyline to find out how people have rated it, nor can I select which ones to download with any filters other than most recent and most-highly-rated. Overall, the options for the game’s online modes are just not specific enough for the needs a player might have. The content and gameplay available through online, though, is solid.

Immediately Outdated: I played a developer-scripted storyline that involved a rivalry between Edge and Mr. Kennedy. But Mr. Kennedy doesn’t work for WWE anymore. Many of our matches were announced by Jim Ross and Tazz. But Tazz doesn’t work for WWE anymore, either. Both men left the company in 2009, and I understand the challenges of adapting to such changes. But this is one of those things that, as a potential consumer, I just want to have work right. This is an online-connected game. So let’s see it adapt to the present.

Buried Info:What are my character’s finishing moves and what position does his opponent have to be in so I can execute them? How am I doing in career mode in terms of raising my wrestlers’ ability to connect with the crowd and raise his charisma stat? There are many pieces of information that are relevant to the gameplay of Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 that seem to have been omitted from menu screens and the instruction manual, possibly being reserved for the official game guide. That leaves the player to stumble across or guess many important details. This is not a bad thing for those who don’t like a lot of tutorials and explanations, but gamer beware that you’ll have to figure a lot of this game out for yourself.

I used to avoid pro wrestling games because of my disinterest in fighting games and my belief that the games treated pro wrestling as something different than what I enjoyed. I liked the acrobatics and the melodrama of real WWE. The games, I guessed, treated the whole affair as if it was straight-up sport. WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 still does treat pro wrestling a little more as sport than I’d want. Things like winning streaks are almost required in the game, even though they are rare in the real wrestling leagues.

But the addition of configurable storylines provides that element of unpredictable, scripted entertainment that has made WWE programming, in some years, among the best and most enjoyably wild material on TV. Finally, I’m interested. The fact that the configurable narratives — the post-Sims, post-mods playing we can do with sort-of real lives — is a spectacular and mind-bending bonus.

(WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 was developed by Yukes and published by THQ for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS and Wii on October 20. Retails for $US59.99/$AU99.95 on the home consoles. An copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played the 360 version. Won the Royal Rumble as Vincent Kennedy McMahon. Made it on the Road To Wrestlemania as Edge. Progressed Shelton Benjamin up a career ladder to ECW and Intercontinental title glory. Created, uploaded and downloaded storylines. Invented a new top-rope finishing move. Got pinned a lot online, including by a female version of MVP.)

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THQ’s latest grappler, WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 looks like it may have a glitch that could leave your WWE superstar embarrassingly pantsless, as shown in the above, potentially NSFW video that features virtual ladies sans underthings.

Reader Nathan was on the unfortunate receiving end of that glitch, resulting in a user created WWE “diva” whose outfit is clearly not fit for primetime. Nathan’s experience with WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010’s create a wrestler mode is more unfortunate, in that this particular instance of wrestler nakedness was borne of a game ending lock up.

As you can probably expect, this sort of bare bottom polygonal action is probably not safe for watching while in a cubicle. It’s also potentially offensive to anyone disturbed by the sight of a pantsless Barbie doll. You have been warned!

We’ve reached out to THQ to see just how widespread this shocking digital nudity really is…

In Marvel Super Hero Squad, tiny cartoon versions of your favourite Marvel heroes and villains race to collect Infinity Fragments in order to either forge them into the Infinity Sword and take over the world, or prevent that very occurrence from happening. The storyline is ripped directly from The Super Hero Squad Show on Cartoon Network, itself based on Hasbro’s line of superdeformed action figures. Once you finish story mode, the game also features a Battle Mode that allows up to four players to step into the boots, shoes, spandex, or bare feet of their favourite Marvel characters and beat the living daylights out of each other.

As enticing as that all sounds, Marvel Super Hero Squad is still a game aimed at children. Does that mean that only children will enjoy it? Read on, true believer.

Loved
Strange Tales: Marvel Super Hero Squad is a kiddy game, but the plot and the way missions are split up is very reminiscent of the way multi-character team-up events were once traditionally treated by Marvel Comics. An Infinity Crystal is shattered in the initial chapter, and then subsequent chapters feature individual heroes—Hulk, Wolverine, Falcon, Iron Man, Thor and Silver Surfer—as they fight through countless enemies in order to retrieve the fragments before Dr. Doom and his henchmen do. Each chapter is distinct and tailored to the hero involved — Thor fights his brother Loki in Asgard; the Silver Surfer is transported through alternate dimensions; Falcon has to do a lot of flying; and the Hulk just wants ice cream. Okay, maybe the last one was a stretch.

The Squadron Supreme: They may be tiny, but there sure are a lot of them. Between the story mode and the battle mode, Marvel Super Hero Squad features a nice selection of the best and worst that Marvel has to offer. You’ve got your core hero group, with Ms. Marvel barking orders from behind her S.H.I.E.L.D. desk; a motley cast of villains including Dr. Doom, Mole Man, MODOK, Loki, Crimson Dynamo, and Sabretooth; and then you’ve got supporting characters like Storm, Invisible Woman, and The Thing. If you were looking for a game with tiny little Marvel characters running about, hitting things, then this is your game.

Secret Wars: Once you unlock all of the playable characters and finish story mod, you’re left with quite a passable little brawler for 1-4 players. It’s a watered-down Super Smash Bros. with 3D movement, a nice selection of tiny Marvel characters and arenas, and the ability to fight in free-for-all or squad-based battles. It isn’t perfect, but there are far worse things you could do with four friends and four Wii remotes.

Funny Pages: While the majority of the humour in Marvel Super Hero Squad is aimed at the much younger set, it does have its fair share of funny moments. The characters are versions of their grown-up counterparts with their flaws exaggerated to humorous effect. Take the Silver Surfer, for instance. He’s long been one of Marvel’s most long-winded, introspective characters, which in the MSHS universe translates into a Keanu Reeves-sounding surfer dude who thinks really deep thoughts. Some of the dialogue is rather witty as well, such as when Magneto quips, “You interrupted me while I was erasing hard drives just for fun.” That’s what I would do if I was Magneto.

Hated
The Vile Voice Acting: I realise the game is based off a cartoon which in turn is based on a toy line for toddlers, but even a toddler would wince at some of the voice acting in Marvel Super Hero Squad. It starts with Mole Man and MODOK sharing the same high-pitched squeaky voice and then goes downhill from there. When Stan Lee is one of the most dynamic voice actors in the game, you know something isn’t quite right.

The Chaotic Camera: The camera in Marvel Super Hero Squad does grant a certain amount of control to the player, but it isn’t quite enough to keep from getting hung up on scenery or stuck behind your character at times when that isn’t a good place for it to be. It’s also a very large pain during some of the more delicate platforming moments in the game, when you can’t quite tell where you’ll need to jump to avoid being plunged into molten lava.

The Enigmatic Easiness: Once again, Marvel super Hero Squad is a kid’s game, so don’t expect any real challenge here. Even when you uncheck Easy Mode, which seems to be checked by default before each mission, you can easily breeze through the game’s story mode in a few hours. If you are a small child, it’s probably perfect. If you are reading Kotaku, chances are you are not a small child, or your parents are really irresponsible.

The key thing to remember about this review is that I am a 36-year-old man, and therefore not the target demographic for Marvel Super Hero Squad. This is not a game that was developed with the 36-year-old man in mind. I am also a gigantic comic book geek, however, so I can still appreciate the title as a method for introducing a younger audience to the heroes that helped make me the slightly twisted individual I am today, and while some of the things Marvel has done to cater to the younger audience border on blasphemy in my eyes, I’m confident that those younger Marvel fans will eventually graduate to grown-up superheroes (really?), looking back on their time with Marvel Super Hero Squad and thinking how stupid they were back then.

Until that day, Marvel Super Hero Squad serves as a fine entry into the world of comic book heroes for the younger set, but once you get past the point when you start adding “teen” to the end of your age it’s probably time for something meatier.

Marvel Super Hero Squad was developed by Blue Tongue and published by THQ for the Wii on October 20th. Retails for $US39.99 USD. Additional versions exist for the PSP, PS2, and Nintendo DS. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played through story mode and played through multiple fights in battle mode.

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The announcement trailer for THQ and 4A Games’ post-apocalyptic shooter Metro 2033 sets the stage for what could very well be mankind’s last stand.

THQ announced the 2010 game this morning, posting this trailer on the game’s official site to introduce prospective players to the setting. The game is based on Dmitry Glukhovsky’s popular Eastern European novel, the synopsis for which gives you a pretty good idea of where the game is going.

The book is currently available in Russian and German, though Amazon has a listing for an English language version being released in February of next year, which should give you plenty of time to bone up before diving into post-apocalyptic Moscow.