Dark sector is the type of game that people like to refer to as a hidden gem. It's a fairly unique and obscure IP that looks kinda cool and hasn't been used since. In reality, I can only really agree with the hidden part. Dark sector is a 3rd person cover based shooter ala gears, which adds in a couple of extra mechanics to add a bit of spice to the game. The visuals are the first thing I noticed, and you will see a very dark and brooding game, and this style is pretty nice. The most loved aspect of the game is the super sharp boomerang that you can use to slice up enemies. You can fling it through fire and it will set enemies on fire and there are some puzzles that use it too. Aside from these two points we have a fairly bland game. Maybe I'm just a bit fed up of gears-ish games, but I don't even think the cover system works all that well here. The levels are fairly dull and linear, intersected with some alright boss battles. Nothing really changes throughout the game. Each level is effectively a corridor of enemies who jump out at you, with a a little bit of cover to hide behind. If the gameplay was clean and fast like gears I could accept this, but it's just not quite as polished which left me feeling a bit bored. A game which is unfortunately far less interesting than it looks, which ends up being just ok. In 2023 you are probably tired of these time of games so I'd suggest leaving this one.

It's almost surprising how many different genres of racing game you can find on the 360. This is the 2nd of the Moto Gp series to be released on the 360, and is an officially licensed product. Like a lot of these official licensed racers, it's not particularly forgiving on the beginner. I mean i'm sure moto racing is super challenging in real life, but I was basically falling off at every corner, and as a video game that is no fun! With that in mind, you can see this is definitely aimed at the more experienced and skilled players, and I'm sure fans of Moto Gp will get some enjoyment out of this. But it's a real kick in the face to new players when the training is extremely poorly executed and difficult to understand. Unless you have nostalgia for this year or moto gp, or love simulation racing games, this is probably one to avoid.

Many many moons ago, before Assassin's Creed was the yearly franchise that it is today, before it had become one of worst offenders of the typical Ubisoft game, it was one of the coolest ideas in gaming. From all of the cool and interesting IPs that we got with the 360/PS3 generation, I think AC was the one with the most promise. A historical game featuring assassins and templars, secret societies, beautiful realistic ancient world cities like Jerusalem, bustling with life and NPCs that you could actually interact with, bump into etc. I wasn't a huge fan of the whole animus sub plot, let's just set it in the past, but aside from that it's such a great concept. And at the time, it was a big hit and its easy to see why. For 2007 the environments are incredible, bursting with detail and life. Damascus and Jerusalem are beautiful to look at and are still fairly vast and detailed to todays standards. Nowadays, and perhaps because of the better sequels, AC1 has been somewhat cast aside, perhaps unfairly for that matter. Now, personally I am in two minds about this, because I am not an AC fan. The issue is really what I think of as the gameplay loop. Now the basic gameplay is fine. It offers a parkour style of gameplay similar to mirrors edge where you can run up and jump across building automatically just by holding a button. You traverse the environment, climbing up building and hiding from ensuing enemies as you explore the city. There is a bit too much fighting in this game, and a lack of stealth, but it's not horrible. The way the game works, once you get into it, is you are sent on a mission to assassinate someone. Once you get to that location you need to climb towers around the city to uncover the map, and then complete some smaller tasks like assassinating someone or chasing someone to get more information about the target. Once you have done enough you can actually go and assassinate the target. The problem is, all of this pre-assassination set-up is not good. It's boring, virtually identical for every mission and really just feels like filler. The main event assassinations are better as they offer some story and a bit of variety, and give a nice break from all the time spent doing what seem like procedurally generated sub missions. It upsets me how un-fun this series is, because I really want to love it and that makes it difficult to review. As much as I don't really enjoy playing it, AC is still an impressive world. The story and environments are excellent, it looks beautiful and has most of the basics that made the AC creed franchise so popular. A flawed but impressive IP that I can recommend only as an impressive point of reference and not as a fun game.

This game will be forever remembered for the award on the front of the box art. Proudly wearing it's best of E3 on its cover art like a badge of honour, Raven Squad comes crashing and burning onto your console with a very awkward splash. A FPS game where you control two squads of 3 soldiers, Raven squad lets you move between a first person mode and a tactical overhead camera, to control you two teams and infiltrate enemy compounds. It's a fairly unique game on the system and the concept seems really cool. Of course, if you have heard of this game, you will know its a C grade, so bad its good style game, and was not met with rave reviews. In some ways this has actually helped RS age well. People will probably have more fun playing it now than on release. The stereotypical characters, over the top voice acting, just plain dumb cutscenes, everything about this game is cheap and tacky in a endearing way, and it could have been good. The premise of the game feels like it could work and for a couple of minutes it kinda does. There is one section where you have to defend a group hostages as they tried to escape while getting attacked by waves of enemies. The enemies come from both sides so you need to use your tactical view wisely to hold of enemy waves, then switch to your FPS mode to deal some damage. The thing is, this is probably the only time I found the game to work as intended. Most of the time you can just jog through the game in FPS mode, with its frankly horrible controls and shoot everyone with one dude. Each soldier has different weapons and specials, a sniper, heavy machine gunner, close range shotgun dude. They have grenades, smoke bombs etc etc. Again thought, you rarely need to be tactical in this game. As expected the levels are bland and ugly, it is unresponsive and hard to control and of course, the classic mega short 3 hour campaign. BUT, and this is a big but, it is fairly interesting. It attempts something different and fails in a funny way, which in 2023 I quite admire. There are no games like this released nowadays and for that reason I think it's a worthy addition to a collection. It does suck though.

I hate this game. Maybe the hate is a little unwarranted, but its just so forgettable. In fact I beat the campaign last night and I can barely remember it. Now I am not an FPS snob by any means. I love a crappy FPS. Shell-shocked 2, Soldier of fortune, Rogue warrior, hell even Turning point had an interesting concept. But this, this is just bland. Jump through a 10 level romp around very similarly rocky locations, fighting the same group of enemies with basically the same weapons. It handles fine. The graphics are fine. The story is fine. There's just something about it that seems so unnecessary. I mean this was the era of Call of Duty and Battlefield Bad Company, and you can see this game borrows heavily from them. Heavy scripted shooting sections in modern times with some gruff real american heroes by your side. You can forgive Danger Close Games for trying to tap into this popularity. And there is the Tier 1 mode which adds a bit of challenge and replay ability to the game. I just really can't recommend this, even to hardcore FPS fans.

So I should start by saying that this is not a good game but it is a game I really enjoyed. Released in 2007, Vampire Rain got absolutely hammered by reviewers at the time, people hated this game. The difficulty is often brought up, the wooden characters, horrible weapons, the list goes on. I'd argue this is one of those games that's actually been misrepresented and I will try to explain why. Vampire Rain is a stealth/action horror game released by Japanese developers Actoon. Gameplay wise it is quite similar to MGS. You sneak your way around a fairly open and large map, trying to avoid enemies. You play as "American of Welsh decent" John Llyod, a member of the AIB, a special forces group, dealing with a infestation of nightwalkers in the city. The story and dialogue are campy B-movie style, but pretty fun. I actually found the story fairly engaging, and really enjoyed the setting in the rainy streets of LA. The excellent music also adds to the atmosphere and helps the game feel less low budget than it actually is, it's probably one of my favourite music scores on the console. The nightwalkers or vampires themselves are the main enemy you are facing. From a distance they look like normal people, but if they spot you they transform into monsters and charge directly at you. In this respect the game is definitely a stealth game. If an enemy spots you, you are basically dead. This is also probably down to the weakness of the weapons. The pistol does absolutely nothing and the SMG can kill 1 enemy if they are far away enough when they spot you. The real problem is that the game doesn't do a very good job of explaining this, and in my opinion this is what has lead people to label the game as too hard. The second level of the game, where you first encounter an enemy, is a great example of this. When you meet the nightwalker you need to hide around a corner, shoot the birds away, wait for the vampire to come and look around, then when it starts walking away make a dash down the road. This took me around 10 attempts to get right. If you make any kind of mistake you are dead. It's stuff like this early on in the game that really pose a problem for people just getting into the game and I have a feeling that a lot of people that complain about the game, didn't actually get very far. If you can get past these random hard sections Vampire Rain is a lot of fun. It's nice exploring the city, hiding from vampires and finding alternative routes to get past vamps. There are even some better weapons later on that make the game much easier, in some ways too easy in fact. There are some things about the game I dislike. It is very linear. Each level has one real route that you are meant to take and if you try deviating from it, well you will die. But I can't help feel like most reviews are a bit too harsh due to the frustrating nature of a small number of sections. I beat the game, enjoyed it and would play it again. It's not polished. It's not very well made or explained. Yet it is fun to play, and I found myself enjoying it more than a lot of "good" games. I'd grab this one for your collection and see if you can enjoy it with a bit of effort.

Development cycle hell game with horrible reviews on release, Aliens Colonial Marines is a mess. It's a real shame as it could have been really decent, especially seeing as how good Alien Isolation was. Instead of an interesting horror game, we have a fairly generic FPS which isn't quite as bad as most people say. With a fairly standard story of a fire-team being sent into a space ship with unknown problems, ACM takes you along a very short campaign with some standard multiplayer features that we don't need to think about in 2024. Perhaps it was my really low expectation, but I did find myself enjoying my time with the game. I didn't notice many glitches which are frequently complained about and did quite enjoy the atmosphere of the game which looks and feels like the movie. The dark abandoned space ship, the Xenomorphs which constantly hunt you and the motion tracker. Now this doesn't hide the poor enemy AI and bog-standard FPS combat, but it does go some way to make the game more enjoyable. Aliens Colonial Marines is kinda bad, but not as bad as everyone thinks. As a huge FPS and Aliens fan, I enjoyed my time with ACM. If you see it cheap, give it a try.

The year is 1995, it's Saturday morning and you are playing Sega Rally on your Saturn. You have the whole weekend ahead of you. No homework to do. Pure bliss. These were the heydays of the arcade racer, but at some point we lost our way. By the time the Xbox 360 had been released, driving games focused more on realism, car customisation, story and real life locations. Sure there are a lot of great and revolutionary racing games on the console. Grid brought the excellent rewind feature, Test Drive unlimited brought a beautiful open world Hawaiian island, Forza 2 created an almost perfect racing package, all of these changed the way we view racing games. In this regard, Sega Rally Revo stood out like a sore thumb. A pure arcade rally game, with no damage, no customisation, no real life tracks. It didn't go down well with reviewers and in my opinion has been severely misjudged. SRR is an excellent classic arcade racer and a must play for all retro arcade racing fans. For a start the racing is smooth and competitive. You take part in a selection of championships, 3 races for each event, against 5 AI opponents. The difficulty of these opponents cannot be changed and it does get really tough. The AI will attack you aggressively at corners and jump at you if you make even the smallest mistake. It's a hard but fair style of racing. There are times when you have managed to pick up speed and are ready to overtake the pack but the car in front of you swerves right into your path causing you to lose all momentum. At the same time, sometimes when you make a mistake the AI will come crashing into the back of you sending you flying forward and able to hold onto your position. It's both frustrating and incredibly satisfying at the same time. You have 6 sets of tracks, based of different locations and track types. Arctic has snow and volcano ash on the track, and the icy roads will have you skidding. Safari tracks are dusty which affects your vision. The Canyon tracks get very muddy with huge water puddles that slow you right down. Every track feels different in terms of the feedback from the road and it's a real nice feature which I much prefer to having a huge number of tracks that feel the same. Similarly, while there are not a huge number of cars in the game, each one handles differently and you will have favourites based on how they handle the terrain. As mentioned earlier, you are not bogged down by car customisation or autobraking. You have 2 options, auto or manual gears and a road or off-road set up. It keeps things simple and focuses the game on the fun part, racing. What makes the game really standout is the graphics and the deformable terrain. This game looks incredible. It's not something that I really pay attention to in games but even for a 2007 release, it's one of the best looking games on the console. The car models are nice and the lighting works well, but it's the tracks and the environment which really standout. This is probably due to the aforementioned deformable terrain. As you race around the circuits, the tracks themselves are affected by your racing lines. This could be simple like cutting lines in the snow to make it more compact and creating a harder more grippy surface for racers behind you, or more impressively changing the formation and area of puddles of water in the road as you carve through the mud. It really changes the tracks every single race and keeps things fresh and exciting. It looks beautiful too. I love getting my car all caked up in mud before driving through a puddle and washing it all off. Every time I play this game I enjoy it a bit more and I can't sing it's praises enough. So is it perfect? Well no. I can understand people being frustrated by its difficulty. A big crash can really mess you up for a whole race and the AI is brutal. The small number of tracks may be a turn off for some, but each race plays out differently each time so I have never found it an issue. One minor issue I have with the game is that you always start off at the back of the pack, no matter where you finished in the previous race, but this is mere nitpicking. I'm an official SRR fan boy now. There is nothing like it on the console and it is a must have for any 360 collector.

The guys at Koei seem intent on realising the same game in as many ways possible. Not satisfied with having Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors they decided to combine them into this package, the first in the Warriors Orochi series. It is basically the same hack and slash gameplay as the others Warriors games and if you are familiar with those games, it's more of the same. Of course this is extremely lazy, but it makes for an easy review. What has changed? Well there is one positive. In this game you get to fight as a team of 3 instead just 1. I do welcome this change. Rotating characters when they are low on health and using characters with different move sets for different battles adds a bit of tactics to the otherwise mash X game. The story is also a little bit more interesting but nothing special. I also found this game pretty hard compared to other warriors games, but maybe I just suck. Better than the standard warriors games but still nothing particularly special. Unless you love these, I wouldn't bother picking this up.

With all the more recent excellent battlefield campaigns like Battlefield 1 and Bad Company 2, it's easy to forget that the first few battlefield games didn't even include a campaign. For whatever reason, they decided to change that with the release of Battlefield 2 Modern Combat, the first battlefield release on the 360. Based on the PC game battlefield 2, which was multipalyer only, the console version offers a fairly decent single player mode which is very similar to the multiplayer mode. This was a great decision as the multiplayer mode is what battlefield excels at. You are a nameless soldier in wave upon wave of others working together to capture bases and advance further behind enemy lines. It does feel clunky and a bit basic, but it's a real nice throwback to shooters of old and plays to the series strengths. Similarly to the excellent Call of Duty 2, your AI teammates are vital to your survival, and the war off attrition feeling to the game keeps your pushing to make it a little further each run. One of the best aspects of the campaign is the Hot-Swapping feature, which lets your warp between different soldiers at will and pick who you respawn as. This keeps the action constantly going and you can be tactical about who you pick to face the different challenges of each mission. Another funny quirk of the game is how much damage you take is related to how many enemies you can see on the screen. This means that in some cases the best tactic is to look at the floor and just run forward. It's stupid stuff like this that makes the game more enjoyable and it really works as a dumb fun throwback FPS. Surprisngly good and a definitely worth picking up for cheap.

This is the type of game that probably divides people into 2 groups. People who played the game or enjoyed Bakugan as a kid and people who have no idea what it is. I was in the latter group, but having played around half the game, I'm pleasantly surprised. Let's get the obvious out the way, Bakugan is a dated childrens game, which is very simple to play, a little repetative and has horrible graphics. Yet hiding under all of that is a fairly fun animated game. Bakugan is a pokemon style creature brawler. You have different Bakugans, think pokeball and pokemon combined, with different elements (water fire etc) and their own attacks and abilities. The game tells a, as far as i can tell, original story of a boy who is dropped into the bakugan universe. You have to help all the "famous" Bakugan characters to save their world. The story is cheesy as hell, but fun for kids and surprisingly well fleshed out with nice simple cutscenes. The gameplay is split into two different sections, which adds a bit of variety. A simple 3d roaming collection and sneaking section, where you need to get to the end zone without being spotted. This is followed by a battle section where your Bakugan of choice will fight against of bakugans to defend your base and destroy the enemies base. There's a little more to the gameplay, but its fairly simple and easy to pick up. It's not mind-blowing, but It's a pretty interesting game, and I would say a worthy addition to a collection, especially if you have kids.

Carrier Command: Gaea Missions, a reboot of a series that you have probably never heard of. With a very weird title, CCGM was destined to fail. Of course, poor selling games can sometimes be fun or offer something new, but Carrier Command is just a mess. The game is an odd mixture of very bland FPS gameplay with some vehicular combat and some very limited strategy elements. It's the same old story of developers dumbing down games and turning them into first person shooters for the console release, but it leaves a extremely unenjoyable experience. Starting off on a warship, you will deploy vehicular combat units onto a map and then control one of them while issuing orders to the others. The areas are quite vast but extremely bland and the simple enemies and repeated gray bases provide little in the way of visual stimulus. Controlling your vehicles can be an issue, especially in water, which creates lots of frustrating sections of gameplay. The FPS sections are not any better, with some of the weakest feeling guns I can remember on the console. I spent a few hours fumbling around the campaign, most of the time getting frustrated by the lack of guidance and my own lack of progression. Definitely one of the least enjoyable games in terms of gameplay on the console. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Another quite random NTSC release, Little League is a kid-friendly baseball game, not dissimilar to the Mario sports series. Based on the sport of baseball, LL is full of all the cute colourful graphics and chibi syle characters that you would expect from one of these kids sports ventures. Now, as far as sports games go, one issue I normally have with them is that if you are not into the sport, it can be very difficult to pick up and get the hang of. I suppose for most people, if you don't like sport X, you wont be interested in playing sport X games. With this in mind, LL is refreshing in the same way the Mario sports games can be. It does a great job at explaining baseball to a novice like me, and the tutorials make the game understandable. It's easy to pick up and play. The downside is that that's all I can really say in terms of positives. LL is an extremely shallow game with few redeeming features, which really should have been a cheap arcade title. There is a severe lack of features in the game, and while I am not expecting a detailed baseball game, I was looking forward to some cool powerups or mini games, like the Mario kart series. These were few and far between. There are barely any game modes and the gameplay itself seems almost random. Through my short time with the game, it didn't seem to make much difference how I played and I wasn't able to get much better as I practiced. My final complaint is the poor camera, which leaves it impossible to see the action at times. What is boils down to is this. LL is a cheap arcade game that never really should have got a full retail release. It may seem novel at first, but this shine wears off very quickly.

So here we go with some more rally action. WRC 2 is an officially licensed rally game, with more realistic controls, driving and damage. WRC 2 is the second in the WRC series on the 360, and the first that wasn't released in the US. So, are US rally fans missing out on anything? Well, to be quite honest, no. It's really difficult to actually pinpoint any differences between this and WRC 1. Yes, it does have a rewind function which makes it more accessible for the casual gamer. Apparently, there are some changes to the campaign, but I didn't notice them. Appealing to the casual gamer in some ways defies the point of WRC 2 though. WRC 1 was seemingly for more hardcore rally fans, with more realistic controls and racing. If you were interested in a more accessible (or better) rally game, surely you would buy dirt instead? In 2023 this game is no better or worse than WRC 1, but its lower because at least 1 was original. Buy Dirt 3 instead.

The first of 2 Monster truck games released on disk for the console, Monster Jam puts in you the shoes of a Monster Truck driver taking part in a variety of competitions. It's officially licensed so it is packed with all the famous trucks such as Grave Digger and in what I assume are real life locations and competitions from around the globe. I was pretty new to Monster Trucks before playing this, so let me try to run down how it works. A section of the game is some fairly standard racing competitions. You race against other trucks and smash through obstacles, smash into each other and smash through different routes and shortcuts. These are probably the most interesting part of the game. It's quite difficult at first. The trucks skate around as if they are on ice and crashes can send you flying off the track. This is probably fairly realistic as I can't image these trucks are easy to drive in real life. However, once you get used to the controls it is pretty fun. The physics are nice and it's great smashing through the environment. You get a real feel of the track and going over jumps is a lot of fun. The other modes are an elimination mode which is quite similar to racing, a trick based mode which is a bit like tony hawks in a monster truck and a head to head mode which is a time trial. These other modes add some variety but are not as good as the racing. The main issue with the game is how quickly I got bored with it. There's no real progression to the game. Each level just feels like more of the same and is in reality quite simplistic, which detracts from the fun and the longevity of the game. I wouldn't bother with this one but I didn't hate it.