ROME II: TOTAL WAR (sort of) announced

A fan-made logo.

 Creative Assembly have revealed that the next Total War title will be announced on 6 July at the Rezzed gaming convention. At the same time a number of PC gaming magazines have said that there will be a big reveal in their July issues. One of them, PC Gameplay, went as far as listing the contents for their next issue and confirming there will be an article on Total War: Rome II (or Rome II: Total War for those who preferred Creative Assembly's old-school naming system).

Excellent news. Rome: Total War was an excellent strategy game (well, once the patches upgraded the AI to something more formidable) and the last title in the series to garner near-universal praise. We can assume that Rome II will have vastly superior graphics and will likely employ the same format as the recent Empire, Napoleon and Shogun 2 (apparently it will continue to use the Warscape engine of those games) games by having both naval and ground battles, as well as possibly combined-arms operations. Expect more news in a couple of weeks' time when the formal announcement is made.

Metro 2033

2033. Twenty years have passed since a nuclear apocalypse ended civilisation. A number of survivors have built an underground society based in the Moscow Metro. Stations and their adjoining halls and tunnels now serve as towns, some banded together into factions. Some of these factions are at war with one another, and all are threatened by the hostile creatures (transformed by radiation into mutants) that roam the tunnels and the overground.

A young man named Artyom volunteers to leave his station and journey to the largest town in the metro, Polis, to seek help against the creatures threatening to destroy his home. However, this is only the start of a long journey as he discovers that there is a potentially greater threat gathering and he may be the only hope of stopping it.

Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter developed by the Ukrainian 4A Studios, an off-shoot of the recently-closed GSC Game World (the creators of the STALKER series of games). It's a post-apocalyptic game employing some elements of survival horror in addition to its more traditional FPS trappings.

The game is played from the POV of Artyom, who narrates the game through observations that appear during loading screens. Otherwise, he is a silent protagonist in-game, more willing to listen and learn from other characters than engage in lengthy conversations. The game style is inspired by the Half-Life series, most notably the idea that it's up to the player how much exposition and backstory they need to hear. When in a peaceful area, such as a town, you can simply press on immediately with the next mission or stick around and listen to conversations to pick up more information about the world and setting. There are a variety of NPC characters who help Artyom out during missions, though usually they are forced to bail out at some point, leaving Artyom to press on alone.

The STALKER influence can be seen in the atmosphere, which is dark, brooding and often oppressive. When on the surface or in gas-filled chambers, Artyom has to wear a gas mask to survive. As the gas mask's filter clogs up, his breath starts to fog over the screen and the sound of his increasingly laboured breathing becomes dominant, until he replaces the filter. Finding filters is thus essential to survival (though only truly an onerous task at the highest difficult levels). This gives a tremendous sense of claustrophobia to some parts of the game. Another issue is that bullets are relatively difficult to find in the game and enemies tend to soak up a lot of damage, making the player have to think much more carefully whether to engage in combat or attempt to sneak past enemies by sticking to the shadows.

The game employs a highly naturalistic style to its interface. Your journal and compass are in-game objects and looking at them means unequipping your weapon, which can be lethal in dangerous areas. The onscreen HUD only appears when needed and tends to vanish whenever you're not using it. There are both stealth and morality mechanics, the former tracking how locatable you are and the former how 'good' or 'bad' your decisions have been, but both are invisible to the player. This adds to the atmosphere, as it leaves you wondering if you have made the right decisions rather than being able to hit a button and bring up a bald numerical figure representing your situation.

The game's art style is dark but impressive, cold in atmosphere and successful in conjuring up an air of constant terror during missions. The towns are warmer and richer, with people huddled over fires discussing how they are surviving and merchants eager to sell you their wares. However, the towns are let down by a lack of variety (they're similar to one another, with little in the way of optional side-quests available) and also a sense that they are not necessary. Whilst ammo is very limited, there's usually enough to be looted in the wild to make depleting your (extremely limited) supply of currency. Amusingly, currency in the game are also bullets, which in moments of desperation you can use as ammo.

Combat is chunky and in many cases satisfying, but the game's difficulty level can make it frustrating. At normal difficulty headshots have no impact and enemies can take a lot of damage to kill. At high difficulty levels enemies can be killed more easily, but at the expense of also making you extremely fragile and also making ammo and money extremely difficult to find. Unfortunately, the game also pulls the old Far Cry trick of removing the satisfying human opponents in favour of unconvincing monsters and mutants later on, but unlike Far Cry never brings back the human enemies later on. The mutants tend to be much less satisfying to fight, which is a problem since they dominate the second half of the game. Particularly annoying are the ape-derived 'librarians', who take ludicrous amounts of ammo to put down. There is a system for 'staring them down', but it feels somewhat arbitrary whether employing this tactic is going to work or not.

Metro 2033 features regenerating health, but only at a very slow rate, making it almost impossible to heal up mid-battle (you also have pain-killing injections that speeds up the process, but is little help in frantic firefights). There is also no cover system (at least beyond the old-school 'duck and pop up again to shoot' technique). These reductions in modern gaming's most tedious and over-used elements are successful in returning real menace and tension to combat, although they do sometimes go the other way and make battles annoyingly frustrating to win. This isn't helped by a checkpoint system that, whilst never as enragingly awful as Max Payne 3's, is still sometimes unforgiving, forcing you to replay lengthy sections as punishment for tiny mistakes (or random chance).

The game's atmosphere is tremendously effective, its setting interesting (and surprisingly varied) and the characters you meet and ally with tend to be well-motivated individuals. There's a jet-black sense of humour that constantly pervades the game. The game also has a surprising, twist ending (but only if you've done enough 'good' acts to unlock it) that nicely subverts the violent action game you thought you were playing. This has to be balanced against sometimes frustrating spikes in difficulty and a sometimes ridiculous lack of ammo for a first-person shooter.

Metro 2033 (****) is definitely one of the more original and impressive first-person shooters of recent years. If you can get over its brutally unforgiving difficulty, this is definitely a game worth playing. It is available now in the UK (PC, X-Box 360) and USA (PC, X-Box 360).

Eastbound and Down: Season 1

Kenny Powers is a former baseball pitcher, noted for his powerful throws. He has been forced out of the game due to his drug-taking, partying, abrasive personality and use of steroids, all of which has also left him broke. Returning to his hometown of Shelby, North Carolina, he is forced to move in with his brother's family and take up a position as a temporary sports coach at his old high school. Powers is determined to both return to the major leagues and win back his old sweetheart, who is now engaged to the school principal, but finds it difficult to change his lifestyle and attitude.

Eastbound and Down is a HBO comedy show starring Danny McBride, who also co-created the series. It's strongly similar in style to the Will Ferrell school of comedy (Ferrell is a producer on the show and has a recurring role), based on social faux pas and inappropriate behaviour with awkward silences and a healthy dose of swearing and occasional gross-out moments. However, freed from the cliches of the two-hour comedy movie format, the show is more successful at achieving a decent level of characterisation and (mostly) avoiding mawkish sentiment.

McBride is the show's main star and makes the character of Powers work well. He's not a particularly sympathetic figure, especially as he himself is responsible for almost all of his problems, but is funny and possesses enough personality to make it plausible that he'd have so many friends and people who want to help him, despite his appalling behaviour. Most of the rest of the cast puts in good work, especially John Hawkes and Jennifer Irwin as Kenny's long-suffering brother and sister-in-law, but the show relies on McBride's performance in order to function and he does a good job with the more dramatic stuff (particularly the final episode, which Powers's ambitions and dreams are not so much crushed as painfully atomised) as well as the humour.

The show employs an interesting device where each episode begins the moment the previous ends (breaking this format once), with the story continuously developing over the six-episode season. Character relationships evolve fairly steadily (and amusingly), although Powers's nemesis, Principal Cutler, doesn't work very well. It's good to see Will Ferrell being used fairly sparingly, but also disappointing that Craig Robinson's hilariously inept rival baseball player doesn't get more screentime.

There are some problems with pacing. The show frontloads a lot of its best gags into the first episode and the rest suffer a little in the process, whilst a fair few characters are under-utilised. The short length of the season (six 30-minute episodes) also prevents a number of side-stories from being developed. This does result in a concise, focused series that is surprisingly restless, unwilling to settle into a predictable format and takes a major turn in direction at its conclusion.

The first season of Eastbound and Down (***½) is watchable, funny and overall enjoyable thanks to some good performances, but is slightly let down by uneven pacing, a fair few jokes and moments that fall flat. The show is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).

Consorts of Heaven by Jaine Fenn

It is a time of tribulation for Kerin. Discriminated against in her village for the circumstances of her birth, her son Damaru is skytouched and will soon be blessed by being raised to the ranks of the Consorts. Events are complicated by the discovery of an unconscious man in the mere outside the village. As Kerin helps him regain his health, his memory comes back in fits and starts...and indicates that Kerin's world and everything she knows may be a lie.

Consorts of Heaven is the second novel in Jaine Fenn's Hidden Empire sequence (which currently stands at four books, with a fifth out this year). It is not a follow-up to Principles of Angels, instead taking place roughly simultaneously with it but in a different part of the galaxy. It can be read independently of the first volume. The first novel was more overtly SF, with a dash of the New Weird added to it, but this second volume is more akin to traditional fantasy. It's set in a much more primitive world where some people have abilities that seem similar to magic.

As with her first novel, Fenn has created an interesting world based on some solid foundations, and seeing how this lines up with what was established in Principles of Angels can be fun. Also, as with her first novel, Fenn undercuts the premise and fascinating backstory with a fairly indifferent prose style. This is made even worse by featuring some considerably less-interesting characters than the first book. The major protagonists - Kerin, the amnesiac Sais and the priest Einon - have potential, but ultimately end up being fairly straightforward and predictable. The commentary on the planet's problems, such as being in the grip of a religious theocracy and its issues with rampant sexism, also disappointingly never rise above the obvious.

There are a few nice touches. A traditional SF mega-structure turns up later on in an interesting guise and, despite the primitive setting, we get a lot more information on how the basics of Fenn's SF universe work (such as how FTL is employed in the setting). But ultimately the novel, whilst certainly not disastrous, is not as engaging as its predecessor.

Consorts of Heaven (***) is available now in the UK and USA.

Dungeons and Dragons 3 movie trailer

A trailer has been released for the third movie based on the Dungeons and Dragons franchise. You may gaze upon it below, but I take absolutely no responsibility for anyone smashing their screens in horror at its quality:

The first film, simply entitled Dungeons and Dragons, was an famously rubbish, medium-budget movie released in 2000, starring Jeremy Irons, Thora Birch and Marlon Wayans. The sequel, Wrath of the Dragon God, was released in 2005 and was a near-zero budget movie starring absolutely no-one you've ever heard of. Whilst the first film was awful, it did have some basic watchability (due to the excellent 'down a pint every time Jeremy Irons either overacts or looks like part of his soul has died due to the dialogue' drinking game). The sequel was fifty times worse. If the trailer is accurate, the third will continue this decline in quality to hitherto unsuspected depths.

If you want to watch a decent D&D-based movie, I instead unreservedly recommend The Gamers II: Dorkness Rising, a very zero-budget indie movie made by fans with real talent and wit, and much more successfully nails what makes roleplaying games fun.

Write Like the Wind, George

An amusing musical plea for George R.R. Martin to write a bit faster:

Principles of Angels by Jaine Fenn

Khesh City floats above the uninhabitable surface of the planet Vellern. It is a city of contrasts, with the rich and powerful living on the luxurious surface and the poor and downtrodden forced to live in the Undertow. The city is a democracy by assassination, where unpopular politicians can be removed by official killers known as Angels. When an Angel is brutally murdered, it falls to her nephew, Taro, to learn the reasons why.

Principles of Angels, the debut novel by Jaine Fenn and the first in her loosely-linked Hidden Empire sequence, is a far-future SF novel centred on two contrasting protagonists: Taro, a male prostitute trying to avenge his murdered aunt, and Elarn, a high-class singer who has been blackmailed into travelling to the city to commit a heinous crime. Taro lives in an underworld of crime and exploitation, but is idealistic, which leads him into becoming an agent for the Minister, the city's enigmatic ruler. Elarn is a more civilised character, out to do the right thing but trapped in a situation not of her own making, one which could have severe repercussions for the entire human race. Other major characters include the Minister himself, the Angel Nual and detective/info-broker Meraint. Fenn does an effective job of distinguishing and motivating these individuals, although the focus is firmly on the two main characters (who alternate POV chapters for much of the novel).

A thousand years before the events of the novel, mankind was ruled by an alien species, the Sidhe. Humanity broke free of their control and apparently destroyed them but, as the title of the series indicates, this may not be the case. Fenn does a good job of filling us in on this backstory by seeding the information into the text naturally, not relying on info-dumps. In doing so, she creates an intriguing universe which the reader definitely wants to see more of.

The plot unfolds at a good pace, helped by the book's relatively concise length (the novel is just over 300 pages long in paperback) which keeps events moving nicely. The writing is reasonable, though given the weird and unusual nature of the setting possibly a little too straightforward. Ultimately, events unfold in interesting enough a manner to make the sequels - Consorts of Heaven, Guardians of Paradise, Bringer of Light and Queen of Nowhere - appealing.

Principles of Angels (***½) is a decent debut novel, with well-drawn characters, a memorable setting and an interesting premise. The book suffers a little from too tight a focus on the two principals, which results in some of the more interesting side-cast being neglected, and also from a writing style that feels like it should have been bolder rather than settling for decent. It is still an entertaining book which effectively sets up a fascinating universe. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.