With two major blockbusters hitting the market in previous weeks, two Rip staff members review EA Sports’ Fifa 12 and Epic Games’ Gears of War 3 to help you decide which of these games more fits your style, because although both are more than worthy of a five-star rating, each will provide you with something different.
By Esteban Ramirez
Reporter
The new FIFA video game is out and the world’s most anticipated sports video game, has a few new features and improvements on it.
They put more of a focus on the defensive side of the game, and you won’t have to be a FIFA video game expert to notice it.
For this year’s game, they added more of a realistic feel from the players’ faces to the actual gameplay and they even have new commentators. For the gameplay, you get better ball control on the offensive side, but they’ve also made it harder for players by giving a boost to the defense in actually defending.
In this version, they give you the ability to send defenders to the opponent with the ball, while you can mark their best player, for those who like dominating defenses by muscling their way through many defenders with one player. I would advise you not to do it in this game, unless you have Didier Drogba or someone of that caliber in strength.
Because not only is tackling improving, but they have also improved the ability for the defenders to bump you with their shoulders. That just means you will have to think more strategically on offense, but with the improvements to ball control on offense, you will find different ways to get your goals.
You still have to be careful on defense because they might give an advantage to defenses, but if you push with your shoulders a bit too much you will get called for a foul. It’s the same if you tackle just a little too hard.
In previous games, it would be easy to get the ball back with just one player, but in this one you will find it hard to do it that way because of the improvement on ball control. Thus, you will have to get the ball back with teamwork.
Overall, I thought this game is good and shows that it’s going on the right path by giving you more of a realistic feel for the game.
They also put improvements for the Career Mode features, such as a Youth Academy, scouting for young players and players’ stories.
You can scout for young players by sending scouts to different areas of the world.
After you have scouted those young players and signed them, then you can add them to your Youth Academy, and from then on you can see their development.
In player stories, you will get to see if your players are happy with the team and if they think they should get more playing time, or if they’re unhappy with someone you signed.
New to this year are Head to Head Seasons and Online Friendlies. Head to Head Seasons is an online league, split into 10 divisions. Depending on how you do in your division determines which division they put you in next.
Online Friendlies is where you get to play a friend online for a ten-game season. Whoever wins more gets a trophy for your cabinet, which makes playing your friends more exciting.
By Zak S. Cowan
Editor in Chief
Epic Games and Microsoft brought the hype train in full force for Gears of War 3, and for good reason.
The final installment of the “Gears” series is, without a doubt, one of the best games I’ve ever played.
Gears does the most important thing better than anyone else: firefights. They often last for well over 45 minutes in the story mode, and I found myself exhausted from all the ass kickin’ I was dishing out.
There is so much to the game with four basic gamemodes: Story, Versus, Horde and Beast, there is an endless amount of gameplay that I can’t wait to get back to at this very moment.
It seems in every shooter these days there is a defense-type gamemode, where you have to fend off wave after wave of enemies, usually without an ending. Gears perfected this way back in Gears of War 2, or so I thought, with Horde.
Horde 2.0 brings so much more to that table, and creates a much deeper experience in a tower-defense way.
You earn money throughout the rounds, and you can spend that money on barbed wire, turrets and even mechanical body suits.
Epic Games has done it again, in terms of bringing something completely new to the table that no other shooter is doing. As every other game is fighting to catch up to Horde, Epic has made Horde 10 times better.
Not only have they revamped the gamemode that started the craze, Epic Games has taken Horde and completely flipped it around to make Beast.
Beast is the antonym of Horde.
In Beast, you are the attackers trying to breach the defenses. Not only that, but you play as the Locust (Gears’ antagonists), and not just their regular troops. You get to play as every Locust creature in the story mode, like the fast and agile wretches, the big and beefy butchers and boomers or just the fast and suicidal tickers.
Versus has been tweaked to perfection, and it was hard to find a problem with it.
If there is anything bad to say about the game, it could be that the Versus mode doesn’t bring anything new to the franchise, but it doesn’t have to. It brings perfected versions of all the gametypes of the previous two games.
The game’s campaign is a perfect ending to the franchise, and I was happy with every moment of it. A lot of people have said that Gears’ characters are empty. They are, and I love it.
I get so sick when video games try to be something that they aren’t, and Gears doesn’t. The characters are brutes and were raised to kill, and the only thing they care about is life and family, which drives the whole campaign.
The game’s graphics are amazing, and it is hard to imagine that the first Gears and Gears 3 is on the same console. The massive Locust monsters that you face throughout the campaign look spectacular. It is some of the most impressive graphics I’ve ever seen, especially in a console game.