Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) - Dystopian Video Game Review

I very nearly decided not to attempt a review of Cyberpunk 2077. I have been playing it almost constantly over a four year time period, but it saw me restarting the game several times after being deep into it. The issues with this game at launch were many, but years later it is not only in a much better shape, but had the release of amazing DLC titled Phantom Liberty. I love cyberpunk stuff, I've reviewed things previously here, so here is my attempt at doing written justice to this frankly amazing game.

The game is a first person shooter with driving and RPG elements to it. Mainly taking place in Night City, you play as V (female version voiced by Cherami Leigh), a low level mercenary who through a series of misadventures ends up with an artificial construct of a legendary rocker and terrorist named Johnny Silverhand (voiced by Keanu Reeves - The Matrix trilogy) who died decades previously during an assault on Arasaka (in this dystopian future as is the way with cyberpunk, large corporations rule the world) embedded in her head. With this construct unavoidably taking over her mind, V goes on a hunt to try and find a way to get rid of the construct before it kills her.

I loved this game, I loved the stories told here, I loved the missions, I loved the combat, and I loved the atmosphere. It is a bit of a flawed gem as it got so close to complete greatness but there are some elements that hold it back from a perfect score for me. It plays most like Grand Theft Auto I guess, but instead of driving being the focus, it is the combat and story telling that is the biggest thing. For my build, my V had the ability to hack enemies, uploading viruses to them, and even being able to force them to commit suicide or turn against their teammates. Combat is fast paced and full of great music and brutal and bloody kills. Missions are plentiful and run the gauntlet of cyberpunk style situation. Side quests include such topics as discovering a self-aware vending machine A.I, rescuing a Buddhist monk who had been spliced with tech against his will, and discovering a candidate for the role of Night City mayor is secretly being controlled by a shady group. There is simply too much to go into, I loved the story telling here, there are some really powerful moments. One minor complaint is the amount of side quests that task you with stopping crimes, these little moments are so numerous that at the games start the map screen is covered in the symbols for them.

Then there is Phantom Liberty, taking place in an area of Night City inaccessible in the base game, this twenty to thirty hour DLC features Idris Elba (Luthor TV show) as agent Solomon Reed. It felt like a half-step sequel to the core game due to the amount of improvements here. The story missions are much more involved and detailed, while combat encounters have been levelled up (such as reinforcements arriving during battles). In total, the game took me around a hundred and seventy hours to finish, it is a large game and one that never gets dull due to the intense atmosphere that almost makes you feel like you are in a living city. That is where some complaints come in. The traffic situation is one of the biggest peeves. In the distance the roads are full of cars, yet these fade away when you get close to them, making the city streets feeling a bit dead in terms of vehicles. In general the cars are barely needed, there was a later attempt to add combat to driving, as well as to make the police an actual threat, but it couldn't really be achieved. There are various radio stations featuring some really cool music, but the songs on the stations aren't many (originally you could only listen to the radio while driving, so tracks are limited, something that becomes apparent after they added the ability to listen to music anywhere you go).

This has been a bad review, I just can't put into words how much I enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077, I may even go so far as to include it in my top ten games of all time, despite its issues! It is that much of a nova game choom! Cyberpunk as a concept is something I hope happens in the real world, for now, I'm happy to have such an atmospheric game as this one to occupy my time. Something special, if with some obvious flaws.

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Dying Light: The Following (2016) - Horror Video Game DLC Review (Playstation 4)

I really enjoyed playing Dying Light and so when a sizeable expansion was released (titled The Following) I happily snapped it up. Fast forward some six years later and that DLC was still sat unplayed on my Playstation 4. With Dying Light 2 coming out I thought it was about time I returned to to the original to finish things off, but after playing this ill suited expansion I almost wish I hadn't bothered.

A mortally wounded stranger appears in the zombie infested city of Harran and before he dies he speaks of a cure that has been discovered in the area surrounding the city. With map in hand, the protagonist Kyle Crane (voiced by Roger Craig Smith - Batman: Arkham Origins) heads into the nearby countryside in search of this cure, as the supplies of the virus suppression drug Antizin has almost ran out at the HQ of the main survivors in the city. It is not long before Crane learns there indeed is an apparent cure, a strange cult named 'The Children of the Sun' are said to be immune to the undead, as are its followers, and with this knowledge in hand, Crane sets out to infiltrate the cult and discover the secret to their thriving in an undead world.

The Following is around a ten to twenty hour experience that takes place in an open world setting that is bigger than the base game's two maps combined. Much of this setting is open countryside, while there are a few small towns dotted about the place. To make up for this huge area you get provided with a buggy, this buggy provides you with a new skill tree, points are earned for this skill tree by doing stunts and running over zombies. The buggy, while a neat idea on paper, is what really ruins this DLC. There is only the one vehicle in the entire game, it requires constant repairing of five different key parts, as well as fuel to keep running. Should you accidentally flip over the buggy then there is no way to put it right again, the only option is to slowly traverse the giant world on foot until you can get to a safe house and respawn the vehicle. That wouldn't be such an issue if the buggy wasn't so notoriously difficult not to flip, I literally lost count of the amount of times I was in absolute nowhere and my buggy either got jammed on a bit of the scenery or got knocked over. This made traversal a real headache, add in to this equation of misery a complete lack of a fast travel option and frustration station was the place I spent far too much of the playthrough at. Dying Light wasn't designed to be an open world game with a vehicle, try as they might the antiquities of the base game meant the developers really didn't think things through. It's made even more annoying that quests typically bounce you from one extreme of the map to the other.

Far Cry 5: Dead Living Zombies (2018) - Horror Video Game DLC Review (Playstation 4)

I am a fan of the Far Cry series of action video games and have been slowly working my way through them over the past couple of years. Personally I think that Far Cry 5 was the best game in the series so far. The main game dealt with a crazy cult in America. As much as I loved it, it wasn't horror and so didn't warrant a review. The game featured three additional downloadable experiences. The first had you as a soldier behind enemy lines during the Vietnam war, the second was a comedic jaunt through alien infested Mars, the third is the one I will be looking at in this review as it is all about zombies.

Dead Living Zombies is different to both the main game and the expansions as rather than a large open world area it is instead split into seven different episodes, each of which takes the form of a movie pitch that wannabe director Guy Marvel is describing to a different producer. This is the shortest of the expansions, with each episode totalling anywhere from five to fifteen minutes. So, each episode is a self contained story revolving around the undead. First is Fields of Terror. This takes place in rural America, and has you as a farmer dealing with a zombie outbreak that occurs when a plane crashed in your fields. This was a nice introduction to the expansion, and mainly has you needing to destroy machines which constantly spawn zombies around them.
Burned Bridges is the second one and is one of the better ones here. This has you as a soldier working your way across a devastated bridge. I loved the level design for this one, it remained inventive from beginning to end.
Keeping the imagination going is Undying Love. This is set in a large graveyard and is a retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story, with of course added undead. I will add here that each episode opens and closes on a comic book style intro and epilogue, both detailing Guy Marvel's latest attempt to sell his ideas, but also showing the beginning and end of the stories he is explaining.

The real stinker of this expansion is Escape From the Rooftop. It had a cool backstory to it (zombie apocalypse has meant the survivors all live on rooftops now), but the level itself took place in a moderately sized arena and saw you fighting waves of undead. This was what I had feared the whole of Dead Living Zombies would be, thankfully just restricted to this one level.
Killer Climate is one of the larger episodes here. It has you as a park ranger battling zombie animals, such as wolves, deer, and even a bear. What was cool about this one was the argument Guy and the producer were having as to the direction the story would take, this was reflected by things within the level constantly changing back and forth.
The Fast & The Fiendish was the shortest one here. It had you as an infected scientist who is on a race against time to get to his lab and develop a cure. With a time limit of seven minutes this led to plenty of running and driving, short but sweet.
The final episode is the excellent Laboratory of the Dead. Starting out in marshland you had to get to a secret underground lab and find the source of an undead uprising.

While the short length may put some off this was on the whole pretty fun. There is replay value in that you open up a score attack mode upon completing each episodes. One complaint I did have was that if you die you have to replay the entire episode again. No so much a problem on the shorter levels, but getting nearly fifteen minutes in and then perishing made my heart sink each time. Overall, while not essential to play, Dead Living Zombies was a fun, albeit brief experience, not bad, but not amazing either. It was a cool idea though.

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Control: AWE (2020) - Horror Video Game Expansion Review (Playstation 4)

AWE is the second expansion for the horror video game Control and one that I was really looking forward to playing. This was both because the first expansion, The Foundation was so enjoyable, and also because it was a crossover with Alan Wake. In anticipation I had played through both that game, as well as its sequel/spinoff, Alan Wake's American Nightmare. I have to say I was a mite bit disappointed with what was given here, my overall impressions being that it was merely just ok.

Jesse Faden, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Control receives a strange message from the infamous missing author, Alan Wake. Via the form of narration of a story she is told to head to the elevator where she discovers she now has access to a previously unreachable floor, the Investigations Sector. This floor had been purposely sealed off some years previously after Dr. Hartman (a key character from Alan Wake), who was being kept there due to being infected with the Darkness (the evil force of that game) managed to escape his confinement. Now the Hiss has managed to also infect him, and the two different possessing forms have made him into even more of a threat. Jesse is, in a roundabout way tasked by Wake to find a way to stop the monster escaping the Investigations Sector.

The Foundation was so enjoyable as it was a completely new looking area. With AWE (which stands for 'altered world event') though the floor it takes place on look identical to th look to the rest of Control. It is made up of grey sterile office areas, engineering areas and large lifeless rooms. The Investigations Sector is split into three areas, each one dedicated to the investigation into a different AWE. In each of these you have to find the Dr. Hartman monster and using battery puzzles turn on the power in whatever pitch black arena he happens to be in, in order to get him to flee to the next area. Being possessed by the Darkness he can only thrive in dark environments. For this new expansion you get access to a new weapon form, essentially sticky grenades, this was a decent addition. Weirdly though, the power-ups you get are low level, which is strange when the power-ups you got during The Foundation were new higher levelled ones, as such I didn't see any need to use these new weaker power-ups. Also strange is the miserly amount of new upgrade points you get, barely any in fact.

Control: The Foundation (2020) - Horror Video Game Expansion Review (Playstation 4)

The Foundation is the first of two planned expansions for the horror video game, Control. Having only completed Control yesterday (at the time of writing) it should be clear that this first expansion isn't a gigantic addition to the new game. However, it is still a decent size that features a brand new area and sheds some light on just some of the mysteries left unexplained. Because of this I found it to be a nice accompaniment. I will try not to include many spoilers from the main game.

With the Hiss threat contained, Jesse Faden (now the Director of FDC) receives a Hot Line communication from the mysterious entity known as The Board. It instructs her to head down to the base of the Old House where she discovers an entrance to a hidden network of caves which she comes to learn is the foundation from which the Old House originated from. She discovers an ancient stone structure known as 'The Nail' and learns it has been split into four pieces. Jesse is instructed to search the foundation area for these four missing pieces, as without the Nail complete the Astral Plane has started to bleed into her reality.

When I heard negative things about the first expansion I assumed that would mean it would both be short and take place in areas already seen in the main game. It was a great start then to find a whole new area. This area is roughly on par with the other four areas you explore in the game and took me roughly five to six hours to play through. The majority of the time you are in beautiful caverns with blood red sand, but you also go to the Astral Plane for parts of this, as well as get to explore a missing area of the Old House which has somehow materialised here. The main quest here may be simple but I had a lot of fun going through it, there are also three side quests, one of which was forgettable but the other two feature Objects of Power (ordinary looking objects that cause various effects around themselves) . Unlike the majority of the main game's encounters with these objects, that often just led to a dull and hard boss fight you get to do some fun things that felt a little different. One of these, Found Footage has you escaping from a deep chasm while carrying a TV set whose light is able to hypnotise enemies. The other one, a camera, transports you to a wonderful action packed adventure on a tram cart, replete with fantastic cheesy eighties music playing.

Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition (2017) - Post Apocalyptic Video Game Review (Playstation 4)

Here at The Rotting Zombie HQ horror is the order of the day. However, I do have a soft spot for anything post apocalyptic and so that is why this prehistoric-techno 3rd person open world adventure game is gracing these pages. Originally released at the start of 2017 Horizon Zero Dawn then got a huge chunk of extra content in the form of The Frozen Wilds expansion released at the end of that same year. I played through the 'Complete Edition' which perhaps unsurprisingly includes both the core game, and that expansion, and this review will reflect that additional content.

Horizon Zero Dawn takes place in a post apocalyptic world in which animal like robots exist in far greater numbers than humans. By that alone you can probably guess what caused the apocalypse, even if it isn't as simple a line as it initially appears to be. In this new world mankind have regressed back to living in tribes, each holding various spiritual beliefs, and many worshipping or fearing ancient surviving technology. You play as Aloy (voiced by Ashly Burch - Borderlands 2, Attack on Titan English dub) who since birth has been mysteriously exiled from her tribe; the Nora, along with her carer Rost (voiced by JB Blanc - Breaking Bad). As a child she discovered a 'Focus' which is an augmented reality device that allows her to interface with past technology. As an adult the once passive machines have become increasingly hostile to human life, and murderous corrupted machines have also started to appear in larger numbers. Because of her special abilities Aloy is sent out into the greater world in order to find out what is causing the machines to become corrupted, along the way discovering just what happened to cause the ancient world to collapse.

Including the expansion this took me around 65 hours to get through, in this day and age I actually see that as a smaller game than many. It is hard to go into too much detail as so much changes from the start that it would be spoiler upon spoiler. This post apocalyptic landscape is much less Mad Max, and far more Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. The world has returned to nature with most signs of the old world lost to time. Instead you get lots and lots of beautiful nature to explore, and this takes place over a variety of biomes, from the snowy Nora lands that the game starts in, to canyons, forests, and deserts, all the way to the huge mountains of the expansion. Sure it might not initially make sense how these locations are so close to each other, but they make for a game that can often be stunningly pretty. The game world is pretty huge, existing as one large world, rather than a series of smaller open world locations such as with The Witcher 3. There is a ridiculous abundance of fast travel points (campfires here), with many of them even being within eyesight of another one, no complaints here as once you have opened them all up it makes going from mission to mission a great streamlined experience.

Little Nightmares: The Hideaway (2017) - Horror Video Game DLC Review (Playstation 4)

The Hideaway is the second of three planned DLC levels for horror platformer Little Nightmares. I've realised my problem with the DLC packs so far is that I merely thought the main game was good, but I never loved it, I didn't care much about the story it was telling and I found the platform and puzzle parts to be an exercise in frustration. The first DLC titled The Depths I found to also be quite frustrating due to the amount of cheap deaths encountered. This time around it is much harder to die but the frustration was still there. Minor spoiler for DLC 1 to follow...

Having been captured by the janitor at the end of the first DLC this one begins with you quickly escaping and finding yourself on the janitors home turf of the boiler room. It also happens to be the home of the gnomes; neutral creatures that are scared of you. Earning their trust is the key to escaping this place and continuing your quest to escape The Maw (a giant floating fortress).

The Depths further explored the puzzles and situations involving water, this one is based around utilising nomes to assist you in pushing items and pulling switches. The main mission here is to gather together enough of the creatures to power up the main boiler which is your key to escaping. To do this you have to explore many many dingy rooms to locate enough nomes to help you. The puzzles don't get much more complex than throwing the little guys around, I only got stumped at one point and that was due to them frequently getting stuck behind objects.

Little Nightmares: The Depths (2017) - Horror Video Game DLC Review (Playstation 4)

When I brought Little Nightmares I opted for the more expensive version that includes Secrets of The Maw. This is a three part DLC package that tells a different story that just so happens to be going on at the same time as the main game. While it is pretty much more of the same it does connect in interesting ways.

This time around you play as a boy; another prisoner in The Maw, and like Six he too has decided to escape his prison. As you progress it becomes apparent there is at least another child also in the midst of escaping. Your adventure sees you falling into the titular depths, these are the lowest part of the construct and many of the rooms here are flooded and patrolled by an underwater adversary known as the Granny...

The Depths is around forty minutes long and is made up mostly of new areas though there is some crossover with the boy passing through areas the opposite way that Six did. Most of the DLC takes place in the flooded area and sees you having to desperately leap or swim from floating debris to platforms whilst the underwater creature pursues you. This is basically the iconic shoe room from the main story stretched out to explore further possibilities with the mechanic. The boy controls identically to Six but instead of a lighter he is armed with a flashlight that does a much better job of illuminating the rooms you travel through. A lot of the puzzles revolve around managing the floods, there are switches that rise and lower the water level and many floating objects that must be moved into the right place to act as bridges once the water is risen.

The Last of Us: Left Behind (2014) - Zombie Horror Videogame DLC Review (Playstation 4)

I reviewed the Playstation 3 version of post apocalyptic zombie game The Last of Us back in 2014 and thought it was amazing. Since then I have brought and completed The Last of Us Remastered which is even better, mainly due to the upgraded graphics making a great game look truly stunning, and that the single player expansion; Left Behind was included in the package (the expansion is now also available to buy as a stand alone game). I'm not planning to do a review for the remastered The Last of Us, though I will say if I had reviewed it I would have gave it a 10/10 due to the added inclusion of this.

In Left Behind you play exclusively as teenager Ellie with the game taking place across two different time periods that constantly swap places with each other over the roughly two hour game. The first story takes place midway through the events of The Last of Us after Joel gets impaled on a metal pole with Ellie taking him to an abandoned shopping centre where she sets out to search for medical supplies. The second story takes place a few weeks before the start of the main game and is set in the human safe zone that starts in. Ellie's best friend Riley reappears after vanishing six months previously. Having joined the Fireflies (a rebel group accused of terrorist acts) she wants to spend one last day with her friend before going away and so takes her to a large shopping centre outside of the safe zone to have some fun. However knowing that Ellie starts the main game with a zombie bite on her arm it is safe to assume things probably wont go swimmingly for the duo...

Call of Duty: Black Ops III 'Zombie Chronicles' (2017) - Video Game DLC Review (PS4)

For literal years I have been saying that Treyarch should make a stand alone Zombies game comprised of all their old maps. Well it seems like they have nearly had the same idea as out the blue a fifth DLC map pack was announced for Call of Duty: Black Ops III, one that is called Zombie Chronicles and is made up of eight old Zombies maps remastered for the current generation. Me and my best friend regularly play the old maps anyway, but having them made beautiful is an amazing surprise. You would think this £25 Zombies Chronicles would have been released as a stand alone game, yet bizarrely it isn't and so a copy of Black Ops III is required. Sure this is going to sell like hot cakes as Zombies is very popular but it would have enticed new players if it had only been stand alone.

So the eight maps remade here are all the ones that feature the stars of Black Ops III Zombies; Tank Dempsey, Richtofen, Takeo, and Nikolai. The story has always been super confusing taking place as it does over multiple dimensions and time lines and there is no effort here to make it any clearer. These maps feature the same introductions as they ever did so we get the splash loading screens, or opening cut scene as it was, just with the HD treatment. So what maps are there then? The maps come from Call of Duty: World at War, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Call of Duty: Black Ops II with Nacht der Untoten (a German airfield), Verruckt (a German insane asylum), and Shi No Numa (a swamp based Japanese research facility) coming from World at War. Next we have the classic Kino Der Toten (a German theatre), Ascension (a Russian Cosmodrome), Shangri-La (jungle ruins), and Moon (set...on the moon) from Black Ops. Finally is Origins (the trenches of World War I France) from Black Ops II.

Dead Rising 2: Case Zero (2010) - Zombie Horror Video Game Review (X-Box 360)

As a promotion for Dead Rising 2 rather than give a demo instead we were treated to a mini prologue taster called Case Zero set in a self contained area that would show off what the main game was going to be like. However I never was able to complete the roughly hour long game, time and time again I tried but always gave up, as a result I never did play Dead Rising 2, Dead Rising 2: Case West, Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, or indeed Dead Rising 3. With the fourth numbered game coming to X-Box One this December I thought it was high time I played through all the existing ones.

You play as Chuck Greene who arrives at the sleepy town of Still Creek with his daughter Katey having escaped a zombie outbreak at Las Vegas. While looking for petrol to refill your car it gets stolen taking with it the essential Zombex medicine that your infected daughter needs to take once every 12 hours to stop her turning into one of the undead. Now you have one day to search the town for more medicine, as well as an alternate mode of transport, all before the military turn up. Things are made harder by the fact that there has also been a zombie outbreak in Still Creek...

Call of Duty: Black Ops III: Zetsubou no Shima (2016) - Thoughts on the new Zombies map

After what seemed like forever finally the second of the DLC map packs for Black Ops III have arrived. Eclipse like Awakening is comprised of four multiplayer maps and one map for the awesome Zombies mode. I have become rapidly aware that I usually do these posts about the new maps long before I have seen even a little of what they have to offer. That was the way with Der Eisendrache as I did not mention the bow or its many alterations at all then. As such this is my initial thoughts about the new map, not a definite deconstruction of it.

Zetsubou no Shima (Island of Despair in English) takes place on a Japanese island which was the base for a research team studying Element 115. The prologue sees the four intrepid heroes (Dempsey, Nikolai, Takeo, and Richtofen) on a boat en-route to the island when they get caught in an altercation with Japanese soldiers and end up diving overboard. Washing up onto the shores of the mysterious island the search for the parallel dimension of Takeo begins and the game starts...

Dead Nation: Road of Devastation (2011) - Zombie Horror Videogame DLC Review

Dead Nation is a fantastic zombie game that came out back in 2011 on the Playstation Network. I loved its level design and it was real fun to play. Road of Devastation is the DLC that was released for it and which I have finally stumped up the £3 something asking price to play.

Disappointingly there is not any story to this one, all you really need to know is it takes place after Dead Nation and has you as either the man or woman character running a series of gauntlets in some premade testing grounds.for the benefit of your shady captors. You have to run the gauntlet six times, each time the zombies you face get stronger.

What I do like about this is that each time you run the gauntlet there are different routes you can take that give you different benefits. You can go the XP route and get lots of that to improve your weapon stats, you can go the weapon way to get a new weapon, the same for armour and special weapon routes. This at least means that you never get bored as there are in total six alternate paths, one for each round.

The level design is ok, there is no real theme to tie the disparate locations together. For the most part they are streets full of abandoned vehicles, though one route did take me through an area full of vegetation from which plant based zombies emerged.Traps appear sometime that can be used to mass kill zombies such as buzz saws and electrified fences. Enemies are not really any different from the main game, I did not mind though, zombie design is great in Dead Nation, will never tire of shooting cop zombies and the rest, though the zombie soldiers are still kinda boring to fight. On some routes hulking super zombies get air dropped in.

As well as the six round main part you can also access an endless mode. I am sure this may be fun in two player, and it kept me occupied for an hour early this morning but unlike the main game I can't see myself ever desiring to return to this. So much DLC is just not very good and Dead Nation: Road of Devastation falls into that category, for the price if your a fan then why not, just don't expect anything in line with the quality of the main campaign.

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Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money (2010) - Post Apocalyptic Video Game DLC Review

I have had quite a break from Fallout: New Vegas so I thought what better way to get back into it by playing the games first add on pack 'Dead Money'. Recently I discovered that there is to be three additional add ons over the next couple of months, so really is a fine time to play it.

Dead Money is set in a separate part of the Fallout world. A radio broadcast talking about an exclusive casino brings you to an underground bunker. Upon investigating the bunker sleeping gas is released and your character passes out. You awake in a mysterious villa complex where the sky is a blood red, a giant casino sits on a hilltop in the distance, and you have a bomb collar around your neck. A transmission from an old man named Elijah informs you that you have been brought to the Sierra Madre casino; a casino full of riches from the old world, hidden in a cloud of toxic fog, a place that was thought to be nothing more than a myth. The voice tells you that he wants you to recruit three strangers located around the villa compound and then together break into the Sierra Madre Casino to pull off 'the heist of a lifetime'. If any one of you die then you all die as your collars are linked, should you be successful and get the hidden treasure for Elijah then you will be released from your collar and allowed to return back to the wasteland.

Dragon Age: Origins DLC - The Golems of Amgarrak (2010) - Horror DLC Review (X-Box 360)

The Golems of Amgarrak was one of the last DLC missions to be released for Dragon Age: Origins. The DLC was advertised as being very hard, what wasn't advertised is the fact that the stand alone DLC feels very like a survival horror game if it were set in a fantasy world.

The DLC is set in the Deep Roads (massive underground dwarven tunnels). A dwarf has hired you to find his brother whose team went missing when they left to find a laboratory where the secrets of golem creation were being studied. Upon finding the laboratory you become locked in and soon find mysterious levers that move you to different plains of existence as well as nightmarish creations after your blood. Before the golems had been created out of stone and metal but the experiments in Amgarrak were looking to create golems out of stitched together flesh.

The first part of the DLC sees you en route to Amgarrak which sees you in typical darkspawn fighting mode. You have a team of four as usual, including a golem and a bronto (a large beast). Arriving at Amgarrak sees the horror begin. It seems the person in charge of re-creating golems was quite the mad scientist, dotted around the lab are various diary entries detailing the insane work the scientist was doing and the many victims of that work. At first sentry golems are the main enemy but upon finding a strange switch you are transported to another dimension full of skeletons and zombies. Eventually you find that to be able to leave the nightmare lab you will have to destroy a creature called The Harvester. Keeping horror conventions going the DLC ends on a shock twist.

As with the rest of Dragon Age I played this DLC on casual mode so it was not too hard, the end boss and a room full of golems were the only hard parts I got to. The DLC being horror based was a pleasant surprise so all in all a good standalone game full of corpses and mayhem.

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Dragon Age: Origins - The Darkspawn Chronicles (2010) - RPG Video Game DLC Review

I know it is yet another Dragon Age review! You may be pleased to hear that out of the remaining DLC I will only be reviewing this and The Golems of Amgarrak. Leliana's Song DLC centres around humans, while Witch Hunt is Dragon Age by numbers and nothing special at all.

The Darkspawn Chronicles takes place in an alternate timeline to that of Dragon Age: Origins. In this timeline the main character from Origins died and so it was down to the Grey Warden Alistair to unite the people against the darkspawn threat. The game takes place during the end of Origins at the assault on the city of Denerim. You play as a darkspawn; a Hurlock Vanguard. As you fight through the city you get new objectives given to you telepathically by an Arch Demon.

The game is far more combat based and plays more like an action brawler than a RPG. You can't level up and there is no downtime, it is just one big fight from the start of the DLC to the end. You are able to enthrall up to three other darkspawn to fight with you. Ogres are able to smash barricades, genlocks are basic fodder, while shrieks are able to use stealth to creep past weapon emplacements. Being a darkspawn, your missions mostly involve killing; whether it be butchering innocents, destroying enemy blockades or killing key characters from Origins. By the end of the DLC I had killed all the main characters, quite satisfying, especially the more annoying ones (e.g: Alistair!)

The Darkspawn Chronicles lasts around an hour and uses no new locations at all. Being mindless monsters the plot is kept to a bare minimum. It is fun enough but really could have done with some new locations. It was fun being the bad guys for once.

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