Currently Playing: Episode 2

Week of 9.10.13-9.17.13
Games include:  Assassin’s Creed III and Dead Rising 2: Case Zero

This week on Currently Playing we will take a quick look at Assassin’s Creed III (ACIII) and Dead Rising 2: Case Zero (DR2 Case Zero).  As I mentioned last week on Currently Playing: Ep 1 I didn’t get a ton of gaming in.

            The first game I played was ACIII.  This one I have been playing off and on for a while now and I finally put the last nail in the coffin on last Tuesday by completing the last section on sequence 12 (which is the last one in the Main Story line) and doing the couple of epilogue missions.  I won’t go into much detail on this game except to say that I really liked it.  Being American the setting was familiar to me as was the history itself.  One of my favorite sequences was the Boston Tea Party.

Helping dump that tax heavy tea into the sea.

I liked how the story started out with Connor’s (the main character) father taking the lead and putting the player in the position of trying to figure out how the story will progress from a white Englishman until you play as Native American Connor. I enjoyed the sections in the modern day setting that involved combat as they showed how much the Animus aids the player in the memory sequences with all that nice heads up display information.

Waging war with the Aquila... Here I come Jackdaw

My favorite parts of the game were the naval and privateer missions aboard the Aquila.  Even though these were very scripted event, the ship to ship combat left me aching for more.  That is why I am excited for Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag.  As this is the last game in the Miles Desmond story arc it is definitely worth the play if you played previous Assassin’s Creed games. I give the game a score of 4/5.

The other game I played was DR2: Case Zero, which is the prologue to Dead Rising 2 and came as a standalone Downloadable Content (DLC), which I was able to pick up for free last month from Xbox Live’s Free Games with Gold program when I got Dead Rising 2 through the same program.  Case Zero was short, sweet and self-contained.  There was some benefit beyond additional story to Dead Rising 2, in the form of your character level (up to level 5) carries over to Dead Rising 2 when you play that as the follow-up. The game helped give a short introduction to the gameplay of Dead Rising 2. Case Zero had the time constraints like Dead Rising 1 and 2.  I am not a huge fan of time constraints.  I am more of a stop and smell the roses kind of guy.  I don’t like missing content because I was exploring the world.  However this game was short enough that time wasn’t overly pressing. This was a good thing. Dead Rising 3 will not feature these time constraints unless you play on Nightmare Mode.  I like the idea that I will be able to enjoy DR3 at my own pace.

 

Without time being off the essense I will actually have time to kill more of these guys. 

 

  The majority of DR2: Case Zero is spent gathering parts for a motorcycle and rescuing survivors.  You surprisingly don’t get that much time to kill zombies but rather just run past them to keep up a brisk rescue schedule.  By the way the wheel you buy for your bike must not fit because the handling on the motorcycle is terrible.  But in reality this is probably due to poor gameplay rather than your in game mechanical ability. I still give the game a 3/5.  Fun and short.



 

Here is the bike being build to ride off in escape.

 

I needed some short games and these fit the bill.  Just to be clear I was just finishing up ACIII.  Assassin’s Creed III is by no means a short game.  On a side not, open world games tend to take me a while as I easily get distracted enjoying the world rather than just powering through the main story line.

Next week on Currently Playing come check out my playtime with Grand Theft Auto 5.  What did you think of these games?  Sound off below.