This jazzy number from Dell might look like a P2411H Professional series, but there’s one important difference here. It’s an IPS screen, not a TN like the P2411H. That means better colour representation, better viewing angle, and a higher price. Screen types are seldom highlighted by manufacturers but they’re the single biggest deciding factor in your screen’s image quality. So why pay more for IPS?

Class now in session – crystals in In-Plane Switching (or IPS) screens are aligned horizontally between two oppositely polarised glass substrates, rather than the perpendicular arrangement of crystal rods found in TN, or Twisted Nematic panels.

In IPS screens, crystals are kept parallel in a lateral electric field, whereas in TN panels they untwist when a voltage is applied, and their alignment alters as they drift from the anchored electrode. This in turn hinders the flow of light from the bulbs and hinders contrast and colour representation as you look at the screen from wider angles than head-on.

IPS panels are capable of true 1000:1 contrast ratio – that’s the difference between the whitest white and darkest black to you and me. TN panels often boast a ‘dynamic contrast ratio’ of 8000:1, much higher than an IPS screen, but that doesn’t mean the contrast’s eight times better; in fact it’s worse.

As TN screens change from deep dark colours to bright whites, the contrast adjusts automatically, temporarily changing the contrast setting to allow the deeper colours through. The result is an often irritating visible colour adjustment that grates and has anyone of right-mind and seeing-eye reaching to turn it off.

Ready… draw!

After dragging TN panels through the mud a bit, it’s worth highlighting their advantages. Firstly, they’re a lot cheaper to produce because they require half the transistors per pixel that an IPS screen requires. Secondly, they produce much quicker response times. 2ms isn’t an unusual figure for a good TN screen, while IPS panels struggle to get under 8ms.

So is it worth paying more for all the IPS niceties? When they come in a package like this Dell U2412M, absolutely.

The screen and panel look very similar to Dell’s flagship U3011H 30-inch screen, and like the £1000 model, this U2412M is vertically adjustable and can be flipped to portrait orientation. It’s had a lick of silver paint and looks none the worse for it, departing just a little from Dell’s stern, corporate screen design aesthetic.

The depth of blacks and brightness of whites on screen is instantly noticeable, and as we put the U2412M through it’s paces with some high-colour HD video, it certainly didn’t disappoint, rendering the full 16.7 million colours of the RGB spectrum.

There are also a good range of menu options like clock and phase that we don’t often see in affordable panels, though we were a tiny bit bummed that the U2412 didn’t automatically adjust its orientation as we flipped it from landscape to portrait.

As for that Achilles heel of the IPS screen, response time, yes it is noticeable through rigorous benchmarking, but you won’t notice the difference to a TN screen’s response while you’re gaming or watching hectic video.

That makes the U2412M a bit of a no-brainer. It’s a well-built, affordable and adjustable IPS panel.

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Just as serving a delicious cheesecake on a bed of rotten mackerel kills the appetite, so OpFlash: Red River turns the stomach with its nauseating intro. No matter how appealing the main event might be, you just can’t get that image out of your head.

In a punishingly tasteless opening FMV, you’ll see a visual demonstration of piss on cornflakes seconds after the 9/11 attacks are made fair game for one liners in a potted history of east-west relations as told by morons. It’s as if Codemasters are saying, ‘Try and enjoy the game after THAT, suckers!’.

I tried to enjoy it after that. Shaking my head vigorously to try and loosen the memories, I started the campaign. I began to soften to the U.S. marines the game plays out around that spouted all that puerile nonsense in the beginning. They seemed to get it all out of their system and once I was riding shotgun in a Humvee through Tajikistan with them, I felt that we bonded. The eastern mountains painted by rosy dusk, artillery fire playing out a staccato accompaniment to our journey through dusty twisting tracks. It was almost romantic.

And then suddenly I’m running around cluelessly, running for cover from the insurgent forces that crashed our party. My ears are hot with radio communication. Riflemen at all angles, none visible to me. Tracer fire running over my head like dizzy fireworks. Three marines, standing behind me, alert and waiting for my orders, confident I’ll keep them all safe. I don’t share their confidence

The first assault

We hole up in an old farmhouse and pick off a few Tajis. Alpha and Charlie companies are reporting dead marines but I’m damned if anyone checks out of my Bravo team. I heal them all furiously as they bravely shoot through the pain.

The monstrous noise like a thousand bones breaking eases up. Radio noise settles down. The insurgents lay at awkward angles in the hills around us, some twitching. As our transport out of this hellhole arrives, I walk past one still alive by the roadside. I shoot him in the face. There are empty seats in most of the Humvees now, but the bravo company vehicle is full. I look into the bloodsoaked faces of my marines. You are forgiven, I tell them.

That day we all became men, and men are proud creatures. There’s no place for pride in war though, as I found out by selecting ‘hardcore’ difficulty for the next mission. The red waypoints I’d been chasing after to try and find some order in all the chaos were now gone. I used to be able to recognise my squad mates, but now they blended into the other grunts. What’s more, without scoping in, I no longer had a crosshair. I was going in blind and the Tajis would be waiting. ‘Squad. Form up on me.’ I said, in that inimitable, charisma-less way I have.

More chaos, more gunfire, more dead marines. Soto. He was a good shot and a family man. Bravery killed him. I ordered him behind cover, but Soto couldn’t bare the thought of a single Taji escaping. Again and again I urged him into safety, but the adrenaline was coursing through his veins. Soto didn’t listen, and took one in the neck. Taylor rushed to help him. Rushed straight into enemy fire. A goddamn pile of dead marines.

Losing battle

It must have got to me, losing men on my watch. Staff Sergeant Knox told me to order in an air strike, but I had no idea where. I missed Soto and Taylor, but I missed the red markers that told me what to do even more. I took a guess and ordered in a strike on a suspicious looking building and failed the objective.

Time passes. I get sharper at shooting. More men are assigned to my squad. They’re also called Soto and Taylor, and this poetic coincidence reassures me. Ordering these men about is easier for me now. I have them lay down a suppressing fire on the enemy while I flank them, or sometimes I suppress and they flank. By and large they obey me but I can see a bit of that old Soto bravery in new Soto. They just don’t have that survival instinct, poor brave bastards. Staff Sergeant Knox’s 10 rules echo through my head every time we engage insurgents. ‘Don’t get shot’. ‘Avoid confined spaces’. ‘Suppress and flank’. Funny, those words help me as much as the red waypoints now.

The Chinese get involved, things turn sour fast. I’m on a co-operative mission with eagle-eye Thornett. He’s handy with a stinger and smart with cover. Together

we hold off a massive wave of PLA forces. Then another. Another still. Funny, but I know I’m going to die out here, and all I can think is ‘this game serves as a pleasing middle-ground between soldier sims like ArmA II and linear shooters like COD. Sometimes it’s not clear what you should be doing and the AI is imprecise, but the way Codemasters have utilised the memorable and vivid terrains makes for a rewarding pseudo-soldier sim’.

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Crysis 2 is initially a DirectX 9 release. There it is, chew it over. There’s a DX11 patch in the pipeline, but out of the box it uses an older API than its predecessor. Finished posting your furious CAPS LOCK rant on the official forums? Good, let’s proceed.

On one level it’s a great shame that such technically gifted developers as Crytek haven’t released another game that pushes the graphical boundaries of PC gaming to the extreme and made us question our own eyes and the nature of reality itself. On another level, who could actually play the first Crysis at full detail on its release?

Tech Analysis

It’s the prettiest DX9 game ever made, for better or worse. Real time shadows and particle effects are impressive in CryEngine 3, as is deferred lighting from multiple sources. But then, of course they are. CryEngine 2 had those licked. Officially, the engine supports tessellation, ambient occlusion, compute shaders producing motion blur and ‘bokeh’ lens blur, when the patch cometh. CryEngine 3′s other ace is that it’s optimised for multi-core machines. CryEngine 3 can chuck out double the frame rates of CryEngine 2 at similar level of detail, which is good news for machines at both ends of the spectrum.

Crytek have in fact achieved another impressive feat by bringing their trademark level of graphical detail and technologically demanding level design to the kind of machines gamers actually own right now. It may owe more to the title’s cross-platform release than anything else, but the end result is a beautiful gaming experience for a wide range of gamers.

Vivid jungle locales are out in Crysis 2, and while the devs were choosing a new setting, Cloverfield was apparently playing on a TV in the background somewhere. It’s New York as you almost always see it- ravaged by some humanity threatening crisis (yeah, I just did that). As well rendered as it is, we’re all veterans of the big American city, us PC gamers. From F.E.A.R. to Farenheit, Modern Warfare to Morrowind… Alright, definitely not Morrowind. The Jungle was fun because it was fresh and new, and while Crysis 2 paints New York as vividly and viscerally as anyone, sometimes it feels as though you’ve played this game before.

If it bleeds, we can kill it

It’s not just the graphics that define the Crysis brand though, there’s also that nanosuit. An array of superpowers ready to be called upon at the flick of a mouse or, more practically, press of a hotkey. Upon summoning said superpower, the world’s most deep-voiced man says ‘maximum strength’ from somewhere in your nano-head and suddenly you can chuck cars around and climb tricky ledges. You can make your suit repel bullets. Or go invisible like the predator. Or switch to thermal vision, like the, um, predator.

It’s a unique feature to first person shooters and allows the gamer to choose their approach to combat situations. In Crysis 2, each of the primary Strength, Armor and Stealth suit functions are customisable by choosing certain bonuses from an umbrella of sub-functions. It’s kinda like levelling up, but you can change your suits’ features at any point.

I chose Armour enhance, Stealth enhance, and made my suit restore power at a faster rate. Basically, I was either cloaked or -deep voice- maximum armoured the entire time. Dozens of mercenaries patrolled the streets of alien-war-ravaged New York. I walked past them. Ten foot Aliens in stompy armour guarded huge tentacles that ripped through the city. I walked past them. Even on the hardest difficulty, conflicts can often be entirely avoided with some well-timed cloaking; it feels like you’re cheating.

Of course, it’s up to you. You can run a tactical assessment of a scene before you get stuck in and identify where the baddies and ammo are, how to flank them or gain higher ground. You can also run in like a madman with maximum armour engaged and soak up the bullets as you charge through. The nanosuit functions can be used ingeniously in certain situations and certain moments occur that force you to pause and take stock in the aftermath. Did I really just shoot a guard in the eye whilst powersliding off a ledge and switching to armour mid air to absorb the impact?

Call of Crysis

The problem is, Crysis 2 is competing with the intensity levels of the Call of Duty and Bad Company 2 single player campaigns; heavily scripted experiences that drag you by the nose through near-miss explosions and perpetual deafening gunfire. Crysis 2′s biggest problem is that when gameplay becomes that linear, the nanosuit becomes extraneous. What the game does best is open world large-scale hunting. It’s what defined the original, in fact, though the early exploration and freedom were funnelled into an increasingly linear game.

The sequel takes that ball and runs with it, sadly. In its efforts to match existing titles, Crysis 2 compromises its character. As an open world sandbox shooter, it could have been something truly special. It feels like the original non-linear creative vision for the game’s been diluted to a thin solution spread over the conservatively scripted end product.

That said, it’s not like Crysis 2 fails in the intensity stakes. The entire second half of the rather brief (I’m talking 6-8 hours) single player journey is one of the most relentlessly cataclysmic explosion-fests in gaming.

However, as human mercenary enemies make way for the dreaded aliens, the AI suffers a brain haemorrhage and the game needs to distract you with spectacular visual events to distract you from your stand and shoot enemies. It’s as good as any recent shooter at epic moments and gun-toting drama, but it feels a little shallow once you realise how remedial the all-conquering alien force actually are.

Price: £1499
Manufacturer: Palicomp
Web: www.palicomp.co.uk
CPU: Intel Core i7 2600K
Motherboard: ASUS P8P67 PRO-B3
GPU: 2x MSI HD 6950 Twin Frozr 2GB
RAM: 8GB Storage: Kingston SSD 64GB, Samsung 1.5TB HDD
Optical: Lite-On Blu-Ray
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
Price Check: www.palicomp.co.uk

The Sandy Bridge release hoo-hah is a few months old, and only now the dust has settled are we beginning to see what system builders can put together around Intel’s new CPU architecture for this hardcore gamers’ price point. Enter the Phoenix Hydro X PC from Palicomp.

Actually, stop. Must systems be christened with this kind of fantastical nomenclature? Aren’t games for all the elf-eared escapism? Surely it’d be more alluring to the browsing enthusiast to peruse the systems on offer using simple letters and numbers, like German cars, rather than being forced to order the Goblin Slayer King Elemental XXX in an embarrassed whisper? Okay, resume.

The Phoenix Hydro X, like Scan’s excellent 3XS Vengeance, packs Intel’s top 2600K chip – although unlike the 3XS, there’s no out of the box overclocking. Another crucial difference comes in the GPU spec; rather than the single GTX 580 sported in Scan’s system, Palicomp has paired some tasty MSI Twin Frozr HD6950s in a CrossFireX array. Despite the extra silicon inside the formidable Coolermaster HAF X case, it’s £250 cheaper than the Scan 3Xs, too.

So what gives? Where’s the compromise in components that lands the Phoenix Hydro X at this price point? Take off your cynical hats, folks, this is a balanced, well thought out build that doesn’t skimp on any particular area (such as with cheap, rubbish RAM) and thus delivers uncompromising performance.

The real sugar of the deal comes down to the CPU and GPU pairing really. That i7-2600K offers much more value and, in some cases, raw performance than its i7-9xx series brethren. Similarly, AMD’s long-standing emphasis on the ultra performance GPU at the two-ton mark makes these two HD 6950s an extremely powerful pairing for comparable money to a single top-end NVIDIA card. We were hugely impressed by the 3XS’s marriage of 2600K chip and GTX 580, but in the Phoenix Hydro X we’re witnessing a genuine match made in heaven – pretty much the exact sweet spot in price and performance on the market right now.

Technical Analysis

That the Phoenix Hydro X outperforms its more expensive competitor in both DirectX 11 tests shows you why this rig is such a superlative deal. Scan’s 3XS came pre-overclocked, but if you’re willing to get your hands dirty in the Phoenix’s EFI BIOS, that CPU performance score can be bolstered up to a similar level.If you were to buy all the components that make the Phoenix Hydro X individually, you’d save yourself around a hundred bob. That includes the Corsair H70 self-contained (read: no nightmare) CPU water cooler unit, 64GB SSD and 1.5TB HDD storage and more fans than Justin Bieber. But to our eyes, that hundred nicker mark up is well worth it. In return you receive a very smart combination of parts, expertly built (the inside of the case is immaculately arranged and cable tied) and all under warranty for a year.

Now take into account the actual performance you get out of the box and it’s got better DirectX 11 performance in tessellation and gaming stakes than the £1,740 3XS Vengeance, and CPU benchmark scores that, with a little overclocking encouragement, could easily match the Scan rig. It’s a great time to buy full systems, and right now this is definitely the full system to buy.

We’ve made no secret of just how much we love the new Sandy Bridge set-up from Intel here at PCF Towers and this rig from YOYOTech only goes to highlight why we’re so smitten.

Price £1,000
Manufacturer YOYOTech
Web www.yoyotech.co.uk
CPU Intel Core i5 2500K@ 4.6GHz
Motherboard Asus P8P67
GPU Sapphire Radeon HD 6950
RAM 8GB Kingston HyperX 1,600MHz DDR3
Storage 1TB Samsung HDD
OS Windows 7 Home Premium
Bundle 22-inch Iiyama Prolite, keyboard/mouse

Last month we looked at a high-spec Sandy Bridge rig from Scan, the 3XS Vengeance. Housing the top-end Core i7 2600K and coupling it with NVIDIA’s outstanding GTX 580 meant that it was one hell of a rig. Granted it was close to two grand for the base unit alone, but mighty impressive it was too.

In general terms though when you’re looking to pick up a highend gaming rig the £1,000 mark is where most of the smart money goes. And we’ve not seen a grand rig that could come close to this YOYOTech beauty.

Packs a punch
The overclocked i5-2500K sitting at the heart of the Asus P67 board is an incredible processor. It may not have the HyperThreading chops of its big i7 brother, but it certainly packs a punch in the gaming market.

It’s also been paired with the current darling of the £200 graphics market, the Radeon HD 6950. More often you’ll fi nd the card sitting around the £220 mark, but shop around and you can fi nd bargains.

One of the reasons it’s such a popular card is that like some of AMD’s older CPUs you can unlock the dormant potential of the GPU which was locked at the factory stage. A quick BIOS fl ash and your HD 6950 is now a stable HD 6970. All it takes is a quick Google, a little download, and a run of a script file. Nice.

This CPU/GPU combo represents the price/performance sweet spot for a gaming system right now, and shows some intelligent component picking from YOYOTech.

It hasn’t flashed the HD 6950 BIOS itself, but what it has done is overclock the silicon bejesus out of the Core i5 2500K. Hitting 4.6GHz on air. Impressive sutff, doubly so when it’s so darned quiet too still. That helps make the lack of HyperThreading almost a distant memory when it comes to hard core processing tasks.

In order to hit the £1,000 price point though you are sacrificing an SSD boot drive compared to rigs like the 3XS Vengeance. With a decent 1TB HDD spinning away though that’s something we’re more than happy to compromise on.

Technical analysis
We’ve tested the gaming performance at 1,680 x 1,050 to give a direct comparison with the Scan rig of last issue, but the 1080p resolution of the bundled monitor will come close. The 3XS Vengeance is faster across the board, but in the games especially it’s not by a huge margin, and the Warbird still posts excellent gaming numbers.

There’s little compromise anywhere else though as this latest Warbird oozes quality. The use of Bitfenix’s Survivor chassis gives the rig a cool matte finish, and although it’s a bit awkward to access for the tinkerers out there it’s still a great case. It offers space and excellent cooling options for your overclocked goodies inside.

The good news doesn’t stop there either, that £1,000 also nets you a fairly decent 22-inch Iiyama monitor into the bargain, and with the keyboard/mouse bundle that’s a full PC ready to roll as soon as it’s dropped off.

The Warbird SB4.6CS is a fantastic bundle and just shows how good, and how affordable, the new Sandy Bridge platform can be. A grand is still a lot of cash, but this set-up is well worth the outlay.

Look! Up there in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s… you. Or at least, it could be you, flying high above Metropolis in search of justice.

You might also be flashing past at superspeed, or gliding down from a building to unleash hideous fury on a gang of mooks. You might be fighting evil bee monsters on the Moon, or have been morphed into a gorilla to help another supervillain try to conquer the world. You might be teaming up with Batman to fight the Joker, or the Joker to help taunt the Dark Knight with your own adopted insane clown posse.

Say what you will about DC Universe, it’s a true master of stroking your fanboy glands until they explode into quivering orgasm.

The basic premise of the game is that Lex Luthor has finally managed to defeat Superman, only to instantly realise that he’s made a horrible mistake when alien supercomputer Braniac shows up to steamroller the now-defenceless Earth.

Repenting, he races back in time with stolen technology capable of giving anybody superpowers in the hopes that the Justice League will be able to build an army capable of saving the future. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman promptly take this new generation of heroes under their wing, training them in their own brands of truth, justice and the American way.

Unfortunately for everyone, the same technology works just fine on jerks too, and Lex’s less-enlightened present day self, The Joker, and Circe have their own evil mentoring program.

The side you join determines the morality of your quests, but the actual action is the same for both: pick your superpowers, design your character (via an editor that’s not quite as good as Champions Online’s, but that will still let you create more or less anyone you might want), and head out on patrol.

The most surprising thing about DC Universe Online is how little like an MMO it often feels. It is one, make no mistake, and as driven by stats as any other – but it does a great job at pretending it’s an action game instead.

Combat powers
Combat is incredibly kinetic, feeling much more like God of War than World of Warcraft, forcing you to pay attention, dodge, block, and make use of a huge range of powers.

These are not simply slightly different ways of hitting people in the face, but a huge toybox of things to play with, including placeable sentry turrets to offer fi re-support, weapons with combos to perform, travel powers that let you grapple your way around the city or turn your superspeed into a weapon, and much, much more.

You even get to pick up some iconic powers, such as Superman’s heat vision, the Joker’s gag-glove or a set of Batarangs. All of this is ultimately all stat driven, just like every other MMO out there, rather than skill-based, but that doesn’t stop it letting you feel like a badass.

The standard quests are often a little bland, following a ‘kill 25, collect 15, use 10’ template to the point of madness, but you’re never far from something much more fun. ‘Legends PvP’ for instance, where you can fi ght against other players as one of the signature heroes, such as Batman or Harley Quinn. Alerts, which use a WoWstyle Dungeon Finder to send you to places like Bludhaven or Gorilla Island.

Or how about PvP, either server-wide or in special regular events, complete with bounties? Even the more solo-friendly content, dull as it can get, often ups its game with regular scripted dungeons featuring celebrity boss fi ghts and fun one-time mechanics.

As good as DC Universe is though, there is one problem: the PS3. The 1game was clearly designed for that console fi rst and foremost, and it mostly shows in the lousy interface.

Painful controls
Everything from controls to the chat interface is built around using a gamepad rather than mouse and keyboard, making even something as simple as chatting to other players more painful than it needs to be, with a few specifi c combos bordering on torture in a pitched battle. Doubletapping a mouse button is easy, but mixing and matching quick-clicks and holds never really becomes intuitive enough.

Despite the impressive amount of content on offer, the speed at which you’ll burn through it makes me suspect that this isn’t an MMO you’ll play for month after month, with the nature of the action seeming more suited for an adventure pack/DLC model instead of a monthly £10 subscription.

Still, while it lasts, DC Universe is easily one of the most enjoyable MMOs we’ve played in ages, and one that makes everything else seem positively ponderous.

Hopefully Sony can keep churning out the stream of content it’ll need to keep the game fresh, but DC Universe Online is well worth a month just for what’s in the box.

Price: £30
Publisher: Sony
Web www.dcuniverseonline.com

Do you have any idea how hard it is not to write this entire review in a collage of quotes from war movies? For all our sakes I’ll restrain but wow. Vietnam is clearly trending right now, after CoD: Black Ops, and rather than be seen in last season’s military jacket DICE is offering us the chance to ‘nam it up in Bad Company 2 with this very reasonably priced DLC

Once you kiss your tenner goodbye, you’ll find five new maps, a handful of era-specific guns per class, helicopters with scary faces painted on them (also other less terrifying vehicles) and the ubiquitous Led Zeppelin soundtrack.

It doesn’t sound much, but each element changes the nature of combat. Gone are the sniper scopes for each class and huge maps full of twitch gamers sniping each other from astronomical distances. Battles are won and lost at close quarters, with assault rifles and grenades. There’s less cover and the routes to objectives are trickier. The whole combat dynamic is slightly reminiscent of Counterstrike.

Well, except for the fact that Counterstrike is very old now, and however frenetic the gameplay is, it’s no longer immersive. See that courtyard full of washed-out rectangles? That’s telling you you’re in a computer game, buddy.

In this regard, Bad Company 2: Vietnam has immersive visuals and gameplay as covered as any online shooter. DICE’s excellent Frostbite engine has been used to create a world of constant explosions, settling dust, shacks being shot into splinters and bullets wailing past as you kiss the smouldering dirt.

Frosty goodness
Frostbite was created with the original Battlefield: Bad Company’s rather demanding features in mind. Its procedural rendering allows for impressive detail levels across huge maps. Actually, these procedural techniques reduce lag by sending description in compact form to and from the server as its needed, rather than as a whole.

The end result of the tweaked Frostbite 1.5 engine is a beautiful, accurately shaded environment full of destructible scenery, vehicles and convincing physics that generates a decent frame rate on a mid-range system and doesn’t crash a server when 32 people try their utmost to destroy absolutely everything around them.

It’s a game that welcomes Direct X 9, 10 and 11 APIs, although it really has DX10 in mind. Old-school XP users sticking with DX9 will see some pretty impressive rendering and performance minus options for anti-aliasing and horizon-based ambient occlusion, which cleverly creates realistic contact shadows around objects based on the player’s viewpoint. It gives objects a credible physical presence and also creates an ’I’m focusing my eyesight on this’ effect that Crysis did (to death).

For those keen to play a game that makes the most of their DX11 cards, BC2: Vietnam won’t blow your mind. There isn’t much perceptible difference to the DX10 graphics, although it does boast softer dynamic shadows and ´improved performance in general’ according to the game’s developers, although it’s hard to dissect API optimisation from GPU performance on that one.

Nippy gaming
We found in general that BC2: Vietnam runs very diligently with the hardware you ply it with to produce stable, fast gaming. It still looks pretty at 1,680 x 1,050 with medium settings with ambient occlusion and anti-aliasing stripped away, but it looks pretty exquisite running on a high-end system with all options maxed.

If you’re running at minimum spec things might get frustrating, though. And in a way, all that prettiness is a bit of a problem. There are so many shadows and settling dust and explosions that it’s often quite hard to see what’s going on and where people are. If I cared enough about my kills/ deaths ratio (which I don’t) I’d be turning all the graphical options down to make things clearer.

That’s the problem when the two darlings of modern PC gaming meet: ranked, ultra competitive online gameplay and cutting edge visuals. Competitive players see the game as just that: they want to exploit every glitch in the level design, fi nd any loophole in the programming to gain an advantage. And that’s completely at odds with what all the shiny (and very expensive to developers) graphics are about: immersion.

The importance of great graphics in a game harks back to the days of the great single player game. It’s a storytelling device. Consider Team Fortress 2, the king of class-based online shooters. Visually stunning but far from cutting edge. It looks hectic but it’s easy to see what’s going on, and that’s down to smart design choices that allow the gamer more fun. Sometimes it’s as easy as painting everything red and blue.

Price: £10
Publisher:EA
Web: www.battlefieldbadcompany2.com

Let’s just get this straight: you don’t have to play Monday Night Combat on a Monday. You can play it on any day of the week. You can play it at 4.38 on a Wednesday morning if you want to. You can play it on Easter Day, if you’ve nothing better to do. There’s no dictum with the game – other than the title – that requires you to play on the fi rst working day of the week. Now, have we got that clear? Good. [Ed - Just to be annoying PCF are playing it on a few of Mondays in February. Sorry.]

Monday Night Combat nabs not only Team Fortress 2′s chunky character design and blue versus red (or dark orange, in this case) colour scheme, but its character classes. In game you’ll fi nd six classes, among them slow heavy gunners, speedy assassins and the indispensable support class, who can heal his team mates or suck the life force out of the opposition. Again, it’s all rather TF2-esque, but developer Uber Entertainment has added an interesting twist on top of the slightly over-familiar shooter mechanics.

Despite their neon, capitalism-drenched aesthetics, Monday Night Combat’s arenas owe a lot to classic Warcraft III mod Defence of the Ancients, which has recently inspired Chris Taylor’s epic real-time strategy, Demigod, as well as the upcoming Valve-developed DOTA 2. It’s all there: the ‘Ancients’ are replaced by towering balls of money, there are numerous nubs where turrets can be erected, and the maps are designed around the inevitable violent choke-point encounters. It elevates the game above its campy shooter mechanics and into the realms of an (almost) fully fledged real-time strategy, albeit one played from an over-the-shoulder perspective.

Prepare to swarm
As with TF2, you get 30 seconds to set up, with a small amount of in-game currency to spend either on upgrading your player, or on building turrets. Next, waves of robots are unleashed from each side, and it’s up to you to escort them to the opposition’s MoneyBall. They’re fundamentally quite weak, and you have no control over their direction or attack, or even which type are released. It does make you wonder why one of your team can’t be given a god-like proper real-time strategy role and direct the swarms, but it could become a mega bone of contention if they do the wrong thing.

There’s also the added threat of other players on the opposing team. As with Team Fortress 2, working together and balancing your team is essential, although the latter doesn’t seem quite as intricate as TF2′s fine-tuned mechanics. One match I played simply consisted of assassins stabbing each other in the back while the robot march continued unabated. The problem could well be down to the six versus six dynamic – at the time of writing, enter a half-full server and you’ll note that most players instinctively choose the stealthiest characters available.

Matches end when a MoneyBall is taken, which can take some time, or when the time’s up. Randomly, Bullseye, Monday Night Combat’s mascot, is introduced. Pepper this hyperactive smiley loon with bullets and he spews money, which is equally disturbing and funny, like being able to shoot that bloke from Pineapple Dance Studios. It’s a nice touch in a game obsessed with ludicrous levels of capitalism – one level is set near the Egyptian pyramids, which have been torn down and replaced with giant corporate effigies.

Strategic run and gun
It’s fun and funny, but it’s also too easy to think that Monday Night Combat is trying too hard to please everyone at once. And to a certain degree it is. It treads an oh-so-fi ne-line between shooter and real time strategy, but does it successfully enough. It still hasn’t quite shaken its Xbox 360 roots, though, and it’s probably the first PC online shooter I’ve ever played that feels like you could score kills with a 360 pad as well as keyboard and mouse. There are still some issues with the game and it does need a little more balancing to feel like a complete game. This is the key to Monday Night Combat being a success: the devs have to make sure they keep it updated and keep adding new stuff.

Even if it’s not a runaway success, it deserves to garner a cult following, and it certainly deserves respect for its inventive blend of blasting and strategy. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite feel like it’s right up there with Valve’s best efforts just yet.

Price: £9
Web www.mondaynightcombat.com

World of Warcraft expansions aren’t optional. Most of us would pay up, even if all we got was a new level cap and anyone who bought the last two expansions has already bought this one. For a game boasting 12 million subscribers, selling 3.3 million copies in 24 hours is the least we should expect. The real measure of Cataclysm is how many ex-players it will tempt back and how many new ones it will lure into its grasp.

Let’s take new players first. With the patches released just before Cataclysm, the WoW game world has been substantially rebooted. The old continents of Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor have been remodelled with altered landscapes, better water effects and spruced-up capital cities for each faction. Gnomes and Trolls have their own starting areas now and virtually all the quests from levels one to 60 are new or updated. Game mechanics are simpler too, with many of the more baroque stats, like armour penetration removed or hidden from your character sheet and a talent system that makes each spec feel properly different. But you get all that for free with the basic game now; you’ll only need Cataclysm if you want to roll a Worgen or a Goblin, or learn the Archaeology profession. Later on, at level 60, you will need Cataclysm if you want to get your Flight Master’s Licence and fly in the Old World. But to buy Cataclysm, you’ll also need to buy The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. That’s a big ask for new players.

Can you dig it?
Archaeology is fun if you like grindy, completionist, mcguffi n hunts (which I do). You collect (lots of) fragments from dig sites and assemble them into an archaeological fi nd. Most of these are just lore fl avour items but there are a few bind-on-account rare and epic items, as well as a fossil raptor mount and pet. The best part of archaeology is that all the flavour items you find don’t take up bag space. They are recorded separately in a sort of virtual Panini sticker album. But without access to a fl ying mount, the huge amount of travelling between dig sites makes it much too slow to focus on, so you aren’t going to be doing much archaeology before level 60.

So the lure for new players absolutely rests on the appeal of playing a Goblin or Worgen. Both starting areas use phasing technology to change the world around you as you progress through the storyline; told through cut-scenes and quests. The Goblin zone almost doesn’t feel like WoW at all because you spend almost all your time driving around in a hot-rod completing mini-games. There’s a very Mario Kart vibe to it, that is probably aimed at younger players. Personally, I hated the zone, but the worst of it only lasts for the first five or 10 levels so you can blow through it in an hour or two and then you go to Azshara, which is much better.

Worgen, are Victorian werewolves and will be played mainly by teenagers. The initial quests are beautifully moody and it’s a nice touch to begin as a human and acquire the wolf transformation a few levels in as the story unfolds. Unfortunately after that, your human form becomes entirely cosmetic, like a You can change back and forth whenever you aren’t fi ghting but as soon as you enter combat you are forced into wolf form. This looks particularly silly for hunters because you stand there, taking careful aim as a dapper Victorian gentleman but as soon as your bullet hits its mark, you become a slavering wolf. It would have been nice if you could learn to retain your human form except in melee combat, at some later level.

For those of you with level 80 characters, parked on lapsed accounts, Cataclysm has another fi ve levels to persuade you back. There are fi ve new zones as well. Mount Hyjal and Twilight Highlands feel fairly conventional; Uldum is a beautifully realised slice of medieval Egypt; Deepholm is in the Elemental Plane of Earth, that you reach by fl ying through the giant whirlpool in the middle of the world map, and Vashj’ir is all underwater. Of these, Vashj’ir is probably the most surprising because Blizzard has managed to make it not suck at all. Everyone gets underwater breathing when they are in the zone, courtesy of the Earthen Ring shamans, and a free seahorse mount that swims at epic flying speeds. Even better, when you walk along the seabed, you take huge bounding moon-strides that are as fast as riding a land mount.

Heroic is heroic
The gear inflation at level 80+ is at least as steep as it was in The Burning Crusade and steeper than Wrath. You can expect your Tier 9 gear to be completely replaced by level 82, and Ice Crown Citadel gear well before you hit 85. The biggest change is the amount of stamina we all have now. Your health pool will roughly quadruple by the time you start heroic dungeons. The stats are much more sensibly allocated on weapons and armour, with no more ludicrous combinations, such as strength and spirit on cloth bracers. If you do end up taking a quest reward with a stat you don’t need, the new reforging system will let you swap some of this for another, more useful, stat.

There are seven new five-man dungeons and three raids in both 10 and 25-man flavours. As well as heroic versions of all the new dungeons, there are also heroic level 85 versions of the classic Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep instances. Excitingly, heroic dungeons are actually hard again. Tanks struggle to hold threat, DPS pull aggro and get themselves killed, and healers run out of mana. You can’t just grind dungeons while you watch the telly anymore and the days of AOE-ing the trash down in one long, boring chain-pull are officially over.

PvP continues to be mostly rubbish. There is a new Arathi Basin (Battle for Gilneas), a new Warsong Gulch (Twin Peaks) and a new Wintergrasp (Tol Barad). Tol Barad, in particular is so unbalanced in favour of the defence that it virtually never changes sides.

But unless you only like PvP, there is really no reason not to buy Cataclysm. If you have ever played and loved WoW, this is another shot of the good stuff. And if you somehow haven’t, this is the best time since it launched six years ago, to give it a try.

To say Dragon Age 2 is BioWare at its best would be a high accolade indeed. It’s the proud parent of some of PC gaming’s greatest moments, vivid roleplaying worlds that we gamers exchange anecdotes from like the old folks trade war stories. It has set the benchmark high, and fans have set their expectations even higher for this, the sequel to 2009’s best RPG.

And with a story as complex and player-driven as Dragon Age: Origins, it’s a minefi eld trying to write a sequel that’ll engage new players and appease veterans, all the while maintaining that insane level of detail that we come to expect from the Dragon Age universe. With this in mind, there are some wholesale changes from the original.

This time around, there are no race-specific opening levels. In fact, there’s no choice in the player’s race at all. Character creation is a streamlined experience to say the least. There are but three classes to choose from- warrior, mage and rogue. There’s a default appearance to the main character that BioWare really wants you to choose. They’ve even gone to the extent of designing a custom character facial editor that generates nothing but alarmingly hideous faces. It’s a nod to the success of the Mass Effect series’ Shepard character, a predetermined, voice acted guy or gal with actual character, that rarest of traits in the videogame world of mute player-controlled morons.

So get used to that. You’re not an elven bard. You’re Hawke, a swaggering human with the darkspawn hot on his (or her) heels and a family to protect. Hawke might just be the first player-controlled character that this reviewer actually likes, thanks to some superlative writing and voice acting. Again, like Mass Effect, Hawke’s dialogue options offer a spectrum of human emotional responses, but as a rule each time someone talks to you, you can respond with the usual sickeningly earnest selfl ess hero babble, shoot off a bit of smart talk, or take a no-nonsense and rather violent tone. Somehow Shepard ended up sounding like a right square no matter what, but DA2 offers you three completely separate, larger than life characters to play with. Or one that’s hugely schizophrenic.

Character dev

That inspired character design doesn’t end with Hawke, not by a long shot. Every character that holds any sway to the main plot is intriguing, convincing, and visually varied, and that’s crucial to making the quests any fun. The mechanics of questing are just the same as any RPG since time immemorial; talk to him, go there, kill them, bring that back. Without any decent story to flesh out these tasks, you’re just orienteering. A miserable human packhorse of loot, trudging from one end of the map to another. But if you actually care about why you’re going between these places, if you can decide who to kill and you really care about the characters you’re dealing with, these orienteering courses become an entirely different experience. You forget the underlying mechanics for a bit, because there’s no way you’re letting the Viscount get away with THAT.

Most of the characters you’ll do business with inhabit the city of Kirkwall, a smothering metropolis tainted by a dark history, present day corruption and racial tensions sparked by an influx of refugees from the darkspawn invasion. It’s how David Cameron sees multicultural Britain, basically. As Ferelden asylum seekers, Hawke and his family are persona non grata in the city, and must suffer in bondage to work off a debt their silly old uncle accrued. Along the way you pick up a diverse band of tag alongs, who are – get this – probably the best party BioWare has created. From socially-awkward, Welsh, elven blood mage to criminally underdressed, female incarnation of Jack Sparrow, they’re all an absolute delight. Rather than paragons of good or dead eyed psychopaths, each party member is intensely human, and all the easier to find affection for. Crucially, Bioware has indulged fans of the original with cameos from old characters and plenty of nods to the events that preceded this game, but Bioware has still created a coherent and less daunting world for new players alike.

Enchantment!

Of course you’re not just running around talking to all the lovely people and looking at how lovely everything is. There’s all manner of disembowelling and beheading to be done too. Combat was one of Origins’ major flaws. All too often your party would form an orderly queue in a doorway, ignore all their tactical routines and wait patiently to be destroyed by an astonishingly tough enemy. Well it’s all sorted now. Doorway battles are obsolete, frustrating difficulty spikes are gone and tactic slots work perfectly. Both friendly and enemy AI seems much sharper and it makes fighting so much more fun.

Abilities and skills are represented by superb comic book-esque animations, and are gained through levelling up and choosing specialities, so though there are just three base classes there’s plenty of customisation. All classes have a smorgasbord of ways to perforate and lacerate foes though, and each is hugely gratifying.

API lovin’

There’s been a significant graphical overhaul on the game’s engine, which now supports DirectX 11 features. It is though still the basic Eclipse engine that Origins was built around. This is great news for scalability; the minimum specs are the same here as they were for Origins and you’ll get good frame rates out of mid-range systems with DX11 features disabled. Even updated though, the Eclipse engine doesn’t allow players the kind of free roaming they might expect from a role playing experience, and it’s only in this area that DA2 loses any ground to existing titles. I’m not talking the vast levels of exploration that Oblivion had to offer, but a jump key would be nice. Ultimately though, it’s a speck of dirt on an old master’s painting, and shouldn’t put anyone off this great gaming experience. After all, Dragon Age 2 is BioWare at its best.

Phil Iwaniuk