3 Demos, 0 Sales

Earlier in the month, my sampling of the Dead Space 2 demo convinced me not to buy the game once it launched. Good for me, in that it saved me approximately $70, but bad for the game developer.

Yesterday, I tried two more demos: Bulletstorm and Crysis 2. Neither came even close to winning me over, although I could see how each would appeal to different types of gamers.

Bulletstorm gets top marks for creativity, as the focus in the game appears to be on earning XP by killing your enemies in the most original manners possible! Combo moves, such as pulling the creature toward you via an electronic leash and then smashing him against a wall, generate more value for you than simply shooting them repeatedly in the head. Therefore, anyone who wants to really think about how to eliminate their enemies will probably have a great time with this game. To me, it felt too much like a button masher where I have to expend large quantities of mental energy just remembering what to press in what order, and so I'll pass. But the demo definitely had a few fun moments, including the point at which I completely ran out of ammo and yet stayed alive for another several minutes by virtue of simply kicking everyone who came at me firing!

Crysis 2 feels like a poor man's Call of Duty to me. The graphics were unimpressive, and most of the movements felt slightly off, rather like Killzone 2 did, at first. Now, I got used to KZ2's 'weighty controls' after awhile, so maybe the same would be true for this game if I stuck with it. But I'm not sure the payoff's there, to be honest. I got sniped many times, often from a distance, and had a hard time figuring out exactly how the physics in the game worked. At one point I fell quite a long distance but suffered no perceivable damage; at another, I saw players making huge leaps that I didn't seem capable of. I also got killed up close by an unseen enemy, which was my clue that we could cloak ourselves. Those are all teething pains, to be sure, but nothing about the map (a rooftop greenhouse area) or the action itself made me want to continue.

If I had to buy one of the two, it'd be Crysis 2, I suppose. I could imagine playing it for a day or two before I'd want to go back to Call of Duty: Black Ops and experience real fun. With the Killzone 3 demo/beta just a week away now, and the full game coming a couple weeks later, I can't see shelling out cash for either of these Tier-B offerings, though.

[Update later that same day: I just finished trying Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II demo, with similar results. It's possible that I'm the dumbest gamer ever, but when I try for five minutes to force grip a TIE fighter in order to throw it into a tower, all to no avail, that's a pretty good clue that this game ain't for me!]