Let me channel Demi for a moment: "More like grapple caliber. lol. shit game". There are about 75 fun games inside of Soul Caliber, sadly none of them are the same game and none of them ever meet. While the game looks awfully pretty, the play feels sluggish and the presentation is lackluster. Even the touted "Tower of Souls" is little more than a menu screen that could have been programmed in an afternoon. Character creation is fun, but the RPG-ish and thoroughly byzantine "stats" attached to equipment ruin the fun by forcing you to use certain items or gimp your hero. Add that to the fact that you're doing little more than re-skinning an existing character and the fun falls flat on it's face.
Also, who decided it'd be fun to force the player to play the same levels TWICE to get new items? You could get them on the first go-round, but then you'd need to guess with of the ten million possible circus tricks you'd be required to perform to get the item. The game only tells you what you need to do on a second go-round. Oh, good, fun.
I guess this game could be fun if I sunk hours and hours into it, but the fact is that the game starts at a solid 8 and wanders down to about a 4 the more time you spend with it. The effort required to get it back to an 8 is enormous, I can't ever imagine this being a game I'd find enough people similarly dedicated to enjoy with. Add that to the fact that game barely explains it's own convoluted mechanics (There's something about finishing moves, but I've tried to do them in every possible fashion and I have yet to pull it off.) and the for all the pretty presentation, you've got a game with an enormous learning curve that doesn't really reward the effort.
2/5, fun for a few hours.
Battlefield: Bad Company might as well be called Battlefield: Pennsylvania for all the variety in it's level design. Yes, the levels are huge. But the missions are insipid (Go destroy 4 SAM sites. Okay, now go destroy 3 antennas. Okay, go destroy 2 weapons sites. Okay, go destroy 5 stationary guns. Next level! Go destroy 2 tanks....) and the levels are about as exciting as the Midwest. Big empty tracts of farm land separate generic buildings that came out of a toolset. Even separate levels look identical. Am I in Zabograb or the Middle East? I have no idea.
The mutliplayer is also a FAIL. No aerial vehicles means everyone makes a mad dash for the tanks and armor cars get fucked right off the bat. Only a single multiplayer mode comes packed-in, which is an odd choice for a game that made it's name on massive multiplayer struggles.
On the upside, the presentation is AAA, the dialogue is better than good and the sound design is killer. Too bad it's all part of such an utterly boring game.
