COP, TMNT Smash Up, Aragorn’s Quest and other pals

**COP: The Recruit…

or C.O.P.? It’s a confusing logo**

An impressive engine that is not used. The controls are smelly, the graphics are adequate, and the camera OH THE CAMERA. It’s just not a good game. It’s an overly generic story and you can’t run people over because you’re a “cop.” It’s stupid and I hate it. Driving is sort of alright, but running around is just so stupid. I hate this game. You are running with the d-pad and the face buttons move the camera around. When you want to shoot you pull out your stylus and tap the gun on the screen to equip it and now it plays like an over the shoulder third person shooter where you can barely see the enemies and when you do kill them you find yourself more bored than you were when you weren’t playing it. TMNT Smash Up

This is an uninspired clone of Smash Bros. I found the close combat to be notably interesting and fun, but the rest of the game is rather bland. It’s competent enough assuming some of the fluidity problems get tightened up before release, but it’s not at all worth owning. Just play Brawl and pretend your characters are turtles. You will proceed to have more fun. Smash Up does feature a standard health bar fighting system to kill your opponents in addition to knocking them off the stage, though, if that wets your whistle. I don’t know what wetting a whistle does.

Aragorn’s Quest: Battle for the Moons Eye

The Lord of the Rings license has left EA and gone to Warner Bros who has decided to make a potentially interesting games… for the kids. It’s fairly competent and I liked the game’s world. The demo consisted of finding the members of the fellowship all around Rivendell so they would actually go to the secret meeting Eldaron had planned. It was “cute” and simple, but the story didn’t seem dumbed down which was nice. Gimli still explains that he’s the son of Gloin even though a kid playing the game wouldn’t know what he was talking about, for example. I enjoyed the game’s presentation and the possibilities it arose. Combat is a slower paced Twilight Princess with the ability to do strong attacks by pressing the B trigger while swinging your sword. You can also use different items Zelda style like a bow and arrow, torch, shield, and spear all mapped to the d-pad. The Z button allows you to use these. Waving a torch scared away spiders and it amused me. Worth a shot.