Review: Superman Red Son

I make no secret of my hate of superhero comics. Not comics in general - I love comics - but specifically the type popularised by Marvel and DC, the type Joe Average will think of if you mention the word "comic" to him. Sure, they're great fun for kids, but when graphic novel sections of bookshops become dominated by characters in silly outfits fighting each other, it's no surprise no-one takes the artform seriously.

Anyway, the only types of superhero stories I enjoy are those in which a talented author purposefully plays with genre conventions, such as in Alan Moore's work, or re-interprets the "mythos" of a classic characters such as in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns.

Superman: Red Son falls into the latter category, re-imagining the Man of Steel as a Russian-born communist who turns the tide of the cold war for Soviet Russia. Much praise has been lavished upon Mark Millar for not portraying the Soviets and Stalin as evil villains - but honestly, in this day and age shouldn't this be seen as an expectation rather than a breakthrough? Millar never goes as far as to actually explore communism's ins-and-outs, simply allowing Superman to tell the reader how committed he is to the cause. (Again: is this really cutting-edge stuff for the US? Have they not got over their Red Fear yet? Then again, this is the country that considers Obama a socialist.)

To his credit, Millar cleverly subverts the cold war arms race: instead of stockpiling nuclear deterrents, the US produces a series of supervillains to fights Superman. (We never actually get to see any of these fights, although presumably they'd play out like in any other Superman comic.) Superman's arch-nemesis is, as in the regular comics, super-genius Lex Luthor, who is introduced playing fourteen simultaneous games of chess while reading Machiavelli's Il Principe during a coffee break - when Mark Millar writes super-geniuses, he doesn't do half-measures. The rest of the cast are re-imagined - well, to an extent - DC characters: Wonder Woman, Batman, Lois Lane, Brainiac and the Green Lantern. The best of the lot is the Russian anarchist Batman who attempts to bring down Superman's communist state.

Unfortunately, Millar loses any pretence of exploring complicated political issues by the halfway point and instead goes for some obvious moralising about the downsides of oppressive totalitarian regimes and obligatory mindless fight scenes between superheroes. Its epic pretensions are far beyond the depth of the story and the ending (which is either "OMG GENIUS" or entirely pointless depending on what side of twelve years old you are) reads like bad fanfiction.

Let's be honest: Red Son is an attention-grabbing stunt of a book with only a couple of good ideas to its name. While a decent read, it's painted with such broad strokes that it relapses into the very hyperbole that "groundbreaking" graphic novels such as these are supposed to be subverting.

"Fear 2: Project Origin" review

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (or, as humans might refer to it, "Fear 2") is not a game of subtleties, as you can probably gather from its title. Fear 2's aim is to scare you, and you play it if you want to be scared - perhaps not the most noble of ambitions, nor a particularly original one, but regardless one it set flat-out to achieve.

Well, actually that's not quite true. The true meat of the gameplay consists of a fairly bland first-person shooter that can't quite decide if it's Call of Duty or Halo. The identikit grunts (quite literally - most enemies are "replicas", a mindless army of clones distinguishable from the earlier human enemies only by their powerful weapons) are fairly satisfying to fight, but the most exciting variations they present are "guy with flamethrower" and "guy with a really big machine gun".

While the logic of featuring such a large quantity of mindless gunplay in a game marketed as a scary experience is questionable, the shooting at least contrasts well with the genuinely scary bits. Monolith pulls out all the stops, with claustrophobic dreamlands and bizarre graphical effects heaped on top of one another. While used sparingly, the infrequent visits from Alma Wade (the "icon-but-only-because-they-ripped-off-the Ring" cover star and very angry poltergeist) become predictable: the screen will turn orange and/or you'll see a swing in a field, and/or Alma will engage the player in a brief thumb war before being shaken off (yet again) with a simple QTE. The secret to great horror, someone once said, is the same as comedy: never repeat yourself. There's a good reason why, in "The Shining", those twins and the disgusting old woman only appear once.

That said, fights with supernatural enemies are tense, horrible affairs that successfully remove the feeling of empowerment the game's ridiculous arsenal provides, with masterful pacing that makes their initial reveals genuinely scary. Yet for all it gets right in these sections, it takes it all back with mounted turret set-pieces and, astonishingly, a handful of opportunities to pilot a giant mech suit.

The bar for horror games' stories was set high by Bioshock, which knew that the sight of a society cannibalising itself is far scarier than freaks jumping out the walls. Fear 2 tells a superficially similar story of science gone too far and how "we make our own monsters", but it's cliched and predictable to the point of self parody. Your team, meanwhile, consist of a bunch of characters so paper-thin it's a surprise they don't just float away in a gentle breeze, and who either provide the player with meaningless objectives ("Get to the nurse's office! Meet up with Snake Fist! Save Corporal Keegan!" - why are these necessary when the player is travelling through glorified corridors, anyway?), or just die occasionally throughout the story. It's a bad sign when the most memorable line in your game is "You're like free pizza in an anime convention!"

This isn't a bad game by any means: if you're looking for a dark, atmospheric and sometimes scary shooter, Fear 2 fills all of the criteria. It is, though, a success only if you switch your brain off beforehand.