VideoGamer.com Plays

What we've been playing this week.

Tom Orry, Editor - FIFA 11, Xbox 360 and PS3

If I had more spare time to play the games of my choosing, this would be in my disc drive an awful lot. It's just brilliant. If someone had shown me FIFA 11 back when the Mega Drive version of FIFA appeared to look like real life (I was only young), I'd have probably fainted. EA has already managed to make the closest thing to real football ever, and I'm already looking forward to what the company can do with the next round of consoles. Hopefully, if nothing else, they'll make the players look a little less like creepy monsters.

Neon Kelly, Deputy Editor - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, PC, PS3, Xbox 360

Nope, I've not returned to MW2's multiplayer - I haven't got the skill, the patience, or a decent enough internet connection (thanks for nothing, Talk Talk). No, last weekend I found I had the peculiar urge to revisit the single-player campaign - I say "peculiar" as, let's face it, there are dozens of great games from this year that I've yet to play. On my second playthrough, a couple of things stood out: firstly, just as I felt last time, I reckon that it gets off to a quite shoddy start. "Cliffhanger" is pretty great, but the opening level is a bit dull, the first slums level is a total chore - and the less said about "No Russian", the better. However, the middle of the game onwards still holds up really, really well. I remember really liking the oil rig and gulag stages, but all the American invasion stuff was surprisingly great this time around. The plot is still totally all-over-the-place; whether or not that was what Infinity Ward intended, I'll never know. At any rate, I doubt I'll finish this second playthrough; I've finally snagged one of the office copies of Reach.

Jamin Smith, Staff Writer - Final Fantasy XIV, PC

Uh oh. Seven or so hours into FFXIV, and the hooks are well and truly in. If you don't see any articles of mine up on the site next week, assume the worse. I'll be holed up in my room surrounded by empty pizza boxes and cans of Redbull, with eyes that haven't seen sleep for several days. I'm not normally one to lose myself in the world of an MMO, but for FFXIV I decided to make an exception. I'm not far enough into the game to tell you if it's actually any good, but it's been a while since I sunk my teeth into an MMO and I'm loving every second of it. I'm particularly impressed by the option to change class and profession on the fly simply by swapping the weapon or tool in your hand. I always get upset that I've made the wrong choice class wise, and this completely removes that worry. If you're on the Trabia server, and want to say hi, look out for Drake Lionward, the most badass conjurer in the whole of Gridania. Probably.

Emily Gera, Staff Writer - RUSE, Xbox 360, PS3, PC

It's a universal truth that WWII is the coolest of all the wars, a well known fact around my house that if I had my way we would live in a world where all games were required to include Nazis, and here's an extra bit of trivia: RTS is a brilliant genre. So naturally R.U.S.E. gets extra points for combining all three, but more importantly it gets a gold star for its ambitions. It's rare to find an RTS title that is made for console and is legitimately worthwhile to play, but this is a surprisingly clever game. Beyond the novelty of playing an RTS with a controller its strategic elements are truly interesting within the genre as a whole. Lie your way through a war! Build rubbish, fake tanks out of plywood! Pretend to have more troops than you do! If R.U.S.E. is a measure of real combat I would have been ace in WWII.