Review: Gears of War: Anvil Gate SPOILERS!

Gears of War: Anvil Gate by Karen Traviss follows closely on the heels of the alliance between the Gorasni and COG remnant in Jacinto's Remnant. In it, Marcus Fenix and the rest of Delta Squad and Jacinto survivors and the rest combat a force deadlier than the Locust Horde. It's called: the Lambent. And it's invading Vectes Naval Base. Can Colonel Victor Hoffman and Delta Squad defend it like Hoffman defended Anvil Gate? Only time will tell.

The book opens with Corporal Damon Baird in a bar when Bernie Mataki walks in with a dog and announces her plan to hunt down the Stranded who are still terrorizing them. Trescu, the leader of the Republic of Gorasnaya, invites the COG to visit their imulsion drilling platform Emerald Spar to see how it can better be defended against Stranded forces. Bernie, Anya, and Samantha Byrne are attacked by four Stranded and the three women capture them. Hoffman tries to extract information, and when he runs out of options, he turns things over to Trescu who promptly kills one of them to soften up the youngest. He tells Trescu what he needs to know and the COG works from there. Meanwhile, Marcus, Sam, Dom, Baird and a couple of the Gorasni guys are searching for a missing trawler. The citizens are rioting when Marcus arrives and calms people down. Baird's trying to piece together what happened with Jace Stratton. Fishermen haul in a glowing fish and everyone freaks out. Baird blows it up, taking the boat down. Baird pieces it together that the Lambent have been attacking the fishing boats. Prescott wants it kept quiet which pisses Hoffman off as he thinks the people ought to be told the truth. On patrol, Bernie and a few others listen to Scepter as it reports seeing a weird tree inside a boats hull.

Thirty-two years earlier, during the 62nd year of the Pendulum Wars, Victor Hoffman, a lieutenant in the COG army, gts ready for another day at Anvil Gate (a.k.a. Anvegad). Meanwhile Adam Fenix is getting ready to ship out for Tyro  in Western Kashkur. In the small nation Pesang, Bai Tak signs up with the COG to feed his family. Adam waits in Tyro for the UIR to invade. The UIR have changed targets and began a siege on Anvil Gate by blowing up the road way, cutting them off from the rest of Kashkur.Sander's dies, Adam and the 26 RTI (Royal Tyran Infantry) try to reach Anvil Gate and Hoffman's holding the fort. Bai Tak and six Pesanga soldiers are met by Padrick Salton who takes them to Hoffman. The siege isn't going well. Hoffman surrenders after days of fighting and uses that to kill his captors. Pad Salton, Bai Tak, and the Pesanga soldiers hold out while the civvies, including Samuel Byrne's wife and unborn daughter, flee for Jacinto. Samuel Byrne dies during the siege. Adam, after seeing and hearing how bad the fighting at Anvil Gate was, quits the COG army to become a scientist to find a way to stop war.

In the present, Baird and the rest of Delta go with Clement and her crew to investigate Trescu's missing ship. Lambent stalks appear in the ocean. Baird grabs his Lancer and tries to take it down by himself. He succeeds and is rescued by Dom and Marcus in Gettner's Raven. They learn that the Lambent are heading for Emerald Spar. The COG and Gorasni fight to save the imulsion platform but to no success. The Lambent destroy the rig and the Gorasni remnant join the COG on Vectes. Gettner tells Baird and company that the Lambent are en rout to Vectes. Hoffman persuades Lyle Ollivar to get his Stranded together and fight off the Lambent. Hoffman arranges Vectes Naval Base to have the same kind of traps and breaches that he'd made at Anvil Gate. The battle is severe but with minimal losses o n the human front. A pair of Lambent leviathans show up and Baird wrecks the coastline using the Hammer of Dawn to deal with one while Michaelson's navy takes out the other one. After the fight, the Stranded flee, leaving the COG and Gorasni to the island. Hoffman, no longer having confidence in Prescott, breaks into his office and steals a disk.  Bernie hunts for her dog, mac, who ran during the fighting. She finds him amidst a growth of Lambent stalks. The novel ends with her calling to Vectes for help.

All in all, a good, solid novel. Probably the second best in the Gears of War novel series. It's pack full of emotions from Hoffman worrying about what he did at Anvil Gate to defending the COG's last base with Gorasni soldiers, and Dom still trying to come to terms with how he killed his wife. I'd recommend this novel for any fan of the game series.

Review: Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan SPOILERS!

Following the events of the popular Star Wars games Knights of the Old Republic I and II, Revan, penned by Drew Karpyshyn, contains an absurd amount of continuity errors. The premise is that Revan remembers why he fell to the dark side and runs off to confront it. Not a bad thing in and of itself, as this is what KOTOR2 implied, but Drew sees fit to toss out all of KOTOR2, except the title The Exile, because it doesn't gel with him. I apologize in advance for the lengthy post.

In the first part, Revan, married to the stuck-up prig Bastila, has become, for whatever its worth and apologies to my language, an ass. He seeks a confrontation with Jedi Master Atris (who's seventy but Drew describes her as twenty-five) over the misleading in the texts about the Battle of Malachor V. He's trying to find out what happened to some lame Jedi named Meetra Surik (dear God that still looks horrible being written; this is the name Drew gave Jedi Exile). Revan recruits Canderous Ordo to find Manalore's Mask as it leads to what Revan believes is a threat. After finding the mask, Revan abandons his long-time friend and rushes to the hidden Sith world Dromund Kaas. He's captured by Sith and held as a prisoner for the next five years.

Part Two completely, and with noted dislike, rewrites KOTOR2's entire storyline. In the game, the Jedi Council is non-existent, no one knows who the threat was or where they were striking from (it was noted in the novel that everyone and their pet dog knew about Kreia and her band of "rogue Jedi"). Yeah, that's what Drew called the deadly Sith Triumvirate. Rogue Jedi. Meetra (ugh) despite having rebuilt the Mandalorians, refounding the Jedi Order, and saving the worlds of Dantooine, Nar Shaddaa, Telos IV, Onderon, as well as destroying Darth Sion (the Lord of Pain, visibly scarred and hate-filled), Darth Nihilus (the Lord of Hunger; he devours everything and one that has a strong potential in the force and wiped out dozens of planets), and Darth Traya (the leader and Lady of Betrayal). Revan supposedly left others in charge and had a plan for why he led war on the Republic, but Drew overwrote this for "seemingly" no reason. Everything Jedi Exile and Revan did is discounted and tossed aside as Drew butchers his way through the Star Wars galaxy. Also missing is Jedi Exile's compassion for everyone and everything; Drew turned her into one hateful and angry Jedi.

She saved the galaxy from extinction by the Sith Triumvirate, which were revealed to be the advanced guard for the True Sith (the threat in The Old Republic), but Drew tossed all that out and said she was a Jedi who fought the rogue Jedi and their leader, Kreia (who was Darth Traya), and had many people who hated her. Drew treats her like the red shirt she is. She tracks down Revan and frees him with the help of one Darth Scourge. Together, with no plan and no allies, they attack Darth Vitiate (The Sith Emperor). Scourge stabs Meetra in the back and presents Revan as a gift to Vitiate. The Emperor grants Scourge immortality while Revan is imprisoned for the next 300 years (his story ends in TOR where the Jedi free him and the Sith kill him; so much for being the man with The Plan).

All in all, this book crushed the hopes of the KOTOR fans and Revan fans as Drew sacrificed great characters for a mediocre plot in a bid to hype up The Old Republic. All it did was fail in the majority of the eyes of the fans.

Review: Mass Effect: Deception SPOILERS!

The tie-in novel to the Mass Effect game series, Mass Effect: Deception by author William C. Dietz, has many screaming for blood. This is because of continuity errors that are spread about in Bill's novel. They are listed here.

Now, I've read and loved most of Bill's other media tie-ins, but this one takes the cake. He screws up continuity between characters, history, technology, and military that it forces one to take a step back from the novel. Even Star Trek has better continuity than this.

Now, don't get me wrong, the premise of this novel is great but sacrificed nearly everything established by author Drew Karpyshyn in the previous three novels. It's a fun read if you've played the games and read the books if only to see how many of the continuity errors you can spot. If you've done neither, read the book with the link above and below to get a clear idea of how things went.

That said, with a good premise, this novel could've taken place after Mass Effect: Invasion, but the lack of fact-checking and simple knowledge prevent it from working within the series as a whole.

Review: Gears of War: Jacinto's Remnant SPOILERS!

The novel Gears of War: Jacinto's Remnant is written by Karen Traviss as she continues to add more depth to the GOW cast. The book starts off with a letter from Colonel Victor Hoffman, asking future generations of humanity to forgive the Coalition of Ordered Governments (COG) for destroying Jacinto in Gears of War 2 as it was the only way to defeat the Locust Horde.

This part is mirrored with the chapters that take place in the past, as Prescott and Hoffman order the destruction of Sera via Professor Adam Fenix's Hammer of Dawn satellites. Citizens are moved in, but once the explosion goes off, those humans left outside Jacinto become the Stranded (those bums in all three games). These scenes run throughout the novel alongside the fight to save humanity after the evacuation of Jacinto as seen in Gears of War 2.

The novel starts where Gears of War 2 left off, with Cole Train, Anya, and the others in flight away from the watery grave that is Jacinto. Cole notices the tension rising between Hoffman and Chairman Richard Prescott over the Sires (a part of GOW2) and how late he was declassified and demands to be told everything. Prescott, for the rest of the novel, continues to hold everything, echoing his death in GOW3 where he reveals his final secret.

The COG are evacuated to Port Farrall in the middle of winter and people die as the COG struggles to stave off the remnants of the Locust who keep attacking. Hoffman, after a talk with COG Navy leader Quentin Michaelson, orders Marcus Fenix and Delta Squad to checkout Vectes naval base int he southern hemisphere of Sera for relocation. Upon arrival, they find that there are people living there who've been there since the Pendulum Wars.

The COG move in and end up facing a group of Stranded pirates, one of whom raped Bernadette "Bernie" Mataki. They hand them over to the Stranded leader who is blown apart by the remnant of the old Union of Independent Republic (UIR) members, the Republic of Gorasnaya and their leader Miran Trescu. The Gorasni want a treaty with the COG and it's made official.

Throughout the novel, we periodically meet up with Dom Santiago, still trying to get over from having to kill his wife Maria. I should mention that in GOW2, he finds her as an empty shell, withered and decaying. He doesn't know what to do and Marcus tells him "It's okay." Dom tearfully kills Maria to spare her the pain; he'd been searching for her for the last ten years and has now lost every member of his family except for his honorary brother, Marcus Fenix, the main hero of the series.

Everyone's giving Dom enough space to cope, but aren't sure how to help him along. This is a very powerful character driven story arc that Karen gave Dom and it was only natural because of how soon this book takes place after the second game and is a theme that is brought up again, loosely in Gears of War: Anvil Gate, Gears of War: Coalition's End and Gears of War 3, all of which (including the game) are written by Karen Traviss.

It's a very powerful addition to the series and comes with enough quips about the comic series that Joshua Ortega and later Karen Traviss wrote for the franchise.

Review: Gears of War: Aspho Fields. SPOILERS!

Gears of War: Aspho Fields, written by acclaimed author Karen Traviss, tackles the events of Aspho Fields during the Pendulum Wars and the events after the first Gears of War. Sure, this was written years ago, but it's still a fun read. Traviss starts out with a battle, like all good sci-fi novels do. The Locust Horde is still reeling from the attack by the Lightmass bomb (the ending to Gears of War). Delta Squad, particularly Sgt Marcus Fenix and Pvt Dom Santiago, along with Pvt Augustus "Cole Train" Cole and Corporal Damon Baird fight a wave of grubs when one of them is taken out by a sniper shot. They track the shot down to a mall and find former COG soldier Bernadette "Bernie" Mataki. They radio in for evac and head back to base, Dom asking her about the Battle of Aspho Fields.

The storyline then shifts to Carlos Santiago, Dom's older brother, in school, defending the new rich kid Marcus Fenix, son of Professor Adam Fenix. The scene shifts through time and shows Marcus growing up with the Santiago family. Dom and Carlos note how tightly Marcus keeps his emotions in check when he's told that his mother went missing exploring the underground caverns.

In the present, Colonel Victor Hoffman prepares to move one food supply base away from the Locust Horde's war path. This part of the plot is fairly simple and is short enough to get the gist that the COG is once more on the brink of being overrun by the grubs. The COG manages to reallocate the personnel and deliver them behind COG lines. Through the scenes, Hoffman refuses to apologize for leaving Marcus to die in Jacinto's prison known as The Slab during the events of Gears of War. Hoffman and Marcus eventually set aside old grudges and get over their angst.

Back in the past, the United Independent Republics (UIR) are building a major satellite network that will obliterate the COG from space. Hoffman leads the campaign with commandos, particularly Dom Santiago, while the rest of the soldiers, including Mataki, Marcus, and Carlos, stage a distraction to lure the UIR away from the base. It works. Hoffman and Dom retrieve the satellite data while several COG men and women die in the diversion. Carlos is wounded and sacrifices himself to save Marcus, an act that disturbs him to the end of Gears of War 3. Dom, after being told his wife's given birth to his second child, is ecstatic but sad that his brother was killed. Marcus and Mataki vow to never tell Dom what really happened.

In the present, Mataki tells him, coming clean a couple of decades late. Marcus says he wanted to spare him the grief, and now, what with Dom's kids dead and his wife Maria missing, Marcus didn't see a point in opening old wounds. The book closes with the threat that the COG is about to take the fight to the Locust.

All in all, a very well crafted novel that held suspense and keeps you wanting more. For those who've played the games, this novel is worth it and adds depth to the characters.

Book Review: Halo: Glasslands SPOILERS!

I've recently read the novel Halo: Glasslands by bestselling novelist Karen Traviss. Set between the flight from the Ark at the end of Halo 3 and the memorial scene in Halo 3, Glasslands and Traviss draw you into a world dealing with the after effects of war.

On Earth, the Office of Naval Intelligence sends out a team lead by a failed SPARTAN II candidate with a mixed-bag team compromised of a Spartan II named Naomi, two ODSTs called Val and Maz, an AI named BB, and a Sangheili (Elite) linguistics expert to sell weapons back to the Elites hoping they'll start a war with The Arbiter Thel 'Vadam. They do this all while killing Brutes and Jackals and planting fake footage of them attacking Elite ships.

Meanwhile, in the Dyson Sphere that used to be Onyx, the remaining Spartan 2s and 3s with their trainer Franklin Mendez and Spartan creator Catherine Halsey explore the world they were trapped in during the events of Halo: Ghosts of Onyx by Eric Nylund. They're trying to find a way out as well as new Forerunner technology while thinking that the Flood have overrun the galaxy or that the Halos have all fired and wiped out all life. They find a way out eventually with help from three original Forerunner-made Engineers.

On Sanghelios, the homeworld of the Elites, a group of Elite terrorists have started making plans to fight the Arbiter for dismissing the Forerunners as gods and for promoting peace with the humans. The three plots come to a head when one of the Elites is kidnapped by the ONI group before they race off to arrest Halsey for stealing war assets.

Admiral Hood invites Vadam to attend the memorial where they agree that The Master Chief is dead (as of the trailer for Halo 4, we know that's not true, but the characters believe this). The novel comes to a close as Halsey is shipped off to work with others on the Spartan-4 project while the captured Elite helps human technicians with acquiring Forerunner technology from the now open Dyson Sphere. The linguistics expert goes to Sanghelios as a guest of the Arbriter and the Elite Terrorists strike, signaling the end of the book.

A good book that provides enough detail and character moments as well as recaps of the storyline from the other Halo works for the average reader to easily follow along.