Copper: "Surviving Death" Review

Advance Review: From TV crime veteran Tom Fontana (Oz, Homicide: Life on the Street) comes BBC America's first ever original scripted series, Copper - a gritty, gloppy "Uptown/Downtown" look at law and order in 1864 New York City. And you don't have to look much further than the cinematic world of Five Points, Manhattan in Scorsese's The Gangs of New York to know that justice rarely reared its head in this time and area that we now consider to be a fascinating hotbed of socioeconomic strife.

Copper has the appealing grime and soot for a show dedicated to showing the corruption that permeates through an entire city system, but I never quite felt invested in any of the characters; especially (and most importantly) the hero of the tale, Irish immigrant Officer Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones). Within this first episode, entitled "Surviving Death," we're loaded up with so much back-story that there's almost no way one leading man can live up to all the potential.

Old Timey Pew Pew Pew!

Corcoran is a beloved Civil War hero and a former prized pugilist looking for his missing wife and a mysterious ship all while mourning the death of his six year old-daughter, Maggie. Sure, he's corrupt, but only enough to make him fit in with his historical surroundings, and nowhere near as corrupt as his higher-ups. As a man with - conveniently - no prejudices, Corcoran is able to utilize the entire city in order to solve a crime - from a black forensic expert named Matthew who's opinion no one will accept, to a posh city-aristocrat who Corcoran saved in the war. Copper never stops being interesting, but the predictable way that Corcoran is allowed to be, for example, the only one who cares about the death of a young prostitute sinks the show into the mire a little bit.

Business does pick up however when Corcoran starts running into bureaucratic walls after his investigation begins pointing to places and people whose reputations simply won't allow for sordid accusations. And so while a case might get solved in the pilot episode, it doesn't necessarily mean that things will play out the way we might expect them to on a contemporary cop show. And I'm not sure whether the loose ends from this premiere will get wrapped up as soon as the second episode, or if they'll play out in a Terriers/Luther-style through the rest of the season.

I will admit to enjoying watching how Matthew (Ato Essandoh) uses the science and lab techniques available at the time to run his CSI: Five Points experiments, even though anybody who's watched enough procedural autopsy TV could look at the dead girl's body and tell you the exact murder weapon.

As Copper moves forward, with several mysteries yet to play out, we'll watch issues of immigration, segregation and voter rights texturize the background, giving the series extra weight and significance. And like Scorsese showed us previously, any hero of this era is mostly likely marked by past tragedy as a way of helping us believe that he would want to see true justice served. A yearn for vengeance works well in that respect too. Unfortunately, any hero surrounded by so much interesting history can be easily overshadowed and made bland. Run Lola Run's Franka Potente is also on board as Eva, a hooker with a heart of silver - aka Corcoran's lust interest. As female characters go on this series, it'll probably be hard to find one that isn't a prostitute or a princess as such was the times.

Copper has some good seeds planted down in its muddy Mulberry Street and I'm hoping that the reason that some of it came off as bland to me is due to the fact that I've seen a lot of these characters before; in Westerns and other films and shows taking place post-Civil War. Still, a decent start.

Copper premieres Sunday, August 19th at 10/9c on BBC America.

Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and IGN. WARNING: No Nudity!

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Soul Sacrifice Reveals the Brutal Cost of Ultimate Power

You wouldn’t think it to watch the trailer, but Keiji Inafune insists that Soul Sacrifice has strong autobiographical overtones. While the veteran developer readily admits that he’s never had to go quite so far as to stick his hand down his throat and pull his spinal column out through his mouth and brandish it as a sword, Inafune reveals that he struck upon the theme of sacrifice while reflecting on the career decisions that have brought him to his current role as an independent developer, after years of towing the company line at Capcom.

“I’ve always wanted to do a dark fantasy, but the concept of the sacrifice came up when I left my former job and looked back on my life and rethought the choices I’d made to get to that position,” explains Inafune. “I realised that I’d made sacrifices to get to that point and that made me think of the sacrifices that are necessary in life and the path that those sacrifices create.”

However, unlike Inafune, the decisions taken and sacrifices made by the player throughout this Vita-exclusive action-RPG will not lead to the founding of an independent video game company. Instead, they will influence how much power the customisable protagonist is able to wield and, ultimately, how noble or corrupt a sorcerer they will become.

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The concept of the sacrifice came up when I left my former job and looked back on my life and rethought the choices I’d made.

The sacrifices are not just of a personal nature, though. While the wince-inducing sacrifice of a hand or eyeball will grant access to spells of varying destructive power, the most common choice to be made is with regard to the hostile denizens of Souls Sacrifice’s twisted worlds.

Once defeated, the broken creatures can either be offered in sacrifice, a process from which great power can be derived, or laid to rest, thus freeing their tortured souls. It’s a question that’s not unlike the harvest/rescue mechanic posed by Bioshock’s Little Sisters, but where those otherwise innocent infants were victims of Rapture’s peculiar ecosystem, the grotesque, once-human antagonists of Soul Sacrifice are creations of their own making, contorted by avaricious over-use of the same power afforded to the player.

Inafune hopes that the emotional kicker in this instance will come from the delivery method of the back story for each genus of creature. Instead of a static screen or entry in a bestiary that can be easily ignored, a tale of woe is spun via short sentences of text overlaid on the action as the player engages the beast in mortal combat. Subsequent encounters with bloated harpies or deformed minotaurs reveal more of the story of each and at the end of the fight the once aggressive assailant will become a pitiful shade of its former self and beg to be released from its torment. Whichever way the player leans in deciding the fallen creature’s fate will affect not only the power they can harness, but their path through the game, as different levels will open up depending on the choices made. The levels here are represented as chapters in a book that recounts the tales of former sorcerers, read and relived by the protagonist while their corporal body sits imprisoned in a cell.

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It’s not as simple as making a choice one way and then making another choice the other way five times in a row

“It’s not as simple as making a choice one way and then making another choice the other way five times in a row; it’s not that mathematical,” explains Inafune. “Every time you’re given a different back story and so the more you find out about the monsters that you’re defeating, the more you might feel sorry for them.”

This constant requirement to re-examine your motivations extends to other players, too. Soul Sacrifice features ad hoc four-player co-op in which alliances with friends or strangers can be forged and broken as each player weighs-up the benefits of having other players fighting alongside them against the potential power to be harnessed by sacrificing them for their own ends, a process that the sacrificial victim has little say in – except perhaps to offer pleas to the other players over voice chat.

“There will be different rewards if you are sacrificed, but really what I want to illustrate is the emotional aspects of whether you are the one being sacrificed or are sacrificing another, such as feelings of guilt and different motivations that would lead you to do that,” highlights Inafune.

The headline gore and gristle of Soul Sacrifice might have already ensured it will be forever referred to as “that game where you pull your spine out through your mouth”, but its customisable protagonist, varied spell set and ample replay options suggest there’s more to its DNA that wanton, bloody violence; it appears that a tale of unlikely hope and irrepressible despair lurks beneath its adult-rated, mutilated facade.

Soul Sacrifice launches next spring exclusively for Vita, pricing details have not yet been revealed but in all likelihood it won’t cost an arm and a leg. Perhaps just an eye and a foot.

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