30 public written reviews
The views here are this user’s only and are not representative of Giant Bomb's thoughts and opinions on the discussed video game. GB's official reviews reside at giantbomb.com/reviews.
First person shooters are a dime a dozen in the game industry so every new game in the genre needs to have a hook to capture the interest of its prospective audience. Developer Kaos Studios set out to one up the competition with Homefront by setting their game in a near future where a unified Korea has occupied the United States west of the Mississippi. It is a horrifying premise to be sure and to bolster the game’s…
Crafting a solid gaming experience is much like putting together a puzzle. Regardless of if you have all the pieces directly in front of you, if you can't get them to fit together the puzzle remains a broken mess. Venetica, an action roleplaying game, is one of those puzzles. Reminiscent of Microsoft's Fable series, Venetica puts players in the role of the tough but beautiful Scarlett. After a rather drawn out, if…
Assassin's Creed was a good game marred by many overt flaws that hindered players enjoyment. It's sequel Assassin's Creed II took all the criticisms to heart and delivered what in my mind was the single best game to be released in 2009. Gone were the tedious “investigations” and extremely long travel times from city to city and in its place was an action title that made you feel like more of a bad ass than Kratos in…
Titles such as Konami's Dance Dance Revolution and Ubisoft's Just Dance have proven that there is a market for dance centric video games. Despite their successes, dancing games up to this point have never been able to fully capture dancing in its entirety and required a peripheral, be it a dance pad or a hand held motion controller. Through the power of Kinect, Harmonix's Dance Central alleviates all the functional…
Thus far in the big Kinect experiment I have played a variety of mini games compilations that do a great job of showing off the capabilities of the hardware but the nature of these games means that they don't provide a traditional gaming experience. Sega saw that there was a hole that needed to be filled in the Kinect launch line-up and they stepped up providing Sonic Free Riders, an arcade style mascot hoverboard…
This current console generation though Square Enix has hit a bit of a rough patch. Games like The Last Remnant and Infinite Undiscovery failed to wow either critics or consumers and even the latest entry in the company’s flagship series, Final Fantasy, failed to live up to the overwhelming expectations put upon it. Still, even with their recent disappointments, it is hard to not give Square Enix the benefit of the…
Developer Harmonix has long been the standard bearer for the music genre of games. Since the release of Guitar Hero, which they developed in conjunction with Red Octane, Harmonix has blazed the trail that all other developers have followed. Recently though the music genre has been a bit stale. While titles like DJ Hero have certainly done something different with the niche, the two main franchises, Guitar Hero and…
Sports are an inherently active activity and as such do a great job in showcasing motion controls and so it was no surprise when Microsoft announced that Kinect Sports would be a launch title for their new hardware. It was something of a surprise that the game was not to be the bundled app with the Kinect hardware but there were fairly decent reasons, which I explore in my Kinect Adventures review, but the biggest…
For the longest time, pack in games had become a thing of the past and then the Wii launched and to entice people to buy their product Nintendo packaged it with what would quickly become a cultural phenomenon, Wii Sports. Now, four years later, both Sony and Microsoft are tasked with proving to people that their motion tech works and both have chosen games to launch alongside their systems. Sony went the…
Last year, Activision attempted to expand upon its Hero brand by introducing DJ Hero to the mix. The DJ themed Hero title was well received critically but was met with rather tepid sales figures. Speculative reasoning rained down from above as everyone attempted to put their own two cents out there for all to see and hear. Was it the over-priced turntable peripheral? Was it a reluctance to play a DJ themed game? Or…
Medal of Honor is one of the most storied first person shooter series (FPS) in the history of games. For a time the series was synonymous with how a World War II FPS should be developed. At least until the development team moved on to create the current king of the industry, Call of Duty. Since the rise of Call of Duty, Medal of Honor has been relegated to an also ran and the once gargantuan franchise has spent the…
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the Guitar Hero franchise for the last few years that the most recognizable franchise in music gaming has an identity crisis. Publisher Activision, developer Neversoft and even the series own fans do not know what the purpose of the long running music franchise is anymore. Is it an arcade game with a focus on blazing guitar parts? Is it a single player game…
Twenty years is a long time but it is the length of time that Electronic Arts NHL series has been around. Dating back to the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis days the series has gone through many, many changes and like any series, it has had its fair share of ups and downs. Over the last three years EA has left its closest competitor NHL 2K in the dust and the latest game in the series, NHL 11 is no different as it…
Games like film are highly subjective. There are going to be some games that people love and some games that people despise to their very cores. Deadly Premonition, a horror/thriller themed open-world/action game that draws inspiration from a variety of games, films and television shows, is one of those types of games. Deadly Premonition is quirky, quirky in a Twin Peaks kind of way. If you aren’t into quirky, brain…
Limbo, when viewed on the surface, seems like a very simplistic game. After all it is a platformer that is displayed in black and white, contains just three actions the protagonist can perform at the behest of the player and contains virtually no narrative. But if one were to only view Limbo on the surface they would be missing an awful lot. What they would be missing is a beautiful game that takes players on a…
Super Mario Galaxy was one of the most critically acclaimed titles to grace the Wii console, it was accepted by the fans having sold over eight million copies worldwide, and has won many awards and accolades since its release, including being called the Nintendo Game of the Decade by Nintendo Power. Following up such a title is an unenviable task but it was the challenge set before Nintendo and they have delivered…
The World Cup has finished, Spain has declared supremacy for the next four years and if you are anything like me you are going through some serious international soccer withdrawal. Fortunately there is a cure for the twitches and it is in the form of EA Sports' 2010 FIFA World Cup: South Africa. Offering nearly everything that FIFA 10 did but instead of focusing on club soccer and the world's best leagues, World…
Racing games come explicitly in two forms, simulation racers and arcade racers. I myself enjoy both styles but my play type tends to make me more successful at arcade racers and thus I was anticipating Black Rock Studio's latest effort, Split/Second. While demoing the game pre-release Black Rock explained the concept of the game to me as being Burnout but in reverse. Once I got the nightmarish idea of a slow moving…
Heavy Rain is a difficult nut to crack. On many levels, the latest Sony exclusive for the Playstation 3, is a breath of fresh air that updates an old game style for today's modern gamers but its not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, regardless of what some people would have you believe. Developer Quantic Dream would like you to call Heavy Rain an Interactive Drama, I prefer the term I grew up with…
With Modern Warfare 2 sales topping over a billion dollars, Call of Duty is undeniably a gaming phenomenon but for many the roots of the series remain unexplored. I am one of the many. For some reason or other I never played the original Call of Duty, probably because I was busy playing Electronic Arts World War II themed shooter series Medal of Honor. In any case I never played the original Call of Duty and the…
Let us not be shy about it, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was one of the biggest games to ever be released. The game garnered mass critical and commercial success on its way to becoming one of the most played online titles of this current gaming generation. So it goes without saying that the sequel to that game would garner a feverish hype train that it would have to contend with. Now the game is here and it has a…
You would think that with “Uncharted 2: Among Thieves” being the biggest Sony release of the year that a salesman at a particular gaming store would know what Uncharted was all about. Oddly enough though, when I went to pre-order the title a couple weeks before its release I was asked by an employee of this company what Uncharted was. After overcoming my shock at this individual's ignorance I gave him the following…
Every console generation has a handful of games that will be remembered for years to come as the standard bearers of their era. Gears of War will very likely go down in history as one of those games from this current console generation. Epic designed the title from the ground up with the XBOX 360 in mind and the game plays phenomenally on the system. Of course it was only a matter of time before Microsoft decided to…
I'm not going to lie. I have not been a fan of the Tom Clancy line of video games. I've played my fair share of them but I have never felt the need or desire to finish one out. The closest I had ever come to finishing one before was the original Ghost Recon on the PC. I made it through about eight mission in that game before hitting a brick wall. It basically comes down to my desire to feel like a super-hero badass…
If you had asked me at the beginning of this generation which Capcom series I was most excited to see upgraded, I undoubtedly would have said Devil May Cry. Despite being a huge fan of the Resident Evil mythos, the gameplay of Devil May Cry has always grabbed my attention more. While are their core both games are quite similar (exploring 3D environments, solving insane and illogical puzzles, experience over-the-top…
A lot of people are tired of the World War II setting but I just can't seem to get enough of it. After consuming the above average and quite fun Call of Duty: World at War I was still itching for some classic warfare and Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway was there to scratch my itch and it did a good job too. The Brothers in Arms series has a long and storied history, none of which I know because Hell's Highway is my…
I am going to come right out and say it, I never finished Resistance: Fall of Man. I liked it well enough I guess, The story seemed interesting enough and at the time I got it, there really wasn't all that much else to play on the PS3 but I got bored with it somewhere around half-way through and then got distracted by games that did the genre better, like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. It came as somewhat of a surprise…
When I first heard about “Rocketman: Axis of Evil” I had pretty high hopes, after all I grew up on top down shooters like “Ikari Warriors” so this looked to be right up my nostalgic wheelhouse. Unfortunately “Rocketman: Axis of Evil” has more than its fair share of problems, most notably the lack of fun I had playing it. As I said “Rocketman: Axis of Evil” is a top down shooter, but unlike “Ikari Warriors” it is a…
Almost nine years ago Blizzard dropped “Diablo II” on the gaming community and it quickly became one of the most successful games ever. The game was very well polished, told a great story and for people who love to collect stuff dropped tons of loot much like its predecessor. To this day I still play “Diablo II” and like a junkie chasing the dragon I love to try out new loot drop RPGs in the off chance that it will…
There is a saying, "Free is for me". There is also a saying, "You get what you pay for". So with that in mind "Dash of Destruction" was certainly going to be a game I downloaded, after all you don't pass up free games even if you are swimming in money Scrooge McDuck style but it was also a game I didn't expect a lot out of, after all I downloaded the Yaris title and well we all know how that pile of poo turned out.…
