96 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.
Dark Void was released in 2010 and developed by Airtight Games. The game mixes regular third person shooting with Crimson Skies like air combat, a previous game form Airtight Games. The story focuses around a cargo pilot that while traveling through the bermuda triangle got catapulted into a another world where he has to fight of on alien invasion that targets earth. The game starts out with a ridicoulus long…
Star Wars: Tie Fighter was developed by LucasArts and originally released in 1994 for DOS on floppy. A year later it was rereleased as an enhanced CD edition featuring additional missions and full voice overs, which this review will focus on. The game is the sequel to Star Wars: X-Wing and just like it precesessor it focuses on building a complex simulation of the spaceships of the Star Wars universe instead of just…
Donald Duck's Playground (C64) was developed by Al Lowe and released back in 1984, it is what you would call today a mini-game collection for kids. You play as Donald Duck who has to make money to buy toys for his nephews. This is done by playing one of four jobs, each presented by a short mini game. One job has you catching and sorting vegetables, another has you sort cargo at an airport, one has you place toys…
Outlaws is a wild west first person shooter released in 1997 by LucasArts. It uses the Darkforces engine, one of the last Doom-like engines, meaning it doesn't allow full 3D scenarios, but supports slopes, limited looking up and down as well as buildings with multiple stories and simplistic polygon objects. Enemies continue however to be represented by simple 2D sprites. The game starts with an elaborate hand…
Infinite Space is a science fiction RPG/visual-novel developed by Platinum Games and released 2010 for the Nintendo DS. In the game the player takes control of Yuri, a 16 year old boy who wants to become an adventurer exploring the galaxy. The game starts out with an anime intro that is based on a few anime short movies created for advertisement purpose for the game. This by itself would be nothing special, but in…
Alpha Protocol is a RPG/stealth/shooter mix developed by Obsidian Entertainment and released in 2010. The game takes a lot of inspiration from Biowares Mass Effect, using a similar mix of third person shooter elements along with a dialog driven story. Unlike Mass Effect the game doesn't take place in a Sci-Fi universe, but instead in contemporary times, putting you into the role of the special agent Michael Thorton,…
Goin' Downtown was released in 2008 by Silver Style Entertainment. It is a classic 2D point&click adventure set in the New York of the year 2072. The story focuses around the depressed police officer Jake McCorly who investigates the suicide of a prostitute. The game only seems to be released in Germany with German language. The game is presented in a comic book like style with cell shaded 3D characters and hand…
Read the full review Great start, but it's over way to quick
Phantasmagoria was released in 1995 for the PC and developed by Sierra On-Line. Roberta Williams was responsible for game design and story. The game is a third person FMV based point and click adventure game, similar to Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within released by the same company the same year. In the game the player takes control of Adrienne Delaney, who together with her husband Donald Gordon, just moved into…
The Void was developed by Ice-Pick Lodge and originally released 2008 in Russia followed by an international release in 2009. The game is probably best described as an resource management action-adventure with a heavy focus on artistic expression. While the game shares elements with games like Myst or Flower, it really is quite a different beast. The game puts the player into a role of a lost soul that hangs…
"Perry Rhodan: The Adventure", known in other regions as "The Immortals of Terra" or "Rhodan: Myth of the Illochim", is a 2D point&click adventure for the PC, released in 2008. The game is based on the Perry Rhodan science fiction novel series which has been running in Germany since 1961, knowledge of that series is however not required as the game will provide plenty of background information on the characters and…
Read the full review The Immortals of Terra: A Perry Rhodan Adventure
Overclocked was released in 2007 by the now defunct German developer House of Tales for the PC. This review focuses on the German language version. The point&click psycho thriller adventure puts the player into the role of David McNamara, an ex-army psychiatrist, who is tasked with finding out what happened to five college-aged teens that showed up armed, disoriented, confused and without memory in the New York. The…
Read the full review A very well done gripping take on interactive storytelling
Memento Mori was released in 2008 for the PC and is a classic point&click adventure. The game puts the player into the roles of Larisa Svetlova, an Interpol art theft specialist, and Maxime Durand, an art forger who was caught, but set free in exchange for offering his talents to the police. The two work together and try to solve the mysterious theft of some paintings and a connections of that theft with an ancient…
Read the full review Solid adventure, that gets interesting far to late in the game
Myst was released back in 1993 and one of the first games to make use of the CD-ROM, featuring pre-rendered backgrounds and video sequences. It turned out to be one the best selling PC game of it time. The Myst: Masterpiece Edition was released seven years later in 2000, upgrading the graphics from 256 to 24-bit and adding hint system, but leaving the game otherwise unchanged. Another version of the game was…
Geheimakte: Tunguska (engl. Secret Files: Tunguska) is a classical point&click adventure released in 2006 for the PC, with later ports to the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS. The story of the game is centered around the explosion of an unknown object over Tunguska in 1908. The player takes control Nina Kalenkov who is investigating the disappearance of her father, who lead an expedition into the Tunguska incident a few…
Metroid Prime Hunters was released in 2006 for the Nintendo DS and is a spin-off of the Metroid Prime series for the Gamecube and the Wii. The game takes place after the first Metroid Prime game, but as the story doesn't have any connection with the other games that hardly matters. The game features both a single player adventure mode as well as online multiplayer, I however haven't played the multiplayer, so I will…
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption was released in 2007 and marks the third and final entry in the Metroid Prime series (ignoring the Nintendo DS spin offs Metroid Prime: Hunters and Metroid Prime Pinball). Unlike its two predecesors this game didn't came out on the GameCube, but on its successor, the Nintendo Wii and large parts of the game design reflect this change in being build specifically around the Wiimote…
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes was released in 2004 and is the sequel to the 2002 game Metroid Prime . The game follows directly into its predecessors footsteps, telling another tale in the Metroid Prime triology. The game takes place on the planet Aether, just like in the first game, a Phazon poisoned asteroid has crashed on the planet, devastating it and this time splitting the planet into two phases, a dark world and…
Metroid Prime was released back in 2002 for the Nintendo GameCube and marks the first try in moving the Metroid series from 2D beginnings into a more modern 3D game. Instead of going with a third person perspective, the first person perspective was choosen. The gameplay however doesn't follow modern first person shooter controls as established by Halo, but uses its own unique control scheme and gameplay style.…
Metroid II was released back in 1991 for the original Game Boy. The game was the first one after the original NES Metroid game and introduces many new elements, game mechanics and a graphic style that have defined the series since then. The game however does also divert from other parts in the series. Most notably is this in the story. Samus is given the task to destroy all Metroids on the planet SR388. Ridley,…
Metroid on the NES is the game that started the Metroid series back then in 1986 and then was remade in 2004 with the game Metroid: Zero Mission on the GBA. I played the original NES version that comes as unlockable with Metroid: Zero Mission. Changes to the original NES version include graphics that are being a little squished to fit the GBAs lower screen resolution and the ability to save the password, so that one…
Metroid Zero Mission is a remake of the original Metroid from the NES that was released some years after Metroid Fusion. Aside from the first few rooms and the boss fight against Mother Brain however, there really isn't all that much noticable reassemblence to the original NES Metroid. This is especially true since you are given almost all the weapons from Super Metroid, which in turn change the flow of the game…
The first thing one notices when launching Super Metroid is that it is unusually option heavy for an Nintendo game. Not only can one configure the button layout, but also a few other things such as "moon walk" (walking backward when holding the shoot button) and icon cancel (automatically deselects icon on room change). The default control scheme is also pretty unusual in using X for shoot and A for jump, instead of…
I recently replayed Metroid Fusion for the Game Boy Advance. In terms of graphics the game still holds up nicely, it doesn't look quite as good as say a Castlevania on the NintendoDS, but as far as the GBA is concerned it is definitely one of the better looking games. Sound and music are also pretty good. The controls are a bit overloaded due to the lack of buttons on the DS, but work overall quite nicely. The L…
Lair was released back in 2007 and planed to be one of the Playstations 3's exclusive flagship titles, but turned out to be the game that bankrupted Factor 5 in the end. The game follows straight into the footsteps of the earlier Factor 5 games such as Rogue Leader , just instead of having a Star Wars setting, the game takes place in a fantasy world filled with dragons and other mystical creatures. This by todays…
In Brütal Legend you take control of Eddie Riggs, who is a roadie that gets thrown into a heavy metal inspired universe where he has to fight demons and other bad guys. The game combines aspects of open world, with hack&slash and real time strategy aspects. In terms of character design and dialog the game delivers as usual for a Tim Schafer game. The graphics also look rather good from a technical point of view and…
Lets start with the bad things. The game is short, really short. I already knew that it was gonna be short and its to be expected to be smaller then a full game, but I didn't expected it to be this short. In just around three hours I was through the main game and it really ended up feeling more like an elaborate tutorial then a proper full game. The graphics are also not all that great and while my not-so-great…
Unlike Bioshock and a few other modern console ports, Mass Effect does not support a gamepad, so I had to go with mouse and keyboard, which however worked quite fine, as the UI of Mass Effect has been changed quite a bit to work well with mouse and keyboard. The game puts you in the shoes of Shepard on a quest to save the galaxy. RPG typical you can create a custom character at the start of the game and as always I…
Sam & Max: Season 1 tries to continue what LucasArts stopped doing a decade ago, namely being a point&click adventure in the very classical sense. The interface is for most part what you expect, you have an inventory as usual, classic dialog trees and control your character by good old point&click. The interface however got simplified in that you no longer have any verbs left, actions are automatically triggered by…
[This review was done while playing the Windows version on Linux in Wine] Some days ago I picked up Tomb Raider: Anniversary for the PC (yes, thats the old one, not the new Underworld). Its a standard Windows game, of course, but it actually works near perfectly under Linux in. No hacks or cracks requires, it works out of the box. The only issue I could find is that one has to disable reflections in the display…
[This review was written while playing the PC version on Linux in Wine] Just as Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Legend works near perfect in Linux in Wine. One additional issue issue is that the "next generation graphics" option doesn't work and causes plenty of graphical glitches which makes it unusable, so one has to play with the low graphic settings, which by the way is the same graphic quality that Anniversary had,…
After Warrior Within Two Thrones however was a pleasant supprise. It is still nowhere near as good as Sands of Time, but it actually is a good game on its own. The level design is back to being linear and the map screen is gone. The game actually feels a little to linear at times, since often your path is predetermined by a number of 'jump-spots', leaving little room for exploration, but thats still better then the…
[This review was written while playing the Windows version of the game in Linux under Wine] On the technical side, Warrior Within has the same small problems as Sands on Time, but adds some more on top of it. It requires a no-cd crack to function in Wine and when you up the graphic detail level the picture ends up being upside down. Playing a bit around with the detail level and Wine configuration makes things…
A few first impressions after playing Tomb Raider: Underworld for an hour or two. The graphics are pretty nice, they capture the feeling of scale pretty well, frame rates however aren't so great. Animations feel pretty broken in this one, some things such as diving into the water just look plain wrong and looked much better in previous parts. In addition collision detection is pretty wonky, you clip through other…
Some quick first impression of Boom Blox for the Wii. Since the game was selling for just 9EUR on Amazon.de I couldn't resist to give it a try, its after all one of the tiny few original and good games on the Wii. The gameplay of Boom Blox is pretty much a cross between Jenga and a physics engine sandbox. Each level consists of a structure build out of blocks. Some of those blocks are special and need to be…
I finally managed to play Bioshock. I picked the PC version instead of the PS3 one, since it was quite a bit cheaper and because it had support for the Xbox360 controller. The controller support works for most part extremely well, you flip a switch in the option menu and the whole thing behaves pretty much like a console game and works out of the box without more configuration. Its really nice to see that at least…
Mirror's Edge , is a first person platform for the PS3. It follows into the footsteps of games like Prince of Persia or Tomb Raider, except its all from the first person perspective this time. In many aspects the game is quite a bit like Breakdown , which had first person platforming as well, but with Mirror's Edge there is a much stronger focus on running and momentum and much less focus on fighting. When it comes…
The 2D graphics are pretty cool, Braid does some great things with particles, color and light that give it a very dynamic quality, haven't seen anything quite like it. Music is pretty good too. The story is far out in the weird artsy territory, every now and then it seemed to make a little sense, but then it lost me again. The story doesn't really have any impact on the gameplay, so its no big deal, but a little…
What I really liked about the game was that for the first time in a long while it felt like a full blown original game on the system. Most other games either boil down to simple puzzle mini-game stuff or cheap rip-off of titles from the big consoles. GTA:CW on the other side, while not 100% original, knows that its not running on a big console and doesn't try to emulate GTAIV. Instead it goes back to a more cartoony…
The press and plenty of forum posts have been rather negative on the game and not completly without reason, but overall I think a lot of it was really overreacting and missing the point. The game puts you into the role of an assassins at the time of the crusade that has to kill a handful of evildoers spread out over a handful of cities, but all that happens with a twist. You are not actually the assassins, but just…
Don't let yourself fool by the positive reviews, this game is the same garbage as many other license games, on top of that its an awfully frustrating experience. First of there would be the story or better lack there of. The game really doesn't connect to the Simpsons at all, instead you simply have a GTA clone featuring Simpson character. All your missions resolve around collecting stuff or driving trough…
The good thing about Aquila is that flying is as fun as ever. With the genre of flying games mostly gone, its good to see a game in that area and in large parts the game is enjoyable. The switching between plane mode and mech mode works nicely and is a nice addition and the other gameplay is also not that bad, even so a little primitive, since the flight physics are far from realistic and collision detection is also…
Can the graphic hold up to a Half Life 2? Maybe not on a single screenshots, but if you take into account that OF:E's environments are gigantic while HL2 and most other FPS are limited to small corridors, it definitvly doesn't look so bad anymore, in fact when you get used to them they hold up quite well. Sure, the characters faces look a bit weird, but the very good voice acting and brilliant story lets you forget…
Read the full review For most part the exact same game as four years ago on the PC, bu
More or less by accident I came across Primal for Playstation2 and was pleasantly surprised. While doing a little cleanup I came across on old video game magazine that mentioned the game, never heard of it before, but it looked interesting and ratings seems to be ok'ish (80/100), so I bought it. The basic setup is quite a bit similar to The Longest Journey or Dreamfall, a normal girl from this dimension, gets sucked…
Time for another little game review, this time it is Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie turn. Short summary, its a good game. It is not great and it is not another The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (i.e. awesome), but what the game does it does quite well. At the beginning of the game you arrive in the role as Jack on Skull island, things go a bit awry and you are left on the…
Read the full review Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie
A week ago I decided it was time to look into what all those 10 million gamers are doing in the World of Warcraft. So I did create a 10 day trial account to try it out. One of the nice things about WoW is that it runs almost flawless in Linux, it doesn't provide native binaries, but Wine pretty much just works with it. No need to go hunt for cracks or anything, since it works out of the box, which is a pretty care…
If one believes the hype it is currently the second best PS3 game right after GTA4, clocking in at a shiny 94/100 on metacritic, but well, I don't trust reviews, so I played trough it myself (single-player campaign only, 'cause I don't do multiplayer). If there is one thing that Call of Duty 4 does really well it is giving a nice demonstration of all the things that are wrong with video games these days. The…
Uncharted tries to be a mix of Tomb Raider with Gears of War shooting mechanics. Nothing wrong with it, since after all shooting was never Tomb Raiders strong point and Gears is pretty good at it. So what could go wrong... The core problem of Uncharted is that it is way more shooter then adventure game. It not only has those shooter sequences like Tomb Raider, but it has pretty much bad guys all over the place. If…
The first five to ten hours into the game I was pleasantly surprised by this game. This is was the first GTA I played seriously, mainly because it was the first that featured a main character that looked like a nice guy. In a world of crazy people, mafia, drug dealers and other organized crime he comes along as a reasonable guy and gives a good contrast to the crazy world out there. His cousin, which isn't part of…
