83 public reviews
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If there was one game of 2011 that embodied the spirit of pure fun, it was probably Saint’s Row: The Third. The game was stylish, ridiculous, and managed to deliver some exquisitely over-the-top experiences in an entirely self-aware manner. It’s therefore a pretty big letdown to see it become another of the great AAA games out there that has been saddled with DLC that feels tacked-on and poorly made. Jenny and Zhen.…
There have been a lot of games based on the classic Breakout over the years, but not many manage to do something as charming with the formula as Wizorb. Available on Steam for £2/$3 and consisting of 65 different levels, Wizorb takes the Breakout framework and uses it as the basis for a unique love letter to retro fantasy RPGs. The classic Breakout gameplay is still plenty of fun. A lot of the enjoyment that can be…
Harmonix’s Rock Band franchise has become well-known for successfully pulling off some wonderfully ambitious ideas in the rhythm game space. The commitment of the development studio to never rest on their laurels, and always bring us something new and entertaining has given us some amazing experiences in the past, but after bringing a full band set-up to the living room, releasing literally thousands of different…
Halo is back and the new developers have everything to prove. When it comes to being a new development studio taking on an existing franchise, your first job can’t get much bigger than Halo. There had been considerable debate up until the launch of Halo 4 over whether 343 Industries could really take the reins from ex-developer Bungie and successfully create something that did justice to a series as influential and…
FTL: Faster Than Light is a low budget indie game that exists in a strange but rather charming space somewhere between a roguelike and space sim. In it you command a ship carrying data vital to a futuristic military conflict and must travel through seven sectors of space, protecting it from rebels, pirates, and other adversaries wherever you may encounter them. At first glance FTL may seem daunting to newcomers, but…
Judging on first impressions, you could be forgiven for thinking that Bulletstorm is a largely unremarkable shooter, with a couple of unconventional mechanics thrown in for novelty’s sake; The humour is immature, the characters appear generic, and it takes about an hour before the game lets up on it’s plot dumping and simplified gameplay to actually introduce the key mechanics which really make things interesting.…
Following in the footsteps of it's predecessor, Batman: Arkham City stood up as one of the most enjoyable action-adventure games of recent years, and arguably the best Batman game we’ve seen. With it’s fantastically empowering combat system, impressive array of gadgets, and great presentation of its world and characters, anything coming after had a hell of an act to follow. Unfortunately, Harley Quinn’s Revenge just…
Read the full review A Disappointing Epilogue to an Excellent Game
With the “golden age of platformers” a time long gone, and both the Rayman character and platforming mechanics having been largely absent from the franchise for a fair while now, it would be easy to conclude that the days of Rayman contributing anything significant to the platforming genre are over, but that would be a big mistake. Rayman: Origins is a 2D platformer which brings the series surging back in style and…
On the off-chance you’ve not encountered it before, Sid Meier’s Civilization is a series of turn-based strategy games which task you with leading one of the great civilisations from human history, and developing it over time from a group of a few scattered tribesmen to a thriving modern-day empire. Along the way you pick the technologies they adopt, what they build, their politics, their military decisions, and a…
2009’s Red Faction: Guerrilla was an open-world action-adventure title, praised by critics and fans alike for its insanely fun destruction mechanics. Guerrilla was made exciting by the opportunities it gave the player to rip apart bridges, buildings, and other structures, and the empowering tools it provided to do so. It’s therefore a bit of a disappointment that 2011’s Red Faction: Armageddon includes many elements…
Fez is an indie puzzle platformer five years in the making. As the brainchild of independent developer Phil Fish and his company Polytron, the game has undergone various trials and tribulations during its development, but after being fully remade three separate times and receiving a whole host of buzz from the games journalism community, Fez is finally here. In the game you play as Gomez, the adorable inhabitant of…
Gruff-voiced protagonist, Adam Jensen. The original Deus Ex, released for the PC in 2000, is commonly considered to be one of the most ground-breaking action-adventure games ever developed. Famed for its cyberpunk thematics and giving players a variety of different ways to overcome challenges, it blew away reviewers and players alike. Deus Ex: Human Revolution acts as a prequel to the highly acclaimed original,…
Over the past few years the Mass Effect franchise is one that has captivated audiences with its rich and detailed world, characters, and stories, and rightfully earned itself a vast and dedicated fanbase. For Mass Effect 3 the bar was set ridiculously high and in closing out the trilogy the game may fall slightly short of hitting it, but still manages to deliver a fantastic experience and do things with its story on…
If you have had any lengthy experience with 90s FPS games, you’re undoubtedly familiar with id Software and their illustrious shooters such as Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. In recent years though, the company has been a far less prominent part of the world of first-person shooters. Rage, however, presents one of the most anticipated releases from id since their golden days. Put simply Rage is a game that takes the…
Shadows of the Damned is not simply your run of the mill third-person shooter game, rather this project represents years of work on the part of video game super-developers Goichi Suda, known for such cult hits as Killer7 and No More Heroes, and Shinji Mikami, the man behind such respected titles as Resident Evil and Devil May Cry. The fruits of their labour aren’t quite up to what you might expect from such…
Up until now the Saints Row series has been one that’s lived in the shadow of the Grand Theft Auto franchise which it so closely resembles, providing a slightly wackier and well-made, but somewhat derivative experience. Saints Row: The Third changes all that and as the Grand Theft Auto franchise appears to be going down a more serious route, Saints Row has contrasted nicely by bringing a far more insane and far more…
Generally, licensed video games have had a bit of a sorry history. Save for a few exceptions they’ve largely been mediocre titles rushed out to squeeze money out of people who don’t know any better than to scoop up anything labelled with the name of a franchise they like. But in 2009 Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum hit shelves, showing us that licensed video games can’t just be good but also truly great. In late…
Welcome to scenic Bright Falls. Alan Wake is a story-focused third-person shooter from the team at Remedy Entertainment. Spending more than half a decade in development and being finally released in 2010 this game still manages to live up to expectations. The title character of the game, Alan Wake, is a troubled novelist who earned a name for himself penning best-sellers but has found himself unable to write…
Given the ability of the team at Traveller’s Tales to take beloved franchises and overhaul them with a charming Lego aesthetic, and the success of Harmonix’s Rock Band franchise in recent years, Lego: Rock Band doesn’t seem like such a bad idea at first glance, unfortunately this instalment of the long-running rhythm game series fails to quite hit its mark. A familiar sight for Rock Band aficionados. At the base of…
I, like many other video game fanatics was a huge fan of the original Portal. The gameplay, narrative, and environments of the game captured my mind in a specific way that no other game was able to do before, nor has been able to do since. Naturally my expectations for Portal 2 were very lofty, perhaps unreasonably so, but Portal 2 surprised even me with its quality. The game brings back everything you loved about…
The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned was the first DLC expansion released for Gearbox Software’s hit 2009 FPS-RPG Borderlands. In this first expansion for the game you’ll be dumped onto a mysterious island that has become over-run with mortally impaired, and where the scientist Dr. Ned (who looks suspiciously like Dr. Zed from the main game) needs your help to find a cure for the zombie plague. It's like a Max Max Halloween…
Read the full review A Fun Romp in An Alternate Zombie Borderlands
Poker Night at the Inventory is a poker game developed by Telltale, which drops you into a seat at one of the world’s most secretive gambling dens, and lets you face off against four famous characters from video games and the internet in a good old-fashioned game of no-holds-barred Texas Hold ‘Em. Considering that Telltale first got their start with a poker game back in 2004, it’s not surprising that six years later…
A slightly unconventional protagonist. Mirror’s Edge is a 2008 first-person platforming game from DICE. It’s rather surprising that DICE made a platformer, let alone a first-person platformer, but here it is. The game takes place in a futuristic dystopia where the government has breached the privacy of its citizens, and forced regulations on all aspects of the city in an effort to drive down crime. The game puts you…
The Halo series has been one of the most successful video game franchises of the past decade and is not only responsible for the popularisation of countless features and gameplay systems in modern shooters, but has also been largely responsible for kick-starting the wave of console-based first-person shooters we’ve seen in the past couple of console generations. With this in mind Bungie had a monumental task in…
Bejeweled 2 is perhaps the best known game in Pop Cap Game’s Bejeweled series, a series which is one of countless franchises to re-imagine the game Tetris Attack (also known as Panel de Pon), possibly the most ripped-off puzzle game in all of gaming history. If you’re unfamiliar with the basic format of the game then allow me to explain. The game features a grid of different types of gems and you can move each gem…
Garry’s Mod is a sandbox game based in the Source engine, originally created by programmer Garry Newman as a mod for Half-Life 2 and released in 2004. Garry’s Mod (often referred to as GMod) is arguably not a game; it has no preset aims or goals and play is simply based around manipulation of the objects and physics in the world. Garry’s Mod comes with all the weapons, props and vehicles you’ll find in Half-Life 2…
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a 2009 hack and slash game based on the movie of the same name. You play as James Howlett, better known as Wolverine, a wolf-like human weapon famed for his adamantium claws and inclination for merciless violence. Of course it’s no secret that video game tie-ins for movies have a history of very poor quality so how does X-Men Origins: Wolverine match up to the competition? Surprisingly…
In 2005 the minds at the DigiPen Institute of Technology created a unique and innovative indie game called Narbacular Drop. Upon seeing their success the folks at the Valve Corporation snapped up the Narbacular Drop team and so work began on Portal. Originally released as part of Valve’s The Orange Box in late 2007 and later released as a standalone game in 2008, Portal is a genius first-person puzzle game that’s…
Returning you to the Capital Wasteland and letting you jump right back into the boots of the Lone Wanderer, Operation Anchorage is the first of the Fallout 3 DLC packs. When you pick up a radio transmission from a group of Brotherhood of Steel outcasts you find that they have stumbled upon an armoury of valuable equipment and are willing to share some their stash with you should you be able to successfully aid them…
Beat Hazard is an indie-developed rhythm-based stick shooter from Cold Beam Games. Beat Hazard works using the music from your hard-drive (or one of the games built-in tracks) to directly determine the effectiveness of your weapon. While your song of choice plays in the background you swoop around the screen destroying asteroids and spaceships, and picking up the items they drop. The louder the song is currently…
Osmos is a physics-based puzzle game for the PC, developed and published by indie games studio Hemisphere Games and released on August 18th 2009. Osmos was created around the concept of Isaac Newton’s third law of motion: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” and aims to be a relaxing and ambient experience. It has already received attention at PAX and the Independent Games Festival but what…
Spore Creature Creator was released as a brief glimpse for the highly anticipated God game from Maxis, Spore. The Creature Creator is a stand-alone version of a feature in Spore that lets you design creatures and import them to play with in the full game. When creating your creature you'll start with a faceless blob of clay with a spine inside it, this will be the body of your creature. You can change the length of…
The graphics in this game are technically the best you'll currently find on the console and there is no shortage of detail in the indulgent world of Super Mario Galaxy. The level design is brilliant, you'll have the wide, open cosmos around you at most times and the levels all look fun, with each keeping its own theme. The game also uses its level design to take a jump back in time, reflecting environments such as…
As many Xbox 360 gamers will recall back in 2005 the Project Gotham 2 Racing minigame Geometry Wars was revived and brought into the modern age on the Xbox Live Arcade in the form of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. The game was one of the best received Xbox Live Arcade games the console has known and many a fan spent hour after hour of addictive game time on it. Now Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 has hit the arcade…
Viva Piñata is a completely original game; it just can't be classified into the same genre as any 'pet' or 'gardening' game that has come before it. The game starts with you receiving a small, run-down patch of land which you will turn into your garden and as you'd expect as the game goes on you'll gain access to more space and various other things to help make your dream garden. You'll be able to grow grass, care…
