Posts By Joe Ryan

Pester is a top-scrolling shoot 'em up where you fly your ship against tons of enemy fighters, dodging an occasionally absurd amount of enemy fire, grabbing power-ups and wiping out as much alien scum as you can before you lose all your lives. It's as simple a concept as it ever was, with the arrow buttons controlling your movement.

It would be hard to argue that Magic: the Gathering was not the most popular CCG on the planet. It's been going strong for 20 years now because of the excellent tactical gameplay. While many card games end up being pay-to-win affairs, Magic is balanced in such a way that a good player will nearly always beat a player who has simply spent more money on good cards.

It seems like every game they release these days calls itself a 'survival' game. How many of them actually are? To me, if you are calling a game a survival game, that implies consequence. If you are playing a game and the only consequence of failing to survive is that you have to go back to the last checkpoint, then what you are playing is not a true survival game, in my opinion. I can say one thing with absolute certainty: Don't Starve is a survival game.

Have you ever dreamed of piloting an attack helicopter, loaded up with huge machine guns and enough missiles to level a major metropolitan area? I...have not. And if I had, Thunder Wolves may have turned me off to the whole exercise. Thunder Wolves is a 90s style arcade helicopter game. If you are looking for some sort of helicopter simulation, you'll want to look elsewhere. This is a game about easily piloting one of the most complicated vehicles on the ...

State of Decay is the zombie game that is taking the world by storm, after seeming to come almost out of nowhere. With a distinct lack of marketing dollars spent on the game, it's incredible to see how word of mouth has sold so many people on surviving a zombie apocalypse. But when you actually play the game, it's easy to see why the word of mouth is so positive. Despite a few issues, State of Decay is essentially the zombie game that people have been asking ...

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is one of the touchstone RPG's of my life. It's the first BioWare game I had ever played, having missed the large majority of them as a person who spent most of my time on consoles as opposed to PC. Thinking back, it might even be the first proper western RPG I played as I spent most of my RPG hours playing games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior. Who'd have guessed at the time that a game with the Star Wars license ...

Designing an endless runner game that catches the attention of the public must be a challenge. The App store is flooded with them, because they are great for quick gaming sessions and they don't typically require complex inputs from the player. How does Dead Ahead set itself apart from the pack?

NarcoGuerra is the latest in a series of 'Game the News' games. The idea is to take a real world issue, in this case the ongoing battle between Mexican police forces and drug cartels, and make it a little easier to understand how complicated the situation truly is. But is NarcoGuerra a good game, or just a fancy news piece?

Towards the end of World War 2, with all of the great powers of the world arrayed against them and closing in from all sides, the Nazi war machine had one last chance to turn the tide: the V2 rocket program. As the program nears completion, scientists working on the rockets begin making deals with Americans and Russian forces to escape from the sinking ship that is Nazi Germany. One American sniper is deployed behind enemy lines in order to find these ...

Star Command is easily some of the most fun I have ever had on iOS and is a game that you almost have to have if you play on your phone or tablet. If you've heard of Star Command at all, you will likely understand the appeal straight away. Take a starship and build all the rooms inside, then hire a bunch of crew members and take to the stars while looking at some interesting planets (always from a distance, unfortunately) and destroying strange and hostile aliens.