Posts By Mat Growcott

When Valve announced Left 4 Dead 2, the internet imploded. Fans had been promised a wealth of DLC, long-lasting support and now the developers had had the nerve to release a sequel. After mild controversy around launch and a steady sale-by-sale drop in price, this is a game that has become increasingly difficult to resist. Not only has the price dropped, but the content in the game has been expanded on as well. Along with the original five campaigns, Left 4 ...

The Cave brings together Monkey Island alumni Tim Schaefer and Ron Gilbert for a brand new adventure game unlike anything you’re likely to have played before. Pick from a cast of seven characters and explore a dark cave where anything is possible, where your character’s traits are tested over and over again. With the hilarious writing and critical thinking that made the genre great in the nineties, The Cave is a nostalgic look back at a time when games were ...

The original Sims game was a massive leap forward for gaming. News articles were run announcing that AI had finally got to a point where little people could run around inside your computer and teenage boys everywhere were making the girls they knew at school WooHoo in heart-shaped vibrating beds. Finally, a game where you could truly define the lives of your characters – so long as they weren’t hopping up and down on the spot or burning the house down. The Sims ...

Guardians of Middle-Earth is the first MOBA game made specifically for consoles and the first set in the Lord of the Rings universe. That alone would make it worth playing, but the fact that it’s a big part of PlayStation+ (or that it’s going to be, depending on your location) should push that excitement over the edge. Good or bad, this is a title that is part of MOBA history and as MOBA is one of the most popular genres in the world right now, that’s a pretty ...

Dead Space 3 brings a lot to the franchise that has had long-time fans hesitant in their purchase. Trailers and the demo seem to show a game not so much survival horror as third person action, more like Gears of War than Dead Space. In an industry not generally interested in scaring those that want to be scared, major franchises dropping the horror element that made them big is a problem for many, but does that mean that action and horror aren’t at all ...

Lord of the Rings: War of the North was supposed to be a darker, more adult game for those of us old enough to appreciate the films when they first came out. It was going to have a deeper story, more intense combat (complete with decapitations and blood – adult stuff) and it was going to show a side to Middle Earth we’d rarely seen, let alone in video games. War of the North was also publisher Warner Brothers’ first chance to show the world what they could do ...

Call of Duty has become a yearly phenomenon, breaking record after record on an annual basis. Black Ops 2, the latest in the series, is no exception, bringing together an action packed single player story and a set of chaotic, fast paced multiplayer games to create what is arguably one of the best arcade shooters of this generation. The addition of Treyarch's popular Zombies mode is only that stretch extra. Call of Duty may have its fair share of detractors, ...

If you’d heard of Zone of the Enders at its original release, there's an overwhelming possibility the only reason you planned to buy it was because of the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo that came with it. Flash forward ten years and the robot franchise has all but disappeared, but with a sequel confirmed and this HD Collection available in stores, Konami hope to re-establish a cult classic. If you can ignore the layer of technical dust that comes with any re-release, ...

Perhaps Capcom and Ninja Theory started off on the wrong foot when it came to DmC: Devil May Cry. From its initial announcement, people have been offended - literally offended, as if their four year old had been forced into sex ed. Why the controversy? Because this reboot would disregard everything that made the original Devil May Cry games so important to millions of people and would try to rebuild from the ground up. Perhaps it might not be too bad, but more ...

Sleeping Dogs was originally going to be the third title in Activision's True Crime series, a franchise that famously put the Grand Theft Auto formula on its head and put the player in the role of a police officer at a time when open world action driving games were two a penny. Although the original, Streets of LA, was very popular at the time, a lacklustre sequel – New York City - and the high cost of making a Hong Kong-based title caused Activision to cancel ...