Genres

Badland might be crammed into the category of an “Autorunner”, the genre of gaming where characters zoom along the screen and players just need to hit a jump button at the right moment. But the character in Badland doesn’t actually run; it’s a weird furball that flies, and players have to tap the screen of the iPhone to flap its wings and keep it afloat. It’s an “Autoflapper” if you will, but that doesn’t even begin to describe this unusual and engrossing game from the two-man team of Frogmind Games.

Many's the day I spent in my childhood trying to combine my two favorite things: Card games and Chess. I never quite succeeded. When I first fired up The Wild Kingdoms for review, I found that I was clearly not the only one who had ever dreamed of combining these two disparate genres. But is The Wild Kingdoms everything I dreamed of?

Evoland is a love letter to a genre long past its golden age. By combining your favorite elements from The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and Diablo, it manages to act not only as a nostalgic trip through some of the best gameplay features of the last twenty years, but also as a decent game in its own right. You'll laugh at the jokes, you'll get the references, but you'll also question why so many classic franchises are finding it so hard to re-find their identities, when a small studio like Shiro Games can sum it all up so succinctly. If, as a child, you ...

When Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater came out in 2004 the world had gone past fear of a Third World War and shifted its focus to the War On Terror. Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles were passé, replaced by thoughts of Dirty Bombs. So instead of setting Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater in the near future, Kojima Productions chose a Cold War setting filled with quaint talk about the good old days when people only feared mutually assured destruction. Now, nearly ten years later, the notion that Saddam Hussein will unleash his dreaded Weapons of Mass ...

We have seen various changes to the Paper Mario franchise over the past decade. Having started with turn based battles for the first few installments, then switching over to more dynamic combat in Super Paper Mario Wii, I’m happy to say that with Paper Mario: Sticker Star for the 3DS, the series has gone back to its roots and makes for an immensely adorable and memorable adventure.

There have been a number of attempts to bring the MMO to consoles and they have, by and large, been unsuccessful. Instead of building a game to play with a controller in front of the TV from scratch, developers instead adapt a game built around dozens of keyboard keys and a mouse. They're often surprised when that doesn't work. Defiance is a game that brings together the spirit of third person multiplayer gaming and the massive, persistent world of the MMO, and it does it so successfully you might begin to question why it wasn't possible before. This feels ...

50 is a simple game. Flick a coin down a wooden plank with painted numbers and make up to 50. No more, no less. Sometimes the numbers are in a different place, sometimes the surface area they cover is a little smaller and you’ll need to target more accurately, but for all intents and purposes, scoring 50 is all you need to worry about.

Coming Soon on 28/09/2013

In the last few years, the big budgets and carefully-constructed profit margins of AAA-titles have unfortunately taken a toll on the creativity of games. There are more modern/futuristic war first-person shooters and open world action games than ever - and at the same time, less unique protagonists and stories being told within these genres. Although some of these games may be impressive with game mechanics and scope of their story, I've felt less of a connection with the characters I control and as a byproduct, the journeys I take with them become easier to ...

Aliens Need Burgers has a goofy and semi-charming premise: aliens who love hamburgers come to Earth to relieve us of our beloved cow meat. Fortunately enough, there's a satellite worker hanging outside the atmosphere in space, ready to defend the world from the incoming threats. Unfortunately, the game itself doesn't employ any of this creativity, and Aliens Need Burgers is another forgettable touch-screen experience.