Genres

Knights of Pen and Paper is a game designed to take you back to a time when a group of likely slightly smelly individuals would sit around a table, getting engrossed in a story of their own creation. By lovingly combining table top RPG with the gameplay devices of late eighties/early nineties, Behold Studios have created a game that is both nostalgic and fresh, seriously fun and, at times, frustratingly true to its source.

Game & Wario boasts 16 minigames that were originally planned to be pre-installed on every Wii U in order to show off the GamePad's abilities. However, Nintendo decided that the games would probably take up too much space, so they opted instead to release them at a later date as the seventh installment of the now decade-old WarioWare series.

Each and every year sees the release of dozens of sports management simulators, and the vast majority of them are extremely niche. While the likes of Football Manager destroys millions of man hours each year, similar games are often completely overlooked, panned or even mocked for their apparent lack of interactivity or their place in the sports hierarchy.

Taking cues from Portal, 3AM Games' debut title is one of the many physics-based puzzlers that have been emerging as of late. Initially conceived on Kickstarter, Magrunner: Dark Pulse uses magnetism as its core game mechanic and has a heavy focus on narrative. Regrettably, this ambitious project is held back by some pesky flaws.

With light beams shimmering around sails, and the deck glistening with a mixture of rain of seawater, the opening gameplay of Jack Keane 2 is a more cinematic adventure than you’d expect from point and clicks. You might be fooled into thinking you’re playing a genre where the main mechanic isn’t clicking randomly on everything in sight.

The most common complaint leveled against mobile gaming is the seeming lack of "console-quality experiences" - which, despite being a bit of a moot point (it's a tablet, not a console, correct?), is grounded in some real complaints. There are too many money-hungry free-to-play games, and way too many physics puzzlers and endless runners in the App Store - so when Firaxis and 2K announced a fully-featured handheld port of the award-winning XCOM: Enemy Unknown, it presented an opportunity for the platform to show off its skills beyond forgettable $1 titles.

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 planet and turning everything you see into a smoking crater. Sounds great, right?

Nintendo's “Year of Luigi” is here, and what better way to celebrate then by giving the oft forgotten brother his own game that doesn't involve catching ghosts? Well, New Super Luigi U is that game, currently available as a digital add-on for New Super Mario Bros. U, and set for a stand-alone retail release later this Summer. The result is a game that shines on its own in subtle and cagey ways.

The Dracula franchise started as a PS1 game back in 1999 and a mere three sequels have been released since, with each subsquential title being made by a different developer each time. This time it's the turn of developers Microids to try breath some life back into a dying franchise. The Bram Stoker story of Dracula should be excellent material for a pretty good video game. Blood-sucking vampires, gothic fantasy world, conspiracies, legends, horror and folklore would make for a good game if in the capable hands of a developer willing to go that extra mile. ...

Sonic After the Sequel is a fan made retro-inspired Sonic game set between Sonic 2 and 3 that was released as a free download this week. It's not a hack or a rebuild of something SEGA decided to ditch, but a full game designed and made from scratch, with new levels, new opponents, new obstacles and new music. If you didn't know much about Sonic history, you'd be forgiven for thinking this game is some long lost Genesis title. Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give it is that it feels like that regardless of when it was released or which platform it ...