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These days, it seems like everyone is trying to breathe new life into the zombie genre. Most developers are looking for the angle that nobody has done before, trying to make zombies terrifying all over again and forcing people to sneak around in the darkness lest they find their tender brains being chewed. What happened to all the fun we used to have with zombies, where we were the ones with all the power and they were just rotten targets, ripe for the shooting? Splatter brings it all back.

Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee was a PlayStation staple. Along with Rayman, I'm not sure there was a single person I knew that didn't have that iconic green sewn-up mouth grinning within their PS1 collection. When the Oddworld series jumped to the Xbox, abandoning not only much of the userbase but also, in a small way at first, Abe himself. Stranger's Wrath ended up under-performing and would have been lost to time if not for Just Add Water and their release of Stranger's Wrath HD.

I've only tried one other Vanillaware game, and that's Muramasa Rebirth. While I did understand the appeal, it was still an experience that left me feeling cold, and my expectations for their next release plummeted. Regardless, I still felt like I should give their next effort a chance. I'm glad I did, too, because Dragon's Crown is one of the finest games I've played all year.

In 2004, Sony Computer Entertainment acquired a somewhat unknown Amsterdam based studio called Guerrilla Games. At the time, the studio had really only produced one game: a multiplatform third-person shooter set in the Vietnam War called Shellshock: Nam '67. Though Shellshock went mostly unheard of, one title of theirs began to stir some excitement amongst gamers, generating considerable hype: Killzone.

Since Ratchet and Clank propelled Insomniac into the role of "Masters of Weaponry," they've done everything they could to hold onto the title. Fuse is the video game form of their attempts. From the very beginning, mad weaponry is not only a feature of the game but the game itself, embodying not just your actions and means of attack, but the plot and design as well. Unfortunately, this isn't enough.

Dynasty Warriors 8 isn't a huge improvement over Dynasty Warriors 7, but with its remained focus on a cinematic form of story telling, and with a far more technically sound gameplay, Dynasty Warriors 8 manages to be the best, most accessible game in the franchise so far.

007 Legends was released on Wii U at the end of last year, and if it had been the only first person shooter available on the system, it might have been enough to kill the genre entirely. It's not that it's actively bad - not when compared with the likes of Ride to Hell: Retribution - but it might be the very definition of generic shooter. The Bond licence has had some stinkers attached to it, but this one is something else.

Ride to Hell: Retribution is a gritty tale of revenge, set in a world where every woman will have sex with you if you beat up their partner (unless they're prostitutes); where police officers and miners carry vast amounts of drugs on their person; where cowboy hats protect your brain from bullets and in which walls, floors and doors are mere suggestions. That the credits contained almost ten minutes of names is perhaps the biggest surprise to be found in Ride to Hell: Retribution. The only other that even approaches it might be that it's actually possible ...

The words "console quality" get thrown around way too often in the mobile game-o-sphere. I've been guilty of it, too: desperately clamoring for a bar-raising iOS game, we've been all too-willing to slap a AAA-tag on whatever good-looking and somewhat entertaining title and laud it as redefining what a mobile game is. Deus Ex: The Fall is the latest game to enter this conversation, a recently-announced FPS with RPG elements that acts as a prequel to the Deus Ex: Icarus novel. Don't get me wrong: this is not some shoddily-constructed mobile cash-in: it's a ...

The combat in Dark sucks. By extension, this means almost all of Dark sucks, as it's built, by and large, around this idea of combat. You see, it's a little known fact that vampires can only clumsily walk up to enemies, bash them over the head or suck their blood, making loud slurping noises like granny at Christmas and alert everybody within a five mile radius.