Genres

In general terms, if you've played one LEGO title, you've played 'em all. Though each series features different, property-specific mechanics (like the spells in the Harry Potter titles), the concept never changes. Watch a cut scene, enter a room, smash and bash everything in sight, solve a puzzle, repeat. There's certainly nothing wrong with this; when it comes to simplistic third-person platformers, LEGO's created a specific niche that only collecting golden nuts and bolts can fill.

Since the original ‘Luigi's Mansion’ released for the GameCube in 2002, fans and enthusiasts have been yearning for another opportunity at ghost hunting. Nintendo’s E3 conference in 2011 left gamers in awe after the unexpected but welcome announcement of Luigi's Mansion 2: Dark Moon, a sequel to the original game, for the 3DS. Luigi's Mansion 2: Dark Moon does a great job, not only with improving the ghost hunting mechanics but also by adding quirky personalities to ghosts and allies alike, making for an incredibly charming experience.

Have you ever been tempted to knock over a few mailboxes? How about whilst driving a tank and whilst dressed as Kim Jong Un? Mobile games need to be easy to pick up, easy to play, humorous (or at least accessible) and playable in short snippets over a long time. Mailboxing is all of those things. It's such an ideal mobile game, in fact, that it may just end up being the new must-play on the App Store.

With one of the funniest trailers of 2013 behind it, Leviathan: Warships was perhaps something that initially caught people off guard. Armed with an abso-boat load of terrible puns, people took to this game like a... well... a boat to water. The downside of this was that as soon as they'd bought and downloaded their new purchase, they realized that the voice in the trailer had been just that: a voice for the trailer. The jokes had been written to lure people in, and those same people didn't actually watch the trailer for the game they were so desperate to buy.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have had a rough run the last two decades; what began as a mid-80s comic book grew into a cultural phenomenon in the early 1990s. Most kids I grew up with had the TMNT lunch box, the action figures, we watched the cartoons... and then over time, with a few bad studio film sequels and a failed live-action TV show, the pizza-loving turtles slowly disappeared from the public eye, save for a few attempted reboots (including a well-received cartoon series, and the recently announced Michael Bay film) over the past fifteen years. So ...

It's not unusual for a fan of video games to believe the industry is going wrong somehow. Through the use of DLC and the like, they feel the industry is losing what is most important to it: the games. With the likes of Game Dev Story giving these same fans the opportunity to do things differently, a new subset of the "Tycoon" genre has been born. Publisher Dream, a new title recently released for DSi and 3DS (via DSiWare), is one of those games, but how effective is it in allowing you to make your publisher dreams come true?

When Sony opened their doors and welcomed indie games to be sold on their PSN Store, it was like a flash flood. Games like Braid, Limbo, Knytt and many more could now be enjoyed by a much wider audience. Console gamers got a break from their action-packed retail games and got to experience games they normally would never have had the pleasure to try, and developers were enjoying a bigger success riding on the back of the PSN. For the price of a sandwich and a cup of coffee you can now download these smaller games which in all honesty are often better and last ...

Legendary designer Keiji Inafune has dabbled in macabre video games before. He's most well known for co-creating Mega Man, but he also has Resident Evil, Onimusha and Dead Rising production credits under his belt. Since leaving Capcom, he's decided to dive back into darkly atmospheric game design with his latest project, Soul Sacrifice.

The first Zeno Clash game could be easily summed up as “A game where you get punched in the back of the head every ten seconds.” That’s both a literal description of the gameplay, and the effect of the visual design and story. It was a weird little indie game that focused on hand-to-hand combat from the first-person perspective, and put the Player inside a distorted fantasy world filled with bizarre creatures. People who loved their brief journey through the first Zeno Clash will be happy to get a much larger adventure with Zeno Clash 2. People new to the ...

I have a magazine from when the PS1 classic Metal Gear Solid was originally released, upon which is the quote "[Metal Gear Solid] gave me flashbacks." Sometimes I look at this magazine to remind me just how far things have come, and how well we thought we had it back in the day. Either way, Metal Gear Solid was a big enough deal that it kept getting front cover treatment for months after release, and even today it manages to stand up with the best of them. By bearing in mind a few more permanent cobwebs, Metal Gear Solid still manages to be a top title.