The Curse of Nordic Cove is an unabashed indie game. The graphics are primitive, the controls are frustrating, it is filled with “What the hell am I supposed to do NOW?” moments, and much of the time the damned game engine just plain doesn't work. The list of things wrong with this game is nigh-endless, but it still deserves a closer look because the development team was clearly dedicated to creating something ...
Return to Ashan in Shades of Darkness, a new expansion to the hugely popular Might & Magic Heroes VI. With over a dozen new units and a conservative announced guess of 20 hours of new gameplay (We all know we'll play it more than that), Shades of Darkness is an adventure designed to be a little darker than the game it is based upon. With that darker tone comes an increased difficulty, a difficulty that ...
On March 15th 2013, Saints Row IV was officially announced. Rewind to 2006, a little known game called Saints Row was hitting the shelves for the very first time. Since the game was released solely on the Xbox, I sadly couldn’t buy it; as I only had a PlayStation 2. So imagine my joy when it was announced that the sequel was to be released on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. Many assumed that the ...
After downloading my copy of Amiga Forever, I came across a friend who was so excited for this emulator that he'd changed his status to "Amiga Forever" on Skype. What I'd taken as a simple emulator (with a little hype behind it) was actually something that others had supported for years (since 1997), people who had awaited the official release over modern AAA titles. What was it about this pack that got these ...
Alas, had I played Fire & Forget on a mobile device, my opinion might have been different as I can see how it would appeal to mobile and casual gamers. Views and opinions are strictly based on the PC version of the game. One of the few things that Fire and Forget: Final Assault does right is that it stays true to it’s title; after a few shots, you’ll forget all about it. While similar arcade shooters might ...
In 2004 Hugh Jackman made a movie called Van Helsing where he fights vampires and werewolves. There was a tie-in game based on it, but neither the game or the movie were worth remembering nine years later. The new indie game The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing has no official relation to that movie, but it does use the film’s clever idea of re-imagining the character of Van Helsing as a tough ...
Another day, another indie side-scrolling shooter. They seem to be a dime a dozen currently, but that's OK since they serve a purpose – fast entertainment on the cheap. Point 5 Projects' Bad Bots is another 2D shooter that recently hit the scene. Like many games of its ilk, it tries to recapture old-school aesthetics by providing gamers with challenging arcade action. Bad Bots accomplishes this, but in a way ...
StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm continues the epic story and intense multiplayer action of its predecessor, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (WoL), while refining the experience further as an eSports franchise. The expansion includes all of the things loyal fans have come to love and expect, as well as new challenges that level the field for new players hoping to try their hand at multiplayer matches. In the ...
If you've heard of Game Dev Tycoon, there's a good chance it's for one of two reasons. Either you've seen the story of their day one anti-piracy stunt, in which developer Greenheart Games uploaded a version of their game to torrent websites, a version in which your games are violently pirated and never make any money, or because of the accusation that Game Dev Tycoon is basically Game Dev Story slightly ...
Cyberpunk RPGs aren't very common in gaming, so I'm always intrigued when I hear about a developer taking the genre for a spin. Mars: War Logs is the most recent post-apocalyptic RPG to surface, but the game's developer, Spiders, decided to throw a future Mars colony into catastrophe instead of Earth civilizations. This gives War Logs some unique qualities compared to most other games of its ilk, and the change ...
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 ...
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. ...
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon came out of nowhere. “This is just an April Fool's joke!”, people claimed. “Oh, it's just going to be some lousy DLC!”, cried the cynics. Thankfully, none of this was true, and the Kojima-esque viral marketing campaign successfully drummed up interest. Blood Dragon is its own game, is definitely not DLC, is definitely an homage to 80s blockbusters, and is definitely awesome.
Path of Exile is a new MMORPG from Grinding Gear Games, currently in open beta. The new action RPG introduces exciting and complex new elements to the genre, and should be a delight to fans of games such as Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2. Path of Exile places players into the dark and gritty world of Wraeclast, which is designed to be the antithesis of modern action RPGs' slant towards bright and cartoony motifs. ...
So it's come to this. The likes of Farm Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator have become beyond a joke, have become mainstream and apparently deserve a parody of their own. From YouTube onwards, Surgeon Simulator 2013 is the main topic of conversation, with hundreds of thousands of videos popping up in a matter of weeks. It's difficult, it's wacky, but is it worth buying and will you get your money's worth out of ...
Arcade style beat 'em ups are becoming fashionable again in the gaming scene. Many have either bought new gameplay concepts to the table or have been clever reimaginings of old franchises. The Sacred series, which are action RPGs in the vein of Diablo, has decided to join in on the brawler craze with its latest instalment – Sacred Citadel.
Papo & Yo is a puzzler platformer, but only on the most superficial level. Players do push blocks around and jump over things, but Papo & Yo will also force players to wrestle with emotional issues like childhood abuse, alcoholism, and poverty in the Third World.
Rise of the Hutt Cartel, the new digital expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic, injects new life into the game a few months after its first anniversary. Players have had a love/hate relationship with SWTOR since launch, yet the game retains a loyal fan base while the overall user count steadily increases over time. There are so many things about this latest Star Wars MMO that players love, and yet SWTOR lags ...
Unlike most iterative sports game series, the Out of the Park development team never rests on their laurels in the off season, making it one of the only sports titles worth purchasing on a yearly basis. Out of the Park Baseball 14 is no different: where OOTP13 received a number of cosmetic changes and feature additions, OOTP14 is about refinement, reworking a lot of the game's code and adding another layer of ...
Gravi is a puzzle platformer, not entirely like the well-loved Super Meat Boy. Like Super Meat Boy, it pits your mind and reflexes against sharp objects, dangerous pitfalls and molten lava. Like Super Meat Boy, your deaths are going far outnumber the amount of levels you complete. With 40 levels of mayhem, Gravi is a game that is bound to keep genre fans' attention.
There's a fine line when re-releasing a title, between making modern and leaving a kind of older charm. The team behind Age of Empires II HD have decided not to even approach that line. The risk of modernizing one of the greatest RTS games of all time was just too great. Depending on your take on this issue, you'll either applaud them for their conservative re-release or you'll find the game archaic and slow.
In what appears to be a bid to garnish more sales for the aging franchise, Capcom has decided to shake things up in the Resident Evil universe. With four campaigns, multiple playable characters, Mercenaries mode and the all-new Agent Hunt feature, RE6 is positively ripe with content. Gone are the days of puzzle solving in an eerie atmosphere. Now, it's all about cinematic action and ultra-linear level design. ...
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 ...
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 ...
If you’ve ever looked through the papers, hoping to find a shred of explanation as to why politicians act the way they do, knowing full well that you could do a far better job, Masters of the World is for you. It’s the third in Eversim’s geo-political simulator series, and while other games task you with ruling the world or coming to an uneasy peace with every other nation, in Masters of the World you’ll make ...
Trials HD was perhaps one of the most difficult games of this generation. Getting through the later levels took such a degree of timing, so much muscle memory and a healthy dose of luck. For Evolution, Red Lynx pushed everything one step further, creating a game where the stunts were more deadly, the feats more impressive and the locations more interesting. Now the franchise is finally returning to PC, and to ...
Mists of Pandaria is the fourth expasion to the ever popular MMO, World of Warcraft This time around, players will be leaving the sundered lands of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdom to head to (you guessed it) Pandaria, where a mysterious race known as the Pandaren wage war against the Mogu, an ancient race that wants to reclaim Pandaria for their own. After more than 7 years, is World of Warcraft still the top ...
Action movies in the eighties were simple. There were two sides – good and evil. A large muscled man (quite often with only the smallest grasp of the English language, and I’m not just talking about Arnie) would fight “someone bad” while causing millions of dollars of damage, a couple of hundred explosions and spouting kick ass catchphrases.
Crytek is a studio known for pushing the technological envelope in game development. The Crysis series in particular has become infamous for its incredibly demanding system requirements, alongside its staggering visual realism. With the third and possibly final numbered entry in the series, Crytek is looking to give the story a fitting conclusion, while proving to the world that they are the undisputed kings of ...
Lara Croft is a gaming icon, a woman that, in the nineties, became the very symbol of video gaming and its place in society. Although many of the people who saw her in newspapers and magazines couldn't tell you that she came from a video game called Tomb Raider, they certainly recognized her face (and, perhaps, other part of her anatomy). The fame didn't last, and it didn't take long for the Tomb Raider ...
