God Mode is a four-player horde shooter that can be played alone, but only in the sense that Strip Solitaire exists and can be called a game. Each of the five levels, all simple but beautiful in design, is made up of a series of linked arenas. Monsters pour in, and it’s your team’s job to make them regret having bothered. The basic action is exactly that, with weapons that feel a touch weak (unless you’re using a controller that adds a shot of rumble to every action,) but otherwise landing between "solid" and "decent" from the moment you blast your first skeleton into bones. The main annoyance is that character movements can be sluggish, which isn't too bad when getting around, but can be a matter of life and death when a big monster decides to try swinging something heavy at your face.
This island dungeon harbors many fears, and is the main new attraction in Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, a rerelease of one of 2012's best role-playing games, with new content added to tempt the faithful back to the city of Gran Soren and beyond. Strangely, Bitterblack Isle isn't available to you any other way, though it would seem to be a prime candidate for release as a downloadable add-on. In any case, if you're a Dragon's Dogma veteran, seeing this new content means buying a new version of the game, though the extensive dungeon is no small morsel, which makes it an intriguing proposition for returning adventurers. What a pity, then, that much of the new content gets in its own way, sometimes making it difficult to enjoy the story's hushed mystery and the undeniable thrills of felling a gargantuan winged cockatrice.
Your imagination is tasked with translation and embellishment: mapping the game's top-down mazes to the bright arc of the French Riviera and transforming this brisk steal-'em-up's elegant 2D blueprints into lavish museums, hotels and casinos ripe for raiding. That's a neat trick, and it's a testament to the cues that Pocketwatch Games provides that it works as brilliantly as it does. What's even more astonishing, however, is that the developer has the guts to try such a strategy in the first place.
You know what kills you in a zombie apocalypse? We all like to imagine it's the blaze of glory at the end of a hard day's survival - gravely wounded, sacrificing ourselves to trigger the explosion that lets our friends live to fight another day. But Dead Island Riptide holds the truth. The thing that gets you killed in a zombie apocalypse isn't holding them off while someone you love sprints for the chopper - it's losing your footing on a walkway or rooftop, or getting slashed to death while you're doing a three-point turn in a boat. When it comes to the end of the world, it's the boring stuff that really kills you.
That wasn't always the case with Dead Island, though. Techland's first stab at an open-world survival RPG - where players joined with friends or fought alone through a holiday island overrun by zombies - was light on smarts and heavy on smacking things with a modified shovel, but its biggest problem was the bugs and glitches that killed your enthusiasm more effectively than the undead. The developers belatedly patched in some dignity, and sales were tremendous thanks to canny marketing, but a lot of us felt burned by the experience.
Few moments in a competitive first-person shooter feel as good as nailing someone with a rocket from across the map. It's a satisfaction that comes from knowing that you not only had swift reflexes and precise aim, but that you out-thought him and knew exactly where he planned to be before he did. That's the sensation that ShootMania Storm is built around. Its humble graphics are deceptively simple, as its modes incorporate some really clever ideas that make it a tense and unique experience, at least for a little while.
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