What a title - and The Wonderful 101 knows it. Every loading screen displays the logo prominently, and each time a different member of the voice cast gives it their all: "The Woonnnnderrfullll ONE-OH-ONE!" The first time the game loads, the attract screen talks of the Wonderful One Hundred, before it flips around and flashes an irresistibly cheesy grin: "I knew we forgot someone... YOU!"
Platinum Games' Wii U debut is a thrilling game, the kind that has so much energy and variety it can leave you open-mouthed. In style, it's a love letter to classic children's television. The presiding spirits are shows from Britain and Japan: Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, and of course those Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.
It's undeniable that many games from Japan that make it to our shores--particularly in the role-playing genre--have strong influences from anime. Great role-playing game series like Disgaea, Persona, and Tales feature visual and storytelling elements heavily influenced by the art form. Developer Imageepoch aspired to go one step higher with Time and Eternity, billing the game as "playable anime." Unfortunately, the end product is not only a showcase for nearly every negative stereotype ascribed to anime, but a bad RPG to boot.
When I first saw the commercial for the movie Pacific Rim, I thought about how bad ass it looked. It was basically a bunch of childhood fantasies for those who are in their mid-20s to early-30s, who grew up playing with toys wishing that they were bigger so they can battle in real life. I have yet to see the movie as I hate going to the movie theater, but luckily the officially licensed game managed to pop up on Xbox LIVE (a game based on a movie? Shocking!).
It's not every day that you see a game like Shin Megami Tensei IV, especially on the 3DS. It hints at a mysterious tale early on, befitting the series' reputation for brooding themes and hellish settings, and this dark wash informs the attitude and appearance of the world, which is unsurprisingly experiencing an influx of demonic activity. You play as a samurai charged with protecting the Kingdom of Mikado, and the invading demons are yours to recruit as much as to destroy, keeping with the series' well-known catch-'em-all mindset. But make no mistake: although demon hunting, recruiting, and fusing may provide some of the best experiences here, there's more to enjoy beyond the demon-hunting trappings.
Ever wanted to know what your little brother dreams about?
Probably not… but Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, the latest entry in AlphaDream’s acclaimed series of handheld RPGs, givs Mario just that opportunity. Ostensibly, it’s an RPG with some platforming elements, but it's really a restless compendium, wrenching together so many different types of gameplay that it lacks overall focus and a steady rhythm. It continually offers up new experiences only to then put them to one side because it wants to show you something else, something new. And while this is one of its great strengths, it unbalances other aspects of the experience.
Here’s a fact: late-game Civilization is usually awful. Most of the important decisions take place at the beginning of a game, and the last third is about managing momentum. That’s what makes Civilization V: Brave New World the best Civilization expansion so far. Instead of just losing the endgame, now you can win it.
Crazy things happen when video game worlds collide. Mario and Sonic compete alongside each other at the Olympics. Claptrap plays poker with canine cop Sam while GLaDOS looks on. And in Project X Zone, Mega Man, Ulala, Jill Valentine, Dante, Jin Kazama, Sanger Zonvolt, and many, many more find themselves thrown together by fate to take a stand against the forces of evil. Though many of these characters hail from action games and fighting games, these battlefields force them to take a more tactical approach to combat than they may be used to. Unfortunately, Project X Zone's strategic gameplay is too one-dimensional to captivate, leaving the game's huge cast and its spirited presentation to keep it afloat.
Playing through Deadpool feels about as schizophrenic as its main character. On the one hand, it’s zany, wacky, goofy, silly, sophomoric, and many more adjectives that Thesaurus.com suggests. This is a funny game – that is, if you’re into dick jokes and casual sexism. If not, then Deadpool – the character and the game – will grate on you like a buzzsaw on hard cheese.
The Night of the Rabbit is a fairy tale: whimsical, wondrous, brimming with talking animals, hidden dangers, and a hundred reasons to lose a few hours to its depths. A point-and-click adventure very much in the spirit of those old Sierra games, The Night of the Rabbit puts you in control of 12-year old Jeremiah Hazelnut who somehow finds himself apprenticed to a talking rabbit named Marquis de Hotto in the last days of summer and on route towards the adventure of a lifetime.
The downfall of civilization redefines moral boundaries. No longer do labels like thief and murderer mark you as a criminal; everyone must steal, must kill, must do whatever it takes to survive. Humans roam in packs like feral dogs, claiming their territory and killing anyone who encroaches on their turf. Paper-thin alliances link individuals together for mere flashes, their connections severed once their mutual needs are met. Life is bleak, brutal, and exhausting. Tomorrow doesn't exist when the stench of death lingers like a fog and hope was extinguished years ago. There is only today; there is only right now. Morals? Morals won't put food in your mouth or a roof over your head. Morals are for the weak. And you're not weak.
The best things in life are better with friends, but those experiences are rarely bad by yourself. Fuse wants so badly for players to have a co-op group of four that it punishes them for trying to enjoy it alone. This is one of many crises Insomniac Games’ uncertain third-person shooter faces throughout its eight-hour campaign, which features so many ups and downs it’s difficult to discern where its greatness begins and mistakes end.
One of the darlings of the Wii library,Donkey Kong Country Returns has been given a second life on the Nintendo 3DS. With some new levels – and a new mode to help lessen the harsh difficulty level – DK and Diddy triumphantly return in an expertly crafted platformer that’s more fun than a barrel of… ya know.
Ubisoft’s latest attempt to make something of its Might & Magic Heroes franchise follows in the footsteps of the original Heroes VI release. I still mostly approve of the changes to the core design. Units are grouped together into armies with wonderfully distinct identities and playstyles, especially the fantastic new dark elf faction. The campaigns, however, are badly wounded if not outright killed by the free armies the AI continually spawns in some of the worst cheating the strategy genre has ever seen.
There’s a moment in Metro: Last Light when you get a car – a bodged-together, fortified jalopy – and you immediately think of Half-Life 2’s driving sections. Ah, the open road!
The difference is that Last Light’s car runs on train tracks. There’s something about seeing your future snake off with rigid inevitability that makes it a particularly easy metaphor for Last Light’s frustrations: sometimes it feels like an on-rails shooter in every sense.
Those are just lulls, however. Elsewhere it’s a game of gratifyingly kinetic gunplay, intense stealth sequences and a stunning, bleak vision that rivals the imagination of even BioShock Infinite. Its stage-managed linearity cuts both ways, too, enabling Last Light to draw a world of incredible detail, carefully framing sights and scenes of postapocalyptic tragedy and chaos. It describes humanity with a degree of success that few games of any genre achieve, much less shooters.
If you've ever gathered around a table with a gang of buds who aren't particularly great at playing cards but still carry the evening with their oddball banter, then Poker Night 2 will feel very familiar. Serious poker playing often takes a backseat to the funny interactions that unfold between this group of likable misfits culled from a few well-known game and TV/film franchises. That's fine for the first few hours of entertaining antics, but as the jokes grow stale and the matches become more predictable, the charm fizzles, leaving you itching for actual human opponents to play against.
I probably spent the bulk of my time in Campaign mode, which gives you a large variety of missions that slowly up the scales in terms of enemies as well as your own resources. Each map is a standalone experience, usually with an objective that is not easily completed by yourself. The Challenge mode is much harder - almost to the point of being unfair. Some of these you are just too ill-equipped to handle and really have to be creative in order to win (I suppose that is why it is a challenge). For me personally however, I enjoyed the Campaign mode more.
In the small Pacific Northwestern town of Greenvale, this event isn't that peculiar. After all, Greenvale is home to a lady who totes a cooking pot around with her all day, a physician who delights in the various ways he can eat potato chips, and a wheelchair-bound eccentric who speaks in rhyming couplets by way of his manservant's translation. Francis York Morgan doesn't make his home here--he has come to solve the murder of a local beauty--but he's just as zany as the locals. As he drives down the highway, he engages his unseen companion, Zach, in light conversation, discussing director Richard Donner's filmography and describing the relationship between cartoon cat-and-mouse team Tom and Jerry as though they are a gay couple locked in a slave/master relationship. "He does terrible things to Tom. Nasty, even sadistic things. But that's fine, as long as that's what Tom wants."
Zeno Clash 2 is violence as interactive entertainment, a slightly different thing that's never been quite as neatly caught. Often it means shooting fruit-headed foreigners with assault rifles. But this singular world of anthropomorphic weirdos offers an earthier, much less dignified take - a place where everything is settled with fists. From start to finish this is a game about repeatedly punching humans and other animals in whatever they have for a face and, if nothing else, you have to admire that purity of vision.
It is this game's guiding light. Oddly shaped opponents line up and then get duffed up, with everything from piledriver finishers to flying fist-slams awaiting beyond the basic hooks. Left and right attacks are basic jabs, while holding either button charges haymakers and uppercuts; basic alternation, plus a few throws on stunned enemies, will finish off most everything.
It's been over a year since the PlayStation Vita launched, and despite some excellent games like Gravity Rush and Persona 4 Golden, it's fair to say that we're still waiting for its killer app. We'd love to say that Keiji Inafune, Sony's Japan Studio and Marvelous AQL have finally cracked that code - but although Soul Sacrifice has a lot going for it, it falls into the trap of style over substance.
The story focuses on a nameless slave who is captured and then imprisoned by a powerful sorcerer. At first, it seems like the slave's situation is pretty hopeless. All he can do is crawl around his cell with nothing but oversized bugs to keep him company. But when a talking book named Librom appears from a pile of rubble, the slave is offered a potential lifeline. By reading Librom's pages he can relive the author's memories. This allows him to slowly learn the art of casting magic spells and unravel the mystery behind the sorcerer who has imprisoned him.
You start the game with the ability to sprint at top speed endlessly. You can hold your breath forever and can fall from any height without dying. Colt's arsenal, too, isn't hanging around. You begin with sniper rifle, machine gun and other tools already in your possession, and before long the game has decided you should probably have a minigun as well. You've already had a sample of what these can do, since the game opens with a wantonly destructive turret section in which you sweep past an enemy compound, finger on the trigger of a mounted minigun, decimating a bad guy fortress conveniently filled with exploding fuel tanks.
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.
While all fans of the Shin Megami Tensei series will likely find something to like about its latest release, Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers -- it is, after all, cut much from precisely the same cloth as contemporaries Persona 4 and Devil Survivor -- the folks most likely to fully appreciate its unique quirks are gamers of, shall we say, a certain age. Namely, those old enough to remember when Soul Hackers was new, way back in 1997.
The latest incarnation of Motocross Madness has its share of visual surprises scattered across its Egyptian, Australian, and Icelandic vistas, but none leaves so great an impression as a daredevil in the Elite Knight armor from Dark Souls flipping his dirt bike 30 feet above the Egyptian desert. Is this the titular madness? Hardly. Rather, it's just Motocross Madness' use of your Xbox Live Arcade avatars to serve as the actual racers, and it's but one way that this entertaining dirt bike racer maintains its emphasis on fun all the way to the finish line.
As welcome as it is to have a use for Xbox Live avatars, however, they sometimes seem out of place. At heart, Motocross Madness is a fairly realistic racer that doesn't shy from moderate challenges, and the sight of your gangly avatar on an almost photo-realistic bike occasionally emphasizes the game's awkward juggle of realism and cartoony aesthetics. Not one for racing in whatever crazy getup you display on your XBLA social panel? Fear not: Motocross Madness also awards you with in-game helmets, T-shirts, and other assorted cosmetic goodies for leveling and completing some achievements so you can look more like a professional racer and less like Skyrim's Dovahkiin in a Portal shirt.
I didn’t hate the dozens of hours I spent shooting generic aliens and mutants in Defiance, but I know I’m not going back to it, either. Rather than the addictive, "Where did the day go?" sort of experience I had when I started out my adventures in World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic, Defiance doesn’t do anything special enough to hook me, even for the short term.
Decent story missions and well-designed dungeons are too few and far between, and the vast intervening stretches are filled with some of the dullest and most repetitious quest design I’ve experienced in an MMO, punctuated by polish issues in the form of a poor mouse-and-keyboard UI, occasional broken quests, and crash bugs. The competitive multiplayer entertains for a while, but that and a few other redeeming features ultimately aren’t enough to make Defiance worth spending more than a short time with.
Black Adam streaks towards Earth, wreathed in golden-hued lighting. He touches down on the streets of downtown Metropolis with a simple proclamation: "I have returned." Cut to its guardian, the son of Jor-El, tearing his suit off to reveal the iconic “S” beneath it. After being slammed through a skyscraper, Black Adam rears up and shouts, “SHAZAM!” rending Superman with a massive thunderbolt. Supes responds by punching Black Adam into the atmosphere, flying up past him, and sending him crashing back down to Earth with a towering overhead smash.
It’s not often that I review a game where I struggle to identify the genre. With Sang-Froid – Tales of Werewolves though, I find myself at somewhat of a loss. What kind of game is it? I don’t know. Is it any good? Most certainly!
As well as being difficult to categorize as regards its genre, its also hard to say whether Sang-Froid – Tales of Werewolves is an indie game or not. Certainly it’s from a smaller studio, and there are elements that reflect lower production values (like the voice recordings), but other aspects of the presentation are slick and impressive. For example, the music is fantastic, with a celtic influence throughout complete with pipes and flutes. It’s the sort of music I have never heard in any game before, and it’s amazing to see it work so well. These Irish/Scottish ditties are present from the opening moments of the game, and later the addition of more haunting orchestral pieces and some brilliant ambient audio make Sang-Froid – Tales of Werewolves one of the best sounding games of the year so far.
Retro-game-homages are as popular as ever, but too many fail to capture the magic of their inspirations. To call Guacamelee! anything other than an homage is downright uninformed. However, it's surprising just how well it manages to both cite its source material and use those inspirations to form a game with a fresh and distinct identity. Those in the know will quickly recognize hints of Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, and even Portal, but these references never quite dominate the unlikely setting of a dimensionally disturbed re-creation of rural Mexico. They've inspired parts of the world, and to a larger extent, the gameplay, but Guacamelee stands tall thanks to its brilliant art style, witty writing, and a steady pace, of which the biggest flaw is that the fun comes to an end sooner than any game of this caliber should.
Imagine what minecraft might like be like if it had been made with pixel art sprites and released in the super nintendo era. That sums up the overall vibe of Terraria pretty well. This devious little indie sandbox game borrows so many ideas that it essentially is Minecraft in 2D but it also beefs up the familiar gameplay in exciting ways. There's a lot more creepy-crawly stuff to kill, and the staggering number of deadly doodads you can MacGyver together to slay them with is mouth-watering. There's some gnarly fun to be had in these uncharted depths.
The Behemoth is growing up. You're over halfway through Battleblock Theater, the indie developer's latest, before you get to see someone poo themselves to death. Considering the team's previous game, 2008's Castle Crashers, had a variety of woodland creatures suffering from varying degrees of terminal diarrhoea within the first few levels, this clearly represents a significant stride towards maturity.
Thankfully, such restraint doesn't mean that Battleblock Theater has abandoned the studio's goofy, surreal sense of humour. Quite the opposite. This is by far The Behemoth's funniest game, with a laugh-out-loud narrator spinning a barking mad tale about weird little puppet people with interchangeable heads, shipwrecked on an island ruled by sadistic cats who force the refugees to survive deadly gauntlets in a shabby theatre for their feline amusement.
There's that classic problem with trilogies: after the intrigue and excitement of the first instalment, the follow-up must wrestle with moving the plot forward in a meaningful way, while avoiding those grand revelations so often saved up for the third and final entry. It's unfortunate that The Tyranny of King Washington - The Betrayal (Ep. 2) is the very epitome of a plodding second act. It makes no effort to expand on the mysteries raised by its alternate-universe setting, nor does it offer up much in the way of action from its dull assortment of characters. And worst of all, there's little to be seen of the enigmatic and evil George Washington, the very villain who brought The Infamy (Ep. 1) to life.
Instead, you're introduced to a few familiar faces from the Assassin's Creed universe, most notably Benjamin Franklin. He's not his old self initially, but he soon reverts to the same slightly odd character who never really sparked much interest in Assassin's Creed III. Indeed, many of the cast members of The Betrayal fail to capitalise on the alternate-reality setting and instead spend most of their time standing around conjuring up plans and sending Connor out on errand missions around misty Boston. There's a hope that it's all for the greater good of Episode Three, but when you're faced with waves of repetitive missions and seriously dull dialogue, it's hard to see the bigger picture.
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