What drives a man of God to wash away the sins of his past, only to blacken his heart with a multitude more? How far can a freedom fighter be pushed before virtue and righteousness are replaced by a lust for vengeance? What does a privileged society do when the foundation of its prosperity is shaken? BioShock Infinite dares to explore these heady themes and many more, giving you glimpses at just how the seemingly smallest of decisions can forever alter our realities, and our hearts. As an agent provocateur in the fantastical floating city of Columbia, your actions bring turmoil and strife to an ostensibly idyllic landscape. It's immensely fun to stir up trouble, and even more engaging to see how boldly BioShock Infinite portrays a society torn asunder. You'll be haunted by this thematically devastating adventure, and indeed, its phenomenal final minutes, which are bound to be discussed and dissected for some time to come.
Of the power-ups available to use, only one seems to be incredibly over-powered; the "cloud" attack. This specific power-up emits a cloud out of the back of your car, making your opponents have almost no visibility. This power-up really hurts you later on in the single player when the tracks get even more narrow.
During the first few races, the way the cars handle can take some getting used to as they are extremely loose. Thankfully, even with different surfaces like snow, mud, and pavement, the cars act the same on all of them. So once you get down the feeling of the cars, you can really start enjoying the game.
Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moonis the second entry where Luigi suits up with a vacuum, shows he’s not afraid of no ghosts and starts sucking down anything in sight. Ghosts, money, rats, spiders and more are not safe from the power of the Poltergust 5000.
The game starts off with the Dark Moon, a purple moon keeping the ghosts in-check and friend, being shattered by a Boo. Once chaos starts happening, Professor E. Gadd again ropes Luigi into cleaning up the ghosts while trying to find fragments of the moon to put back together.
Unlike the first game, Dark Moon takes place through five mansions, each with a different feel. However, the personality from the mansion in the last game never seems to fully come out. There’s not a lot of character backstory in mansions, and ghosts are fairly repetitive once you see the main types the game has to offer.
There's already two Worms games available on the PSP. Worms: Open Warfare, and Worms: Open Warfare 2. This means that Worms: Battle Islands is going to appeal one of two groups. The people who can't get enough Worms, (even though it's the same game) and those who want a worms title on the PSP, but don't already own one. For those still interested, here's the game types you're getting.
The campaign. Here you'll take over large chunks of land, collect blueprints and take over islands by winning matches. It's traditional Worms gameplay at it's best topped off with a boss fight once the four surrounding islands have been conquered.
Gears Of War has never been the most pretentious series, but there have been moments when it grasped for the kind of gravitas usually reserved for games that are less about swearing and muscles and guns. Whether it was Dom dying against lonely Mad World piano music in Gears 3 or a clumsy concentration camp allegory in Gears 2, there was always some cutscene insisting that this is more than a game. Not so for Gears Of War: Judgment, which goes out of its way at every moment to remind you that, yes, this is a game, and aren’t games fun?
Judgment’s Locusts advance in unprecedented numbers with only the barest regard for taking cover, your stars – a score system, more or less – are always visible onscreen, gibs and headshots are visibly totalled up on the left, and your friends’ high scores are tracked on the right. Every level is broken into sections, and every section is preceded by a screen-filling option to make it harder and concluded with another screen-filling rundown of everyone’s kills, headshots and deaths. “Would you like to retry?” it asks when you’ve fallen short of a three-star ranking, and it might as well be asking you to insert a coin for one more credit.
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Most of your time with Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 will be spent with the three-part campaign. You play as Cole, a special-ops sniper helping out assault teams in hot zones ranging from the Philippines to Sarajevo to Nepal. You come to care for Cole and his buddies through this seven- to eight-hour saga of betrayal and revenge that begins today, bounces back to 1993 for a look at the civil war that ravaged the former Yugoslavia, and then jumps to the present to wrap everything up along the border between Nepal and India.
The first of my many deaths in Etrian Odyssey IV came at the hands of a kangaroo, of all things.
Now, you may laugh, but this was no ordinary kangaroo. A towering behemoth that dwarfed my guild's modest airship, the so-called Bounding Beast possessed a territorial drive matched only by its pugilistic chops. It made those boxing kangaroos in the old cartoons look like runners-up in a kindergarten slap fight.
My guild members held their own for most of the fight. In fact, they took the monster's health to critical with ruthless efficiency. But then its desperation moves came out, including a maneuver that stunned my party of five warriors, leaving them vulnerable for it to follow up with punishing cross-hooks that knocked multiple targets out of the fight in a single blow. The tide of battle turned against us quickly. Game over.
Before we begin properly talking about Darkstalkers Resurrection, let me be honest and say that I never really had much experience with the Darkstalkers games during their heyday in the '90s. I've always been more of a Street Fighter guy, but I think a lot of that had to do with the arcades in Windward Oahu never having any Darkstalkers cabinets. I voraciously followed coverage of the titles, bought strategy guides and artbooks, but rarely touched the home ports because, well... the PS1 just couldn't handle the games.
So when Capcom announced Darkstalkers Resurrection, I realized that I would be starting on the ground floor of this franchise, learning it from scratch despite Just how many fighting game franchises I've played and reviewed and lived off of over the years. It was something to really look forward to, and a great way to finally try out this series I'd heard so much about, but never spent any real time with.
Darkstalkers Resurrection is an online-capable, HD-upgraded two-pack featuring Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge (Vampire Hunter in Japan) and Darkstalkers 3 (Vampire Savior in Japan). Following the mold set by Street Fighter lll: 3rd Strike Online Edition and Marvel vs. Capcom Origins, DSR has solid GGPO-enabled netcode, a long list of in-game challenges, the ability to upload and view replays via YouTube, and a huge gallery of concept and design art from the included titles.
LEGO City Undercover faces a burden unlike any previous LEGO game developed by Traveller’s Tales. Not only is this production the first LEGO game by Traveller’s Tales to not feature a major movie or comic book license, it’s the first major Wii U game of 2013 – and the biggest release to come since that system’s launch four months ago. Nintendo fans will not just be looking for a great LEGO game. They’ll be looking for Undercover to deliver a complete and lasting experience that will help end a languishing software drought. In many respects, LEGO City Undercover delivers upon that potential. This is by far the largest LEGO game Traveller’s Tales has produced. Yet, at the same time, it’s held back by a variety of issues, including the fact that its core gameplay doesn’t have much depth.
Undercover’s cleverly clichéd story begins with a quick-witted cop, Chase McCain, returning to his home of LEGO City after an extended absence, tasked with investigating the escape of his arch nemesis, Rex Fury. Ten hours later, the plot more resembles something out of a James Bond film, and the journey to that point is skillfully handled. There’s a strong sense of progression throughout the game, both in terms of the actual plot, as well as a steady unveiling of new missions and quirky costumes and abilities for McCain himself.
Fans of other teams might wince, but Sony’s long-running MLB: The Show baseball sim is almost New York Yankee-like in its ability to deliver a playoff-caliber product every year. For the Yankees, neither age nor injuries nor bad free-agent signings seem to slow them down, while The Show seems immune to both its competition and the ever-increasing age of the console it runs on. Can MLB 13: The Show keep its Yankee-esque streak of success going in 2013? Well…does a Cubs fan cry in October?
With The Show, two things immediately leapt out at me: the visuals and the gameplay. The former are again capable of fooling passersby into thinking it’s a real baseball telecast from afar. Player faces, animations, and stadium details are just that good, and interface details are convincingly TV-like. I enjoyed bolstering this illusion using the “Broadcast” camera mode, which closely replicates the perspectives you see when watching a real ballgame on TV, but there are also plenty of more traditional video game views, such as one that lets you pitch from the catcher’s perspective.
Sports games take a lot of abuse for their one-year production cycles. It's hard to jam in innovations alongside the usual schedule and roster updates, given the lack of development time available in the measly 12 months between seasons. Still, you generally get some sort of new feature or cool new physics to take the sting out of spending $60. And then there's MLB 2K13, a sports game that lives up to all the cliches about publishers doing little besides changing the packaging and the number in the game title. This ostensibly 2013 baseball game from 2K Sports looks, sounds, and plays exactly like the 2012 baseball game from 2K Sports. Aside from new rosters, a new schedule most noteworthy for the oddly annoying move of the Houston Astros to the American League, and the deletion of online leagues, this is simply a repackaging of what has come before.
When we say that MLB 2K13 is the same game as MLB 2K12, we mean it. The feature set has been fully carried forward with the one noteworthy exception being the removal of online league support. Perhaps it wasn't being used that much, or perhaps it was removed for budgetary reasons. Either way, it's a loss, since online leagues are a staple of sports games. The only significant changes are to the schedule and the team setup; the game does move the Houston Astros over to the AL West and out of the National League, where they comfortably resided for the past half-century.
Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 is a game that knows its audience. Picking up where its predecessor left off, it tells the ongoing tale of young ninja Naruto Uzumaki's struggles as the Nine-Tails' jinchuriki and his complex relationship with Sasuke Uchiha. It also covers the five kage summit and the outbreak of the fourth great ninja war.
If none of this means anything to you, Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 is not the game for you. It spends tremendous amounts of time on storytelling, and there are so many characters, factions, rivalries, chakras, jutsus, and other aspects of Naruto history and lore at play that unless you have a working familiarity with all this stuff ahead of time, you're going to be completely lost. The series hasn't lost its knack for eye-popping boss battles and amazing ninja powers. But even diehard Naruto fans will find that this latest entry fumbles the pacing in its single-player Ultimate Adventure mode by spending far too much time hitting you with conversations and cutscenes and not nearly enough time letting you meaningfully participate in the story.
Of course, you can always skip the story sequences and get right to the next gameplay section, but the story is such a focus here that if you don't have an interest in watching this game unfold its tale, then there's little point in playing the game at all. Well over half of the time it takes to get through the single-player campaign is taken up by cutscenes and chitchat. You often watch several minutes of cutscenes, take control of a character to move him or her through an environment, maybe stopping to talk to other characters now and then, and then watch several more minutes of cutscenes. Sometimes, those cutscenes are action-packed and entertaining, but there are also lots of long expository sequences in which characters just stand around calmly talking to each other. Yes, there are intense battles from time to time, but there aren't nearly enough of these to support the bloated narrative.
A lot of people won’t like Citadel, Mass Effect 3’s final bit of DLC, because they’re under the impression that the DLC “adds nothing” to the conclusion of the game. Fair enough. Mass Effect 3 wrapped up back in March, after all. Why should anyone want to pay for and play an additional chapter in game that they’ve already finished? Well, sit back and give me a couple of minutes: I’ll tell you why this episode warrants a revisit of the game if you’re a fan. “If you’re a fan” being the key phrase there. If you didn’t care for the linear action gameplay or the irritating narrative-related flaws of the conclusion of Mass Effect 3, this isn’t going to fix those issues — sorry. However, Citadel might alleviate some of the pain associated with the ending by giving fans a little more closure in regards to the relationships they’ve built throughout the series.
It would be easy to dismiss Citadel as a pure fan-service DLC, and, in many ways, this is one for the fans. There are numerous sections where I felt the writers winking at me behind lines of dialogue referencing running jokes and even making light of obvious plot holes. There’s a whimsical “don’t give a shit” attitude that’s so obviously ingrained in every facet of this DLC, but not in a bad way. The episode never comes off as the developer pandering to a fans in order to snatch the last bits of currency from their pockets. Instead, I would argue that Citadel is reminiscent of Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.
SimCity is a good game hobbled by its insistence on putting as many obstacles as it can between it and you. You can point to the ridiculous online connection problems that have bogged down the game's launch as the most obvious examples of this, but they aren't the only ones. From its online infrastructure to the simulation that powers each city, SimCity has numerous flaws that can turn a few hours of delight into a few hours of seething frustration. Many, or even most, of these flaws can be fixed, but it's the here and now that's important--and in the here and now, SimCity is a fun, engaging, and broken game.
Just how broken the always-online SimCity is depends on when you're playing, what server you choose, and the sheer luck of the draw. Did it need to be this way? Probably not: the game offers the option to have a fully single-player experience in a closed region of your own creation. Alas, you must sign into SimCity (the service)--as well as Electronic Arts' Origin service--in order to play SimCity (the game). Since the game's release, connecting has been a crapshoot. You may not be able to log in at all, or the server might be full. In that case, you don't enter a standard queue as you might in a massively multiplayer online game (though to be clear, SimCity is not an MMOG). Instead, you initiate a 20-minute countdown. Should the server be full when the countdown is finished, the countdown and the wait begin again.
Grand strategy games that span hundreds of years of history do many things well, but they often gloss over exactly the kind of tense political and military action that March Of The Eagles excels at as nothing more than a blip. This isn't necessarily the best example of what Paradox's grand-strategy game engine can do (relative to Crusader Kings II, for example), but a tight focus on Napoleonic Europe from 1805 to 1820 makes for an entertaining game set in an era that (apart from Napoleon: Total War) has long lacked good, accessible strategy games.
Like its Paradox-developed siblings (such as the Europa Universalis series) March of the Eagles happens in variable-speed real-time, which is a good thing because it can offer more depth of information and time for strategic choice than an RTS like StarCraft II. Being able to slow things down to see and absorb the economic information of every single one of your nation's provinces and the diplomatic connections of the dozens of nations, or plot the first complicated phases of a war, then to speed things up when rebuilding while at peace allows us to play at our own pace. My single-player campaigns generally ran between five and eight hours in length.
I assume they’re weight-watchers, anyway. Certainly none of your minions seems to want to eat of their own volition. No one seems to want to do anything on their own. Your creatures can spend days gallivanting past the fetid innards of the local kitchen without so much as a second glance inside, or acknowledgment of the fact that they’ve starved themselves into impotency.
Workers will not run when intruding heroes are hacking at their ears, they’ll just… stand there, taking it. And unless they’re on patrol or have been explicitly told to do something about it, your units will ignore suspicious ladders up until the point where uninvited guests drop in and they’re forced to look incredibly surprised about it all.
This has been a long generation for Sony, but a quiet one for Kratos. Nathan Drake has fronted an entire trilogy on PS3 and Assassin’s Creed has settled into an annual cycle, but this is only the second God Of War game on the console, with a three-year gap between the pair. While that avoids familiarity breeding contempt, it also means developer Sony Santa Monica has had fewer chances to recognise that several elements of the God Of War template could do with modernisation. Much of what you’ll find in Ascension’s singleplayer is unchanged from the eight-year-old PS2 original. QTEs – hopefully dubbed ‘context-sensitive actions’ – are everywhere. Rather than celebrate its Greek mythological setting, Ascension fixates on ultraviolence and bare breasts. Bump into one of the many invisible walls and Kratos just runs on the spot.
But six games and eight years on from his debut, Kratos has learned a few new tricks. He’s a more agile climber, for one thing. He now automatically clambers from one handhold to the next, with a tap of the jump button flinging him across larger distances. He’s still no Lara Croft – and he remains in possession of the most comically awkward-looking double jump in gaming – but it’s a welcome change to a moveset that has remained largely static since his 2005 debut.
Bit.Trip Presents...Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien is a pleasantly fresh experience, relying on the strengths of its predecessor while simultaneously morphing into a game accessible to nearly anyone. Yes, Runner2 is at times incredibly frustrating — but only if you want it to be that way.
Spanning 100 levels, Runner2 has you guiding series protagonist Commander Video through increasingly difficult, cartoonish stages. Gone are the retro-inspired visuals of the original Bit.Trip Runner, replaced with highly stylized environments. Still, the core gameplay remains: jumping, sliding, and kicking your way past spike-laden enemies while collecting gold pick-ups in an effort to complete a high-scoring, perfect run.
An enormous structure has collapsed on top of me. Now I will never return home or know love from another."
Take note: when disaster struck in the middle ages - or whenever it is that Castlevania's meant to be set - people were generally rather stoical about it. Stranded by shipmates? Skewered by cursed arrows? Crushed by a tumbling wall? Time to bust out the pen and ink and write an even-handed little message about the whole affair.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Mirror of Fate is filled with these sorts of missives. They're encountered every few minutes as you ramble around the dark corridors of a huge, terrifying stately pile where nasty things lurk in the rafters and there are block-pushing puzzles waiting down in the basement. The letters are a joy to come across, really. Even when they're doing little more than elaborating on the backstory, they offer the aftermath of intense violence or loss, picked over with the idle distance of someone describing why the number 7 from Margate failed to arrive in a timely fashion that morning. "I've been gored by a narwhal. How tiresome!"
Something else Mirror of Fate has taught me about the middle ages - or whenever - is that, back then, everybody was busy avenging somebody or something. 'Avenger' appears to have been the only occupation, really, beyond 'blacksmith' or perhaps 'troll'. No wonder so little got done. Throughout the latest Castlevania's dozen or so hours, you're dropped into the shoes of a selection of different Belmonts - Gabriel, Simon, [spoiler] and [even spoilier] - and all of them are out for some kind of bloodthirsty compensation. Revenge is the plot's defining concept - and its only real flavour, too.
After committing a variety of unspeakable acts against your fellow man, you have finally gained the trust of the evil sorcerer Demonaica. Your reward for walking the path of darkness is a crystal that grants you immortality. Tarnished though your soul has become, you hope to use your new strength to destroy the very individual who foolishly placed his confidence in you. Wiping out evil and saving humankind isn't a simple task, though. To persevere, you need to rely on both reflexes and intellect.
Despite featuring a rather conventional premise, A Valley Without Wind 2 stands apart from the crowd of similar action games by deftly combining a slew of platforming stages with what initially seems like a generic turn-based strategy interface. First impressions may lead you to dismiss the latter element as unimportant, but that would be a mistake. If you don't consistently pay equal attention to each aspect of play, you won't be able to complete the game, because your progress is frequently auto-saved, and a few critical mistakes can render victory impossible. If you're ready to embrace that unusual and rather demanding dynamic, you'll find a worthwhile experience that might surprise you.
Rebellion released the first Sniper Elite in 2005 with their award winning ballistics. They followed that up with the reboot, Sniper Elite v2 in 2012 in which they added the controversial “X-Ray Kill Cam”. This latest installment sees Rebellion ditch the stealth for zombies in Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army.
In Sniper Elite v2 you played as Karl Fairburne, an OSS officer assigned to Berlin in 1945 and tasked with eliminating the scientists involved in the German V-2 rocket program. In Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army you once again take control of Karl Fairburne in Berlin in 1945, however, this time you are the only person alive.
The first cutscene in the campaign shows Hitler in his bunker being informed of the situation in and around Berlin. In a rage, Hitler orders his men to execute “Plan Z” which, based on what happens next, I can only assume is the plan to turn all the dead soldiers into zombies.
The story is told through several missions that are reminiscent of the campaigns in Left 4 Dead. These missions can be played solo or co-op with up to four people. Each mission consists of a series of objectives leading up to a final standoff between you and the undead horde. Some of the objectives will have you setting up choke points before opening up the door that stands between you and an army of zombies.
The most important piece of knowledge you need going into Brutal Legend has nothing to do with heavy metal music. Sure, a deep love of that genre can play a huge part in your overall enjoyment of the game's guitar-solo-fueled and star-studded story, but it's easier to find satisfaction in what the game is when you're not expecting it to be something it is not. With this PC release of Brutal Legend coming years after its 2009 console debut, it's easier to prepare for the unique experience it offers while also enjoying it at a higher resolution.
Merely looking at screenshots or old prerelease marketing materials for the game can make it appear to be many things, yet it's not "Zelda with a guitar," and it's not "God of War as told by Black Sabbath," as cool as either of those things might have been. It's a real-time strategy game, even though that term may not accurately represent the first couple of hours of the campaign.
Brutal Legend follows Eddie Riggs, a roadie (voiced by Jack Black) with a profound love of classic metal who finds himself transported to an appropriately brutal fantasy land that's part The Lord of the Rings and part Iron Maiden album art. The game's strongest qualities lie in its writing, its characters, and its world. The magic (and much of the humor) is in how many fantasy tropes are twisted to fit into a heavy metal world. Basic melee characters, for instance, are literal headbangers who smash their craniums against anything in their way. Roadies are your strong but stealthy units; guitar solos can literally melt faces; and "fans" are your mystical, music-loving resource. This all combines with a well-acted cast of characters featuring voices from the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy Kilmister, and Tim Curry. The story does lose some of its whimsy toward the end, when the plot is in danger of taking itself too seriously, but the over-the-top nature persists through the six- to eight-hour adventure.
Ah, puzzle games, the last bastion of the indie developer. When the world consumes itself with one triple-A shooter after another, indies cast aside their Call Of Duty distaste for something a little more lateral.
The problem is if you've played games at all in the past two or three years then chances are you've played every possible iteration of a puzzle game just by virtue of playing games.
Such is the unoriginality of the genre, unfortunately, but that makes The Bridge all the more compelling.
Though its overarching mechanic – namely the ability to rotate the world – has been seen in one form or another throughout gaming's history, its implementation here is fairly unique.
Think Escher style art if it was made into a puzzle game and you'd be surprisingly close to what The Bridge manages.
And much like the artist's inimitable style, The Bridge is capable of just as many mind-breaking, head-scratching, grey-matter-tickling levels of confusion. Again, it's all part and parcel of the game.
The objective is simple: navigate your sketchbook drawn character along floors and across ceilings until you reach the exit door. Sometimes you'll need a key, other times your task is to sensible evade a ball with a gurning face on it.
Though the puzzles become harder and the challenges more complex, the underlying mechanic never changes. That's the hallmark of a damn fine puzzle game, where the gamer doesn't need to relearn the tools with each new task.
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