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.
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