PixelJunk Shooter – Review

£20 PSN card, £17.95 (Game cost: £6.29)

by Will Templeton

There’s something about PixelJunk games that distils the absolute best mechanics of a genre down to a seemingly simple experience. It’s a pattern and an ethos that Q-Games have followed for each of the series – take a base mechanic, stretch it to the best of its ability without straying too far from it, build a game around the abilities that are produced and release it, all within the span of an extremely short development cycle. Read more…

Tales of Monkey Island: Series One – Review

Tales of Monkey Island: Series One – £21.48

Review by Bobby Foster

Games in the early 90s mostly didn’t bother with narrative. The titles that sold best recreated the kind of experiences people were having in arcades, and you’d probably only catch a glimpse of a “plot” in the opening couple of screens. Even there, the aim was mostly to explain what the player needed to do and what was meant to be represented by the crude in-game graphics. Games that aimed to build a meaningful relationship between player and avatar were almost non-existent. Read more…

Blood Bowl, Xbox 360 – Review

Blood Bowl, Xbox 360 – £17.73

Review by – Mr Chris

Blood Bowl was a Games Workshop board game first released some time back in the, oooh, 80s or 90s or something. A while ago, anyway. Basically (for those of you who don’t know) it’s an American football style sports game played by the various denizens of the Warhammer fantasy universe. Your little plastic or lead team of Orcs, Goblins, Humans, Undead or whatever played a turn-based game of Extreme Rugby against each other on a big gridded board. Many dice would be thrown. People would get injured, or killed (and that’s just the argumentative teenagers disputing a dice roll). Touchdowns might be scored. Girls would likely be absent. Read more…

VVVVVV – ReVVVVVView

VVVVVV, PC/Mac/Linux – £9.36

ReVVVVVView by Lewie Procter

VVVVVV is the story of a little bloke with a big smile. He’s Captain Veridian. He has to save the day via puzzle platforming. Read more…

Torchlight, PC – Review

Torchlight, PC – £12.35

Review by – TychoCelchuuu

Do you like clicking? Do you like loot? Do you like putting skill points into skills? If you’ve answered yes to these three questions, you’re either pining for Diablo III or you’ve done the sensible thing and purchased Torchlight to tide you over. The brazenness with which Torchlight rips off the Diablo series would be criminal if it wasn’t so cute. This game plays like a refinement and a distillation of the classic hack and slash, and the only thing that hasn’t been pinched from Diablo is its violent, gothic tone. Instead, Torchlight has wholly appropriated World of Warcraft’s cheery stylized visuals, which means you will spend hours clicking on and picking up town portal scrolls from skeletons with endearingly large heads that you’ve smashed with bright, glowing swords. Read more…

Seizuredome, PC – Review

Review by Bobby Foster

Seizuredome is about shooting things before they collide into you. In that sense, it’s a direct descendant of the 30 year-old Asteroids. What Seizuredome adds to the mix is sumo wrestling, nudity and amazing music. I think I’ve fallen in love. Read more…

The Path, PC/Mac – Review

The Path, PC – £6.29

Review by Bobby Foster

I’ve become a willing participant in the rape and murder of seven young women. I say “young women”, but five of them you’d definitely call girls. What worries me is that I’m not sure I even regret it. Read more…

Secret of Mana – Review

Secret of Mana – 800 Wii points

Review by Bobby Foster

Single-player, fantasy-based roleplaying videogames are often a lonely, tedious experience. You spend hundreds of hours developing your character, trudging through predictable environments, and repeating the same attacks over and over again. Japanese developers in particular have a track record of making games where the core mechanic consists of battling against wave after wave of easily defeatable enemy, who exist solely to dispense the Experience Points you need to beat the more challenging and interesting boss encounters. Any time spent in combat with enemies who never realistically pose a threat is no fun, because a fight without some sense of peril is inevitably dull. Yet it’s become so commonplace in modern RPGs that fans of the genre have learnt to accept it and even name it: ‘grind’.

Read more…

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, PS3 – Review

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, PS3 – £29.99 delivered

Review by Amitai Winehouse (twitter.com/amitaiwinehouse)

If you’ve logged onto the internet (who really “logs on” to the internet anymore?) over the last two weeks, you’ll probably have realised that quite a lot of people like Uncharted 2. Not just like, like, but like, like like. Are they correct to do so? I suppose it’s my job to find out. Read more…

Wet – Review

Review by Will Templeton (continueorquit.com)

In movies, the best characters are those with which the viewer can sympathise; a character that, while flawed, can be enjoyed and identified with by the viewer. Considering that Wet draws so heavily from cinema, to the extent of running it as a motif throughout the game, it seems somewhat out of place that the protagonist is as blank a slate as she is. Rubi is a humourless, callous bitch, an outcast with only the pursuit of money on her mind and nothing interesting to say, and I simply do not identify with her, nor do I want to. Read more…

Atomhex, Xbox 360 – Review

Atomhex, Xbox 360 – 80MS Points

Review by Lewie Procter

Dual Stick shooters have seen a bit of a wonderful resurgence in the last few years, and you can very easily track it back to the release of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved on the Xbox Live Arcade. This indie endeavour has a bit of an interesting history to it though. Read more…

Terminator Salvation – Review

Review by 043

When Epic’s Gears of War was released in 2006, it made a splash on the console shooter scene by bringing the controllability of a first person shooter to the third-person perspective, while retaining a certain cinematic flair. Of course, its over-the-shoulder view was used in Resident Evil 4 a year earlier, and even cited as an influence on the game; but it brought more clones to the market than RE4 ever did. GRIN’s Terminator Salvation can be considered one of those clones, taking Gears’ perspective, cover system and even gameplay segues straight from its Great Uncle Marcus. Only this time, there’s a film license, and as such, a lack of creativity behind its production. Read more…

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena – Review

Review by Justin Thurman

In order to make some sense of this review, I would like to summarize my feelings on Assault on Dark Athena first and qualify them afterwards: I would very much like to recommend Assault on Dark Athena to you but I find that I am largely unable to do so. I wanted to like it myself. Having loved Pitch Black, been annoyed with but understanding of Chronicles of Riddick, and having not played Escape from Butcher Bay, I came to Assault on Dark Athena expecting (or at least hoping) to find a game wherein I play as the morally ambiguous, very unsettling, sneaky, stabby badass Richard B. Riddick – and at certain points throughout the game, this is exactly what I got. But those points are far too infrequent for me to have felt satisfied by the overall experience or to have felt that Assault properly seizes what makes Riddick such an appealing character. Read more…

Street Fighter IV – Review

Review by Fig-D

Figuring out whether or not you’ll enjoy Street Fighter IV is a fairly simple process:

Did you play Street Fighter II?
Did you like it?

Now, just about every game enthusiast born before 1990 will answer “yes” to the first question, but the real question is whether or not you enjoyed it. Did you throw a large portion of your pocket money into a dingy machine peppered with chewed gum and cigarette burns? Did you rent the game for your SNES or Mega Drive and lose an entire weekend beating up your childhood friends? If “yes” then you’ll probably get a kick out of Street Fighter IV. Read more…

Peggle DS – Review

Review by Lewie Procter

Peggle, in all it’s guises, is a bit of an oddball. Dual Shot in particular. Read more…

Space Giraffe – Review

Review by Lewie Procter

The closest I can come to flat out recommending Space Giraffe is saying “I would feel like an idiot if I didn’t flat out recommend Space Giraffe”. Read more…

Peggle, XBLA – Review

Review by Will Templeton

Peggle on PC, for the uninitiated, is the poster child for the casual game that can break through to the hardcore (or vice versa). It’s Positive Reinforcement: The Game, essentially a mash-up of Breakout and Pachinko wrapped up in pretty colours, classical music and characters based entirely on puns. Read more…

MadWord, Wii – Review

Review by Lewie Procter

Very cool.

Very very cool.

Fuck Mediawatch-UK, Fuck Anne Diamond, and fuck the Daily Mail. MadWorld is fun fun fun fun fun. Read more…

WWE: Legends of WrestleMania – Review

Review by myp

So, wrestling eh? You either love it or you hate it. Me, I think it’s ok, as long as you accept the fact that it’s just a soap opera for boys. The acting is terrible and the plots are weak, but for some inexplicable reason it still manages to draw me in with its implausible story lines and over-the-top circus theatre. This game takes us to the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of the World Wrestling Federation Entertainment of the 1980s and 90s, back when the fights were real and the best man really did win (sub please check). Read more…