Category: Reviews
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Lost Dimension Review
The recently announced Black Rose Valkyrie has the premise of members of your own group betraying you. This is an interesting concept, so it might be interesting to check one of the first Japanese titles to brings this idea to a video game. As a member of a special elite group of ESPers, you must…
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Frogatto Review
Continuing the retro-style gaming trend found in Mega Man 10 and Super Quickhook, Frogatto brings us back to a simpler time in videogame history, a time of gorgeously detailed 2D sprites, a time of running, jumping and joyful enemy slurping. And although it looks like a 16-bit platformer, Frogatto has plenty of conveniences to appease…
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Viva Piñata Review
Everyone who plays it says they love Viva Piñata – and if you own a 360, odds are pretty reasonable that it’s a game in your collection. For those of us who have been out of the loop however, we could only turn green with envy as we watched Viva Piñata pronounced as one of…
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Children of Carnia Review
South Korean developer Com2us has made a name for itself with charming, addictive, pick-up-and-play titles such as Homerun Battle 3D and Slice It. Likewise, its old school JRPGs Chronicles of Inotia and its sequel Intoia: A Wanderer of Luone have garnered countless fans. The most recent entry in the series, Inotia 3: Children of Carnia,…
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Battlefield 3 Review
The challenge of a first-person shooter is the same title from title. Put your crosshairs over the enemy soldiers and pull the trigger. The speed at which you can accomplish this task represents your aptitude in this particular branch of game. It’s odd that this simple and repetitive action could make up the foundation of…
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Tom Clancy’s EndWar Review
We’ve all seen plentiful variations of Tom Clancy’s military franchise in the gaming world, and to Ubisoft’s credit, they are still trying new things. EndWar is an attempt to incorporate all the realistic political drama of a Clancy novel in an action-packed real time strategy game. Truth be told, EndWar is more action than strategy,…
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Hitman Go Review
In a way, all stealth-based games are made up of puzzles. The levels in series like Metal Gear Solid, Hitman, and Tenchu usually give you an area to infiltrate, with well-placed guards who act in a predictable manner, whom you have to sneak past (or kill) without alerting anyone. The makers of Hitman Go have…
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Gears of War Review
The original Xbox 360 version of Gears of War was something of a turning point for Microsoft’s latest console. Well, perhaps turning point is the wrong phrase to use, but it was certainly one of the first games around that truly felt ‘next gen’- at least to me. I was impressed not only by the…
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Ridge Racer Unbounded Review
In recent years, the Ridge Racer series has persisted by being the only racing game for launching consoles. Once upon a time this was a valuable franchise that people paid attention to, but it has since become difficult to take new entries seriously. The last five years of Ridge Racer just haven’t been very impressive.…
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Helsing’s Fire Review
Dracula has had many enemies over the years, mostly inanimate objects such as garlic and wooden stakes. However, only one human foe has really left an impression on the über-vampire: Dr. Abraham Van Helsing. In this game you fight your way through Dracula’s realm, taking out his minions and underbosses along the way with the…
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The Sims 3 Review
Will Wright’s game of life came out a few months after the world appeared to be going into meltdown with rumours of the millennium bug destroying every computer ever built. Thankfully, our desktops all survived and thus countless hours of real lives were poured into this virtual world of limitless opportunity. Nine years later, the…
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Canabalt Review
We demand more depth all the time from our games. We expect alternate endings, skill trees, side quests, and endless hours of gameplay. For once, though, we appreciated a game that takes the opposite approach: creating an extremely compact, thoroughly memorable minute or so of intensity. According to the developer, Canabalt was developed in the…
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Motorstorm 2: Pacific Rift Review
When Motorstorm first debuted along with the PS3 here in NZ, many people didn’t quite know how to react. The console was new, we were blinded by Sony’s bright lights and flashy marketing jargon and Motorstorm looked fantastic. However, the difficulty level and tough-to-master controls made the game inaccessible to many. Meanwhile real fans put…
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Abyss Attack Review
Games that never end have mostly become a mobile trend, largely due to the success of titles like Temple Run. Sega later refined the formula with its Zaxxon revamp, but Abyss Attack takes the retro shooter genre in a fully endless direction. The result is surprisingly strong. An undersea vertical scrolling shooter, Abyss Attack is…
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Pixel Defenders Puzzle Review
What is it about combat that makes plain old Match-3 games into something extraordinary? In the same way that turn-based combat made Bejeweled’s familiar formula far more addictive in Puzzle Quest 2, the Triple Town style of strategically matching objects gets a much-needed boost in Pixel Defenders Puzzle. This puzzle game adds more than just…
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Payday: The Heist Review
My crew and I have entered the bank and scoped the place out. Two of them find the bank manager, who has the keycard that we need; while I wait in queue at the tellers, and another teammate is upstairs with a view of the whole room. Once the time is right, we put on…
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ChuChu Rocket Review
ChuChu Rocket is a smart puzzle game that originally came out for the Sega Dreamcast back in 1999. It tells the tale of mousy ChuChus trying to avoid being devoured by cat-like KapuKapus. To escape this gory fate, the ChuChus do what any rodents in their right mind would do: Board rockets and launch into…
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The Witcher Review
Bioware’s 2002 classic Neverwinter Nights practically reinvented the Role Playing genre on PC, adding in copious amounts of nifty new stuff (not least of which was the killer Dungeon Master mode, allowing your pen & paper role playing group to transfer their gaming experience to the computer, complete with a real Dungeon Master pulling the…
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The Sims Medieval: Pirates and Nobles Review
Oh yeah, those lovable eyeliner-wearing, grog-swilling, parrot-accessorising scoundrels have come to Sims Land, in this new expansion – er, adventure pack – for The Sims Medieval. Remember The Sims Medieval? It was the breakaway title from EA that took out most of the spontaneous sandbox play from The Sims 3, but then added quests, and put a crown…
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Final Fantasy Dimensions Review
That Final Fantasy Dimensions exists at all is something of a miracle. That we have a somewhat original (it is based on a game that came out for other mobile devices last year), ‘old-school’ Final Fantasy game coming out in this day and age is a pretty special thing. And the fact that it’s a…