Category: Reviews

The Nazis have been a popular enemy in video games. Easy to vilify with no need for character development, they’ve blown apart many times over. Wolfenstein 3-D has a lot of history, as recently discussed in an article looking back at first-person shooters. It was a visceral video game that saw you battling Nazi forces…

What a difference five years makes. Back in ‘07 I was pondering the fate of a favourite genre; now I can’t believe how decisively Adventure Gaming has come back onto the scene. From Dreamfall to Phoenix Wright, and more recently Heavy Rain and Gemini Rue, gamers are gobbling up titles that focus on story and…

Another day, another adventure game. The renaissance of the point & click is in full effect and, I couldn’t be happier. Today’s title, developed by XII Games, can be downloaded for just a few bucks; to find out if you, too, should jump in, read on… Resonance is set in a plausible, high-tech near-future, in…

What do you get when you take the tried-and-true formula for and flip it on its head? The answer is (apparently) Anomaly: Warzone Earth, an indie title from 11 Bit Studios, where the player controls invading forces battling through tons of defensive guns. First, let’s elaborate on this “Tower Defence in reverse” concept. You control…

Built with the same engine as 2008’s Spore, Darkspore is an action role playing game (RPG) in the same vein as Diablo and its ilk. There are a few things that set it apart: Darkspore has a sci-fi setting instead of fantasy, and also has the player using multiple heroes instead of just one, which…

I played The Sims when it first game out on the computer, simply because of my utter and blind devotion to Maxis. Thinking everything that they touched turned to gold, I snatched it up quickly. Yeah, it was okay, but not the gold that I expected. I’m still utterly devoted to Maxis though, and wasn’t…

Buried beneath the numerous layers of desperation and decay, Metro: Last Light is a story about hope. Two long, dreary decades have passed since Moscow was destroyed beneath a volley of nuclear missiles. In that moment, for all anyone in the Metro knows, most of humanity was annihilated along with it. Twenty years later, as…

It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. By that account, Binary Domain is a doting love-letter to a number of film and videogame influences. Make no mistake, you’ve seen this sort of game before. It’s a squad-based shooter, its environments dotted with places to take cover. We have a science fiction setting…

It just wouldn’t be The Sims without yet more ways for you to make a fool of yourself in public. Fortunately the latest expansion pack for The Sims 3, called Late Night, brings skinny dipping, table dancing, bad cover bands, puking in public, and yes, vampires, to the mix. Late Night is absolutely crammed with…

Although its title places it almost 60 years in the future, Anno 2070 is very much a game for our present historical moment. It takes place in a world ravaged by climate change. Rising sea levels have altogether drowned many low-lying countries, completely changing the face of global politics. The central conflict is between the…

It’s always hard constructing a detective story. They are hard enough to write – let alone to play. There’s just something about cramming that much intrigue and mystery into one discreet package that most authors, creators, and game designers find a little challenging. Not that they haven’t given it a go of course. Detective noir…

CrimeCraft is a gritty multiplayer shooter from Vogster Entertainment, although they like to call it a “Persistent World Next-gen Shooter” (PWNS, get it?). Essentially it’s an MMO shooter with some decent role-playing elements included. When it was first released back in 2009 it didn’t receive the best reception from critics, but developed a pretty large…

The Tony Hawk series has been slowly declining for a while now. It’s not that the games are of poor quality, but there’s a big problem with games delivering an experience significantly less revolutionary than they are advertised to be. For example, Underground promised free-roaming environments and cars to explore them in. The environments were…

What do you do when your world’s been destroyed? That’s the question immediately thrown into the protagonist’s (known only as The Kid) face in Bastion. A minimalist presentation masks fairly heavy themes that would be trite in any other game, but Bastion isn’t just any game: Bastion is a game that shows a clear understanding…