Put your hand up if you like mindless action games that involve killing hundreds of people. Right, every one who raised their hand can keep on reading, the rest of you bugger off and go read the latest Farmville news.
For a relatively new series – this is the second game – Kane & Lynch has a bit of a reputation. A rather controversial reputation. The key characters (namely Kane and Lynch) are probably two of the nastiest characters in the realm of video gaming, the first game was a basic run and gun with some variety such as doing over banks, but at it’s heart, a basic third-person action shooter that didn’t care if innocent people got in the way.
Kane & Lynch 2 (K&L2) takes the basic premise of it’s predecessor and narrows the focus down considerably. It’s now basically a run and gun cover shooter with not a heck of a lot in the way of variety when it comes to game play – though there are a couple of nice missions that manage to mix things up a bit. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to Monday Night Combat, the blood sport de jure of a corporate run future where clones battle against robots and clones alike. Once again the future looks pretty bleak if we are bringing back the coliseum but I guess a few thousand years doesn’t really remove the blood lust and self destructive appetite of the human race. This time the battlefield is a class based third person shooter with a healthy dose of tower defense thrown in for good measure.
The first time you fire up the game you get a crash course in playing as ‘The Assault’. The controls are all pretty standard for a run and gun shooter so if you played a shooter before you should pick it up nice and easy. Well it would be easy except for all the skills, development, and class interaction that take place.
It breaks down easy to start with, each of the six classes (Assault, Gunner, Tank, Sniper, Support and Ninja) has four ’stats’ each, killing things get you money which lets you upgrade the stats. There is a grey class stat which is the general aptitude of your clone the other three: blue, yellow and red are skills that can be used with a cool down. Each Classes skill helps define their role and include things such as flight, cloaking sprinting and dashing through to hacking turrets and air strikes. Read the rest of this entry »
I have to be honest and say that I’m not a huge fan of American Football. It just seems so full of fluff that only gets in the way of a good game. This seems to have been mirrored in my past experience with Madden games, where I’ve given up in frustration of the sheer complexity of the game, when all I want to do is to be able to grab the ball and either run with it or throw it.
But Madden NFL 11 is supposed to be different. This time the guys at EA decided to make a game that was accessible to the casual gamer, whilst not alienating their hard core fans. They’ve done this with a feature called GameFlow that when used, cuts down the complex options and focuses on the actual game, leaving you in control of the man on the field, and not forcing you to spend most of your time wading through a play book that has hundreds of options. When used, GameFlow can turn an hour long slog into a thirty minute, fast paced game. Read the rest of this entry »
Pure Football is an interesting addition to the world of sports themed video games, though I’m not sure who it’s being aimed at. When I think of football games, only two really come to mind, FIFA and PES. Both of these long established games do things basically the same.
UBISOFT however have decided to approach the game of football from a slightly different angle. Quite literally. The default view is from behind the player, not the side on view of the pitch that most of us are used to. This of course might be the better way to play, but fortunately for me, you can change it to the more traditional view as there was a lot more to contend with then just a different view point.
The weird thing with Pure Football is that I was under the impression – I’m sure I’d read somewhere – that this was going to be a serious football game. Rather it’s a more arcady approach, similar to FIFA Street than any traditional football game. Read the rest of this entry »
I grew up playing strategy games on PC.
Blizzard titles were my bread and butter, so it didn’t take much to convince me to break my long PC drought (other than a bit of Civilization IV here and there) to pick up Starcraft 2, Blizzard’s 11 years in the making sequel to a game which was acclaimed as the best strategy game ever.
Well, after working my way through the campaign of Starcraft 2, not to mention about 35 multiplayer games, to say that I have mixed feelings is an understatement.
First of all, let me say that this is a fantastically crafted game. The production values are sky-high, the gameplay is fine-tuned and the cut-scenes are gorgeous. Read the rest of this entry »
Most people will sum up Demon’s Souls in two words; one of those words will definitely be “hard”. The other will be a mixture of colourful adjectives that are mostly unsuitable for publication. For my colourful adjective I chose “Too”. As a casual gamer with restrictions placed on my free time by work, family and other hobbies Demon’s Souls is simply too hard. I do not want to spend 4 hours replaying the same level over and over again. Some people will consider that a great challenge and revel in the sense of accomplishment when they finally clear the level but getting to the end of my 2 precious hours of gaming time and having made no progress at all is not fun.
So the game is hard, but is it good? Well actually, yes it is. Very good. Read the rest of this entry »
The Hydro Thunder series has a fine pedigree, starting with a Midway coin-op arcade game released way back in 1999. Hydro Thunder: Hurricane for XBox Live Arcade is the latest member of the family and like the rest is an arcade racer involving driving high speed powerboats through a variety of fantastic race courses. What distinguishes Hydro Thunder: Hurricane from other arcade racers is that the racing happens on water. This adds a dynamic aspect to each race and most of the courses have events, creatures or machines that will add large waves for you to race over.
You start with a single ‘Novice’ level boat and course and have to complete a series of races against 15 CPU opponents or lone challenges to unlock more boats and content by earning credits. Placing 1st, 2nd or 3rd in the race or posting a low enough time in a challenge gives you varying amounts of credit depending on the skill level. There’s 8 distinct courses to race on with three skill levels: Novice, Pro and Expert. The courses are all in fantastic settings like the interior of a hydroelectric dam, a monster filled island, sewers pipes under Paris, or an alien infested secret lab. The courses are a mix of single lap and multiple lap events and each one is scattered with ‘boost’ power ups which fill your boat’s boost meter for extra speed. Snagging boost is vital for winning races in record times, but you can also boost jump, allowing you to get into secret areas and shortcuts in each course. Read the rest of this entry »
Limbo is a quirky little 2d puzzler just released on XBox Live. It’s the first title from PlayDead, an Independent Danish studio. It’s been in development for several years and it shows: Limbo is a polished piece of art work and is frankly a beautiful looking game. Playing the game is like watching a disturbing black and white animated movie from the 30’s. The title, menu screen and even the closing credits echo this and there’s also a subtle flicker effect that makes the whole game look like it’s being projected from some old cine camera onto your screen.
The darkness of the game design matches its content too. The back story is you’re a little boy out to rescue your sister, but you’re given no hint of this in game. Your character simply wakes up and you start playing. You seem to be trapped in some terrifying dream-scape filled with lethal puzzles, and while you start alone you’ll soon meet some less than friendly denizens of Limbo. This is certainly not a kid’s game as the first creature you meet will terrorize most children, and probably a few squeemish adults too, and it’s pretty much downhill from there. Failure to solve a puzzle often results in a gruesome death by dismemberment, and without giving too much away I think I can safely say Limbo is the only game I’ve played on the XBox that involves solving a puzzle by using the drowned corpses of other little kids… Read the rest of this entry »
The Lego franchise has already had a number of outings in the console gaming arena, Star Wars, Batman and Indiana Jones have all had the Lego treatment, some more than once. And yet here we see another addition to the tried and tested formula, but will the magic still be there, or is it one game too many in a series that essentially produces the same game, only with different characters and environments, over and over again? Read the rest of this entry »
When Crackdown 2 arrived on my desk, I decided I would take it home and have a play around with it for about n hour or so. I didn’t want a late night as I’ve been burning the midnight oil a little too much recently. So after the training level and a couple of early missions, I decided to explore a bit and see how many of those magic orbs I could collect. At some stage the game prompted me to look at my stats to see where my mission objectives were, so I did. But rather than looking at my mission objectives – which I already knew, but was choosing to ignore – I looked at some of the other stats, and something struck me as weird. When I looked at ‘time spent in Pacific City’ it stated that I had been running around the fictional, cell shaded location for close to four hours. Odd I thought that it didn’t use real time like most games. Why on earth would it use an excellerated time keeping…. hold on…. wait, it’s almost 1am already? Damn.
So yeah, if nothing else, Crackdown 2 is the same level of addictive fun as the original Crackdown.
But unlike most other sequels, Crackdown 2 doesn’t seem to subscribe to the bigger is better mantra. Infact there seems to be a huge amount of sameness to the game. Same location, same graphics, same gameplay. Read the rest of this entry »
There is something about me..