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Reviews
Peggle iPhone Micro-Review: Touching Balls Never Felt So Good
Peggle is conquering gaming one platform at a time. First it was PC, next Nintendo DS, then Xbox Live Arcade before doubling back to PC via World of Warcraft. Now it’s on the iPhone, and there’s goes all your free time. There’s something powerfully addicting about the part-pachinko, part-puzzle, part-crack downloadable game. Mercifully the short…
By AJ Glasser Published May 18, 2009 -
Reviews
Plants vs Zombies Micro-Review: The Seeds Of Success
While tower defence games have seemingly been done to death, there’s still room for innovation in the genre. Like the kind that PopCap Games’ Plants vs Zombies provides. Plants vs Zombies is to tower defence what Nintendo’s Advance Wars is to turn-based strategy: a game stripped of everything but the raw tactical essentials, then pumped…
By Luke Plunkett Published May 15, 2009 -
Reviews
Top Gun Micro-Review: Affirmative, Ghost Rider
Last year, Days of Thunder quickly asserted itself as a serious arcade racer on the iPhone. Paramount’s back with Top Gun, looking to do the same for combat flyers. Top Gun puts iPhone and iPod Touch owners in the flight suit of a new recruit under the guidance of Maverick and Ice Man—you choose your…
By Owen Good Published May 14, 2009 -
Reviews
Burnout Paradise Cops And Robbers Micro-Review
Criterion Games continues to change the face of Burnout Paradise with the release of the Cops and Robbers downloadable content add-on for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Hearkening back to Burnout titles of old, the Cops and Robbers add-on pits two teams of players against each other, both vying for control of a load…
By Mike Fahey Published May 13, 2009 -
Reviews
Velvet Assassin Review: Lie Back And Think Of England
Velvet Assassin is a stealth action game that’s loosely based on the real-life World War II Allied secret agent, Violette Szabo, who was captured and later executed by the Nazis. That’s not a spoiler, though, because the game has only two things in common with Szabo’s life: the setting and the first name of the…
By AJ Glasser Published May 12, 2009 -
Reviews
Fable II See The Future Review: Wear Shades
Slapped with the moniker “See the Future”, the latest Fable II downloadable content takes players back to Albion and lets them do just that: See the future. “See The Future” adds four new quests, 13 new Achievements, new character duds and new hides for your mutt. Fable II‘s hero is given cursed items by Huxter…
By Brian Ashcraft Published May 11, 2009 -
Reviews
Fallout 3 Broken Steel Review: An Epic Postscript
Broken Steel is the last of three announced Xbox 360 and PC-exclusive expansions to Fallout 3, and the one that was most clearly built to be a crowd-pleaser. Broken Steel adds about five hours of new quests to what used to be the end of Fallout 3. It raises Fallout 3’s level cap from 20…
By Stephen Totilo Published May 8, 2009 -
Reviews
Klonoa Review: Do Hew Wahoo?
Namco Bandai‘s Klonoa, the Wii remake of the 1997 PlayStation game Klonoa: Door to Phantomile, is a game from a simpler time, when “platformers” involved actual side-scrolling platform-to-platform jumping as their core mechanic. Such is the case with the 2009 version of Klonoa, which is amazingly simple in its concept, with regular play requiring only…
By Michael McWhertor Published May 7, 2009 -
Reviews
Equilibrio Micro-Review: Tilt and Break
Based on shareware title Fragile Ball, DK Games’ Equilibrio for WiiWare brings maze maneuvering to the Wii with a motion control twist. Using the Wii Remote or the Wii Balance Board, players must tilt and twist the game world to guide a ball to each level’s exit. Like a two-dimensional version of Sega’s Super Monkey…
By Brian Crecente Published May 5, 2009 -
Reviews
X-Men Origins: Wolverine Review: A Pretty Good Start
There’s a new Wolverine movie in theaters, which means it’s time for another developer to take a stab at Marvel’s stabbiest super-hero with X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Developer Raven Software isn’t altogether unfamiliar with Wolverine, having played about with him in both the X-Men Legends series and Marvel Ultimate Alliance; but this is the first time…
By Mike Fahey Published May 4, 2009 -
Reviews
Zeno Clash Review: Not One For Your Father (Or Mother)
Indie platformers, we’ve seen. Indie adventure games too. But indie first-person shooters that moonlight as first-person brawlers? That’s fresh. That’s Zeno Clash. You couldn’t login to Steam or go near a PC forum over the past month or so without running into talk about Zeno Clash, a game from tiny Chilean studio ACE Team that’s…
By Luke Plunkett Published April 29, 2009 -
Reviews
Excitebots: Trick Racing Review: ***********
Excitebots: Trick Racing, Nintendo’s sequel to Wii launch racer Excite Truck, makes the tenuous connection to the original Excitebike feel increasingly strained. How we arrived at transforming car-beasts doing mid-air stunts may be beyond explanation. But here we are, racing robotic cars shaped like mice, praying mantises and vampire bats against each other in locations…
By Michael McWhertor Published April 27, 2009 -
Reviews
Demigod Review: Aspiring To Godhood
Supreme Commander developer Gas Powered Games seeks to take online PC strategy games to a higher plane with the release of Demigod. Demigod is an action real-time strategy game with role-playing game elements that obviously takes a great deal of inspiration from the popular Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients. Instead of commanding armies…
By Mike Fahey Published April 22, 2009 -
Reviews
The Godfather II Review: The Don Does No Favors
The open-world crime genre, like real-world crime, is wantonly violent, seductive with promises of easy riches. EA returns to the scene with a sequel that must live up to its predecessor—plus two landmark films. In the video game version of The Godfather II, players once again work their way up the ranks of the Corleone…
By Owen Good Published April 20, 2009 -
Reviews
Company Of Heroes: Tales Of Valor Micro-Review: Unconditional Surrender
Relic are on a mission. A mission to shake up real-time strategy gaming by injecting a little character, a little intimacy to proceedings. So it was with Dawn of War II, and so it is here. But while Dawn of War II’s changes – namely dropping army sizes and increasing RPG elements – worked wonders…
By Luke Plunkett Published April 15, 2009 -
Reviews
Ninja Blade Review: Ninja Tragic
From Software’s Ninja Blade gives Xbox 360 owning wannabe ninjas the opportunity to live vicariously—and cinematically—through protagonist Ken Ogawa, a super ninja tasked with saving futuristic Tokyo from parasite-infected Japanese schoolgirls, yakuza and salarymen. If Ninja Blade looks familiar, that’s because it is so unapologetically derivative, borrowing game design elements wholesale from Japanese action-adventure titles…
By Michael McWhertor Published April 14, 2009 -
Reviews
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault On Dark Athena Review: Fumbling In The Dark
Darkness falls on Richard B. Riddick once again in The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Originally planned as a simple current-generation remake of 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, developer Starbreeze changed course during development, creating a whole new chapter in the story of Vin Diesel’s Riddick character. Upon escaping…
By Mike Fahey Published April 10, 2009 -
Reviews
Metal Gear Solid Touch Micro-Review
Kojima Productions brings the epic story of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots to Apple’s iPhone platform with the Metal Gear Solid Touch, a touchscreen controlled shoot ’em up. In Metal Gear Solid Touch, Old Snake’s goal is the same as it was in the PlayStation 3 version: assassinate Liquid Ocelot, taking out…
By Michael McWhertor Published April 9, 2009 -
Reviews
Rhythm Heaven Review: Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven is the beat-matching Nintendo DS sequel to a Game Boy Advance title that never made it out of Japan—but did somehow manage to get an arcade port. The collection of more than 50 music mini-games is surprisingly deep for a title that relies on two touchscreen mechanics: tapping and flicking. (Okay, there…
By Michael McWhertor Published April 3, 2009 -
Reviews
BattleForge Review: Collectible Card-Time Strategy
What happens when you mix together real-time strategy gameplay with collectible card game sensibilities? BattleForge happens. Developed by EA’s Phenomic, BattleForge is an intriguing mix of real-time strategy and collectible card game on a massively multiplayer online level. Where a standard real-time strategy game has units with various powers and abilities, BattleForge has a set…
By Mike Fahey Published April 2, 2009