Latest Reviews
Review Schrödinger’s Cat and the Raiders of the Lost Quark
Dead and Alive
Even for the most open-minded gamers, it is easy to roll your eyes at the thought of playing through yet another puzzle-platform game. It seems like a new one releases every week that promises a unique hook that will turn the genre on its head. This is rarely the case though, as not every game can be as brilliant as Braid or Fez. The...
The amber waves of groan
It almost goes without saying that Farming Simulator 15 will be a divisive game. On a platform filled to the brim with shooters, racers and sports simulations, the simple fact is that a very large portion of the market will just simply not understand the attraction of planting crops and harvesting them for money. On the...
Money.
Couch-based multiplayer has been falling away in recent years but, with the rise of indie developers who are keen to see it make a comeback, more and more titles seem to be remembering that pretty much every console ever made supports more than one controller being in use at a time. This resurgence is most definitely occurring on the Xbox One...
All in the family
Procedural generation is a term that is being thrown around quite often lately, and it's one that has a decent amount of stigma going against it. When environmental characteristics and enemy arrangements are decided by an algorithm or line of code, changing the surroundings with every replay, it can make a game feel cheap, and the...
Review Slice Zombies for Kinect
Quick chop
From Slice Zombies for Kinect's very title, you can pretty much predict what it's going to consist of. If you guessed "Fruit Ninja Kinect with zombies instead of fruit" then you're pretty much on the money. That isn't to belittle developer MADE's work though, rather it's the easiest way to inform readers of what the game is all about...
So NERO, so far(o)
When NERO first made its appearance back at E3 2014, pretty much everybody with eyes on the screen was intrigued. Beautiful settings, a fantastic soundtrack, and stacks of luminescence were the order of the day. That first trailer didn't particularly shed any light on the gameplay though. As it turns out, Storm in a Teacup's...
Review Lifeless Planet: Premier Edition
What is life?
As gaming continues to evolve, more and more games are becoming a melting pot of genres. In fact, it is rare to see a game that strictly falls into a single genre anymore. When pulled off correctly, this makes for a great game that is unique and manages to find the strengths of several genres and forego their inherent weaknesses. When...
And not a light cycle in sight...
When it comes to twin-stick shooters, the Xbox One now has a fair few titles from which to choose. The excellent Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions is at the top of the pile, whilst less high-profile releases such as We Are Doomed and Sixty Second Shooter Prime bring up the rear. Puppy Games' Ultratron – the follow up...
Spin Spin Sugar
It's 8am on a drizzly Spanish morning. Despite the light smattering of rain, the early morning sunlight floods through the trees dotted around the Catalunya circuit, reflecting in the standing water on the wet tarmac and bringing the whole track to life. The sand to the edges of the raceway looks as bright and soft as the most...
Review Pinball FX2 - Star Wars Rebels
Strong with this one, the Force is
Earlier this week we reviewed Avengers: Age of Ultron for Pinball FX2, and we regret to say that we were disappointed with it. Because it felt familiar and uninspired, we were a little bit worried that the developer, Zen Studios, might be losing some of that magic it's been injecting into its pinball tables for the...
Rooted to the flaw
Triangle's Shooting Love 200X managed to find a Western release on Xbox 360 recently and that would suggest that while the numbers have certainly dwindled, there are still enough fans of old-school top-down shooters to be found out there. Many developers have tried – with varying levels of success – to breathe life into a...
Review Pinball FX2 - Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron
Sequelitis
By now we should all be aware that the people at Zen Studios typically do stellar licensed work. Even when they don't entirely get it right – e.g. the chaos found in South Park Pinball – the fundamentals of pinball are handled well enough to offset the missteps, and it's hard to criticize them on that level. But recently a very steady...
Dig your way to retro heaven
Shovel Knight is one of the finest video game success stories of modern times. When a few employees left WayForward to start their very own indie studio, they took to Kickstarter to pitch their first project to the masses and round up the proper funding. That project, of course, was Shovel Knight. The campaign was a...
Review State of Decay: Year One Survival Edition
New and unimproved
When it comes to writing a review, sometimes the words are easy to put together, while the score causes problems and doubt. Sometimes, the opposite occurs and while you've got the score locked in your head, the words just don't flow. With Undead Labs' remaster of the cult Xbox 360 hit State of Decay, we seem to have run into...
How do I jump?
For the uninitiated; Neverwinter is a free to play, massively multiplayer online roleplaying game based on the Dungeons and Dragons universe which truly tests the limits of how high an in-game item can be priced while still qualifying as a micro transaction. We explored Neverwinter's world for a few weeks using the two character slots...
Taking it to the X level
Back in 2011, Mortal Kombat was reinvented for home consoles with its ninth entry, which amounted to what many consider to be the definitive game in the series. Introducing a story mode unlike anything ever included in a fighting game before it, as well as remixing characters, locations, and plot events from its...
Travelling without moving
One type of game that until now has yet to make the jump to Xbox One – some would say thankfully – is the endless runner. Made popular by the likes of Temple Run and a billion other pretenders on mobile devices, the genre has yet to really get a foothold on any home console platform. This is more than likely due to the...
Review Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China
Changing perspectives
The concept of taking the Assassin's Creed franchise into a 2.5D game world is certainly an interesting proposition. Many were wondering how Ubisoft and Climax Studios would go about getting the free-running elements of the main franchise into a side-scroller whilst keeping an element of freedom about the proceedings. The good...
Review The Evil Within: The Assignment
Extra marks for excellence
If you're expecting The Evil Within's first story-based DLC, The Assignment, to play anything like the main game, you may want to sit down and read this first. While the original gave players a chance to fight back the horrors with plenty of weapons and gadgets, The Assignment throws all of that away for a more methodical,...
Bleat It
If you have logged into Steam recently, you have undoubtedly noticed that there are simulators for just about every single type of activity. Farming? Check. Warehouse and Logistics? Of course! This trend is obviously ripe for parody, so it made sense that the April 1st release of Goat Simulator on Steam last year became a hit. Now over a...
Gone too soon
When it comes to twin-stick shooters, Geometry Wars changed the game when it reared its head back in 2003. Plenty of pretenders to the throne have come and gone and the release of Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions (and the subsequent free content-doubling DLC pack) has raised the bar once again. Out twin-sticking the wireframe champion is...
Review Borderlands: The Handsome Collection
It's what's on the inside that counts
When Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel released back in October for last-generation consoles only, pretty much anyone and everyone with any understanding of this industry suspected it wouldn't be long before it found its way onto Xbox One. Sure enough, about 5 months later, it's shown up where we expected it to and...
Burnt out
When it comes to simulations of motorcycle racing, there's really only one name left in the business. When you buy a game based on MotoGP, Motocross, Superbikes, or anything else that runs on two wheels and has an engine, Italian developer Milestone is likely who will be behind it. With so many titles under their belt, we were expecting...
Bulletproof...We Wish It Was
Tower of Guns is a very simple game at its core. You play the protagonist, running through room after room of the eponymous tower, shooting anything mechanical that tries to do you harm. Once you've cleared a room, you shoot the door and move into another one to do the same, then repeat until you meet a boss character...
Review Stealth Inc 2: A Game of Clones
Sneaky Fun
It is quite fitting that Stealth Inc 2: A Game of Clones, a 2D stealth action game developed by Curve Digital, crept up on us. With the previous title being generally enjoyable, this was a game that was anticipated, but no more than your standard sequel. With this one though, you'll decide to play "an hour" before bed, and find that five...
Review Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty!
It's an odd, odd world.
Gamers may claim to be sick of remakes, but they keep selling. These remakes serve the purpose of updating past titles and allowing new people to experience them for the first time. The latest remake to hit Xbox One is Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty!, a remake of 1997's Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee. Has time passed Oddworld by or is it...
Rack and ruined
Back in 2012, a game by the name of Pool Nation launched on Xbox 360. Pretty much overlooked by everyone other than hardcore fans of cue and ball action, it was a surprisingly good take on the sport, featuring a ludicrously addictive Endurance mode, great visuals, and smooth gameplay. Fast forward to 2015, and Pool Nation FX has...
Orange you glad we didn't say banana?
There weren't a great many solid titles released for Microsoft's first foray into motion-controlled console gaming, but few could argue that Fruit Ninja Kinect was anything less than a cracking game. Easy to get into, fun to play, and devilishly addictive, the game was ported from mobile platforms with aplomb by...
Police Brutality
Los Angeles is an odd location for a cop game. While the Los Angeles Police Department is one of the more famous precincts in America, it's famous for the wrong reasons. The LAPD is famous due to racism, unneeded brutality, and for being the catalyst for the 1992 LA riots. So unless you're trying to make some sort of larger point,...
Gettin' tough?
Like the Call of Duty franchise, Battlefield has been doing the same thing for a few years now, and some could argue that the result is becoming a bit stale. While Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare aimed to shake things up with futuristic weaponry and gadgets to spice up both the single-player and the competitive space, it still largely...
