The current video game landscape is a very different one than its most public face.
The game is a pretty basic 2-D shooter, but with each level confined to a single room rather than sprawling through a side-scrolling level.
As the fall and winter months barrel down upon us, so does the cavalcade of retail video game releases.
Hydrophobia works hard at making water move like water—surging forward, leveling out gradually, and moving back and forth based on the velocity with which it emerged.
Though it’s little more than your standard gothic fantasy yarn, it proves engrossing enough, and is wrapped up with a cunning plot twist at the death.
Throw in annoyingly distracting voice acting and bad camerawork and you’ve got a game with a cool premise but frustrating execution.
What initially starts as a traditional RTS quickly evolves into a tactical mind game making players on both sides question various incidents on the battlefield.
Mafia II is overloaded with such chores, which put a far greater premium on commuting toward choppy pre-rendered cinematic sequences than it does on letting you wreak inventive havoc.
The Drowned City isn’t for the fair-weather player.
It remains fundamentally about proceeding straight to the next skirmish, killing every enemy in sight, and then escaping to a checkpoint so an ignorable, if attractive, cutscene can begin.
In terms of presentation, Other M stuns with its high-caliber visuals and sound design.
Where Disney Guilty Party shines is in the mystery elements—not so much the actual assembling of clues, which is fairly automatic, but the style with which the mystery is presented.
For many years, downloadable games have been viewed as nice little distractions when compared to their retail brethren.
Whether it’s a train heist or gathering resources on a transforming planet, the game’s biggest strength lies in how it plays with the traditional formula in the single-player campaign.
What surprised me during my play-through wasn’t the stellar depth of the gameplay (which I was expecting), but rather the breadth of it.
Isn’t the biggest appeal of these games singing songs you know and love?
While everyone will appreciate Atlas taking the time to add the “choose a gender” feature to this portable iteration, some shortcuts were made to make a portable version of Persona 3 possible.
The game might be good for road trips, or for younger players with uncomplicated tastes, but it will leave more discriminating gamers disenchanted.
With the exception of those missions that specifically require you to scare and not harm, there’s no reason to frighten anyone.
From that simple control scheme, the designers generate one clever puzzle after another.
One of the game’s biggest draws is its replay value. Side quests abound, and the alchemy system, which allows you to combine items to create rarer, more potent ones, will keep you busy.