Latest Articles (Page 2188)

With production values to rival most full-price platform games, The Maw is certainly an eye-catching addition to the Xbox Live Arcade line-up. It's also an entertaining one, even if the amusement is rather short-lived.

The remarkable thing about Mafia II is not that it's bad, but that it masks its awfulness so well. The game opens with striking visuals: the backdrop of Empire Bay (Mafia's stand-in for New York City) is packed with World War II-era details, and the characters are authentic-looking, with a veneer of humanity. The nicely curated oldies soundtrack promises to immerse us in the culture and spirit of the period. Mafia II has the production values that players interpret as signs of quality. What comes next is cognitive dissonance.

One of the unsung strengths of the Lego games is that their reductive approach to plotting allows them to skip or gloss over the weaker elements of their inspiration. In the case of Pirates of the Caribbean, that's several hours' worth of storytelling bloat - and at times, TT Games punctures it perfectly.

LEGO Harry Potter is enormous, which is no mean feat given that the title character is two centimetres tall. And plastic.

I always used to wish that some enterprising developer would take the openworld template of Grand Theft Auto and apply it to Batman. Not just any Batman, but specifically the wonderful 1960s TV Batman, with his outrageous rogue's gallery of villains, slapstick humour and an appropriately titled gadget for every occasion. Roaming a virtual Gotham, you'd foil plots by villains both famous and infamous by land, sea and air. Heck, you could even get Adam West and Burt Ward to reprise their roles in voiceover.

Squeezing an entire new Tomb Raider game into a downloadable nugget - admittedly, a rather chunky one, at just over 2GB - has necessarily involved some downsizing. Guardian of Light's opening cinematic is a series of stills with none of the acrobatic action-heroine antics or sharp delivery that we've come to expect from Crystal Dynamics' take on Lara Croft. Before you take your first steps into Guardian of Light's first temple, you wonder whether Tomb Raider without the pizazz can possibly be the same.

I'm both the best and the worst guy to be reviewing this. The best because last year's strategy/role-playing curio King's Bounty: The Legend was comfortably my game of the year, and one I bent the ear of anyone unlucky enough to be in the same room as me about. The worst because, well, that. I know the thing inside out. Armored Princess is a standalone expansion for it, and as such it's pretty much the same game. If I'd come to it without already knowing how good King's Bounty is, I'd have been grabbing people in the street, staring at them with wild eyes, shaking them by the shoulders and shouting, "Princess! Armored Princess! Omi god it's amazing it's a proper PC game you have to play it you have to play it whoops I just had a trouser malfunction."

I can't help wondering what the atmosphere in the IO Interactive office was like when EA announced details of Army of Two: The 40th Day. Both sequels were revealed within a few months of each other last year, and the similarities are startling.

Rico Rodriguez stands, head in the clouds, 1200 feet above sea level. The Southeast Asian island of Panau shimmers far below, a colourful patchwork quilt of diverse terrain, all couched within a Sonic-blue ocean upon whose surface ten thousand pricks of sunlight wink lazy. There's no time to fully take in this National Geographic photo spread of a vista, however. In twenty seconds a helicopter gunship will tear bullet holes through the cirrus wisp and silence - a problem when your feet are planted on two giant zeppelins' worth of compressed gas.

"Press X to jump in mass grave". I've been confronted with some bizarre button prompts in my time, but Homefront earns itself a special biscuit for this strangely calm exhortation to dive in amongst my slaughtered neighbours.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov and Ray Parker Jr. have more in common than you might think. True, one is a Nobel prize-winning Soviet physiologist and psychologist, while the other is an African-American singer-songwriter whose albums include Sex and the Single Man. One is best known for authoring Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex; the other produced Sweat (Till You Get Wet). Pavlov has never been openly accused of nicking ideas off Huey Lewis, and Ray Parker Jr. has never had a ballerina or a pudding named after him.

Shell and BP made a collective 33.7 billion dollars in profit last year, but while the oil companies are laughing right now (and raping, and pillaging, etc), the future according to Frontlines: Fuel of War is not one they will enjoy. By then, the scarcity of oil reserves will result in an East-West divide that can only be solved by hard men with big guns. Cue yet another near-future first-person shooter on the Xbox 360.

If F.E.A.R. 3 has one lesson to learn, it's that horror is at its best when we care about the people involved. This is the difference between rooting for Sarah in The Descent versus cheering for Freddy as he slaughters Midwestern teenagers before making a bad pun about it in the later Nightmare on Elm Street sequels.

Elixir seems to be edging closer to its masterpiece. The idea behind Evil Genius is simple enough - taking the reigns of a burgeoning evil empire, carving an elaborate secret island base out of the side of a mountain and populating it with all manner of minions and specialists, and then researching and carrying out various crimes around the globe, building up your notoriety rating whilst evading the attentions of the forces of justice. But while Elixir does a much better job of translating its good ideas into a good game than it did with Republic, and manages to instil the game with a consistent sense of humour, it's still guilty of undercooking a number of key elements, and the result is a game that, whilst enjoyable, once again fails to capitalise completely on its promise.

Games are full of excuses, whether they're telling you that a terrorist strike has closed off half the city you're exploring or that swimming is a bad idea when you have electricity coursing through your veins. As excuses go though, Driver: San Francisco throws up one of the more outrageous.

I'd love to be able to start this review by telling you about the time in Mission 4 I was held hostage by a talking codpiece, or the bit in Mission 7 where I fought undead tapeworms inside the gut of a flatulent troll princess. Sadly, I can't. Nothing anywhere near that anecdote-worthy happened to me. Though Disciples III is mechanically very similar to the fabulous King's Bounty, it doesn't have any of that game's wit, energy or quirkiness.

Codemasters has always brought the kitchen sink along with it for its racing endeavours. This is, after all, an outfit that in 2006's TOCA Race Driver 3 had players racing in a lawnmower one moment and an F1 car the next, all the while keeping the straightest of faces.

The original Deus Ex was a lot of things to a lot of people. In fact, that was pretty much the whole point: it was a game where you could save the world by shooting all the bad guys, but it was also a game where you could save the world by hiding in vents. The levels all had lots of different paths through them, and the gameplay systems were designed so that you could combine and experiment with them to make progress. Whether or not you played it, Deus Ex was responsible for a lot of the good things that you have spent money on in the last decade.

Beat Hazard Ultra, created by UK bedroom coder Steve Hunt, launches on PlayStation Network in October.

Ah, betrayal. With the possible exception of Brain Training (and I stress "possible"), all videogame stories are about betrayal. Darksiders' certainly is. You play as War, one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and in this alternative retelling of the Revelatory bits of the bible you find yourself called to Earth to judge the sinners before everyone's ready.

Anyone who remembers The Rocketeer has probably noticed something a bit familiar about Dark Void. I can't imagine that even the most indignant of Capcom executives would deny that the graphic novel and film's visual cues have been echoed somewhat in their "vertical cover shooter". Everything from the pack itself to the leather jacket and natty helmet has been a clear influence on the design of game's main character, and the Boy's Own Adventure ethos is firmly in place.

This is perhaps the nineteenth time I've started writing this review. If this were a montage in an old movie, this is the point we'd cut to the bin next to my desk, overflowing with crumpled balls of paper, torn in frustration from an imposing, mocking typewriter. Braid has filled my head with so many ideas, so many opinions, so many emotions that wrestling them all into a coherent critique is like trying to strangle a swan made of jelly. Every time I think I've found a mental strand that leads to the natural start of the review, it unravels. I've gone to bed thinking about Braid, and I've woken up thinking about it. From the fragments I remember, I'm pretty sure I've dreamed about it as well.

Promise is possibly the most powerful weapon in videogames. The promise and possibilities that a title like BioShock dangles tantalisingly in front of us keeps us all hanging on in there, keeps us believing, keeps us pre-ordering. Even when the shelves are awash with me-too pap, cheap knock-off licensed fodder and hyped sequels, a title like this stands out like a beacon of hope amid a sea of mediocrity. No pressure.

The shooter genre needed this. Elements of role-playing games have been creeping in all over FPS games in the past few years, but in Borderlands it's a wholesale hybridisation. Not, I should point out, in terms of choices, story and consequences - that remains with the likes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - but with loot, levels, stats, skills and fiddling about in your inventory to max out your character. Gearbox says it's created a role-playing shooter, an RPS (which sounds strangely familiar to my ears), and that means you'll be playing a shooter that feels a lot like, well, like an MMO.

Character goes a long way. Developers know this, which is why most games based on existing characters are, at best, adequate in their construction. Ghostbusters, for example. It's a rather ordinary corridor shooter, really. Dress it up in a funny script, get a beloved movie cast back together and throw in Slimer and Marshmallow Man, and suddenly you've got something that fans will embrace regardless of the pedestrian construction. The litmus test for any licensed game is to strip away all the fan service and see if we'd still be as interested.

Did you know there is an amusing Metal Gear Solid cameo in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood? It's an apt inclusion really, because while it can't quite hold a candle to the eccentricities and convolutions of Hideo Kojima's labyrinthine stealth-action saga, Assassin's Creed is certainly getting there.

"Nothing is true," said Al Mualim. "Everything is permitted." The point of Assassin's Creed - apart from establishing a hugely successful new IP for Ubisoft - was to avoid taking the old man's words literally, and to begin with you may wish you'd done the same with the pre-release hype for the sequel.

Boy does Amnesia nail running away. It nails running away like Mirror's Edge nailed running away, which is a bit of a damning indictment of the latter game, since it was about a sexy free-runner leaping and rolling through the rooftops of a futuristic cityscape, while Amnesia is about a mentally unstable man fumbling doors open and squatting in cupboards. Then again, Mirror's Edge also gave you the option of fighting instead of running. Amnesia doesn't, which is one of the bigger reasons why it's the scariest game I've played in years.

The legendary agent whose presence looms over Alpha Protocol's Michael Thornton isn't Bauer, Bourne or Bond - although the game is eager to invite all these comparisons. It's Shepard. Obsidian has borrowed a lot from BioWare, a developer it's always had a close working relationship with, and at times Alpha Protocol can feel a little like a Mass Effect mod as much as an original game in its own right.

I'm trying very hard to suppress a Pavlovian instinct over 20 years in the making. As a teenaged boy in the eighties, Aliens and Predator pretty much defined the word "awesome", an ingrained response that has endured ever since.