Gaming
theartsdesk
We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.Our fundraiser is rolling towards hitting the halfway mark, and it’s already raised enough to repair our ageing site and ensure its survival. But just as important to all of us have been the messages of love and support from our readership. It’s not just the morale boost of being praised either – though let’s be honest, the warm glow is pretty Read more ...
Jon Turney
For a couple of decades, the free video game America’s Army was a powerful recruitment aid for the US military. More than a shoot-em-up, players might find themselves dressing virtual wounds, struggling to co-ordinate tactics with their squad, and facing other supposedly realistic aspects of active service. The realism, of course, had one strict limit. If you died, you could reset the game and play again.The game is one of innumerable examples in Kelly Clancy’s book of how the invented reality of play worlds has an appeal which is functional for some, potentially catastrophic for others. Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Rage 2 is a wacky Dayglo-infused post-apocalyptic world filled with various different factions who, for one reason or another, want you dead. Think Mad Max on magic mushrooms. Sounds kind of fun, right? You play the role of Walker, the last remaining Ranger following a major attack from arch nemesis General Cross. You're pushed into a wasteland world to recruit three main leaders from around a sprawling landscape littered with road blocks, bandit camps, broken bridges and desolate dunescapes, as you bring the pain to the main enemy faction, The Authority.Along the way you’ll meet the good, Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Based on the 2006 book of the same name, and set in the same universe as the 2013 film adaptation, World War Z follows groups of survivors of a zombie apocalypse in the cities of Moscow, New York, Jerusalem, and Tokyo. The game unleashes hundreds of fast-moving, bloodthirsty zombies able to move and strike as one collective herd as well as break off into individual attacks. You get to choose from six character classes and an arsenal of deadly weapons, explosives, turrets and traps and battle both zombies and real human opponents in competitive, team-based Players vs Players vs Zombies (PvPvZ Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
The LEGO Movie 2 Videogame is based on events that take place in The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part film that came out in February. The story begins in the desolated wasteland of Apocalypseburg where alien invaders have left Bricksburg in ruins. Emmet, Lucy and his crew of companions go beyond their world to save their friends from the strange inhabitants of the faraway Systar System.Emmet is still a happy little chap, but his smiley demeanour is at odds with his surroundings. The world around him is a wilderness of sand and bricks, and similarly the grandiose gameplay of the previous Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Anthem is an unusual game. Unlike most of its current peers it lacks any numbers after its name, making it a brand new slice of intellectual property in a risk-adverse market, where the big money is only invested in sure-fire hits. It’s also unusual because you can only play with an Internet connection. This isn’t a soup-for-one affair (although you can actually play solo missions), rather a shared visual banquet where you’re auto-matched with other players, working collaboratively in a common goal. Think Destiny or The Division as the other two big shared-world action games. And finally Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Did you play videogames back in 2010? If you did, there’s a reasonable chance you played Crackdown 2. Only a reasonable chance as the game was just on Xbox 360 – this was back in the days when there was a lot more console-exclusive titles. But if you did play, you would know just how much fun this sprawling open world run, gun and mega jump game could be.Crackdown 2 was a vertigo-inducing urban romp, where as a super powered law enforcement agent you traverse the city with giant, gravity-defying leaps. Your abilities increase as you explore and complete objectives, bringing you new powers, Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Battlefield games try to recreate warfare through scaling up the action. The online fire fights involve massive battles where up to 64 players can opt to be foot soldiers (of which there are four varieties), take to the skies as a pilot, or commandeer a tank for a ground assault. It’s epic stuff and the trick with the Battlefield series is that you always feel at the heart of the action, doing a job that is essential if your side is to succeed.You work in squads of four inside sides of 32 and rampage through the European countryside and cobbled city streets taking the fight to the enemy. How Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
It was all going so well for Bethesda Games Studios, the developer behind some of the best single player action-RPGs to ever grace consoles. The Elder Scrolls titles combined with the Fallout games have kept the Maryland-based developer raking in the dollars for the best part of 20 years.The last Fallout game, released back in 2015, was a universally loved epic adventure that The Arts Desk nominated for game of the year. This latest offering, a game that suffered such drastic performance issues it had a launch day patch of over 50GB followed by a subsequent update of 47GB, is a pale shadow of Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Realistic open world games need the little touches to convince you of the reality within which you play. Perhaps it’s your character’s beard that grows a little more each day, maybe it’s the way mud builds up on his boots during wet weather, or how he makes a cup of coffee and talks to members of his 20-strong gang in the morning. But the little touches add to the big picture and Red Dead Redemption 2 is full of the former, creating a sumptuous, deliciously immersive open world adventure that does everything it can to redefine the big picture concept in a videogame context. The Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
For the first time in the 15-year history of Call of Duty games, the developer Treyarch has decided to completely do away with the single player story campaign for its latest Black Ops offering. With context-free multiplayer shooters like Fortnite doing great business at the virtual tills, why spend the valuable resources crafting a 6 to 8-hour story mode that will get played through once and then long forgotten while the vast majority of gamers take the action online to the multiplayer battlefields?So we’re in the world of chasing rather than setting trends, but this is not necessarily a bad Read more ...