Gaming
Stuart Houghton
Telltale Games has pioneered the 'box set' model of gaming with their hit episodic adventures based in the Walking Dead universe as well as The Wolf Among Us, set in the modern fairytale world of the Fables comics. Telltale's long-awaited Game of Thrones licence has now launched on multiple platforms. Does their signature blend of multiple choices and moral dilemmas lend itself to George RR Martin's brutal fantasy world?The answer is a cautious yes. The typical Telltale title is an adventure based around well-drawn set pieces with your protagonist unfolding their story by solving puzzles, Read more ...
Helen K Parker
When I found out Jack King-Spooner was making another game, I didn’t know whether to be happy, or to be sick in my mouth a bit. His previous nuggets like Will You Ever Return and Sluggish Morss, have taught me to handle his small, subversive, artistically experimental and intimate ‘hand-made’ games with extreme care. You never quite know what JKS is going to show you (or rather force you to look at) and some things you just can’t un-see.The risk however, is always worth it, and with that ‘handle with care’ label stamped all over it comes Beeswing, the fourth addition to King-Spooner’s warped Read more ...
Simon Munk
Simple to play, fiendish to beat and with a huge depth of theme and beauty, The Talos Principle is a massively welcome end of year surprise. Like Portal and the recent The Swapper (whose writer also is involved here) this deftly blends a series of (120+) puzzles of growing complexity and ingenuity, that arise out of a very simple and brief set of mechanics, into a rich and deep philosophical theme.Awakening amidst what appears to be the gathered together ruins of the most beautiful bits of human civilisation and history, you're a robot(?) that is told to solve puzzles by a booming voice in Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
The Last Door is a game out of time. Its point 'n' click adventuring has a retro feel matched by deceptively simple, pseudo-8-bit graphics and an almost total lack of handholding. You are instantly dropped into the game's prologue with no tutorial and no indication as to what you need to do. It's just your blocky avatar in a room with some objects. What now?The way that intro plays out is disturbing, even given the faux-primitive presentation and goes a long way to establishing the gloomy atmosphere that envelops the game. Prologue complete, you play Jeremiah Devitt, a young Victorian Read more ...
Simon Munk
Before Minecraft there was LittleBigPlanet. This series lets you jump around cute homespun platform levels, then go in and edit them and create your own. The latest adds all sorts of new editing tools, but still fails to communicate simply enough with its audience.First, you jump around the platform levels of LittleBigPlanet 3. The game, as with previous versions in the series, sees scrappy levels seemingly constructed out of stickers, cardboard and glue, with your homespun hero "Sackboy" a kind of knitted child's teddy. With voiceover by Stephen Fry and one of the main characters handled by Read more ...
Simon Munk
By far the majority of interactive art, entertainment and fiction – videogames for want of a better rubric – could be described as science fiction or fantasy. Very little of what you do when you pick up a gamepad has to do with real life. Even contemporary crime thrillers such as Grand Theft Auto or combat games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare take only a highly-stylised glance at reality. But most games allow you to be and do things that far outstrip any notion of reality.Sci-fi, then, is woven through videogaming, but rarely in an interesting or novel way. Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare Read more ...
Simon Munk
When is more too much? Far Cry 4 continues to expand the freedom enshrined in the freeroaming, first-person shooter series, but this time takes things perhaps too far, diluting the games' core appeal.The Far Cry games have always delicately struck a balance between handing the player a huge amount of freedom, and guiding them gently. The series was perhaps the first to really understand how to on one hand structure missions so you could approach them any way you wanted to, or just mess about in the world, and on the other ensure that the things the players encountered largely tied into the Read more ...
Simon Munk
What a setting! The history-hopping stealth action series drops into Revolutionary Paris in Unity. Arguably the first game of the "next generation" uses more processing power to render a gigantic, living city teeming with revolting peasants, towered over by Gothic cathedrals and stuffed full of passageways and distractions. Assassin's Creed: Unity looks so real you can almost smell Robespierre's breath. Such a shame, then, that the game fails to engage meaningfully with setting or period.The Assassin's Creed series follows an increasingly ludicrous and labyrinthine plot about memories of our Read more ...
Simon Munk
It's Call of Duty, in the future, with Kevin Spacey. For many, the biggest and most important game of the year is here. But for the most part, Advanced Warfare is as conservative and reactionary in terms of innovation as it is in terms of the pro-military, ends-justifies-the-means politics it peddles.For those less than familiar with the Call of Duty franchise, a brief recap – the series specialises in epicly over-the-top first-person shooter action. These games are the Jerry Bruckheimer, the Arnie, of action games. They started out in WWII, but rapidly moved focus to cover Modern Warfare in Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Since Rovio hit the jackpot with Angry Birds the Finnish developer has not been shy about pumping the franchise for all it is worth. There are licensed sequels incorporating Star Wars and Transformers characters, spin-off games like Angry Birds Epic and Angry Birds Go, board games, stuffed toys and even a movie in development. While those furious fowl dominate Rovio's output, they haven't given up on indie gaming entirely. Not content with publishing third party games like Tiny Thief and Plunder Pirates, Rovio is also home to Rovio LVL11 - a development team dedicated to producing games that Read more ...
Simon Munk
If Splot looked any more like Angry Birds, it'd have to call itself Bouncy Birds. But looks can be deceiving – this is a fairly shrewd attempt to merge the visual style of the record-breaking mobile series with something far more traditional in videogame terms – the platformer.Platform games such as the Mario series, most famously, see you jumping from point to point around a level, trying to reach an end goal (often against a timer) and dodge the hazards in the world. Frozenbyte, the developers of Splot, previously made the Trine series – an attempt to update the classic platformer in a Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Mash-ups, genre-bending and creative anachronism can be a fun way to inject life into a stale idea. Pirates meet ninjas, Victorian engineers find themselves constructing steam dirigibles and aetheric ray guns and zombies somehow find their way into space.With Card Dungeon, developer Playtap Games has combined not two clichéd settings, but three different takes on ways to play in the same clichéd setting. Card Dungeon is a curious hybrid of roguelike dungeon quest, tabletop role playing game and card battler. You are The Crusader, a brave knight who seeks to defeat the source of evil Read more ...