Gaming
Simon Munk
On technical grounds, it's pretty hard as a gamer not to simply be amazed by Modern Combat 5 – it is, pretty much, a fully-functioned, first-person shooter to rival Call Of Duty and Battlefield, only on your phone rather than a dedicated home console.That's not just talking in terms of visuals – although they're the most immediately impressive thing about the game. As well as the graphics, there's the amount of single-player missions, the multi-player and the plethora of side-quests, weapons upgrades and loadout options available also.Unfortunately, visual and technical elements are not the Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Minecraft Pocket Edition has been around on Android and iOS since late 2011 and is still officially an alpha release. After a couple of years of slow development, version 0.9.0 arrived this month and finally turned the portable Minecraft into something worth reviewing - and playing.Over the last couple of years the team tasked with devloping the mobile incarnation of one of the most successful PC games of all time have added more and more features and tiles from the PC version but with a hard limit to the size of the game world and therefore a finite amount of resources to uncover, Minecraft Read more ...
Simon Munk
The videogames industry is changing, and not in a good way. There are fewer and fewer people creating single-player stories of depth and ingenuity in games. The sad truth is fewer and fewer people are willing to pay enough (or anything even) for games that are artistic, slower or deeper. Instead, videogames are increasingly falling into one of two woeful categories.The big "AAA" console games are now skewed to multi-player online action – forget the plot, it's all about the twitchy fragging; and (while you're not looking) it's all about getting you to drip-feed payment for new add-on packs Read more ...
Simon Munk
A minus mark for this puzzle game for cannily, if cheesily, being named to hitch a ride on the wildly-popular MineCraft phenomenon. And another minus mark for its barely-a-concept-at-all of mashing together two massively enjoyable and enduring puzzle game series into one.MouseCraft takes the block shapes from Tetris - literally the exact same block shapes: the square one, the S-shaped one, the long-thin one, the L-shaped one – and adds them to a very slightly reworked version of Lemmings.Here, mice are sent scurrying across a laboratory maze by a fiendish cat scientist. The mice must get to Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Sometimes, if you get really proficient at a game you might be lucky enough to enter the psychological state known as "flow", where you become so focused and at one with the task in hand that time seems to compress, everything starts to feel just right and the game could almost be said to be playing you. You are in the zone. Some games more than others seem to actively invite players into this special place, and Fluid SE* practically demands that you jump in with both feet if you are to have any chance at all.At heart, Fluid SE is a time trials racer mixed with a dash of Pac-Man. You have to Read more ...
Simon Munk
Sometimes virtual violence can simply be fun, even morally dubious violence. Sniper Elite III is pretty reprehensible and fairly morally indefensible. It gleefully glamorises violence. Yet throughout, it's fun. Really good fun.Sniper Elite's key selling point, the thing that defines the series above all else, is a repellent, yet hypnotic, slow-motion kill-cam. Improved for the latest game, it shows your long-range bullet entering through skin, muscle, sinew; shattering through bone; destroying internal organs before leaving your Nazi enemy writing in agony on the ground, before expiring in Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Good puzzle game mechanics are hard to find and Kiwanuka has just the one. Luckily, it is a great one that allows for taxing but elegant levels full of the "Aha!" moments that puzzle fans gobble up like smarties. To the casual (if veteran) gamer, Kiwanuka resembles the Nineties classic Lemmings in how it tasks you with guiding a group of tiny charaters to safety across a screen full of rocky 2D platforms. Whereas in that game you had to guide scores of little guys to an exit by bestowing them with special powers (such as climbing, digging or the ability to explode like dynamite) in Read more ...
Simon Munk
A detective ghost story with virtually no violence – Murdered: Soul Suspect is an odd construction. It is part point-and-click adventure game, part interactive fiction and part stealth-adventure – none of which are massively successful elements.While investigating The Bell Killer, a serial killer working his way throughSalem,Massachusetts, your clichéd cop comes off the worse for an encounter. Thrown out of a high window, then shot, you come to as a ghost. Now, in order to be head off into the light, you must find out who your killer is.As a ghost, of course, you no longer have access to guns Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Much fuss is made about realism in gaming. In the drive to recreate the real world in smaller and more numerous polygons, game developers have had to pass through the “uncanny valley” where things look nearly right but subtly, creepily wrong. The very best CGI can fool the eye but even the most canny next-gen console or PC programmer will still produce in-game graphics that are recognisably fake.Photorealism isn’t the only thing worth striving for, of course. The unreal can be just as, if not more interesting and with “Monument Valley”, Ustwo have crafted a beautiful world that is anything Read more ...
Simon Munk
Heralded as the first true "next-generation" videogame, Watch Dogs has either been hugely overhyped or the imaginative leap required for a true new generation of videogaming is entirely absent from mainstream games. Because this cyberpunk-inflected hacking action-adventure offers virtually nothing new.The original Deus Ex in 2000 remains the template for combining dystopian science fiction themes, multi-angled approaches to missions and cyberpunk human augmentation and hacking. This simply attempts to mix that formula with the huge open world and freeroaming chaos of Grand Theft Auto V and Read more ...
Simon Munk
Videogames aesthetics are often misleading. There are many examples of beautiful games that have no artistic merit, emotional heft or ludological interest. There are also many examples of ugly games that grip utterly. Of course, the ideal is both simultaneously – and Transistor almost does that.On visuals, its beautiful Steampunk setting is wonderfully realised. This, combined with exemplary character and narrative design, delicately draws you into a floating city and the story of Red and her sword/partner Transistor. She, silent fury and constant movement; he a disembodied voice revealing Read more ...
Simon Munk
It's time to talk about time travel. The fourth dimension, as time is sometimes called, represents fertile ground for videogames designers. After all, the shift from side-scrolling two-dimensions (move left, right, jump up, fall down) to three was a huge leap.Three dimensional playing fields enabled first-person perspectives, freeroaming adventure and more. Adding a fourth dimension, letting you transform the game around your actions, can be an exciting way to turn gaming on its head. The independent hit Braid proved that. Unfortunately now every game that dabbles with time travel has to walk Read more ...