Gaming
Helen K Parker
Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play... and corrupt oil prospectors shoot you as soon as look at you, and ankle-biting rattlesnakes lurk under the sand dunes, and abandoned gold mines are teeming with bandits.In this world, described by the talented five Banditos over at developers Ostrich as being “built out of the grittiest pixels this side of Montezuma”, our unnamed hero awakens to discover his family slaughtered and his idyllic homestead burned to cinders. Alas! If only they’d been wearing their cowboy hats for protection! With a fist full of pixels Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
The typical episode of the Game of Thrones TV show has been memorably compared to Twitter: there are 140 characters and something terrible always happens. The first episode of Telltale Games' story-driven take on the franchise came close, introducing four of our five playable characters alongside a large cast of non-playables before pulling a very Thrones move and murdering one of our would-be heroes while we looked on, helpless. The message, as in the show, was clear – nobody is safe.Despite that hard-hitting final scene, the first in this series of gameplay episodes felt a bit long-winded Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Normally if you throw together three genres of videogame, the result is a mess. The Quest Keeper however, is a curious mashup of endless runner (think Temple Run), roguelike dungeon crawl and - of all things - free to play, time-eating Frogger clone, Crossy Road that works.You play an intrepid adventurer who must navigate a series of dungeons to retrieve magical artifacts, dodging traps and walking across perilous pathways over stygian depths. A standard adventure, then. The catch is that once you start walking, you can't stop unless you hit an obstacle.You can swipe the screen to change Read more ...
Simon Munk
I've got blood in my eyes… no, hang on a second, it's OK, it's not blood – it's brains and a bit of severed spinal column! Mortal Kombat X is one of the most gleefully violent and bloody videogames ever.It may not technically offer the best in fast-paced tactical combat (or kombat even). Nor does it feature the best visuals. And it certainly doesn't offer a smooth learning curve for novices. But for sheer bloodlust, Mortal Kombat X sticks true to the series' roots and carves itself a niche, with a serrated military knife, in the body of classic fighting games.The Mortal Kombat series has long Read more ...
Simon Munk
"Just one more thing…" What is it about great detective fiction in film and books that defies replication in videogames? You'd think that videogames would be ideal for whodunits. But the best mysteries in games (see Grim Fandango) roam far from simple murder. And the games that most closely ape the policier – like L.A. Noire – tend to take an unhappy tumble into the "uncanny valley".In L.A. Noire it was the supposed "tells" suspects gave under interrogation that marked the game down – with some suspects proving infuriatingly odd-looking and twitchy even when telling the truth, while others Read more ...
Simon Munk
Should games be challenging? One of the perennial design challenges of videogames. Make a game too tough and you'll put people off; make it too easy and you'll offer no interest. And then there's the tricky issue of individuals having vastly different play styles and abilities.Bloodborne and its predecessors Dark Souls and Demon's Souls offer no sliding scale of player-set difficulty and, while you're at it, little in the way of mercy. I absolutely loathed the Souls games – for making me feel rubbish as a gamer, for making me die over and over, for offering no incentive, no easy way in, no Read more ...
Simon Munk
The old house seems empty at first. But in the darkness, a flickering match your only light source, it quickly becomes apparent that something terrible is here…White Night is a classic haunted house tale and a classic adventure game wrapped up in a beautiful, stylised visual feast. Like the Sin City comics and films, this uses stark black and white with just the occasional flicker of colour, mostly the guttering yellow of a match.In Sin City the stark design is a homage to the chiaroscuro of film noir and hardboiled detective fiction. And perhaps, in homage also, White Night unwisely adopts Read more ...
Simon Munk
The Battlefield series is probably the key rival to Call Of Duty for first-person shooters. Whereas the various Call Of Duty strands tend toward epic, over-the-top Hollywood single-player action and frantic multi-player, Battlefield was born of large-scale multi-player arenas, with player-controllable vehicles on ground and in the air, and increasingly, the ability to blow chunks out of buildings and the environment. This latest game features all of the above, but switches out military action for cops 'n' robbers.The single-player campaign sees you play one of a pair of drugs agents taking on Read more ...
Helen K Parker
If you thought life as a badger was tough, life as a lynx is even harder than you can imagine, which is why Might and Delight have imagined it perfectly for you. With their uniquely pixelated designs they have rendered an open world savannah for your character, a female lynx, to roam freely in her search for prey and shelter. It’s an idyllic set-up; in the gloriously realised landscapes, and to the atmospheric and unassuming music of Retro Family, your big-cat has the whole world to herself. Without a care in the world she can hunt and explore, draining and replenishing her stamina levels Read more ...
Simon Munk
There are so many worthy, interesting, non-violent games in the world. And then there's this… this steaming hot mess of pulsing electronica, endless ultraviolence and drug-inflected hyper-visuals. This is the videogame the Droogs would have played in A Clockwork Orange. And, rather worryingly, it's absolutely brilliant fun.Forget the rather pointless plot, involving drug-addled protagonists and hallucinatory phone calls. Instead focus on the play. Your job in each level is to work your way through whatever hellhole (police station, crack den, mafia penthouse etc.) you find yourself in, Read more ...
Simon Munk
Skateboarding, in games and in movies, has always been presented as quite a laidback sport. This couldn't be further from that idea – it's a "twitch" arcade stick-and-button mangler that adeptly balances risk and reward and will wring hardened players for beads of sweat.Like the original, its name an apparent mangling of the skateboarding term for a jump, "Ollie", and perhaps the cycling spectator's imperative "Allez! Allez!", OlliOlli 2 is a side-scrolling arcade blast. Your diminutive skater speeds through levels covered in increasingly unlikely hazards, the concept being you're ripping Read more ...
Simon Munk
A shambling corpse, desperately gouging anything that comes near it for sustenance, a shadow of its former self. I'm not talking of the zombies that infest this game, but the Resident Evil series itself and its iconic Japanese publisher Capcom.For those not familiar with the Resident Evil series, this wildly successful set of games jump-started the "survival horror" genre in 1996, and has since spawned an army of spin-off game titles and films, while the main series has mutated – from slow-paced adventure to high-speed action.The original Revelations saw the game broken into TV-style " Read more ...