Games
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 ...
Simon Munk
There are many admirable things about Child Of Light. It's the game that the core team behind Far Cry 3 – the mega-action, gnarly dude first-person shooter ‑ went on to work on next. Yet, it's difficult to imagine two games further from each other.In Child Of Light, you play Aurora – a princess who falls into a deathly sleep to wake up in a dreamworld dominated by darkness. To return to her grieving father in the real world, she must defeat a wicked queen there. Able to fly, followed by a glowing, controllable orb of light and floating her way through a beautifully detailed landscape of giant Read more ...
Simon Munk
Superheroes and videogames should be a match made in heaven – the primary colour characterisations; the non-stop action and combat; the backstories sketched on a napkin, but then gradually filled in over multiple issues; the superpowers, analogous to classic videogame "power-ups". It's strange then, that videogame superheroes have had such a tough time of it in general.It's also strange to see this third edition in the series floundering so badly in the wake of two inventive and original games that flamboyantly and successfully mixed freeroaming city exploration and action reminiscent of the Read more ...
Simon Munk
Flow states – experienced by athletes, religious zealots and videogamers playing Titanfall. This explosive action game is the most eagerly anticipated and hyped-up videogame of the "next generation" console war so far. It could singlehandedly transform Microsoft's slow start for its new Xbox One console. And while being deeply dull and reactionary in many ways, it encourages a gaming flow state of constant fun like little else in some time.In Titanfall two off-world factions vie for control of a planet. Both are armed to the teeth, not just with conventional weaponry, but giant "Titan" Read more ...
Simon Munk
Thief is the reboot of one of the oldest, and smartest of the stealth-action gaming series. Of course, as is customary in modern videogame design, the gameplay's been somewhat dumbed down. But it's not fatal here – leaving a stealthy and stylish successor that's a touch too repetitive.The Thief trilogy, which ran from 1998 to 2004, was a hugely influential set of stealth-action games. Splinter Cell and Dishonored, for instance, both owe a huge debt to the series' light and shadow-based stealth gameplay. But the series was difficult to master and slow in pace – with players required to Read more ...
Simon Munk
Dracula, the ultimate symbol of undead power, mystery and evil. As the anti-hero in this action-adventure sequel to the excellent Lords Of Shadow, you'd hope this would make for an epic adventure, or at least some toothsome plotting. Instead we get an enfeebled, old man as main character, a meandering, over-complex plot with ill-judged shock factor elements and far too many dull sections to plod through. It makes Twilight look like The Hunger or Near Dark in comparison.Dracula awakens from a long sleep weak and feeble in the modern world. In order to end his cursed immortality, a MacGuffin Read more ...
Simon Munk
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..." thus begins Hunter S Thompson's seminal Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. And the spirit of that book and HST's surreal "gonzo" take on reality live on in this oddball "comedy adventure game set in an alternate-reality Cold War World, plagued with Corporate Espionage, CyberCrime™ and Sentient Martinis."It was when the boss took a trip to the "wine cellar" after handing Agent Polyblank his pill to start the first espionage mission, the boss promptly proceeding to climb under his desk and go to sleep Read more ...
Simon Munk
You are staring at your computer screen; you are literally you. And now, through the wonder of modern technology, you can jump into the mind of, and take over, the security head of a near-future corporation's flying fortress. You control his speech, movements, decisions. That's how Consortium starts.You jump into Bishop 6's head just as he wakes up for his first shift on the Zenlil plane/fortress of the global Consortium security force. The game uses Bishop 6's status as new kid, and your status as new kid inside Bishop 6, to toy with you throughout.Other staff onboard regularly ask you Read more ...
Simon Munk
Set in an icy, fantasy Norse-influenced world, with an art style based on the 1950s work of Disney artist Eyvind Earle, The Banner Saga is immediately, aesthetically, vastly different from most videogame fare. But it's not just in visuals that it strikes out.The Banner Saga's key innovation is in making the player feel far less heroic. This isn't about saving the universe, it's about surviving the next battle.In the icy lands where the game is set the sun has stopped moving, the gods are long dead and to cap it off humanity and their semi-allies, a race of horned giants called the varl, are Read more ...
Simon Munk
It is amazing what canny developers can now do, in terms of visuals, on mobile devices. Archangel's makers proudly trumpet its near-console level of graphical pizzazz and they're right to. Sadly, in copying console games' visual acuity, Archangel's makers seem also to have copied console games' general lack of imagination.The publisher of Archangel, Unity Games, is the company behind Unity 3D – a game engine increasingly used in some of the best independently-created games. The idea behind this new publishing arm is (based on Archangel) to prove that games made in Unity 3D can be just as Read more ...
Simon Munk
As ever with videogames, one great success can lead to many failures. The success in this case was the breakout "sandbox" genius of Minecraft. On its surface, Minecraft is essentially a faithfully blocky attempt to bring Lego bricks into games. But unlocking both the power of collaborative working and the sheer size and scale of Minecraft's possibilities has allowed people to build all sorts of insanely grandiose designs within their virtual worlds. Of course, where Minecraft led, others followed – more's the pity...Minecraft begat Terraria – an amiable sci-fi side-scrolling half platform Read more ...