sci-fi
Simon Munk
Which you is you? Where does your soul live? Who cares if a clone of you dies? For a fairly simple puzzle game, The Swapper asks some serious questions. And importantly, it asks them with subtlety, deftness and atmosphere – that enhances the excellent gameplay.Exploring a semi-ruined space station, your fragile astronaut finds a strange device that lets you create up to four clones of yourself. These clones will walk, grab, jump as you do, but you can place them far from you. More than that, you can swap your control, your consciousness, to them if you have direct line of sight. And that's Read more ...
Simon Munk
The iconic monster is back in a far more successful way than Prometheus. The first-person, stealth game Alien: Isolation largely successfully returns us to the creeping horror and claustrophobic environments of the original film.Set after the events of Alien, Isolation sees Ripley's daughter chasing the black box recorder of the original spaceship, the Nostromo. On reaching the space station it's on, of course she finds the iconic "xenomorph", the "perfect organism, its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility", let loose among a terrified and splintered population.The Read more ...
Simon Munk
This sprawling post-apocalyptic role-playing game comes long after the original. Wasteland was a critical hit back in 1988. It was a fairly unique proposition then. But that was back in 1988 – which in videogames terms is about the dark ages.In the last 25 years, console manufacturers have risen and fallen, Windows has come into existence (and nearly out of again), and mobile phones have turned from bricks to smart. In the meantime, post-apocalyptic settings for games have become common, so have squad-based role-playing games, so, even, have games with "persistent worlds" (where, when you Read more ...
Simon Munk
The blockbuster game to outblockbuster them all. Creating Destiny required a record-breaking budget of $500 million; it's made by the makers of the iconic Halo series; it fuses that series' first-person, space-opera shooter pedigree with World of Warcraft-style massively multi-player online gaming; and it sold $500 million on its launch day alone. In gaming terms, Destiny is huge – a massively slick and serious enterprise… with a hollow heart that would make Hollywood proud.Destiny is best viewed as a surface. It looks undeniably amazing – simultaneously organically complex, gritty and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Luc Besson has always venerated the ladies, preferably trousered types with lashings of spunk. You can tick them all off: Isabelle Adjani in Subway, the felon-assassin Nikita, precocious little Natalie Portman in Léon, bande-dessinée adventuress Adèle Blanc-Sec. Why, in The Lady he even offered a po-faced serenade to Aung San Suu Kyi. Not a lot of submissive mannikins in floaty floral-print cotton skirts in that lot. Just when you think he’s run out of ballsy goddesses to plant on a pedestal, up pops Lucy, his most completely idealised heroine yet, glacially incarnated by – who else? - Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fantastic is the only word for The Changes. Fantastic as in fantasy, and fantastic because it's a television drama that's brilliantly conceived and impeccably executed – and also because it tackles issues of social cohesion and fragmentation head-on without using a sledgehammer. Broadcast by the BBC in 1975, The Changes was a ten-part series adapting Peter Dickinson's trilogy of novels The Weathermonger, Heartsease and The Devil's Children.The series tells how a sudden, inexplicable change transforms British society. Made with serious intent, it was for children and broadcast in a tea- Read more ...
ellin.stein
Director Ari Folman burst onto the scene with his brilliantly realised, quasi-autobiographical Waltz With Bashir, an animated feature that navigated between dreamscapes and reality to explore the personal trauma arising from witnessing the massacres at Lebanon’s Shabra and Shatila refugee camps as an Israeli soldier. His follow-up feature, The Congress, is highly original and fizzing with ideas. But without a similarly gripping central narrative to keep it anchored, it remains somewhat emotionally uninvolving, instead provoking the head-scratching conceptual interest of Inception or The Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Humankind's desperate struggle for survival is exquisitely rendered in this post-apocalyptic set sequel to 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Matt Reeves, the director of another end of the world type scenario in found footage film Cloverfield, takes the reins of this smart and attractive franchise and runs confidently with visceral wanton destruction and a blunt message about gun control.Living a peaceful existence in the wilderness of a San Francisco forest, the apes have carved out a life without humans who they presume have long died out due to the simian flu virus (seen taking hold Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
An anonymous voice screams “Please stop” over the opening credits of Noel Clarke’s sci-fi thriller and after about fifteen minutes of watching it those words are sure to haunt your thoughts, as this dull slog runs out of ideas far too quickly for it to sustain any semblance of tension or real worth. This is Clarke’s third endeavour in the director’s chair - after Adulthood and 4.3.2.1 - and it’s a disappointing and confused effort that relies on the outdated Hollywood action formula to pull its narrative along.To its credit the core idea is an intriguing one. Ryan (played by none other than Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tom Cruise has smugly saved the day in dozens of films. In Edge of Tomorrow, he utterly fails to save the same day dozens of times, dying and trying again, in a loop caused by being plastered in the time-warping blood of one of the aliens currently occupying Western Europe.Director Doug Liman has great fun with this just-go-with-it conceit, from the moment cowardly Army PR Major Cage (Cruise) reports for duty at United Defence Force’s London HQ. General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson, either silently seething or chuckling at the giant UDF sign behind him) finds Cage so insufferable he has him 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 ...