1000 Amps review
If you’re a member of the camp of gamers who believe that the answers to puzzles should never be signposted, and that modern games are way too easy, then you’re going to like 1000 Amps.
You play as a cute lil’ icon called Plug (no relation to the Bash Street Kid) who is attempting to repair a set of electrical stations called the Amp- Tree-System. In each room, you can light up a number of squares by touching them, and when you’ve lit them all, that part of the system is repaired. As you light these squares, you’re given more power – enabling you to jump and teleport. Most of the puzzles rely on using that gradual increase in power to enable you to access more and more lightsquares in each room.
King Arthur 2: The Role Playing Wargame review
I’m in a dank bog, talking to the ghostly wife of a Roman lunatic who thinks that he’s the Emperor Hadrian. I’m desperately trying to persuade her to make him go away. Where did my life go so wrong? I’m supposed to be the son of King Arthur, for the Old Gods’ sake.
Arthur is nearly dead, thanks to an exploding Grail, and so it has fallen to you to scour the land and unravel exactly why great big spikes have erupted out of the earth all over the place. Of course, by ‘scour the land’ I actually mean slowly turn a great big map of Britain your colour, because that’s what you do in RPGs. Wait, no, I mean RTSes. Hang on – which is this again?
Gotham City Impostors review
Imagine if Christopher Nolan walked into the office of Geoff Warner and told him the next movie he wanted to make was ‘The Dark Knight On Rollerskates’. He’d be laughed out of the office. There’s a formula for making a movie blockbuster.
Games are different. In the world of games, it’s entirely possible for someone to walk into an important person’s office, pitch ‘Batman on rollerskates’ and walk out with a signed contract. Gotham City Impostors is the result this pitch.
Nuclear Dawn review
The year is 2049. A third world war has ravaged the planet, splitting humanity under two banners – the totalitarian Empire, and democratic Consortium of Free States. Nanite plagues have stripped most major cities bare, and fighting rages in every territory across the world. The biggest gun I have ever seen – seriously, it’s huge – is inexplicably mounted on Big Ben.
That’s the setting for Nuclear Dawn, a class-based multiplayer shooter that manages to take all the best mechanics of Team Fortress 2, but strips it of its cartoony silliness and adds a layer of serious-face real-time strategy over the top. Most of the time, you play from an FPS viewpoint as a footsoldier in one of the aforementioned armies, battling over a series of checkpoints that generate a steady stream of resources for the side that controls them.
Universe Sandbox review
Judging Universe Sandbox as a game seems a little unfair. There are no bosses, no buffs or power-ups, no levelling-up system, and no objective. It’s simply a physics sandbox that focuses on doing one thing right: gravity.
The premise is simple. You put rocks in space, set various physical properties such as velocity, mass and density, then watch them whizz about while cackling with glee at your power over the universe. If you get it right, their orbit carves a graceful arc across the empty darkness of space.
What’s more fun is getting it wrong. Accidentally making Earth the same size as the Sun and pinging Mercury and Venus out past Uranus, Neptune and the Kuiper belt into the interstellar medium, for example. Or accidently blowing up Jupiter and watching the debris form into a second asteroid belt.
Torchlight 2 preview
This article originally appeared in PC Gamer UK Issue 231.
When news of Diablo 3’s real money auction house broke, gamers responded with the inevitable arguing and outrage, but amongst it was one shared opinion: if it did cause a problem, people would simply play its action-RPG cousin Torchlight 2 instead.
Max Schaefer, CEO of Torchlight developers Runic and co-designer of Diablo and Diablo II, explains their philosophy. “We want to establish that you can have a great, compelling, fun game to which you don’t need to make a long term financial commitment,” he says. “We also want to be able to move onwards – if you charge subscriptions and micropayments you commit to years of support and development on the game.”
GameTrekking interview: “I released a new notgame from Cambodia today”
Back in September 2010, TIGSource‘s founder Jordan Magnuson set off on an audacious project – travelling around South-East Asia, making indie games about his experiences along the way.
He called the project GameTrekking, and funded it with more than £3,000 of donations solicited from the web. Contributors to the fund get email updates from Magnuson and beta access to games in development, and those who contribute more get postcards from the road, links on his website, and even a credit in the games themselves, which are free, open-source and cross-platform.
PC Gamer spoke to Magnuson about doodling, genocide, and his experiences on the road.
