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RUSE review
8 Comments
Thanks to the killjoys behind the Hague and Geneva Conventions it’s now illegal to win a war by inviting your enemies to sham peace talks then feeding them poisoned danishes. You can’t disguise your tanks as ambulances. Soldiers can’t even use fake arms to pretend to surrender any more. All the furtive fun has been stripped from warfare.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent review
18 Comments
OK, I’m proper scared. I’ve just been stalked through a sewer by something I can’t see, let alone fight.
The only thing that gave it away was the languid ker-splosh of its footsteps as it ranged around after me. Every time I lost my footing on the narrow path of tottering crates and other detritus and landed in the drink, a flurry of intense sploshing rose sharply in volume as it made for my meat. It was utterly, panicinducingly horrible. I made errors in judgement, I missed jumps, I clenched. When it was all over, I nearly had a little cry.
Elemental: War of Magic review
41 Comments
I need 1,300 gold immediately. The latest bit of military research I’ve unlocked lets me make teams of things, and one of the things I can make teams of is my killer hell dogs from hell. This gives the resulting unit six times their enormous health, six times their enormous damage, and for reasons that aren’t really clear to me, six times their enormous armour rating. So even though it’s just six hell dogs from hell standing next to each other, they take 36 times as long to kill. 1,300 is a lot of gold – or Gildar as it’s pointlessly renamed in Elemental – but for 36 hell dogs from hell, it’s a steal.
Need for Speed: World review
7 Comments
A whole city is yours to explore in Need for Speed World, a game that claims to be a freeto- play racing MMO. Though, really, it’s only free up to level ten, and it’s not an MMO. For the first ten levels, it’s an open world arcade racer with a great sense of speed and amazing police chases – but travel past that point and things start to slip.
Crap Shoot: Traffic Department 2192
4 Comments
Richard Cobbett digs into the archives to bring obscure, interesting and forgotten games back into the light, starting with a shareware shooter about drawing double yellow lines in the sand.
Worms Reloaded review
7 Comments
Amazingly enough, Worms: Reloaded is Worms. Do you like Worms? It’s Worms! You don’t like Worms? Move along, it’s just Worms. They may be higher resolution than they were back in the 90s, the backgrounds a little more interesting, and the weapons more explosive, but at heart this is exactly the same turn-based war of bazooka-wielding annelids we saw in 1995, 1998, and every other Worms game ever, ignoring the series’ brief jump into 3D back in 2003. It’s also much the same game as last year’s Worms 2: Armageddon over in Xbox 360 land, albeit with a few more toys thrown in.
Mafia 2 review
43 Comments
The chronic oversaturation of the mafia in our international media has taught us much. Mafia II is an attempt to chronicle these teachings in game form. Fact number one: mafia men do lots of killing. Fact number two: they like suits. Fact number three: mafiosa don’t call each other mafiosa; they use the term ‘wiseguys’.
I’ve cross-referenced facts one and two with Mafia II, and they’re definitely right – a lot of killing and a lot of suits. Fact number three isn’t. ‘Wiseguys’, with its implied streetsmarts and cunning, doesn’t fit Mafia II’s mobsters. It certainly doesn’t fit the mid-level gangster the game asked me to tail early in its middle act, who didn’t have the presence of mind to check his rearview mirror as he drove away from a literal hatchet job. Had that guy done so, he’d have seen Sicilian-born WWII veteran and new-boy mobster Vito Scaletta about 20 feet behind, dressed in a red and white cod- Hawaiian shirt, driving a hot pink corvette with ‘BUMS12’ proudly displayed on the numberplate. That guy was not very wise.
Kane & Lynch 2 review
12 Comments
Kane & Lynch: Dog Days is a standard third person shooter with amazing art direction. For every gun blast, blocky artefacts pop up, corrupting the screen like it was filmed on a cheap video camera. Light sources smear vertically, and the viewpoint lurches like the cameraman is running along behind the player. It’s brutal on the senses, but it’s startling enough to make me like the game more than I should.
Sniper: Ghost Warrior review
11 Comments
You are codename Razor four six, real name: something or other. You’ve been sent to a fake Spanish island to shoot people out from under their hats. You’re a sniper. You’re also a warrior. You’re not a ghost warrior – you’re wearing a Christmas tree.
Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 review
3 Comments
Lego Harry Potter plays like a secret lost chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. A chapter where Harry goes mad with power, puts on a fake moustache and runs, giggling, through Diagon Alley, turning people into ice cubes with a wand that looks like a carrot.
