Total War: Shogun 2 review
I had to rub my eyes. How could this have happened? Scant turns into Shogun 2’s campaign on the Hard setting, and I’d conquered my first city. My early-game army was already marching toward the next. Then one of the other clans landed a naval transport next to my home city and walked a small army right in. Total War’s AI, it seems, doesn’t have trouble with ships any more.
Thus began my army’s panicked march home to retake its own capital. Dismay, bedwetting, and the thrill of a fateful challenge: a good opener for ten.
Dragon Age 2 review
To make Origins, BioWare dredged up buckets of backstory from the minds of their best writers. A new land was invented, branded with religious intolerance and inherent racism. Then, once the continent of Thedas was concrete, BioWare forgot they’d invented all that engaging stuff and slapped a typical ‘kill the big bad thing’ fantasy plotline on top. For all its size and wonder, Origins didn’t make full use of its fascinating world.
Dragon Age 2 does it right. It’s still an RPG epic, it still takes upwards of 50 hours to finish. It’s still got a deep, complex combat system, and it’s still got a well-defined supporting cast. But it’s also an RPG that wears its mythology proudly, confident in its goal of charting the rise of a complete and utter badass. You.
Bacon, robots and violence on PC — our Monday Night Combat review
A robot has dropped a churro. The tasty Spanish treat tops off my Tank class character’s life bar, and I push deeper into the blue team’s territory, rending more automatons with my railgun as I go. En route, I pass a teammate dumping minigun shells into Monday Night Combat’s adorable mascot, Bullseye—a guy in a plush, smiling suit that dances through the arena and bleeds coins instead of blood.
DC Universe Online Review
Batman relies on lightning-fast reflexes to dodge a Joker bomb, not a lucky dice roll, and he certainly never auto-attacks Bane. So when I leapt onto the streets of Gotham, clad in the tights and gadget-belt of a newly minted villain named Cat’s Pajamas, to study at the feet of the Clown Prince of Crime, I wanted something other than the stodgy combat of a typical MMO. And DC Universe Online doesn’t disappoint—its fast-paced, kinetic combat and story-driven quests are a breath of fresh air in a genre short on innovation.
Super Meat Boy Review
Imagine a bouncing cube of raw meat sliding into the teeth of a whirling saw blade. Spludge! Now picture thousands more—as many as there are letters on this page—all going splat and splot as they disintegrate into an ocean of juicy beef-stuff. Gross. But your mental slaughterhouse still has nothing on my Super Meat Boy death tally. I flung the game’s lovable, protein-based hero to his demise over 3,000 times just to beat the main levels of this relentlessly difficult 2D platformer. Include the search for collectables, the retro-themed Warp Zones, and the unlockable “Dark World” levels, and the number of exploded meat-bodies I’m responsible for is genocidal—but it’s the fun kind of genocide.
StarCraft 2 review
This is Blizzard’s most polished game to date.
Forget StarCraft’s reputation as a punishing, multiplayer click-fest played only by rocket-powered Korean pro-gamers. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty includes a lengthy and compelling singleplayer campaign, alongside some of the best multiplayer and co-op functionality I’ve seen. It offers a kind of baffling but welcome nostalgia. It looks, sounds, plays and feels like a game you may have loved from over ten years ago – the original StarCraft. When you sit down to play it for the first time, if you’re a PC gamer of any experience at all, you’ll immediately understand what’s going on, and what you need to do to succeed.
Monkey Island 2: Special Edition review
By jove, they’ve got it! Last year saw LucasArts remake the original Secret of Monkey Island with gorgeous new graphics and fantastic voice acting. And then, through some arcane form of voodoo, they managed to make it maddeningly irritating to play. A crazed muddle of menus, inputs and berserk design decisions spoiled a game that was never as good as people remembered it being. Forget all of that – Monkey Island 2: Special Edition has fixed absolutely everything, and was a far better game to begin with.
