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Tomb Raider – Review
There’s a moment at the start of Tomb Raider Legend – Crystal Dynamic’s first Tomb Raider game, released in 2006 – when Lara Croft, the archaeologist destined for spinal troubles in later life, meets an armed guard standing with his back to her at the yawning mouth of a Bolivian tomb. She lines up a ...
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Borderlands 2: Mr Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage – Review
It’s the revenge fantasy of every developer wounded by a ruthless critic: a side-quest in which you send your player off to murder an unsympathetic game journalist. It escalates, of course, as all revenge fantasies do. At first your task is merely to take down the author of a mean-spirited 6/10 review for a game ...
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Karateka – Review
Mariko, just like every winsome princess trapped against her will in a castle, longs to be rescued. But being rescued isn’t her only longing. There is, of course, the delicate matter of the rescuer. Salvation is all well and good, but the specifics of the saviour are just as important. Who’s the face behind the ...
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Fable: The Journey – Review
Motion control cannot be recalled. It cannot be uninvented. But, like the fake plastic guitars of the past, the stereoscopic 3D of the future and all those other tech gimmicks that sizzle in and fizzle out, it will in time be removed from our video games. In that sense Fable: The Journey feels like a ...
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Dishonored – Review
“The boldest measures are the safest.” It makes sense for this maxim to be stamped in tall lettering above the entrance to Dishonored’s plague-ridden capital city, Dunwall. Here is a society that runs on whale oil, a sort of fuel that only a madly courageous culture would choose to pump through the veins of its ...
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Resident Evil 6 – Review
“I can’t believe this is happening again. It’s just like Raccoon.” Leon S. Kennedy’s reference to the first town overrun by zombies in Capcom’s long-running survival horror series is pregnant with meaning. At face value, it’s the eye-rolling incredulity of a zombie-thwacking protagonist thrown into the familiar peril of a sequel: ‘This again? Really?’ But ...
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Deadlight – Review
We knock them to the ground with broken chairs, sever their limbs with kitchen knives, side step their faux-amorous lunges and headshot after headshot after headshot. But still no button press has yet managed to stem the cultural advance of the video game zombie. Some of their popularity with game-makers is practical. The rotten cadaver ...
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Dyad – Review
Dyad’s lineage is rich and favoured. As you barrel down its endless tunnels, flashes of Tempest, WipeOut, Rez, Frequency and Internal Section are caught in its smeary pixels. But at its core, it’s quite unlike any of these. Rather, you must haul yourself along its inscrutable track by grasping onto light points with an esoteric ...
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Rhythm Paradise – Review
Did Nintendo’s Wii drown under the weight of its mini-games? If that’s true, then the unwitting architect of its destruction was Yoshio Sakamoto, creator of the Metroid series and Nintendo’s Dark Mario to the primary-coloured innocence of its better-known star designer, Shigeru Miyamoto. It was his game, WarioWare Inc. – a rudely creative reduction of ...
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Sniper V2 Elite
A criticism often levelled against gun games is their routine failure to address the consequences of the violence they demand their players perform. Nathan Drake may be an affable, swashbuckling hero in the cutscenes, but in action he is a cold-blooded murderer, never pausing to reflect on the cadavers he leaves in his wake. It ...
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Fez – Review
Five years in the making, and yet as fresh as one of the 10×10 pixel daisies that punctuate its felt-tip green hills, Fez is at once a tribute to the joy of childhood exploration, the wonder of adolescent Nintendo video games and the adult realisation of life’s unending mysteries. It’s a game without peril, without ...
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The Witcher 2 – Review
“Legends are almost always beautiful. The reality often leaves a lot to be desired.” The witcher’s remark is aimed at the Elves, who have strained out the grit of life, love and loss before writing down their history, leaving only romantic, idealistic odes to the past. But it could just as easily be applied to ...